I would like to say a few things before you start. I used to not be a big fan of using diseases for a fic, but I wanted to give it a go. I want to see how the dynamic between these characters would change if one of their lives would be seriously threatened in a non-funny way.

I would also like to point out this is fiction and I'm not in any way a medical expert, nor do I have first-hand experience with the particular disease and treatment depicted in this fic. I'm just a person who likes to write. So this will probably have quite a few inaccuracies when it comes to the medical side: things I should have included but overlooked due to a lack of experience, or things I included but aren't accurate etc. I hope you can forgive me for the sake of artistic liberty. However I will do my best to portray it as realistically as I can in a general sense. First and foremost, this story is about the friendship and love between these guys as a family as well as on other aspects, in extremely difficult times. But if you feel the need to correct me on something, please do.

I hope you enjoy this story.

Cover for this fic can be found in the intro of the AO3 version. They don't let you post links here.

It all started with a fight, Rick remembered. Or, nothing had really started, really. He read a lot of war comics, and he thought the whole concept of starts and ending was stupid. They were just random points in time where the writer decided to start telling the story. It begins with the occurrence of a problem, and it ends with a neat solving of that problem. In reality though, there were no real beginnings or endings.
There was just things happening, and sometimes those things are good, and sometimes they are utter rubbish.

But that's getting ahead of everything. As much as the thought beginnings and endings are stupid, this was probably where he would start telling the story if he would ever write a book. Not that he would. It would probably be a ruddy awful book. He knew people sometimes wrote books on these kind of things, but he didn't see why anyone would want to read them. It was all completely depressing if you asked him.

Getting back to the point: it started with a fight. As we know, there is nothing unusual about Rick and Vyvyan fighting, and there was nothing unusual or different about this particular day and fight either.
Everything was normal, or, as normal as it ever was before the day everything turned around.

It had been raining for days. It was almost as bad as that time England flooded and there had been sharks outside. There were no sharks now, though. Neil mentioned he'd seen a few turtles floating around the house, but no one paid attention to him anyway. He was probably on drugs, or whatever these stupid hippies do in their spare time. There were no turtles to be seen anywhere, as far as Rick could tell. It was all bloody boring. Anyway, the rain was bad enough that they couldn't go outside and they had been locked up in the house for far too long. Neil was meditating in the middle of the living room, and Mike was

Vyvyan had taken his explosive potions to the kitchen just to annoy the others, and him in particular, Rick was convinced of that. He was sitting on the couch trying to read one of his war comics, but was repeatedly disturbed by an explosion coming from the kitchen table. He observed him from the corner of his eye. There was a bit of soot on his nose and he was looking rather excited. Rick knew it would be dangerous to disturb him when in the middle of experimenting, so he would have to go about this subtly.

Rick put his comic on his lap, leaned towards Vyvyan and tried to smile politely. "Vyvyan, could you stop those noises please, thank you very much, I'm trying to wead." Demonstratively, he picked up the comic and turned the next page with vigor, to show how engaged he was in this utterly intelligent piece of lecture.

The punk didn't even look at him. "Rick, I'm in the middle of something extremely important, so shut up".

Stay calm, Rick told himself. You're a responsible adult, you can do this without wanting to hit him in the face. "And why exactly can't you do these experiments in your woom?"

"Why can't you read the bloody comic in your room!?" Vyvyan answered, still not looking at him, but at a boiling potion that had too much of a resemblance to lava for Rick's comfort.

"Because, Vyvyan, I'm actually twying to expand my intellectual abilities. Tell me, how does making things explode help society in any way? Finding a cure for cancer, are you?"

"I'll help society by shoving a bloody fork in your throat if you don't shut your bloody face!" Vyvyan yelled, now looking at him.

"Well that's nice, isn't it?" Rick said, as he put down the comic. "How utterly mature. I'm sure being violent solves everything".

"SHUT. UP". His friend was screaming at the top of lungs now. "Why can't you just SHUT UP? You've been trying to impede on my experiments for days now!"

"Oh so I'm the one bothering you one am I!?" Rick screamed, standing up and the comic falling off his lap onto the ground.

"YES!" Vyvyan answered.

Merely to piss him off, Rick grabbed a potion off the table and ran away with it. It wasn't long before Vyvyan tackled him and crushed him with his weight, his back landing on the hard floor painfully. In a matter of seconds they were rolling over the floor and playing a game of 'who can give and dodge the most punches'. Rick dodged a few until a fierce jolt of pain shot through his jaw. You bastard, he thought, and tried to roll Vyvyan over.

To his own surprise, though, Vyvyan's body gave zero resistance. He had him overpowered in no-time. Usually Vyvyan was much too strong to be affected by any attempts of Rick to free himself of his grip, but now, the punk rolled over like a raggedy doll.

He was just about to give him a good jab on the jaw, when he realized what was happening to the boy beneath him. Vyvyan was panting. No, no, that wasn't right. It was more like hyperventilating. He desperately tried squeezing air through his lungs and nose, and made a whole lot of noise while doing so. Assuming this wasn't some kind of trick, he got off him.

"Vyvyan, are you all right? Vyvyan…?" Unsure of what to do, he took him by the shoulder and shook him lightly.

Vyvyan couldn't answer. He just lay there panting and trying to gasp for air. It was like he was drowning, and the sounds he was making were scaring him. It sounded like his lungs had been replaced by old, rusty, clogged pipes. The disturbance had Neil awakened from his meditation and ran to their side.

"Oh no, guys, Vyvyan is like, dying! Someone help him!"

"Shut up, Neil", Rick snorted.

He looked at his friend in panic. What should he do? Give him the mouth to mouth? He would forever call him a poof if he did that.

"Give him a smack on the lungs", Mike advised.

