[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Fever

Genre: Slice of Life/Romance

Length: 2725 words

B/D: I wanted to do something a little cute and a little goofy/fun, for various reasons. I'll talk about it more in the end note. For now, enjoy some Nath/Sora.

Nath groans and twists beneath the sheets, her hair plastered to her forehead, her breath rising in thick, heavy clouds. The air is cold but her skin is hot, fever-blushed. Damp with sweat.

It has been years since she has been sick. As an altered human, she thought she never would be. She also thought she would never again know the pain of a hangover, but she had swiftly discovered the lie in the days following the war.

The war, the war, the war. So tired of the war.

To be entirely fair, they gave her an immune system that was bulletproof. But they couldn’t give her one that was future proof. A handful of times in every few hundred years, something entirely new would pop up that her body didn’t know how to deal with, and she would be reduced to bed rest while it figured it out. Never, she has noticed, at a convenient time.

At least she still has the strength to grumble.

An iron bar of sunlight is falling through a gap in the curtains to strike her aching head, and she wishes dearly to get up and deal with it. But her balance has been off since the morning. She feels clumsy, inert. As if she were made of clay. Clay that is constantly thudding with some dull pain, hidden under the surface.

She glances sidelong at an alarm clock next to the bed. It was a find in a bazaar. Somebody’s heirloom, they said, a real old-fashioned seven segment numerical LED display. Tech speak for ‘big red numbers on a black background’. Probably fake, not older than two years, tops. Part of the retro technology craze. Her mind muddles its way through the useless background knowledge before eventually centring on the one thing that matters: Sora will be here in half an hour for their sleepover. Half an hour is the blink of an eye, the sound of a thought.

“Never convenient,” she mutters into her pillow.

She needs to get up. She needs to haul her legs over the side of the bed, wobble to her feet, and hit the shower so she isn’t sweaty and disgusting. She needs to struggle into some clothes so she doesn’t have to answer the door wearing a vest top and nothing below the waist. She needs to go out and shop for snacks, think about what to do for entertainment, tidy the apartment. She doesn’t do any of these things. What she does is catch the sun in her eye and blink, and then blink again, only the second blink lasts longer than the first, and then the third blink is like the curtain falling down at the cinema, and her eyelids feel too heavy to blink again after that.

And in her dreams the colours bleed together, and there is a roar that she hears in her bones but never with her ears, and she has arms again but the skin is not hers and the hands are not hers and in the back of the hand she sees with such clarity the raised tendons like bird’s feet on her knuckles, and she feels fragile in a way that she has not for years upon years upon years.

And when she looks down her legs are melting, like plasticine beneath a hair dryer, and at once she realised that a bargain has been struck, these arms for her legs, and she tries to cry out, to tell them no, that she’s lived this way for millennia and she can’t unlearn it all, anything but her legs, but when she speaks her voice is the grinding of her own teeth, endlessly and forever.

She feels something cold and wet drip down from her forehead and suddenly she is awake, gasping, thrashing, trying to sit up but there is some great force pushing her head down into her pillow, more irresistible than gravity, needlepoints of pressure that must be fingertips but she was sure the door was locked, she was sure –

“Nath. It’s me, okay? Calm down.”

The voice is Sora’s, and the realisation crashes into her like a tidal wave. She is safe. Sora is here. Even at the fever pitch of the war, Sora never wanted to hurt her. The world slowly begins to make sense again. She breathes deeply, raggedly, feels her pulse begin to slow. She wiggles her toes and finds, to her great relief, that they are all present and accounted for. A little cold, but very reassuringly there and unmelted. Another droplet of water comes from the cold compress Sora is holding to her forehead and trickles down her face.

“Sora? What… what time is it?” she asks. Her voice has a rasp to it that wasn’t there yesterday.

“Just past seven.”

Seven? Sora was supposed to come at six. She groans, long and loud. Tonight was meant to be a fun sleepover, but here she is, having woken up an hour late, drenched in sweat, with no food in the house and still – she realises, with no small amount of discomfort – half-naked beneath the sheets. Needless to say, it’s not how she would want to greet a guest, never mind a friend.

“You didn’t answer when I knocked, so I flew around to the balcony. You were tossing and turning,” Sora says. Her voice is wistful, and a little distant; she still holds the compress in place, although more gently. “I didn’t know you could get sick.”

Nath chuckles, although only to herself. More would probably damage her throat, which feels swollen and itchy. “We weren’t all built with specs like yours.”

Sora crinkles her nose – ‘built’ is something of a dirty word. Suguri always says she was raised to be the planet’s protector, and that her power was a gift from her father; Hime always skirts around the issue of how she came to be. But the only thing that ever got ‘built’ in the war time were walls, and weapons.

“Have you eaten?” she asks.

