Chapter Text
It’s just past midnight, a mid-May Sunday ticking over into a late-May Monday, and Camilla can’t sleep.
Insomnia is a highly unusual occurrence for her. She is a creature of intensely ingrained routine; she makes a point of switching off the light every night at half-past nine and is rarely awake after ten. Most of the time, she’s even able to wrestle Palamedes to bed along with her.
He’s gotten much better about bedtimes over the years. Cam has no illusions about being able to fully convert him into a morning person – necromancers are nocturnal by nature, as a general rule. But almost every night, she falls asleep to the sight of him snuggled up under the covers, book in hand. He’s taken to reading trashy novels rather than textbooks before bed, and his sleep has certainly benefited from the change in literature.
The jury is still out on whether “Romancing the Admiral: Trysts of Trentham Volume One” can even be classified as literature. But if reading his silly little erotica helps him fall asleep, just as his silly little Scooby Doo lunch box reminds him to pack food for his clinicals, then she’ll let him have it. Over the years, she’s learned to view any idiosyncrasies he picks up along the way as extraneous. As long as he’s alive and well, she can rest easy.
However, this time of year is the one time she knows, no matter what she does, Trysts of Trentham will fall by the wayside and his pillow will remain empty. Whatever habits she’s put in place are going to fall apart. Whatever strategies she’s worked out to convince him to look after himself are no longer going to work. Judgment Day is fast approaching.
It’s finals week.
Their apartment has been fully readied for the near-apocalyptic days ahead. The whiteboard hanging above their desks has been filled with her tidy handwriting, laying out their respective schedules in half-hour increments. Every available surface has been coated in notecards and post-its; even their shower, with worksheets carefully tucked into sheet protectors and taped to the curtain, has fallen victim to Palamedes’ penchant for paper. The kitchen has been stocked with frozen dinners and a delightful variety of canned goods, courtesy of her dead week trip to the grocery store.
(She calls the three different varieties of canned tomatoes in their pantry “being fully equipped for the unpredictable”. Palamedes refers to them as her “prepper tendencies taking over”. They agree to disagree.)
In short, they have battened down all the proverbial hatches. Nothing left to do but ride it out.
They have six years’ worth of finals weeks under their belts now, all four years of undergrad and the past two years of medical school. And every year, the one thing that she can never quite prepare for, the one thing she will never get used to, is Palamedes’ seven-year-long crusade to break the world record for how long a human can go without a proper night of sleep.
As with everything he does, he tries his best to be considerate about his overnight study sessions. He does his best to keep his shuffling of papers quiet, keep the lights dim and the frenetic scratch of his pens to a minimum, and he is always willing to move elsewhere if he notices he’s been keeping her awake.
Both of them are used to that sort of thing, are familiar with the compromises necessary when they’re constantly in each other’s pockets. It comes with the territory of being necromancer and cavalier. Accommodating one another, adapting to one another. Living like two plants sharing a pot, growing and intertwining.
They’ve known each other since they were toddlers, attended school together from nursery all the way up, and paired off as necromancer and cavalier at twelve like it was the most natural thing in the world. When it came time for higher education, the necro-cav joint enrollment track at Canaan University had been the only reasonable option. But as their life has shrunk down from a shared cul-de-sac to a shared dorm room to a shared one-bedroom apartment, his more disagreeable finals week habits have grown harder to ignore.
She can’t help that she’s grown used to forcing them both into a semi-regular bedtime, can’t help that she habitually lulls herself to sleep with the rhythm of his breath and the warmth of his lanky limbs encroaching on her side of the bed they share.
(They had moved in with two separate twin beds. That had lasted about a month and a half, before they realized they could replace the two beds with a double bed, two desks, and a bookshelf. Far more economical that way, and, really, they’re twentysomething graduate students. They can be adults about sharing a bed for sensible reasons.)
And currently, said double bed is one-half empty.
She rolls over, blinking blearily across their room. He is hunched over one of his many notebooks, backlit by the dim fluorescent of his IKEA desk lamp. Judging by the heap of textbooks beside him, he isn’t planning on breaking his finals week tradition any time soon.
Quiet as a cat, she swings her feet out of bed, padding across their worn carpet until she can grab him by the shoulders. Although it’s not as wonderful as a good night’s sleep would be, the way he jumps is, at the very least, gratifying.
“My God, Cam,” he gasps, one hand dramatically raised to his throat. “You know I have a weak constitution.”
“Stop the pearl-clutching, Warden,” she grouses, the nickname a relic from his time as leader of the volunteer corps in their hometown library. “It’s almost one in the morning. You can’t do this every night this week. There’s no way you can make it through finals with no sleep.”
“It’s worked so far,” he cheerily replies, sipping from a mug she knows contains one too many shots of espresso.
“Consider that you started this habit when you were a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed eighteen year old, and you are now significantly past that.”
“Cam, I’m twenty-five. That’s hardly decrepit.”
“Yes, well, you have now added the work of clinicals to the work of school, and you aren’t exactly a shining example of good health.”
He chuckles. “Low blow. But think about it. We’re going to have residencies to contend with next year. This is basically the last year of proper finals. Can’t I just savor the last dregs of my college experience before heading off into the corporate world?”
