Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“This war has been going on too damn long,” Magnus growled, pulling the bandage taut around the wounded leg of the soldier he was treating. The soldier gritted his teeth and screwed his eyes shut.

Magnus didn’t bother to apologize for the pain; it was necessary if he wanted the wound to heal.

“Magnus, get your sorry ass over here; as much as it pains me to say so, you’re needed here!”

Mallory Keen’s voice didn’t so much as float through the large, spacious room, so much as reverberated through it. Magnus jumped and cursed, tripping over the supplies at his feet.

“All you can really do now is rest,” he told the soldier he’d been treating. The soldier nodded sullenly, but there was a hint of relief in his eyes.

Magnus crossed to the large bronze doors and shoved through them, peering into the dimly-lit foyer. It was unusual for solitary soldiers to seek shelter at their home. More often it was the remains of a regiment just returning from a battle.

There was Mallory Keen helping two injured soldiers through the doorway, her bright red hair tied up so it wasn’t in her face - at least, that’s what Magnus figured it was supposed to do. Except her knot was halfway ready to fall back into its usual messy loose curls.

The soldiers that Mallory was helping through were both limping, though one was obviously trying to hide his pain with a cocky grin.

One of them was dark-skinned and tall, wearing a tattered Union jacket. Thick, sticky rivulets of blood dripped onto the carpet from a deep gash in his thigh. Blood also dribbled down his temple.

The second soldier was the one with the bold smile. He had disheveled dark hair and the sharp and beautiful facial features of someone who was dangerously sly and accustomed to trouble. A makeshift cloth bandage covered his left eye, though blood was already seeping through it.

“Well, don’t just stand there gaping, help out!” Mallory cried, gesturing at the bag laden with supplies at Magnus’s feet.

Snapped out of his reverie, Magnus relieved Mallory of one of the soldiers’ weight - the one with the cocky grin.

“Is it a bullet wound?” Magnus asked, searching for the source of all the blood covering his clothes and face.

“Among other things,” the soldier said, much too lightly to be normal. Magnus could tell his smile was becoming difficult to hold through the pain.

Together, with one arm slung around Magnus’s shoulders to support half his weight, they limped into the large room full of wounded soldiers. He set him down on the nearest empty cot and set to work looking for bandages and supplies. Meanwhile, his patient unbuttoned his shirt and peeled it off, wincing slightly as he did so.

He dumped a clean cloth into a bucket of water and began wiping off the dirt, dust, and grime from the soldier’s face. He pried off the bloody scrap of cloth that had been plastered to his left eye.

Magnus barely flinched at the swollen cuts and bruises all across his patient’s eye, which was sealed shut and looked infected.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Bullet grazed it,” the soldier said simply.

“It did more than graze,” Magnus scoffed, dabbing at the wound. “It looks like you just barely escaped getting shot in the eye. You have a deep cut in your arm as well, not to mention another near-bullet wound in your side. You’ve lost a lot of blood. How are you still conscious, let alone able to smirk like you’ve just single-handedly won us the war?”

“Ah, but before I received all these wounds - warm gifts from the enemy - I was able to tear down about ten soldiers in just a couple blows,” the soldier said smugly.

Magnus raised an eyebrow. “I am going to have to ask you about that feat later.”

“Of course you will.”

“But for now -” Magnus rummaged through his supplies, coming up with fresh strips of dressing and bandaging the soldier’s head quickly and efficiently, since he’d finished cleaning the wound. “- there’s not much I can do for your eye. I cannot exactly give you sutures there. You might even lose your sight in your left eye.”

“Wonderful,” he said nonchalantly. “I’ve always wanted battle scars.”

Magnus couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

“What’s your name?” he asked as he moved on to the gash in the soldier’s bicep, cleaning out the blood and dirt from it.

There was a pause before his patient spoke again. “Fierro. Alex Fierro.”

“Magnus,” he said simply in return.

Besides the current, fresh injuries, Magnus could see that Alex Fierro had been in many dire, dangerous situations. Long, pale scars told of old wounds and suffering, but some looked more recent - they were still red and puckered.

The wound in his side was long and deep, and Magnus could tell he was going to have to stitch it up. He told Alex this.

He sighed. “I can’t give you anesthesia; we reserve that for the patients who need amputations and such. You’re just going to have to steel yourself and try not to cry out.

“How dare you think so little of me,” the soldier said defiantly, glaring him down with that same cocky grin. “I’m braver than that.”

Magnus rummaged through a few drawers and cabinets before he found the right tools for sutures. He told Alex to lie down on the cot and steady his breathing.

He went through the all-too-familiar motions of stitching up the wound. Alex Fierro was very obviously trying to pretend that the pain wasn’t affecting him as much as it was.

He didn’t speak any more to his patient, just cleaned and stitched up Alex’s wounds. Besides the big injuries - his eye, side, and arm - he had scattered cuts and bruises that just seemed to be from daily life as a Union soldier.

“You ought not to walk that much,” Magnus advised when he was done. “It might reopen the wound.”

“Oh, I will not be walking for a while,” Alex said through gritted teeth. He was sitting up, swaying slightly. He was pale and sweaty, and there was a distant look in his eyes.

“Well,” Magnus said, looking up to where he could see Mallory Keen treating the other soldier that had been with Alex Fierro, “I have more work to do. Will you be all right here? Do you need anything? Food, water?”

Alex shook his head. “No, I’m fine.”

His mind already seemed somewhere else entirely. Back on the battlefield, perhaps.

Magnus sighed and stumbled on to the next injured soldier in need of treatment, vaguely wondering when the last time he'd slept was.

Chapter Text

After Magnus had left, Alex didn’t have much to do except lie on his cot and survey the room. Of course, this soon became a mind-numbingly boring task, and he became restless.

He attempted to sit up, but an intense dizzy spell forced him to collapse back on the cot. He tried to cross his arms, but that irritated the wound on his arm.

He wondered how T.J. was doing, if he was okay. He wondered how long he would have to stay at this blasted “convalescent home.” He wanted to get back on the battlefield.

After an hour or so, he drifted off into a fitful sleep full of blood and gunshots and explosions.

Alex awoke when he heard someone enter the room. He struggled to sit up, but he managed it.

The medic - Magnus, Alex recalled was his name - was standing in the doorway holding a bowl of something.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, setting the bowl down on a cabinet and sitting down next to Alex.

“Horrible,” Alex grumbled, rubbing his eyes. “What is that?”

Magnus handed him the bowl. “You should eat something.”

Alex swirled the contents of the bowl around, watching what he assumed was bean soup slosh around. A roll of bread sat in the bowl soaking up the soup. “Thank you.”

“You should take it easy,” Manus advised. “As I said before, you might reopen your wounds.”

Alex took a big bite of the bread, tearing at it viciously, then gulped down the soup in just a few mouthfuls.

A wave of nausea washed over Alex, making the world spin for a few seconds before his senses returned to normal.

Well, except that Alex never felt normal, per se. She was female now, very much so, and an incessant itching began at her feet and all over her chest. Her head throbbed.

This happened a lot when she was female: she felt wrong in her body, wanted to look more feminine.

When Alex looked up again, Magnus had a bemused look on his face. He was peering at her as if something was different but he couldn’t quite place what it was.

She wondered whether she should tell him, then decided that no, she didn’t even know him; she didn’t know if she could trust him.

Alex scarfed down the remainders of her food and set the bowl down in her lap, wiping off the crumbs from her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Are you sure you are feeling alright?” Magnus asked, peering at her in concern.

His warm gray gaze made her blush and stammer. “Y-yes, why would I not be? Besides the obvious, I mean.” She glared at him fiercely, and immediately felt bad when he glanced away in discomfort.

Oh wonderful, Alex thought. How does it feel knowing that you can’t even talk regularly to people without scaring them away? He knows you are different, he’s just too kind to remark on it.

“Shut up,” she murmured, shaking her head to dispel the thoughts.

“What?” Magnus asked.

“Nothing,” she said, looking back up at the medic. He was handsome in a scruffy way, Alex thought, with chin-length blonde hair, the pale fuzz of a few days lack of shaving, and worn, dirty clothes. His sharp gray eyes had a weariness that only war could bring about. Dark circles made his skin look paler. “How’s T.J.?”

“T.J.?”

“The other soldier who was with me,” Alex clarified.

“Oh! Er... I don’t know. I could go look for Mallory... she would know, I’m fairly sure she treated him...”

Alex scooped up the last drops of bean soup and bread crumbs from the bottom of the bowl, then set it down on the table beside her cot. The soldier lying in his own bed next to her flicked his gaze toward her, then back to the ceiling he’d been blankly staring at.

“What’s it like?” Magnus asked quietly. “The battlefields?”

It takes Alex a long time to answer; so long fact that Magnus begins to trip over his own words in his haste to say, “You don’t - you don’t have to tell me, of course, I’m sorry -” but Alex finally speaks up.

“No,” she mumbles, still staring at the soldier in the cot next to her. His head is bandaged, and his eyes are vacant. “I was just... no, I’m alright.”

She tilted her head up toward the ceiling as well, staring at the cracks in the plaster crisscrossing all the way to the walls. She laughed bitterly. “In the beginning, as we’re marching, we are lined up in our ranks, and after the battle, the dead are lying in rows in the blood-soaked grass. It makes you wonder how they’d been breathing, pumping blood just moments before.”

Magnus was staring enraptured at Alex; she wanted to crawl under the bed and hide from his searching gaze.

“Sometimes a shell would burst right above our heads, and the fragments would fall over us like rain,” Alex continued, pantomiming an explosion with her hand. “The very air is filled with bullets, and the empty fragments catch in your hair and fall in your face.

“I saw this one man being carried away after the battle. Half his face was blown off.” She shook her head. “I had never seen so much blood.”

Magnus nodded. No doubt he had treated many wounds like the one she was describing, as well as injuries much worse, probably.

“Magnus, get your ass over here!” A shout from the other side of the large room carried through the air.

Magnus startled, and Alex flinched; another wave of nausea washed over her.

“I’m fine,” she snapped when Magnus shot an anxious glance at her. “Go see what she wants.”

He stood, hovered for a moment, then made his way to where a woman with messy red curls was standing with her hands on her hips.

They talked for a while, then Magnus nodded in resignation and walked out the large wooden doors into the entrance hall.

He didn’t return until hours later.

Night had fallen, and Alex was lying in her cot staring at the ceiling like the soldier next to her was. She was almost scared to fall asleep, so she was forcing her eyes (more like eye, since her left one was bandaged) to stay open by counting the cracks in the ceiling plaster. It wasn’t working.

Before she knew it, dark gray clouds of sleep had engulfed her, and of course, she didn’t get to rest soundly.

Alex dreamed that she was standing on a precipice, overlooking a deep black pit speckled with red where hundreds of nameless, faceless people were falling through. As she watched, the red slowly rose up from the depths of the hole, swallowing up the people, lapping at the edges of the pit like water. Shouts and pleas for help drifted up from the people, but she was too high up to do anything except watch and shake with fear.

Almost all at once it seemed, the red water had reached up to where she stood on her precipice, lapping at her feet and leaving stains on her bare feet. She knelt down, running her fingers through the water, which was thick and sticky. It smelled like iron. Blood, not water. An ocean of blood, and Alex was caught in the middle of it. She looked up, hoping to catch sight of the sky with its comforting colors of blue and white, but all she saw was more darkness and craggy cliffs.

The blood was washing over her feet now, rising faster and faster over her precipice, frothing and growing more frantic by the moment. And as she stared, hypnotized, a figure emerged from the foaming blood. A tall man with dark hair and a thin build. His face was twisted into a perpetual scowl; he would have been handsome without it.

His mouth moved, and even though she couldn’t hear him, she knew what he was saying. No one is going to accept how you are, and no one should.

Alex backed into the shadows, eyes widening. Of all the people, why her father? Why was it always her father? She’d let go of his ghost a long time ago, why was he coming back now? She covered her ears and screwed her eyes shut, trying to block out all the thoughts rushing through her head; all her senses felt like they were being attacked from each and every side.

The ocean of blood was rushing and roaring in her ears now, drowning out every other sound; the tang of metal suffocated her nose and mouth; she could feel the blood rising to her waist; her clothes clung to her body uncomfortably; her left eye throbbed; the sea of blood was now rushing so fast and frenzied that it felt like a riptide; she felt like she was being washed away in the tide -

- And suddenly she was lying on a cot in a large, spacious room staring up at a plain white ceiling with peeling plaster. She leaned over and vomited.

When Alex looked back up, someone was standing over her, though she couldn’t determine the person’s features except that they had blonde hair and a male physique. Her vision swam; she was freezing cold.

The man spoke, but she couldn’t make out anything he said.

“Stop,” she mumbled, though she doubted anyone could make out what she was saying. “Go away. Stop.”

She covered her ears and tried to drown out the murmurs around her, and the phantom waves crashing against her eardrums. She rocked back and forth, covering her ears and tried to block out the sound of her father’s voice, repeating the same words over and over: No one is going to accept how you are, and no one should.

No one should... no one... no one...

Chapter Text

Magnus has thought Alex Fierro was in stable condition last he’d checked on him, but the next morning, the soldier had awoken vomiting his guts out over the side of the bed, along with a high fever. So... apparently not.

Magnus had to resist the urge to hover around Alex all day checking his condition almost obsessively. But sadly, he had work to do, so the only time he could check on Alex was on the first morning. He did the best he could to make him more comfortable; throwing another blanket over him to stop his incessant shivering, placing a wet cloth on his forehead, setting a pan at the side of the bed in case he vomited again. Alex kept mumbling about blood and shadows and oceans, tossing and turning in his small cot.

The longer Magnus looked at Alex, though, the less he was certain about the soldier. When he looked at Alex, he couldn’t help thinking he’d... changed, somehow. Nothing about his appearance, really, but something seemed... off, now.

Magnus shook his head and tore his gaze from Alex Fierro, who was breathing fast now, eyes screwed shut and arms covering his head like he was trying to shield himself from something.

“Magnus!”

He turned toward the sound of his name being called, and saw Mallory Keen striding toward him with a wide grin on her flushed face. Her red hair was tied in a knot at the nape of her neck, and her skirts were hiked up to her knees.

Mallory grabbed Magnus’s arm and pulled him away from Alex. He shot one last worried glance back at the soldier, but followed Mallory into the entrance hall. “What is it?”

“Halfborn is here,” she said.

Magnus’s eyes widened. “Really? Last I heard, he was in Shiloh.”

“Yes, well, that was months ago. Between then, the big idiot went and got himself in a fight with the colonel whose orders he was supposed to be following, except the colonel said something that Halfborn did not agree with, and now he’s been kicked out of the regiment, and the war.”

“What?”

Mallory rolled her eyes. “He’s been dismissed. The big oaf went and got himself kicked out of the war.”

But her voice was tinged with giddiness and relief.

“He ought to be arriving sometime today.”

Magnus pried himself from Mallory’s grasp. “I have patients to treat.”

What he meant was: he had a certain soldier to fuss over.

Thinking of Alex Fierro reminded him of something he’d said yesterday. “Speaking of which, how is the soldier who arrived yesterday? The one who came with Alex?”

“Alex? That’s his name?” Mallory said without interest. “Oh, well, he’s doing pretty well. The wound was deep but not fatal, and thankfully it wasn’t infected yet. I think he’ll be healthy enough to go with the next regiment that comes around.”

He nodded, filing away the information for Alex later if he was feeling alright.

Mallory pushed through the large double doors into the bright sunlight of late morning. Magnus shielded his eyes from the light, blinking quickly. He realized he hadn’t even stepped outside in ages. The air was fresher and clearer, not clogged with the smell of blood and sweat and pain.

“I’m going to wait here,” Mallory said, sitting down on the steps of the porch. “I need a break anyway.”

It was true; her hair was tangled, dark shadows under eyes, and her skin was an almost sickly pallor, making the freckles on her cheeks stand out more prominently.

Magnus stole a glance toward the double doors and then back at the meadows sprawling before them and the mansion. He sighed and sat down heavily next to Mallory. “I suppose I do too. I’m no help to someone if I die from exhaustion.”

They sat there for a while in silence, staring out at the meadows and sky stretching as far as the eye could see. Sunlight warmed their backs, and soon Magnus had drifted off to sleep right on the porch.

He was awoken when someone very rudely jabbed a foot into his side. He grunted and sat up, rubbing his neck. It appeared the front porch wasn’t the best place to take an impromptu nap.

He begrudgingly opened his eyes, and was immediately pulled to his feet by strong arms.

Suddenly he was being smothered by wild reddish-brown hair and thick arms. It was meant to be a hug, for sure, but he couldn’t help but panic for a moment, thinking he was being drowned. Drowned in a very thick and wild beard.

“Gunderson,” he mumbled. “Nice to see you’re alive.”

“You too, Magnus,” rumbled Halfborn.

“Now, could you let me go before I suffocate and go back on that fact?”

Halfborn freed him from his vice-like embrace, and Magnus saw Mallory standing behind her husband. She was beaming, and looked happier and healthier than he’d seen her in a long time.

“I told you he’d be here,” she said, her cheeks flushed with pleasure.

“How is it going, Magnus?” Halfborn asked, slapping Magnus’s back and almost making him topple over.

“I’m doing all right,” he said, righting himself with a bit of difficulty. Oh, how he wished he could have gotten a little more sleep, preferably in a more comfortable spot.

Mallory snorted. “He’s working himself half to death, the beantown. At least the stubble suits him.”

Magnus ran his fingers along his jaw, frowning. “It’s not even really visible.”

“But, enough distracting us,” Mallory said, waving her hand as if to brush away their idle chit-chat. “Now, how did you get thrown out of the army?”

Halfborn winced; even he was scared of Mallory Keen. Rightfully so, too.

“Well,” Halfborn hedged, “in my defense, the colonel is an ass.”

Mallory glared and crossed her arms.

“Fine.” Halfborn’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “He said that black soldiers could not fight as well as white men, so I might have shot him in the leg. You know, just to shut him up.” Almost as an afterthought, he said, “It worked.”

Mallory rubbed her forehead and sighed deeply. Then, after a moment, she started to laugh, slowly at first, but then it crescendoed into a loud, almost manic guffaw. She doubled over, tears springing to her eyes. Both Magnus and Halfborn were taken aback by her rather extreme reaction.

Eventually, though, she stood up straight and wiped the tears from her eyes, breathing hard. “Oh, Halfborn, of course you would. You just can’t help it, can you?”

Halfborn grinned sheepishly.

“Well, at least you’re here,” Mallory said, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Home.”

“But you have to help around the place,” Magnus added.

As soon as he could, Magnus had returned to Alex Fierro’s side, telling himself that he was simply checking on his health like a good doctor would check on their patient, and that he wasn’t fussing and fretting for nothing.

Alex was awake this time, and was staring blankly at a wall. But at least he was looking better, and less frantic. Magnus noted that he looked rather pretty with his flushed cheeks a contrast to his tanned skin.

“Don’t think I don’t see you hovering around me,” Alex murmured, his gaze still fixed on the wall.

Magnus turned red, and meant to back away quietly, but he ran into the bedpost and tripped. He was able to steady his balance, and he leaned against the wall with a big grin plastered on his face, sweating profusely. “No I’m not.”

Alex almost smiled. “I’m fine, if you’re wondering.”

He dropped the fake smile. “I mean, I suppose that’s true, if by ‘fine’ you mean feverish and sad-looking.”

“I am not sad-looking.”

“You’re staring off into the distance with a faraway look in your eyes.”

“Eye,” Alex corrected, pointing at his bandaged eye. “When can it be removed?”

Magnus shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. Could be in a few weeks. If it doesn’t get infected. Speaking of which, I should change the dressings of all your wounds. They’re looking stale.”

Alex closed his eyes tiredly. “On second thought, maybe I don’t feel well enough to sit up.”

“Nice try. I’ll get the bandages.”

Alex really did look better after Magnus had changed the bandages; he’d stopped looking so feverish, and now seemed a bit more alive. Though he was still dizzy and exhausted.

“How did you come to be here?” Alex asked suddenly.

Magnus flinched. He hesitated before speaking. “My... uncle is the owner of this mansion. I’ve lived here since my mother died. I was the one who convinced Randolph to turn this place into a convalescent home.”

Alex leaned back in his cot, one arm tossed over his eyes. He seemed to be debating something with himself. Eventually, though, he just stared at Magnus and said, “Thank you. For...” He looked like he wanted to say something, but changed his mind at the last second. “For worrying about me.”

Magnus felt like there was more he wanted to say, but Alex stayed silent and still. Even so, Alex’s gratitude warmed his face, and he could feel his mouth twisting into a bashful smile.

Chapter Text

She still felt cold and tired after Magnus visited her, though decidedly happier.

She lay back in her cot, staring up at the ceiling. She wasn’t one to rethink her words after a conversation, but now she found herself re-evaluating and breaking apart everything she’d told Magnus. “Thank you... for what? Doing his job? Stupid, Alex, stupid....”

He’d hastened to leave her bedside, probably because he could sense there was something off about her. She cringed. This was why she didn’t like human interaction.

Sometimes she liked to imagine another world, another time where maybe she could tell someone how she felt, how she was, and perhaps be accepted. Maybe there might even be other people like her.

And while she was lost in her daydream, she allowed herself to imagine herself with green hair, because why not? She’d always liked the idea of having green hair.

Alex shook her head, dispelling the thoughts. It wasn’t healthy to dwell on fantasies.

So perhaps in another world she could have green hair, and friends who would accept her, and more self-confidence because of it all, but not in this one. So it was best not to think about anything that wasn’t here and now.

Since she didn’t have much else to do besides lie in her cot and let her thoughts chase each other in circles, she drifted off to sleep.

Thankfully, it seemed that this dream wouldn’t be as terrifying as the fever-induced nightmare she’d had before.

At least, that’s what she thought as she was placed in a scene full of the smell of wet clay and glaze. In the center of a beige-and-gray paletted room sat an old man spinning a lump of clay in a wheel into a wide, deep vase. Alex kept her gaze fixed on the man, hardly even blinking, enraptured by his movements. She hadn’t seen her grandfather in years, not since he died.

“It’s why you like pottery, isn’t it? The change?”

Alex startled, glancing around until she spotted an all-too-familiar form with long red hair and a voluptuous figure, half-hidden in the shadows behind a shelf full of drying clay sculptures.

“No,” Alex muttered. “Not you.”

“Is it true or not?” Loki said, stepping out of the shadows. She wore a dress of shining satin, deep green and hypnotizing. “You see it as an escape - the constant changing of the clay, how it shapes itself under your fingers. For you cannot truly change yourself, can you? You’re stuck. In this blasted world, in your own mind.”

“You’re not real,” Alex said, stepping toward her grandfather, who hadn’t moved from his seat and seemed not to notice anything out of the ordinary. “This is just a dream. Like last night, with my father.”

Loki almost looked sympathetic as she said, “Oh, you know better than that.”

Unfortunately, she did.

Loki waved her hand and the room melted away, along with Alex’s grandfather. In its place rose up a large room with gilded furniture, a high painted ceiling, and a grand piano in the center of it all. A tall window overlooking a field was across from them both.

Loki sat down gracefully on a backless settee near the window, motioning for Alex to sit down next to her. Alex stood where she was.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why show yourself now?”

Loki looked out the window. “Isn’t it funny, how prone mortals are to chaos? It’s almost too easy to manipulate them.” She laughed, a high, melodic sound. Deceptive.

“What are you talking about?” Alex ground out between gritted teeth. “Get to the point!”

Another wave of her hand and the field was filled with thousands of battling soldiers, one side wearing gray, one side wearing navy blue. Loki smiled almost fondly down at the soldiers fighting and killing each other. She fluttered her hands through the air as if she were playing the harp, long slender fingers plucking at the strings of mortals’ lives. The fighting dissolved into even more chaos, sounds of gunshots ringing through the air.

“What are you doing?” Alex asked, her fist balled at her sides.

Loki smirked. “See? Just a flick of the wrist and they’re causing all sorts of trouble!”

“Did you cause this?” Alex shouted, rushing toward her mother. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she knew she had to stop whatever she was doing to those soldiers.

“Why, didn’t you realize?” Loki asked, turning her wide, amused grin to Alex. “Surely you must have at least had a vague suspicion.”

She stopped in her tracks. It was true - she had thought about the chaos and destruction the war had already caused the country, and had speculated if her mother had something to do with it. But she always pushed the thoughts aside, more concerned with staying alive.

Loki’s grin stretched ever wider. “Oh, it’s true, how easily humans are to control. They don’t even realize the consequences of their own actions. They’ll tear each other to pieces without even realizing it!”

“No,” Alex muttered, swaying on her feet. “No, you underestimate us... we will survive this; we’ve survived much more than this before....”

Loki shrugged. “I’ll give you this, though: your country is quite tough. We’ll just have to wait and see it through, won’t we?”

With one last gesture of her hand, the room, the soldiers, and Loki herself dissolved into the shadows until all that was left was Alex and the darkness, and the memory of Loki’s mocking smile.

"I'll see you soon," said the echo of her voice, so low and unexpected that Alex almost thought she'd imagined it.

Chapter Text

Alex awoke in a pool of sweat, gasping for breath. Even though she was covered in multiple blankets, she shivered. When she pressed her hand against her forehead, she found that she was burning up. Well, at least she hadn’t vomited this time.

“She’s coming,” Alex panted. “She’s coming, she’s coming here. Soon.”

The soldier in the cot next to her was staring at her strangely, so she took a moment to steady her breathing and wipe the sweat from her face. “I’m fine,” she muttered. “I’m all right; it was just a dream.”

But at the same time, a sinking dread filled her stomach, weighing her down. She couldn’t sit up; it took her all her strength just to keep her eyes open.

“When was the last time your bandages were changed?”

Alex looked around for the sound of the voice, and saw a young woman with large brown eyes and short loop braids leaning over her. She had a box of supplies propped on her hip.

“Er... just yesterday,” Alex said, taken aback.

The woman sniffed. “And are any of your wounds infected?”

“I do not know; you tell me,” Alex snapped. “You’re the doctor!”

“Nurse,” the young woman corrected. “No need to get snippy about it.”

She set down her supplies and set to work unwinding the dressing around Alex’s head. Alex didn’t understand why they had to be changed so often; they felt fine to her. Then again, she didn’t want to die, so she figured it was for the best in the long run.

The nurse clucked when she saw Alex’s wounded eye. “Beginning to swell... what did you do, try to gouge it out?”

The nurse made quick work of disposing of the old dressings and administering new ones. Her moves were practiced and sure, but they lacked the gentleness of Magnus’s touches, which felt like he actually cared that she recover, and not that she was just another job to get over with.

Plus, Magnus wasn’t too bad to look at, either.

When the nurse had finished with redressing her arm, eye, and side, she stepped back, surveying her work. “You need a new shirt,” she noted. “I shall get one for you. When did you last eat?”

“Ah... about a day ago?” Honestly, she wasn’t even that hungry.

The nurse sighed. “Who’s been taking care of you? Wait here, I’ll get you a bowl of something.”

Alex opened her mouth to defend Magnus, but the nurse was already halfway through the doorway. She wilted and sighed in annoyance.

“I see you’ve met Louise.”

Alex glanced up and found a tall man wearing a loose, dirty shirt and baggy pants. He had striking golden eyes the same color as his tangled, shoulder-length hair.

“She’s not the warmest person, but she’s sensible,” the man said, flashing a bright smile.

Alex frowned. “Who are you?” He couldn’t be a soldier, he didn’t look injured.

“One of the nurses. I’m the only male nurse, except for maybe Magnus.” He thought for a moment. “Actually, he’s rather a mix of a nurse and doctor. He ought to be just checking on patients’ progress and such, but he likes to be closer to his patients.”

“That does sound like him.”

“Oh, you’ve met Magnus, have you? Did he treat you? You probably noticed the care he treats his patients with.”

Alex blushed. “I like it.”

The man didn’t say anything, just leaned against the wall and grinned like he knew exactly what Alex was feeling.

The days passed in a blur of changing bandages (Magnus and Louise alternated between caring for her), staring at the ceiling, just thinking (for there wasn’t much else to do), and brief, fleeting conversations with Magnus (which seemed to be the only things that kept Alex sane). She also talked often with the man with the golden eyes. She learned his name was Jack, and he was... interesting to talk to, at least. A bit strange, but of course, who was Alex to judge? She herself was odd.

Jack often talked about Magnus fondly, and it was obvious that they had a long history. Whenever Alex asked about him, Jack looked amused and happily supplied answers.

“I always thought that, if he didn’t have such a big responsibility here at the mansion, he’d pack up all his things and leave everything he knew before his mother’s death behind - especially his uncle,” Jack said one day. “I think Magnus blames him for his mother’s death, you know. At least partially.”

Alex opened her mouth to ask what happened, then paused. What if Magnus didn’t want anyone intruding on his history? If he wanted to tell her, then he would. She knew what it was like to have someone intrude on your personal life, and she hated it.

“His uncle owns this mansion, right?” she asked instead.

Jack nodded, looking thoughtful. “Randolph Chase. He lives here, but you wouldn’t ever know it since he almost never shows himself. He likes being mysterious and elusive, I suppose.”

Alex leaned back in her cot, staring up at the ceiling. By now she’d memorized every crack and spiderweb and pattern in the rafters and peeling plaster.

She found that it was easier to deal with the incessant discomfort and anxiety that came with being female, and being unable to change something, anything about herself to feel more like it, if she just detached from everything. She thought it would even be better if she could at least tell someone about it, but alas.

“How’s Magnus?” she asked.

“Still working with very little breaks,” Jack sighed. “And he needs a shave.”

Alex had seen Magnus recently, and she actually thought the bit of pale stubble suited him.

Even she could see how he worked twice as hard as any other nurse or doctor in the whole mansion. He would stay at a patient’s side just long enough to check their wounds or tend to any other needs they might have before moving on to the next patient. Then, instead of taking breaks with the rest of the nurses, he would take the time to talk to the soldiers. His presence seemed to supply its own kind of healing; it was like he radiated warmth and comfort. Alex felt it, too.

She caught sight of Magnus pushing through a crowd of nurses to reach a soldier’s bedside, where he chatted with him amiably as he dressed the soldier’s wounds.

Alex had almost forgotten about her mother’s visit in her dreams. She’d almost been able to push it to the back of her mind, and focus on other subjects.

Almost.

Her thoughts kept drifting back to Loki’s mocking words: Oh, it’s true, how easily humans are to control. They’ll tear each other to pieces without even realizing it!

She shook her head, trying to dislodge the thoughts from her brain. She’d been living in constant dread of her mother’s visit ever since that dream; she hadn’t seen the trickster in person in years.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Jack lazily.

“Nothing that matters,” Alex lied smoothly.

“Well,” Jack said, pushing off from where he was leaning on the wall, “I ought to be checking on some people. I’ll see you around.”

Alex nodded in acknowledgment of his words, and continued to think about her mother, against her better judgment.

Over the days, Alex slowly regained her health; her fever went down (thankfully, she had no more strange dreams), and her wounds were healing well (Magnus told her so happily). Louise made sure she ate well and was comfortable, acting all the much like a mother hen. It still unsettled Alex that Magnus looked at her differently when she was female, like there was something about her he could not understand. Alex’s only relief was when he was male.

Magnus informed Alex that T.J.’s wounds were also healing well and he was recovering quickly. “He’s still not allowed to walk, though,” he said.

One evening, a cold, brittle one, Alex was talking to Magnus during one of his short breaks. Alex was scarfing down a bowl of bean soup and bread, like she’d had each day for dinner since she got here. She wasn’t going to take it for granted, even if she was getting seriously sick of the thick substance. It was more of a stew than a soup, she thought.

“Couldn’t T.J. be moved closer to me?” Alex asked after swallowing the remainder of the bread. “It gets lonely, you know.”

Magnus cocked his head. “Yes, we could do that, I suppose.”

“Wonderful.” Alex grinned. “Now; what’s happening outside? Any news to report?”

He thought for a moment. “Antietam. Maryland, just yesterday. I heard Halfborn talking about it. More than twenty thousand casualties in just one day.”

She winced. “Who won?”

“Union, though we lost many. At least it ended Lee’s campaign to invade Union territory.”

Alex sat back in her cot. “Good. We’ve been losing too many battles lately.”

At that moment, the woman Alex had come to recognize as Mallory Keen, came running toward them, out of breath and looking irritated.

“We have a visitor,” she said, her Irish brogue thicker than usual. “And not the usual kind, either. A woman; wealthy, too, if the carriage is any sign. She’s asking for you.” At this, she looked at Alex, confusion etched across her face, though she was trying to hide it.

Alex immediately sat up straight, trying not to panic. A wealthy woman, asking for Alex? There could only be one person who fit that description.

I’ll see you soon.

“Alex?” Magnus asked, gazing at her in concern. “Are you alright?”

“Just wonderful,” she managed, but she could feel her chest constricting, her vision tunneling. “Just... I need a moment.” And though it physically pained her to say it, she whispered, “Yes. You can bring her in now.”

Magnus still stared at Alex with lingering worry, but she brushed it off. She couldn’t afford to look weak in front of her mother.

“Do you want me to leave?” Magnus asked after a moment’s hesitation.

Alex weighed the options. Let Magnus stay, and have to introduce him to her scheming, power-hungry mother, or send him and his warm support away to protect him from Loki.

She did not know where this sudden solicitous behavior toward the healer came from, but all she knew was that she now felt responsible for the safety of him and everyone in this whole convalescent home. Dammit, why couldn’t Loki just stay out of Alex’s life for once?

And so Alex found herself nodding, and pushing him away. “Go. I do not need you here for this. You have other work to do anyway.”

And she found herself ignoring the look of hurt flash across his face, even as he struggled to compose his expression into that of blank forbearance.

He turned away and did as she asked, crossing to the large double doors that opened to the entrance hall. Alex lost sight of him when he turned the corner and up a staircase.

She sighed, convincing herself that it was for the best.

After a minute, Mallory returned with a woman following behind her. The woman walked through the room and past all the soldiers with her head held high and her hips swaying with every step. Maybe it was the long, flowing red hair, or the velvet dress that swished around her legs each time she moved, or the way she seemed to float instead of walk, or the devious eyes and smile that seemed to strip you bare of all your defenses with one look, but she held the entire room in her thrall.

Alex glared her down the whole time it took for her to get to her bedside.

Loki snapped her fingers and a plush chair appeared next to her cot; even the obvious display of magic didn’t faze the humans. They didn’t even seem to notice it.

With a swish of her hand, everyone else looked away, suddenly enraptured with anything but her and Alex. Though Loki had seemed to be enjoying the attention.

“My darling Alex,” she said, smiling in a way that someone who didn’t know any better might call warm. “How have you been?”

Alex held her head high and smiled wryly back. “I’ve never been better. Oh, unless you count the shelled eye, the stitches in my side and arm, and the terrible nightmares.”

Loki sighed. “You were always so dramatic. I see that hasn’t changed.”

“And you were always so evil,” Alex mimicked. “I see that hasn’t changed either. What are you doing here?”

Loki studied the large room full of bustling nurses and recovering soldiers. “A mother can’t pay her daughter a visit every now and then?”

“No,” Alex said through gritted teeth. “Not when she’s a murderous trickster who doesn’t give a damn about what happens to her daughter either way.”

“You wound me,” Loki said, her hand fluttering over her chest in mock indignation. “Now, what about that young man, the one with the beautiful gray eyes? Magnus, was his name, correct?”

Alex’s eyes widened, and she involuntarily lunged at her mother (which caused a twinge of pain in her side), suddenly clutching the front of her dress and glaring into her eyes fiercely. “No. Not him. You are not going to touch a hair on his head, or even think about doing so.”

Loki merely looked amused as she flicked her wrist, forcing Alex back into her cot with so much force that she hit her head on the wall. She flinched and rubbed her head. Her wounded eye throbbed.

When she tried to attack Loki again, she found that she couldn’t move from her cot. If looks could kill, well, then Loki would be dead three times over.

“Ah... so there might be more to this Magnus character than I first thought,” Loki said, “if he’s received such an intense reaction from my daughter. I wasn’t threatening him, you know.”

“Sure you weren’t,” Alex growled. “As if that isn’t your exact style of getting what you want. Like you did with Samirah.” Against her own will, she could feel hot tears welling up, and she choked back a pathetic sob. She must not appear weak in front of her mother. “Samirah...”

“So who is he?” Loki acted as if she hadn’t heard Alex. She looked around, searching for him. Alex was so glad that she’d sent him away before her mother arrived. “No matter. I am not here for him. I trust you’ve heard of Antietam?”

Alex nodded mutely.

Loki sighed, running her hands through her hair. “Yes, it was getting rather dull after Shiloh, so I decided, It is about time for something different; something that will shock everyone. Well, in short, almost 23,000 dead in one day! A new record for me, I think.”

Alex spat at her mother’s feet. “You heartless, evil, bloodthirsty -”

Loki wagged her finger. “Ah ah, don’t talk to your mother that way.”

Alex opened her mouth to shout even worse obscenities at Loki, but she found that her vocal chords weren’t working. Her blood was boiling now, her vision turning red, her limbs trembling, trying to get out of their invisible binds. Her breath was becoming short and panicked.

Loki stood up, glancing around. She was the picture of serenity with her fingers interlaced and resting in front of her and her sharply beautiful features outlined by the setting sun.

“I shall be staying around here for a while, I think,” she said. “It’s quite picturesque.”

All at once, the tightening binds around Alex’s limbs and throat loosened, and she fell forward, gasping for breath.

When she looked back up again, Loki was gone, and everyone was still talking and working like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Chapter Text

Alex probably had a very valid reason for sending him away. Even so, to make up for it, Alex would tell him all that had happened, and who that mysterious red-haired woman was that had shown up so suddenly. Alex wasn’t the type to keep secrets; he would explain it all in due time.

Magnus had repeated this in his mind so many times that he’d almost convinced himself it was true.

But deep down, he knew that this was something Alex had never wanted anyone to know about and that he would keep it to himself as long as he could.

There was something... off about the red-haired woman; she was just a little too beautiful, just a little too regal, just a little too ethereal. She moved with an otherworldly grace, shone with the light of someone who wasn’t fully human.

And the way Alex had looked so frightened and angry when Mallory told them about the woman. A deep-rooted fear that ran stronger than one could fully understand. He’d tried to hide it, but Magnus had seen right through it. He understood it.

It wasn’t like Alex to be afraid of something. Magnus wondered what had happened to provoke such a reaction from the soldier.

He was only snapped out of his musings when he tripped over the last step in the stairs, which was higher than the rest for some reason. He’d always hated that step. He stumbled and caught himself just in time before he would have crashed to the floor. Dammit, he needed sleep.

“What are you doing up here?”

Magnus glanced up and almost fell over again. Standing in the doorway of his office, was none other than his uncle Randolph. Magnus hadn’t seen the man in months, and he could see that he’d grown years older in that time. His beard was in need of a combing, his glasses were askew, and dark bags under his eyes betrayed his exhaustion, despite the almost feverish brightness of his eyes.

“Er - just - this is my home too!” Magnus stood straight, glaring at his uncle in an effort to look intimidating. A difficult feat when he wasn’t all that tall, nor that strong, and didn’t even feel fully conscious. “This is my break, I have a right to get some sleep!”

With that, he pushed past Randolph and made for the room at the end of the corridor, which he could never come to think of as his own and, either way, was much too large for his tastes. No matter. He would give anything for just a couple minutes of sleep.

He stumbled into the room and collapsed on the too-spacious bed, not bothering with the covers. He passed out instantly.

Magnus awoke much later than he’d intended, when the sun was already dipping below the horizon and the room was illuminated by the dying orange rays of sunlight, the rest of it drowning in thick, tangible shadows. He was lying face first in a heap of pillows, almost suffocating himself. He sat up, running a hand through his hair as he tried to get his bearings. When he realized what time it was, he had to resist the urge to bolt downstairs and make up for the lost time; he had patients to treat, nurses he needed to give directions to, doctors he had to speak to; he had to talk to Alex -

Magnus took a deep breath, trying to calm his racing, spiraling thoughts. Someone should have told him what time it was; someone should have woken him up. He was behind schedule now, and sure, he did feel better rested than he had in days, but what was that compared to the dozens of patients whose health came before everything else?

He hurried to the stairs, straightening and smoothing out his clothes as he did so. He ran his hands through his hair, but only managed to make it even messier.

Halfway to the staircase though, he ran into Uncle Randolph again. He still looked overwrought and exhausted, but there was also a gleam of glee in his expression, where there would have just been emptiness before.

“Magnus!” he called, running up to his nephew and grabbing him by the shoulders, jostling him. “I think I’ve figured it out! I think I know who’s behind it all.”

Magnus shot a glance toward the stairs. “That’s wonderful. You can tell me about it later, all right?”

Randolph frowned. “No, no, Magnus. Look, don’t you see, it is a breakthrough. I may finally be able to avenge them, Caroline and Emma and Aubrey!”

His uncle had said this many times before, only to hit a dead end and descend into an even deeper obsession with catching the creature that had killed his family. He suppressed a sigh, telling himself to be patient.

Randolph led Magnus into his study before he could protest that he had work to do. His uncle sat down at his desk, pulling out many pages of notes and photographs, then flipped through a few dusty books to find certain paragraphs or images.

“A friend in Boston contacted me a while back,” he explained, so excited that his words tripped over themselves in his hurry to get them out. “He said that he had new information that he’d scrounged up from the wreckage site. A single jeweled brooch. It does not appear to be much, right? It couldn’t lead me to anyone or anything concerning my family. That is what I thought at first when I was told of this brooch. I was wrong, ever so wrong. This brooch has a symbol on it, two serpents intertwined to form an ‘S’ shape. Look, here’s a photograph. You might be wondering how this relates to anything. Well, it is the symbol of Loki, the ancient Norse trickster god.”

“What do you think it means?” Magnus asked after a moment. He probably shouldn’t encourage his uncle’s unhealthy obsessions, but Randolph was staring at him intently, as if waiting for a reaction as strong as his own.

“Well, is it not obvious? Loki, the god of mischief is behind it all!”

Magnus shook his head. “Just because you found a brooch with this pagan god’s symbol on it in the wreckage doesn’t mean that he is the cause. That sounds far-fetched, even for you.”

Randolph’s grin faded. “Magnus, don’t you see? This is a breakthrough, a breakthrough I tell you! Here, I have been studying these documents, it’s beginning to make sense, all of it. The sudden storm out of nowhere, it seemed suspicious to me, there really was no warning.... And even the war! I think I might have found evidence that Loki may have been the center of it all. See, he is orchestrating it all; who knows how long he’s had humankind under his thumb?”

Now, this went past all of Randolph’s insane theories. A Norse deity, controlling the war and all of mankind? Where had all these ideas come from?

Magnus looked over the old documents, but could hardly make sense of it - the tomes were all handwritten, with compressed, thick script that devoured the pages. Sprinkled in with the dense font were old, crude drawings of various symbols and emblems - lots of pictures of the symbol that Randolph had described, of the two serpents, but there were also images of the trickster god Loki and the myths he was featured in.

Flipping through the books and notes, he only seemed to be scratching the surface of Randolph’s research. There were notes written in the margins of the books, diagrams and drawings, bookmarked pages and underlinings of certain blocks of text. His uncle really did seem to believe that this trickster god was controlling all the actions of humankind, from the war happening right now to the smaller things such as his wife and daughters’ deaths.

As he studied the detailed depictions of Loki, he couldn’t help but think the god of mischief and strife looked almost eerily like the strange woman that had come to visit Alex. Same red hair, same sharply beautiful features with a mischievous smirk. But he shook his head and convinced himself his imagination was running wild.

“But why?” he asked, finally looking up from the research. “Why cause all this bloodshed and death?”

Randolph stared at Magnus with a blank look on his face. “For the sake of destruction and chaos, of course. He delights in the hopeless plights of mortals.”

Magnus pinched the bridge of his nose, screwing his eyes shut. “If that is what you believe. But... Uncle Randolph, doesn’t it sound so insane, even for you? Gods don’t exist, and neither does magic or... all of this. It’s mythology, nothing more.”

His uncle was becoming agitated. “But all mythology is based on truth. Perhaps not all of it is accurate, but might there still be truth in these stories? I tell you, this brooch and my notes and research are all the hope that I have left of avenging their deaths.”

Magnus knew that there was no swaying his uncle’s obsession with his wife and daughters’ deaths. He refused to believe that it had been a natural storm at sea, nothing supernatural or unearthly about it. So he stayed locked in his study most of the time, poring over new documents and constructing new, crazier theories than the last ones as to a reason for his family’s deaths.

So he just lowered his head and slipped past his uncle, muttering about how he had a job to do, and that they’d talk later, knowing all too well that later would not come for a long time. Randolph did not protest or move to block him from the exit.

Back downstairs, things were as loud and busy as ever. Magnus caught sight of Louise, who was talking to the man Alex called T.J. (He’d been moved closer to Alex as he’d requested.) As they spoke, a rare smile flitted across Louise’s lips, despite her efforts to suppress it. T.J. grinned in triumph, as if he’d been waiting to make her smile for quite some time with no success.

The mysterious red-haired woman was nowhere to be seen. When Magnus looked out the window into the front path, neither was her opulent carriage.

He entered the next room, where Mallory Keen was ladling soup into bowls and handing them to the soldiers that could manage to walk. He hurried over to her, frowning. When Mallory spotted him, she passed the bowl she’d been holding over to the next soldier in line, then let another nearby nurse take over her job.

“It’s nearly nighttime,” Magnus hissed. “Someone should have woken me.”

Mallory glared right back and propped her fists on her hips. “It isn’t my job to inform you of when you should be working. Besides, you need the rest either way. I was being generous.”

Magnus growled in frustration. “But... you know I’m busy, and yes, sometimes I... neglect my own health, but that pales to the fact that there are other people who need me!”

“People who need you in your best shape,” Mallory argued. “Right now you aren’t of any use in your current state. Here, eat.”

She scooped up a bowl from the pile on the table and poured a portion of bean soup into it, then shoved it into his hands. Her clipped, forceful movements spoke of no room for argument. Magnus didn’t intend to, and scarfed it down in a few mouthfuls, having just realized how hungry he was. Mallory watched on in stern satisfaction.

Before he'd even finished the bowl of soup, Mallory snatched it from his hands and set it next to all the other dirty dishes. Magnus protested, but shut up quickly when Mallory shot him a Look.

She went back to ladling soup into the soldiers’ bowls, glaring when one whistled at her. “I have a husband, thank you very much,” she retorted. “Now, shoo.” She waved him off like one might do for a stray cat.

“I spoke to Randolph,” blurted Magnus after two other soldiers got their supper.

Mallory’s head whipped around, immediately interested. “What was he like?”

Magnus looked out the window. “Still mad. He’s convinced himself that his family’s deaths were caused by some Nordic deity. And if that weren't enough, he also believes that the war is all being orchestrated by that same Norse god.”

Mallory stared quizzically at him and didn’t respond.

“He’s researched this god quite thoroughly, though, I’ll give him that,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

“I almost feel sorry for that man.” Mallory shook her head. “But on another note,” she said, peering past the line of soldiers lining up to get food, “after that woman came to visit Alex, he isn’t looking so good. Keeps staring off into the distance and jumping at every little sound. He lashes out at everyone, too. Maybe you can talk to him, make him feel better.”

Magnus was startled. “Why me?”

She looked at him as if he were a particularly dense idiot. “Well, he seems to... respond more to you than anyone else, obviously.”

He raised his eyebrows skeptically. “Again - why me?”

Mallory frowned at him. “I do not know. Why don’t you ask him? Now, go! You were the one who was grumbling about not having gotten any work done.”

She pushed him out of the room, slamming the door in his face after throwing a towel at him. He had no idea when the hell she’d gotten it, for he was certain she hadn’t had it in her hands two seconds ago. Maybe it was one of her many strange abilities that seemed to manifest at odd times. Like how she could sometimes draw daggers from seemingly nowhere in a split second if she felt vaguely threatened, or wanted to look threatening. Perhaps she had pockets in her dresses for some reason - Magnus wouldn’t put it against her to have pulled something like that, she could be rather paranoid.

He shook his head, dispelling any contemplations about Mallory’s strange antics. Although he had always wondered why she was so intent on appearing intimidating; what had happened to her for her to be so defensive all the time?

Alex was indeed acting tense when he arrived at his bedside. His eyes were shifty and anxious, and he kept fidgeting with the bandages on his arm, causing them to fray and tear.

“So who was that?” Magnus asked, taking his usual seat next to Alex. He rested his hand on the soldier’s restless hands, waiting for them to still.

Alex jumped at the touch. “No one. What does it matter to you? It does not concern you.”

Yes, he was definitely avoiding Magnus’s eyes. Why?

“Well, people like her don’t really come around here that often,” he said. “As you may have noticed, wealthy, pompous folk don’t have much place in a convalescent home in between the North and South.”

“Oh, she’s much more than wealthy and pompous,” Alex muttered under his breath. Magnus didn’t know how one petite, injured person could hold so much withering hatred in just one eye, and focused on an inanimate object no less, but he managed it. He glared at the bedframe for a few uncomfortable moments before seeming to remember Magnus was still sitting next to him, staring at him quizzically.

“Sorry,” Alex mumbled. “I just... no, I don’t want to talk about her. Why are you here?”

“Well, you’re picking off your own bandages. I thought I should save you from reopening your wounds.”

He looked down at his arm, as if just realizing how he was scratching at the wound incessantly. “Oh,” he said, letting his arm drop.

Magnus rummaged through the drawers next to Alex’s bed, noting that they were running low on bandages. He unwound the fraying gauze and crumpled it up, then made quick work of inspecting and redressing the wound. It was healing slower than it should, he noticed. Alex might not be able to fully move his arm for a long time.

He was beginning to pack up his dwindling supplies and leave when he felt a soft tugging on his sleeve. He looked down to see Alex holding on to his coat’s sleeve, managing to look both defiant and embarrassed at the same time.

“How many more patients do you have to treat?” he asked, scanning the room.

Magnus looked around, pinpointing the soldiers he should check on. “Er... just a few, I think. Why?”

The soldier looked down. “I thought... maybe you could stay for a while.”

Despite himself, Magnus found that he was smiling. “Well, I’ll make my rounds quick.”

Alex grinned faintly.

Night had fallen with a complete and total darkness by the time Magnus had actually checked on all his regular patients, as well as covering for other nurses and doctors if they asked him to. But when he casually walked past Alex’s bedside (he didn’t want to wake him if he’d fallen asleep) he found that the soldier was still awake, staring out the window with a distant look on his face.

