Show Me How to Get Off the Ground

The smell of smoke was burnt into his nose. When he tried to breathe, he felt something rattling around in his chest like a rock in a bucket. He wanted to cough to get it out, but he didn’t dare to cough, because… Because he needed to stay quiet. That was the last thing his Ama had told him… He’d be safe if he could stay quiet.

He was a big boy now, and because he was a big boy, he needed to help out with chores. He wanted to help his Ama. She worked so hard every day that sometimes she even fell asleep at weird times! Like in the middle of dinner, or when they were washing at the bath house, or while she was reading him a story.

Ama said he was a good helper, that he did a good job, and he was very proud of that. He worked hard because when his Ama wasn’t too tired at the end of the day, she would sing to him, and that was his favorite thing in the world. Even if the rest of his day was horrible, and adults threw things at him and nobody would play with him, at least he always had his Ama.

Ama’s breathing seemed awfully loud to him right now. The way she was wheezing made him nervous, but when it stopped suddenly he felt guilty for worrying about how loud it had been. It would be better if the nasty-sounding breathing came back… Ama being this quiet was much scarier.

She’s just trying to keep us safe, he thought. He didn’t want to ruin the good job his Ama was doing, so he hid his face in her apron and didn’t cry. Ama would wake up again soon. There was no reason to cry.

Suddenly he heard wet crunching noises nearby. It was the sound of sloppy eating. He looked up and saw shaggy creatures hunched all around him, and they were biting and tearing into something on the ground. He forgot all about being quiet as he scrambled to his feet, and began to yell and make as much noise as he could, picking up rocks and throwing them to try and scare the things away from his Ama.

There were bodies everywhere, scattered around the village square like a bunch of dolls a giant had gotten bored of. The creatures were wandering between them, snapping and hissing at each other as they fought over the fresh meat. Meat… No, they were people. People that he knew.

Mr. Yadav, the baker was missing his legs. Where had they gone? It didn’t make sense that a man’s legs would just be gone like that. The top half of his body was propped up against a wall and he almost looked like he was sleeping. The tavern-keeper Mr. Batsa’s head was busted open like a rotten melon, which made it hard to tell that it was him, but he was the only man in the village with a big mustache like that. Two creatures were fighting over Ms. Rani the seamstress, who was laying on the ground with her arms stretched wide apart. They were tugging and pulling her insides out, and it was unraveling just like the ribbons she kept in her shop. He felt sick in his belly, and it seemed like somewhere far away, someone was crying.

It was him, he was the one crying. He was the only person left alive. He wanted to hide his face against Ama’s colorful apron and stop looking. Why? Why was this happening? Was it because of him?

The things hunched over the bodies lifted their heads from wet flesh, and they stared at him with human faces, blood smeared everywhere, tongues lolling. Animals, you could chase off by yelling and throwing rocks. He didn’t know what they were, but they weren’t animals, and they weren’t afraid of him. They licked their lips as they turned their attention from the corpses and towards him.

He stumbled away from them, and tripped and fell, getting caught up in his ama’s arms. They were cold instead of warm like they were supposed to be.

“Why didn’t you stay quiet?” Ama asked him, sobbing. Her face was burnt, her nose and eyes and lips were gone. What came out of her eyes wasn’t tears but some nasty mix of rot and wetness. He didn’t want to see her like this but he couldn’t look away. “Please don’t leave me, babu, you’re all I have--”

“OW! Holy shit man, it’s just me!” Lycion shouted, backing away from Kabru’s bed rapidly, a hand clasped over his bleeding face. Kabru’s heart was pounding, and his fist hurt.

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he apologized with a groan as he sat up, trying to get his bearings. He was in his dorm room, he was still in his sleep clothes in his bed…

“If you’re really sorry, heal my nose,” Lycion demanded, sitting down on the edge of Kabru’s bed. After a quick evaluation, Kabru cast a healing spell that made Lycion hiss with discomfort, but set his broken nose back where it was supposed to be, and sucked the blood smeared on his hand and face back into the skin. “You were yelling in your sleep again, so I wanted to wake you up.”

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hit you.”

“Next time I’ll get a broom and poke you from five feet away,” Lycion said with a grumble. “Anyway you slept through your alarm. It’s almost 11.”

“Shit. Okay. Thanks man, sorry again.” That meant Kabru had missed his discussion group...But he could still make it to his next class if he hurried.

Kabru stumbled his way through his morning routine without really paying any attention to it. Nightmares were nothing new, most of them were like this, jumbled, unfortunately vivid memories mixed together with an overwhelming feeling of anxiety. There was always a nagging sense that he’d done something wrong, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t make it better. Thankfully, the older he got the less frequent the nightmares became.

Sometimes the nightmares were about the local militia men that used to come through Utaya and harass the villagers into giving them food and money. Sometimes they were about the elven soldiers that had eventually taken him to the refugee camp. In the dreams, sometimes his foster mother Milsiril was there when the bombs hit, and sometimes Kabru dreamt that she killed his mother, and then stole him away. Then the memories of his early days at her house got muddied with his time at the refugee camp.

And of course, sometimes the nightmares were about his mother’s final moments alive, and the monsters that had come up out of the dungeon and swarmed the village after the bombs stopped falling.

They were awful things to dream about, and any night when Kabru couldn’t remember his dreams was a good one.

---

Kabru had a flexible meal plan, so usually he ate at one of the student dining halls, but if he had to get something to eat elsewhere it wasn’t a big deal. He only paid for the meals he actually ate, so while the flexible plan cost a little more per meal, it was worth it to Kabru to not have to worry about whether he made it to the dining hall three times every day. Some days he just didn’t have the time.

Kabru was very money-conscious, but the only way he’d be able to eat cheaper than a school meal plan would have been cooking his own food and living off of inexpensive things like beans and rice. However, he also knew how important it was to eat proper, nutritious meals that included protein and vegetables too. He’d gone hungry often enough as a child to know what it did to you… So with his grueling class schedule and lack of cooking knowledge, Kabru knew the meal plan was his best bet.

On days like this when he was running late (which happened more often than Kabru would have liked), having a bowl of cereal from one of the communal boxes in the dormitory kitchen was the best he could do for breakfast. Thankfully he usually managed to get something more substantial for lunch and dinner, but even so, he’d been losing weight ever since he got to Earthdigger, and he knew it was thanks to his bad eating habits.

When Kabru got downstairs, Fleki and Lycion were on the big sectional couch in the common area next to the kitchen, watching music videos on the telly.

Rather than studying, Lycion and Fleki spent most of their time getting high and loafing around together, and right now they had a box of sugary cereal propped up between them, and Lycion was taking sips from a glass of milk between handfuls of dry cereal directly from the box.

“You want some?” Lycion asked as Kabru walked past them, no doubt guessing that a bowl of cereal was in Kabru’s near future, and apparently no longer mad at him for punching him in the face.

“No, you know I prefer to eat cereal for adults,” Kabru replied, which made Lycion laugh.

“What’s wrong with Dobby-O’s?”

“It’s nothing but sugar and empty carbs,” Kabru said, opening the pantry and grabbing a box of boring, but healthy oat bran with nuts and raisins in it.

“You’ve got an eating disorder, man,” Lycion said, which Kabru thought was deeply ironic considering Lycion regularly skipped eating, and Kabru had caught him purging after meals on more than one occasion. He didn’t know exactly what Lycion’s problems were, but there was certainly something wrong, and Kabru didn’t need a diploma to see it.

Sometimes, Kabru felt like he should make a bigger effort to help Lycion sort himself out, but despite sharing a room and having fucked a couple of times, Lycion was still an inscrutable mystery to him. The elf seemed friendly and happy-go-lucky on the surface, but the longer Kabru knew him the more he realized that Lycion didn’t actually let anyone get close to him, and that the other man was profoundly unhappy. Why? Kabru had no idea.

Fleki was the only person that might know, but despite her otherwise loud and boisterous attitude, she kept Lycion’s secrets to herself. They were an odd pair, solitary and private for elves, close to each other and no one else. Kabru thought of them as his friends, but only in a very distant way.

