Work Text:
You’d gotten back to the Shack exhausted. Since Ford was confined to his room (thanks to your nagging as well as the kids’), you were alone in the lab. That meant leaving the house at 3 AM if you couldn’t sleep. And that night, you couldn’t! You slipped out of bed before your boyfriend noticed and got to the lab.
You don’t remember how long you’d been in there, the temperature significantly lower than the norm, to keep any and all experiments cool, as well as make Ford comfy and cool enough to not have to take his jumper off. If it was too warm, he’d have to discard it, and he didn’t do that with anyone. Except his brother, maybe you someday…? You hoped, as you always did, that he’d open up. He already had opened up, so much so that it was admirable, and you felt selfish for wanting more. The lab was comforting, and you found yourself relishing in the cold, even if you weren’t too used to it, as well as the lack of noise. Some could say it was distracting, but it was good enough for you - you worked better without music anyway.
Currently, the specimen you were working on was some sort of jellyfish found near the lake. It was bioluminescent, but they didn’t have the proper luciferins or luciferases to do so! Well, you really couldn’t generalise - you only had that one jellyfish to go off of (you named it Tommy). It’s not like he needed to be bioluminescent anyway, he wasn’t in the depths of the ocean or anything, did he just do it for the love of the game? You were confused to say the least, and you couldn’t handle being in the dark, so you spent hours working. Hours researching in that isolating lab, hours scanning the laptop and finding nothing.
Even the experiments you had conducted on Tommy (to be fair, you hadn’t done much, and you couldn’t really bring yourself to, either, you’d already named him and oh god did this constitute as animal cruelty??) had come up empty. This was all so confusing. Confusing and tiring. You hadn’t had a wink of sleep in the last two or three days. You couldn’t even remember. The room was spinning...
When you got home, shutting the door quietly behind you, as the kids were most likely asleep, it took all your strength to not collapse then and there. Nonetheless, you trudged up the stairs, determined to at least reach your room. You hadn’t eaten the whole day, neither did you have any appetite, too focused on results, on the cold, on Tommy. The “no appetite” excuse could only fool yourself so much until you started getting dizzy, vision swimming. Still, you conquered every stair, though it seemed like they’d been doubled.
When you got to your room, you saw double Ford. A miracle or a burden? Good question, best left unanswered.
You collapsed on the bed right then and there, and you could practically feel how his face crumpled up in concern, how his brows furrowed. He gently sat you up, big warm hands on cold shoulders.
“Are you feeling alright?”
“Mmmmmmfffffr.” was the response.
However concerned he was, that earned a deep chuckle from him. He brushed your hair from your shoulders to the front and decided to give you a massage, sitting beside you. Warm, calloused, six-fingered hands probably made for piano digging deep into any knots you had, making you melt like putty in your boyfriends hands.
Fucking finally.
You didn’t know how long you’d been inadvertently craving this, but you had. Your eyes started to close, and, once he had taken care of all the knots, he drew you in to sit between his legs, carefully laying down and dragging you to do the same, cradling your head so it’d lay on your chest.
His fingers combed through your hair, all whilst humming a soothing lullaby. Finding yourself being no better than a sleepy baby, you fell asleep in his arms.
The last thing you heard was:
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”