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Beldaruit sat among a sea of clothes when his apprentice silently arrived at the room's threshold in response to his summons. Qifrey, his name now was, by his own choosing – that was yesterday. A fine name for a fine witch-in-making.
He beckoned Qifrey over, making sure to keep his smile as welcoming and non-threatening as possible. The boy hesitated anyway, but Beldaruit didn't rue him for it. His steps were quiet as he pattered over to Beldaruit's side, his voice in response to Beldaruit's greeting somehow even quieter.
“Pick any clothes you like,” instructed Beldaruit, gesturing to the spread before them. “I have already sent an urgent request for your clothes from the tailor,” he elaborated when Qifrey continued to hesitate, “but I thought I could resize some of my clothes for you to wear in the meanwhile.”
“With magic?” Qifrey asked, too fast, too loud, uncharacteristically without second thought – and then blanched, ghostly pale as he stared at Beldaruit, clinging to his oversized shirt. “I - I didn't - I didn't mean - ”
Beldaruit hadn't even thought of it – magic came as naturally as breathing to him, too intertwined in his life to be subject to separate consideration. But of course the boy was different. He held up a hand and disliked the way Qifrey's mouth just clicked shut at the gesture, all protests dying out.
“It is merely a suggestion,” he amended lightly. “I'm sure the clothes will be ready before we know it.” The witch tailors were likely to use magic in the process, but that was different. “You are allowed to refuse.”
Qifrey bit his lip, head ducked, hesitating, wringing his hands in a way that looked painful. “I - What can - what can go wrong?”
“With the spell, you mean?” Beldaruit clarified, and he nodded furiously at the words. “Well, the clothes could end up lopsided, or return to their original size when the magic runs out. The spell would only affect clothing and not you. Regardless, the choice still remains yours.”
“I don't - ” he shot Beldaruit a glance that could only be called fearful, “I'm sorry. I don't want that – I'm sorry.”
“It is quite alright. Your choice is more than acceptable – I'm the one who is underprepared to have you live here, you see.”
“Because I'm not supposed to be here?” Qifrey whispered, nervously pressing down the hair over his wound. How Beldaruit's heart ached at his words, grieved for the resignation in his voice.
“Where did you hear that?” he softly asked.
“Some people were talking about it,” Qifrey confessed, his gaze darting to Beldaruit before returning to the same spot on the floor in a flash. “And I overheard them.”
Eavesdropped would have been a more suitable word, perhaps, but Beldaruit hardly had the heart to nitpick, let alone blame him for it – not knowing must be terrifying, all the more so for him in particular.
“They would be right,” he admitted with a sigh. “It is quite the exceptional arrangement we have here.”
“What should've happened to me, then?” Qifrey asked. What could happen to me – his real doubt, hanging in the air unspoken.
“Ideally,” replied Beldaruit, truthful yet reluctant, skirting around questions left unasked, “Ideally we would have found your family and seen you returned to them – or, in this case, otherwise arranged for another family to take you in.”
In the silence left by his words his heart beat fast in resigned anticipation, waiting for another new grief to be unearthed – but that moment never came, and he was only met with utter confusion.
“What does ‘family’ mean?” Qifrey quietly asked, not knowing or understanding the devastation behind those words.
Surely not? Surely they had not taken even that from him?
But they had –
He tried to conceal his shock the best as he could, but it was too little, too late – Qifrey had already caught on, with his keen gaze and keener mind, and he wilted even further for it.
–They had, and Beldaruit had a boy left to guide through its aftermath.
“Well, a family is - ” he paused, fumbling, reeling from the attempt to explain something so rudimentary and essential. But then he took a deep breath – Explain it the way you would explain anything else. Teach him. This isn't the time for you to be wavering.
“Most often, family refers to people that are related by blood. You weren't born alone in this world – no one is.” Perhaps the words might be a cold comfort, considering his lack of memories, but Beldaruit would not deny him of this. “The parents who brought you into this world, and the people they are related to: that is one kind of family.”
“Then there is family that isn't related to you by blood – marriage and adoption would be the most common examples, but it need not be limited to that. Whether blood related or not, it is people being brought together by the close bonds of their hearts that makes them family. Do you understand?”
