The lurid spot on his foot is the only symptom of the disease, at first. Before long it has company. Another bruise-like sore blossoms on his lower back, a garish weed he can't uproot.
His face is spared for now. For now, no one has to know. He goes to work, he comes home, he goes to bed, and Ned presses up behind him, chest warm and grounding against his back.
Summer turns to fall, and Felix starts to feel the cold like an ever-present itch. He's not chilled, exactly, just never quite warm enough. Ned cajoles him into extra layers, loops a scarf around his neck before he leaves each morning, brings him tea when he's sitting on the couch, more tired than he should be after a day of sitting on his ass.
He's not sick yet, not really. He's not sick yet, not really. Well. The sarcoma says otherwise, but he doesn't feel sick. That will come. By now he knows what awaits him, but it's in the future, and for now he's content to live life as he'll wish to be living it two, three, four (God willing) years down the road. Calmly. Unhurriedly. Fully.
Ned puts another blanket on their bed, and for the first time in his life Felix sleeps in a sweater.
It's November and raining, and Felix isn't sick, not like that, though he's thinner than he used to be and sleeping more than he ever thought he'd want to.
But he's sick.
He works in a bullpen, no two ways about it; if one person brings a cold through the doors, four people take it home.
Ned is furious. How dare they? he fumes. How can they not understand? Don't they know what they're risking?
"Send some tissues with your letter of complaint," Felix suggests wryly at one point, then coughs harshly into a handful of his own.
He's huddled under a mountain of spare quilts and blankets, but he can't get warm. It's just a cold. He's not sick. His immune system isn't gone yet, it's not even significantly weakened, and so this is just like getting sick after a long week at work when he's exhausted and stressed—
"It's not funny," Ned says once Felix's breathing has calmed. "You can't afford to get sick anymore, Felix, you have to realize that. You have to stay healthy for as long as you can." Felix pretends Ned's voice isn't anger layered over fear, pretends they're not both thinking of two, three, four (God willing) years down the road, when a cold will kill him, when he might already be dead from the flu.
"A cold won't kill me yet," he says, but it comes out stark and far too honest, and Ned comes this close to slamming the door on his way out. He's back in minutes with tea and a hot water bottle, and Felix doesn't have to pretend he's not too tired to sit up. Ned sits on the bed, slips an arm beneath his shoulders, and pulls him up against solid warmth.
"You're running one hell of a fever," he murmurs, steadying Felix's hands around the mug. Felix lets his head rest in the hollow between Ned's chin and shoulder and smiles over his tea.
"Means I'm still fighting."
Ned rubs his side through a cable knit jumper, recently gifted to him on the four-month anniversary of their moving in together. "Yeah. Yeah, you are."
The next morning Felix can't even consider going in to work. He coughs and coughs, and it's rougher than it should be. Ned's fingers comb through his hair, brushing it back from his forehead. He's been on the phone almost constantly since he got up and Felix didn't.
He's done now, so he sits on the bed and strokes Felix's hair. "You have the rest of the week off," he says softly, "and an appointment with Emma this afternoon, if you're up to it."
"And if I'm not?" Felix mumbles into the pillow. Ned's hand stills.
"Are you feeling that bad?"
Felix coughs in answer. "Do we have any more of those throat things?"
"Cough drops? Sure, I'll bring you some. You want any tea?"
Felix shakes his head.
"Okay." Fingers ghost through his hair again. "I'll go get you those cough drops."
Felix hears him leave. He isn't awake to hear him come back.
He's perfectly capable of walking on his own, even in the throes of a truly horrible cold, but Ned's hands hover around him, anxious, on the short walk from the taxi to the clinic doors.
Emma sighs to see him there then tells him what he already knows. She checks his mouth and throat, takes his vitals, listens to his lungs and concludes that it is, in fact, just a cold. Take care of yourself, she says firmly, handing him a prescription for decongestants (and antibiotics, for later, if he needs them) and looks just a little worried, just a little sad.
Ned is the picture of contained agitation when Felix spends six seconds in the rain, bundling him into the cab and stripping off his sweater to towel Felix's hair dry in the back seat.
