Work Text:
In between phone calls with prospective clients, Strike keeps an ear on the miserable sounds coming from the front office. Stifled coughs amid the shuffling of papers, wet sounding sneezes littering the trill of the telephone and clattering in the kitchenette.
They’ve long since driven across the bridges of polite professionalism and left them burning in the rearview mirrors - so for all that he keeps the warm stirrings of fondness folded tightly to his chest, he cannot help but lift his head from studying the photos sent over by Wardle and call out “you all right, Robin?”
It’s a stupid question, really. She’s too damned stubborn by half to ever admit to being anything other than one-hundred percent. If he were a better boss he would have sent her home the moment she’d walked through the door with her complexion frightfully wan and her round eyes glassy with an oncoming fever, but she’d set her jaw and he hadn’t wanted to send her on the tube back to Matthew - another row two nights ago that she was still tender over - and it was better to just keep her close.
“I’m-” Her response broken off by that horrible, tight cough. He thinks it must certainly be walking pneumonia - Robin never does things by halves after all - and is already hoisting himself out of the chair, hobbling out into the main office when she huffs out “I’m fine.”
One look at her decides it. Miserable and watery-eyed, nose pink and sore from sneezing, the thin skin beneath her eyes purpled with exhaustion. Even her bright, strawberry-fair hair has lost its lustre - all of her faded and sad and bundled up in a cable-knit sweater that seems to be trying to swallow her whole.
“Christ,” Strike says. “If you’re fine, then I’m Thierry Henry.”
Robin sniffles, makes a sorry effort at a scowl. “I’m not going home. I want to work.”
Dragging a hand over his riot of hair, Cormoran already finds himself nodding at this request. “All right,” he says. “All right. You’re not goin’ home.”
He heads for the kitchenette and the small pharmacy stored on the top shelf of the cabinet there. Unsurprisingly, plague has not stopped Robin from keeping the hot water kettle on, and he busies himself preparing tea so that he doesn’t have to look her in the eye when he makes his request. Tries to lighten it with foolishness. “But consider how many times you’ve been here holding down the fort while I’ve been knackered and useless, sleeping off a sore head.” He hears Robin snort. Or it may be a sneeze. “Just have a lie down on the couch, will you? Let someone else take care of you for a change?”
Strike risks a wary look at Robin when he sets the bottle of pills and tea mug before her on the desk, finds her watching him curiously with her feverish, sick eyes.
She says, very softly, with a scratch in her voice “you’ll wake me in an hour?”
“Of course.” He is taken aback by just how tenderly the reassurance slips from him, and he hurries to find her the spare blanket and pillow from his office before he can do more damage.
Exhausted and ill as she is, Robin sleeps almost instantly on the farting leather sofa, curled tightly in on herself, one hand tucked up under her cheek. Cormoran stands over her for a long moment, watching the rise-and-fall of her chest beneath the woolly blanket, listening for a rattle, a wheeze in her breath. Something in his own wide chest aches terribly.
Certain that she is sleeping soundly, he risks reaching out, smoothing his broad dry knuckles against her temple, along the soft round curve of her cheek to check for fever - because of course Cormoran Strike is not a man who is sensible enough to own a thermometer. His fingers catch in a few of the long, glossy strands of her hair and Robin sighs in her sleep, grateful for the press of the cool hand against her too-warm skin.
Oh. Cormoran thinks, watching the shift and change of that familiar face - fierce, lovely, stubborn girl. Too brave, and too smart, and too good. Oh, I think I love you.