Work Text:
Aaron wakes to an insistent buzzing in his ear, which he realizes only after a moment of confused shuffling is his phone beneath his pillow. Disoriented, he pries it out, his fingernails wedging beneath the edge of the silicone case, and turns off the alarm.
Bright blue light from the screen hits his face, shocking him an instant five degrees further awake.
5:30 am. Six precious hours of sleep, and he's off to another twelve-hour shift.
His phone tumbles off the edge of the mattress when he tries to set it down, clattering against the floor before it's muffled by the edge of the carpet. He goes fishing for it, face still pressed into the pillow and one arm hanging off the bed, but it's managed to fall just out of reach.
Groaning, he pushes himself up to his elbows. His head spins on its axis, the whole room blurring around him despite the dark, and he squeezes his eyes shut until the pounding in his temples subsides. His mouth feels rough and foul and his throat scrapes when he tries to swallow. He reaches over to find the cup on his nightstand bone dry.
"Fuck," he whispers to himself, and allows about ten seconds of letting his head hang between his shoulders, defeated, before he gets up.
It's still dark out and he doesn't bother turning on the lights. He slips into sweatpants and the t-shirt he left on the back of his desk chair last night, and pads across the hall to the bathroom.
He manages to brush his teeth and gulp down five handfuls of water straight from the tap, but his head still aches in that annoying way that wiggles itself behind his eyes. The whites of his eyes look more pink than white when he leans close to the mirror to inspect them. He rubs across his upper lids like he might inspire his tear glands to spare some extra lubrication for his corneas, but to no avail.
At least, when he steps out of the bathroom, the apartment already smells like coffee.
Kevin is bobbing on the balls of his feet by the counter, eyes still half-shut but evidently attempting to warm up for his run. He's wearing that godforsaken compression shirt Aaron regularly promises himself he will burn before it kills him.
He has no attention left to spare it today. He sinks onto one of the black leather barstools at the island and accepts the cup of coffee Kevin slides across the countertop into his palms.
"Looking worse than me for once," Kevin comments.
Aaron flips him off and downs half the cup without any milk or sugar — it's enough to scald everything from the tip of his tongue to the back of his throat, but he hardly feels it. The remaining half goes down slower, though he still doesn't quite taste much of it.
Kevin forces two slices of bread and half an apple down Aaron's throat, and Aaron pushes away from the island with herculean effort to dump the rest of the coffeepot into his thermos. He fills it to the top with enough milk and sugar to power a horse, and grabs his neatly pre-packaged lunch from his side of the fridge.
Kevin trails after him to the hallway, water bottle in hand and his shiny new smartwatch strapped to his wrist, and squints his eyes when Aaron crouches down to lace up his shoes.
"Are you sure you're alright?"
Aaron takes three tries to tie his right shoe, and the world does another funny spin around him when he finally straightens back up. He blinks until it rights itself and grabs his bag from the rack by the door.
"Yeah. Why?"
"You look tired."
The laugh that comes out of Aaron is so dry it hurts in his throat. "Yeah. I am."
The hospital is worse than usual. Everything seems to be going too fast, rushing by too quick, and Aaron struggles the whole day to keep pace. He spends his break lying flat on his back on a spare bed in one of the break rooms, only moving to gnaw on the disgusting protein bar Kevin insists on smuggling into his lunch boxes.
His whole body aches by the time he gets home. He's starving, not having managed much beyond the protein bar, but cooking seems too daunting a task with how heavy his limbs have grown. He steals a carton of organic blueberries from Kevin's fridge shelf and all but crawls to the couch.
The soft, ergonomic cushions for ultimate back support that Kevin insisted on feel like heaven on Aaron's wreck of a body now. He lets himself sink into them as far as they will allow and stuffs his cheeks full of berries.
It is a very fancy apartment, the likes of which only Exy prodigy Kevin Day could afford. Aaron's measly residency salary contributes a fraction to rent and groceries, but he knows he has to count himself lucky. When Kevin got traded to Chicago last year, he had to bully Aaron into leaving behind the drafty shithole apartment he lived in throughout med school and move in with him instead.
When Aaron gave in, at last, Kevin showed up — mysteriously with Andrew and Neil in tow, fresh from the airport with not a word of their visit breathed to Aaron, which oddly stung — and packed his meager belongings up in a matter of hours.
