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The first day, Feuilly thinks that it’s just the start of the really cold days of winter getting to him. He hasn’t been sick in years (or at least, not sick enough to do anything), and he might be out of the habit of it, because he ignores the fact that he feels colder than is usual for this time of the year, and steadfastly refuses to think about the fact that his forehead feels hot.
The third day, he goes to the planned meeting at the Musain, and sits next to Joly, which is a mistake.
Or rather, it’s fine at first—the illness that Feuilly still won’t admit to seems to be less severe in the evenings, so he can at least hide it, but when he coughs and doesn’t manage to completely muffle it in his handkerchief, Joly looks at him with a mixture of concern and accusation.
“Are you sick?”
Feuilly swallows back a cough. “I’m fine.”
Joly peers at him. “Really?”
Feuilly’s eyes are watering from not coughing. “Absolu—”
Frighteningly enough, Joly doesn’t look any less cheerful at the fact that Feuilly has just proven himself to not be absolutely healthy.
Instead, he grins. “Some of the other students have caught the ‘flu, you know. I think it’s going ‘round.”
Feuilly, tightens his scarf. “I’m sorry for them, but I don’t have the ‘flu. It’s just the cold making my nose run—it gives me a cough.”
Joly leans forward, examines Feuilly’s nose. Feuilly fights the urge to cover it with his hand, and—when he feels another cough coming on—puts it up anyway.
Joly looks disappointed. “I need to see your face if you want me to make any kind of diagnosis.”
Feuilly imagines Joly going through the list of what he usually diagnoses himself with when he coughs to try to fit something that fits Feuilly’s symptoms. Given that Joly’s self-diagnoses are usually tuberculosis, pneumonia, or influenza, (in that order), Feuilly doesn’t feel hopeful for his continued existence as someone who is very sure that they are not sick, thank you very much.
Distraction, he decided. He’ll try to distract Joly with something else, and then he’ll go home, and sleep off the cold he doesn’t have.
“No! I just need a new scarf,” Feuilly explains. “I’m not sick.”
He realizes that his distraction was too effective as soon as Joly’s face shifts from ‘abstract concern’ to ‘concrete concern with a plan.’
“I have an extra scarf,” Joly says in a tone of voice that implies that it’ll be no problem, really, to give Feuilly his cast-offs. “Bossuet’s been using it—he caught his on fire, which is a long story—but you can have it.”
Something in Feuilly’s stomach twists at the thought of Joly’s charity. He shakes his head, and stands up. “I’m fine. I’m going to go stand by the fire, actually. Since I’m cold.”
He is cold, so it isn’t entirely a lie.
“I am fine,” Feuilly tells himself, walking home. Snowflakes drift softly down through the air, and dust the edges of the cobblestones and the roofs of the barely-leaning buildings around him.
He unlocks his door. “Even if I am sick, it’s just a little cold. Nothing serious.”
He wraps himself in one blanket, and when that’s not enough, another. “Plenty of people get them.”
He shivers. “There’s no need to do anything special.”
His bones ache, but he’s sure that it’s just from the cold. “I’ll be fine.”
The next day, Feuilly sleeps in until far too late—the sun is already creeping in through his window, and the sky is starting to turn more blue than grey. He wakes with his head pounding, and only barely drags himself into the fan shop on time.
The morning passes in a blur of paint, paper, an aching head, and shivering from what he tells himself is the result of the rapid onset of winter this year, not fever chills. Hunger joins in, too, when he realizes that he forgot to pack himself any bread for his breakfast.
Mme. G—— looks in on him, a little worried. “You’re painting slower than usual.” It’s concern, Feuilly thinks, and only a little criticism. It still stings.
“I’m fine,” Feuilly says, and thinks longingly about being back in his bed, asleep. “I’m fine. I’m not sick.”
Mme. G—— frowns, and Feuilly realizes that she never actually asked if he was sick.
Joly breaks in a few days later. “I know,” he says, “I know that you said you weren’t sick, but none of us have seen you for almost a week—”
Feuilly pushes aside his blanket, raises his head. Throat scratchy, he says, “It’s been three days.”
“Four,” Joly says, more worried than smug.
Feuilly would rather he be smug. He rolls over, and stares at the wall. “Just leave me here. I’ll be better in a few days.”
“Nope,” says Joly.
