#yes i am drafting this as a method of procrastinating studying for my stats exam

[clumsyclifford]

For the writers prompt! 16 with jalex please and thank you, I love your work!

damn yall are really obsessed with sleepy jalex huh? well i can’t blame you because i am too <3 thank YOU for sending this in i liked writing it

read on ao3

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There's a tap at Alex's window. Alex ignores it. Sometimes branches sweep down over the house on particularly stormy nights, and sometimes there are birds, and there's always the possibility that he's imagined it.

The tap comes again. Alex sighs. He knows where the sound is coming from, and it's not like he'd been falling asleep to begin with, so maybe this will help in some way. 

Slowly he kicks away his covers, drags himself out of bed, and opens the window.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," Jack whispers. "Did I wake you?"

"Not really." Alex shrugs. "It's okay. I couldn't sleep anyway. What's up?"

Jack peers into Alex's room, which looks strange for how empty it is. So much of it is in suitcases or boxes, ready to be packed into the car tomorrow and driven off to college. The only thing in Alex's room that isn't quite ready to leave is Alex.

"You wanna sit out here with me?" Jack asks. He's on the roof, a place Alex's parents have repeatedly instructed them both not to climb on. Alex thinks Jack only really does this for the drama of breaking the rule, but he has to admit there is something unique about sitting on the rooftop. Especially doing so with Jack. 

"Yeah," Alex says, because why not. Sleep had been a failed venture, and Jack is a familiar presence. In the strangeness of Alex's room right now, he'll take all the familiarity he can get.

Jack shuffles away so that Alex can slide the window open wide enough to climb through, trying to tread as lightly as he can. It's not that he thinks the roof will cave under them, necessarily, but it's definitely an ever-present possibility of which Alex is hyper-aware. Four years ago, when Jack first climbed up the tree to the roof outside Alex's bedroom window and knocked like some Juliet-esque forbidden lover, they'd both been a lot smaller. As they've grown up — and gotten more freedom — they've taken up residence less and less on this roof.

It hasn't changed at all, though. Maybe it's a little leafier now. Alex brushes away some leaves and stretches his legs out in front of him, and at his left, Jack does the same.

"So I guess you couldn't sleep either?" Alex finally says.

Jack breathes a laugh. "Ya think?" He shrugs. "Yeah. I don't know. I've been excited to go to college this whole time, but now that we're going it feels like…"

"Yeah," Alex murmurs.

"Yeah. I don't think I'm scared, you know? But, I don't know, maybe. It's all just so weird."

"Yeah, who'd have thought we'd ever make it this far?" Alex deadpans. "I thought for sure we'd be high school dropouts."

"I seriously didn't think they would let me graduate," Jack says. 

"Nobody thought they would let you graduate. I'm still in shock."

"Just waiting for the call. 'Hello, Jack Bearcat?'" Alex laughs. Four years at their high school and somehow their principal had never managed to correctly pronounce Jack's last name. "'Yeah, we need to revoke your diploma. You actually don't get to graduate because you skipped so many classes and we hate you.'"

"It's too late," Alex giggles. "They already let you. No take-backsies."

"No take-backsies," Jack repeats, folding his hands together between his legs. "Yeah."

They fall silent, and for a moment Alex doesn't break it. 

Through the open window into his room, Alex can see a bare stretch of wall where there used to be a blink-182 poster. That poster is now folded up and hidden somewhere in the depths of one of the myriad boxes stacked upon Alex's floor. When he gets to college, he'll put it up in his dorm, and hopefully it'll feel more like home. But when he comes back for holidays and breaks, his room won't have the poster. The room where he grew up — really grew up, not from a baby to a boy but from a boy to a man, or whatever it is they’re calling him now — won't have Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge, and Travis Barker's judgmental gazes watching over it anymore, and neither will Alex as long as he's here. 

Packing for college is just deciding how much of home you want to take with you, and how much you want to leave to come back to in the summer. Alex still isn't sure if he's one of the things he wants to leave or take with.

"At least we'll be close," Alex finally says. His voice is a little rough, but it doesn't get better when he swallows. He clears his throat. "Right? An hour, that's not far."

"You won't be able to escape me," Jack says. "I'll be at your dorm every weekend, like it or not."

"I'm counting on it," says Alex. "I’m really gonna miss you, y’know?”

