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Red… Orange…
Up and down the rainbow carpet, Sprout paces, hands twiddling anxious thumbs behind his back. The hallway is long, empty, and quiet; perfect for his activity at hand.
Yellow… Green… Gosh, how long does a check-up take?!? I feel like they should be done by now…
Not so perfect for the spinning storm brewing in his head.
He skips blue and purple, opting instead to stand in front of the closed door separating him from his best friend. Attempting to catch some of the conversations happening, he presses his ear to the door, but much to his dismay, most of what he catches from the other side isn’t very helpful. Something, something, ichor… something something… mucus production?
Eugh.
Sprout puts his ear back to the door, and what he hears next makes his stomach drop.
“Ah, Sam…? Hold on. We have an audience.”
Immediately, Sprout pulls back to bolt away from the door, for his fear of getting in trouble overrides all other instincts. Instead of escaping like he planned, however, a sudden force pulls him back with a harsh jerk to his neck, stealing his air quickly enough to prompt a dry cough from the berry.
Arthur, now standing in the doorway, lets out a sharp chuckle at the sight laying at his feet. “Oh, Sprout— how did you manage to get your scarf stuck on the door handle?” He unwraps the striped fabric from its metallic prison, then reaches down to help Sprout back to his feet, taking the time to brush the dust from the floor off his front side. “I should’ve known better than to keep you from your best frie—”
“—Sprout!!”
Behind Arthur, the soft thud of little socked feet signals an escapee from the nurse’s table, and Cosmo quickly darts between Arthur’s legs to dive into a firm embrace with Sprout.
Sam’s familiar, drawn-out, I-don’t-get-paid-enough-for-this sigh cuts through the air, and with no hesitation, they shoulder past Arthur to grab Cosmo back by his upper arms. “He’s not done with the examination. I promise, you two will have time to hang out in the kitchen before your little… meet-and-treat… but not if you keep inter-rupting, Seedly.”
Sprout crosses his arms to his chest and narrows his eyes at his handler, following them into the room as they return Cosmo to the table he was seated on prior. “Whatever, Mc-Laugh-lin. Is he okay? Is he gonna be able to do the meet-and-treat with us?” He lifts up an arm, and like second nature, Sam reaches down to lift the strawberry onto their shoulders so he could see what was happening.
The nurse pivots away from Cosmo, and what surprises Sprout is the fact that she chooses to interact with him instead of his handler. “Yes, Mister Seedly.”
“...Please, just call me Sprout,” Sprout mumbles, shooting Sam a playfully nasty look when they snicker at the berry’s last name for the millionth-and-first time.
“Okay, Sprout. It looks like Cosmo just has a cold… or whatever the toon equivalent is to that. As long as he washes his hands lots and covers his cough, he should be able to attend your meet-and-greet!”
“Meet-and-treat,” Sprout corrects, bobbing his head down to further emphasize. Every so often, he and the other food-themed toons would set up cute little sessions in the bakery where kids could come and enjoy a pastry-filled tea party with their favorite characters. It was something they all looked forward to, as the kids who attended were usually pretty mellow, and they often got to have some fun, interesting conversations with their visitors.
He tilts his body to the side to get a better look at Cosmo when he hears the ever-too familiar sound of crunchy, productive coughing—he works with children, after all, it’s a sound he hears more often than not, especially during the colder seasons—and the sight of his friend hunched over into his sweater sleeve admittedly makes him a little sad.
The nurse’s eyes lower to meet Sam’s, and with a slightly nervous air tainting her smile, she utters, “I’d advise you to keep an eye on him, though. I gave him some generic cold medicine we use for human children… but if the cough gets more productive or he spikes a fever, bring him back here so he can rest.”
Sprout’s stomach twists into an anxious knot. “A… fever?”
To prevent any further worried spiraling, Sam curtly interjects, “Cosmo shouldn’t get one of those. Even if he does, it won’t be like when you get them, Seedly.”
“For some reason, I don’t believe you.”
Sam snorts. “You should.” They lower Sprout to the ground to finally reunite him with his best friend and side-eyes Arthur to non-verbally communicate that they were planning on leaving. “Alright, let’s go get things set up, you little weirdos. The meet-and-treat isn’t gonna… uh… meet itself? Treat itself? …Never mind. Let’s just go.”
