Work Text:
Adam feels... weird.
Not like when he wakes with anxiety itching under his skin, and not like when he’s on the brink of a cold. It’s not weird like those first months adjusting to his deafness, and it’s not like Cabeswater whispering through his bones.
It’s just...weird. Off. Uncomfortable.
It started on the drive home. The shitbox broke down again right before finals, and Adam hadn’t had any time to play around with it, and really didn’t want to waste time after finals trying to figure out what needed fixing and how he could fix it on his very tight budget. So he called Ronan, who greeted any chance to drive for hours straight with such genuine enthusiasm it was as if Adam had given him an early Christmas gift.
He thought, at first, that the weirdness was car sickness. But it never went away: they got to the Barns near 10pm, Adam fell asleep almost immediately, and then woke up this morning with the same feeling. Maybe even worse off than he was before. He’s pretty sure car sickness is supposed to stop once you, you know, get out of the car. But he’s never gotten it before, so he could be wrong.
Ronan is out doing “farm boy shit” when Adam wakes up on day 1 of winter break, a little groggy and a little queasy and a little achy.
He nibbles at the crust of an untoasted piece of Wonder Bread; he’s felt sick from hunger before, and he doesn’t think that’s what this is, but he figures it’s worth a shot.
Three bites into the slice and his mouth won’t open anymore. Guess that’s a sign, then.
He chugs a glass of water, in case his stomach’s weird tightening and the light ache at the back of his head are just from dehydration, or anything else. Water has been his cure-all since childhood. Because if you can make yourself feel better with a glass of water and prevent your dad from calling you a “pathetic piece of shit” who needs to “stop your whinin and get your ass outta bed” so you can “go do some goddamn hard work like the rest of us, you ungrateful, disrespectful, fucking freeloader,” then you do so.
But the water doesn’t do shit expect sit in his stomach like liquid lead.
So he decides to do nothing. Ronan comes back, showers, chugs another cup of coffee, and asks Adam, “what’s the fucking plan?”
“Dunno. Don’t care,” Adam shrugs from the couch.
Ronan gives him a look, but doesn’t say anything more. Instead, he grabs a game controller and heaves himself into the seat beside him.
Adam lays his head in Ronan’s lap, eyes scrunched shut against the increasingly uncomfortable and all-consuming mystery feeling. Ronan plays his video game, flicking the controls and mumbling curses under his breath every so often. After each match, he cards his fingers through Adam’s hair.
“The fuck is up with you?” he asks after Adam has spent an unprecedented thirty minutes lying prone without so much as a twitch towards doing anything productive.
Adam grunts, sort of shrugs. “I feel weird.”
“Weird?”
“Mhm.”
Ronan scratches Adam’s scalp once more before his hand has to return to the controller so his Lucario can decimate some 10-year-old’s Donkey Kong. He adjusts his legs and it feels like Adam’s been thrown onto a ship in the middle of a storm.
“Quit,” he moans, Henrietta drawl on full display.
“My fucking leg fell asleep, calm your shit.”
Adam glares. Ronan quirks a brow. “If you’re pissed about it then move your face.”
“No,” Adam whines.
“Then shut up,” he snaps back, and then lets loose a long string of expletives as Donkey Kong throws him off the platform.
Usually, the rumble of Ronan’s voice and his incessant, poetic cursing does something... nice to Adam’s stomach. Stronger than butterflies, but he wouldn’t go so far as to call it a turn-on (which might just be denial, but whatever it’s not the worse thing he’s ever repressed.) Right now, however, he’s desperate for quiet. The click-click-clicking of the controller is hitting his head at a weird, dizzying angle. His skin feels clammy. His mouth is dry. No, not dry, because if he were actually thirsty the thought of drinking water wouldn’t make his throat close up. Actually, the thought of putting anything at all into his body does the same thing.
Out of nowhere, Adam suddenly remembers the taste of off-brand Spaghettios he used to eat for dinner when he was a kid. Thick, fake tomato taste and texture, half burnt and half undercooked. Rubbery noodles. Hot dog chunks.
His stomach churns.
He’s gone from weird to uncomfortably ill, all within the seven minutes it’s taken Ronan to hand his opponent their ass.
He can feel the moment the color drains from his face. He can’t get the memory of those Spaghettios out of his mouth. It’s curdling his stomach, tightening his throat, and he’s clenching his teeth against the rocking, the dizziness, the nausea until--
A sirens screams out from the TV. A new foe has appeared!
Adam rips himself from Ronan’s lap mid-comb.
“Parrish?” Ronan says with his hands up in surprise, but if Adam opens his mouth he genuinely doesn’t know what will come out of it.
He barely makes it to the bathroom before his stomach completely revolts and ejects everything it possibly can into the toilet, and then keep going because apparently it doesn’t want stomach acid in it anymore, either, which is a problem given that it’s, well, a stomach .
Eventually it decides that it’s done, leaving Adam sweaty and shaky and feeling absolutely awful and embarrassed in the way only vomiting in your boyfriend’s childhood home bathroom can make you feel. Which is to say, completely mortified.
