#ajai

Xiomara was working on her breathing during the morning’s run, timing her pace with the steady inhale and exhale that ought to keep her going. It irked her that the exercise seemed to come naturally to Harriet, who ran as if it were the simplest thing in the world. While Xi loved running, and reveled in the natural runner’s high that came with the itchy legs and aching sides and sweaty back after every occasion, she definitely had to work at it.

It sparked a natural competitiveness between the girls, and after months of the run being part of their morning routine, Xi was finally pushing Harriet to a pace where she actually had to… Try to stay ahead of her fictive sister-in-law.

Their run this morning was a steady-paced loop towards Hammersmith and back, the breeze from the Thames whipping across their faces in the icy air. Xi could see her breath in the air, she watched it as she timed her pace: In, step, step, out, step, step, in…

They turned right to run around a boat shed, ready to continue on their run, when a burst of red light shot across them. It narrowly missed Xiomara’s legs and instead left a scorching mark on the light wood of the shed. The girls barely had time to react before the stunning spell was shot again—then another.

Xiomara’s legs went wobbly from the sudden stop in her pace and she reached down with numb fingers to take her wand from its hidden hip holster. She was just raising her wand arm when there was a tight grip on her upper arm. She immediately pulled against it, twisting to get out of the assailant’s grasp, when a harsh voice said, “Thanks for the tip, sweetheart—consider your Pinnock contract fulfilled. You're off the hook—for now..."

Xiomara’s expression contorted, her mouth half-open for the split-second it took for her to process this. This was Hamilton. He’d come for Harriet. 

She bucked her head back, lurching her chest forward after she heard the back of her skull connect with his nose—which broke with a sickening snap. In the cacophony of spells shot across them, Xiomara could barely make out Harriet, who had responded in a smarter, less physical way, aiming her wand with pin-point precision and shifting her weight as if she’d been duelling for years. She couldn’t hear anything, save for the high-pitched ringing in her ears and the incantations shouted across them. But when Harriet reached her hand across in her direction, already turning her feet, ready to spin, Xiomara leapt across to her. No sooner had they touched fingertips, than Harriet was apparating them back to the safehouse.

The wards set off immediately, as they always did when wix apparated directly into the home rather than the garden. Xi clamped her hands down over her ears, wand still in her right hand, and was about to call out to Harriet about fixing the wards, when she turned and became aware of Harriet Pinnock’s wand, pointed right in her face.

“What the fuck was that, Winters?” Harriet yelled, stepping forward so the tip of her wand was practically burning a hole in the blonde’s cheek.

And Xiomara, who was so dependent on her routine, and potions, and safety, and quiet and calm and an uneventful morning run, shook her head earnestly, tears already gathered in her eyes. A voice, somewhere deep, whispered: You’ll. Explode. Xiomara whipped her head back and forth. No, no. No.

“No?” Harriet laughed harshly, “That all you can say? You fucking sold me out, Xi? Huh? And now you want to deny it? I don’t give a fuck who you are, if you think I’ll—”

Xiomara wouldn’t hear what Harriet would do. In fact, she barely managed to hold on long enough to hear Harriet’s first few comments before she lost herself. It was a rising heat that started low in her belly, then overcame her chest, her shoulders, down her arms, before Xiomara pulled her wand back and yelled, the force of her magic knocking them both away from each other and to the ground.

Xi fell into the back of the couch, and cried out, immediately feeling the crack at the back of her abdomen. Harriet must have landed somewhere less damaging, because Xi had barely managed to stand with the splitting pain that ran down her side, before the older girl sent a spell straight at her. There wasn't enough time to try to counter it, or even to duck out of the sizzling beam's path—but to Xiomara's surprise, when she instinctively raised up her arms to protect her face, the spell ricocheted in a shower of sparks against the translucent white-gold barrier of a shield. 

When she whipped her head around, she saw its caster: Nate, climbing over the back of the toppled couch, a scorch mark in the shape of a body burned into the upholstery where Xi had hit it. His hands were stretched out in a tut in front of him and he looked like he'd gotten about five minutes of sleep before being rudely thrown into consciousness.

"The fuck are you thinking, Harry?" Nate croaked irritably, his voice hoarse. The room had grown uncomfortably still and voyeuristic as hedges gathered along the edges of the room to see the commotion, to witness the fallout. Someone, at some point, had silenced the wards.