Felix teases but doesn't protest. He falls asleep on Ned five minutes into the drive.
They go to bed together after an early dinner, Ned soothing him through bouts of chills and coughs. The medicine he took is doing far too little for such a childish sickness. He's miserable, but he tries not to be afraid. Fear is for later. Now is just living.
Eventually he dozes off, Ned's arm wrapped around his chest like a safety belt, his breathing soft and slow behind him.
When his fever breaks late the next night - a cold, and it'd gotten up to almost a hundred and two - Ned helps him change into fresh pajamas, pressing kisses into the back of his neck as he settles a thick woolen cardigan over his tee shirt.
A damp heap of rumpled sleepwear sits in the laundry basket, awaiting washing in the morning.
Ned wraps his arms around him once they lie back down, and Felix feels a little warmer.
Tommy drops by with soup from Estelle, because of course Ned had told everyone that Felix was sick (not sick, though, not yet) and of course everyone is pitching in. Everyone knows that sharp swoop of panic, that bottomless fall of fear at the word.
Felix is sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over his umpteenth mug of tea, convincing himself that being out of bed is good, that he's feeling better than he did yesterday.
"Hello, love," Tommy says when he sees him, southern sweetness and gentle concern. He sets the Tupperware tub on the counter and comes to sit next to him at the table. "I hear you're a little under the weather."
"Me and the rest of the Times," Felix rasps out with a sheepish grin. He's not sick, after all.
Tommy winces. "Oh, honey, you sound terrible. Should you be out of bed?"
"No," says Ned, coming out of the bathroom. He's dressed but his hair is still wet from the shower, and suddenly Felix wants nothing so much as to wrap his arms around him and breathe in his clean, safe scent. "But he insisted."
"I felt weird being in bed all the time."
Ned gives him a look. Felix glares back. He knows, all right? He knows, but it's not like that yet.
"Felix," Ned says, tiredly, and if he's tired now, how exhausted will he be when Felix is sick, too sick to be out of bed, too sick to care for himself? But that's in the future, and for now Ned just sighs. "You know you need to be resting. I trust your judgement, to a point, but you don't have to prove anything."
"I know," Felix says, half defensive and half relieved.
Tommy squeezes his shoulder and leaves not long after. If he and Ned talk before he goes, Felix doesn't hear.
They spend the rest of the day together on the couch. It's Friday. Felix doesn't have to go back to work until Monday, and he's looking forward to another two days of quiet. They don't talk much, to spare his sore throat. They communicate wordlessly instead, Felix curled up under a blanket, his head in Ned's lap, idly tracing patterns over his thigh while Ned pets his hair. He's feeling better, less congested. Now he's mostly just tired, and still a little cold.
"This is our life now, isn't it?" he asks against Ned's leg. Even as he says it he knows it isn't true. Every month will be worse, every illness more devastating. There will be treatments and doctors, not couches and Ned. He will waste away, eaten from the inside by a virus that no one can name. This will be his life for a few short years (he's trying to hope, but he knows the numbers) and it will be difficult.
But Ned just snorts. "What, you malingering and me making you tea?"
Ned knows. Felix suspects Ned knows better than he himself does. Ned knows what's coming, and he knows it will be ugly and messy and graceless. When it is...
No. Ned is stronger than he is. More stubborn. He fights harder.
But all the same, Felix won't let himself wonder if he'll stay, if he'll go, if it will get to be too much and his own life will be too hard to live without carrying Felix's with it.
"Us," Felix says instead. "Together." Not because Ned won't leave, but because he doesn't have to. Because Felix is finally brave enough to want him to stay.
Ned slides a hand under Felix's cheek and tips his head to look up, to meet him eye to eye. "Yes," he says, seriously, warmly, and Felix has to close his eyes against the emotion welling up from his chest. "Us. Together."
Finally.
A/N: I saw this movie twice in quick succession, and this was my coping mechanism. If I have in any way misrepresented the characters or content of the work, please feel free to let me know. I have nothing but respect for the people whose lives the play and movie were based on, and I wish my writing to reflect that.
Title from Alibi by 30 Seconds to Mars.
Edited 8/02/15 to correct a medical inaccuracy.
Thank you for reading!