Work Text:
Patrick can think of at least seven people who might have done this to him. The strongest candidate is a man he saw on the Blue Line three days ago who spent most of the journey coughing openly into the carriage, each one violent enough to fold him nearly in half before he straightened up and went back to his newspaper like he hadn’t just distributed several thousand microscopic pieces of himself across public transport. Patrick had moved seats after the fourth or fifth one. At the time this had felt like a reasonable act of self-preservation; three days later, sitting at his kitchen table in two sweatshirts and feeling increasingly like shit, he’s beginning to think the damage may already have been done. Movies always make the beginning of a plague considerably more interesting than this. Nobody in Twelve Monkeys has to sit there afterwards trying to remember whether the guy coughing near them on public transport had been there on Monday or Tuesday.
There was also a woman at the coffee shop yesterday morning who sneezed into one hand and then used the same hand to give Patrick his change. Patrick remembers noticing this because he’d briefly considered telling her to keep it, then decided that would turn a perfectly ordinary coffee purchase into a whole fucking thing and took the money anyway. Somewhere between the counter and his apartment he presumably touched his face. Everybody touches their face constantly without realising it, which Patrick knows because he once read something about it and then spent the next several hours becoming horribly conscious of every time his fingers went anywhere near his mouth. This possibility is irritating because it requires Patrick to accept some degree of personal responsibility, so he prefers the man on the train.
Rehearsal offers so many additional suspects that trying to identify one feels pointless. Four people sharing microphones, cables, door handles and whatever else has ended up lying around means disease prevention mostly consists of hoping everybody remembered to wash their hands after taking a piss. Joe had complained about being exhausted on Tuesday, although further questioning revealed that Joe had stayed awake until almost four in the morning watching a documentary about sharks. Andy is probably innocent because Andy washes his hands and, unlike the rest of them, seems to remember that germs exist even when nobody is actively sick.
Then there’s Pete.
Pete should, by any reasonable understanding of infectious disease, be sick constantly. He touches fucking everything. Pens from counters, other people’s drinks, somebody else’s phone, food he hasn’t been offered. He shares cigarettes with people he met ten minutes ago, chews his fingernails after spending half an hour touching every surface in a venue and has a habit of rubbing his eyes with whatever hand has most recently been on a door handle. Patrick’s seen him drop chips on bus floors, pick them straight back up and eat them, put money in his mouth because both hands were full and, on one memorable occasion, find a half-finished bottle of water on the rehearsal-room floor, drink from it and only then ask whose it was. Pete’s interpretation of the five-second rule has roughly the runtime of Return of the King. There are nineteenth-century children with stronger claims to sanitary living.
Pete is completely fine. This is one of several things Patrick currently resents about him.
Patrick himself started feeling a little wrong last night, although there wasn’t enough wrong with him to make an issue of it. His head hurt, mostly. His shoulders ached and his eyes felt tired, but he’d spent half the afternoon hunched over a guitar and the rest arguing with Pete about a line containing roughly twice as many syllables as the available melody, so neither symptom had seemed especially fucking mysterious. He’d gone to bed earlier than usual, slept badly and woken up still tired, which also wasn’t exactly unprecedented. The headache has stayed, though, and that’s the annoying part.
It isn’t especially dramatic. Nothing about this has been dramatic so far, which is why Patrick hasn’t felt obliged to treat it like an illness. His head just hurts steadily behind his eyes, his limbs feel heavier than they should and every so often a little shiver works its way down his back. He made coffee an hour ago and has taken perhaps four sips of it because every time he remembers it exists the idea seems strangely unappealing.
Pete is on the other side of the table going through a notebook. This is why he’s here. He’d come over sometime before noon so they could work on a song, which so far has involved Patrick changing three chords, Pete rejecting two of those changes, Patrick changing one back, Pete deciding Patrick had been right the first time and Patrick considering whether killing another person can ever legally be classified as part of the creative process. Pete has now gone quiet enough that Patrick knows he’s reading something he wrote months ago and trying to decide whether it’s brilliant or humiliating. Patrick has learnt not to interrupt this stage. Either conclusion will eventually be announced, probably at length.
Patrick looks back down at his own notebook. The same four lines have been sitting there for several minutes, and when he reads them again they remain four lines of perfectly recognisable English that have somehow stopped meaning anything. Normally Patrick can feel where a song wants to go even when he hasn’t worked out how to get it there yet. There’s usually something tugging at him, some chord that feels unfinished or a melody trying to resolve itself somewhere else, but right now he could stare at the page until the fucking paper decomposes and he’s fairly sure nothing useful would come of it. He presses his fingers against his forehead.
Pete says, “Your head still hurt?”
Patrick looks up. Pete hasn’t lifted his eyes from the notebook.
“A little.”
“You said that two hours ago.”
“It was true two hours ago too.”
Pete finally looks at him. “Right, and I assumed at some point you’d do something about it instead of sitting there looking increasingly haunted and hoping I wouldn’t notice. You look like shit.”
Patrick stares at him.
Pete considers this for about half a second. “Medically. Obviously. I mean, you look great in every other conceivable context, but right now you look like somebody dug you up.”
“Thank you. That really rescued it.”
“I’m trying to tell you I think you’re sick, Patrick. You’ve got two sweatshirts on, you haven’t touched your coffee and you’ve been staring at the same page since I got to the second verse, which is how I know something’s actually wrong because normally by now you’d have interrupted me six times to explain that I’ve put the emphasis on the wrong word and ruined the entire fucking English language.”
“I have a headache. That doesn’t make this a medical emergency.”
“I didn’t say it was a medical emergency. I said I think you’re sick, which is what normal people call it when somebody feels like shit for several hours and then starts dressing for January inside his own apartment.”
Patrick glances down at himself. This is unfortunately true. He hadn’t really thought about the second sweatshirt beyond being cold and knowing where another sweatshirt was, two facts which had seemed to combine into a fairly straightforward solution. Now that Pete has pointed it out, though, Patrick is forced to acknowledge that the room itself isn’t cold. The radiator is on. Pete is wearing a T-shirt and has shown no sign of discomfort beyond the usual amount produced by being asked to edit his own lyrics.
