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They are going to kill him.
He glances furtively at the faces around him, each one pointedly focused on the meal in front of them--conspicuously avoiding looking at him in a way that makes it painfully obvious that they are all listening to him.
He feels bad about it, but he can't do much to ignore the oncoming fit. He gasps once, twice, and then ducks down into the pile of napkins that's been rapidly depleting over the course of their lunch break. "hiH'TSSHHyue! hih-! iISSHHue! iItSSHHiew! hIH-! hih--!? ...'TSSHHue! iTSSHHyue! iiISSHH'ue!"
Itchy tears roll down his cheeks, and he swipes them away with a soft noise of discomfort. "...excuse me."
Niklas stands abruptly, hard enough that it rattles the entire table and knocks over the open thermos, spilling some of its contents onto the cracked plastic. "Get up."
"But--"
For a man who's more than twice his age, he certainly doesn't show it, practically lunging at him in a low crouch and tossing him over his shoulder like he's a misbehaving sack of potatoes. "Up we get!"
"Niklas--"
He is distinctly at a disadvantage like this, pinned awkwardly as he is marched out of the break room and down the corridor to the Captain's office.
The Captain himself raises his brows at the scene when they enter, but says nothing, just takes off his glasses and folds his hands on the top of his desk. "Yes, gentlemen?"
"Captain, I swear on my life, one of us is going to cut his nose off if he doesn't take something for his allergies." He finally lets go of Elliott, depositing him roughly into the chair across the desk.
"It's not that--that--hh-? hESSHhieww! eTSHyue! ...snf! It's not that bad...I have to drive home after this, I can't take the--snF!--the Benadryl, and I already took a Claritin this morning--I already took two Claritin this morning! You know how the spring is! I'm hardly the only person in this warehouse with hayfever!"
"But you ARE the only one who seems to sneeze as much as he breathes!"
"You aren't being fair--"
"Boys, boys!" The Captain stands, cutting off the argument. "Let's simmer down, shall we?"
"Captain, he--"
A sharp look is enough to silence him. "As I was saying...the two of you can't work out your little squabble on your own?"
"We have begged him for hours to just take something, but he won't do it." Niklas looks genuinely harried, and he really does feel bad that he's clearly been so annoying to everyone today--though he doesn't know that he's really being any more or less annoying than he usually is.
"I hardly think that I'm being so obtrusive that you need to carry me like a sack of potatoes--"
"You're lucky that that's all I did--"
"That's ENOUGH." He clasps his hands behind his back, pacing back and forth slowly behind his desk as he speaks. "I expect my employees to conduct themselves like adults--do you think I would have tolerated this on the ship?" Neither of them speaks, but it says enough. "So why do you think I'm tolerating it in my warehouse? Do I have to send one of you home? To put you on different shifts? Am I supposed to put you both in the corner, have you work on opposite ends of the floor for the rest of the day? I'm running a business, not a daycare."
He is flashed back to sitting in the principal's office, having been hauled in for some struggle or another with his peers--and, just like then, he feels distinctly like he is being punished for someone else's grievance over him, not for anything he's actually done. He opts to keep his mouth shut and leave this one as an inside thought.
"Good--it seems like you both realize that's not what you want. So what am I going to do? You two brought yourselves in here for my intervention, did you not?" Again, he's met with stony silence from the pair of them. Elliott dares to peek at Niklas from the corner of his eye, but snaps back to attention before he actually gets much of a look at him. "What would you have me do, handcuff you two together until you can get along?"
"I would gnaw my arm off like a coyote."
"How would we get any work done?"
"Well you're certainly not getting any done sitting in my office and fighting eachother like children. I'll tell you what we're going to do: you're both going to apologize to eachother, you are going to shake hands, and if I hear another word from anybody else that you're still squabbling after this, you're BOTH getting pulled in for PIPs."
The panic is like ice in his veins. It startles him so badly from the mere threat that he's up from his chair and halfway leaned across the desk. "Captain, you can't PIP me--"
"Then I suggest you two should figure out how to sort out your differences, shouldn't you? I haven't had to put anyone on a Performance Improvement Plan in years, but I also haven't had anyone carried into my office before." He slides a box of tissues across the desk and nudges it against Elliott's outstretched hand. "I suggest you get moving. I'm old, I don't have forever to wait around."
The pair of them stare at eachother, exchange a stiff handshake and an even stiffer "sorry" that is hardly convincing--but it doesn't have to be. The threat hangs heavily enough that they're both keen on not actually pressing their luck to see if he'll carry it out or not.
"Good lads! Now, back to your lunches, and then back to work. I'll give you an extra few minutes since you've been such good sports." He shoos them out of the room, and closes the door behind them.
Every pair of eyes is on them when they reenter the room, and nobody is coy about trying to hide it at all. There's soft conversation and giggling and "oohs" that make it clear that everyone knows they're in trouble.
Someone nudges his shoulder, loudly shakes a bottle of Benadryl he's retrieved from his locker. "A snack? A little snack for you, sir?"
He mutters something blasphemous that his momma would've smacked him upside the head and washed his mouth with soap for, but accepts the pills deposited into his palm with only some fuss.
