Work Text:
When Patrick comes home, David is still in bed, where he left him nearly six hours ago.
One of those days.
He knew it would be before he even set the kettle to boiling that morning. It was in the way David didn’t acknowledge the kiss Patrick pressed to his forehead or the lack of a snarky reprimand when Patrick accidentally knocked his Givenchy sweater to the ground while looking for his scarf. So Patrick cancelled the alarm on David’s phone, set an hour after his own goes off, and quietly moved around the apartment, getting ready for a day at work that David would not join him for.
Because, every once in a while, David cannot get out of bed. If pressed to explain why, he can’t. It’s a melancholia that has no trigger, no warning, no reason. It doesn’t need one.
Those days are becoming rarer and rarer, but they still manage to catch David unawares, like pulling a chair out from under someone just when they turn their back to sit, confident that it will be there to catch them when they fall.
Patrick quietly closes the door, turning the lock carefully, and toes off his shoes. He pads across the floor and stands in the doorway to the bedroom for a moment, watching the steady rise and fall of the mound of blankets that hasn’t moved since that morning. He shucks his jeans and pulls his sweater over his head, tossing them on the bench at the foot of the bed, before lifting the covers and sliding up against David’s back, keeping the arm around his stomach loose and the hand over his heart firm.
“I didn’t come in,” the mound murmurs after a quiet moment, voice rough from disuse.
Patrick smiles softly, pressing a kiss to the back of David’s ear. “I noticed.”
“Are you mad?”
“Nope.” Another kiss, this time to his shoulder.
David turns in his arms and finally noses at the blankets enough to get them to fall below his chin. He squints in the daylight streaming through the windows, and Patrick would find his look of bafflement adorable if he wasn’t too busy wanting to remove the strains of stress etched into David’s painfully beautiful face. “What are you doing here?”
Patrick runs a thumb over David’s eyebrow, and David closes his eyes, one crease easing as he leans into Patrick’s touch. “I closed early.”
David blinks. “Why?”
Patrick pulls the blankets back up over their heads and holds him tighter, nose pressing into the space where neck meets shoulder, as if it was carved just for him.
“More important places to be.”