#maybe?!?

They were almost to town when the tickle started in his chest. 

Cold dread washed through his guts. Not now. Please, whatever gods are listening: not now. 

Strammund patted the pouch at his waist for the twentieth time, even though he knew it was empty: his pastilles had run out two suns ago. (That was fine. He could deal with the jitters, the crawling feeling in his stomach, the chills. He could deal with it until he could get more, once he got paid for this job....)

The merchant took his time with the pleasantries, and Strammund stood with cold sweat soaking through his tunic, trying to keep his breaths shallow, crossbow at the ready as he kept watch over the cart and its load of... of... 

He couldn't remember what they were carrying out here to this sleepy town, out here on the border of Thanalan. (It came with a nagging sense of familiarity, but like their cargo, it remained just out of his grasp.)

His vision was starting to go fuzzy at the edges, fading in and out with the sound of the waves somewhere out toward the horizon. The sun was slipping the rest of the way down, sinking into the ocean in a wreath of fire, and Strammund was seized by a sudden ache that had nothing to do with the maddening feeling building in his chest. 

He must have inhaled accidentally. The tickle asserted itself, growing sharper. Needle-like. Strammund held his breath. 

     Don't cough. Don't cough.

         Don't cough. 

His diaphragm heaved under his ribs, and Strammund tightened his chest, forcing it down. Stars wheeled across his vision.

"Oy! Sailor!" 

The nickname barely registered as Strammund turned his head. 

"If you're gonna be sick, don't do it on the rug." 

"I ain't--" He clamped down on another would-be contraction, trapping it in his throat. Let it out slow. Controlled. 

Don't cough. 

"I ain't sick."

"Sure. Here." The weight of a coinpurse pressed against his palm. "Good work, see you next sennight?"

"Aye."

"Good. You're dismissed." 

-------

Strammund made it a hundred yalms from the empty docks, all the way to a tiny strip of beach at foot of the cliffs, before he couldn't hold it any longer. 

As his control gave way, the first cough tore its way out of him like a thing with claws, raking up his windpipe with another close on its heels. Cough on cough on hacking cough poured out of him, overlapping until there was no time to draw in air between---until his lungs were burning, empty, and his head spun. His stomach clenched; he gagged, spat into the sand. 

He gasped for breath, pulling in salt air like a drowning man, swallowing and swallowing -- only to be wracked with another coughing fit, stumbling in the twilight. His shoulder crashed into the cliff wall, and he sagged against it.

Strammund thumped his fist on the stone, eyes streaming. Each inhale enraged the demon clawing at his chest. Another cough doubled him over, punching the breath out of his lungs as an aching feeling of wrongness bolted down his arms to tingle painfully in his hands. 

As the fit passed, he closed his eyes, letting himself slide down to sit on a patch of grass that clung to the base of the rock face.

Stubborn, came the fragment of thought as his fists closed around its scraggly leaves. Cussed, like me. The tide shushed him, the fingertips of the waves reaching up the sand to pat at his heels.

The coughing weakened slowly, petering out. His stomach muscles were overtired and trembling, the white sparks spinning across his field of view finally starting to fade. 

He was exhausted, but if he sat here any longer, his boots would get wet. 

Then again... Strammund tested his arms, trying to push himself to sitting. ...he might not be able to get up. 

Let the water come, then. His boots would dry, eventually. He let his head fall back to rest against the rocks.

-------

"Ho there, are you alright?" 

It took Strammund a moment to place where the voice was coming from -- overhead, leaning out from a window set into the side of the cliff. The figure was no more than a dark silhouette against the fading sky.

"I'll be fine," he said. Tried to say -- as soon as he pulled in the breath to say it he started coughing again. 

"Stay right there," the figure said. As if he had been planning to move.