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The alarm went off, infuriatingly just out of reach, and Armin woke up with a groan. It was dark inside the bedroom, darker than usual thanks to the new black curtains, which made it harder to wake up. But his alarm was an insistent noise that kept him awake, even as he burrowed against the warmth along his side and tried to ignore it.
Eventually he remembered the test scheduled later that day, which was the reason he couldn’t just roll over and let the alarm cycle through its ridiculously annoying beeping, and so he was forced to sit up. It was freezing outside the little bubble of warmth they had built, making him wish he had a shirt on. He also wished he could have slept on the outside edge of the bed, but he figured since he had been the one to doze off first he sort of lost out on picking the side. It wasn’t awful, it was just that it was kind of hard to climb over the clingy bastard hogging the covers on, like, 5% brain power.
The ground was no less hard than it had been the day before, but it still sucked to land on it, hitting hands-elbows-shoulder into the ground as he almost managed to roll onto his back. He groaned, curling into his side, and the lovable idiot safe within the covers mumbled somewhere above him.
“Jerk,” Armin grumbled, smiling a little bit because the game controller was a few inches from his nose, which meant that it must have fallen out of the other’s hand sometime when he fell asleep. He crawled carefully over the game controller, struggling his way into the first clean-smelling sweatshirt he came across on the ground. The first pair of pants he pulled on weren’t his, too big and long, and he kicked them off just as his alarm gave up entirely and finally went silent.
“We need clapper lights,” Armin muttered to himself as he fished around in the dark on the bedroom floor for a pair of pants that would fit. He found the pair he wore the day before somewhere half under the bed, not caring that they had a coffee stain on the left thigh. Socks were going to need his phone light to find, he already knew that, but once he had most of his skin covered he figured he could brave standing up to retrieve it from across the room.
He ended up pulling on another sweater before he made it all the way across the room. He also tripped over an empty plastic soda bottle, nearly braining himself on the dresser where the phone actually was.
“Please, for the love of God,” Armin begged the person in the bed quietly. “Clean your room.”
They didn’t respond, still completely asleep and out of view, but Armin didn’t mind. Sometimes he liked being able to hold one sided conversations with him. Not because he didn’t like to hear his boyfriend’s answers or anything, but because it was just-
If Jean was asleep then there was no pressure in the words meaning something. They were just words, sounds strung together by a trained tongue, which were strung together by his brain, which were-
“Fuck, don’t clean your room,” Armin said, numb fingers curling around his phone. He leaned against the dresser, grinning a little stupidly down at the dark floor. “I love you, messy room and all, you idiot.”
Mushy feeling moment over, Armin found his socks and stumbled into the bathroom, phone in one hand and probably-clean socks in the other. He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, brushed his hair, considered the word brush and the action it entailed in a bemused sleepy fashion before slumping in exhaustion against the sink. When he finally stumbled back out, socks on his feet and phone in his pocket, he figured he was pretty much ready for the day.
He sat down on the edge of the bed, butt pressing against Jean’s spine, so that he could put on his shoes without falling. The crawling overtop him hadn’t seemed to bother his boyfriend at all, but at the shift in weight as Armin sat down made Jean groaned, long and distressed, garbling out something akin to Armin’s name as he twisted around.
“No,” Jean warbled, curling his arms around Armin’s middle, hugging him close. “No, don’t do it, Armin.”
Armin sighed. Sleepy Jean never made much sense, but he was very cute like this.
“I gotta,” Armin said, rubbing his eyes with his wrist. Tying shoes was too difficult, so he just shoved his toes in them and wriggled his heel until his foot was inside the shoe like it wasn’t supposed to be. Jean clung to him the entire time, rubbing his face back and forth along Armin’s lower back. It was a lot like having a very large, very affectionate cat, Armin mused, reaching back to comb his hands through Jean’s hair and tug himself carefully free of the grip.
“But if you leave, I’ll miss you,” Jean said, solemn and garbled with chapped, sleep heavy lips. Armin felt his chest constrict with fondness as the sentiment behind the words and he slid from the edge of the bed so that he could kneel beside it, hands cradling Jean’s face and holding him steady as unfocused eyes blinked up at him.
“And I’ll miss you too,” Armin promised, leaning forward to press a chaste kiss against unresponsive lips. “But I’ve got a test. I’ll be back afterward, okay?”
Jean blinked at him for a few seconds before bopping his head in agreement, muttering back a small, “okay,” in such a way Armin wanted to crawl back in bed and never leave. He kissed Jean again in the corner of his mouth before drawing back, helping Jean pull the covers back up over his head as he stood up.
“I love you,” Armin whispered again once Jean’s breathing had gone back to being deep and even. He needed to get a move on if he wanted to get to the other side of campus with time enough to review the test material, but for the moment he didn’t care. Jean slept on peacefully, completely unaware of his words.
But that was okay, Armin figured. It just gave him another chance to tell him once Jean woke up.