Jim came home the following Friday, Joanna in his arms. She chattered happily to him, telling him about her castle she had built, and how she was going to be the king. Jim had tried to tell her that female rulers were generally referred to as queens or empresses, but she didn't take any notice. She told him about her castle and how she would have pretty clothes and throw pretty balls. Apparently, daycare was giving her more frilly girls to play with and she felt the need to imitate.

"So, you're not gonna be a pirate anymore?" he asked as the door whished shut behind him. Not that he didn't appreciate her effort to become king of whatever it was she wanted rule over, but being a pirate was generally cooler. Lots more action, much less politics.

She looked up at him with her sweet eyes and smile frozen on her face. She nodded, her curly brown ponytail bouncing. "Yeah, daddy. I'm gonna be a…a…King-Pirate."

He laughed lightly. "King-Pirate Joanna. Y'know, it has a nice ring to it."

He set her down on the floor, giving her cheek a little pinch and then sending her into the living room. She turned on their holoscreen while he wandered into his room, intent on ditching his cadet jacket for the day in favor of just lounging about in his worn t-shirt. It hadn't been a hard day, per se, just…shit, it seemed to drag on forever. He didn't necessarily know what it was about that specific day; usually he was content to just listen to the din around him and the drone of his instructors.

He smiled at the wholly rumpled bed and the accents in his room that definitely didn't belong to him. Day after day, there was marginally less surprise when he woke to find Bones curled possessively around him. The novelty hadn't worn off of course. Each morning he woke to that warm grasp, and he still held Bones to him as well. He felt just a little of himself become more comfortable in believing that this could work each time Bones referred to Jim's suite as home.

That wasn't to say it was all rainbows - Jim would be a little freaked out if it were. Ever since Jim had told him about Sam's marriage, Bones had been pressing for his background information. The doctor wanted to know what was up between Jim and his hermit of a brother, what caused such a long, silent period between their last face to face meeting and present time. Some of it was easy to explain, his absent mother and waste-of-molecules step-father. Some of it…some of it he would rather not, Tarsus IV springing instantly to mind. It wasn't that he thought Bones would treat him differently, and he would if only a little bit, but mostly to do with the fact that even after eight years, Jim hadn't recovered from it - had only learned to cope with it.

Still, he let Bones probe, and in between sidestepping and actually explaining and expounding bits and pieces of his life, Jim had gotten just as much information about Bones' family. He learned a little more about his father and mother. The doctor didn't talk much about his father's death, only hinting briefly that David McCoy had requested medically assisted suicide. His mother had died way back, as Bones had said, when he was thirteen. She had been older, forty-five when she had Bones, and had a heart malfunction that she had never taken care of properly, not even when she married David, and her heart had just failed one night.

It was a hard give and take and sometimes they fell off to sleep with a discomfited silence hovering around them. When morning broke through the windows, though, they always left their nighttime conversations for the night ahead, where after a day to regroup, they were ready to carry on.

Jim heard a clatter in the living area. He carelessly threw his jacket in the general direction of nowhere to go see what Joanna was up to, calling as he went, "Jo, what are you doing?"

Her instantaneous and near innocent reply was, "Nothin'!"

Jim didn't believe it for a second and as she came into his view, staring with wide eyes at a pile of padds, which had been on his desk and were now mysteriously on the floor. He gave her a stern look. "Joanna, what were you doing around daddy's console?"

She shrugged, her little hands tugging at the hem of her sweater. She didn't look up at him directly, but instead up from under her long, dark lashes. She mumbled, even worse than she did when she was tired. She thought she was in trouble. Jim gave her a gentle shake to get her attention. "Look at me when you talk, Jo-bear. Your shoes don't need to know why you were at my console. They were there."

She huffed but did as he said, pushing her fly-away hair away from her face, she looked up at him with a pouty face that was more his than Bones' and told him slowly and clearly, "Miss 'Curdy was flashing. I wan'ed to talk to her."

It took Jim a few seconds to comprehend what that meant, but eventually it came to him. His console must have signaled an incoming transmission while he was in his room. Joanna must have been trying to press the accept button when the padds fell. Jim sighed quietly. "Next time come get me, okay?"

Joanna nodded and he gave her a gentle scoot back towards the holoscreen. She didn't go so easily. She ground her feet against the wood flooring, her petulance coming out with her bottom lip. "I wanna talk to Miss 'Curdy!"

