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Adaine’s been staring at the bright red C on the scorecard from her Transmutation demonstration for so long that she can still see it every time she looks away from it, even though her eyes are blurry with tears that she’s barely holding back, holding the paper so tightly it’s starting to buckle under her fingers.
She’s been hiding in one of the unused practical casting rooms for nearly half an hour now instead of going to the study hall period she shares with Kristen, mostly because she’s pretty sure Kristen is going to be way too nice for her to handle right now, all ‘you’ll get through this’ and ‘it’s all in Helio’s plan, given that Helio has a plan in the first place, which he may or may not.’ Helio’s plan hasn’t protected Adaine from Aelwyn’s special brand of hell this far, so Adaine has her doubts, and Kristen doesn’t need Adaine questioning her faith, too.
“The BALL!” someone bellows—that’s Fabian, there’s literally nobody it could be but Fabian—and there’s a colossal BANG-BANG as the door flies open, crashes off the wall, and goes rebounding straight back into the frame, leaving a crater where the door handle impacted with the wall.
Adaine flinches so badly she almost but not quite tears the evaluation card clean in half, which is good. Ripping it in half would make the situation even worse than it already will be when she shows it to her parents, to her mother . She desperately smooths it out, breathing coming fast and ragged, fingers curling over the rip in the paper as she starts to cast Mending, although based on how hard her hands are shaking, she has no idea whether it’ll work or not, and Mending is a transmutation cantrip anyways, and—as demonstrated by her grade—she’s pants at transmutation anyways. It probably won’t work. She forces back the tears again.
A moment later, the door opens again with a creak —it didn’t creak before, but Fabian kicking the door in must have done something to the hinges—and Fabian pokes his head in, looks at the dent that the door handle left in the wall, shrugs, then says, “Adaine,” curt but not cold.
Adaine desperately smooths out her skirt, takes a deep, teary breath, and says, “Fabian,” attempting her best effort at mimicking his tone. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for the Ball,” Fabian says, with a faint note of disdain. “The fighter and rogue classes have the same number of freshmen, so they paired us off. We’re playing ‘tag.’” Fabian makes exaggerated air quotes as he strides into the room, opening up cabinets and looking behind the teacher’s desk. “He’s not hiding in here, is he.”
“No,” Adaine says. “Or if he is, I haven’t noticed him.” She sniffs. “He is very good at stealth.”
“Unfortunately,” Fabian grumbles. “This is going to take all day. My investigation is terrible, my perception is worse, I don’t know how they expect a bunch of wildly unperceptive fighters to go up against extremely sneaky rogues. ”
He projects that last bit, like saying it loud enough will make Riz pop out. It doesn’t.
“I don’t have Locate Creature stocked, sorry,” Adaine says.
“We’re not supposed to use magic anyways, that’s the point. Most of the point. I will admit I don’t entirely understand the point of this exercise.” Fabian runs a hand through his silver-white hair, flicks pale eyes over the rest of the room one more time, and turns to go, but pauses at the door, turns around. One perfect white eyebrow lifts.
“What?” Adaine says, furiously scrubbing at her eyes as a single tear spills over, rolls down her cheek. She loses her focus on Mending and has to start the spell all over.
“Is there something wrong?”
She manages a watery smile, looking down at the evaluation again, at that C. If she looks at Fabian, who is (for the most part) cool and suave and has parents who love him and probably don’t give a shit about his grades given his attitude, she’s pretty sure she’s going to fully burst into tears, so instead she focuses on making sure her somatic component is right, murmuring every so often under her breath to satisfy the verbal. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Um, just. I got a bad grade on my Transmutation practical?”
Fabian closes the door, and it whines on its hinges; Adaine winces at the noise, but Fabian doesn’t seem to react, just leans up against the doorframe and crosses his arms. “And?”
“And,” Adaine says, hiccups. Oh, god, hiccups , like this breakdown couldn’t get more embarrassing. “And I, I, my, I can’t—” She hiccups again— hic! —and her next breath comes tearing into her lungs, like the air grew claws and is stabbing them into her chest wall, digging deep into the intercostal muscles between her ribs.
She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes, giving up on mending the tear in the evaluation card, and doesn’t look up when she hears Fabian’s footsteps crossing the room again, then the screech of a chair being pulled out from a desk next to her. She does look up when something lands on her own desk, registers Fabian sitting down next to her, a tissue box in front of her.
“Thanks,” she says, pulling a whole handful of tissues from the box and shoving her face in them, and when she emerges, Fabian is picking at his cuticles, not even looking at her even when she hiccups again.
“Yeah,” he says, sounding bored. He kicks his legs up so he’s propping his feet on the desk he’s claimed—Adaine’s mother would have a fit —and the blade of his rapier ting s off of the metal leg of his chair as he shifts his weight. “What’s so bad about the grade? It’s a, what—” He cranes his neck to spot the card half-hidden by Adaine’s desperate attempt to cover it up. “C? That’s not even that bad. And you’re in the wizard classes too, those are hard.”
