[ The tug snaps his attention back. Nathan frowns, fucking knee-jerk murderous, all instinct to shove Ian back with his palm. For a second, the look holds: this close, it's audible, the sharp inhale of breath Nathan takes. Like he's preparing himself for a fight.
That tension flattens, in the next breath, right when some semblance of cognitive awareness returns. He knows it's a good point. Justifiable. The right one, even. He nods, again, but it's not much of an apology.
The screaming becomes a moot point anyway. The voice gets cut off halfway through a word.
A bead of wet splashes across his jaw around about the same time something falls. Nathan's attention pivots to beside them. It takes him a comically long time to fucking process— laughable that he'd ever been someone who knew how to respond to chaos like this. Nathan stares and stares and keeps fucking staring at the sight of it, because.
Jesus. Jesus Christ.
Some part of his brain that's trying right now, that is scrabbling for any point of comparison, thinks that this just isn't— right.
That at least magic vaporizes. Leaves little trace. That when casting goes wrong, it cauterizes you clean. Forces burning you from the inside out. Injury doesn't look like this: a jut of bone and sinew and blood, tissue smeared along point of impact. Nausea ekes into the fringes of his awareness and Nathan closes his eyes. Sometimes that happens, when the world slows down for him. Synaptic kickback. Some shitty side-effect.
But he can't lie. It's this, too. Pressure of hand over chest eases, a bit, as Nathan minutely shifts his weight. Presses his own shoulders back to the wall behind him, as if the texturing there could dig in harder, replace nausea with pain. Would be a fucking shitty time to throw up, is the thing. ]
no subject
That tension flattens, in the next breath, right when some semblance of cognitive awareness returns. He knows it's a good point. Justifiable. The right one, even. He nods, again, but it's not much of an apology.
The screaming becomes a moot point anyway. The voice gets cut off halfway through a word.
A bead of wet splashes across his jaw around about the same time something falls. Nathan's attention pivots to beside them. It takes him a comically long time to fucking process— laughable that he'd ever been someone who knew how to respond to chaos like this. Nathan stares and stares and keeps fucking staring at the sight of it, because.
Jesus. Jesus Christ.
Some part of his brain that's trying right now, that is scrabbling for any point of comparison, thinks that this just isn't— right.
That at least magic vaporizes. Leaves little trace. That when casting goes wrong, it cauterizes you clean. Forces burning you from the inside out. Injury doesn't look like this: a jut of bone and sinew and blood, tissue smeared along point of impact. Nausea ekes into the fringes of his awareness and Nathan closes his eyes. Sometimes that happens, when the world slows down for him. Synaptic kickback. Some shitty side-effect.
But he can't lie. It's this, too. Pressure of hand over chest eases, a bit, as Nathan minutely shifts his weight. Presses his own shoulders back to the wall behind him, as if the texturing there could dig in harder, replace nausea with pain. Would be a fucking shitty time to throw up, is the thing. ]