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Cycle Two
The first time they try it, Magnus has just died and come back to life.
“Haha what the fuck?” Magnus demands, seconds before the stunned silence breaks and everyone starts talking at once. Lucretia starts scribbling, faster than the rest of them can follow, while Barry and Lup start comparing theories and Taako double checks to make sure Magnus isn’t a vampire or something, Merle ‘assisting’ with the inspection, all while Davenport wrestles with the controls over this new plane.
“Alright!” he yells finally, Captain voice in full effect. “We’re somewhere different again, I want readings from every instrument we got. That means you, Science Officer Bluejeans!”
“But Cap’nport, Magnus just came back to life!” Barry yells.
“I know, but we have to focus on living through the next few minutes!”
He’s right. The atmosphere of this new plane is turbulent, spitting rocks double the size of the ship directly at them. Davenport has to pull out some of those moves that he got banned in training just to avoid a head-on collision, while the twins make a show of balancing on the couch as the ship twists and flips, cheering.
“I gotta try this for real sometime!” Taako says brightly. “Maybe on water.”
Taako is narrowly saved from ending that cycle very early indeed when Lucretia yanks him down just in time to avoid a flying vase to the head. The vase, all dark clay with feathered imprints, shatters against the back wall.
“My mom made that vase,” Barry moans quietly.
“Was your mom goth as fuck, Bluejeans?” Lup yells, catching one of the kitchen chairs just before it falls on him.
“She worships the Raven Queen, actually.” Barry pauses, flinging up a hand to catch his glasses as Davenport does a barrel roll. “Or well… she did.”
Out of necessity, Davenport lands them on the planet early, a windswept desert dotted with massive, crumbling ruins, mostly buried in the pale blue sand. The ruins are coated with that same blue sand, carved with runes and symbols none of them have seen before. Davenport steers them into a lee made by a half-collapsed tower and a buried temple. Safe from the howling wind, for the moment, he relaxes his white-knuckled grip from the wheel and turns to his crew.
“Everyone alright?”
He’s met with another wave of sound.
“Okay here, skipper—”
“Lulu, you good—?”
“Yeah, Koko, I just—”
“—Never seen carvings like these before—”
“I’m alive!”
“Okay”! Davenport yells again, and at his Captain voice his crew falls silent, mostly, and all eyes turn to Magnus.
He has a black eye.
“I have a theory,” Barry says into the silence. His brow is furrowed in a way Davenport is entirely familiar with, having seen it time and time again when building the bond engine itself. It’s the look Barry gets when he’s about to say something either entirely brilliant or entirely insane. The scientist flushes as everyone looks at him, and snaps his mouth shut.
“Go on,” Davenport says, when Barry doesn’t look like he’s going to talk again for another century, at least. “What’s your theory, Science Officer Bluejeans?”
At the mention of his title, Barry rallies, pushing up his glasses with a firm hand. “I think it’s something to do with the bond engine,” he says.
“Yeah, that’s cool and all, my man,” Taako drawls. He’s the only one not looking at Barry. Instead, the elf’s eyes have been drawn to the window, and he drifts towards it through the scattered debris, tugging his sister with him. “But we got company.”
The rest of them move to the window, Magnus touching gently at his eye and then the rest of him. Taako points a languid finger towards the ruined temple. Although that pale blue sand fills most of it, there’s still enough of a gap that the Starblaster could fit through it. There are humanoids moving out of that gap, a small delegation, with one person leading the way, two others flanking them with pointed weapons of some sort, and two more bringing up the rear.
“Hachi machi,” Taako murmurs. “Look at that handsome fella in the front.”
“Okay, we’ll debrief after I talk to them, whoever they are,” Davenport says, straightening his shoulders.
“Dibs,” Taako says, darting for the front hatch.
“Taako, wait!”
“Hell yeah, get it Koko!”
Taako has the gangplank open and lowering before Davenport can catch up with him, and he strides down before it even touches the sand. He reaches the ground just as gangplank makes contact, and strikes a dramatic pose in front of the assembled group of locals, who are all watching the ship with no small amount of trepidation.