“You’re lurking,” he said, turning to look at Magnus, his one amber eye glinting eerily in the darkness.

“And you’re acting odd,” Magnus retorted. “Are you trying to scare people off?”

Alex crossed his arms and raised his chin. “Maybe it’s a survival instinct.”

“That makes no sense.”

“In my experience, it’s better to frighten people and have them stay out of your life than it is to let them manipulate and ruin you. It may be a lonely lifestyle, but it’s a safe one. For yourself, and for the people around you.”

Magnus tipped his head to the side. He really did sound like he was speaking from experience, and that made Magnus wonder who - or what - had hurt Alex to make him as untrustworthy as he was now. The blood in his veins boiled at the thought of someone having hardened Alex from the world. But then again... wasn’t Magnus the same way? Ever since his mother’s death, he’d kept everyone at arm’s length, deciding to focus on those that he had a chance of saving.

Maybe everyone in this whole mansion was paranoid and terrified, though they might not let it show, even to themselves.

When he looked back down, he found that Alex was lying curled up on his cot, fast asleep. He snored lightly, and his fists clutched at the blankets. Despite this, Magnus had never seen him looking so peaceful; there was no trace of the worry or confusion or even the wry sarcasm that usually crossed his features when he was awake. No, now he just looked younger, smaller, more vulnerable.

Slowly, careful not to wake him, Magnus pulled the bedsheets over the soldier’s sleeping form, then glanced around the large room - nearly everyone was asleep, save for a few nurses bustling around taking inventory of supplies.

Magnus slumped in his chair, taking a moment to make himself comfortable, before he closed his eyes and let himself drift off to sleep next to Alex.

Chapter Text

Alex awoke feeling very decidedly male that morning. He rubbed his eyes and blinked multiple times, trying to adjust to the bright sunlight.

The first thing he saw was Magnus, still sound asleep in his chair by Alex’s bedside. A trickle of drool hung from the corner of his mouth, and his hair was even more disheveled than it usually was. He sat slumped back in his seat, practically falling out of his chair.

Alex suppressed a giggle. He’d never seen Magnus looking so... well, childish. So unlike the tired, serious person he was when awake.

Alex almost didn’t want to wake him, but he wasn’t given the choice. Louise came stalking up to him, a vaguely irritated expression on her face, and whacked him over the head with a roll of bandages, which didn’t seem very heavy, but they were effective. Magnus woke with a start and almost toppled out of his chair. He righted himself clumsily and wiped the drool from his mouth, looking sheepish. Alex did laugh at that, but Louise shot him a look that made even Alex shut up.

“You should have woken him,” she scolded Alex. “You know how much work he has. Wake up, you lazy louse! It’s past dawn and you can’t afford to sleep in until noon like some of your patients!”

Magnus rocketed to his feet, shaking his head as if to throw off the cobwebs of sleep from his mind. “All right, all right! Where’s the fire?”

Louise snorted. “No fire. Just your work.”

Magnus surveyed the room, taking in the nurses and doctors already going about their daily routines, then looked out the window by Alex’s bedside, trying to determine the time of day from the position of the sun.

“It’s about seven in the morning,” Louise informed him. He flinched and glanced at Alex apologetically.

Alex waved his hand. “I’ll be fine; I’m not a child. Besides, Louise said I might be able to get up and walk soon.”

Magnus whipped his head around to stare at Louise, who shrugged and said, “He’s been pestering me about it for a while, so I said that to shut him up.”

Alex sat up and glared at Louise. “You lied? I trust you with my health and you lie to me about it?”

Louise snorted. “No need to be so dramatic.”

Alex turned to Magnus hopefully, asking the question with his eyes.

He just let out a short, wry bark of laughter. Then his face turned serious again. “Absolutely not. Not for another two and a half months at least.”

Alex sat back in his cot and crossed his arms, ignoring the dull ache that the action sent through his arm where he’d been stabbed with a rebel’s bayonet. He pouted. “T.J. was shot in the leg. And he is up and walking already.”

Louise frowned as if this were new information for her.

“But you were stabbed,” Magnus retorted. “Almost clean through your side. Would you like to walk with a cane for the rest of your life?”

“I wouldn’t mind it,” Alex muttered sullenly, “if it means I can still walk.” He’d had plans for today. Loki had said she was going to stay near Magnus’s mansion, and that meant she was a threat to everyone here or in the general vicinity. She might get bored and launch a full-scale battle nearby. Alex was determined to confront his mother soon, and had hoped that might have even been today. But Magnus had dashed his hopes, or maybe he’d just made the obvious apparent again. Alex could never take on Loki by himself, in the state he was in.

Louise coughed, reminding both of them of her presence. “While you two bicker, I’m going to check on T.J.” She turned to Magnus then, shooting him a disapproving look. “Meanwhile, you might want to make yourself useful, instead of arguing with one of the patients.”

Magnus blushed. “Yes, of course.”

And just like that, Alex was alone again, free to spend the rest of the day stewing in restless and bitter energy. Perfect. He couldn’t even find Jack anywhere in the room of busy nurses and doctors.

“I could do with a book, at least,” he murmured crossly.

He did not find any books in the vicinity, neither did he expect to. Eventually, he settled into glowering at the opposite wall, eyes half-lidded in boredom.

He began to search the room, not exactly sure what he was looking for. Louise was fussing over T.J., even though he didn’t seem to be in any pain or discomfort. When he tried to protest to her fretting, she snapped and bunched her hands in her skirt as if to remind herself to keep her irritation in check. Alex figured she was chastising him for overexerting his leg wound. T.J. shot a glance towards Alex’s bedside and shrugged in a What can you do? kind of gesture. Alex smirked back at him.

He caught a glimpse of Jack, but he was deep in conversation with another doctor.

Magnus was back to flitting about the rooms ordering around nurses and physicians, counting supplies, and trying to tend to everyone’s needs at once.

Alex smiled softly and rested his head against the wall. A spider was scuttling across the ceiling, just beginning to weave its web in the corner.

Alex remembered how he used to be fascinated with spiders. He didn’t remember why; just that he’d loved them. He’d even spent many of his days hunting his father’s estate searching for a few to keep as pets.

On Alex’s eleventh birthday he remembered how all she’d wanted was to hide in the undergrowth of their backyard for eternity, watching the spiders work diligently at their webs, creating something that was solely their own, for no one else but themselves.

How pathetic could she get, sitting here being envious of spiders? She was ruining the new suit her stepmother had gotten her, and she dug her gleaming new shoes into the dirt, gaining a twisted satisfaction from seeing the shiny surface cloud up from the fine soil.

She’d protested so much that day. The itching and pain in her body were horrible that day, and it only worsened when he was forced to put on that suit for his grand birthday gala. She thought she could survive maybe a few hours, but as soon as her father pulled out the “why must you be so ungrateful?” and “why can you not act normal for just one day?” cards she’d fled in a mess of tears and angry curses at her father.

So she found herself curled up hiding in the backyard shrubs with tears streaming down her cheeks and leaves and twigs entangled in her hair. The itching in her legs was worsening with every second that passed in that dreaded suit and waistcoat.

She was just starting to wonder if it was worth it to risk getting caught sneaking into her room so she could change when a familiar voice interrupted her thoughts.

“What is wrong, darling?” Loki asked.

Alex glanced up, and found her mother standing right outside the bush she was hiding in. She was wearing a sultry red dress with jewels that glinted in the sunlight. “Birthday went wrong?”

After a moment of surprise, Alex nodded miserably, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

Loki handed her a pearly white handkerchief, much too pretty to use to wipe your face with. Nevertheless, Alex blew her nose into the handkerchief.

That was when Loki still cared about maintaining the lie that she loved Alex. And when Alex was still too naive to see through her act.

“What happened?” her mother asked.

Alex stared intently at a ladybug resting peacefully on a twig. “I hate him.”

She didn’t elaborate; she didn’t need to. Loki had listened to Alex’s rants over her father many times over.

“And he said he was going to renounce me,” Alex mumbled. “My name, my claim to the estate, everything. He actually seemed like he meant it this time.”

“What did you do this time?”

Alex ducked her head. “I said I wanted a dress.”

Loki brushed her fingers across Alex’s shoulder comfortingly. “I might be able to arrange that.”

Alex was sure her entire face split into a grin, betraying her true desire. Loki reached out and helped her crawl out of the shrub, then waved her hand.

Now, Alex recalled that beautiful dress as clearly in his mind as if he were wearing it now. A simple pink-and-green gown that she’d thought was worthy of a princess at the time. She was able to sneak it into her room and wore it whenever she could. She’d treasured that dress for three years. She didn’t care that no one could see how pretty she looked in it; that dress was for her and her alone.

Alex rather missed that dress now. Eventually, her father had found it hidden under her bed and tossed it out the door, along with a few of her belongings and Alex herself. And just like that, she’d been disowned; discarded from her own family like a pair of gloves her stepmother had worn only once.

As he watched Magnus flicker from one person to another, sometimes pausing to chat with someone, he was also reminded of the day he’d known he was different. Today was a maze of memories, he supposed.

Alex had been younger, maybe eight or nine, and his grandfather had been teaching him how to use the potter’s wheel he kept in the shed. Alex had been begging for him to mentor him for months now, and he’d only now given in to Alex’s wishes.

He watched his grandfather carefully mold the clay under his steady hands, transfixed. His grandfather spoke in calm, even tones, demonstrating when to lift the pressure his hands were delivering to the clay so that it didn’t give way under his touch, and where to place his hands so the clay came out smooth and a consistent width.

Then, Alex caught sight of a strange figure lurking in the shadows of the doorway, their face obscured. There was a man standing there, dressed in a fitted white suit and a pristine white hat, a faint grin gracing his sharp features. His eyes glinted with something Alex couldn’t discern, and it unnerved him.

He was so wrapped up in watching the stranger that he only realized that he’d ruined the clay piece he was working on when his grandfather rested his hands on top of his.

Alex glanced down, and was vaguely startled when he saw that he’d kept his hands to the clay for so long that he’d worn it right through. It was already collapsing under his touch.

He apologized profusely to his grandfather, but the old man just smiled his usual warm smile and said that they could start over, no problem.

But Alex stole another glance at the strange man standing in the doorway, and hastily asked to be excused. His grandfather’s face took on an expression of mournfulness, but just as quickly he shrugged and began to clean up the pottery wheel. He suggested that they start over tomorrow. Alex agreed and rushed to the door. He was young, and too curious and whimsical to just dismiss the strange man haunting him.

Alex’s grandfather didn’t seem to see the man, but that only added to his intrigue.

The mysterious man looked down at Alex with a questioning look. Alex stared back up at him with wide eyes.

“Alex,” the man finally uttered, in a voice low and cold. It sent shivers down his spine, the way he said his name. Like it didn’t even belong to Alex. “I’ve always dreamed of meeting you. How pretty you’ve grown.”

Alex looked down at his feet, confused. He knew he was much too thin and angled for his age. He looked back up at the man, studying his face for any signs of insincerity. “Who are you? And why can’t my grandfather see you?”

The man let his mouth curl into a cold approximation of a smile, the way Alex sometimes did even at his young age. “Your grandfather isn’t allowed to look upon me. Most people aren’t. But you... well, shouldn’t my own child be able to see me?”

Alex wasn’t able to comprehend his words. So he just kept gazing up at the man, eyes full of question and confusion.

The man tilted his head to the side. “I’m Loki. I’m your mother.”

“But you are a man.” It was all Alex was able to grasp from his words. He’d never known his mother, true, and his father didn’t talk about her, unless it was to curse her out for leaving him with only Alex.

Loki shrugged. “Nevertheless. You are my blood. My child.”

Alex squinted up at the man, searching for any features that might be feminine. He couldn’t find any.

Loki sighed, and before Alex’s eyes, he started to change. His figure became curvier, his hips filled out. The smart suit transformed into a simple white gown.

Alex blinked, but the woman standing in front of her didn’t change back into the man he’d seen just seconds before. She was... still the same person, though, he could tell by the same sharp features and eyes, and the red hair that was just a bit longer now.

Loki fluffed his - her - hair, running her fingers through the strands and letting them come away longer until the thick red waves hung down halfway her back. Something fluttered in Alex’s chest - and emotion that he couldn’t quite place.

“As you can see, it’s a little trick I can do,” Loki said, shrugging. “It is just the way I am, I suppose.”

Alex’s face twitched with a wavering smile. “If I am... your child, could I do that too?”

Loki smiled apologetically. “No, I do not think so. You’re still mortal, unfortunately.”

Alex stepped closer to Loki, reaching out his hand to touch the soft fabric of her dress. A hesitant, warm feeling was growing in his chest. He did feel a little strange at times, a tingling pain that would grow in his legs and crawl up to his body and face, tugging and pulling at his skin and bones and emotions. He could never quite place the reason for it. But staring up at Loki, this woman claiming to be his mother, something clicked. And a thought grew in his mind. What if he could be like her? One minute male, then... female? Was that possible for a... what word had Loki used to describe him? Mortal? He was almost afraid of the answer.

But Alex had never been one to run away from his questions. So he voiced his musings.

Loki smiled, a little warmer this time. “That would be up to you, wouldn’t it?”

Before Alex could respond, she disappeared. Not in a flash of light or a cloud of smoke, but in the moment between thoughts. Like she’d just flickered out before Alex could comprehend her not being there.

That night, Alex pondered everything that had happened, everything Loki had revealed. After many hours of lying awake staring at the curtains swaying gently in the wind drifting out from the open window, Alex came to a realization.

Maybe he really was more like Loki than he first thought.

Alex hadn’t realized that he’d fallen asleep until he jolted awake at the sound of someone talking in hushed tones standing over his cot.

He cracked his one good eye open and was startled to find Magnus sitting in his usual seat by his bed. He was staring at a fixed point out the window, seemingly lost in thought and mumbling to himself.

Judging from the soft light filtering through the window, it was nearly dusk. Alex had slept through most of the day. Well, it was better than lying awake doing nothing, he supposed.

Magnus looked paler than usual, and his eyes dulled. Alex strained to hear what he was muttering about, but he only caught a few words. Many curses, but also: Randolph. War. And, the one word that chilled Alex to the core: Loki. Could it just be a coincidence? Of course not; coincidences didn’t exist.

What did Loki have to do with any of this? With Magnus’s uncle Randolph, of all people?

Alex lay there for a few minutes, not even daring to breathe, until he couldn’t stand Magnus’s sad puppy eyes any longer. Honestly, it was impossible to resist the mournful look on his face; it didn’t suit him.

Alex waited until Magnus had stopped muttering, then looked up at him, a faint smile crossing his features. “I just remembered - you never asked me how I single-handedly defeated ten soldiers in just a few minutes.”

Magnus startled; he seemed to have forgotten he was there. He clutched a fistful of his shirt, wrinkling the fabric. “Dammit, don’t scare me like that. I thought you were asleep.”

Alex stretched. “I don’t exactly have anything better to do to pass the time, true.”

“So? Are you trying to kill me with anticipation?”

Alex grinned, and let his head fall back onto the pillow. “Well... as you very well know, I was stabbed in the shoulder. Damn rebels; forget trigger-happy, they love their bayonets. Well, one of them went running for me, but his friend was going for T.J. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I wasn’t really thinking; instinct took over, I suppose.

“I pushed the one who had stabbed me into the dirt; I think I might have broken something in his face. Right before the other rebel was going to stab T.J. in the heart, I got to him first. Or, rather, I jumped in front of him and took the blow for him.” He wrinkled his nose at the memory. He remembered everything so clearly: T.J.’s wide panic-filled eyes, the smell of blood and feces and fear, the glint of the rebel’s bayonet. Everything but the pain, strangely enough. That was a blur.

“I wasn’t going to let that stop me, though. I discarded my gun.” He glared at Magnus. “Do not look at me like that. And no, I don’t know what I was thinking then.”

“Please don’t tell me you fought him with your bare hands while you were injured,” sighed Magnus.

Alex grinned triumphantly. “That is exactly what I did. Ah, Maggie, you know me so well.”

“Please do not call me that,” he muttered. But his cheeks turned pink and he didn’t protest the nickname further.

“Never underestimate the power of a fist and sheer anger,” Alex continued. “I took him out along with about five other rebels who tried to get near us. T.J. was in no shape to fight.”

He heard someone call from a few beds over, “Neither were you, and that didn’t stop you! You were babying me, don’t deny it!”

Alex cackled as T.J. frowned. Magnus sighed in frustration, but it was obvious he was holding back a silly grin.

Alex allowed himself to bask in that smile for a moment; that smile was what he’d been looking for. Success.

Chapter Text

The days slipped by like water through their fingers. September drew to a close, the days grew shorter, and the months soon passed by with little to note - except for, of course, Fredericksburg. At the end of December, a surge of wounded soldiers - both Union and Confederate - sought shelter at Magnus’s convalescent home, as it seemed to be the closest one by for both sides.

There weren’t many protests from the soldiers at having to share space with the “enemy.” They just seemed tired of all the constant fighting. Fredericksburg had been costly, after all.

Magnus was busier than ever; they hadn’t had such an influx of wounded and sick since the second battle of Manassas. He couldn’t remember the last time he got to sit down and take a breath that wasn’t choked with the tang of blood or the heady scent of anesthesia. Neither did he have time to just... talk. With Alex. With Jack. With the other nurses and doctors for more than a few seconds that it took to deliver clipped orders.

Christmas came and went with a few minor celebrations among the nurses and patients. The past year had been taxing on the mansion’s resources, and they had no other way of replenishing the money they’d spent. They were relying on Randolph’s family inheritance to get them through the war.

So there were a few more fanciful dinners than usual and a few gift exchanges, but that was all. Magnus barely noticed, knowing that this holiday was just a reminder of another year gone and past, with the war still raging.

About a week into the new year, Randolph’s mansion was paid a visit by a group of soldiers who seemed to be passing through.

There were four of them, two of them only about sixteen years old and scrawny. Nevertheless, they all wore equal expressions of giddiness and disbelief. When Mallory went out to see what was going on, one of them shoved a slip of paper into her face.

“Look!” he cried. “I still can’t believe it.”

Mallory snatched the paper out of his grasp and peered at it. As she read, her eyes got progressively wider. She turned on her heel and pushed through the door to the room where most of their patients were resting. She held the paper up for everyone to see, then started reading from it before most people could process what was happening.

“‘By the President of the United States of America: a Proclamation. Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

“‘That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.’”

She looked up from her recital, an expression of hopeful disbelief on her face. She turned back to the paper quickly at the expectant looks of the nurses and patients alike. No one dared speak.

Her eyes skimmed over the words, muttering under her breath as she read along, “Er... ‘I, Abraham Lincoln... by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief,’ ... What does that word mean? ... ‘Including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons,’ that is good.... ‘And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.’”

She glanced up before reading through the rest. “‘And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.’”

There was a pause before she muttered, “What a mouthful.”

Magnus cast a glance at T.J., who was sitting statuesque in his cot, his eyes wide and hesitantly hopeful.

Then someone sitting in the corner threw something into the air - a roll of bandages. It unwound in the air and fell to the floor with a dull thump, where it continued to unravel across the floor. It finally landed at T.J.’s bedside.

When everyone turned to glare at him, Alex looked around, shrugging. “Well? This is an accomplishment! We ought to be celebrating....”

An unspoken agreement hung in the air: the soldiers from either side of the war would try not to kill each other, or fight over this new proclamation from the president. Hell, some people in the room didn’t even recognize Lincoln as the president.

That didn’t mean they could celebrate together. Alex, realizing this (probably know this all along), huffed and crossed his arms - his signature move, Magnus had come to realize. “You are all idiots,” the soldier said. “Can’t we put aside those stupid prejudices and rivalries for once?”

“That’s what the war is about,” Magnus muttered. Alex shot him a look, a warning to back him up despite his questionable logic.

Magnus cleared his throat. “What he means to say is, don’t kill each other over this new... development. After all,” he said, glaring out at the masses of expectant and flustered soldiers, "this is still my convalescent home, and I can just as easily kick you out."

T.J. was sitting awfully silent next to Louise, who still looked rather stricken.

“My mother would’ve wanted to see this,” he murmured. “It was her one dream, the one that hadn’t been beaten out of her, despite losing a child, despite a lifetime of hard labor and horrible treatment. She would have been so happy that she’d hug me for ten straight minutes.” He laughed, hoarse and quiet. “She wouldn’t even wait a day to throw down her plows and tools at her master’s feet and march right off that damned plantation.

“She might have been just a few years short of freedom.”

The room was deathly silent, hanging on each shy, resigned word.

Louise slumped down beside him, a wistful, regretful look in her eyes that somehow made her look younger. They were only talking to each other now. “My mother didn’t trust anyone after Papa died. She won’t trust that slip of paper either, I know it.”

Her face hardened, and just like that, she was regular old Louise again. “I remember once, when I was trying to get her to escape with me and a group of other slaves, she said that she couldn’t care less about herself, that she’d already lived too long to be able to enjoy the freedom, knowing that she could have had it her entire life if the circumstances had been different.” She shook her head. “I never understood what she meant by that. It didn’t make any sense... take what you can get, right...?”

She looked up from staring at her clenched fists only when T.J. nudged her, his face understanding. Her eyes widened as she took in the large, silent room full of people watching her as if she would crack and shatter like glass at any moment, and bristled. “What are you all looking at? Don’t you have things to do, places to be?”

They all snapped out of their trances, looking away with red faces at having intruded in such a quiet, personal moment. That these hardened, worn soldiers were still embarrassed by such small things, Magnus found intriguing.

The days following the Proclamation were... interesting, to say the least. It was definitely surprising to see that most of the soldiers kept their peace. There were scuffles between rebels and Union soldiers, and even between soldiers on the same side, but the rest didn’t seem to have the strength to fight over anything at this point.

Four days after the two soldiers came by with news of the Proclamation, Magnus had just broken up an argument between two Union soldiers. From what he could tell, they were fighting over whether or not the new colored recruits should be paid the same as the other soldiers; if they ought to be paid at all. They began to brawl, but that was when Magnus had to cut in. He wondered if T.J. really had to deal with this on a daily basis.

Magnus asked him so when he later saw the soldier.

T.J. nodded, looking nonchalant. “Yes, that seems about right. Right now I get ten dollars every month, but it is actually seven, with the cost of clothing.”

Magnus’s eyes widened. “That isn’t fair! White soldiers get thirteen, don’t they? They don’t have to pay for their own uniforms.”

T.J. stared up at him, dismay written on his features. “There isn’t any point in protesting the rules when they won’t change. I am just glad they let me carry a gun. Hell, at first, they wouldn’t even let me enlist, but I soon won them over with my charm.” He flashed a toothy grin. Magnus was certain he’d only been allowed to enlist when the Union began running out of white volunteers.

“Still,” Magnus mumbles, glaring at the two Union soldiers from the corner of his eye. They flinched and turned away, sullen. They were relying on him to heal their wounds and cure their illnesses, after all, and they couldn’t chance to get on his bad side.

“You ought to have a nice long talk with your superiors,” Magnus heard Alex call, a few feet away. “If that does not work, you have my permission to fight them one-on-one.”

T.J. raised an eyebrow. “Is that a challenge? Then I accept.”

“As soon as we get out of here, you’ll confront the general and tell him to his face what you think about him,” Alex said gleefully. “Or else you are gone.”

T.J. nodded in all seriousness. “I accept your challenge.”

Magnus felt like he was witnessing a secret conversation and had no idea what was going on. So he backed away and happily found a basket of tightly packed, rolled-up bandages. He started meticulously pulling them out one-by-one, unwrapping them, and wrapping them back up again.

He heard T.J. laugh, and saw Alex beam from the corner of his eye.

Then he felt a tugging on his sleeve. He glanced down and was startled to see Alex sitting up in his cot with a sly gleam in his eye, practically hanging on his arm like a cat.

“You don’t have to feel so left out, Maggie,” he said. “You are part of this friend group as well.”

Magnus dropped the rolls of bandages, sighing. “I told you not to call me that.”

“Would you prefer... what is it Mallory calls you? Beantown?”

“No, that’s even worse!” he cried, laughing.

T.J. rolled his eyes. “You two...”

Alex glared, though the look was laced with playfulness. Nevertheless, T.J. shut up immediately.

Alex nudged Magnus’s shoulder, and Magnus nudged him back. They continued like that for a while, acting like children who fancied themselves as sweethearts. T.J. was highly aware of this.

Louise sat down next to him, spreading her hands over her skirt in an attempt to smooth out the wrinkles. “They’re close, aren’t they?”

T.J. nodded. “Does it make you feel jealous?”

Louise frowned. “Why would it? Magnus and I were only ever acquaintances.”

“No, I mean their relationship. Have you never wanted something like that? Something so effortless and charming?”

Louise cocked her head, staring at him with a blank expression. “I thought I already had that?”

T.J.’s eyes widened, and he glanced around the room as if searching for whoever she was talking about. Louise, on the other hand, demonstrates one of her longest sighs. “You fool. I thought we were friends.”

It took him a moment to process what she’d said. Then his face broke into a wide grin. “I got Louise herself to befriend me. Now that is what I call an accomplishment.”

Randolph had decided to pack up all his things and travel to Boston to find out more about his supposed “lead.” He wanted Magnus to look over the mansion while he was gone. As if he didn’t do that already.

“What more do you think you’re going to find?” Magnus protested. “It isn’t like you are going to track down this Loki character through some damned brooch.”

Randolph paused in the middle of throwing a bundle of clothes into a pack. Magnus was surprised he even remembered to pack clothes.

“Why do you not believe me?” his uncle asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “This might even stop the war if I found and caught Loki. I know you would do anything for that.”

He had hit home. Magnus wavered by the doorway. He decided he’d humor Randolph.

“But... are you sure about this? It’s been years now, and you have barely...” He stopped mid-sentence at Randolph’s glare that was equal parts appalled and offended.

“All right, do what you want,” Magnus said, backtracking. “I will stay watching over the mansion while you’re gone.”

“Or you could come with me...,” his uncle mused. “You might finally understand what I am trying to accomplish.”

As much as it would be nice to leave this stuffy convalescent home once in a while, Magnus couldn’t leave his patients, and Randolph knew it.

Magnus just left out the fact that he was also staying for another reason. A specific person....

Randolph left, with hardly a farewell to Magnus or the teams or nurses and doctors. Magnus surprisingly didn’t mind - a sense of fragile peace had fallen over the mansion despite everything.

January melted into February, and that, in turn, gave way to March. The days were getting progressively warmer, which made Magnus feel giddy.

Alex’s wounds were healing well - he was now able to walk around short distances (though with a heavy limp and sometimes Magnus forced a cane into his hands), and the gash in his arm was almost fully closed up. The eye wound was still questionable, though. It was definitely a tricky thing to deal with. Alex kept telling him to stop worrying and fussing over him, but Magnus couldn’t help it. Was that not his job, after all?

Mallory was enjoying her time with her husband - the knowledge that the war wouldn’t snatch him out of her hands again making her heart lighter. She and Halfborn could be heard bickering good-naturedly (and sometimes not-so-good-naturedly) almost all the time, providing an oddly comforting perpetual noise.

Louise and T.J. seemed to be getting along well; Louise spent lots of her free time talking with T.J. in the shade of the hemlock trees in the expansive backyard. She seemed looser, happier than Magnus had ever known her to be, and she could be seen wearing a smile that more resembled contentedness than her usual tight one. Magnus didn’t know T.J. as well, but he could tell the soldier was also happier than he'd been since who knew how long.

They could almost forget that a war was going on.

One evening, as Magnus and Alex were sitting on the porch, Alex brought up a question he’d never thought about deeply, let alone talked about. Alex did that a lot, made him think about things that he hadn’t really considered before.

“How did your uncle become... the way he is?”

Magnus was too startled to answer for a moment. He couldn’t seem to meet Alex’s eye as he answered, “His family died. Lost at sea years ago. After that, he became convinced that it couldn’t have just been ‘a storm.’ he keeps trying to find evidence of the supernatural or fantastical. But... I don’t really know the rest. It happened so gradually that I probably didn’t even realize it at the time.”

Alex thought about this for a moment. “Believing in the fantastical is so much easier than believing it was just chance,” he said. “I understand that. At least, I used to.”

“Then what happened?” Magnus asked.

Alex shrugged. “I found that the fantastical is not as... enjoyable as some may think. Sometimes it is worse than chance.”

Magnus shot a bemused glance at him, but he didn’t elaborate.

“Now he thinks some old deity is in control of everything,” Magnus continued. “That’s why he left so suddenly. Because of some brooch found in the wreckage of the ship his family drowned on.”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “Oh, what pantheon?”

“Norse, I think. But what was that specific god’s name...?”

Alex’s brow furrowed, growing apprehensive.

Magnus snapped his fingers. “Aha! Loki!”

But when he looked over at Alex, the soldier was sitting as still as if he were carved from marble. When you read about people becoming motionless for one reason or another, you hear about a stricken look frozen on their face. But no, Alex just looked... blank. Like he couldn’t even decide on what emotion he ought to be feeling right now.

Magnus nudged him. “Did I say something?”

Alex startled and stared wide-eyed at him. “I’m sorry. I think I am just... not feeling well. Yes. It’s chilly out, that’s all. Just... cold and unpleasant.”

“You’re rambling, Alex,” Magnus said, raising an eyebrow. When Alex didn’t respond, he simply leaned closer to the soldier, letting him rest his head on his shoulder. The air really was boisterous and frigid despite the bright sunlight. Spring couldn’t seem to decide what weather it wanted to have throughout the months.

“You’re like goddamn sunshine,” Alex murmured. It was true, though - Magnus had a perpetual scent of forest life and what could only be described as sunlight about him despite his job that was filled with so much blood and steel and the sickly sweet smell of chloroform.

Magnus simply smirked and hummed in acknowledgment.

Chapter Text

Tell him. Tell him. Tell him tell him tellhimtell -

Alex’s thoughts were driving her mad. Ever since that conversation with Magnus two days ago, that conversation that had started out so normal and had quickly turned into a disaster, and, sadly, no amount of warm hugs was going to change that.

Of course, how could she even begin to tell Magnus about her relation to Loki? And would that involve telling him about herself? The way she couldn’t even decide on the answer to a question that ought to have been automatically written out for you at birth.

Before, Alex would have never even considered telling anyone her secret. But now she wasn’t so sure. The way Magnus looked at her was not in any way normal to her. He was much too prone to staring, and it simultaneously unnerved, flustered, and delighted her. That fact that anyone would even look at her as if she were a human being was so inconceivable...!

Oh, how could she possibly risk that all for the truth?

Obviously, her dilemma was enormous and she’d been thinking of hardly anything else for the past two days, deliberating over the same points, pros and cons and worries.

On the third day, she told herself to stop wondering and start actually thinking of ways to tell him. After all, it would either end in disaster and ruins or... better than that. She couldn’t allow herself to get her hopes up.

Magnus, she began, there’s something you do not know about me. I am... well, there isn’t a word for it, but I am not exactly male. At least, not most of the time. I know it sounds very confusing, but... Agh! This is not going the way I want it to, even in my head.

She took a deep breath and started over again, but she soon hit a dead end. This continued for the next few minutes until she finally huffed and tried to quiet the incessant murmurs of Tell him, tell him what? in her head.

She could not just give up, though. She owed Magnus that much. And the ever-present, ever-confusing emotions that were caused by the simple things, like his unknowing compassion, or his humor.

Wasn’t there a word for that? Alex couldn’t think of it.

Every time Magnus passed by her bedside, sometimes stopping to say a word or two, sometimes just giving her funny looks in an effort to make her laugh, she felt a tugging in her chest that urged her to tell him the whole truth.

Before Loki went and ruined it for her, as she inevitably would.

So she waited until nightfall when there might be a lull in Magnus’s duties. She wouldn’t allow herself to rehearse her speech two thousand times because that would just wreck her nerves even more.

Finally, as the sunlight was fading and turning a pale orange, Alex grabbed her cane (stupid as it was, it helped her to walk) and slipped behind Magnus as he was stacking fresh bandages on a shelf in the foyer. She tapped him on the shoulder, cheeky grin already in place, though even she could tell it looked forced. Magnus would surely notice immediately.

Magnus jumped, dropping two rolls of bandages. He turned around, brows furrowed. “Please don’t let that become a habit of yours.”

“Too late; third time’s the charm.”

He hastily skipped over the pleasantries. “So? What concerns you?”

Alex chewed on her lip. So it really was that obvious, or at least to Magnus it was. He was not making this any easier.

Alex motioned towards the back door. “Can we talk in private?”

Once they were outside, Alex took her time settling herself comfortably on the porch, resting her cane beside her, breathing in the sharp night air. Until Magnus started to get restless, and he opened his mouth to ask her what this was all about.

Alex silenced the bickering voices in her head with a loud and stern Shut up! Then she took a deep breath and looked away from Magnus’s face, which was much too sincere and curious to not make her feel vulnerable and riddled with anxiety.

“I never knew my mother,” she began, diving right into it. “It never rather bothered me, because I figured if she abandoned me with my father, then she couldn’t be any better than him or my stepmother. So that was that, no more fuss.”

She inclined her head slightly, deliberating. “Until, of course, I actually met her. She was... not what I expected, to say the least. A person of honeyed words and a mysterious history, she drew me in with her lingering shadows. She flitted through the rest of my life inconsistently, showing up around the manor every month, year or so. At first, I thought it was because she cared about me. She did nice things for me, and at the time I didn’t really realize that disappearing in and out of my life wasn’t exactly normal for a family like mine. I didn’t exactly have anyone to model her after.” Alex laughed ruefully. “I was very gullible then.”

She couldn’t tell him about Samirah, though. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And though it pained her to hold this crucial bit of information to herself, something told her Magnus wouldn’t protest or press her.

So she skimmed over that part, squeezing her eyes shut. “Then... I upset her. Which is an enormous understatement. She went berserk, did something I - I’ll always regret.”

“If it was your mother who did it, then you shouldn’t regret it as if it were your fault,” Magnus said.

Alex groaned and pulled at the roots of her hair. “But it is! If I hadn’t upset her -”

Magnus snatched her wrist, glaring at her, though it was laced with some other emotion she couldn’t place. “No. I went down that dark rabbit hole once, and I can tell you it is not worth it. You cannot change what happened, or what someone else did. I am not telling you to get over it, but don’t let yourself be consumed by self-blame.”

Alex froze. She knew how Magnus didn’t really like physical contact, but now his eyes were steely and certain.

She nodded weakly. “Alright. Alright.”

“You don’t have to continue,” said Magnus.

Well, it was too late now. She might as well suck up and get through with it.

She picked up farther into her story, tripping over her words now. “Despite all this... As much as I hate to admit it, she helped me discover a part of who I was - am. Specifically, the fact that I wasn’t always a boy. Sometimes - most of the time, actually - I felt feminine. It sounds” - she laughed abruptly - “very strange, I know. But it is not my place to make you understand if you do not want to. For me, it’s just... incomprehensible to simply stay one sex my whole life. My mother helped me realize that. Though I am certainly not even close to fully understanding it myself.”

When she looked back up at Magnus, she expected to see him looking disgusted, or angry, or at least amused, as if he did not believe her. But his face didn’t display any of those emotions. Instead, he sat there looking pensive - as if he was actually trying to understand her... situation? Condition?

After an eternity and a half, he glanced over at Alex. His usually blank gray eyes now had a spark of curiosity flickering in their depths. “Would it be rude if I asked what it’s like?”

“You don’t think that I’m lying? Or that I’m joking? Or I’m just confused, or I’m mad, or an aberration, or -”

His eyes widened, slightly angry, slightly distraught. “You’ve had too much time to think about this, haven’t you? But no, I don’t think you are any of those things. I just want to know more about you.”

About her. She did not know where to start, now that she knew someone was interested. Rational side of her brain be damned, no matter how loudly it was yelling at her to get a grip on her emotions. “Well... I only knew about the way I was until I met my mother. She explained some things to me, and surprisingly, they made perfect sense. Fit right into my perception of the world, however strange and absurd they may seem. It fit me. Later, I was able to discern when I had shifted from female to male or vice versa. It was very disorienting - sometimes it took ages, sometimes it happened in a split second. I could usually tell when a change was coming on, though, when I started getting these... itching sensations over my arms, my legs, my face. Sometimes they were worse than other times, sometimes I could barely sense them. But they were always there, like a neverending, throbbing headache.”

She kicked the wood paneling of the porch. “This isn’t making any sense, is it?”

Magnus did still look a little lost, but another part of his expression was lit up with recognition, replacing his confusion. “No, no, keep going.”

Alex shrugged, her words turning blunt. “There isn’t much more to tell. I tried to be myself, my father did not respect that, so he kicked me out of his household. I survived alone for a while. Better to have no home at all and live on my own rules than to have a warm place to sleep every night but with no freedom of my own. Until I enlisted in the war and now” - she waved her arm around, taking in the entire convalescent home - “I am here.”

“So what about now?” Magnus asked. “Are you male, or...?”

Alex blinked, startled. It actually took her a few moments to answer, afraid that the tingles tracing their way up her spine and through her head meant she was changing right then and there. But no... these were different. Less of an itch and more of a warm pink-and-orange spark. “Female. She and her.”

Magnus didn’t speak for a while; Alex started to think that revealing herself as female as of that moment had finally made his tolerance snap. But when he glanced back at her he just looked flustered. He quickly looked away again, face obviously red even in the dim light.

Finally, he blurted, “You’re strong - you better know that. To have been through all that you have... most people probably would not have been able to stand it.”

Alex’s shoulders slumped. He had only found a single key to unlock the heavily-bolted menagerie of lies and secrets she kept buried deep down under her feet. “I am a coward,” she spat. “You do not know me well enough to say that I am strong. You have no right.”

He was stunned into silence. When Alex stood up to leave, he hardly moved.

Now, instead of feeling like a weight had been lifted from her chest, she felt more burdened than ever. So maybe Magnus hadn’t pushed her away or shut off his emotions from her, but he’d been almost too understanding for her to trust. It was not that she doubted his acceptance - it was that it had come so easily. He was too kind for his own good, and that was what she both loved and despised about him. She was leading him astray with her damned maudlin plea.

And of course, she was a fool. A fool for being so weak and self-pitying; a fool for shutting someone away, yet again, because what had that gotten her last time? A load of heartbreak and regret.

Still, she could not turn around and sit back down next to Magnus and tell him whatever she wanted to say - though she didn’t really understand what she wanted to say to him in the first place.

Because she would never learn.

She did not dream peacefully that night. (Surprise, surprise.) Later, she didn’t remember much, except for snippets and flashes. There was a cavern, and black roiling waves confined under glimmering silver nets. It reminded her of the nightmare she’d had the first night she arrived at the convalescent home, only with less blood.

There were two people standing in the shadows of the cavern, one thin with disheveled hair, the other with a stocky build and a scarf covering their hair.

Oh, she’d recognize those silhouettes anywhere.

They stood looking away from each other, back to back. Samirah stared at the ceiling of the cavern as if she could see right through the granite and obsidian into the sky that she longed to travel and explore. Her head was wreathed in a mess of reds and purples, as always a ceaseless confusion.

Magnus was barely a corporeal form, more of a shadow than a person. Whenever Alex tried to look him straight on, he flickered and began to dissolve. Bright white bandages speckled with red were wrapped tightly around his wrists and hands, almost like shackles.

Then, in the blink of an eye, Samirah fell to her knees, and Magnus began to fade - just another of the cavern’s shadows. All that was left of him was the blood-spattered bandages crumpled on the floor.

And even as her vision blurred and swam, and as she stumbled toward the shadows of her friends, and as the ground rose up to meet her, as the rational side of her brain chided her for being so affected - this was only a dream, after all, only a dream - Alex screamed long and loud, letting all the confusion and frustration and pain and anger out in one self-indulgent moment.

If this was the price of her cowardice, then she figured it was only fitting.

Chapter Text

Alex Fierro had always been somewhat of an enigma to Magnus, and this new revelation did not exactly shed light on the soldier’s shadowy, faraway silhouette.

After Alex had simply abandoned him on the porch after dropping that bombshell, he’d attempted to follow him - her, he chided himself. It was going to take a while to get used to that.

However, when he’d finally regained the sense to get up and walk into the convalescent home, he’d found Alex curled up under her thin sheets fast asleep. She kept muttering in her sleep and fidgeting, but Magnus was too much of a coward to stay and sit next to her.

T.J. peered at Magnus as he backed away from Alex. “What happened? He just charged in here and collapsed on the bed. I could almost see the storm cloud hovering around his head.”

Magnus resisted the urge to correct him with a curt “she and her.” But he knew that it wasn’t his place to tell anyone else. So he simply shrugged and turned away, busying himself with grabbing a basket of dirty bandages and making his way across the room with his head down.

His mind drifted back to Alex - no surprise there. He knew that at best, society would react with confusion if she were to flaunt who she was, and at worst, they would tear her apart whilst laughing the whole time.

But knowing Alex, she would probably jump right back up with a witty retort already on her tongue.

Magnus was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t realize he’d been staring at the basket of soiled bandages for a few minutes now, standing stock-still. He dumped the contents of the basket into a larger bin, for someone to take out and burn later. But staring at the pile, which was already quite high, he figured he could just do it himself. He snatched up the basket and carried it out to the backyard, where he quickly made a small fire.

As he watched the contents burn, he caught sight of something in the dim light. Alex’s crutch; she’d left it by the porch in her hurry to get inside.

He sighed and picked it up. It was crudely made by one of the surgeons, with a few splinters covering the wood. Magnus absently plucked them out.

He thought about Alex’s words: Specifically, the fact that I wasn’t always a boy. Sometimes - most of the time, actually - I felt feminine. It wasn’t particularly difficult for him to wrap his head around her words - in fact, he had met a few people that felt similarly in the years after his mother’s death when he was living on the streets of Boston. Those people had formed a small community full of other outcasts or folk just trying to understand a part of themselves. Magnus had been a part of that secret community. That Alex still felt so alone made him want to wrap the soldier up in a fierce hug - regardless of how she would bite and scratch.

Well, in all honesty, he would probably burst into embarrassed flames before Alex could deliver her own fatal blow.

It made perfect sense that Alex couldn’t stay one sex her entire life. She was constantly changing, exploring, trying. Nothing about Alex Fierro was fixed; Magnus had known that for a while.

Well, he wasn’t going to allow her to sulk any longer. The fire was dying, and the smell of dried blood and cerate was masked by the thin veil of smoke rising into the air. He picked up the empty basket and the crutch and went back inside, instantly missing the smell of wood and the fresh night.

He made his way through the door, past a few nurses lingering in the entrance hall, and tried to stall as long as he could until a nurse politely but firmly told him to get out of the way. Magnus tripped forward in a decidedly ungraceful manner. He found his way towards the end of the wide room, where Alex’s cot was shoved into the corner, cloaked in shadows.

Alex was still stubbornly curled up under the thin wool covers. Contrary to her fitful sleep an hour ago, now she lay as still and silent as a dead person. Magnus almost wanted to check her pulse to see if she was still breathing....

He didn’t even bother to sit in his usual seat next to Alex’s cot, simply slumped down onto his knees by her bed. The floor’s cold, hard wood drove into his knees, but he welcomed the discomfort. He stared at Alex’s back turned away from him. Her hair lay flat on one side of her head and stuck up at every angle imaginable on the other. The worn bandage still covering her left eye had taken on a dull color of white, and Magnus figured it was about time to change it. Or even just be rid of it for good. At this point, it couldn’t get infected, and it could only heal on its own now.

As he was thinking, Alex finally stirred. But she only flipped onto her other side and kept sleeping quietly. He tried not to stare, remembering that it was a bad habit of his - especially around Alex Fierro, dammit.

Alex kept twitching in her sleep. Her hands reached up to bunch a fistful of her shirt, and moisture beaded in the corners of her eyes. Needless to say, Magnus panicked. He’d never seen the soldier show any signs of vulnerability, and tonight alone he’d witnessed Alex spill her history to him, storm away in a cloud of confusion and pain, and now she was crying? This wasn’t the Alex he knew. Or at least, not the Alex she ever dared to reveal.

Magnus did the first thing he thought of: he reached out and brushed a single tear away. And was it his imagination, or did Alex’s lips curl into a faint smile? Either way, she stilled once again, so Magnus kept his hand there, resting softly on her cheek, not knowing what to do anymore. This was probably the worst mistake he’d ever made, and that was saying something. He had work to do; the nurses would wonder what he was doing. Alex would wake up and land a blow to him that would certainly render him unconscious for days on end -

Alex’s hands slowly unclenched from their death grip on her shirt. One hand found Magnus’s own still resting on her cheek and laced their fingers together.

All right, maybe he could live with this.

To distract himself from getting too flustered, he started talking. About small things, like the weather, or how the trees were finally shaking off their thin blankets of snow and outstretching their arms to welcome the spring. The growing season was coming in late this year, whereas, in Boston, this could have been considered early.

Somehow, his one-sided conversation turned to his years of living on the streets of Boston. Alex had told him that she’d lived homeless before she drafted into the war, so they had that in common, at least. She wouldn’t hear him talking anyway, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the aftereffects of spilling his heart and history out to Alex Fierro.

“My mother died when I was fourteen. I still have no clue as to the cause of her death. Because I just ran. She told me to, so I ran as fast as I possibly could. Didn’t look back until I heard the windows shattering and the room bursting into flames. That was how I became a vagrant in Boston. I - I guess you can tell that already by the accent, though.” He smiled sheepishly.

Magnus stared at their hands interlocked, lying on the cot by Alex’s head. His own dirty, pale fingers and her freckled, slender ones. He focused on that and continued speaking in a whisper.

“I was weak. I was a coward. I was selfish. I still am. That’s the reason I am still trapped in my uncle’s mansion tending to the dying. Because I wasn’t strong enough to offer myself up to the death and glory of war. When Randolph finally found me in Boston, the war had already begun, and Lincoln was looking for men to enlist. My uncle bid to pay the Union for the weight of a uniform and a rifle to be lifted from my back. I took him up on his offer. So here I am. Blood on my hands, but at least it is not my fault.”

Alex hardly stirred, save for her eyelashes, which fluttered as if only disturbed by a breeze. Magnus’s words drifted from tangible sentences to singular words murmured into the shadows, where they quickly evaporated before he could discern what they read. He had the impression that he was repeating the same few words over and over, but he could not tell.

He didn’t realize when he fell asleep, but he woke hours later with sunlight just beginning to filter through the windows and nurses already going about their usual duties. Magnus lifted his head lazily, vaguely realizing that he was still lying by Alex’s cot quite unceremoniously. He felt numb.

When he looked over at the soldier, she was staring at him, her face blank with confusion. But as soon as Magnus met her gaze, many emotions passed over her face in the space between a breath. He eye took on a gleam of mischievousness, but it was soon replaced with a warm and innocent delight until finally landing on pure, utter vexation.

Magnus followed her gaze to where it landed on their fingers still laced together. He was suddenly aware of how close they were; he could make out the traces of amber in her eye, and the strands of hair clinging to her temple that were slightly greasy from lack of wash. Her breath was stale and smelled a bit like strawberries - which was strange, since strawberries were hard to come by these days.

Alex seemed to finally snap out of her muddled morning thoughts. She snatched her hand away and retreated behind a mask of indifference. It was frightening how easily she could call up that cold, hard facade, and how genuine it appeared. “What do you want?” was her affectionate way of greeting.

He figured it would not be a good idea to bring up last night just yet. “Calm down. I am just going to see how your wounds are healing.”

She relaxed a fraction. In time, she allowed him to take a look at the wound around her left eye. Magnus took his time in unwrapping the dressings, finding that his hands were stalling at the soft strands of Alex’s hair that would occasionally brush at his fingertips and wrists.

Alex, on the other hand, drummed her fingers on her leg and hummed impatiently. Finally, she snapped, “When will you be done?”

Magnus startled and tore off the rest of the bandage. A part of it had stuck to Alex’s skin, and she let out a little cry. Magnus flinched. “Sorry for that...”

“Damn right,” she said through gritted teeth, covering her eye with her hand.

Magnus didn’t move towards her again for another minute. They just sat there, him with his hands in his lap, twisting the soiled bandages around his wrists with no idea as to what to do, and Alex with her one eye filled to the brim with half-hearted fury and her hand cupping her injured eye; and Magnus wondered if this was simply what they would be for the rest of the time she would spend in his convalescent home. And then she would leave to who knew where, having been discharged from the war. And they would never fix this.

He was never one to simply accept things as they were determined to be.

Magnus tore the bandages off his wrists (he’d wrapped them into a complicated pattern of bracelets without his own knowledge). “Come,” he said, gently but firmly pushing aside Alex’s hand.

The swelling in her eye had gone down weeks before, but a few small, deep scars still speckled the areas from her eyebrow down to her cheekbone. Magnus was pleased to see that the infection had been successfully chased away. (How, he had no idea. The wound had been a nightmare.)

Alex winced when she tried to open her eye. Nevertheless, she was able to peek through it for a minute.

Magnus ran his thumb softly over the tender skin, determining that it was healed enough that it wouldn’t need constant dressing anymore.

“You might not be able to see very well through it,” he murmured absently.

“Things are blurry,” she agreed, “and there are a few black spots dancing around my vision.”

She attempted to look to the left side of her vision, but she hissed and clutched her eye again. “Well, I suppose moving my eye in that direction is out of the question as well,” she growled.

“So...” Magnus began fiddling with the bandages again before he sternly forced himself to stop. “Are we simply not going to talk about what you told me?”

Alex shook her head curtly. “There is nothing to talk about.”

“Yes, there is! We have to talk about how you’re not alone in the world, despite how much you think you are, and how you drive me absolutely insane! You are not this mythical being that no one can understand; you are a human being, and that also means that you have emotions. So stop hiding behind that fearless mask and... accept that everyone is struggling! You are not completely alone. Some people might even be going through similar circumstances as you are. Hell, I used to know a few people like you, so I am certain there are people in similar circumstances.”

Alex did not respond for a few moments. She simply stared, stunned into silence. Magnus didn’t think that Alex Fierro could ever be rendered speechless.

Finally, she murmured, “There are other people like me? How?”

He thought back to his times living homeless in Boston, and the people he’d met. “Well... there was this one person who said that they could not really understand the concept of man or woman, so they eventually realized that they were simply neither. And I met someone who felt similarly to you, who fluctuated between male, female, or oftentimes somewhere in between. We were good friends.”

