Twisted Reality

Three days later, Jinxx was up in the middle of the night with their infant frontman, whom appeared to be coming down with something. He hadn’t told CC and Ash, knowing the pint-sized bassist would flip his shit and start freaking out that his lover was sick and there was nothing he could do about it. Besides, his grandmother’d arrived from Phoenix and, although she was trying her damnedest to remember that he was still grown mentally, she couldn’t resist treating him as if he really was the child he was physically.

Jake had been caring for the little guy during the day so he could get some sleep, but he had a harder time doing so since it was all guesswork on his part. Unlike his sweetheart, he couldn’t read Andy’s mind and know exactly what was wrong, what he wanted, and how to help. The poor little guy spent most of his time with the guitarist crying since he couldn’t verbalize what was on his mind.

Right now, the multi-instrumentalist was sitting in the rocker they’d put in their living room with him, gently rocking him as he slept restlessly. He’d had a fever for the past twenty-four hours that they were able to keep under decent control by alternating Infant’s Advil and Infant’s Tylenol, but that wasn’t his only symptom. He had a nasty cough that, combined with his constant crying when he was with Jake, had left him pretty hoarse. Neither of them could blame the guitarist for doing what he thought was right; he was doing the best that he could under the circumstances, and they both knew it. That didn’t stop the poor little guy’s cries, which broke both their hearts when they had to hear them.

Shortly after he’d gotten their infant frontman back to sleep, his sweetheart stumbled down the hall, barely dressed and in desperate need of coffee. Jinxx looked up at him through equally bleary eyes and asked what he was doing up, surprised to hear that Chris and Amy were at the airport and needed a ride. Knowing that it wasn’t very smart to be taking Andy anywhere right now, he agreed to keep him here at the apartment while the guitarist went to pick them up. He really didn’t want to disturb him while he was getting whatever sleep he possibly could, especially since he was sick and needed his rest.

“I’ll be back in a little while, sweetheart,” Jake said softly, leaning down to kiss him.

“Just be careful, my love,” he answered, returning the kiss. “I don’t want you or Andy’s parents getting hurt.”

“That was the plan. Give him a kiss from all of us if he wakes up before we get back,” he requested.

“Will do. Again, be safe,” the multi-instrumentalist said.

His lover smiled at him sleepily as he headed out the door, a cup of coffee in hand.

“Mmm, what am I gonna do with you, little fella?” Jinxx murmured softly, gently kissing the top of the sleeping baby’s head.

“Mmm,” Andy whimpered in his sleep, still sounding miserable.

“Shhh. It’s okay, Ands. You’re all right with me,” he whispered, still gently rocking him.

“Inxx?” he asked, looking up at him with bloodshot eyes.

“What’s the matter, Andy?” the multi-instrumentalist countered.

He groaned as best he could, reaching up to touch his throat.

“Your throat hurts?” he asked.

The infant frontman nodded his head weakly, tears of pain welling up in his eyes.

“Let’s go get you some more Advil and see if that’ll help,” Jinxx said, sighing as he rose from the rocker. “You hungry, too?”

“Mmm hmm,” Andy murmured slowly. It was almost as if any sound or movement made his little throat hurt worse.

He quickly headed into the master bathroom, where they’d been storing anything they could use for his health ever since they took him under their wings four days ago. In there, he sat him down in the little bath chair they used when bathing him, which was secured to the toilet lid for the moment, so he’d have both hands free. It made things move quicker as he grabbed the medicine and measured the dosage.

The little guy obediently opened his mouth and let him use the dropper to administer the dosage, quickly swallowing it since it was grape-flavored and he was fairly fond of grapes. Jinxx was just glad that his friend wasn’t refusing the medicine necessary to not only help the pain in his throat, but to keep his fever down, as well, like he’d heard of babies doing before. It could’ve been in part to the fact that he was mentally an adult and knew he was only trying to help him, or possibly because he felt too bad to be his normal stubborn self. Either way, not having to fight him helped a lot.

With the Infant’s Advil down his throat, he picked Andy up and cuddled him close, quickly wrapping his blanket back around him as he gently kissed his forehead. He cooed to him softly to keep him fairly calm as he walked to the kitchen to quickly make him a bottle. Even though it meant feeding him more often, he’d taken to making him four-ounce bottles while he was sick, just in case he started throwing up. It meant less to clean up, as well as less chances that his stomach would reject the formula in the first place because of his illness.

