every day i take a minute of your time

So, the good news is that it is not a very busy day.

The bad news is that Augustus is stuck on the register by herself anyway, Rosemary just said that she would be busy with a meeting in her office, and now Augustus cannot get her head to stop jerking to the side.

It's a feeling caught right between the vertebrae at the base of her skull, getting progressively worse with every minute that passes. One of those things where, maybe there's a way to see it coming, but Augustus is never tuned into her body well enough to figure out how. She never really notices anything until it's suddenly very urgently upon her — not hunger, nor thirst, nor headaches, nor nausea, nor needing to go to the bathroom, so unfortunately, she figures that tic attacks are kind of out of the questions. She can only maybe look back and remember that she had been ticcing worse than usual on her drive that morning, but often that doesn't mean anything at all, and even if it did, so many of her tics fade into the background anyway that it is difficult to keep track of them in any meaningful way.

Less difficult at times like these, though. Her head jerks to the side again — once, twice, three times. It has been happening with increasing frequency for several minutes now, and she fears the insistence will soon reach its peak — overreaching from a "bad tic day" into a "Full Blown Tic Attack". Already, her whole face is caught in the contraction of a blink that will not stop, her neck has begun to ache with the repetitive strain, the movement growing so intense that her shoulder has begun hitching up to collide with her jaw.

Worse, Augustus cannot make herself stop sniffing, and it has begun to make her feel as if she is hyperventilating. 

Annoyed, Augustus fumbles for the talk button on her walkie-talkie's headset. "Hey, Changeling," she manages to grit out, hurriedly letting go of the wire when her head jerks again and nearly pulls her ear out of its little cuff entirely. She grunts at the force of it, breath hitching uncomfortably through several compulsive sniffs.

"What?" the Changeling's voice crackles back. It is difficult to decipher whether the growled edge to the word she hears is because of the static or because it is annoyed. It could be either; Changeling's shift today has been largely dedicated to sorting through the entire vault to collect all the damaged bills so they can be sent to the bank and finally stop jamming the bill-counter machine when they inevitably tear in half — a task that Changeling is rather fond of. So, the interruption has most definitely annoyed it, Augustus decides.

Well, that sucks, but so does this. "Can you come out to the register?" Augustus manages to ask. "I'm-," her vocal chords seize up in her throat as she wrenches her head back, eyes squeezed shut against the electric agony building up in her cheeks and spine. She fumbles her hand blindly up to her face to hold her glasses in place so they will not fall, expression caught in a wince so severe that all her eyelid muscles hurt, but still it is not enough to meet the minimum threshold her misfiring brain is attempting to demand of her.

It is bad already, but she knows from experience that it will continue to get worse. The goalpost is shifting further back every time Augustus gets close to fulfilling the insistent need to move. Her head snaps back hard enough to ache a little, muscles in her neck yanking sharp against nothing at all, leaving her a little dizzy. Her breath catches uncomfortably in her sinuses.

Augustus slams the heel of her palm against the side of her head. That one is not a tic — just a rather futile effort to knock loose some of the tension coiling tightly around her vertebrae, to make it pass, to convince it to let her pull in a full breath, or at least hold off just long enough for the Changeling to make it up here and take over the register. She can't remember if there were any customers on the floor, but she feels a flash of anxiety about someone else seeing anyway. It doesn't even especially work, except to make her temple throb with the impact, but at least the pain is something tangible to focus on, to anchor herself with and stave off the attack just a few moments longer.

A distressed noise catches high up in the back of Augustus' throat. She is having a truly terrible time.

"Okay," comes Changeling's voice finally, its tone as flat as always. "I suppose I will watch the register, then."

Despite the fact that she had called it to the front to do exactly that, Augustus distantly feels a little bad for it. Changeling is truly terrible at working in the front — even when it tries to smile it can never really pull it off, and it works very deliberately in a way that customers find slow, and it usually needs to yield any questions to someone else immediately because it never knows the answers — which is why it's usually exclusively in the accounting office during its shifts, except for the moments like these when there are no other options.

Augustus tries to figure out how to apologize, but the words get lost somewhere between the increasing anxiety in her brain and the uncomfortable spasms of her muscles. Usually, when she has an attack at work, she leaves to go wait it out in the back since there's supposed to be a second person on the floor, but he had called out sick today, and now Augustus fears that it might be too late to leave. The dizziness is steadily worsening, and she can't see all that well through the incessant blinking, and it becomes difficult to walk straight when her neck is ticcing this badly. Changeling could try to help her walk, but that would necessitate they leave the front of the store unattended, which they are not supposed to do for any period of time. 

She cannot determine the correct course of action. Like it wants just to complicate things further, Augustus' head jerks to the side forcefully enough to jar her glasses halfway off her face.

