"A Little Night Music"
Title: A Little Night Music
Author: Fair Hearing
Characters/Pairings: Chekov/Sulu, McCoy.
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Explicit sex.
Kink request: "Chekov sleepwalks, but that isn't the only thing he does in his sleep..."
Sulu was a heavy sleeper, which he recognized as a blessing in most scenarios, and so it was possible he would have slept through the whole thing -- or at least the first encounter. At some point in the last six months, however, he had developed an entirely new set of senses apparently designed exclusively to detect anything and everything Pavel Chekov, and at the first sound of suspiciously Russian breathing Sulu was awake, blinking blearily into his dark room.
He was confused at first -- he knew he'd woken up to Chekov, but wasn't sure how -- until he heard the breathing again and realized it was located at his lap.
He began to blink much faster.
"Computer, lights, ten percent," said Sulu, just as he felt something hot and wet engulf his not-quite-soft cock. The room lit up with a soft glow, and there was Chekov, kneeling between Sulu's legs, his eyes closed, suckling nonchalantly.
For a minute Sulu could only stare, trying to work out how on earth he'd managed to have a lucid wet dream now when he'd spent the ages of thirteen through seventeen praying for nothing else. Then Chekov made a little noise of satisfaction and switched to wet, noisy, open-mouthed kisses, and Sulu choked and bucked. Not a dream, then.
"Pavel," he managed to croak out, feeling dizzy from the rush of blood to his face and other parts of his anatomy. He tried to think of something more to say, something both ethically appropriate yet not overly discouraging, but then Chekov started sucking again, this time purposefully, his palm hot around base of Sulu's cock and making noises that Sulu couldn't believe weren't from his own deepest unconscious after all. And all at once he was coming, with a single shocked gasp, into Chekov's mouth.
Afterward he simply stared speechless down at Chekov, waiting for him to open his eyes and explain himself. (It didn't help his thought process that Chekov, having swallowed Sulu's come, was now licking his lips.) But after a minute Chekov just linked his hands behind his back, stretched with a sleepy mumble, and slid off Sulu's bed, padding back through the bathroom to his quarters.
For a second Sulu just lay there, stunned. Then:
"Wh- Hey!"
He scrambled out of bed and into his boxers, but when he dashed into Chekov's room he found him, of all places, in bed, under the blankets, curled up peacefully with the little threadbare stuffed schnauzer he pretended not to own.
Sulu blinked, hard.
"Pavel?" he said finally, loudly, as if insulted, and Chekov thrashed awake with a snort.
"Eh?" he mumbled, squinting in the light from Sulu's open door. "Chto... Hikaru?"
"Um. Yes."
"What is it? Is something wrong?" Chekov started fumbling around on the nightstand for his communicator.
"No, no, you don't have to get up," said Sulu hastily. He shook his head. "I mean. Were you -- I mean --"
Chekov stared up at him in slack-jawed confusion.
"You were asleep," said Sulu, figuring it out at last.
Chekov, bleary and wild-haired, took a brief survey around his bed.
"Yes," he said carefully.
"No, that's fine, I just, I thought maybe you had a, um, weird dream," Sulu mumbled.
"Oh!" said Chekov. "Er, I don't think I did, but maybe?"
"No, no, it's okay, I was just, uh ... Yeah. Sorry. Good night."
"Good night," Chekov said belatedly, as Sulu closed the door. "Thank you!"
***
The next morning, Sulu dropped by sickbay on his way to the bridge and casually asked Dr. McCoy if he knew anything about sleepwalking.
"I know my daughter used to do it," McCoy sniffed, trying to adjust the settings on his new dermal regenerator. "Used to find her downstairs on the couch in front of the vidscreen at all hours of the morning. Come to think of it, maybe she was just claiming to be sleepwalking ... damn this stupid thing ..."
"Is it true you should never wake someone up, though?"
"What?" McCoy glanced up at him. "What kind of fool question is that? Everyone needs to be woken up some days. If you're Jim, multiple times a day -- oh, Christ, is this in backwards?"
"Do you want any help, there, Doctor?"
"No!"
"Um, okay. Anyway, I meant, you know, sleepwalkers, waking them up."
"Hmph." McCoy poked his tongue out. "Actually, my aunt Alma used to say waking a sleepwalker could kill them instantly. Of course, my uncle was a restless sleeper, so maybe that was wishful thinking on her part, they never did get along."
"What?" cried Sulu in horror.
McCoy finally looked up, glaring. "What?"
"Is that true?"