He didn’t hear Alex speak for a long time. Eventually, he glanced up to find that she was staring intently at her hands in her lap. Her eyes shone, and a sad, lopsided smile graced her lips.

“I have never met anyone like me before. I’ve only ever told a few people who I was. Those people either shut me away, or they just threw me out. Only one person ever did try to understand it.”

Her tone said that she wasn’t ready to talk about that person.

As had been revealed many times before, Magnus was useless in situations that involved Alex Fierro and complex emotions. Or just situations that involved Alex Fierro in general. He wondered if he would ever be able to act normally around her.

Alex was absently scratching at her arms, and Magnus remembered how she’d said that that itching sensation was always present, an unwelcome index of her flexibility.

“What?” she asked. She looked down at her hands, seemed to realize what she was doing, and forced herself to stop. She glared at him. “What?” she repeated, this time more forcefully.

He coughed. “Nothing.”

Yes, he was never going to be able to act normally around Alex Fierro.

“You are so strange,” she said, leaning back in her cot and closing her eyes.

“You’re one to talk,” he countered, grinning.

Well, what was normal worth, compared to what this was?

“What do you plan on doing after the war?”

“Assuming that I survive?"

“Let’s not go down that path. And another thing, you have been discharged.”

Alex had laughed. “Like that will stop me. I’ll force them to let me back in. Just thinking about sitting idle for the rest of the war makes me feel helpless and dumb.”

“I don’t doubt that. But you haven’t answered my question.”

“Adamant, aren’t you? Alright, this is the truth.” Alex stared assertively at him, eye smoldering with something uncontrollable. “I have absolutely no idea. I suppose every man knows precisely what he wants: to go home to his children, or his sweetheart, or his picturesque household. Well, I don't have any of those things. I don’t think I ever did. So all I have is right here, right now. Perhaps one day, I’ll find what everyone else has, but I don’t count on it, nor do I particularly desire it.”

“You don’t like the idea of having someone special to return to, a soft place to land?”

“I don’t allow myself to mull over flights of fancy. It drains you, weighs you down like molasses.”

“But just... for a moment, imagine it. What would you do if you had a home like the ones your fellow soldiers reminisce over?”

Alex laughed again, this time slightly less derisive. “Oh, Magnus. If that were the case then I suppose I wouldn’t have much of a choice, would I? Having someone you care about is its own kind of cage.”

That had been the spark of their friendship.

Chapter Text

Ten months. Alex and T.J. had been living in this convalescent home for almost a year. During that time, Alex’s wounds had healed a decent amount - she could open her left eye, she could walk without collapsing from the pain. She had even gotten used to the day-by-day sounds of the place: the banter of nurses, the complaining and arguing among the soldiers - and yes, even the shouts and whimpers of pain that could be heard from other rooms of the mansion when a limb would have to be sawed off if it got too infected, or when any other number of dastardly ordeals had to be performed.

Alex had also sat by and heard from second- or thirdhand accounts the ghastly tales of the battles that had erupted around Virginia and other places near - Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville; each battle costly in its own way.

But most infuriatingly, she had grown fond of the nurses and soldiers that she saw on an almost daily basis. Jack, who, despite his annoying tendencies, had always managed to lift her spirits. Louise, with her stubborn will and firm but motherly affinities. And even the soldiers that more often than not got on her nerves with their headstrong personalities, but with whom she could also trade stories and jokes (which were oftentimes inappropriate among most company). And of course, Magnus-goddamn-Chase, whom she didn’t think she could describe seriously without abandoning all her composure, and her pride along with it. It all gave her a heady sort of feeling, warm and full of surprises.

But there was one thought that instantly sobered her up. Alex had been stealing away the days and the weeks for seven months, and it was past due time to give them back.

She thought about Loki; about what her mother had said so many weeks ago: I shall be staying around here for a while, I think. It’s quite picturesque. Alex didn’t believe that Loki was staying here simply for the quaint setting for one second. She was keeping track of Alex, making sure that she stayed in line. And though Loki could do that from anywhere, being near her child made it much easier, not to mention it allowed for her hold on Alex to be as effortless as controlling an inanimate puppet.

Alex could not keep waiting forever. She had to get back up and fighting again, or she would surely go mad. An idea started forming in her mind, burning red and hazy.

She scanned the room until she found a familiar head of sunshine-blonde hair. Magnus was bent over another soldier, talking to him in hushed tones. Every person around the vicinity seemed to be preoccupied with something or other. Perfect.

Alex’s feet hit the wood floor with little more than a whisper. She grabbed the hunting knife that she’d snuck under her bed the first day she got here (just in case), and successfully slipped away from the noise and bustle of the main room where the wounded and healing soldiers were staying.

She was wearing little more than a loose, threadbare shirt and pants that weren’t in much better condition. She was barefoot but ready to either stand her ground or flee if need be. Not that she planned on fleeing any longer.

She went out to the back porch, lingering at the spot where she had confessed to Magnus. But she shook her head and continued on. She could not allow herself to become sentimental; when had that even happened?

The grass was wet and spongy underneath Alex’s feet. Dirt clung to her ankles and heels. Despite the pain that still stabbed through her side on occasion, the backwoods seemed to turn it into a throbbing memory.

She walked far enough that the mansion was obscured by the various hemlock and pine trees littering the woods. Only then did she stop and allow herself to think about what she was doing. Standing in a copse of trees to summon Loki? Assuming that her mother would deign to come, what would she say to her? Alex wasn’t in any mood to plead for another place in a regiment of the Union Army, and in no position to bargain either.

She didn’t have to figure out a way to talk to Loki, because when she turned around she found her mother perched on a fallen tree branch. She wore a ball gown of red velvet and black lace, boasting of both opulence and vicious power. She sat as still as if she were carved from glass.

Loki glanced up, her eyebrows arched in an approximation of surprise. “Oh, my dear, what in the world do you think you’re doing here?”

Alex took a deep breath. She would not allow herself to lose sight of her goal as she did so many times.

“I suppose you can call checkmate now,” she said evenly. “I have to go back.”

Loki’s face took on an expression of mild interest. “Go back to the war? I do not think I’ve ever heard that one before, and I have heard many strange things before.”

“I’m not asking for your opinion on this,” said Alex. “I need you to distort their perception. As if I were always in one regiment you place me in.”

Loki canted her head. “And here I thought you were too cowardly to even enlist once. But you haven’t told me what I might gain from this.”

“I might die. Would that be payment enough?”

Loki seemed to be seriously considering it until she shook her head. “No, you still might have some worth to me. Don’t be selling yourself short, dear.”

Alex stood stock-still in front of her mother, glaring. She hardly breathed. In response, Loki stared at her with the same intensity. Her hair burned the color of the sunrise; her eyes flickered like a wildfire setting the underbrush ablaze.

But eventually, in response, Loki sighed and stood. Her ball gown swished around her body, catching the light and bottling it up to create a sort of halo of shadows around her. With her next step, though, the dress melted away, replaced by a suit of the same colors. Loki’s shoulders broadened; her hair turned from astonishing red to a shifting mix of pale colors akin to the autumn leaves.

Alex felt like her stomach was writhing, twisting, reaching up to strangle her. She refused to drop to her knees, but she stumbled, and almost fell into a tree. Dammit. No matter how many times this happened, she would always despise the feeling that she was drowning, suffocating under waves stained black and red.

The pain and confusion seemed to last for eternity, but it eventually subsided. The waves ebbed away from Alex’s vision.

“Why must you always make it as dreadful as possible?” Alex growled, regaining his balance. “I. Wasn’t. Ready.”

“Do you think I care about whether it makes you comfortable or not?” Loki said irritably. “Stop complaining. Chin up, that’s right. Don’t drag your feet.”

Don’t drag your feet. It had always been something Alex’s stepmother had said, usually right before they entered the ballroom for some social gathering or another. He could imagine the scene as clear as if he were standing there witnessing it. His stepmother’s voice simpering and disapproving, ringing in his ears. She would tap his chin, straighten his dress shirt, then the steward would pull open the broad wooden doors, revealing a room full of light and jewels and dread thick enough to blot it all out.

Alex forced himself to stand up straight, to stare Loki right in the eyes. He looked smug, but then again, he always did.

It had been the last curse Loki had bestowed on his child. To introduce Alex to this volatile trait and let her understand it and even begin to treasure it... and then tear it away and take it as his own. When Loki changed, Alex changed. A reminder that Alex was never meant to be his own person, that every bit of himself would always belong to someone else.

It had almost been worse than losing Samirah to delusions and fury.

“Well, all right,” Loki continued, pulling Alex back to the present, “I shall concede. Though remember: one day you will have to repay me.”

He looked Alex up and down, one eyebrow arched. “But you are in no shape to join the war again just yet.”

Alex crossed his arms. He tried not to betray the thought that he might not mind staying in the mansion for a few more weeks so much.

“Perfect,” he said, brushing the idea aside. Perhaps he really would die and he would not have to pay his debt to Loki in the end. But knowing the trickster, he probably wouldn’t allow that to happen. Alex couldn’t decide if that would be a comfort or an enormous fear looming over the horizon.

“I’ll give you seven days, precisely.”

When he blinked next, Loki was gone. The only sign that he’d ever been there was a coil of smoke unfurling from the grass where he’d been standing.

Alex watched the curl of smoke until it dissipated into the sky. He was stalling, and he knew it. But he felt like he needed a minute to process the future.

He had gotten what he wanted. In a way. At least, he would not have to endure any more endless days spent staring at a wall or wandering the mansion, trying to get used to walking again. He would have the weight of a rifle in his hands and the burning sun on his back. But now that he had this plan set, he wondered which fate would be worse.

He forced himself to move forward. One step at a time, that was how it was done. Forget the disorientation and the shame, forget the pain that was returning in his shoulder and side, forget everything except the rustle of the grass under his feet as he made his way back to the mansion.

As soon as he emerged from the trees, though, all of his thoughts were driven away by the concerned/furious gray-eyed glare of Magnus Chase.

He had never really thought of Magnus as frightening - Alex always thought he had more of a “lost puppy” look to him - but now he was certainly going to give those rebels with their bayonets and blood-stained cheeks on the battlefield a run for their money.

Alex attempted an expression of nonchalance as he strolled up to the porch.

“I would grab you by the arm and drag you back here if I weren’t worried about agitating your wound,” Magnus said as a way of greeting. “Where were you?”

“That’s not important. I’m all right, aren’t I?” Alex raised his arms and spun around.

Magnus squinted. “You seem different now...”

Alex was thrown off guard. Not even Samirah had ever been perceptive enough to notice the changes.

Or perhaps he just had dirt on his face or something. He resisted the urge to rub his hand across his cheek and settled for telling Magnus. “You can refer to me as he and him now.”

Of course, he couldn’t mention that simply being male right now made him feel anxious. He’d have been quite all right with staying female for a little while longer but no, Loki had to be Loki. Still, the discomfort of changing against his will wasn’t usually this bad.

Magnus didn’t look as surprised as Alex expected him to; which he appreciated more than he dared to admit. Magnus simply raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“Don’t think that means you can just leave on your own accord while you’re still” - he paused, peering at Alex - “well, not in a fragile state, you’ve never been like that, but at least still wounded.”

“I appreciate the concern,” Alex said, canting his head. “But it wasn’t needed.”

He flashed his brightest smile at Magnus as he passed - and yes, it was a dirty trick, but it worked. Magnus forgot to ask Alex what he’d been doing in the woods, and he was temporarily left a stammering, blushing mess.

T.J. gave Alex a curious glance as he walked in, but Alex ignored it. Instead, he sat at the edge of his cot and stared at the ceiling. It was elegantly designed if a bit overdone, and now chipping and dusty. Paintings of Norse deities and heroes were depicted in all their bloody, thunderous glory. Alex focused on that.

He had a week. When that time was up, he figured he would have to scrounge up the scraps from his life from ten months ago - his uniform and his courage, namely - and pray that he didn’t end up in a terrible regiment. Which made him realize that he had no idea how this transfer was going to work. Was Loki simply going to snap his fingers and drop him into an arbitrarily-chosen regiment? That didn’t sit right with Alex.

Then it hit him. Obviously, Loki wouldn’t make it so straightforward. There was going to be some sort of catch.

He caught sight of Magnus making his way down the hall. All traces of his bashfulness from earlier were gone, replaced by a subtle determination. But as Alex watched him approach (he allowed a lazy grin to spread across his face, hoping that would earn him some points), Magnus was pulled aside by a frantic-looking nurse. As he was being dragged away, he shot a glare Alex’s way, as if to say I’m still not done with the interrogation so don’t think that you have gotten away this time. Alex just gave him a self-indulgent smile. He dropped it as soon as Magnus disappeared into another room.

A pleading voice at the back of Alex’s mind told him that a week was too short; seven days to... to do what? He didn’t really know. He just knew that it was too soon, though it also could not come fast enough.

Magnus did indeed attempt to interrogate Alex. “Attempt” because Alex managed to weasel his way out of the more difficult questions by turning them on their heads, countering them with outrageous demands of his own. With an adorable little huff, Magnus eventually gave up and went back to tending to a patient with a fever.

Alex just wished he could tell him that their time was waning. And it was almost all he could think of, now that the road was paved and he was meant to walk it.

What do you do when you know that you might have only a few scarce days left with someone in your life? What do you do with that time? Do you pretend as if everything is normal and continue with your regular tasks and banter? Do you try to make the most out of every last second, clinging to those final days like a dying man? Do you let every last word that has been building up in the back of your throat for so long spill out with no consequences or concerns? The possibilities always seem endless, yet so limited at the same time.

Alex had started wandering the mansion to pass the time, and also to get used to walking again. Though he was not allowed past the second floor for some reason, he soon discovered that Magnus’s uncle did indeed have a strange obsession with the Norse - he found many tapestries, paintings, and old relics hidden behind glass panes and heavy velvet drapes. The entire place reminded Alex of a long-abandoned museum. Or a house in mourning.

Two days after meeting Loki, he ran into Jack, of all people. He hadn’t even seen the nurse in weeks, and truth be told, his absence hadn’t seemed very significant. Except that now the man was actually here, Alex could recall all the days where he would have been a sight for sore eyes.

Alex had been studying a large tapestry hung up on the wall outside of what probably used to be the dining room before the mansion was turning into a home for injured soldiers. It depicted a woman hovering in the air with a spear clutched in one hand and a shield in the other. Alex couldn’t help but think of Samirah.

“She’s a Valkyrie,” a voice said from behind Alex. He spun around to find Jack standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets, golden hair tied into a braid.

Jack stepped toward the tapestry and peered at it. “The Valkyries used to be my idols. They all seemed so powerful and almighty, see?” He sighed wistfully. “I wanted to be one.”

“Weren’t they a group of all-female warriors?” Alex asked.

Jack frowned as if he’d never thought of that technicality. “As if that would have stopped me.”

They stared at the tapestry in silence a moment longer, but that eventually seemed too much for Jack. “So, I was with a few other nurses doing fieldwork.”

A twinge of guilt passed through Alex’s chest; he had barely thought of what Jack might have been up to these past weeks. Magnus had not even mentioned it. “You went on the battlefields?”

He nodded. “It was... harsh. I don’t think it’s quite for me. I kept slipping up; my hands were constantly shaking and it was so loud. I think I’ll be staying here from now on.” He smiled crookedly. “Call me a coward all you want.”

“No, not at all.” Alex shot one last look at the Valkyrie, with her winged helmet and confident stance, before turning on his heel towards the stairs. “It only means that you are still sane.”

He did not think that the same could be said for himself, though.

Alex tried not to think about anyone else those next few days. Tried not to think about the people that had shown him kindnesses and courtesies. It wasn’t worth the additional muddled, torn thoughts.

On the sixth day, Alex shifted from male to female and back again twice. Alex’s body eventually settled on feminine, to which she could only let out a muffled sigh of relief. Damned Loki, pulling and tangling the puppet strings again.

The seventh and last day dawned with a clear sign of foreboding. Alex grabbed the navy blue jacket that still hung draped across her cot’s frame and snuck away to put it on. She found a pair of fitting shoes this time, after a bit of scrounging. She also brought her hunting knife and tucked it into its sheath.

She surveyed the room as she walked to the door that led to the back porch. Cots were lined up on both sides of the room, dispersed unevenly, along with simple furniture and the occasional photograph hung up on the wall. But otherwise, the whole place was rather bare-bones, as if the room ought to be filled with flamboyant art and ornamentations. It had perhaps been a sitting room in its life before the war.

“Where are you going with that?”

Alex prided herself in not jumping two feet in the air at Magnus’s voice behind her.

She tried to inconspicuously stuff the navy blue jacket behind her back. “Ah - that’s none of your concern,” she replied.

Magnus cursed. “I knew it. I’ve known it for a while. You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

He said it so bluntly that Alex had to stop herself from flinching. She could already tell that he wasn’t going to try to dissuade her. He only sounded resigned.

“I’m not going to apologize,” said Alex stubbornly. She felt like she was trying to convince herself.

“I wasn’t waiting for you to. Just... think about it for a minute. Why go back out there? Why risk your life again?”

“Because I’m not a coward,” Alex mumbled.

Magnus didn’t seem to know what to make of this. He led her towards the back porch, where they had spent many hours discussing the war, the soldiers, their idyllic futures.

He sat down on the porch. Alex didn’t miss how he refused to look at her. She sat down next to him, her uniform tucked over her arms.

“I have to do this,” Alex said quietly. “Not just for my country, but for myself. I told you once that I couldn’t just sit by for the rest of the war without feeling useless. That still stands true - even more so now, I think. And I can’t really explain everything, not yet, but you’re just going to have to trust me.”

She flinched at adding that “not yet.” If she could, she would keep the Loki part of her past a secret forever. But things rarely worked out so well.

But Magnus said anyway, “I trust you.”

Alex was so taken aback that she couldn’t respond. She snuck a glance at Magnus from the corner of her eye and found him staring intently at the sun-dappled ground. His hands were clasped together, and a sad smile flitted across his lips.

In that space between moments, Alex’s mind all but stopped. All she knew was that she wanted to keep that self-conscious quirk of his lips there. She leaned forward and planted a chaste kiss on the corner of his mouth before she knew what she was doing.

That successfully caught Magnus’s attention. His head shot up. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Alex couldn’t fairly say that she didn’t feel the same way.

She let out a huff of exasperation and planted her hands on either side of Magnus’s face. He still looked too stunned to do anything but stare. “I never planned this,” she said, somewhat annoyed at the gray butterflies that laughed at her as they fluttered in her stomach.

She kissed him - fully on the lips, this time. She savored every moment of it, drawing out the seconds from the world around them and cradling them close - from the trees lining the property, to the wet grass that gleamed under the sunlight, to the cold porch with its chipping white paint.

Eventually, Magnus began to kiss her back. He was clumsy and shy, but Alex tangled her hands in his hair to give him some clues. And even as brilliant, ecstatic colors were bursting behind Alex’s eyelids, her heart shattered in her chest - ripping up her lungs, cutting her throat, spilling blood that felt as real as the sensation of Magnus’s fingers curling into the ends of her hair.

At some point Alex found that she had wrapped her arms around Magnus’s waist and buried her face in his chest, melting into his touch. He was murmuring something into her hair, but she couldn’t make out the words. Silent sobs wracked her body.

Alex slowly regained her senses, and with them, she soon realized that she would have much rather forgotten every responsibility and fear she had ever had. She could not stay here hidden and safe, nor could she even allow herself to admit that there was now something - someone - anchoring her to a spot drenched in sunlight, surrounded by pine trees on one side and a towering mansion on the other, tucked away in the scent of sunshine and dusty relics.

But she had known all that already.

Which made it easier for her to pull away, shrug on the navy blue jacket that was still just a bit too large, and stand up.

“I would say something else right now,” she said softly, “but I told you that I wasn’t going to apologize.”

Magnus’s expression was pure sadness. It was etched across every plane of his face, evident in the way he slumped like a flower in the snow. “You owe me quite an explanation when you return,” he sighed. “And you will return; you are not allowed to die on me anytime soon.”

She laughed, softly. “You too” was all she managed to say.

He seemed to be debating if he should say his next words. “And... you should know that no matter how long the war lasts, or whatever happens, I... I’ll still be here.”

Alex turned away briefly, feeling her chest swell with burning coals. No one ever stayed.

He didn’t even seem to realize the weight of his words. “Let me get you a pack of provisions, at least?”

She couldn’t force herself to say no. So he rushed back into the mansion and returned a couple minutes later with a leather satchel in his hands, weighted down with one other pair of clothes and whatever food he could have scrounged up from their stockpiles.

He handed it to her and said, “I’ll walk you to the main road.”

She tried to hide the eagerness with which she jumped to walk by his side.

The main road was only a short ten-minute walk away, and for that Alex was simultaneously grateful and disappointed. She stayed close to the bushes, away from Magnus. She kept her head high, but there was a twinge of pain that was crawling its way up through her chest that she blamed on the wound in her side.

The silence between them wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it wasn’t completely awkward either. In fact, their silence seemed to speak more volumes than any excuse that Alex could have stumbled through or any protest Magnus could have thrown at her.

The main road could barely be called that. It was winding and dusted with so much dirt that all of one’s senses would be clogged up anytime a carriage or brigade of soldiers marched on by.

Magnus stopped abruptly at the edge once they reached it and turned to Alex with some difficulty.

“Where do you plan on going from here?” he asked.

Alex tipped her head back and stared at the sky, stuffing her hands in her pockets. The breeze toying with her hair and the warmth of her jacket kept her grounded. “I don’t really have it all planned out in my head, really. But I will figure something out. I always do.” She flashed her most confident smile.

Magnus was staring at her, appearing lost in thought. But when he spoke again, all he said was: “You have different colored eyes.”

Alex was so taken aback that she momentarily forgot what colors her eyes were. Wait. Ah. Brown and pale amber. She wanted to slap herself.

She laughed softly and shook her head, an action she had learned to perfect after months that very clearly meant Dammit, Magnus. He shrugged somewhat bashfully, somewhat smugly.

A thought struck her suddenly, and she voiced it before she could think better of it. “Do you ever receive letters?”

He scoffed, which was all the answer she needed.

“Well, that’ll change, don’t you worry.”

Only one genuine smile lit up his face that day, and it was a sweeter reward than any lie Loki could have spun.

Well, I suppose you could have chosen worse.

Speak of the devil. Alex almost threw her satchel at the ghostly apparition of Loki lurking behind Magnus. Her feet hovered a few inches off the ground. Her smile was pure heaven’s light, but her emerald eyes glinted with something devilish.

Alex’s voice felt trapped, but this wasn’t Loki’s doing. The trickster was just... watching. And studying every inch of Magnus’s face with a look that was utterly ravenous. Like she could not wait to twist his mind into something wild and unrecognizable. The way she’d done with Samirah.

And it was then that Alex realized she should never have shown any interest in Magnus Chase.

But Loki just kept grinning, leering, until she turned around, letting her skirts swish around her alluringly, and dissolved into golden mist. Leaving Alex with a sense of dread thicker than any panic she would feel during a battle.

Magnus looked over his shoulder, probably wondering what Alex was staring at that had made her go so pale. Finding nothing, he stared at her in bemusement.

Alex choked back a sob. There was no point in holding back now, she thought, since Loki already knew how she cherished this gray-eyed, golden-hearted boy. So she entwined their fingers and pressed her forehead against his. He looked taken aback by this; Alex was not one for dramatic gestures.

“If you say goodbye right now I will punch the daylights out of you,” she said.

“See you someday” was his rapid-fire response, as if it had jumped out of his mouth without his volition.

She smirked. “That’s more like it.”

Alex pulled away as fast as she had rushed to Magnus’s side. She clung to the satchel’s strap across her chest, watching him with an expression as vulnerable as she could allow. Then, before she could change her mind, she turned around and raced down the road. She didn’t look back, but somehow she knew Magnus was still standing there in the middle of the road.

It might have been just her imagination, but Alex felt as if someone was watching from above, grinning as they snuffed out a candle faster than she had time to relight it.

Chapter Text

Alex was crying again.

All the pent-up frustration and anger of so many years had taken form into red-hot tears. Alex cursed each one on their way down.

Not that she feared being called weak or useless. Her father was long gone, disappeared in a storm of rage and incoherent threats. It was just Alex, some broken pottery shards, and a few of her things scattered on the side of this dusty road in front of her father’s mansion. Her legs couldn’t seem to work right now, blasted things.

Her bruised arms hurt. Her chest felt pinched from all the painful sobs. The cut on her cheek throbbed - a parting gift from the large blue ring on her father’s right hand.

She hated being incompetent, but she had nowhere to go, no one to run to, nothing to call her own. If her grandfather were still here perhaps...

The sun was setting, turning the honeysuckle crawling up the sides of the mansion gilded.

Alex pulled her knees up to her chest and buried her face into the rose-soft pink fabric of the gown Loki had given her so long ago. Her father’s voice still rang in her ears, harsh and impossible to ignore. Coward, useless, stupid... Words that physically stung. He always looked taller when he was angry.

I’ll show you who’s useless!

The sound of feet scuffling through the dusty street made Alex glance up. She saw a pair of green shoes sticking out of a black dress, and when her gaze traveled up she found a girl around Alex’s age. Her skin was a rich dark brown, and a green headscarf covered her hair. She had an umbrella propped on her shoulder for no reason Alex could discern, until she realized that it had begun to drizzle.

“Your name is Alex, correct?” she asked.

Alex prayed that the darkness obscured the puffiness of her eyes as she glared stubbornly up at the girl. Who was she and why should Alex trust her?

As if she’d read her mind, the girl held out her hand. “I am Samirah. Your half-sister.”

Alex stared, stunned, at the girl long enough for her to become uncomfortable. Eventually, though, she said in a small voice, “How did you find me?”

Samirah shuffled her feet. Alex still hadn’t taken her outstretched hand, so she let it drop awkwardly to her side. “Well, this is going to sound strange, but... I had a dream about you. Sitting here, now.”

Alex’s eyes widened. It sounded like this girl had clairvoyant dreams as well. And she only knew one person who could grant those.

“Loki is your mother?”

“Ah... father. Unfortunately.”

“And let me guess. Loki sent you here to fetch me.” Alex blinked the rain from her eyes. The ground was thoroughly soaked now, as was she. But she was too proud to go stand under the umbrella with Samirah.

The girl - Alex’s half-sister - wrinkled her nose. “I am not Loki’s little puppet. No, I came here of my own accord. My plans just so happen to align with my father’s on this matter.”

She didn’t seem happy with this idea. Alex wondered what made her so wary of Loki. She decided that she would allow a sliver of trust for this girl. After all, where else was she to go?

“I’m a girl right now, by the way,” Alex said, brushing past Samirah. “I’ll inform you when that fact changes.”

“A-all right,” Samirah said slowly. She didn’t seem to know what to think of this piece of information on her new half-sibling. Alex didn’t care. She was done caring.

This was why caring was a terrible, dangerous thing. It left you vulnerable, it left you sore, it made your heart bleed.

It made you feel invincible when you were still so painfully mortal.

This was what Alex thought about as she kept walking down the same small road she’d started on hours ago. (She was certain she’d know when to change directions - Loki didn’t have time for her to get lost on her way to glorious death.)

How wonderful these butterflies in her stomach were. She almost wished they would stay.

Samirah was almost too kind. She took Alex to her former home outside of Boston, where she’d lived before her mother died. Samirah herself lived nearby with her grandparents. She didn’t ask a lot of questions, she gave Alex a dress to wear (it was plain gray, but, well, you can’t have everything) when the confusion and discomfort became too overwhelming, and she visited every other day or whenever she had time.

Alex didn’t want to, but she grew to be fond of her half-sister. (It was still strange to think that she had family that was halfway decent.)

Alex ended up spilling everything a few weeks later, when Samirah pressed. Her father and step-family, Loki, the changes. She didn’t think her sister understood everything exactly, but she wasn’t repelled by Alex at least.

In return, Samirah told her all about how she dreamed of flying. It was all she wanted t of her future, she said (besides getting married to her fiancé from childhood, Amir).

Alex had sat back in her seat, humming. “But how?” she finally asked.

Samirah blushed. “I haven’t figured that out yet. I do not think we have the knowledge to get humans in the air, and we might not for a very long time. So... it’s hopeless, I realize that.”

“Not necessarily.” Alex smirked. “Don’t you know you have a powerful immortal being for a parent?”

“I have never seen Loki fly before,” Samirah said, deadpan.

“Ah, but who knows what Loki can or cannot do?”

Loki had too much power, that was for sure. She fed off strife and trouble, so she was practically gorging herself in times like these. A nation divided against itself, how divine! Alex was sure that Loki could do anything to her and not suffer any consequences. Still, she’d kept her word. No one questioned Alex’s sudden presence in the 40th New York Infantry Regiment.

Marching was miserable. Marching in the rain even more so. With every mud-soaked step, Alex was increasingly certain that she would never want to look at another body of water again.

Just her luck that they were marching to the Potomac, which they were going to have to cross sooner or later. The river was swelling with black waves, knocking out any boats that dared to cross.

Alex sighed and tugged her heavy uniform jacket over her head - not that it did any good; it had soaked through hours ago.

Alex stood outside in the pouring rain doing little more than mulling over everything that had happened in the past few months. She had never felt so... comfortable before. At peace with her current situation, if not with the world. It definitely wasn’t in a place she expected to be, with the mud squelching under her feet and her wet hair clinging to her face. Her dress clung to her body like a second skin.

She closed her eyes and zoned in on the sound of the rain pattering against the porch. Comfortable was all well and good, but she had never quite been satisfied with that. There were only so many hours she could spend up to her elbows in clay, even if the piece she was currently working on required a great deal of effort and concentration. This one she was planning to dedicate to Samirah. A thank-you, however small.

Her eyes flew open at the sound of footsteps. No one came around this part of town; it was run-down and near vacant. She couldn’t make out the person’s features very well in the musky air, but Alex would recognize that confident gait anywhere. Loki had finally paid her a visit.

Before, Alex might have greeted her mother rather gratefully. But over the months Samirah had told her about the more... unpleasant aspects of Loki’s character. Now, Alex had always known that Loki was a trickster. But she was only just realizing that it ran much deeper than getting a few laughs out. Samirah had told her of the times Loki had gone out of his way to ruin her life. He’d told her grandparents all about the complicated history the al-Abbases had with the Norse, shaken up their entire perception of the world for no apparent reason except that it had struck his fancy. And Samirah was beginning to question if the flames over slavery spreading throughout the North and South were being fed by Loki.

Either Alex was a favorite of Loki’s, or he needed her for something important. She shuddered at the thought.

“What do you want?” Alex said, trying to keep her voice nonchalant. She stood and began to fight a losing battle to wring out the dampness of her skirt.

Loki stopped in front of Alex. Though he was mostly still in shadow, his eyes cut through the gloom like amber beams from a lighthouse. He bared his teeth in an approximation of a grin. “What, no warm welcoming for your mother?”

“I’ve been further enlightened to your character.” Alex shrugged.

“I see you’ve been listening to Samirah’s tales about me. That won’t do. If it’s just between the two of us, she’s a little biased. A war is bound to spark sooner or later in this country; I’m only opening their eyes to the possibility of sooner.”

“So you admit it,” Alex said. She didn’t phrase it as a question. “You’re behind all this.”

Loki laughed. “Oh, you are giving me too much credit - though I do appreciate it. But humans are fickle creatures. It does not take much to persuade them.

“Anyway, flattery won’t get you anywhere; I thought you would know that by now.” All the mirth in Loki’s expression dropped away. “I led Samirah to you so that maybe you could convince her to stop with her little rebellions. Yet it seems that my plan has backfired on me.”

He shot a glare Alex’s way, daring her to contradict him. Alex didn’t speak or move.

Loki tsked. “Where have your manners gone? You used to be so complacent and trusting.”

Before she could think of the consequences, Alex blurted, “Perhaps it is because I don’t need you anymore.”

Was it just Alex’s imagination, or had the darkness turned suffocating? And the rain suddenly felt like acid on her skin.

Loki’s eyes flared unnaturally bright. “I’ll allow that to slide this time. But, I’ll let you know, you will always need me. To kill the snake, you must first cut off its head.”

Alex just glared at him without blinking for so long that her eyes started to water. Then his head snapped up at the sound of footsteps and a grin spread over his face.

“Well, I should be going now,” he said. “Think about what I’ve told you.” With that, he turned on his heel and in the next instant, he was gone.

When Alex looked up she found Samirah approaching her, a bounce to her step. Alex couldn’t help but think that her green headscarf bore a stunning resemblance to the scales of a snake’s head.

No. He would not dare.

Except he would.

Against her will, Alex found herself rushing towards Samirah and strangling her in a hug.

“Oh! Ah, hello. What’s wrong?”

Alex buried her face into Samirah’s shoulder long enough to be sure that the tears had been banished. Then she pulled away and turned back to the house. “Nothing. Sorry. Just...” She shook her head. “Nothing.”

Samirah shot her a befuddled expression but followed her sister inside. She wiped her hand down the front of her dress and looked over Alex’s half-drowned-kitten appearance. “Have you been standing out in the rain all day or something?”

Alex’s hands were sore from spending the past twenty minutes wringing out his uniform jacket. He knew from experience that the fabric stiffened when it dried, so better to squeeze out as much water as possible now. The air was still crisp from the rain, but the sun was now baking their troops. Alex’s boots were too thick to even feel the coolness of the mud he was trudging through.

They’d been marching for the past four days to reach the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. They were hot on the heels of battle, Alex could sense it.

Alex almost felt guilty for the excitement that was buzzing through him at the prospect of fighting again. There was definitely something wrong with him, no doubt about that.

Was there something wrong with him? Alex couldn’t tell. His mind was always muddled and dull these days, like the murky water he used to clean his pottery tools. He poured that frustration into his current clay piece. He wasn’t quite sure what it was yet, but it seemed to be taking the form of a two-headed beast.

Alex rubbed at an itch on his forehead - this only succeeded in getting wet clay on his face. As it was progressing, his bust was starting to look more and more like a house caving in.

Alex groaned and dropped his head onto the table. Lately, he couldn’t seem to make anything at all and it was driving him absolutely mad. And what else could he do around here besides explore the town and make sculptures and pots?

He hadn’t realized Samirah was watching him until she spoke up.

“I think you should meet Amir.”

Alex shot up so fast that he almost fell out of his chair. “Amir? As in, Amir your fiancé?”

Samirah smiled faintly. “He is the only Amir I know, so yes.”

Alex whooped. “In that case, of course. When?”

“Well, I still need a male family member to act as escort. So whenever that may be.”

Alex immediately started washing off the clay from his hands, a huge grin on his face and a gleam in his eye. “Never fear, sister. I shall save you from going on another outing with your grandfather tagging along as your male guard dog, for I will be his replacement!”

“Wait, I still need Jid and Bibi to write his parents!”

Alex had already left the room to grab his coat.

Aside from the marching, Alex had forgotten how dreadful all-night picket duty was. And of all the positions, he was stationed in the innermost circle. The last resort to warn camp of an attack or fend off the enemy, if they were to catch the camp unawares.

Well, at least the tree Alex was leaning against was comfortable. Except it wasn’t. Hadn’t been for the past three hours. (Or was it four? Alex had lost count.) His rifle felt like deadweight. He was starting to think that the snoring coming from the nearby tent was his own personal punishment and temptation.

Alex stuffed his cap between his neck and the tree, hoping it would provide some support. Feh, not really.

Exhaustion clung to Alex’s eyelashes. He blinked furiously. The only thing keeping him awake by now was the thought of the formidable punishments for falling asleep during picket duty.

His thoughts wandered to flashing smiles, muffled laughs, and a cold fall afternoon.

Acting as Samirah’s male escort was nowhere near as exciting as he’d thought it would be. After being introduced to Amir and joking (read: flirting) with him for a while, Alex was soon cast off as the third wheel. He slunk along a few feet behind the couple, watching with more than a sliver of envy at the way they laughed and glowed around each other.

The park was practically abandoned - it was late in the afternoon, and the gray sky had gotten carried away trying to replicate the chill of midnight. Alex kicked at a pile of leaves off the side of the path. As much as the boredom was getting to his head, muting most of his emotions to gray, he figured it was worth it to see his sister so happy. She was always so uptight, worrying about Alex, worrying about her grandparents, worrying about the future. She needed someone to be her breath of fresh air.

It was pathetic, he knew, but Alex began drafting a letter in his head. A letter to anyone who would look at him as if he’d given them a piece of the sky.

The blank sheet of paper in front of Alex was leering at him. Just taunting him. Oh, how hard can it be just to write a simple letter? Not like you have anything better to do.

Alex put his pen to the paper, watched as a black stain spread across the white surface. Now this was procrastination at its finest, he thought dully. He should know better by now than to make rash promises. The last letter Alex had written had been fairly decent, but he’d let his mind slip away around the end. He had signed it, With love, Alex. He’d practically burst into flames when he read over the letter and found that waiting for him at the end. His hands had damn minds of their own, but now that he was well-grounded he had no idea what to write Magnus. No way would he care about daily camp life or Alex’s midnight ramblings.

Alex dug his heel into the dirt, grunting in frustration. Enough of this. A promise was a promise. He flipped the page over and let his mind detach itself to a mansion tucked away in the backwoods, allowed his hands to scrawl out anything and everything, thoughts that hadn’t even formed themselves fully.

In the end, it was a two-page letter. Alex’s handwriting got messier and messier the further on he went, and his sentences more garbled as well. Certainly not a masterpiece. He dipped his pen in the inkwell one more time and signed with a flourish. Because it made him feel light and warm, but also powerful.

With love, Alex.

“You know, at first I thought Samirah would derail all my plans. All her talk has changed you, my dear Alex.”

Alex didn’t look up from the clay piece he was glazing. “I already told you, I don’t want you here.”

He was refusing to look at his mother - partly because he was disgusted by her presence, but also because she wouldn’t stop shifting from female to male and back again, and it was frankly giving him a headache. Currently, she was sitting on a stool in the corner, her glittering emerald dress taking up a quarter of the room.

“You’ve grown much closer to Samirah than I thought you would,” Loki continued. “The two of you are so different, I didn’t consider it. But now…”

Her voice trailed off, her tone speculative. Alex kept his face impassive, but he was certain his trembling hands betrayed his fury. He didn’t want to hear about Loki’s next diabolical plan or her thoughts on Samirah.

Alex snapped off the tip of his paintbrush as he watched Loki’s enormous gown morph into a sleek suit from his peripheral vision. Was his mother doing this just to irritate Alex? If so, it was working better than he was willing to admit. He’d been stuck as male for a while now and was all too eager for a change. It was a shame it didn’t work like that.

Loki was about to go on another long boast when Alex snapped his head up to glare at him. “I’ve been thinking about signing up for the war,” he blurted.

Not a flicker of surprise crossed Loki’s features. But a dangerous spark lit up in his amber eyes.

His voice was honey when he said, “And why would you ever want to do that?”

“If you think it’s to prove myself to you, you’re wrong. I don’t give a rat’s ass about what you think about me.”

That wasn’t necessarily true. Alex did care whether or not Loki thought he was a dutiful son, since it kept him and Samirah alive. But recently - well, no, not recently; more like in the past year or so - he’d begun to walk quite a thin line between being a competent individual and still pretending to be Loki’s oblivious lapdog.

“You see, that’s the problem,” Loki said, tracing the scars on his cheek. “Or at least, one of its many branches. I’d say the true roots dug their claws in long ago.”

“What are you saying?”

Loki narrowed his eyes. “Do you remember what I told you all those months ago?”

To kill the snake, you must first cut off its head. How could he forget?

Loki nodded, his expression caught between serene and calculating. “You have no business in the army; you won’t last a day.”

He didn’t say it with any hint of emotion - just stating facts. Alex tried his best not to flinch. But his father’s voice rang through his mind: coward, useless, stupid…

Alex should have expected Loki to pull this card. To dangle Samirah’s well-being over his head like this, for everything that Alex did out of Loki’s preferences.

Alex began to clean his tools, managing to look nonplussed about Loki’s threats. “I shall go out to purchase a few of my own weapons later today,” he said. “I don’t think rifles and bayonets are quite my thing, so I believe it’s nice to have some backup plans.”

“I could make you a weapon, in fact,” Loki commented. “Pick an object and I’ll make you one right now.”

Alex studied his mother from the corner of his eye. She’d shifted back to female again. Her red hair caught each of the sun’s rays, and her eyes glinted gold. “And how would that benefit you?” Alex asked, turning back to his tools. “You stopped giving a shit about me as soon as you got my father to kick me out.”

“Language, darling,” Loki purred. “I just thought we might still be able to mend this relationship. No point in throwing it out to the wind just yet.”

“Too late, Mother.” Alex inspected the bust he’d been working on. It was one of the worst glazing jobs he’d ever done, with shaky, irregular strokes and poor color choices. “It was thrown out long ago. Now, I’m only going to say this one more time. Get. Out.”

Loki released a delicate, exasperated sigh. “You always make things too hard for yourself. This is precisely why no one ever stays with you for long.”

Alex threw the bust at Loki’s head. She disappeared at the last second, and the clay shattered into a dozen poorly-painted shards as it hit the wall.

Alex chucked a rock at a nearby tree, wishing he had something to smash. It was his way of coping since before he could remember. A childish thing, he knew, but that didn’t mean it didn’t work.

Damned colonel, always quick to find a fight. They’d heard the sound of battle a few miles off and suddenly they were mobilizing to help out their comrades in a small town called Gettysburg. His emotions were strung tight in a tug-of-war between exhilaration and dread. This would be Alex’s first time in action since Bull Run. And yet all he could think about was that he’d never gotten a chance to send that letter he’d written. What a waste. What if it got sullied or torn?

What if he’d never even get the chance to send it?

He kicked at a large rock embedded in the path. Where the other soldiers were calmly writing their names on slips of paper and pinning them to their lapels so their bodies might be identified on the battlefield, Alex refused to acknowledge that death was a very near possibility. He was rather stubborn that way, and not even for the better.

This had to be one of Loki’s evil little jokes. Samirah wasn’t even a part of this. This was Alex’s fault, shouldn’t she pay the price for her stubbornness and pride? But no, she still hadn’t learned her lesson, even after she had her one claim to individuality stripped from her.

“Alex?”

Samirah’s thin voice snapped Alex out of her murderous thoughts. Her sister was slumped on the ground, her shaking fingers clawing desperately at her arms. Her breath came out in irregular gasps.

Alex had been dreading this. For Loki to finally pull on a string a little too hard and make it snap. All this to make sure Alex stayed under her thumb. She knew for a fact her mother couldn’t care less about Samirah, for she was already too far gone.

“Alex,” Samirah managed. “Alex, please tell me this is a dream. Just a nightmare.”

She couldn’t say anything. Samirah’s desperate, pleading expression didn’t help.

“Alex, come on. Tell me this isn’t real.”

“I am going to destroy her.”

Samirah balked at Alex’s cold tone. At first had been anger, so much anger that it blotted out her vision with dark red splotches that spread like bloodstains. Now there was only ice. Ice coating every emotion, every precise, direct thought. Nothing muddled, nothing fervid. Alex was almost frightened of her lack of emotion.

“Alex?”

Every time Samirah repeated Alex’s name it became more and more half-hearted. As if she were giving up on her sister as well as her fiancé.

“It can’t be permanent, right?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. The words tasted bitter.

Samirah collapsed into Alex. She didn’t quite know what to do with her sister’s blatant display of emotion - she’d never seen her so worked up before, but then again she’d just lost her fiancé to madness - so she wrapped her arms around her and didn’t let go.

Words didn’t seem to work. No condolences or apologies seemed fit after what had just happened. What were you supposed to say when your sister lost her childhood friend, her future husband, to a hysteria not at all natural?

Samirah had told Alex of the time Loki tried to open her grandparents’ eyes to her world, but it had only lasted a little while. However, if Loki were to show them her entire world, complete with its all-too-real myths, magic, and mayhem, the damage to their minds would be irreversible. Mortals were not wired to comprehend any world outside of their own.

So that was exactly what Loki had done to Amir.

It had almost been too easy. Alex didn’t know exactly what she’d shown Samirah’s fiancé, but it was enough to break him.

What Alex couldn’t understand was why Loki would have done it. It seemed a very strange way to get across to Alex. Less direct than she had anticipated.

“We can fix this,” Samirah mumbled. “We’ll fix this, right?”

Alex knew there was a very small possibility of that happening. Loki was always very thorough in her destruction, and no way would she let Samirah even get a chance to save Amir. There was something else up her sleeve, of that Alex was certain.

Hmm. She might be able to get used to this analytical kind of thinking. It was certainly less stressful and not at all cumbersome.

“Of course,” she said.

Cold heart. No heart. That is how you survive.

Alex had been repeating that same mantra in his head for the past half hour or so. Every so often it would die out under the storm of gunfire and shouting, but then he would fire his rifle, or catch sight of another mangled body, and it would come roaring back in his ears. Yet it always returned more feeble than the last time.

Cold heart. No heart. That is how you survive.

Was it possible to be so full of emotion that you would explode? Because that was what it felt like, to be so full of fury and grief that Alex wondered if she would just end right here and now.

There was a time when there might have been hope for Samirah. But then again, there was a time when none of this would even be happening. Not with level-headed, practical Samirah.

She was dead, though.

See, pain did strange things. At Amir’s sudden change in personality - his mind broken, he was now about 80% more unstable - the engagement had been broken off. That was the last straw. Samirah just... snapped. It wasn’t the kind of breakdown Alex would have expected. It was slow, almost imperceptible. Like Samirah’s sanity was held up by sturdy ropes, and every day chafed at them a little more, until they were so frayed that they were hanging by only a couple of threads.

It had started a long time ago, before everything that happened with Amir, Alex could see that now. It was marked only by her increasingly rare visits, her stressful rants, and the more frequent bursts of annoyance. Was it the weight of her grandparents’ expectations, or Loki’s antics, or her worries about Alex’s well-being? Was it an overwhelming mixture of all that and more?

The sound of the front door slamming shut startled Alex out of her thoughts. She launched herself off her bed, smoothed out the wrinkles in her trousers, and poked her head out of the bedroom door just as Samirah stepped inside.

“This is your fault.”

She looked just as refined as usual - simple green hijab, pressed black dress, perfect posture - but her eyes were... wild. They were dull, but also blazed with something that bordered on hysteria. Equal parts exhausted and insane. Barely noticeable to anyone who didn’t know her.

Samirah leaned on the doorframe and closed her eyes. “Why did you not tell me?”

Alex sank into a chair silhouetted by the pale sunlight streaming through the window. “Tell you what?”

Her half-sister marched up to her and shoved a slip of paper in her face. A picture of an eagle holding a flag that read “Down With The Rebellion” spread its wings across the top of the page. Below that, in big, bold letters was written: Volunteers Needed! Able-bodied men needed for 11th Massachusetts State Volunteers under Colonel George Clark, Jr.

Samirah snatched back the paper before Alex could finish reading the entire poster.

“Patriotic men needed to avenge Fort Sumter,” Samirah read aloud, her voice trembling. “State and Federal bounties will be paid to each volunteer on enlistment. Don’t tell me it just slipped your mind to tell me.”

Well, it was kind of true. But Alex had also been dreading breaking the news to her, and her current instability had not helped matters.

“Is this why she did all that? With - with Amir and forcing your changes on her own conditions? All to stay in control, or something like that?”

Alex opened her mouth to say something, but Samirah plowed on.

“I am truly sorry. I suppose I’m not enough for you, if you have to go off and join the army as well. Oh, well. I don’t really care about any of that, I am not even enough for myself.

“But what I want to know is why? What is it for - the money, the glory, pride?”

She’d begun to pace, whereas Alex still sat frozen in her seat by the window.

Alex sighed. “I’m just tired of not knowing where Loki ends and I begin.”

It wasn’t the complete truth. Sometimes it felt like her father’s words clung to her like a cat’s persistent claws, sometimes it was her stepmother’s fussing hands. But it still stood - as it was, Alex Fierro was more of a concept than a distinct person.

Samirah stood stock-still for a while, her expression distant, as if she’d finally gotten word of her execution and couldn’t muster the strength to feel anything but resigned. The paper slipped from her grasp. Alex watched intently as it fluttered to the floor, because she wasn’t ready to look her sister in the eyes.

“Go then,” Samirah said. “If you want this.”

“Really?”

“Just go!” Samirah shouted, clutching her head and turning in a tight circle. “You caused all this! I don’t even know what is real anymore. I don’t... know...”

Alex didn’t stand, or offer any kind of comfort. She just sat there, staring up at her sister. Her lovely, broken sister.

“I think I am going to stay here for a while,” Samirah said, then proceeded to collapse on the floor, folding like a house of cards. Alex could tell she was holding back tears - whether they were tears of frustration or fear or something else, she could not tell.

Alex sank down next to her. Samirah’s words pried at her skin, gnawing and buzzing incessantly. But since it was all true, she didn’t try to swat them away.

Three days of that same distorted symphony repeated over and over on the battlefield and on to the small town nearby, so much so that it soon became white noise.

It only got worse after that. Samirah spent less time around Alex, and when she did, she looked pained because of it. Alex spent those times adding the final touches to her piece for Samirah, trying to ignore the way her sister sent her thinly-veiled looks of betrayal. She did not seem to realize she was growing to despise Alex, but Alex knew enough to notice the signs.

In this way, the piece came out... wrong. It was a sculpture that could fit in the palm of Alex’s hand, but it was highly detailed. From the creases in the hijab to the folds in the dress to the feathers on the wings, everything was painstakingly crafted and painted. The tiny replica of Samirah had an expression of longing on her face, her hands spread in front of her as if trying to hold something only she could see. Pearlescent wings sprouted from her back, spread wide.

Still, it looked off. It was not relevant anymore, and the sight of it left a bitter taste in Alex’s mouth.

Alex picked up the statue and slammed it against the table, taking satisfaction in the way the wings cracked and crumbled away from the rest of the figurine. She added a splash of red glaze to the jagged pieces on the shoulder blades where the wings used to be, even though it had already been fired for the last time and the glaze looked pale and dull against the brighter colors.

It seemed Loki was influencing Alex’s thoughts and emotions as well. She had resigned herself to this already, which was why she let herself drift. Joining the war no longer felt like such a sacrifice, because what was a sacrifice worth if there was nothing to leave behind?

