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One of the first things Barry had learned about Taako, many years before when they became acquainted, was that the only person he would willingly talk to on the phone was Lup. He could be half-dead in a ditch and still call Lup to have her call 911 for him, rather than do it himself. Even sharing the biggest news of his life – getting into culinary school, getting custody of Angus, officially calling Kravitz his boyfriend – had all been shared with Barry via a string of emoji-heavy text messages. It was a quirk of his best friend’s personality that he had grown not to question, simply rolling his eyes whenever it made a situation more complicated than necessary.
It was all the more concerning, then, when Barry’s phone lit up during his Materials and Methods of Necromancy lecture with an incoming call from Taako Taaco.
Hastily excusing himself to the hallway, he hit the ‘Accept’ button and said nervously, “Taako? Is everything okay?”
A sharp intake of breath was all he heard for a moment, and then a strangled chuckle. “Uh, well, no, Barold. It’s, uh, it’s Lup? There was an accident in her Intermediate Evocation lab and, uh—it’s—she’s not doing so great.”
Barry fell onto a nearby bench, feeling for all the world like his blood had completely left his body. “What—fuck, Taako, I’m so sorry—where are you? Where is she?”
“She’s at Neverwinter General, I’m—I’m heading there now with Kravitz and Ango. Apparently Merle and Magnus beat us there and the old man demanded they name him her spiritual counsel, so, uh, he’s already in there with her I guess. Lucretia and Dav are heading over as soon as they can, Luc’s getting someone to cover her shift at the writing center. Are you—can you come?”
“Can I—fuck, Taako, of course I’ll come. Let me grab my bag from my classroom and I’ll head that way.”
Taako sucked in another tight breath, and Barry quickly said, “Hey—listen to me. Lup is the toughest person I know, right? She’s going to pull through this and kick all of our asses for being so worried, okay?”
He got a punched out laugh in response, and Taako replied wetly, “Yeah, okay, you’re right. Just—just hurry, okay? We’re pulling up now.”
“Of course, see you all in a few. Text me any new developments, I’ll be there in twenty.”
The line clicked off, and Barry allowed himself a few steadying breaths before attempting to stand. Honestly, he was impressed that he had held it together so well on the phone – Taako may be his best friend, but Lup…Lup was everything. He’d been half in love with her from the moment he saw her, only falling more and more fully in love with every second they spent together for the ten or so years of their friendship. But he had never told her, never even told Taako – it just seemed too fragile a hope to put any weight on, and definitely not something worth risking a friendship over. But now, the thought of her dying without ever knowing how he felt slashed through him like a blade. No. That’s not going to happen, no way.
--
The journey from the bench back into the classroom and then across campus to the hospital moved like a dream. Barry’s watch told him that it took just under twenty minutes, as he had told Taako, but it might’ve been ten seconds or fifty years for all he knew. The only thing he could understand was that he was suddenly in Taako’s arms, letting the elf sob into his shoulder as tears ran down his own face. Through the blur he could see the faces of their friends, Magnus’ eyes red and puffy while Lucretia wrote frantically in her notebook in an attempt to distract herself. Davenport was pacing, Kravitz was trying to keep Angus engaged in a conversation about the detective novels he liked, and it was all Barry could do to guide Taako to a waiting room couch before they both collapsed.
Between heaving sobs, Taako was mumbling things like, “I don’t think I told her I loved her today, Barold, fuck” and “I swear to Istus if she dies I’m going to kill her”. Feeling out of his depth, Barry would simply hum in agreement and rub a comforting circle into his friend’s back. As his tears quieted, however, Taako looked up at him with bloodshot eyes and said with deadly seriousness, “You have to fucking tell her, Barry.”
He laughed nervously. “Uhh, tell her what?”
“You have to tell Lup you’re in love with her. And don’t fucking argue with me, man. If—” he broke off, scrubbing at his eyes angrily, “—when she wakes up, you have to tell her. Get the fuck over yourself and tell her.”
Barry gaped at him, mouth opening and closing in wordless shock. He thought he had been pretty subtle about the whole thing, but then again Taako had an uncanny sense for when other people were hiding things from him. Fuck.
Before he could think of a coherent response, Merle stepped through the swinging doors at the end of the waiting room. He looked exhausted, like he’d burned all his spell slots in the course of an hour, and the pale blue surgical gown he was inexplicably wearing was stained dark with splotches of blood. Behind him appeared a tall doctor in a more traditional doctor’s coat, looking equally tired but more professional than the dwarf by his side.
“Are you all the family and friends of Lup Taaco?”
Around the room, they all nodded and mumbled their confirmations, hands finding hands and squeezing tightly. Barry was certain Taako wasn’t breathing; to be fair, he was barely managing to do so himself.
