Archive of Our Own

"Why did you decide to take on apprentices?"

Qifrey follows Olruggio's gaze to the girls in the other room. Tetia is asleep, her head resting on Agott's shoulder. The last time Qifrey looked, Agott had been staring up at the ceiling with some mixture of boredom and resignation, but now he smiles to see that she seems to have nodded off as well, head leaned back against the couch, pen slipping from her slack fingers. Earlier in the evening, she had been allowing Tetia to watch her work—a huge step for Agott, who's usually so solitary, especially when it comes to her spellwork. When Tetia had nodded off against her in the middle of Agott explaining some aspect of her practice, Qifrey had expected Agott to shift away in annoyance and seek her own room, but to his surprise, she'd only looked at the sleeping Tetia in consternation and gotten quiet.

When Olruggio had come in earlier to find Qifrey watching his apprentices getting along from afar, he'd just grunted, joined Qifrey at the kitchen table, and poured a glass of wine for them both. He must have finished the commission he's been working on the last few days, and usually Qifrey would be glad of the opportunity to ask him about it over drinks, but Olruggio seemed to sense his mood, and joined his contemplative silence rather than breaking it. Until Agott falls asleep, and he asks his question.

Why indeed, thinks Qifrey, who has been busy contending with the peculiar feeling in his chest as he watches the girls: like there's something in him too big for him, trying to expand past the bounds of his heart. It certainly wasn't for this. He did not take on apprentices so that he would feel his breath catch when he sees them getting along, or so that his chest would swell with pride the first time Agott showed him one of her spells with a look of pride instead of him having to coax the workbook out of her hands, or when Tetia finally let herself talk as loudly and excitedly as she liked without cutting herself off with hands over her mouth before she'd finished.

He had expected teaching to be difficult, stressful. He had expected to feel the strain of others in his space when he is used to having most of the atelier to himself; he had expected to struggle to keep his patience with a child's incessant questions and desire for attention. He had expected the anxiety, the pressure of being responsible for his apprentices' wellbeing, the insecurity of being worth their trust when they agreed to join his atelier. And he has experienced all of those things. When it was just Agott, and she was quiet and too serious and reluctant to open up to him, when she insisted on practicing alone and chewed her lip in anxiety whenever he looked over her work, when he struggled to find his way into conversations with her and break the awkward silences when he did convince her to eat dinners at the table with him—it was hard, it was nervewracking. And then he'd brought in Tetia and added a second child to feed and tend to, a second girl with her own trauma, desperately in need of friends and yet anxious about the space she took up, and she and Agott had both struggled to adjust to a fellow apprentice with a very different personality, and that was hard, too.

And yet. He hadn't expected it to feel so…worthwhile. He hadn't expected all the stress and anxiety to dwindle into unimportance the moment one of them smiled at him with real trust and joy in their eyes. He hadn't expected the ache in his chest as he watched them slowly becoming used to one another, and found himself hoping that Agott might find in Tetia the kind of friendship he had found in Olruggio. He hadn't accounted for this.

Why had he taken on apprentices? To make his life harder, of course. To make the atelier feel less his, less home. To divert his attention from Olruggio, to something else designed to cause him anxiety. He is beginning to worry that he may have miscalculated.

It's a question Olruggio has asked before, but of course Qifrey can't give him the real answer. He cannot tell him that to continue living alone in an atelier with Olruggio would have been the death of him, one way or another.

"I'm leaving the Great Hall."

He doesn't announce himself, just stands at Olruggio's doorway and waits for him to look up from his notebook and then says it, before he can think of saying anything else. It's a bad idea, probably. He shouldn't. He hadn't, for longer than he thought he'd manage. If he could do what he wanted, he'd have fled the Hall and never looked back the moment he'd passed the fourth test. Olruggio knows this. Olruggio doesn't understand why he hasn't, and Qifrey can't tell him. (Qifrey has told him. He's told him twice. Two more failures for his tally.)

