no sick days
prompt: viral (alt no.5)
whumpee: michael westen
fandom: burn notice
hi everyone here's me with another new fandom this month :) i love this show but this is my first fic and i wrote it while watching s2 and am still only on s4 so pls keep that in mind lol. hope you like!!
Spies aren’t afforded the luxury of taking sick days. Whether you’re conducting surveillance or chasing down a bad guy, there’s never time in the middle of an op to lie flat, do nothing, and recuperate. You have to be able to work through a bad cold, a sudden onset of allergies, the worst food poisoning you’ve ever had.
--
Michael wakes up on what passes for a cool morning in Miami and immediately shuts his eyes again with a low groan.
He’d felt a little off last night, but had chalked it up to lack of sleep and the change in the weather.
He’d been wrong.
He’s sick. Like, sick-sick. Like, getting-hit-by-a-truck-would-be-an-improvement-on-his-situation-sick.
Great.
And he’s got the damn job. He’s meeting today with Adam Lund, the owner of several local clubs who has been embezzling from his own business, all the while laying a paper trail to place the blame squarely upon the manager of one of the clubs, a friend of Barry’s. The manager had found out and told Barry about his situation, and now Michael’s in it, posing as the business manager of an investor who’s heard about the embezzlement and who wants to protect his client’s interests (or, failing that, make some money for himself).
It’s not that awful, as far as jobs to do while sick go. It doesn’t involve a lot of running or dexterity and the meeting will last for two hours, tops.
Of course, he also needs to work on laying his own paper trail, documenting the actual embezzlement and absolving Barry’s friend of any wrongdoing. But this part is easier, and it’s something he can ask Sam and Fi to help with.
The meeting, though, is all him.
He checks the time–nearly ten. He’d slept in. He gets out of bed slowly, trying to mitigate the inevitable dizziness, which only kind of works. His head spins and he firmly closes his eyes and waits for it to pass. He neither throws up nor passes out, so he’ll count that one as a win.
When the dizziness recedes, he makes a beeline for the bathroom, hoping that a shower will wake him up and beat back some of the general shittiness he’s feeling.
A minute later, Michael is sitting on the floor of the shower, hot water running over his head, cataloguing everything that’s wrong with him.
First, he’s cold, and it doesn’t feel like the warm water is even helping. His whole body is sore, like he’s done a heavy workout or been in a nasty fight. His head is throbbing as though this is the worst hangover he’s had in years. His throat feels like he’s swallowed sandpaper and–yeah, there’s the coughing. It lasts for what feels like several minutes and leaves him even more tired than he’d been before.
It’s gotta be the flu. He’d had it once as an adult, in Afghanistan. The medical center there hadn’t been able to offer him anything besides tylenol, which he’d taken the maximum dose of each day. The symptoms had been pretty mild, but even then, everything had been made so much more difficult. He’d struggled through a week of surveillance setup and monitoring, and while his tasks had taken him longer than usual, he hadn’t messed anything up. And when that particular job had ended, he’d been given two days off, and he’d slept through them both.
He’d had the flu as a kid once, too, but he doesn’t remember much of it. Heat and pain, his mother’s concern and his father’s indifference. He doesn’t dwell on it.
He gets out of the shower, tries to get his limbs to stop shaking with the power of thought, and gets dressed. There’s a bottle of tylenol under the sink, and he pops three of them into his mouth, sticking his head under the tap to wash them down.
Swallowing the pills hurts like hell, and he has to fight to keep from coughing, which will only make everything hurt worse.
When the pain dies down, he heads to the refrigerator. He needs to eat something. Give his body some fuel to fight this off. He locates a cup of yogurt and forces himself to eat it. He’s not at all hungry, and while he knows logically that this doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make the task any easier.
Eventually, after quite some time, he manages the yogurt. He’s debating whether to try his luck with a piece of toast when his phone rings.
It’s so loud and it makes the pain in his head spike. He presses one palm to his temple to try and calm the pounding, reaching out half-blind with the other hand for his phone.
“Yeah?” His voice comes out too quiet and too low. Speaking feels awful, like swallowing glass.
“Hey, Mikey, rough night?”
“Mm.”
“Well, listen, you don’t really need me for the job today, right? The Caddy got a scratch, and I’ve gotta fix it before–”
“Yeah, fine.”
“You alright? You sound a little…”
“Hungover? Yeah, believe me, I know.”
Sam is silent for a second. “Okay, well, thanks, man. Talk later?”
“Sure.”
“Bye.”
Michael hangs up, then sinks down to sit on the floor, letting his head rest against the fridge. Maybe he should’ve told Sam the truth. But he’s got his own problems to deal with, and Michael had told him he didn’t think he’d need Sam for the whole paper trail thing. So it’s his own fault, anyway.
He could ask Fi. Should ask her, probably. But his throat is aching from the few words he’d spoken to Sam and his hands are shaking too much to bother texting. He’ll contact her later. Yeah.
