Work Text:
It’s good, Davenport says, for them to have some time alone.
They’ve spent forty-six years in close quarters, stalking the same halls of the same ship with the same people. Even on safe worlds, on beach planes and welcoming animal environments, they never stray too far from each other. It’s strengthened their bonds, year after year, plane after plane, but the years feel longer as they add up, and it’s probably healthy for them to take a step back, to reestablish some boundaries, to have a little time to themselves.
Lucretia’s dorm room at the Legato Conservatory is almost twice the size of her berth on the Starblaster. The housekeeper insists that she’s welcome to paint the walls whatever color she likes. The bed is wide, the pillows are plush, and her classmates are warm and welcoming.
But they’re not her family and this isn’t home, and however healthy this might be, it’s lonely as well.
Davenport stays with the ship, because if they lose the ship they lose everything, but everyone else moves into dorms at the conservatory. Barry and Lup and Merle are in the Music building, and Taako is off in the Languages department, and theoretically Magnus is here with her in the Visual Arts complex, but the sculpture students are on a different floor from the painting students.
She looks for them everywhere - constantly, unconsciously - her eyes always scanning the campus for a flash of red robe. When she walks from her classroom to the dining hall, when she wanders around the submission mountain on restless afternoons, when her class heads outside to learn about natural light techniques, she is always on the lookout for the others, but the Legato Conservatory is large and crowded and she hasn’t seen any of them yet.
It’s been weeks. Lucretia hides away in her room, fighting the urge to paint her walls a stark, gleaming white, just like the walls back on the Starblaster. There’s a freedom here she feels obligated to seize while she has the chance, even if she doesn’t really want it.
In the morning, she heads to the painting supply closet and brings back the deepest, glossiest red she can find and coats the walls until she feels like she’s wrapped up in her robe all the time.
One night, a little over two months after they arrived, Lucretia almost trips over Magnus in the stairwell between the art studio and her dorm room. He's curled up on the landing between floors and she's mentally composing notes about her piece that she'll need to take down once she gets back to her room, and then her feet are tangled with his legs and she's going down.
But Magnus catches her just before she hits the stairs, broad hands around her waist, and she marvels at the fact that her heart rate didn't skyrocket. She's startled, sure, but some innate, fundamental part of her recognized Magnus and trusted him to catch her.
And when he realizes who he's caught, Magnus shouts her name and sweeps her up into a hug, burying his face in her hair and sighing deeply. It's so good to see him - to see her family - and she presses her face into his chest and they just stand there for a while, holding on tight to each other. When they finally feel settled enough to pull away, Magnus gives her a bright, wide smile and beckons her to tell him everything she's been doing lately. They sit in the stairwell for hours talking about their last few weeks, how their lessons are going, which of the others Magnus has seen on his jogs around campus (Merle, regularly, tending the campus garden early in the mornings, and Taako, just once, surrounded by admirers).
By the time Lucretia makes it back to her room, the sun has started rising and she realizes she never asked him what he was doing sitting in the stairwell in the first place.
She gets her chance two weeks later, in the middle of the night, when she’s heading down from her dorm to the dining hall because she's run out of tea again, and there's Magnus, stretched out on the stairwell landing. He has his hands tucked behind his head, his feet propped up on a stair, and she thinks maybe he's wearing one of Barry's old sweatshirts because it's riding up a little on his stomach.
He has his eyes closed, but she doesn't think he's sleeping; still, she takes a moment to get a good look at him and she's not wild about what she sees. There are dark circles around his eyes, and his lip is swollen and chapped like he's been chewing on it. When she taps his boot with her slipper, he bolts up and - despite how exhausted he looks - she can't help but smile.
"What happened to those vigilance lessons at the beach?" she teases gently, and he grins back, his ears turning red.
"Alright, you got me," he concedes. He scoots back to lean against the wall and pats the spot next to him. "How ya been, Lu?"
