faderift | OPEN | I won't be made useless

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OPEN | I won't be made useless

WHO: Colin and OPEN
WHAT: Administering magebane, dealing with phylactery bullshit
WHEN: Present/course of maybe a week
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: I will mark individual threads for any warnings.

I: Apothecary

The room across from the infirmary doesn't actually have a name, but at the moment, Colin has claimed it for mixing up drugs and one particular poison. He has never made poisons before, but the concept is really quite the same. There's also something soothingly demystifying about learning the ins and outs of a drug that causes mages to be powerless. Maybe he can start fashioning an antidote. But mainly, he is here to administer the poison to the sick. Since he has agency over this, he has made the stuff as palatable as possible by mixing it into spicy-sour bowls of gazpacho topped with fresh herbs and minced garlic. The soup is cold but flavorful, made from raw winter vegetables from the garden. The vinegar helps to mask the bitterness of the magebane, but there is still an unavoidable metallic taste. Patients are handed a hunk of bread and encouraged to wipe the bowl clean with it, eating every drop.

The apothecary himself, however, is dealing with occasional...problems. Not just being overworked to the point of moving some bedding into the room and sleeping there.

A few times, he finds he cannot put a cork in a bottle without missing. He reaches for something and his hand grabs air. His feet won't go in his shoes. It only lasts a few minutes each time, but it's maddening.

You might be in the room when there's a sudden burst of electric energy and Colin gives a cry of agony as it hits him. He hits the floor, hard.

II: Closed to Kostos

It's time for their spirit magic lesson, and Colin is waiting in his quarters when Kostos comes in. But he's sitting with his back to a wall, knees against his chest, trembling so hard his teeth chatter. His gaze is fixed on the opposite corner of the room. Nothing is there. Not to Kostos, at any rate.

You're not real.

Of course I'm real, Colly-boy. I'm just not here. And you're still afraid of me.

III: Hallway - one thread

Colin is coming back from running an errand to his store when he hears the air crackle. It's not the same sort of electric crackle as he heard before. It whistles, shrieks like ice, and before he can fling up any manner of defense, it closes around him. Ice encases him, freezes him, minute but sharp crystals digging into fingertips and toes. Most frightening is the chill in his chest, and the layer of ice between his face and air. He can't breathe.

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Well. Colin is not dead, so that's a start. Nikos doesn't move to give him a hand, or offer any kind words of bracing comfort. Instead, he looks down at him. Thoughtfulness, on Nikos, looks like distrust, with a pinch or two of disgust.

He does, sort of, feel the thinking. Allows it to wash over him.

"Would that be a yes, or a no." As he did ask a question, sort of, unfinished as it was.

Colin really wants to say he is absolutely contagious with colpo di fulmine and Nikos had better leave before he is infected, but it would confuse the public perception of this phylactery crisis. A residual shudder wracks him before he stills, breathes, and finally reaches up to remove the earring that burned him.

"Not contagious," he gasps. "Some of the Inquisition is--"

He stops. The phylactery issue has been discussed on public channels. He's not sure he wants Nikos to know he's a mage.

"Not contagious," he repeats lamely. A reddish lattice is blooming, creeping up the side of his neck. Pain is centralized on his right shoulder and left side now, and Colin tries to remember what the Circle taught about electrical wounds. Inflict them is the only thing he can recall as the pain gets worse.

Edited 2018-02-20 16:27 (UTC)

"'Some of the Inquisition is not contagious'," Nikos repeats, flatly. His eyebrows do not arch when he says it, because Nikos does not arch his eyebrows. "By the tits of my ancestors. No wonder we're all so irritated by the quarantine."

And then he sees the spread of color on Colin's neck, an angry flush. At first, he thinks perhaps it was there before--a birthmark that he overlooked, because he wasn't checking out Colin's neck. But the red mark is spreading, and still, Nikos stays where he is. His right hand closes over itself, forming a fist.

"Don't mistake this for interest," he says, in a tone that is, regrettably, far less flat, "but what is that."

And what can be done to stop it, he does not add, though he is thinking it. Though of course, this is something else, something entirely Colin's fault, some stupid ailment to which Nikos has now borne witness, and all for the wine.

"Isn't that a dwarven curse?" That Colin's brain puts that together moments after being struck by lightning may be a testament to his composure, or it may be that he's just train-of-thought-ing. "Orzammar curse, I mean."

At the comment, Colin turns his head, unable to peer at his own neck, but he gingerly peels the shoulder of his shirt off his skin so he can look underneath at what he's dealing with. It's a hole. There's a burned hole as if something burrowed into his arm. He untucks the left side of his shirt now and lifts it, and sees another burned hole as if the same thing burrowed its way back out. So the lightning went straight through him like an arrow, meaning the majority of the damage is on the inside.

