Actions

Work Header

(sleep)talk to me, baby

Summary:

Sometimes, Reki talks in his sleep. Sometimes, he talks in his sleep about Langa.

Notes:

A gift for Jes for the Sk8 Secret Santa Exchange! :) Hope you enjoy!

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

I.

The first time it happens, Langa wakes up in the middle of the night to Reki saying his name and nudging him in the side with a bony elbow. 

“Langa,” Reki says, “Langa, I gotta tell you something.” Like they’re both still wide awake, like they didn't go to sleep hours ago.

Langa's not wide awake. They did go to sleep hours ago.

“Langa,” Reki prods him again, and he groans, an attempt at burying his face into his pillow and falling back to sleep foiled by Reki repeating his name over and over until he finally gives in and looks up, trying to muster up the biggest pout he can because Reki’s waking him up in the middle of the night. It’s impossible to keep up the act, though, and a smile tugs at his lips when met with those excited amber eyes, looking back at him through the darkness almost– almost like…

Love, his mind supplies, and suddenly he’s very aware of how close they are, how he can hear and feel Reki's breath with every exhale of his name, how Reki’s pressed firmly against him where the bed dips toward the middle, how, if Reki turned his head just slightly, it would be far too easy to close to remaining distance between them, and god his face is getting warm just thinking about it.

He isn’t really sure when that started. The quickening heartbeat, the butterflies in his stomach, the heat in his cheeks whenever Reki so much as looks his way. But it started at some point, and now he’s always thinking about it—holding Reki’s hand, kissing him, sometimes even thinking that Reki’s looking back at him like he’s thinking about the same things. But Langa’s never quite sure if he’s actually seeing it—the love he thinks he sees in Reki's eyes—or if he’s just imagining it, just seeing his own love reflected back at him.

So, like usual, instead of acting on the urge to just kiss Reki right then and there, he takes a deep breath, shoves his feelings down as far as they’ll go, and speaks as calmly as he possibly can for someone staring down the person they’re in love with while in the same bed– 

“What is it, Reki?” He says, and his breath catches in his throat when Reki leans into him a bit more, almost close enough to–

“Langa, man–” Reki’s eyes drift shut, and he smiles while Langa fidgets nervously beside him. “Aren’t the stars pretty tonight?”

Huh?

“...Stars?” Langa asks, hesitantly, glancing around them in the dark. There are definitely no stars, the shaded window masking any light that might exist in the sky outside.

“C’mon, you know,” Reki continues, like Langa definitely should know. (He still doesn’t.) “Those twinkling things on the ceiling, dude. I know you know what stars are.” 

After stealing another look at the dark ceiling, just to be sure, Langa decides that Reki… yeah, Reki is probably not wide awake either. In fact, he’s probably more asleep than Langa is. Or, you know, just… asleep. An assumption that’s proven right when Reki lets out a couple of loud snores in the midst of describing one of the constellations he’s supposedly seeing, right before his head falls back into the pillows with a small oomph .

“Reki?” Langa pokes at his cheek, soft and warm beneath his fingers, and Reki curls into his touch, trapping Langa’s hand between his face and the pillow.

“Want more stars,” he mumbles, eyes still closed, completely unaware of the closeness Langa’s been freaking out about for the last few minutes. It’s nice, though, getting to touch Reki like this when usually it’s Reki who’s the touchy one, hanging all over him and squishing Langa’s cheeks in his own hands. So, Langa scoots a little closer, brushes some hair from Reki’s eyes with his free hand, and makes no attempt to free the other. 

“Yeah, it's pretty,” he replies, glad Reki doesn’t know he’s not really talking about the sky, and half-hoping Reki’s not talking about real stars anyway. It’s not exactly a gift he could give, even though he would if he could. 

Reki lets out a long sigh in response, smiling slightly against Langa’s palm. “So pretty, man. Wish we could see ’m like this every night.” His words slur a bit from sleep, and Langa tries to ignore the implications of ‘we’ and ‘like this’ and ‘every night’ as best he can. He doesn’t say anything after that, though, and Reki doesn’t either, his breathing returning to a low and steady rhythm that tugs Langa back closer and closer to sleep by the minute.

He probably shouldn't fall asleep like this, he thinks, though only for a moment. In the next, he’s drifting off with Reki’s head still in his hand. 

