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Something is very wrong with fWhip.
Gem doesn’t mean this in the way that people normally say something is wrong with him - ‘what is wrong with him, why did he just blow up half my empire and steal my most precious possession?’ to quote a nonspecific, hypothetical example - but in the sense that he’s been acting really, really weird lately. Not his normal weird, either; a new and frankly concerning kind of weird.
For starters, he’s hardly moved at all during this meeting. That’s not normal. The fWhip she knows is constantly in motion, bouncing in excitement or stomping around in anger or pacing just because he can’t sit still. Gem can’t even count on both hands the number of times she’s had to put a Wither Rose Alliance meeting on hold to tell him to stop doing laps of the room and for the love of all the gods to please stop climbing on top of the table every time he makes an especially dramatic point.
But today fWhip’s just been sitting in his chair, awkwardly leaning forward to accommodate his new wings, and fidgeting occasionally with his pen. Every so often, she catches him staring at her with an expression she doesn’t quite know how to read, but whenever she makes eye contact he immediately bends his head and pretends to be incredibly interested in the notes he’s been taking.
She knows for a fact that he’s pretending, because she can see from here that a good chunk of the page is taken up with aimless swirling designs. There are maybe three sentences written down, and Gem isn’t entirely convinced those weren’t in the notebook already when he pulled it out.
Figuring out what his problem is will have to wait a moment, though; first, they have an important meeting to wrap up.
“So if there’s nothing else that either of you want to bring up…?” Gem looks from Sausage, who smiles and shakes his head, to fWhip, who gives a careless shrug with one shoulder. “Then I believe we can call this meeting finished. Thank you for joining me, Count fWhip, King Sausage.”
No amount of practice will ever not make it feel slightly awkward to refer to the men who were once among her closest childhood friends by their titles. They’d grown up together, the three of them, thrown together with the expectation that they would continue the friendship between their parents’ empires as the future rulers of the Wither Rose Alliance. Formality has never really fit between them, but there are certain expectations that must be met in situations like this even if there’s hardly anyone around to see it, and so Gem struggles through it.
With her dismissal, the room flies into motion around her as the handful of courtiers that accompanied the three rulers begin to gather their papers and strike up quiet conversations about this or that point from the meeting. Gem ignores them all as she stands and picks up her staff from where it was leaning against the table, waving away one of her own mages when they try to approach her. Her eyes are locked on fWhip, who’s twisted around in his seat to listen to one of Sausage’s nobles with a slightly distracted expression.
Gem makes her way along the table, dodging a few more attempts to get her attention, and steps up next to the noble. FWhip can’t pretend he doesn’t see her now, but he seems to seriously consider it for a moment before smoothing over the brief flash of worry with a polite smile.
“Wizard Gemini,” he greets, cutting off whatever the noble was saying. “Did you need something?”
“Could I speak to you for a moment?”
“Of course.” He rests his elbow on the table and sets his chin on his palm, looking for all the world like he’s giving her his full attention, but there’s something tense about his posture, like he’s only barely restraining himself from jumping up and fleeing the room.
Again, weird and kind of concerning, but that’s not the kind of conversation to be had here in front of everyone.
“Alone, please,” Gem clarifies, tilting her head meaningfully toward the noble that’s still hovering nearby.
Another flicker of panic crosses fWhip’s face, there and gone again as quickly as the first one. Then he rises from his chair, smiling cheerfully enough that Gem would almost think she’d imagined it if she didn’t know him as well as she does.
“Please excuse me,” he says to the noble, then bows his head toward Gem and makes a flourishing gesture at the door. “Lead the way, Wizard.”
Gem leads him through the meeting room and out into the main hall, where she chooses one of the other doors at random. The false doors and the dead-end hallways they conceal aren’t only good for confusing attackers and spies; they also provide an excellent location for private conversations (or, as a much younger Gem, fWhip, and Sausage had learned, for hiding from angry parents after pranking a visiting diplomat).
She waves fWhip in ahead of her and shuts the door behind them. It’s much dimmer in here - why waste the torches to light an area that’s never meant to be used? - and the only light they have is what’s leaking under the door from the hall outside and the soft red glow of fWhip’s wings. It’s a gentle light, not much brighter than charged redstone, and doesn’t so much illuminate the darkness as give it a little extra depth.
It’s atmospheric, but not very conducive to conversation, so Gem holds up her free hand and whispers a word that calls a small ball of light to gather in her palm. She gives it a gentle toss, and it floats into the air to hang above their heads, revealing the plain stone walls around them.
“Ow. A little warning next time, please?” fWhip complains, grimacing and raising a hand to shield his eyes against the sudden brightness.