For now, though, he can do some of the work himself. It’s pretty easy, mostly just assembling information they’ve already gathered, organizing it, making different pieces of evidence speak to each other to spell out what’s really going on.
It’s a lot of staring at the computer, though, and after about half an hour, his head feels like it’s going to split open. He takes another tylenol and drinks a glass of water, both of which hurt quite a bit, then gets back to work.
It takes him a lot longer than it should, but he gets into a sort of rhythm. The tylenol finally starts working, pushing the headache slightly back into the margins.
The door opens, and he startles, reaching for a weapon that isn’t there.
Michael Westen doesn’t startle. It’s not part of the job. He is steady and controlled.
It’s why Fi is immediately walking over to him, slamming the door with enough force to make him wince.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, all business.
“You should go,” Michael says, which is not an answer. He doesn’t want her to end up sick. That’d be just what they need, two-thirds of the team operating at diminished capacity.
Fi just looks at him. He tries to look away but finds himself incapable.
“Ah,” she says, after a second, making her way to the fridge and poking around. “You’re sick. What is it? Cold, flu? Malaria?”
“Flu. So you should leave.”
“I’ll be fine, Michael. I don’t get sick.”
It is true that he’s never seen her sick before. Which doesn’t mean anything.
“Fi–”
“Just shut up, Michael. You sound like hell. Anyway, Sam called, said you might need some help. So here I am.”
At a loss for what else to do, he lets her help.
The work goes a lot faster with Fi there. Her hands are steady on the keyboard and she doesn’t have to take breaks to cough, to let her eyes refocus. They’re done in just under two hours, which gives Michael another two hours before his meeting.
“You should rest,” Fiona says. “You don’t exactly look like a business manager right now. More an office drone who hasn’t had a day off in two years.”
“Thanks.”
“Seriously. Go sleep. I’ll stay here in case anything comes up.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
She shrugs. “Meeting of my own fell through. I was gonna go see if I could find another buyer, but I can do that here, too.” She wiggles the mouse as evidence.
Michael doesn’t have the strength to argue, and he would really like to sleep. He needs to be as on top of it as possible for the meeting, and he’s nowhere near there right now.
He retreats to his bed, climbs under the covers, and is asleep in seconds.
--
He wakes up and he feels somehow worse. That shouldn’t be possible, he thinks, and shoves himself out of bed. The dizziness from before returns full force, sending black spots across his field of vision. He nearly falls, is saved from this fate by Fiona’s arm around him.
“Jesus, Michael, you’re burning up.”
“Hm.”
“Come on, have some water. Your meeting’s in half an hour.”
This wakes him up a bit. He drinks some cold water, which hurts and makes him shiver. He gets dressed slowly and painstakingly. Fi does his buttons when his hands shake too much.
She drives him to the club and tells him she’ll pick him up after. It’s very kind of her, though she tells him it’s just so she can be assured he won’t wreck the car.
As soon as he’s out on the sidewalk, he slips into work mode. It’s something innate in him, after so many years. Outside distractions–the fact that he’s still cold, that he aches, that his throat is burning–disappear into the background. He has his target and his goal, and little else registers.
The meeting goes smoothly. He forces down two cocktails which burn like fire and schemes with Lund for a chunk of the embezzled money, recording every word on a doctored-up cellphone tucked into his suit jacket. He excuses himself to run to the bathroom and steals a few papers from a filing cabinet in Lund’s office, planting a bug while he’s at it. In short, he does everything he’s supposed to, and does it perfectly.
The evening ends well. They toast their efforts. Michael half chokes on his drink and is rewarded with a hearty thump on the back that, just for a second, makes every ache and pain in his body cry out.
And then the moment passes, and he’s fine. They plan another meeting for after the unfortunate manager is arrested, shake hands, and part ways.
Michael makes it two blocks away, catches sight of the car and Fi behind the wheel, and everything he’d been repressing comes back at him full force.
He all but collapses right there on the street, and then he blinks and Fiona is there with him, the only thing stopping him from hitting the ground for the second time that day.
“Nice work,” she says, depositing him into the passenger seat. “We can move in on him tomorrow, maybe the day after.”
Michael nods, not fully hearing her. His head is spinning and everything aches and it’s very hard to focus on anything at all.
They’re home just like that. He must’ve fallen asleep. Fi opens the door, and he makes his way directly to the bed, not bothering to remove his shoes or jacket.
Fiona sinks down beside him a second later. He’s already almost asleep, but responsive enough to be taken aback by her presence.
“We’re not–” he says, and then starts coughing, and doesn’t bother to finish.
“I know. But I can’t have you dying in your sleep, and there’s nowhere else for me to lay down.”
“Okay,” Michael agrees, too tired to argue further. He lets Fiona lie down beside him and curls very slightly into her warmth.
It is the deepest he’s slept in a very long time.
thanks for reading! i had fun with this, i love these guys so much and rest assured if you want more of them there is more to come. love ya <333
