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When they’re kids, they don’t let go of each other’s hands.
It’d be stupid and dangerous, mostly, for one twelve-year-old elf who looks even younger to wander off alone into the belly of a city. It’s still stupid and dangerous when two of them do it.
But hey, it’s at least harder for two people to be swept away than just one. So Lup and Taako keep their hands interlocked, no matter how hot the day gets, sweat gluing them together as they navigate through the slums and markets of cities all over the continent.
The places the twins find themselves all have wildly different cultures, sure; from one place to the next everything can change from the dialect to the architecture to how you need to act to avoid getting stabbed.
On the other hand, there’s a standard core experience. Too-crowded spaces full of ramshackle buildings and merchants’ carts, enough wood that a candle-sized flame could take the whole place out in minutes, and the general sense that all the wonderful, futuristic combinations of science and magic have barely made a dent in these people’s lives. Most of the time it’s easy to see magitech skyscrapers towering over the cities, if you bother to look up.
Taako and Lup usually do.
Their system works like this: Lup scans the crowds ahead, finds the thinnest path through, and then leads the charge. It’s safest if it looks like they have a goal in mind, because that would mean there’s someone waiting for them at the other end of the trip.
People-watching falls to Taako; he surreptitiously but constantly glances back and around, making sure no one seems too interested in them and hasn’t been following too closely behind. At the first whiff of trouble he’ll squeeze Lup’s hand - once means go faster, twice means it’s time to slip out of sight, three times means they need to bolt, like, yesterday.
When it comes to caravans, their tactics are even more strict than that.
It’s best to present themselves as a united front right from the start. There is no “Lup is better at” or “Taako likes to.” Start talking like that and people will start trying to split up their tasks, as if Lup could be fine with Taako being sent into town to haggle while she unloads cargo, as if Taako is cool with Lup lighting up the campfires while he’s in a wagon getting a start on dinner. If they go down that path things can go bad fast - fast enough that they learn the lesson almost instantly, after just a couple of fuckups.
After that they’re a package deal, everything offered and done in pairs. We’re good at cooking, we can manage a fire, we can haggle a good deal. They know they’ve done a good job with a caravan when their names start to fall by the wayside; if only calls of “you two” or “the twins” follow after them, it feels like they’ve pulled something off.
The problem is that Lup and Taako aren’t actually the same person. When they watch a sorcerer send a fireball flying, the wild-eyed look of delight in Lup’s eyes can’t be found in Taako’s. The first time they give up on just watching wizards and try casting their first spell, changing the taste of their shitty grass soup, they’re both breathlessly giggling, delighted and amazed. But it’s only Taako who feels like power is finally tingling in his veins, like if he works a little harder at this then he can turn the world into anything he wants it to be.
Problem is, learning real magic takes bullshit like “resources” or “an education.”
The basics come easy; Taako and Lup decide that any old idiot could trip face-first into getting a handle on a handful of cantrips, it’s just that there’s a lot of stone-cold dumbasses in the world.
But there’s a rich tapestry of energy flowing behind every spell, intricate threads that dissolve or snap the instant they’re grabbed at by, for example, a clumsy child’s hands.
One time, a real wizard traveling with the same caravan catches them nestled in the woods behind camp. Taako is trying to manage Blink while Lup stands a few feet away, providing motivation in the form of a slow stream of tiny motes of fire that he’s not allowed to dodge. Every few minutes Taako will get fed up enough with the whole thing to send a bigger fireball right back.
The wizard finds them, both grumpy and gently smoking, and she laughs. “Ah, apologies, I only - it feels as if someone is attempting to break down the barrier between our world and the Ethereal Plane by ramming into it with their skull. Could that have been you?”
In unison, they tell her to fuck off. She laughs again. “I’m only saying, it’s - hm. What are you are doing wrong-” The wizard seems to be distracted by her own thoughts, and neither twin bothers to interrupt her.