“Hail and well met, my dude,” Taako says to the presumed leader, winking
The man in front of him is tall, taller than any of the others. He eyes Taako warily, his warm brown eyes watching both the elf and the six others still within the ship. He’s dressed in creamy white robes, with a sand guard attached to the head, at the moment pulled away from his incredibly handsome face. The robes are embroidered with more of the unknown runes, the color setting off his dark brown skin beautifully. Thick black braids spill from his hood, many decorated with golden beads, these also carved with those runes.
He is, as Taako asserted, a handsome fella.
“Who are you?” he asks sharply, his speech crisply accented. “How did you come to be here?”
“Well, it’s a hell of a story, my man,” Taako says. “But I’d be happy to tell you all about it over some drinks.”
The man raises sculpted eyebrows. “You claim hospitality?”
Taako glances back at the rest of the crew. Lup winks exaggeratedly while Davenport frantically gestures him back in. Taako furrows his brow and then nods before turning back to the handsome man.
“Sure do!” he proclaims, ignoring the audible smack Davenport’s hand makes against his own forehead. “What’s your name, thug? I’m Taako, y’know, from TV?”
“I see,” the man says, before bowing deeply. “I am called Kravitz.”
*
The year passes quickly.
Kravitz and his people, the Jarbeen, have lived in the windswept blue desert for thousands of years. They were once great, Kravitz explains, but were laid low by the shifting sands that spread from the south, long before Kravitz was born. Now they eke out a living among the ruins of their ancient cities, hunting the increasingly rare desert-dwelling foxes and jealously guarding their few remaining crops.
The surviving members of the IPRE scatter for the year. Magnus helps with the weekly hunts, while Merle tends to the weak gardens the Jarbeen have managed to maintain. There’s no Pan, he tells the rest of the crew, not exactly, but there’s some sort of life god who seems into being prayed to. He laughs when Lup and Taako shriek and pelt him with sand, his winking only increasing whatever oblique innuendo he was trying to make. Barry and Lup spend much of the year studying the bond engine, formulating theories of how it works as well as the strange force that’s pursued the crew across two planar systems now. Davenport goes after the Light, not long after it falls, and to her surprise, chooses Lucretia to go with him.
Taako and Kravitz spend a lot of time together.
Taako learns that the dark-haired man is the prince, such as it is, of the Jarbeen, and follows him on his rounds, cracking jokes and flirting dramatically, moaning whenever it looks like Kravitz is paying too much attention to something else.
Kravitz, for reasons beyond the understanding of the rest of the IPRE save Lup, seems amused by this, rather than annoyed. Whenever Taako does this, he very quickly goes from surprised embarrassment to fond looks to rolling his eyes.
“Taako,” he says gently, as the elf groans and drapes himself over the ancient stone Kravitz had been inspecting. “I’m trying to work.”
“It’s boring,” Taako whines, batting his eyelashes upside down at Kravitz, who can’t stop a grin. “C’mon, thug, let’s go get that drink.”
“If you tell me what’s pursuing you,” Kravitz says, giving up on that particular stone and turning his attention to the damaged frescos on the wall.
“Oof,” Taako says, sitting up and watching him in the flickering light of their single torch. “Heavy topic.”
“So it would seem.”
Taako doesn’t say anything, sitting cross-legged on the stone now.
“I can see how it weighs on you,” Kravitz says to the fresco, carefully brushing blue sand away from an elegant female figure, robed in white, haloed with stars, holding knitting needles. “All of you.”
Taako still doesn’t say anything. Both of them think of Davenport, returned one week before the end of the year, missing one eye, Lucretia, and the Light. He still refuses to say what happened, instead checking and rechecking the Starblaster’s readouts. There’s a day, maybe less, before the arrival of whatever destroyed their home world, and the Animal Planet.
“Some bad shit, homie,” the elf says finally, quiet. His ears are low. He rises from the stone silently and pads to their torch.
“I see,” Kravitz murmurs, although he yelps when Taako blows the torch out, plunging them into darkness. “Well, I don’t now. Taako, where are you?”