“I’m tired.”
Pete looks at him for a second. “You’re not just tired. I know what you look like when you’re tired, you get grouchy and start acting like everybody else in the room is personally responsible for the fact you can’t think straight. This isn’t that. You’ve barely said anything for, like, twenty minutes, and before you tell me you’re enjoying the silence, I know what you look like when you’re ignoring me on purpose too.”
“I am enjoying the silence.”
Pete smiles. “Yeah, I know. I still think you’re sick.”
Patrick goes back to the notebook. Pete lets him, which is suspicious, and about thirty seconds later his chair scrapes back.
Patrick looks up just in time to see Pete coming around the table, one hand already reaching towards him, and leans away. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m checking your forehead,” Pete says, like this should be obvious. “Stop moving.”
“You could just ask whether I have a fever.”
Pete pauses, eyebrows lifting. “Okay. Do you have a fever?”
“I don’t know.”
“Right.” Pete gives him a long look. “Great. Really glad we tried your method, because we’ve now reached the exact reason I was trying to touch your fucking forehead.”
Pete reaches for him again and Patrick catches him by the wrist before he gets there. “Can you not?”
Pete looks down at Patrick’s hand around his wrist, then back at him. “Can I not check whether you’re running a fever when you’ve spent the last two hours insisting everything is fine while getting progressively less convincing about it? No, probably not, because otherwise I’m going to spend the next hour watching you do this until Dustin Hoffman turns up at the door in a fucking hazmat suit.”
“I have a headache, Pete. I don’t have Ebola.”
“I know you don’t have Ebola.” Pete’s mouth twitches. “If I thought you had Ebola I’d be handling this very differently.”
Patrick lets go of his wrist mostly because continuing to hold it is beginning to make this exchange stranger than it needs to be, and Pete immediately takes advantage of the opening by putting his palm against Patrick’s forehead. The contact is cool enough that Patrick understands the problem before Pete says anything. Pete’s expression shifts slightly, amusement giving way to something more attentive, and then he says, “Oh.”
Patrick doesn’t like the tone of that. “What?”
“You’re really fucking hot.” Pete keeps his hand there for another second, frowning. “Like Johnny Storm hot, except all you’re doing with it is sitting here looking miserable.”
“Your hand’s cold.”
“My hand is a normal temperature. Your head is doing something else entirely, and I feel like this would be a stronger argument if you weren’t currently shivering in two sweatshirts.”
Patrick pulls away before Pete can get any more pleased with himself and immediately regrets it, because the movement unsettles his stomach in a small, unpleasant roll that seems to come from nowhere. He goes still and waits for it to pass. It does after a few seconds, but Pete is standing close enough to catch the whole thing and his face changes again, eyes narrowing in the particular way that means Patrick has just done something Pete intends to investigate.
Patrick hates that Pete notices things. More specifically, he hates that Pete notices things about Patrick. Pete can spend twenty minutes looking for sunglasses that are on his own fucking head. He once borrowed Joe’s phone, put it down somewhere, forgot where he’d put it and then spent the next ten minutes helping Joe look for the phone he himself had lost. Patrick’s face does something slightly unusual for half a second, though, and suddenly he has the investigative instincts of the FBI.
“What was that?” Pete asks, watching him.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit. You just went completely still and made a face like one of your organs moved somewhere it wasn’t supposed to.”
“My stomach turned over a little. It’s fine.”
Pete studies him for another second before putting both hands on the table and leaning in slightly. “Okay, so your head’s been hurting since last night, you’re freezing in an apartment that is objectively not cold, you’re running a fever and now you feel sick, but somehow I’m still the one making too much of this. At what point am I allowed to say you’re actually ill without you acting like I’ve turned this into an episode of ER?”
“I’m not saying I’m not ill. I’m saying I don’t know why you’ve decided this needs to become a whole fucking production.”
“Because you’ve been getting worse for hours and your treatment plan so far has been putting on another sweatshirt and glaring at me whenever I notice. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”
“It worked.”
“You’re still cold.”
Patrick considers this, because unfortunately he is. “Mostly.”
Pete’s mouth twists into an expression that suggests Patrick has just proved something for him, which is irritating enough that Patrick decides not to ask what. Pete straightens instead and starts opening cupboards, getting through two before Patrick finally says, “What are you doing now?”
“Looking for a thermometer. Since touching your forehead has already turned into a fucking constitutional dispute, I’d like something with numbers on it.”
“I don’t know if I have one.”
Pete stops halfway through opening the next cupboard and turns around slowly. “How the fuck do you not know if you own a thermometer?”
“Because I don’t keep an inventory of every cupboard in my head.”
“No, obviously. That would be insane. You only know where every guitar pick, cable and adapter you’ve owned since approximately 1998 is at all times.”
“That’s useful information.”
“So is knowing your own fucking temperature.”
Patrick opens his mouth to answer and never gets there. His stomach turns again, harder this time, the nausea rising so quickly that for a second his brain refuses to understand what his body is telling him. Then it catches up all at once. He shoves the chair backwards and gets to his feet too fast, one hand going straight to the table when another sick rush moves through him. Pete says something behind him, but Patrick doesn’t hear enough of it to answer. He makes it as far as the kitchen sink.
Then Patrick throws up.
***
Two hours later Patrick is sitting on the bathroom floor trying very hard not to throw up again.
This effort has so far accomplished nothing except giving him something to concentrate on.
The tile is cold through his sweatpants, which had felt good when he first sat down and has since become another problem because Patrick is still cold despite being hot enough that his hair is damp around his temples and the back of his T-shirt has started sticking unpleasantly to his skin. His head hurts every time he moves it. His stomach has spent the last two hours alternating between long enough stretches of relative calm to convince him the worst is over and sudden, vicious corrections to this theory.