Feuilly grumbles something unintelligible, and closes his eyes. If Joly won’t listen, then maybe he’ll get bored when Feuilly inevitably falls asleep.
Feuilly wakes up some time later to the smell of broth. He’s just halfway through sitting up (which is worryingly harder than he’d like; maybe his bed is trying to devour him whole) when Joly sees, and hurries over.
“Are you hungry?”
Is he? Feuilly has to think about it for a minute. “Maybe?”
Joly grins, with only a slight edge of worry to it. Feuilly wishes that no one would worry about him, and then wonders if he’s a bad friend (a bad person?) for wishing it.
Feuilly blinks at him. “Why are you here?”
Joly frowns. “Because you’re sick? None of us have seen you in a few days, and you seemed sick the last time we met. Either you were actually sick, or the…” he trails off, but Feuilly can fill in the rest. Or someone who shouldn’t have found out what we’re doing, and decided to start with you.
“Well,” says Feuilly, trying to force some cheerfulness into his tone, “I guess I was sick.”
Joly gives him the bowl and a spoon that doesn’t look like any of Feuilly’s. “I thought so.”
Feuilly peers down at the spoon which, upon closer examination, is one he’s never seen before.
“It’s mine,” Joly says. “I couldn’t find any of yours, so I went to get one of my own.”
“Huh,” Feuilly says faintly, imagining Joly walking from his rooms to Feuilly’s and back—just for a spoon, even after he knew that Feuilly was alive and well (...for certain definitions of ‘well’ that is).
He takes a bite of soup, swallows, and opens his mouth to say something about the fact that a large proportion of the vegetables in it are ones that he’s ninety percent sure that he hadn’t bought.
“I brought them,” Joly says, thoughtlessly generous. “We had extras. Speaking of extras, I got that scarf back from Bossuet, if you wanted it.”
Feuilly looks over to where Joly is pointing. The scarf, lying draped across the back of his chair, looks like wool, and nice wool. He swallows. “If you really have another…”
“Of course,” Joly says.
“...then I guess it would be useful for when I have to go to the factory. I’ll give it back to you when I’m better, of course.”
Joly frowns. “You can keep it even after you’ve recovered. And speaking of you going to the factory, you don’t have to until you’re fully recovered.”
Feuilly wonders if medical school is like that—if you can just skip days because you’re sick, and nothing will happen. He says it.
“Not really,” Joly says, “but we have a plan.”
“We?”
“No,” Feuilly says. “Absolutely not.”
“I’ll be great.” Bossuet grins. “M L—— is going to love me.”
“M L—— is going to charge you for any fans you accidentally ruin,” Feuilly says, darkly. “I’ll go. You don’t need to do anything.”
Joly crosses his arms. “In order to recover from the ‘flu—which I think you have; it’s most likely—you need to stay warm and out of the cold. Going out in the snow isn’t going to help that.”
“I—” says Feuilly, and considers the slushy snowflakes drifting down past his window even now. He would like to not have to go out in the snow.
“I’ll go with him,” Enjolras says, terrifyingly earnest. “The two of us should be able to put the fans together, at least.”
“That’s not exactly—”
“Or paint them.”
Feuilly wonders what Mme. L—— would think of the combined forces of Enjolras and Bossuet.
“I’ve got a great idea for fans,” Bossuet says, and gestures widely. “We could use them for secret signals. Imagine! You see a fan with a hyacinth on it, and you know that we’ll have to move our meeting rooms. You get a fan with a—”
Enjolras says, “Or we could just paint them for now. We’ll respect what you want us to do, Feuilly.”
Feuilly wavers. “Well...”
Joly claps his hands together. “Then it’s decided!”
As it turns out, Mme. L—— wants to hire Enjolras, who apparently took to fan-painting with the same single-minded focus that he gives anything even vaguely related to Revolution. Bossuet, on the other hand, is banned from any and all fan-painting shops in the greater Paris area.
He’s unperturbed: “Just think! I could develop an entire code. But I only needed one visit, so it’s fine.”
When Feuilly finally recovers, it’s not gradual; he wakes up knowing it, having slept deeply for the first time in nearly a week, able to breathe through his nose, and missing his pounding headache. Well, not missing, but he’s without it, and happy for that.
“It was the soup,” Joly says. “And the company.”
Feuilly grins. “Maybe.”