Chloé and Igneus passed each other while she moved from the kitchen area to the futon, and co moved from the futon to the kitchen area.

Neither said a word. This was not the first time they had gone for something at the same time, and the narrow straight-shot of the apartment meant that any time they both moved, they had to pass each other. Chloé took her tablet from on top of the TV and sat on the futon; Igneus went to the sink for a glass of water. Co glanced over at Chloé, watching her steel-blue eyes scan whatever it is she was reading.

"You do that a lot," Igneus said after shutting off the water, and before draining the glass.

"I like to read," she replied, scrolling through whatever it was she was reading.

"Not what I meant." Co put the glass in the sink. "You go around."

"Oh." She looked up, but only got as far as the ground in front of Igneus' feet. "Yes. I do that too."

"One of these days you'll come across someone who doesn't want you to get out of their way, and then where will you be?"

She locked the tablet to focus on the conversation. "Eaten," she replied easily, staring at her reflection in the blank screen. "Or captured to be eaten later."

"You know, in the wild, prey put up more of a fight. That's how they survive to make more prey."

"If I knew for a fact that someone was trying to eat me to death I would try much harder than I do when Cayen or Justice or Sirin does it."

This made Igneus pause, and co went to lean up against what co had come to think of as a kind of defined space of its own, this part of the wall that existed between the TV and the kitchen table. Co crossed co's arms. "Huh. I thought you were just bad at it."

"No. I am just also good at losing."

Igneus appraised Chloé a moment, and after realizing there was no reply coming, she looked up at the silence to see co staring; her gaze returned shyly to her lap. "...Show me." Co said.

"That I can resist?"

"Yeah. I wanna see what you're made of."

"...Okay." She set the tablet on the futon and got up, and Igneus pushed off the wall, and they met in the middle of the apartment.

Igneus looked Chloé up and down for a few moments, pondering, and she stared at co's midsection, using her peripheral vision to monitor the movements of co's body. Even this was interesting, co thought; co hadn't noticed Chloé doing this at other times. Co moved forward; she turned her shoulders and moved past, barely avoiding brushing co on the way by. Co turned back and slowly swept co's arm across; she ducked it, folding her ears back to avoid touching co with them. Co extended co's other arm towards her head in a slow-motion palm heel strike; she leaned back to avoid its progress. Co swept co's arm back around; she took a step back to dodge it.

Igneus stepped forward and Chloé stepped back, pressing her hands against the wall behind her. Co moved forward to put co's hands on the wall on either side of her head; she ducked and slid under co's arm to move past. Co's arm swept out again and Chloé moved with it, and they turned until she had to duck under it again or risk being herded back to the wall. Slowly, co sped up co's attacks, waving co's arm in wide sweeps and throwing little forceless jabs; she matched co's speed, fluidly shifting just enough to avoid each of them.

As the tests continued, Igneus kept getting closer and closer to full-speed. Chloé began to lower her centre of gravity, and used her forearms to deflect rather than simply dodge. Co grabbed Chloé's wrist; she spun it around to break the grip. Co threw a quick jab to Chloé's midsection; she blocked it with an elbow. Co laughed, and started throwing combinations that backed Chloé up from the living room into the kitchen, but still co landed nothing that wasn't blocked, until Chloé's back hit the front door.

Igneus surged forward, and pinned Chloé against the door by her shoulders; she slipped her forearms between co's and drove them outward. Despite co's hands being forced aside, the pressure on her shoulders remained, kept up by co's powers. She struggled, but from there it was trivial for co to find her wrists and pin them as well -- until both of her feet left the floor and she kicked off co's chest, sending co skidding on co's back as far as the fridge. This broke co's concentration, and the force keeping her up disappeared, and she landed on her backside.

A profound silence followed. Igneus stared at Chloé in a half-sit-up, resting on co's elbows, and Chloé stared back, leaning up against the door.

"You cheated," Chloé said.

"We never set rules," Igneus replied, and got up, walking over to offer a hand.