A hesitant nod, the usual vigourless face – an expression too hard to read, a boy too timid, too afraid to elaborate. Beldaruit must simply trust him to have retained at least part of the explanation.
“In your case, I was talking about the family you were born to,” he noted, returning to the point.
“Family that I don't have,” Qifrey spoke up, voice shaky, frail and brittle as cracked glass.
“As far as we could find,” Beldaruit gently reminded. Cold comforts, platitudes, something.
“That's nearly the same,” retorted Qifrey, his bottom lip trembling, expression gloomier than ever. “If I can't meet, or even remember – I don't have any family.”
That wasn't exactly true – Master and apprentice were regarded as family by the laws of witches, but Beldaruit kept that fact to himself – there was a limit to how callous one could be. So Beldaruit simply hung his head in quiet solidarity.
And truthfully, there was a part of Beldaruit, some bleak and craven part of his heart, thoughts that were meant to be tucked away in some unvisited corner of his mind; that feared further questions – What if Qifrey's family were somehow to be found at some point in the future? What if he would have preferred to be sent to live with some outsider family, with memories wiped, over this? – a part that feared the answers to them.
But Qifrey asked not about any of these questions, only for Beldaruit's leave – which he granted with a heavy heart, allowing Qifrey to slink away to whatever corner of the atelier he liked to hide away in his lonesome.
(The clothes he had commissioned fit Qifrey in the end, at least – cold comforts.
Or well, technically fit. The string of his pants still had to be fully drawn for them to stop slipping, but that was going to change if it was the last thing Beldaruit ever did.)
Beldaruit's apprentice arrived for afternoon lessons enraged. He didn't know exactly where he had previously gone, because Qifrey was seemingly allergic to telling Beldaruit anything; but he was willing to stake everything he owned (and that was no insubstantial amount) on that time being spent with young Olruggio.
Which made him all the more concerned – while children having their spats was inevitable, Olruggio was also one of his lonely apprentice’s sole friends. As a result, Beldaruit was nagged by a need to intervene.
“What has gotten you so mad, might I ask?” Beldaruit said at last, making Qifrey sharply look up from his work sheets.
“Nothing,” replied Qifrey shortly, the sleeves of his pale blue shirt ink stained all the way up to the elbows in patches, which reminded Beldaruit that they had once again fallen behind on laundry.
It was a bad habit of his, really. That smoke sculptures didn't stain or wrinkle or smell didn't help his case much either. But he must hasten to deal with it somehow, lest he imparted the habit to his already water averse apprentice as well.
“Did you get into a fight?” he tried instead.
Qifrey huffed and ignored him this time around, directing his anger towards his glyphs.
Just how many times had Beldaruit told him not to draw his magic under the influence of rage?
~
He did discover that it wasn't Olruggio who Qifrey was mad at when the boy slipped away with him before dinner, but that just left him clueless, fumbling even further.
“Are you angry at me, perchance?” he guessed at the dinner table, scrambling through his memories to put together any reason for it.
Qifrey glared at his plate as though it had personally offended him. Really, Beldaruit's heart went out to the potatoes.
“No,” he hissed, voice curt in that particular way that told Beldaruit he had met his mark.
“You know you need to tell me when something is wrong, my boy,” Beldaruit pushed. “I can hardly read your mind to know.”
He earned a bitter scowl for this, but with a sharp breath and a prolonged sigh, Qifrey did relent.
“Is it true that masters and apprentices are considered family?”
“What?” Beldaruit breathed out, stunned by the nature of the topic.
“Oru told me that master and apprentice are considered family, because of his– ” Qifrey abruptly cut himself off, mouth instantly clicking shut, probably out of respect for his dear friend's privacy – Beldaruit would not pry into it any further. “Anyway,” he deflected, “he told me that master and apprentice count as family! Is it true?”
“Technically, the bond of master and apprentice is treated equivalently to that of family,” Beldaruit explained. “But those are nothing but semantics. Yes, it is true.”
“I see,” said Qifrey quietly, resolutely staring at the table, eye glistening in the light. In one forceful motion, he rose, the screech of his scraping chair filling out the silence.
