Chapter Text
He realized too slow.
Qifrey’s gasped “Wait, Olly don’t–” was cut off with a choke as the previously hidden lines of magic blazed to life beneath them, blinding light encircling them and searing into his eye.
He slammed it shut with a cry, arms coming up in a futile effort to protect his splitting head. Winds roared in his ears, whipping his robes around him and tangling his limbs so he stumbled, disoriented and off-kilter.
He heard a cry and a thud through the maelstrom, and turned towards it blindly. “Olruggio! Where–”
He didn’t have the chance to finish before his entire body buzzed strangely, seeming suddenly disconnected from himself. The sensation in his limbs receded into his chest and up his throat, then disappeared entirely. His panicked mind floated unmoored for a moment before there was an indescribable impression of speed and he slammed into a resistance that felt just as panicked as himself.
Olly?
The resistance abruptly gave way and Qifrey was falling, falling…
The second impact was even sharper than the first, every bone aching. His eyes fluttered, a blurry vision of white and grey next to him registering before they fluttered again. Everything went black.
Olruggio scrunched his nose in displeasure. His head pounded, and his entire body ached with a strange sort of buzzing in his veins. He grunted and shifted clumsily, his muscles slow to obey him and his limbs like foreign objects against the hard ground beneath him.
Why was he on the ground?
What did I drink last night?
Groaning, he forced open his eyes.
No.
His eye.
His hands flew up to his face as he lurched upright, knocking the tiny glasses off his nose.
Through the throbbing ache making his vision wobble with each pulse, he glimpsed pale, slim hands move in response. Tendrils of white hair tickled the edge of his field of vision as those hands (his hands?) pressed into the scar where his right eye should be.
What. The. Fuck.
His panicked breaths were interrupted by a sound from beside him. He looked over (turning his entire neck) to see a dark-haired figure crumpled in a tangle of blue and black fabric.
He’s–
Olruggio stumbled upright, nearly crashing back to his knees as he landed next to his body.
His own body.
That he was not inside.
"Qifrey?” He ventured, voice unsteady and far too melodic, vibrating back through his skull.
Olruggio’s body (Qifrey?) made a noise of pain and opened his eyes, then froze.
Eyes wide open.
He slowly reached a trembling hand up to his face, much like Olruggio had, to brush the skin below his right eye.
Which… was rather more shadowed than Olruggio remembered, even through his smarting, blurry vision. Did he really look that haggard? He thought he’d slept rather well last night.
“I– I don’t–” the other man’s breathing picked up, gaze darting from his own (Olruggio’s) body to Olruggio himself. “Olly?”
“Aye,” Olruggio confirmed, squirming at the sound of his nickname in his own voice. “It’s you in there, right, Qifrey?”
The other man swallowed, breathing through his nose. “Yes.” He looked around them, brushing his hand over the darkened lines nearly hidden by the dust. “This– this spell, it–”
“Swapped our minds and bodies? Seems so,” Olruggio finished, his tone less acidic-sounding than he’d intended it coming in Qifrey’s smooth voice.
Qifrey’s wide eyes somehow went even wider, almost unfocusing as his breathing sped up again. Olruggio felt his stomach drop as his friend curled forward, hands reaching towards his throat as his breaths grew strangled.
“Qifrey!” He caught the other man’s wrists before they could claw at his skin. “Qifrey, you have to calm down. We’ll figure this out, I swear to you, but you have to breathe. Breathe, I said, just relax, we’ll–”
Qifrey’s hands whipped around and caught his forearms, his grip painfully tight. “Do not relax,” he rasped, chest heaving and eyes wild. “Whatever you do, Olruggio, you must not relax.”
Olruggio tugged away on instinct, gut twisting as he watched his friend shudder with every wheezing breath. “Dammit, Qifrey, you need to calm down and breathe or you’re going to suffocate– and who knows what that means for you in my body!”
Qifrey shuddered again, but his face twisted at that, and he closed his eyes and seemed to focus on his breathing. It was still fast and far-too-shallow.
Olruggio shifted closer, breaking Qifrey’s hold on his arms to take his hand and press it to his chest. “Follow my rhythm, Qif,” he instructed. He inhaled deeply, counting the seconds as it moved through his chest, then exhaled, watching the other man attempt the same, eyes still squeezed tightly shut.
Olruggio wasn’t sure how long they stayed there, just breathing, before Qifrey’s breathing quieted and his heaving lessened.
“There ya are,” he murmured, closing his own eye with a more natural exhale against the anxiety still thrumming in his veins.
It popped open in surprise when he felt something thump against his chest. He looked down at the dark-haired head resting just above his heart, and hesitated for a moment before resting a shaking hand at the base of his neck.
They were both still trembling.
“Damn it, Qif, way to give me a heart attack,” he said to the dark hair that was most of what he could see of his friend in his body. Now that he wasn’t distracted by his hyperventilating partner, the numb shock of the situation was starting to creep back in. “Alright, so we’ve swapped bodies. What do we do now?”
Qifrey straightened, fingers still clenched in the loose white fabric over Olruggio’s heart. Black hair fell over his face, but it didn’t conceal the barely-reined-in terror still brimming behind his eyes. Eyes that, while set in Olruggio’s face, were all too Qifrey.
“We have to fix it, Olly,” he said raggedly. “We have to find a way to undo this, without involving anyone else.” His voice dropped. “And… quickly.”
Olruggio felt his brow furrow. Well, obviously they needed to figure this out– and he too felt the hammering of urgency. But something niggled at him about Qifrey’s reaction. What had him so terrified, was so acute, that it stole his breath away?
Feeling the tremors still running through the shoulders beneath his hand, Olruggio couldn’t bring himself to ask. Yet.
“Aye,” he said instead. “We need to…”
They’d need to what?
They couldn’t go to the Knights. As much as it grated, he knew that they would take no further measures to investigate this spell. It was clearly forbidden magic, either from the Brimmed Hats or a remnant from before the Pact, and they would act accordingly, without deliberation.
His gut twisted to think of what would become of the atelier without them; what would become of the girls. If both he and Qifrey were taken…
No, the girls couldn’t be at all connected to this. It had to stay a secret.
Alaira was gone, hidden in the wilds with Eunie. Beldaruit was too far to reach, and even after all these years… Olruggio wasn’t sure what the Wise One would do when facing a situation like this.
A rotten voice in the back of his mind turned the thought back around. What if the only answer to this is forbidden magic? What will you do?
“We must examine the spell,” Qifrey said, his words drowning out the ones in Olly’s head. (It disoriented him, hearing his voice from another body.) “Do you have regular ink? If we can record the spell composition, we may be able to research it and find a counterspell.”
“That’s– yeah, I do. That’s a smart plan,” Olruggio replied, unfolding himself to stand shakily and almost overbalancing, mind and body disagreeing about how far away the ground should be. (Qifrey was always so blasted tall, Olruggio had never once managed to catch up with him, even in the midst of their growth spurt years.) “Let’s get moving then, eh?”
Qifrey accepted his proffered hand up. “Yes, let’s,” he said, and the unconscious primness of the words from Olruggio’s mouth set his head spinning all over again.
He was going to need an entire bottle of wine for this.
No, two.