"I'm on it."

"Yanli," he explains to Annaka, "has affinity for food. I think she gives him food that is tasty enough that he eats even though"-- he gestures.

(Also it's a kindness that he can get away with.)

Masozi waits in silence. He’s inexplicably shivering now, despite the room not being at all cold.

"Here. Blanket," he says, keeping an eye on Annaka to see if she considers this unwarranted sympathy.

Annaka is mostly trying to parse if Seoul is right that Lan Xichen is thinking with his dick but she's not the best judge of that even without the extremely high stakes and the culture gap. Anyway doesn't he already the sworn brother and she should look up whether that's a gay thing or not and if so if it is a monogamous one.

In that case he wraps Masozi's blanket around his shoulders.

Masozi tenses up and flinches away when Lan Xichen reaches to touch him. Other than that, he's still and quiet and externally calm while they wait. When food and water are brought, he drinks the water, and eats a little without paying any attention to what it is and hopes that that will satisfy Lan Xichen so they can go on and get this over with and he can find out if he's going to die. 

Lan Xichen doesn't have any sort of feelings about that because those are the kinds of feelings he made himself unable to feel because that isn't very good for politics. (He wonders what Annaka makes about his indifference to Masozi flinching.)

"You drink truth potion. It's larger dose, it's going to feel stranger."

Annaka figures that Lan Xichen is a normal person who doesn't lose a lot of sleep about miserable children facing their impending death, because if he lost much sleep to that he'd be out of sleep and dead.

Masozi drinks it. 

The effects are, in fact, a lot more noticeable than the earlier time. It's not that he's stopped feeling distant from the room and what's happening in it, exactly, but somehow at the same time his thoughts feel much more...pinned down? Like the world is made of grooves and paths and patterns, all the things-that-are-true, and he's glued so tightly to the what's-true-now that there's no room to be anything more than that, anymore. 

He waits for someone to tell him which of the threads of what's-true-now he's supposed to be steering down. 

"Did you try to draw malia from Sophie?"

"No. ...I don't think I - could. Even if I'd wanted to which I didn't. She's a wizard and she's not six." 

"Did you use any magic on Sophie, or on her room, or with the suit of clothes that she was making for you?"

...The high dose truth potion is very weird. He - can't seem to think about what he wants right now. Not that he was very successfully doing that before, but it's a different flavor of it now. Before it felt like there just wasn't space for it, in between the terror and the desperate struggle to keep it under control and the fact that he has no idea if he'll survive the next hour. Now it's...as though the concept of wanting doesn't make sense, anymore, it's been flattened out of existence by how tightly bound his mind is to what's true-already-now. 

It would be very upsetting if he were able to - access preferences about that, right now. Instead it's just confusing and stressful and makes him feel disoriented. 

"No. ...I don't think so? I used magic nearby her to find mals, I was being a lookout for her supply run so she could get cloth. I - walked her to her room after and I checked her room for mals too? It shouldn't've done anything that'd stay. I didn't–" 

He stops, because he's confused about something, and now the threads of what's-true are suddenly tangled and this is, for some reason, intensely panic-inducing. 

"–that doesn't make sense, if something happened to her on Thursday and you think I did it - how would she - there wasn't a suit of clothes yet! It was just fabric!" 

His hands are twitching with the desire to hug Masozi and tell him that everything is going to be all right, he just needs to take a deep breath and tell them the truth.

...Annaka probably won't let him get away with that.

He says nothing.

"Did you expect her to die?"

"No! ...I - what - maybe? Not this soon? She wasn't - dangerous enough - careful enough - I, I wanted to, but I didn't -" 

The truth potion effects are making it incredibly hard to think about! He...wasn't expecting her to die this weekend...but she DID...so the true thing is that he should have expected it?? and the only reason he didn't is that he had false beliefs about the world???

And he - wanted - to intervene, somehow - he thinks he wanted to protect her - but he didn't because she's dead and so what does it even mean, that he wanted to....? 

He's so confused that it's making him literally dizzy. 

"Is this a normal potion side effect?"

"It takes everyone differently but usually messes them up. I think question too broad and it confuses him so he doesn't know what the true thing to say is?" He carefully tries to remember the use of the past tense in English and then says: "Do'ed you do something you thinked would make Sophie die?"

Annaka's Mandarin is even worse than that so she does not smirk. 

"No! I didn't! I don't want her to be dead!" 

And he starts crying again, even though he's somehow still far away from his body and the room. 

Lan Xichen has Resting Pleasant Smile Face so his level of smugness is concealed from Annaka. 

"Before, what about question maked you upset?"

Aaaaaaaaaaaah this is UNFAIR, he's being asked questions about his emotions and his goals and what he wants - okay, to be fair, only in the past tense - but even so it's incredibly hard to dig down far enough to reach that. 

"......I didn't want her to die. People dying is bad. I - I wanted to, to be strong enough, fast enough, that I could - do something -?" 

(And now he's imagining Sophie dying alone, again, except she has his baby sister's face, and he can'tdothisanymore–) 

A couple Indian upperclassmen run up and stop in the hallway outside Masozi's room. Lan Xichen, at least, will recognize these as two of Jaipur's seniors. They don't immediately say anything.

There are TOO MANY THINGS happening. Masozi curls up into a ball again.