Dreaming
He dreams of her.
Strange, really. He's a king after all, one with all the money in the world, enough milk to sink a battleship and a score of subjects who, at the least, are loyal. Idiots perhaps, but ones who will fulfil his every whim. Well, almost every whim, but they can't perform the impossible. They can't give him what he desires most.
In his dream, he's smiling. Not the idiotic grin of someone who's high, nor the goofy smile of one who's had a few too many drinks. No, this is genuine happiness. A happiness from having the one thing, the one person at his side that money can't buy. But for all his joy, he can't say it. He can't say what he feels. It's as if his conscience is holding him back. He was a jerk in the waking world, so what gives him the right to seize the day, to say the three words to a certain gray squirrel in his dreams? True, he's the king in the real world, but here, he is less than nothing.
And then he wakes up.
The castle is like a tomb to him and his pounding headache isn't helping matters. No, he hasn't been drinking, though at this point in time he's sorely tempted to. The Panther King was somewhat…rustic, so to speak, so while there's almost as much wine here as there is milk, sleeping pills are non-existent. But he doesn't get up. It's early in the morning, the candles have blown out and his room is so stuffy he feels suffocated by it. The tomb analogy appears to be valid, albeit a crypt for one who is dead only metaphorically and yet cannot achieve rest.
Should he have been the one to have died? It's a bit late to think about the past, but he can't help from doing so, from feeling like the world's biggest failure. "No rest for the wicked" as they say. And while he has never considered himself to be a bad person, all the times he spent at the bar rather than with her certainly prevents him from seeing himself as an angel, regardless of what his subjects think. Well, no use fretting. The grass is always greener after all.
And with that, he falls back to sleep, disturbing the silence of the night with only one word…
"…Berri."