Dovetail Joints and Other Tests of Tensile Strength (Rating T, Word Count: 2065) by BloodScout
“Hurt very much?”
That surprised him. If she had asked him the same question last year, he wouldn’t have answered. He wouldn’t have told her that when she kidnapped him from Mike Crew’s house, she dislocated his wrist and it took three weeks to get back to normal. He wouldn’t have told her exactly how easy it was the pull his leg out of its socket, that he had a slipped disc that made his vision go white when he bent over in the wrong way. It would have been out of self-preservation, of course. The Daisy-that-was didn’t need more information on how to hurt him. To be fair, the Daisy-that-was wouldn’t have asked in the first place. Not in a way that sounded like she cared.
Friends, then.
Simple (Rating G, Word Count 3300) by @janekfan
Prompt: health scare with Jon and the crew.
Just Hide, They Don’t Need to Know (Not Rated, Word Count 676) by @shuttymcshutfuck
Jon had only been officially back at work after the attack for about a week and he’d spent the week hiding.
or
Jon hides his cane from everyone after the Jane Prentiss attack and it's a bad idea. Thankfully Martin pays more attention than Jon thinks.
The Trials of Control (Rated G, Word Count 1570) by @kaiserkorresponds
"What part of fine don't you understand?" Jon snapped, the building burn of frustration from the fall, and the pain, and the jealousy of seeing Tim's clear ableness, reaching a fever pitch and exploding into the bitter words. "I said, I'm alright."
He drew in a inhale, fighting to pull it past the tightness in his chest and the still aching clench around his heart.
A look of shock passed over Tim's face, before melting back into concern.
"Jon–"
"Don't. Just don't, Tim."
--
Jon being frustrated with his limitations and ableism. In this fic Jon has a combination of POTS/EDS and hasn't had great experiences with ableism in the past. [Tim is not ableist in this fic]
“Just Take a Minute, Put Your Mind on Ice” (Not Rated, Word Count 834) by @shuttymcshutfuck
Tim took one good look at him and his demeanor immediately changed. Jon looked terrible, the bags under his eyes were much more prominent than usual, he wasn’t wearing his usual formal wear and was instead wearing a soft looking shirt and one of Martin’s old cardigans he must have “borrowed”.
or
Tim finds Jon overworking himself and calls in Martin for back up (Romantic JonMarTim)
Make It Small So It Fits (Rated G, Word Count 3555) by @taylortut
A combination of pain, infection, and Not!Sasha paranoia cause Jon to have an episode of delirium at the Institute. The others do their best, but not before panicking a lot
What Is Broken Can Be the Beginning (Or What Is Dislocated) (Rated G, Word Count 1287) by @kaiserkorresponds
Martin flinched at the shout, but didn't falter.
"Your wrist." He stammered. "I heard, well I thought I heard, something break, and so I came to see what had happened, and you were just sitting there. With your wrist like that, and it looked bad, really bad, and well–"
Martin broke off. "Do you need the A&E?"
--
Or Martin finds out about Jon's EDS in arguably the worst way !!
Both Tim and Jon have a bad time after the Buried.
cw fever, illness, vomit mention, suicidal ideation, grief. Also as a note, the night I wrote this was a hard one, and the day after was worse and this might reflect that. I don't think this is one I can go back through and comb for more cws, so hopefully that is warning enough. Stay safe, and enjoy something that was very cathartic to write.
The day after the Buried, it doesn’t even occur to Tim that he should be hungry. He hasn’t needed to eat in so long that he simply forgets. Just downs glass after glass of water in the break room after a shower that lasts far longer than the meager supply of hot water. He can’t be fucked that Daisy and Jon still need to wash the muck off. At least Daisy has somewhere to go, Basira is hovering around, ready to ferry her out of this hell archive.
Of course, it’s his own fault that he doesn’t have a flat.
He supposes he owes Jon. Or something.
He doesn’t care.
He’s still angry. And tired and filthy and depressed. The only thing the buried did was keep him from dying. Hell of a suicide watch to be on.
Sometimes when he closed his eyes down there, he could believe it was Jon or Martin lying on him. Keeping his fingers from itching to do harm… Well, almost, anyhow.
After that, he sleeps. And sleeps.
And, well, after that. He feels like shit.
Complete shit.
When he was a teen with soup for brains, Danny got sick. A bad flu, but he couldn’t keep anything down for three days. Three days of foisting broths and lucozade on his brother with little success. Should have been taken to hospital, by all rights, but their mother didn’t really believe in the whole modern medicine thing, and well. Dad was away, so Tim couldn’t even get Danny to an adult who could help, even if he didn’t give a damn. It had been awful.
He really thought his little brother was dying. Cracked and dry lips, fever so high that he wasn’t coherent. Three days he sat vigil. Praying to a god he barely believed in.
