Work Text:
He wakes up feeling dried out, first.
Too much time at the bartop drinking Monk’s poorly named concoctions, Bode muses. One too many drinks with Cal tends to do that— it's an easy enough explanation for his chapped lips and achy head.
The soreness of his throat he can blame on that new DJ Cal brought in. Bode's a quiet bar kind of person, but Cal seems suited for some of the flashing raves in the not-so lower levels of Coruscant where there's thumping base and a hint of glitterstim that you can taste in the air as the dancers sweat it out. The DJ he discovered doesn't belong on a backwater like Koboh or in a little saloon like Plyoon's, but Cal had a slew of requests at the ready that left Bode shouting over the counter most of the night to be heard.
That's probably a one off. He'd seen Greez's reaction to the noise as well and suspects that the speakers will suddenly be much quieter tonight, but for one night Cal had enjoyed his impromptu rave.
Bode's a little dizzy when he crawls out of his bunk, but again, easily explainable. It'll pass as he gets up and moves around. Bit of breakfast, some caf, he'll be right as rain, he figures.
The fever that cloaks him around noon is slightly less explainable. It's not bad, just… warm. He peels off his gloves for the first time in forever and Cal quips that he's got the same tan lines— or tan line, he corrects, waving his one gloved palm. “Cal,” he laughs, shaking his head, “you'd have to have a tan for that to be true.”
Cal's replying grin is bright. “Okay, so it's more… less freckles,” he admits, bumping shoulders with Bode companionably. Bode does his best not to waver too hard when he does. Cal's one bare hand catches his and for a moment he thinks he didn't quite manage to play off the dizziness, but Cal’s just weaving their fingers together. “I like your hands.”
Cal's flirtations are as unsubtle as the rest of him. He's staring down at their entwined fingers with an obvious hunger, and Bode knows he's taking stock of all the beauty marks he's just uncovered and contemplating just how nicely they fit together— because Bode's doing the latter too, admiring Cal's slim, calloused fingers slot between his own. They do look good together. He can easily picture their fingers entwined in another place, pressing Cal's hands down with his own into the sheets he rolled out of this morning.
He swallows. His throat hasn't lost that rawness yet from shouting over the bar, and he feels the whole length of it compress uncomfortably. Saliva sticks at the top of his throat and he has to clear it.
Cal takes the sound the wrong way and withdraws, sending him an apologetic smile, before he's immediately turning his head to chat with the droid perching on his shoulder.
Bode's hand is still too warm even without Cal's holding it.
His throat keeps getting worse throughout the day too, the urge to swallow to clear the lingering frogginess never actually helping to do so, just leaving him more and more aware that this probably isn't solely from last night. The discomfort isn't passing; if anything, it's getting worse.
He begs off early when they get back, downing water and feeling grimly unsurprised when he still feels flush as he strips down and crawls back into bed. He keeps swallowing and turning over, unable to get quite comfortable, before he eventually falls into an uneasy sleep.
He wakes up feeling clogged.
The fever is still wrapped around his skin in a too-warm blanket he can't shrug off and his throat isn't just uncomfortable— swallowing is painful now, but just as compulsive as the day prior. He can barely breathe through his nose and his lips are still damningly chapped.
“Kark,” he says to his ceiling, and he has to clear his throat hard afterwards and breathe in shallow to not risk a cough. The curse comes out croaky.
He gets up long enough to stumble to the fresher and piss, try downing another glass of water to stave off the inevitable dehydration, and falls back into bed. He can't keep an arm thrown over his face because of how warm his skin is, so it slumps over his head, and that feels a little better.
Bode can probably power through this in a day, if he rests.
Cal comes in later when he doesn't show. Bode opens his eyes blearly to see Cal watching him sleep, his lip between his teeth and a glimmer of amusement in those pretty green eyes.
“You've overslept,” Cal accuses with mischief in his smile.
Bode clears his throat before speaking. It's a bad idea.
He coughs. His lungs feel like his throat— raw, achy, awful —and the sound he makes is less of the light cough he hoped and more of a deeper, violent choke of clearing air from his lungs.
Cal's expression shifts quickly from amusement to alarm, his hand landing on the edge of the bed. “Oh,” he says, his tone understanding. “You're sick.”