In all fairness, it wasn’t as if Kabru was an open book to them either. He liked them, enjoyed their company casually, but he never really sought them out or shared his own troubles with them. They just lived in the same dorm as him and so they were a part of his life. Like a lot of his friends here, they probably wouldn’t keep in touch once they all left Earthdigger…

“I just eat healthy and enjoy working out,” Kabru said, filling a bowl with cereal, and then topping it with milk. “Nothing disordered about that.”

“Gods, you sound like one of those stupid elven diet commercials,” Fleki said, her tone dripping with disgust. She put on the nasal voice she always adopted when she was trying to mock the accent of upper-class elves. “You too can be a size -1 if you just replace two meals a day with a single bite of Lembas-brand meal replacement biscuits! Give us a try dah-ling, it really works!”

“That accent gets worse every time you do it,” Kabru said dryly as he returned to the living room and sat down to eat his cereal. Though he knew that Fleki wasn’t trying to make fun of him specifically, the Received Pronunciation accent she was imitating just happened to be how he talked. “You sound like a Vestran cowboy or something.”

Fleki and Lycion were both from the Southern continent, and their families had been part of the elven diaspora for a dozen generations. They had more in common with the dwarves of Sadena than they did with elves from the empire, and they’d never set foot in Maalinan, even though it was the homeland that all elves descended from.

“You just can’t handle the truth, old bean,” Fleki said with a laugh, her accent slipping from one side of the continent to the other, “Pip pip, cheerio, that’s what you sound like when you’re sucking up to somebody.”

“Or when he’s mad,” Lycion added.

“I don’t have time for you guys and your nonsense,” Kabru said with a sigh, and he continued eating his cereal. He could grab a cup of coffee to go on his way to class and he was considering which dining hall was the most convenient for that when his mobile buzzed. Glancing at it, he saw he had a new text message.

Kabru sighed as he set his mobile back down so he could finish his breakfast and think about how to reply. Rin was his oldest friend, they’d met when they were both at the children’s refugee camp. They’d kept in touch over the years, and she’d been the one to suggest he apply to Earthdigger when he started looking for a school to transfer to.

(The truth was, he was a little hung over, but not enough that anyone would notice, now that he’d applied some under-eye concealer and cast a detox spell on himself.)

Rin seemed convinced that they would be the perfect couple if Kabru would just give a relationship a chance, but no matter how Kabru tried he just wasn’t attracted to her that way. He felt guilty about it even though he knew logically that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and he struggled with telling her ‘no.’ He often went along with things he didn’t actually want to do just to keep the peace between them, which in turn led to her believing that he actually wanted to do those things, and then it made telling her no in the future even more difficult.

He’d felt attraction to girls that looked like Rin, acted like Rin. She was quick-witted and fun to talk to, they shared plenty of life experiences, and a lot of the things that mattered to Kabru mattered to her, too. He picked his mobile back up and used his thumb to type a one-fingered response while chewing on his high-fiber oat bran.

His life would be a lot simpler if he could fit into Rin’s fantasy where they were a power couple. Someone like Rin was probably what he should want in life, pretty, smart, a student with a bright future. She’d get a good job after school, and it would be easy to make a life and a family with her… All the normal things that people did as they got older.

But she never seemed happy with anything Kabru did and was always pushing him to change things about himself, from what he wore to the way he spoke or how he styled his hair. With how often she said ‘I told you so’, Kabru thought she must derive some kind of sadistic pleasure out of kicking him when he was feeling down.

This wasn't new: he remembered even as kids that Rin had been bossy. As teenagers it had been annoying, but now it was starting to feel unbearable. Sometimes Kabru wondered if Rin even really liked him anymore. It felt as if she liked the version of him that she’d made up in her head, and she was determined to bend and break him until he fit into that mold.

Not knowing how else to deal with the problem, he’d started avoiding her whenever he could, but he couldn’t get up the courage to actually talk to her about it. It would hurt her and he desperately didn’t want to strain their friendship more than it already was.

She was Rin after all. A little mean, a little bitchy, but she had always been his friend, and he couldn’t imagine a life without her in it.

---

Today they were going to do their first human-to-human mana transfer in class, Rin was going to partner with Kabru, and she needed to look perfect for it.

She sat her mobile down on the metal shelf beneath the public bathroom mirror and scrutinized her own reflection. The humidity outside was wreaking havoc on her hair, she had static flyaways and split ends sticking out in every direction, and she sighed with frustration as she ran her fingers through her loose hair, then switched for the small brush she always carried around in her school bag.

Kabru’d been impossible to reach all weekend, missed their informal Sunday study group, he’d been hungover during classes for the past two days, and now he’d missed this morning’s class, too. If Rin was right, he was probably hungover today too. Why? Kabru liked to drink, sure, but getting drunk wasn’t like him, and when he was drinking heavily, he always tried to confine it to the weekend.

His last text was still staring up at her unhelpfully from her mobile as she twisted her long hair into a neat bun at the nape of her neck.

In most of her medical classes, they were expected to wear scrubs with a simple hairstyle, and excessive jewelry or makeup were frowned on. So the only way you could make your appearance stand out was with the color of scrubs you picked (which was very limited), or with careful application of just the right amount of makeup and jewelry. Rin wasn’t really a fan of wearing makeup, but over the past couple of years she’d spent an embarrassing amount of time and money teaching herself how to use it. She was now a pro at contouring and could get her makeup done in thirty minutes most days.

But it just didn’t seem to be working the way she wanted. Sure, random people often complimented her appearance now, said she looked particularly nice sometimes, but it was never the one person that she was so desperately trying to get that attention from.

Kabru was playing the world’s longest and stupidest game of hard-to-get, and it was really starting to get on Rin’s nerves.

Rin knew that she was pretty, smart, hard-working, and a good person. She knew that Kabru liked girls…Okay, well, she knew that he didn’t dislike girls, though it did seem like he’d been doing nothing but sleep with old men lately. But she still caught him looking at other girls all the time, so… Why didn’t he ever look at her like that? What was she doing wrong?

When Rin had first arrived at the refugee camp, she hadn’t been able to talk, and refused to eat. The entire world had felt like an impenetrable gray fog, and the first thing she remembered outside of that fog was Kabru sitting by her cot, asking her what her favorite candy was. At the time he’d seemed unreal to her, the first tallman she’d seen since her parents had died, and somehow she’d been able to find her voice and answer him, and tell him that she liked sour candies.

A few days later Kabru brought her a lemon drop. Gods only know how he’d managed to find it, but he had. After that, they became best friends and were inseparable until the day that rich elf woman had shown up and taken Kabru away. It had been absolutely devastating for Rin, and she’d thrown endless tantrums about it. Not that the elves who ran the camp had cared. As far as they were concerned, any orphan they could adopt out was a good thing, it meant they had one less mouth to feed.

Rin had never gotten adopted. Had she been too much of a wreck for anyone to want her? Was there something wrong with her that adults had been able to immediately pick up on? Only the fact that the majority of orphaned refugees never got adopted either kept her from worrying about it too much. There were just too many of them and not enough people willing to take them in.

So while Kabru had been raised in the lap of luxury by a weird elven hermit, Rin had been a ward of the state. She’d spent most of her childhood in the refugee camp, until her good grades had gotten her out of that place and into a state-run boarding school for exceptional students. It hadn’t been a huge improvement, but because she’d moved to the capital city, she was eventually able to track Kabru down.

They’d become pen-pals at first, and e-mails from Kabru had often been the highlight of Rin’s life. Some of her most cherished memories were of the times they’d been able to meet up during high school… Even if the decade they’d spent apart had changed him a lot.

She definitely hadn’t been in love with Kabru back then. He acted exactly like all the arrogant elf kids they were surrounded by, even though he wasn’t one. All his friends were elves, and sometimes he seemed like an entirely different person from the little boy Rin remembered… Other times it was like she could still see some parts of the old Kabru and more than anything in the world she wanted to find a way to get that person back.

