Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They cut it too close this time.

The Hunger has been getting faster and faster lately… First a few days early, a week, a month, and they’re running out of time to think something up.

Caught off guard, they scrambled to get to the Starblaster in time, with Magnus going down along the way, along with Barry’s corporeal form. Speaking of which…

He’ll be damned if he’s going to let any more of his family get hurt this year.

They’ll be back in a few minutes. The rational side of his brain argues. It’s not like it matters.

He hates how cold that sounds, and he hates that part of him agrees. So he keeps pushing, and it hurts like hell, but he thinks about Merle and Davenport and Lucretia and Taako and… Lup. Lup who’s at his side now, fighting with him for their friends and for a cause that has no consequences, because It’ll all be back to normal next year.

He pushes the thoughts away, muttering incantation after incantation under his breath with a fire and rage that hasn’t been there in a long time, casting spell after spell after spell and ripping the shadows apart piece by piece.

He feels the pain in his chest first, a thrumming that he tries to silence, almost like a crying for help, for Barry to stop just for a moment so it can catch up.

Then it burns through him, like cracks through shattering glass, breaking him to shreds over and over and over again.

He’s crackling with bright red electricity, his robed form blurring around the edges and twitching with glitches everywhere like it’s struggling to hold itself together. And his vision is blurred too - not like without his glasses - the scene around him getting more and more faded by the second until he’s almost firing blind, throwing out every spell in his arsenal at the consuming darkness in front of them.

Lup is yelling now, but his hearing is muffled too, and he can’t make out what she’s saying. He drowns it out with mumbling more spells, louder now, since he can’t even hear himself think anymore.

And then he’s back on the deck of the Starblaster, in the same place he starts every year, arriving on some new plane he can’t pay attention to right now.

Because he instantly collapses.

His knees give out beneath him, leaving him shuddering and kneeling on the floor. He’s drained and he’s shaking, even if he knows his physical body is fine. It should be, anyway.

But his very consciousness feels so fragile, with that same ache in his chest from last year. Because unlike most magic users, liches have souls made of pure, unfiltered magic. They don’t draw their power from a deity or the Plane of Magic, or any other exterior source… it’s all them. He’s cracked at his core, and he’s not quite sure how to fix it. He’s not sure he can.

Barry gave too much of himself away, and now he’s not sure what he has left.

Chapter Text

Lup’s the first one to get to him when the dust settles.

She crouches in front of him, looking him over a couple billion times and mumbling under her breath. (Or maybe he just can’t hear her that well. He can’t tell.)

He feels her arms around him, a couple times he hears his name among the fog of words he can’t really make out, and then he hears Magnus and Lucretia and too many people come to check on the two of them. Suddenly it’s too loud and there’s too much noise and he can’t breathe, there’s too much happening and there’s too many of them and it’s all too much and he can’t handle it anymore.

Things clear up after an amount of time that he can’t even fathom, after what feels like an eternity in that strange limbo between control and the severe lack of it.

“Hey, hey, Barry, please. I need you to breathe with me, okay? It’s alright, you’re alright.”

He knows she’s lying. She knows just as much as he does that he’s breaking from the inside-out, but he appreciates the gesture.

He doesn’t understand how the tears got on his cheeks, or why his chest feels so tight, or when the rest of them left to probably try not to worry, but right now he can’t bother and leans against Lup because he’s too exhausted to care.

He lets his eyes close, and before he know it he’s passed out in her arms on the deck of the ship they’ve been on for far too long.

Barry has a lot to wake up to.

When his eyes blink open, one of the first things he notices is that he’s definitely not where he started. He’s in the common room now, probably, and he can feel one of the fuzzy blankets Lup picked up about three decades ago draped over him because she knows he likes it.

One of the second things he notices is Merle (who he can only hope hasn’t been burning spell slots on a lost cause) sitting in one of the armchairs a bit across the room, flipping through a book he can’t read the cover of. Where the fuck are his glasses?

“I can’t see jack.” He says oh-so-eloquently.

Merle perks up from his book at the sound of his voice, a smile that isn’t as genuine as he’d like flashing onto his face. “Rise and shine, Barold! Feelin any better?”

“I’m alright,” Barry says, wincing at the sharp pain in his chest that’s getting far too familiar for his liking as he manages to sit up. “Aside from y’know.. feeling like I got hit by a double-decker bus.”

“Whoa, whoa, take it easy, okay?” Merle sighs, marking his place in the book and closing it. Barry gets the feeling he wasn’t really paying much attention to it in the first place. “After what happened last cycle, I’d imagine you’re not doin’ too hot just yet.”

