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It came in waves.
Anthony breached consciousness by degrees, clawing upward through fever-thick delirium until the room finally assembled around him in fractured pieces: the mattress sagging beneath him, sheets twisted around his legs like restraints, dark corners swollen with shadow. A lamp on the nightstand leaked a bruise-coloured amber across the walls, dim and sickly.
Sweat slicked his body in rivulets, threading down his throat and pooling in his collarbone while a deeper heat raged beneath, furnace-hot and merciless. His loose shirt adhered to his back in damp strips, clammy as a second skin.
Breathing hurt; each inhale scraped through his lungs like glass. He swallowed against the raw butchered ache in his throat and forced his eyes open wider, fighting the viscous drag of exhaustion. The ceiling hovered above him, tilting in nauseating revolutions, the plaster seeming to bend and warp at the edges. He shut his eyes before the vertigo could spill over into sickness—
—and trumpets detonated through him.
The sound crashed through him, through memory and whatever lived deeper, some primordial instinct old enough to recognise annihilation long before humanity ever forged a word for fear. Anthony convulsed against the mattress with a strangled gasp as white light swallowed everything whole. An infinite, ravenous radiance flooded across his vision until the world ceased to exist. There was only white, blinding and immaculate and absolute.
Heat struck all at once—catastrophic, holy, unbearable. Pillars of gold vanished upward into forever while fractures of incandescent light split the sky apart seam by seam, great glowing fissures spiderwebbing through eternity itself. And he was falling.
Stars, he was falling.
Down through shrieking wind sharp enough to pare flesh from bone, his body spun violently through the abyss, helpless beneath the sheer velocity of the fall. Something vast dragged behind him, heavy and ruined and wrong—
wrongwrongwrong
Its weight wrenched at his spine with sickening force, unbalanced and broken. He felt it thrashing in the slipstream, felt the grotesque pull of ruined joints and torn sinew, so he twisted instinctively, and agony detonated across his back. A white-hot rupture tore through him so violently that he felt vertebrae grind, felt tendons strain to snapping.
Wings. Burning wings.
Great ruined appendages lashed behind him in ragged arcs, skeletal and colossal, their span impossible, feathers igniting one by one. Fire consumed them from the pinions inward, racing along blackened quills and exposed ligature with hungry brilliance. The smell hit next: scorched ivory, charred blood, ozone and lightning. Every frantic movement ripped fresh torment through his body as the wings convulsed uselessly against the fall, too damaged to catch the air, too ruined to save him.
He was plummeting with the corpse of something holy strapped to his back.
Anthony awoke choking on air. He lurched upright in bed with a gasp, hands clawing at the sheets as though he’d surfaced from deep water. He was back in the bedroom, pulse hammering hard enough to burst, but something was still wrong. Something was missing. He pressed a trembling hand to his chest. It felt empty. Something enormous had once lived inside him, bright and endless and as intrinsic as breath, woven through every vein, every thought, everything his body had ever known.
And now it was gone. Taken.
He doubled over with a strangled sound, fingers digging hard into his chest as though he could tear himself open and retrieve whatever had been ripped away. Grief crashed through him without source or context, immense enough to drown reason.
Anthony squeezed his eyes shut hard enough to hurt, and immediately the white light was back, and there were hands grappling at him, and then…absence, but for a violent, tearing scream.
Was that him?
Anthony lurched awake so violently pain cracked through his neck. The room reeled around him. Too hot. Stars, he was burning alive. The blankets tangled around his legs felt suffocating; he kicked weakly at them even as his body shivered with cold anyway.
Pressure gathered suddenly along his spine and every muscle locked. His back arched instinctively, body straining to bear weight that no longer existed, a phantom agony ripping between his shoulder blades.
Burning feathers—he could smell them. Ash and smoke and stormfire. Anthony curled onto his side with a shattered sound trapped halfway in his throat. Around him, the room seemed to flicker between reality and nightmare, the transitions coming in brutal epileptic flashes.
Bedroom.
Void.
Bedroom.
Falling.
Bed—
Falling—
The door opened and Anthony flinched violently, panic striking before recognition could. Horror that they were here, they were going to hurt him, the torture he instinctively knew he was about to endure…
A silhouette crossed the room, too bright around the edges. Anthony shoved himself backward, heart slamming against his ribs. “Don’t—”
His voice split apart, barely coherent, and the figure stopped immediately.
