Chapter Text
“I’ll give you war.”
And truthfully, Ben thought it was an empty threat. Just like so many other unkept promises from their restless battle-worn youth. He honestly had thought it was a fleeting caveat on the wind, murmured (although fiercely) into the night winds as they lay sprawled on the grass. Bottles clinked together in wordless agreement before they left themselves sag back down exhausted and delirious from the adrenaline spiking through their nervous systems only hours before.
He lay there on his back staring up at sky, inky black and mottled with a few clusters of stars and he mused silently that this was all rather poetic and grand. He breathes deeply and whatever kind of illusion his mind was drifting towards (of campfires and gentle laughter and war stories shared amongst friends grateful to have gotten back to one another alive) is abruptly shattered. He blinks and realises where they are and what it means. Their return to Alfea isn’t for some cheerful reunion, it’s a return to base. The school is not the decadent castle of childhood fantasies any longer. There are war rooms and dungeons and unspeakable horrors held within its walls now. And he knows it’s wrong somehow. His magic connects him to the earth and every living thing whispers to him in the night. It leaves him unsettled. Then again, so does the knowledge that the burned ones are ripping through towns and cities ravaging everyone and everything that stands in their path. Parents, children. It doesn’t matter. And so, when he remembers that moment decades later the memory is flecked with fire and blood, stars and desperation and the longing (a terrible aching feeling deeply woven into his gut) to go home. Just be home and safe with his friends and family.
“Do you really think she would go that far though?” he asks quietly into the darkness. His friend breathes a heavy exhale on the grass beside him and scrubs a hand over his face.
“I think… think that she wouldn’t hesitate before pushing any one of us that far. Make it look like an accident and leave us to fall.” He drawls slowly, almost as if surprised at the words his mouth forms around.
“And then?”
“War.”
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They thought they had known war. Intimately and in all of its gory detail. The intensity of the nightmares attested to their past. Fire and blood, and the screaming. The screams were the worst. The most frightening part was as the years went on it became harder to tell whether the screams were their own. So, they had each considered themselves in their own way battle-worn and weary. As only soldiers can be.
Ben notices it first: the shift. He feels a wave of restless energy come over him on a spectacularly bright morning while he’s making coffee. The mundanity of the task is what makes him question it. But it is there and it settles. He can’t quite shake it, though not for lack of trying.
When the branches of the willow tree outside the kitchen start to tap on the window with a strength he doesn’t recognise is the moment he decides he should probably say something.
He does.
Circling back towards her office after attending to the greenhouse and making sure his actual children are otherwise occupied, he is full of purpose. Terra had mentioned something about a PlayStation at ‘the boys’ house when she whirled past him in a happy blur. He reckons the coast is clear, not having seen one of the aforementioned boys in particular he marches forward with intent.
And she knows before he even knocks on her door. Her eyes flashing back to hazel as he steps through and closes the door firmly behind him, the solid oak gliding on its hinges.
“I’m going to replace that later this week.” She muses, sitting back in the chair that once upon a time she found uncomfortable and grotesque.
“With? Surely curtains and beads are going to be misleading for the students. And the faculty.”
“A glass pane.” She laughs at him and motions for him to sit, he can’t obviously and she surely knows that too.
“Right. Well, that seems a bit stu-silly considering your magical abilities, no?” he stumbles over his words a little when a glimpse of her in that chair reminds him that there is a hierarchy within the faculty (much as they often pretend there isn’t) and she is his superior after all.
There’s a knock on one of the many windows and her eyebrow arches towards him in question. He takes a deep breath and the tree branch at her window recedes towards its trunk.
“Ben.” The unspoken ‘tell me’ hangs uncomfortably in the silence. He clears his throat and slaps his thighs, adjusts his glasses before fixing her with a measured look.
“Something has changed. There’s been a…a- “
“A shift.” She finishes for him and meets his eyes with a kind but determined face. A moment stretches between them elongated by an agitation neither can pin down and put to rest. She eventually rises from that chair and moves towards the bookcase. Her eyes glow and she raises a hand momentarily before letting it fall to her side.
“I found a changeling in the first world. She’s arriving next week with the rest of them.” Her tone is weary but unclipped.
“Farah.”
“She needed help. She- she almost burned her family alive. And I don’t know about you but from I know that’s not exactly considered a redeemable offence in the first world.” She turns to face him and shrugs, her hands lifting in the air with a ‘what could I do’ kind of effect.
Ben runs a hand over his face and his brows are knitted together as the pieces begin to fall (not together, regretfully they only manage to forge that path a little later than they would like).
“So, you think that the changeling is powerful enough that the barrier might take notice.”
“I think she might be powerful enough that the land might take notice.”
Ben nods and squeezes his eye shut firmly; he pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s not the changeling, the girl, that bothers him, unnerves him. It’s all of the possibilities and potentials unearthed by Farah finding her that leaves Ben with a tension in his chest that hasn’t been in years.
“She needs training. And she needs support. I can’t think of anyone better equipped to provide that for her than us, Ben.” He watches her move to perch on the edge of her desk, proud shoulders slump slightly and she draws a circle with the toe of her shoe. Afraid to look at him until she is absolutely certain he agrees.
He stands and steps closer, squeezing her shoulder he kisses her cheek gently and wordless moves to leave. With a hand on the door handle he responds: “I’m certain the Headmistress will see to it that the Master of Specialists is informed.”
As he moves through the corridors the restlessness still lingers over him. Perhaps it was wishful thinking on his part that one conversation would fix it. But then again, she is the most powerful fairy alive that he knows. He’s crossing the expanse of meadow when his friend’s words echo in his ears. And he knows it’s magic, a magical foreshadowing to their lives that he truly would rather ignore but he can’t.
“I’ll give you war.” And there was no threat in Saul’s voice that night, just a promise.
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