For the longest time Gall assumed that everyone got headaches as bad as his, and that they were just better at ignoring it. After all, he had no frame of reference. He'd always been told it was his problem.
He tried to hide it, then, when he had to stop working to rub his forehead with his knuckles, or he put the lamp on the other side of the room because it was too bright, or his vision started blurring before the pulsing pain kicked in. Maybe he was sloppier, slower, but during a mission he could not stop to accommodate for a weakness he shouldn't have had in the first place.
After all, what Fergal wanted him for didn't require precision anyway.
"I'm fine," he would say, and Fergal would take that at face value, and he thought that was the end of it.
Alex disagreed, because of course she would, and he'd tell her to go away, which she did, and usually he would finish his work fast enough to go lie down in a dark room before anyone would miss his presence.
When his head started hurting while he was holding a target tied up in his strings while waiting for help to arrive, Gall tried desperately to focus through the pain. But his focus slipped enough that his target managed to slip out of one of the loops and kick Gall in the joint of his knee.
Gall's focus now completely gone, his strings flickered off for just long enough that the target could escape.
Several minutes later, Alex burst through the doors to find Gall crumpled on the floor and clutching his head.
"What happened?" she asked him.
"He kicked my knee and my focus slipped, I'm sorry -"
"I'm telling Fergal that he kicked you in the head," Alex whispered to Gall, and he was in so much pain that shaking his head to disagree seemed like an impossible task.
Every step as she carried him back home sent another jolt of pain through his head, and he desperately tried not to wince, but he must have failed because Alex tried to tell him that it was okay and they would be home soon. He told her to shut the hell up. She did so.
Fergal seemed to buy it, at least, and Gall got the untold luxury of being able to lie down in a dark and quiet room until the pain receded, without anyone yelling at him that he needed to be doing something. In fact, everyone turned completely around and started demanding that he needed to stop and lie down at the slightest of frowns.
Eventually he exploded. "Quit acting like I'm so fragile! You think you know anything? I've been dealing with this my entire life, Alex was lying when she said I'd been kicked in the head -"
Fergal looked up, sharply, at Alex.
"It was a reasonable assumption," Alex said. "I found him on the ground clutching his head, and I had to carry him home, you yourself saw it!"
Fergal punished her anyway, burning the soles of her feet until she was left hobbling for days, but she just looked at Gall with an expression of sympathy that he didn't understand.
"He doesn't like admitting it, but he gets headaches," Alex was saying.
Gall stomped into the doorway. "I absolutely do not!"
Jessee looked up. "We were just -"
"Don't give him an excuse to treat me like a porcelain doll."
"Gall," Jessee said, looking up, "a lot of my mother's side of the family would get headaches when bad weather was coming in. So as long as you avoid liquor and chocolate, and make sure to not skip meals and always drink enough water, us having a forecast could actually be useful -"
Gall slammed the door behind him.
The hell of it was, it helped.
Avoiding hard cheese and sausages, always carrying water and a handful of crackers and nuts with him to make sure he had something to eat and drink, staying inside when the temperature went from hot to sweltering, not looking at the reflections of sunlight on water, meant he didn't need to stop as often to massage his temples against the pounding in his head. The conditioned fear and shame that came with his vision swimming happened less often.
And it turned out that Jessee had been right about the headaches being a surprisingly good weather forecast.
When he finally managed to admit that he was starting to get a headache, then, the others said that being able to lie down in a dark room was a reward for giving them useful information.
It made sense to him that his pain could be useful to someone else. It was just weird, he thought, that they rewarded him with something that helped him feel better.
But it cost them almost nothing to do it, so.