He should stay because the Great Hall is the perfect home for him. There is no comfort for him here. If he begins to feel safe, all he need do is look outside, stare into the depths of the ocean, remind himself of its pressing force against the wards that keep them all breathing. He hates the Great Hall, hates the muted blue light that filters through all the windows, hates the whispers that still, still follow him down thoroughfares, hates being surrounded by stone and water all the time. That hatred is why he should never leave; it is why he cannot stay.

He thought about just running away. He's done it before; it would just be more permanent, this time. He doesn't need to register an atelier, do things in the proper, Pact-ordained order. He could just leave. Dedicate himself to hunting the Brimmed Caps, perhaps. Or just—disappear. Somewhere quiet and forgettable, with no watching eyes and no lives to ruin.

Of course, if he disappears then Olruggio will find him. He always does; he comes looking even when everyone else is content to let Qifrey be. Qifrey has thought about this, factored it in. Because—he can't leave Olruggio entirely. He's tried. It doesn't work. It's too much of a relief, to think of being free from the shackles of Olruggio's careful attention, and letting Olruggio be free from him. Too great a joy, to think of never hurting Olruggio again. But if he leaves, knowing Olruggio will come for him but not knowing when, then it's the tension, then it's the anxiety and the guilt. He can be solitary and alive, that way, perhaps—but then, Olruggio will find him eventually, and he's imagined it already, the relief of being found. He always wants to be found; all of his leavings are really, in the end, about being found, even when he tells himself they aren't. He mightn't survive it, and then they'd be back at the start.

So—no running. The proper way, then. He tells Olruggio. The sole concession he makes to the desire to run is that he isn't going to ask. Olruggio could do so much better than to follow after Qifrey and they both know it, so he isn't going to ask. He'll just tell, and see.

Olruggio sets down his book, processes Qifrey's tone for what it is, raises his eyebrows at him. "Figured you'd be tellin' me that years ago. Never thought you'd stick around even this long."

Qifrey doesn't answer the question Olruggio isn't asking. He's told Olruggio before. He won't make that mistake again.

Olruggio shrugs at Qifrey's silence, leans back in his chair, props his legs up on his own desk. "So where're we going?"

It's that—the easy, assumed we. He wasn't going to ask, tried to bury the part of him that already knew. He knew, and it still—

"You don't have to," he says through the squirming feeling of growth inside him: an unfurling where there shouldn't be, shifting organs out of the way. "Your business—"

"Is with outsiders anyway," Olruggio points out, rolling his eyes. "I'll be travelin' either way. Sure, there're more resources here, but all I need is a windowway. I can make contraptions anywhere. Qifrey, I've just been waiting for you to make up your mind." He pauses, narrows his eyes at Qifrey. Playful, mostly. A challenge, not an accusation. Mostly. "Unless you're saying you don't want me to go."

He's ruining Olruggio's life, he tells himself, closing his eye just briefly, just for a second. Sanding away his mind little by little. If Olruggio comes, he'll have nowhere to hide from Olruggio's attentions, which means he will have to be careful, have to hold himself back all of the time. It isn't a thing to celebrate, Olruggio coming with him. It's a lifetime of anxiety. It's a punishment.

The creeping, invasive feeling of growth within him recedes.

"It'll be remote," he admits, fists clutching at his skirts. "I'll need to be assigned a Watchful Eye."

At that, Olruggio laughs, startled and ungraceful. "You think I'll be approved as your Watchful Eye?"

"You will be." Despite himself, he smiles, small and smug. "I asked Beldaruit." Because he wasn't going to ask, but he did know.

Olruggio's mouth hangs open for a moment, then he snorts. "Nepotism'll get you everywhere, huh? I guess if he approves it…Though you'd think he'd know better than anyone."

Qifrey knows what he means—Beldaruit knows full well that Olruggio has never stopped Qifrey from doing anything. Aided and abetted, more like. He thinks Beldaruit also believes, however, that Olruggio is one of the few people Qifrey might listen to, one of the few whose authority he might allow. Beldaruit's wrong, in that regard, but it's a reasonable assumption.

