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“Okay. Yes, understood, thank you. We’ll take precautions. You too, goodbye.”
Tenya ends the call, drops his cellphone to the table, and then slides face down his hands, displacing his glasses as he does.
“That good?” Shouto asks from the other side of their kitchen, where he’s fiddling with the settings on the rice maker.
“The Commission highly suggests,” says Tenya, not removing his head from his hands, “that we quarantine for a week as a precaution. Just to be safe.”
Izuku pauses at the kitchen threshold, his hair still damp from the shower. “What? Do they think it’s going to be that bad? Are you going to need to move to a hospital?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” Tenya cuts him off before he can really work himself into a muttering spiral. “Like I said, it’s mostly precautionary. The Quirk we were all hit with today is called Contagion. It triggers and mimics common illness symptoms. Unfortunately, they don’t have enough information on it to determine whether or not it creates those symptoms independently, or if it literally constructs some new strain of contagious illness. So they think it best if we stay away from the general population at this point.”
Shouto pauses. Izuku tilts his head.
“Um. Do we know what symptoms it causes?”
“Oh yes,” says Tenya. He presses down on his eyes harder. His glass fall awkwardly off his ears. “Moderate fever, sore throat, chills, upper respiratory symptoms, things of that nature.”
Shouto blinks slowly, like a very disoriented cat. “So what you’re saying is that we’re all going to get the flu.”
Tenya groans from deep in his chest, in a very un-Tenya-like way, which sends a stab of panic through Izuku’s chest. “Yes. In fact, I’m telling you that we’re all going to get the flu very badly.”
.
And they sure do.
They’d learned, during their time at UA, that fevers tend to hit Shouto harder than any of the rest of them. They tend to hit him harder than most people, honestly — his body is so used to immediate temperature regulation that, when presented with the command not to do that, his brain scrambles entirely.
Izuku discovers that Shouto, at 27, has not grown out of this, when he stumbles out of bed the next morning wrapped in two different blankets and with icicles hanging from the white side of his hair.
“Shouto,” Izuku croaks out through his swollen throat. He, personally, woke up only an hour or two before, chilled and with the feeling of an egg being glued to his tonsils.
He’d been hoping to just offer a good morning, and maybe ask how Shouto’s feeling, but Shouto proceeds to answer both of those questions by bumbling directly into the wall as if unaware of its existence — it is not a good morning, and he feels terrible.
Shouto then confirms both of these things by not actually saying anything. Instead, he leans his cheek more firmly against the kitchen wall, and makes a noise like the air being too-quickly let out of a tire.
Top-10 Pro Hero Shouto, right here.
“Okay, yeah, I get it,” says Izuku, and hauls himself out of his chair. His head spins for a moment. He clutches at the table until the world goes solid again, and then crosses the kitchen to collect his friend.
Shouto even feels incorrect to the touch, when he’s got a fever. His skin is always dramatically the wrong temperature. Izuku guides him back to the chairs, which he allows in a passive daze.
Izuku also sits down again, and is considering what to do next when Tenya walks in.
It is almost unheard of for Tenya to wake up this late, and it is even less heard of for him to stay in his pajamas for more than 10 minutes or so. Eyes glassy and nose red, he stares at them blearily, taking in Izuku’s pallor and the ice still crusted in Shouto’s hair.
He shuffles to the other side of the room, and fills three glasses with cool water. He takes them all back to the table, and then goes back for one glass of orange juice.
The water is blissfully cold on Izuku’s throat.
Tenya sniffles, and then takes alternating sips from the water and the orange juice.
“How’s our status?” he asks, muted and congested.
“I’d rather be fighting All for One again,” says Shouto, without hesitation or apparent irony.
Izuku snorts, and then regrets it immediately. His throat hurts so much.
Tenya casts his most unimpressed look at Shouto. “You never even directly fought All for One. Out of the three of us, only Izuku did that.”
“Technically —” says Izuku, because, well, technically, but a round of chest-deep coughing cuts him off. Probably for the best.
“Okay,” says Shouto, “then I’d rather be fighting Dabi again. Does that paint a more accurate picture?”
