Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Sleep"
by Mona Ramsey
[email protected]

/Sleep. What is sleep? How do you sleep? I mean, you get into bed, you close your eyes, and there you are - asleep.

/Except, here I am - not asleep. Again./

Blair Sandburg opened his eyes, staring up at the too-familiar ceiling. It was there again, just like it had been last night. All 250 000 little tiny bits of stucco of it. Damn little flecks of paint the painters hadn't been able to get their brushes into and just wiped over, never thinking someone would be nearly interested in it to actually look and realize what they'd missed.

And any sane person would never have noticed it. Which was actually a good thing, considering that if he didn't get some sleep, and soon, Blair was seriously considering getting one of those nice automatics and taking a few people out from the top of a watertower, and the insanity plea would come in handy. It wasn't the monotony of their jobs that sent people over the edge, or the loss of a loved one, or even a nice chemical imbalance. Right at this moment, Blair was convinced it was a lack of a basic building block to the maintenance of the stable human condition.

Sleep.

It was the fourth day in a row, and he was starting to get a little stir crazy. He'd tried every remedy, short of conking himself over the head with something heavy. And every morning he'd get up again, and look at his haggard face in the mirror, and wonder, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

/Other people can sleep, no problem. I bet, right this very instant, there are millions, no billions of people, completely and totally asleep. Snuggled up in their beds, pillow nice and soft, warm blankets, wrapped around someone they love -

/Damn./

He pulled off the covers, and slid out of bed. It was hopeless, and lying there, tossing and turning, was just making him hot and exhausted. Time to try something else.

Warm milk was completely disgusting. There wasn't any brandy, and even if there had been, one sniff and he'd have passed out, and had a hangover the next day, on top of everything else. He'd taken a warm shower, done some relaxing yoga, watched C-SPAN for a while. All guaranteed snoozemakers, and none of them worked worth a damn.

He plopped down on the couch and flicked on the tube. There had to be something boring enough to lull him unconscious. Surely an infomercial, an evangelical re-run, the weather channel, for god's sake! Nothing.

A change of venue was definitely in order. He'd been there too long, pretending he was a nester, pretending that he knew how to do this 'home' thing. He'd never had a home that couldn't be uprooted and moved in a bag or on the back of a truck in his life, and here he was, in this one place, for three years already! A ninth of his life, invested in this place. He could leave today, his thesis in hand, and travel the globe. See the things he'd always wanted to see. Be a man of the world.

His eyes flicked over the darkened apartment. He'd set the volume on the tv down low, automatically, even though Jim wasn't there to bellow at him to shut it off. He was on stakeout, alone, again. The week looked to be a total wash, partner-wise. Stakeout was boring, tedious, bitch-inducing work, and he wished with all of his heart that he'd taken Simon up on his threat to send him out on it as well. Jim had saved him from the assignment, explaining that he'd have to be at the University all day, on stakeout all night. When would he sleep?

When, indeed?

He shut the tv off and wandered around, shivering a little. The apartment was chilly, the early spring still not having settled surely into summer. He considered a late meal, but knew that it would rest heavy on his tired body. Trailing through the apartment, he found himself suddenly on the stairs, going up, up.

The bed was inviting. He leaned over and took a deep lungful of the crisp, new comforter, the clean sheets underneath, the pillows propped up just the way Jim liked them. A sudden impulse later, he was on his back, on top of the bed, eyes closed. The pillow felt right, somehow, comfortable. It reached up around his head, drawing him in, down, just the perfect softness.

He pulled the comforter up around him, wrapping the downy warmth around his body, intending to stay there just long enough to fend off the cold until he could go back down to his own room. But, somehow, that wasn't what happened. . .

He jerked awake with a start, taking a scant second to realize that he was awake. Which meant, of course, that he'd been asleep. So happy was he over that revelation, that it took a full minute before he realized just where he was.

Panicked, he threw a quick glance at the bedside alarm clock. Five-thirty. He settled back down with a sigh. Jim wouldn't even be off duty for another half hour, not home for at least an hour. He had time.

Time to what? Sleep some more in his best friend's bed? True, he'd only managed a few hours, but it felt like a week to his overtired body. He felt good, clean, refreshed, and he didn't want to get up, ever.

Maybe this was the solution, then. All he had to do to insure himself a night of blissful sleep, was to somehow figure out how to get Jim to let him sleep in his bed.

That thought caused him to sit up, way too fast. The possibilities were endless - /Jim, really - I have to sleep here. I have a doctor's note to prove it./ or /Naomi said I have to sleep with my head pointed west, in order not to disturb the karmic integrity of my aura./

"Oh yeah, he'll go for that one."