An hour or two later, Sprout lays out the final set of silverware atop the newly decorated bakery tables, releasing an exerted sigh and lifting a hand to wipe imaginary sweat off his brow. To some degree, he enjoyed the set-up and preparation that came with these organized events—a little manual labor often helped clear his mind—but he certainly felt relieved when such tasks were completed.
“Finally… All finished, Cosmo! Now we just have to wait for the kids to get here!” His tail swishes back and forth excitedly as he rocks back and forth on his feet, waiting for a response from the cake roll.
Cosmo barely looks up from his hundred-somethingth coughing fit smothered into his hoodie to squint his rheumy eyes at Sprout, offering a shaky thumbs up and wonky smile to confirm he heard.
Sprout, however, frowns, furrowing his eyes with worry and resting a hand on his shoulder. “Cos, if you need to sit this one out, they’ll understand…”
The cake roll shakes his head, and Sprout grips his shoulder firmer when the action makes him sway on his feet. “I can do it. It— snf— can’t be Sprout and Cosmo meet-and-treat without me…!”
Before Sprout can come up with a response, the sound of Sam’s thudding footsteps turns both toons’ attention away from the conversation.
“Are you two ready?” they ask, leaning against the doorframe with a strikingly similar nonchalance to when Sprout takes the same position. “We’ve got a couple kids checked in and ready to go.”
“Yes!” Cosmo quickly responds, forcing himself up straighter and clasping his hands in front of himself. The desperate look he shoots Sprout next just begs—begs for nothing more than a chance to prove himself, his worth, his capability…
And Sprout understands. Against his better judgement, he flashes Sam a smile and a nod, prompting them to slip out the door and invite the kids in.
If there’s one thing Sprout was good at, other than culinary arts, it’s entertaining children. While he was bashful and hesitant to accept compliments from his peers and superiors, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride when he heard young, excited shouts praising his name. His favorite part had to be the art. Over the years, he’d received many crayon drawings of him and Cosmo, and some of them had cute, personal messages written across the top. One of his favorites was a particularly well-done illustration of them holding hands, gifted to him from a little girl. She had written a sweet little story on the back about how her and her best friend once baked cookies together, just like Sprout and Cosmo had on their little show segment. To this day, the drawing remains taped to his wall above his bed.
Things went by pretty smoothly at the beginning. Everyone got to introduce themselves to each other, and Sam helped set out the blank sugar cookies and supplies so each kid could decorate their own cookie however they pleased. Sprout couldn’t help but be distracted, however, when every time he cast a sideways glance at Cosmo, he somehow looked more tired.
At one point, after Cosmo excused himself to get a particularly rough coughing fit under control, Sprout found himself doubting the nurse gave him medicine at all. Every so often, he caught Sam also surveying the shaky pastry, though they did nothing but stand in the back of the room and watch.
Then, whilst trying to reach for a sprinkle shaker, a little girl accidentally bumps a bowl of red frosting onto the floor. When everyone's attention falls on her in response to the loud crash, her lip begins to tremble and her large, shiny eyes sparkle with the threat of tears.
“Aw, no need to cry, cutie,” Sprout reassures, offering a loving squeeze to her shoulder. “Cosmo and I make messes in the kitchen all the time, remember?” Once she nods in affirmation, he adds on, “So what do we always do when we make a mess?”
Another kid chimes in instantly with a cheerful, “Clean it up!”
“Yes, yes, good job…!” From his pocket, Sprout magically produces a piece of candy, tossing it to the second kid with a perfect arc. “We should always try to clean up our messes when we can, but if it gets too big, don’t be afraid to ask a parent or caretaker for help.” He folds at the waist to examine the mess with a bit of exaggeration. “Looks like we can clean this up ourselves, because only a little bit of frosting spilled! Perfect.” He picks the bowl up and sets it back on the table, wiping off its sides with his thoroughly stained apron.
Silently, Cosmo slips in behind him with a bottle of cleaning solution (labelled toon-safe, as extensive research was done for fear that certain compounds may interact with the ichor) and a roll of paper towels to deal with the spill. When he feels all the kids’ eyes fall on him, he offers up a weary smile and holds up the bottle like he’s talking to a camera. “Don’t, uh, use this stuff without an adult.”
