She'd seen a lot of people throw up before. Like, a lot. Hell, she had thrown up a lot in her short life for various reasons. Drink too much, ate the wrong wild mushroom and panic vomit, too much candy or junk food... She was pretty used to it by this point.

Seeing Blue throw up was different though. He was a friend and while she could solider through her own problems without much complaint, she had a much harder time standing by idle while people she cared about were suffering.

Him shoving her jacket back at her was only mildly offensive to the degree of how suddenly he'd done it... but it made sense. She couldn't fault him for it. She stayed quiet and hovered in case he were to ask for help. At some point, it came to that and she used her power to lessen the burden of his own weight on his body. There weren't many things you could do to help someone who felt ill and had just ralphed all over the side of a building. Sometimes patting or rubbing the back could help.. sometimes it was just giving them space and not touching at all.

Juniper wasn't sure what to do in this situation.

Once Blue was on the couch she fretted about for a bit, looking through her cupboards for things she could give him. Her phone became her best friend momentarily in place of popping over and pestering her actual best friend for information. What did you give someone who was sick? What if he was sick because of the dart? Or was it from the cold truck?

So many questions!

In the end, she had a list of various things to try and left him on her couch for a bit so she could run her scrawny butt over to the closest 24-hour store for supplies.

She made it back in record time, sweaty and flushed and trembling from yet more running, and with a large paper sack in her arms filled to the brim with tons of things. There was cough syrup in there, cold and flu medicine that she was actually familiar with for nefarious reasons, about a dozen cans for off-brand chicken noodle soup, a box of plain crackers... Hot and cold compresses and for good measure a small fortune's worth of hand and body warmers. She'd figured she could get them all going and just bury him in them if she needed too... right?

First things first, though... the article had said to put a cold, wet washcloth on his forehead, right? She did just that and was irked to find it basically dry again in a flat minute due to his fluctuating temp.

... It was going to be a long rest of the night, wasn't it?

By the time he was waking back up, he'd find her sat crisscross on the couch beside him, just out of distance of the majority his fluctuating heat, asleep with her cheek in one hand. The other hand had fallen into the metal pot filled with water and ice cubes, which were mostly melted. Clyde was nestled up against her tailbone, on his back, and stretched out weirdly. Blueberry was curled up on the top of her head, which was clearly the best vantage point around at that moment in time.

Blue didn’t know when he fell asleep, or if he ever was fully unconscious. His mind seemed trapped between the delirium of a fever and the emptiness of rest. He felt his powers struggle for the first time since he was a child, hungrily seeking warmth while his body desperately wanted something cold again. His torso and neck were covered in sweat but his own flames seemed dimmer than normal.

He knew enough about his body that he knew he was sick. The overexertion in the cold sapped what energy reserves he had, and his body overcompensated in the process. He managed not to burn the couch, or Juniper, but one of the wash clothes may have been scorched, and he vaguely remembered spotting the super hero towel on the couch and trying to cuddle it. Thankfully, that one also escaped damage.

Juniper was asleep when Blue woke, and curled deeper into the couch. Cold... why was it so cold. He hated knowing what cold felt like now, and felt the closer he got to Juniper the warmer it was. The cats felt warm too. He reached for one, but the heat must have been too much and Blueberry scooted away, and his hand bumped Juniper’s arm instead. He withdrew the heat enough he wouldn’t burn her, but had a feeling it was still uncomfortably warm. ”I don’t feel good....” he complained. What did mutants do when they were sick? Medicine? Doctors? Witch doctors?

She started to stir first when Berry dug his claws in a little to scoot away, but more or less made a mental note to trim those claws later and tried to go right back to sleep. Instead, something hot nudged her and she startled fully awake. She sat there for a moment blinking and scrambling to keep the pot of water from tipping over.

"M'awake! Whut?" Oh. Right. Sick. Blue. He didn't feel good.

