sneezing is hot i don't make the rules

Avery’s nose was still itching though, and he shoved the side of his wrist beneath it to briefly withhold a sneeze as he used his other hand to pat down the pockets of his stolen trousers for anything equivalent to a handkerchief. He’d grabbed one hours ago from a laundry line, but the fabric was rough and whorled, and when he’d used it to blow his nose earlier, he’d all but felt his skin chafing to the touch.

But his search was taking too long anyway, he realized as the inhale at the tail end of his shallow breathing began to swell and deepen, the heavy pressure at the back of his sinuses flickering forth in something genuinely irresistible.

"IESHHoo! h'EHHSH!"

He was alone on the balcony in the growing dark, but he still caught the sneezes against the back of his hand, then sniffled afterwards, twitching his nose to try and shake the fragments of the tickle that had been lingering for hours now. His hair probably still smelled like whatever it was that had set him off at the store, but he’d had little time to bathe before he was due to start his shift in the cathedral’s watchtower.

Ruby was two floors below, briefing a new Rushlight apprentice on the mission that the three of them were to carry out. The Darkvision spell she’d cast on Avery would last for another seven hours, even if she were to fall asleep, which was much handier than some of the magic Avery had been gifted by other sorcerers or artificers. Ruby was clever, and she had tricks stashed away that were sending her shooting rapidly up through the ranks of the Guild, though this was Avery’s first mission working one-on-one with her.

Or…one-on-two, but the apprentice hardly counted. He had a reedy, sweaty kind of vibe that meant he was more likely to panic when backed into a corner than to recover his nerves and come out intact.

Apprentices were cheap. Good sorcerers were not.

He should check in before he was officially on duty. He sent one last glance out onto the darkening city before making his way down the rickety ladder into the church's attic.

The dust laying grey and thick on every surface up here wasn't helping his sinuses, but neither was inhaling the stuff with every sniffle and twitch of his nose. He pressed the side of his wrist against one side of his nose and scrunched his face into something approximating a grimace as he wove through the piles of boxes and stacks of paintings.

"htt'ISHH! h'IHHsh!"

Those two, even stifled, had gotten away from him, and now he was itchy and getting congested. His scowl had settled in fully by the time he reached the first floor, and it only deepened when he stopped to sneeze angrily into his elbow and Ruby offered a blessing.

"Dust getting to you already?" She said, not looking up from the series of herbs she was sorting through with one hand, while her other held a small ball of flame.

It wasn't the dust, not really, but he didn't have it in him to correct the cheerful sorcerer, so he cleared his throat and didn't deign to answer.

He didn't think he'd met Ruby before this mission, but the firelight flickering up the side of her jaw set off a short memory cascade — a hushed conversation by torchlight in the early hours of the morning, a crumbling staircase, his first mission after Wynn's death — and he realized he was incorrect.

Back in the present, he saw her roll a chocolate-brown eye, its too-large pupil a deep well in the dim light. "You're just now remembering this isn't our first mission together, huh?"

He shifted his weight and coughed ticklishly into his fist. "Sorry." And he even was, a little bit. "It's been a while."

"No harm, no foul. I didn't look like this back then either."

That would also explain it. The apprentice was hovering in Avery's periphery, his hands twined anxiously at the level of his heart, clearly waiting for some interaction from Avery before he felt like he was allowed to speak.

Avery was uninterested. He coughed again, for long enough this time that Ruby's attention shifted to him for a modicum of time, and his bad temper surged again.

"I'm going up now," he said, cutting off whatever helpful or concerned thing she might have been about to say, then turned on his heel and brushed past the pale apprentice to return to the clocktower. It was only once he was halfway up the ladder again, blinking through eyes made suddenly and desperately itchy by all that damned dust again, that he remembered he'd wanted to check in with Ruby. Whatever. She knew where he was if she needed anything.

He was grateful yet again that her magic was not holy magic, that the power that flowed through her veins was not divine in origin. There weren't many holy people in the Rushlight Guild, but there were a few, and Avery did his best to keep the widest of berths around them. He didn't know if they'd be able to see his god if they looked deep enough into his eyes, and he wasn't about to find out.

The air was warm and tasted like salt, even a ways out from the sea, and Avery found himself licking his lips reflexively until they began to feel cracked and dry. He usually avoided taking jobs in seaside towns, but with the way he was avoiding the port of Vernika…well, his options grew more limited.

Ruby had even said something about it when they'd been getting set up.

"You're going to keep getting stuck in shithole towns like this one if you're going to be snobby about Vernika."

"If you think this place is a shithole," he'd said dryly, "I don't think I'm the snobby one."

She'd snorted a laugh, which had made the corner of his own mouth twitch briefly before he caught himself. "Touché. But Vernika's where all the money is."

