Chapter Text
No one had seen Dylan in twenty-eight hours. It wasn't strange for him to lock himself away and vanish for hours at a stretch. But more than a day without coming out once? Not even to grab a bite or get a breath of fresh air? That was out of the ordinary. His was the only room with private access to a tiny bathroom, but even that didn't excuse food, and he hadn't touched any. Jun was a light enough sleeper to track everyone's movements through the house, and he was a hundred percent certain Dylan hadn't surfaced during the night.
They'd knocked. They'd called. Every message went unanswered. It was unsettling enough that even Jun felt off about it. And when they argued over who would dare open the door to confirm he was still alive, the vote landed, predictably, on Jun. It made sense because Dylan already hated him. Jun wasn't at risk of being wounded by the sharp words Dylan would inevitably hurl the second he was dragged out of whatever hole he'd buried himself in.
Jun wasn't the least bit surprised to find Nano trailing him, practically glued to his back. He was the most worried of all of them, and would be in any circumstance, because that was simply who Nano was.
It took Jun all of a tenth of a second after cracking the door to turn around and tell Nano to wait outside. He wasn't afraid of being sniped at so much as afraid of what he'd actually find. The smell alone was horrid, and Jun didn't have a faint heart to begin with. Nano's big eyes nodded up at him, and Jun couldn't resist pressing a kiss to his forehead to reassure their youngest before slipping inside.
He made sure to shut the door behind him; Nano wouldn't resist a peek otherwise.
The stench was worse with the door closed, and it didn't take long to find the source—a dark, drying patch on the floor. Gross!
He decided to confirm Dylan was alive before anything else, and padded toward the open bathroom door, careful not to disturb anything on the way. He didn't bother calling out. Dylan wouldn't answer even if he were awake and breathing.
What he found tugged at his heart. Dylan was folded in half on the floor, curled in on himself, dried sick crusted at the corner of his mouth. He was ghostly pale—pale enough that Jun would have genuinely feared the worst if he hadn't caught the labored rise and fall of his chest.
Jun weighed his options for a few seconds and settled on cleaning the area before waking Dylan from whatever miserable state he was in. He messaged Pepper, the least likely of them to gag from the smell alone, and asked him to bring cleaning supplies and as much water as he could carry.
He started by throwing the window wide, letting cleaner air pour in even if it was hotter outside than in. He stripped the bedsheets and balled them by the door, then the pillowcases—pausing to smirk at the ugly hippopotamus plushie he'd won at a fun fair and gifted to Dylan as a joke. Who knew Dylan was sentimental enough to keep the thing?
When Pepper arrived with the supplies, the wrinkle of his nose said everything: Jun would be handling this alone. He swapped the soiled linens for what he needed, confirmed again that Dylan was breathing, told Pepper to order soup, and shut the door in his face before getting to work.
He scrubbed the room floor to ceiling as best he could, breathing easier as fresh air chased out the rot. And when he turned back to Dylan—still folded on the floor—his chest contracted all over again.
Their relationship was complicated, tangled, mostly thorns. But Jun cared for him, and this was nothing he ever wanted to see.
He brought the water bottle over, deciding hydration came first. It was rare for Jun to be this gentle, but he couldn't picture himself doing anything else—couldn't help brushing the sweaty grey hair off Dylan's forehead, the fried tips damp under his fingers, as he murmured his name. When Dylan didn't stir, Jun moved his hand to his shoulder and shook him lightly until his eyes cracked open.
"Hey, big Dyl. You're all green, like the Hulk."
Jun knew Dylan would respond better to the usual needling than to kindness. There was nothing Dylan hated more than looking vulnerable. Even like this, he'd rather drop dead than accept what he'd deem charity. So Jun did almost nothing—just set the bottle on the floor beside him without a word and went back to working around him in silence.
It was painful to watch Dylan struggle upright in his peripheral vision, but if Jun reached out now, he'd only get shoved away and ordered out.
So he waited. He finished wiping down the bathroom—the rim of the toilet, the smeared edge of the sink—until the room finally smelled of citrus cleaner instead of bile.
By the time he was done, Dylan had managed maybe two sips from the bottle before his arm gave out and the cap clattered against the floor. His head lolled back against the cabinet, eyes half-lidded, breath shallow.
Jun crouched in front of him and snapped his fingers near his face. "Still with me?"
A faint, irritated noise. Good enough. And too weak, clearly, to put up the fight he'd normally throw at the first sign of being fussed over.
If Dylan couldn't even lift the water bottle, he couldn't shove Jun off—which meant Jun could finally do what needed doing without the song and dance of being told to get lost.
