Rafael stares at his knees, sitting a bit slumped, a bit hollow now that Nicholas and Stavros aren't here to prop him up.

“Rafael, can you tell me what happened?” Ms Connell asks. When she called him into her office, she led him to the little circle of couches and not to the desk. Now, she sits with her hands clasped in her lap, trying to look harmless.

“Nicky had a panic attack,” Rafael reports.

“Do you know why?”

“He said he didn’t know,” Rafael repeats. “The nurse already asked about it.”

“What do you think might have caused it?” Connell reiterates. “Was there something he said, or said to him? Do you know if he’s dealing with something at the moment?”

“I don’t know.”

Connell pauses. “The timeline is a bit confusing. From the time that witnesses reported, it took you twenty minutes to get Nicholas to the nurses. You were only one floor down from the clinic. Can you tell me why it took so long to get to the clinic? Did something happen on the way?”

Rafael and Stavros carried Nicholas to an empty classroom. They blocked the light and covered Nicholas with blankets before wrapping around him, trying to shelter him the way he likes so he’ll calm down. Nicholas didn’t calm down, he just kept crying and hyperventilating and it was terrifying.

Stavros didn’t want to go, he said they just needed a bit more time, but Nicholas was barely breathing and wouldn’t respond to anything. Rafael picked him up and ran him to the nurses.

“I have a guess,” Connell continues when she realises Rafael won’t answer. “The last time Nicholas had to go to the nurses for a panic attack was a few years ago…” She trails off and leans forward. “Rafael, did Stavros do something?”

Rafael's head jerks up in shock but when he meets her eyes, he looks away again. He doesn’t know how much of him is a monster right now, or if it’ll show in his eyes. “It wasn't. He didn’t.”

“I just want you to think about it because if Stavros is doing something to Nicholas, or to you, then we can stop it. You always have another option. But I can’t help unless you tell me what’s wrong.”

“He didn't hurt us,” Rafael insists, meeting her eyes this time. “He didn’t. I’ll swear on my magic, he didn’t.”

“There’s a precedent,” Connell says regretfully.

“He wouldn't. Not now.”

“We don't have to make a big deal out of it,” Connell offers quietly. “He doesn't have to know. Change some class seats around, get you out of the dorm - we can say the room needs to be redone because there are problems with the wards. We can get you away from him.”

I'm a werewolf, Rafael thinks about saying. I'm diseased, the ape came after me, they got hurt because they tried to save me. Kill me.

But the last time Rafael did that, Stavros had to wipe the teacher's memory and Nicholas wouldn't let Rafael go anywhere alone in case he tried to tell someone else. They were both so upset with him.

“Nothing happened,” Rafael rasps out. “Can I go? I want to see Nicky.”

Connell waits for a moment and then leans back. “Okay. Okay, but just know this offer is always on the table. You can come to me any time.”

“Yeah,” Rafael mutters.

He walks back to the clinic, the halls quiet during lunch. Stavros and Nicholas are waiting, sitting on a cot together and eating gummies because Nicholas needs to get his sugar up. There’s a case of potions by Nicholas’ bedside - the same ones he was taking after Adam died. One nurse can be seen through the windows of the office but the rest of the room is empty.

“She'll want to talk to you alone soon,” Rafael tells Nicholas quietly.

“I already told her I don’t know why it happened,” Nicholas says even though that’s a blatant lie to everyone but Nicholas.

Rafael isn’t surprised though, and Nicholas probably even believes it because he’s always excusing his emotions like he’s just being dramatic that he cried over seeing Adam’s dead body, or that he’s being too clingy when he came back from getting kidnapped and desperately didn’t want to sleep alone.

The truth is, Nicholas killed a creature today. He saw people die, he heard Stavros torture someone – strip their arm right to the bone and grind his shoe into raw muscle, and he saw Rafael rip someone’s throat out with his teeth. Even just the truck full of bruised and bloody werewolves -children even- ready to be shipped off would be too much for Nicholas on a normal day.

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Maybe some of it is physiological. Nicholas almost died and went through the shock of feeling so much pain and losing so much blood, his heart cut open by the time Stavros pulled the curse into himself and then Rafael finally broke the curse entirely.

They healed Nicholas with potions but rapid healing has its own consequences and they used potions with dosages scaled for werewolves. They’re lucky they didn’t overdose Nicholas with something that would have killed him anyway.

So maybe on top of the panic attack, Nicholas’ body is breaking down too, but it doesn’t matter how he’s crashing. What matters is that Rafael didn’t notice a single fucking thing and he didn’t stop it from happening in the first place.

Nicholas didn’t say a word ever since they killed the poachers. It was coming on two hours by the time they got back to the citadel and Nicholas said nothing and Rafael didn’t even notice.

