Archive of Our Own ^beta

October

In a moment of pure impulse, Taako throws his wand into the river from the edge of the rocky bank. It’s a cool autumn afternoon, skies overcast, grey and threatening rain. He’s alone, everyone at their jobs or school or jobs at school. He’d taken a walk, a minute away from the stuffy air of the house, and the nearby river had drawn his attention.

The swift water swallows his wand up almost immediately and he stares blankly until his actions catch up with him and he realizes what he’s done.

“Fuckin’— great,” he mutters to himself, looking down at his traitorous hand. His back twinges, the motion of the throw screwing his already delicate body balance. His teeth find the inner corner of his lips, chewing as he considers his options.

He’s not getting that wand back, that’s for damn sure.

It’s not like he doesn’t have extras: the KrEbStAr sits gathering dust on the mantle, an extra burner wand sits in his desk at the school, and there’s one million options that he could go and buy at the snap of a finger. The main question, really, is why he threw his fucking wand away in the first place.

A low roll of thunder sounds over the skies, far enough away not to be a problem, but close enough to become one soon. He kicks a rock into the water for good measure before turning back towards the house. The walk back is longer, joints stiff from the impending rain, and when he finally makes it back home, he sinks into the chair near the fireplace. He reaches for his wand on instinct to light it, and his fist closes around nothing.

Taako sits there until the sky grows dark and rain starts pattering on the windows. Lightning brightens the room for a moment, and he realizes just how dim it is. Looking at the clock finds it nearing six, almost time for the Reaper Squad to tumble in. He’s wasted most of the day, but if he starts now he can have dinner ready a little after they get home.

He looks at his hands, little burn scars from cooking oil and knicks from kitchen knives marking them, and sets his mouth.

He hoists himself up, walking gingerly into the kitchen and flipping the lights on as he goes. Taking stock of what they’ve got, he notes the leftover focaccia from yesterday, the pumpkins they got last week that he hasn’t used yet, and the weather raging outside.

Pumpkin soup will have to do.

Throwing a record on the gramophone, he lets the scratchy music fill the room alongside the rain sounds. He heats the oven up, drizzling some broccoli in oil and spices for a side before getting to work on slicing the pumpkin. He boils it with some onions and garlic, watching the flesh soften in the water as he slides the broccoli in to roast while he finishes the soup.

Draining a bit of the liquid off, he picks out the chunks of onion before mashing the pumpkin down to a smooth pulp. Spices and cream go in next, and he lowers the heat to keep the cream from splitting.

A tear comes from behind him, the clatter of feet in the living room, and he feels his shoulders relax where he didn’t know they were hiked. The sharp pain at the base of his neck he’s just noticed dissipates as well. He whisks the soup to fully blend it and leans into the hand Kravitz lays on his back.

“Smells good!” Lup calls as she walks in. “Finally putting that pumpkin to use?”

“Thought we could use something hearty,” he says. The record fizzes and he hears Barry flip it around. He holds up a spoon to Kravitz. “Taste?”

He takes it, tasting it, and says, “It needs… something more. A spice, I’m not for sure.”

Lup snags the spoon from his fingers and dips it back in, tasting for herself. “Needs more cinnamon, T.”

He sprinkles a small palmful in, stirs, tastes again, and nods. The oven dings and he pulls the broccoli out, setting it on the free burner as he makes a grabby hand at Lup.

“Yogurt,” he says, keeping his hand outstretched. She sets the container in his hand and he sets it on the counter, pulling the lid off and dumping a spoon in. He gives the soup one last good stir before turning the burner off. Lup uncovers the focaccia and slices some chunks up for everyone. Barry grabs the bowls and plates and spoons and dinner is ready.

“Anything new at the old office job?” he asks, scooping a dollop of yogurt on top of his soup before sitting down at the table.

“We learned that Kravvy here has a dogshit organization system,” Lup says, sliding in across from him. “There’s drawers and drawers full of unkempt folders on all the astral baddies.”

“They’re not unkempt,” he says, exasperated. He knocks shoulders with Taako as he sits, and Taako hides the smile that flashes on his lips with another bite of soup dipped bread. “They’re organized by time period and crime level.”

“They’re not alphabetical, at all,” Barry says. “You’ve got Wezius the Harvester right next to Mortimer the Mortician. There are at least seventy-eight more people that should go in between those two.”

“Wezius and Mortimer did similar crimes at a similar time. Obviously they should be next to each other.”

“I dunno, Skeletor,” Taako says, and Kravitz looks at him, wounded. “I think LB are right. Alphabetical is the superior way. Even if you keep it by crime level and time period, they should at least be organized A to Z inside those sections.”

“Exactly,” Lup says primly, taking a spoonful of soup.

“That’s— that’s hundreds of years of reports to resort! I know where everything is right now, it would take ages for me to map it all back out in my brain.”

“Shoulda done it right in the first place,” Barry says quietly, and Kravitz makes a dirty face at him.

“What about you? Anything new today?”

“Oh y’know, it was a big day for the kid,” Taako says. “Settling into my duty as a housewife, just like I always dreamed.”

Barry chokes on his broccoli, coughing as he chugs some water to get the florets out of his throat. Lup steeples her fingers and sends an interrogating eye Kravitz’s way.

“Cooked and cleaned and read my little books,” Taako carries on, and Kravitz looks at him with a raised eyebrow. “I even took a walk today! I do so love to get out of the house.”

“Dishes are still in the sink, housewife,” Lup says, and Taako grins.

“Well, I figured I’d leave that for my darling sister to take care of, seeing as I slaved away all day over a hot pot of soup.”

Lup gives him the finger, and he slurps his soup loudly.

Barry does the dishes after dinner, and Lup picks a new record, spinning Taako around as they clear the table. It’s an early night, an early start in the Astral Plane for the three of them, and Taako has… things to do tomorrow. Probably.

He pulls his shirt off, leans down to stretch his spine out before bed, and Kravitz comes up behind him, pushing his shoulders down gently as he reaches to touch his toes. His hands are warm, a soft press on his skin.

“Hey I…” he starts, drawing back up. He sits down on the rug, kicking one leg out and drawing the other in. It twinges something in his hip, and he grimaces. “I lost my wand today.”

“What?” Kravitz sits down next to him, mirroring him in some fake need to stretch his construct out. It doesn’t matter to Taako, it makes it easier to remember doing the whole stretches before bed thing if they’re both doing it.

“Threw it, actually. In the river, you know, up the path a ways? Yeah, I just threw it! In the water! Didn’t even think about it first, ‘s like my arm had a mind of its own.”

“Taako,” Kravitz says. “Why even— what for?”

“No clue,” he says, grinning like a madman. “But I don’t have a wand anymore!”

“I mean, if you want me to go with you to the store, I can see if—”

“Nah nah nah, that ain’t necessary, Bones. I’ll get down there in the next day or two. Just… don’t mention it to LB, y’feel? Or anyone else, for that matter. I’ll take care of it.”

Kravitz stops stretching, pulling a leg up in his dark flannel pajama bottoms and resting an arm on his knee. He looks at Taako in a way that makes him feel squirmy, so he twists his spine the other direction.

“Is everything okay?”

“’s cool, Krav. Promise.”

“Taako—”

“I don’t need it, you know,” he snaps, twisting back the other way. “I don’t need magic to make my fucking life run.”

“That’s true,” he says gently. “Is that what you want?”

“No,” he says, and it sounds whiny even to his own ears. He frowns, untwisting and dropping back on the floor. “I dunno. But I’m… I’m figuring it out, okay? Don’t bring it up with anyone. I’ll get it.”

“Okay.” Kravitz puts a hand on his foot, a small point of connection that calms him down, and he feels like a fucking sap for it. “Bed?”

“Yeah, yeah, bed.”

He could go tomorrow. Pick out a sick new wand or staff or ring or any other thing. He’s Taako, he’s got a million people that love him that would practically throw their magic items away for him to have. He could have one at the drop of a hat.

So why doesn’t he want one?

November

Taako sits on Magnus’s back porch, sipping a glass of the homegrown elderberry wine that Davenport gifted the last time he was in port. It’s mostly quiet outside, the dogs rustling around in their enclosed part of the yard on the side of the house, stars lighting up the sky as he rocks back and admires the night.

The party’s still going inside, Carey challenging Lup to an arm wrestle loud enough to cut through the screen door to where Taako sits in solitude. He’d stepped out a few minutes ago to cool off from the busy house, but he’d gotten comfortable in the rocking chair and hasn’t bothered to return to the fray. The night time breeze feels good on his flushed cheeks.

He examines his glass, the deep purple-red of the wine inside, color dark enough to stain, backlit by the lights inside just enough to show that it’s not totally opaque in there. His inner lips will be purple for the next day or two, already on his fourth glass of the night and it’s only just past ten.

He hadn’t wanted to come, really, but Magnus had been blowing up his stone with requests to hang out, to clear their busy schedules and see each other, and then went and made a big friends get together the month before they’re going to do this larger scale for Candlenights, and Taako and sighed and said that yes, fine he’d be there, Maggie, now could he please get back to his truly busy uninterruptable schedule?

The door creaks open and heavy footfalls alert him to Magnus’s presence. He creaks back in the rocking chair and raises his glass to him in greeting. Magnus sits in the chair next to him, kicking his feet out with a sigh.

“Man, it’s good to see you,” he says cheerily, taking a drink of his beer. His cheeks and ears are ruddy, he’s always shown his alcohol clear on his face from the first sip, and he’s all smiles.

“You too, Mags,” he says, taking a drink of his own wine.

“Are you hitting the buzzkill zone of drinking?”

“I’m not a buzzkill,” he says, glancing at him and giving him a grin that’s all teeth. “I’m Taako, you know, from TV? I’m the life of the fuckin’ party.”

“So yes,” Magnus says for him, looking back out. “’s cool. That’s what the porch is for, you know?”

Taako, for all that this is his fourth cup, feels instantly not drunk enough. He’ll regret it in the morning, he can already tell the hangover will leave him a wreck for the next few days, but if he’s down for the count he’s gonna go ahead and go down. He knocks the rest of his glass back, relishing the cloying sweetness of the elderberries, and holds out a hand in a “wait” signal for Magnus as he stands.

He slips inside, giving Kravitz a lingering kiss as he pours another helping before saying fuck it and grabbing the whole jug to take back with him. Magnus watches him return, two different glass receptacles in hand and halfway done with the new pour in the time it took him to walk back outside.

“I was kidding,” Magnus says, a little less amused now.

“Get sloshed with me, Mags, just like the good old days,” he says in a sour tone.

Magnus considers his own beer, looks at Taako’s very large, only half empty Cap’n’port original, and throws back his bottle of beer. When he finishes, he makes a face and burps, holding a fist to his chest and screwing up his face.

“Shit,” he says, voice strained. “Ohhhh, I forgot I wasn’t twenty anymore, god that hurt.”

He makes one more face and sucks his teeth, leaning back in the rocker. Taako razzes at him, makes a jeering noise in his throat and laughs. Magnus laughs with him, and it’s good. It’s so good for just a second.

Taako looks at Magnus, at the grey hairs just starting up in his temples and beard, the laugh lines etching into his skin, the bulk of his body, and tries to connect it with the strapping, patchy bearded, fresh faced twenty year old he spent a hundred years with. It’s like a schism, two Taakos reconciling the only Magnus that one’s ever known and the older imposter sitting in front of the other’s eyes.

“Y’ever have a hard time,” Taako starts, licking the berry taste off his teeth, “figuring out whether it’s real or not.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“I mean, look at me. You’ve known me for a hundred years. Isn’t there some… disconnect for you? With the Taako you met four years ago and the Taako you met a hundred years ago? We look different! You look different!”

“I mean, I watched you change, y’know? In Wonderland? You still, well, you still had the same face that I… knew? When we all met back up. There’s not that split for me.”

“Magnus,” he says desperately. He looks down at his cup, licks his dry lips, and drains it. He puts it down on the porch and holds the bottle closer. “I don’t just mean what you fucking look like.”

“Hey,” Magnus says warily. “Maybe you should be done for the night.”

“There’s no way for me to tell,” he says. “She could’ve made it all fucking up.”

“Taako—”

“Just— Fuck, lemme get it out at least,” he snaps, and Magnus bites his tongue, pulling the hand he’d reached out back to himself. “I know you don’t— resent it like me. Her. But Maggie, I can’t fucking cross reference, alright? There’s no way for me to know. Is that who I am? Who we were? Is that what I want?”

He looks back out at the night, at the sparse little wooded area near Magnus’s house, the open night sky beyond it, the stars that make up their solar system, their interplanar connections, and screws his face up, closes his eyes.

