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Zelos could probably count the times in his life that he’s been sick on his fingers.
The benefits of high-end living is that he has always had access to the best medical care in the world. Not to mention, he was less likely to be exposed to the bugs which commonly wracked the Meltokio slums or other similar areas. He didn’t live a sheltered life, per se, after his mother’s death, but he certainly never had to worry about the passing cold becoming fatal.
He suspects that his aversion to wintery weather has probably made him more susceptible to its effects, though. In their initial travels, it wasn’t so bad; while they stopped in Flanoir multiple times, they were never there for very long, and though the cold and the snow were less than pleasurable, they were tolerable. This time, however, it is just Zelos and Lloyd, and they have been stopping in cities for longer stretches of time in order to be as thorough in their journey as possible.
All that into account, it shouldn’t be any wonder when Zelos starts coughing.
Still, even when Lloyd asks if he’s okay, he brushes it off.
“I don’t get sick,” he insists. “It’s probably just something in the air.”
Lloyd lets it go, but he still seems to watch Zelos a little more closely after that.
Which turns out to be a good thing, because after a couple more days of restless sleep and incessant coughing, Zelos collapses during a battle with some monsters outside of Flanoir, and Lloyd is immediately covering him, taking care of the monsters on his own before turning to Zelos with a grimace.
“Are you okay?”
Zelos’s head pounds something fierce, but he looks up at his friend anyway and tries for a grin.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Let’s—”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have asked,” Lloyd grumbles. He puts a hand out for Zelos to grab on to. “Obviously, you’re not okay, so we’ll head back for now and you can get some rest. It’s pointless to press on if you’re too exhausted to do it.”
Zelos takes his hand, allowing Lloyd to pull him to his feet, but immediately stumbles as soon as Lloyd loosens his grip. He finds himself against Lloyd’s side, chest heaving as though he has been doing a great deal of work.
“It’s okay to rest,” Lloyd says, wrapping an arm around Zelos’s waist to keep him upright. “C’mon, let’s head back into town.”
Zelos can’t find it in him to complain, especially with the feeling of Lloyd’s hand at his waist, holding him close.
He wishes it was not at the forefront of his mind like this, but a part of him recalls the first time he remembers getting sick, just a child who wished for his mother’s attention but instead was tended to by a private and entirely impersonal nurse. He was just a kid, then, but even now…
No, it isn’t the same. His feelings for Lloyd aside, he isn’t some kid starved of basic human intimacy anymore. He’d like to be taken care of, sure, but that doesn’t mean he needs it.
Their journey back into the city is slow, but they make it to the inn in once piece. Back in their room, Lloyd drops their bag of items by one of the beds and then leads Zelos to the other, encouraging him to sit.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
Zelos would laugh, if his body didn’t choose that exact moment to dissolve into hacking coughs.
“Honestly?” he manages as it passes again. “I feel kinda shitty. Must be the cold or something.”
Indeed, it is very cold. Even removed from the snowy outdoors, his teeth chatter. With the absence of Lloyd’s body against his, he can only cross his arms tightly over his chest, trying to maintain even a bit of body heat.
“You don’t look so good,” Lloyd remarks.
Zelos scoffs at him. “I always look good, thank you very much.”
He only rolls his eyes at this. “Yeah, whatever. Let me check you for a fever, and then we can figure out what to do from there.”
Zelos shrugs, waiting to feel a hand at his forehead, but it does not come. Instead, he notices that Lloyd suddenly looks a little red in the face, and he seems to want to say something but doesn’t quite know how .
“...Lloyd?”
“Er, well, I don’t really know how to…” There is no doubt that he is embarrassed; his cheeks are more red than his shirt, Zelos thinks. “I do, I mean, just not the, uh, traditional way.”
“I have no idea what you’re trying to say,” Zelos mutters between coughs. “I don’t care if your methods are indirect. Just tell me if I’m burning up or not.”
He coughs again, then sits back and waits for whatever Lloyd is going to do. It comes more quickly than he was expecting; Lloyd leans forward, until his face is right above Zelos’s, and he presses his lips against Zelos’s forehead. Zelos’s heart stops beating for a moment, he swears, and then—
Lloyd pulls away, cheeks still quite red.
“You’re pretty warm,” he says. “I’ll see if we have anything that can help.”
Zelos can do nothing but stare helplessly after him as he scurries to the other side of the room, where he dropped the bag earlier.
Though he is cold and tired, the feeling of Lloyd’s lips against his forehead remains, deeply imbedded in his mind even as Lloyd returns to him with empty hands and a frown on his face.
“I think I’ll have to stop by the doctor’s,” he says. “Maybe you should try getting some sleep until I get back?”
Zelos takes a moment to register the words, and then nods. “Yeah, okay.”
Lloyd studies him briefly before stepping back towards the door again.
