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1.
Riz likes to consider himself an expert witness in emergency late-night study sessions, which is why he made a full pot of coffee and flashcards beforehand.
Adaine seems to appreciate the effort, though the coffee sits untouched so long there's no way it hasn't gone cold. She pores over her theory and spell books with a intense laser focus, more in her own head than really talking to Riz, nodding and mumbling dates and mnemonics as he quizzes her. It's starting to look like she might be slipping in and out of trance while she crams. Riz honestly isn't looking forward to deciding whether to let her rest or try to keep her awake long enough to finish the stack of questions he prepared.
"Fortune's Favor, yes, composed in the early third age as pearls of wisdom became more widely available, that's the material component, but the somatic--" She flips back and forth through pages of spellcraft, offering a few more unintelligible notes, sketching out a few glyphs onto her note paper. "It's a...third level? Second level, damn. Damn, damn..." One corner of a page tears in frustration, and she purses her lips.
"Do you want to try again from the top?" Riz prods, after a moment. "Is it like spelling bee rules, or do they let you go back and correct--"
"No," Adaine groans. "Yes. No. It doesn't matter, clearly I don't know it, it's not even in my fucking spellbook, god damn it--"
She slams the book shut with such vicious force that Riz moves to disengage on instinct, and tugs at her hair with a groan.
Riz looks at the stack of flashcards in his hand, foxed at the corners. They've been through it twice tonight. Usually, Riz doesn't consider taking a break until at least the third pass, but he's had a long time to build up a tolerance to stress-induced breakdowns, and when he pushes himself like that it's usually for a matter of life and death, not for a pop quiz that he saw coming in a prophetic vision.
He hears a muffled scream, and glances up.
"I'm such a shitty wizard," Adaine murmurs tearfully, obscured by a throw pillow she's snatched off the couch and pressed against her face. "God, I can't remember anything, this is a nightmare."
Riz has his reputation as a study buddy to uphold. He frowns at the flashcards in his hand, laying them out into a row, and starts reorganizing them, combining where he can.
"Okay," he says. "Okay, no worries. We're gonna translate these into shorthand, alright, and find a way to get a notecard into the exam room with you, and then you don't have to memorize anything. You cast comprehend languages, it's all right there in front of you."
"What?" Adaine glances up, her glasses askew from being shoved haphazardly into a cushion. "You want to help me cheat?" she says, in a hesitant croak.
"This quiz is important to you," he explains, solemnly transliterating half a semester's worth of spell craft into the smallest space he can. "So we're gonna make it happen, okay? On my honor as a study buddy."
Adaine sniffs, and reaches out, grabbing for his free hand and twining their fingers together, squeezing. "Riz, that's so sweet."
Riz stops scribbling for a second to look over at their joined hands. Adaine's not a very physically demonstrative person, in his careful observation of two years running. A lot more than she used to be, but it's still rare. He squeezes back. It feels grounding, having a friend's palm pressed against his own. Comforting, but not in the way overbearing comforting gestures tend to make Riz feel like crawling out of his own skin.
"No problem," he says, faintly.
"Oh!" Adaine's face goes blank and distant, and she sits up straighter, watching something intently that's beyond his vision, eyes aglow. Then she snaps back to herself, all at once, and slaps a palm to her forehead.
"Oh fuck!" she announces, with a strange mix of triumph and fury, the color drained from her face. "Oh my god, it's open note."
Riz locks eyes with her for a solid six seconds before they both dissolve into laughter, doubling over with the force of it, heads bent together over the stack of scattered flashcards.
2.
He's on his tenth attempt in as many minutes to pop the lock from the inside, because when you roll the way Riz does it takes time to get results. Time, and willpower, and the fortitude to avoid losing all feeling in his fingers before he can slip the pick past the fifth pin, which has been a real pain in the ass.
Riz forces himself to stay totally still, frozen (ha) in place and holding his breath and listening close as the mechanism shifts by small, painstaking degrees. Click. Click-click. Click. Waiting for the final thunk.
