This is the only thing I ever posted on tumblr that I never reposted to my ff account, so since my tumblr is gone I thought I should probably post it here. Currently reworking the part of the idea in this story into a much larger story but I'm kinda attached to this one, so. Still gonna post it. Btw this was inspired by an 'sleeping habits headcanons' post on tumblr a couple months ago and it got out of hand haha.

Edit: whoops I uploaded the unedited draft... Hahaha. Grammar mistakes GALORE. Fixed now.


Sleeping Habits

x - x - x

It's Danny's freshman year that his sleeping habits go to shit. It becomes a sort of game amongst the other students to see who can wake Danny first, before the presiding teacher notices that he's fallen asleep on his desk yet again. He grows accustomed to waking up to the random pelting of paper airplanes and crumbled paper and pens and pencils and erasers and, on one occasion when he was particularly exhausted and the teacher was particularly inattentive, shoes.

After the incident with the shoes Sam follows Star from the classroom and corners her by the drinking fountain to let her know that if her and her friends ever throw anything at Danny again while he's sleeping that she'll make their lives a living hell. The next morning a scream rings through the hallway when Star opens her locker to find it stuffed with dozens of live lizards.

Most people back off after that but some still don't get the message. Sam brings a tennis racquet with her to school now and when Danny's eyes flutter shut and his forehead slips from his hand to the desk she glares at the other students, ignoring the lesson completely, silently daring any of them to challenge her. And when someone does she stands from her seat the moment the projectile leaves their hand and swings the racquet full force. It turns out the years of little league stuck in her veins. When the third time she does this and nails Dash Baxter in the eye with his own football she's sent to detention. But no one tries to wake Danny anymore. He's still failing half his classes... but she notices, triumphantly, that he is beginning to look the tiniest smidge less tired.

Danny is voted Most Likely to Fall Asleep In Class in the school yearbook four years in a row: the first time any student has done so with any award at Casper High. Because of this unprecedented honor, in their senior yearbook a full page is dedicated to pictures of Danny sleeping on desks.

Sam votes for him every year, except senior year, when she jokingly votes for herself.

The first time Danny sleeps over at her house is when he's ten years old. It's an accident but her parents are furious; after that fiasco he doesn't stay the night there again until he's fourteen and afraid to go home and go to sleep because he might have a concussion and he needs someone to make sure he stays awake. They both fall asleep anyway sometime in the night. He stays over often after that.

The first time he sleeps in her bed is senior year.

The first time he wakes up in her bed with his arms still around her from the night before she's drooling slightly, her hair stuck to one side of her face. He sorely wishes he would never have to go back to sleeping in his own bed again. Here he stays for more than an hour, reluctant to disturb her, dreading the moment he has to move.

She wakes slowly. She's never been a morning person and never will be. "Are you crying?" she says incredulously.

"No," he says as he sniffs, "are you drooling?"

She hastily wipes at her mouth, glaring daggers at him. "I am not drooling."

"Then I'm not crying."

The first bed they own together isn't used nearly as often as it should be. Sometimes Sam gets home late at night to find Danny asleep in odd places, like at the kitchen table or on the couch or under the coffee table or halfway down a hallway, as if he'd been trying to accomplish something and had given up halfway there. She gives up trying to lug his heavy ass to bed as a lost cause and starts leaving pillows and blankets all around the house instead. He makes good use of them.

The first time Danny ever comes home to find Sam sleeping somewhere other than the bed, she's slumped down in a chair with a picture book hanging open on her lap, her head resting on the side of the crib. The tiniest and most delicate pair of hands imaginable are tugging weakly at the strands of Sam's hair that poke through the crib. Danny disentangles them gently before carrying Sam to bed.

Sam learns to make good use of the strategically placed pillows too. She doesn't get a proper night's sleep for the next four years.

The kids grow older and Danny and Sam sleep more soundly and more regularly, but the scattered pillows and blankets are now far too permanent a fixture to clean up. For the next fifteen years they will be used for movie nights and sleepovers and indoor forts.

By the time they're forty Danny's snoring rivals his father's. Sam chalks it up to one too many punches in the trachea. She sleeps with earplugs, that way she can still push up right next to him while she drifts off.

The first night after Annie moves out Danny comes home late to find her sleeping in Annie's bed. He wakes her and doesn't say anything until she stops crying and falls asleep again. As her breathing evens out he realizes he can probably count on his hands he number of times he's seen her cry.

When they move away from Amity Park they leave behind almost everything they own. Stuff has never mattered much to them anyway. They do take a couple of things though. Important things. Before they go Danny floats around the bedroom, peeling off all the glow in the dark stars. He's had them since he was eight years old and isn't sure he can bear to part with them just yet.

He puts them up on their new ceiling in Alaska.

The next year, he hangs them above their bed in New York City.

Not long after that he's hanging them in England, in Portugal, in a tiny apartment in Brazil.

As the years go by it seems there are less and less of them, and Sam begins to wonder if Danny grows tired of putting them up and taking them down every time they move, sometimes several times in one week. If maybe he leaves a few behind every time.

Or maybe he doesn't, and some are simply lost as time goes by.

By the time they're sixty there are only fifteen stars left.

One night Danny wakes up to the smell of acrid sulfur and whisks his sleeping wife out of the house. It doesn't burn all the way to the ground, but they had been ready to move anyway. For the second to last time they leave everything behind them. The only things Danny bothers to salvage from the wreck are two scratched and grey but still faintly glowing stars.

Danny dies in his sleep, and Sam knows because she wakes up one morning and he isn't snoring. They've never been morning people. Danny says so just then - he's sitting across the room, waiting for her to wake, glowing and smiling, young and lean, no older than thirty or forty.

He follows her around his funeral and makes nearly inaudible jokes to distract her from the heartache. It's a small funeral, though thousands of people wanted to come. Friends and family stand around his grave and when it's Sam's turn to speak, instead of turning to her family and talking, she goes to his grave and sticks a solitary plastic star onto the headstone. She offers nothing in the way of an explanation before returning to her place. Danny quiets in her ear for the first time all day.

Sam dies not too long after Danny. Everyone had always joked about how they couldn't live apart from each other even for a second and in the end it proved true, if only by coincidence. Danny flies in to check on her one morning and finds that she's cold. He tries to remember if he said goodnight to her the night before. If he reminded her how much he loved her. He's said it so many times before but for some reason he can't recall whether he remembered to say it yesterday... When you're alive everything seems so infinite, but now that he found himself on the finite side of life he found that every moment they had was infinitely more precious. He knew now why Sam cried so bitterly the morning she woke to find he was gone. Still there, but gone. The end of infinity.

But now she's come to join him. He isn't sure whether he should be happy or sad.

He settles on neither when he can't find her. He searches and searches. She isn't there waiting for him, bright and glowing and younger and strange but still indisputably there like Danny is. He searches and doesn't find her.

He never considered the possibility that he might linger on and Sam would not.

He haunts her funeral like he had his own, silently and invisibly, and after everyone leaves he stays at her gravesite until the sun falls and everything grows dark. The star on the grave marker beside hers gradually begins to glow faintly green, familiar and welcoming and warm, like a quiet goodnight in an alto voice he knows so well.

Danny smiles to himself and flies away, and ten minutes later he's placing the last remaining star on her grave marker, her star, in its final resting place next to his.

He thinks he hears her calling his name and for a moment wonders if he's been waiting here for her all this time, but when he turns there's no one there. But he does see another star in the distance, a third star where no star should be. It's a strange color he's never seen before and for some reason it reminds him of her. He moves toward it and everything begins to dim around him until all he can see is a solitary star. He follows her into the dark.