Work Text:
You frown at your laptop's bright screen, scanning over the words of the academic paper. You only look away to glance down into the cup of noodles. You gather a bite on your chopsticks, eat it, and drop the sticks into the cup to set it beside you. Hands now free, you open up another tab and begin typing the info you need.
The cup is picked up. Zayne takes up the chopsticks and looks away from his own work to dig through the cup. He pushes aside the carrot bits and picks out his own bite.
This has become commonplace, especially as the semester goes on and the work gets harder. All-nighters were spent on your dorm's couch, side by side on the bed, on the floor, or at the table. You'd gather a bunch of snacks, quick meals and drinks, and hunker in for the foreseeable future.
You're mid-sentence when an alarm goes off on Zayne's phone. With a pavlovian response, you stop typing and close your laptop. Tonight, you sit on your couch, feet up on the coffee table. The back comes up to your neck, allowing you the perfect opportunity to tilt your head back and stretch your arms overhead.
Zayne stops the alarm and closes his laptop. "Fifteen minutes." He takes another bite.
You sigh. After working for a solid hour, it does not feel like enough time to rest. What you both really need is one night where you get 6-8 hours of sleep, each. However, with finals just on the horizon, that feels like a dream that won't be coming true anytime soon.
You hold out a hand. He drops the chopsticks back into the cup and passes it over. You don't comment on his picky eating. Besides, the vegetables in this are sub par; you don't really want to be eating them either.
There's not much left. You finish it off and set the empty cup on the table. Zayne massages the tension in his hands. "How much do you have left?" he asks.
You rub at your eyes. They're raw with exhaustion, your vision beginning to blur despite how much you try to focus. "Too much," you mutter. "What about you?"
He hums, holding his laptop as he stretches his long legs out under the coffee table. "Too much," he parrots, though he doesn't say it with the same overwhelm as you. He's always been better at all-nighters, working with the utmost efficiency to get it all done. He's top of the class for a reason. Not to mention he’s already grades ahead of you, despite you both having started freshman year together. How you became friends in the first place was mere chance.
In one of your lecture classes, you both sat next to each other. You both stayed respectfully on your sides of the table, didn't speak to each other, diligently took your notes and did your work.
Then, weeks in, you'd overslept and were running late. The embarrassment of slinking in mid-lecture was bad, but when you realized you forgot your stuff for the class, you wanted to be swallowed up by the floor.
Zayne had watched you frantically rummage through your bag. He watched you stop, bow your head as though you were trying to pull yourself together, and quietly set it down under the table. He watched as you sat up and watched the lecture, leg bouncing and hands fiddling together.
You probably were about to cry when he slid over a small candy, wrapped in shiny paper. When you looked over, he was looking ahead. But, you took the candy. It was a small gesture, but the underplayed kindness of it made you feel loads better. When class ended and you thanked him, he offered to send you his notes from the class. You eagerly agreed and offered to make it up to him by buying him lunch.
You've been friends ever since.
You set your laptop aside and draw your legs onto the couch, trying to get comfortable. "'M gonna take a nap," you mumble through a yawn.
You have no idea if Zayne said anything in response. As soon as you were even remotely comfortable, you were asleep. After not sleeping well for the last few days (if not the last few weeks), your body just gave out.
Zayne checks the time on his watch. He can stand to stay awake for a while longer. He gets up, doing his best not to disturb you, and uses the rest of the break time to tidy up the snack wrappers, drink a glass of water, and grab a spare blanket to drape over you. He almost feels bad, knowing that in about 2 minutes, he would need to wake you up again, just so you can get back to your work. While he was ahead of you now, you'd told him about this class before. It's a neurology-specific class, one you'd been excited to register for, before you heard anything about the absurd workload.
He double checks your schedule. The next time you have this class is a couple days from now, and your class tomorrow isn't until the afternoon.
He sits back down, settling his laptop back in his lap, and turns off the alarm set to go off soon. He waits for the last few seconds. Then, he gets to work.
It's maybe 30 minutes later when you shift to get more comfortable and end up leaning against his shoulder. He pauses his typing for a moment, watching you. You look quite peaceful like this. Though, the dark bags under your eyes contradict that peace, describing it instead as utterly necessary with a secondary threat of what might happen if you don't get enough rest right now.
Maybe it's seeing you asleep that makes him yawn. Maybe it's the warmth and weight of you leaning into him that makes him acutely aware of his own exhaustion. Maybe it's just the late (or very early) hour.
Whatever it may be, Zayne's body refuses to keep looking at this screen and working.
He sighs quietly as he closes his laptop and sets it aside, his glasses with them. Fully relenting to the situation, Zayne closes his eyes and slowly falls asleep.
Come morning, your roommate wakes to find you both asleep on the couch. You have your head on Zayne's shoulder, and he has his head resting on yours. Your hands have somehow sought each other out, holding each other in his lap, which has some of the blanket strewn across it. She snaps several pictures, snickering to herself as she gets ready for her classes, already thinking up ways to tease you when you wake up.