“She told you all then, huh?”

“Did you expect her not to?”

It’s a fair point, and he doesn’t exactly blame them for wanting an explanation.

“Anyway,” Merle interrupts the uneasy silence that had fallen between the two of them. “Dav wants talk to ya about all this later. Someone’s in trooouuuubleee.”

“Uuuuugh.” Barry groans, throwing his head back in fake-annoyance. “If it’s anything like last time we had a lich crisis then please just slam a rock into my skull.”

“No-can-do, Barry. No death until we know what you actually did to yourself. Captain’s orders.”

“Life. Gross.” He mutters. “By the way, still can’t see jack. Do you have my glasses?”

“Oh, right!” Merle gets to his feet, picking up a pair of squared, thick-rimmed glasses off of the coffee table and handing them to Barry before resuming his previous position curled up in the armchair.

“Thanks.” He smiles, before nearly poking himself in the eye trying to put them on.

“Seriously, though..” Merle’s tone loses a bit of the brightness he’s found familiar, which is alarming to say the least. “You can’t push yourself like that again. Not when-”

“I know, Merle.” Barry isn’t one to interrupt, but he just.. can’t right now. “It was a stupid thing to do, and I know. Please, can we just.. not?”

“Right, okay..” Merle smiles a little too wide, and Barry pretends not to notice the twinge of guilt that hits him afterward. “Right. Sorry, you’re dealing with a lot right now. I shouldn’t have-”

“Merle.” Barry tries to smile, soft and genuine and a little bit sad, hands fidgeting nervously in his lap. “It’s fine. Really.”

Merle nods, and Barry thinks they can work things out from there.

Chapter Text

It doesn’t take long after that for Barry to be up and about again, even if it feels like the longest two weeks of his life.

Sure, there’s still the pain in his chest. Sure, he still isn’t good for much of anything at the moment. But at least he can do something.

Which leads him here, awake at 8AM, (after absolutely, positively, definitely going to sleep in the first place) trying to help his pseudo-brother make pancakes.

Keyword is trying. Barry can probably count on one hand the amount of times he’s made something that doesn’t involve a microwave, much to Taako and Lup’s dismay.

“Hey, can you pass me the sifter?” Taako asks, plopping a bag of flour that’s probably heavier than he is onto the counter with an alarmingly loud thump.

“Uh, yeah, sure.” Barry roots around in the cabinet for a minute or so, eventually finding what he thinks Taako is asking for.

“Barry…” He blinks for a few seconds, staring him down for a few seconds before adding, “Barold, you poor thing.. That’s a cheese grater.”

“Oh.” He stares down at the thing he’s holding for a few seconds and yes, it is indeed a cheese grater.

He puts it back, grabbing what he thinks is the right thing this time, and thank the Gods he picked the right one.

“Okay, now can you get me a mixing bowl? I mean..” Taako glances at him, teasingly raising an eyebrow. “You do know what a bowl is, right?”

“Fuck off.” He says good-naturedly, with an eye roll even if he can’t help but smile. Then he glances at the obnoxiously high cabinet with the bowls in it and thinks that’ll be a decent enough excuse.

He tries and fails to take out his wand without Taako noticing.

“Don’t.” Taako says, voice blunt as ever while a mage hand sweeps the bowl off of the shelf and onto the countertop.

Damn.

If there’s one fucking thing that’s making this year the most miserable at the moment, it’s the magic ban. No using magic, not until he either gets better or they at least know that it won’t get any worse. Great.

“Ugh. I thought you of all people would be cool about this.”

“Nice try, Barold. Grab some sugar, won’t you?” Barry begrudgingly hands him the sugar. “Lup’ll kill me if I let you. Also, this is salt.”

“Fuck.” He grabs the actual sugar this time and sets it on the counter next to Taako. “I’m not usually this bad, I don’t think."

“Well two days without sleep and an unholy amount of caffeine does that to ya, Bluejeans. Ya need to get some beauty rest eventually. Also, milk please.”

“How did you even know that?” He asks, trudging over to the fridge.

“After a few decades, you start to pick up on things like that, Barry.”

“Huh.” Barry hands him the carton of milk, obviously intrigued. “I didn’t think you payed attention.”

“Sure I do.” He measures some of the milk out and adds it to the mixture, handing the carton back to Barry. “Davenport’s tail twitches when he’s angry. Mags bounces his leg when he’s excited. Lucretia’s handwriting gets messier when she’s sad. It’s all in the business, baby.”

Barry tries not to think about it too hard, and they bake for a while longer. Then he starts to wonder what gives him away.