The bluntness of his hoarse, tired voice makes Sprout internally cringe a bit, having had much more extensive training on how to deliver safety messages to very young audiences. However, most of the children shrugged it off and went right back to decorating their cookies, so no further action felt necessary to the berry.
Sprout inhales deeply, catching the newly present scent of the cleaning solution at the end of the breath. He’d always liked the smell, although embarrassingly enough, sometimes it made him sneeze if he breathed it in too much. Truth be told, a lot of things did that to him, though, and some of the other toons took it as an opportunity to relentlessly tease him.
A light tugging sensation on his apron brings Sprout out of his thoughts. He twists his upper half to make eye contact with a very nervous-looking kid, and his heart worriedly skips a beat.
“What—?”
Before he can even ask his question, the kid interrupts with a surprisingly flat tone, “Sprout? I think Cosmo is, um… choking?”
Sprout shoulders past the kid and makes it to Cosmo’s side in less than a second. While he wouldn’t necessarily have used the word “choking” to describe what was happening, it certainly was on par with the amount of elicited distress put upon any unfortunate witnesses.
Cosmo looks up at Sprout with drooping eyelids, and he coughs, but the action proves nearly fruitless, as he doesn’t suck up enough air for the cough to productively clear whatever sounds like it’s rattling in his throat. Despite the pastry’s visible panic, the rising and falling of his chest disturbingly shallow, Sprout is caught off guard when the tears start flowing.
Sprout had never seen this happen before. So, without a moment’s hesitation, he does the only thing he knows how to do. Something he’d taught the camera how to do many times in the case of an emergency, a protocol he knew he could trust with his life, his safety; anything.
The protocol?
“Sam!”
Sam shoots up and mutters something Sprout can’t quite catch into their walkie talkie. They immediately take Cosmo up by his underarms and bark a command at the incoming employees— “Get these kids cleaned up and bring them back to the center. Sprout! Stay behind me.”
With no room for protest, Sprout darts after Sam, having to hold a light jog to keep up with their hasty speedwalk, and his scarf billows behind him much too majestically to fit the situation. “Sam! What’s going on? Is he gonna be okay?”
Sam’s lack of response—only due to their intense focus on getting Cosmo to the nurse’s room—makes Sprout feel sick. He knew overworking oneself while ill could make symptoms worse, but this felt different. He’d never seen ‘worse symptoms’ equate to such loud, labored breathing.
When they arrive at the nurse’s office, however, the nurse’s demeanor is cool, collected, and put-together, which seems extremely inappropriate to Sprout, given the current situation. “Don’t worry your pretty heads off, you two… I had a suspicion this was going to happen.” Sam shoots her an incredulous look, but she brushes it off and continues, “I’ve already set up a breathing treatment. It’ll open him up quick’.”
Open him up…? Sprout swallows down the lump in his throat and finds himself mindlessly pressing into Sam’s leg for a familiar, grounding sensation of safety. Sam rests a large hand on his back, and when the touch finally registers in his brain, Sprout turns his head to hide his face in their pant leg.
“He’s gonna be fine.” The hand stroking his back trails up to ruffle his leaves, and the tightness in his throat begins to loosen a bit. “You’re nervous right now ‘cause you’ve never seen something like this happen. I know you; you just wanna protect him.”
Barely audible and muffled in Sam’s clothes, Sprout mumbles, “I wish it happened to me instead.”
“I know… I know.”
The two of them stand there in silence for another minute or two, Sprout remaining paralyzed in worry and clung to Sam like his life depended on it. Then, he picks up on the faint noise of padded feet running down the hallway, and finally removes his face from Sam’s leg to look out the door when curiosity overtakes him.
“Nurse! Nurse!”
A very concerned Dandy hurries through the doorway, clutching Pebble carefully in hands and holding the happily panting rock out in front of him. “Pebble bumped his head! I— I think he might be hurt!”
Devan appears behind him not long after, grimacing apologetically at Sam. “...I tried to talk to him…” he starts to explain, prompting Sam to step out into the hallway and engage in a general conversation with their fellow handler.
Sprout takes one confused look at Pebble, then snorts in amusement. “Dandy, he’s a rock. I don’t think rocks can get hurt…”
Dandy huffs indignantly and shoots the strawberry a frustrated side-eye. “Yeah, but he’s a pet rock, and I promise you, he’s hurt.”
