I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 28: The Sleep Depriver.

POV: Silas Carter.

Silas was having trouble sleeping.

This was not, in itself, unusual. Having such a fast moving mind, the clutter built up pretty fast, and brains usually decided that midnight was the prime time to sort through all the information, necessary or unnecessary.

He was used to it at this point, replaying conversations, dissecting bits and pieces of information he needed to study, going through each and everything in such a fast thought to comprehension ratio that he woke up sweating at times.

What was weird about this particular day was the source of his trouble.

It wasn’t the clutter, contrary to it, it was the very lack of activity in his usually loud brain that was throwing him off.

He let out a long exhale as he stared at the ceiling. The cold blue lights from the streets still bled through his worn curtains, and Silas could hear the racketing of the junkies outside, peppered with the occasional screaming of car horns in the distance.

It was a little unnerving, and frustrating. For someone who had spent an entire lifetime learning to find comfort under a never ending stream of thought, the entire situation being flipped over itself was frankly offending.

He had been trying to sleep for the last three hours, flipping over and over on his bed as he adjusted his body, trying to find a comfortable position that would finally let him sleep.

He rolled onto his back again, stared at the ceiling again, listened to someone outside have a very passionate argument with what sounded like a vending machine.

The silence in his head was the problem. His brain had a gear it ran in—fast, loud, constantly processing, thoughts running parallel tracks simultaneously until exhaustion finally caught up and pulled the plug. He’d lived in that gear his whole life. He knew how to sleep through the noise because the noise was always there, a constant he’d stopped noticing the way you stopped noticing traffic outside a window you’d lived next to for years.

Tonight the noise was gone.

In its place was one thing.

Not a thing exactly, an image, of a face.

No matter how much he tried to wrangle the image out of the forefront of his mind, it was just simply useless.

Because the face was, objectively, a problem.

He was a reasonable person. He was, by most accounts, a practical person, someone who dealt in observable facts and direct conclusions and didn’t spend time on things that weren’t useful.

He had, on multiple occasions, been described as frustratingly level-headed, which he privately considered a compliment even when it wasn’t meant as one.

And yet.

The face.

He put his arm over his own eyes as if that would help, which it did not, because the face was not coming from outside.

It was just—it was a lot of face, was the thing. An unreasonable amount of face to put on one person. He’d seen attractive people before, he wasn’t a monk, he understood the concept, but there was attractive and then there was whatever was happening with Aris Ashborne, which felt less like attractiveness and more like a natural phenomenon that someone had neglected to put warning signs around.

The silver hair, for instance. It shouldn’t work. Silver hair on someone who wasn’t at least sixty years old should have looked affected or strange, and instead it looked like it had been specifically designed by someone who had sat down and thought very carefully about what would cause the maximum disruption to the average person’s ability to form coherent sentences. Soft and slightly disheveled in a way that suggested he’d put no effort in, which was somehow worse than if he’d put effort in, because effort could be resented.

You couldn’t resent effortless.

And the eyes. The aquamarine eyes that were always half-lidded like the world was mildly beneath his full attention, which should have been irritating, which WAS irritating, and also happened to be the most unfair arrangement of color and shape that Silas had personally encountered in twenty-twenty years of existing.

And he was small. That was the part that really got him, in a way he couldn’t explain without sounding unhinged. He was small and slight and looked like something that should be handled carefully, and then you watched him walk into a dungeon and come back out twelve minutes later looking mildly inconvenienced, the gate crumbling into pieces behind him, and your brain just... short circuited.

Completely.

Sparks and everything.

Silas made a noise into his pillow.

A noise he was grateful no one was present to hear.

The face in his head tilted slightly, the way Aris tilted his head when he was processing something, and half-lidded eyes blinked once with the slow patience of a person who had all the time in the world and knew it, and Silas made the noise again.

He was a grown man. A High A-rank awakened now, the highest reasonable rank. He had fought things with more limbs than the classification system had brackets for. He had told an S-rank guild official, to his face, that his tactical assessment was wrong, and he’d been right, and he hadn’t apologized for it.

He was lying in his apartment at two in the morning making embarrassing noises into a pillow because he couldn’t stop thinking about someone’s face.

Specifically the way it looked when something almost made them smile but didn’t quite, the corners of the mouth doing a thing that stopped just short of committing, like smiling was a card they were considering playing but hadn’t decided on yet.

Specifically the way the silk shirt had slipped off one shoulder in the morning, which he had noticed, catalogued, and informed himself firmly was not relevant information, and his brain had said noted and kept it anyway.

Specifically the way they’d said thank you in the car, quiet and unprompted, like the words had escaped before the internal editor caught them, and then gone back to looking out the window as if nothing had happened.

Silas stared at the ceiling.

"This," he said, to his apartment, to the vending machine argument outside, to the general concept of his own brain, "is a problem."

His phone buzzed.

He picked it up.

Virginia.

He stared at it for exactly one second, eyebrows perked in confusion.

True that he had exchanged phone numbers with her, but a call in the middle of the night?

He blinked.

Then he answered, took a moment to listen to her, swung his legs off the bed, and started looking for his jacket, because apparently the universe had a sense of comedic timing.

The bit was that he’d spent three hours unable to sleep thinking about Aris Ashborne and now he was going to go see him at two in the morning.

Fine.

That was fine.

He found the jacket.

He was normal about this.

Yes.

Very normal.

There was a small hole in the concrete wall, perfect size to fit a fist, when he left his apartment.