#this is also completely unedited atm so please look away from grammar mistakes etc <3

[astralstarlight]

sleep habits !

w/ layla and mona

a/n: this has just been me manifesting that i'll get c6 layla <3 i love her and mona so much!!

Layla sleeps in short bursts – a couple hours here and a few minutes there. When she actually does fall asleep, it’s restless sleep. Sometimes she gets the proper eight or nine hours a night, and yet, it feels like she’s gotten nothing. It doesn’t matter to her anymore. Her body might need the rest but her brain simply won’t let her have it.

She stretches her whole body with a quiet huff, taking the time to look around her. The House of Daena keeps its doors open indefinitely, so most nights it’s crammed with other students, trickling off bit by bit once they’ve had a decent amount of progress on their work. Tonight, it’s just her. All the bright lights are causing her eyes to feel like they're on fire. Archons, how long has she been sitting here just sketching?

Her eyes trail back down to the table. Scattered sketches strewn across it, each diagram annotated with her neat handwriting. Your padded shoes step across the cold floors of the Akademiya, echoing throughout the empty building. She hears you before you even turn the corner and come into view. 

“Layla?” Your clothes are thrown on haphazardly, and you’re holding a hot cup of…  Layla tilts her head. Is that tea? As you get closer, she gets the chance to really look at you. Dark eyebags loom under your normally bright eyes, and you blink slowly, the tired blinks of someone abruptly awoken from sleep. 

Layla feels guilt churning inside her stomach, twisting and kniving its way up her throat. “Sorry,” she murmurs. “I still need a few more minutes to summarise.” 

“Okay.” 

She expects you to go back to bed, return to the comforts of home, away from the harshness of fluorescent lighting and back to the natural lights from the stars shining through the open window. What she doesn’t expect is for you to continue to pad across to her side, taking the chair next to her with a muffled huff. Her eyes follow your motions, watching as you cross your arms under your head, pushing the cup towards her, and shutting your eyes. 

She swallows. “Won’t you be more comfortable back in bed?” 

You mumble something that sounds suspiciously like an insult, and Layla raises an eyebrow. You slide one eye open, peering at her as she’s frozen in her seat, hand still grasped around her pen. “You’re not there.” You say, louder and clearer. The cup is nudged just a little bit more in her direction. 

Layla knows that smell. She’s made it for you, so many times in the past. A warm cup of tea, for drowsiness and restful sleep. You know it doesn’t work for her too, she’s told you that repeatedly. Still. Layla takes the cup in her hands, taking a single sip and feeling the warmth run through her bones. A contented sigh leaves her lips. Still, it doesn’t mean she wouldn’t like being taken care of every once in a while. The thought does count after all. 

You’re leaning up on your hand again, eyes barely open to look at her. “If you want me to go, you’ll have to drag me back with you.” The threat does not really feel like a threat when Layla knows for a fact that you will doze off again within the next ten minutes.  

Instead she smiles, a small smile towards your sleepy state. “Then stay.” Layla replies, setting the cup down. She sees you out of the corner of her eyes getting comfortable again, and she almost begins to tidy her drawings into a pile. But she doesn’t, and soon enough, she hears your breathing become quieter and even. Everything in the library becomes still, once again. 

Layla finishes her work just before dawn, and she celebrates with a yawn, stretching out on her chair before deflating back into a relaxed stance. It’s finished. An accurate map of the stars lays in front of her, charted to precision again. She glances over to you, still asleep. You’ve barely moved at all during the night. 

She brings her fingers to brush the strands falling over your face, pausing as you wriggle in your sleep, and resuming the motions once she’s sure you’ve settled. 

“There’s no way I’m strong enough to carry you back, silly.” She whispers, followed by a kiss on your forehead. 

So she settles for this instead: dragging her chair closer to yours and curling up next to you in the same position, elbows and knees touching. Matching her breathing with yours is easy enough, and she sinks into a deep sleep with no dreams. 