Alex deserved this. The hot, sticky blood and the stench of bodies and the deafening sound of cannons. But in the end... they’d won? The Union had won. Alex was by no means a prophet, but it felt like the turning point in the war. They might have hope just yet.

Then why did he feel like there was an enormous weight resting on his shoulders, pushing down on him more and more with each passing day? The fighting of man against man may have ended already, but the battle had not truly ended. The night, which was just trying to recover from the nonstop fighting of the past few days, was disrupted by the screams and cries of the soon-to-be-dead, though the surgeons and nurses tried their best.

Alex had been spared, thankfully. He stood in the shadows of the trees, watching the bodies being lined up on the battlefield.

Had he really forsaken monotony and safety for terror and adrenaline? You fuck-up.

And so Alex was crying again.

Chapter Text

After awhile, Magnus had almost forgotten what the mansion had been like before it had been opened as a convalescent home.

For one thing, silence had permeated the halls in a way that felt like speaking or making any kind of noise at all would anger the entity that lived in the shadows of the mansion.

He hated it, to say the least. When his mother had been alive, he’d lived with her in a room they’d rented from a family Natalie knew from her time working in a women’s college. True, they hadn’t had much, but that had hardly mattered. It was comfortable, safe, and the house was always suitably noisy.

In Randolph’s mansion, however, there was hardly any sign that it was actually lived in. When all there was to occupy the 50 rooms of the mansion was old manuscripts written in a variety of languages long out of fashion, artifacts from 900 years ago, and two people who tried to stay out of each other’s way as best possible, the sound of Randolph’s cane rhythmically hitting the wood floors could feel deafeningly loud, fear-inducing.

Well, that had all changed when the war came bursting through the front door, as it did to most everyone in the nation, especially to those living so close to the capital.

As fighting began to break out nearby, the Chase mansion was soon filled with newly-hired nurses and doctors as well as tired, sickly soldiers from both sides of the war. Gone were the paintings lining the walls of the expansive dining room, replaced with cots pushed up together as close as comfortably possible. Gone were the shelves covered with books and artifacts in the library; instead they were stuffed with bottles of medicine and rolls of bandages. The furniture in the entrance hall grew worn, the carpet could be found coated in several mysterious stains.

But the most notable change was the noise. The noise was unabashed, relentless, swelling. With the crypt-silence Magnus had experienced before, he had almost welcomed it.

It had been about two years since then. The mansion’s noise was familiar now, background music. Still, there was something missing, and Magnus had a pretty clear idea of what. Or rather, who. He just didn’t like to entertain the notion, since it made him feel flustered and bemused, and that in turn made him feel pathetic and even more bemused.

He’d never really been a “reflection clears the mind” kind of person.

Magnus had been wandering around the mansion as of late, reminiscing of those days before the war without much fondness. Business in the mansion was slow these days, and he needed something to do.

It was one of those days when he found himself hanging around his uncle Randolph’s office. Which was strange all in itself; he wouldn’t enter his uncle’s office if it was the only safe place in the midst of the war.

He stared at the glass case nailed to the wall in front of him. It was full of old Viking artifacts, unlabeled. Randolph’s desk sat underneath it, in all its cluttered and dysfunctional glory. Wrinkled papers, various writing utensils, old tomes, and the like covered every inch of the mahogany.

“Shit,” Magnus muttered. Enough was enough, he had to get Mallory to let him join a field group.

Before he knew what he was doing, he’d sat down at Randolph’s desk and began to organize the papers scattered about into a neat pile. He also began to shelve the books in order of how old and ugly they looked. He was doing pretty well for a while until he came across two equally enormous, moldy volumes. He eventually just stuffed them both in randomly.

He turned to the letters next. Some of the envelopes hadn’t even been opened, though they were dated from some time ago. A vast majority of them were from Boston. As in, Boston, Massachusetts. As in, the same Boston his uncle was - presumably - still galavanting around in search of a magical solution to end the war. Well, it had been months without any word from Randolph, so if he were to have died or gone missing or who-knows-what-else, Magnus would be the last person to know.

In an arbitrary decision on his part, he pulled out a random envelope from the pile before him - one of the Boston letters, written in bold, flourishing lettering - and tore open the seal. It was dated late December, from before Randolph had left. There was no return address.

Randolph, I have to say that I am growing impatient. You know me; I cannot bear to wait, and I have already been worn thin. So, if you still desire the best out of this arrangement, I would suggest you hurry up and fulfill your end of the bargain. We shall see how it goes from there.

“The hell are you doing in here?”

Magnus jumped at the sound of Mallory’s familiar, brash voice. He hastily gathered together all the envelopes he’d been sifting through, then turned around in his uncle’s chair. “I could ask you the same thing.”

“You’re wasting your time up here searching through his old records, you are needed downstairs.”

He fixed her with a long stare. “Am I really?”

“Yes. I’m organizing another field group, and we’re short-staffed. You are skilled, they are not, come on, are you really so dense?” She stood fists balled in her skirts, her face blotchy red and her expression vexed. It pained her to admit he was needed, that was obvious enough.

Magnus raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, trying to hide his enthusiasm. “Oh, so you’re finally giving in due to pure necessity?”

“Just this once,” Mallory warned, but Magnus didn’t care. One step at a time, right? He’d convince her of his capability... eventually.

“When will we leave?” he asked instead.

She’d already turned back into the hallway and was heading for the stairs when she called back, “Early tomorrow. Something has broken out in a small town in Pennsylvania. If we take the most direct route we should get there in less than two days.”

“Thank you, Mallory!” he said to her retreating back.

She released a disgruntled sigh and waved at him, more in a “piss off” kind of gesture than a form of farewell.

Magnus grinned to himself for a moment. At least one victory might be salvaged from this past mess of a month. His head felt clearer than it had in a while.

Still, as he went to close the door behind him, something made him pause in the threshold. The sight of Randolph’s desk, still cluttered with all those unopened letters. Mallory’s announcement had pushed all thoughts of the mysterious letter from his mind, but now they all came flooding back. Despite his better judgment (which he was lacking in anyway), he crossed the room again, gathered up all the envelopes he could, stacked them in a neat pile, and stuffed them into his pockets.

Magnus sighed. He could do this, couldn’t he? One thing at a time, and his most pressing issue at the moment was preparing for his journey to Pennsylvania.

Mallory found him the next day pouring the contents of near-empty whiskey flasks into larger containers and placing those in sturdy wooden crates. He knew they’d need every drop they could find.

Mallory appeared behind him seemingly out of nowhere. She reached around him and picked up the crate of whiskey bottles. “I swear, you’re the slowest member of our team. Hurry up with whatever else you need to bring, we are all waiting outside.”

“Wait, there’s still one more bottle -”

She’d already left, so Magnus grabbed his coat and followed Mallory outside. A handful of other nurses were packing crates of bandages, bottles of anesthesia, alcohol, and surgery tools into three wagons, all built in with dozens of chests of drawers.

“Mallory, when did we buy supply wagons?” he asked. They were all in top condition, each pulled by four to six horses, and as much as he liked the idea of not having to drag everything all the way to Pennsylvania with just the old carts they had stored in the shed, he was certain they didn’t have this kind of money.

“Well, Halfborn bought them just yesterday in town. Says he still had some wages left unspent from when he was serving, but if you ask me he stole it from the other soldiers.” She seemed completely unconcerned by this thought.

“That’s terrible,” Magnus protested. “Stealing from other soldiers? Really? Wounded, tormented soldiers that might have to pay for their families back home? Is that what we’ve resorted to now?”

“Would you like to go in there and ask around about anyone’s missing pocket change?” Mallory asked, raising an eyebrow at him contemptuously.

Magnus grumbled under his breath a moment longer but didn’t put up any more of a fight. He’d make Halfborn repay whoever he’d stolen from later, even if the man was a terrifying, hulking ex-soldier of the Union Army.

“You’ll walk by the wagons,” Mallory informed him as she climbed up onto the seat at the front of the vehicle. “Ladies up front.”

“You’re a lady about as much as I’m a gentleman,” Magnus muttered.

“Sweetheart,” Mallory said, smirking.

In reality, Magnus didn’t mind walking. He just put up the fuss for Mallory’s benefit. After a while, the pain in his calves felt welcome, as it gave him something else to think about besides whatever horrors he’d find in Pennsylvania.

After some time, though, Louise took pity on him. He’d begun to lag behind the last wagon, and she stopped the vehicle to jump off it. Magnus put up plenty of protests, but she insisted, and she looked ready to pick him up herself when he finally relented. She pushed him lightly, an ironic smile on her lips for reasons he couldn’t discern.

The wagon was indeed well-crafted and new and expensive. The wooden seat became uncomfortable soon enough, but Magnus couldn’t complain. It was better than walking his feet off.

Plus, the horses loved him, though he had no idea why.

When they arrived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, they found the town near deserted. Dead animals littered the alleyways. Homes were riddled with holes and abandoned, some no better than scraps. The buildings that still managed to remain standing were dark and sealed off. A ghost town.

The fields and woods, on the other hand, was clogged with smoke, makeshift camps, and bodies. Mostly bodies. Some were lined up for mass burial, but most remained flung across the hills broken and foul-smelling. Magnus passed by a man in a coat so faded it was more dirty white than gray slouched up against a wooden fence. His arm was bent at an unnerving angle over his stomach, his rifle abandoned a couple feet away. The area around his left eye was a mangled mess of flesh hanging in chunks and strands like processed meat.

Magnus swallowed and walked up to the man. He nudged the rebel with his foot, just to make sure he was dead. But instead of his body flopping aside uselessly, his fingers twitched. Magnus jumped. The man didn’t make any kind of noise, nor did he try to move his head or open his one remaining eye. But the fingers of his left hand just kept twitching. They wouldn’t stop.

“Quit lagging,” Mallory muttered behind him, making him flinch again. “He’s already gone.”

“He’s alive,” Magnus argued.

“Look at him,” snapped Mallory. “How could you carry him without just finishing him off? Besides, that wound is probably already infected. You know this.”

Magnus had nothing to say to that. Mallory was right, of course. He wasn’t stupid; he knew why Mallory had refused to bring him along for so long. She’d noted the way he lingered by the bedsides of soldiers on the verge of death, and mourned them as though he knew them personally for a long time afterward. This was not model behavior for a nurse or doctor or whatever he deigned to call himself.

Mallory might tease him with words like “useless” but a part of him knew that she thought his heart just a bit too fragile for fieldwork. Jack had said it wasn’t for him and also not-so-subtly alluded to the idea that Magnus might not work the best in such high-pressure situations as this. Magnus had shrugged him off and thanked him rather sardonically for the advice.

Still, now he couldn’t help but think that Jack might have been right. Working in a convalescent home was different from doing fieldwork, he knew that much. In a field hospital, he’d be working on the front lines, fresh blood and hysteria and all.

He shook off that thought almost as soon as it occurred to him. He might be a coward sometimes - well, most times - but he could handle these things no problem.

Mallory must have gotten tired of watching him deliberate, because she groaned and grabbed his forearm, dragging him along behind their little troop. Magnus began to protest, but when he looked back at the soldier, his fingers had stopped twitching. Magnus wasn’t quite sure if that meant it was too late, or if Mallory was right and it had already been too late long before he arrived, but he still couldn’t ignore the wave of guilt that struck him as he stared at the soldier’s limp, mangled body.

They walked in silence for a while, passing through the town into the fields surrounding it, where a multitude of miscellaneous buildings had been converted into makeshift hospitals. Farther away, Magnus could see that tents had been set up closer to the battlefield as well.

“We’re rather late to the party, aren’t we?” he muttered.

Though her back was turned to him, he could practically feel Mallory rolling her eyes. “Well, we don’t exactly live in the next town over. The only reason we came was because we’d gotten word that this battle was already racking up casualties higher than the doctors currently available could handle.”

“Why does no one inform me of these things first?”

Mallory groaned. “Because you’ve been acting like a ghost for the past three weeks. Drifting through the mansion, not talking to anyone, what has gotten into you?”

“Oh...” She was right, of course. He still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was living through a fog. Ridiculous, of course. He looked down at his shoes, studying the frayed laces with interest. “I’m sorry -”

“Shut up,” Mallory said. “No need to be wallowing all the time. Just take care of your patients and your mansion, that’s enough.”

“It’s not my -”

“Maybe not legally, but as far as anyone knows your uncle could be dead. He hasn’t sent any word to you at all since he left, has he?”

“No, but then again the post isn’t in the best conditions lately.”

“I say good riddance.” Mallory chuckled to her herself. “If you find him months from now locked up in some asylum or other, just let him rot there.”

That might be a little harsh, he thought, but then again... Randolph hadn’t been much help at all when Magnus had told him of his idea to turn the mansion into a convalescent home for incapacitated soldiers of the war. He’d been complacent enough in the beginning, when Magnus had first pitched the idea to him, but as soon as Magnus brought up the issue of funding the endeavor, and what that would mean for Randolph’s investigation on his family’s deaths, he’d shot it down fast. It took a lot of negotiation, strained compromises, and plenty of sneaking behind Randolph’s back until it was too late for him to argue against for Magnus to set up the mansion as it was now. Still, even as the war raged on and their funds dwindled, Randolph held back many precious resources in some kind of desperate desire that they’d lend some benefit in his search for “the truth.”

Magnus was struck from his thoughts when he rammed into Mallory’s back. She’d stopped dead in her tracks and was murmuring something to another nurse unpacking a bundle of blankets from the last wagon.

Magnus backed away quickly, turning to the next wagon to help Louise unload crates full of clanking medicine bottles.

“Where exactly are we taking these?” he asked, cutting a glance around the surrounding fields. A few tents were set up nearby, and a humble house and barn crowded with nurses, surgeons, and soldiers were located closer to the battlefield than Magnus liked.

Louise nodded towards the home. “I’m assuming we’re meant to help out over there.”

“Wonderful, the place is about the size of our porch.”

Louise peered at him critically. “You are welcome to go out on the battlefield and scrounge up the deceased from every godforsaken shadowy hole out there, if you’d prefer.”

He’d seen the rows of dead bodies lined out on the hills like crops, and the scent of decay had followed on the wind even before he’d caught sight of the source of such a terrible smell. Magnus certainly didn’t want to go anywhere nearer to the battlefield than was necessary. “No, ma’am.”

Louise reached out and grabbed his wrist then. He jumped at the sudden movement, but she just inspected his hand, tsking. “Wash your hands. Can’t have you treating folks with the amount of grime you’ve collected over the past few days.”

He just nodded. Her grip was tight, uncomfortable.

“A few ground rules, also,” Louise said, almost to herself. “Since you’re new to this kind of work. I warn you now, there will be a lot more people on the verge of death. Do not linger by the sick, those who look emotionally or mentally unstable; that job is for the matrons. Do not try to attempt surgery - I cannot believe I have to tell you that - but I know how you just love to get in over your head.”

“You know, I’d almost think you see me as incompetent,” Magnus drawled.

Louise frowned apologetically. “I’m just warning you not to pull yourself too thin. Focus on what you know you do best, and be efficient.”

“Of course.” Magnus nodded, but he fell back a few steps, pretending that the boxes he was carrying were weighing him down.

Mallory and her troupe showed up at the house a little while after Magnus and Louise did. The barn was already overflowing with patients, so they moved to the house, which wasn’t much better, since the rooms were small and there were more soldiers in need of treatment than there were actual people to treat them.

The house in question had been inhabited by a one John Slentz, who had supposedly taken shelter with his family in the town of Gettysburg when the fighting started. Magnus felt a bit embarrassed over the fact that they’d pretty much just stolen a family’s home and were now using it to take care of bloody, broken soldiers, a large handful of which were on the verge of death.

The system they’d set up was holding together well enough, Magnus found. Nurses rushed through the two-story house with strips of sheets or bedspreads to make up for the lack of manufactured bandages. Outside, surgeons had brought out tables and tents and had set to operating in the open space. Magnus quickly turned away from the sight of so much blood and the sawed-off limbs that was creating quite a gruesomely impressive pile.

It appeared that before they’d arrived with more workforce and supplies, the farm-turned-hospital had been lacking in both. Magnus followed Louise for a while, trying to adjust to the frantic energy swirling about the house, so unlike the steady pace of the mansion.

He shook his head, silently chastising himself. There was no time for feeling awkward, and there was no time for pretending this house was a compelling photograph published in the newspaper for sheltered Northerners to pore over.

Magnus turned on his heel, darting past a matron carrying a crate packed with bottles of anesthesia (one of the boxes of provisions they’d brought with them, in fact). He was just about to dump his own crate of supplies by the others when the matron he’d previously ran into turned around and called out to him. He stilled.

“If you’re here with the new group,” she said, “I’d say the surgeons might need assistance out there. And I’ll bet they’ll need that whiskey as well.”

Louise’s warning flashed through his mind, and he started to say, “I’m actually -”

“It would be most appreciated,” she said, fixing him with a serious stare.

He nodded mutely, and immediately cursed himself internally. Of all the jobs to sign up for, it had to be the one involving the most blood and limbs or lack thereof; not to mention the one medical area he knew the least about. Louise would have his head, if the surgeons didn’t cut it off as soon as he showed them how incompetent he was.

But the look of relief on the matron’s face made it near impossible to refuse.

“Thank you for the supplies, by the way,” the matron added. “You came just in time.”

Her eyes were tired, so tired. Though Magnus couldn’t say that he felt any more stable at the moment, and the real work hadn’t even begun.

There were five or six surgeons working outside, and about twice as many people to assist them. This seemed terribly inadequate, considering the number of people in need of the most drastic of treatments. Magnus was willing to bet that there wasn’t half as much blood out on the battlefield than there was here.

Well, he’d already convinced himself that he wouldn’t be deterred, not by anything. He made promises; he liked to keep them.

Magnus didn’t allow himself much time to take in his surroundings. He caught sight of a man in a long, threadbare overcoat standing by a tent and forced his feet to carry him in that direction. He hefted the crate packed with alcohol bottles in his arms to a more comfortable position; the wooden panels had been digging into his forearms for a while now.

The man in the overcoat didn’t seem to notice Magnus approaching. He stumbled to a halt a few feet away from the man, biting his lip nervously. He couldn’t adequately put it into words, but this didn’t feel right.

Which was probably the dumbest thought he’d ever had. He sighed and stepped forward, gathering the conviction to speak. “Excuse me?”

Overcoat turned around from inspecting the surgical tools laid out on the table by the tent (or whatever he was doing). He looked Magnus up and down for a moment before comprehending the crate he was holding up and the fact that he didn’t seem to be in much hurry.

“Do you have anywhere I could leave this?” Magnus asked. “It’s heavy, and I’ve been carrying it for a while, and I was told you might need it? And if you need an extra set of hands I guess I could help out as well?” God, did he wish he couldn’t talk.

But Overcoat just raised his eyebrows and took the crate from Magnus’s hands without a word. He canted his head in the direction of another nearby tent and turned his back on Magnus, his eyes skipping over the bottles of whiskey as if counting them.

Magnus left him to his task, heading in the direction the man had pointed him towards. The tent was large compared to all the others in the general vicinity, to which he was marginally grateful. He sighed and pushed back the entrance flap.

What he found was a fair number of soldiers missing a hand or a leg or a foot, while others were simply covered in so much blood he couldn’t tell where their actual wounds might be. There were also a handful of nurses, each entirely absorbed in their tasks. He caught sight of one woman murmuring something to a man lying on the ground, his head resting in her lap. He didn’t appear to be breathing, Magnus noted, and he didn’t feel much shock at the realization. The man’s face was sweaty and red, his right arm heavily bandaged and cradled close to his chest. Nevertheless, the attendant who had been watching over him gingerly brushed a wet strand of hair from his forehead as though that might make him feel more comfortable. She closed her eyes briefly before standing up, tapping the broad shoulder of a man standing nearby, and stepping away from the soldier lying on the ground. The other man didn’t hesitate to lift the body up over his shoulder. He shoved past Magnus and lumbered outside, carrying the soldier without ceremony.

Only then did the woman who had been tending to the dead man notice him. She raised an eyebrow at him, but when she opened her mouth all she said was, “I do hope you have a purpose for being here. There isn’t any room for lingering strangers like yourself.” She grabbed a rough blanket from a pile and handed it to a nurse, who unfurled it and threw it over a twitching soldier.

Magnus bit his lip. This wasn’t any different from dealing with the folks he’d had under his care back at the mansion. Treating malaria was… relatively the same as treating post-surgery infection.

So he hoped.

Magnus snatched up a bowl of water that was resting on a table and poured most of its contents over his hand, remembering what Louise had said about washing his hands (he assumed this was the bowl’s purpose; if not, he was going to feel like an idiot). He rubbed his hands together and dried them off on his shirt. This was probably the last he was going to see of this particular garment, he thought. He’d probably have to burn it after he was done here.

“What would you have me do?” he asked the icy attendant.

Without missing a beat, she took a sponge, a metal cone, and a few bottles of chloroform from a small crate resting by the water bowl and placed them in his hands. “Go back out there and provide relief for anyone who might soon be going under those old sawbones’ weapons. Don’t give them too much, or they’ll die, don’t give them too little or they’ll still feel their bones being cut clean through.”

Magnus nodded, feeling a little faint. This wasn’t going to be like treating malaria.

Still, he’d been feeling useless ever since they’d left the mansion (perhaps even before that, when the balance in the mansion had been upturned by the absence of simply one person), and so he stumbled back out into the unfamiliar night of a foreign town. He immediately found the man in the overcoat standing by a table under a tree, washing a large, thin saw with a bloody rag. This didn’t seem to succeed in anything besides making the instrument even dirtier, but Magnus wasn’t in a place to comment.

As for Overcoat’s patient, a boy a couple years younger than Magnus was lying on the table, shivering and breathing heavily. He looked half-delirious; Magnus wondered how much alcohol they’d already given him to numb the pain.

Which suddenly made him realize that he didn’t know how much chloroform you were supposed to give a patient in a given situation without killing them.

Magnus rushed over, fumbling with the anesthetics he was carrying. There were two other nurses along with Overcoat, a man and a woman.

The man noticed him first, and called him over. When he reached the little group, Magnus placed the bottles on the table and took a moment to catch his breath before speaking. “If any of you need, er, any of this before you get to work, here it is?”

Overcoat stared at him for a minute, then quietly chuckled. He gestured to his patient as if to say Be my guest.

Magnus was really regretting this by now. He was fully aware that he might be condoning this boy to death - from an overdose of chloroform no less. Still, foolishly, he uncorked one of the bottles and poured a tiny bit of it onto the sponge. As he was moving to put the bottle back down, the man reached out and took the sponge from his hand, as well as the metal cone. He administered a few more drops of the anesthesia and purposefully nestled the sponge into the cone. He then placed it over his patient’s mouth, avoiding Magnus’s gaze. The boy seemed too weak to put up much of a fight, and in a matter of minutes, his eyes were heavy-lidded and glazed over.

That was when Overcoat pulled out the saw, and Magnus gathered up the chloroform bottles and the supplies and left as quickly as possible. He tried not to look behind as he moved on to the next people who might need relief from their pain.

He went from tent to tent, table to table. Some people already had their own batch of anesthetics, and some used alcohol instead. After awhile he learned how much chloroform you were actually meant to give a person, and he noted with satisfaction that he never once did paralyze someone, which he considered to be a great success.

After that Magnus had taken to carrying out odd jobs throughout the makeshift hospital. This consisted of washing out the soldiers’ grimy clothes, bandaging their fresh surgery wounds, or delivering supplies from the house to the barn to the tents. He never once got a chance to sit down and rest, or to even get a drink of water; not that he much noticed his discomfort, surrounded by the needs and demands of so many people at once. Though the battle had occurred nearly two days ago, there never seemed to be an end to the blood and bodies and limbs. Magnus never wanted to see another pile of hacked-off arms and legs again, not that he had even wanted to beforehand.

He marked the passage of time by the constellations that appeared in the sky over the duration of the night. Many of them he recognized from the times his mother would bring him to the women’s college in the dead of night. They would climb to the rooftops simply to watch the stars and point out the glimmering patterns they etched across the sky.

He missed that. He missed everything from before. All he had now was dirty rags used to clean the sweat and blood off the brows of people he’d been too cowardly to fight alongside.

Still, he supposed the sickly sweet, flammable smell of the medicine he handled was its own source of comfort that he couldn’t explain.

Chapter Text

July, 1863

Alex,

No dear. No hello. A name can say all, or maybe it’s just cowardice to not include anything else before it.

I’ve heard about everything that happened at Gettysburg; have you? I think the whole country is reeling. Have you seen action yet? If so, hopefully you remember not to be so reckless in your fighting style while still recovering from your wounds.

Damn. Alex wouldn’t appreciate the nagging on his part, but he had a right to be worried.

Where are you now? You didn’t mention anything about that in your previous letter.

Magnus dropped the pen onto the desk. Black ink spilled from the nib in thick drops, staining the pocked wooden surface. He cursed and tried scrubbing at the desk with his sleeve, but that only succeeded in spreading the blemish.

He took inventory of the desk; found a few old, mostly-intact books stacked off to the side, and moved them to cover the stain. He hoped Randolph wouldn’t notice. Knowing how scatterbrained he was, he probably wouldn’t. It ran in the family.

In all honesty, this was the last place Magnus had expected to find himself in. But his trepidation concerning his uncle’s office had lessened considerably since he returned from Gettysburg. Really, it was ridiculous that he should feel such a sense of foreboding in a room whose inhabitants consisted solely of musty books and abandoned letters.

Randolph’s letters. Magnus was still carrying around that mysterious note he’d found the day before he left for Gettysburg. Even now, it weighed heavy in his coat pocket, which, every now and then, he would reach into and run an ink-stained thumb over. But he never took it out to read over again. He wanted to ignore it, and maybe then it would turn out to mean nothing, that Randolph hadn’t gotten himself mixed up in some underhanded plot.

If he had, it was nothing but wishful thinking to hope that it would conveniently pass Magnus by.

He debated confiding in Alex, as he had done some months ago. But the memory of her stricken expression when he told her about Randolph’s obsession with Norse gods stalled his hand. And so he filled the rest of the page with the things he’d seen and done at Gettysburg. He hoped that would suffice.

Ending the letter was a different story, however. There it was, written at the bottom of Alex’s letter in her usual uneven, messy handwriting: With love, Alex. Casual. As if she thought nothing of it before writing that.

With love. Comma. How was he supposed to respond to that?

No love. No comma. Just his name, because Magnus was as cowardly as when he sat down to write this letter.

He barely let the ink dry before he folded up the letter and stuffed it in an envelope. He reached for Randolph’s wax seal stamp sitting in the corner of the desk, but hesitated when he realized that that might seem excessive. He put the stamp back down.

He propped his head on his hand, staring at the plain white envelope in front of him. It was uncertain when he would be able to send it; the postal service had been in shambles around here even before the war.

For now, he supposed he would have to hold on to it. He capped the ink bottle and stashed it and the pen on the bookshelf he’d originally found them. The letter joined Randolph’s tucked away in his coat. With that, he bolted from his uncle’s office and downstairs.

He ran into Jack on the bottom step, carrying a bundle of dirty uniforms so high that his face was almost entirely obscured. Jack stumbled back, muttering curses into the heavy fabrics. Magnus smirked at him before taking part of the load to carry.

“Are we washing these?” he asked.

Jack nodded, grimacing. Of all the miscellaneous jobs he carried out, he despised laundry duty. Magnus couldn’t blame him; the uniforms were always filthier than any piece of clothing should have the right to be.

Jack had already set up the necessary equipment for the laundry out on the back porch. He sat down with a huff and picked up the washboard. Magnus joined him, and together they made their way through the heap of unwashed uniform coats.

Jack managed about a minute of silence before it became too much for him. “So, señor, are you going on another field job soon? There isn’t much to do around here anymore, now that the battles have moved elsewhere.”

“I haven’t heard anything from Mallory. The town news is dull too, for that matter.”

Jack sighed, more dramatically than seemed necessary. “Just when you were starting to get your start. The world really is cruel.”

Magnus didn’t bother to ask why Jack was so keen on getting him to leave the mansion. “Even so, I’ll probably be leaving soon.”

Jack dropped the coat he’d been scrubbing against the washbasin into the soapy water. “Wait, what? Where?”

It almost physically pained to take the letter out from his pocket. But he handed it over to Jack, not caring about his wet hands coated in soap bubbles.

Jack completely forgot about the laundry in favor of reading over Randolph’s letter. His eyes roved over the page, then skipped up to the top to read it again. “Señor, I don’t like this. Not at all. You shouldn’t get yourself mixed up in his messes.”

“I need to know what it means,” Magnus insisted. “It’s better if I uncover what’s going on now than figure everything out when his ‘mess’ inevitably comes bursting through the front door.”

“And what makes you think that will happen? Maybe he’s already dead somewhere. That would be convenient - sorry, señor, but it’s true.”

Magnus picked up a few of the uniforms that they’d already washed and starting hanging them up on the clothesline across the yard, forcing Jack to follow after him to continue the conversation. “I’m just saying - out of sight, of out mind.”

“Not really,” Magnus said bitterly.

He held out a hand, and Jack tossed him a few laundry clips. He tried for a different approach. “Still, we need you. You created this little place.”

“I scrounged up the funds to start it, sure, but you can live without me now. Which is good. Because I’m leaving for Boston this week.”

Jack stared at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Even if you did, what would you do there? There isn’t a return address, so you don’t know where this associate of your uncle’s is. Your uncle hasn’t contacted you, so you don’t know where he is either. You have nowhere to go.”

As much fancy as he liked to talk, Jack did have a point. Magnus scowled. “I’ll figure it out as I go.”

“In that case, I’m coming with you.”

He didn’t know why, but Magnus almost laughed. “Definitely not.”

“Why not?” Jack asked defensively. “I’m a wonderful travel companion! I’ll even pay for my own train ticket.”

“You don’t have the money for that.”

“Actually, I’ve been doing odd jobs around town lately.” Jack smiled, smug. “Earned quite a bit, too.”

Magnus grumbled under his breath, but he had no logical argument to opposing Jack’s request to come along with him to Boston. Besides, it might be… beneficial to have someone else with him as he traveled. Save for Gettysburg, he hadn’t so much as left the state since Randolph took him in three years ago, let alone returned to his hometown tainted with memories of his mother and other lost things.

“Is that a yes?” Jack asked eagerly.

In answer, Magnus frowned and turned back to the porch and the laundry. Jack laughed triumphantly and punched his arm with such unnecessary force that he almost tipped over into the water bucket. “You have good sense! I’ll be the best travel companion and investigation partner you could ask for, don’t worry.”

“I have complete faith in your detective skills,” Magnus deadpanned.

Jack sat back down on the porch and started on the laundry with renewed vigour. “I’ll prepare my things immediately after this. We should leave as soon as possible.”

Magnus took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to calm his thoughts. He hadn’t prepared himself to leave so soon, but he supposed it was better to get going now, or else he might never actually start.

It was a little pathetic how little time it took to pack. It wasn’t even that Magnus traveled light - he just didn’t have that many things. Most of his possessions had been destroyed in the fire that killed his mother and left him homeless for a while, and when Randolph took him in, he never bothered to buy any more than the bare essentials.

Jack was quite the opposite, however. Magnus didn’t know when he had acquired so many belongings (not to mention why he needed to bring them all on this trip), but he did know that the large suitcase he was perched on in the foyer was definitely not coming along with them.

“You don’t need that much stuff,” Magnus said, pushing Jack off the trunk.

He scoffed, affronted. “I’m coming prepared!” He gestured to the satchel slung over Magnus’s shoulder. “What can you fit in that thing, one shirt?”

Magnus threw up his hands. “Well, it’s a long trip. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“And don’t come running to me when you need product for that tangled mess you call hair,” Jack snarked. “I am a civilized human being.”

Magnus would be lying if he said that it didn’t bother him at least a little that the convalescent home would be completely fine without him. When he’d informed Mallory of the short leave he’d be taking (since when had she become his mother, needing to ask her permission for all things?), she just shrugged and said, “So long as you come back in time to give us our monthly wages.”

(Not exactly a mother, then. Mothers never asked their sons for money so shamelessly, at least not in his experience.)

Though, he supposed that did mean he’d done a good job in establishing the convalescent home in the first place. If he lacked the satisfaction that came from being needed, then, if anything, he would pride himself in those skills.

Jack was already out the door and halfway down the walkway by the time Magnus snapped out of his thoughts. He took one last glance at the dining-room-turned-main-hospice-area (all was well and normal there, which put him a little more at ease), then gave one final muttered farewell to the empty, no-longer-very-grand foyer, before walking out the door.

The railroad systems in the South had never been much to brag about compared to those of the North, and the war did not help it much. Magnus cursed all the rail workers and businesspeople that had abandoned them for greener pastures in the North after the war broke out. This meant that he and Jack were stuck sitting on a sidewalk, calling out to every person with a sturdy cart that passed by and asking them if they were heading to Washington. The answer was no 99% of the time, but the one man who stopped to tell them he was indeed heading to the Northern capital recognized them as “those Yankee hospital workers out there past the woods” and refused to give them a ride, even when Magnus showed him the fare he was willing to give up.

After that encounter, Jack started singing “Dixie” under his breath, just to appear less threatening to the Southern folk. He never once stumbled over the lyrics, and Magnus wondered how he could possibly know the entire Confederate “national” anthem. “Traitor,” he muttered as he tried to ignore the relentless heat bearing down on them.

It worked, though. As the hour passed, a cart rolled up to them, and a man with an impressively curled mustache leaned over to ask them what they were doing.

“Oh, just waiting for some kind soul to accept us along on their journey to Washington,” Jack said cheerfully. He made a big show of weighing Magnus’s wallet in his hand.

The man took the bait. “I might be passing by that area.”

“Well, how lucky we are!” Jack cast a glance towards Magnus, who felt as if he were a few minutes close to a mental break, between the terrible heat, boredom, and vexation at Jack’s constant singing. “Señor, I’ve found us a ride.”

“I wouldn’t have given him that much,” Magnus muttered. But he climbed onto the cart and made himself as comfortable as possible on the splintered wooden surface.

He tuned out most of the journey. Jack alternated between entertaining the mustached man with exaggerated stories that Magnus knew for a fact were barely based in truth at all and singing miscellaneous Southern folk songs that he inexplicably knew very well.

It was noon by the time the rolling Virginia fields were replaced with busy streets and brick buildings. Magnus begrudgingly handed over the money Jack had promised the mustached man back in town, and they were left alone in a somewhat-terrifying city with a lot less coin than Magnus had expected. It was then, and only then, that he realized he had never even visited the capital in passing, and so he had no idea where anything was. It appeared they would again have to resort to asking passerby on the street for help.

Jack was ahead of him in that regard. While Magnus was still staring around the bustling city - taking in the construction going on around nearly every block, the streets choked with dust and horses and rows of either eager soldiers lined up with rifles perched on shoulders, or, more commonly, wearied men in stiff blue coats marching at a snail’s pace with heads still held high - Jack was hailing down every person that passed by, asking them for directions to the nearest train station.

Finally, one woman was kind enough to stop and write down a few directions for them. Jack’s overly energetic thank yous followed her down the street for a long time.

The walk to the closest city train station was a half hour filled with chatter on Jack’s end (how could his voice still work?), silence and the occasional response from Magnus when Jack wanted one. Their scrawled directions even led them past the White House - Magnus marveled at the rows upon rows of tents set up on the lawn, and the soldiers milling about as comfortably as though this makeshift camp was their own homes.

The train station wasn’t as big as he had expected. His only prior experience with cities was Boston, and he had always known it to have a grand and bustling railway system. Washington, however, could only boast a long, sturdy wooden platform and a building that looked more like a glorified barn than anything else. Not that Magnus was complaining. He was very grateful for the train station, because if not for it, they’d have been stuck walking the whole way.

He had a moment of panic right in the doorway when he rummaged through his coat pocket and couldn’t find his wallet. Well, more than a moment of panic. He wondered if he was slick enough to stow away on the next train to Boston, and how he would be able to convince Jack that he couldn’t bring his trunk of useless things with him.

He realized a second later that he’d lost Jack among the few people in the train station. It was so dimly lit that he couldn’t make out a single bright blonde head among the travelers. His moment of panic rose in heights.

“Why do you look like you’re about to faint on the tracks?”

Magnus jumped. He turned around and nearly collided with Jack, who was chewing obnoxiously loud on a peppermint stick. Two train tickets hung lazily from his fingers.

“The train will arrive in twenty minutes,” Jack informed him, tossing him his stolen wallet.

Magnus caught it and stared open-mouthed at who he’d thought was his friend. “You bought yourself candy with my money.”

Jack shot him a bemused look. “I got you one, too, I’m not that terrible of a person. Here.” He held out another peppermint stick to Magnus. “I also have -” He rummaged through his suitcase and pulled out a small bag of lemon drops, another bag of taffy, and a tin decorated with a little red bow that, judging by the illustration on the side, was filled with neat squares of chocolate fudge. “- This. Sustenance for the long journey ahead. But if you are not going to appreciate it, well, I might just keep it all to myself.”

Magnus stuttered out something unintelligible as Jack huffily marched outside onto the platform and sat down on a bench, placing his trunk and loads of candy at his feet. How he could still have so much energy after lugging it around all day, Magnus could not fathom.

His wallet was near empty. They would have enough cash for maybe two nights in a hotel and tickets for the train ride back. Oh. Well, he supposed they just wouldn’t eat for the entire rest of the trip. That was… doable. If he was returning to his roots by going back to Boston, then he might as well add in the memory of starving to death on those same streets as well, right? All or nothing.

He sat down next to Jack, took the previously-offered peppermint stick, and unwrapped it with plenty of disdain. Jack raised an eyebrow at him, but didn’t say anything, which was refreshing but also very unlike him. He must be trying to make a point.

As they waited, Magnus scanned the city area again. Across from the train station was a large expanse of raw earth and skinny building frames. A single post office sat between the construction, seemingly unaware of it.

A post office. Magnus leaped to his feet. (Jack glanced up at him, then returned his attention to the newspaper he’d picked up from the stand nearby. Magnus knew for a fact that he was only looking at the political comics and trying to gauge their meaning despite not understanding a single written word.)

“I’ll be back,” he said.

The post office was manned by a teen boy that was sorting through the day’s mail when Magnus walked in. Magnus slammed his envelope on the desk (with a little too much force) to get his attention.

The boy jumped in his seat and fixed his askew glasses with shaking hands. “Yes, what can I -”

He looked down at the envelope on his desk. “Oh. Of course.” Another moment of adjusting his glasses, and the boy muttered, “40th New York Infantry, right… Um, sir, do you have any information on where that regiment might be right now, or where they might be heading next?”

“Oh… no.” Alex had made no mention of that in her first letter.

The boy tried his best to hide his annoyance. “Then, that will be twice as much for us to track them down ourselves.”

Magnus had conveniently forgotten about the issue of money. “…How much would that be?”

“Fifty cents.”

“Fifty -” Magnus nearly dropped his wallet. “Since when -”

“Fifty cents,” the boy insisted.

Magnus paid the fair, albeit grudgingly. Next time he would just wait for the dysfunctional postal service to come around town. He would wait months if it meant only having to pay the usual five cents.

He walked out of the postal office with a bitter frown plastered on his face, but he supposed if his letter could reach Alex, wherever she was, it might just be worth it.

He sat down next to Jack (who was still “reading” the newspaper) just as the train pulled into the station with a whole lot of steam and noise. Jack folded up the newspaper smartly, then stuffed it in his suitcase with a lot less elegance. With that, he was finished with his strange playacting of a businessman. He practically skipped onto the train. He handed over his fare to the ticket collector and wandered around the entire train car before finding a spot near the end to settle. Magnus followed, a lot less enthusiastic. He took the stub that Jack had forgotten about from the bemused ticket collector and sat down next to his friend.

“You’re supposed to keep these,” he said, handing the ticket stub to Jack.

His golden eyes lit up at the little slip of paper. “Oh, a memento of the trip. Of course, that’s very important.”

Magnus shrugged and turned to stare out the window. The train car hummed with chatter from the few other travelers, and Jack was soon deep in conversation with the little girl sitting next to him. He even heard Jack pop open the fudge tin to share some with her. Magnus snuck a glance at the woman that must be the girl’s mother, but she seemed more preoccupied with arguing with her husband than the fact that a strange man was giving her daughter questionable food.

As the day waxed and waned, the clatter of the train tracks became a welcome background noise to the unsteady thoughts that filled his mind. The convalescent home, how would it fare? What if something unexpected, something dreadful, came up? What if Magnus was too caught up in untangling his uncle’s mysteries that he didn’t return for months on end?

And then there were the times his thoughts drifted to more worrisome things. There was no telling when he might hear from Alex again, and in that time all numbers of things could happen. Things he did not want to think about at all.

Jack offered him a piece of fudge (the last one in the box, how considerate), which worked a little to quell his thoughts. Magnus momentarily wondered if his worries were really etched on his face so obviously, but he shook it off. Jack was much too invested in getting the little girl sitting next to him to laugh at his terrible jokes to notice anything else.

“Well, this certainly brings back memories,” Jack said as he passed through the great black doors of the (much more impressive) train station with his trunk in tow. “Many of which I’d rather forget.”

Magnus had to agree with him. For the most part, Boston felt unchanged since the last time he’d lived here - if you ignored the groups of blue-coated soldiers now marching down the streets and hanging about the downtown businesses much like in Washington. That was new.

He kept his eyes on the dusty ground as he crossed the street, which probably wasn’t the best idea considering all the foot and carriage traffic in Boston.

Jack waved a map in front of his face to get his attention. “There’s an inn just a few blocks away,” he said. “Shall we?”

Magnus nodded numbly. He’d been debating for most of the trip whether he wanted to chance a visit to the smaller Chase mansion on the edge of Boston. If Randolph really was still in the city, he’d most likely be there. Magnus had never visited the mansion, but his mother’s many stories of growing up in it gave him enough apprehension about it that he hesitated at the prospect of spending the night there.

Jack was silent as they traversed the streets of Boston towards the inn, but that was mainly because he was too busy stuffing his mouth with taffy to speak. He offered some to Magnus, but he declined.

The good news was that the inn was cheap enough for them to afford three nights instead of the presumed two. The bad news was that it was cheap. It was a simple wooden building, a little rickety on the outside and more than a little seedy-looking on the inside. But, in all honesty, Magnus would have been grateful for any place with a bed at this point. Jack, full from all the sweets he’d eaten throughout the day, collapsed on his cot as soon as they managed to get the door open (after 10 minutes of jiggling their issued key in the keyhole with no success).

Magnus pulled back the off-white curtains on the window and looked out at the city. The street the inn was located on was the kind of place that only came alive after the sun disappeared - and even then, the individuals that populated the street could be equated to shadows.

He sat down on his own bed and pulled out Randolph’s letter for the hundredth time. It was starting to wear out around the edges.

He decided then and there that tomorrow morning he would visit the Chase mansion. (Well, perhaps not in the morning; he was not so delusioned as to think that he would muster up the strength to leave the inn any time before 1 in the afternoon.)

He would need the extra sleep anyways, if Jack’s snores from the other end of the very small room were any indication. Magnus grabbed a handful of the taffy and lemon drops that Jack had set on the only piece of furniture in the room: a round table with a pockmarked surface. He made himself as comfortable as possible on the bed and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen - because writing letters to Alex, whether he planned to send them or not, had apparently become a much-too prevalent hobby.

Chapter Text

“I don’t think you’re supposed to smile,” the private next to Alex whispered.

Alex shushed him by cuffing him over the head and grinned wider. For good measure, she leaned on his shoulder, because what was the point of having your very own scrawny little soldier friend if you didn’t take advantage of them just a little bit?

The 16-year-old boy had taken to bothering/entertaining Alex with his company ever since they’d ended up marching next to each other after Gettysburg. His name was Adrian Fletcher and he almost lost his arm, he’d told Alex - proudly waving around his right arm which was bound in a crude splint and sling. The way in which he’d introduced himself told Alex a lot about him, really.

The camera flashed one last time, and the photographer emerged from under his black blanket. Alex dropped her smile and sat down on a nearby tree stump. Fletcher plopped down on the ground next to her, staring curiously at the photographer as he hurried into his wagon to develop the picture. “Now what?”

Alex crossed her ankles and began systematically kicking up the dirt with her heels. “Now we lie in wait to grab that thing as soon as it’s finished developing.”

“Why? Do you want to give it to some girl back home?”

She flicked Fletcher’s cheek. “Stop talking as if you have any knowledge of those kinds of things. And please do not tell me about your cousin, I don’t want to hear about her pretty golden ringlets and striking blue eyes one more time.”

Fletcher’s face flared. “So is it? Some girl back home, that is.”

“No. It’s not for my cousin, either.”

“Then, what, you just want to keep it to look at your own face?” He snickered loudly as if he were just so funny.

Alex huffed and rested her head on her palm. She had to admit, the other soldiers’ offers to drop the boy on the side of the road on some cold, dusty march did sound tempting every once in a while.

They waited impatiently for about twenty minutes. Occasionally Fletcher would glance around the camp nervously, as if he could hear the major general shouting at them to keep digging their trenches as he had been doing since the army set up camp near the Potomac less than a day ago. (Meade was a funny, useless man anyway, so Alex didn’t take him very seriously.)

Alex pounced on the photographer as soon as he emerged from his wagon/darkroom. Fletcher trailed behind her, ready to support her if need be. Not that it seemed his assistance would be needed; upon seeing a small, scruffy soldier half his age barreling toward him, he quickly hid behind his camera and busied himself with dismantling it.

“Sir!” Alex called as she approached him. “I was wondering if you were offering today’s photographs for profit? Because I would gladly take one or two off your hands.”

“Um, well…” The photographer fiddled with the blanket over the camera as though he were thinking about using it to protect himself from Alex’s gaze. She did have that effect on people again, she’d noticed. Now that she had both eyes again and had managed to snuff that sad-looking light out of her eyes.

Alex stared at him expectantly.

“We only took a couple,” he said weakly. “We plan to sell them to the, er, the highest bidder?”

“Oh, wonderful.” Alex stood up straighter. She rifled through her satchel, which she now kept on her person at all times after one too many belongings went unexpectedly missing.

“Will this be enough?” She held out her threadbare wallet filled with her only recently-acquired wages of eleven dollars. (It really should have been thirteen, but their regiment’s new colonel was a cheapskate.)

“Alex,” hissed Fletcher beside her. “You realize that’s probably the last you’ll ever see money for another four months?”

“That’s alright with me. Not like I have anyone to send it home to or anything to spend it on.”

“Then what do you want the picture for?” Fletcher demanded, looking more distressed than seemed necessary.

The photographer snatched up Alex’s wallet and sifted through its contents. “Let me see if they are ready,” he said quietly. He pocketed Alex’s wallet as he scurried back towards his wagon.

Alex scowled at his retreating back. “I had hoped I’d get that back, at least.”

Fletcher stared at her with a mixture of awe, fear, and bewilderment as he often did. “How will you pay for coffee?”

“You’ll share with me, won’t you?”

His shoulders slumped, but he didn’t even try to argue the topic further.

The photographer returned with a thin black-and-white picture freshly developed. Alex accepted it and thanked the man for his services, then trotted off to the tent she shared with Fletcher. Distantly, she heard the scuffling of boots on leaf mulch to let her know that Fletcher was following close behind. Honestly - one day his attachment to her would blow up in his face.

The photograph was a little smaller than she would have liked, but she was standing in the front, at least. Fletcher stood beside her, awkwardly hunched to accommodate her position leaning on his shoulder coupled with her small stature. None of the four other soldiers in the photograph were smiling, but, oh well, at least then Alex would be distinguishable from them. They all had matching dirt-streaked faces, patchy uniforms, and exhausted eyes, after all.

She set the photograph on the ink-stained wooden board next to her half-finished letter. Camp life was monotonous and dreary, so she’d been hoping a photograph might provide something extra so as not to be too much of a disappointment.

This was her second letter to Magnus, woefully short and bland. Not so much as a single mail wagon had passed through, and so she was stuck with one stupid unfinished letter (the first having been mailed off at a less-than-functional post office in the town of Gettysburg less than a day after the fighting had ceased) and no word from the convalescent home.

The thin tent flap rustled. Alex turned around to find Fletcher poking his head through the opening. “The major is coming,” he warned her. “I think he’s bringing shovels.”

Alex cursed without much venom behind it. “Don’t we deserve a few moments of rest? We’ve been marching for days in the rain and only just got to set up camp.”

“The time it took for the photographs to be taken was our break,” Fletcher pointed out.

She glanced at the photograph once last time, frowning. She followed Fletcher outside, and they made their way through the muddy campgrounds, filled with loud voices and the smell of pack animals. It was a different kind of busy from the mansion, which was almost always filled with snippets of conversation from nurses on break, orders shouted across the room - water for this patient, anesthesia for another. And it was always warmer, in more ways than one.

There was none of that warmth here, physically or metaphorically or what-have-you.

It’s funny, Alex thought as she picked up a shovel and headed towards the half-formed trenches. She could hardly wait to escape the mansion just a few weeks ago, and now here all she could think of was how much she missed the place.

Useless thoughts.

As they got closer to the ongoing construction project, Alex realized that the trenches had been mostly completed. Now soldiers were in the middle of using all the excess dirt to build a long line of earthworks. When she got there, Fletcher was already in the process of stacking logs on top of each other to fortify the trenches.

“Mason says we’re on picket duty tonight,” Fletcher muttered to Alex as she jumped into the trench next to him.

“Mason? Since when does he give out the orders?” She shot a glance at the soldier in question. He was a stout man who was always wasting their regiment’s short supply of coffee by chewing on the beans raw. When he looked over at her, she made a face at him.

Mason grunted and continued stacking his own log supports. “Since you decided to spend your boundless time hanging around camp, the least you could do is make up for that wasted time.”

“It was fifteen minutes,” Alex protested. She hooked her boot in a crevice in the logs and hoisted herself a few feet to get a higher look beyond their encampment. She took in the sight of the town in the distance, the rolling hills, and the Potomac River winding through the land before the logs gave way underneath her and she landed heavily on the ground. A cloud of dust and chunks of soil erupted around her.

Fletcher laughed. Mason shouted at her. Alex refused to give either of them the satisfaction of seeing her in pain from the fall, and so she stood up and dusted herself off.

“Your fortifications are weak,” she informed Mason.

He sputtered for a good minute, then picked up his shovel as if he were planning to use it for something other than digging up the earth. Alex made a point of grabbing one of the tumbled logs and aiming it at her fellow private.

