What is your OC's financial status? Are they just scraping by, making enough to live comfortably, or wealthy? Has there ever been a drastic change in their status? If so, what happened?
Does your OC have a signature weapon and/or attack? How long did they train to master it?
What does your OC believe in? God(s)? Monsters? Love? The power of unbreakable bonds of friendship to overcome any obstacle? The ability of money to open any door? Or are they indifferent?
Finals week during a particularly difficult semester of your Ph.D program is not a very convenient time to get very sick.
This is the first of three parts. The first part of this was inspired by this post by Myles. A bit of forewarning, this part also involves some mess, more implied than described.
I’ve been working on this for the past few months and it has become incredibly important to me and incredibly important in Cal’s story, and I’m super excited to finally be able to share it :) Part II here.
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It was only a matter of time.
He hasn’t been sleeping well for a while now, really the entire semester. On the rare nights he’s able to get in a good six or seven hours he often wakes up to find he’s cooked something in a bout of somnambulance. This week has been particularly bad, he’s awoken to unfamiliar aloo gobi three separate times. It’s a wonder he hasn’t burned down the apartment. His roommate found him on Tuesday, apparently, peeling potatoes at three in the morning. Said it seemed like he knew what he was doing.
Some months ago a psychiatrist prescribed him a sleep aid, and he tried it for a couple of weeks but during the following days he was always so groggy he may as well have been sleepwalking through his waking life as well. His latest research paper was taking so long he was forced to table it entirely, and what’s more he’d started to wonder why the hell he thought it even mattered what John Locke did or didn’t mean in the first place. Academic burnout looms like a dwindling flame waiting to be extinguished, so vulnerable it may truly be snuffed out by the lukewarm reception of an essay.
He knows it’s good for him, healthy even, to question whether this really is what he wants to do for the rest of his life, to stand in classrooms and lecture halls and pretend he has any idea how to better interpret life’s moral quandaries than anyone else. But things were certainly much easier when his questions weren’t all so inward facing, and he’s about to have to answer fifty multiple choice questions, plus three (or god was it five?) in short essay form, so this in particular is not the best time for existentialism.
“Cal you look awful,” says Malik, as he and Saanvi walk up to where he’s leaning against a wall in the corridor outside the lecture hall.
He zones back in from the coffee he’s been staring at, which he almost never drinks but felt like he could really use today, and he’s glad he got it but mostly because it gave him a chance to grab a greedy fistful of coffee shop napkins. He’d put tissues in his jacket pocket but changed into a warmer coat last minute and thus forgot them, so he’s now using his limited number of napkins as sparingly as he possibly can to deal with the current state of his nose, which is not good.
“I know,” he responds finally. “I’m at peak head cold right now.”
“Oh no!” Saanvi says.
“It’s okay,” he insists with a sniffle. “It’s my last final, so just need to get through it and I’m done.”
“Right,” Malik says, “well it seems like you’re not going as mental about this as I am, so can anybody quiz me? Swear I only remember half of this.”
“Absoh-solutely—” Cal attempts, betrayed by his own wavering breath, eyebrows coming together in shared anguish as he sucks in a needy inhale and uses his free hand to tug at the collar of his sweater, bury his face in it, and wince against sneezes that echo through the hallway.
Thank god for the lid on this coffee.
“Hhuh-USSHHue! UHHH-shue!”
“Bless you!”
Cal pulls his face out of his sweater only for his mouth to immediately fall agape, so he just nods, eyes struggling to stay open through a breathless, “Sorryonemore—” as he again covers his face and stumbles sideways into a third sneeze that’s even more emphatic from his attempt to delay it.
“HRRUSSHHsyue!”
The bless yous are also more emphatic this time, and he coughs through his “Excuse me, thank you.”
“I take it you’re not feeling much better,” Josephine says from behind him.
He turns around, nose still buried in a napkin. “No not really, snffh!” But then he grins. “Also hi Josephine.”
“Hi Rudolph, I see you did not heed my advice about not using napkins.”
“I know, snfff! I am suffering the consequences.”
“This is what happens when you don’t listen to Mum, Cal,” Malik says, and they laugh. An ongoing joke, that one. Josephine and Cal have been dubbed Mum and Dad and are addressed as such whenever either of them fits the stereotype, which, to be fair, is kind of often.
Josephine exchanges greetings and how are yous and mutual casual panic about what promises to be a very difficult exam, but her attention doesn’t stray from Cal for long, which probably has something to do with all the pitiful snuffling.
“Your cheeks are all red too,” she says, and it’s not until she puts a hand on his shoulder that he realizes she’s addressing him, coming to and blinking at her dumbly as if her sentence came at the end of a different paragraph he had to read first.
“Are you running a fever, can I check?”
“Uh yeah, sure,” he sniffles, realizing that perhaps that’s why his usually warm coat feels so insufficient today.