He nearly drifted off again, jerking himself awake with bare minutes to spare before Jim was due home. Jumping up, he flicked the comforter quickly over the bed, smoothing it flat, fluffing the pillows and turning them. Then, taking one last look before he descended to his personal hell, he slipped down and into his bed.

Kid was asleep, of course, when he came in. /Huh. Must be nice for him./ Jim gave a long, bone-stretching yawn, and arched his back, loosening his entire body, from tip to toes. /What is it about police stakeout vans, anyway? Put a urinal in the corner and it would still be ten steps from certification as a prison cell./

He took a half-hearted look in the fridge, then decided he was far too tired to even consider bothering with food. He started to undress on the way up the stairs, slipping off his shoulder holster, unbuttoning his shirt.

There was something different about the bedroom, the slight, instinctive pricking of his senses putting him instantly on alert. He drew his gun, but a quick visual and aural sweep told him he was being paranoid. Only one other heartbeat in the place, and its steady beat was more familiar to him than his own. Shaking his head, he dropped the gun into his bedside drawer, and took off the rest of his clothes.

It was only when he was fully undressed and inside the haven of his bed, eyes closed, that he realized that what he'd perceived had nothing to do with either sight or sound. It was a smell - slight, musky, maddeningly familiar. What was it? It was something, someone, that he knew very, very well.

He turned over on to his side, punching the pillow down a little, turning it over, to get it in just the right comfortable spot -

/Damn. There it was again. What the hell?/

It took him a full minute before he rested his head back down on the pillow, turning his nose into it. There it was. The pillow. He took a deep lungful of it, and smelled -

Blair.

He dialled down his senses. /Why am I all of a sudden smelling Blair in my bed?/ The sudden combination of 'Blair' and 'in my bed' in his mind led to a particularly delicious visual which was one of his favorite fantasy images. It made him groan, a little too loudly. He silenced himself, listening for any indication that the kid was up and had heard him.

/Nope./ He let out a breath, which turned into a sort of a sigh. It was going to be another rough day's sleep, he could just tell. At least Blair would be gone to school, soon, and he'd be free to pursue a little 'relaxation' and maybe get some rest.

Blair swore to himself that he wasn't going to do it again. It had been a one-time thing, and now that he'd gotten some sleep and wasn't so wound up about not sleeping, he could just get right back into the old patterns, in his own bed. Only, nobody told his body that.

He lay there for three hours, staring up at the damn ceiling, before he gave up. /Why am I doing this to myself? I mean, it's not as if he noticed anything today, right? He didn't say anything, and he would have, if he'd noticed, so - /

The rationalization took him straight up the stairs and into that tangible bliss of a bed. He couldn't figure out what it was, but the comfort level was just amazing. It took him the better part of thirty seconds to fall asleep.

And so it continued, for the rest of the week. Blair went straight into the bed that night, eschewing his self-doubts and doubletalk and just jumping right in. He was deliberately not thinking of what would happen to him once the stakeout was over - a part of him was perverse enough to wish bad luck onto the team, just so he could have a little continuation of his wonderful sleep.

A little Guide-twinge inside wondered how it was that Jim didn't notice anything, but he chalked it up to the pressure of the stakeout, and the change in his sleep cycle. It was the one area in which Jim hated to be disturbed, yet there it was - he was continually having to be flexible in this job. He was the type of person who worked better on no sleep than on sleep that didn't fit into his patterns, but Simon would freak to find out that one of his best detectives went three or four days at a time without sleeping. He slept when he could mainly to take the edge off.

Still, he didn't say anything, and they saw each other for a good ten, maybe twenty minutes a day. /Just one more day, Sandburg,/ he told himself. /Just keep this up for one more day, and then you go back to your room./

/Just one more day . . ./

The thought drifted in his mind as he fell asleep.

He didn't hear the apartment door when it opened. 6.05 a.m., Saturday morning. He hadn't even been going to sleep up there that night, seeing as there was nowhere that he had to be the next day. He'd thought that the stakeout shift was switching over that night, but Simon kept them on, having a tip that the case was going to break, wanting the original team to be the ones to work the bust. So he'd resisted resisting the bed, and climbed up the stairs again, crawling in, wrapping himself in the warmth of the comforter, turning the pillow the way he liked it, and fell asleep.

So deeply asleep that he didn't hear his partner/roommate arrive home the next morning, twenty-five minutes early.

Jim walked in the apartment, tired out again, but glad that at least he didn't have to spend another night in that van with three other guys. Male bonding was all well and good, but there was something to be said for the joys of peace.