"True? Sure it's true! They hated each other! Aren't you supposed to be on the bridge?"
With that, McCoy stomped off to his office, taking the remains of the regenerator with him.
***
Sulu had been dreading meeting Chekov for lunch, but it turned out he didn't need to be. Chekov clearly had no memory of his somnambulant extra-curricular activities, and spent the entire time chattering on excitedly about free will in the context of chaos theory with sweeping gestures and a mouth full of rice.
Sulu nodded and laughed and agreed at all the appropriate intervals, and forced himself to stop thinking of last night as anything more than one of those chuckle-worthy roommate things. Like accidentally locking one another out, or eating the last of the pizza. This one had just happened to coincide with his sexual fantasies of the past four months, that was all. These things happened.
They happened again three nights later.
Sulu, unsurprisingly, had been having trouble sleeping since the incident, but his shift that day had turned into twenty hours of tense maneuvering through an unexpected planetoid cluster on the outskirts of Vector, and afterward he collapsed face-first into bed, fully clothed and asleep within minutes.
And woke up to Chekov grinding against his thigh. Although Sulu was still trying to register this fact when Chekov let out a quiet groan, bucked his hips a few more times, and went slack.
After a minute, Sulu actually pinched himself. Just once, not too hard.
Barely breathing for fear he'd make Aunt Alma's prophecy come true, he waited to see what Chekov would do next, steadfastly ignoring his own erection and trying not to linger too much on how gorgeous Chekov looked with eyes closed and lips parted. Unfortunately, by the time Sulu figured out he was fast asleep, he had already started to snore.
It took Sulu another two hours to work up the courage to carry Chekov back to his own room and lay him gently on the bed, by which time it was almost alpha shift anyway.
Sulu hauled himself to the shower with a groan. At least his morning masturbation wouldn't take long.
***
The next few nights were a lesson in experimentation. The obvious solution, of course, was to simply lock his side of the door, but the idea of a frightened (or happy, or anxious, or dyspeptic) Chekov trying to reach him in the middle of the night, only to find Sulu had locked him out, ranked right up there with Aunt Alma's thesis in terms of horrific prospects.
Night one's method was to devise methods. Sulu stayed up till 0400, one eye on the door and the other on the blank screen on his PADD, trying to make a checklist but thinking instead about the sounds Chekov made when he came. Soon he was watching the door exclusively. Method: unsuccessful.
Night two was an intraural alarm. Sulu had heard this trick from his father many years ago, when he'd had to get up two hours before Sulu's mother and hadn't wanted to wake her. It involved borrowing an earpiece from Communications, synching the alarm with his quarters' computer, and setting the environmental controls to "motion sensor."
It worked perfectly. A little too perfectly, in fact: when Sulu rolled onto his stomach in the middle of the night, a piercing whine sounded directly in his ear, and in his panic he fell to the floor, where he struggled to unlock the damn thing from his earlobe. To make things worse, Chekov wandered in a few minutes later and managed, even with closed eyes, to kneel beside him on the floor and try to make out, with surprisingly good aim.
Method: unsuccessful.
Night three involved a little something Sulu liked to call "directed discouragement." He spent an hour rearranging his quarters, unlocking all his furniture from the walls and, after moving his bed to a particularly inconvenient corner, creating an elaborate barricade around the bathroom door that would allow aimless wandering but block any actual ingress.
He figured that if a conscious Chekov did need him in the middle of the night, he'd speak up in confusion, Sulu would be able to spring up to the rescue, badda bing badda boom. Peace of mind secured, Sulu fell asleep the minute his head hit the pillow.
Unfortunately, stupid Chekov was a genius even while unconscious. It seemed he was able to navigate his way through the bathroom, carefully unstack all the books and fencing equipment blocking his path, climb over the dresser, and find his way under the covers.
Of course, Sulu pieced all of this together later, because when he woke up Chekov had both their cocks in his hand and Sulu was already gasping out his orgasm.
Method: unsuccessful.
***
The next morning Sulu stared into the mirror at the circles under his eyes and realized he had to admit defeat.
Not by locking the door; he still couldn't bring himself to do that. No, he would have to tell Chekov what was going on. Sulu's deteriorating mental health aside, Chekov deserved to know. At this rate, he and Sulu would have reached all four bases before Chekov had any idea he was even involved with anyone.
This didn't make bringing it up any easier. Sulu must have cleared his throat ten times that night at dinner, Chekov glancing at him each time with increasing confusion, before he finally slammed the table with his fist.
"That's it," he said.
