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Willow Park had many talents: plant magic, flyer derby, lending an ear… the list wasn’t short. Near the top of it had always been sleeping. She dozed off quickly, slept deeply, and had no problem taking up all the space she needed to get comfortable. It was concerning to her, then, when she found one night that she could not sleep at all.
It wasn’t necessarily surprising. After the events that took place a few weeks prior, with Belos and the Collector… Well, sleepless nights weren’t uncommon among Willow’s friends. But while their worries kept them awake, Willow had always been able to escape her problems by 11:00 PM at the latest.
Well, until tonight.
Willow blinked at the ceiling. Twenty nine, thirty, thirty one… one, two, three, four… She finished and then restarted counting the glow-in-the-dark stars on Luz’s ceiling for the sixth time. It wasn’t helping.
She looked to her left and saw Amity sleeping peacefully on the other cot, Ghost curled up at her side. At least Amity’s sleeping, she thought. Most nights, Willow fell asleep to worried whispers between Amity and Luz and awoke to dark bags under both their eyes. But at the moment, Willow seemed to be the only one awake.
Quietly, she climbed off the cot, dragging the blanket with her. It was a colorful quilt that Luz said her abuela made a long time ago, and Willow liked the soft, worn feeling of the material. She wrapped it around her shoulders and carefully left the room, her feet padding softly on the carpeted floor.
Everything was tinted blue. The Connecticut night sky peeked through the windows and its melancholy light followed Willow down the stairs and into the kitchen. She liked the kitchen. Camila always left on a light, the one above the stove, bathing half the room in a warm yellow. And at this time (looking at the microwave, Willow saw that it was 2:36 AM), when everyone was asleep and the house was still, she could hear the low hum of all the appliances, and there was something comforting about it. (Appliances was a word she learned from Vee. However nightmarish their circumstances were, Willow was still interested in just how much there was to learn about the human realm.) She pulled a chair out from the kitchen table. Its wooden legs scraped against the floor in a way that made her cringe, but it wasn’t loud enough to wake anyone. She lowered herself into the seat and propped her chin up on her hands. There was no real reason for her to have moved from her bed to the kitchen table. Maybe she felt better having stretched her limbs a bit, or maybe she just wanted to see that warm yellow light, or maybe… Well, she wasn’t sure. She was just as tired there as she was in Luz’s room, and just as worried, and just as sad.
Willow missed her dads. She tried really, really hard not to miss them; she thought that somehow it would be easier to not think of them at all. Like if she didn’t miss them, it would mean they weren’t really separated. And if she didn’t miss them, she wouldn’t have to wonder how long that would last, how long it would be until she could go home.
But Willow’s heart was big, and extraordinarily tender, and she missed her parents like crazy. She wanted Dad to wrap her up in a safe, warm hug and Papa to sing her a lullaby and stroke her hair like she was a child again. She wanted to go home so bad that she thought her heart was going to burst. But she was hesitant to admit this to her friends. If thinking about her family was hard, talking about them could only be worse. And besides, she wanted to protect her friends as much as she could. They had all suffered so much, and adding her stress to their lists of burdens was the last thing Willow wanted. Her friends were trustworthy and caring, she knew, and she knew that bottling up her feelings wasn’t very smart, but… well. Gus was so young, and Hunter was processing so much, and Amity just looked so tired and Luz was always so far away, even when she was sitting right next to Willow. So if sitting on her hands and clamping her teeth shut was what it took to protect them, then that’s what she would do.
“Willow?” Her train of thought was broken by a soft voice. Looking to the doorway, she saw Hunter and couldn’t help but smile at his messy hair and cardinal pajama pants. “What are you doing up?”
“Just… thinking. I couldn’t sleep” she replied, beckoning him over. After a moment’s hesitation, Hunter walked towards her and tentatively sat in the chair beside hers.
“What about?”
Willow didn’t respond right away. Instead she gazed at Hunter, noting the way that half of his face was illuminated by the stove light while the other remained in shadow. It almost made his eyes look like two different colors. She looked at him and saw his earnest eyes, his open expression, his brows just slightly furrowed in what she thought was concern. She looked at him and saw her friend, and she smiled a little.
“I’m… thinking about my dads, actually,” she replied, averting her gaze to the table. She picked at her fingernails and didn’t see the way Hunter’s expression softened.
“Oh.” The room was quiet for a moment. Willow didn’t expect Hunter’s next words. “Do you want me to make you some tea?”
She looked up at him. “Oh. Sure. Do you know how?”