Pebble barks and wags his chunky tail, smiling at Sprout in a way that indicates the exact opposite.
“Yeah… right,” Sprout mumbles, his gaze trailing back to the closed back door where the nurse had dragged Cosmo earlier. He couldn’t hear anything going on back there, which in his mind, meant Cosmo was probably dead.
Dandy tilts his head to the side to look behind Sprout, his eyes darting from side to side like he was looking for something. “Where’s Cosmo?”
Sprout points to the door, his other hand finding the bottom of his scarf to fidget with the soft edges.
“...Oh.” Feeling a little awkward in the silence that follows, Dandy returns Pebble to the floor to sniff around the nurse’s office, busying his hands with straightening out his petals. “What happened?”
An anxious sigh escapes Sprout, and he tugs on the edge of his scarf to tighten it uncomfortably around his neck. “He’s sick, and he was having trouble breathing at the meet-and-treat.” He frowns a little when he feels the pressure release around his neck, the result of Dandy gently pulling the sides to loosen the scarf once more.
Dandy mirrors his frown, but in a much more thoughtful manner. He doesn’t quite get the opportunity to formulate a response, though, before the nurse slips out through the door with a soft click of the handle.
“Hi, Sprout,” she greets, and at the moment, her honeyed voice grates on his nerves a little bit. “Is Sam here so I can talk to him?”
“Them,” Sprout quietly corrects, kicking his foot against the carpet, “but yeah, outside talking to Devan.” His gaze flicks to the ground when the two aforementioned handlers come into the office to have a discussion with the nurse about Cosmo’s condition. The word sends a shudder down his spine.
He flinches when Pebble rams his hard head into his leg, but he can’t be too angry at the little round creature, wide eyes looking up at him with adoration… and possibly something a little more. “You want a treat, huh?”
Pebble barks and stretches out his front legs to curl his tail into the air.
“Yep, I gotcha.” Just like he did with the kid, Sprout reaches into his apron pocket, coin-flipping a small biscuit in a sparkling arc leading right to the rock’s mouth. “Yeah, who’s a good boy?” It was difficult to be anxious when something so cute was right in front of his feet. He crouches to pet Pebble’s smooth back, then scratch under his chin.
“Sprout, c’mere,” Sam calls, and the berry stands up and routinely presents himself at his handler’s side. They shift Cosmo to rest limply against their shoulder. “He’s really tired now, but he’s alright. He just needs to rest now.”
“What happened to him?” Sprout frowns up at the two adults staring him down, gaze flicking back and forth between Sam’s eyes and his sleepy friend.
“Well,” the nurse pipes up, “the best explanation I can come up with is that he might have some kind of toon asthma. Similar to the way certain things trigger your allergies, some things may make his lungs tight, which is why he has trouble breathing. If I had to guess, the combination of his cold and the cleaning spray made him flare up.”
Sprout’s head spins. Dandy’s hand grips the waist strap of his apron to hold him steady, but the touch barely registers in the berry’s fogging head. “...W-What? Like— this is a forever thing?”
“It’s treatable with medicine,” the nurse offers, hoping the statement could calm some of his nerves. “There’s no need to worry…”
Spoiler alert, her strategy didn’t work even one bit.
Thankfully, much more well-versed in dealing with these strange scenarios, Sam carefully kneels in front of Sprout to be at eye level with the toon, and even Cosmo’s warm, sweet scent does more to soothe Sprout’s worries than words ever could. But, of course, they will try anyway.
“Yes, this is something he will have to deal with for a very long time, like your allergies. However, most of the time, it won’t look nearly as bad as this.”
Sprout sniffs sadly, tucking his chin to his chest and nervously shuffling his feet. “How do you know…?”
“Y’know how when he runs around with the kids a lot, he gets out of breath really fast? Sometimes he coughs a lot…?” Sam waits for an affirming nod from the berry before continuing, “That’s pretty much it. It only looked so bad this time because he’s sick, so his breathing was already a little sticky.”
A thought creeps into Sprout’s mind, and his tail coils with discontentment, the leaf on the end unhappily twitching. “But… Delilah always says she created us to be exactly the way we are!” His leaves bristle. “Why the hell would she give him such an awful feature?”
Dandy, always the optimist about his beloved creators, chimes in with a suggestion: “Why don’t you talk to her yourself about it? Her and Arthur are always excited to talk to people about how they made us. Maybe she has an explanation!”
