Oneshots and Other Things

Dizzy Spells ~ Part 1

A little bit of hurt/comfort for @daphreak and @AvenueVenue :) (the comfort will mostly come later)

Ant/Dec/Stephen because that's my current obsession XD

Also contains a lot of probably inaccurate medical stuff. Don't pay any attention to me, I'm not a doctor...

{*~*}

It crept up on him this time, the warning signs easy to shake off as nothing to worry about. He'd gone a couple of months without getting hit by a wave of dizziness, long enough for him to get complacent even after a lifetime of untimely and embarrassing fainting episodes; many of which Ant and Dec would frequently tease him over.

So, alone at home for the afternoon, Stephen was caught unawares, stood up too quickly, the usual. He'd knocked the throw that they had draped over the sofa onto the floor behind the chair when he sat down earlier, intending to pick it up, smooth down the corners, put it back in place. All to stop Ant from doing just that with a joking tut, the other man sitting firmly in first place when it came to cleanliness. Stephen liked to take second position, earning his spot only by tidying up when he inevitably made a mess. Dec remained at the bottom precisely because he had a habit of walking innocently away from the tornado-like state he could leave a room in when he was searching for something.

Tidiness habits to one side, that was how it started. Maybe it was the combination of standing up too quickly and then immediately bending down when he was around the back of the sofa but whatever it was, there was no stopping the force of the wave that hit him when he straightened himself once more. It knocked his vision out in a split-second, turning everything grey as he reached blindly for the back of the sofa, his other hand feeling out for the wall, searching for anything to try and lean against.

The blanket slipped out of his uncooperative fingers, a sure sign that his legs were going to give way too. It didn't come as a surprise when they folded beneath him. He'd been fainting since he was 8 years old, on and off, and it had only got worse into adulthood. Nothing to be done about it, apparently. Nothing to worry about.

As a kid, his parents had certainly worried about it but several doctor's appointments had resulted in nothing but the underwhelming news that he was prone to fainting. No underlying problem was causing it – it just happened far more regularly to him than to most normal people. Stephen would have been disappointed not to have an answer about the cause of it were he not relieved to find out that he wasn't dying from some mysterious condition.

And having no real answers meant he'd just got used to it. It happened all through school, standing up at the end of a lesson only to come round on the floor a few minutes later, the face of a teacher swimming in front of him. It happened at home, at first scaring the life out of his mum but slowly desensitising all of his family to the sight of him laid out across the floor.

Everyone tended to worry about it at first.

Take Ant and Dec, for example. Whilst nothing had been particularly conventional about their three-way relationship, the two of them had been far less accepting of the fact that Stephen 'just faints sometimes' whilst barely batting an eyelid over the way all of them shared similar feelings for one another.

It was the first time since childhood that Stephen found himself around people regularly when it happened, having to bury twinges of guilt when he caught worried expressions being swapped between two people he only ever wanted to make happy. He also made the worst possible mistake of feeling too awkward to mention it happening.

Cut to the first time he bent down to get a plate from a kitchen cupboard. He didn't get far towards being upright again before slumping onto the tiles. One piece of smashed crockery later, he awoke to a hand patting his face and a panicked conversation that was spiralling dangerously close to an unnecessary call to 999. Having convinced them not to do that, Stephen was then followed around for the rest of the evening, having to watch the pair of them exchange suspicious glances with one another whenever he stood up.