He decided that would suffice, and did it with all the strength he had. It helped, because Vyvyan found the power to sit straight and stumble to the couch, where he slowly steadied his breathing.

"What in the name of Cliff's trousers was that?" Rick asked, watching him suspiciously.

"No… thing…," Vyvyan brought out between two huffs. Rick wasn't convinced.

"Well it didn't look like nothing to me, young man! Also, is that blood on your arm?" He stared at his arm in horror, where blood was swelling up in a small wound.

It took Vyvyan another minute to steady his breathing enough to be able to talk normally again. It felt like ages, and it made Rick feel uncomfortable. This was strange. Vyvyan usually was not someone who collapsed after a bit of a fight.

"Yes, I'm bleeding!", Vyvyan said surly, having found his voice again. "Thanks for that, by the way".

"But how?" Rick couldn't hide his shock.

"Because you beat me, you twat!"

"Oh come on, I barely touched you!"

"Well I'm bleeding, so apparently you did!" Rick gave him a hard look, but Vyvyan just made a cross-eyed face at him.

"That sounded like, really heavy, man", Neil said. "Are you sure you're okay, because…"

"I said it's nothing!" Vyvyan screamed, after which he gasped for air again, but turning it into a cough.

"You should stop smoking, Vyv", Mike commented. That was the last word anyone said on the matter.

He would have forgotten about it if that had been the end of it, but it wasn't. The rain stopped the next day, and they were all relieved for a few minutes, until they realized they had no business outside anyway. Vyvyan had been whining about the rain and not being able to get away from them non-stop, but when it was finally dry, he didn't go outside. Instead he was lying on the couch, watching the Bastard Squad.

"Aren't you going to go outside, Vyvyan?" he tried.

"Nah", Vyvyan said, and he grinned. "They're going to blow up the Poof Squad now".

Rick eyed him suspiciously before shrugging it off. So what if he felt like watching TV more than going outside. There wasn't anything strange about that, was it? Except Vyvyan barely got off the couch anymore these days, except for a piss. This certainly wasn't normal behaviour for Vyvyan, and after a few days he got rather tired of it.

"All right, that's just about the bloody limit, young man!" he yelled, making his anger clear by crossing his arms. "You've been lying around for a week now! For God's sake, get your bottom off that couch!"

"What do you care what I do with my bottom, poof?"

That was a question Rick didn't have an answer to, so he said: "I don't! I don't care at all! I'm just getting rather tired of smelling it all the time, is all!"

His punk friend made one of his cross-eyed faces at him. "Why don't you just sod off, then!"

Another two days later, Rick caught him panting against the wall after going up the stairs. Vyvyan had told him to piss off, which was normal, but it seemed as if there was something more intense about the way he said it. He started to pick up on the fact Vyvyan avoided going up the stairs when any of the guys were around. He always stayed up to watch the dot long after the rest had gone to bed before going upstairs. Rick heard him once, and he had paused and rested at least three times before finally reaching the second floor.

Besides the stairs, the punk also seemed to be avoiding food. Not that the food in this house was something Vyvyan ever got excited about before, but this was different. He didn't even seem to enjoy it when Mike had gotten everyone hotdogs.

He noticed the red spots for the first time one morning at breakfast. They were just under his shirt, on his uppers arms, and some on his wrist. Then some time later they appeared on the right side of his nose and in his neck. At some parts it had started bleeding from all the scratching. And since when had he gotten so thin? He used to have a fat belly, but his shirt was sagging around his waist. Rick had asked a few times what was wrong, but he usually said something like: "Shut up". He didn't want to talk about it.

Soon enough, Neil and Mike also started to pick up on Vyvyan's strange behaviour. They were all so used to the punk's occasional violent outbursts and furniture going out of the window on a daily basis, it was hard not to notice the lack of it lately. It hadn't stopped immediately. At first, Vyvyan just got a bit out of breath after throwing something or smashing him around the head with it, but it didn't stop him from doing it. It never got as bad as the day of the fight anymore.
Until one afternoon he tried lifting a chair to smash Rick over the head with it, but gave up halfway. The chair was too heavy, and he had too little breath. Rick saw Mike raise an eyebrow, but all he said, as he took a sip of his coffee, was: "Had a late one, Vyv?"
Vyvyan hadn't tried throwing stuff anymore ever since.

They went to the Kebab & Calculator, and they all had beer, except Rick, because he thought drinking was stupid. He drank fast and seemed to be more energetic than he'd been in a long time. He chatted and drank excitedly. It seemed like whatever it was that had been wrong with him, it was gone now. Until after the fourth beer, he suddenly sprinted to the bathroom. When he still hadn't returned in fifteen minutes, Rick went to if he was all right. He found him hanging over the toilet and throwing up every few seconds. He threw up until all he was spitting was just gall. Rick just stood beside him, not knowing what to do, but having enough decency to know he couldn't just leave him. After half an hour, the punk had stopped throwing up, and he sat with his back against the tiles of the bathroom, his face sweaty and green. His forehead felt hot when he felt it.

"Vyvyan?" Rick sat down beside him.

"What". His voice sounded weak.

"Vyvyan, I think you need to see a doctor".

"I don't want to see a bloody doctor".

"Wait here, okay? I'll get Mike and Neil"

Vyvyan had too little energy to protest. They carried him out of the bathroom together, hand put him on his chair. He kept saying how he didn't want to go to the doctor, but a few words from Mike were enough to shut him up.

"Vyv, this has been going on for long enough. We're taking you to the hospital, and that's the end of it".

He went to get the car, while Rick and Neil kept an eye on Vyvyan. Not that he was in any condition to leave on his own.
Rick waited outside, standing in front of the front door, keeping out an eye for the car. He felt a rather nervous feeling coming over him, and he wrapped his arms around each other in an attempt to hold these feelings inside.