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“I brought reinforcements,” Tony announced, elbowing the door to the common room open with an armful of blankets stacked high enough to partially obscure his own face. “The good ones. Not the scratchy compound-issue throws, the actual soft ones I keep in my closet and pretend I don’t have sentimental feelings about.”
Peter, curled on the couch in sweatpants and one of Tony’s old MIT hoodies, sniffled with the congested misery of a garden-variety head cold, and managed a weak, grateful smile. “You didn’t have to raid your entire closet.”
“I absolutely did have to, this is a minimum four-blankey situation, possibly five depending on how the next hour goes.” Tony deposited the pile beside him and began the serious business of construction – one blanket as a base layer, one draped over Peter’s legs, one wrapped around his shoulders like a cape, and the fourth folded specifically for optimal head-and-neck support against the arm of the couch. “There. You look like a very congested burrito. I consider that a success.”
“I feel like a burrito,” Peter admitted, voice thick and nasal. “A gross, snotty burrito.”
“The best kind.” Tony settled into the other end of the couch, close enough that his knee bumped against the blanket-wrapped lump that was currently Peter’s leg. “How bad is it today? Scale of one to ten, ten being the flu that took you out for a week in March.”
“Like a four. Maybe a five. Mostly just stuffy and tired. Nothing dramatic.” Peter blew his nose into a tissue with theatrical misery, tossing it toward the overflowing trash can beside the couch with the accuracy of someone who’d had considerable practice over the past two days. “Which honestly feels kind of nice, compared to some of the stuff we’ve dealt with. Like, this is just a normal cold. Nobody has to call Dr. Cho. Nothing’s tilting. I’m just… stuffy.”
“A refreshing change of pace, truly.” Tony reached over and pressed the back of his hand briefly to Peter’s forehead – a reflex at this point, one that had become so automatic Tony barely registered doing it anymore. “No fever, which tracks with ‘ordinary cold’ rather than ‘something that requires an IV and a strongly worded lecture’. I have to say, I’m enjoying the novelty of a Saturday where the biggest crisis is finding enough throw blankets.”
“Sorry you’re stuck babysitting a snot factory instead of doing actual work stuff.”
“Kid, I would take ‘stuck babysitting a snot factory’ over roughly ninety percent of my actual scheduled Saturdays without a second’s hesitation. I cleared this whole day the second May texted me you’d woken up sneezing. This is, unbelievably, the good version of my weekend.” Tony grabbed the remote, scrolling through options with the deliberate care of someone curating something specific rather than just picking whatever came up first. “What are we watching? And I want you to know that whatever you pick, I reserve the right to fall asleep partway through and blame it on you being a bad host.”
“You cannot blame your own narcolepsy on me.”
“I absolutely can, and I will, watch me.” Tony settled further into the couch cushions as Peter scrolled to something familiar – an old sci-fi movie they’d apparently watched a dozen times already, comfort viewing rather than anything requiring actual attention. “Good choice. Low commitment. Perfect for a day where the primary goal is horizontal recovery.”
They settled into the movie, or at least into the general shape of watching it – Peter dozing in and out through the middle stretch, congestion making even simple things like breathing evenly a small chore, occasionally surfacing to make a half-formed comment about a scene he’d clearly missed most of. Tony, true to his word, drifted off somewhere around the second act, only to jolt back awake when Peter’s coughing fit rattled through the blanket burrito with enough force to shake the couch.
“Hey. Hey, you okay?” Tony was upright instantly, hand finding Peter’s back, rubbing slow circles until the coughing settled.
“‘M fine,” Peter managed, voice even more wrecked than before, eyes watering from the effort. “Just- congestion went somewhere it shouldn't have for a second. Happens sometimes.”
“You want the humidifier? I can grab it from your room.”
“Nah, I’m okay. It passed.” Peter settled back into the nest of blankets, considerably more disheveled than he’d started, one blanket having slipped entirely off his shoulder during the coughing fit. Tony reached over without comment and resettled it, tucking the edge back under his arm with the kind of automatic care that had become second nature over two years of exactly this sort of afternoon.
“You want tea? I make a genuinely excellent honey-lemon situation, I’ve gotten a lot of practice.”
“You’ve made me tea like six times today.”
“And I will make it a seventh, eighth, and ninth time if that’s what the situation calls for. I have a very robust tea-making operation and absolutely nowhere else to be.” Tony was already up, heading for the small kitchenette attached to the common room, moving with the easy, unhurried rhythm of someone genuinely enjoying the domestic mundanity of the task rather than treating it as an obligation. “Besides, it gives me something to do besides just sitting here watching you sniffle, which, while extremely riveting content, does eventually make a person want to be useful.”
“You could just watch the movie.”
“I could. I’m choosing tea instead. Priorities.” He turned a few minutes later with a steaming mug, settling it into Peter’s blanket-wrapped hands with the careful precision of someone who’d learned, through at least one memorable incident, exactly how easy it was for a congested, sleepy teenager to spill hot liquid on himself. “There. Drink that, it’ll help the throat thing.”
Peter wrapped both hands around the mug, breathing in the steam with visible relief, some of the congestion easing if only for a moment. “This is really good, actually. What’s in it?”
“Trade secret. Involves an amount of honey that would probably horrify a nutritionist, but desperate times.” Tony resumed his spot on the couch, close enough that Peter’s blanket-wrapped shoulder pressed lightly against his arm. “How’s the tea rating going, out of curiosity? I’ve been informally tracking your feedback across today’s six previous cups.”
“This one might be the best so far. Ten out of ten. No notes.”
“Excelent. I’ll note that down for posterity, in case Sick Peter feedback ever becomes a formally tracked metric in this household.” Tony picked the movie back up, restarting from roughly where Peter had last been conscious for it, apparently unbothered by having already seen the missed section. “You know, for what it’s worth- days like this are kind of my favorite version of taking care of you. Not because I want you sick, obviously, God forbid, but because there’s something almost nice about a version of sick that’s just… low stakes. Blankets and tea and a movie you’ve seen a hundred times. Nobody’s in danger. Nothing’s an emergency. It’s just quiet.”
“Yeah,” Peter said softly, leaning a little more of his weight into Tony’s side, blanket burrito and all. “It’s nice having a version of this that’s not scary. Like, I know you’d show up for the scary kind too. You always do. But it’s kind of nice getting the boring kind sometimes. The kind where it’s just… tea and blankets and a saturday.”
“The boring kind is underrated,” Tony agreed, settling an arm carefully around the blanket-wrapped shape of him, mindful not to disturb the careful construction of the day’s fourth and fifth blankets. “I intend to fully enjoy every boring, low-stakes second of it, right up until you’re recovered enough to go back to complaining about homework instead of complaining about your sinuses.”
“Give it like two days.”
“I’ll take it. Slowly working my way up from ‘medical crisis’ to ‘mild inconvenience’ feels like genuine progress for us as a family unit.” Tony pressed a hand briefly to Peter’s forehead again – still no fever, still just an ordinary, unremarkable cold, still exactly the low-stakes Saturday it had promised to be from the start – and let himself settle fully into the couch, into the movie, into the small, unremarkable comfort of a sick day that required nothing more dramatic form him than blankets, tea, and staying exactly where he was.
Peter fell asleep somewhere in the third act, congested breathing evening out into something slower and more even, blanket burrito intact, tea mug carefully rescued from his loosening grip before it could tip. Tony stayed put – not because anything demanded it, not because of any emergency or fear, but simply because there was nowhere else, on this particular unremarkable Saturday, that he’d rather be.