He poked his head in the fridge, spying half a bowl of some sort of vegetarian Blair special that would probably make a great microwaved lunch in about eight hours, if the kid didn't get to it first. They were stocked up on groceries, the place looked reasonably clean - there wasn't anything that he had to do until Monday, except get some rest.

He shrugged out of his clothes, half of them off before he'd reached the top step, ready to just pull back the covers and slide in, when he noticed the change again. He couldn't have said which sense registered it first, but it was the sight of Blair in his bed that shocked him into immobility. He stood there, staring, blinking his eyes, trying to slow his heart.

He told himself it was just the shock of seeing Blair there, lying in his bed, deeply asleep, head crooked slightly on one arm, the other lying across his hip, his mouth barely open, lashes dark against his cheeks. His hair only partly obscured his face, so different in repose from the animation it held when awake.

Jim honestly didn't think that he had ever seen anything more beautiful.

He didn't know what to do, caught in between letting the kid sleep undisturbed - /just stay here, just watch him, it couldn't hurt anyone, could it?/ and running as fast as he could down the stairs and out of the apartment. He stood there a minute, considering, then felt himself carried across the few steps it took to reach the bed.

He knelt there beside him, so still, so concentrated on his Guide's form, so deep within his own conflicted thoughts, that he barely noticed the slight change in breathing coming from the still-prone form. He closed his eyes, willing himself away, downstairs, far from this spot, where he'd have time to compose himself, where what was going to happen would never happen.

Blair opened his eyes.

The blue was so bright, the skin still sleep-flushed, and he was looking at him, at him, with that Blair-look. The flash of 'I need you' he saw there was quickly gone, as Blair gathered his still-sleeping wits about him and realized just where he was.

He vowed not to let it leave for good.

"Jim - "

There was apology in that voice, as if there was anything to apologize for. As if his body wouldn't make up for whatever imagined indiscretion he'd committed. As if he didn't know it.

His lips parted, suddenly dry. He could feel the blush that was suffusing the younger man, could imagine the rising heat slowly spreading down the bare skin. His eyes followed the path of that heat-trail, joining the blush to caress the length of his skin. He heard rather than witnessed the shiver that followed. Jim willed him, with his eyes, not to turn away.

He didn't.

There was perhaps an instant in time, certainly less than could be perceived, where they still weren't touching, then it was shattered, the shards of their aloneness tumbling down off of the bed that now held the two of them. They molded together, unheeding of the sheet that separated them, the single layer of clothing. The heat seared wherever they touched, melting away the in-between. One mouth caught another, captured the goal, the prize, the mate for life, the twin of its own. They didn't say a word.

He felt the rest of his clothing melt away - or was it ripped? - and then he was there, across the bed, his body memorizing the length of the man underneath him, the sheets gone now, the comforter flung across the room, the pillows threatening behind, and there was only this mattress, bare and uncompromising and Blair, his Blair, all his own, to be claimed, waiting, begging with his eyes, promising with his hands, desperate half-human noises coming from that throat.

There were eyes bluer and blacker with desire than he'd ever thought humanly possible and this kid was underneath him, moving as if he could get away, /as if -/, the smile proving that it wasn't away that he wanted, the tease in his grin torn away by a series of kisses so hot that they seared away breath and speech and thoughts and left only this need and that one and the desire in the wake washed over both of them and they were drowning, drowning in need to be together like this, forever.

How did he find his way inside so quickly, and did he hurt him with this possession, but those thrusts weren't all his own, he was helping, too, and the moans weren't all his, either, although who knew who was beginning and who was ending, there was only this pushing, pounding, all-encompassing need, and he had to reign it in, didn't he? it was too much for both of them, they'd never survive it, they'd never be able to go back -

To what? and why would they want to?

/No/ he thought, /there is no back and there is only here and now and he feels so good and he's mine mine mine mine mine -

/Mine!/

And not one word did he speak, and not one word did he hear.

Much, much later: "I thought it was the bed."

"What?" He was half-asleep already, and only heard the low voice on the quiet edge of his consciousness. He turned over on his side. "What did you say, Chief?"

Blair smiled. "I thought it was the bed. I thought that was why I was sleeping so well up here."

"And now?" He reached a hand up to stroke the silky curls.

"I should have known it was you all the time. It was this bed, true, but because it was your bed. It smells like you, it fits you. If I'd thought a little harder, I would have realized that I wanted to fit you, too." He stretched and yawned, curling himself further into his lover's arms. "I still haven't caught up on the sleep that I missed torturing myself, though."

"You'd better catch up now, Chief," Jim said, quietly, hugging him tight. "I have a feeling that you're going to be very short on sleep the rest of this weekend."

The End
MonaR.