Chapter Text
She discovers them towards the tail-end of sophomore year in the midst of finals season, neck-deep in essays and at her wit’s end when it comes to battling her insomnia.
Four sleepless nights in a row has put Anne on edge, tossing and turning trying to get her brain to turn off, still dwelling on earlier when she zoned out during the last ten minutes of her English 201 exam; precious time in which she could have spent reviewing the four questions left unanswered on her Scantron. Anne only halfway hears the proctor yelling “Pencils down!” as she scrambles to bubble in all C’s in a last-minute panic, wild around the eyes when she staggers up front to turn it in.
Charlie bumps shoulders with her on their way out the lecture hall, striking an especially tall figure while she hunches under the collective weight of her textbooks. “You alright?” he questions, which causes Anne to scowl.
“Probably not,” she answers, adjusting her backpack straps and speeding off in the opposite direction, twin braids trailing like streaks of lightning in her haste. She is too tired to keep up pleasantries and especially with Charlie Sloane, who can’t take a hint as it is and would interpret something like a half-hearted wave over her shoulder the wrong way. (To his frat buddies, he'll proclaim that she was “too shy to say goodbye” or something equally as ridiculous in the name of saving face.) Already, there are rumors being spread up and down Greek Row about an alleged hook-up last Saturday, which only reached her ears because Anne was too swamped with deadlines and RUD duties to firmly nip it in the bud.
Charlie shouts something back in response, but the words get lost in the wind. Regardless, Anne has also put enough distance between them despite her body threatening to collapse.
She’s had sleeping problems going back for as long as she can remember, childhood nightmares transitioning into listless consciousness as an adult, immune to her pleading and most over-the-counter medications. Even still, this is the longest Anne has ever gone without stringing together a couple hours of sleep—fitful and restless as they are, but still sleep nonetheless. It’s a miracle she’s even alive, sustaining off of convenience store coffee and determination alone.
Ostensibly, she should go back to her dorm room and crash for the rest of the day, power down her cellphone and drift off into oblivion. But Anne foolishly elects to catalogue end of the year surveys in the Union Directorate office instead, trying to get a jump on them before everyone else leaves for the summer and wrap-up falls completely to the wayside. (The wayside being Anne’s plate, of course, since she is the only one amongst leadership who is staying behind at Redmond.)
Gilbert, who is jetting off to Paris soon for a research project on plant receptors or the like, is on his way out the doorway when Anne arrives, red-faced and sweaty from the afternoon heat. The picture of cool, he greets her with a wink and says “Don’t stay back too late” before disappearing around the corner. Which, obviously, Anne takes as a personal challenge and hunkers down for the night.
Her seat is still warm when she sits down at the table, meaning that Gilbert had annoyingly claimed her customary spot by the window despite his usual preference for the wingback chair across. He also must have showered recently because Anne picks up on the smell of his soap, piney and clean like mountain springs. His doctor’s scrawl on a sticky note denotes that last entry he’d filed, smiley face doodle in the corner a proxy for his own smirking expression.
Anne crumples it up and tosses it in the trash. She is not a Gilbert Blythe fan by any stretch of the imagination.
Nose to the grind, she starts working her way through the surveys, oblivious as the first hour slides into three and then four, until it is well past dinner time when she thinks to look up from the stack of papers in front of her. The pile has seemingly doubled in size despite the dent of progress she’s made throughout the evening, due in part to the rotating door of RUD members dropping off new pages without her notice. Anne yawns but continues to work, internal justification being that it will hopefully tire her out later on for when she actually goes to bed.
Clown logic. A total joke.
The night drags on and Anne remains wide-awake. “What the hell?”
It just doesn’t make sense given the level of care she’s taken to prime for the night: three melatonin and a warm glass of milk. Anne wipes the liquid mustache from her lips before crawling underneath the covers. She even goes so far as to kick Ruby out of the room because the younger girl has a habit of talking loudly in her sleep and Anne cites the need for optimal conditions if she is to succeed in sleep. It is certainly no skin off Anne’s back to effectively bully her roommate into staying over at her boyfriend’s frat house for the night, if only because it has the added benefit of irritating Gilbert in the bedroom next door.
But rarely does anything ever phase the tall pre-med major, who takes nothing personally and almost everything in stride. Calm, cool, and collected—precisely everything she is not.
In fact, the bastard is probably asleep in his bed right now, blissfully ignoring the loud, freaky sex she explicitly instructed Ruby to have.