"Oh, is that all?" he says faintly. The red marking on his neck is becoming more defined--a fractal pattern much like the scarring Nikos has. It's all over Colin's arm as well, and he's not going to think too hard about it yet.

"Please look away," he requests calmly. If he's going to heal himself, he doesn't want Nikos gawking. He's sure the man will work out what's going on, but he would like something to be sacred.

Edited (now with limited visual aid) 2018-02-21 00:19 (UTC)

"I enjoy the variety," Nikos says, in way of confirmation. "And besmirching my ancestors. How exciting to find someone who shares my interest."

If he does not sound excited, it's because he is not. Given the angle, he misses much of the burned bore-holes detailing. It hardly matters. He can see the scarlet marking perfectly well, figures like the fan of a tree's roots.

His gaze is hard, but at Colin's request, he jerks his eyes to his face instead. Calm, and idiotic. A directionless anger passes across Nikos' stormy features before he looks up at the ceiling with an irritated sigh. It's a very small concession but then, he doesn't really want to be here.

"Whatever you're going to do, I've seen it. Probably."

Clipped, but still a little like a joke. He isn't necessarily thinking of magic, though of course he has seen that, too. He's thinking of the canopied ceiling of a bed. Someone probing his arm with gentle fingers until he kicked them. The smell of incense, the heavy underground smells of clay, and dry stone. He narrows his eyes.

"I wish now that it had been an illness," he offers, as he goes on staring at the ceiling. Counting backwards from twenty. "Illness, even contagious illness, would have been preferable. This is something you should warn people of when you trick them into helping you cork your damn potions."

Colin's voice takes on a tone Nikos has not heard in it before as he reaches the end of his patience.

"You say that as if you think I'm the sort what expects to get hit by magical lightning on the regular," he snaps, his native accent emerging. He is afraid, in pain, and trying to fix this damage before it kills him. "It's never 'appened before to warn you about, so shut up and let me think."

Thinking isn't what he's doing, and it may become clear when a pale glow creeps along the edge of Nikos' sight. Colin has never healed anything anywhere close to this serious a hurt, but he has an advantage in it being his own body that bears it. His own body, after all, is connected to the Fade. If it were someone else, he would have to channel the magic through space or through touch. Now, he can let the energy fill him, as much as it takes, no focus necessary--it would only be like blowing into a balloon with a straw. His eyes slide shut and he opens the floodgate between him and the next world.

Of course the drawback is that, once the healing energy has done all it can, Colin is blind with exhaustion. Internal burns are healed, as the energy came at him from the inside out. He stops to check the external wounds. They are no longer critically threatening, but a better healer than him will have to look and see if anything more can be done or if there will be scarring. The angry red lattice is still there, but it's the least of his concerns right now as he crawls toward the bedding he brought into the room. He gets as far as resting his cheek on the blanket with the rest of his body on the stone floor before blacking out.

The good news is, Nikos does shut up. Or at least, he limits himself to a loud snort, as he continues to stare at the ceiling with his mouth drawn into an unhappy frown. As if he knows what Colin might expect in way of attacks. As if he cares that this was an attack, one that was not, probably, Colin's fault. Most importantly: as if he wants to be here at all.

He catches sight of the glow out of his peripheral vision and looks without tipping his chin down or moving his head at all. Eyes only. This is a skill that Nikos has perfected, useful for looking surreptitiously around in taverns and dark alleyways, cheating at cards, and side-eyeing anyone talking too loudly and too passionately. And for watching a shopkeep-and-apparent-mage lay on the floor, wracked with pain and yet still healing himself. How nice that would be, Nikos thinks, but does not say, because he hates himself and not Colin, or for that matter, anyone who can heal the worst of electrical burns on their own, without anyone making a fuss over them.

By the time Colin has dragged himself over to the bedding, Nikos is no longer pretending not to look. And when Colin passes out, Nikos cranes his neck a little, waits a few seconds--and then sighs again, and turns back to get his wine. Marvelous.

Later, Colin will come to, still half on the stone floor, but stretched out to prevent cramping in his legs or a stiff neck. The other half of him is on some empty sacks, which someone has bunched up before sort of of rolling him onto them. No one tucked him in. The blanket is still folded.

Nikos is sitting in his chair with his legs stretched out in front of him, taking up a good portion of the small room. He has drank much more of the wine by now--the whole of what Colin had provided to him, and then, after some searching through the clutter, more wine--which he helped himself to as a reward. He is now balancing a cup of it on his stomach, with his hands held around the rim like a sort of halo, ready to catch the cup if it starts to fall.

He looks up, when he hears Colin stirring. Ah, says his expression, all of him a little looser thanks to the wine.

"So. Who is it that wants to kill you?"

Conversational.

