Work Text:
The apartment is dark save for the whitish-blue glow of the television screen in the living room. On the couch, buried under a nest of blankets and soggy used tissues, Cronus Ampora languishes away in quiet solitude, praying silently for death between wet sniffles – or, at the very least, some more apple juice, as his cup’s empty and he simply doesn’t have the energy to haul his carcass off the couch and fetch it himself.
And your little bro ain’t here to be handing out the tender loving care quotient, more’s the fucking pity.
You stand there for a while, just watching him wither away into desiccated purple misery. The hell even are you doing, you wonder. Making sure he doesn’t die, you guess; just cause you ain’t pale for him and you find him insufferably fuckin’ obnoxious don’t mean you’re gonna ignore the dude when he’s couch-ridden with gross snotty sicknastiness. Shit would be downright cold, ‘specially when you’ve still got all those deep-seeded big-bro instincts from all the years you’ve taken care of Dave’s sickly little ass growing up in Houston.
Ah, fuck, you’re up anyway.
“Ampora,” you get his attention. “You doin’ all right?”
He slowly looks up at you, yellow sclera shot through with mapping purple-and-green blood vessels. Ugh, dude looks positively miserable as fuck. You’re gonna get him some more AJ in a minute, you tell yourself. Fuck, you hope Dave didn’t drink the last of it before he left, ‘cause then you’d feel obligated to buy more for this pain-in-the-motherfucking-ass seatroll of his.
Said seatroll is now stirring, roused into activity by your entrance. You juuuust barely resist the urge to place a gloved hand on his forehead and feel for fever like you did for Dave so many times ago.
“Dirk,” he replies, but the cordiality of the statement is somewhat ruined by his sudden hitch of breath followed by the subsequent wet and horrible hack that curls him up like a purple pillbug, fists clenching, those neck-frill-thingies flaring wide open, seeking oxygen. Oh, shit.
You swear under your breath and go over to him, easing him upright so he doesn’t drown in his own gross lung fluids, holding him up with one arm and rubbing his back with the other. You can feel accessory muscles straining under the thin damp cotton of his T-shirt, and abruptly (unpleasantly) you are reminded of helping Dave through wheezing fits just like this, back in the day when his bitch-ass asthma would flare up after strifing or just dicking around outside, exacerbated by the sweltering Houston heat. Oh, are you glad those fucking days of joy are over (but you still get kinda worried during the summers here, as they are not without considerable amounts of respect owed, and one time you actually threatened Dave with testicular torsion if he didn’t comply with your demands to take your inhaler with, little man, I am serious one of Cheney’s eight fuckin’ heart attacks – Dick, not Lon, smartass).
Ampora…is not getting any better, you can tell by the way his arms have wrapped around his chest, holding his opercula closed in-between whole-body forceful coughs, and okay, this TLC needs to be taken up a notch before the dude actually croaks. Dave would be most displeased if you let his moirail expire on your watch, especially due to matters of such pressing familiarity.
“Bro,” he’s choking out, calling for you, and you flashstep into the living room to find Dave hunched forward on the couch, bent over double with wheezes, face red from ineffective dry coughs that strain his neck and chest and scare the fuck out of you; this is a bad one, you can tell immediately.
You go sit by him and – inhaler, you think, he needs his fuckin inhaler goddammit where the hell even IS that thing – and put hands on his back, holding him upright, steadying him, rubbing circles on his back to try and calm him down, not that it’ll help much if he’s not getting enough goddamn air because his fucking lungs are closed-
Shit oh shit oh shit okay, he’s calming down, okay okay he’ll be okay, his breathing’s sounding better now and you are SO tearing this fucking apartment from the floor up to find his goddamn inhaler after this.
“There you go, little dude,” you tell him, steadying him as he catches his breath, fuller and slower now, mercifully evening and god, that one really scared the fuck out of you. “’s all right, I gotcha. Breathe.”
“S’okay,” you tell Cronus, and that same damn tenderness leaches into your voice now. “I gotcha, dude. Breathe.”
Suddenly he pitches forward and retches a thin stream of bile and apple juice (almost in the trash can you’d placed under the coffee table so he’d have somewhere to conveniently not deposit his goddamn Kleenex) and you catch him by the shoulders, keeping him from falling forward.
Goddammit, you think as you eye the fresh new carpet stains, you’d just had a moment with him, too.
But hey, on the bright side, he’s not coughing anymore, just panting and sweating, hanging limply in your arms, and you’re gonna make comment on that stunt but he just makes the smallest pitifulest noise EVER and you merely sigh heavily and let him regroup for a minute.
“…sorry,” he rasps. “Shit, ‘m sorry, ‘ll clean it up, lemme just-”
“Shush.” It is a definitive command, reinforced by your callused fingers on his clammy forehead (your self-control, while admirable in its fuckin’ restraint, has been voluntarily and temporarily rescinded). A-yep, dude’s got himself a nice little lukewarm fever brewin’. Great. “Sit tight. I’ll go get you some more juice.”
He does, and you do, and you think you’ll feel justified if you just leave the mess for Dave to clean up when he gets back with the kids in the morning.
You offer him the juice, and he takes it with a grateful sip, eyes closing in rapturous bliss. Then, he looks up at you. “Dirk?” he says.
"Hm?"
"Thanks."
“‘s no problem. Now, I’ma head back to bed. Holler if you need anything.”
He nods, takes another drink, sets the cup on the coffee table, and lies back down. You grab the remote and turn the TV off, then hesitate a moment longer before reaching out and smoothing the sweaty hair back off his forehead, the action drawing with it the bittersweet tang of familiarity.