“You can savor failing physio because you fell asleep during the exam.”
“We both know full well that I have never actually fallen asleep during a class.”
“You’re dangerously close to tempting fate there, Warden.”
He doesn’t dignify that with a response. Mostly because they both know she’s right.
Palamedes isn’t necessarily overreacting with his desperation to get more studying done. Medical school finals are nothing to sneeze at. But Cam knows full well that he practically lives in office hours, is in two separate study groups, and, on top of all that, the two of them spend every Saturday afternoon in the campus coffee shop, catching up on work. He’s always taken to academia like a duck to water. He would surely have no difficulties passing his finals without his little midnight escapades.
And yet, he still insists on them. At this point, they are more tradition than anything else, the act of studying for reassurance rather than any actual need to absorb information. He’d started pulling all-nighters for essays and projects as early as middle school, and his little finals week proclivities were a natural evolution.
Just as routine is in her nature, she supposes nocturnal study habits must be in his. Just a little quirk; everyone has them. Just something she needs to get used to.
Cam knows, from seeing what some of the other cavaliers in the program have to deal with, things could be a hell of a lot worse. The scarring experience of the Sophomore Year Halloween Party Incident was a testament to that. She still shudders whenever she thinks about it, but it had given her a healthy appreciation for Palamedes and even healthier distaste for the Tridentarii.
(She’s pretty sure Naberius had recovered eventually, eighteen stitches and a tetanus shot later. What hadn’t recovered was the floor of the Tridentarius entry hall. Who knew that it was so difficult to get blood stains out of parquet?)
For precisely three hundred fifty-eight days out of the year, Palamedes is everything she could ever hope for in a necromancer, a friend, a domestic partner. Whatever incomplete label fits best in the moment.
That’s mostly the problem. He is so wonderful for those three hundred fifty-eight days, so intelligent and witty and kind. It makes her feel terrible for not being able to let him have just this one week of being a nuisance.
But this behavior isn’t just him being a nuisance, Cam tells herself. Getting next to no sleep is actively harmful to his health, which turns it from an annoying habit into a problem that it is her responsibility to fix. She already makes him take his vitamins daily, rest his eyes every hour when studying, even come along with her on her morning jog when his joints are feeling stiff.
And, much as he might complain and grumble about doing what she recommends along the way, he ultimately listens to her. He trusts that she has his best interests at heart, which, of course, she always does. It is in her job description to protect him from anything that might hurt him. Including himself.
She isn’t sure what it is about finals week that makes him lose all sense. He replaces his rationality with textbooks, practice worksheets, and an excess of caffeine. Everything that usually gets him to take better care of himself goes out the window. And, the longer she spends living with him, the longer she gets used to thinking of the bed as their bed, which they are both supposed to be sleeping in, the more his quirks morph into the source of her insomnia.
It is easy enough to justify her desire to fix his sleep habits in terms of them affecting his general health, or how they might jeopardize her own finals performance. It is a far more difficult thing to defend the particular way watching him not take care of himself makes her heart ache.
Cam would prefer not to interrogate the fact that she is apparently incapable of sleeping without him beside her. That level of attachment is inconceivable, and therefore cannot be added to her list of considerations.
She pads over to the bookshelf where they keep their collection of generalized textbooks from their intro year of classes, rifling through the indices until she finds what she’s looking for.
“Here it is. Chronic sleep deprivation, or insufficient sleep syndrome. The result of repeated periods of curtailed sleep, fragmented sleep, or inadequate sleep. Unlike insomnia, sleep deprivation is often driven by voluntary behavior choices which reduce available sleep time.”
“Chronic conditions are defined as three months or more, Cam. You know better.”
“Well, acute, then. The causes are more or less the same. Symptoms can include cognitive impairment, hallucinations, slowed thinking, memory lapses. All conditions that are assuredly going to be a help rather than a hindrance when attempting to pass your finals.”
“Camilla, really.”
“Severe yawning, Warden. Do you really want to explain to Professor Oct that you had to miss your anatomy final because you dislocated your jaw yawning?”
“Believe me, I shudder at the thought. My reputation would never recover. I would surely pass away from the shame and embarrassment, if the acute sleep deprivation didn’t get me first.”
She returns the book to its place on the shelf – keeping it alphabetized, just as she likes it – and maneuvers herself into her typical spot on his chair. Legs curled across one arm, bracing herself against the backrest with her shoulder. “Spare me the theatrics, Warden.”
He glances up at her, winding one arm around her waist. His eyes are puffy behind his glasses, but fill with warmth when he smiles. “Theatrics? It’s Monday morning. We have the full week ahead of us. If I start feeling the cognitive impairment coming on, then I’ll just drink some wheatgrass juice.”
“Wheatgrass juice is far from a panacea. Also, you are allergic to grass pollen.”
“Fair point. Some sort of green smoothie, then, preferably one that will not give me hives.”
“Five more minutes of work, and then you’re coming to bed.”
“No can do, unfortunately.” He takes another sip of what she can now see appears to be several espresso shots cut with a large quantity of oat milk.