"I'll fall," she realizes she's saying; between her uncontrollably hitching breath and general lack of concentration, the words are nigh unintelligible. She tries to fix her glasses but can't keep still well enough to orient her hand to the correct position to do so. Augustus can be rather clumsy at the best of times, and a tic-induced inability to establish equilibrium is not the best of times. There is no way she will be able to make it to the back of the store like this. "I'll fall."

Frustratingly, she feels the overwhelming urge to cry rising up the back of her throat. There's just too much.

"Okay," Changeling repeats, somewhere between brusque and calm. She feels it step forward and snag the arm of her glasses that had fallen entirely out from behind her ear, pulling them off all the way and out of the risk of being thrown to the side. In the brief glances of the world Augustus can see through the frantic blinking, she sees Changeling hook them on the collar of its shirt where they will not get lost.

"I'll- hhck," Augustus' voice catches in her throat, her head craned so sharply to the right that her spine aches with it. Despite her best efforts, she feels a few tears drip down her face — the sensation hot and crawling against her skin — and that makes everything worse. She does not mind her tics usually, but when they are this bad they are not usual. She does not want people to stare at her, and the fact that she is getting emotional about it only makes everything harder than it already is. She wants to be at home, or even in the back, or at least anywhere except in full view of the whole entire store. She can't even get her eyes all the way open to check and make sure no one is staring at her (or worse, filming).

"Come on," Changeling says sternly, reminding her all at once that it is right there. "Just sit down." It steps in closer to place its hands beneath Augustus' elbows, pulling a little to encourage her to brace her weight against it. For once, Augustus is relieved to be so much taller than Changeling when her head jerks in such a way that definitely would have hit it had they been of similar heights. "If you are on the floor, no one will see you."

Obediently, Augustus braces her weight against the Changeling's grip and staggers unsteadily to the ground with its help, just to promptly slam her head backwards into the shelf under the register. She hears herself make a choked little noise at the impact.

"Shoot," Changeling swears. "Not that way, idiot."

It leans in just close enough to haul Augustus back and sideways, so that the backwards snap of her head will not make contact with anything but the side of the Changeling's thigh. Her breath hitches in the back of her sinuses again, head snapping to the side; her face hurts. It is the worst.

The inability to draw a full breath has begun to make Augustus feel sick to her stomach, and the unsteady spasms of muscles around her throat only serves to make the sensation more intense. She digs her heels into the ground and tries to focus on the deliberate pressure of her legs pushing into the resistance. She tries not to lean too hard against the Changeling and does her best to muffle the noise she's making. Hiding behind the counter was a good idea, but it will only help so much if she fails to get the ugly sounds of herself ticcing through tears under control.

She can't tell if she is doing a good enough job, though, and the panic threatens to wrench itself even higher at the thought. Augustus is used to ticcing — even when it gets this bad, she is familiar enough to not be caught excessively off-guard — but it is difficult to apply logic to a panic as hindbrain as this one. It does not matter how firmly Augustus reminds herself that this will pass as it always does, it is not enough to convince her body to cease screaming about how she cannot breathe, cannot speak, cannot move. In the back of her head, Augustus imagines a dog with its leg caught in a bear trap, frantic and bleeding, and feels a miserable noise catch in the folds of her vocal chords.

"Breathe," Changeling reminds her, and Augustus' face twists painfully tight with the effort of heaving in a thin, useless breath. Her shoulder hitches up as if in a shrug, and smacks against the underside of her jaw hard enough to make her teeth clack uncomfortably against each other. Her hand flails back blindly and lands on the Changeling's boot, and Augustus digs her fingers in around the leather and bears her weight down in a desperate attempt to ground herself to something. If this attack unfolds into a full blown meltdown because she could not calm down, that will be bad, so she has to try her best to hold it together.

In her head, she imagines reaching up and catching the Changeling's hand in hers instead, holding on tight and feeling it hold her back. The notion is so tantalizing that her mouth opens to ask "Can I hold your hand?" (or paw, sometimes the Changeling calls its hands its "paws", and it is one of many cute things about it that Augustus can never point out because she will embarrass it so terribly that it will make her leave and refuse to answer her texts), but the words don't make it to her mouth at all. She doesn't have the air to speak, and cares too much about its permission to try to just reach up and grab it without warning.

Instead, she lets her nails drag against the rounded ridges of its boot laces and forces her lungs to pull in another breath against the crawling need to sniff skulking around in her nose. She doesn't have to hold its hand, even if it would maybe be nice; it is enough that the Changeling is here at all. Augustus is almost always alone during attacks like this, and usually she prefers it that way, she thinks. But unlike usual, Augustus is caught out in the middle of public instead of already hidden away somewhere else. If she was by herself here, she wouldn't be able to help any customers, or keep them from staring at her, or tell them to stop it or go away if they tried to reach out and "help" her — it is all very upsetting to think about.