“Don’t have dark vision, huh?” Taako says from right in front of him. He watches in grayscale as the man jumps and then relaxes instantly, his blind face turning towards him with a smile.
Kravitz doesn’t say anything in response, merely humming softly. It’s an old song, Taako knows, from long before the desert. He tilts his head down slightly, still humming, eyes searching for Taako in the dark, that soft smile still playing around his lips.
Taako leans in. “Is this…” he whispers, voice barely audible above the wind outside, so violent it can still be heard even this far in the temple. “Is this okay?”
“Well, I can’t see,” Kravitz says, amusement clear in his tone. “Can you be more specific?”
“I’d,” Taako pauses. “Can I kiss you?”
Taako mentally blesses whatever god saw fit to give elves dark vision, or he would have missed the brilliant smile that breaks across Kravitz’s face like the sun. “Oh,” Kravitz says softly. “Yes. Yes, I’d like that very much.”
Taako lifts up slightly, pressing his lips to Kravitz’s. They’re cool and gentle against his own. Kravitz, as with most of the locals, runs cold, something about their biology or the sun or some other nerd shit Barold was mumbling about.
It’s a nice kiss, as kisses go, but Kravitz keeps breaking it off with his smiling.
“C’mon, thug,” Taako murmurs, tugging at his robes. “Kiss me for real.”
“Well,” Kravitz says, and his eyes must have adjusted, because he finds Taako’s eyes and he’s smiling, smiling, and oh, this was a bad idea, Taako should have never gotten this close to someone, oh no, and then he’s kissing Taako for real.
It’s scorching, for all Kravitz’s coolness. It’s fire, it’s light, it’s the sun passing through his lips on the tip of Kravitz’s tongue, and Taako thinks dryly that he needs to stop hanging out with Lucretia so much because clearly he’s getting too much of a taste for metaphors, and then Taako doesn’t think very much at all.
*
“We’re taking them with us,” Taako announces that night at dinner.
“What?” the entire crew, plus Kravitz and minus Lucretia, says together.
“Yep,” Taako says, unconcerned.
“T-Taako, we can’t,” Davenport argues. “We don’t have the room for all of them.”
“My people will not agree to it,” Kravitz says.
“Maybe we can’t take everyone,” Taako says, eyes flicking up over the rim of his cup. The look in them is sharp, angry, and entirely unfamiliar to everyone except Lup. His eyes flick to Kravitz, softening ever so slightly. “But I’m not leaving you behind.”
“I’m with Taako,” Magnus declares, entirely missing Lup’s questioning expression and whatever’s going on between Taako and Kravitz. “I dunno if the same thing’s gonna happen as happened last year, but I’m not just gonna leave people behind!”
“What happened last year?” Kravitz breaks in.
Davenport glares at Taako, who glares right back. Magnus glances between them and then also glares at Davenport. Lup is busy watching her twin, while Barry attempts to fade to invisibility without actually casting the spell.
The absence of Lucretia is palpable.
Merle, seeing all this, sighs, drawing their attention.
“Big nasty cloud thing,” he says, waving a piece of flatbread. “Eats the whole planar system. We’ve escaped it twice so far.”
“On your ship?” Kravitz guesses.
“Right,” Davenport says as the silent tension stretches past unbearable.
“I’m not leaving him behind,” Taako says flatly.
“I need more information about this,” Kravitz says, slipping his hand into Taako’s. To everyone’s astonishment, Taako lets him, gripping the man’s hand so tightly that his knuckles whiten. “And I will need to speak to my people.”
“Let’s do that, then,” Taako says, and gets up from the cushion without further discussion. “We don’t have a lot of time.” He grins, lopsided, no real humor in it. “Come sail away with me, thug.”
It falls to Magnus, then, and Lup, to debate the plan with Davenport. The fighter is insistent, almost as much as Taako was, that they can’t abandon every plane to the vast cloud of darkness.
They argue long into the night, but when morning comes, it finds Kravitz aboard the Starblaster, along with a dozen others who volunteered for the mission. Before he goes, he unclips a specific set of golden beads from his thick black braids, ceremoniously clipping them into the hair of Secula, his successor. She nods as he gives her one last bow, and the Jarbeen board the ship.