"You will," Jim said with another shove, but she crossed her arms at him giving him a look that was so Bones it was almost ridiculous. "We're gonna have to talk to popsicle about this look, little miss," he said, suppressing a smile.

Her stare mixed petulance with confusion but she still didn't move. Jim looked around for a moment finally zeroing in on one of his padds, one obviously older and a little banged up. It was one of his from Iowa and if it was on his desk it was probably something to do with starships or shuttle schematics, hell possibly even his downloaded files on Relativistic Physics. However, since it was from Iowa, it was likely to have an application for coloring pages. Joanna loved coloring pages.

He snatched the padd from the pile and pulled up the application with flourish. He presented it to her, compromising, "Color this for Ms. McCurdy and then we'll call her, okay?"

That would give him enough time to decipher if it had actually been Maggie Jay or one of his professors.

She stared at him for another long moment, weighing her options like the little genius she was, before she took the padd and climbed up on the couch. Jim watched her as she fumbled momentarily with the stylus, then as she tapped the color she wanted to begin with and began scribbling across the screen. Certain that she was occupied with her coloring he turned back to the mess of collapsed padds, sorting them into manageable piles between his collection and Bones'. Finally, he turned his computer console and pulled up his missed transmissions.

It wasn't an identification number he recognized. It was from a Laurent, Aurelan. Ph. D. He didn't know who she was, and had certainly never met a woman from Oregon. Vaguely he thought that Helen right about now would be commenting on the fact that he had never remembered the name of any woman in his life, but he did. He remembered them all, some of them more hazily than others but he always knew their name. Aurelan was definitely not one that sprung up in his memory.

There was no recorded message waiting for him, which the Academy offered for the cadets, though not for all other consoles. Older computers had applications one could download so that callers could leave recorded messages, but otherwise only voice recordings could be left.

Jim decided to ignore it, double checking the time. It would be about seven in Iowa, and Maggie may be at work, but since moving to California he was never exactly sure when she was working. She had been switching schedules so often, for dates, and for coworkers, and just because, hell, she just didn't feel like fucking working on a Monday that it was hard to keep up with her. He tried her anyway, estimating that he only had maybe another five minutes before Jo pestered him into it.

She answered after a minute and Jim noticed immediately an oddity. She was not even dressed. She had a robe on. Maggie Jay was very odd sometimes, but she was normal in her clothing standards. Adding to this confusion, her hair was dry and she didn't look like she had been ready to enter the shower. She looked bedraggled as well. Jim's mind went to dirty places.

"Did I interrupt something?" he asked with a lewd grin.

She gave him a dirty look, one that said he would toast in the fires of hell the next time they were in person. His grin instantly faded. Had she been in the midst of something sexual or even a little bit pleasurable, she would have wasted no time in sharing with him. She may have drawn it out a little, but a full glare…something was wrong, passing oddity and going straight to problem.

"Maggie?" he asked.

She waved a hand at him dismissively. "It's nothing, Jim," she said with a hoarse voice. The hand she had waved at him struggled through her tangled red hair. "It's just been a rough few days." She cleared her throat, her eyes glancing toward Joanna, a meaning hidden well within her gaze. "Michy was asking about you earlier today. She wants to know when she gets her calls."

Jim was concerned. "Hold that thought, Maggie," he told her as he went away from the console and over to Joanna. "Hey, Jo-bear?" She looked up at him. "Will you go into your room for a few minutes? I need to talk to Ms. McCurdy in private for a few minutes."

She nodded without hesitation, as opposed to the few minutes beforehand when she had been stubborn as a mule. She took her padd and stylus and hopped off the couch with a small 'oomph.' As she passed the screen, she waved excitedly at the woman who had helped in her caretaking for near all her life.

When she was safely in her room, Jim programmed some music to play for her in an attempt to keep her attention occupied. With that done, he turned back to his friend. "Does this have anything to do with that doctor guy you were seeing?"

Maggie Jay gave a harsh laugh. "Oh, Jim. No, it has nothing to do with Nick."

A few seconds. "Then what is it?"

She sat down at her seat, putting both of her elbows on her desk and resting her head so heavily in her hands that her cheeks all but eclipsed her eyes. "My life is desolate."

