It starts quietly.

A tickling sensation under his fingernails.  A sneeze that never comes. Waking up and knowing he'd dreamed something and being completely unable to recall it. Things easy to shrug off.

It builds.

Someone asks him a question, and he knows the answer, he does, but the words stay fuzzy and just out of reach until hours later when the answer no longer matters. He tries to not let it bother him, but it does.

It builds.

He wakes up five minutes before his alarm one day, ten the next. A handful of weeks pass, and he's down to four hours sleep a night. If he's lucky.

People start to notice something is wrong.

A professor holds him after class and asks him if everything is alright. School, home, family. The usual red flags. They are, and he says so, and the professor lets him leave after making him promise to get a good night's sleep.

It is.

All three hours and forty-eight minutes of it, that is.

It builds.

He tries to look at this logically. Clinically. Treat his waking insomnia as someone else's. A patient's—better yet, a subject's.

Sleep deprivation causes nausea, which makes the subject less willing to eat when whatever is consumed will be rejected before there's a chance of proper digestion and absorption of nutrients. Ergo, when the subject abstains from eating, the subject loses weight.

Two pounds.

Five pounds.

Ten.

Fifteen pounds lighter and averaging two and a half hours of sleep a night, the subject's best friend visits for a long weekend and the first thing out of his mouth when he steps off the train is a long string of expletives.

The subject didn't think the symptoms were so obvious.

"You're kidding, right? Have you seen yourself lately?"

The answer is no. He hasn't had much need to pay attention to his appearance since—

Actually, he's not quite sure. It can't have been so long ago. He's just tired. Sleep deprivation causes memory lapses, cognitive impairment. Nothing to worry about though. It's all repairable, of course.

Eventually.

Lamont convinces him to go out to eat because there's something worth spending $30 on a plate of food, something the two of them are celebrating, but he can't remember. His attention has become increasingly slippery, which is understandable and completely within the expected list of symptoms attributed to severe waking insomnia. He had a general knowledge of sleeping disorders even before he had become affected by one, and further research has yielded an even greater understanding.

But no cure. Yet.

"Your hands are shaking."

"'Course they are."

He sets the glass down, sneering at the rattling ice that has betrayed another symptom.

"You're not okay."

"'Course I'm not."

No point in lying, not that he's ever been good at it.

"What's wrong?"

"This steak ain't worth twenty-eight fuckin' dollars, fer one thing."

"Shut up, college boy. You can afford taking me out somewhere nice once in a while."

He wants to ask why they're here at all, but that would only aggravate Lamont further. Usually that sounds almost as good as Christmas in July, but saying "You ain't my fuckin' wifie, cupcake" would just raise more questions. More questions about him, and he—the subject—has never liked talking about himself under the glare of an investigative light.

He manages to eat most of the steak. It's twenty-eight fucking dollars, after all.

It builds.

The night before Lamont leaves they're out late, smoking bent cigarettes and drinking cheap beer from a liquor store owned by people who barely speak English, let alone the finer points of Greek and Latin. Lamont calls him an asshole when they leave, like that's anything new.

They're out above the city, slouched on the hood of his rain-slick car. The way the heavy clouds absorb and reflect the light over the city, orange and thick and oppressive, makes him think it's the end of the world. Or maybe just his.

Lamont asks about the Band-Aids on six of his fingers.

"Started chewin' my fingernails. Fuckin' stress 'n' all. Haven' yah noticed?"

That, and the subject prefers the burning-bleeding-hot ache in his fingertips to the goddamned tingling.

"Hmm." A pause, and the subject feels eyes peeling and pulling at his fraying edges. "You've got that big test coming up, don't you? Where you get to mangle a corpse to your black little heart's content?"

"It's called an autopsy, yah lil' shit, an' yeah. Gotta fake invasive surgery on some Doe's liver fer the talkin' heads fer the final exam this semester."

"Can you?"

"'Course I can. You sayin' I'm a shitty doctor?"

"You won't even be a doctor for a couple more years yet." The best friend taps his ashes into the subject's lap, which is met with the automatic but harmless fuck you response. "And that's not what I meant. You look like a scarecrow nobody finished stuffing. Don't need a PhD to see you're not your usual bright-eyed and bushy-tailed self."

"Th' fuck you know? S'just one stupid surgery. S'not even that hard."

"Stick out your hands."

He does, grumbling of course, and they both watch as his scabby, bandaged fingers quiver like inquisitive antennae.