Anthony couldn’t drag enough air into his lungs. The room warped at the edges again, lamplight stretched gold-white, walls became towering pillars. Trumpets roared, the triumphant chorus of war. Something inside his chest twisted, then tore. Like molten hooks dragging through the centre of him strand by burning strand. The pain transcended physical sensation entirely; it was spiritual vivisection. The brutal extraction of something sacred. He clawed at his chest desperately, fingernails scraping hard enough to leave crescent welts through his sweat-soaked shirt.
The figure moved closer carefully. The figure moved closer carefully. Warm fingers closed around his wrist—gold light, pale robes, horrified eyes—Anthony lashed out blindly.
“No!” The words ripped from him raw with terror. “Don’t look at me! Don't touch me!”
Anthony knew that there was something monstrous about him now. Something ruined. Defiled. Something they would recoil from if they truly saw it.
The figure faltered. “Anthony?”
Warmth. Safety. Dusty bookshelves drenched in sunlight. Gentleness so profound it ached. Anthony squeezed his eyes shut again.
That was a mistake. Instantly he was back in fire devouring blackened feathers, wings splitting apart under white-hot fractures, light dragged from his ribs in searing threads. He folded inward with a sharp gasp, arms wrapping around himself as if he could physically keep from coming apart. Something was being taken. Something sacred.
The mattress dipped carefully beside him. Anthony trembled violently, everything blurring into pain; grief, terror, devotion, a longing so old it felt fossilised inside him. It all coalesced until his head felt too compressed with sensation, as though his skull might crack open.
The trumpets still echoed somewhere far away. There was another flash, more endless dark rushing up to swallow him whole, yet now there was also someone reaching after him through fire anyway. Whoever that figure was, he loved them with devotion so enduring it felt older than worlds.
It was someone he would follow willingly to the end of creation.
“Angel?”
It had started three days ago with a cough, and not even a bad one, at that.
Anthony had woken late on Tuesday morning with a rough voice and a faint crease between his eyebrows, already irritable before coffee. He’d brushed it off immediately as just a cold, as one does. By noon he was sniffling constantly, wrapped in one of his old black jumpers despite the cottage being frightfully warm. Asa had at one point caught him standing in front of the open fridge staring blankly inside like he’d forgotten what he was looking for.
“You’re sick,” they’d said.
Anthony had rolled his eyes without looking up from the milk carton. “I have a wee cold.”
By evening the cough had deepened. Not terribly, but enough that Asa heard it through the bathroom door while brushing their teeth. Anthony had gone to bed earlier than usual, which alone was enough to worry them. Still, the next morning he’d insisted on getting up, and that was when Asa knew something was definitely wrong.
Anthony never slowed down willingly; he pushed through migraines, exhaustion, stress, everything. But Wednesday morning he’d sat at the kitchen table staring at untouched toast like the effort of chewing was too much, his face was flushed dark with fever and his hands shaking around the mug Asa had handed to him. And beneath the irritation, beneath the stubbornness, there was a strange unfocused quality to him that Asa didn’t like at all.
“You should call the doctors.”
“I’m not dyin’, angel.”
“You can barely sit upright!”
Anthony had glared at them weakly over the rim of his coffee, then immediately dissolved into coughing hard enough to fold himself in half.
By afternoon the fever hit properly, and when it did, it climbed viciously and fast. One moment he was sweating through his shirt insisting he was fine, the next he was shivering so hard his teeth clicked together audibly under three blankets. Then came the vomiting, which frightened Asa more than the fever, because Anthony could barely keep even water down. Every attempt to drink ended the same way, with nausea rolling over him within minutes, leaving him pale, shaking, and exhausted afterward.
By Wednesday night he could hardly stand without swaying. Asa had found him sitting on the bathroom floor at two in the morning, cheek pressed against the edge of the bathtub, too drained to move; that had been the first real spike of fear, the cold realisation that they were not twenty-five anymore, and flu hit differently in your fifties.
Anthony’s breathing had grown rougher by Thursday morning, a horrific rattling in his chest. He drifted in and out of sleep most of the day, sometimes lucid enough to mutter sarcastic complaints when Asa forced electrolyte drinks into his hands, sometimes so feverish he barely seemed aware of where he was.
