Chapter Text
Khadgar makes himself smaller in the back of the wagon.
No natural light reaches him, but he is glowing from all the spots on his body where his skin is thin. Blue energy seeps through the cartilage of his ears. It makes him look almost impish for anyone who doesn't know him. His nail beds are ridges, and the skin around his eyes glows. But the greatest source of light leaks from his eyes. More so than usual, they are hauntingly bright these days.
The blue that Khadgar emits bounces off his pallid skin. He looks at Lothar once helplessly and then averts his haze. If not for his light, Lothar would see the bags beneath his eyes. He might notice the fever that has crept into his limbs. Khadgar hasn't slept a good night's sleep in days. That this happens to the mage is all wrong.
Lothar doesn't have the time to see at the many changes Khadgar goes through, because the mage's healer regards him pointedly and closes the flap, cutting him off from anything more. If he thinks to protect the source of Khadgar's ailment, or how it is kept at bay—or even decorum—he is too late. They have traveled together long enough for Lothar to know.
He returns his focus on the road ahead. His warhorse walks a slow four-beat gait. Next to him, Khadgar's black gelding is keenly aware of its master's plight. Its ears are angled back, twitching from time to time; until Khadgar returns, the slightest surprise might set the horse off. Lothar takes the reins and creates more distance between the wagon pulled behind the third horse and them. With enough distance, he won't have to hear the sounds that his dear friend makes as he falls prey to the wretched curse once again.
A drizzle weighs down Lothar's hair and drips from his beard. With stilted patience, he leads on their small party.
Ten minutes later, Khadgar returns to his horse with a flush on his cheeks. The light from his eyes has faded now; it won't be back for another few hours. It is instead replaced by anger. “Did anything happen?” the boy asks, stating immediately that he doesn't want to talk about it.
Lothar ignores the beads of sweat and the exhaustion. “We should find a place to stay for the night soon,” replies he. “A few hours until nightfall, and I am certain this is not a good place.”
“I can ward the place.”
Lothar looks to the young mage. Defiance stares him in the face; it is more energy than Khadgar has shown all day.
“I can,” insists Khadgar. “Let me make myself useful.”
He is trying so hard that Lothar doesn't have it in himself to push back. The mage's magic is so volatile since he fell ill, especially in the minutes before he needs to be sapped, that the chance the ward would collapse on them and bring injury is too big. So Lothar chooses the option he does have. “I will hold the first watch.”
“Let me.”
“You need your rest.”
Khadgar's composure darkens. Something like black smoke creeps around his eyes, right under his skin, but when Lothar looks again, it is gone. “Don't you dare treat me like a child.”
Lothar snorts. Being responsible for this curse is a hard burden to carry, and it often drowns Lothar in sullen moods and a need to help his friend wherever he can. Most of the time, he is unsure which one of them two is more pissed off. But Khadgar is more than the child Lothar took him for when he first met him, and Khadgar is also not against putting Lothar in his place if he needs to.
If only Lothar would have listened once or twice, they would not be in this situation.
He inclines his head with a wry smile. “Whoever falls asleep first, loses.”
“Fair enough. I've been hoping to practice my sleeping spells.”
And Lothar knows he has lost that one.
* * *
Khadgar's breathing has picked up.
A grove of tall trees towers up around them. Up in the tree tops hoots an owl; several times, when they pay attention, they catch sight of a glowing wisp drifting through the thicket. This the safest place in the nearby area, and near a stream of fresh water. It is not the worst place to settle in for the night.
Khadgar dabs a piece of cloth into the bowl in front of him and presses the wet towel against his neck. As his malady is a magical one, anchored inside his body like a parasite as it continues to drain his energy while it stirs his control over his magic to greater and greater unpredictability, the water won't work. With his back against the tree, Khadgar mutters, “What is keeping him?”
The healer has been gone for some twenty minutes, and it ought not take so long to freshen up at the stream. A man of barely twenty years old, the healer is younger than Khadgar and horribly unskilled at magic. But that is not his purpose. As a healer, the man is to sap the boy when he needs sapping. It is a a personal process that ensures Khadgar's resentment towards his personal assistant, leading the healer to be highly uneasy all of the time.
“He will be back,” Lothar says over sharpening his knife. He tries not to stare at his companion; it is hard, when Khadgar licks his lips and furrows his brows with his neck exposed like that. His legs are rubbing against each other. Light has once again consumed his eyes.
Khadgar hates the affliction.
“We'll lift it,” promises he. “It is only a day more to Karazhan. We will find the cure, and then we will lift it.”
But he too is beginning to be disheartened. Where is the blasted healer? Faster than it has before, Khadgar's situation worsens. Already he is shaking, and if Lothar may have imagined it before, he is now sure that he sees smoke crawling under the skin of the boy's bare wrists and along his neck. There is a pulse in them, a wicked worship of the body of a man too pure to be prey to such a thing.
Lothar gets up and snaps his fingers in front of him when the mage's limply head lolls back. “Boy.”
No response.
He hits Khadgar's cheek with the flat of his hand. When that doesn't give him anything, he does it again. “Hey. Wake up. Wake up, boy. It's not your time yet.” But all the while he curses the healer. If the man ever dares show his face again, Lothar will not be done with him soon.