They turned you into this thing, but you’re a tallman, not an elf! It’s not like you’re really one of them. They’ll never accept you. Why can’t you see that?

Rin had gotten out of Maalinan as soon as she’d been able to secure a scholarship in another country. She’d begged and pleaded with Kabru to do the same, but he’d stubbornly insisted on enrolling at the Royal Medical Academy, believing that he could do what nobody had ever done before: graduate in less than fifty years.

Rin knew it was never going to work, and she’d told him over and over again that there was no way the elves were going to let him take an accelerated course. No matter how good Kabru was, the elves would never change how they did things just for him.

It took Kabru two years to finally get fed up with the Academy and admit that he’d been wrong, and Rin had done her best to not say I-told-you-so too many times. She’d helped him when he started looking for a non-elven university to transfer to, and of course had been absolutely thrilled when he eventually picked Earthdigger. It felt like Kabru had finally gotten tired of elves and all the bullshit that went with them, and she couldn’t have been happier.

That was when she first realized she was in love with him. She’d been so happy that he’d come to her for help, and it had felt so good, so right to be helping him… The current Kabru still needed improvement, he had bad habits and he was stubborn, but that was alright. Rin was up to the task.

She finished touching up her lipstick in the bathroom mirror before grabbing her bag and starting her trek from the library to the medical center’s teaching laboratories.

---

Earthdigger’s Medical Center was a huge complex made up of labs, classrooms and lecture halls for students, and a massive teaching hospital where research and real medical procedures were done by the teachers. The students watched and learned, and as they progressed through their studies they took on various tasks within the medical center as part of their training.

Rin wanted an extra caffeine hit before class, but food and drinks weren’t allowed in the laboratory, so anything she got, she’d have to finish before class started. She grabbed an iced coffee from a vending machine and sipped on it while taking a detour through the small dungonium nearby. Walking around in the dungonium would also give her a little mana boost, which was always good before this class.

Rin liked dungoniums, even this small one always felt very peaceful. She’d never been in a wild dungeon of course, but the artificial dungeons that hospitals used as mana banks never had anything more dangerous than small walking mushrooms in them, and they always had plenty of fresh air and sunlight. They were the perfect place to take a break, and all through the day you could always find students and teachers alike eating or drinking something out here, recharging before their next class or medical procedure.

Because the Earthdigger Medical Center was so large, there were actually three dungoniums spaced evenly through the facility, a large central one in the middle of all the operating rooms and the ER, and two smaller satellite dungoniums, one in the teaching wing, the other in the consultation wing where all the doctor’s offices were.

She spotted some of her classmates doing the same thing as her, but didn’t want to interact with them, so she turned down a different walking path to avoid them. It was Touden and Donato, and while Touden was fine, Donato was an elf and Rin preferred not to deal with her. In the time they’d been classmates together, she’d managed to only talk to Donato on a handful of occasions, and Rin considered that a victory, even if maybe it was a bit petty of her.

She just couldn’t help feeling suspicious of an elf. Why was she at a school like Earthdigger? There were so many other schools that catered to elves specifically, there were even some here in the eastern continent! Donato probably hadn’t been a good enough student to get into any of them and so she was slumming it here with the short-lived races. That was typically the only reason elves enrolled in Earthdigger.

Rin couldn’t understand why Touden spent all her time with Donato. It was probably because Touden was a total push-over, she just followed along with everything Donato did, and seemed like kind of an air-head. If the gossip she’d heard was true, they might even be dating… Ugh. It was a good thing Touden wasn’t a scholarship student like Rin and Kabru, or she would have for sure been expelled for low grades. Rin had heard Touden’s family had money, and that her parents were paying for her tuition, her rent, everything. Must be nice to live like that, not having to worry about your expenses at all.

It wasn’t even that Touden was totally incompetent. She was actually one of the best of them when it came to practical spellcasting classes, but her handwriting made chicken-scratch look downright calligraphic, and whenever she got called on to answer a theory question, her answers were so inarticulate and meandering that Rin thought she must be trying to bullshit her way to a right answer.

Probably she’d make a great small-town doctor that did most of her work with spells, and sent anything too complicated to a big city hospital. There was nothing wrong with that, plenty of doctors in the world who worked that way. That wasn’t what Rin wanted for herself, but that didn’t make it any less important.

But Rin didn’t want to think about Touden and Donato. She needed to calm down, center her mind, and get ready for class. The dungonium was good for that.

She practiced her mindful breathing techniques and tried to focus her attention on recalling the spells and formulas they’d need to use in class. She tried not to get too excited about partnering up with Kabru for the mana-transfer exercises they were going to be practicing.

She’d have to be quick, because left to his own devices Kabru always paired up with their kobold classmate, Kuro. Kabru was obviously doing it out of pity, because he knew nobody else would willingly partner with a kobold, but working with Kuro was certainly holding Kabru back. Kuro could barely even speak proper Common, and Kabru was constantly having to translate things into kobold for him.

Kabru needed to work with someone at his own level. Rin would have to jump in first and say she wanted to work with Kabru before either he or Kuro could say anything, making it too awkward and rude for Kabru to deny her. Maybe Touden would partner with Kuro. She was always talking about how much she loved animals.

---

Introduction to Mana Management was a foundational course for all medical students. Dr. and Dr. Floke had been teaching it for longer than Rin had been alive. They were a sweet gnomish couple that were strict but fair, and Rin really enjoyed learning from them. Mr. Floke was the no-nonsense curmudgeon that was always reminding them of the dangers of reckless mana usage, while Mrs. Floke was a sweet, grandmotherly woman that seemed naturally adept at encouraging people. Alone, either of them might not have been very effective as a professor, but as a team they balanced each other perfectly.

It was really something to aspire to, Rin thought, watching Kabru’s profile in her peripheral vision, playing absently with a lock of her own hair. If he noticed her watching him, he didn’t show it. Maybe someday the two of them could run a private medical practice together, and she felt her face heat at the thought.

Mrs. Floke was reviewing the material one last time, and reminding them of all the steps. Some of Rin’s classmates were still scribbling down notes, but she had already memorized the theory. They’d been practicing mana transfer spells with the dungonium since last year, and while that was an important first step in learning general mana control, and part of knowing how to work in a hospital where you could use the general mana pool instead of your personal mana, it was nothing like what they were learning now.

At the beginning of the school year they’d started practicing on animals, but this was going to be their first time giving and taking mana from another human being. It was an essential skill for a doctor to master, and good mana control made it possible to even operate on some of the sickest, or most grievously injured patients.

“The most important thing is to be aware of how you’re feeling during and after the transfer,” Mrs. Floke said. “And keep a close eye on your partner. Watch them for any sign of discomfort. The most common adverse reactions are headache, nausea and fainting. This can happen whether you’re giving or receiving mana. If your partner seems like they might faint, help them lay down on the floor until they recover. We’re only moving very small amounts of mana today, so nobody should get that ill unless there’s a Severe Mana Incompatibility, which is rare.”

“SMI is most common in mana transfer across races,” Mrs. Floke continued. “So try to partner up with someone of your own race if you can. Obviously in a medical emergency you may not have a choice about who you transfer mana with. When in doubt, do the transfer and worry about consequences later. You can treat mana toxicity, but you can’t treat being dead… Past a certain point.”

“Mana transfer isn’t always easy,” Mr. Floke said, his gruff voice a sharp contrast to his wife’s gentle tone. “Don’t let us fool you into thinking it’s effortless. We’ve been doing this for almost a hundred years, so it comes naturally. Be prepared for some discomfort, especially you,” he shot a pointed look at Kuro, whose ears shot straight up towards the ceiling in response. In her peripheral vision, Rin could see the kobold’s tail was tucked between the legs of his chair. He was probably nervous. “I’ve never had one of your kind in this class before, so we’ll see how it goes.”

