A/N: Chudley Cannon Captain checking in for Season 7, Round 3 of the QLFC.
Prompt: Fandango of Spain; center the story around something a character is passionate about.
Word count (before A/N): 2,532 words
I am not JK. This is her world and I merely dabble.
I woke this morning at the crack of dawn-something I haven't done in ages. Luckily, though, I don't feel the sense of panic and doom I once did when I wake at such hours. Right now, honestly, all I feel is joy.
I quietly slip from my bed, my feet hitting the soft carpet of my bedroom floor. Stretching, I creep out of the room so as not to wake my husband. He tends to get a bit cranky when he wakes before his alarm, and I personally want this time for myself and my thoughts.
Sleep is a delicate thing in our household, something we hold near and dear to our hearts even more so than the love we share between us. Why?
It's simple really: We love to sleep.
Like there are maybe three other things I actually, genuinely love outside of sleeping, but sleep is number one. And like every other human being who has ever walked this planet, I probably don't get nearly enough of it as I would like.
Of course, I have a slightly better excuse than my fellow homosapiens. Whereas people like my sister lose sleep over Netflix binges or late-night parties, I lose sleep because my body just won't do it. It actively rejects the Sandman's advances, and unfortunately for me, that means I don't usually get in my recommended seven to ten hours.
It used to be a bloody nightmare.
And yes, it's always been like that-I'm genetically predisposed to the insomniac lifestyle. I used to wake at ungodly hours just to sit and stare at the dark walls of my bedroom, contemplating why, why, why I can't just close my damn eyes and sleep. Humans are supposed to spend at least a third of their lives sleeping-I've probably spent a third of mine wishing I could do just that.
When I was little, maybe seven or eight, I would leave my room at two, three, four in the morning, and sit with my mum who was up for many different reasons. (I suppose running the governing body of the entire wizarding world is a relatively fair reason, though my sleep-deprived brain always wondered why someone who could sleep chose not to. Anyways…)
Both Mum and Dad did what they could for me-Healers, potions, even Muggle doctors. But they didn't help. Nothing helped. Not until one day…
"Merlin," Rose's voice creeped out of the foggy world that was my reality. When you don't sleep-can't sleep-everything becomes muted. Sight, smell, taste, and sound.
"You look like a zombie."
I blinked, looking into my sister's oval face. She had these amazingly blue eyes and bushy red hair. Of course, she did her best to plait it, but the frizzy ends would curl away, leaving her braid looking like a knock-off red version of a chia pet.
"A what?" her best friend came into focus, his thin lips painted across his porcelain face in a frown. Scorpius Malfoy stood beside her, his emerald green eyes staring like a cat.
"Inferi," Rose offered him instead, her eyes still searching mine. It took a moment for me to realize her hand was resting against my cheek, cool fingers running along my jaw, tilting my head upward. "I thought you said Madam Patil's potion was working. You look like you haven't slept in weeks!"
"That would be an accurate assessment," I said, peeling her hand from my face.
I was in my fifth year back then. Rose in seventh. I had somehow managed to make it through most of my Hogwarts education without severely maiming myself despite my lack of sleep, but it was becoming increasingly clearer that danger was inevitable. My spell work was shaky at best and I almost transfigured my partner into a teacup a few weeks before. My latest attempt at potions had all but burned down the entire Potions classroom in a bubbly pool of acidic doom. Flitwick had even threatened retirement after I Wingardium Leviosa-d him up to the ceiling.
Madam Patil tried very, very hard after that to create a sleeping potion so potent it probably could have killed a small child.
It worked for three days. Then my eyelids fluttered open on the fourth night at three a.m. I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried.
"I think I have to quit school," I told my sister for the umpteenth time. And as always, her reaction was predictable: abject abhorrence.
"Hugo, you can't give up on magic just because you lose a little sleep! You're a wizard, for Merlin's sake! It's a part of who you are. You can't change that."
"Insomnia is a part of who I am, too," I spat back. Irritability came in waves back then. "Am I supposed to accept I can't change that either?"