Nath looks to the side, which is a firm a ‘no’ as any. Long experience teaches her to expect a scolding, although she isn’t sure what a scolding from Sora would sound like. Probably a fate best avoided. Her punishment, however, doesn’t come. Instead, Sora takes a scrunchie from the pocket of her dress and ties back her shaggy hair.

“Okay. I’ll make you a sandwich. Stay in bed and I’ll bring it in. Yell if you feel bad.”

“Sora, wait.”

“Mm?”

“Sorry. For getting sick. I didn’t mean to,” Nath says, and immediately feels silly when she hears the words out loud. Of course she didn’t mean to. “Can I… ask you to feed the cat, too? He usually hangs around the fences outside. There’s food on the counter.”

“Roger.”

With that, she bustles purposefully out of the room, and Nath is alone once more. She’s almost surprised to see Sora being so practical, although she knows she shouldn’t be. Deep down, she, Suguri, Hime, and even herself are very practical people. They’ve had to be.

“Tooooriyaaaaaah!!!”

Somewhere in the kitchen, she hears a chef’s knife crash down heavily on the chopping board. Not that practical, evidently. She leans back, settles into her pillow and allows herself to wonder if Sora is making a sandwich or murdering one. Eventually the sound of chopping becomes gentler and more uniform. Rhythmic, somehow cathartic. Her eyelids begin to droop again. She is carried away by the tide of sleep.

She doesn’t doze long enough to dream. She’s woken up by something flumping onto the bed near her feet, and opens her eyes to a face full of cat, all whiskers and deep green eyes and heavy purrs. When she turns her head to the side, she finds another pair of green eyes staring at her – Sora is sitting at her bedside, cross-legged, on a cushion. There’s a plate of turkey sandwiches on the bedside table – a little ragged looking at the edges, but probably tasty nonetheless.

“I fed him, and then he followed me all the way back up to the apartment. I think he knew you were sick and wanted to cheer you up,” the girl says.

“Come on, now. He’s a cat, and a stray at that. He didn’t know I was sick. He was just trying to get more food out of you,” she replies. “Look, he’s trying to eat the sandwiches.”

“No! Bad Roger. You can have one sandwich, but that’s it,” Sora says sternly, wagging a finger at the cat. The cat reaches out to bat it with a paw, and soon there is a paw-finger duel going on.

“Roger? I thought you were calling him Major.”

“I thought he was a Major, but he looks more like a Roger today.”

“He doesn’t look like either. He looks like a cat.”

“Fine. Give him a name and then we’ll call him that.”

“He’s not even my cat, though.”

“He’s in your house, and you feed him.”

“No, you fed him and you let him into the house!”

The cat, content with the ritual offering of a single turkey sandwich, ignores the noise, gives Nath’s eyebrows a cursory lick, and strolls down the length of the bed to curl up on her feet. Before she can do anything about it, he has used the ancient cat art of becoming an unbudgeable ball of fur five times his regular weight, the better to avoid being picked up and moved. Meanwhile, Sora cuts off a corner of sandwich, spears it with a cocktail stick and thrusts it insistently in the direction of Nath’s mouth.

“Alright, alright, I’m eating,” she groans. “Mmpfpf.”

“Good. When you’ve eaten the whole thing, you can go back to sleep,” Sora says, spearing another chunk of sandwich. “That’s what sleepover are for, right?”

Nath has to nudge the sandwich away with her chin before she can speak. “Well… traditionally, not a lot of sleeping goes on at sleepovers. Usually, you’d spend all night talking, playing games, eating sugary snacks, telling spooky stories…” Although what stories would satisfactorily bespook a centuries-old super soldier, Nath couldn’t guess.

“That’s ridiculous. It has sleep in the name. Why would they call it a sleepover if you spend all of it awake?” Sora asks, critically. “Are you feeling better?”

She rolls her shoulders and mulls over the question. It’s true that, for a moment, she almost forgot she was sick. But the sickness is still there, scurrying inside her in a futile attempt to stop her altered immune system ripping it to shreds. It feels, despite the cold compress, that all the heat in her body is being sucked into her forehead, leaving nothing but empty cold and goosepimples in its wake.

She decides that, with Sora, honesty is probably the best policy. Honesty leavened with understatement. “I’m a little chilly.”

The blonde girl nods slowly. “Okay. Budge up.”

“Huh?”

“Budge up. I’m warm, so I’ll lie next to you.”

There are moments in life when you become suddenly, starkly aware that horrible, horrible consequences are coming your way, and it is utterly up to you to avoid or divert them. It isn’t easy to change the course of fate while your body is filled with tiny microbial invaders, but Nath quietly resolves to do her best.

“Sora, I appreciate the thought, but you can’t.” It sounds very nice. Very diplomatic. Not a screaming, ‘you are disgusting and I don’t want you to have direct body contact with me’ refusal, but still quite firm. Solid, one might say. Unfortunately, Sora has a pretty solid head.

