Archive of Our Own

It seems only fitting that it rains incessantly all through the afternoon and well into the night as Qifrey makes his way across the familiar rolling hills. Slate grey skies grow black as conjuring ink as the daylight fades, and all the while they unleash an unremitting deluge upon all that resides below. Qifrey trudges through it less defenselessly than most, the rainward spell he carries carving out a dry haven for him, but that does little to lift his dire mood.

At night one can see points of light at vast distances across the wide open spaces of the downs. The windows of the atelier are lit.

In a fit of self-pity, and to stave off the relief that rises in him — traitorously, as if he has any right to it — to see those lights shiver into view, he drops the rainward spell, letting the droplets fall on him and drench him to the bone anywhere the cloak cannot cover. Cold rivulets run from his hair down his neck, soaking his back, making his undershirt cling to his skin like rotting seaweed. His boots squelch with every step. Water truly is the most miserable element. The fact that you need the blasted stuff to live is one of existence’s defining indignities.

The lights in the windows are getting closer.

He’d chosen to travel on foot rather than by windowway to give himself time to prepare, to get his head right, but he feels no more ready to face the moment to come now than when he set out this morning. If anything he feels less ready with every step, a roiling boil of contradicting emotions intensifying inside his rain-chilled body. Joy and defeat, guilt and relief, an old grief that clings to his tongue like the taste of tears and torn leaves. A stubborn tug towards life that has wished him back to this place a thousand times since he left it, the exhaustion of having struggled against it like a thick layer of wet autumn mulch weighing on his chest.

Once he stands before the front door, his resolve nearly falters. Then, cursing himself for a coward, Qifrey gathers all his courage and knocks.

It isn’t opened immediately. He waits there with his heartbeat for company and only means of telling time, the distant stars above glittering silver through a brief tear in the clouds. The rain has stopped, for a moment.

When the door does swing open, the light it unleashes into the quiet night is accompanied by a hush of warmth. Olruggio blinks to see Qifrey standing there.

They stare at each other across the threshold.

“Why’d you knock?” Olruggio says finally. “You live here.”

“I — didn’t know if you were in,” Qifrey says feebly. Olruggio’s eyes barely flicker to the radiance of floatglow lamps that’s flowing from the room behind him and past them to light the ground around their twining shadows, the same glow that leaves the windows squares of gold visible for miles in the darkness, before returning to Qifrey’s face.

Qifrey grimaces slightly in acknowledgement that it hadn’t been among his best lies. You would think he’d be better at conjuring them on the spot, at this point. “I’m… not sure what I thought. I’m back, though. Hello, Olly.”

Far more so than the turning of the seasons, seeing Olruggio again is the first thing that has made it sink in for Qifrey that the days have actually passed, that his travels did not happen in some long suspended moment or a dream. Qifrey’s eye takes in every detail hungrily, makes a cartography of the time spent apart from the points that differ from what he remembers.

As has tended to be the case these last few years, the dark circles beneath Olruggio’s eyes have only grown darker, the tired lines on his face more pronounced. He looks like he hasn’t slept, though his shirt is wrinkled like it might have been slept in a night or two. Beneath the cover of the shirt, Qifrey is almost certain he has lost weight. The beard he has taken to growing, since he complains none of his patrons take him seriously without it, has been left to claim new territory across the lower half of his face, though it still can’t make its coverage convincing everywhere it’s been allowed to spread. His hair, already getting a bit on the long side when Qifrey set out months ago, is now on the verge of shaggy. There are spots of conjuring ink on his sleeve, a streak of soot on his cheek.

He’s the best and the worst thing Qifrey has seen in his life, the most welcome sight and the most harrowing proof of his own failure. Olruggio’s eyes flick up to meet his after scanning his face and taking in the general sodden-through state of him, forcing Qifrey to consider that Olly had been engaged in the same process of compare and contrast from the other side — holding the Qifrey now up against the Qifrey who left, spotting the difference. Qifrey honestly has no idea what he must see.

“Well,” Olruggio says, and steps aside, gestures with his head for Qifrey to come in already with a briskness as if to ask what he’s idling for, exactly, waiting for the rain to start back up?

What most strikes Qifrey as he steps inside and pulls the door closed behind him is that the atelier smells exactly the same. He might have stepped out for all of five minutes instead of days and weeks, for all that has changed about the house itself. This house they’d built together, on the unstudied foundations of a childhood dream.

With barely a glance at Qifrey standing there tragically dripping rainwater onto the floor with the mien of a half-drowned cat, no doubt, Olruggio slips his hand into his pocket and brings out a familiar pair of link rings.

“Gonna catch a cold like that,” Olruggio murmurs, slipping the rings on. He raises his eyebrows at Qifrey as he holds up his hands, asking permission.

Unable to speak right then, Qifrey nods to grant it.

Olruggio brings the two halves of the seal together. A wave of warmth washes over Qifrey, banishing the slick cloying chill from his skin and leaving a pleasant hum in its wake. Qifrey closes his eye for a moment. He thinks, distantly, that he might really start to cry, but he manages to master the impulse by the time the warmth ebbs away.

“Thank you,” he says quietly.

Olruggio makes a dismissive sound and slides the rings back into his pocket. “Can’t have you drippin’ puddles all over the floor, can we.”

They stand in silence for a while, not quite looking at each other.

