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Sometimes Wemmbu regretted making friends at all in college. It was just-- a waste of time, really, and he hadn't even planned on having them in the first place but halfway through his first year he'd blinked and suddenly he's in a film project, swept along in the tailwinds of everyone else around him. The hang-outs to storyboard and toss out character ideas blend together, and then suddenly they're all hanging out for no reason at all, even when filming's done. And Wemmbu. Doesn't really get it.
It had taken Egg, his roommate, the one who'd roped him into it in the first place, calling him a friend to his face to realise that he didn't really mind it either.
But sometimes, times like these, he circles back around to how he'd felt walking into his dorm on his first year; when he'd still been heavy and quiet and pinched, just barely free of his small-town high school and saddled with the weight of family legacy. He'd stopped at the threshold of his tiny, double-bed dorm and thought: I cannot believe this shit. And now, staring down at the screen of his phone lit up with a text message, he thinks: I cannot believe this shit.
It is two in the fucking morning. On his lock-screen, superimposed, is a text from Egg reading 'wemmbu ineed hejjlp'. And Wemmbu knows, in his heart of hearts, that Egg is a capable man. He's in on a scholarship, full-ride. Hell, he's double majoring. But his hands, revolting against his common sense, tap in his password and swipe open the message anyway to respond.
'Wdym you need help', He taps out. There is only a little bit of hesitation before sending, and Egg's little typing bubble pops up instantly.
'i think imgsick'
'Where are you?'
Wemmbu's already begun preemptively rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and now with a jolt he hops out of his bed with one still on his phone, fumbling around for his glasses on his nightstand and smacking on the lamp in the process. His car keys go into the pocket of his ugly flannel pyjama pants, met by his wallet only a moment later. Is he catastrophizing? Maybe.
But Egg had told him before he'd left that he'd be going out on the town-- not his words, but it was implied-- and that had been before the sun had gone down, and then Wemmbu had gone to sleep before he'd come back and thought nothing of it. Something in his stomach twists with a little twinge, on-edge, offput; Egg hadn't really seemed sick or anything before he'd left, and Wemmbu hadn't had anything to say to him when he'd told him so he'd just waved him off to go have fun.
He's not a huge worrier, but he fiddles with his thumbnail anyways, waiting at the door for Egg to get his words out onto the screen.
'i dont know'
'im asking a guy'
'he sas iys the pirates house'
'I can be there in ten minutes'
'Stay there'
'ok tjuanks wemm'
Their room is down the hall from the washing machines, stuffed in the back corner of the cold ground floor. Wemmbu cracks open the door as quietly as he can, willing it not to creak, and strides into the laundry room as quickly as possible. Out back, through a barely-hidden door next to a shelf of cleaning supplies, is an alley; and further back, as he had found out on his first week here, is a gap in the chain-link fence separating it from the road that's just big enough for him to wiggle through. No one ever locks the alley door (he's heard rumour it's because the RA smokes back there), so he ghosts out and is through the fence with barely a rattle.
It's only a short jog from there to his car where it's parked in one of the dorm spots, and thus the first leg of his trip is done. Now he just needs to get to the Pirates' fraternity house. Easy.
Two minutes into the drive his phone vibrates again, and it startles him so bad he actually jumps and fumbles for it, hitting his brakes a bit abruptly at a stop sign as he exits the campus through a back road no one ever looks twice at. Not that he thinks anyone would care enough to stop him, but still.
'ru here soin?'
'Yeah. I'm seven minutes out.'
'Hold tight'
'i feel bad'
Wemmbu grits his teeth. His music had started automatically when he'd started the car, so over his speakers The Cure is quietly playing, and he cruises along to it at a speed that may or may not be pushing the limits on the signs he happens to pass. Egg doesn't usually text like he is now, even when he's drunk-- Drunk Egg loves emoticons, endearingly enough. Now, Wemmbu hasn't caught sight of even a spare colon-bracket sad face.
Something is wrong, his gut says.
He gets to their frat house in record time, he's pretty sure, and only commits like two minor traffic violations on the way. When he pulls up all of the lights are off, and there's a figure half-sitting on the sidewalk outside, leaning back on their elbows in the grass. Wemmbu pulls the parking break, staring.
When he opens the door and circles the car, The Cure filters out and he's hit with the mid-summer humidity, the damp quiet of the night where the crickets sing to themselves and the wind does not blow. It's kind of oppressive, and it smells like petrichor and vomit. The figure stirs, a little, and the beam of his headlights catch on one eye as it wavers over to look at him.
"Egg?" He asks.
A groan, and he's by Egg's side in an instant. He's hunched like he can't keep himself up, stomach parallel to the ground, legs splayed behind him like an afterthought. His forehead is warm and slick with sweat whenever Wemmbu puts the back of his hand on it, and he swears softly.
"Egg?" Wemmbu asks again, kneeling down onto his knees in the wet grass of the Pirates' front yard, because really it's not like it'd make his pants look worse. Egg turns his head further to look up at him, and Wemmbu gets a look at his face-- trashed, pinking at the edges with his eye bleary and unfocused, mouth parted on a silent word. His gaze hits Wemmbu and he blinks once, twice, before coughing wetly.
