They got up the next day when their alarms went off, and got dressed into their uniforms. Kageo was still a little miffed that their designations were right there in the open but he'd have to deal with it. When they got down to the cafeteria for breakfast, they found that Stella was still in hot demand as a breakfast partner.
Yami had managed to befriend a few people now, which Kageo was happy to see. He expected people would be avoiding him and Walt from then on, and he wasn't upset about the idea of getting to eat meals with just Walt for a while. It would let them talk openly for a bit.
What he wasn't expecting was that them being labeled as "dangerous" would make them interesting to other students. Of course, part of the interest with Walt was that he was a Whitmore, but the fact that he was a Whitmore with psionics was attractive to people who were willing to accept that they would be putting themselves at possible risk by trying to befriend him. Actually befriending him, though, could come in handy later.
Kageo, though, was attractive only because he was considered dangerous and the son of a traitor. He may have done nothing wrong, yet, but he already had that bad boy reputation and it made people want to see if he really was a bad boy. The problem was that they weren't particularly kind about how they went about it. Some of those with more courage than sense set about rigging a few "practical jokes" to test Kageo's sensitivity to disruption.
Kageo's reaction to the pranks were truly a lesson in patience. Even if they startled him, he would simply close his eyes, take a moment to recenter himself, and then open his eyes back up and go back to what he was doing. It only added to the mystery of who he was to everyone. It just backed up what Walt was seeing to be true about Kageo though; he was a good person who had no need to be cruel or angry, despite having every good reason to be angry at the world.
A lot of the pranksters lost interest after breakfast when Kageo didn't give them the satisfaction they sought but there were a few resilient souls who persisted into lunch. The more determined among the trolls included Walt in the second round of shenanigans, clearly not concerned that he might abuse his psionic powers openly at the Academy so soon after being hailed as the first psionicist in a century. What they conveniently forgot was his gravity manipulation, a power he had exercised plenty among his friends and family at home.
The first one to try to telekinetically yank Walt's chair out from under him found herself rooted to her own chair and struggling mightily to overcome the downward force holding Walt's and Kageo's chairs in place. Kageo could feel the energy Walt was using to keep the chairs down, so he just looked back at her like she was one of the dumbest people he had ever seen and eventually she slunk away from them.
"I hope this doesn't continue until we graduate," Kageo grumbled.
Walt met his eye and nodded his complete agreement. Fortunately, Stella decided to grace their table with her majestic presence and the practical jokes stopped for the day. Beyond mealtimes, they also shared a few "core" classes, such as Magical Theory, Signs and Sigils, and Herbology. Walt in particular was over the moon for Herbology, obviously, and easily moved to the head of that class. After lunch, they separated to work on their individual specialties or spend time in the library if there were no teachers available, such as in the case of Kageo's Blood Magic.
Kageo always went into the very back of the library to practice. The Head-Minister had gotten him an array of blood samples to play around with, but most of the time he just used his own blood.
Blood magic could be used for quite a lot of things; some of them perfectly benign while other things were past just being a gray area. You could control someone with a drop of their blood, do rituals, heal people, curse people, and more. Kageo knew how to do it all, but liked to focus on ways he could help people. That meant learning the gray areas, though. He trained the less helpful ways by using bugs or small rodents. He never hurt them; just made them do things to make sure he knew what he was doing.
Normally he would heal his small cuts before he went back to the dorms, but he came back at the end of the first week having been too tired to worry about it, so he had a ton of little cuts all along the side of his hand and arm, which Walt only saw when Kageo stripped down to get a shower.
"Kageo!" Walt exclaimed without thinking, approaching him and reaching for his wounds. He stopped, of course, before actually touching. After Kageo nodded his consent, Walt gently laid his hands on the worst of the cuts. "I'm not as good at this as Stella, but..."
That was all the warning Kageo got before a cold rush of energy flowed through him. Kageo had been healed a few different ways before but this was definitely different. He could tell that the cuts would scar, albeit much better than they would have had he left them to heal naturally. Once the feeling of being plunged into a freezing lake subsided, Kageo looked at his arms and smiled.
"That's pretty impressive," Kageo told him. "I usually heal with the blood magic but I'm wiped out. I'll probably barely be able to get this shower done before I crash. Wait a minute, why didn't that wipe me out the rest of the way like healing usually does?"
Walt smiled a secret smile and touched his finger to his temple. "That's because healers have to get the energy for healing from somewhere and generally the healing is rejected a lot less often if the energy comes from the person being healed," he explained. By the look on Kageo's face, he knew that already, so Walt pressed on. "But we all get a tiny trickle of energy from the earth and the people around us. It just sort of... leaks out of life and permeates the aethyr. That energy is completely neutral, so I just borrow some of it."
