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When Theo's knee catches on the corner of the coffee table and he has half a second to catch the toppled stack of papers in the crook of his foot, he thinks to himself: this is ridiculous. He used to be the chimera of death, g-ddamnit. Since when does he go sneaking around a sleeping Liam and picking up his boyfriend's snotty tissues?
Liam snuffles for a second from his station on the couch, sending a ball of tension zipping through Theo's bones as he freezes in place and swears colorfully to himself in his head. Liam is half-splayed, half-sprawled over the cushions, a bare foot and part of an arm peeking out from under the confines of his fortress of blankets. If Theo were to have his way, he'd shove socks onto Liam's feet when he's as sick as a—ha!—dog like this, but of all the body parts that malfunction when Liam's running a fever, it's his feet that go overly toasty and he ends up kicking off even the most lovingly knitted socks in a matter of minutes.
(Theo pleads the fifth regarding whose love and whose hands were responsible for aforementioned knitted accessories.)
Liam makes a sniffling sound again. Theo watches him with eagle-eyed precision from his position across the living room, feeling not unlike a gargoyle exasperatedly observing its ward. As Liam's nose then twitches once, twice, Theo feels his own heart start to pitter-patter in panic. If Liam sneezes now, he'll do so raucously enough to wake up the neighbors from here to the end of the street two blocks away, plus himself, and then Liam's much-needed bedrest will be interrupted all over again.
Liam's nose twitches a third time.
"Don't you dare, don't you dare," Theo hisses at his boyfriend.
There's a fourth twitch, a hitched breath, and then—the wrinkle in the bridge of Liam's nose smoothes out along with the rest of his breathing pattern.
Thank fuck, Theo thinks eloquently with a sigh of relief.
His movement jostles the stack of papers he's been holding hostage with his ankle this whole time. He wrenches one hand free from his armful of dirty laundry and goes pinwheeling to regain his balance. He does so—barely—and tests out another string of creative epithets in his head as he finally decides to drop the load on the floor for a minute so he can use both hands to pick up and repatriate the papers instead. Toward a Further Complication of Labyrinthine Gender Roles in Pre-Empire Grecian Military, reads the title on the top page.
G-d, Theo knows he very unwillingly and very irrevocably fell in love with a nerd, but he hopes to high heavens that isn't the final title Liam is going with.
After a brief debacle with the inane arrangement of potted bonsai trees littering the other side of the coffee table—and which were therefore also vulnerable to the universal law that everything suddenly falls and cracks or explodes when someone else is sleeping in the room—Theo manages to scoop up his load and dump it in the washing machine a few paces away. It's on the quietest setting possible, and Liam could sleep through a concrete drilling contest as long as the sound is rhythmic, so Theo lets the machine turn on with a mild beep and a whoosh of water.
Finally he swivels on his heel to grip the counter behind him and let out a gusty sigh of triumph.
Except that he'd miscalculated one thing: it's never the sounds around him that wake Liam up first, but rather the scents.
Theo finds himself blinking back dumbly at a slitted pair of blue irises for a full eighteen seconds before Liam beats him to the greeting.
"'R' you—are you doin' th' laundry?"
All that sneaking around and tiptoeing with a basket of tissues and playing Twister with himself to catch random breakable objects—all that for nothing. Theo wants, quite frankly, to murder something.
"If you don't close your eyes right now and go back to sleep, I swear I will close your eyes for you so hard they're never opening again."
Liam just flips back the corner of the top layer of blankets and pushes himself up, the tousled top of his hair bobbing with the movement and filling Theo's animal brain with preposterous notions like vulnerable and adorable and perfect for petting.
Oblivious to Theo's silent apoplectic fit over the seventh realization of the week that he is, indeed, disgustingly in love with Liam Dunbar, Liam sluggishly coasts his gaze around the living room. And so comes to some pretty damning conclusions.
"You gave me an extra blanket."
"No, I didn't."
"And you cleaned up my dirty tissues." A hand reaches for another Kleenex and blows a snotty nose in punctuation.
"No idea what you're talking about."
"Yeah, you do. And you—you put out a bowl of chicken soup for me?" Liam folds his used tissue into rough squares and places it on the vinyl flooring with a pat, then turns his nose up hopefully to give a tentative sniff at the air.
"It came from a can. There was nothing else to eat," Theo lies through his teeth.
In answer, Liam's puffy face breaks out into the most beautiful grin Theo has grudgingly slapped eyes on. He hooks his chin over the back of the couch, propping himself up on his folded arms, and beams at Theo.
"I love you," Liam declares.
"Jesus Christ," is Theo's strangled reply.
He really needs to start toughening up again. Seems like eating Liam's favorite cereal and pouring turmeric powder in his socks are at the top of his agenda for next week.
(He'll work up to gentle bouts of bodily harm another time.)