A fever that scooped out his brother until he was praying for a breathing corpse. Giving oblations of thin liquid.
On the third day, his eyes opened and he stroked Tim’s hand, as Tim shook with exhaustion by his bedside. He had to be propped up to sip at his broth, but it was far better than trickling it down his unconscious baby brother’s throat.
Pure helplessness. Both in empathy for his brother, who was probably having a worse time than Tim, and because he was next to useless.
Three days and Tim can’t keep down food. Gave up trying. Just shivers on the cot, gazing nearly sightlessly at the ceiling, muscles too wasted to move. He doesn’t know if anyone notices that he’s gone. He hasn’t heard any word from Martin. Basira and Daisy fucked off days ago, as far as Tim can reckon. Then again, he doesn’t have so much as a working phone. He doesn’t even know if it’s been three days or thirty.
His skin feels hot and tight. Like the Buried is taking a new approach to suffocating him. A dreadful thirst clawing at him, but he doesn’t have the strength to stand and get water anymore. Barely could limp his way there before the lack of food and probable fever stole what little he had left.
Is this just some divine punishment for prodding too hard at the forces of evil in the universe?
He’d finally come to terms with the abstract and incidental nature of these things, but he can’t help the hazy imagining that he deserves this.
Failed to keep his brother safe, for all his bedside bargaining and promises made to the wind on long walks after his brother disappeared. All the broken promises betwixt his savior and himself. Bitter words corroding promises that could have been harder than diamond.
It was his fault. Couldn’t hold up his end, and he deserves this dreadful heat and the foul desert of his mouth. His body generating his own funeral pyre.
He wishes he could bring himself to care. But all he’s known since Jon betrayed him has been anger and dissent disinterest.
There is an ache at his very core.
He lies there, on the cot. Tangled in the sheets. Bone dry. Dry as parched soil. For he has no moisture to spare for sweat. His own body out of anything that could bring his temperature down.
Finding Tim isn’t easy. Jon’s body betrays him after the Buried. Months of uneasy sleep, and days of pressure on all the wrong parts of him leave him poorly put together and his joints slipping apart at the slightest provocation. He spends days on the floor of his office, in too much pain to move, too dizzy to stand, and running a fever from the pain in his squashed and shitty joints.
His own fault, but a small price to pay for Tim and Daisy.
He would have stayed there if it meant getting them back.
One less monster.
Of course the Eye doesn’t let him die. Aren’t humans supposed to die if they don’t drink water for three days?
He spends most of his time passing out when he tries to stand.
And he can’t bring himself to care. He’s so tired. Too tired.
He didn’t expect anyone to come after him. Certainly not Tim. Not after everything.
Well maybe he hoped.
(He did).
(Damn his… well it isn’t optimism. Damn his longing for someone to give a shit if he vanishes for days. He should know by now that no one is coming. No one ever does.)
Groggy and foggy and battered.
He’s tired. He needs a proper mattress for just one night, but he can’t even get off the floor. Just lays in the remnants of mud, waiting to whither like the corpse he is, one just hasn’t stopped breathing yet (again).
But something draws him upright, more or less. Clinging to the walls, bracing his stilted journey on aching limbs.
It’s probably the Eye. Probably the Eye, or maybe Jon’s piercing curiosity, control slackened by fever, peering though a hairline fracture in the door of his mind.
He all but crawls to the cot, securing a half empty water bottle from somewhere he probably should be worried about, but he arrives to find Tim burning away before him as his own vision swims dangerously.
A face in front of his. Features obscure and unreadable. He can read the worry in those eyes. Even in the half light.
Tim couldn’t hear Jon in the Buried. His hearing aids long since ran out of life. All for the best, for the singing of the coffin in the rain will haunt his dreams (not only in a spooky way) for the rest of his life.
Only knew it was Jon by Jon guiding his (Tim’s) hand with too thin and gentle and burned fingers to his (Jon’s) mouth. So Tim could read his lips by feel. An imprecise thing, but better than nothing.
Filthy fingers against dry and dusty lips. Almost like a kiss. Perhaps more intimate.
The face hovers closer. Thin and careful fingers soothing his brow.
Pressing water to his lips. Mouthing words that are lost to Tim. And even if they reached him, he knows he wouldn’t understand them.
Is this Danny before him? Would he know his own brother? After all these years? After the Stranger chewed him up and regurgitated …whatever. Is he lost as much as Sasha had been? Like she’d been?
And what good would knowing that do? He would rather keep the memories he has, doesn’t want to know the creeping uncertainties that plague him when he closes his eyes.
He supposes that the advantage of the Buried is that it keeps the mind off things that aren’t the slow process of returning stone to stone in a way that obliterates everything in between. Everything but fear.
Not Danny, but Jon, Tim discovers. Pulled awake by uneasy stomach, and panicked breath, to find Jon fluttering out of consciousness by his side.
