38 degrees
word count: 3.6k
pairing: do i even have to list this our blog is called caejosed
summary: “I’m dying, Caesar. I’m on my deathbed. You’re going to come home and I’ll be here, dead,” he threw his hands up dramatically, “because you didn’t take the time to feed me some chicken noodle soup.”
notes: i think the summary gives you the gist of this pretty well but ill leave some authors notes anyway. this is just a domestic sickfic please enjoy (also i originally posted this on ao3, if you would rather read it there)
Caesar always woke up on time. Even though someone was usually eager to keep him in bed for a while longer, he always pulled himself out of the tangle of arms and the warm blankets. Something was different this time though, he noticed as Joseph didn’t even rouse in the slightest. Usually, he would reach out, hand snagging onto Caesar’s sleeve and a mumble of “is it really already six…” following. Caesar brushed the dark hair away from his forehead, noticing how hot his skin was. He frowned, he knew Joseph would probably catch a cold, considering it had been rainy and Joseph had been stupid, but actually dealing with it was an entirely different beast.
Joseph’s eyes cracked open when Caesar laid his hand across his face, and he had to blink a few times before registering that it was, indeed, morning. The curtains stayed drawn, but sunlight shone through the small space where they didn’t quite match up, hitting just by his eyes. Joseph definitely was not a morning person, but he fought the urge to turn away from the light. It was worth it to put up with it if Caesar’s hand stayed cupping his face.
“I told you that standing out in the rain wasn’t worth it, you dumbass.” There was no bite to his words, and even if there was, the way he ran his fingers through Joseph’s hair would’ve cancelled it out. Joseph leaned into his hand, closing his eyes again, probably intent on going back to sleep. He laughed a bit under his breath, hand trailing down to Joseph’s cheek for a moment before pulling away. That seemed to be the nail in the coffin, and Joseph finally opened his eyes and pushed the blankets off of himself, sitting upright and rubbing his eyes.
“You have to nurse me back to health, Caesarrrrrrrr…”
“Don’t. You know I have work today, but I’ll call your professors for you.”
“Wow, so generous,” Joseph’s tone sharpened, waking up enough to be sarcastic, “It’s not like you could, I don’t know, call your own boss too!”
“I can’t skip work to babysit you.”
“I’m dying , Caesar. I’m on my deathbed. You’re going to come home and I’ll be here, dead ,” he threw his hands up dramatically, “because you didn’t take the time to feed me some chicken noodle soup.”
“I don’t think chicken noodle soup can cure life threatening illnesses, and I don’t think a cold is-”
“Well, maybe you’re wrong! Maybe, I’ll just die from the depression, from knowing that my loving boyfriend would rather go and stand, scanning books for eight hours, rather than to stay home with me,” he said as he threw himself back down.
“I guess you’re gonna have to live with that weight,” Caesar chuckled, watching Joseph’s dramatic feigned sadness turn into a grimace, sitting back up from the bed and pulling Caesar’s hands into his own. This, Caesar had learned, was what Joseph looked like when he was pleading. He had the privilege of seeing it a few times before, most recently when Joseph had begged him to order pizza, insisting that, even though it may not taste good, it was part of New York culture to eat shitty pizza delivery while watching reality TV on a Friday night.
“Caesar! Just- You know, I stood in the rain to pick you up from work-”
“Is this my fault now? I didn’t tell you to pick me up from work, I know how to take the subway-”
“Do you?”
Caesar bit his tongue, glaring down at Joseph. His lopsided smirk twisted into a frown as Caesar stood up from the bed and walked over to their closet. He knew the number one way to make Joseph feel bad for teasing was the silent treatment, Joseph’s worst nightmare was his teasing going unappreciated. So, Caesar tugged the door open, reaching to sort through all of his hanging shirts as Joseph shifted in bed. The creak of springs was telling, and soon arms wrapped around Caesar’s sides. He smiled to himself, as a hot forehead pressed into his back and Joseph started mumbling.
“I’m sorryyyy….”
Caesar weighed his options of teasing Joseph or letting him off the hook. Obviously, the former seemed more fun, but. Joseph was already sick. He had dealt with Joseph getting stupidly worried about making him actually mad with his jabs. Having to actually take off work because Joseph made himself even more sick from worrying was not on Caesar’s schedule for this week.
“It’s… okay. But I’m not staying home, it's just a fever. Obviously you aren’t even that sick, you’re walking just fine.”
