March 9th, 1891 — Magical London
Forty-eight hours. It had been forty-eight hours since he'd ran out of the last vial of the ingredient he'd needed. Forty-eight hours since he'd raided the hospital potions cabinet, forty-eight hours since he'd left work early to visit the apothecary. Forty-eight hours had passed—forty-eight hours he hadn't been on the potion.
It was not usually this bad. He'd suffered from withdrawal before, but usually involved nothing more than muscle achiness, tiredness, irritation, and—at the worst—an itchiness in his stomach that was comparable to a nasty mosquito bite. Now ware worse. Now the achieness, tiredness, irritation, and itchiness was there, but there was also felt to be an irritation in his lungs that was effecting more than his breathing.
He was shaking. He was angry. He needed his ingredient and he needed it now, and if he'd realized that grew in Scotland in autumn he'd never had laced his potion with it. Now it was cold, wet, and anyone who'd had it in stock no longer had it.
And he was desperate. So desperate. So tired. So hungry.
The fucking apothecarist had had the gall to tell him to come back in six months, had dared to smile when Billy suggested that they import stock from somewhere it didn't get so cold. He'd then had the audacity to direct him to the library, as if some fucking book on some fucking place was going to make getting his hands on the vial any easier that day.
But he'd gone, not because the trusted to apothecarist's sense but because he had no other option, and it was there he'd discovered a herbologist in London held the record for possessing the most specimens of plants and potion ingredients in all of England.
So there he was, before the sun was up on a Tuesday morning, in some stranger's house without their knowledge, in a room with thousands—if not tens of thousands—of ingredients that would take days to go through. And now it was snowing. Blizzarding. The windows in the room were nearly as big as the walls themselves, and the streets of magical London were veiled by such a thick downpour of snow that Billy knew he wouldn't be able to navigate on foot.
In short: he was trapped.
