Normally, Daria was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow; surviving Lawndale's idiocy during the day was more than enough to wear you down, no matter how resilient you were, and she wasn't nearly as sturdy as the façade she liked to present to the world. Eight or nine of hours of sweet oblivion was exactly what she needed to recharge. It wasn't just that, though; it seemed that the local environment was doing its level best to ensure that the exact combination of circumstances best suited to not sleeping were in effect, and it was difficult not to take that slightly personally, even if it was a patently absurd line of reasoning.
It was too warm; the covers were clinging to her body, practically suffocating her in a claustrophobic nightmare that was entirely too much effort to escape. She needed a drink, she needed to pee, but both of those tasks involved more strain than she was willing to countenance at that moment in time. Space and time distorted itself until it seemed that the bathroom was at the tip of some great summit, and not just down the hallway. That, and the fact that, outside of the covers, the temperature was roughly equivalent to the Arctic in the middle of winter; to expose her fragile skin to that, it was to invite frostbite and death.
All right, she knew she was being ridiculous; she knew that she was just being lazy, and having to deal with her own internal thought processes was half the problem here. Daria's mind was pretty sharp, and she knew how to wield it to cut most effectively, but she also knew how to quieten it; she wasn't used to ideas popping into her mind at just after midnight, when it would be impossible to fire up the computer without attracting scores of complaints from nearby towns fearing that war had broken out. Even then, it wouldn't have mattered; either she would've remembered the ideas or forgotten them – in which case, they probably weren't worth bothering with, anyway – but Daria could feel the nerves in her fingers getting twitchy.
Some people couldn't sleep unless they'd packed enough activity into the day; they would go for runs, or go cycling, or even immerse themselves in a frigid lake and actually swim for hours on end. Daria got an adrenaline rush from sitting in front of a phosphorescent screen shouting obscenities when the thesaurus suggested a blatantly stupid word. She felt that she couldn't take it easy unless she'd done some writing, even if it just to sketch out vague notes for the future.
Fishing underneath the bed meant exposing herself to the biting chill, but she risked the imminent bisection of her arm in order to retrieve a notepad that had been dumped there weeks, possibly months, earlier; it had been purchased in a deluded fit of self-improvement, idiotically thinking that she'd feel more like a writer if she actually wrote on paper. Without backspace to cover up the moronic errors and half-arsed ideas, what was the point?
There was a ballpoint pen next to it; it had probably dried-out by now, but Daria made some experimental swirls on the paper and found to her surprise that it was still working, even if she did have to shake the life out of it in order to get a consistent flow of ink. She quickly jotted down the little nuggets of scenarios that had so skilfully burrowed into her mind, clamping on to her neurons until she was afraid that the whole world would dissolve only leave her half-crazed notions as her new reality. It usefully wasted an hour of her life, but she didn't feel any more tired by the end of it.
She hefted a sigh in the direction of the ceiling; counting sheep, plotting out story ideas, picturing her and Jane taking on the zombie hordes in a hellish, post-apocalyptic Lawndale … none of her usual calming strategies were having any effect. No matter how many times the pale, wasted figure of Brittany exploded in a hail of machine gun fire, Daria couldn't get her mind or her bladder to stop nagging her for attention. If there was something concrete she could put her finger on, it would've helped, but even after an extensive trawl through her memories of the day, she couldn't find anything that would bring on this level of insomnia.
Staring at the ceiling was usually an effective remedy; it was so mind-bogglingly boring that, if she ever had to have major surgery, she was going to insist on using it instead of anaesthetic to ensure that she was actually under. Tonight, though, every crack, every striation, every gap between the tiles twisted and resolved themselves into a pattern of psychedelic complexity. It was as if she could see the entire structure of the universe revolving around in the plasterwork. It was then that Daria realised she had to go to the bathroom or her pelvic area would explode.
She made it to the bathroom without receiving any permanent damage from the glacial wasteland the hallway had become; Daria half-imagined that she could see a thin layer of frost coating everything, and icicles growing out of the floor in bizarre shapes. Some strange analogue of performance anxiety kicked-in, however, because as soon as she was in there, she found that she no longer needed to go; trying to maintain her temper after the wasted journey, Daria skulked back to her bedroom and barely avoided slamming the door shut. She collapsed face first into the covers and mouthed a scream that was muffled by the blankets. Facing the world was bad enough, but having to do so without proper respite from its previous assault on her psyche?
A weight joined her on the bed. A voice, cool and calm, said, "Hey, Daria. You having trouble sleeping?"
It sounded familiar to her somehow, but her sleep-fuzzed brain had trouble identifying the source of the voice. Daria wondered if it was worth the effort to haul her neck around forty-five degrees in order to learn who had so brazenly secreted himself into her room. They might have interesting things to teach her in regards to stealth, anyway. The fact that she wasn't more concerned about the intruder's intent concerned her. "Hey," she replied slowly, "uh, how did you get in here?"
"Does it really matter?" There was a hint of something in the person's voice. Quiet amusement, perhaps? As if breaking-and-entering into a teenage girl's bedroom while she was trying to sleep was such an everyday occurrence to them that expounding upon the methodology involved was an absurdity.
"I suppose not," agreed Daria. "But if you're an axe-murderer, could you at least keep the noise to a minimum? I'd hate for you to disturb everyone in the neighbourhood." She could just imagine the almighty brouhaha that would ensue if her parents were to stumble upon some madman dismembering their eldest daughter; it brought a smile to her face, obliterated though the expression was by the foamy duvet doing its best to asphyxiate her, picturing them berating a psychotic murderer as they artfully cleft her into her component parts. Maybe Jane could use the pieces in an ironic sculpture?
Instead of being viciously rent asunder by sharpened blades, however, Daria felt a strong pair of arms gently nudge her until she was lying on her side; facing away from the intruder, however, so she was still in the dark as to his or her identity. She guessed that it was a male, although making snap-judgements was probably best avoided at this point. Then again, the list of people she could reasonably distinguish in her soporific state wasn't especially high, and they certainly weren't in possession of arms such as the ones snaking around her waist, pulling her close until she was nestled snugly against … okay, it was definitely a male. "Uh, I should be fighting you off, shouldn't I?" said Daria. "I mean, you've invaded the sanctity of my lair, and are, um ..." she trailed off, feeling silly.
"Sometimes," the voice was saying in a measured tone, while the body got on with doing something that caused a soft gasp to escape Daria's lips, "it's best not to over-think things and just go with the flow. How many times in your life can you honestly say you've done something that was purely in and of the moment?"
Daria had to admit that there were relatively few occasions when she'd actually done something spontaneous. It wasn't her style. Rigid planning and thinking, that was how she rolled. Still, the bits of her mind that remained steadfastly logical were telling her that letting a complete stranger do what he was doing to her now, even if the irrational sections of her consciousness were telling her to just shut the hell up and enjoy it, wasn't exactly the best place to begin this wild foray into uncharted territory.
The body that the voice was connected to finished its work with a little satisfied grunt, and even Daria had to admit that she, too, was feeling a certain giddy warmth after the whole process had been brought to a successful conclusion; curiosity finally overwhelmed her and she turned to see who her mysterious visitor was, and then, her eyes snapped open and daylight was pouring in through the minute gaps in the blinds.
"Damn," Daria said softly, shielding her eyes from the harsh yellow glare that threatened to blind her. "Jane was right. I really do have weird sexual fantasies."