Also, he so rarely asks Beldaruit for anything that his old master is generally too busy being touched and delighted at being called on to consider saying no.

"You will, then? Be my Watchful Eye?" He finally steps out of the doorway, perches himself on a corner of the desk not taken up by Olruggio's feet. "So far as I understand it, it's little more than a title; you needn't do anything beyond write a report here and there, so it shouldn't get in the way of your work—"

"'Course I will," Olruggio says over him. "So what'm I watching over, exactly?"

Qifrey hesitates, and then smiles down at the papers full of half-drawn seals strewn across Olruggio's desk. "It's in the Naakiwan Downs."

A pause, and then: "Not that old shepherd's hut?" He remembers.

Qifrey nods. "I got clearance to have an atelier there. I thought I could fix it up; I don't think anyone's lived there in decades, so it shouldn't be a problem." He looks up, and stops short at the way Olruggio's smiling at him. "What?"

"Nothin'. I was just remembering—that's the first time you ever talked like you were planning for the future. Still, I never thought when I brought you there that one day we'd be fixing up that old place ourselves!"

Qifrey hadn't, either. Then, and long after, he hadn't been sure he'd make it that far. Maybe the smart move is to stay away, to smother himself here at the bottom of the ocean away from temptation. But there's a balance he has to find, here, between a life he can live and a life worth living. What is the point of being alive, if he entombs himself to do it? He has reasons external to himself for clinging to life. The Brimmed Caps and what they have of his. Olruggio's ribbon on his cap. But, he thinks, looking at the way Olruggio smiles at him, he has to find a way to live for himself, too. If he can do it under the stars, if he can do it in the first place he ever felt hope for the future—

It's a start.

When they finish fixing the atelier, when the last furnishings are brought in and the last of the tools packed away, they celebrate by getting spectacularly, fantastically drunk. Olruggio's scheme: Qifrey had been none the wiser, until the bottle Olruggio brought out to pair with Qifrey's first meal cooked in their own atelier's kitchen turned into two, then three. "You planned this!" Qifrey accuses laughingly once he realizes he has been baited, one innocent refill from Olruggio after another, into drinking far more than he usually would. He's careful. He knows how to be careful. When the other recent graduates had all gotten together for a raucous celebration, drinks flowing, Qifrey had hung around the edges, sipping sparingly, speaking to few except Olruggio and Alaira. When Olruggio would come back from a business dinner one step from drunk and coax Qifrey into helping him the rest of the way there, Qifrey would smile and indulge him and restrict himself to a single glass, knowing Olruggio himself was too far gone to notice.

But his atelier is complete, and the stars are flung wide across the sky just outside the open window, and the air is fresh and clean and not the least bit salty, and Olruggio is flushed and cheerful and Qifrey forgets, for a moment, to be careful. He's never been drunk like this before, the world blurred at the edges like the heat shimmer from one of Olruggio's flames. The night is a sparkling, beautiful thing, and when he laughs at something Olruggio has said and finds himself listing sideways, Olruggio is there warm and solid and steady to lean on.

At some point Olruggio drags Qifrey outside, both of them stumbling and clutching each other, and pulls him down onto the hillside. They fall back against the grass and stare up at the stars. It isn't the first time Qifrey's seen this, the night sky blanketing these hills. It's what made him fall in love with this rundown little shepherd's hut in the first place, the first time he really wanted something for his own. But he gasps anyway, at the way it spreads so open and wide and clear it might envelop him. He could fall into it, like this. He could be floating in a sea of stars, and nothing could ever touch him.

A dark shape blocks his view, and it takes Qifrey's eye a moment to make out Olruggio's features in the dim light of the moon. Olruggio is sitting up. Olruggio is looking down at Qifrey, flushed and vibrant, eyes shining, just as beautiful as the stars. Qifrey pushes himself up, and when the world wobbles around him he reaches for Olruggio's cloak to hold onto, and Olruggio grabs his shoulder, and for a long breathless moment they're sitting there, staring at each other, holding on to one another. When Olruggio leans in, Qifrey doesn't pull away.