“Sorry, sorry.”
He lowers his hand slowly, still squinting slightly as his eyes adjust, and Gem resists the urge to make a remark about how spending all of his time in that underground workshop of his probably hasn’t had the best effect on his sight.
“So, what’s going on?” he asks. “Or did you just drag me in here to make me see spots for the next twenty minutes?”
Gem ignores the transparent attempt at a distraction and fixes him with a serious look. “Are you okay, fWhip?”
“What?” he asks, giving her a confused frown. “Of course I am. What do you mean?”
“You just seem …” She waves her hands vaguely, not sure how to illustrate what she means. “I don’t know. Just kind of … upset, or something.”
“Well, you see, Gem, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we do kind of have a demon running wild on the continent right now. That kind of thing tends to upset people.”
Gem rolls her eyes. “Don’t start that with me. The demon has been around for months; this is a lot more recent. And now I know something is bothering you, because that’s your lying voice.”
“Ugh, fine.” FWhip sighs, dropping the sarcastic half smile. “I’m just a bit tired lately, that’s all. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
He sounds it, too, now that he’s no longer putting on an act to distract her. There’s a bone-deep weariness in his voice, the kind of exhaustion that speaks not just of lost sleep but of far too long banging your head against a seemingly unsolvable problem. Gem has felt it herself, during those pre-exam nights where memorizing even a single piece of information more seemed impossible and she honestly considered giving up on becoming Wizard of the Crystal Cliffs and running away to Pixandria to be a copper miner instead.
And it’s not like fWhip doesn’t have reason to be tired; the infrequent letters he sent that mentioned the corruption in the Grimlands were always worded with formal detachment, but there was an undercurrent of desperation to them that grew stronger and stronger as the weeks passed. Gem hasn’t received one recently, but she can only imagine that the situation there is still getting worse.
“Is it the corruption?” she guesses, and he shrugs.
“... Kind of? But I think I’ve actually found a new way to keep it out of the city, at least.”
“Really?” Gem asks, eyes widening in surprise. “Why didn’t you say anything about it during the meeting? That’s really important news!”
FWhip hesitates, folding his arms and looking slightly to one side. “It … hasn’t been tested very well yet, and it’s not exactly the safest. I don’t want anyone getting hurt trying to copy my stupid decisions.”
On the one hand, even an untested and potentially dangerous solution is better than what they have right now, which is a whole bunch of nothing. But on the other hand, fWhip is - and Gem says this with love - one of the most reckless idiots she knows, so if he says something is a bad idea, it’s probably a really bad idea.
“Okay,” she decides after thinking it over. “Maybe it is better not to tell anyone yet, then. But you promise you’ll let us know as soon as you find out if it works?”
“Of course. You’ll be the first to know, how about that?”
“Thank you.” Gem tilts her head, eyes narrowing as something else he’d said strikes her. “What’s the rest of it, though?”
FWhip blinks in what looks like genuine confusion. “Excuse me?”
“You said the corruption was ‘kind of’ what’s bothering you. What else is there?”
He starts to say something, then pauses, fingers tapping against his arm. His wings twitch slightly behind him like he wants to flare them out, but they don’t fully extend. He’s gotten better at that; when Gem first saw him with them, they were just as emotive as the rest of his body, and he’d smacked several people in the face with accidental gestures before learning how to keep them under control.
Finally, fWhip seems to come to some kind of conclusion. Slowly, like he’s not quite sure about what he’s saying, he asks, “Are you still having the dreams?”
When he says it like that, there’s no need to clarify which dreams.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Gem says, shivering a little at the thought of them. “Not often, but … often enough to be really unpleasant.”
FWhip huffs out a humorless laugh. “They are that, aren’t they.”
“I’m guessing you’re still having them too, then?”
“Almost every time I slept, for a while. They’ve cut back a little bit, but, uh.” He shrugs, shaking his head. “Not really the biggest fan of sleeping right now, you know?”
“FWhip …” She can’t stop the hint of scolding from leaking into her tone, an instinct born from half a lifetime of being the designated impulse control for their trio.
“It’s fine! It’s fine. I’m pretty sure sleep is overrated anyway.”
“I really don’t think it is.”
“Really, Gem, I’ve got it handled. I’ll be fine, I promise.”
“You know, you could always stay in the Crystal Cliffs for a little while,” Gem offers. “It seems like the demon doesn’t spend as much time here as it does in the Grimlands, so you might be able to sleep better -”
“No!” The sudden exclamation makes Gem jump, and even fWhip seems a little taken aback by the force of his denial. “No, it’s - that’s okay. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“You’re never intruding here, fWhip; you know that. We’re allies - more than that, we’re friends. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, but you’re always welcome, and I really think it might help.”