Tenya grimaces, and then covers his eyes as if the light hurts him. It probably does — Tenya gets headaches even when he doesn’t have a Quirk-induced flu.
“Maybe you’re right,” he says, and Shouto would look smug if he didn’t look so miserable.
.
Izuku immediately collapses back into bed after he finishes his water and chokes down a few bites of rice. When he wakes up again, it’s early afternoon, and he’s crying.
This is another teenage reaction he’s always hoped he would grow out of, but never has. He processes every physical pain and ache as if it's something emotional. He cries less, these days, than he did when he was a kid, but not by much.
Fevers make Izuku feel hallowed out, empty, dizzyingly alone. Like he’s groping around in the dark of his worst moments and can’t find the lightswitch. It doesn’t even take him back to a specific moments — just makes him feel small and isolated and sad.
He feels paralyzed by it, and the ache in the back of his throat, for a few moments. Tears stain his pillowcase.
It’s not until Izuku is finally able to push himself into a seated position, groping around for a tissue, that something is able to break through his fever-induced despair.
Like a dream, muffled and far away, he can hear the soundtrack to a kids’ movie.
Izuku drags himself up without really thinking about it, stumbles out of his room and into their shared living room.
Tenya is stretched out on the couch, a cool compress pressed over his eyes. On the floor in front of the couch, Shouto has made a nest of blankets and pillows and gone to sleep halfway under the coffee table. The TV plays an old animated movie at a low volume. The score swells as the little protagonist begs her friends to believe enough in the good of the world to ignite the crystal clutched in her hands, and Izuku looks at it for a moment, transfixed. He feels very small, all of a sudden. And very young.
“He’s never seen this before, can you believe it?” Izuku startles more than he probably should in this situation, and swings his head back over to the couch.
Tenya has pushed himself into a seated position, wincing and rubbing at his eyes as he does. “I thought everyone had seen this one,” he continues. “I’ve even seen this one.”
Izuku sniffles again. The sadness is pounding on the inside of his chest again, because he knows full-well why Shouto has never seen this standard-childhood-classic, and right now if he thinks too much about little baby Shouto and how small and alone and hurt he must have been, he’s going to start bawling again.
“Why is he on the floor?” Izuku asks instead, ignoring his own strangled voice. He can blame it on the sore throat.
“Ah,” says Tenya, deadpan despite his congestion, glancing down at Shouto and his little rat’s nest of comforters, “I think that’s because our friend might be the weirdest person I know.”
Izuku giggles. Tenya pats the couch next to him, and he crosses the room without another word of protest.
On the screen, a little girl’s tear turns into a flame that ignites her older sister’s magic. Tenya makes a sound in the back of his throat, and he covers his eyes with his hand as if the light hurts him.
Izuku smooshes his cheek against Tenya’s shoulder, because Tenya is the ideal height to smoosh his cheek onto. Shouto half-whimpers in his sleep, and Izuku reaches down to thread his fingers through his hair without thinking. Shouto turns towards his hand and quiets. Maybe doing that soothes the crying, lonely fever-creature in Izuku’s chest, which is just an added bonus.
“You want me to put on the next one?” Tenya asks, watching the screen as the group of kids saves the universe by loving it and fall onto one another, cheering and happy, with no indication that they’ll be hurt by what they’ve seen or that they saw too much or that they’re tired of fighting.
“Sure,” says Izuku, and closes his eyes. Even with his own fever, he can feel Tenya’s fever through the worn-out cloth of his shirt, loved until it’s soft.
Normally, at this point, they’d all be starting their second patrol shift. When was the last time any of them had taken a sick day?
Shouto curls against Izuku’s legs and lets out a miserable snore.
Tenya shifts around, and another familiar soundtrack cues up.
Izuku half dozes against Tenya’s shoulder. His throat aches, and he can feel the beginnings of a headache begin to chew at the back of his eyes. But for now, at least, the urge to cry has left.
“This is a story about the power of love,” says the familiar narrator on the screen, and Izuku thinks, yeah, that sounds about right.