The following morning, Langa wakes up to rain pattering against the window, something cold pressed to his nose, and a pair of wide eyes staring back at him. He blinks a few times, then freezes when he realizes why Reki looks so surprised. His hand is definitely not cupping Reki’s cheek anymore, no—that would almost be preferable. Now, his whole arm is tucked under Reki’s head, and another is wrapped around his waist, Reki’s t-shirt bunched up in his fist with Reki’s own hands caught between their chests. The cold thing is Reki’s nose. On his nose. Because Reki’s wrapped up in his arms so close that their noses are touching. And sure, they’ve slept in the same tiny bed loads of times, woken up tangled together even, but not like this, not with these… feelings.

He breathes out once, flexing his fingers in the fabric of Reki’s shirt and trying desperately to remember the steps for boxing up said feelings. “Um,” he manages, and Reki’s cheeks flood with color. “Good morning, Reki.” 

“M-Morning, dude,” Reki squeaks out, and all of the feelings burst right back out of the box Langa haphazardly put them in. “We, um– should probably get up,” he quickly adds, even though he doesn’t move an inch. “We gotta work, remember? D-Do you, um– want breakfast or something before we go? What am I saying, of course you do, lemme make us some breakfast.” He finally breaks away, slipping out of Langa’s arms and off the bed almost gracefully, only to trip over the textbooks they abandoned on the floor the night before. Langa giggles, then ducks under the blanket when Reki chucks a balled up sock at him.  

“Not funny, man, I could have died.”

“Tripping over a textbook? That’s embarrassing.”

Reki shoots him a look, then turns to strip out of his t-shirt and boxers, quickly pulling on a clean pair of clothes and his pink Dope Sketch shirt. It's a normal thing really; what’s not normal is the flush Langa now has to hide under the covers from seeing Reki naked for all of five seconds. Though, if he sneaks a peek at Reki’s butt for a few extra seconds… well, he almost regrets it when Reki drags him out of bed by his legs, face still burning. 

“Why’re you all red?” Reki snorts, and Langa shrugs, breathing out a silent sigh of relief when Reki believes his excuse about the house being too warm. Naturally, he forgets that tiny detail almost instantly when Reki offers him a hoodie, which he pulls on over his own pink t-shirt without hesitation.

“What?” He says, and Reki shakes his head.

“Nothing. Let’s go,” and then he ushers Langa down the hall to the kitchen. The house is noisy like always, though Langa only notices once Reki sits him down at the table, somehow completely missing the splashing water and high-pitched squeals coming from the bathroom they just walked by, where Koyomi and Masae must be giving the twins a bath. In his defense, he was a little distracted by Reki’s firm hands on his back and shoulders. And he’s still a little distracted, watching Reki cook for them, so he scrambles up and starts rooting around in the fridge for some leftovers to eat while he waits.

The cool air from the fridge helps—until he sits back down, and Reki sits down beside him, wedging their shoulders together and passing over a plate of eggs to go with the leftover soba noodles he found. Then, all the heat comes rushing back, along with the urge to go crawling under the table where Reki won’t see how red he is. 

Thankfully, Reki doesn’t seem to notice, only glancing over occasionally while he eats his own food and talks about this dream he had about a skateboard palace, made out of old skateboard decks and full of stars, of all things. 

“Oh!” Langa says, trying to act surprised when Reki mentions the stars despite the anxiety beginning to pool in his gut. Because Reki’s telling him about his dreams, and they always tell each other stuff like this, except–

Except he hasn’t told Reki about the sleep-talking.

And what if he tells Reki, and Reki gets stressed—worried he might say something embarrassing while he’s asleep—then has even more trouble sleeping than he already does, or doesn’t want Langa staying over anymore at all. And Langa doesn’t want that, he wants… well, he wants a lot of things. But he also wants to be honest; he doesn’t want to keep anything from Reki either. So, after they clean up their breakfast and head outside, boards strapped to their bags because of the rain, Langa says, “Reki?” And Reki hums, adjusting the umbrella between them.

“What’s up, man?”

“I…” He pauses as an image of Reki’s face, all scrunched up and worried enters his mind. “…Forgot,” which earns him a playful jab in the shoulder. “I forgot, sorry.”

