#terrykarim

[raayllum]

Claudia, you're changing, too. / But it's not too late to change, Claudia, please, I know you can change.

7x04 / 7x05

[raayllum]

"And you call them..." Karim eyes the pastry with haughty skepticism. "Jelly tarts?"

"Yes." Terry gives the proffered one in his hand a little shake. "They're quite tasty."

"Hm."

"Much better than prison food, anyway," he says more flatly.

Karim mulls over it for an impossibly long, stubborn second further, and then takes the tart and bites into it. A teeny one, chewing, but even he can't hide the way his big brown eyes light up, and the way his second bite is far more eager than the first.

His tasks of getting Karim to 1) eat and 2) eat a human food without insulting it finally done, Terry takes a relieved seat in the grass. It's warm out here in the rolling expanse of fields near where the rebuilt castle will sit over the ruins of the old. Opeli had mentioned it'd be a good place to take their prisoner, given that it's private and secluded but... nice.

A reward for good behaviour, even if Soren and Corvus both wearily report Karim is like a hissing cat in the dungeons more often than not, but he's not spewing fire at them anymore, so...

Karim sits down while chewing, bracelets around his wrists to keep his fire magic at bay, enshrined with anti-magic runes. A bird flies overhead.

It has been six months since he'd betrayed them at the Great Orb, and been carted home, unconscious and badly burned. His skin has healed. His heart less so.

"My child... they will be born any day now," Karim says just when Terry thinks he is not going to say anything at all.

"Oh?" he replies, stupidly. Of course Terry knows this already. He's seen Miyana, spoken with her, back in New and Lux Aurea. He knows she isn't just having one baby, but two.

"I wonder..." Karim falls silent.

You see, as she dies, all she can think about is her hatchlings, and how she has failed them. She would do anything to return to them, but she can't. And that is why she—

"We all have unfinished business," Terry murmurs. He looks away, and twists the grass between his fingers. "Things we don't know, or... regret."

"Is that why you sit with me, Terrestrius? Day after day?"

"I don't know." Terry haunches his shoulders. "Maybe." He pulls on the grass, but lets go before he snaps it. It wavers, bent, but not broken. "I want to believe you're capable of doing more than destroying things, Karim."

Like Claudia, maybe. And himself.

Karim huffs and looks away. "I destroyed nothing."

It's pointless to counter him directly, Terry has learned. "Maybe," he allows. "But you didn't build anything either."

The wind rustles the grass as silence laps at them like water on a calm day.

Eventually, Terry unfolds, and Karim draws his knees to his chest.

"You say there is a bakery where they make these?" he asks, taking another tart from the picnic basket between them. Terry nods. "Could you show me?"

Terry smiles ever so slightly, rising and brushing the dirt off his pants. "I'd be delighted to."

[raayllum]

"So... no heat being mode like your sister?" Terry asks at last, legs against the wall and back against the cool stone floor, actually glad to be in the dark of Karim's cell for once. It's cool here, shuttered away from the sweltering heat of Katolis above ground.

Karim wrinkles his nose, face barely visible from where he sits in shadow, Terry's torso in a patch of filtered sunlight that ends just above his collarbone. "That's what you call it? It is—but never mind. I doubt you could pronounce it properly."

"Try me."

For once, embarrassingly—or frustratingly—Karim is correct, which will do nothing for his already oversized ego. Cheeks heating, Terry puffs out a breath and looks away.

"Whatever. It's not like you can speak Os Vitis—"

"As though I'd want to speak a mere commoner's tongue?"

"And," Terry sits up properly and wags a finger at him, "you never actually answered my question, either."

Karim sits back, frowning. His calf brown eyes glint in the dark. "No. I was not... blessed, like my sister. Another gift she squandered."

"Maybe the gods knew you didn't deserve it," Terry says, flippantly frustrated the way he only is with Karim—who quite frankly, does deserve a sharp tongue more often not. "Though I can't think of an Earthblood elf who doesn't have prima formus..."

"Don't tell me you do?"

Terry knits together and then flexes his fingers. "Watch."

He hones in on the tiny sapling poking through a crack in the floor, confident. He's been practicing more, and just gotten better at it, too, the green light familiar as it fills his veins and vision. The magic channels through him easily, the connection warm and tingly.

It feels good to feel connected, these days. Reconnected.

The sapling grows and sprouts. A tiny blossom buds in the patch of sun.

Karim scoots closer, his knees encroaching on the rays. The shadows on his face lessen. "Hm." He considers the indigo petals, like for a moment he's seeing another flower—another seed of orange ombre light—before he sees what's truly in front of him. The corners of his mouth curve upwards, ever so slightly. A hand closes over his finger, twisting a phantom ring of sorts. "Blue flowers were my mother's favourite."

Terry nods towards the pitcher of water in the corner that Karim refuses to drink from, more days than not—a petulant child in protest of being kept alive, so angry he'd rather die than carry on existing.

In Terry's more honest and less ideal moments, Terry knows he knows what that feels like, too.

"You could help it grow, y'know," he suggests more gently.

He aids King Ezran in Katolis' new gardens sometimes, trimming hedges and growing trees, one just for Aaron and Sam and their nest. It feels good to help things grow and thrive, after everything.

Surely Karim isn't so far gone that he has no instinct or desire for that, either?

Karim considers, touching the flower's petal stems with a finger, the sunlight refracting in his fingernail. "Perhaps."

The next time Terry visits, the flower is in bloom.