“Connell wasn’t mean to you, was she?” Nicholas asks with a frown.

You were carved open and I had to watch, Rafael doesn’t say. “She's going to ask if Ross is hurting us.”

Stavros huffs out a laugh, that swiftly turns into a giggle and then loud, wild laughter that throws his head back. It's ragged and high-pitched, half hysterical.

Nicholas rubs a hand up and down Stavros' thigh. “It's okay, I'll explain to her it was stress.”

And Rafael, he sits on the bed because he's feeling shaky and hunches forward even with Nicholas' arms around him.

“Sorry, I’m so sorry,” Nicholas whispers, pulling them both in. “It was the adrenaline, you know? My body just took over. I don't know why I lost control like that. You know I cry a lot.”

Rafael wants to tell Nicholas that there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s the normal one, that it’s okay and expected after the situation they went through – but Rafael is crying too hard to say anything that’s actually fucking helpful.

----------------------------------------

“Vasundhara Bhale and High Mage Niaa,” Rafael says, sitting in bed and reading his own notes from a while back. All three of them have bits and pieces of information from Luca and Christos but the most coherent and most recent is from Nicholas’ mum.

“We can take on a high mage,” Stavros mutters, cross-legged at the foot of the bed. “I’ll ask my older self how they off'd the bastard last time.”

“Christos would just tell Luca,” Nicholas points out, lying down and wrapped around a pillow.

“Well then skip the middle step. When Luca gets back, we’ll ask what he needs to get done and help him with it.”

“He doesn’t need our help, that’s half the problem,” Nicholas complains. “You think I haven’t offered? He already has everything in hand and won’t even hear about it. He got so worried when mum started helping, you think he’ll let us do anything?”

“You want to do nothing then?” Stavros demands.

“You both have a point,” Rafael cuts them off. “Maybe we shouldn’t jump Luca and demand to be let in on a fight, but we can start helping in smaller ways.”

“How long will that take?” Stavros complains. “I don’t see why we have to wait for Luca because quite frankly, I don’t think he’s going to change his mind. We should make our own plan.”

“To take down a high mage?” Rafael demands. “Ross, we’re not even working off our own information, this is all spotty second-hand from two time travellers who might be wrong because they don’t know this timeline. What we need is information and then we can make a plan.”

They settle into an uneasy silence.

Nicholas didn't understand, is the thing. He didn't understand how dangerous it was because Luca made it look easy, always dismissive when Nicholas asks if things are going well, always confident about the next step and so determined to see it through.

Nicholas didn't even understand how close it was because in his mind, Rafael wasn't a werewolf, he was Nicholas' precious Raffy who couldn't be hurt - since even if Nicholas fails, Stavros won't let it happen.

Other werewolves get killed. Other creatures are caught and put in reform centres.

None of that has touched Nicholas' world. Even with Luca -especially with Luca- none of that was a real threat. It's always been disgusting and horrible but never something that could affect him.

This...this is scary. This needs to be stopped. Not just talked about, not left to Luca and Christos’ already burdened shoulders. Nicholas wants to do something about it.

“Alright, then we get information,” Nicholas decides. “That’s a good milestone. We hit that first and then figure out what we can do.”

The other two agree and they pour over notes for a bit longer, filling in missing bits with what Stavros got out of the reform centre staff in the jungle.

They sleep together that night, Rafael stuffed into the middle with the windows and door locked and tightly warded.

----------------------------------------

The next day, they’ve thrown a saddle bag over Rito’s back because they’ll be setting up a few rituals to close the portals that lead anywhere near that Congo jungle.

Only a few portals are regulated and those are marked clearly, mostly for research purposes by the extension classes, or for ecological studies. The great majority aren’t even discovered and the forest is a restricted zone anyway so no one will know the difference if a few go missing.

It’s in an open space thankfully, the ones in bushes or too high off the ground suck. Rito moves off to stomp a circle around the portal, digging gouges into the dirt with his hooves. Rafael conjures rope and starts to outline a trigram inside the circle Rito is making. Stavros pops back up and starts pulling yew wood out of the saddlebag, dropping them chaotically along the circle behind the sheep.

They sprinkle around the potion, a cute bubbly pink that dissolves magic so is understandably very illegal to both make and own but Stavros has an entire Lambros library at hand. They bury a seed at the centre right under the portal and Rafael bleeds himself to provide Darkness.

Twenty minutes later (as well as an accidental lightning strike because Stavros stumbles over the Latin – that word is stolen from Greek, why is it pronounced stupid?!) a massive feywood tree has planted itself where the portal was, absorbing the magic and distributing it softly into the atmosphere.

“Four more to go,” Nicholas chirps, running around erasing evidence.

It’s a stupid thought but it almost feels like Rafael gets safer each time they close one.