Glory |A. Potter|

Sixteen

Waking up in the morning was a struggle for Albus Potter. It wasn't because he hated waking up in the morning—on the contrary, he actually enjoyed the idea of it as he would have the rest of the day for himself to do as he pleased—rather because these last couple of years, his sleeping schedule was pretty much non existent.

It had been fine before he entered his fifth year. Before that, he had been able to sleep for eight or nine hours every night regardless the day, always striving to be well rested the next morning so he would be able to process whatever his friends wanted to tell him every time or anything his professors wanted to convey. Then fifth year came and things changed.

The homework became too much for him to handle after school, bringing him to spend less and less time sleeping as he attempted to catch up with his studies. He couldn't help but spend hours every night trying to learn all his professors asked him to during the day, and during fifth year, he truly was envious of people like Scorpius or Jane that somehow managed to not sacrifice their sleeping schedule and be ahead in their studies at the same time, while they also had Prefect duties and in Jane's case, Quidditch practice and frog choir practice on top of that. Albus couldn't learn the material in his textbooks without spending hours attempting to memorise it first. And so, he slept less and less as the time to reach his exams came, reaching the point to sleep three hours a day during the last week of his exams.

It was needless for him to admit to himself his sleep schedule had pretty much been ruined and with the end of the exams, things didn't return to the way they used to be. Albus could no longer bring himself to sleep before midnight and most of the time, when he laid to sleep, it would take him a few hours of tossing and turning before he finally managed to disappear in the land of dreams. It had been fine when he didn't have to wake up early the next morning, but when school started, he found himself sleeping four or five hours every day, sometimes six, and in the end, he woke up the next day tired.

Today had been no exception. It was the third day in a row he had slept only four hours and he was starting to feel the consequences. He had had a cup of coffee in the morning that hadn't helped him in any way, he had smoked in hopes he would wake up but still he had had no luck. Ever since he had woken up he had been aimlessly roaming the corridors, hardly realising what his professors were saying. It was his last class of the day now and he told himself he would go to sleep straight after as he got in the Care of Magical Creatures classroom, wincing at the volume of the chatter. He stole a look at the front of the classroom and saw no creature. Today would be a theoretical lesson, he noticed in relief, so there wouldn't be much effort on his part. Slowly, Albus trudged to his regular seat and pretty much collapsed on it. Jane looked up with a frown.

Albus's hair appeared unkept, but other than that, she couldn't see anything wrong with him. He had hidden his head in his arms, preventing her from looking at his face. She briefly noted the way he seemed to be leaning on the desk as if he would slip if he were to not have its support before she spoke up.

"Are you alright, Albus?"

"Just peachy," he grumbled as he slowly rolled his head to the side and she could now see his face. He appeared tired, his gaze unfocused as he looked over her for a while before he met her gaze. "How do you always appear so put together?"

Her eyes widened. "What?"

"You make it look so effortless, you make everything look effortless," he whined, "look at you. You wake up every morning and fix your make-up, your hair that I'm sure takes a while to get ready, your clothes are always impeccable, how do you have the energy to do it?"

Jane blinked and without thinking much, she raised a hand to his forehead. "You're burning up."

"I'm not sick, just sleep deprived," he protested as he moved away from her hand.