“You should talk to her, man,” Magnus says, and Taako bristles and opens his eyes. “I mean it. We talked for a long time about it all, after everything was done? I know it was different for you, but it helped a lot, setting my head straight.”

“I can be civil, twice a year,” Taako hisses out, “but she’s not gonna spin my head any fuckin’ more than she already has.”

He sees Magnus rub his face in the corner of his eye, and he feels poised for something, tense and ready to run. Where? He asks himself. There’s nowhere to go but off the damn edge of Raven’s Roost.

“I can remember remembering,” he says, clearly some last ditch effort. “In the mannequin body, I remember remembering, and it all looks the same, the memories do. There’s no static, no gaps. She was a biographer, Taako, not a fiction writer. It was real. You’re the same elf.”

“That’s funny,” he says flatly. He uncorks the bottle, takes a long, long drink from it, and sets it down heavily on the deck boards. Something nasty is sitting in his chest, something dark and wicked and so undeniably Taako that it makes him sick. He stands, unbalanced, Magnus scrabbling up after him to try and steady his shoulder before getting his hand smacked away. “I think. That I’m done for the night.”

He leaves his drinkware there, sitting on the floor, and steps carefully inside the house. His mouth tastes like iron, head like a balloon, and he knows his back would be screaming at him if not for the wine.

Kravitz greets him again, and is much less pleased at the kiss he gets this time.

“What’s the matter, love?”

“Nothing, my darling man,” he says, curling his mouth into a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and holding onto his charming little vest for dear life. “I think. That I’ve gotten myself thoroughly drunk.”

“I can see that,” he says, amused. “You’re alright?”

“Course I’m alright, I’m Taako.” He brushes a loc out of Kravitz’s face and gives him a wobbly smile. That nasty thing is twisting inside him, wants to make a scene, tell everyone how stupid they are for accepting this life as truth without so much as a struggle. But…

But this is Magnus’s party, that he put together to see everyone before the pleasantries of Candlenights. Low key, happy, a chance to relax and catch up.

Magnus comes back in then, carrying their bottles and his glass. Taako doesn’t look at him, but he watches Kravitz make a few faces. He removes his fingers from his vest, smooths the fabric down. Opens his mouth to speak before closing it again, and stares at the loose tie around Kravitz’s neck.

“Should we go home?” Kravitz asks him quietly. He nods, chewing on his lip, still not looking up at him, and Kravitz sighs. “Alright. I’ll go make the rounds for us, okay?”

He nods again, saying a quiet “Yeah” in assent, and Kravitz lets him go to say goodbye to their friends.

Magnus wraps an arm around his shoulder, and Taako snorts, tipping his neck up to look at the ceiling. He feels queasy, a little off kilter, and rocks in Magnus’s hold until Kravitz comes back to collect him.

“You can always call, you know,” Magnus says just before the rift is made, and Taako smiles at him.

“Don’t worry, Maggie, I know.”

He steps through it, the half second of dark cold that deposits them in their bedroom. Taako totters his way into the bathroom, undoing his hair, washing his face off, brushing his teeth, going through the motions. His lips are wine purple, sweet and dry, and he scrubs at them until they’re raw, purple still clinging to the dry skin he couldn’t get rid of.

Kravitz is reading in bed, clothes changed, reading glasses on the end of his nose, and Taako feels so stupidly domestic.

“Hey,” Kravitz says to him, and Taako smiles, climbing into bed and shoving his face in the pillows.

“Hey,” he mumbles into the down.

“We should… are you sure you’re—”

“Bones, not— not tonight. We can talk in the morning, jus’ not tonight.”

In the morning, Taako will wake up with the worst headache he’s had in weeks, with a dry mouth and drier eyes, and an ache he can’t get out of his bones. He’ll drag himself up, choke down some of the frankincense tea Merle made him take home, and ask Barry to rift him to the school for the first time in weeks before Kravitz wakes up. He’ll hole himself up in his office, get nothing of note done, and take the train home when he’s less certain the rattling of the rails will break his body apart.

But Kravitz doesn’t know this, and neither does he, so he acquiesces, placing the bookmark between the pages and turning down the lights.

He falls asleep hard.

December

Sometime in the first week of December, he sits at his kitchen table, alone, arms resting on the wood that Magnus made for them, and undoes a small pouch. It was a gift from Merle last Candlenights. “Homegrown,” he’d said with a wink, and then, “If you run out just let me know.”

He sprinkles the ground up bud into the pipe and presses it down. He always used his wand to light in the past, but he lights a match this time, sucking in as he sets the herb to smolder. He hasn’t smoked in a while; did once with Merle and Magnus up in their moon suite, and once alone in his inn room after refusing to live on the moonbase until he could get a house of his own, and him and Lup rang in the new year with a smoke sesh this year.

His hips ache, back twinges, and there’s a migraine playing at the edges of his temples. Merle had also said it would help with the lingering pain from Wonderland, as if Taako doesn’t know the medicinal properties of weed for fantasy Christ’s sake. He doesn’t put a lot of stock into his “lingering pain from Wonderland,” as a whole. Sure, his body hurts most days, he can’t move like he used to, and if he “overdoes it,” he’s down for the count for a few days, but that’s only if he listens to his body afterwords. He can push past all of that, natch. He’s Taako, from TV. The goddamn washing machine he got dropped on him almost two years ago can’t keep him stuck in one place.

The smoke hits his throat and he holds it down, refuses to cough, what is he a baby? It comes out in a rush, though, and he sips his tea to keep from making any embarrassing noises, empty house be damned. The second pull is smoother, no choking to be found, and he readies himself for the fog to clear his brain.

A couple of minutes in, he feels his muscles relax, headache ebbing, but the hip pain is still there. That’s fine. He’ll take one instead of three any day. The house is empty, snow just starting up outside, and he finishes the bowl, setting it aside for now, the option to repack always there. He pushes away from the table, standing, and man. Maybe Merle was right.

He throws that thought out with a physical motion of his hand. Merle’s never right. His secret weed garden helping Taako’s “pain?” Just a lucky break.

But it’s better. He can move easier without the constant throbbing of his body, the tension gone, and he sucks a breath in through his nose and blows it out his mouth in a rush. He puts a record on, letting the crackle of the vinyl fill the room as music livens up the empty house.

Swaying in place, he touches his face, feels the differences that even now are foreign to him. There’s a mirror in the hallway, and he slides across the floor to it, stationing himself in front of it and looking, like he did those first few days after they won, getting used to the way he looked.

His nose is just a little crooked, not an even line down his face anymore. His eyes have bags, and he’d had them before but they’re more pronounced, a darker, bruised look perpetually on his face. His cheeks are more sallow, jawline less pronounced. His eyebrows are sparser, lips are thinner, pinched at the corners. His hair, where it was a naturally full and curly dark brown, is a little mousier before the hard line where his roots meet dye job, thinner, holds a curl if he puts some work into his hair but falls limper now most days.

He still looks like himself, but like someone snapped a picture after a bad hangover. Hell, he feels like he’s got a hangover most days.

And this, here, is where the disconnect in past and present shuts off. It doesn’t matter who he was before the brain wipe, it doesn’t matter who he was after it. Both Taakos looked like he used to, and the elf he is now, well, he doesn’t.

This shouldn’t be a comfort, but it is. His brain, comfortably buzzed by the weed, half dizzy and stuck staring at himself, turns off that constant drivel of not knowing whether his memories are telling him lies. He isn’t the same, at all. Everything is different.

“Everything’s different!” he shouts out like a revelation.

He grabs a jacket, stuffing his feet into slippers, and steps out onto his front porch. The snow falls gently all around his yard, a thin but complete coating of white on the ground. He scurries down his stairs, pain in his hip a dull thing, the weed taking most of that from him, too. Snowflakes hit his face, cold and wet and melting and in the buzz they tingle on his skin. He closes his eyes, reopens them again, and stands, mesmerized, as he stares up into the sky and watches the swirling of the snow.

When his fingertips get cold enough to notice, he reluctantly goes back inside. There’s no reason to get frostbite. He shacks up in the window nook, flipping the record beforehand and curling under a blanket, staring back out at the snow. It quiets his brain, the acceptance that things are different, and that’ll last about as long as the high before the fear that his brain is lying to him kicks back in, that the gaps filled by Junior are just another one of Lucretia’s lies.

But now, the snow swirls down in imperfect patterns, occasionally landing on the window where he watches it melt with rapt attention, breaking concentration only to put another record on, something nice for the background. His high lasts a few hours, a few blissful hours where his brain is off and his body isn’t flashing alarm bells at him for some issue he can’t fix. He spends most of it curled up at that window, enjoying the silence in his mind.

It's nice enough that he does it the next day, home alone again, spending it slowly deep cleaning his entire kitchen, taking a hit every now and then to keep the vibe going.

And again a few days later.

He’s groggy, when he isn’t high, a tacky taste in his mouth, eyes dry and eyelids pinched. Lup laughs at the scent in the house, but double checks that he’s doing alright, with how frequent it is. He assures her that yes, Lulu, he’s fine. Just enjoying his Candlenights gift before the season hits again. She nudges his shoulder, but lets it drop.

The Monday before Candlenights, he gets too high. Smokes a bowl, says fuck it and smokes another one at the same time, and settles in for the ride. At once he realizes his mistake, fingertips tingling, mouth cottony and dry. He sips at water, but it doesn’t help, tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, to his teeth.

Taako touches his face, feels the strange curve of his nose, the puff of his eyelids made puffier by the weed, and pulls his fingers away. Tries to remember that this is his life now, it’s different and that’s okay, but Taako hates change. He’s always hated change. Sure, he puts on a big game, loved life on the road and a new cycle every year. But it was always the same him, the same people surrounding him, the same day in day out goal of survival and fighting and live another day and that’s gone.

His heart beats too quickly and his teeth find the corner of his lip and he chews and chews and chews until his thoughts find the pain of his hips and the ache of his spine and pulses them into the front of his mind so hard he can’t stop thinking about them. It’s everywhere and nowhere and he gasps, sinking out of his chair onto the floor.

The rug in this room is a blue medallion rug, intricate pattern weaving all over the expanse. They’d picked it up on some plane in a country named Riparonia. The rugs had been the highlight.

And he remembers all this. He remembers all this, or it was planted in his brain. Is there a difference anymore? Does he even want to know? What was the name of the rock man that sold it to him, or was that a different world all together? How many people has he met and forgotten? How many of them does he remember only because Lucretia took the time to write out their mannerisms and facial details? How much of his life is his life and how much of it is her hands spinning a story?

How is he supposed to be a person when he doesn’t even know who he is anymore?

Lup’s face hovers above his, brows furrowed, a hand reaching down to touch him and he grabs at her wrist, gripping desperately.

“Are you real,” he wheezes out, staring his dry, unblinking eyes up at her.

“Yeah, T, I’m real,” she tells him, and her voice drags through his ears, familiar, comforting.

“How do I know,” he says, holding her wrist in a vice grip. “How do I know she didn’t just make you up.”

She looks stricken, and he frowns. She shouldn’t look upset. The skin of his palm tingles where it touches her, and he takes a deep, crackled inhale.

“Come on, Taako,” Lup says, “you know me.”

He shakes his head and her face drags side to side to side, a smear of eyes and downturned mouth and frizzed out hair. She reaches for his other hand, taking it in hers and reaching it up to underneath one of her ears. There’s a bump there, raised skin, a scar. He was there when it was made, knows that nobody knows about this, ‘cept maybe Barry.

“When we were seventeen,” she starts, eyes boring holes in his head. “What happened?”

“Someone snuck off with you in the middle of the night,” pours out of him. It’s fresh in his memory, like it was yesterday instead of— fuck— two hundred and twenty eight years ago. “Wanted to— wanted your ears.”

“Did you ever tell Luce about it?” He shakes his head no, her face smear smear smearing again. “Because I sure never did.”

He breathes a shaky inhale, a fist in his chest opening up.

“I… hit him. With the frying pan.”

“Cast iron,” she corrects, and he nods, mistaken on purpose, a test passed. “Grandpa’s.”

Taako lets go of the strain in his neck that he’s just noticed, head dropping down onto the rug. He closes his eyes, still too high, too dizzy to do anything but lay there, but Lup is here. Lup’s been there when he’s gotten too high. She’s real. She’s real. Lucretia didn’t plant her there, she’s real.

It takes a few hours for him to sober up, and she successfully moves him from the floor to his bed, popping a handful of peppercorns in his mouth for him to chew on to focus on something. The crackle, the chew, the burn, it takes his mind off the nausea creeping up his whole body.

