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Michael didn't get sick.
He said so on many occasions, usually when Fi or Sam or Maddie were sick with some bug or other, and when they glared at him, as they always did, he'd ask them if they had ever considered eating more yogurt.
Fi had sworn on at least three occasions that when he did get sick, properly sick and not shot and run over and on the verge of dying sick, she was going to force so much yogurt down him he wouldn't want to touch the stuff again. She usually said it while she was weakly trying to shove him off her bed (being sick made her solitary and violent, like a hibernating bear) and coughing or breathing in his face in an attempt to infect him (being sick also made her particularly spiteful).
None of her attempts were successful, and Fi may never have seen Michael really ill if he hadn't had to sit on top of a twenty-five story building in the middle of the night and photograph a hand-off between a government contractor and the first cousin once removed of a North Korean higher-up. The contractor and first cousin were engaged in a passionate affair, and Michael had to sit for fifty-three minutes, through their enthusiastic screws on the desk and against the wall, before he handed her a flash drive. Eight minutes into his fifty-three, the contractor and the first cousin once removed crashed into the wall, knocking his U-Penn diploma onto the floor, and it started to pour down rain. It was warm at first, a summer rain, but Michael started to shiver regardless. He hadn't been feeling completely himself, not that that was the same thing as being sick, but as the rain and the wind turned colder and started to slap and yank at him, he felt his chest start to tighten up.
He pushed the pain aside, pulled his jacket over his head, and held the camera against his chest. Max had reassured him CIA cameras worked in any weather. Unfortunately for Michael, his fingers may have been CIA-sanctioned, but they were not CIA-issued. By the time he crawled off the roof, they were so stiff he kept fumbling with the little camera. Twenty-five flights of stairs later, he met Max and Raines in a security company van parked in front of the building. Max was paring an apple, the peel hanging in a long single strip, and Raines was reading tomorrow's edition of the Washington paper. Nice work if you can get it, Michael thought bitterly. His thighs were trembling from the long climb down the stairs, his knees red-hot pockets of pain. He frowned and tried not to rub at them as he slowly sank down on a seat in the van.
"Camera?" Raines asked impatiently and Michael passed it to him without comment. He handed it off to a nameless tech- they used a different set on every op, it seemed- and Max tossed him a towel with a sympathetic glance. He dried off as best he could, but he still had to sit in damp clothes for thirty more minutes until they hammered out the plan to blackmail the contractor to find out about other operatives in the U.S.
"Are you sure you're not coming down with something, Michael?" Max asked for the second time as the van swung around to his place and Michael climbed it. "You sound awful." His body was wracked with shivers, and he coughed a few times, something phlegmy and rattling he had never heard come out of his own mouth before.
"I'm not sick," he muttered in reply, ignoring the chorus of sneezes that followed his statement. "I never get sick."
Max's chin moved in an attempt to hide his humor. "Obviously."
It was close to 4am as he trudged up the stairs, but there was a light from the windows that shone through the endless monsoon. He caught himself hoping desperately she would be awake. If anyone could distract him from a shitty night like this, it would be Fi. But when he hauled his weary body inside, his shoes making spongey, squishy sounds with every step, he saw she was sprawled along the exact middle of the bed, sound asleep.
As he pulled his wet clothes and shoes off, he smiled in spite of the fatigue and assorted aches afflicting him. She could look peaceful like this, her face placid and her arms folded across her stomach; his personal hurricane slowed to a light breeze that did nothing more than ripple the water. Of course, she was also sleeping like a baby with her laptop blaring her new favorite song about three inches from her face. Michael winced as he bent closer, pressed a few buttons, and moved the machine off the bed.
Fi stirred a little in the sudden silence, making a sleepy noise in her throat, and she stretched her arm up and slammed her fist under his chin.
He snapped back, one hand flying to his head. He wiggled his jaw and laughed a little under his breath. Okay, maybe she wasn't so peaceful in her sleep after all. I should really take a shower, warm up. He coughed, wrapping an arm around his ribs as the cough went on and on. But she looked so comfortable. He sank down on the edge of the bed, turned on his side to face her. I'll just rest for a minute. He coughed again, cleared a throat that felt like it was lined with grit. Thank god I never get sick, he thought, and fell into sleep like it was a deep, dark cave.
He slept through the end of the night and the beginning of the morning and into the late afternoon. Bits of him struggled awake for a minute or two, his mind catching a piece of daylight and straining to hold onto it before the darkness sucked him down. He woke with pain, the sheets too scratchy, the comforter too heavy, the air too hot. And usually, he woke coughing, his whole body seized with it, his gag reflex kicking in with the force of his spasms, doubling him over and making him heave with the effort and the lack of breath. And then, when he could finally suck in some air, he would fall back on the bed, his hands unfisting and a small moan of relief slipping out.