I spun on my heel and left her standing slack-jawed beside Scorpius. Not only had she insulted me in the span of a few minutes, but she scrutinized my well-being and lectured me on something she clearly did not understand. And I was fifteen, so this was a huge slight to my character.
When I couldn't sleep at Hogwarts, I often found myself walking along the shelves of the library late at night. The school's caretaker, Phoebus Stone, did not like it at first, but after some mild convincing and a few insomniatic tears, he had gladly let me peruse the ancient tomes while the castle slumbered.
I rarely went into the library during waking hours-the quiet during the daytime was static, buzzing with nearly silent students; the quiet at night was calming, the kind where crickets would happily chirp and the books could rest on their shelves.
But I am so grateful I walked into the library that fateful day.
"Can I sit here?" I asked a fellow fifth year. His name was August and he was in Slytherin. That was about all I knew of him. I had found him seated at a window table, his head resting against the glass. The only open seat directly across from him.
When he didn't answer, however, I almost lost it; he was adding insult to injury-just sitting there, sleeping.
I slammed my books down, awakening the poor boy. Had I known then what I know now, this encounter would have gone quite differently. Alas, I have a temper. And I don't sleep. It's not a good combination.
"Your bloody dorm room's for sleeping," I sank into the seat opposite him, nostrils flaring. "Why don't you take your stupid face and run along back to the dungeons where you belong." I wasn't asking.
August, bless him, was still dazed from his daytime nap, and he was not in any means prepared for a verbal sparring match with the likes of me. Instead, he blinked away the sleep from his eyes, his head bobbing slightly, his hand feeling around for his books. That's when I noticed what he was reading and my mood shifted significantly.
"The Narcoleptic Wizard's Guide to Ancient Runes?"
"When you can't even keep your eyes open long enough to take in the symbols, it gets," August paused to yawn, and I had to stifle my own. "It gets harder and harder to pass with a decent O.W.L."
August and I, before that point, had never really bothered with each other. Gryffindors and Slytherins had had a long history of rivalry despite many efforts to soothe the tides. It also didn't help being a world-famous Weasley without ever having done anything world-famous myself. I never tried to branch out of my small circle of family and friends because I was certain everyone else just wanted to know about my parents. August was just a face in the crowd. A boy at a window, in the library, with an empty chair in front of him.
Fate works in mysterious ways; I will never doubt that again.
"Hugo Weasley," I said, extending my hand for a shake. "The Insomniac of Gryffindor Tower."
He smiled, his drooping purple eyes meeting my own. His hand grasped mine.
"August Waters, Slytherin's Bonafide Narcolept."
It was the start of a beautiful friendship. And partnership. We began lamenting our sleep-related woes, everything from falling asleep while flying a broom to staying awake for nearly a month straight. He would fall asleep mid-sentence, mid-word even, and I would gently move him along, away from crowds or stairs or wherever we were at the time. And he would sneak into the library late at night and walk the length of the long shelves with me the best he could, his reasoning being he would sleep all day the next day anyways.
I also learned that though he fell asleep at random, he too struggled with feeling well-rested. His inability to sleep on command, instead being enslaved to his drowsiness at will, left him a walking zombie like myself.
And it was like I had found a lifeline. I still wasn't sleeping, mind you, and I very much wanted to. But August grounded me on my worst days, where my head was so foggy I could have been floating through the clouds for all I knew.
Then, Potions class of our sixth year. Both of us had decided to continue forward in our N.E.W.T.s and both were adamant on being partners. Professor Richards did not protest.
"I've been thinking," August had said. "What if we did something about our little sleeping problem?"
It was the start of term, so the summer heat was still upon us. And summer was always worse for me. My eyes were so heavy that day, I thought they would melt down the length of my face.
"I would drink a cup of goblin's piss if you told me it would let me sleep."
"I was hoping you'd say that," he grinned.
A pause. "You were?"
"Well, maybe not that exactly. But, I have an idea."
After class, August and I approached Richards. She was absolutely thrilled with our plan.