He closes his eye, and for a moment, he's boneless, melting into Olruggio's warmth, trusting Olruggio to hold him steady. And then Olruggio pulls away, languid at first, then sharp, and his inhale makes Qifrey open his eye, disoriented. Olruggio is staring at him in horror. He's saying, "Holy—" He's saying, "Your eye, what's, what is—" and Qifrey, feeling half in a dream, reaches up to brush his fingers against the leaves sprouting from where his right eye should be.

He doesn't remember the rest of the night very well. (Ironic, he knows. Painfully, miserably ironic.) He remembers crying until his lap is full of baby leaves of new-spring green. He thinks he begged Olruggio to let him go this time; he thinks he said this was good, this was a good place to stop, this was where he wanted to be. He remembers Olruggio, once he had understood enough of Qifrey's drunken confession, pressing pen and ink into his hands, and then taking them back when Qifrey's hands shook too badly with drink and misery to make straight lines. Olruggio had drawn the seal himself, just like the first time. Olruggio had slept on the ground while Qifrey buried his head in his arms and sobbed next to him, sobbed until there were no tears left and then kept a silent vigil of the sunrise until Olruggio woke complaining of his hangover.

He'd resolved, after that, to have the seal ready in advance. So he's prepared. So he never has to watch Olruggio draw that awful spell again.

The routine they find their way into is like a dance, but one where Qifrey's role is to stay always one step apart.

They are not, precisely, living together. Olruggio has his own atelier on the other side of the bridge, which serves as bedroom and workshop both, and he's just as prone to holing up in his room for days at a time when working on commissions as he ever was at the Great Hall. Between that and the business trips that take him to various parts of the peninsula, Qifrey often has days to himself, days he fills with spellwork, and community service around their part of the countryside, and afternoons spent picking herbs from the cliffsides and experimenting with gardening. It is solitary, and peaceful, and a little bit boring, and that's fine. It's nice.

But other times Olruggio is home and present and the dance begins, their coming together in a thousand little ways. Olruggio joining him for meals becomes Olruggio in the kitchen watching him work becomes Olruggio helping him cook. Olruggio leaning on the counter with his sleeves tied back. Olruggio asking where he'd picked up this recipe or that. Olruggio teasing him with the memories of their first attempts at cooking, Qifrey's near-inedible initial results and the boyish lack of grace in failure that had made him stubbornly determined to work at it until he could outcook Olruggio.

Olruggio settling onto the couch with him afterwards, glass of wine in hand, telling Qifrey about his latest trip or narrating aloud the process behind his most recent contraption. Olruggio, cheeky and emboldened by that wine, stretching out and crossing his legs atop Qifrey's lap, trapping him there. Olruggio, asking him questions, blue eyes bright and interested and fixed on Qifrey until he feels like a butterfly spread out and pinned for observation.

And Qifrey, ever taking the first step away. Avoiding with casual subtleness the shoulder Olruggio would have bumped him with companionably during their cooking. Disentangling himself from Olruggio's legs, pleading weariness to disappear into his own room for the night long before Olruggio would have chosen to part. Lines drawn in the sand, walls carefully erected. He lets Olruggio believe he doesn't much like to be touched. He lets Olruggio believe that Qifrey prefers his solitude, prefers his own room at night, prefers a life where they orbit each other without ever coming into alignment. There is no other choice. There is no other way to make this work. Olruggio reaches and Qifrey pulls back. Olruggio looks and Qifrey looks away. Like a tightrope walker he feels the delicate balance of his soles against the wire he walks, and knows that to wobble too far in either direction is to fall.