"Wemm," Egg croaks. Wemmbu nods supportively. "I think... I think I'm sick."
"Did you take anything?" He asks, because he has his suspicions and he knows that peer pressure is a thing, even if Egg wouldn't take a pill on his own. The Pirates-- big, bloody sports jocks, the school's reigning champions-- are pushy assholes about whatever knockoff drug of the week they've gotten their hands on. He knows people stronger-willed than Egg who'd given in just to get them to shut up.
Just. Well.
He kind of really needs to know whether or not he should be calling for an ambulance or not. Or going for the narcan he has in his wallet. Or something.
"Nuh," Egg says, helpfully. Wemmbu leans in, a little, and slips a hand under his armpit like a side-hug to try and get him upright, or at least in a position where he's not bound to face-plant into the grass. Egg's warm all over; he can feel it through his shirt, stuck to his back with sweat.
"You didn't take anything? No pills?"
Egg shakes his head. Wemmbu sighs rather thankfully, and props him in a sort-of-sitting position to get a better casing of what he's dealing with. From what he can make out Egg isn't shaky, his pupil looks fine, and the only visibly off thing about him is the feverish tint to his eye and the way he's sweating. It's not alcohol-- Wemmbu's seen him drunk, nearly blackout, and it was nothing like this. That ticks another thing off his list.
So: actually sick, it seems.
"Do you think you'll throw up if I put you in the car?"
"Nn," Egg hums thoughtfully, and then shrugs. Alright. Wemmbu heaves him up in one motion, because they're like the same height and Egg is built like a stick, and holds him by his side like a crutch all the way over to the car, which is only five steps but feels longer. Egg does try to help, to his credit, but it seems like his feet are not doing him any favours; they keep slipping out from under him so that Wemmbu's basically supporting all of his weight anyways.
Without a terrible struggle, he gets Egg into the passenger seat of the car, and grabs a plastic bag from the glove compartment just in case for him to hold while he buckles him in. Egg leans his head back onto the seat, and Wemmbu nudges him to get him to wake back up.
He circles the front again, gets in, buckles his seatbelt and starts the car like he's on autopilot. Egg perks up a little bit when the music filters back through the speakers.
"So, did you go to a party?" Wemmbu asks faux-absently, two minutes into the drive wherein Egg's been clenching his fingers tighter and tighter on the baggie in his hands. Egg shakes his head again, scrunching up his face. Rather than rolling the windows down he's instead turned the A/C all the way up and he's pretty sure Egg can tell, but he hasn't pieced together where exactly the cold air is coming from.
"Rejoice and I studied at his place," He says, slowly, like he's just remembering. His words are thick, slurred a little. "'N when we were done, I was feeling really sick."
"You walked to his house," Wemmbu says, in realisation. He'd assumed-- well, Egg isn't a huge party person, same as him, but he'd assumed when Egg said he was 'going out' that he meant to a party, or a bar, or something. But Rejoice lived off campus, in a house with two others who were gone most of the time anyways, and his house was right down the road from the Pirates'. And since Egg had walked there--
"I tried to walk back," Egg says, and in the drivers' mirror he's pouting a little. It takes away from the ice in Wemmbu's stomach, a little. "But I just. I dunno."
"It's fine," Wemmbu says, "Really. I mean, it's good you called me, dude."
They get back to the dorms without, thankfully, Egg throwing up in Wemmbu's car. It might be a piece of shit, but it's not exactly to that level just yet. He has to unbuckle Egg and help him out whenever he fumbles with the seatbelt like his fingers aren't cooperating, and then he helps him inside as efficiently and unnoticeably as he can manage, which is only hindered by his passenger; Egg isn't very flexible, and squeezing him through the chain-link fence presents an issue for a few minutes as the two of them try to figure out how to contort his body enough to fit. It works in the end, and Egg only gets a scrape on the chin for his troubles.
"Can you, like. List your symptoms?" Wemmbu asks, once he gets Egg lying down like a patient on his own bed in their room. He's no medical provider, but it's three in the morning. He's kind of out of other options.
Egg complies, and Wemmbu takes them down them mentally as he bustles around trying to find things to help. Egg's not at the point of fever that he feels cold, so Wemmbu wets a washcloth with cold water to put on his forehead like he's seen people do, and then gets him ibuprofen for his headache, with the bonus points of it being a fever reducer. He also fills a glass up with water, makes Egg drink it, and then fills it up again because he knows firsthand that throwing up dehydrates the fuck out of a person.
"Thanks, Wemmbu," Egg says quietly, a little bit after Wemmbu's turned the lamp back off to let the man get some sleep. He's already drafted an e-mail to Egg's professors about him being sick and scheduled it to send in the morning, just in case he can't do it himself, and so now all he needs is for Egg to actually go to bed.
"Of course," He says easily, pulling his glasses off and ignoring the grass stains on his pants as he clambers back into bed. "Anytime, man."
(Wemmbu wakes up late the next morning with a fever, a full-body ache, and a roommate who's terribly nonfunctional when he's sick.)