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It started, as nearly all the worst things did in Dream’s opinion, with a cough.
He turned back to his squires just in time to hear Ranboo clear his throat and retake his stance as Tommy and Tubbo sent him suspicious glances.
“Are you alright, Ranboo?”
Ranboo swallowed and nodded, earrings jingling a little with the force. “Yeah, I’m alright. Just- had something in my throat. I’m fine.”
Dream’s stare lingered worriedly on him through his mask as he continued teaching.
It soon became glaringly evident throughout the day that Ranboo was not fine. His stance became loose and almost sloppy, which Dream had never seen from him before; he stared into space and forgot things Dream had taught not ten minutes before despite his usually impeccable memory; he tripped over nothing and made a racket when he was normally by far the stealthiest of Dream’s three squires; he was bent over and nearly wheezing from barely any exercise by lunchtime.
“Ranboo, stay here and wait for a moment. Tommy and Tubbo, you can head in.”
Ranboo looked up from where he was slumped over on a bench with his elbows braced on his knees, drenched in sweat and clutching a canteen of water with a shaky hand. His black hair was almost plastered to his pale face with sweat, and another drop of anxiety slid down Dream’s sternum.
“Are you sure?” Tommy tried to protest. Tubbo was anxiously putting his training sword back a few feet away, nervously staring at Dream as he made his way over to where Ranboo was sitting. “We can stay if you-”
Dream held up a gloved hand, feeling some of the scars on his palm pull. “It’s alright. He’ll be fine, you two go on ahead.”
Ranboo was tensed and trembling by the time Dream turned back to him after making sure the other two troublemakers were at least out of sight. “Sir, I’m sorry, I promise-”
“Can you stand up, Ranboo?”
Ranboo swallowed hard and set down the canteen, pushing himself upwards and standing at attention. He closed his eyes and shifted his heel out slightly, likely to keep himself from swaying. It didn’t work. A drop of sweat rolled its way down to his jaw and fell onto his tunic, which was already soaked through.
Dream shook his head sadly. His poor squire- is this what he’d looked like to Sam all those years ago? Ranboo’s knees were almost knocking together, whether from effort of keeping him upright or from fear he didn’t know. “Look at me, Ranboo.”
Ranboo peeled his eyes open, looking five seconds and one bit of bad news away from collapsing.
“I’m not kicking you out, you know that right?”
“You’re no- I-I mean-” Ranboo straightened, trying to hide how he’d visibly wilted with relief at Dream’s words. “Yes, sir.”
“You can sit- whoa!”
Before the words had even finished leaving Dream’s mouth, Ranboo’s legs had given out completely. He scrambled to catch his squire-
Blood poured from Robin’s mouth and throat as he clawed helplessly at the arrow in his neck, crying as he clutched at Dream-
Dream felt Ranboo’s fever through his clothes before he even placed his wrist on his squire’s forehead. It was a cool spring day with a good breeze and no humidity- there was no reason for him to be so hot. The fist around his lungs tightened further as Ranboo curled up in his arms and began to cough. He felt his squire’s chest shake and spasm in his arms with each hack and found himself rubbing Ranboo’s back to try and calm the boy down.
“Why did you come to training, Ranboo?” Dream heard himself asking, trying to stuff the memories of Robin, Robin, Robin down into the depths of his mind. It didn’t work, as the only thoughts that came up to replace those of his first squire were panic.
Did he push Ranboo too hard? Had he missed any signs of underlying…anything? Had Ranboo been sneaking out at night to train and overworked himself? Was Ranboo sick because of him?
“...’cause I gotta train…?” the boy said weakly, clearing his throat and staring pitifully up at Dream’s mask. “...be a knight…gotta be strong. Push through hard things.”
Dream could feel his heart almost breaking in his chest as he brushed Ranboo’s hair from his eyes. “Ranboo…” there’s a difference between pushing through and passively trying to kill yourself through overwork like he did because he didn’t know how to self-regulate. “Knowing your body is one of the most important things a knight can do. Imagine you were on the battlefield just then. What would’ve happened?”
Imagine that he’ll never see the battlefield
prepare him the best he can be prepared so he has the best fighting chance once he gets there.
Ranboo hummed, eyes glassy. “...would’ve…” He frowned. “Got hurt?”
“You would’ve been a liability,” Dream corrected, and it hurt to have to tell his squire he was being a liability right then, but he had to learn, he had to learn so this didn’t happen again at the worst possible time. He had to learn this now so it wouldn’t come back to haunt Dream for the rest of his life. “More knights die of disease than of wounds out on the fronts. Fighting while you’re sick- there’s a difference between duty and idiocy, Ranboo.”
