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“Can I sleep in here tonight?”
It’s nearly eleven when Henry knocks softly and appears in Piper's door frame. He's got his pillow, a thin sheet and his space comforter that she hasn’t seen in a while all bundled under his non-broken arm. Piper is sat up straight in bed, a pillow propped up against her headboard as she moisturizes. She’s already put her hair into loose plaits for the crimped effect she wants in the morning.
She stares at him in the dimmed lighting before nodding silently, barely moving her head.
“Cool.”
“Close the door.”
She watches Henry follow her command before he crosses into her room. He’s wearing a gray, long-sleeved t-shirt and red and black plaid pajama bottoms, one of dozens of permutations of the same outfit he always wears to sleep. He slides one bare foot under the small mountain of clothes she’s left crumpled on the floor by her bed and then forklifts it a few feet away before beginning to lay his bedsheet on her plush carpet.
“Do you want-” Piper starts but then stops. “You can sleep up here… if you want.” She has a queen-sized bed, an ingenious twelfth birthday gift, if she did say so herself, that she had asked for in hopes of making her room look cuter in the backdrop of her influencer unboxing videos.
Henry shakes his head. "What, you mean like butt to butt?” He says it so stupidly, with a stupid voice and stupid face, nose and eyebrows scrunched with mock disgust, that Piper snorts with laughter.
“No. You kick a lot in your sleep. And I don’t need you to donkey kick me or scratch me with your sharp-ass toenail or something.” Piper glares at him before glancing down at her socks of choice, blue with the cartoon monkeys printed on them. They don’t match her silk pink pajamas, but they’re comfortable.
“Weapons.” Henry insists, before disappearing as he kneels and then lays down. For a few seconds, Piper watches her brother's comforter appear in her field of view as Henry kicks it open and settles down. They mumble goodnight to each other before Piper shuts off the small lamp by her side.
It’s nearly two in the morning when Piper rolls over twice to the far edge of her bed and wakes her brother up. She’s listened to him sleep fitfully for a half hour, before he devolves into thrashing as he's chased by some entity that makes him cry out and repeat things like “no” and her name. She throws a pillow at his head and he bolts up, hyperventilating. Piper peers over the edge of the bed.
“I can’t sleep when you’re down there. Either come up here or leave.” It takes Henry a moment to remember where he is, before he exhales heavily and falls back onto his pillow, raking a hand through his hair. Piper reaches a hand down and dangles it in front of his face. He takes it before they realize he’s too heavy, the angle is too difficult and they’re both too sleep-deprived to make it happen. She grabs his comforter and pulls it up before he hands her his pillow, and she rolls back over to her side with her back to him. Henry uses the bed for leverage as he pulls himself up and lays down facing the opposite direction. There's a comfortable distance between them, and they are definitely not sleeping butt to butt.
“Thanks,” he mutters. “I think you have the nicest bed in the house, Pipes, what the fuck?”
“Stay on your side of it. I’m not going to sing you a lullaby,” she says. She reaches for her phone on the nightstand; it reads 2:12 AM.
“Love you.”
“Gross.”
She hears Henry chuckle before she finds herself capitulating. “Love you too.”
Piper is nearly asleep when Henry’s voice floats into the air.
“Not even ‘IwannahippopotamusforChristmas’?” he asks, already half asleep.
Piper makes a face in the dark. What's he on about? “That’s a Christmas carol, you idiot, not a lullaby.”
“Well yeah,” he slurs, “but... you were so good at sounding like the little girl who sings it, remember?”
She does; she could throw her voice into that old-timey cadence so well that she had fooled their elderly neighbor into thinking there was a record playing somewhere. It's a party trick she hasn’t used in at least three years.
Henry infuriatingly starts to mumble-sing to himself until Piper reaches behind her and hits his nose on her way to covering his mouth with her hand. Henry opens his mouth and clacks his teeth together loudly, causing Piper to yelp and pull her hand away.
“What’s wrong with you?!”
“You used to love playing Shark Bite when you were little,” he croons.
“Shut up!” she cries, and he does.
“Hey Pipes,” Henry says, and Piper can hear the sleepy smile in his voice.
“What,” she answers, annoyance clawing its way out as sleep evades her for the third time.
“Try, try saying ‘Mob Boss Rob Moss’ five times fast.”
“Oh my God.”
Piper is certain that aliens have kidnapped her brother and replaced him with this delirious, milk-drunk kitten who falls asleep before he can finish the tongue twister he’s trying to say.
It's 3:17 AM when Piper wakes up feeling unbearably hot and like she’s trapped somewhere. Henry’s arm lays across her collarbone as he pulls her close. She is tucked below his chin; his head and broken arm are somewhere above her, and his torso is pressed up against her as he sleeps soundly. Piper fights the urge to reverse headbutt him. Instead, she listens to Henry breathe, and feels the steady rise and fall of his chest behind her.
Before she spends seventeen careful minutes extricating herself, Piper lets her head flop to the side and rests her cheek against the side of Henry’s palm. Good Lord, his knuckles are dry. She tries to will the bottle of lotion to her with telekinesis, but no luck. Henry is asleep, she's sure of it, but somehow, he still caresses the side of her face with his thumb twice before falling still.
When she’s curled herself halfway into the fetal position, leaving Henry’s legs to stretch on forever down to Avalon, probably, Piper shifts as minutely as possible until she is no longer burning up or suffocating, and Henry’s arm is draped loosely over her.
She thinks about earlier that day, how he sat on her floor when she let him in, not complaining about the handles of her dresser digging into his back. How he handed her a makeup wipe and spun in her desk chair as she sipped the ice water he’d brought her. “Do you want to talk about it?” he had asked, and she'd said no.
“Do you want to get some pizza?” he had asked, and she had nodded yes. So she drove them to Slices and Dices, where Henry paid for their food and went over to the shelf of greasy board games and brought back CandyLand. They’d pored over the board for an hour instead of actually playing, and ranked where they most wanted to live (her: Candy Castle, him: Ice Cream Sea).
Piper cranes her neck and glances back at what she can see of her brother in the shadows. His hair is still slightly damp and plastered to his forehead from his shower and nightmare. He looks closer to her age when he sleeps. She tells herself that he is fourteen until a passing car lights up his face. Henry is stretched so thin he is sallow, with chapped lips and dark circles under his eyes, and tonight, he's wrapped up in a blanket that has stars and planets on it, all but breathing down her neck.
It is 3:38 AM. Piper drifts off, though it’s not restful.
For what it’s worth, Henry sleeps like a baby through the rest of the night.