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~*~
Since David's first year at the Little Palace, the best school for magic–not only in Ravka, but the whole world– in his opinion,he had always been paired with Alina Starkov during potions class.
It had proven to be a good partnership, and the few times they were paired with someone else, it had not gone too well. Not for either of them. Especially not for him.He simply couldn’t talk to Genya Safin; her beauty rendered him mute and clumsy.And partnering with some of the Heartrenders, like Ivan Kaminsky, well David found his voice with them, but they barely listened to him.so Alina hadn't had better experiences with other potions partners, either. Sergei, like most of the Heartrenders, it seemed, never listened to anyone but himself. The third time he ignored Alina's warnings about their concoction, it landed both him and Alina in the hospital wing. (Seriously, how hard is it NOT to add clover?)
Really, it was just better if they stayed together in potions class.
And this partnership with Alina had helped him personally as well. David was shy and often felt awkward talking to other people, but, with Alina, it was easy, she made friends easily, and he had quickly become part of her circle of friends.He and Alina were perfect for each other, amazing lab partners and best friends.
Even his cat liked her – and Sasha normally did not like any other human except David. He barely allowed David’s own parents to pet him, but, with Alina, he would flop onto his side, a request to be petted, just like he would with David.
But just once, their perfect potion partnership did not work out as it should have.
And it kind of changed David’s life.
Like many things, it had all started with a big bang. During potions lessons, David was – as so often – partnered with Alina. They were working on some calming potion to used with theinjuried, but he must have used the wrong ingredient or the wrong amount. A mystery, as it turned out, they would never solve; even much much later. David had wrecked his brain with what and how much of it he had added in which order so that such a mistake could never be replicated. But it was not to be.
The potion within the cauldron began to simmer.
It should have begun taking on a pale lilac colour.
Only, now, it shone bright, a captivating yellowy-orange hue.
And it bubbled and bubbled and bubbled.
Desperate to rescue the potion, David flew back to the desk, fingers flipping through pages upon pages of recipes, in the hopes that there was something in there that could rescue the potion.
That was when it happened. The potion not only began to boil over, but somehow exploded with a loud boom and splattered over everything and everyone.
He was lucky, his back had been turned to the fireplace, but Alina was close to the cauldron and got hit by the majority of the liquid.
When David emerged from behind the table, her face and most of her upper body were splattered orange. It was on her eyelids, her mouth, her hair, her hands….everywhere.
“What…what just happened?” David stammered. Alina just stared at him with big, frightened eyes.
Slowly, very slowly Alina raised her hands, staring at them, almost like she had not seen them before. “Alina, are you alright?” She was not reacting to him at all. Just staring.
“Alina!” Panic began to creep into his voice.
David surged forward, kneeled in front of his friend and took her hands in his. “Alina?”
Finally, Alina reacted. “David, I’m… not feeling well.” Her hair was an absolute mess, her face splattered with the potion, in addition she had a few cuts, and her eyes were dark and confused.
Then she fainted.
~*~
Alina spent three days in the hospital ward of the Little Palace recovering from her ordeal. As expected the potions master had some stern words with David for not being careful enough, and from now one David and Alina would have to be supervised during their experimentations until it could be ensured that they acted more responsibly and such a thing would not happen again.
But that was not the only thing that had changed. Alina became more and more absent in the next weeks, sometimes she excused herself from their usual experimentation sessions, sometimes she seemed beside herself and David could her that she was mumbling something. He wasn’t sure if it was to herself, it surely seemed that way as there was no one in the room besides the assistant teacher and himself. And Alina was definitely not speaking to one of them as she had before.
At first David thought it was his mistake. He had been the one to endanger her, maybe she was wary of him now, maybe she needed some space, maybe their friendship had run its course. The thought alone made his heart ache, without Alina it would be a lot lonelier. It would be like most of the first year at the Little Palace, when all David had was his cat. And as much as he loved Sasha, their conversations were decidedly one sided.
But after the first week of Alina’s strange behaviour Zoya had approached him to ask if he knew anything about Alina’s weird behaviour as she had caught her speaking to a wall in their dormitory recently. And then Sergei asked him, if he Alina was also acting weird around him. And finally Genya, beautiful Genya, had come to him to ask if he had noticed how changed Alina’s behaviour had been since that accident. All of them had noticed that Alina seemed to speak with inanimate objects occasionally, being mentally absent and generally not like the Alina they all knew.