“Jinxxy! We’re back!” he heard Jake call as the front door closed.

“In the kitchen, Jakey!” the multi-instrumentalist answered tiredly.

“Hey, Jinxx,” Amy said. “How’ve you guys been?”

“Tired as Hell,” he yawned, tightening his grip on Andy. “Not to scare you, but I think Andy might have strep throat, and he’s been keeping us up quite a bit.”

“Oh, my poor baby boy,” she cooed, gently taking him from him. “You do feel a bit warm, sweetheart.”

“I just gave him a dose of Infant’s Advil a few minutes ago,” Jinxx told her, turning to the stove. “He complained of a sore throat, and I realized his fever was coming back, too.”

“How long has he been feverish?” the middle-aged woman asked, bouncing him gently.

“About twenty-four hours,” he answered. “If he’d been feverish for much longer than that, I would’ve tried taking him to the ER already.”

“If he stays that way much longer, Chris and I might have to take him, anyway,” Amy told him. “Course, we’ll have to figure out how to get around the obvious age issue.”

“Yeah. He’s supposed to be nineteen, not seven months old,” the multi-instrumentalist agreed.

“Mmm, Ma-ma,” Andy murmured, tucking his face into her neck.

“I know, I know,” Amy cooed in response, gently rubbing his back. “You don’t feel good and you want Mommy to make you feel better, don’t you?”

“Mmm hmm,” he murmured, tears welling up again.

“You still hungry, Andy?” Jinxx asked, testing the bottle on his wrist.

He nodded and reached out, making a grabbing motion that translated to “Gimme my bottle!”

“There’s a rocker in the living room we’ve been using if you wanna go sit in there,” Jinxx told her. “It’s actually gotten more use the past day or so than we thought it would.”

“Can’t he sleep in the crib you told me you guys got?” she asked, settling herself in the chair before setting it into motion as her son wrapped his lips around the bottle’s nipple.

“He seemed to be able to sleep in it fine the first couple days he acted like he was getting sick,” he answered, taking a seat on the couch next to them. “Ever since his cough worsened night before last, he hasn’t been able to sleep laying down. It seems like laying him down flat makes his breathing worse, as well as the cough, so one of us tends to sit in the rocker with him so he can sleep.”

“Yeah, he never really did well laying flat when he was sick,” Amy agreed. “When he was literally a baby, Chris and I used to have to do the same thing. As he aged, we’d just give him extra pillows to help prop him up.”

“I’ve spent so much time in that chair the last day or so, just so he can get some sleep, that I’m surprised it hasn’t conformed to the shape of my ass!” he chuckled, beginning to get a bit delirious from exhaustion.

“You guys have his crib in your room, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. We’ve kept him at the foot of our bed since he was so used to being cuddled by Ash and we wanted to make sure we heard him if he woke up,” Jinxx answered, nodding.

“Unless you have issues with Chris and I coming in there to tend to him, why don’t you go on to bed?” she suggested. “You’re exhausted and can use the sleep. Even though he should still be grown physically, we’ve been through this with him many times before; we can handle him for a while so you can rest.”

“Let’s see if we can get the crib in the guest room with the bed and changing table.” He had to pause to let out a yawn he couldn’t stifle. “If we can’t, that’s no problem. But like Jake, I tend to prefer my privacy when I’m asleep.”

“That’s perfectly fine, Jinxx.” She bowed her head to kiss her son’s temple.

The multi-instrumentalist yawned again as he walked down the hall toward the guest room-turned-nursery, where he found his lover helping Chris unpack their things. He quietly asked his opinion about whether they could get the crib in here while the Biersacks were here, that way Andy could be closer to his parents. Considering that he was sick and, not only were they used to this, the two of them needed a break from the past few days.

Jake glanced around the room with a shrewd but appraising eye, then turned back to face his sweetheart. Unfortunately, the room was so small that they’d be better off leaving the crib at the foot of their bed and their bedroom door unlocked while they were asleep so they could get to the baby. That didn’t exactly sit well with Jinxx, but they needed their rest, Andy needed someone to be able to care for him, and their apartment wasn’t exactly roomy enough for this. They’d chosen an apartment slightly on the small side because they hadn’t been planning on adopting anytime soon.

