Chapter Text
Taako is eyeing a pair of giant hoop earrings at a market kiosk, fingers itchy, when Lup bounds up to him. Her eyes are shining and she’s holding a large stack of papers in her arms.
“What’s up, Lu?” She raises an eyebrow at him, and she probably would have punched him in the face if not for the papers precariously cradled in her hands.
“I want to go to nerd school.” His hands pull back from where they were surreptitiously worrying the earrings and go to his hips.
“You want to what?” He can see, now, that the stack of papers is a bunch of application documents, on the top of which is a flyer that proudly, in bold red letters exclaims, ‘Become a Red Robe! Apply for I.P.R.E. today!’ along with pictures of an elf, a human, and a dragonborn all clad in red, arms linked, with the circular insignia of the Institute emblazoned on their robes. Ew, they’re all matching, Taako thinks.
She begins leafing through the documents, occasionally thrusting one into his face expecting him to read, all while chattering excitedly.
“Do you think we could find a reference? Page three says we need one… Oh shit no, it says we need two. Well, I’m sure the owner of that dive bar we cooked for would vouch for us if we threw some gold his way. Oh, and if we ace this audition bit, we won’t need to worry about tuition and training fees. It says the rooms are supplied, and spacious, but we both know that’s bullshit, they probably count vertical space in the square footage and expect everyone to be in bunkbeds like snot-nosed brats. Anyway…” And she goes on.
Taako turns away from the jewelry display and faces Lup completely. She stops, mouth open, then closes it. On anyone else it would look sheepish. From the angle of her jaw, though, Taako can tell she’s being more… mule-ish.
“You want to go to school ? You want to apply for a four-year program at a--” He grabs one of the papers near the top and points to a line “--’ prestigious research institute for the arts both arcane and otherwise’. Lup, we’ve spent our entire lives doing magic for money on the road, and we’ve done fine! So fine enough that I might actually pay for these earrings!” He takes them off the display and holds them in her face.
She looks at them, then back at Taako, with her eyebrow still raised. Don’t hold your face like that for too long, it might stick, he thinks. “You know those are fake, right? They only cost a few copper. Your ears’ll be green in a couple hours.”
Taako bristles. “Fine!” He throws the earrings at the display and brushes past his sister back in the direction of the merchant they’ve been travelling with. “You can try this nerd thing, train with some knuckleheads who can’t tell a second-level evocation spell from a cantrip, explore the planarverse, and when you get back,” He looks over his shoulder and sees her, eyes blazing, following him with the application papers still clenched in her arms, “Send a carrier pidgeon my way. I’ll be a famous travelling chef by then, whose risotto won’t burn because someone can’t help but throw some pyrotechnics in the mix.” His fists are shaking as he keeps walking, then slows. Her boots aren’t right behind him, they’ve stopped.
He can see her standing in the road when he looks back again, heart pounding in his chest. She is still furious and she might catch the papers on fire if she’s not careful, but they might be extinguished by the tears he can see forming in her eyes.
“You asshat, can’t you see this? We might get to learn from people who actually know what they’re doing, train with the best, and do dope shit for the world, and this is what you want to keep doing? Smelling mercenary armpits day-in and day-out, who can’t even tell that the risotto is burnt because they don’t know what a fucking risotto is?! This is all you want?! ”
She’s drawing an audience, now. For the first time in as long as he can remember, he wishes she wouldn’t.
Lup walks towards him, then passes him, hitting his shoulder with hers. Even though she didn’t put any fire in it, it burns.
That evening, in the tent (like, yeah, it’s a tent, but they’re made it a comfy-ass tent. They’ve made it their home, or the closest thing they’ll ever get to one!), Taako sees Lup setting out her nicest clothes, the closest thing to ‘business attire’ that either of them own. Clean, pressed tan trousers, her shiniest knee-high boots, a red shirt that is just nice enough to possibly considered a blouse, and a blue blazer Taako didn’t even know she had .
He sighs and looks at his hands, rough, dry, and cracked despite the ridiculous amount of lotion he uses to try to make them soft. Scarred and calloused. The hands of an urchin-turned-travelling-chef. Not the hands of someone deserving of an institute, much less the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration.
Or…
“You’re really gonna do this, aren’t you Lup.” There’s no question in his voice.
“Whether you want me to or not, brother,” she says across the tent. Her voice is almost completely steady, but quavers at the last syllable, just like his resolve.
“You know,” He says, reaching for one of the ten applications she grabbed in her fervor to get one, and then another just in case, then a backup for the backup, “it would be really unfortunate if we wasted all this paper.” He finally looks up at her across the tent, where she’s shining her boots for the third time that night. “I might as well fill one out, too.”
Her face breaks into a sly grin at the toes of her boots. “Nah, I don’t think they could handle the both of us there. The atmosphere can only probably hold the cool factor of one Tacco twin at a time.”
“Good thing I’m getting in and not you, goofus.” He grabs the quill on the table between them and begins scratching in his sparse personal information, the perfect mirror of Lup’s.
“Oh, you spend the whole day coming up with that sick burn, dingus? I’m honored!” She throws one of the roughly twenty pillows they keep all over at his head. He pretends not to see the tear on her cheek, but the pillow smacks his writing hand and the quill scritches across the whole page.
“Damn it, hand me another one!” He says and lobs it at her, where she incinerates it midair, easier than breathing. Her howling laughter fills the tent with warmth and they toss the leftover papers in the air just to watch them burn.