Work Text:
"I hate being sick," Steve grumbled, muffled slightly by several layers of blankets.
"Oh, I am more than aware," Tony replied, mostly amused, as he worked on designs for SI from a nearby chair.
"Can I have more NyQuil yet?" Steve asked.
"I know you'd like to spend the entire week unconscious, but it's not great for you," Tony replied.
"I have a high metabolism. I've already gone through the last dose."
"What am I, an idiot? I factored your metabolism and your body weight into the dose, I know what I'm doing," Tony said. "Ten more minutes."
"Ten minutes is nothing," Steve whined.
Tony reached out a hand and pressed his fingers into the crown of Steve's head, rubbing gently. Steve subsided with a reluctant groan.
Bucky had warned him about this, or he might be significantly less calm over Steve's sudden crankiness. When Steve had begun sniffling over brunch and then vehemently denying he was sick, Bucky had followed Tony to the bar for another pitcher of mimosas and buttonholed him.
"Steve spent his whole childhood sick," Bucky said, fingers tapping nervously on the bar. "He really, really hates it and he's a son of a bitch when he gets sick nowadays."
"I've looked after him before when he's been hurt," Tony said.
"Hurt's different, he thinks he earned that. Sick's...he thinks it's not fair."
"Ooh," Tony said. That did put a spin on things. When Steve thought something wasn't fair, he could be very loud and very insistent. Tony liked it, most of the time; he liked that Steve had stubbornness to match his own. But you couldn't punch the flu in the face.
"Just remember I warned you," Bucky said. "And buy some cherry Lifesavers."
Cherry Lifesavers were not cough drops, but Tony and Steve had gone three rounds over this, Steve coughing his way through an impassioned defense of them as folk medicine, until Tony finally gave up and put away the cherry Ricola lozenges that Steve was refusing to use.
Steve's hand now snaked out from under the covers, grasped the roll of cherry Lifesavers (his third in two days), and drew back under the blankets. There was a crinkle of foil and then the Lifesavers landed back on the table. Tony smiled indulgently and got up to pour him a new, carefully measured shot of NyQuil.
***
The benefit of being a genius was that genius was portable; he could work as comfortably from the bedroom as he could in the workshop, at least for a few days. He'd thought he might catch what Steve was suffering through, and he'd spent the last two nights sleeping on the sofa in the penthouse -- plus washing his hands a lot -- but at this point he was pretty confident that Steve's self-described "broken immune system" was to blame.
Depending on when Steve's fever broke, he might actually get to sleep in the same bed with him tonight. The sofa was comfortable, and chronic sleep debt meant he hadn't had any problems dropping off, but he could feel the creeping fatigue of lumpy cushions catching up with him.
Slowly, above the buzz of his own mind at work, he became conscious of a background noise, a chorus of sniffles and wet breaths that sounded different from illness. He glanced over at the bed, where Steve was just a tuft of hair emerging from the blankets. He could see his shoulders moving.
He set the tablet aside and leaned over the bed, shifting to sit on the edge and resting a hand in the general vicinity of Steve's head, under the blanket.
"You okay, burrower?" he asked. There was a sniffle in response. "Steve?"
"I'm fine," Steve said, but his voice cracked. Tony leaned over, resting one hand on Steve's other side, and peeled the blanket down a little. Steve huddled his face down in the crook of his arm, but it was evident he was crying.
"Hey," Tony said, as gently as he knew how, considering the shock that went through him. "What's going on? Are you in pain?"
Steve rubbed his face roughly against his forearm. "No."
"Are you having like...allergies?" Tony tried.
"No," Steve said, more sharply, curling tighter in on himself.
"Um...should I ignore the fact that you're crying?" Tony said.
Steve shivered, and Tony made an executive decision, twisting around to weasel his way under the covers, pulling Steve up against his chest, even though his elbows poked him right in the solar plexus. Steve made a terrifying, broken little whimper.
"I don't know what's going on and I'm bad at comforting," Tony said. "You gotta tell me what's happening here, Steve."
"I don't feel well," Steve said wetly, his voice thick. His cold hands slid under Tony's shirt, seeking warmth. Tony was about to reply, hopefully with something vaguely comforting, when Steve drew a deep breath and a torrent of words fell out. "I don't feel well and I can't sleep and I want to sleep because my chest hurts and it's hard to breathe and I hate this, I hate feeling like a kid again and a burden and I hate that it makes me cry, I always used to cry and I hated it and I hate it now -- "
Tony held onto him as best he could, given Steve was shifting irritably and trying to both curl up and curl into Tony at the same time, and wondered if he'd miscalculated a dosage. Steve was normally stubborn and if not imperturbable then at least calmly rational about things. He only ever let loose like this when he was really mad about something, or arguing with someone about Captain America.
"Nobody thinks you're a burden," he soothed, securing Steve's head in place with a curl of his arm.
"Nobody ever does but I still -- am," Steve said, half-interrupted by a hiccuping sob. "Wasting your time, making Clint pull a double shift -- "
"Clint's on call, it's not like a double's gonna kill him," Tony pointed out.
"Can't even get up and punch something," Steve grumbled. "Can't do paperwork, and you're stuck here -- "
"I choose to be here," Tony corrected. "Because my boyfriend is sick. You looked after me after Afghanistan."
"I fed you steak in a waterfront mansion."
"And I very much appreciated it."
"It's not the same."
Tony reached over to the side-table and popped a Lifesaver out of the packet, tucking it between his front teeth.
"Hey," he said. Steve, after a second, took his head out of Tony's neck and looked up. Tony waggled his eyebrows. Steve pulled a laugh up out of somewhere in him, lifting one hand out from under Tony's shirt to wipe his eyes.
"You'll get sick," he warned.
"Sick of waiting for you to kiss me," Tony said around the candy, only slightly garbled.
Steve sighed, but he tilted his head up a little and took the candy out of his mouth, a bare brush of chapped lips.
"I get emotional when I have fevers," he said, huddling into Tony again. "I don't like it. Makes me feel helpless and weird. Creepy."
"You don't come off creepy, just really angry," Tony told him.
"Sorry."
"Don't be. I wouldn't stick around if you weren't worth it."
Steve heaved a sigh that felt like it came from his toes. "Can I have more NyQuil?"
Tony laughed into his hair. "Tell you what, if you're not asleep in five minutes I'll slip you an extra shot."
"Will you stay?"
"Yep. You're freezing, you need the heat."
He felt Steve turn to press his chest up against the arc reactor. Tony lay still, letting him situate himself, and by the time Steve was done soaking up body heat, he was pretty close to unconscious. Another few minutes and he was snoring hoarsely and drooling on Tony's shirt.
Tony felt pretty good about it all, really. It wasn't often Steve showed that kind of emotion; usually if it was strong emotion it was rage that was fuelling him, and rage could be a lot of fun, but -- sadness was more vulnerable. Required more trust.
If they got through something like this they could probably survive a lot, but Tony still closed his eyes and breathed the closest thing he had to a prayer, a nightly devotional when Steve was in his bed: please, please don't let me fuck this up.
Steve coughed into his neck, nose poking right into his windpipe. Tony adjusted them just enough that Steve wouldn't strangle him in his sleep, then closed his eyes. He fell asleep to the rattle of Steve's breathing and the smell of fake cherry flavoring, happily.