"Better than you," she says, frowning a little. She kneels down next to him, her mission to find tea forgotten, and cups her hand around his cheek, smoothing her thumb under his eye. "When was the last time you slept?" He shrugs. “Magnus.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it.” When he rolls his eyes, she takes his chin in hand and forces him to look at her. “I just snuck up on you, Mags.”
“I, y’know, it’s…” He looks up, away from her, and his voice drops. “I can’t sleep. My room’s not right. It’s better here.”
“Here?”
He gestures around them, at the stark white walls and the gleaming metal handrails in the stairwell. “I hang out here because it, it reminds me of the ‘Blaster,” he admits quietly. “You… you’re not having the same trouble?”
And he sounds so young, so exhausted and vulnerable, so hopeful that maybe he’s not the only one having trouble adjusting. She wants to tell him yes, of course she is, of course living alone is devastatingly hard now, but she can’t say she’s not sleeping. It takes her a moment to figure out why.
She settles down on the floor next to him and when he lifts his arm she tucks herself into his side. His arm comes down heavy and warm across her shoulders and she relaxes instantly. “The student in the room next to mine,” she says, “they snore like Merle. I think that’s helping.”
Magnus chuckles. “Yeah, I bet that’ll do it.”
They sit side-by-side in the stairwell for a few minutes, soaking in the quiet and the closeness, and Lucretia thinks Magnus isn’t wrong; there is something familiar and comforting about their surroundings, even if the tile on the landing is cold under her robe. They can’t stay here, though, and Magnus needs sleep.
So she stands and she pulls him to his feet, then leads him back to her floor by the hand. They sneak into the housekeeper’s closet at the end of the hall and take all of the extra pillows and blankets they can find and build Magnus a little nest on the floor next to her bed. Her neighbor starts to snore.
Magnus is out like a light.
That’s how things go for a while: every few days, Lucretia will find an exhausted Magnus hanging out in the stairwell, soaking in the Starblaster-esque surroundings, and she’ll invite him back to her room, and he’ll get a good night’s sleep. It’s nice, she thinks, hanging out together every few days, but it’s incredibly inefficient.
So one night she beats him to the landing where they always meet, sitting cross-legged in his spot, and he grins - tired but clearly delighted - when he sees her as he comes down the stairs.
“Do you mind?” he asks, jerking his thumb towards the door to her hall, and she shakes her head.
“I have an idea, though.”
It doesn’t take them long to pack up Magnus’ things; they all pack light these days, knowing that there’s finite room on the Starblaster and they won’t stay any place longer than a year. Lucretia’s room is large, but not quite big enough for two beds, so they abandon his frame and just levitate the mattress downstairs and shove it into the corner. She already cleared out half her closet for him that morning, and when all of his things are unpacked with hers, they sit side-by-side at the end of her bed. Magnus folds his hand over hers and sighs.
“Thanks, Lucretia,” he says, very very quietly, and Lucretia smiles.
She’s missed Magnus’ warmth, his smile, the way he always talks while he eats; she’s missed his hugs and his laugh and the way she never, ever feels alone when he’s around. Having him move into her room is a selfish act; sure, she knows it will help him sleep better, but all that loneliness that had been welling up within her, threatening to drown her, has vanished. She still misses the others, of course, and looks forward to living with them again, but she doesn’t feel quite so lost.
The way Magnus clutches at her hand, she wonders if maybe he was feeling a little lost, too.
Magnus needs his people, she remembers Merle telling her once. It was decades ago, in a bad cycle when the twins were both killed early and Magnus spent the rest of the year overprotective and anxious about everyone else’s safety. Magnus needs his people, Merle said, one night when he had coaxed Magnus into a restless sleep, his head in the cleric’s lap. This boy was always meant to take care of folks.
Lucretia had never really thought the same of herself, but she thinks maybe they’ve all grown a bit more like Magnus in this way over the years. That’s a good thing, she thinks. But it’s just them this year.