“You’ve done well in all the other mana transfer skills, Mr. Yodan,” Mrs. Floke said, and Kuro’s ears relaxed. “So I think you’ll be alright, as long as you don’t partner with Ms. Donato or Ms. Moretti. You two will want to partner together, since mana incompatibility is most common between elves and other races.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the two elves replied in unison.

The Flokes concluded their safety lecture and gave the order for everyone to partner up and begin doing the exercises. Rin turned to Kabru and grabbed his wrist to catch his attention before anyone else (Kuro) could.

“Partner with me,” Rin said to Kabru, and he stared at her for a moment before replying.

“But Yodan--”

“Maybe he can partner with Touden,” Rin said, trying to make the suggestion sound casual.

“It okay,” Kuro said. “I ask Falin.”

“You sure?” Kabru asked, and it took all of Rin’s self control to keep a neutral expression plastered on her face. “I mean, Rin could work with Falin too.”

“Does Kuro want to work with me?” Touden asked, her face lit up with excitement exactly as Rin had anticipated. “Marcille’s working with Fionil so I need a new partner anyway.”

“Is okay? Really?” Kuro asked, ears flattening back against his skull, tail wagging timidly.

“Yeah! This’ll be fun!” Touden said.

“See? No problem,” Rin said, trying not to sound curt. “You don’t always have to babysit Kuro.”

“I’m not babysitting him,” Kabru said with a sigh. “It’s… nevermind. Good luck, Yodan! I know you can do it.”

“Thanks, I’ll work hard,” Kuro replied, making a thumbs-up gesture at Kabru. Rin had to take a deep breath and hold it to keep herself from yanking on her own hair in sheer impatience.

“Yes, yes, good, wonderful, you two can work together another time, it’s not like he’s moving away to another country,” she said in a huff.

“What’s gotten into you?” Kabru asked, looking either amused or perplexed, Rin couldn’t tell which. Rin felt her face reflexively twitch into a scowl.

“Nothing,” she snapped. “Let’s focus on doing the practice exercises.”

“Okay. Should I go first? I draw some mana from you, and then you take it back,” Kabru suggested.

“Okay,” Rin agreed, trying to sound nonchalant as they turned in their seats to face one another.

“First, we check our patient’s mana levels and distribution…” Kabru said, bringing his hands together in front of himself and creating a sighting diamond between his thumbs and forefingers. Though Kabru’s neatly written class notes were on the table next to them, he didn’t look at them. That wasn’t surprising to Rin, Kabru was one of the best students in their year, especially when it came to the theory stuff. Him and Donato were constantly trading places for who had the best grades.

“Alright, your mana looks normal,” Kabru concluded after peering at Rin through the circle of his fingers. He held out one of his hands and Rin counted to five in her head before reaching out to take it, not wanting to seem too desperate or eager.

Kabru’s hand felt warm and steady, and was big enough that it made Rin feel dainty in a way that she liked. Kabru was a bit of a gym rat, he liked to work out and lifted weights… He was no bodybuilder, but he had a good figure. So holding hands with him had Rin’s stomach tied up in knots, and she felt warm all the way down to the tips of her toes. Though they were only holding hands lightly, Kabru’s grip felt solid and reassuring, and she could feel the strength of him even like this.

Should she start going to the gym, she wondered. Maybe Kabru would like it if she did? Rin had never really had an interest in working out, she felt like studying was more important, but maybe… Oh, shit, Kabru was talking to her.

“You okay?” Kabru prompted, and Rin sat up straighter, tightening her grip on his hand.

“Y-yeah! Sorry, I got distracted,” she said, her cheeks feeling hot.

“I asked if you were ready to start,” Kabru repeated gently, and Rin nodded her head.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Practically speaking, sharing mana was just a part of being a healer, a useful tool for helping patients or aiding other spellcasters. But it was also potentially very intimate, in the same way that sharing blood or donating an organ was intimate. The only real difference was that mana wasn’t a physically tangible thing, it was the raw energy of life itself. It wasn’t the same thing as the soul, but the two things were closely tied together. Sharing mana with a stranger was always a bit awkward and embarrassing, but sharing mana with someone you liked…

Well, there was a reason that their mana-sharing teachers were a married couple. Being close to someone made freely sharing your mana much more comfortable.

“Feel anything yet?” Kabru asked, and Rin had to drag her wandering mind back to the task at hand.

“Oh, uh, yeah it’s sort of…” Rin frowned as she tried to focus on how her mana felt, a difficult thing to quantify even under normal circumstances. “Feels like… I’m using it for a spell, except I’m not casting anything.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No, just feels… Normal, I guess.”

Maybe it would feel different when she was drawing the mana. Getting it taken out probably felt the same no matter where the mana was going, whether another person was drawing it out of you, or if you were using it to cast a spell.

“What about you? How does it feel?” Rin asked.

“Uh… Fine,” Kabru said after a moment of silent thought. “Feels fine. Like when we drew from the frogs last week.”

Shouldn’t it feel different from that?! Rin worried, after all drawing mana from an animal had to be different from drawing from a person you had a close bond with. Shouldn’t it feel… special? Good? That’s what she’d always seen in books and movies.

“Let me cast something,” Kabru said, pulling his hand out of Rin’s grasp abruptly while she was still lost in thought. He cast a small light spell, and a glowing point appeared hovering in the air between them. It winked out of existence a moment later as Kabru quickly dispelled it. “Yeah, feels just like the last time. The mana that’s not mine feels… a little weird, but it doesn’t hurt. Uh…”

“Like a shirt that’s too tight?” Falin suggested. She was sitting at the table directly behind them with Kuro, and despite Mr. Floke’s earlier warnings, seemed to be having no trouble sharing mana with the kobold.

“Maybe not even too tight. It just doesn’t feel like it fits.” Kabru replied.

“Like a pair of shoes you still need to break in?”

“Yeah, that’s a good way to put it,” Kabru agreed.

Every comparison Falin and Kabru made was more unflattering than the last, and Rin felt like her stomach was trying to crawl up out of her windpipe.

“Your turn,” Kabru said, nudging her with his knee under the table. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay? You’ve been acting spacy ever since we started doing the exercises.”

“I-I’m fine,” Rin insisted, sitting up straighter. “I guess maybe I was just, uh, feeling a little nervous about today--”

“Aw, you’ve got no reason to be nervous, darling,” Kabru said, in a warm voice that made Rin feel like she was about to spontaneously combust. Darling was a term of endearment Kabru flung around recklessly at little old ladies, waitresses and sometimes even his friends. It made him sound extremely uncool, like a pensioner, but it never failed to make Rin feel flustered when he talked to her like that. “You’ve got fantastic mana control. Even old man Floke has complimented you on it. And you know getting a compliment out of him is like getting blood from a stone. You’ll do great.”

“Yeah! You’re right,” Rin said, forcing enthusiasm into her voice to try and hide everything else she was feeling. “Let me, uh, let me step out into the hall for a drink of water and then we’ll keep going.”

“Should I come with you?” Kabru asked, brow furrowing with concern. “I don’t want you to keel over and hit your head.”

“No no no, I’m good, I’m great,” Rin insisted, grabbing her water bottle and getting up at the same time, the metal feet of her chair scraping loudly across the linoleum floor. She beat a hasty retreat to the hallway and only stopped once she was outside of the classroom. She stood out there for several minutes, just breathing with her eyes closed. Eventually she took a sip of water, and braced herself to go back inside. I can do this, she told herself.

Rin heard the sound of a door opening nearby and she was surprised to see the teacher from the next classroom coming her way.

“Hello Dr. Sana,” she greeted politely. Dr. Sana taught advanced surgical techniques for students in the plastic surgery specialty, so Rin had never had a class with him, but since his class was next to theirs at the same time she knew his name.

“Hello, dear. May I?” he asked, and Rin realized he wanted to go into their classroom, so she stepped aside and opened the door for him. “Thank you.”

Rin followed Dr. Sana inside and returned to her seat, leaving the teachers to their conversation, though she couldn’t help but overhear some of it.

“Oh, hello Mohan,” Mrs. Floke greeted Dr. Sana. “Don’t you have a lecture right now?”