“I’ll be back,” he says as he opens it, and though an expression of gratitude sits on Zelos’s tongue, he finds he cannot force it out before Lloyd is gone and then there is nobody there to say it to anymore.
He lets out a sigh, but is shortly overwhelmed by coughs again. As it passes, he flops down on the bed and scowls up at the ceiling. The silence in the room is almost stifling, and though his ears ache with whatever the hell has gotten into his sinuses, the quiet rings painfully between his eardrums.
He has a feeling that Lloyd probably doesn’t have a lot of experience as a caretaker. It’s likely that his forehead kisses are not his only odd dwarven-learnt medical technique, after all, but Zelos isn’t sure that it really matters much either way. For his part, he’s more concerned about recovering quickly and getting out of this deplorable city once and for all.
As if it was bad enough that it’s so damn snowy… If this is what such weather does to one’s health, he’s glad that he has never stuck around for winter in Meltokio.
Eventually, the warmth offered by the inn’s bed and blankets is enough to pull the tides of restless sleep over him. It’s no different than the nights they have spent here already, waking up periodically with remnants of a dream or a memory swimming through his head, except for this:
He is freezing cold, yet covered in sweat, and even when his eyes open, the image of blood-stained snow does not disappear.
He inhales sharply, scrambling to sit up, and blinks firmly. His eyelids are seared with his mother’s dying face, and as he forces his eyes open again, he sees the same brown wall of Flanoir’s inn as before, no red in sight but for the strands of hair that fall around his face.
Letting out ragged breaths, he pulls his knees up close to his chest. His hands grip as his hair, holding the tresses tightly in hopes that the stinging of it will rid his chest of this feeling.
He screws his eyes shut again, tightly enough that whatever image was there before has begun to disappear, and now all there is are the words, words, just her—
“Zelos?”
His eyes fly open as a shocked gasp escapes his lips. It is quickly covered up by another bout of excruciating coughs, and when he is finally able to breathe again, he dares to look over at the other bed in the room, where Lloyd is sitting.
Lloyd’s eyes are masked with clear concern, noticeable even from this distance. Though they tremble slightly, Zelos lowers his hands, dropping them in his lap and willing his shoulders to relax.
“Sorry,” he says, voice scratchy as it leaves his sore throat. “I didn’t know you were back.”
“You were asleep, so I figured I’d just let you rest.” Lloyd reaches for something on the table beside his bed; as Zelos watches, he sees that it is some sort of potion, and Lloyd pours out a portion of it into a small cup. He stands and delivers it to Zelos, who takes it without a word.
“Not an instant cure or anything,” Lloyd says apologetically, “but at the very least, it should help you get better faster.”
Zelos eyes it carefully. “Will it help me sleep?”
“Dunno. It might.”
Zelos sighs, then knocks back the potion. It has a bitter taste, and he scrunches up his nose at it as he passes the cup back to Lloyd.
Lloyd is quiet for a moment as he sets the cup back on the table, but Zelos doesn’t doubt that there is something he wants to say.
Finally, he turns to Zelos again and asks, “Are you okay ? You know, if there’s something else bothering you—”
“You don’t need to worry.”
Lloyd falls silent, but he does not look happy about it.
“Thanks for looking out for me,” Zelos adds. Even to his own ears, his voice is painfully strained. “But...really. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be back on my feet soon, promise.”
“That’s not really what’s worrying me,” Lloyd says flatly.
Well, he never did beat around the bush.
Still…
Maybe he has shared his hideous past with Lloyd before—in this very city, what seems like forever ago now—but he has always tried his best to keep the nastier parts of it to himself. It’s something he has spent many years learning to do effectively, and the last thing he needs is for some stupid head cold to get the better of him now.
“I’ll be fine,” Zelos says again. “What time is it?”
Lloyd considers him a moment, then sighs and says, “It’s probably getting close to dinnertime. I don’t really know.”
Zelos nods, turning his gaze up to the ceiling and then—stopping.
Though he is sure he is awake, the brown above suddenly does not look like the same welcoming hue as it did before. Instead, there is red, crimson, like blood, like…
He blinks hard, but it does not go away.
It is not going away.
His heart hammers somewhere between his chest and his throat, even as he reminds himself that it’s not real.
...Probably.
He isn’t sure how long he sits there, staring and blinking, otherwise frozen by the dreams he thought he had left when he woke from his restless sleep, but it is Lloyd’s voice which eventually pulls him back:
“You can tell me if you need something, you know,” he’s saying. “That’s what I’m here for.”
Zelos often thinks that Lloyd does not realize quite how much he has already done for him since they met.
“Lloyd,” he says tightly.
“Yeah?’
“I’m not a—a kid, you know.”
Lloyd says nothing. Zelos still cannot tear his gaze away from the ceiling, but it is thankfully quite brown now, the same as it ever was.
“Do you think I’m treating you like one?” Lloyd finally asks.
“...I don’t know.”