“Caesar….” Joseph tightened his hold, making it hard for Caesar to even shift and pull the shirt he chose off of the hanger. His face really was burning up, making a hot circle in the shape of his cheek press in between Caesar’s shoulder blades, as Joseph turned his head and sighed, dramatically. Caesar found himself stifling another laugh, while this wasn’t his favorite side of Joseph, he knew it was a side he would show only to him. Well, him and Lisa Lisa. And maybe Suzi too.
“Get some sleep, drink some water, you’ll get over it.”
Joseph relented. He knew, if after this amount of begging Caesar still wasn’t giving in, it was a lost cause. That didn’t make him throw himself into the bed any less dramatically though, or make him act any less weak when Caesar handed him a bottle of water, insisting that Caesar opened it for him. It didn’t make him let go any sooner when Caesar reached out a hand to check his fever again, and pulling his hand off of the thermometer to lace his fingers with it, savoring the last moments Caesar would give him before he ran off to work.
Caesar rolled his eyes, but squeezed Joseph’s hand nonetheless.
“You’re not going to die without me for a few hours.” He brushed Joseph’s bangs away from his forehead again, pulling the thermometer from his mouth.
“You never know what the future holds!” Joseph said, now free from the limits of having to hold it from under his tongue.
“Well,” Caesar started, looking down at the miniscule screen, “with a fever of thirty eight degrees, I might be wrong after all.”
Joseph’s eyes widened, “No kidding. Isn’t the average temperature supposed to be-”
“Oh.” Caesar laughed, just for a minute, looking at Joseph’s confused expression. “Celsius. In American-”
“Fahrenheit.”
“-it’s one hundred. Try to get some sleep,” he ruffled Joseph’s hair, knowing he could get away with it considering Joseph wasn’t going anywhere today. “Okay?”
---
Joseph was not getting ‘some sleep,’ or any sleep at all. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since Caesar left, but he had been tossing and turning in bed for what felt like hours. His head had started aching, and every time he opened his eyes everything was masked in a fever stricken blur. Struggling to decide between piling blankets over himself and throwing them all to the floor, he decided it was time to just get out of bed.
Maybe it was the fever that kept him from sleeping, but it didn’t seem unlikely that his restlessness was a result of him either. Joseph had never been good at falling asleep, or holding a sleep schedule. He just slept when he was tired, and if he wasn’t dead exhausted, he wasn’t going to fall asleep. It wasn’t really a good habit to have, but it had stuck with him since he had left his grandmother’s house. With no one to push him to go to sleep and wake up at the right times, he fell into it. Thankfully, he did have someone to push him now.
And, although he wouldn’t admit it to anyone besides Caesar, trying to sleep without Caesar next to him proved to be a struggle too.
He realized he had been standing there for a while, and finally reached to pull all of the blankets he had pushed off of the bed into his arms. The walk to the living room was short, with only a couple stumbles on the way, and he unceremoniously dropped the blankets onto the couch before following suit much the same way.
In elementary school, he would’ve been ecstatic to have caught a cold and be able to stay home from school, but now he was just dreading the work he would have to catch up on, and the wait for the next few hours until Caesar came back. He didn’t have anything to do , without going into school. He had hobbies, sure, but none of them really went together with a cold. Trying to read comics when everything seemed blurry seemed like a death wish. Everything else was an outside activity, and he already knew if he left the apartment in this state Caesar would kill him. Joseph would probably kill himself, too, trying to navigate to the stairs.
He considered calling Caesar, before he realized he had left his phone in the bedroom, and sighed at the thought of walking all the way back just to bother Caesar and probably be met with a “did you try sleeping?” and a quick quip of “well, try that!” before being hit with the dull tone of an ended call. He wasn’t even sure what time it was. For all he knew, it had only been ten minutes since Caesar left, and he definitely wouldn’t be happy being called back so soon.
The lack of any clocks in their living room didn’t help either, though Joseph could only blame himself for that. Caesar had told him it would probably be helpful to buy at least one, but Joseph argued that it was a waste of money, when they could just look at their phones for the time. It definitely ranked pretty high on their ‘stupid arguments’ list, but also on their ‘arguments Joseph had won’ list. It was the only one, after all.
He was regretting that decision now, as pulled the blankets over himself. He decided, if nothing else, he could at least put on the TV for some background noise, and then try to sleep with that. Not thinking that, considering it was a television, he could just check the time on that too. So he slept, or at least he tried to, closing his eyes after turning on the news and listening to the anchor babble on about some breakthrough at the zoo. And finally, finally , he drifted off.
It didn’t take long after that, though, for the door to swing open.
