Chapter Text
Gerry lets himself into the flat, wincing slightly at the loud creak of the door. He’s been reminding Jon to get that sorted for months now – maybe tomorrow he’ll leave a sticky note on the fridge and see if that works. It’s tempting to just walk in and collapse into bed – it’s definitely late? early? enough to justify that – but instead he shrugs off his bulky leather coat and carries it into the living room, where Jon seems to have fallen asleep. Whatever history documentary he had been watching is still running, but the lights are switched off, and Gerry has to half-feel his way through the cluttered room. He can just about make out the shape of his partner curled up under a blanket in the soft blue light of the screen, and his heart gives a little tug at the sight.
“Shoes off.”
Gerry jumps, his coat slipping out of his arms and onto the floor with a hefty thud, and then barks out a laugh.
“Yeah, yeah, alright. Jesus, Jon, I thought you were asleep.” It wasn’t an unfair assumption, considering the hour, but Gerry sometimes forgets that Jon’s internal body clock seems to be just as irreparably fucked as his own. He scoops his coat back off the floor and drapes it over the back of the sofa, where Jon has sat up and is watching him with eagle eyes, before retracing his steps to the hallway to begin the long process of unbuckling his boots.
“I was waiting for you to get in,” comes Jon’s reply, punctuated by a yawn and what he would vehemently deny to be a pout, and - well. That's just unfairly sweet. Gerry sticks his tongue out at him, which can roughly be translated to ‘I love you, stop being so cute’, to which Jon rolls his eyes, which in turn definitely means ‘stop deflecting my affection and come sit with me I missed you’. Gerry has to suppress a grin, because Jon’s exaggerated annoyance in combination with the knitted blanket currently thrown around his shoulders is frankly adorable, but he’s not sure that’s something Jon would let him say without some complaint.
“Good night?”
Gerry hums his reply affirmative. It hadn’t been anything special, just a little pub gig, but it had been a great set, and it was nice to catch up with some familiar faces. He drops himself onto the sofa before leaning into Jon, whose long fingers begin gently pulling Gerry's hair from the braid he'd put it in to keep it out of his face. The exhaustion is hitting him now, not helped by the pints he’d drunk at the gig, nor the canned cocktail he’d shared with a friend on the tube to Jon's. He buries his face in the crook of Jon's neck, grateful that his partner runs colder than him and immediately abusing that to cool his alcohol flushed face. Jon chuckles at this, and continues running his hands through box-dye black hair.
“Thanks for letting me crash here,” Gerry mumbles. It’s muffled only slightly by Jon’s shoulder, and Gerry knows he’s been heard when a soft kiss is placed on the top of his head. “Watch anything good?”
“There was a documentary on the Saxons, but I seem to have missed some of it due to a home invasion at the hands of some drunken punk.” It’s an easy jab, Jon knows how easy it is to get Gerry ranting on the variations between alt subcultures - especially because Gerry knows Jon knows the difference, he’s seen the evidence of Jon’s own punk phase - but it’s nearly two in the morning so he mostly lets it slide, raising one hand high enough that he knows it’s obscuring Jon's view of the television before flipping him off. This gets him another laugh, before Jon catches the hand with his own and pulls it closer to his face so he can place a kiss on the tattooed eye on the knuckle of Gerry’s middle finger. He snorts and presses a kiss to Jon’s shoulder in return, resting his eyes for a minute whilst Jon goes back to playing with his hair.
At some point, Gerry must have drifted off because eventually he’s being woken by Jon's subtle attempts to stretch his legs. He sits up from where his head has fallen into Jon's lap and lets out a yawn, not bothering to cover his mouth in favour of stretching both arms before letting them fall around Jon.
“Documentary finished?”
Jon nods, obviously half-asleep himself by this point.
“Right then. Bed?”
“Yes, I think that’s probably a good idea.” Jon slides his glasses off his faces to rub at his eyes, and Gerry uses this as an opportunity to grab a thin wrist and press a kiss to his knuckles, a mirror of Jon’s earlier action. They’re not usually this affectionate - Gerry’s a touchy person and Jon tends to cling to anything he can get, touch starved as he is, but they’ve been together long enough now that they’re comforted just by existing in the same space - but things have been…
Well. Not exactly rough, per se, but certainly a little different, lately. Gerry had never liked Jon working at the Institute in the first place, but given that that’s how they met, he couldn’t exactly complain.