Ugh. The thought of having anything more than a passing conversation with Delilah leaves a slightly sour taste in Sprout’s mouth—she seemed so cold to him, being more concerned about the production than the well-being of the toons. But… if it meant he could get some answers, maybe it would be okay just this once.
“Uhm… okay, okay,” he mumbles, nervously adjusting his scarf and turning back to Sam. “...Please take care of Cosmo…”
Sam chuckles, rises to their feet, and offers a comforting pat to Sprout’s head. “Oh, he’ll be fine, Seedly. I’m gonna take him to his room for some rest. Yes, I’ll stay with him. Go do what you need to do.”
Sprout nods, feeling filled with a new sense of determination as he waves goodbye to Dandy and their humans and heads down the hallway with a confident stride. Delilah’s office was easy to find, as it was at the end of the hall and had a golden plaque on the door reading “DR. DELILAH KEEN”. He gently raps his knuckles on the door, stepping back after and holding his hands politely behind his back.
From behind the door, Delilah’s muffled voice calls, as formally as ever: “State your name and business?”
The urge to mirror her formality cancels out his desire to be pragmatic and straightforward. “Uh… M-003. Question about… toon creation.”
A somewhat awkward silence follows, as if the human on the other side of the barrier was debating whether or not to allow him inside her sacred domain.
“...Come in, Sprout.”
Sprout swallows hard, brushes off his apron, and pushes open the heavy door with an almost menacing creak. Delilah’s office was dark, save for the uncomfortably bright blue light radiating from her computer screen. As he tentatively approaches her desk, he can’t help but notice how the artificial light makes the familiar shadows under her eyes look so much deeper, and further, brief observation shows several empty cups of coffee scattered across her desk and unkempt hair and clothes suggesting she hadn’t stopped working to take care of herself in days.
Without looking away from her computer screen, Delilah spins the desk chair around next to her with her foot. “Have a seat.”
It takes Sprout a second to climb into the tall chair, but his taller stature and longer legs make it a little easier for him to get up there compared to most of his fellow toons. He wipes his palms off on his apron again, trying to brush away the clamminess ultimately caused by his anxious energy.
“Talk to me.”
His walk was short, so he hadn’t had much time to formulate how to ask his question. He quickly runs through a couple of scripts in his head, ultimately deciding to go with the most direct option.
“If you truly get to decide exactly how we are as toons, why would you choose to give some of us such… odd, or even disabling features?”
“Explain.”
This was where Sprout’s quick thinking started to benefit him in conversations; multiple examples immediately surface to the top of his mind, and he confidently lists them off: “Well, for starters, the nurse just told us Cosmo probably has asthma.”
At that, Delilah raises her eyebrows in interest, and Sprout’s tail thumps against the seat of the chair in upset protest. However, his voice remains calm, and he continues speaking.
“Flutter can’t talk at all, and Blot sorta can, but it’s really difficult to understand him. Astro can never get enough rest, it seems, and he’s always exhausted and falling asleep in random places. If Yatta doesn’t get enough sugar, she gets dizzy and faint, but if Brusha eats sugar at all, really, she gets a terrible headache and has to lay down instead of paint.” A slightly stressed laugh slips past him. “Shoot, sometimes my allergies are so bad I can’t leave my room—!”
Delilah sighs, clicks into a new window on her computer, and starts typing away at another task. “When I say I decide exactly who you are, I’m talking about things like your personality, your interests, your looks… Like, I created you to have a passion for cooking and taking care of people. I created Gigi and Connie to be little shits who like to fuck around where they’re not supposed to.”
Despite being used to Delilah’s exhausted sailor mouth, Sprout still cringes a little at her blatant cussing, especially because of its utilization toward fellow toons.
She continues, “I don’t have anything to do with most of these oddball medical issues you’re bringing up. Flutter can’t talk because she doesn’t have a mouth, but otherwise, everything else you listed off is, if I had to guess, an unfortunate side effect of the ichor trying to mold to do what I tell it to. Per your previous example, Yatta is, obviously, a piñata who likes candy, so that’s what I programmed. Again, if I had to guess, the programming took that a little too seriously, so the ichor causes those sensations of dizziness and unsteadiness if she is not heeding to her programming and consuming adequate amounts of sweets.”