Something weird was going on and David was determined to get to the bottom of it.
A few days later, he and Alina were studying in the palace library alone, just like they had often done in the past. They were almost done with their homework for the week and both had selected a few books for further research. It just felt right like that and while David was normally not someone prone to big emotional outbursts, the whole familiarness of the scene warmed his heart. Even Sasha’s presence was as usual – that cat had made itself scarce recently. The little rascal was sleeping in Alina’s lap, where she petted him absently.
Now would be the perfect opportunity.
“Alina” When she smiled at him, it felt like old times. Him and his best friend studying, the books piling up on their table and they volleyed one idea after another between each other of how to improve their potion making. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” She looked back at the paragraph she was just reading and made a note on her paper.
“You seem to be talking to someone quite a lot recently?” Alina hummed affirmatively.
“Yes, my friend Mal.”
Mal? There was no Mal at the Little Palace that David knew of, and how could she speak to him here? There was no one in the library except them?
“Mal?”
“Yes, he is often with me now. He’s nice.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, we’ve been talking to each other since the accident in the laboratory. When I woke up in the infirmary, Mal was there.” Alina smiled.
Thoughts were swirling in David’s head. Something must have happened when that potion had exploded. Something that had confused Alina and made her see people that were not there. He ended their conversation there, not willing to dig any deeper and maybe scare Alina with the fact that only she seemed able to see this Mal.
He was responsible for this, so David resolved to be the one to get her out of this and get his friend back.
~*~
A new task. A new challenge. Something that David loved, especially when it came to potion brewing. And now he had extra motivation, as he was sure that only he could bring Alina back to normal again.
So, in the next weeks he was brooding over books, like never before and even neglected some of his other studies for this. (Something that had never happened before, David prided himself on being an exemplary student. But it wouldn’t be for long, only until Alina was back to normal.)
The first antidote he prepared had been useless, maybe because it was the most basic one, they had all learned in year one. He produced antidote after antidote, pouring through ancient volumes in the library as well as the newest discoveries in the newest journals from the magic universities in Ketterdam, Os Kervo, Djerholm and Amrath Jen. But attempt after attempt proved to be a failure.
In the late afternoon after the last potion had failed, David was sitting at the desk in the small testing laboratory he and Alina often used, and despaired. It seemed that he had doomed Alina to this weird behaviour and seeing this imaginary man forever. It would be only him and Sasha again.
“I messed up.” David addressed his cauldron. Maybe voicing it out loud would help order his thoughts? Or maybe he would also begin seeing imaginary people soon? “Alina is still talking to that imaginary Mal person and nothing I do seems to help.”
“He isn’t imaginary.” A deep, smooth, and definitely male voice spoke.
David lifted his head and looked around. There was no one in this room, except him, so who had just spoken? Was he now starting to imagine things? Had some of his latest potion experiments gone wrong and he was hallucinating?
Sasha had risen from his napping spot near the window and was now rubbing against his legs, David automatically picked the cat up to set him on the desk. Petting his cat always had a calming effect and helped him order his thoughts. Maybe it would also help if he suffered from hallucinations?
“It really isn’t imaginary.” David gasped and dropped Sasha onto floor again. Did his cat just say that?
The black cat that he had had for over four years landed on the floor, immediately recovered, and jumped on the desk to sit himself directly in front of David.
Sasha was looking at him. And not like cats normally looked, his eyes sparkled, and it almost felt like David was sitting across another person? Like a conversation happening at the dinner table.
Then Sasha opened his mouth. “Believe me, Mal is not imaginary.”
David shot up from the chair and scrambled a few steps back, the chair uncomfortably digging into the back of his knees.
“You can speak.”
Sasha’s eyes were fixed on him.
“Cats cannot speak.”
“Obviously I can.” Sasha’s mouth moved; he heard the voice speaking. But it still didn’t register with David that this was the voice of the cat. (Weirdly enough the voice fit him? Sasha had always been a very dignified and elegant cat, not very playful and this baritone voice with the gravitas of a nobleman…it fit the cat. Was he going insane thinking such thoughts about the voice of a cat?)