He started with Dylan's face. Wet a clean cloth, wrung it, and wiped at the dried mess around his mouth and chin. Dylan flinched, made a sound that might have been a protest in another life, but didn't pull away.
Then Jun reached for the hem of his shirt. He got it halfway up before he understood the scope of the problem. The mess wasn't just on Dylan's face. It was everywhere—down his front, dried into the fabric, streaked across his collarbone, and probably further down too. A wet cloth wasn't going to be enough. Not even close.
Jun sighed through his nose, a long-suffering sound, and finished pulling the ruined shirt over Dylan's head before tossing it toward the pile by the door. He worked the rest off the same way—matter-of-fact, gentle where he had to be—until Dylan was down to nothing, swaying where he sat.
There was no avoiding the shower. With another sigh—reluctant, resigned—Jun stood and stripped his own shirt off. Dylan's eyeballs went wider than Jun had ever seen them, comically round in his grey, hollow face. His mouth worked around something that took three tries to become words.
"—the fuck—are you—"
"Relax." Jun snorted, stepping out of his jeans. "Like I'd want anything off you while you're leaking out both ends."
He kept his boxers on. The thin white fabric wouldn't hide much once it was soaked, but he needed some scrap of composure, and one of them naked on the bathroom floor was already a step too far. Not that there was anything sexual in it—nothing even faintly sensual in the way he hauled Dylan up by the arms and walked him backward under the spray, holding him steady as the water hit them both.
He kept it lukewarm, mindful of the chill working through Dylan's body. Worked the worst of the grime off his chest and shoulders, tipped his head back gently to rinse his neck. Dylan was beyond arguing now; his protests had dissolved into the occasional grunt, his weight sagging more heavily into Jun's hands by the second.
Then his legs simply gave out. Jun caught the slide of him before he could crack his skull on the tile, easing him down with both arms until they were both on the floor of the stall, water raining over them. He shifted around behind Dylan, kneeling, letting Dylan's back rest against his chest so he wouldn't tip over, and reached for the soap.
He washed his back in slow circles. Lathered shampoo into the sweat-stiff hair, careful around his temples, and—because some petty, fond part of him couldn't help it—worked conditioner through the dry, color-fried ends afterward, the way he knew Dylan never bothered to do himself.
It was unbearably intimate. Jun hadn't known he had this in him, this much patience and tenderness, least of all for the one bandmate who made a hobby of finding every bruise Jun carried and pressing on it. And yet here he was, rinsing suds from grey hair with a cupped hand so it wouldn't run into Dylan's eyes.
Because, somehow, Jun knew Dylan would do the same for him. Underneath all the brashness and the barbs, there had always been a softer Dylan.
Dylan never minded his own suffering. What he couldn't stand was watching someone else hurt.
Jun only realized he should have remade the bed first when he found himself with an armful of wet, dripping Dylan and absolutely nowhere to put him.
He stood there a beat, water sliding off both of them onto the tile, and exhaled. "Genius. Real genius."
He shut the water off, snagged a towel and bundled Dylan into it where he sat slumped against the stall wall, then scrubbed himself half-dry with a second one in a few rough passes. Leaving Dylan propped and shivering, he padded back into the bedroom for the fresh sheets, snapping them open over the bare mattress and tucking the corners with more speed than care.
His own boxers were a lost cause: soaked through and clinging. He stood in front of Dylan's dresser and hesitated over a clean pair for all of two seconds before his dignity lost the argument.
"Stealing your underwear," he announced to the room at large, peeling off the wet ones.
From the bathroom came an outraged grunt. Jun cackled.
Getting Dylan dry and across to the bed was, frankly, a trial. Dylan was dead weight in his hands, head lolling, limbs uncooperative, and Jun genuinely couldn't tell whether he was truly running on fumes or whether some stubborn, spiteful corner of him had decided to make this as difficult as humanly possible out of pure principle.
"You weigh a ton," Jun grunted, hauling him the last few steps and tipping him onto the mattress. "You're lean, but full of bad attitude."
A knock at the door. Jun crossed and opened it without thinking, and found Pepper standing there with a steaming bag of soup and an expression that slowly cocked one eyebrow higher than Jun had ever witnessed on him—taking in the fact that Jun was wearing nothing but boxers.
Jun smiled. Stuck his tongue out. Said, "Thanks," and shut the door in his face. Again.
He pulled the windows shut against the heat and clicked the air cooler on, the room finally tipping toward something livable, then carried the soup over to the bed.
Dylan cracked one eye at the bag and made a sound of pure betrayal.
"Eat," Jun ordered.
A weak, mutinous noise.
