Work Text:
The clock on Chase's nightstand insisted it was a quarter past three, and Buddy had no particular reason to doubt it.
Sleep had always been a peculiar negotiation for him — something he could perform competently when the circumstances were right, but which abandoned him without warning the moment his mind decided there was thinking left to do. Tonight, apparently, there was thinking left to do. He couldn't have named the subject if pressed. It simply hummed along beneath his skull like a kettle that refused to either boil or cool, and so he lay still in the dark, listening to Chase breathe.
The bed was, by any honest measure, too small for two people. It was a twin, purchased presumably with the assumption that only one body would ever occupy it, and yet here they were — a testament to the fact that bodies could be made to fit where furniture insisted they shouldn't. Buddy had solved the geometry early on by curling, knees drawn toward his chest, spine bowed into a comma. Chase had solved it less elegantly, sprawling first one direction and then another over the course of an evening until eventually, sometime past midnight, he gave up the starfish approach entirely and simply wrapped himself around Buddy instead, an arm slung heavy over his ribs, face tucked somewhere near the back of his neck.
It was, Buddy privately thought, a remarkably efficient use of space. He did not say this aloud. There was no one awake to hear it.
He was nude — fully, unapologetically so — and it had taken him an embarrassingly long stretch of their relationship to admit, even to himself, how much he relished it. There was a luxury in it that no one who hadn't spent over a century sealed inside metal could properly appreciate: the simple fact of air, moving freely over skin that was, undeniably, skin. Not wax. Not the cool unfeeling shell he'd worn for a hundred and thirty-odd years, polished and proper and entirely without sensation. Just air, and warmth, and the occasional errant draft from whatever gap existed beneath Chase's door, raising the fine hair on his arms in a way that felt almost indecently good. He had become something of a connoisseur of small sensations. He doubted Chase fully understood why, on the nights Buddy slept here, he so flatly refused even a t-shirt — but Chase had stopped asking, which Buddy appreciated more than he'd ever articulated.
A soft, inelegant sound interrupted his reverie. Wet, faintly ticklish, dragging itself across the curve of his shoulder.
Buddy went very still.
He angled his head as far as the awkward press of Chase's arm allowed and confirmed, with a kind of resigned affection, that yes — Chase was drooling on him. A thin, glistening trail had made its way from the corner of his slack mouth down to where his face was smashed against Buddy's shoulder blade, and with every slow exhale, a fresh contribution was added to the cause.
It was, objectively, disgusting.
It was also, infuriatingly, the kind of disgusting that made something in Buddy's chest go soft and warm and entirely too fond for his own comfort. He considered, briefly, extracting himself to fetch a tissue. He considered it for perhaps four seconds before deciding the operation wasn't worth the risk of waking him, and settled instead for simply enduring it, filing the indignity away as one more small, unglamorous proof that this — whatever this was, this borrowed bed and this drooling boy and this thin blanket that covered neither of them adequately — was real in a way that nothing in his previous life had ever managed to be.
Chase made a noise.
Not the drool-noise. A different one — a low, plaintive little whine, pitched somewhere between distress and outrage, the sort of sound a much smaller creature might make over a much smaller grievance. Buddy's ears, such as they were, pricked with interest.
"No," Chase mumbled, with the gravity of a man delivering a eulogy. "Not the good fork."
Buddy lay perfectly motionless.
He had known, in the abstract, that Chase talked in his sleep — he'd witnessed it precisely twice before, weeks ago, once a single mumbled fragment about a bus schedule that Buddy had chosen not to mention in the morning, mostly because he hadn't been entirely sure he'd want anyone narrating his unconscious musings back to him over breakfast, and… that other time. But knowing a thing existed and being subjected to it again, at point-blank range, in the smothering hush of three in the morning, were evidently very different experiences.
"That's my fork," Chase insisted, with rising indignation, to some invisible adversary. His grip on Buddy's ribs tightened fractionally, as though bracing for theft. "I called it. I called it first."
A laugh was assembling itself somewhere behind Buddy's sternum, climbing with the particular, traitorous urgency of laughter that has been suppressed too long and is no longer interested in negotiation. This presented a logistical problem of the first order, because Buddy did not laugh quietly. He had never managed to. Something about the shape of his throat, perhaps, or simply decades of disuse before he'd had a throat capable of laughing at all — whatever the cause, the result was a short, ungainly snort, pig-like and entirely without dignity, every single time something struck him as sufficiently funny.
He clamped his jaw shut. He thought, with great discipline, about something profoundly unfunny — taxes, the dentist, the seventeen different ways Greg from accounting mispronounced his name. None of it helped, because Chase, still deep in whatever culinary injustice his dreaming mind had conjured, made a small, betrayed sound and mumbled, "Traitor," with such wounded conviction that Buddy's resolve fractured entirely.
The snort escaped before he could stop it. Brief, sharp, mortifying.
Chase stirred. Not awake — not quite — but his brow furrowed, his grip shifted, and for one suspended moment Buddy held his breath entirely, the way a man might freeze upon realizing he's stepped on a floorboard. But Chase only exhaled, long and slow, and burrowed his face deeper against Buddy's shoulder, the fresh drool a small price paid for the privilege of not waking up.
Buddy let his breath go, silent and shaking with the laughter he was still, somehow, managing to contain.
He glanced toward the window, where the faintest grey suggestion of dawn hadn't yet bothered to arrive, and found that the restless hum behind his thoughts had, at some point in the last several minutes, gone quiet. He still wasn't tired. He doubted he would be for some while yet. But there was something to be said for lying here regardless — bare-skinned and wide awake in the small hours, a drooling, fork-defending boy wrapped around him like he had no intention of ever letting go — that felt, Buddy decided, infinitely more worth doing than sleep.
He reached up, carefully, and brushed a strand of hair from Chase's forehead.
"Go back to defending your fork," he murmured, barely above breath. "I'll keep watch."
Chase, naturally, said nothing back. But his mouth curved, faint and unconscious, into something that might have been a smile — and Buddy decided that was answer enough.