“Yeah,” he said, rising from his chair. “Camila taught me. She made me some, um, carmo— cam—” he struggled to remember the name of the tea as he rummaged through a cabinet, but eventually found what he was looking for and read the label on the box. “...chamomile tea. She made me some chamomile tea the other night when I, uh, couldn’t sleep. She said it relaxes you, I think.” Hunter filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove before setting out two mugs. One was plain and red, and the other had a pattern of mushrooms.
“Well, thank you. Maybe it’ll help.” Willow’s expression was fond as she watched him. Hunter was extremely interested in human customs and culture, and he was a fast learner, making him one of the most functional members of the group. Willow liked watching him learn and carry out human tasks. It reminded her how smart and capable he was, which relieved some of the worry for him that had permanently settled in the back of her mind. He was just so, so good, and he had been through so much already. She couldn’t help but feel anxious over his wellbeing.
Hunter returned to his seat while he waited for the water to boil. He started to say something, then stopped, but after a few seconds he quietly said, “Do you… want to talk about it?”
Gazing out the window rather than at her friend, Willow frowned. Did she?
Hunter saw the look on her face, saw the gears turning in her head, and he knew that she was calculating her response carefully. He knew she was considering every possible factor: how it would make him feel, whether she would sound whiny, how she could say no without being rude or yes without oversharing. True, he had only known her for a short time, but she was one of his best friends; he knew that she was caring to a fault.
“You don’t have to,” he said softly after a moment. “I just—” The whistling kettle interrupted him. Hunter hurried to the stove to quiet it and returned a few moments later with two steaming mugs of still-steeping tea. He set the one with the mushroom pattern in front of Willow. Again, the room fell to silence, until they both tried to speak at once.
“I didn’t—”
“I was—”
“Sorry, you go first,” said Willow. She stirred her tea idly.
“I was…” Hunter looked at her with eyes full of worry and sympathy and good intentions. “I was just going to say that you must be so, so tired.”
Oh. Well, that did it. His words made Willow feel seen and cared for and they cracked her right open. She stared at the table and a few warm tears slipped down her cheeks. “Um… yeah. Yeah, I am. I’m really tired.”
Hunter reached for the hand closest to him, which was resting on the side of her mug. “Can I…?”
Willow didn’t say anything, but she took his outstretched hand in her own and squeezed it tightly, their fingers woven together. He felt warm and solid and comforting, and it anchored her.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes and trying to smile. “Sorry, I—”
“Please don’t say sorry. You… you don’t have to say sorry to me, Captain.”
Willow smiled at the nickname and this time, it was real. She looked up at Hunter. He was already looking at her, his expression sympathetic and his cheeks tinted red.
“Okay, I won’t apologize. But can I say thank you?”
“Oh, um, I— what for?”
“I don’t know. For making me tea. For holding my hand. For being my friend.”
“Oh. Well… consider me thanked.”
Willow laughed a little bit. She took her hand from his and hoped she didn’t imagine the look of disappointment that crossed his face at the loss of contact. It was short-lived. Using her freed hand, she grabbed the side of the quilt and wrapped it around Hunter’s shoulders so that they were side by side in its warmth. Slowly, cautiously, she wrapped her arms around his torso.
“Is this okay?”
“It’s— Yes! I mean, yes. Uh, I mean—” Willow laughed softly, cutting off Hunter’s flustered stuttering. She fit her arms snugly around him and rested her head on his collarbone.
“I just need a hug.”
Hunter gingerly returned her embrace, allowing her a few seconds to change her mind before tightening his hold on her.
“Yeah. I… I think I do too,” he said. Willow hummed in response. His arms felt warm and safe and comfortable, and she decided that she should hug Hunter more often. She listened to the hum of the refrigerator and he watched the steam rising from their mugs. They were both still.
“I… miss my dads. A lot. And I want to go home,” Willow whispered. Hunter tightened his hold on her momentarily in a gesture of comfort.
“I’m sorry,” he replied quietly. “We’ll get you home to them. I’ll get you home. I promise.” Hunter placed a gentle kiss on the top of Willow’s head. “I promise.”
This time, it was Willow’s cheeks that were red. Oh, she thought. That was nice.
They stayed in each other’s arms for several minutes. Willow’s leg was sort of falling asleep, and Hunter’s arms were kind of tired, but neither of them wanted to be the first to move away. So they stayed there, wrapped up in each other and in an old, well-loved quilt, illuminated half by the yellow stove light and half by the silver moon, and Willow thought that she felt a little closer to home than she did before.