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“Y/N? Are you alright?”
Pure Vanilla, ever the guardian angel, drew away from the crowd, a deep look of concern etched into his forehead, his eyes searching your body with the utmost worry. You keep noticing the slightest twitch of one wing the longer you watch him watch you- a habit he’s developed recently. That, or you just never noticed it before. It's hard to concentrate on what the wings are doing over their existence in the first place- large, white and resembling a swan’s. And heavy, judging by how much he’s started complaining about back pain.
He’s only here because it’s your birthday today- the best day of the year! And maybe that was true this morning- you’d invited friends over, Pure Vanilla had turned up late with flowers just for you, and everything had been going perfectly well until about ten minutes ago when you were struck by the worst headache you’ve ever experienced. You’re probably going to go throw up soon- way to ruin the day.
You only didn’t realise anyone had noticed- though the fact that Pure Vanilla seemed to be the only person at the party to notice you were missing might’ve actually hurt more than the headache- until Pure Vanilla calls out your name once again.
He puts his hands around one of yours- the other is a little busy, considering that if you tried to move that hand off of the wall, the vertigo is so bad that you’d probably collapse. He only looks more nervous now. His skin seems warmer than usual- his hands are usually warm anyway, especially with his magic, but it almost feels like he’s burning you.
You finally remember he’s just asked you a question, and try to decide what to actually answer. You definitely aren’t ‘alright’, but the reason for that still evades you. If you knew why you had a headache, you would’ve done something about it by now.
“Headache. Just a headache. I’ll be back to the party in a bit, okay?” You smile through the hurt, but he looks unconvinced and doesn’t take his eyes off of you.
He runs a hesitant thumb along the side of your forehead, feeling a worryingly large amount of sweat beaded on your face, which only makes his concerned expression more and more serious; his eyebrows are furrowed in distress for your health.
“Flower.? Are you sure.? You’re really pale.”
You blush at the affectionate nickname- only a little, while praying he doesn’t notice- before you nod slowly. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
He hesitates to step away from you, his apprehensive gaze finally landing on the hand you’re holding yourself up by on the wall; he still doesn’t look like he has any confidence in anything you’re saying, and he’s really bad at hiding it. He finally takes a sharp breath, clearly still nervous, and nods politely. “Well... if you’re sure you’re alright.”
He barely even gets the chance to take a single step away before you suddenly feel faint, and everything seems to spin underneath you- until you feel his gentle hands wrap under your shoulders and around your chest. He lifts your limp body from the ground, carrying you like a knight might carry a princess; he already treats you like a princess, so you suppose it was only a matter of time before he tried this on you. Though, you’d also imagined it would go a little differently- you’d planned on being fully conscious and not precariously balancing between passing out and staying conscious. Though you also aren’t about to start complaining.
“Flower-! Oh, crumbs-!” He sounds panicked, and you realise you can hear his footsteps moving away from the party- the sounds of chatter are getting fainter. He's presumably searching for somewhere comfortable to put you down. He must be really worried- you think this might be the third time you’ve ever heard him curse, and the other two times had arguably much higher stakes than you passing out.
He finally puts you down on something cushioned, which gives you the opportunity to sit up and actually open your eyes. He’s put you on your bed in your bedroom- and now he’s just sort of standing there, waiting for you to do something to calm his nerves.
“Are you… sure you’re alright? I don’t want you to pass out again and hit your head on something, flower.” He grips one sleeve tightly from anxiety, and his eyes are back to searching your body for whatever is causing this- like he might somehow find a perilous injury that neither you nor him had noticed before that’s plaguing you like this.
You consider telling him that you’re fine again, but you’re completely sure he wouldn’t believe you if you did, so you shake your head slowly instead. “No. I think I have a fever.”
He looks like he can’t decide whether to be more or less worried at hearing that, before he suddenly turns on his heel and leaves the room. You watch him leave with a slight sadness- he’d seemed so worried for you just to leave you alone. Or, at least, you’re sad until you see him return maybe three minute later, his orchid staff giving you a dirty look in one hand, and about five different boxes of various medicines in the other, both of which he puts on your bedside table. The eye of the flower on his staff still looks irritated- and half asleep.
Pure Vanilla pulls the blanket of your bed around your body, which makes you realise how cold you feel, despite the sweat still dripping down your forehead. He searches the many boxes of medicines he brought with him until he finds what he was searching for- a small thermometer, which he then pushes into your mouth and waits nervously for the reading; one hundred and two Fahrenheit. A fever, yes, but not a dangerously high one.