“...I’m starving,” Qifrey says, only realizing the urgency of this truth as he’s speaking it aloud. He hasn’t had a bit of food all day. “Have you eaten yet?”

A wince flits over Olruggio’s face. He rubs at the back of his neck. “Not, uh, not yet. Fair warning, there ain’t a lot of food left in the house. I’ve been holding off on stocking up until after I’m done with this batch of commissions. A couple of designs that’ve been giving me trouble.”

Not surprised by this answer — when left to his own devices, Olruggio tends to go hours and sometimes days without eating before falling upon a meal like a scalewolf upon the fold, and then all but passing out — Qifrey takes his cloak off and hangs it up in its usual place, puts his travelling kit aside, leaned against the wall by the door; he’ll unpack it later. “That’s fine, I’m sure we can whip up something decent with whatever’s left. Something edible, at the very least.”

“You’ve been known to work magic in that direction before, but you might be up against a real challenge this time,” Olruggio says dryly, and Qifrey smiles a little.

He takes care to put the sword away properly. Magic or steel, it’s never wise to treat a weapon without the respect that is its due. Then — dry, unburdened physically, if nothing else — he steps from the entranceway into the atelier proper. His eye widens at what he finds.

The living area looks like a hurricane came crashing through and left no survivors to start in on the recovery work. Half-made and discarded spell concepts are strewn everywhere, piles of books have been left on any surface that can support them, and plates and cups dot the spaces between, some of them with half-eaten meals left out to mold. Over by the stairs up to Olruggio’s rooms is what looks like a heap of dirty clothes and perhaps a sheet, some of the fabric showing marks of having been scorched. A sprawling nest of blankets and pillows is laid out on the rug before the hearth, which is lit with the steady soothing warmth of Olruggio’s magic, but could use a good scrub. Tools from Olruggio’s workshop are lined up against the wall by the fireplace, stained with soot. There are a lot of bottles about, most of them empty.

“Sorry about the mess, like I said I’ve been… tied up with work all week,” Olruggio murmurs, and won’t meet his eyes.

Qifrey’s hand finds the slumped line of his friend’s shoulder, which makes Olruggio glance up at him finally. The drawn, exhausted lines of his face look even more painfully so in the light, exacerbated by a tinge of shame. Worse than that is the look of defeat in his eyes, like a great resignation has hollowed out a space for itself behind his pupils and made its home there.

“It’s no matter,” Qifrey says, his voice as soft as he knows how to make it. His thumb brushes over Olly’s shoulder, carefully back and forth along the ridge of his collarbone. His skin is warm through the exquisite if currently irredeemably wrinkled cloth of his shirt. Olruggio has a fine eye for fabric, the way it moves and falls. “I can do a bit of tidying here and there over the next few days, and then we’ll do a proper job of it once you’re done with your deadlines and have rested up. A bit of mess never killed anyone. Don’t worry about it.”

After a moment of hesitation, Olruggio nods. His hand briefly, absent-mindedly, comes up to touch Qifrey’s on his shoulder, and then he moves off to gather up the spell work he’d clearly been engaged in before he was interrupted, putting it safely aside for later.

The kitchen isn’t quite as messy as the space Qifrey moved through to get there, but it does look like some invading army has been through and carried off everything not nailed down to use for provisions. Qifrey contemplates the cupboards and shelves, which have not been this empty since the day the kitchen had been built, before they even moved in.

“Oh, you weren’t kidding,” Qifrey says faintly.

Olruggio, who’s come wandering in to put away empty bottles and clear space on the countertop, says flatly: “Why would I be?”

“What have you been eating?”

Olruggio shrugs. “What do I usually get, when a deadline’s looming?”

“A man cannot subsist on pointed cap pastries alone, surely,” Qifrey says, more to try to convince or maybe soothe himself than because he actually believes it.

With an insouciant wave of his hand, Olruggio says: “Someone’s gotta keep that guy in business, he’s got the best stall in the Great Hall. It’s the least I can do, really — the bottom must have dropped out of his entire enterprise the day I passed my apprentice trials and moved out.”

Leaning his forehead against an overhead cupboard and laughing helplessly, Qifrey says: “Please, if only for my peace of mind… tell me you’ve eaten at least a vegetable at some point during, say, the last fortnight?”

“Wow, didn’t realize I’d gone and let an agent of the Knights Moralis into the house, my mistake.” Olruggio gives a wan but real smile at Qifrey’s chuckle. Oh, Qifrey had missed him, with the same constant placeless ache as the absence of his right eye. “Anyway, it isn’t as if I’ve set out not to eat a vegetable, it’s just easier to get something on the go when you’re really busy. Especially — y’know, when you’re just cooking for one, it can seem like a lotta hassle, if there’s more pressing stuff to get to.”

Brightening his voice to keep anything less upbeat from shining through, Qifrey says: “Well, yes, I take your point there. It’s alright. I’ll go into town and stock up on fresh produce tomorrow. We’ll get creative with what we do have on hand for now. Are you in the mood for something sweet or savoury?”

“Either’s fine. You pick.”

“Very well.”

