Work Text:
Dave shook, his body paralytic in rictus formation, upturned into a full-limb grimace on the couch of a stuffy apartment in Houston. It was a cold winter day, with a surprisingly light sprinkle of snow outside the window - both surprising for the fact that there was snow at all, and that it was only perhaps a light sprinkling. That, however, didn't stop Dave, yesterday-soaked from an incoming rainstorm, from feeling like he was on fire. Perhaps he had been hasty when he ran outside to his car to get his wallet that he had forgotten, since it wasn't like he used it for anything in the intervening now and then, and all he had gotten in return was sick. Unfortunately for Dave, he was also very stupid sometimes, which was why he forgot his umbrella in the car yesterday too, and forgot to bring it back with him. And now, we are at today.
Dave's body was covered with a thin blanket that his brother was willing to toss over him while he was sleeping. He hadn't lived with the man for years, since he had moved out some time ago, but he was willing to come over and offer some aide in his packed schedule of filming potentially ironic muppet pornography or whatever it was he did now (VTubering, that was what it was, but Dave had forgotten). The coffee table in front of the couch was packed with all the essentials: a bag of Doritos, family sized, pecked at when he felt the need to reach out for it, a bottle of Sprite, one of those premade bowls of Campbell's soup that you just threw in the microwave half-eaten and lukewarm. The array of medication was as wide as it was amusing. Doxylamine succinate, acetaminophine, dextromethorphan, all of those three things combined in the form of NyQuil, DayQuil, AfternoonQuil (another bottle of Sprite), a bottle of ritalin, five different kinds of headache medicine besides the other ones, and a bag of cherry flavored cough drops, and then also another bag of honey-cherry flavored cough drops, and finally a bag of honey-mint-cherry flavored cough drops, and then finally for real a bag of honey-mint-cherry flavored cough drops with a dollop of cough syrup in the center.
Suffice to say, Dave was loaded. Not in the monetary sense, although, in a sense, that was true, but in the medical sense. He was ready to weather this shit. He had his favorite movies playing in an endless, drowsy, incoherent loop on the television, although whether that was from him being ill or him editing the files, he wasn't exactly sure. It was possible, probable, even, that both were true. Thankfully and against Jade Harley's better wishes, there was an app on his phone that let him control his fancy new air conditioning from his phone, which meant he could blast his face with all the wintery chill that the AC was willing to muster when he felt hot, like right now, curled up into a small ball on the couch and awkwardly crumpled into the biggest fanciest pillow he had. It was not a pillow meant for laying on, or even relaxing on, but for admiring and showing off to dinner guests uncomfortably crammed into his childhood home in a way deliberately meant to make them feel weird for inviting themselves in to watch Dave's newest cinematic masterpiece.
What bitter irony, then, that Dave would end up its biggest victim. His ear was not sitting right on his head, and he scrumpled his face into a little ball as he adjusted his position on his pillow, over and over again, trying to let his eyes shut tight. He reached out, blindly groping for the coffee table, and knocked over the NyQuil in such a way that it miraculously fell, bobbled up for a moment, and then continued falling until it tumbled all the way off the table. This elicited a very loud cuss, followed by a series of rapid coughs, from Dave, who settled for grabbing the rest of the soup from the bowl and very rudely slurping it. Thankfully, nobody was around to be offended by his poor table manners, and he tossed the plastic bowl and its accompanying spoon, now devoid of nutrition, into an open trashbag nearby with a very weak "Kobe!"