Pete took his temperature forty minutes ago and got 102.4, a number he reacted to like Patrick had just handed him the launch codes.
Since then he has become some horrifying combination of Patrick’s mother, an anxious first-year medical student and somebody who has watched one episode of House and come away convinced the only thing separating him from a medical degree is paperwork.
At the moment he’s sitting against the bathtub a few feet away, Patrick’s laptop open across his thighs, reading something on WebMD. This would be irritating under almost any circumstances. It becomes substantially worse when Pete makes a small, concerned noise at the screen.
Patrick keeps his eyes closed. “Don’t.”
Pete glances over the top of the laptop. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You made a noise.”
“I’m allowed to make noises.”
“Not that one.”
Pete gives him a look, then goes back to the screen. He’s quiet for perhaps five seconds before asking, “Do you have a rash?”
Patrick opens his eyes.
Pete looks back at him over the laptop screen, perfectly serious.
“No.”
“Anywhere?”
“I haven’t conducted a full-body inspection recently, Pete, but I think I’d have noticed.”
“Okay, because fever, headache, nausea, vomiting, body aches—” Pete starts, glancing back down at whatever list he’s found.
“You’re just listing everything I told you.”
“I’m establishing the facts,” Pete says, mildly offended. “This is how medicine works.”
“This isn’t medicine. This is Google.”
Pete ignores that. “Anyway, those can all happen with West Nile.”
Patrick stares at him for several seconds. His head is pounding hard enough that even moving his eyes feels like work. “I don’t have fucking West Nile.”
Pete lifts his eyebrows. “You don’t know that.”
“I live in Chicago. I haven’t been wandering around a swamp.”
“Mosquitoes can live in Chicago, Patrick. They’re not restricted to Louisiana.”
“Thank you, Discovery Channel.”
Pete scrolls down, lips moving slightly while he reads. “You’d probably have more muscle weakness if it was the serious version. Also maybe confusion.”
“I’m not confused.”
“I know.” Pete glances at him, mouth pulling slightly at one corner. “You’re still being enough of an asshole that I’m confident higher brain function is intact.”
Patrick closes his eyes again. It would be easier to hate him if he weren’t funny, which has been one of the more persistent inconveniences of knowing Pete Wentz.
The laptop keys start clicking. Patrick hears Pete type for another few seconds and then stop.
“Okay,” Pete says after a moment, sounding interested. “Meningitis.”
“No.”
Pete looks up. “You didn’t even let me read it.”
“I don’t have meningitis either.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if you say stiff neck and sensitivity to light, I’m going to hit you.”
Pete goes silent.
Patrick opens one eye.
Pete’s eyebrows are up. “So you have been listening.”
“You’ve been reading symptoms at me for forty fucking minutes. I know more about meningitis now than I did when this started.”
“Good.” Pete nods once, as if this has vindicated the entire exercise. “Education is important.”
“So is shutting the fuck up.”
Pete’s mouth twitches. “Your neck isn’t stiff, though?”
“No.”
“And the light isn’t bothering you?” Pete asks, still watching him a little too closely.
“My head hurts. I’d rather it wasn’t incredibly bright in here. I’m not recoiling from the fucking sun like Dracula.”
“Okay, see, that’s useful information.” Pete looks pleased by this, which Patrick finds difficult to justify.
Patrick lets his head fall carefully back against the side of the cabinet. “You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m absolutely not enjoying this. You’ve thrown up four times and you look terrible. I’m extremely concerned.” Pete pauses, then looks back at the screen, mouth twitching again. “I am enjoying being right about you being sick, which is completely different.”
Patrick would answer, but his stomach contracts hard enough that he stops breathing instead.
Pete sees it before Patrick has properly moved.
The laptop is off Pete’s knees and on the floor almost immediately. Patrick barely gets himself turned towards the toilet before he’s throwing up again, one arm braced against the seat and the other wrapped painfully around his stomach. There isn’t much left to come up. That somehow makes it worse. His whole body keeps trying anyway, stomach clenching hard around almost nothing, his eyes watering and sweat breaking hotter across his forehead.
Pete moves in behind him and puts one hand between his shoulder blades.
Patrick would object to this if there were currently room in his body for anything except being sick.
There isn’t.
By the time it stops, his arms are shaking slightly from holding himself up. He stays where he is for a moment, forehead nearly touching his wrist, breathing through his mouth because absolutely nothing about the toilet needs to become a more complete sensory experience.
Pete’s hand moves slowly over his back. “You done?”
Patrick swallows. “I don’t know.”
“Cool,” Pete says, very dry. “Very decisive.”
“Fuck you.”
“There he is.” Pete sounds relieved enough underneath the joke that Patrick decides not to acknowledge it.
Something cold touches Patrick’s forehead. He flinches before realising it’s the washcloth Pete has been periodically attacking him with for the last hour, newly rinsed and folded over his hand. Pete pushes Patrick’s damp hair out of the way and wipes carefully across his forehead, then his temple, casual about it in a way Patrick finds deeply fucking unhelpful because there are, unfortunately, plenty of circumstances in which he has imagined Pete Wentz putting his hands on him and very few of them have involved Patrick kneeling beside a toilet with watering eyes and the taste of vomit still burning the back of his throat. Technically Pete’s hand is on his face and technically Patrick has wanted that for years, but this feels like abusing a loophole.
Patrick knows he looks awful; there’s no useful denial available when he’s sweating through his clothes, his face feels swollen around the eyes, his hair has given up on whatever vague arrangement it started the day in and he has just spent several minutes making noises over a toilet that would probably have been rejected from The Exorcist for laying it on too thick. It isn’t as though Patrick expects to look good in front of Pete all the time. They’ve toured together. Pete has seen him unshowered, sleep-deprived, soaked through after shows and once wearing the same T-shirt for enough consecutive days that Joe eventually threatened intervention.
