Chapter Text
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*.・゜゜・༶
They had stopped for the afternoon at the edge of a meadow where the road widened and the grass was long. The light came through the treeline at an angle that made everything look slightly more significant than it was. Lucas had declared it a good camp on the grounds that he could see in three directions and the fourth was water, which was his standard criteria. Nobody argued with Lucas about camp criteria anymore.
The party spread out in the comfortable way of people who had learned each other's rhythms. Will had found a patch of shade and his journal. Mike was doing something with his armor that involved a great deal of focused attention and occasional muttering. Lucas was at the water's edge doing what Lucas did at water's edges, which was assess it professionally and then just look at it for a while. Max was sharpening her blade against a flat stone with the unhurried efficiency of someone with nowhere to be, which was technically true of all of them but which Max wore more naturally than most.
Dustin was sitting cross legged in the grass approximately four feet from El, which was the distance he had learned was acceptable for asking questions without crowding, and he was asking questions.
This was not unusual. Dustin asked El questions the way he asked questions about everything. He had genuine enthusiasm and zero self consciousness about the asking. El had noted, in the weeks since joining the party, that his curiosity had a different quality than the curiosity she had spent twenty years being subjected to. It didn't want anything from her. It was just — interested. In her specifically, as a person, rather than in what she could produce.
She was still calibrating what to do with that.
"The temperature thing," Dustin was saying, with the energy of someone returning to a subject they'd been thinking about since the last time it came up. "Because Will's magic runs warm — I can feel it from across the room when he's healing someone, it's like standing near a hearth. But yours runs cold. Is that a cleric versus sorcerer thing or is it specific to you?"
El considered this. It was a good question, which Dustin's questions usually were underneath the enthusiasm. "I don't know," she said. "I have nothing to compare it to."
"Right, because you've only ever had your own magic." He nodded seriously, like this was significant data. "What does it feel like from the inside? Is it cold to you or does it only feel cold to other people?"
El looked at her hands. She turned the question over carefully, making sure she understood what was actually being asked before she answered it. She thought carefully about all the questions Dustin asked her.
"It doesn't feel cold," she said slowly. "It feels... like pressure. Like something that wants to move."
Dustin's expression was the one he got when information landed in a way that reorganized something. "Like it's always there."
"Yes."
"And you direct it."
"When I choose to." She paused. "It moves on its own sometimes. When I'm not paying attention."
Dustin opened his mouth, which meant another question was coming, and El made a decision that surprised her slightly in the making of it. She held out her hand, palm up, and let the pressure move.
It came the way it always did when she wasn't performing. Not the cold focused beam they'd trained into her but something quieter. The air above her palm shimmered and the light in it shifted, bending in a way light didn't usually bend, pulling the afternoon gold apart into its separate colors the way water did with sunlight. Small and precise and entirely controlled, a private spectrum hanging in the air between them.
Dustin went completely still.
This was, El had noticed, significant. Dustin was not a still person. He had a resting level of motion that she had catalogued in the weeks of traveling. his hands, his expressions, the perpetual readiness to speak he had. When he went still it meant something had his complete attention in a way that had bypassed his usual mechanisms entirely.
He was looking at the light in her palm with an expression she didn't have a category for yet.
"You can change the colors," he said. Not a question exactly. More like something being confirmed.
She shifted the pressure slightly and the spectrum moved, the violet end deepening, the gold warming toward amber. Dustin made a sound that wasn't a word.
"El," he said. "That's —" He stopped. Started again. "I've read about innate sorcery. I've read a lot about it actually, I found a monograph in a scholar's library in —" He stopped again. "That's not the point. The point is that what you're doing is — the refraction alone is —" He looked at her. "Do you know how remarkable that is?"
El looked at the light in her palm. At the colors she had made for no reason except that he'd asked with genuine curiosity and she had decided to show him.
"No," she said honestly.
"It's remarkable," he said, with the complete sincerity of someone who had read the monograph and was therefore qualified to have an opinion. "You're remarkable."
El looked at him. At his open honest face that meant exactly what he said and found the alternative genuinely confusing. She let the light dissolve slowly, the colors folding back into ordinary afternoon.
She didn't have a word for what moved through her in that moment. She filed it carefully, saving the moment for a quiet moment where she could revisit it.
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*.・゜゜・༶