Qifrey starts taking stock of what he has to work with here, which really isn’t much. The icebox is mostly a bust, but he brings out some jars of fermented or pickled vegetables and other preserves that have been hiding at the back of the cupboards — Olruggio has never been a big fan, but from previous experience they’ll go down just fine when integrated into a dish — and he finds a half-full sack of flour that’s still perfectly good, some oil, some spices. None of the other necessary ingredients to bake bread, nor the patience to, with his grumbling stomach urging him on, but with this he can whip together some quick pan breads to fry on the skillet. As he moves through the familiar space of the kitchen, he realizes how long it’s been since he’s done any real cooking.

Wordlessly, Olruggio goes about gathering plates and cups from where they’re scattered all over the atelier as if displaced by some great storm, and starts doing dishes while Qifrey makes the dough. That is their usual division of labour, whenever they’re cooking together. Qifrey does most of the active cooking, Olruggio assists in preparation and cleans up as they go, reads the steps of a tricky recipe aloud as needed. Mastering water magic might make the washing up a lot easier, but sometimes you do still have to come into contact with whatever you’re cleaning and thus risk suds and water running down your hands. Olly doesn’t mind it; he says he gets enough time with fire during the rest of his day, if anything casting some water spells is a nice change of pace.

They fall into the rhythm as if this everyday dance had never been interrupted. They barely speak; they hardly need to. (If they did speak, more may be said than either of them is ready to have spoken right now.) Once Olruggio is done setting the table with the newly washed plates and glasses, he points at some ingredients laid out on the cutting board, raising his eyebrows in question.

Qifrey nods as he flips a pan bread on the skillet, checks to make sure the one next to it isn’t sticking. “Yes, that would be nice. Finely minced, please.”

Olruggio grunts in acknowledgement and starts chopping.

While Olruggio’s attention is occupied, Qifrey watches the nape of his neck, his dark head bent over his work, his clever hands steady on the knife. There’s a small burn mark on the side of his thumb that Qifrey doesn’t recognize — it looks quite fresh, and has the fierce red outline to it like it hasn’t been properly treated. His focus on his task is impeccable, bordering on demonstrative, but his eyes are also red and slightly swollen.

One of the pan breads narrowly escapes getting scorched on one side, Qifrey shaking himself back to focus just in time.

“I’m gonna have to get back to work, after we’re done here,” Olruggio says as he sits down, once it’s time to eat. “Only a couple of days left until the deadline, and it’s, uh… it’s not quite coming together yet, I gotta admit.”

“Understood,” Qifrey says, keeping his tone light. “I’ll handle the cleaning up, then. Just take the time to get some food down, you’ll be returning to it with a clearer head that way.”

“Yes, dad,” Olruggio mutters, lifting a corner of the kitchen towel keeping the stack of pan bread warm and snatching one from the pile, unbothered by the heat with the nonchalance of a smith.

The banquet they’ve ended up putting together is an eclectic affair, lots of little bits and pieces coming together without much rhyme or reason other than availability. There’s the bread, which smells wonderful for all its simplicity, a bit of cheese they found, some soup from ages ago kept in a repetition seal jar and forgotten about until now, various preserves in various and variously speculative combinations. Taking it in, Qifrey chuckles, memory sparking through him. “This is almost like…” He trails off, the smile freezing on his lips.

“Yeah,” Olruggio says.

It is just like the feasts of their first boyhood adventures into the outside world. That had been before either of them had learned how to cook much of anything, when they would sneak food from the Great Hall cafeteria — whatever they could squirrel away and bring with them on their expeditions, a hodgepodge of morsels which had not always come together into the most coherent of meals. Olruggio still favours some of the stranger taste combinations the mother of all inventions had forced them to discover during that time.

“Well,” Qifrey says, a bit chastened. “At least it beats the first meals we tried to make from scratch on our own.”

“True, they got kinda dismal there for a while, until we figured out recipes.”

Olruggio has made himself a huge mug of ironbark tea — Qifrey can’t help but note that their stores are running low on that, while the other teas seem mostly untouched — and spoons a big portion of their last remaining sugar into it. There had been no milk left in the house for him to drink it as he normally would, but he gets a bottle of whiskey out and pours in a generous, bordering on reckless, amount.

Qifrey doesn’t ask how much he’s had already. He has a feeling he won’t find any comfort in the answer.

They start in on the meal like several clockmarks past midnight is a perfectly sensible time to have dinner. Olruggio eats mechanically and without inspiration, but Qifrey finds himself descending upon his plate ravenously, tearing into the meal like it’ll escape if he doesn’t. The bread is warm and chewy and perfect in its complete lack of grandeur.

Olruggio watches him put away his food with faint amusement. “Oh, you weren’t kidding, huh,” he says, when Qifrey finally comes up for air, mostly satisfied.

“Why would I be?” Qifrey parrots back, affecting Olruggio’s tone from before, and Olruggio smiles slightly and glances away. Emboldened, Qifrey adds: “Did you finish up the commission for the Cladd family yet, by the way?”

Olruggio nods absently, swallows a bite of preserved scarlet lemon and says: “The one I was starting on before you left? Only just beat the deadline, as usual, but yeah. Got it past the finish line in the end. They came back and placed a new order, though, paid extra to get it up the list of priorities. You know how it is. They want the moon on a stick, and when you find a way to deliver it to them, somehow, they ask if you can’t throw in the sun and a couple of stars too, while you’re at it. How hard can it be, right.”

Qifrey smiles. “I believe that is what they call being a victim of your own success, Olly.”

“Well, I call it a pain in the neck.” Olruggio takes a big bite of bread and speaks around it. “So how about you, where’d you go this time?”

