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It had begun as a faint pain in his sinuses, quickly passing; then a scratchy throat which had lasted a day and a half before turning into a tight and difficult cough he'd had to hide from Peter. Neal had thought at first that he was in for another standard winter New York cold, the annoying sort that made your nose run and your voice go amusing, but instead of turning into violent sneezes and laryngitis, this one seemed to settle in his chest. He could feel it, a sort of hot unpleasantness just behind his breastbone, especially at night, when his cough shook him and would not let him go.

Then the heat had gone off. He...hadn't wanted to annoy June on holiday. Over the weekend he'd stayed in his loft wrapped up in blankets and all the sweaters he owned, hoping to throw off whatever was bothering him; although he'd slept a lot, it didn't seem to help. By Saturday night he had a temperature, and by Sunday night he was even grateful for the chill in the air; it felt good against his hot skin. He wriggled out of the layers of warm clothing and lay on top of the covers, shirtless, tossing and turning to try and find a cool spot on the pillow. There were odd breathless terrifying dreams.

In the morning he remembered to ask June's housekeeper to call the furnace repairmen, and was told they'd been working on it for some time already. Neal had nodded dully at this intelligence, and gone to unearth an ancient half-bottle of ibuprofen stashed in the bathroom cabinet, settling down to pills and tea for breakfast.

The ibuprofen did what it could, bringing his temperature down, easing the pain, and he thought he had the thing beat for a while-long enough to get into work and settle at his computer and start looking through cold case files, before the intolerable tickle in his throat and chest caught up with him and drove him to the bathroom to hack in relative privacy over the sink. It was...bad, the coughs doubling him over, making his eyes stream; for a moment or two he thought he'd be sick, but his breath returned and let him lean on the sink, panting, wheezing, for a long moment before he caught Agent Burke's worried eyes in the mirror.

Oh shit.

Burke-Peter-had said something and come forward to feel his forehead; Neal had winced away from the coolness of his hand. No, he couldn't go home. June's house, the furnace, not right now. Let him stay here in the office where it was warm? But Peter was talking again, and then he was in Peter's office, feeling somehow as if the air was more breathable here, and Peter was on the phone to someone. He blinked hard, trying to make this all make sense.

El slid the car into their prized and well-earned parking spot and leaned over to wake him. "Neal, hon, we're here. We're home."

The words were offhand, casual, and yet Neal-half-dreaming still-couldn't help but attach meaning to them. Home. He blinked hard several times, trying to get reality to settle, and managed to find the button to undo his own seatbelt. El had to help him into the house, though, her hand astonishingly strong wrapped around his waist, her shortness made entirely out of iron. Neal thought disconnectedly that he ought to weld a woman out of iron, an essence of a woman, and see whether it made him think of El. Everything hurt.

She deposited him on the couch with the confidence of practice. Neal dreamed: had she been that kind of college girl who helped her drunken friends in extremis? had she had experience handling someone not quite steady on his feet and liable to keel over at any moment? That he was relegated to the category of drunk fratboy rankled a bit, but Neal didn't have the strength to say anything in his favor just at the moment. He sank into the couch and pressed his face against the cool cushions, eyes closed, shivering.

Bustling, and then she was there again with something hot and pleasant-smelling. "Here, Neal. Tea with honey and lemon. D'you feel like eating anything?"

He wasn't sure, but the heat of the teacup (and the kindness, God the kindness) woke him to some kind of effort at being Neal Caffrey; he took the cup in his palms to warm them and drew a deep breath of its aromatic steam before trying to meet Elizabeth's eyes. "Um," he said. "Not really? Kind of haven't been hungry in a while now."

She nodded, as if they were talking about the weather. "It's okay. Take that slowly and let me know if you feel sick, okay? There's a bit of ginger in there that might help your stomach."

Neal shut his eyes again in embarrassment, but the thirst and the appeal of the hot sharp smell of the tea pushed that out of the way. He settled back against his couch cushions and took a sip, surprised at how much it didn't hurt.

Some time later Peter let himself into the house, tentatively, not at all sure what to expect. El hadn't called or texted him, so he assumed nothing was noteworthy enough of immediate communication, but still...he was a bit curious as to how she'd dealt with an ailing Neal. Or, in other words, whether an ailing Neal was romancing his wife.

Satchmo came galumphing up to greet him, and Peter had to spend some minutes ruffling the dog's fur and fending off sloppy kisses; when he straightened up, there was El, wineglass in hand, reaching for him. "Come here, you."

"Well, hello there, Mrs. Burke," he said. "I take it our patient wasn't any trouble?"

She curled her other arm around his waist and stood up on tiptoe to kiss him firmly. "No trouble at all. He's upstairs in the guest bedroom, poor guy was really zonked when I got him home. I think he'll be okay, he just needs rest and OJ and a functioning central heater."

Peter kissed her back, just as firmly, and let her lead him through to the kitchen, where she poured him a glass of Shiraz as well and made him hold the oven door for her as she hauled out a sizzling pan of lasagna. "Looks fantastic, hon. So he...just...biddably went up to bed, no questions asked, no quibbling?"

"Yeah, pretty much. He gave me the most astonishing sad-puppy eyes when I brought him a cup of tea, Peter, it was heart-wrenching. If he ever figures out he can leverage that against women he is going to be unstoppable."

"You think he's okay, though?" Peter made a face the moment he'd said it, and rubbed at his forehead. "Goddamn Neal Caffrey. Of course he's okay, he's always okay. It's a thing."

"He's running a temperature. But we got it down to a hundred with ibuprofen, I don't think it's anything more than a really horrible cold. Or flu, but, well. Nothing you can really do for either except soup and tea and juice and Advil."