“Grasping the bonds that connect everything, every solitary aspect of our world, and tugging on them, that is how we perform magic, yes?” The twins nod as if this isn’t entirely new information. “Right now it is as if you are attempting a song on the violin, a difficult one, by knocking on its wood. Before the song can be performed, you’ve got to understand how the instrument is played. Perhaps I could provide some instruction?”
Taako, suspicious but not disinterested, opens his mouth to say something cutting, but Lup leaps ahead of him with enthusiastic agreement. The wizard smiles and suggests an easier spell, something about spellcasting levels and starting at the first one. “After all, there is plenty of time for practice; the two of you do not seem terribly aged. Tell me, what are your ages? It will help me to gauge your raw power.”
Lup exaggerates, but not by enough. The wizard whistles long and low.
“You are elves. The two of you are by yourselves?” Lup frowns and opens her mouth to argue with the implication, except Taako is already disappearing up into the branches of the nearest tree. This isn’t a fight Lup wants to try on her own, so she follows.
They avoid the wizard for the rest of the trip.
But. The part about understanding their instrument, about studying their world’s Bonds, it isn’t bad advice.
Libraries turn out to be a pretty safe place for them to spend their time, the only trick is getting through the front door.
There’s a technique to making yourself look charmingly scruffy. Usually it involves a bath, some floppy clothes, dirt strategically smeared on the nose and cheeks but definitely not the fingers.
Hello mister librarian, Lup says, that book you’re reading looks terribly interesting. Taako chimes in with, If you have the time, could you please tell us about it?
Boom, instant access to rich people books.
And if not then, well. The only problem is getting in the front door; libraries’ back doors don’t tend to have high quality security.
It’s easy to learn to nestle into the stacks, little towers of books and pyramids of scrolls forming a wall between them and the outside world. They huddle together, trying to chip some meaning out of lengthy, ponderous tomes or unhelpfully laconic summaries of the theory behind a particular school of magic.
First they choose books and topics indiscriminately, desperately trying to find any foothold in the rush of information around them, but it isn’t long before their attentions are caught and held.
Lup gravitates straight towards the Evocation section, every time. Taako thinks, setting stuff on fire, big deal, but there’s a pretty easy Transmutation spell that lets you run away faster, talk about every day applications. Half of each visit is usually spent fighting about which section more urgently needs investigation.
Splitting up could be an option, and it’s dumb, but like. The Evocation and Transmutation sections are usually pretty far away from each other. Sometimes they’re even in different rooms, or on different floors?
The first time they try that, Lup climbs to the library’s second floor and Taako tucks down into the basement. It only takes a couple of hours for things to break bad; someone who’s actually supposed to be in the building wanders near the transmutation section, and on instinct Taako tries to dodge out of sight. Instead he backs up into a precarious stack of books. Lup hears shouting and guns it down the stairs, but once she’s there panics and sets something on fire, and long story short they have to run for the next town on foot, hands clenched together even if it slows them down.
University does a better job of trying to split them up than life on the road ever did.
Please state your name (Taako, why the hell did put our last name as Taaco-?), age (Hey Lulu, what'd they say the minimum age for elves was? 'Cause I'm just putting that), and preferred school of magic (sh'yeah, more like pick which rat cage they keep you in).
The last point, maybe unsurprisingly, does its damnedest to prevent them from seeing each other. The University's Colleges for Evocation and Transmutation are in different buildings in different parts of the city, with separate class times and dorms to boot. They might as well not even have applied to the same school.
Whatever, it's cheaper to rent a shitty apartment at the halfway point anyway, and they feel more at home in a place where the buildings are wooden and the roads are properly cobblestone or dirt. More and more these days, the nice parts of town are all metal, glass, and the color white, like they’re trying too hard to look like something out of a magi-science fiction scroll.
It's weird and uncomfortable that they've been in town long enough to notice the change.
Still, what sucks is how much time they have to spend apart. There's a handful of remedial classes together, stuff like math and writing and archaic elvish, but their schedules rarely manage to collide.
