Chapter Text
He gets the message at precisely 3.33 a.m.
It’s a bit uncanny, seeing that precise sequence of numbers light up on his screen. He’s not particularly one for superstition – if anything, he’d cackled more at the abrupt and severe allergic reaction Kuramochi had developed to this particular time of night after convincing him and Zono to watch The Exorcism of Emily Rose that one night back at the dorms, when they still had the carefree privilege to ditch their responsibilities under the illusion of somehow evading the consequences.
It’s the witching hour, he insists now, tucking himself into bed well before two in the morning and refusing to budge until, at least, four.
And yeah, college has fucked up their sleep schedules. Yeah, having been a sound engineering student, all those nights staring into computer screens with headphones clapped over his sweaty ears had fucked it up even more. It’s the only explanation for why he hasn’t been able to get in one restful night’s sleep in, edge-wise, though moving into a new apartment and the constant blare of Tokyo’s night-life in the background definitely contributes.
His body clock is messed up, his skull is packed with wool, and he slides the message open despite the digital warning sign the three identical numbers flash at him.
It’s from an unknown number.
Hello
And that’s it. Kazuya squints. He stares hard at the last couple of digits of the number, partly because he doesn’t have his glasses on, sifting through his memory to try and recollect if he’d seen it anywhere. Work? One of his friends? The electrician he’d had to call after realising his air conditioner’s spewing out rancid, unrecycled air?
He’d have been more inclined to consider those options, were it not the for the ungodly hour at which the text arrives.
But he doesn’t get time to dwell on it. A thin line of text on his screen indicates Unknown Number is typing again.
You’re at no. 2 right? The new guy
Kazuya frowns. The inevitable lethargy that dulls the nerves and blunts out the edges of awareness dissipates a little, leaves him just a tad more alert.
If this person knows where he lives, he’s compelled to be a bit more serious about this.
He types, Who is this
A reply bubble swoops into his screen almost immediately.
Oops
Sorry
I got your number from the group chat
Kazuya tsks, even as the slight tension gathered in his shoulders release. The group chat. Of course. The landlord had told him that he’s going to add Kazuya to the text group he has with the rest of the tenants in his moderately sized apartment complex – it doubles as a community forum, but, from what Kazuya’s seen up until the point he’d simply turned his notifications off given how often it dinged, was more of a collective complaint box for everything from stolen parking spots to someone sticking their coloured clothes into someone else's whites in the laundry.
This is why Kazuya doesn’t like social media, he thinks, grunting as he straightens up in his couch, jostling the laptop he’d been balancing on his knee and feeling the cracks tapping up his spine – it’s too social. It’s too easy to be found.
Which is a great inconvenience to people who’d just like to be left alone, thank you.
After a moment’s consideration, Kazuya lowers the volume of the YouTube video going on autoplay in the background that he’d not bothered to change as he idly searched for a movie or something to kill time, and responds with a terse, I still don’t know who this is
He figures he might as well give this person the benefit of the doubt. It might be an emergency – the hour’s a bit portentous, either way. It gets a smirk out of him, thinking how Kuramochi would have reacted in this situation.
A reply pops on to his screen.
I’m from number 18!
Sawamura
The name doesn’t ring any bells. And if Kazuya’s understanding of the layout holds, flat number 18 should be the floor above him in this two-storey complex, a U-shaped building around the communal courtyard in the centre. The landlord’s fond of gardening and company, and frequently mixes the two down there.
But that’s not the pressing point here.
The pressing point is, Number 18 doesn’t exactly sound like they’re having an emergency.
Starting to run out of patience, against his will – Kazuya’s not heartless, at least not gratuitously – he thumbs into the keypad: Can I help you?
This time, there’s a noticeable delay before he gets a reply. Kazuya’s eyes flick to the tiny clock at the corner of his laptop screen, stomach churning the way it always does when he begins to resign himself to the fact that he’ll be showing up at work sleep-deprived and grouchy again in a couple of hours. It’s got to stop, the thought, starting to sound a little hollow from the number of times he’s said this to himself, floats through his head, riding the muggy clouds of exhaustion burgeoning bigger inside his skull with every passing day.