The intrusive thought of “if you want something done right, then you have to do it yourself” creeps into her brain. No doubt a byproduct of her insomnia and also the fact that Anne hasn’t had sex in over two months; not since her last Tinder hook-up ended up an abject disaster and Diana had to drive across town to pick her up at two in the morning. Anne promptly deletes the dating app and spends the next six weeks in a whirlwind of assignment deadlines and involuntary celibacy, both of which she manages flawlessly save for the occasional dirty thought about men she otherwise wouldn’t have given the time of day. Anne’s only consolation about being randomly attracted to Gilbert Blythe all of a sudden is the fact that she also gave the Quaker Oats guy a particularly long stare-down over breakfast the other day, proving this to be an all-encompassing frenzy rather than a specific derangement.
Which is neither here nor there when Anne’s alarm clock reads 2:00 and her first final of the day starts at 9:00 AM sharp.
In a fit of frustration, Anne opens up her laptop to put on some soothing music—anything that isn’t the incessant whine of her halfway-broken air conditioner rattling into the night. Her hand shakes from exhaustion as she scrolls halfway down the page, selects a playlist at random, and then rolls over in bed.
The first few videos are par the course, nature noises and ambient sounds that do little to knock her out, but result in more of an imaginative state than one actually conducive to sleep. She pictures a dream version of herself—fuller and prettier and with decidedly auburn hair—wandering through a forest or traipsing through city streets, going on adventures that require her full scope of imagination. The playlist makes for a great backing track . . .
. . . until it takes a turn for the strange, no longer the usual fare but an ecclection of different videos that pull Anne away from the fantasy.
“Hmmm?” she grumbles, blinking blearily awake.
There is little connecting the assortment of clips currently playing other than the creator’s determination to be as random as possible, cycling through short, animated affairs to longer mukbangs bordering on ASMR. After a while, Anne tunes out most of the content, treating it purely as background noise because she is too lazy to change the playlist.
But a familiar voice drifting through the speakers pulls Anne out of her semi-conscious state, wheeling her body around to face the fuzzy glow of her laptop screen in the dark. She rubs the exhaustion from her eyes to ensure that she isn’t actually dreaming and that her mind is still a safe space that doesn’t play tricks on her before arguably her most dreaded exam of the year. (Anne is hopeless at calculus and cannot for the life of her conceptualize the volume of a washer in rotation when there are so many other interesting problems in the world to expend energy thinking upon.)
Only sure enough, as if to confirm her worst suspicions, Anne’s archnemesis introduces himself to the camera from a distance.
“Hi everyone, it’s Gilbert and today, we’re going to be talking about root development and gravitropism! Now, this axis can be divided into three zones: the meristematic zone, which is the site of division where cells produced by the meristem begin to elongate and push away from the tip as it continues to make new cells; the oscillation zone, where expansion occurs; and finally, the differentiation zone, where cells decide their ultimate fate!”
She watches as his body, long and lithe, positions itself in front of the whiteboard and starts to move, the beginnings of a medical scrawl evident as he meticulously starts drawing out the different sections of whatever root zones he is droning on about in real-time. Even in grainy pixelation, Anne can make out the strong bent of his forearms, shirt sleeves rolled up so that they’re out of the way, and a mop of curly hair he occasionally has to push back out of eyes hazel enough to break through the shitty video quality. She recognizes the length of his mane and knows without checking that this particular video was uploaded sometime last October, when Gilbert was starting to grow it out in preparation for The Big Shave to benefit St. Jude’s.
Vaguely, she remembers that Gilbert had signed up to be a class note-taker for the disability resource center on campus, but started uploading videos when he discovered that his anonymous classmate learned best with an audio-visual component as well. So even though he was getting paid the same amount of money as everyone else turning in paper notes, Gilbert still took the time out of his week to film and upload multiple lectures, waving it off as something he does for his own personal gain. “I absorb the material better when I have to explain it out loud” he says, when Winnie asks him about it before a Union Directorate meeting. Really, it’s just one of the many noble things Gilbert does because he’s annoyingly perfect and continues to do because he “hopes it helps at least one person out there.” Anne rolls her eyes into the next century and promptly forgets about the existence of these videos.
Until now.