The doctor nodded and glanced down at the chart in his hands. “Well folks, the good news is that she’s stabilized. Her, ah—” he looked down at Merle somewhat skeptically at this point, “—her ‘spiritual counsel’ assisted our team of clerics and doctors and managed the worst of her external wounds. She’s resting comfortably now, and all vitals are trending positive.”
Magnus let out an abrupt cheer, causing the doctor to flinch. “Well, hold on, she’s not out of the woods yet. We had to put her in a magically-induced coma to address the internal damage, and she’s not coming out of it as quickly as expected. This is a normal response, but it may be 24 to 48 hours before we can say with certainty that she will come out of this unscathed. She had severe burns and internal trauma, and that cannot be overstated. However, if and when she regains consciousness, we expect her to make a full recovery.”
Taako’s vice-grip on Barry’s hand loosened slightly, and he said, “I’m her brother, can I see her?”
The doctor nodded. “Yes, she’s in room 69A. You can all see her if you wish, but only a few at a time, okay?”
Under his breath, Taako mumbled, “Room 69, nice,” as he dragged Barry to his feet and towards the doors to the patient wing, stopping only briefly to hug Merle awkwardly around the shoulders.
The room was simple to find, but Barry still felt winded as he followed Taako through the door. Everything about hospitals made his anxiety spike, to say nothing of the sight before him. Lup’s entire right side was covered in white bandages, glowing softly with healing magic, and while her left side was obviously better off it was clearly crisscrossed with superficial burns and dark bruises. Her face, half-obscured by an oxygen mask also pulsing with magic, was as if lost in uneasy slumber, brows knit together and eyes flickering beneath their lids. Barry was struck by how incredibly small she looked in the bed, surrounded by sterile, medicomagical instruments with her larger-than-life personality stripped away. He was so caught up in searching her for signs of the Lup he knew, the Lup he loved, that he nearly missed Taako’s voice when he spoke.
“She—she looks like shit, Bar, oh my god.”
A startled laugh pushed through the fear in Barry’s chest. “Don’t say that too loud, ‘Ko, she’ll hear you.”
“Well maybe she should! Do you hear that, Lupe? Lupador?” He approached her bedside as he spoke, swaying just a little. “I said you look like shit, what are you gonna do about it?! Come out here and fight me or something? Fuck!”
Taako collapsed into the chair beside the bed, head thrown back with frantic, nearly hysterical energy. “Fucking fuck, I just—I don’t know how to do this, Barry! How do I—how do we just wait and like, hope? How do we just do that when she should be here, she should be okay, she—she has to be okay.”
“Hey, hey.” Barry said quickly, going to his friend’s side and crouching to meet his eyes. “It sucks, but it’s not going to help her if we lose it out here. And in the meantime, we’re here for each other, right?”
The elf took a deep, ragged breath and expelled it forcefully, then nodded. “Yeah. Okay, yeah. Fuck. Nice save there, Barold, knew I kept you around for a reason.”
Barry rolled his eyes. “Right, because this situation comes up sooooo often.” He gave Taako’s hand a squeeze and stood up. “I’ll go back out and let the others come in, that sound okay?”
“Yeah, okay. But don’t go far, alright? She—she’ll need us both here when she wakes up.”
--
Twenty-nine hours. Twenty-nine long, awful hours, and still no change. Lup lay as still as a statue in the hospital bed, and though they were well within the window of possibility, Barry felt sick to his stomach with dread.
He was alone by her bedside for the moment, Kravitz having all but dragged Taako home to change clothes and get some real coffee. Barry’s eyes flickered back and forth between Lup’s prone form and the open notebook in his lap, brimming with anxiety. Before Lucretia had left to get some sleep, she had pressed it into his hands with a very intense expression on her face.
“Write it down, it’ll help.” She’d said, pulling him into a quick hug before leaving him with the blank journal.
Barry had never considered himself much of a writer, but as the hours trudged past he’d decided to give it a try. Most of it was short, stilted observations:
It’s 3:18 am. Angus is asleep on Taako’s shoulder because he refuses to leave his dad’s side. My legs are sore but I can’t stop pacing. Lup is still out cold.
It’s 9:01 am. Magnus brought us scones that Julia made. Taako critiqued them heavily to cover up how emotional he was getting. I’m so hungry but I could barely eat one. Lup is still unconscious.
1:15 pm. About 24 hours now. Davenport FaceTimed in to check on Lup because he couldn’t get out of work today. Taako looks like he might crack. I feel like I might, too. She’s still asleep.
He’d realized quickly that these held little comfort for him as the hours dragged on, so when Kravitz pulled Taako from the room he had tried a new approach – he wrote Lup a letter.
