Filip Nagata (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} restitutions) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} dunwichgame,@ 2024-03-03 20:12:00 |
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Sunday, 03.03 - evening
Filip Nagata & Rowena Macleod
Experiments in magical healing.
Experiments in magical healing.
Apothecary Mistica | Low | ⚠ Chronic pain
"I'm fine!" Filip gritted out, sweat beading on his forehead as he struggled to lift his knee, slap his foot down on the seat of a wooden chair, and then try to lever his weight onto– "Fuck!" His knee buckled, the other leg folded, and he wound up sliding to the floor in an ungainly pile.
At least he didn't smack his head. This time. But the indignity of it. The pointlessness of his efforts. Frustrated and aching, he gave the chair leg his version of a vicious kick. It only served to slide the chair back about a foot across the floor of Rowena's shop.
"It was working," he growled. "I could do it fine last week." There was an argument to be made about the Martian meds still tapering off, last week. About Rowena's pain management potions keeping him from feeling the worst of the strain on his weak limbs.
About not being so damn tired for packing up the apartment at Pickman.
But Filip wasn't in the mood for arguments. He wanted results. From Rowena, yes, but also himself. Since he couldn't glare at himself, though, he glared at her instead. "Why isn't it working?"
Rowena looked absolutely affronted. She, too, was a little sweaty, breathing a little hard. The spell was exhausting, and she was trying so hard. The trial and error portion of this was exhausting. Sometimes it seemed like it would work, or it did a tiny bit, but not the way Rowena would have wanted it.
His kicking her chair, though. That was obnoxious. She flicked her hand, the glow of purple in her eyes fading as the chair came to a stop, and Rowena waved it back towards the desk it should have been sitting at anyway.
“Kick my things again dear and it will never work.” She threatened, stalking over to the small kitchen area in the back room of her shop. It had a sink and a kettle and that was essentially it, aside from a few cups. The cupboard itself had some teas and sugar in there. The kettle had been sitting warm for a while and she poured two cups of tea, leaving one of them for Filip to go get himself.
“The ingredients are different here than they are home and these are difficult, complicated spells. I am essentially creating you an entirely new spell in order to heal you in this world with the ingredients we have. It’s close, I can feel it. It’s working sometimes, but it’s not coming easy and that’s just life, my wee little cairn, so suck it up.” Her words a little sharper at the end there. “And drink your tea. We’re taking a break.”
"I can keep going," Filip insisted mulishly. But he didn't kick the chair again and when he got up – slowly, wincing at the pain in his left ankle – it was only to go retrieve his tea. He wasn't about to admit it, but he was tired. At first, he'd approached their experiments with enthusiasm and determination. Even optimism.
A few weeks in, with the last of the Osteo-X firmly out of his system and no other form of medication to take the edge off, he was inching steadily into pessimism and resentment. Anger, even. Why was it so hard. Why was his body not adapting fast enough. Why did the magic not work on him.
"It almost worked the other day," he insisted, switching the hot mug of tea from hand to hand so the heat wouldn't hurt too badly. It didn't occur to him to just set it down and let it cool. "Can't you just… do the same thing again, and just… make it last longer, ke?" Evidently he didn't understand magic at all.
She didn’t even honor that with a response, watching as he got up. The wincing, the way he favored his right ankle over his left, the slowness of his movements. It was getting worse, and quickly. She knew it would though, given he was off his other meds in full.
After another sip of her tea, she rolled her eyes at his suggestion that she just do it again and make it work longer. “Oh gee why didn’t I think of that?” Rowena replied, throwing her hand in the air like she was shocked and impressed by his stellar idea. “I’ll just use the same spell but tell it to last longer this time.”
Scoffing, Rowena set her tea down and turned towards the cupboards to her left, shuffling through them. She grabbed a specific potion out of there, and came to set it down in front of Filip. “This tastes like shit and it’s not easy to make, there is no continual supply. Two drops, in your tea, every other day should help you move a little easier and take some of the edge off that pain.”
Heading back to grab her tea, Rowena frowned. “I am working on it, Filip. I am inventing entirely new spells here, it takes some trial and error. I didn’t manipulate the right bit this time, next time it could work better. Patience, dear, patience.”
Her sarcasm wasn't unwarranted. Filip grit his teeth all the same. He couldn't do much else: he needed Rowena's help. And it wasn't like he couldn't tell that she was doing her best.