Nodding his understanding, the multi-instrumentalist told him that he was going to try to get some sleep and tilted his head back for a quick kiss. Chris’d finished unpacking his and his wife’s things and headed out to the living room to check on his sick son, leaving them alone for a private moment together. After ending the kiss and breaking apart, Jinxx headed to their bedroom to ready himself for bed while his lover got their guests settled in before even thinking about joining him to catch up on his own sleep.

In the master bedroom, he stripped down to his boxers, uncaring of whether either of the Biersacks saw him in his underwear or not. Normally he was just modest enough that he didn’t want anyone but Jake to see him in even that much of a state of undress, but right now, he was too exhausted to care. Thankfully, he made it into the bathroom before he heard Amy come in to put Andy back in his crib after changing his diaper. When he walked into the room again, he saw her gently propping him up with a couple of pillows to aid his breathing, quietly telling her he was going to bed. The middle-aged woman wished him sweet dreams, even kissing his forehead as if she were his mother, and that was the last thing he remembered for several hours.

* * *

In the living room, Jake was relaxing with Chris and enjoying a cup of coffee, knowing that he’d slept just long enough to keep him from getting back to sleep for a while. Even though he hated that Andy’d gotten sick right before his parents were due to arrive, he was glad that they’d arrived when they did. He and Jinxx had been doing the best they could the past three days, but they really had no clue just how hard caring for a baby, especially a sick one, really was.

“You guys have been driving yourselves nearly up the wall the past couple days, haven’t you?” Chris asked, taking a sip of his coffee.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered, nodding. “Caring for a baby is hard enough, but a sick one? I’m not sure how Jinxx and I have kept our sanity the past three days or so.”

“At least you’ll have something to reference later on if you decide to adopt or use a surrogate and egg donor,” the older man chuckled.

“Yeah, I suppose that’s true,” the guitarist agreed. “We haven’t really discussed having kids of our own because of the band, though. That, and even if we weren’t a part of the band, I don’t think either of us are ready for kids of our own yet.”

“Well, I wasn’t trying to be presumptuous by saying that,” he said.

“I know, Chris. We haven’t really thought about kids of our own, but then again, we didn’t exactly have much choice in this matter.” Jake shrugged. “Even if we’d been able to get in touch with you guys the day we found out he and Ash’d been de-aged, we wouldn’t have been able to get Andy back to you for several days, as it turns out.”

“Well, we both thank you greatly for taking care of our son so far.” He gently wrapped his arm around his shoulders in a side-hug.

“It’s not a problem, Chris. We all love Andy, the majority of us like brothers; we’d do anything humanly possible for him, even if he weren’t trapped in the body of a baby.”

Moments after he closed his mouth, Amy came back down the hall and took a seat beside her husband on the loveseat. She, too, thanked him for taking their son in and doing everything in his power, alongside Jinxx, to take care of him the past few days. Once again, he blew off her thanks and told her that he’d have done it anyway, even if he were still in the body of a grown man because he was like the little brother he’d never had and he couldn’t live with himself if he hadn’t.

The middle-aged woman told them that baby Andy was sleeping peacefully in his crib, that she’d found a safe way to prop him up a bit so he could breathe easier. The multi-instrumentalist had also crawled into bed to get some sleep as she was laying her son down, and was out like a light before she ever left their bedroom. Jake was glad to hear that they were both getting some sleep, knowing that they both needed it. His sweetheart had been staying up with him more than he had once he got sick because he was able to read his mind to figure out what he wanted or needed, something the guitarist was unable to do. He’d practically been running on fumes the last day or so because of that, and definitely needed his rest.

While things were quiet and the baby didn’t need their attention, Amy offered to go start a pot of chili for lunch, something that Chris could handle if their son woke up. The guitarist was grateful, for they hadn’t been able to cook very many real meals because they were so busy with their infant frontman, and besides, they loved the older woman’s cooking.

Smiling at one of the men she considered her other son, she headed into the kitchen to take a look around to see if they had the ingredients she needed. Thankfully Jinxx was almost as much a chef as she was, so they already had everything, which meant she just had to cook the chili she’d offered to make. Jake and Chris stayed in the living room, keeping an ear out for Jinxx and Andy, so they weren’t in her way, their conversation ranging from a mutual love of music to sports and everything in between. Things were going pretty good…until they heard a frantic knocking at the front door.

Notes