But the walls he builds have windows, and he sees the consequences of his own efforts with cruel clarity. He sees the gradual shuttering of Olruggio's hopes, the withering of expectation. He sees the battle within Olruggio of when to reach out, and how far, and pretends he does not. He sees him packing himself away, in resigned little pieces, and wearing his want openly only when he thinks Qifrey isn't looking. Worse still, he sees the trips Olruggio takes lengthen, and the greater number of times they end with Olruggio wobbling his way through the door or the windowway with wine sweet on his breath. He knows which nights Olruggio remains in the kitchen after Qifrey leaves it, drinking alone rather than returning to his own atelier.

Qifrey has always recognized in himself a capacity for cruelty, but he had never imagined it could be this systematic. He had never imagined what it might be like, to break a heart with open eyes. He tells himself that it is better than the alternative, for the alternative is Qifrey dead and Olruggio brokenhearted anyway. He wonders if the Olruggio who gave him his ribbon knew even then what he was asking Qifrey to do, or if he had been too young to imagine such things.

One would think that such routine ruthlessness would become mundane over time, a thing of grey resignation. It does, in that it becomes automatic; it does not, in that it never stops hurting. Good, he tells himself. As it should. Except that it is a test of his willpower, and Qifrey has never been as good at self-denial as he professed. If he was truly as indifferent as he leads Olruggio to believe, the tale would be a different one. But he is not, he has never been, and even his guilt is not enough of a shield against the lure of Olruggio's flame. Every day he has to choose not to have what Olruggio would give to him willingly, and every day the waves of that choice lap at the sandcastle walls he has built. And inside those eroding walls, the temptation: He could have one perfect day, but only one. Or he could have a hundred perfect days, if only he is willing to complete a hundred seals. Or he could stay the course, and keep a promise, and wonder if a lamp that dies gradually from lack of fuel is any happier for it than a lamp doused all at once.

Something has to give. Something has to snap. The day it happens is a windy one, one that has him holding onto his hat and Olruggio turning up his collar during their trip into Kalhn. Nothing of note happens that day at all, except for this: That during their shopping, Qifrey happens to see two men walking down the street opposite them, holding hands openly, and all of a sudden he hates them so badly that it takes his breath away. He hates them so badly that it stops him in his tracks, as if jealousy were a physical thing pinning him in place. He is overtaken with it, the wind whistling in his ears like a shriek, until Olruggio asks him what the holdup is, and Qifrey has to take it all and fold it up small enough to hide behind the smile Olruggio taught him, and keep walking.

That night, once Olruggio is asleep, Qifrey makes breakfast for him by lamplight, plates it atop a seal to keep it fresh, and leaves the atelier.

There are no windowways near the Forest of Thristas. It takes the better part of a day to fly there from the nearest one, and so by the time Qifrey arrives, it is twilight again.

He alights at the edge and walks beneath the boughs on his own two feet. They welcome him in, they reach for him: huge, twisted, hulking black trees that block nearly all remaining light from the sky, under whose branches rolls a permanent uneasy fog. His shadow lengthens before him until it disappears into the trees' heavy shade, and he follows it inside. Sound is deadened within Thristas: he can hear no birdsong, no call of animals through the mist. Only his own muted footsteps, and the creak of ancient trees.

He lets his hand rest on one of the trunks, half-expecting his fingers to come away black. They had been silver once, so the stories go: a beautiful, thriving forest of silverwoods gone black with the sins of forbidden magic. Magic attempting to resurrect the dead, so it was said, but it had killed these trees instead. In a sense, he is walking into a graveyard. A ghost amongst corpses. He had been buried with them, once. His body had been exhumed, but a part of him has always lived here under the trees. Under which one's roots had his coffin been nestled? Which tree had birthed him from that sodden earth?

This is where you came from, he reminds himself. This is what you are.

In the absence of any way to know under which tree he had been buried, he chooses one at random instead, putting his back to its dead trunk and seating himself between its protruding roots. He doffs his hat and clutches it in his hands, unbuttons the flap to reveal the memory erasure seal, one tiny gap in its circumference awaiting completion. Memory spells have always reminded him of eyes. They stare at each other now, its unblinking iris a dark counterpart to his own.