Mason grudgingly started to rebuild. “You will give back to your country in this way,” he muttered. “I will volunteer you both as soon as we’re done making these damn barriers.”

“I wonder when we are going to fight,” said Fletcher, peering into the distance where he must think the rebels had set up camps of their own. “What are we waiting for, a formal invitation to come across the river to them?”

Mason had retreated into his sullen thoughts at this point, however; he didn’t spare them a glance from his work. Alex eventually joined him, but only once the colonel started making rounds to pick out the shirkers. Mason took this time as an opportunity to sign Alex and Fletcher up for picket duty - the final line of defense yet again - as he’d sworn to do, marking the perfect ending to the most mind-numbing day of Alex’s life.

Never satisfied, are you?

She dropped her shovel, which she’d been using to hack at a stubborn clump of dirt just to look like she was doing something. That thought had not been hers. It was cold and lilting and heavy in her mind.

Loki used to do this all the time. When Alex’s thoughts would start to spiral all alone locked away in her bedroom while her parents were away, or when her emotions clouded her judgment in an all-too-public space as they so often did, Loki was always there to weave in a few comforting words to steady her child’s world again. Alex had found it quite helpful at the time, but of course Loki was never so benevolent. It had planted a seed in Alex’s mind - even though Loki had let up on that specific kind of mind manipulation over the years, Alex occasionally caught herself second guessing whether or not a thought was her own.

Now, after so long a break between a planted idea, she caught Loki’s words almost immediately. She had to do it quickly, too, because Loki’s manipulations were like snakes - react too slowly, and they might bite.

So she cut the snake’s head off. She filled her mind with the first thing that came to mind: a medley of various songs she’d heard from the other soldiers while marching, setting up camp, and on their off times. When she felt Loki’s words start to prod at the barrier she was building, she started humming them aloud.

She picked up her shovel before anyone could notice anything strange about her behavior. Fletcher had wandered off to help someone else with their earthworks, whereas Alex was still relatively in the same place she’d started. Even Mason had moved on.

Though the daylight had disappeared a while ago, she felt too warm. She shed her wool coat and let it drag behind her as she looked for some other place that might need another pair of hands and a shovel.

She was stopped short by a pack of soldiers barreling past her. She had to jump into the nearest trench to dodge them.

“Day’s work is done,” someone stopped to tell her, in case it wasn’t obvious. “You can get back to your tent, or line up for some supper.”

Alex could only nod. The songs had evaporated from her mind, leaving her feeling vulnerable.

She left the shovel in the ditch and slung her coat over her head, grimacing when she realized it had picked up enormous chunks of disrupted soil when she dragged it through the trenches. Why the hell did she do that?

She passed the supper line without a glance and walked straight to her and Fletcher’s tent. The woman handing out the rations tried to catch Alex’s eye meaningfully (as she’d been doing for quite a while), but she just quickened her pace and retreated even further underneath her coat. She knew that woman’s husband, and he was a bear of a man that Alex was not in the mood to worry about.

She tugged her coat off her head when she reached her tent. Fletcher was lying sprawled across her bedroll reading a slip of paper. Alex slumped down next to him and pushed his head away. “Get your louse-ridden head off my bed,” she muttered.

Fletcher started to protest, but she shushed him. “The other day I saw you scratching your head like you had an entire city of them living in that cabbage patch you call hair.”

“You’re one to talk,” Fletcher grumbled. “Your hair’s a shade away from being a thriving garden.”

“Courtesy of my grandfather,” Alex said proudly, fluffing up her curls. “What are you reading?”

Fletcher’s smile turned crooked with a bit of mischief, a bit of guilt.

Alex whipped around to look at her writing board. It was empty. “You bastard,” she said and snatched her letter out of Fletcher’s hands. “Why do you have to be so goddamn nosy?”

“I didn’t read the whole thing,” the boy wailed. “But it sounds to me like you do have a sweetheart! You just have to read between the lines a little, but your descriptions are much too poetic for you to not be writing someone special.” He sighed wistfully. “I wish I could write. Then Eliza might -”

“She’s your cousin!” Alex shoved the letter underneath her writing board, along with the photograph that had been left undisturbed.

When she looked up again, she thought she heard an irritatingly dignified giggle from the corner of the tent. But there was no one there; only the feeling of suspension, as if whoever was watching Alex was waiting for something from her.

Alex was not an idiot, nor was she delusional. She knew Loki had something planned, and the knowledge of that was almost impossible to dislodge from her brain.

“Come on.” She stood up and nudged Fletcher lightly on the shoulder with her boot. “Time to freeze our faces off while we try our best to numb ourselves to every tiny rustle in the trees. Don’t forget your rifle this time.”

Fletcher caught up to her as she was heading toward their assigned positions (where a relieved-looking guard gave over his spot). She pretended to be angry with him, but Loki’s laugh was still echoing around every tree and bush, and the truth was she needed someone to talk to to get it out. She managed to stay silent for a full two minutes before she gave in and said, “What are you planning to do when the war ends?”

It was an awfully optimistic question. But Alex figured it couldn’t hurt to imagine a perfect outcome for the both of them.

Fletcher’s spirits visibly lifted. “Well, firstly I am going to have to acquire a dog. A big, brave one who is also very friendly. Then I will return home with it and the ladies of White Plains, New York will be all over me begging to marry me.”

Alex raised an eyebrow even though he couldn’t see it in the dark. “Because of your dog?”

“Because of my courage and my dedication to my country.”

“Because of your dog.” Alex nodded to herself as if she understood completely. “So that’s your plan.”

“What about you?” Fletcher shot back. “You’ve never said anything about your life before you enlisted. Mysterious Fierro, that’s what they call you in camp.”

“That’s not clever at all, and no one calls me that.”

“So?” he prompted. “What is your story?”

Alex turned her attention to her rifle, pretending to rub an imaginary smear off the barrel.

Fletcher sighed. “You’re no fun at all.”

“I’m alright with that.”

They dropped off into silence. Music drifted up from the camp, a flute and a violin weaving together to form a sprightly melody. Further into the woods shadows could be seen moving around, the silhouettes of other soldiers on picket duty. Alex closed her eyes and tried to think of anything besides the impending confrontation she was soon to have with her mother.

Minutes or hours passed. The night felt heavier, as did her thoughts.

A bush rustled. Alex’s eyes snapped open. She hefted her rifle, prepared to fight anything that moved despite her sluggishness.

Fletcher yelped. Alex whirled around in a panic and stumbled through the underbrush to reach him, but when she did, all she found was Fletcher crouched down petting… a dog?

It was small and ragged, with curly black hair that covered its eyes. It yipped. Alex jumped, still on edge. Fletcher only laughed and continued to pet its head, which made the dog bark even more.

“Where did that come from?” hissed Alex.

He looked up, grinning wider than Alex had ever seen him. “She just appeared from the shadows! Do you think I could take her home with me in place of the bigger one I’d planned for?”

“You can’t keep her!” Alex protested. “She probably belongs to someone.”

“Oh, look at her. If she has an owner, they must treat her very poorly.” He stuck his tongue out at her. “Don’t you like dogs?”

“This is not the best place for a dog to live,” Alex mumbled.

“From here on out, your name will be…” Fletcher lifted the dog into his arms, studying her. “Lilith? Yes, Lilith.”

Lilith yapped. Alex clutched her rifle tighter.

She despised how she was acting so much like her stepmother, snappish and disapproving. But her exhaustion, that growing sense of unease, and the sound of the dog’s barking was not an ideal combination.

“You can keep me company as we guard the camp,” Fletcher told Lilith, and Alex resigned herself to a long night of him cooing and doting over his new pet.

It was near dawn before other soldiers came to take over picket duty for them. Fletcher had settled into the underbrush as though it were the finest of fabrics. Lilith dozed in his lap. Alex leaned on her rifle - minding the bayonet, of course - staring at some unfocused point further in the distance.

She didn’t acknowledge the new guard as she passed by him. She had to admit, with her mind so numb and her actions so slow, she didn’t feel like much of a soldier. The war novels and newspapers had lied to her about everything, hadn’t they?

“Where will you keep the dog?” Alex asked Fletcher, who looked like he was trying to hide Lilith while simultaneously trying to act as though it was normal for him to be holding a tiny black dog in his arms.

“In our tent?” he asked hopefully.

“Absolutely not. We don’t know how destructive she might be.”

“No, she’s a sweetheart, I know it.” He smiled down at Lilith. “Aren’t you?”

Alex was trying to think of places to hide the dog when she noticed a group of people causing a small commotion outside the wooded area. It looked like they were gathering around a wagon with its horses still hitched.

“Mail!” Fletcher shouted, sounding more eager than he should, considering he himself could not even write. “Fierro, it’s a mail wagon!”

“So I see,” Alex said, trying to appear calm while also breaking into a run towards the rapidly-growing cluster of soldiers.

“We haven’t seen a mail wagon in months,” Fletcher mused as he practically trotted behind Alex. How he could run at such a leisurely pace and still keep up with her she couldn’t know. “Though I suppose that means we are luckier than other regiments. Do you think a letter from your sweetheart will be in there?”

Alex’s first thought was I sure damn hope so, quickly followed by a “Shut up, Fletcher” when she came to her senses and fully realized what he’d said.

The mail carriers were going through each letter at a time and yelling out the names they were addressed to in no particular order. Alex shoved her way through the crowd until she was close enough to the front that she could at least see the mail carriers. A couple of men grumbled in protest, but they understood just as well as her the eagerness in her eyes, so they did not try to kick her out. Plus, she was sure at least some of them might feel guilty for pushing over someone as small as herself.

Greene, Laurence, Nelson, Lindsay… The names kept coming, and each time a soldier would push through the throng of people in front of him and collect his mail. (Some of the luckier bastards left with a thick handful of letters.)

Williams, Penns... Fierro!

Alex slipped through the final front line and waved her hand high above her head. One of the mail carriers spared but a glance at her then tossed her a single pure white envelope.

Luckily she caught it, but that didn’t stop her heart from doing a painful skip as she watched it fall too close to the ground. Perhaps she was being ridiculous, but the thought of it getting sullied sent an absurd rush of anger through her.

Seeing the address - To Alex Fierro, of the Army of the Potomac, 40th New York Infantry, Company E - written in Magnus’s chicken-scratch handwriting at the top of the page brought Alex a surge of emotion that she couldn’t handle all at once. There was joy bundled up in there, of course, but also something a lot less easy to pinpoint. Homesickness? Was that possible, to miss a place that could barely be considered a home? Or, no, not a place, but a person?

Alex shook herself out of her thoughts and refocused on actually reading the letter she was currently clutching in a death grip, crinkling the fine paper. Of course Magnus would only have the most expensive paper available in his mansion. Despite how much he tried to distance himself from his family’s old money, he was always surrounded by it.

She made her way towards her tent buried in Magnus’s words, dodging people and trees and dips in the ground effortlessly.

He wrote perfectly, thought Alex. Despite how the ink was smudged half the time, as was the curse of left-handed folk, his spelling and grammar were perfect. Alex suddenly felt rather self-conscious about her own writing abilities; she had never considered tutors and lessons to be that important, much to her father’s chagrin. (Her stepmother had an endless list of little comments that she would throw out every now and then whenever the subject came up. “Perhaps he is more suited to women’s work,” she would say with a smirk, then wave about her embroidery hoop as demonstration.)

Alex nearly tripped and fell face-first into the dirt when a certain word popped out at her. Gettysburg. No. He could not have possibly been at Gettysburg, because wouldn’t it be impossible for Alex to have missed him?

But really, it wasn’t that far-fetched to think that Magnus had been to Gettysburg - after all, the mansion was relatively close to Pennsylvania, and the battle’s aftermath had been broadcasted all over. Some said the casualties were so high that officials were still scrambling to count them all up and find a definitive number.

But last Alex remembered Mallory had refused every one of Magnus’s pleas to join his own employees on field operations. She smirked at the poorly veiled enthusiasm and admiration in his words as he described the plight of the Gettysburg field nurses, doctors, and surgeons whom he had soon found himself working under as an assistant, running from table to table delivering anesthetics. Alex was glad to hear that he had successfully avoided paralyzing anyone’s lungs.

She was trying to savor the final paragraphs when she made it to her tent. Fletcher was already settled into his bedroll and was fiddling with the tuning pegs on a guitar. Alex had never seen him play, and perhaps it was for the fact that it was missing a string.

That didn’t stop him from strumming a few basic chords before launching into a fast-paced song that had his fingers dancing all across the fretboard. Alex stared at him for a moment, wondering why he had chosen to keep this talent a secret. With a skill like that, the dinner campfires would be much more lively.

Fletcher didn’t look up, so she didn’t comment on his playing. She returned her attention to her letter.

Magnus hadn’t added any kind of closing before his name; perhaps Alex had scared him with her own. She could get hung up over that some other time, she thought, but at the moment she couldn’t muster the energy for it.

She sat down in her bedroll and sprawled out on her back. The letter and envelope fluttered onto her chest. Alex decided that she would rest here a while, and that would be alright.

It was not alright. She was tired, but she wasn’t sleepy, which made for a rather inconvenient state of being where she felt too heavy to do anything that would be of use to anyone, but also too bored not to.

Meanwhile, Fletcher’s song slowed to an almost leisurely pace, which didn’t make Alex feel much better.

“What happened to Lilith?” Alex asked with a start, having realized that she hadn’t heard any snuffling or high-pitched barking since she arrived at their tent.

Fletcher stopped playing for a moment to shift aside to reveal a curly black ball of fur that had been sleeping next to his leg. “She has made her rounds across camp. I’d reckon the entire regiment’s adopted her by now,” he said flippantly. “Including the colonel.”

Alex raised her head to stare at Fletcher, frown full of skepticism. “Really? Our trigger-happy, underpaying Colonel Egan, finding some joy in a pet? Or has he been replaced with someone who’s less touched in the head?”

“Well, he was wounded rather badly at Gettysburg.” Fletcher played a progression of notes and chords that were very sorely in need of that missing string. “That might have given him a new outlook on life.”

Alex hummed, unconvinced, and picked up her letter off her chest. She folded it back into its envelope and set it on her writing board.

The mail wagon would probably stay in camp for a few more hours or so, waiting for the rest of the soldiers to collect their mail and write out responses to be delivered back. Which meant that Alex should probably be getting along to doing that as well.

She ran her hand along her writing board, trying to find her half-written letter again without having to raise her head.

Reading over it now, it was even less satisfactory than it had been before, despite whatever Fletcher had said about her “poetic sentences.” Alex turned over onto her stomach and furiously scratched it out. Her pen ripped straight through the paper. And even though her writing supplies were already meager as they were, she grabbed a new one and started scribbling randomly, not caring if she was applying more ink than the paper could handle.

She could practically hear Loki’s voice like a ringing in her ears even though she wasn’t currently making her presence known. And that, most of all, was what pissed Alex off. The fact that she just couldn’t shake Loki from her own mind even when she wasn’t trying to be manipulative. It was ingrained in Alex’s mind.

Things hadn’t really changed at all, she found.

A loud twang and a curse interrupted Alex’s angry thoughts and simultaneously reminded her of Fletcher’s presence. He had busted another guitar string, presumably, as one half was now curling up towards the tuning pegs. The shorter end was drooping towards the ground.

Alex sat up as slowly as if she still had smarting battle wounds. A hollow pain was starting in her head and spreading throughout her body, and it was a pain she was greatly familiar with. “Fletcher, could you leave for a moment?” she asked as politely as she could with her blood only just below boiling.

“I was just going,” he said. He picked up his guitar and ducked through the door flap, muttering something about stealing McGrath’s strings from his tent. Lilith stirred, and her large eyes opened to blink at Alex. She rose to her feet and padded over to lie in Alex’s lap.

Alex enjoyed one peaceful minute of solitude before the steady sound of a foot tapping against wood melted into the tent’s thin walls of fabric and became unbearable. He finally looked up.

Loki tipped his head, flashing a smile too bright for the tent. “Ignored me for quite a while there, you did.”

Alex stayed silent. Loki kept tapping out his beat on the writing board lying at his feet.

He was sitting on a chair that had appeared along with him. He was wearing a navy blue suit that looked mockingly like a Union soldier’s uniform. Little multi-colored badges made of cheap metal glittered on his chest. “How are you, dear?”

“I’m fine.”

“I see you have found yourself a pet. I always thought you didn’t like dogs considering your father’s affection for that flea-ridden thing.” Loki flicked his fingers over an imaginary speck on his pants, as though just thinking about Mr. Fierro’s feral Rottweiler put him ill at ease.

“How is Magnus?”

Alex pulled his letters off the writing board and away from Loki’s prying, expectant eyes. “That’s nothing to concern yourself about.

“You should probably leave soon,” he continued. “Fletcher will be returning, shortly.”

“I would like to meet him,” Loki said, brushing off Alex’s warning. Of course he knew Loki wouldn’t actually show himself to any other mortals, but just the thought of him doing so irritated Alex.

Loki seemed to take note of this spark of emotion. He leaned forward in his plush chair a bit. “I am so glad that you have found a friend,” he said, arching his eyebrows. “You two seem to have some things in common.”

Alex hadn’t thought it was possible to tense up even more than he already was, but his shoulder muscles were starting to hurt with how tightly they were wound. “What do you mean by that?”

Loki shrugged and settled back into his chair. “You ought to ask him that yourself.”

Alex peered out through the tent’s opening. Fletcher was nowhere to be seen, but Loki’s reach stretched far beyond physical distances. He found his mind wandering to that “payment” Loki had mentioned when he agreed to help Alex slip into another regiment and bypass the long, strenuous process of reinstating into the army. He made a mental note to himself to keep a much closer eye on Fletcher than he’d been doing so far.

“How long will you be staying here?” Loki asked, studying his nails. “You must be tired of this monotony in camp. I could prepare some action for you. That is what you signed up for, isn’t it?”

He leered, and Alex just kept thinking about that payment. However, not leading Loki into the belief that she desired bloodshed for the sake of bloodshed was more important at the moment.

“It’s important to have a careful balance of it in your life,” he said with false calm. A bit of pomposity, the way Loki would have done it.

Loki nodded as though he thought his son very wise. “Yes, you did just have a great four-day massacre out there in Pennsylvania, didn’t you? Gettysburg - now there’s a battle that will live in infamy for a while to come.”

There was a pointed edge of pride in his voice when he said that. Like Alex’s father whenever one of his brothers did something that Alex himself could never accomplish, or refused to. (Create actually marketable ceramics, for example. The things Mr. Fierro made had none of the personality that Alex’s grandfather had taught him to craft with.)

“You sparked Gettysburg,” Alex guessed. He was getting tired of this, very tired.

The prideful grin grew painfully sharp, revealing teeth. “You escalated it.”

He lowered his voice as if he were divulging a secret. Alex only felt his weariness and dread grow thicker. “If you ask me, this is the beginning of something. I’d say this is around the time when things ought to start getting a little hectic.”

Alex hid his discomfort pretty well, he thought. But then again, Loki could always make room in his mind and sift out the real emotions with little trouble at all. The fact that he wasn’t doing so now was perhaps proof of how giddy he really felt about this business with Gettysburg and what it apparently meant for the rest of the war.

A shout came from outside, and Fletcher practically fell through the tent flap into Alex’s lap. His guitar came after him, making a hollow thunk as it slammed into Alex’s writing board, which was no longer being kicked at by a thick-soled army boot. When he managed to push Fletcher’s purposefully limpless body off himself and onto Alex’s bedroll, Loki and his chair were both gone. The acrid scent of his words clung to the air, and Alex felt them more than heard them: Best keep your guard up.

Oh, as if he wasn’t already so wound up that he could hardly think right.

“What happened out there?” he asked Fletcher, who was now lying facedown on Alex’s satchel (which had become irreversibly misshapen from his use of it as a pillow).

Fletcher made a noncommittal grumbling noise into the satchel. He picked up his head and held up two thin wires that wavered around in the air. “Retrieved the guitar strings, but now McGrath is after me.”

Alex picked up the guitar and set it on the ground. The broken string had been removed, though it now seemed to have gained a considerable amount of new scuffs and scratches.

His mind landed on what Loki had said about Fletcher, that they had some things in common. He didn’t know what made his mother think that. Fletcher had grown attached to Alex quickly, probably just from the fact that Alex had looked like the youngest soldier in the regiment second only to himself. No one could look at Fletcher and assume he was anything older than 16 or so, which made Alex figure that he was either filled with conviction or delusion to have enlisted in the army anyway. That had endeared him to Alex at first, and he grew to like Fletcher (most of the time, anyway). But he wouldn’t say it was from any special connection they shared.

Unless, of course, Loki meant they shared that oddity that Alex had never thought anyone would ever fully accept, let alone understand.

He watched Fletcher, hunched over his guitar as he wound the new string around the tuning peg post. He might be making something out of nothing, but he had always thought that Fletcher’s face structure was more delicate than any boy’s he’d known, and his voice almost girlish. Alex had chalked it up to his age.

But perhaps Alex wasn’t being too presumptuous, and perhaps Fletcher had enlisted in the war in a desperate attempt to escape something, as well.

He picked Lilith up out of his lap and set her down next to Fletcher, then lay back down on his bedroll next to them both. He found Magnus’s letter and began to read it over and over, trying to memorize the shape of his words and imagine them in his voice. It wasn’t too difficult. Alex found comfort in that.

“So will you ever tell me who that person is?”

Alex felt like he was waking from a dream when he finally looked up from the letter. “What?” he asked sluggishly.

Fletcher smirked and returned his gaze to his guitar when he knew he’d gotten Alex’s attention. “Who is that person to you?”

After a moment of hesitation, Alex decided to take a chance. “His name is Magnus. I don’t know what we are to each other. We… parted on strange circumstances.”

Fletcher revealed only a touch of emotion with an arch of his eyebrow. “That is still pretty vague.”

“Let’s just say that we’re both cowards, but myself most of all.”

Fletcher nodded as though he finally understood enough. He didn’t say anything more. His expression was unreadable, which was so unlike him that it unnerved Alex. He kept that pensive look on his face as he tuned his new strings and starting plucking a few experimental notes.

Those lazy notes soon shaped into a calmer version of the first song he’d played. It sounded much better with its missing string having been replaced.

Alex breathed out through his nose and rested his hands on his chest, staring up at the tent ceiling that was much too close to his head. He would mull over the idea of Fletcher that was forming in his mind that may or may not have actual merit in reality. And then he would decide what to do or say next.

And concerning Magnus, he would stop hiding. Alex had made his feelings clear when he said his goodbyes; trying to distance himself from those feelings in his letters was pointless, and probably wasn’t doing any favors to Magnus’s sanity. Alex knew how his poor mind could worry and fret and short-circuit very easily. He could imagine Magnus’s expression trying to figure out the emotions written behind his letters as easily as a photograph. The thought burst a spark of amusement that outshone every other concern that was burning into his mind at the moment - even Loki.

Even Loki. That was quite remarkable, wasn’t it?

Chapter Text

The Chase mansion was a hulking mass of a building. Built on a foundation of chipping red bricks and surrounded by a tall spiked fence made of black iron, it took up a sizeable portion of the city block it was located on. Stone gargoyles perched on the edge of the roof at regular intervals, drooling dirty water left from last night’s showers. Some of that water dribbled onto Magnus’ head as he stood at the base of the front steps, deliberating.

All in all, he could understand why his mother had left the place behind and struck out on her own as soon as possible. (He had to remind himself that this mansion was only half the size of the one in Virginia; the thought made him feel dizzy.)

He took a couple steps up the stairs, then retreated. He’d been repeating this process for a while now as the same thought circled through his mind. Mom, what would you have me do? Leave this place untouched and abandoned, return to the hazy numbing medicines of the convalescent home, or enter in the desperate hope that he might find something worthwhile?

In the end, he didn’t have to make the choice himself; Jack did it for him. He came up from behind Magnus and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, pushing him forward.

“Señor,” he whispered urgently as he ducked their heads close together. “I believe I’ve gotten myself involved in a few things best left behind as soon as possible. So if we could just…” He tightened his grip on Magnus’ shoulders and steered him toward the stairs, not letting go until he’d tripped his way up the marble steps and through the tall doorway. Surprisingly, it was unlocked. Magnus had come prepared with a hatpin he’d found in the hotel just in case.

However, this also meant that it was more likely than not that he would find more than papers and letters in the mansion this time. He couldn’t figure out how he felt about the prospect of that.

He ducked out of Jack’s one-armed embrace. “Who did you start a fight with?”

“Oh no, nothing like that,” he responded, waving his hands about as if trying to dispel Magnus’s theories from the air. “Only a slight misunderstanding between myself, a lady with an incredibly fine skirt, and her male companion with an equally fine suit and, er, weaponized cane.”

“Weaponized cane?” Magnus circled the foyer for anything out of the ordinary of a Chase mansion. But only a high ceiling, dusty tapestries, and glass cases filled with equally dusty artifacts. It appeared as though no one had entered the building since Randolph - along with his newly orphaned nephew - left for Virginia four years ago.

Jack brushed a finger along a crack in one of the cases near the doorway. “The things you can build into canes these days. A little disquieting, isn’t it?”

Magnus appreciated Jack’s attempts to distract him from the feeling of claustrophobia that was currently bubbling just below the surface. He walked closer to Jack as they made their way upstairs into a foyer where the only source of light was a sliver in the curtains of a large window.

It was as quiet upstairs as it was below. Carpeted hallways muffled Jack’s footsteps as he bounded from room to room, poking his head in each one only to pull back and report that it was empty, just like the last. Magnus followed with much more caution, taking in the details of each room in a way Jack was not. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for besides Randolph himself, but it was a persistent feeling that he could not ignore.

Near the end of the hallway was a room slightly ajar. This in itself was strange, as all the other rooms had been closed, if not locked. What made it stranger was the fact that Magnus recognized it. The door was a pale green whereas all the others were bronzed.

A memory resurfaced of his mother sitting on the edge of his bed, silhouetted by the lamplight. It’s true that I did not like that place, but I made a part of it my own. I painted my bedroom door green to brighten it up a bit.

Magnus approached the door in a sort of stupor. Natalie had obviously done it when she was very young, unevenly painted as it was. Inside the room, he caught a glimpse of a rocking chair and a detailed floral wallpaper.

He pushed the door back. It creaked on its hinges.

The rest of the room was occupied by a bed with rumpled sheets, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a bookshelf so full that it sagged with the weight of trinkets and thick medical volumes. A portrait of his mother when she must have been around ten or eleven hung above the chest of drawers. She sat at a table with her elbow resting gracefully on the edge, her expression fierce even with chubby cheeks and an array of freckles. Her dirty blonde hair was longer than Magnus had ever seen it, falling in waves over her shoulders. Unwittingly, he raised a hand to comb through his own unkempt, chin-length hair.

He approached the portrait slowly as though it might lunge at him. It was large, almost comically so, and there was nothing else in the painting besides a backdrop of a dimly lit library, which was un-Natalie-like enough that it made Magnus think that it had been put up sometime after she’d lived in this room. Besides, she hadn’t been the kind of person to hang up a picture of herself if it didn’t at least have someone else she loved in it as well.

They had gotten a photograph taken together once. Natalie kept it in her purse at all times.

Perhaps it had been a rash decision to look around his dead mother’s childhood bedroom, he thought, though he didn’t move towards the door.

He pulled a random book off the shelf by the bed and wiped the dust off with his sleeve. The Alternative: Disease & Premature Death, or Health & Long Life. Well, that was a mouthful.

Despite the textbook being easily around 900 pages long and packed with dense text, figures, and charts, Magnus leaned against the bookshelf and started flipping through the pages.

His mother had the kind of heart that held one strong, simple desire to help other people. She’d figured the best way to accomplish that was by becoming a doctor; but not many people were looking for a female doctor, so Magnus had only ever known her as a nurse for the local women’s college.

“What are you doing here?”

Magnus jumped and dropped the textbook right on his foot. He swiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand and spun around.

He had not actually prepared himself for the prospect of finally coming face to face with his uncle for the first time in months. And so all he could manage was a breathless “Shit.”

Randolph canted his head, his expression unreadable. He didn’t look too shocked to find his nephew here, despite his question.

He looked rather worse for the wear - and that was saying something, considering Magnus had thought he’d only ever known his uncle at his worst. Randolph’s eyes were heavy-lidded and dark. He was leaning on his cane as if it were the only thing keeping him upright.

Magnus wasn’t sure why he was so surprised to see him. If he were to have found his uncle anywhere in Boston, this would be the most likely place. He picked up the textbook in a dizzy haze.

Randolph shuffled over to the bed and sat down heavily on it. (So that was where the wrinkles had come from.) He stared up at Natalie’s portrait. “I put that up the other day. I found it in our father’s - that is, your grandfather’s - old office.”

“It doesn’t feel like her,” Magnus murmured. “It looks too…” He glanced at Randolph, wondering why they were talking about an old portrait of his mother instead of the real issue at hand. “Never mind. You haven’t answered my question.”

Randolph continued to stare at him quizzically. “Nor have you answered mine.”

“I came looking for you! You’ve been gone for months without so much as a letter to tell us how you were doing, or if you’d return soon, nothing! Not that we weren’t doing fine without you, but -” Magnus realized that he was still holding the old medical textbook with all too much force. He slid it back onto the shelf, self-conscious.

“Oh, well, yes,” said Randolph. “You know what kind of business brought me here. It has been keeping me very busy.”

“I’ll bet that’s working out for you nicely.”

Randolph averted his eyes to the rocking chair. “It is. It really is.”

He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. Magnus studied his expression, searching for a better answer than the one Randolph had given him.

He frowned. Not only was his uncle’s face unusually pale and drawn, but it looked like there was a faint red mark of some sort on his cheek, as though someone had splattered boiling water across Randolph’s face and had given it just enough time to heal that it wasn’t noticeable unless you were looking for it.

“What happened to your -”

Shouting from down the hall drowned out his question. Magnus rushed to the door as Randolph struggled to rise from his seat on the bed.

The source of the noise turned out to be Jack. He had been running so fast he had to catch himself on the handle of Natalie’s door to come to a stop.

“Where were you?” Magnus asked in mild surprise. He had assumed Jack had gone on to explore the rest of the mansion, but he looked too riled up to have simply been sifting through Nordic artifacts and who-knew- what from the dark pasts of the Chase family.

Or, well. That actually did sound reason enough.

“Your uncle’s office. At least, I think it was his office. It smelled vaguely like mold and was cluttered enough that I could barely walk around in it. I am pretty certain it was his office.”

“But then?” Magnus prompted.

“But then what?”

“You look shaken.”

“Oh! Yes, see,” - Jack lowered his voice, leaning forward - “I was looking through some documents, couldn’t understand half the things written, but they seemed boring -” Upon seeing Magnus’ distressed expression, he cut off his own rambling, looking sheepish. “And then a brick flew through the window.”

Magnus leaned his forehead on the doorway, muttering things he hoped his uncle or Jack couldn’t hear. “What have you been doing to get bricks thrown through the window?”

Jack shrugged. “Couldn’t have asked them. By the time I looked out the window, the culprits were gone.”

Magnus looked back into the room at Randolph, who was standing a little off to the side of the doorway, white-knuckling his cane and looking very anxious.

Magnus stepped out of the way of the doorway. “You should probably… check your office,” he said, stiffly waving towards the hallway.

Jack watched Randolph with wide eyes as he limped down the hall. He turned back to Magnus with a look in his eyes that clearly said, Well, you found him.

Magnus shot him a look that he hoped didn’t convey the same amount of I know, help! that he was currently feeling. But since it was Jack, it was probably no use either way. “How much damage was done?”

“I’m fine as well, thank you for asking,” Jack chirped. Magnus could never tell if he was joking or not when he said things like that. “But really, I think you ought to see his office as well. I might have found some things, but, well, you know.” He raised his palms upward in a comically bashful shrug. “I can’t say for sure.”

Magnus smiled thinly. He glanced back into Natalie’s room one last time - at the rocking chair and the bookshelf and the portrait that didn’t belong there - before closing the poorly-painted door with a sense of emptiness in the pit of his stomach.

Around a corner and at the end of the hallway was a very unassuming door - unassuming, that is, in the sense that it wasn’t decorated with gold filigree or carved from marble or whatever other kinds of things wealthy people had strange fascinations with.

It took more physical effort to push open the door than what was usually required to open a door, but when it finally gave, Magnus realized why. Piled up in front of the door were stacks of wooden boxes overflowing with papers, letters, and various artifacts tinted green with age.

Besides that, the floor was strewn with shards of glass from the window. A brick lay nestled in a box of books, looking very cozy where it was.

Randolph’s feet crunched against the glass as he circled the tight space of his office. Some papers rustled in his hands as he flipped through them, muttering things too low for anyone but himself to hear. He only acknowledged Magnus and Jack’s presence when Magnus stepped over the boxes blocking the doorway, picked up the brick, and flung it back out the window.

Randolph jumped. “What do you -” He tried to indiscreetly shove his papers into a box and shut it, though it closed with a loud click that caught both Magnus and Jack’s attention. “What do you two want now?”

Jack tipped his head towards the box, signaling to Magnus that it was the source of his concern originally. He made a mental note to retrieve that box later.

But for now, he had to…

Well, he didn’t know exactly what he had to do, but he knew it would test his sanity.

“We wanted to make sure you were safe,” Magnus responded, with only the slightest touch of sarcasm that Randolph certainly would not catch. “We didn’t know if another brick had flown through the window or what-have-you.”

He leaned out of the window and looked down the street, but the brown-gray fog sifting through the buildings clogging the streets made it futile.

When he turned back to the office, Randolph was stepping over the boxes to get through the doorway. Jack locked eyes with Magnus and raised an eyebrow impressively high, letting him know that he had the situation handled.

“Um,” Magnus said, but that was about as far as he got.

Jack poked Randolph in the chest, which seemed to surprise him enough to actually make him stop in his tracks. “I do wish we could let you go,” he said, sounding truly apologetic as he backed Randolph into his office. “But the truth is, we have gone to a lot of trouble to find you, and I’d hate it if you just up and left and continued on with your self-destructive antics without giving us at least some closure.”

Magnus barely ever saw Jack this worked up, and, frankly, he never knew where it would come from or when it would make an appearance. It was rather jarring.

But then he pushed his hair out of his eyes and turned a brilliant smile in Magnus’ direction, and he was back to his usual carefree self. “Señor, I figure since you know him best you’d prefer to do the interrogating? It isn’t my forte.”

Randolph’s eyes flitted between them, seeming more bewildered than anything else you might feel if you were cornered by your halfway estranged nephew and his friend in your old office while searching for a supernatural reason to explain your family’s deaths.

Half of Magnus was still thinking about the brick and worrying over that new development, but at Jack’s expectant and almost excited expression directed towards him, he pushed that to the back of his mind for the time being.

Still, all that came out of his mouth was a more drawn-out “Um” than the first one.

“What is your motive?” Jack blurted, a gleam in his eye.

I thought interrogations weren’t your forte. But the knot in Magnus’ shoulders unwound itself.

“I have no motives that should concern you,” said Randolph, steadfast.

“They do, though,” Magnus murmured. Jack gave him an encouraging smile that didn’t sit right with him. “They concern us because you are using up an unnecessary amount of funds that would be better spent towards the convalescent home. And what do you have to show for it?”

“Quite a lot, actually. I cannot go into the details, but… there have been results.”

Magnus eyed his uncle, wondering if it would be worth the time and effort to try to pry anything else out of him. Randolph’s eyes shifted everywhere but his nephew’s.

“Jack, can I catch you up on all this later?” asked Magnus.

Jack started to protest, but for better or for worse, he not only understood but agreed to Magnus’ request. He kicked aside the boxes and various objects that wouldn’t be found in a normal office blocking his way to the door.

Once Jack had left the room and shut the door behind him, Magnus leaned against the windowsill in a semblance of composure and took a deep breath. “Alright, I’ll not waste your time. The main reason I came here was because I found some things in your office - your other office.”

“Oh, Magnus, you know that is a confidential space -”

“Then keep it locked next time,” he said, holding out the letter he had found back in the Virginia mansion.

Randolph’s complexion visibly paled as he read it. “You don’t know what this means, do you?”

“I was hoping you would explain it to me,” Magnus said, trying to keep his voice from rising in a mix of impatience and nervousness.

Randolph shook his head. “I told you I cannot do that. I don’t wish to endanger you.”

“I can handle danger,” Magnus snapped. “I don’t need someone like you to -”

He bit his tongue before the rest could come out. I don’t need someone like you to protect me, he’d meant to say - but not really. It might feel true, but he didn’t want Randolph to know that; not when the greatest fault he seemed to see in himself, the root of his obsessions, was that he hadn’t been able to protect his family when it really mattered.

Randolph just looked sad now. Apologetic, not that that counted for anything in the grand context of things.

Right. It didn’t count for anything. Nothing at all.

Magnus lunged for the mysterious box resting on the desk, which Randolph’s hand had been hovering over protectively the entire conversation.

He snatched it up before Randolph had time to close his hand over it. He undid the heavy golden clasp and rifled through the contents.

“Magnus -” Randolph started.

The box was mostly filled with papers slightly yellowed at the corners, all having been folded and unfolded so many times that they could easily be torn apart at the creases. Magnus pulled one out at random, which was when Randolph started… babbling seemed to be the closest description of it.

“Magnus, look, I know you don’t believe any of this, but recently I have been thinking that that would be for the best… You do not want to become involved in things like this, considering you only appear interested in your hospital, which is courageous enough, I suppose -”

He unfolded the paper. It looked like it had been ripped from the pages of a very old book - it crinkled like autumn leaves under the pressure of his fingers, and one side was jagged, cutting off some of the notes scrawled in the margins in smudged blue ink. Randolph only ever used blue ink.

“If what you want is more money from the bank, then I can provide that -”

“No, it’s not that,” Magnus muttered distractedly. His eyes skimmed the text, but gave up on that once he realized it was written in some dead language - probably Old Norse, or whatever language it was Randolph had gotten his Harvard degree for.

But there were small detailed drawings scattered throughout the text, and that was where Magnus found fruition.

“Oh, now that is just… research. Old research for things from my, er, Harvard years…”

It was a weak excuse, which even Randolph seemed to realize. He finally trailed off. Magnus still didn’t look up.

The drawings had been painted on the pages with a precise, steady hand and a very fine brush. Magnus admired them for a moment before he completely soaked up the significance of the drawings themselves. One was a head-to-toe depiction of a man with deep, puckered scars marring his face. He was all points and angles - thin, with long limbs that somehow managed to make him look elegant instead of gangly, and a grin like a crescent moon, so wide it turned his eyes to slits of red.

The other drawing was smaller and much simpler compared to the one before. It was a symbol of two snakes entangled to form an intricate ‘S’ shape, painted in hues of gold and white like metal gleaming in the sun. It took a moment for Magnus to recognize it as one of the “leads” Randolph had gone off about before he left. Now that he tried to recall it, there had been something about a brooch?

He studied the third drawing, which seemed to be incomplete. It was little more than an indistinct sketch of the same person at the top corner of the page, though in this one his hair was long and red, curls falling over his shoulders like flames licking at his face. His smile was as wide as in the first drawing, but the scars previously criss-crossing his face were gone, leaving his cheeks jarringly porcelain.

The longer Magnus looked at it, the more certain he was that the drawing was meant to be of a woman instead. And even after that, he couldn’t help thinking this face looked much too familiar.

By now Randolph seemed to have shaken himself out of his frightened stupor and was back to rattling off unnecessary warnings. “If you remember the things I told you about those months ago, it’s best you forget about them…”

“Loki,” he said.

Randolph paused, blinking fast as though someone had thrown sand in his eyes.

Magnus waved about the page. “It’s Loki, isn’t it?”

“...Yes,” Randolph admitted.

“Back then” - Magnus made a wide hand gesture to reference their conversation months ago in case that needed clarifying - “you said that a friend in Boston had contacted you about a new lead. A new lead concerning the ancient Norse god Loki. He was a trickster deity, wasn’t he? You say he enjoys meddling in human affairs, and that’s what you think he’s been doing with your life? With your family…” Another vague hand gesture. “And your evidence to back this up is that a brooch with this serpent symbol of Loki’s was unearthed around the wreckage. I remember now.”

Randolph flinched. “Well, further investigation has led me to believe it was more complicated than that.”

Magnus sighed. He was pretty sure that meant this whole trip was another dead end, though Randolph was too far in denial to accept that yet.

Though this was most likely the reason behind all his worried talk and fidgeting, Magnus went for a last-ditch effort and asked, “More complicated how?”

Yes, he did still believe that most of this “evidence” and “research” was simply myth and his uncle’s delusion, but a part of him couldn’t shake the drawings of Loki from his mind. Something was off about them, an almost visible aura both repelling him and drawing him forward in the same breath.

That was also a familiar feeling, though at the moment he couldn’t place what or who had ever made him feel that way before either.

Randolph opened his mouth to respond.

- which was, of course, when fate decided it would be the perfect time to throw another brick through the window.

Well, that was a slight misinterpretation. Magnus couldn’t prove that this was fate’s doing (though it did feel like he was purposefully being led further away from the truth and some goddamned answers) but rather a young Irish boy wearing an alarming amount of scarves. He could safely confirm that the boy was Irish because he was shouting words in Gaelic that Magnus had picked up on after years of knowing Mallory.

Once again he swung open the now-very-battered window and leaned out, prepared to ask what this person had against the Chase family, but as soon as the boy saw him he bolted, disappearing into the fog.

Now that he paid attention, he thought he heard something like a riot going on farther out in town. Screams and gunshots and the sound of breaking things rang out in the streets.

He shouted a curse of his own out into the street and turned back into the office. Randolph had picked up the brick (which had landed in the same pile of paperwork as the first one; that damn box was having a terrible day) and was currently turning it over in his hands as though it were one of his Nordic relics.

“What the hell,” Magnus muttered, not quite sure what he was directing it towards. Randolph? The brick throwers and apparent rioters? The incomplete situation in general? “What the hell, what the hell.” He picked up the smooth black box of old papers, which Randolph seemed to remember a moment too late. The brick made a dull thunk as it hit the floor.

“What is this about?” Randolph asked. “Magnus, what have you -”

“Why do you assume I brought this upon myself?” he snapped. “For all I know, you could have done something to make someone angry with you, and this is their payback! Need I remind you that I have no clue what you have been doing these past months!”

“Oh no, no, nothing like that, he would never do something so crude -”

Halfway to the door, Magnus stopped in his tracks. “He?”

Randolph looked stricken.

Magnus shook his head, knowing that it would be a waste to hope that this slip-up would lead to anything more substantial. Still, he felt the need to tell his uncle, “We are not finished” before storming out the door.

Jack leaped away from the door as soon as it opened. “Señor! I heard a crash from inside, and I was wondering if I ought to see if you were alright before you came out, but you did tell me to wait out here, so I stayed, but know that I would have come bursting through the door ready to defend you in any other circumstance. To be fair, I didn’t think Randolph could do too much to you in terms of physical harm, so I was not too worried, but you’re here now, and you seem alright, so could you tell me what was going on in there?”

“Well, another brick flew through the window,” Magnus said calmly. “So we’re going to find out what is going on with that.” He showed the mystery box to Jack before he shoved it deep into his coat pocket. “And we’re taking this.” He didn’t feel the need to recount their conversation to Jack, knowing full well that he probably overheard the entire thing anyway.

“I rather missed my homeless criminal days myself,” Jack said, practically skipping down the stairs ahead of Magnus.

Randolph followed them out, which was surprising. He looked as though he hadn’t left his office since he arrived in Boston, and he had seemed alright with that. He came limping out the front door by the time Jack was halfway down the empty street, following the sound of shouts and gunshots like a bloodhound.

“Magnus, please,” Randolph called from the top of the marble steps. “I don’t know what you plan on doing now, but it better not involve that box -”

Magnus, who had been about to run after Jack, turned on his heel, nearly lost his balance in the process, and waved it around haphazardly as if to show that he didn’t care if anything were to happen to its contents (which of course wasn’t true at all, but Randolph didn’t need to know that). “If you hope to get it back, your only choice is to come with us.”

Magnus considered simply leaving him there to stand alone on the top of the stairs, but that felt a step too far, so he glared at Randolph until he caught the hint and hurried down the steps to meet him.

When Magnus turned his attention back to the street, he just barely caught sight of Jack turning around a corner. He trotted after him, looking back at Randolph to make sure he was following.

Around the corner, the commotion was louder.

The longer they walked, the more existential Magnus started to feel. He wondered how many things had led him up to here - here being this moment precisely, in which he was walking through the streets of Boston following the manic, purposeful shadow of his oldest friend as they searched for the culprit of a minor crime (which now seemed to be part of something bigger) done upon them - or, more accurately, done upon Magnus’ uncle, who was currently hobbling along beside Magnus but only so he could reacquire a box of old papers concerning the ancient Norse god of trickery that Magnus was currently holding hostage.

A strange day indeed. The perpetual sleepy days of Northern Virginia (when it was not being interrupted by battles and skirmishes) felt far behind them.

“You know,” Magnus said as the grand houses lining the streets began to give way to more humble ones, “you could always simply tell us what the things in this box mean, instead of leaving us to figure it out on our own anyway.”

Upon seeing Randolph’s desperate expression, he shrugged. “Can’t be too hard, right?”

It was more of a genuine question than he let on.

“Look, Magnus, I could not possibly put you in danger if I could help it -”

“You said that already. Just assume that I don’t care and that I can take care of myself by now. I’m not some hopeless sixteen-year-old anymore.”

To his surprise, Randolph agreed with him. “No, of course not. But you are only… only human, as am I, and I don’t want…” He took a deep breath, shook his head. “I swore not to tell anyone about this, but if it’s you, I suppose it can’t be helped.”

Perhaps the fog was getting to his mind - seeping into some vulnerable place that shouldn’t exist, as it had when he lived here - but Magnus might just call that a loving tone in his uncle’s voice.

Lord.

Magnus refused to be swayed. He opened the box nonchalantly and started flipping through the papers again despite being unable to read most of them.

“Loki, it’s all Loki!” Randolph said wretchedly. “I feared that you would have already figured out at least some of it by now, for how bright you are, but you are more stubborn than bright, I realize that now, so I suppose here we are - my having to explain it all.”

Magnus chose to ignore the comment about his stubbornness. “Yes, and what about Loki?”

“He is -”

It was then that a rapid succession of gunshots broke through the fog, sparking a clamor of screaming. He heard a recognizable shriek from further down the street. Magnus broke into a run, Randolph following further behind.

They pushed through crowds of people running the other direction before finding Jack crouched behind a line of wooden barrels. Magnus dropped down beside him.

“What’s going -” he started.

Another round of gunshots cut him off.

“What is going on?” Magnus hissed.

“What does it look like?” Jack whisper-shouted back. “Perhaps a very realistic rendition of the Boston Massacre.”

Magnus peered over the barrels at the majorly lower-class crowd currently working up a storm amongst themselves. From the upper windows of a tall building, militiamen systematically loaded their rifles and fired down, undeterred by the miscellaneous things being thrown at them - rocks, large sticks, glass bottles - some of which hit their targets.

But the militia’s bullets did far more damage than what could be found on the streets, and so screams of pain rang out higher than the gunshots.

A mane of pale blonde curls spilled out on the street beside Magnus like water from a bucket. He glanced at Jack, who was looking at him with a mixed expression - part shock, part idiot, don’t you dare.

Staying low to the ground, Magnus crept over to the figure lying still on the street, face pressed into the cobblestones, blood from a head wound seeping into the cracks.

Magnus scooped the woman up in one swift motion and quickly retreated behind his and Jack’s hiding spot.

“Señor, might I inform you that you are insane,” hissed Jack, but he propped the woman up against the barrels in the same breath. He pushed her hair out of her face and inspected the gaping wound on her hairline, oozing brilliant scarlet down the side of her face. He winced at the sight. “Oh, now that is…”

“She’s awake,” Magnus said. The woman’s eyelashes fluttered, revealing glimpses of pale green eyes, but they never stayed open for long. Her breathing was regularly irregular - it hitched every now and then as if her body was trying to remind her to breathe, but couldn’t bring itself to keep it up.

He wished he had bandages, or tools other than his own hands, but they would have to make do.

He had just rolled up his sleeves and haphazardly wiped his sweaty palms on his coat when he heard his name being called.

He whipped around and glared at his uncle, who was pressed against the wall of the building, more or less hidden in the shadows. “We should really, really just leave now,” he said, more distressed than Magnus had ever seen him.

He bit back a retort and returned his attention to their patient.

Jack had picked up where Magnus left off and had, with some apparent difficulty, torn off a part of his billowy shirtsleeve, folded it up, and pressed it against the woman’s head. (Why Jack’s entire wardrobe consisted of loose, long-sleeved shirts that looked about a century out of fashion was beyond him, but he was suddenly immensely grateful for it.)

The blood soaked through the cloth instantly. Just as Jack was about to reach for his sleeve again, Magnus stopped him. He checked the woman’s pulse, tearing his hand away when he was certain that there was nothing was beating underneath his fingers.

“Oh,” said Jack bluntly, lowering his hand from where it was clasping the edge of his sleeve. “Oh, dear.”

His tentative expression crumbled, leaving his eyes carefully blank. Magnus wiped away some of the blood on the woman’s face with his sleeve, wondering if it was some kind of omen that the first true time his skills were needed, he could do nothing to help.

Someone stumbled into the stack of barrels lining the sidewalk, toppling them over onto Magnus and Jack and the dead woman that Magnus couldn’t yet think of as a corpse.

Perfect timing as well, he might add. As Jack let out a yelp and Magnus ducked his head to avoid getting hit, the militiamen released another round of bullets. They had been silent for the past few minutes, but of course they should choose to go off just as Magnus and Jack’s only cover was obliterated.

Randolph was fine. He lurched towards them when the barrels toppled over, but as soon as the crack of the guns resounded, he ducked behind the side of his building again.

Magnus heard someone cry out in pain behind him, and perhaps it was because his mind was still caught up in self-pity while an unknown woman’s body cooled in his arms (because he was just that brand of terrible person), but he stood right up through the stream of dangerous objects flying through the air and fixed his attention on a boy no more than ten clutching his shoulder. Blood seeped through his fingers and dribbled to the ground in heavy globs.

“Oh, señor, please,” Jack mumbled from the ground beside him, still trying to assemble his senses. “Stop trying to be useful for once…”

Magnus called out to the boy. He heard Jack sigh.

The boy looked up, but Magnus never reached him.

