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The thing with being in Mordred Manor is that it is a place full of adaptations. Fig only plays her bass before 7AM in the rooms she knows are soundproofed. Jawbone leaves chocolate on the coffee table so anyone can take it without asking. When Adaine is the first one up she makes two pots of coffee in preparation for all of them, laying out the right combinations of milks and sugars using scattered visions of the future. Which is why, one week after their return from the Forest of the Nightmare King, Riz is not surprised to see a lift being installed up to the Adaine’s tower.
He doesn’t even need to ask before Kristen clarifies, watching from the lawn. Aelwyn can’t currently do the stairs. He could have predicted that they would change for her, open up spaces in their lives for her to fit into. What he’s more surprised by is that the distant elven woman is letting them. It's like when he looks at her there are two different versions, the boundlessly confident antagonist and this newer paler person, gripping the armrests of Lydia’s spare wheelchair.
But if she will let them then they will adjust, like they always do. He’s sure somewhere in the recesses of her tower Adaine is watching a new future fall into place.
It’s easy from there to accept Aelwyn as just another part of the landscape of his life. It’s almost too easy for her to fit in, like she was always there and they’ve all only just noticed it. She’s not even the only person he’s regularly in contact with that’s previously attempted to kill him. That doesn’t mean they really ever talk, just that they acknowledge that this is what life is now and really is there any point in fighting it.
(He does expect Fabian at least to take two Abernant’s under the same roof worse than he does, especially when Aelwyn casually breaks up with him over the breakfast table, but even he just steadies his shoulders and passes her another coffee.)
Which is why it’s surprising even to him when she comes into his dark office towards the end of his junior year and passes him a small metal tin of sweet smelling salve from a pocket on her chair.
“For your hands.” It’s too late to hide from her the way he’s clenching and unclenching the hand by his side but he tries to keep it steady as he reaches for the tin. It’s been raining all month, and the ache between his knuckles is starting to get to him.
He tries not to think about his hands too much, his wrists either, but they make it difficult. When at their worst he’s aware of the space between each of the twenty seven bones that make them up, mostly because they feel like they’re pulling apart and his skin isn’t much better itchy with mirror shard scars. It’s not something he expected or something he ever talks about, just figures this is part of the cost of a business that runs on bodies. If the magical warmth coming off the tin is anything to go by then he isn’t as subtle about it as he aims to be. Or at least if Aelwyn has figured it out then there’s some detail that gives him away.
“What is this?” Even though they both know they can see fine he wishes she hadn’t walked in on him in the dark. It feels strangely intimate in the still space of his office.
“It’s a salve Adaine got from Ayda who got it from an artificer in Leviathan. It’ll help.” Neither of them move.
“Fine.” She snatches his hand from where he’s still holding the tin up in the space between them. He winces as her skin meets his, her hands are numbingly cold and her nails are sharp. He lets her drag his wrist further into her space anyway until it rests palm up on her lap. “Don’t be a baby, I’m not going to hurt you.”
It’s her turn to wince this time at her own choice of words as new silence falls between them but for some reason he doesn’t move his hand. Not only because he knows she’d move it right back. But because he knows she’s being honest and he’s more than a little curious at what she’s going to do next. He watches as she carefully removes the tin from his curled fingers, unscrews it and uses one of those sharp nails to portion out some of the salve, depositing it into his palm. It’s as warm as the tin was and without the barrier smells acrid and slightly like thyme.
Aelwyn moves slowly and doesn’t take her eyes off of him as she picks his hand back up. She works outwards from where the blob of salve rests. Carefully working it into his skin down his fingers and skimming across the base of his wrist, taking extra care across the tangle of raised scar tissues that now make up his knuckles. It would be nice if it weren’t so strange, or if her hands warmed up at all through the process.
As if she can tell what he’s thinking she laughs, a small sound in the dark. Her hands don’t stop moving across his but for the first time since coming into the study she stops meeting his eyes.
