Jirou hates being sick. There are the obvious reasons: runny nose that she has to wipe every five minutes, reddening and eventually chapping the sensitive skin around it; sneezes that shake her entire body, sending quick shots of pain as a bonus to her sore muscles.
But there's also something else that makes her hate colds with boiling passion: her dull senses strip her of the strength she worked so hard to build up over her first high school year, and they leave her feeling vulnerable and utterly useless.
Which is exactly why she asks Yaomomo to tell Eraserhead she won't be coming to class due to feeling "like a piece of preprepared steak: frozen and cheap". Holed up in her dorm, she ignores the morning rush of her classmates with practiced ease and brilliantly makes abstraction of Kaminari's messages.
Until he knocks on her door, that is. In retrospect, she didn't do a good enough job of ignoring him. Maybe that's where it all started - she never could go on for too long without allowing his dopey face into her life.
The fact of the matter is that Jirou drags her feet to the door, hears his unmistakable voice yell, "Jirou, it's me! Open up!" in the damned hallway for everyone to hear, and groans.
She opens the door nonetheless.
That isn't a brilliant idea either, and Jirou blames it all on the cold for slowing the gears in her mind. She forgot she's wearing slippers and is still dressed in her pjs, the ones with Olaf for crying out loud. In her defense, they're a present from her aunt, and they're really comfortable and fluffy. Besides, no one was supposed to see her with unruly hair, a red nose and oversized Olaf pjs.
Kaminari just has a way of breaking the norm.
"You look-" he eyes her from head to toe, his eyes lingering on the image of happy Olaf for just a second too long, eventually stopping on her face.
"Horrible? Disgusting? Like a frozen chicken?" she helpfully supplies, her hoarse voice doing the trick to make her sound even more like a bass.
"I was going for sick, but it's good to know the cold hasn't taken your sarcasm away at least," Kaminari smiles weakly, then squeezes past her and into her room, holding up a bag as if that excuses his presence there.
She just rolls her eyes and closes the door after him. "Please tell me you have a caramel frappuccino in there," she says as she eyes the brown paper bag.
"Not sure that's how you treat colds, Jirou. But I do have-" he stops for dramatic effect, but Jirou's nonplussed look makes him pout and empty the contents of the bag on her bed with no flair.
"You brought me fast food and musicals? I don't think that's how you treat a cold, Pikachu," Jirou snorts, trying - and failing - to keep in a laugh.
"I thought we could share!" His eyes light up with a spark as he holds out the DVDs, winking encouragingly.
"High School Musical?" Jirou lifts a skeptical eyebrow, but that doesn't dampen his excitement.
"It's a classic. We're all in this together~" he chants.
She jabs his sides with all the power she has left, which is enough to make him wince. "I got goosebumps and I don't know if it's because of the cold or how cringe your suggestion is."
"Well I also have this from Yaomomo," he says, suddenly serious as he pulls out another bag from his backpack. This time, Jirou discovers energy drinks, pills and porridge, and a small smile spreads on her face as she reads her friend's post-it note: "Make sure you stay hydrated and get rest! Get well soon!"
"And this, Pikachu, is what you're supposed to bring when someone is sick," she makes a show of pointing to the useful items and crinkling her nose at the smell of oily fast food.
"But you love fries!" he wails dramatically. "And I heard you talking to Ashido about how High School Musical was your childhood movie!"
Her breath catches in her throat, and Jirou meets Kaminari's gold rimmed eyes. She doesn't usually take the time to look at his eyes - she noticed they're an unusual yellow when they met, and that was it. Sometimes they'd sparkle and she'd catch herself staring, in which moments she quickly looks somewhere else. But now, she follows his hard stare, notices how the light plays around them, hardening the solid gold that smiles at her, and shudders.
"Are you cold?" he asks, his voice suddenly worried. Jirou doesn't have the time to make a remark about how dumb he is before he wraps the purple blanket around her and pushes her back in bed. "You need to rest. Sorry if I bothered," he sounds guilty as he rubs the back of his neck and shifts his body weight from one foot to the other. "I should probably-" he gestures for the door and makes a move to leave, but Jirou catches his wrist.
She doesn't get why he always does this - barges into her life just to feel guilty afterwards. He's already banished the concept of personal space, so why does he bother caring about her well being all of a sudden?
Kaminari looks at their hands uncertain, then raises questioning eyes to her. "You're gonna let me cringe at High School Musical alone?"
His face breaks with a grin, and not-caring-for-boundaries Kaminari returns to sit next to her. "Scoot over, Jirou, and prepare to be amazed with my knowledge on cheesy songs," he declares, nestling into her pillows and pulling her laptop from under her bed. She should be scared he knows his way around her room so well.
Instead, she curls into her cocoon of blankets and tries not to jolt when he loops a hand around her shoulders or chirps comments too close to her ear, his warm breath fanning across her neck. His singing is surprisingly not off key, and Jirou curses the lack of opportunities to jab him or make fun of his singing.
By the end of the first movie, her body temperature has risen by two degrees, and Jirou is desperately aware it isn't because of her cold. By the middle of the second movie, she argues that if he keeps sitting so close to her, he'll catch a cold, but he brushes off her concerns. By the start of the third movie she stops fighting the urge to tangle their feet and cuddles into his chest.
She falls asleep before the credits start rolling.
/
Saturday brings rays of sun filtered by the curtains, yet they somehow find Jirou's eyes and make her groan and blink to an empty bedroom. Her throat feels less sore as she swallows, and her eyelashes don't stick together for once. She sneezes still, but the bed doesn't tremble under the force of the cough that follows, so she deems it an improvement to her condition.