“So… what about Cosmo?”
“Cosmo is supposed to be personally adverse to things like sports, physical exertion, yada yada yada. Maybe a bit wired with anxiety, but otherwise, he’s mellow. Calm. Probably, if he’s having some sort of exercise-induced asthma, it’s the ichor trying to remind him to stay in his place.”
Stay in his place?! Sprout’s head spins with frustration, his tail coiling up tightly to mirror the emotion externally. “I thought you had control over the ichor! And— And that you knew everything it did?”
“I am still in the process of studying the ichor. I learn more about it every day by watching you toons and how it affects your development… That’s my job as a scientist, after all.”
Her calm, collected responses were starting to piss Sprout off. “Well— can’t you do something about it?”
“I don’t know yet, I haven’t—”
“Do you even care about us at all?!”
Delilah’s rhythmic keyboard clicks cease to a sudden halt. Sprout’s hands fly up to his mouth, his angered volume having startled the both of them.
The question had clearly caught her off guard, but the emotion behind the freeze was unreadable.
Annoyance? Anger? Maybe… hurt…?
She sighs sharply, rests her hands in her lap, and for the first time, turns her chair so her body is facing Sprout.
“Sprout, you’re a clever toon. Let me ask you this. Do you think Dyle cares about you guys?”
The berry’s instinct, argumentative and stubborn, is to immediately snap back with a defiant but confident ‘no’. However, he’d worked with Delilah long enough that he knew a response like that would get him nowhere. Instead, he thinks.
Dyle spends most of his time at Gardenview behind his counter, controlling the train travel in and out of the center. Sprout didn’t really care about trains, and sometimes it was all the clock seemed to want to talk about. Otherwise, he could be quite standoffish, sometimes even cold.
But then, slowly, a couple memories in particular resurface for him. The way Dyle would listen to Shelly and Finn go on and on about their respective special interests, his hands folded under his chin and his eyes sparkling with piqued curiosity. How he would coordinate train deliveries to contain ingredients to whatever new concoctions Sprout and Cosmo wanted to try cooking up, with the only stipulation being that they bring him a small sample of anything sweet they baked.
Dyle spent a lot of time listening to people talk without having much to say back, which, from the outside looking in, Sprout had previously depicted as something negative. However, now that he was really, truly thinking about it, the sentiment began to touch him in a different way than it ever had before.
Finally, after a long moment of silence, Sprout presents his carefully crafted answer. “…Yes. It just looks different from the way I care about toons.”
“Precisely. Do you think, then, that it is possible I could care about you toons in a way that is different from, let’s say, Arthur? What about Sam?” Delilah inquires, and the corners of her mouth creep into a flat smile when a look of realization dawns on Sprout’s face. “After all, even though Arthur designed you, I created you. Sprout, how could I not care for something I built with my own two hands…? A good creator will always care for their creations.”
Sprout watches her head track to an odd, t-shaped object stuck to the wall amidst an assortment of other papers covered in awards, notes, and more that he couldn’t quite make out.
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend. Is that what you wanted to hear? I’m not worried about him, though. In the end, the ichor is just taking care of him in a way that the programming believes is correct. It doesn’t look that way to us… but I wouldn’t be too concerned.”
The two of them sit in silence, the words marinating between them as the darkness engulfs their figures, Delilah’s computer screen having fallen idle.
Finally, Sprout quietly pipes up, “Thank you for answering my questions. May I go find Cosmo, now?”
“Yes. You’re excused.”
Sprout hops off the chair and heads to the door, looking back over his shoulder to cast one last glance at Delilah. Already, her attention was back to the previous task open on her computer, and the clicking of her keyboard filled the small room once again.
He walks down the hall for the dozenth time today, taking a leisurely pace to give himself time to reflect. Delilah was a very busy woman, and despite Dandy’s correct observation surrounding her enjoyment talking about her findings, she could have easily turned the strawberry away with the excuse of being too busy to talk. Even if her responses weren’t tailored to what Sprout wanted to hear, they were honest, thoughtful, and straightforward.
He arrives at the elevator, still alone, and presses the button to take him up to the floor with Cosmo’s room.