The hours she spent with him were hours she could have spent doing literally anything else. Another witch – another person – might've thrust him at the local doctors who couldn't fix him, but Rowena hadn't washed her hands off him, even if his issue wasn't one she'd encountered before.
Then there was the bottle she'd dug out for him. Filip grabbed it before she could think better of it and twisted off the stopper.
Hard to say why he bothered sniffing the contents. "Ugh, that's rank!" It didn't bode well for the taste, but Rowena had warned him. What was the alternative, though? Grimacing, Filip doctored his tea with two drops and quickly stuck the stopper back on. "Must cost a lot, if you only got a limited supply." What was it going to cost him?
What was all of it going to cost?
“It’s a finicky spell, takes far too many ingredients in my opinion. I’m going to try and manipulate that one as well, to be more convenient.” It wasn’t a healing spell, it was more for pain management and mood than anything else, but it was guaranteed to work - because it didn’t actually touch the pain, just dulled how you felt about it, how much it affected you.
Rowena, for what it was worth, hadn’t once thought about charging him for any of this. A favor, perhaps later on. She really had changed in a lot of ways, since she’d met Sam and Dean and gotten herself involved so deeply in saving the world and all that. Now she just, well, wanted to help. Filip seemed like a good sort, someone she could be friends with.
“Don’t push yourself too much because you’re not feeling as much pain. Trust me, you are feeling it you just don’t care about it with that little potion, so you could injure yourself more if you do too much.” She was sure he already knew that, though. Most medications were more masking than healing, when it came to pain management.
After a beat, she had a brainwave and quickly set her tea down, moving over to grab a different crystal, swapping it with the one she had already in place for the spell, and adding several more leaves off of a plant she had in the back, flourishing even in the dim light. Thanks, Ivy.
She crossed out a word in the spell book she had laid out in front of everything else and wrote down a knew one. “Finish that up dear, I have an idea.”
So: a pricey potion and Rowena wasn't charging him for it. Weird. Or maybe not so weird, if she was going to count on him to do something for her, later. A favor for a favor. He'd seen his father invest in people in the same way, raise them up, outfit them for battle, and then have them serve.
He wouldn't, he told himself. Never again.
But as he drank his tea – and grimaced at the taste, even though it was mostly just piping hot – Filip wondered if, with his body in the balance, he'd really be able to refuse.
"Aiight," he said and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Pashang, you weren't kidding about that tea." He limped to the kitchenette and walked back with his ankle already feeling better. Shitty-tasting potion, yes, but damn it worked fast.
“It works. It should last a bit, too.” Rowena wouldn’t ever ask Filip for something he couldn’t provide, or not be willing to. While Rowena was… selfish and self-serving, she could be kind. She could be giving. It was a choice, and she was making it. Besides, Quentin had a sort of magic that was interesting to Rowena and perhaps if she could heal Filip, he could convince Quentin to join the coven.
That wasnt her ultimate goal, no. Something about Filip was endearing. Maybe it was the attitude. Or the pain. Maybe she was making up for something in her own right that she wouldn’t talk about. Whatever it was, Filip was benefiting and Rowena was getting whatever she was getting out of it, too.
With the slight change, Rowena had Filip sit on the couch. “Don’t move and I swear if you curse at me in any language you know I will reconsider giving you that potion.” She warned, and lit the candle, giving just the slightest readjustment to the items there. She lit the ingredients on fire, muttering an incantation. With a wave of her hand, the chair Filip had kicked earlier came back to her, and she side stepped it and sat down in front of Filip.
She put her hand on his knee, eyes glowing bright purple as she recited the incantation, just a bit differently than she had before. She moved one hand to take hold of one of his, continuing to repeat the incantation for quite some time.
Eventually, her eyes dimmed back to their normal blue. She left her hands where they were, though. “I know you’re already a bit numbed from the tea - but, well? Stand up then, take a little walk.”
The first time Rowena did one of her spells over him, Filip had jumped at every crackle and flame. He liked to think he'd toughened up since then. Magic was still way beyond his pay grade, but he'd decided to put his trust in Rowena and, well, this was the price.
So he held still. And bit back his questions. And tried not to react when the candle flame licked a little too close for comfort or the air seemed to crackle with the smell of ozone. Or when Rowena's eyes changed color.
