There are alot of painful things in ep 23 of trogun 98 but i just noticed (cuz I literally don't rewatch this episode ever) how much it fucking hurts to have wolfwood avoid vash after we have seen how direct he usually is for a long time.
He is such a no nonsense, "say it to my face" guy and when vash says it to his face he just can't take it. Wolfwood has learned how to deal with the guilt but when vash asks "did it have to be this way" its too much. The whole episode is about him running from that hypothetical
Tagging @castielamigos-whump-side-blog, @iwhumpyou, @doglover82; @top-hat-aye; See the tags for the rest of my work with these characters.
Illiam cursed loudly and slammed to his feet, making the things on his workroom table clatter. He whirled, and threw the book he’d been holding at the far wall with an inarticulate noise of rage.
Helis yelped, flinched, arms flying up to protect their head.
“It just isn’t making any fucking sense!” Illiam snarled into the room at large, voice echoing back from the stone walls. “There is an answer! I know there is!” He kicked his chair aside, his hands carding through his hair in frustration.
Helis, pressed into the far corner of the room, uncurled a little from their protective ball. They looked cautiously at the book, which had fallen to the floor a foot away in a sad little heap, a few creamy pages knocked loose.
The two of them had been in this chill, sparse workroom for what felt like an eternity. Illiam had shut himself in here as soon as the last of the castle’s guests had gone, and taken Helis with him. He had been sighing heavily and making increasingly frustrated noises over his work for the last hour, but his outburst had taken them by surprise, knocking them out of their haze of miserable boredom and hunger.
Illiam’s gaze went from the offending book, to Helis, and back. He dropped his hands away from his hair and straightened.
“What are you looking at?” he demanded, a touch of colour rising in his face. “Did I ask you? Did I? No, shut up, why don’t you make yourself useful for once and… and get that, will you? Do I have to do everything around here? Ugh.”
He knocked his pen aside with one furious sweep of his hand, sending it spinning across the table and onto the floor. Then he turned his back to Helis and leaned over the worktable, head dropped, tension evident in the line of his shoulders.
Helis crept to the book and picked it up, straightening its battered spine. A few pages fell out as she did so, skidding softly a few feet across the chill stone floor.
It was his notebook, they realised – fabric cover worn from use and stained at the edges, its width swollen with all the extra pages and charts tucked into it. The pages that had fallen out were covered in forceful, elegant handwriting and neat diagrams.
They chased the stray pages across the floor, one by one, conscious at every second of Illiam’s looming presence at the other end of the room. There was no way to tell where the pages were supposed to go in the book, so they held them separately. They caught a few words on one of them, what looked like a calculation of force and power – and then snatched their gaze away. Helis didn’t even like other people reading their things, Illiam certainly wouldn’t.
They looked over their shoulder, fearfully. Illiam was still leaning over the table. Still filling the room with the force of his ire, almost palpable, making the feathers on Helis’ back try to rise up under their clothes.
They edged closer, closer, until they could lay the abused notebook and its handful of loose pages a few inches from Illiam’s splayed hand on the table
He didn’t react, and they beat a hasty retreat back to their corner.
I wonder what it is that’s giving him trouble, they thought, watching him pull the notebook towards him, and then change his mind and shove it away with a growled curse. The spell’s not working out, that much is obvious.
A tiny, rebellious part of Helis wanted to ask him: Is this the spell that you’re confident will open the pass, then? The one you, how did the duke put it? You have it in hand?
Doesn’t look like you have it in hand.
Well, good.
“What time is it?” Illiam demanded suddenly.
“Past midnight,” Helis said, hoping none of her thoughts showed on her face. They had been in here since mid-morning. Illiam had said he wasn’t to be disturbed and she supposed the castle stuff knew to take him at his word, because she hadn’t seen or heard another soul since.
His head came up, and he frowned across the room at them, his voice like the cracking of ice. “What? Really?”
“Um. Yes.”
As if to punctuate Helis’ words, their stomach growled. They winced and folded their arms over their abdomen, as if that would stop it from happening again, or stop Illiam from hearing it. Since they followed him everywhere, Helis ate when Illiam did.
Or didn’t, as the case might be.
Illiam muttered a few more curses to himself, and stood up straight. As if he’d suddenly realised that he had been seated for hours, he grimaced, rolled his shoulders and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, loosened the tie on his hair.
He glanced up at Helis, and his expression of annoyance deepened.
“I can’t think with you in here,” he snapped. “Go away.”
Helis caught their breath. Go away? Yes, please, anything to get me out of this room with you. But… the castle was so big, and confusing, and everybody in it seemed to despise Helis. Where would they go?
They nodded anyway, and started to circle around Illiam and his worktable, heading for the door.
They were almost out, reaching for the door handle, when Illiam spoke again in a low mutter. “Go to… I don’t know, go to the kitchens or something and tell them I said to feed you.”
Helis almost smiled in surprise and relief; they felt a spark of something like gratitude. Followed by another, stronger wave of resentment. Why should I be grateful for that?
They hesitated. “Should I – do you want –” They dithered for a moment. Illiam hadn’t eaten all day either, and he apparently didn’t plan to now. And that was his own fault, but they wouldn’t put it past him to be angry at them for not being a mind-reader. “Should I bring you back something? From the kitchens? If someone’s up I could…”
He gave a wordless exclamation of anger. “I told you to go, and yet I still hear you prattling at me! Get out!” He hit something, maybe the table; Helis didn’t turn to see. They wrenched the door open and fled.
