Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Hey, Elaine?” Elaine was pressed back to back with Jerry, so she had felt his deep breath before the question.

“Yeah?”

“What do you think about at night?” He was using some dry tone like it was the setup for a joke, like it wasn’t midnight.

“I dunno. Are we talking like, general night-time thoughts or trying-to-fall-asleep?”

“Nighttime.” Elaine wasn’t going to be able to avoid this one. She exhaled just long enough to let Jerry know that she wanted to end this as soon as possible.

“Past boyfriends? Whatever funny thing you guys did during the day? What I’ll have for breakfast in the morning?”

“Past boyfriends?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

Elaine glared at the wall, softly illuminated by Jerry’s alarm clock. “Jerry, it’s nighttime.”

“Ah.”

Elaine’s gaze traced over the messy lines of the blankets.

“Why, what do you think about?”

“Oh, I don’t know…” He dragged out the vowels comically long and Elaine wondered what would ever make him stop. She settled for rocking back a little and elbowing him in the kidney.

“C’mon, I answered.”

“Yeah.”

Elaine sighed and rolled over, wrapping her arm around his chest and pressing her nose into his neck.

“Now?”

“Fine. I think about baseball.”

“Hey, who has two big toes and poor circulation?”

“I think about feelings, ok? About my deep inner turmoils.” Jerry wasn’t doing the embarrassed mumble that George did; instead, his voice was comically high. This was the setup for another joke.

Elaine hummed, pressing her face deeper into his neck, and brushed her thumb back and forth across his worn T-shirt.

“You know, that’s almost funny.”

Jerry brought his hand to Elaine’s and traced her knuckles absently. “I do my best.”

“Yeah, you do.”

Chapter Text

Jerry was having difficulties falling asleep for multiple reasons, most of them related to the hotel’s extraordinarily inefficient air conditioner, but, well. George was crying. Jerry could count on a few hands the times that he had seen George crying, and on the same hands the times that George, tear-stained and voice cracking, had tried to deny it. Jerry was well-versed in emotional repression so he’d usually let George get to it, but Jerry could count on one hand how many hours of sleep he had gotten last night, and given how George didn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon...

“George?”

“Shut up,” came the choked, nasal response. Jerry thought for a minute. In for a penny, in for ten bucks?

“George- if there were-hypothetically, you understand- an issue that would, hypothetically, be more easily resolved with talking-”

“Jerry.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jerry rolled over and started to erase the whole thing from his memory.

“In this hypothetical situation-” George started and paused. Jerry immediately regretted saying anything, but rolled back over anyway. “-what if, the issue at hand, were that, well, we could say that, er.” Jerry could make out the sigh in the line of George’s back in the near-dark. He wondered why he’d ever discounted emotional ignorance.

“It’s about Susan.” The words were scraped raw and if Jerry were a romantic he would have imagined them hanging heavily in the air. Jerry wasn’t, though, and instead he wrote a bit in his head about how come gravelly morning voice is sexy but gravelly just-cried voice isn’t?

He realized the ball was in his court and flipped through a few remarks, like “Looks like accidentally poisoning your fiance didn’t work out for the long run,” and “At least your mother doesn’t think you’re gay anymore,” but he thought the occasion called for something more comforting.

“Y-”

“Good night, Jerry.”

“Good talk,” he muttered.

Chapter Text

“I have to say, I am really looking forward to this trip-” Elaine started. She stopped sharply. George and Jerry bumped into her back and began to complain, but they stopped quickly too.

Kramer appeared to have tried to mass produce friendship bracelets using live wires criss-crossing between his and Jerry’s apartments. However, his monstrish braids had apparently gotten away from him and he had tried to destroy his creation using kid scissors.

In other words, Kramer lay smoking gently in a pile of frayed wires in the middle of the hallway.

“Good lord,” Jerry muttered and walked quickly to try to prod him conscious.

“Well,” Jerry began tiredly, “he should be fine, but the wiring won’t be until Tuesday.” He, having just returned from his neighbor’s, flopped onto the armchair with a world-weariness usually seen in college students.

George and Elaine had managed to clean up most of the wires, but they had left the final damage assessment for Jerry and hauled up the rest of their luggage in the meantime. George, sitting on the floor, stared past a glass of milk on the coffee table and didn’t respond. Elaine, however, leaned forward and started a drawling rant.

“What, pray tell, inspired him to wire his fridge to your living room lights?”

“Well, he figures, he won’t want to have his lights or his fan on separately, so why not have one switch for both?”

“I’m guessing things managed to go downhill from that incredible reasoning?”

“The upshot of it is, we can’t turn the lights off in here or else his pigs’ feet will spoil.”

