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Cellbit’s twentieth birthday comes and goes with little fanfare. He goes to class. Takes notes. Gets lunch. Goes to the library. Goes home. Does homework. Skips dinner. Ignores his sister blowing up his phone. Turns his phone off. Goes to bed.
His birthday is the one night out of the year he actually tries to sleep on. There’s no point in staying up until midnight waiting by the window just to get disappointed. (He learned his lesson four years ago on his sixteenth. A whole night up and waiting in the backyard for nothing. Absolutely nothing.)
And so Cellbit sleeps. He doesn’t have any magic, so he doesn’t dream. It’s a blessing, really; you can’t have nightmares if you can’t dream to begin with.
He doesn’t dream, but he does find himself tossing and turning uncomfortably throughout the night. It’s like the room is too hot, but it’s also too cold, but it’s also too hot, but it’s also-
Eventually, he stumbles to his bathroom and takes an extra dose of his sleeping pills. His doctor won’t be happy, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
Cellbit falls asleep for real just after midnight, and he sleeps so deeply that he can’t hear the scratching at his bedroom window and the frantic squeaking from outside.
In the morning, Cellbit rolls out of bed and trips over himself on his way to the bathroom. His head is still fuzzy with sleep, so he only halfway acknowledges the way his apartment’s lights are flickering above him.
He turns on the shower and is immediately blasted in the face with water that smells like wine.
Weird.
He showers and brushes his teeth and gets dressed. He makes a mental note to get more shaving cream and toothpaste.
Skipping breakfast, Cellbit grabs his bag from by his front door and leaves for class.
(He doesn’t notice the little head sticking out of his bag or the way his footsteps almost seem to leave sparkles in their wake.
His head hurts.)
He sits down for his first class and pulls his laptop out of his bag without looking; his fingers brush against something fuzzy, but he figures it’s the sweater he keeps in his bag specifically for days when the library’s air conditioning is working too well.
Class one of the day is all about magic theory. Cellbit doesn’t have any magic, but it’s a required class for his degree. So.
Cellbit’s laptop shocks him every time he presses the spacebar. Its screen flickers every color of the rainbow.
So Cellbit makes a mental note to take it over to Pac and Mike after class so they can take a look at it. They’re technopaths, they can figure it out.
Class ends, and Cellbit shoves his laptop in his bag and hurries out of the classroom.
It’s as he’s leaving that a student behind him screams, “Holy shit, there's a rat in his bag!”
And that’s when Cellbit thinks back to the fuzzy thing he felt, and he yelps and pulls his bag off and throws it to the side. The rat comes flying out, slamming into the wall and sliding to the floor and squeaking what has to be little rat swears.
Cellbit scoops his bag up and rushes out of the room, but he swears that the rat flips him off as he goes.
What the fuck.
“Your laptop’s fine,” Pac says after only a second of looking at it.
Cellbit looks him dead in the eyes and touches the laptop’s screen. It explodes into a multitude of colors and starts playing the Nyan Cat video.
Pac’s eyes widen and he snatches the laptop away from him. As soon as it's out of Cellbit's hands, the screen goes black, and the sound shuts off.
"Come back tomorrow," Pac tells him.
As soon as Cellbit sits down for his second class of the day, he finds himself face-to-face with the rat from earlier. It's sitting on the table where Cellbit's unofficial assigned seat is with twitching whiskers and wiggly little rat fingers.
"Absolutely not," Cellbit tells it. He doesn't know why he's telling it, but he does.
And then he moves to another seat on the complete other side of the room where he knows nobody sits.
But the rat follows him. It squeaks as angrily as a rat can squeak, and it fucking follows him.
A couple of other students come into the room just as Cellbit is moving seats again. Their familiars are with them, because of course they are; every table has a spot for a familiar to sit with their magician whether the familiar is in human or animal form, and the rat seems just at home curling up in the little nest area wherever Cellbit chooses to sit.
And so Cellbit doesn't sit. After two more times of trying to move seats, Cellbit grabs his bag and books it out of the room, head throbbing.
That night when he finally calls Bagi back, she asks, "Are you sure that it wasn't your familiar?"
Cellbit snorts humorlessly.
"Are you kidding?" he asks. "I know it isn't. It's been five years, why would it show up now?"
"Maybe it got lost, I don't know. Tina was late, remember?"
"Yeah, by an hour."
"She was still late!"
"Five years isn't late. Five years is evidence."
"Dude. I think a rat following you around is pretty good evidence."
"Well-"
"And your shower smelling weird."
"Bagi, listen-"
"And your computer shitting itself! Remember when I first got my magic? I blew up my phone!"
"That's all. Circumstantial."
