i promise im not a bot

Patton had been off all morning.

It started small. He measured the coffee wrong — twice — and laughed it off both times with a "well, aren't I just a hot mess this morning!" that landed a beat too late to be funny. He hummed while he made breakfast, but the tune kept drifting off mid-bar like he'd forgotten what song he was humming. And when Virgil asked him a perfectly ordinary question about whether they had more oat milk, Patton stared at him for a solid three seconds like the words had arrived in a language he used to speak fluently and had since forgotten.

Janus noticed it the way he noticed most things about Patton now — quietly, from the corner of his eye, cataloguing small wrongnesses before Patton himself would admit to them. He noticed the gray cat-ear hoodie Patton had thrown on over his t-shirt, the one with the little embroidered whiskers on the front pocket, zipped all the way up to his chin even though the kitchen wasn't cold. He noticed the extra cheeriness in Patton's voice, stretched thin at the edges, like a smile a size too big for the face wearing it. He noticed the pun that fell flat — actually flat, no delivery, no timing — and then, ten minutes later, a second one that trailed off entirely into a cough Patton tried to disguise as a laugh.

Patton never flubbed a pun. Patton never let a pun die on the vine. That, more than anything, was what made Janus put his mug down and actually look.

"You're doing the thing," he said, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen with his arms crossed.

"What thing?" Patton chirped, far too brightly, and then promptly swayed sideways into the counter, catching himself on the edge with both hands.

Janus was across the room before he'd consciously decided to move. "That thing." He caught Patton by the elbow, steadying him properly, and pressed the back of his fingers to Patton's forehead before Patton could duck away or protest. Patton was radiating heat like a space heater somebody had forgotten to switch off. Under the fluffy gray hood, his hair was damp at the temples, curling slightly the way it did when he sweated.

"I'm fine!" Patton said, in the exact tone of a man who was very much not fine. "Just a little warm, is all! Probably this hoodie, actually, I really overdid it on the layers today — I'll just, um, take it off, and then—"

"You are not going to take off the hoodie. The hoodie is not the problem, Patton, and I say this as someone whose hand is currently on your forehead and can feel you cooking from the inside like a rotisserie chicken." Janus steered him, gently but with absolutely zero room for negotiation, toward the couch. "You're going to sit. Preferably lie down. I have seen worse than this, believe me. I have seen considerably worse than this."

"Is this a Remus thing?" Patton asked, letting himself be maneuvered, which told Janus more about how bad he felt than anything he'd actually said out loud.

"This is very much a Remus thing." Janus deposited him onto the cushions and reached for the throw blanket folded over the armrest, shaking it out and draping it over Patton's knees with more care than the gesture strictly required. "Once he ran a fever so high he became absolutely convinced his skeleton was 'unlocking new abilities.' Spent forty minutes trying to punch through a wall to test the theory. I had to sit on him."

Patton laughed — a real one this time, bright and startled out of him — which immediately turned into a cough, and then a longer, rattling one, and then he curled in on himself with his knees drawn up under the cat hoodie, looking miserable and small and entirely unlike his usual self.

"Sorry," he mumbled, once the coughing settled. "I don't want to be a bother. You've probably got things to do, and Roman's got that whole big presentation thing he's been running lines for since Tuesday, and Virgil's—"

"Roman and Virgil are perfectly capable of surviving one afternoon without you personally supervising their well-being," Janus said, sitting on the edge of the cushion beside him. "And nothing I have to do today outranks this. Nothing on my agenda is more pressing than you not passing out in the kitchen."

"I wasn't going to pass out—"

"You swayed, Patton. You swayed like a tree in a light breeze." Janus reached out, and when Patton didn't flinch or pull away, let his hand settle into his hair, careful of the hood. It was warmer even than his forehead had been. "You spend every single day making sure Roman eats something besides energy drinks and making sure Virgil doesn't disappear into his room for six hours straight worrying about nothing. Let someone return the favor for once. It won't kill you."

"They're not really — I mean, they're not really my kids," Patton said, in the tone of someone reciting a fact he didn't fully believe himself. "I just worry. I've always just worried."

"I know the feeling." Janus thought, unbidden, of Remus at four in the morning, of years spent being the only steady hand in a room that hadn't had many steady hands in it. "Remus wasn't ever really mine either. Not on paper. Didn't stop me worrying myself sick over him for the better part of a decade."

Patton looked up at him with damp, fever-glassy eyes, and something in his expression went soft and unguarded in a way it usually only did late at night, when he thought no one was watching closely. "You're really not grossed out? I get gross when I'm sick, Janus. Like, properly gross. I might throw up. I cry sometimes, when I'm really under the weather, which is embarrassing, and I get all — sniffly, and clingy, and—"

"Patton." Janus said his name like a period at the end of a sentence, firm and final. "I lived with Remus for the better part of a decade. He once attempted to kiss me directly after being sick — and I do mean directly after, no interval, no rinse, certainly no toothbrush involved — as what he called a 'bonding gesture.' He considered it romantic. He was deeply offended when I disagreed."

Patton made a horrified, delighted noise into the blanket. "Janus."

"It happened. It was formative. I have never fully recovered." He said this with the flat, weary cadence of a man reciting an old and well-worn scar, and it worked exactly as intended — Patton laughed again, wetly, shoulders shaking, and some of the tightness went out of him.

"That's awful," Patton said, when he'd got his breath back. "I'm so sorry, that's genuinely one of the worst things I've ever heard, and I once heard Remus describe in detail what he'd do with a wood chipper—"

"Don't remind me. I was there for that too." Janus smoothed his thumb along Patton's damp hairline, and Patton's eyes fluttered half-shut at the touch like a cat leaning into a scratch behind the ears — fitting, Janus thought, given the hood. "My point stands. You could throw up directly onto my shoes, right now, this instant, and it would still represent a marked improvement over my prior experience of nursing sick people. You are, and I cannot stress this enough, an extremely low-maintenance patient by comparison."

