Elle Writes - Glad you gave it a go :) Seer's are useful when they have Binds, just not as useful. Generally it goes: Seer without Bind can foresee a war and how to prevent it, but the same Seer when he gets his Bind can foresee a war, but not who it's against, when it will happen, and if it will happen for sure. Though that premonition, and the strength of it (also whether or not he can decipher the premonition, they can be finicky) depend on the submission of the Bind. More will come on how seeing the future works when people actually start seeing the future in the story.
Pikeebo - The information on magic, magick, majic, majik, and magicka was entirely made up. Though in my experience, with other stories and lores, people generally use "magick" when they mean the supernatural uncontrollable type stuff, and anything spelt with a J is usually just when people want to differentiate themselves from the usual magic literature. Magicka is so rarely used, but usually a combination of "I want to be different" and "This magic is a bit more alive and uncontrollable". Again, that's just what I've noticed in my reading, and may not be true in all books/real life. Basically, grab a wand and shoot stuff with it = magic. Feel like you're invisible then actually turn invisible = magick. Use a rainstick and it rains = majic. A rainstick comes to life and beats you up during a drought = majik. Use a rainstick during a flood and spontaneously combust = magicka.
Primary Mission: Make him not hate me
Heero
Wufei woke us up with breakfast, and before my Little One woke I told him of the change in circumstances.
"So soon? I was hoping he might be grateful for the rescue for a few days," Wufei muttered. "What did he say to you that makes you so sure he hates you already?"
"His version of a 'Sleep well' was 'I'm done with you now, shut up and let me sleep, if you don't I'll scream until I throw up'," I clarified. "That and the 'Fuck off and die'."
"What did you do to upset him that much?" Wufei asked incredulously.
I shrugged, completely unaware.
"I gave him a pair of shorts?" I said.
My movement, and the voices, seemed to have woken him up. "I can hear you," he informed me through what sounded like gritted teeth. "That's a problem. Fix it, or I start screaming."
Wufei's eyes were wide open in shock. The timid little thing from earlier was hard to reconcile with this new, angry monster. "God," he breathed out.
My Little One mistook it for me, and the screaming began.
It shocked me off the bed. Even Wufei was clearly freaked out. His screaming was absolutely terrifying, even to two grown men.
It was only after he stopped, and we both cleared out of the room, that we realised what had just happened.
He could project, and he could throw his voice. He was about ten times louder than a normal person and he could make it sound like it was coming from one direction, then another, then another.
"He's a fucking banshee!" Wufei whispered frantically at me once we were in the hall. A whole bunch of people then showed up, peeking at us curiously, even though Little One had quietened.
"You've brought a goddamn banshee's wrath down upon us!" Wufei accused me in a whisper.
"How am I supposed to help it?" I whispered back.
"Well," came Relena's voice from down the hall. "I take it all back, he's clearly an Amraki priest," she said. "They teach them that in choirs."
"Be quiet!" I shushed her. "He's only screaming to block out the sound of my voice, if he hears you he might mistake it for me and start up again."
She stared at me in shock for a moment. "He'd rather hear that," she nodded to the wall of the hall that shared with my room, "than hear your voice?" she questioned.
"Apparently so," Wufei whispered.
Relena gave me the saddest, sweetest look. "And you have such an adorable voice," she said sadly. "I'd listen to you speak any day of the year."
"It's not you that needs to listen to me," I said quietly. "I need him to calm down. How am I supposed to give him breakfast if he won't listen to me or look at me?"
"He won't look at you either?" Wufei said incredulously. "God, it's like it's a different person in there."
"Best check on him to make sure he's okay," Relena said quietly. "He sounds quite unstable."
I had been standing with my head next to the wall, listening for just that, but in my stupidity I had forgotten that I was no longer ahead of everyone else. I wouldn't be able to stop anything I heard before it happened, because I would hear it when it happened, not before. I turned tail and stalked purposefully back into the room.
My Little One lay quietly snuggled back into the blankets, curled up with his arm over his face. I walked to him wordlessly to check on him. He would move his arm only to childishly poke his tongue out at me.
I bit back the urge to say "Don't be like that", honestly fearful of what he would do if I said anything, let alone if I dared to tell him how to act. Wufei picked up the broth he'd gotten for Little One's breakfast and handed it to me, giving me an expression that clearly stated 'Good luck'.
