Scrap: 014, To Touch the Dark - Part II
Title: To Touch the Dark
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Angst
Fandom/Original: Original
Prompt: n/a
Status: Incomplete
Word Count: 5125/????
Author’s Notes: To Touch the Dark [TTtD] takes place in the same universe as scrap: 009 and The Cat Will Die Nobly-both short drabbles that don’t need to be read for TTtD. This chapter continues directly from scrap: 010. It was started August 04, 2008.
Summary: In a world of alchemy and inhuman slaves, political turmoil and social decadence, there’s very little that the mind can be restricted to. When a field agent of the AGD is forced into taking a leave of absence, he’s left stranded in the selfsame world.
To Touch the Dark
Part I, Part II, Part III, …
Silas stood, motionless, in the empty hall outside his senior adviser’s room, leaning against the wall beside its door.
Leave. He’d been forced into taking a leave of absence. Not now, he thought irritably and shoved the thoughts into another compartment of his mind to deal with at a later date. He couldn’t keep separating his mind into pieces-could think of a thousand and one textbook reasons why it was a Bad Idea-but he’d done it for seven years, almost eight-
His anger finally disappeared.
Breathing a quiet sigh of relief, Silas looked up from the floor to the empty hall he stood in with tired amusement.
Godfrey had fallen silent the second his door had been shut, leaving the persistent silence of the Kadréthe guard divisions’ office free reign; Silas absently began tapping on the wall behind him, to a rhythm he didn’t know the name of, to drown out the silence. If he went parading through the office slamming doors just to get rid of the familiar emptiness in his mind, the old man would probably extend his leave of absence to the full five months and nine days it had taken him to completely finish the Síomha case.
Eight days, he corrected himself absently, knowing today, his last, wouldn’t count. And weeks of arguing, begging… The only reason he’d been allowed an extension on the case was to collect evidence against Síomha for child abuse of Children Who were Suspected Alchemy Constructs was to allow the bureau enough time to confirm that evidence had been unnecessary. And, apparently, they’d finished their investigation first. Bastards. The insult was an empty one.
It wasn’t as though he could do anything, even if he wanted to. And right then, he had some construction work to start on. To have his mind falling apart, in the middle of his adviser’s office no less, wasn’t going to become a common occurrence. No; he’d craft as many layers of stabilizers as it took.
Exhaustion leads to irritability. Exhaustion leads to irrationality. Exhaustion leads to irritability. Exhaustion leads to irrationality, he chanted silently. The mantra was one every field agent in the guard divisions had been forced to remember, one way or another, although it had been a while since he’d had to stand still so that he could chant himself into a coma.
Carefully weaving a spell into the mantra, Silas pushed himself away from the wall and headed for the stairs.
Exhaustion leads to irritability. Exhaustion leads to irrationality. Exhaustion leads to-
“-insanity! Being around alchemists and their spells and constructs and badness all the damn time. It does things to a person. No one can last forever doing nothing but field work!” When a large, wooden spoon migrated to within a hair’s breadth of his face, Silas looked up and glared at his roommate. Brandishing the spoon like a weapon, Raschelle stared back, then added, waving the spoon admonishingly, “Even you, Silas. Even you.”
Silas reached out and pinched the brown-haired woman’s pudgy abdomen.
“That hurts!”
He quickly ducked away from the spoon aiming for his head, and settled down in a another chair at the table. “And no one will survive sitting around all day doing nothing but research,” he said, smirking vindictively up at the other guard divisions’ agent. “What if you get too fat for the door and you have a heart attack? You’ll probably die before they can haul you to a decent sized bed that’s a hundred times a normal sized person’s bed would be!” he said innocently, ignoring the wounded the look on his roommate’s face with ease.
