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jomiddlemarch · 11 months

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Where might I be, if I were not here?

“Grace. Listen to me—”

“Just leave me alone,” she interrupted. At least, that was what she had intended to say. She wasn’t 100% sure those were the words that had come out of her mouth or ones he’d be able to recognize as belonging to the English language. It was entirely possible she’d spoken in Cantonese and didn’t even realize it. If pressed, she would not have been able to reliably determine the day of the week or the last time she’d eaten, though she dimly remembered Joel talking about broth.

“No. Take it off. Or I will,” he said. She turned her head, very slowly, and looked up at him. He might have sounded brusque or even harsh, well beyond brooking no nonsense, but instead he’d used a very gentle tone, almost coaxing.

“I only need to take a nap,” she said. It was a lie or she was dead wrong or she was wandering somewhere between the two in a greyish netherworld that was nauseatingly wavy around the edges. Joel crouched down so he was nearly at eye-level.

“Grace, you’ve been in those sweats for three days,” he said. “You’ll feel better once you’re in clean PJs and we can put your stuff in the laundry. Or burn them.”

“I’m fine,” she protested. Weakly. She was exhausted and the sweats did have a certain lizard-skin-that-should-be-sloughed quality to them, though she didn’t particularly want to admit it. “It’s no big deal.”

“They weren’t lying about doctors making the worst patients, were they?” Joel said. Thank God it was rhetorical, because her head was killing her, not that she was planning to say anything about it. “Grace, you’ve had a fever for the past week and Ted said they were maybe going to bring you home from the clinic in a wheelbarrow on Tuesday, you probably don’t even know what day it is—”

“It’s just a cold,” she said and winced. She’d stumbled home on her own two feet, the prospect of the wheelbarrow making her vomit into the sink in the corner of the exam room, running the faucet with the excuse that she was only going to splash a little water on her face before heading out.

“It was walking pneumonia until you stopped walking,” he said. “You look like shit and—”

“That’s mean,” Grace muttered. “You’re not supposed to be mean to a sick woman.”

“Let me help you out of those sweats and get you into a clean nightgown, darlin,’” Joel said. She’d admitted she was sick, so he’d won and now the gentleness was mixed with relief. Grace made a superhuman effort and sat up enough for Joel to do the rest of the work, dragging the sweatshirt over her head, letting her rest her forehead against his chest before dealing with the ratty sweatpants she couldn’t remember putting on. He made a series of murmured reassuring comments, c’mon now, there you go, like that, let me, baby and then she was somehow in a fresh, loose flannel nightgown which was mercifully not plaid, nor patterned with anything egregiously twee, only some faded rosebuds scattered on the cream-colored material and no lace at the collar or cuffs. Her hair would have been more of a mess if it weren’t a lank bundle heavy against her neck, unwashed for several days. The flu outbreak had started in Jackson two weeks ago, maybe three, and she’d had moments when she wondered whether the remnants of mushroom-uninfested humanity were going to go the way of 1918 before the tide had turned and then she’d started coughing.

“I look like shit,” she said, echoing him and he shook his head.

“You’re beautiful. You’re fucking sick as a dog, but you’re still beautiful,” he said. “Where’s your water bottle?”

“Bedside table,” Grace said, sinking back onto her pillow. Joel poked around among the various items stacked and clustered beside the oil lamp without lighting it, cursing lightly under his breath.

“This is a pile of junk.”

“I have a system,” Grace said. She didn’t look over at the pile he was rooting through. Usually, books were stacked in order of her aspirational plan to read them, Buddenbrooks not budging from the base, a hair clip was perched on top, the dish that held her earrings sat to the right of the lamp’s base and whatever face cream she’d most recently traded for was carefully set to the back, against the wall. She couldn’t have told him where to begin to find the water bottle at this point, even if she’d opened her eyes to look.

“Maybe when you’re well. It would be a miracle to be able to find anything in this mess. I should’ve stayed home with you,” he replied, finally managing to unearth the half-filled water bottle, flipping the cap and holding it to Grace’s mouth for her to drink. He watched her, careful to pull the bottle away before she sputtered. She couldn’t think of anyone in her whole life who’d ever looked at her with such intimate scrutiny.

“I’m a big girl, I don’t need a babysitter,” she said.

“You’re mine,” he said, taking off his wool work-shirt and then his jeans, leaving him in a tee-shirt and boxers. He was already in his sock-feet, having accepted her assertion that there should be no shoes worn in the home without her needing to bring up manure, though he didn’t always wear the slippers she left for him by the front door. He bent over and took off the socks, then walked around to the other side of the bed and got in. “Should’ve looked after you properly—"

“Joel, you don’t—you should keep on sleeping on the sofa,” Grace said. She couldn’t help the little sighing breath that came out when he brushed back the hair on the side of her face and settled himself next to her. It turned into a cough, but not a full-on hacking one, and he pulled her to rest against his chest when she was done.

“Where d’you think I’ve been sleeping, Gracie? I’ve been in that chair the past four nights,” he said, his voice lower now that he was so much closer. “C’mere, relax—”

“That chair will destroy your back,” Grace said. It usually sat in the corner of the room with a laundry basket on it, the slat back slicing the afternoon sun and shadow into cubes like grass jelly.

“It wasn’t the most comfortable, I’ll give you that. But there wasn’t a better choice,” he said. “Couldn’t keep an eye on you from the floor, tried it the first night.”

“You didn’t have to,” Grace said.

“Yes, I did. And I wanted to,” he said. He was quiet then and so was she, the comfort of the clean pajamas and even more, Joel strong and warm beside her easing the myalgia that had been competing with the headache and cough for first place in the Grace viral-misery Olympics. She felt sleepy instead of obliterated by fatigue and she’d run out of arguments.

“We’ve both lost people, before,” Joel said softly, like he wasn’t talking about the shrapnel they both carried. He wouldn’t say Kian or Tess or tell her the name of Sarah’s mother, but Grace understood him. Regret was its own creature, separate from grief. Sometimes it was like a poison eating you up, sometimes a vital tether between the past and the future, a rope strung between buildings in a Wyoming blizzard. “I wanted, I want to do better by you. They’d want that. You belong to me, belong with me. I don’t plan to let you go—”

He'd said everything except I love you. Except that he’d said that every other way he could, with the nightgown and the water and the chair, with his body and his heartbeat, his breath steady against her cheek, the way he said her name. It was enough and too much and she shivered. He held her tighter.

“You gonna tell me I’m your woman?” she said, trying to make a joke of it.

“If I thought you’d let me, yeah,” he said. “I expect, even at death’s door, you’d tell me to stop talking like a fucking caveman and respect your goddamn autonomy. But you are, even if I don’t say it so you can hear me.”

“You can say it,” she whispered. He made a sound like a laugh without it actually being one.

“I’ll bear that in mind,” he said. “You sleep now and you wake me up if you don’t feel good.”

Written for @pedrostories 1K celebration and because @tessa-quayle suggested it would be fun to play

#tlou au fanfic #joel/OFC #grace yang MD #hurt/comfort #tropes #second chance romance #only one bed #doctors making terrible patients ad infinitum #grief #romance #my ted lasso x tlou au universe #found family #pedrostories1k

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