A Bedtime Story, by tigs (Amnesty)

Challenge: Amnesty (Abandonment)
Title: A Bedtime Story
Author: tigs
Pairing: Er, McKay/Bed. Yeah.
Disclaimer: Not mine, unfortunately. Crack!fic to the nth degree.
Summary: For 10,000 years she’d lain in this room, waiting, hoping for someone to come. Set post-Siege III.

A/N: Apologies for this. Really. I just felt like writing fluffy!fic and this is what came out. Totally unbeta’d.



For 10,000 years she’d lain in this room, waiting, hoping for someone to come. To sit on her, lie on her, feel her soft firmness beneath them, and every year, she was disappointed. Every year the lights in the city stayed off. Every day, stubbornly, the door to her room remained closed.

But then one day that changed. First she felt a fine trembling in the walls of her room, signifying that the city was coming to life again—she could feel it down to her very springs. Then there were people, people such as those that had last abandoned her 10,000 years before walking the halls. She could hear them speaking in strange words, entering her neighboring rooms, and she thought, *please, please, pick me!*

And then one man did. He walked into her room, walked over to the lovely balcony, turned in a circle, eyeing her, the desk and chair, everything. She tried to look her most comfortable: firm, yet fluffy, because she didn’t know what sort of mattress he liked, and then he did the most wondrous thing. He set his bag down on top of her, said, "You, you, I don’t know your name yet, but don’t even think about setting foot in here. This room’s *mine*," and she was happy.

*

He wasn’t as regular a sleeper as her previous occupant had been, nor did he spend precious sleeping minutes rolling around and getting settled. No, when he was on her, he slept *hard*, head to the pillow, mouth open and lazy, and he always burrowed down underneath her covers. She was in heaven.

The first night he didn’t come back, during the middle of her second week of being his, she worried. She thought, maybe, that these people had abandoned her, too. That she was going to have to wait another 10,000 years before another man came along and settled onto her length. She listened hard, her springs creaking with her effort, but the city was still awake, still humming, and the next morning he came home.

He talked to her, said, "Idiots, imbeciles, wouldn’t know a power conduit if it shocked them in the ass." He tossed his shirt on her, then his pants, and even though he left again almost immediately, speaking of something called ‘coffee’, she knew that he would return.

She was glad.

*

She grew used to the odd hours, to the skipped nights of rest, and always after those, he was tense, even more exhausted than normal. Always after those nights, she tried to be just an extra bit springy, to give him the best sleep possible.

For, she had discovered, he was a genius. And not just because he said it to himself quite often, when he was alone in the room. She knew it because sometimes, most nights, in the pre-dawn hours, he would go from sleep to waking in less time than it took to blink, and he would make a grab for his notebook and he would begin writing. Those times, she tried to be a little bit more firm, so that he would have a nice solid surface to write on. Sometimes, he would write for ten minutes, twenty, an hour. Sometimes he would not go back to sleep at all. He would uncap the pen with his teeth and spit it out onto her pillow.

Occasionally, he would fall asleep again in mid-sentence and the ink from his uncapped pen would seep into her sheets.

She felt well loved.

*

As the weeks passed, she felt the tension growing in him, in the tightness in his shoulders and neck, in the way that he was starting to toss and turn, rather like her old master had in the final days before he left her. He frowned more, talked to himself less.

She grew worried. But every night, still, he came to her. He lay on her, burrowed under her sheets. And then one night, he didn’t. Nor did he come to her during the day to cover her with clothing and papers and pens. He did not return that night either, nor the next, and she started to fear that again, again she had been left behind.

The city was still alive around her, though, thrumming with life, but her occupant, her owner, he did not come. And then there were the sounds of explosions overhead, rather like ones from her memory, and her springs trembled with the impact. The silence was worse, though, because she listened, trying to hear his footsteps in the hallways outside, and there was nothing. No one coming for her. Coming to her.

Still she waited. And waited. And then the city calmed around her. She started hearing voices in the hallways again, people making their way past, and she listened even more closely than before.

And finally one evening, with all the glory of the sun setting for the night, she heard him, his footsteps, and they sounded tired, as if he was shuffling to her. The door to her room slid open, and she heard another voice say, "I don’t want to see you for 24 hours, McKay. That’s an order."

"One I don’t think I’ll have problems following, Major. Now if you’ll excuse me—"

And then they were alone.

He was back.

She tried to puff herself up, to let him know that he’d been missed, to look as inviting as possible, but he was already looking at her like she was the most beautiful thing he’d seen all day. He didn’t even bother undressing before he crawled up on her and sprawled out. He burrowed down, pulled the covers up to his neck, and said, "I’m never leaving you again, do you hear me?"

She rejoiced.