“Let’s do this,” Davenport says, eyes on the horizon. They launch, instantly buffeted by the strong winds and whipping sand. The darkness is here, shooting down pillars of black tar deep into the surface of the planet below.
“What is it?” Kravitz exclaims in horror, desperately clinging to the back of Taako’s chair. They tied everything down before takeoff, so there are no flying dishes or plants as Davenport weaves and rolls, but the Jarbeen are still huddled together in the back of the common room, eyes wide with terror.
“That’s the thing, my man,” Taako says. He rises from his chair, pitching sideways instantly, but Kravitz is there to steady him. They turn to look out the window together as Davenport avoids another pillar of blackness. “We don’t know.”
They hold onto each other as the Starblaster bursts through the barrier between planar systems.
Taako, and the rest of the IPRE, split into thousands of themselves.
They reshuffle.
When they break through the light, Taako is holding onto Lup.
And Kravitz is gone.
*
Cycle 78
“I’m telling you, I don’t know what you’re talking about, my dude!” Taako swears as he leaps backward, narrowly avoiding the swipe of the man’s scythe.
“You do!” the man snaps back as they fall back into circling each other. “You have way too many deaths to not know why!”
“No joke, my man,” Taako says hastily, eyeing the scythe. “We don’t know how it happens, it just kinda… does.”
“You will still be taken to the Raven Queen for judgement!” As he swipes again, the man’s hood falls back, exposing his handsome face and thick black braids, his brown eyes glaring at Taako.
“Hold on,” Taako murmurs, ducking the scythe again, staring. “Hold on!”
“W-what?” the man demands, but he halts his onslaught. “Are you… calling timeout?”
“Just for a second!”
“You can’t call timeout during a fight!”
“Say my name,” Taako says, urgently. “It’s Taako.”
“Yeah, you said,” the man snorts. “Along with some other nonsense tacked on to the end. I’m not saying that.”
“No, just—” Taako searches the familiar face. “Just Taako. Please.”
Confused, suspicious, the man lowers his scythe just slightly. “Taako?”
Taako inhales, sharply. The tone behind it is different, but the cadence is unmistakable. “Kravitz?”
“How do you know my name?”
“It is you,” Taako murmurs. “But it’s not you.”
“What are you talking about?”
Taako draws himself up, pulling out his spare wand. “How dare you.”
“What?”
“I don’t know much about your Raven Queen,” Taako hisses, slashing his wand down. A fiery sword, conjured from nothing, swipes at this Kravitz who isn’t Kravitz, glowing red with Taako’s rage. “But I don’t think it’s par for the course to take my memories.”
“Now I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Kravitz who isn’t Kravitz says, and that look of confusion is all too familiar, for all it’s been seventy-six years. “I’ve never met you before.”
Taako huffs a bitter laugh, barely. “Sure, thug. Sure.” He grins viciously as he feels Lucretia’s summoning spell tugging at him, and flips off the man in front of him. “See ya never.”
*
Faerun, Miller Laboratory
“If you wanted to lure me in there, you should have stayed handsome, my fella,” Taako says, winking at the increasingly skeletal Kravitz in front of him. “People were all ready to write slash fiction between you and me.”
The rest of that trip is a little busy, what with the ghost monster and the prophecy and getting a goddamn Grand Relic out of Magnus because the man will eat anything that floats past him without being tied down.
Through it all, and after, Taako finds himself thinking of Kravitz.
There’s something about him that feels… familiar.
(Taako is fairly certain he’s never dated anyone with red eyes who can turn into a skeleton before.
But then.
There’s a lot of things Taako is fairly certain of that turn out to be quite wrong indeed.)
*
Faerun, Taako and Kravitz’s house
This is the third night in a row that Taako has made stew, and Kravitz is starting to get worried.
“Hey, Taako?” he asks, poking his head into the kitchen.
“Yeah, babe?” his husband is standing over the stove, flipping through a book while a Mage Hand stirs the stew.