Peter nodded, accepting this as read. "Did he eat anything, though?"

"I got some soup down him and it stayed down-he was a bit uncertain about that, but it seemed to settle all right. In a while I'll go up and see if he's awake and if he wants anything." El got plates out of the warmer-oven and served them up lasagna with green salad. "For now, honey, enjoy your dinner and quit worrying?"

"It's kind of an occupational hazard," said Peter, but he gladly shed his suit jacket and helped her carry the plates and the salad bowl through to the dining-room. "But thanks, El. Really. Thank you for dropping everything and coming to get him. I didn't know what else to do."

"Under the circumstances," she said, refilling their glasses, "I don't think you had a lot of choice, Peter. You're a good man."

"That's me," he said, grinning. "Agent Burke: Good Man."

Neal was asleep when El went up to check on him; she refilled the half-empty glass of water beside the bed, and counted out two more Advil tablets in case he woke wanting them. She and Peter washed up the dinner things and watched some TV before she went up to bed; in half an hour or so he followed her, settling into the warmth of the bed and wrapping himself comfortably around the curves of his wife.

It wasn't until about four in the morning that he came awake, unsure of what had woken him. Ever since he'd become an FBI agent, having to train himself to be aware at all times of any tiny detail in his surroundings, he'd found it difficult to sleep through windstorms, or lightning, or even the tiny beeping of his phone warning of low batteries. The smallest noise could wake him to cold lucidity, because in his day job it might mean danger.

He lay awake, staring at the corner of the wall above his wife's shoulder. Then it came again, a little noise, dulled by corridor and wall and space, but a miserable one.

Shirtless, wearing only his pyjama bottoms, Peter eased himself out of the bed as carefully as possible to avoid waking Elizabeth. In the darkness sounds seemed magnified; he crept across the hallway to the guest-room, and found it, too, dark, but half-lit from the bathroom light that spilled across the carpet.

Neal was huddled over the toilet, wearing what Peter recognized as a set of his own nightclothes-of course-with his forehead rested on his crossed arms. Sweat darkened the fine cotton down his back.

Peter bit back a couple of nasty words and knelt down beside Neal, putting a hand on his back. Neal jerked in shock and groaned, twisting his head to squint up at Peter: those astonishing eyes were glittering, wide with pain, almost colorless in the bathroom's overhead light.

"Hey," he said. "It's me. Neal, it's okay. It's okay. You're safe."

The eyes closed; Neal relaxed in a boneless slump under his hand. Peter had to not say more bad words at the blatant, wordless gratitude, and tugged a towel down from the rail to wrap around Neal's thin shoulders for warmth. "You think you're done?"

Neal was shivering in long comber-waves, unpleasant to feel, much more unpleasant to experience. He shook his head after a moment, and Peter settled in beside him, still holding him, wanting to make the unavoidable less awful. The thought occurred that Neal might prefer to be alone while throwing up his toenails, but that look of absolute thankfulness at the sight of Peter told him his presence was welcome.

After a moment or two Neal's throat hitched and he leaned farther over the bowl, making industrial grinding noises; whatever was left of El's soup came up. Peter rubbed his back through it, not saying anything-what the hell was there to say-and when Neal at last slumped back, his breathing beginning to ease, Peter flushed the toilet and leaned up to get him a cup of water from the sink.

"Here," he said. "Wash your mouth out first. I know I have some Dramamine somewhere but you have to give your innards a minute to settle."

Neal took the cup in shaking fingers, swished and spit, and looked up at him with (those amazing) wide eyes. "...Peter," he said.

"Well, you are in my house," Peter pointed out. "Think you can handle the walk back to bed? I won't tell El if you won't."

That got a rather ghastly flicker of a smile, and Neal let Peter haul him to his feet, leaning on the older man for the few steps from bathroom to bedside. He was still shivering, but he looked, in the four a.m. twilight, less miserable-but the misery seemed to come back when Peter headed for the door. He had to pause. Was Neal wanting him to stay? "I'm just getting you clean clothes," he whispered. "Relax, okay?"

Tiptoeing in and out of his own room while trying not to wake his wife was novel. Peter hoped, very much, that the squeak of the dresser drawer hadn't roused El, but she just moved slightly under the covers and sighed, and he crept silently out of the room with a fresh pair of pyjamas.

"Here," he said quietly, back in the guest room. Neal hadn't moved, sitting and shivering with the towel wrapped round his shoulders. "-You have to get out of those damp clothes, okay? Here."

Neal blinked in the dimness and seemed to shake himself, trying to find lucidity, and fumbled at his buttons for long enough that Peter had to stifle cursing a third time and settle on the bed beside him. "Let me."

In short order he'd got Neal out of his sweat-soaked shirt and into a clean dry one; he went to busy himself in the bathroom while Neal laboriously changed pyjama bottoms, coming back with a fresh glass of water and a small yellow pill. And a towel, which he settled over the pillows.

Neal tried to smile a bit at the towel. Protecting those Martha Stewart sheets, yeah, that's suburbia. Peter tucked him in, sitting on the edge of the bed to feel his forehead. "Think you're going to be okay," he said. "But there's the trash can right here if you need it, and, hell, yell if you need anything. Really."

He was a little surprised at the words coming out of his mouth, but no less surprised at that immediate, naked gratitude on Neal's face for a third time, the same expression he'd had when Peter called El to pick him up, and when he'd come into the bathroom.

"Thanks," Neal said, catching Peter's hand. "Thank you." The fingers were too warm, dry, little light touches.

"Pff. Take your pill and go to sleep, Neal Caffrey." Peter reached out, without meaning to, and brushed some of the damp hair from Neal's forehead. "That's an order."