I sighed. The best course of action was to give it to him and let him deal with it himself. He clearly didn't need to be handfed again.
I sat tenderly next to him on the bed, and gingerly placed the bowl down near him on the bed, keeping it steady with one hand while I shooed the others out.
He had his back to me, so I placed the bowl near his face, hoping he might smell it. No such luck, not with his arm still over his face.
I took his wrist in my hand, and tried to gently guide it to the bowl, but he was having none of that either, keeping that arm firmly locked over his face. I could have forced it, but the last thing I wanted to do was hurt him, or scare him with a display of force that would remind him how weak he was.
His fingers had curled into a fist.
Stuck with inspiration, I took the spoon from the bowl, licked the broth off it so it wouldn't drip onto the bed, and wedged the handle into his fist.
This clearly confused the hell out of him, and he used his thumb to try to figure out what the little wooden utensil was, and then he seemed to get it. I guided his arm over to where the bowl was, off his face, and touched his fingers to the edge of it. He still wouldn't open his eyes, the set of his jaw the same.
He fingered the bowl, and moved to prop himself up on his elbows to get to it.
Yes, that's it, I thought. Perfect. Smell it, get hungry, eat. There's plenty more where that came from.
He sniffed it, and then I saw through the curtain of his hair that he opened his eyes and looked at it.
"Oh," he said. "Thanks."
I breathed a sigh of relief. I was about to tell him that it was okay, when he grabbed the side of the clay bowl and yanked it over, smashing it and hot broth into my arm.
He laughed. He laughed.
Wufei burst back into the room, and I realised that the agony of hot liquid and shards of clay in my arm had made me yell out.
Meanwhile, Little One cackled maniacally, his eyes tightly shut, but honest and true happiness on his face. He rejoiced in causing me physical pain.
WuFei cleaned up my right arm. The bowl had broken, broth was all over the bed, but Little One fell back to sleep after that, with a smile on his face.
I'd unleashed a monster.
"Maybe the drunk had a good reason for keeping him locked up down there," Wufei mumbled angrily, as he wiped a wet cloth down my arm, trying to make sure there were no fragments of bowl in my skin anymore.
"Don't say that," I whispered. "No one could deserve that."
Wufei grumbled again. "I don't mean to pry, but it took months before Quatre decided to hurt Trowa. What are you going to do?"
I shook my head. "I have no idea," I said sincerely. "But it won't involve letting him feed himself again."
Wufei snorted in a most ungainly fashion. "I should hope not," he said.
I sighed. "We have to get him off the bed," I said. "Feed him breakfast, change the sheets. Might as well try to wash his hair while he's out of bed. And then I have to figure out how to make him stop hating me. By tomorrow night, I have to have him ready to get in a wagon the next morning and leave with us calmly and quietly. That's the plan."
"Tomorrow noon," Wufei corrected. "We're telling them we'll leave the morning after tomorrow, but if we can go faster, we should. The King needs you, and the longer we stay put, the easier you are to assassinate and he is to snatch."
"It doesn't matter which one of us they assassinate or which one they snatch," I said. "Assassinate me, he's worthless. Assassinate him, I'm worthless. Snatch me, I'm worthless until I'm back with him. Snatch him, I'm worthless until I'm back with him."
Wufei grunted. "True. Just that they normally don't bother kidnapping Seers." Wufei cast a sidelong glance to the sleeping lump on my bed. "Seers have loyalty. Even if you got them with their Seerbound they wouldn't betray their King. Plus it's hard to kidnap a person who sees things one second before they happen. I've heard of that incident where you caught an arrow in mid-air."
That was not actually what happened. The people had glorified it in their retellings. I had actually reached out to catch the arrow, missed, and gotten shot in the forearm. However, it is important to note that I missed because I am a bad catch, not because I didn't see it coming.
I sighed. "It doesn't matter. Neither of us will get snatched or assassinated. We're going home. I just have to find a way to make this work. He just has to be better than Quatre. That's what we need. Better than Quatre at the absolute minimal."