They slowed down once they reached the end of the corridor. They paused, leaned against the wall, and pressed a hand to their chest to feel their heartrate slowing.
He had always been like this, they remembered, dully. Once he got absorbed in something he forgot that things like food and sleep existed. Nobody at the Academy had ever managed to break him of the habit; to be honest, Helis had probably been the only one who’d ever bothered about it.
Well, they wouldn’t now. Fine, they thought defiantly. You’re an idiot. Much progress you’ll make on your oh-so-great project if you can’t think straight from exhaustion, and when it all falls to pieces around you it’ll be your own stupid fault.
So you can starve yourself to death for all I care.
~
“Illiam!”
The young man walking underneath Helis stopped and looked around, blinking like a man coming out of a deep daydream. Afternoon sunlight shone through the wide open doors that lead out into the Academy grounds, and a handful of students wandered through the foyer. Illiam turned to look behind him, and then back with a nonplussed expression, obviously wondering where the voice had come from.
Helis giggled, on their tiptoes, leaning almost dangerously far over the railing of the mezzanine as they waved to him. “No, Illiam, up here!”
He tipped his head up with a little start and saw them. He looked, if anything, more puzzled, but he raised one half-hearted hand in greeting.
“Er… yes? What is it?”
Helis grinned down at him, awash with pent-up energy and relief. “How do you think you went on the exam?”
“Uh… decent, I think,” he admitted. He hesitated, and then as if remembering that he was supposed to, turned to face them better and look up at them. “And yourself?”
“Yeah, good!” Helis agreed. They tipped forward further, spreading their wings for balance, one foot almost in the air. “That last question was unbelievable, I’m going to fail that one for sure! But I think I did well enough on the rest to make up for it!”
A smile broke over Illiam’s normally serious face, tipped up to them. “It wasn’t so bad,” he said, the words coming quicker now. “Just a little unorthodox. I’m sure if you put something down you’ll get part marks. What got me was the fifth one, up until I realised what the question was actually asking. You Southerners and your ass-backwards energy notation...”
Helis made a face. “Explain it to me later. Where are you going now in such a rush, anyway? Do you have plans now?”
“Um, more study,” he reminded them. “We have another exam tomorrow.”
Helis shook their head. They didn’t know how he could jump right back into the books; they knew they couldn’t. They were abuzz with nervous energy, needing to be around other people and dissect the last exam before they could put it aside to focus on tomorrow’s. “I meant for lunch.”
He looked blank.
“You know. That thing where you eat food in the middle of the day,” Helis prompted. “Sometimes with other people? Any plans for that?”
They saw him weigh his book-bag in one hand, soft expensive-looking leather. He shifted it to hang from one shoulder, and adjusted his coat to sit better under it. “Ah… just… study,” he said.
Helis frowned down at him. They folded their arms on the polished wood of the railing, wings settling, claws dropping back down to the ground. “Illiam, it’s been a long time since breakfast, that was a big exam. I’m going to that place on the corner with Kit and Remy before we head home, and I was seeing if anyone else wanted to come! You did eat breakfast, didn’t you?” they added, suspiciously.
He tilted his head. “Yes, I… I definitely… had coffee.”
“Coffee!” Helis squawked. “Illiam, you need to eat real food!”
“I do,” he said defensively. “I will.”
“No you won’t, you’re going to head back to your rooms to study and drink coffee,” Helis said, disgusted. “Coffee is not lunch. You need to come and eat something with us!”
He glanced around the foyer, as if thinking Helis had to be addressing one of the other students wandering through the sandstone halls. “I – don’t – I – that’s, uh, hmm, of you but I don’t think I have the time. Thank you, but I can’t.”
“Come and explain the last question to me,” Helis wheedled. “Over lunch. It’ll only take a little while.”
He almost smiled, sweeping a hand through his hair and hissing in a breath past his teeth. “Maybe later. Thank you, but I should be reviewing my notes on inanimate trigger materials, I really don’t have them down and it’s going to take…”
“Oh, I have a chart,” Helis said brightly. They bounced on their toes again, leaning over the railing. “Joss gave it to me and it’s really good, I’ll loan it to you. If you come to lunch.”
“I…” He looked up at them, and finally let his shoulders drop in defeat. “All right. I can spare... half an hour, I suppose?”
“It’s a deal,” Helis said. She put her clawed foot in one of the wrought-iron curls of the railing, boosted herself up onto the top of it, and jumped, pale wings spread wide.
Illiam stepped back as they landed, holding his book bag between them; almost as if he was scared they’d land on him or hit him with their wings.
“I wouldn’t get you,” they said cheerfully as they folded their wings and patted their own bag where it lay across their chest. They had the chart they’d promised in there, didn’t they? Yes, they’d put it in this morning.
He gave a terse nod, and then a careful, polite smile.
“Let’s go, then! Remy and Kit are meeting us there!” Helis said, forging ahead. “So. This unorthodox question. What exactly do you think it meant by ‘shift the gradient’, because…”
“Oh, that,” he said, falling in beside them. “I’ll draw you a diagram, but in essence…”
His long stride keeping up with Helis easily, they walked out together into the open green space of the grounds.
Helis, Illiam and their other friends ended up spending a chaotic, productive, laughing few hours in the café on the corner, while the tolerant owner brought them refills of tea and coffee, magical ingredient charts, papers and crumbs spread over two of the tables, and regardless of what Illiam had said about half an hour, he made no noises about needing to leave.
Can anyone rec chanbaek twitters (who aren’t too delusional)? I’m trying to be more active on twitter since tumblr is now a hotter (???) dumpster fire shit show
