Work Text:
“Hey, Jon.”
You are so tired. The lines of the statement blur. You frown harder, force yourself to concentrate.
“Jon.”
You look up, slowly. He is there, blurred too: in the doorway, a blotchy, unrecognisable figure in the dim light of the table lamp.
“Hey, Martin,” you say, try to say. Your voice is scratchy. The cup of tea has sat, untouched, the whole evening on the table, long cold. “H-Hey.”
“Heya.”
Martin crystallises more after you push the heels of your hands aggressively against your eyes.
There is a pause—Martin is clearly hesitating—and then he says, “Jon, you should go home. It’s after midnight.”
You huff a faint laugh. “Hardly any use now, is it.” Which is true. Work starts in another eight hours. Hardly worth it to go home.
“I guess,” Martin says. “Go home.”
“Or what?” You can’t help the mocking tone. You can’t help it. There’s something about him that turns you into your worst self. You’re not exactly proud of it, and you don't exactly understand why, but it is what it is.
Martin heaves a deep, frustrated sigh. He spreads his hands and shrugs. “Or I’ll make you?”
“You’ll make me.”
“Sure. Remember when you had that cold? You weigh nothing. Wanna test it out?”
Your head jerks back at that. This side of Martin, just the littlest bit brash, is so new. Ever since he’s lived here, human parts have added to the image of him as incompetent, painfully clumsy archival assistant—they’re the pieces of him you witness in the break room, when you stand around the side of the door and don’t go inside and hear them talk and laugh together. (If you go inside, that stops. You’re their boss: you’re also yourself. You know how this goes, so you don’t even try.) (Distance is safer, anyway.) He’s bratty: you would even say he is bitchy, if that weren’t unprofessional. (What is professional any longer about all this?) When you stand there, around that corner, all but eavesdropping, you smile. You have no goddamn idea why, but it makes you smile to hear him snark back at Tim.
You push that thought away and put on what you hope is a sneer.
“I don’t have a cold now,” you say. “Weren’t you sleeping anyway? Just go.”
“Nnnnope.” He actually steps further into the room, into your territory, like he’s sure of himself. He steps lightly. In this quiet hour, it’s one of the first times you notice just how lightly he walks. “You go, then I go.”
“For God’s sake, Martin,” you snap, affronted, rising a little from your seat. “You’re not my handler. Go back to sleep.”
“Well, I would, if I could,” Martin snaps right back, a little condescendingly, with a glower on his face. “But I can’t. Because you’re still here.”
“That’s—that’s stupid. That doesn’t make sense. So what?”
“It makes sense: I don’t make the rules. Up, Jon, home you go.”
This is ridiculous. This is just like the thing with the cold—he’d fairly bowled you over, he’d been so pushy, like he really knew better. Which is stupid. Because he doesn’t, obviously. Martin doesn’t know things better than you.
He’s just Martin.
“I—I—stop being stupid, Martin.” Your mouth feels drier than before, a little. You stand properly to oppose him, square your shoulders and set the scowl on your face. A stray curl of hair falls into your eyes. You angrily push it away. “This is entirely unprofessional, I hope you know that.”
Martin actually chuckles at that and gestures down at himself (at his off-white, cheap t-shirt, and the checked sleeping bottoms). “I’m sleeping in a cot in the storage room at work,” he says plainly like he’s spelling it out for a child. “We passed that mark a while ago.”
God, nocturnal Martin is a nightmare: is he always such a smart arse? It makes your jaw twitch, your palms tingle. You curl your hands into fists.
“I don’t care.”
“Well, good for you.” A pause. “Come on.”
“No.”
“Yes, Jon. You’ll go home.”
“No, I won’t go home, stop treating me like a child, you have no right—”
“Then stop acting like a child, Christ, Jon!” Martin barks. “You’re not a machine. You need sleep! If you want to function tomorrow, and if you want me to function tomorrow, bloody go home!”
“What I do or don’t do doesn’t have anything to do with y—”
“God, it’s like explaining a toddler the concept of human interaction, sometimes,” Martin mutters, endlessly exasperated. He claps his hands together, then takes a couple decisive, fast steps towards you. “Right. As fun as this has been, I’m done.”
You are beyond appalled. “Good,” you snap, “because I am too. Goodbye.”
“Yeah, bye, Jon.”
And before you know it, he has draped your jacket from the guest chair over his elbow and taken your shoulders from behind to frog-march you towards the door.
“Martin!” It is possible that your voice reaches a higher decibel. “Martin, what are you—”
“Thought you knew?” Martin says, faux cheerfully, somewhere from behind, a little from above. Because he is bigger than you, in frame and height. “You always know everything.”
“You know I’ll have your hide for this—” You try to struggle, shrug him off, but his fingers just dig deeper. They did that last time, too. This entire scenario is eerily familiar.
“Oh, you can try.” You barely hear his chuckle over the sounds of him forcing you onward, down through the dim-lit hallway. “Actually, I’d like to see that.”
“You can’t—just—Martin—w-where are you going?”
He’s pushing you to the storage room. Once you’re in it, he lets you go and stands before the door as if to barricade the exit. “Hop,” he says. “The cot.”
You turn to stare at him, slack-jawed, disbelieving. Belatedly, you touch the collar of your shirt as if to right it, but you don’t do it. “What,” is all you can say, because seriously, what.