The day progressed in a similar fashion to the morning. I tried to help him stand up, so as to walk him over to a chair. He kicked and flailed out out me sightlessly and I ended up having to forcefully grab him, haul him over my shoulder and deposit him down, after which he appeared very, very dizzy, put his head in his hands and simply sat quietly in the morning sun, as the doctor had prescribed.
We had more broth made for him. When I tried to spoon it into his mouth he burst out laughing. "Seriously?" he said, in hysterics. "I'd rather starve to death than spend a moment longer with you. I thought you would have gotten that after this morning. Clearly, you're a moron!"
I let him skip it, as he seemed to have much more energy now, not nearly as deathly sick as before.
The one thing he wouldn't part with, however, was Wufei's empty waterskin. "No," he said, when I tried to pry it from his hands, just to refill it. "I'll scream again," he threatened. In the end, he only parted with it because Relena donated hers to him as well, which let us create a swapping routine. He would only release the empty one if a full one was placed into his hands.
He refused to open his eyes, and the moment anyone spoke within hearing range he loudly threatened to yell, or came up with some sort of creative insult.
By lunchtime, we were all exhausted, I was emotionally drained, and my arm hurt from the morning's violence. He had kicked me in the side and that hurt too.
I knew I had to force-feed him. At least he was drinking, though, and drinking well. He loved water. I would have sworn he must have been part fish. While he wasn't drinking from whichever one of his bottles was full, he would be holding it close to him in his arms like a revered pet. I was envious of the darn things.
In the end we decided that the essence of surprise was the only way to do it. Wufei and I stalked up to his armchair in the sun, Wufei grabbed his wrists, and I put the broth - this time bottled for this task - to his lips, forced it in and waited. He screamed. He screamed and screamed and screamed. I was certain I was going to go deaf.
Eventually the screaming turned into crying and he tried to beg me to stop.
"Please, let me go," he said. "Just let me die," he begged me.
I started crying at that point. Wufei could see me, but my Little One still hadn't opened his eyes to look at me.
I have always prided myself on being strong. I held the bottle to his lips and refused to let him have his way.
By the time he grudgingly accepted any of it, it was nearly dinnertime, and his entire face was wet with tears, snot, and broth he'd tried to get out of his mouth. Once we'd forced a whole meal's worth into him, and we'd had to go through five bottles to do so, as he kept spitting it back out at me, we finally let him go.
He curled up into himself and sobbed. "I hate you," he said. "I hate you so much."
At the time, I did too.
He sobbed while the innkeeper and one of the men brought a tub into the room, to give him a better bath. He cried while it was filled. He didn't even fight me when I took off his trunks to put him in the bath. He just cried harder. I couldn't undo the knot he'd put in the tie, but it didn't matter, they ended up simply pulling off him easily enough. He kept crying when I wordlessly picked him up and placed him into the warm water.
The tub engulfed his miserable form, and it upset me.
I wondered for a moment how to get the top of his head wet when he solved that problem for me, though I wasn't grateful. He scooted himself to the foot of the tub, thrust himself backwards, slipped out of my grip and under the water. I yanked him up as fast as I could, and he coughed and spluttered crazily.
He'd inhaled under the water. He really, really wanted out. He was trying as hard as he possibly could to die.
After that, Wufei held him solidly by the arms while I washed and combed his hair as gently as I could. All the while he spoke mean things to us. He hated me, Wufei's mother was a whore, my breath smelled like the hole of a bitch, clearly I should get my face out of the dog's backside. The shampoo was bad, it smelled like piss, he would rather die filthy than have my hands in his hair. When Wufei suggested we should just cut it all off then he turned his face to him and screamed in his ear. I managed to keep my calm and put a hand over his mouth until he stopped. He bit it.
He never opened his eyes. I didn't know how he was doing it. Even as I thought about it, I couldn't keep my eyes shut without unconsciously opening them. How was he keeping that up, all day?
Tired and exhausted, but clean, we wrestled him out of the tub. Wufei held him as still as possible while I toweled him off as best I could. We managed to get the robe onto him, and then put him into the bed, which had gotten fresh sheets at some point.
He crawled under the sheets, and with one final, "I hate you", he went to sleep again.
I collapsed in the armchair he'd been in.
WuFei shook his head. "I'll check on dinner," he whispered to me, and then left me alone with my exhaustion and my monster.
A/N: Sorry. It had to be done.