She is probably a quarter of the way through and considers skipping the rest because Gilbert already haunts her waking hours, she doesn’t need him to do so in her dreams as well. But her body feels like the equivalent of molasses, heavy and lethargic, but pleasantly warm. Her eyes droop and struggle to remain open for long enough to properly appreciate the way his scientific illustrations are on par with that of a four year old developing their fine motor skills, and cannot stay awake for long enough to file that roast away for later. He proves to be so boring, it puts Anne handedly to sleep.
At least, that is what she will tell herself when she wakes up tomorrow morning. Or rather, later today. It is 3:45 AM, after all.
-
Sunshine greets her when Anne cracks open an eyelid, languid and slow as she stretches out atop her cheap, linen covers. Ruby had returned at some point after dawn, evidenced by the overnight bag whose contents are strewn messily across her bed, but gone for the day given how her work desk has been swept summarily clean. Anne yawns and notes how much More the world seems around her, focused and clear-headed for the first time in forever. To have slept through Hurricane Ruby is a testament to how deeply Anne was asleep thanks to Gilbert’s boring Botany lecture, currently replaced by a beekeeping tutorial as her laptop continues to shuffle through last night’s playlist.
Sluggishly, Anne reaches for her cellphone set face down on the bedside table, staring and trying to make sense of the numbers that swim hazily across the screen.
8:22
“Fuck!” she swears, finally registering the time and how little of it there’s left. Too much of a good thing, Anne has overslept her alarm and has maybe twenty minutes to make it to the other end of campus; fumbles and falls into a heap of limbs and sheets on the floor. Already, she is calculating when and where to skimp on minutes, the fastest route to Humanities, and which intersection is most conducive to being hit by traffic as a sympathetic excuse for her delay.
She looks down at her pajamas, oversized t-shirt and soft shorts that have gone baggy at the crotch, and figures it covers enough of the essential body parts to not necessitate a change of clothing, before grabbing her backpack and keys from the foot of the bed; double-checks that her ID is still tucked safely inside her wallet.
Panicked, Anne sprints to the communal bathroom at the end of the hall, Birkenstocks slapping against the linoleum floors. The sinks are all occupied (of course), so Anne has to lean over and dip her toothbrush under the gush of Jane’s faucet, who glares bemusedly in the mirror but doesn’t otherwise protest. Anne quickly brushes her teeth and splashes whatever remaining water that isn’t used to rinse out her toothpaste to wash away her eye gunk. She is a mess, but a well-rested one at least.
Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of everything else.
From start to finish, Anne clocks in at around seven minutes, which is one over the amount of time she needed to stay under in order to catch the bus that would get her to her exam before 9. Just as Anne is rounding the corner from her residence hall, she sees a trail of exhaust fumes behind the vehicle carrying away the last of her hopes and dreams; can only stare after it and the realtor ad plastered across the back, the white-capped grin of Honest Joe Alder mocking her mercilessly.
“But—” she can’t even finish the sentence, something close to a sob gurgling in the back of her throat.
Anne allows herself eight and a half seconds to cry before she starts miserably jogging in the direction of Humanities, backpack clanking rhythmically against her butt and riding up the hem of her t-shirt by the straps. She can hear the halfway empty Altoids tin and an assortment of other mystery items rattling around inside, waking Anne up in a way that her phone alarm failed to do this morning. And without Ruby there, she had no other failsafe to ensure that she wouldn’t oversleep. Even if that had never been a problem for her in the past.
Somehow, she knows that Gilbert is to blame.
Darling Diana will accuse her of jumping through the equivalent of Olympics-level hoops to arrive at this conclusion, but Anne is determined to pin this on her co-VP, whom she hates with a passion. Ever since the Island-themed party at his frat house last year . . .
But speak of the devil, Gilbert cruises by on his bike.
“Going somewhere?” he asks, the perfect amount of smugness to instinctively trigger Anne’s fight or flight. Predictably, she chooses ‘fight’.
“Don’t you have anywhere else to be? Rumors of Charlie’s conquests to spread around?”
Gilbert is normally always up for a round of verbal sparring, but something about the accusation she’s leveled makes him frown. He stops biking altogether and gives Anne pause, strangely compelled to stay in place as the world slows down around them. Her feet stall while they stand, facing each other, at the corner of Waxing and Waning, train tracks and gravel and a sweet, morning breeze.
“I haven’t done anything like that, Anne. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
He is earnest in a way that makes her ears heat up, serious expression further furrowing Gilbert’s brow. He stares at Anne as if the answer to some unspoken question is written somewhere across her face, vivid eyes flitting from cheeks to nose to lips and lingers on the latter for long enough to remind Anne of precious time slipping away. She tries to clear her desert throat before replying, “Thanks, but I’m going to be late.”