“Your cot, Jon,” Martin groans. He rubs at his eyes. “Please. Please just go to sleep. I know if I make you go home now, it’ll take an hour before you get there, then an hour back to work in the morning, that’s just—that’s just a waste of two hours you could be sleeping. So the cot. Get in. Sleep. Please.”
At last, his voice has taken on a pleading quality. He sounds suddenly exhausted and looks small in the door framing him. The first time that day, your brain just shuts off: it just completely shuts off.
“B-but—I-I mean—where—what—what about you?” you ask, faintly. Your fingers cramp around the hold of your collar. “What—where will you sleep?”
“I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “It’s fine. I don’t care. My chair, maybe.”
This is ridiculous. “Your chair,” you repeat.
“Yeah. Sure. Why not.”
“You can’t sleep in your chair.”
“Oh, says ‘Mr. I sleep over my desk in my chair until my back hurts like I’m an old man all the time’?”
“Martin. You won’t sleep in your chair.”
“Well, there’s nowhere else, and I don’t care, I just want to bloody sleep somewhere now—”
“Take the blankets,” you say, impulsively. “And—and the pillows. Sleep—if—if you want me to use the cot, then take the blankets and the pillows and sleep on the floor, or—or something. Or, or I can take them and the floor and you use the cot, and you can just—just, maybe use our jackets as pillows, or…”
He looks at you looking at him, and this whole thing is just bloody ridiculous, stupid, unprofessional, all of it. You don’t want him to sleep on the floor: it’s bad enough he’s sleeping in the cot at all. It’s your fault to begin with that he does. Cold dread creeps up your back, sits nauseous in your throat. You knew he would do this. You knew he would barrel in if he saw you were awake, you knew he’d coddle you. He’s Martin: it’s what he does. Teas, sandwiches, all those lunches he drags you to; the time he bullied you to go home until you’d fully recovered from that damn cold—more and more, these gestures—the act of caring; a deep-seated, inevitable kindness—crystallise into integral parts of the person behind it.
You knew he would do it. You knew he would put his large hands on your shoulders and march you away from your desk. You knew he would be here, caring, forcibly, because God knows you don’t.
(You’d hoped he would do it. Didn’t you?)
“I—take the cot,” you say, voice rough, just a bit too raw. “Martin.”
He deflates like a balloon, with a soft, barely audible sigh. It’s too vulnerable. All this has no business being so vulnerable. It makes your skin prickle, all over. To take the edge off, you dig your nails into the side of your neck until it hurts.
“Just take the cot, Jon,” he says, tiredly, so tiredly. He waves at the cot half-heartedly. “I’ll take the blankets and the pillows, fine, I don’t care. Whatever. Just take the cot.”
“Yeah, all—all right.” You jerk your head in a nod. “I’ll take the cot.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
Settling down to sleep with your employee, good acquaintance, sometimes friend in a storage room with only your bundled up jacket as pillow and him without a mattress is a very weird ordeal indeed. It’s not the top five, but it is weird. You don’t look at each other as you do. When you’ve laid down, your cheek bunched from pressing onto your jacket, you watch the broad outline of him down on the floor before you, huddled tight.
It’s very silent. Your heart is hammering. It’s been years you slept with someone else in the same room. But this is Martin: he’s safe. Martin is safe.
You breathe slowly, deeply, to these words, until your heart rate has settled a little. Your body grows heavy, heavier, like your eyelids. Martin was right. Of course he was right. You are drained beyond belief.
“Damnit!” he suddenly whispers, jerks upright, which startles you into a gasp. He glances at you over his shoulder (his shirt has slipped a little: a sliver of skin—), an apology over his expressive, exhausted features. His eyes are bleary beneath his tousled, greasy fringe. “Oh—fuck—sorry, Jon, just—the lights—we forgot them. I’ll be right back—”
Heavy-eyed, you watch him stumble from the room. In a daze, you listen to the far-away sounds of his steps, the moment of silence, then the steps growing ever so slightly louder as he makes his way back. It’s like a dream, all hazy, washed out. A safe, unreal dream. Your eyes are narrow slits by the time he’s back in the room. You hear his socked feet on the cheap linoleum. You hear his heavy, exhausted breathing from the way he hurried.
Your eyes close, before he even reaches his make-shift bed on the floor.
You are not sleeping yet. You’re almost there, though. You are aware of his presence, suddenly silent, unmoving, right there before you.
He is big, the little, paranoid voice in the back of your head whispers suddenly. Martin is still just standing there watching you. You are so aware of people when they watch you nowadays. He is tall, he is big, he could overpower you in a second. There’s no one here but the two of you.
He is watching you. You are still so paranoid.
After a moment, there’s a little huff from Martin: you tense, just slightly, involuntarily. The light dims further—he must have shifted the torch—and then there is a rustling sound, and then, another moment later, you sense him coming nearer—
and then he drapes fabric over you—what can only be his jacket. There’s nothing else left in the room. He doesn’t exactly touch you: he settles the jacket over you, ever so cautiously, ever so gently. The only time he touches you is when his fingers brush the side of your neck, when he makes sure his jacket covers your neck.
The voice in the back of your head dies. His fingertips brush your skin: your body relaxes. It just relaxes. It just relaxes, your whole body, just like that.
“Git,” you hear him, faintly, mumble. “Sleep well.”
You sleep.
You sleep well.
You sleep peacefully.