Samuel glanced over to Don Juan and put the watch back into his pocket. Ten minutes, give or take, until he would start to feel it. He stood up and came a few steps closer, until about an arm's length away from the man. A faintly bitter smell wafted up from his body.

He answered him honestly.

"A little too much and you will feel out of balance. Your vision starts to blur at the edges. If you take more than that, it will feel like there is something heavy lying on your chest and you might want to fall asleep. You will still be able to move. The ability to move only goes away close to the point of no return. Signs of danger are vomiting, falling over, convulsions. The worst case scenario is, I assume, unconsciousness and failure to breathe."

He listed these things in a clinical manner, omitting the fact that up until the very unpleasant symptoms a person might still feel good enough to underestimate, or not care about, the danger.

"However, what I gave you to remove the opium will work to restore a person to their faculties. Just a greater quantity is needed," he added.

While he stood and looked down on Don Juan, the flames in the fireplace seemed to sharpen and soften. A warmth slowly rose deep in his stomach and his skin seemed suddenly more sensitive to the fabric of his shirt and the strands of hair that had fallen into his face and touched it at the height of his cheekbones. These were the first signs. Other than opium, this substance did not make one primarily numb and bleary; for the first dose and first hour or so it tended to lift Samuel up into an embrace of heat and aliveness, blurred and hazy, but very much awake; everything felt smoother, better, more intense but less sharp. Pain lessened. He could move and talk and act and seek the things whose sensation multiplied. After that, it gently submerged him into a comfortable sedate state that lasted hours and it seemed to be that part of the concoction that was similar enough to opium to keep the withdrawals at bay.

If he wanted to regain his energy after the first peak, all he needed to do was redose—here, however, lay the insidious quality of the substance, and its very real danger.
It required careful control.

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Nothing that he listed off alarmed Don Juan — though the pragmatism with which he did was a bit unnerving. Feeling out of balance, vision blurring — he was aware enough to know that he had just been slumped in this chair a moment ago, unable to stand under his own power and not cognizant of anything more than an arm's reach away. So that was typical. The idea of a high without it was intriguing. And the more dire symptoms were just the things that happened during withdrawal, except — well, the last ones. But he had just pulled Don Juan out of the midst of a deep opium trench, with only a few drops of whatever the last thing had been. Don Juan didn't think he was in any serious danger of death while something like that was handy.

He should probably have asked more questions, but he was wary of having the offer rescinded. Whatever it was and whatever it did, the man said it would keep him out of withdrawal. Don Juan wanted that desperately; he couldn't afford to lose his chance, even if it still seemed too good to be true. He nodded and reached for the dropper, palm flat but eyes eager.

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Samuel looked at Don Juan's outstretched hands and shook his head. "No," he said. "It is potent. The margin of error is very small."

As much as he trusted himself to administer the quantity correctly, as little did he afford Don Juan such assumptions of competence. "Open your mouth," he said. Then he added, "That did not trouble you before. Does it now?" and there was a hint of sardonic delight in his eyes. Don Juan had, in fact, been very eager to follow any such orders; preceding his involuntary sobering.

Another flush of sensation ran down Samuel's body. Something like a shudder, but not strong enough to unsteady his hands.

They were ready to administer the drop as soon as the man acquiesced.

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Opening his mouth might not have troubled him, given that he'd just had the man dropping something else beneath his tongue a moment ago and his logic was sound enough. Don Juan had recognized instinctively that it was potent and dangerous, just from the look of the container it came in. But there was something malicious in the tone when he said that did not trouble you before that made Don Juan think he wasn't just referring to the other drops he'd administered. Don Juan looked up sharply, and suddenly the features that had been only vaguely familiar before connected with memory. Not memories that would explain that comment, but — Griffith, he was Gilbert's brother and a Hogwarts professor. They'd sat together at a dinner party. He'd been inside Don Juan's head, made vague allusions to some prior interaction in Paris. Likely not an interaction of note, he'd said. Smug even then, under the surface of things. Had Don Juan slept with him in Montparnasse, while he was too high to remember? Was this a reference to something he'd glimpsed while he'd been poking through Don Juan's memories — on his knees for someone else? Either idea, that Griffith had slept with him and he didn't remember or that Griffith had watched an intimate moment and he didn't know which one — made him feel profoundly dirty.