He'd let himself forget, is the problem. He had, nearly literally, stopped seeing the forest for the trees. A holding pattern, that's all his life is right now—focusing his every attention on the knife's edge of his balance with Olruggio, playing chicken with domesticity, testing how much of it he could chase before he lost that balance. As if that were its own end. But it is an illusion, that life, and a trap. There is no peaceful resolution without action, and he only has so much time. He admits that to himself now, as he has denied it before: the difference it makes, being under these shaded boughs. The headache that takes up near permanent residence in the light of day eases here, with no bright light to spark painfully in his remaining eye. The silverwood can heal injury; he doubts it can sustain a failing eye indefinitely.

Olruggio isn't his and never can be, and if that is all he focuses on, then there are only two paths open to him: Either his willpower will fail, and he will grasp for what he cannot have and hurt them both, or he will become what he had glimpsed in himself yesterday, heart deadened with hatred for all who have what he does not. Is that a life worth living, one where he has gone small and mean with jealousy and resentment, where his only defense against the temptation of joy is to forget how to feel it entirely? He is no stranger to hatred, but to hate the world—to hate the people in it who have committed no sin except to have what he cannot—that cannot be the life Olruggio had thought worth sacificing himself that Qifrey might live. That cannot be the legacy he builds for the ribbon on his cap.

He thinks to himself: I cannot do this anymore. Tests the thought on his tongue without speaking it aloud. Thinks: I'd rather die than live like this, with everything I want at my fingertips and none of it allowed to me. In this of all places, he can be allowed honesty. So: Does he mean it?

He places his fingertips on the ground before him, soft with decay. Somewhere in this forest, his eye was taken from him. They might be here even now, in some hidden lair, those Brimmed Caps who had taken it for their own foul purposes. The thought awakens something in him, a zeal that gives the lie to his thoughts. No. No, he would not rather die, because he does not live only for himself. If he did, he would have given it all up long ago. While he has been pantomiming the life he wishes he could live, flirting with death for the chance to play at it like a child with a toy house, the Brimmed Caps have continued their work. That there have been no reports of forbidden magic for over a year now does not mean they have abandoned the plans he had discovered in the Tower, so why should he abandon his own search?

They have a piece of him, and they would do evil with it. They have stolen his past, and they would steal his future as well. One day his sight will fail him, and ignoring that will not prevent it. If there is no saving him, then he must do something with the life he has left, something worthy of all that has been given to preserve it.

Clarity settles over him, razor-edged. Yes, he has hatred in him, but he knows where it deserves to be pointed. Focus it, hone it, and it need not spill over into the rest of his life. But if he is to continue on that course, then something must change. He cannot trust himself to maintain this fragile balance with Olruggio; he doubts this flash of renewed purpose will be enough to shield himself from the temptation of a life he is ever a word away from having and losing. Something new, then. Some new source of anxiety, something that will give him ample cause to fret while also distracting him from Olruggio, something that keeps him busy enough to mask any investigations he might need to make if he is to renew his search for the Brimmed Caps.

A few moments longer to gaze searchingly into the miasmic forest that is his grave and his birthplace, and then he stands. There will be plenty of time to consider his options on the long flight home.

"Whiskercat got your tongue?"

Qifrey blinks, then smiles apologetically at Olruggio, who's waggling his glass of wine in Qifrey's direction. "Sorry, Olly. Say it one more time?"

"You heard me. Why did you really get so bent on taking the Fifth Test? And don't give me that bit about not bein' able to stand watching other witches do a bad job at it. You're competitive, but you're not that competitive. If that were the reason, you could've just reported them and moved on."

Qifrey's smile gains a genuine fullness at that. Caught out, of course; it's always been perfectly true that Qifrey hates witches who clearly have no love or care for the children they profess to teach, but his snide remarks to that effect had never led to any declaration of his own intent to teach before his trip to Thristas. Olruggio had openly wondered at Qifrey's intent to take the Fifth Test when he'd first declared it, and who could blame him? Qifrey had never been particularly comfortable around other children even when he was one, and had complained about every aspect of the master-apprentice relationship at some point or another during his years ensconced in it.