The image of her hunched over her computer with dark circles swallowing her eyes, the coffee trash littering her desk and floor, and the dirty takeout containers taking up space in her actual trash can remains cemented behind his eyes. For as much work as she put into making sure everyone was in tiptop shape, even if it was mostly to look good to the public eye, it was obvious no one returned the favor back to her even a little bit. He would’ve assumed that to be Arthur’s job, but the two of them, despite being coworkers in a confusing relationship, seemed to have tension between them at the moment. Maybe that’s why she seemed so disheveled.
The elevator shakes to a stop, jerking him out of his thoughts. Cosmo’s door was right next to the elevator, seeing as he was the first side character to be created, so he didn't have much farther to walk. Sprout slowly creaks open the door to his room, greeted by the sound of Sam’s warm voice reading off the pages of a book to a very sleepy-looking Cosmo in their lap. However, the sight of the strawberry immediately perks him up a bit, and Sam pauses the story to allow Cosmo to slide off his bed and shuffle over to Sprout for a hug.
Sprout chuckles softly when Cosmo presses his face into his scarf, both of them wrapping their arms around the other’s waist. Sprout drags his hands firmly up and down Cosmo’s back, trying to provide some simple, extra comfort for his sick friend. The warmth of a fever creeps through his sweater, a bit damp from sweat, but Sprout doesn’t care all that much.
“Oh, Sprout… you came back to see me,” Cosmo rasps, coughing to clear some of the phlegm rattling in his throat. He sniffs thickly, rubbing his nose on the small of his wrist. “I missed you…”
“Aw, I missed you too… How are you feeling?”
“Better now that you’re here…~”
The two of them trail off into a synchronized fit of giggles, and they take a seat on the bed beside a thoughtfully watching Sam.
“Seriously, though,” Sprout asks again, pretending to wipe a stray tear from his eye, “how are you actually feeling?”
Cosmo releases a congested sigh, which only trails off into more miserable-sounding wet coughs, which Sam responds to by placing a steadying hand on his back. “Not very good… The nurse says I spiked a fever, probably during the meet-’n’-treat… She gave me medicine, but I’m still all, uh—” he hesitates, the word stuck on the tip of his tongue, gesturing between where his sinuses would be and his chest— “...stuffy. And tired.”
Sprout frowns in sympathy for his friend, his tail flicking to the side to wrap around Cosmo’s waist. “Ah… yeah, I know that feeling pretty well. I get that with my allergies.”
“Yeah…” Cosmo pauses, then looks up at Sprout with a smirk and playfully elbows his side. “At least I don’t make people go deaf when I sneeze.”
“Hey!”
The two of them lean over to press their foreheads together, a feeble way to stay upright when they’re rapidly overtaken by amused giggling once more. Cosmo’s laugh rattles in his chest, and he coughs through pretty much the entire episode, but there’s something about it that still remains as charming as ever to Sprout. His smile? The twinkle in his eyes?
Hm. What a weird thought.
Ever-inclined to caretake, when Sprout finally sits up from their second bout of laughter, he lets out a slow sigh to calm his breathing, then offers, “Can I get you anything? Some water? Soup? Tea? Tissues?”
Cosmo tucks his head down bashfully with a sheepish smile. “Maybe some tea…? Something to help with the congestion, please.”
“Okay!” Sprout tries to get up, but he’s stopped by a hand on his shoulder. His eyes meet Sam’s with a curious sparkle.
“Let me get it. After all, you two probably wanna hang out with each other some more, right?” Sam winks at the two of them, not giving either a second to protest before they slip out the door to retrieve a cup of tea for the sick toon.
Cosmo tucks himself back under his blankets and leans against his pillow, relaxing his poor, sore body into a more comfortable position. He pats the empty spot next to him and pulls back the covers, nonverbally inviting Sprout to sit next to him. Sprout feels his cheeks heat up a little when he slides under the blanket to join him, the warmth only growing when Cosmo twists around to lay his face over Sprout’s stomach, his weight sinking into both the mattress and his legs.
Sprout’s heart thuds so forcefully in his chest, it may as well have been trying to jump right out of it. His tail happily flicks against the mattress, making surprisingly loud thumping noises, but the pastry didn’t seem to notice or care. He’d had these feelings before, sparingly, but recently, they’d been getting considerably more intense.
He didn’t mind. If Cosmo was comfortable, already drifting off to dreamland with quiet, stuffy snores, he could stay as long as he liked.
No, no, Sprout really didn’t mind at all.