It isn’t healthy. He’s managing to hold up for the time being, but if this keeps up it’s going to start to put a dent in the quality of his work – as it were, his work situation isn’t exactly ideal.
And yeah, he’s aware that a part of his situation is his own doing – the rebellious disregard for routine and structure in college, the late nights spent out, and even right now, staring into a computer screen probably emitting way too many UV rays to be good for either his naked eyes or the rest of him –
It’s just easier for his cranky, fatigue-ragged brain to channel that frustration at a different outlet.
Namely, Number 18.
Who’s just messaged him saying: No it’s just that
I saw your lights on again
On a different day, when he’d be more attuned to his surroundings and circumstances, his eyes would have snagged on the word ‘again’, and his brain would’ve been able to pick apart the syllables and reassemble them to deduce just what, exactly, all this implied.
Instead, he feels the abrasive tension of one too many nights without rest corrode his patience, and types, almost belligerently,
Is that bothering you?
His phone is assaulted with a barrage of messages. Kazuya’s neither impressed nor appeased by the speed of the replies.
Oh no no no
Sorry
It’s just I thought maybe
You were having trouble sleeping too
This time, Kazuya’s eyes do snag on the last word of that sentence.
Having trouble sleeping too.
There’s an effort, an attempt, somewhere at the back of his mind, to examine what that means. A sputtering, like a gas-stove clicking on again and again with flames that disappear almost as quickly as they alight.
But the rest of Kazuya is tired – the rest of Kazuya feels like his head has been sandpapered, like all the blood in his body’s turned into wax, slow and uncomfortably warm and sticky and rolling arduously down his veins, clogging him up, weighing him down; like his tendons are made out of worn-out rubber, pulled and stretched until he’s inched close to the point where he can just bend over and break.
The rest of Kazuya is well aware that he has a scant couple of hours left to at least attempt to get some sleep before he has to head out to another full day of sitting inside a studio surrounded by the harrowing fear, growing more pronounced and profound with each passing day, that he’s not going to be able to produce a single, decent enough melody to at least convince his supervisor that maybe he’s good enough to start training.
That he’d not made a colossal mistake, defying everyone who’d said he wouldn’t be able to do this.
That this – everything he has worked toward since he’s graduated high-school, his Big Dream to becoming a music producer, haughty ambitions of the kind of genre-bending music he’d introduce to an industry growing stale with the same old formula rehashed again and again – has all been a mistake.
Like his father has always told him it is.
It’s a moment of vulnerability, honestly – a moment of self-doubt that’s probably been lurking around in the dark for a while, biding its time and searching for an opening to pounce out, to side-step his justifications that he’s just hit a slump, all artists do, and if he could just sleep – if he could just lay down and close his eyes and block out the incessant buzzing behind his ears, drown out the pessimistic repository of doubt and dread dammed up inside his head, he’d be better, he’d be able to think, find inspiration again, rhythm at his fingertips and etched into the bars of music-sheets.
It gets to him – the same guy Kuramochi has always accused of being too thick-skinned, too haughty, too unaffected, far too arrogant.
It gets to him, and Kazuya resents it, is repulsed by it, and maybe there’s some truth to it, to the witching hour; maybe there is something unholy about this time of night and everything that’s still awake and wandering around in it.
There’s bitterness in his bones and volatile ire that’s not really ire in his fingertips as he curtly replies: Actually, I am trying to work
His phone spazzes out again, text per millisecond.
Oh my gosh I’m so sorry I disturbed you
I’ll leave you to it
All the best with work :)
Kazuya looks at the last message he receives and thinks it’s the type of ambiguous sentence you can choose to see either as an invitation to keep talking, or a definitive conversation-closer.