He’d woken to being bodily dragged out of his own bed while a banshee screamed into his ear about being late to work; then, after forcing himself awake enough to explain that, no, he hadn’t decided to live a life of hedonism without telling anyone and that he’d actually been ordered to a strict regimen of sex and sleep, he had been bodily dragged into the kitchen, of all places, where he’d had to sit through an entire spiel about the dangers overzealous work ethics interspersed with life-threatening spoons and adamant praises regarding the genius that is Godfrey. Guilt over teasing Rasche had no right existing.
In any case, he still wasn’t awake enough. He’d given the magic woven into his mind time to settle, without any violent or disruptive thoughts to wreak havoc on the stabilizers, but making his mind work through magic that was now convinced that his natural state of being was Sleep or Brain Dead was slow progress. Forgiveness would take too much effort.
“The case is over, already. Yet it seems like agent Silas Frost is still as crass as ever,” Raschelle was saying ponderously, giving up all pretenses of abject dejection at being insulted to peer at him curiously.
Silas glared back.
“It becomes more and more likely that Silas Frost was just born a crass son of a bitch,” she finished, nodding to herself with the satisfied air of someone who had discovered the secrets of the universe. “I was right. As I always am. But that is neither here nor there!
“Did you know that arysia are going to be classified as too lethal for shops to sell without monthly inspections?” Raschelle asked quickly, returning to the stove in a flurry of movements. “Tarah-an incredibly adorable girl from one of the newer federally sponsored shops that just opened up-she just has the sweetest smile!-well, she came over the other day worrying over whether or not they should even sell arysia since it’s so dangerous. Asked all sorts of questions.”
Silas yawned and dropped his head so that his chin rested on the table; he stared absently at the swirls of grain in the wood in front of him. Talking to Raschelle meant being as quiet as possible for ninety-seven percent of the talking. If Rasche had simply dragged him out of bed to the kitchen just to blather on about new regulations of alchemy components and adorable florists with sweet smiles, he wouldn’t have minded, he thought. Except she hadn’t. Silas closed his eyes and happily imagined himself shoving the pudgy woman off a convenient cliff.
“-wouldn’t have even the cashiers in alchemy shops knew so much about what they’re selling, but I suppose they would need to, wouldn’t they? Being around volatile components and lethal components and alchemists all the time, they’d have to know something to survive. But, really, some of the questions that girl asked me! As if anyone would know if arysia was compatible with tursom to stabilize it because of the alchemical duality of tursom’s root-ends! I didn’t even know that there was a kind of tursom that had roots, it’s so rare-”
“-up!”
Silas started, automatically calling a shield of pure, crackling energy that layered his body like a second skin. When smoke rose in from beneath him, Silas quickly scrambled up and pushed himself away from the source, only realizing then that scorch marks were smeared a table and that his clothes were floating around him-that his skin gave off sparks and that his heart was racing frantically through his ears. Forcefully wrenching his power into a corner of his mind, Silas hissed out an angry breath and spun around to face the only person who was in the room with him.
Raschelle stood several meters away from him, a shuttered look in her grey eyes. “I told you field work does things to you,” she said. “Being around alchemists all day, nothing good. You’d fallen asleep. I was trying to wake you.” She gestured widely to her left, where the stove was. “I finished breakfast.” Then she grinned. “You must have been too tired earlier to fry me, or else I’d be dead already, right?”
As if someone had splashed him with cold water, Silas abruptly found himself awake. “What did you do?”
“I was trying to wake you!”
“Did you want to harm me in any way?” he asked softly, unsettled.
Raschelle stared uncomprehendingly back at him. “I was maybe going to hit you?” She raised her spoon and waved it around uncertainly. “With this?”
Silas stared at the spoon, his thoughts sluggishly informing him that wooden spoons were really not all that dangerous. His heart still raced and he could feel the stabilizers that had managed to settle waver indignantly at being disturbed by something they couldn’t control; he hadn’t crafted anything for his reflexes. He hadn’t needed anything for his reflexes.