So Magnus will take care of her, and she’ll take care of him.
She wonders if any of the others have paired up like this, if anyone else is struggling the way the two of them are. They might be, after forty-seven years of close contact living, but she wouldn’t be surprised if this is hitting her and Magnus the hardest. The others are older - some of them by decades - than the two of them; Magnus and Lucretia have lived on the Starblaster twice as long as they lived on their home plane. It’s a hard thing to remember sometimes, but the ship, the crew -- they’re more home to the two of them than anything else they know.
There are afternoons when both of them are free from their classes and they’re supposed to be working on their presentations. Lucretia is still trying to figure out exactly what she wants to paint: the ship? Another portrait of the crew? One of the planes they couldn’t manage to save?
(She considers, briefly, painting her childhood home, but the thought carves out something hollow in her chest - a pain she hasn’t felt quite so keenly in a decade - and she dismisses the idea entirely.)
They go back to the stairwell a few times and brainstorm their projects there, but more often than not they’ve been sticking to their dorm room. It feels more comfortable now with the two of them in it and they don’t feel the need to retreat to those white and silver surroundings quite so often. She sits on a stool near the window of their room with her canvas, sketching out options and considering color palettes. Magnus sits on his mattress on the floor with a block of wood, turning it over in his hands slowly. He has his grandfather’s knife resting on his knee. The room is quiet, and it has been for almost a full thirty minutes when Lucretia can’t quite stand it anymore.
She’s never seen a conscious Magnus stay quiet for so long.
But the silence stretches from thirty minutes to an hour, then two, and he starts carving, slow and painstaking. After a while she stops her own work and just watches how hard Magnus is trying, how much he’s focusing, the way his eyes turn down when he knicks his finger and stains the wood with his own blood.
When he’s finished, he has something that can almost be considered a bird, rough and crooked but still recognizable. The look of pride on Magnus’ face is… she’s never seen anything quite like it.
Lucretia loves how, even after all this time, there is still something new to learn about her family.
She abandons her own work, grabs the mostly-empty chronicler journal for this year, and starts to sketch him.
She settles, eventually, on painting the city square, the one near the IPRE Headquarters. It was famous, on their plane, for its commerce and nightlife and architecture; she loved to sit outside during her lunch hour and watch people of all races walk by, going about their lives. Sometimes she would make up stories about where they were going and what they were doing, and even now if she closes her eyes she can picture the way the suns would reflect off the windows of the buildings, the way the pavement smelled after it rained, the way everything would sparkle when people decorated for Candlenights.
Maybe the ship isn’t the only thing Lucretia is homesick for.
She doesn’t try to keep it secret from Magnus. It doesn’t seem quite fair, since it’s pretty obvious what he’s working on himself. Not only that, but she remembers the early years, when their whole situation still felt raw and Magnus would come into her room late at night and they would talk about everything they could remember from home. She filled two whole journals with the color of the sky at dusk, the smell of Magnus’ mother’s favorite pie, the titles of the books on the shelves in Lucretia’s father’s study, the sound of those native birds neither of them can remember the name of that used to sit on the roof of the Institute.
So she shows him the painting, works on it in their room by the light from the window, and sometimes Magnus smiles when he sees it and sometimes he watches her paint with a sad, contemplative look on his face.
“You need a little more red in the sky,” he says quietly one night, and he’s right, and she’s grateful all over again to have him.
On her birthday, she wakes to a cup of tea and a hastily wrapped gift on her nightstand. Magnus is nowhere to be found, but that’s not so surprising: he’s taken to jogging around campus in the mornings, to get his blood pumping and see if he can spot any of the others out and about. Sometimes he prods her awake and convinces her to join in, and they race each other around the mountain, but he must have let her sleep in because it’s her birthday. The tea is still warm, so he can’t have been gone long.
