Work Text:
“Hmm. Pass.”
“Oh, come on!”
The small crowd of neighbourhood children protested and cajoled the odd one out, the strange one who shared their age but spoke like someone well beyond their years. It was never really easy to get a handle on Gale, though he could hardly blame them. If he couldn’t do it then it wasn’t as if other children stood a chance. Still, they tried, once in a while when the mood would strike, and it was difficult not to appreciate the effort.
He frowned, and attempted to at least find a piece of discarded paper to sit on to join them sitting on the ground. Prestidigitation wasn’t exactly difficult, but remembering to cast it could be. He reached for a poster just lying there, a wrinkled advertisement for Waterdeep’s loveliest ladies, only to be told that the poster was off limits. He gave up and joined them. He’d probably remember to cast it this time.
Mestin made a little ooh noise as Gale’s bottom hit the dusty ground of the little side street. Gale tried not to worry. He had checked first. There wasn’t any rubbish or broken bits of glass. He hadn’t sat on any poo.
“Fine,” he said. “How exactly do you expect you could divine my future when I don’t even see spell components? Who’s even teaching you divination magic at your age?”
Frowns again, probably, even though he had no idea what he could’ve said wrong. He was just asking.
Jhesrik wrinkled his nose before picking it. “You’re at that scary old bookstore too much,” he said. “What are you even apprenticing to be, a book?”
“Serpentil is a rich resource for anyone pursuing an education in arcane—” He stopped at the sight of the frowns deepening. “No. I mean, Dad wants me to apprentice at a guildhall. I’m just helping Mum with her work at the shop until I find something.”
Kaelora rolled her eyes. “Ooh, how noble,” she said. “A guildhall.”
Shifts in the frowns. The others narrowed their eyes at him and murmured. Kaelora wiped at the stray bit of fish blood on her cuff that she couldn’t manage to wash off before her break and Adric imitated his pronunciation of guildhall, which Gale had only really learnt from his father and the other adults around him. Surely he wasn’t saying it wrong.
Mum said that people generally appreciated honesty and that it was a good quality to be truthful. He was being truthful. He didn’t understand why that made it harder to make friends.
“Okay, okay!” Syllia said. “Book boy said he wants to play. So let’s play.”
She brought out a small, crumpled pile of assorted discarded papers. Posters, mainly, from what he could see, with the odd receipt or letter that had probably been fished out of a bin.
Cards, perhaps? Was this their attempt to create a deck?
She looked around again, searching for someone in the crowd of riffraff and adventurers in this part of Waterdeep, and she grinned when she couldn’t find them. One more furtive little scouting glance for good measure, and she reached into her pocket and brought out something small but valuable enough that the other children had gathered around it, fascinated. Gale struggled to angle for a better look when Syllia placed it into his hand instead: a die—twenty-sided, from the looks of it, and cast in metal with what appeared to be enamel accents to make the numbers stand out. What prince had she pickpocketed for this?
More importantly: what did this game piece have to do with divination?
Syllia’s wide smile only highlighted the baby tooth that had well rotted in anticipation of being replaced. “Got it at the Quaffing Quaggoth,” she explained, “not far from yours, book boy. Some Sea Ward rich kid thought fancy dice means better rolls.”
“And he… gave it to you?”
The other children laughed.
He wasn’t sure he approved.
“Okay!” Syllia said. “So, you go ask about your future partner. I say what the numbers mean.”
The papers flipped over. On the backs of them, in her unsteady hand and poor spelling, were lists of words ordered by number.
The pieces fell into place.
“Ah!” Gale said. “I roll the die, and the number corresponds to the question about my partner.”
Blinks in his direction, tilted heads.
Jhesrik snacked on whatever he’d found in his nose.
Gale tried again. “The, erm, answers, to the number on the die, are on the papers.”
Tentative nods and murmurs. Syllia just seemed relieved he was making the effort.
“Yes!” she said. “See, lads? Gale can be normal sometimes!”
His smile faltered. He should’ve been flattered. She was being nice.
“Now, start asking.”
The game was easy enough to get the hang of. He asked a question from the lists Syllia had made, then he rolled the die and she’d look up the answer. If it was a particularly short list then the options would alternate until the numbers ran out. It was a far cry from the lanceboard games he’d play with Mr Sepentil when the shop wasn’t so busy, or the wizards he did play with when it wasn’t, but he could admit the simplicity of it held a certain charm.
What gender was his partner? Male. (Giggles from Mestin and Adric.) What job? That fell victim to the uneven surface of the road beneath them, pocked as it was with potholes and broken cobblestones, the die landing on one surface and then another.
Judj, the list read for the first result. Kriminol, it read for the other.
The children nodded sagely.
“They do like their extra monies,” Jhesrik said.