"Cellbit."
Sighing, Cellbit looks out the window. Thankfully, the rat didn't follow him home; he doesn't know what he'd do if he was actually being stalked by a goddamn rat.
"There's no point in even trying with you," Bagi huffs. "When did you get so pessimistic?"
"It's called being realistic," Cellbit flatly replies.
Sighing again, he explains, "Look. I realized a long time ago that it just isn't going to work out. Either my familiar hated me or the gods did, and I've taken enough divination classes to know that the gods don't actually pay attention to us mortals anymore."
"What are you doing taking divination classes?"
Cellbit doesn't know how to tell her that he's been trying to reach the gods and beg for their forgiveness, so he doesn't.
His phone explodes, instead, in the exact same way Bagi's did when she was fifteen and taking her first ever selfie with Tina.
Cellbit stares down at his phone's sparking remains and tells himself not to believe.
There's no point, after all.
Cellbit picks up his laptop from Pac and Mike first thing in the morning, dropping his phone off with them in exchange, and then he goes to class. Thankfully, the rat isn't waiting at Cellbit's desk for him.
No, instead, there's a hot guy sitting at the desk next to Cellbit's playing on his phone.
For whatever reason, the lights in the lecture hall flicker.
Ah.
Very, very casually, Cellbit goes to his seat. He sits. He pulls his laptop out. He flinches as it shocks him. He swears as it starts playing music at the top of its volume.
The guy next to him looks like he's trying very hard not to laugh.
He's... wow. Fluffy-looking brown hair, eyes the color of melted chocolate. Freckles on his nose. A jawline so sharp that Cellbit could cut himself on it.
Cellbit hasn't seen him in the class before, but that isn't too surprising; he keeps to himself, he doesn't know half the people in his class.
But he's hot, and he's laughing at Cellbit. He's laughing! At Cellbit!
Gods, Cellbit wants to melt into his chair and fucking die. Is it too late for him to switch out of the class?
As if sensing Cellbit's crisis, the other guy stops his laughter by biting his lip and looking away. He crosses his legs, and the toe of his shoe bumps against Cellbit's leg.
Suddenly, Cellbit's laptop goes back to normal. The audio shuts off, and the screen switches back to his Google Doc, and it's. Normal.
Cellbit could just about die with relief.
Class goes normally, and Cellbit leaves as soon as the professor dismisses everyone. He keeps his head down as he walks out the door, not willing to accidentally make eye contact with anyone. (Especially not the hot guy.)
After class, Cellbit likes to grab a spot in the student center and copy his notes from his laptop into a notebook. They say that you memorize things easier if you write them by hand, after all, and Cellbit doesn't have the magical ability to cast a memorization spell.
So he sits at a table, and he puts his AirPods in, and he gets to work. He keeps an eye out for any rats trying to bother him, and he gets to work.
...The hot guy from earlier sits with him at the table, and Cellbit gets to work.
"Hey," the hot guy says, voice barely audible over Cellbit's music. "You're Cellbit, right?"
Cellbit nods, short. He's working, hot guys be damned.
But then his AirPods heat up so abruptly and so quickly that he's forced to yank them out of his ears and throw them onto the table. Just the same way Bagi's old wired earbuds did on her fifteenth birthday.
The hot guy snorts, but he quickly quiets down as Cellbit glares at him.
Raising his hands, the guy says, "Hey, it's chill! It's chill! I'm just... uh. Wanting notes!"
Cellbit blinks. "For class?"
The guy nods. "Yes. For class. For the class we share."
His voice is... rough. It sounds like he hasn't spoken for years, filled with cracks and dips and scratches. But, really, Cellbit can't judge considering how rough his voice is now after years of screaming at the gods.
Hesitantly, Cellbit nods. "Okay. What's your student email? I'll share my doc with you."
"My what?"
"Your. Student email. You know, the one with your ID number in it?"
There's a long period of silence before the guy gasps and goes, "Oh, shit! I forgot it!"
Hm.
"You... forgot it."
The guy nods. "Yep. Completely forgot it. I'm real bad with numbers. So why don't I give you mine?"
He winks.
Cellbit blushes.
"My-" he stammers. "My phone isn't working. Right now. So. Um."
"That's fine! I'll just write my number down for you. Hold on..."
The guy steals Cellbit's pen right out of his hand and leans forward, scribbling his phone number across the top of Cellbit's notebook. His writing is shaky and uncertain, and he takes a long time doing it. But that's fine, Cellbit remembers when Felps had to relearn how to write after his car accident back in high school. He gets it.
Eventually, the guy sits back and drops Cellbi's pen onto the table. He smiles, wide and toothy, and Cellbit barely even notices his laptop's screen turning pink and erupting in cartoon hearts.