"Listen, hey, I get that you don't wanna tell me to my face that I blew this one, but I just want you to know I accept full responsibility, " Kristen says, with a slightly punch-drunk air. "You're the stealth guy! I'm the guy who knocks over a table and gets us both stuck in the walk-in freezer, and I do regret that."
Riz's clenched teeth chatter, and he shivers hard enough to dislodge the tension wrench, sending it spinning across the floor, and he groans. "Shit!" he says, which doesn't totally encapsulate his feelings about the situation but the cold is making it harder to articulate any kind of point with every passing minute. Kristen looks up at him with a sympathetic pout. "S'fine. I'm gonna. Gonna get this fuckin' door open," he promises, scrabbling for the dropped tool. "No problem."
"This door sucks," Kristen agrees, from where she's huddled next to the frozen yogurt tubs in a mass of freckled limbs and an oversized green hoodie advertising a weekend retreat with a cartoonish map of a corn maze. She looks at Riz, and the pout turns to a full-fledged frown. "Hey, man, if you need a break--"
"I'm good," Riz insists, gets a grip on the little wrench and then fumbles it again, his fingers refusing to bend the way he needs them to. "I've got this. Let me j-just...give it one more try. This one's gonna work."
His knuckles are aching with shooting sharp pains and he definitely doesn't have all the sensation in the tips of his fingers that he woke up with this morning, and Riz swallows hard and tries not to think about shattering the inside of a palimpsest by beating his hands bloody to claw his way out.
"Riz, dude," Kristen says, shifting to her hands and knees, and Riz is enveloped in a clumsy embrace before he has half a second to duck out of the way. "You gotta give it a minute, okay, time out. I don't know what hypothermia looks like on someone with green skin but I feel like I'm about to find out."
She sits back down against the wall, and tugs so Riz is curled up in her lap, shivering too hard to vocalize a protest. "K-kristen," he splutters.
She grins wide enough to show the gap between her white teeth, and zips her hoodie shut with Riz bundled inside. "Ta-da," she says, cheerfully. "Warmer, right? Tracker says I'm like a furnace, but I think she's got bad circulation or something because her feet are always freezing, so."
A distant part of Riz's brain is busy trying to calculate how he feels about overlapping on any vector with Kristen's girlfriend, but he's pretty preoccupied by the fact that she's got a point and is, compared to the rest of the walk-in that he's paced a dozen times up to this point, warm as fuck.
Someone like Fig would be warmer by enough to fully melt her way out in a blaze of fire and brimstone, probably, but Riz's whole deal is supposed to be busting his way through locked doors and he's managed to be pretty useless so far anyway, so. No point in blaming Kristen for not radiating the literal toasty glow of hellfire when regular human body heat is a godsend. He snuggles in a little closer.
"Sorry," he says, muffled into her sleeve.
She slings an arm around him casually while he shakes like a leaf. "Pssh, no, it's cool. I saw the whole sharing body heat thing on a TV special and I've been waiting for a chance to try it. We're just like emperor penguins, it's awesome."
"No, I--" Riz burrows in, wraps his arms tight around himself and curls in like a ball. Play to your strengths. "I'm the door guy," he argues, with bleary-eyed passion. "S-supposed to be able to get the. Get the goddamn door open, and I f-f. Fucked that one up, but its. That's my whole thing, Kristen, that's the p-point of keeping me around, is to do rogue shit."
"Don't worry about it," Kristen says, matter-of-factly, and plants a kiss to the crown of his head. "The point of keeping you around is that you're my friend and I love you, man."
Even with his nose smushed against her bicep and his whole face bloodless with cold, Riz feels his cheeks get a little warmer. "Hm," he says, voice cracking, "Uh, thanks."