This feels different, though. Touring gross is communal. Everybody looks like shit eventually, which at least gives it some dignity in numbers. This is just Patrick being sweaty and useless on his own bathroom floor while the person he has been unsuccessfully trying not to want for several years wipes his forehead for him.
Fantastic.
Patrick takes the washcloth out of Pete’s hand. “I can do that.”
Pete looks at him, expression completely straight. “Congratulations.”
“I mean you don’t need to.”
“I know what you mean.”
Patrick wipes his own face, mostly to prove a point which becomes considerably weaker when lifting his arm makes his muscles ache. “You also don’t need to sit in here. I’m not going to fucking die because you leave the bathroom for five minutes.”
“No, you’re probably not going to die at all, which I’ve actually found very reassuring.” Pete settles back against the tub and retrieves the laptop, giving Patrick a brief sideways look. “That said, you nearly fell over going from your bedroom to the bathroom twenty minutes ago, so until you stop walking like an extra from Night of the Living Dead, I’m staying close enough to stop you cracking your head open.”
“I got dizzy.”
“Yeah,” Pete says. “I was there.”
“It lasted about five seconds.”
Pete’s expression goes solemn. “It was an incredible five seconds. Really inspiring stuff.”
Patrick glares at him.
Pete smiles at the laptop. “Three, maybe four steps completely unaided. I almost called Sports Illustrated.”
“Why are you such a dick when I’m sick?”
Pete looks genuinely affronted. “I’m being incredibly nice to you. I got you water, I found your thermometer, I changed the pillowcase because you sweated through it and I have now spent nearly an hour researching whether you’ve contracted an obscure tropical disease. Florence Nightingale never worked this hard.”
“Florence Nightingale probably knew when to shut up.”
“Florence Nightingale didn’t have WebMD,” Pete says, like this settles the historical question.
Pete resumes scrolling.
Patrick leans against the cabinet and closes his eyes again. He can hear the laptop fan, the occasional click of the trackpad and Pete breathing through his nose while he reads. None of this would be especially aggravating if Pete hadn’t decided every new piece of information needed to be shared.
“Leptospirosis,” Pete says eventually, squinting at the screen.
Patrick keeps his eyes shut. “No.”
“Hang on, this one’s interesting.” Pete leans a little closer to the laptop. “Fever, headache, vomiting, muscle aches. You can get it from water contaminated by animal piss.”
Patrick opens his eyes. “Pete.”
Pete looks over at him, completely earnest. “I’m just asking whether you’ve had any unusual contact with animal urine lately.”
“You’ve been here since noon. When exactly do you think I fitted that in?”
Pete shrugs. “I don’t know what you do when I’m not around.”
“Mostly recover.”
Pete grins. “Okay, probably not leptospirosis.”
“Thank God you’re here. I’d never have ruled it out.”
Pete scrolls again, squinting at the screen, and his expression gradually loses some of its theatrical concern. “Or,” he says, drawing the word out, “and I want you to keep an open mind here, it could be viral gastroenteritis.”
Patrick looks at him.
“The extremely common stomach thing,” Pete continues, tapping something on the screen. “That causes fever, headache, body aches, nausea and vomiting and usually goes away on its own.”
“You think?”
“I said keep an open mind.” Pete’s mouth twitches.
“Did WebMD also tell you water is wet?”
“No, but it did tell me you’re supposed to keep taking small sips even if you feel sick, so drink.” Pete reaches for the glass beside him and holds it out, his expression shifting into the one he’s been using whenever Patrick fails to cooperate quickly enough.
Patrick looks at the glass, then at Pete. “You’re enjoying having authority far too much.”
“I don’t have authority,” Pete says, visibly enjoying having authority. “I have internet access and you currently have the physical capabilities of somebody’s grandmother after hip surgery. This is situational.”
“My grandmother would fucking kill you.”
Pete grins. “Yeah, probably. She’d still make you drink the water.”
Pete nudges the glass closer until Patrick gives in and takes it. The water tastes wrong in his mouth, still sour and dry no matter how many times he rinses it out, but he manages two small swallows.
Pete watches the entire process.
Patrick lowers the glass. “Can you not stare at me while I drink water?”
“I’m making sure you don’t chug it and throw up again,” Pete says, making absolutely no attempt to stop staring.
“I know how to drink.”
Pete looks pointedly at the toilet. “The evidence today has been mixed.”
Patrick gives him the finger.
Pete looks delighted. “See? Motor function. Great sign.”
Patrick puts the glass down before he decides to throw it at him.
Pete reaches out and, before Patrick can stop him, pushes another damp piece of hair off his forehead. His knuckles brush Patrick’s temple, cool against skin that still feels much too hot, and some of the amusement drops out of his face.
Patrick shifts away from his hand. “I’m fine.”
Pete looks at him for a second, then nods with exaggerated seriousness. “Yeah, absolutely. I’ll call Rolling Stone and let them know. Patrick Stump: doing great, actually. Fever, vomiting, sitting on a bathroom floor because standing’s become a team sport. Really strong material. Maybe we can get you a cover.”
Patrick laughs before he can stop himself, immediately regrets what it does to his head and closes his eyes.
Pete’s grin is audible in his voice. “Still got it.”
Patrick would like to hate him. It would make several things considerably easier.
***
By six o’clock Patrick has been relocated to the couch.
Relocated is Pete’s word. Patrick had walked there himself, although Pete had followed close enough behind him that the distinction became largely philosophical. He’d also arrived first somehow, clearing the notebooks and CDs off one end, putting a bowl on the floor beside him and producing two blankets despite Patrick saying he was hot before immediately complaining that he was cold once Pete took one away. Pete had accepted this contradiction without comment, which Patrick found more concerning than if he’d made fun of him.
Now Patrick is lying lengthways under both blankets, one arm thrown over his eyes and a cool washcloth folded across his forehead. The television is on because silence had started making him aware of every individual beat of his headache, but actually following anything on it requires more concentration than he currently possesses. His body feels exhausted in a way that should make sleep inevitable. Unfortunately, nobody has informed the rest of him. Every position becomes uncomfortable after about thirty seconds. His legs ache if he stretches them out and feel cramped if he doesn’t. The blankets are too hot until he pushes them down, at which point the air against his damp skin is immediately unbearable. His eyes burn when they’re open and his head throbs when he closes them.
