Work Text:
Boccaccio
by Jayed
Looking back, Dr. Pitt knew that he should not have joked about it. He should have absolutely forbidden it. Ducky, now, recognized that he should not have told Kate that she was brave; he should have told her she was taking a foolish risk with the man she was trying to comfort. Hell, any of them should have realized that a woman with a cold, that most contagious of diseases, had no business sharing space with a man with compromised lungs and a weakened system, a man suffering from a disease which was an unholy alliance of the unknown past and the terrorist-haunted future.
In retrospect, they should never have been in the same room; protocols for the future would be quite different; future lives would be saved. Kate had not been infected by the letter, which they had not known at first, but she could have been infected by Tony, if the disease had been that strain. A few beds', a single bed's, distance was not enough to keep an airborne pathogen in place in a sealed room. Her compromised immune system should have made them all think. But none of them, medically trained or not, did.
Tony's nose and lips had been slowing changing from blue to a sort of white-pink, and he had been feeling well enough to sit up and eat a light lunch. Then he sneezed. Just a sneeze. But.
Later that night, Tony proved Boccaccio had it right.
end