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“Erm,” Jake says, and even through the gas mask you can hear the nervousness in his voice. “I don't mean to be a bother, but there seems to be a problem.”
“What problem?” you reply, double checking the tent stakes. You think they're hammered in deeply enough, but it wouldn't hurt to check again. You make a show of it, getting on your hands and knees and thinking hard about the angle of the stakes into the ground as they work against the drag of the wind, but between you and Jake you're not sure who you're trying to convince of your earnestness.
“Well, you see...” Jake trails off, and you don't prompt him to continue. You get up instead, brushing off the knees of your black pants. When you walk around to the back of the tent he follows you like a lost puppy, and when you finally give in and turn to look at him, his eyes are comically round with worry.
“It's just that,” he starts again. Then he seems to give up talking as a lost cause and holds up a black sleeping bag.
You raise an eyebrow, and his face falls. “Don't tell me you don't know what that is,” you tell him. “You're supposed to be the wilderness jungle expert.”
“Of course I know what a sleeping bag is, don't be daft!” he snaps. “The problem is that you only seem to have alchemized one of them!”
You shrug. “We're running low on supplies. I only had enough stuff to alchemize one.” When his eyes narrow, you say, “try it yourself if you don't believe me.”
You can see him pause, warring between his innate trust of you (and everything else, let's be honest, you aren't special in that regard no matter how much you want to be) and the fact that it's highly unlikely that the two of you, whose sylladexes are stuffed full to bursting, wouldn't have enough materials to alchemize two sleeping bags from.
“Besides,” you add, “you remember how cold LOMAX gets at night. We can share body heat this way. It's more efficient.”
You see his expression clear and swallow your relief. “That's true,” he says. “Well! I do love happy accidents, don't you?”
--
Later that night the two of you are standing above the sleeping bag, which has been unzipped and thrown open invitingly.
“After you,” Jake says.
“I just remembered, I wanted to finish a program I was working on,” you say. “You can go ahead.”
Jake frowns. “Nonsense!” he says. “We only have so many batteries, and there's no reason you can't finish any of your coding jackanapery in the morning.”
You frown at him. “It's not like we can't alchemize more.”
“But you said we were running low on supplies,” he says, confused. “Isn't that how we ended up in this pickle in the first place?”
A part of your mind snickers at pickle because you are never above sexual double entendre, but the majority of your thoughts are occupied with a mental facepalm.
“Um. Yeah,” you say. “I guess you're right.”
Jake is frowning at you. “It's not like you to be forgetful,” he says. “Why, you've got a mind like a steel trap. You must be tired, eh, Strider? It's high time to get some z's.”
“Z's,” you repeat. “Yeah.”
Then the two of you just stand there for a minute. Eventually Jake huffs with exasperation and grabs you in a headlock, wrestling you to the ground. “Come along, then!” he huffs. “In you get.”
In the ensuing tussle, you end up kicking the electric lantern over and flinging the sleeping bag to some far corner of the tent. When you finally manage to pin him down, both of you are breathing hard, and you can barely see his eyes staring at you in the tent's deep shadows.
“This is stupid,” you say.
“Quite right,” Jake pants agreeably. “Let's just go to bed.”
You manage to locate the sleeping bag and roll yourselves inside it with a minimum of pushing and shoving. You're all elbows and angles, but he's all cushioning muscle, and though you think you must be poking him in twenty places he doesn't complain at all, just squirms in beside you with a contented sigh.
You can't believe your plan is actually working. Your heart is going at a hundred miles an hour, and you can feel your face growing hot as you stare at the ceiling of your tent, listening to Jake's breaths slow and deepen next to your ear. About ten minutes later he throws an arm around you and you think you might actually die.
--
When he wakes up in the morning and sees you blearily staring at him, he laughs. “I didn't peg you for an early riser!” he says. “Up and at 'em at the crack of dawn, aren't you?”
You try to stifle a yawn. “Yeah,” you mumble. “Definitely.”
“Well, we've a long day ahead of us,” he says, leaping from the sleeping bag to stretch luxuriously. You watch the way his muscles bunch and ripple under his skin and think about how his body was pressed against you all last night, and—
“Dirk,” Jake says, peering at you with concern, “are you catching a cold? You're awfully flushed.”
“No,” you squeak. “I'm totally fine.”
--
After three days of Jake-inflicted sleeplessness, you manage to scrape enough materials together to alchemize another sleeping bag. It was a tough sacrifice, but sometimes you just have to take one for the team.
He's taken to holding your hand instead, though, and even when you know it's coming you can't stop your heart from racing.
You can already tell that this is going to be the worst week of your life. (It's also going to be the best.)