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“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sleep,” Arthur said one night after returning from a very long hunting trip, strolling over to where Micah sat alone at the campfire after everyone else had gone to bed.
Micah didn’t look up at him, continuing to stare at the fire. “It’s overrated,” was all he said, grateful when Arthur walked away without probing deeper.
If anyone else has noticed Micah’s lack of sleep, they haven’t mentioned it. And that’s fine by him—he doesn’t want to talk to most members of this gang anyway, and especially not about his sleeping habits. Because he doesn’t want anyone to know why he never sleeps.
Well, that’s not strictly true. He learned over twenty years ago that it’s impossible to stay awake forever, but he quickly perfected the bare minimum amount of sleep he needs without impairing his shooting skills. And although it makes him even more irritable than normal and his head aches all the time, sleeping for a couple of hours a day has kept him alive so far.
But those couple of hours of sleep never happen at night. Instead, Micah snatches his sleep across a few short naps in the daytime—almost always with his feet propped up on a table and his hat tilted to block the light out. It isn’t comfortable (the position makes his neck ache, and he regularly awakes to Grimshaw shoving his boots off the table, or John or Arthur nudging him awake and insisting he go out and make some money—like he doesn’t always do more than most these lazy bastards), but he puts up with it—because, for reasons he doesn’t understand, sleeping in the daytime keeps the dreams at bay.
And Micah would do anything to avoid the dreams. For one, he hates how weak and pathetic the nightmares make him feel—he’s a grown man, a murderer with a price on his head, but in the dreams, he’s a scared little kid again, sobbing like a useless piece of shit as memories of his father scream and threaten and punch—and he awakes with a racing heart and shaking hands, noticeably not his best the entire day all because of one stupid dream. But he also doesn’t want to repeat something that happened ten years ago, when Micah and a guy he ran with landed themselves in jail, and Micah fell asleep in their shared cell. He awoke to the guy laughing at him, mimicking the way Micah twitched and whimpered in his sleep, and Micah never felt so utterly humiliated (and when their fellow gang members broke them out, the moment his guns were returned to him, Micah shot the bastard through the head in revenge for embarrassing him, and to stop him telling the others).
He never wants any of that to happen again—and he never wants to have the nightmares either. So although his body craves sleep, Micah forces himself to stay awake all night long.