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“How are you not afraid?” Taako asks. His hands are covered in the blood from fruitlessly pushing against the wound in Magnus’s side.
Magnus shrugs as best he can. “It’s gonna reset,” he says. “Sucks now, but I’ll be back next week, you know?” He’s an old hand at this; he’s died eight times already.
Taako just looks at him. The light from the fire beside them plays on his face. He looks younger than usual. Taako, eighty-five years Magnus’s senior, has died only twice. “You don’t worry?” he asks. “What if this is the time the Starblaster doesn’t get away? There’s no guarantee we’ll escape.”
“Sure,” Magnus says. “But if it’s going to happen, no point in worrying, you know?”
Taako does not know, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Besides,” Magnus says, reaching his uninjured hand out and putting it warmly on top of Taako’s, “I trust you guys.”
Taako wonders if he’s doing this whole trusting thing wrong. He’s closer to the IPRE crew than he’s ever been to anyone except his sister, but trust is different from belief in success. He would explain it to Magnus, except he’s unconscious now.
They have the same conversation, seventy years later. Taako’s mind is duller than it had been, and his tongue sharper, and Magnus is irreversibly older, shoulders weighed down by ten years in a way they weren’t by a hundred.
“How are you not afraid?” Taako asks after Refuge. It’s late enough and he’s drunk enough that some of the careless facade he puts on has crumbled.
“Death ain’t shit,” Magnus says. “I’ll die, I don’t care.” Magnus is drunk also.
“Oh, shit,” Taako says. “Is that, uh, is that good?”
“Dunno,” Magnus says. Taako doesn’t know either.
“Are you afraid?” Taako asks. He has crawled, uninvited but not unwanted, into the bed Magnus has been unable to get out of. It’s coming, he knows, and Taako knows too; he has been unofficially in charge of organizing people to get here. Carey is in the guest house already, and Merle has a room at an inn in town. More people are arriving tomorrow. Taako offered to ask his husband which day it would be, so they would have better time to plan, but Magnus declined. He’s okay doing this traditionally.
“No,” Magnus says. He turns his head to get a better look at Taako. Physically, he’s almost untouched by the sixty-odd years that have passed since they arrived here, save for a tiny crinkle around his eyes when he smiles. Not that Magnus would ever point it out.
“Really?” Taako asks. “How?”
Magnus smiles at him. Taako’s never understood; he clings to life desperately because it’s in his blood and bones, because if it hadn’t been he wouldn’t have survived childhood.
“Guess I just know I’ll be in good hands,” he says.
“Maybe we should write ‘fragile, handle with care’ on your forehead, just in case,” Taako says, and Magnus shoves at him a little and Taako laughs.