Most of his furniture was cheap crap he inherited from the previous tenant and that he felt no remorse leaving behind, so the majority of his boxes included only books and the few trinkets he wasted money on over the years. Two framed pictures: one that Nicky forced him and Andrew to take before he left for Germany, and another, dustier one of Aaron and Katelyn.
He had placed all of that down in the empty spare bedroom of Kevin's upscale apartment. When he turned around, he found Andrew leaning in the doorway, hand in his pocket, lollipop stick between his teeth, and one brow raised at Aaron.
Aaron knew what he was going to say before he did, and cut him off with a sharp, "Shut up."
Andrew raised both palms in apparent appeasement, but when he and Neil geared up to head home the next day, he cocked his head in Aaron's direction and said, "Enjoy your bachelor's flat," in a tone that made Aaron dream of whacking him over the head.
Of course, even then, Aaron knew this would not last forever. Kevin signed a two-season contract with the Rogues, the second of which is coming to an end this spring. After that, he will go to the next highest bidding team, and Aaron will be left to scramble for a new place to live. Maybe, if he's lucky, Katelyn will be willing to let him stay with her until he finds a place.
For now, though, he gets to enjoy the expensive comforts of Kevin's lavish lifestyle, like this perfectly designed couch, a large box of juicy blueberries, and the ambient noise maker Kevin bought himself for Christmas, now spilling calming bird song out into the living room.
He doesn't realize he fell asleep until the front door startles him awake. His eyelids feel even heavier than this morning, and by the time he manages to pry them open, he finds Kevin already peering down at him.
"You look awful."
Aaron lets his eyes fall shut again. "You're full of compliments today."
"I mean it," Kevin says. "You look like absolute shit. Did you eat my blueberries?"
Aaron hums. He'll pay him back, though his mouth is too leaden to say that.
Kevin flicks his forehead. "Aaron. Are you sick?"
"No." Aaron opens his eyes just in time to prevent another flick, and swats Kevin's hand away. To prove his perfect health, he pushes himself up to sit and is immediately gripped by a violent coughing fit.
Kevin takes two loping steps backward and out of the spray of Aaron's pathogens. His face scrunches up. "You are sick."
Aaron shakes his head and soundly ignores the way the world starts wobbling around him again. "No, I'm just exhausted. I'm going to bed early."
Kevin watches, dubiously, as Aaron pushes himself to his feet. "Okay," he says, a little haltingly. "Did you pack your lunch for tomorrow?"
Aaron did not, but he will figure that out when he gets there. By which he means he will spend an ungodly amount of money on cafeteria food if he has to, or get a candy bar from one of the vending machines in the break room and pretend that constitutes a lunch.
He gives a vague grunt in Kevin's direction and stumbles down the short hallway to his bedroom. He barely manages to chuck off his clothes and is wracked by shivers as soon as they hit the floor. He digs through his closet and procures a big, old sweater from college, now fraying at the seams and worn out in the arms, but it's comfortable and warm when he pulls it over his head. Still, even with that and the thick pair of sweatpants he somehow coordinates his legs into, he shivers when he buries himself under the covers.
Every movement makes him cough, wet and deep in his chest, the fits lasting long seconds, perhaps minutes. His head aches with the fierceness of them, and he has to press himself into his mattress with the comforter pulled up to his chin and keep perfectly still for sleep to have any chance at reaching him.
Despite the fatigue weighing on his eyelids, it takes him a long time to fall asleep. When he does, it's restless and feverish, interrupted by coughs ripping through him.
In the brief snatches of sleep he gets, he dreams of his mother.
Aaron was often sick as a child. Coughs, fevers, the flu at least once or twice a year. Whenever teachers or neighbors commented on it, his mother would always say he was born early and tiny, and that he was already sickly as a baby. Aaron would later learn that while this was true, there was a specific reason behind it that she was keeping from them all.
That did not matter much, though, when he was sick with fevers and his mother would stick him into bed with some cough syrup and not much else. She never cared much, even then. Only as much as she needed to — if his fever hadn't broken by day three, she would drag him to the doctor's office and make sure he would take his antibiotics so the school wouldn't come calling.
Tilda Minyard never put in more effort than she had to. She'd somehow perfected the art of administering just enough childcare to keep CPS off her trail — Aaron was five when he learned that.