It hadn’t started sappy; well, he hadn’t meant for it to start sappy. But sitting alone in a room with the woman he loved more than sunlight, more than oxygen, more than denim…it was always bound to lean that direction. Between Barry’s own fear of losing her before he could confess and Taako’s voice echoing in his head to tell her, fucking tell her, the short note turned into a somewhat rambling love letter.
He read through it over and over in that quiet room, glancing up at Lup after every sentence, begging to see any difference in her expression, anything, but it was fruitless. Finally, his phone buzzed – a short text from Taako confirming that he and Krav were on their way, and that he should run home to change clothes when they got there – and Barry made up his mind. He carefully separated the page from the notebook, folded it crisply in thirds, and wrote Lup on the outside in large, swirly print. This way, he reasoned, if she woke up while he was gone, she could just read the note and he wouldn’t even have to spit out the words!
Of course, just as he moved to place the letter on her bedside table, a flicker of movement caught his eye.
Barry froze, barely daring to breathe. Had her forehead always been creased like that? Wasn’t her right hand closer to her hip? “Lup?” He asked, and—there! Her nose scrunched, her shoulder twitched. Letter forgotten, he gently took her unbandaged hand and repeated, “Lup? Lup, can you hear me?”
Her lips parted, and she released the driest, ugliest groan that he’d ever heard, but it still sounded like music to his ears. Tears began slipping down his cheeks as Lup fluttered her eyes open, looked up at him, and cracked a tight half-smile.
“Well hey, Barold.”
He choked out a laugh at that, squeezing her hand just to feel her squeeze back. “Hey yourself, Lup. Fuck, I’m so glad you’re awake.”
“That makes two of us, babe, except I feel like I got hit by a truck.”
Barry resisted the strong urge to pull her to his chest, instead cradling her hand between both of his. “You look that way too, except the truck was on fire.”
She rolled her eyes, wincing as the slight movement tugged at the burned side of her face. “I can’t believe the fire betrayed me like this, Bar. I’m gonna have to kick its ass. And speaking of kicking asses—” Her eyes flickered around the room, “—where’s my bro?”
“Kravitz made him go home and get cleaned up for a minute, he’s been a wreck since we got here. They’re on their way back right now, though.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.” Lup said, squeezing his hand again. “All I know is that he wasn’t here when I woke up and you were. He’s getting kicked off the top of the ‘favorite people’ list and you’re taking his spot, babe.”
Barry tried hard not to blush at the comment, chuckling awkwardly and glancing away. How is she still this beautiful when she’s beat to shit?
“Hey, what’s that?”
He turned back to her and followed her gaze to the folded letter on the side table. He was definitely blushing now as he sputtered, “Uhhh, it’s nothing! I just—I was going to go home and clean up when Taako got back, and I didn’t want you to—to wake up without me being here, so I was leaving a note. But I was here, I am here, so it totally doesn’t matter.”
Lup untangled her hand from his and reached for it, fingers barely brushing the crease of the paper before he snatched it away. She gave him A Look. “Damn, Barold, what’s in that thing? If you were going to let me read it when you weren’t here, why can’t I read it now?”
“I, uh…it just seems weird for you to read it when I’m sitting here?” He tried.
“You could, I don’t know, read it aloud to me?”
That felt so much worse than her reading it while he sat there, and Barry shook his head, hard. “Nope, nope, can’t do that either.”
“C’mon, babe, this is some coward shit. Either read it to me, or give me the Fantasy Cliff Notes version, or just…let me read it. You know I’ll only make fun of you the normal amount no matter what, right?”
He felt his resolve waver, and she caught onto that immediately. Lup batted what remained of her eyelashes and slid her hand back into his, interlacing their fingers as best she could. “Pretty please with a cherry on top?”
With her eyes on him, bright and tired and alive, he knew he would’ve given her anything. He awkwardly unfolded the letter one-handed against his leg, cleared his throat, and started reading.
“Dear, dear Lup:
I’ve been sitting here at your bedside for over twenty-four hours now, and as everyone moves around me all I can focus on is you. The silence of you, the stillness of you, how in all the time I’ve known you you’ve never been either of those things for more than a few minutes, even when we’re at the movies. It’s wrong and I’m scared, we all are, but if you’re reading this that means you’re awake and we can replace that fear with happiness. You’re a source of happiness for everyone who knows you, Lup, and I can’t wait to make it back to your side and bask in you again.
There’s something I need to tell you, something I thought I was keeping secret until Taako called me out on it earlier. I’m in love with you, Lup. I knew it the first time we met, when you called me a nerd and invited me into your life in the same breath, and it’s only become more true the longer we’ve been friends. You’ve brought color and warmth and excitement into my world in a way I couldn’t have even imagined before you, and I feel like the luckiest person in the whole planar system to know you, to sit next to you in class and share dinners and fall asleep on the couch watching Fantasy Schitt’s Creek. If that’s all we ever share, I will still count myself as the luckiest person.