The subject sneers and drops his hands back to his knife-blade knees and watches his cigarette burn out, and neither of them say anything until it's time to take Lamont to the train station.

It builds.

The date of the exam looms closer. The subject averages just under two hours of sleep a night. He dozes often during the day, but still lacks proper REM sleep. Black and white shapes have been playing in the edges of his vision for weeks. Mild hallucinations.

Considering how consistently little sleep he's been getting, he's actually kind of surprised it's taken this long.

In class, he feels like he's looking through everything through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Doubled and out-of-reach. Nothing reaches him. His notes are indecipherable, scrawled between the lines, trailing off into meaningless scribbles and loops. A few drops of blood from his fingers—eight Band-Aids now—stain a page about amebic liver abscesses and kittens. Or something. It's hard to make out.

He stops taking notes.

It builds.

Despite protests from concerned friends and classmates, he's up to three packs of cigarettes a day, because in his opinion, who cares about lung cancer when your body was killing you anyway?

Most of that is smoked at night while the patient sits out on his balcony and seethes at his thyroid gland, which is the most likely cause for this mess even if there's nothing backing that up; not a great-great asshole to screw up the family genetics or just his own chemicals gone haywire. He's administered tests to himself; double- and triple-checked the results; even gone to the handful of others he trusts to poke around his anatomy too.

The results are all inconclusive.

At this point, he figures it doesn't matter anymore.

It builds.

The night after the exam, he's drunker than he's ever been and his roommate has finally stolen his booze and his keys—"For your own good, you crazy Aussie bastard," which is universally translated as "Good God, no man should be able to drink that much,"—so he lays face down on the couch and lets the world spin.

He failed the test. Spectacularly.

If you wanted to be picky, he failed it on purpose. After he saw the ragged, sluggish hole he'd made to reach the cystic liver in the cadaver, it—finally—hit him through the haze.

There was no fucking way he could do this.

So he upended the bristling surgical tray into the incision and called it a day, and now he was working on making his own liver cysts while he waited for the hammer to fall.

Something hard and plastic hits his head. "Your sis," his roommate says over his swearing, "Wants to know how your big day went."

He stares at the phone where it landed next to his hand—almost numb it's tingling so bad—and slurs, "Shit."

It builds.

The dean wants to pull him from class. Temporarily, of course.

Frankly, he's amazed it's taken this long.

"—think it's best if you don't return until blah blah blah take some time to blah blah blah all very worried blah blah blah such a bright student blah—"

He walks out after five minutes.

It builds.

He hasn't bothered sleeping for three days.

He's in the university's morgue, listening to the hissing wet wheeze of dead people breathing. He's imagining it, hallucinating it, he knows this, but he still can't shake the sound of it.

Eleven Band-Aids on his fingers. His nails won't stop bleeding because thin blood doesn't clot well. Thin blood can be the result of a wide variety causes, but in this subject's case it's fairly safe to rule out more serious diseases such as leukemia and Bernard-Soulier syndrome. The subject's blood has merely thinned due to a deficiency of vitamin B-12 and folic acid.

This is expected, as the subject has lost thirty-two pounds due to an increasingly decreased diet.

He's holding a scalpel and smoking. He likes watching the smoke drift over the steel. There's a certain sound to it that he's heard before a handful of times, but he can't remember it, nor can he hear it now over the working lungs of the dead.

It stinks in the morgue, but cadavers are the only ones who don't ask questions. He likes that too.

He listens to a sound echoing off of the shiny steel freezers. Someone somewhere is singing under their breath. Their voice wavers, cracks on a vowel, dips low and gains a familiar accent, and it's him, singing an old song he'd liked as a kid—ankle biter, his brain supplies, and isn't that funny—back in Australia a thousand years ago.

He wonders why the subject is crying.

Fatal familial insomnia. It's the only thing left to explain what's happened to him. Happening.

They call it fatal for a reason.

He stops singing because it hurts his throat and puts out his cigarette stub on his knuckle because it doesn't, and he lights another one and laughs, because at this point, nothing matters.

The scalpel slips from shaking fingers and when he looks down to see where it went, there's a weeping red eye in the center of his palm that stings.

It stings.

The subject's—his—hands have been numb for two weeks, and he can actually, finally feel his fingers in little warm arcs of heat running under his skin. He sits there, staring as heat flushes the godawful tingling out of his hand, and for a moment doesn't know what to think.

So he picks up the scalpel again.

It breaks.