He wants to be put out that they are flush with each other, but …but they were closer still in the choking darkness with air thick with the soil that Tim swears he can feel coating his internal organs.
He’s drifting off again when he hears Jon gasp awake, looking nearly as unwell as Tim feels.
The small figure curled at his back is not his brother. But he feels as warm and as fragile as Danny did when he sat his vigil. Counting the seconds between breaths. His heart stuttering when they lagged and caught in his raw throat in the muted hours between sunset and sunrise. The hours that Tim feared if he stopped willing the next breath to happen, they wouldn’t.
But Jon is hardly human. His pulse is jittery and uneven. Each breath just a little more strained than they should be. Likely matching Tim’s own.
Some distant part of him… the distant part that can feel Jon’s pulse when the rest of him is floating away, untethered to a body too light and empty without topsoil and rich loam to brace him into and against the earth… worries that his own furnace of a temperature is too high and will roast Jon.
Another equally distant part of him is annoyed that Jon dares to share this pyre of internal heat with him. …If this is how he goes out, he wishes he saw the stars when he still had any strength.
Tim wakes again to cool water against his tongue.
Jon is mumbling to himself fervently. And Tim can recognize that look. That fear. That determination. The will of someone breathing for someone else. Holding their life-force steady in the mind. Knowing to let it faulter is a death sentence. With wild certainty that is bounded in something beyond reason, for when you are willing another person to breathe, you are often beyond the reach of science.
And Tim wonders who Jon could possibly be breathing for, because there is no universe in the extensive multiverse that Jon would ever will the life into someone who has spewed such hateful things and led another fragile being he swore to protect to his death.
And yet…
Tim exhales deeply. Sliding into what looks to be a restful sleep for the first time in uncounted months. Watching the rise and fall of his chest look more natural and less like an afterthought, what little strength Jon had found, abandons him. And he curls himself around Tim. A small and fragile and dusty shield. And is asleep in an instant. Knowing without a doubt that Tim will sleep comfortably through the night, and if anything changes, Jon will know. Both in body and from beyond the waterlogged door in his mind.
WHEEEEEE a speedy write! For @celosiaa and @captaincravatthecapricious for the teeny bit of trans martin :3
“Professor?”
“Mm.”
“Sir, excuse me?”
“Mm?”
“Uncle Jon!”
“Moll--What??” Jon lifted his head from where he’d been staring at his phone, leg jiggling under the table and one folded beneath him in the chair. “What did I say…oh.” Clearing his throat, he let his eyes wander along the queue, absently counting the gaggle of students he’d inadvertently left waiting. “Oh.”
“Are you alright, Professor?”
“I’m sure you’ve noticed.” They had the decency not to snicker, lord they were too good to him. “I’ve been. Well...”
“Distracted.” Molly offered up, finishing his sentence sardonically.
“Quite.” She must have seen something in his face because she frowned.
“Is it, is it Uncle Martin?” Fear, barely conveyed in the miniscule tremble in her voice, had her reaching for her own phone, checking for any messages she might have missed while it was silenced.
“He’s fine, he’s. He’s been under the weather.” And Jon allowed his own anxiety to show, dragging both hands through his hair to completely ruin it. “A, uh. A chest infection. He’s alright. Emma said she’d be in touch if.” It was fine. Martin was fine. It had been so long since the Lonely had taken hold enough to make something like this dangerous so if the humming, jittery, worry would be kind enough to leave him alone and let him finish this class--
“You should go home, sir.” A chorus of “yes, of course” and “we understand” followed suit and he glanced at the clock. Class had barely begun.
“No, everything is--” the notification for a message lit up his cell and the jingle threw the room into quiet and he nearly dove for it. The bank. An advert. Wonderful. “--Fine.” But he wasn’t so sure. That nagging, unsettled, gnawing drone in the back of his mind where the Eye still liked to lurk, to spy, flooded him with second thoughts.
“We can email with questions. We’ve done it before, no worries.” And while Jon didn’t like being reminded of his worst days, they had a point. He wasn’t unreachable. He had appointments with all of them during his upcoming office hours. A firm hand landed on his shoulder, squeezed, Molly.
“Go home. I think we’ll all feel better for it.”
“If you’re absolutely certain--and, and you promise, promise,” he lifted a stern finger, “to contact me if you have trouble?”
They all but shoved him from the lecture hall, Molly already handing him his cane, another student fetching his coat and scarf from the hook while he packed up the most pertinent work. It was Friday anyway and this section was very tight knit being made up of students he’d had the pleasure of teaching before. Too good to him, indeed.
Rushing, Jon made the next train with seconds to spare, firing off a quick text to Emma as he exited the underground right as her number flashed across the top of the screen.
“Baba?” The word trembled. He was right to leave when he did.