Chekov, who'd been in the middle of describing how gross the cuisine looked on Mobliza II, paused mid-gesture.
"Pavel, there's something I have to tell you."
"What's wrong?" said Chekov, looking worried.
"It's nothing bad. I mean, it's nothing serious. Nothing really serious. I don't think."
Chekov began to look terrified.
"No, no. It's just -- ugh." Sulu put a hand to his forehead. "Pavel, have you ever sleepwalked?"
"Sleep walk?"
"Yeah, like walked in your sleep."
"Oh!" He brightened. "Moved all around without waking up. Yes, I did this when I was younger, when I had my own room at home. My mama and papa would have to lock me in at night, and even sometimes I could get through that. It was funny." He smiled. "Why?"
"Um, have you done it since then?"
"Hmm." Chekov squinted. "No, I don't think so. I stopped when I started sharing a room at the Conservatory, and in the Academy as well, so ... ah!" His eyes popped open. "Hikaru! Do you mean to say I have been walking around recently?"
"Well..."
"How embarrassing!" said Chekov with a laugh. "I'm sorry, Hikaru, I never even thought about how I had my own room again. I hope when you heard me I did not scare you!"
"Oh, no," said Sulu, fiddling with his silverware. "Um, you didn't scare me."
Chekov was watching him carefully.
"Hikaru," he said, sounding hesitant. "I hope I have not ... gone into your room?"
Sulu felt himself blush.
"It's okay, really," he began, but Chekov had already slapped his head and groaned, muttering something in angry Russian. "Seriously, Pavel, it's not a problem, honestly it's not."
"I hope I did not do anything strange," said Chekov miserably, hazarding a glance at Sulu.
"Um." Sulu went back to his silverware. "Um, well."
"Hikaru, oh, no. What did I do?"
Finally Sulu let out a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut.
"Um, a few times you've kind of, um, like I've woken up and, we'd done I guess something sexual," he said in a rush, bracing himself.
There was silence.
He cracked one eye open to see Chekov staring at him with, to Sulu's complete horror, tears welling up in his eyes.
"Oh God," said Chekov in a sob as he covered his face.
"No, no, no!" stammered Sulu. "No, Pavel, you didn't do anything wrong!"
Chekov just kept crying into his hands.
"Seriously, Pavel, I swear, it's fine! I just wanted to let you know, is all, because I, I felt bad --"
A choking sound.
"-- but not bad like that, no, not at all! It was actually, Pavel, I'm serious, it was actually really nice and I think I actually felt bad because I wanted you to be awake, I mean that's the kind of thing I'd want to do with you when you were awake, wanted to do I mean, for a long time, but obviously, not, um, in that way, by which I mean when you were asleep..."
He trailed off when he realized what he was saying.
After an excruciatingly long pause, Chekov sniffed and looked up, his eyes still watery.
"Really?" he whispered.
And the hopeful disbelief in his voice suddenly made everything all right. Better than all right. Sulu felt himself breaking into a grin.
"Yeah," he said, and laughed a little. So did Chekov, and soon they were both laughing, giddy with nervousness and relief.
"So, then," said Chekov, looking up at him shyly, "you would like to... do these things when I am not asleep?"
Sulu didn't trust himself to speak. He just nodded.
"Would ... tonight be all right? After my meeting in Engineering?"
"Um." Sulu swallowed, throat dry. "Sure. That would be fine."
"Okay," said Chekov. He was grinning. "In your quarters? Since I seem to like them so much."
Sulu laughed breathlessly. "It's a date."
***
Chekov forced himself not to sprint all the way from Engineering to Sulu's quarters, but it was difficult. After so long, thinking and hoping and, he had to admit as probably the cause of all this, dreaming about the things he and Sulu could do together, he was finally going to do it. Well, some of it, anyway. Most of it, even, who knew? The sky was the limit, he told himself as he sounded the chime on Sulu's door, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
After a minute, he pressed the chime again, but again, no response. Maybe Sulu had muted his door again. Chekov tapped the "enter" key experimentally, and the doors whooshed open.
"Hikaru?" he called, suddenly worried he'd come the wrong night. Maybe "tonight" meant something different in certain Standard idioms.
Then he glanced over to Sulu's desk. There was a bottle of unopened wine, a list of vids pulled up on the computer screen, and Sulu himself, head nestled in his arms, fast asleep.
After watching him for a little while, Chekov took an extra blanket from the bed and wrapped it around Sulu's shoulders.
"Sweet dreams," he said, giving him a tiny kiss on the forehead.
