Have another short/cute thing because my wife is awesome at giving me ideas and motivation for this fic.
She tells herself she needs to grow up, to sleep on her own for once. She's seventeen for God's sake! She can't keep crawling in with someone whenever she has a bad dream.
She tells herself that, but she doesn't follow through.
After a particularly terrifying nightmare about monsters and blood, much worse than the usual deformed creature-feature, she's left panting and soaked in fear sweat. Once she's calm enough to think Lilith tells herself just how pathetic she is and that she should be over bad dreams about monsters by now. But she isn't and the nightmares are too vivid to get over so easily.
She creeps upstairs to Steve's room and tries her best to stay quiet as she closes the door behind herself. Steve is in his bed, obviously, but he doesn't look like he's sleeping. He moves, then flinches, and makes a strangled whimpering noise.
Nightmare...
She wants to laugh at the strange coincidence.
Instead she makes her way to the bed, sitting on her knees next to him as he tosses and turns, studying his face to try and figure out how bad the nightmare is. She needs to know if it's worth it to wake him up, or if he should just ride it out. It doesn't take long for her to decide that waking him up is the best idea. She shakes his shoulder and he doesn't open his eyes so she shakes harder, but that just makes him roll onto his side. Now he's facing the window, still twitching and murmuring.
She sighs and shakes him even harder, and that's when the dream gets worse. His eyebrows crease just before his eyes fly open, and his arm comes up and out to defend him self from the monster he thinks is there.
The back of his tightly clenched fist collides with her jaw, sending her tumbling off the edge of the bed with a surprised yelp and a thud.
After a few seconds of catching his breath, Steve realizes what he just did.
"Shit, fuck, Lil!" He scrambles to the edge of the bed, finding her on the floor with a hand to her stinging cheek. His apology comes out as a single word instead of a proper sentence. "OhmyGodI'msosorry!"
She giggles a little as she stands, then plops down on the bed next to him. His voice becomes higher with every sentence. She sits down next to him, as calm as can be
"Are you okay?"
"Calm down."
"I just backhanded you!" He's dangerously close to screeching now, "With my fist!"
"You hit like a little girl." She deadpans.
"That's not the p- Hey!"
She smiles at him. A small, sad smile that helps him calm down just a little.
"I had a nightmare." She states, "And so did you."
"That's, um, really weird, in a kinda cool way."
"Monsters?" She asks.
He nods, "Yeah."
"Me too."
That's all they really need to say. They don't ask each other for details, or directly comfort each other with words, but Steve does apologize a couple more times. They simply lay down next to each other and talk about stupid things; like Steve's stories about the kids, and Lilith telling him about some of the interesting things she's seen while living on the road.
Eventually they fall asleep. Lilith goes first, in the middle of a sentence and Steve makes sure she didn't just pause for no reason. He falls asleep a little while later while staring at the red mark by her mouth that he put there. It may have been an accident, but he still feels like a major jackass for doing it. He'll figure out a way to make it up to her tomorrow though.