“Okay.” Simple. Easy. “Well, it’s not childish to ask for help if you need it. It’s getting pretty late. I’ll get us something to eat, and then we can get some sleep, yeah?”
Zelos nods, but the sudden lump in his throat does not allow his voice to escape at all.
Lloyd seems to understand, though, and Zelos knows he is gone by the sound of the room door opening and then closing again.
He lets out a long sigh which quickly dissolves into coughs again. Once he has caught his breath, he finally drags his eyes away from the ceiling, down to his trembling fingers.
It is just because he’s sick, he reasons. He can think of only one other thing which has ever made these things occur outside of dreams—and has worsened the dreams as they, too—and that think is too much alcohol. In moderation, it can have the opposite effect; Zelos sort of suspects that may be the case here as well.
While he knows Lloyd means well, it is endlessly frustrating to be reduced to the same motherless child he was fifteen or so years ago, so torn up by the circumstances of Mylene’s death that even the weight of breathing felt terribly painstaking. This time, it is not her death which makes it hard to breathe, of course, but the feeling remains firmly in his chest.
A child, lost without his mother, reaching out for a frigid hand which he was never allowed to hold anyway.
By the time Lloyd returns, he has at the very least stopped shaking from anything but the cold. Still, he cannot rid his mind of the dreams, of her voice, of her blood…
“It’s not much,” Lloyd declares, coming to stand beside him again with a bowl of something steaming in his hands, “but you can at least rest easy knowing I’m not the one who made it.”
Zelos snorts, accepting the dish. “You’re not that bad of a cook, you know.”
Lloyd grimaces. “You only say that because you’ve seen Professor Sage cook.”
Well, that may be true. Zelos doubts there is anybody else in the worlds—world, now, he supposes—that can compete with Raine in that respect.
They eat together in silence. Not that Zelos eats a lot , though; Lloyd makes no remark on this, and Zelos is glad that he does.
Lloyd spends the next few hours going through their things. He’s far from the most organized person Zelos has met, but he seems to have his little systems, at least. Zelos has tried to get a grasp on Lloyd’s methods, but he can’t really say, himself, that he sees any order in them at all.
Zelos watches him for a while, but eventually finds himself dozing off again. At first, he is in and out, snapping out of sleep once in a while with a shiver down his spine or a cough caught in his throat. After some time, though, probably after Lloyd has gone to bed as well, he finds himself consumed by his exhaustion entirely.
The pleasant darkness of heavy sleep is limited, though.
His mother’s cool gaze. The snowman he had not quite finished, would never finish. Her hands, so far from his.
Her blood, the ugliest shade of red he has ever seen.
Her breathing, laboured, painful, dying—
You never should have been born .
The next time he wakes, his throat aches, and his eyes prick. The words chase through his head, over and over and over and—
“Zelos?”
He lets out three ragged breaths. It is beyond dark now, but there is no mistaking the voice.
“Lloyd?” he rasps back, sitting up a bit, and then… Footsteps, tired but certain, coming towards him.
And there is Lloyd, looking down on him in concern.
His mouth moves, but the words Zelos hears are not his own—
You never should have been born .
He stares at Lloyd, breathing hard. It is impossible to tell, so drenched in darkness, if any of this is even real at all. Maybe he is still asleep, maybe he—
“Zelos,” Lloyd says again, and it is real, definitely real. No dream could make Zelos feel as safe as Lloyd’s voice does.
Even still, he cannot bring himself to respond.
Instead, he reaches a feeble hand out for Lloyd, who takes it without question. It is warm. So warm.
“Bad dream?” Lloyd asks, and these are his words, undoubtedly, not something pulled out of Zelos’s sick-tired psyche. They are warm, caring, sincere…
Zelos grips his hand a little tighter.
“Yeah,” he finally manages. “Are you—?”
But Lloyd doesn’t seem to be listening anymore. He puts a knee up on Zelos’s bed, then urges him to move over.
“Wh-what are you doing?” Zelos demands, even as he scoots to the side to allow Lloyd room.
“I used to sleep bad when I was sick, too,” Lloyd says quietly. “But having someone near helped.”
“You’ll get sick, too, idiot.”
“Doesn’t matter. If you really don’t think it’ll help—”
“I never said that,” Zelos mutters. Their hands are still locked together, spreading warmth through his body.
“Good.” Lloyd stops, yawning, and then rests his head against the pillow, eyes fluttering closed again. Within seconds, he is snoring gently, and Zelos can only watch him, heart hammering in his chest.
No, Zelos doesn’t always understand Lloyd’s methods. They’re a little strange, almost always surprising, and yet…
They work, no matter how crazy they seem.
His breathing evens out again, and he falls back against the bed too. It is not big enough for the two of them by any means, but Zelos cannot say he minds the closeness.
When he falls asleep this time, he does not feel cold at all.
For the first time since coming to Flanoir, he does not even dream.