“Late?”
She sighs as if it’s the Universe’s fault and not her own that Anne overslept. “I have a Calculus exam in Humanities in approximately—” she checks her watch “—eleven minutes. The last forty seconds of which have been monopolized by you. So, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to run.”
Anne pivots to do just that when she feels firm fingers circling around her wrist, holding her back with more than just his gaze this time. With the other hand, Gilbert makes a gesture with a thumb and closed fist over his shoulder.
"Hop on."
Anne seriously contemplates being late to her exam just to get away from the squirming sensation Gilbert causes in her gut, but she desperately needs the grades to maintain her scholarship at Redmond. So resentfully, Anne climbs aboard, horrified at her choice of footwear because her Birks were the easiest thing to slip on but allow her no traction atop Gilbert’s bike pegs because he doesn’t have a proper passenger seat. To compensate, her hands grip extra firm to his shoulders for balance, which he doesn’t seem to mind despite the fact that her fingers are surely digging into his skin and back muscles, tanned and defined beneath his thin, cotton t-shirt.
“Hold on tight,” he says, almost like a joke, and starts pedaling with a fury.
Campus breezes by like this, the smell of spring in the air but slowly seeping into the first muggy hints of summer. Anne is constantly amazed at how close to nature they are despite being blocks away from the busy metropolitan of downtown, buttressed by lakes and forests to one side and the State Capitol building to the other. Redmond had always seemed like an impossibility until the day that it wasn’t and Anne never misses the opportunity to appreciate her fortune.
“I finished cataloguing all the surveys, by the way.”
She blinks. "What? How? There were like a million of them when I left yesterday night.”
Gilbert tsks, tsks, shaking his head in something close to disappointment. “Even after I told you not to stay too late?”
“Since when have I ever listened to anything you tell me to do?” Anne rolls her eyes, incredulous. “And besides that, how did you manage to get them done?”
“I woke up early today and pounded them out. It wasn’t that bad.”
“But you didn’t have to do them all,” she mumbles, almost into the crook of his neck.
“Well you looked exhausted yesterday. And it’s the least I could do.” Gilbert coughs, recognizing the suggestion behind his words. He recovers with, “As your fellow Vice President, of course.”
“Of course.”
The breeze isn’t enough to cool down the blush that envelopes Anne’s body. She swears Gilbert can feel the heat of it like rolling off of her in waves.
By the time he deposits her in front of the Humanities building at 8:55, a labyrinth in and of itself to navigate much less try to locate the exam room, Anne is already sweating bullets; jumps off and is prepared to sprint inside when she notices Gilbert fixing to bike away.
“Where are you going?” she asks. “Don’t you also have an exam?”
“I do, but it’s in Biomed.”
Biomed?
“Gilbert, that’s back near where you picked me up.”
He grins, lopsided and boyish. Cruises by her on his bike lackadaisically. “I know. Good luck with your exam though, Carrots.”
Anne can’t afford to look after his retreating back, still an exam to get to somewhere in a building she doesn’t know how to navigate, but hates that she thinks about him instead of formulas all the way up until she opens her test.
-
She is still thinking about Gilbert when she settles into bed later that night; performs all the same rituals, but allows Ruby back into their room. The younger girl is out like a light in seconds, just the soft rustling of blonde curls hitting the pillow enough to knock her out. Anne, meanwhile, stares up at the ceiling, restless for what seems like hours, knowing well and good she has another early final in the morning. But still, she refuses to cave and seek out his videos, going through the motions of playing that same playlist on shuffle, so if his video just so happens to pop up, it isn’t of Anne’s choice or volition.
She doesn’t want to give Gilbert too much credit as a cure. After all, she was simply overtired and delirious and sleep was the natural result, marginally aided along by the contents of the video. Probably four more seconds of watching paint dry would have been enough to knock her out, nevermind the way Gilbert’s dulcet tones seemed to envelope her brain in a warm sense of comfort the night before.
Anne chalks it up to fatigue, pushing her body to the brink after weeks of all-nighters, and spreading herself thin with all of the commitments she’s tied to. Nothing to do in particular with Gilbert’s videos or the way her body instinctively relaxes under the cadence of his words when Root Development and Gravitropism pops up again.
Quietly, Anne drifts off to sleep.