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After a day of traveling through wind and snow, the hard chair that Occtis is sat in feels like a luxury, as does the small table he’s currently hunched over at. It’s just one of many inns that they’ve stopped at on their way through the Dvalmar Pass, each one nearly functionally identical to the other.
When Occtis had been traveling with Thaisha to and from Venatus, he’d mentally rated the inns they’d stayed at based on the quality of their food and the comfort of their beds. Now that he no longer eats or sleeps, he has to find another rating system. How large of a table the room has might be a good measure, if indeed there is a table at all. This room gets points for the table, but an overall deduction for the size of the table in question, Occtis decides. He can either write at it or set up about two thirds of his alchemy equipment, but not both at once. Maybe if he brings over the tiny table near the bed…
Occtis feels a tug on the left leg of his pants, followed by a whine. A week ago, this would have brought a smile to his face, followed by an exasperated chuckle. Now, Occtis just looks down at Pin, who gazes back up at him with his bright button eyes, teeth still in Occtis’s pant leg.
“Pin, it’s not bedtime.”
“Not for you, anyway,” Thaisha says with a yawn. She’s sitting on the unused bed as she taps the lid of Vaelus’s iron teapot to start the water heating enchantment. “For Julien though, absolutely.”
Occtis grimaces, shifting slightly in his seat. “I thought me having a separate room would help.”
Julien seems intent on making good on his promise to be Occtis’s shadow. If Occtis is in a room, Julien’s eyes are on him. When they’re on the road, Julien always stays as close as he can, just shy of crowding Occtis’s horse. On the few occasions he actually speaks to Occtis, half the time he’s condescending, and the other half seemingly convinced that Occtis has come back wrong and just biding his time to do something unspeakable to them all.
“Oh, it does,” Thaisha says. “It’s cut way down on his ominous mumbling. And the fact that Vaelus is in here with you seems to reassure him that you’re being ‘watched over properly.’” She rolls her eyes and glances over to the corner where Vaelus is trancing in the room’s second chair. Occtis mentally adds another point to the room’s score. “But if Aranessa doesn’t tell Julien to come to bed, he’ll sit in a chair set against the door, or pace the room. And even when he does lay down, he sleeps badly.”
Occtis’s clenches his jaw as he looks back down at his journal, the words at least he has the option to sleep badly locked tight behind his teeth.
“So I’m making Aranessa some sleepy time tea,” Thaisha continues. “Which she’ll politely refuse, just like we’ve worked out ahead of time. I’ll insist on the importance of a good night’s sleep for her health, she’ll say that she’ll have some if Julien does, and since Julien wouldn’t refuse Aranessa’s wishes up to and including crawling naked over broken glass for her, he’ll drink it too.” Occtis can hear the smile in her words.
Pin chooses this moment to tug on Occtis’s pant leg again, this time with a low growl. A second warning. Next he’ll yip and start nipping at Occtis’s ankles. Occtis raises a hand to send him back to his pocket dimension and is halfway through the first flourish when Pin lets go, his ears flat as he stomps his forefeet.
“Pin—”
Pin turns his back on Occtis with an angry flick of his tail before stalking off and jumping up onto the bed, laying his head on Thaisha’s thigh and heaving a put upon sigh with breath that he doesn’t need.
“Oh sweetie.” Thaisha scratches Pin behind the ears. “You don’t have to bully Occtis into going to bed anymore, you do know that, right? That he doesn’t need to sleep?”
Pin just whines and nuzzles Thaisha’s hand. She looks over at Occtis. “He does know that, right?”
“I did explain that to him the first time he did this after I— returned, yes,” Occtis says with a sigh purely for emphasis, wondering even as he does it if it’s a mannerism he’s picked up from Pin. “It’s strange, because he used to exhibit that same behavior when I would get so deep in my studies that I would forget to eat, but now he doesn’t react when I don’t eat or drink with the rest of you. So he clearly understands there’s no reason to fret about that.” He frowns, remembering something else. “And he hasn’t been roaming around like he used to at night. You know how he was, he’d be out and walking around while we were sleeping. Now I go to let him out and he just stays outside for a few minutes before he’s whining to come back in, if he even goes out at all.”
