Baris lay propped against a stack of pillows when Corren entered, thinner than he'd been at the Academy's earlier trials, his ruined arm bound in a sling that had, over the weeks, become as familiar a part of him as the reckless grin he'd once worn constantly and now rationed carefully, as though it cost him something to spend one on anyone.
"Rookie," he said, and the old nickname landed with real warmth this time, no edge buried under it. "You look like something the tide dragged in and then reconsidered."
"Close enough," Corren said, sitting on the edge of the cot. "I have a way to fix your arm, Baris. Properly. Not the healing chants that only ever get you partway there."
Something guarded moved behind Baris's eyes. "How proper."
"The Vaelora regeneration technique. Voss finally agreed to teach me the full binding, not just the theory. It's a ritual, not a chant, tattooed rather than spoken, and it should regrow what the sword strike took from you completely."
"Should," Baris repeated.
"I've never done it on someone else before," Corren admitted. "Only read the theory and watched Voss demonstrate it on his own arm. There's real risk in that gap between reading and doing, and I won't pretend otherwise to make this an easier decision for you."
Baris held his gaze a long moment, and whatever calculation played out behind his eyes resolved, eventually, into something Corren recognized as the same reckless conviction that had once made the man volunteer for every dangerous drill at the Academy before anyone else's hand had finished going up. "Do it," Baris said. "I'd rather bet on you badly than keep losing slowly to an arm that already knows it's beaten."
They performed the ritual in Corren's own dormitory that night, Wrenna assisting with a discomfort she didn't bother hiding, painting the last of the intricate symbols across Baris's exposed back with a steady hand while Corren murmured the corrected phrasing under his breath, checking each glyph's alignment against Renwick's transcribed notes with the same obsessive care he'd once given a damaged manuscript's margins.
"You're certain about the sequence," Wrenna said, not quite a question.
"As certain as a first attempt lets anyone be," Corren said, and meant it honestly, the vertigo of applying a theory for the first time on flesh that wasn't his own pressing uncomfortably into his chest alongside the familiar hum of mana already gathering at his fingertips.
The glyphs kindled into a soft orange glow the moment he spoke the activating phrase, climbing across Baris's back and down the ruined arm in a slow, deliberate crawl, and for a handful of seconds it seemed to be working exactly as the theory promised, torn muscle knitting visibly beneath skin gone briefly translucent with the working's light.
Then Baris screamed, a raw, animal sound that had nothing performative in it at all, and thrashed hard enough to tear one arm free of the cloth restraints Wrenna had bound him with as a precaution against exactly this.
"Stop," he shouted, "get away from me," and Corren, three-quarters through a sequence that could not safely be abandoned mid-working without risking worse damage than the original injury, pressed forward instead, murmuring the final lines faster, sweat running freely down his own face as the drain of holding the working steady against active resistance climbed past anything he'd paid for a single chant before.
Baris's free hand caught him across the jaw hard enough to split his lip, and the working stuttered, the careful crawl of orange light faltering at the elbow, incomplete, before Corren managed to force the last syllable out through a mouth already filling with the copper taste of his own blood.
The glyphs sealed themselves into stillness a half-second later, translucent and permanent beneath the skin exactly as Voss's own had been, and Baris, still screaming, still fighting the last of the restraints, drove his newly regenerated fist into Corren's stomach with a force that sent him crashing into the room's single desk hard enough to splinter one leg out from under it.
"You don't get to decide this for me," Baris said, standing over him now, breathing hard, something wild and wounded in his face that Corren recognized, distantly, as grief wearing the shape of rage because grief alone had never once been allowed room in Baris's own accounting of himself. "You never asked if I wanted to be your project. You just decided, again, the same way you decide everything, and you dragged me along behind the decision like I don't get an opinion about my own body."
"Baris," Corren managed, tasting blood, "I asked. You said yes."
"I said yes to you fixing it," Baris said, voice cracking, "not to lying there feeling you inside my own arm like you had any right to be there." He drove another blow down, wilder this time, less controlled, and Corren, dazed and slow to rise, felt his own temper finally break past whatever careful patience he'd been rationing all evening, a killing intent surging up out of him fast enough and dark enough that it reached, distantly, the senses of every mage in the building.
He caught Baris's next punch on an open palm without meaning to move that fast, and for one terrible, suspended second, standing there with his friend's fist locked in his own grip and something cold and furious rising in his chest that had nothing to do with the ritual's leftover mana, Corren understood exactly how easily this particular evening could end somewhere neither of them would ever fully recover from.
Doss and Voss burst through the door together a heartbeat later, Renwick close behind, and it took all three of them to pull the two boys apart, Baris collapsing the instant the restraint gave way, sobbing now instead of screaming, the fight gone out of him as completely as it had arrived.
"Enough," Voss said, voice carrying an authority Corren had never once heard him use on a student before. "Both of you. This ends now."