Sipping his own tea — willowgrape, which Olruggio hadn’t touched in his absence — Qifrey says: “All over. Nowhere in particular, anywhere with a registered request for the services of a witch that hadn’t been answered in a long time. There were tide wards that needed touching up in Rochalla, so I took care of that — that was probably the most notable one. Lovely town, not too crowded.”

“All the way out by the Dragonpass Isles, huh. And you such a fan of the seaside. You see any dragons, at least?”

“Wrong time of the year, I’m afraid. I was disappointed too. But the food was excellent, I’ve gathered several recipes I would like to try my hand at.”

“Something to look forward to, then.” Olruggio takes a big swig of his drink. “Find anythin’ else interesting out there? I’ve barely been out of the house for weeks, honestly, I’m living vicariously here. I don’t even do well with water magic, but I’d try my hand at fixing a tide seal right about now if it meant a couple of days at the beach.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint again, but — nothing particularly notable, no. Just… the world moving steadily along, as is its wont.”

That’s the truth, at least. Qifrey hadn’t found anything on the road but more road, more emptiness. There had been no trace of the Brimhats anywhere he’d looked… which either means that they are currently inactive or, far more likely, taking extra care to ensure their activities stay hidden.

Olruggio is contemplating him in that way he has, with that deceptively impassive look that means that under the inconspicuous surface he’s watching intently, trying to work something out.

Not tonight, Qifrey thinks, hopelessly. Olly, please, don’t figure it out tonight. I just got home.

As if to answer his silent prayer, Olruggio drops his eyes to his empty plate, pushes it away from himself a little. “I should get back to it. If you’re finished, too?”

“Yes, I’m done.”

“Okay. Your room’s the way you left it. Alaira sent some books over for you while you were — out, I put them on a chair by the door.”

“Oh, yes, I did request some texts the last time we spoke. Thank you, Olly.”

“Don’t mention it. You’ll probably want to set off some wind spells to dust in there, though, air it out a bit. Been shut up for a while.”

“Good call. I’ll put it on the list of things to get done tomorrow, if the rain has stopped by then.”

Something, equal parts wariness and weariness, stirs in Olruggio’s eyes whenever Qifrey makes some reference to the future — when he indirectly promises a tomorrow, a next week, an ‘after your commissions are done’. It’s the subtlest thing, a flicker, a spark; someone who knew him less well might not pick up on it. But Qifrey knows Olruggio as well as he knows himself, and he can hardly in good conscience begrudge him his flinch of cynicism. Not when it’s wholly his own fault for having put it there.

Fool you once, shame on me. Fool you twice, still shame on me. Fool you thrice… well, if it’s any consolation whatsoever, I was fooling myself most of all.

“Here’s to hoping,” Olruggio says, and walks off.

— — —

The first time Qifrey tried to leave Olruggio, they were eighteen. Well. Olruggio was eighteen; no one knew how old Qifrey was, exactly, but from how they’d struggled through the many battlefields of puberty roughly concurrently, the approximate age assigned to Qifrey when the Great Hall found him couldn’t be too far off. Qifrey didn’t have a birthday so much as a ‘got plucked out of a coffin’ day. Beldaruit had offered to assign him a birthday, one of his own choosing if he liked, but Qifrey had declined. In his heart of hearts he thought of Olruggio’s birthday… not as his own, exactly, but as the point around which his own life too accumulated another layer of time, year upon shared year winding around them like some kind of cocoon.

When he made the decision to leave, it had only been a week since the last time he had to use the memory erasing spell, and Qifrey’s hands had been shaking so badly this go around that Olruggio had taken them in his and guided them, giving him a shaky but encouraging smile all the while, until the spell took hold and it was wiped away into blankness. Until the spell took all of him away once more, dropping him to the ground like a corpse awaiting a mangled, groggy resurrection, returning with less of himself every time.

Qifrey’s hands had kept shaking for hours afterwards, for days, were shaking still. The conversation they’d had, the process of it, Olly’s piercing unerringly through all his secrets and clean through to the other side into renewed obliviousness, had been no different than the ones that had come before, the outcome was the same. The outcome was always the same. Maybe that was the thing that had broken Qifrey more than anything, in the end — not the moment itself, but the realization in its wake that there could be monotony even in such pain. That this really might go on forever. The horror of resilience was unfolding itself to him, the grind of what could be survived and for how long carving itself a permanent space within his mind. It’s hard to stomach the things you can stomach, to experience so directly that the apocalyptic can become routine, habitual, very nearly tedious. He might visit this violation on Olly with the same regularity and mundanity with which the barber cut his hair for the rest of time, and the world would move on all the same, the stars above would witness it unprotestingly, no rescuing bolt of lightning from the heavens would strike down and put a stop to their folly for them. This was all there was.

The creeping understanding that they might go on like this for twenty years and nothing would change, nothing would resolve, it would just be this forever, filled Qifrey’s lungs like water, settling on him with the crushing weight of an ocean that Olruggio couldn’t save him from, this time. He was drowning under it, and he was bringing Olly down with him. He had to change that, if he couldn’t change anything else.

One night he had been sitting up sleeplessly, trying to get his hands to still, and realized all at once that very soon, the years in which he’d been doing this to Olly would outnumber the years he had known him before that, the years when his friendship had still been able to bring Olruggio something other than pain, and it was like some crucial thing inside him snapped.