Colin comes to with one of the blankets bunched in his fist. At first he feels like he's floating outside his own body, before his senses return and he blinks slowly. He can feel the way Nikos has manipulated the way he lies, pillowing his head and stretching out his legs. Colin has had real anxieties about what people do to him during his sleep stemming back to his Harrowing, but right now, he's going to have to pick and choose what to freak out over, and he chooses the attempted murderer rather than the surprisingly well-intentioned Nikos. He keeps underestimating this man.

He doesn't move, just turns his eyes on Nikos. His reply is half-muffled.

"We don't know. We think someone got their hands on a lot of phylacteries and is casting spells on the mages they were made from."

"Wait. You're a mage?"

Nikos makes a quiet tsk to signal his dry surprise. Very wine-loose indeed. He is looking into his cup, and not looking at Colin at all. It takes great concentration to balance wine in this way. Helps if you stare at it.

"Who is the we who believes this? You and... all of the other mages?"

Colin cannot tell, with Nikos or with his brother, when one of them is or is not joking. After he's sure the room has stopped spinning, he sits up, bedraggled but in very little pain now.

"Me and some of the mages being affected like this." He pauses to peel back the shoulder of his shirt and examine the damage. He'll have to put dressings on the entry and exit wounds of the lightning, but everything else seems to have healed up nicely. Even the fractal bruising is stable, for now. "There are at least five or six I know of, which means there are more than that. All of us who were at Ferelden's Circle are affected, except the one who transferred some time ago, but her phylactery would have transferred with her."

He purses his lips, then gives Nikos a slightly puppyish look.

"Pass me the wine?"

Despite his lack of eye contact, Nikos is listening. Ferelden. He ticks that box on his mental list. Far from Circles he has heard a little of in letters. That is good.

"Fereldans are shit at keeping secrets." No surprise that they would be shit at holding on to phylacteries as well, is what he means, but he doesn't quite finish the thought aloud. Instead it comes out like a musing. As the conversation turns toward an earnest request, Nikos looks up to meet Colin's gaze. Absorbs the full brunt of the sad dog look.

Lifts his cup with exaggerated care and tips it into his mouth, draining it all in one go. Then he leans over and sets the cup on the floor with a quiet tock.

"Perhaps water," he suggests. "You are out of wine. Generally casting spells on a handful of mages, presumably from afar, is a sloppy strike. It is not much better as a threat. Unless you are meant to be intimating something from it, personally."

Ah. There goes the wine. Colin doesn't mention it, although it's a bit rude because it is his wine and he was just struck by lightning. It's more important that Nikos is listening actively, with neither pity nor judgment. Well, all right, there's a little judgment, but it's not about him being a mage.

"Maybe they're not trying to kill us." He looks away, defeat in his eyes. "Maybe they don't want anything but to torture mages. Show us our place. I've known..." He blinks and finds the image of Ser Lutair in the dark behind his eyelids. "I've known plenty who would do that. Who have done it. Happily."

Again: thoughtfulness, on Nikos, looks like distrust, with a pinch or two of disgust. Right now, it's a look that is heavy on the distrust, as he considers Colin and all he has to say on the matter.

"Mm," he says, after a second of this treatment. It isn't a charitable mm. More suspicious that Colin might be feeling sorry for himself, with legitimate motivation or no. "People who want to torture you, happily or unhappily, usually want to see what they're doing to you. People who want you dead would be happy to have it done out of sight."

Some kind of comfort, anyways. Nikos uncrosses his legs and recrosses them at the ankles, with great focus.

"Would you torture whoever's doing this to you, or would you kill them for it."

He doesn't respond at first. Instead, he stares glassily into space as if Nikos said nothing at all. Then, he turns his face in Nikos' general direction.

"Are those my only options?" he asks almost wistfully.

Cute. Nikos looks back with bland disinterest.

"They were the only ones offered," he points out, pointedly. "I realize you may be temporarily stupefied from the lightning, so I'll be charitable. Do you have a compelling third option to add?"

Colin isn't sure whether to be touched or disturbed by the implication that Nikos wasn't speaking hypothetically. Either way, he takes no pleasure in adding hurt into the world. The world hurts enough as it is.

"I want my phylactery," he says steadily. "I want it gone and for this to be over."

"And when it is gone and this is over, you'll inevitably have another threat to contend with." A bleak that's life goes unsaid, if only because blatant cliches make Nikos want to vomit. "There is no 'over' until there is. And the easiest way to achieve that complete peace would be to throw yourself off of one of the tall towers. They keep most of them locked. But if you're interested, I can get one of them open for you."

He wouldn't. Probably. He would, however, sigh, which he does now as he directs his gaze up at the ceiling.

"You have your goal. Now work out how to reach it, and the lengths you'll go to do so. If it truly matters, kill for it."

But Nikos, it's harrrrrrd. Exhaustion and residual pain have shortened Colin's patience. Not to the point where he snaps, because snapping takes energy. And hope. He lies back down and does nothing for a few seconds besides blink.

