Basically what happened was I woke up to a CPU fan error, and I panicked. Decided to nap and sleep the panic off, took me all day to gather the courage to open up and clean the CPU fan.
Ended up having to remove the CPU fan and dust it more intimately, which means that unplugging the header which was in a precarious position that made removing it tense and terrifying.
Cleaned it off, swabbed off the old cooling grease, added new thermal paste, then put everything back together.