She reaches up to lay a gentle hand to his forehead and frowns and under any other circumstance this would be a little thrilling, to have her touch his face like this, but now he’s distracted because he really would like not to have a fever right now as he takes an exam he was already anxious about, and so Josephine’s diagnosis feels unreasonably like a death sentence. “Yeah, you do feel hot.”
Malik checks to confirm, says, “Oh yeah bruv, that’s definitely a fever.”
Makes sense, checks out. Suddenly he recognizes symptoms he’d been sort of ignoring. “Yeah I tend towards fevers when I’m sick.”
“Aww Caliph, are you going to make it through this?” asks Saanvi.
“I’m gonna do my best,” he laughs, sounding quiet and exhausted and not at all humorous.
Here is the problem with HIST 401: It is all rote memorization of dates and facts, there is no real holistic throughline — no overarching themes to tie all these separate facts into something meaningful, much less something memorable, at least not beyond the information regurgitation that this exam unfortunately encourages. The only not-Philosophy courses they have to take in their doctoral program are three history classes, and they’ve all proven themselves unjustly difficult. Frankly this course has no right to be as hard as PHIL 551.
Courses really should not be purposely hard, there is no reason that should be some academic goal, especially not for a class that satisfies a general education requirement. Not the way to foster passion in history, and in fact Cal didn’t think it unreasonable to consider such a class capable of actively fostering dispassion in the subject for the incoming cohort of history doctoral candidates who have to start with one of the HIST 401 courses their first year.
“That’s because history professors are the most boring people who exist,” Malik had said, and though perhaps judgmental in a reactionary way, it wasn’t an entirely unfair judgment, though Cal’s personal take on the subject is that history professors just often seem to have a hard time translating their passion into their syllabi. Maybe because there’s just a lot of history one needs to cover. Or maybe, he thinks, with uncharacteristic bitterness as he stares at a multiple choice question involving two options of date that differ by a mere 30 years, maybe Dr. Nguyen in particular really is passionate about disparate dates and facts.
Studying for this test has felt a bit like pouring water into a cracked vessel he simply does not have time to fix — every sleepless night steadily leaking some of the course content as he tries to memorize it, demanding the sacrifice of more sleep to replace what he keeps losing, relying on quantity of hours and sheer repetition as a desperate means to hold himself together just long enough to make it through the semester.
Unfortunately Cal's body hadn’t gotten the memo, and started in on the coming apart a couple of days early. He’s sniffling more or less every time he inhales, and his nose feels as if it’s ceaselessly sort of buzzing. And if he pays it a single iota of attention it’s very bothersome, so he tries not to.
He’s only a few questions in, the first time the feeling comes over him, urgent and inexorable. Drawing a shaky inhale, he puts down his pencil, presses a napkin tight to his face, tries and immediately fails to hold his breath. The initial aim is to keep his mouth closed when it happens, but that proves only to give him less control over it, leading to something like a delayed explosion of an “mmMFFSHHUE!” that ends wildly from his attempts to suppress it.
Instead he allows his mouth to open but tries to muffle as best he can — harsh, strangled vowel sounds smothered into submission and followed by shaky little exhaled ‘shyoo!’s as quiet as he can make them, his entire upper body shuddering and trembling with each expulsion, huddling into himself as he weathers fits of two to four that beg to be more resounding than he’d prefer. It reminds him of screaming and/or sobbing into a pillow. Both of which are things he’d kind of love to do right now.
He hadn’t adequately prepared for how effusive this runny nose would be, and soon enough Cal finds his nose never not needing the attention of a napkin. He absolutely did not grab enough of them from that coffee shop, he probably could have taken the entire dispenser and used every one.
His usual please-god-no-don’t-sneeze tactic is also proving even less effective than usual — squishing the back of his hand against his nose does nothing but make him drippier, and it produces a sort of squelching noise he’s not fond of when every sound is acoustically amplified and obvious. He resorts to keeping a napkin constantly pressed very firmly to his nostrils, occasionally placating himself with a wince and a hard back-and-forth rub. But it’s harder to tell whether he’s actually going to sneeze when his nose’s baseline state of being is very tingly, when he’s fending off close calls too many times to count, when it could apparently be brought to fruition just by sniffling a little too hard.
Sometimes when he’s sick like this the urge to sneeze becomes an insatiable thing, an itch only barely scratched no matter how many times his body tries. All Cal wants to do right now is just let the feeling have its way with him; to sneeze, and sneeze, and sneeze, however many times it takes to not feel quite so damn ticklish.
All Cal can do, in this moment, is steadfastly sniffle and continue muffling sneezes that leave him quaking like they're seismic events, blearily blinking himself back into focus as he stares at a scantron that’s lost his attention because the main thing on his mind is the Sisyphean management of overwhelming cold symptoms and trying to make them as unobtrusive as overwhelming cold symptoms can possibly be.
God, why can’t he remember who Mazares is? He’s definitely one of those expendable Median generals but which one? It doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things or even in the scheme of his understanding of ancient Persia but which one??
