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Janus actually felt okay for the first time in a while.
In fact, he felt pretty good. He actually had energy, and his motivation was trickling back.
As such, he decided to take the opportunity to catch up on his work, to finally feel like he was actually doing something other than laying around.
Except Janus vastly overestimated the amount of energy he had, and he continued to work even once his body started giving him signs that he should take a break. He ignored the heaviness of his limbs and the drooping of his eyelids and the slowly increasing wandering of his mind. He pretended that his energy wasn't dwindling because he had finally felt normal for the first time in forever, and he didn't want to let go of that feeling. He was tired of feeling useless, tired of feeling unmotivated, tired of not feeling like himself.
But eventually, he couldn't keep denying, keep lying to himself.
He had kept working way longer than he should have, and now he was even more exhausted than he had been the day before. Janus found himself almost falling asleep at his desk, and he jolted back into awareness with confusion and a thumping in his chest. He rubbed at his eyes and let out a frustrated groan.
He was so tired of this, but he was also too tired to do anything about it. All he could do was throw up his hands and crawl back into bed, his eyes drooping shut within minutes.
And then he heard a loud knock on his door.
Janus's eyes flew back open, and he jumped out of bed without thinking, almost stumbling from the too-fast movement. He caught himself on the edge of the bedside table and blinked. Just as he reoriented himself, the knocking came again.
"You have got to be kidding me…"
He trudged over to the door and pulled it open, revealing Virgil, whose eyes shot up toward his hair before raising an eyebrow.
"Dude, were you asleep?" Virgil asked. "It's, like, not even 8:30."
Janus rolled his eyes.
"Do you need something, Virgil?"
The other man's eyebrow only raised higher.
"Well, yeah, but let's put that on the back-burner for a sec," he said. "You good?"
Janus sighed.
"I'm fine, Virgil, just tell me what you want."
He just wanted to get whatever this was over with so he could go to sleep.
"Well, Lo wanted to get your opinion on something and he asked me to come get you," Virgil explained. "But if you were going to bed, it can wait until tomorrow."
"No, it's fine; just give me a moment," Janus huffed, starting to straighten out his rumpled clothes.
He really didn't want to do this now. He didn't want to walk all the way to wherever and stay up who knows how much longer, but what else could he do? He was already falling behind and not contributing as much as he should be. And besides, this situation was his own fault. Why did he have to overwork himself just because he had a little more energy this morning?
With another sigh, Janus and Virgil walked down the hall.
He tried to ignore the glances Virgil kept sending his way.
XXX
He hated this.
He hated it, hated it, hated it.
Janus couldn't sleep. He couldn't sleep, but he was exhausted- so exhausted that he had thought he'd fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow- but he didn't. No, instead of getting sleep, Janus got a fast heartbeat, a tight chest, and a sudden inability to feel comfortable in literally any position. And on top of that, his mind was racing so fast he barely even knew what he was anxious about at this point.
The last time he glanced at the clock, it was past 4 am, and with each minute that ticked by, Janus started to feel more and more like he was going insane. His room was swirling in the dark, and his mind was creating shadows that weren't even there, and even though he knew that all of this was just his tired mind playing tricks on him because it was the middle of the night, he couldn't help feeling like the world was crashing down around him (even if such a thought would seem so over-dramatic later).
Eventually, Janus just couldn't stand it any longer. He couldn't stay in bed, no matter if he simultaneously felt like he was going to pass out.
This really sucked. He didn't always have trouble falling asleep, not even now (especially with all of his recent naps), but when he did, it sucked. It was some strange combination of being completely tired during the day and then not being able to sleep at night, even if he didn't indulge in one of his naps. He could never predict when he was going to have a night like this because it didn't matter how much sleep he got or how tired he was. It would just happen. He would just go through his day as normal (or, what had become normal for the past few months), and at night, his amplified anxieties sometimes ate away at him.
And this was one of those nights.
Usually, he'd try to wait it out and pass out at like 6 am, but he just couldn't tonight. It was stupid, but he was scared, and he didn't even really know what he was scared of. It was just a disembodied feeling of tenseness, and the lack of a distinct direction for it was only making things worse. He just couldn't stay in his room any longer. It was too cut-off and isolated, and it was starting to make him feel like things weren't real, as if he might have already fallen asleep and he was just having a strange nightmare.
And so, Janus got out of bed and stumbled his way into the living room. No one else was up quite yet, but a dim light had been left on in case anyone got up to get a glass of water. The warm glow almost instantly settled down his nerves a bit as it reassured him that there wasn't really anything going seriously wrong- he was just having one night of bad sleep, not going through a crisis.
With a deep sigh, Janus settled onto the couch and grabbed one of the blankets they usually had laying about. Once it was wrapped around himself, he grabbed the remote and turned it to some random channel. Something about making a roux? He didn't really care; he just needed something to distract himself from whatever was making his damned brain decide to follow in Virgil's footsteps.
And so, Janus spent the rest of the night drifting in and out of semi-consciousness on the couch, only falling into actual sleep once the sun began to rise.
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Shorter chapter today *shrug*
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