#anyWYA i hope you enjoyed it even tho it probably wasn't what you expected and thank you for the prompt omg!!!!!

[playedwright]

For the fic ask-- 17 for Shitty and Lardo (because I'm madly in love with both of them rn) or 19 or 25 for Nurseydex? (25 is just so.... them) Only if any of them strike your fancy of course!

17. “I can’t sleep, can I stay here?”

i chose to do shardo bc i’ve never written them before and i love a challenge!! thank you for the promptalso this turned out super melancholy and kind of sad? but like…. i like it

*

She finds Shitty sitting in the Reading Room, and it feels kind of inevitable that they both end up here as often as they do.

Lardo maneuvers herself quietly through the window. He doesn’t look up as she takes a seat next to him and draws her knees to her chest. There’s a half-smoked joint dangling between his fingers, but it looks like he hasn’t taken a pull in a while.

“Didn’t know you were still here,” Shitty murmurs. It’s rare, Lardo knows, this quiet side of him. Something only she is really privy too. Sometimes the weight of it feels suffocating; tonight, though, she just feels lucky. He offers her his joint and she takes it with a terse nod.

“I can’t sleep,” she says, like she’s commenting on the weather, like it’s not a heavy burden that feels sharp in her throat as she tries to say it out loud. She hasn’t been able to sleep in days. Her voice is too timid, not her own, when she asks, “Can I stay here?”

Lardo doesn’t wait for the answer, bringing the joint to her lips and breathing it in slowly. It might help her sleep, she thinks almost desperately. Shitty exhales as she does; he hasn’t really looked at her, she realizes, since she came out here and joined him.

“Course you can, brah,” he tells her. “Always an open invitation.”

Lardo takes another drag before passing the joint back to Shitty. He still doesn’t look at her as he takes it from in between her fingers. His eyes close as he takes a pull for himself. “If it helps,” he mutters, “I can’t sleep, either.”

“I wouldn’t describe that as helpful, no,” Lardo deadpans. Shitty’s laugh is strangled.

“I’m scared as all holy fuck, dude.”

Lardo closes her eyes. She drops her head to his shoulder. In what feels like almost no time at all, he’ll be gone. She’ll help him put a graduation cap on his head and he’ll inevitably ask her for help with tying his tie, and then she’ll send him across a stage to receive a diploma and wave goodbye as he crosses over to Harvard and doesn’t look back. She’s terrified, and she can’t say it out loud. She can’t admit it. She can’t admit a lot of things, if she’s being honest, and soon Shitty will be gone and she’ll never get the chance to.

“If it helps,” she parrots. “I’m scared as all holy fuck, too.”

Don’t leave me, she wants to say. You’re the first real thing I discovered here and nothing will be the same without you.

Shitty presses a kiss to the top of her head. They’re both exhausted, tired of running circles around each other and playing a game of will-they-won’t-they. There are appearances to upkeep and there are standards to be met; there are expectations on both sides of their families that neither of them think they can uphold. There is the undeniable reality that he’s going to Boston and she’s going to be stuck here, and there’s the looming realization that she has no fucking clue what she’s going to do this time next year when she’s standing in the same place she is.

She wants to follow him to Boston. She’s too terrified to admit it out loud.

“Can we go to bed?” she asks, instead of the thousands of other questions that whirl through her mind. Perhaps there isn’t an easy solution for them and perhaps there will be even more months of uncertainty. Perhaps she was too hard on herself when she came to Samwell with set expectations, and maybe it’s even too late to change those. But there are certain things that she can do now; she can lie with him on his bed, she can tangle her legs with his, she can listen to his heartbeat until she’s certain that both of their hearts are beating in sync. She can wake up early as she always does and slip out before even Jack wakes up, and she can wait in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a plate of cold breakfast before Shitty joins her. She can watch him stumble in, bleary-eyed and, as always, half-naked, and she can wish desperately that he’d cross the room and press a gentle kiss to her mouth before going to fill a cup of coffee for himself.

There are certain things she can do, and there are things she will stop herself from doing tomorrow, and somehow in between the mess of all of it, she will tell herself that it’s going to be okay.

Shitty stands and extends a hand to her to pull her to her feet. His fingers hesitate against hers and she knows he wants to hold on longer, too. They haven’t smoked all that much, but they can blame this on it in the morning. Lardo stretches up on her tiptoes and gently presses her mouth to his. It’s not enough, not by a long shot.

His heartbeat does line up with hers, when she curls against his chest and tries her best to fall asleep. She knows he feels the same way she does. She closes her eyes and hopes that one day it will be enough.