There would be other nights.
Author: Fair Hearing
Characters/Pairings: Chekov/Sulu, McCoy.
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Explicit sex.
Kink request: "Chekov sleepwalks, but that isn't the only thing he does in his sleep..."
Sulu was a heavy sleeper, which he recognized as a blessing in most scenarios, and so it was possible he would have slept through the whole thing -- or at least the first encounter. At some point in the last six months, however, he had developed an entirely new set of senses apparently designed exclusively to detect anything and everything Pavel Chekov, and at the first sound of suspiciously Russian breathing Sulu was awake, blinking blearily into his dark room.
He was confused at first -- he knew he'd woken up to Chekov, but wasn't sure how -- until he heard the breathing again and realized it was located at his lap.
He began to blink much faster.
"Computer, lights, ten percent," said Sulu, just as he felt something hot and wet engulf his not-quite-soft cock. The room lit up with a soft glow, and there was Chekov, kneeling between Sulu's legs, his eyes closed, suckling nonchalantly.
For a minute Sulu could only stare, trying to work out how on earth he'd managed to have a lucid wet dream now when he'd spent the ages of thirteen through seventeen praying for nothing else. Then Chekov made a little noise of satisfaction and switched to wet, noisy, open-mouthed kisses, and Sulu choked and bucked. Not a dream, then.
"Pavel," he managed to croak out, feeling dizzy from the rush of blood to his face and other parts of his anatomy. He tried to think of something more to say, something both ethically appropriate yet not overly discouraging, but then Chekov started sucking again, this time purposefully, his palm hot around base of Sulu's cock and making noises that Sulu couldn't believe weren't from his own deepest unconscious after all. And all at once he was coming, with a single shocked gasp, into Chekov's mouth.
Afterward he simply stared speechless down at Chekov, waiting for him to open his eyes and explain himself. (It didn't help his thought process that Chekov, having swallowed Sulu's come, was now licking his lips.) But after a minute Chekov just linked his hands behind his back, stretched with a sleepy mumble, and slid off Sulu's bed, padding back through the bathroom to his quarters.
For a second Sulu just lay there, stunned. Then:
"Wh- Hey!"
He scrambled out of bed and into his boxers, but when he dashed into Chekov's room he found him, of all places, in bed, under the blankets, curled up peacefully with the little threadbare stuffed schnauzer he pretended not to own.
Sulu blinked, hard.
"Pavel?" he said finally, loudly, as if insulted, and Chekov thrashed awake with a snort.
"Eh?" he mumbled, squinting in the light from Sulu's open door. "Chto... Hikaru?"
"Um. Yes."
"What is it? Is something wrong?" Chekov started fumbling around on the nightstand for his communicator.
"No, no, you don't have to get up," said Sulu hastily. He shook his head. "I mean. Were you -- I mean --"
Chekov stared up at him in slack-jawed confusion.
"You were asleep," said Sulu, figuring it out at last.
Chekov, bleary and wild-haired, took a brief survey around his bed.
"Yes," he said carefully.
"No, that's fine, I just, I thought maybe you had a, um, weird dream," Sulu mumbled.
"Oh!" said Chekov. "Er, I don't think I did, but maybe?"
"No, no, it's okay, I was just, uh ... Yeah. Sorry. Good night."
"Good night," Chekov said belatedly, as Sulu closed the door. "Thank you!"
***
The next morning, Sulu dropped by sickbay on his way to the bridge and casually asked Dr. McCoy if he knew anything about sleepwalking.
"I know my daughter used to do it," McCoy sniffed, trying to adjust the settings on his new dermal regenerator. "Used to find her downstairs on the couch in front of the vidscreen at all hours of the morning. Come to think of it, maybe she was just claiming to be sleepwalking ... damn this stupid thing ..."
"Is it true you should never wake someone up, though?"
"What?" McCoy glanced up at him. "What kind of fool question is that? Everyone needs to be woken up some days. If you're Jim, multiple times a day -- oh, Christ, is this in backwards?"
"Do you want any help, there, Doctor?"
"No!"
"Um, okay. Anyway, I meant, you know, sleepwalkers, waking them up."
"Hmph." McCoy poked his tongue out. "Actually, my aunt Alma used to say waking a sleepwalker could kill them instantly. Of course, my uncle was a restless sleeper, so maybe that was wishful thinking on her part, they never did get along."
"What?" cried Sulu in horror.
McCoy finally looked up, glaring. "What?"
"Is that true?"