"Fuck off," he hissed, and leaned back in the chair to put some distance between Griffith and himself. He leaned back into his sweat-soaked clothes, onto a worn armchair, and felt despicable and pathetic. He didn't even know where he was, only that it was connected to the floo. He didn't know the time, or how he'd gotten here. He was only sober enough to carry a conversation because Griffith had made him — and why? He still hadn't figured out the man's motives. It couldn't have been just to taunt him. But if he'd wanted to hurt him, or steal from him, or take advantage of him, there were clearly easier ways than getting him sober and then high again.

He wiped sweat off his brow in the vain hope that this would make him look or feel less like something the cat had dragged in off the street. He glowered at Griffith for a moment while the other man regarded him, carelessly by all appearances — and then his shoulder clenched, the first telltale sign of the muscle aches and spasms that came with withdrawal.

"No, wait," he said before Griffith could turn away, with a note of desperation in his voice. He slid back to the edge of his chair and reached for Griffith's pant leg to stop him. "I want it."

Even having made the decision, even having just begged for it, it took half a second for him to wrestle with his disdain enough to open his mouth and stick out his tongue.

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   Samuel Griffith

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Samuel silently observed the rebuttal that snapped out of Don Juan. His anger seemed to brand out of him like a wave, that he almost felt pass trough his core.
"As you wish," he said evenly. As he started turning away from him, Don Juan's face became illuminated in profile by the flames and in anger, as in self-forgotten intoxication, he reminded him of Kazimir. Dark and temperamental; Kaz had cut down Samuel's cold arrogance until Samuel had learned, if not to change, to be cognizant of the way he provoked people.

Careful, said the quiet voice. This was not Kazimir. Don Juan had nothing at all to do with him and he disliked Samuel. It was unwise to insist he accept his admittedly very odd gifts, and it was unwise to linger on him or any perceived similarities at all. It might all just be in his head — there had been a time where Kazimir's face had haunted him through crowds, always just in the corner of his eye, and gone when he turned. He had to admit to himself a tendency to see him where he would never be again.

It should not bother him if Don Juan now got up and left. He himself was already on the ascent to respite from his misery. So he made a movement to step away from him, until suddenly a hand grasped his leg.

Samuel stopped, then turned. Don Juan now opened his mouth. In his eyes glowered both disdain and desperation.

I thought so. This time, Samuel held the words behind his teeth. With a feeling of elation that he could not place as belonging to the substance or the fact of being yielded to, he dropped the liquid on Don Juan's tongue.

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He felt humiliated, debased, but if Griffith was gloating he at least had the grace to do so silently. Don Juan let go of Griffith's trouser leg as the drops hit his tongue and retreated back into the armchair. He'd rather go somewhere else — somewhere not damp with the opium-scented sweat — but he wasn't actually sure if moving would help since his clothes likely stank as badly as the armchair, and he didn't want to edge past Griffith to get out. And he was used to being still after he took something; languid, waiting for it to hit, so that he could feel the first impacts of it working through his bloodstream. Don Juan looked at the fire and watched Griffith's movements out of the corner of his eye.

"Why help me?" he asked, though he was not at all sure that help was the right word for what Griffith was doing.

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A good question. One Samuel wanted to deflect with something sarcastic. He felt lightheaded; he pulled in the second armchair with a flick of his wand to sit down, two arms' lengths apart from Don Juan. With slow movements, he took off his coat and put it over the backrest. The fight to get here had put strain on him, he noticed. His hands were cold and his face very warm. This was the slump before being taken on a shaky path upwards. "I am not sure. You were being pathetic and needy. You have the face of a dead man," he heard himself answer, and he noted his inhibitions to give direct responses were already reduced.

"I asked myself the same question in Montparnasse and had as inadequate of an answer back then."

Samuel looked at his hands, which seemed slightly out of focus. He felt resentful of Don Juan and his hostile eyes. The scent of his bitter sweat stung in his nose.