He slowly forced himself to breathe as evenly as he could and tried to organize his thoughts, which were less thoughts than emotions. Anger, panic-scrubbing his face harshly, Silas turned and started for his room. “I’ll eat later,” he called out sharply without looking back, teeth clenching tightly after he finished.
He needed a shower. He needed time to reinvent his mind so that it didn’t jump at shadows and touches from people who had nothing to do with anything.
“Right. Before you go, um, what do I do with these books?”
Silas froze. He knew, as his heart beat wildly in his ears, that if he hadn’t spelled his mind into siphoning unwanted thoughts and emotions concerning Sío, or anything about the case, he would’ve lost all the control he’d manage to steal over his power.
His reaction the first time had been triggered by a mistaken need for self-defense, by reflexes honed again and again over the past five months, piled high over reflexes honed again and again over the past decade; the second wouldn’t have been so innocent, based on nothing but senseless anger. It was like being splashed unceremoniously with cold water as the realization wormed its way into his thoughts.
“They arrived this morning with your name on it, Silas. You sly dog! I didn’t know you were a father. Why didn’t you tell me? Am I your roommate or am I your roommate?”
Silas turned, looking over his shoulder. He hadn’t walked out of the kitchen and turned the corner into the hall outside of it, yet; from where he stood, it was too easy to see the thick book that Rasche held in one hand, a bright picture of a fox and a fish on its cover. His eyes traveled without permission to the stack of books on the counter beside his roommate.
When his fingernails pressed too painfully into his skin, Silas stuffed his hands into his pockets and clenched the material of his loose sleeping pants in them.
“I’ll tell you later,” he said finally. When his body wasn’t betraying him, without his help.
“You mean you really have a kid?”
“Those aren’t for a kid,” he corrected impatiently, turning back to the kitchen entrance.
“Oh. Because that makes sense.”
Silas stepped into the shower and leaned against one of the stall’s walls. Cool, almost cold water sprayed his skin, as harsh as gravel. He ran a hand through his now soaked hair and, on a whim, tugged, once, as harshly on his hair as the water that pounded into his skin. Wincing, Silas rubbed his abused skull. When he pulled his hand away and held it up out of a morbid curiosity to see how much hair he’d managed to pull this time, short strands of black quickly washed away from his skin.
For a brief second, the water washed off thin, pale blonde strands.
Silas blinked.
The hair were black.
Closing his eyes, Silas reached for the bottle of shampoo Rasche had just bought and scrubbed some into his hair. The smell of lavender and strawberries quickly filled his nose. Silas wrinkled his nose in disgust at the overwhelmingly sweet and cloying smell, before throwing himself into the process, again, of constructing his mind to fit with his needs.
He’d never lost so much control around anyone; he wasn’t planning on doing so again any time soon. Although he didn’t have as much control over his body magically as he did his thoughts, he had complete control over his thoughts and that was enough. Reflexes started out as conscious thought and control, didn’t they?
It was going to be enough. He would construct his mind into something that more closely resembled a civilian’s until he returned to work.
Feeling his heart finally calming, Silas determinedly did not think of the fact that his senior adviser might have been right or that the older man was right.
“Feel better now?” a familiar voice asked curiously.
Silas pulled the towel off his head and glanced over at his roommate. “Lavender and strawberries?” he asked, pointedly ignoring the question. Raising an eyebrow, he silently dared the other agent to pursue the subject.
She didn’t. The brown-haired woman leaned against the bathroom’s doorframe and crossed her arms. “If you bought your own shampoo instead of stealing mine, you wouldn’t smell so heavenly, plebeian,” Raschelle said imperiously. “So I will forgive the tone of absolute disgust from you. For now. Dear roommate,” she finished kindly.
He snorted at the tone Rasche had adopted and didn’t bother pointing out to the other agent she wouldn’t need to walk on eggshells, because they no longer existed; it was better to pretend that he was ‘normal’, at least for a while, until he could be normal. Absently making a note to act reticent about some subjects for the next few days, Silas pulled on and buttoned up his shirt.