And her patience only grew thinner the older he got.
By middle school, Aaron knew that being sick no longer earned him any free days in bed. His mother would send him to school no matter how hard he was coughing — he'd need to be puking to be allowed to stay home. By high school, he was glad for every minute he got to spend out of the house; would swallow down his coughs and self-medicate for any pain. He'd push on through, get himself to school and to class on time, until Tilda died and his life changed in such innumerable ways.
There was a worse sickness then, for a while. Locked in the bathroom of an unfamiliar house, sick and shivering on the floor. His head still pounds at the memories whenever they force themselves to the forefront of his mind.
Nothing, he thinks, will ever compare to that.
But he hasn't had anything worse than a mild cold or a stomach bug since high school, and he certainly hasn't missed a day of class or work for it.
He won't start now, not years later.
He wakes to his own coughing once more, though this time the wet, painful scraping of his lungs against his ribcage drives him over the edge of the bed. Without conscious input, he finds himself on his knees on the cool floor, folded arms propping him up and his forehead pressed against them as he all but retches his lung tissue onto the floorboards.
It's dark — he forgot to close the curtains, but the sun has long disappeared. The door, when it opens, throws a long sheath of the hallway light across the floor, the edge of the rug, and Aaron's crumpled form.
"Aaron?"
The last piece of phlegm unsticks itself from his trachea, pooling on his tongue before he swallows it down. Relieved, he breathes in deep, and raises his head to find Kevin standing in the doorway. He's got a face mask he must have stolen from Aaron's work bag pulled over his nose and mouth, and he's peering down at him with his brows pinched together.
Aaron wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. "Water?" he croaks, feeling incredibly pathetic for all of three seconds, until Kevin thrusts the cup he was already holding at him, and Aaron becomes too consumed by gulping it down to feel anything at all.
Kevin takes it back when it's empty, and raises his brows again. "I don't think you can go to work like this."
"Shut up," Aaron says automatically. He grabs for his phone on the nightstand and finds that it's three in the morning, two and a half hours before his alarm. He has no idea what Kevin is doing up.
He gets no chance to ask when his next breath in catches on a fresh bout of phlegm gathered in his lungs, and sends him wheezing once more.
Halfway on his way to the ground, hands catch his shoulders and keep him upright. One arranges him backwards against his bedframe, and the other comes down on his back in soft, practiced hits. It helps knock something loose in his chest, and his airway frees up with a final, wretched hack.
Aaron tilts his head back against the mattress when oxygen reaches his lungs again. Kevin sweeps a hand up to his forehead and hisses.
"You definitely have a fever."
Aaron shakes his head. "I haven't had a fever since I was like, twelve."
Kevin's eyes narrow on him above the edge of his mask. "What does that have to do with anything?"
Aaron's whole brain pulses in his skull, and a fresh shiver wracks through him. He misses his bed. He waves Kevin off, though. "I just need some more sleep. I'll be fine in the morning."
"Aaron," Kevin says again. "You work in a hospital. You can't go into the hospital with a fever and a cough this bad." The broad of his palm presses into Aaron's forehead again, and he uses it to push him back, a little meanly. "You know that."
Aaron sniffles. He does know that. "It's fine," he grits out despite himself. And it is. It will be, anyway.
"It's really not. You sound like Neil," Kevin says, and sounds Kevin-appropriately annoyed about it. Aaron takes offense to that, but gets no chance to retort before Kevin gestures for him. "Come on, up."
His hands somehow hook under Aaron's arms — where Aaron is suddenly painfully aware he's sweat all the way through the thick fabric of his sweater, leaving it damp right where Kevin touches him now — and lift him up.
The world around him goes spinning again, though Aaron vaguely suspects that has more to do with his brain grappling with being manhandled into his bed by Kevin Day than with his fever. Somewhere along the four years of med school and the past year and a half of his residency, Aaron lost most of the bulk Exy afforded him once upon a time. Kevin, though, is still in top form, and has no problem heaving Aaron onto the mattress and sticking him under the blanket.
In the back of his mind, Aaron has the vague idea of a complaint. Instead, he pulls his comforter tight under his chin and shivers into his sheets.
He can't really see Kevin's face like this, backlit from the door and without his glasses, but he blinks up at the vague dark outline of him at the edge of his bed.
