#can y'all tell I'd like a stinky bug man to hover over me rn

[beetled-juice]

Currently feverish and sick, so this may not make any sense to anyone but me. But in the movie, keatlejuice makes a quip about how he was there during the black death - in my mind this means he's intimately familiar with how illness and disease affect breathers. And while before it was funny at best and kind of annoying at worst, he now actually has a breather he doesn't want to be sick, especially if it could possibly end with them no longer breathing. Add this to the fact that this loser has the emotional maturity of a rotting cabbage, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster whenever you get sick.

He's trying to play it cool, but he's hovering like crazy and jerking his head up every time you cough or sneeze. He's burning through cigarettes faster than you can keep track of, though between your chest cold and your asthma you have to remind him to keep it as far away from you as possible (which he definitely doesn't like but after triggering more than one coughing fit it seems to get through his thick head that it's necessary). He won't sit still either, pacing around your house and trying to find something to distract him from this annoying bubble of worry in his chest. He hates feeling this way, hates that some stupid breather has managed to worm their way under his skin and lodge themselves in his unbeating heart, but he can't seem to pull himself away from you.

He definitely won't be the attentive loving type when you're sick, at least not at first. Maybe with time and a wearing down of the mask he's built up all these centuries he'll be better about it, but for now he's trapped between the uncaring jackass persona he's perfected and the desire to mold himself along your body and make sure your heart keeps beating beneath his ear. So you get this weird in-between: intense hovering and vigilance with a bitchy attitude and crappy bedside manner that almost makes you want to kill him. But it never escapes your notice that the blankets stay up around your shoulders and your cold water never goes room temperature no matter how long you sleep, and that's enough for now.