So Augustus stops thinking about it and focuses on the line of sensation where her spine leans against the Changeling's leg instead, and that is alright to do because she is not stuck up here all by herself. Changeling is here with her, there to take care of things while Augustus is indisposed. She doesn't have to be worried, because Changeling can work the register if any customers do show up, and it will tell people to stop it if they try to stare at her, and it would not let anyone get close or take a video on their phone or try to touch or talk to her, and that is a relief.

Her head wrenches back and collides with the Changeling's knee, and it does not buckle beneath the impact. Inside her head, Augustus imagines a dog standing guard, eyes big and staring, ears pricked forward attentively, with one of those big, spiked collars that keep predators from going for its throat. Another noise chokes in the back of her throat, and she feels the Changeling widen its stance to brace them both better against the continued torrent of movement.

It will be okay, Augustus reminds herself against the way her head gets caught in an uncomfortable constricting side twist. Changeling is here, and it will be fine, and if anything goes wrong, the Changeling will be able to handle it. It will not tolerate anyone else staring at her.

(The Changeling itself is, of course, almost certainly looking at her. It does that a lot — either little glances like it's checking to make sure she is still there, or even staring outright, just because. It is okay if it is Changeling staring at her, though; Augustus likes Changeling, ergo she likes it when the Changeling stares at her.)

The tension that has had her spine in a vice grip loosens, just a little. Her head jerks to the side — once, twice, three times — and she feels it slowly begin to unravel. When Augustus finally manages to heave in an unsteady breath through her mouth, the sharp insistence of it unlocks and falls away completely. This time, it actually stays gone.

Augustus lets out the breath that has been stuck agonizingly in her sinuses as a deep, groaning sigh, stretching her neck out to the left and digging her knuckles into the sore parts of her cheeks and forehead. It doesn't feel like she pulled any muscles this time, thankfully, which is nearly as much of a relief as finally getting to wipe away the sticky trails of tears on her face is. She scrubs out the few drops that had gotten stuck in her eyelashes and lets her weight settle a little more firmly against the Changeling's legs, since it has already proven itself capable of standing firm against it.

She should get up, probably. Changeling makes a very good guardian dog, but it really is awful at working the register and it's kind of a miracle no customers have shown up to antagonize it yet. Plus, it probably has got ants in its pants about going back to finish its actual job in the vault already. She should get up, but Augustus lets herself hesitate just a little bit longer. Just until I catch my breath, she tells herself, and moves her hand off the Changeling's boot to lay it flat on her chest to count out a better breathing rhythm so that she doesn't accidentally make herself hyperventilate in the other direction.

It was almost a very close call; she knows if she rushes herself too much, that just leaves her vulnerable to having another meltdown later on, which she does not think she can risk with time still left in her shift. Changeling is blunt enough to let her know if she is taking too long. Until then, she can let herself focus on just recovering, and let it take watch just a little while longer. 

It is maybe a couple minutes later when the Changeling finally clears its throat above her, the muscles in its legs bunching awkwardly like it is restraining itself from shuffling its feet. Augustus leans forward so that they are no longer touching, and then clumsily shifts up onto her knees so that she can stand up without falling over.

Her head shakes again when she gets back on her feet, but the tic passes like normal this time. Changeling waits for Augustus to regain her bearings, and then offers her glasses back, frames balances delicately in the flat of its palm.

"Thank you, Changeling," Augustus tells it, voice soft. She's still a little too tired to shape the syllables the way she's supposed to, but at least she hadn't lost speech entirely this time.

"There are 46 minutes until the store closes," it replies, its gaze fixed somewhere above her head. When it shifts its stance uncertainly, its tail shifts too — it looks a little bit like it's wagging.

Augustus nods, and it turns into the arc of a tic on the upswing. "Got it. Have fun sorting the rest of the vault," she says, and Changeling nods back and promptly scampers off, almost as if it was waiting for permission to go.

It probably was, Augustus thinks, smiling a little to herself as she turns to log back into the register. If she had still needed it to stay with her at the front a little longer — because she was still regaining her footing, or her words, or even just because she was still a little nervous and wanted it to stay — it would have, even though it was impatient to get back to its other job too, because Changeling is a very good friend like that. It is always more helpful and considerate than other people give it credit for.

Never again does Augustus want to be forced to suffer through a tic attack while stuck in full view of the whole entire store, but regardless of where the next attack occurs, Augustus feels certain that she will want Changeling there to guard her through the worst of it. There is no one she trusts more than it, after all.