so six years later i'm back on my 'the old guard' bullshit. i'm thinking about biphasic sleep and immortality. it's something so mundane most people just forgot that's what we did for thousands of years before electric lighting normalized sleeping the whole night through. would they change with everyone else during the industrial revolution? or would they not even realize anything had changed, until nile joins them
andy has a sleep schedule beyond mortal comprehension. lies down for the first sleep at sunset, sleeps for like 3 hours, gets up and starts wandering around. if it's a good (define "good") night she'll go out and stargaze. if it's a bad night she'll compulsively check her gear and care for her axe. if it's really bad she'll run
joe and nicky never adopted monophasiac sleep specifically because the those hours in the middle of the night have been their Special Alone time ever since they met up with andromake, neriko, and lykton. essential when they're on a mission and don't have time to themselves during the day. they have strange, winding, half asleep conversations in multiple languages. if there's anything that's been troubling them, that's often when they talk about it. i think they first realized they were having the same dreams during one of these conversations
booker stays up until 4 am reading encyclopedia Britannica articles and getting increasingly drunk. nile teaches him to use google earth and he becomes mildly obsessed. he likes zooming out to look at the whole planet and then zooming in on france
nile goes to bed on time with military precision and sleeps for eight hours the whole night through. the others find this mildly disconcerting. joe and nicky debate whether she's unwell somehow (''we don't get sick, my heart" "it's not like there's a rulebook, nicoló"). the rare occasion comes when nile gets up in the middle of the night. she encounters, in quick succession:
joe and nicky, having a bizarre conversation full of non-sequiturs, pidgin, and intricate, centuries-old in jokes. their eyes are still closed, and they're still spooning. it honest-to-god looks like they're still asleep
booker, massive bags under his eyes, pouring another glass of gin, britannica article for the Napoleonic wars open full brightness on his laptop
andy, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, sharpening her axe with a whetstone. scraaape, scraaape, scraaape
nile quietly tiptoes back to bed and never mentions any of it
