Chapter Text
The thing about not sleeping is that you stop being surprised by it.
Stiles had been awake since — he checked the ceiling — probably two-thirty. Maybe two. The numbers blurred together by now, stacked on top of each other the way bad nights always did, each one borrowing interest from the last until you couldn't remember what it felt like to just close your eyes and drift off.
His body had given up hours ago. Each limb was that particular kind of heavy that felt like lead wrapped in wet sand, joints aching the way they always did when he'd been horizontal too long without actually resting. His wrists throbbed when they went still too long. His hips had gone stiff from lying on his back too long, and when he'd shifted onto his side, something in his shoulder had made a small unhappy sound and he'd had to spend twenty minutes finding the exact angle where it stopped complaining.
His brain, though. His brain was doing laps in an atomic accelerator.
It wasn't even thinking about anything, in that way that it was thinking about everything and none of it stayed long enough to really remember. That was the part he couldn't explain to people — there wasn't a topic. It wasn't anxiety, exactly, or maybe it just wasn’t only anxiety. It was more like his thoughts had just decided tonight was a great time to start free-associating at full volume: whether he'd ever actually learned the capital of Myanmar, and where Myanmar was, and then a memory of the card catalog at the library when he was eight, and whether card catalogs were still a thing anymore, and then a rundown of every time he'd embarrassed himself in sixth grade in reverse chronological order, and then in chronological order again, then the sound that song made — not the song, just the sound of it, that one guitar part — and then the capital of Myanmar again (Naypyidaw, probably, or maybe he was making that up), and then whether he'd remembered to lock the Jeep, and he knew he had, he watched himself do it, but now he couldn't not think about it because was that memory of watching himself lock it from yesterday? Or today? —
Not this again.
He didn't say it out loud. He thought it in that particular register that didn't have much feeling left in it — it wasn’t frustration, or anger, just recognition. The same tone he'd use to register a weather pattern. Oh. This again.
He tried the usual things. Counted breaths, which worked for about eleven breaths before his brain seized on the number eleven and started doing math. Tried to pick one thought and follow it to its end, which dissolved into the next thought before he got anywhere near an end. Tried to consciously slow down, to just — let there be space between the thoughts — and that worked for about one entire thought, which was two seconds long before he noticed himself trying to listen to the space and then he was thinking about listening to space and then he was just back in it again.
He adjusted his wrist against the pillow. The angle was off. He shifted.
His hip complained.
He shifted back.
He stared at the ceiling.
The light in the room was that flat gray that meant it was either four in the morning or six and he'd missed the whole night, and he wasn't ready to look at his phone and find out which. Looking at his phone made it real. Not looking at it meant there was still technically a chance this had only been half an hour, which was a lie he knew was a lie, but still.
Stiles closed his eyes.
That was the thing, right? Maybe he just needed to close his eyes. Maybe that was the part he kept skipping. Maybe that’s how most people fell asleep? Scott always did that. Closed his eyes and he was gone. Maybe Stiles is actively making sleep harder because he wasn't trying hard enough to actually sleep. Maybe if he stopped thinking about sleeping and just laid still and kept his eyes closed and let himself — drift? Fall? How did people fall asleep like that?
His shoulder itched.
His knee hurt.
Somewhere downstairs the pipes groaned.
His brain immediately started wondering how old the house plumbing actually was and whether the Sheriff had ever gotten the water heater replaced after that one leak in middle school and whether water heaters could explode because he was pretty sure he'd read somewhere that they could explo—
His brain started ranking every teacher he'd ever had by how likely they were to survive a zombie apocalypse.
He kept his eyes closed.
Mr. Yukimura would make it. Definitely Mr. Yukimura.
Coach Finstock would either be the first one turned or the last man standing, no in between —
He opened his eyes.
Gray light.
Worse gray light than before.
Shit.
He grabbed his phone before he could talk himself out of it.
The brightness stabbed directly through his skull.