"You got it," she says, nonchalantly. "Listen, I can't judge, I don't have any spells for getting out of locked freezers unless I try some necromancy on the froyo. Maybe make some kind of ice cream golem. Actually--"
"That's a b-bad idea," Riz assures her, but she's already flipping through her spell cards.
"Oh shit," she chimes, half a second later. "Ha. Completely forgot I had that one, I'm not gonna lie."
Riz lifts his head just to narrow his eyes at her, but Kristen is grinning wide and digging a little mote of starlight trapped in a glass bead out of one pocket of her hoodie, crushing it between her finger and thumb.
A bubble of twilight darkness pops into existence around the two of them, and the immediately evident thing about the bubble is that it's about five feet across and toasty warm inside. Riz blinks.
Kristen beams at him. "Tiny hut!" she announces triumphantly, and unzips her hoodie far enough to let Riz in on a high-five. "I mean, we're not out of the freezer, but at least we're not in the freezer, right?"
It doesn't help the fact that Riz can't see himself holding out for more than an hour before he's crawling up the walls of the little pocket dimension, but the nice thing about this pocket dimension and also the walk-in freezer outside of it is that he's not trapped in here alone. Riz rests his head on Kristen's shoulder. "Thanks," he says again, and slots in against her side for as long as she'll let him stay there.
3.
About three rounds into combat, when the second wave of demons start to appear out of the woodwork, Riz looks around and watches everyone simultaneously realize the fight is a bust. They're coming from somewhere, and they're going to keep coming, and there's just a lot more of them than there are Bad Kids to fend them off.
"Where did Aguefort go?" Fig shoots. "He wanted to take you on a solo field trip to the Abyss and he didnt even offer you a ride home?"
"I honestly assumed you guys needed the help?" Kristen swings diligently at the extremely angry demons, looking a little sheepish and visibly lower on spell slots than usual. "He's taking the relic thing he stole back to his office to ward it up. I think he totally had a fling with this archfiend a while back, there was definitely a weird sexual tension there."
"Wonderful! I'm so glad they're taking that frustration out on us!" Adaine forgoes her more delicate spellwork to uppercut a vrock so hard Riz can hear their beak snap in half, and then backs away, looking quickly toward the door.
Riz could be halfway down the stairwell with a disengage and a dash, but he's feeling brazen enough to bet he could hold down the fort for another round or two. He grits his teeth, plants his feet and shouts, "New plan! Head for the door, I'll cover you," to anyone willing to listen. Then, he ducks behind a plant and hides.
Fig takes him up on the offer, shredding a pair of nashrous apart with a wave of force from her bass guitar and turning to retreat. Gorgug scoops Adaine under one arm and runs, and Fabian does some kind of back handspring to clear the banister and drop out of sight. Riz ducks out of his spot and takes a shot, and Kristen offers him two thumbs up as she pulls some utterly ridiculous swinging swan dive with her silver ribbon dancer that only works because she can literally fly.
Then, one of the barlgura moves between Riz and his exit, gnashing its teeth in a threatening grin.
"Great," he mutters under his breath, and takes a swipe from a claw across the back while he's distracted by the sudden loss of a direction to retreat. "Good going, Gukgak. Smooth."
There's some kind of explosion further down the stairwell, which might be good or bad but Riz is preoccupied trying to hide in a room full of demons with nobody else to pick on. Which is bad, but. Looking past all of that, Riz has a new plan. Provided, of course, that nobody kills him before he can get to it.
He holsters his arquebus, grits his teeth, and runs full-tilt down the hallway, weaving around the teeth and claws and shadowy weapons taking glancing swings in his direction. He closes his eyes and jumps straight through a half-open window, tucking and rolling as he goes.
The impact of shattering glass almost knocks the rest of the wind out of him, but he holds on long enough to engage the feather-fall on his vest, and shift from a dead drop into a gentle glide. It's super badass, but unfortunately the only people around to see it this time are the demons.