Kevin clears his throat. "Let's see how you feel in the morning," he says, in what Aaron thinks is supposed to be a kind voice. It misses the mark and lands somewhere in vaguely condescending, but Aaron appreciates the sentiment either way. He has known Kevin for too long to be offended.
So he hums, tucks his face down against his pillow, and listens to Kevin's soft footfalls crossing the room.
He never hears the door shut.
Kevin left Palmetto two weeks after his graduation.
It was a particularly hot summer, sweaty and unbearable. They sprawled around Abby's house, even Kevin turned lazy by the heat. He'd dragged Andrew and Neil to the court that morning, but they'd returned earlier than usual to lie on the floor under Abby's blasting AC.
Neil and Andrew disappeared after an hour to enjoy the Maserati's AC instead, leaving Aaron behind with his shoulder a scant from Kevin's and his eyes fixed directly on Abby's popcorn ceiling.
Tension mounted between them with every passing minute, simmering in the air as much as the humid heat. It had for years, Aaron remembers vaguely thinking even then. He had been catching Kevin's eyes more and more often, across the court and in the locker room.
But back then, Aaron still had Katelyn and Kevin still had Thea. (The illusion of her, anyway, though that was something he would only confess to Aaron years later on the floor of their newly shared living room, with a bottle between his knees and eyes shot red with memories. She was always too good for him to keep, he'd say. And Aaron would pry the bottle from his fingers, take a swig himself, and tell him about how things ended with Katelyn, and the humiliation of having to stay living with your ex because your shit job did not pay enough to rent a place by yourself — all while your twin brother made more money than he could hope to spend this lifetime for being good at hitting a ball with a stick.)
But not that summer day at Abby's. That day, they were just two guys with girlfriends who'd played on the same college sports team for three years and nursed that quiet tension, and neither of them was going to say anything about it.
When Aaron tried to bite down on it, he caught his tongue instead and asked, "When are you going to Texas again?" even though he knew the answer well enough to recite it from memory.
Kevin looked over at him like he knew it, too, but said only, "Day after tomorrow."
Aaron nodded. "Exciting," he said, and it sounded as lackluster as he felt.
Kevin didn't call it out. His gaze had drifted back to the ceiling, and he'd propped his head up on his lower arm. Aaron tried not to linger on it, but the bulging of his biceps was hard to ignore where it swelled past his sleeve.
At twenty-one, Aaron had gotten over himself just enough that he could admit he knew why every sports magazine called Kevin Exy's heartthrob, why everybody in their scene wanted to get his hands on him.
Kevin was gorgeous and strong and young, and he was leaving.
He followed when Aaron pushed up to sit, and their knees nearly knocked into each other. Aaron, who had become something of an expert at this, swerved out of the way just in time.
At long last, Kevin said, "Yeah. It is," but did not sound like he really believed it.
But Aaron knew he did. Everything about Exy excited Kevin, and he knew that nothing better could have happened to him than the contract the Sirens offered him. Five years with the exact pro team he'd wished for. A contract befitting the son of Exy, the up-and-coming star player of the professional league.
And yet, in that still, hot hour in Abby's living room, Kevin flicked a tongue over his bottom lip and looked like he had — regrets.
It was silly, entirely. Aaron reached out and punched him in the shoulder — the only point of contact he allowed these days. "Well, don't you look ecstatic," he said, though his sarcasm fell flat when Kevin just kept staring at him.
His eyes were very green. Before meeting him, Aaron, whose own eyes were a sort of muddled green-brown, did not think eyes could be a shade of green this intense. They were almost electric, and their current sprung over Aaron's skin all too easily.
He swallowed, and watched Kevin's throat bob almost simultaneously. Their knees were still so very close to touching.
"Aaron —" Kevin started, at the same time that the front door opened with a jangle of keys that always announced Abby's entrance.
They flinched apart like illicit lovers even though they had not been touching anywhere just as she poked her head past the kitchen door with a cheery, "Hey, boys. Holding up alright?"
Aaron found he had forgotten how to act like a person, but Kevin managed a nod. "Yeah. It's hot."
Abby laughed. "Yeah. I brought ice cream if you want any."