His palm itched something awful by the time it was over, but the soreness in his ankle had receded. He felt the kind of floaty, invulnerable relief that had come with weed, back when he'd first started smoking.
"I don't feel any different," he said, wary and not entirely truthful. But how much of what he was feeling was the spell and how much was it the potion? Only one way to find out. He stood. No sudden wave of dizziness, as sometimes happened. No need to brace himself on the back of a chair.
He tested his ankle, but it didn't hurt at all. He walked from one of the shop to the other, then back again. And again, a third time. "Don't wanna jinx it, but…"
She held her tongue, waited until he’d walked several steps. “We’ll see if this lasts a bit longer than the last one. It’s not supposed to be blocking pain, it’s supposed to be healing you. Have you had scans done of yourself, by Liv? Since you’ve arrived here, I mean.” Rowena sat back, somewhat tired from the effort of healing Filip.
“I’d advise you to get scans done routinely from here on out. You should be getting healed, we need to see if this is actually working to reverse the damage done to your body coming to Dunwich or if its still a temporary fix.” While Rowena was confident in her own work, she wasn’t unaware of the differences in worlds they all came from. Her world was different than Filip’s and they were both different to Dunwich. It was a lot to work through.
Standing up, she moved the chair back to where it belonged, and began gathering up the spell ingredients, returning them to their various spots. “I want a scan done before next session.” Advising was just a polite way of telling him it was a requirement, which it obviously was now. “That way I have time to adjust again if need be.”
After a moment. “Well you can walk now, help clean up.” She waved her hand at the crystals, candles, and other various items on the table they had been working at.
"No scans since–" Filip tried to think of a way to explain the Infinite Agency, and his brief and boring time in its well-supplied infirmary, and decided not to bother. "Not since I got here. Liv knows, though." That he was fucked, basically. It was why she'd set him up with prescription painkillers, and weed, and physical therapy.
None of which was a solution for the long term.
Rowena might be, though. And if she wanted scans: "Okay, okay." Filip held up his hands. "I let them poke and prod at me all day long, you want me to, jeez." But the complaint was toothless, unlike his grin. There was a chance that this, tonight, would be his silver bullet.
And scans would confirm it.
And Quentin would never have to deal with the alternative.
Filip picked up his teacup and poured its last drops down the gullet, just in case. Sore joints already forgotten, there was a real spring in his step as he moved to help Rowena erase the evidence of her spellwork. Belters were nothing if not optimistic.
At least he didn't smack his head. This time. But the indignity of it. The pointlessness of his efforts. Frustrated and aching, he gave the chair leg his version of a vicious kick. It only served to slide the chair back about a foot across the floor of Rowena's shop.
"It was working," he growled. "I could do it fine last week." There was an argument to be made about the Martian meds still tapering off, last week. About Rowena's pain management potions keeping him from feeling the worst of the strain on his weak limbs.
About not being so damn tired for packing up the apartment at Pickman.
But Filip wasn't in the mood for arguments. He wanted results. From Rowena, yes, but also himself. Since he couldn't glare at himself, though, he glared at her instead. "Why isn't it working?"
Rowena looked absolutely affronted. She, too, was a little sweaty, breathing a little hard. The spell was exhausting, and she was trying so hard. The trial and error portion of this was exhausting. Sometimes it seemed like it would work, or it did a tiny bit, but not the way Rowena would have wanted it.
His kicking her chair, though. That was obnoxious. She flicked her hand, the glow of purple in her eyes fading as the chair came to a stop, and Rowena waved it back towards the desk it should have been sitting at anyway.
“Kick my things again dear and it will never work.” She threatened, stalking over to the small kitchen area in the back room of her shop. It had a sink and a kettle and that was essentially it, aside from a few cups. The cupboard itself had some teas and sugar in there. The kettle had been sitting warm for a while and she poured two cups of tea, leaving one of them for Filip to go get himself.
“The ingredients are different here than they are home and these are difficult, complicated spells. I am essentially creating you an entirely new spell in order to heal you in this world with the ingredients we have. It’s close, I can feel it. It’s working sometimes, but it’s not coming easy and that’s just life, my wee little cairn, so suck it up.” Her words a little sharper at the end there. “And drink your tea. We’re taking a break.”
