#wherein the role of querl is performed by a warm rock

[spandexinspace]

Lyle jolts awake. He looks around, his heart racing, but the room around him is plunged in darkness and silent, save for the faint hum of the life support systems and Querl’s breathing next to him. He rubs at his eyes and steadies his breathing. Whatever woke him up appears to be long gone. Or, he thinks as he slips down from the bed onto the cold metal floor, maybe it never was at all. It wouldn’t be the first or even tenth time he’s done that.

He slinks out of the bedroom area of their quarters, making sure to close the door behind him as he enters the strangely under-dimensioned living room area. It’s smaller than that of the other living quarters and seems to have been furnished by someone who only has a vague idea of what a living room is supposed to be, which is to say, there’s one chaise longue in there, shoved up against a wall like an unwelcome gift from a far off relative. At moments like this that’s a blessing, because in the pitch dark of the room it’s hard enough to make out the walls, much less any individual piece of furniture. He holds his breath and listens. Nothing. Not a single strange sound. 

This is stupid. Or, no, it’s paranoid. Maybe both. Stupid and paranoid and the product of years of conditioning he didn’t even understand the gravity of at the time. Random night drills, staying awake for days at a time, every sense of security being stripped away from them all until they were too affected to even sleep through the night properly. They’d all been going through it then, and it had seemed so normal. He sighs, a heavy breath rolling out of his chest like a lead weight. 

The yellow, automatic light in the bathroom stings his eyes even at the dimmed night setting. He squints and tries to avoid looking directly at it, feeling somehow even dumber as he takes in the predictable emptiness. It’s just a white-tiled stretch of nothingness occasionally dotted by various toiletries and towels. Mostly his, at this point, since Querl apparently fell into the “why do I need more than two products” hole at an early point in his life. He’d felt a bit weird about it when they’d first started sharing a living space, like he was imposing what he’d never before thought of as a particularly high maintenance lifestyle on a space that wasn’t really his, and overstepping what was at the time a not totally solidified arrangement. He’d eventually asked Querl about it and found out that he’d barely thought about it at all, that he simply considered it their space from the start. Unlike the lab, Lyle had asked, earning an eye-roll in lieu of any real response.

Lyle convinces himself to skip the lab this time. The newly upgraded security system should do a much better job than he ever could and it feels like a break-in in the lab, if nothing else, would be enough to raise Querl from the near-death state he seems to enter whenever he’s asleep.

He makes his way back to bed, walking by memory rather than whatever little night vision he’d had before he’d entered the bathroom. The bedroom is still calm and quiet. He lies down carefully and pushes away a warm, errant arm from his side of the bed before settling down properly. Querl shifts next to him, a shallow sigh interrupting his otherwise calm and steady breathing. He’s probably still splayed out in a position that makes Lyle’s back ache by mere thought alone, but he’s at least doing it on his side of the bed. And he can’t truly fault Querl for sleeping well when he knows what the alternative looks like. They’ve had bad nights before, often after equally bad days, and he’ll take a hundred nights of interrupted sleep over that. Sleep pulls at him as soon as he closes his eyes, stretching out and fading away any further thoughts into oblivion.