Chapter Text
Too soon, the world was dissolving around them, and Lup and Taako helped each other off the floor.
Taako gave their audience a calculating look, but she put a quelling hand on his arm. No need to fuck shit up and get himself in trouble with these things. They still had a good shot at getting the Light through this gauntlet.
And luckily, the scene around them swirled into a dark forest clearing that she knew was well off the road. It had taken them all day to get out there and she’d been too nervous to wait any longer, but they were far enough out that no one would hear a scream and she’d researched so hard.
The scene shifted with her as she jostled a much younger Taako’s shoulder, making a perimeter around the clearing.
“You think this’ll work?” she said, gesturing around like she had at the time. The real Taako took it in with a fond smile while his younger self stared solemnly.
“It’s open and far away from the road,” he agreed. “You’re not gonna get hurt, are you? With the soul thing? And if my bosses come you’ll be careful?”
He sparked a line across their shared soul and Lup zinged with the memory. She laughed, because she’d been young and felt invincible that night. Unstoppable.
“No one’s gonna notice a thing. No one but us. Promise.” The little Taako looked a touch reassured, glancing at the sky and all around him. He wasn’t used to it yet, so his ears remained neutral while his face and posture read two steps from terror.
“I guess we should start, then. You wanted a circle? Is wood okay? I can try stone if you need it. If I do bad at this, will I be…?” He was trying very hard to be neutral, fussing with the grass while Lup paced the length of the clearing, making measurements. Barry looked pained, though whether it was at their terrible scientific method or their intent was hard to say.
She laughed, because her past self had laughed, although in retrospect she maybe should have taken his concerns a bit more seriously. If nothing else, just because Taako was terrified. But she’d laughed, and put her arm around him, and said, “Nah, you’re mine now. We’re twins. You can’t separate twins.”
And the little Taako looked at her with big, trusting eyes, and nodded, and said, “Yeah. You can’t separate twins.”
The scene sped up as they transmuted and painted and chalked and measured, and she did feel a little bad looking back at it, because without the blinding sense of pride she could see how Taako stared at the symbols and manifested his soul when she wasn’t looking, and the fine tremble in his hands that he shook away irritably when he was painting in details, and how often he glanced at her and steeled himself.
She hadn’t gotten good yet at asking him how he really felt about things, and he hadn’t learned how to tell her. When she remembered her younger self turning around, finally ready, Taako was blank-faced and complacent.
“You ready for this?” she asked, following her role. The little Taako nodded as the current Taako looked on intently, warmly. She wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of his better memories, too.
The younger Taako—Taaquito—moved to stand in the center of the circle, and Lup caught his arm.
“We’re gonna get you better,” she said, cringing a little. She was not a diplomat as a child. “We’re gonna fix you.”
Taaquito looked placidly at her, having reached and surpassed peak panic.
“If that’s what you want,” he said. She nodded and grinned at him.
“Of course! It’s gonna be great, Koko, it’s gonna work!” In retrospect, why had she been so eager to try this out immediately? What if it hadn’t worked? The rudimentary ritual they’d set up didn’t have any of the safeguards they’d later develop, and it worked on faith and desire more than anything. One wrong step could have seriously fucked Taako up. What the hell had she been thinking?
But current Taako was smiling fondly at the scene, relaxed, and Lup couldn’t be too upset. Maybe she hadn’t been as careful as she would be later, but to let him be free like this, yeah, that was worth it. She had to start somewhere.
Taaquito manifested their soul and surrounded himself in it. He’d always been better at manipulating it than Lup—she’d had a hell of a time even getting to be consciously aware of it, she was too used to it—but Lup had concentrated on wrapping it around him as best she could, a big Taako burrito of soul that could stand between him and the worse consequences of his new deviance.
The wooden circle began to glow, and Taaquito gave her an awkward attempt at a smile as magical energy built up around him. She returned it as sparks came off the edges of their arcana and the wood began lightly smoking, hands on the markings and mind on her brother, feeling some something that hooked deep into him and touching it.
She’d never been able to write down exactly what it felt like, later, touching into Taako’s magical essence. Not for lack of trying. The best she could think of was fishing, really.
She and Taako liked fishing. It was free food, it was calming, no one yelled at you for not working hard enough, it was fantastic. One time they’d been in a fishing village and one of the fishmongers offered them a fair price for any salmon they’d managed to catch in the river nearby, and they’d spent most of their time there for almost a month.
Lup had caught this huge fish one day. It was a largemouth bass, not in season and too grizzled-looking to sell for much, but she clearly hadn’t been the first to catch it.
The thing had three separate fishing hooks stuck in its mouth and some bit of metal stuck in its side that’d been there so long scales were growing over it. The hooks pierced right through the thin skin around its fish lip area and one of them left scars where the barbs were. Another had really gotten into the meat of the thing and Lup hadn’t been able to find most of it. The fish had thrashed so hard when she’d tried to ease it out that she’d dropped it back into the river, and Taako had shrugged and told her better luck next time.
That was kind of what Taako felt like, on a metaphysical level.
It wasn’t exactly a quick metaphor. Lup had written it down in one of her reference notebooks just in case she ever needed it, but she’d gotten distracted trying to detail the exact feeling of Taako’s tangible metaphysical rulebook where it stabbed him through the core and wound up with three pages of incomprehensible nonsense and a stress migraine. And whenever she asked Taako about it, he’d shrug and say he couldn’t feel it the same way she did. He had no idea that he lived with impalement, because he thought it was a part of him.
