I just reread all of Double or Nothing because it's genuinely one of my favourite fics of all time SO GOOD
But I was wondering how do R and Joe reconcile their wake up routines once they're together? Snoozer v non-snoozer
bet!joe's back! turned himself into snooze!joe (not by choice lmao) thanks for the request, hope you enjoy! Wordcount: 2.4K
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Before Daybreak
Joe doesn’t understand how your brain works.
Can’t fathom how it’s even possible that you don’t just... wake up. The sound of your alarm was meant to wake you up. That’s how it worked. People sleep in silence and then a loud noise wakes them up. It’s how the world had been designed.
How can you, barely awake, turn it off and doze right back off to sleep again?
Joe’s brain works different. Joe’s brain doesn’t work like yours.
He hears an alarm and he’s... up. Just... awake. Groggy, and tired still, sure... but definitely awake. Unable to just go back to sleep. He thinks if you were both cavemen still, you probably wouldn’t have survived very long. You’d sleep right through a bear sneaking in. It’d eat your face off and you’d just sleepily murmur, “Nooo, five more minutes.”
And it’s not like he hasn’t tried.
For weeks he’s tried, because if you love snoozing so much, surely there’s bound to be some amazing secret to it he just hasn’t discovered yet.
So far though, he’s come up empty.
Your phone explodes into the darkness. Cheerful, chirpy, loud and fucking merciless.
Joe’s eyes fly open instantly.
Boom.
Awake.
He turns his head, finding you a soft lump under the covers, one of your arms flung across your face whilst your alarm keeps chirping on the bedside table right next to you.
“Babe…” Joe tries, voice hoarse and low. A hand wanders over and taps you on your hip a few times. Turn that shit off.
You give no audible response, but simply move a hand over to find your phone, groaning slightly as you press snooze. The second sweet, blessed silence takes over again, you sink back into the soft fuzzy brain space that exists between the night and the morning. Joe tries joining you there, eyes still closed, face pressed into his pillow, but, alas. It’s of no use.
A couple minutes later, your phone jumps alive again, and even though Joe knew it was coming, he still jolts and sits up in bed like a man possessed.
You’re on your back, hips twisted, serene as a Disney princess, not stirring at the shrill noise or even the movement in the bed. Joe frowns at you for a full ten seconds before you reach for your phone again.
He sees you press snooze in real time.
Through gritted teeth, Joe says your name, a low warning to his tone that you miss entirely.
“Mm, five more…” you muffle an unfinished sentence, face rubbing into the soft warm fabric that surrounds you.
“How many five mores will there fucking be?” Joe grumbles, moving the covers aside and getting out of bed. It’s too early still. He should’ve been asleep still.
“It’s part of the process.” you reply, eyes still closed.
“Yea, well,” Joe stands up, turns and leans over to slap what he thinks is your bum under the covers. You softly groan to it, eyes remaining firmly shut. “My process is called sleep. Yours, for whatever reason, is called torture.”
And Joe can’t lie.
You look super peaceful, all soft and cosy, hair a halo of chaos that surrounds your face… yea, you look lovely. So comfortable. Relishing the mental stretch of the early-morning-ritual you’d carefully crafted for yourself. He could easily watch this for hours.
Just… maybe not at 6 in the fucking morning.
Joe doesn’t like how he’s deeply affected by disturbance and broken sleep. Where you prioritize emotional softness, he unfortunately needs to prioritize physiological necessity.
He needs to sleep until he needs to wake up.
No weird in-between lull that has very quickly turned into a point of daily friction for the two of you. The broken mornings shape his whole mood. His energy for the day.
Joe stares at you until your phone, once again, interrupts him, another alarm you’d set rather than the previous one you’d just hit snooze for, disturbing the peace and quiet.
“Why does it have to sound like a fucking fire drill as well?” Joe swears under his breath, walking around the bed. He might as well go and make himself a coffee. “Can’t you set it to one that sounds like… a breeze?” Joe thinks of anything he’d rather hear the sound of. “Or like, a hug, maybe?”
“Too soft,” you reply, barely awake. “I’ll sleep through that… this one works.”
“It works on me, too.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t get much more out of you than a slight hum.
Joe supposes he’s lucky that you were friends before you became something else together, and that bickering has been a solid constant that brings the two of you together rather than pull you apart. He can just tell you that he’s annoyed without being scared of offending you beyond repair.