He looks relieved, and sits down on the bed beside you, looking thoughtful. “Would it be alright if maybe... I stayed for a while? To take care of you?”
His staff rolls its singular eye, clearly completely over whatever Pure Vanilla is doing. You still don't know why he likes the thing so much- it clearly doesn't enjoy his company as much as he likes its company.
He looks nervous, but he looks more nervous about what might happen to you if you say no than what he plans on doing if you say yes- though that’s a bit of a silly thing to be nervous about considering that you know full well he’ll stay anyway even if you do say no. He’s never been good with ‘I don’t need your help’ or 'I'll be fine, you can go home'. You still haven’t decided whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
You smile anyway- rejecting his help would be a fool’s errand, and he’s also a really good healer, so you have literally zero reason to say no. “Yeah. That would be nice.”
“Then should I kick everyone else out? The party shouldn’t be going on without you- its supposed to be about you, flower.” He looks guilty for spending even a moment at the party while you weren’t there, and incredibly willing to make up for it, regardless of whether you minded- you didn’t really mind until he pointed it out. You suppose it was a little rude of everyone else to just not notice.
You nod weakly, and he scampers off to go tell everyone to go home. You silently thank him for it. You probably wouldn’t have had a strong enough nerve- or the strength left- to actually return to the party just to tell everyone that it was over. Or the energy to return to the party at all, considering you’d already nearly passed out once, and were currently feeling significantly more like you might pass out any minute, though being tucked lovingly into a warm bed really isn’t helping.
You finally do pass out, before he gets back.
You open your eyes slowly, feeling gentle hands brush against your face, and a pair of soft lips press against your forehead, which sends a strangely scorching feeling of fizzing throughout your body- not an overly unpleasant feeling, but it’s enough to wake you up. Pure Vanilla flinches away from you when he realises you’re awake, already apologising. His face only turns redder and redder with every passing moment, white feathers bristled in surprise.
“Ah-! Sorry, sorry, go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to wake you up.” It’s a bit late for that, considering you’ve already sat up in bed, but you don’t really want to go back to sleep anyway, wanting to ask what the fizzing feeling was- and also for some water, because your throat feels like a desert.
He relaxes when he realises you aren’t mad at him for waking you up, and sits back down on the edge of your bed, though doing so forces him to bend one wing awkwardly, but he just crosses one leg over the other and smiles warmly anyway. Maybe he can’t feel it, but it looks a little unnatural.
“What was the-?” You stop talking from sheer embarrassment- your voice currently sounds like the voice you might hear from the ghost of a mummy from ancient Egypt, raspy and croaky- and Pure Vanilla seems to understand why you stopped talking, and offers some water from a bottle he must’ve gotten while you were asleep.
You take a few sips until your throat stops feeling like sandpaper, and finally get the chance to actually ask the question. “What was the weird fizzing feeling for? From the kisses.”
He blushes, like he didn’t expect that you might’ve noticed what he’d been doing. “Well, my magic is too warm to help with a fever- I was just trying to see if… other methods of healing might not be as warm.” He touches one hand to his own lips, but quickly flinches back, like he’s burnt himself- you didn’t think his magic was that warm. “It’s not going well.”
You realise what he might be implying by that, and your heart skips a beat or two. “Wait, so you can’t heal me?”
He shakes his head, looking nervous. “Well- I could, but if you get much warmer, it’ll be considered a medical emergency. And… you should be fine without needing me to heal you. That’s why I brought the medicine and everything.”
He finally smiles another comforting smile, like he didn’t just admit to the fact that his healing magic was completely useless- no, it would actively be harming you if he used it- and starts shuffling through the boxes he’d brought with him. His flower staff watches in irritation, rolling its eye at how he’s become obsessed with keeping you safe.
You take another careful sip of water, but each sip tastes worse than the last- you didn’t think it was possible for water to taste bad, but apparently a fever was enough to manage it. You push the water away, but he must’ve seen you do so out of the corner of his eye, because he turns away from the boxes to push the water back into your hands, looking concerned- almost too concerned, like he’s worried that if you don’t drink that water, you’ll shrivel up and die. He’s a doctor, so he’s supposed to know best, but that seems a little extreme.