She blinked, and pulled herself up with co's help. "That is not usually how these interactions go."

Co turned and went back to the futon, and she followed. "What, you expected me to pin you to the floor and fuck you senseless after that? Could be an idea some time, but I'm too busy mentally revising how much respect I have for what you're capable of."

"...Okay." She picked her tablet back up. She unlocked it, and then just stared at the password screen. "How do you do that?"

"It's pretty simple, all I do is make sure my preconceptions of someone are yeah that's not what you mean." Co smirked. "Do what?"

"Just... do things. Assert yourself. Take up space."

"It's my nature," co leaned back, throwing an arm across the back of the futon. "I was always a cocky kid. Then I had to bluff my way through shit for a year. You learn to project confidence real fuckin' quick or you get fucked up."

"Oh."

"I'd always figured you'd have had plenty of time to cultivate some bravado given the shit you went through."

"For a short time I kind of did," she says. "The first few weeks of the venlafaxine trial -- that was the drug trial at the end of my testing regimen -- resulted in some extreme mood alterations. I was... not the same person then."

"Venlawhat?"

"Oh, um, it's an antidepressant." 

"They don't have those in Galdor."

"...Um, okay." she gathered her thoughts a moment. "Clinical depression -- persistently lowered mood and affect -- is caused in some but not all cases by a deficiency of the neurotransmitter -- brain chemical -- serotonin. And sometimes norepinephrine. An antidepressant helps to raise the level of these neurotransmitters in the brain to correct this."

"Huh." Co thought. "That's your thing, right, you can't do serotonin."

Chloé nodded. "But my norepinephrine levels are fine. Venlafaxine is indiscriminate. Its action does not regulate but instead elevates serum levels of both chemicals regardless of their original levels. So along with the correction of the serotonin imbalance I also received a surplus of norepinephrine. this resulted in side effects such as impulsiveness, mood swings, brain zaps, mania, and anorgasmia. And sleep problems. More than I had before."

"So why not try again with actual liquid courage?"

"No." Chloé shook her head emphatically. "It was not pleasant."

"Yeah, it would be, if it was that pathetically badly designed." Co reached into co's pocket and pulled out a phial with a blood-red fluid in it -- in fact, Chloé thought, it could /be/ blood for all she knows. "If you design a potion to work on the mood directly, and not the neurowhatevers, it works a lot better."

She began to fidget a little. "Brains do not work like that," she said softly. "You cannot chemically induce a mood."

"Right, so don't worry about a chemical solution. Worry about an /al/chemical one. If there's one thing the big man has taught me, it's that everything changes. And alchemy is the study and application of change. If it can be altered, chances are, Alchemy has something to alter it." Co shook the phial; its contents slid back down the glass in thick rivulets. "Take this shit. Blind Rage. Mercurocoercide-class alchemical. Meant to literally change your mind. Something this size would give you both the drive and the emotional compromise to try and fuck me up. Even though you know that you'd almost certainly never succeed. You'd see red and go off on whoever and whatever is nearby until you no longer could, or until it wore off. But if you watered it down, added some other stuff to it, a little liquid contempt, maybe some powdered don't-give-a-fuck, it could do for you what that antidepressant shit can't."

Chloé looked away and hugged around her middle. "I don't know," she whispered.

Igneus paused, cluing in to Chloé's body language. "Hey, it's just a suggestion. I'm not saying it's necessary. Shit, you got a good thing going for you, you've got a room and some food potions I can't even figure out and a steady job that keeps you fed. All I'm saying is, potions work differently than your shit did. It alters your mood and, probably, the brain chemistry follows suit."

Chloé was silent for a long time, and after a few moments, Igneus got up go to back towards the kitchen, feeling distinctly like co better give her some space. Co sat at the table and opened up co's notebook, and that's when she spoke again: "...What are the side effects?"