A week later Lamont gets a phone call from a fussy-sounding operator who says she has a call from some town he's never heard of, and when he asks for a who she gives the name of one of his favorite childhood heroes and oh fuck that asshole into next week, yes, he'll take the fucking call, put him through, sorry about the language ma'am.

"Where the hell have you been?" he snarls into the phone, and familiar smoky laughter batters his ear.

"Don' git yer drawers in a knot, Montie. I was jus' doin' a little soul-searchin', is all."

"And you found your soul in Missouri?"

"No, asshole, this is just a pit stop. Come get me."

"C—what? Come get you? Did I just hear you right?"

"Would yah quit it with the prissy harpin' shit? A dull roar'd be better, if'n yah don' mind."

He sits down, forcing his fingers to unclench. This is Luce he's talking to; he's got to remember that.  Even before he stopped sleeping, the gears never quite worked at the same level of everybody else's. Geniuses were always assholes, isn't that what they said?

However.

"Luce."

"Now Montie, don' be getting' that high 'n' mighty tone ah voice wit'—"

"You are such a goddamn idiot."

Just because he's a genius doesn't mean he can pull this kind of vanishing-when-dying-of-some-brain-hiccup bullshit and expect to get away with it.

It settles.

Lamont meets him at a diner in a town that is actually called Peculiar two days later. Luce has gained some weight, but he's still far too skinny for someone so tall, and he knows this, so he's on his second plate of breakfast and he's ordered some pancakes for Lamont too because he certainly in no rush to leave.

"I hate pancakes," Lamont says instead of, "I was worried."

"I know," he replies with a grin, which almost means, "I'm sorry."

Lamont sits down, elbowing the pancakes his way while stopping the waitress for coffee and hash browns instead. When she leaves they look each other up and down and try to find something about the other to insult, and Lamont gets the first swing in with "Nice shiner," and a nod to the purple bruise eating up half his face.

"Lost a tooth too. See?" He opens his mouth wide and points at a gap in the back of his mouth that he can't stop running his tongue through yet because the last tooth he lost was in sixth grade and he'd forgotten how fun it felt.

"Impressive. How'd you manage that?"

"Some big wanker in the next town over didn' take too kindly to my particular brand ah' vernacular, if yah know what I mean." He leers over his glass of orange juice as Lamont struggles to keep his disapproving face on straight when really, they both know that Lamont would have been right there with him if he'd had the chance.

"So," Lamont says after the waitress brings him his coffee and disappears behind the counter again, "When you said 'soul-searching,' you actually meant 'fist fighting in the back alleys of towns with stupid names,' is that right?"

He shrugs and shovels some more scrambled egg into his mouth, and Lamont sighs and lets it go, which is just fine with him.

"Thanks fer comin'," he says after swallowing.

Lamont waves it off, but he's still wearing the disapproving face. "Your family thinks you're dead, you know. Are you planning on keeping it that way?"

"No, no, I'll call 'em later. Don' want 'em hearin' it from you, makin' me out to be th' bad guy or somethin'. An' you so would."

"I would."

They eat and catch up, and it's only when it's time to pay the check that his sleeve shifts enough to bare a slip of bright white gauze, and of course Lamont sees it.

"What happened?"

He tugs his sleeve down. "Nothin'."

"Hey."  Lamont's hand on his wrist is warm and tight with the kind of concern that only a best friend can have, and he jerks away, but only because Lamont's nails dig like hell into the gauze.

"Ow, Jesus, that shit's still tender!" he snaps, and Lamont just stares at him, waiting.

No point in lying, not that he's ever been good at it anyway.

He sighs and starts rolling up his sleeve.

It settles.

Four hours later they pull into a gas station in San Louis, and he goes inside to pay for the diesel and grab a few over packaged, overpriced and highly questionable sandwiches and coffees for the next stretch of uninhabited road. He tosses the bag through the open passenger window, then leans against the hood and lights another cigarette.

"It's illegal to smoke in a gas station," Lamont says, his hand on the nozzle.

"You gonna tell?"

"Nah, just don't blow us up."

"No promises."

They're quiet while the pump station ticks away enough gasoline to get them to Nashville, which in his opinion is a far better way to burn thirty dollars than a fucking steak. He says so, and the both laugh.

Lamont hadn't said anything when he'd shown him the scalpel scars, and perhaps that's for the best.

"So what's the plan?"

He grins around his cigarette. "You think I got a plan fer this shit?"

Lamont shrugs and spins the gas cap closed. "Well we're driving somewhere. How about a destination? Got one of those?"

He thinks about it for a minute.

"How about somewhere coastish?"