Summary: Percy-centric vignette, Percy recalls a time when he had the chickenpox. Disclaimer: Percy does not belong to me. Charlie does not belong to me. Rose Red and Snow White do not belong to me. I do have a bag of oranges, though.
Orange
He drinks orange juice. Because orange juice is good for you when you're sick. When he throws up, twenty minutes later, he feels light-headed and sweet, and his mouth tastes like an old orange candy found in a seat cushion and thoughtlessly swallowed.
All he can do is sleep.
He has not gone to work. He realizes this as soon as he wakes up, as soon as he moves one arm and realizes how painfully cramped he is, still lying like an inch-worm mid-scrunch on the loveseat.
He has never missed work before. Everyone will think he is dead. Or worse, irresponsible.
He cannot even worry about it properly, his mind is distant and foggy, smothered with a heavy, muffling blanket. He gropes blindly for a proper thought or at least a feeling. Remorse. Guilt. These could be things to steady him. But he slips away from worry, longing for a cold hand pressed against his forehead, someone to stroke away his damp bangs. Mother.
His stomach writhes, he feels something move within him like a rattlesnake with a burning rattle, it must be loose in his small intestine, it is tickling the bottom of his stomach with its rattle. It is agony.
On second thought, not Mother, her best treatments involved forcing hot tea down the invalid's throat until everything was better. Charlie would be a better nurse. No. Charlie would be perfect.
It was Charlie who was his solitary comfort when he had chicken pox and no one had the time or worry left over to be concerned for a small itchy child. They had the war to occupy them, but that was a poor excuse to abandon your sick children, even now he felt the little bitterness come over him. The others had chickenpox together, twins and Ron and Ginny all in one fell swoop, Bill and Charlie had it together before he was even born. Everyone else had a pair in misery.
No one else could turn Charlie into a ministering angel, though, and it was Charlie who could sense when Percy needed a new damp washcloth to cool his aching, itching face, it was Charlie who brought him blankets and made him change into clean clothes. It was Charlie who read him the story of Snow White and Rose Red. And which sister was it that ended up with the bear that turned into a prince? Because there were the two sisters but only one lover, how could they have decided between lover and sister?
Lucky that Percy never had to make that choice. No lover offered. But wasn't there something else, something like a sudden extra brother at the end of the story? Yes, there were two princes, the bear-prince had a brother-prince and they were all able to live in the same castle together forever after.
He slips out to sleep again, like a bottle left close to the shore washing out, message unread. He sleeps without ends or beginnings, his dreams mixed with the sounds of his neighbors, he runs up and down staircases in his dreams and thumps on walls and tries to study over the distracted thrumming static of someone's untuned radio.
When he wakes completely and sits up his head is full of heavy lights, he cannot see. When he stands it is even worse. He staggers to the kitchen and makes himself tea, chamomile. There is an orange sitting on his table. He is not hungry yet.
The second day is altogether like a dream, even when he is awake. It is a blurry thing, he stretches as far as he can, his knees bent over the arm of the loveseat, he covers his face with a pillow to block out the light. The third day is all sleep, but he wakes at night, head throbbing, but the wicked ache in his abdomen has vanished, the snake has doused its rattle.
Now he is hungry.
He grates orange over his spaghetti and douses it in olive oil. He toasts bread and smears it with jam; he picks rosemary from the plant on his windowsill and sprinkles it over everything, stuffing a piece into each orange segment and stacking the segments into a pyramid. He sits down and wishes that he were not alone. When he has finished washing all the crumbs down with a glass of wine he was probably saving for something special, he is content. It would never have worked, if he were living with people.
If Charlie had been there he would have woken Percy from a deep sleep by opening and closing doors, by trying to wash dishes as quietly as possible and offering unwanted meals and unwelcome tea and a soothing hand at the wrong moment.
He washes, he changes his clothes and he combs his hair. He has chosen neither prince in a bearskin or his Rose Red, he has chosen the cramped apartment in the city and the wretched view and the quiet. The miraculous quiet that comes at midday, the silence that he didn't know could exist in the middle of a city, in the middle of an apartment building.
But it does. It wells up out of some mysterious basin of silence and fills his little room. It is such a relief. It would be far worse if he were married now and had five children. It would be far worse and far less likely, but it is still a path he might have traveled.
He composes a quick note to owl over to the ministry explaining his absence. He exhales. He is a little sick of oranges.