Chapter 20: Sleep Deprivation Is A Hazard

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Let's say . . . Keith doesn't do well without sleep and having idiots keep him from sleeping.

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Another update! Kind of short, I think, but at least it's something!

Disclaimer: As per usual, characters belong to their respective creators, except the OC's that have been spawned as a result of this story and the tweaks we've made to characters.

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Keith was having a bad day.

You see, it was his day off, but Shiro and Lance had both left early for some introductory appointments as they got settled into the building.

He had gotten up to see them off, but found it impossible to go back to sleep after that, ending up curled on the couch with Nuka watching whatever was on at that time in the morning.

It didn't help that he really had little to no sleep, having pulled an all-nighter and returned at almost 4AM. Despite cuddling up to Shiro and Lance, he only managed to grab little 4 or 5 minute naps, so he was currently running on fumes.

Then Nuka got fussy.

Like real fussy.

Nuka very rarely cried, so when he did cry it tended to freak them all out, which meant Keith jumped on it right away.

No matter what he did, Nuka continued to cry, curling up into a ball and wailing into the couch cushions.

By the time Nuka's crying reached the two hour marker, Keith ended up calling Omael hoping he would have a clue of what Nuka might have, simultaneously looking up the symptoms Nuka was displaying on his home computer. The rumbling tummy Nuka had was worrying him, but since Nuka wasn't exactly a normal baby, he could just check with a veterinarian or a pediatrician.

Despite Nuka's crying, Keith managed to hear Omael over the phone, the scientist suggesting it could be colic.

Which accurately fit the symptoms Nuka was displaying.

This was going to be a long few hours trying to get him to settle down.

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He had just gotten Nuka to sleep, even with Shiro and Lance's help it had taken a while, when a Turk trainee chose it as the perfect time to jump him.

"I've only just got Nuka to sleep, since he's suffering from colic. You wake him and I'll put on trash duty for the next year."

Once the Turk had fled, Keith returned the kitchen blade back to the knife stand before going for the shower he had planned on having. Shiro and Lance joining him wasn't a bad bonus, but he would later have to swing by Tseng's and make a complaint about being jumped in his own home.

However, instead of going for that power nap like he had intended once finishing his shower, he got a phone call from the general management.

"Yes?" He didn't even try to hide the annoyance in his voice.

"Help? There's a cadet with his head stuck in a stair railing."

Keith found himself dumbfounded, pulling his PHS away from his ear, looking at it, before holding it back up to his ear and asking "I'm, I'm sorry? Could you repeat that?"

"A cadet got his head stuck in a stair railing."

"Wha - how, how'd he get his head stuck in a stair railing?"

"Um, I can explain later but he got his head stuck on the outside of the railing and we can't hold him up for much longer, please hurry!"

Keith felt his right eye twitch.

"Alright, I'm on my way."

He ran off as fast as he could, muttering curses under his breath the entire way, and happily took out his irritation on the cadet as they cut him loose.

That cadet would later on develop a fear of both stairs and Keith, even taking a whole different route if he ran across Keith in the hallways.

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It had been 58 hours since Keith had taken any proper sleep, 2 minute power naps didn't count.

He had managed to go make a complaint to Tseng, who couldn't bare to look him in the face given the love bites his boys had given him during his shower, but he got a promise that there would be no Turk trainee ambush's in his home from now on, and in the entire Turk apartments.

At this point he had probably run through 70% of his normally bottomless pit of patience, but when it hit the 70 hour mark of going without proper sleep, he didn't care anymore.

The cause for that? Somehow there was an acid leak in the SOLDIER floor bathrooms, which left the entirety of SOLDIER that was living in base quarters to be displaced due to the flood damage.

And of course he was the only one that could sort it out since no one else was available in the housing allocation department, they were all clocked out for the night and their department head, Vlad Wolkin was currently on a well deserved vacation.

So he stumbled through four hours of assigning temporary lodging and cordoning off the area to prevent any idiot from wandering in and getting themselves seriously injured.

It was around the 76 hour mark that he was ready to murder someone.

