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Qifrey had known that he wouldn’t be sleeping tonight. He never did, after nights like that. Olruggio’s eyes, widening in realization, shock, betrayal, before slipping closed into sleep, haunted his dreams most nights, but were always worse on the night. It was getting easier, though, and that, more than anything, was what scared Qifrey half to death.
They had talked in Olruggio’s room, last night, and it was so simple to move his friend into his bed, to watch the magic-induced unconsciousness transition into the easy breath of natural, dreamless sleep. Olruggio would assume that he had fallen asleep before the end of their conversation, and Qifrey would tease him about it until the girls laughed (or, at least, until Coco and Tetia laughed), and he would pretend not to see the way confusion lingered on Olruggio’s face for a moment too long before fading into fond exasperation. And life in the Atelier would continue on, the way it was supposed to. The way it had to.
The sun was coming up now, but Qifrey was in no rush to get out of bed. His apprentices had found a special kind of joy in preparing breakfast together, in having food and coffee ready when Qifrey and (later, always later) Olruggio emerged. He’d leave that to them, give himself an extra moment of quiet to calm his mind.
He should have known better.
“Master Qifrey! Master, please, something’s wrong!”
Tetia’s voice echoed down the hall, heading in his direction, and Qifrey wasted no time in shoving aside his covers and scrambling to his feet, rushing to the door to meet her. He pushed it open, and there Tetia stood, her eyes wide and frightened. “Are you alright?” Qifrey asked, scanning her quickly. She didn’t seem to be injured, her pigtails still in place, a little bit of flour dusted on her robes.
“Yes,” she said, wringing her hands, “yes, I’m okay, and Coco and Agott and Richeh are, too. It’s, um, it’s… Master Olruggio.”
Qifrey's whole body felt suddenly cold, his breath caught in his throat. He was moving before he even realized it, stepping forward towards the hallway.
But there was Tetia, holding up both hands to stop him. “Wait, Master, please,” she said, and from her face, it was clear that she had expected this. “Let me… let me explain, first. Please.”
Qifrey knew his students well- had taught them well. If Olruggio was injured or missing, if they were being attacked, Tetia would not be holding him here. He had to trust that she had a reason. “Alright,” he said, “I’ll wait. What’s happened?”
Tetia shifted her weight from one foot to the other, clearly gathering her words, and Qifrey wondered for a moment about why she had been chosen for this role, wondered about what the other girls were doing right now. But then she began, and those thoughts moved to the back of his mind, for later. “We were making breakfast,” Tetia started, “the four of us. Like usual. Agott heard Master Olruggio’s door open, so she started making his coffee, since she knows best how he likes it. But, um, we didn’t actually hear him in the hallway, and then the coffee was done, and he still hadn’t gotten to the kitchen, and that was… weird.”
She hesitated again, and a small part of Qifrey wanted to shout at her to get to the point, to push past her and go see Olruggio for himself. But the other part of him, larger and louder, could see how scared she was. So he stayed put, and kept his voice soft, and said simply, “Go on, Tetia.”
Tetia nodded, swallowed hard, and continued, “Agott went into the hallway, to see if maybe we were wrong about hearing the door, and… and Master Olruggio was just… standing in the hallway, in front of his door, not looking at anything, really. Agott asked if he was alright, and that’s when the rest of us went out to join her, and.” She stopped again, her gaze lowering to the floor, before she seemed to steel herself, looking up to meet Qifrey’s eye and finishing, “He didn’t know who we were.”
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe he couldn’t breathe-
Qifrey stood in the doorway to his room, looking down at his student, but at the same time, he was drifting, miles away from there. “What do you mean?” he heard himself ask, and it must have been him speaking, but it didn’t feel like him.
“He knew we were apprentices,” Tetia answered, and her voice was muffled, like it was being carried through deep water. “He recognized our cloaks, and our hats, but he didn’t know us. And he didn’t know the Atelier, either.”