She drinks the whole cup before she moves on to the gift, hoping he might be back by the time she got around to it, but he’s not and she’s curious so she carefully peels the shiny paper away. It's a carved wooden duck, the lines rough but straight, and she recognizes it as one of the attempts Magnus had been working on last week. It's an improvement to be sure - this one does genuinely resemble a duck - but his chisel had slipped when he was nearly done and he had accidentally chipped a large divot out of the duck's back.
But that blemish is gone now because he's carved a cylinder in the middle of the duck; it goes all the way through, and when she peers down into it she can see that he's plugged up the bottom with a thin round of cork.
There’s a slip of paper curled up inside the cylinder and she pulls it out: For pencils or paintbrushes or whatever. Happy birthday, Lu!!! Love, Magnus
She tucks the note safely away in her journal, then fills the duck with her paintbrushes and sets it on the windowsill with the rest of her painting supplies. When he comes back an hour later, a plate of pastries in hand, and sees her already using his gift, his joyous, triumphant laugh wakes up their neighbor.
They go off campus for lunch one day and see Barry and Lup walking down the street. Magnus actually spots them first, and he shouts their names and goes sprinting towards them, but Lucretia's the one who notices the way they aren't quite holding hands, they way their knuckles brush as they walk shoulder to shoulder. That’s been a long time coming, she thinks, but doesn’t say a word. Magnus pulls them both up into back-breaking hugs, spinning Lup in a circle and ruffling Barry's hair. They're both just getting their feet back under themselves by the time Lucretia catches up. It's good to see them, and Lucretia feels that same sense of bone-deep relief that she did when she found Magnus in the stairwell the first time. Barry looks to her with concern when Magnus says they're sharing a room now because of the loneliness, but she brushes it off; Barry, she thinks, probably understands better than anyone else.
Humans and time, it's a whole thing.
They don't talk for long, once Magnus' stomach starts growling, but the chance encounter leaves Lucretia smiling for the rest of the afternoon. That night, when she works on her painting, she adds a couple in silhouette strolling through the city square, hand in hand.
She adds the others, eventually.
A short figure tending to the garden by the Institute's gates is Merle. Davenport, she imagines, is the silhouette standing in the doorway of the IPRE's headquarters building. There is a figure exiting a building Lucretia remembers as being a restaurant, on the far corner, and she gives them elven ears and a hat like Taako's.
She doesn't add herself or Magnus. When she looks at the painting, she imagines the two of them hiding away in an Institute stairwell, talking and laughing together.
The closer they get to the submission deadline, the more nervous Magnus gets. He vacillates between excitement and fear, proud of the progress he’s made but worried it won’t be good enough. They start going back to the stairwell again regularly because it’s still comforting after all these months, and he turns the little wooden duck over in his hands, trying to decide whether it’s worth submitting at all. Lucretia tries to comfort him, because the ducks that he carves are genuinely charming and she can’t imagine anyone disliking something that was clearly crafted with so much love and effort, but it’s hard for Magnus to take her seriously.
“C’mon, Lucretia,” he laughs. “I mean, look at what you’ve done. The Light’s not gonna look twice at my duck when your painting is on display.”
She’s proud of her piece, grateful for her picture-perfect memory, touched that Magnus finds it so beautiful, but she never wants her own talent to make her friend feel less-than. She doesn’t know how to convince him that he’s done good work.
So she starts painting a second piece in secret, when he’s out jogging or talking with his professor. It’s smaller, not meant for the mountain, and it’s based on that first sketch she did of Magnus a few months ago, hunched over his very first attempt looking so proud and satisfied. She wraps it in the same shiny paper he used to wrap her birthday gift and tucks it into her bag; she’ll give it to him after the submission. Regardless of whether or not the Light accepts his duck, she wants him to see himself the way she saw him that day.
