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It didn't take Rory long to appear, floating outside Benny's window before the "omw" message had fully sent. Benny even felt his phone vibrate in his pocket as he slid open the window and gave his boyfriend permission to come in, though he didn't bother checking it, knowing from past experience what the message was. He was just glad his boyfriend usually showed up at the agreed upon times. Damned super speed.
"So, where do we need to go again?" Rory asked as he flopped on the witch's bed, completely uncaring of the pile of laundry and weird rocks he disturbed. Rude.
"Well technically we don't need to go to Mexico, I think Texas and Florida would also work, but we'll probably have better luck in South America." Benny explained, carefully stocking his bag with glass jars. Tupperware containers would probably suffice, but he liked the aesthetics, and Grams always went on about the "poisoning powers of commercial plastics." He just had to take extra care to make sure he didn't end up with a bag full of broken glass. He had made that mistake enough times that he was pretty sure there were permanently small fragments stuck inside his fingers from when he had unknowingly reached into his bag while grabbing an ingredient. It was so worth it though.
"Are those the only places it grows?"
"I mean, unless you want to run us all the way to Africa it will have to do."
"Hm, yeah I think we'll stick to Mexico. Not sure my considerable powers extend to running across water. That would be cool though. Like a vampire Jesus! Anyways, you ready to go or do you need to do some witchy stuff first?" Rory asked as Benny zipped up his bag and set it carefully on his desk, having only half listened to his boyfriend's rant. Rory was cute when they spoke with a stream of consciousness, but sometimes Benny could only blink against the onslaught of words, having picked up on absolutely no information.
"Hm, I do have one more witchy thing to do before we leave."
"Which is?"
"Putting a spell on you," Benny grinned, approaching his boyfriend who was giving him a largely unimpressed look from their place on his bed.
"Dude. That sucked."
"I know. Want to make out or what?"
"You're such a dumbass. Of course I want to make out."
-
"Remind me again what we're looking for?"
It was the loudest noise either of them had made in the last hour, the time having been spent with only snapping twigs, crunching leaves, and Benny's muttered Latin breaking the silence. It had taken some trial and error, as well as a lot of frustrated grumbling and yelling at their phones' GPS, but they had somehow managed to locate a forest towards the northern border of Mexico that was likely to contain the herb they were looking for.
At least, Benny kept insisting it was probably there. So far Rory had seen a lot of green shit, and some brown shit, and he was starting to doubt his boyfriend's confidence in his location skills.
"It's um, green leaves? And it might have little white flowers on it, with a yellow middle." Benny didn't look up as he answered, scanning the ground as he walked. Every once in a while he would stop and examine something, occasionally taking some and placing it in one of his jars, though it seemed those were unrelated to their actual quest.
"Ohhhhhhkay. Where do these leafy green things with white flowers grow?" Rory prompted.
"It should be growing in the shade, probably along the river, or at least somewhere lower in the ground that would collect more water. Oh! I think I have a picture here, hold on."
Benny pulled a large tome, bound in leather and looking like it weighed more than Rory, from his backpack, jars clinking against each other as they were disturbed, and rifled through its pages, muttering again.
"Ah, here we go, see?" He held out the book, gesturing to the illustration that took up half a page, surrounded by scrawled notes of the plant's properties.
Rory did see. In fact, he saw a shitty sketch of what looked like pretty much every weed in this forest. Instead of saying that, he nodded.
"Okay, if you see any of it just let me know, Grams said she didn't need much so if we can find one plant we should be golden. We can't take the whole thing though, it's like, bad karma or something, so hopefully it'll be big enough."
"Sounds good."
Benny owed him another date with a lot more kissing and a lot less mud for this. He never wanted to see another weed again in his life.
Their boyfriend was back to muttering. One of these days Rory was going to turn on google translate and find out what he was saying. He missed the good old days when he got to understand Benny's rants.
(Truthfully, they had never understood them. Benny tended to think out loud and, whether his thoughts were in Latin or English, they very rarely made sense to anyone that wasn't him.)
"So…" Rory cast around for a conversation topic. "Has Jane chosen which path she wants to take yet?"
There. It was witchy enough that Benny should hopefully still be able to talk about it while he was "in the zone" but was also something Rory was interested in. They were interested in everything their boyfriend had to say, but sometimes it was nice to understand some of it.
"No, but that's understandable considering she hasn't gotten to play around with very much from the different paths yet. Besides, your path is something that changes all the time. Grams considers herself a Hedge witch most of the time, but she has a lot of Green practices. I don't even like the idea of labeling yourself, you know? Why place these arbitrary limits of the way you use magic when you could just… use it?"
"That makes sense."
"I mean, I guess it might be useful for older witches who want to stay connected to their magic when they aren't actively learning or using it in combat all the time, but for me it doesn't really have much use. Jane likes the idea of it, though. I think she's going to end up being a Hearth witch."
"That's cool."
"Mhmm," Benny agreed, eyes already drawn back to the ground, looking carefully for a hint of the plant they were hunting.
