Okay here’s my unnamed sleep-deprived songfic about singing Moon a lullaby - enjoy!
Still early by your standards, but you’re cuddled up with a Sun plush in your arms and pretending to sleep nonetheless.
Unfortunately for you, the long creature propped up at the end of your bed isn’t buying it.
He blinks once, and then again. A stream of red flickers into your vision momentarily as you realise you forgot to keep your eyes closed, and the jig is up.
Moon huffs, prickly and uncertain, swooping closer to tuck you in more tightly, as though that might help still you whether through magically delivering you to dreamland in a comfy cozy nest of a duvet or simply cutting your life short.
You snort as his fingers brush tentatively past your neck as he’s smoothing the duvet, and he flinches back with a squeaky sound as though he’s just pressed them to a hot stove.
“Moon?” You venture blearily. His eyes narrow, but his hands are clasped as he hears you out.
The tiniest rasping wheeze escapes him for a moment, then he clamps his hands over his mouth as though to silence the sound.
“Voice box is broken.” He rattles, and you don’t have the heart to sit back up and ruin the tight burrito he’s wrapped you into over the course of several attempts, but now you’re curious.
And being curious is not conducive to getting a good night’s sleep.
“Shh!” He hisses, jerking forward suddenly like a Jack-in-the-box someone wound up too tightly.
You shuffle back at that, arms bursting out of the now decidedly spilled bed burrito, and you catch him stiffening up, mouth twitching as you grab blindly for the Sun plush you nearly dropped, failing to tear your eyes from the unwavering flash of red.
The room is every bit as still and silent as Moon seems to want it to be for a few short seconds, but you’re staring each other down now, and the air is still caught in your throat.
“Okay, no lullabies tonight, that’s fine by me.” You blurt out, finding your breath just in time to hear the scrapey sound escape him like a little choked gasp, and look up to see him still frozen in mid motion, his eyes flickering between your face, your body, the foot of the bed, and then to the door.
You reach up towards him just a fraction, but the words aren’t coming.
“Alright, well,” You feel around for a sentence you can string together, landing on another idea. “What if I do the singing?”
He looks at you with an unreadable expression.
Then he slouches back ever so slightly from where he was just poised to grab you, gently taking one of his wrists in the other hand and sitting in an almost …attentive way.
He doesn’t say a word, but offers a raspy squeak of support in your general direction instead.
You’re slightly unnerved for an altogether different reason now.
“Okay, just …” You suck in another breath. “Don’t expect too much.”
And it hits you at this moment how you can’t seem to remember a single lullaby off the top of your head. Reaching through the hazy recesses of your mind, finding one you don’t feel embarrassed to start singing out of the blue feels like an even harder ask, and you feel a new level of sympathy for Moon start to kick in.
With that in mind, you abruptly settle on a song that embarrassingly came to you as you broke eye contact and the pattern on his clothes became apparent, uncomfortably humming and mumbling the first few words, impressed to find him still watching and waiting for more.
“Hmmhm hmhmm little star …”
He hasn’t stopped leaning forward yet, but the softest whirr escapes him as he picks up the barely audible tune.
“How I wonder what you are …”
Then you start to find your voice, the words soft but at least fully formed and enunciated now, and when you dare to look back at your audience of one again you notice him padding back ever so softly towards the little spot he’s claimed for himself at the foot of the bed, no longer staring you down and poised like a gargoyle but now flattening down the sheets around him as though that was his true reason for returning to his perch.
“Up above the world so high …”
And you hear the faintest, softest, tuneful buzz start to sound from his direction as he does so.
“Like a diamond in the sky …”
It sounds halfway between a tune you don’t think you’ve ever caught the sound of before, and what you’re certain is some sort of purr.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star …”
You keep going, determined to hear more of the sound before he catches himself. And he spins like a little lost puppy at the end of the bedsheets, circling a couple of times before curling up in a neat lunar lump.
“How I wonder what you are …”
You almost stop then - you’re running out of song, and you’ve never seen him settle down in a spot so quickly, if at all while he’s been watching you. But he’s trying to find the tune himself now, voice cracked and whispery at first. Then he’s humming.
A silky, crackly sound emerges as he softly begins to fill in the blanks.
“When the blazing sun …is gone …”
You hope you don’t slip up on the new words, but Moon doesn’t seem to mind, and you find yourself cozying back down to where you’d once been - duvet not as tightly wrapped around you, but the warmth and the cuddle of the Sun plush still inviting as ever, and the pillow silky soft as you had been hoping for.
“When he …nothing shines upon …”
And you notice at some point that his words are slowing. He’s humming once more. Or perhaps you are.
“Then you show your little light …Twinkle, twinkle, through the night …”
The flicker of red from the foot of the bed dims fractionally, and your eyes begin to close to the sound of soft snuffles and whirring, and a half-dazed tune you both seem to be making up at this point.
The tiniest shimmer of blue light fades on the the duvet as your eyes close, and the Moon purrs:
“Good night, little star.”
