These Days (Tea with a Vampire) // Caius

[Ephraim Prothero]

He felt raw and empty.

Hollowed out.

As though his soul had exited his body and floated off to somewhere else.

He didn't see, hadn't seen Caius sitting there. Did not register his presence at all until the voice reached him, at which point he had already passed, but now he hesitated, pausing to stand with his good arm resting against the doorframe leading out to the dorms.

He looked well.

It was the only way in which there was any way for him to take control of the situation, though somehow it just made everything seem more surreal. To dress himself up like the perfect student, the perfect youth, with his perfect appearance, in his perfect clothes. It had taken double the time as usual because of the arm, but he'd gotten there.

He'd just been to dinner, but he hadn't eaten.

He'd stared at the food for a bit and then he had exited for the rooftops. Could not stand being there with the others - the glances, the whispers. Usually he would not have cared, but everything had been messed up and he wasn't himself.

"How’s the arm?"

He thought about moving on, to continue pretending like nothing, but the throught of being alone was just as unbearable, and anxiety gripped his chest to hold its cold claw around his speeding heart. Turning his head, he sent Caius a desperate gaze, but it was all he could do before rushing forward to find his dorms before his insides cracked open to reveal the ugly.

Not here.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

Of course he wasn't well, but Caius didn’t want to make the assumption.

How one coped with difficulties was a deeply personal thing, and at the base of their relationship Caius was an upper year and a Prefect first, the difference between their ages just stark enough that Ephraim could have almost been just some kid, to Caius' eye. Cocky, confident, venomous, clean-cut-- all things a proper young Slytherin pureblood ought to be, down to the shine of his shoes and the crispness of his white collar.

There were other things that tipped off what roiled beneath the surface-- just beneath, he'd thought, though he couldn't be certain how far down. A dullness in his eyes, maybe, a dragging to his step.

But, then, something surfaced.

Ephraim had stopped, turned, and the flash of desperation that sounded from that look resonated like a bell struck. Caius actually lurched forward a fraction as it echoed in him, skin crawling, the surprise of that openness eating into him.

Ephraim disappeared down the corridor and Caius was already on his feet, following. The book lay forgotten on the little table beside the sofa.

Caius watched Ephraim’s heel disappear behind the doorframe into his dormitory, the line of light on the floor cut momentarily as the door swung partially shut behind him, but Caius’ hand was out and he pushed it open after Ephraim, and he ducked in.

He latched the door and leaned his back against it, hands clasped before him, letting himself be the human shield against intruders to Ephraim’s exposed underbelly.

Caius waited, his eyes trained carefully on Ephraim Prothero’s turned back. He did not speak first.

[Ephraim Prothero]

He was breaking down.

Burning up.

Bursting into a thousand pieces.

Not by the situation per se, but by Caius' question.

He had walked around for two days an eggshell of a being, a perfect surface to hide the thing inside. As though that single drop of concern for his wellbeing was breaking him open, against his will, to hatch this monstrous being that was himself.

Safely inside the door to his dorms, he fell down to his hunches, balling himself up as though to brace for impact.

It was all that he could do to prevent it all from spilling out, to avoid the cut necessary to open him up and bleed him onto the floor.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

It was as though he was seeing from a very far distance for a moment, seeing himself seeing Ephraim crumple into himself— supernova, he thought, noun, the end-stage of a supermassive star, after which a neutron star may emerge, but only after extreme gravitational collapse—

He didn’t remember closing the distance to him, making his way around Ephraim to face him, but suddenly that was where he was: Caius folded himself into a kneel, and as before, found Ephraim’s shoulders, one hand on each, as if to prop him up.

In so many ways, this had nothing to do with Caius. There wasn’t an obligation to speak of here, no reason for him to be as invested as he felt, and yet he’d been watching the doorways for sign of Ephraim since the night he’d tucked the kid into bed. As though there were some wound, somewhere, in himself, also, that needed tending, and the way to tend it was to allow others his shoulder to cry on.

But it was still different, somehow, like—

He didn’t know what it was like.

“Hey,” Caius said, quiet, head dipping, trying to catch Ephraim’s eyes despite his bowed head. “You can, you know.” Cry, scream, talk. Any of it. “It’s all right. It’s just me. It’s just me.”

[Ephraim Prothero]

For a moment he was nothing. A nucleus with no connection, floating freely in a black void of non-existence. Disappeared and imploded into himself.