“I can’t believe you sometimes,” Reki laughs as he wraps an arm around Langa, leaning his weight into him, and a few stray raindrops dribble down Langa’s cheek from the edge of the umbrella. “Was it about me?” 

“No,” Langa lies, then adds, truthfully, “I wouldn’t forget anything about you.” And he’s pretty sure he’s imagining the dusting of pink on Reki’s cheeks, because Reki turns away, prompting a few more drops of rain to land on Langa’s face, and when he turns back the color is gone.

“Well,” Reki clears his throat, then grins. “You can always tell me if you remember.”

“Yeah,” Langa says, supposing keeping this one little thing to himself won’t hurt anybody. It probably won’t happen again anyway.

 

II.

“I want a dinosaur as a pet,” Reki says a week later, muffled into his pillow, and oh, it’s happening again Langa realizes as he rolls to face him. Reki’s still fast asleep, eyes squeezed shut, but– “something cool and spiky,” he adds, and Langa snorts.

“I don’t think you can do that,” he says back, only to be met with a sad sniffle a few seconds later. “...Reki?” He asks tentatively, prodding Reki’s shoulder a few times with his finger. “Are you crying?”

“No,” Reki says, even though he is.

“I’m sorry,” Langa whispers as he snuggles closer; seeing Reki cry because of him isn’t exactly something he likes to relive. “Maybe… maybe I can get you one,” he adds, “maybe not, um– a real one, you know, because they’re extinct–” Another sob. “–or, or a real one, whatever you want really. We can teach it to skate.” That seems to do the trick, and he can see Reki smile into the pillow, a happy humming noise escaping into the night before he’s back to snoring face-down into the soft fabric.

Waking up the next morning is rough. It’s early, they have school—which is bad enough on its own—and Langa is tired. It’s one thing to go to bed late, but it’s apparently another thing entirely to be woken up mid-sleep. It’s a third completely different thing to have Reki jump on him, wrestling to get him to wake up for school, which, admittedly, wakes him up a little more than he’d like.

“You can go get ready,” he tells Reki nervously, pulling the blanket up to his nose and still feigning exhaustion even though that dissipated pretty quickly a few seconds prior. “I’ll be up by the time you’re done, I swear.”

Reki huffs and hops off the bed. “Fine, you better! I’ll let the twins loose in here if you’re not.” The twins are much less forgiving than Reki is, so Langa gets up the second Reki leaves the room, hastily adjusting himself and changing into his school uniform before Reki gets back. The last thing he wants is for Reki to find out about his feelings because of… something like that. God. He’d rather get mauled by a couple of six-year-olds every day for the rest of his life. But he thinks it’s okay now, so he gathers up his things and just hopes that Reki doesn’t mention it.

“Why are you so tired today, dude?” Reki asks on their way to school, and Langa nearly trips over the curb. “You fell asleep before me, normally you’d be all… I dunno, sparkly and well-rested from that much sleep.”

Langa cocks his head. “Sparkly?” 

“You know, like… pretty or something.” Reki averts his eyes, and Langa has to bite down on his tongue to avoid asking if Reki thinks he’s pretty. Reki’s called him pretty before too, though usually in the context of what other people think, like ‘all the girls think you’re pretty,’ or ‘of course you’d get confessions, look at you,’ and Langa’s never really known how to respond to that. He doesn’t care what they think. But this, god, at this rate, his confession’s just gonna slip out the next time Reki so much as says the word.

It doesn’t this time, thankfully, and he doesn’t end up telling Reki why he’s tired either. Instead, he just says, “Oh,” and then they joke about how Nakamura, the guy who sits in front of Reki, seems to get a little “sparkly” whenever the class representative talks to him.

And, for the second time in a week, Langa forgets about the sleep-talking.

 

III.

“Hey,” Reki says, eyes lighting up when Langa slides open his window and scrambles in from the ramp outside. It’s late, and he’s just snuck out of the apartment to spend the night at Reki’s. Actually, he’s not really sure if he can call it that, since his mom isn’t home to notice that he’s gone, but whatever. He’s just snuck out to spend the night at Reki’s, because that sounds more exciting, and Reki’s sitting on his bed, propped up against the wall and squeezing a small plush dinosaur in his arms that Langa got him for his birthday, slightly illuminated by the glow-in-the-dark stars that now cover the ceiling, and Langa thinks he might pass away on the spot. 