“That's all I wanted to know.” The tablecloth scrunched up under his fingers. “I understand not wanting to consider me family – I won't – I won't ask for it.”
Having said this, he fled to the sanctuary of his room, even as Beldaruit called after him.
~
There were often times when Beldaruit let Qifrey be – times when he needed to be left alone, when it was best to not inflict the world upon him while overwhelmed by his crushing emotions. Then there were times like this, times that led to a point of no return once passed – Beldaruit could feel them tethering on the sharp edge of one.
Thus he stood outside Qifrey's room, cursing his lacking speed as he knocked the door once again.
“You don't have to let me in,” he said when met with a wall of silence. “I shan't even ask you to open the door, or to talk. You don't have to accept my apologies – won't you simply hear me out?”
The answer came in the form of the lock clicking open, the door opening just wide enough for Qifrey's pale blue eye to shine through.
But the door was open – Beldaruit sighed in relief, letting his chair sink down to the floor.
“Am I right to assume,” he questioned, “that this has to do with our old conversation?”
Still tight-lipped, Qifrey gave him a short nod.
“Then you must be wondering why I never told you about this, and I must admit – I couldn't. How callous it would have been, to interrupt a child mourning a family he would never know, only to tell him that place had arbitrarily been replaced by me without his knowledge? Without even giving you the time to make sense of it all? How could I?”
“It’s not like I can remember to mourn anything,” Qifrey bitterly cut in, knuckles white against the wood of the doorframe.
“Don’t say that,” Beldaruit softly replied, hand reaching out to comfort –
Quick as lightning, Qifrey’s hand struck it away. “It’s true!” he shouted. “Don’t you say it isn’t when you’re - when you’re the one who’s always telling me I should stop trying otherwise– ”
The anger deflated into exhaustion in the blink of an eye, but… “You’re right,” Beldaruit accepted. “You’re right, that was insensitive of me. I apologise.”
“Hm.”
Beldaruit took the dismissive sound as a sign to continue.
“You were so afraid, back then,” he whispered. “Afraid of magic, afraid of the Assembly, afraid of witches – afraid of me.”
A sharp breath. “You knew?” Qifrey asked, looking up from the floor, “You could tell?”
“It wasn’t as well hidden as you might have wanted.” Beldaruit admitted, his lips curled into a defeated smile, small and humourless. “To inflict such a bond upon you at such a time, to force a relation when there was no fondness in your heart – it felt rather cruel.” He looked at the ceiling, trying to get rid of the sting in his eyes. “That’s why I said nothing. And later, I hesitated. And I kept on hesitating. Even when your fear faded – mine didn’t. It’s rather embarrassing, isn’t it, for a master to be more cowardly than his apprentice? But regardless, trust me, it was never because I considered being your family to be beneath me – never. Forgive me for ever having made you feel so.”
“But none of that is true anymore, is it?” Qifrey quietly spoke up, something bleeding into his words – dare he call it hope? He pushed the door, wider and wider until it was fully ajar. “The relation wouldn’t be forced anymore, so… maybe we could be?”
Beldaruit's heart swelled at the words. Surely not… surely he didn't mean?
“It would be an honour,” he sincerely replied, brimming with fluttering hope, “to be considered your family.”
“S-same here,” Qifrey echoed, uncharacteristically shy and apple red from embarrassment as he –
Oh.
As he extended his hand towards Beldaruit. Just like Beldaruit once had, back then.
Beldaruit gratefully accepted the offer, encompassing it in his own larger hands, cradling this moment close to his heart.
(Perhaps that exhumation so long ago had somehow been akin to a birth in its own way: to be brought out from the darkness, freed and exposed to the world, then given into the hands of a parent – their first meeting – whilst still soaked in water and clad in the red of cloak and bloodstains, eye brimmed with tears and weakened body supported by a steady pair of arms. Perhaps that had been their fate all along, even when unknowing of it as they were.)
“Don't you start crying!” Qifrey protested – indignant, sniffling.
Beldaruit, indulgent as he wiped away tears from the corners of his eyes, didn't point out the ones welling up in Qifrey's as he smiled.