Jim tried to keep it together, but in the end he couldn't. A small chortle escaped his lips, and he didn't even try to cover it up. Her face and her sentence and combined and oh my God! "What?" he asked through his amused laughter. She was glaring at him, but he could hardly care. If he had done that to her she would have been out of her chair by now.

"Well, it's true!" she said haughtily. "Life is so boring here!"

"Maggie! It's been that way since its first laws were written. What kinda shell have you been living in?" he asked, astonishment not too far out of his tone.

"Apparently yours!" she yelled at the screen. "Ever since I moved to Riverside all those years ago my life was lived through the joy of hearing your stories the next time I saw you."

He couldn't believe he had to send Joanna to her room for this. This was not a problem…well, not the problem he had imagined. She was lonely and it was understandable, but the way she had carried on he would have thought her world was ending. He sighed, trying not to play this disproportionately "Maggie…"

"I'm moving," she said abruptly. "I'm moving to California. I never realized how awful it was to be away from family. I'll be there before the Spring. I just have to get a few things in order and then I'll be over in no time."

"You did just hear what you said right?" Jim asked, looking at her with a hint of disbelief hovering in his voice. "Are you sure you're not jumping the gun, just a bit? You're just…experiencing empty nest syndrome or something."

She scoffed. "Oh bullshit! I'm bored as hell and I don't want to be here. The fact that you happen to be in California is just a bonus."

He shook his head. "Why don't you think on that for a week or so?" he suggested.

"I thought about it all damn day, Jim. I've made up my mind. I'll be there by Joanna's birthday, okay?"

He didn't even argue with her. He just laughed. "You wanna talk to Jo? She was all excited to talk to you earlier. She even colored you a picture."

Her eyes lit up, and Jim didn't doubt that she would be in California soon.

+ststst+

The Aurelan Laurent woman called again several times over the next week. Jim had ignored them steadily as most of the time the transmissions came at times when he just could not take them. They usually came while he was in classes or just before getting home with Joanna and Bones. Even over the weekend, this person had called when they were out for something or another. With November crawling steadily towards them, they each had more and more to do at the Academy with both their own essays, and essays they graded for the teacher they were assisting. She had called a few times while they were at the library, juggling studying, grading, and keeping Joanna from wandering off too far. On Sunday, she had called while they were at a park.

Bones had noticed this caller, having forwarded his calls over to Jim's suite when he missed three of Professor Felding's -the man he was TAing with - calls. He briefly inquired about it to Jim, but after Jim explained that he had no clue who she was and honestly expected her to have the wrong coordinates the doctor dropped it from the discussion pallet. Instead, he grew steadily annoyed with the caller. He wanted to send her a transmission or a message explaining that she had the wrong number. Jim only said he'd tell her when and if she called at a time he was available to answer.

Bones sighed from behind him as he pulled Joanna's jacket onto her arms. "Seriously, Jim. This woman must have called fifty times in the last week. Are you sure you shouldn't just put her out of her misery? What if there's an emergency and she's tryin' to get a hold of a family member?" He crossed his arms over his chest, sending the console a frustrated grimace. "Are you sure she isn't from one of your classes?"

Jim shrugged. It was Thursday and they were getting ready for the day. Bones was already prepared, leaving in little less than ten minutes. Jim had decided to drop Joanna off early so they could walk some amount of the quad together. "I suppose she could be, but if she wanted a date that badly she should just come up to me in person." He pulled a cute, little, purple hat over Joanna's ears and braided pigtails. She'd probably pull it off at some point, unable to stand the itch on her hairline. But if he could keep it on her while she was outside he'd be a happy camper. When he turned around Bones had turned his glare to him.

"Your attempt at humor has suffered a horrible, gruesome death, Jim," he said blandly.

"It's suffered worse." He turned around to see Joanna pulling her little cap down over her eyes, tilting her head up to see the two of them. Jim gave her a tap on the head, mild irritation at her messing up her hair so early in the day. He stood up from the floor, scooping Jo up as he did to let her watch some more of her cartoons before they left. When she was firmly engrossed in her show, he wandered over to the doctor with a happy smile on his lips. "Y'know, Bones, I kinda think you're jealous."

"I kinda think you're cocky," Bones retorted with an amused roll of his eyes. "Your swollen ego could probably do with a hypospray or two."

"It's your fault."

"I have nothin' to do with your inflated ego, Jim."