Slowly, with great effort, mindful of Tetia waiting for a response, Qifrey pulled himself back to his body, back to his awareness of the world. Now was not the time for panic, for fear. “Alright,” he said, and his voice was much calmer than he thought it might be. “Where is he now?”
Tetia managed a smile, small and shaky. “Drinking coffee in the kitchen,” she said. “It’s definitely still him.”
“A good sign, too, that he recognized you as witches,” Qifrey added, and it took monumental effort to speak like this, in a way that would reassure Tetia instead of frightening her further. How much was lost? He knew the uniform of an apprentice, but not the Atelier, not his home.
And the other question, of course, the one that Qifrey’s mind couldn’t bring itself to ask, the one he flinched away from, the one he knew he’d have to consider. The one he feared he knew the answer to.
Was this his fault?
He understood now, at least, why Tetia had stopped him from rushing in. Olruggio was likely putting on a brave face for the children, but it had to be terrifying, waking up in an unknown place with no idea how you got there. Qifrey, an adult, suddenly crashing into the room wouldn't have helped matters. Qifrey took a deep breath of his own, managing to smile at Tetia, and said, "Thank you for explaining, Tetia. Shall we go join the others?"
Tetia nodded, though her hands still trembled at her sides. "Do you think you can help him, Master Qifrey?"
"We can try," Qifrey said, reaching down and taking Tetia's hand in his. "All of us, we'll do what we can."
His apprentice squeezed his hand, and together, they walked towards the kitchen.
He heard Coco’s voice before they reached it, her chatter filled with that relentless excitement he knew so well. “It’s great, isn’t it?” she said, and Qifrey could hear the grin. “So small, but makes such a difference. It’s, um, one of yours, actually.”
“Is it?”
That voice was Olruggio’s, and Qifrey had to stop for a moment, his breath catching in his throat. Because he knew Olruggio’s voice, better than his own, sometimes, and he could hear the wrongness of it- the confusion, the vacancy. Tetia looked up at him, concerned, and he managed to offer her a smile, though he knew it was strained.
Coco, meanwhile, just kept going. “Yeah, you made them for us, because we were having some trouble sleeping! Your contraptions are incredible, Master Olly.”
Qifrey and Tetia stepped into the room, then, and Qifrey took stock as quickly as he could- there was Coco, gesturing with enthusiasm, though now he could see a certain frantic quality to her expression. Richeh, watching her intently, expression even more unreadable than usual. Agott, sitting with her head lowered, avoiding eye contact entirely. And Olruggio himself, sitting at the kitchen table with his back to the door, both hands wrapped tightly around a steaming mug resting in front of him.
“Good morning, Master,” Richeh said softly, cutting off Coco from whatever she had been about to say next.
Qifrey nodded at her. He didn’t quite know what to say, and before he decided, Olruggio turned around in his seat, his eyes going abruptly wide.
“Qifrey?” he breathed, like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing, and Qifrey’s heart clenched in his chest.
“You know him?” Coco asked, looking between the two, her own eyes widening in a match to Olruggio’s.
Olruggio didn’t turn to look at her, keeping his focus on Qifrey’s frozen form. “Sort of,” he said, and the words came slowly, like he was carefully weighing each one. “Things are… scattered. I have pieces, but I don’t know how they connect to each other, and I know I’m missing some. But I know your face.” He tilted his head, and a small smirk danced across his face. “More of an old man than I remember, though.”
The laugh tumbled out of Qifrey’s mouth against his will. “There’s a mirror in your room, isn’t there?” he asked, and it was astonishing, how quickly the panic could fade, with just that one small flash of who Olruggio was- who he should be. “Don’t suppose you’ve taken a look at your face.”
“Fair point,” Olruggio snorted, rubbing at the scruff on his chin.
“Um,” Tetia interjected, “I feel like there are, maybe, more important things? Right now?”