"The Ball!" someone shouts--the only person who still calls him that, probably. Riz grins, and watches his friends pour out the front of the building in a frantic jumble. He waves from where he's drifting gradually toward the ground on a pair of incorporeal wings.
"Oh, that is so sick," Fig says, and Riz's feet don't actually touch the pavement because Gorgug's arms get to him first.
Gorgug gives the best hugs in the world. That's an indisputable, objective fact. This is more of a scoop, but he takes the time to squeeze Riz tight before slinging him up around his shoulders without breaking stride. "We thought we lost you, dude," he says, voice cracking. "We looked back and couldn't see you anywhere. Are you okay?"
"I had it under control," Riz blusters, half-aware that he's covered in gashes and scrapes and blisters and looks like a feather could knock him over. And it probably could, honestly, he's pretty lightheaded.
"Hell yeah he did!" Fig cheers, winking as she skates by. "Our little angel's a badass!"
Riz manages to find half cover behind Gorgug's giant axe. "Not an angel," he mumbles.
"Keep going!" Adaine chimes, clinging to Fig from the back of her skateboard, eyes glowing white at the edges. "We'll lose them if we make it back to the van!"
"I call shotgun," Riz says, and promptly passes out.
The rumble of the road wakes him gradually, and he realizes by degrees that he's not sitting in a carseat so much as in a lap. Riz raises an eyebrow, and glances up until Gorgug's face comes into focus, white hair falling in his eyes, upper lip stuck on one protruding tusk as he snores. The distorted hum of a Sig Figs bassline is playing over the radio, and Fig's fingers tap against the steering wheel in time. They did let him have the passenger seat, which is nice. But it's definitely been a solid couple hours of unexpected unconsciousness, which is less cool.
"Why did nobody wake me up?" he says in a croaky huff.
Fig glances his way. "No offense, but you looked like you really needed the rest. Plus Gorgug said he didn't mind holding onto you a little longer, it's whatever."
Gorgug is holding him sort of like a teddy bear, now Riz thinks about it, arms wrapped around him like a seatbelt in a firm grip none of the others could break if they tried. It probably should be weird, especially because of how comfortable it is, but he honestly can't say he minds. "Oh. Cool."
"Are we there yet?" Kristen says sleepily from somewhere in the supernaturally wide back of the Hangvan.
"I'll kill you, Applebees," Fig replies, cheerfully, and turns the radio up.
4.
In his limited experience, Riz tends to be kind of a sad drunk, which is a problem because he also doesn't super remember that that's the case until he's already halfway through a game of spin-the-bag-of-wine-then-chug-it and abruptly turns a corner from having a good and chill time to paranoid but too fuzzy to keep track of what he's supposed to be worried about.
The sensation kind of sneaks up on him this time. He's giggling along to a song Fig and Gorgug have made up on the spot dedicated to Gilear, looking between all his friends and their bright, shining, smiling faces, and he thinks about how happy everyone looks and for some reason that thought fills him with this cold shock of anxiety that wipes the grin right off his face.
He doesn't really know how to do downtime, and something about the way they're just sitting around this bonfire in the backyard of the manor without a care in the world like everything is so safe and secure nobody even needs to keep an eye out in case the shit hits the fan makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. It's weird, right? To pretend they're safe to do normal teenager stuff like this? Riz looks nervously to Adaine for acknowledgement, but she's happily tapping Gorgug's borrowed drumsticks against the side of the piano in syncopated rhythm and bobbing her head to the music.
Maybe, Riz thinks, it's just him that's the weird one, ruining everybody else's good time.
He looks up, gets a quick glimpse of Fig with one heavy boot propped on the piano stool, leaning over her bass to croon at Ayda, who looks back with a fiery lovestruck grin, and another glimpse of Ragh across the room dragging Gorgug into a kiss by the strings of his hoodie, and feels the vertigo hit before he even registers that he's stumbled to his feet.
