Chapter Text
He couldn’t seem to get himself to fall asleep, despite the fatigue he felt down to his bones. This sleeplessness wasn’t as unfamiliar as he wished it, but tonight he had no reason that he could point to as the cause. With the frequency of Kaiju attacks increasing, he knew that he needed to get all the sleep he could manage to get. His body was weary from age and the abuse that he put himself through. It sometimes made him wonder how long he could keep this up, if one day it would just be too much for him. These weren’t the thoughts he liked to dwell on, but nights like this they crept in anyway.
He extracted himself from underneath the sheets, difficult as it was when there was a forty pound mass of drool and wrinkles trapping him underneath them. But his movement didn’t even seem to bother the damn thing, instead Max just huffed and licked his jowls before dropping back into the dream land of food and belly rubs. He shook his head in amusement as he headed for the bathroom. Maybe if he got a quick drink and moved a little he would be able to finally get some shut-eye.
Emerging from the bathroom a few minutes later, he stopped in the doorway and let the dim overhead light spill into the dorm. If he really looked he could see the pile of dirty laundry in and around the basket in the corner, as well as the small table piled high with manuals and administrative papers. But those didn’t interest him at all; what he found himself studying was the bed he’d vacated. Because it was there that he felt his heart both constrict and swell.
There Chuck was curled on his stomach, his hand twisted in the sheets where he had been just moments before. The sheets had fallen down low on his boy’s waist, leaving a mass of pale skin to the view of the lighting and his eyes. Along the skin he could see a mixture of marks, some from inside Striker and some from their round of sex just a few hours ago, painting that pale skin alongside the freckles that his boy had gotten from him. It was a sight that he would never get tired of, seeing his marks on his boy’s soft, sweet skin.
He moved back to the bed, gently shoving Max out of the way with his foot as he slid under the sheets. He didn’t even have time to get himself situated before his back was being pressed down against the mattress and his front was overtaken by both boy and dog. Chuck curled himself across his chest while Max sprawled himself over his legs, let him know that he wouldn’t be leaving the bed again anytime soon. But that didn’t bother him in the least right now. Right now he had a moment of perfection.
Looking down he managed to see just a bit of Chuck’s face, relaxed and still disheveled from their earlier bout, and it made his heart swell just a bit more. He gently swept a hand through his boy’s dark blond locks before pressing a lingering kiss to the top of Chuck’s head. The scent of both pure Chuck and a subtle note of himself mixed together, finally getting his body to relax. He could finally feel sleep approaching, finally ready to allow him to get some needed rest. If he could, he would gladly just stay like this with his boy curled into his body with nothing to interrupt.
But as fleeting as he knew this moment was, he knew that he would gladly fight every day for moments like this. He would be damned if those monsters took this away from him.