“What do you want?” he asked, back glancing up at his reflection once he finished.
His reflection watched him with brown eyes that were lined with dark smudges on skin that was flushed red. Day-old growth shadowed its jaw. He looked tired and ragged. “Huh. I look like shit more than usual,” Silas muttered dryly.
“As glad as I am to know that you finally noticed,” Rasche said, appearing behind him to look at his reflection over his over, “what makes you think that I want something?”
He rolled his eyes. “The whole ‘dear roommate’ thing. You either want something or you’re drunk.”
“There’s a crea House that’s having an exhibit on Crafted dragons. I got us tickets,” Raschelle said promptly.
“Why?” he asked, reaching out to grab his pajamas and the towel he had dropped on the floor earlier.
He looked up and squinted his eyes into a look of exaggerated suspicion. Raschelle regularly dragged him to any place that she’d seen featured in newspapers or in the gossip she randomly dropped in on out of boredom; it had become a normalcy between the two of both. So had the teasing. “This isn’t your sneaky way of going on a date with me, is it? Because it isn’t going to work.”
Raschelle made a show of looking him up and down.
Silas obligatorily spun in a circle, fluttering his eyes, and bowed low once he finished. He blew a kiss his roommate as he straightened from the bow.
“As if I’d want to go on a date with the likes of you,” she said finally.
“Touché.”
The look of disgust that Raschelle had adopted turned into one of excitement, then. “And we’re going to see that fellow the crown’s been claiming is an ambassador from the dragons. I want to see what all the trouble’s been about! All everyone seems to be able to talk about is dragon this, dragon that! Man’s probably not even a real dragon. Can you imagine? Dragons! Dragon ambassadors!”
“Dragons can’t be ambassadors?” he asked, raising his eyebrows incredulously. “Big, sharp teeth. Fire-breath. And the muscles. How much you wanna bet that if we had a dragon ambassador, we wouldn’t have had so many wars?”
Part I, Part II, Part III, …
Genre: Fantasy, Romance, Angst
Fandom/Original: Original
Prompt: n/a
Status: Incomplete
Word Count: 5125/????
Author’s Notes: To Touch the Dark [TTtD] takes place in the same universe as scrap: 009 and The Cat Will Die Nobly-both short drabbles that don’t need to be read for TTtD. This chapter continues directly from scrap: 010. It was started August 04, 2008.
Summary: In a world of alchemy and inhuman slaves, political turmoil and social decadence, there’s very little that the mind can be restricted to. When a field agent of the AGD is forced into taking a leave of absence, he’s left stranded in the selfsame world.
To Touch the Dark
Part I, Part II, Part III, …
Silas stood, motionless, in the empty hall outside his senior adviser’s room, leaning against the wall beside its door.
Leave. He’d been forced into taking a leave of absence. Not now, he thought irritably and shoved the thoughts into another compartment of his mind to deal with at a later date. He couldn’t keep separating his mind into pieces-could think of a thousand and one textbook reasons why it was a Bad Idea-but he’d done it for seven years, almost eight-
His anger finally disappeared.
Breathing a quiet sigh of relief, Silas looked up from the floor to the empty hall he stood in with tired amusement.
Godfrey had fallen silent the second his door had been shut, leaving the persistent silence of the Kadréthe guard divisions’ office free reign; Silas absently began tapping on the wall behind him, to a rhythm he didn’t know the name of, to drown out the silence. If he went parading through the office slamming doors just to get rid of the familiar emptiness in his mind, the old man would probably extend his leave of absence to the full five months and nine days it had taken him to completely finish the Síomha case.
Eight days, he corrected himself absently, knowing today, his last, wouldn’t count. And weeks of arguing, begging… The only reason he’d been allowed an extension on the case was to collect evidence against Síomha for child abuse of Children Who were Suspected Alchemy Constructs was to allow the bureau enough time to confirm that evidence had been unnecessary. And, apparently, they’d finished their investigation first. Bastards. The insult was an empty one.
