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The world has tilted on its axis. It might as well be a skies-falling, civilians-screaming, apocalypse event because Tony is just about as prepared to deal with all of that as he is with this. Because Rhodey is sick. And James Rupert Rhodes is never sick. Never has been, at least as far as the semester and a half that Tony has known him for go. Not even during the difficult adjustment period when it seemed like half the freshman class was down every other week with stubborn colds and stomach flus and all the other little woes that come with adjusting to a new place with new routines and new germs.
This is just…this is just weird.
Rhodey lies sprawled on the bed on his side of the dorm room, one arm thrown over his eyes to block the last of the fading afternoon sunlight and the other straining to reach the box of tissues perched on the corner of their shared nightstand. There’s a prolonged sniffle that rattles with something wet and unpleasant, followed by raspy cough as Rhodey finally gives in and rolls onto his side to snag a Kleenex. Tony winces as he honks into it.
“You’re gonna keep that on your side of the place, right? Right? Because I don’t want to get sick.” Tony schools the worry that might otherwise have crept onto his face and saunters into the room to crouch down to Rhodey’s eye-level, but with a solid couple of feet of buffer zone between them. “Can I get you one of those surgical masks? A nice chaser of hand sanitizer?”
“You can get me some peace and quiet, that’s what you can get me,” Rhodey croaks back, leveling Tony with a glower too bleary-eyed to be taken seriously. Tony snorts as he nudges the tissue box a few inches down the edge of the table for easier reach.
“Where’d this come from? You were all good this morning.”
“No, you were too hungover to notice me sneezing my socks off this morning—it’s not a new thing.” It’s matter-of-fact rather than accusatory, but Tony frowns anyway, a pang of what might or might not be guilt prickling in his chest. He had been hungover, still nursing the consequences of the party Rhodey had hauled him home from—had seen him home safely from, had steered him to bed after, had poured a few glasses of water down his throat after because Rhodey is always the one looking after him—the night before when Rhodey took off for his morning classes. If Rhodey had been sick earlier—or even yesterday, for that matter—odds were he wouldn’t have seen it.
“Huh. Well, I’m not sleeping in here with you. You snore when you’re congested.”
“Tough luck.” Rhodey goes narrow-eyed again as Tony stands back up. “Because I’m not goin’ anywhere.”
“Oh, I wasn’t planning on kicking you out—”
“Good, because that ain’t a fight you’d win.”
“—I just meant that I’m going out,” Tony says, already half-way back to the door. Whatever Rhodey shouts in retort is lost behind the door that Tony pulls shut behind him, but there’s enough resignation in his voice to leak through the plywood. A note of disappointment…but not surprise.
Surprise is quite evident, however, when Tony returns half an hour later to upend a sack of drugstore purchases over a dozing Rhodey’s feet and then retreat to his desk, pulling down textbooks and half-finished lines of code to keep him busy throughout the night.
“Tony, what are you—?” Rhodey blinks at him as he pushes back the cocoon of blankets he’s buried himself in enough to investigate the small mountain of cold medicines and pain relievers and everything else that happened to be on the shelf labeled “Cold and Flu.” Tony is nothing if not thorough.
“Said I wasn’t sleeping in here with you,” Tony says, flippant as he wings a final package of cough drops across the gap between the beds. “Didn’t say I wasn’t gonna be here.”
Because if Rhodey is going to be there for him day in and day out, well…Tony owes him at least one night.
“Tony—” Rhodey’s voice goes a little softer, a little quieter in the way it always does when Tony manages to surprise him with a move that’s more human than socialite.
“Ah, ah, ah—don’t make a thing out of it.” Tony keeps his attention resolutely pinned on the schematic notebooks he’s unearthing from the pile of projects shoved beneath his bed. He’s not going to look over there. He’s not. The air is too sappy as it is. “A man can take a night to get some work done without it being an event.”
Rhodey gives him a long, knowing look — he can feel it on him even if he can’t see it — of the sort that used to make Tony bristle with the knowledge that he was being seen right through, but which he’s slowly become accustomed to and smiles.
“Sure, Tones.”