RUNNING HOT II (a multifandom fever!fic comment meme)

[ariadnes_string]

Colds, flu, infections, insect-borne pathogens. Poisons, curses, spells.

Chills, sweats, delirium, hallucinations.

Huddling for warmth. Cool cloths. Unanticipated handsiness.

Delirious confessions of love. Confessions of love while the other person is unconscious.

Repressed memories rising to the surface.

The possibilities are endless.

Comments

Proceedings Of Sherlock's Society Of Clinical Medicine, 3/?

[anonymous]

A week passed in much the same fashion: wracking fevers and chills every two days, exhausted sleep in between the bouts of delirium. When John was both awake and lucid, which was perhaps one hour out of every twenty-four, Sherlock was always there, applying a wet cloth if John was hot, lying next to John's shivering body and holding him if he was cold. And always talking, prattling on about his latest case, or about the unsolved case from years ago, the one with the malaria patient. Sometimes John envied the man, being free of the misery of this disease as well as of Sherlock's endless rambling that hurt his head.

He didn't feel Sherlock taking all those blasted blood samples (and if some of his fever dreams were to believed, there were ... other ... fluid samples being collected, dreams which he steadily ignored), but he could see a steadily growing collection of blood smears lined up in a neat row in a slide box next to Sherlock's microscope, fixed and stained blue-green-purple with giemsa. Once or twice when he managed to push off Sherlock and stumble to the loo under his own power, he saw a few printsouts of graphs of what he presumed to be data taken from his samples.

(Sherlock certainly believed in statistical rigor; all his plots showed error bars and confidence intervals.)

He dreamed of blood cells rupturing and Sherlock's hemoglobin compound swirling in his head and he tried to catch the cells in his too-small hands.

-

His fever broke after two weeks of misery. It was a rainy day and he was chilly and damp under the sheets. His skin was covered in a fine sheen of sweat but he woke clear-headed, if completely and utterly exhausted.

Sherlock was sitting by the bedside, a copy of the Proceedings Of The Royal Society Of Tropical Diseases being ignored on his lap as he texted someone madly. Lestrade, probably. Sherlock hated to show Mycroft any kind of urgency.

"Ah," he said. "Feeling human again?"

"Oh yes," John said, voice hoarse but coherant. "Please tell me you've got a case on. I'm so bored of the bed."

Sherlock gave him a smug smile, as if he'd known this would be John's first coherant thought after recovery. "As a matter of fact, I've got some evidence that needs to be taken into Scotland Yard. Bring it over, will you? There's cab money in the skull."

John all but leaped out of the bed.