#i hold pencils and pens and stuff slightly odd so instead of being thick on the vertical and thin on the horizontal its the opposite LOL

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It’s Never Too Late to Call Quit

This sickfic is heavily inspired by @swiggity-swump’s amazing fic Late Work, based on an also really cool prompt by @taylor-tut ! I just felt like I had to credit them both because they’re Sickfic Goals TM. For once, the fic is on Tumblr, but I’ll probably still post it on AO3 later anyway.

Summary: It’s a peaceful Monday evening, and Richard has had a nice day until then. What could possibly wrong, when he has a training oral with the best student of the class on a text he personally loves? Well... It doesn’t depend on Richard.

Fandom: PDV (original work, zero need for additional material)

Word count: 2.3K words

Note: “Ulm” refers to the fanciest college one can enter. “Khâgne” and “hypokhâgne” refer to a special cursus to allow students to enter this prestigious school, which correspond to the two first years of college (but it’s literature).

Now available on AO3!

Richard is quite happy today. All his orals have been good so far, or at least decent, and he hasn’t given a single bad grade all week. This is a rare occasion, even among his fellow Ancient Literature specialists. This is the last oral he has on the list to give, and unfortunately for him, he has no oral to go through while his last student prepares his translation and commentary.

He already reads again the text he is about to give. A very short extract he loves from Aeschylus’s The Persians, a fragment of the Messenger’s address to the Queen of Persia after the defeat of Salamis. He isn’t sure about the historical accuracy of the text: he just knows he loves this play and is, deep inside, glad to give it the top student of this class.

 He has a filled grid in front of him, with all the students’ names. On this Monday evening of February, he is feeling pretty good. This is rare enough for him to smile about it. He muses over a name sloppily written in blue ink, facing the hour of the oral’s preparation and start: François Bannaire.

Despite his common name, common-sounding surname and his sloppy writing, he is by far the top student of his class. Good in everything but philosophy, brilliant in literature despite clearly disliking his teacher (who could blame him, she is quite the old hag), good enough at his secondary language to already be trilingual in English and Italian. Richard can’t lie to himself: he really likes this kid.

 “Kid” is the way he would describe François Bannaire, at least. He is fairly young, maybe too young for all he knows and is capable of doing. It’s as if he was condemned to study like a monk before joining Henri IV for his khâgne year. Nobody even knew about the school he had made his hypokhâgne year in, but his personal file was good no one even dared refusing one more student in a slightly overstuffed class. He was just this miraculous. The kind of student who had his free pass for Ulm. On this field, he has yet to disappoint anyone but the philosophy teacher, who is still a bit pissed at the boy for having just given back an introduction to an essay out of lack of inspiration for passions and war.

“Kid” is more about how François is. He is barely eighteen, discovering the joys and cons of adulthood one head at a time (he still hasn’t agreed to a single drop of alcohol, “my mom told me to be careful” has become a joke in the class, but he laughs at it too), isn’t too rushed about growing up as if he is in a daydream. He isn’t, but nobody dares telling the kind and naïve François life is harsh and will spit in his face more than once. That’s what happens when you’re one college year ahead of your age and attend an abstract cursus, Richard guesses.

 A knock on the door breaks the teacher from his thoughts and he walks to the door, already expecting his star student to rock his Bailly dictionary to success. He did so the first time around, so why would he not on the second? This is exciting, when he thinks about it. It’s always exciting when he’s certain this is going to be marvellous.

He opens the door and faces the boy, except his excitement falls flat on its face as soon as he does so. François looks… more than odd. When he would be a bit stressed, and showing so, but still make his greatest grin to his teachers, he was sporting a pained look, as if his stress had taken over. He can see his legs are shaking, and the way he holds his Greek-to-French dictionary is feeble at best.

 “H-hello s-sir… Sorry, I’m a tad late…” he rasps, breathless.

It must be anxiety. The boy has the pressure of everyone’s hopes, after all.

“Hello, François. Please take a seat in the room. I will get you the text” the teacher replies as he walks to the desk.

