Take Me Far That Road

Chapter 6 - Then if the Clouds Get Heavy and Start to Fall

Author's Note: Crosshair and Tech get a Moment. :D

~ Amina Gila

Crosshair wakes up in the middle of the night cycle, after a series of disjointed, broken images, flashes of his enslavement, of Mayday, of the supervisor yelling, of the electroprod hitting his back and sides. He's alone in his rack, and he can hear Wrecker breathing below him. It should be enough for him to shift and go back to sleep, but he just – can't. He's too wide awake for reasons he can't explain even to himself, and there's an anxious, buzzing energy under his skin. His head is throbbing dully, promising a coming migraine, and he doesn't know if it's from the stress and emotions of yesterday, or if it's from his lack of sleep.

He doesn't sleep well anymore, something he's been struggling to hide from his brothers. They fuss over him enough already. He's a soldier, not a baby. If he told them about his sleepless nights, the nightmares, the way he struggles with concentrating on the simplest tasks, the random but minor muscle spasms and aches, he doesn't think they'd ever let him so much as use the 'fresher on his own ever again.

Ugh.

He rolls over to face the wall and squeezes his eyes shut, trying to focus on just breathing, no matter that his heart is pounding too fast, or that his breath is coming too quickly. He thinks they know something is wrong, anyway.

(Useless, defective, weak, he can't do anything right anymore, not even being a soldier, and that's all he has all he's ever been good at if he can't be a sniper what can he even be he'll have nothing –)

He lost the round of dejarik to Wrecker earlier. It was humiliating. He hasn't lost a dejarik round to Wrecker in years. Wrecker always puts up a fair challenge, but they all know that the outcome is pretty much inevitable. Crosshair lost. He shouldn't have lost. He can't even do that right. He hadn't wanted to play against Hunter or Tech or Echo after that. Instead, he'd watched them play against each other until Cid yelled at them to stop running up her power bill.

Why does he feel like this? He shouldn't feel like this. He's a soldier. Why is – why does –

Crosshair sighs quietly, scrubbing his hands against his face, trying to pretend they're not trembling faintly as he sits upright and swings to the floor. There's no use lying down when he won't be able to sleep. He's too on edge. Doesn't know why. Nothing happened. The others went to Raxus and came back fine. He didn't even go on the mission – sometimes it happened that after a particularly tense mission, he was too keyed up to sleep, but even that isn't true right now. He doesn't – what's wrong with him?

Hunter's on the floor near the ladder to the gunner's mount, a blanket haphazardly thrown on him. Echo's in the next room, sleeping in a chair. Crosshair tiptoes to the cockpit, to take over for Tech, who must be on watch. If he's going to be awake, he might as well do something useful.

Tech's fiddling with a mechanical something that Crosshair knows better than to ask about, and he looks up when Crosshair settles into the co-pilot's seat. A teeny, tiny part of Crosshair wishes that Mayday was here. He wouldn't have to explain anything to him if he was. He'd just... get it. Because they went through the same things together, and they didn't need to talk when they... felt like this. Mayday hid it better, but he still struggled sometimes. Maybe not as much as Crosshair – (he's defective, but then, he always knew that) – but still enough that he'd – get it.

It feels wrong somehow to think about him, to miss him, when he has his brothers back. He doesn't know what's wrong with him.

"Want to lay down for a bit?" Crosshair asks. "I'll keep watch."