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They don’t wake Aaron.
It’s just the sort of rule which falls into place without anyone mentioning it. The jet is one thing, when someone who’s asleep gets left asleep, but with Aaron it is a little firmer than that, operating on the general knowledge he’s running on much less sleep than he should be. Derek had known it even before he’d slept with him—knows now that the extent he’d imagined was far better than reality.
Sleepless nights aren’t exactly a rarity on the job, when the weight of everything they deal with turns suffocating at night, but a straight eight hours are for Aaron what those are to the rest of them.
He’s used to the tossing and turning in the evening, to the soft light from the living room or study spilling into the hall in the early hours of the morning, when sleep really isn’t happening. To the earthy aroma of the herbal stuff supposed to help—doesn’t seem to do much, in Derek’s opinion, and Aaron doesn’t seem to actually enjoy the taste but maybe it does do something. It can’t hurt. And the weekend often finds him catching up on half an hour here, an hour there, laid out on the couch or in bed on top of the covers. The insomnia comes in bouts, and it’s no exception for when they have a case.
The relative ease with which Aaron handles it suggests it’s a long-standing thing, one he’s adjusted to as best he can. Derek really doesn’t envy him. Their days are so long he can’t imagine not being able to crash out—hell, even two or three hours on a particularly fast case is a godsend, so having to go an entire day without any seems like it’d fall under cruel and unusual punishment. If there isn’t much he can do at home, unfamiliar hotels only exacerbate the problem, all creaking pipes and rowdy neighbours.
During a particularly bad couple of weeks, Aaron looks worse than he has in months one morning. Usually he manages an hour minimum but Derek had known without asking that Aaron hadn’t slept at all; he’d refused breakfast and the coffee he clearly did crave, nauseous and feverish from going without, and hadn’t eaten until midday when the hunger overwrote that. He’d gone through as much advil and tylenol as he could, neither of which had helped much with the headache, and though he was surprisingly present all things considered his eyes were a little dim with exhaustion.
Derek senses it’s a relief to be able to go home. Because he might not be able to sleep but there’s less of a presence demanded of him, less of a performance when it’s just the team; Aaron is allowed to be tired. He doesn’t like letting himself be but there’s nobody else holding him back.
Despite the bags under his eyes, Aaron sits down with the file propped up on his legs resting back against the table. Doing the paperwork at the minute is out of his reach—Derek has watched him rewrite the lot when he’s been dissatisfied with what he’d produced at the height of his tiredness, so really he’s glad Aaron has realised doing it now would be a fruitless endeavour—but reading over the details is easier. Familiarising himself like he’s going to somehow forget in the six hours until they’re back.
It doesn’t take long before Aaron slows down, taking longer and longer to read the words on the page until he’s rereading the same paragraphs multiple times. He wants to suggest that he lies down—and JJ meets Derek’s eyes and raises her eyebrows in a silent question, ready to move from the couch if he agrees—but Aaron being Aaron means that he’d refuse. And insomnia is a bitch: there’s a chance that just the little movement involved in resettling over there is enough to stave off the tiredness for a few more hours. When he’s falling asleep, it’s best to let him sleep.
His head tilts forwards and jolts back up again. None the wiser to the milliseconds of sleep between them, Aaron just stares at the paper as if it’ll make more sense the next time he reads it.
Each time it happens he’s less and less focused, losing his place, trying to power through it to work—because of course he is. There’s not much Derek can do except sit back and wait and hope he succumbs instead of blinking his way through the wave of exhaustion. So that’s what he does.
It takes four full songs of nodding off and immediately waking up until Aaron’s head lolls forwards and he stays like that; his grip on the file starts to slip and Derek catches it before it can fall off his lap and spill the papers everywhere. He’s convinced there is nothing Aaron does the easy way. Still, he’s finally sleeping, his chest rising and falling to a slow, even rhythm.
Derek can’t help but wince at the position he’s in though, his neck bent forwards uncomfortably. Aaron had managed nearly four hours asleep like that once and they had all heard the crack when he straightened up. But a sore neck is a minor thing if it means he can get some overdue sleep.
He isn’t concerned for long.
They hit a patch of turbulence; nothing bad enough for the pilots to warn them about but it’s enough to jostle them around a little, coffee lapping at the side of their mugs. Aaron sighs and stretches out his legs. Derek hardly dares to move—waking up after ten minutes honestly seems worse than not falling asleep at all—but he only sinks back into the seat, head tipped back. Sitting so upright with the turbulence doesn’t last much longer than slumped over.
Aaron’s head tilts to the side and he rests against Derek’s shoulder with a quiet exhale, settling into a more comfortable position. With his own eyes closed, he almost goes for his hand before he remembers it’s the jet, not home. Not that he suspects the others mind—to the contrary, they’d just never escape the friendly teasing—but Aaron certainly would. So Derek smiles to himself and lets him lean against him, all the way back to Virginia if needs be.