For that moment, he was in a calm, in the centre of a storm of his own creation. But he could not exist like this for long. Had never been this far from the people on which he relied, physically or mentally. Had never understood how dependent he really was on them to be there to keep him elevated, spinning around an axis he had always thought of as his own.

It was the first time that he had lost control that there had been noone there.

And then there was.

"Hey."

Hands at his shoulders, voice in his ears.

Serene.

It's just me.

It was just Caius.

Caius.

He lifted his face, slowly, to look directly into the other's eyes, holding them. And though his eyes were wet with tears, he was calm in a way that contrasted starkly with his wildly beating heart.

Sad and desperate.

"I don't know what to do," he said, his voice barely a whisper.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

The eyes shone darkly when he caught them, damp, and Caius found himself coming away with wet fingers, thumb brushing the lower lid and disturbing the fine black lashes there.

"I don't know what to do."

"You're already doing it."

The monster that was pain, grief, fought its host desperately until it could be released. It tore at insides and cut ribbons with slick-sharp claws from soft things like stomach lining, heart ventricles, cheeks. Caius knew the monster desperately.

The opposite hand lifted, catching the trickle from Ephraim's other eye. One tear lingered whole on his finger and it trailed down the back of his hand and beyond his white sleeve, unseen, as Caius replaced his hand further up Ephraim's shoulder, at the meat of the thin muscle, angled up. He looked into one eye, then the other, and back.

Atonement wasn't something Caius could provide an opportunity for, as this was a matter squarely between Cuddrun and Prothero, and whichever adults were involved in the disciplinary action response-- but adults so rarely tied up matters of emotion, like they were afraid of it, couldn't remember the volatility of youth, or didn't want to.

But there also wasn't advice Caius could give him that would matter. There weren't words he could speak to fix it. He was letting himself fall on the grenade, as usual, to contain the blast with only himself as collateral.

-- but he couldn't see it that way, not with Ephraim looking so small, that palpable desperation seeping from him. Caius knew it too well. He knew it.

He wished, with a level pang of something, that Ephraim did not.

Left arm first, then his right, one over the shoulders and the other under. He let Ephraim's face tuck into the crook of his neck, and Caius hugged him tightly, as though trying to keep the pieces of Ephraim from falling away.

"Keep feeling it. It's all right."

Voice dusky, lost in dark hair.

"It's all right."

[Ephraim Prothero]

He stared into a pair of eyes that were so dark they felt bottomless. Frozen with the motion, with the mere gentleness of the movements, his eyebrows knit to create a deep furrow between them even as the tears kept running.

In-between the flashes of Cuddrun's fall, and of his body, small, under the bed covers (- he'd been to the Hospital Wing again -) were the impossibly soft touches and words of Caius Ellwood-Luxe.

Until it was more than that, and he was pulled into a full embrace.

No, he thought.

He did not want to be babied, did not need to - it was too much. But there was something else in him too, something deeply conflicting that he could not quite grasp. Something that made his insides curl and ache and spin around.

And so he gave in, closed his eyes and allowed for the shaking to overtake him and turn into loud, ugly sobs.

Waiting for the impact of the bludgers - first one to the side, them one to the head - the feeling passing to him through the other's body.

But they never came.

Friday, November 16
Slytherin Common Room

More days had passed.

They had interacted.

He had shed the occassional tear.

His mind returning to Benji and to Nael almost with every passing thought had slowed down some.

Classes helped. They got his mind over on something else.

And he had learned a word.

The word was heartbreak.

It was not one he had not encountered before. But now having read about it, he thought he'd reached some sort of new understanding. Not just for the situation with Benji, but also surrounding the fact that he'd had to leave his friends in Durmstrang behind.

It was as close he could get to what he was feeling.

He had not talked to Caius about any of this, nor of the things that had happened in the immediate days following the match. Somehow that hurt, too, and there was something strange there that he struggled to identify. Somehow Caius was not like the others, and not the image of masculinity that he'd grown up with.

And he had not been either, small and broken.

He would have used the word pathetic, but he tried to give himself some grace. And perhaps it was Caius that had helped him get there, to realise that self-loathing might not be the way to go about this.

But he still felt broken.

He had just returned from duty as Hall Monitor, to find Caius sitting in the common room, reading again. Passing through to the dorms, Ephraim went and got a set of wizard's chess, pieces carved out in beautiful black and white marble. Finding the school sets too noisy, the pieces of his own merely walked off the board without much ruckus upon defeat.

He brough it with him and promply tidied Caius' table of everything but the Prefect's book and cup of tea, then set up the board between them, without ever looking up.

