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He’s been trying and failing to hide it for a couple days now. The steady tightening of his chest, an ache at the base of his skull that just won’t budge. It’s not a headache, exactly. There’s nothing he would classify as actual pain, just a heaviness that slows his processing and makes the bed seem a really appealing place to be the moment the sun dips below the horizon.
Tasha keeps shooting him questioning looks, but he’s trying to avoid admitting that this is definitely not going away with persistent denial. As a medical plan, that one rarely works out for him, but that hasn’t stopped it from being the first one he goes to every time.
They’re walking out of class when his breath catches in his chest and he spends an embarrassing several minutes coughing hard enough to see stars. Damn cough syrup and its 6-hour dosing schedule. Never works the whole time and taking it too early makes him feel like he’s back in hospital post-IED with the fuzzy chemical grogginess that he will never understand Tasha’s love for.
There’s a slim hand on his back, patting him like an overgrown parody of a toddler and when he can breathe again he fully intends to tell her he’s just fine. Instead he gags on a sudden glob of sticky mucus in the back of his throat and barely manages to avoid hurling in a hallway packed with students.
“How does home sound?” Tasha asks him when he’s back in control of his lungs and his gag reflex.
His throat feel like someone has taken a blowtorch to it, so he just nods.
The ride home is awful. Tasha digs a grocery sack from the console and hands it to him the second time he has to gulp back a tide of slimy stomach contents. “Emergencies only, got it? You think you’re going to hurl, you tell me and I’ll pull over.”
Her bedside manner leaves much to be desired, but Steve has the market cornered on hovering concern so it’s almost refreshing to be the target of Tasha’s version.
He gets his feet planted on the parking lot surface and his body facing out of the car before he loses the fight against his snot filled stomach.
“Gross,” Tasha comments when he’s finished choking up what feels like a gallon of stringy, bile tinted goo.
“Yeah, that,” he replies, taking the offered shoulder to push himself up onto his feet and stumbles into the apartment he shares with Steve.
Tasha points him to the threadbare couch and he drops into the saggy cushions with more relief than should ever be associated with a piece of furniture last in good condition during the Nixon administration. A pillow appears near his head and Tasha glares at him until he drops his head to it, stretching his legs out and trying hard not to be a ridiculous sap when she tosses a blanket over him. There’s a crinkle of plastic as a trash bin appears near his head.
“I am not cleaning your carpet,” Tasha tells him, but the hand she brushes his hair off his face with is soft and gentle.
He doesn’t intend to go to sleep, but he wakes with a start when she puts a hand on his shoulder. Tasha and Steve are the only people who aren’t weird about touching the side where his prosthetic attaches below his elbow. It’s comforting, to know that at least they don’t treat him like a robot.
“Hey,” she says. “You can go back to sleep in a minute. I have tea for you. Might help break up the funk a bit so you can breathe. You’re snoring like Rip van Winkle there.”
He nods, pushes himself up to sit fully and takes the warm mug from her. It’s the strong oolong they both prefer, and he can just barely taste the sweetness from the jam she adds to it. She told him once, when they were kids, that she recalled some elder relative doing so and that it just felt right. He sips at it until the mug is empty and she takes it away. His head is back on the pillow and eyes drifting shut almost immediately. He can hear Tasha’s voice in the kitchen, telling Steve over the phone that he’s sick but she’s got him and would he please pick up some more tea on his way home that evening.