#(but this premise Just Didn't Work on a character who understands his chronic symptoms' mechanisms as well as i know mine | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hecticcheer · 4 years

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This is ~2,000 words of fluff, inspired by late-night brain’s inadvertent mashup of this suggestion by boxofsfic with the ending of this story by sickiepop. (If either of you are seeing this post, hi! I love your work, and I hope you don’t mind what a monster I conceived while reading it…!)

The OCs I made up for the occasion are both around 30; the sick one’s a guy, and the other is nonbinary; they’re housemates; they might be in a QPR, but I don’t think they know that yet either.

I mmmmight write the sequel foreshadowed in the last few lines? Not sure yet; depends on whether I still like what I’ve written by tomorrow. But if you’re reading this and you’d dig that, please let me know!

—

Mr. Bartholomew Fox lay on his classroom’s hard, dusty floor, trying to remember how to pronounce respite. It had been a vocab word this week in some of his tenth graders’ books, but grading their worksheets had not required him to say the word aloud. He could remember that it wasn’t phonetic—it did not rhyme with despite, like its spelling suggested it should. But did one say the word as though it were spelled respeet? Reecepite? Resspit? The remembered voice of a friend from the days of his first smartphone reminded him, You have 3G; he fumbled for his phone, hoping the dictionary app would load this time deecepit the classroom’s shoddy cell service. When he lifted his phone, however, a text from Leverton distracted him.

You ok? At a meeting I forgot about or s/t?

Barty (he was Barty to friends, Mr. F among his less-creative students) hadn’t quite felt like himself all day, though he wasn’t sure what more than that to say about it. His joints and muscles ached, sure; his head throbbed for a bit after every movement, yeah; he’d been shaky and dizzy all day, true—but none of that was weird. He guessed these symptoms must be worse than usual, but no one of them seemed enough that way to justify what an unpleasant day he’d had. Or at least, none had done so until his final class ended, when struck the irresistible urge to lie down on the floor instead of heading home. On the floor, with nothing else to think about, they all seemed urgent. He felt so dizzy it made him hot all over, his upper lip prickling with sweat. If he moved in any way, and whenever he opened his eyes, the feeling grew worse. His left shoulder, right wrist, that mysterious place in his lower back, both knees, the muscles in his neck and thighs and forearms and halfway down his right calf—all traded off shouting for his attention. The throb behind his left eye grew sharper now, more electric, like the start of a migraine (but those usually came on earlier in the day). That side of his nose was clogged. Was he getting a cold? Not unlikely, this early in the school year. Or was it just allergy season.

He’d gone about this far in his musings and then apparently quit thinking at all until something (he could no longer remember what) had made him reach for his phone. Now, having read Leverton’s text, he laid the phone down on his chest and closed his eyes, trying to think how to reply. After he’d typed I’m okay, just and then lay still for a bit pondering how to make must’ve fallen asleep sound less dumb, another text arrived from Leverton:

Just send me an emoji or something so I know you’re not dead? You’re probably just at a meeting and I don’t want to bug you, but, starting to worry a little

I’m okay Barty sent back therefore, deleting the comma and the just. They’d both long-since turned off their phones’ “Read at 4:18 PM” feature—it made Leverton anxious, and incensed Barty on principle. Sending a quick reply took priority, therefore, over explaining himself. The little green progress bar hovered for eons about two thirds of its way across the screen, which it would never have dared at home unless he had tried to send multiple photos. Making sure not to touch the phone’s sides directly, even though he knew that made no difference on this non-dinosaur model, he wrote further, No meeting; fell asleep in classroom. Somehow that one went through at once—so quickly that he’d barely had time to close his eyes and set his head back down before it buzzed again.

Oh my god

Are you ok??? That sounds so unlike you

He didn’t know what to say. The first I’m okay hadn’t felt like a lie, since in that case it was clear he meant okay as opposed to dead. But now neither Yes or No seemed like the right answer. The long pause he elected to respond with instead probably treated Leverton worse than either one:

Are you still in your classroom? Stay there, I’ll come get you

I don’t knw [sic] if I’m comfortable w/ the thought of you driving like this.

