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Stark didn’t mean to get sick.
Not on purpose, anyway. It wasn’t like he walked into the cold wind every night whispering please, universe, destroy me. But a part of him wasn’t surprised when he woke up with his throat feeling like it’d been sandpapered and his body like it had gone three rounds with a demon lord.
He sat up, blinked blearily at the inside of the tent, and tried to ignore how the world was spinning sideways.
“You good?” came Fern’s voice from the next bedroll. Sharp, observant. Suspicious, already.
“Yeah,” Stark croaked, then cleared his throat and repeated it, lower, smoother. “Yeah. I’m good.”
Lie.
He was not good.
But he walked anyway, shouldered his sword like it didn’t weigh ten tons, and even cracked a few awkward jokes when Sein offered to let him ride on his back “like a princess.”
Stark laughed—then had to stop walking because the laugh turned into a coughing fit that left him breathless and sweating.
“You okay?” Frieren asked, from up ahead. She didn’t stop walking.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Stark wheezed. “Just—dusty air. Y’know?”
Fern glared at him so hard it felt like she might light him on fire.
They made camp early. Stark didn’t protest, but he also didn’t sit down, didn’t eat much, didn’t drink more than a sip of water. He kept zoning out, blinking too long, and jolting like he was about to fall asleep standing up.
“Alright, that’s it,” Fern snapped after the fourth time he dropped his cup. “Lie down.”
“I’m not—”
“Lie down.”
He did, mostly because his legs were starting to give up on him anyway. Fern shoved a blanket over him, muttering under her breath about idiots who think being tough means dying from a cold.
Sein appeared ten minutes later with some weird broth that smelled like mushrooms and something sharp. “Drink. You look like a ghost’s sock puppet.”
“...What does that even mean,” Stark groaned, but he drank it anyway.
Frieren sat down beside him quietly, watching him with her unreadable expression. After a moment, she reached out and pressed her palm lightly to his forehead.
It was cool. Her magic probably kept her skin like that. Or maybe she was just always a little frozen.
“You have a fever,” she said plainly.
“...Yeah,” he admitted, eyes half-lidded now. “Didn’t wanna bother anyone.”
“You’re part of this party,” she said. “You don’t bother us by being human.”
It was one of those things she said in that flat, ancient tone—but it landed like a hug.
The fever broke that night, but not before it got worse.
Stark thrashed through dreams of war and loneliness, of people leaving him behind, of Himmel looking at him with disappointment and Frieren vanishing into the mist. He muttered apologies, half-lucid nonsense, and Fern had to hold him down at one point when he tried to sit up mid-hallucination.
“Stop trying to fight monsters that aren’t there, idiot,” she whispered, brushing his hair back. “You’re not alone anymore.”
When he finally slept deeply, Frieren stayed by the fire, her gaze distant. Sein refilled Fern’s cup with tea and muttered something about boys who don’t know how to ask for help until they nearly keel over.
“Sounds familiar,” Fern said dryly, sipping the tea.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sein replied.
Stark woke up late the next morning, groggy and wrung out but clear. The fever had burned off. He blinked up at the tent ceiling, and slowly became aware that someone was next to him.
Frieren.
She was sitting cross-legged beside his bedroll, eyes closed, not asleep but clearly meditating—or maybe just thinking in that thousand-year-old way she had.
“You waited,” he said hoarsely.
She opened her eyes. “Of course.”
He looked away, suddenly embarrassed. “...Sorry I made everyone stop.”
“You didn’t. We decided to.”
“I still feel dumb.”
“Then you’re recovering normally.”
He blinked. Then laughed weakly. “That a joke?”
“Maybe.”
When they finally set out again, Stark had three extra blankets shoved into his arms, a new thermos full of Sein’s “revitalizing” soup, and a hat Fern knitted sometime during the night.
It was shaped like a tiny wolf.
“Wear it,” she ordered. “You lose heat through your head.”
“I—seriously?”
“Do you want to relapse?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then wear the dumb wolf hat.”
He did.
And as they walked into the snowy woods, Fern beside him, Frieren just ahead, and Sein whistling some old song he swore was a hymn but definitely wasn’t, Stark thought:
Maybe being cared for doesn’t make me weak. Maybe it just means I belong.