Re: The Woods: Pesha/Tandy
Subtle hadn’t been any part of the intention of walking away from the sullen, either. Billy wasn’t trying to preserve the guy’s dignity, or whatever. He didn’t mind if the time-out was obvious, and so it wasn’t patronizing, either. And it was also partly that he already seemed to spend so much freaking time around people who were determined to bury their feelings that it was, admittedly, kinda old. Billy was sort of over it at this point.
The only thing that really mattered was that Billy did genuinely want to help, at the end of the day. There was certainly some self-serving reasons guiding his desire to help along the way, because each spell was a flex of his magic like a muscle and he could feel it getting stronger, like every day was leg day except, y’know. With magic. And it wasn’t enough to just sit around grinding the same old stuff out day after day, either. He needed new, and he needed more. So while he’d technically done this one before, it was different in the delivery. After all that, though — he wanted to help. The kid was clearly having a Bad Day on, like, a colossal scale magnitudes greater than Billy could appreciate proper. So if he could help make all the transplanted-reality shit a little less with the terrible-awful, he would like to do it.
Still, when Tandy mentioned the thing in the woods, Billy's eyes couldn't help but flicker in the direction of the shack across the property where Atticus lived.
Billy’s fingers had already dipped into the bowl with the paste and smoothed it out a little against the bottom curve, spreading it evenly. At the same time he scooped out some of the stuff on his index fingers and one thumb, reaching out to gesture with the crook of one finger and his palms facing the sky. “Hands,” he requested, waiting for the guy to obey and being very careful not to let the viscous material drip off his fingertips. When Tandy’s hands came up, he reached out and gently smeared the paste against each of the his palms, running the length between his head line and heart line. Then, quickly and before Tandy could pull away, Billy reached out towards his face once more and gently smeared the paste from his thumb onto the guy’s forehead, between and slightly above the inner corners of his eyebrows. He smiled, and it was a little apologetic for the lack of warning, but he needed to work fast.
Billy knew that the stuff on Tandy’s hands and forehead would start to tingle, almost feeling cool to the touch like something with peppermint had been rubbed on his skin. He picked up the bottle of rosewater again and poured it into the wooden bowl with careful precision, then picked up the bowl to swirl the contents once in the same direction that he’d done with the rosewater earlier. The substances mixed improbably, and the surface of the bowl’s contents looked almost silvery-reflective. Billy pulled the stolen ID out of his pocket and dropped it beneath the top of the liquid.
He said a few more words in Romanian, not any that he knew this time — they came to him the same way that he’d known how to cut the plant stems, or which bottle to select from the array in his trailer. (Sometimes he tried to Google Translate the words after the fact to figure out what they meant, but he could never get the pronunciation quite right away and usually Google just gave him nonsense back.) Then he brought his hands up to cup Tandy’s, just below, barely touching while Billy closed his eyes and sat very, very still for several long minutes.
“Cup some of the liquid and splash it on your face, almost like you’re in a face wash commercial,” he eventually said with some authority, smiling as his eyes opened and he dropped his own hands. He smiled because he knew it sounded ridiculous, and also because he knew that it would work. “Then take the card out of the bowl.”