Smile for the Eye - Chapter 1
Story Masterpost
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AO3 version available here.
Latin isn’t such a pain, after all. As long as you bypass how atrocious that text’s grammar is, and how petty the vocabulary is being, it’s not so painful. He can almost not hear the voices in his head telling him all he’s doing is complete bullshit.
He coughs again, loudly, and it doesn’t stop for a while. All it’s good for is making him lose some precious time he could be spending on his translation. He has to read a book for French class after he’s done there, too. Coughing makes him not able to read. It sucks and it’s useless. Who even invented coughing in the first place? That person was as bored as a human being can be, for sure. He hopes it hasn’t woken his roommates, though. Now that would be bad.
His chest has felt squeezy, compressed lately. It’s like he’s wearing a corset of some sort, and he coughs all the goddamn time now. Maybe he should see a doctor, but he’s running low on money until the end of the month. It was that, or the book Mr Marquier absolutely requested them to read. None of his roommates really cared about it, because they’re not Hellenists, but he is so he had to buy it. He also can’t help but do anything Mr Marquier tells them to because he’s that good of a teacher.
He feels lightheaded, so he looks at his watch, but it’s only midnight. He’s usually not that tired at midnight, but maybe he should postpone reading the book to tomorrow so he can sleep a little. He feels very tired too, lately, now that he thinks about it. He hates being sick, but he’s so used to it, it’s next to little to him now.
The dim light of his desk lamp is just enough for him to see the contents of his sheet and of his Latin-to-French dictionary. At least it doesn’t bother his sleeping roommates, and that’s what he wants more than seeing the goddamn text currently. He should sleep. He should finish this as soon as possible. The quicker it’s done, the earlier is free from charge.
He has a box of tissue next to him. He sneezes from time to time, but it’s mostly for his congested nose and especially for his cough. He needs something to spit in green slime. His throat is infected, inflamed, he knows this because it hurts like the driest past of the driest desert. No cough drops nor cough syrup he could afford made it any better. He regrets buying that book now, but there’s no turning back. It’s probably just a bad strain of flu. He’s already happy he didn’t have more than a nausea.
That’s why he gets surprised when he starts coughing up blood.
It’s not it hasn’t happened to him before. It did: bronchitis is a nasty thing. He still doesn’t remember feeling breathless because of any illness not his asthma, however. That’s a first time. There’s a first time to everything, they say. Maybe they didn’t think of feeling breathless. Maybe he just forgot to take medicine for his asthma.
His chest has hurt, more and more, lately. It’s like there’s something burning inside his lungs. He can’t exactly why could be on fire right now: he just knows it hurts. It hurts a lot. He doesn’t like it. Who would like to have a hurting chest, after all? Maybe he should see a doctor, after all. This weekend, then. Maybe he still has twenty-three bucks on his bank account. He needs to check that tomorrow after class. Maybe air will make his lungs better.
Maybe not.
He barely knows what happens to him anymore. Everyone tells him to be cautious, that he looks tired and ill, and he knows he does. That’s why he doesn’t look to himself in the mirror. Denial is a powerful magic. He’s probably just a bit sicker than usual, nothing bad… right? Right. Everything’s fine. The exam is more important than whatever this shit is.
“François?”
Startled, he immediately bolts to see what voice is calling for him from behind his chair. It’s Marc, hair going haywire, except he isn’t half-awake nor sleepy. That’s weird, he thinks, because Marc spends ages to get correctly woken up usually. Did he not hear the fire alarm or something?
“M-Marc…? Y-y’need something…?” he wheezes out.
“Yeah, for you to go to fucking bed and stay there.”
“I’m almost finished though…”
Christophe appears right behind Marc, with a similarly upset expression on his face. He already has his glasses on his face: what’s the hell happening? That’s so weird! That must be a prank. That has to be a prank.
“Can we know what the hell you’ve been up to?” he asks.
“M-my Latin… I still haven’t finished it… It’s like I can’t even string words properly anymore… I think I’ll go to bed… Sorry for waking you up, guys…”
“The hell you’re talking about?” Marc asks with a distorted face.
François blinks. His brain feels so mushy, he doesn’t know if it’s legitimately confusing wording or if it’s just him.
“Fran, it’s six in the morning. You’ve pulled an all-nighter,” Christophe replies nonchalantly.
“Again,” Laurent, who has just appeared from the back of the bedroom, adds. “It’s your third in a week.”
“And I can see you’re still sick as a dog,” Marc finishes, contemplating the tissue-filled bin next to the desk.
Their roommate just laughs the comment off. He’s been sick for a while, that’s true… Just a worse-than-usual cold who doesn’t want to go away. These things happen all the time, right?