Walking down the hall on his way to the kitchen, he can’t help but think that surely Izzy must hear all of your alarms too. The walls in your flat aren’t made of solid concrete — he knows because Izzy set some very strict rules about... other... noise complaints. And it’s not often that she chooses his side in any of your little spats, but he’s certain that in this case it’ll be two against one in his favour. He’d bet on it, should someone challenge him.
Joe’s already finished most of his coffee when you stagger into the kitchen just past 7. He jokingly checks a wristwatch he’s not wearing and says, “Good afternoon!” like you’re a teenager who hasn’t left her bed all morning.
To retaliate, you take his mug from his hands and finish whatever’s left of his coffee before you shove him aside to make yourself a fresh new cup.
You’re lucky he really likes you.
When Izzy shows a sign of life, sort of glaring at the two of you as she shuffles into the kitchen already dressed, but definitely not warmed up to the idea of having to be awake yet, Joe doesn’t wait to bring up the issue.
“Maybe she’ll listen to you…” he begins, turning to face your flatmate. “You can’t tell me the... the fifty alarms that you can hear coming from her bedroom every morning aren’t fucking with your sleep.”
Izzy gives Joe a deadpan stare.
Oh yea, he’s totally right. Joe’s already smirking slightly, ready to tell you how unhealthy snoozing really is, and how you should listen to your poor flatmate who you’ve been torturing for years.
But then Izzy speaks up and says, “It’s not the alarm. It’s you, Joe.”
Oh.
What?
It catches Joe by surprise so much so that it makes you snicker softly as your eyes don’t leave the two mugs of hot coffee you’re preparing.
“Me? But I—”
“Your alarm monologues. Your Shakespearean betrayal speeches— your deep-breathing despair.”
Joe really thought Izzy was going to agree with him. Instead, he unexpectedly finds himself in her direct line of fire. And she’s not done yet.
“I don’t even hear her alarm anymore, but it’s you, every single time, like you’ve just been drafted into a war you didn’t sign up for.”
You’re full on giggling now, and Joe can’t believe the position he has found himself in.
“Do you know what it’s like to be woken up by the slow, rumbling tragedy of your soul trying to process that she likes to snooze in the morning? Your voice, it’s like a fucking foghorn married a cello that run an emotional support podcast together every time her phone goes off.”
It’s too early for this, Joe thinks.
“Izzy,” you warn, but your laughter completely kills the effect.
“You get so fucking narrative in the morning.” Izzy squeezes her eyes shut as she says it, her forehead etched into a deep frown.
And Joe knows that he can yap, that he’s good at finding a lot of words to describe how he feels, but, he thinks it’s for good reason.
“I’m expressing my distress!”
Izzy pushes past him and grabs a full mug of coffee, the one Joe thought you were making for him, and says, “Well, consider expressing your distress with your inside thoughts, Hamlet. Just once, I want her alarm to go off and not hear you cry, ‘Why does the world hate me?!’, because it’s honestly getting really fucking boring.”
Before Joe can even reply, she disappears into her bedroom again to finish getting ready for work.
He’s left sort of perplexed.
When he turns to look at you, you’re looking at him with a little amused half smile that he doesn’t appreciate.
“I mean…” you start, speaking into your own morning brew, “You do turn a little into a Victorian widow about it, don’t you? She has a point.”
And... yea, okay.
Maybe she does...
But so does he!
He has a point too!
If you don’t have to get out of bed until the clock hits 7, then why would you set eighteen alarms that go off at various intervals from an hour before?
Without Izzy backing him up, Joe is forced to find different ways to ease this stupid habit out of you.
He gifts you a gradual wake-up light that is meant to replace your alarm.
It doesn’t work.
Well, it does work, because it easily replaces all of your phone’s snoozing alarms, but Joe kind of forgot that... he also has eyes. A light turning on in your bedroom doesn’t just wake you up. And even though it’s definitely a more peaceful way to start the day, Joe is still left to stare at the ceiling, fuming in silence for an hour before he needs to get up.