The dreams started sometime that afternoon, too. At first it was just restlessness. Tossing, muttering under his breath, his face twisting with discomfort. But then he started saying things.
“...too bright…”
“...don’t…”
“...falling…”
“...my wings…”
By Thursday evening, his temperature had climbed high enough that Asa nearly called emergency services outright. Anthony had talked them down with the little coherence he still had left, pale and sweating beneath the blankets.
“I’m alright,” he’d rasped, which was a blatant lie.
Eventually the fever medication dragged him into deeper sleep. Asa sat beside him another hour anyway, watching the rise and fall of his chest, listening to the rasp of his breath. Only when Anthony finally seemed at peace did they leave the room.
They made a tea they didn’t drink and attempted to read a book in Bentley's room next-door despite the chaos of their anxious mind. Eventually, a muffled sound from the bedroom caught their attention. Another sound followed, louder. A cry, raw enough to send ice through them.
They were moving before thinking.
When they opened the bedroom door, they found Anthony thrashing violently across the sheets. The blankets had tangled around his legs and sweat darkened his ginger hair at the temples, his face flushed with fever so high it frightened Asa on sight. He looked trapped inside something awful, breath coming in ragged gasps.
His eyes were glazed but open, and they seemed to scream as they washed over Asa.
“Don't!” Anthony gasped, throwing himself backwards, almost painfully colliding with the headboard.
Heart breaking clean in two, Asa moved forward anyway, aware that fevers of this temperature could cause vivid hallucinations. Whatever Anthony was seeing, it wasn't his partner, and Asa had to do something to soothe him. As they came closer, they thought that perhaps the touch of their hand might ground him back into reality, so they closed one around his thin wrist.
The response was immediate and devastating.
“No! Don’t look at me!” He cried and recoiled, eyes wild and terrified. “Don't touch me!”
For a second, Asa simply stood there, hands half-raised and then slowly lowering again as if they weren’t entirely sure what to do with them. Their heart was hammering too hard, not from fear of Anthony, but from the way he had looked at them.
Anthony was still shaking apart on the bed. He looked utterly unreachable.
Asa swallowed once. They had seen delirium before; the confusion, even the fear. But there was something in Anthony’s expression that didn’t feel like simple disorientation. It felt like he was seeing something layered over reality, something that didn’t belong in this room. A cold thread of dread moved through Asa’s chest before they could stop it.
They forced themselves to breathe more evenly, to ground their attention in what they could actually act on. Temperature. Hydration. Safety. He was burning up, he was hallucinating, he was frightened. That was all.
They licked their dry lips. “Anthony?”
Anthony looked horrified, though not fully aware of what he’d done. His eyes darted frantically around the room like he was seeing something Asa couldn’t, then they squeezed shut hard enough to crease his whole face with pain. This seemed to only make things worse; another broken sob pulled from him as he curled tighter into himself, shaking violently now despite the sweat soaking through his shirt.
Asa sat carefully on the edge of the mattress again, gentler this time, afraid to spook him. Anthony, still gasping for breath, appeared to settle a little, eyes blinking open. They seemed a little more focused as his head tilted a fraction, as if trying to locate something familiar in the space between them. “Angel?”
“Yes, my darling, I'm here,” Asa tried not to burst into tears as they instinctively placed a hand to Anthony’s forehead. “You’ve a mighty fever, and it is causing some distressing dreams, but you're okay, my dear. You're safe, and you're with me. I won't let anything hurt you.”
Anthony trembled harder beneath their hand.
“No,” he whispered, voice cracking apart. “Something’s—”
He stopped abruptly, breath hitching sharply like pain had interrupted the sentence halfway through. Asa could feel heat radiating off him even through the blankets—far too hot. They reached for the glass of water on the bedside table instead, helping Anthony sit up just enough to get a few small sips into him. Even that seemed difficult; his hands shook so badly Asa ended up holding the glass themselves.
Anthony’s eyes stayed lidded the entire time, tracking things that weren’t there. At one point he stared past Asa’s shoulder with sudden naked horror flooding his expression, then his gaze snapped back to them and softened into something so heartbreakingly vulnerable it made their chest ache.
Disorientation flickered visibly across his face. Like he knew them, like he didn’t. Like for one impossible second he’d mistaken them for someone else entirely.