“Adaine never told you all. Is it both hands or just this one?” Her smile is tight across her face. He thinks he’s starting to understand why she came to him in the dark, rather than under the shock of fluorescent lighting that runs in this section of the manor. He keeps the office lights off because sometimes they make his head feel like it’s exploding, and this way when he needs them off no one questions it. But it feels like an easier thing to talk about without them pressing down on them.
He moves his other hand so it's within her reach. “It’s both.”
She releases the hand she was working on, and replaces it with the one he’s offering, repeating the steps as easily as any well practised craft.
“I need you to know I’m not sorry. For any of it.”
“I believe you.”
“Good. Adaine doesn’t and that’s worse.” He can’t tell if the conversation is getting to her or if she’s just relaxing into the task now she knows he isn’t going to pull away but her hands start to speed up, though he can tell she’s still being careful not to press too hard or jostle him too much. “I know she doesn’t like to talk about it but our parents were terrible. And it’s easy enough to say that but it doesn’t come even close to feeling it. And I mean, she felt most of it but they were. And, well,”
For the first time ever he sees Aelwyn run out of words. There’s a moment where her speech trails off and the image she holds up around herself, as tightly woven as any magical glamour, falters. Even her hands stop moving, only for a second. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, dragging out the pause. Riz feels like he’s intruding even as she’s still holding his hand between her own. This feels private and he’s barely more than a stranger to her.
“They were terrible. Bitter and selfish and full of hate and they only really wanted children if they were exactly in their image and we all know how that went.” She lets go of him for a second to wave her hand around the room. He isn’t sure if she’s gesturing at herself or at Mordred.
“You don’t have to keep-”
She cuts him off with one last flick of her hand before restarting the task she’s given herself, working the salve into a particularly vicious scar running across the back of his hand and between his fingers.
“Jawbone says we should talk about them more and somehow you seem like you’ll ask the least questions. Besides I needed to give you this anyway, though I didn’t think you’d make it so involved.” Riz sputters at the suggestion this was his idea, the most physical contact they’ve ever had including the time he’d tried to stab her through the heart after jumping from a second story window. This time when she smiles he can tell she means it a little more. In the dark her teeth seem nearly as sharp as his own.
“Well you can imagine my parents' abject horror when all that carried on through me and instead of the perfect wizard they had planned for I got my first magic from sorcery. Of course they believed having blood magic is something I chose to spite them and not some fucked up joke from the universe, so they had Adaine and she is their perfect wizard. The greatest wizard of our generation. And even that didn’t really matter to them because, again, they were terrible.”
He thinks if he says anything now she would kill him, send magic jolting through the hand in her grasp. This is less of a problem than it would normally be because he can’t think of a single thing to say as she finishes talking. The space created by her speech gives him a breath to notice the way his hands feel. Even that’s something like a relief, a pause where he wasn’t thinking about the pain in them at all.
“You’re right, this is helping.” Despite her cold fingers his hands are pleasantly warm. He’s less aware of the bones and muscles that make them up, like with all her anger she’s intimidated them into staying in place. “And Adaine didn’t tell us.”
“No, she doesn’t like to.” She releases his hand and when he doesn’t immediately move it she flicks him, with clear intent but gently enough not to cause harm. He takes it back with a jolt, stretching out his fingers with the expectation of a pain that doesn’t come. She screws the lid back onto the tin and holds it back out. “Take it.”
“Don’t you need it, if it works?”
“Do you think I like you enough to give you all I have of it?” Riz thinks he’s starting to understand the tone of her voice. That while it’s still indistinguishable from ire, and the laugh that comes along with it is sharp as crystal, this is her way of making peace or showing affection. He still isn’t quite sure of why. He takes the tin anyway, if it was poisoned then she wouldn’t have been willing to touch it.
Aelwyn is out of the room before he can even say thank you, leaving him in the dark holding the tin with hands that don’t hurt for the first time in a month. He moves to his desk and its most secure compartment, the one where he keeps photos of his dad and of the Bad Kids and puts the tin there with them before restarting his work. It’s just another adjustment, new ground being laid in the foundations of Mordred and though it feels strange it isn’t really surprising to him at all.