Kageo looked at Walt in a way that said something like that had never occurred to him before. "That's actually kind of brilliant, Walt."
Walt looked surprised that Kageo thought so, as if it had been obvious to him. "Can I ask you something strange?" Walt asked him.
Kageo sat down on his bed and nodded his head. "Go ahead."
"Do other people not know about this? We are strictly forbidden from talking about pretty much anything we learn from our tutors, and besides it doesn't make sense to share information that could be used as a weakness where I'm from," Walt asked quietly, as if afraid of being overheard.
Kageo again looked surprised at that. "I don't think it's common knowledge, no, at least not to people who don't work with that type of magic. My family has always been very open about what our tutors taught us, at least to each other, but I was always warned not to talk about the shadow and blood magic because people could be judgmental. I don't know why your father would forbid you from speaking about it at all, though. That seems to be his own insecurities talking."
Walt's smile looked pained. "He's... a very paranoid man and he insists on running his court as if that's normal. I'll let you get cleaned up, but I will probably have
so
many questions about what is normal and what isn't, if that's okay," Walt said as he moved out of Kageo's way and stood ready to help him stand up if needed.
Kageo chuckled and accepted the help up, telling Walt it was okay to ask him any questions he wanted to, before he grabbed his towel and clean clothes and went to get his shower. He was right that he would be completely wiped after the shower, and he came back into the room, clad only in loose pants that were comfortable for sleeping in, and laid down on his stomach, his head on his pillow as he watched Walt get ready for bed.
They had only been there a week so far, but Kageo found himself feeling at ease around Walt. Walt, normally shy around new folks and generally uncomfortable about opening up, had absolutely no idea of body modesty. He stripped completely down, threw his clothes into his chest, and strode purposefully into the bathroom. With anyone else, that might have annoyed Kageo, but he didn't mind the view at all. In fact, it stirred something in his pelvis and made him feel his stomach flip in a way it never had before. When he realized he had gotten hard, his face flushed and he turned his head away toward the wall so Walt wouldn't notice it.
He needn't have worried, however, as Walt peeked into the room and saw Kageo facing the wall. He quickly took advantage of the opportunity to cross the room unseen and slipped into clean smallclothes and pajama pants before slipping into bed. He was not afraid of being seen nude, but it was another thing entirely for the reason for such a reaction as he had experienced while washing himself in the shower to see him trying to scurry to his bed dick-first.
Kageo heard him come in but couldn't bring himself to turn back around and say anything. He was puzzling in his head why he was reacting this way to Walt. He hadn't had a ton of chances to be around people outside of his family, but enough to know that he was happy to check out women. He'd never been kissed, though, and never had sex, but he was young and he took care of that on his own just fine. He'd never reacted to a guy like this before, and certainly not someone like Walt.
Walt was kind, smart, well educated, talented with magic, and from a very wealthy and well-known family, but more importantly, they had become friends. Now he was feeling guilty for having lustful thoughts about his only friend. Did this make him a bad friend? Walt had been nothing but kind to him since they met. Would he be disgusted if he knew what Kageo was thinking about?
Walt, for his part, laid awake considering his own life. He had never questioned or even considered his gender preference before. It had been assumed from the day he was old enough to be introduced to his father that he would marry a woman and produce offspring and that any heir unable to do so would no longer be heir. As such, he hadn't thought to question or fight against what seemed to be necessary. He wasn't exactly sexually repressed, but he also wasn't someone who masturbated frequently or thought about other people sexually. Something about Kageo, though... he could feel a pull to the man that seemed stronger than his heaviest gravity trick.
Kageo could feel that pull too, but he couldn't quite figure out what to do with it. Part of him wanted to say fuck it and just go to him, but he was struggling internally. Still, the exhaustion of the day and studying finally caught up to him and he fell asleep. Eventually, Kageo shifted in his sleep so that he was on his back, his head positioned so he was facing Walt. His expression in sleep looked softer than it did when he was awake; when he was awake, it was like he was always looking for danger. It made him look slightly younger now, but even more handsome than he usually was.
Walt fell asleep still struggling with this new internal conflict, gazing thoughtfully at Kageo. That night, he dreamed some rather raunchy things about the man, which was a strange occurrence for Walt, because he had learned early on with his psionic powers that he needed to guard his dreams or he might wake up to the entire castle shaking. As such, he seldom dreamed that he remembered, but this was different.
