For the love of GOD, give me Kentler and "Why are you awake?" I love you so much and i miss you, too 💜
I am totally incapable of writing anything super short (or rather this was just a great prompt) so the full fic is on AO3 & here’s a snippet:
His hand lingers on the door to Chandler’s bedroom nonetheless, a faint itching in the arch of his feet telling him that he could turn around now, give his apologies in the morning for being too drunk, too tired, too whatever, and he knows Chandler wouldn’t say anything. It isn’t fair, though. He thinks of his sister laughing as she bundles him into a cab and forcing Chandler’s address out of his lips before he can tell the driver his own, and knows it isn’t fair to him, or to Chandler, and she wouldn’t forgive him for fucking it up now.
So he turns the handle, swallows, and creeps inside without waking Chandler. Except,
‘Oh,’ he gasps as he stops himself jumping half a metre.
Through the gloom there’s a figure – Chandler, except for a split second Kent’s detective brain had jumped to other conclusions – standing at the foot of the bed, frozen. His hands twitch where they’re white knuckle clutching the end of the duvet.
‘Joe?’ he whispers through the dark, wonders if he should put a light on, except he can almost hear Chandler’s jaw grinding from here and he doesn’t seem to have noticed Kent yet. ‘Joe,’ he says again, and steps forward until his hand is hovering lightly over his forearm, close enough that he can feel the goose bumps raised on bare skin. ‘Why are you still awake?’
It sounds ridiculous even to his own ears, as if he’s found Chandler reading, or watching late night true crime (a horrible habit they’ve both developed), rather than pressing his eyes so tightly closed he must be seeing static and almost shaking with the effort of staying still.
‘Talk to me,’ Kent whispers, and wonders, with the same panic he always does, if it’s the wrong thing to say. Chandler does relax a little, though, into his palm, and Kent takes the opportunity to move behind him, dropping his head onto Joe’s shoulder and running his hands down his arms until his fingers wrap around his wrists, tracing tendons so tight they feel like they might snap in his touch.
‘I can’t let go,’ Chandler says, eventually, and his voice sounds as wrecked as he looks. Kent hums into his skin and waits. ‘It won’t sit even at the sides, it isn’t straight, and I can’t… I can’t make it right .’
The first time Kent had watched Chandler make the bed, both of them still wrapped in the hazy nakedness of sunrise, he had marvelled at the preciseness of it; the billowing of the sheet caught like a sail in a sudden wind until it lay flat, the same length hanging over each side as if the bed were a mirror. Tonight it feels like walking into a nightmare.
He presses his lips against Chandler’s neck and traces a slow circle along his pulse points in time with his own breathing.