The die wobbled again when he asked for eye colour. It seemed undecided between red or green. They compromised by all agreeing that his husband likely just had one of each.
Hair colour: white.
Mestin snorted. “You’re going to marry an old judge!”
Gale bristled. “Maybe he’s kind!”
Which only had the others laughing harder.
He liked making people laugh, but not like this. Gale knew when it went well, like when he would help Jym set up the paper mesh in the store’s back rooms and some remark would make Jym giggle, or when he’d beat Mr Serpentil at lanceboard and he’d laugh in the glow of the shop’s hovering light orbs, calling over to Mum that clearly he’d inherited his brains from Morena’s side of the family. Sometimes the wizards would have a little chuckle at the size of the little boy bringing them the books they requested, and laugh even deeper when he had answers to their questions about condition or content.
This wasn’t that.
Gale tried not to sniffle. This was stupid, really. It wasn’t even real divination.
Money: one million copper, which Gale barely restrained himself from mentioning probably wasn’t as much as they all thought it was. Living: Dock Ward. This particularly amused Kaelora, who crowed that maybe he wasn’t too good for their part of town after all. Kids: zero.
Jhesrik actually looked understanding. “Because your husband’s going to be too old to have babies.”
Pet: one cat. Ha. He wished. Gale was good friends with a lot of the cats he’d met around the Dock Ward, but even though he’d never asked, he knew his parents would never agree to him actually having one. Dad said unless the pet were to serve some sort of purpose like guarding or pest control, there would be no point, and he knew Gale was the type to treat animals like friends whilst doing their actual jobs himself. Dad was not going to have Gale grow up spoilt like his distant cousins up in the North Ward, distracted from real life with pets and fashion because they had no need to worry about money like his branch of the family did. Gale may not exactly have been normal, Dad smiled kindly, but he was going to at least become useful, and worthy, and that would be success enough.
Still, maybe if he gave it a few more years and worked hard enough on being useful and worthy, Dad would change his mind and his parents would finally let him have a cat, as a reward.
What race, he asked. Again, the curse of the uneven road beneath them. The die didn’t seem to want to give a straight answer.
“Says elf,” Jhesrik squinted at the list.
Kaelora barked in laughter. “The dice bounced!” she said. “You got monster!”
The laughter rippled outwards until everyone but Syllia joined in. She tried to at least sound encouraging when she spotted the red in Gale’s cheeks that stung enough that surely it showed by now.
His heart hurt. His mind twisted in on itself in its confusion. He was playing the way they asked. He was trying to be truthful and to use words they could understand. Mum said be himself, but more polite and possibly more smiley, and he was doing just that. Why all this effort for the sake of their comfort only made them dislike him more was what he couldn’t understand.
There was just so much about other people that he couldn’t understand.
“It’s just a game, yeah?” Syllia smiled. “Anyway, there’s very handsome monsters.”
Gale fought not to cry. “I guess.”
Mestin took a break from idly chewing on his knuckles. “Seems to me,” he said, “Gale’s going to marry a rich old judge with one red eye and one green eye, and he’s a monster, and he can’t have babies.” He thought about it further, giving his knuckle another idle bite. “Does this mean he marries a lich?”
And this was enough to finally exhaust what reserves of restraint everyone besides Syllia had. Gale, marrying a lich. If anyone was going to marry some undead freak it made sense it would be Gale. Kaelora in particular couldn’t decide if that meant he was miserable or he was exactly weird enough to enjoy such an arrangement, and she verbally illustrated both theories in enough detail that the others were practically wheezing at images of him kissing those rotten lips and keeping him out of the sun.
Gale softly handed the die back to Syllia, swallowing the tears already clogging his throat. “Thank you, Syllia,” he said, “but I don’t wish to play anymore.”
Adric sputtered at the word choice, asking him who he thought he was, talking like that. There was another brief imitation of the accent he picked up from his parents and the wizards and merchants at the shop. The others joined in, ignoring all Syllia’s attempts to get them to quiet down.
He blew them all back with Gust before he could realise what he was doing. The papers Syllia carefully laid out flew in wildly different directions along the street, one poster smacking a delivery man right on the face. Adric actually did land on a horse poo.
Gale fought the urge to apologise. They didn’t get his attempts at politeness when they didn’t even try to be polite back. He picked what papers he could and handed them over.
“I’ll make more when I find some spare paper,” he offered.
“That’s okay,” Syllia shrugged. “We already know all our futures.”
Kaelora yelled from Adric’s side, where she was fighting valiantly to wipe his face clean of the poo. “And you won’t play again!” she said. “What was that, book boy? Can’t even take a joke. This is why you have no friends.”
He blew them both onto the poo and took off back to the direction of the shop.
It was stupid.
This wasn’t even real divination, anyway.