"True? Sure it's true! They hated each other! Aren't you supposed to be on the bridge?"
With that, McCoy stomped off to his office, taking the remains of the regenerator with him.
***
Sulu had been dreading meeting Chekov for lunch, but it turned out he didn't need to be. Chekov clearly had no memory of his somnambulant extra-curricular activities, and spent the entire time chattering on excitedly about free will in the context of chaos theory with sweeping gestures and a mouth full of rice.
Sulu nodded and laughed and agreed at all the appropriate intervals, and forced himself to stop thinking of last night as anything more than one of those chuckle-worthy roommate things. Like accidentally locking one another out, or eating the last of the pizza. This one had just happened to coincide with his sexual fantasies of the past four months, that was all. These things happened.
They happened again three nights later.
Sulu, unsurprisingly, had been having trouble sleeping since the incident, but his shift that day had turned into twenty hours of tense maneuvering through an unexpected planetoid cluster on the outskirts of Vector, and afterward he collapsed face-first into bed, fully clothed and asleep within minutes.
And woke up to Chekov grinding against his thigh. Although Sulu was still trying to register this fact when Chekov let out a quiet groan, bucked his hips a few more times, and went slack.
After a minute, Sulu actually pinched himself. Just once, not too hard.
Barely breathing for fear he'd make Aunt Alma's prophecy come true, he waited to see what Chekov would do next, steadfastly ignoring his own erection and trying not to linger too much on how gorgeous Chekov looked with eyes closed and lips parted. Unfortunately, by the time Sulu figured out he was fast asleep, he had already started to snore.
It took Sulu another two hours to work up the courage to carry Chekov back to his own room and lay him gently on the bed, by which time it was almost alpha shift anyway.
Sulu hauled himself to the shower with a groan. At least his morning masturbation wouldn't take long.
***
The next few nights were a lesson in experimentation. The obvious solution, of course, was to simply lock his side of the door, but the idea of a frightened (or happy, or anxious, or dyspeptic) Chekov trying to reach him in the middle of the night, only to find Sulu had locked him out, ranked right up there with Aunt Alma's thesis in terms of horrific prospects.
Night one's method was to devise methods. Sulu stayed up till 0400, one eye on the door and the other on the blank screen on his PADD, trying to make a checklist but thinking instead about the sounds Chekov made when he came. Soon he was watching the door exclusively. Method: unsuccessful.
Night two was an intraural alarm. Sulu had heard this trick from his father many years ago, when he'd had to get up two hours before Sulu's mother and hadn't wanted to wake her. It involved borrowing an earpiece from Communications, synching the alarm with his quarters' computer, and setting the environmental controls to "motion sensor."
It worked perfectly. A little too perfectly, in fact: when Sulu rolled onto his stomach in the middle of the night, a piercing whine sounded directly in his ear, and in his panic he fell to the floor, where he struggled to unlock the damn thing from his earlobe. To make things worse, Chekov wandered in a few minutes later and managed, even with closed eyes, to kneel beside him on the floor and try to make out, with surprisingly good aim.
Method: unsuccessful.
Night three involved a little something Sulu liked to call "directed discouragement." He spent an hour rearranging his quarters, unlocking all his furniture from the walls and, after moving his bed to a particularly inconvenient corner, creating an elaborate barricade around the bathroom door that would allow aimless wandering but block any actual ingress.
He figured that if a conscious Chekov did need him in the middle of the night, he'd speak up in confusion, Sulu would be able to spring up to the rescue, badda bing badda boom. Peace of mind secured, Sulu fell asleep the minute his head hit the pillow.
Unfortunately, stupid Chekov was a genius even while unconscious. It seemed he was able to navigate his way through the bathroom, carefully unstack all the books and fencing equipment blocking his path, climb over the dresser, and find his way under the covers.
Of course, Sulu pieced all of this together later, because when he woke up Chekov had both their cocks in his hand and Sulu was already gasping out his orgasm.
Method: unsuccessful.
***
The next morning Sulu stared into the mirror at the circles under his eyes and realized he had to admit defeat.
Not by locking the door; he still couldn't bring himself to do that. No, he would have to tell Chekov what was going on. Sulu's deteriorating mental health aside, Chekov deserved to know. At this rate, he and Sulu would have reached all four bases before Chekov had any idea he was even involved with anyone.
This didn't make bringing it up any easier. Sulu must have cleared his throat ten times that night at dinner, Chekov glancing at him each time with increasing confusion, before he finally slammed the table with his fist.
"That's it," he said.
