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The thing about Iceman is that he never gets sick. Or at least he thought he didn’t. Most of the time it was just a cold. Most of the time he jut felt a little bit more tired for a couple of days, then he was back to normal.
This was not one of those times.
His head felt like it was about to explode as he sat in Viper’s lesson on Monday, it was boring and he couldn’t concentrate. Or breathe properly, for that matter. Viper’s slow drawl was needling his ears and he couldn’t think straight.
After what seemed like three hours, but in reality was only half of one, the break had finally arrived. He needed to go, everything was seemingly attacking his head.
“Mav,” Ice nudges him. “I’m gonna go, I can’t brea- uh- concentrate,” The lights were too bright. “Can you tell Sli and Viper?”
“Yeah sure,” Maverick smiles a little from beside him.
“Thanks,” Ice stands up, blinking hard to offset the shine of the lights. “I’ll see you later,”
Maverick nods at him.
He needed to get out of there, he felt rough, but it would pass in a day, wouldn’t it? He’d be fine for tomorrow. Anyway, it was Hop 31, he didn’t want to miss going up there with Maverick and Goose.
Fresh air and no mindless talking or writing was what he needed in him right now.
But not five minutes from leaving the classroom, Maverick appears beside him.
“You going home?”
“Yeah,” he stops, looking at the shorter aviator next to him.
“Because..?”
“I feel a little… under the weather,” The biggest understatement of the month, and that was saying something, since it was the 28th.
“You’re sick?”
“No,”
Maverick lowers his eyebrows. “Yes you are,”
“No I’m not,”
“You just said you can’t breathe,” Maverick says. “I’m coming with you whether you like it or not,”
“Mav- I don’t-” he exhales, proving Maverick’s point. “I’m fine,”
“You don’t leave your wingman,” he says. “That includes the times when he’s sick. Now come on,”
There was no arguing with Maverick, he’d never win against him, not in his state, so he sighs and keeps walking on, with him at his side.
When they get to Ice’s apartment, Maverick gets a hold of Ice’s arm and gently pulls him to the bedroom.
“Go on, get in bed,”
“Since when are you looking after me?” Ice raises an eyebrow.
“Since you said you had to leave, now go on,”
“No, Mav I don’t need to go to bed,” Maverick was treating him like a child, and he didn’t know if he hated it or not.
Maverick sighs. “Ice, come on, yes you do, you’re ill- get in bed,”
“It’s just a cold,” he replies as he reluctantly sits on the bed. “I’ll be okay in a day,”
He narrows his eyes. “Suree. Tell me that tomorrow,”
“I will be, Mav,”
Maverick hangs around Ice’s apartment until six, when he leaves, still unsure if Ice was infact, well, as opposed to his persistent conformations that he was. Ice however, spends half of the night awake with a headache and a throat made out of sandpaper that would not go away no matter how many pints of water he drank.
~~~
Ice’s alarm goes off at 6am, and he realises he still feels awful the moment he opens his eyes. If he was being honest, he feels worse than he did the day before. He’d managed to have a shower before he went to bed last night too, so at least he didn’t feel gross. His head was thumping, and the cough that tickled the back of his throat turned out to be attached to ten others, which were the kind of coughs that felt like they were ripping up your windpipe.
He was going to miss Hop 31. He was going to have to call in sick and stay in bed the whole day, then Slider would laugh about the fact that he’s finally fallen ill and it’s on the day he was going to go up with Maverick and Goose; and Maverick would have to go up with someone else or not at all. Ice groans as he makes his way to the phone and dials in the first number on his mind, which happened to be Maverick’s.
Please pick up and please don’t laugh. He thinks as he listens to it ringing, holding himself up with his left hand, which was trembling even though much of the weight of his torso was not going through it. He was sick.
“Uh-huh?” Maverick’s voice comes through on the other side of the line.
“Mav,” His voice sounded exactly like how his throat felt.
“Yeah?”
“Uh.. can you.. come over here?”
“Are you sicker than you were?” he asks.
Ice closes his eyes. “Yeah, now please can you get over here,”
“Alright alright, I’ll tell Goose there’s no Hop 31 for us,”
“You can go up- don’t- don’t not do it if I’m... not there,”
“Ice, I want to do the hop with you, now get off the phone, I’ll be there in ten,”
He exhales as much as he can. “Okay,”
“Okay, bye bye,”
Maverick puts the phone down and Ice tries to take deep breaths, putting the phone back on it’s holder and dragging himself to the kitchen sink to get himself another glass of water.
Maverick was true to his word, for once in his life. Ice only moved from the kitchen to wrap a blanket around himself, he was cold, and he sits on the sofa until the bell rings, precisely ten minutes after he put the phone down.
“Thanks Mav,” Ice says as he opens the door to a slightly amused Maverick. “Don’t laugh,”
He was going to say something along the lines of ‘I told you so’, but as soon as he looks at Ice, a blanket wrapped around him, eyes narrowed against the sun and shivering in the late July heat, he decides against it and falls into his own Mother Goose mode. “I wasn’t going to,”
Ice sniffs and tries to clear his throat, stepping back to let Maverick in.
