Displaced

Chapter 15

Ivar rolled over in bed to lay on his back, and cradled his head in his intertwined fingers. He stared up in frustration at the darkness above him, and wondered how long he had been laying there unable to sleep. Or, more importantly, how much longer he would need to lay there until the first rays of sunlight rose over the horizon and it was an acceptable time to get up.

He had a feeling that it was going to be a long wait.

He rolled over again, onto his stomach this time, but no matter what position he chose, he couldn't get comfortable. The problem wasn't the bed; it had been perfectly adequate for the past few nights. Nor was it his body, as was often the reason for his sleeplessness when he was himself. He had no pain at all, there was no discomfort of any kind keeping him from drifting off. There was no reason why he shouldn't be able to switch off his thoughts and sleep.

Yet, he could not.

Ivar had never been good at sleep, not for as long as he could remember. It always seemed that even on those nights when pain did not keep him awake, that there was something better that he could be spending his time on. As a baby and a young child, his mother had told him once, he had been the same. At first, it had been the breaks in his infant legs that had kept him from sleep; she had told him how he would frequently wake the whole house with his screams. They had all slept together in one room then, his brothers sharing a bed and Ivar close by in his crib. But even after the wanderer Harbard had eased some of his pain, he had persisted in his wakefulness.

There were nights when he would lay awake reliving the day before, often struggling to extinguish a white-hot rage over some little thing that somebody had said or done. Other nights, he found that he could not switch off the plans and ideas that washed through his mind like the tides ebbing and flowing unrepentantly.

Other nights were simply bad ones, where the pain in his legs refused to subside in rest as it usually did, and cruelly held him back from the sleep that would allow him to escape from it.

Those were the nights that he hated the most; the ones where no matter how he lay, or what he did, no matter how exhausted he might be, or how loudly his body cried out and begged for sleep, he simply could not give it what it needed. Those were the nights that lasted the longest, and the ones that he dreaded the most.

It was one of those nights, he was almost certain, that Sigurd was suffering through right now.

He tried not to care. He told himself that he shouldn't care. After all, his brother had almost certainly never lay awake at night thinking about Ivar's pain, but for some reason he couldn't stop thinking about it, feeling guilty about it. It was that, that was preventing him from sleeping.

He was being ridiculous. He had no reason to feel guilty; no matter what Sigurd might say or think, it was not his fault. But yet, it was his body, and apparently something inside of him believed that the sleepless night should have been his, and had decided to even the score.

He let out a frustrated sigh, rolled over again, and threw off the furs that covered him in the bed. Instantly, he went from too warm to too cold. He reached for them again, pulled them back over him, covering only half of his body. Rather than reaching an equilibrium, he found himself both too hot and too cold at the same time.

Angry now; with himself, with Sigurd, with the ridiculous situation that they found themselves in, with everything, he kicked off the covers a final time, and sat up. There was only one thing that he could do on nights like this, when no matter what he tried, sleep would not come, and that was to accept it. He needed to give up on sleep for the time being, embrace wakefulness, get out of bed, and do something else. Then, perhaps, if he was lucky, he might be able to return to bed later, and get a small amount of rest.