“Why not? I won’t get sick.”

Nath reminds herself, clinging to the fact like a sailor to a shipwreck: With Sora, honesty is the best policy. Leavened by understatement, of course. “It isn’t that, Sora. It’s just that… well, I’m not dressed.”

Sora tilts her head to the side, then nods. “Oh. It’s fine if you’re in your pyjamas. I won’t judge. We walk around in our pyjamas all the time. You can even go to the supermarket in your pyjamas nowadays. The world is a really crazy place.”

Okay, Nath thinks. Perhaps a touch less understatement. “Ah… I mean I’m really not dressed.”

Sora looks at her with a strange, blank expression – like an animal seeing a television for the first time, and wondering what to make of it. Then, very quietly, a little “oh” escapes from her lips. “No underwear?”

For a moment, Nath finds her gaze rooted to a particularly interesting whorl in the cat’s fur.

“That’s pretty daring.”

Nath feels some of the heat collected in her forehead kindly relocate itself to her cheeks. “How is it daring? I’m a grown woman, living alone in my own house, and I have blown up tanks by myself. I can wear as much or as little as I want when I sleep!”

There is a slight twist to Sora’s smile, and it looks like it would be right at home on Hime’s face instead of hers. “It explains why you’re cold. Budge up. I’ll lie on top of the duvet and you can stay below it.”

For a moment, she thinks about protesting. There are still things that she can leverage to prevent this. For one, moving her will disturb the cat. For two, you shouldn’t move a sick person. Before she can count the third reason, Sora has already given her a hard shove and is arranging herself in the newly made space so she can stare at Nath nose-to-nose.

The real problem with not having hands, Nath realises, is that you can’t hide your face in them when you’re embarrassed.

“Nath?”

Sora’s voice is very, very close. As is her mouth. And her eyes. And most of the rest of her, come to think of it. There are a lot of thoughts and emotions going through Nath’s mind, most of them probably not suitable for somebody undertaking bedrest, and the most she can do is make an answering grunt.

“You’re sweaty.”

“Don’t say that!” she snaps. Well, perhaps she’s not snapping. Perhaps it’s a little too high pitched to be a snap. Perhaps it, technically, if you were really into specifics, qualified as a wail. Just a small one, though. A teensy, tiny, hint of a wail that nobody would ever notice if their face wasn’t a hand’s width from her own. Which Sora’s was, still.

“Hmhm. You’re usually very calm and reliable. It’s funny to see you pout,” Sora chuckles.

“I am not pouting,” Nath sniffs.

“Nu-uh. That was a pout. I’m an expert pout spotter, since Hime does it all the time.”

Nath sighs deeply, which the cat takes as an opportunity to relocate in the gap between their bodies after having been so rudely knocked off Nath’s feet. “Very funny. Be careful, though. If you tease me too much, I’ll smack you.”

“But then you’d have to get up. And you can’t, because you’re naked, and because I’ll get mad if you move around too much when you’re sick.” There is a certain smugness in the girl’s expression, not unlike the cat’s.

“Supposing,” Nath says, defiantly squaring her chin, “you annoyed me enough that I just did it anyway?”

The blonde takes a moment to think about the possibility. “Then you should buy me dinner first.”

“All these risqué jokes… I think Hime has been teaching you the wrong things,” Nath says, and this time she’s definitely pouting.

“Rude. I’m an adult too. Even if I don’t act like it,” Sora replies, and reaches across to boop Nath’s nose with her fingertip. “Okay. I’ll stop teasing you. But you have to go to sleep and get well soon.”

She sighs, and accepts the compromise. “Roger.”

“Roger is the cat’s name.”

“Roger is not the cat’s name!”

“Then what is his name?”

“Kaze or something, I don’t know! I’m going to sleep.”

She rolls over to face the wall, but sleep is slow in coming. If she’s honest, she feels stronger and more energetic than she has all day. Never convenient, she thinks. She is almost, but not quite, surprised when Sora pulls her into a soothing, drowsy hug.

She wakes up the next morning with a face full of cat, and Sora’s arms still around her shoulders.

A/N: So, time to talk a little about this story. Originally I started it because Coffgirl, who has done such lovely cover art for these stories, had been ill. But because I'm so atrociously slow at writing anything, it's probably a little late for a get well soon present. What I did notice, however, was that some of the other artists in the OJ community were making sketches and drawings to help her feel better as she recovered as well.

It honestly really drives home to me how full of nice people the OJ fan community is -- and that, even if I only touch a few people in an ephemeral way, I'm a part of that community too. Get well soon, Coffgirl, and for any other OJ art peeps who might see this: I hope you enjoyed the story. It's a pleasure to watch you guys work.