“It is super bad,” Adaine says, trying to find the right words to explain just how bad it is. “Definitely super duper bad. Especially when your family has a background in arcane research, specifically focused on the intersectionality of Transmutation and Conjuration magic, and your sister gets all As at Hudol , which is, is the better school for magic to begin with, and this is— hic! —this is, just, just another reason why you’re a massive failure, because you can’t even be good at magic when you’re practical casting, never mind arcane researching.”
She takes a deep breath punctuated by a hiccup, pulls another tissue out of the box, and when Fabian doesn’t say anything, keeps talking. “And, and, and, objectively I shouldn’t even be attempting to live up to my family’s standards, because they are wildly unfair and place my sister above reproach even though she is arguably the most valid target of reproach, sorry, that’s not even the point, although I hate her, I do, I hate her so much, but essentially I’m never going to be as good as they want me to be and they’re always going to hate me for it, so what’s even the point of trying, but. But. I know I could’ve done better. And I didn’t. And that’s bad.”
When Adaine looks over, Fabian has stopped picking at his cuticles and is just staring vacantly at somewhere around his knees, mouth set in a line that Adaine interprets as pensive. On him, it looks vaguely painful.
He glances over at her, visibly breaking out of whatever funk he had just been in. “Well, you’re a Divination wizard, right,” he says. “And everyone’s got a weaker point. Like, every time there’s a table, ever, I get my shit rocked, because apparently every single table is sentient and out to get me specifically. But I’m very good at stabbing things. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t stop trying to jump on tables, because it’s going to be epic when I do manage to get there, but maybe it’s going to take more work than I anticipated at first and certainly more work than stabbing something will, because I’m not very good at it right now, even though my father was for sure a table-hopping champion in his golden days.”
“An entire school of magic isn’t exactly comparable to jumping on a table.” Despite herself, the barest idea of a smile tugs at the very corner of Adaine’s mouth, remembering the first day of school: even though, for the most part, it had been a painful reminder of just how far she had fallen from esteem, what with everything about that day associated with the feeling of the handle of a ladle digging into her skin and parents too ashamed of a daughter with blood on her hands that they failed to even consider comforting her after a traumatic experience, there was still that moment, right at the start of the fight, when Fabian tried to jump on a table and ate shit. It’s amusing.
“Well, it’s not like you’re doing polymorph, right,” Fabian says. “So it’s not even a whole school of magic, just whatever the practical was on.” He shrugs, looks away, fingers picking at the artful distressing to his charcoal gray jeans. “And, for what it’s worth, I get it. The expectations thing. So.”
She can feel confusion tugging her brows low, not just at the strangeness of the statement but also at the incongruity of Fabian’s presence in this room, weirdly antithetical to his usual posturing bullshit: a Fabian boiled down, somehow, stripped of the swagger that he generally cultivated.
“Your parents love you,” she says, because from what she knew of Bill Seacaster, he practically doted on his son, and while she hadn’t seen much of Fabian’s mother she imagined she couldn’t be that much further away. It was just as hard to imagine Adaine’s parents doting upon her like Bill Seacaster did upon Fabian as it was to imagine that Fabian’s parents despising him as Adaine’s parents despised her.
Still, though. Adaine knows it’s the wrong thing to say the moment Fabian sets his jaw. “Yes,” he says, terse. “They do.”
Clearly her reasoning was flawed. “I’m sorry, I—”
“No, it’s fine.”
The silence between them stretches out, unbearably awkward.
“I should really b—”
“Is there—”
“You go first,” Adaine says, and Fabian looks at her like he wants to say no you, but eventually he shrugs.
“Is there anything else I can do,” he says. It’s not really a question, sounds more like an expectation of being given some other instruction, but Adaine thinks she’s mostly okay, now, doesn’t feel like she’s going to hyperventilate her way through her next class, which is in—she checks the clock on the wall—fifteen minutes.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Thanks for listening to me rant about my shitty parents, though. And, you know. The tissues.”
She holds one up as an example, but she really didn’t have to: there are so many crumpled, soaked tissues scattered across the desk. She hadn’t realized she’d gone through that many.
“Of course,” Fabian says, hesitates briefly. “I’m sorry for barging in like that.”
“It’s really okay,” Adaine says. “Although you might get in trouble for the door thing.”
“You can cast Mending, can’t you,” Fabian says with a dismissive flick of his fingers, and there, that’s Normal Fabian again; Adaine doesn’t particularly miss him. “It’ll be fine.”
He levers himself back up to standing; Adaine does too, corralling all her tissues into an easily manageable pile.
“If you say anything about this,” Fabian says, almost but not quite a dire threat, and she feels that almost-smile tug at her again as she looks down at her nasty pile of snot rags, because she’d half-expected this.
“Worry less about my destroying your ‘street cred’ and more about that tag game you aren’t playing,” Adaine says, and when Fabian curses a blue streak and sprints from the room, she finds that that smile curls across the rest of her face, entirely without her say so.