Chapter Text
Lucretia found her own apartment in the city, only a few minutes walk from the others, but in a very different neighborhood. It was a tiny space with a tiny window that overlooked the massive stone university library. The building was crammed full of students; she’d lived a whole other lifetime, but she still looked like she could be one of them.
It was much smaller, and it would cost her a little more, but for the first time in thirty years, she would be living alone. She left the crates of journals and curios on the Starblaster, bringing just a duffel bag of clothes, her pens and pencils, and a few sundries.
The apartment came with a bed that folded out of the wall and some battered pans and dishes. Magnus went with her to shop for a desk and a chair.
“You know you could stay with us,” he said.
“I know. But I wanted to be close to the university to work.”
He ran his hand over a smooth dark desktop, tapping his fingers.
“What are you planning to work on?”
“Barry and I have talked about combining my narratives with his research, so we’ll probably work on that. And it’s a university. They have a real library. I could spend a whole year on just a single floor!” Her face glowed with excitement. “I might sit in on some classes. The pedagogy sounds very innovative.”
He looked away, spinning a chair on a sort of axle.
“That sounds….”
“I know, probably terribly nerdy.”
“No, it sounds perfect.” He picked up the chair, whose seat was now absurdly too high, and fiddled with the mechanism under the seat for a moment before setting it down again.
“What about you?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know yet, really. We already know where the Light is, and I guess Merle has that under control. You know, it’s pretty civilized here? And after that broth we had with the abbess, Taako just keeps going about the food. Really only Lup even gets what he’s talking about.”
She patted his arm. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”
He smiled the broad grin she’d come to love so much.
“I think I found just the desk,” he said, pointing across the room. “It looks sturdy, but I think the whole thing folds together! You could take it with.”
He lifted it up for her so she could examine the hinges and pins that held it together.
“This is great, thank you Mags. I think I’ll get a lot of use out of this. Let’s find a simple little chair to go with it.”
Years later, she would unfold her simple writing desk into the room with the big map and the tank. It wasn’t the desk that everyone thought of as the Director’s desk. It was for her secret work, and it seemed only fitting that it had traveled so far, and that he had been the one who found it for her.