Khadgar moans, and the hairs on Lothar's neck stand up. The smoke churns now. Blue energy pulses. Every now and then, it isn't blue but darker. Blacker. He cups his face and tries to grab Khadgar's attention. He is terrified; he can't lose him too. “Listen to me. Stay with me. Boy. Hey. Boy.”
The mage sinks to the forest floor. There, he twists into the most sickeningly impossible curve.
His body is still.
The light intensifies.
Like a container of an energy source beyond the capacity of the human body, Khadgar is being consumed by it. He fights so hard, but there will be nothing left of him, his own magic being turned against him from the inside. And the healer still hasn't come back.
Lothar doesn't want it. He doesn't want to do what he knows he has to.
Thrashing on a bed of grass with daisies and leaves scattered around him, it is too easy to imagine what Khadgar's funeral bier would look like. Lothar can't stand to watch.
Khadgar is slipping.
If Lothar doesn't act, he might as well have killed him with his own hands. Even that would be better than this. And so he purses his lips and looks away. His gloved hand searches the mage's body by touch.
Thinking of anything that is not the boy, Lothar rubs his palm with pressure between Khadgar's legs.
It is a mockery of something that ought to be intimate. Khadgar blazes back to life with a gasp. He has no control over himself when he seeks purchase and pushes his pelvis up against the hand. A rhythm of gasps and whimpers fills the quiet woods, the pulsing light of the unruly arcane waking up the sleeping forest.
Where the healer sapped Khadgar in a matter of minutes, this time it lasts tens. Lothar is not doing something right, but he is not an expert in black magic curses just like he doesn't know Khadgar's body and he just applies more pressure.
He understands the basics; release Khadgar fast enough and sate the curse. And the mage has been managing that just fine most of the time. The healer, being little more than a helping hand when Khadgar is no longer able to handle it himself, is a safety net.
But it has never hit Khadgar as fast as it did this night.
Lothar keeps his mind away from what he is doing. He doesn't compare sizes, nor does he listen to the wanton sounds that beg for more—he tries not to think of them as sounds of passion. “What do I do?” he hisses when the end just does not seem to come.
"Lothar? What are y—oh, by the Light, help me."
“How?”
“You know how!”
They aren't looking at each other. Lothar is conflicted. Although he no longer underestimates the boy who looked so hopelessly like a green leaf in the barracks where they first met, he can't help but want to protect him. Be proud of him. All the things, he thinks, that sound like family. And yet his hand moves on its own accord, quite curious after the responses Khadgar gives him; the sound of lips being licked and breaths being sucked, and an undulating body under Lothar's command.
He knows how. Of course he does. “Look away.”
Khadgar is so glad to comply that it hurts. He twists his body around to grasp the floor with his hands and bite his teeth into his knuckles. Magic spills into the ground in a corona around them.
And Lothar's hand pushes past the tunic and into his trousers. Even gloved, it doesn't leave much to the imagination when he wraps it around Khadgar's cock and tugs it experimentally—and neither does Khadgar, who grunts in reply and thrusts into it.
They settle into a clumsy rhythm. Lothar tries not to twist his arm wrongly while he faces away from the body on the ground. And Khadgar has no clue what he is doing. Degraded to a wholly instinctive creature, he takes whatever is up for offering if it brings him closer. One particular jerk, Lothar has no choice but to rearrange himself or break his arm. “Hey,” he almost laughs, so uneasy is he, “kid.”
The word is another painful mistake in a line of many.
Khadgar's energy is pooling. Rivulets of it run up his neck. Where they traverse his tangled hair, they turn black or evaporate. He hides his face against his own hands while he pants, bites his lips, keens.
Is it just Lothar, or are there new sounds just for him?
Lothar stops going to lengths to look away. It is impossible, anyway. Khadgar's body is building up to something, and Lothar has never seen it look so powerful. He has never known the mage to even be able to hold it. No expert in the arcane, Lothar has always assumed mages to be channels for some mystical power from the aether. Instead this seems decidedly like Khadgar himself generates it. All of it.
A muffled cry against the back of his wrist, and a cloak of black smoke suddenly bursts from Khadgar's being. It twists itself into shapes and creatures, and then the smoke turns into a silvery white.
It is the curse. Both beautiful and ugly, it coils up into the trees. Lothar stares after it. Khadgar is panting on the ground, and Lothar has pulled back his hand as soon as his job was done. He doesn't know whether to hope that this time, it is truly gone.
“Hey,” he asks, “are you all right?”
Khadgar does not say anything back. He crawls up, more invigorated than he has been for the last hour, and closes his eyes in bitterness when the smoke just sinks into his body again. “I am taking a bath.”
Khadgar needs no protection now. If he did, he would still not accept it. Lothar is left alone in the copse in an overflowing sense of guilt. He tries to clean the glove by rubbing it against grass, then with sand.
Just one more day to Karazhan, he tells himself. He himself doesn't know how to go about that if the healer doesn't return, when it's just the two of them. Lothar promised Khadgar a cure and he will do what he can to help him find it. But he doesn't think it is going to be a pleasant journey.