“I do,” Dr. Sana replied. “But all the white board markers in my room have gone missing again--”

“Let’s get back to it,” Rin said to Kabru, but much to her surprise, her partner was sinking down in his seat as far as he could go without slipping out of it, and had a slightly panicked expression on his face.

“What are you doing?” Rin asked, bewildered.

“Hiding,” Kabru whispered. They were sitting in the second row of tables, so the students sitting in front of them would at least partially obscure Kabru from view at the moment, but…

“Why?” Rin asked, still bewildered. “It’s just Dr. Sana. He teaches next door--” Her voice trailed off as Dr. Sana looked their way with what seemed like… Hostility? But why? Why would Dr. Sana be giving Kabru such a dirty look? How in the world would Kabru even know a teacher he didn’t have any classes with? Dr. Sana was an older man, well-regarded by everyone in the hospital. He was refined, well-spoken, and a bit handsome, now that Rin thought about it. She felt her stomach drop as she realized with horror that Kabru must have…

“Kabru!” she hissed at him, “He’s a teacher!”

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” Kabru hissed back at her. “Tell me when he leaves.”

---

“I still can’t believe you hooked up with a teacher,” Rin said while they were waiting at the student dining hall. The lunch rush always meant a long queue, and unfortunately for Kabru, that meant he’d been getting castigated by Rin for the past ten minutes.

“Oh please, like nobody’s ever done that before,” Kabru muttered. “He’s an adult, I’m an adult. Anyway, he hit on me, all I did was say yes.”

“He probably didn’t realize you were a student!”

“It happened at the campus library,” Kabru said sourly. “He asked me what classes I was taking, and if I’d considered specializing in plastic surgery before inviting me out for drinks.”

That shut Rin up for the moment, but Kabru could tell that she was still fuming and that she was probably going to keep scolding him later. They had finally reached the head of the queue, where they could order their food, and she just didn’t want to talk about the subject while they were within hearing range of the cafeteria staff.

“What can I get for yeh?” The middle-aged dwarf behind the counter asked. His name was Senshi and he was the manager and head cook of the Brandywine student dining hall, which was the one closest to the Medical Center. Kabru and his classmates ate lunch here almost every day. “We have yer favorite, lad! Shakshuka with lamb meatballs and flatbread.”

Kabru didn’t know much about Senshi because he rarely had a chance to just stand around and chat with him (the most memorable occasion had been when the deep fryer had needed to be cleaned and refilled, and Kabru had learned that Senshi was single, lived alone, and had a miniature golem for a pet), but the man was good at his job, passionate about nutrition, and seemed able to remember hundreds of people’s food preferences even if he didn’t always remember their names.

“Yeah, I’ll have the shakshuka,” Kabru said with delight. The disgusted face Rin was making gave him a little wave of schadenfreude, considering how mercilessly she’d been harranging him earlier. Shakshuka was Kabru’s favorite dish that the school served, and the only Vestran thing they made, but Rin wasn’t a fan.

“Yuck,” Rin muttered. “What are my other choices?”

“We have salmon filet with jasmine rice and roasted vegetables,” Senshi said, “And the vegetarian option today is roasted garlic cauliflower soup with sourdough bread.”

“I’ll just get a salad,” Rin started to say, at the same time Kabru said “You should get the fish.”

Rin was always under-eating, worrying about her weight, and Kabru tried to nudge her into eating more whenever he could. “It’s fish and rice and vegetables,” he said coaxingly, “It’s good for you. And I know you like the roasted vegetables they serve here.”

Rin frowned tightly, and spent a moment clearly deliberating on her choices before her internal debate was ended by her stomach growling loudly. “Fine, I’ll take the fish.”

“That’s a good lass!” Senshi said approvingly as he finished dishing up Kabru’s plate, and turned to prepare Rin’s. “Fish is fuel for the brain!”

They used their student ID tokens to pay for their meals, and joined the rest of their classmates where they were already eating at a table. Falin and Marcille were sharing the salmon and an extra salad, Holm and Fionil were both eating the vegetarian soup, and Yodan had gotten the shakshuka as well. He was very carefully spooning the tomato-based sauce into his muzzle to avoid staining his white fur with it.

Kabru had spent most of his time since his breakup on Friday alternating between drunk and hungover, so getting to eat shakshuka for lunch was the first nice thing to happen to him. He dug into his meal with gusto, ignoring the small headache that had been nagging at him ever since he’d done the mana transfer exercises with Rin. Hopefully it would fade soon.

“Well, whatever the circumstances were that got you involved with a teacher,” Rin said, picking up where she’d left off earlier, “I hope it was just a one-time thing.”

“It started at the beginning of last year,” Kabru replied, vindictively enjoying Rin’s aghast reaction. “Went all through the summer. Look, I already broke up with him, alright? That’s why he was scowling at me like that. I realized the relationship was a bad idea and I ended it. You’re right. That’s what you want to hear me say, isn’t it? You’re right.” He ended his little rant by shoving a meatball into his mouth.

Rin looked as taken aback as if Kabru had thrown his drink in her face. “Sorry,” she said quietly, and Kabru sighed in frustration.

“I just don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Kabru muttered. “It’s over and done with, so please leave it alone.”

“Okay,” Rin said, poking the fish on her plate with her fork and pushing it around before she committed to taking a bite. “...Thanks for making me get the salmon. You were right about that.”

Kabru managed to produce a little smile. “You should always eat something solid after mana class.”

They ate in companionable silence after that, and Kabru listened in on the conversations their tablemates were having.

“--Slimes in the elevator shaft, and the stairwell is infested with tentacles!” Marcille was in the middle of saying. “All the common areas are disgusting. As soon as my lease is up I’m getting a new apartment. One in a building that has a real dungonium, not just a courtyard with a pest control problem.”

“Where will you move?” Falin asked, her eyes wide behind her glasses.

“I don’t know,” Marcille huffed, “Hopefully somewhere closer to campus. If your brother would get his own place, I could move in with you...”

“Laios doesn’t make enough to afford that…”

“Didn’t you say he just got a job?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t pay that good.”

“I guess it’s better than being totally unemployed,” Marcille said with a sigh. “But I’m telling you, he’s never going to shape up if you keep babying him. He’s the older sibling! He should be taking care of you!”

“Well… I don’t want him to move out, I like sharing with him…” Falin said reluctantly.

Kabru had never met Falin’s brother, but he’d overheard enough to understand why Marcille had such a negative opinion of the guy. Laios Touden had followed his sister to Vakstran to get away from their parents, something Kabru could relate to, but after arriving, it sounded like all he did was get high and play video games. As far as Kabru knew, their parents didn’t know Laios was here, they sent Falin money every month to pay her bills, and the Touden siblings found some way to make that money stretch to cover two people.

Well, at least he had a job now, that was a step in the right direction. Falin seemed to like him, so maybe he wasn’t a bad guy, just going through a hard time.

“Where’s he working?” Kabru asked, both because he was curious and because he wanted to help Falin get out of the uncomfortable conversation she was stuck in with Marcille.

“Oh, I keep forgetting the name, but it’s a fast food place!” Falin replied, “There’s a clay oven for baking bread, it’s really spicy, they serve curry…” Falin’s gaze fell on Kabru for a long, pregnant moment, her brow creased in thought, before her face lit up in the triumph of recognition. “Oh! Korma Kitchen. That’s what it’s called.”

If it had been anyone else, Kabru would have been annoyed that looking at him was the trigger that prompted them to remember they were talking about ethnic food, but because it was Falin he wasn’t really bothered. Falin was a friendly person, but she was socially awkward and talking to people wasn’t her strong suit.

“Huh, I didn’t know there was a fast food place that served Sindhi cuisine,” Kabru said, genuinely surprised. He didn’t think of the food from his home region as something that was popular enough with the mainstream to have a fast food chain that featured it. When he’d been growing up, Sindhi food had always been an exotic specialty that was confined to ethnic ghettos and specialty grocers, you had to know where to look if you wanted to find it.