His name is Roier, and he might be the first friend that Cellbit has managed to make outside of his old high school gang. Because, sure, he has Pac and Mike and Felps, but they've known each other for years. And Bagi is his sister. But Roier? He's new, and he's exciting.
Roier doesn't mention his familiar. He doesn't really do any magic at all, and Cellbit appreciates it. He doesn't ask why Cellbit doesn't do any magic or talk about his familiar, and Cellbit really appreciates it.
Roier doesn't talk about his family. He mentions having a brother and a grandfather, but he doesn't go into detail. He has a cousin named Melissa that he lives with and two friends that he jokingly calls his parents.
Cellbit doesn't talk about his family. He mentions Bagi a few times, but he doesn't talk about his parents. (He thinks that, somewhere, his parents appreciate it.)
Roier doesn't meet up with Cellbit outside of class and the student center. He always says that he's busy, and that's fine. Really! Cellbit's crush doesn't need to dictate Roier's life!
But Cellbit does see the rat a few times on campus. It follows Cellbit around and tries to climb into his bag and tries to get him to pick it up. But like. It's a rat. And it's a stalker.
"I hate rats," Roier says one day after class and in the student center.
Cellbit nods in agreement.
Roier continues, "My brother is obsessed with them. He always wanted a pet rat, but my abuelo never let him have one."
"Rats kind of freak me out," Cellbit says. "Like. Why do they have fingers?"
"To grab things, stupid."
"Okay, but they have mouths."
"Rats are too smart for that," Roier explains. He's staring down at his notebook, hands in his lap, fingers knit together tightly. "They have egos. You call a rat an animal, and it'll rip your throat out."
Cellbit thinks back to his teenage years and the week or so after his fifteenth birthday. He remembers the way Tina screamed and the way the sirens flashed red and blue and red and blue and-
"I get that," he admits. "I don't know if I ever told you, but I have a twin sister. When we turned fifteen, she got her familiar, and I..." (He swallows, hard.) "Yeah."
Roier is quiet after that.
A few days pass without Roier, which is fine. Cellbit's laptop just explodes a few more times. And his phone melts. And his shower starts spraying literal, actual grape juice. And his lights stop working.
It's fine.
Of course Roier got scared off when Cellbit said he didn't have magic, of course he did. Cellbit's a freak! It's unnatural to be as untalented as he is, of course Roier left the second he found out that Cellbit isn't normal. (Everybody else does, parents included.)
Cellbit doesn't see Roier.
Cellbit doesn't see the rat.
Two weeks pass, and the class ends. Finals happen, and everybody heads home for winter break.
...Except for Cellbit. He doesn't exactly have a home to go to. Bagi does, but Bagi is also with Tina. And Tina hates Cellbit, and Cellbit hates Tina.
So.
So Cellbit wakes up on Christmas morning hearing something scratching against his bedroom window.
Despite his disdain for the little bastard, he rushes to let the rat in. It's too big for him to hold just in his hands, but it tries to huddle there, anyway, searching for warmth.
Immediately, the apartment's lights all go back to normal.
Of course.
Fond despite the sick feeling in his stomach, Cellbit sighs, "Come on, I'll put you in the other room."
He figures that he can just leave the rat in the main apartment and huddle in his (locked) bedroom until the snow outside stops, but the rat immediately latches onto his shirt and scrambles onto his shoulder as soon as he leaves his bedroom.
Cellbit frowns. "Hey, no. I don't like you."
The rat snickers to itself, whiskers tickling the side of Cellbit's neck.
"I don't!" Cellbit insists. "You're a rat!"
The rat blinks at him. Its nose twitches a few times. And then it sighs a little ratty sigh and mopes back down into Cellbit's arms.
Sighing himself, Cellbit deposits the rat on his couch on a throw pillow.
He looks at it.
It looks at him.
Cellbit sighs a second time. Fine.
He sits next to the rat and stares at the wall.
Well, he thinks, at least Bagi will be proud of me.
"You're late," he tells the rat, voice short and clipped.
The rat squeaks in acknowledgement. At least it knows it fucked up.
Cellbit clasps his hands in his lap and squeezes his fingers together so hard that his knuckles pop. The light bulbs in the lights above him pop, too, because of course they do.
"You're late," he repeats, voice cracking just slightly. "It's been five years, rat, what the hell?"
Silently, the rat rests a paw on Cellbit's thigh.
"Did you fucking get lost or something?" Cellbit demands, snapping his head down to glare at it. "What, did the gods actually tell you not to find me? Am I that fucked up?"