Jack was right - he was an idiot to have pretended as if he could do anything to help in this terrible situation. And maybe it didn’t even run that deep, not really; maybe he was simply an idiot because he’d stood up in the middle of a riot in which bullets and sharp, heavy objects were being thrown about the air.

This was all just a more sophisticated version of what was actually going through Magnus’ mind as some aforementioned sharp and heavy object collided with the back of his head. Rather, as tiny black sparks burst in front of his vision and spread like flames engulfing a piece of paper, the only thought that surfaced through that was Idiot.

Oh, and one more thing.

He was going to have a lot to explain to Alex once she returned.

He didn’t know why Alex Fierro was the last thought on his mind, but perhaps, in his muddled subconscious, something spat out a bit of information at the last minute and connected the two dots that had refused to be connected before then.

Magnus couldn’t remember where he’d placed the little black box of papers he’d stolen from Randolph - maybe it was buried in the felled barrels, he didn’t know - but he did still have the nagging memory of Loki’s face sinking through his mind. The slant of his nose, the way he held his shoulders, but what stood out most prominently was the curve of his smile: the way it pulled his lips taut and fit so perfectly on his face.

It connected at the same time Magnus finally placed that feeling of being pulled on a string forward and away from that face at the exact same time. He knew where he had felt that way before.

He knew of a lot of secrets that needed to be uncovered, he had known that before, but only now was he coming to terms with the idea that he had not even scraped the surface.

Chapter Text

“She has good taste, I’ll give her that.”

A voice like satin broke through the dimly lit room. A rustling of fabrics quickly followed, filling the silence.

The book Magnus hadn’t realized he’d been holding melted into the same blue-black shadows that engulfed the wooden floors and ill-painted walls of the basement he and his mother had lived in when he was young.

He turned around, his mind full of that silvery fluff that dreams created. Which was why he hardly batted an eye at the woman sitting at the edge of the bed with a gleam in her eyes that felt achingly, twistedly familiar.

She rearranged her silk skirts, seemingly waiting for him to react.

And yet all that came out of his mouth was a simple, steady “You’re Loki.”

She canted her head, and that, too, was familiar. “Figured it out, have you?”

Suddenly she was right in front of him, soaked in the moonlight spilling through the tiny window at the top of the wall that had always made the basement feel like a dungeon.

“Why her?” Loki asked, circling him leisurely. “I don’t mean to question your devotion, but I do have to wonder why you chose her in the first place.”

Magnus took a shaky breath. “Who?”

“You know who. My daughter. Wait.” She stopped in her tracks, holding up a slender finger to her cheek. “Son. It changed just now.”

Magnus didn’t respond. Loki poked him in the back, pushing him towards the window one slow, minute step at a time. “It was not a rhetorical question. I’d like to know.”

He still couldn’t speak, and he wondered if that was somehow Loki’s doing or the product of his own nerves.

Loki watched the wavering moon above them, partly obscured by the ground, which the bottom of the window just grazed. Magnus had always remembered the window to have a direct view into the street, never giving the moonlight a chance to sneak in, but that didn’t seem to be an issue in dreams.

When he blinked next, Loki had shed the long hair and shimmering gown in favor of a general’s uniform bedecked in medals. In the shadows, Magnus couldn’t discern what color it was.

“`s not possible,” he mumbled. He wasn’t sure if it would be better to look away or study the rest of Loki’s features until it was undeniable. “You’re not… you’re not real. Just myth.”

“You flatter me. Misguidedly, however.” He paused in front of the window. “You wish you’d paid attention to your uncle sooner now, don’t you? You wish you’d asked Alex more questions. So many secrets, how could you possibly keep your loyalties intact?”

Magnus wanted to tell him to stop. He wanted to wake up and wave all this away as a fever dream; where had he been before he was here?
“Would you like to see something?”

This time he managed a petulant-sounding “No.” He wondered if that was better or worse than if he had let his fear get the better of him. It probably didn’t matter; Loki looked so smug and contented that he gave Magnus the sense that he already knew everything about him.

Loki returned his attention to the window. Some invisible force jerked Magnus’ head in that direction as well.

The window had grown larger, too, reaching almost to the ground so it now resembled a door rather than a dungeon’s ventilation. It was no longer letting in the sight of the old streets at night. Through a veil-like haze Magnus saw his old apartment, the one he left but his mother never did. He heard the roar of out-of-control flames, followed by a burst of heat as if he were right in the thick of the fire.

He didn’t watch himself wander so much as remember. Two years of frayed nerves and a perpetual cold that had nothing to do with Boston’s weather. That he’d been able to meet Jack and forge a meaningful connection between them despite how he’d been teaching himself to live without anyone’s help was a small miracle that he probably took for granted these days.

Then Randolph found them, and things had to change yet again. At least Randolph hadn’t cared enough to say no to Magnus’ plea of bringing Jack along as well. (“Aw, señor, if only you had shown such loyalty when we were running from those policemen and you completely left me behind.” Magnus could tell he was touched, though.)

He remembered feeling stuck and sinking, even as he felt relief at waking up in a bed knowing that he wouldn’t have to wonder where his next meal came from.

“Selfish, don’t you think?” Loki’s voice cut through his thoughts like a knife suddenly pointed to his face. “Some might say you have everything. You live in a mansion, have a noble role in this grandiose war, people to enjoy company with. And yet none of that’s what you want.”

Magnus didn’t reply and tried his best to avoid Loki’s eyes.

The window was still replaying scenes of his past. He watched Randolph retreat into his office time and time again, talking to himself about old things that he had no chance of recovering. And Magnus would watch through the balusters, waiting for him to be gone to simply retrieve a book from the library or creep into the bedroom he couldn’t think of as his to catch some sleep.

He met Mallory Keen when she and her husband knocked on their door selling basic foodstuffs - bread and eggs and cheese and the like. They must have been surprised to find a tired, disheveled 16-year-old that they’d never seen before answering the door.

The man he’d come to know as Halfborn Gunderson wasn’t fazed, and asked if Magnus would like to buy some eggs. Upon Magnus’ blank stare, Mallory Keen interrupted and explained, “Sometimes we sell food to the old man that lives here because he doesn’t know how to take care of himself.”

“Oh,” Magnus had said slowly. “We probably do need someone like that.”

Jack took to them well. He didn’t even try flirting with Mallory, which spoke of his deep appreciation for her. (“Because she is a married woman.” “Because you’re terrified of both her and Halfborn.”)

The scenes through the window stopped abruptly, and Magnus remembered where he was. Loki was still circling him. Though before it had seemed menacing, Magnus now got the distinct impression that he was a mouse pinned under the sights of a python.

“On second thought, I can see it now,” said Loki. “You share similar stories. I suppose you can find comfort there. And, oh.” He clapped his hands together softly. “How your stories entwine so imperfectly, and in more ways than one. It’s delightful.”

Magnus opened his mouth to say something, but in the next second he was waking up in a cold sweat.

He was immediately greeted by a deep, persistent headache and a darkened room, though not as damningly as in his dream. Because it was a dream, it turned out. Just a dream. None of it had to be real.

The thought sounded false and metallic even when it was only contained in his head. A strangled whisper of a sigh escaped him.

He tried to sit up but quickly gave up on that. His head felt heavy and blurry, and moving caused painful little stars to burst behind his eyelids. So he tried to take inventory of his surroundings. He was in a bed, and a very comfortable one at that. He was propped up on a multitude of feather pillows and tucked into layers of musty afghans.

Oh. And there was a large painting of his mother hanging over a chest of drawers directly across from him. Why did even his afterlife have to be a reminder of things dead and gone?

Magnus lay there for a moment or two, staring at the ceiling and trying to comprehend everything. Everything that might have happened before his dream was a scrambled mess. All he could really pull from it was the repeated sound of gunshots and screaming, and that only made his headache worse. Why was he here? Was he dead?

He turned his head slowly when he heard the door creak open. Yellow light spilled into the room, cut around the shape of a person.

“Oh, you’re awake! How was your rest, señor?”

Magnus squinted. “Jack?”

“Oh, good, you remember me. I was worried about that.”

He caught a glimpse of bright green paint on the door before Jack shut it behind him. He sat by the bed, setting down a roll of bandages. “How are you feeling?”

“Why am I… here?”

Jack’s brow furrowed. “Because you were knocked unconscious and the mansion was the best - well, only - place we could take you.” He added, “You’ve been asleep for less than a day.”

Magnus was getting more agitated with every word, and with his rise in emotion, his headache worsened. “But what happened?”

“Oh, I was hoping you had dodged the memory loss bullet altogether,” Jack said. “But… we were looking for whoever had thrown those bricks into your uncle’s office window, remember, and we ran into that bloodbath on Cooper Street. Turns out it was some kind of riot against the new draft law that was passed, and everything got out of hand with the militiamen and civilians, which was around when we arrived.

“Well, you were being dumb and self-righteous again, trying to help whatever injured person you could find, and someone hit you in the head. You fell like a sack of rocks and scared me quite well…

“Then, oh, then the militia wheeled out cannons. They stuffed them with as many bullets as they could fit. That was when I figured it was time to leave, when people began falling like cornstalks. I carried - well, dragged - you here, and you’re heavy, señor.”

Magnus closed his eyes and sank further into the pillows, processing Jack’s retelling. It seemed to be coming back to him now. He remembered a girl with blood in her watery-sunlight hair, and a boy too young to be in the center of a scene such as that one. He wondered if the boy had ever reached safety, or if he had been gunned down by the cannons.

And then there was also -

Jack frantically poked him in the face, perhaps stronger than he’d intended to. “Sorry, can’t have you falling asleep again. You looked half-dead before.”

Magnus swatted his hand away. “What about Randolph? What happened to him?”

“Oh, he most likely left as soon as you were hit. He certainly didn’t help me take you back here, but I saw him retreating to his office again after I’d taken care of you. Oh, and also -” He reached for the nightstand drawer closest to the floor and pulled out the little box Magnus had stolen from Randolph’s desk and promptly lost track of. Jack waved it around nonchalantly. “Filched this before I left that terrible scene. Figured your uncle wouldn’t dare enter this room while you were in it, even if you were unconscious, so I kept it in here.”

Magnus sighed. “Thank you, Jack.”

Jack just shrugged and glanced down at his hands, his tiny grin somehow both smug and bashful at the same time. “Come on. Your bandages are soaked through.”

He lifted a hand and, for the first time, realized there was a thick covering of them wrapped around his head. “I can do it,” he mumbled as Jack motioned for him to sit up.

“Shut up, señor,” said Jack respectfully.

Magnus did as he was told and managed to keep quiet throughout the entire process. Jack bundled up the stained bandages, ordered Magnus to lift his hair away from the wound at the base of his head, and washed away the sweat and blood that had accumulated over time.

“It feels strange,” Magnus blurted just as Jack was finishing tightly wrapping the new dressings. “To be the one being taken care of, for once.”

Jack tore the end of the bandage from its roll and haphazardly stuck some surgical tape to keep it all together. “Yes, well, don’t get used to it. The wound doesn’t look infected or anything.”

Magnus ran his hand over the bandage, but the pressure sent pinpricks of pain throughout his head. “I should probably talk to Randolph…”

Jack shot him a glare. “Absolutely not. You need to eat and rest and preferably not stress yourself out more than you ought to be.”

“Oh, that’s already a losing battle,” Magnus muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Listen, I need to speak with him. It’s extremely important.”

Perhaps it was the desperate look in his eyes, but Jack didn’t protest any further when Magnus stood up, clutching the table as he regained his balance, and lurched towards the door. As a second thought, he grabbed the black box from the nightstand.

“In that case, I’m coming with you,” Jack said. His tone made sure that this was non-negotiable. As they entered the corridor in the direction of Randolph’s office, he began to rifle through whatever cupboard that caught his attention. Magnus even caught him pocketing what things he fancied.

He was gathering quite the collection. Most of them could probably fetch some high prices and keep the convalescent home running for an added year or so. Magnus began to survey the shelves and cupboards as well, wondering which things his uncle would miss and which he would overlook if they were to disappear.

All those thoughts dissipated when they pushed through a small, empty room and ran right into the man they’d been looking for.
Randolph jumped and whirled around. Magnus kept a death grip on the doorknob for a while, partly because seeing his uncle without a steady speech prepared didn’t sit right with him and partly because his heart had just skipped a beat or two in a very unhealthy kind of way.

“Magnus,” Randolph said. He wasn’t even attempting to sound relieved. “You’re awake.”

His eyes immediately flitted towards the black box in Magnus’ hand. His fingers twitched.

“We’re not doing this again,” he said when he’d caught his breath again. “We are going to… we’re going to get out of this musty room and you are going to answer all my questions because I think they just doubled.”

“Wonderful idea, señor,” Jack quipped. He slunk behind Randolph and nudged him in the direction of the door. He didn’t stop hovering over him like a guard dog until they were halfway down the stairs.

“All right, first of all.” Magnus leaned against the banister to steady himself, still winded from… what, he couldn’t really tell. Everything? He hated feeling this weak. “I believe you about everything you’ve said about Loki except for the bits about him… her… killing your family and causing the war,” he finished awkwardly.

Jack coughed and sent Magnus a worried look as if to ask How hard did you hit your head? And Randolph had still been eyeing the box, but his head jerked up at Magnus’ words.

“And if you are wondering where this sudden change of heart came from,” he continued before Randolph could say anything, “don’t ask, because I will never tell you.”

He glanced up at Randolph, giving him a moment to speak. He didn’t take the opportunity, so Magnus undid the clasps on the box and started rifling through the contents. He knew what he was looking for - evidence - but he wasn’t sure if Randolph would have kept it around. If he did, it would be in this box, he was sure of it.

“You’re in league with… with Loki. God, it sounds ridiculous but I know you are. He ordered you to come here; you obeyed. You exchange letters, like old friends - except that he seems to terrify you. What does he want you to do? Why do you do it? What is he offering you?”

There only seemed to be more pages ripped out of the same book, with indecipherable notes scribbled in the margins in Randolph’s handwriting. By now they were outside in the foggy, gray air - when had that happened? Jack had taken the lead and was walking down the street in the opposite direction of last night’s riot.

“My family,” said Randolph. Hearing an answer was so surprising that Magnus shut the box on his fingers.

“What?” Magnus shook out his hand to alleviate the pain. He exchanged a look with Jack, and he knew they shared the same thoughts.

“He’s offering me my family,” Randolph said. He looked up, and the growing fervor in his eyes, coupled with his whisper of a voice, scared Magnus a little. “If I just do this one thing for him, he’ll give them back, alive and well.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jack said, beating Magnus to saying it this time.

“Loki is a powerful god of old. I am sure it won’t be a problem for him,” Randolph insisted.

“A powerful trickster god of old,” said Magnus. “Whatever he wants you to do, I’ll bet it isn’t worth the results.”

Shaking his head, he plowed on. “Find the brooch. That’s all I have to do. Should not be difficult, right? It isn’t like it is a wild goose chase.”

He didn’t sound at all convinced of this. In fact, he seemed rather… frightened. He kept wringing his hands and looking about the empty street - which wasn’t abnormal, but it looked more like genuine distress rather than his usual fidgety nature when interacting with his nephew.

“I don’t like this,” Magnus muttered to himself. “This is all too coincidental. There has to be more to it.”

Randolph looked puzzled.

Magnus realized his slip of tongue a second too late. “Never mind,” he said, even though Randolph hadn’t said anything yet. “You know, this is all one big nightmare. It just happens to seem very real. We should just - just go back to Virginia and forget about all of this. Put it behind us. And I’ll ask Alex…” He stopped before he could say I’ll ask Alex about all of this, and she’ll be able to make sense of it. Alex was gone, and she would not be able to fix it even if she were.

Randolph didn’t seem to notice Magnus’ second slip-up. He hadn’t seemed to hear any of Magnus’ words after “nightmare”. For a while, the only sound that filled the air was their footsteps on the cold streets and Randolph’s cane rhythmically hitting the stones. For a brief moment Magnus wondered where they were going, if anywhere in particular.

“It’s too late for running away,” Randolph finally said, forcefully calm. “If I don’t finish this job soon, this will all have been for nothing and…”

“And Loki has already grown impatient,” Magnus finished, recalling the letter left on Randolph’s desk in the Virginia mansion. “What are you afraid he’s going to do?”

Randolph ran a hand over his face but didn’t answer. Magnus stifled a groan and went ahead to keep pace with Jack. “What do we do about him?” he whispered.

“I was wondering more along the lines of ‘what are we going to do about you’? Señor, you are going along with his mad ideas? I fear for you.”

“Thank you, Jack.”

“We’re supposed to look out for each other. If that involves telling you that you’ve gone off the edge, then so be it.”

Magnus threw his head back in dramatic exasperation, but he knew Jack was right. “Yes, but I’m going to need you to trust me this time.”

“You will explain everything,” Jack prompted, jabbing a finger in Magnus’ face. “Promise.”

“Promise. But right now…”

Jack screwed up his face like he did when he was annoyed with Magnus’ behavior. “Right now we are going into this nice place and getting some… coffee or something.”

“I don’t like coffee,” Magnus muttered. Jack shot him a warning look and pushed him into the little coffeehouse they’d stopped in front of, then went back out to drag Randolph in as well. He didn’t make as much of a fuss as Magnus would have expected him to.

Jack ushered them to a table in the corner by the window and meandered towards the front, where a handful of staff sat looking tired.

“I don’t understand; why are we here?” Randolph eyed the wooden tables and chairs as if they might be infected with something.

Magnus slumped into one, shifting nervously when it creaked loudly. “I have no idea. But we did need to get out of there…”

He laced his fingers together over the table and stared at them, just so he could avoid looking Randolph in the eyes.

“Listen. I probably don’t have any say in the matter; this is your family, and I’ve never even met them, but… they’re already gone.”

Randolph flinched. Anger suddenly flashed, stronger than Magnus would have expected. He tamped it down and kept his voice level.

“They’ve been gone for a long time. How will that affect… everything?”

Unexpectedly, Randolph’s eyes softened. Magnus tensed. “If someone came to you and offered you a deal in which they could bring back your mother, what would you say?”

Magnus looked down at his hands again, which were twisting around each other so tightly his fingers hurt. It was something Randolph did all the time. He laid his hands flat on the table.

Jack’s swift footsteps interrupted the silence that had descended like a guillotine upon their table. He set down a steaming cup of what smelled like tea laced heavily with honey.

“What have I missed?” he asked as he sat down. Unlike Magnus, he didn’t seem at all bothered by the fragility of the chairs.

“Not much,” Magnus said coldly. He pushed away from the table. “You can stay if you like. I’m going back to the mansion.”

Jack made a noise as if he was going to protest, but he bit his tongue. Magnus hoped his tea was good, which was the thought he left with as he stepped back outside.

He was greeted with wind and fog, yet again. Now that he had a moment alone, he only just seemed to realize how exhausted he was. They’d only walked a couple of blocks down from the mansion and yet it felt like miles in the weight of his limbs and the empty static that filled his mind.

He supposed it was better than the alternative, which involved his thoughts spiraling so out of control that he might not return from them.

The imposing front doors were unlocked, of course. Magnus stumbled through them and shut them with all the remaining strength he’d been clinging to on the way back. He sat down on the marble staircase that matched the ones just outside and rested his head on the banister.

He ought to write a letter, he thought numbly. He ought to ask Alex about all this. He would ask for some kind of explanation, and it would somehow make sense because it was written in Alex’s handwriting.

He glanced up at the front doors. He blinked rapidly, but there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in the moment after. For a second, however, he thought perhaps he’d seen someone standing there in the cold light. A man or a woman - he couldn’t tell - with brilliant hair and a smirk that fit their face perfectly.

He shook his head. Forget writing letters - a plan was forming in the back of his mind, a plan that perhaps was a little mad and perhaps very much worth the risk.

Chapter Text

Dear Magnus,

There isn’t any point in preamble. This is going to sound so damn sentimental, so you ought to appreciate it.

Listen, aren’t we both ridiculous? All of this is. Here I am, close to either dying of boredom or bullets on any given day and unable to even write a sweet word before your name without losing my dignity. Not that it matters in the long run, which is why I am writing this in the first place.

There are some things I didn’t get to tell you before I left. Like how I think you ought to get more sleep. And that your handwriting is unspeakably terrible, though I suppose I’m not in a position to say so. Can you even read this right now? Part of me hopes you can’t.

My list isn’t over, you can’t look away yet. I also wanted to tell you that your eyes aren’t a dead kind of gray, but more of a morning-light kind of gray, which is unfortunate because I can’t watch a sunrise without thinking of you. And your hair is too long and soft for someone to resist running her hands through, and you once told me you have never had a sweetheart before, but I’m inclined to doubt you because of your hair alone. That isn’t fair at all - oh, and neither is your smile. It lights up things, dark and cold things, and everything, really.

The mail carriage has left by now, I’ll bet. Maybe they’re trying to tell me something. Like “This letter should not be sent.” I wish I could have sent it anyway, because this is getting to be too much.

Alex woke to the sound of someone mumbling curses through unsteady breaths, shifting under their covers, and generally making a muffled racket.

She rolled over on her side, nudging Lilith away from where she had curled against Alex’s side in her sleep and ignoring the dog’s snuffles of protest in the process. She forced her eyes open a sliver. After she processed the fact that the sun wasn’t even close to being up, and gave herself a moment to be irritated by that, she realized that the noises were coming from the lump under a blanket next to her.

As much as it ruffled her to be awake as such a terrible hour, Alex couldn’t simply ignore Fletcher’s sniffling.

“What’re you doing?” Alex said, her speech slurred through her sleepy state.

The pitiful sounds abruptly stopped. After a moment of fragile silence, Alex followed up by murmuring, “You can stop pretending to sleep, I heard you.”

“It’s nothing,” came Fletcher’s reply, stifled by the fact that his head was still covered by his blanket.

Even though Fletcher couldn’t see her, Alex smirked. “No, that won’t work.” She was well-acquainted with that excuse - quite personally, in fact. But even if she weren’t, anyone would be able to see through it.

There was a shuffling sound, then Fletcher poked his head out of the blanket. Alex couldn’t read his expression in the dark, but she didn’t need to.

“My arm hurts,” Fletcher mumbled. “Well, my arm hurts but that isn’t why…”

Alex wondered which of those admissions she ought to respond to. “That does tend to happen when you play the guitar with a broken arm that isn’t fully healed.”

Fletcher didn’t respond.

“What’s really wrong?” Alex asked, softening.

“Noth -” he began, but stopped himself. “Sorry. Not used to anyone asking.

“I miss home,” he all but whispered. “I’ve, er… never really been away from it until now. But it’s strange. I never liked the place when I actually lived there - might have even hated it there - and yet now I miss how it looked in the summer, golden and green.”

Alex hummed. Somewhere very deep in some crevice in her heart, she agreed with the sentiment. The scent of honeysuckle in the spring, creeping up the towering walls of the Fierro mansion, was an absence she had felt strongly in the months after she left, though she’d never have admitted it at the time. Sometimes she even thought of her half-siblings, who were oftentimes cruel without even realizing it, whose words clung to her in a way that wasn’t black or white the way it was with Loki and her father; they were only children, after all.

“I don’t want to go back, though,” said Fletcher, bringing her back to the present. “I never want to go back.”

Alex studied his silhouette, gradually lightening along with the sky. When had the sun begun to rise?

She had been thinking about this conversation for a while now. Alex decided to throw a line out in the hopes that Fletcher would catch it. “Why’s that?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he grumbled.

This was playing out in quite a familiar way. “I might. How can you know?”

“I just do,” said Fletcher.

There was a lull in which Alex watched the sky melt from gray to pink, while Fletcher tried in vain to rebuild his composure despite his arm - not to mention his memories as well - still giving him hell. Lilith nuzzled closer to Fletcher in her sleep.

“So did I,” Alex blurted. Now that the night was pretty much officially dead, she felt like she could raise her voice above a whisper. She sat up and threw off her meager blanket. She’d have to get up soon anyway.

Fletcher stared up at her, his gaze questioning.

“I also thought nobody would understand.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and played with a corner of her blanket. She felt like she was standing on a cliff, the wind buffeting against her back and urging her off the edge.

“It’s difficult, isn’t it? Everyone thinks you’re mad, or broken, or possessed by the devil. That last one’s my personal favorite.” She laughed, but it quickly fizzled out. “They say it for so long you rather start to believe it.”

Fletcher’s expression had stilled. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re not exactly who you say you are, are you? I think we’re the same.”

Before he could answer, the piercing sound of the wake-up call blew through camp. Alex pushed back the tent flap, glaring out at the boy standing on a tree root self-importantly. At twelve years old, he was the youngest in the regiment - aside from perhaps Fletcher - though he didn’t fight, thank god. Instead, his main job was to blow the bugle always slung over his shoulder whenever necessary - in the mornings to rouse the soldiers, throughout the day to mark the hour, or on the battlefield to keep the troops in sync.

The boy, whose name came and went through Alex’s memory, tapped out a little dance on his tree root as he played a quick procession on his bugle in accordance. Alex was fond of the child just as much as the next soldier, of course, but right now really could not have been a worse time for him to break out his repertoire.

But as it was, he was signaling for the 40th New York Infantry to start breaking camp. They were marching out today, away from the failure that the generals didn’t want to call a failure. After weeks of playing cat and mouse with the enemy, they had slipped right out of General Meade’s - and thus a sensible portion of the Union Army’s - hands. Alex figured there was perhaps a month or so of fighting off the dullness of camp life in their futures.

She retreated back into the tent and fished around for her jacket and shoes. Fletcher was stuffing all his miscellaneous belongings scattered around their tent into his pack. He kept his head down and paid no mind to the furtive glances Alex cast his way. She tried to speak on multiple occasions, but, stubbornly, no words came out.

She refused to give substance to the bitter thoughts swirling around her mind, but they were there nonetheless. She shoved the writing board into her own satchel, followed by her unsent letter, pen, and dwindling supply of paper. She picked up Lilith and set her on top of a log to keep her out of the way for the time being.

Fletcher helped her pack up the tent even though it was Alex’s turn to carry it. They made quick work of it together, so the silence between them did not have the chance to grow uncomfortable.

The sunlight was watery and null against the buffeting wind, but Alex did her best to ignore the weather altogether. It didn’t matter if the wind picked up to resemble a raging storm, or if the dark clouds overhead broke open later in the afternoon to release driving rain; they weren’t resting until they had marched thirty miles, announced the colonel to grumbles of dissent among the gathered soldiers.

Alex tuned out the colonel’s rallying cries, which didn’t have much effect on the troops anyway. Lilith had gotten tired of sitting on the log, and had opted to visit each soldier individually, sniffing around their ankles and steadily winning the hearts of each and every one of them. She collected their cooing and head pets like currency, but she eventually returned to Fletcher’s side, seemingly rejuvenated. Fletcher stared down at her and mustered a smile, and just like that he seemed to have returned to his regular self.

Alex kept an eye on him, however, all the while as they formed their lines and the bugle boy ran ahead to the front of the troops, his instrument catching the smallest glint of sun and gleaming it bronze on the way to his lips.

Alex kept her head low for the first hour or so, thoughts tumbling over themselves in her mind. Mentally, she weighed the evidence she had for her theory, but she could feel in her chest that she was right.

Fletcher was walking a few lines ahead of her, his guitar slung over his shoulder, Lilith trotting by his side. The thought of going up to him made Alex’s stomach turn with nerves, but she pushed through the soldiers blocking her path to him and slipped into his line.

Fletcher looked more apprehensive than angry to see her. Not that Alex had expected anger - she didn’t know what she had been expecting.

“What do you mean?” Fletcher asked so quietly Alex could hardly discern it from the unanimous sound of marching feet. “What did you mean we’re the same?”

Lilith circled Alex, nibbling at her pant leg and almost tripping her. “I meant…” She hesitated. Thought of Loki, smiling as he told Alex, You ought to ask him yourself. Doubt, it crept in, and it made a home there somewhere, like an old friend expecting to be welcomed at the door.

Footsteps, marching and marching. Deafening, if you listened long enough.

“I meant that you aren’t the only one who feels like they were born to be something other than how people see you.” Alex played with the leather strap of her satchel slung across her chest, recalling confused but understanding eyes lit up by the sunlight to steady herself. “I’d rather be called a girl, most of the time. Look like a girl, too, occasionally. Not exactly something most people can understand.”

The sound of marching feet returned to Alex’s senses. Her eyes were still on the ground, and she watched Lilith weave between her and Fletcher, unable to decide on one or the other.

“Look up,” Fletcher told her. Alex, startled by the commanding tone in his voice, immediately obeyed.

First, she noticed that they had fallen a few steps behind the rest of the regiment. And when she turned to look Fletcher in the eyes, she saw a gentle smile on his face. A little hesitant, perhaps, but nothing worse than that. He picked Lilith up, against her yips of protest.

“My name isn’t really Adrian Fletcher. Well, to me, it is. In all intents and purposes. But to my mother, and my sister and father, I’m…” He trailed off, squeezing his eyes shut for a second. “They say women can’t enlist as soldiers, but I figured that applied to the ones who actually felt like a part of that category.”

Alex couldn’t hear the sound of the troops’ footsteps and conversation anymore. And it felt strange to keep looking at the ground. She scratched Lilith’s fluffy head and mustered something not quite a smile, but something closer to a smirk. “I suppose we’re both law-breakers, then. Me, a girl on occasion. You, barely an adult. Both of us in the army.”

“Perhaps that’s why they say we’re mad,” Fletcher remarked.

Alex shrugged lightly.

“What if they are the mad ones? That’s an idea, isn’t it? We’re the normal ones, and they are the ones making a fuss out of nothing.”

Alex pretended to consider it, though she couldn’t hide that the idea made her step lighter and her smile easier. It was one thing to stand alone and resist the dark things people told you, and another to have someone beside you as proof that you weren’t as twisted as everyone said you were.

The first ten miles felt like a walk through a city park, though Alex’s aching feet and various scars and minor wounds tried to tell her otherwise. She could hardly pay much attention to physical pain, however, when the euphoria of feeling safe had finally wrapped its arms around her - not like a bubble though, cut off from the rest of the world by an irreversible fact, the way she had felt for most of her life. This was more like actual… belonging, comfortable and warm.

It was rather easy to get used to, Alex noted as Fletcher went on about how much he wished he could take a furlough and track down a grand piano in whichever city he was nearest to, one of his usual fantasies he enjoyed talking about. Apparently you could not call yourself a pianist until you’d played a Blüthner in an empty concert hall. Alex told him that he already seemed a musician well enough, and who needed a Blüthner to make good music?

“You don’t understand,” Fletcher said, shaking his head. “It’s all about the feeling, the way you soar with the music.”

It began to rain in short, harrowing bursts in the late afternoon. (Why was it that whenever they were marching, it always rained?) The ground beneath their feet turned to mud quicker than the soldiers could begin complaining. Still, they couldn’t let up - after a midday break that had lasted longer than intended, they were a little less than halfway to their destination.

The wind and humidity made quick work of turning Alex’s curls into frizzed knots, and she spent a good deal of time running her fingers through her hair trying to untangle it just to busy herself with her hands. This mostly succeeded in turning it into an even fluffier mop. Whenever Fletcher glanced over at her, he looked away with a barely concealed snort and a grin. Alex glared at him until he got the idea.

They marched for hours upon the ground that quickly turned to mud beneath hundreds of pairs of feet, over hills and past small towns half-obscured by the blue-gray fog the rain produced. They didn’t rest even when the wagons got stuck in the mud, or when Alex was sure she was wearing her shoe soles into nonexistence. Lilith certainly was not used to walking such long distances, and so

Alex often found herself carrying fifteen extra pounds of black terrier in her arms.

This continued for nearly four days. They made very makeshift camps when the sun set, and packed them up as soon as the sun rose. The rain persisted for a good half of their march. At the very least they no longer had to walk thirty miles a day; the colonel took pity on them and lessened it to twenty, then fifteen.

All the while Alex and Fletcher stayed near the back of the procession of horses and wagons and soldiers. They went over well-worn subjects whose words grew old but not the emotions behind them. They discovered new topics of conversation, as well - Fletcher talked about his ten-year-old sister quite a bit when before he had never even mentioned her. By the end of the second day, Alex felt like she knew the young girl personally. And, after some nagging on Fletcher’s part, Alex even found herself talking about letters she nervously wrote and nervously waited for in response, which was so unlike her that it frightened her a bit. She hadn’t meant to say anything about the convalescent home or Magnus, she really hadn’t. But that unsent letter felt like it was burning a hole in her pocket, and it loosened her tongue.

On the fourth afternoon, they reached their destination. The Rappahannock River was wide and tumultuous after days of rain, and the trees that were settled deep in the rocks on the bank leaned their heads close to the water, letting loose branches get swept away without a care.

There were already a few regiments gathered by the river, a quite permanent-looking camp set up farther from the riverbank. Alex, Fletcher, and the rest of the regiment hesitantly mingled outside the encampments while their colonel went ahead to converse with the generals clustered together at a tent farthest from the river.

“What are we doing here?” Fletcher asked. He set Lilith on the ground with an overdramatic “Oof.”

Alex slumped down on a log, too weary to care that it was soaked through. She propped her head on the palm of her hand and allowed herself a moment to rest her eyes. “Oh, who knows. But I don’t think it’s anything you’d want to stay on your toes for.”

Fletcher hummed quietly and joined her on the log. Alex sighed. In a matter of moments, she could feel herself drifting off to sleep.

She didn’t get the chance to savor it, though. Fletcher flicked her forehead, and she jolted upright. They were already setting up their tents and getting the wagons settled. Fletcher set Lilith loose through the new terrain, watching as she greeted every new person she came across with excited sniffles.

After pitching the tent and dumping all her things on her bedroll, Alex tripped her way through the densely-packed camp towards the river. She wasn’t sure she was allowed so close to the bank without pretense of being on picket duty, but she’d never been a stickler for rules.

The rain had lessened to a light drizzle, so the river was less frothy now than when they had arrived. Alex leaned on a tree sturdy enough that its leaves didn’t trail in the river like the ones beside it. If she squinted, she thought she saw figures in gray moving about across the river. But then she looked away for a moment, and there was just the brown hills to look at.

She glanced back at the camp that seemed bustling and yet lazy at the same time. Before pushing off the tree, she stuck her hand in her pocket and played with the corner of her letter, just to check that it was still there. It was a bit damp, but still intact.

She began the trek back up to the camp.

“I need you to cover for my absence for a little while,” said Alex, standing up from the rock she’d been sitting on for the past three hours.

Fletcher pushed back his cap to look at her. “What? Why?”

Alex hesitated before pulling out her worn envelope that had stayed in her pocket for half a month now. She slipped it back in when Fletcher’s eyes widened and a sly glint in his eyes appeared.

“I see, I see. You can’t wait for an off day, can you?”

“They give those out like Christmas presents,” Alex said, resisting a blush.

She was right, and Fletcher knew it. Who knew when they had last had a decent Christmas?

“Well, alright.” Fletcher waved her away, acting bored. “Take your lovesick smell somewhere else.”

Alex lightly kicked his foot as she left. She heard him drawl, “No, sir, I haven’t seen her since she left to investigate that strange noise around over there ten minutes ago.” Already practicing.

There was a town a little over a mile from camp that hopefully had a post office. Alex had taken note of it when they first arrived at the river two weeks ago, but hadn’t found the time to visit. Their days were spent building fortifications and patrolling alongside the river watching the distant shadows of the enemy as if they might build an impromptu bridge across the waters and attack, and only now had Alex been assigned to picket duty alongside Fletcher, who she knew would cover for her. They wouldn’t miss her. The whole point of a stalemate, she reasoned, was that nothing happened between either side for a very long time.

As she trudged up a muddy hill intent on pulling her feet all the way into the ground, she wondered what the rest of the country was doing. She hoped they were making more progress in the war effort than the mucky work they were doing here.

It was much too quiet on the hills. There was the rustling of leaves in a distant patch of trees, and the rise-and-fall hum of the wind, but not much else. Alex whistled a snippet of one of her regiment’s marching songs just to provide some more noise.

The town had come into sight by the time the sun had begun to set. Silhouettes of simple wood and brick buildings were backlit by the orange glow. Alex hastened her step; she had no desire to walk back to camp in complete darkness.

It was as she was pulling out her letter to inspect it one final time that she noticed a flash of color that couldn’t have just been a bird passing by. It lasted half a moment, a streak of auburn and green in the shape of a person against the dull shades of the town.

Alex paused, but it didn’t make a reappearance. She held her letter closer to her chest and stepped onto the main road. It was mostly empty at this time of day, save for two people conversing in the shadow of an inn on the corner of an alley. For a moment one of them looked like a woman in voluminous skirts and red hair, but Alex chanced them a look from the corner of her eye and saw that it was only a worn-down-looking old woman.

Alex couldn’t make our their conversation as she passed by them on the other side of the street - which was strange, because they appeared to be exchanging rather heated words.

She had just caught sight of the post office when the couple’s conversation came into clear focus. She seemed to have caught the tail end of it, as the only thing she heard was a feathery voice saying, “Suit yourself. But I don’t think you’ll need my help anyway.”

Alex stopped cold in her tracks. The first two times she might have been able to ignore it, pass it off as tricks of the light, but that voice was unmistakable.

She lifted her rifle from where its muzzle had been dipping towards the ground, knowing that it couldn’t do a thing for her. Still, her hands instinctively found the trigger and forestock, until all she would have to do to fire a shot would be to lift it chest-level and turn around.

She didn’t get to, however. A voice called out through the cold sunset air, hesitant, “Alex?”

The rifle slipped a little closer to the ground again. Alex turned around, and it settled in the dirt with a soft clatter.

He was wearing a very stupid-looking hat, was the first thing Alex noted. She might have laughed if her voice had not temporarily left her. The rest of his clothes didn’t look too out of the ordinary - an old wide-collared coat over a wrinkled shirt, and pants tattered around the ankles. And his hair… well, it was disheveled, as per usual, but a tiny bit longer. It almost reached his shoulders now.

Alex took the first step, but it was Magnus who closed the gap between them. All of a sudden her toes were barely touching the ground as she was crushed in a hug. She may or may not have let out a tiny squeak, proving that her vocal cords still worked.

Sooner than she could even process the unnatural warmth of his body, it was gone. Magnus jumped back, a blush taking over his face. His eyes were glistening, and though Alex’s eyes were dry, she felt like they might be for long. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t like -”

Alex wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder. He smelled like earth and sunlight, so achingly familiar that she questioned whether the past few months had even happened. And though his hair was mussed and in need of a wash, she twined her fingers into the soft strands at the base of his neck, and he finally returned the embrace.

When she looked up, she realized two things. First, that her letter was still crumpled in one hand. The envelope seal had broken open, and the ink had stained her fingers.

Second, it was the old woman that Alex had barely taken note of when she first stepped onto the road. She was still there, in the shadows, but she was not ragged and unassuming anymore. She was standing up straight, her radiant hair cascading down her back in coiffed tongues of fire. Alex couldn’t see her eyes, shrouded in darkness as they were, but her tiny smile was unmistakable and felt as loud as a warning. When Alex blinked, she was gone.

Her eyes fell back down to her letter. It was too crumpled to be legible by now, but Alex remembered what she’d written.

She felt numb as she settled into Magnus’ arms, trembling and shaky-breathed. Perhaps she was murmuring things under her breath, but he didn’t ask questions nor did he pull away, and Alex didn’t let go of him for a long time, afraid that if she did he would discover that her cheeks were wet and he would grow worried.

There are other things you ought to know, but I’m not sure

Anyways. This is getting too long for my tastes.

Love, Alex

Chapter Text

Getting back to Virginia was the easy part. Magnus waited only for Jack to return, which wasn’t soon after he left the coffeehouse. He mumbled apologies to Jack for leaving him alone with “your uncle of all people, really señor, it’s as if you don’t even care for me,” all the while running around the mansion looking for his things, which had been misplaced sometime after the riot.

Eventually, Jack simply pointed Magnus in the direction of his mother’s bedroom, where the single bag he’d brought along was sitting on the rocking chair.

“I mean, he didn’t even have the decency to go after you, even when I told him tea was best enjoyed alone. He almost didn’t seem to hear me, just kept wringing his hands and staring at the table. I really don’t think he’s all there, señor, are you sure you want to rely on his word?”

Magnus was only half-listening as he picked up his bag and left his mother’s room as quickly as possible. Jack’s voice was becoming increasingly more frantic.

“Does it run in the family? Is there something in your blood that draws you to insane theories and ancient relics? And you have finally caught it, the - the illness, after breathing the same air as your uncle for too long.”

“If that were true, you’d have caught it as well,” said Magnus, ignoring the twinge of concern he felt at Jack’s comment. But that was just classic Jack ramblings - he talked as he thought.

Jack appeared to be considering it. Magnus picked up a small vase fashioned from metal and decorated with images of snarling wolves, stared at it for a moment, then set it back on its dusty shelf. No one in their right mind would buy something so hideous.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said as he began making his way down the stairs leading to the foyer. “I’m not going to become some obsessive recluse, and I don’t believe anything about this Loki person being as involved in humankind as Randolph thinks he is. I just… I’ve realized something, and I might even receive a direct answer for once if I do this.”

“But what are you doing?” said Jack. “You’ve been acting so strangely lately, so what am I supposed to believe anymore? You can’t really expect me to believe that you are just going to stay at the convalescent home once we return. You can confide in me, you know.”

Without thinking, Magnus blurted, “I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you,” then hurried down the rest of the stairs.

“Well, what does that mean?” Jack pressed. He tugged on Magnus's shoulder, turning him around so they were face-to-face. “Señor!”

“Alright!” he said after only a moment of having Jack stare intensely into his eyes, uncomfortably close. “But… not now. How about on the train ride back? Please?”

Jack looked like he was about to continue protesting, but quickly shut his mouth and began poking Magnus in the shoulder until he turned around to see what Jack was looking at.

Randolph was sitting at a round wooden table with his back to the stairs. He hadn’t seemed to notice them yet. He was hunched over what appeared to be the little black box Magnus had nearly forgotten about, and was carefully turning it over in his hands like an exotic animal on a spit.

He could probably make an escape for the front doors without his uncle even looking up, but Magnus realized when he’d reached the bottom of the stairs that he didn’t quite want that. Call him delusional, or stubborn. Jack might call him both.

“We’re leaving,” he said quietly, still leaning on the gilded banister. Randolph barely stirred, which was unnerving. Magnus had almost gotten used to his jittery nature. “Back to Virginia, that is. We could get you a train ticket, if you’d like.”

Randolph turned around at that, but his eyes were a vague kind of empty that made Magnus want to retract his offer if only to be rid of that gaze.

“No, thank you,” his uncle murmured, turning his attention back to the box in his hands. “I am needed here.”

Magnus looked over at Jack, but he just scowled and impatiently motioned toward the doors.

“You can always turn your back on it all,” he said as a final effort, knowing that his words were helpless.

He and Jack made their way across the foyer, and with that he slammed the enormous doors shut behind them, holding a sense of dread in his gut.

Before heading to the train station, they stopped by the bank. It was the only one in the area when Magnus lived in the city, so he figured it was the most likely place his uncle kept all his important things. He’d originally planned to withdraw a few hundred, just enough to cover the nurses’ wages, but Jack interrupted him and told the clerk, “Five hundred, please.” To Magnus, he said, “You never know.”

So now they had a thick envelope of five hundred dollars (hopefully) safely tucked away in one of Jack’s suitcases under a pile of newspapers that he had been collecting for some unknown reason.

They didn’t speak on their way to the train station (it took Magnus a little while to remember where it was), but he was quite aware of the concerned looks Jack was shooting his way every minute or so.

He kept his questions to himself for a surprising amount of time; perhaps he understood that Magnus wasn’t in the best mood to keep talking about his uncle.

However, they had just boarded the train when Jack gave up. “I’m tired of your secrets, señor.”

Magnus blinked, having lost himself in thoughts related to transportation, dates, days.

Jack plowed on without giving him any time to respond. “First, there is everything to do with this Loki character. I’ve gathered enough from the ramblings of your uncle, but why your sudden change of view? Secondly, why are we going back? We haven’t figured anything out as far as I can tell. And, third, what are you planning after this? I don’t expect you to just settle back into your life before, because why would you be in such a hurry -”

Magnus grabbed Jack’s hands, which were flailing about as he spoke. This garnered his attention, and he shut up.

“Jack! Jack. Listen. I know I’ve been… cryptic. I brought you along, and for what?” He tried for a smile, but he was pretty sure it came out more of a grimace. “But…” He stumbled, unsure of where to even begin in explaining. He wondered how much he could tell about Alex Fierro without betraying her trust and confusing Jack unnecessarily.

Still, Jack was staring intently at him again, his eyes both demanding and pleading.

“I had a dream,” he began. “It was Loki, I’m sure of it. He looked just like the pictures of him in those old books. He told me things that… well, I can’t really tell you right now. But it wasn’t just a dream. It was real, I’m pretty sure.”

At Jack’s expression, he faltered. “I know what it sounds like. But I’m telling the truth.”

“No, no, go on,” Jack said, staring unblinking into Magnus's eyes. He mostly looked like he was trying not to look confused, which Magnus took to mean that he was going into this with an open mind.

“And I think I know someone who can confirm Loki’s existence,” he said helplessly, knowing how similar he sounded to his uncle. “Do you remember Alex Fierro?”

Jack blinked, taken aback. “Who?”

“Oh, come on, it hasn’t been that long. The soldier with the wounded eye? You were friends.”

Jack shook his head, though there was a muffled spark of recognition in his eyes. It flickered and died after a moment. “I think you need to rest, señor.”

“You said you wanted an explanation, I’m giving it to you!” Magnus protested. Something wasn’t right in Jack’s expression; how could he so easily forget a person he knew not two months ago, when to this day he could perfectly recall dozens of tales of his time on the streets?

“I won’t be going with you to the convalescent home.” Magnus wrapped his worn satchel strap around his knuckles just to have something to do. “You should, though.”

“What?” Jack, who had allowed his eyes to wander around the train car, whipped around to look at Magnus again. “To chase after some mystery soldier who has a supposed connection to Loki? How would you even find him?”

“I haven’t figured that part out yet.” But he knew that he couldn’t wait around for another letter - who knew how long that would take? And by the time he received it, who was to say that Alex’s regiment hadn’t already moved on to another state, another battlefield?

“I don’t suppose I can keep following you, then?” Jack sighed.

Magnus stared mutely out the window at the slow-passing, repeating scenery. Part of him wished he could bring Jack along, but a larger part knew that it was wrong to keep dragging his friend all over the east coast while still keeping him in the dark about most things.

Jack settled as comfortably into the train seat as the stiff wooden boards could allow. He didn’t say anything else for a while, and when Magnus finally gathered the courage to look at Jack, he was already asleep.

The train left them on the muddy streets of Washington in a cloud of smoke. Through miles of walking along the sides of streets that had turned to little more than dirty pools of rainwater and long-trodden grooves in the earth while they were away, and occasionally paying some passerby with wheels to take them part of the way, they reached the convalescent home, unchanged from when they had left.

A few soldiers were sitting outside on the porch, talking in the lilting tones of people that had been at the same conversation for a few hours. They barely nodded at Magnus and Jack as they approached. Still, Jack stopped by them to insert himself into their conversation.

Magnus left them on the porch steps and slipped through the front doors. He was immediately greeted with the scent of chloroform and the sound of across-the-hall murmurings. The foyer was lined with shelves laden with neat rolls of bandages, stacked towels, tiny glass bottles, though the numbers of which had dwindled noticeably since Magnus had last laid eyes on them.

He had just put his hand on the doorknob to the former dining hall when the door opened and a nurse with loop braids and a basket of dirty laundry in her arms ran into him.

Magnus opened his mouth, but Louise didn’t give him a chance to even say her name. “Finally back, are you? I hope you’ve arrived with something to stock our shelves or fill our pockets.”

“Missed you too, Louise.”

Louise sniffed and pushed past him toward the coatroom, where she disappeared into for a moment and came out again balancing a bucket, a washboard, and a bar of soap on top of the laundry basket.

Before she could leave, however, Magnus called out to her. “How is T.J.?”

She turned around, and her expression changed. Softened. Perhaps she had not completely reverted back to her callous self. “You can’t ever really know, can you? Not when they’re out there again.”

Magnus watched her leave, wondering why it suddenly felt like they understood each other for the first time. She probably didn’t feel the same way, but it was a fleeting thought.

He hovered in the doorway for a minute longer, watching the regular activity play out around him. There appeared to be a new assortment of soldiers around, looking recently arrived from some across-the-state battlefield.

Across the room, a door opened from the kitchen. Magnus only caught sight of wild red curls before he figured it was time to move on. He left the dining hall and quickly disappeared up the stairs in an act befitting his usual brave self.

Upstairs was empty and dusty, as always. Magnus wandered into his impersonal bedroom, for lack of any better place to go. He dropped his bag beside the bed and all but collapsed into the pillows.

He closed his eyes for a moment. His head throbbed, his legs ached, and all he’d been doing today was sitting on a train and thinking about his plan to leave the convalescent home as soon as he’d arrived.

Yes, that was why he was here. To provide the nurses their overdue wages and pack up some medicines - though on second thought he supposed it was rather selfish to take from the meager supply they still had. He’d pawn the random trinkets he’d stolen from Randolph’s collection, Magnus decided. And after that, well… he would figure it out.

He really meant to get up in a minute or so, but then a minute became ten, twenty, and when he opened his eyes again, the bedroom was dark and cold.

Before he could fully shake the sleep from his brain, he sensed that there was someone else in the room. When he sat up, his eyes were immediately drawn to the old vanity in the corner of the room. It was soaking in barely-there moonlight, turning its chipping white paint into something almost to be admired.

But the woman in red staring into the dusty mirror didn’t have any of that ethereal nature about her. When Magnus looked over at her, she caught his eyes in the mirror and curled her red lips into a smile that just shied from motherly. She stood, and the legs of the cushioned bench she had been sitting on screeched as they were pushed back.

“I was wondering when you would wake,” said Loki. She wrinkled her nose. “Well. You aren’t truly awake yet, but I couldn’t see you any other way.”
She didn’t approach him, simply waited by the vanity with her hands nestled in the folds of her skirts. It gave Magnus the sense that she was waiting with a knife at the ready.

It took him a moment to find his voice. “How long have you been there?”

She shrugged minisculely. “Not long. But you don’t want to engage in small talk, do you? We are here to talk business.”

