The moon above them was gentle, waxing and swelling as time crawled by. Silvery moonbeams would ghost through the cracks between the blinds, and particles of dust would dance and revel under the sweet light.

The night time was idyllic, peaceful, mesmerising.

Jiyong hated it.

It was too dead and silent, just like the moon: empty, cold, lonely; a pale and crude imitation of something that would have been soothing yet was anything but--

And it grated at him, picked at him like a wound, picked at his mind without mercy. His head was bleeding sore and the silence like crows was pecking at it, drawing more and more pain--physical, he could feel it jabbing into his bones and digging at his very marrows and breaking him up from the inside out, as if to make him want to scream out his sheer agony.

And as if the silence wasn't enough, the stillness of the night was too artificial. The forced peace of the late hour filed at his nerves, sparking them and he could feel jitters running up his leg, down his spine, sending lava-like heat down his neck and to his fingers. He picked at his nails, dug them into his thigh, fidgeted and clawed at his skin--anything, anything at all to get rid of this burning silence in his head!

It was begging for him to shatter the quiet, send fire and brimstone down onto earth and tear it to shreds; anything to destroy this muffling, encumbering, isolating glass wall that was slowly enclosing around him and trapping him in this state of living in an eternal artificiality!

It truly would have been too much for Jiyong if it hadn't been for the slumbering woman next to him, lying in perfect harmony with this false tranquility of the night as if she couldn't feel how it mocked at them both with its sheer gall and destruction.

Yoona was asleep.

His little love, his sweet human, the woman who he swore never to harm or hurt or disappoint, was asleep.

She'd tired herself out that day, and she had been so exhausted when she finally let herself fall unconscious by his side, curling up against his hip and never waking. Her eyes were closed and her lashes were long: every time they fluttered with her dreams, they would brush against his hip, as soft as a butterfly's wings and as ghostly as a wraith.

His Yoona was asleep, trusting him not to wake her up, trusting him to watch over her vulnerable mortal shell throughout the darkest hours of the day.

For that, he would grit his teeth, calm his heart and stay still, stay quiet, obedient and cowed like a tiger whose claws had been cut, whose teeth had been filed.

She was asleep, and he would not wake her up, not for something as selfish as this; when the night's song imposed on his mind, forced him to listen to this blackboard-nail cacophony that would blare into his ears without mercy--

--and he would force himself to listen to the beat that was her breath, inaudible in this pressuring, deafening silence of the room. He would let his mind drink in the sounds of her breathing, let them become his mantra, his mind's voice, and fill the silence in with the music of her vocals, the melody that accompanied the lyrics that were her words.

Anything to mute this silence that was ripping his mind to shreds.

Rends venir le matin.
Let the morning come.