AN: I'll be on my tour of Europe in . . . thirteen days now, and have been worrying a little bit about if my roommate snores/steals the sheets/thrashes. So a product of my worries is this little drabble. This is actually set in the world of my other fic Drop Your Defenses where Augustus is a tuba player in the marching band. (The other tuba player mentioned also makes an appearance there!)

A Habit

Everyone, no matter how saintly or angelic or pleasent they seem, has at least one annoying habit. It could be popping their gum a little too loudly. Or leaving the toilet seat up. Or drinking the last of the milk and never telling anyone until they've filled their bowl full of cereal. But our gum popping and milk-drinking and toilet-seat leaving-upping is what makes us all a little more human, a little more relatable because of our small, bothersome quirks. And usually, if we're decent people, we try and correct them for the sake of not driving our loved one bonkers.

But what about those habits that happen when we aren't in control of ourselves? As we dip into sleep, our conscious selves fall into a dream world while our physical selves do whatever they please in bed. Snore, snort, roll around, wrap ourselves like a burrito in the layers of blanket.

The thing is that we're not really aware if we do anything annoying in our sleep until we have spent a night sharing a bed with somebody else.

Augustus was well aware that his parents have several complaints about how their spouse slept.

"Your mother is not very good at sharing sheets," his father once told him in secrecy in the shop's meat locker at they were digging through slabs of lamb. "I'll wake up freezing in the middle of the night with only a sliver of the coverlet."

"He snores," his mother said once as she asked Augustus to help her roll some beige-colored yarn into a ball. "You cannot blame me for stealing the sheets at night - I have to cover my ears to even go to sleep."

And he knew that they had plenty of stories about others' sleeping habits.

"I had a friend who spent the night once when I was in school and she could carry on a whole conversation in her sleep," his mother laughed as the family was gather around the table for after-dinner coffee and dessert. "Of course, it was a whole lot of nonsense."

"Your Uncle Heinrich has shoved Aunt Viktoria out of bed several times because he dreamt he was fighting someone," his father added with a chortle.

But Augustus wasn't aware he had one bizarre sleeping habit of his own.

That was, of course, until he had to share a bed with someone else for a few nights.

It was during the Marching Band's Spring Break trip when he had to stay a hotel room with three other boys. He was completely oblivious to if he snored, or stole sheets, or rambled gibberish, or shoved people in his sleep because back when he was a child he didn't many friends to stay over or invite him to their house for the night. No one ever informed him about how he slept.

Their first day in New York was very filled with activity. After a long bus ride to the city, they explored Times Square for a little bit and then grabbed dinner at a diner before rushing down Broadway to catch a musical at one of the many theatres. The show lasted until about 11 o'clock at night. As he started his day at around 4:30 am, Augustus was worn down and as soon as his head hit the pillow, he drifted off into a hard sleep.

When they had to get up the next morning to tour Radio City, Josh, a fellow tuba player, looked exhausted. "Did you sleep okay?" Augustus asked later when they were getting breakfast in the hotel's lobby, noticing how the other boy took a large coffee and had dumped (right now) three sugar packets inside of it. while Augustus took three pieces of toast off of the bread rack.

"No," he said, ripping out another Sweet and Low. "You kept me up all night with that weird finger-sucking thing you do."

"Finger-sucking . . . what do you mean?" Augustus stopped grabbing food (for once) and looked over Josh. This was the first time he ever heard this.

"You shove your two middle fingers into your mouth and suck on them and it makes this annoying slurping noise."Josh snapped a styrofoam lid on his coffee before taking a sip.

"I - " Actually, he should have figured he did something like this in his slip. There were many-a-baby photos of him both adoring the wall and displayed in albums of him taking a nap, two middle fingers of one hand stuffed into his mouth. He always assumed he outgrew the habit.

But then again, he had been dreaming about the M&M World he had seen while in Times Square the other day.

"I am sorry," he said, not knowing what one should say after discovering some previous unknown sleeping habit. If anything, he thought Josh would complain about him taking up too much room in the bed they had to share for the trip.

"It's alright," Josh said after a minute of downing his coffee. "I hope I didn't kick you last night, or something. I've been told I'm a bit of a violent sleeper."

Augustus laughed and dumped two scoops of scrambled eggs onto his plate. He could live with a sleep-kicker if Josh could live with a sleep-slurper.