Finding the Right Path

Originally posted here on April 11, 2019:

writing-prompt-s:

You’re a witch who makes a living selling potions, breaking hexes, etc. You seem like a regular shopkeep, but, if someone can give you the correct code-word, they can buy illegal love potions from your store, instantly making the recipiant fall madly in love with the customer…

Or at least that’s what would happen if you hadn’t started partnering with the FBI soon after you opened the store. Write about your first sting.

Trigger warning: practices described can get around people’s consent to romantic and physical relationships. I am writing from the ‘dealer’s’ angle, as it were, and so no assault takes place ‘on screen’, as it were. But the fic centers around stealing people’s consent through magic, and while it’s mentioned somewhat offhand and talked around, it’s definitely present throughout this story. Take care of yourself, and proceed with caution. 

Everyone does it, right? 

I mean, it’s part of the business. It’s hard to get by without doing some, you know, under the table stuff. Flying ointments, those are popular too. Not, you know, the legit ones that actually let non-magic users fly (also popular, but extremely tricky to make) but the ones that make your mind fly. Anyway, those are mostly harmless and we’re all adults, right?

Love potions are… look, I don’t think anybody likes selling them. But they’re big money for low cost ingredients. I kept a couple on hand. I’d, you know, try to push people off onto cheaper alternatives. More ethical. Mostly people let themselves be diverted. I’d talk about opening communication channels and letting people come to you. Honey and vinegar. I was smooth.

But for some people, they have only one goal, and if you can’t provide them with what you want, you’ll lose a customer to someone who will. Right? I tried to console myself with that, that they’d just get it somewhere else, that I wasn’t doing anything that everybody else wasn’t also doing. 

I was wrong.

I got caught, that’s the first thing. That’s the necessary thing. I got caught out. I tried to be careful, but I got caught. And the house of cards I’d built up around deceiving myself collapsed.

I didn’t guide people to other solutions to prevent them from doing harm, I did it to protect myself. 

Every step of the way, every move I’d convinced myself was for others, I was doing to keep myself out of trouble. And they failed, and my sense of betrayal at my own self, my own actions and my own… foolishness, my own sense of being untouchable, my own moral high ground. “Everyone is doing it” is an excuse. I wanted the money, and these potions were unbelievably lucrative.

That was the core of it. My own greed. I let myself get sloppy in my greed, too. 

Here’s the truth: these potions are simple to make. They require inexpensive ingredients, and around these parts if you know what you’re doing (and you don’t have to know that much) you can find them more or less laying on the ground. They take a little time but if you remember to shake the jars once a week, in a month you can have as much as you can find the ingredients for. Any witch at all can make them. So why come to me? 

Because I was one of the few selling them, while convincing myself that everybody did it. 

(Flying potions- well, yes, you do actually need more skill to make them, and after a long conversation with some unusually sympathetic FBI agents I discovered that they’re really common in stores like mine, and at this point them and the Spells and Magical Regulation Unit- aka SAMRU- don’t bother prosecuting people who are making them correctly and selling them only to adults.)

The crackdown on my shop was a joint investigation between SAMRU and the FBI, but I was offered amnesty. (Well, amnesty and a hefty fine, which is honestly way more fair than I deserve, at this point.) Amnesty, in exchange for helping them set up a sting.

See, they came down on me because they’re chasing an underground group of strictly non magical drug dealers. They’re selling to people who don’t want to go to shops, but they can’t make it without a touch of magic, so they buy from me and then water it down (which is horrifying in and of itself, you dilute those and the results get way more unpredictable, you can make your victim violent towards themselves and others and screw up their lives forever) and sell them to people who sell them to people, all at exorbitant costs.

I don’t know, even if I’d known that, that I would have stopped. There’s part of me that wants to believe that, but the honest part of me thinks I probably wouldn’t have. 

Listen, I did a smart thing after I got caught. I brewed myself an Insight potion. They’re easy to make but difficult to take, because you see all of yourself, all the way down. You can think you’re a good person and then learn all the ways that you’re not. 

They’re not very popular, I sell one every two months, maybe. 

But you can make it out of stuff from a prison lunch, if you’ve got a little grass and get lucky with ingredients. 

Sitting in a jail cell with a bunch of other women while internally examining everything you ever did wrong in your life ain’t exactly a good time, but it was the right thing to do, maybe the first right thing I’ve done in a long damn time. That’s where all this brutal self-honesty came from. Better living through magic, right? 

So when they came to me with a deal, of course I snapped it up. I mean, my lawyer would have throttled me if I hadn’t, because the case against me was so airtight, but also because it would give me an actual chance to try to right some of my wrongs. 

First thing I did was destroy all the love potions I’d made, and then I mixed up some potions that looked similar but just made your farts smell like roses. (That sells really well near the end of March, my own invention, I think they’re hilarious.) I was politely asked to refrain from dealing with flying ointment (again, the hallucinogenic kind, not the ‘you literally fly’ kind) until the sting operation was over, to make things easier. 

Which, you know, fair. 

I actually ended up throwing some other stuff out. It wasn’t illegal but some of it was on the dark side of gray, and I wanted to revamp how I dealt with customers. When the (somewhat frustrated) FBI and SAMRU folk asked how I’d deal with that while still being in the sting op, I said I’d just say that the stock went bad while I was away and was gonna have to be redone. And some of the stock had gone bad while I was away, so it wasn’t that much of a lie. 

I talked to people. When I was in jail waiting for my trial to start (which never happened, fortunately that public shame disappeared, as did my jail time, so it’d be easier for me to participate in the sting). After, too. I talked to people who’d used Love potions, or been tricked into taking them. People who had a parent use love potions on the other. People whose lives had been shaped and harmed by people like me. It was hard, and I got at least one black eye out of the deal, but it was important. Insight potions wear off, and then you have to deal with the knowledge. Sometimes you can pack it away. 

Can’t pack away a sobbing 20-something swinging on you for ruining her life for want of a few bucks. And sure, I didn’t give her the potion, maybe I didn’t even make it (though probably I did) but I contributed to the whole industry that caused her life to go to shit. I bailed her out when I got out, and talked to the SAMRU people about helping find her a job. 

It’s not enough. Fuck, I know it’s not enough. I’m gonna start putting money aside and seeing if I can’t use that to help somehow. There’s some non-profit organizations that deal in this kind of thing, I’ve talked to the SAMRU folks about which ones are the best at using their money (I figure they know) and I’m gonna start dropping money their way. Help people get counseling and work. Gonna donate some potions if they want. The kind they need is expensive (Insight potions are cheap, but therapeutic ones are not) and I’ll give them as many as I can afford to make and still eat.

The first sting was almost a non-event, to be honest. Guy came in, asked for a thing, asked for a thing more clearly, finally said ‘do you have love potions or not?’ and I sold him my rose fart potion masquerading as a love potion and he got himself arrested. 

It was important, but it wasn’t. A small step. They’re all small, you know? I guess the good news is that if I keep this direction, the only way forward is up. The bad news is that it means it’s all uphill, but whatever. I dug my way down, I’ll crawl my way out.

There’s a kind of freedom in knowing where you’re at and where you’re going. I haven’t been right, not in a long time, but I’m not going to fool myself again. I’m making more Insight potion, and I’m going to keep it in stock, no matter how low it sells, it’s cheap. 

And if some of it is about to go bad, I’ll take it again.

Just to be sure that I’m keeping myself on the right path.