Our Scars

You Might Think

66

You Might Think (Title by Sons Of The East)

She was torn from sleep by a sound that had her heart beating madly, from one to 100 in less than a second. This was getting ridiculous! If she hadn't been so bone deep tired she would have wanted to scream: Not again!

Trying to estimate where the sound was coming from, Rianne got a hold of something loudly vibrating on the nightstand next to her. An angrily bright screen read: "Voight".

This wasn't her phone! Hell this wasn't even her side of the bed she realized and it seemed she was also lying across in it.

Arms and limbs flailing, half-asleep and completely groggy, she tried to feel her way around the darkness, searching for the upper half of the other body she was tangled up in. It seemed there were legs everywhere, pinning her down and it took another few agonizing seconds of the constant buzzing before she had extracted herself enough to be able to move freely and press the device to Jay's face. She prodded him in the ribs for good measure, calling out his name:

"Jay, Jay... hey! Someone's calling!"

Rianne's eyelids felt so heavy, just like the rest of her body, that she was almost instantly drifting off to sleep again, only then she felt that thing was still vibrating against her skin in an annoying way and Jay wasn't moving. She kicked him harder:

"Jay, make it stop! You gotta take that call!" Her own voice sounded very foreign in her own ears, whiny almost.

God she was so tired she wanted to cry. Rianne wasn't normally that delicate, but this call wasn't the first interruption of the night. First Jay and her had fallen asleep on the couch rather early, watching some series. For whatever reason he had woken her up to get them into bed at one point, already pissing her off, because she had felt too weak to move. And after another while of again peacefully sleeping, Jay had begun to trash around, first kicking and groaning a lot and then holding on to her too tight, so that she could find no rest. She had woken him up from his obvious nightmare, but only to the point that he was soon sleeping soundly again and she had struggled a while before being able to close her eyes again, wondering what he had been dreaming about.

Maybe this was payback for keeping Jay up with her more or less three nights in a row, two weeks ago. It had been the time around the day of Andrea's death and thereby their accident. As usual around this time of the year, Rianne had been reliving it in her dreams over and over. Everything about and everything surrounding it. Like her body knew exactly when trauma had hit three years ago.

Emotionally more stable at the moment and positive that every time these episodes got shorter, the more time passed by and the stronger her support system got, there was just this overall tiredness since a few weeks now, and it got her more sensitive to nightly disturbances. Rianne suspected an early case of spring fever or that being back at work after her long medical leave was challenging her more than she wanted to admit.

The weight of the phone was suddenly gone and a gruff: "Halstead?" somewhere next to her definite music to her ears.

The bed dipped and she knew Jay would leave the room to let her get back to sleep and on order to sort of walk himself awake. She always wondered how he managed to be so alert in a matter of minutes every time. Despite his good intentions she could make out some words that had her completely awake before he was out of earshot:

"Right, is Ruzek doing okay?"

***

The second the gravelly voice on the other end of the line addressed him, Jay was wide awake. It seemed that trigger words like 'crime scene', 'case', 'you gotta come in' always did the trick.