Co sat back, thinking. "Depends. I'm sure none of the things you took had the same effects as each other." Co began to tap along the cover of co's notebook, like co was going down an invisible list of items. "Blind Rage can give you a headache. Side-side effect of the subsequent adrenalin rush. Nemesis can start to fuck with your sense of time. Komm Suesser Tüd can have paradoxical withdrawal symptoms and make you paranoid after it's done. Interactions are possible, usually predictable, sometimes not. But at the levels it would take to nudge your mood, it'd be minimal. I doubt the headache would happen. We're talking maybe a tenth of a full dose, the vasoconstriction isn't going to be as pronounced. Very definitely the other two wouldn't even get to the level of an intrusive thought, if they happened at all. Maybe a twinge if you're sensitive. A lot of alchemical effects are threshold effects, including the side effects, meaning they do different things at different doses. I'll talk to Valí, see what he says."

"I thought he didn't want to give away his secrets."

"Yeah, that's why I'm not offering to teach you how to brew the stuff. But using it? Shit, the man ran clinical trials out of a tavern back home, and no, he didn't tell his test subjects first. Dosing's different than manufacture."

Chloé fell silent again, and Igneus returned to co's notebook, scratching out diagrams and alchemical formulae. After a few minutes, co got up and turned towards the door, and Chloé looked up from the blank tablet to watch co.

Igneus paused with co's hand on the doorknob, and then turned back. "--Just--" Co let out a breath, and then began again. "Even if I come back with good news, and there's nothing stopping you from getting whatever Valí and I come up with, you can tell me to shove it up my ass if you're not feeling it. But this is... obviously a problem in this realm. And if I can come up with a potential fix, even if that fix doesn't fit you, then I think it's worth thinking about. Maybe it's not a fix for you but it's a fix for someone." Co scoffed and a little rueful smirk appeared on co's face. "Listen at me, I sound like that pretentious asshole."

Chloé smiled, a little. "Thank you."

"Yup." Igneus turned back to the door. "I'll be back," co said, and walked out.

Chloé watched the door close, and then stared at it for a moment. The stillness was palpable compared to what was now the routine bustle of three people in the small space, and she was at once familiar with it and no longer accustomed to it.

That said, for once, she didn't have to go into the bathroom to masturbate. She had the privacy to do so on her own bed.

She unlocked the tablet and got the mask off the wall, put it on, and returned to the futon to stretch out on it face-down. She loaded one of the apps from her testing regimen on it, and laid the tablet down next to her ears; the shriek of a red-tailed hawk sounded suddenly, and she stiffened, feeling the warmth of sexually-charged fear blooming in her belly. One hand slipped between her legs, and the other reached behind her to squeeze her backside, intensifying the ache of where she landed.

She moaned softly, though this is drowned out in her own ears by the low growl of a Bengal tiger, and though her mind was spinning a fantasy of teeth and wings and claws, her mind was also partially elsewhere. She was often tired, often spent all her energy at work with little left over for her own projects. It would be so helpful sometimes to just have something available that would help her through those periods when all she wanted to do was to stare at the walls and feel time passing. Something that could give her motivation on a visceral level when she had an abundance of it on an intellectual level.

Her fingers began to move faster, and her thought process derailed as the cry of a barn owl emitted from the speakers of her tablet. She dug her nails into the flesh of her backside, hips rocking into her fingers, and she whimpered, picturing bones snapping and blood draining and pain and warmth and darkness, and her orgasm began to build low in her belly--

A completely different noise startled her into a completely different kind of panic, as the door flew open. She yanked her hand out of her pants and flung herself into a sitting position, and in her haste, locked the tablet before silencing the app. "Honey, I'm ho-ome." came Justice's voice from the doorway.

"Oh, sh--" Chloé whispered to herself, as she frantically unlocked the tablet and tried to enter her password; she got it wrong on her first attempt, and the screen flashed red, and the cry of a stoat emitted from the speaker a moment later. Her face erupted with heat, and she squeaked plaintively at the tablet as she re-entered the password -- correctly, this time -- and closed the app.

