Nothing to see here, just two of my very favourite snz muses, Galadriel and Faith Connors from Mirror's Edge, both having trouble with their noses courtesy of @debachoory Thank you so much Deb <3
THIS IS A HOLY COMIC PAGE TO JUST RANDOMLY POP UP. I DONT KNOW THE ARTIST NOR WHERE THIS PANEL COMES FROM, BUT ALL I KNOW IS THAT THIS IS THE CLOSEST TO C/HISAKI SNZ ILL GET BCUZ I CANT DRAW M/HA CHARACTERS FOR THE LIFE OF ME AND MY FELLOW SNZFUCKERS DONT CARE ENOUGH ABOUT HIM
I WILL EAT EVERY OUNCE OF THIS ART
bonus rambling :>
By using crappy Google translate I have concluded that in this comic, Chisaki is dying from pollen and Kurono is trying to get his stupid bf to rest.
love it.
I also adore the idea of Chisaki being allergic to literally everything because he is not exposed to anything at all so his immune system panics and does whatever works.
and since his mask for the Shie Hassaikai is a plague doctor mask and their whole use was to distract from the smell of death during the bubonic plague so the doctors stuffed flowers and herbs into the beak-like pockets. So I feel like Chisaki tried that once and immediately regretted it.
I headcanon that Gray has mild hay fever combined with a bad pollen allergy and he hates it. He tries really hard to hide it once Lucy, Juvia, Wendy, and especially Gajeel join but it’s no use.
He’s an ice mage and he doesn’t sneeze when he’s freezing, the only explanation is that he’s totally getting his ass whooped by allergies.
Sex Pollen would simply not work on me because my allergic ass would be busy sneezing and rubbing my eyes and blowing snot into a tissue and feeling just overall bad before I could even think about being horny.
Also I'm asexual if that accounts for anything here
Now on to the good part haha. Thank you for your patience while I explored world and characters a bit (I'm hoping it will come in handy later for future installments) Enjoy!
~~~~
The large greenhouse really was one of her favorite places on the estate, and not just because she was a woman of science. It was really a sprawling, picturesque indoor garden, and it offered many places to sit serenely amongst the flora even if the outdoor weather found itself disagreeable.
Today, Charlotte would be having a lovely visit here with her fiancée—and a proper chaperone, of course. And since her closest brother had only had opportunity to meet the gentleman once before, he was the obvious choice.
Leo had been polite enough to show Nicholas to the small table in the middle of the greenhouse while Charlotte finished her toilette. At least, that’s what she had claimed to be doing. Really, this would all have been so much easier if Leo had had the decency to be sensitive to any of the dozens of varieties of good English plants they did grow at the estate. But no matter—she would have her revenge for the trouble he put her through within the hour.
“Miss Highgate!” Nicholas called out at her arrival, perhaps a bit desperately. He and her brother stood politely, Nicky practically falling over to pull out a chair for her.
Maybe she had been cruel in leaving them alone for so long. Oh, well. She was about to become much crueler.
“Good Afternoon, Mister Weatherley,” she put on her most saccharine voice. Being the beautiful youngest daughter of a large and well-to-do family, the tone was something she took to exquisitely well.
“I do hope our Leo hasn’t been too beastly” —she playfully bopped her brother’s nose with a finger— “to you in my absence?”
Leo laughed while she took her seat, and Nicholas tried to echo the sound. She had to admit she felt a bit nervous herself. But now all she had to do was wait and see if she could play her next move.
“Just discussing university,” Leo assured her with his easy smile and the patented hand through his coppery hair. “I must say I am rather worried the return to fine English education may be too much for me. Perhaps I’ll just drop out entirely.”
“Oh Mister High—Leo,” Charlotte’s ears perked up as Nicholas corrected himself quickly, as if the two had been over this several times already. “Surely that isn’t right! You’ll re-acclimate in no time, I promise you.” She grinned at his earnestness—the poor sucker. She wasn’t the only one prone to games.
“Ah. Well thank you, dear Nicholas,” Leo intoned with mock-wistfulness, “at least I know I’ll have a friend in you, examining bodies in the esteemed but woefully far-off campus morgue.” He flicked at the tip of his nose with a knuckle, but Charlotte wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t meant as close-to-tears posturing.
