Ford would have liked to have said yes, both because that had been what he'd originally been angling for and because he was just so tired of having to work his way through this conversation, picking his way through it like a minefield. The fact that Noble was offering it like it was nothing, however, after he'd just be so upset about it, made Ford suspicious of this apparent olive branch.

"What else are you going to do with them?" he asked. Noble couldn't have been suggesting that he'd just keep using them in potions he sold to people, without knowing whether or not something had happened to them. Surely he couldn't be suggesting that, so what was the alternative?

  

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Set by Lady!

He frowned, as if he was thinking about it again, and took a few moments before he replied, because he was trying to think about it. Both the solutions he’d pursue if he was interested in a safer method of dealing with this, and an actual way to get away with dealing with it. (He’d have to send the ingredients somewhere else, and he’d have to test them somewhere else. But where?)

“I’ll have to cash in on the favor Healer Chevalier owes me from the other month,” Noble said, “And ask her to run the hospital’s purity tests on everything.”Did the hospital run purity tests on ingredients? Noble really didn’t know, but it seemed like something they could do.

“It’ll probably take her up to a month and I’ll have to generate a backlog on some things, but it won’t cost us anything,” Noble said, with a genuine wince on the word backlog — no matter what happened with the ingredients, there were some potions he was going to have to put off, lest he actually poison anyone. “And you won’t have to worry about me being a — what was it?” Noble’s eyes flashed with some of the anger and hurt he was still pulling back into his chest. “Liability.”

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The following 1 user Likes Noble Greengrass's post:1 user Likes Noble Greengrass's post
   Fortitude Greengrass

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set by Bee

Ford was a little wary of getting the hospital involved with this, but it was at least some consolation that Noble had said Healer Chavalier and not Darrow. Presumably Noble’s other healer friends could be trusted, and Noble said purity test so casually that it must have been something they did regularly, even if Ford had never heard of it before. Ford’s ignorance on the subject meant nothing; he’d stopped taking potions in fifth year and, unexpected lesson on potion ingredients earlier that month aside, he didn’t really know anything about how this worked. So it sounded like a fair plan, and he couldn’t really argue with something that would cost them nothing.

And he didn’t want to argue anymore, not when Noble was throwing his own words back at him and it took so much energy to keep himself from flinching at both the word and the tone that his brother said it in. Ford shouldn’t have said liability; he knew it before he said it, he’d regretted it immediately, and he regretted it still now. It had gotten them here, though, with Noble agreeing not to poison himself anymore and presenting a plan that was objectively better in every way, so — maybe it had been worth it. They could recover this, maybe, someday — but Noble had to be alive for them to recover from it, so that was still the priority here, not his feelings on the matter.

“Alright,” he agreed, crossing his arms over his chest. He had forgotten about his drink for a moment but now it was making it inconvenient to stand the way he wanted to, so he finished it off with a long gulp. “That’s fine.”

  

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Set by Lady!