As quickly as it had come, the teasing died. “Right,” Qifrey said, looking at his students, at his friend. “I think Olruggio and I should talk a bit, try to figure out what’s going on. And, for now, that will be easier with just the two of us. We’ll need to pull all our minds together later, but first we need the facts. I hope that’s alright?”
For the first time since he had entered the room, Agott looked up, her face stormy. “Only if you promise,” she said. “Promise that you’ll tell us if you figure anything out. Promise that you’ll let us help.”
Qifrey opened his mouth, but for a moment, no sound came out. Because he already knew, didn’t he? He could tell himself that it was only a guess, that there was no way to know what really caused this, but he was lying to himself. He knew, because he had done it. His oldest, dearest friend had seen him, had understood him, had tried to help him, had trusted him, and Qifrey betrayed that trust over and over again. It was only a matter of time before something broke.
But the children didn’t need to know that.
“I promise you, Agott,” he said, and forced himself not to look away from her. “If there is anything at all that you can do to help, I will tell you.” It was the only promise he could make, and he had to hope that it would be enough.
For a moment, Agott didn’t speak, and the others stayed quiet, waiting for her. Her eyes never left Qifrey’s face. At last, she nodded, just once. “I’ll trust you, Master,” she said. “Please don’t let me down.”
“Come on,” Richeh said, pushing out her chair and stepping away from the table. “We all have work to do.” The others began to follow, but at the last moment, Richeh stopped in the doorway and turned to face the table again, dipping her head in Olruggio’s direction. “I’m glad to have met you, Master Olly, even for the second time.”
Olruggio, still turned around in his chair, smiled at her. “I’m glad to have met you, too. All of you. Let’s hope we don’t have to do it a third time.”
Richeh smiled back, the small, private smile she reserved for those closest to her, and then the four girls filed out of the room, leaving Qifrey and Olruggio alone.
Qifrey moved on quiet feet until he stood on the opposite side of the table, his hand resting on the back of a chair, not able to make himself sit down yet. Instead, he simply stood and watched as Olruggio practically crumpled in his seat, no longer needing to put on a show for the girls.
“Qifrey,” he said, the words muffled as he buried his face in his hands, elbows resting on the table, “what happened to me?”
“I meant what I said to Agott,” Qifrey responded, rubbing a hand back and forth against the grain of wood in the chair. “We’ll… we can fix this.”
Slowly, Olruggio raised his head. “That’s not an answer.”
Even now, even with his mind a scrambled, broken thing, he was too perceptive. “I know,” Qifrey admitted, and then he stopped. He couldn’t go on.
Olruggio spoke instead. “It could be a curse, but I doubt it. If you suspected that someone had cursed me, you’d already be out hunting them down.”
“How do you still know me so well?” Qifrey murmured, not really expecting an answer.
“It’s a… feeling, more than anything,” Olruggio shrugged. “I know we were friends as children. Most of my youth is still in here, if foggy. But you… you’re there for all of it.” He smiled, a little sheepish. “You must be important to me still.”
“No more so than you are to me.”
Olruggio ducked his head, going quiet for a moment, before he shook himself off. “Ah, right, the other option. If it’s not a curse, then the only other thing I can come up with is that… a spell went wrong, somehow. A memory erasure that took more than it should have. That would explain why you’re not telling me what happened, either because something happened to both of us and you don’t remember either, or because it’s something you’re not supposed to be talking about.” He looked up, then, meeting Qifrey’s eye, his own gaze suddenly much sharper. “I’ll only ask you one more time, and I promise you, I’ll accept whatever answer you give. What happened to me?”
Qifrey knew that he should tell his friend the truth. They’d be able to work together on a solution more easily if Olruggio could see the circle that Qifrey had drawn, and if anyone would understand, if anyone would forgive him, if anyone would accept his reasons, it would be Olruggio, who had already forgiven him so many times before. He should tell the truth.
Qifrey opened his mouth. Qifrey lied.