His wild imaginings, his frequent daydreams of what it might be to remove himself from the equation and stop draining Olruggio’s life into the red with his very presence — to know that no matter his own fate, somewhere out there Olly would be living his life safe and happy, unburdened by the weight of Qifrey connected to him like an anchor… in a moment they had gone from fevered escapism to gaining solidity, timeframes, tangible steps that could be planned and carried out.

And so it had been that Olruggio had returned to their shared rooms unexpectedly early one day, to find Qifrey out of breath and damp with sweat in the middle of one of the sword drills his Ezrest-based tutor had instructed him to practice.

“Oh. Uh. All right, then,” Olruggio had said, standing in the doorway and looking tired and gamely perplexed at what he saw.

Feeling awfully exposed all of a sudden in his undershirt and with his arms trembling with exertion, Qifrey cursed himself for having been so careless. He should have gone somewhere by windowway where Olly would never have thought to look for him, if he wanted to practice, no matter how long the job had been scheduled to take.

“You’re home early,” Qifrey said, taking refuge in the obvious as he caught his breath and his blood thundered in his ears like the hoofbeats of a herd of buffashoal sensing a threat.

“Yeah, got things wrapped up early for once,” Olruggio said, still staring. Qifrey barely fought back the bizarre instinct to hide the sword behind his back, like Olruggio would just forget about it as soon as it left his line of sight. Instead he lowered it and went to get the scabbard, sheathing it so at least the naked blade was hidden from view.

“What’s that?” Olruggio said, pulling the door closed behind him and leaning in curiously.

“A sword,” Qifrey said wretchedly, like he was admitting to some abominable act of forbidden magic, or a torrid affair.

Olruggio snorted. “Yeah, smart alec, I ain’t blind. What are you doing with it?”

Qifrey carefully put the sheathed sword down on a table and placed himself in front of it, half blocking it from view. “Oh, I have been practicing with it on and off for a while now. You know, whenever I have a spare hour. For the exercise. It helps me clear my mind.”

Looking at Qifrey with a fascination as if he’d never seen him before, Olruggio demanded: “You have been? How come this is the first I’ve heard of it?”

“Well,” Qifrey said, “you’ve been pretty busy recently.”

Sighing as he hung his cloak up, Olruggio said: “Ugh. You can say that again, feels like it’s just one damn thing after another. Never would’ve shown the glowstones to a soul but you, if I knew they’d make this much stress down the line.” He paused, gazing at Qifrey with his head tilted to one side like some scruffy but well-meaning crow. “I mean, as long as you’re having fun, I guess. It’s nice to have a hobby, and it sure looks like you’re getting the hang of it to me, at least. But it does seem a bit…”

“A bit what?”

Olruggio scratched idly at some stubble on his jaw — a mark of not having bothered to shave in a while rather than an intentional choice, this was before he’d affected the beard. “I dunno, feels like a weird pick, I guess. Bit redundant. What would you need to learn swordfighting for? You’re a witch.”

“On the road, there are times when casting magic would be less practical and simple steel more so, especially when one is closely observed. I thought it couldn’t hurt to arm myself with both.”

With raised eyebrows and a tilt of his head to the other side, Olruggio squinted at him. “‘On the road’? Are we going somewhere?”

Qifrey, like the coward he occasionally is, had not intended to have this conversation. His initial plan had been to slip away while Olly was busy with work one day, and leave a letter behind to explain himself. To the extent that he even could explain himself, to anyone but especially to Olruggio. Perhaps it was only justice, at the end of the day, that he would have to look Olruggio in the eye as he said this, though.

“...I am going somewhere,” Qifrey said, with a feeling of looking at himself from the outside, his soul fleeing his body as it realized where this was going and yet unable to get far enough away. “I don’t think you should come with me.”

“Uh,” Olruggio said, “what?”

Sinking horror laid siege to Qifrey’s insides as the next part of the conversation played out in some grotesque mirror of the one he had meant to never have to have again. He watched Olruggio move from blithe confusion to scoffing denial, looking for the joke he apparently wasn’t spotting the punchline to, through alarm and towards something like blind panic. To say that he was less than impressed with Qifrey’s line of argument in every particular was an understatement.

“And you’re planning to be at this for how long, all alone? Qifrey, this is crazy,” he insisted finally, his vehemence betraying his fear. In Qifrey’s head was the voice of a boy with too much knowledge in his eyes telling him, It doesn’t take a lot, to die. “You can’t really mean to — not without me. Actually, I don’t even care if you mean to do it without me, you can’t stop me from coming after you. You’ve never been able to keep me from doing that before, and you won’t be able to do it now, so it’d save both of us a bunch of time and trouble if we just pretended we’d done that part already and you accept that I’m going with you.”

“No! Please, that isn’t what I want at all, I can’t ask you to uproot your entire life for me. I wouldn’t want to take you from your — business,” Qifrey said, realizing only too late how lamely that last part landed. Fuck. This was what happened when he had to rely on improvisation only.

“From my — business,” Olruggio repeated, disbelieving.