“Th-the only morgue we have is the one in the University Hospital.” Nicholas gave the smallest of smiles, seeming to catch on to his assigned role. “It isn’t that far from everything else on campus. I’m usually always somewhere around there.”
“Then perhaps there’s hope for me yet!” Leo cried with a deviously earnest-sounding sense of relief. He leaned forward at their little outdoor table, brushing at his nose again and flashing Nicky his devilish grin. “If I ever find myself in need of your companionship, I’ll be sure to contract some sort of horrible, hospital-worthy disease.”
The smile vanished from the medical student’s face. Charlotte tried not to outwardly react. Oh Leo, you wonderful bastard, you’re wicked even when you don’t know it.
Nicholas forced a chuckle, trying to save face. Was he blushing?
“Tha-That’s—”
“You tease too much, Leo,” Charlotte admonished, playfully batting at his arm. The motion also had the affect of rustling the sleeve of her day dress about, hopefully billowing more of her certain secret weapon out into the air around him. “Mister Weatherley will think you’ve gone mad on your long voyage home.”
“You do your fiancée a disservice,” Leo countered, sniffing just slightly, “He’s a bright young man, Lottie. He knows”—the knuckle again, the briefest swipe—“we’re only messing around.”
Nicholas’ laugh finally seemed to be genuine.
“You two really were cast from the same mold, weren’t you?”
“Uck, did Mummy tell you that?” Charlotte watched Nicky’s eyes flick away from her when Leo sniffled again across the table. But try as he might, that knuckle wouldn’t wipe away the pollen she’d deposited directly with her finger before.
“Misters Weatherley and Highgate, Miss Highgate,” Mathilda announced herself, cutting off the conversation with her cart of snacks and tea.
For a few blissful minutes, the scene was one of perfect civility. Mathilda laid out the tea service with quiet efficiency, the gentle clink of fine china a soft counterpoint to the buzz of a bumblebee somewhere amongst the blossoms. Leo held forth with an amusing anecdote about his voyage home, Nicholas nodded along attentively, and Charlotte smiled, the picture of demure charm, all while the invisible timer she had set ticked steadily down.
"eEEiy'HUu!"
Charlotte suppressed a self-satisfied smirk. Here we go.
“Ugh, apologies,” Leo snuffled once, twice, seeming genuinely taken aback, “I duh-hohn’t know what’s, ah, h-hehh…” he trailed off the apology with a loose fist hovering in front of his face, teary eyes looking off into the middle distance.
Charlotte noticed that poor Nicholas seemed to grip his cup and saucer quite tightly.
“Hheihh’tYuu!” He let another squeaky sneeze out over his fist, but his eyes stayed closed after the first outburst. His mouth hung slack for just a moment before pulling back into a childish and, frankly, wholly undignified grimace. “Eeii’hoo!! Uhghh…”
He sniffed, audibly wet now, and tried the single rub with his knuckle again as if it would have any effect. Not that those sneezes would either, she reckoned. Leo always made these horrible, itchy little sounds that rang as terribly unsatisfying to Charlotte's ear.
“I do apologize, you two,” he tried again, regaining his composure with a thick swallow and thicker sniffle. “I’m not sure what’s gotten into me.”
“’Some sort of horrible, hospital-worthy disease,’ was it?” Charlotte’s eyes glinted.
“Haw-Haw,” he drawled back, the pitiful knuckle rub getting near constant now. He grunted in annoyance. “I had hoped to leave this blasted hayfever back across the pond.”
Now that did surprise her, so much so that she was content to let Mister Weatherley continue pretending he wasn’t at the table with them for now. If she could keep the conversation focused on this topic, all the better, right?
“Hayfever? You had only suffered with the lilies before…”
“Yes,” he sniffled ruefully, “but once things thawed in the States, it was awful until they’d refroze.” Another sniff. “I’d hh-hoped it was just the, hehh…snrf…unfamiliar American plant life, bu-hhut—!” A pause, two more liquid sniffs, and a grunt. The valiant knuckle, firmly in in place throughout this whole display, was finally allowed a slightly more forceful back-and-forth rub.
“I’ve heard such things can naturally worsen over time,” she prodded, trying to get him to keep talking. She could feel Nicholas’ breath hitch beside her whenever Leo’s did.