"It's all yours."

The apprentice had piped up then, wide-eyed and quiet as he asked, "What's wrong with Vernika?"

Bad memories. Ghosts. Regrets. "I hate the ocean."

The apprentice looked reflexively over his shoulder, towards the unseen waves lapping against the unseen shore not three miles out, but Avery kept his expression level.

But actually, the ocean reminded him of home. He'd grown up in a small seaside town tucked in the curve of a bay, a hidden gem of a place graced with azure waters and bone-white sand, and sometimes he still summoned memories of the waves on nights when he couldn't find sleep.

There was a flicker of motion on the streets below, yanking him from his daydreams and depositing him squarely back in the moment at hand. Dinner hour would be over soon, which meant the streets would again have the quiet energy of people drifting home or to taverns or wherever else their evenings brought them.

Hopefully their target would be one of them. Avery had the tracer in a thin tube at his hip. But tonight was more for an initial surveillance run than anything; neither he nor Ruby had any expectations that he, from the clocktower, would get close enough to slip something into a seam of the dwarf's coat. But learning someones's habits and patterns was the first step to catching them unawares, then bringing them down.

Perhaps that was why he was so disquieted that Ruby noticed he was avoiding Vernika jobs. He was used to being the invisible one watching from above, the shadow in the alley, the quiet one at the bar.

You could do something about that, purred the god in his head, startling him. It had been quiet all evening, presumably bored by the sitting-and-watching that was a solid 80% of Avery's work.

"About?" He spoke aloud, though it was no more than a breath whisked away into the sea-specked air. He refused to speak with the god in his thoughts if he could help it.

An image of Ruby seeped into his mind — Ruby, distracted as she sorted herbs; Ruby, torch in hand and obscured by darkness and another name; Ruby, who relied too much on her innate prowess with magic and was prone to letting her guard down. Ruby, whose throat would be easy to slit in an alley while they were already away on unscrupulous tasks.

"No," Avery snapped, raising his voice. He could hear a note of panic in it. "That's not happening."

The god grumbled at him in response, but then it subsided. Perhaps its attention was required elsewhere. Avery didn't know what it did when it wasn't actively present in his mind, or if there even were such times. He knew there were other followers of the god — 'cultists,' as they were referred to in a derogatory tone in Avery's circles; how weak of them to pour faith and hope and energy into the empty promises of beings who had long since left the world — but the god was careful to whisper in his ear that he was special, that he had been chosen, that he alone had been what it had been looking for.

Avery had never knowingly come face-to-face with one of them, and he never wanted to.

For nearly an hour he watched the streets, leaning unmoving against the railing until his elbows and forearms began to grow numb and tingly, and still no sign of the target. It was past dark now, and while Ruby's Darkvision spell gave Avery plenty of visibility into the shadowy streets, he couldn't see what wasn't there, and that included their target.

Perhaps their lead had been wrong, or perhaps the dwarf had altered his habits. Regardless, he should be messaging Ruby and the apprentice soon and updating them on his lack of results.

(He didn't know what the two of them were doing downstairs, but he hadn't gotten this far in his line of work by asking questions.)

Movement again, this time near the base of the tower. Avery glanced down, then slowly leaned back out of the view of the streets, fighting the urge to duck quickly out of sight.

It was Dusk. They had a paper bag in their arms and an instrument case over their shoulder. Piccolo? Flute? Some other woodwind? Avery couldn't tell from here.

What were they doing here? Avery wasn't too far from the town where Dusk's tavern was, only a few hours by horseback, but he certainly hadn't anticipated running into anyone he knew, even passively, on this mission.

The coast was getting too damn small, he griped to himself.

Maybe Dusk wouldn't recognize him, if they looked up from the streets and saw a figure in the clocktower. But it wasn't worth the risk, and it wasn't like he'd seen their target either, so at this point, today's surveillance was over.

The attic was still dusty, and even after an evening in the open air, he was still easily irritated. He did his best to hold his breath, but the distance across the room and down the ladder was too great, and by the time he was back in the lower floors of the church he was sneezing again.

"hh’ESSHH! Hh–hESHHoo!"

"Bless you!" Ruby said cheerfully from where she sat on the floor, which made him glower. "We're gonna have to stick someone else on surveillance if you're going to keep sneezing like that."

It was a light-hearted comment, but it also probably wasn't, and Avery felt the back of his neck heating. Ruby hadn't been in his cohort coming up through the Guild, so she shouldn't know about the barbed jokes passed between them that Avery was always sick or injured. He hated that this was still her impression of him.

"It's only when I'm in the attic," he said, the words grinding from between his teeth. "I was fine outside. But the guy's not showing tonight, I'm calling it a wash."