It was only then that she turned to look at Justice, and seeing that he was on his way to her, locked the tablet again and hid it behind her in the way that people do when they have been caught red-handed. "Hi!" She says, in a high-pitched, startled tone. "That was very sudden."

Justice sat next to her and put his hands on Chloé's shoulders, obviously trying to soothe her after seeing her in the state she was in. "Whatcha got, mousebutt?" he said, glancing at the tablet.

"Nothing! I was watching a thing and you startled me and I locked the screen by accident and it kept making noise and--" She stopped her babbling -- mostly because she was lying through her teeth, and didn't want to dig herself in deeper -- and took a deep breath. "You just startled me is all." She let herself relax into Justice's arms a moment, trying to will herself calm with limited success.

Justice wrapped his arms around Chloé, and started to kiss her neck. Being entirely uncertain whether he realized that he caught her masturbating, the neck kisses both inflamed her deferred arousal, and made her feel that much more trapped behind her need to hide it. "Well I can make up for that. Unless you like being startled. Or I could keep startling you /and/ make up for it." He smirked against her neck, and the ambiguity made her that much more uncomfortable. "Care to tell me what you were watching?" he asked, and the bottom fell out of her stomach, making her fidget.

"It was a thing, um, it was a nature thing. On predators." Chloé began to feel profoundly guilty for continuing to lie, and being in his arms, in this position of trust, didn't help. She extracted herself with as much grace as her anxious body could muster, and got up, taking her tablet with her. "I, um, I just realized I was going to go see Cayen. We were going to do a thing together." She grabbed her keys from the kitchen table. "Um, tomato consommé is draining in the fridge. It is not ready yet but there is still leftover curry from last night. Feel free to take the rest if you like." She went to the door, but paused just before going through it, turning only as far as the sink. There was no way she could face Justice right now, figuratively or literally. "I, um, I will be back later tonight I think." Without waiting for much of a response, she made her escape.

She locked the door behind her and went up the stairs, and it was only then that she felt relief course through her, bringing tears to her eyes. She leaned up against the side of the house, letting the heat of the sun-baked brick penetrate into her back, and tried to get her breathing under control. Her heart was pounding in her lips and her chest, and her fingers tingled with the excess oxygen. Her eyes closed, and she tried to ride out her body's panic.

It took a few minutes of ignoring her own physiological state for it to return to something approaching normal. After a long sigh, she finally began to feel confident in her ability to stave off any further panic, and pushed off the wall to begin walking to Cayen's shop.

During her trek, she had plenty of time to think about what happened, and her brain would let her think about nothing else. Something about Justice just barging in like that irked her, the flagrant disregard for privacy when she had so little of it left after Igneus and Justice moved in with her. She also felt profoundly strange indulging in certain things with others around, and the intersection of these facts frustrated her, as much as she could never admit it. 

The assertion that she could never admit it caught her off guard, and she thought about it a moment. 'Why not?' she asked herself. 'What are you afraid of?'

'I am afraid of things that are not real,' she thought in response, beginning to mentally withdraw into herself to explore her feelings. 'I am afraid of anger and punishment and reprisal from someone I know would never, /never/ do that to me.' She began to tear up again, as more guilt wracked her; however, her body language didn't change, and she didn't make a sound, and she was secure enough behind the porcelain façade of her mask to let the tears come, even as she walked down the street.

'If only I had some of Justice's confidence. He would never think twice about telling me if something bothered me. For that matter very little bothers him. If only he could bottle up that confidence and give it to--'

She stopped dead in her tracks, which was fortunate, because she hadn't noticed she'd reached a corner, and cars were passing crossways in front of her.

She watched them for a moment, and felt her mind changing.

Maybe whatever Igneus was proposing would turn out as badly as the clinical trials.

Maybe it was exactly what she needed.

Either way it was a hypothesis she could not falsify just by thinking about it. And she knew that Igneus wouldn't force her to continue. She could trust him that much, at least.

The light turned, and she began walking. 

She hoped Igneus came back with good news.