Chekov, who'd been in the middle of describing how gross the cuisine looked on Mobliza II, paused mid-gesture.
"Pavel, there's something I have to tell you."
"What's wrong?" said Chekov, looking worried.
"It's nothing bad. I mean, it's nothing serious. Nothing really serious. I don't think."
Chekov began to look terrified.
"No, no. It's just -- ugh." Sulu put a hand to his forehead. "Pavel, have you ever sleepwalked?"
"Sleep walk?"
"Yeah, like walked in your sleep."
"Oh!" He brightened. "Moved all around without waking up. Yes, I did this when I was younger, when I had my own room at home. My mama and papa would have to lock me in at night, and even sometimes I could get through that. It was funny." He smiled. "Why?"
"Um, have you done it since then?"
"Hmm." Chekov squinted. "No, I don't think so. I stopped when I started sharing a room at the Conservatory, and in the Academy as well, so ... ah!" His eyes popped open. "Hikaru! Do you mean to say I have been walking around recently?"
"Well..."
"How embarrassing!" said Chekov with a laugh. "I'm sorry, Hikaru, I never even thought about how I had my own room again. I hope when you heard me I did not scare you!"
"Oh, no," said Sulu, fiddling with his silverware. "Um, you didn't scare me."
Chekov was watching him carefully.
"Hikaru," he said, sounding hesitant. "I hope I have not ... gone into your room?"
Sulu felt himself blush.
"It's okay, really," he began, but Chekov had already slapped his head and groaned, muttering something in angry Russian. "Seriously, Pavel, it's not a problem, honestly it's not."
"I hope I did not do anything strange," said Chekov miserably, hazarding a glance at Sulu.
"Um." Sulu went back to his silverware. "Um, well."
"Hikaru, oh, no. What did I do?"
Finally Sulu let out a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut.
"Um, a few times you've kind of, um, like I've woken up and, we'd done I guess something sexual," he said in a rush, bracing himself.
There was silence.
He cracked one eye open to see Chekov staring at him with, to Sulu's complete horror, tears welling up in his eyes.
"Oh God," said Chekov in a sob as he covered his face.
"No, no, no!" stammered Sulu. "No, Pavel, you didn't do anything wrong!"
Chekov just kept crying into his hands.
"Seriously, Pavel, I swear, it's fine! I just wanted to let you know, is all, because I, I felt bad --"
A choking sound.
"-- but not bad like that, no, not at all! It was actually, Pavel, I'm serious, it was actually really nice and I think I actually felt bad because I wanted you to be awake, I mean that's the kind of thing I'd want to do with you when you were awake, wanted to do I mean, for a long time, but obviously, not, um, in that way, by which I mean when you were asleep..."
He trailed off when he realized what he was saying.
After an excruciatingly long pause, Chekov sniffed and looked up, his eyes still watery.
"Really?" he whispered.
And the hopeful disbelief in his voice suddenly made everything all right. Better than all right. Sulu felt himself breaking into a grin.
"Yeah," he said, and laughed a little. So did Chekov, and soon they were both laughing, giddy with nervousness and relief.
"So, then," said Chekov, looking up at him shyly, "you would like to... do these things when I am not asleep?"
Sulu didn't trust himself to speak. He just nodded.
"Would ... tonight be all right? After my meeting in Engineering?"
"Um." Sulu swallowed, throat dry. "Sure. That would be fine."
"Okay," said Chekov. He was grinning. "In your quarters? Since I seem to like them so much."
Sulu laughed breathlessly. "It's a date."
***
Chekov forced himself not to sprint all the way from Engineering to Sulu's quarters, but it was difficult. After so long, thinking and hoping and, he had to admit as probably the cause of all this, dreaming about the things he and Sulu could do together, he was finally going to do it. Well, some of it, anyway. Most of it, even, who knew? The sky was the limit, he told himself as he sounded the chime on Sulu's door, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
After a minute, he pressed the chime again, but again, no response. Maybe Sulu had muted his door again. Chekov tapped the "enter" key experimentally, and the doors whooshed open.
"Hikaru?" he called, suddenly worried he'd come the wrong night. Maybe "tonight" meant something different in certain Standard idioms.
Then he glanced over to Sulu's desk. There was a bottle of unopened wine, a list of vids pulled up on the computer screen, and Sulu himself, head nestled in his arms, fast asleep.
After watching him for a little while, Chekov took an extra blanket from the bed and wrapped it around Sulu's shoulders.
"Sweet dreams," he said, giving him a tiny kiss on the forehead.
There would be other nights.