I love you, and now you know, and there’s no turning back from that. I’m scared of that, too, but not as scared as I am imagining a world without you in it. So, I hope you are reading this, because no matter what I think there’s a lot left for you to do out there. I really hope I get to be by your side for all of it.
Yours, in every possible way,
Barry”
His hand was shaking as he finished, and he let his gaze linger on the page a moment before raising it to gauge Lup’s reaction. Her eyes were huge, but not looking at him – instead, she stared past him into the middle distance, her expression one he recognized from class as her ‘calculating’ face. Gently, she pulled her hand from his and brought it to her chin, pressing on her lips experimentally.
“Uh, Lup? Are you okay?”
“Just one sec, babe.” Her voice was muffled behind her hand as she continued to press. After a moment, she nodded decisively and met his gaze, something fierce and determined in her eyes. “Alright, Barry? I love you too. That letter was so fucking sappy and perfect, and I love you too, so get over here and let me smooch your fucking brains out.”
“I—what?”
Lup sighed and reached for him, tangling her fingers in the collar of his button-up. “I think twelve years and at least one near-death experience is a long enough wait, right? Kiss me, Barry!”
He didn’t need to be told a third time, especially not with her fingers on his collarbone drawing him in. The first brush of her lips felt like an electric shock, at once everything he’d imagined and so much better. He was suddenly thankful that he wasn’t the one hooked up to a heart-rate monitor, because the thing would no doubt be screaming – he could feel his racing pulse in his eyelids and his ankles and everywhere in between.
For his part, he really was trying to be conscious of Lup’s injuries and be gentle, but when she tilted her head slightly and made a low, needy sound against his lips his higher brain all but short-circuited. Her hand was still scrabbling at his chest, working open the top two buttons of his shirt, and Barry was mere seconds from devising a way to climb onto the bed next to her when there was a comically loud gasp at the door. He leapt back to see Kravitz, Angus, and Taako standing in the doorway, the former looking scandalized and covering Angus’ eyes (as if the kid hadn’t seen far worse in his own home). Taako’s face, however, was nigh unreadable as he approached the bed, taking a place next to Barry and staring at him pointedly.
“Hey, ‘Ko, nice of you to finally—”
The elf held up his hand to silence his sister, then folded all but two fingers. “Real quick, two questions. One: not that some Sleeping Beauty shit wouldn’t be appreciated here, m’guy, but you know you aren’t supposed to kiss unconscious people, yeah?”
Barry shook his head vehemently. “Yikes, no, definitely not, Lup was awake a—and asked me to kiss her, I promise, 100% consensual.”
At Lup’s nod of confirmation Taako’s shoulders relaxed. “Tight. And two: which of you is gonna be first in thanking cha’boy for pushing Barold over the edge, hmm?”
Lup’s laugh filled the room as Barry blushed and sputtered, “I—I would’ve told her eventually!”
“What, in another decade? You’re not getting any younger, and LuLu apparently likes to get blown up. Time is of the essence, my man.”
“Fine, fine – ‘Ko, thanks for scaring Barry into confessing. I guess you’re my favorite person again—wait, tied? You’re tied for my favorite person. With Bar. Obviously.”
Taako made a fake retching noise, but Barry could see the relief and happiness in his eyes as he squeezed Lup’s hand and beckoned Kravitz and Angus inside. Calls were quickly made to their other friends, and before long the room was full of familiar voices and laughter. They’d all made the rounds when they arrived, hugging Lup carefully and giving her small get-well-soon gifts – mostly flowers, although Magnus had brought a carved wooden duck ‘for protection’. As soon as Merle let go of her, though, her hand found Barry’s once more and didn’t let go. And they kept not letting go, as Angus told them about his newest science project and Merle produced a bottle of something that he had snuck in and Lucretia sat at the foot of the bed sketching. It was all so familiar and yet so new, like the press of Lup’s hand in his made every color a little brighter. Finally, when Barry’s eyes couldn’t stay open no matter how hard he tried, he felt a squeeze from their joined hands.
“Go home and sleep, babe, you’re gonna fall out of the chair.”
He rubbed his eyes blearily, shaking his head. “Don’t wanna leave. I’ll miss you too much.”
Lips brushed the back of his hand. “I’ll miss you too, but you’ve got to sleep. I’m not going anywhere, I swear.”
He looked down at her affectionately, her eyes drooping a little with sleep as well, and sighed in defeat. “Okay. I guess I’ll take care of myself and sleep. Can I—can I get a kiss for the road?”
Lup grinned happily and nodded, kissing him long and deep before murmuring “I love you” against his lips. The words jolted through him just like they did the first time; he wondered if they always would, and hoped so.
“I love you too, Lup.”