Caesar took a few quiet steps into the apartment, slipping his coat off and dropping it onto the coat hanger. He had caved, coming home at lunch with a quick explanation to his boss that it was a ‘medical emergency.’
As much as he had argued with Joseph this morning, he spent the entire morning worried. Was Joseph sleeping? Was he even still home? What if he left anyway- well, that would be ridiculous, seeing as he had almost fallen down just walking back to bed this morning, but he wouldn’t put it past him. And, they didn’t even have anything to eat at home. Not anything Joseph would be able to make, fever or not. So that was what Caesar used, to convince himself that going home wasn’t worrying too much.
He set down the plastic bag hold his convenience store haul onto the coffee table, bottles of orange juice falling against cans of soup as he sat back on the couch next to the pile of blankets that wrapped around Joseph. The blankets shifted, and hand snaked out from under them, blindly patting around on the couch next to him until his hand hit Caesar’s leg. At that, the blankets were thrown off and Joseph was looking at him.
“It’s not even dark out-”
“Are you complaining?”
Joseph frowned at him, pulling the blankets back up, “No.”
“Did you sleep?”
Joseph stretched, leaning back into the couch, “I was trying to.”
“Sorry, did I interrupt you? I can still leave-” Caesar’s laugh was cut short by a pillow hitting his face, and when it fell he could see Joseph had turned away, the blankets pulled up over his shoulders.
“Are you going to answer?”
“Caesar,” Joseph sounded exasperated, as he threw himself back and over Caesar’s lap, “I’m tired. ”
“Don’t you need to eat?”
“Sleep sounds better.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to sleep in bed?”
“Caesar. ”
“Jojo,” Caesar struggled to hold back his smile, a laugh sitting in his chest.
“I know usually this is your catchphrase, but just shut up .”
Caesar shrugged, but it went unnoticed as Joseph closed his eyes and let his cheek rest on Caesar’s stomach. He dropped the remote into Caesar’s hand as soon as he felt him lean over to look for it, and after Caesar changed the channel to something less boring, they stayed like that. Joseph dozed off again, as Caesar chuckled at something that was nothing more than background noise to him, idly running his fingers through Joseph’s hair and feeling the fever, which had definitely not gotten better, still making his skin burn.
The TV faded away, and he started thinking. Maybe he should make Joseph get up and eat, or at least drink something. Was it better to just let him sleep? He had some experience nursing people back to health with his younger siblings, but back then it wasn’t like they really had the option of doing anything but sleeping it off.
Time slipped away faster and faster, hours going by with him and Joseph there on the couch, his hands idly running across Joseph’s face. A day off every now and then isn’t too bad, even if it’s just being lazy like this. Quiet moments like these were kind of hard to come by, when you were dating someone like Joseph. He didn’t dislike the playful banter, but times like these left his heart feeling lighter.
Just like the times when Joseph would lean against him in the subway and take his hand, dropping his head to Caesar’s shoulder and recounting all the pains in his classes that day. Or when Joseph would wake him up, in the middle of the night, a little bleary eyed but still definitely Jojo, babbling a quick “you know, I love you right?” And Caesar would laugh through his nose, looking at Joseph like he had just asked him if he knew the sky was blue. “Of course, and you know I love you too.”
Finally, Joseph shifted off of him, making Caesar’s trip down memory lane quickly detour into the present. He had been putting off getting up and being productive, the excuse of “I can’t wake up Joseph!” being easy to latch onto with him sprawled over his lap. Now that he had curled in on himself, away from Caesar’s lap, it was kind of hard to convince himself with that. After a bit of internal debate, trying to decide if he could waste just a couple more moments soaking in the silence, he stood up.
Whether Joseph woke up from the shift of the couch cushions, or from Caesar accidentally banging a cabinet open too loudly, no one knew, but he was awake either way. He looked over at Caesar, quietly heating up soup on their small stovetop.
“What time-,” his voice cracked, and he started over, “What time is it?” It seemed to just now be catching up to him that he hadn’t had anything to drink since that bottle of water that morning.
He leaned off of the couch, reaching into the plastic bag Caesar had left on the coffee table and retrieving a bottle of orange juice. It definitely wasn’t cold anymore, after sitting there for a few hours, but it was better than nothing. The warmth that clasped his heart after the thought that Caesar had bought it specifically for him was just an added bonus.
“It’s past seven.”
Caesar poured the soup into a bowl, forgoing using an oven mitt on the uninsulated handle and immediately regretting it. His grip slipped for a second, as he tried to fight the reflex to just drop the pot completely. He swept up the bowl and a spoon in his hands, deciding that maybe using a napkin to shield his palm this time would be a good idea.