“Get over here,” Reki grins, patting the empty space next to him, which doesn’t help Langa’s heart in the slightest. Quickly slipping out of his shoes and leaving his board by the window, Langa crawls in next to Reki and slips his legs under the blanket. 

“Look at this,” Reki says, snuggling closer and bumping their toes together as he holds up his phone between them, and Langa looks, but… he also looks at Reki. He can’t not, even though his heart beats wildly whenever he does—watching as Reki’s eyes follow the skaters in the videos, gradually getting heavier until he slumps against Langa’s shoulder and the phone falls into the blankets between them. 

Langa tucks him in carefully, then, before nestling in beside him. Two hours later, he wakes up to Reki shaking his arm much less carefully, sitting upright with the dinosaur crushed to his chest.

“D’you think Langa would wanna date me?” He immediately says, talking in the direction of his lamp despite still shaking Langa’s arm, and Langa’s breath catches in his throat. 

“W-What?” He chokes out, but Reki continues the conversation without him. Continues to tell the lamp how much he loves Langa (a statement that practically sends Langa into cardiac arrest right then and there), and how badly he wants to date him, and how he’ll take him on a date to the skateboard palace he dreamt about weeks ago, and how he wants to run his hands through Langa’s soft hair, and, and– Langa. Langa is warm. He’s so warm, burying his face into the mess of blankets and pillows and squeaking out Reki’s name every time Reki says something new, something he’s always wanted to say to Reki but never had the courage to.

But then, Reki sighs, loosening his grip on the dinosaur and melting back into the pillows just slightly with the smallest, stupidest smile on his face. “Do you think Langa would wanna kiss me?” He says softly. “I kinda wanna kiss him, even though he always–” And he scrunches up his nose and eyebrows into a pout like he’s imitating Langa, even though Langa is absolutely certain he does not look like that when he pouts. He wants to argue it, to tell Reki to stop being a little shit and just kiss him, because it’s embarrassing how much he’s thought about kissing Reki. But Reki’s still asleep, saying these things and spilling his heart to Langa without even realizing it, so Langa sits up and grabs Reki’s shoulders, shaking him a few times and saying his name until his eyes widen, like he’s waking up for real.

"Reki? Reki, did you mean it?" 

"Huh?" Reki blinks a few times. “Langa?" And he’s so cute—rubbing at his eyes, still bleary from sleep, scooting a little closer to squint at Langa through the dark. So Langa takes a deep breath, rips up his internal ‘how to avoid kissing Reki’ guidebook, cups Reki’s cheeks in his hands, says–

“I really want to kiss you, Reki.”

And then does. 

He panics a little when Reki doesn’t kiss back, eyes widening in surprise with their lips pressed clumsily together. In hindsight, kissing Reki out of nowhere was probably not the best idea, he thinks, though, thankfully, he only has to think it for a moment. In the next, Reki’s arms are wrapping around his neck, pulling him closer and nearly toppling them back into the pillows.

“This isn’t a dream, right?” Reki mumbles against him, then giggles as Langa claims a few more quick kisses before shaking his head no. 

“Why? Did you dream about this?” He teases, and Reki’s cheeks burn in his hands.  

“No!”

"Are you sure?” He asks, and the next words tumble out of his mouth before he can stop them. “When you were sleep-talking, you said you wanted to kiss me."

“When I what?!” 

Oh. 

"You, um– talk in your sleep,” Langa says, then quickly adds, “sometimes," when Reki looks horrified. 

Dude,” Reki groans, “I can’t believe you’re just telling me this now.” His eyebrows furrow, and he pokes his finger into Langa’s chest a few times. “Tomorrow, man, tomorrow you’re gonna tell me everything I’ve ever said.”

"Okay," says Langa. "Not right now?" But Reki’s hands are already in his hair, pulling him back in. 

"Hell no," Reki grins, breath puffing against Langa’s lips before they’re kissing again, and the rest of the world falls away. Tomorrow can wait.

Notes:

Thank you for reading! :) <3
Link to the fic on Twitter

Edit: I commissioned fedz for the lovely art in part 3 bc I just couldn't stop thinking about these two snuggling with that dinosaur under the stars ;-; they did such an amazing job with it, thank you thank youuu!! <3