It wasn’t as though he could do anything, even if he wanted to. And right then, he had some construction work to start on. To have his mind falling apart, in the middle of his adviser’s office no less, wasn’t going to become a common occurrence. No; he’d craft as many layers of stabilizers as it took.
Exhaustion leads to irritability. Exhaustion leads to irrationality. Exhaustion leads to irritability. Exhaustion leads to irrationality, he chanted silently. The mantra was one every field agent in the guard divisions had been forced to remember, one way or another, although it had been a while since he’d had to stand still so that he could chant himself into a coma.
Carefully weaving a spell into the mantra, Silas pushed himself away from the wall and headed for the stairs.
Exhaustion leads to irritability. Exhaustion leads to irrationality. Exhaustion leads to-
“-insanity! Being around alchemists and their spells and constructs and badness all the damn time. It does things to a person. No one can last forever doing nothing but field work!” When a large, wooden spoon migrated to within a hair’s breadth of his face, Silas looked up and glared at his roommate. Brandishing the spoon like a weapon, Raschelle stared back, then added, waving the spoon admonishingly, “Even you, Silas. Even you.”
Silas reached out and pinched the brown-haired woman’s pudgy abdomen.
“That hurts!”
He quickly ducked away from the spoon aiming for his head, and settled down in a another chair at the table. “And no one will survive sitting around all day doing nothing but research,” he said, smirking vindictively up at the other guard divisions’ agent. “What if you get too fat for the door and you have a heart attack? You’ll probably die before they can haul you to a decent sized bed that’s a hundred times a normal sized person’s bed would be!” he said innocently, ignoring the wounded the look on his roommate’s face with ease.
He’d woken to being bodily dragged out of his own bed while a banshee screamed into his ear about being late to work; then, after forcing himself awake enough to explain that, no, he hadn’t decided to live a life of hedonism without telling anyone and that he’d actually been ordered to a strict regimen of sex and sleep, he had been bodily dragged into the kitchen, of all places, where he’d had to sit through an entire spiel about the dangers overzealous work ethics interspersed with life-threatening spoons and adamant praises regarding the genius that is Godfrey. Guilt over teasing Rasche had no right existing.
In any case, he still wasn’t awake enough. He’d given the magic woven into his mind time to settle, without any violent or disruptive thoughts to wreak havoc on the stabilizers, but making his mind work through magic that was now convinced that his natural state of being was Sleep or Brain Dead was slow progress. Forgiveness would take too much effort.
“The case is over, already. Yet it seems like agent Silas Frost is still as crass as ever,” Raschelle was saying ponderously, giving up all pretenses of abject dejection at being insulted to peer at him curiously.
Silas glared back.
“It becomes more and more likely that Silas Frost was just born a crass son of a bitch,” she finished, nodding to herself with the satisfied air of someone who had discovered the secrets of the universe. “I was right. As I always am. But that is neither here nor there!
“Did you know that arysia are going to be classified as too lethal for shops to sell without monthly inspections?” Raschelle asked quickly, returning to the stove in a flurry of movements. “Tarah-an incredibly adorable girl from one of the newer federally sponsored shops that just opened up-she just has the sweetest smile!-well, she came over the other day worrying over whether or not they should even sell arysia since it’s so dangerous. Asked all sorts of questions.”
Silas yawned and dropped his head so that his chin rested on the table; he stared absently at the swirls of grain in the wood in front of him. Talking to Raschelle meant being as quiet as possible for ninety-seven percent of the talking. If Rasche had simply dragged him out of bed to the kitchen just to blather on about new regulations of alchemy components and adorable florists with sweet smiles, he wouldn’t have minded, he thought. Except she hadn’t. Silas closed his eyes and happily imagined himself shoving the pudgy woman off a convenient cliff.