But apparently the times were changing. Sindhi culture as a whole had been growing more visible over the last decade, in no small part due to all the immigrants that had been forced out of Vestra by the numerous civil wars that had rocked the continent over the past 500 years.

Kabru didn’t eat out a lot, but maybe he’d have to check Korma Kitchen out sometime, just for the novelty of it.

“Laios told me all about it, the franchise started here in Sadena, but they’ve been branching out into other countries. He brought home some of the food after his first shift and I thought--”

Kabru let Falin’s cheerful babbling wash over him, half listening while he continued eating. Eventually everyone else sitting at their table began to pack up and leave as they finished their meals, until it was just Kabru and Rin left. They’d gotten their food last so of course they were the last to finish.

“Hey, do you remember what I was telling you about the school choir?” Rin asked, as they returned their trays and plates to the kitchen.

“Uh, yeah, you wanted me to audition for it…” Kabru said hesitantly. Rin had brought up the school choir no less than ten times since the school year had started. The choir was an extracurricular group of students that performed concerts several times a year, but it wasn’t a class and participants did it just for the sheer love of music. Members could be from any department, and musical experience wasn’t mandatory, as long as you could pass the audition you could get in.

“They’re holding auditions in the music classroom in two weeks. I’m going to go try out… You should come with me. If we both get in, we could be in the choir together. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Kabru was sure that, to a certain extent, it would be fun. He loved music, loved singing , but he hadn’t thought Rin was particularly interested in it. She never seemed to really enjoy herself when they went out to karaoke, but maybe he was wrong about that. Sometimes it was hard for him to tell when Rin was genuinely happy. With the way she kept pushing the choir idea on him, maybe she hoped that if they both joined, they would spend more time together.

Kabru wasn’t sure if he wanted to join the choir regardless of Rin’s motivations, because having to practice songs picked by somebody else, to perform them in public, sounded like way more stress than he wanted to add to his life. He already had so little free time and he didn’t want to sacrifice it to rehearsals where he had to do what someone else told him.

“I’ll think about it,” Kabru said, and he wondered how mad she’d be if he just didn’t show up, and claimed he’d forgotten. Or what if he turned up and blew the audition on purpose? No, she’d notice if he did that for sure, and then she’d probably take it as a personal insult…

---

The classroom for art history was a large, old-fashioned tiered auditorium with wooden pews dividing each row of seats. It reminded Mithrun of Etun, the boarding school he’d attended with Malthus when they were growing up.

As was usually the case, the back of the auditorium was quiet, dark, and never as chilly as the front, no matter how hard they were blasting the air conditioning to try and combat the heat outside. Even though he actually found art history extremely interesting and enjoyed the class, he didn’t want to run the risk of being called on to answer a question, or having to interact with any of his classmates. Better to sit in the back by himself.

But today, there was something more important than art history going on. Today he had his coffee date with the helpful tallman that had saved him last Friday.

Who was he? Why had he helped Mithrun? His memory of the time they’d spent together was fuzzy thanks to how sleep-deprived he’d been at the time. All he really knew was that they had a class together, Kabru was a medical student, he had a Maalinus accent, he’d been able to help Mithrun fall asleep, and he hadn’t taken advantage of the situation to rob or assault him. Kabru had even sent him a follow-up text message the next day, to make sure he was alright. It seemed like he was somebody who would go out of his way to help a stranger. Mithrun could use that.

All in all, he seemed like an unusual fellow. Of course Mithrun was curious, but more than that, he was desperate. He needed to find a long-term solution to his insomnia, and so far Kabru seemed like the best option available to him. He needed to figure out what he could offer the man in exchange.

Mithrun was pragmatic. If he could regularly get two or three nights of sleep a week, he’d be able to hold his life together. That was all he was hoping for, so he was certain he could find a way to make it work… He just needed to gather more information about Kabru before they started talking, so he could figure out his strategy for convincing him.

So Mithrun made sure to arrive thirty minutes early to art history class so he could lurk in the back seats and watch for Kabru. He didn’t know if the man usually showed up for class early, late, or just on time, so he made sure to give himself an abundant buffer.

He had a general sense of what Kabru looked like: Dark curly hair, brown skin, blue eyes, and an unusually soft and round face for a tallman male. He had bushy eyebrows, ears that stuck out on the sides a bit, and he was taller than Mithrun, but not exceptionally large for a tallman. Mithrun might have mistaken him for a local since darker skin and hair weren’t uncommon in Sadena, but Kabru’s accent had given him away.

Would the fact that Kabru was from Maalinus help him? Mithrun wasn’t sure. With how well-spoken Kabru had been, it was likely he had an upper-class education, so they had that in common. That would either make him easier to deal with or harder, depending on what sort of person Kabru was and his relationship to elven society.

Of course, since he was here, in Sadena… Odds were very likely that he didn’t care for elves or their society, and he’d gone as far away as he possibly could get from them. That was another possible point of leverage he could use.

After all, that was why Mithrun was here.

Students started filling the auditorium gradually, and eventually Mithrun spotted Kabru going down the stairs and taking a seat in the fifth row. He hadn’t looked around while going down the stairs, which suited Mithrun. It was easy to slip into the crowd of other students and make his way to an empty seat two rows behind Kabru. That was close enough to observe without being noticed.

He was surprised from the moment the other man opened his notebook: he was using traditional elvish script, rather than the simplified elvish alphabet other races used, and his handwriting was so immaculate that Mithrun could read it even from where he was sitting. But the thing that really caught Mithrun’s attention was the fact that Kabru’s highlighted, color-coded, bulleted lists and paragraphs looked exactly like an AEGIS mission brief.

Why the hell does it look like that? Mithrun wondered, feeling his face tighten into a grimace as his heart hammered against his ribs. The lecture was starting but the professor’s voice couldn’t penetrate the thick shell of anxiety that was suddenly suffocating him. His thoughts spun rapidly further and further away from him. Is he some kind of operative? AEGIS doesn’t accept non-elves into their ranks. What if he’s just an unusual-looking elf, and they gave him plastic surgery so he could pass as a tallman? Or he could be a halfbreed. AEGIS still takes them under special circumstances. Or what if he’s from the South? Usilan doesn’t have any standards, they use child soldiers, they’d use a tallman, or they’d mutilate an elf so they could pass for a tallman…

“--The royal academy of Khaka Brud, established in the year 750--” Something about the professor’s words punched through his spiraling thoughts, and suddenly he was able to breathe again. Royal academy. Right. Kabru had said something about studying at the Royal Medical Academy, hadn’t he?

If that was true, then of course he had great penmanship. Of course his notes were organized with military precision. It was the best medical school in the empire, they’d never accept a tallman unless he was an exceptional student.

Or it could just be a clever cover story, his mind whispered, and he had to take a deep breath to push it aside. It was unlikely that Kabru was some kind of spy, placed here at Earthdigger to… what? Entrap Mithrun? Assassinate him? No. That was pure paranoia and he needed to ignore that train of thought and instead focus on observing Kabru.

Neat handwriting. Good organizational skills. Studious. The notes Kabru took were succinct and used the same shorthand that Mithrun had been taught to use, but he didn’t necessarily take notes on the parts of the lecture that Mithrun might have. Kabru seemed most interested in the human element, the interpersonal drama between artists and society. A people-person, Mithrun thought, once again wondering how he could turn that to his advantage.

---

Unfortunately Mithrun had only been able to glean relatively obvious details about Kabru from watching him take notes, and now he regretted not running a background check on the tallman before class. He’d thought about it, and he’d had enough time to do it, but he’d refrained because it felt disproportionately invasive…Well, it was too late to worry about it now. He’d have to improvise with what he had.

The closest cafe to the history building was across the street, between the entrance to the arts building and a newstand. They’d agreed to meet there, so Mithrun ordered himself a caffeine-free fruit tea, and took a seat at one of the tables while he waited for Kabru.