Patrick has been trying to fall asleep for twenty minutes and has somehow become more awake through effort.
Pete comes back from the kitchen carrying a glass of water, takes one look at him and says, “You’re doing that thing where you’re trying so hard to sleep you’ve turned it into a competitive sport.”
Patrick moves his arm enough to see him. “I’m fucking tired.”
“I know.” Pete puts the water down on the coffee table and studies him for a second. “You also look furious about being tired, which I don’t think is helping.”
“I can’t get comfortable.”
Pete reaches over and lifts the washcloth from Patrick’s forehead, testing it against the inside of his wrist before making a face. “This is warm now. Hang on.”
Patrick watches him disappear towards the kitchen again and thinks, not for the first time that afternoon, that Pete has become alarmingly comfortable giving orders in Patrick’s apartment. He has already decided when Patrick drinks, how much Patrick drinks, where Patrick sits and which blanket Patrick is allowed to complain about. At some point he located the Tylenol Patrick hadn’t known he owned and wrote the time of the last dose on the back of an envelope, which is currently sitting on the coffee table beside the thermometer like Pete has established a small field hospital.
Patrick’s mother would approve of all of this.
This is possibly the strongest argument against it.
Pete comes back and replaces the washcloth, colder now, across Patrick’s forehead. Patrick hates how good it feels enough that he doesn’t say anything.
“You’re not going to sleep,” Pete says after watching him attempt it for another minute.
“I gathered.”
“So we’re watching a movie.”
Patrick opens his eyes properly. “Why?”
“Because you’re lying here being miserable and thinking about how miserable you are, which seems like a terrible use of everybody’s evening.” Pete crouches in front of the DVD shelf and starts looking through it. “Also I’m bored.”
“There it is.”
“I can care about you and be bored at the same time. Human beings contain multitudes.”
Patrick closes his eyes again. “Put on whatever you want.”
The pause that follows lasts just long enough to become suspicious, and when Patrick opens his eyes again Pete is holding up 28 Days Later.
Patrick stares at him while Pete looks from the DVD case back to Patrick, managing about half a second of innocence before his mouth starts twitching. “What?”
“You’re an asshole.”
“It’s a great movie.”
“I’m sick and you want to make me watch a movie about a virus destroying Britain.”
“It’s rage. Technically.” Pete turns the case over and glances at the back like he intends to fact-check this. “Also you’re not in Britain, so statistically you’re doing better than everybody in the movie already.”
Patrick lets his head sink farther into the cushion. “Put the fucking movie on.”
Pete grins and does.
He keeps the volume lower than Patrick would normally tolerate, which Patrick notices and pretends not to, then settles into the chair beside the couch rather than taking the other end and jostling him. For the first few minutes he actually watches in silence. Patrick begins to think the illness may have finally produced a miracle.
Then Jim wakes up in the empty hospital.
Pete leans forward slightly. “See, that’s you in another twelve hours.”
Patrick doesn’t look away from the television. “Why?”
“Hospital gown, confused, terrible complexion.”
“My complexion is fine.”
“Sure.”
Patrick pulls one edge of the blanket higher and decides not to answer.
Pete lasts another three minutes.
“Okay,” he says, settling back into the chair, “if this actually happened, everybody would fuck it up immediately because they’d panic and start grabbing canned food and baseball bats when the first thing you need is water.”
Patrick turns his head slightly. “What?”
“Zombie apocalypse. Rage-virus apocalypse, whatever. Water comes first because you can survive for weeks without food and only a few days without water, and half the city’s going to be trying to fight over bottled water at Jewel while the taps are still working.”
Patrick looks at him. “Have you thought about this before?”
Pete looks genuinely offended. “Obviously I’ve thought about this before. You haven’t?”
“No, Pete. Somehow I’ve made it twenty-one years without developing an emergency response plan for zombies.”
“That’s exactly why you need me.” Pete shifts in the chair, already warming to the subject. “So, water first. Fill everything that holds water while we still can, bathtub, sinks, bottles, whatever. Then I come get you.”
Patrick looks over properly this time. “Me?”
Pete’s eyebrows pull together. “Yeah. Of course you.”
There’s nothing performative in his face. Pete looks genuinely confused by the question, like Patrick has asked why he’d remember his shoes before leaving the house, and for a second Patrick can’t think of anything to say back.
It’s such a stupid thing to be affected by. Pete is describing an imaginary zombie apocalypse while 28 Days Later plays on Patrick’s television and a wet washcloth slowly slides down Patrick’s forehead. This is not, by any reasonable standard, a significant declaration of anything. Pete hasn’t even paused long enough to realise he’s made one.
That might be the problem.
Patrick has spent years listening to Pete talk about the future. Pete does it constantly, usually at a volume and level of certainty that makes the future sound like something he has personally booked. When the band gets bigger. When they make another record. When they play somewhere they’ve only ever bought tickets to. When some song they haven’t written yet becomes the one everybody knows. Pete can take a thing that doesn’t exist and talk about it long enough that eventually everybody else starts making practical arrangements around it.
Somewhere along the way Patrick has become one of those things Pete doesn’t bother making hypothetical.
Pete never says if Patrick is there. He says when we. He builds the sentence and Patrick is already standing inside it.
Usually Patrick doesn’t think about this because thinking about Pete’s use of pronouns seems like the sort of behaviour that should get a person taken outside and aired out for a while. Right now, though, feverish and exhausted and staring at Pete’s completely baffled face, it’s difficult not to notice that even at the end of the fucking world Pete’s first thought after making sure they don’t die of thirst is apparently to come and get Patrick.
Water, then Patrick.
It is an objectively ridiculous place to discover you occupy in another person’s priorities.