Next, he tries a pillow-based vibrating alarm, one that’s marketed towards heavy sleepers, but he runs into the same issue. He had been unaware — and had come to learn the hard way — how often you end up sharing a pillow together. It’s very cute. Almost romantic enough to feel a little embarrassed about having to tell his friends about it. But when that pillow is also your vibrating alarm clock? Not so great.
It’s unfortunate that he likes you so much.
That he still wants to come and sleep over so badly.
That he genuinely misses you when he spends the night in his bed on his own, convincing himself in those moments that your snoozing isn’t actually so bad, that being on his own is definitely worse.
He wishes he still felt that same way when he jolts awake from your alarm, set to a softer volume now as you tried to compromise, and he’s wearing fucking earplugs.
He wakes up from your alarm whilst he’s wearing noise-canceling earplugs.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake…” Joe grumbles. He had been so determined to out-sleep the snooze siege, had been so sure that this was actually going to work.
And yet...
Joe wakes up inside of his noise-cancelling cocoon and can’t fucking believe that you haven’t.
“Are you fucking joking right now?!”
Joe’s voice pulls you from your slumber more than your phone does.
“You cannot sleep through that when I can hear it through these high quality too fucking expensive new noise-cancelling earplugs. Not a fucking chance!”
He’s angry enough to feel the itch to reach over and turn your phone off entirely, even though he vividly remembers how angry you’d been when he’d done that once before, and how awful he’d felt after.
But he still wants to.
He really, really wants to.
Joe continues swearing loud enough to prompt a barrage of pounding from the other side of the wall where Izzy’s fists bang in protest.
“Fuck off, Izzy!” Joe’s tone is laced with that raw, unfiltered annoyance that slips out when exhaustion wears down restraint. He’s done. So, so done. He could’ve had another full sixty minutes of blissful sleep that you’ve now ruined for him.
However, the shouting across the flat before the sun’s even dared to edge the horizon, shadows still speaking in full voice, quickly stops when you let a hand snake over Joe’s bare chest.
You somehow find an answer to the issue without even thinking.
The simple solution just sort of... happens, completely organically, underneath the thick covers of your bed.
Joe starts to speak once more, but the breath he draws turns into a shudder, and he goes still beneath your hand which slides across his soft skin until it curls around his side and pulls.
Something in the air changes.
The early morning shifts.
Joe easily lets himself be pulled into you, and whilst his warm body curls around yours, your other hand finds your phone and turns chiming the alarm off.
Off.
Then Joe watches as you squint at the bright screen of your phone as you unlock it and turn off all other alarms too, one by one. Next, it gets dropped besides your pillow and you turn around to face him. You groan softly with the movement, pulling him closer until your bodies fit together like they were always meant to.
“Can you make sure I get up at seven?” you mumble, voice thick with sleep, nose tucked somewhere near his collarbone.
And... oh.
Yea.
Joe can do that.
Joe can... yea, Joe can be the alarm.
Your alarm.
He can be part of your snoozing if this is what snoozing is, absolutely. So he nods, barely a movement, and presses a kiss into your hair like a promise.
Suddenly, snoozing turns into something gentler— not a battle against the day, but a shared quiet wrapped in warmth and, more importantly, each other.
Suddenly, all frustration slips from him in an instant, and he melts into the slow hush of your breathing and into the tangle of your limbs.
Suddenly, Joe is gifted a whole hour of hands that roam lazily beneath soft linen sheets and over sleepy skin, fingers tracing the familiar curves of comfort.
After a moment, Joe shuffles down and buries his nose into your chest, snuggling into the space as he inhales deeply before dragging his face up and into your neck. He finds he doesn’t actually care about the time so much if he gets to spend it like this, right here.
He feels like an idiot for not working that out himself sooner.
When the clock ticks past seven, he murmurs your name against your temple, and you grumble something unintelligible, nuzzling closer. And really, who is he to complain about a frivolous thing like snoozing when playing a part in it means he gets to kiss the curve of your shoulder and feel your fingers comb sleepily through his hair for a bit?
Snoozing, as so it turns out, isn’t really about sleep.
It’s about these soft, golden minutes before the day begins, where nothing matters but bare skin, and comfortable warmth, and the sleepy weight of love.
Joe thinks he might have just learnt how your brain works.
Finds it’s not so unfathomable after all.
Finds that his brain actually might work just the same.
If this is what mornings will look like from now on, then maybe snoozing isn’t so bad after all.
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