Work Text:
When Qifrey tells you he wants to bring in an apprentice, your quill falls out of your grip and splatters a shameful mess of ink onto the ground. Your ribcage drops into the thick-black puddle pooling below.
You do not want an apprentice.
You do not want to see the light of wonder in their eyes. Their trust will cause your ears to scream until they ring in endless alarm. You will be forced to face the truth.
The truth: This world is not safe.
The truth: You cannot save them.
The truth: You couldn't save them.
The truth: You cannot save him.
You have pretended not to catch him gazing at you with longing when you wash the dishes and catch his figure in the reflection of the kitchen window.
He has not noticed your indirect stare. He is always too lost in thought. You want to pull him out of his brooding with hands on his shoulders, around his waist, up his thighs, down his skirt.
His cold-bitten skin could warm under your fingers.
You have not offered to touch him.
His silenced want could moan breathy pleas into your lips.
You have not offered to kiss him.
The truth: you will never offer to touch him, though you know you could light his skin aflame, as hot as your heartbeat runs when he looks at you, sad and faraway and half a step from being yours.
The truth: you are, fundamentally, a coward.
You are most comfortable in the shadowed semicircles of deception.
You will lie to your clients, and to your friends, and to your not-lover, and to yourself. You will say you're okay holding his life in your hands but never holding his hand. Never knowing the perfect indent of the writer's bump on his middle finger into the valleys of your fire-burned knuckles.
The spilled ink has given you an excuse to turn away from him. You're no longer looking at the questions rising hopeful through his gaze. You're looking at your own warped face through the sheen of candlelit ink. It is a trembling mockery staring back at you.
Your voice runs faster than your thoughts.
"An apprentice, huh? I don't hate the sound of that," you lie as you cast a counterclock spell to reverse the spill.
You hate the way your throat smolders when you ask: "So, what's our plan to bring one in?"
You are running out of time.
The apprentice will arrive, and she will find out the truth.
She will look at you with trusting, testing eyes and ask you what and how and why and you will lie. You will lie, and years later she will learn that every lesson was laced with deception, and she will hate you for it.
She will forgive you for it.
You will not forgive yourself.
For every client whose needs you meet, and whose cover you use to descend into the towns of the unknowings, you will build up a reputation of reliability you do not deserve. For every townsperson whose home you warm, whose streets you light, whose stomachs you help fill, another ten twenty hundred will go cold and tired and hungry.
You should not be their savior.
Your magic could so easily be theirs.
You could stop inertia in its tracks. Sweet-tongue your clients into loosening their wallets for repairs to shadowed abandoned streets. Better yet: you could give the townspeople the power to solve their problems, with a vial of ink and a piece of parchment and the right flick of a pen.
But you will do no such thing. You will only spare an extra clock tick here, a look of empathy there.
You have always been a coward, where Qifrey has never been. He looks his past in the face and fights his fate until failure succumbs to his stubborn will. He is not scared. He is propulsion. He is risk.
You would risk your life for him. Fall into thorn-barreled caves and outwit beasts and brimhats for him.
This, too, stems from the depths of your cowardice. Your chest sinks and your blood freezes at the thought he may be pulled from your side. He is the trunk around which the vines of your veins entangle. You will wilt without him.
Your apprentice will see this. She will know this. She will know your weakness and she will take him from you and you will see the joy she brings Qifrey and you will stand there, the coward you are, as Qifrey pours his love into her instead of you.
When he tells you the girl is an Arkalaum you freeze for a second too long. He smiles with an overconfidence that pulls you into his scheme, and when he insists he wants to take this girl in he wears an honest joy you haven't seen since you first suggested you make the shepherd's house into your shared home.
You want to see that smile again. You will do anything to see that smile again.
So when he says he doesn't want to bring in an outside watchful eye, and asks you to take the role, you lie and tell him it would be your honor.
You will convince the knights you are reliably truthful, you assure him. You will do whatever must be done to protect your atelier.
You redirect the conversation and tell him he will make a good professor, and he smiles fondly at the compliment. You swallow. He would not smile for you like this if you told him he would make a good lover, too.
That is okay, you lie.
You will fool the knights as you have fooled yourself.
Cowards make the best liars, after all.
You know it is only a matter of time before his apprentice sees through this, too.
She is sharp in mind and in words, but you're sharper, and she hates you for it.
The glare behind her thick curls cuts you with earned distrust. She looks up at you not with wonder, but with anger. She demands more of herself and of you and this, this you can handle.
You are not scared to let her see you as another adult who will disappoint her. It is better than the crushing guilt of broken trust, and she is not wrong.
It is only a matter of time.
You find reasons to stay in your workshop when Qifrey invites you to join their lessons. Mumbled excuses about piling deadlines and endless contraptions rub your mouth dry.
You try, and try, and try again to create something that isn't another problem as proof of your craven absence. You triple count the invoices on your desk and cross-check your accounting for discrepancies. You stare at your palm quire as layers of unvialed ink coagulate into staining piles among the mess of your desk.
You imagine the whisper of Qifrey's breath on the back of your neck. The hazy memory of sensation from ephemeral encounters with nameless faces churns the muscles beneath your shoulder blades.
You hate yourself for your selfishness and your lack of focus and your perversion and your wanting for more.
You want to drown in work, in wine, in weariness.
You make up for your daytime absence with nighttime accompaniment to Qifrey's closing routines.
The girl has awakened within him new life. He is glowing. He praises her growth and builds an arsenal of strategies to strengthen her skills.
He asks for your opinions on his lesson plans. They are brilliant, you tell him. You do not need to lie.
He says that he learned how to teach the reluctant from you. That you are the brilliant one. He has downed two glasses of wine and they smear blushing roses across his cheeks. You want to reach out and harvest the petals of his soft shy skin. You want to paint his neck with bitten marks beneath his loosened collar.
You reach instead for your glass of wine. Its drink is bitter and dry and you pray it will drag you into the honest promise of forgetting how much you want him.
Join me in tomorrow's lesson, he asks of you. Before you can make another excuse —
She asks about you, you know. 'How hard did he have to work to become the star of Ghodrey? What did he do to save so many? What can I do to be like him?'
You should answer her yourself.
You would be happy to try, you lie.
He smiles again. You do not know if he smiles for you or for her.
You stand and clear the dishes.
It does not matter, you accept. The running water soothes blistered ridges of scars that run up your palms and around your knuckles. It does not matter whether he smiles for you or for her.
You catch his reflection in the light of the kitchen window.
He is still smiling.
He is still smiling, and that is enough. You do not need to feel the ridges of his ink-stained hands. You do not need to memorize the angles of his crested spine as he arches under your touch. You do not need to know the sound of his whispered moans calling your name. You only need to memorize this smile, and index it among thousands of others, as you pretend not to notice him absentmindedly tracing the length of the wine glass' stem.
No matter how much you work or how far you travel or how little you sleep, you will never escape the truth.
It was the girl, and not you, who saved him.
You are no more than a coward wearing the cloak of a hero.
You will never dare to want more.