Okay, he really didn't. Jim had always been cocky, had never really stopped. He tried not to overdo it around Joanna, and he had been way over his head with Bones, but the cockiness was there. He supposed he was finally feeling like himself again that he could joke with and tease Bones and not feel like the world was going to fall down on top of him.

Bones raised his eyebrow at him, arms still crossed over his chest. "Are you gonna call this lady back?" he asked tossing his head back towards Jim's console.

"Sure. I'll call her back over the weekend," Jim said to appease him. "But if she asks for a date…" He put his hands up implying that it was out of his hands.

Bones sighed, but leaned in for a quick kiss, before he grabbed his jacket. "Come on. Let's get out of here. Jo-bear, come here, sweetheart. We gotta go."

Joanna came running over to them, though her eyes stayed on the holoscreen until the very last second. Jim thought about going to turn it off but the holoscreen was programmed to turn off after a few hours on the weekdays. So, Bones holding Joanna and her bag in his hand, they went out into the morning air. Jim had already forgotten about Aurelan Laurent, Ph. D.

+ststst+

That night, he was coming back from tutoring Henry, whom he had began calling Eight half way through the session because, really, Henry was a horrible name. That and the cakette had briefly mentioned that he was the youngest of eight children They had gone over the weak spots Jim had found in his notes and his equations the previous week and Jim was pleased that Eight had taken to Jim's new technique and approach to the notes quicker than either of them had expected. He still stumbled to be sure, but all in all he was doing much better than before.

In between explaining, while Eight had been reworking the problems and pouring over some of his other notes, Jim got him to open up about his life a little. Jim had poked fun when the cakette had told him that he was from Alaska of all places, and Eight took it well, much better than Jim would have expected him to. Of course, being the youngest of eight children it did make sense to Jim. It also made sense why he was such a scrapper. Honestly, of the four cakettes, it had really only been Eight who had gotten a good hold of him.

Jim shook his head, a small smile on his face.

He never expected to love San Francisco so much and he really hadn't expected the city to be so kind to him either. People he had started off on the wrong foot with took to him well, Uhura, Eight…okay, those were the only two, but it was better than it had been in Iowa, where if they didn't hate him to his face then they hated him behind his back. Not to mention, he was talking to and sleeping with Bones again. It still sometimes surprised him how quickly life could change. It sure as hell shocked him how one decision had made everything else so much better.

He just hoped it stayed that way.

The errant thought flittered through his mind, but it was easy enough to quell. He was about to step inside his suite where Bones and Joanna were waiting and, hopefully, something to eat. He had been so busy today that he hadn't eaten lunch. He jogged up the stairwell and over to his door, smile still intact as he keyed in his code.

The sound that met him was that of his little girl's evening cartoons. That was not uninvited, however, he heard Bones just on the other side of the partition making halted conversation with… someone. His face crumpling in confusion and curiosity he quickly stepped into the living area to find Bones sitting at the computer desk. He looked uncomfortable, apprehensive; his left hand squeezed his right compulsively.

"Hey, Jim."

He whipped his head up to the computer console for the first time. "Sam…what are you…I mean," his gaze flicked between his brother and Bones, and he put on a smile, more for himself than anyone else. "How are you doing?"

His brother was still thin, painfully so, looking gaunt and like he hadn't received any sleep in weeks, but he also seemed as if he had kept up with himself a little better. He was clean-shaven, though with a moustache over his lip that almost immediately made him think of his old boss, Marc. His longer hair was brushed and pulled back, not wild and tangled as it had been for his birthday. He looked rather acceptable and honestly Jim wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. He was used to seeing Sam look ragged; this was just a shock to his eyes.

"I'm doing pretty good, Jim," Sam answered and he kept himself in character by his inability to smile as well as the inability to completely meet Jim's eyes. His accent held more of his time in New York than Iowa these days, but his bad Standard was purely him. "So, uh, how you been? You didn't return my calls."

"You called?"

Bones spoke up from his position in the seat still looking just as uncomfortable as when Jim first entered. "Dr. Aurelan Laurent is his fiancé, Jim."

"Oh!" he said with no small amount of surprise. "Sorry, Sam. I thought you were still in New York. How long have you been in Oregon?"

Sam looked upwards toward his ceiling, which Jim for the first time noticed wasn't actually Sam's ceiling. The room behind his brother was completely foreign to Jim's eyes, possessing none of the clutter that had always occupied Sam's apartment. It wasn't necessarily neat, but compared to what Jim used to seeing it was almost sterile.