Asa brushed damp hair back from his forehead carefully. “It’s alright.”
Anthony leaned weakly toward the touch, whimpering, “...angel…”
They slid one arm firmly around his shaking shoulders and pulled him against their chest despite the heat pouring off him. At first Anthony resisted, but exhaustion won. The tension slowly bled out of him in uneven increments, though his breathing remained shaky. Every few minutes another twitch ran through him like he was still falling through whatever nightmare had him trapped, but eventually he stopped trying to pull away. Asa held him tighter every time he flinched.
“It’s okay,” they kept murmuring into his sweat-damp hair. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
Anthony woke slowly, surfacing through layers of exhaustion thick enough to feel cloying. For a few long seconds he simply lay there, eyes closed, listening to rain tapping softly against the windows, feeling the cool sheets against his damp skin and the warm body beside him.
No fever, it seemed. Oh, his skin still felt oversensitive, his head heavy and aching, but the violent, consuming heat must have broken sometime during the night. In its place was the miserable weakness of aching muscles, a raw throat, and a tiredness deep enough to settle his bones. He exhaled shakily, and something about the movement hurt emotionally, causing him to frown faintly without opening his eyes.
There was… something. A feeling lingering at the edges, like an aftermath. He recalled, vaguely, an all-consuming terror, or grief, or perhaps both. Followed quickly by the sickening sensation of falling. Anthony’s stomach turned abruptly and he opened his eyes at once.
The cottage bedroom greeted him, with its wooden ceiling beams and floral wallpaper, the window nook overstuffed with pillows and the sill overflowing with plants and books. Home. He was home. And Asa was asleep beside him.
One arm remained loosely around Anthony’s waist, their head tipped awkwardly against the headboard at an angle that absolutely had to be destroying their neck. Anthony stared blearily for a moment, a strange ache spreading through his chest. Then another fragment surfaced suddenly—white light, trumpets, hands reaching toward him—Anthony flinched instinctively.
The motion woke Asa immediately, their eyes opening wide with panic before they locked with Anthony's. Something must have calmed them, because they breathed, “thank the stars.”
“You look awful,” Anthony mumbled hoarsely; and it was sort of true, that Asa had large dark circles beneath their eyes and their usually neat hair was sticking up at odd angles, though it was also true that they still looked utterly gorgeous.
Asa just laughed before pressing their knuckles against his sticky but cool forehead. “The fever broke, thank goodness. You really frightened me last night, my comet.”
“Did I?” he grimaced.
“You don’t remember?”
Anthony swallowed hard. “Not properly.”
“You were hallucinating a bit,” they said, voice gentle. “High fever.”
Anthony stared at the blankets, embarrassment crawling beneath his skin. “Sorry.”
“Anthony.” The immediate firmness in Asa’s voice made him glance up automatically. “You do not apologise for having the flu. How are you feeling now?”
“Less dead than yesterday.” he informed them, stretching their long limbs until something cracked. “Needed that sleep, could've slept for a century.”
Unfortunately, the tugging on his stomach caused by elongating his entire body seemed to remind him that he was still unwell, despite being over the worst of it. Nausea rolled through him with vicious speed, and he went pale instantly.
“Oh, no…” Asa gasped, moving backwards and grabbing the bucket by the end just in time for Anthony to vomit up what little water he'd managed in the night.
And then some more, and a bit more, until all he could do was dry heave miserably, eyes watering and lips wobbling. Asa retrieved fresh water and a damp cloth without a word of complaint.
“Small sips,” they instructed gently. Anthony obeyed this time without argument. He simply didn’t have the energy.
This time, the water stayed down. When Asa pressed the cool, wet cloth against the back of his neck, he nearly melted outright. A weak noise escaped him before dignity could intervene.
Asa smiled “Better?”
“Mm.” he mumbled, leaning into their soft, comforting body.
He didn't mean to start crying. The exhaustion had hollowed him out too thoroughly for pride to sit properly anymore, but still, some stubborn part of him recoiled instinctively from the possibility. He was fifty-one years old. He had spent the better part of three days insisting this was ‘just a cold’ while actively dying on the sofa. Crying about it now felt absurd, so when the first tear slipped unexpectedly down his cheek, Anthony honestly felt confused by it. Another followed immediately after.
“Oh,” he whispered.