"Eat, Dyl, or I'm spoon-feeding you, and I'll do the airplane noise, and I'll do it loud enough for Nano to hear." That got Dylan to eat, at least. Jun parked himself on the edge of the mattress and waged a patient war—a spoonful, a sip of water, a glare, another spoonful—until a solid half of the soup was gone. Then came the anti-nausea tablets Pepper had somehow scrounged from god-knew-where, which Jun pressed into Dylan's palm with another mouthful of water and a flat, "Down the hatch.”
Dylan swallowed it. Mostly because he didn't have the strength left to do otherwise.
Only when Dylan's eyes were sliding shut again did Jun finally let him sink back into the clean sheets.
Jun lingered a few more minutes, making sure Dylan was truly settled—checking that his breathing had evened out, that the water bottle was within reach, that nothing touched by sick remained anywhere in the room except the bundle of ruined clothes he'd take to the laundry on his way out. He gathered them up, the sheets and shirts and his own sodden boxers, and set the pile by the door.
Then he turned back for one last look, and couldn't help himself. He drew the blanket a little higher and brushed the hair off Dylan's forehead again, smiling at how soft the strands had gone—conditioned, finally, instead of fried, falling through his fingers. Asleep like this, with all the pouty attitude smoothed off his face, Dylan looked harmless.
Jun didn't know what came over him. Some stray paternal instinct, maybe. Or a flicker of his own childhood—his mum's cool hand on his forehead during a fever. Whatever it was, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to Dylan's forehead before he slipped out, easing the door shut behind him.
Nano was on the couch, watching warily Jun, big eyes going comically round as they tracked Jun stepping into the hallway—wearing nothing but Dylan's underwear, arms full of everyone's dirty laundry.
Jun winked. Half to reassure Nano that Dylan would live, and half, he'd admit, to feed that hopeful little shipping agenda their youngest kept spreading. He watched Nano's mouth open, then close, then open again on a question that never quite made it out, and grinned all the way down the hall to the laundry room.
Jun checked on him all day. Every hour or two he'd crack the door and lean in just far enough to confirm the slow rise and fall of the blanket. He left a fresh water bottle on the nightstand each time, swapped the warm one for cold, set out crackers Dylan ignored and then, eventually, didn't. Once he found the soup bowl empty and felt the relief settle in his chest.
By evening Dylan had rolled to face the wall, which Jun decided to read as improvement. He nudged the air cooler down a notch so it wouldn't chill him, told the others over dinner that their resident disaster would live, and waved off Nano's pointed, hopeful questions with nothing but a smirk and a mouthful of rice.
He checked once more before bed. Dylan was still out, one arm flung over the ugly hippo plushie. Jun pulled the door shut and went to sleep himself, light as ever, half-listening for any movement that came in the night.
None did. Dylan slept through the night.
It was late morning when he finally emerged. Jun was in the kitchen, halfway through a coffee, when he heard the door go and the shuffling tread of someone moving like every joint hurt. Dylan appeared in the doorway looking wrung-out but human again—colour back in his face, wearing a different shirt and very visibly not making eye contact.
"Morning, sunshine," Jun greeted, lifting his mug.
Dylan grunted. He shifted his weight and scratched the back of his neck. Jun watched the entire ordeal with open delight and said nothing, because nothing he could've said would've been funnier than this.
"...Sorry," Dylan finally managed, gruff and aimed roughly at the floor tiles. "For the. Whatever. The trouble. The—cleaning, and the—" He gestured vaguely, miserably, at the general concept of being looked after. The tips of his ears had gone pink. "Pepper said you did all of it."
It was, Jun thought, possibly the shyest he'd ever seen the man. All that sharpness gone soft and fumbling, unable to hold his gaze, hating every second of being grateful out loud.
Jun could have milked it. Under almost any other circumstance, he would have—dragged it out, made him squirm, collected the moment like a trophy to bring up at the worst possible time for years to come.
He took pity instead.
"It's no big deal," he said, easy, like it really wasn't. He nudged the second mug he'd already poured across the counter toward the empty stool beside him. "Sit down before you fall down. I'm just glad you're feeling better."
Dylan blinked at him, like he'd been braced for the mockery and didn't know what to do now that it hadn't come. Then, slowly, he shuffled over and sat, wrapping both hands around the mug.
"...Thanks," he muttered, into the coffee this time.
"Yeah, yeah." Jun bumped his shoulder lightly against Dylan's and went back to his own cup, hiding his smile behind the rim. "You owe me underwear, by the way."
The startled, indignant noise Dylan made was the most alive he'd sounded in two days, and Jun counted it as a win.