“Huh.” Thaisha continues to pet Pin, looking thoughtful. “Stress? It’d make sense he’d want to stay close to you. The two of you have been through a lot.”
Some of Occtis’s memories of that night are blurry, sharp edges made soft by shock. But he remembers Pin’s face peering up from his chest, Pin leaping out out of him covered in the last of Occtis’s heart blood. He gets up from the chair and moves to sit on the bed next to Pin, who doesn’t protest when Occtis pets the irregular patch of gray fur along his back. “Yes. Yes we have.”
Pin rolls over onto his back, a bit of playfulness coming back to him that Occtis can’t help but smile at just a little as he rubs Pin’s belly. “I wish I could just slip my senses into Pin and fall asleep watching him explore and play like I used to. I think I might miss sleeping more than I miss eating.”
“Really? Because I remember how on the way back from Venatus you couldn’t stop talking about this one bakery near the Death and Life Sciences building at the Penteveral—”
“The one with the zucchini fritter sandwiches and the chocolate marshmallow croissants that I will never eat again, yes.”
“Sorry.”
Occtis waves her apology away. “The point is, I don’t feel hungry anymore. It’d be harder if I always felt hungry and couldn’t do anything to make that feeling go away. Since I don’t, it’s easier to bear. But while I don’t get physically tired, mentally—” He gestures vaguely towards his head. “I don’t really get a break from thinking about everything.” He pauses. “Well, unless drugs are involved, apparently.”
“That was nice, wasn’t it?” Thaisha smiles fondly, and Occtis catches the way her eyes flick over to Vaelus for a moment. “The three of us?”
“It was,” Occtis says, remembering the soft, slow fuzziness of his thoughts, the way that it seemed the smoke had been carrying them up to the stars. “And while I look forward to more experiments along those lines, I should probably try to find more than one way to mentally clear my head.”
“We could try meditation,” Thaisha suggests. “Even just fifteen minutes or so leaves me feeling like I’m carrying around a lot less stuff inside my head. It might help.”
“All right,” Occtis says. He won’t be worse off for trying, and either way it’ll give him something to write about during the sleepless hours until dawn. “What do I have to do?”
“Let me just—” Thaisha pours the contents of a pouch into the teapot. “Okay, now we need to get comfortable and close our eyes.”
Occtis imitates the cross legged way Thaisha is sitting and closes his eyes.
“Now, breathe in,” Thaisha directs. “And when you breathe out, imagine all your thoughts and worries leaving with your breath.”
“If I stop thinking, I’ll forget to keep breathing.”
“Ah. Right.” A pause. “Try to hold on to that one thought I guess.”
So Occtis breathes in, feeling the movement of his diaphragm, the expansion of his chest cavity as air that he no longer needed fills his lungs. Breathing out, he tries to visualize his anxieties leaving him, but all he can focus on is the complex movement of his body’s internal workings. Still, he makes an effort for several minutes before he decides to stop breathing and instead focus on Thaisha’s breathing.
Occtis will have to figure out something else to focus on if he does this while he’s alone, but it actually seems like it’s working. Sitting there, imagining his thoughts leaving with breath that isn’t his own, he feels his mind slow, like the snowflakes outside drifting down from the sky to settle on the ground. It doesn’t feel like the first few days after he had died, when he had closed his eyes and lay still as if he could mimic sleep hard enough, he could gain some benefit. There’s a feeling of mental restfulness. Quiet. Peace.
When the thought comes, it’s the first maggot to break the skin of a body freshly buried.
If you’re not moving, not breathing, not thinking, you’re a corpse, not a person.
“Occtis? Occtis, open your eyes.”
If you’re a corpse, you can be used as a tool—
Something bites Occtis’s hand where it rests on his thigh, pressure with no pain followed by a cold, dry tongue. Occtis opens his eyes to see Pin licking his hand, which is shaking along with the rest of him.
“— If you’re not moving, not breathing, not thinking, you’re a corpse—” His thoughts are so loud that he can hear them over his breathing— why is he breathing? He only breathes when he speaks...
Oh.
