AN: Sorry for not updating last week. Personal issues and whatnot. Anyway, thank you guys so much for reading, and here's the next chapter. Enjoy!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Contagion

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nate shows up uninvited at Lindsey's apartment with chicken soup, several bottles of sports drinks in different flavors, extra calamine lotion and oatmeal, and some more much-needed items a few days into Eliot's bout of combination flu-chicken pox. He is greeted by the distinctive stuffiness of an ill person's sickroom, or rather, sickrooms, as he soon discovers Lindsey draped over the toilet in the bathroom across from Eliot's room when he is led there by a frantically barking and tugging Bandit.

"Wha' d'rng hrr, Na'?" Lindsey asks, looking up at him with fever-blurred eyes.

"You too, huh?" Nate sighs, and reaches down to help the lawyer up from his seat on the tile floor. The skin under his hand is hot, so he runs a cool, wet towel over Lindsey's face and neck before continuing with his task of getting him vertical.

Bandit disappears into Master's room after he is sure that Hair-Like-Poodle-Man is taking good care of Smells-(Sick)-Like-Master.

"Y' gon' get sick, Na'," Lindsey remarks groggily as Nate leads him to the room at the end of the hall. "'S highly conta- c'ntagious."

"Yeah, I can see that," Nate says, and lowers him onto the bed, which is, surprisingly, seeing how sick Lindsey is, still made.

The sick man falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.

Nate rubs his head and thinks. He'd come here thinking that he could give Lindsey a hand with taking care of Eliot, as he had no doubt that the cooped-up, sick seven-year-old had to be giving Lindsey a hard time and pretty much driving him up the wall. He had anticipated Lindsey getting sick too as a possibility, but seeing it is something else.

"Hi Nate," Eliot rasps listlessly as he pushes by him to get to Lindsey, Bandit trailing behind him as always. From what Nate can see of Eliot's bare skin – mainly his arms and bare feet, and a flash of his face as he passes by – the pockmarks are still spreading densely across his pale skin.

To Nate's surprise – he really shouldn't be, at this point – Eliot crawls up onto the bed with Lindsey and snuggles right in, teddy bear firmly gripped in a be-blistered hand. Lindsey, still fast asleep as far as Nate can tell, reaches out and pulls the boy closer, leaving his arm wrapped around the smaller back in a protective gesture.

Eliot wriggles a little more to get comfortable (and possibly to scratch his multitude of itchy blisters) and catches Nate's curious eye in the process. "Keeps bad dreams away," he mumbles, turning his face back into his brother's chest, and promptly falls asleep.

"Huh," Nate says, and goes back out to the kitchen, Bandit following him. He soon discovers the reason when the dog nudges his food bowl against his foot and looks up at him with an expectant expression in his intelligent brown eyes.

"Haven't been fed since Lindsey got sick, whenever that was, have you?" Nate asks the Dalmatian. "Alright, I'll get your food, but let me finish getting Eliot and Lindsey taken care of first, okay?"

He doesn't feel as silly talking to the dog as he might have; Bandit has long since proved that he understands most of what is going on around him, especially things like Good Dog and No Pee On Wires.

Bandit sits obediently on his haunches with his bowl in front of him and watches as Nate pulls several ice packs out of the freezer – Nate can always count on Lindsey to keep an entire shelf of ice packs in both his freezer and Nate's for his own use, much like Eliot used to when he was a hitter – and fills one of the grocery sacks with them and a few bottles of the sports drinks. Nate stops by the bathroom, leaves a bottle there (just in case), then makes his way to Lindsey's room to check on the two sick McDonalds.

He takes both of their temperatures - not dangerously high, but high enough – and ponders the danger of prodding Lindsey awake (Eliot, though he still can pack a punch, is small enough that Nate can take it, or at least avoid it, but Lindsey has magic at his disposal, which might potentially be dangerous in a delirious state), but decides that the pale clamminess of the hitter's face is enough for him to risk it.

"Lindsey. Lindsey, you need to take these pills," he says, shaking Lindsey's shoulder. "Lindsey."

Eliot cracks an eye open a few more tries later, takes in Nate's worried, frustrated face, then pokes his brother in the chest, hard. "Linny, med'cine time." Though feverish himself, the boy looks positively gleeful at the prospect of force-feeding Lindsey his medicine.

"Mmrmph," mumbles Lindsey, rolling over and away from Eliot and his abusing fingers. "L've me 'lone, 'Liot," he says, sounding congested, then lets out a chest-rattling cough.

Nate sighs, puts down the regular flu medicine he'd brought just in case on the bedside table for later, and offers Eliot the children's chewable tablets. "These are yours."

The face Eliot makes then would have been ridiculous on an adult Eliot, but Eliot de-aged and with chicken pox scabs all over his face somehow manages to appear adorable while conveying absolute disgust and outrage.

"Eliot."

"Fine." Eliot obediently takes the pills and chews them, washing the taste out of his mouth with the lemon-flavored sports drink Nate offers him, but he rebelliously indulges in a thorough scratching of his torturously itching chest.

