In which an eyelash in your eye is a nightmare when you got claws.
Tw for chapter 4 happenings, and the general way Cedric processes things that happen to him tbh.
Just like the river, the sea never comes up to meet him.
Crackling and tingling of a levitation spell around him, Wormwood is suspended in mid-air, hung by the scruff like a wolf pup. Am I dreaming? he finds himself wondering, once again, as he looks down at the limp floating of his own feet.
On the clifftop, out of the corner of his eye, he can espy someone standing. It is a slight figure, arms lifted and fingers arched as grabbing talons, shaking from head to toe with the effort of holding him up. Cedric, he thinks distantly.
The sorcerer tries to pull Wormwood up, falters, and finally resorts to hauling him back in one go. It's too hasty to aim, and in the blink of an eye the raven slams into the trunk of a bare apple tree.
Air knocked out of him, the kick of adrenaline still in his nerves and his neck aching from the whiplash, he feels the last leaves come fluttering down over his collapsed form as he lies there, face to the sky, taste of blood in his mouth, eyes closed. Guess I'm not dreaming.
In his foggy mind, the rival ravens are vultures, circling over him, waiting for him to die. And the carrion bird became the feast. He can hear quick, light steps in the grass, and the flutter of laboured breathing, hissing imprecations in a flurry. It is the drowned deer he met in the river, the night he ran away: it has come to feast upon his stricken body, rotten and dripping, in retaliation for all his cruelties. Wormwood coughs, lying in pain, head full of fog, tree roots digging into his back. He jolts when a hand brushes his.
"Wormwood," Cedric calls, in a breathless squeak. The hand ghosts over him, swatting a stray leaf from his brow, and goes to nudge his shoulder. He can feel it shake. All the raven can let out in answer is a vague grumble.
"What in the world were you trying to do?" Cedric hisses, right after a huge sigh of relief, still out of breath. "Honestly, can I leave for one moment without you getting in trouble?"
"Look at who's talking," Wormwood coughs out. He tongues the inside of his cheek, where his sharp teeth have nicked the flesh. "You sound like you've run a marathon."
He opens his eyes, and looks skywards; the trio of rivals has flown off, but their mocking caws still ring in Wormwood's ears, and for a moment he cannot speak. They'll be back, he knows. And he knows that somehow, it doesn't really matter; having come to the castle at all is enough offence, and one time is already too many.
"Alright, yes, we all agree I'm―a second rate good for nothing who can't save anyone," Cedric snaps, and Wormwood is not all the way sure he is, right then, talking to him. "So be careful, will you?"
Wormwood sighs. He's about to snark back, Was it a pleasant time, flying in good company? But then he looks over, and sees Cedric's face, and he's glad that for once he waited before letting his mouth run.
"What happened to you?" he says, pulling seated with a grunt, taking in how Cedric's hair sticks down to his temples with sweat. The sorcerer's face is a wan mask of anxiety, blotched red with more than the exertion still labouring his breath. A hand is pressed to his heaving chest, and the rim of his eyes is lined in red.
"Nothing," Cedric yelps, flinching like a startled cat. He lets out a sigh that is more of a sniffle, and rubs self-consciously at his face and neck. "A-actually, the endeavour has been a complete success! The village will be able to harvest soon and I... I've seen you did a good job here too, so the feast is saved, and―"
"Cedric," Wormwood interjects, and the alien sound of his own name in the raven's mouth seems to bring the rambling to a halt. Firm and quiet, the raven follows, "What did he do?"
"Who?" Cedric tries, fingers gripping and releasing his wand for a few moments. Wormwood just looks at him. In that hurried way of when he can't keep things bottled up anymore, the sorcerer finally caves in, "Oh, nothing new. Just... old memories came up."
Wormwood hums. "Not good ones, I take."
"Quite the―" Face buried in both hands, he sighs out, "Oh, Wormy, the worst ones. There, I said it."
"Oh? Oh," the raven gasps in disbelief, "but... has it not been ten years, already?"
Cedric frees a hand to splay it in vague helplessness. He glances up, between his fingers, catching the last of the departing flock.
"I didn't mean to slam you in the tree," he mutters, apologetic. "The weight caught me off guard, and I overcompensated my levitation spell."
"A very lousy rescue," Wormwood huffs, following the change of topic. He stretches his back with a few satisfying pops that make the sorcerer wince. "Almost like that time we both fell into the fountain."
A crinkly-eyed grin hides behind Cedric's hand at the memory. "I didn't mean to freeze you, that time," he says sheepishly. "I was aiming at the griffin."