 The student installed himself in the back of the room, so he has to walk a little bit to reach him, but it doesn’t take long and soon enough, he’s all ready to translate the short extract. Richard goes back to his seat, at the desk, and plunges himself inside his novel. He’s corrected enough tests for the day, he can allow himself a small hour of reading, can’t he? He’s the boss of himself, duh.

The sound of a pencil scratching paper is nice, he thinks. It helps him focus, for a reason he can’t ever get out of his brain. However, the occasional muffled cough noise isn’t. It’s grating, and since he doesn’t come from him, it must come from the only other person in the room. It may just be some regular cough his mind makes up to be stronger, muffled by his student’s scarf. He shrugs it away. It’s February, of course the boy is going to be a bit sick, who isn’t?

 After a while, there is a complete silence. No pencil, no cough. He doesn’t think of it a lot at first: François must be reading his paper again to see if he made some translation error, or is thinking about what to say for the commentary on the text. Nothing big, nothing out of the ordinary. He lays back into his chair, still deep into his crime story (he’ll never admit to his workmates his love for crime novels, it’s not real literature).

“Time’s up,” Richard tells him while looking at his watch, “come to the desk now, please.”

There is no reply. No sound. Nothing.

 Feeling like he’s being kidded with, the Greek teacher gets up from his chair, clutching on his red pen in a hope to exhort his anger out of the words he is about to throw at the boy’s face. When he arrives in front of the table, he has to admit to himself something: that wretched student is fast asleep on his sheets, and the dictionary is still opened to the Ν pages. Honestly, Richard is more than a little pissed about this.

“Mr Bannaire, it is time to wake up. You have an oral to take. I do not want this to require me waking you up.”

He doesn’t even begin to stir. This is going to frustrate him to anger far quicker than he ever expected it to.

 At his feet, Richard notices a pencil whose point got broken and a tissue. That’s when he notices how unnaturally his student is slumped, left hand limply hanging out of the table while his right arm is still on the open dictionary. It’s as if he fell asleep so suddenly he didn’t have time to see it coming. This is quite an impressive fatigue, Richard thought, and a small sigh escaped his mouth. If he was this tired, maybe he should be a bit kinder today.

He puts a hand on his student’s shoulder, only to take it off a second later. Did he just put his hand on a heater instead? Doubting, he shakes him, still feeling this heat on his palms, until a cough is heard, and François finally stirs, slowly, almost numbly.

 His eyes eventually lock into his teachers’. His face is instantly washed with fear and panic, and his hands retrieve all his needed papers, including a full draft for a translation.

“I-I’m sorry sir… I didn’t mean to fall asleep…!” he grogs out before retaining a cough. “Sorry for that, let me… let me just get my stuff together for it…”

“François.”

 Upon hearing his name, the boy stops and looks at him. Richard slips his hand under the thick, chocolate brown bangs of the younger man, only to grit his teeth.

“You’re not taking that oral tonight, on my career’s sake. You’re going home right now.”

“B-but why…? It’s because I slept…?”

Richard can barely believe he just said that.

“Okay, François, listen. You’re burning up. You’re clearly ill beyond reason. You should be in bed right now, not translating some Greek. We’ll just postpone it, okay? This isn’t as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be.”

Red, puffed eyes look away as he attempts to wipe them by wiping his glasses.

“It’s just a tiny fever… I can do it, sir, please…”

“No is no, Mr Bannaire. You are officially discharged and going back home.”

Oh wait.

“No, that’s right, you live in the dorms… I’ll bring you to Edith then. She’ll be able to call your parents so you can go back home.”

 As if it was possible, François’s face loses even more colour, to the point he looks like a corpse with a huge tint of red all over his face and cheeks. He suddenly gets up from his chair and, from the other side of the table, throws himself at Richard.

“Please don’t send me home! I don’t wanna explain to my dad why I’m sick again! Just send me back to dorm, I’ll find a way to get better by tomorrow! Don’t… don’t send me home…”

“François. How long have you been sick?”