She reads, sat beside him, his head up against her legs and stomach, listening to her flip pages, shift, wiggle her fingers, take sips of water. She’s grounding and warm and oh so familiar.

He dozes off, waking up a few hours later to Lup still next to him, looking down at him and then back up to her book.

“Feeling better?”

“Ugh,” he groans, rolling off of her, scrubbing at his prickly eyes. He’s got a weed hangover at the very least, head foggy, body disgusting, mouth tacky and dry. Lup presses a glass of water into his hand and he gulps it down like he’s dying. “Yeah, woof.”

She shuts her book and he passes her the water back. Sitting up, he stretches his arms out, grimacing at the heaviness of his limbs.

“Been a minute since you greened out like that.”

“Not intentional, believe me,” he mutters, standing and shaking out his legs. As comfortable as his position on Lup had been, it isn’t doing him any favors now. “How come you’re home?”

“Got off early,” she says. “Kravitz is still trying to make it so we don’t reorganize all his files, so he’s trying to keep it to just one at a time to keep an eye on us. Barry and I got plans though.”

He quirks a smile, pulling on a sweater from the post of the bed. It’s snowing again, blanketing the walk up to their home in white. He checks the time, mid afternoon, still enough time to do something with the day than get too high and lie on his living room floor.

“Dinner,” he says, stuffing his feet in slippers and making for the door. “Should we do a stew? It seems like stew weather.”

“Taako,” Lup says sharply. “Come on.”

“What? I just don’t think we have enough time for a while roast situation, y’feel?

“You don’t think it’s a problem?”

He bristles a little, turning his head just a bit, still not facing her. “I mean, sure I’d like a roast, but we just don’t have the time for it. This week, though—”

“You didn’t think I was real. You wouldn’t believe me that I was real.”

“Something wrong with Merle’s hash,” he says blithely. “I’m sure the old bastard mixed it with something and didn’t tell me—”

“T.” There’s a level to defeat in her voice, and for a sick second he revels in it. “Talk to me?”

“I dunno what you want me to say, Lulu.” He turns around then. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, legs drawn. “I smoked too much. It happens. You’ve done it plenty of times.”

“It’s different. You’ve been different, lately. There’s something wrong and you won’t tell me what it is. And dammit, I’m nosy!”

“I’ve just been tired. That’s all. Candlenights is right around the corner, we’re gonna cook a fucking feast, see all our friends, and you know, I just wanted some chill down time, y’know? I just wanted to relax and not think, and I overdid it! I’ll be the first to admit, smoked too much, got too high, freaked out.”

“Has it helped?”

“Until today, yeah.” He’s gonna need a fucking break after this one. The weed’s getting fucking furloughed without notice.

Lup mulls it over, and he can tell she doesn’t really believe him, but it’s all true, for the most part. He did want a break, and it did help. Kept his mind out of the ditch of paranoia until it didn’t.

“Come on,” he says. “You think those boys are gonna feed themselves?”

She joins him, reluctantly, and they make a banger stew.

Angus shows up Candlenights Thursday, dropping his school duffel on the floor of the living room and grabbing him in a hug that comes from too high up. He’s grown, again, shooting up between every time he comes home, and one of these times he’s gonna shoot past Taako, get at least as tall as Magnus.

Their party is that Saturday, and the Friday before Taako and Lup and Angus spend it cooking and prepping for the stuff that can’t be made ahead of time. Lup mixes and kneads the challah, helping out when it’s rising before going back and braiding it together and letting it rise again. Angus and Taako take on the goose, Angus wrinkling his nose at the removal of all the giblets.

“Alright, boychik,” Taako says, motioning to their giant pot of boiling water. “Think your scrawny arms are strong enough to pull the goose out of the water?”

“Really?” He practically bounces in his seat. “I thought only you and Miss Lup were allowed to handle the preboil of the goose!”

“Well, you’re a teenager now. That’s practically an adult! Plus, I’m always looking for places to slack, so if you can handle it it’s your job forever.”

He grins, taking the gloves Lup provides him with gratefully. They hoist the goose over the water, dropping it in for about a minute. Angus holds the legs with rapt attention, full focus on not letting go. He stares at the bird, and Taako glances sideways at him. He’s up to the middle of his cheeks now, step stools put away, tall enough to manage all the cabinets on his own. Something scary flares in his chest and he focuses back on the fucking goose.

They flip it around, boiling the bottom half, and then they pull it out, patting it dry with towels inside and out. Him and Angus rub the whole thing down with salt, spices, and baking powder, getting all the crevices and hidden spots. They place it in their icebox to dry overnight, preparing to roast it tomorrow.

Lup and Angus start on blintz making while Taako gets the challah loaves in the oven and starts on some clean up. Kravitz and Barry had been banned from the kitchen, but with the sound of the sink they emerge, poking their heads in.

“Ah,” Taako sounds off, and Lup makes a shooing motion with her hand. “We’re not done, you’re still banned.”

“Taako,” Barry whines, and he gives him a look. “I promise not to touch anything this year.”

“You said that last year!” Lup says, stopping her folding. “Absolutely not. We had to redo the entire berry sauce because of you two.”

“I worked hard on that berry sauce, sirs,” Angus says, very serious. Kravitz bemoans the childlike charm he still holds and leaves again. Barry takes a little longer, and it takes Angus pouting his lip to get Barry to leave, grumbling about how unfair it all is.

“Very good work, Angus,” Lup says gleefully. “You’ve really locked that pout in.”

“People hate saying no to the waterworks,” he explains, and Lup nods, adding another blintz to the stack.

As reluctant as he is to go, the next day they take all their food through the rift into the BoB’s industrial kitchen. Lucretia volunteered to host this year, and the saving grace of that is that he’s allowed to hide away in the massive, beautifully decked out kitchen for a few hours before having to face her. She knows better than to intrude here.

They set to roasting the goose, setting it in the oven with its pan of water, rotating it every so often to ensure the skin gets crisp. Lup makes the gravy from the fat and oven bits they get off it, whisking until the kitchen is filled with the heavenly aroma.

Angus fries the blintzes. He keeps a plate of finished ones in an oven set to low heat. Taako shred potatoes and onions together, mixing in with flour and eggs and a little salt and pepper. The latkes fry up nicely, and he mixes his heavy cream and vinegar for a fresh sour cream to serve with them. Lup roasts some vegetables, carrots and brussels and onions and squash.

They make mashed potatoes as well, because Taako loves to please with food, and the Latkes may be to his taste but knows they’re not everyone’s. Plus, there’s always more gravy than the goose can handle.

About an hour before the party is supposed to start, Davenport joins them in the kitchen. He unloads his wines and starts a pot boiling. The star anise, cinnamon, and cloves get poured in, with some brandy, orange slices, and honey. Davenport makes a mean mulled wine, brought it last year for Candlenights too, an Taako may be taking it easy on the substances but he can never resist a mug of that.

Held in their old suite, they enlist Carey and Killian’s help in bringing all the food down the elevator. Barry and Kravitz have proved themselves untrustworthy time and again, and their sulking does nothing to soften Lup and Taako into letting them help.

Davenport sets his mulled wine on a table separate from the foods, near the hot chocolate and eggnog. Avi brought a pumpkin pie, setting it at the end with the blintzes. Lucretia is setting a baked brie with cranberry jam on the counter, and Taako sets his dish as far away from her as he can.

Merle tends to the Candlenights bush in the corner, wrapping a string of cranberries around it and talking it up. Magnus is chatting up Hurley and Sloane, Mavis is trying to stop Mookie from slamming into Angus while he carries the latkes, and Ren is finishing hanging the star garland around the room.

Kravitz puts his hand around Taako’s waist, and he relaxes back into it. It’s Candlenights, even if it is on the moon. He can be charitable and friendly for one day.

Everyone eats at their various tables, and Taako Lup and Angus give each other high fives for another successful year of providing food for the celebrations.

The later evening finds Taako where he always ends up at these things, squirreled in a back corner with his cup of hot wine watching the party. Davenport had come up a few minutes ago, leaning on the wall next to him nursing his own mug. Lucretia is in the middle of the floor, oblivious to them watching her, or completely aware and not showing it, chatting with Lup and Magnus. Everyone has a pleasant buzz from the wine, smiling and laughing and eating pie off little plates.

“How’s it been, Cap’n?”

“Windy,” he says. “All these winter storms have made sailing a little more than difficult.”

“Bringing her in for the season, then?”

“At least until we get a clear stretch. It’ll give me some time to make up some new wines, though.”

“This bangs, by the way,” Taako says, motioning his mug towards Davenport. “Really fucking good this year.”

“So was all the food.” Taako looks at him, hair combed back, Candlenights sweater over his button up. “I’ve got another batch of elderberry for everyone to take home if they want it.”

“Good.” He drinks. “Cleaned off most of mine at Magnus’s last month. There’s a little bit left that I’ve been meaning to finish off.”

“Shared?”

“Mostly solo,” he says, smirking, and Davenport whistles.

“That was a four liter bottle, Taako,” he says, sounding shocked.

“Yeah, only made a scene with Magnus and everything. He’s lucky he made that porch or I woulda ruined everyone’s night.”

They’re quiet for a minute, and Taako mulls it over, considers when he’ll see Davenport next, knows it won’t be for a few months at least, probably not until the S and S anniversary. Davenport will hole himself up with his wine side project, probably visit Merle, come when he’s asked to see people, and then be back out on the sea again until he gets dragged by to port by weather or a personal call.

“Dav,” he says quietly. No one’s really near them, the closest being Avi, Carey, and Killian, a good distance from them laughing about something or another. “D’you ever wonder if it any of it’s real?”

Davenport doesn’t answer him, takes a drink of his wine, stares out at the crowd and the people that make up their family. Taako sips his own, staring out with him.

It’s another couple minutes before he speaks.

“Every fucking day.”

They stand there quietly again, watching the festivities.

“I wake up sometimes,” Davenport says, quiet and steady. “Thinking I’ve woken up, that I can’t speak anymore, that finally being able to be… to be heard, not just thinking, that it’s all gone away again. That I’m ‘Davenport Davenport!” and this was all some dream.”

“Yeah,” Taako says. His voice feels rough. “How come you’re always alone on the boat then?”

“It’s so different out there,” Davenport says. His voice is filled with disgust. “I don’t wake up and see the walls of my room here, I see the ocean, and my boat, and I can talk to myself until I know I’m not just saying my own name.”

Taako blinks, eyes glossy, and chews at the corner of his lip.

“I threw my wand in the river by my house,” he forces out, and Davenport does look at him then. “I didn’t… I didn’t know why, but I haven’t replaced it. Haven’t used magic for two months.”

The party moves around them, Barry inching his way on the edges of the party, out and away from Merle and the Candlenights bush, trying to make it over to their corner.

“Got too high and thought she made it all up. Wrote in Lup, our journey, everything. Filled in the gaps she erased with something new.”

“Fuck, Taako.”

“Yeah.”

Davenport knocks his shoulder against his hip and Taako leans against him. Barry finally gets around the crowd to join them, nursing his own mug of wine. Just like last year, they stand together, for a little while, watching the group around them. Lucretia catches sight of them finally, and the face she makes is stricken before turning away again, carrying on with her conversation with a hard set to her shoulders.

Good, Taako thinks bitterly. She should know what it is she’s done.

When the party winds down, when the kids are slumped in a corner and Angus is trying not to fall asleep, when Merle is asleep on the couch with them, they pack it up. Barry offers to take Davenport down but he’s staying with Merle, and Bottlenose Cove is just below the base. Angus holds a bag with their dishes and his gifts in it, yawning next to Taako and swaying on his feet. Lup hugs Lucretia goodbye, close enough for Taako to get antsy.

“Thank you for coming,” Lucretia says to them. Angus nods, thanks her, and Kravitz smiles holds out his hand and squeezes hers. Lup still has an arm around her, but him and Barry stand there uncomfortable.

“Yeah, Creesh,” he says when the silence gets too loud. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

Barry says nothing, and she nods, turning and going back to her goodbyes. Magnus gives her a hug so big she’s lifted off the ground, and Taako has to turn away.

“Taako,” Davenport says before they leave. “If you ever want to get out on the ocean with me, you just have to ask. It’s nice out there, away from it all.”

“Thanks, Cap’n’port,” he says, and he gives his shoulder a squeeze. Maybe he should, one of these days. Just hoof it out to sea with their captain, forget it all.

Bad choice of words.

Kravitz rifts them all home and Angus crashes, falling into bed after sleepily brushing his teeth. They all follow suit. Taako looks out the window of their bedroom, watches the snow fall with the moon shimmering through the snowflakes. Candlenights is half over, and the weather looks it, perfectly wintry for the holiday.

