Work Text:
The call came at half past nine.
Bruno White had been reviewing containment logs for Subject 1006 when his desk phone rang.
"White." He picked up, keeping one hand on the page.
"White, you may need to check up on your boss before Leith gets pissed off at him." Eddie Ritterman's voice came through, easy and unhurried. The man had the tone of someone watching something mildly entertaining happen to someone else.
White stopped writing. "What?"
"Sawyer is currently coughing up an enormously large fit in the workspace." A brief pause. "I would much prefer not to see Leith tear into him once he checks in. Bad start for everyone’s morning."
"How long has this been going on?"
"Caught it on the monitor about ten minutes ago. Nobody else is in there with him." Another pause, this one with a faint suggestion of amusement behind it. "He sounds horrid, by the way."
"I'm on my way." White set the receiver down and pushed himself up from the desk.
He capped his pen, squared the file stack, and left his office.
The shared workspace smelled of antiseptic and old coffee, the overhead lights always running slightly too bright. It was a long room — monitors along one wall, filing cabinets and desks clustered through the middle, surgical equipment carts at the far end.
White pushed through the door.
He found Dr. Sawyer almost immediately.
Harley was at one of the desks, one hand braced flat, the other gripping a ceramic mug hard enough that it had drifted close to the edge. He was coughing in waves — deep, rattling, full-body things that bent him slightly forward.
White crossed to the desk and moved the mug further back from the edge before it could become a problem.
The room was otherwise empty. Eddie had been watching on cameras, then.
He looked at Harley properly.
The dark circles were severe. Not the ordinary kind from a late night, but the bruised, sunken kind that came from several days of disrupted sleep. There was a flush across his cheekbones. He was carrying more weight on the desk than usual, leaning into it without seeming to notice.
The coughing broke. Harley straightened — slowly — and pulled in a slow, wet breath. He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. The gesture seemed to irritate him the moment he made it.
"Dr. Sawyer." White kept his voice even.
Harley turned. His eyes fixed on White with the particular look he reserved for interruptions. The effect was somewhat undermined by the obvious effort it was costing him to stand upright.
"What do you need, White?" His voice was thick, consonants slightly flattened.
"Mr. Ritterman informed me that you were unwell." White said flatly.
Something moved across Harley's expression. A faint narrowing of the eyes. A slight tightening of his jaw.
"I'm fine." He said it with clipped certainty. "Tell Eddie to go fuck himself." He reached for the mug and wrapped both hands around it. (Harley was a sophisticated man. He knew not to throw curses randomly in the air. If he was swearing, he was probably mad.) "I have work to do involving 1006."
"You should go home, Dr. Sawyer." White said.
"I'm fine." The same tone. A fact being laid down. "I have work to do, and Leith will not be pleased if I'm not here when he arrives."
"Mr. Pierre will not be pleased at your condition either." White kept his voice measured. "Even less so if it spreads to others. He has a meeting in two days."
"I have work to do." Harley repeated, as if White hadn't spoken.
White looked at him carefully. The flush was worse up close. The breathing between words had a wet, hitching quality that wasn't going anywhere.
"You caught this because you weren't taking care of yourself." White said. "Take a day or two at home. Or I'll remove you from the premises myself."
The look Harley gave him moved through several stages in quick succession. Disbelief, then something close to genuine affront, then a brief flicker of something else, and finally back to flat irritation.
"I'm fine." Four times now. He sniffled immediately afterward, which did nothing for his argument. He picked up a file from the desk. "I still need to check on 1166's condition."
"I'll ask someone else to cover it."
Harley's expression soured. "They are all improper for the job. Only I know what to look for with 1166."
"Then we'll wait until you're back."
"There isn't time to neglect—" Harley stopped. His jaw tightened. The file in his hand crinkled faintly at the edges where his grip had gone rigid without him noticing. He looked at White steadily. "I don't need to be managed."
"I'm not managing you, Dr. Sawyer."
"You're standing in my workspace telling me to leave." Harley said, voice dropping quiet. "That is the definition of—"
He stopped abruptly. His jaw worked for a second in a way that was clearly unintentional. He turned away, set the file down, and braced both hands on the desk.
The next wave of coughing was worse than the first.
