124. Seb
SEB
Two weeks after he’d been thrown out a window, Seb went outdoors for the first time. Spring had fully arrived; all of campus blushed in shades of white and pink. When Lily pulled up to the health center, a breeze flung petals into her hair.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked as she helped him trade the wheelchair for crutches, then finagled him into the front seat. She swung his keys around her finger and caught them.
“Yes,” he grimaced, for the eighteenth time that week.
The physical pain had dulled into a constant ache.
In a few weeks he could even get back to dance if he wanted.
Without magic, his injuries would have taken a year, or more, to heal.
With magic, with his Magic, the thread that pulsed inside him with every beat of his heart, the internal damage would vanish without a trace in less than a month.
It wasn’t the physical pain that tied his lungs into knots, that kept him staring and staring up at the health center ceiling every night, that woke him up in a cold sweat, drenching his blankets.
Lily pulled slickly onto the arterial, the car obeying her every whim. He could tell she’d been driving it back and forth to campus, and he was glad for it. When they hit the main road, she headed south.
“I’ll wait out here,” she said, wrestling his crutches out of the back seat and handing them over.
He didn’t ask her to come in. When he looked back at her, as he crutched up the walk to the station, she was leaning coolly against the car, brighter than the bright day.
Conrad looked awful. The fluorescent light stole the sun from his skin, turning him sallow.
His hair was shaggy and greasy; there were deep bags under his eyes.
It was his eyes themselves that were the most changed.
Their normally flame-blue spark was extinguished, and they were a flat gray.
All the vitality and power that had drawn Seb was gone.
He looked up as Seb entered, his face moving through a complicated dance before settling once more on blankness. He was unrestrained, and Seb paused, his shoulder propping open the door, before he remembered that Conrad had no magic, nothing but his voice to fire against him.
The room’s only window surveyed an empty parking lot.
There were a number of Magicians in the local government, which was why Conrad was being held in relative comfort in a station rather than jail.
The details given over to law enforcement were doctored, but no less powerful.
Seb looked out the window as a car used the lot to correct a wrong turn before dragging his eyes to meet Conrad’s.
“Come to gloat?” Impossibly, there was still a challenge in his voice.
Seb leaned forward on his crutches, letting the door click closed, and gazed steadily at him.
“Do you really think so little of me?”
Conrad didn’t answer. Seb used one of his crutches to pull out the free chair at the table and sank into it. He didn’t try to mask his exhaustion.
“Why are you here, then?”
Seb tilted his head to regard Conrad. After nearly a year, after all this agony, he was starting to understand what Dr. Metcalf had been trying to explain. This—this husk in front of him—was the real Conrad. Everything else had been a glamour, an enchantment. Without magic he was so much less.
“I came to say goodbye.”
“Sweet of you.” Conrad smirked emptily.
He didn’t stop the cruel little smile that crept onto his lips. He hadn’t felt the shape of it in so long. Conrad brought out the worst in him. He’d told Seb that they were better than everyone else, and Seb had been dumb enough to believe it; cold-blooded enough to want to.
“You think any part of this is for you?”
Conrad had nothing to say to that. Seb let him stew for a while, then scraped back his chair and made his way upright.
“Goodbye, Conrad.”
“What?” He couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Seb agreed.
“You’re not going to ask me why? You don’t want—”
“Of course I want to. But I’m only interested in the truth, and I don’t believe you’ll give me that.”
He made for the door.
“Seb!” Conrad’s voice was desperate. “Sebastian!”
He stepped into the hallway.
Conrad’s sobbing followed him all the way to the lobby, “Seb! Please! Come back, please!”