Note: Well, wouldn't you just know it? I sit down to write a chapter about Belle getting ill and lo and behold, I end up going home from work with a fever and spending the majority of the next sixteen hours asleep. Maybe I should write a chapter about her winning the lottery…
Summary: Belle is unwell and Gold takes care of her, prompted by DuskTillDawn95.
Honey Cake
Belle knew she was coming down with something when she woke up at four in the morning feeling as if she was both roasting alive and freezing at the same time. She peeled herself away from Gold – the man was honest to goodness a human hot water bottle – and curled up on her own side of the bed, feeling her throat slowly turning into sandpaper. Oh, brilliant…
She squeezed her eyes tight shut and buried her face in the pillow. Belle hated being ill – well, it was no-one's favourite pastime – but now she had a second person to make her feel even more miserable. In Belle's experience, men did not handle sick women very well. Gary had stayed away from her like she had the plague every time she so much as sneezed, which had not helped matters, and her dad went to the opposite extreme, not leaving her alone at all.
Belle also hated the fact that she seemed to lose all perception of time when she was ill. She was certain that she had been lying awake the entire night, and suddenly, the alarm was going off and there was a Scottish accent muttering curses at it, like every morning. Gold leaned over and kissed her ear.
"Time to get up, love," he said. Belle shook her head with a little noise that she hoped signified 'no'. Gold just chuckled. "Ok, ten more minutes."
It didn't help that she was on the early shift at the café and had to be there to open up for eight o'clock. Belle curled up in on herself further and groaned. She was not going to work today. No way, no how.
Two seconds later, Gold returned. Annoying man, he'd said ten minutes.
"Belle, love."
He kissed her cheek, and Belle had to concede that since he now smelled of shampoo and his chin was smooth rather than whiskery, he'd been away for longer than two seconds and it was just sleep and her sense of time playing up again.
"Belle?" Gold's voice was concerned and Belle pulled the covers up to her nose. "Belle, you're not well."
"Well done, Sherlock," she croaked. "Whatever gave you that impression?"
She felt the weight on the bed shift.
"Shut up and let me kiss you."
Belle shook her head and opened one eye.
"I'm not in the right shape," she grumbled. "Do you want the dreaded lurgy too?"
Gold just raised an eyebrow.
"I meant your forehead, to check for fever. But I'd quite happily kiss you even when you are snotty and feverish."
"Charmer." She conceded and turned onto her back to let Gold press his lips against her forehead. He nodded.
"You're burning up. So," he continued as she curled up on her side again, "do you want looking after or leaving be?"
"Ugh," was Belle's reply. Having had experience of both, she didn't want either. "Happy medium?" she suggested feebly.
Gold squeezed her shoulder.
"I'll use my initiative. I've got to go into work, I've got meetings, but I'll try and get you sorted before abandon you for divorces and Wills."
He collected his cane from where it was hooked over the foot of the bed and left the room. This time, though, he seemed to take an age and then some to return.
"Right," he said, depositing the tray he was carrying on her bedside table. "Lemon and ginger tea with honey, water and toast if you want it." He moved away and Belle heard him rooting through his medication. Most people kept their pills in the bathroom or the kitchen, but when Gold had made the executive decision to keep his painkillers within a reachable-from-the-bed distance, he'd also decided 'what the hell' and moved the entirety of the medicine cabinet in there. It had been both a blessing and a curse; Belle couldn't count the number of times she'd gone into that particular drawer in search of condoms and come up with three boxes of pills of varying description before reaching her goal.
"Paracetamol," he concluded, placing the packet on the tray next to the other items. He brushed a damp curl out of her face and gave her a soft smile in the dim light peeking through the curtains. "Anything else I can get you before I go?"
"Ring Ruby and tell her I'm not coming in."
Gold nodded and kissed her flushed cheek.
"Get well soon, Belle."
She closed her eyes, hearing him pottering about, and contented herself to sleep off and on for the rest of the day, only venturing out of bed to the bathroom and the kettle.
Gold rang at lunchtime.
"Feeling better?" he asked.
"Not really," Belle replied, and went to get herself some more water before pulling the covers back up to her stuffed nose.
When Belle next woke, she found herself curled up next to a large hot water bottle. On further investigation, it turned out to be Gold's leg. She raised her head up slightly to find him sitting on the bed beside her, reading his paperwork.
She thumped his hip weakly.
"No working in the bedroom," she croaked. "Bed room for sleeping and sex only. That's your rule."
"I'm not really working." He shuffled the papers into a vague semblance of a neat stack and stroked Belle's hair. "Feeling better?"
"A bit." Belle snuggled up against him. "What time is it? How long have you been back?"
"It's just gone four, and I've been back about ten minutes." He nodded over to her bedside table. "I made you some more tea."
"Lemon and ginger?"
"With honey. Or I could put whiskey in if you'd prefer." He paused. "I do. Best way to cope with the 'flu is to spend the duration of the illness drunk."
Belle laughed and wriggled around until she was in the vaguest semblance of a sitting position, and sipped her tea.
"You're a good little caretaker," she said.