He picks the latter and tosses his phone away, even though another twenty minutes pass before he can make himself haul his stiff joints out of the couch and in the direction of the bedroom, too much of a realist to really believe that maybe this time, he’s going to get some shut-eye.
***
There’s something about going prolonged periods of time without a decent night’s rest that does things to your memory – if you’re retaining anything in the first place. His senses are dulled out, a rusty prehistoric radio antenna that does little more than pick up indistinct crackles you’d be wasting your time trying to decipher.
Kazuya feels that way – feels gingerly around the gaps and chasms inside of his head where his knowledge of what he ate for breakfast should be, the faces of the people he shared his train with, whether he greeted the manager on the way into the office or not, what exactly he spends all those empty hours stretching into the night doing.
That’s probably why it takes him a while to comprehend the meaning of the six-pack beer he finds in front of his door when he shuffles back from work that day, mind idling on neutral if only to stave off the wave of self-deprecation threatening to surge if he lets it, another day spent in the studio being of no other use than a trainee doing the filing and running errands for one of the directors.
As he bends toward it, a lot confused, and almost a little resentful at life for constantly throwing baffling things at him when he’s too bummed out to even colour-coordinate his clothes in the mornings, he notices a yellow slip of paper.
A post-it note.
Kazuya moves to pick up the beer, belatedly notices the dull throb in his back – yet another self-inflicted injury no doubt caused by the gymnastics he pulls on the couch trying to balance junkfood and his laptop at once – and grabs the note instead.
I’m really sorry about disturbing you last night! I hope you will accept this as an apology :)
It takes Kazuya the entirety of seven shameful seconds before he grasps what the hell this is all about, before his hand subconsciously pats down on the pocket he keeps his phone in.
Oh
Number 18
He blinks, bleary. Not entirely sure what to think of it.
Not entirely sure what to do.
He eyes the beer, and is conscious of an uneasy prickling inside his chest.
He feels…bad?
It’s…quite an elaborate act, to go get a peace offering and leave it diplomatically outside of his door, and Kazuya wonders, retrospectively, if he’d been a tad too harsh, his demeanour too clipped. After all, even if Number 18’d had the questionable courtesy to not only root his number out from the group chat and decide three-thirty in the morning was a good time to make small talk, this had still been his first time interacting with a stranger who, for all intents and purposes, hadn’t exactly meant harm.
In fact, now that he thinks about…maybe they had something in common.
But he still doesn’t know anything about this person other than their room and contact numbers and their last name, the latter having slipped Kazuya’s mind like many little details these days do but which he can find in his messages if he can bother himself with it –
The question is, does he want to bother?
Kazuya’s not particularly up to the task of overthinking this – aside from the fact that he’s kind of standing blankly outside of his door, evidently stumped by half a dozen cans of alcohol – but if he were to wager a guess he’d say Number 18’s just…being friendly. Maybe overly friendly, because Kazuya firmly believes that there’s an etiquette to the world of texting and strangers do not just initiate conversations in the middle of the night, whether or not they’re reaching out to fellow insomniacs, but then again, he knows some people can’t stand the idea of being disliked by or upsetting others – he’s always criticising Nori for being too nice like that.
Huffing out a sigh, Kazuya decides he’s just going to take the beer and leave it at that. He could drop a text to Number 18 saying thanks, but he’s wary that it might be interpreted as some kind of invitation – maybe that’s what this is, a conversation opener, a ploy to get Kazuya to invite them for a drink under the dictums of politeness.
Kazuya, low on the reserves of all the easy charisma that’d made him effortlessly popular with his peers back in college, decides he can’t be bothered.
So he picks up the liquor and makes his way indoors, thinking that their disappearance should be a good enough equivalent to explicitly accepting Number 18’s apology.
***
And then he finds another reason to be thankful to Number 18.
If it makes sense to be thankful to someone for letting them get totally drunk and passing out until the next morning.