Something under Patrick’s ribs pulls tight anyway, small and warm and embarrassingly pleased by the whole thing.
“Why am I second?”
“Because water has to be first or we both die, and I’m not leaving you here while Chicago turns into Dawn of the Dead.” Pete says it as though the reasoning should have been obvious from the beginning. “Then we get Joe and Andy. Andy probably already has some kind of practical survival shit because he thinks about things like that, and Joe knows enough people that he’d somehow hear about a safe house before the rest of us. After that we get out of the city before everybody else decides to do the same thing.”
Patrick stares at him.
Pete waits a second, clearly trying to work out what Patrick wants from him, then shrugs and turns back towards the television. “Also, if I left you here you’d try to save every guitar you own and get eaten carrying an amp down the stairs, so really I’d be protecting you from yourself.”
Patrick snorts. “I wouldn’t bring all of them.”
Pete twists around to look at him. “You absolutely would. I’d show up and you’d already have six guitar cases by the door and some argument prepared about why each one fills a different sonic role in the post-apocalyptic band we’re apparently still going to have.”
“Six is excessive.”
“Patrick, I’ve watched you pack for tour.”
“That’s different.”
Pete’s smile widens. “You’d be standing there while people are getting eaten on the sidewalk going, hang on, this one’s a Telecaster.”
Patrick can’t help laughing, although it comes out more like a breath through his nose because anything stronger still hurts his head. “You wouldn’t exactly travel light.”
“No, but my stuff would be useful.”
“You’d bring twelve hoodies.”
Pete sits up straighter. “First of all, layers are useful. Second, pockets. Third, if civilisation has ended I’m not spending the rest of my life dressed like shit just because you failed to plan ahead.”
Patrick looks back at the television. “Good to know you’ve identified the real threat.”
“I’m just saying, everybody thinks apocalypse and immediately abandons standards. That’s how they get you.”
Patrick isn’t entirely sure who they are in this scenario, but asking would almost certainly produce another ten minutes of explanation.
Pete keeps going anyway, because Pete has never needed encouragement once a subject has acquired momentum. He wants two cars if they can manage it, although he doesn’t like splitting everybody up because then somebody inevitably takes a wrong turn or breaks down at exactly the point where phones stop working. He wants paper maps because GPS becomes useless eventually, enough gas to get well outside Chicago, antibiotics if they can find them and somewhere defensible at the end of it that has its own water source and enough distance from the nearest major road that strangers won’t keep stumbling across them.
“A farm,” Patrick suggests.
Pete makes a face. “Maybe. Everybody thinks farm, though, and farms have owners who are probably going to object when four guys from Chicago arrive asking if they can survive the end of the world in their barn.”
“Everybody has somewhere they live.”
“Sure, but once there are zombies I think property law gets a little flexible.”
Patrick turns his head towards him. “That feels like an incredibly convenient point at which to discover socialism.”
Pete grins. “I’ve been a socialist the entire time. The zombies are just finally creating favourable conditions.”
Patrick closes his eyes again.
The movie keeps playing behind his eyelids, dialogue and music blurring at the edges of his headache. Pete’s voice comes and goes over it whenever something onscreen reminds him of another problem he’s already solved in this imaginary disaster. He has strong opinions about gas stations, mostly that everybody else will have exactly the same idea and therefore they’ll become dangerous almost immediately. Hospitals are worse because the first hundred people who get bitten are all going to have the very reasonable idea of going to a hospital. Pete considers bicycles underrated, which turns into a surprisingly involved argument about maintenance and blocked roads before Patrick stops contributing enough for Pete to notice.
At some point the washcloth starts slipping down over Patrick’s eyebrow.
Pete reaches across and fixes it without interrupting himself.
“So I think two cars are still worth it if we stay together, because if one dies we move everything important into the other one. Obviously you’re in my car because if I put you with Joe you two are going to spend the entire drive arguing about music and miss the turnoff, and if I put you with Andy you’ll both decide you can fix something yourselves and I’ll find you six hours later rebuilding an alternator in a cornfield.”
Patrick means to tell him this makes no sense, but the effort required to organise the sentence suddenly feels disproportionate to its importance.
The couch has finally stopped feeling hostile underneath him. His headache hasn’t gone anywhere, although the edges have softened enough that Pete’s voice is easier to follow than his own thoughts. Patrick can feel himself slipping towards sleep and makes one last half-hearted attempt to resist it because falling asleep while Pete is talking feels vaguely dangerous. Pete could agree to anything on Patrick’s behalf. He could wake up enlisted in another band, engaged to somebody, or legally responsible for acquiring farmland in Wisconsin.
Pete is still explaining why they need a generator but shouldn’t rely on one.
Patrick loses the middle of the sentence.
A little later, or possibly immediately, Pete’s voice changes. The running commentary disappears and something quieter takes its place.
“Yeah, okay,” he murmurs. “Go to sleep.”
Patrick doesn’t remember closing his eyes.
***
Patrick wakes up just long enough to know he’s going to be sick again.
He barely gets the bowl off the floor before his stomach contracts, hard enough to fold him forward around it. There’s nothing left in him worth throwing up. What comes out is thin and bitter and horribly yellow, mostly bile by now, burning the back of his throat and leaving an acrid taste across his tongue that makes him gag harder even after his stomach has stopped producing anything. Pete is beside him before Patrick has properly registered moving, one hand taking the bowl when Patrick’s grip slips and the other settling between his shoulder blades while he retches uselessly into it.
By the time it finally lets him go, Patrick is sweating again and breathing through his mouth, eyes watering so badly he can’t immediately see the television. Pete keeps rubbing a slow hand over his back as though this is an entirely ordinary way to spend an evening.
Patrick wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and looks miserably into the bowl. “Pete, this is fucking disgusting. Just go away.”
Pete’s hand stills for a second. “I will if you actually want me to.” His voice has lost the running commentary now, and when Patrick looks over, Pete is watching him with an expression irritatingly close to patient. “I just don’t think you do.”
