Chapter 17

17

G urlien’s limits end up being roughly forty-five meters away with his back turned, before all he can do is manage a whisper of sensation around her neck and no compulsion. The work, whatever it may seem to him, draws sweat from his brow despite the cold and bright pink to the tops of his cheeks.

So Ambra takes him back to the apartment with the too large bed, and he immediately chugs one of the protein drinks and then a glass of water, all before resting his forehead against the cool granite counter.

Ambra sits on one of the stools after shedding the giant wool coat, resting her chin in her hands.

“I haven’t done anything like that in a year,” he grumbles at her waiting expression. “That’s not easy to do.”

“Lie, you did it two days ago, in this very room,” Ambra remarks.

“Not like that I didn’t,” he mutters, then pushes himself up straight, grabbing a stick of…cheese?…from the fridge.

She tilts her head at him, observing his motions .

“Do you need more food?” he asks, staring down at the fridge.

“No,” Ambra replies honestly, bouncing her leg against the stool. “That took nothing out of me, I could rush into battle and be fine.”

He eyes her.

“Really,” she reassures him, giving him a quick smile. “That was fun.”

Her skin still thrills with the excitement of the summoning, and if the College had ever even thought to work with her like that, she doubts she would be on this quest to end them.

All that it would take to change the course of her existence would have been to treat her a little more like Gurlien does.

It’s a somewhat sobering thought, that an organization so obsessed with power and structure could have just…thought of kindness instead of brutality and been so much more successful.

“Why are you making that expression?” Gurlien asks, swallowing down his food. “You’re making an expression. Why?”

She squints at him, appraising the risks and details of giving him that information.

But he had just done what she asked, practiced when he thought he couldn’t, she at least owes him that to keep him on her side.

“I find it ironic that all the College would have had to do with me is treat me a bit more like you do and I would be there willingly,” she says, and he blanches. “No, no, you’re fine, just that was the first time anyone’s done anything like that with the leash and…not hurt me.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gurlien mutters. “I have got to get you exposed to more people.” He clears his throat and straightens, like he’s a professor and about to give a lecture, and she smiles at the thought. “One. That’s not the first time I’ve heard of a similar sentiment and it’s depressing that it’s not.”

“From who?” Ambra interjects.

“And two,” Gurlien pushes forward, “I am not some…paradigm of kindness and it’s not good for you to think of me that way.”

She stares at him, tilting down the tinted glasses so she can get a better look at him.

He shifts, before refilling the water.

Whatever it is in his background, whatever the thing that’s haunting him, he must think it’s bad. Horrible. Laughably vile.

“You know they made me kill people, right?” Ambra checks, somewhat suspicious that he seems to forget that. “You make sure I eat food and try not to hurt me. That’s a massive improvement.”

“Jesus Christ,” he repeats, then scrubs his face. “I’m gonna go shower.”

Abruptly, leaving half the cheese stick on a plate by the sink, he turns on his heel, shutting the bathroom door behind him with a click.

Alright.

Ambra slips off the stool, getting a glass of water for her own, then drifts around the apartment, checking on the books, checking to see if there’s anything she should be immediately researching, before she sits at her desk and pulls out the phone.

AMbrA (1:02 PM): What did Gurlien do that made him think he’s a bad person?

Immediately—

CHLOE (1:02 PM): That’s his story to tell, not mine .

AMbrA (1:03 PM): Obviously. But he seems to think he’s a piece of shit and it’s not matching with any of his actions.

AMbrA (1:03 PM): Also, nobody besides you likes him and it’s weird.

CHLOE (1:04 PM): Maison and Delina are his friends too, but yes.

Ambra puzzles over this, listening to the sound of the shower run through the pipes. She leans back in the chair, and it’s some comfort against the lower back, in an area she hadn’t even noticed was aching until it wasn’t.

AMbrA (1:07 PM): He has a lot of good knowledge. Even with whatever happened, he’s able to grasp theory and use it effectively and learn it fast.

CHLOE (1:07 PM): Lol.

CHLOE (1:07 PM): Yes, but that doesn’t make him any friends.

AMbrA (1:08 PM): It should.

It should, because who else, when faced with a gaping maw of ability, would stare down a demon and control them cleanly. And with kindness.

CHLOE (1:11 PM): Look, Gurlien can be prickly and some people find that off putting, and he has some history of doing some very questionable things before he was kicked out of the College. The kindness you see now is the result of hard work on his part, and more people should be seeing it, but it takes time.

Ambra blinks at the wall of text, practically filling up her phone screen.

It makes sense, with how everyone knows him, that he had been part of the College, but even more impressive that he somehow did something to get himself kicked out. After all the unethical things that she saw while in stasis, all the unethical ways they cut into Ambra’s mind after the death of the body, to have someone do something so interesting that even they couldn’t stand it…

Her estimation of him kicks up a notch.

