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"You're quiet."
"Your power of observation astounds me as usual," Loki said listlessly.
Stephen was not fooled. He could read Loki's deflections almost as well as his silences, and his sort-of boyfriend's silence tonight was of the suspicious kind, if not a little alarming.
Was it the movie? Had he chosen the wrong one to watch?
But Just Like Heaven's a classic! An inside voice argued. Why wouldn't Loki like it?
"We can watch something else if rom-coms aren't your thing?" Stephen suggested for the second time that night; he never did receive Loki's answer the first time he asked it.
"The movie's fine," Loki said vaguely.
"Well, what is it then?"
Loki abruptly stood. "I need to go to the bathroom.”
Stephen tried to suppress a sigh but it exited his nose instead, inadvertently coming across more irritated than he intended. It was typical of Loki, avoiding conversations when clearly something was up.
The bathroom visits became a repeat occurrence, and soon, Stephen became too distracted to focus on the movie. When Loki returned to the couch after his third trip to the toilet, Stephen pounced.
"What's wrong?” Stephen asked, noting the poorly concealed look of distress on Loki’s face. “Are you okay?"
Loki sighed, digging his fingers into his waist. "Something I ate isn't agreeing with me."
Stephen watched Loki swallow compulsively like someone trying hard not to be sick. His boyfriend sure looked green around the gills. "Did you throw up?"
"I tried," Loki huffed. "It mostly hurts.”
A pang of déjàvu hit Stephen like a freight truck. It had been a little over a month since Loki’s brush with death, and no, Stephen was not being dramatic. He still had the occasional nightmares about it. “You…it’s not that thing again, is it?”
“What are you on about?” Loki mumbled, trying to make himself comfortable but no amount of fidgeting was helping.
“Peptic ulcers have a recurrence rate of up to thirty percent within the first year, even with religious use of PPIs.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Well, you aren’t exactly religious.”
Loki gave a derisive snort. “Now there’s a marker of a date night going well. You start throwing statistics around and flaunting your conscientiousness.”
Stephen grabbed the remote control out of Loki’s hand and pressed the pause button.
A weak protest, “Hey, I was watching that.”
“No, you weren’t. This isn’t the nineties, we can replay it anytime,” Stephen said. He pushed himself, and all the cushions, off of the couch. "Lie down."
As expected, Loki's stubborn streak reared its head. "I'm fine."
"I'll be the judge of that. Lie down."
"You can't tell me what to do," Loki said petulantly.
"I can when the last time you told me you had a stomach ache, it turned out to be an ulcer and you almost bled to death on my operating table."
Loki averted his eyes. "I didn't tell you anything.”
"My point exactly." Stephen said. "Abdominal surgery is the most common cause of adhesions, and adhesions cause more than half of small bowel obstructions."
"You're being paranoid, you know that? Paranoid and overbearing," Loki complained. "It's unattractive."
"Ballpark figure is seventy percent," Stephen continued his rant. "We can talk about my looks later."
"Strange, I can tell the difference between food poisoning and a bowel obstruction. I'm not an idiot."
"No, you're absolutely the smartest person I know, coz now you're going to let me have a feel, okay?" Stephen pleaded. He patted the armrest. "You were right. I am paranoid. Humor me."
"Honestly!" Loki threw himself back onto the couch with a huff, followed closely by a soft, pained ‘Damn’ when the movement induced a wave of cramps that rippled across his abdomen. “Ow, ow, ow…”
Stephen could only follow with worried eyes as Loki shot out of his seat and staggered for the bathroom again. When he returned a few minutes later, he was a few shades paler than normal and sweating lightly, his hair clinging to the sides of his head like a crown of thorns.
Loki crawled into Stephen’s lap on his own volition, a testament to how utterly wretched he must be feeling. It was an awkward position, and hardly the most ideal to conduct a proper examination in, but at least Loki was horizontal enough that Stephen could slip a clinical hand in to feel his belly.
It felt warm to the touch as though Loki was running a bit of a temperature, but it was soft, with no one part more tender than the other. A turbulence rumbled beneath Stephen’s palm, a cacophonous borborygmus that hinted at a more innocent, but no less worrying, cause of Loki’s suffering.
He fished his stethoscope out from under the coffee table.
"You keep your stuff in the most random places," Loki observed critically. "How did you even know it was there?"
"One’s allowed to be messy, as long as one knows one’s own mess," Stephen said, shrugging. He pressed the diaphragm of the stethoscope to Loki's belly and listened for a good ten seconds, before presenting his findings to his patient.
“It sounds like a circus in there," Stephen commented. "I think the nachos and the fish tacos are duking it out."
"Please," Loki groaned, gripping his stomach tighter. "Don't mention food. I don't think there's anything left in me to evacuate."
“Yeah, a bad case of Montezuma’s revenge will do that to you,” Stephen winced in sympathy. He nodded at a glass on the table. "Do you think you can keep down some fluids? I can put you on a drip if that's easier."