Ranboo’s eyes filled with tears and he looked down in shame. “...sorry.”
“Hey-” Dream readjusted his squire’s sweaty, lanky body as he sat down on the ground. “None of that. Better here than there, now you know. You’ve learned. Just worry about getting better, okay?”
“Mhm…” Ranboo closed his eyes and slowly turned his head so it was nestled in Dream’s shoulder as his chest hitched. A single tear fell down his pale, flushed face and soaked into Dream’s tunic. “...m’sorry, sir.”
“You’re alright,” Dream soothed, brushing a gloved thumb under Ranboo’s exposed eye. “You have no need to apologize.”
Footsteps echoed behind him and he whipped around, only to see that it was Tommy and Tubbo running towards them.
“Ranboo? What happened?”
“Is he-”
“I need you two to go to the infirmary and ask Phil to set up a bed for him,” Dream said, firmly but not unkindly. He was in charge here despite his growing panic the boys looked to him there wasn’t much he could do he had to give them somewhere to direct their energy and do something productive instead of freaking out. “He’s sick.”
As if to prove his point, Ranboo started coughing again, curling up and hacking into a fist as his head banged against Dream’s chest. In an instant, Tubbo and Tommy were hovering anxiously, rubbing their friend’s shoulders and back as he shuddered and wheezed, trying to catch his breath.
Part of Dream wanted to just stare in horror because he remembered sounding like that, he remembered collapsing and hacking up a lung during training, staring deliriously at the ceiling of the infirmary, watching Sam and Zach and Boomer and Five hover anxiously over him as he trembled and writhed in the sweat-soaked sheets-
And the other part of Dream recognized that he was the Lead. Not only that, he was the knight of these three boys, these three squires of his. He had to take charge, and he would. So he steeled his nerves, gave Ranboo a reassuring squeeze, and looked up to Tommy and Tubbo.
“I need you two to run to the infirmary. He needs to rest, and he needs Phil to treat him. I’ll carry him in.”
They presumably heard the unsaid ‘go,’ because they both stood straight up, and with mumbled ‘yes, sir’s and worried glances at Ranboo, they ran off.
“You ready?” he asked Ranboo, voice hushed to
disguise the tremble in it
try and keep the boy calm. “I’m picking you up now.”
Ranboo swallowed and nodded, curling into Dream’s arms and winding his fingers into his shirt.
Dream gently hefted his squire upwards, one arm beneath his shoulders, the other beneath his knees; Ranboo’s head rested limply just below his left shoulder. Dream could still feel the boy’s fever through his sweat-soaked clothes.
He made his way to the infirmary, focusing on each step he took, every breath Ranboo wheezed and the ones he didn’t, and the doors he passed until he saw Phil waiting outside the infirmary door, flocked by an anxiously rambling Tommy and a silent Tubbo wringing his hands.
“-and he was coughing, and I think he has a fever, too, and he was all-”
“Excuse me, mate,” Phil hushed, then walked quickly over to Dream and Ranboo, whose eyes were rolling up in his head. He brushed away the squire’s bangs from where they had been plastered to his forehead with sweat and put his wrist on his face, then frowned. “Bring him in, I’ll take him from here.”
“You two stay out here,” Dream said as he passed. He glanced back the slightest amount and saw Tubbo reach out a hand and hold Tommy’s wrist to keep him from following him inside.
He didn’t hold it against them that they struggled to follow these specific orders of his. Following orders was always good, but sometimes a knight had to go against orders and towards their better judgment. Tommy and Tubbo’s loyalty, both to each other and to Ranboo, was incredible; the three of them held a bond of trust he could tell had been hard-won. But now they needed to trust him-
And he needed to trust Phil.
“Lay him down here.”
In an instant, Phil was hovering over Ranboo, unlacing his shirt and feeling his pulse as the boy lay wheezing and gasping for air on the infirmary bed.
“He’ll be alright?” Dream couldn’t stop himself from asking.
“He’s not as bad as you got, that’s for sure,” Phil shot back, stripping Ranboo’s sweaty shirt from him completely and covering him in a thin blanket. “I’ll take care of him. Now, shoo. You still have two more squires to deal with. I’ll handle this one.”
If he was going to be honest, Dream barely remembered the few hours afterwards. He knew he’d sent Tommy and Tubbo to lunch, then told them to find Sapnap and Punz. He knew he’d told Tubbo to work on…whatever project he’d been working on with Sapnap, and he’d told Tommy he needed to work on stealth with Punz.