He doesn’t meet her eyes as he answers. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to be away from the Grimlands for that long. So - thank you, but I can’t.”
“Are things really that bad over there?” Maybe his letters have been understating the problem more than she thought, if he can’t even afford a few extra nights away from his empire. “I thought you said you figured something out with the corruption.”
“I did - I think I did. But I need to keep an eye on it, and there’s just a lot of stuff that needs to be dealt with. Not demon stuff. Just, you know … stuff.” FWhip is fidgeting again, shifting his weight from foot to foot the way he does when he wants to pace but can’t.
Gem frowns at him, fingers tightening around the wooden grip of her staff in a burst of frustration. Why does he need to make this so difficult? “You could have just said no. There’s no need to lie to me about why.”
“I’m not lying, things have just been really busy for me lately.”
“Exactly how stupid do you think I am, fWhip?”
“I don’t think you’re stupid at all,” he says, and to his credit he does sound genuine, if somewhat annoyed. “But I don’t have time for a sleepover just because you’re feeling all mother-hennish. There are much more important things I need to get done.”
Moving carefully in the narrow hallway to avoid a collision, fWhip steps around her and moves toward the door. Gem’s hand darts out as he passes, grabbing his forearm to stop him, and to her surprise she feels him flinch under her fingers. Not dramatically, but impossible not to notice from this close, especially as it’s accompanied by a quick hiss through his teeth like she’d brushed against a sore spot.
Another burn, most likely; his arms constantly seem to be covered in them despite his gloves, which can only do so much to protect against the dangerous materials he loves to work with.
“You know you can talk to me about anything, right?” Gem says, a little desperately, and shifts her grip closer to his wrist to avoid where the sore spot seems to be.
“Sure.” He hasn’t turned back to look at her, still facing toward the door. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Good. Because I’m worried about you, fWhip.”
“You don’t need to be. I’m fine.” He’s gone very still, which people often assume means anger, but Gem knows it means he’s trying to keep his body language from giving something away - sometimes fear, sometimes anger, sometimes the fact that he’s lying. It’s his most transparent tell, which is why she’s never told him she notices it.
“Are you sure -?”
“Yes, Gem, I’m sure,” fWhip snaps, cutting her off. “Despite how often you treat me like one, I am not actually a child. So how about you stop fussing over me, and for once in your life trust that I’m a competent adult who knows what I’m talking about when I say everything. Is. Fine.”
With that, he yanks his arm roughly from her grasp and stalks through the door to the main hall, slamming it behind him and leaving Gem to stare after him in shocked disbelief.
FWhip isn’t usually nearly so quick to anger, especially when it comes to the other members of the Wither Rose Alliance. With his enemies, of course, he’ll rush to claim offense at the smallest slights, but that’s mainly because he likes having an excuse to blow things up. Among the three of them it’s normally much harder to get him this wound up, and yet Gem somehow seems to have managed in the course of only a few minutes.
That has to be a new low for her.
She tucks her staff into the crook of her arm so she can bury her face in her hands and let out a long groan. This is pretty much the worst possible time for them to be fighting among themselves. There are a million more important things to worry about, starting with the demon who’s actively trying to end the world and working down to fWhip’s continuing feud with the Codfather. And more than that, Gem just hates fighting with fWhip in general. He’s her best friend; they work so much better together than they do when they’re at odds with each other.
She’s not sure how to fix this, though, because she’s not even entirely sure what she did to upset him in the first place other than being worried about him. Rightly so, she thinks now, because none of what she’s seen from fWhip today has been normal. Something is definitely going on with him, and she’s pretty sure it’s not just sleep deprivation.
He won’t tell her anything if he’s still upset with her, though, which is a problem. With the meeting over, the delegations from the other two empires will be leaving the Crystal Cliffs soon, and barring any emergencies it’ll be a while before they see each other again. There are letters, of course, but getting fWhip to communicate by letter when he’s annoyed is worse than pulling teeth. If she wants to get anything out of him, she’ll need to convince him to calm down before he leaves.
Then again, maybe the trip back to the Grimlands will give him some time to cool off. Gem can give him a day or two, then send a friendly apology note and hopefully sneak some information out of him that way. It’s a little bit of a dishonest strategy, but if something is wrong with her fellow alliance members she needs to know about it sooner rather than later.
She nods to herself, warming to the idea. Subtlety seems to be the key here, since asking directly didn’t get her anywhere. And whether fWhip likes it or not, she’s going to get to the bottom of this. One way or another.