Night Shift
He looked guarded even when he slept. His fingers were curled, often in an irresolute position, but he looked tense with a petulant energy, like the exhaustion that had taken over was unwelcome, a bitterly acknowledged fault. Solid evidence of the man's vehement hate toward the Sandman's vocational duty was his right hand lain across the keyboard, flattened now like underbrush under an exploratory boot. His face was wrinkled but refined like the faces on paper currency. Sand-colored stubble flecked his jaw line. His sweater and starch shirt were both untucked like a rakish schoolboy's uniform. His glasses hadn't been removed. It looked like he had merely been adjusted sideways, bent at the waist like a toy solider, unless Desmond was lying down and Shaun was as erect as ever.
The only difference really was the silence. There was no frivolous humping of the man's tongue against the many fallacies of Desmond Miles. There was no childish huffing, no spiny sighs. For the first time Desmond was listening in on something farfetched, surreally gut-pleasing. He was listening to the man breathe, the vapor he was emitting, opposing its dingy vessel, was pearl-like.
What the fuck, was all he could repeat in his head, What the fuck. His fingers probed the inside of his jean pockets for absolutely nothing. He couldn't remember the last time he could pull out lint, an assortment of tips, a bus ticket. They were completely empty of anything but his dredging flesh.
Desmond, for the purposes of making his absorption in the sleeping man a priority, was himself sleep-deprived. It was a desperate mutiny of his bed, of succumbing to a vulnerable torpor. He made his rounds watching the others sleep in their various haunts; Lucy sprawled brutishly on her claimed bed, pillows thrown by her feet. Rebecca, if not loyally curled up in the plush of her baby, was spread out on some thatch rug she rolled out for herself at the foot of Lucy's bed, though she never looked as peaceful as she did roosting across from Shaun's work desk, cradled by her creation.
Desmond had discovered in the long run that Shaun never failed to pass out near his computers and papers, suspended by his desk, looking just as harmlessly menacing as he did animated. Desmond often wondered if he would ever be pitted against so much by life's funhouse mirrors to become that bitterly depressed and lonely. He wondered if there was still room in the man to be happy, even if it was another shot glass away to a total compromised existence, which he had witnessed, had served those drinks.
Lucy said she still felt fleeting moments of happiness. Rebecca he would feel silly asking. Despite Shaun's lousy rapport, with well, feelings, Desmond found himself nonetheless invested in the bugger's sour rhythm of dictation, depending on a break, a stumble, anything, to make the strangled form of the sleeping Shaun somewhat tolerable. Where was the give? There had to be something, some vantage point to the otherwise planar man.
Desmond breathed like a clanking motor on purpose. Why didn't he wake up? Even the man's knuckles connecting with his cheek, a hefty swing at his gut, would force him to reconcile with his own bed quite possibly. Or was that really why he was so wired lately? It had certainly come to that point, but had started with the visions. It was funny how he tended to forget. The visions. The initial 'what-the-fuck' instigators.
It made him feel mad, but a stunted mad, not what he had felt leading up to the events of his kidnapping from Abstergo. He had been absolutely stir-crazy then, ready to cause his big brute body to shatter. He had been foolish, he knew it, but that had never mattered. Shaun was more than strictly callous as he ate Desmond out on that one, was beyond hysterical. He wouldn't drop the matter, either, like Desmond was a rubbish bin designed especially for hecklers. He had become good at ignoring him, usually just summoned the image of Shaun asleep, Shaun with his mouth hung open like a mackerel's, Shaun splayed out on his desk for a definitive period like a chalk outline, until somebody blew on it.
Finally, one day, like the day he had bought that motorcycle without a thought, just a blinding feeling, he snapped at Shaun, albeit staying his fumbling rage as if it were a serving tray stacked with plates. He stood there, fuming, but determined to keep those plates in check, limit the use of the colorful language he was itching to use, as if with a customer. Usually, he didn't give a flying fuck, but around Shaun he felt as if he was answering to a superior, which really made him even more pissed. Therefore, preserving his dignity was the upmost necessity. Shaun could flounce and wheeze like a blown up balloon released suddenly in an absolutely voracious, helter-skelter tumult. Let him play the part of the prick.
"Hey," Desmond found himself voicing with an unbidden harshness. He reeled back, produced again, with softer edges, "Hey."
He hadn't gotten past that word, naturally. Shaun verbal buffet extended before him, inviting engorgement, just one mouth-watering bite. Desmond, absolutely nauseated, and lacking Tums, walked on, as the back of his head got pelted with words that indulged the attacker like gross amounts of bread and butter.
Desmond couldn't imagine what he would have said if Shaun had uncharacteristically stared at him, taking in another human beings façade for once, noticing the glyphs on his face, the relief of his brow. Desmond knew for a fact that Shaun had never really looked at him full on, only past him, only took in the fibers of his shirt for all her knew. He had never felt bodily scanned by him as he did by Lucy on a daily basis, checking for anything off, anything worth commenting on in a matronly tone. Sometimes he believed Shaun's eyes were huddled stubbornly behind the lens of his glasses, hunched and scowling like silver-backed gorillas at a zoo. He really was harmless when you started to notice these things, once you realized there was something permanently barring the way between you and 'it', whatever 'it' was. No matter how provoked 'it' was all it could ever do was supply a testy glare, canine teeth poised in a mask of containment, amusement for others.
When Desmond began to associate himself with the sleeping Shaun more and more the animated Shaun began to lose its sauciness, it's pretense. Shaun's regular outbursts and commentary became wallpaper, frilly, garish wallpaper that lacked no other use than to match the cozy on the toilet seat. He still felt baited, but the desire to bite was void.