"We're doing that," he sighs. "Trying. Not trying to walk off the tower, trying to find out who's doing this. They'll die. But you didn't ask me what I'll do, or what will happen, you asked me what I want."

Edited 2018-04-05 17:01 (UTC)

"Yes, well done," Nikos says, in a monotone. "The bare minimum answer. I asked with the intention that you would work backwards from there. Figure out how to get it. 'They'll die'. You don't want them to die. You just want your phylactery destroyed and the matter concluded, bloodlessly, painlessly. Maybe even out of your sight. Or else you would have said that you would boil their blood. Burn them with a little lighting of your own."

See how much he doesn't care about magical lightning burns? He can talk grimly about that. That's how much he doesn't care.

"What you want will require bloodshed. That's what I'm telling you. Expect nothing less or when your moment comes, you'll be fucked."

Colin's expression does not change, but there is a longer silence following what Nikos says.

When he was in his teens, he got into two fistfights with other apprentices. Exactly two. After the second one, an enchanter took him aside to explain that if he did not stop getting into fights, he would be made Tranquil and there would be nothing even the First Enchanter could do about it. Anger had to be redirected after that, and there was no place for it to go but inward. Now, the question is whether he can control the violence, or if finally unlocking that door will prove it was a floodgate all along.

"What if I can't stop once I've started?" he asks quietly.

"Don't be fucking dramatic," Nikos says. Without particular rancor. So really, that's almost like being nice.

He reaches across himself to scratch, irritably, at his right arm. Really works at it through his sleeve for a few seconds before he falls to a kind of compulsive rubbing with the flat of his hand.

The precipice from which a mage might fall is precarious, an edge over a deep hole of things somewhat beyond their control. Nikos isn't an idiot. But any man might fall into a similar depth. Blank-eyed grim killers.

"You will probably be able to stop." This is better advice. He pinches his sleeve between his fingers to stop himself from rubbing at it. "Most people manage it fine. It becomes like a door to open and close. Afterward, if you puke, try to keep perspective. Better men than you have pissed themselves and puked after taking a life. And if you truly defy the odds and bulk up into some twisted revenge-monster, then I'll kill you myself. I won't even charge for it."

He releases his sleeve, shifts so he can pluck his cup from the floor and, with some effort, hauls himself out of the chair with only a slight stumble. "Feel better?"

The initial admonishment causes the low drone of melancholy to break suddenly, and Colin looks at Nikos in some surprise. There is no dismay to it, no hurt, only a slight disorientation as if just waking up. A second later, while Nikos scratches his arm, a smile touches Colin's face. There is something remarkable about finally seeing how silly you are being. At twisted revenge-monster, the smile even shows teeth. And at the end, there's a breathy, exhausted laugh.

"Yes," he says quietly. His brow furrows. "Which makes at least one of us really weird."

"Really."

Nikos is slow to cross over to where he'd dumped his cloak and things when he'd first arrived to help. The wine is largely to blame for his speed. As often as he drinks, and as skilled as he is at holding his alcohol, the world can still take on that boozy muzziness that makes everything look soft-focused.

"Must be you," he says, as he fumbles at the cloak. Not as clumsy in that as would maybe be expected. He has learned to keep his fine motor-skills honed, at least. Even after several glasses of wine. "I am exceedingly normal. In all respects."

There. A small flask, very plain and battered. Nikos slides it across the floor toward Colin, with a quiet scrape of pewter on stone, and the slosh of whatever liquid is contained within.

"I want it back." He picks up his cloak to put it on, making preparations to leave.

Colin sits up and tugs his hair free, it now being an absolute disaster all around his face. His fingers work gently at the tangles while Nikos ambles over to his cloak, mind drifting along some current vaguely aimed in the direction of whatever faceless enemy he now has.

"Want what back?" He blinks in exhausted bewilderment, broken from thought, and picks up the cold pewter flask. He hopes it's alcohol. "What's this?" Because he's not certain the two are the same query. Fortunately he has asked these questions before assuming it's alcohol and draining the entire thing in one go. He's still not even sure if Nikos is his friend, or friendly, or knows his name. He is even more inscrutable than Kostos is.

"Poison," Nikos says, flatly. He turns a dull look back on Colin, that somehow communicates a deeply unimpressed what the fuck do you think it is, without the need to articulate the thought.

"What the fuck do you think it is," he says. Always ready to take the opportunity to articulate that kind of thought. "It's alcohol. Rum, if you're too lazy to open it and smell for yourself. Drink it. Return the flask."

He fastens his cloak with sullen impatience, irritated that Colin has made him admit that he was giving something of a gift. What an asshole.

"Return it washed, if your conscience moves you to do housework. I don't give a shit."

OPEN | I won't be made useless

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cw: electrical burns are fucked up

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