“Come to bed, love,” Kravitz says, and he smiles, turning away from the window.

“Happy Candlenights,” he whispers.

“Happy Candlenights.”

January

It’s early January, a couple days after New Years. Angus sits on the couch, reading a book and fiddling with the edges of the paper. Taako is reading his own, but he’s been watching his magic boy for the last few minutes. He’s gotten increasingly fidgety as the minutes tick on, and finally he shuts the book and looks up.

He jumps as he locks eyes with Taako, and Taako can’t help but grin at the reaction.

“What’s on your mind, little man?”

“Oh!” he says, like he didn’t expect Taako to notice his brain wandering off. “It’s, um, it’s nothing really.”

“Well now I gotta know,” he says, shutting his own book. “Go on and tell your old friend Taako.”

“It’s…” he starts, picking at the edge of his shorts. “I was just… would you braid my hair?”

Taako blinks. Of all the things he expected this was low on the list. “All over?”

“I’ve never had them done before,” he says quietly. “If you don’t know how or don’t want to, that’s okay, I can always go somewhere to have them done I just thought—”

“Slow your roll there, kid. I never said no, I’m just surprised. I thought you liked wearing it loose?”

“My parents always had me keep it short,” he explains, and Taako nods, another thing to add to the shit list of Angus’s parents. “And I’ve been growing it out, and it’s finally long enough to really do stuff with! At least I think it is. So I wanted to… mix it up?”

“Hell yeah!” he says, and Angus finally brightens up. “It’s been a while since I’ve been able to practice so it might take a little longer, and let me tell you it will take a while, but we can for sure get you all decked out.”

It’s been a pretty good day, body wise. He can sit in one place for a few hours and focus on braiding. Odds are Angus will need a break pretty quickly in, anyway, so he’ll just give himself stretch time then.

“You go wash and moisturize and Taako’ll get everything together.”

He scurries off to the shower, and Taako stands, stretching out his back before going to gather all the leave ins and creams he’ll need. Angus’s hair is thick, but not as tightly coiled as Lucretia’s, so it’ll be a little easier than hers.

A sour taste gathers in his mouth at that. Him and Lup used to do her hair on the years she didn’t immediately shear it all off. They would spend the first few free hours they had braiding or twisting her hair into some new funky style, and then mix it up throughout the year until it all reset again. He bites his tongue. Angus isn’t Lucretia, even if he shares some of her mannerisms; writing in his damn notebooks all the time and always having some book at the ready. This is his— well, this is Angus. And he wants his hair braided and gods dammit if he can’t do that for him.

He drapes a towel over the back of a dining chair, pulls another one behind that for himself to sit on for the starter parts, and sets all of Angus’s jars of creams and oils and the fine comb Taako keeps for emergencies.

Angus comes bounding in not too long later, hair still a little wet and slathered over with leave in. He sits in the front chair, grabbing his book beforehand, and settles in for the long run. Taako’s gut twists at this, some unknowable emotion in his throat, and he swallows to get it away.

“So,” he says, sectioning out his hair with the comb and clipping it in place. “How thick are we talking on these braids?”

“Oh,” Angus says. He pulls his glasses off at Taako’s nudging. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Not, um, not too tiny, I don’t think?”

He holds his pinky finger out for him to look at. “Sorta like this at the top work for you, bubeluh?”

“Yes,” he says decisively. “That works for me.”

He starts at the bottom, combing in the cream before starting, and steels himself for a good few hours of work.

“Why braids?” He pulls his hair tight and sees Angus tense for a moment before relaxing into it.

“Well,” he says, and there’s this note in his voice, this… hesitation that has Taako zeroing in on every word he says. “There’s just, uhm, some of the kids at school have them, you know? And I’ve always sort of, uh, admired the way it looks? Yeah.”

“Some kids at school,” he says, chewing that over. “Anyone in particular?”

“N-no,” he says quickly, and aha. That’s it. “No one in particular.”

“You’ve got a cru-u-ush,” Taako teases, and Angus instinctively pulls away before hissing at pulling his own hair. He lets go of that one for the moment, can come back to it when there’s not something so delicious right in front of him.

“I do not,” he says, embarrassment clear in his voice.

“Do too,” he says, leaning back. “Come on, Agnes, spill!”

He crosses his arms, fingers holding his book in place, and Taako snorts. “I’ll wheedle it out of you at some point, kid. Might as well tell me now.”

He’s still giving him the silent treatment, and Taako falls back on an old reliable. “Are you even old enough to have a crush yet? I thought little babies couldn’t have those.”

“I’m thirteen, sir,” Angus says, turning and glaring at him. “I’m plenty old enough to like someone.”

“Aha! So, you admit it!”

Angus flounders for a second before his face darkens and he screws his face up and turns back around. Taako takes mercy on him and goes back to the braid he’d interrupted. “Do they like braids or do they have ‘em?”

“Have ‘em,” he mumbles, arms still crossed. Taako sighs and starts the next one.

“I won’t tease if you want to talk,” he says gently, and he loosens up a bit. “But you don’t gotta. We can just sit and braid in silence if you want.”

Angus doesn’t do anything for a moment, and then he pulls his book back out. Taako chews on his cheek. Damn, he thinks, kid really is a teenager.

And then he falters. He’s thirteen. That’s three years older than he was when he first met him, and oh, his squishy little human body is growing up. He takes a shaky breath and gets back to it, a job to finish after all, but damn. A teenager is sitting in his dining room. A teenager has taken root in his little magic boy who has crushes and opinions and is getting moody. Isn’t that strange.

He gets the second row done before Taako’s hips start to protest the angle he’s sitting at. Angus shows no signs of needing a break, enraptured in his book. If he can get the next row done, he’ll need to stand up for the rest anyway.

“Taako?” Angus says finally, and he feels a little relieved. Two more hours of silence might’ve killed him.

“Yeah, little man?”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment and Taako doesn’t press. He did enough of that earlier. He gets himself there anyway. “What’s, um. What’s wrong?”

That throws him for a loop. “What’s wrong with what?”

“With… you?”

He stops. Laughs. “Nothing’s wrong with me, pumpkin. Taako’s all good out here.”

Angus hums, putting the bookmark in his book and setting it on the table. He shifts in place, tugging the braid Taako’s got in his fingers. “I’m the world’s greatest detective, sir. And you’re a pretty good liar, but you’re no match for me.”

“Oh, is that so?” This is amusing. There’s nothing wrong with Taako, nothing more than normal. He’s having a pretty good day, all things considered. He knows his faults, he’s always known his weak points, but he’s eager to see if the kid can guess them. “Tell me then, Angus. What’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t think we have time for all of it,” Angus mutters, and Taako grins. “Don’t make me state the obvious.”

“Try me.”

“You haven’t been using magic.”

His hips throb, a steady beating pain shooting down his thighs and up his sides. His fingers jerk and he drops the braid, standing abruptly. Angus turns around quickly, eyes wide, hand on the left knob of the chair.

“Sitting too long,” he grits out. He bends his knees, reaches down and touches his toes, bends to either side. The pain subsides, ebbs back a bit, and he sighs. “Sorry for the interruption.”

“No, I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and Taako grimaces.

“Not your fault,” he says. He reaches out and squeezes Angus’s shoulder before kicking out side to side. “Shoulda stood up sooner, that one’s on me.”

Angus nods but doesn’t turn back. Taako makes an expectant hand motion.

“Is that it, then? I’ve stopped using magic?”

“Is that— no! I mean, that would be enough, I think, for me to ask. You’re the greatest wizard in the world, Taako. Everyone knows that.”

“Yeah, they sure do,” he says tightly.

“And your hips. Or back. Or body in general I think. There’s something wrong there, but it’s not new. And you’re… absent.”

“Absent?” That one’s a surprise to him. “I’m here all the time, Ango.”

“Exactly.” He points a finger at him. “It’s like you’re always stuck in some fog. Sure, you’re the same old observant Taako, I know you don’t miss, but you’re not all there.”

Man, he hates this kid sometimes. He should count himself lucky they’re alone and the rest of his household isn’t here to hear him air out all his dirty fucking laundry plainly like this.

He sighs, finishing with a spine twist before sitting back down. Angus cranes further to keep looking at him until he motions with his hands to turn back around. The pain is a dull, quiet thing now, plenty of time left to finish the section he can sit for.

“I… lost my wand.” He says. Not entirely honest, but it’ll do. “I haven’t gotten around to picking up a new one, that’s why I haven’t been using magic.”

“Taako, it’s been months. And the KrEbStAr is right there,” he says, motioning to the mantle they can both see from the table.

Damn this kid and his hyper awareness of everything.

“Well, she’s a delicacy,” he says casually. “I can’t just whip out my Krull Glaive whenever I want to light a candle, now can I? And besides. We saved the world. I don’t need to blast every chump that thinks they can tell me something into next Tuesday.”

He starts another, twisting his fingers out before braiding them in so his hair will catch better. They’re turning out better than expected, with a few decades of practice lost. Each one lays flat so far, and Angus hasn’t complained about the tightness once.

“As for the body, well, it’s bangin’, obvi.” He hears Angus make a disgusted noise. “Just some leftover stuff from Wonderland, nothing you need to worry about.”

“You got healed, though,” he says, clearly thinking. “All of you did, eventually.”

“That was the point, bubeluh.” His head feels tight now, like he’s the one getting his hair tugged around. “What you lost you didn’t get back. Sure, I technically got healed for the washing machine that got dropped on me—,” he carries on through Angus’s shocked repeating of ‘washing machine?’ “—but they took some of my vitality in there, some of my… springiness, if you will. It’s like I’m an old man now, sometimes. And even the big ass machine that dropped on me. I didn’t get healed for another day and a half after that. It was… more permanent than I wish it was.”

“Is that why you can’t sit for too long?”

“Yeah, that’s why.” Angus hums a thoughtful noise and Taako smiles without any mirth. “You don’t gotta worry about me, kid. Taako’s got a handle on it.”

“You know that won’t stop me,” he jokes, and Taako smiles again, a little realer this time.

“I mean it. Krav and Lup and Barry know. And Merle and Magnus. Probably Dav and… others, too. You’re not the only one that can tell I’m less spry than before.”

“And the, the brain fog?”

“That’s, well. You try having your whole sense of self ripped apart with no time to process it.”

He’s being more honest than he meant to be, but Angus is right. He’ll sleuth it out eventually, one way or another. At least this way involves less people realizing he’s not quite all the way there.

“Oh,” he says quietly, and they fall back into silence.

Taako stands up soon after that, working on the top of his head. Angus takes a quick break, shaking his gangly, increasingly longer little arms and legs out, and Taako gets hit with that feeling in his chest again. He ignores it, again, and sets on finishing as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Lup comes home not long after that, Barry in tow, and she comes and coos over Angus’s almost done hair. He squirms and thanks her and Taako shoos her out of his line of sight on the braids he’s trying to finish.

They make it through the rest with nothing of note, Taako finger curling the ends to lay smooth before pushing Angus up to go look. When he comes back, he’s beaming, and Taako raises an eyebrow, leaning on the counter.

“Thank you, sir!” he says, practically bouncing up and down. Taako waves a hand and Angus comes and gives him a big hug.

“You better cover those at night,” he says. “I don’t wanna have to redo all that in two weeks, you hear me?”

“Of course, Taako. I looked into all the proper care before I committed to wearing the style. I’ll make sure everything stays nice and neat and—”

“Live a little kid, just enjoy them for right now.”

He grins and runs off to show Lup and Barry. It’s Lup’s turn for dinner tonight, and Angus chatters away at her while chopping up vegetables. Taako goes and slumps into the couch, pressing his fingers to his eyes and rubbing until he sees stars.

“They look good,” Barry says. “You haven’t had much practice recently, have you?”

“Muscle memory,” he says, and he knows that Barry knows. They’re on the same page, after all, about Lucretia. Them and Davenport don’t have the misery corner at Candlenights for nothing.

“You alright?”

“Kid’s an observant bastard, that’s all.”

“About your spinal problems you refuse to get checked out or the wand that’s been missing for three months?” Taako stares at him sharply and Barry gives him an unimpressed look. “What? Give me some credit, Taako. I’ve known you for over a century. It’s not like I don’t notice when you’re being a stubborn bastard about something. Everyone’s been avoiding bringing it up, for your sake, but quitting magic is a pretty drastic change in lifestyle, Taako, especially for you.”

His chest feels tight, and his lips feel numb. He licks them, swallowing and twitching a finger. “Huh,” he says, feeling more than a little far away.

Taako sees Barry hesitate and then get up, sitting down next to him. He puts an arm around Taako’s shoulder and he drops his head, grimacing. They sit like that for a while, until Lup pops her head back in to announce that dinner’s been served.