And just like that, the spell was broken. Aaron shook his head to right himself, and got to his feet to follow Abby to the kitchen, well aware of Kevin following suit. They ate their popsicles by the kitchen counter, and Abby's voice filled the room with gleeful chatter that left no room for their strange tension. Aaron was glad for it.
Two days later, Kevin packed the rest of his things, and Andrew drove him to the airport. Aaron said his goodbyes on Abby's porch, arms crossed over his chest and a very respectable two steps away from Kevin.
He would not see him again for almost six years.
The next time he wakes, sunlight is streaming into the room through the open curtains.
Aaron blinks at the blurry image of swirling dust mites for a second, thoroughly disoriented, before he sits up with a start.
"Fuck."
His head pounds and his throat is so dry he may as well have swallowed sandpaper, but the sun being up this high means he must have slept through the first few hours of his shift.
He stumbles out of bed, his whole body feeling leaden and sore, and nearly brains himself on his nightstand. His phone tells him it's almost ten and Aaron feels an old, familiar panic swell in the back of his throat. A fresh coughing fit grips him as he tries to chuck off his sweater, and the door clicks open at his back.
"Hey," Kevin says, knuckle rapping against the doorframe. "I got—"
"Can't," Aaron says through the wet rasp in his throat. He coughs all over again, until his stomach hurts and his chest feels scraped raw, and he thinks he might be sick all over the floor. "I'm late for work," he manages somehow, and knows how ridiculous he sounds even as he says it.
Kevin's quirked brow, when Aaron looks over at him, only confirms it. He pushes himself off the doorframe. "I called in for you this morning," he says. Then adds, with a touch more impatience, "Everyone was very understanding and emphasized that you should not be coming in with a fever and a cough."
The shirt Aaron somehow got his hands on drifts out of his grip to the floor, and he sags forward to lean his forehead against the closet door.
Belatedly, he remembers to say, "Thank you."
Kevin sniffles behind him. "You're welcome. I also went to pick up some meds for you and made soup. It's in the kitchen."
Despite himself, Aaron raises a brow. "Made soup?"
A beat of hesitation. "Heated up soup," Kevin amends, and Aaron snorts.
"Alright," he says, and pushes himself away from the closet. He sways, and somehow Kevin is already there to hold him up by the shoulder.
If his body weren't so feverish, Aaron thinks he might have felt the touch like a brand.
He makes it into the living room mostly on his own. Kevin bullies him into one of the dining table chairs and sets a steaming hot bowl and three different bottles of pills down in front of him. Aaron takes one of each and washes them down with sips of the soup.
It's good. Salty and warm, and it loosens something in him that balled up tight before.
He watches Kevin putter around the kitchen, throwing away take-out trash and cleaning up the dishes of his own breakfast, before his eyes wander up to the clock again.
"Don't you have practice?"
Kevin shrugs. Aaron narrows his eyes. "Coach thought I could stand to miss morning gym one time. I'll be there for afternoon drills."
While Aaron's fever-wracked brain tries to compute the possibility of Kevin Day skipping practice with his team, Kevin swoops back in and washes his empty soup bowl. Aaron blinks after him, but Kevin offers no further commentary when he ushers Aaron onto the couch with a fresh blanket.
"Your sheets should be washed," he declares, and disappears into Aaron's bedroom to, presumably, take care of just that.
Aaron blinks until the image of him disappears from the inside of his lids, and quite convincingly tells himself that his heart beating in his throat is another symptom of the fever.
Despite the fatigue dragging at his bones, he's too awake to sleep again. He flips the TV on and skips past the first ten channels — all exclusively sports related, courtesy of Kevin — until he finds something remotely more interesting.
Kevin makes him a cup of a different soup for lunch, then packs his practice bag and disappears to the court. Aaron stays on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally interrupted by a burst of coughs, until the sun sets around him and the TV turns itself off from inactivity. Aaron lets it — the quiet is nice, he finds.
Kevin returns, but only stops by the couch to check Aaron is still alive before he moves on to the kitchen. Aaron has no energy to follow him. The soft, domestic sounds of him moving around the apartment are good, too. The opening and closing of cabinets, the sink cutting on and off, his footsteps across the tile.
Aaron isn't stupid. He got the joke that was implied in Andrew's waggling brows when he helped him move. Two old college friends rooming together years later after being dumped by both of their girlfriends. No one around but the two of them and the handful of plants they keep alive on the windowsill.