He thinks Olruggio had expected him to give up on the notion soon enough, as if it were some fancy that had entered his mind that he'd soon think better of. He's not sure Olruggio ever truly believed he'd willingly take on an apprentice until after the test had been taken and passed. Perhaps he'd sensed Qifrey's detachment from his own rationales. Qifrey himself hadn't believed it when he'd said, when pressed, I just think I might like it, passing on what I've learned, so how could Olruggio? But he hadn't quite been willing to label Qifrey a liar, so he'd had to let it rest.

"Why the sudden curiosity?" He keeps his voice pitched low, so as not to wake the two girls slumbering in the next room. He injects a teasing tone when he adds, "Still doubting me, old friend?"

If so, he'd hardly be alone. That had been part of the appeal of the whole thing. Qifrey had known full well how the general populace would react to learning that Beldaruit's strange, one-eyed Outsider of an apprentice was planning to take on apprentices of his own. Was he really who they wanted teaching their next generation? Doubt and veiled judgment would come from every angle, and Qifrey would forever worry that any apprentice he took on would be damaged in turn by the reputation of their master. If it made him feel sick with guilt even in advance, to use a child that way, to take them in knowing what they might face in learning from him, well, all the better for his purposes.

But Olruggio snorts into his wine. "I never doubted you'd be good at teaching magic." There's a monumental but weighing down the last word, and Qifrey doesn't have to wonder very hard what would be hanging on it if he fished it out. But why would you want to? But would you be able to show those children the attention they deserved? Would you even know how to talk to them? All questions Qifrey has wondered about himself. He doesn't fish, though, and after a moment of silence Olruggio chooses a far kinder phrasing. "But you're good with them, too. Wasn't sure you had it in you, but you are. You've got them starting to open up like flowers in spring. What I want to know is, how'd you know this was what you wanted to do?"

"I didn't," Qifrey murmurs honestly, setting his own forgotten glass on the table. "I just…" He hesitates. He can't tell Olruggio the real reason, but he'd like to at least give him an answer Qifrey himself believes, this time. He watches them for another moment, Agott and Tetia, sleeping against each other in the dim light. Feeling safe with each other, in the atelier he's given to them. Girls who had not known safety before they came here, for one reason or another.

"There are things I want to do in this life, Olly," he says finally. "A mark I'd like to leave on the world, while I'm here. I think having them will help me do that. Beldaruit and I may not always see eye-to-eye, but he saw a boy everyone else simply wanted out of the way and reached out a hand to him. I'll never forget that. If I can help a lost child feel safe, and loved, and give her the tools to flourish and make the world a better place with her magic…If I can do that, then at least I'll have done some good through them. That's a legacy I wouldn't mind leaving."

It's a dangerous thing, the truth, even a pared-down version of it. He knows it's true because of the relief he feels in saying it, the relief of looking inside yourself and finding something, just one thing, that you might admire in another person. It settles oddly in his chest, a tenderness that seems to reach out to the girls sleeping on his couch, as if he could gather them up in an embrace without moving, without touching them. He breathes in, and feels the breath tripping over jagged edges on the way up, splinters of branch and twig that stir to life in him. Dangerous.

It's only when the silence stretches over-long that he looks over and sees the odd look Olruggio is giving him. It lasts a breath beyond that, beyond their eyes meeting, and then Olruggio is reaching over to shove him lightly in the shoulder. "You could stand to be a little less morbid sometimes," he quips, and Qifrey has to hold fast to his expression. "'While I'm here' indeed. Still. You're doin' right by them. Keep it up, Master Qifrey."

Qifrey rubs his shoulder, gives a halfhearted chuckle, and quietly despairs. Dangerous indeed.

Perhaps he ought to take on a third.