It’s just the four of them tonight, Kravitz away on a reaper scouting mission. Angus chatters away about what projects he’s planning for the next semester, who’s running what classes and what classes he’s helping teach, all while swishing his head back and forth to feel out the new ‘do. Taako notes names and class titles to mess up later, twisting Jackson into Jakey and Practical Magic for the Aspiring Scientist to Home and Hearth Warming Spells to Crank your Wank With.

He shifts restless in the wooden chair, hips and back sore, but he lasts, ignoring Barry’s watchful eye as he lilts over his own empty plans for his school semester. He hasn’t planned a thing yet. And honestly needs to check with Ren on most of it. She’s the brains behind the whole operation, after all. Taako’s name is there for posterity and brandability and they both know it.

January moves quickly, Angus heading back to school the next week, Taako making plans to go up and never doing it, the semester starting without him there. Ren calls him, to check in, and he tells her he’ll be up in the next day or two to sort some things out.

It’s another week before he manages it, stuffing his hat on his head and dolling himself up like he hasn’t in weeks. He hasn’t really bothered with glamour since before he chucked his wand, trying to get used to his face as it is now, a little less Taako and a little more Normal, but he’s itching for it now, to mask his tired eyes and pinched mouth. It’s not enough for him to grab the KrEbStAr, though, not enough to push him back into the familiar flow of magic.

He takes the train, ignoring Lup’s offer of rifting him in, it’s only an hour for Pan’s sake, and immediately regrets it. It’s a busy day, and he’s oh so recognizable. He’s flocked at the station, on the actual train, by well wishers and people with children and it’s all he can do not to wrinkle his nose at all of them.

The last straw comes at the Neverwinter station, when he steps wrong, feels something spasm in his back, and stumbles. He catches himself, or he would have, if not for the hand that grabs his arm to steady him. His skin prickles, hackles raising, and he turns and snatches his arm out of their grip.

It’s a human woman, looking at him in shock, and knows the face he’s making, pissy and rankled, mouth and brows twisted into something unpleasant, and he makes a frustrated noise.

“I got it,” he says, sharp, and turns on his heel to leave. There are eyes on him, he can feel them all over, and it just hastens his gait, avoiding the limp he knows would help. It’s to his detriment, hips clicking and twinging, and the walk to his school is a long one.

He goes in the back way, behind the gardens and in the side doors up the hidden staircase that only staff are allowed to use. His office is empty, no sign of Ren yet, and he sinks into his plushy, gaudy chair with a sigh. There’s a stack of papers sitting on his desk, untouched and a little dusty. He closes his eyes and melds into the upholstery.

A knock on the door startles him, and he sits up abruptly, pulling the chair in. “Come in!”

Ren opens the door and shuts it behind her with her hip, another stack of papers in her arms. Taako instantly regrets coming in, imagining the hours ahead of him filing paperwork and signing forms and every other monotonous task he’s been putting off.

She dumps them on the desk, grabs a chair, and sits down across from him. He sighs, grabs a pen, and she holds her hand up.

“We need to talk,” she say firmly, and one of his fingers starts tapping on the pen. “You’re… Taako, you know how much I appreciate you, right?”

This stalls him for a moment, and he cocks his head. “Well… yeah. I know, Ren. I appreciate you, too.”

She nods and leans back. “Then you should know what when I have a problem with something, it’s not that I don’t like you, it’s that you’re making my life, hmmm, more difficult than I like to have it be.

“Listen, I know I haven’t been here that often this year, but—”

“Taako, it’s the end of January. The term started weeks ago. You weren’t there for the start, you weren’t there for the end of semester assemblies, and frankly, you’ve barely been here at all this school year. I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen you here, and that’s including the times you hole yourself up here and don’t let anyone else in. It’s an issue, not just on appearances, but logistically. You have to clear things that I don’t have the power to, and a lot of stuff has been piling up.”

He eyes the stacks of paper and swallows, gripping the pen a little tighter. She holds up a finger, stopping the words he didn’t have ready in the first place.

“I’ve, don’t get upset, I’ve been talking with Kravitz, okay?” Taako twists his mouth but doesn’t say anything. Ren continues. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I don’t have to to know that it’s something.”

“Get to the point,” he says, a grit in his voice that wasn’t there before.

“I think you should take a sabbatical.” She motions to her stack of papers. “I have most administrative access, but you sign over the rest to me, until the end of the school year, and then it’s yours again. You take a couple months, get your shit together, figure whatever this is out, and come back this fall.”

He presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose, squeezes, tries to relieve the stress he feels building up. “You’re firing me from my own school?”

“Come on, Taako,” she says, a little desperately. “I’m not firing you. I’m giving you a mandatory leave of absence.”

He looks at her, at her dusky purple skin and braided white hair, at her quickly deteriorating patience, and gives in.

“Fine,” he breathes out, sitting back in his chair. “You get the keys to the place, you’ve usurped me, the coup is up. You can change it all if you like, but leave the goddamn stained glass in the auditorium.”

“If I changed anything in the months you’re gone, you’d fire me on the spot,” she says good naturedly. It’s clear she was expecting more of a fight. “I just need you to sign these papers, and then you’re scott free, alright?”

“Well, gimme more than that. I took the train here, after all.”

They split the stacks, Taako rifling through the ones that give Ren temporary jurisdiction over their school first, then moving on to assembly approvals and field trips. There are a few work orders here for repairs, adjustments, a company that wants to add a gods damned atrium, which he promptly throws in the garbage. Together, they finish up in about an hour, the dismissals thrown away with no preamble and the signatures in piles to either be mailed out or delivered to their staff.

Ren hugs him before she leaves, pulling him up out of his chair and giving him a good squeeze.

“You can come up whenever,” she says. “Just… look after yourself, alright?”

“I got plenty of people who’ll do it for me if I can’t,” he jokes, and she smiles.

Taking the finished piles with her, she leaves, letting the door swing shut on its own, and Taako is left alone in his office that, with a start, he realizes isn’t even his for the next few months. Sure, it’s still technically his, but Ren will probably be in and out of here, tinkering with that and this until the beginning of next school year when he can come back and be a normal fucking elf for once in his life.

The stone walls feel a little smaller, his desk a little too big for him. The skin of his knees brushes against his pants and stings. He sits back down, hands on the wood of his desk, and swallows.

His hands dial Kravitz on the stone before he knows what he’s doing. He picks up with a fizzle, a sure sign he’s in the astral plane, and Taako bites his tongue.

“Helloooooo?” he answers, a pleasant note in his voice, and Taako relaxes. It’s all fine, he’s just… not got a thing to busy himself with for the next few months, not that he’s been busying himself with it at all.

“Hey, Bones,” he says, and he tries really tries, to make himself sound cheery. “You busy?”

“Just filing, but Barry’s with me so it’s not too terrible,” he says, before there’s a pause and he gets closer to the stone. “Except him and Lup have started a revolt and began reorganizing my case files when I wasn’t here. They’re almost done with the Cs and have forced me to help them tear apart my entire system.”

Taako snorts. “Well, if you’ve got a free minute, or thirty, or sixty fuck it, you wanna come pick me up and get a hot boy lunch with cha’boy in Neverwinter?”

Kravitz groans about leaving Barry to sort on his own, but Barry, ever the wingman, assures him that he won’t change anything major without Kravitz there, tells him to go have fun and he’ll hold down the fort.

Kravitz hasn’t known Barry enough to hear when he’s lying, but Taako certainly has.

They meet at a homey little diner, and Taako listens to Kravitz prattle on about his day while picking at the perfect, middle of the road BLT. The host and waitress had been nice, used to him picking up food for him and Ren sometimes.

“I didn’t know you were at the school today,” Kravitz says near the end of their lunch date.

“Well, Ren wanted to pick my brain about something, get a couple signatures from the old T double A Ko, y’feel? Force me into take a few months of leave, the normal.”

“Leave?” Kravitz puts his fork down, forgetting his egg hash.

“It’s fine,” he says, waving his hand. He glances to his right, sees a few passers by point to him and look at one another, and his appetite leaves him. He pushes the sandwich away. “Probably for the best.”

“Taako—”

The bell rings and the people from outside trip over themselves walking in. “Oh my god, it is you!”

Kravitz shuts his mouth, clamming up in the face of fans. Taako looks at them, unimpressed, and they falter, just for a second, but still come up to him.

“We were wondering if we’d ever get to really meet you,” one of them says, a younger elf man with glasses and robes on. “I mean, with the school here in town I thought maybe it’d be sooner, but at Lisa’s Café? I’d never guess!”

The aforementioned Lisa has poked her head out of the kitchen and makes a face at the people heckling them.

“Listen,” Taako says, trying to keep the bite out of his voice. He doesn’t quite succeed, if the face the other one makes, a dragon born in a loose fitting shirt and leather trousers, is any indication. “Any other time, I’d love to chat. Believe me, most times you can’t get me to shut up. But this? I’m eating lunch. I have a guest. Is this like, appropriate to you two? Do you feel good about interrupting?”

“Taako…” Kravitz starts, but it’s awkward, work accent slipping through.

“We just thought—"

“Did you!” He’s just being cruel now, he knows it, but he just wants one goddamn day out in the world without someone saying hello to him with stars in their eyes. “Because I don’t think you did. I think you saw me, totally ignored that I was with my fucking boyfriend, and thought ‘Hey, here’s a great chance for an autograph.’ Well, lemme tell you, it’s not. So why don’t you scoot on out that door you just came in and go on with your day, hmm? Let me finish my lunch.”

Everyone sits there in silence for a second, Kravitz staring at his food, Taako staring at the two intruders, and the two of them staring slack jawed at him, until the dragonborn grabs the other’s wrist and drags him out the door behind them.

His heartbeat sits in his throat, and he takes an unhelpful drink of water. Kravitz picks at his plate, grimacing. He starts to speak, a thin sounding “Taako…” and he rubs at his eyes.

“I know,” he says, dragging his fingers down his cheeks. “I know, fuck.”

They don’t say anything for a moment, and Lisa, the old dwarven owner of this hole in the wall establishment, brings him a free slice of pie. He gives a half smile, says nothing, and she leaves them be once more. The silence is deafening, a roar growing in his ears, and gods he can’t take silence like this anymore.

“She’s having me go on leave,” Taako picks back up, poking at the key lime pie with his spoon, “just for the rest of the semester. I haven’t been any help, you know that. And she can’t sign all the documents without the ‘headmaster’ there, you know how it is. And I agreed. I’m… you’ve talked to Ren, she said that. Everyone knows I’m off my fucking rocker.”

“You’re not ‘off your rocker,’” Kravitz says, amused. “You’re just…”

“Having the years overdue breakdown? Yeah, I’m aware.”

Kravitz offers him a hand and Taako puts the spoon in it. He gives him a look, but takes a bite for himself, eyebrows popping up in surprise. Taako gives him a grin and steals the spoon back for himself.

“Lisa’s is great for a quick diner meal.” He shoves his own spoonful in his mouth. “But tha pie ish the shtar of tha show.”

The rest of their lunch date is unobtrusive. It’s like how it used to be, their dinner dates on the moon, and it’s nice, to just ignore the world for a while, even if it pokes its ugly head in sometimes to try and introduce itself at his lunch table. He leaves a hefty tip, over double what he was supposed to pay for the nuisance. He gets dropped off in reaper style, cold ozone invading his nostrils for a split second, and gives him a kiss goodbye before he goes back to what will most certainly have been an impromptu speed reorganization session, if the suspicious lack of Lup at home is anything to go by.

He’ll hear about it that night, how Kravitz had shown back up to Lup sprinting across the office with an armful of folders while Barry was hunched over a pile having cast Speed Read on himself with a mage hand to sort through it for him. He’ll bemoan the loss of his organization system that he’s used for years, decades Taako! And Taako will give him a conciliatory pat on the head.

When they climb into bed that night, Kravitz will fall asleep within five minutes while Taako, eyelids heavy but not heavy enough to drop, will stare at the ceiling and think about how he dismissed those probably nice fucking people like they were nothing to care about. How he’s nasty and self serving and has left Ren to her own devices for the last five months at least with barely a care if she could handle it.

And when the sun peaks its rays up over the hills that surround their home, he’ll still be staring, gripping the sheets in a vicelock.

February

Chesney’s may not open for another few hours, but Taako sits at the bar anyway, watching Merle dry out glasses behind it. Occasionally, Merle will pass him the joint he’s smoking, Taako will take a shallow hit of it, pass it back, and de-char his throat with a mead that Merle had recommended him. It’s not bad, all things considered, weaker than what he normally drinks, but it’s still early in the day.