"Do you play black or white?" he asked, hazel eyes now locking, gaze hard, on the dark brown of the other.

Who the hell are you, Caius?

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

He'd let himself become involved in a way that, in retrospect, perhaps he shouldn't have.

The blurring, in the moment, between conscious thought and automatic movement had been pronounced. There had been no plan, really, though in the days between encounters he'd kept his eyes open and watching for Ephraim for reasons he'd told himself were to do with his duty as a Prefect. He'd provided a steady presence for other classmates when they were distressed, after all: Lorelei still came to talk with him occasionally, even now, and Rocío still spent most nights in his dormitory besides. Caius broadly spent his days profoundly fine, with little need to dig much past his own surface, but the past week he'd been markedly tense. His shoulders ached, like he'd spent too much time hunched, but he couldn't find it in him to relax, even as he sat-- again, as he always did-- in his habitual sofa near the fire in the common room.

He wondered whether this was the reality of things now-- being left by after making himself so intensely visible, solid, corporeal, to an incredibly upset thirteen-year-old-- and how much of it was simply the course of the world: violently applying one's own lived experience to the plight of another, and making a fool of one's self as a result. He wondered whether Ephraim thought him too intense, or too assumptive, or too anything, really, because they hadn't spoken in days. Not since the night Caius followed him down the corridor to his dormitory at a glance's prompting.

It wasn't much his style to speak first. Caius was a watcher. If he deigned to act, and it was judged to be faux pas, he was much more apt to let a sleeping dog lie and never speak of it again. If he gleaned that this was the more correct option, as though in silent agreement with other entities involved that it hadn't actually happened the way they remembered it, so it would be. He moved in careful coordination with a jumbled set of rules that did not make clear distinction between social ordinance and personal preference.

Usually he could read a mood with ease, picking at the intricacies of a façade with a simple once-over, like pulling white hairs from a black wool coat. But, when their paths crossed, Ephraim's shell was perfectly opaque, like frosted glass, allowing light through but not any exposing detail-- it made Caius progressively more uneasy, days passing along with no clarity.

And that was simply the way it was.

In the meantime, he had moved from Coriolanus to Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the translation was dry. Caius had strewn himself over the little table beside the sofa, cup of tea steaming beside a likely looking pile of parchment and textbooks and dry quills, his balled-up heather grey Slytherin uniform jumper innocuously tossed amongst them. He had begun to turn a page, white shirtsleeves folded up to his forearms, when his objects began to clatter and shuffle.

His frowned and he looked up, drawing breath, annoyed, ready to offer something scathing, when his eyes focused and reality reordered itself.

It was Ephraim, setting up a chess set.

He glanced over the side of the sofa, where his things lay now in an orderly pile on the ground, and then back. Ephraim stood the pieces in their places carefully, without looking at him, and Caius watched without speaking, baffled.

"Do you play black or white?"

"Black," he replied.

It wasn't much his style to speak first.

[Ephraim Prothero]

He set it up sideways, white pieces to the left, black to the right, neutral, an attempt at offering a choice that did not, at the same time, reveal his own preferred position.

But, as they so often did, the pieces fell into the right order as a choice was made and he reached out his hands to turn the board, facing the white pieces as he so tended to back home.

Now, it was conventional wisdom that white would be at an advantage, but this was not his reason why. While also an observer, Ephraim was not the sort to wait for others to make their move. He preferred being the aggressor - he observed as a way to figure out how to take control of the game. Although whether preferrance was the right word was an open question - it was sort of in his nature to not wait.

He did not open yet, but took a moment to look at Caius, considering the opponent and his choices, Ephraim's right hand to his chin in a thoughtful expression.

(His left arm had also been declared healthy - the sling had been removed sometime last week and with the aid of magical medicine it had returned to its full function, although he had been told to take it easy and not jump straight back into Quidditch - as though Cassian would have allowed for that, anyway.)

And he reached out his arm to push his pawn to E4, exposing his king but opening the diagonals for both his bishop and his queen.

Leaning back, he fell into quiet observation, waiting for the older boy to make his move.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

Ephraim turned the board and Caius straightened, shutting his book and sliding it onto the table beside the board, turning such that his attention showed forward to the game. The tea, he picked up and sipped, gaze not at all on the lines of pieces.

No sling, he noted, the only apparent change. Everything else was as usual: hair neatly combed, eyes clear, expression neutral-- studious, even, trained down at the board and its waiting soldiers, a finger over his lips in thought.

Caius' eyes shifted abruptly as Ephraim's eyes moved back up, having made his first move, an attempt at masking the truth of his focus.