Occtis stops breathing, words cutting off as he scoops Pin up into his arms, taking comfort in the weight of him as he forces himself to look up at Thaisha’s stricken face.
“Sorry,” he manages to say. “I don’t think meditation is for me.”
— — —
Occtis stays sitting on the bed for a long time after Thaisha finally leaves, petting Pin’s fur and trying not to touch the stitches over the empty place where his racing, anxious heart would have sat. He needs something to occupy himself with for at least a few hours, until Vaelus wakes up. She seems to enjoy talking to him, and takes an active interest in whatever book he is reading or experiment he’s working on. There’s that new spell he’s been fiddling around with, the one he’s been collecting animal bones for. Maybe—
Occtis moves to get up and Pin whines, ears going flat.
“Pin. I can’t pet you all night. I have work to do.”
Pin shakes his head and jumps off of Occtis’s lap, trotting over to the room’s one window and looking up at it. When Occtis opens the window, Pin leaps up onto the sill but doesn’t take the short jump to the ground below, instead staring at the swirling snow before looking back at Occtis.
“Well?”
Occtis isn’t at all surprised when Pin just whines again, jumping back to the floor. When Occtis closes the window and turns, Pin is sitting in Occtis’s chair, and he does not move when Occtis walks over to him. A few flourishes could send Pin back to the dimensional pocket Occtis has made for him, but that won’t solve the problem, will it? Pin will just come back, in minutes or hours, and the process will repeat, if not this night then the next.
“All right,” Occtis says, reaching down to pick Pin up and moving back towards the bed, because that’s clearly where Pin wants him. “Let’s figure this out.”
Pin yips, not in distress but excitement, doing a happy, full body wiggle as Occtis sits down on the bed, sitting in Occtis’s lap and looking up at him with his button eyes, ears perked up.
When you have a problem, math or spellwork or even your love life, try explaining it to your familiar, the Familiar Studies professor had told their class. Not because your familiar will offer advice, unless you have a familiar that is capable of speech, but because trying to explain your problem to someone else might offer you new perspective.
Surely the logic still held when the problem involved your familiar.
“You are an intelligent creature,” Occtis begins. “You understand that I am different. That I am not— alive any longer. Your behavior has changed to reflect this.”
Pin doesn’t nod, not unless Occtis’s consciousness is in him and he’s trying to communicate with someone like Vaelus or Thaisha, but he tilts his head, ears still forward, listening.
“You no longer worry at me when I do not join in meals with the the others, so I feel it’s safe to say that you understand that, like you, I do not need to eat or drink.”
Pin’s ears flick, but he otherwise does not move.
“I have explained that I no longer need to sleep, a concept you should be familiar with, since you also do not sleep, and I am much more like you now. So that must mean there is another reason that you keep herding me towards the bed as you used to. Do you just want me to take a break from work? And why have you stopped going out at night? Is it related?” Occtis keeps speaking, feeling ideas beginning to connect. “Thaisha thinks you might be stressed. What do we do when we’re stressed? Distract ourselves. Fall back on comforting routines. I write and do my experiments, but you no longer go out exploring during the time I would have been sleeping, even though you clearly seem to want to—”
I wish I could just slip my senses into Pin and fall asleep watching him explore and play like I used to. The thought that he had expressed to Thaisha comes back to him. A routine Occtis missed. Isn’t it reasonable to think that Pin might miss it too? He looks down at Pin, into the purple buttons of his eyes that can not express emotion, yet still seem so deep.
“Pin, do you miss me being with you when you go exploring?”
Pin’s jaw relaxes into something that very much looks like a smile seconds before he stretches to lick Occtis’s face with his cold, dry tongue. Occtis just chuckles, touching his forehead to Pin’s and holding him close. “It seems so obvious now that I said it.”
Pin yips, possibly in agreement as he wiggles out of Occtis’s arms and leaps off the bed, turning in a circle before going back over to the window and looking back at Occtis expectantly, turning in another excited circle when Occtis walks over and opens the window.
“I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” Occtis promises. This time, Pin doesn’t hesitate to leap out of the window and into the fluffy white snow below.