"I-" She yawned and blinked away sleepy tears. "-have no idea how I'm supposed to tell if the fever I think you have has broken or not." She searched for the cloth she had been using on his head and dunked it back in the water.

After ringing it out and setting the pot and Berry aside, she got it awkwardly settled on his forehead again and dug her phone back out to check and see what next to do.

"Uhm... You should probably have bland foods.. maybe some broths? Broth would probably be good." Would a cold bath help? A hot bath? This was even more confusing then when a regular person was sick.

"Want me to see if I can get ahold of that green chick again? Maybe she'll know more about how this is supposed to go..."

In the meantime, broth! She got up and tried to stretch the kinks out of her back before heading into the kitchen and digging in the sack for the little broth cubes she had found.

Berry yawned and stretched, licking one of his paws as he sat at a safe distance from Blue.

Clyde hadn't moved a single muscle and was now loudly snoring.

Fever, broken. Yeah, he felt broken. He heard her mention broth and take off, and he tried to use the super hero towel he claimed as a blanket. He shivered. A cat meowed somewhere near his head and he heard some mention of the green lady. ”That’s like...asking someone what to do when a fire is sick. I don’t think...anyone knows.”

He was angry. He was furious something so petty had worked on him. If he had sat in the cold without trying to free himself would he have been fine? He sat up suddenly, the towel falling as he stared at the door. Protect. There had been danger. He was near Juni, he was keeping her safe. How could he keep her safe if he was sick? He needed to get up, needed to make sure no one could get here. The idea seemed to float at the front of his thinking until he lost energy again and sat back. He coughed, and there were cats by his head and cats in his dreams.

He remembered being encouraged to eat, and then falling asleep again. Eventually Blueberry decided it was safe and curled up on his chest. His breathing went from ragged to normal and his flames had a steady color again.

He woke up with a cat and a towel. Neither seemed to mind that he was holding them.

"I...suppose..." She frowned. What did you do with a sick fire? If he were a literal fire, like a campfire, she knew how. Lots of tinder and kindling. Slowly stroke it back into a full fire where you didn't have to monitor it so much anymore. It took care and patience and lots of burnable things.

At some point, as she got the broth ready he sat up suddenly and she abandoned the stone since she thought he was going to try and stand. He... seemed out of it. Kept looking at her door like he was expecting someone to come through-

Oooh, he was still in survival mode then? She supposed it made sense. They had both been attacked the same freakin day. "Hey, hey, hey! We're fine, everything's fine! You gotta rest dude, or your gonna get worse!" She wasn't even sure if he could hear her. She was hesitant to try and touch him what with the wonky heat levels, so just tried to block the path he would have to take if he tried to leave.

Thankfully he seemed to lose steam and laid back down on his own, so she didn't have to figure out what she was gonna do.

The broth didn't take much longer to finish, and then she added an ice cube or two to cool it back down.

...and then came the awkward question of how exactly she was going to get him to eat the broth. Uh... pour it in his mouth and rub his throat? Turkey baster??

Resigned to her fate and hoping he wasn't going to kill her for it later, she sat herself down beside him and slowly and carefully spoon-fed him broth little by little. She got half a bowl into him before he seemed to conk out again. It was better than nothing, she guessed?

After tucking him in as best she could with the towel he refused to let go of, she crossed the room and settled herself down with her guitar. She might have decided to try and take a nap again if she hadn't been so worried about what might happen to him if she was asleep. She... didn't wanna take any chances.

SO! Time to practice a few songs until he woke back up and she could see where he was at.

A few hours passed and boy was she tired. The sun had fully risen and she had kinda-sorta filled Xaiver in on what was going on in half-truths and a handful of white lies. Just telling him she was trying to take care of her sick friend seemed to be enough to shoo him off as he got ready for whatever it was he was up to today.

She worked her way through a slew of songs she knew, singing and humming quietly to avoid waking him up before his body was ready. By the time he had started to stir on his own she'd run out of songs she knew and had looked up a few new ones on her phone. She was halfway through I Started a Joke[/i] before she realized he had woken up.