“I’m sick,” Bode agrees, because unlike Cal, he knows when he's down and even if he didn't, the way his lungs just betrayed him really puts arguing otherwise out of the picture. He feels heavy for having slept, not better. The light on the wall helps confirm why— it's mid-afternoon, at least. He didn't even notice the other man coming in and wonders if it's the first time he has, or if he'd popped in earlier to try and rouse him before heading out. Cal's dressed for the day and he's got a streak of dirt up by his ear.
He probably spent the day in the garden waiting for Bode to show, then got impatient and came to wake him up. Bode clears his throat a bit more successfully this time. “You heading out?”
“I was,” Cal admits. “Turgle’s making a fuss about the raiders. I came to see if you were up to join me before Greez tears his head off, but…”
Bode smiles at him. “They'd hear me coming from a mile away,” he agrees, clearing his throat unhappily again.
Cal places his bare hand on his forehead. “You're warm,” he says. “There’s the cough, too. Anything else?”
Bode gives a halfhearted shrug. Nothing that isn't connected to the rest of it. It's not like he's bleeding out. “It's just some backwater bug. I'll sleep it off, Scrapper.”
Cal smiles sympathetically and stands up. “Don't go back to sleep just yet,” he advises. “I'll have Greez send up some soup or something. Eat a bit before you sleep again, yeah?”
Bode makes what he hopes sounds like a noise of agreement, eyes already falling shut. Cal's presence is soothing in the Force, even if he can't reach out and touch it. Between the gentle warmth of it and the exhaustion weighing him down into his bunk, he's not sure he can really accomplish that, but Greez’ll undoubtedly wake him up if he dozes off.
“Feel better, Bode,” he hears Cal say, soft, from the door.
He does not feel better.
The fever turns to a chill. He wakes up damp with sweat and has to peel off his clothes, abandoning them on the floor as he makes his wobbly way to the fresher. The sonic doesn't help— no warm water to wash away the goosebumps that keep prickling at his skin in waves —and just leaves him feeling marginally less gross, but worse for having gotten up at all.
There's soup by his bedside, kept warm with a heavy bowl and a little lid. He drinks it tentatively straight from the bowl, trying not to upend the whole thing on himself but knowing that a spoon is just asking for trouble with how his body keeps suddenly shivering. It tastes alright. Greez is usually a much better chef. He has to stop drinking so he can breathe through his mouth now and then— his nose is properly clogged now and his sinuses ache from it.
He gets halfway through the bowl before he's simply too karking exhausted to keep going without spilling, and he abandons the rest back on the tray, catching sight of a few pills laid out on it.
Bode doesn't recognize them. He'd normally give more than a cursory glance to the shape and color, actually putting in effort to figure out what they are before taking them, but he's got a good guess that they're either from Cal or Greez. They're probably not poison or something debilitating. Fever reducers, decongestants if he's lucky.
He swallows them dry. It hurts and makes him hack up a lung afterwards, but they stay down with the soup.
Bode curls up with one of the blankets tucked fully around him, shivering. Backwater bug, he'd said. Somehow, he doesn't quite believe that anymore.
His lungs won't fill.
They rattle when he breathes in shallow, shudder violently with protest when he breathes deep until he wears them out coughing and they quietly submit to his wheezing, tired inhalations once more.
He's still chilled. He's also pretty sure he's cooking, swaddled up in his blankets. Bode keeps kicking free of them only to seek them out with shaky hands minutes or hours later, tucking them back up under his chin and cursing that they've lost their warmth in the brief time he hasn't been huddled under them.
When he swallows, it feels like he's swallowing around his own torn throat. His lips have gone from chapped to cracked, and there's no helping it, not when he can only breathe through his mouth. His whole head aches like it's caught in a vice, a gear slowly but inexorably turning the pressure tighter bit by bit, trying to crush his skull.
Bode hates being sick. It feels like dying.
He knows it's the fever that's the primary culprit of that sensation. He knows it because he can feel someone there, at the edges of his miserable awareness.
A wet cloth on his forehead. A pair of steady hands helping him sit up, holding a glass of water to his dry lips and making him drink. Fingers in his hair, brushing it away from his face.
He cracks his eyes open and sees a familiar face looking down at him, summer green eyes wide with concern. He tries to speak.
“Don't,” Cal chides. “You'll cough again.”