"Oh, I've been in Portland for, like…a week, I think? Maybe two?" It wouldn't surprise Jim if Sam didn't actually know how long he had been in Oregon. Science was always on his mind; there wasn't much room for anything else. "I sent a message to your padd. Didn't you read it?"

"Sam, are you sure you actually sent me a message?" Jim asked skeptically.

He wasted no time answering. "No. No, not entirely. I should really make a habit of 'To-do' lists."

There was a drawn out pause in which the three of them just kind of looked at random objects that caught their attention. Jim fixated on Bones' hands, left hand still reflexively grasping his right in a tight grip before releasing. Out of the corner of his eye, Joanna stood too close to the holoscreen projection, but he didn't call her on it, not yet at least.

"Your uh, your…Leonard was telling me about San Francisco," Sam struggled out, uncertain what to call Bones, almost as much as Jim was. "What d'ya think of it? How d'ya like being in," he took a deep breath, "in Starfleet? Does Joanna like it?"

Jim shrugged, feeling a niggling in his chest. Sam, if it was possible, hated Starfleet more than Jim had. He hated that their mother had been more enamored with her career than her children and that she hadn't even returned when Jim finally made it back from Tarsus IV. It was easy to see that Sam wasn't necessarily thrilled that Jim had ended up there, and that some minute part of him worried that Jim would suddenly somehow morph into Winona.

"It's not that bad. So, far everything is working out well. Joanna is having a grand time. She's in daycare at a local center so she's been making a lot of friends." Jim wasn't sure if that was a satisfying answer for his brother, but it was the best he could do. He didn't think any amount of explanation would be good enough for Sam and really he didn't want to try. Instead, he re-routed the conversation. "How long have you and your fiancé known each other? I don't remember you talking about her in our last call."

"We've known each other for…" he searched around the room as if that would help him remember, as if he could see the memory files in his brain. Jim should have known better than to ask that question. "You know I really wish she was here. She's so much better than I am with dates. Erm, I think it was August we met in. Yeah, that sounds right. The trees looked like those old copper pennies Grandpa Kirk used to collect from the shuttlecraft view."

Jim nodded, leaning against the back of the computer chair. Bones looked up at him, his look something torn between begging to escape the awkwardness Jim was sure they were exuding, and like he wouldn't be ripped from that chair if he was paid. Without thinking he gave the doctor's ear a tug.

When he turned back to Sam, his brother was looking at Jim uncomfortably. Jim cleared his throat. "Okay, so where'd you guys meet?"

That he had no problem answering. Sam forgot a lot of things - time, mediocre things, telling people he had just packed up and moved - but he didn't forget where he had been. "We met at a seminar in Manhattan. It was over universal botany. The speaker was presenting a new hybrid between…" He went on about something poisonous found on a Class M planet crossed with some verbenas plant here on earth and how it made a tincture that strengthened the immune system to the point where it was almost impossible to even catch a cold. He used a lot of fancy words and the actual botanical names of the plants involved. Jim kept up really well, he always did, but some of the processes used when directly over his head, though Bones looked like he was with Sam all the way.

Apparently, Aurelan and he had sat together and she was an herbal pharmacologist or something like that and had been especially interested in the tincture it could make and they had debated over whether it had to be ingested or if they could engineer the mixture to be made into a hypospray injection. It really sounded super boring but Jim kept that to himself. If Sam was excited about anything other than science Jim probably would have had a seizure.

As it was he nearly had one anyway when Sam said that before moving to Portland he and Aurelan hadn't seen each other for two months. That was to say their time together had totaled maybe a week beforehand and the two weeks Sam had been in Oregon.

"You moved clear across the country for a girl you knew for a week?" Jim was impressed…and a little worried for his brother. "Wow, Sam…that…that's…"

"She wants to come down and meet you two weeks from now," Sam interjected, finally looking Jim in the eye with anxiety written all over his thin face.

Jim could practically feel his entire body freeze.

+ststst+

Jim sighed as Bones shuffled under the blankets after him. They were going to bed early. Well, originally it was just Jim going to bed early. He laid Joanna down, read her a story and when she was still awake after the story, looking up at him with big, awake, blue eyes, he set some soft, melodic music on for her. It had drained him. He was already drained from his conversation with Sam, but it had just tipped it all over. He had returned to the living area, where Bones had been straightening some things up and probably forming some plan of attack or something. After mauling him and maybe kissing some of the life out of him, he had just gone to bed.