George found him hovering around the closed infirmary door, anxiously rubbing at his scarred palms beneath his gloves.
Dream swore that if he listened hard enough, he could hear Ranboo coughing inside.
“Love, what’s-”
“Ranboo’s sick,” Dream heard himself say blankly. “He- he’s really sick. He was coughing and so feverish and-”
George cut him off with a hug. Dream took in a shaky breath and hugged him back, relaxing slightly when George tightened the hug three times.
“He’ll be fine, Dream,” George reassured after pulling away, dark hair haloed by mid-afternoon spring sunlight coming in through a window at the end of the hall. He laced his fingers through Dream’s gloved hand and squeezed again, one, two, three times. “Do I need to remind you how many times you’ve come back to me? Your squires are just as stubborn as you.”
“Which is exactly why I’m worried,” Dream continued. “He showed up not well but not as bad and wouldn’t stop training until we broke for lunch, then he just…collapsed.”
“Dream-”
“He looked like- like Robi-”
George’s expression shattered before Dream even finished his sentence and he threw his arms around him. Dream felt for a moment as though he would shatter too and that George was holding him together; he took a deep breath, in and out, and tried to banish all thoughts of Robin from his mind.
“Ranboo has Phil,” George reassured him with his face pressed into his collarbone. “Ranboo has everything he needs, Ranboo will be fine.”
“He looked like me, too, George,” Dream confessed in a whisper, winding his arms around George’s waist and pressing his mask into the top of his head. “He was just coughing in my arms…”
“He’ll be fine, Dream,” George repeated. “Everything’s going to be just-”
The infirmary door swung open. “Dream, I’m going to need you in here,” Phil called. Whimpering and huffed sobs echoed out from the infirmary through the door.
Dream’s lungs froze.
He would’ve pushed George away and ran in himself what was happening was Ranboo okay was he dying had George not pulled out of the hug, grabbed his hand, and walked in with him.
The shuddering, hushed cries cut themselves off with a bout of ugly coughing that made Dream’s lungs hurt in sympathy.
Phil rushed to greet them in the calm but frantic manner only a healer could manage. “He had some kind of nightmare and then panicked, we can’t get him to calm down,” he said, ushering them to Ranboo’s sheet cubicle around a corner bed, as was standard when someone was ill in the infirmary rather than injured. The coughing only got louder as they got closer. “We wanted you to try to help before we got Tubbo and Tommy in here.”
Dream ducked through the sheet barriers set up around his squire and froze.
Ranboo looked worse. Much worse.
He was curled up on his side, still shirtless with the bedsheets haphazardly tossed off him, hacking into his fist. His face was pale, yet flushed over his nose in the way that almost universally signaled a bad fever; a wet cloth was crumpled in a heap beside his forehead, having apparently fallen off in the midst of his coughing fit. As soon as he stopped coughing he began to wheeze, gasping for air. Someone had taken his earrings out; his face seemed almost bare without them. He was heaving out sobs like his life depended on it, tears soaking his cheeks and the sheets beside his head.
“Oh, Ranboo,” Dream breathed, and Ranboo froze.
“...s-sir Dream?” he wheezed, chest shuddering as he wrapped an arm around himself and curled into a tighter ball. “...s’at you?” His eyes whipped around the space in front of him, seeing nothing. Dream quickly crossed the little ‘room’ and knelt in front of his squire.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Dream soothed, bringing his hand up and gently cradling the side of Ranboo’s face. He ran his thumb over his squire’s fevered, tear-stained cheek. “I’m here, you’re alright, Ranboo.”
“I failed-” Ranboo cut himself off with a sob. “...failed y-”
“Ranboo, no.” Dream brought up his other hand and grasped one of Ranboo’s in it. He could wash his gloves and use another pair, and his mask would be plenty good protection from whatever illness was plaguing Ranboo. “You did not fail.”
“... how?”
Dream swore he could hear his heart shatter in his chest with its next beat as his squire stared up at him, eyes overflowing with tears that fell down his fevered face. “Failing isn’t falling, Ranboo. Failing isn’t being defeated. Failing would be you giving up. You didn’t do that, remember?” He brushed his thumb in the path of a tear as Ranboo’s face crumpled and the boy let out another gut-wrenching sob. “You did not fail anyone, I promise.”
Promises didn’t come easily to knights who had been in war.
There was nothing more devastating than a broken promise that had only been broken because the person would never make another promise. People promised to show up, to come back, to stay healthy and whole; they showed up ill or mutilated or delirious or worse: not at all and never again. Dream had promised George he’d come back and he had.