“Your work,” Qifrey had tried to quickly amend, backtracking furiously as it became clear that he’d taken entirely the wrong tack. “I know your work is important to you, and to so many who depend on it for — ”

Olruggio scoffed, the dawning and bewildered hurt in his eyes scoring itself deep into Qifrey’s chest like knives, like molten metal searing his insides. “My work doesn’t own me, and most of the official stuff is just juggling selfish nobles and their whims anyway. If this is really what you wanna do, I can make arrangements, put all of that aside for a while to — ”

“Don’t you get it, I don’t want you to come with me!” Qifrey snapped, and as Olruggio seemed to stagger on the spot in the wake of those words it felt, for one absurd moment, that out of all the terrible things he had done to Olly over the years, that might have been the worst one. Steeling himself before the task of making it final even though he was trembling all over and no longer from fatigue, Qifrey said, with all the conviction he could muster: “It’s not a trick. It isn’t a misguided attempt to protect you, or ploy to get you to come after me. We aren’t children anymore, I’m not employing playground tactics. I really mean it this time, Olruggio.”

Olruggio had looked at him like… only in that moment did Qifrey realize that he had, in some way, grown to think of Olruggio’s spirit as something essentially inconquerable, a force as mysterious yet fundamental to the fabric of the world as magic. Olruggio had taken all of Qifrey’s vilest, most terrible secrets and laid them to his own gentle heart without even breaking his stride. He had chosen to stay the path of thorns again and again, every time he was given the choice, never flinching from it, guiding Qifrey’s hand when he did. He had borne things that should not have to be borne without ever faltering, and all so Qifrey wouldn’t have to bear it alone. As this whole conversation sprung from, he could bear what Qifrey, in his weakness, couldn’t.

It had been an easy mistake to make, perhaps, to think that meant he could bear anything.

I broke something, Qifrey realized as he took in the dimmed light in Olruggio’s eyes, the guilt like nausea infecting his whole body, a rival root system to the silverwood making a home for itself in his flesh. How unworthy in a witch, to not understand the extent of their own power before being confronted first hand by the harm they could wreak.

“So I’m just meant to let you go off chasing Brimhats all alone, is that it?” Olruggio said.

“I’m not — that’s not why, that isn’t what this is. I promise you. I told you, I’ve stopped chasing the past. I’m… trying to find the future.”

“And that you have to do without me.”

“No, I… yes. For now, I think so.”

Olruggio stayed quiet for a long time. For all it hurt like looking directly at the sun to see the look on his face, Qifrey couldn’t find it in himself to glance away — not with so little time left, with the countdown of the days he could still gaze his fill finally out in the open. Even when all he saw there condemned him for his multitude of sins against someone who had deserved only grace from him.

Brave, brilliant, warmhearted Olruggio, who had lived through whatever it was that made him wake from dreams sometimes with a tight, strangled-back scream and only become kinder for it, Olruggio, who still burned in Qifrey’s mind like the pyreball he had lit that awful night overlooking the Tower of Tomes, one singular point of radiance in the eternal dark; Olruggio, who had promised to pay the price for him and followed through every time without hesitation or quibble or complaint — and the first thing that had broken him in a way that mattered was the idea that there was an adventure Qifrey would want to go on without him.

I’m killing you! Qifrey had wanted to scream. It had been the only thing there was room for in his head those days, that endless scream. Every single time I’m killing another version of you who will never exist again, who’ll never get to live, as you would have me do. You’ve set me to dig your grave over and over, and asked me to take that to mine. We were children, Olly, we couldn’t have understood what we were doing. I understand it now, and I cannot bear it. I’ll keep my promise, but I only ever promised I’d live. Not that I could keep burying you forever.

Like the child he had only recently been, Olruggio asked thinly: “...did I do something wrong? I — I know I haven’t been around much, recently, but I can —”

“No!” Qifrey exclaimed miserably, his resolve wobbling on a knife’s edge. “No, that isn’t it, please believe me, it’s nothing like — it’s not… this is something I need to do. None of this is because of anything you…”

Olruggio’s expression, the horribly frozen, closed-down stillness of his body, told Qifrey that for all of Qifrey’s pleas to, Olruggio didn’t believe him in the least. He seemed terribly far away, suddenly, like he had gone somewhere no one could follow and Qifrey would never really find him again. “But — you’ll be alone out there.”

Qifrey’s fingers twisted into each other, the new calluses from the sword hilt still feeling strange next to the ones from his pen. “Like you said, I’m a witch. Magic will always be with me. And I will have what you taught me — the spells, the skills, your… way of looking at the world. I’ll be alright. I’m not a helpless boy anymore, striking out into the dark blindly. You don’t have to worry about me.”

The barest hint of bitter amusement passed over Olruggio’s impassive face. “Well. I don’t have a map of the territory to give you, this time. Or for you to steal, for that matter.”

“That’s okay. You taught me how to make my own. You… you have given me so much, and I never feel like I can… Thank you.”

Not responding to that, Olruggio asked: “How long will you be gone?”

At the last, though it could do nothing but confirm Olruggio’s worst fears, Qifrey couldn’t bring himself to meet his eyes. “I… don’t know.”

Olruggio said: “I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t. I can’t explain it better. I’m so sorry. But it’s… it’s better this way,” Qifrey said, and believed it — he’d still believed this would be better; it would cause pain in this moment, in the grim face of it that was impossible to deny, for all he had failed to reckon with the extent of it beforehand. But the cut would be clean, the severing clinical and quick and all at once, allowing it to close and safely scar as it should, unlike the horrible gaping wound in Olruggio’s mind that could never be healed while Qifrey kept gouging it open again and again, each memory erasing spell another assault on the integrity and coherence of his soul. He was up to his elbows in Olly’s blood at this point, and perhaps the selfish truth was that he couldn’t take it anymore, no matter what he had promised.

