OPEN | I won't be made useless

[keenly]

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.

Comments

[exsecutus]

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."

[keenly]

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.

[exsecutus]

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?"

[keenly]

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."

[exsecutus]

"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."

[keenly]

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."

[exsecutus]

"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."

[keenly]

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.

[exsecutus]

"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?"

[keenly]

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."

[exsecutus]

"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.

[keenly]

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.

[exsecutus]

"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."

[keenly]

A sigh.

"I spent too long in a Circle to just...drink from unidentified bottles," he says with a tinge of grump. Which he feels he is allowed at this point. But. Rum? Rum is good. He twists off the cap and takes a long drink. And remembers how very long it has been since he had pure rum, not watered down and cut with lemon juice like it is aboard a ship. The back of his tongue tries to protect his throat, refusing to let him swallow for several seconds. It burns going down.

"Thank you," he aspirates before tossing back another, more elegant swig. Mostly because the ghost of his mother is berating him for being half-Antivan and incapable of drinking rum like a normal person.

[exsecutus]

"Yeah, yeah," Nikos says, already at the door.

He could make some additional commentary. Start some banter about strong drink. Offer an observation about the food options at whatever Circle Colin came up in, but.

He would rather just leave. Which he does.

[keenly]

Colin squints an exhausted farewell at the departing rum-fairy, decides there's no point in taking anything personally (because there never is), and continues to drown his stress in a metabolic poison.