Pass 6 - 100indecisions
quarantine blues
“I’ll give them one thing, I’ve definitely seen worse ways to quarantine,” Sylvie says, surveying the little room. It’s aggressively beige with no extra frills whatsoever, similar to every other ultra-basic example of living quarters Loki’s seen at the TVA, but there’s a big bed and a bathroom, plus a couch and a TV set, so—yes, he can easily imagine worse and hates that Sylvie’s speaking from experience.
“It has a bed, that’s the important thing,” Loki says. He uses a flicker of magic to change into loose sleepwear, partly because it’s convenient but mostly because he can feel the beginnings of a sick headache and probably has very little time left in which he’ll still have energy for frivolous magic.
Sylvie dumps her backpack on the couch and sits down next to it. “Right to bed, huh?”
“Getting a head start.” Loki settles into bed with a sigh. “Also I don’t want to write a mission report.”
She snorts. “Yeah, okay, I’ll jump on that grenade for you, you big baby.”
“My hero,” Loki says in an exaggeratedly saccharine voice, immediately ruining the effect by triggering a coughing fit. When he gets his breath back, he says more seriously, “I am glad you’re not sick.”
He’s still a little concerned about that. It was supposed to be a completely routine mission following up on a lead about a Kang variant that produced very little actionable intelligence, as usual. What they didn’t know until too late was that they were walking into an active pandemic, and by the time they found out, they’d both been exposed to a fast-acting strain of Kree flu, able to infect most known races. Sylvie said she’d had it before but could still be contagious, so they both had to go straight into quarantine as soon as they returned to the TVA. And as he was told to expect, Loki’s already starting to feel some symptoms. He just hopes Sylvie’s right that she won’t develop any.
“You like having me take care of you, huh?”
“No!” Loki protests. “I mean—I don’t mind? I’m just…glad you’re not sick, that’s all.”
“I know.” Sylvie tilts her head, smirking a little. “I thought you told Mobius you felt fine.”
“That was when I thought you could leave. But unfortunately for you, you’re stuck with me. I’ll, um, try to be a good patient.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.” Sylvie sets a glass of water and some pill bottles on the nightstand. “For now just get some sleep, yeah? Even if you’re not really feeling it yet, you will be soon.”
No, that part was a complete lie; the room is starting to dip and shiver around him when he turns his head a little too quickly, and his body already aches in a way that warns him to expect worse. Loki settles back into the pillows. “Well, apologies in advance if I start snoring. You can throw a pillow at me or something.”
“I’m not gonna throw a pillow at you while you’re sick. Probably. Now sleep.”
“Yes ma’am.” Loki closes his eyes, smiling a little despite the prickly pain growing in his temples.
When he wakes up, for half a panicked second he doesn’t know where he is—trapped, and burning alive—
No. He is not…being burned. He’s only tangled himself a little in his blankets, and his own body is doing its level best to cook him from the inside out with fever. That could still mean poison, or infection, but the bed is a good sign even if he’s too muddled to remember exactly how he got there.
Pain stabs through his head in time with his heartbeat, relentless and nauseating. He manages to turn his head enough to see a glass of water and some pill bottles on the nightstand, and then he runs out of energy to do anything more than stare at them for several minutes. Finally he gets one arm out from under the blankets, immediately starts shivering, and makes a grab for the nearest pill bottle. After a couple tries, he hauls it back into bed with him and pops the top off. This one is for…pain? Fever? Something. It’ll probably help. The water glass, when he tries to lift it, is much heavier than he expects and wobbles alarmingly in his grip, the water almost sloshing over the edge. Loki lets the glass clunk back down so he won’t spill it, growling to himself, which just makes his throat hurt more than it already did.
“Hey,” a voice says close by, and oh right, Sylvie is here, that’s why he knows he’s safe. “What do you need?”
“Head hurts,” he croaks. Lacking the energy to lift a glass without spilling it is pathetic, but he’s too miserable to care.
“Oh, sure.” Sylvie helps him with the glass, and that way he manages to take the pill he’d grabbed and two others she picks out for him. He has no idea what they do either. The important thing is that Sylvie keeps helping him drink water until he’s too tired to continue, and it soothes his throat a little bit. She checks his temperature, frowns, pulls out a standard-issue Tempad, and starts typing. “You guys…are morons. Send…normal…water bottles, plastic cups, and ice.” She snaps the Tempad shut. “I changed my mind. It’s a shitty quarantine. You’d think these people never get sick. Maybe they don’t.”