“I’m here, Habibti, I’m coming home.” Juggling his bag, the phone, his cane-- “I can see our flat.”
“O’okay. See you soon, Baba.” Within the next moment he was through the door, all but throwing off his coat, leaving his shoes wherever they fell to stride quickly into the sitting room.
“Martin.” Just a breath, relief, at seeing him laid out on the sofa, feet up and elevated, with a cold cloth over his eyes. Emma hugged him, rubbing her face into the worn wool at his shoulder and he took the time to drop a kiss to the top of her head. Soon she’d be too tall for that. With Martin’s scolding in the back of his head, Jon opted to sit beside his legs instead of kneeling on the floor, taking a warm hand in his own. “Hayati.”
“...Emma, I tol’you, darling…” Gravelly, ruined from coughing, and Jon interrupted.
“I was already on the way when she called.” Gently, Jon rubbed his thumb in tiny circles over his skin and Martin sighed, shaking a wet cough loose from somewhere deep in his chest. “That sounds awful, love.”
“He fainted.” Jon pushed all the concern away, turning all his sharp attention to his husband.
“...li’l dizzy, that’s all.” Sentences short, leaving him gasping, and Jon didn’t have to Know that his fever was climbing as it was wont to do in the evenings, instead pressing a kiss to his clammy forehead. He kept his frowning to himself.
“That doesn’t exactly make me feel any better.” He removed the flannel and used it to wipe down his face, his throat, the bit of his chest peeking from under his tee. No binder, he knew better, but still. “You’re burning up.” Bless her, Emma appeared with tea and medicine and Jon maneuvered himself and a protesting Martin so he could curl up against him instead. He was a furnace, oozing heat, and even Jon who always ran so cold, began to sweat. “Oh, Hayati.” Murmuring a few more soft things, he swept the cloth over the back of his neck.
“Jon…” carefully, he drew in another measure of air, barely a lungful. “Don’...ha, feel well.”
“I know, love, I know. It’s alright.” Jon peppered his cheek with kisses, accepting the pills and tea, cajoling Martin into downing both before burying fingers in his lank hair. The tension in him relaxed as he melted further into Jon, the wheeze in his chest pronounced but he’d keep an eye on it. “Well done dad-wrangling today, Em.”
“...’eeey.” Martin coughed into his elbow, hastily tossed over his face, and left it there.
“Hush.” Once everything had a little time to work on that fever it would be straight to bed with him. (Which he never should have left in the first place). “Homework?”
“Yes, Baba.”
“After I put dad to bed we can order take away.” At least her face lit up at that. Martin’s last bout of illness had planted fear deep inside the both of them, but there was nothing to suggest that he hadn’t just pushed himself too far. He’d ask just what he was attempting to accomplish later, if he could remember. For now, he settled into the quiet, listening to Martin’s soft snoring of which he would adamantly deny, and debated whether or not he could be convinced to take a hit off Jon’s own inhaler. “Alright, Hayati, up you come.” In this moment, Jon wished he was strong enough to carry him up the stairs, like Martin would do in these sorts of situations with him, but he could lend him support.
“...Couch’sfine…”
“It isn’t.” And with no more air left to complain with, Martin focused on putting one foot in front of the other, panting heavy when Jon left him sitting on the bed to rummage for a soft set of pyjamas. He was less helpful than he wanted to be when trying to assist but before long and after another full glass of water, Jon was pulling him into his lap.
“Mmh.” Cuddling closer. “M’sorry, Jon.”
“Whatever for?”
“Nng…”
“I feel I have to ask for clarification because there’s nothing here necessitating apologies.” Tone low and even, the goal was to soothe. Accepting care was not one of Martin’s strong suits and Jon supposed he could forgive him that one minor transgression. He began smoothing a hand up and down his back. “Falling ill is no one’s fault, Habibi.”
“Din’ have--” He broke off in another fit and Jon levered him forward so Martin could hack properly, offering another sip of water before laying down with him and wrapping him up in his arms.
“I will always come home when you need me.” Overwhelmed and weepy from fever, tears began to slip over the bridge of his nose, soaking into the pillow, and Jon kissed them away, cupping his cheek in one hand to brush away the damp with his thumb. “Know why?” Stubborn, Martin shook his head, tucking himself beneath Jon’s chin and pulling in a shuddering breath, exhaling slow and following the steady rise and fall of his narrow chest to sleep. “Because I love you, Hayati.”
i’m so glad that my impact on a small little corner of the tma fandom has been disability headcanons, seeing all the POTS and EDS fics in the tags has got me tearing up a little and thinking i should maybe take another pass at that first POTS!Gerry fic
Jon: Okay *carefully removes a ring splint.* *carefully removes a ring splint.* *carefully removes a ring splint.* *carefully removes a ring splint.* *carefully removes a ring splint.* *carefully removes a