Patrick opens his mouth and finds, annoyingly, that there’s nothing useful to say. He could tell Pete to leave and Pete probably would; he’d make Patrick promise to call if he got dizzy again, leave water within reach, spend the entire drive home checking his Sidekick at red lights and almost certainly call before he’d even made it back to his own place, but he would go if Patrick asked him to. Patrick only has to imagine the door shutting behind him and the apartment settling into silence to feel something in his chest sink.
Which is fucking humiliating in its own right. Apparently Patrick would like the dignity of being violently ill in private right up until privacy requires Pete not to be there.
He looks back down at the bowl instead, because Pete is still waiting for an answer and this is the closest Patrick intends to come to giving him one. “It’s disgusting.”
Pete glances down too, his nose wrinkling because he is, despite everything, still a human being with functioning senses. Then he takes the bowl from Patrick and gets to his feet to rinse it out.
“Not if it’s you,” he says.
Patrick looks up, but Pete is already heading down the hall towards the bathroom, carrying the worst thing Patrick’s body has managed to produce all day like it’s nothing worth making a fuss about.
***
When Patrick wakes up again, it’s dark outside.
For a few seconds he has no idea what time it is, which day it is or why he’s in bed wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt he doesn’t remember changing into. The room has that strange evening quality it gets when he sleeps through daylight, familiar furniture reduced to shapes by the orange glow coming through the blinds, and his mouth tastes stale enough that his first coherent thought is that he desperately needs to brush his teeth.
His second is that he doesn’t feel sick.
Patrick lies completely still while he investigates this.
His stomach feels hollow but settled, no longer threatening mutiny every time he breathes too deeply; the headache behind his eyes has disappeared, his skin feels normal against the pillow instead of simultaneously scorched and freezing, and when he pushes the blankets down a little the rest of his body doesn’t immediately object. He still feels awful, just in a broader and considerably less interesting way. Every muscle seems to have been replaced overnight with something cheaper, and lifting his head from the pillow leaves him weak enough to understand why Victorian invalids were always being carried towards open windows and told to take the air. It isn’t exactly health, but after yesterday Patrick is willing to lower the bar considerably.
Patrick lets his head drop back down and only then realises he isn’t alone.
Pete is asleep on the other side of the bed.
At some point during the night he has apparently helped himself to Patrick’s clothes. The T-shirt is one Patrick vaguely recognises and the sweatpants are definitely his because they’re slightly too short on Pete, one ankle sticking out from beneath the blanket. Patrick has no memory of this happening. He has scattered fragments of the night instead: Pete making him drink water; Pete changing the washcloth on his forehead; Pete telling him he absolutely could not take more Tylenol yet because he had written the fucking time down specifically to prevent this argument; the bathroom light at some impossible hour; a hand on the back of Patrick’s neck while he tried not to throw up again.
Somewhere in there Pete must have decided that sleeping in jeans was beneath him and raided Patrick’s dresser.
This should probably annoy Patrick.
It does, a little.
Pete asleep makes it difficult to sustain properly.
He always looks younger like this. Patrick has noticed it before and tries not to make a habit of noticing because there are limits to how much time a person should spend studying his best friend unconscious before somebody ought to intervene. Awake, Pete is constantly doing something to his own face without seeming to know it. Smirking, frowning, biting the inside of his cheek, lifting an eyebrow because he thinks somebody has said something stupid, looking around rooms like he’s already found three exits and two people he dislikes. Even when he’s still, there’s usually something happening behind his eyes.
Sleep takes all of it away.
His face goes soft around the mouth. The permanent little crease between his eyebrows disappears. One hand is curled loosely beside his head, fingers tucked into Patrick’s pillow, and there’s something almost unfair about how peaceful he looks considering Patrick knows better.
Patrick knows what Pete’s head is like when it isn’t peaceful.
He knows the nights when Pete talks too fast and changes subjects faster than Patrick can follow because there are five ideas happening at once and all of them have somehow become urgent. He knows the fights Pete starts when something inside him is already hurting and apparently the easiest way to deal with that is to make everybody else hurt too. He knows how quickly Pete can turn cruel when he’s frightened, how precisely he can find whatever nerve he wants and press on it, then look devastated afterwards like he’s only just realised the nerve belonged to somebody he loves.
Patrick knows the other version too. The days Pete barely gets out of bed, when the phone rings until somebody else answers it and food becomes a thing he claims he’ll deal with later. The stretches when everything that usually spills out of him seems to have gone somewhere unreachable and Patrick can sit in the same room for an hour hearing almost nothing except the television and Pete breathing.
There have been plenty of versions of Pete that aren’t pleasant to look at.
Patrick has never once considered leaving because of them.
He’s considered strangling him. Frequently. He’s walked out of rooms before he said something he couldn’t take back and told Pete he was being an asshole often enough that Pete usually just agrees with him.
Leaving is different, and Patrick wouldn’t. The thought comes so easily that he almost misses what it means, because there has never really been a version of this where Pete becomes difficult enough that Patrick stops wanting him there. He’s wanted Pete to shut up, to calm down, to stop picking at whatever bruise he’s found just because he needs something else to hurt as much as he does. He’s hung up on him and called back ten minutes later, sat through hours when Pete barely spoke, listened to him talk himself in circles at three in the morning and stayed close through all the other ways Pete has been sick that never came with a fever or a bowl beside the couch. None of it becomes pleasant because it’s Pete, and Patrick has never needed it to. Pete can be exhausting and unfair and occasionally so fucking impossible that Patrick wants to put his head through drywall, but somehow none of those feelings have ever managed to turn into wanting him gone.
Yesterday, Pete sat beside him while Patrick threw up bile into a bowl and told him it wasn’t disgusting if it was him. Patrick had thought that was insane, and objectively it still is. Vomit doesn’t acquire sentimental value depending on who produced it, and Patrick feels fairly strongly that affection should have limits somewhere before stomach contents get involved. Looking at Pete now, though, asleep in Patrick’s clothes with his face gone soft and all the noise in him temporarily switched off, Patrick thinks maybe that wasn’t what Pete meant at all. Maybe the disgusting part can stay disgusting and the exhausting part can stay exhausting, and the only thing that changes is that when it belongs to someone you love, none of it makes you want them any less.