Some ugly, taunting part of his hindbrain tells him not to waste time on stealth as he beats a hasty retreat back to the manor, because his friends don't give a fuck if he stays or goes anyway, they'll be happier without having to watch him mope. The cold rational center of him flags that as a lie, but it's not especially comforting when it makes his eyes prick with tears anyway.
"Stupid," he hisses, sitting heavily on the stairs to knock his head against the railing. "We've been over this already, it's fine."
He smells the smoke on the wind a second before Fig meanders into his line of sight, but she doesn't look like she's trying to be stealthy. Her braid is starting to unravel at the end and her eyeliner is smudged and her boot laces are untied, and she gives Riz a nod with the clove dangling from the corner of her mouth. "You gonna tell me what's wrong?" she asks without preamble.
Riz takes a deep breath. "I thought you were busy," he says, flat and just a little on the wrong side of accusatory. "Did you just run out in the middle of a song?"
Fig shrugs. "Fabian put on the sea shanty playlist." She stubs out the cigarette and leans against the other side of the banister, offering him a sideways glance. "You looked kinda freaked out, is all. Wanted to make sure you were okay."
"Why wouldn't I be okay?" Riz shoots back, defensively, and sits in the ensuing silence for a full round before he says, quieter, "I dunno, it just. Gets to me sometimes, alright? I get weird at parties, it's stupid."
Fig's shoe scuffs a circle into the dirt, and then kicks absentmindedly at the crumbling cement foundation of the staircase. She tilts her head in Riz's direction, sizing him up, and then clambers over the side of the banister to perch on the stairs beside him, tail swinging behind her.
"Partying's overrated," she says, in that dismissive way that means she's probably lying. "Pretty sure all the cool kids sneak off to feel weird and lonely in a quiet corner somewhere."
"Don't patronize me," Riz groans.
"Hey, come on, that was totally earnest," Fig argues, and pulls a flask out of an inner pocket of her leather jacket. "Look, I brought hooch! This is a bonding moment now, I'm being one hundred percent real with you." She pops the cap off the flask and extends it, and Riz takes a slightly suspicious sniff and a quick sip that sears his throat all the way down.
"Oh god," he winces. "What the fuck is that, ugh."
"Yeah, it's awful, right? Ayda brought it over from Leviathan, she hates it too."
Riz coughs, and Fig grins, and the sensation of deep loneliness and impending doom fades into the distance a little.
"I don't want to be in love with anyone," he says, so softly that he barely realizes he's spoken it aloud. "I might never want to. I don't think I feel that way about people."
He's a little too fuzzy-headed to read Fig's expression. She reaches up to play with her braid, pulling strands of hair loose to frame her face. "That's cool," she says. "You don't have to be a romance guy if you don't want to, yeah? Stick it to amatonormativity."
It's not that he expected her to meet him with condescension or disbelief, because that's not how Fig operates, but the blanket acceptance puts him off kilter anyway. "But you're gonna get tired of me," he points out. "Everybody's gonna have somebody and I'm gonna get on everyone's nerves if I stick around like some kind of...permanent third wheel."
Fig laughs, not directly at him but definitely ringing in his ear. "Gorgug's in a wholeass throuple, Riz. We got enough love in us for more than one person." Her hand comes up to clasp at the side of his face, hold him still so she can lean in and press a sloppy kiss to his cheek. "You'll always have me," she proclaims, and takes a long pull from the flask. "Promise. I know I'm not, like, the greatest friend in the world, but--"
"You're amazing," Riz says, cutting her off. "Fig--"
Fig's smile goes a little weepy at the edges. "--you've got me," she echoes. "I'm sticking around until you kick me out. Suck it up."
Riz kind of half-falls into her, and blames it on the alcohol buzzing through his head. Makes it heavier, or something. Fig smells like brimstone and cloves and wood smoke, and he's too tipsy to regulate his emotions so his voice comes through a little choked when he says, "Do we have to go back to the bonfire now?"
