At six in the morning, Gekkou Hayate gave up. He'd tossed and turned and coughed and ached and twisted and twitched for three solid hours without once actually falling asleep. It just wasn't going to happen. He was certainly tired enough. Beyond tired. And he knew with certainty that he'd be paying for it later, when he went on duty that afternoon and had to face night shift on no sleep. But there was nothing to be done. It couldn't be helped. He simply could not sleep.

When he'd gone to bed, he'd dutifully taken the drugs to fight the illness deep in his lungs, and the ones that were supposed to take the edge off the pain in his aching joints, and the ones that were meant to enhance his sleep, to make it both easier to achieve and more restful. God only knew whether that first one was working, and if the second was doing it's job, then he had to conclude he'd be in unendurable agony without it. As for the last one, he might as well have snorted a few lines of coke, or eaten a handful of sugar-coated espresso beans.

"Fuck. I'm awake."

He lay on his back and stared at the fuzzy greyness of the ceiling, as the whitewashed boards and beams slowly resolved and sharpened in the growing dawn light. Awake, yes, but still bone tired. So tired he couldn't focus his thoughts long enough to do anything other than interrupt himself before he got anywhere. He wasn't fretting or anxious or worrying endlessly over the myriad troubles in his life like a normal insomniac. No, he was just awake. Sort of. Awake, as in not sleeping, but not any more than that.

Hayate was so tired that he really couldn't worry or plan or strategize or theorize. He couldn't meditate. He couldn't tell himself a nice distracting story, or mentally sing himself a lullaby. Sleep was tantalizingly just out of reach, and that was the one thought that kept reoccurring, breaking his trance just as he finally got to the edge of release. He'd tense up, or his leg would twitch, or his back would spasm, or he'd cough, or his eyes would just fly open for no good reason at all, and he'd be back where he'd started, with the thought, "Fuck. I'm awake."

He'd tried training himself mentally through the Lunar Dance forms, imaginary katana flashing in arcs over his imaginary body, twisting with graceful balance and power, and just as the flow was settling into him and he into the flow, he'd felt the electric crawl of a firing nerve in his shoulder. It traveled across his back and pulled the muscles into a brief contraction, and his train of thought derailed. He lost his mental footing and stumbled, and he was too tired to remember where he'd left off. Too distracted to remember what he'd been doing at all. He was suddenly, painfully in the physical here and now, with the thought, "Fuck. I'm awake," and there was nothing else.

And he'd done this over and over, pursuing different attempts to ease himself into sleep, but the result was always the same. He'd known better than to let real world concerns plague him. He didn't replay old battles or dwell on past mistakes. Didn't think about upcoming missions or worry about people he cared for or enemies he feared. Instead he'd tried letting his memory recreate the hypnotic intricacy of a piece of modern music. It ended with a stabbing pain in his leg as his calf knotted into a cramp.

He'd visualized a game of go he'd lost to Kakashi, playing each move in his head, trying to find the place where he'd made the fatal error that cost him the game. Before he could get there, before the imaginary clack clack of the stones on the board could lull him to sleep, he'd jerked awake, scattering illusory stones and losing even the outlines of the partially replayed game.

He'd tried telling himself a story, one of adventure and daring, with a brave ninja hero and a damsel to be rescued, a village to be saved, and a fiend of an evil daimyo to slay through cunning and skill. And just as the images in his story were starting to smoke and steam and curl out of his conscious control and into a dream, he'd been seized with an irresistible urge to stretch, as every muscle in his body seemed to contract at once. And he was awake again. Story forgotten. The very idea of storytelling forgotten.

He'd tried physical meditation. If his body was going to insist on taking his attention, he'd give in and let it have it. He'd concentrated on his breathing, slow inhale on a count of eight. Hold it for a count of nine. Let it out over a count of ten. Hold again for a moment in weightless, breathless suspension, then repeat. He'd cycled through it several times, finally feeling his muscles start to soften, his heartbeat start to slow, his mind start to disengage. And then his legs and feet had thrashed awake, jittering and twitching and seeming possessed, and Hayate could only swear and sigh and try again.

He'd tried to force himself into boneless exhaustion by masturbating. It had been pleasurable, sure, but it hadn't worked. In his strangely keyed up state, his orgasm had come quickly and hard, and for a few blissful minutes as he basked in the afterglow, he thought he was finally going to drift off. And then a shiver started in his chest that grew and grew until he had to cough. And the cough grew and grew until he was hacking and choking in a voice that didn't sound like his own, and on the verge of vomiting as his body convulsed and the foul taste of infection filled his mouth. And when it finally relented and he lay panting and wiping the back of his hand across his lips, one thought filled his mind: "Fuck. I'm awake."

After three hours of fruitless attempts, as the pale grey light of a mist-filled dawn invaded his bedroom, Hayate glanced at his clock, kicked his restless legs under the blankets, and gave up on the idea of sleep. On the notion of rest. On the very concepts of relaxation and slumber. He was awake, and he couldn't sleep, and he couldn't even rest; he just felt worse for trying.

He sighed and sat up, running his bony hands through the tangled mess of his longish black hair. He stretched and yawned and rose from the bed, shedding the comforter and sheets as a moth sheds its cocoon. Shivering and naked, he stumbled across his room and out into the cold hall, where the shock of the unheated tile floor made his bare toes curl defensively. In his bathroom, a pale-faced exemplar of dissolution and waste, a phantom who looked the very embodiment of exhaustion and illness, greeted him in the mirror. Hayate gave it a surly look. "Fuck. I'm awake."

END

Author's Notes

A birthday present for Bite. It's not on the theme she set me, but I hope she'll enjoy it just the same.

Please review, even if it's just a short note. Tell me what works and what doesn't. Your feedback will mean a lot to me.

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