It had almost been a shock when Bones entered the room after him, shucking his uniform down to his underwear and crawling in after Jim. The doctor had turned Jim over onto his back, curled around him and rested his head against Jim's chest, draping one arm loosely around Jim's waist. Jim felt a small smile curve his lips again and brought his hand up to run through the doctor's dark hair.

In the comfortable dark of the room accented by soft orange light and bathed in the soft beat of the music in the suite, they breathed comfortably. He could tell that Bones wanted to talk, and he would stay awake for it despite the fact that he wanted nothing more than to sleep until Joanna's birthday. He knew they should talk; they should talk about a lot of things before Sam arrived, because Sam had no problem with bringing up Tarsus every now and then, randomly. Bones should probably know about it before his brother started drilling him to make sure he didn't have post traumatic stress disorder.

He wouldn't bring that up tonight; it had been stressful enough without that. It would be better if they did that earlier in the afternoon. Jim thought that maybe they could do that next weekend. Perhaps they would leave Joanna with Pike and Archer for a night and Jim would just tell Bones and whatever happened, happened.

"Sam seems nice enough," Bones said quietly between the musical chords. It sounded awkward. Bones probably hadn't been too enthused with him; more to the point hadn't known what to do with Sam. Not a lot of people did.

Jim shrugged as best he could with a full grown man resting on top of him. "Yeah. He's not half bad."

"Has he always been so…" Bones trailed off unsure how to categorize Sam. Jim didn't make him try.

"Flighty?" He asked before shaking his head. "No. Well… not as bad. He's always had a one-track mind, always forgot about minute things like brushing his hair, turning his shirt right-side out, things like that. He grew into insomnia, though, so it's gotten worse. Can't really blame him for not telling me he moved, though, I hadn't told him I was in California. In that, we are pretty much identical."

There was a long pause, and Jim really, seriously toyed with the idea of falling asleep. Bones was a comfortable weight on his chest; Jo's music was soothing. He was almost under when Bones started speaking again.

"How do you feel about him coming to visit?"

Jim swallowed, ran his hand across Bones' neck. "Like my stomach is about to drop out." Mostly for the fact that Jim didn't want to have to talk about things that he would have to talk about. He didn't say that. He gave a soft laugh. "Y'know, I'm more nervous to see him again than to meet his fiancé."

"You don't seem especially pleased about that either."

"They've only known each other for two and a half months, had only really dated in person for three weeks…" Jim trailed off, knowing he sounded hypocritical.

Bones apparently thought so, as well. He pushed himself to his elbows, looking up at Jim from under his lashes. It was kind of creepy; in the half-light of the room his eyes gleamed from shadowed hollows. Most unnerving, so Jim chose, instead, to focus on his lips, heart-shaped and speaking words that made Jim melt. "I knew you for three days and spent the next three years idling over your memory."

"We're not the norm, Bones. What happened between us in New Orleans and what's happening now doesn't happen for everyone. And on top of that we are not rushing out to get married." Jim sighed, dropping his head onto his pillow to stare up at the shadowed ceiling tiles. "I guess I'm worried he's not thinking this all the way through."

"I think that's a sound worry, Jim, but they'll be here in two weeks." Bones scooted up until they were eye level, which was still creepy, but the proximity eased it a little. "Why don't ya wait to meet her? She could be perfectly matched for him."

Jim didn't argue. Bones could be right. Hell, when Jim was panicking, he tended to lose arguments close to all the time. Aurelan was probably a wonderful person, and she could very well be the perfect person for Sam.

Bones settled in beside him, still pressed against him and sharing his warmth.

Jim cleared his throat. "You don't have to-"

Actually, Jim didn't have to; didn't even have to finish his sentence. Bones cut him off sharply, demanding, "Shut up, Jim. I'm going."

He inhaled, exhaled slowly. Bones' hand strayed to his stomach, signaling that it was now officially time for sleep. They didn't immediately drop off, of course. Each stared into some distant corner of the orange-tinted darkness, breaths even and measured, keeping pace with the music in the background.

+ststst+

(waltz with me)

InnocentGuilt