“Go back to bed Kazansky,” Maverick says once Ice shuts the door, “I’ll get you the stuff you need,”
This time, he doesn’t need to be asked twice.
The light he turned on in his room was just about burning his eyes, so he switches it off and sits back on the bed, trying to catch his breath and not cough, but the more he holds it in, the more the tightness in his chest wants to burst out.
Maverick comes in and sees him clutching his chest, still just about sitting up, almost unable to carry on coughing. “Oh Ice...” he says quietly as he goes round to sit beside him.
“..God- dammit,” Ice gets out as the coughs begin to subside. His throat now felt like a desert, and it hurt to swallow.
“Here, have this,” Maverick holds out the glass of water with his right hand he brought from his kitchen, rubbing his left on Ice’s back.
“Thank you,” Ice sniffs, gratefully taking the water from him and sipping it.
He smiles, putting it back on the table beside them once Ice had drunk as much of it as he could. “Have you taken any paracetamol?”
“...I took one last night,”
“But any today?”
He shakes his head. His mind was so preoccupied by the fact he was going to miss the hop that he’d not taken anything to help himself. Not getting ill often meant he was awful at swallowing pills.
“Lucky your saviour is here then,” Maverick smirks a little, leaning over to the side.
“Saviour?” Ice raises his eyebrows.
“Yup,” he replies, holding the paracetamol and the water out to him.
Ice eyes the innocent white pills for a second before taking them, and painfully swallowing them one at a time. “Yuck,”
“Yuck?”
“Yeah?” He looks at him, giving him the now almost empty glass. “I hate swallowing pills,”
Maverick chuckles softly, “Likewise,”
Ice runs his hand through his hair just as a shiver runs through him.
“You can lay down you know, there’s no judgement here,”
He manages a sort of smile as he shifts to lay down properly, absent-mindedly leaning his head closer to Maverick. He was warm, Ice was not, so he could justify it that way.
“How did you think you were okay?” Maverick asks, gently testing his forehead with the backs of his fingers. “That fever’s insane,”
Ice sighs. “I don’t get sick.. very easily,”
“I can tell,” he gets the cloth he ran under the tap. “Hold on, this’ll be cold,”
He flinches as Maverick lays it on his forehead. “Woah oh my god- you could say that again-”
“I’m sorry,” he replies, smiling.
“You don’t have to stay here, y’know,”
“Oh I think I do. Plus, I already called Viper and told him about how you won’t be able to do the hop, and that I was gonna be over here,”
“Mav- you didn’t have to do that,” he replies, looking at him as best as he could from where he was laying.
“What did I say yesterday?”
Ice shrugs. “I don’t know,”
“This fever’s really got you good, huh,” he pauses. “I said you don’t leave your wingman, even- in fact- especially when he’s sick. And since we were gonna be flying together today anyway, who am I to let you suffer through this on your own?”
Somehow, Maverick’s words get to him. It wasn’t the usual cocky and arrogant kind of stuff he said, it was kind and caring. And if Ice was being honest, he almost didn’t think Maverick had it in him. But oh he was wrong. Obviously at least a little of Goose’s caring nature must’ve rubbed off on him. “You surprise me, Mitchell,” he says slowly.
“I do?”
Ice nods slightly, half not wanting to dislodge Maverick’s hand from his head, and half not wanting to say anything more than he had to. “I thought you were too.. full of yourself- for this,”
“There’s more to me than meets the eye,” he replies, he sounds honest.
“Like..?” Ice genuinely wanted to know.
“You want me to tell you my deepest secrets?”
“No, no. I was just…” he looks back at his hands. “Just curious,”
“Oh,” Maverick replies. “Well in that case, I.. I mostly prefer cold showers, especially in summer, I like the ocean a lot, and uh, I don’t always mean to come off as arrogant, I’ll have you know,”
“You don’t?”
“No,” Maverick shakes his head. “I also have tried to.. spin a pen like you have, but,”
“You kept dropping it?”
“Mhm,”
“I know, I saw,”
“You weren’t supposed t- wait, you were watching me?”
Whoops. “Uh, maybe,”
“Icee,”
“Mavv,” He says. “I could teach you if I wasn’t feeling so terrible,”
This piques his interest. “You would?”
“Yeah,”
Maverick smiles, running his other hand through Ice’s hair, pushing it back as he re-adjusts the cloth.
Ice doesn’t say anything, his mind was slowing down and he could only feel Maverick’s fingers through his hair.
“I told you you were sick, Kazansky,” Maverick says quietly.
“Shut up Mav,” his words were blending together.
Maverick smirks, still with his hands in Ice’s hair.
Ice might be sick, and maybe he wasn’t used to doing nothing and letting himself be taken care of, but if Maverick was taking care of him, that was okay. He was never going to admit that, but just in case it happened again, he’d want Maverick to look after him.
It was strange, being so distant from him and yet he was around in a flash to help. Ice wasn’t expecting him to even go out after him the day before, let alone turn up when he had called him in the morning. Ice doesn’t even know why he called Maverick to come round. Obviously this fever had got him good, as he had said.
Right now though, he felt too awful to do anything except lay there and not talk, concentrating on Maverick’s hands in his hair.