Logs:Sick and Tired

Sick and Tired
Dramatis Personae Bucky, Steve
In Absentia	1934-01-25 "Forget how to breathe again?"
Location Rogers Residence
<NYC> Rogers Residence - Redhook The winter has been brutal, and shows no signs of letting up anytime soon. Several layers of filthy snow blanket Brooklyn, and the water in the harbor looks slushy and leaden. Inside Sarah Rogers's tiny apartment it is grudgingly warmer, but stuffy, too -- the temperature achieved by smothering the windows with old fabric so that the watery daylight cannot penetrate and the meager warmth cannot escape. All except for the window next to Steve's bed. In an old, off-white tunic and trunks, the pale, scrawny boy is somewhat ineffectually propped up on all four of the rather flat pillows in the house and buried under a pile of mismatched, moth-eaten blankets. He has his sketchbook open to a shaky sketch of a pigeon taking flight. The strokes may be uneven, but there is still a certain boldness to the lines of the drawing that conveys the drama of the movement. He is not, however, sketching at the moment, being much too busy with a violent fit of coughing. The door to the apartment opens just long enough to let Bucky squeeze inside, which is still long enough to steal some precious heat from the air. It gets closed with a bit more force than needed, as if the weather might care about having a door shut in its face. "It's me, Steve," he calls toward the sound of coughing. He keeps track of the wheezing gasps that come between racks of coughs as he shucks off his scarf and jacket, sets up a pot on the stove to reheat the soup his mother sent. Once that's started, the bedroom is his next stop. "Forget how to breathe again?" Bucky asks, taking a seat on the edge of the bed to start unlacing his boots, worry hidden under a casual tone. Steve does not immediately answer. When the coughing finally stops, his breathing remains labored, but not too noisy. He slumps back harder against the pillows and turns toward Bucky. His ice blue eyes look glassy and eerily washed out in the sickly light. "Figured I oughta...save some air...for you..." He's trying to tug the blankets up higher, his shoulders hunched and shivering in the draft from the window, but doesn't seem to have enough strength for even that simple task. His boots half-laced and forgotten, Bucky looks over Steve with a sharp gaze. With a 'tsk' that he could have easily learned from either of their mothers, he gently pushes Steve's hands away and tucks the blankets in around him. "Ma sent some Jewish penicillin for you. I got it heatin' up, if you think you could eat," he tells him, pushing the bunch of fabric back into the window where they must have been pulled down. Forget saving air, Steve needed to save some brains. Steve doesn't put up much resistance and, shivering notwithstanding, his skin is alarmingly warm to the touch. He nestles into the blankets and smiles faintly. "She still think she can fatten me up?" His body hunches inward as he starts coughing again. He makes a soft, plaintive noise when Bucky covers the window back up, plunging them into gloom. "I was using that," he mumbles indistinctly, gathering his sketchbook closer. "Not using it well, though..." "I'm not gonna argue with her about it, are you?" Bucky feels around the window with a hand to make sure the worst of the drafts have been blocked. "And hush, I'll find some candles if you need to resist restin' that badly." He sits on the bed again, closer to Steve now, to finish taking off his boots and gives the sketchbook a glance while doing so. "Better than I could do," he remarks plainly. Once his boots are off and hands are free, he pushes off the bed to momentarily leave the bedroom. If Steve hears Bucky reciting his way through one of the chapters of Psalms while he's out of the room, what is he going to do about it? When he returns, it's with a few stubby candles in one hand, and his jacket and scarf in the other. The jacket gets laid across the foot of the bed, another layer against the cold. The scarf just happens to land on Steve's head before Bucky lights candles around the room, driving off some of the winter darkness. "Don't actually...have a death wish," Steve mumbles indistinctly, "whatever you say." He pats around the blankets until he finds the short length of pencil he had been using, but his hand is shaking so badly that he hesitates to put the lead to paper, which is just as well given that his vision is shortly obscured by scarf. He doesn't try to remove it. "Tired of resting." The words sound perfunctory, abstract. "Sick and tired." He chuckles shallowly, then promptly starts coughing again. "I can imagine, pal." The candles lit, Bucky wanders back over to the bed and pulls a small bundle of paper, folded and tied together with string, from his pocket. Serials from issues of Wonder Stories that long ago fell apart from being read over and over. "Scoot over," he says, his customary bossy tone more gentle than usual. Placing a comforting hand on Steve's back through the blankets, Bucky carefully listens to his breathing again until the coughing stops. "I'll read to you until the soup is done heating. I brought The Man Who Awoke, about that fella that sleeps for thousand of years at a time." Steve tries scooting over but sort of just falls onto his side, his back spasming under Bucky's hand as he tries without success to clear his lungs. At least this gets the scarf out of his face, finally, and he tucks it clumsily around his neck once the coughing fit has run its course. "I think...I know how...he feels," he wheezes as he rights himself. Flops against the other boy, his head drooping to rest heavily on Bucky's shoulder. "Thanks, Buck," he murmurs softly as his shivering subsides, though he feels no less feverish to the touch. Once he makes sure the blankets are still tucked in to keep more warmth from escaping than need be, Bucky unties the stack of pages with one hand, his other arm going around Steve's shoulders in spite of the heat that rolls off of him. "Don't need to thank me, Stevie." Picking up the first page, Bucky clears his throat, angles the page toward the candlelight, and starts to read.