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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:46:36 GMT -6
It began with San waking up to find his hands bandaged up.
For a moment, feeling the raw aching sting in them, he wondered where he was - if he was still in the warrens of the Watchful, late for the training regimen of the day, and everything he remembered had been nothing but a long and convoluted dream. But then his eyes focused, and he banished the thought. Sunlight filled the room, filtering in from a small window above the bed, with all the warmth of early autumn.
Waking up had always seemed a straightforward thing to San in the past. He had never thought it might be something he could take for granted.
But then, he couldn’t possibly have anticipated the things that had transpired in his life since then. Now it was a process, feeling out his body’s condition. He had grown begrudgingly used to the frequent hangovers, a result of Seveth’s fondness for drink.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:46:48 GMT -6
He had allowed that perhaps Seveth had some right to it, when Seveth was the one dealing with the aftermath of San’s training sessions, not to mention the insomnia that he grappled with when it was his turn to sleep.
Cut up hands, however, was new.
San raised one hand and inspected the bandaging, then let it fall back to the bed with a sigh. A sloppy job, and he would have to redo it. He would dearly have liked to ask Seveth directly what had happened, but of course that wasn’t possible. He lay awake in bed a moment longer, staring at the ceiling and cataloguing pain. It stung, and stung worse for the bad first aid that had been administered, but he wouldn’t lose any fingers to it if he cleaned it up properly.
And then he got out of bed, and began the work of figuring out just what to do about it.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:47:32 GMT -6
Roku found him as he was applying disinfectant to the cuts, having already carefully unwound the lumpy bandaging to inspect the full extent of the damage, and cleaned out the wounds out with water. The disinfectant stung too, but San had been through worse. He had been through worse by such magnitudes that he didn’t so much as flinch, and bore under his own ministrations with the same stoicism that had carried him through his punishments in his Watchful days.
“You’re not going to ask?” Roku said, after watching him for a few minutes.
“Will you tell me?” San replied. He didn’t take his eyes off his work, and Roku didn’t answer, which neatly settled that question.
But the silence, contrary to San’s expectations, was only momentary. The cat spoke up again as San began the process of rewrapping the wounds. “He found your knives.”
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:49:25 GMT -6
San paused. Here, he considered what he had discovered since unwrapping his poor abused hands. There had been dozens of cuts, of varying depths, across the palms and the inside of the fingers. One especially deep gash ran through the right palm. He had wondered; Seveth hadn’t seemed the type to cook, and San hadn’t thought him so foolish or clumsy as to cut his own palm with a kitchen knife repeatedly to such an extent.
A kitchen knife wasn’t what Roku was speaking of.
“It’s fascinating, actually. I’ve seen plenty of fools in my time, but I must say I’ve never experienced quite this flavor of tomfoolery.” The cat licked a paw and swiped it over one ear. “He went on and on about muscle memory, but… Well, you can see for yourself how that turned out.”
“And you didn’t stop him,” San said.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:50:49 GMT -6
“No. I was curious myself; and it was very entertaining to watch. You don’t know how strange it is, to see you fumble your own weapons like that.”
… San didn’t know what he expected. “And Rei?” he said. “Ichaival?”
“Rei went out to town on some errand. You hadn't asked her to do it? As for the dragon, you have that one to thank for not losing any fingers. It put a stop to things before he made you a permanent amputee.”
Roku sounded amused and sarcastic, but then, he always did. San made a mental note to speak to Ichaival later. He was unhappy with his circumstances, but he supposed he did owe something to Ichaival for not letting it get worse. Left to his own devices… He had to fight back a grimace. How was it possible for someone to be so lacking in common sense?
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:50:59 GMT -6
He finished wrapping up his hands, and tested the bandages to make sure they would hold. Satisfied with his own work, he rose and made his way to the small desk in his room. There, lying inconspicuously off to one side, was a simple leather-bound journal, with a pen resting on top of it. The pen, San noticed, had traces of blood marring its surface, dried to a rusty color.
The most recent entry, too, was smeared with blood. The effect was dramatic. San wondered whether it had been intentional on Seveth’s part. With him, one could never be sure.
The entry itself was written in an even messier scrawl than Seveth’s usual, which was saying something. San had to puzzle out some letters, and guess at others. He had been using Common long enough that he could be considered fluent now, but it was still his second language, and it took him some time to read the whole passage.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:51:59 GMT -6
It was, mercifully, a short one. But San found himself wishing it was longer as he registered the words. hands hurt can’t write much. daggers very sharp!! don’t get mad and teach me next time okay :) The wobbly looking ‘smiley face’, as Seveth had called it when San had first asked him what those scribbles were supposed to be, seemed like it was mocking him from the page. San had to swallow back several sharp retorts, knowing that he would have no satisfaction; their intended target wasn’t present to hear them. He could write them, but his hands were not much recovered from the state they had been in when Seveth had put down these words. San could power through the pain, but to do so only to pen insults to vent his feelings would be a waste of those efforts. He picked up the pen and rubbed off some of the blood, which flaked off easily and settled as reddish dust on the table’s surface. Putting it to the page, he wrote:
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:53:36 GMT -6
No. Stay away from my things.San had thought that would be the end of it. He certainly intended to put an end to any idea of Seveth playing around with weapons when he wrote the words. But of course Seveth could not be so easily dissuaded, and his subsequent entries were all filled with entreaties for San to teach him how to use the blades, if he was so unhappy about Seveth having made a mess of things with them. teach me! then you won’t get cut
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come on you know you want to
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I could run errands for u. knife errands. And then, when his - their - hands recovered a little more, and Seveth found it bearable to write in proper sentences again: It’s selfish to keep all the cool stuff to yourself! We’re the same person if you think about it, so you might as well share.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:54:23 GMT -6
You can’t stop me, you know. And if you don’t teach me the proper way to do it, I might stab somewhere really important next time. You don’t want that, do you?
