faderift | MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

The base operations office is overflowing with paper. Stacks of paper like narrow ramshackle towers--on the tables, the desks, the shelves and cupboards--towers of paper and files and books that sprout up from the floor, like fingers reaching up toward the ceiling. The narrow windows are obscured by stacks of paper. The floor is thick with it, like rushes strewn in a rustic hall. All of it makes the office feel very small, and closed in.

There's no one sitting behind the desk. Or rather, there's Salvio, but no one will recognize him as Salvio. He'd had to shift a stack of files and papers off of the chair so that he could sit in it, but as no one pays the office any attention, and no one is paying him any attention, he'd managed it without trouble.

He picks up one of the piece of paper from the top of the desk and looks at it. Sets it aside. Picks up the next. Sets it aside. And so on, even if someone walks in, since they won't be looking for a seneschal who doesn't exist.

"There's too much light," Salvio says, and Tellias pulls closed the curtains. Salvio looks, again, at the book--tilts it in one direction, then the other--and nods, satisfied.

It's Edmond, Flavio, and Sofia in here with him today, organizing the records. The record books are old, with pages so thin they resemble decaying leaves. Exposure to the light will fade the ink, which is already no firmer than a spiderweb sprawled across the page.

"Lamplight," Salvio says, and Flavio--tall, broad, surprisingly delicate with his hands, a good assistant--goes to fetch a lamp, while Sofia carries a stack of records over to one of the tall tables, takes the one from the top, and opens it, carefully. The binding creaks; Salvio winces.

"Take care," he tells her, and Sofia turns pink and looks away. She's the oldest of the three, but the most sensitive, and still younger than Salvio by a good ten years. Salvio likes her. He likes them all, even surly Tellias, who was transferred from the Cumberland Circle to Antiva City Circle in Harvestmere. Tellias likes to read, and doesn't like to talk, and that is good for the work that they have been assigned to do.

There are two templars outside the door of the records room, and a third down the hall. The rumble of Flavio's voice drifts through the doorway as one of the templars asks where he is going. Salvio keeps his eyes on the record book before him. The thought of them posted like glyphs is equally comforting as it is nerve-wracking--but the four mages are here on business, in this new city. They have been assigned to redraft the records of the mages in every Circle in Antiva, and then Nevarra, and then presumably Orlais, or wherever they are sent next. It is busy and ponderous work, and Salvio likes it.

When he hears the footfalls in the corridor, Salvio thinks that it must be Flavio, returned with the lamp. But when he looks up, it is someone else. He frowns, slightly, and flattens his hand against the record page.

"Can I help you, serrah?"

Serrah? Oh, that's funny. The clearly-teenaged boy looks at Salvio, then behind himself, and back.

"Me?" He shakes his head. Laissez-fair, like Salvio had just offered him a cheese plate and he's politely declining. "Nope. Carry on."

With hands folded behind his back, he moseys into the room, peering at the stacks of records and whatever else is on the tables.

Oh. Salvio has broken himself of looking to the reactions of others in order to formulate his own reactions--or at least, he has broken himself of it in large and obvious ways. Latent habit still makes his eye muscles twitch, and if he is at all unsettled--as he is now, by this young stranger walking lordly and bold to look at the record book, occupying the space as if it is his--he has to give in to old habit.

Which means that he looks over at Sofia. But she isn't looking, she's concentrated on paging through the book that she is working from--and Flavio is not back with the lantern, and Tellias has sat down to look through a book as well, and so Salvio...

Well. He folds his hands. "Have you," he starts, and stops. Swallows. "Um. Your business, please? Only we three have been tasked here. And our fourth will be back in a moment, and that is-- enough, I think."

"Just browsing," he assures, poking at a few of the tomes nearest to him. By the Gods this stuff is dull. Dull, dull, dull.

"This is really your idea of enjoyable work, then?" He looks at Salvio with a piteous expression, like he'd expected better of the man. A prisoner on loan to shove his nose into old moldy books and re-scribe them into new books that will, eventually, become old moldy books that someone else will have to re-scribe.

The teen snaps his fingers. "Oh, but you needed a lamp, didn't you? Like that one, there?"

Perhaps everyone had merely failed to notice, but there is a lamp on the desk. Flavio has not yet returned, and it seems that Sofia and Tellias are still paying no heed to the newcomer or the lamp. Why should they? It's not like this boy is truly there.

The snap startles him, though it should. And then: there is the lamp. It is of good quality. That's what Salvio thinks first, and somewhat blankly. But why had Flavio gone to fetch a lamp if this one was here? Perhaps it requires oil, and that is what he went to fetch, and Salvio only heard him wrong.

His fingers curl over the edge of the book, taking hold there to ground himself.

"I enjoy my work," he says, carefully, "yes."

Neither Sofia nor Tellias have looked up. Not at the young man's voice, or the snap, or the lamp, or even at Salvio speaking. They continue to read: the soft whisper of pages, and the quiet even breathing, and the little hm that Sofia makes when she comes to a part of particular interest--the scratch of pen-nib, when she makes a note--

And the young man, standing carelessly. Salvio begins to feel a cold seep of horror, somewhere in the soles of his feet.