He can feel Fig's shoulder shift under his cheek when she shrugs. "Sea shanty playlist is six hours long at least," she tells him. "We've got time."
5.
Riz starts awake in the kind of pain that makes him wonder how the hell he's alive to feel it, grasping blindly for a weapon and clutching instead at a strong, calloused hand reaching back for him.
He sucks in a slow, painful breath, feels it bubble unpleasantly in his chest and rattle fractured ribs. Everything in him feels like one angry bruise, and it takes a minute for his vision to slide into focus through the white-out agony of it. The hand grasping his is squeezing almost desperately tight, like its trying to pull him back to consciousness by sheer stubborn force.
It's that stubbornness more than anything that clues him in to whose face must be hovering above his, even before his eyes or ears have come fully back online. "Fabian," he gasps, using up a full breath and paying for it with a sharp ache in his battered chest.
He sees a mouth moving, belatedly registers the voice a second later, ragged and softer than he's ever heard it. "...The Ball, hey, hey, take it easy, yeah? I've got you. You're alright."
Riz's breath catches in a harsh whistling laugh, because the last time he was this beat to shit he spent the better part of a minute fully dead in a crater the shape of his own body. He could have sworn he'd been making death saves again just now, actually, now he thinks about it, and not with very promising results. Fabian doesn't...he hasn't taken any healing magic, not that Riz knows about, and it's only Fabian here, so, "How?" he wheezes.
"Don't--don't worry about it," Fabian says, and Riz sees his face streaked with the kind of messy tears he would refuse to acknowledge on pain of death, eyepatch askew and artfully styled hair tousled with mud. Half a silver heart on a chain dangles from the collar of his shirt, the shining metal catching the light.
"Fa--Fabian," Riz says again, frustrated, and tries to push himself up onto his elbows. His body denies the request to comply swiftly and with prejudice.
Fabian's hand clutches his like a lifeline, his thumb running restlessly over Riz's bloody knuckles. "It's not important, I just. I had a lucky medicine check, alright?"
"You--" Riz wheezes, and this one must sound painful enough that Fabian gives in and helps shift him upright, a hand bracing under his shoulders. "Goddamn resuscitated me?"
He's definitely getting blood on Fabian's letter jacket, but he does Riz the favor of deciding not to be precious about it just now. "What, I was just supposed to carry your dead weight back to the others? 'Sorry, I took The Ball with me on a scouting mission and got him killed'? Don't be ridiculous," he scoffs, in a slightly shaky approximation of his usual haughtiness. "Imagine the fucking embarrassment."
Riz aches all over. "Sorry for," he sucks in a fortifying breath, and then another, "Almost dying, I guess. Didn't mean to be in--" he winces sharply, "Inconvenient."
"Such a pain in the ass," Fabian agrees, but his jaw trembles a little when he says it. Unprovoked, he ducks his head and presses a kiss to the back of Riz's hand, still joined with his own. Riz is a little mystified by the raw expression on his face, but also frustrated by the way it makes his chest seize up all over again. Catching his breath is hard enough already.
"M'your best friend, aren't I?" he jokes. "That's my job."
Fabian's face twists like he's trying not to cry again. "You are," he agrees. "Of course you are, The Ball--Riz--"
Riz feels a grin spread across his face, and his head pounds where he vaguely remembers failing to dodge a heavy branch the gray render flung his way. "Thanks," he says, before Fabian can brush it off again. His fingers reach up to probe at the sore spot on the crown of his head, and he frowns. "Help me find my hat?"
Fabian snorts. "Absolutely not, I hope that thing ate it." He hefts Riz into his arms as he stands, half-swaddled in the battle sheet, and Riz does his level best not to black out. "Alright?" Fabian says, more gently, watching Riz grit his teeth and bite back a whimper.
Riz's fingers scrabble under his tie for the other half of the necklace, the matching silver pendant and the chain. It's warm against the skin at the hollow of his throat. "Yeah," he manages, "I will be."