Work Text:
Heart thudding loudly in his ears, Harry jolted awake. With a silent groan, he shook his dark hair out of his eyes, grimacing at how crusty they felt when he blinked them open. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but he must have while he was reading over his notes.
Now the question was how much time he had lost.
He was still in the lab at the table he tended to use for a desk, so no one had decided it had been too long and had seen fit to move him to his bedroom. But it was long enough that there was a blanket draped over his shoulders.
His nose twitched and he felt himself start to perk up as he caught the scent of cinnamon. When he lifted his head, he realized that his notes had been moved and a mug of cinnamon tea—with a cinnamon stick included—was where they had once been. Just beyond the tea was a plate of yellow rice, spiced with turmeric, ginger, white pepper, and cardamom. The aroma caused his stomach to growl and he rubbed a hand over his face, both to get the crust out of his eyes and out of realization that he had definitely skipped several meals.
Enough meals that he probably needed to take a break and go home for a few days, reassure his parentals that he wasn’t completely forgetting to take care of himself. They tended to give him some leeway, knowing from their own experiences that sometimes it was impossible to step away from a project or experiment at regular points, especially if the project or experiment in question were sensitive or volatile enough. But they also knew that research tended to suffer after a certain point in time and weren’t shy about enforcing breaks, to give the brain time to rest and recharge.
Harry was long past needing one of those breaks, and probably at the point where he needed to ask for help too.
Sitting up, he reached for the tea, using the cinnamon stick as a straw. He hummed as he realized it was on that edge of hot, but not being so blistering hot that it was impossible to drink. He hummed again, happier, when he caught sight of the refilling rune at the bottom of the mug.
A few minutes later, he set the mug aside as it refilled, turning his attention to the plate of spiced rice, and it was only then that he realized he wasn’t alone in his lab. Nnenne sat on the other side of the table, reading over his notes while she sipped on her own cup of tea.
She’d been there a while, he realized, considering she was more than halfway through the three-inch stack of notes. Long enough to be responsible for the blanket around his shoulders and to arrange for the meal and tea.
Considering that she was the first one he would have called on to help with this particular project, he didn’t say anything to interrupt her reading and instead focused on eating. She was still reading when he finished a few minutes later, and he couldn’t continue his research without his notes, so he gripped the blanket tighter around his shoulders and shuffled his way over to the small couch he kept in a sectioned off part of the lab to get some more rest. He was fairly sure that had been her plan all along, to read slow enough to ensure that he got some extra rest, because Nnenne’s schemes tended to be on the subtler side.
Sometimes, anyways.
It didn’t take much for him to drift off to sleep again, and he only stirred again when sunbeams from the rising sun angled just right to land across his eyes.
This time, when he sat up, Nnenne was stationed at her own worktable, a set of vials and ingredients lined neatly up in front of her.
“You’re off to a good start,” she told him as he rose to his feet and rolled his shoulders to stretch them out. “Especially for such a tricky poison.”
“You’ve come across it before?” he asked.
She sighed, but nodded. “And ran into the same issues. No antidote. No permanent solution. Even the extremes—tears, blood—were just temporary fixes. Lesson number one.”
“Despite popular belief, phoenix tears and blood cannot heal everything. Even with them, you will lose patients, encounter injuries, illnesses that you cannot heal,” Harry recited. “I know. But I still have to try. It’s … important. There’s…”
He struggled to put what he was feeling into words. There was a reason he was so driven to find an antidote that the idea had started to consume him the past few days, forced him to put aside his own needs, but it wasn’t one he could articulate.
He’d had clients, patients, with tricky, complicated issues before. He’d already learned lesson number one several years back. There were plenty of individuals he saw only one time, then never again.
It didn’t make sense why this particular case, that particular client had stuck in his mind so prominently, had made him so determined to attempt what so many others had concluded was impossible. Even Nnenne hadn’t been able to find or make an antidote—and he could tell from the look on her face that she’d definitely tried her hardest at the time.
She was one of the most renowned healers of their kind, so what chance did he have succeeding if she hadn’t been able to?
But like he said, he still had to try.
From the look on her face, though, Nnenne understood what he couldn’t put into words. She put down the vial she was examining and turned toward him, stepping closer to tuck a strand of dark hair behind his ear. “When it happens, no words are needed. You just know. Such things aren’t unique to dragels. And when it happens, nothing stands in your way. Not the end of the realms, not the end of time, not even Death herself.”
“Not even Death herself,” Harry agreed, a determined edge in his voice. “So you think it’s possible then?”
“Of course it’s possible. Just because a poison doesn’t have an antidote yet, that doesn’t mean it will never have one. When I came across it the first time, I was younger and there was only one of me back then. That’s not the case now. I’ve already sent Vitali to get my journals from the archives. When’s the follow-up?”
“I estimated a month. The appointment was around…” Harry quickly eyed the calendar on the wall. “Five days ago.”
“Then we’ve got time. Even if we don’t have it by then, we’ll have made some more progress. Let me do the lab work for the morning, run the tests you laid out in your last batch of notes. Go stretch your legs and run to the library, see what they’ve got on the poison and any attempts at creating an antidote. And get one of the Kalziks to do the same at the Healers’ Archives. And reach out to the other Healer clans from other elements to see if there’s any research that wasn’t submitted to the Archives.”
Harry pointed with his thumbs at a stack of books on a nearby table. “I already went to the library,” he said. “I even had help when I did.” And spent nearly an entire day there because the ones he had gone with hadn’t wanted to leave.
“At the very beginning, right? Go again, now that you’ve got more key words and data to expand the search.”
He waited, and was rewarded when Nnenne rolled her eyes. “Technically the orders I was given were to make sure you got out of the lab for a few hours,” she admitted. “Get some exercise, fresh air, all of that. Things you can still do on the way to the library. It’ll count.” She made a shooing motion with her hand, and Harry laughed.
“Don’t blow anything up,” he said as he fetched a cloak.
“Who do I look like? Kai?”
He laughed again as he headed out the door.
“And get some breakfast on your way there!”
“Will do!” he called back, because that would be easy enough. There was a shop with extra-large cinnamon rolls by the library, one where all the staff knew him by name. And to show his appreciation for Nnenne, he’d even get a dozen for them to split over the next few days.
Well, maybe two or three dozen, since Vitali would probably be arriving sometime around then. And because it probably wouldn’t take much for Kai to get involved either.
Harry had a feeling his lab was going to get loud as they worked on this latest project.