"Is this," he says, haltingly, "your doing? Some... some strange magic? Who--" what "--who are you?"

“Meeeee?” He blinks exaggeratedly, a picture of false innocence and flattered that anyone would care to ask. “Oh, I’m nobody, not even a mage. I can’t do a whit of magic.”

He disappears behind a particularly tall stack of books and papers—like, actually disappears. And then, as if he hadn’t just gone from one side of the room to the other in a single step, he’s peering over Sofia’s shoulder. What a shock, the book she’s looking at is just as boring as all the others.

“You may call me Thaddeus, if you must.”

Unbothered, Sofia turns the page and continues to read. Salvio stares at her, or, more properly, past her. Because he is staring, really, at Thaddeus behind her shoulder, and his stare is full of dismay.

Then he pinches his fingers against the bridge of his nose, and takes a breath. Holds it. Lets it out again. And then another, and--

"This," he says, in a tone more nasal than usual, "cannot happen. Whoever you are, please. I--we--have important work to do. Thaddeus. And I will, I will call the guard. If I must. And have you," but no one is looking, he is talking and Sofia hasn't asked him who he is talking to, is he talking, really, "--I will have you expelled. From the room. Please. Stop. Thaddeus." The last part is more of a plea, a last-ditch attempt to leverage sense out of this person.

Or-- thing.

No, he can't start down that path. Person. This is a person.

Thaddeus tips his head, face painted with a bemused expression.

"Stop what, Sally?" He asks, showing his palms. "As you can plainly see, I'm not doing anything." In the blink of an eye--two eyes, both of Salvio's--he is in front of the desk, peering at the mage. "You're looking a bit pale, are you feeling alright?"

"Salvio," he says, with weight, and drops his hand and opens his eyes, and both just in time to find Thaddeus suddenly right up close. With a stifled yelp, he jumps backwards. There's a library table pushed up against the wall, piled high with more books. Jostled, they fall to the right, dominoing against one another, one after another.

Hastily, Salvio twists to slap one hand against the book at the very end, to stop the entire line of them from falling off of the table. No one but Thaddeus is looking at him, with his very clear eyes, which are now so much closer since he'd appeared suddenly in front of the desk.

"Please," he says, half-choking on the word, "don't-- What are you? Why can't they--any of them-- What is this?"

"Oh come now, Sal," Pointedly ignoring Salvio's correction. "If I told you it'd take all the fun out of it!"

He looks at the lamp on the desk, up at Salvio, then back. Like a cat doing something he's not supposed to, Thaddeus starts to nudge the lamp closer and closer to the edge of the desk.

"What is it you like so much about this work, eh?" He asks, nonchalant in the face of doing something that threatens the welfare of every page in this room.

His flinch is first for the nickname, and then second for the lamp. But he can't leave the books, not unless he wants them to fall to the floor. Then again, the lamp's fall would be more destructive. Does he risk it? Can he push the books back into place, quickly, and save the lamp?

Keep talking. That will distract Thaddeus. Salvio swallows, and pushes a little at the stack of books, without looking at them, trying to get them back into place.

"I," he begins, "that is, it is-- good. Good work. Predictable and-- and of great help. Without being at all-- claiming of attention, or-- There are small tasks. That are not always given attention, and yet their-- their completion, remains of greatest importance, to the larger tasks. The larger picture. That is-- this. Please, do not--touch that--"

“So your idea of good work is being the guts of a clock?”

The lamp reaches its fulcrum point on the lip of the desk, and Thaddeus pauses. Not because Salvio has distracted him, but for the sake of suspense.

"Well--"

With great willpower, Salvio keeps his eyes fixed on Thaddeus. His face, his eyes--depthless, unknowable, who is he--not his hand, not anywhere near where he is touching the lamp. He dares not even hold that in his periphery. If he doesn't look, it won't happen. It can't happen.

"Well, yes. There is necessity to the-- to the guts, as you say. The inner workings. Without, the clock would not function. It cannot always be the face. Um, you," please don't, he almost shouts it, but bites furiously at the inside of his mouth, willing himself to shut up, shut up, shut up, "you, ah, disagree?"

Salvio gets a momentary reprieve from the lamp being edged ever closer to toppling onto the floor as Thaddeus moues thoughtfully. He reaches his decision quickly.

"No. I just know that it would drive me completely mad."

One final nudge and the lamp falls. It takes only a second to hit and, presumably, smash, but that second keeps stretching longer, and longer, the lamp moving more slowly than it should. To look at the lamp is to see the destruction it will wreak, the room ablaze and the precious tomes and books and papers destroyed forever--

--but looking away, there's no such calamity. So long as the focus is not on the lamp, it continues to fall as though through gelatine and the room stays uncharred.

MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Salvio Pizzicagnolo || OTA

a dream of an office

Salvio the Real Mage AU || closed to the Skull

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