But that was no excuse.

“It’s better this way,” Qifrey said again, and the numbness descending on him felt at long last like peace that wouldn’t kill them.

“Okay,” Olruggio said, with no inflection whatsoever, and that was that.

The day he had seen Qifrey off, Olruggio gazed at him for a long time, put his hand on Qifrey’s shoulder as if there was something he had meant to tell him once but now he couldn’t quite remember how, and in the end only said: “If this what you have to do, it’s what you have to do, but just… be safe out there. And you know I’m always gonna be right here if you need me. Don’t you dare be a stranger. Okay?”

Qifrey had to leave with barely a word or glance back, before the silverwood burst its way through the confines of his body and wrapped them both up in its cloying roots to keep.

In hindsight, perhaps the worst thing Qifrey had ever done to Olruggio without Olruggio’s direct instruction and collusion wasn’t that he’d left him. It was that he kept coming back. That first time, the second time, after they’d built the atelier and Olruggio had said: “But… but we built all of this, we… I thought you were done with this. When we made this place, I thought it meant that you…”, the third time, when he’d only sighed and let him go. Qifrey’s brilliant idea for a quick clean cut had turned out no less bloody or drawn out than what came before, in the end.

There, then, was the lesson. Intention may matter in magic, but not more so than its results.

— — —

Qifrey carries the dishes off while Olruggio goes back to work in the living room, taking a pile of spell concepts with him to settle, cross-legged, on the pile of blankets on the floor before the fireplace. It’s clearly where he has made his current lair. Olruggio is a nomadic creature that way; he drifts from thinking spot to thinking spot while working through a problem, as if lounging against a variety of different surfaces and frowning into thin air is an indispensable step of his process. Qifrey tries to keep the clattering of dishes and cutlery to a minimum to avoid disturbing him out there. The rain has started up again outside, drumming arrhythmically against the window.

When Qifrey is done with the washing up and walks back into the living room, he finds Olruggio lying curled up on his side on the blankets and pillows, breathing slowly and deeply, seemingly dead to the world with his pen still held, just barely, between his fingers.

Qifrey smiles a little, kneels next to him to carefully gather up the papers and scribbled notes before he can roll onto them in his sleep, saves the pen from between slackened fingers, makes sure the conjuring ink is safely bottled before he places it out of harm’s way. Olruggio doesn’t stir as Qifrey works around him. Presumably the combination of exhaustion, his first meal in a while, and alcohol had conspired to take him down with a formidable three-pronged assault, against which the thornbark tea alone could not hope to hold the fort.

When he drapes a blanket over Olruggio — the flames are burning low now, on their way out — Qifrey steals a long moment to observe him without having to account for being observed himself, answering to a different hunger than the kind their meal had sated. His best friend looks younger when he sleeps, the beard and the exhaustion no longer able to cover for his dark eyelashes fanned against his cheek, the sweet pointy angle of his nose, his soft mouth. It’s the boy Qifrey remembers within the face of the man he sometimes fears he knows and doesn’t know at the same time, with a flush in his cheeks like they’d just come back from an adventure on a windy day and he’d fallen asleep within minutes of reaching a warm place. His unfamiliarly too-long hair is falling into his face and over his eyes. Qifrey ignores the itch in his hand to brush it back from his forehead and instead gets to his feet, moves over the floor on soft feet to get his travelling pack so he can retire to his own room, begin to find a way to fit back into his life here. Without letting it fit him too comfortably, of course.

That’s always the senseless, wretched trick to it. Like that of a cobbler specialized in making boots that never quite fit. But how long can he subsist on the discomfort of blisters until they callus and harden, until the only remedy to cut back the roots is the same old wound to which they always return, the one thing he meant to… but he has a plan this time. He has a plan. It’s not one he expects to be or should be forgiven for, should anyone figure him out at it, but it’s a plan. It’s all he has. He must cling to that sense of purpose, if he means to get through this without going finally, irrevocably mad. Unless this is the sign that he already has, and just didn’t notice.

“Qifrey,” Olruggio says behind him.

Qifrey startles; he’d thought Olruggio fast asleep. Something in Olruggio’s low voice makes him walk back across the room to Olruggio’s prone form. He sits down next to him, interlocks his hands around his knees so he won’t have to think what else to do with them. “Yes, Olly?”

Olruggio stays quiet for so long that Qifrey thinks he isn’t going to say anything more, that perhaps he really has dozed off this time. Then, very hoarse and small, Olruggio asks: “Are you leaving again?”

The only consolation is that not having lifted his head to, at least Olruggio can’t see his face, Qifrey reflects. He doesn’t think anyone should see his face right now.

“No,” Qifrey says, and the ache that blooms in his chest is such that he dares to reach out to stroke Olruggio’s hair. Olly’s forehead is hot and clammy to the touch, as if he were running a fever. Qifrey brushes away the fine black strands that stick to his skin, eases them back with careful fingers. Olruggio’s hair has always been very soft and light, like silk, where Qifrey’s own is willful and liable to tangle if he lets it grow out enough. “No, I… I think my travelling days are behind me for good now. I’m here to stay. If — well. If you’ll have me.”