Evocation classes are scheduled by a cheery madwoman who insists that it's best to learn and practice as near as possible to the rising of the sun. The Transmutation College's class times seems to have been planned by drunkenly throwing darts at an hourly calendar that has ripped away any time before one pm.
Lup works the night shift at one restaurant, Taako works mornings at some fancy brunch place, and they’re both sure to at least grab a meal together. It’s possible to go two or three days without seeing each other, but it’s not allowed.
For old times’ sake, sometimes they’ll find a promising rooftop to watch airships from, like they did when they were kids. Maybe they’ll toss harmless spells at the lower-flying ones just to watch how they rebalance in the air.
Also like when they were kids, that’s usually enough troublemaking to warrant a daring escape into the slums.
College sucks, and sitting down to properly study is awful when it’s not their idea, and they’re sort of exhausted all the time, but things actually go pretty well right up until Lup mentions a study abroad program.
Just her, studying abroad.
Six months on a different continent, some place they’ve never seen, to do research on “the intersection of dynamic energy storage and sustained evocation output to create a more efficient propulsion engine.”
They’ve been at this goddamn university for eight years, and Lup wants to bounce the second someone offers to put her name under a research title so long it should rightfully be a run on sentence.
What the fuck.
Lup uses phrases that their professors and advisors throw around all the time, stuff like “a great opportunity” and “we’ve got so much potential.” She’s saving up for a couple of stones of farspeech, something she says the research stipend will help with, and it’s not like they see each other all that much these days anyway. Hell, they might actually get to talk to more this way-
Taako does not care, because none of that does anything for the panic itching under his skin. What if something happens? What if she gets hurt, or stuck? And like, sure, he knows a lot of people and works on a lot of things, but what is he supposed to do?
The fight drags from the minute Lup breaks the news, nervous but intrepid, right up until she walks out the door with everything she’ll need crammed into two bags.
Gods, and most of her things are still in the apartment, they’ve got so much stuff these days.
Forget finding a new roommate, Taako gets a second job to make rent and spends the rest of his life in classrooms, libraries, and labs. Lup calls at the same time every day. Every once in a while he’ll just let it ring because fuck, fine, if she wants to be apart then they better have at it.
One evening Taako actually, for realsies misses her call and unthinkingly hits redial. A few rings later Lup picks up, says “Taako? Hon, I thought you weren’t gunna-” in a watery voice, and then sobs.
Oh gods, aw fuck.
“What, Lup, no, I was just outside and I didn’t hear- shit.” He deserves this.
“It’s just,” she swallows so loud he can hear her on the other end, then gets her voice back under control. “I went grocery shopping today, yeah? And every food here is different; I can’t even get eggs that taste right. It’s pretty dumb of me, there’s not enough time to cook like a normal person anyway, and frankly it’s easier to find vegetables pickled than fresh, can you believe-“
“Hey Lup?”
“Hmm?”
“I miss you too, dingus.” They laugh in tandem, neither voices quite on kilter. “Lulu, are you homesick? Is that even possible?”
“Right?” Lup demands. “What the hell!”
Over the months it gets easier, so that when Lup gets home Taako doesn’t feel like yelling at her even a little, except for the awful scarf she’s got wrapped around her waist.
He does take the time to point out what a good, considerate, and loving brother he’s grown into in her absence.
“I’ve been doing all this growing as a person stuff, Lu’,” Taako points out from where he’s draped himself across her lap. “Maybe you should bounce more often so I can reach my full potential.”
“Taako, you haven’t left me alone for more than five minutes in the last three days.”
But Lup’s trip abroad wasn’t just for kicks - important people know who she is now, and that comes with big-girl amounts of funding. “Normal life” amounts of funding.
Her new notoriety must do something for the twins’ collective reputation, because Taako isn’t too far behind. Between fewer classes, flexible hours, and a big enough stipend to drop the part time jobs, they make their schedules sync again.