Asa looked down at him at once, and Anthony turned his face away, humiliated.
“It’s fine,” he muttered.
Which, unfortunately, only made it worse, because the second the words left his mouth, something inside him seemed to give way completely. A broken breath escaped him, then another.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Asa murmured.
That did it—Anthony made a small helpless sound and covered his face weakly with one hand, shoulders tightening abruptly as the tears finally broke loose in earnest. The bed shifted and Asa’s arms were around him properly, embracing him so that he could collapse into their chest. He folded against them with a shaky exhale, forehead pressed against the warm curve of their shoulder while the crying worsened embarrassingly fast. Gasping hiccups, agonising sobs. Utterly mortifying.
“It’s okay,” they whispered into his hair. “Oh, my dearest love. It’s alright.”
Anthony shook his head weakly. He couldn’t have explained why he was crying if asked. Everything simply felt too large suddenly.
“I’m sorry,” he panted through grating inhales.
Asa immediately leaned back just enough to look at him properly. Their thumb brushed carefully beneath one of his eyes, catching tears as they fell. “No. None of that. Hush, now. I've got you.”
They stroked slowly up and down his spine while he cried himself empty. Patient, loving. Comfort incarnate.
“I feel ridiculous.” he mumbled once the worst of the tears had abated.
“You have a fever-broken flu and haven’t eaten properly in three days,” Asa informed him. “It’s no wonder you're a tad emotional. Just be quiet and let me love you.”
Despite himself, a weak watery laugh escaped him. Their fingers slid gently into his hair, scratching lightly against his scalp in the exact absentminded way Anthony loved even when healthy.
“Sleep helped,” Asa said after a while. “Your fever’s broken. You’re keeping water down now. You’re through the worst of it; perhaps we could try you with the chicken soup I made yesterday?”
Anthony nodded, unable to form words. He felt emotionally flayed open, as though the fever had burned straight through whatever barriers usually kept him functioning. Asa didn’t seem bothered by that vulnerability at all—if anything, they only held him more carefully because of it.
They kissed his crown and hummed some old tune, lulling him back into a dreamless sleep.
It had taken three days of escalating illness, one terrifying night of delirium, and more fear than Asa cared to examine too closely, but Anthony was no longer pretending this was ‘just a wee cold.’ He was ill. Undeniably, properly, body-wringing ill. And, at last, he had stopped fighting the simple fact of being cared for.
Asa kept their face composed as they guided another spoonful of chicken soup to his mouth, but internally there was something uncomfortably close to satisfaction about it. Not at his suffering, obviously, but at the fact that he was here, present, no longer burning up alone in the blaze of his own obstinacy.
“Good boy,” they murmured as he swallowed.
Anthony made a faint noise that might once have been an innuendo in better health; now it barely had weight behind it. Asa adjusted the blanket around his shoulders with, tucking it higher when it slipped, then pressed a loving kiss into his ginger hair. Once the soup was gone, they set the empty bowl aside and reached for the medication without breaking rhythm.
“Two tablets,” they said, holding the glass of water ready.
Anthony frowned, already predictably resistant out of habit rather than energy. “I took something earlier.”
“Yes,” Asa replied calmly. “And now it has been four hours, so you're taking these. Go on.”
He took them without further commenting, throat working as the powdery capsules slipped down his throat. The television played in the background, something comforting and old involving time travel and aliens, but neither of them were really watching it. Anthony’s breathing had begun to even out properly now. Yes, the fever had broken overnight, but this was the first time Asa could actually feel the aftermath settling; the cough, the dehydration, the deep physical depletion—it was all easing inexorably.
He was shivering slightly still, so Asa tightened the blanket around him again without being asked. “You’re freezing.”
“Mmm,” Anthony replied vaguely, eyes half-closed.
Asa shifted slightly to get more comfortable. One hand went to his hair automatically, fingers carding in repetitive strokes, a liturgy of care that they knew helped ground him even if he wasn’t fully aware of it. Anthony’s hand found Asa’s wrist under the blanket a moment later, holding on loosely, and Asa covered his hand with their own.
Just…held him. Scraped nails against his scalp and kissed his temple intermittently, all whilst holding him close. Anthony had said, at some point between fever and fatigue, that he felt like he was falling. So, Asa would catch him, even if it was metaphorical. He would always catch him, and hold him, and keep him from harm.