Loki allowed Stephen to help him up and accepted the glass, eyeing the effervescent, radioactive-looking liquid with dread. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
Stephen took one look at the back of Loki's white, shaky hand and changed his mind. "Not gonna be easy, with your veins all collapsed like that. Drink up, you need to replenish your electrolytes."
Loki glared at his boyfriend over his Hydralyte. “You and your electrolytes."
"What can I say? It's my love language," Stephen deadpanned.
Loki almost choked, electrolyte water spurting out of his nose and quite possibly, from his eyeballs too. "You fucker."
"Seriously, what did you think it was? The takeout tasted fine, and we both ate the same thing," Stephen said.
"Not at lunch, we didn't." Loki grimaced at the memory. "I think the prawn cocktails they served at that drug talk today were dodgy."
“Drug talk?” Stephen’s forehead furrowed into a thousand creases. “But Merck & Co always do great lunches.”
Loki shook his head, looking nauseated all of a sudden. “Pfizer.”
“Yeah…they can be a hit-and-miss,” Stephen clicked his tongue in disapproval. Then his eyes narrowed. "Wait. Were you feeling sick before you came over?"
Loki fixated on something very interesting on Stephen’s ceiling. “You should get that crack checked out. There, in the corner right there - ”
“Odinson,” he growled.
“Give me a break, Strange. It’s my first night off in weeks!” Loki’s voice dropped to a sullen mumble. “Yours too.”
Understanding finally dawned on Stephen, as did an avalanche of exasperation and a flight of fluffy, fluttery butterflies. “Loki, if you’re sick, you’re sick. These things happen.”
“Yes, but why always to me?” Loki mourned.
“Doctor Masterson would beg to differ,” Stephen said, referring to the female lead character in the movie they had just half-watched. “All that time spent working herself to death only for a car accident to do her in when she’s on the verge of finding love. I told you, you gotta listen to your body when it’s trying to tell you things.”
Loki sniffed. “You do realise you’re feeding me philosophical advice from a movie.”
“It’s a good movie, apparently,” Stephen said. “My scrub nurse recommended it.”
“Let me guess. She’s into Mark Ruffalo.”
“Everyone’s into Mark Ruffalo. I think it’s all that hair.”
Loki broke into a chuckle, but it was cut short when his stomach seized again, this time with a cramp so horrendous it left him prostrated in Stephen’s lap and shaking like a leaf.
"God, this fucking hurts," Loki moaned into Stephen's thigh. "I think I'm dying."
Stephen rubbed comforting circles on Loki’s back. “There's nothing more reassuring to me than you admitting that you feel like shit. You'll live."
Loki could sense Stephen fussing over him but he hardly registered it, so thoroughly consumed by the raging pain in his stomach.
A few excruciating seconds later, the cramp passed, and Loki unfolded himself gingerly. He clasped a hand over Stephen’s, only now realising it had been there the whole time, massaging the knots in his belly.
“Are you okay? Should we go to the ER anyway?”
“And let people see me like this? We’ll be the laughingstock of the whole hospital.”
“I don’t give a shit about other people.”
Loki heard the sick anxiety in Stephen’s voice and was instantly overcome by guilt. “I’m sorry, Stephen.”
“What the hell for?”
For coming over. For being a bother. For noticing the prawn had smelled a little funky and eating it anyway.
“Did you know E. coli smells like Worcestershire sauce?”
“You can’t see, smell or taste E. coli,” Stephen said flatly.
Loki could do without seeing the worry in Stephen’s eyes. It was terribly ageing on him.
“I’ll be fine, Stephen,” he said firmly. “I’m tougher than I look, you know.”
A look of sadness fell over Stephen’s face. “Yeah, I know.”
Loki sighed; he could not help feeling sorry for himself. “This wasn’t how I imagined tonight was going to be.”
“How did you imagine tonight was going to be?”
Loki shrugged. “Certainly not you giving me a belly rub like a five-year-old.”
Stephen’s face softened. “I don’t mind it.”
“I ruined our movie night.”
“It’s just a movie,” Stephen said. "There's always next time."
“You're right," Loki mumbled. "There'll be more things to ruin next time."
"That's the spirit," Stephen said fondly. He ran his fingers through clumps of Loki's lank hair. "You idiot. Why couldn’t you just tell me?”
“I took a couple of Imodium from your medicine cabinet.”
“That’s not an answer, Loki.”
Loki was quiet for a while. “Maybe I don’t have one. Not yet, anyway.”
He braved a glance upward. “Is that…okay?”
Stephen slowly bent and gave Loki an upside down kiss. “Silly Loki. Do you really have to ask?”
A rumbling sound emanated from somewhere in the region of Loki's midsection.
“Should I go get a bucket?” Stephen whispered huskily. “I should go get a bucket.”
“Yes, oh yes.” For how could Loki refuse? It was the most romantic offer of a bucket Loki had ever received in his entire life. “You most definitely should.”