On its face Barty found this absurd. Students fell asleep in his class nearly every time he turned on the projector, and that seemed a much greater feat than dozing off while lying alone on the floor. Besides, it hadn’t been real sleep—only stage one or two. If someone had asked whether he was awake he could have honestly said Yes, without startling first. Don’t, he began typing back, but once the initial guilt wore off he thought again about Leverton’s words (Stay there, I’ll come get you). The corners of his eyes grew hot when he pictured them setting out on foot to collect him. Leverton was right, after all—Barty never fell asleep during the day. He deleted the message he’d started and sent instead, Okay.

By the time he heard Leverton’s hand on the doorknob Barty had drifted back into early-stage sleep: close enough to the surface to recognize the sound, but far enough under that it surprised him a little. He’d forgot where he was, his thoughts (now vanished) so vivid they’d seemed realer than the floor under his back. He pulled himself up onto his elbows and his sight went dark blue from the corners inward.

“Hi,” he told Leverton as the latter entered—too quietly, as it turned out, for them to hear over the sound of the closing door. They peered around the room, but it took them a few seconds to spot him; he could tell they were looking for a seated person, rather than one on the floor. Barty cleared his throat and this time said, “Hello.”

“Oh my god—did you fall? Are you alright?”

“No, I’m fine,” Barty insisted, shaking his head, and then, smiling inanely, added, “I meant to do this.”

(Meant to do that was a long-standing meme of theirs, an offshoot from Leverton’s comparisons of Barty to a cat. After a cat does something stupid, it recovers its dignity so quickly you’d think it was trying to look like the stupid thing it did was all part of the plan. Thus whenever either of them made a mistake too large to ignore but too small for a real apology, they’d say to the other some variation on, Meant to do that.)

“You just thought the linoleum seemed like a nice change of pace from the nice couch we have at home,” summarized Leverton, and Barty noticed how they used the word nice twice in a row.

He lowered his head back to the floor, feeling too dizzy and neck-sore to waste his strength on trifles. “It’s vinyl; they just replaced it.”

“What?”

“The floor.”

“Ah. Vinyl. Excuse me.” They sat cross-legged down next to Barty, on the aforesaid vinyl.

“I’m alright,” Barty said again.

“Yeah, but that word doesn’t mean a lot coming from you. Excuse my cold hands,” Leverton warned, and placed the back of their hand to Barty’s forehead and each cheek in turn, brushing some hair out of the way first so it wouldn’t get in his eyes. Barty flinched slightly, having gone from unpleasantly hot to unpleasantly cold in the time since he’d first made contact with the floor. “Feels like you’ve got a fever. Do you think you might be coming down with something?”

“You just said your hands are cold, though,” pointed out Barty.

“Well, yeah,” Leverton conceded with a snarl of laughter—“‘cause compared to a face I figured they would be.”

“Thought you meant ‘cause you’d come from outside.”

“No; I wasn’t cold out there.”

This week had brought their town its first cold snap of the season, but in California an early-fall cold snap parses out to more like absence of heat wave. The last few days it had been cool enough to keep the AC off, but it was still t-shirt weather out from ten to ten. Leverton’s tie dye, sweatpants and flip-flops attested to this—as well as to how quickly they must have hurried to meet him. Though they worked from home, Leverton usually put on jeans to meet the public. And that tie-dye t-shirt, Barty knew, had a small hole in one armpit. It pleased him to remark that he could still keep track of details like this; too bad these examples of lucidity were invisible to Leverton.

“You look pretty sick,” said the latter. “How do you feel?”

Come to think of it, the word lucid itself could also mean translucent. That was about how he felt: diaphanous, vague, barely-there. His mother always said with it instead of lucid; though she’d never said so, he’d deduced the antonym of with it must be out of it.

“Not my best,” Barty admitted.

