Authors Note: Just a drabble that got caught in gears while I was doing homework and reaffirming my relationship with the cannon of my Yuletide assignment. Title from Siegfried Sassoon's "Sick Leave."
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Vincent never sleeps when she's here.
Her deep even breaths the gentle ocean that his awareness relaxes in. The flicker of her eye lashes, the press of her lips, the simple way she twists and small noises she makes a multitude of miracles more precious, more fragile, more real than anything he can conceive.
She defines the sunlight and makes the moon.
Each of her dreams the stars that number his sky.
He follows them more dutifully than any written word, tracing his fingers over the acts of her bravery, her innocence, her duty, her unending charity and passion.
Her nose wiggled, stilling the finger that traced a gentle line on her forehead where the first blush of their meeting was hidden but never forgotten, and she murmured sleepily, "Tickles."
Even so, Catherine shook her head into the pillow and curled her cheek into the palm next to her face. An act beyond comfort or trust. He sighed into her hair, slowly so that it wouldn't rouse her. She is a perfect amalgam of so many imperfect things; a mirror of the world he loves, a being so incomparably more important than everything else.
He'll sleep when she's gone back above. When the world exists again only in colors and voices.
It is night here, and she is here, and here- there is only the world of dreams.