The three of them were planning to travel to Florida in the morning, but their flight was at 4 am due to ticket pricing, so they had figured it would be easier to sleep over at Jerry’s and take a taxi together in the morning. Elaine, who was intensely opposed to sleeping in Jerry’s bed if she had to share it with George or deal with Jerry’s morning breath, had dibs on the couch. However, with the current situation with the lights, she almost regretted her lightning-fast dibs ability.
She heaved a sigh and rolled over.

Not being able to fall asleep, she reflected, is up there with grainy coffee and humidity. Being tired but unable to make yourself just go to sleep begins to feel more like personal failure after an hour or two.

Elaine tried to reason that the lights weren’t really such a big deal.

Jerry stared at the ceiling and listened to George’s obviously-not-sleeping breaths. It was going to be one of those nights.

“Jerry?” Jerry couldn’t see George’s face but he knew this was the beginning of an argument.

“Yeah, George?”

“When I was a young boy-”

“Yeah, George?”

“You know, my father used to say-”

“Yeah, George?”

Jerry couldn’t see George’s face, but he knew that he would be rolling his eyes, wetting his lips, and getting ready for another approach at whatever it was he wanted.

“Susan was always very touchy-feely, and I complained about it, but it was a sign she loved me, you know?”

Jerry opened his mouth and closed it. “Yeah,” he said eventually. George rolled over and usually Jerry knew better than to look because this was just another tactic, but George so rarely talked about Susan. Jerry could indulge this once. He rolled over and came face-to-face with George.

“I took her for granted.”

The only thing that came to Jerry’s mind was that George wasn’t making eye contact, which was usually a key part of this persuasive method. His expression was something near somber. Jerry stared.

George’s eyes flicked up.

“No,” Jerry said emphatically.

“C’mon,” he wheedled. When that didn’t work, he raised his eyebrows and started a different track: “You know, studies have shown that oxytocin improves rest quality.”
Jerry resolutely rolled his eyes. George frowned.

“I’ll tell Elaine that you moaned my name in your sleep.”

“George, if anybody’s moaning, it’s you.”

George made a face between hurt and stubborn, but he rolled over. Jerry stared at the back of his head.

Fifteen feet away, Elaine completed another full-body rotation. She sighed again, forcefully, and glared at the glaring ceiling lights. She hissed a curse and sat up, grabbing her pillow. Her feet hit the floor with a resigned stomp and continued with similar sounds as she made her way to the bedroom. She set her jaw and opened the door very quietly.

A slice of light framed a scene that left Elaine’s jaw slack.

Jerry Seinfeld, a big spoon for once? Answers would have to wait, but she was thankful they were asleep; she didn’t want to deal with admitting she was wrong about being able to sleep with the lights.

Elaine turned out to be wrong about two things, because Jerry had twisted his clearly-not-sleeping head to look at Elaine, panicked. Elaine started to laugh, but he shushed her quickly.

“He only fell asleep a few minutes ago and I can’t deal with this again,” he whispered miserably as Elaine slid into bed next to him.

“Deal with what?”

Jerry shook his head. “Too ghastly to talk about.”

Elaine smiled, still laughing a little. “Whatever. I’ll just corner you tomorrow on the plane.”

“Technically, it is tomorrow.”

Elaine nodded at George and put a finger to her lips exaggeratedly. Jerry made a face at her before nestling into the pillow again.

“Night.”

“Night.”

Chapter Text

Jerry stared into space. In the near-darkness, he could vaguely make out the painting on his wall. He squinted and tried to cloud-watch in the abstract blobs.

He glanced back at his alarm clock. 11:43 pm. Three minutes later than it had been three minutes ago.

He was in the process of flopping his head back to check the alarm clock before he felt an elbow in his right side.

“What?”

“Some of us are trying to sleep,” came a very muffled and disgruntled voice from the right. The owner’s face was trying to become one with Jerry’s ribcage.

“Some of us are trying,” he shot back, “but can’t because they can’t get comfortable.”

“It’s two to one, Jerry, give it up,” came a much more tired voice from his left. She was curled on her side, chest rising and falling as slow as the sun.

“Elaine, you can sleep anywhere, you don’t count.” Jerry was derailing quickly from his original argument.

“I’m too tired to argue, but you’re wrong.”

“Yeah, remember when she made us sleep at the foot of the bed because it was ‘too hot’?” Jerry felt George’s lips move groggily against his thin cotton T-shirt. Jerry decided that debate would help nothing and that he would either have to make himself very unpopular or deal with the hand he’d been dealt.

He looked at the clock. 11:47. Through the faint grey light, he looked at the lump in the covers that was George and watched the changing concavity of the curve of Elaine’s side as she sighed for what seemed like a decade. He felt George’s faint breaths on his middle ribs, cycling through warm, then cool, then one long, warm sigh.

Jerry inhaled deeply, briefly crushing George’s nose and pressing Elaine’s side further into his. He let his eyelids drift close with an exhale and hoped he didn’t dream of anything but the present.