Though he didn’t have anything he particularly wanted to look at on his mobile, he also didn’t want to give the impression of being overly invested in their meeting, so Mithrun kept his gaze down and did his best to project an aura of disinterest in his surroundings, even though he was still paying close attention.

A pair of tallman girls at a nearby table were talking too loudly, the sound of their voices jarring every time one of them suddenly spoke. The muted clattering of typing as a halfling worked diligently on his laptop. The murmur of people further away talking, the hiss of the milk foam being added to drinks, the gurgle of coffee makers, the bright tinkle of silverware and ceramic cups being handled. The distant, unintelligible purr of the radio under it all. It was a comfortable level of ambient noise, though Mithrun knew when he was sleep-deprived, he would find it infuriating and intolerable. Right now it felt…Cozy. He should try to come out to coffee shops more often. They would be a good place to do his weekly sketch assignments.

Footsteps, coming towards him with purpose, a bit of weight behind the tread. Probably Kabru.

“Hey, Mithrun,” The man said. There was an unoccupied rattan chair across from Mithrun at the table, and Kabru pulled it out and took a seat.

“Kabru,” Mithrun replied evenly, studying the man across from him. He’d missed a few spots while shaving, as there were stray hairs dotting his jaw and neck. Both the hair and Kabru’s skin were dark, so the strays blended in. Someone who wasn’t scrutinizing him probably wouldn’t notice at all. Though Kabru looked cheerful and alert, Mithrun could see a tightness between his eyes, and the hint of dark circles. Worried about something? Headache? Hangover?

Though to Mithrun the tallman’s discomfort was obvious, he could tell that it was only a minor inconvenience to Kabru. The man was just trying to get through the day and not broadcast how he felt to the whole world. He presented a good facade, and Mithrun could respect that. Keeping one's emotions and mental state private was a sign of good character. It suggested self-control and dignity.

“You’re looking a lot better! That’s great.” Kabru said.

“It’s all thanks to you. I’m sure you noticed, but I was in a very bad way when we met…”

“I did notice,” Kabru admitted, with a smile that was clearly meant to communicate that Mithrun shouldn’t worry about what Kabru had seen at his flat, that Kabru wasn’t going to use it against him.

“Why don’t you order yourself something? Anything you want, it’s my treat.”

“Well, since you insist…What about you?”

“Already ordered,” Mithrun said, handing Kabru his PBT.

“Okay, thanks. Be right back.”

Kabru went to the end of the queue by the cafe door, and Mithrun watched him interact with the other customers and the barista with interest, though he did his best to hide the fact that he was looking.

Kabru’s body language was friendly and open, and he smiled a lot. He had a slender build for a tallman, but he was muscular enough that it was obvious even though he wore loose-fitting medical scrubs. Despite the fact that he wasn’t very big for a tallman, he seemed enormous in both height and mass when standing next to a halfling or an elf. The way he moved showed a keen awareness of that largeness, as if he were used to being around smaller people. It reminded Mithrun of watching a big dog interacting with newborn kittens.

As Kabru exchanged pleasantries with the strangers around him in the queue, Mithrun could see the effect of Kabru’s attitude ripple outwards from him: People relaxed around the tallman, even from just a short exchange of a handful of words and a smile.

There was something odd about Kabru’s smiles though, and the longer Mithrun watched him the more noticeable it became. The tallman wasn’t smiling because he was happy, he was smiling to try and put the people around him at ease and make himself seem approachable… And even though Mithrun could tell he was doing it, he found the tactic was working on him as well. Normally he wasn’t affected by that sort of thing…

He’s got natural charisma, Mithrun thought. He’s good at handling people. That’s probably an asset for someone that wants to be a doctor.

Mithrun was used to people handling him, of course. Ever since he’d left the military, other elves were constantly trying to handle him, like he was an incompetent child in need of careful steering. They were horrified and disgusted by Mithrun’s appearance, uncomfortable because of his behavior, and usually they were trying to find a polite way out of any interaction with him as fast as possible. Talking with Kabru, being around Kabru didn’t feel like that, even though Kabru was also handling him. The tallman was good at it, Mithrun concluded. Better than all the people he’d personally dealt with until now.

Kabru rejoined him at the table a few minutes later, and slid Mithrun’s PBT across the table to him.

“I told them I was sitting with you, and they said they’d bring our orders out together,” Kabru said. “And you know, even though we met in a really strange way, I’m glad we did. I don’t like to think about what might have happened to you otherwise.”

“I would have wound up in the hospital,” Mithrun admitted, surprised by how easily the words left him. Normally admitting that he was weak and sick seemed unthinkable and nerve-wracking, but somehow he felt that Kabru wasn’t going to judge him. Or if he did judge him, he’d keep it to himself, and it wouldn’t get in the way of Kabru helping him. “...But as you can see, I made it through the weekend in one piece, and I’m doing much better now.”

“You are, I can tell,” Kabru agreed, smiling again. “So…I’m just really curious, please forgive me if I’m being too nosy,” Mithrun felt his ears perk up under his hair despite his best efforts to keep them limp and uncommunicative. “You said you were a spellcaster. What kind of magic do you specialize in?”

The question seemed innocent enough, and Mithrun couldn’t think of any good reason not to answer honestly. “Teleportation.” He could tell that the man was surprised by his answer.

“Teleportation? For… combat?”

“Yes,” Mithrun responded tersely, realizing his mistake too late. Though teleportation magic was innocuous on its own, Mithrun was probably one of the only people in the world that used it in combat. Of course Kabru would find that unusual, it was like telling someone that he was a licensed taxi driver, but that he used his taxi to kill people instead of driving them places.

But… Wait. How did Kabru know that he used his magic for combat anyway? He’d only told him that he was a licensed spellcaster. Not every soldier used their magic in combat. Not every soldier even saw combat.

“How do you know I use my spellcasting for combat?” Mithrun demanded. He could feel the muscles on his scalp tightening as his ears flattened against his head.

“Uh,” Kabru seemed taken off guard by Mithrun’s sharp response. “You were wearing an off-duty jacket? I saw the patches. That’s what they’re for, aren’t they? To tell people about who you are. I thought one of them looked like it was for combat magic.”

Even though Kabru’s answer was completely reasonable, Mithrun scowled at the other man. He felt in his gut that there was more to Kabru’s knowledge than just being observant. The tallman knew something more than what he was saying. Their conversation was interrupted by a barista dropping off their drinks, and a small plate of biscuits.

“Thank you,” Kabru told her, while Mithrun ignored the woman and kept his focus on Kabru.

“The jacket is yours, right?” Kabru asked once the barista was gone, picking up a biscuit and biting it in half. He waited until he’d chewed and swallowed before continuing to speak. “I noticed the name tag was missing, but you don’t seem like the type to buy it second-hand.”

“It’s mine,” Mithrun said grudgingly. Kabru didn’t seem to be taking him very seriously, and Mithrun found that irritating. “Okay, my turn. Who taught you to take notes like that?” he demanded, a little more aggressively than was polite.

“What do you mean?” Kabru asked, clearly puzzled.

“I saw your notes in class today. Very meticulous. That’s how they train us to take notes…” He paused for dramatic emphasis, looking at Kabru intently. “In the military.”

For a moment, Kabru stared at him with a blank expression, before bursting into laughter. Mithrun didn’t think anything about their conversation was particularly funny, so it was his turn to wear a blank expression and wait for Kabru to explain himself.

“My--” Kabru had to stop immediately to take a deep breath. He bit his lip to stop himself from laughing more. “Ah. My foster mother… She was in the Canaries. I grew up around a lot of elven soldiers.”

Mithrun felt as if he’d been stumbling around in the dark until now, jumping at shadows, and all of a sudden Kabru had turned on the lights. Now the things that had seemed like hidden traps and secret dangers were actually just familiar things that he was actually quite comfortable with. Kabru’s self control, the sense of ease Mithrun felt around him almost immediately, even though he was a stranger… No wonder talking to him felt like talking to one of his veteran friends, Kabru was a military brat.