Kazuya doesn’t know how he’d not thought of this himself – he’s never been prouder of being the lightweight Kuramochi always laughs at him for being. It takes him a can and a half after dinner to lull himself into that fuzzy grey-white trance so familiar to him from those drinking parties ritualistic in the lives of university kids, and the exorbitant amounts of exhaustion he’s amassed push him that extra step to tranquilise him altogether. He doesn’t come to until five in the morning, having KOed for close to eight hours in a spread-eagled heap half on the floor and half on his couch, and it feels so weird to feel rested - like he’s had cotton stuffed inside his ears and someone’d just pulled it all out, and all the muffled sounds are crisp and clear again. And slightly headache-inducing, but that might be a hangover headache and not a I just slept for more than an hour and not the spacing out with my eyes open on the train type headache. If there even is a headache for such a blissful thing.
Lord, his thoughts aren’t even making sense. Sleep’s supposed to fix his mental incoherence.
That’s what he’s thinking as he hoists himself off the floor, surprisingly spry considering the leaden ache clawing into his shoulder from where it’s been digging into the couch’s frame all night, and heads into the shower absently grinning to himself.
***
Work goes relatively better – nothing extraordinary, nothing drastic, because of course all that damage cannot be recovered overnight. But he’s alert. He sees and hears and processes things markedly faster than the slug-like pace he’s only now realising he’s been moving at over the past couple of weeks. He shuffles through his notes, the works-in-progress he had shelved for fear of ruining with his lack of inspiration and is able to look at them a little more forgivingly than he has in the past, is able to gather up the confidence to take them up to the director he’s been fetching iced lattes for all of last week with at least some of the composure he’d harnessed when presenting his projects to his lecturers.
There’s critique, there are notes, there are suggestions for change, a commendation here and there, and a final Show me when you’re done, and Kazuya has had the best day he’s had in a long, long time. The pessimist in him would have dourly commented on how sad it is that his standards for a good day have fallen so low, but he’s going to take what he can get.
This newfound buoyant mood also makes him re-evaluate his position on Number 18.
So maybe they hadn’t exactly intended to orchestrate the best night’s sleep Kazuya’s had in the longest time. And yes, drinking himself to sleep is a terrible idea in the long-run no matter how effective it’d been last night.
But Kazuya’s good mood spills into his generosity in his estimations of people, and Number 18 is quite possibly his favourite person in the world right now.
Even though he doesn’t know much about him. Or her? Kazuya can’t recall a face as their profile picture, and he’s inclined to think it’s probably a guy, given the tenants he’s seen coming in and out of the complex – people around his age, all guys, young working adults who can’t afford to be picky with their accommodation in the city. Maybe he’s even crossed paths with him before. The guilt which’d only begun to take root in his conscience yesterday blooms a tad more as it sinks in, more acutely than before to his now sharper wits, that he knows or remembers so very little about them, aside from the fact that they live upstairs and –
Wait.
Kazuya frowns, absently reaching for his phone, the steady movement of the train for once not feeling like a prolonged lurching nightmare of vertigo. If Number 18 lives above him…
How did he know Kazuya’s lights are always on at night?
Kazuya clicks open his messages. Scrolls through them. Flinches, a little, at how curt he’d probably come off. Damn, now he feels awful. Maybe the insomnia wasn’t so bad if it helped dull these kinds of feelings out.
Hesitating, not sure if he’s supposed to let sleeping dogs lie – he could try to make up for his coldness, but he’s not sure if he can correctly forecast the outcome of that, and isn’t sure he wants to commit by belatedly bringing all of this up again just when it’d simmered down.
The fact keeps reiterating inside of his head – he still doesn’t know this guy.
On impulse, he clicks on the contact number and into their profile.
Username: Sawamura Eijun
There’s a picture of a sunflower, and underneath, what appears to be a quote: “There is a romance about all those who are abroad in the black hours.”
It’s not a quote Kazuya’s familiar with, but a part of him feels, as he steps out of the train, brisk, that he knows them slightly better now.
