Ber made a noise of agreement at Hazel’s claim and winced at the shrill squeal that she made in an apparent attempt to deafen him. Rubbing his ear, he watched the girl pick up one of the many labels scattered across the floor. Employing obvious effort - Ber could hardly blame her because reading sucked - she read it with dubious accuracy before showing the label to Shannon, who also took her time picking apart the words. The girl said it read ‘toadstool’. Shannon claimed it read ‘mugwort’. Ber knew immediately which witch he believed.

He had redirected Hazel to a more productive activity as something of an olive branch to Shannon. A shame she had to throw it away.

When she claimed some nonsense about his superior reading ability, Ber raised his eyebrows at her from behind Hazel’s back before taking the label himself from the girl. Though the word itself was as lost on him as the actual contents of the jar, he made a show of reading the slip of paper. Then he looked to both of his companion. In situations like these, the truth of his claim mattered less than how confident he sounded. “No, I think Hazel’s right.” Still kneeling at the little girl’s level, he looked up at Shannon with a pleasantly innocent smile that only hinted at the smugness underneath. “I’m pretty sure that says ‘toadstool’.” Hazel would believe him. Shannon would know he was wrong, and if she wanted everything back in order, she wouldn’t be able to escape so easily.

After all, only one of them cared about the accuracy of the labels. Ber wasn’t about to let her foist the work onto his shoulders, not when she was only reaping what she had sown.

More white flowers. He was beginning to detest all of these near-identical little white flowers.

For a long moment, Ber eyed the two jars suspiciously before turning his gaze on Shannon. He wasn’t sure what the labels read or if they were accurate - and he wasn’t about to take the time to actually try to figure out what trick she was playing - but he had gotten enough of a measure of the witch now to not trust anything she said in such a saccharine tone. Nor was he about to put either flower in his mouth.

In the time that he had spent helping Temperance prepare various ingredients for her potions, she had impressed upon him the wisdom of only eating that which he could identify; while many plants were edible, many others would also make his stomach upset or worse. Given that Ber could reliably identify very few plants, he did not make a habit of taste testing them, and he did not plan on making an exception here.

“I only know a few words, Shannon,” He said with a shrug. “Toadstool happens to be one of them.” It was not. “And both you and Hazel know more plants than I do, so I’m not sure why you’re asking me.” After a gesture and a brief grin in Hazel’s direction, he added, “This one especially knows a lot. Right, Hazel?”

Ber might have been exaggerating his hopelessness with reading a little bit, though his knowledge of words lay far more within the realm of military reports than it did with anything else. Still, he wasn’t above claiming ignorance of most potion ingredients if it meant that Shannon would finally accept that she could not foist the bulk of the work onto him, which she did. Hiding the smug satisfaction, the soldier offered a shrug and pleasant agreement. “Guess so.” How unfortunate, truly.

When Hazel tugged on his hand, Ber easily followed her over to one of the piles of jars and quickly considered the situation. The most efficient way to get through this would be to order the jars and order the labels in the same way, but despite his humoring of the little girl, he highly doubted that she could reliably identify most of these ingredients. That meant sorting them into some semblance of alphabetical order was out of the question, if only because Ber wouldn’t be able to check that everything was actually correct.

“Hey Hazel,” He said after a moment, turning to look at the girl. “What if we put all of the pretty flowers that are the same color together? We can put red over there, orange over here, and so on. How does that sound?”

If she agreed, he would raise his voice and inform Shannon that they were sorting the ingredients by color – and she could do with that knowledge what she wanted – before finding a jar of each color flower and setting it where the respective pile belonged. Then he would turn back to the girl with one more challenge. ”Who do you think can sort more jars, Hazel? Me or you?” A pause in which he would wait for her answer. “Let’s see who can sort the most jars, but you can’t drop any or else you’ll lose points. Think you can win?”

When the world around him slowly started shifting into shades of yellow and blue, Ber froze and blinked a few times. Setting aside the jar in his hand, he rubbed at his eyes and looked around but still the colors were wrong. What the— Alarm quietly growing, he stared at the discarded jar – its contents had been green, but now they looked like a dark yellow – and searched his memory for any indication of what could have happened. He hadn’t touched his eyes until a moment ago, so nothing could have gotten into them. Slowly, he picked up the jar again and moved to set it in the pile with the other green ingredients. He hadn’t hit his head on anything. Eyes didn’t just stop working unless—

Ber’s gaze shifted from the mess of ostensibly yellow and blue ingredients to Shannon as she sorted through labels nearby, the colors of her own clothing similarly muted. It would not be a reach to suspect her, he decided after brief consideration. She had cursed the kid in mandatory training, cursed Abbott in front of everyone, and – allegedly, though given his current circumstances he also had to wonder about the veracity of that implicit claim of innocence – cursed Abbott again. What reason would she have to hesitate to curse him?