Magnus stared at her.

Loki scoffed. “You want to find her,” she prompted. “I can help you.”

Magnus fought the hopeful look that was surely obvious on his face. He ought to know better than to trust in Loki’s help - hadn’t he told his uncle over and over that she was naturally a trickster?

But he also didn’t have a single better idea.

“What do you know about Alex Fierro?” he asked.

Loki smiled pleasantly, and Magnus almost forgot why he ought to be wary of her.

“What do you want?” he asked, bringing his unease back to the surface as a warning not to get too carried away - by her eyes that gleamed like coins, by that smile that felt too welcoming.

Loki raised an eyebrow, and Magnus had to look away to shake the image of Alex’s face from his mind.

She only responded when he met her gaze again. “What makes you think you have anything I could desire?”

Magnus blinked. He wasn’t sure what answer he had been expecting, but that was not it.

“No need to look so tense,” Loki purred. “I’ll give you not only what information you need, but also a means of reaching her. Anything for you who can find yourself so devoted to one such as herself.”

From the folds of her dress, she produced a folded piece of paper and what appeared to be a map, clasped between her middle and forefinger.

Magnus stared at them for a moment as if they were coated in poison, but eventually reached out to accept them. He told himself he didn’t really have a choice, after all.

Magnus woke when the sun was just barely gracing the horizon. Gray light filtered through the window, which was no longer blocked by a god with a brilliant smile.

The rest of his senses came to him in bursts - first he realized that he had found his way under the bedcovers, and it took a minute to untangle himself from them. This involved him very gracefully falling out of the bed and landing in a heap on the cold wood floor.

He kicked off the blankets still clinging to his ankles and looked over at the vanity. It was unoccupied and back to its unremarkable self, not glimmering with moonlight the way it had in his dream. What was it about his dreams and moonlight that was just a bit off?

There was still something different about the vanity, though. When Magnus approached it, he picked up a yellowed and creased piece of paper and a map in the same condition.

He unfolded the map first. Its tiny rivers and town names were faded, but it was unmistakably a map of Virginia. The only thing out of the ordinary was the heavy red ink encircling a small, nameless cluster of civilization. Next to that, a thin line of pale blue was labeled in tiny text as the Rappahannock River.

On the second piece of paper, printed neatly in bold lettering on the top - Volunteer Enlistment. Then a paragraph about allegiance, pay, honor, general information to be filled in by the volunteer.

“I wasn’t going to join,” he muttered to the empty room. Still, he wondered if he heard a wry laugh from the vicinity of the window.

No, of course Magnus wasn’t stupid enough to do that. But all he’d really needed was an idea of where he was going.

He grabbed his bag and his coat, which he’d left on one of the bedposts sometime last night, and rushed down the stairs as quietly as he could.

The convalescent home was already picking up its usual morning pace. The smell of bread and porridge wafted through the house as matrons went room to room providing breakfast for the ones that could not get out of bed - which was, of course, most of them. Miraculously, Magnus hadn’t caught sight of Mallory, Louise, or Jack yet, but he didn’t want to test his luck. He felt terrible that he was leaving so soon, and on no notice at all, but hopefully the nurses could make do with the sums that were still in Jack’s suitcase.

A few nurses acknowledged him as he made his way to the front door, and for a moment he wondered if he ought to think these kinds of things through first -

“Magnus!”

He winced and turned around.

Standing in the doorway to the kitchen was Mallory Keen in all her fiery glory - her hair twisted up into a knot that was barely keeping its shape, a wooden spoon lazily held in her hands as if she’d forgotten it was there. She was frowning, but there was a spark of something warmer in her eyes.

“I knew you’d returned because I saw Jack around last evening, but he told me not to go looking for you. You look terrible.”

“Thank you,” Magnus said weakly. “But I, um, have to go somewhere right now -”

“At least take your coat off,” she fussed, seeming not to have heard him. “And come help me in the kitchen, I can’t find anything other than beans and soup.”

“Try the pantry.” Magnus reluctantly did as he was told, draping the coat over his bag, which he placed in a broom closet.

“The pantry,” Mallory scoffed. “As if I didn’t already look.”

He shrugged. “You asked.” The kitchen smelled like sugar, even though he was pretty sure they hadn’t had sugar in stock for at least a year. The South wasn’t very well-stocked in those kinds of things these days.

Mallory stuck the wooden spoon into a large metal pot and turned around to look at Magnus. “Jack told me all about your little trip. I’m sorry about your uncle.”

Magnus blinked. “Oh. Um… thanks.”

Mallory looked at him quizzically as if he was the strange one in this conversation. “Stir the pot, please.”

Again, he obeyed. As he wrestled with the thick mixture of porridge, and Mallory nearly knocked herself out with a falling pile of pans from a high shelf, he figured it would be another day or so before he could find his way out of here.

A day or so became five, and a week became nearly two. Magnus had forgotten how well the everyday motion of the convalescent home could drag you in, and how difficult it could become to tell the days apart. Plus, every time he looked even remotely idle, Mallory found something for him to do. At least he felt useful, he digressed.

Still, every time he looked from the corner of his eye he saw Loki smiling there, and he couldn’t tell if it was real or simply evidence that he was much too high-strung. Either way, her presence was a constant reminder: Get moving.

That was why, on a barely-begun morning, he was standing in the doorway of the pantry, looking at Mallory with a vaguely pleading expression in his eyes.

“A field visit? Why on earth would you need to go on a lone field visit?” Mallory was holding a loaf of bread (apparently there had been some left after all) and a knife in the way she usually carried sharp and/or heavy things - as if it were second nature, and she could very readily be using it for dismemberment or bread-slicing.

“I want to help,” Magnus mumbled, glancing down. “I know we’re kind of short of hands here, but that was why I figured I’d just go alone. Plus they’ll need supplies, so I can bring some -”

“Where to, anyway?” Mallory interrupted, staring him down despite the fact he was much taller than her.

“Further downstate. The Rappahannock.”

Mallory pushed past him into the kitchen, where a young matron was digging through the - admittedly rather bare - cabinets. “What makes you think we have any funds to spare? Sure, you brought more cash in just a week ago, but, well.” She gestured to the cabinets. “We did sorely need it.”

“Right,” Magnus said, wilting.

“If you’re to leave, do it on your own means,” Mallory finished, setting the bread down on the counter.

Magnus stood by the pantry door, thinking. Now that he thought about it, he was certain there were still things in this mansion that could be pawned off, whether they be artifacts that someone could find appreciation for, or some decorated gold piece of furniture from years past.

He headed for the stairs and took the steps two at a time.

“How much would this be worth?”

The man behind the counter ran a hand through his generous beard and peered at the items Magnus had unceremoniously dropped before him. Instead of answering his question, however, the pawn shop owner pointed to a hunk of tarnished gold shaped into what could have easily been a human being or some ancient beast. “What is that?”

Magnus shrugged, shifting his balance from one foot to another. “Is it worth anything?”

The pawn shop owner attempted to set it upright, but it fell over again with a loud clunk. “Well, it is gold, albeit a very ugly piece of gold. So, yes, of course.”

“Oh! Alright, that’s good. How much -”

But the pawn shop owner had already turned his back to Magnus and was busying himself with weighing the other various precious-metal items he had brought in.

Once he was done, he made room on a shelf for them and sifted through what looked like a cigar box. He placed a wad of bills on the table and promptly seemed to forget that Magnus was even there.

Magnus picked them up, dusting off some remaining ashes hidden between them. Apparently that cigar box was being used both for its intended purpose and to store the pawn shop’s earnings.

He wasn’t sure if this was truly the correct amount he was due for the things he had brought in, but all he cared about was that it seemed enough to buy the various supplies he would need. Food, medicines, blankets, bandages, a wagon and a horse. He didn’t even know the town well enough to know where to search for these things, but he would have to figure it out.

He refused to look anywhere but straight ahead, despite how that itching feeling of being watched grew.

Traveling alone was apparently incredibly boring. Without Jack’s mindless chatter, or even the sound of the rattling wooden beams of other medical wagons, Magnus felt small and inconsequential in the face of the dusty hills and distant blue mountains that went on as far as the horizon did.

The best you could say about the wagon he’d bought was that it was humble: it was a regular supply wagon, riddled with splinters and a little creaky. Every time the wheels ran over a rock or a dip in the road, the boxes of medicines clinked together loudly, nerve-wracking.

The horse was in good shape, at least. He had a tendency to dramatically fluctuate speed, one minute trotting along at a steady pace and the next bursting into a full gallop as if he’d forgotten he had a fragile load to carry. This didn’t help the fact that Magnus didn’t know how to properly keep animals under control. Nevertheless, he figured the horse needed a name, as they would be each other’s only company for the next couple of days, so he named him Stanley.

Magnus spent the majority of the journey walking next to Stanley because the wagon seat was too sharp. Almost compulsively he checked the map, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that he was making a mistake. Loki had said she didn’t want anything in return for her help, and something about her had seemed genuine. And he couldn’t see how what he was doing could result in anything too terrible.

At least, so he hoped. He’d been doubting himself a lot more these days.

By nightfall of the second day on the road, Magnus reached a town by a river. The only reason he knew it wasn’t just a town by a river was for the distant cluster of tents, people, and fortifications down by the water’s edge that you could see if you only crested a hill.

He contemplated going down to them immediately, but the sun was setting and Stanley was neighing loudly in Magnus's ear every five seconds, probably wondering why he wasn’t being fed.

“Alright,” he muttered, forcing himself to look away from the encampment down below and pushing the horse away from his face. “Alright. Let’s go.”

Magnus was staying close to the shadows, scoping out the town’s shops that were closing up, when he saw Loki. Contrary to her usual appearance, she seemed to be trying to blend in. Her hair was not its usual unnatural brightness of a god’s, and for once her dress was something that looked like it could be afforded by the general population.

For a second Magnus wondered if he could ignore her. But just the thought of it made his heart lurch for some reason. So he pulled Stanley into the shadows, hoping he could communicate his apology to the horse as he approached Loki.

“It took you long enough,” she said as way of greeting.

Magnus didn’t respond. He was too busy staring quizzically at the god’s face. The longer he looked at Loki, the older she appeared. Her nimble fingers stiffened and the knuckles grew more pronounced. And her face was no longer perfect and unmarred - wrinkles were burrowing into the corners of her eyes and mouth to make her look as if she were used to smiling instead of smirking.

“Why are you doing that?” Magnus asked, unnerved.

She shrugged in the same elegant way as she usually did. Her voice remained unchanged from its sickly sweet tone, as well. “I must blend in, shouldn’t I? I was much too conspicuous.”

Magnus kept staring at her, and she stared right back. Then he shook himself out of the fog he’d suddenly found himself caught in. “Are you certain she’s still around here?”

“Perfectly. Would you like me to lead you to her?”

He shook his head.

Stanley neighed. Loki frowned at the horse, then turned her attention back to Magnus. “Will you take my advice?”

Though she didn’t specify what that advice was, he somehow knew it was about that volunteer paper.

“Why would I join the army?” he asked, irritated. “I can’t even carry a gun, and all I’m good for is healing anyway.”

“Oh, that may be true,” she said, tsking. “But the army offers other positions, does it not? For those handy with the sharp knives and bottles of painkillers. And you hate it back there in that mansion, don’t you?”

Magnus hesitated with his hand halfway up to pet Stanley’s gray nose. “I don’t hate it there,” he muttered. That was a little too strong of a word.

“But you do have to admit that you would be of much more use here rather than there, don’t you?”

She kept framing everything as a question, as if she was only giving passive suggestions. But Magnus could feel something sharp and heavy about her words, like a knife held to his throat.

Still, it sounded so simple. So honest.

He’d meant to say “I can’t” but what slipped out instead was a bitter “If you wanted to me to join the army so badly, couldn’t you just force me?”

“Suit yourself,” she said, smiling serenely, stubbornly not rising to the ill-given bait. “But I don’t think you’ll need my help anyway.”

That was what troubled him the most out of all Loki’s false suggestions. Why did she have to sound so certain, like it was only a matter of time?

“Oh, would you look at that,” Loki said suddenly, puncturing the silence that had begun to cloud the evening air. “This could be interesting.”

Magnus looked up at the god first, trying to gauge her expression of mild interest, then over his shoulder where she was staring across the street at someone.

At first their back was turned to him, but their uniform and the rifle carried readily in their hands made it obvious that they were a soldier.

And their hair was tousled in a very familiar way, their head held high the way one did when they weren’t even trying to prove anything.

“Alex?” he asked quietly. He wondered if he was wrong, or if his voice even carried across the street when the person didn’t turn around for a moment.

But then he saw the flash of one amber eye as she turned around, and he was rushing forward, having forgotten all about Loki and every other emotion that was not a wondrous, fastly growing light that may have been hope or relief or rapture. It was what led him to sweep Alex into an embrace, despite knowing that he shouldn’t, and it was what led him to stammer out an apology before she shut him up by pulling him toward her again.

By most standards, it hadn’t been so long. Two months at the most, and they’d had their letters. But two months felt longer when there was a war going on.

All of Magnus's thoughts were distant as they stood in the middle of the street and he breathed in the musty scent of rain and gunpowder from Alex’s hair. Her shoulders were shaking from what could only be a vicious urge to hold back tears, but he didn’t know what to do about that besides hold her tighter. If he were being honest, he wasn’t quite sure why she was crying. All he felt was relief.

Eventually, though, Alex pulled back just enough to look him in the eyes. Her hands were cold where they rested against his jaw, but her fingertips were warm as they brushed at the wispy strands of hair at the base of his neck. There was something in her hand, a piece of paper, maybe, but Magnus didn’t get a chance to look at it before she shoved it deep into her pocket.

“What - how - why -” Her sharp lips twisted into a frown, evidently upset with herself for being at a loss for words. “You know.”

“Long story,” Magnus mumbled. Now that Alex was watching him like that - a battle between distress and happiness on her face - he began to desperately hope that she would take this well. Because right now, well, she didn’t look like she was going to.

Alex kept glaring at him, though the intensity of her anger was lessened for the fact that she was still holding his face in her hands.

“You dropped your gun,” he said instead, deflecting. “You probably shouldn’t just leave it on the street like that.”

Alex stared at him a moment longer, her expression unreadable, then stormed away and grabbed her rifle off the ground. This made him realize that it was probably not a very good idea to get on Alex Fierro’s bad side when she had a weapon in her hands.

She stood there, staring at her hands wrapped around the barrel. When she looked back up at him, her eyes had softened to a less destructive fire.

Magnus could tell she was waiting for him, and he couldn’t think of a perfect way to lay this out, so he said, “I think there’s more to you than you let on.”

He mentally hit himself for sounding so accusatory. Now Alex was staring at him with a tense, flight-or-fight stance and a shuttered-off expression.

“You don’t have to tell me right now,” he said, quieter. “I understand. But…” He glanced at Alex again. “Maybe it was a mistake to come here.”

A shadow passed over her face, which was better than practiced blankness, at the least. “No. I don’t know. It depends on how you figured out I was here.”

The weight of all they had to say and yet couldn’t hung heavy. Alex broke it first. She sniffled and walked over to Magnus's side. She slung her rifle onto her shoulder and tugged on his sleeve. “It’s late. If you’re really going to stay, you should probably find an inn around here somewhere.”

Magnus's eyes widened. “Oh, actually… I have an excuse for coming with you.” He grinned hesitantly as he headed back to the other side of the street, where Stanley had taken to snuffling around the ground in boredom. At least he hadn’t run away.

Alex followed Magnus slowly to the wagon. He pushed back the canvas canopy to reveal the boxes of supplies he had spent many ancient- Nordic-relics-worth of money on.

“Maybe I could join your company for a while,” he said. “I don’t know if you have a few medics already, but I figured they could always use a few more hands.”

Alex blinked at the dark bottles and then up at Magnus. “You’d join the army?”

Loki’s parting words echoed in his mind. I don’t think you’ll need my help anyway. “I don’t know. Maybe. Not for long.”

“Joining the army isn’t a short-term thing,” Alex said, now very obviously irritated. “You think it’ll only be a couple of months or so - just a nice, sweet war - and then suddenly you’re dead in a ditch somewhere two years later.”

“I wouldn’t be fighting,” he pointed out.

Her eyes were shining again, and again he didn’t know why. Until she snapped, “Did you know that in my last regiment, we had four medics? Two surgeons and two assistants. Maybe they didn’t fight, but they still saw things that most shouldn’t see, and they still faced the same dangers that every soldier faced.”

“What happened to them?” Magnus found himself asking.

“Two of them died. One from illness; the other was stupid enough to try to drag someone to safety in the middle of a battle.”

“You have to admit that it’s less likely that I would die, though.” He didn’t know why he was still pushing the subject. He hated seeing Alex so upset, and he hated it even more that it was because of his stupid mouth and his stupid ideas.

Still, he wondered if there was perhaps something deeper that she wasn’t saying. Even before he figured things out about Loki he kind of knew that there almost always was, and that hadn’t bothered him too much. She had her own reasons for being secretive.

The sudden lack of warmth by his side made him realize that Alex had backed away, and was now approaching Stanley. “Do you even have money?”

Magnus shook his head quickly.

Alex scowled, but pulled Stanley along by the reins. “Come on, then. Completely irresponsible, not taking care of your horse the correct way.”

“What is the correct way?” he asked as he joined her. “I’d love to know. I plan to buy a farm and become a horse breeder when the war is done.”

She kept scowling, but it seemed looser now, like she was about to smile instead. She still looked on edge and exhausted, but Magnus hoped he could stay long enough to change that as well.

Chapter Text

Alex’s emotions had never been in as much turmoil as they were now. Well, maybe they had. But she couldn’t remember a time when her heart danced ridiculously light at the sight of Magnus muttering things to his horse or trying to break the ice between them with terrible jokes. Yet simultaneously it felt hard to breath as she thought about the circumstances of his arrival. Something in the way he looked at her said that he knew. Not much, perhaps. But he had figured some things out, and that was why he was here. That was why he was here, Alex thought, but he was too considerate to actually confront her about it.

She wished he would just get on with it. Waiting in tight-shouldered suspense was worse than anything he could say, she figured. (She hoped.)

She should have told him to leave. That he didn’t need to come here, that she didn’t need him here. But just the thought of it made her physically wince.

Magnus was going on about how he could help Alex’s regiment, but she couldn’t seem to tune into his words to understand more than that. So when he placed a hand on her shoulder, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Sorry. You looked like you were…” He gestured vaguely around his own head. “Spiraling.”

She blinked, and his face came into focus again. He’d taken off that ridiculous hat some time ago, and now there was a pale strand of hair hanging over his eye. Alex’s fingers twitched as if she wanted to tuck it back.

Instead, she forced herself to duck out of his touch. “Just tell me why you’re here. Or… how.”

He avoided her gaze. “It’s kind of a long story.”

Alex stopped in her tracks. Stanley released a loud huff that sounded much like a disgruntled sigh. She patted the horse’s mane as a comfort, but kept her eyes trained on Magnus, shifting his weight almost imperceptibly from foot to foot.

“Oh, I understand,” he said. “You’re not going to move until I tell you everything. Everything about my insane uncle who has gone off the deep end - just gone off to Boston and refuses to leave - and how I’m even more worried because I think I have, too. Gone off the deep end, that is. I did go to Boston as well, but I didn’t stay, obviously. But now I’m having these… dreams about a woman with red hair who looks a lot like the pictures of Loki in Randolph’s old books of Norse myth, and I’m fairly certain those dreams are real, and that would mean that Loki is real and that she’s been, I don’t know, manipulating my uncle to do her bidding? And who knows how long that has been going on, and who’s to say -”

His words came out in one long waterfall of an explanation, leaving Alex feeling like she’d been washed away and had nothing left but the horse’s bridle to cling to. She wasn’t sure why Magnus had stopped talking, but he looked nigh on the verge of hysteria, and, much as she despised it, she could probably guess how he was going to finish that sentence.

Who was to say he wasn’t next in line?

It made sense, she thought, feeling a bit removed from the entire situation. Perhaps she was spiraling, as Magnus had said. She remembered how Loki had looked at him when she left for the army for the second time - like she just couldn’t wait to sink her claws in. Alex was starting to see a pattern here, with her leaving before others could truly leave her first.

Magnus was twisting his hat between his fingers. (It wasn’t a terrible hat necessarily - it was a simple design, brown and flat and round - Alex just disliked the way it looked on him. It hid his hair.) He was watching her rather unabashedly, and she didn’t know what to do with his gaze.
They shouldn’t be like this, should they? They ought to act like real friends, or whatever the hell it was they were. Instead, there was just… this. Them. Holding their breath, looking and then looking away.

“You shouldn’t have come here, then.” Alex tore her eyes from his, pushing past him to crest a hill. “I’m sorry to hear about your uncle, but you don’t have to…” She gestured vaguely around herself, which Magnus couldn’t even see properly because she was turned away from him.

He kept pace with her, relentlessly. Why was he so persistent? Why couldn’t he just fall back? “I think it’s a little late for that.”

And as if that weren’t bad enough, he kept trying to hold her gaze, using everything in his power that didn’t actually involve physical contact. Alex felt like she was being led along on a string every time he ducked in front of her and tried to will her to turn her head towards him and take him in. She didn’t hate it the way she should, though.

“As I said, you don’t owe me an explanation,” he said, finally seeming to show some humility when he looked away from Alex’s face. “But… she knows you, and I think I’m going insane not knowing why that is. Actually, I think I’m going insane not knowing a lot of things right now.”

Alex loosened her grip on Stanley’s bridle. “Makes it sound like I really do owe you an explanation.”

He started to protest, but she went on. “You already figured it out, though, right? I don’t think you need me to confirm it. What was it - the nose? Something in her eyes? Or maybe it was just because she reminded you of someone else who could be a girl one minute and a boy the next?”

She tried to play it off as lightly as she could, but that turned out to not be very light at all.

“Your smile, actually,” Magnus said quietly.

Alex didn't reply.

“Though, honestly, I think yours is better,” he stammered, seemingly unable to stop talking. “It’s not - not so - I mean, like I said, I saw her in a dream, and she seemed a lot more -”

Despite the fact that the sun had gone down about half an hour ago, Alex could tell that his face was getting redder the longer he went on. She was worried he might implode, so she said, not unkindly, “You can stop now.”

He did, releasing a barely audible sigh. “Sorry. I only - sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter. I take after her, don’t I?” Almost unconsciously, Alex ran a hand over her cheek as if trying to remind herself that her face and body were her own, that she didn’t display any inherent signs of half-godliness.

“Not exactly what you were expecting, was it?” she said conversationally. “When I came in all those months ago with a ruined eye and I told you I defeated ten enemy soldiers. Come on, say something. Tell me you’ll never look at me the same way again, and you’d actually prefer it if you never had to again.”

She’d never really took the time to wonder how people would react if they found out about her mother - and actually believed it - but now that the prospect was in front of her, she felt like she was unraveling.

“You’re still the same person.”

She stopped in her tracks again. Turned back to look at Magnus. The look on his face was simple and calm as if by now he was used to the idea of Alex throwing strange revelations at him.

“I mean, I didn’t know what your parents were like before. Now I know your… mother, is it? It doesn’t suddenly change your personality or anything else about you, really, so I don’t see how it matters much.” He shrugged. “And like I said, I had already kind of figured it out. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

Alex kept staring at him. A strong gust of wind swept across the dead grass, ruffling his coat and her hair. Something clicked into place, but she couldn’t tell for sure.

Stanley snorted and butted his head against Alex’s shoulder. She turned to the horse, shushing him by petting his pale gray mane.

“Well, there’s something,” she muttered, tugging on the bridle to pull Stanley and the wagon along. Though it was a better reaction than anything she might have expected, she still couldn’t seem to lower her guard entirely. It might have something to do with the fact that Magnus looked the exact opposite. He was out of his element, awkward, but equable. Trusting in a way that Alex remembered being back when she first met her mother and found the trickster god’s smile so alluring.

“Still, you shouldn’t listen to her. She plays with people like puppets and disposes of them when they’re no longer necessary to her plots. You know that, don’t you?”

Magnus hesitated for only a second before replying. “Of course.”

“Whatever she’s told you, she’s only saying it because it’s part of some plan.”

“Well, maybe her plans just happen to be the same as mine,” Magnus countered.

Alex stared at him. For a moment she saw a girl dressed in a black dress and green hijab, standing under an umbrella. She’d said practically the same thing when they first met.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Maybe.”

She hadn’t meant her voice to sound so bitter and weary. Thankfully, Magnus didn’t take this as a chance to delve into another realm of secrets.

Magnus took over steering the horse and wagon when they reached a hill that slanted off abruptly as if it had been cut in half with a blunt knife. As they made their way down the side of the hill, he said, “You were friends with Jack back in the convalescent home, weren’t you?”

Jack. The bright-eyed, talkative nurse who had frequented Alex’s bedside with outlandish tales and bad jokes that he and Magnus had obviously accumulated between each other for years. “I suppose so.”

“Then why can’t he remember you?”

Alex had been walking close enough to the edge that her feet dislodged rocks and sent them crumbling a short distance to the muddy earth below. She’d been watching the ground intently so as not to misstep. Now she glanced up, confusion and impatience etched in the furrow of her brow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I mentioned you to him and he didn’t seem to have any recollection of you. And even if his memory wasn’t impeccable as it is, that would still be odd.”

Alex scowled. She didn’t quite know the logistics of Loki’s little spell that helped her bypass the re-enlistment process, but perhaps it had warped the minds of the people she’d known in the convalescent home as well as the soldiers she seamlessly joined later.

If that was so, she wondered why it hadn’t affected Magnus’s memory, as well.

She should have asked more questions. She should have doubted her mother more. She should have taken the extra time and money to enlist the proper way. She should have, she should have.

She told Magnus all of this. It felt strange to do so, but not unpleasant anymore. It wasn’t any worse than what he already knew about her, she figured.

As soon as she’d finished he began to ask, “Then why didn’t I -”

Alex shook her head. “I told you, nothing Loki does is without a reason.”

He seemed to ponder it a minute longer, then said matter-of-factly, “Well, I’m glad I didn’t forget you.”

He guided Stanley down the remainder of the hillside, not waiting for a reply from Alex. She didn’t have one, anyway. “Oh,” she murmured, and made sure that her cheeks weren’t warm to the touch before she followed after him.

The troops had set up camp just beyond a line of thin, spindly trees. The distance between the trees was just enough that they would navigate the horse and wagon through them, but Alex stopped just outside the woods.

Magnus didn’t immediately notice the lack of Alex’s presence right behind his shoulder. He was almost lost in the shadows of the woods before he turned around. “What is it?”

“Why are you so understanding?” she asked. It came out harsher than she’d meant.

He didn’t respond, but his perplexed expression, sharpened by the moonlight, made Alex sigh. She tried again.

“Don’t you think this is all just so ridiculous? Why are you still here? The only person that ever…”

Her chest constricted painfully, cutting off her words.

“I thought it was kind of obvious.” Magnus ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up in many directions. “You are, um. You’re you.” He made a wide gesture that probably meant to encompass all of her.

Alex’s eye twitched. What was that supposed to mean?

“Not in a bad way, of course! Actually, kind of the opposite. Very much the opposite. So I thought, I don’t know, that you knew you’re more than all those things you seem to be always angry at yourself about.”

“I know how much I’m worth.”

His lips quirked hesitantly. “I know.”

Alex refused to look Magnus in the eye as she brushed past him. “It’s getting late. You should feed your horse.”

Stanley whinnied softly as if in agreement.

Just outside the camp, which they heard before they saw through the trees, a soldier sat on the churned earth, half-obscured by a browning shrub. His cap was pulled low over his head, but Alex knew it was Fletcher from the way he snored.

She snatched up his cap and brushed off a few fresh leaves from it. “The punishments are strict for those that sleep on duty.”

Fletcher’s eyes flicked open. He straightened immediately and grinned up at Alex. “Fierro! I was starting to think you’d gotten sidetracked by someone pretty.”

Alex made a face. “You could say that. Fletcher, meet Magnus Chase. Magnus, Adrian Fletcher.”

Fletcher blinked up at her as if to check that she was serious, then snuck a glance behind her and waved at Magnus with a toothy grin. Magnus just looked uncertain, as if he were wondering Why does this thirteen-year-old boy look like he’s been dying to meet me for a month?

“Where’d you pick him up?” Fletcher asked Alex nonchalantly.

“I came to find her -” Magnus cut himself off quickly at the slip of words, glancing at Alex with some panic in his eyes.

“Her,” Alex mouthed to him, confirming that Fletcher knew as well as how she felt today.

A cross between doubt and bemusement flickered across his face for half a second before he turned back to Fletcher and continued, “I came to find her myself.”

Fletcher’s eyes flashed happily. “Well, now isn’t that romantic? Please, tell me more -”

“We should be heading back,” Alex said loudly, stuffing Fletcher’s cap back on his head. He giggled and leaped to his feet. “It’s past time for you to get back, anyway.”

“He’s the one, isn’t he?” he asked from right behind her. Alex resisted the urge to push him into a shrub, partly from annoyance and partly from surprise that he’d snuck up on her so easily. “The one you write so many letters to but only sent one. A good one, isn’t he?”

“Shut the hell up,” she hissed.

Fletcher waved cheekily at Magnus again, who was trailing behind them looking even more perplexed, bless him.

“What is in the wagon?” Fletcher asked.

“Oh, um. Medical supplies, mostly.”

“A doctor.” He nodded approvingly. “Even better. Are you joining the army? Because I think you’d have to wait for the next enlistment period to do that.”

“More like a glorified nurse, really,” said Magnus.

“He’s only staying for a while,” Alex cut in. “So he doesn’t get killed.”

That last part she called over her shoulder pointedly. Magnus only smiled and patted Stanley’s mane.

On their way into camp, they passed a soldier carrying a trumpet making his way to their former picket station. He looked suspicious that they were returning before he had come to replace them, but not like he particularly cared enough to report them. Fletcher flashed him a smile.

The sound of a slightly out-of-tune trumpet drifted through the trees a few moments later, indicating the soldier’s arrival to their former post.

Fletcher broke away from them soon enough, chasing down a soldier with impressively fluffy sideburns and a bundle of terrier squirming in his arms. Lilith had made her rounds through their entire company by now, and she could usually be found following around a new soldier every day. Fletcher was still her favorite, though.

“You didn’t tell me you had a dog,” Magnus said.

“Haven’t told you a lot of things,” Alex said, without thinking. When she saw Magnus’s face become a little more closed off, she added hastily, “Yet.”

They led Stanley to the edge of camp, where the animals and wagons were kept at a makeshift stable. The soldiers tending to the horses didn’t even question where they’d come from. Magnus pestered them until they promised to be very careful when unloading the crates of jars and vials.

“The set-up here looks rather permanent,” Magnus commented as they made their way through the crowded rows of tents.

Alex took in the well-used fire pits, outlines of wood-and-earth barriers by the river, personal items congregated outside tents over the past two weeks. “Makes you wonder when we’re going to actually do something.”

“What are they doing these days?” he asked.

“They’re at a bit of a stalemate, it seems. The enemy’s right across the river and no one is really at a vantage point to do anything about it. That’s about all we know.”

Magnus hummed thoughtfully. “You would think they’d keep their troops updated on the war that they’re also fighting.”

“Speaking of which, we’re heading for the regiment’s colonel’s tent. It’s around here somewhere, but I’ll know it when I - there.”

Foot soldiers were issued simple dog tents of varying stability and size, but the colonel’s was recognizable for the fact that it was twice the size of the largest soldier’s tent. A rough-cut wooden table had been set up outside the entrance, where a handful of officers were gathered around. They were surrounded in a haze of cigar smoke that Alex had to wave out of her face to see them properly.

“I’ve never done this before,” she muttered to Magnus. He shrugged as if to say Me neither.

Alex turned back to the officers. She recognized her regiment’s major and colonel, but not the other two men at the table. They were in the middle of a very intense card game by the looks of it, and hadn’t even looked up to notice her.

“Excuse me,” she said curtly.

One of the unfamiliar men looked up. Judging by his green shoulder straps, he was an officer of the medical corps. That was promising.

“Yes?” he drawled.

She was fully prepared to use a bit of her mother’s silver tongue, heavy with a combination of inheritance and disuse, but Magnus pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from his coat pocket first. From a glance, Alex noticed it was an old recruitment poster. “I’m a… doctor from a few towns over. I want to join the 40th New York.”

“Enlistment and reenlistment period passed a while ago,” another man said without looking up from his card hand. Gold leaves on his shoulder straps - a major for some other regiment. “And we’ll be getting drafts soon, anyway.”

Contained anger flickered beneath Magnus’s detached expression. “Wouldn’t you rather have willing volunteers over people that were forced into service by the government?”

The medical officer raised an eyebrow. “You think you’re special?”

The major looked up from his cards to see the recruitment poster. “This is at least a year old. If you really wanted to join, wouldn’t you have done it then?”

“Circumstances didn’t allow it,” Magnus said vaguely. “But I’ve brought plenty of supplies as well, and if you won’t accept me I can always return them to my convalescent home.”

The medical officer raised an eyebrow. “You run a hospital?”

“Convalescent -”

“No, no, doesn’t matter. We’ll take the supplies.”

“And him?” Alex asked, warring between hope and dread.

“And him.” The colonel spoke for the first time, eyeing Magnus shrewdly. “We could use him. What’s your name?”

“Magnus Chase.”

The colonel waved his cigar at him dismissively. “Come here tomorrow morning to officiate it all. Your friend there can help you figure the rest out.”

Magnus shot a glance at Alex. His eyes smiled, even if his mouth didn’t.

For some reason, he lingered. Alex tugged on his sleeve until he got the idea and they left the officers to their gambles and cigars.

“I recognized them,” he muttered. “Not them, specifically but… their air. Of self-importance and arrogance.”

Alex had grown up in a family of such people, and so she was well-acquainted with the type. “I don’t think they’re as bad as the ones we’re familiar with. We all have the same chances of dying out here, after all.”

Magnus didn’t seem perturbed by this. He shot a glance back at the officers enveloped in their tobacco smoke again before turning his attention to the camp again. Alex watched him take it all in, mainly because she’d never seen him in an environment other than the convalescent home. He looked different against the backdrop of a gray sky, wearing clothes that weren’t as wrinkled and frayed with age as the ones he’d worn when tending to the sick. His skin was darker from a few weeks of sun, and Alex was standing close enough to him that she could make out a few new freckles on his cheekbones.

Not that she was staring.

She realized much too late that if she had wanted to kiss him, she’d missed her chance out on the hills where people from afar would see nothing but vague silhouettes against the sky.

“It’s a lot less… grand than people think,” Magnus said eventually, snapping her out of her idiot thoughts.

Alex gazed out at the rows of tents and soldiers milling about and tried to see it through his eyes. She couldn’t. She felt like she had always known it just as it was. “No one thinks it’s grand. Everyone has seen the photographs in the newspapers.”

“They’re still only photographs. People will see a day-old corpse and think At least he died for his country, and that was enough.”

“It’s never enough.”

“And that’s what they don’t know.” He gave her a wry smile. “That’s the difference.

“Plus, the general public doesn’t see things like this.” He gestured to a group of men on the outskirts of camp staging a sword fight with poorly-carved wooden sticks.

Alex couldn’t help a smile. “No, this is much grander than what we do on the battlefields.”

The camp was settling down for the night, the dim lights of stubborn fire pits snuffed out and tent flaps pulled over entrances. Alex didn’t move in the direction of her tent. The thought of sleeping now, after everything, was so absurd it made her smirk.

“Let’s go to the river,” Alex blurted.

Magnus raised his eyebrows.

“You don’t have anywhere to stay tonight. And, despite all their talk, the officers don’t really care where you are so long as you don’t cause trouble.”
He canted his head. “Lead the way.”

They passed the barriers constructed of wood and earth relatively easily - only a few were left guarding it farther down; and anyways, their real job was keeping others out, not in, as Alex told Magnus with conviction.

The river was a little way down the hill, inky blue waves lapping against a pebbly shore. Alex stopped just shy of the bottom, far enough away that the barricades disappeared over the edge and they wouldn't be visible to others up above. She sank down onto the grass, unbothered that it was slightly wet. Magnus sat next to her.

“You want to talk about something.”

Alex drew her knees up to her chest and rested her arms on top. “What makes you think that?”

“It was just a guess. I kind of figured we’d have a lot to talk about, after all.”

She looked at Magnus from the corner of her eye. He was leaning back on his hands, watching the river.

“You didn’t really explain how you got to be here,” she said. “What happened in Boston?”

“Oh, you know. Randolph followed a ‘lead’ all the way to Boston, only to get caught up in some kind of plot involving… your mother? A god?” His face scrunched up involuntarily at the word. “A god,” he murmured.

Alex tensed. She knew from experience how the knowledge of Loki’s existence could twist people’s minds, but Magnus almost seemed to be taking it too well.

“It’s… really strange,” she said, if only to fill the silence.

Magnus huffed a dry laugh. “Only a bit.”

“I didn’t tell you the whole story.” Alex stared intently at the grass crushed beneath her boots. Why could she never look him in the eyes when it mattered? “She can manipulate most people, but… she has a special kind of control over her children.”

“What does that mean?”

Alex took a deep breath, but it was a useless endeavor. Infuriatingly, her voice rose in pitch almost immediately. “It means I’m her puppet! It means I used to be so entirely trusting in her that even now I can’t get her claws out of my mind, at least not permanently. I don’t know what I’m like without her, and I don’t know what she could make me do with a single word. I don’t even know what she wants from me! She’s the same as me, you know. My father used to blame the way I am on her, because she’s the same. And she controls that part of me too, half the time. It shouldn’t be hers to control, why can’t I have even that for myself? She has everything…”

God, she hadn’t meant to say so much. Her words hung out in the open air, finally bared for just one person to see. Alex resisted the urge to cover her face with her hands; there was no reason to make this more humiliating than it already was.

Sudden warmth by her side made her glance up. Magnus had scooted closer to her on the grass, close enough that she could feel that familiar unnatural body heat. Close enough that when Alex dropped her hand to her side, their fingers brushed.

“I’m glad you told me.”

Alex’s gaze roved up to his face, only to find that was already looking at her. His eyes still carried that worn emptiness they had at the convalescent home, though it was smothered by something else just below the surface.

“I’m sorry about your uncle,” she said.

Magnus shrugged. “It seemed Loki had already… how did you say it? Dug her claws in. I don’t know if he can be saved at this point.”

“You aren’t obligated to give him any mind.”

“It feels like I am. Or at least, I can’t just leave him.” A frown flitted across his face. “Not yet, anyway.”

Alex was suddenly aware of how much closer he was. She was leaning to the side involuntarily. Their shoulders were touching. It wasn’t a terrible feeling.

Neither of them said anything for a moment that lasted longer than it should have. It was not a bad moment, though. Alex’s hand was warm where it met Magnus’s.

“So,” he said, breaking the silence. “Fletcher? How did he break your infamously thick walls so easily?”

His voice didn’t carry any malice or jealousy, just curiosity.

Alex hesitated. “He’s like me.”

“As in…?”

She nodded. “He doesn’t go through the same… changes as I do, but he joined the army to leave who he was before behind - his image of himself and how others perceived him… they didn’t connect.”

She didn’t feel like she had to brace herself for Magnus’s reaction this time, she noticed. His expression was the same mix of bemusement and patience. A part of Alex still wanted him to understand, but a larger part felt like it wasn’t her place to explain Fletcher’s own experiences.

A part of her also wondered, as she studied the planes of his face, the nuances of the way he looked at her, how this could possibly be a reality.

It was still a surprise when he kissed her, though. They’d been sitting so close together, practically breathing the same air already, but Alex’s few remaining sensibilities just about left her entirely when Magnus closed that short distance first.

Perhaps it had been presumptive to think that the heavy subject matters they’d just touched had completely ruined the atmosphere. But apparently the soft grass and the rushing of the river and that small matter of parting unfinished business two months ago won out over talk of Loki and corruption and mistakes. Alex couldn’t help feeling a little lilt of pride at the idea.

Speaking of parting unfinished business, this kiss was much different. For one thing, it was softer, slower. It carried none of the desperation or last-ditch efforts that had fueled the first. For another, Alex realized that she was really overthinking this.

Alex had never quite loved her curls as much as when Magnus undid them into frizzy wisps with his fingers. She’d never loved her hands as much as when they tugged at his jacket, nor her voice when they pulled apart and she rasped, “Didn’t think you had it in you after all… this.”

She gestured halfheartedly around, hoping it would encompass everything that had led up to this particular moment.

Magnus only smiled conspiratorially and closed the distance between them again.

They continued like that for quite a while, Alex would admit without shame. At some point they ended up lying on the grass next to each other, Alex tracing lazy circles across Magnus’s cheek with her thumb; Magnus watching her with wide eyes that seemed almost in awe of her. Alex smirked at him, but he only took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. That made her laugh. She told him he wasn’t playing fair, to which he responded by smothering her in a kiss.

It felt strange. Very strange, that was for sure. And Alex wondered how long this would be able to last. Just the night, until the sun rose? Or longer - weeks, perhaps? months?

She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter in the moment. She buried her face in Magnus’s shoulder and found that it was quite easy to fall asleep there.

Chapter Text

“How did you learn so much about all this?” Fletcher asked, hovering over Magnus’s shoulder as he sorted through tinted bottles of medicines. The man who had unloaded the crates from the wagon evidently didn't know a single thing about organization or medicine - or he simply hadn’t cared - so now Magnus was sitting in a stuffy medical tent taking inventory of the supplies he had brought and the ones the camp already had. It wasn’t much for an army of their size, but that had been expected.

“You make it sound impressive.” He opened a metal box full of surgeon’s tools - scissors, knives, saws, some in need of a cleaning. He filed that information away for later, part of his ever-lengthening to-do list.

“It is,” Fletcher insisted. “Did you go to school for it?”

What had happened to the honey? He knew he’d bought a couple of jars, but he couldn’t find them anywhere -

Magnus realized that Fletcher was watching him expectantly a moment later. “What? Oh, no. I just… figured things out along the way. My mother was a nurse, sort of, at the women’s college she worked at.” He frowned. “I think I learned a lot from her, actually.”

He’d never exactly thought about all the hours he had spent poring over the medical textbooks and papers Natalie Chase kept well-stocked on her bookshelves. But perhaps that was where it had begun.

Fletcher hummed thoughtfully. “So… no real training?”

Magnus scowled at him. “If you’re ever bleeding out somewhere, maybe I’ll just wait for a man with a degree to come in from New York and take care of you.”

“No, no, I completely entrust my life in your hands. Not to pressure you, though.”

“Oh, of course not,” he said dryly, and turned his attention back to searching for the missing jars of honey.

“What’s this?” Fletcher asked from the other side of the tent. Magnus almost chose to ignore him, but a loud crash and a series of hissed curses forced him to turn around.
Fletcher was precariously balancing a crate of glass jars on his knee, standing amongst a collection of unrolled lint, gauze, and blankets.

“Saved them,” he said casually.

Magnus noticed the label on one of the jars as Fletcher steadied his grip on the crate and began to push it back into its crevice on top of a high shelf. Honey, written rather unnecessarily in Magnus’s own familiar handwriting. “Wait,” he said. “I need those.”

Fletcher shrugged and dropped the crate on the ground. He started to fold up the blankets and stack them on top of each other on the shelf they’d been on.

Magnus was in the process of checking that the honey jars were in the same condition they were when he bought them when he heard the rustle of someone pushing past the entrance flap. A moment later, Alex sat down cross-legged in front of him. Lilith was close behind, snuffling at Alex’s shoes.

Magnus glanced up. “Shouldn’t you be mending the batteries out by the river -”

Alex scoffed. “None of that matters right now. We’re finally getting out of here. Moving down to Kelly’s Ford to try and take the river.”

Fletcher ambled over, his hands full with messily wrapped rolls of gauze. “How do you know for certain? There’ve been plenty of false alarms of attack and such lately.”

“I know,” Alex insisted. “I was walking by the major general’s tent, and they had so many maps and papers out and were huddled in a tight circle arguing about how to divide the corps. Not much left to interpret. And we’re going to Kelly’s Ford.”

Magnus looked about the medical tent, at the piles of half-organized supplies and Alex, eyes bright and anticipating. “Should I come?”

“It’s only a few miles away, and it’ll be a quick fight anyway,” Alex dismissed. “You won’t even realize we’re gone.”

He scowled. “You just came in here to say that you were leaving, so I would think I will.”

“You are so smart.”

Alex stood up and headed for the entrance flap. In and out like a whirlwind. “Come on, Fletcher. You can go around camp telling everyone you know the generals’ next moves. Get them riled up.”

Fletcher perked up. He promptly forgot about the bundle of bandages he was carrying and dumped them on the ground by Magnus’s feet.

Magnus sighed and gathered them up again, but not before sending a glare Alex’s way. Alex only smirked and followed Fletcher out of the tent.

In reality, Magnus didn’t mind his current work in the supply tents. It was slow going at the moment; that was kind of the point of a stalemate. And sorting medicine bottles was probably preferable to treating the various camp illnesses that spread like wildfire amongst the troops. He kept on his toes by the thought that any day could be filled with casualties of a sudden skirmish-turned-full-fledged-battle. Better to be grateful for whatever days of stillness he might still have.

He continued as he’d been for another half hour or so, and got a great deal done. The bandages were recollected and placed in labeled boxes. He cleaned the surgery tools as well as could be done, and found a place the anesthetics could be better reached.

His work was broken by the increased sound of footsteps and chatter. A glance through the tent flap confirmed his suspicions that the troops were on the move.

Magnus watched them march past, looking every bit the perfect soldiers save for the eager expressions they wore and the snippets of easy conversation that drifted to the medical tent. He wondered if this was standard morale for those going out to battle.

There was something strangely unnerving about it. Magnus ducked back into the medical tent and found things to busy himself with. At first, it was only the same ordeal of sorting and cataloging, but after a while he tired of that and found himself wandering around camp, making small talk with the regiments that hadn’t gone out to see if he could patch together knowledge of this new development. More often than not the soldiers’ accounts contradicted each other, but the general consensus seemed to be that the divisions were further engaged around the area in an attempt to push the enemy away from the river.

Magnus found himself visiting Stanley in the makeshift stables as dusk was sweeping over the hills. The horse nuzzled his hands as if searching for anything sweet.

“Sorry,” Magnus said when Stanley gave him a disappointed glare. “They don’t have much in the way of fruits or sugar around here.”

He found a brush among the supplies littered around outside and took to untangling the knots in Stanley’s gray mane. And because he had nothing else to do, he began to recount his experiences with the army so far. Horses could be very good listeners, he found.

“You know, I thought it would be worse. I don’t know what exactly I was expecting, but… well. It’s pretty easy to get into the army, for one thing. Not many people want to these days. The people are different, too. The soldiers are nice, right? They treat you alright, at least. The other medics…” Magnus hesitated. In truth, he hadn’t exchanged many words with any of them, and only ever saw them around the medical tents. They weren’t eager for interaction, and Magnus wasn’t one to seek it out. “They’re good at what they do,” he decided, and left it at that.

“And Alex…” He sighed, wondering how he ought to word this, then remembered that he was talking to a horse. “You don’t care; look at you! You just want apples.”

Stanley stared at Magnus like he wanted to say, And what about it?

Magnus sighed again and returned to brushing out Stanley’s mane.

He was broken from his thoughts when two soldiers hurried past with fresh dressings, bottles of anesthetics, and the same jars of honey Magnus had been handling many hours ago.

Magnus watched them disappear behind the edge of camp, down toward the river. He placed the brush on the ground and glanced at Stanley. The horse’s ear flicked.

“I’ll be quick,” he told the horse. “Alex said it wouldn’t be a large battle.”

The camp filled quickly with men in blue, though their uniforms were distinctly dirtier than when he had last seen them. Magnus saw a few more soldiers carrying various supplies from the medical tents, so he assumed that was being taken care of. He followed them just outside the woods, where half the army seemed to have converged.
He had meant to find the 40th New York - even if he hadn’t known anyone of that regiment personally, he was technically one of them - but was quickly sidetracked by the people in his more immediate surroundings.

He caught sight of a man propped up against a tree, his comrade fumbling with the buttons of his coat, the front of which was almost entirely soaked with blood.

Without haste, Magnus crouched beside the man and helped the other soldier tug his jacket off. But by the time they’d undone enough buttons of the man’s shirt, he understood that no amount of bandages or sutures could do a thing. A part of Magnus had known this already when he saw the amount of blood on the man’s jacket and the paleness of his face.

And yet when he stole a glance at the other soldier and saw his thoughts mirrored in the soldier’s eyes, his tongue grew heavy with the words that would seal the doomed man’s fate. Magnus found himself saying, “I can try.”

The soldier’s face cleared - his hope was fragile and even more painful than it would have been if Magnus had simply told him to leave his comrade for dead.

He peered at the wound again, the result of a bayonet no doubt. It was deep and jagged, as if the soldier’s reaction to being stabbed was to wrench away, only to have it dig deeper.

It wasn’t the sight of so much blood, or the skin already turning green beneath it, but simply the idea of pretending like Magnus could do anything about it. He tore his gaze away and stared up at the other soldier. “Um. Th-thread. Needle and thread first, then… lint. Lots of lint.”
The soldier nodded tightly and stumbled to his feet. But before he could leave, a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. The soldier jumped and raised the rifle clutched in his hands, apparently still holding on to reflexes from the battlefield.

“One shouldn’t waste supplies on those who cannot be helped.”

Magnus leapt to his feet to meet the glare of the doctor before him. “Should I leave him for dead, then?”

“Exactly so. Look at him. He will be gone in less than an hour.”

Staring into the doctor’s defiant eyes, he was reminded of Mallory, dragging him away from the ruined, twitching body of a rebel leaning against a pure white fence. A perfect white fence in a small, picturesque town, he could imagine he was the only witness to the final movements of a man alive only enough that he could move his fingers. Magnus wondered now if those bloodied fingers had been a plea.

The soldier lowered his rifle. He glanced over at his comrade again, but didn’t move to continue the useless mission Magnus had given him. Perhaps he’d known the entire time that it was only a ruse. A wave of shame washed over Magnus for having given the man hope - but more so for having ever thought he could change an unchangeable fate.
It would have been easy to keep standing there, thinking deeper on the subject until only a select few things could drag him out of such a pit, but Magnus didn’t allow himself the courtesy. He let the doctor drag him away from the ruined scene before him - the soldier sitting against the tree beside his dying comrade the way one might settle beside their friend on a lazy summer day. But of course, that was not the truth. It could never be the truth again.

