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Angus McDonald wasn’t necessarily a normal eleven-year-old boy.
For one thing, he was the world’s greatest detective. For another, he was getting to be pretty handy with magic. And, perhaps most importantly, he joined a top-secret organization on an artificial moonbase with whom he not only found a family but also helped save the world.
At the same time, though, he was quite a typical boy in other ways.
He sometimes got tired of his homework, and grumpy when he stayed up too late. He liked playing soccer on the team at school and loved getting to help Magnus with his dogs. He always ate his vegetables without complaint - after all, Taako always made them taste amazing - but his favorite snack was Fantasy Oreos. He was embarrassed by it sometimes, but he needed the bear hugs he got from Magnus, the hair ruffles from Lucretia, the pecks on his forehead from the twins.
But, most normal of all, Angus sometimes got nervous.
He was perfectly fine a lot of the time. Sometimes he’d go a whole week without an ounce of fear, could go about his days perfectly carefree.
But sometimes he couldn’t.
It would come on without warning. Sometimes he woke up with the buzzing in his head, the ringing in his ears. He’d managed to make it down for breakfast, and the way Taako and Lup flitted about the kitchen while Barry pored over research at the counter and Magnus set the table - it almost made him feel okay.
He knew the others saw him pick at his food, push it around his plate, but they didn’t say anything. His stomach churned with the guilt of wasting food the twins worked so hard on, but that guilt only kept him from eating, too.
On those days, Angus would help gather up the dishes to be washed and try to make a quick escape to hide back in his room, but not before Taako pressed a banana or something in his hand, kissed the crown of his head, and let him run upstairs to burrow beneath a blanket under his desk for the next few hours.
He didn’t always wake up with it. Other times, he went the whole day as easily as anyone. But then, out of nowhere, when he was helping Barry in the garden or brushing one of the dogs, it hit him out of nowhere.
It felt like the whole world tipped and suddenly his heart was lodged in his throat. It was harder to escape in those cases; he couldn’t just run off without one of the others giving him an odd look.
He took on pacing as a distraction. He said it helped him focus, that he needed to think hard about a case or a homework problem but really it felt like the only way to control the crawling under his skin. He knew it made no sense, but it felt like if he just kept walking , the buzzing in his head might just trickle out of his feet. It was nonsense, but so was all of this , and Angus began to fear that this would be his reality until the day he died - just a steady stream of staticky fear interrupting the very best parts of his life.
In very typical eleven-year-old boy fashion, Angus didn’t know this wasn’t true.
One Saturday, Angus blissfully woke up to a perfectly normal, static-free morning, the nest of baby birds outside his window chirping happily. He ate both his pancakes for breakfast and even asked for seconds, which made Taako beam. He got all his homework done by noon without any issues, tidied up his already-tidy room, and had just curled up on the couch with a new book when his heart clenched ever so slightly.
He tried his best to ignore it, but suddenly the letters on the pages were just that - he couldn’t string them together into anything resembling words. He took a few deep breaths, hoping to calm the wave before he crashed, but his palms were already beginning to sweat.
He had to get up, had to go . He didn’t know where or why; all he knew was go.
He hadn’t seen anyone in at least an hour, so he figured they were scattered about the house in their own little nooks of preference. Safe to make a run for it, then, he decided.
He jumped to his feet too quickly, felt the world sway a little until he righted himself. Gripping his book tight to his chest, he took jerky steps toward the hallway. Some part of him vaguely realized he wasn’t really breathing, but he couldn’t focus on that. He kept one hand on the wall to steady himself but made quick work stumbling down the hallway. The stairs were in sight, he was nearly there, nearly to his room where he could crawl under his desk and hide forever and ever-
He was so disoriented that he didn’t see the pair of legs step out of the kitchen until he was running into them, nearly losing his balance altogether and ending up on the carpet.
“Watch where you’re going, Ango,” Taako said amusedly, catching his shoulders before he fell. “You good?”
Angus swallowed hard and nodded, eyes cast down to the floor as he tried to sidestep around Taako. Under normal circumstances, he’d apologize profusely, but now he wasn’t sure he could open his mouth. He was so close...
Taako intercepted his escape route and crouched in front of him with a frown. “Hey, seriously, you okay? You look like you saw a ghost, dude.”
Shit, now he had to say something.
Angus met Taako’s concerned gaze and tried for what he hoped was a smile. “I’m okay!” He said, already inwardly cringing at how forced it sounded out loud. “I—I’m okay — ” The room spun, and he couldn’t help but pitch forward.
