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pigeonwit · 9 months

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ok but like jack who loveeeess when hes under the weight of something, he sleeps with like four hundred stuffed animals weighted blankets are his jam, etc etc, and then davey comes along and just flat out sleeps on top of him 24/7. its a win for both of them. (sorry if this isn’t coherent im literally asleep)

(sneep i dont know if you're referencing the prompts list at all or if it was just deeply important to you that i know this but i'm writing about it anyways)

It's hard for Jack to keep his feet on the ground sometimes.

He can't quite put it into words. He's not really a words guy. It took him about a year and a half post-American-public-school-system to realize that he was actually smart enough to read books, let alone echo them. Colours, that's where Jack's mind lives. A big swirling sea of shapes and colours. Sometimes it's calm; the gentle blue strokes of a calm, well-rested morning; the occasional pops and starbursts of the New York streets - a baby babbling at their parents, a dog yipping excitedly, a song that's been stuck in Jack's head drifting out of the cracked window of a passing car - all painted in pretty pinks and bright, sunny yellows. He's nowhere near whimsical or delusional enough for the happy-go-lucky "where dreams are made of" view of NYC, the one that's been washed over in watery-pink with Gershwin plunking in the background - but he's not nihilistic enough to pretend it's nothing more than a tar-pit. There's plenty to love, to be inspired over, to leave happy little brushstrokes on his skin.

But sometimes - sometimes - he gets too swept up in it. All the movement, all the noise, all of it, it picks him up by the scruff and throws him, spins him around and kicks him right between the ribs, until he's drifting listlessly along the sidewalk like a scrap of paper, small and sensitive, marked by every fume of exhaust and drop of gutter-water.

It's the difference between being painted and being stained. That's the only way Jack can describe it. Paint, colours, it has a purpose to it. It presses into his skin and keeps him grounded to reality. A stain is just... Nothing. A tear, a black hole of graphite in his chest, sucking up all his being until there's nothing left.

He needs solidity, when he gets like this. He needs to be held in place until all that old, wasted paper is rubbed away, and he can grow into himself again, fresh and newly remade.

It starts with a pillow. His first night at Medda's - she gave him two instead of just one. He'd no idea what to do with it. He only needed one or else his head felt too high, and he didn't want to just chuck it on the floor or stuff it in his closet, Miss Medda might think he was rude, and he liked Miss Medda, he didn't want her to think he was a bad kid, she might get angry, might give him back... And then he was panting, trembling with every inch, tears stinging at his eyes as he tried to press his nails into his palm, hold himself together, but nothing was working, nothing was firm enough-

It was humiliating - as humiliating as everything else is for an eleven year old, but still, humiliating - to go to sleep that night, clutching a pillow to his chest as he squeezed with all his little might. But it pressed his lungs into the mattress, forced the air in and out, and the foam held tight against his sharp, scrabbling hands, not breaking, not pushing him away... It was just enough.

He almost would've been content with just that, hugging a pillow every now and then - but Medda and Siôn had this whole thing about 'making Jack understand his worth as a person', the nerve, and suddenly he was being given all he needed and more. A plushie, then two, then five. A throw pillow with Val Kilmer's face on it, because Siôn ("Just fucking call me Crutchie, dude, I won't break-") was just as much a cretin when he was a teenager than he is now. A weighted blanket for his birthday that redefined Jack's understanding of the word comfort.

And that could've been enough. It all could've been enough. Fuck, just a hug every couple of days would've been enough. It was certainly more than he'd earned.

He'd offhandedly said something along those lines to Davey - or "Library Guy" as he'd been referred to at the time, since Jack had only really met him three times in two weeks - who had calmly raised a finger, taken a long swig of his coffee, slammed his travel mug (reusable, of course, because Davey is the world's most irritatingly perfect saint) on his desk and given Jack a seventeen minute speech about humanity's relationship with validation through the lens of a capitalistic society - and all of a sudden, Jack wanted everything. Coffee. Dinner. Pet-names, hand-holding, lazy Sundays, teasing each other when they woke up and talking about bullshit until they fell asleep. And Davey gave him all of it without a second glance.

Jack was hesitant to ask, at first. They'd fallen asleep on the couch - they were supposed to be studying, but Davey had found out Jack had never watched any of the Lord of The Rings movies and had spent the entire evening pausing every five minutes to eagerly share his Silmarillion trivia (Jack still hasn't gotten him to admit it yet, but he's pretty sure he can pinpoint Davey falling in love with him to the moment Jack asked why Viggo Mortensen kicking a helmet was so funny to him) - and they'd inevitably fallen asleep on top of each other, with Jack flat on his back and Davey splayed over him like the world's sweetest, sleepiest octopus.

