I circle the kitchen island. Approach her from the side, maintaining a lateral angle that positions my face in her peripheral vision without entering her direct line of sight. Close enough now to observe the details that distance obscured.
Her eyes are open.
Half open. Lids lowered to the approximate midpoint of their range, the green irises visible but unfocused, aimed at the refrigerator's surface without registering the stainless steel or the magnetic notepad or the campus meal plan schedule that I stuck to the door with a freebie magnet from orientation. Her pupils are fixed at a dilation that does not correspond to the kitchen's ambient light level, enlarged past what the dim environment warrants, occupying the specific, glassy aperture that neuroscience associates with REM-adjacent brain states.
Her breathing is slowed. Measured. The deep, regular rhythm of a body operating on the automated settings that consciousness does not supervise, each inhale and exhale arriving at intervals that are too consistent to be produced by a waking mind and too active to indicate standard deep sleep.
Oh.
The realization assembles itself from the observational data with the clinical clarity of a diagnostic algorithm reaching its conclusion.
She is sleepwalking.
I know enough about somnambulism to understand the protocols. Do not attempt to wake them. The disruption of the sleep cycle during a parasomniac episode can produce disorientation, panic, and in some cases, a combative response from a nervous system that registers the waking stimulus as a threat and activates fight-or-flight before the conscious mind can override the alarm.
Do not startle a sleeping Omega who has been trained in competitive hockey and whose default response to perceived threats involves fists.
Noted.
"Sage."
Her name, spoken softly. A test. Delivered at a volume calibrated to reach her auditory processing without exceeding the threshold that triggers the startle reflex.
Nothing. Her eyes maintain their half-lidded fixation on the refrigerator. Her breathing does not alter. Her body remains in the standing rest position of a person whose legs are executing the final instruction their sleeping brain issued before the navigation subroutine lost its signal:go to the kitchen.
"Wildcard?"
The nickname, the one she claims to hate and responds to every time, producing nothing. No flicker of recognition. No wrinkle of her nose. No huff or groan or the specific twitch of her lip that precedes every protest she has ever lodged against the name I assigned her. The absence of reaction confirms the diagnosis more definitively than any clinical observation: Sage Holloway is asleep on her feet in my kitchen, and neither her name nor her nickname possesses the security clearance to reach her consciousness.
I extend my hand.
Slowly. The motion gradual enough that her peripheral awareness, which remains partially functional during somnambulism, can register the approaching contact as non-threatening. My fingers find hers where they hang at her side, the tips making contact with the specific lightness of a touch that announces itself before it commits. Her skin is warm. Soft at the pads, calloused along the ridges where hockey tape has been building layers for years.
I wrap my hand around hers. Gently. Not gripping. Holding. The way you hold a sleeping child's hand to guide them back to bed without activating the alarm system that their unconscious mind maintains during the vulnerable hours.
She seems to register the contact.
Not with her eyes, which remain fixed in their half-lidded stare. With her body. A slight rotation of her head in my direction, the movement carrying the slow, underwater quality of a person responding to stimuli through the filter of a brain operating at reduced processing speed. Her nose wrinkles. The specific, involuntary contraction that I have learned precedes her olfactory assessment of any new scent entering her proximity, the same wrinkle she produced when she declared that I "stink" on the rink and when she buried her face in my tank top during a dorm flood and when she pressed her forehead into the curve of my neck in a locker room and inhaled like my scent was oxygen and she had been underwater.
She shuffles forward.
One step. Two. Closing the distance between the refrigerator and my chest with the unhurried determination of a sleepwalker whose unconscious navigation system has recalculated its destination fromkitchen appliancetoAlpha.Her body presses against mine, the contact arriving with the warm, boneless weight of a person whose muscles are operating under sleep's governance rather than will's direction. She inhales. Deep and slow, her nose pressed against the bare skin of my sternum, the breath expanding her ribcage against my abdomen with a fullness that tells me her sleeping brain has found what it was actually looking for when it sent her body to the kitchen.
She exhales. Long. Satisfied. The specific, contented release of tension that accompanies a nervous system confirming the presence of a scent it has been cataloguing as safe.
Her head settles against my chest.
The weight of it is minimal. She is smaller than her personality suggests, her physical frame carrying the compact, dense musculature of an athlete whose strength is distributed through functional muscle rather than visible mass. The top of her skull rests against my collarbone, her hair tickling the skin beneath my jaw, the navy-and-emerald strands carrying the faint residue of peppermint shampoo that her sleeping proximity delivers directly into my olfactory receptors at a concentration that makes my hindbrain produce a purring frequency I did not know it was capable of generating.
My hands find her waist.
Automatic. Protective. Positioned on the crest of her hips through my borrowed shirt, the fabric warm beneath my palms, my fingers curving around her frame with the specific, stabilizing pressure that I apply instinctively because I have learned through repeated experience that Sage Holloway's relationship with gravity is adversarial and any vertical position she occupies should be assumed temporary until proven otherwise.
Which is good. Because approximately three seconds after her head settles against my chest, her knees buckle.
The collapse is gentle. Not a dramatic crumpling but a gradual, sleepy surrender of the muscular effort required to maintain an upright position, her legs folding beneath her with the unhurried yield of a marionette whose strings are being lowered by a tender hand. Her weight transfers from her feet to my arms in a smooth, predictable cascade that I intercept before it achieves any dangerous velocity.
I catch her.