So it sliced through the room like an axe, the sound of Harriet Pinnock, who was never the loudest voice in a room, screaming at her brother and punctuating every word: "She SOLD ME OUT!" Her wand stayed trained on Xiomara in incrimination. 

Nate looked between Xi and Harriet, dumbfounded, refusing to believe it. He shook his head and debris fell from his mussed-up hair. "No, she didn't. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about—"

Harriet barked another humorless laugh. "Fucking open your eyes, Nate! She's been playing us into dad's hand from the start—"

"—Harriet," Nate snapped in warning.

"—Nate," she shot back, teeth bared, not budging. The siblings squared off for just a moment before Harriet gave a growl of frustration and lowered her left arm, the one holding her wand, and with her right hand she gestured at a spot on her inner forearm, just beneath the elbow. 

For some reason beyond the comprehension of everyone watching the argument, the cryptic signal from his sister caused Nate to stiffen suddenly. He held eye contact with Harriet, a silent conversation no one else was privy to, while his fingers grazed over a mirrored spot on his own arm. Nate had a small raised scar there, that much Xiomara did know from her own thorough cataloging of all the sensitive spots on Nate's body that she could touch to invoke a reaction.

Where the scar had come from, though, and what the fuck it meant to Nate and Harriet was beyond Xi—and she didn't have a chance to consider it any further before Nate was rounding on her and hissing in accusation, "What the fuck, Xi? You told him she's here?"

“You are just as guilty in this,” she snapped, before pressing her hands flat against the floor to steady herself while she stood. “You do this all the time, it doesn’t surprise me that your fucking sister is exactly the same.”

“Me?” Nate barked back with an incredulous laugh, and Harriet was aghast at being addressed only as his fucking sister. Nate tugged his hands through his hair, tightening and pulling. “Christ, what does that even fucking mean–”

“—I am not the only one who signed that contract, Nate! You know perfectly well what it says. What, you think it just went away?”

Nate scoffed, holding up the sigil on the back of his hand, which seemed to shimmer and gleam with sadistic glee, while he talked over her. “I’m well the fuck aware, Xi! In fact, I’d say you got off pretty fucking easy, getting high and drinking plum-fucking-wine while I was going through hell—”

“You have NO IDEA what I’ve been through!” The bursting abruptness of the way she shrieked it forced the argument’s momentum to a screeching, momentary halt. They were both breathing heavy and still heated as Nate held his tongue, waiting.

But instead of elaborating or explaining, instead of letting him in, Xi sniffed and took a breath. Cold and dismissive, she continued, “You don’t get to toss away your own guilt by making me out to be the bad guy…”

Nate threw his hands up, genuinely too stunned to know what to say. To break the silence, Ruma stepped forward, her brother anxiously hovering a hairline behind her. Ajai’s hand was half extended, itching to take her sister’s arm and transport them both the hell out of there. 

The therapist raised a hand, as if she were trying to soothe a frightened animal. It wasn’t the first time Xiomara had been treated like this. She remembered Nate approaching her in the Caves while she wailed. She remembered healers approaching her in Clearer Skies, talking her through each step they made. She remembered Isaac approaching her in the hotel bathroom.

Ruma opened her mouth to speak, and the French woman cut her off—

“Fuck off, Ruma. This has nothing to do with you,” Xi snarled, leaning forward. The move was enough to spook Ajai into action, the traveller’s fingertips barely grazing Ruma’s shoulder before both hedges disappeared.

“When you’re done being such an insufferable bitch, maybe you’ll wake up and realize not everything in the world revolves around you,” Nate sneered, and Xiomara scoffed.

“And that’s you, isn’t it? Great to hear from Mr. Benevolent himself…”

“Better that than a hypocrite and a fucking snitch—”

The two continued to bicker like that, a ping-pong game of back and forth that increased in intensity with each barb shot back to the other.

Neither seemed to notice how the walls began trembling, the floorboards and furniture creaking and quaking, the glass in the windows whining dangerously. It wasn't until he felt one particularly tumultuous shake of the safehouse foundations, jolting them all off balance, that Nate snapped out of his anger enough to glance around in alarm and become fully aware of the powder keg he'd put them in by provoking her.