“-wouldn’t have even the cashiers in alchemy shops knew so much about what they’re selling, but I suppose they would need to, wouldn’t they? Being around volatile components and lethal components and alchemists all the time, they’d have to know something to survive. But, really, some of the questions that girl asked me! As if anyone would know if arysia was compatible with tursom to stabilize it because of the alchemical duality of tursom’s root-ends! I didn’t even know that there was a kind of tursom that had roots, it’s so rare-”
“-up!”
Silas started, automatically calling a shield of pure, crackling energy that layered his body like a second skin. When smoke rose in from beneath him, Silas quickly scrambled up and pushed himself away from the source, only realizing then that scorch marks were smeared a table and that his clothes were floating around him-that his skin gave off sparks and that his heart was racing frantically through his ears. Forcefully wrenching his power into a corner of his mind, Silas hissed out an angry breath and spun around to face the only person who was in the room with him.
Raschelle stood several meters away from him, a shuttered look in her grey eyes. “I told you field work does things to you,” she said. “Being around alchemists all day, nothing good. You’d fallen asleep. I was trying to wake you.” She gestured widely to her left, where the stove was. “I finished breakfast.” Then she grinned. “You must have been too tired earlier to fry me, or else I’d be dead already, right?”
As if someone had splashed him with cold water, Silas abruptly found himself awake. “What did you do?”
“I was trying to wake you!”
“Did you want to harm me in any way?” he asked softly, unsettled.
Raschelle stared uncomprehendingly back at him. “I was maybe going to hit you?” She raised her spoon and waved it around uncertainly. “With this?”
Silas stared at the spoon, his thoughts sluggishly informing him that wooden spoons were really not all that dangerous. His heart still raced and he could feel the stabilizers that had managed to settle waver indignantly at being disturbed by something they couldn’t control; he hadn’t crafted anything for his reflexes. He hadn’t needed anything for his reflexes.
He slowly forced himself to breathe as evenly as he could and tried to organize his thoughts, which were less thoughts than emotions. Anger, panic-scrubbing his face harshly, Silas turned and started for his room. “I’ll eat later,” he called out sharply without looking back, teeth clenching tightly after he finished.
He needed a shower. He needed time to reinvent his mind so that it didn’t jump at shadows and touches from people who had nothing to do with anything.
“Right. Before you go, um, what do I do with these books?”
Silas froze. He knew, as his heart beat wildly in his ears, that if he hadn’t spelled his mind into siphoning unwanted thoughts and emotions concerning Sío, or anything about the case, he would’ve lost all the control he’d manage to steal over his power.
His reaction the first time had been triggered by a mistaken need for self-defense, by reflexes honed again and again over the past five months, piled high over reflexes honed again and again over the past decade; the second wouldn’t have been so innocent, based on nothing but senseless anger. It was like being splashed unceremoniously with cold water as the realization wormed its way into his thoughts.
“They arrived this morning with your name on it, Silas. You sly dog! I didn’t know you were a father. Why didn’t you tell me? Am I your roommate or am I your roommate?”
Silas turned, looking over his shoulder. He hadn’t walked out of the kitchen and turned the corner into the hall outside of it, yet; from where he stood, it was too easy to see the thick book that Rasche held in one hand, a bright picture of a fox and a fish on its cover. His eyes traveled without permission to the stack of books on the counter beside his roommate.
When his fingernails pressed too painfully into his skin, Silas stuffed his hands into his pockets and clenched the material of his loose sleeping pants in them.
“I’ll tell you later,” he said finally. When his body wasn’t betraying him, without his help.
“You mean you really have a kid?”
“Those aren’t for a kid,” he corrected impatiently, turning back to the kitchen entrance.
“Oh. Because that makes sense.”
Silas stepped into the shower and leaned against one of the stall’s walls. Cool, almost cold water sprayed his skin, as harsh as gravel. He ran a hand through his now soaked hair and, on a whim, tugged, once, as harshly on his hair as the water that pounded into his skin. Wincing, Silas rubbed his abused skull. When he pulled his hand away and held it up out of a morbid curiosity to see how much hair he’d managed to pull this time, short strands of black quickly washed away from his skin.