"I can keep going," Filip insisted mulishly. But he didn't kick the chair again and when he got up – slowly, wincing at the pain in his left ankle – it was only to go retrieve his tea. He wasn't about to admit it, but he was tired. At first, he'd approached their experiments with enthusiasm and determination. Even optimism.
A few weeks in, with the last of the Osteo-X firmly out of his system and no other form of medication to take the edge off, he was inching steadily into pessimism and resentment. Anger, even. Why was it so hard. Why was his body not adapting fast enough. Why did the magic not work on him.
"It almost worked the other day," he insisted, switching the hot mug of tea from hand to hand so the heat wouldn't hurt too badly. It didn't occur to him to just set it down and let it cool. "Can't you just… do the same thing again, and just… make it last longer, ke?" Evidently he didn't understand magic at all.
She didn’t even honor that with a response, watching as he got up. The wincing, the way he favored his right ankle over his left, the slowness of his movements. It was getting worse, and quickly. She knew it would though, given he was off his other meds in full.
After another sip of her tea, she rolled her eyes at his suggestion that she just do it again and make it work longer. “Oh gee why didn’t I think of that?” Rowena replied, throwing her hand in the air like she was shocked and impressed by his stellar idea. “I’ll just use the same spell but tell it to last longer this time.”
Scoffing, Rowena set her tea down and turned towards the cupboards to her left, shuffling through them. She grabbed a specific potion out of there, and came to set it down in front of Filip. “This tastes like shit and it’s not easy to make, there is no continual supply. Two drops, in your tea, every other day should help you move a little easier and take some of the edge off that pain.”
Heading back to grab her tea, Rowena frowned. “I am working on it, Filip. I am inventing entirely new spells here, it takes some trial and error. I didn’t manipulate the right bit this time, next time it could work better. Patience, dear, patience.”
Her sarcasm wasn't unwarranted. Filip grit his teeth all the same. He couldn't do much else: he needed Rowena's help. And it wasn't like he couldn't tell that she was doing her best.
The hours she spent with him were hours she could have spent doing literally anything else. Another witch – another person – might've thrust him at the local doctors who couldn't fix him, but Rowena hadn't washed her hands off him, even if his issue wasn't one she'd encountered before.
Then there was the bottle she'd dug out for him. Filip grabbed it before she could think better of it and twisted off the stopper.
Hard to say why he bothered sniffing the contents. "Ugh, that's rank!" It didn't bode well for the taste, but Rowena had warned him. What was the alternative, though? Grimacing, Filip doctored his tea with two drops and quickly stuck the stopper back on. "Must cost a lot, if you only got a limited supply." What was it going to cost him?
What was all of it going to cost?
“It’s a finicky spell, takes far too many ingredients in my opinion. I’m going to try and manipulate that one as well, to be more convenient.” It wasn’t a healing spell, it was more for pain management and mood than anything else, but it was guaranteed to work - because it didn’t actually touch the pain, just dulled how you felt about it, how much it affected you.
Rowena, for what it was worth, hadn’t once thought about charging him for any of this. A favor, perhaps later on. She really had changed in a lot of ways, since she’d met Sam and Dean and gotten herself involved so deeply in saving the world and all that. Now she just, well, wanted to help. Filip seemed like a good sort, someone she could be friends with.
“Don’t push yourself too much because you’re not feeling as much pain. Trust me, you are feeling it you just don’t care about it with that little potion, so you could injure yourself more if you do too much.” She was sure he already knew that, though. Most medications were more masking than healing, when it came to pain management.
After a beat, she had a brainwave and quickly set her tea down, moving over to grab a different crystal, swapping it with the one she had already in place for the spell, and adding several more leaves off of a plant she had in the back, flourishing even in the dim light. Thanks, Ivy.
She crossed out a word in the spell book she had laid out in front of everything else and wrote down a knew one. “Finish that up dear, I have an idea.”
So: a pricey potion and Rowena wasn't charging him for it. Weird. Or maybe not so weird, if she was going to count on him to do something for her, later. A favor for a favor. He'd seen his father invest in people in the same way, raise them up, outfit them for battle, and then have them serve.
He wouldn't, he told himself. Never again.
But as he drank his tea – and grimaced at the taste, even though it was mostly just piping hot – Filip wondered if, with his body in the balance, he'd really be able to refuse.
