Work Text:
Decembers in South Carolina are an indecisive rush of hotcold and Andrew has always hated it. One day, it’s balmy and warm enough for shorts, the next it’s chilly and Andrew has to pull a cap down far enough to cover his ears: the tips always got so cold. Decembers were an annual war waged on his immune system, but he has a system: drink dollar store knock-off NyQuil every night before bed like it’s a glass of warm milk.
Like clockwork, he waits until December hits to start his process, no longer bothering with the little measuring cup; taking shots from the bottle and letting the warmth in his belly lull him to sleep. So color him fucking surprised when it doesn’t work. It always fucking works.
Andrew wakes up to a fire in his throat and lead in his bones, trapping him under the heavy duvet. He’s not sick. Admitting that would be like surrendering defeat to the hands of a dead, protein-surrounded strand of RNA. He’s not sick.
He’s going to pretend to be sick, though.
He makes the call to Kathryn, the general manager for the Bighorns, and twists his face into a moue of sorrow and mounfully tells her that he is too sick to come into practice. She agrees, he doesn’t want to infect anyone else. Of course, he tells her, nodding seriously. She orders him to the doctor before hanging up.
Fat fucking chance.
Andrew swallows after hanging up, wincing at the lancing pain that cuts down his throat. It’s the first time in years that he’s called in sick—for anything. Not that he’s sick...he has allergies. He blames the obscene amount of snow blanketing the earth. He must be allergic to the cold. Neil hardly notices, too used to the idea of a city buried in snow. Andrew can hardly stand to look at him from underneath the furry hood of his parka on the best of days.
If he were back in South Carolina, he would have gone into work like there was nothing wrong with him. Like it was the most normal thing in the world to be sniffling and wincing red-rimmed eyes when sniffing set off his sinus headache. Andrew was the master at persuading people—with knives—into indifference. He really was a words person, he thinks with a smirk. He would have swaggered his way throughout the day and then gotten home as soon as he was able to, so he could suffer in the lonely solitude of his own home.
That’s impossible where he is now, living with a five-foot-three menace of a man. They picked out a dining set together, needless to say, nothing got by Neil. There is no looking a man in the eye and playing off your weaknesses when he knows that you like the little flowers on your plates because you think it classes up the place. So if he was crowded back into bed as soon as he dragged his concrete legs into the kitchen, well, only he, Neil, and the little blue flowers on their plates had to know.
Neil’s smirk said it all really.
“No one is allergic to snow, Andrew. It’s just water.”
Yeah, well no one asked his opinion anyway, the smelly motherfucker.
“I just got in from running, babe.”
Andrew didn’t know why Neil had the audacity to read his fucking mind .
“You’re speaking aloud.”
“This isn’t a goddamn preteen movie, Junkie.” Fucking Edward Cullen acting little bitch.
“I can still hear you, and I always saw myself as more of a Jasper, what with all the scars.”
“Fuck off out of my room.”
“You know, you’re the one that insisted we get a one bedroom apartment when we moved to Colorado. Something about the—”
“Don’t speak to me about the economy when I’m dying of a snow allergy.”
“Besides,” Andrew continued, “You’re next, what with this wind. If I’m sick then Mr. Run in the Wind is next.”
“December is Denver’s least windy month.”
“I will fucking —” a hellaciously loud sneeze interrupted his threat, but Neil’s grin says he knows how that sentence ended. Fucking good.
“Well, it has to be windy, because I’m cold.” Andrew was glaring at Neil from under all of the blankets they had in the apartment; a red scarf covering half of his face. “Check the windows, I feel a draft.”
Their building was less than two years old and was incredibly well insulated, but with the massive windows and high ceilings it would get Neil out of his hair for awhile. He’d have to borrow the super’s ladder to feel around the edge of each window.
He’s lying in bed, sweating through his chills because his body can’t decided if it’s hot or it’s cold, and he’s so exhausted, well and truly to the bone. The kind of exhausted that you can’t try and trick your body out of with insane amounts of caffeine and adderall. It isn’t his mind that was trapping him under the covers. It’s his useless body.
Neil comes in sometime between fever dreams to take his temperature.
Andrew tells him that he’s hotcold like a Carolina winter before he passes out again under the syrupy thick taste of grape. Grape isn’t a real flavor , he wants to tell Neil, but he forgets about manufacturers when the cold compress is pressed to the thinnest parts of his skin.
Neck, groin, armpits, forehead. Andrew feels like he’s bathing in starlight.
His scratchy, raw throat is keeping him just under the cusp of sleep, but it’s like Neil knows. He comes in while Andrew dreams, listless, and sprays bright cherry down his throat and he’s numb. Blissfully numb and he goes under.