“Drink the water! You’re dehydrated, I can tell.” He nudges the water closer to your lips, but you shake your head and push the bottle away. He looks conflicted- unsure of whether he should go against your wishes, or go against whatever is telling him that you’re dehydrated. He eventually settles on ‘you don’t get a choice in matters of health if a doctor is telling you to do the opposite of what you want to do’, and pushes back harder, but only ends up spilling the water onto the bed and onto you.
“Pure Vanilla, the water tastes like metal, stop trying to force it down my throat.” You finally tell him, and his shoulders sink just a little, looking guilty for accidentally pressuring you, thinking he was helping.
“Oh. Sorry. I’ll- get some new water.” He stands up, taking the bottle with him, very obviously trying and failing to look like your words didn’t hurt him. His feathers are bristled, and he’s gone strangely tense.
You watch him leave the room with a small twinge of guilt, but at the end of the day he was trying to shove that water down your throat, so it's hardly your fault for not being happy about it. No matter how good of a doctor he is.
You push the worry to the back of your mind, deciding you’re probably better off that way- that's pretty easy considering your unending headache has just returned, and it hasn’t gotten any less painful. You roll over in an attempt to distract yourself from it, noticing something in your bed that wasn’t there before.
It’s a plush bear about the size of your head, with neat brown fur, two round ears, and a red ribbon bow tied around its neck. It’s holding a small heart, with the text ‘get better soon’ stitched into it with a thin white thread. The plush smells faintly of vanilla- its obvious who it’s from. You’re only a little worried about how this means you must’ve passed out long enough for Pure Vanilla to have had time to go and buy a cute little teddy bear while you were out, and for you to not even notice until just now. Well, it’s a nice gesture regardless.
You pull the bear close to your chest, and the vanilla scent gets stronger- he must’ve found some way to imprint the scent onto the bear instead of just having it happen to smell like him because he’d held it. You do think that it’s cute, but the scent is a little overwhelming.
You spot something else behind where the bear had been- pulling it out reveals a small wooden heart in a red mesh bag, engraved with the words ‘pocket sized hug’ on it. How cliche.
You twist the little wooden heart between your fingers, a small smile creeping across your face. All of this because you happened to get a fever.
Pure Vanilla finally returns, holding a different bottle of water this time. His eyes dart to the stuffed animal in your hands, and he pushes the bottle aside to sit back down with you.
“Oh- you saw the bear. I hope you like it.” His face goes a passionate shade of red, but he seems more pleased that you noticed it than embarrassed about getting you the bear in the first place- if anything, he looks quite proud of himself for clearly being such a caring boyfriend. He brushes the back of his palm again the side of the teddy bear’s face, like how you might pet a cat.
“It’s nice. It smells like you.” You run your thumb along the side of the plush heart the bear is holding- or at least, you do until he takes it from you, and the entire thing lights up in a gentle yellow glow from his magic. He hands it back to you, and you instantly notice it doesn’t smell like him anymore.
“Hm? Why did you-?”
Before you get to ask that question, he cuts you off, looking pleased with himself and taking a few quick steps back. The vanilla scent returns, though it’s weak. He moves ever-so-slightly further back, and it gets a little stronger the further he moves away.
“It’ll be stronger when I’m further away. I hope you like it.” He blushes, looking nervous when you don’t instantly react, probably worried you’ll think he’s weird for such a gift. You don’t, but he’s full of anxiety regardless. Like always. To be fair, getting someone a gift to remind them of yourself sounds like something a narcissist might do, but you know him better than to assume he is one- because he’s not. Obviously.
“I do. But- can I have some water now?” You put the bear to the side, and he quickly nods, realising he forgot about the water he’d brought, too caught up in his gift for you.
He puts the cup in your hands, but he looks like he’s trying to gather up the courage to ask you something. His jaw suddenly sets, like he’s made a decision. “Is it alright if I… laid in the bed with you? It’ll help keep you warm.”
You wouldn’t dream of saying no, and you tell him that, and he lights up.
No, literally, he starts glowing a little from happiness.
You shuffle over a little to let him in, and he wraps his arms around your chest and under your shoulders. His face is pressed gently into your neck, and you slowly realise he’s managed to sneak one wing underneath you and the other over you, like he’s pulling you into a winged cocoon. It’s warm, his wings a weighted blanket around you.
You eventually drift out of consciousness, the last thing you remember being his strong vanilla scent surrounding you.