As the realist that he is, Kazuya should have known better.
Insomnia can’t be cured overnight. Of course it can’t. It doesn’t take him much to relapse – go back to that torturous routine of lying awake in his bed painfully aware of every contour of the mattress that doesn’t meld into his spine, the slightly troubling angle of his head against his pillow that won’t sit right no matter how much he shifts. This bizarre, pointless restlessness that burns under his skin like an itch, like an allergic reaction he can’t assuage.
He’s looked it up, done his research, because it’s started getting to the point where it’s becoming worrying. Kuramochi tells him, when they meet up one weekend for lunch, that he needs to lay off the coffee, go see a doctor, ask them to prescribe you sleeping pills or something. Dude you look terrible.
He means well, Kazuya knows, can see it in the genuine concern etched in the furrow between his brows and the all but daily texts he gets, disguised as casual inquiries, but he feels helpless and afloat and desperate because he thinks he already knows the cause of his insomnia. The notes he had left space for on his music sheet are tantalisingly blank again, mocking him, the bridge that he was supposed to write gone, poof, out of his head and he can’t help but worry that this time it’s gone permanently, those melodies, the tunes he used to be able to improvise with his now untouched guitar and his ex-dorm-mate’s expensive Launchpad.
It’s a vicious cycle, the anxiety of not achieving what he’d envisioned achieving feeding into his fractured mental state, the insomnia feeding into the physical exhaustion that leaves him unfit to even walk in a straight line these days, let alone create music.
And Kuramochi means well when he says, Dude you look terrible, go see a doctor, ask them to prescribe you sleeping pills or something, but the bare, naked, shameful truth is that Kazuya is afraid.
Kazuya’s afraid of what he’s going to be told. Kazuya’s afraid of having a medical file shoved into his hands telling him things like, Hey, you are way too stressed to be working on music now. Take a break, rest, do other things. He’s afraid it’ll tell him things like, You know what? Maybe this isn’t for you.
He’s come all this way, all this way, and it can’t be for nothing.
Can it?
God, no.
Please, no.
Not after everything he’s had to give up, everything he’s had to do –
And so he lies there, sleepless, slowly being eaten alive by his own mind, a living corpse buried under a flurry of restive ants picking him apart.
There’s a new quirk to this cycle now, though.
Now, he spends a lot of the blank hours where weariness weighs on his mind like an inescapable thing and sleep eludes him thinking about Number 18.
Wondering if they’re like him too.
Wondering if they grow as frantic and anxious in the noisy silence of quiet bedrooms where they have nothing but their demons for company.
It doesn’t seem too outlandish, when he thinks about it like that, to imagine someone would look at a lit window in the night, maybe while they pace, feet uncoordinated and clumsy, round and round the courtyard, just to have something to do, and think, hey, maybe that guy’s like me too
Maybe it isn’t too outlandish to think that it’s a little nice, to have someone who could relate.
Kazuya’s Googled the quote he found in Number 18’s status. It’s R.L. Stevenson. Kazuya can’t exactly say he’s all that well-read but he isn’t uncultured – he knows who that is.
It makes him wonder about Number 18. Is he the type to simply search ‘quotes about insomnia’ online to come off as poetic? Or does he actually read? Does he try to escape into books when he can’t shut his eyes and quiet the voices inside his head? Run away into a different world and a different person’s problems? It’s sort of romantic, if you think of it like that – a sentiment that can be made into a song.
There’s even something poetic about the irony of his profile picture – a sunflower. Framed by a bright sky of blue, a strange choice for someone who’s perpetually trapped by the night.
God, Kazuya’s really losing it. He’s starting to wax poetic about what might just be a stock photo lifted off the net.
He needs to sleep.
He keeps staring at his phone, and the unnamed contact number.
He sees the time.
3.30 a.m.
His finger hovers over the text bar. Number 18 is online.
Oh what the heck.
None of WebMD’s articles mention recklessness as a very real side-effect of insomnia.