Whumptober Day 8!

Link to the Ao3:https://archiveofourown.org/works/34210837/chapters/85543648

Title: Severe Illness - Lois

Prompt: No. 8 ‘Coughing Up A Lung’ - pneumothorax, exotic illness, “Definitely just a cold”

Trigger Warnings: puking

Word Count: 1463

Lois didn’t get sick very often - having grown up an army brat, she was ninety-percent sure she had almost every vaccine under the sun and had the immune system of a… damn, her writer’s brain wasn’t working… something that had a good immune system and didn’t get sick very often. Today was an exception.

It was hardly noon yet, and she’d already thrown up twice - once at the ungodly hour of five in the fucking morning, and again around nine when she had tried to down a cup of coffee and ended up losing it into the toilet. Her first thought was that maybe it was morning sickness, but that was quickly dismissed as an impossibility for a variety of reasons, then doubly-confirmed to not be the case when Clark, who had gone to fetch the mail, came back with the news that their neighbor across the hall and two people on lower levels of the apartment building were also “feeling a bit under the weather”, as he put it. Of course, that meant that they were throwing up too.

Clark, seeing that despite her protests she was in no state to go to work that day and probably shouldn’t be left on her own, promptly ordered her to bed and called the Daily Planet offices to explain the situation. He would work from home while Lois… Lois would try, but there was no assurance that anything she typed up would be coherent.

Now confined to bed rest, Lois lay spread-eagle beneath the covers staring up at the ceiling. Clark had come in at some point to close the curtains against the morning sun, set a glass of water on the nightstand and put her laptop on the end of the bed, just within reach, and had gently asked if she wanted a bucket as well. Lois, being as stubborn and as sick as she was, refused and rolled over in bed to bury her face in her pillow with the hope that he would go away if she ignored him hard enough - but Clark, being as sweet and as caring as he was (and a damned alien who had never had a sick-day in his life), didn’t take the hint and grabbed his own computer, situating himself on his side of the bed to get some work done while he kept her company.

The rest of Lois’ morning was spent curled up in a semi-comfortable position in her darkened bedroom, drugged up on Tylenol with a semi-awareness of Clark sitting nearby and a full awareness of the incessant clacking of his keyboard while he carried on with his day. There were a few times where he would get up to kiss her hot forehead and disappear out the window in a flash of red cape only to come back half-an-hour later, and a few more times where her phone pinging with a text message or her boyfriend asking a question would rouse her out of the fever-induced stupor just enough to give a half-hearted reply before she settled back onto the mattress. Being sick, she decided, was boring as fuck.

She knew that she must have fallen asleep at some point because the next thing she knew, Lois was waking up hot and rumpled with a dull throbbing in her stomach and a dim awareness that Clark wasn’t sitting beside her anymore. Groaning with a combination of fatigue, pain, and general frustration with life, she kicked off the blanket and tried to sit up to check the living room for his presence before regretting the attempt immediately. Her head spun and the pain in her stomach doubled, but the worst of her issues was the sudden tightening in the back of her throat that she had very quickly come to associate with a violent need to heave.

Somehow she managed to gather the energy she had been utterly lacking in that morning to stumble to her feet and down the hall to the bathroom, flipping up the toilet seat just in time to lose the meagre contents of her stomach into the bowl. Lois, still not quite awake, was just upset that she still had enough half-digested food inside her for her body to get rid of.

Doing her best to keep breathing and ride through the convulsions wracking her core until the worst of it was over, she hardly noticed when Clark came running into the room - likely after hearing what likely sounded like an elephant seal puking up live penguins, Lois later noted, and then also noted that there was probably a reason Perry usually rejected her articles written while sick if these were the sort of descriptions she came up with - but she most definitely noticed when he gently held her hair out of the way, tying it back with a hairband that in all likelihood originated from his pockets that always seemed to contain exactly what she needed, and soothingly rubbed her back with his free hand while Lois threw up for the third time that day.

It stopped eventually. She was able to take a full, deep breath, to sit still without her entire body heaving with the effort it took just to get a little virus out, to finally focus on Clark’s warm touch instead of how fucking sore she was. Clark, being the adorable, caring studmuffin that he was, gently asked if she was alright and dampened a washcloth for her so that Lois could scrub at the feverish feeling covering her face and the back of her neck as she sat slumped against the bathroom cupboards with her boyfriend at her side. The small attempt at cleaning herself up made her feel a little bit better, or at least enough that she agreed to let Clark pick her up and carry her back to the bedroom. Once she was settled back in her chaotic nest of pillows and sheets, Lois watched as he busied himself with opening all the windows and turning the fan on, proceeding to shake out the unneeded blankets on their bed before folding them neatly away, and finally grabbing a glass of water, a half-eaten box of saltine crackers, and a bucket from the kitchen to set them down at her bedside. Whatever she had done to deserve this man, Lois had no idea.

Her appetite quickly returned after the last bout of puking, and Lois contented herself with steadily polishing off the crackers while Clark rearranged the pillows and settled himself on his side of the bed with a quiet, “Do you mind if I sit here?”

She shook her head and watched as he sat down and pulled out his phone - answering emails, if the way his fingers moved across the screen were anything to go by, and unsurprising as sometimes laptops felt like they had a little too big of a screen to do such a small task. She watched him type as she ate, switching the crackers for the water every now and again now that she was feeling a bit more up to the task of eating and thinking.

“You sure it’s not morning sickness?” Lois asked suddenly - and damn, she noted, was sick-brain Lois paranoid - stuffing a saltine cracker in her mouth and not caring if she spilled crumbs on the bed, though Clark with his hyper-tactility would most definitely care when he found out. He apparently hadn’t noticed yet, poking diligently at his phone as he lay beside her and nodded his head.

“I’m sure. I would’ve heard a heartbeat by now.”

That was good enough for her, and she continued to work her way through the remainder of the crackers now that her appetite was finally returning and her curiosity with it, “What’re you up to?”

“Playing Rummy,” came the answer, and Clark turned his phone so that she could see the screen and confirm that yup, the farmboy was playing cards and actually appeared to be losing against a bot, of all things.

“Clark?”

“Hmm?”

“Get me some more crackers?” she begged, “Please?”

He was up in a moment, and Lois could hear him rustling around in the kitchen before he returned a minute later with a bag of oyster crackers and what appeared to be a cup of homemade applesauce from the batch he had made a few days ago (his mom’s recipe, of course). Handing both items to her, he sat down on the bed with his laptop to pull up Netflix while she stuffed a handful of crackers into her mouth and snuggled up beside him with her applesauce to watch an episode of some random home renovation show. Being sick was boring as fuck, but somehow having Clark with her made it just the tiniest bit better.