If he was even helping Don Juan was debatable. Sure, in theory he could now go home and be well for a good while. Be better off than passed out on opium in a dingy hovel like the Orchid. Get him down, get him up, watch him go. A good deed well done, he thought sarcastically.

Samuel had developed this substance under great expenditure of effort to give himself an alternative to the things one could buy on the streets, and it had been both better and more functional to be on, but unforgiving in the havoc it had eventually wreaked on his life regardless—it had been too good. In the end, the only way out had been to cut himself off. Well, to cut himself off for the most part. Most of the time.

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Well, whatever his reasons, it certainly wasn't due to fondness. Pathetic and needy, Griffith pronounced. Probably an accurate description, but that didn't mean it needed to be said. The next remark could have been equally sharp — the face of a dead man was not a particularly flattering comparison to make — but Griffith said it like there was more to it. What more, Don Juan hadn't the faintest idea. He doubted Griffith had dragged him here and force-fed him whatever that concoction was that had gotten him sober just to see roses in his cheeks again. He didn't know what to make, either, of the reference to Montparnasse. Griffith had mentioned it before, the last time they'd met, and in the interim Don Juan's memory hadn't been jogged in the slightest. He wasn't going to get those memories back, he didn't think, barring some sort of magical intervention. He didn't like to feel as though Griffith always had him at the disadvantage in terms of their shared past.

The muscles which had seized up a moment ago continued to tighten. Don Juan leaned into the armchair's back and tried to rotate his shoulder back to slow it down and hopefully keep himself from starting to twitch.

"I won't sleep with you," Don Juan declared. Again, maybe, but since he didn't remember he dared not add it except in the defiance of the look he offered Griffith. Of course, whatever Griffith had just given him was supposed to get him high again — how capable he would be of sticking to this resolution remained to be seen. He pushed back on his shoulder again, fitful. "How long does this take to kick in?"

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Samuel laughed. To be accused of having that particular motive after forgoing all opportunities to take advantage amused him. He felt nauseous, in a pleasant way. "Well, good," he told Don Juan. "When you inserted my fingers into your mouth under the table in the opium den where I found you, it could have given me the wrong impression. It is sensible of you to clear that up."

He doubled over in the chair and put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Goosebumps spread over his body. Then it hit him like lightning into the base of his spine. He had not done this in so long that he had almost forgotten the feeling. Everything in his body contracted. He felt his own nails dig into the skin of his scalp, where he was propping up his head. Like surfacing after a long time underwater, he drew in a breath of air. There was suddenly an enormous release in him. The ice that had been covering his insides, rendering them unresponsive and dead, started melting. Comically, he felt like he could cry in relief, although he couldn't. He found himself back upright, standing, lightly swaying.

"Five more minutes." He belatedly answered Don Juan's question. The absurdity of the situation ceased to matter to him. A layer of heat settled on his skin, protecting him from the harshness of the man's gaze. "As they say, there is nothing like the first time," he added. Although his words felt hazy in his head, they came out sharp and clear. He leaned back against the wall next to the fireplace, trying to settle into the shifting tides of sensations. A part of his attention remained fixed on Don Juan. Since every person was different, getting the dose exactly perfect on the first try was not guaranteed.

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Every word of Griffith's response only made the picture he was painting more grim. Under the table — bloody hell. It was a portrait of someone with no shame, no dignity. Perhaps that had been accurate when he was in the clutches of the opium, but now he felt shame in spades. It was paralyzing. He stared at Griffith for a moment, wide-eyed and speechless. I should leave, he thought. This was not a safe place. Griffith had seen him vulnerable once and knew he could get him into that state again, if he pleased. It was there in his voice, buried under the smugness of his tone; an implicit threat. Maybe Griffith had no intention of ever acting on it, given that he'd (allegedly) stopped at his fingers in Don Juan's mouth... but there was no telling what Griffith wanted, in the end. He'd brought Don Juan here, a private location where they couldn't be interrupted, then forced him into withdrawal and made him beg for his next high. Don Juan had swallowed this concoction down with no real notion of what it was or what it would do... and Griffith had gone out of his way to mention this, to paint the picture of the scene in the opium den. Maybe he wasn't going to push things that direction, but he wanted Don Juan to know what had happened; he wanted him thinking about it. Laying down the foundation for their interaction tonight: I have all the power here; you only have what I've given you.

