Who: Casey & Cecilia. What: Fancy seein' you here. Where: The stairs in Hamartia, then the roof. When: Later in the night, after this. Warnings: TBD.
Sleep failed to mystify him; it miscarried bloodily on its baby-pink stockings in the middle of an energetic waltz inside the wild playground of the velvet shadows. Pregnant with a grim omen that simply couldn't continue to live on, the botched ballet production of the Sandman and his blanched procession, runny eyes and runny yolk, seduced him not in the end, but turned him off. The demon was so awake, so very alert, constantly thinking, thinking, consuming every detail of the ocean of dust that was the world, cough cough, that he just couldn't sleep on the sediment. He hungered and he yearned, the mark of the beast. Something was bothering him, thrilling its fingers musically down groves of his rib bones, ringing haunted bells, curling welcomed claws into the dampness of his sensitive skin...
Sleep was a deformed idea, wistfully pirouetting in the cornered darkness, doomed. A joke wadded up and thrown into a mouthless, laughless void. Dreams were running through pines and squeezing snake oil into the alchemical vials for a flesh-thirsty witch doctor, wood into bone -- they were fun to watch -- but sleep? Itself? It was one killing phantasmagoria followed by its relative. Different but resembling the same thing. It lost the harmony of its seductive siren's song. Farther and further, pulling and ripping him away, willingly... to simply accepting defeat. It wasn't about giving up or giving in, it was about curiosity, what was there to stay up for? Was this bittersweet taste on the back of his tongue the powdery remains of an under-brewed loneliness? He swallowed down the sinister urge to sleep with a spoonful of sugar to make the acrid medicine go down.
In the most delightful way.
A few nights ago he'd slept for a grand total of three hours, before being alone in the dark stripped too many exotic layers of the multiple identities of a more appealing Hell. Tonight, with his freshly showered flesh and fresh-faced approach to accepting defeat -- who needs sleep? -- he'd changed after work into black jeans and a once-white t-shirt that by now had inherited a healthy gray cast. Echoing the color of the sky outside, which was the hue of Edgar Allan Poe's pajamas, he slithered down the stairs in search for a few constellations to watch pull their clothes off for him.
The dull thuds of his boots distracted the soft shuffle of angel slippers and the fragrance of familiarity. Until it was too evident to deny that: