You drop back against your pillow and exhale slowly. The ceiling stares back at you, indifferent and unhelpful. Somewhere outside your window the neighbourhood has gone quiet—it's late, later than you should still be awake, and yet here you are. Thermometer on the nightstand. Fever climbing. The elaborate skincare routine you had promised yourself—the one specifically designed to ensure you looked like a functioning human being tomorrow—sitting completely forgotten on your bathroom shelf.

Tomorrow morning, which is the morning of your first date with Kim Woonhak.

Even just thinking his name sends an embarrassing flutter to your chest. That small, involuntary lurch behind your ribs, the one you've grown so used to that you almost forget it hasn't always been there. 

Almost. 

The truth is you remember exactly when it started. It wasn't dramatic. No grand revelation or cinematic eye contact across a crowded room. Just the smallest detail—stupid and completely ordinary, and then it settled somewhere deep and refused to leave, through months of friendship and late nights that ran longer than they should have, through every conversation where you chose your words a little more carefully than necessary and every time you looked at him and had to remind yourself to look away.

And now, after all of that, tomorrow is finally arriving. 

Your first date. With him. Your first date with anyone, if you're being fully transparent with yourself, which you are actively avoiding because that particular truth makes everything feel even more enormous than it already does. The outfit is already hanging on your wardrobe door. You'd spent an almost unreasonable number of evenings narrowing it down, texting Woonhak about completely unrelated things while your floor was covered in rejected options, and the memory of it makes a quiet warmth bloom in your chest even now, even through the fever haze.

You reach for your phone. His contact is already open because of course it is, your thumbs have developed their own opinions about where they want to be apparently. The rational thing is right there—one text, simple and reasonable. “I'm not feeling well, can we move this?” He would understand. He would insist on it, even. He is, frustratingly, that kind of person.

You stare at the empty message box.

Then you lock your phone and set it face-down beside the thermometer.

No. Absolutely not.

You have waited too long for this. You've sat with this feeling for too long, through too many months of wanting a relationship you weren't sure you'd ever get to have. You are not surrendering tomorrow to a fever. You will sleep this off. You'll feel better in the morning—people recover from fevers overnight all the time, surely, and you will simply be one of them through sheer force of will if nothing else.

The glass of water on your nightstand, the one you poured an hour ago with genuine intentions of drinking it, sits completely untouched. The medicine in your bathroom cabinet stays in the bathroom cabinet. The half-eaten snack you'd abandoned on your desk earlier in favour of rereading your last conversation with him remains exactly where you left it, slowly going stale.

You turn off the lamp.

Tomorrow, you decide, with the serene and entirely unfounded confidence of someone who has comprehensively outsourced her common sense to her heart—you will be absolutely fine.

You close your eyes.

You are so utterly, devastatingly, hopelessly cooked.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

Morning arrives, and it is not kind.

You become aware of consciousness slowly. Everything feels heavy. Your head, your limbs, the very air pressing down against your skin—all of it conspires to keep you horizontal, and for a long, bleary moment you comply. The sunlight filtering through your curtains feels aggressive. Your throat has graduated overnight from sandpaper to what feels like gravel, and the low throb behind your temples from last night has settled in with the comfortable permanence of an unwelcome houseguest.

You lie there, blinking at the ceiling.

Something was supposed to happen today.

You can't quite—

Your phone lights up on the nightstand.

You reach for it with the slow, waterlogged movements of someone operating at approximately forty percent capacity, fingers closing around it weakly. The screen swims into focus. One notification. A text, timestamp seven minutes ago, from the contact name you may or may not have spent an embarrassing amount of time choosing.

“Good morning :) still up for today? or did you finally come to your senses and realise you can't handle me?”

The effect is instantaneous and completely involuntary.

You sit up.

The headache detonates behind your eyes like a personal vendetta, white, sharp and immediate, and you actually have to press the heel of your palm against your forehead for a moment, teeth gritted, vision briefly unreliable. A noise escapes you that is not remotely dignified. You stay very still until the worst of it passes, phone clutched to your chest, the room tilting gently at its edges.

Then you look back down at his message.

The smile happens before you can stop it.

“I’ve been ready since yesterday,” you type back, which is true in every sense except the one where you are currently sitting upright through sheer determination alone, fever still very much present, head still very much attempting to detach itself from your body. “don't keep me waiting :)”

You hit send.

Then you push the covers back, plant your feet on the floor, and decide with absolute finality that you are fine.

You are so fine.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

Getting ready takes longer than it should.

It’s not because you are indecisive—you already know what you're wearing, have known for days, the outfit still hanging exactly where you left it on your wardrobe door like a small monument to your own optimism. It takes longer because somewhere between washing your face and attempting eyeliner, your body keeps requesting breaks you haven't scheduled. A moment gripping the bathroom sink while the floor shifts unreliably beneath you. Another moment sitting on the edge of your bed, mascara wand in hand, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass with the patience of someone who has decided that dizziness is simply not on today's agenda.

You look at yourself in the mirror.

You look terrible.

You look, specifically, like someone who ran a fever through the night and then got up anyway and tried to cover it with skincare and wishful thinking (which… is exactly what you did). Your eyes are glassy enough that no amount of concealer has managed to fully disguise it, and there's a specific quality to your complexion that sits somewhere between delicate and concerning.

You lean closer to the mirror.

Fine, you decide. Totally fine. Practically glowing, even.

Breakfast does not happen. You think about it briefly, open the fridge, register that the idea of eating anything feels genuinely implausible, and close it again. You'll eat later, during the date. That counts. That's basically the same thing.

By the time his text arrives—"on my way :)”—you are dressed, presentable by the loosest definition of the word, and running on a potent mix of adrenaline and delusion. You do one final check in the mirror, smooth down your outfit, and decide firmly that you look fine.

You look fine.

When the knock comes you cross the apartment in record time, pull open the door, and there he is.

And for a moment, you forget entirely that you feel like you're dying.

He looks like how he always does, which is to say unfairly good in an entirely casual way that he seems completely unaware of, and he's smiling at you with that radiant smile that has absolutely no business making you feel the way it does. His eyes do a quick, almost imperceptible sweep of your face—a brief, unreadable emotion passing through them—before settling back on yours like it never happened.

"You actually showed up," he says, delighted, like he genuinely wasn't sure you would. You lean against the doorframe with what you hope reads as effortless and not please give me something to hold onto.

"Told you," you reply. "Don't keep me waiting."

He laughs—bright and easy—and steps back to let you through, and you decide with complete certainty that you would drag yourself off your deathbed every single morning for the rest of your life for that sound without a second thought.

You grab your bag. You step outside. 

Yes, you are completely, totally fine.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The night market is everything you imagined it would be.

Warm light strung low between stalls, the smell of frying oil and sugar competing in the air, noise layered over noise until it stops being individual sounds and becomes atmosphere. Woonhak grabs your wrist the second you step inside, already pulling you through the crowd before you've fully arrived, pointing excitedly at a stall halfway across the market.

"Okay, okay—do you see that? We're going there first. No arguments."

"We just got here—"

"No arguments," he repeats, already moving, and you laugh and follow him, and for a blissful, golden little while, you forget entirely that you are running a fever of nearly thirty nine degrees.

He's so bright tonight. That's the thing about Woonhak that you can never quite explain to anyone who hasn't stood next to him—he fills whatever space he walks into, this warm and restless energy that makes everything feel like it's moving slightly faster and more vividly than it did before he arrived. You've liked him for so long that you've genuinely forgotten what it felt like not to, and standing beside him now, it feels like a reality you keep having to convince yourself is real.

You feel strange tonight. Everything seems just a little out of focus, like your body can't quite keep up with the rest of the world. But his hand is warm around your wrist, grounding you, and the dizziness eases enough for you to catch your breath. 

You're here. You made it. Everything else can wa—

A sudden chill moves through you from your shoulders down, your whole body shuddering once, visibly, before you can catch it.

Woonhak turns immediately.

"Are you cold?"

"No," you say. "Just the breeze."

He looks at you. Then he looks very deliberately at the banners hanging from the stall directly beside you—completely, utterly motionless, not a single thread shifting—and then he looks back at you with his eyebrows raised.

"There's no breeze."

"There was one. It passed."

"It passed." 

"It was… very fast!”

He stares at you with his mouth slightly open, caught between disbelief and amusement, and then he laughs—short and bewildered—and shakes his head and turns back to the stall. You exhale quietly.

Fine. You're fine.

But when he falls into step beside you again he's closer than before that your arms brush with almost every step, and his hands have come out of his pockets, and you notice all of this and choose, very deliberately, not to think about what it means.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

He talks without restraint, like every thought that crosses his mind is worth sharing. He keeps up a running commentary on every stall you pass, tells a story about Jaehyun that has him laughing before he even reaches the punchline, and bumps his shoulder against yours every so often to make sure you're looking at whatever has caught his attention.

You are. You laugh when he laughs, follow wherever he points, match his energy as best you can. It's just that every few minutes, the world blurs around the edges, and you have to blink until everything settles back into place before he notices.

"—and then he actually tried to convince the guy that it wasn't even his—" Woonhak glances over mid-sentence and catches you a half-beat behind, your gaze slightly unfocused, and stops. "Hey."

You blink back into the moment. "Sorry — those caught my eye." You gesture at a nearby stall. "What were you saying?"

He doesn't look at the stall. He looks at you, and underneath his expression a different frequency of attention has switched on—the laughter still warm in his face but behind it, watchful now. 

"You sure you're okay?" he asks.

"I'm great," you tell him, and you smile, and you put your whole self into it. "Tell me what happened."

The moment passes. He finishes the story and you laugh in the right place. But when you start walking he's closer again— closer than he was even a minute ago— and his shoulder stays pressed against yours, steady and deliberate, and you think he's started noticing more than he's letting on.

Inside, the throb behind your temples has quietly escalated. You breathe through it and keep walking and tell yourself it's fine, it's fine.

You're absolutely fine.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

He buys you tteokbokki without asking, appearing at your side with it like it's the most natural thing in the world. He holds it out to you, his expression easy, but there's a quiet insistence beneath it.

"You haven't eaten anything this whole time," he says, and the teasing lilt that's coloured his voice all evening gives way to quiet concern.

"I've been pacing myself."

"For an hour."

"I'm very disciplined."

He looks at you, and for just a second, the easygoing expression slips away. What's left is intent—focused, a little worried.

"Eat," he says. "Please."

The word startles you more than it should. You don't think you've ever heard him sound quite so earnest. 

Before you can talk yourself out of it, you're reaching for the skewer. 

You smile, take it, and try. You genuinely do.

Two bites in, your stomach clenches in immediate protest. You stop chewing.

For a few long seconds, all you can do is stand there, swallowing carefully, willing the nausea back down. The skewer hangs forgotten in your hand as you fix your gaze on the lantern above the nearest stall, counting each breath and praying your face doesn't give you away.

It passes. Barely.

The third bite never comes.

You find a bin a minute later. When you return to his side his eyes go straight to your empty hands, and the silence stretches three full seconds longer than it should.

"You couldn't finish it?" he asks quietly.

"I wasn't as hungry as I thought," you offer.

He looks at you for a long moment, jaw shifting once. He has the expression of someone assembling a picture from pieces he doesn't want to believe, choosing very carefully not to say what he's thinking yet.

"Okay," he says, quiet and measured.

It's only one word, spoken in a tone you've never heard from him before. But it tells you more than anything else he's said all evening.

You take his hand without thinking about it, lacing your fingers through his, and he squeezes back—warm and immediate—and you feel him exhale through it.

"Come on," you say softly. "What's next?"

He lets you redirect him. But his thumb traces a slow, absentminded pattern against the back of your hand as you walk, and you don't think he realises he's doing it, and it keeps you tethered to the present unlike anything else tonight has managed. For a little while the fever recedes back to a murmur and you almost forget again.

Almost.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The adrenaline leaves gradually, and then all at once.

There's no single moment where you register it happening. It's just a slow and incremental dimming. The idea of him has been powering you through this all evening—the wanting, the waiting, the electric reality of finally having what you'd spent so long hoping for—and ideas, it turns out, have limits when your body is running a fever on no food, no water and sheer stubborn devotion.

You're still beside him, matching his pace, answering when he speaks. But your reactions come a fraction too late now, every smile feeling just a little heavier than the last. He tells a joke that would usually have you laughing without thinking. It still reaches you. Somewhere beneath the fever, it's just as funny as it always would be. Your body simply can't keep up.

Woonhak has gone quiet.

The commentary has stilled entirely. He's just walking beside you now, close enough that your shoulders stay in constant contact, and you can feel the weight of his attention on the side of your face like a hand pressed gently against glass.

"Hey," he says, low.

"Hey."

"You having fun?"

"So much fun." You mean it. You mean it with everything you have left, which isn't much, but every last bit of it is his. "I really am."

He nods slowly. "You'd tell me if something was wrong, right?"

Your chest tightens. "Nothing's wrong," you say. "I promise."

He doesn't push. But his free hand finds the small of your back, warm and steady, and it keeps you upright in more ways than one.

Almost there. 

Just the rooftop. 

You just have to get to the rooftop.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The street leading away from the market is quieter, lined with low amber light and the particular stillness that follows when a crowd falls away behind you. Woonhak mentions the rooftop ahead with practiced casualness—definitely looked it up, definitely pretending he didn't—and even now, even like this, the quiet effort behind it makes your heart soften.

You make it halfway down the street.

The dizziness arrives without warning and without mercy—a full and consuming wave that drains the colour from the edges of your vision and turns the pavement unreliable beneath your feet in a single, devastating second. Your steps falter. Your free hand reaches for something solid to grab onto and finds only air.

"Hey—" Woonhak feels it through your joined hands before you've even fully registered it yourself, turning towards you instantly. "Hey, what's—"

"I'm—" But the word dissolves. The world tips. Your knees buckle before you can catch yourself, and the pavement rushes up to meet you—

Arms catch you before you reach the ground, immediately pulling you in against him, and the impact you braced for never comes, just the solid warmth of him and his voice saying your name with an urgency that cuts through the fog like the first clear word you've heard all evening.

"Hey — hey. I've got you. Can you hear me?"

"Mm." It's all you can manage. Your hands have found the front of his jacket and are holding on with what little grip you have left.

For a moment he just holds you, one hand braced at your back, and then his palm comes up to press against your forehead, and the sharp breath he draws in tells you everything about what he's been expecting.

"You're burning up." His voice is low and even and very, very careful. "How long have you been feeling like this?"

You close your eyes. "Since yesterday."

Silence settles between you.

"Since yesterday," he repeats. His grip doesn't loosen, but it changes somehow, tightening just enough for you to notice. His gaze searches your face as if he's trying to reconcile the answer with the version of the evening he'd convinced himself was real.

"I didn't want to cancel," you say, into his jacket, very small. "I've been waiting for today for so long. I just—I really didn't want to cancel."

He doesn't say anything for a moment. You feel him exhale, slow and deliberate, feel the way his arms adjust around you with a care so methodical and certain that your throat tightens with it. Before you can ask what he's doing, your feet leave the ground. The movement is so smooth you're already tucked against his chest by the time it registers that he's carrying you.

"Woonhak—"

"Don't," he says softly. His jaw is set and his eyes are forward and his hold on you does not waver for a single second. "Just stay with me, okay?"

You try.

You really, genuinely try—you focus on the amber light above you, on the steady rhythm of his footsteps, on the warmth of his chest against your side and the sound of his voice and every small anchor that might keep you tethered here, present, with him. You want to stay. You want to see where this street leads, what the rooftop looks like and every version of tonight that has yet to come.

But the fever has been patient all evening, and it is done being patient.

The amber light blurs and stretches. His voice reaches you from somewhere far away, your name in his mouth sounding like the last clear sound in a room going slowly, gently dark—and your hands, still curled into the front of his jacket, go slack.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

You wake slowly, and the first thing you register is cold.

A damp cloth sits folded over your forehead, cool water tracing a thin line down towards your temple, and beneath it your skin feels tender and overheated in a way that makes the cold almost unbearable and welcoming at the same time, like your body can't decide which sensation to trust. You lie there for a long moment without opening your eyes, just breathing, just existing inside the strange heavy quiet of a body that has been running on empty for far too long.

The air smells different from your own room—cleaner, somehow, with an undertone of a warm, familiar scent that you can't immediately place, not until your mind catches up and supplies the answer : him. It smells like him.

You open your eyes.

The ceiling above you is not your ceiling. The light fixture is wrong, the crack in the corner that you've memorized from your own bedroom missing entirely, replaced by smooth unbroken white. You blink, slow and uncertain, and let your gaze drift sideways instead—soft grey walls, a desk cluttered with things that are clearly not yours, textbooks stacked at an angle that suggests they were shoved aside in a hurry, a hoodie thrown carelessly over the back of a chair like someone changed out of it in a rush and didn't bother folding it.

His hoodie. His desk. His room.

Oh.

The realization comes quietly as the memories begin to return, uneven and out of sequence, as though your mind is still catching up to everything your body has already lived through. The market, warm, loud and golden. Lanterns strung low overhead. Tteokbokki you couldn't finish, the way his eyes had gone straight to your empty hands when you came back from the bin. His hand at the small of your back, steady even as the ground had started to feel unreliable beneath you. The street after, quieter, amber-lit, his voice mentioning a rooftop with poorly disguised excitement.

And then the ground tipping. His voice, sharp and urgent, cutting through a fog that had already started swallowing everything else. Your name, said like it mattered more than anything else in the world.

And then nothing. A long, formless nothing, dark and total.

You lift a hand—slowly, testing, like you're not entirely convinced it will cooperate—and press your fingers lightly against your own forehead, beneath the cloth, as though you might be able to feel the fever from the outside if you just try hard enough. It's still there, quieter now, banked down to a more manageable ache than whatever had been raging through you last night, but present all the same. A dull, insistent hum beneath your skin.

You have never in your life felt more like a zombie than you do in this exact moment, and the humiliating part is that you know, somewhere in the honest core of yourself, that it isn't only the fever's doing. You'd spent the entire week rotting quietly from the inside—skipping meals because his texts felt more urgent than hunger, staying up because talking to him felt more important than sleep, letting every small warning sign slide because nothing, nothing, felt more pressing than the fact that you were finally, finally going to get to have this. Him. A date. A version of tomorrow you'd been aching for since the moment you realized you were in this deep.

Lovesick, in the most literal, humiliating, medically inconvenient sense of the word.

You almost laugh, except your throat is too dry and your head throbs in mild protest at the idea, so instead you just lie there, staring at his ceiling, marinating in the specific mortification of having quite literally fallen ill over a boy.

Maggots for brains, you think, a little deliriously. If he ever found out that phrase existed, you would never, ever hear the end of it.

The door opens.

"OH MY GOD—okay, okay, you're up, you're actually—" Woonhak comes in fast, too fast, a bowl balanced with visible concentration in one hand like he'd been hovering just outside the door waiting for exactly this. The moment his eyes land on you properly, something in his whole body seems to loosen, relief washing so plainly across his face that it's almost startling to witness, like he'd genuinely been bracing for the alternative.

"Do you know how long you've been out?" He crosses the room in a handful of long strides, setting the bowl down on the nightstand with more care than the rest of his movements would suggest he's capable of right now. "A full day. Twenty four hours, I've been checking your temperature every hour like some kind of lunatic, Jaehyun's been texting me asking if I've lost my mind, I genuinely think I might have—okay, here, sit up, slowly, don't just—wait, let me—"

His hands hover, uncertain, torn between the cloth on your forehead and the pillow behind you and you in general, like he can't quite decide what needs fixing first and is mildly panicking about the sheer number of options.

"Okay, cloth first, probably, or—no, wait, are you thirsty, should I get water, I have water right here actually—" He reaches for a glass on the nightstand you hadn't even noticed, thrusts it slightly in your direction, then seems to reconsider whether you're upright enough to drink anything and pulls it back halfway. "Or not. Not yet. Cloth. I'll do the cloth.”

 It would be funny, you think distantly—the way concern turns him chaotic instead of calm, all that easy confidence from last night nowhere to be found—except you don't have it in you to laugh, not yet, because somewhere between the door opening and him crossing the room, the full shape of everything has finally caught up to you.

The date. The one you'd wanted for months, quietly, achingly, through every late-night conversation and every carefully chosen word. 

"—and I texted my mom, actually, don't ask me why, I panicked and she was just the first person in my contacts who wasn't you—" He resettles the cloth against your forehead with a gentleness that doesn't match the speed of his voice at all, two entirely different registers running at once. "She said to give you soup. I'm already doing that. I feel very ahead of the curve here, honestly—”

The one you'd promised yourself you'd be present for, fully, unmistakably yourself, not this. Not fainting in the middle of a street. Not losing an entire day. Not waking up small and fever-warm in his bed while he hovers over you like you're a fragile object he's afraid of breaking further.

"—I mean it, I nearly had a heart attack, you just went completely limp, I've never carried anyone that fast in my life, I think I set a personal record actually, not that this is a competition, but if it were—" He stops, and notices, maybe, that you've gone very quiet beneath him, that your eyes have taken on a glassy, distant quality that has nothing to do with the fever.

There was no rooftop. There was no ending. There was just—an entire day gone, swallowed whole, and the quiet devastating certainty that you'd taken the one thing you'd wanted most and broken it before it had even properly begun.

Your eyes sting before you can stop them.

Woonhak's rambling cuts off mid-sentence.

"Hey—hey, what's wrong?" His hands finally land, one bracing gently at your shoulder, the other hovering near your face like he's afraid to touch without permission. "Is it your head? Are you dizzy, do you need me to—"

"I…" You swallow hard. "I r-ruined it." Your voice catches on the second word, and you squeeze your eyes shut, willing yourself to stop.

It doesn't work.

The tears come anyway—hot, fast, and completely outside your control, spilling over before you can do anything to stop them. 

"I ruined the whole thing." Your breath hitches. "I wanted it to be p-perfect. I wanted to be—I don't know." You shake your head, another sob breaking through. "I just wanted to be normal."

Your next words come out in a rush, tripping over each other.

"I wanted you to have a good first date, and instead I passed out in the middle of the street, and you had to carry me, and there was no rooftop, and I missed an entire day, and I'm s-sorry." The apology fractures around another shaky breath. "I'm so sorry. I just wanted it to be good, and I—"

"Hey. Hey, no—" Whatever he was about to do gets abandoned entirely. He sinks down onto the edge of the bed, closer now, and his hands come up slow and careful, as though you're a frightened animal that might startle at sudden movement. One thumb brushes beneath your eye, catching a tear before it can fall further, and then his palm settles against your cheek, warm and steady, like it belongs there.

"You didn't ruin anything," he says, and there's no trace of teasing left in his voice now. Only a quiet certainty, delivered as though it isn't even a point worth arguing. "You showed up to see me with a fever of thirty nine degrees because you didn't want to disappoint me. Do you understand how insane that is? You ate tteokbokki you could barely keep down because I asked you to. You held my hand through an entire night market while you were actively about to pass out, and you still laughed at my stupid Jaehyun story, and you still smiled at me like—" He stops himself, exhales, shakes his head slightly, like even he can't quite find the right shape for it. "Like I was the only good thing in the whole market. That's not ruining a date. That might be the most anyone's ever tried for me in my entire life."

You blink up at him, throat too tight to answer, more tears slipping free despite his thumb's best efforts to catch them.

"There's going to be a rooftop," he says softly, still wiping at your cheeks with a patience that leaves your chest painfully tight. "There's going to be a hundred rooftops, I promise you, I already looked up five more just in case. I'm not going anywhere. This isn't the only chance we get." His voice grows gentler with every word. "You could've just told me you were sick, you know. I would've shown up at your door with soup and my bad taste in movies instead. I wouldn't have cared about some rooftop."

"I wanted the date," you mumble, small, pressing your face slightly into his palm without quite meaning to. "I've wanted it for so long. I didn't want a fever to be the reason I didn't get it."

"I know." His thumb sweeps once more beneath your eye, gentle. "I know, you absolute menace. You've got maggots for brains, you know that? Fever like that and you still texted me 'don't keep me waiting.'"

A wet, surprised laugh escapes you despite everything, undignified and hiccupping. "That's so mean."

"It's affectionate," he says, entirely unbothered, leaning forward to press his lips briefly to your forehead, right where the cloth had been. "Extremely affectionate. I've been thinking about it all day, actually—maggots for brains, over me. I don't think I've ever felt so honored to be someone's rot."

"Please stop talking."

"Never," he says, grinning now, some of the earlier panic finally bleeding out of him now that you're laughing instead of crying. He reaches for the bowl on the nightstand, angling it towards you with exaggerated ceremony. "Soup. Made by my own two hands, so lower your expectations accordingly. And then you're sleeping, and I'm staying right here, and tomorrow—when you've got actual functioning brain cells again—we're renegotiating this whole rooftop situation. Non-negotiable."

You take the bowl from him, your fingers brushing his, and the tightness in your chest eases for the first time since you woke.

"Okay," you say quietly.

"Okay?"

"Okay." You manage a small, worn-out smile. "Take care of me, then."

The look that crosses his face at that—soft, a little stunned, like you've handed him permission to hope—stays with you long after he's tucked the blanket back around your shoulders and settled into the chair beside the bed, close enough that his hand finds yours without either of you really deciding it should. The fever hasn't broken yet. There's no rooftop tonight, no ending you'd planned for.

But his hand is warm around yours, and his eyes stay on you even after you've closed your own, and for the first time all week, the ache in your chest doesn't feel anything like sickness at all.

Maybe this was just the thing that happens when your baby stays. 

@coriihanniee ᯓᡣ𐭩

˖➴ reblogs are appreciated! ty for reading! <3

You drop back against your pillow and exhale slowly. The ceiling stares back at you, indifferent and unhelpful. Somewhere outside your window the neighbourhood has gone quiet—it's late, later than you should still be awake, and yet here you are. Thermometer on the nightstand. Fever climbing. The elaborate skincare routine you had promised yourself—the one specifically designed to ensure you looked like a functioning human being tomorrow—sitting completely forgotten on your bathroom shelf.

Tomorrow morning, which is the morning of your first date with Kim Woonhak.

Even just thinking his name sends an embarrassing flutter to your chest. That small, involuntary lurch behind your ribs, the one you've grown so used to that you almost forget it hasn't always been there. 

Almost. 

The truth is you remember exactly when it started. It wasn't dramatic. No grand revelation or cinematic eye contact across a crowded room. Just the smallest detail—stupid and completely ordinary, and then it settled somewhere deep and refused to leave, through months of friendship and late nights that ran longer than they should have, through every conversation where you chose your words a little more carefully than necessary and every time you looked at him and had to remind yourself to look away.

And now, after all of that, tomorrow is finally arriving. 

Your first date. With him. Your first date with anyone, if you're being fully transparent with yourself, which you are actively avoiding because that particular truth makes everything feel even more enormous than it already does. The outfit is already hanging on your wardrobe door. You'd spent an almost unreasonable number of evenings narrowing it down, texting Woonhak about completely unrelated things while your floor was covered in rejected options, and the memory of it makes a quiet warmth bloom in your chest even now, even through the fever haze.

You reach for your phone. His contact is already open because of course it is, your thumbs have developed their own opinions about where they want to be apparently. The rational thing is right there—one text, simple and reasonable. “I'm not feeling well, can we move this?” He would understand. He would insist on it, even. He is, frustratingly, that kind of person.

You stare at the empty message box.

Then you lock your phone and set it face-down beside the thermometer.

No. Absolutely not.

You have waited too long for this. You've sat with this feeling for too long, through too many months of wanting a relationship you weren't sure you'd ever get to have. You are not surrendering tomorrow to a fever. You will sleep this off. You'll feel better in the morning—people recover from fevers overnight all the time, surely, and you will simply be one of them through sheer force of will if nothing else.

The glass of water on your nightstand, the one you poured an hour ago with genuine intentions of drinking it, sits completely untouched. The medicine in your bathroom cabinet stays in the bathroom cabinet. The half-eaten snack you'd abandoned on your desk earlier in favour of rereading your last conversation with him remains exactly where you left it, slowly going stale.

You turn off the lamp.

Tomorrow, you decide, with the serene and entirely unfounded confidence of someone who has comprehensively outsourced her common sense to her heart—you will be absolutely fine.

You close your eyes.

You are so utterly, devastatingly, hopelessly cooked.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

Morning arrives, and it is not kind.

You become aware of consciousness slowly. Everything feels heavy. Your head, your limbs, the very air pressing down against your skin—all of it conspires to keep you horizontal, and for a long, bleary moment you comply. The sunlight filtering through your curtains feels aggressive. Your throat has graduated overnight from sandpaper to what feels like gravel, and the low throb behind your temples from last night has settled in with the comfortable permanence of an unwelcome houseguest.

You lie there, blinking at the ceiling.

Something was supposed to happen today.

You can't quite—

Your phone lights up on the nightstand.

You reach for it with the slow, waterlogged movements of someone operating at approximately forty percent capacity, fingers closing around it weakly. The screen swims into focus. One notification. A text, timestamp seven minutes ago, from the contact name you may or may not have spent an embarrassing amount of time choosing.

“Good morning :) still up for today? or did you finally come to your senses and realise you can't handle me?”

The effect is instantaneous and completely involuntary.

You sit up.

The headache detonates behind your eyes like a personal vendetta, white, sharp and immediate, and you actually have to press the heel of your palm against your forehead for a moment, teeth gritted, vision briefly unreliable. A noise escapes you that is not remotely dignified. You stay very still until the worst of it passes, phone clutched to your chest, the room tilting gently at its edges.

Then you look back down at his message.

The smile happens before you can stop it.

“I’ve been ready since yesterday,” you type back, which is true in every sense except the one where you are currently sitting upright through sheer determination alone, fever still very much present, head still very much attempting to detach itself from your body. “don't keep me waiting :)”

You hit send.

Then you push the covers back, plant your feet on the floor, and decide with absolute finality that you are fine.

You are so fine.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

Getting ready takes longer than it should.

It’s not because you are indecisive—you already know what you're wearing, have known for days, the outfit still hanging exactly where you left it on your wardrobe door like a small monument to your own optimism. It takes longer because somewhere between washing your face and attempting eyeliner, your body keeps requesting breaks you haven't scheduled. A moment gripping the bathroom sink while the floor shifts unreliably beneath you. Another moment sitting on the edge of your bed, mascara wand in hand, waiting for a wave of dizziness to pass with the patience of someone who has decided that dizziness is simply not on today's agenda.

You look at yourself in the mirror.

You look terrible.

You look, specifically, like someone who ran a fever through the night and then got up anyway and tried to cover it with skincare and wishful thinking (which… is exactly what you did). Your eyes are glassy enough that no amount of concealer has managed to fully disguise it, and there's a specific quality to your complexion that sits somewhere between delicate and concerning.

You lean closer to the mirror.

Fine, you decide. Totally fine. Practically glowing, even.

Breakfast does not happen. You think about it briefly, open the fridge, register that the idea of eating anything feels genuinely implausible, and close it again. You'll eat later, during the date. That counts. That's basically the same thing.

By the time his text arrives—"on my way :)”—you are dressed, presentable by the loosest definition of the word, and running on a potent mix of adrenaline and delusion. You do one final check in the mirror, smooth down your outfit, and decide firmly that you look fine.

You look fine.

When the knock comes you cross the apartment in record time, pull open the door, and there he is.

And for a moment, you forget entirely that you feel like you're dying.

He looks like how he always does, which is to say unfairly good in an entirely casual way that he seems completely unaware of, and he's smiling at you with that radiant smile that has absolutely no business making you feel the way it does. His eyes do a quick, almost imperceptible sweep of your face—a brief, unreadable emotion passing through them—before settling back on yours like it never happened.

"You actually showed up," he says, delighted, like he genuinely wasn't sure you would. You lean against the doorframe with what you hope reads as effortless and not please give me something to hold onto.

"Told you," you reply. "Don't keep me waiting."

He laughs—bright and easy—and steps back to let you through, and you decide with complete certainty that you would drag yourself off your deathbed every single morning for the rest of your life for that sound without a second thought.

You grab your bag. You step outside. 

Yes, you are completely, totally fine.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The night market is everything you imagined it would be.

Warm light strung low between stalls, the smell of frying oil and sugar competing in the air, noise layered over noise until it stops being individual sounds and becomes atmosphere. Woonhak grabs your wrist the second you step inside, already pulling you through the crowd before you've fully arrived, pointing excitedly at a stall halfway across the market.

"Okay, okay—do you see that? We're going there first. No arguments."

"We just got here—"

"No arguments," he repeats, already moving, and you laugh and follow him, and for a blissful, golden little while, you forget entirely that you are running a fever of nearly thirty nine degrees.

He's so bright tonight. That's the thing about Woonhak that you can never quite explain to anyone who hasn't stood next to him—he fills whatever space he walks into, this warm and restless energy that makes everything feel like it's moving slightly faster and more vividly than it did before he arrived. You've liked him for so long that you've genuinely forgotten what it felt like not to, and standing beside him now, it feels like a reality you keep having to convince yourself is real.

You feel strange tonight. Everything seems just a little out of focus, like your body can't quite keep up with the rest of the world. But his hand is warm around your wrist, grounding you, and the dizziness eases enough for you to catch your breath. 

You're here. You made it. Everything else can wa—

A sudden chill moves through you from your shoulders down, your whole body shuddering once, visibly, before you can catch it.

Woonhak turns immediately.

"Are you cold?"

"No," you say. "Just the breeze."

He looks at you. Then he looks very deliberately at the banners hanging from the stall directly beside you—completely, utterly motionless, not a single thread shifting—and then he looks back at you with his eyebrows raised.

"There's no breeze."

"There was one. It passed."

"It passed." 

"It was… very fast!”

He stares at you with his mouth slightly open, caught between disbelief and amusement, and then he laughs—short and bewildered—and shakes his head and turns back to the stall. You exhale quietly.

Fine. You're fine.

But when he falls into step beside you again he's closer than before that your arms brush with almost every step, and his hands have come out of his pockets, and you notice all of this and choose, very deliberately, not to think about what it means.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

He talks without restraint, like every thought that crosses his mind is worth sharing. He keeps up a running commentary on every stall you pass, tells a story about Jaehyun that has him laughing before he even reaches the punchline, and bumps his shoulder against yours every so often to make sure you're looking at whatever has caught his attention.

You are. You laugh when he laughs, follow wherever he points, match his energy as best you can. It's just that every few minutes, the world blurs around the edges, and you have to blink until everything settles back into place before he notices.

"—and then he actually tried to convince the guy that it wasn't even his—" Woonhak glances over mid-sentence and catches you a half-beat behind, your gaze slightly unfocused, and stops. "Hey."

You blink back into the moment. "Sorry — those caught my eye." You gesture at a nearby stall. "What were you saying?"

He doesn't look at the stall. He looks at you, and underneath his expression a different frequency of attention has switched on—the laughter still warm in his face but behind it, watchful now. 

"You sure you're okay?" he asks.

"I'm great," you tell him, and you smile, and you put your whole self into it. "Tell me what happened."

The moment passes. He finishes the story and you laugh in the right place. But when you start walking he's closer again— closer than he was even a minute ago— and his shoulder stays pressed against yours, steady and deliberate, and you think he's started noticing more than he's letting on.

Inside, the throb behind your temples has quietly escalated. You breathe through it and keep walking and tell yourself it's fine, it's fine.

You're absolutely fine.

 ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

He buys you tteokbokki without asking, appearing at your side with it like it's the most natural thing in the world. He holds it out to you, his expression easy, but there's a quiet insistence beneath it.

"You haven't eaten anything this whole time," he says, and the teasing lilt that's coloured his voice all evening gives way to quiet concern.

"I've been pacing myself."

"For an hour."

"I'm very disciplined."

He looks at you, and for just a second, the easygoing expression slips away. What's left is intent—focused, a little worried.

"Eat," he says. "Please."

The word startles you more than it should. You don't think you've ever heard him sound quite so earnest. 

Before you can talk yourself out of it, you're reaching for the skewer. 

You smile, take it, and try. You genuinely do.

Two bites in, your stomach clenches in immediate protest. You stop chewing.

For a few long seconds, all you can do is stand there, swallowing carefully, willing the nausea back down. The skewer hangs forgotten in your hand as you fix your gaze on the lantern above the nearest stall, counting each breath and praying your face doesn't give you away.

It passes. Barely.

The third bite never comes.

You find a bin a minute later. When you return to his side his eyes go straight to your empty hands, and the silence stretches three full seconds longer than it should.

"You couldn't finish it?" he asks quietly.

"I wasn't as hungry as I thought," you offer.

He looks at you for a long moment, jaw shifting once. He has the expression of someone assembling a picture from pieces he doesn't want to believe, choosing very carefully not to say what he's thinking yet.

"Okay," he says, quiet and measured.

It's only one word, spoken in a tone you've never heard from him before. But it tells you more than anything else he's said all evening.

You take his hand without thinking about it, lacing your fingers through his, and he squeezes back—warm and immediate—and you feel him exhale through it.

"Come on," you say softly. "What's next?"

He lets you redirect him. But his thumb traces a slow, absentminded pattern against the back of your hand as you walk, and you don't think he realises he's doing it, and it keeps you tethered to the present unlike anything else tonight has managed. For a little while the fever recedes back to a murmur and you almost forget again.

Almost.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The adrenaline leaves gradually, and then all at once.

There's no single moment where you register it happening. It's just a slow and incremental dimming. The idea of him has been powering you through this all evening—the wanting, the waiting, the electric reality of finally having what you'd spent so long hoping for—and ideas, it turns out, have limits when your body is running a fever on no food, no water and sheer stubborn devotion.

You're still beside him, matching his pace, answering when he speaks. But your reactions come a fraction too late now, every smile feeling just a little heavier than the last. He tells a joke that would usually have you laughing without thinking. It still reaches you. Somewhere beneath the fever, it's just as funny as it always would be. Your body simply can't keep up.

Woonhak has gone quiet.

The commentary has stilled entirely. He's just walking beside you now, close enough that your shoulders stay in constant contact, and you can feel the weight of his attention on the side of your face like a hand pressed gently against glass.

"Hey," he says, low.

"Hey."

"You having fun?"

"So much fun." You mean it. You mean it with everything you have left, which isn't much, but every last bit of it is his. "I really am."

He nods slowly. "You'd tell me if something was wrong, right?"

Your chest tightens. "Nothing's wrong," you say. "I promise."

He doesn't push. But his free hand finds the small of your back, warm and steady, and it keeps you upright in more ways than one.

Almost there. 

Just the rooftop. 

You just have to get to the rooftop.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

The street leading away from the market is quieter, lined with low amber light and the particular stillness that follows when a crowd falls away behind you. Woonhak mentions the rooftop ahead with practiced casualness—definitely looked it up, definitely pretending he didn't—and even now, even like this, the quiet effort behind it makes your heart soften.

You make it halfway down the street.

The dizziness arrives without warning and without mercy—a full and consuming wave that drains the colour from the edges of your vision and turns the pavement unreliable beneath your feet in a single, devastating second. Your steps falter. Your free hand reaches for something solid to grab onto and finds only air.

"Hey—" Woonhak feels it through your joined hands before you've even fully registered it yourself, turning towards you instantly. "Hey, what's—"

"I'm—" But the word dissolves. The world tips. Your knees buckle before you can catch yourself, and the pavement rushes up to meet you—

Arms catch you before you reach the ground, immediately pulling you in against him, and the impact you braced for never comes, just the solid warmth of him and his voice saying your name with an urgency that cuts through the fog like the first clear word you've heard all evening.

"Hey — hey. I've got you. Can you hear me?"

"Mm." It's all you can manage. Your hands have found the front of his jacket and are holding on with what little grip you have left.

For a moment he just holds you, one hand braced at your back, and then his palm comes up to press against your forehead, and the sharp breath he draws in tells you everything about what he's been expecting.

"You're burning up." His voice is low and even and very, very careful. "How long have you been feeling like this?"

You close your eyes. "Since yesterday."

Silence settles between you.

"Since yesterday," he repeats. His grip doesn't loosen, but it changes somehow, tightening just enough for you to notice. His gaze searches your face as if he's trying to reconcile the answer with the version of the evening he'd convinced himself was real.

"I didn't want to cancel," you say, into his jacket, very small. "I've been waiting for today for so long. I just—I really didn't want to cancel."

He doesn't say anything for a moment. You feel him exhale, slow and deliberate, feel the way his arms adjust around you with a care so methodical and certain that your throat tightens with it. Before you can ask what he's doing, your feet leave the ground. The movement is so smooth you're already tucked against his chest by the time it registers that he's carrying you.

"Woonhak—"

"Don't," he says softly. His jaw is set and his eyes are forward and his hold on you does not waver for a single second. "Just stay with me, okay?"

You try.

You really, genuinely try—you focus on the amber light above you, on the steady rhythm of his footsteps, on the warmth of his chest against your side and the sound of his voice and every small anchor that might keep you tethered here, present, with him. You want to stay. You want to see where this street leads, what the rooftop looks like and every version of tonight that has yet to come.

But the fever has been patient all evening, and it is done being patient.

The amber light blurs and stretches. His voice reaches you from somewhere far away, your name in his mouth sounding like the last clear sound in a room going slowly, gently dark—and your hands, still curled into the front of his jacket, go slack.

ᡣ𐭩 •｡ꪆৎ ˚⋅

You wake slowly, and the first thing you register is cold.

A damp cloth sits folded over your forehead, cool water tracing a thin line down towards your temple, and beneath it your skin feels tender and overheated in a way that makes the cold almost unbearable and welcoming at the same time, like your body can't decide which sensation to trust. You lie there for a long moment without opening your eyes, just breathing, just existing inside the strange heavy quiet of a body that has been running on empty for far too long.

The air smells different from your own room—cleaner, somehow, with an undertone of a warm, familiar scent that you can't immediately place, not until your mind catches up and supplies the answer : him. It smells like him.

You open your eyes.

The ceiling above you is not your ceiling. The light fixture is wrong, the crack in the corner that you've memorized from your own bedroom missing entirely, replaced by smooth unbroken white. You blink, slow and uncertain, and let your gaze drift sideways instead—soft grey walls, a desk cluttered with things that are clearly not yours, textbooks stacked at an angle that suggests they were shoved aside in a hurry, a hoodie thrown carelessly over the back of a chair like someone changed out of it in a rush and didn't bother folding it.

His hoodie. His desk. His room.

Oh.

The realization comes quietly as the memories begin to return, uneven and out of sequence, as though your mind is still catching up to everything your body has already lived through. The market, warm, loud and golden. Lanterns strung low overhead. Tteokbokki you couldn't finish, the way his eyes had gone straight to your empty hands when you came back from the bin. His hand at the small of your back, steady even as the ground had started to feel unreliable beneath you. The street after, quieter, amber-lit, his voice mentioning a rooftop with poorly disguised excitement.

And then the ground tipping. His voice, sharp and urgent, cutting through a fog that had already started swallowing everything else. Your name, said like it mattered more than anything else in the world.

And then nothing. A long, formless nothing, dark and total.

You lift a hand—slowly, testing, like you're not entirely convinced it will cooperate—and press your fingers lightly against your own forehead, beneath the cloth, as though you might be able to feel the fever from the outside if you just try hard enough. It's still there, quieter now, banked down to a more manageable ache than whatever had been raging through you last night, but present all the same. A dull, insistent hum beneath your skin.

You have never in your life felt more like a zombie than you do in this exact moment, and the humiliating part is that you know, somewhere in the honest core of yourself, that it isn't only the fever's doing. You'd spent the entire week rotting quietly from the inside—skipping meals because his texts felt more urgent than hunger, staying up because talking to him felt more important than sleep, letting every small warning sign slide because nothing, nothing, felt more pressing than the fact that you were finally, finally going to get to have this. Him. A date. A version of tomorrow you'd been aching for since the moment you realized you were in this deep.

Lovesick, in the most literal, humiliating, medically inconvenient sense of the word.

You almost laugh, except your throat is too dry and your head throbs in mild protest at the idea, so instead you just lie there, staring at his ceiling, marinating in the specific mortification of having quite literally fallen ill over a boy.

Maggots for brains, you think, a little deliriously. If he ever found out that phrase existed, you would never, ever hear the end of it.

The door opens.

"OH MY GOD—okay, okay, you're up, you're actually—" Woonhak comes in fast, too fast, a bowl balanced with visible concentration in one hand like he'd been hovering just outside the door waiting for exactly this. The moment his eyes land on you properly, something in his whole body seems to loosen, relief washing so plainly across his face that it's almost startling to witness, like he'd genuinely been bracing for the alternative.