He woke once, in the late afternoon, his head pounding like the entire U.S. Army was running drills inside his brain. Someone was pushing something into his mouth, and he jerked his head away, moaning as the movement caused a wave of dizziness hit his stomach. Thoughts drifted hapharzardly across his brain like pollen-drunk, fat bees and he wondered if he had been drugged. Was this Somalia again? No, he was dizzy, he was on a boat somewhere-
And then he smelled her. She always smelled so good, it made him want to move closer, pick her up and press his face to her hair, inhaling, shivering-
Shivering. He frowned. That's not right. He could feel his arms shaking, he was so cold all of a sudden, and he heard her talking, rhythmic and soothing. She pulled a blanket up to his chin and then raised something to his mouth, her hand holding his head up like he was a little kid and a bit of water filled his mouth. He was suddenly ravenously thirsty and he took a few deep swallows before she moved the glass away. His head dropped back to the sheet like a stone. The water had felt wonderful and cool in his mouth but stung like a knife as it went down his throat. "Fi?" he rasped out, his eyes not even open enough to see the huge, beaming smile on her face when she turned around.
"Michael!" She picked up his hand, and he almost moaned again at how good her soft, cool skin felt. "How do you feel? Sam came by. He said he never thought he'd see you so sick. Almost wanted to take a picture to savor the event, but I talked him out of it-"
"I'm not sick," he managed to get out. He inhaled, wet and raspy, sneezed, and started coughing. Fi tilted her head and waited the ten seconds it took for his coughing to quiet.
"Michael," she sighed at last. "You're going to lie there and tell me you feel well right now?"
"Yes," he replied, opening his eyes all the way and focusing on her exasperated face. He set his jaw and began to pull himself out of bed. He made it as far as levering his head a few inches off the pillow before he collapsed. She watched his pitiful efforts without comment, crossing her arms Everything hurt. His head, his trachea, his abdomen, fuck, even the skin between his toes hurt. "I never get sick," he said, his voice coated with both snot and disbelief.
"Here," she held two pills up to his mouth and he dry-swallowed them with no complaint. "Try to go back to sleep," she advised, settling into the armchair she'd drug next to the bed and picking up the thriller she was using to pass the afternoon.
And Michael closed his eyes again and slept through to the next morning, at which point he got up, went to the bathroom, dressed, sat down at the table and ate four containers of yogurt and two bites of his mother's chicken noodle soup, and declared his sickness "a fluke virus" that had caused everyone to overreact.
"Why was I naked when I woke up?" he asked, shooting a glance at Fi, who shrugged her shoulders and smiled innocently.
"You were delirious in the rages of fever, Michael. Who can say?"
"Right." He paused for a moment, looking up at the ceiling as he struggled to remember something "Were you singing to me?"
She scoffed. "Like I had nothing better to do than sit there and sing all day? Some of us actually work for a living, albeit not with the CIA." She shoved away from the table with a clatter of plates. "If you're miraculously better, you could do the dishes for once."
"For once?" he called at her back as she went to the bathroom to change. "I do the dishes all the time!"
She dressed in a fury, thinking back to those hours next to his sickbed, when she had been secure in the knowledge that, for once, she was his whole world. When his face contorted in pain, she would stroke his forehead or rub his back until he relaxed. She put his sheet in the freezer when he got too hot and layered him with blankets when his arms shook so hard with shivers, she thought he'd bruise a rib. She wouldn't leave him long enough to get supplies, calling in Sam and Jesse instead, and then, when they had left and she was alone with him again, she sang to him. Mostly old Irish drinking songs because they were the only ones she knew all the way through, aside from some punk rock that probably would have been the final nail in his coffin. But he seemed to like it regardless; he turned his head in her direction and the nightmares that plagued his sleep didn't come as often. When he would moan, from a bad dream or from the pain, her voice and her presence were all it took to calm him. Sometimes he would wake up a little when she bent to kiss his forehead, measuring the heat on his skin with her lips. "Shh," she said, "shh, it's okay, Michael" over and over, through the day and his dreams, and when he heard it, he would try to smile. Just a little, to reassure her, and she saved them in her soul like poems.
She came out of the bathroom to find him on the phone with Max. She could tell by the expression on his face they were already onto something else. Some other stake-out, some new emergency. She sighed and moved around him, slamming the dishes in the sink as she washed them.
"I have to go meet Max." He shoved his phone in his back pocket.
"Yeah, I figured as much." The water splashed over dirty spoons and plates and she stuck her open palms in the stream, trying to ignore the ache in her chest. Not from the flu, at least, she thought. Unless Michael Westen is a flu. "Imagine me saying not to overdo it and you not listening."
She felt him hesitate before he turned away. He bent down and kissed her back, in the hollow just under her shoulder blade. Her shirt was low-cut and she could feel his breath there even after he had left, his quiet "Thanks, Fi," echoing in her ears after the thump of the door shutting had faded.