Nate, unlike Lindsey, who would have had kittens over it, simply raises his eyebrow at him and says, "I was under the impression that you were kind of vain as an adult, but maybe that's just me. Of course, what's one chicken pox scar among all those other battle scars you had back then? It's up to you, isn't it, how many disfiguring chicken pox scars you want to keep forever?" all with that one eyebrow, without even speaking a word.

Eliot pouts, yes, pouts up at him and lets his hand fall. He looks down at his brother, still rolled over on his side, then gives him another poke in the back. "Linny, medicine time." When that doesn't work, he sighs, rolls his eyes, and bends closer to say into Lindsey's ear, "Linny, I don't feel good. Linny, can you wake up? Please? I really don't feel good."

The weak child's whine obviously gets through because Lindsey jolts and sits up. "Wha'? El, y' 'kay?"

"Med'cine time, Linny." Before Lindsey can fall back asleep, Eliot shoves the dose in his mouth and hands him his own bottle, which Nate replaces with a new one while he levels a look at Eliot that says, "Germs, Eliot."

Once the medicine is downed, half-chokingly, Nate plies the both of them abundantly with ice packs and backs out of the room.

Now all they need is sleep. They've already got their medicine, ice packs, and probably as much fluid as they can keep down without vomiting it back up. And they've got each other.

He'll stick around to keep an eye on them and make sure that neither of their fevers goes up any further, but he really can't do much more than this for now.

"Okay, Bandit," he says, walking back into the kitchen, "Where does Lindsey keep your food?"

This marks the day that Bandit's name for Nate transforms from Hair-Like-Poodle-Man to Man-Who-Fed-Bandit-And-Took-Care-of-Master-And-Sme lls-Like-Master-And-Fed-Bandit (short name Man-Who-Fed-Bandit). Bandit was a Happy Dog that day. (The day Master got up to play with Bandit was the day he was a Very Happy Dog. Bandit has a lot of Very Happy Days. In Bandit's eyes, this is because he is Loyal and Good and has a Good Master.)

Nate still has one more thing to do before he can sit down to Lindsey's high-def television and the game: he enters Eliot's room and changes the sheets on the twin-sized bed. From the looks of the room, Lindsey has spent the last few days and nights here instead of in his own bed, evidently only getting up to stagger to the bathroom once he fell ill. This makes sense, as Eliot had stumbled out of this room and straight to Lindsey's as soon as he'd missed him, professing in an even more childlike manner than his usual de-aged self that Lindsey's presence "keeps bad dreams away."

Yet again, Nate finds himself marveling at the closeness of the brothers, the trust between them, and the lengths that they would go for each other.

For all that Lindsey had initially made fun of Eliot's chicken pox, from what Sophie had said and the evidence before Nate, Lindsey had sacrificed his own health to take care of Eliot. Potentially contracting the flu isn't much, considering that doctors, nurses, and parents do it every day, but Nate knows too, that Lindsey wouldn't fail to lay down his life for the sake of Eliot's happiness – not just his life or safety, but his contentment. He has already proven it before, when he had shown up ready to take his own life to turn Eliot back into an adult.

The thing is, if it had been Eliot in Lindsey's shoes, Nate knows that Eliot would have done the same, perhaps not in the same way, but there is no doubt in Nate's mind that Eliot would do anything in his power to make his brother happy.

It's hard to remember sometimes, among all the teasing and mocking and overall squabbling, but underneath all that, there's a deep, powerful love that rears its head to an almost terrifying effect when it's needed the most.

It worries Nate sometimes, thinking of what the brothers would do for each other (and may have already done). The fatherly role that Lindsey has taken over Eliot of late concerns him, too – will there finally be a day when Eliot's distress at being a child instead of the adult he's supposed to be pushes Lindsey to break his promise to steer away from the self-sacrificing spell that would turn Eliot back? The knowledge that it would hurt Eliot more than it would Lindsey, coupled with the fact that there are four more people now who care deeply about him, is the only thing, Nate suspects, that is keeping Lindsey from going through with his original plan.

Family. Lindsey has a family now, other than Eliot, and that's enough...for now.

Taking some cleaning supplies out of his bags, Nate pushes these dark thoughts out of his mind as he dons rubber gloves and a mask and concentrates on scrubbing the place clean of chicken pox and flu germs. Maybe he'll even be able to avoid getting sick himself.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As if.

Nate gets sick, as he'd feared, but so do Sophie and Hardison. Parker somehow manages to steer clear of it all. Lucky girl.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A week later finds her scratching a multitude of blisters with Bunny safely tucked in her be-spotted arms, refusing her oatmeal bath on the grounds that oatmeal is gross and wanting a chocolate bath instead.

Everyone's still too achy and cranky to argue.

This incident would forevermore be referred to as the "Fondue Parker" debacle.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AN: Don't worry, Parker will be fine, even though she has adult chicken pox (which is potentially dangerous). Sticky and still itchy, but fine.

Okay, so my plans at the moment are to end this story with a last chapter to wrap things up (make everyone who was sick better, romantic pairings are paired…um…yeah…Oh yeah, and family stuff is more family-like than ever). Just a warning, okay? Next chapter is the last, unless I get a sudden inspiration to add a better ending.

Also, since people keep asking, yes, I will resolve the de-aged problem. Just…not quite yet. I'm still having fun with mini-El. Thanks!