"Xi—stop it…"

But Xiomara was beyond reasoning with, long past simmering and fast approaching boiling point. Heat was radiating off of her in waves as she sneered, "Or what? What are you going to do, hit me? Fuck me? You gonna drug me, Nate?"

Nate flinched, looking genuinely stricken by the blow and without a ready response to throw back. Everything held still for one tense moment that seemed to stretch on for hours.

Then someone—Harriet, maybe, Xi couldn't be sure—moved in Xi's peripheral vision, and she exploded.

She threw out her arms as a furious scream ripped its way out of her throat, and a ripple of scalding ambient energy burst outward from where she stood and knocked back everyone within a ten-foot radius—including Nate and Harriet.

Hedges were yelling—at her, at Nate, at each other, Xi really didn't give a fuck and couldn't comprehend any of it, anyway, over the roaring in her ears and the sound of plaster crashing down from the ceiling. Entire strips of the wall were searing and peeling off. Xi's vision was vibrating and blurring. YOU’LL. EXPLODE.

A sorrowful voice with a distinct Irish lilt managed to cut through the clamorous noise within Xiomara's head. This voice was not loud, but it was far too close as it said, "I'm real sorry 'bout this..."

Xi flung a hand back, throwing a wave of energy at the too-close intruder. But it didn't throw Oz like it had the others. 

In fact, the wiry hedge witch who normally moved his body with about as much balance and grace as a drunk toddler, uncannily braced himself against the torrent Xiomara sent at him from less than three feet away, such that the most it did was to blow his dark hair back like a warm breeze. Despite the commotion and the still-imminent peril, the Free Traders stopped what they were doing to face Oz and openly gape.

His face was filled with palpable regret as he opened up his tattooed palms on either side of his body, joints twitching as if he were gently caressing the air, assessing it. Then he arced them forward, tracing a circular shape with his right hand curving up and to the left while his left hand swept down and right. His wrists met in the center, palms thrust out toward Xi so that she could see the words inked there, fingers curved slightly as if waiting to catch a baseball.

And then she felt it—a draining, suctioning sensation of the torrential magic that was swirling around and within her, that had pressed up against her bones as it begged release from her body just moments ago. Now it was being siphoned out of her in a powerful rush, and seemingly funneled between Oz's open, waiting hands. His arms, his shoulders and back, trembled and strained as he took in the current. His spine curved forward as his body cowed into itself, but his feet stayed firmly planted on the ground, the sigils on his hands glowing brighter and brighter until he finally dropped his arms, panting with exertion. The house, though clearly battered, had stopped shaking.

"What the fuck. Did he just do?" Nate said from where he was propped against the broken banister of the stairs, wheezing like he’d had the air knocked out of him.

Oz's head swiveled toward Nate, his eyes glazed over, but he made no effort to respond. He didn't look like he could respond, swaying where he stood like the magic he'd just siphoned from Xiomara was whiskey. The air all around them felt thinner, too, like they were standing at the peak of a mountain and the oxygen was sparse. 

"Par off, blud," Rue growled at Nate with odd and unexpected protectiveness bolstering her tone, "He just saved all our fuckin' skins."

There wasn't a chance to question what the fuck had just happened. Xiomara's face was shining with sweat, and all at once she started shivering where she stood—her drastically overheated body reacting to the sudden, vacuumous removal of its power source.

Nate made a panicked lurch toward her, but it was Rue who got there first; in the secondmost baffling and unprecedented event that had occurred in the FTB safehouse within the last five minutes, Rue placed her hands on either side of Xi's convulsing frame, brow furrowed in concentration until the blonde stilled and her complexion returned to a normal shade.

Harriet hovered behind her brother, murmuring something to him so low that only he could hear. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed, and an emotion that looked like genuine anguish washed over his face for just a moment before it was gone, and his hazel eyes hardened and shuttered. His voice only barely more audible than his twin, Nate said, “Xiomara…You need to leave. We have rules. You broke them.”

As weakened and drained as she felt, practically squashing Rue as she leaned on her for support, Xiomara shook her head. “No,” she replied, looking up at Nate past heavy eyelids.

An awkward beat, and then: “Well, you don’t get to—”