He should leave. He could go home, or to a friend. If whatever Griffith gave him affected him negatively, he could have someone call a healer. It might be an unpleasant night — even an unpleasant week — but at least he could be with someone he trusted. Griffith had said there was no apparition in this building, so Don Juan's eyes slid towards the fireplace and scanned the mantle for a collection of floo powder. He'd started carrying floo powder in an interior pocket for situations like this — ending up somewhere unexpected after getting too high — but he didn't know whether it was still there or whether he'd already depleted it, and he couldn't think of a way to check without alerting Griffith to what he was doing. Would Griffith try to stop him from leaving now? He'd offered it earlier, but that had been before Don Juan had begged to be hand-fed more drugs. Things might be different now.

While he was searching for an exit route Griffith suddenly rocked forward. Don Juan's eyes jumped to him and remained there, riveted. He knew what was happening, in the abstract — it was hitting him. Don Juan watched, fascinated. In spite of his growing misgivings about the situation there was a hunger in him to feel that way. His mouth was dry. (You have no fucking spine he thought. You need to leave.) The window for escape closed; Griffith was on his feet again and leaning against the fireplace, like he'd anticipated what Don Juan was thinking. Maybe he had. Don Juan wasn't sure he was capable of subtlety at the moment. He was trapped, in a web that was at least partially of his own making.

Five more minutes. He wanted it so badly.

He settled back into the chair, like it might shield him from Griffith's attention, having determined to stay. He looked at Griffith's feet so that he wouldn't have to see the man's expression. The estimate hadn't been far off. Drugs of the nonmagical variety usually took affect slowly and built as time went on — this was clearly not that. It hit as forcefully and suddenly as taking a spell to the chest. Everything seized up for a moment, then on the release it felt as though his body evaporated into mist; the muscle pains gone, the ache that had started in his back from whatever position he'd been slumped in at the opium den, any trace of discomfort. Mentally things smoothed as well. He looked up at Griffith's face and knew that he had decided the man was dangerous, but now the idea of Griffith posing any threat to him or trying to manipulate him felt almost amusing.

He let out a long, audible breath. He stretched out in the armchair, flexing his fingers and wiggling his toes inside his shoes. "Hooo, that's — nice," he breathed, taking a moment to consider his fingertips as they moved through the empty air.

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   Samuel Griffith

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Samuel felt the cold stone in his back, through the fabric of his shirt. He slid down the wall until he sat on the floor. The fire warmed his face from the side. He stretched his neck by rolling his head from one side to the other. It was like someone had poured a warm viscous liquid under his skin in place of his muscles, which lately tensed relentlessly, no matter what he did. It was too good. He closed his eyes. The very first time after a long break still felt so pure. It was yet devoid of the dirtiness that was inherent to the third, the fourth, the fifth redose; there was no tremor to his hand, no fraying of his nerves. He could breathe again, that's what it felt like.

There was a vague awareness in him that Don Juan watched him. He knew that the man was afraid of him by the tightness around his eyes. Samuel's position at the fireplace had not been wittingly chosen to prevent him from leaving, but that did not mean that something in him had not instinctively employed that strategy. If he really did try to leave, he would not stop him. But did he want him to go, would he feel relieved? He had thought so, but now he was not sure anymore.

Everything in the background became one with the dark. The stone tables and shelves all but vanished from his field of view. Only the man in the armchair was there. The light of the fire gathered on Don Juan's skin and his hair; It felt like they were on a lonely island, or on a stage in an empty theater. What was to be the performance?

He moved one of his hands across his eyes, as if he could wipe something away that prevented him from seeing clearly. Samuel did not know what he wanted with Don Juan. It gave him a strange feeling in his chest to look at him. He did not fully trust himself here. He did not think that he wanted anything bad, or much of anything at all, but could he be certain?

Don Juan seemed to set something off in him. It seemed Samuel was determined to maximize his impact on him, without fully grasping his own motives. It unnerved him.