"A wash, huh?" Ruby didn't look over at him, but her eyes were sharp in the flickering glint of the candles before her. She'd laid them out in a ring, interspersed with little bundles of herbs (the pale lavender-and-sage ones made Avery sniffle just by proximity, and he rocked a step back to rub at his nose with the side of his thumb) and a shallow saucer of a dark-colored mystery liquid. The apprentice was nowhere to be seen.

"Yes," he said flatly. The surveillance and tracer were his part of the mission; whatever Ruby was doing with her herbs and candles and magic (because he could feel the magic in the air, it clung to his tongue like ash) was hers. She had no grounds to infere with what he was up to, just as he had no jurisdiction over hers.

"Very well," she said, and she finally broke her staring contest with the ring of candles to look over at him. There was a new curve of bruising beneath one of her eyes, Avery saw with a flicker of surprise. That hadn't been there earlier. "We'll meet back up tomorrow then, same time."

"Fine."

"Did anything else happen?"

It was decades of practice that kept him from pausing and giving himself away. And nothing had technically happened, anyway. Being seen by Dusk might have blown his cover, but he had had eyes on the tiefling the whole time they'd been out in the streets, and they hadn't once looked up towards the churchtower. "No. It's quiet out there."

A wordless hum of acknowledgement from Ruby, who now seemed to find Avery and his mission far less interesting than whatever she was working on. Whatever. He'd see her again the next day.

The faint aromas from the herbs were also beginning to make his already-sensitive nose itch again, and he palmed his pocket handkerchief as he let himself out of the church and into the night. One good sneeze, that would help, he felt; the dust from the church was clinging to the inside of his nasal passages and would continue to irritate him until he could clear his nose.

He should have borrowed some of Ruby's herbs. But even thinking about their cloying aromas when he was this sensitive was just about to be enough. Lavender especially would always shake a sneeze from him, if he was unlucky enough to be in close enough proximity.

It was only a few minutes' walk away, so he waited until he had let himself into the room of the boarding house that he'd rented for a few days, then brought the handkerchief to his face and gave his nose a good, solid rub with the rough fabric.

The tickle had been dancing around the edges of his nostrils, and the careful pressure applied by the handkerchief sparked it into action, like the flick of a match in a room full of gunpowder.

His inhale was almost on a moan as the long-needed sneeze began to make its way to fruition — he could feel that this one would be it, that it would finally take care of the itch that had been plaguing him for hours. His eyes slid shut, already beginning to water a little, as his single inhale split into a hitching breath.

"hhh — hiiiih — hhuh?"

Then, at long last, something shifted in his sinuses, and he snapped forward into the handkerchief with a sneeze that he felt deep in his bones. "hhr'IESHhieu!"

But of course once he'd begun, it was going to be difficult to stop — his nose was greedy for relief, and the sneezing felt so good. The next few were softer, itchier, and made his nose run, but they burned away the final bit of tickle, the remainder of the aromas from the apothecary and the dust that had been tormenting him all evening. "hh’IESHHuh-ESHHhh! gh…ESHHeuu!"

Four sneezes was a lot for him, and he was panting and sniffling and teary-eyed as he resurfaced. He was more gentle as he drew the handkerchief across his nose this time, though it still triggered one final reflexive sneeze — "h’IESHHiuh!" — before he began to clean himself up.

How irritating, to be so incapacitated by such minor stimuli. Maybe that was something the god could do something about — it could enhance his other senses; why couldn't it squash some of his more inconvenient weaknesses while it was at it?

Do you want that? Really? The god purred to life, summoned by his relevant lines of thought, flickering with curiosity.

"And what if I did?" He spoke aloud, still sniffling. He knew his desire to strike a new deal with the god in his head was hasty, but they could at least speak about it.

We can…discuss, the god whispered, but then, surprisingly, faded from his mind again. It had to be busy tonight; there was no other excuse for why it hadn't immediately latched onto Avery's questioning about the possibility of a new bargain. The idea made him feel uneasy. Where was the god when it was not in his mind? What else could it be doing?

At least his head felt clearer now. He settled on the thin mattress and leaned back against the wall. It wasn't a disappointment that the dwarf he'd been watching for hadn't shown up; so much of surveillance was pacing out long stretches of empty, boring hours. Seeing Dusk, however, had been a bit of a shake-up. What would Avery have done if they'd run into each other on the street? He would have had to come up with an excuse for why he was in Nuross, although Dusk was good enough about not prying that Avery could have just said "work" and they would have accepted it.

It had been too long since he'd been to the Rusted Toad. Maybe he'd have to return to town the next time he had some time between missions.

But that line of thought was dangerous. Getting attached to a place, to people…it never ended well.