"I don't know if that's a compliment."

"Take it as one anyway."

Patton smiled at that, small and genuine, before it faded back into something more uncertain. He picked at a loose thread on the hoodie's cuff, not quite meeting Janus's eyes. "Do you need the — I mean, should I get the bucket. Just in case. I don't want to ruin the couch."

"I'll get it. Stay put." Janus rose, fetched the small wastebasket from the bathroom and set it within easy reach on the floor, then returned to his spot on the edge of the cushion. "There. Contingency handled. Now. Be honest with me — how bad is it, actually?"

"...Kind of bad," Patton admitted, in a small voice. "My whole body kind of aches. And I'm dizzy when I stand up too fast. And—" He hesitated, cheeks going pinker than the fever alone accounted for, fidgeting with the hoodie's zipper pull. "And mostly I just — I really want to be held. Is that okay? I know I'm all sweaty and gross and probably not exactly—"

"Patton." Janus cut him off gently. "You are asking the human embodiment of a snake whether it is acceptable to be warm and clingy in his vicinity. I am perpetually, chronically, biologically freezing, Patton. Cold-blooded, if you recall — it's not a metaphor, it's a medical fact of my existence. You are, at this exact moment, the single warmest object in the entire Mindscape. This is not a sacrifice on my part. This is possibly the best offer I have received all week, fever notwithstanding."

That got a real laugh out of him, wet and delighted, muffled into the sleeve of the hoodie. "You're ridiculous."

"I am accommodating. There's a difference." Janus was already shifting to make room, pulling one arm free of his cape and settling back against the armrest. "Come here before you talk yourself out of something you clearly want."

Patton didn't need telling twice. He curled in against Janus's side in a slow, boneless slump, all overheated skin and soft gray cotton and the faint whiskery outline of the hoodie's pocket pressed against Janus's ribs, and Janus wrapped an arm around him and felt the fever-warmth soak into his own perpetually cold hands like sitting close to a hearth on a winter night. Patton, for his part, made a small, pleased, involuntary sound at the contrast — Janus's cool skin against his too-hot cheek — and burrowed closer, tucking his face into the curve of Janus's neck.

"You're like a — a Janus-shaped ice pack," Patton mumbled, voice already going soft and slurred at the edges.

"The nicest thing anyone has called me all year."

"I mean it as a compliment. You're so cold, it's amazing, how are you always this cold—"

"Cold-blooded. We covered this."

"S'nice," Patton said, simply, and pressed even closer, one hand curling loosely into the fabric at Janus's shoulder like an anchor.

They sat like that a while. Patton's breathing slowly evened out, ragged edges smoothing into something steadier; his fidgeting stilled by degrees, hand going lax against Janus's shoulder. Janus kept one hand moving idly through his hair — not for any real purpose beyond the fact that it seemed to help, that every pass of his fingers seemed to ease something in Patton's shoulders by another fraction of an inch — and watched, with an attention he wasn't sure he wanted to examine too closely, the tension bleed slowly out of him.

"Janus," Patton mumbled, eyes closed now, voice gone thick and drowsy.

"Mm?"

"You're really warm to have around. Not — not temperature-wise. I mean the other thing." A pause, his brow furrowing faintly like he was working hard to find the words through the fever fog. "Like. Having you here. S'nice. I don't say that enough."

Janus's hand stilled in his hair for just a moment. "Go to sleep, Patton."

"M'not tired," Patton said, and was asleep within the minute — all at once, the way overtired, feverish people go, mid-sentence, mid-breath, his hand going slack where it had been fisted loosely in Janus's sleeve, his breathing dropping into the slow, even rhythm of someone who trusted the room around him enough to let go completely.

Outside, faintly, Janus could hear the ordinary noise of the house continuing without them — Roman's voice rising and falling in dramatic cadence as he ran through his lines again, Virgil telling him, with real irritation, to for the love of god, pick a different monologue, I've heard this one four hundred times — the mundane, bickering, comfortable sound of people who were, against every reasonable expectation Janus had once held for his own life, his people now. The way Remus once had been the entirety of it, and only it, for a very long time.

Janus sat very still for a moment, just looking at Patton: pink-cheeked, damp-haired, mouth slightly open, one cat-ear of the hoodie flopped sideways, utterly unglamorous and utterly unbothered by that fact, because he trusted this couch, this room, this ridiculous, cold-blooded man holding him, enough to fall apart in front of it without flinching.

Carefully, so as not to wake him, Janus reached up and slid Patton's glasses off the bridge of his nose, folding them one-handed and setting them on the side table beside the wastebasket and a half-drunk glass of water Patton had apparently abandoned earlier that morning. Patton's face without them looked younger somehow, softer at the edges, all the day's forced brightness finally, fully switched off. Janus looked at him a moment longer than was strictly necessary — longer than he probably should have, if he were being honest with himself, which he generally tried to be, at least about the things that mattered.

Then he leaned down and pressed a light kiss to Patton's fevered forehead — warm under his lips, warmer than anything ever got to be around Janus — half comfort, half something he wasn't yet in the habit of naming out loud, even to himself.

"Sleep it off," he murmured, mostly to himself, settling back against the cushions and drawing Patton a little closer, a little more securely, one arm curled protectively around him like he intended to stay exactly like this for as long as it took — an hour, an afternoon, the rest of the day if that's what it came to. "I've got you."