“But you didn’t faint, or hurt yourself, or anything.”

“No. Worried I might, but figured I’d preempt it.”

“Always thinking ahead,” scoffed Leverton, combing their hand through some more of Barty’s hair. “Your hair’s all sweaty; did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“You don’t usually sweat that bad just from feeling faint, I didn’t think.”

“You’re right.”

“So again I say, You look sick.”

“I’m probably getting sick.”

Leverton sighed through pursed lips, making them billow noisily. “Well, shit, pal, this is a terrible place to be sick.”

“Such language,” mumbled Barty, without conviction. He was so unused to letting swears pass without comment in this room that it would have taken more effort to say nothing. But Leverton, rightly, ignored this comment:

“Can you stand? Maybe I could get you some water—would that help?”

“Yes, and yes. On my desk,” Barty said, pointing without looking up.

“Uhhh… ah! I see it.” Leverton stood up and brought back Barty’s bottle of water. They sat again, uncapped it, and, once Barty had sat back up on his elbows, handed it to him and gripped his shoulder, presumably to help him keep his balance. Barty gulped down several mouthfuls, broke off to catch his breath, and shoved the cold-sweaty bottle back into Leverton’s hand, eager to lie back down. “Ah!—no—wrong way!” squawked Leverton. “Are you sure you can stand.”

“Just need a minute. Can you drag the desk chair over? Seems a pleasanter middle ground than.”

“Oh—good point. Sure.” They rolled it over, apologizing for the squeaky wheel. When he had more energy, among his friends Barty would sneer and hiss at such unpleasant sounds; the chair’s squeak hurt his head now too, of course, but somehow at the moment he found it easier to withstand unpleasant phenomena than resist them.

After a minute, he did indeed pull himself up and slither into the chair. (Leverton evidently knew better than to offer a hand to help him up; such offers would hurt his pride, and possibly also his shoulders.) His hands shook as he gripped the arms of the chair to haul himself up into it; his head spun; he was so weak the exertion hurt his chest and all four limbs. When he subsided to catch his breath his head throbbed raucously. He leant it into his hand—whose support Leverton then seconded with their own hand. Their touch chilled him at first, but he lacked the strength (whether of will or body who knew) to scoot away. He hadn’t realized how much the weight of his head had hurt his wrist until Leverton’s help removed that hurt.

“You’re really not feeling well, are you.”

“Seems that way.”

“Thank god I didn’t let you drive yourself home.”

“Too bad for the kids, they’re all gonna catch it,” Barty muttered, regretfully; “as will you, of course. And I won’t do nearly this good a job of looking after you.”

“I don’t mind. You’ll do your best.”

“Will I?”

“You always seem to. From my limited perspective.”

“I don’t have your patience. Or your empathy.”

Leverton scoffed: “Empathy? Yes you do! You feel other people’s feelings just as well as I do—you’re just shyer about it. You’re just emotionally constipated.”

“Perhaps,” granted Barty. He doubted that first half, but could already feel himself smiling at Leverton’s flatteries, and knew if he tried to argue that they would hold the smile against him as an admission. So he gave his doubts no more explicit form than, “Nice of you to say so.”

“Are you ready to try and walk to the car?”

Barty sighed, sort of phlegmily—almost a hiss. “Might as well be.”

#a shifty tract #(...first time i'm using the writing tag and it feels like a lie; no digestive ills here at all #(just vague fluey stuff and undiagnosed chronic illness. in my headcanon he has heds and pots 'cause that's what i have lmao #(but this premise Just Didn't Work on a character who understands his chronic symptoms' mechanisms as well as i know mine #(and barty--again like me--is the kind of guy who Learns Everything about any label he knows applies to him #(but who dislikes not knowing so much that if the problem has no name he'll pretend it doesn't matter for as long as possible #(sooooo no diagnosis for him. sorry pal)#permasickfic #(trying to avoid the chronic illness tag but figured i should tag for it in SOME capacity as i suspect it squicks some people)

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