He nodded, snuffled, continued rubbing at his steadily pinkening nose.
“Now I fear that mbight —snf!— be-hee the case...”
She wondered if he was right—how fortunate that would be! More theories to test later, she supposed.
His non-rubbing hand started to search for his pocket. Charlotte readied herself for the next move.
“Ah,” he sniffed back what was starting to glisten above his lip and grimaced. “What an awful timbe for me to have forgodten a handkerchief—”
“Oh, Leo, here!” she tried to offer it to him casually while still beating any opportunity Nicholas had to offer another. As if she hadn’t been waiting to give it to him since she sat down at the table. Her piece de resistance.
If Leo hadn’t played far more than his fair share of pranks on her while they were growing up, she may have felt a little guilty. In her defense, she didn’t remember Leo’s reaction to the lilies being very intense, and she had to make sure she sealed the deal here. Did she, just maybe, feel the slightest pang as she handed over the golden yellow handkerchief, it’s marigold color perfectly hiding its magnificent coating of lily pollen?
Who was she kidding. He totally deserved it.
For that matter, so did sweet Nicholas.
Leo took it from her gratefully, instantly burying his nose in the cloth and rubbing at it with a two-handed ferocity that implied the itch teasing him was worse than his polite rubs and cute little nothing sneezes had been letting on. He gave a blow after the harsh rubs, then dabbed at his eyes with the cloth. They weren’t pink yet, like his nose, but apparently they were bothering him as well.
“Anyways,” he tried to get things back on track, clearing his throat once, twice—did that itch, as well?—“Nicholas, you were saying before that—ohh, h-heHH...”
He turned to look off over one shoulder, the handkerchief clamped in a fist at least a full foot away from his mouth.
"Hh, HHeh, Ehh-hehh...hh'HEH...ehh..?"
He panted for near half a minute before he turned back to the conversation, sniffling incessantly.
"It won't come?" Charlotte guessed aloud with a smirk, as if it wasn't obvious. "Why does that always happen to you?"
It was Nicholas's turn to clear his throat beside her.
"Dhhunnoh—" Leo shuddered, hitched, and then sighed. "Damb well annoyi'g, though." He allowed himself a prolonged, self-pitying snuffle.
"Forgive him, Nicky," she grazed her hand along her fiancee's upper arm, making him jump. "Leo always gets a bit mopey when he's feeling poorly."
Both men seemed to snap out of their individual trances, rushing to cover for their lack of decorum.
"Ah, mby apologies, Mbister Weadtherley!" —sniff— "My language—"
"No, um, of course! It's really..." Nicholas sputtered, Leo fighting the distraction of another fit of hitching breaths. "It's really..."
Charlotte watched the bob of his throat, the slight hunching of his posture. "I'm not offended! You can't, um, help it, of course, so..."
Leo gave a breathy chuckle between panting little gasps.
"I appreciadte your k-kindd'ess, Mbi-hihh! Mbister Wheatherleeyh..." More sniffing, more eye-dabbing, more rueful grinning that somehow clearly and succinctly projected a sense of gentlemanly, amused resignation. "Though I promise I will try to co'dtroll mbyself, polled or ndo polled."
Seemingly back in "co'dd'troll" for the moment, he smoothed his hair with his non-kerchiefed hand.
"Forgibve mbe, Mbister Weatherley, truly." Leo sniffed. "What was that about old Greville's new experimends?"
"Ah!" Nicholas flushed with a more publicly-appropriate kind of excitement, instantly snapping into the discussion of his work with some grizzled old professor of the University. He began explaining the professor’s theory on cellular regeneration, but his lecture was punctuated by a series of soft, stifled explosions from across the table.
“He posits that the key lies in—" "ei’TSHH!—pardon me—" "—in the larval stage of—" "heh’ISHHih!" "—of the common—" "nn’XT!" "—ah, the common newt...”
Leo, with a look of profound betrayal, kept the yellow handkerchief pressed to his nose, his eyes watering more with every stifle.
What a wonderfully dramatic showing. Charlotte would have to think of a gift for him.
"Ah, well...perhaps we should move our conversation indoors..." Nicholas suggested from behind the safety of his teacup.