Jack exhales. “I’m really gonna miss you too.” He glances around them. “I’m really gonna miss this. I don’t know what I’ll do when I can’t just walk five minutes and be at your house. Knock on your window. How am I supposed to be your annoying best friend if I can’t wake you up in the middle of the night and make you sit on the roof with me?”

“Hey, you’ll always be my annoying best friend,” Alex says, linking his left arm in Jack’s right. He leans his head carefully on Jack’s shoulder, and Jack slump down a bit so it’s more comfortable for both of them. “And I’ll sit on any roof with you. Time and place, I’ll be there.”

Jack hums. “But I don’t want to sit on any roof,” he mumbles. “I like this one.”

A dizzying feeling swoops through Alex’s stomach. He closes his eyes. “Yeah, me too.”

They’re quiet again, and so is the world. It, like Alex, might be holding its breath, waiting for some kind of resolution, some happy ending to this moment. Where Jack and Alex realize that they would rather stay together no matter the cost, and one of them decides to transfer schools; some kind of sweeping rom-com finale that has the audience in tears. But Alex knows it won’t come. Life isn’t a romantic comedy. Life is just life, and they’re both forging paths. Setting down each stone right before they take the next step across it, maybe, but forging paths nonetheless. 

They’re not starkly different, but they’re not the same. As much as the two of them had dreamt of being together forever, pointing at adjacent unclaimed clusters of stars in the sky with bright, optimistic fifteen-year-old eyes and calling them the Jack and Alex constellations, Alex had never really thought they’d end up in the same place. 

That might be part of the magic, though. If Alex is searching for a silver lining, he can find one in this: however far apart he and Jack drift on the map, they’ll always come back to each other. It’s only an hour now, but Alex knows the way that life can grab you by the collar and whisk you away to another state, another country, another continent, how forcefully it can shake away all the strings you try to attach to yourself to keep you from being adrift in the world. He’d been too young after his first move; now he knows better. It’s not a string this time so much as an anchor, locked around Jack’s heart, braced against his rib cage, and Alex knows with almost unyielding certainty that wherever he goes, or wherever Jack goes, they’ll always find each other. 

“Hey,” Alex says, cracking the silence down the middle. “Can I give you something to bring to college?”

“Sure,” Jack says.

Alex pats his thigh. “Okay. Give me a minute to find it.”

He detaches himself from Jack and crawls back through the window into his bedroom. Compared to the breezy nighttime atmosphere, the house is eerily silent. Alex hurries over to the stack of boxes — thankfully he’d had the presence of mind not to seal them shut yet — and begins digging through the first one. He’s pretty sure it’s in this one. He’s pretty sure it’d been one of the last things he’d packed.

After emptying the box of almost all its contents, he hits jackpot. “Aha,” he mutters, carefully tugging it out from under a stack of notebooks. Ignoring the mess of stuff on his floor, he returns to the window and clambers back through it.

“What’s this?” Jack asks.

Alex unfolds the poster and holds it out for Jack to take. “You should take this to school.”

“Your blink poster?” Jack looks up from the poster and through the window, and Alex knows he’s picturing it fastened to the wall across from them. That poster has been up for almost the entire duration of their friendship. “Don’t you want this?” 

“No, I want you to have it,” Alex says. “If you want, I mean.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jack says, glancing back down at the poster. “Man. The things this poster has seen. The things this poster will see. I hope these dudes can keep a secret.”

Alex knows what the poster has seen: the two of them, growing up in tandem, constantly pulled together by something akin to gravity, making a home not out of any room or rooftop but out of each other. 

If all Jack brings of Alex to his dorm is this poster, Alex thinks that’s enough. 

“I should probably go,” Jack says reluctantly, and panic seizes Alex, because however much he can kid himself that he’s ready to say goodbye, he’s never really going to be. They’ll be counting down the hours once it’s tomorrow, but until then they have forever. And Alex isn’t letting go.

“Please don’t,” he says quietly, looping his arm in Jack’s again and shifting closer to him. “Please just stay a little longer.”

Jack breathes out, leans his head on Alex’s shoulder, and nods. “Yeah. I didn’t want to go anyway.”

The breeze ruffles Alex’s hair. He closes his eyes, cheek to the top of Jack’s head, and breathes as quietly as he can, like maybe if they’re still enough the world will mistake them for statues and they’ll never have to leave. Like breathing slowly will delay the inevitable. These things are impossible. Alex knows that.

But Jack makes a lot of things possible, and Alex isn’t willing to give up just yet.