“I’m just saying, kid,” Merle says, because he always needs to be ‘just saying’ something. “We won! You should try and be happy about it.”

Taako rolls his eyes. “I’m plenty ‘happy about it,’ old man. I don’t have to live my life thinking something’s gonna fall outa the sky and kill me forever. I’d be hard pressed not to be pleased as punch.”

“I could Zone of Truth you, ya know,” Merle threatens, but it’s light, teasing. “Pan knows I’m no genius, but I don’t need to be to see you’re doing bad. Don’t you have a school to run? How come you’re here with me in the middle of the week, anyway?”

“Ren put me on leave,” he says, and he’s shocked by his own honesty. Merle didn’t even have to Truth Zone him, his body’s just naturally attuned to telling the truth around the bastard.

Merle whistles, low and slow, and takes a bigger puff off the joint. He offers it to Taako but he shakes his head.

“Got the old kick in the pants from your lady. I’ve been there.”

“Grossarooni,” Taako groans, and Merle laughs.

“But seriously, this is what I’m talking about. You’re out your school job and you’re day drinking with me instead of doing something else. What gives?”

“Maybe I just like being around you,” Taako counters, and Merle scoffs.

“Well that’s certainly not it.”

He groans, laying his head on the counter. Kicking his knee out to unstick it, Taako stares down the wood out the window to the ocean. It’s a nice place Merle’s been given, Bottlenose Cove. Beach life suits him.

“Still having trouble with the pain?”

“I don’t have any trouble with pain,” he says petulantly. Merle just hums in response. “I don’t. Everyone’s body hurts sometimes. I’m sure yours does, you’re high in your middle ages. And if I did, it wouldn’t matter. We won, you’re right. There’s no reason to be a fucking buzzkill about it.”

He holds his hand out and Merle puts the joint in it. It’s the dregs, down to the cone, and he sucks the smoke down until it burns out.

“I think you’re misunderstanding me.” Merle takes the stub from him and chucks it in the garbage. He hops up on the stool he keeps back there and leans on the bar with him. “I’m not saying you don’t have a right to have a tough go of it. I mean, come on. I house Davenport when he’s not sailing out at sea. I get it. But Taako, what are you doing to make your life better? Sure, you’ve got that school, but Ren’s kicked you out of that for some decent reason. Your body hurts all the time, you bring this air of despair around with you everywhere, and I’m sick of watching it.”

“Wow, thanks,” he says flatly, and smiles when Merle groans.

“That’s exactly it!”

“Look,” Taako starts, raising his head off the wood. He takes a drink of his mead. “I’m figuring it out, alright? I just… I dunno what I want to do anymore, you know?”

“Then try things out. Take up a new hobby. Hell, open a bar. Except don’t, because I’ll sue you for thought infringement. And try something out for your damn hips. A cane could look cool, give you that Willy Wonka look.”

“You want me to look like fucking Willy Wonka?”

“Or not! Jeez, I’m just spit balling here.”

He considers it. A cane, as much as it feels like… giving into his body, might not be awful. It could be cool, just not in the Willy fucking Wonka way. And, he realizes, it could be his Focus.

That’s… that’s not horrible. Every time he’s thought of picking up a wand or taking the KrEbStAr from the mantle, he gets this pit in his stomach, like he’s acquiescing to something he doesn’t want to do. But having something that he uses every day, for function, that he can use as a Focus when he wants, well. That doesn’t sound half bad.

“Yeah. Yeah that could… work.”

“Just get one you can switch sides with, if you do. Use it opposite whichever hip’s hurting more.”

“Yeah yeah, Dad. I’ll be sure to do that.”

When he gets home later that night, after ditching Merle to run his bar and getting dinner with the Reaper Squad, he steps outside. It’s a nice night, warm enough that he can step out with his robe and not be shivering too bad.

“Taako!” Magnus’s voice chimes from his stone, and he twists his mouth. “Wow, a call from you unprompted? I should be honored.”

“Can it, Burnsides,” he says with no heat.

“Whaddya need?”

“I…” and this is the hard part. Asking. “I have a favor I need to ask.”

“Yeah, T, what’s up?” He sounds so earnest, like he’s been waiting sat on his hands for Taako to call and ask him to do something for him. Fuck, Taako’s not there all the time, maybe he has been.

“I need, ugh, I need a cane.”

“…A walking one? For you?”

“Yeah, Mags for me,” he grits out. His face is hot with embarrassment. It does feel like giving in to his body, gross. “I just, you know. Y’know?”

“I know,” Magnus says gently. And then he perks up, quick to avoid being too tender, knows it’s not what he wants right now, or ever, and Taako is silently grateful. “What kind? Do you want an animal head? A specific wood? A cool color? Some crazy design?”

“Understated,” he tells him. “I mean, you know me. Extravagant as fuck. But I don’t need some crazy shit, I need something that can go with everything.”

“Alright.” Magnus is clearly writing notes down. “Yeah, I’ve got time right now, this is the best time you could’ve asked for this. You wanna swing by next week? I won’t finish the bottom until I get a fit on you, but I should have the rest of it done.”

He agrees and Taako keeps mum on it for another week. He’s made plans to go out there tomorrow, but finds himself opening the door to Magnus. He’s got a cloth wrapped length with him, standing sheepishly on the porch with Johann, the deerhound. Taako gives him an unimpressed look.

“Couldn’t wait one day?”

“Well, I figured I could size it here and then have it stained and finished by tomorrow, you know? Then you can swing by tomorrow and get it!”

He lets them in, wrinkling his nose at the dog, but it’s a pleasant surprise, overall. Magnus has him stand and unwraps the cane. It’s a light wood right now, unfinished and raw, but the design is perfect. It doesn’t have anything terribly crazy, but there’s engravings in it, swirls around the handle, grooves and patterns down the whole of it. Nothing to ruin the integrity or stability, but just enough that it’s not a plain piece of wood.

“Wow,” he says, and there’s really nothing more to say. Magnus preens a little.

“It’ll be dark, the stain. That way whatever you wear will be fine with it. Light wood can be so finicky to match with, you know?” He has him hold it, marks something on the bottom, and cuts it down. “I was pretty sure I remembered where your hand rests, but I didn’t wanna risk being wrong and making it too short, so this way we get it perfect.”

They continue like that, Taako walking around with it, switching it between sides to see if the fit is the same. He finds his left hand sits a little higher than his right.

“Well, which side is worse?”

They’re both bad, he doesn’t say. They are, but usually, when they hurt, the right one flares up worse. It can switch, but it’s most frequently that one.

“We’ll fit it to you left hand then,” Magnus says. “At least you won’t be leaning for the right side. Just holding your hand up a little more.”

He sands out the bottom, tests it one more time, and leaves, promising a finished product by the time he gets there tomorrow.

When Lup drops him off, Magnus is waiting for him. He’s practically bouncing in place, and Taako has to hold up a hand to get him to chill out enough for him to get in the front door. The twenty dogs don’t help either, but they’re mostly all well trained.

Mostly.

“Oh man, I’m so excited for you to see it,” he says, leading him back to the workshop. “I mean, I’ve made a couple canes for people in town before, but I think this one’s my favorite.”

The cane sits hooked on the edge of his bench. It’s been stained a warm dark brown, and Magnus’s craftmanship really pops out here. He can see all the shadows and hollows and grooves, all the fucking love he put into it. There’s a small golden boot on the bottom of it, scored to give him some traction, and Taako feels a little breathless.

It looks like his.

He swallows, harsh and thick, and picks it up. It fits his grip perfectly, and it did yesterday but it’s smoother now, a finished piece, something he’ll ideally be using every day. And oh, that’s a gut punch. Here’s this thing he’s asked for, has needed for almost two years, and actually having to use it, well, it’s gonna send him over the fucking edge.

“Well?” Magnus prompts, and he’s jolted back to himself. “What do you think?”

“It’s, I mean what do you want me to say, Maggie? It’s perfect.”

He beams, and Taako actually has to look away from his fucking sunshine smile. Man, he’d forgotten how nice it was to have that pointed at him.

There’s a mirror in the corner, probably to test visually symmetry, and he walks over to it, looks at himself. He looks… stately. Like those fancy fucks him and Lup used to make fun of as kids, but also nothing like that at all. He looks, well, he looks almost like himself. And with a jolt, he realizes it’s not the face. It’s not the difference in his nose or his eyes or anything like that. Those, he realizes, are familiar now. Those are his. And if he looks long enough, it all is.

There’s a blur in his eyes, and he blinks it away, turning from the mirror and back to Magnus. He’s leaning on the workbench, watching him, and Taako grins. “The kid is back in fucking business.”

Magnus whoops, and Taako whoops, and Johann howls and the rest of the dogs do too and it makes his head split with pain a little bit, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care! He’s his own person, he has a fucking sick ass cane now, that Magnus made him and everything. All he needs to do is outfit it with some fucking magic properties and he’s back in business.

He walks around Raven’s Roost after that, testing it out, feeling out his new half a leg. It works, and he’s almost surprised when his right hip doesn’t flare quite as bad. It’s quieter, manageable, and sure this is gonna take some getting used to, but fuck if he isn’t stoked not to hurt quite as bad all the time.

Kravitz picks him up over his lunch break, and he feels self conscious, suddenly. It’s not something he likes, not something he really cares to feel, and he grips the handle. He hasn’t told anyone he’s done this. It shouldn’t be a secret, everyone knows he’s not the flip wizard he used to be. But seeing himself with it and having others see him with it, well, that’s a different story.

He keeps it half hidden, still visible if Kravitz wants to look, and he does, but he doesn’t say anything, kissing him hello and opening the rift back to their home. He stays for a quick lunch, a lettuce wrap made with last night’s pork, and leaves again. Doesn’t mention the cane at all.

It doesn’t stop Taako from stuffing it in the back of his closet, not to be thought of, not to be mentioned, not yet. He’ll class it up, imbue it with magical energy or what the fuck ever. He’s done it before, they all have. He knows how to make this cane his, how to channel his innate magical knowledge into it so that it’s attuned to his energy and his magic.

He just… has to sit down and do it.

March

As the snow melts, he feels a restlessness settling in his bones. The cane sits in the closet, unused, and while Kravitz may not have said anything to him, it’s clear the house is walking on eggshells around the topic of his, hmm, mobility. It taunts him, while his joints ache with the changing weather and even walking around the house becomes a chore. He yearns for it a little bit, though he wouldn’t call it that. Taako wouldn’t been seen sinking so low as to yearn for the thing that’s sitting in his damn closet this very moment.

But maybe, now, he would.

The mirror in the hallway teases him, shows his tired and drawn face, his hair hanging limply past his shoulders. There’s a stark line at the middle of his neck where the ashy brown of his hair turns abruptly into the flaxen dye job he kept after Glamour Springs. He’d grown it out, itching for his natural hair back, some semblance of his old self clawing to the surface, but as he looks at the hair, the way it waves over his head, not quite the curls he used to have, he thinks.

On a day when the rain drizzles onto the trees near their home and leaves a fine mist of water on their on their windows, Taako takes the hair scissors from their drawer in the bathroom and sets them on the table in front of Lup. She finishes the spoonful of cereal she had in her mouth before moving, glancing between him and the scissors.

“I want you to cut my hair.”

She raises an eyebrow. “How much are we talking, T? Spring trim? Totally new Taako?”

“Short,” he says. Totally new Taako, he feels around in his brain. Yeah, he thinks. Exactly. “Like, not Lucretia short, but y’know, somewhere between berries and cream and that.”

Her other eyebrow shoots up. He hasn’t had hair that short since they were well under a hundred, had a fresh mid neck cut that renewed on their hundred year journey, and grew it out during the swiss cheese years, clipping it back to his chin and bleaching it after killing forty people in an attempt to become less recognizable. He’d grown it back out a few years in, kept it dyed even on the moon, and it sits below his shoulder blades now, stringy and fried. Taako doesn’t do short-short hair.

Didn’t do, he corrects. Didn’t do short hair.

“You sure?” Lup asks, taking another bite. “’s a lot of length.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Totally new Taako, didn’t you say?” He runs his fingers through it, frowning. “I just… need something different, I think.”

She finishes her breakfast and Taako showers, getting his hair thoroughly clean and wet for the chop. He’s sat in the kitchen, a reverse of Angus, towel around his shoulders, hips freshly stretched out to ensure they have enough time to work with him sitting. They’ve moved the full length mirror from hers and Barry’s room in here. She snips all the dead length off first, right where the brown turns to blonde, and he watches the clippings fall to the ground in a ring around him.

