He woke up sweating. Crying. For the third time in the last five days. He raked his fingers through his hair, tried to quiet his labored breathing so he wouldn't wake her.
He didn't realize that it was already too late.
She slid one arm across his stomach, the other wrapping itself around his shoulders, her fingers finding their way into his hair. She pulled him into her, rocking back and forth.
"Another nightmare?" She asked quietly, knowing the answer already.
Kai clung to her, saying nothing, burying himself into her chest.
Queen Levana had been killed three months ago. Winter was instated as queen shortly thereafter, and Cinder decided to stay on Earth, in the Eastern Commonwealth, where she belonged.
The nightmares had begun around the same time. The evil, ugly queen coming down from her burial place on the moon, her features skeletal and decayed, kidnapping Cinder in the night, taking her to a cave deep in the earth.
The nightmares were so vivid. The queen was a ghastly sight – harder to look at than her glamour, more hideous than the way she looked without it, and every night, she snatched Cinder from his arms and ran so impossibly fast out of and away from the palace, he was unsure how he kept up. The cave was always deep and winding and dark, and he had to hold to the rough walls so as to know where he was going in the blackness of it.
But he was always too late. She was always already on the verge of death, her metal parts ripped from her, her body mangled almost beyond recognition. She was calling out for him, but the deceased queen was quick to silence her. Levana caught sight of Kai every night, her smile as evil as it'd ever been, and then, just as she grabbed Cinder's head to snap her neck, Kai woke up.
"She can't hurt us anymore," Cinder whispered, stroking his hair and steadily rocking him back and forth. "I'm right here, I'm right here," she cooed, knowing he would eventually calm down and fall back into a peaceful sleep.
She never fell back asleep after he woke up from nightmares, always so afraid that he might have another. Most nights when he had them, she would wait for him to fall back asleep and hold him close, listening to his steady breath and his steady heartbeat and pray for the stars to allow him to sleep for the remainder of the night.
Some nights, she watched net dramas in the small screen implanted into her prosthetic left eye. Other nights, she thought of the events of the last five months, from the day Kai showed up at her booth at the festival until now. So much had happened in such a short time, but they were there, the galaxy safe and sound for another night.
But she never admitted that the nightmares plagued her, too. They were identical to Kai's, but a role reversal.
She couldn't cry, so how would he ever know if she didn't tell him?
He wouldn't, and that was that. He had enough to worry about. Every night, they awoke at the same time, and he had never noticed. Every night, after he drifted back to sleep, she repeated the same words to herself that she'd used to comfort him. And, every night, she reaffirmed that they were, in fact, all right.