Hello ladies and gentlebugs.

I wrote a oneshot, and it was requested that it be made into a full length story. I am only too happy to oblige.

Please note, the characters do not belong to me, I'm simply playing with them. I will be keeping close to canon and drifting far away from it, as I please. No expectations!

Her eyes were shadowed, hollow, fluttering like a pulse as she flitted through nightmares, dark half moons of eyelashes against flushed cheeks. She was nothing more than a skinny child, ten years old at most, body blunt and nondescript beneath the lace ruffles of her borrowed night-gown. The moonlight cut across her bed, severing her face from the blackness of her body as her lips and cheeks were bathed in light. Even in sleep, flushed and scared, twisting in sheets that snaked around bony ankles and wrists, she was remarkable. There was nothing particular in her appearance. Although pretty, he had seen many pretty women and girls before. It wasn't even in her vulnerability, that was another area he knew particularly well.

It was in her susceptibility.

He sat by her bedside, night after night, cloaked in darkness as he stroked sweaty curls from her forehead and ran soothing fingers across her tensed neck. She would moan against the night, shrieks in an alternate reality as death and despair and whatever else that plagued her childish fantasies reared their ugly head in her subconscious. He would sing to her; only that. He would hum tunes he had composed, repeating the words until he was sure she would mouth along with him had he offered her the change. He sang of angels and masks, of desire and death. He sang softly when she slept shallowly and louder when she was deep in dream.

Soon, she began to welcome him. She did not know it. When he was near she would quiet and sleep easily. When he retracted his hand from her face she would cry out in despair. When he sang she would mumble the words with him. In her prayers she would thank God for the angel of music that had been sent to protect her, somehow foggily remembering his comfort even through the haze of wakefulness.

Her susceptibility was no longer her greatest attraction.

Never had he been needed.