“Um, you probably heard some of that,” Occtis says, remembering that Vaelus had told him that she’s aware of her surroundings even when deep in trance, and that sometimes conversations do make it through. Which means she had possibly also heard his anxiety episode with Thaisha earlier, which is embarrassing. “I’m going for a walk with Pin, so if I’m unresponsive when you— ‘wake up’, that’s why. So don’t worry about me.”
It’s only the work of a few moments for Occtis to pull off his boots and lay down on the bed. Closing his eyes, he reaches for his thread of connection with Pin (in his mind’s eye it’s the same purple as Pin’s buttons) and sends his mind down along it.
The world is white though Pin’s eyes, the snow he leaps through shining as if touched by moonlight, though the sky is dark. There are occasional hints of color as Pin gives brief glances to other things, snow covered trees with deep green veins glowing under their trunks and along their roots. There are other, smaller, more concentrated areas of a lighter green in the branches of some of these trees, birds maybe, or nesting squirrels. Occtis doesn’t know if Pin’s way of seeing is unique among familiars, it hadn’t been too long after making Pin that he had found himself traveling with Thaisha, whose bond with her animal companion seemed similar on the surface, but was entirely different in practice.
Pin yips and barks, the sound echoing as he rolls around in snow that Occtis cannot feel. Occtis doesn’t direct Pin’s movements, just takes things as they come. After awhile it starts to feel like a dream, or at least how dreams used to feel, stimulus happening without his conscious thought. In what feels far away, Occtis senses muscles in his body relax, and only in relaxing does he realize how tense they had been.
Occtis remembers what it was like, that first night he had slipped himself into Pin when he had been too restless to sleep, nervous about an upcoming exam. How putting his senses into a body not his own had been a novel and pleasant distraction from his own anxiety, eventually allowing him to sleep. All those nights when he’d watch Pin run through the Penteveral’s familiar walkways, sometimes playing with other familiars. The night Pin had gone into the woods and encountered the “big dog” that had turned out to be Wulferic. So many things the two of them had seen together. How could Occtis not have realized what Pin had wanted before now?
Was I so focused on what I lost that I couldn’t see what I still had? The thought interrupts the calm that Occtis had been feeling, like a stone cast into a pond. Pin, I’m sorry.
The telepathic bond between a wizard and their familiar is only supposed to go one way. But Pin hadn’t started as a familiar, and the spells Occtis had used to bind him had involved some of his own blood. Maybe that’s why, rarely, Occtis gets something back from Pin. Not actual words, but feelings, colors, even scents that Occtis’s mind tries to translate into something he can understand.
(Fluffy white cold sharp air smell) snow (blood bones alive not alive gentle hands gentle voice needle thread purple green) Maker (fluffy white cold sharp wood green grass red fur white fur shadow darkness sewn together sewn Together) with me (jump bounce leap yip hands in fur lay on lap lay on chest) happy happy happy—
It’s the same shock every time. That moment as a child when he had realized that Thimble liked playing with him, that they were friends. Thaisha calling him back from the Path with so much grief and love in her voice that Occtis had turned around. Pin, who Occtis had made from scraps and bits to be one thing and then shaped again into another, who has demonstrated over and over that he cares about Occtis, does so again. Pin doesn’t need an apology from him. He’s here now, with Occtis, and because Occtis is here he is happy.
I’m happy too, Occtis thinks at Pin as the undead fox runs and leaps, yipping in sheer joy as he bites at the falling snow, and lets himself relax into the moment. Being here with you.
————
Pin is digging in the snow (good smell dig dig dig) when Occtis feels a hand on his shoulder. Immediately he is back fully in his body, blinking up at Vaelus, momentarily disoriented by the sudden change in vision.
“Hello,” Vaelus says softly. “It’s almost morning.”
“I—” Occtis blinks again and yes, there is the faintest hint of light outside the window. “I lost track of time.”
“You were having fun.” Her voice holds a hidden smile, and above her veil her eyes crinkle slightly at the corners. “I was watching for a little while. Out the window.”