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Don’t you think it would be grand? Me, dagger in hand, turning back all assailants with a dashing smile on my face, the picture of handsomeness and grace. And then when they ask me where I learned, I can give them a mysterious little smirk and---
The threats and cajoling San ignored, and the verbose flight of fancy he didn’t even bother to finish reading. On that particular day San closed the journal with a sigh, put it back down on the desk, and asked the heavens what he had done to merit such a punishment. The heavens, inscrutable as always, offered him no answer.
“He hasn’t stopped badgering you about the knives, then?”
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:54:45 GMT -6
Roku was sitting on the bed atop the covers, his paws tucked under him so that he looked like a perfectly round shadow with a head. His eyes were half-lidded, glinting with mirth. San glanced at him, considering whether it was worth gracing the cat’s question with an answer. In all likelihood, Roku already knew.
Closing his eyes, Roku resettled himself, shifting slightly to lay more comfortably. “Why not have him give you something in exchange? Surely he must have something to offer.”
It said something about the resilience of childish impulses, perhaps, that the first thought that crossed San’s mind was to deny this. But no, categorically it must have been true; even someone as shiftless as Seveth had some knowledge of value. Discarding the first flush of irritation that always surfaced when he thought of Seveth, San tried to recall what Seveth preferred to occupy himself with.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:54:59 GMT -6
There was no shortage of advice penned into the notebook in Seveth’s loose, messy scrawl. The trouble was that it was invariably flippant and invariably unnecessary. Critiques of San’s clothing choices, urgings for him to find a hobby - of which scrapbooking and needlefelting had been some of his suggestions - and offers to recommend him some particularly choice liquors had all been proposed, and San had ignored them all. These had done nothing but reinforce Seveth’s image in San’s mind as a person without much merit, and now it was increasingly difficult to recall where Seveth’s talents lay in a field that might actually be of use.
But Ichaival had mentioned that Seveth had been a mage by trade before his death, and as much as San hated to admit it, his own mastery of his magical abilities was still erratic at best. An elemental was supposed to have instinctive control over their powers.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:55:29 GMT -6
He certainly didn’t recall his sister struggling so much with the transition, or for such a long time, and Juu had seemed perfectly at home with her abilities the few times San had seen her use them. He stared at the journal, still closed on his desk, and sighed. The very idea of trying to impart his combat skills to Seveth made his head ache in anticipatory dread, but if Seveth could help him with his magical abilities… He was painfully aware of the time it was going to take to train himself back up into fighting shape, and in the meantime, he needed some other way to defend himself. He had been through more unpleasant things, he reminded himself. Humoring one fool was bearable if it was a means to an end. Flipping the journal open to an empty page, he put a pen to the page and began to write. -----
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:55:39 GMT -6
Contrary to what people liked to suggest, Seveth didn’t have a death wish. The facts supported this. After all, dying was easy; if all he wanted to do was end it, there were poisons aplenty that he could have gotten his hands on. If all he wanted to do was end it, there wouldn’t have been a need for himself or Ichaival to have gone to all this trouble. Staying alive had taken a lot of effort, and if he hadn’t had such a jolly disposition, he might have taken more umbrage to the fact that people thought he wanted to die so much.
But there was also a difference between just plodding your way through life and living that life to the fullest. And having narrowly come back the once, it would have been remiss of him - not to mention pretty stupid - to live as if he were waiting for death to come for him, wouldn’t it?
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:55:49 GMT -6
That was the principle he lived by, anyway. And so when he found San’s knives by chance, hidden away in a stash underneath the mattress, he thought to himself, wouldn’t it be grand to give them a try?
Nevermind why he had been looking underneath the mattress in the first place. Oh, well, if you must know, then he was curious as to whether San had something scandalous hidden anywhere, and naturally one would look under the mattress for that kind of thing. Pity that he didn’t find anything more carnal, but knives were almost as good!
… It didn’t work out the way he had hoped. Muscle memory wasn’t as comprehensive or as easy to invoke as he would have liked, as it turned out. And it wasn’t for a lack of trying either, though after a while he had to stop to address the fact that his hands were bleeding pretty heavily from all the nicks and cuts.
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Post by Linyü on Mar 12, 2021 23:58:13 GMT -6
{Maybe,} said Ichaival unhelpfully when he presented it with his plight, {it would have been better if you hadn’t attempted to juggle them first.}
Seveth frowned at the blatant misconstruction of his intentions. “I wasn’t trying to juggle them, Chai, I was trying to knife tricks.”
{You threw them in the air and tried to catch them,} Ichaival pointed out.
Seveth sighed. “Why do I even bother trying to explain to you? Besides, I only did that once.”
{Yes, and nearly severed half the tendons in your palm when you caught it.} Ichaival bent close to examine the wound, then hissed sharply through its nostrils. {You are lucky you didn’t lose usage of that hand. What possessed you to even attempt it, I can hardly imagine.}
There were healers in town, but Ichaival had a point there, Seveth supposed.
And San wasn’t going to be happy about this.
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