Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2022-01-01 20:14:00 |
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Rosario hadn’t suffered from insomnia since elementary school. It didn’t take a straight-A psych med student to figure out what had brought it on now (which was fortunate, because Rosario was tracking at a B-minus in psych, and a fairly tentative one, after that nightmare finals week). For weeks, her dreams had lurched with stars that gazed back and constellations that beckoned, corpses that opened their eyes and enormous snakes that coiled round temple columns. The kind of dreams that you had when you were tense and stressed and you’d spent two months being hit round the head with weird shit. Because that’s what dreams were, right, just the unconscious mind running amok through your wants and fears and memories and randomly-firing synapses. Unless, perhaps, you were a daughter of the god of prophecy, in which case there was a chance they weren’t coming from your unconscious at all. And how were you supposed to know if a dream was a— shit, an omen, or a sign, or some flash of knowledge that didn’t belong to you, especially when your own sleeping mind was so good at summoning up home-grown horrors, when you’d been spending every spare moment reading Greek myths, when you couldn’t get Apollo’s stupid words out of your stupid mind? The stars said they miss you. You used to talk to them, but you stopped listening. And so Rosario dreaded sleep, and no amount of her bullheadedness was enough to shift that dread. She cut back on coffee. She tried breathing techniques. She read her pharmacology textbook till her eyes blurred and listened to science podcasts while laying in the dark, and none of it was enough to trick her keyed-up brain into sleeping. She’d had one rock-solid insomnia cure when she’d been a kid. But after Orion, and the meteor— after the other things she may or may not have seen in the sky— Rosario couldn’t be sure whether stargazing would help hasten sleep or banish it entirely. She feared and missed the stars in equal measure. The week after Christmas was an interminable slog. It shouldn’t’ve been. School was out and finals were over, which left her with a few hopefully Apollo-free weeks to recharge her batteries and get ahead on the next semester’s reading. She was even free to sleep in, since job number one was closed till after New Year’s. But sleep, which refused to come at night, tugged and tore at Rosario throughout the day. She opened her textbooks and the words swam in front of her eyes and her note pages remained empty, the single unfilled bullet point boring into her like an accusing eye. She moved zombie-like through job number two, tethered to wakefulness by the clattering of plates and Julian the cook’s sharp tongue, and at the end of each night she collapsed aching and smelling of grease into bed only for sleep to abandon her again. By Thursday night – technically the early hours of New Year’s Eve – Rosario was desperate enough to chance the roof and the stars. She bundled herself up warmly in layers of coats and stretched herself out on the plastic deck chair and turned her face to the heavens, and— And it was fine. Her stars were all there, exactly where they should be. She sought out the constellations, joining the dots on each, same as she’d done back when she was a kid. The jagged ‘W’ of Cassiopeia. Ursa Minor, with its tail pointing to celestial north. Ursa Major at its side. Neither of them looked like bears, not really. Castor and Pollux marking out Gemini, Sirius dipping near the horizon. Orion— not a man, whatever the myths said. Just an arrangement of stars. Rigel the blue supergiant burning its way towards supernova, Betelgeuse the runaway red star plunging through the interstellar medium at enormous speed. Each one where it should be. No patterns but the ones she knew to expect. Rosario’s eyelids drooped, the tension behind her forehead uncoiling. Her gaze grew unfocussed. A ruby glint. Aldebaran, flaring briefly, like a torch catching alight, like wings unfurling— Wings. An answering flutter from across the sky, Corvus poised to take flight— Torchlight on scales. Hydra arcing his neck, venom dripping from his fangs and truth on his flickering tongue— Fuck!! Rosario jerked out of the doze wth a panicked gasp, rolled off the deck chair, and hissed as the concrete bit into the heels of her palms. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!! She’d been drifting. She’d been practically asleep. It coulda been just her imagination, just a dream. A month ago, she woulda said— and maybe she woulda been right. But how the fuck could you tell? Rosario got no more sleep that night. When dawn’s rosy fingers curled beneath her bedroom blinds, she sent Clio a text. Clio introducing me to Merlin this afternoon, she texted Lyra. Will report back on beard situation. Offhand, like they were just dropping by for drinks. They weren’t, but Rosario didn’t know how else to say it, since she still hadn’t found a good time to tell Lyra about the whole— affinity bombshell. She’d wanted to wait till after Lyra’s talk with Jem and Jocelyn, but then that had gone disastrously, so she’d put it off till the next weekend. But that weekend they’d been invited to lunch with Lyra’s cousins, and the following week had been finals hell, so— fine, just leave it till after Christmas. But the day after Boxing Day, Lyra was jumping on a flight to Tennessee to meet Avery’s horrible family, and Rosario couldn’t send her off to the airport with an extra worry, it wouldn’t’ve been fair. So now it was New Year’s Day and Rosario couldn’t tell Lyra the real reason she was walking into a Brooklyn comedy club to meet Merlin the wizard. The Farcical looked different in the light of day. Last time she’d been here, on the night of Lyra’s birthday, it’d been buzzing with people, packed tight around the bar. Today, it was empty: just her and Clio picking a path through the detritus of last night’s celebrations. From the look of things, it’d been some party. Rosario tugged at the sleeves of the jacket Lyra had given her for Christmas, rubbing a thumb over an embroidered comet for reassurance. At least she wasn’t walking into this alone. |