Taako managed to catch him by the shoulders, eyes wide. “Istus bless, Angus, take a breath. C’mere, sit down for a minute.” He was trying to help, but Angus refused to comply— if he could just get upstairs…
“I-I’m fine,” he gasped, struggling in vain to escape from Taako’s gentle but unyielding hold. “I gotta— Taako, I need to leave—”
“Sweetheart, I need you to breathe ," Taako said, his voice laced with magic that Angus couldn't even be bothered trying to deflect. "Do you realize you’re having a panic attack?”
Taako's voice came out so uncharacteristically gentle that Angus briefly stopped struggling. “No, I— I just- Taako, I need to go , please,” he whispered, cheeks burning as his voice wavered and tears welled in his eyes.
Taako squeezed his hands. “Do you need to go somewhere special, or just go?”
Angus opened and closed his mouth several times.
“Right, okay.” Taako straightened up and brushed off his jeans. “You need to walk, is that it? Walk it out?” He held his hand out, and Angus, nodding dumbly, took it.
Taako led him down the hall in the opposite direction, stopping by the front door to shove on his sneakers, grab the keys from the little bowl, and take his sweater from its hook. Without saying anything at all, he crouched down in front of Angus- whose mouth still refused to cooperate- and helped him put on the sweater.
“Right,” Taako said with a nod of approval. “Off we go, then.”
Angus, more concerned with how very not fond of breathing his lungs were, just stared back.
Taako took his hand again and tugged him out the door, setting off down the narrow dirt path that led toward the forest. “I can talk your ear off if you think it might help to distract you, but I can shut up, too, if you’d rather,” he said easily, tugging his braid over one shoulder.
“Um. You can talk,” Angus managed to croak. His cheeks burned, but when he looked up at Taako, he looked unbothered.
“Hell, yeah. Alright, so do you remember how Mags and I went to get lunch with Hurley and Sloane on Tuesday? You should come next time, by the way, they miss you. We’ll find a time when you’re not in school. But anyway, I was being my usual generous self and let them choose the restaurant, but oh my gods , Angus, you wouldn’t believe—”
When Taako said he could talk Angus’s ear off, he wasn’t kidding. At first, Angus wasn’t really paying attention. He was more focused on the way his heart was still hammering against his ribcage and whether any air was making it into his lungs.
After a few minutes, however, he caught himself actually nodding along to Taako’s story. It was a little hard to pay attention when his own thoughts were still racing, but it was a funny story- and telling funny stories at Merle’s expense was one of Taako’s greatest talents.
When Taako regaled him with another tale, that of his disastrous first attempt at making tikka masala, Angus actually laughed out loud. Taako smiled down at him briefly and carried on, but he held Angus’s hand just the slightest bit tighter.
After a while longer, Angus started pitching in comments of his own.
“Did you really think you could use a Fantasy Bunsen burner to make pancakes?”
“Magnus says he’ll build a treehouse for Mavis and Mookie and me in the spring.”
“To be fair, Merle was out of spell slots. I don’t think Zone of Truth would’ve helped much, anyway— not that it normally does.”
By the time they rounded back through the woods and the house was in sight, the sun was beginning to set over the valley. As Angus admired the brilliant streaks of pink and orange arching through the sky, Taako stopped to crouch in front of him.
“You don’t feel so bad now, do you? Still upright and all that?” Taako asked, giving him a critical once-over.
Angus blushed slightly and nodded, not quite able to meet his eyes.
Taako hesitated. After a long moment, he sighed. “I’m sorry, Angus.”
“You- what?”
“I’m sorry,” Taako said again. “The anxiety, the panic... This has been going on for a while now, hasn’t it? And you’ve been dealing with it by yourself?”
Angus hated himself for the way his throat suddenly felt too tight to reply but forced himself to nod weakly.
Taako crouched in front of him to smooth back his curls, an unreadable expression on his face. "I should've noticed sooner. I'm sorry you've been doing this solo. But the good news is that I know some tricks to make all this easier to manage. And if those don't work well enough, we can find someone a little more qualified to talk about it with you. Plenty of people have a similar deal."
Angus worried his lip. “Promise?” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded all croaky and childish, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. “‘Cause I’ve been trying my best with it ever since the Song, but it just keeps getting worse no matter what I do, and at this rate, I feel like it’s never gonna go away—”
“It’ll get better,” Taako cut him off firmly. “I can’t promise that there’s some magic solution to make it go away overnight, but I know for a fact that this is something we can fight. And I can promise that I’ll be there the whole time, okay? All of us will.”
Angus let his breath out, along with some of the tension in his shoulders. After a moment, he managed a smile, small and shaky but there , and he let himself be proud of that.