The doctor left him in the midst of a storm - both internal and around him. It took the form of frenzied thoughts that he tried to tamp down in the face of bleeding, dirt-streaked men still riding the rush of battle.

Away from this shadowed tree, he surveyed the rest of the scene. From a wider perspective, the damage was not so terrible. In fact, the vast majority of the army hardly seemed scathed. That didn’t improve his mood much.

He was making his way towards a soldier in the midst of a violent coughing fit when someone came up from behind him and wrapped their arm around his shoulders. Instinctively, Magnus pushed them off.

“Now, that’s not how you greet your friend who surmounted the odds to live another day,” Fletcher protested. He didn’t allow Magnus to respond before plowing on. “Before you ask, I’m perfectly alright. So is Alex. Last I saw him he was still with the rest of the regiment closer into camp. He’s in a foul mood, though. I wouldn’t go looking for him right now, but I guess I’m not you.”

Magnus wondered if he wanted to know what that meant, but decided he didn’t care enough. He patted Fletcher awkwardly on the shoulder in acknowledgment and brushed past him.

It wasn’t a linear path to his goal. He was pulled aside by other doctors to help with various operations that could not wait to be performed in the medical tents, and got sidetracked on his own by simple requests for water or could you check this wound or that? is it serious? Yes, of course; no, he will be fine; I don’t know; I don’t know -

By the time he caught sight of mismatched eyes in the sea of blue-clad men, Magnus’s hands were sticky with blood and smelled overwhelmingly of iron and alcohol. Futilely, he wiped them on his jacket. This only succeeded in making him look even more like he’d been in the center of a slaughter.

He needn’t have worried, though. Alex didn’t look much better. He was leaning on his rifle, the bayonet unceremoniously stuck in the earth. His hair and jacket were caked in blood, but the first thing he said to Magnus was “It isn’t my own.”

“Looks like you had a time,” Magnus noted as he approached Alex and began to look him over for any hidden wounds, just in case.

He scoffed. “It could barely count as a fight. I’ve seen much worse.”

Magnus didn’t counter the indignant glare thrown his way; a part of him figured Alex was trying to tell him something, but he’d need to think on it longer to figure such a thing out.

The only serious injury he found was a fractured wrist that had already been tended to. Alex held his hand stiffly against his chest, eyeing Magnus with a combination of amusement and irritation when he backed away.

Alex sighed and sank to the grassy floor. He crossed his legs and set his rifle in his lap. Magnus sat next to him. He knew he couldn’t stay long - there were still many things to do in the post-battle chaos.

“Do you think it accomplished anything?” he asked Alex.

Alex pursed his lips. “The generals have been all over each other with congratulations ever since we stopped fighting, so I’d say so. We have the river now, which hopefully means we can get out of here.”

Very unexpectedly, he felt Alex’s hand reach for his own. His first instinct was to pull away, but really, who was watching? They were sitting in the shadows festering on the edge of the woods, and everyone was caught up in moments of their own. Why not allow themselves the courtesy of one as well? He took Alex’s hand in the shade, and did not feel self-conscious about the blood on his hands because Alex had it, too. For different causes, but similar purposes.

Alex was watching him and Magnus didn’t know why. That was usually his job, he begrudgingly admitted to himself. And a part of him worried it wasn’t a good thing, that she was staring so intently at him across from the empty cot Magnus was stripping the sheets of. There were dark bloodstains all over it, and its last inhabitant had died not too long ago. It wasn’t exactly the best tone to start with.

Eventually, it grew to be too much, as he bundled the sheets into his arms and threw them in a basket with others like them and Alex followed him. “How is your face?” he asked.

Alex’s hand flew to the fresh bandages wrapped strangely around half her head, making her look like a soldier risen from the dead. The thought made Magnus shudder. She’d looked even more the part a few days ago, with the entire left side of her face looking like it’d been mauled by a bear. In reality she had had an unfortunate instance with the exploding shells tossed haphazardly their way from across the battlefield. Magnus had been the one tasked with the pleasant job of removing the bits of artillery from her face, but it had looked worse than it actually was.

Alex shrugged. “About as well as you might expect. That just isn’t my lucky side, you know.”

“At this rate your eye will never heal properly.”

“What’s the point of fighting in a war if it doesn’t leave you with a few scars?” Alex said haughtily.

Magnus tended to disagree, but he didn’t voice his opinion.

“Don’t you want to know the real reason I came here?” asked Alex.

“And here I thought you came to visit me because you missed me.”

She indulged him with a smile, though it twisted wryly at the corners in that way of hers. “It’s your birthday.”

“Is it?” He wasn’t trying to be cheeky - though that was part of it - Magnus had thought it wasn’t for another week. Time got lost in places like these.

She punched him on the shoulder. “Nineteen. What an accomplishment.”

“It doesn’t feel that way.” What should he say? That he felt lucky to have lived longer than fourteen, when he was certain that his inevitable fate was to die one the streets, alone and forgotten? That he ought to celebrate at a time like now, when there was work to do and much larger events looming over the horizon all the time?

Alex seemed to pick up on his mood, and cast her gaze downward; specifically to the bloodied bundle of linens in his arms.

“Of course,” she said, “it hasn’t for a long time.”

Magnus hummed thoughtfully, questioningly, but she did not elaborate.

He tossed the sheets into a wicker basket and carried it outside, then went back in to root around for the washboard, soap, and a bucket to fill with water. This, at least, felt like a regular action.

Alex followed him, somehow still looking curious. When Magnus sat down on the bench outside the medical tent and set to washing the linens as best he could, she asked, “How did you normally celebrate?”

“My birthday?” Magnus was taken aback. He hadn’t thought about such a thing in a very long time. Alex nodded patiently, as if, again, she understood exactly what was going through his mind.

Flustered, he went back to diligently scrubbing the bloodstains out of the sheets. The water soon swirled with red. “My mom and I weren’t exactly the best off, so we didn’t usually give gifts and things. She liked to take me out of the city when she could, though, so we could see the stars.” He paused. “That was a long time ago.”

Alex’s expression turned contemplative. She watched Magnus work in silence a while longer.

“What about you?” he hazarded. Asking about Alex’s childhood could have two very different reactions, and he was very aware of her rifle resting against the bench.

She looked like she was resisting a smirk. “What were my birthdays like?”

When she put it that way, it did sound rather trivial.

She shrugged sharply. “They weren’t given much attention. Usually it was an excuse for my stepmother to plan a party, and my father to arrange business deals with whoever attended.”

“But what did you do?”

“Bah. Avoided people mostly. Though… my grandfather made it bearable.”

That seemed all she was willing to offer. Magnus stored this information with the rest like it, in a little nook in his mind devoted to solving the puzzle that was Alex Fierro. He didn’t think he would ever piece together the entire thing, but only time could tell.

He didn’t know if they had time, either.

The glass bottles on the table shuddered regularly with the thunder of musketry, never allowing Magnus to let his guard down. Every time he tried to sit down or go elsewhere, the long table always seemed to buck and protest, and he had to keep the bottles from falling from their places and meeting the ground in a spectacular display of glass shards and wasted powders.

The third time around of this unfortunate dance, Magnus gave up and put the bottles back in their respective crates. The table would be better put to use as a surgery table anyway.

The medical staff had stationed themselves not far from the dense woods where the battle had been roaring from sunrise to sunset for a few days now. It gave them ample time to set up a large, well-oiled machine of a field hospital with a schedule that went around like clockwork. They had supply tents, sick tents, tents for the wounded and the ones the medics were just waiting to die. It reminded Magnus of the convalescent home, but with decidedly much higher stakes. The feeling of so many lives hanging in the balance, that might not last the night, kept everyone on their toes. And so even though the battle sounded so close, Magnus knew they had no chance of arriving on the frontlines like some saving angels. There was simply too much work right in front of them.

And all he could do was stay here, trying to keep those already bedridden and injured alive and well, preparing for the moment the fighting ceased for the day and the wounded came pouring in like one large, limping beast.

It wasn’t like Magnus wanted to be out there in the thick of things. The noise of battle filtering through the eerily calm forest was enough for him, thank you very much. But… he kept thinking. He was certain there were men out there in the middle of battle that could be saved if there were only someone nearby that cared to help them, or ones that wouldn’t be able to make the distance from the battlefield to the field hospitals when the battle did end.

It couldn’t be helped. Magnus just barely saved a bottle of morphine from falling off the table, and made peace with the fact that this was his role right now. In the grand scheme of war, patriotism, and all the like.

“They are arriving,” one of the surgeons said, suddenly appearing before Magnus like a ghost. Magnus resisted the instinct to startle. He looked up at the bearded face looming sternly over him and tried to place a name to it. If he were honest, the surgeons all sort of looked the same. From the way he had so suddenly crept up on Magnus, however, he must be Edward Phips, surgeon for the 99th Pennsylvania. He had a penchant for lurking, whether he meant to or not.

He saw the men on stretchers first, trickling in from the shadows of the trees like shambling corpses. Magnus leapt to his feet and went to join Phips in greeting the approaching soldiers.

“Greeting” was too pleasant a word. Magnus rushed to help the surgeon lift one of the soldiers on the stretchers onto the table and then hand Phips a bottle of chloroform and a thick slip of cloth, not having noticed where the soldier’s wound was but knowing that they would be needed. Phips took them with a nod and began to carefully measure the anesthetic out onto the cloth.

And then he was surrounded by commotion, the forest now filled to the treetops with people and shouting and putrid, metallic smells. The rest was a blur, but he knew he was doing right by the raised eyebrows of the older medics that said mild "well done"s and "good work"s.

He did not see individual faces as he neatly sewed skin shut, cleaned blood to reveal deceptively simple wounds, held doused cloths over gasping mouths to send them to sleep, closed eyes that would not open again.

It was quite simple once you knew how to do it. The surgeons rarely hesitated to ignore the men that took breaths much too far apart, and so neither did Magnus. There was a way these things were done, and he was beginning to see it as the necessity that it was rather than the inhuman coldness it appeared to be. Efficiency was the line that separated a person from recovery and death, at least in this cramped field hospital.

Fighting had been on-and-off for days as the generals tried… well, Magnus didn’t know what their end goal was, he wasn’t consulted on such things. If Alex and Fletcher’s snooping around the officers’ tents did not dredge up any results, then he had no other source of information on the war effort. He only ever saw the aftermath, and thus had long ago reached the conclusion that most of the battles were inconclusive save for the rising casualties. Magnus couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a proper night’s sleep, but this time it wasn’t for taking the weight of more work than the others - every medic in the II Corps looked stretched as thin as they could go.

“Chase!”

Magnus was roughly pulled out of his lamentations - they went along the lines of goodbye, sleep, may we meet again sometime in the next week - when another surgeon unceremoniously coaxed him to his feet by tugging on the collar of his coat. He uttered a short cry of protest.

“You have no time to daydream,” hissed the surgeon, whose name Magnus thought was Collins or something of the sort. “You must do better.”

Newly invigorated, Magnus swiftly finished the suture he’d been working on, cutting the fine thread with his teeth. He’d been doing just fine closing the wide wound in the arm of the soldier before him, but not nearly quick enough. “You’re alright,” he murmured to the half-conscious man. He motioned for a sturdy-looking soldier standing nearby to take him to the hospital tents.

He glanced down at his dirt-and-blood-smeared hands, and just like that managed to return to that strange, disconnected part of his mind that made him so efficient.

“You haven’t slept in a while.”

Magnus startled from his state of half-lucidity, sitting straight up in the tiny stool he’d been inhabiting for a few hours now. He looked up to find Alex leaning over his shoulder, brows furrowed in that way that could look either frustrated or concerned. Most often it was a confusing mix of both.

Magnus shrugged lightly, but Alex only tightened her grip on his shoulder. “Really, you look terrible.”

She was one to talk. She had only recently recovered enough from the shelling shrapnel that she didn’t have to wear the bandages anymore, but her face was still a map of vibrant bruises and stitches. It looked like she’d be getting those scars she wanted after all.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Alex’s eyes drifted over to the soldier in the cot Magnus was watching over. He was sleeping fitfully, twitching violently every so often. His head thrashed about on his thin pillow in a way that made Magnus worry about his neck. That wasn’t what he should be worried about, though. The soldier had his arm amputated to the elbow the other day, but it had soon gotten so infected that the surgeons had gone at it again and removed the rest of it to start the process all over again.

After the melee of the day’s work dwindled to the counting of the dead and caring to the last few cries of the ones that had already been treated, Magnus had taken to looking over this particular soldier for the time being. Just to make sure his condition was stable.

Outside, the sounds of camp were muffled by the pattering of rain against the cloth of the medical tent, making it seem deceptively alright for him to fall asleep.

From over his shoulder, Alex sighed. “You’ve always been like this, haven’t you.”

It was a deadpan comment, not a question. She knew well enough that Magnus had done the exact thing when she first came to their convalescent home, and there was no changing plain nature.

Alex straightened up again, and Magnus thought she was going to leave, but she only went over to another soldier’s cot and picked up a stool that was next to it. She brought it over and set it next to Magnus with a thwack of finality that left no room for argument.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“If you won’t allow yourself the decency of sleep, then neither shall I,” she said as if it were obvious.

“You have to march tomorrow,” he said wearily. “And after that, there’s more fighting, and then -”

“And you have hundreds more people to take care of when we do,” snapped Alex. “You aren’t special.”

Magnus huffed quietly and turned back to his patient. He would be alright with the proper care and attention, Magnus was sure of it. Which made it even harder to concede with the fact that he wouldn’t be able to get such things. When they loaded all the ones that couldn’t walk onto the ambulance wagons the next day, Magnus would again have too many people to worry about to keep track of individuals. The least he could do was stay by the soldier’s side now, while he still could.

After a moment of tense silence, in which they realized that neither of them was going to budge, Alex scoffed, though at what Magnus didn’t know.

The medical tent always felt like a tomb. No one ever talked unless it was an exchange of orders or a soldier dictating a letter to be sent home to his family, and neither of those things were exactly the happiest of conversations. It was so different from the convalescent home, where talk flew on light wings through every room about the smallest of things, of the state of that morning’s porridge to the secondhand reports on the war efforts found in the newspapers.

Alex apparently held no distinction between the two. She told him gossip the soldiers exchanged like currency around camp, and described the battles that Magnus struggled to see the purposes of. Alex did not take the words of the generals very seriously either, but he believed her when she said the rebels were wearing thin.

“They don’t fight the same,” she said solemnly. “They are only dragging on to postpone the inevitable.”

Magnus looked at her with awe, wondering if it was presumptuous to imagine that soon this all might be over.

Alex swatted his shoulder. “Stop it. I know what you’re thinking, and it’s no use.”

Magnus held her gaze for a moment. She was right, of course. He could imagine a time when the war was over, and the next thing he knew he’d be planning out some semblance of a life without it. It was a dangerous line of thinking.

Alex understood that, too. She sighed, quiet enough that Magnus wouldn’t have heard it if he weren’t so close. She rested her head lightly on his shoulder, and he did not move away, and so they stayed that way until the rain grew scarce and the tent grew warm with the sunrise.

Chapter Text

A part of Alex had thought that his first battle would also be his last. He’d been fine with that at the time, or at least he’d thought so. The idea of being dead in a ditch somewhere, beside hundreds of others like him, felt… fitting, as morbid as that seemed.
He wasn’t badly injured, no, but he was almost certain that he would be. Either that or he’d be captured and taken prisoner, or killed swiftly by a bullet that he’d never see coming. There was no lack of opportunities, as he’d learned from watching the soldiers around him drop like flies for the past couple of days.

War wasn’t what he expected. First there had been the training, which had been more about marching and pitching tents than anything else. After that, it was month after month of picket duty in cold places, surrounded by people Alex didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

And when action did come, it was different from what he thought it would be. To be fair, he’d only ever read about battles from the newspapers, and those were always dramatic and overzealous, peppered with epic drawings of men in blue and gray facing off against each other like two avenging armies of myth.

Alex supposed it might look like that. But he wouldn’t know. He’d only seen a bit of the advancing army before they were wiped away by smoke from the exploding cannons, and it was all just chaos after that.

All these thoughts and others flew through Alex’s mind as he tried to make himself as small as possible behind a fence that would do nothing to protect him from the blasts of artillery that lay waste to the earth in patches.

Occasionally Alex would turn around and fire a random shot that was immediately lost in the smoke. Every time he did, he caught sight of the soldier slumped over the fence beside him. His eyes were open, bright blue like the spring sky even in death. Then Alex would retreat behind the fence again and try not to focus on that soldier’s hand, cold and motionless, and brushing up against Alex’s shoulder with the crawling dread of a spider.

He continued like that for a long time. He wasn’t sure exactly how long, but he only emerged from behind the fence when the smoke cleared enough over the battlefield for him to see the mapwork of bodies sprawled over the ruined terrain.

He thought, in the back of his mind behind a red curtain of shock and fear, that this was a memory that would never leave him.

“It isn’t even located by any body of water,” said Fletcher. “Calling it a ‘harbor’ is misleading and wrong.”

He had been very adamant on the subject since they discovered the name of the wooded area they found themselves in, his indignance pushing past the boundaries of justified. Alex had long ago given up on trying to steer the conversation in another direction.

They’d been marching all night to reach the place known as Cold Harbor, only reaching it in the early hours of the morning to learn that the fighting they’d been called upon to assist in was over and would be continued the next day. Currently Alex was curled up in her bedroll, trying to ignore the weak morning sunlight so she could sleep at least a few hours before they went into battle. Lilith slept soundly next to her, practically taunting Alex with her snuffling snores. Could dogs snore? Evidently.

Fog drifted low over the ground as if it were too lazy and heavy to rise any higher. Alex watched it, thinking dully that it looked like a vast gray ocean lapping against the edge of the relative comfort of their tent.

“Waiting so long to fight can’t lead to anything good,” she mumbled. “I’ll bet the enemy is out there right now building a damn fortress.”

Fletcher’s boot came into view as he stretched his legs out in the small space. Alex half-heartedly pushed it away from her face. “For someone who hates war so much, you really want to fight,” he remarked.

“I don’t want to fight. I just… don’t think it’s a good idea to postpone it. Why aren’t we at least doing reconnaissance missions?”

“You ought to go visit Chase. You know, he has a very calming effect that I think you could benefit from.”

Alex snorted. As if she needed to be told that. “He has a lot of work to do. I can’t get in the way of that.”

“He always has a lot of work to do. He’ll appreciate the distraction.”

Alex kicked him lightly, taking satisfaction in the grunt of protest it elicited. “I’m trying to sleep. You should, too.”

“I can’t help it! I am full of energy, and the sun is out now. Who can sleep in such conditions?”

“You go visit Magnus then. To calm down.”

“Perhaps I will,” he said haughtily.

Alex pulled her blanket over her head and feigned sleep. After a moment, she felt Fletcher sit up and leave the tent. It was considerably colder without the warmth of his body nearby.

She did try to sleep, at least for a little while. But the sunlight was distracting, and the fog was creeping upon the tent, and her scratchy blanket and lumpy satchel of a pillow were doing little to let her rest.

She threw back her blanket and pulled her uniform coat out from under her haversack thrown haphazardly in the corner. She stared at Lilith for a moment before deciding that she would be fine by herself for a while. With that, Alex threw back the canvas flap doorway and headed in the direction of the outcropping of medical tents on the edge of camp.

Alex did not hide behind a fence on her second battle. She had seen the handfuls of men that ran from the front lines when they caught sight of the sea of gray that approached. Some didn’t even wait until they reached the front lines; when they heard the yells of the rebels, growing louder with every moment, they dropped their rifles and shoved past their fellow soldiers.

Alex wondered if they were actually the smarter ones, to run away rather than fight; but at the same time vowed to never be one of them. She had offered herself up to this war in desperation and despair, and damn it all if she wasn’t going to see it through.

Rifles raised in unison, the sun glinting on smooth metal, the rattling percussion of hundreds of bullets exploding forth from the underbrush.

Alex did not hide, nor did she run. She was a part of this big blue machine, whether she wanted to be or not. And she had to admit that there was safety in the knowledge that she was only one of thousands, and just as disposable as the soldier next to her.

She raised her rifle, found her target, and fired.

Fletcher had already made himself at home when Alex found him in the sick tent. He was sitting cross-legged in the corner next to an empty cot, two large piles of linens surrounding him. As Alex watched, he would cut up a sheet from one of the piles into long strips and roll them up with remarkable speed. He was so focused on his task that he didn’t notice when Alex entered the tent.

She was wondering if it would be right to disturb him when Magnus appeared behind her. “He works well when he wants to.”

“Yes, he does alright,” she said distantly. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You look different.”

Magnus blinked. “I… um. I slept? Maybe that’s it?”

Alex nodded sagely. “That’s it. Do more of that, will you? I’d hate to have to catch you when you inevitably faint from exhaustion one day.”

A deep blush quickly took over his face, though Alex continued on before he could start babbling. “He didn’t cause too much trouble, did he?” she asked, tilting her head toward Fletcher in the corner.

Magnus cleared his throat and did his best to look unaffected. “I think he just needed something to do. He seems to like making bandages, and honestly, we were in need of some hands to do so. He came just in time.”

Alex grinned. “Glad to hear it. Do you need any more?”

He thought for a moment. “Actually, I don’t think so. You know, we’ve mostly had cases of regular camp illnesses and things. Yesterday’s fighting didn’t seem too terrible.”

“Oh, it mostly looks the same when you’re in the middle of it all.”

Magnus’s ears turned pink, though this time not for a simple teasing. “Oh. Right.”

Alright, so she might have gone too far with that one. “I… think I’ll help Fletcher.”

He looked as if he wanted to ask her to stay, and Alex waited for him to say so. Instead, he only nodded curtly. She hid her frown as she ambled over to Fletcher’s little nook.

He finally looked up when she sat down next to him. He greeted her with a wide smile, as was his way. “I think I have finally found my true calling,” he announced.

“That so,” Alex grunted.

He nodded vigorously as he plucked a petticoat from his pile of cloth and went to work on it with a pair of dull scissors. “You know, my mother used to organize parties with all her friends to make bandages and scrape lint and the like. I rarely attended them. Too busy pretending to be a soldier. And then I was one.” He frowned, holding two strips of the shredded petticoat as if he were weighing them. “What a turn of events, don’t you think?”

Alex reacted slowly to the sudden disclosure. She hummed an acknowledgment and took the bandages from Fletcher’s outstretched hands to roll up. This seemed incentive enough for him to continue.

“Seems like a long time ago. I wonder what my mother is doing now.”

His hands fell into his lap. Alex studied his face, searching for some clue as to how she ought to respond. She wished Magnus were here. He might know what to say.

“How old are you?” she blurted instead, and mentally kicked herself.

Fletcher’s head shot up. “Eighteen,” he said automatically. Then he coughed awkwardly, as if remembering that he wasn’t speaking to an enlistment officer. “Maybe a couple of years less,” he mumbled.

Alex carefully rolled up a few scraps of cloth before responding. “I was your age at the beginning of the war. Not exactly in the same situation but… you know. Wanting to escape. Do you feel like you escaped?”

After a moment, he nodded slowly. “I think so. There wasn’t any future for me back home, not really.”

“Then you did the right thing,” she said simply.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a tentative smile light up his face again. “Well,” he said quietly, returning his attention to his work. “You are the more experienced out of us.”

Alex had been here before. She recognized the terrain, and the name of the place besides. She had a feeling that it wouldn’t turn out any better than the first battle that took place here over a year ago.

She was getting used to it by now, she thought. The booming of artillery could be heard in every loud noise, the faces of the dead so familiar that they came to her whenever she closed her eyes. It didn’t matter so much that she could hardly sleep more than an hour at a time before waking up in a cold sweat. It prepared her for the days when her dreams grew into reality around her.

She woke up stifling a scream once, the memory of a particularly gruesome nightmare sharp in her mind. She looked over at the man tangled in his bedroll beside her, snoring magnificently, and all she could see was his corpse strewn in a similar position on the battlefield like she’d seen in her dream. She didn’t even know this man very well, but she knew that she didn’t want him to die.

There was no use in any of it. He died the next day in an inconsequential skirmish, and Alex slept alone that night in her too-small dog tent.

She thought too much before battles. Just once she wished she could be filled with an emotion other than apathy. She figured even fear must have its place somewhere, or anger, or something.

Alex had been here before. At some point in her childhood she’d discovered a useful little trick that allowed her to distance herself from her own life, her own emotions. The only difference now was that she couldn’t seem to control it.

The next day they would fight over the same terrain they had a year before. If that didn’t perfectly summarize the state of this war then she didn’t know what would. And all she could do was stay in this empty tent and think.

She had grown quite handy with her rifle. She could fire three rounds a minute if she really tried, though she had no idea about her aim. Accuracy was unimportant in the melee of battle. And then there was the bayonet… she saved that unsavory work for desperate situations.

She managed a low laugh, falling onto her back and resting her rifle across her stomach. What was she thinking? All of this was unsavory work, even if some people didn’t seem to like talking about it that way.

Still… she hated that bayonet. She hated using it. At least bullets were quick and impersonal, and you didn’t have to see their effects if you didn’t want to.

She sighed and turned her gaze to the weak sunlight filtering through the tent. If there was any justice in the world, she thought, she would be killed neatly on a field somewhere, surrounded by strangers doomed to the same fate as her.

Fletcher was complaining again, though this time not about something as trivial as a name.

“Reserve?” he cried. “We get up before sunrise and not even to fight? What’s the use in that?”

Alex didn’t respond, though secretly he was thinking the same thing. After all the marching and preparation, to be put in reserve felt… anticlimactic, to say the least.

Maybe Fletcher was right. For someone who hated war so much, he wanted to fight an awful lot.

The din of battle was muffled through the trees, and the soldiers around her jostled around each other like they were still in camp, but Alex couldn’t seem to loosen his grip on his rifle. His sense of foreboding was only growing with every passing second. He couldn’t remember a time before a battle when he had ever felt so on edge.

“You look rather worse for wear.”

Alex ever so slightly slackened his hold on the barrel of his rifle. Lilith appeared from behind Fletcher’s legs and began to snuffle around Alex’s feet. “I’m just fine.”

Fletcher laughed. This succeeded in pushing Alex’s apprehension to the back of his mind, if only to be replaced by irritation. “Shut up. You should feel the same.”

He sat down on the ground beside Alex with a small "oomph." Alex took note of the way he gingerly stretched his left leg out, taking care of where he let it rest. How had he not noticed before that Fletcher had sustained a wound there? How long ago had that happened? A twinge of guilt struck him as he watched Fletcher make himself comfortable against the tree trunk they shared.

“And why should I?” Fletcher asked, in that same maddeningly calm tone of voice. Lilith crawled into his lap and he leisurely combed his fingers through her fur.

“None of this is right,” Alex mumbled. “Why did we wait so long to attack? Why did we not even scout the territory before fighting? Why are we just left here in reserve?”

“Fierro!” He startled when Fletcher punched him in the shoulder. “It’s not like you to worry so much. What’s gotten into you?”

Alex scowled at him, but he only grinned. “It will just be another battle, you’ll see. Haven’t things been rather moderate lately?”

“That, too,” Alex muttered.

Fletcher didn’t seem to hear him. “You know, I’ll bet this whole war can be over by the end of the year! And then I can…” He trailed off. “What do you want to do? When the war is over, that is.”

“You’ve already asked me that,” he sighed.

“You’ve never answered! Mysterious Fierro,” he taunted under his breath.

“Keep saying it; it will never catch on.”

He crossed his arms in imitation of Alex’s position. “Well, answer my question then.”

He closed his eyes, if only to picture something other than this dreary woods and ever-present battle. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Why not? Every soldier I’ve talked to won’t shut up about what he’ll do after the war if given the chance to talk about it.”

“They’re different,” Alex said coldly. “They have wives and children and homes to return to.”

Fletcher was silent, and Alex opened his eyes again to find him thoughtfully stroking Lilith’s fur, his eyes distant.

Eventually, he spoke up. “You do have someone, though.”

Alex stared at him. If he looked closer at Fletcher’s face, he thought he could see a deeper well of emotions than he ever let to the surface. Unable to think of a good response, he turned his eyes to the ground.

He was right. Alex did have someone - someone bright and summery who, against all the odds, seemed to accept and even appreciate him for everything he knew about Alex and everything he didn’t.

Before he could think of some way to respond, a great commotion of chattering and shoving broke out near the front of the lines. Fletcher seemed grateful for the distraction, scooping up Lilith and pushing past the clamoring soldiers. Instinctively, Alex followed him.

Neither of them managed to reach anywhere near the front, but the snippets of arguments from the soldiers seemed the next best source of information.

“...a complete farce.”

“A massacre, they say…”

“...needs us! How do they expect to win -”

A sharp tug on Alex’s sleeve made him turn around. Fletcher pulled him out of the crowd, Lilith close at his heels.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Alex demanded.

Fletcher stopped abruptly and whipped around, planting his hands firmly on Alex’s shoulders. It scared him, in a way. It reminded him too much of Samirah’s intensity, when she still had it.

“We have to go out there,” he said. Alex couldn’t find any of his usual flippancy in his voice now. “You heard what they’re saying, right? They’re in complete disarray out there! And we’re just sitting here, doing nothing to help!”

“And what are two people going to do?” Alex snapped. “If it’s as bad as they say it is, you’ll only get killed.”

Fletcher faltered for a moment, but the steely look in his eyes quickly returned in full force. “Who knows - perhaps if we go, they’ll follow. It’ll be like a war novel, us leading the charge and all that.”

Alex began to tell him he was an idiot, plain and simple, but an outbreak of shouting from the crowd of soldiers behind them drowned him out. Before he could even gauge what was causing this new storm of noise, the crowd parted and an obviously high-ranking officer pushed through. A handful of others followed behind him, one of them the 40th’s colonel.

As the soldiers watched, the man at the head of their little procession whirled around to face the rest of them. His face was bright red under his thick beard. “No one is going anywhere! Your best course of action right now is to stay here and trust that your superiors know what they are doing!”

Fletcher was practically vibrating with energy next to Alex. He pulled his rifle off his shoulder and clumsily loaded it. He’d never been as good with it as was expected of a soldier.

“Let’s go,” he said around the piece of a bullet cartridge still between his teeth.

“Fletcher -”

“You should call me Adrian,” he said as he began to climb out of the shallow ravine they’d sheltered in. “No one has ever called me Adrian except for myself.”

Alex stared at him. He seemed to fluctuate so quickly from one emotion to the next - energetic and ridiculous one minute, serious and determined the next.

“Adrian, then,” he said sharply. “Adrian, you’re not thinking -”

He broke off suddenly when his eyes caught on something over Fletcher’s shoulder. It was one of the officers, decorated in epaulets and a fanciful saber at his belt in the fashion of a cavalry major. But unlike the men around him, his expression was as devil-may-care as could be. His lips were quirked into a crooked smile that looked wrong on his face, like it belonged to someone different.

Then he turned his head in Alex’s direction and smiled right at him - and Alex knew it was Loki with as much certainty as he suddenly knew none of this could end well.

In front of him, Fletcher shot Alex a smile that he probably meant to be reassuring and climbed over the ravine, and Alex had to resist the overwhelming urge to vomit.

He crested the ravine and took off after Fletcher, cursing all the way.

The sharp yelp of a small terrier made Alex pause and whip around. Lilith chased her on short, stumpy legs, bursting through the underbrush like a bullet herself.

“Go back!” Alex picked the dog up and set her on the ground in the direction they came from. “Please, go back, you don’t know -” A sob broke from his lips. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

With Lilith quivering in front of him, her eyes seeming to plead with him, Alex realized with a final jolt of painful irony that he had left his rifle behind. A great deal of good it had done to clutch it to his chest like a child with a doll. And a great deal of good it had done to let his guard down for just a few months, as well, he thought.

Just a few months… it had only been a few months.

Alex stood so fast that black spots burst in his vision. He couldn’t simply stay here and despair - he could still do something - there was a small knife that he kept in his boot -

The ground exploded in front of him with dirt and bits of metal, throwing Alex back into a bramble bush. His head hit something hard, a rock or a tree root. He had only enough time to comprehend the fact that the battle had suddenly moved closer to him when another grenade went off somewhere behind him, showering him in debris. Alex tried to raise his head, but it never left the ground. His vision was foggy; was that a person standing over him or an illusion cast by a shadow?

Alex closed his eyes, but only for a moment.

“He looks dead to me.”

“Idiot, he is breathing!”

“I don’t know, he has lost a lot of blood by the looks of it. Seems dead.”

“The dog is still licking his face, though.”

“Risked your lives to save a dead man…”

The first thing Alex saw was the sky peeking through the gaps in the trees’ foliage, heavy and gray as if it were about to rain.

The second thing he noticed was that his face was very wet, though not from blood or rain. Weakly, he raised a hand to his cheek and found a coat of curly black fur in the way. Lilith.

Before he could comprehend anything more than that, he found that he was being lifted by his shoulders into a sitting position. Black spots momentarily overtook Alex’s vision. When they cleared, he found he was staring at the stiff gray hand of a dead man, protruding from a makeshift wall of dirt, logs, and, apparently, other corpses.

Alex startled, but stifled a shout of alarm before the men surrounding him noticed. There were three of them, though if he tried to focus on them his vision blurred.

The soldier who had propped him up followed his gaze. His eyes, shadowed by a heavy brow, spoke of a deeper kindness than his gruff voice did. “Oh, yes. That. No need to be frightened. We didn’t have many materials to work with, see.”

Alex didn’t say anything, at a loss for words. Lilith was now alternating between licking his fingers and anxiously running in huffing little circles. Alex felt like he should be doing the same.

One of the other soldiers, this one around Alex’s own age, leaned forward. “I’m glad you aren’t dead. It would be a shame to have saved you out there only for you to already be dead.”

“You’ll be sure to get a medal out of that,” grumbled the third soldier, who was sitting further down the hill that the earthworks had been constructed on.

Alex blinked at them. His head felt heavy, his thoughts sluggish. But when he touched his hand to the back of his head and discovered his hair was crusted in blood, it all seemed to come flooding back to him.

He moved as if to stand up, but the bearded soldier roughly pulled him down. Alex didn’t think that he would have been able to stand for a few moments anyway, with the way his vision was swimming.

“What do you think you are doing?” hissed the bearded soldier. “They have some damn good sharpshooters out now.”

Alex peered over the hastily-constructed breastworks, but quickly ducked down behind them again when he saw the silhouettes of bodies strewn on the forest floor.

“You only just woke up,” the second soldier added. “I’m sure that wound needs to be looked at sooner rather than later.”

Alex pushed the images of the dead from his mind. He really should be numb to these kinds of things by now. “What part of the troop are you?”

“Second Division, all of us. Third brigade.”

“Have you seen a boy, about sixteen, red hair up to here, rather plain-looking?”

They exchanged looks, though none of them answered. Alex’s anxiety heightened, even though he knew it wasn’t probable that they would have seen him anyway, being from different brigades.

“I have to go,” he mumbled, crawling further down the hill so that he’d be less conspicuous to the sharpshooters that apparently hid waiting to find a target. He picked up Lilith, who immediately stilled. That was unnatural for her, Alex imagined, though he didn’t dwell on it.

The bearded soldier looked like he wanted to insist that he stay, but Alex shot him a glare with a force no less diminished by his current state. The soldier kept his mouth shut.

Alex shook off the last dredges of dizziness and exhaustion. With nowhere good to start, he continued down the hill, where most of the troops had found places to dig into for the time being. He asked around, and got quite adept at describing Fletcher’s appearance to groups of weary, grime-coated soldiers. None of them had so much as a direction to point Alex in, but by the time doubt began to creep into his thoughts he had been going on like this for too long to stop.

He made it through the 3rd division into the 2nd, his own, but still found no satisfactory answers. He felt light-headed, and found that he was catching himself on tree trunks and low-hanging branches more often than he managed to walk straight. His head throbbed with every step, and he was certain that his wound had begun to bleed again. And on top all of that off, his misgivings were only growing with every passing moment.

The soldiers around him spoke of a massacre, just like Alex’s regiment had. Thousands dead in less than an hour, the rebels’ trenches so sturdy and their own lines so confused that there could only have been one outcome. Personally, Alex didn’t know what to think. Thousands dead… it had to be an exaggeration. But at the same time, he’d never seen the troops look so… weary. Like the war had finally caught up to them in full.

He supposed he didn’t look much better, stumbling around bleeding and carrying a small black terrier in his arms, asking about a soldier no one had seen. But what else could he do? Sit down and push it to the back of his mind, pretend as if he hadn’t seen Loki in the face of that cavalryman, as if he didn’t know exactly what that smirk had meant? Hope that everything would be just fine once they got out of these trenches?

The best scenario Alex could imagine was that Fletcher was injured and had been taken off the battlefield by a medic a long time ago. Worst case scenario… he was still there, bleeding out from a wound that shouldn’t have been deadly under any other circumstance.

But as it was, Alex was sure he couldn’t even go onto the battlefield to look for him without being taken out by a carelessly thrown grenade or the deliberate bullet of a sharpshooter. So he kept asking around the trenches. They couldn’t stay like this for long, after all.

It seemed they very well could. There was a moment when General Grant himself rode along the troops to inspect their condition and rile them up for another charge, but the cursing and shouting this elicited was so strong that Alex thought they might pull him down from his horse right then and there to meet the soldiers at their level. His already frazzled nerves, on the verge of splitting at the slightest provocation, forced him away from the scene with his head ducked low and his hands surreptitiously covering his ears.

After that, there was only the occasional sound of shells being thrown across the short space between the trench lines like a disastrous exchanging of gifts. Alex tried not to think about the bodies caught in the middle of the deluge, unable to do anything to protect themselves.

Alex didn’t sleep that night, his mind caught on an endless loop of watching Fletcher run into the forest as if he had nothing to lose. The words the other soldiers had circled around kept ringing in his head.

These men seemed just as shaken, but Alex felt as detached from them as he had when he first joined the army. Occasionally someone would approach him, asking where the rest of his regiment was, what the hell he was doing here. Alex stopped answering them after a while. People left him alone, if only because they didn’t seem to know what to make of him.

Morning found him lying against the shallow breastworks, half-heartedly trying to keep his bunched-up uniform coat pressed against the wound in the back of his head. Unfortunately, he was already fighting a losing battle with consciousness, and he let his hands drop into his lap. The coat was covered in dust and mud, anyways, which might be worse for the wound in the long run.

It was fine, he thought. It wasn’t even bleeding that much anymore, and even his headache had lessened to some degree.

He pulled his coat around his shoulders with one hand and Lilith closer to his side from where she’d begun to wander with the other. The clouds were still heavy and gray, the fog as cold and dense as the day before. Once again Alex wondered how long this could last.

The fog lifted a couple days later, giving way to a scorching sun. What had started out as rudimentary earthworks constructed under heavy fire the first day of battle were rapidly growing into solid trenches. In a week Alex could stand upright without fear of a bullet through his head, and the dirt- clogged corpses, which had begun to rot, were replaced with timber and tightly-packed earth. Much for the better, Alex thought. They had only served as reminders for how the dead still festering on the battlefield would look like now.

Alex found ways to sleep, but that almost seemed worse than insomnia could have been. If the occasional nightmare had been bad before, then this - waking every hour with the image of Fletcher’s body built into the breastworks, or lying forgotten amongst thousands of others burned into his mind - was unbearable.

He was also starting to get restless. Not to fight, though, or to see for himself the aftermath of the carnage that had yet to be uncovered; from all the talk surrounding it, he could piece together just what was awaiting them when they got out of this stalemate. No, what couldn’t leave his thoughts was that he’d been stuck as male for much too long now. A dull, aching reminder from his mother. You shouldn’t have gotten so comfortable. Again.

On the fifth day, there was a disturbance that rippled all down the line, a collective shifting of tone from the relative on-edge boredom of waiting for another shell attack to a thick dread that came from the new order issued - they had two hours of ceasefire to collect their dead and wounded.

A large part of Alex didn’t want to go out there at all. It would be easier to leave the job to someone else, to let the commanding officers overlook him in favor of soldiers they actually commanded. He had seen what awaited them past the trenches. And after so many days, there couldn’t be any wounded left anyway.

But even if there weren’t…

Alex picked up Lilith, who’d been busy sniffing the pant cuffs of anyone around her, cursing her as she squirmed. He pushed to the front of the group that had gathered around the colonel who was meant to be choosing the soldiers to venture out and finish the unsatisfactory job. But every time he hesitantly called out a name, the owner of it would either let out a string of curses and protests, or simply vanish into the crowd. The colonel was a squirrely man with a mustache too large for his sallow face, and he didn’t seem to have the strength to order them back.

Alex raised his hand the next time someone else turned away. “I’ll go.”

The colonel narrowed his eyes. “Who are you?”

“Alex Fierro, 40th New York Infantry, First Brigade. Third Division,” he added as an afterthought, ridiculously.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Alex gestured at the shuffling men around him. “But it doesn’t look as if you’re overflowing with volunteers.”

He seemed to deflate, though there was a definite note of bitterness in his voice when he muttered, “If you want it so desperately…”

In the end, they scraped together a small, reluctant group. As they made their way through the dense shrubbery, Alex caught some of them loading their rifles, apparently wary of a ceasefire that had taken five days to arrange. Once again he was painfully aware of his lack of any decent weapon.

A part of him was grateful to get out of the dust and dirt of the trenches. The more sane part of him was terrified of what he might find between the lines.

Still, he nudged Lilith forward in an effort to uproot his feet from the spot they’d been planted in for the last minute.

The stench hit him first, sweet and stomach-churning and overwhelming. In the trenches he would sometimes catch a whiff of the battlefield, when the wind was in the right direction, but that didn’t even compare. Alex realized that he’d never really stayed at a site long enough for the smell to become so unbearable as this.

When he first caught sight of the battlefield, he stumbled to a halt. There were other parties like theirs, some already at work digging the graves and piling the dead. And… there were a lot of dead. Alex was afraid to look up from the ground lest he take a step and find his foot stuck in some blackened corpse’s chest.

The sun felt like it was boring holes into his back. He shucked his coat and tied it around his waist.

God, he didn’t even know where to begin. He couldn’t make out the facial features on some, but when he leaned closer to one of them - trying to stifle the smell with his sleeve over his nose, trying not to pay attention to the way the skin sagged over the bones, mottled yellow and purple - he found a tiny slip of paper pinned to the body’s coat. Lieutenant Frank Hill, 37th Massachusetts, written in sloppy cursive.

Well. It seemed he’d had some foresight as to how this battle would end.

Lilith whined, and he quickly moved on to the next one.

Alex quickly discovered that others had had the same idea. It didn’t help him much, though, as the scraps of paper only served to remind him that he had yet to find the person he was actually searching for.

If he squinted, he could see the outline of artillery half-hidden in the foliage and shadow. The white flag stuck in the earth fluttering serenely in the breeze did little to ease his discomfort even though he knew, logically, the truce was still in effect.

Two hours. They had two hours to clean all this up. Alex went back to searching the faces of the dead, more frantic now, before he could be called over to help with the digging of the graves or throwing the bodies into them.

He continued like this for some time, foraging the ground like a carrion animal until he was almost accustomed to the smell, almost numb to the sight of yet another discolored, bloated face.

The sun reached its peak in the sky. The white flag writhed in his periphery.

He walked for what felt like miles; it might have been. He didn’t care. He couldn’t seem to care about the faces he gently turned to the sunlight to better catch their features. They weren’t familiar to him; and yet after a while, they were all the same.

The wind picked up, throwing the white flag into a frenzy on its skinny pole staked in the ground. Lilith’s whining grew louder, more distressed.

This one had similar hair; that one was too tall; it couldn’t be that one; not that one, either -

Working like this, you’ll never find anything.

Maybe it was because he’d been anticipating it, or maybe he wasn’t as slow as he thought, but Alex immediately recognized the thought as not his own. His hand stilled on the makeshift nametag of yet another corpse, but he didn’t look up.

In this endless sea of blue bodies, there was only one that stood up straight, without a single speck of dirt or blood on his uniform; even the saber at his side looked more like a prop for a play than a genuine weapon.

Then again, Loki had never had trouble balancing his theatrics with his destructions.

Against his better judgement, Alex slowly rose to his feet to look his mother in the eyes. He wasn’t wearing the face of that cavalry major, but of course, he didn’t need to anymore. There wasn’t anyone else around. “This is your fault.”

Loki gave him a cursory glance, lingering on the agitated dog at Alex’s side, but fixed his attention on straightening his epaulettes as he spoke. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?” he spat. “This couldn’t have been natural.”

“Couldn’t it have been?” Loki’s eyes flashed. “You put too much faith in my abilities, always have.”

“You did this.” Deep down, he realized that he was losing his grip on something inside himself, but he didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t know how to keep ahold of it. “You did this. I know you did.”

Loki cocked his head. “Did I? All I promised was that I’d collect my dues, eventually. I’ve been generous, haven’t I? ”

“There are many words for what you are, but that isn’t one of them.”

Loki’s silence was almost worse than anything he could have said. But of course, he could never stay silent for long.

“Call me what you like. But I know you knew this was coming. It was inevitable, and you agreed on that the moment you let me help you.”

He was shaking. He was shaking, and he couldn’t stop it. Alex’s bones felt brittle, little more than twigs keeping him together. “A human life for a position as a soldier is not an equal exchange.”

Loki’s smile this time was barely noticeable, but Alex recognized the glint in his eye, and knew it was more significant than anything his mouth might convey. “So you really don’t care about these ones as much as you say. Only him. Because he’s like you. How very human of you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did. And you said many more things without saying any of them at all.” He was approaching Alex slowly now, one hand open and extended in a falsely placating gesture that put him even more on edge, but he couldn’t seem to move away. “You are my child and I know you better than you’ll ever know yourself. I know that you still have no idea of consequences, no matter how many times I try to make it clear to you. I know that you still put on such a brave front, so uncaring, so collected, but you care so much. You hate so much. Honestly, it gets tiring after a while, watching you pretend your way through life.”

Alex didn’t have the strength for a retort, though it blared in his mind with unequivocal desperation: I wonder where I get that from, Mother, I wonder.

Loki was standing right before him now. Alex’s legs finally gave out beneath him, and he just barely avoided falling on top of a soldier with awkwardly bent arms and wide, wide open eyes. Lok loomed over them both. “Are you going to keep searching? You know it’s pointless. You’ll never find anything in all this rubble.”

“It’s not an equal exchange.”

“And even if you do, what will you do? Send him back to his family, who is disgraced by him? Let him be taken away by the gravediggers, whom you ought to be helping?”

“You did this. Don’t think -” He couldn’t seem to bring himself to voice anything he hadn’t already said. He couldn’t seem to -

“Keep up, dear. You brought this upon yourself.”

The man splayed before him, the one Alex had nearly fallen into; his hand was reaching for something. His eyes were wide open; his hand was wide open; his chest was wide open. Alex didn’t know his name, would never know his name.

The sharp shush of the saber being unsheathed pulled his eyes from the sight of that man. Briefly, he wondered if one life really wasn’t enough for Loki, that he had finally tired of his child just enough to really end it all this time -

But he only took a moment to study the blade in the fading sunlight, before sticking it into the earth with a note of finality. “It gets heavy after a while,” he said.

Lilith yelped, and from his blurring periphery Alex watched her turn in a series of tight circles before stumbling in the opposite direction of all this.

He would have to chase her down before she ran off too far.

With strength he didn’t know he still had, Alex shakily rose to his feet. But by the time he managed to tear his gaze from the ground, the only one standing amidst the undisturbed sea of bodies was himself.

“...terrible work. I tell you, we might as well have just left them out there to rot into the ground again, they were halfway there already. ‘Retrieving the wounded’! There weren’t any left.”

“That’s barbaric. They deserved a proper burial at the least.”

“Nothing proper in being buried one on top of the other. It’s all the same.”

“Well. At least now no one will have to see them like that.”

“Two hours wasn’t nearly enough time. There’re still some out there.”

“Barbaric.”

“Don’t tell me.”

Alex wondered why any of them even bothered to discuss it. Obviously it was barbaric; wasn’t that what they’d signed up for?

Her complaints were weak even in the confines of her mind. But the constant conversations of those around her chafed at her ears, so much so that she almost wished a volley of fire would start up again just to drown them out. At least the shells were loud enough that their enormity could almost be blocked out, but this chatter had the same quality as the numbing patter of musketry.

The more she thought about it, the more she yearned for it. And the more she yearned for it, the more crooked she felt.

Yes, that was it - she felt crooked. Just off-center. She didn’t like the feeling, but she didn’t know what to do about it, so she tried to tamp it down.

Lilith was more skittish lately; perhaps it was the shells going off at uneven intervals. Or perhaps it was that she was beginning to notice the absence of her favorite human, and it was getting to her.

There wasn’t anything Alex could do about that, so she gave the dog half of her dried meat rations every day. At least she could tell herself that she was needed for this one thing.

In true Lilith fashion, she had quickly gained the amusement and appreciation of this new regiment Alex found herself stuck in. Throughout the day soldiers would approach her to stroke Lilith’s ears unbidden, or feed her a portion of their own rations. Alex hated those ones; selfishly, she wanted to be the only one caring for this little black terrier, the only one capable enough for her.

Dogs were much easier to protect than humans. But then again, Loki had no interest in dogs.

Alex fed Lilith half her rations and focused on the way her stomach cramped indignantly against it. It was the simplest emotion she had.

Chapter Text

HI!!!! hi. this is most likely not at all what you were hoping for from the next update, and i know this is painfully wattpad of me but holy FUCK i have been working on this fic for what feels like an eternity and. to be frank i just don't have the passion for it that i used to :') it be like that with me and long-term projects, i'm honestly surprised i was able to get this far with this fic as it is. that being said, i'm orphaning this fic and peacing out!! if someone rlly does care for this story enough you are welcome to continue it or change it up however you want lol

i have a couple of mcga fics planned (an alex-centric 1920s au bc i am still in fact a slut for historical aus + a fantasy au that focuses on similar themes and relationships that i had hoped to explore in this fic except that one will be. way less convoluted and just way better overall lol) you can look forward to that if you are so inclined :)

btw i have a kick-ass playlist for this fic uwu

thank you so much to everyone that has followed this story this far!! thanks for dealing with the random and far-between updates and speculating about stuff/yelling at me in the comments y'all deserve a goddamn award honestly it was a great run!! peace bitches <3