The boy didn't speak after his initial question, and Caius' tongue held. The pawns and court all were so still, awaiting orders, so contrary to the increasing chaotic pattern of his thoughts. Caius tried to force himself to consider the board as it lay, hands clasped before him, knuckles white; but there was a distracting undercurrent that kept one thought from following another. An incessant, low buzz, his growing annoyance at not understanding the stakes of this game or Ephraim's aim in setting up here, now.

His jaw tensed briefly. Caius willed one still thought extracted from the muddling haze after a moment of apparent keen deliberation. Setting the mug down on top of his book, he lifted the opposite hand.

He moved his pawn in mirror to Ephraim's, to E6. Equilibrium, or something parallel to it, a quiet confirmation.

Caius didn't sit back, but let his hand hover, elbow resting on the table, frozen in media res, but eyes alert. He studied Ephraim with a teeming intensity, gaze tilted, tense.

He didn't understand. He hated that.

[Ephraim Prothero]

There was an uneasiness.

It drew itself between them, hovered in the negative space between walls and bodies and board.

Ephraim was not a patient person by nature, but he was by training. Impulsivity was not a trait appreciated in the Prothero Castle, as demonstrated by Eugene's tendency to lay a damper on the spontaneous enthusiasm even of people such as Florence. The constant dynamics that went on between his parents was not one that Ephraim was blind to, but it was one that he knew to keep away from.

It was his oldest brother Harmon that came closest to Eugene both in personality and in relationship. There was a silent agreement, a quiet co-dependence in their double existence since Harmon had come of age (at which point Ephraim had been merely five), when he had been invited to take on an increasing amount of responsibility. It was in part for this reason that their paths, despite the familial relation, had rarely crossed. As well as the fact that, for all of Ephraim's childish attempts at reaching out, Harmon was not really the social sort.

In the end, however, he had found a way.

The games between himself and Harmon were quiet and droning, but they were present, and they usually went on until some sort of conclusion was reached. For the most part, that conclusion ended in Ephraim's loss (with the one exception where Eugene had taken an interest in teaming up). There was something sacred about those games, in him taking loss after loss from a brother than otherwise only paid him very little attention.

This was very different from that.

Despite their buzzing quiet, the attention he received now was so tense that he could cut it with a knife.

He did not.

Instead he watched, eyes on the figure of Caius Ellwood-Luxe, sixteen, with his intense gaze and hovering hand.

And reached out again, pushing a second pawn to D4.

It was an obvious move. This was all about taking control of the centre of the board, where the majority of their battles would take place.

And he thought about keeping it going, felt at the exhilaration of this strange change of power that followed after he had given himself so completely over into vulnerability.

But he could not help it, that his face wanted otherwise, breaking into a widening smile that he, at first, tried to hide behind his hand, but which bubbled over with an entertained, yet strangely happy, laughter.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

Caius was no master chess player, but he'd read enough to be dangerous. The strategist dance of back and forth was tritely poetic, regarded highly as both gentleman's game and intellectual pursuit, and that alone was enough to have piqued his interest as a younger teen; but he had little natural talent for it, and that had dulled the interest considerably.

His mind worked fitfully, struggling to focus on the matter at hand.

He could see the possibilities as they mounted, linear paths that jutted from each previous point, and they narrowed-- to his relief-- as Ephraim took the glaring track.

Caius was inching along the path to his next move when a noise forced him to surface, through the haze of his own thoughts, more jarring than a scream would have been, or even an actual full sentence.

Ephraim Prothero was laughing.

Caius' eyes became round and he sat back, hand dropping down like a lead weight beside the board.

“What?”

Confusion multiplied, a spiral of thought that landed him squarely in the early stages of panic. He searched Ephraim’s face for clues, but the laugh continued, a shock of color through the grayness of his now low-simmering frustration, and when no answer came, he took a sharp breath in.

“What?!” He demanded. The boy’s mirth cut the tension, at least, and it wasn't long before the wave of panic subsided, leaving only a stream of hyper-concentrated bewilderment. Caius himself deflated slightly, shock playing out plainly across his face.

A moment of stillness in Ephraim's wake before resolution hit him, and the corner of his mouth quirked up, slight, and he leaned back toward the board.

He pulled up another pawn and put it down-- D5.

This was the way it was going to be, then.

[Ephraim Prothero]

It was hard to say what it was exactly, that had happened. He'd walked around these past two weeks with his steps heavy, head hung low, even as he had pressed his chest forward as not to let it show. He could not really deal with more tension.

