Title: Treading Water
Characters: Gillian Foster
Rating: K+
Disclaimer: Lie to Me belongs to Fox.
Summary: She's like a child, resisting bedtime solely on principle. Only there's no principle at work here.
Sometimes, she doesn't go to bed. Just because. No reason, really. It bothers her a little, because she does like to sleep, and she can't imagine anything better than curling up in bed and drifting off until maybe nine or ten or even eleven if she's feeling luxurious and wasteful.
Yet she stays up. She finishes bits of business on her laptop, wipes down the kitchen counters, dusts the knick-knacks on the shelves. Mindless bits of drudgery that keep her from thinking about…nothing. If she's avoiding something, she sure as heck doesn't know what it is. And if it's loneliness she's running from, staying up certainly won't help and will most likely exacerbate the problem.
She certainly has rational, logical frustrations to lose sleep over. Alec and his mess, Cal and his idiotic recklessness, her inability to completely trust her judgment when it comes to men. There's a whole host of other reasons to be restless: stress over the company's financials, emotional drain from the tough case last week, guilt for all her secrets. And these are all valid concerns, totally relevant to her life and understandably upsetting…but they're not why she's up at two-thirty in the morning, jumping at the noise of the refrigerator in the silence.
She wants to know why. Wants to dig it out, turn all those well-honed analysis skills inward to find and fix and control whatever's broken and malfunctioning. But every time she starts sorting things out, panic creeps up on her, poisoning her logic, and suddenly everything's out of control. She's not peacefully doing menial tasks, she's avoiding her problems and stewing and failing at everything because she's not being truly productive, but damn it, she won't sleep either, which would let her function and succeed and not get sucked in by this drowning current of despair and…
She has to consciously reject that route. She has two choices. Go to bed, exhibit discipline, and squelch her desire for companionship with the night, or make peace with her wakefulness and deliberately accept the consequences with full consent. There is no third option. Whatever her demons are, they'll be there the next time she can't sleep. Won't sleep. So she pretends everything is fine, hoping that if she pretends hard enough this visceral feeling of wrongness will be convinced and agree.
She pretends she's considering going to bed for the first time, after a lovely, productive night of doing necessary-but-not-urgent tasks she's been avoiding, where she will peacefully and happily curl up and fade off into blissful slumber, waking up with the panic-demon banished to the dark nether regions of her mind. As she imagines, so goes reality. That's what she tells herself, anyway. And whether or not she really believes the platitudes, she pretends she does. And that's enough, for tonight.