“...That is pretty funny,” Mithrun admitted reticently. The relief he felt was intense and visceral, his muscles no longer felt so painfully tight, and his breathing evened out after a big sigh. “What’s her name? When did she get out?”

“She retired in 2496,” Kabru replied succinctly. “Milsiril of the House of Tol.”

“Milsiril!” Mithrun sat down his tea cup so fast that liquid sloshed over the rim and onto his fingers - it was hot enough to sting but he barely felt it. “You were raised by Milsiril?!”

“Whoah! Careful there," Kabru said, fumbling as he set down his glass, picked up a napkin and offered it to Mithrun. "Yes. Do you know her?”

“We were in the same unit,” Mithrun said, taking the napkin automatically, holding it without really processing what was in his hands. He was still trying to absorb the shock of this new information. He’d never been close to Milsiril, nobody had, but he remembered her gloomy, antisocial presence very well. How had she managed to raise someone who seemed as socially competent as Kabru? How had she ended up fostering a tallman child? The more he learned about Kabru, the less he knew, and the more questions he wanted to ask.

Before, he hadn’t really cared beyond what he needed to know in order to work out an arrangement between them, but now he was morbidly curious. Suddenly remembering the napkin in his hands, he blotted up the spilled tea from his saucer, and dried his hands off.

“I didn’t even know she’d retired. How did she end up adopting you? I had no idea she was interested in having a family.” Mithrun picked up his cup once more and had another sip of tea. It was a nice aromatic floral blend, and most importantly it was decaf. Avoiding caffeine didn’t necessarily help him sleep, but consuming it did make sleeping harder, so he’d cut it out of his diet decades ago.

“I don’t know about having a family, but she likes adopting children. She just keeps picking up more of us… I was the first one, but I think she’s got about twenty, now.”

“Twenty?!” Mithrun yelped, nearly dropping his tea cup this time, splashing himself once more.

“Careful!” Kabru said, but he seemed less worried this time, and more like he was trying hard not to laugh at Mithrun.

Elves didn’t typically have large families, and the Milsiril he remembered avoided socializing at all costs. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d heard her speak outside of a mission. The only thing he knew about her aside from the fact that she came from a respected military family, was that she liked to collect dolls. So when he tried to imagine her raising such a huge brood, all Mithrun could picture was Milsiril watching a playroom of children through one-way glass like they were zoo animals, while a fleet of uniformed servants did the actual child care.

He wondered if she liked to dress them up in costumes and play with their hair.

“Some of us are adults now, of course,” Kabru said, and though he was still smiling, now the expression looked forced. He’s spent his whole life explaining his unusual upbringing and Misiril’s eccentricities to people, Mithrun thought. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how tiring that must be. “The rest of them still live on the estate, but I managed to get out. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’m glad I left.”

“I’m sorry for bringing up something so…” Unpleasant? Painful? “...Personal?”

“It’s fine, I started it by asking about your time in the service,” Kabru replied magnanimously. “I’m sorry if that was too personal. My friends always tell me I’m nosy.” Kabru was smiling again, but this time the expression looked more genuine.

“It’s alright. Only natural for you to be curious after the way we met,” Mithrun said with a sigh, looking down at the table and contemplating his tea-covered hands and the sopping wet napkins next to his saucer. There was now more tea in the napkins and tablecloth than there was in his cup.

If he were alone, he might have tried to wring the tea out of the napkins and back into his cup, but he knew that was a little too gross and goblin-like to do in public, he still had some dignity left. He could order himself another tea, if they were going to continue talking, but maybe it would be best if he wrapped up this conversation and got to the point of why he’d called Kabru here in the first place.

A corner of something white intruded in his field of vision, and Mithrun looked up, startled to see Kabru offering him another napkin.

“I promise I won’t tell you anything else shocking,” Kabru said with a wry smile.

The joke was so unexpected and delivered with such sternness that Mithrun found himself laughing. He didn’t laugh very often these days, and it made him feel like a balloon that had suddenly had all the air let out of it. Even though they’d only been talking for a short amount of time, he felt exhausted… but also a little bit relieved of his constant, every-day tension.

“That’s okay,” Mithrun replied, matching Kabru’s tone, as he accepted the napkin from him and began blotting his drink from the table. “I don’t have any tea left to spill.”

“Oh, in that case: I disagree with the Queen’s stance on colonial self-determination,” Kabru replied with a mischievous smile. “I think we should have a 70% wealth tax on the rich, and health care should be free for everyone in the UE.”

Mithrun laughed again, but it was more of a quiet snigger than a full-on chortle. The joke was still funny, Kabru had rattled off three of the most fringe and divisive political opinions someone might have in Maalinan. That kind of thing got you branded a leftist nutjob, and laughed at on the evening news. It was clearly a punchline, and not necessarily an announcement of Kabru’s opinions, but… It made Mithrun suddenly very curious about what opinions the tallman might have.

“...You know, I, uh… I don’t necessarily agree with the Queen on everything either,” Mithrun said hesitantly, watching Kabru’s reaction for any sign of disapproval, or any hint of interest.

“Egads, man,” Kabru replied with a smile. “What are you, an anarchist? Is my life in danger? Should I call the police?”

“No, really, I mean it!” Mithrun said, trying to put more force and sincerity into his words, but they came out sounding hesitant and wishy-washy to his own ears. “I think… There’s a lot of problems with how things are, back home in Maalinan. That’s why I’m here. I couldn’t deal with it. I just needed to get away.”

As Mithrun continued speaking, Kabru’s jovial expression faded into something more somber. The tallman was nodding his head in agreement, and Mithrun felt relief flood through him.

“I know what you mean,” Kabru said, sounding grim and sympathetic. “I tried to make it work in the capital, going to the Royal Academy, but… The hostility was just too much… Uh,” Kabru smiled gamely. “Do you want another cup of tea, or something? I could go get you a refill--”

“No, no, that’s quite alright,” Mithrun said hastily. “I don’t want to keep you here all day, I’m sure you have someplace else you need to be--”

“Well,” Kabru glanced at his mobile briefly, “I do have to get to my next class soon--”

“Right, so uh, let me get to the point--” Kabru’s confused expression suggested that the tallman hadn’t realized that there was a point to their conversation, and that he was now curious to find out what it was. So Mithrun took a deep breath and got right down to it: “Could you come by my flat a couple of nights a week?”

Kabru’s blank, uncomprehending stare told Mithrun that maybe he’d jumped a bit too far between one thought and another, and left his conversational partner behind by not providing enough context.

“Erm, what I meant to say is, you really saved my skin last week… Insomnia is a chronic problem for me, and I need to find a long-term solution for it, and I thought maybe you’d be able to help me out.”

“Uh,” Kabru said, clearly surprised. “Well…”

“Of course I would compensate you somehow.” Mithrun blurted out, Kabru’s obvious hesitance causing Mithrun to descend into a sudden, intense panic.

“It’s not--”

“Anything you want, just name it.” Mithrun said, feeling like there was no room in his body for his lungs to move or his heart to beat. “Please!”

Kabru fell silent, and much to his frustration Mithrun found himself unable to guess what the tallman was thinking. Kabru was a blank slate, even to Mithrun’s well-honed observational skills.

“...Alright,” Kabru said eventually. “We can work out a schedule… There’s some nights I won’t be able to come--”

“That’s completely understandable!” Mithrun said, the sudden influx of hope pushing all the remaining air out of his chest and thinning his voice as he rushed to speak before he had time to inhale again. “A couple of nights a week is all I’m asking!”

“Okay. Do you want me to come tonight?”

Mithrun gave it serious thought for a moment. Malthus had only left the day before, so he was running on five days of decent sleep. If he wasn’t able to sleep tonight he’d be alright… But as Mithrun thought about lying awake all night staring at the dark ceiling of his bedroom until the sun rose, and feeling like a raw nerve the next day, greed overtook temperance and caution.

“Yes, please. I could buy you dinner? Just let me know what you want, and I’ll have it delivered.”

“Sure, that’d be nice. What time do you want me to come? Would 8 o’clock be okay?”