("You really know how to make a guy feel hot, y'know that?"

"Bold of you to assume octopuses are not hot. Tentacle porn exists for a reason, Dave."

"See, I want to be mad at you for bringing up tentacle porn at brunch, but I'm more offended that you called them octopuses and not octopi.")

It was nice, having Davey over him - which, yes, got him some eyebrow waggles when he first admitted it, but it really wasn't like that. It was the weight of it, the reassurance of Davey's warmth encompassing his own, knowing that Davey was here, and he was here, pressed down firmly to the ground and not going anywhere. The sensation of it - the firmness on his chest that makes him feel every breath and every beat of his pulse, that tells him he's here and he's fine - it's like his whole brain's been washed clean.

"Pressure stimming," is the word Davey uses about two months later, a short while after Jack had finally realized that they were actually, exclusively, undeniably boyfriends and not just 'friends who are kind of maybe dating if Davey wants that maybe'. He'd walked into his bedroom in his and Crutchie's apartment to find Davey already there, lying face down on the bed - and Jack might've left it be, because he's had plenty of days where he just needs to lie face-down for a whole hour, but Davey telling him that he physically couldn't get off the bed was the thing that sent him panicking.

"It's not a big deal..." Davey's forefinger flicks up-and-down, up-and-down against one of Jack's many pillows as he speaks, the way he does when he has just slightly too much nervous energy. "It's just something I need sometimes. The way my energy is, it's like everything I do starts weighing down on me - and sometimes I can just let that weight off every now and then, and I'm fine - but sometimes I just... Need something. To support me."

Jack nods slowly, thinking of pillows and plushies and weighted blankets, and hovers his hand over the small of Davey's back.

"You need something, like... On top?" He cringes, because there's no way for that to not sound like an innuendo, but Davey only snorts into the comforter and shakes his head against the soft fabric.

"You're perfect," he smiles, so earnest that it makes Jack's chest squeeze, "but - no. I don't really like that. Feels like I'm being restrained."

Jack frowns, adds that to the little drawer in his brain marked Davey - a drawer that is becoming so cluttered and full of tiny details and special memories that it's almost overflowing - and bites his lip.

"I could, um..." Slowly, like Jack might spook him, he lowers himself onto the the bed next to him, raising his brows in question. "If you want?"

Davey stares at him for a moment - and then it's as if all the tension in his body just bleeds out of him, as he makes wanton little grabby-hands in Jack's direction. Jack laughs quietly, grabs him gently by the shoulders and pulls, rolling them until he's flat on his back and Davey's spreadeagled on top of him - and they both sigh from somewhere deep in their bones as they lean and are leaned upon, pressing and being pressed against each other, two solid weights supporting each other in place.

"I like this," Jack murmurs into Davey's hair as they rest. Davey makes a quiet chuffing sound into his clavicle and wriggles slightly, like a cat kneading a pillow, pressing them both impossibly closer as he settles.

"Oh, yeah?" He says quietly. "You like having a big octopus on top of you?"

"My exact words were sweetest and sleepiest octopus." Jack teases, tugging lightly on one of Davey's curls. "C'mon, English Major, those're some important words, there."

"You're so weird," Davey mumbles, but Jack can feel his smile pressing through his shirt, all the way to his skin, through the muscle, until it prints like ink on his breastbone. It holds him there, keeps him perfectly still and secure - and Jack breathes like he's tasting the air for the first time.

"I love you," he says quietly, because it's the only way he can even think to put what he's feeling into words. Davey would know better than him on that. He could write sonnets about this, pages and pages of prose about how it feels just to hold someone - but Jack's not a words guy. Give him a few hours with a canvas, and maybe he can get down a fraction of what he's feeling now, the barest impression of the thousands upon thousands of colours dancing inside his head like grass in the wind. But for now, he'll just say "I love you", and hope that it's enough.

He can feel Davey's throat flex against his sternum, can feel the way his body tenses, then ebbs, like the pull of the tide.

"I love you, too," he whispers.

It's so much more than enough.

#this got SO fucking sappy towards the end #but yknow. love is stored in the stimming!#i have a few more asks queued up but they'll have to wait until after tomorrow cause. work.#alas we are all victims of capitalism #newsies #uksies #javid #javey #jack kelly #davey jacobs #david jacobs #pigeon scribbles #sneepsnoopboopideeboop

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