Dream did not promise anything he thought he couldn’t keep.
“Just breathe, Ranboo,” Dream urged softly. “I’m here. You’re alright.”
“...wasso scared,” his squire blubbered through glassy eyes and a mouthful of tears. “...was ‘lone… y’r here now?”
“I’m here, Ranboo,” Dream hushed. “You’re not alone. There’s no need to be scared.” Ranboo choked out another wave of tears and Dream hushed him again, rubbing his thumb back and forth over the boy’s face. The thumb of his glove was soaked in seconds, but he didn’t care. “It’s okay. Let it out.”
After a few minutes, Ranboo had cried and coughed himself out, staring out past Dream with half-lidded, exhausted red-tinted eyes. Dream gently rolled his squire over to his back and brought up the sheets, almost tucking Ranboo in. He dragged over a chair, then picked up the sodden rag that had fallen off the boy’s head. He looked back at George and Phil, only to see their shadows silhouetted beyond the sheet partitions, then removed his gloves and dunked the cloth in a bowl of cool water.
Dream’s hands were not soft. They were covered in thick calluses from over a decade of working with weapons, they were covered in scars because of his personal form of atonement during the war. They were rough, and large, and occasionally hard to bend without hurting from the scarring on his palms.
Dream’s gloves were soft, worn leather, broken in from so much use that they fit like a second skin. He wore his gloves all the time; his squires had never seen him without them.
Dream used his bare hands to wipe the sweat from Ranboo’s fevered face.
“…m’tired,” Ranboo whispered, voice hoarse. He closed his eyes as Dream ran the cloth over his face with one hand and cradled his cheek in the other. “Y’r han’s…”
Dream froze. “Yeah?”
Rough destructive killing murderous-
“...r’ big.” Ranboo hummed. “R’ warm…n’strong.” His breath hitched like he was going into another coughing fit, but he just sighed. “...y’can pr’tec’ me.”
Dream smiled as he submerged the cloth in the water again, wrung it out, and set it on Ranboo’s forehead. “Go to sleep, okay? You need to rest.”
He could see Ranboo’s eyes roll up a little in his head as his squire began to fall asleep. “...be here…wh’n I…I wake up?” The question was so quiet it was almost silent, and still Dream caught on.
He took one of Ranboo’s hands that was resting limply over his chest atop the bedsheets and gave it a firm squeeze. “Of course.”
“Good,” Ranboo breathed with a soft smile. In a moment, he was fast asleep, wheezing a little as he breathed.
Dream sat there, just holding his squire’s hand.
Phil peeked in after a moment or so, and Dream could see George anxiously looking in behind him. “Hey, mate. How’s he doing?”
“Asleep,” Dream said softly, grateful his mask hid the tears that had sprung in his eyes. “I’ll stay here for now.”
“Dream-”
“He asked me to, Phil. The other two are taken care of for today. He needs me here, so I’ll be here.”
He could tell George was staring at his bare hands.
Phil placed the back of his hand on Ranboo’s cheek, then hummed. “His fever’s gone down a little. I can send the other two in here to see him once their training is done for the day.”
Dream nodded, and Phil left, mumbling about the medicines he had to get for Ranboo’s cough.
“You took your gloves off,” George said softly after ducking into Ranboo’s partitioned-off cubicle.
“I did,” Dream responded, matching his tone as he looked back over to Ranboo’s sleeping figure on the bed. Fever still radiated from his body, making his bare hand sweat where he was still holding Ranboo’s hand- or where Ranboo was gripping his, even in his sleep. Dream honestly wasn’t sure. “He probably won’t remember it, though.”
“Maybe not,” George said as he shrugged, walking behind Dream and wrapping his arms around his shoulders. “But you will.”
Dream leaned his head on George’s arm as the two of them stared at Dream’s sleeping squire.
It took Ranboo about a week to recover fully: a week of Dream helping him sit up and supporting him while Phil checked his lungs, a week of Sapnap and Punz having to take over training for Tubbo and Tommy, a week of calming Ranboo down from fever-induced nightmares or coughing fits, a week of having to all but shove his other two squires out of the infirmary so they wouldn’t get sick too, a week of Dream staying by Ranboo’s side and being there when he woke up.
When Dream asked Ranboo what he remembered out of curiosity a few weeks later, Ranboo said he remembered feeling rough hands being soft on his face and Dream being there.
Dream just smiled, ruffled his hair, and went to stop Tubbo adding random things to whatever bomb he was making with Sapnap now as Tommy egged them on and Punz stared on with poorly disguised curiosity.