“Oh?” Occtis sits up, stretching muscles that have gone stiff. He feels— good. Not physically rested, that feeling might be beyond him now, but mentally refreshed. He’d always slept better before, for riding in Pin’s mind until he had fallen asleep. He had thought that was because he had gotten a good night’s sleep, but maybe there’s something else to it, some sort of restorative effect that doesn’t require sleep at all. He should make some notes, maybe—
“I thought about joining you, but it seemed important that the two of you spend time together without anyone else,” Vaelus continues, gently nudging Occtis out of the beginnings of a research spiral. Not everything had to become a project. Maybe this could just be, at least for a little while.
“Thank you.” Occtis walks over to the window, smiling slightly when he sees the tracks in the snow leading off into the near distance. He can just see the tiniest flash of red beginning to bound closer. “Maybe some other night? I’d want to set up some sort of protection for the room if you aren’t going to be in it. But I can ask. Or you can. I think he’d like that.”
“Maybe I will.” The smile remains in Vaelus’s voice, and there it is again, the reminder of a concept that Occtis keeps needing to wrap his head around. Vaelus cares about him too. “I’m glad you figured out what what he wanted. What you needed. Routine can be a comfort in times of stress.” A pause. “Or grief.”
Occtis stares out the window, his mind trying to form a question in a way that won’t be taken wrong, second guessing himself that what Vaelus had just said had been an invitation to ask what routines comforted her. By the time he turns around, she is gone, having slipped soundlessly from the room, probably to get some breakfast. Occtis has just enough time to feel intensely awkward before Pin scratches at the window, fur completely covered in snow.
“Now, don’t shake off, just let me—” Occtis says as he opens the window, hand half raised in the cleaning variant of prestidigitation, only to have Pin immediately launch himself at his chest, yipping with joy as Occtis catches him, staggering back slightly. Occtis barely feels the cold, wet snow as he finds himself chuckling.
“Is it my fault that you’re a ridiculous creature, or is that all you?” Occtis teases, and gets a cold tongue to the face for his trouble. He finds he can’t stop smiling as he looks down into Pin’s button eyes. “I feel better. Did you know that would help me? Or was that just a side effect? No, don’t answer that,” Occtis says, as if Pin could. “It made you happy. That would have been enough for me, I think. But thank you, either way.”
Pin jumps down from Occtis arms and immediately shakes snow everywhere. All Occtis can do is laugh, for the first time in a week not even noting how many bodily processes go into such a joyful sound.
— — —
Another night, another inn. Occtis is writing down his thoughts on the room (full marks for the large table, minus a point for only having one chair) when he feels a tug on his pants leg. He smiles, looking down at Pin. “Yes, I know. I didn’t forget.” He reaches down to scratch Pin behind the ears. “I can’t stay out all night this time, all right? As much as I’d like to, I still have things to work on that I can’t do while we’re out on the road.”
Pin stomps his forefeet but leans into the ear scritch.
“Going out?” Vaelus asks, looking up from the book she’d been reading on the bed. She keeps getting romance novels from somewhere, possibly from Thaisha. “Can I— if you don’t mind, that is?”
Occtis tilts his head towards Pin. “It’s all right with me, but you’ll have to ask him.”
Vaelus puts her book aside and hunkers down next to Pin. “Pin, would it be all right if I accompanied the two of you outside for a time?”
Pin yips and turns in a circle before running to the window. Vaelus looks up at Occtis as she stands. “Was that a yes?”
“Yes.” Occtis reaches into a pocket of his coat and pulls out a spool of silver wire and a small, bone handled bell. “I think he would have licked your face if not for the veil.”
“I am sorry Pin, I cannot break my vows, as tempted as I am,” Vaelus says dryly, her eyes smiling as she opens the window. “After you,” she says with a grand sweep of her arm.
Pin gives a joyous bark as he leaps out the window.
“Give me two minutes,” Occtis says.
“Of course.” Vaelus’s exit is much quieter, Occtis can barely hear her feet landing in the snow. When he goes to close the window, he’s just in time to see Vaelus throw a snowball for Pin to chase after.
It’s the work of a minute to ward the room to alert him to intruders, then another minute to take off his boots and get comfortable on the bed. When he closes his eyes, his body already beginning to relax in anticipation, it’s with a smile.