“Long story short. The reason why I can talk is that I was a Grisha wizard once. Still am. But due to some events in past, I have been sentenced to spend 200 years as a cat.”
“Some events?” David still felt like he was dreaming. He knew the High Grisha council could hand out sentences such as this, but… how did Sasha end up as his cat?
The noise that Sasha made would probably have been a hum if a human had made it, but coming from a cat, it was more like a satisfied purr.
“Malyen and I were both wizards. Friends since our days at the Little Palace. Both of us had climbed up high in the Grisha hierarchy as adults. But we got too ambitious, lost ourselves in our research, in our desire to improve the world and best the other. In the end it escalated into dangerous territory. We researched things that should have been left alone and at some point Malyen…” The cat tilted his head, like a human being deep in thought, licked his paw and groomed his whiskers with that paw. “… Malyen lost his way and dipped into magic that should have been left alone. I almost fell down the same path, but I pulled myself back in the last moment and then I had to fight him. In the end he died at my hand, which I will be forever sorry for, and after the council was informed of what we had done, they also decided to punish me. As the only reason why, the whole thing had escalated as it had, was our competition.”
Sasha looked sad. At least as sad as a cat could look like. So, David couldn't help but reach out to pet him in a comforting manner. “I’m sorry Sasha.”
“Please do not call me Sasha.”
Would this weirdness ever end? “What should I call you? Everyone knows you as my cat Sasha.”
“Well, in public I will still be Sasha, your normal cat. But if it is just the two of us, please call me Aleksander.”
David nodded. This just couldn’t get any weirder.
“Your friend Alina… the lovely girl with the soft hands, she is seeing Mal, right? Since that accident you two had?”
David’s head felt like it would burst, his thoughts were racing with all the weird revelations Sasha had made. A headache was announcing itself at his temples, so he just nodded again.
“It seems, your mistake has brought Mal back, but only for her, only she can see him. And to be honest, I do not know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.”
This was too much for someone like him. David was only a student and now he seemed to have stumbled right into some old disagreements between old wizards and then also some council matter? And his best friend and him had now been caught in the middle of it. Dread crept into his bones, there was nothing he could do here, David felt utterly helpless.
“I just want Alina to go back to normal. I just want things to be as they were before.” He murmured.
Sasha purred.
“I was a very talented potions master in my previous life, if you want, I’ll help you make Mal disappear. Even though him and I had our… disagreements in the past, he doesn’t deserve this half-life as a ghost.”
Was it wise to accept this offer from a speaking cat, that was supposedly some wayward wizard? Probably not, but if he could help to turn back things as they were, David wasn’t picky.
~*~
Even though he was hesitant (who wouldn’t be when one’s cat suddenly started speaking?) David filled the deep purple liquid into the vial. It was not more than a sip, maybe two. He held It up against the window, checking for any possible residue inside. In his hand, the liquid had been as dark, almost black, but with the light shining through the potion was glittering in a beautiful translucent purple in a dark aubergine shade.
And just like Sasha – Aleksander, he had asked David to call him Aleksander – predicted Alina’s imaginary friend seemed to vanish a short time after David had secretly poured the potion into her tea.
Everything was back to normal. Alina was his favourite lab partner again, and they could explore potions and alchemy without the weird interruptions of “Mal”, he could still gaze at Genya when their friend group was studying, or going for social activities on the school grounds, and generally hanging out.
Well almost normal. His cat was still able to talk, and Sasha did talk to him frequently when they were alone. That cat had a seventh sense, as soon as anyone approached, he made himself rare, or in Alina’s case he snuggled up very close and even flopped onto his back so she could scratch his belly. That little sycophant!
The only worrisome thing was that Alina seemed to have developed an uncanny ability to find or know things since she had drunk the potion. Almost like a sixth sense (and suddenly her grades in divination had gone up exponentially. Until recently Alina and him had always made fun of divination and the unpredictability of it).
Just yesterday she had told him, her tea leaves were indicating that he should ask Genya out and it would be a success. David was highly suspicious of this claim, as he did not think he would ever have a chance with Genya.
But Alina’s new ability had been quite successful? Maybe, just maybe he should test out if it held any truth…