It was now 6AM, and the day had begun for the early birds, mostly the morning janitors and those that liked to torture themselves with starting their work when the sun was barely in the sky.

So when some self-entitled pompous little twat rocked up to his office to complain about how the janitors weren't doing a proper job, because there was one, tiny, miniscule, little, coffee stain in his cubicle from the previous occupant . . .

Keith snapped.

It didn't help that the guy was hated by his entire department, as he barely acknowledged the regulations and safety requirements, only staying true to it enough that they couldn't fire him for negligence and keeping up with company conduct.

It wasn't the panicked stammering from Sephiroth's secretary that clued the General in on the problem, it was the incoherent screaming from several floors down that did.

Kristen barely got a sentence out before Sephiroth was dashing into the stairwell, bursting into Keith's office just in time to prevent Keith from actually choking the employee to death, who was literally a moment away from ascending into the afterlife.

Zack and Cloud had both heard the commotion, the Puppy dragging the employee off to medical while Cloud and Sephiroth held Keith down, actually terrified when it took an enormous effort on both their parts to keep him pinned to the floor.

Keith was throwing out a slew of Nibel curses mixed with what seemed to be gibberish (which Vincent later confirmed to be quite colourful cursing in the Ancient's language), snarling and growling like a rabid dragon.

Through the gibberish and curses, Cloud was able to translate snippets, enough to realise what the issue was.

Keith was severely sleep deprived, and had reached his breaking point.

So much it was driving him loopy.

Omael was called up and he administered a sedative strong enough to down a dragon (he wasn't actually sure but basically it was on that strong a level), it took a painful eight minutes for the sedative to kick in.

Sephiroth and Cloud sighed in relief when Keith went limp, the General shaking out his numbed limbs and Cloud's fingers were cramping up.

It was there and then they both decided to never let Keith get that sleep deprived again, otherwise someone might actually die next time, and they wouldn't be able to stop him.

Shiro and Lance took him home, to a worried Nuka who had overcome the colic, more than happy to snuggle up with his exhausted parent.

Keith would wake up two days later, wondering why he felt like he was experiencing the worst hangover ever, and had no recollection of the 76 hours he spent without sleep.

No one mentioned it to him, they rather not relive the experience.

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Omake

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Keith was very confused.

He couldn't recall the three days he spent without proper sleep, Shiro and Lance had both caved when he asked them why the date was wrong, but they had no idea what he had been doing since they were busy with their introductory course.

They did let him know how Nuka had ended up with colic, which Keith had spent most of one day looking after him, but that made Keith curious as to why Nuka had colic in the first place.

They had been feeding Nuka with formula so far, but one of the more common causes of colic was milk protein, and they hadn't given Nuka anything other than formula.

So how that gotten into Nuka's system?

Thankfully (for him) he found that out pretty quickly.

Nuka liked to wander the Turk apartment building, and was smart enough to know not to leave it without one of them, the Turks were pretty chill with him wandering round.

So when Keith ran across a familiar looking Turk, who for some reason made his hand itch for a knife, about to feed Nuka something that certainly wasn't formula, he was on the verge of exploding.

The Turk took one look at Keith, seeing murder on his face, and began to babble out an apology for jumping him (so that explained the knife twitch), but that wasn't the apology that Keith wanted.

That Turk then suffered a half hour lecture on what causes colic in babies, the symptoms and treatments, Keith dredging the information up from his subconscious.

Apparently it had stuck, given it was the first illness his child had gotten, it was pretty darn important information to him.

Shiro and Lance ended up running across Keith in the last few minutes of his lecture, the Turk crying and in a dogeza position while Nuka just watched on.

It was there and then that the Turks learned to never feed Nuka unsanctioned foods unless they wanted to suffer the wrath of Keith's overprotective Dad mode.

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A/N: From what I can remember, we were talking about sleep deprivation, I think I had been up for quite a while and then ChaosBalance said something about being up for a long period of time as well at some point, which spawned into the idea of Keith being severely sleep deprived and then proceeding to snap because of idiotic things needing his attention.

And so this chapter was born!

LiulfrLokison out! :3