"Oh..." Her fingers dropped from the strings and she blinked at him curiously. "... How are you feeling, Blue?"

Blue was distracted by the music a bit then realized she asked a question. He looked at the cat, the towel, the various strewn supplies near him and felt like he was still in the middle of a very strange dream. ”I....feel confused. Should I expect a white rabbit to appear? Or a tinman? Or is this a musical since you are singing?” he felt one hand reach up and pet Blueberry, then relaxed back into the couch.

What had happened? A truck, cold, something with cooking... he shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead at the flashes of images going in his brain.

”We need to decide what to do about these....incidents” he remarked calmly. It was surprisingly calm considering what they just went through. He could freak out. But he wasn’t. Just, tired.

She snorted oh so attractively. "I mean, I've got costumes for those characters somewhere... I think." She wasn't sure about the musical bit, but him bringing it up brought her attention back to the fact that she was still absently playing and she abruptly stopped. She was so used to him being around that she kinda forgot that he technically factored into that whole 'I don't like singing in front of people' thing she had. She proceeded to over analyze what she had been singing to decide just how embarrassed she should be by it. "Oh, uh... sorry. Hope that wasn't what woke you up."

Plucking at the strings in relative silence, she glanced at him when he finally spoke up again. Hoo boy, was that a doozy of a question she wasn't at all prepared for. 

"I... I don't know?" There wasn't really a need to lie. Both for the situation as well as to him directly. He knew more about her and how she worked than anyone else in her life currently, so... she'd just speak as honestly as she could. 

"I know it sounds stupid, but I was just kinda hoping they'd get bored eventually and stop coming after me? Like, I dunno... doesn't seem like a big deal to me."

Of course, now Blue was involved and they had actively tried to murder him too.... so the whole lot of them were already on her bad side. 

Did she want to hurt them because of it? Yes... deep inside she did. She wanted it to be painful and have a lasting effect on anyone who hurt one of her friends. Did she want to think about some of the more final ways to take control of the situation? ... No, not really. The sounds from the last few attempts were firmly stuck in her head and she wasn't sure if she could bury many more of them like she had the first ...six? Nine? @#$%, how many dudes had died again?

"I never really stuck around and faced any of my problems before, so.... I don't know how to face this one. I suppose I could talk to the girl who employed me in the first place and see if she can do something?"

Blue's brain was still trying to process the idea of 'costumes', so it took a moment for the music to click. Blue shook his head. "I don't mind your music," was all he said. Someone else may have complimented the singing, or asked her to keep playing, or made a more dramatic statement, but for Blue 'not minding' something was as much as he could compliment in the end. Blueberry butted his head and he blinked, reaching for the kitten. His flames seemed normal again, and the kitten purred and curled against his hand.

"You could talk to the girl, maybe see if we can get wind of how they're taking losing a few men. Some groups will give up after there is a body count, some may get more motivated," he seemed mater of fact about it, then shut his eyes. In his brain he was calculating. For someone who lived on a couch, he still had old resources he could reach out to if it came down to it. Not that he wanted to. He sighed, unhappily.

"And generally, running from problems only works in the short term. I preferred to vanish over running....less energy involved..."

She listened, ceasing playing for a moment while she spoke since he had her undivided attention. When he was done she started up again, but with much less energy. She wasn't sure what he meant by vanishing, or if it was any different than what she had already done.

"I don't wanna leave yet." She muttered, brows drawn together as she plucked at the strings on her instrument and contemplated things. "I just got here, and this is the first time in a long time that I've had people I can consider friends." She'd considered it, of course, many times. When her anxiety overflowed and she lapsed into a deeper depression, she had absolutely considered just packing up the few things she needed and hopping over to another state. Restarting.

Three people, in particular, were the main reason she stayed, and one of them was sitting in the same room with her. "I've still got like, two years before I'm supposed to leave again. It's not fair."