Thumbing through her hair, Jirou swings her feet over the side of her bed, feeling for her slippers. She eventually finds them buried under her bed, and drags her feet to the bathroom. The mirror reflects mussed hair with a fry caught in the tangled web her bangs have become, and that's the reminder Jirou needs to recall fragments of yesterday and see her face color red.
Splashing water on her face sobers her up, and she takes a quick shower, willing her mind to remember when Kaminari left last night. The last thing she recalls is the rhythmic beats of his heart and the warmth of her blankets. The oily taste of fast food lingers in her mouth even after she washes her teeth, and she needs to open her windows to get rid of it.
The memories don't float out with the smell.
On her laptop, she notices a yellow post-it, the Pikachu model ruined by Kaminari's scribbling, "I had fun, we should watch musicals more often! Take the medicine from Yaomomo when you wake up. ~ElectroBolt"
She bites down on the smile dancing across her lips and dresses up quickly. It's Saturday, so she expects to find him in the common room, bickering with Sero over the last bit of Bakugou's omelette. To her surprise, his obnoxious presence doesn't light up the kitchen.
Sero notices her confused blinking and smirks, "Kaminari's still in his room. We called and he wailed 'Let me be, I'm sick' in my ear and then hung up."
Jirou feels her stomach churn and remembers her jabbing his ribs with her jacks the evening before. "You'll get a cold if you stick so close, stupid Pikachu!" "I don't get colds, Jirou!" She feels like laughing at the irony of it all, but she just marches out of the kitchen to the boys' wing.
"Don't you want breakfast?" Kirishima calls after her.
She waves him off with a hand, "Keep it for your bedridden friend, he'll get hungry after he stops his drama."
She doesn't hear Ashido's response as she takes the stairs to his floor. A part of her feels guilty - the other part is begrudgingly worried for him. Kaminari never misses a chance to feast on Bakugou's spicy breakfasts or the how-many-chilly-peppers-can-you-eat-before-you-cry competition he has with Kirishima every Saturday.
When she knocks on his door, she gets no answer. Her second knock receives a muffled, croaky "Who is it?"
"Your savior," Jirou says with none of her usual spark.
"Go away, I'm mourning."
Jirou pushes the knob and goes in. "What are you mourning?" she asks the pile of blankets and pillows under which she supposes Kaminari squirms.
"The death of my health," he sobs dramatically.
Jirou wants to roll her eyes, but the way his voice breaks because of his stuffy nose makes her step closer and peel the blankets from where his golden bangs betray his head. "Are you okay?" she asks seriously, kneeling on the side of his bed.
"Do I look like I'm okay?" he manages, and Jirou realises his voice is even more hoarse and cracked the closer she gets to him.
"You look terrible," she says as she takes in his runny nose and the hair that sticks out in all the wrong places.
"Please, I'm a sight for sore eyes," he argues without energy, wheezing the words between chattering teeth. Jirou hates to admit that even in this state, he isn't lying.
His cheeks are rosy and sweat beads run down his forehead. She doesn't need to check for his temperature to know he has a fever, but she does it anyway. Her hand burns. "Stay there. I'll get you a compress and a cup of tea."
"Even if I wanted to move, I doubt I could," he weakly retorts, and she throws one last glance his way before she closes the door behind her.
Jirou feels horrible the whole way to her room and back, and having to pass by Sero's knowing smile twice makes her almost stop and jab him with her jacks. Eventually, she's back by Kaminari's side and pressing a compress to his hot forehead, brushing away strands of hair from his sweaty face.
"You really don't have to do this," he mutters as she fluffs a pillow and helps him to a sitting position.
"It's probably my fault in the first place," she mumbles. He hears her anyway.
"Does that mean we're watching High School Musical again?" His voice is giddy despite the fact that he must feel like crap, and a playful smile tugs at his lips. Somehow, Kaminari always finds the energy to smile.
She shoots him a reproachful look. "Do you really want my cause of death to be cringe and your hoarse singing?"
"You're no fun." He only pouts for a moment before making another offer, "Want to watch Brooklyn Nine Nine?" That sounds less painful than scraping through the scenes of Troy and Gabriella fighting over stupid misunderstandings, so after making him swallow the rest of her pills and empty a glass of tea, Jirou agrees.
By the middle of the first season, Jirou somehow finds herself being used as a teddy bear by Kaminari, who tucked her head under his chin, and stops the episode to turn around and face him.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"Warming up?" he feigns an innocent smile.
"You're a walking heater."
"I have a cold, Jirou. It's called so because people get cold." There's amusement in his croaked voice, and Jirou feels like punching and kissing him at the same time. It's troublesome, and she realizes none of this would have happened if she had just ignored him yesterday.
She shakes her head and presses play again, nuzzling closer into Kaminari's chest. He's freaking warm, but she lets that slide. Their friendship became a blurry mess of hugs and poking fun at each other sometime in their second year, and she knows they've both lost sight of the line between friend-zone and relationship-zone quite a while ago. She just wonders when they'll be honest with themselves.
Until then, she lets him ask her to make him soup and elbows him, "I told you that you'd get sick if you cuddled with me and no, I'm not making you soup because I'm still sick ."
Later that evening, she googles recipes for soup and closes herself in the kitchen.
Love is lost on Jirou, and she doubts she and Kaminari will ever have a romance like the ones in the movies. In the meantime, he can get her fast food when she's down with a cold and she can try to learn how to cook. That's good enough for her.
AN: Hello!
I am back to writing Kamijirou, because I love them so much I couldn't let this prompt as just a drabble. My thanks go to Adi fro constantly motivating me to be a better writer and giving me lovely prompts - this one's for you!