And even when you wake up the next morning with intertwined hands, complaining of a stiff neck and missing your first class of the day, Layla still knows, from the grin on your face, that you don’t really regret a bit of it at all. 

Mona dreams vividly. She dreams of the past, the present and the future in torn fragments. It’s voices and screams, and then languages she cannot name, and at its worst, she dreams of fire and burning, and wakes up in a cold sweat. The worst of nightmares tend to happen just before she wakes up to find you’ve disappeared from the bed next to her. The sheets are rumpled and there’s a distinct dent in your pillow from where you lay, so she knows she hasn’t been imagining you there.  

And yet, where were you? Rarely do you disappear on her like this, and whenever it does occur, it’s because you’ve had something big on your mind. Restless nights. Sleep does not come easy to the both of you. 

Perhaps she shouldn’t curse the two of you like this just by thinking it, but Mona has always had a distinct feeling that the cause of your distress may have been because your stars have become aligned with hers. Intertwined perhaps. She hasn’t dared to consult the stars to be certain of it. She doesn’t want to see the blatantly obvious star-crossed lovers label over the relationship between you and her, and she certainly doesn’t want to guess at the ending it may have. For once, curiosity hasn’t gotten the best of her. Yet. 

Mona tugs her shoes on over her feet, walking the few paces to her front door and yanking it open, prepared to hunt the streets (and forests) of Mondstadt to search for you, only to find you right outside the door. She freezes in her steps. You’re leaning against the handrail outside her house, arms crossed and looking upwards. 

Mondstadt’s lights are nowhere near bright enough to dull the night sky. It lays itself before the both of you, stretched endlessly and filling the dark space with twinkling stars. At the sound of the door opening, you take a sharp breath in. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” you say, at the same time that Mona states: “you didn’t wake me.” 

The two of you share a smile. Mona waves the issue away with her hand, moving in to stand next to you. 

You sigh. “What was it this time?” 

“Fire and destruction.” Mona shrugs. This sort of dream has been happening a lot recently. “I don’t know where or how.” 

“They’re just dreams, you know? They don’t need to have a proper meaning to anything.” 

Mona knows this. She knows there isn’t any point placing validity and reason on things completely out of her control, and there is definitely no point in trying to pull substance from something she can barely remember after she opens her eyes. But these dreams… “They’re too vivid.” She says at last, fingers twirling at the ends of her hair. She wears her hair loose to bed, unravelled from the usual updo for daytime travel. 

A gentle tug on both of her fingers pulls her towards you, and you’re running your thumb over her knuckles as a sort of comfort. “Yes, but you really can’t do anything about them until you know they’re a proper issue. Or until the stars show you something different.” Mona opens her mouth to retort, but you brush a finger over her lips. “I’m not telling you to forget about it. Just…” You trail off, evidently at a loss for what you wanted to say. 

But Mona gets it. She sends a confident nod back to you. “Then you’re not allowed to worry for tonight either.” She intertwines your hands properly. “Come back inside with me.” 

When Mona decides on something, there’s not really much you can do to argue about it. So you let her chastise you about not going out dressed warmly and you let her guide you back under the covers. You hadn’t even noticed you were shivering until she reprimanded you about it. Mona tucks you in, making sure all but your face is under the blankets before clambering in herself and curling up next to you. 

As always, you fall asleep quicker than she does, and Mona is left staring at your sleeping form with one arm thrown over your side. 

She watches peacefully for a moment, before her mind returns to her own. 

Yes, there are things out of her control. There have always been things out of her control. There will always be things that she wishes would never come to an end, but endings are a constant of life. Despite this knowledge of a universal truth, she still wants this. She still wants you and her to be in her control, avoiding disaster after disaster. So she sends a little prayer instead, to keep you here beside her for as long as you both will it to be. 

Barely satisfied with all she can do, she drifts off to sleep. It’s a restful sleep this time when you’re by her side. She dreams of nothing of great importance that night, but she wakes up to the sun on her skin, and the feeling of softness and warmth.