When he wakes the shadows are all wrong and he croaks out Neil’s name, not expecting a response. The shadow is too tall and that means it’s Neil-is-gone o’clock.
But he’s there and his cool hands are on Andrew’s clammy forehead. Andrew chokes on the feeling that gets caught in his throat. Neil lifts him by his shoulders, giving him a sip of water because he doesn’t understand that Andrew isn’t someone that you take care of, period.
“Practice?” Andrew croaks like a frog that’s waiting to kiss a princess.
“I called in sick to stay with you. I didn’t go.”
Maybe Neil could be his princess.
“D’n do tha’” Andrew slurs through a haze of too much children’s tylenol because Neil knows that Andrew doesn’t like to take pills anymore.
“I’m going to go get you some NyQuil, you finished the bottle last week and you drank like all of the children’s stuff already.”
“‘M a growing boy.”
A sigh, maybe, but Andrew is under again.
A blast of cold hits him in the face and it’s enough to wake Andrew up swearing.
“Sorry,” Neil says, sheepish. “I need to bring down the fever.”
“I’m going to bring you down.” Is what Andrew tries to say, but the swallowed glass feeling is back and Andrew just wants to brain himself with something inconvenient. Like the weird fucking soup spoons Neil insisted they needed. Just scoop his brains right out of his head because he’s feeling inventive and festive.
Andrew only grunts in response, deciding that the cool air drying his sweat isn’t too terrible. He loses his brain somewhere between coldcoldcold and Neil covering his nose with a tissue and ordering him to blow, but it comes back online when Neil presses a kiss to his forehead and tells him he’s going out for medication.
He leaves in a hurry and Andrew knows that there is no way for Neil to read his mind, but Neil left the door open and Andrew doesn’t know how to tell the little voice in his head that is delirious with fever that he’s 28 now and hasn’t had to worry about doors left propped open in years.
He closes his eyes as if he could banish the image of a dark figure standing just in the shadows of the doorway before his brain registered it somehow. He’s breathing through his mouth because he’s congested and it sounds too much like the scared hyperventilating that he was so used to as a child that it isn’t too out of character for him to fight with his deadened limbs to kill or kick or just do something when the weight presses down on his legs so he can’t fight back and he’s small and bird-boned again and the mucus sliding down his throat like a river of hot lava chokes him and he almost doesn’t hear the pissed off meow over his own frantic noises.
His eyes flash open and down on the floor is a pacing King, her tail swishing out behind her as she contemplates the best way to get back on the bed. Andrew’s flailing only served to dislodge the cat, not the hands that haunt his darkest fever dreams.
Throwing her off the bed isn’t enough to deter her. Living with two owners with posttraumatic stress, she was used to becoming a projectile when her usually careful steps were too much for Neil or Andrew to handle. Legs are out so she lands with a soft sound of blankets on Andrew’s stomach. She curls around his neck like a too-fluffy scarf and Andrew would pick her up by the scruff of her neck and toss her out the window, but she’s too warm for him to argue with the kitty-loving.
Sir decides that she wants to join the party, too. The sleek, black cat worming her way under the covers, turning to put her head on the pillow like she’s a fucking person. Andrew’s goddamn cats are ridiculous, but he loved them so fucking much.
“I love you, you stupid fucking cats. If you tell him, I’ll skin you and eat you for dinner.”
“Tell who what?”
Neil is back, and by the grin on his face, he’d been there long enough to know just exactly what had just happened.
“Don’t speak to me,” Andrew harrumphs, blushing like a frostbitten tomato, all white and red.
Neil belly flops on the bed, careful to not dislodge the sleeping cat off his pillow.
“If you stay in here, you’re going to get sick.”
“I’d kiss your sick, ugly face knowing it would make me sick if it wouldn’t kill you since you can’t breathe through your nose.”
“You’re disgusting and I hate you.”
“Take your NyQuil and go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Andrew feels small and for a wild moment wants to ask Neil to confirm the truth of his words, but for a man whose very foundation had been a lie, there wasn’t a man Andrew trusted more in the world.
The NyQuil coats his tongue in a slimy, green feeling. It’s hot and it sinks into his belly and he’s finally warm in a way he hasn’t remembered being since he woke up sick. It swirls outward from the pit of his stomach, the tendrils warming his entire body as it goes.
Andrew reaches out one hand and gets a handful of black cat fur and the other gets a handful of Neil’s jacket. The only two things tethering Andrew to the earth. King stretches out on his neck, reminding him that there are three points keeping him rooted.
What had Neil told him all those years ago? There’s nothing more structurally sound than an equilateral triangle.
Andrew’s small family was the triangle that was keeping him balanced. He could drift safely.