But this was funny.

His fit continued as the expression of the boy accross from him changed, one uttering of confused what replacing the other.

And there - a smile.

Almost.

The sound stopped, but the grin remained, triumphant. Ephraim Prothero slumped back in his chair, uncharacteristically childish. Caius was not Harmon nor Cephas, but a strange creature before him. The sort that people like Rocio Valdés would snuggle up to in the dead of night, in the dorm of the 6th year boys.

He wondered at what sort of punishment would have been given for that sort of behaviour in Durmstrang.

"Tell me about your book," said Ephraim, the smile smug on his face, and moved the knight on his left-hand side, to C3.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

It was radiant, almost. The grin that shone across the table served a sort of comfort, equally confusing, and Caius' impulse was to harvest and store it, examine it, save it for later.

The past days had been far too heavy, interpersonal horrors coming to too much a head, and this whole thing had been a dismal flourish, a worry that Caius had tried and failed to shed. And here was Prothero himself before him, sling gone, robes still somehow perfectly pressed, and he was laughing.

Caius got the distinct impression that it was a victorious laugh, which was, of course, deeply annoying. It was as though an unseen, unknown confrontation had taken place between them, and Caius had, without ever having realized what was happening, lost.

He'd never get one over on any underclassmen if they kept on like this.

"Tell me about your book."

The voice floated to him.

He frowned at the knight, a left field move given Caius' pawn in Ephraim's easy reach, and swiftly moved to rectify that: pawn to E4, taking the white pawn there.

"It's about transformations-- different sorts," He said, placing his prize along the side of the board. "Transformations as punishment, as consequence, as a matter of course, in Roman myths."

He let himself sit forward, arms crossed over the lip of the table, neutral, but expression softer.

[Ephraim Prothero]

He watched, took in the frown.

Amused by the removal of his little, white pawn.

He had not really taken Caius for the competetive type.

But he was intrigued. Somehow, there were layers.

"Transformations as punishment, as consequence, as a matter of course, in Roman myths."

"And that interests you?" he asked. Ephraim had no trouble reading, but there was a stark contrast between the two of them where Caius always sat here, far removed from the rest of them as though lost in some dreamy world, whereas when Ephraim brought books to the common room it was only ever school books.

He leaned forward, smirk mildening, propping his left elbow against the table surface, chin in his palm as he regarded the board.

His right arm extended, his index, middle finger and thumb stroking against the smooth, white marble of his right-hand bishop. Ephraim did not really think of this way of play as the muggle way - there was something about the touch of his skin against cold stone, about the manual movements that made it easier for him to orient around the physical space.

Besides, he was gathering useful information.

And Ephraim looked up to hold Caius with his eyes, darkly.

"Bishop to B5," he said, this time speaking the command as the magical piece glided accross the board and out of his fingers.

"Check," he said.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

"And that interests you?"

What a question.

"Of course," he replied, bringing a hand up to lean against his cheek. His gaze was gentler now, and he relaxed into the half-smile. "We all transform."

Some more than others, and all at different points. The starting point for one man could be the ending for another, a midway point just a crossroads where two individuals met and nodded and passed. The course of a life changed wildly as it wended, and that was what  Metamorphoses was about-- the wildly different ways an individual came to transformation by the course of their life itself.

Or, you could anger a god and be turned into a bird. That was always a possibility if you were a character in classical myth.

Leaning just so on his hand, he studied the board quietly, lingering on Ephraim's fingers worrying at the bishop.

He felt Ephraim's gaze shift and so his did reactively; their eyes locked, and Ephraim spoke again, those fingers lifting as the piece moved of its own accord to its ordered position.

"Check."

Caius pursed his lips, momentarily troubled. He supposed he ought to have seen that coming.

Eyes down, and back up.

"Pawn to C6."

Ephraim's eyes were light, flecked with yellow. He hadn't noticed before.

[Ephraim Prothero]

Of course, said Caius, but to Ephraim it really was not that clear. Transformation, as a concept, was something he associated with butterflies, perhaps animagi, possibly half-breeds like werewolves. Ephraim held no desire to transform.

"Why?" he asked.

For whatever monologue Caius had going on in his own head, the younger Slytherin had trouble following, though not for lack of interest.

The predictability of Caius' move matched the unpredictability of his own. The aggressive move of his bishop had, by no means, been good. But that had also not been the point of it.

Now Ephraim retreated his Bishop to C4.

And just so, he had effectively given away the upper hand - he was no longer the one to lead, but one to follow.