And if the kindness doesn’t come naturally, if the care he put into making sure she was okay and unhurt and always fed isn’t an instinct for him, that’s astoundingly impressive.

AMbrA (1:18 PM): Kindness by effort is more impressive than kindness by nature. And I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.

AMbrA (1:19 PM): Though he did say to not fight anyone on his behalf. Which is foolish.

Across the room, on the marble countertop next to the cheese wrapper, Gurlien’s phone buzzes.

Ambra lifts her head to stare at it, but the shower turns off and he could emerge at any time and she doesn’t want to be caught snooping on his phone if he does.

AMbrA (1:20 PM): So how do I get him to tell me what happened to get him kicked out because that sounds like a fun story.

CHLOE (1:21 PM): Lol. Wait until he’s not spooked by accessing magic for the first time in a year. Bribe him with books.

AMbrA (1:22 PM): I’ve bribed him with an entire library if we deal with Nalissa.

CHLOE (1:23 PM): Omg.

AMbrA (1:23 PM): It’s too close to her base to go now or else I would.

The door to the bathroom swings open, and Ambra bounces up to her feet.

“Your phone went off,” she calls out across the large room.

Gurlien blinks at her, as his hair is sopping wet, hanging in his face, a few shades darker than its usual color, and a new button up is open, revealing a plain black undershirt. A towel drapes over his shoulders, one of the ones that came with the apartment, fluffy and light blue.

“Is this because I made you drink coffee?” he asks, suspicious. “Is that what this is?”

“Is this what what is?” Ambra responds.

He shakes his head at her, before scrubbing at his hair with the towel.

Smiling at the motion, Ambra sits back down, something settling in her chest.

Until Gurlien rolls up his sleeve, revealing the cut left by Johnsin.

The edges are red, visible even from this distance, as he picks up his phone. He hasn’t rebandaged yet, and Ambra doesn’t fully know enough about human biology to know if it’s normal, if he needs care, if he needs help…

Beyond her consciousness, her shoulders stiffen, the muscles freezing into place. Her stomach drops at just the glimpse.

“What did you tell Chloe?” Gurlien asks puzzled, gesturing with his phone.

“I texted,” Ambra says, the words falling out of her mouth outside of her control.

His mouth tilts up into some sort of half smile as he taps out a response.

“Check with your experts to see what they experienced around coffee,” he says, almost lazily, scrubbing his hair with the towel again.

And he’s so vulnerable like this. His attention split, halfway between a mundane automatic behavior such as maintaining his body and whatever he’s reading and writing on his phone. The ruddy ness of his cheeks, from the hot water. The bright red of the cut .

“Do you need more medical care?” She blurts out.

“Hmm?” he asks, glancing back up at her, and even his glasses are still a bit fogged from the steam. “Wait, this? No, I was just letting it dry before bandaging.”

She creeps upwards again, drawing near him. “It looks bad?”

He twists his arm to get a better glance at it. “It’ll definitely scar,” he replies, matter of factly. “It’s not terrible, I’ll recover.”

It still sits poorly, and that must’ve shown on her face.

“It’s just a normal stage of human healing,” he informs her. “It’s not infected, it’s clean, and the skin is connecting again, which means it wasn’t too deep. Stop making that face.”

“What face?” She shoots back immediately.

“Like you’re grossed out by normal biology,” he says. “It’s just a healing cut. It takes a while.”

“I’m not grossed,” she starts, then shuts her eyes, forcing the lungs to inflate and her ribcage to flex, to see if that’ll calm her down. It doesn’t. “How do we make it heal faster?”

He gives her a blank look. “We don’t.”

“But there has to be something we can do.”

“There isn’t,” he says, running the towel through his hair again, making it stand on end. “Or, rather, this. This is what we do. We let it air out while clean, until the skin is dry, then put on more antibiotic gel and rebandage it. That’s what we can do.”

She scowls at him.

“No, really,” he says, returning to hang up the towel, even though his hair is still out of place. “It’s doing fine, I’m not concerned with it.”

Out of a fit of frustration, she sits on the bed, but her leg still jangles with the want for motion .

“Do you need any help healing that?” he asks, gesturing at her face, where the blackened wound from the Necromancer—Delina—still annoys. “That looks way worse than this.”

Impulsive, she reaches a hand up to touch it, and while it stings, it’s not even registering on her awareness of her general pain.

“Why didn’t you heal that one?” he asks, giving his hair one more go through before hanging the towel back up.

“Apparently, necromancer wounds don’t heal nice,” she answers, before lifting her chin at him. “Teach me how to help rebandage that.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, bemused.

“If I have to be ‘among humans’ then I should know how to help them,” she says, mirroring the quotation marks with her fingers the body occasionally did. “And I don’t like that…” She trails off, actually hearing herself approach something emotional and actually able to stop herself from going too much further.

“I can do that,” he replies cautiously, because of course he caught that hesitation. “Give me about an hour for this to dry.”