“Alright,” she says, clips in her mouth. “I’m gonna do it real short in the back. Clean at the neck and everything. You still want it short?”

“Mhm.” He closes his eyes, making sure his head is straight and forward. “Go for it.”

Clipping his hair out of the way, Lup sections him out, trimming the hair down, and he breathes out through his nose.

“I’m almost there,” he says quietly.

“Where?”

“Almost a full person again, y’know?”

She pauses but picks back up quickly. “Break it down for me, I dunno if I follow.”

“It’s like,” he snaps a finger, trying to get a good analogy. “You know butterflies, right? They start as these weird little caterpillars, and then they go in their soup pod, and they come out a completely different thing but it’s still the same little dude that went in.”

“So you’re in the soup pod right now,” she clarifies, and he hums. “Alright. That makes sense, I guess. What does butterfly Taako look like, then?”

“Sexy as fuck, natch,” he says, and she snorts.

“Natch.”

“Like this,” he says, opening his eyes and motions at his face. She unclips the next section and keeps trimming, nodding along. “It’s. You know. It’s like two different people are in my brain all the time. One remembers you, the other doesn’t. One made a rock into pure transmutative energy and the other thought he poisoned an entire town because he fucked up a spell so bad. And neither of them looked like this.”

She doesn’t say anything, just holds her fingers to a length in his hair and he bumps his hand up until she takes it shorter.

“I can’t do anything trying to be the old me,” he says quietly. “I threw my wand in the river, I’m sure you and Kravitz and Barry have talked all about it by now.”

“Yeah, T, we’ve stayed talking about it.”

“Duh, I’m a hot topic.” He clears his throat, brushes a few stray hairs off his nose. “But it’s been nice. Not casting, not thinking about magic. It’s… different. And I’m still the best wizard around, obviously. I’ll still smoke everyone’s socks off when I get it going again. But I’m different, Lup. I look different, I act different, my body’s a suitcase full’a shit that hurts when I sit or stand or walk or do anything. I can’t be the old Taako, whichever one you’re thinking about. But I can still be a Taako. Does that make any sense?”

Lup bites at her lip, blinking a little rapidly. “Yeah, Taako, that makes perfect sense.”

He raises a hand and she takes it, pausing her trimming to squeeze his palm a few times. He smiles at her in the reflection and she smiles back, their mismatched faces not quite a mirror anymore but similar enough that it shouldn’t really matter.

And it doesn’t.

She gets back to it, cutting his hair until it sits much shorter on his head. The curls bounce a little more short like this, hitting the middle of his forehead and tapering down to flip out around his ears. It’s short in the back, just longer than the width of his fingers when he runs them through it. There’s still enough to get a good grip in at the top, but it’s so different than it was an hour ago.

He stands, looks at himself, shakes it out, turns and gets in the new angles, twists around, and really considers it. It’s a style he’s never really had before. Their aunt kept both their hair short for ease of care, and they’d taken turns giving each other shitty haircuts until they got good at it, but this is new for him, short and styled and intentional.

He loves it.

“It rips, Lulu,” he says, grinning, still looking at himself. “I mean, I was joking about sexy as fuck, but I think you made it happen.”

“I was gonna kill you if you hated it.” She picks at it herself. “You always hated having short hair.”

“I did,” he says a little reverently. “But I think I’m gonna like this.”

He takes the cane out the next day, alone in his house. Artificing isn’t his specialty, but they all did it enough for him to feel confident enchanting a piece of wood. It’s even a nice piece of wood, which makes it easier, attuned to his body by Magnus and everything.

So when, after he burns his plants and crushes his gemstones and lets his raw magical energy flare out of the tips of his fingers and current into the cane, he can’t cast so much as Light, he’s thoroughly perplexed.

He tries again the next day, goes through the steps one by one, slower this time, takes special care on the placement of his sigils and the speed at which he burns his herbs. He pours a little extra of himself into this one, just in case it wasn’t enough the first time, but he finishes an achy mess, and the stick still sits there, plain wood mocking him as he tries to light it up.

There is nothing more frustrating to him than a spell that won’t work, especially now. He may be neither of the Taakos that rest in his brain, but he knows he’s still magical enough to make a piece of wood light up.

Barry sits in his lab in the basement, reading through a confiscated necromantic tome, and Taako slams the cane on the desk in front of him. Watching him jump is almost enough for this to be worth it.

“Fuck, Taako,” he breathes out, clutching at his chest. The book slides closed. “A little warning?”

“What am I doing wrong here,” he asks. “We all made magical items, right? I’m not imagining that?”

“What, uh, what are you doing?”

“I’m making this cane my Focus, Barold, keep up.”

He blinks, takes the cane in his hands, and inspects. “Did Magnus make this?”

“Yeah, cashed in a favor,” he mutters, trying and failing to be blasé about it.

“You crushed the—”

“Crushed the gemstones, burned the herbs, wrote the sigils around it and me. I took my time, too. I can’t figure out why it won’t stick.”

“Did you make a taco?”

He stops, hold his hand out, walks back up the stairs, and makes him and Barry lunch. He comes back, tacos in hand, biting into it and feeling the rush of magical energy he got two years ago when he did this. Him and Barry set it up again, and when he tries again, it’s easy to pour his energy into it.

And it still won’t so much as light up.

“Huh,” Barry says, looking puzzled. “You did it right. We all did it, even Magnus. It should be bursting with magical energy at this point.”

“This is what I’m saying,” he groans, laying his upper half down on the bench. “I finally try and jumpstart my magic career again and this happens? Gods, I’m a fucking sham.”

“I mean,” Barry says hesitantly. “Have you tried casting with anything else?”

He grabs Barry’s wand from the table without looking and casts a shower of sparks with it effortlessly. He drops the wand back into Barry’s outstretched hands.

“Asked and answered, I guess,” he mumbles, looking back at the cane. “Magnus didn’t happen to enchant this already, did he?”

“He wouldn’t,” he says, picking himself back up. “I should be walking around with a sick ass can that can blast any fucking chump within two miles, but instead I’m stuck with a piece of wood that hates me.”

“The wood doesn’t hate you.” Barry picks it up again, turning it this way and that way. He looks at a spare notebook, and grabs it. “Do something to this. Enchant it in some way.”

“I don’t want to.” He crosses his arms.

“Not to be your Focus, come on Taako. Just, anything. Anything in your specialty.”

He looks at it. Takes a pen, draws a dick in it. Barry snorts. He does a smaller ritual, puts less of himself in it, and when he opens it up, the dick is still there. He writes a sentence, Taako’s writing in your notebook, doofus, and it stays there, ink still fresh on the page. He frowns, chewing at his cheek.

“Didn’t work.”

“Right,” Barry says. “And what was supposed to happen?”

“It was supposed to turn anything you wrote into a drawing of a dick.”

Barry tries it this time, same thing, ripping out Taako’s page of writing but not the shitty dick on the page. He hands Taako the pen again, and this time, when he writes, the ink morphs into a penis.

“Man,” he whines. “It was gonna be funnier when it was because of me.”

“You can tell everyone it was,” Barry says without paying attention to him. He looks at the cane, then at Taako, and he sits back in his chair. “I mean, I could enchant it for you, but I feel like you don’t want that.”

“Obviously not.” Taako picks the cane back up. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. It shouldn’t be this difficult.”

Barry steeples his fingers and looks at him without saying anything. He looks almost troubled and Taako holds out an expectant hand. 

“Copper for your thoughts? What’s with the science face, Bluejeans?”

“You’re not gonna like it,” he says behind his hands. 

“Well now I have to know.”

“I mean. The best of us at artificing was always—”

“No.” Taako points the handle at him, frowning. “Absolutely not.”

“Taako—“

“No! I shouldn’t even have to tell you this! Of all people, you know I can’t.”

“I know,” he says, hands out, placating, and Taako’s temper flares. “Believe me, if I didn’t think it would help I wouldn’t suggest it. I’m the last person that’s gonna push you to talk to her.”

“But you are,” he snips, and Barry looks pained. “I’m not asking the fucking Director to enchant my damn cane for me. Not when it’s her fault any of this is happening.”

“That’s exactly why,” Barry says, reaching for the cane. Taako gives it to him but not without a murderous look. “You can still cast magic, that’s obvious enough. And you should be able to imbue anything with your raw power, all the rest of us can. But she broke your brain, Taako. And— that’s it, right? You’ve remade yourself, again, out of who you were and who she turned you into and made this, which is great! It’s really, really great.”

“But?” 

“But,” Barry winces, “you’ve got this giant block of whether she fried your brain and replaced all your memories with a good story or not.”

He glowers and Barry inspects the cane. “What does any of that have to do with making a fucking Focus?”

“It’s all still emotions, Taako,” he says without looking at him. He runs his fingers over the grooves, admiring the handiwork. “Sure, you’re at a point where you’ll finally use this, sure, you’re ready to start practicing magic again. Those things are inherent, they’re you, regardless of if she made you a banger wizard or not. But artificing? That happened in the hundred years. That she could’ve made up. She didn’t, we all know how to do it, clearly you do or you wouldn’t have all the steps down pat, but you don’t know that you know it, you only know what was shoved in your brain by Junior.”

Barry hands him back the cane and Taako curls it close to himself, chewing on his cheek. He doesn’t say anything back to that, trying to figure out how the fuck he can plug that final piece without having to go grovel to Lucretia. Barry sighs.

“You’ve got a couple options here. You let one of us do it, you let a professional do it, you don’t make it your Focus at all, or you go talk to her.” He starts cleaning up their last attempt, pushing the schlong book towards him. “I wouldn’t want to see her, either. I won’t judge whatever you do, honest, I don’t know that I could go ask her for… whatever it is you have to ask her. But I think that’s your answer.”

Taako sits there silently simmering until he can’t take it anymore. He pushes out of the chair and stomps back up the stairs. Barry doesn’t try to stop him, just sits back in his chair and looks at the ceiling. 

The cane goes back in the closet, shoved behind coats and skirts and shoes.

April

Lucretia’s office is different now. She has windows, first of all. The natural and overhead lighting creates a warm atmosphere, much different from the clinical blue tinge of before. She has personal effects on her desk; a snow globe, a picture frame facing away from him, a notebook and pen in plain view. 

And the painting. 

Gone is the glamour that hid their faces, showing off her regal stature and weathered eyes. His face, his old face stares back at him, smiling, beach waves in his hair. The rest of the crew surrounds him, grinning and happy on the beach planet. 

It mocks him. The cheerful, oblivious faces look on, watching over her when she works. 

He’s rankled, feet up on the desk in front of him, waiting in the empty office in the guest chair for Lucretia to return. The cane is hooked on the armrest, still devoid of magic. He’d finally gotten tired of waiting for his brain to fix itself, and there’s still no way in hell anyone else is enchanting his items, so he’s here. To do what exactly he doesn’t know yet. 

The door clicks and creaks open and there’s a minute of silence, the feeling of being watched creeping up his neck. He doesn’t turn, doesn’t greet her, just stays sitting with his heels on her desk. 

Her footsteps begin, decisive in their gait, and she comes around and pulls out her chair. She’s wearing blue robes, silver trim around the hemming, a belt cinching it into a nice silhouette. 

“Hello, Taako,” she says, sitting down. She eyes his feet, but he doesn’t move, arms crossed, lounged back. “I wasn’t aware you were coming for a… visit.”

“Pulled a favor with Avi, heard you were busy, figured I was fine with waiting.” His voice is flat, none of his normal bravado. 

“You look… good,” she says, leaning back in her chair, relaxing. “Better than the last time I saw you. The hair looks nice.”

“Yeah, you’re not so shabby either.” His words are clipped. She presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose and breathes in deeply. 

“Taako, it’s not that it isn’t good to see you, but I’m busy and it’s really not the best time for a social call—”

“Oh, is it not? I’ve got eleven years to cash in on, and you can’t spare ten minutes?”

Her hand drags down her face. “Exactly. I don’t have time to argue with you about whether I made the right decisions with the information I had.”

“That we all had. We could’ve helped you, figured out something together, but you shot that idea in the fucking foot and pushed it off a bridge.”

She pulls out a file folder and starts flipping through it, writing in here and there with her pen. “If you won’t leave I’ll just have to deal with you being here.”

His feet fall to the ground and he sits up. She barely bats an eye. “Deal with me.”

“I can always call Killian in, if you’d prefer.”

There’s one thread of patience he has left and it’s rapidly fraying. His back aches, and it’s like a switch is flipped. 