“I did,” Loki mumbles. Whatever he took, it’s not acting very fast. Every inch of skin feels hot and tight, all his nerves jangling each time he breathes, and he could swear there’s a Titan’s hand crushing his skull. (He is very displeased with his brain for providing that metaphor and trying very hard not to think about it, not quite paranoid enough to believe he can make it real but well aware that it would be easy to panic himself into feverish delirium and nightmares.) “As a child. Every summer.Couldn’t stand the heat. Thor didn’t understand why I was so…weak.”
Sylvie sits down on the edge of the bed. “I don’t remember if I got sick in Asgard or not. But I always avoided really hot apocalypses when I was younger, just kind of by instinct. That did cut down on the options for a while.”
“Pompeii,” Loki says.
“Mm, yep, didn’t go to that one until I was an adult.”
“Ragnarok?”
“Hah, well, I skipped that for other reasons, but the one time I went, I took off before Surtur’s fire really got going anyway. Never went back. It was…too hard to be there.”
Yes, Loki can easily imagine that. He lets his eyes fall shut as the fist around his head finally begins to ease a little. He thinks he feels gentle fingers brushing back his hair as he slips down into fitful sleep again.
The next time he’s aware of his surroundings, he feels no less awful, but the heavy glass is gone from the nightstand with a plastic bottle in its place. That, at least, he can manage. He drinks half of it, dozes some more, finishes the bottle, and blinks around for Sylvie. The other side of the bed looks like she might have slept at some point, but she’s not there now or on the couch, and leaving the room would defeat the purpose of a quarantine. Loki’s sick-fogged brain chews over this very slowly for what feels like a long time without reaching any conclusions except that his throat feels like he’s been swallowing glass and he’s desperately thirsty. Finally he heaves himself upright and more or less out of bed, waits for the room to stop spinning quite so badly, and makes his unsteady way to the bathroom, one hand in a white-knuckled grip on the bottle and the other clinging to the wall for balance.
The bathroom is just around the corner from the beds, which is good, because he’d probably end up crawling if he had to go any farther. As it is, every shuffling step sends shockwaves of feverish pain up and down the length of his body. The door is already ajar when he gets there, and he sags against the frame for a few seconds before nudging the door open.
And then he just stares, because Sylvie is in there, which is very obvious in hindsight, but the really unexpected part is that she is hunched over the toilet in the unmistakable position of someone who has just vomited into it.
“You are sick!” Loki says.
Sylvie groans. “I said…I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.” Loki drops the water bottle in the sink and stumbles to his knees next to her so he can at least pull her hair back from her face. “What’s wrong?”
“It was supposed to be milder,” Sylvie mutters.
Loki rubs her back. “My brain doesn’t work right now. You’re sick, right?”
She sighs. “Yeah.”
“Do you think you’re done throwing up?”
“Probably.”
“Then you should be in bed too, not trying to look after me. Come on.” Getting upright again is a team effort. Then Loki refills his water bottle and they support each other back to bed. Once Sylvie is under the blankets, Loki wobbles his way over to the couch for the Tempad, an emergency trash can, and another water bottle. By the time he puts the bottle and trash can within Sylvie’s reach and crawls back into bed himself, he’s almost too tired to keep breathing.
We’re both sick, he texts Mobius. Send helper robots or something.
“I didn’t lie,” Sylvie says, staring up at the ceiling. “I did have it before.”
“And you’re sick now.”
“So I may have let you think getting the virus causes natural immunity—” She pauses, coughing. “But really it’s just that the symptoms usually aren’t as bad after the first time and take a little longer to appear.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, something about the immune response—” Loki makes an exasperated noise, and Sylvie says, “Why did I—well, look, I was hoping it wouldn’t be a big deal, you know?”
“You didn’t want me to know you were sick?” Loki says. It comes out a lot more plaintive than he’d like.
“It’s habit,” Sylvie says quietly. “Instinct. I don’t like anyone knowing if I’m hurt or sick. It’s not that I wanted to hide it from you specifically.”
“I do that too sometimes,” Loki says. “But I know I’m safe with you. And I want to take care of you, but I’m kind of useless right now, so let’s just try to take care of each other, okay?”
Sylvie sniffs. “Okay. That’s fair.”
“Okay,” Loki repeats, and stops fighting to stay awake.
The next time he’s anything close to awake, he finds himself tangled up in her arms, and he still feels terrible, but he’s smiling as he lets sleep claim him again.