“Ndoh Ndoh, I’mb sure idt will die dowd sood eddough," Leo insisted, his voice a stuffy, wet mess that utterly contradicted his assurance. He punctuated the lie with a sudden, deep gasp, his body tensing as if struck by a bolt of lightning. "Pblease, you were say-yii-yi'g...?”
The conversation continued, but it was a fractured, pitiable thing. Leo’s attempts to focus were shattered by relentless hitches and sniffles, his contributions to the scientific discussion reduced to watery-eyed nods and muffled grunts of agreement. Nicholas, for his part, was a study in conflicted fascination; his answers grew increasingly distracted, his gaze lingering on the way Leo’s shoulders hitched with every suppressed sneeze, a faint blush high on his own cheeks. Charlotte simply sipped her tea, her heart singing with the glorious, chaotic success of her evil scheme.
With a supremely frustrated sigh after another round of false starts, Leo cut off the chatter again.
“Oh, hehh, Hhexcuse mbe-hhee—”
He scrubbed at one swollen eye with the handkerchief, desperately clearing his throat again and again. Auxiliary fires tended to, he then clamped the cloth over his nose with both hands just in time— "MMPH'HH! MNPHF'HUH!!" — to muffle two more loud, wet sneezes into the cloth. He leaned over the tea table on his elbows, all decorum forgotten, furiously massaging the fabric into his red, streaming, tortured nose. He clawed at every part of the offending organ with fierce determination, desperate to scratch out the tickle wherever it might hide, ignoring the pain of his rough treatment in his quest to stave off the horrible burning itch that felt like it had sunk deep in every nook and cranny of his face. He interspersed the scratching with wet, shuddering blows, rapidly cycling between every method he knew to try and rid himself of this horrible mystery pollen.
All this, for some reason, didn't seem to help. Especially as he chose to end this display with a final liquid sniffle directly into the cloth.
Leo resurfaced for all of a second. In the eye of the storm, he struggled to school his slack-jawed grimace into a shaky grin, his burning eyes open into a teary squint, his furrowed brow into something a fraction less furrowed. He blinked rapidly at his two stunned companions, a tear running down his cheek, mucus glistening on his red-rubbed upper lip.
Through the angry red haze, could Charlotte see the yellow stain of lily pollen coating his skin?
Leo sniffled his twitching nose once, twice...and moaned as the truly demonic itch hit him with the full force of hell.
Whatever he had opened his mouth to say, it came out only as a high, whining gasp. But this itch was too strong for his mischievous nose to torture him with any more build-up.
“Ey’KTSCHoo! Hih’ISHHiew! Heh’KNGTchh—! EH’ISHHuu!” He barely had time to gasp between them, the fit tearing through him with violent efficiency. He held up a shaking finger, pleading for a moment’s respite, his chest heaving. “Hih’hih… heh’HEH…! Hii’KXTCH! Ei’SCHYOO-EH’GYISHHuu!!”
Charlotte and Nicholas could only stare, frozen in their seats. Charlotte’s scientific curiosity was momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer visceral spectacle of it. Nicholas looked as if he were witnessing a particularly gripping surgical procedure, his medical fascination warring with a flustered arousal he was at this point forgetting to hide.
Feeling a sudden, surprising pang of mercy now that her point had been so thoroughly made, Charlotte produced a clean, white handkerchief from her pocket.
“Oh, you poor thing Leo, that one is soaked through. Here, I have an extra.” She deftly plucked the pollen-laden yellow cloth from his limp hand and pressed the clean one into it. With a subtle nod to the ever-patient Mathilda, the evidence was whisked away on the tea cart before anyone could remark on its distinctive color.
“Goodness!” Charlotte clucked with a mingling genuine and theatrical sympathy, “we shall simply have to take a tour later and figure out what new villain in our garden is responsible for this.”
Leo tried to form an apology, but it dissolved into a wet, shuddering cough that spoke volumes. Any further attempts at conversation were clearly impossible.
The party beat a hasty, undignified retreat from the greenhouse, Nicholas stuttering out well-wishes and desperately searching for any excuse to make a hasty exit from the manor. Leo stumbled ahead with the clean handkerchief pressed permanently to his face, a symphony of miserable stifles and hitches echoing back to them.
When they arranged for their next visit, Mister Weatherley was insistent that Leo should accompany them once more.