Stiles hissed and squinted down at the screen, eyes watering instantly. Everything blurred together for a second, the numbers smeared and doubled until they slowly began to swim in and out of focus. His eyes felt dry and gritty under his eyelids from hours of staring into the dark without really blinking enough. He rubbed at one eye with the heel of his hand until stars burst across his vision. Apparently that’s what he needed to focus, only one eye.
5:12 AM.
“Awesome,” he whispered to absolutely nobody. “Love that for me.”
In an hour and a half, his alarm would go off.
Assuming he'd actually set one.
He stared at the ceiling again.
No. No, he definitely set one. Probably.
Except now he couldn't remember physically doing it. He remembered thinking about setting it, which — okay that was not the same thing, he knew that was not the same thing, he'd learned that lesson the hard way sophomore year when he'd spent twenty minutes mentally composing an email to Harris and then never actually opened his laptop. And honestly maybe the cruelest possible software update his ADHD had ever installed was making thoughts and actions feel interchangeable at three in the morning —
He grabbed his phone.
6:45 AM.
Thank God.
Then immediately his brain asked, unhelpful as fucking ever: What if I turn it off in my sleep?
Which would require sleep, technically, but his brain didn't seem interested in technicalities.
He put the phone back down.
Picked it back up.
Set a second alarm for 6:47.
Then a third one for 6:50 because what if he turned the second one off too.
His eyes burned so badly they watered when he blinked.
He was tired. That was the insane part. His body was exhausted down to the marrow. Every muscle felt overused. His joints ached with the deep bruised feeling that came from existing wrong for too long.
But exhaustion and sleep had apparently ended their relationship years ago and now only communicated through lawyers.
If he fell asleep right now, like in the next thirty seconds, which he wasn't going to do but theoretically — he could still get maybe an hour and a half.
Which wasn't good, but he'd done worse. He knew his own math on this. Less than two hours and he'd either sleep through the alarm entirely or turn it off in that horrible half-conscious place where it felt like a decision and wasn't, and then he'd wake up at 9:15 in a cold sweat with seventeen texts from Scott —
Okay, stop doing hypotheticals… based on previous experiences. Be realistic.
If he fell asleep in the next five — no, ten minutes, maybe his hands would stop shaking by third period but he knew the fluorescent lights at school were going to feel like knives behind his eyes.
Somewhere outside a car went past and he thought about where it was going at five in the morning, and whether the driver was tired, and then he was composing an entire life history for the driver, commute schedule and everything, and his brain settled into it like it was something to do, like this was productive, like this was fine —
He closed his eyes again.
The driver had a name now. Greg. Greg worked at a distribution center off the highway, 6am shift, drove this street every morning. Greg probably slept fine. Greg probably set one alarm and it worked and he woke up feeling like a person.
Greg was doing great.
Stiles' knee throbbed.
He shifted.
Found the shoulder angle again.
Lost it.
Found it again.
The number on his phone was 5:12 and climbing and there was a very specific kind of math that happened in the dark at five in the morning where every minute felt like it was being subtracted from something finite and dwindling, and he could feel himself doing it, tallying, recalculating, sixty-three minutes now if he fell asleep right this second, fifty-nine if he didn't, and the counting wasn't helping but he couldn't stop —
His wrist ached where it had gone still against the pillow.
He moved it.
His brain moved with it, smooth and automatic, onto whether Scott had finished the bio lab writeup or if Stiles was going to have to text him the answers at 6:49am again while simultaneously trying to make himself look like a person, and then onto whether there was any coffee left or if his dad had finished it, and then onto Myanmar, apparently that was just going to be a thing tonight —
Not this again didn't even feel like a thought anymore. It was just weather. The kind you stopped checking the forecast for because it didn't matter. It was going to do what it was going to do.
He stared at the ceiling and let it.
And somewhere underneath everything, under the counting and the checking and the exhausted math, there was a very quiet realization forming that didn’t have words yet:
He was not actually falling asleep anymore.
He was just waiting for time to punish him.