"Aren't we a reckless lot." Wormwood huffs from his nose. "Thanks for catching me mid-air twice, regardless of outcome. A bird appreciates."
"You're... welcome." Cedric hesitates, something hanging unsaid. "Speaking of birds... I saw ravens from the coach window, earlier. Is that what you were trying to...? Do you miss flying?"
Wormwood feels his face twitch in revulsion. It's like he had asked him do you miss breathing air when they became sea creatures. He doesn't know what he misses. One of his eyes starts to itch uncomfortably.
"Just trying to keep pests out of my turf," he grumbles. A bit aggressively, he inquires, "How were you able to catch me with such impeccable timing? I thought you were busy in the village."
Cedric leans away, and in the split second it takes for his expressive face to change, the glimpse of hurt hardens in a frown. "I came looking for you, you bothersome bird." As his undercurrent of nerves takes over, his voice takes a slightly higher pitch, "I was finished by seven. I waited... but no one has seen you in hours."
For a moment, Wormwood cannot reply. He makes himself stare him in the face. It should be the eyes, but he cannot quite bear how red they are, and the burning chestnut of Cedric's offended stare. He fixes his gaze on the frown marring his pale forehead.
"The greenhouse just took longer than expected," he evades. "I was fine."
"Of course you were," Cedric snarks, glancing to the cliff and back to him. Seems that somehow, the King has managed to put both of them in an ugly mood. He draws in a sigh. "Anyway, let's have something to eat before someone else can come and drop some other task on us, shall we?"
The raven doesn't question why Cedric wants to eat out there. If he doesn't wish to go back to the castle yet, there must be a reason. Maybe he's avoiding Roland, Wormwood speculates. Cedric has been hidden away all these hours, who knows where, after reliving those bad memories...
When the raven thinks of what might have happened, he can feel something spear him through the stomach, a breed of jealousy entirely different from the one he felt towards Sofia. Something uglier and darker, that a creature much braver than him would be afraid to look in the face. So he doesn't. Maybe they've simply talked instead, he tells himself, and Roland has made Cedric upset some other way. There are many ways, after all.
Back against the tree trunk, he stretches out his legs, and watches in silence as Cedric conjures a tray ready from the kitchens, with a plain tea set and egg sandwiches―"I have kept myself busy, see?"―and he lets the worries float away from his mind for a moment, just for a moment. He still has the loquats with him, so he produces them from his sleeve, like offerings. Cedric lets out a high-pitched hum, snatching one immediately. Wormwood grins, and he wants to joke again, but the itch in his eye just won't go away. He rubs it with the heel of his hand.
"Something wrong?" Cedric asks after a while, swallowing the last bite of fruit and looking up, spoonful of tea leaves halfway to the steaming teapot.
"I don't know," the raven grumbles, cross with himself.
"Let me have a look," Cedric says, setting the spoon down, and scooting closer to him, kneeling on the brittle grass by his side. He cleans his fingertips on a dampened napkin. "Stop rubbing like that―if it's a splinter, you'll only make it worse."
"Wasn't the one to slam myself into a tree." Wormwood presses in with his knuckles, frustrated, and the shock of pain tears a yelp from him. Cedric has come to find him, even after the King made him upset, to share a meal with him and talk―and he'll ruin it, that precious fragile normality, with this stupid itch that is driving him mad...
Cedric lets out a noise of annoyance, a sort of disgruntled huff. "Well, you were the one to leap off a cliff―Wormy, what did I just say?" he chides, slapping his hand away. "Stop trying to claw your eyes out, will you?"
His hands cup Wormwood's face, and he's so close, kneeling right in front of him. Wormwood sees him through a wet blur now, gone still as though hit by a petrifying charm, his eye twitching. The fingers of Cedric's left hand shape to his face, carefully thumbing his lower eyelid down. It's instinctive to pull his head back, because Cedric's thumb is preventing him from blinking again, and the itch is intolerable.
"Oh, I see it." Sounding relieved, Cedric explains, "You still have your third eyelid, and you've got a lash trapped behind it."
Wormwood, who hasn't looked at himself too closely in a mirror since he assumed his new form, is suddenly overcome by a hideous mental image of what he must really look like. Through the pain and burning in his eye, he hears himself emit a low keen, and he feels a drop of something spill down his cheek.
"No, no, none of that," the sorcerer hushes him, and he wipes his cheek with a flick of his thumb that is almost impossibly, unbearably gentle. "You just have to hold still and trust me, alright? Steady."