An easy enough request. Bode stops trying and just watches Cal, seeing him vanish and reappear with his long, slow blinks and swimming head.
Sometimes Cal is by his side. Other times he's not. Sometimes when Bode slits his heavy eyes open he sees Cal touching things around the room, a small frown on his face, and he knows that something about that isn't good, but it's hard to remember what exactly when he's barely able to hold a thought for a few minutes at a time.
It gets worse, after that.
He hallucinates a bit. Or toes the line between dreaming and waking in a way that his exhausted brain can't comprehend, perhaps. There's no other explanation for why he wakes himself up with a hacking cough and thinks he can hear Kata speaking with Cal.
“Is Papa going to be okay?”
Little star, he wants to say, turning towards her voice, of course, of course. He doesn't know if it's true, but it's instinct to quell his daughter's fears. Of course he'll be okay. He has to be, for her.
“I’m taking care of him, he'll be alright.” That's Cal, impossibly. Bode drags his eyes open to see him sitting at the table, Kata a blue glow in front of him.
It's a nice dream, he decides. Cal and Kata. Impossible, but nice.
Cal's head turns his direction. “He's waking up,” he says. “Do you want to say hi?”
He doesn't quite hear dream-Kata’s answer, but when he blinks his eyes open once more, Cal is at his side and there's the blue holo-glow of his daughter between them. Bode's mouth curls up in a smile and his fingers touch the buzzy image, sending the light scattering. Kata's expression is worried, her fingers twisting over each other nervously.
“Little star,” he croaks. “Miss you.” Her face crumples. Bode tries to touch the holo again, pet his daughter's hair, but the dream refuses to cooperate with him and make her properly solid instead of holo-blue.
“Are you really sick?” she asks. Her voice is so far away.
Bode shakes his head, lies. The words feel torn from his throat. “Just a cold.”
“A bit more than that,” Cal says behind Kata. “But he'll be okay. I promise.”
Kata says something else, but Bode's already slipping back into a different dream where everything is dark and heavy and he can't breathe right.
He feels like shit.
Sticky with old sweat and misery, but his cinched skull is no longer drifting in delirium from fever. Bode drags himself up slightly, wonders where exactly his shirt went, and immediately reaches for the glass of water at his bedside. The cold of it makes him cough, a heavy, ugly thing that has him spitting up phlegm with disgust into a handful of tissues similarly placed nearby.
Bode makes a face at the color. He's going to be doing that a lot, he reckons, until he clears it out.
Someone else clears their throat nearby, pointedly.
Bode looks up.
Cal's sitting over at the table. “Your fever broke last night,” he offers. “But I don't think you were all there, for a little while, even with the meds. How are you feeling?”
“Like—” his words catch and he has to hack up into the tissue again. More phlegm, more tissues, and his voice is raw when he's able to collect himself well enough to finish his sentence; “—shit, Scrapper.”
The other man wears a sympathetic grimace. “Yeah.”
Bode slumps back against the pillows. Someone's been kind enough to pile them up to help him breathe better. “You took care of me,” he croaks. “You didn't have to.”
Cal is quiet long enough that Bode has to open his eyes to check that he's still there; he is, sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, staring at Bode with something complicated in his expression. “I wanted to,” he says finally, and taking a deep breath, he sits back in the chair, one hand rising up to touch something on the table with his bare hand. “I'm glad I did.”
Bode flits his gaze towards Cal's hand on the table— bare, freckles and callouses on display —where it touches Bode's Imperial commlink. The one he uses to report back to Denvik; the one he uses to call his daughter.
The vague memory of blurry blue and two unexpected voices speaking to each other bunts up against his clogged head. Not a hallucination, not a dream. A reality that he'd been too sick to acknowledge— an impossible one, really, because the only way to use that commlink would be to know Bode's security codes.
But Cal’s palm is bare on the metal grill of the device, and Bode knows that impossible isn't exactly something in Cal Kestis' vocabulary. Not with his gift of psychometry. Cal meets his gaze dead on when he drags it away from the commlink, and Bode has the distinct feeling he's just skipped a step and dropped heavily onto the next with an unpleasant, disconcerting swoop in his gut. “We need to talk,” Cal says, his mouth a grim line.
Yeah, Bode muses. He supposes they do.