White stood still and watched without moving forward, because stepping in was the last thing Harley would accept. But he tracked the bend of the man's knees, the angle of his arms, whether the mug was going to become a problem again.
It ran for almost a full minute.
When it ended, Harley stayed bent over the desk. He didn't move. He just breathed.
Then, slowly, he straightened.
"Very well." He said. Quiet. Flat. Like a small concession being made under protest.
White let out a quiet breath through his nose.
"I'll drive you." He said, before Harley could suggest anything else.
White had been to Harley's house several times before, always to retrieve something — case files, a lab notebook, once a specific set of annotated notes that apparently couldn't be recreated. He'd never been inside for any other reason.
He pulled the car around. Harley got into the backseat without comment, which was unusual. The silence lasted about three minutes.
"This is a waste of time."
"It doesn't have to be a long recovery." White kept his eyes on the road.
"I had a schedule for this morning." A pause. A congested sniff. "1006's logs were supposed to be reviewed today."
"They'll keep."
"I had a schedule."
"I understand, Dr. Sawyer."
Harley went quiet. Outside, the facility grounds thinned into flat grey road.
"Eddie should have kept this to himself." Harley said after a moment.
"He was being practical." White said.
"He was being entertained." Harley said. The precision of that conclusion was blunt and certain and most likely accurate.
White said nothing to that.
The rest of the drive passed without conversation.
Harley paused at his own front door for a full ten seconds. He stood there with one hand on the frame and the expression of a man taking stock of a decision he'd already made but hadn't finished resenting.
Then he stepped inside.
White followed.
The house was precise. Orderly. The kind of space that reflected a meticulous person — books by subject, equipment properly stored, nothing without a reason to be where it was.
Except the coffee table. Which held a considerable spread of paperwork across its entire surface.
Harley moved toward it immediately.
"You're not touching a single piece, Dr. Sawyer." White said.
Harley stopped. Turned.
"Fuck you," he spat, with sudden renewed energy. "Fuck you to hell."
He turned and walked down the hall to his bedroom.
White stood in the quiet living room for a moment. He picked up one paper that had drifted near the edge and straightened it. Then he went to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
The bedroom was dim. Harley had pulled the curtains and was sitting at the edge of his bed — upright, rigid, the posture of a man who'd agreed to lie down in theory but wasn't there yet.
He looked up when White came in with the water. He took the glass without speaking.
He sipped. Set it on the nightstand.
"I'll head back now," White said. He stood near the foot of the bed, hands at his sides. "Pierre won't want neither of us in."
"No." Immediate.
White raised an eyebrow. "Dr. Sawyer—"
"You stay." Harley said it without looking at him. "If I can't work, you don't either."
"That isn't how the arrangement—"
"You said to wait. So wait." Harley's eyes moved and landed on White.
The logic was poor. White was aware of this. He was also aware that saying so wasn't going to accomplish anything.
"Fine." He said. "But don't expect me to sleep with you."
Harley made a short, dry sound — ambiguous enough to be almost anything — and lay down. He pulled the blanket over himself, turned onto his side, and went quiet.
White sat on the edge of the bed. Hands on his knees, back straight. There was no armchair nearby and standing in the doorway seemed worse. The room was still. Harley's breathing was rough at the edges but settling.
About twenty minutes passed.
Then the warmth against his arm.
Harley had turned over. And with a movement that seemed partly unconscious, he'd pressed his face into White's arm and gone still.
White didn't move.
He looked down.
Harley's eyes were closed. The flush was more visible up close. His hair was slightly damp at the temples. He looked — for the first time in all the years White had worked under him — entirely unguarded. None of the cold, sadistic emotion he usually had. Just a sick, exhausted person who had defaulted, without ceremony, toward warmth.
White looked back at the wall.
He sat very still and told himself it was simply what illness did to people. It lowered the defenses. It made people irrational. It was physiological and it meant nothing, and he was not going to—
Harley shifted, fractionally. His face pressed a little closer.
White breathed slowly, a slight flush creeping up his face, keeping his eyes firmly planted on the wall.
He didn't move.
He was still sitting there an hour later when Harley came awake with a sudden sharp movement and was off the bed before White had fully registered it.
He was across the room in four strides and through the bathroom door.
White was off the bed and following before he'd thought about it.
He pushed the door open carefully.