Bolormaa's got his chin rested in his palm as he watches the exchange. "I'd offer you some of my tea to wash those down with, but SOMEBODY--" he turns completely in his chair to glare at Niklas who's taken up residence at a different table, "knocked it over and spilled it when he decided to try his hand at being a pro wrestler. Seriously, where'd you pick that up?"
"I've got two brothers."
"Okay? I've got, like, a billion cousins, and I still don't leap at people like I think WWE's recruiting?"
"I don't think the WWF wants me."
"I don't think the WWF has been recruiting since 2002."
Elliott opts to ignore their conversation about the titling of professional wrestling, and instead takes a sip of a bottle of water somebody else offers. His throat feels that sort of raw, itchy feeling that always comes during the height of allergy season, and he scarcely swallows the pills before he's half choking on the water he swallows at the same time as a cough.
It doesn't help the raw spots at the corners of his eyes, already so watery, to be fully teary from the cough, but he can't really do anything about that when everybody is watching him choke on nothing extremely obtrusively in the middle of the break room. Nobody comments, most politely avert their eyes. Bolormaa drops his conversation with Niklas in order to pat him on the back in his best approximation of a reassuring touch.
"You don't have to die to avoid getting PIPed."
He clears his throat, eyes and nose streaming at this point, and manages to find his voice. "You don't know that."
"He might just fill it out and drop it into the casket with you." He motions throwing the papers in. "You'll have to hand it to the gate guard."
"I don't know that Peter would take kindly to having to receive paperwork that I came with."
"I don't think he'd mind. Famously patient or whatever, that guy." The clock on the wall chimes the half hour, and everyone begrudgingly starts packing their food up. "We'll see you out there?"
It's Niklas that answers, standing at the wretched little coffee pot on the counter. "We'll be out in a few."
Everybody files out, stragglers dragging their feet behind the others to goose neck at what conversation may take place, but ultimately being shuffled along with the rest of them to hit the time clock. Which leaves two.
Elliott has a death grip on the bottle of water in front of him, pointedly refusing to look at him. The Benadryl hasn't kicked in yet, he isn't yet fighting the drowsiness, but so, too, does that mean that it isn't really doing anything to diminish his allergy symptoms. He gingerly wipes at his nose with a crumpled napkin, ignoring the fact that they're chapped in a way that makes it absolutely sting his skin to be touching it much. He'll have to consider Vaseline or something when he gets home tonight.
"So."
He sniffs. "So?"
"I...owe you an apology."
He sniffs again, intending it to sound haughty, but it comes off more liquidy and miserable than he intends it to. "..well?"
Niklas takes a seat at the table across from him, dropping into the chair heavily. "I'm sorry."
"And?"
"And I shouldn't have picked you up."
"And?"
"And what?"
"And you realize that I had already taken allergy meds this morning, so now I'm weirdly dosed and it's going to throw off the rest of my schedule, and I'm going to be so tired for the rest of this shift?"
"Elliott--"
"So help me God, if I'm getting PIPed over this, I will make sure you do too."
"Calm down, nobody's getting PIPed, especially not over this." He displays his palms in a gesture of mock defeat and reassurance.
He means to respond, but he doesn't get any further than to gasp and hardly twist away in time. "ATSSHhiew! Hh'ISSHHyue! iiTSSHHue!" He gasps raggedly for a fourth, but it peters out into an unsatisfied sigh at the last second. He blushes as he awkwardly eyes the spray off the tabletop, not having managed to cover the first two in any meaningful way. The "excuse me" is barely audible as he stands to go get a couple of paper towels from their perch next to the sink.
"Bless you."
They rigidly avoid making eye contact, Elliott occupying himself with wiping down the table, Niklas with avoiding watching him do so and sipping his coffee.
"You know," he finally says tensely, "you don't have to treat me like I'm a child."
"Deaglan was planning to slip them into your tea like giving pills to a dog in some cheese."
"Okay, well, you don't have to treat me like a dog, either!"
"We love you, but we are going to kill you if we have to listen to you sniffling and sneezing even more than usual for hours on end."
"I don't know that I really like that your love is so conditional on my health."
"It's not conditional on your health. It's conditional on the fact that we don't like watching you refusing to do anything that could improve your situation because it doesn't comply with whatever rules you've applied, which always seem to skew well out of your favor."
"That...isn't true." Well. Gosh, maybe a little true. "I have a schedule. They--I'm sure those guys who write the dosage instructions on the back of the box had to test that at least a couple of times to figure it out."
"All I'm saying is, if we can't convince you to be good to yourself, we're gonna have to either force or bribe you into it." He stands, his chair scooting noisily across the cement floors. "We'll see you on the floor in a few."
He watches his back retreat, his bandana a blazing red against the soft grey of the walls as he disappears around the corner and back onto the floor. He chews on the inside of his cheek, watching the way the light shifts across the table when he rocks the water bottle along its bottom edge.
Well. Maybe he should be a little more lenient with his schedule, if only because it will keep his coworkers from vividly daydreaming about beating him to death in the middle of the warehouse floor. He pinches the tip of his nose with the paper towels, willing it to behave long enough to get through the rest of this shift mostly unscathed.