(Her journal for this year is mostly sketches of Magnus: facedown and drooling on his mattress, beckoning her to go running with him, surrounded by woodshavings, hugging Barry and Lup on the sidewalk. He looked in the journal once and said she was making him blush, and pestered her the rest of the night until she sketched the two of them together, sitting next to each other on the landing in the stairwell. Her head is tipped sideways against his shoulder, his arm around her back, and he dragged her into the bathroom so she could use the mirror to get their smiles right. It was important, Magnus said, that she get their smiles right. She draws them both together more after that.
She wonders what the Captain will think when she presents her journal for this cycle. They don’t stand on much protocol now, not after more than forty years, but there’s a degree of comfort in the expectation of her work. It’s more important than ever, actually, to chronicle their journey, but to write about the conversations she and Magnus have shared - in the stairwell, in the dark of their room, as they work on their pieces - over the last few months doesn’t feel right. They were lonely and they found each other again; to be more specific than that would sour the memories of those late-night talks.
She think Davenport will understand.)
The mountain, or whatever is inside of it, accepted their pieces - the whole crew’s pieces, actually - but they still can’t get to the Light inside. It’s a major setback, since there are only a few days left until the Hunger arrives, and despite the elation she felt earlier of seeing her painting disappear and then reappear to everyone, she feels jittery now, anxious and worried. Magnus’ brow is furrowed, his movements sharp and focused, as the two of them pack up their belongings and turn their keys over to the dorm housekeeper.
Davenport wants everyone back on the ship by nightfall. They don’t have that much time to save the plane and things feel more dire than ever.
She tucks her clothes and painting supplies into her bag, places the journal for this year on top - easy to access, since she’ll have to update it soon with their frantic search - and is reaching for the zipper when she spots the wrapped edge of the smaller painting she made for Magnus, shoved at the very bottom. She pulls it out, pushes everything she dislodged back into the bag, and stares at it.
Is it silly to give it to him now? When the mountain already accepted his carving? When they have so little time to stop the Hunger?
Maybe that makes it more important than ever. Maybe this is exactly the time to give it to him. To tell Magnus how much this year meant to her, how much having him here meant to her, how proud she is of him.
Magnus heaves his duffel up onto one shoulder, then reaches for hers and tosses it up on the other. He doesn’t notice the wrapped canvas, tucked away under her arm, nor the way she’s still debating on whether or not to give it to him. “You ready?” he asks, nodding toward the door. She follows him down the hall, waving goodbye to some of her fellow students, and then reaches around him when they get to the stairwell door, opening it so he can keep hold of their bags.
He slips past her and starts jogging down the stairs, grabbing the railing and jumping several to land heavy and loud on a landing between floors. It’s not their landing, that one is up a floor or two, closer to the art studio and the woodcarver dorms, but this is still their stairwell, the place they retreated to, and even though they’re on their way back to the Starblaster right now, this seems like the right place.
“Magnus, wait,” she says, and grabs at the back of his jacket before he can start down the rest of the stairs.
“You forget something?”
“No, I… here.” She holds out the painting. “I know we have other things to-- I know it all worked out but I--” She practically shoves it at his chest, and he takes it from her, the canvas looking so small in his large hands. “You made something beautiful, Magnus. I just wanted you to know that.”
Magnus rips the paper - and she chuckles a little to herself, at how different they are but still manage to fit so well together - and stares at the painting, at himself, with the same kind of focus that he gave to his wooden duck. The moment stretches long enough that Lucretia starts to get self-conscious, but then Magnus smiles, as wide as he did when his duck was accepted and she wishes she had the time right now to get out her journal and sketch him again, her brother looking so happy in this tiny stairwell that they made their own over the last few months. He tries to wrap the shiny paper back around the painting, and it doesn’t quite work, but she appreciates the sentiment: he’s trying to protect her gift before he shoves it into his bag. Then he gathers Lucretia up in a hug, taking a moment they don’t really have.
“You’re my favorite roommate,” Magnus whispers into her hair, and she laughs and clutches at his back.