“No, François, this isn’t just a joke. You’re too sick for class,” Laurent tells him, his serious face on.
“Look, guys, I… I’m sure I’ll find to rest later… For now, I just gotta… finish this and go to class…”
His voice is more and more painful to speak with as words go on. It’s like he’s getting strangled by his own throat. He’s sicker than he thought, for sure. Medicine is one powerful drug.
He gets up from his table in front of the three guys, who all look at him with something between anger and… upset-ness, or something. His legs feel like they aren’t very solid anymore.
“’m not feelin hungry… M’gonna take a shower, don’t wait for me for breakfast…” he slurs as he wobbles past them. Gee, now he does feel like he’s just pulled an all-nighter on a stupid translation.
“Really, François, you should stay in bed today. I’m sure Edith’s a better place than class for you,” Christophe tells him as the three of them go eat breakfast in the downstairs cafeteria. He’s right, but at the same time, they’re in the middle of a school period and they don’t have time to dick around in bed all day, don’t they?
They’re all hushing stuff to each other, but to be fair, his ears feel stuffed so he can’t really hear them. He’ll have to clean them off. When did he last do so? His memory is awful lately. Must be the illness. Must be his deep focus on school work. Must be his exhaustion. Must be his airhead playing tricks on him again.
The shower doesn’t make anything better. His nose is still leaking, his cough hasn’t subdued, and his muscles ache as if he had just run a fucking marathon. The only marathon he’s known was when he studied the Persian Wars. His chest feels so tight he gives up on the idea of wearing a button-up shirt. He just goes for the warmest yet most comfortable things he can find still clean in his closet: a long-sleeved shirt, two sweaters, a jacket, a scarf. Minutes later, he wishes he wore least, because it’s getting hot in here; but he’s already on his way to class. Then he’s happy he did when he reaches the classroom, already opened up.
Thanks goodness for that, his legs are as solid as the cafeteria’s mashed potatoes. He almost crashes down onto his table when he arrives at his usual seat, barely having the energy to get his copybook and books from his bag. Ugh, he doesn’t want to even see the teacher’s face, even less than usual.
Christophe, Marc and Laurent arrive a bit later, along with all the classmates than weren’t already in the room. His vision is blurry, so he cleans his glasses and rubs his eyes, but it barely goes away. He’s still sleepy. Maybe he’ll take a nap when their next hour-long break shows up. He’s heard the Latin teacher wasn’t here today. The flu, Elisabeth said. Good for the hag, he thinks.
The French teacher’s still there, though. That’s too bad. He hates him, he’s a douchebag with unexplained biases and opinions he wants to shove down everybody’s throats. François hates that, maybe because he never agrees with these opinions. He misses Mr Honfleur. He’s missed Mr Honfleur since September.
He feels like crying now, but all he does is sniffling miserably and cough and cough and cough.
The class is tedious to follow. His eyes keep closing on their own and his head is pounding full force now. No amounts of coffee would remediate to that exhaustion. But he can’t fall asleep. He can’t fall asleep in one of his main classes. That’s not how it fucking works, so he braces himself for two long, painful hours of a class he doesn’t like that much. Maybe it’s just that he’s in an awful mood thanks to whatever that bullshit is. It’s like he can’t focus at all today. That sucks.
His cough doesn’t want to stop. He’s being the noisiest thing ever and people are staring at him. Something’s bothering his trachea so badly his body just wants to get rid of it as soon as possible, despite all the soreness and pain it causes him. He can barely hear anything not his cough anymore.
The world is burning yet freezing around him. Everything’s just becoming a blurry stir of colours, shapes and muted sounds. Waves of shivers are going down his back, arms, legs every ten seconds if not less. His ears are buzzing and he’s already running out of tissues. He should had brought more of these last week. That was a crucial underestimation of his condition.
His book falls off from his right hand as his left palm is still fully busy keeping all that cough in. It’s just getting worse by the second and he can’t do anything about it. It’s like his throat isn’t even under his own control.
“Mr Bannaire, would you stop coughing already? You are bothering everyone,” the teacher’s voice scolds him from the top of his head.
He barely looks up. He can barely distinguish the asshole’s face and his head feels way too heavy. He attempts to retain an urge to cough, but it just keeps on going.
“Reply to me with actual words, Mr Bannaire. I do not speak cough.”
He bolts from a crouching position to a more normal one, except he can’t keep what his body’s been detaining for so long. In a few coughs, it’s all out, and he feels a tiny bit better (but barely), while he can see there’s one thing that changed about his teacher.
“What the hell did you just do?!”
“What the fuck, François?!” his neighbour, the local double-faced-snake girl, screams.
The teacher’s covered in blood. Specifically, the blood that came out from his throat.
World fades to blur and black as he feels his pain going dim.