(no subject)
Title: The day erased
Pairing: David Posner/Don Scripps
Rating: PG-13 - Kissing, but not much else.
Summary: The night before exams, Posner panics.
Word count: 700ish
Disclaimer: The History Boys belongs to its creators, and I am but a penniless student.
The night before the exam, David is quite possibly going mad.
When he settles in to sleep, he ends up tossing and turning - elbowing poor Scripps in the head at one point- and when he gets up to revise, he can’t concentrate - doodling in the margins about how he was doomed to fail rather than reading.
So instead, he makes tea, and contemplates that if he died in a freak accident - shark attack, falling sheet of glass, choked to death on the very cup of tea in his hands - it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Well. It’d be the end of his world, but he wouldn’t be alive to worry about it. Best of all, he’d have no exam to worry about.
(It strikes him at that point that he’s applying to Cambridge and is contemplating spontaneous death by shark in landlocked Sheffield, and he laughs, loud and nervous in the quiet of the kitchen. When he goes to put the cup down, his hands are shaking, and the cup skids off the edge and smashes, loudly, on the floor.)
David sighs and puts his head in his hands. His reflection in the window is rather pathetic - thin and washed out in an old saggy t-shirt, dark shadows under his eyes, and -well, alright, the lovebite on the side of his throat is more shameful than pathetic (he and Scripps still don’t talk about when they accidently end up getting each other off) but still. If he judges how well tomorrow is going to go on his current appearance-
David swallows hard. He still hasn’t cleaned up the shattered cup, and when the door creaks open behind him, he thinks it’s probably his mum, coming to complain about the racket and bemoan her ruined carpet.
“Wrecking the place again?” Scripps says sleepily from behind him, and he turns around, smiling wanly. Don is wrapped in the quilt, just his head sticking out, hair seemingly defying gravity.
‘Can’t sleep for worry.’ He replies, turning back to the table. As if he needs to, really. It must be fairly obvious that he’s still awake.
Behind him, Don looks unimpressed.
David hears him come closer (can feel the warmth radiating from him), but the arms that wrap tentatively around his waist are a pleasant surprise. David never seeks affection (it would surely be overstepping an unspoken boundary?) and Don is seemingly reluctant to give it (probably doesn’t want to - not with him, anyway). He sits stiffly in the embrace for long seconds. When Don begins to pull away, he catches his arm and leans back, head on Don’s shoulder.
“I don’t know what you’re worried about.” He says. David can feel the words in his chest, along with his heartbeat. He closes his eyes and listens. “You always panic like this and then do brilliantly. What about your Nazi essay?”
David snorts. An A for something he didn’t believe in at all. It had been a pleasant surprise though. He’d expected a C, at best.
‘That wasn’t the same, though. I might fail this one. I never was good with art history.’
“Bollocks.” Scripps says, chin resting against his temple.
This is nice, David thinks. The warmth is making him want to sleep, even if to do so would be a struggle.
“You’re too clever for your own good half of the time, you don’t butcher Latin like I do, and you’ve had your nose in The Complete Works of Caravaggio for nearly a month now.” He pauses, one of his thumbs brushing back and forth across David’s inner arm. Don’t get used to it, he thinks. Don’t get attached, even as he can feel himself lull into more relaxed state from the skin contact alone.
“I won’t say you’re going to do fine, because I’d be lying. You’re going to do brilliantly.”
David takes a minute to process what was said and shrugs.
‘Maybe.’ He yawns. The exhaustion seems to have caught up with him all of a sudden.
Scripps tugs on the hem of his top, unwinding his arms.
“Come on, bed, you daft sod.” He steers David up the stairs by his shoulders, grumbling about having been woken in the first place. David can almost believe he sounds fond.
When he finally gets in the bed again, Don’s chest against his back, quilt cocooning them, he loses consciousness almost immediately, his last thought of how he can feel Don’s heartbeat against his shoulder blade.