That night, this night, her proudest choice, had led her to decades of research. She gasped as her younger self had upon knowing, for the first time, what Taako lived with. How many bolts and bindings were screwed into him so deeply he couldn’t even feel the wound anymore. And she felt, for a moment, the horror, the confusion.
She’ looked on the glowing life-but-not-life and its glittering mutilation, the shifting that she’d thought at the time might be breath, the placid nervousness, the passive fear from her heart as she saw him for the first time as the monster people said he was.
She’d stared at the delicate threads and strict bars wrapped around and pierced through her brother.
This can’t be my brother, she’d thought. This thing can’t be…
And her hands had clenched into fists, and her jaw had tightened all on its own until it ached. Her magic rose with her fury and flooded the circle, searing veins of power into the air and snapping wildly around Taako, lightning whips of pure energy that she could recognize now as a bond flaring up.
Taako had remained in the circle, eyes closed, concentrating on not fighting her. Waiting for her to do what she would to him because he couldn’t do anything else, because of those fucking rules made by some evil fuck who would never know her brother.
The memory saturated in glowing-white light as her magic overwhelmed them and the ritual it was supposed to power. She’d overshot the circle entirely and left a protective buffer around her brother by sheer force of will. Ever since that night, she’d gotten something of a tingle when Taako was trying to pull some shit that would hurt him, but the real proudest moment was yet to come.
The memory faded back in as her past self woke up in the clearing, ash still falling like snow to cover everything in fine powder (“What the fuck,” she heard Barry say). The younger Taako groaned.
“That fucking hurt,” he whined, and they’d both stared at each other for a moment, startled.
“What?” she asked, and Taako just stared. “Did you just…?”
“I—I’m sorry, I—I—I—” Taako said, but she’d already dashed through the soot, barely bothering to get to her feet as she jostled his shoulders and brushed ash out of (into) his hair.
“Taako, that’s fantastic! That’s great! You just complained!” she brought the memory in for a hug and he stood stiffly.
“I, I. I guess I…did?” he asked, dazed. “That’s a good thing?”
“Absolutely,” Lup gushed. She’d treated him to a stolen cookie the next day, she remembered. It had had frosting on it and it’d been the most decadent thing either of them had seen in their lives, at least in-world. Taako had hesitantly insisted on sharing and she’d been too thrilled to bother protesting.
“I guess I did what you wanted,” Taako said. “That felt…kinda…I mean, uh, feelings, hah, what? I, um. That.”
He leaned hard into the hug in his Taako way, putting all his weight on her to reciprocate when he wasn’t sure entirely what to do with his arms.
“Thanks, Lup,” he said. It sounded like he’d wanted to say something else, but he didn’t. He just did his very best to fuse into her ribcage.
Lup stumbled forward as the memory faded away.
“And I haven’t stopped complaining since,” the real, actual Taako said wryly. “What a beautiful memory.”
Barry shook his head. “I give up. I give up, you two. I’m throwing in the hat.”
Lup grinned or bared her teeth. She had had a long day, okay, she wasn’t gonna deal with his ‘your scientific ethics are questionable at best’ shit. “Can’t stand the heat, get out the kitchen.”
He took a breath to speak, exasperated, but Taako nudged him.
“Hey,” she heard him say, softly. “She set me free, my dude. She let me go.”
“No, no! It’s not—I mean yeah, that’s definitely a thing that I have to work through later, but—you just vaporized a forest. You put Mordenkainen’s Circle on transmuted wood in fucking whitewash,” he groaned. “You didn’t even get it right. That’s thousands of years of obsessive study that you just decided to tweak, at fucking, however old you are there. And then you just—Lucretia. Tell me you also think they’re insane.”
Lucretia nodded solemnly. “I gave up on them when we realized they hadn’t seen Fantasy The Matrix.”
“What? That has—Lucretia,” Barry complained. “I’m talking about their magical bullshit. You know you’re breaking all the rules, right? Like, all of them. How were you using bonds as an intentional power source at that age? You vaporized a forest. Neither of you should have made it to adulthood.”
“That’s what they always said about me, too,” Magnus commiserated, thumping Taako on the back. Taako pitched dramatically to the ground, wheezing.
“Hey, fucko, you killed my brother,” Lup said, nudging him with her foot. “Does this mean I get those gloves?”
“Fuck off,” Taako groaned. “My dying wish is for you to bury me with them. You can’t ignore my dying wish.”
“Can’t she?” Magnus asked. Davenport was rolling his eyes. “I’ve seen those gloves. I think your dying wish is for me to have them.”
“Obviously, they go to Merle,” Davenport said. “As a weregild. I seem to remember an aloe—”
He was cut off when the ground under him formed a large hand and pounced, and he was forced to roll out of the way.
“No one speaks of the aloe vera!” Taako exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “Nope! Not happening! No one! Nope!”
“Wait, what’s this about my aloe vera?” Merle asked, just now beginning to pay attention. “Oh, shit, the memory’s over. Good times.”
“Don’t even bother, old man,” Taako said, swinging around Magnus to hide from retaliation. “Don’t worry about it!”
If you’re quite finished, their hosts said. You still have one memory more, elf.
Taako dropped from Magnus’s shoulders and the crew herded closer to her. She held out a hand for Taako and one for Barry, and Magnus hovered at her back.
She squared her shoulders. Biggest regret.
Well, fuck that. She had her family with her and her brother was freer than he’d ever been. There was nothing she couldn’t face.
“Let’s go,” she said, and faced her demons.