Alarmed, the rat's ears stand on end. It shakes its little head and crawls onto his lap fully, creepy little rat fingers gripping the front of his sweater tightly in some ratty semblance of a hug.
"You realized it, didn't you?" Cellbit asks it. "That's why you stopped showing up. You realized that the gods were right. I'm not worth giving magic to."
Briefly, a voice echoes in Cellbit's mind. A familiar one, sweet and heartbreaking and utterly Roier: "Cellbit..."
He ignores it, both the rat and the voice. He tilts his head back until it's resting on the back of the couch, and he stares up at the ceiling.
"I almost killed Tina, you know," he says. "When I realized that I wasn't getting a familiar. I tried to. I almost did. Bagi stopped me. I don't think she's actually forgiven me. Which is fair, I guess, I almost killed her familiar. And her girlfriend. Or whatever it is now with them."
He blinks. "I think they're married now?"
He blinks again. Shakes his head. "I think I'd still do it. Kill her. I don't know."
There's absolute silence. The rat is warm. Cellbit's brain feels cold.
It's Christmas.
And then, suddenly, the rat scrambles off of Cellbit. Of course.
Cellbit doesn't watch it go. He doesn't think he'd survive if he did.
And then there's a sudden heavy weight on the couch next to Cellbit and a warm, familiar presence by his side. (Pun not intended.)
"Cellbit," Roier says, voice thick and wet and so emotional that Cellbit wishes he remembered how to cry so he could cry with him, "I'm so sorry."
Blankly, Cellbit turns his head to the side to look at him.
Yep.
That's Roier.
His familiar.
Crying.
Really, Cellbit should've seen it earlier; Roier and the rat have the same eyes: warm.
Roier reaches for him, falters just inches away from his arm, flinches back into himself. He's twitchy, just like a... well, a rat.
"I feel like I need to explain some stuff," he says, laughing slightly, fakely.
"Not really," Cellbit says. "I've basically figured it all out."
Roier's eyes widen. This time, he does manage to grab onto him.
"You're wrong!" he shouts.
He flinches at the volume of his own voice, says: "It's not your fault. It's mine."
Cellbit frowns.
Roier frowns, too, and shakes his head.
"No," he continues. "It's Doied's fault. He... he's my brother, remember me talking about him? Well. He sucks. He's a familiar just like me, but he never got the, like, feeling that he had someone. And he was angry about it."
His hand curls around Cellbit's forearm tightly. On instinct, Cellbit puts his hand over Roier's and squeezes.
The lights above settle, and Cellbit's whole body seems to shut down. It isn't numbness, it's... calm.
After a moment, Roier hesitantly explains, "Before I could leave to find you, he put me in a cage.
(His voice is low, pained, almost terrified-sounding.)
"I can't do any magic on my own. I can only help you with yours. All I can do is transform, and I couldn't even do that because the cage was so small.
"It was years before abuelo found me. And he didn't even know it was me. Apparently Doied told everyone that I had run away to find you."
Roier goes quiet after that. And Cellbit's heart breaks. And he feels horrible. And he just wants to throw himself out the window and apologize to Roier and give him a hug and lock himself in his room and-
And then Roier smiles, reaching up to wipe at the tears under his eyes with a thumb.
"And then I came to find you," he says. "And, yeah, you're kind of a dick, but, like... who'd be nice to a rat? Rats suck."
Quietly, Cellbit looks away and admits, "They're actually kind of cute."
Roier laughs and pushes at his shoulder lightly. "Ay! You aren't just saying that because of me, are you?"
"Well..."
"See? You aren't that bad. We both just got really unlucky."
That's one word for it, Cellbit thinks.
He takes a moment before turning in his seat to fully face Roier eye-to-eye.
Roier adjusts with him, moving his hand from Cellbit's forearm to his own lap, where it sits limply as if waiting for something.
"Roier..." Cellbit trails off, takes in a deep breath, firmly says, "I'm going to kill your brother."
Roier blinks. "Okay, cool. I'll help you."
At that, Cellbit finally lets himself smile.
Moving on pure instinct, he leans forward and pulls Roier into a hug. It's tight and wrong and not remotely how you're supposed to hug someone, but Cellbit hasn't hugged anyone in years.
And, he realizes as Roier fucking bites him as he hugs back, Roier hasn't, either.
"I really don't know what to do now," Cellbit admits.
Because he doesn't. He's never had magic before, and now he does. He has to talk to his academic counselor and ask about remedial magic courses, he has to talk to his landlord about familiar insurance, he has to call Bagi, he has to call Felps, he has to-
"That's fine," Roier says. "I don't, either. We'll figure it out together, easy."
Yeah, Cellbit thinks. Easy.