The five minutes were up. Don Juan stretched in his chair. "Isn't it," he answered him. "It got me off opium when I was stuck on it. Not that it didn't cause its own trouble," he said. But it had gotten him back up walking and working. He had been eventually able to leave Paris and get himself together.

"You will feel quite active in a little while, and more sedate after that. Unless you redose, of course. But you have to be careful with that."

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Redosing was the farthest thing from Don Juan's mind at the moment. That would come later, when the high started to thin and fade, but for now he had no interest at all in Griffith's cautions. He was instead stuck on another phrase: it got me off opium. He hadn't realized Griffith had been entangled with opium before now — or if he'd had that knowledge, it hadn't stuck. The way he described it was familiar enough, though: Don Juan was stuck on it, too. But this exceptional feeling had gotten Griffith off opium? Don Juan had tried before, on multiple occasions... but given that Griffith had found him insensible in a backroom of the Orchid, clearly none of them had taken. Was Griffith serious when he said that? Perhaps his sobriety had only been a fleeting thing, too; after all, he had found Don Juan at the Orchid, which meant he had been there for something. But surely he had to have at least a better handle on his life than Don Juan did. He was a Hogwarts professor; they probably didn't let you teach classes if you were actively under the influence. Don Juan's career, if one could call it that, was malleable. He could write anywhere, in almost any state, and he didn't even have to worry whether it was any good; his name wasn't the one under the title when it was published.

He'd described it earlier as something that could get a person high without robbing them of their faculties. That certainly seemed to be the case. He'd watched Griffith react to the onset of it, and he'd felt himself how intensely it started, but the other man was still speaking clearly and logically. Don Juan stood up experimentally and took a step; he felt like he was moving through clouds, but he had no trouble walking in a straight line. A high that didn't show, that could get someone off opium. He saw the appeal of redosing. This could be life-changing for someone like him. This could fix things.

"I want a change of clothes," he decided; taking another step forward had caused him to notice once again the weight of his own shirt, with its persistent dampness. "Don't suppose you've got a wardrobe around — what is this place?"

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"It used to be my laboratory. I am in the process of selling it. We are in Whitechapel," he answered. "And I do — have a wardrobe. Upstairs," he added. It had been his wish to keep Dempsey out of his personal life, but looking at what they were doing, that seemed an ill-conceived attempt from the get-go. He got to his feet. His body felt unlike itself — not that it had changed, but his way of perceiving through it was altered.

They walked into the dark, Samuel ahead, and he looked over his shoulder to make sure that he did not lose sight of the other man. He knew the way blind. On the cursed stairs he knew when to pull Don Juan over the trapped steps and where to veer off the course and turn. It all seemed rather dreamlike. They ended up on the second floor in front of a dresser, in the room where Samuel had once slept. "Take what you want," he said without interfering further, very untypically for him, and sat on the bed; he was light-headed, but pleasantly so. Don Juan would find something. Samuel had always kept an immaculate wardrobe and they were nearly the same height.

He looked around the room and down the narrow corridor that led to the bath and to his study. It was a place half here and half gone, to him. His most valuable things were already taken away but the remainder of the decade he spent here hung in the air. A decade of work and responsibility and unsatisfying success; it had been thankless. He took out a cigarette and lit it — inconceivable to him, when he had still lived here. With a familiar movement, he checked his watch and deliberated how much time he had left, before he would slow and inevitably want to remedy that.

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This is a bad idea, Don Juan thought as he ascended the dark stairs behind Griffith. If being with Griffith while still within a short jaunt of the floo was dangerous then going off into the dark, dodging certain steps for unexplained but ominous reasons, must have been worse. But this whole sequence felt dream-like; it was hard to conceive that there could be real world consequences for anything that happened while he felt like this. He reached the room at the top of the stairs and felt disoriented, but was entirely unworried by it. It wasn't unpleasant to be adrift. Untethered.

