The Bruce can hurry through getting toweled off and dressed, feeling marginally more functional and marginally less like he's viewing the world through a periscope. "Alright, I'm decent." Tiny hysterical giggle.

Bruce sounds like he should be hugged, and then not fully unhugged until they are in bed together.

That is such a good plan. Bruce tries to remind himself that he's safe, everything is fine, and hugs Eli back and does his best to resist the urge to cling to him like he's a rock in a storm.

Regardless of Bruce's good intentions once they get into bed Eli is going to cling to him.

Then Bruce will absolutely not have the self-control not to cling right back. He wants to go to sleep and wake up on the morning of the symposium and have this all have been a particularly vivid and meandering pre-exam nightmare.

It is not!

However, he does wake up to a peacefully asleep Eli who makes protesting noises when Bruce tries to pull away.

Bruce instinctively stills and takes a moment to catch up to where he is and what's going on, and then relaxes back into the bed. He has stuff he should be doing, research and drawing blueprints for things and maybe also breakfast, but all of those sound like they involve being fully conscious and not being hugged, so maybe he just won't for a while.

Eli gradually transitions from an unconscious Eli who makes protesting noises about Bruce moving away to a conscious Eli who makes protesting noises about Bruce moving away.

Eli's hair is fluffy and also right there but Bruce is not going to pet Eli's head while he's mostly asleep, that would be super creepy, what even, brain. He will murmur "G'd morning" when Eli seems awake enough to hear it.

"Good morning." Eli flops his head directly on Bruce's chest. "Don't wanna move."

"Big mood. . . . I wonder how that translated."

"Large emotion?"

"Huh. Bit overly literal. I meant I don't wanna move either."

"The miraculous translation effect is apparently not that good at slang. --We could just. Not move."

"We will eventually have to eat. But not yet." 

"That is what servants are for."

"Heh." That is Decadent and Ridiculous but it's not objectively that much more decadent than the concept of delivery pizza, so whatever. . . . Possibly he needs to invent pizza. 

"Cuddling is good. Why were we not previously cuddling."

"Probably because I am very socially awkward."

"I guess this is maybe insensitive to your previous suffering."

"If it is, you should make up for it by cuddling me, oh wait you already are."

Eventually Eli says "probably we should go do work. To get your mind off things."

"Yeah. Yeah. Let's go invent things and be awesome." He sounds like he's trying to convince himself, but he does exit the bed.

Eli has some questions about vaccines!

Bruce has some answers! He asked about current innoculation technology when they went to the doctor to get him some level of smallpox immunity, and he knows the difference between dead and live-attenuated vaccines though not which one works best for which disease in some cases, and he has a vague idea of how to culture a virus in an egg and a much better idea of how to make that process less dangerous. Though that last thing may need some revision given the lack of plastic.