But he also feels like total shit. And feeling like total shit definitely outweighs everything else. So he's going to focus on that instead and hope Ronan does the same.
Ronan’s standing in the doorway by the time Adam is rising his mouth out.
“Who’d you get?” Adam manages to say. He’s trying to play it cool, but even he has to admit it’s sort of a lost cause give that he’s pale as a goddamn ghost and his eyes are still tearing.
“Wii Fit Trainer,” Ronan says, and Adam has never appreciated Ronan’s willingness to play along more than he does right now. “You okay?”
“If I say yes, would you fight me on it?”
“I might.”
“Then no, I’m not okay.” He shuffles over to the door, stands hunched and shivering in front of Ronan.
“Think it was something you ate?” Ronan asks, using the hand not holder the controller to feel Adam’s clammy forehead.
Now he’s thinking about those goddamn Spaghettios again. He swallows that down as best he can, grimaces at the taste of bile still stuck in his throat, and shakes his head.
Ronan’s brow furrows. “Wait, when was the last time you ate something?”
There’s a long pause.
“You know what, if you have to think that long, you need to eat something.”
“I really don’t want to do that right now,” Adam says.
“Might be why you puked.”
“Might also make me puke again.”
“Can you just fucking try it?”
Adam physically cannot protest at this moment, so he’s forced to “try it.” Ronan gives him a sleeve of crackers and a glass of water, and watches him while he nibbles through a couple saltines.
“If you keep it down, then we’ll know what the problem was,” he says.
Adam doesn’t.
Exactly twenty minutes later, the saltines and the water are back outside of his body in a significantly less appetizing form.
“Well, fuck,” is the closest Ronan will ever come to saying he was wrong. Adam gives him the middle finger in between heaves, which is the closest he can come to saying “I fucking told you so” right now.
Two puking sessions in under an hour leave Adam exhausted and trembling and starting to hate the antiseptic burn of mouthwash.
“Go upstairs and lie down for a bit,” Ronan says. “Sleep it off, or something.”
He tucks himself into Ronan’s bed, while Ronan grabs water, gatorade, and a trash can for him, “you know, just in case. I don’t wanna clean your puke up off my floor.”
It’s a smart call, because another thirty minutes of napping and Adam’s stomach is heaving again. And he now has a fever, which means he’s officially got the stomach flu.
“Fuck,” he rasps, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “That hurt.”
“Need anything?” Ronan asks from the doorway, stepping far out of the way when Adam stumbles back to the bed.
Adam makes a noise. “Just sleep,” he mumbles, cocooning himself back under the blankets.
Except his stomach will not cooperate. Every thirty minutes, almost frighteningly exact, Adam wakes up from whatever feverish half-sleep he’s been in to his body feeling like he’s been reading in a rocking chair in a car driving dangerously fast down the twisting, turning back roads of the Blue Ridge, and then his stomach is desperately trying to exorcise itself from his body, because at this point there’s literally nothing else left to purge.
It goes on for hours. Sometimes Ronan is there, rubbing his back as he kneels, shaking, on the bathroom floor. Most of the time he’s alone--which he’s thankful for, because he’d rather not have someone watching him dry-heave. It makes him self-conscious. And he’d really rather not BOGO being violently ill and self-conscious right now.
Those times, Ronan waits by the bed, brow creasing further and further with each passing hour.
Adam tries to drink gatorade, tries to get some water down, but at some point he realizes it’s a Sisyphean cycle and anything he consumes will be ejected promptly afterwards, so there’s literally no fucking point.
“I get it, I really fucking do, but you have to at least fucking try to get some water in you,” Ronan says during hour 4 of this hell.
“Gonna puke it back up. Doesn’t matter,” Adam mumbles, nearly falling back into bed after yet another episode.
“I know, I know, but something from it will keep and it’ll prevent you from dying, so take a fucking sip.”
Adam moans like a child on the brink of a temper tantrum.
Ronan takes a deep breath, cools the insta-rage he feels whenever anything or anyone is being difficult, and brushes Adam’s sticky, sweaty hair from his overheating forehead. Adam screws his eyes shut and trembles beneath the top sheet.
“I know this sucks, and I know you’re fucking miserable right now,” Ronan says gently. “But can you please do this one thing for me? I promise, fucking swear on my life, it will help. Maybe not right now, but it will, okay?”
And Adam is so, so tired and feels so fucking awful that Ronan “I’ll Fuck You Up” Lynch begging him to drink water almost makes him cry. So he takes a few sips, grimaces with how it scrapes against his acid-burned throat, and curls back up until his next vomiting episode (scheduled to begin in 24 minutes.)
Being this weak and helpless and at the mercy of his heaving stomach is honestly humiliating. But he can’t think about that right now. Because he has to puke again.
By hour 5, his throat is rawer than road rash. His eyes are sore and prickling from too much saline. He made the mistake of glancing at himself in the mirror and Christ he’s seen corpses-- literal corpses-- that look better than him.
By hour 6, Adam’s entire body aches, from the muscle spasms of dry-heaving to how tightly he has to wrap his body in the fetal position in order to sleep once he’s back shivering in bed. It’s like his body is trying to purge his organs, or his pride, or his soul. Maybe all of the above.