"I'm trying," the raven grits out, straining not to balk.
He has learnt to apologize, and other things that would have seemed plain unnatural just a few days before. He has flown up a mountain on borrowed wings. He has learnt how to use an entirely new body in the span of a few days. And yet, the effort it takes him to put trust back in Cedric's hands, when he would have all reason to exact revenge on him in his moment of helplessness, proves to be almost superior to his strengths. He holds his breath, shaky hands clenching emptily.
Just like nail trimming, what feels like a daunting menace is over in an instant. It only takes a little nudge of Cedric's knuckle under his lower lid to let his haw swipe across by itself, and flick the lash onto the waterline of his eye, where the raven can still feel it tickle. Then, a brush with the side of Cedric's forefinger, as delicate as the kiss of a moth, and it's out. The itching eases, and the raven breathes again, shaking his head like a dog out of water.
"There, the wonders of a nictitating membrane! Here it is, the little rascal," Cedric says in satisfaction, lifting the eyelash to his eyes, as the raven rubs with the side of his hand, and blinks all his inhuman eyelids with purpose. They still feel wet. And hideous. "Well, not so little, I'd say, no wonder it was bothering you... Wormy?"
"It's... not stopping," the raven hears himself say, eyes trained on his open hands, watching the drops fall on them from both his eyes.
"Does it hurt still?" Starting to sound a bit worried, Cedric grabs the second damp napkin to put to his face, and let him wash up.
"You needn't mother me like this," Wormwood evades. He snatches the napkin, trying to wipe away the traces before Cedric can see, close as he is. Cedric pulls away at his harsh movement, and the raven bites down on his useless soft mouth until he hurts it. He wants to apologize, but his throat went so tight the words won't come out.
"Well, forgive me if I still worry about you, after I've cleaned bits of eggshell from your featherless snout," Cedric retorts petulantly, cleaning his hands again and crossing his arms. "You know, if you were feeling so independent, I wouldn't have stopped you."
Wormwood looks away. "I just... thought I could fly, for a moment," he sighs. Defensively, he adds, "Those ravens, they were taunting me."
Cedric blinks at him. "I didn't mean stopped from leaping off a cliff, Wormwood," he says, a bit tiredly. "I meant... well, from going your way and migrating, I suppose?"
"Ravens don't migrate," he says, also tiredly. Then it comes, he doesn't know why, "But I'd like to find it again, sometimes. The smell of the forest I was born in, up North." Where we met, he doesn't say.
He doesn't register the shadow passing over Cedric's eyes. "It's only natural, isn't it?"
A bit anxiously, Wormwood asks, "But if I were to go, how would you know that I'd be back?"
"I'd just have to wait here, I suppose," Cedric tells him, with a small shrug. Vaguely, he gestures to his middle, as if something were tying him up, keeping him chained to the earth. "It's not like I can go anywhere."
It pains him, to think Cedric would feel like a prisoner in the place that became their home. To think Wormwood is only making things even harder for him, when they were already so difficult. He thought he was helping, before he made all this mess. He thought of himself as one of the few good things keeping Cedric's days afloat.
He doesn't feel brave enough to ask directly, do you want me to go? And maybe he has misunderstood, and that carriage ride was fruitful, instead of upsetting. At the thought, as if they'd been waiting with bared fangs and outstretched claws, every emotion he has pushed down during the past days lunges forward, and runs him through.
"This flight reflex you had," Cedric asks, inadvertently slicing through his thoughts. "Has it happened other times?"
Wormwood takes a deep breath, and takes over the tea preparation, to distract himself.
"Only when..." he tries, struggling to speak through the roil in his heart and mind. The empty spoon slips from his hand, clinking sharply on the tray. "Drat―only if I cannot think clearly."
"So, you didn't have complete control over your form when you changed, but had to grow used to it instead...?" Cedric asks with interest. And something else, something insinuating and hidden Wormwood doesn't want to think about. As if talking to himself, he mutters "And no mark can be seen..."
The raven clears his throat. "Yes, as you might have noticed... the hands, especially, were a challenge."
A bit steadier, his control refined through the night of potion-making, Wormwood carefully pours the tea, holding the pot's lid in place with the tip of his claw. His fingers are still a bit shaky after the fall, but if he concentrates he can still put in enough precision to not be ashamed of himself. He spies Cedric watching his hands with intrigue, and it gives him a bit of strength. Three sugar cubes, plucked delicately from the jar, a generous slug of milk. He stirs, spoon stem pinched between his thumb and the side of his forefinger.