He had complained about him taking up the Head Archivist position, though. He’d complained about that a lot.
That had been a rough patch, this was just the product of not seeing each other in a while. A combination of Jon working late and Gerry working early, not to mention the fact that he’d started hunting Leitner’s again, for the first time since he’d come back from America. Not often, one every couple of months if that, just to help feel like he was still contributing something good to the world.
Jon hadn’t been happy, when Gerry had first told him, but Gerry had joked that it seriously messed with his image if Jon of all people had a more dangerous job than him now. That hadn’t been the end of that discussion, but it had certainly given Gerry the upper hand, and so the Leitner hunting had continued.
He’d only gotten back to London today from his most recent trip - a false lead in Manchester - and the gig tonight had been the perfect excuse to drop by Jon’s flat, it being far closer than his own. He doesn’t like being away from Jon, but Gerry can’t help appreciate all the extra attention it gets him when he comes back. Like now, Jon sitting him down on the bed and fussing over his face with a bottle of micellar water and some cotton pads. They’re both stupidly tired, and Gerry’s still feeling the lingering buzz of the drinks he’d had earlier, and it's just nice. Nice enough that he bats away Jon’s hand from where he’s undoubtedly just making more of a mess of Gerry’s lipstick in order to pull him down for another kiss.
Jon pulls back almost immediately to pull a face, his nose wrinkling. “You taste like makeup remover.”
Gerry can’t help but laugh. “And who’s fault is that?” He should probably get up, go to the bathroom to take his makeup off properly so he doesn’t end up with lingering panda eyes in the morning, but he’s far too comfortable here on the bed, with Jon practically in his lap. Well, he would be comfortable, if he wasn’t acutely aware of the seams of his jeans digging into his thighs thanks to wearing them for over twenty-four straight hours. “Help me get these off?”
He lets himself fall against the duvet, lifting his hips to try and wriggle out of the tight fabric whilst Jon pulls at the cuffs around his ankles. Jon grumbles something about how ‘ridiculous’ it is for Gerry to ‘still be wearing these things at his age’, and Gerry reminds him of the drainpipes he’d found in Jon’s own wardrobe not so long ago, but they’re both laughing by the time Gerry is finally denim-free.
Jon’s been wearing his sleepwear no doubt since the minute he’d got home, desperate to keep his ‘work self’ and ‘real self’ separate; soft pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt that may have once been Gerry’s or may have once been Georgie’s or may genuinely have belonged to Jon himself in the first place, threadbare and baggy and only faintly still advertising some small band that probably doesn’t exist anymore. Gerry doesn't actually own any sleepwear, let alone keep any at Jon’s, but there's a thin grey hoodie that’s lived here since the first time he’d stayed, and he changes into this because Jon’s apartment somehow gets even colder at night.
The lights weren’t turned on in the first place, so when Gerry finally gets to collapse properly into bed, there’s nothing delaying Jon from curling up next to him and immediately shoving his hands under Gerry’s hoodie to steal some of his body heat. Gerry whines at this, mentally retracting his earlier appreciation for Jon's low temperature, but the way Jon traces the twin scars on his chest, matching with Jon’s own, is soothing enough that he can’t actually complain.
Jon falls asleep before he does and, despite how thoroughly exhausted he is, Gerry can’t help but watch him sleep for a while. It’s partially to make sure he’s sleeping well - it’s a common enough occurrence for one, or both, of them to wake up shaking from night terrors, and although he can’t do much to help, he wants to fall asleep knowing Jon is actually resting - but also because the way the bright streetlight falls through the shitty bedroom blind highlights the small patch of silvery hairs at Jon’s exposed temple.
He used to tease Jon about his premature greying, but it’s increased rapidly since his promotion, and now it’s more of a cause for concern than anything. Not that either of them are bothered about the greying itself - although Jon can be a little self-conscious about it sometimes, Gerry had laughed for days when he’d found out Jon’s been using it to his advantage to seem older at work. It’s just slightly worrying that the Archives are already stressing Jon out this much.
Still, in the orange glow of the light, Gerry can’t help but think it looks sort of pretty, and it’s whilst he’s musing over that, thinking about how he’d like very much to paint Jon one of these days, in warm lighting and smiling and free of the stress of the Archives, that he drifts off to sleep too.