Patrick lies there looking at him for another few seconds, feeling strangely exposed despite Pete being unconscious. The whole thing is embarrassingly obvious once he sees it. Of course he knows this. He’s known it for years, every time he’s stayed through one of Pete’s bad nights without thinking of it as staying, every time helping him has felt irritating or frightening or exhausting without ever feeling optional. He just hadn’t realised, until Pete was holding a bowl full of Patrick’s vomit and looking at him like the answer ought to have been obvious, that Pete might feel exactly the same way.
Pete’s eyes open while Patrick is still looking at him.
Patrick redirects his attention to the ceiling with what he considers reasonable speed, although Pete spends a few seconds blinking himself awake before his face starts arranging itself into something suspicious.
“Were you watching me sleep?” His voice is rough and muffled, one side of his face still creased from Patrick’s pillow, which should make the accusation considerably less effective than it is.
“I woke up about thirty seconds ago.”
Pete rubs both hands over his face and pushes himself onto one elbow, hair flattened strangely on one side. “Thirty seconds is actually a pretty substantial amount of time to stare at somebody while they’re unconscious. I feel like I should be allowed to know what you were doing.”
Patrick turns his head to look at him. “You’re asleep in my bed wearing my clothes.”
Pete glances down at himself as though this information has only just reached him. “Oh, yeah. I stole these sometime last night. My jeans were making me want to peel my own skin off, and you were asleep, so I made an executive decision that whatever rights you usually have regarding your dresser were temporarily suspended.”
“That sounds legally solid.”
“I thought so.” Pete yawns, scratches absently at his stomach through Patrick’s shirt and then looks back at him properly. The sleepiness in his face disappears almost at once. “Wait. You look way better.”
He’s moving before Patrick has time to object, leaning across the space between them and pressing his palm to Patrick’s forehead. Patrick considers swatting him away on principle, but Pete’s expression changes so quickly from concentration to pleased satisfaction that he waits a second too long.
“Holy shit,” Pete says, sitting back. “You’re normal. Temperature-wise, obviously. I’m not claiming miracles.”
Patrick pushes his hand away belatedly. “The immune system is a miraculous thing.”
“Your immune system had excellent management.” Pete looks enormously pleased with himself now, awake enough that all the softness Patrick had been studying a minute ago is rapidly being replaced by Pete in full possession of his personality. “You can give it all the credit you want, but I was running a very professional operation here. There were fluids, temperature charts, medication schedules. I stayed calm under pressure. I made difficult decisions. Frankly, I think you owe a significant portion of your recovery to the standard of care.”
Patrick laughs softly through his nose and starts pushing himself upright. Feeling better turns out to be different from feeling good; his stomach no longer objects to movement, but his body seems deeply unconvinced that it should be required to support its own weight yet, and halfway up he has to stop and brace one hand against the mattress until the weakness passes.
Pete notices immediately. Of course he does. He doesn’t reach for Patrick this time, which Patrick appreciates, but his eyes follow the whole manoeuvre and the corner of his mouth starts curling once Patrick finally gets himself settled against the headboard.
Pete looks at him with exaggerated seriousness. “Look at that. Sitting upright, completely unsupported. I don’t want to put too much pressure on you during recovery, but if things keep progressing at this rate I think we can have you operating heavy machinery by the end of the week.”
Patrick lets his head rest against the wall. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a car.”
“Sure, but you feel like you’ve been hit by a car without a fever, which is a huge improvement.” Pete throws his side of the blankets back and climbs out of bed, stretching until Patrick hears something in his shoulder crack. “Also, you’ve slept through basically an entire day, so there is absolutely no chance I’m letting you close your eyes again and wake up at four in the morning ready to start your life while I’m trying to sleep. You’re getting up, I’m finding you something sufficiently boring to eat, and then we’re watching a movie until your body remembers what time zone it lives in.”
Patrick watches him head towards the door. “You’ve become very authoritative in the last twenty-four hours.”
Pete turns around, walking backwards for a couple of steps with an expression of immense self-satisfaction. “I saved your life. This is what happens. There’s a bond now. You’re going to have to defer to my medical judgement forever.”
“You didn’t save my life.”
“That feels pretty ungrateful considering I’ve already decided not to bill you.”
Patrick narrows his eyes. Pete is enjoying himself far too much, which means the movie has almost certainly already been chosen. “What are you putting on?”
Pete stops just inside the doorway, and the fraction of a second he spends trying to arrange his face into innocence answers the question before he does.
Patrick sighs. “What?”
“Okay, before you react, I want you to understand that I chose this because I think laughter is important during convalescence, and I’m pretty sure there’s medical literature supporting that somewhere.” Pete has started smiling despite himself. “Also, the title is relevant.”
Patrick knows enough about Pete to dislike that sentence immediately. “Pete.”
“Cabin Fever.”
Patrick closes his eyes.
“It’s perfect,” Pete continues, enthusiasm increasing now that the objection has begun. “You already had the fever, so there’s basically no suspense for you. If anything, you’re uniquely qualified to critique the realism, and after everything I’ve done for you I think the least you can do is provide expert commentary.”
“I had gastroenteritis. They have a flesh-eating virus.”
Pete waves this distinction away. “Details. The important thing is that this marks the beginning of your triumphant return to society, and I personally think there’s something beautiful about confronting your recent trauma through cinema.”
Patrick opens his eyes again. “You’re an asshole.”
Pete grins, completely unrepentant. “Yeah, I know. You can put it in my performance review. Come on. Nothing says recovery like watching people get catastrophically sicker than you did.”
Patrick reaches for the nearest pillow.
Pete gets out of the doorway just before it hits him.