Lucilfer (ChrolloxReader)

Chapter 68

My heart was warmed and saddened in the same degree as I gazed through groggy vision at the message Chrollo had sent me the previous night—I'd fallen asleep around eleven, but now I was cursing myself for not staying awake later. I hadn't been very tired; I'd really just forced my eyes closed. I could've stayed awake, but I'd already spent a half hour staring at his inbox, waiting for something, for anything.

I was glad, though, that I'd received a text, even just one. Knowing that the words on the screen were from him always grounded me and reminded me that this empty time period would eventually fizzle out, that this confusion and this stress would cease at some point. My perspective had grown to shift dramatically as I spent every day loving him, and I found it not quite as impossible to endure, to persevere.

Maybe he's influenced me more than I've realized.

I did feel like a shell without him, however, not nearly as whole or full of vitality. I couldn't see this sensation ever completely subsiding, but I suppose, when one loves another, such was how it would always continue to be. Love, in a way, was medicine, but even medicines were technically considered drugs. It would forever be difficult to separate myself from my main source of healing, and I knew the same went for Chrollo.

I shifted onto my elbows from where I'd been lying on the couch and peered over the backing to check for Kurapika. He was either still asleep, or simply hadn't left his room yet—the time was only around half past eight in the morning, so hopefully, he was slumbering peacefully. I'd tried to convince him to gain back a decent sleep schedule, and he'd reluctantly agreed that it didn't help his thought processes to stay awake and pondering all night, but I wasn't sure how persuading I'd been. Even when he wasn't sleeping, I knew he typically didn't come out until around nine or ten in the mornings, or at least, that's what I'd noticed.

For the first two days, he'd insisted that I take the bed at night and even used his lack of sleep as reasoning for why I should, but I'd refused every time. I didn't mind the sofa, but I also didn't want to sleep in his bed—it felt odd and mentally uncomfortable. It didn't necessarily have anything to do with him more than it did my own automatic flinch from the fact that I would be sleeping in another's bed, especially after the strange way he'd acted my first full day there.

I still couldn't deduce a reasonable catalyst for why he would have touched me in such a way, or perhaps I just didn't want to. He'd been gentle and kind, not forceful or triggering, but it struck me as out of character for him, bold and unsettling. I didn't want him or anyone else to move so close to me with such an intensity burning in their gaze. Part of me felt this way because it only reminded me of the way Chrollo would console me whenever my mind was scattered and unsafe, when his embrace was a more secure fortress than the silence in my own head, and it sent a thrashing longing to my soul to know that it wasn't my lover whose hands I held, that it wasn't my protector whose body heat I could feel. It wasn't that I couldn't be comforted by anyone else, but it felt wrong to allow even those outwardly innocent, and most likely platonic, advances from Kurapika.

Was being over dramatic? It seemed hypersensitive and foolish of me to cringe away from his sweet exterior, an exterior which had never expected anything from me or held any ulterior motives. No, he would never hurt me or purposefully trigger me, so why was I so gun-shy and unwilling towards Kurapika's lenient hands? Perhaps I simply felt as though it were being unfaithful to Chrollo in his absence—he would never allow anyone else to touch him in that manner. But I almost felt stupid, like I were blowing things out of proportion and making it to be so much bigger in my head.

Am I?

Either way, I didn't enjoy it. It could've been from the general understanding that Kurapika was one who wished death upon my lover, and for that reason, alone, I couldn't indulge him. I tried not to think about the heaviness in the words he'd spoken to me that day for fear of a greater analysis towards what he might've possibly meant. It was easier to write it off as a sort of fever madness, sparked by his lack of sleep.