"Aiight," he said and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Pashang, you weren't kidding about that tea." He limped to the kitchenette and walked back with his ankle already feeling better. Shitty-tasting potion, yes, but damn it worked fast.
“It works. It should last a bit, too.” Rowena wouldn’t ever ask Filip for something he couldn’t provide, or not be willing to. While Rowena was… selfish and self-serving, she could be kind. She could be giving. It was a choice, and she was making it. Besides, Quentin had a sort of magic that was interesting to Rowena and perhaps if she could heal Filip, he could convince Quentin to join the coven.
That wasnt her ultimate goal, no. Something about Filip was endearing. Maybe it was the attitude. Or the pain. Maybe she was making up for something in her own right that she wouldn’t talk about. Whatever it was, Filip was benefiting and Rowena was getting whatever she was getting out of it, too.
With the slight change, Rowena had Filip sit on the couch. “Don’t move and I swear if you curse at me in any language you know I will reconsider giving you that potion.” She warned, and lit the candle, giving just the slightest readjustment to the items there. She lit the ingredients on fire, muttering an incantation. With a wave of her hand, the chair Filip had kicked earlier came back to her, and she side stepped it and sat down in front of Filip.
She put her hand on his knee, eyes glowing bright purple as she recited the incantation, just a bit differently than she had before. She moved one hand to take hold of one of his, continuing to repeat the incantation for quite some time.
Eventually, her eyes dimmed back to their normal blue. She left her hands where they were, though. “I know you’re already a bit numbed from the tea - but, well? Stand up then, take a little walk.”
The first time Rowena did one of her spells over him, Filip had jumped at every crackle and flame. He liked to think he'd toughened up since then. Magic was still way beyond his pay grade, but he'd decided to put his trust in Rowena and, well, this was the price.
So he held still. And bit back his questions. And tried not to react when the candle flame licked a little too close for comfort or the air seemed to crackle with the smell of ozone. Or when Rowena's eyes changed color.
His palm itched something awful by the time it was over, but the soreness in his ankle had receded. He felt the kind of floaty, invulnerable relief that had come with weed, back when he'd first started smoking.
"I don't feel any different," he said, wary and not entirely truthful. But how much of what he was feeling was the spell and how much was it the potion? Only one way to find out. He stood. No sudden wave of dizziness, as sometimes happened. No need to brace himself on the back of a chair.
He tested his ankle, but it didn't hurt at all. He walked from one of the shop to the other, then back again. And again, a third time. "Don't wanna jinx it, but…"
She held her tongue, waited until he’d walked several steps. “We’ll see if this lasts a bit longer than the last one. It’s not supposed to be blocking pain, it’s supposed to be healing you. Have you had scans done of yourself, by Liv? Since you’ve arrived here, I mean.” Rowena sat back, somewhat tired from the effort of healing Filip.
“I’d advise you to get scans done routinely from here on out. You should be getting healed, we need to see if this is actually working to reverse the damage done to your body coming to Dunwich or if its still a temporary fix.” While Rowena was confident in her own work, she wasn’t unaware of the differences in worlds they all came from. Her world was different than Filip’s and they were both different to Dunwich. It was a lot to work through.
Standing up, she moved the chair back to where it belonged, and began gathering up the spell ingredients, returning them to their various spots. “I want a scan done before next session.” Advising was just a polite way of telling him it was a requirement, which it obviously was now. “That way I have time to adjust again if need be.”
After a moment. “Well you can walk now, help clean up.” She waved her hand at the crystals, candles, and other various items on the table they had been working at.
"No scans since–" Filip tried to think of a way to explain the Infinite Agency, and his brief and boring time in its well-supplied infirmary, and decided not to bother. "Not since I got here. Liv knows, though." That he was fucked, basically. It was why she'd set him up with prescription painkillers, and weed, and physical therapy.
None of which was a solution for the long term.
Rowena might be, though. And if she wanted scans: "Okay, okay." Filip held up his hands. "I let them poke and prod at me all day long, you want me to, jeez." But the complaint was toothless, unlike his grin. There was a chance that this, tonight, would be his silver bullet.
And scans would confirm it.
And Quentin would never have to deal with the alternative.
Filip picked up his teacup and poured its last drops down the gullet, just in case. Sore joints already forgotten, there was a real spring in his step as he moved to help Rowena erase the evidence of her spellwork. Belters were nothing if not optimistic.