Logan Hitchcock’s struggles with sleep were nothing new. Despite his best efforts to hide them, it was kind of inevitable that when his fiance was sleeping beside him every night, he eventually caught on. But there really wasn’t much to be done about it, and ever since the incident at the carnival - well, they’d been having some new struggles since then. He was there for Tolliver, comforting him, holding him in his fits of anxiety nightmare after nightmare, rocking him and stroking him and soothing him until he finally fell back asleep.

Hitch, too, found himself having more nightmares; his were just generally more subdued, waking up in a cold sweat gasping rather than half-sat up and sobbing or crying out, instead just swallowing his own voice and trying to hold steady the pressure of fear on his chest. He could never remember what exactly it was he dreamed of. But he knew a lot of it had to do with Tolliver, with absence, with fingers slipping into his chest and Thraen’s words of warning to him. Sometimes he woke up and pressed his own fingers to his chest, marveling and wondering if he really had seen and felt what he’d thought that night, if it was really so possible just to reach into him and - what was to stop that from happening to anyone? To Tolliver?

Not to mention, quietly, it wasn’t as though he wanted to die. But if he had to - if that was a thing that was going to happen - that was not the way he wanted it to be. A blaze of glory, bloodsoaked, carving a safer world for people like Tolliver, that was something he would not exactly regret bar the pain he would caused his fiance. Being rendered helpless was not the way he wanted to go. Not the way Cinnabar had nearly done it, and even less the way Xenotime could have.

Sometimes the darkness of their home got too oppressive, and even if he knew that Tolliver would have never minded Hitch waking up, he never deliberately did. Especially now, his lover needed his rest. Every now and then, just watching him as he slept with enough, but not always. Not enough. He tried other ways, ranging from pleasure to a sitting at the edge of the bed with a cigarette dangling from his lips, but nothing ever seemed enough to shake his own thoughts long enough to rest. After a week, he was fine. After two weeks, he was struggling. In the third week, he’d had enough.

Something had to change.

With a low sigh he hoisted himself up off the bed, ignoring the chill of the floor against his bare feet as he fumbled for his discarded pajama pants, cigarette glowing dull red in the dark and illuminating the outline of his face. Hitch headed into the kitchen as quietly as he possibly could, carefully tugging a freshly cleaned glass from the cabinet alongside one of the several bottles of bourbon they kept in the house. Settling on the couch, he had his first glass, the burn soothing as it traveled down his throat, warming him in what was honestly a too cool room.

Three glasses later, feeling pleasantly buzzed and much less afraid of everything, Hitch set the glass gingerly into the sink, placed the bottle back where it belonged, and for the first time in weeks, properly and truly slept.