“Are you… alright?”
Taako’s ears flick back towards him, although he doesn’t otherwise move. “Uh, yeah Krav, I’m fine.”
“That’s not a cookbook,” Kravitz says quietly.
It’s not. The book in Taako’s hand is blue leather, with silver trim. He comes further into the kitchen as Taako’s ears lower.
“It’s one of her early journals,” Taako says quietly, holding it back to Kravitz without turning. “Cycle two. She died in that one, so she missed a lot. I was just… we told her, the next cycle, but some of it you just, uhhh,” he snorts. “Had to be there for it, I guess.”
Kravitz skims the opening descriptions, of the blue desert and the ancient ruins, and the once-proud people living within them. He frowns, barely noticing when Taako turns to look at him, as he reads the description of the leader of those people.
“I have a confession to make,” Taako says when Kravitz looks up. His ears are down by his shoulders by now, and he looks… guilty? Regretful?
“This sounds like me,” Kravitz says, tapping at the book.
“Yeah, there was,” Taako fiddles with his apron, his wand, his hair, until Kravitz captures his hands with his own. “There was another Kravitz,” Taako says with an explosive rush of breath. “I don’t mean like I loved someone else before, I mean literally. There was another Kravitz, in cycle two.” He snorts again. “A few of em, actually. At least one of them worked for the Raven Queen too. Tried to catch me and everything. Cycle, uhhhhh, 78? Yeah, that sounds right.”
“Oh.”
“And I just, Istus told us that that happens, a lot actually, that people repeat and things repeat and all and we were kind of an exception, you know, not on purpose or anything, and I know it’s wild—”
“Taako,” Kravitz interrupts, gently loosening Taako’s hands from tight fists, uncurling his fingers one by one. “Why are you upset about this?”
Oh, that was probably the wrong thing to say. “Aren’t you?” Taako snaps, and his ears are drawing back now, not just low.
“Well,” Kravitz says, humming thoughtfully to buy himself more time. “It’s pretty wild, I’ll agree to that. But,” and he twines his fingers through Taako’s, until his husband’s hand relaxes. “I don’t mind, I suppose.”
“How could you not?” Taako demands. “There are more of you out there! That I’ve met! That I’ve lo—” he slaps a hand over his mouth, wrenching it from Kravitz as he does, rocking backwards until his hat is in danger of falling in the stew. He sinks to the floor, arms tight around himself, Lucretia’s journal cracked open on the floor.
“Taako,” Kravitz says, kneeling next to him. He offers Taako a gentle smile, knowing he’ll hear it in his voice even if the elf refuses to look up at him again. “You all went through a lot, during your journey. We all heard the Story, but,” he shakes his head. “I don’t think any of us can really know what it was like. And if you found some happiness with another version of me, well,” he tugs at Taako’s arms, carefully, until his husband opens them in silent invitation. “I think I win,” he says in his work accent.
This gets a laugh from Taako, as he hoped, and Taako finally looks up. “Are you sure?” he whispers, staring at Kravitz with sharp, watering eyes. “Are you sure you’re okay with it?”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Kravitz says, thickening his work accent until Taako snickers again and shoves at him. “I’m the best possible Kravitz, because I have you.”
Taako laughs and sniffs and mutters, “Damn right.”
“And I’m going to have you,” Kravitz adds, wrapping his arms around his husband. “And you’re going to have me. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”
“We all might be taking a one-way trip to the Astral Plane if you don’t get the stew off the stovetop, sir,” Angus says from the doorway, where he’s leaning against it and eating an apple. He waves casually as Kravitz and Taako both jump and curse in surprise. “And then who will feed the cats?”
“See if you get any, you little gremlin!” Taako shouts, flipping himself upright in one fluid motion and pulling Kravitz up with him. “I’ll have you know, my husband is the Grim Reaper!”
“That doesn’t intimidate Susan, and it doesn’t intimidate me, sir,” Angus says, grinning.
“We don’t mention Susan in this house!”
And in that house, there’s laughter, and light, cats and scythes, books and wands and partially burnt stew, for a long, long time to come.