“Did you ever fucking— stop and think about it? From our perspectives? From mine, from Davenport’s. Did you even apologize to him? Fuck, try Barry! You turn us against him, he tries to keep everyone alive and gets turned into a mythical villain for it! I don’t know my face from my ass and convince myself the world just fucking loves me and fuck it so bad I have to go on the run! You ruin our fucking lives and you can’t give me the goddamn time of fucking day. How’s that sound to you, Creesh?”

“And what about my perspective?” She slams her papers down on the desk. He tightens his jaw. “Have you ever tried to see it from my view? I lost everything! I chose to lose everything, and I got to watch as you lived and thrived, or didn’t, and I couldn’t interfere, not once. Because it would bring you back too soon. I thought— I thought it would be quick. I thought I’d get it back sooner. But you’re right. It was eleven years and it’ll never be the same.”

“’Chose’ is really doing some heavy fucking lifting there.”

“You don’t—”

“I don’t know what’s real anymore, Lucretia!” He stands, grabbing the cane for stability, and he watches her eyes flicker to it and back to his face. “I hurt, all the time. And I probably would if you’d prepared us for Wonderland better, but that’s still— it’s still there, yeah? And my face. I was pissed about it, hated it, but thank fuck it got changed. It’s the one thing I can look at and figure out I’m not either of the fucking elves in my brain telling me different stories about my fucking life.”

He straightens, popping his shoulders, gripping the handle so tightly his arm shakes.

“I’m here,” he says venomously. “Because I can’t fucking artifice anymore. We all learned it, I know how the fuck to do it, but I don’t know that I know how to do it. I can’t tell whether Lup’s real or a dream half the time. Am I the greatest wizard in the world? Or am I fucking swiss cheese brained enough to murder half a town? I can’t tell. I don’t know. And it doesn’t really matter because Taako, this Taako, isn’t either one of those. But it does matter, because I can’t enchant this fucking cane to be my focus. I haven’t used magic in months. I’ve been going through an identity crisis the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was thirty-seven. But I can’t even fucking tell if that’s a real event in my life or if you made it up and spoon fed it to me like I’m a baby you’re in charge of manipulating into a fucked up adult.”

He walks over to one of the windows and looks down through the sparse clouds to the ground. Spring is in full bloom, everything is lush and green, sprouting from the ground and coloring the world again. Birds fly by and he twists his mouth, shoulders tense, throat thick.

“I hate this,” Taako says quietly.

“I’m sorry.” Lucretia’s voice is almost a whisper, but he still gets it. He doesn’t turn, just keeps looking out the window. “I didn’t… I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t.”

The chair scrapes away from her desk and her footsteps tap closer to him. “You don’t want me to… enchant it, I suppose?”

“Fuck no,” he snorts. “It’s mine. Nobody gets to fucking touch it.”

“Right.” She stands next to him, looking out the window. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with hair this short.”

“Part of my brand new Taako transformation,” he mutters. “I don’t know what I thought would happen when I came up here. Maybe looking at your face would make me so angry I remembered my life?”

She chuckles, and a smile quirks at his lips.

“For the record, I didn’t make any of it up. I know that’s not any sort of consolation, especially with you not… trusting me to have kept it truthful, but that is the truth. I was never much for fiction. And our story was good enough that it didn’t need any embellishing.”

He hums, glancing down at the cane. It fits him perfectly, the dark wood meshing well with his outfit, with every outfit. Magnus did an excellent job, just like he always does.

“Give me your wand,” he says, holding a hand out and looking at her. She looks at him warily. “Come on, Creesh, if I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve done it already. I don’t have a Focus right now, that’s the whole problem. Give it.”

She doesn’t give him a wand, but does slip off the sapphire ring on her pointer finger. He slips it on and casts his first real spell in months.

Merle would be proud.

He watches Lucretia willingly fail her own check, and he fails his own, and Zone of Truth settles around them like an old blanket. He gives her the ring back, just as some sort of peace offering, and turns back to the window.

“I didn’t make it up, Taako,” she says, and her voice doesn’t even waver. “The— the KrEbStAr should be proof of that enough, for what you need. You made that, designed it, and enchanted it all at the Arcaneum. We were all there, we all did it.”

He thinks, thinks about what Fisher and Junior spit back out at him, about what was the Story and what was memory that filled itself in after. About the millions of little things about himself that only Lup knows, that not even Lup knows.

“Did I ever tell you,” he asks, even though he knows he never told her. “About my brief but intense stint as a bard?”

There’s a shocked silence, followed by a very cautiously amused “No?”

“When we were in our early thirties, Lup and I really started getting into magic. I mean, we had to, right? We were cooks on the road, but that doesn’t mean shit when every cook you see can fight or cast or curse or anything else. We needed to be valuable. Needed to be needed enough that the fact that one chef was cheaper than two didn’t matter. And I’m, well, you know I’m not a fighter. Lup could’ve been, but it was magic that really drew us in.

“Lup settled on Evocation pretty quickly, but I thought ‘Hey! Why don’t I become a bard? I can entertain and cast baller spells.’ I got the whole outfit and everything. A lute, puffy pants, the split puff sleeves shirt.” He ignores Lucretia’s stifled laughter. “Did the whole, uh, Berries and Cream haircut for under my feathered cap. Real Johann look, right? Only problem is that I was absolutely dogshit at playing the lute.”

He looks at Lucretia and she’s clearly biting her tongue to keep from saying anything. Taako grins.

“Yeah, it was about as disastrous as you can imagine. It lasted for five years, too. I was committed. Got us kicked out of more than one caravan with my shitty playing and shittier spellcasting. Bad music begets bad magic or whatever. Lup tried really hard to get me to kick it, to do literally anything else, try a different instrument or anything. But it was the lute or nothing for me. And I ended up having a whole identity crisis that, in retrospect, is really fucking funny? Because I was sooooo shit at the lute and at being a bard, but I didn’t want to give it up. And then I became the baller flip wizard you know and love because Lup couldn’t stop laughing at how upset I was about it.”

Lucretia does laugh then, at the easy to imagine image of Lup laughing at him in his feathered cap and puffy shorts. He huffs one out as well, a comfortable feeling he hasn’t felt with Lucretia in decades settling onto his shoulders. It’s strange. He still can’t look at her, at her aged face that’s both familiar and not, like Magnus but taken to an extreme. A face that he’s both known and loved for over a century and a face that betrayed him and a face that only wanted the best for him. He looks over to the painting, at her face next to his, both of them different, both of them happy, and a bitter taste floods his mouth.

He glances back at her, and she’s looking over at the painting as well, bags under her eyes more pronounced than they ever were when he knew her like the back of his hand. Now he barely knows either.

“Would you change it?” he asks her. “Knowing what you know now, would you change things?”

“Would you?” She asks him back, and he doesn’t bite at her, doesn’t rage about her avoiding his question. He considers it. Thinks about his life, about his home, about Kravitz, about Angus, about his family that he’s pieced back together with new additions.

He’s not sure that he could do it any differently.

“I think. I think I’m gonna go,” he says quietly. She looks at him, eyebrows raised. “Thank you. For… I dunno, wasting time with me?”

“It’s not a waste, Taako.” She grimaces, holds out a hand, and against his better judgement he takes it. They squeeze their fingers over one another’s palms, and then he lets go, turning and leaving the room. Lucretia doesn’t stop him, but that’s better.

Avi shoots him back down to the ground, chattering idly about what he’s been up to, filling the silence that Taako doesn’t even bother trying with. His house is blessedly empty and he sprawls onto the couch, launching the cane somewhere into the ether of his living room. He doesn’t bother trying with it, doesn’t bother doing anything but mulling over the first decent conversation he’s had with Lucretia in almost two years.

It almost feels itchy, having spoken to her in a way that clearly got his issues across, that he got an apology with, that made him laugh with her. His head feels fuzzy, and he spends most of the afternoon sifting through memories, of Lucretia, of their journey, of the different ways she would act depending on her mood, and her ultimate betrayal of them all.

It doesn’t sting as bad anymore.

Don’t get him wrong, he doesn’t think they’ll ever be anything close to close, even friendly is hard to stomach. But maybe he can say hello without feeling like he’s going to hex her with his eyes. And maybe he can speak to her for more than a minute without needing to launch himself off the moon. He can be civil, he thinks, and he can mean it.

When the month is almost done, when Lup is tinkering with a new recipe and Kravitz is reading up on new necromantic theories and Barry is conducting dubiously ethical homunculus experiments in the basement, Taako takes a walk. It’s misty, a heavier rain storm brewing for the evening, but for now the water clings to his clothes harmlessly. He walks to the river, stands at the bank before the rocks turn to fine silt, and he pulls out his components.

Sigils drawn, gemstones crushed, herbs smoldering in a shell under the cover of an overhanging rock, he sits down. He was never any good at meditation for rest, but meditation for magic was a different story. Ignoring his aching hips, he crosses his legs, closes his eyes, and lets his mind fall to the river of the arcane. It’s an old feeling, familiar in a way he knows can’t be falsified. He’d done this before Lucretia, when Lup had finally convinced him to try being a wizard, and he’d let himself float into the river, to feel the power rushing through his mind, and to learn what it felt like to submit to something greater than himself.

You can’t harness like that, unless you’re born special or something grandiose that he’d never put any stock in. You have to feel it, let it build under your skin, and find a physical outlet to release it. Spellbooks help, help to put words to what you want to do, make it easier to cast exactly how you want, but Taako and Lup learned on their own, with half rotten textbooks found in dumpsters and an innate knack for it that came with being elves. Letting the magic sift into their brains and shaping it after with a wand was the best way to learn.

He puts himself back there, back in the woods with his sister, young and clueless. The mist tickles his nose, frizzes his hair into a puffball upon his head, and he ignores it all, lets the magic filter into his head, down his spine, into his fingers and toes, until he feels it in every inch of himself, a livewire of magic trapped in a fleshy body. He reaches out with both hands, feels the buzz of power under his skin, and with his eyes still closed, finds the circle of sigils he’d placed the cane. They glow in his brain, a beacon to where he needs to grab. And he does, hands closing around the black of the cane, glowing hands wrapped around nothing behind his eyelids.

He pours the magic into it, into the shape in his hands, watching the cane fill out with a dull glow that slowly gets brighter. The sigils around it and his hands dim, sucking up into the wood until his body is barely glowing and the cane is blinding in the blackness. He pulls himself out of the river, removing that stream from where he’s imbued it, and the light stays. He waits another moment and the light still stays.

Taako opens his eyes, the gray afternoon still misty, and the cane is still gripped in his fingers. The herbs have stopped burning, smoke dissipated. His body is sore, coming back to the forefront of his brain now that he’s left his meditative state, but he ignores it, staring at the cane with his tongue between his teeth.

He looks at the wood, at the lovingly handcrafted piece, and casts light. It glows immediately, lighting up the hazy day with a warm bloom. His breath catches, and he swallows, blinks. It’s still lit, and his hands shake where he holds it. A Mage Hand appears in front of him, a rock turns to a flower, a shower of sparks comes from either end of the cane, and his eyes fill with water.

He did it.

He fucking did it.

A noise that would embarrass him were anybody around to hear it escapes his mouth and he curls over, clutching it to his chest. He doesn’t cry, thank you very much. His face is wet from the mist and his eyes are red from… allergies. Yeah, allergies.

The rain picks up on the way home, his aching joints flaring with the thunder, but it doesn’t matter. His cane keeps him steady, magic at his fingertips, hat shielding him from the worst of the rain. The glow of his house is a welcome sight in the drizzle, and he enters it with a pep in his step, a floating feeling in his brain.

He hangs up his hat, shucks off his shoes, kisses Kravitz hello, and lights a fire in the fire place with a point of the end of his cane.

“Nicely done,” Kravitz says, smiling, and Taako beams.

“Obvi,” he says as nonchalantly as he can manage, which isn’t very. “Chaboy’s back in business.”

They’ll eat dinner tonight, and Taako will tell them casually that his cane is finally enchanted, and all of them will congratulate him and he’ll see the relief on everyone’s faces. The realization that his months long breakdown is, mostly, over.

In a month Angus will be back with the end of school, and he’ll undo the braids he’d reupped in March, do twists this time, laugh with him, teach him a new spell or two. Everyone will get together for the Midsummer festival and the big S&S anniversary. He’ll crack jokes, cook dinners, laugh, really feel alive. He won’t use magic as frequently, but that’s alright. It’s there when he needs it. Magic is in his fucking bones.

But before all that, he’ll look in the mirror again. Look at his hair that Lup has touched up, at his face that is more familiar now than not, at the cane that sits at his side every day. Taako stares back at him, a creation of love and loss and reclamation. He’s made up of his selves that don’t exist anymore, that can’t exist anymore, but that’s okay.

He’s Taako from TV, after all. And that really is the whole of it.