“Twenty more minutes, then.”
“No, thank you.” He isn’t even bothering to look up at this point, keeping his gaze firmly trained on his textbook of choice.
“Could you at least give me an estimated arrival time of your head to your pillow?”
“Could you help quiz me with these notecards?”
She shoots Palamedes a glare that could burn through steel, and he finally relents. Dealing with him during finals week is truly a test of her patience. Her irritation is evident from her even thinking of it as that, as dealing with him. She collaborates with him. She coexists with him. She lives a peaceful, happy life that just so happens to be inexorably intertwined with his. But during finals week, she has to deal with him.
Funnily enough, personality changes are included in the list of sleep deprivation symptoms provided by their general medicine primer.
But Cam knows when she’s fighting a losing battle, when it’s time to give in and let him face his own natural consequences. She’s learned how to tell when it’s time for her to sit back and be swept along for the ride.
So there she sits, perched like an owl on the arm of his chair. Helping him find the sections he needs to review in textbooks, passing over pens and highlighters when he reaches out for them, flipping through flashcards so they can both quiz themselves. She even drinks from Palamedes’ mug when he offers it to her, but swiftly deems his concoction far too nauseating to consider getting up to make anything similar for herself.
(She takes more than a few sips, though. For the rush of caffeine. Not for the flutter in her chest when she fits her mouth to the mark left by his lips on the ceramic.)
He can memorize long strings of information, she can simplify and categorize the data into more digestible patterns. They work well together – always have. She fills in his gaps, he smooths out her sharper edges. Cam is good at the whole fulfilling basic needs part of life; Palamedes is the one who fills that life with light and laughter and vibrant color. Less two individuals and more two halves of one whole, functioning better when they’re together than they ever would apart.
And besides, she has to admit that it’s always nice to do a little extra studying. They remain in their respective positions, resting in companionable silence, for a long while. Two and a quarter hours, to be exact. She’s still watching the clock like a hawk.
Once she sees the red numbers on her bedside clock tick over to 2:45, Cam decides she’s had enough.
“Alright,” she declares, hopping down from the chair and flopping diagonally across the bed. “We’re done. Time’s up. We need to get up in four and a half hours. Bedtime, now.”
Palamedes spins around in his chair, leaning back and blinking at her. His glasses are slipping down the bridge of his nose. “We’ve had a very productive couple of hours. Get some sleep, and I’ll get a jump on some of the assignments for Wednesday.”
“I’m not sure what part of ‘bedtime’ you don’t understand. ‘Bedtime’ is not me making an announcement of what I’m going to do next. ‘Bedtime’ is a suggestion for something that you might find beneficial for your general health and well-being.”
“Damn my general health and well-being,” he says, his tone far too chipper for somebody planning on pulling an all-nighter alone. “Why sleep when there is work to be done?”
“Because you’re going to reach a point where you cannot do the work and your body will force you to sleep.”
“Has that point been reached yet?” He drains whatever is left in his mug. “I daresay not.”
“Innocent sleep,” she intones, rolling back over onto her side of the bed. “Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care –”
“Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast, I know, I know. And yet, Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
“Are you really willing to martyr yourself over Medical Ethics?”
“Perfectly willing, darling,” he says, dispensing the endearment ever-so-easily. Affection has always come quite naturally to him.
Usually, his praise washes over her like a warm bath at the end of a long day, or a steaming bowl of soup on a winter evening. Something welcome and comforting, warming her from head to toe. His present fondness does the same, until she catches a glimpse of the empty pillow beside her, the twin to her own. Then it settles like lead in her stomach.
“Bed, Warden.”
“Eventually.”
They spend a few moments glaring at one another.
This time, she is the one to break eye contact, clearing her throat and transferring her gaze to the ceiling. Cam makes a big production of getting ready for bed, fluffing her pillow, straightening out the sheets, rolling over to face him with a huff. She can’t resist; it’s her turn for some theatrics now.
Finally, Palamedes stands, popping a few of the vertebrae in his back as he does so, and comes to kneel at her bedside. He picks up their sheets and quilt, pulling them up to just under her chin, cupping her jaw to adjust her neck on the pillow. Tucking her in, so she’s cozy and warm and, although not quite sleepy, at least relaxed.
“My light is probably keeping you awake,” he concludes, gently running a hand through her hair. “I’ll move to the living room so you can get some sleep, yeah?”
“Sounds like a great plan. I can’t wait to get up in the morning and find you passed out on the kitchen floor.”
He frowns at her. “If I’m sleepy, I’ll stay on the couch, so I don’t wake you. I don’t want you to worry about me, Cam. I promise I’ll take care of myself if I’m not feeling well.”
They both know that last bit isn’t fully true. They both know she’ll be the one who will end up looking after him, just as he’s the one who looks after her when she’s overwhelmed and dazed from a particularly exhausting day. But still, his eyes are wide and earnest, and she knows at least the sentiment is sincere.
Cam nods, silently acquiescing, and he bundles his collection up from his desk. He leans down to kiss her on the forehead before flicking the light off and closing their bedroom door behind him.
She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the light isn’t the problem.