Leaning back in his chair again, his eyebrows rose in mild anticipitation.

And perhaps Caius could be forced out of this place in which he seemed to be always hiding.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

"Why?"

Caius considered Ephraim then, perceiving a shift as though the light had suddenly changed, stepping to the side of his own preconceptions. The bishop retreated, gliding back, and he let it do so beyond his gaze, the card of the encounter flipping abruptly.

Why?

Caius often found himself lost in his own thoughts, and there was a momentary silence before he reconnected to the present. A gaggle of students tittered as they passed through the common room on their way to their dormitories, silly but typical, at an age where such things were expected. The tittering students would lose some of that silliness as they grew up, Caius thought. Adults were, as a rule, a far more sober bunch, working off a scope that Caius couldn't quite grasp-- but he could see in himself a before and after, a singular point in time where things were irrevocably changed. He was not the same as he had been when he was thirteen, as when he was ten, as when he was five.

Reaching, he moved the blocking pawn back to its original place, eyes down then up, and he paused, thinking.

"Evolution is natural," he said after a moment, voice smooth but slow. "We change without meaning to. We shift. Our experiences-- mount. Build on themselves. It changes us. In the book, there's usually a catalyst, some strong emotion-- but the transformation is usually literal. Into a tree, or a flower, or that."

He reached a hand for the book beneath his mug of tea, picking up the mug and dragging the book to him. He held the ceramic unsteadily as he tried to flip the cover open one-handed.

He leafed through the book for a moment, bringing the mug shortly to his lips for a sip, then placed it down and tracked a finger down a page.

"The grief of having her pool trampled by Hades turned Cyane into the very waters that she protected. Or, no--" Here he flipped the pages again, somewhere near animated, but couldn't find the passage quick enough. He gave up and let his hand be cradled idle, in the center of the pages. His head tilted a little as he looked up and to the side, as though accessing a particularly engaging memory. "Apollo, who loved Hyacinthus, and then lost him to death. So rather than letting him wither away or let decay take him fully, Apollo turned him into a flower. The hyacinth."

The permanence that an emotion could work on a landscape-- physical or mental-- was something that he couldn't unstick his mind from. "To feel something so strongly that you put roots into the dirt and force the world to see you growing there. Wishing for someone so desperately that you fill the world with their beauty. It's compelling."

Caius straightened, righting his posture, chin down but gaze forward, suddenly back.

He shut the book.

[Ephraim Prothero]

Something happened.

A window opened.

It opened with a silence, and Ephraim held himself very still, transfixed as the moment unravelled itself before him, the shift gliding over Caius' face. His own face blanked though his eyebrows knit, as they so often did when he tried to follow something that was complex and, in many ways, completely out of his reach.

But there was something else too. His protest of the illegal move caught in his throat as his eyes caught on Caius' movements, the removal of the cup, and the clear but subtle enthusiasm behind the one-handed page-turning. His hands, long-fingered, spread out like a spider, ending in clean, pink nails.

He didn't know what it was, but somehow what Caius did to him merely by reading, was deeply painful.

And so he glanced down, stared at the chessboard, disappearing into some heart-wrenching silence for a long moment.

"You can't do that," he said.

All of it. The pawn could not move backwards and Apollo could not be with a Hyacinth and you could not change someone into a flower.

The whole thing was absurd.

[Caius Ellwood-Luxe]

“Do—?”

Caius blinked and breathed out a laugh, uneasy, hands flexing over his book.

He supposed he had misstepped again, then. Only this time, instead of laughter in its wake, there was a weighted pause: that contagious joy that Ephraim had conjured up at pulling one over on him before was, abruptly, troubled and muddied.

There was suddenly an uncomfortable sense of having revealed too much, though he couldn't see how. Prothero had asked a question, and Caius had answered. He slid the book back to its place beside the board and took his mug up, but didn’t drink; instead, it was armor, and he held it with two hands at the level of his chest, close.

He tried to keep his expression easy, pleasant, a thin smile breezing over his lips.

“The Greeks— and the Romans, too for that matter— they did all sorts of strange things, all of their stories are sort of mad like that—“

He looked down at the board, smile fading, trailing off.

“Did I break a rule? Is that it?"

Even with modern Transfiguration techniques, turning a person completely into a flower that then could propagate itself the world over was far-fetched-- Caius didn't think Prothero was so literal as to be caught on a fictional detail like a man being transformed into a flower by a god.

He tipped his head a little, searching for Ephraim's eyes.