Okay, maybe she was being a bit childish here... but she couldn't help it. As much as she wanted to track those people down and hurt them for what they had done, or wishing that they would all just vanish themselves, she couldn't actually bring herself to do it. She wanted to, but she didn't like it.

"I'll see if L can do anything, at least specifically about keeping them off of you. I'm sorry I dragged you into it."

She shifted as Clyde stretched and yawned loudly, then sat and started cleaning his paws.

"How do you know so much about this kinda stuff, anyway? Kinda sounds like you've dealt with it before."

Blue regarded her with half-lidded eyes. But the fact he was looking, and regarding her, was it's own show of respect. Respect? Did he respect people? Maybe friends. He cared enough to listen, and take note of what she was saying. He knew enough to understand her desire to stay where she had people she wanted to be around.

"That's the difference between vanishing and running. Running is what I did when I was younger. Wasn't a plan, just a direction. But, vanishing...that's where I am now. I...I have somewhere I'm comfortable. But I have people I want to be around. But I make sure the people I don't want around can't find me. We need to make you vanish to the people you don't want..." he closed his eyes again, and leaned back into the couch. A tiny motor was on his head making it hard to think. Somehow he didn't mind.

How do you know so much about this kind of stuff?

Blue opened an eye again. "Darlin', you think someone who's going to pay me to fake an accent is gonna keep someone useless around? People with money know how to be safe, and take care of problems. What we have is...a problem to take care of." He shut his eyes again. Then a devilish smirk spread across his face that most people would find unsettling.

"You don't live like I do without knowin' how to act fast in danger. These aren't the first men I've kill, luv, an' if that bothers you, best come to terms with it now."

She... didn't get it. The expression on her face probably said as much. but she was trying at least. 

How was she supposed to vanish more than she already had? Like... spy stuff? Cut her hair and wear big shades all of the time? Maybe he just meant being more careful when she went out or something, or... "I dunno. You're a lot smarter than me about all that kinda stuff." A lot smarter in general, actually, but she wasn't gonna say that. People didn't need to know how little she thought of herself normally. That'd just make things weird. 

"I suppose I could quit my job and just go back to stealing whatever I need..." That'd take her out of that kinda lime light, at least. "I could probably stop going to school too... Being around all of those guys there gives me the heebie-jeebies and I suck at the courses anyway." She laughed, a bit to herself and stared at her fat, lazy cat as he flopped over in a new position and started snoring loudly again.

"...I kinda don't want to though. I hate hiding in the shadows. S'all I ever did back at home."

Listening to him talk again she was reminded of exactly how dangerous Blue truly was. She didn't mind though. She liked him as he was, unsettling grin and all. "I don't mind, not really. Some people just gotta die, right? I just.." She trailed off, collecting her thoughts for a bit. "I dunno, i'm soft I guess. I don't mind hurting people if i've got a reason, but sometimes it's hard to find a reason unless it's for someone I like, ya know? "

Talking was hard. This was SUPER HARD. She wasn't good with words to begin with and trying to sort out something as complicated as that just seemed impossible. "I... I wanted to kill someone for a while, a few years back. Like, had plans and everything. Just wanted him gone off the face of the earth no matter what, ya know?'" She chewed on her lip and set her guitar aside, gripping her crossed ankles with her hands where she sat. 

"I just don't think I could do it. Like, i'd chicken out or something. So I just decided I never wanted to see his face again and got out of dodge."

It was totally weird to think about, but in the same way she respected Xavier for his unwavering ideal to not let anyone die, she also respected Blue in his ability to take that plunge when he needed. Or wanted to, potentially. She... wasn't going to think about that.

"I'm sorry if that sounds really @#$%in lame, it probably is. I just don't like lying to you since I don't have to." There was an unspoken You're the only one i'm honest to that she wasn't going to let out, because it felt sappy and she already felt like she was talking too much. 

"I'll try to do better. I don't want you to get hurt again."