Shaun, an embryo still in many senses, was still unmoved by Desmond's sense of interest in his work, his social advancing, executed with fine guerilla tactics. If Desmond pointedly walked away, Shaun's stammering outbursts still clawed at the air in this wake. There was no recognition of abandonment, which, Desmond absolutely despised, for the other man's sake.
Like a child, once, he blurted, "I'm not listening," from the place from which he stood now, at the corner of Lucy's desk, gripping it like he could manage to snap a triangular piece off with his fingers, like sodden earth. Lucy's desk had not been vacant. She regarded him earnestly at first, as she always did, but then her eyes seemed to be jolted into a magnetic retrograde, were steadily falling away as if broken off at the hinge in which she was sautered to Desmond, at the point they most overlapped, most understood each other. It wasn't much, what they had, and it felt like absolute shit, feeling like the anchoring point had snapped between them. In that moment he had let it slip that he did give a fuck. I walked away and the bastard hasn't got a clue. He could only look at Lucy briefly. She looked like she had swallowed herself, temporarily, and was stunned by the sudden overhead fixture blazing above. It was just like that, to retreat, and realize it was worse than sunning your meat for the vultures. He had never seen Lucy look in a reflective surface, was actually sure if she even had the leisure to fix her appearance in a mirror she would just settle for Rebecca's opinion, which was as valuable as the opinion of an ungainly father with good intentions, espying his daughter through newsprint. A distracted 'fine' was usually the verdict, dictated through her strained sense of voice, which never helped with the delivery.
When Lucy slept she was this thriving, rippling thing, like the fronds of a sea anomie rocking amorously back and forth on its heels. She sunk deep in herself and would thrash suddenly in her sleep every time her soul deceived her, treating her like Sisyphus, pitching her toil to the bottom of the preposterous incline of her heart. Sometimes it seemed Lucy had waked, when really, she was only grimacing to regain ground, to press her own head back down into the depths of a futile utopia.
"What are you trying to accomplish?" he wanted to whisper, unlike himself, whipping up a role reversal on the spot. Lucy had this way of calming him down, only because beyond the thin layer of stolid duty there was a figure wavering underneath, resentfully fallible. These glimpses of that figure gave him the wherewithal to bring himself out of a fit of hysteria, when the images butchered his perception. In a way, he did not want to quell the struggle inside Lucy because it was that struggle that bounced him back from his own hell. Sometimes he felt so transparent, so trivial, because he had room in his shoes for an entire army of people to take charge in. Surely, it was a slow loss of control.
It was when he was steeped amongst the trio's repose, when he caught them on the flip side of it all, them not harried, lost in an unfamiliar gradient where they were snatched of a symbiotic gleam—no not the white flaring light—he could not help but take the time to study them. He wondered if Shaun could learn to find the fascination in it as he did, realize that people were pitted into ruins too, and on a routine basis at that. Maybe he could learn to appreciate it.
When he was watching them sleep he felt in control. There are no repercussions for being too curious, too close. He didn't want to lie next to them, feel them too close too his own body. He liked watching them from his viewpoint above. His eyes fluttered occasionally, thinking his late night prowls unreasonable.
Fuck that, he thought. Every time I close my eyes…every time I let my guard down for even five seconds…He'd gotten sick of something that seems to be causing more harm than catharsis. He'd rather position himself in front of a prissy, passed-out Brit, notice the man's eyelashes for the first time, notice faint freckles on the back of his closed fist.
Shaun tries to be inconspicuous, acting so absorbed in his computer screens, when really, at intervals, he is shifting his gaze to the reflection of Rebecca in the monitor, tinkering with the Animus or just bunking down, curling up like a cat on her throw or right on the Animus's stomach. Shaun was usually the last to drift off, convinced that Desmond was one of the fallen as well. Every night he haughtily acted like he was going to pull an all-nighter, poured himself cup after cup of Americano, each sip taken with a dose of irony. More than never he ends up cheek pressed to desk, fingers tapping out some sort of tattoo on the wood, dashing out vital messages to the world he has unwillingly left behind.
Desmond watched this all happen from a distance, approached slowly as Shaun wilted. It was Shaun he visited first and Shaun he visited last. It was strange. Shaun refrained from budging an inch, was absolutely petrified from the onset to the surfacing. At least this was what he observed. It wasn't as unsettling as he would have surmised given solely a description and not being next to him, the immobile man lapsed into some enchantment like a princess encased in a glass funnel. It wasn't unsettling at all. It was like when we saw that part of Lucy, the part bereaved of any sort of functional form. Like a parasite planted in a corpse, it just suffered.
For these three workaholics, those with the weight of an expanding world on their shoulders, time stopped.
Shaun rose first, never in a daze, already pulsing like a well-oiled machine with residual caffeine. Desmond would scope out a spot on the floor to look idle on, wave a hand if Shaun happened to acknowledge him. Despite Shaun's protocol to fail to do just so and either go to the kitchen to brew more coffee or mold to the monitors again, Desmond accepted the morning without qualms or ornery opposition. There was a reason Desmond chose Shaun to be the fall of an empire, as well as the dawn of a new era.
When Shaun slept he looked like a column that had caved, marble as white as snow, as resistant to touch. Often Desmond would muse if Shaun felt as torn between times as he did, was spread so thin that only a shell was left in the present, one exhibiting his most shallow design. He wondered how much of Shaun was buried within the dates, the dust, the tomes. It seemed plausible they would meet, as Desmond too had pieces missing, trapped between the pages of history. It was just a manner of waiting, watching, until something stirred, until Shaun lifted his eyes to feign critique when really he was reliving something falsely charted but something that finally felt real, down to his very bone.