That's how I became a Master Potioneer. Er, well. That was the start to it anyways. August and I embarked on a tireless journey of mixing and matching and remixing and rematching ingredients. Researching sleeping potions and sleeping remedies. Diving headlong into the science of sleep.
I fell in love. With sleep. With August. With Potions.
But mostly sleep.
It's a fascinating topic on its own, all the intricacies of a night of slumber. There are several stages we all go through, even me and August with our out-of-sync brains. When we don't get those hours in, we lose more than an hour of z's-your life and your health are so intertwined with your sleep schedule, it's astounding how many people still chose to watch just one more episode before bed.
(I could write a whole book on why watching screens before bed is probably the most horrific, insidious thing a person could do to themselves, but this isn't the time or place. Perhaps for my dissertation…)
At the end of our Hogwarts stay, August and I were on the brink of something that would change the world: the thirteenth use of dragon's blood.
"Just one drop, and we'll both be on normal sleeping schedules for the first times in our lives," said August.
"Do you really think that's the key?" We had failed so many times before.
"One drop, Hu," his purple eyes boring into mine. I was exhausted, from lack of sleep, from lack of success, from N.E.W.T.s and homework and loving my potions partner and-
"One drop."
The potion turned a midnight blue, sparkling faintly like a fading star. I drank a spoonful and so did August.
When I went to bed that night, I truly thought only moments passed between sleeping and waking. But when I opened my eyes, Daryl Thomas-Finnegan was staring at me from his bed, eyes wide, his mouth open in a perfect 'o.'
"What?" I asked. "What time is it?"
"You snore. Did you know? Loudly, like two Blast-ended Skrewts having a go at each other."
"What?" I sat up. For a moment, everything felt more real, more solid. Like the world came into focus in a dazzling rainbow of color and sound. I felt the deep red wool of my comforter, heard birds chirping outside, smelled someone's aftershave wafting in from the boys' loo down the hall.
"What time is it?" I repeated.
"9:30."
I ran to the Slytherin Common Room's entrance in my pyjamas and bare feet.
"It worked!" August shouted when he saw me rounding the corridor. "It bloody worked, you beautiful orange-headed sleep-depraved nightmare!"
I may or may not have cried into his neck while we celebrated our victory, dancing in the halls as our classmates gave us a very wide berth. They didn't matter-two years of research and we did what we set out to do. We found a solution to our little sleeping problem.
After that, I immersed myself in the research of sleep, yearning to find out as much as I could as fast as I could-did you know 12% of the population dreams only in black and white?
When that wasn't enough, I branched out into the Muggle world. Even now I'm on my way to becoming a somnologist-a sleep disorder doctor-with just five months left to go. There are more narcolepts and insomniacs out there beside August and myself, after all, and I never feel more awake than when I'm working to better my sleep.
Speaking of being awake...
"August," I call from the little breakfast nook, back in our one-bedroom flat. My thoughts and reveries dissipate as I take in the rising sun. It's about time August woke up, too.
"Hugo?" he calls back and I smile at the grogginess in his voice, just like the library all these years ago. He clambers out of our bedroom in his boxer briefs, his brown hair sticking straight up. "Don't tell me you were up late."
"No. Up early with the sun," I smile.
"Oh, Hu," he hugs me from behind as I pour him coffee (it's decaf, by the way. There's no caffeine in this house, for obvious reasons). "By choice?" he asks.
"No," I murmur, turning to face him. "But I'm certain it was nerves and nothing else."
He smiles, taking his mug. "Yeah. She'll be here any day now, I can't even believe it."
Ah, yes. You see, when I said there are maybe three other things I actually, genuinely love outside of sleeping, they would have to be my research, my husband, and our soon-to-be adopted baby girl.
For so long I've devoted myself to sleep. It's a passion born out of pain, really, that turned into something much bigger than myself. I have awards for my contributions to the wizarding and Muggle worlds alike.
But that's nothing to the love I feel right now, for her. And I don't even know her yet.
"I almost regret getting up with the sun," I say, sipping on my own coffee. A teasing smile plays at my lips. "Once she gets here, I doubt we'll ever sleep again."