righteousindignation | (no subject)

it's never a proper time of night, always two-seventeen or three-twenty six or five-oh seven. if it was predictable, it wouldn't have been what it was.

usually, it's her fault -- she tends to lash out. punches where she could reach, occasionally shoving, clawing out at what her truth is for a minute, until she wakes with heart pounding and eyes wild, coming back up to reality like a police flashlight in her eyes. he's annoyed but by now shoves a pillow between them when he's calm enough to know who it is, why it is. worse nights, he shoves, grabs, is too asleep to remember and tries to suffocate the attacker with a pillow. there are bruises and marks and they have to wonder, when do you stop saying sorry for something that isn't your fault?

the psychiatrists called it reflex, when she'd asked them years ago why it was hard to sleep next to someone. common among people in their line of work, to mix up dreams and reality. exhaust oneself before bed if medication wasn't your route, and you'd be dreamless, without cause for alarm.

she always hated the psychiatrists.

one time, he almost didn't realize, fixated on smothering the enemy. she thought she was drowning, that she was going to have her lungs fill with water and carry her down, until she heard him swearing and felt her body shaking and she's not underwater she's right next to him.

she forgave him, as she always does.

it's never anything real that gets confessed when they can't sleep, only fragments -- "volgograd," she'll whisper, and it may mean nothing to him but it means graffiti in cyrllic and the sight of blood on snow through a rifle scope. or, they don't sleep at all, and they pretend they do for the other's sake.

it's hard, trying to stitch yourself back together enough to make a whole person when you left pieces of you in different countries (overweight bags are such a hassle, leave something behind), using coarse black thread and awkward stitches that will leave scars. sometimes you will get a knife at your back and sometimes you will sleep so lightly that someone getting up wakes you to full alertness, and it will take years before you can sleep soundly, purely, contently at each other's sides.

years to not kill each other. seems like a challenge they can't resist taking.