ealdor

leveragehunters:

For @kiriei, who has a cold (warning for frank and frequent discussions
of snot, wildly inaccurate discussions of physics, and fluff).

It’s Snot Funny

“I think there’s a wormhole in my sinuses,” Steve
pressed a finger between his eyes and poked, like he was trying to feel for it,
“that leads to the snot dimension.”

Bucky didn’t laugh. He wasn’t going to laugh. He wasn’t
going to… He burst out laughing and had to quickly put Steve’s soup on the
bedside table before it spilled. “There’s not,” he managed to get out,
“a wormhole to the snot dimension
in your sinuses.”

The wounded baby deer look Steve turned on him, all big, fever
bright eyes and confusion, made him sit on the edge of the bed and gently run
his fingers through Steve’s sweaty hair. “How do you know?” Steve
whispered, pressing into Bucky’s touch like a cat.

“Trust me, sweetheart.” He brushed his metal thumb
across Steve’s cheek, leaned in and kissed his forehead. Steve’s skin was too
warm and clammy under his lips, but the way he briefly closed his eyes, the tiny ghost
of a smile, made it worth it. “Sit up and drink your soup.”

“Okay.” Steve shuffled around and Bucky
rearranged the covers, tucking a pillow behind him, pulling him
forward a bit to wrap another blanket around his shoulders before letting him
lean back and pressing the mug into his hands. “S’good,” he said
after taking a sip.

“It’s just the kind you pour boiling water into.”

Steve lifted one shoulder. “Still good.” He sipped
his soup slowly, because Bucky knew his throat was sore, gazing into it contemplatively.
He had to stop several times to blow his nose, staring in disgusted betrayal at
each tissue before hurling it into the garbage can.

Bucky settled next to him, leaning against the headboard, one
ankle hooked over Steve’s leg, humming quietly under his breath. However you
measured it—time, life, experiences—it had been a long time since Bucky had looked
after a sick Steve, and back then it’d been a lot scarier, the outcome potentially
so much more dire, if Bucky had failed.

It sucked like hell that Steve was sick, but it was, at the
end of the day, just a cold. A nasty, horrible, can’t-take-anything-for-it-because-nothing-works-on-Steve
cold, but just a cold. And it was kind of nice to look after him. It was kind of
nice that Steve was letting him
without putting up a fight.

“I don’t understand,” Steve said, draining the
last of his soup.

Bucky plucked the mug from his hands and set it on the bedside
table. “Understand what?”

Steve blew his nose for one minutes and thirty seven seconds
(Bucky timed it), going through four tissues, before answering. “Isn’t
there some rule about not creating new stuff?”

“What?”

“You know, you can’t just make new stuff. Everything has
to come from something.” Steve’s eyes were fever bright and he was staring
intently at Bucky, like he was willing him to understand.

After a minute in which Bucky racked his brain, trying to
twist it into a Steve-with-a-fever configuration, he asked, “Are you
talking about the law of conservation of mass?”

“Maybe? Is that the one that means something can’t just
get made out of nothing?”

“Uh, sort of.”

“Then yes. Bucky, my body’s violating the laws of
physics. It’s making snot out of nothing. I don’t think it should do that.”

“It’s not—”

“It’s snot.” Steve grinned at him.

Bucky rolled his eyes. “It’s not, it’s,” he paused, because he had no idea why or how the
body produced snot, “look, I don’t know what it’s making it out of, but
it’s not making it out of nothing.” Steve looked dubious. “Come
here.” He wrapped his arm around Steve and pulled him into his side.

Steve half-heartedly tried to resist. “I’m all gross.
I’ll make you sick.”

“Not like you bein’ gross is anything new,” he
said with a grin and Steve weakly punched his arm. “And you can’t make me
sick. It was just dumb luck you got sick. Bad timing you got exposed to a cold
virus in the, what, ten minutes that HYDRA bullshit ray affected you.”

“But the snot.”

He bit down on a laugh and kissed the top of Steve’s head.
“I don’t care about the snot.”

“But this is super soldier snot.” Steve went
quiet, punctuated only by more nose blowing and more glaring fiercely at what
Bucky had to agree were frankly disgusting tissues. “Maybe it’s a
side-effect of the serum. I can throw the shield and run faster than a car and,
you know, beat up an entire army. And I can produce rivers of snot. Lakes of snot. Oceans
of snot.”

It was said in his best, most earnest, I am Captain America voice, but it kept cracking like a kid going
through puberty and it was so ridiculous
Bucky was shaking with the effort of not laughing.

“You’re laughing at me.”

“Yeah, I am,” Bucky admitted, “but only a
bit.”

“Fair enough.” Steve closed his eyes and curled
closer to Bucky and Bucky wrapped himself around him as best he could. It
wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, being sick didn’t change Steve
from being a mountain of hard muscle, but he didn’t care. He made sure the box
of tissues was on the bed, where Steve could reach them, and bundled the covers
more firmly around him.

Steve was starting to drift off when he mumbled, “Imagine
if a dragon got a cold, living in his cave on top of a mountain. He’d get to
eat so many people.” Bucky wasn’t sure Steve even knew what he was saying,
but he gave a quiet, questioning hum. “‘cause travellers would be, ‘You
said there was not a dragon up here’ just before the dragon chowed down on them.
And the villagers would be, ‘No, we said there was a snot dragon’.” Bucky
stared down at Steve, bemused, gently stroking his back. “We’d probably
have to go and stop him, though. Can’t let a dragon just eat people, even if he’s
got a cold and I feel sorry for him.”

“It’s okay, Steve. Dragons aren’t real, so you don’t
need to worry about it.”

“I’ve got a wormhole to the snot dimension in my
sinuses. I think dragons could be real.”

Bucky gazed up at the ceiling, deeply amused and overwhelmed
with a sudden rush of pure love for
the sick idiot nestled against his chest. “Go to sleep, Steve. You’ll feel
better when you wake up.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”