Tybalt’s foot missed a step, scuffing the side of the stairs and threatening to throw him back down them when Elsie called like that, because she was exactly the kind of person not to make a fuss about anything. So this really had to be Something with a capital S. And it didn’t really matter if he were ready or not, did it?
No, because Sebastian had pushed him back through the bedroom door before Tybalt could digest his own urge to cling onto the doorframe and fight it, childish and cowardly as that urge may be. Sebastian had seen it done – fine, that counted as a victory; it stood him in better stead than either of them – and he –
Knew how to tell if things are about to go very wrong, he’d just said. How to tell if things were going to go wrong. “Tell?” Tybalt echoed, wide-eyed and dumbstruck for a moment, not about to repeat the whole sentence in the same room as Elsie, but nevertheless peering at her cousin with barely-concealed alarm. “How to tell?” Bloody great congratulations to him, if that was all they taught him in mediwizard training! Maybe Sebastian would have a head start, and see the signs first, but Tybalt figured if something were to go very wrong, Merlin forbid, that he would probably eventually be able to damn well notice it too.
Tyb took a breath, crossed his fingers and prayed that what Sebastian had forgotten to say in his fucking useless half-sentence of a comforting pep-talk, was that, if anything did go wrong, of course he was also confident in his abilities to fix it.
(Better yet, Tyb hoped that nothing would go wrong.)
No, because Sebastian had pushed him back through the bedroom door before Tybalt could digest his own urge to cling onto the doorframe and fight it, childish and cowardly as that urge may be. Sebastian had seen it done – fine, that counted as a victory; it stood him in better stead than either of them – and he –
Knew how to tell if things are about to go very wrong, he’d just said. How to tell if things were going to go wrong. “Tell?” Tybalt echoed, wide-eyed and dumbstruck for a moment, not about to repeat the whole sentence in the same room as Elsie, but nevertheless peering at her cousin with barely-concealed alarm. “How to tell?” Bloody great congratulations to him, if that was all they taught him in mediwizard training! Maybe Sebastian would have a head start, and see the signs first, but Tybalt figured if something were to go very wrong, Merlin forbid, that he would probably eventually be able to damn well notice it too.
Tyb took a breath, crossed his fingers and prayed that what Sebastian had forgotten to say in his fucking useless half-sentence of a comforting pep-talk, was that, if anything did go wrong, of course he was also confident in his abilities to fix it.
(Better yet, Tyb hoped that nothing would go wrong.)