Gold's returning smile was somewhat sad.
"No I'm not. I'm on autopilot. Slipped back into parent-mode. It was really quite worrying how easy it was. I've gone down the lines of 'treat you like a twelve-year-old and hope for the best'." He put the papers down on the covers between them. "I used to take care of Bae when he was ill. Liz is a midwife; she worked odd shifts and couldn't exactly come home in the middle of a birth, so it was easier for me to work from home and look after Bae. And obviously, when it was just him and me… I used to work on his bed like this."
Belle leaned her head against his upper arm; she was too slouched to reach his shoulder.
"It must be odd, looking after me."
"You're a much better patient," Gold said with a chuckle. "You're quieter and you don't get quite as bored."
Belle decided it was time to change the subject.
"So what's all this then if it isn't really work?" she asked, indicating the papers.
Gold showed her the top of the stack. It was a CV belonging to a Mr Philip Desmond.
"Fox has asked me to take a trainee," he said, with a slight grimace. "We need someone to take on the simple cases with Dawn; we've needed someone for a long time. We'll be understaffed as it is when Fox retires in a couple of months and Regina takes his place as senior partner. Sid's already got Dawn, Her Majesty can't be trusted with trainees, and neither Jefferson nor Jones has been qualified long enough to take one, so the honour unfortunately falls to me."
Belle raised an eyebrow at him.
"So Regina can't be trusted with trainees, but you can? Gold, everyone knows the horror stories that get passed around between the temp secretaries when Ashley goes on leave. Tara Castle refused to come back, she was that scared of you. I pity the poor unfortunate soul who gets you as their mentor."
Gold looked affronted, but only mildly.
"The other trainees I've taken on during my career all turned out fine. Slightly shellshocked, but physically unharmed."
Belle remembered the tale he had told Dawn of one of his trainees losing a decree absolute. She tried to laugh, but it came out as a rather pathetic sounding cough.
"I'd hate to see what Regina did to her trainees if that's the state yours end up in," she grumbled, snuggling back down under the covers and closing her eyes. This was a good happy medium, she decided. It was nice to have company in her misery without feeling herself completely stifled by worry. She wondered if it was just a parent thing. Gold was in self-confessed parent-mode, but Belle wasn't his child, she was his lover, and she doubted he'd have joked about adding a shot of his Glenmorangie to the tea if the honey didn't work with Bae. Her dad, well, she couldn't really blame him for his reaction. Her mother had died when she was still young – just twenty-seven years old, younger than Belle was now – and naturally he was petrified of losing his daughter in the same way. She guessed that Jefferson would be the same with Grace, having lost her mother so young.
So she dozed off her cold, feeling Gold's arm around her and occasionally hearing him rustle his papers. Presently he squeezed her shoulders.
"I'm going downstairs. Give me a shout if you need anything."
Belle nodded without opening her eyes. She continued to sleep on and off through the evening, eventually waking up suddenly and completely to find the room pitch black and a warm, pyjama-clad body asleep beside her. Damn her sense of timing, or rather the lack thereof. She wasn't going to get back to sleep in a hurry; her body had decided it was going to stick to the old adage of 'a cold has to get worse before it can get better' and she was feeling rougher than she'd been all day, and wide awake on top of it.
"If you toss and turn any more you'll end up on the floor," grumbled a low voice from the duvet-covered shape that hadn't moved in the last half-hour, despite the number of times she'd accidently whacked him whilst trying to get comfortable. "Mainly because I'll have kicked you out of bed for being annoying."
"I'm ill," Belle croaked . "I can't help it."
Gold rolled over to face her and opened his eyes blearily.
"At least fevered insomnia was one thing I never had to worry about with Bae, what with sleeping in a different room. Except on the few occasions he managed to kick the wall so hard it made my headboard vibrate." He reached out and touched her flushed cheek. "Come on, I know what'll help."
He got out of bed and limped over to the window, pulling the curtains back and pushing the sash up before gesturing for her to join him.
"Don't tell me you'll catch cold, because you've already caught one," he said. "And don't tell me I'll catch cold, because I'm more likely to do that staying in a nice, warm, unventilated room full of your germs," he added matter-of-factly. Belle got out of bed and joined him at the window. The cold air felt lovely on her hot face.
"What are we going to do with you?" Gold murmured. Belle gave a weak smile.
"Love me?" she suggested.
"That's easy enough."
Belle didn't know how long they stayed like that at the window, leaning on the sill, but presently she felt Gold shiver and move away.
"I've got court in the morning; I'm going back to bed." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, even though she hadn't washed her hair for a couple of days and her locks were still damp with sweat. "I love you. Even when you're snotty and feverish and elbowing me in the back."
Belle smiled, remaining at the window for a few minutes until she felt fatigue begin to settle in her limbs. One of Granny's pearls of wisdom had always been that if a man couldn't love you when you were sick, he wasn't worth keeping.
Gold had definitely proved his worth today.
I think it's definitely a parent thing, not being one myself. Gold knows it's only a cold, it's not going to kill her; I don't think that in this AU he'd over-react to Belle being ill quite as much as he might in the canon. ;)