"But I'm used to them now," he says, and presents the finished cup with a little flourish, and somehow manages a smile.
"Well, you do make a fine butler," Cedric comments, with a bit of snide. But he takes the cup, stirs some more, and takes a small sip from it. "Oh, it's perf―hm, I mean, it's not bad."
The sky above them stays overcast, but in the raven's heart the clouds part a bit to let in a bit of sunlight. He watches Cedric drink more of the tea he made for him, and eats a few sandwiches in greedy bites. Eggs taste a lot different now, he notes vaguely, but in a good way.
As soon as he's finished, Cedric sets his cup down, and reaches for Wormwood's right hand with both of his, the spark of interest bright in his eye.
"May I?" he asks, well after having taken it.
Wormwood is still nodding, and Cedric is already testing the flex of his fingers, leaning his own against them, extending the raven's arm to see how his grip differs from the automatic grasp of a bird's talons.
"Interesting," Cedric hums, one of his eyebrows arching. Wormwood watches his thin fingers probe every nook and cranny of his muscles and ligaments, grazing firm and clinical over the sensitive underside of his wrist, making him shudder a little. "Say, would you say your perceptions have changed, compared to when you were a raven?"
"Quite," Wormwood admits. If he tries, it's easy to imagine Cedric is just holding his hand. "Some things are very new. Some are familiar, but feel... way more intense. Other things instead, have become easier to handle."
Cedric tilts his head at him, birdlike. "What kind of things?"
"Being outside the tower isn't so stressful... I can be alone for longer without..." he never tried to describe the sense of looming silence to anyone. "Without... getting agitated. And I can tolerate things that would have―compelled me to fight before," he says, thinking of all the times he didn't attack Roland, though the man went looking for it with the persistence of a truffle dog. "And new ideas... aren't so difficult to wrap my mind around anymore."
Cedric's fingers curl on his wrist, and he lets out a thoughtful hum. "So, when you scratched me... it was more of a reflex too, because your hands were still hard to control?"
Wormwood's breath catches. "That would be... an awfully convenient excuse," he murmurs, looking away. "But no more than an excuse, nevertheless."
"Oh well, nothing wrong with the truth being convenient, once in a while, right?" Cedric eases, leaning back on his haunches. "If you didn't mean to―"
"But I did mean it. I was using more force than I thought, but my intentions... I really wanted to..." The raven shakes his head, his eyes low. "To overcome you. It was easy... and all the new power I found in my hand, I've done nothing but abuse it."
The same hand, he lays softly on the sorcerer's sleeve. Cedric lets him, sitting still in front of him, letting him touch where his hands have struck, where the marks will sit forever, as reminders imprinted in his skin.
"Alright, it went to your head. But you've seen I have done the same." Cedric's tone is so casual, as if they were discussing the weather. "Was I thinking straight when I changed into a Sea Monster? Do you think I'd be using much restraint, if I finally acquired the Supreme Strength I've always wanted? You said yourself, we are just the same, cold and mean and deceitful. You just took a little revenge, for all the times I've mistreated―"
"No," the raven stops him, fighting down a wave of anxiety. "No―it doesn't matter if the wounds I've given you have healed, or if you would have done the same... it still happened, I've treated you like... an enemy."
"But now that you have control, you won't do it again, just like I promised not to experiment on you anymore. Right?" Cedric insists, as if that made them even.
"Of course I won't!" the raven gasps. With his free hand, he reaches and covers both of Cedric's. "But―"
"But it still bothers you, I know," Cedric interjects, with a strange, forced ease. "I, too, have wished so many times for it to be all a bad dream. Things would be much easier for us if it never happened, right? We could get right back on track, couldn't we?"
"I―yes, I suppose you're right," Wormwood says thickly, hunching over like he'd just been kicked in the gut. "But I know it cannot―"
"Listen, then," Cedric cuts him off, freeing his hands to steeple them, and inhaling like he were about to deliver a great proclamation. "Earlier today, as I bravely did my duty though I was perilously dangling out of the royal coach, held up only by rope and the King's grasp, I happened to have a most brilliant idea!"
Oh no, Wormwood thinks. An idea that could make it like it all never happened... that promises nothing good. Then, a distant part of him only registers, the King's grasp.
With a broad, self-satisfied grin, Cedric splays his arms and declares, "I have elected to look into Memory Charms!"
Shoutout to Hella's fic Poison for that eyelash scene in Chapter 8 that has been in my heart since 2011, here referenced. That fic is majestic okay.