Joseph looked expectant, but Caesar walked right past him and into the hallway. The huff of anguish from Joseph was followed quickly by the sound of him getting off of the couch and dragging all of the blankets with him. He dragged them along the floor, ignoring the nagging thought in the back of his head telling him Caesar would nag him about it later, intent on following Caesar.
He nearly tripped on the trail of blankets running by his feet, but managed to keep from falling as he turned and followed Caesar through the open door of their bedroom. He had all but forgotten Caesar’s comment about how he should sleep in bed instead of on the couch, but when Caesar walked to the far side of the bed and cocked his eyebrow at Joseph, he remembered.
“You could’ve let me eat first .”
“Yeah, and then you’d fall asleep immediately after, and when you woke up you would be complaining about how your back hurts, like the old man you are.”
“You’re older than me!” Joseph stalled his dramatic hand gestures to crawl on top of the bed and take the bowl of soup from Caesar, sticking his tongue out at him before sitting back.
“Plus, I wouldn’t be very happy sleeping alone.”
Joseph choked on his first spoonful of soup, and Caesar took a seat next to him on the bed, handing him the napkin that was left in his hand. Joseph had neglected to grab it, in his rush to take the food from Caesar.
“You know,” he wiped his mouth, “you could try being sweet when I don’t have boiling hot soup in my mouth.”
“Picky.”
Joseph rolled his eyes, deciding eating was a better option than replying. Canned chicken noodle soup wasn’t the best thing he had ever eaten, but at that moment he kind of doubted it. The headache that dully throbbed in the back of his mind wasn’t something he enjoyed, but everything else about that moment, he wished he could stretch it out.
It was dumb. They had moments like this every night, when Caesar came home from work. Joseph would pull his head out from the stacks of books and papers that had surrounded him, and he’d smile at Caesar. Caesar would commend him on actually doing some homework, his tone a mixture of teasing and genuine admiration. The energy to go back and forth wasn’t there for either of them, though, and soon they would both tumble into bed.
The difference this time was that they could soak in it for longer, even if Joseph had slept through most of the time Caesar was home. Caesar leaned over to pick up the blankets from the ground, frowning at them but letting Joseph forgo a lecture (for now). It couldn’t be too bad, he kept their floors pretty clean. That was what Joseph’s eyes were telling him at least, as he raised his eyebrow at Caesar.
Joseph finished his soup, setting down the bowl on the nightstand next to him, but with Caesar’s eyes narrowing at him he groaned and stood.
“You really are a tyrant.”
The trip to the kitchen and back didn’t take as long as he expected. Or maybe he was hurrying without realizing, crashing back into the warmth of the bed again only five minutes after leaving it. The blankets had been spread out over the bed in the time he had been gone, free of any dirt (though he didn’t expect any to be there, anyway.) Obviously, nothing was going to stay neat for very long when Joseph was involved, and he pulled the blankets up to throw them over both himself and Caesar. He heard Caesar sigh, but he didn’t say anything further.
“I never thought I’d be tired at before seven,” he admitted, leaning his back against the wall their bed was pushed up against. He looked down at Joseph, face buried in the mattress, snorting at the sight.
Before he could laugh too much, Joseph pulled on his arm until he moved to lay face to face with him. At this point, it was getting hard to even tell Joseph was sick. His face wasn’t burning hot anymore, and he seemed less fatigued and stumble-y than he had in the morning. Was it even possible to get over a fever in just one day?
“Are we going to break our tradition of a goodnight kiss?”
Caesar bit his lip, a habit he seemed to fall into whenever he actually thought about something. It was cute- Joseph thought it was cute.
“We can compromise,” he settled, kissing Joseph on the cheek before he could question it.
Joseph beamed, wrapping his arms around Caesar’s waist. “You’re really cute, you know?”
“I’ve been told,” Caesar chuckled, well past the stage in their relationship to get flustered at the simple compliments Joseph dropped. It was easy to fall asleep like that, Joseph’s arms around him and his resting on Joseph’s hip. Joseph’s heartbeat thrumming steadily, when Caesar moved to rest his head against his chest.
---
The morning came too fast, and Caesar awoke with a headache pounding all of the thoughts out of his head. He fumbled, finding the thermometer used yesterday still on their nightstand (washed off, of course.) Seconds felt like hours, and he would’ve fallen asleep with it still taking his temperature if Joseph hadn’t woken up to pull it away from him.
“Wow! Thirty nine, you’ve beaten me Caesar.”