And he isn't blind to the tension they have been nursing, steadily, slowly, since before all this. That summer day at Abby's, and all the little pieces in between. The texts. Kevin sweeping back into his life and taking it all down with him.
Aaron never resisted, though he would never quite admit why not.
When Kevin reappears over him again and tilts his head so he can take his temperature, Aaron doesn't think he imagines the way his fingers linger at the edge of Aaron's jaw for just a moment too long.
But he also knows, realistically, that this is not something he can have. Or if it is, it is not something he can keep. Kevin is not settling down here. His contract expires in two, maybe three months, and he will be gone before summer if all goes well. Aaron should already be looking for a new place, but he's not had the energy to confront the reality of his impending homelessness.
Kevinlessness, if he were more dramatic.
He shakes that thought off before it can gain hold.
"Ready for more soup?" Kevin asks when he sets the thermometer down.
"Can't wait."
A wry kind of humor twinkles at the corners of Kevin's eyes, one that never quite made itself known back in school. He was always so high-strung then. Still is, in many ways, but Aaron can tell that a life spent in relative comfort for a near-decade has done wonders for his psyche.
He drinks less. Smiles more. Laughs even, sometimes. And, despite the mask still snapped in place over his face, he's taking care of a sick roommate when years ago he would have simply fled at the idea.
Aaron was not around to see all of those changes in real time. In the year after Kevin left Palmetto, Andrew and Neil stayed in touch with Kevin, but Aaron did not talk to him beyond the occasional text Kevin would send. It was only when Aaron moved to Chicago for med school a year later that Kevin begun texting more frequently. Aaron answered most of them.
Things with Katelyn fell apart two years into med school. Too much stress, too little money, and they both cracked and broke around the edges. It was okay. Another six months later, Kevin texted him, clearly drunk, that Thea had left him, too.
The following season was the last of Kevin's initial contract with the Sirens, and the Exy world was on the edge of their seats to see where their beloved son of Exy would go next.
Aaron was lying on his shitty bumpy couch, listening to the drip of his kitchen sink and trying to pretend he was paying attention to the show he put on, when he got the text. See you in Chicago.
Now, Aaron pushes himself up far enough to take some more medicine that Kevin hands him and hold the bowl steady. He foregoes a spoon to sip the soup straight over the rim. Kevin, in strange solidarity, sits beside him with his own bowl.
He turns the TV back on, though he switches it to one of his sports channels. Aaron doesn't mind. He drinks his soup and lets the white noise wash over him until he's too tired to hold the bowl. It's slipped gently from between his fingers, set down on the couch table with a soft clink, and then his head is drooping against a sturdy, body-warm surface, and he's drifting off.
There are no dreams this time, just golden-hued memories of the apartment and flashes of Kevin's presence. His shoes by the door. The second coffee mug on the drying rack. His sneaky little additions to Aaron's lunch box. The schedule he pins on the fridge. History books on the shelves. His cologne in the air of the bathroom when Aaron brushes his teeth in the morning.
Aaron sleeps, dreamless and content, and does not wake even when he's lifted from the couch.
When he opens his eyes again, it's to the ceiling in his bedroom, lit up golden by the bedside lamp.
He must have slept most of the evening away, but there is a fresh round of meds and a tall cup of water sitting beside his phone on the bedside table, and an oddly Kevin-shaped lump huddled under a blanket in the armchair beside his desk.
Aaron blinks over at him, trying to make his overheated synapses make sense of his presence. Kevin had taken off the mask at some point before falling asleep, and he looks soft and younger in the light. Almost like he did back in Palmetto.
Aaron sits up. He still feels woozy with fever and every other breath threatens a cough, but he drains the water and finds himself in desperate need of the bathroom.
It takes him a few minutes to drag his beleaguered body back and forth, and when he opens the door to his room again, Kevin is awake and sitting up in the armchair with a book in his lap like he'd never fallen asleep at all. He looks up at Aaron with blurry eyes, his hair mussed over his forehead, and Aaron, fever-stricken and delirious perhaps, aches to reach out and smoothe it down.
If he hadn't been across the room, he might not have been able to suppress the instinct.
"Hey," he says instead, the word feeling thick in his mouth.
Kevin tilts his head and raises a brow, though the expression falls flat on account of how visibly tired he is. "Hi. Sleep well?"