By hour 7, he has no energy left, nothing left anywhere at all, yet his body keeps trying and trying to get something out. Something that isn’t there anymore. Something that hasn’t been there for hours.
He really wishes his stomach would know when to give up.
By hour 8, Adam accepts that he will most likely die on this bathroom floor.
By hour 9, Adam has forgotten what life was like when he didn’t puke every half hour. Did he have friends? Hobbies? Hopes and dreams? He doesn’t remember. He’s nothing more than a husk, now. A shadow of a human being. Was this what Noah felt like? When the end of the quest drew near?
Only Ronan remains from his previous life.
He’s glad for that. He’s glad Ronan is here. Ronan, who’s whispering gentle condolences. Ronan, who’s laying a cold cloth against his burning forehead as he tumbles back into restless sleep. Ronan, who caresses Adam’s white-knuckle fistfuls of blanket until they relax and hold his hand instead. Ronan, who doesn’t care how contagious he his, or how gross he is, or how downright difficult he is right now. Ronan, who doesn't give a shit that Adam has resigned himself to Death’s sweet embrace, refuses to let him die in his bed in a pool of his own vomit, so “drink the goddamn water, you defeatist mother fucker.”
By hour 10, he wonders at what point he’d need to seek medical attention. Ronan, hopefully, knows the answer to that.
But it never gets to that point. Because at hour 10 and a half, Adam falls asleep. And he stays asleep.
######
He wakes up, bleary-eyed and so horribly weak, but different. No longer weird. He thinks about food, and it doesn’t send him reaching for the trash can.
It’s dark out. He has no idea what time it is. Doesn’t really want to know, because he’d rather not calculate his suffering right now.
When he rolls over, Ronan is sitting in the chair in the corner, playing with some dream object puzzle. He looks up when the blankets rustle.
“Gotta puke again?” he asks, and it’s said with such honest nonchalance that Adam wonders exactly how many times he’s asked that today.
Adam shakes his head. Relief washes across Ronan’s expression immediately.
“Christ, Adam,” he admits, sagging into the chair and running a hand over his fresh buzzcut. “That freaked me the fuck out. Thought I was gonna have to take you to the hospital or some shit, get you an IV.”
“Sorry,” Adam whispers, because his voice can’t do anything stronger than that right now.
Ronan shakes his head, and comes to kneel at the bedside. He smells like bleach and anesthetic. Like a hospital. Or like he’s been cleaning bathrooms for hours.
Ronan runs his fingers gently through Adam’s hair, delicately peels apart the sweat-dried strands. Adam intertwines his fingers with Ronan’s free hand.
“Gatorade? I switched to a new flavor. Figured you wouldn’t want to drink the same thing you puked up,” Ronan says. With that reassurance, Adam nods. This is the true test. If he can keep this down, then the nightmare is over.
Adam sits up on a trembling arm. He has no calories left to burn, didn’t really have anything to burn to begin with, so he is deep into the negative reserves at this point. It will probably be a solid couple of days before he’s back to normal.
He sips the Glacial Freeze quietly, and, feeling quite brave, he slowly eats a cracker and a half.
"If you can get up, I can change these gross-ass plague sheets," Ronan says.
Adam nods and hobbles to the chair. He thinks, briefly, about showering, but standing takes herculean effort right now, and frankly he doesn't have the energy to give a shit about how gross he is. Besides, Ronan has now watched him throw up at least twenty times, and there's that whole "we all almost died that one time" thing, so it's not like there's any sort of dignity or pretense left between them.
Saltines and teaspoons of gatorade only give him a few extra minutes of energy. He's back in bed with new, clean sheets before he can’t sit up anymore.
“It’s late,” Ronan whispers, and places a kiss just beneath Adam’s ear. “Sleep the rest of this shit off, okay?”
Adam’s hand tightens around Ronan’s. “Can you stay? Please?”
“‘Course I can." Ronan climbs over Adam, extra careful not to jostle him. He won’t sleep, Adam knows that much. But feeling his weight beside him, heavy and strong, is a special kind of comfort. The kind he, for a long while, didn’t think he deserved, or didn’t think he was allowed to indulge. Even now, he’ll catch himself thinking he’s not allowed, thinking he hasn’t earned it. It’s a privilege to be loved and cared for.
Right now, though, he’s exhausted, weak, a little cold, a lot wrung out. He doesn’t think he needs to earn it. Ronan clearly doesn’t, either, the way he’s carding his fingers through Adam’s objectively gross, unwashed hair and leaving featherlight kisses along shoulders that probably taste like dried fever sweat.
He’s a person. A person who just threw up way too much for way too long. He deserves this, this comfort of being loved and cared for. And even if he hadn’t just suffered through a ten-hour long stomach exorcism, even if he’d just spent the day lazing around, enjoying his vacation, watching Ronan play Smash Ultimate, feeding cows: he’d still deserve it.
Will he remember that eleven hours from now when he wakes up again? Probably not. But for now, he falls asleep with the comfort of knowing that he is loved, that he is cared for, and, most importantly, that he never has to eat Spaghettios ever again.