It’s… good. To have that again. It’s really good.
One year later, Taako hops a few cities over for a two month class nicknamed “Polymorphing Bootcamp.” Be able to turn yourself into anyone or anything, guaranteed or your sleep schedule back.
Sometimes Lup has to travel to present her research at a conference, but brings Taako with her.
Once, Taako takes an offer to teach a few classes at a sister university while Lup stays behind.
They flex, back and forth, together when they can be but learning to live apart.
When Lup announces over dinner that she’s got a real, permanent job offer doing cutting-edge research, they’re nearly the age they’d put down on their university application. Taako braces his fingers against each other and prepares to not be a terrible brother.
“But I told him that I’m not taking it unless you get hired too,” she says, sliding a flyer for the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration across the table.
“Davenport actually seemed pretty psyched about that, something about bonds being important? You’ve still gotta interview, and it’s just if you want to, but.” She laughs. “We’ll finally be working on the same project, yeah?”
Taako hasn’t cried since he was thirty-eight, but somehow this is enough to break the streak.
Each time a mysterious light ravels them back onto the bridge of the Starblaster, Taako and Lup are linked by three fingers.
It takes decades for their first seconds of re-existing to no longer be consumed by flashbacks to that moment of awed horror, the last one in their home plane. They hadn’t been sure if it was time to fall back and protect each other or go, they don’t know, arm the nonexistent canons. Start blasting at the thing that’d eaten the sky, the whole world.
For the first few moments of existing, they always take a few moments to properly hold hands, or, after a bad cycle, hug like nobody else is in the room.
It becomes a rhythm: reform, squeeze, move forward. Invariably this is the starting point, however the team splits up later.
(Their starting point is, it slowly sinks in, all six of these people.)
And splitting up into different teams does happen. Being flexible, able to work well together but also apart, was literally in the job description.
A lot of worlds are dangerous enough that nobody’s allowed to wander off on their own. For the first time, Taako finds himself playing lookout for someone who’s not his mirror image. Lup learns what it means to carve a path through the seediest parts of a city for someone whose every move she can’t predict.
Barry Bluejeans stares at Taako’s sister like she personally invented the moon; at least he’s got good taste. Lup gravitates towards Barry in research, on missions, in precious downtime when she’s free to rag on whoever she wants.
Taako can’t even find it in himself to be offended. He wouldn’t be losing anyone to anybody because, weirdly e-godsdamn-nough, Barry is already one of his people.
Either they all find each other on the Starblaster, twins linked, Davenport leaning forward in the captain’s chair, Magnus angling himself protectively in front of Barry and Merle, Lucretia tucked into a corner like she’s hoping a cosmic horror will overlook her - either they’ve got that, or it’s the end of existence.
Maybe because they have to be, Taako and Lup find themselves weirdly okay with that.
Lightning courses through the air, then up Taako’s arm as his hand closes on this mystery handle. The electricity’s buzzing through every nerve ending he’s got, but it’s worth it because honestly, this dramatic shit? Peak Taako Taaco, a very good look.
The thing glues itself into his grip with an invisible gravity and, to be honest, probably the electricity is making his muscles seize up a little so his fist can’t loosen. Gravity, or maybe static cling, what with how it rolls back against his side if he sets it down too far away, how anyone else who makes a grab at it is lightly shocked.
Probably there should be something egotistically validating about all that, and it’s true that Taako never puts the thing down when he can help it. Maybe that’s how it looks, like he’s just milking the fact that some magic umbrella likes him best.
Validating is the wrong word, but Taako’s not sure of the right one.
It’s like, look. He’s out here on his own, team Taako from TV, and usually that’s chill. The trick is to finagle everything he needs out of other people, money and backup and attention, then bounce before they can get tired of that arrangement.
Also before he can manage to murder them, but hey. If you take it as a ratio of people he’s murdered to people he's met, then good ol’ Taako’s not doing too bad, and ain’t nobody can argue with math. Especially not Taako, who never learned it in the first place.
