Calling it a ‘bad day’ was, all in all, putting it extremely mildly. He’d woken into a living nightmare on that fucking mindflayer ship, then woken up again on that beach after expecting death and been thrown right into a race against time so frightening that if a solution wasn’t found then the previously expected death would have been preferable (and it was still very much an option). Finding Shadowheart alive and willing to cooperate had been something, at least, the promise of not being alone in the fight enough to keep him going.
Then he’d pulled a second tadpoled companion out of a flaring travel portal; a charming, eloquent man with a pretty smile who just so happened to be an extremely knowledgeable wizard.
Thomas did not have problems with wizards in general, but he was a sorcerer born that way, and multiple times in his life there had been wizards who’d had a problem with him… most prominently of all his own father, Mathias, a waste of air whose struggles with the magical arts had ensured hostility once his son showed the signs of being a soul sewn together with stormy weave. Until the final incident that had caused him to flee to the streets, young Tom had endured screaming and cursing and accusations of ‘stealing’ the magic Mathias had felt was owed him; there’d even been accusations to the Gods of intending his son as a curse. That kind of childhood had left Thomas with resentment of his own powers, the tendency to brew up a windstorm when he was frightened or angry, and something of a sensitivity to anyone who glossed over the difficulties of being born with such magic.
‘Gale of Waterdeep’ hadn’t shown most of those tendencies initially, and so the first handful of hours had been fine. He’d been pleasant company in fact, possessed of helpful information and even with the dulling of his apparently usual levels of power a formidable ally in the first few battles they got thrown into. They found and freed Lae’zel from a wooden cage not long after, stumbled across a roguish elf who’d tried to ambush Tom and been on edge until their shared statuses as victims of the mindflayers was proven, then stumbled through a crypt and freed… someone from a stone coffin. Thomas was still completely thrown off by that one. But as the daylight shifted towards dusk…
“Ah, but you are quite fortuitous to have the weave innate within you, yes?”
After the hellish day they’d had, with the weighty threat on their backs, Thomas was understandably more on edge than was normal for him and the smallest things were starting to cut. Once they’d found a decent place to set up camp and got to work putting it together, and he’d sorted his own little hideaway (a slip of a dark space invisible to the other camp-mates), Tom had started helping the others. While engaging with idle conversation with Gale the topic had somehow come to this and it stopped Tom in his tracks.
“I dunno, am I?” He put down his scrounged tool and glanced over at Gale, managing to keep his tone measured and only a touch irritable. “Can’t say I’ve ever felt that way.”
“It’s quite an advantage,” Gale said, gesturing with a pointed finger. “You can access your potent magic with minimal endeavour, bringing forth your lightning with swift aptitude and without—”
“Gonna stop you right there,” Thomas interjected with force. “I’d like us to get on well, Gale, so in order to make sure that happens I’m going to let you know that when I say I’ve never felt that way I fucking mean it for good reason.”
Gale looked very put-out for a moment, dropping his hand while Tom stared right back at him, crossing his arms.
“My apologies, I did not intend offense,” Gale managed after a handful of awkward seconds, with obvious sincerity.
“Yeah, I get that,” Thomas replied, glancing away and rubbing the back of his neck. “Just watch yourself. I dealt with too much of that bullshit as a kid and I don’t want to deal with more of it on the road, alright?”
“We’ve indeed just met, so I hesitate to ask why—”
“Then don’t.”
Thomas snapped the words, temper seeping in as a wisp of wind was summoned into his aura with it; the unnatural breeze set his own red curls to a sway and blew between them, gently shifting the looser strands of Gale’s hair as well. Gale stared around him, intelligent eyes wide with understanding as he considered what he saw. The quiet lasted quite a bit longer this time, long enough that Tom’s anger subsided at least a little (though not entirely, as the manifestation of that emotion’s continued motion proved).
“Sorry to cut you off again.” Thomas eventually sighed, raising his hands up. “I know already that you have a deep fondness for your magic and a hell of a lot of talent for it, but being a fucking sorcerer doesn’t mean my experience has been positive and it certainly hasn’t been bloody easy. I don’t want to go into that whole spiel right now, alright? Maybe some other time, I don’t know. But not now.”
“I see,” Gale said, softly. “I will bear this fully in mind… but I hope that you might come to me in future for assistance, if you have issue? We might pluck at the weave in different ways, but it is still the same symphony we play. I know I can help you, Thomas.”
“…thank you.”
It was an evidently sincere offer, and if Thomas was honest, one he’d probably have to take up at some point. A breeze was the least of what he’d summoned in one of his outbursts. He watched Gale from the corner of his eye as they finished setting up the tent, wondering if he’d feel brave enough to ask when it came to it, and perhaps more importantly, if this would be the last time Tom got set-off by something his new companion said about the magic stuff. Maybe time to work harder on his anger problems as well, because he knew that as with that magic, the temper he’d shown was just a taste.
And whether that temper was justified or not justified, their futures depended on working together. He needed to grow resilient to the quiet cuts to his heart.