“It’s just today… I don’t know why I feel so ba… I mean why I have a fever all of a sudden. It’s just a fever.”

“I can’t let you remain on school grounds in such a condition. We’re going to the nurse’s office immediately.”

 Then, Richard realizes what’s wrong with his student.

“Did you sleep a lot lately?”

“S-sir, if it doesn’t bother you, can we do that translation now…? I still have Latin and history stuff to do…”

The man had to retain the boy from falling over.

“You’re about to pass out, François. This isn’t the time to insist on taking an oral. Your hubris isn’t going to help at the moment.”

A small smile creeps on the student’s face.

“I get it… It’s like Xerxes’s failure at Salamis…”

He sits down as Richard decides to tide his stuff up, grabbing the backpack sloppily bleeding sheets on the table.

“S-sir… Can you walk me there…? I don’t think I’m seeing very clearly anymore…”

“Of course, if it means you can get the bed you deserve.”

 A few minutes later, Richard has two backpacks on his back and a boy on his shoulder, whose ragged breathing tells better than anything else how unwell he is. This wasn’t stress, after all, but maybe he should had seen that coming.

“I think you overworked yourself, François. It’s not natural to have such a fever from a day to the other. Did you sleep lately?”

“Huh… I slept two hours last night, I think so at least…? I can’t tell, my roommates were sleeping when I went to bed and when I woke up…”

“You have some deep dark rings under you-”

“Fuck I forgot to take my medicine… That’s why my chest feels so squeezy today…”

“What medicine?”

“Asthma treatment… Mine’s pretty bad apparently… That’s what Mom kept telling me…”

 Once at the nurse’s office, Richard finally remembers something. Edith’s shift ended an hour ago, and the night time nurse doesn’t come until another hour. However, he has a key of the room, kindly given to him by Edith in case anything happened to any of his students… But the single fact she wrote “François” on the keychain tells him she had a precise goal in mind.

Once the door is unlocked, he hurries to put his student on the closest bed he can find. He gets his phone out, calls for a doctor, who tells him to call for an ambulance if the fever is higher than forty and a half, so he shoves a thermometer down the boy’s mouth, and it reads “only” forty, so they just decide to wait for the other nurse.

 “Sir, I… I can sta-”

“I’ve heard you were easily ill, is that true?” Richard asks, interrupting his sentence on purpose.

“I do… But usually it’s just colds, or at worst anginas… I’m not used to harsh fevers yet…”

“Yet?”

“I haven’t had strong fevers before a few years. I guess that’s linked to overwork, that’s what everyone keeps telling me… I hate those, I feel really bad when they happen…”

“Why not sleep more to avoid it? You look exhausted.”

“Don’t have time… I have to get to Ulm… Or else I’ll have even more depths towards my father… And I don’t want that…”

“You do now letting yourself get this sick is more counterproductive than anything, right? You’re making things even harder for yourself.”

“Y-yeah, I wish I would stop doing that, but I always feel like I’m running out of time…”

 Richard sighs. He feels bad for that boy, dammit.

“That may be because we put a lot of pressure on you and your peers, but you may feel it more easily than the others… Did you feel that way last year?”

“Not really… They weren’t as competitive as here… The pressure was on whether or not I’d get my ancient lit speciality here… Is it me or is it cold in here…”

He’s shaking like a leaf in the middle of a blizzard.

“It’s your fever. I sadly have to leave you so I can get home before half past eight, but I don’t want to see you before you’re all better, ok? I’m sure you can get the lessons from your friends. Take care, François.”

“Thanks sir… Sorry for that…”

“It’s all fine. See you when you’re better.”

“G’bye…”

 Richard exits the room, closes the door and wipes up a sheet from his bag, writing down a small note for the incoming nurse. Once it’s done, he gets some transparent tape from his pencil case, tapes the paper to the door and makes his way to the exit of the school. It’s been a while since he genuinely hoped someone would get better soon.