For a brief second, the water washed off thin, pale blonde strands.
Silas blinked.
The hair were black.
Closing his eyes, Silas reached for the bottle of shampoo Rasche had just bought and scrubbed some into his hair. The smell of lavender and strawberries quickly filled his nose. Silas wrinkled his nose in disgust at the overwhelmingly sweet and cloying smell, before throwing himself into the process, again, of constructing his mind to fit with his needs.
He’d never lost so much control around anyone; he wasn’t planning on doing so again any time soon. Although he didn’t have as much control over his body magically as he did his thoughts, he had complete control over his thoughts and that was enough. Reflexes started out as conscious thought and control, didn’t they?
It was going to be enough. He would construct his mind into something that more closely resembled a civilian’s until he returned to work.
Feeling his heart finally calming, Silas determinedly did not think of the fact that his senior adviser might have been right or that the older man was right.
“Feel better now?” a familiar voice asked curiously.
Silas pulled the towel off his head and glanced over at his roommate. “Lavender and strawberries?” he asked, pointedly ignoring the question. Raising an eyebrow, he silently dared the other agent to pursue the subject.
She didn’t. The brown-haired woman leaned against the bathroom’s doorframe and crossed her arms. “If you bought your own shampoo instead of stealing mine, you wouldn’t smell so heavenly, plebeian,” Raschelle said imperiously. “So I will forgive the tone of absolute disgust from you. For now. Dear roommate,” she finished kindly.
He snorted at the tone Rasche had adopted and didn’t bother pointing out to the other agent she wouldn’t need to walk on eggshells, because they no longer existed; it was better to pretend that he was ‘normal’, at least for a while, until he could be normal. Absently making a note to act reticent about some subjects for the next few days, Silas pulled on and buttoned up his shirt.
“What do you want?” he asked, back glancing up at his reflection once he finished.
His reflection watched him with brown eyes that were lined with dark smudges on skin that was flushed red. Day-old growth shadowed its jaw. He looked tired and ragged. “Huh. I look like shit more than usual,” Silas muttered dryly.
“As glad as I am to know that you finally noticed,” Rasche said, appearing behind him to look at his reflection over his over, “what makes you think that I want something?”
He rolled his eyes. “The whole ‘dear roommate’ thing. You either want something or you’re drunk.”
“There’s a crea House that’s having an exhibit on Crafted dragons. I got us tickets,” Raschelle said promptly.
“Why?” he asked, reaching out to grab his pajamas and the towel he had dropped on the floor earlier.
He looked up and squinted his eyes into a look of exaggerated suspicion. Raschelle regularly dragged him to any place that she’d seen featured in newspapers or in the gossip she randomly dropped in on out of boredom; it had become a normalcy between the two of both. So had the teasing. “This isn’t your sneaky way of going on a date with me, is it? Because it isn’t going to work.”
Raschelle made a show of looking him up and down.
Silas obligatorily spun in a circle, fluttering his eyes, and bowed low once he finished. He blew a kiss his roommate as he straightened from the bow.
“As if I’d want to go on a date with the likes of you,” she said finally.
“Touché.”
The look of disgust that Raschelle had adopted turned into one of excitement, then. “And we’re going to see that fellow the crown’s been claiming is an ambassador from the dragons. I want to see what all the trouble’s been about! All everyone seems to be able to talk about is dragon this, dragon that! Man’s probably not even a real dragon. Can you imagine? Dragons! Dragon ambassadors!”
“Dragons can’t be ambassadors?” he asked, raising his eyebrows incredulously. “Big, sharp teeth. Fire-breath. And the muscles. How much you wanna bet that if we had a dragon ambassador, we wouldn’t have had so many wars?”
Part I, Part II, Part III, …