He will never do this to his students, he will never ask them stray, irrelevant trivia questions on an exam, he will…
Try his best not to let this get too loud—
“uhUHHH!..shyue…” He’ll… “HRRUSH!” -Damnit. He will never ask them— “hh?” any… “HRUHHoo-!” He will never ask his students any question on any test that doesn’t tie into the core concepts of the course as a whole. Everything will have meaning, everything he teaches will be meaningful or at least objectively interesting. He will make an effort to figure out what is and isn’t objectively interesting in case his idea of that is as skewed as Dr. Nguyen’s seems to be.
This is exactly the kind of class Cal wants to teach—an intro course that doubles as a GE credit, something that allows the instructor to take their niche interests and turn them into something less pedantic, more practical, more universal—seen here done exactly the wrong way, the clear picture of a professor who resents having to deal with any student not pursuing his own field. And the confusing language of these questions… or to be fair it’s possible they’re not objectively that confusing and it’s just that he’s foggy from fever, that does seem like a possibility, he is feeling a little addled. For several stupid minutes he tries to calculate how many of these answers he can miss exactly and reconcile that with the number of them he’s confident about, because he needs an overall grade of at least a B in this class for it to count and that is not something he usually needs to worry about.
An hour into the exam his nose is still running terribly, and eventually it gets to the point where there needs to be a place for it to… go. Because he’s not about to blow his nose in here, he's kind of already exceeded the capacity of every last napkin, and in all honesty it is why he went with the turtleneck this morning. It was a worst case scenario plan, and this is a substantially worse case than he thought it would be. A particularly productive sneeze has him pulling the neck of the sweater over his nose and slipping the final sodden napkin into his pocket for good.
He tries not to think about how thoroughly gross he feels as he attempts to exhale lightly through his nose into the fabric on the inside collar, aiming for a silent version of a nose blow that he instantly realizes he cannot actually make silent, so instead he goes with another sadly adapted strategy that involves more pinching and squishing than blowing. He tries not to think about the fact that he can feel the warmth of his own wetness on his neck, and he tries especially hard not to picture what this poor sweater would look like turned inside out.
While for the purposes of this exam they’re staggered out to every other seat, Cal is sure he’s disturbing a fair few stressed classmates with his ongoing little symphony of echoing symptoms, because there is nothing about this cold he’s managing to keep quiet here, and when an especially unquiet series of sneezes jolt him forward enough to jostle the #2 pencil on his desk and send it rolling off, he finds his suspicions confirmed in the incredibly unamused look from the person to his right as he leans over to retrieve his pencil from the nearby vicinity of their shoe. His quiet apology is sharply shushed by one of the TAs in the aisles, and the shush’s subtext is As if you in particular were not making noise enough.
He’s gonna go home and, god willing, sleep for a hundred years.
Cal is one of the last ten students to finish. Finally he hands his scantron and blue book to the proctor with a dejected, pathetic sounding, “Thank you, snff! sorry, umh… wash your hands, probably,” and then walks off to try to never again think about the fact that he just spoke that sentence aloud. By the time he exits the lecture hall, struggling to simultaneously slip his bag back over his shoulder and keep the neck of his sweater held to his nose, Malik, Saanvi and Josephine are waiting for him.
He says, “Sorry, give me a minute,” and hastens to the nearby restroom to sneeze with abandon and blow his nose into toilet paper over and over, for what feels like five minutes and triggers more stray sneezes, and extends over the course of a good third of the roll, because he’s waited an interminable test period worth of time to experience anything like relief so he’s allowing himself this as an indulgence.
Upon leaving the bathroom he sees first Josephine, who puts a hand on his arm and whispers “Sweetheart,” and then Malik and Saanvi who say “Aww buddy,” and a gentle “Hey,” respectively.
As soon as he opens his mouth to respond his breath gets away from him, and he quickly fishes out the rolled up length of toilet paper he just stuffed into his coat pocket and brings it to his face with both hands, the unused portion unrolling almost to the floor and dangling pitifully as he does.
Two frantic, frustrated sneezes, the second of which is essentially just the first elongated and reiterated with more conviction, issued at a volume that suggests his lungs feel the need to make up for lost time, and a correspondingly harsh, strangled quality.
“hh’URRSHHue! h!-HURRRSHHshyiuu!”
It must sound truly miserable because their blessings feel like condolences and Josephine’s hand finds its way to his shoulder and remains there when he makes no attempt to initiate a divorce between his face and this sad mess of toilet paper, because he suspects he will not be capable of doing so with much dignity.
He intends to mutter some mix of ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Excuse me,’ and perhaps something like an apologetic ‘Jeez,’ but only manages as much as “Thay-h-EHHG’KSSHHHYOO!” A display so obviously productive he doubts they’re surprised when he follows it up with a stuffily mumbled, “Uhm, m’gonna try this again,” pushes the bathroom door back open with a shoulder and spends another minute or so blowing his nose until he’s mitigated a couple catastrophic seconds’ worth of damage.
When he again re-emerges, Cal finds himself meeting the sympathetic faces of his friends with a half smirk and a single request.
