"No more crazy than the rest of your species anyway," Amaru agreed from beyond the doorway.

Anne didn't argue.

"What do you see exactly, when you look at Amaru?" Chris asked Anne curiously as he handed her a cup of broth.

She took the cup with a firmer grip than he expected, and then complained, "He is even more difficult to see than you are, because instead of little ripples there are waves coming off of him that make everything ripple like you do." She gestured to her surroundings, and then did her best to describe the golden sea, the coils, and the impossible eyes. When she finished, she watched Chris with an odd mixture of defiance and fear.

He considered her for a moment, but Amaru walked through the door in his human guise before he could think up a reassuring response. He did manage to catch the cup when Anne flinched and dropped it. She covered her eyes and tried to turn her head away, before turning her whole body away from them.

"Closing my eyes doesn't help, and all I can see is the golden sea right now," Anne complained shakily.

Amaru gazed at her curiously and said, "I had thought that all of the wise among your kind were completely blind to physical sight. They are exceedingly rare though, I found only a few in all of the millennia that I watched them."

"Is there something different about them? How did you find them?" Chris asked. "And will Anne be able to reinforce her own pattern too?"

Amaru looked taken aback. "There is something different: they can see. Generally they will stay near one of the places where many lines cross to form a natural pool similar, but less condensed than what is gathered in a heart. I do not know if Anne will be able to. In general the wise tend to live longer than most of their kind, so perhaps."

Anne coughed and croaked, "My pattern?"

Chris tried to explain, "I think it is… maybe something like DNA? He said he wrote wings into his pattern, and then his children could inherit them."

Anne turned to stare at him incredulously, but hurriedly turned around again. "He didn't have wings? All dragons got their wings from him?"

Amaru grumbled, "Many dragons are naturally winged now, but certainly not all. I think only a few dozen or so would be my descendants."

"I don't have wings," Chris admitted ruefully. He looked at the way Anne was still trying to avoid looking anywhere near the older dragon and then turned to Amaru and added, "I think you are too bright for her, even if she doesn't see the same light that my true eyes do. Can you withdraw for now and converse with her when she has recovered a bit?"

"Very well," Amaru agreed.

Chris frowned when he heard the outer door open and shut as Anne finally turned around, and he pressed the cooling cup of broth back into her hands. But Anne seemed relieved, and presumably Amaru would return. He added cell phones to the list of things he needed to buy.

--

Anne took what felt like the most exhausting shower of her life after Chris finally decided that she had kept the broth down long enough.

She was so weak that she had to lean against the wall while she scrubbed at her hair. When she gave up and decided that she was as clean as she was going to get, she was shocked by how difficult it was to get out of the tub. She couldn't stop coughing, and was too weak to dry her hair.

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She was sure that Chris must be wrong about her not having the new virus. She blinked at the clothes piled on the counter where she'd left the bathrobe. She hadn't heard Chris come in. She didn't feel like she had the strength to get dressed, but they looked clean.

She ignored the bra. Her shirt had been inexpertly patched, but it was good enough. Underwear was a necessity, but she stared at her worn jeans for a bit. She was too exhausted to struggle into them. If she didn't lay down soon, she was going to fall down.

She opened the door a crack, and peeked out. Chris immediately stood up from the couch that was still pushed up against the wall. She could see that the other furniture was all pressed up against the other walls.

"Are you okay?" Chris asked with concern.

"Too tired for pants," she admitted with embarrassment. "Need to lie down."

"Okay," Chris agreed and turned away from the door. "The bed is already made, and I won't look," he promised.

Anne was relieved and amused by the old fashioned behavior. Halfway back to the guest room, she wondered if she was going to make it all the way on her own. She tottered up to the bed and flopped the top half of herself face down on the clean covering.

She was still telling herself that she just needed to rest for another minute before getting into the bed, when Chris picked her up. She didn't even have the energy to protest about how he wasn't going to look. He managed to hold her up with one arm while he pulled back the covers with the other, and then tucked her into the bed as easily as if she were a small child, and she stared at him.

His eyes opened as he pulled the covers up over her chest. "The fever is making you weak. I'll bring you more broth."

"Can't I have ice cream?" she asked plaintively.

"Do you enjoy coughing?" he asked dryly.

"No, but," she began.

"The cold increases your congestion and reduces the effectiveness of the fever," he chided.

"Isn't reducing the fever a good thing?" she argued.

He shook his head. "No, the fever is how your body fights the illness that causes it. Unless it endangers your own life as well, it is better to encourage it to run its course quickly."

His medical treatments sounded as old fashioned as his speech and she muttered tiredly, "I wish I still had my phone."

"I can bring you Mac's iPad if you'd like," Chris offered helpfully.

She nodded, and he left the room. Even if he was using dangerously old fashioned methods, at least he was taking care of her. She turned her head and squinted at the medicines on the little table. Everything said things like draining and clearing, cough suppression on the red one, but nothing listed fever.

She was almost asleep, or already asleep when Chris got back with the broth and the tablet, but he held her up while she sipped it, so she struggled to swallow it all. The tablet was the new kind that she knew weighed barely anything, but it felt as heavy as a slab of stone.

Somehow Anne felt betrayed when several respectable medical sites agreed with Chris about letting fevers run their course. None of them said don't eat ice cream, but ice baths were listed as a bad idea. Just the thought of being dipped in ice water made her shiver.

The advice for the new virus was the same, and her horribly runny nose wasn't on the common symptom list for it, even though fever and cough were. She closed the browser and let the tablet lay against the pillow in front of her face instead of trying to hold it upright. She could watch something. Read one of the comics she used to follow. Or a web novel. Her eyes closed before she decided what to try while she had the opportunity.

--

Chris walked quickly, toward the fast food shop where he had applied. He owed Bobby and Mac a lot. He wished that Anne had come down with something easily identifiable, like the chicken pox, because then he could let Mac come home and keep an eye on her if it were something he'd already had. But of course, both of them had probably been vaccinated for anything like that.

He considered asking Amaru to watch over her, but he felt leery of that idea for several reasons. The older dragon had clearly said that he wouldn't mind at all if sickness wiped out more humans. He did seem interested in her now that he knew she could see things, but he had seemed oblivious to her distress when he got close.

Probably someone who blinded you, or at least made you nauseous if you looked toward them, was not a good nursing candidate anyway.