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Tuesday morning—Ushijima wakes up five minutes before his alarm rings, turns it off, and nudges Oikawa lightly. A grunt, singular. Silence, peaceful.
Satisfied, he shuffles to the bathroom to wash up. He showers and changes, heats up last night’s rice while brushing his teeth. Has a moment of mild panic when he drops shaving cream into the frying pan with an oddly morbid sizzle, fumbling before he remembers he can put his razor down and then head to the sink.
At eight o’clock sharp, he goes back into the bedroom to wake Oikawa up for his nine thirty class. Oikawa’s formed a cocoon around himself with the bed sheets; Ushijima uses his rudimentary knowledge of human anatomy to infer where the side of Oikawa’s abdomen is located, and gives him a gently forceful jab. There is a small noise. Oikawa does not un-cocoon himself.
“I made eggs,” Ushijima tries. “With the yolks runny, so there is no cause for complaint.” Despite the attempt, Oikawa does not budge. Ushijima, more than a little forlornly—and also wistfully, for the days he could delve wholehearted into the morning news and leave his eggs to burn—wonders why.
He reaches out to give the lumpy bundle that is Oikawa a more forceful shake. This time, Oikawa reacts, turns around so that the small hole he’s left for breathing faces upwards. His face is red and blotchy and more tired than seven hours of perfectly decent sleep could ever warrant. “It’s cold,” Oikawa complains, words hoarse and sandpaper-y, sawn off roughly at the edges.
“Uh,” Ushijima replies, contemplates Oikawa’s sniffling, and goes to the bathroom to look for the thermometer under the sink.
Oikawa registers neatly at thirty eight and a half degrees. Despite being promptly informed of this, he refuses to unbundle himself from the sheets, even when the fan is turned off and the windows are opened and a dead leaf breezes in and tangles in his hair. Ushijima, who has accessed the Yahoo search function and is fervently reading about the dangers of excess blankets to a fever patient, begins to have a moment of what he later deems mild hysteria.
He concludes that fighting against Oikawa’s instinctive physiological reactions is, at the moment, less imperative than simply working around it, so he picks Oikawa up, swaddled in the epicentre of a wad of blankets, and tries to carry him to the neighbourhood clinic.
Oikawa gets over the imminent loss of his voice long enough to scream bloody murder.
“A waste of time,” Oikawa hisses, tries to untangle a leg out of the sheets to kick Ushijima in the face. “And money. And my dignity—is that your goal, huh, to embarrass me in front of this whole apartment building—”
“We don’t have any medicine at home,” Ushijima explains evenly. They’re halfway down the second flight of stairs, and his nose has had three narrow escapes. “And it would be better for the both of us if you didn’t die.”
“Then go and buy some!”
“I appreciate you alive.”
“It’s the common cold!” With a howl, Oikawa wrestles his arm out and elbows Ushijima in the chin. “I swear to God, you carry me out of this building, and I will never touch your dick again for the rest of my life. Never ever ever, until I’m dead and buried and gone—”
Ushijima stops. And then doubles back around.
He leaves Oikawa’s mobile phone, a box of tissues and a glass of water on their bed side table. “If there’s an emergency, or if your symptoms worsen suddenly, call me,” he tells Oikawa before he goes. Oikawa, whose blankets have been confiscated, is curled up in a ball, conserving body heat while simultaneously sulking over recent injustices committed towards his person, and only pokes his head out from under the covers to stick his tongue out at Ushijima.
A violent fit of coughing ensues. Ushijima deeply reconsiders his decision to leave the house.
At the corner store, he stands in front of the shelf and squints at the labels for so long that the cashier begins to stare at him (Ushijima notices and stares back, bemused, until the cashier turns away). There’re only three boxes of the fever medication he’s looking for, and he grabs them as well as a whole stack of cooling anti-fever pads—the type marketed at children, so that he can apply them on Oikawa’s forehead whenever Oikawa begins to whine or pout, and then he can look at the cute animal patterns and have a good laugh about it to himself in private. A hearty, loose guffaw in the place of runny eggs; a promising idea.
When he returns, Oikawa is still sick and miserable, but he’s crawled his way out of his resentful funk to be sick and miserable on their couch. He doesn’t look up from his Taiwanese drama serial even when the door opens, but Ushijima notices that he’s remembered to bring his phone and glass out to the living room, and is inordinately pleased.
“I’m going to make porridge,” Ushijima announces, heading to the kitchen. “Once you eat, you can take medicine.”
“I don’t remember my mother accompanying me to Tokyo,” Oikawa mutters. When Ushijima ignores him in favour of turning on the stove, he makes an attempt at raising his voice. He sounds a little bit like what Ushijima imagines the aliens he is so obsessed with might sound like, raspy and inhuman. Ushijima decides against pointing this out. “Don’t you have class? Oh, wait, no, don’t answer that—you’re going to give me a stupid reply, like ‘I’m skipping to take care of you’—”
Ushijima blinks. “I’m skipping to take care of you.”
“I don’t remember moving in with an idiot either,” Oikawa complains, ends the sentence with an ugly cough. He struggles into a sitting position, forgets the tissue box on the coffee table, and blows his nose using his shirt. “If you skip class, you’re going to fail. And then you’re going to have to drop out, penniless and hopeless, spending the rest of your life living off of my hard toil and labour. That is unattractive.”
"Your throat is going to hurt if you keep on talking."
Oikawa sniffs. “Since you’re trying out at the nurse act and all, you really should go all the way, you know. Feed me sweet, delicious fruit by hand. Daintily wipe the juice off my chin. Uniform and nursing cap. The works.”
“Finding one in my size might be a test of resourcefulness, even for you.” Ushijima stirs the pot. Pauses. "And, maybe."
Oikawa stares, and then the switch flicks on and he brightens—nose red, eyebags shadowy and lips pressed together, trembling, "how unusual, pro volleyball stardom hasn't whittled away your generosity at all, Ushiwaka!" and Ushijima's ears feel warm, maybe he's caught the bug, maybe he wants to kiss Oikawa, childishness and germs and all—
Later, Oikawa eats the whole bowl of porridge, even the spring onions, and Ushijima doesn’t complain when he falls asleep on his lap. Lets him. Ushijima’s is a different sort of sickness.