Thinking abruptly of Temperance, Ber bit back whatever words he might have spoken across the room and let Hazel distract him as she held up a jar of red – they looked like a darker shadow of yellow than the green – flowers to show him. He nodded his agreement. “Very pretty.” His gaze fell across the slowly growing collections of each color of ingredient, relying as much on his memory as where Hazel ran to put each jar after she announced the color to him to try to judge which new shade of yellow or blue belonged to which color. Distinguishing red, orange, and green from each other was about as difficult at teasing apart blue and purple. Only yellow, which was the brightest yellow of all the shades, remained easy to accurately identify.

Once he'd determined that, Ber looked back at the pile of unsorted ingredients and dug through them until he found two jars that contained yellow flowers. He turned to find the girl. “Since you know colors so well, Hazel,” He invited her, holding the jars down low for her to see. “What color are these?”

As he had innumerable times throughout this entire affair, Ber resisted the urge to sigh. His gaze traveled from Hazel to the jars that definitely contained yellow flowers and then back to the girl who had provided him with an answer that cast everything into doubt. Was she lying to him or did she genuinely not know her colors? It would have mattered less had he been able to properly identify the colors himself, but now…

Well, he could work with this, he supposed. Attempting to put the ingredients into some semblance of an order had been in an effort to make it easier for Shannon to match the label to the correct ingredient, but he had no qualms about throwing that system away as a result of her making his life more difficult. “Interesting,” Ber said lightly. “I thought these were yellow flowers, but if you say these are blue, purple, and green, that must be so.”

He put them in their respective groups, at least according to Hazel, and watched as the girl in question finished sorting a handful of jars in the time it took him to do those three. Standing off to one side, he pointed toward some other jars and asked, “What about those over there?” Once she answered, he would direct her to sort them herself.

Despite not understanding that Hazel had also taken the stem color into consideration, Ber nodded sagely. “I see.” He did not see. “Thanks so much for helping me though.” He didn’t think he was all that bad with children, at least the grown ones, but sometimes they were a mystery even to him. Well, he hardly needed to understand precisely what ran through her mind to get her to do his work for him, which was precisely the reason of their little race: the more ingredients Hazel sorted, the less he had to do himself. His sudden inability to distinguish colors from each other had simply given him a valid reason to sit back and let the girl run around.

With Ber directing more than sorting - though he occasionally moved a yellow flower to the yellow pile himself - they carried on. While Hazel’s energy seemed endless, she was easily encouraged to continue whenever she did falter, and the occasional glance toward Shannon, whom he presumed actually did have to do her work, left him rather pleased with this whole arrangement. Eventually, when his vision returned to normal, Ber dared to look over the various shapes made by the jars to find something of a mismatch of colors. For the most part, they seemed to be grouped by color as he’d intended, but for some reason, Hazel had put a whole handful of non-green flowers into the green pile.

Children. Shaking his head slightly, he caught the girl’s attention as she put the last jar in place. “Woah,” Ber praised. “You sorted way more jars than me. I think you definitely won that one, Hazel.” He watched her celebrate before gesturing toward Shannon. “You wanna be extra helpful now and go check on her?”

With far less enthusiasm, Ber obligingly spun once in a circle before watching Hazel continue to twirl in her little victory dance. Luckily, she fled to Shannon’s side easily enough and left him to survey their collections of jars while he kept an ear on the somewhat entertaining discussion happening nearby. The mention of another game had him pausing from where he had begun to resort some of the jars to peer over at the pair.

As Shannon laid out the rules of her cruel and unusual revenge, he used his last moment of relative peace and quiet to run a hand down his face and let out a quiet sigh. Then he turned to face the excited patter of feet and their eager owner. “Nightshade berries?” He repeated, though he’d heard the exchange between the two witches clearly. With one hand, he gestured toward the jars. “What color are they, Hazel?”

Of course, he didn’t know whether the black berries they found were actually nightshade, but as Ber carried them over to Shannon, he figured that she would double check their - by which he meant Hazel’s, because he was still more than willing to let her shoulder the majority of the work - identification of the requested ingredients all the same. “Having fun?” He asked, tone dry, as he held out the jar.