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“Don’t laugh.” His voice is almost hoarse from wine drunk laughter and Taako can’t believe he ever forgot his sister’s laugh.
“I won’t.”
“Really?”
“I make no promises.” At least she’s honest with him and his heart’s so full of love he doesn’t even really care that the edges of laughter are already written across her face.
A pause hangs in the air for just a second as he takes another sip of the cheap wine. It tastes almost exactly like the kind they drank on their home world when they were young and stupid and didn’t know what the world had in store for them yet. The thought is almost as comforting as Lup, soft but reassuringly solid in front of him.
“I started talking to the umbrella.” She manages to keep her face straight but he breaks immediately and then the kitchen’s full of the sound of them laughing together.
Then he’s crying because it’s also kind of damn tragic. He spent twelve long and aching years in a world that wasn’t his, found some magic object and was so hopelessly lonely he talked to it like a journal. He was alone for so long and can’t even imagine what it was like for her, confined in something she had created.
Somewhere along the way the seven of them had strayed so far from normal.
After that first date with Kravitz at the Chug'N’Squeeze, he’d come home cussing the umbrella out and then sat down and explained how much he actually liked the reaper. Now he thinks she must have heard him but then he was just a lost man talking to something that could never reply.
He had been so damn lonely.
He hadn’t been lonely since the Day of Story and Song and he didn’t think he could be now. In the mornings he woke up to Kravitz’s cold arms wrapped around him. He made breakfast for a revolving door of adventurer’s, taught classes he likely wasn’t qualified to and each night he made dinner and his kitchen was never empty when he did. Now he can remember his childhood in full and he knows this is the life he had dreamed of. Maybe even better. He could never have dreamed of feeling this golden.
He’s still crying, so she is too. Just like when they were kids, they were never singly sad. Sadness was a shared feeling. No wonder the twelve years had felt so long. Logically he knew Magnus and Merle had lost those years as well but not in the way he had. For the first time in his life he had been without Lup and he couldn’t be a person like that.
He was working on forgiving Lucretia but it was taking time, sand trickling through an hourglass.
Eventually their crying subsides and they fall into lazy silence at his table. He pours more wine even though they’re both wasted just for something to do with his hands. She breaks the silence, always the one of them to find the path through.
“What was it like, when you’d forgotten?”
“Tiring. Everything took twice as much energy.” She intertwines her fingers with his and he’s smiling again. It’s hard not to when she’s there. This was his home now. He’d fought so hard for it.
He hears the front door swing open behind him and he guesses it’s Kravitz without even turning around. He isn’t sure he should when his cheeks must still be tear stained and his eyes are surely puffy. Lup does a little nod and says something about getting ready for bed. Her room is just down the hall from his, they haven’t worked out how to be apart yet. There’s time for that but it isn’t right now.
And he turns to see his boyfriend. He’s tall and lean, pretty as ever. Taako can see the image of a skull clinging to the edges of his face. It must have been a busy day, normally he shakes off the reaper face before walking in the door. And then Taako’s up in his space, planting a kiss onto freezing lips. He’s used to the cold now and it’s nice against his flushed face.
“I’m so glad I found you.” The words are barely audible, murmured into the crook of the taller man’s neck. But Taako knows he feels them, they warm up the space between them.
He thinks of the dates between pottery and the end of the world. Nights spent under the stars with the Grim Reaper. He had built something small for himself in the year of the Bureau and it had been nice and clean. A little sweetness in among the fight for the relics.
(The fight to fix the chaos they had caused.)
At the time he didn’t know why he didn’t tell Merle and Magnus. He knows now he was waiting to tell her. She had to like Kravitz before it could ever be the real solid thing it became. They’d known something was going on, they weren’t clueless for the most part. But he needed something for himself. He didn’t have a life in Faerun like they did, he just had himself and then incrementally he had Kravitz.
This life was better than anything he could have dreamt of in the inbetween. That’s all he could think of it as. Not before or after just the middle, stranded without his family.
“In the inbetween I told the umbrella about you.” It’s a sentence that must sound like nonsense to his deeply patient boyfriend but now he’s told Lup he feels like he should tell everyone. But Kravitz smiles and his eyes crinkle in such a handsome way he’s glad he said it.
Kravitz is saying something but he’s not really listening. The man's voice melts over his skin like honey and he just revels in the sound. He is too drunk for any more thoughts so he just grabs his boyfriend’s hand. It fits perfectly just like it always has. He is so much happier than he ever thought he could be. In this moment every awful second has been worth it. He is here and he is happy.
Tomorrow he will wake up with his sister down the hall and a man who loves him in his bed. The single sun will rise and he thinks he will make pancakes and everything is so good his chest aches with it. He is not lonely anymore.