Rory thought again of starting another conversation, but he figured it would fizzle out the same as that attempt. Besides, they didn't want to distract Benny from his goal and end up wandering around the woods for even longer.
"Don't you have a location spell you could use to find it?" Rory couldn't help but ask. He didn't want to sound whiny but his feet were starting to hurt. The strange mind breaking physics involved with being able to run the entire distance across the United States in under a minute was pretty cool, but he did still run that distance. He could have probably done with a break from walking for a few minutes.
"Hm, I guess if we search for a bit longer and still haven't found any I can try it, but I worry about numbing it's magical properties. I could do something to narrow down a general location though, I guess? It shouldn't affect the herb directly, so it should be fine. And if it does hurt anything my grandma can get her own damn herbs."
"Incredibly valid babe."
"Thanks babe. Uh, stand back for a moment, would you?"
Benny once again pulled out an extremely large book, though Rory noticed with a sense of slight horror that this was an entirely different one. If anything, it looked bigger than the other. How the hell was Benny carrying that? How the hell did it fit in there? How were those stupid and yet very aesthetic glass jars Benny insisted on using not broken yet?
Benny had flipped to the page he was searching for as Rory contemplated this, reading in his head for a moment and muttering before nodding.
"Yeah, this should do. You might want to take another step back though, this spell has to spread out over a large area so it spreads with a bit of force, it might knock you over if you stand too close."
Rory complied, taking another step back and even floating a few feet in the air for good measure.
"Oh, good thinking! That should stop you from disrupting the signal. Okay, now this should just be…" he trailed off, once again muttering.
" Area invenire herbam virentem," he said finally, a purple glow beginning in his hand. " Ire," he added, and the glow quickly spread from his hand and cast about in every direction, traveling so quickly that Rory blinked and it was no longer visible. Benny's eyes were closed for a long moment, and he took a deep breath before opening them. Rory couldn't see anything different, but Benny had a satisfied look on his face, so they assumed it must have worked.
"Okay, I got a general read, we actually aren't too far, but it will be faster if we start traveling a bit more north of here rather than continuing west.
"Alright, lead the way Harry Potter."
"I resent that," Benny sighed, but he started leading them deeper into the forest anways. Rory was content to follow, and, well, Benny had grabbed his hand to lead him, so that a plus.
Crunch
Snap
Crunch
"You ever think about how weird it is that things make noises?" Rory spoke up again suddenly. Benny had assured them that they were "getting close" but it was hard for Rory to feel reassured when they didn't have whatever magic sense Benny had.
"Rory what the fuck does that mean?" Benny asked, so startled he looked up from his careful scan of the ground.
"Like you're stepping on leaves and twigs right now and they're making noises. How fucked up is that? It's like they're screaming."
"I really don't think it's comparable."
"Why else would they make noise?"
"I don't know, vibrations in the air? I bet E would know."
"Huh. We should ask him when we get back."
"He'll probably just tell us to Google it."
"Only if he doesn't know."
"Hm, true. Even if he does know he might just call us weird."
"Well, he always calls us weird but usually he answers our questions after that."
"Yeah. He's reliable like that."
"Yeah," Rory smiled. Benny snorted. "What?"
"Nothing, it's just funny seeing that look on your face. You should tell him you like him."
"S-shut up!" Rory demanded. "I do not. And even if I did, theoretically, which, again, I don't, I definitely wouldn't tell him!"
"Okay, okay, I'm just saying, date nights would be a lot easier if all three of us were dating. Plus, then Erica would be the only one who was only dating one person, and that would be really funny."
"The sheer comedy factor is something I hadn't considered before…"
"I think you should go for it, but only if you want to. Dating Ethan is great. Personally, I think more people should get to date him."
"I g-"
"Shhhh shut up! Holy shit we fucking found it!"
"Huh?" Rory asked, startled at the reminder of their actual purpose for traipsing through the woods.
"Oh sweet fuck. Thank god. I was worried we were going to be here all night."
"Benny!" Rory gasped. "You told me you knew we would find some!"
"I mean, I knew we would eventually. Just thought it might take longer."
While they were talking the couple had made their way over to the planet Benny had spotted, carefully nestled along the river bed under a large tree that was providing generous shade. The green leaves nearly blended in with the grass, and Rory wasn't sure it would have been all that noticeable if it weren't for the small white flowers on it. Huh, now that he saw it in real life, he guessed that sketch was pretty accurate.
"Awesome, looks like there's plenty here. Let me just get a few clippings and then we can get out of here."
"Aw, do we really have to leave so soon?"
"Haven't you wanted to leave all day?" Benny's eyebrows were furrowed as he looked up at his partner, having already dropped to his knees to carefully examine the leaved on the plant before he placed clippings into his glass jars.
"Well, I can think of some fun things we can do alone in the middle of the woods."
"You're insatiable," Benny rolled his eyes, but he stood up and kissed them, so Rory was pretty sure he won.