The point is, once this whole Relic thing wraps up and the BoB calls it a day Taako’s gunna have to hit the road again, but this stupid umbrella is coming with him. And if on the way he’s gotta leave it behind every once in a while, then a magic artifact is still out there that likes him best, and it’ll probably be pissed if he doesn’t roll back around again.
Until then he’s got two disastrously dumb chucklefucks who desperately need the help of a highly effective elf to get through the day, and a bizarro but steady job, and if he decided to go Gone Girl there’s basically a whole moon of people who’d be such big babies about it that they’d go looking for him and drag him back.
He doesn’t have to be, but Taako’s weirdly okay with that.
“You actually,” his sister says, batting another peanut out of the air, “signed up for a job advertised as ‘the last you’ll ever need to take’?”
“Hey, it seemed like a great idea at the time,” Taako defends, almost sending a third peanut her way. Then he thinks better of it and tosses it into his mouth instead.
Which is pretty gross, considering he’s sitting at a desk in his room, pelting her with things that he’s scrounged up from its drawers while he packs.
Lup raises a wry eyebrow, so he sends a coin flying her way. She tries to dodge, but she’s not quite fast enough and it nails her in the ear. “Hon, you’ve gotta stop that or I swear I will set something in here on fire.”
“Nuh-uh. You wanna stay in my fancy moonbase room, you gotta respect the rules.”
“And the rules are what, death by a thousand blows? ’Cause I’m already dead, Koko.”
“No, dingus, the rules are,” he begins to punctuate each word with a projectile, “eye-hand coordination training. Gotta get those motor skills back up and running if you’re gunna be dragging horrific undead monsters back into the underworld.”
“Hey now.”
“No offense intended? Like, at most, a very small amount of offense intended. Negligible, really.”
Lup snorts. “Then none taken, dingus.” She surveys the room, taking in how every cranny is filled with souvenirs and tokens from all over Faerun. Enough stuff that it had been hard to walk around even before the cardboard boxes were dragged inside. The junk he’s tossed into her lap alone has probably come from half a dozen different cities, and he’s kept all of it. “You really settled in here, huh?”
“Eh, you know how it is. Give a guy a bag of holding and a year to stash away as much shit as he wants…”
“Hah, yeah, you’re telling me.” Lup grins as she brushes the layer of pens and scarves and unwrapped snacks off of her, then rolls off the bed. Instead she stares dubiously at the piles of stuff on the desk, scopes out a relatively flat spot, and plants her butt there. “Remember our first apartment? I'm legit pretty sure the neighbors almost had us evicted before we figured out we could throw stuff away.”
A few seconds pass as Taako stares into dead air before he hits on the right memory, and a couple more go by as it sinks in before he clicks back into motion. “Holy shit, yeah. I think I finally figured out Levitate just so I wouldn’t have to carry out that broken fantasy refrigerator?”
“Oh, definitely. The first time I left for a little while I didn’t even know where to start on what to bring, honestly I think I may’ve just picked two random bags and hauled ass.”
“I’d argue because you spent so long packing? But honestly, it’s not like I helped you with that even a little bit, what do I know.” Taako’s gone distant again, pensive instead of lost this time, so Lup stays quiet to let him think.
“Hey, Lup?” he says eventually.
“Yeah?”
“I never actually apologized for that, I don’t think.” Gracious sister that she is, Lup doesn’t point out that he’s probably never apologized for anything in his life. “But also… you were right, back then, we never did say it enough.”
“Uh, sure, say what?”
Taako runs a hand through his hair, wrecking an already mussed-up braid. “Thank you?” He looks unsure of himself, like it’s the wrong thing to say.
It’s no apology, but she can probably handle this instead.
Two of her fingers grab his pinky. They squeeze in unison, then let go.
Lup tosses a couple of large potions into the nearest box, and the room looks a little emptier. A little more ready for the next thing. “You’re welcome.”