Without a Clue {Diall}

Chapter Eleven: The Sleepy Boy

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You'd think after three whole days without sleep, someone would simply pass out the second their head hit the pillow. You'd think. It seems to be the complete opposite for Niall. As I watch him crawl into bed, I can tell he already feels like he's lost this battle again, and he'll be lying here awake until Grayson demands his attention in a few hours. He tells me he's put a call into the doctor to adjust his meds, but he won't be able to go in for three more days. Going this long without sleeping is extremely dangerous, and I can tell it's wearing him down, no matter how used to it he is.

When I crawl into bed after him, he looks up at me, lifting up the covers and motioning me over to his side. He seems to be eerily quiet as I shuffle closer to him, my head ending up on his chest. As his arms wrap around me, I start my investigation. Why can't he sleep? His eyes are closed and he looks comfortable. Whatever is keeping him from getting his necessary rest, must be buried somewhere deep inside that pretty head of his.

We lay there in silence for a good ten minutes before I get my first good lead: Niall starts shaking. He seems to be straining as an attempt to lay still and starts to clench his eyes shut. I don't have a clue as to why he's shaking, but I do know that all I want to do is hold him. I try to wrap my arms around him, but with my position on his chest there's not much I can do. I manage to wiggle enough for him to open his eyes and let me out of his arms, allowing me to move away from him. He looks a bit hurt that I left our cuddle, but he soon throws me a small smile when I open my arms much like he did moments before.

He ends up feeling incredibly small against me, his head resting against my right shoulder as my arms wrap around him. His shaking reduces a bit, but I can tell there's still something bothering him. I don't know if I should push for an answer or wait it out, so I simply let one of my hands find its way up to his hair. There's not many things that I enjoy more than playing with someone's hair, and Niall is no exception. Luckily, he seems to love it and lets me tangle my fingers in his messy blonde curls whenever I want to.

Now I just have to think about why he's shaking. On the flight, I even attempted to google PTSD and all of the subsequent mental illnesses that come along with it. I tried to focus on anything that might cause his insomnia, and the only thing I could find is fear of what might happen if he falls asleep. Out of the few times I've slept in the same bed as him, I've never noticed a single night terror or even nightmare. I'm an incredibly light sleeper, and I think I would have caught onto that by now if he'd have had one around me.

I don't even know what's caused his this disease to affect him anyways, and maybe that's where I'm going wrong. Maybe I need to know what happened to Niall to understand how to help him, but some part of me feels like him going through whatever it was again in order to tell me about it would only make him worse.

"Do you have night terrors?" I ask him softly, a quietness emitting through the room that I don't quite like. Answering if he has them in the first place is a lot easier than answering what they would be about, isn't it? His fingers clench against the cloth of my t-shirt, and I can feel his jaw tighten against my shoulder.

"Yeah." He whispers, and almost instantly, his sudden onset of insomnia makes sense. Niall might be afraid of his night terrors. It feels horrible to think that Niall would rather not sleep at all than experience whatever thoughts plague him when he's asleep, whether it's a conscious fear or not.