He peeled his jacket off and discarded it on his way to the wardrobe. It didn't even occur to him to seek out privacy before he slipped his suspenders off his shoulders. His attention was on the task at hand and he had nearly forgotten Griffith's presence. There weren't a great deal of things to choose from — expected, maybe, since Griffith said he was selling the place — but it was more than enough for him to find something suitable. None of it was coated in opium-sweat, which meant it was all an improvement on his current wardrobe. You should wear more color, he considered saying, but it was probably for the best if whatever he took from Griffith's wardrobe was monochrome; anonymous. He only needed to be decent enough to get through the floo when he headed home.

He had gotten a fresh pair of pants on and had a shirt in his hands, but had momentarily been too distracted by the feel of the linen between his fingers to continue. He remembered Griffith then and glanced back at where he was sat, feeling... not abashed, not sheepish, but slightly suspicious.

"How long were you — what did you call it? Stuck on opium?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. Don Juan was easily distracted in his present state, by any stray sensation or rogue thought, but he kept circling back to that same notion: that this had gotten Griffith off opium. Incredible things had happened to him tonight, with the sudden sobriety and this new experience, but this was still the most difficult to believe.

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Don Juan started undressing and Samuel kept sitting on the bed, smoking his cigarette. It did not strike him as particularly odd and he made no effort to look away. His notions of a normal distance had been done away with when Don Juan fell against him in the Orchid. From that moment on he had held him up, carried him and pushed him under a table, had known the feeling of his hands in Don Juan's hair and his spit on his fingers — things that would be considered intimate in any other context, but between them, only Sam was aware of it in a meaningful way. Physical distance had only been reestablished after Don Juan had been made to sober up. The perception of their closeness was asymmetrical — it had been so, perhaps, ever since Samuel had forced himself into his head at the dinner party. Perhaps it had been so since their first run-in in Montparnasse, almost ten years ago, that Don Juan did not remember at all.

It might have been due to this strange circumstance that Samuel answered his question willingly and without hesitation. "Let's see; I had my first brush with it at 25 when I lived as an apprentice alchemist in Prague, for medicinal purposes," he recounted and leaned back on his elbows. At 25 he and Kazimir had begun their work on the transmutational scar etchings that still covered a significant portion of his body. Kaz had become fascinated and then corrupted by opium and other substances very quickly. Samuel had been more cautious; He was always the one of them meant to keep things under control. "But I went with and without it for many years. I cut back dozens of times, only to start again. It did not seem that serious. It only started really destroying me at 32. The Alchemist I worked for in Paris dismissed me because I could not keep up with the demands of the work anymore. I was quickly running out of funds. I used all my coherent time to come up with this—" he absentmindedly took out the vial from his pocket. It spun languidly on the silver thread. "It was not easy to get right. I knew it had to leave me able to walk and work, but it needed to be as intense as the opium — it needed to be stronger, or…" I would not have been able to stay away from other things, in the state of mind I was in, he silently finished his sentence.

Sam frowned. He was telling this man an awful lot. He thought about the chimera-plant he had painstakenly created to source the most important compound of the substance. It lived in his office now. He had not been able to destroy it, could not go trough with it. He put away the vial and sat up on the bed.

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Twenty-five wasn't so far off from when Don Juan had started experimenting with these sorts of things, though in his case there was no noble, medicinal purpose. Someone had just said it would be fun and would feel good, and that was enough for him at the time. Back then he hadn't seen any of the fallout from it. Everyone in his circle of friends did it, and it was always casual. Don Juan had been able to maintain the illusion that it was only casual until around 1891, after he'd returned from Spain. After a year and a half abroad his usual friend group had splintered; some married, or took more serious careers, or had the law laid down by stricter parents than Don Juan had; they quit. And the ones who didn't — well, there was no longer a pretense that anything was casual about their habits. They became the sorts of people one never invited to parties but could always reliably find insensible in an opium den. Unsavory types. Don Juan hadn't slipped quite that far, but Griffith's words about cutting back and then finding himself once more in the throes of it hit close to home.

Destroying him at thirty-two, he said. Don Juan grimaced and turned his attention to the shirt, turning away from Griffith while he put it on.

"I'm thirty-one," he remarked, and he thought he meant it as a joke, though wasn't sure what the implied punchline was. Thirty-one, so clearly not destroyed yet? Thirty-one, and thus destroying himself more efficiently than Griffith had done?

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