"Do you know how long you've been out?" He crosses the room in a handful of long strides, setting the bowl down on the nightstand with more care than the rest of his movements would suggest he's capable of right now. "A full day. Twenty four hours, I've been checking your temperature every hour like some kind of lunatic, Jaehyun's been texting me asking if I've lost my mind, I genuinely think I might have—okay, here, sit up, slowly, don't just—wait, let me—"

His hands hover, uncertain, torn between the cloth on your forehead and the pillow behind you and you in general, like he can't quite decide what needs fixing first and is mildly panicking about the sheer number of options.

"Okay, cloth first, probably, or—no, wait, are you thirsty, should I get water, I have water right here actually—" He reaches for a glass on the nightstand you hadn't even noticed, thrusts it slightly in your direction, then seems to reconsider whether you're upright enough to drink anything and pulls it back halfway. "Or not. Not yet. Cloth. I'll do the cloth.”

 It would be funny, you think distantly—the way concern turns him chaotic instead of calm, all that easy confidence from last night nowhere to be found—except you don't have it in you to laugh, not yet, because somewhere between the door opening and him crossing the room, the full shape of everything has finally caught up to you.

The date. The one you'd wanted for months, quietly, achingly, through every late-night conversation and every carefully chosen word. 

"—and I texted my mom, actually, don't ask me why, I panicked and she was just the first person in my contacts who wasn't you—" He resettles the cloth against your forehead with a gentleness that doesn't match the speed of his voice at all, two entirely different registers running at once. "She said to give you soup. I'm already doing that. I feel very ahead of the curve here, honestly—”

The one you'd promised yourself you'd be present for, fully, unmistakably yourself, not this. Not fainting in the middle of a street. Not losing an entire day. Not waking up small and fever-warm in his bed while he hovers over you like you're a fragile object he's afraid of breaking further.

"—I mean it, I nearly had a heart attack, you just went completely limp, I've never carried anyone that fast in my life, I think I set a personal record actually, not that this is a competition, but if it were—" He stops, and notices, maybe, that you've gone very quiet beneath him, that your eyes have taken on a glassy, distant quality that has nothing to do with the fever.

There was no rooftop. There was no ending. There was just—an entire day gone, swallowed whole, and the quiet devastating certainty that you'd taken the one thing you'd wanted most and broken it before it had even properly begun.

Your eyes sting before you can stop them.

Woonhak's rambling cuts off mid-sentence.

"Hey—hey, what's wrong?" His hands finally land, one bracing gently at your shoulder, the other hovering near your face like he's afraid to touch without permission. "Is it your head? Are you dizzy, do you need me to—"

"I…" You swallow hard. "I r-ruined it." Your voice catches on the second word, and you squeeze your eyes shut, willing yourself to stop.

It doesn't work.

The tears come anyway—hot, fast, and completely outside your control, spilling over before you can do anything to stop them. 

"I ruined the whole thing." Your breath hitches. "I wanted it to be p-perfect. I wanted to be—I don't know." You shake your head, another sob breaking through. "I just wanted to be normal."

Your next words come out in a rush, tripping over each other.

"I wanted you to have a good first date, and instead I passed out in the middle of the street, and you had to carry me, and there was no rooftop, and I missed an entire day, and I'm s-sorry." The apology fractures around another shaky breath. "I'm so sorry. I just wanted it to be good, and I—"

"Hey. Hey, no—" Whatever he was about to do gets abandoned entirely. He sinks down onto the edge of the bed, closer now, and his hands come up slow and careful, as though you're a frightened animal that might startle at sudden movement. One thumb brushes beneath your eye, catching a tear before it can fall further, and then his palm settles against your cheek, warm and steady, like it belongs there.

"You didn't ruin anything," he says, and there's no trace of teasing left in his voice now. Only a quiet certainty, delivered as though it isn't even a point worth arguing. "You showed up to see me with a fever of thirty nine degrees because you didn't want to disappoint me. Do you understand how insane that is? You ate tteokbokki you could barely keep down because I asked you to. You held my hand through an entire night market while you were actively about to pass out, and you still laughed at my stupid Jaehyun story, and you still smiled at me like—" He stops himself, exhales, shakes his head slightly, like even he can't quite find the right shape for it. "Like I was the only good thing in the whole market. That's not ruining a date. That might be the most anyone's ever tried for me in my entire life."

You blink up at him, throat too tight to answer, more tears slipping free despite his thumb's best efforts to catch them.

"There's going to be a rooftop," he says softly, still wiping at your cheeks with a patience that leaves your chest painfully tight. "There's going to be a hundred rooftops, I promise you, I already looked up five more just in case. I'm not going anywhere. This isn't the only chance we get." His voice grows gentler with every word. "You could've just told me you were sick, you know. I would've shown up at your door with soup and my bad taste in movies instead. I wouldn't have cared about some rooftop."

"I wanted the date," you mumble, small, pressing your face slightly into his palm without quite meaning to. "I've wanted it for so long. I didn't want a fever to be the reason I didn't get it."

"I know." His thumb sweeps once more beneath your eye, gentle. "I know, you absolute menace. You've got maggots for brains, you know that? Fever like that and you still texted me 'don't keep me waiting.'"

A wet, surprised laugh escapes you despite everything, undignified and hiccupping. "That's so mean."

"It's affectionate," he says, entirely unbothered, leaning forward to press his lips briefly to your forehead, right where the cloth had been. "Extremely affectionate. I've been thinking about it all day, actually—maggots for brains, over me. I don't think I've ever felt so honored to be someone's rot."

"Please stop talking."

"Never," he says, grinning now, some of the earlier panic finally bleeding out of him now that you're laughing instead of crying. He reaches for the bowl on the nightstand, angling it towards you with exaggerated ceremony. "Soup. Made by my own two hands, so lower your expectations accordingly. And then you're sleeping, and I'm staying right here, and tomorrow—when you've got actual functioning brain cells again—we're renegotiating this whole rooftop situation. Non-negotiable."

You take the bowl from him, your fingers brushing his, and the tightness in your chest eases for the first time since you woke.

"Okay," you say quietly.

"Okay?"

"Okay." You manage a small, worn-out smile. "Take care of me, then."

The look that crosses his face at that—soft, a little stunned, like you've handed him permission to hope—stays with you long after he's tucked the blanket back around your shoulders and settled into the chair beside the bed, close enough that his hand finds yours without either of you really deciding it should. The fever hasn't broken yet. There's no rooftop tonight, no ending you'd planned for.

But his hand is warm around yours, and his eyes stay on you even after you've closed your own, and for the first time all week, the ache in your chest doesn't feel anything like sickness at all.

Maybe this was just the thing that happens when your baby stays. 

@coriihanniee ᯓᡣ𐭩

˖➴ reblogs are appreciated! ty for reading! <3