Harley was on the floor, one arm braced against the side of the toilet, and he was very sick.
White crossed to him and crouched down. He put a hand flat between Harley's shoulder blades.
Harley's whole body flinched.
"Don't." His voice came out wrecked and furious in equal measure. "Don't you dare."
"I'm not doing anything." White said, and kept his hand exactly where it was.
What followed was prolonged and undignified, and White was aware that Harley was acutely aware of every second of it. It was visible in the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his free hand pressed flat against the floor in a posture of forced composure. He was a man who catalogued weakness in others. Being on his knees on a bathroom floor while his second-in-command watched was, White suspected, landing somewhere in the region of acute unwanted vulnerability.
When it was over, Harley stayed still.
He braced his arm against the tank and breathed.
White got up. He ran the tap, wet a cloth, folded it, and held it out.
Harley didn't take it right away. He raised his head slowly and looked at White with something that was exhausted and proud and furious all at once, each fighting the others for space.
"I don't need—"
"I know." White pressed the cloth gently to the side of his face anyway.
For a moment he thought Harley was going to push him away. His jaw tightened. His eyes were very bright — fever, or something else — and they moved across White's face with a look that was too controlled to be read.
Then he reached up and took the cloth himself, holding it in place. Their fingers were in contact for two or three seconds longer than the handoff required.
White pulled back. He sat on the edge of the bathtub and said nothing.
Harley sat on the floor with the cloth pressed to his mouth and didn't look at him.
"This doesn't leave this room." His voice was low and venomous.
"Of course" White said.
A pause.
"The fever's worse," White said. "You need more water and something to eat."
"I'm aware of what a fever requires, White." Flat. "I have a doctorate."
"I'll make something." White stood.
"I didn't ask—"
"I know." He left before the sentence finished.
There was an unopened can of chicken soup in one of the upper cabinets. Probably not the best, but it'll do. After opening and heating it up in a bowl, he filled a fresh glass of water and brought both back.
Harley had made it back to the bed and was sitting against the headboard. He looked like a man conducting a quiet audit of his own dignity.
He took the water without a word. He drank the soup slowly. Then he set the bowl on the nightstand and looked at the far wall.
"You can go." He finally said.
"I said I'd stay."
"I'm releasing you from that."
"You don't have the authority to do that." White said, which was technically backwards, but which sometimes worked where direct argument didn't.
Harley looked at him.
It was a long look. The kind he used deliberately — silence and eye contact deployed with precision to produce discomfort or compliance.
White returned it without flinching.
"You're irritating." Harley said, eventually.
"I know."
Harley looked away. Toward the faint line of light at the edge of the curtain.
"People don't generally involve themselves in my affairs." He started, "Not without being invited to."
"I know, Dr. Sawyer."
"And yet you do. Consistently." He stated it without looking at White.
White didn't respond to that. It was true, and anything he added risked becoming something he wasn't ready to navigate.
"Lie down," he said. "You'll feel worse sitting up."
Harley made a quiet, dismissive sound. But he slid down against the pillow. He didn't tell White to leave.
White sat back in the same spot as before. The room was gradually getting dim as the light shifted. Harley was still, his breathing rough but steadier.
White was looking at the wall when Harley spoke.
"Why do you do this." Not quite a question.
"Do what?''
"Stay." A pause, "No one would fault you for having dropped me at the door and gone back."
"Mr. Pierre would."
"That's not why." Harley said it simply, like checking off an incorrect answer.
White was quiet for a moment.
He could feel Harley looking at him, even without turning to look back. That particular quality of attention — the way it shifted the air in a room.
The silence that followed wasn't comfortable. It sat between them at the edge of something, neither of them moving toward it or away.
"Sleep, Dr. Sawyer." White said.
He heard Harley exhale slowly.
Then, for the second time, the warmth of Harley's face finding his arm. Slower this time. And this time it was deliberate, in the quiet way that things were deliberate when someone had decided not to say them out loud.
White felt the faint exhale against his arm.
He looked down.
Harley's eyes were closed. His face was still — none of its usual operating expressions, the cold amusement and the precise assessment, all of it gone. Just the plainness underneath.
White held his gaze on him a second too long.
Then he looked back at the wall.
He sat very still. He let his arm stay where it was.
He told himself it meant nothing.
He'd allow it, just once.