Aaron glances at his phone and finds it to be some ungodly hour of night. He shrugs and lets himself fall back onto the bed. Kevin's eyes follow him down, glued to him like magnets, only snapping up when Aaron clears the phlegm from his throat and says, "Yeah. I guess."
Kevin nods, mostly to himself, it seems, and folds his book shut. He pushes to his feet, though the fatigue stalls him there a moment, face morphing through various stages as he makes his decision.
Aaron wishes he could claim to be surprised when Kevin, finally, makes for his bed instead of the door.
"Your mask," is the only weak reminder he manages, but Kevin shrugs.
He perches on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, looking like an apparition in the dim light that touches only half his face. He says, lowly, "Aaron," and nothing more.
It must be the fever, but Kevin almost seems to glow.
Aaron remembers when Andrew got the flu sometime in their junior year, and how Kevin had hightailed it out of his dorm to hide in Aaron and Nicky's instead, terrified of contracting it and being unable to play. There is none of that now, just his steady gaze on Aaron's face and this heavy, pointed silence between them.
"You're gonna get sick," Aaron says, like it might solve anything.
"Too late to do much about that." Aaron doesn't miss the minuscule wince on his face — enough to reassure him that the real Kevin Day is still in there, somewhere. "Coach won't mind."
"But will you?"
Kevin shrugs again. "I have time to get better until playoffs."
Aaron wrinkles a brow. "What if it ruins your lung capacity?"
Another shrug, though with a touch more hesitation this time. "I'm about to be thirty next month. I'm lucky if I have another five years in me."
He doesn't say it like he means it, but Aaron lets it pass. He doesn't have enough brain power left to tear apart the nooks and crannies of Kevin's brain tonight.
"Who are you and what have you done to Kevin?" he asks instead, aware of how tired he sounds, and lets his head sink back into his pillow.
Kevin smiles as if relieved at the joke, the distraction. "I've nothing to lose, I suppose. Management has already offered to extend my contract."
It's Aaron's turn to rock to a stop, even if only metaphorically. His brows shoot up.
He didn't think there was any chance of Kevin staying in Chicago. It was already incredible enough that the Rogues managed to nail him down for two seasons when he was freshly released from his initial five-year contract with the Sirens. Everyone expected a star like him to keep his options open, to be on the hunt for bigger and better things, more expensive contracts and more opportunities at the championship.
The spark of hope under his skin at those words is dangerous. It could set Aaron's whole world alight if he doesn't contain it.
Carefully, he asks, "Are you going to take it?"
"They know what I'm worth," Kevin says. The haughtiness in his tone is familiar enough to soothe some of Aaron's fraying nerves. "And I have … reason to stay."
His gaze grows so heavy, Aaron has to swallow around the pit in his throat. "Oh yeah?"
"Yes."
Aaron blinks. It's too much for his fever-addled brain to take in. Kevin, staying. Kevin, here, for at least another year. Maybe more, if that's what he's hinting at.
"Okay," he says, a little stupidly. "Okay."
"Okay," Kevin agrees. His green eyes look ethereal in the low light. "You should sleep. You can take more meds in the morning."
Aaron nods, distracted. He pushes his sweaty bangs out of his forehead and tries to grapple with his aching thoughts.
When Kevin makes to get up, Aaron reaches out before he can think about it, fists a hand into the seam of his shirt. Kevin startles, halting, and Aaron has to swallow again before he can open his mouth. "Stay?"
It might have been a trick of the light, or a fever-induced hallucination, but Aaron could swear he sees Kevin's face soften.
"Okay," he says, and settles back down. "I'm staying right here."
Aaron's eyes drift shut, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, but his fingers never uncurl from their grip on Kevin's shirt until Kevin takes them himself. His warm palm covers Aaron's clammy fingers and pries them from his shirt just long enough that he can wrap them in his own.
The touch sends a warm tingle down Aaron's spine, and he has to take a breath to steady himself. He squeezes Kevin's fingers, and Kevin squeezes back.
Into the darkness behind his lids, Aaron says, "Glad I won't be homeless."
Kevin snorts. "Sleep, idiot." A pause, almost long enough for Aaron to fall asleep, before he adds, sounding indignant, "I would not have just thrown you to the street!"
Aaron smiles and floats away on the soft clouds of dreams.