Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

“I bet. I’m not sure that she even knows what she likes, some of the time. But, that’s beside the point,” Rebecca said, leaning closer. “My point is this — Eerie has put a lot of effort into being the first thing you see when you wake up, right? And her reaction to this, when it happens, is likely to be, well, intense.”

“…and?”

“And I’m wondering if you want that.”

“Huh?” Alex said, puzzled.

“Alex, I can put you back to sleep for a few more hours,” Rebecca said glumly. “So that you’ll wake up when only the nurses are here. Or, if you prefer, a bit later, when Emily is around.”

“Wait, what? What does it matter?”

Rebecca shrugged.

“If you don’t care, then I don’t care,” she said. “Just wanted to give you fair warning. Girls take this sort of thing seriously.”

Alex scratched at his arm, where the tape had been torn away, leaving behind red, irritated skin.

“Consider me warned, then. I’m not going back to sleep, anyway, not for any reason,” Alex said firmly. “Besides, I thought I was supposed to be staying away from the cartel girls.”

“Eerie presents her own set of complications. But I’m not interested in keeping you away from anyone, Alex, and I’m sorry I gave you that impression,” Rebecca said, looking upset. “I’m trying to give you options, okay? Eerie seems to be kind of fascinated by you, and that’s already kind of a dangerous thing. If she decides that she likes you, well, then we are in unexplored territory.”

Alex held his hands up in surrender.

“Okay, sorry, I didn’t mean to be a jerk,” he said apologetically. “I’m still out of it and in shock, you know? Don’t take me too seriously.”

“I never do,” Rebecca cut in, cheerfully, folding her arms across her chest and sitting back in the chair.

“What’s so scary about Eerie?”

“Well,” Rebecca said, looking at him doubtfully. “She isn’t fully human, for one thing.”

“Yeah, and? I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but compared to my daily life lately, that doesn’t seem all that odd.”

“Being part of the same species is kind of a minimum standard that most people apply in dating,” Rebecca said, resting her forehead on her hand tiredly. “Beyond that, you have noticed that she has some little biological quirks, right?”

Alex nodded.

“Sure, the whole ‘my body is a drug factory’ thing, right?”

Alex paused while he recalled the room of dead Weir, and then his own somewhat fuzzy recollections of the night he’d spent with Eerie. Both seemed a touch surreal now, for different reasons.

“Yeah, that thing,” Rebecca said, smirking. “What do you think happens, Alex, when you act as a catalyst for her abilities?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said, scratching his head. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Rebecca admitted, spreading her hands. “And that’s the whole problem.”

Alex yawned and sat up in his hospital bed.

“This is all kind of a moot point, because I’m not going back to sleep.” Alex shook his head. “I still can’t believe I’ve been asleep that long.”

Alex felt just a bit of the panic he’d felt earlier, then, like he could feel the shape of the thing out there, emotionally, but it was still somehow distant, something to be objectively observed, but not necessarily something to be concerned over. He couldn’t help but wonder how long this particular perspective would last.

“Yeah, it has to be disconcerting,” Rebecca said, putting her hand against Alex’s forehead. “You seem totally healthy, though, if a bit undernourished. Are you feeling any better?”

“Thanks to you,” Alex said. “But, it isn’t a brand new experience for me. You lose a lot of time, being locked up. It’s weird, actually — every day seems to stretch on endlessly, but when you look at a calendar, you realize you’ve lost weeks or months, with no specific memory of the time passing.”

Rebecca smiled at him.

“It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? What we can get used to, if we have to. It’s always more than you think you could deal with, in the abstract.”

Rebecca looked affectionately at the sleeping girl curled beside her, reaching over to tuck an errant faded blue lock back underneath the hood of her sweatshirt.

“You’ve already changed a lot, Alex, since I met you. I’m interested to watch what happens from here. But you’ll be okay, you know that, right?”

“Why in the world,” Alex asked plaintively, “is Eerie wearing a Pittsburg Penguins sweatshirt? Don’t tell me she’s a big hockey fan. Is she from Pittsburg? There are Fey in Pittsburg?”

Rebecca laughed, standing up and brushing the wrinkles from her jeans.

“She says she just likes penguins,” Rebecca said, shrugging. “I’m going to stay out of your way from here on out, okay, Alex?” She leaned close to him, and then, much to his surprise, kissed him on the forehead. “You keep coming to see me every week, but I’ll stop meddling in your affairs. You seem to have everything under control.”

“Do I?”

Alex gratitude was obvious in his shining eyes.

“No, not really,” Rebecca laughed, patting him on the head and then heading for the door. “But I think you’re doing okay, all things considered.”

Alex sat there for a while, after she left, wondering what she had actually come for, why it was that Rebecca kept such a close eye on him, and why she got so nervous anytime he mentioned Mitsuru. After a few minutes, he decided to put it aside, no closer to a solution than when he had started. He would have to find out what the deal was, eventually. But, he didn’t have to do it right now.

He lay back against the pillows, his eyes half-open, and let his mind drift. It felt good, at that moment, to just lie there, nothing he had to do, nothing to worry about, no expectations to meet. Somehow, Alex felt so tired, and that bothered him, on a fundamental level. What had been the value of all that sleep, if he had not rested?

He frowned, trying to remember, something about sleep, something Eerie had told him. Something about what sleep actually was, what happened while he was asleep…

“The Church of Sleep,” he said softly, turning the phrase over in his mouth like sour candy.

Had he heard someone say that before? Alex wasn’t sure. It still didn’t mean anything to him, but there was a certain… resonance, maybe. A quality of dislocation. A memory from the time before words, like something passing nearby in darkness, evident only in the displacement of air. He felt uncertain, reluctant to follow his thoughts any further in this direction.

Alex wondered if he had slept. Had he dreamed? Had this all happened before?

The headache was so brief, it was over before he realized that it had started, accompanied by a piercing shriek that reverberated in the back of his skull, echoes of a pain he had forgotten. It went on and on, much longer than he could stand, even though it was over before he realized it had begun. The silence that followed was beautiful.

Alex tried to remember what he had been thinking about for the last few minutes for a while, and then he gave up.

He looked down at his hands, blue-veins under the pale skin of his palms, and flexed his fingers. He was awake. Alex ran his fingers along the cold rounded steel of the bed frame, bunched the starched sheets in his hands. This was real.

There was nothing, he thought, opening his eyes and smiling at Eerie, curled in her giant sweatshirt, her head peeking out from the gaping hood, breathing softly, the pink of her slightly parted lips. There was nothing here to worry him, nothing to be afraid of. He had not forgotten anything, nothing important.