There’s silence.

Fingers faltering, his heart sharp in his mouth in equal parts dread and the closing horizon of a singularly great relief — maybe this is it, maybe it’s happening, maybe he has finally tested Olruggio’s patience, kindness and generosity past even their superhuman capacities, maybe he won’t have to carry out his new plan after all — Qifrey eventually queries: “...Olly?”

With the wrenching, gasping sound of someone pulling in a breath for the first time in a long while, Olruggio starts to cry, great, graceless, hiccuping sobs, like those of a child.

“Oh,” Qifrey says, “oh, Olly,” misery a living, heaving, feral thing inside him, clawing its way up from his guts to his throat and making everything bleed. His hands hover in the air; he isn’t sure where he can put them that won’t make it worse.

Curling up on himself, Olruggio grasps the collar of his own shirt and uses the grip to press the fabric and his hand tightly over his mouth, as if desperate to muffle the sounds he’s making, to hide his face from view, and Qifrey can’t bear it, can’t allow him to hide those tears away like they’re anything to be ashamed of. None of this is Olly’s shame to carry.

“Olly, please, come here,” Qifrey says, and wraps him up in his arms, pulls them both into a sitting position, Olly’s head resting against Qifrey’s shoulder so he can hold him close, close, take his weight.

Olruggio’s arms wind around Qifrey’s shoulders and his fingers latch on to his clothes, as if he’s afraid Qifrey will disappear from between his hands, as if they’re both drowning. He presses his face tight, tight against Qifrey’s body, shaking.

“I’m sorry,” Qifrey whispers, rocking him slightly back and forth. He lets his hand find the nape of Olruggio’s neck, presses his own cheek to the top of his head, cradles him against him like that. “I know. I know. I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again. I’m here now. I promise. Ssh. It’s alright.”

He has no idea if his words reach Olruggio at all. There’s no change in the cadence of his sobs to indicate he’s absorbing their meaning. Qifrey keeps talking anyway, though, a low constant hum of reassurance pressed against his hair and his skin.

Pulling his head back for air but still gripping onto Qifrey for dear life, Olruggio stares at Qifrey’s face with eyes bright and shining as if from fever.

“I’m sorry,” Qifrey says again, now that he can see Olruggio’s eyes and knows he can hear him.

Voice barely carrying over the crack in it, Olruggio says: “You’re… you’re staying?”

“Yes. Maybe I should have, all along. It didn’t agree with me, to stray so far from home. I… please believe me, at the time, I thought it the kinder thing to do.” Qifrey smiles, watery himself. “Every day I realize a little more that I don’t have your knack for that, I’m afraid. But I — I’m staying, this time. Unless or until you tell me to go.”

Olruggio gazes at him dazedly. He looks exhausted, wrung out.

Forgive me. Tell me to leave. Free me from my promise, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this without you.

Instead of doing any of that, Olruggio wipes at his tear-blotchy, flushed face with his sleeve, struggles to get enough breath to speak.

“Okay,” he rasps, fighting through a few more sobs to get it out, “I — okay.”

“You don’t have to believe me yet,” Qifrey says. “I understand if you can’t. I’ll understand if it takes time to believe.”

Olruggio nods unsteadily, but whether in response or just — in a general sort of sentiment is hard to say. Some minutes go by where the last active tremors shudder their way through him and then fade away. Qifrey can feel them echoed faintly in his own body, they’re pressed together so closely, like tangled vines.

A sigh shivers its way out of Olruggio. His grip easing minutely on Qifrey’s clothes, he keeps one hand anchored there and brings the other one to knead roughly at his own neck, grimacing at the tension there. Once his face falls back towards relaxed, his expression is crushing.

If it were anyone else who’d made you look like this, I would… I’d… Qifrey lets out a tired breath of laughter at himself. What does it matter. Who else but him has ever managed to make Olruggio look this sad. It seems to be his one defining talent, his evergreen specialty.

Eyes falling shut as if against pain, Olruggio lets his head fall forward, until his forehead comes to rest against Qifrey’s shoulder.

“I’m so tired,” Olruggio whispers.

He does still smell quite strongly of booze, this close up. If he doesn’t remember all of this tomorrow, it will for once not be Qifrey’s doing. Qifrey strokes his fingers through the too long sweat-damp hair at the nape of his neck and listens to his wobbly breathing.

“I know,” Qifrey says. “Me too. I’m… despite everything, it’s good to be home.”

Olruggio sighs again, pushes his forehead harder against Qifrey’s shoulder for a second.

“I think I need to know… I missed you so much, but sometimes when you’re here you look so sad that I wonder…” Olruggio swallows. His eyelashes are dark and clumped together, still wet. “Are you less sad, when you’re out there?”

A bark of savage, bitter laughter tears itself from Qifrey’s throat before he can even think to stop it, a shrill ugly thing that rings borderline unhinged to his own ears. It barely even sounds human, more the mad mocking cry of a crestgull, the shriek of a hyena, some animal in pain. Olruggio glances up at him in surprise, his eyes wide.

“No,” Qifrey manages, “no, Olruggio, I’m not.” Pushing the fever pitch spike of raw emotion down — it’s so unfair, it’s all so fucking unfair, if only he could burn the damn tree out of himself with the heat of this rage so he could collapse into Olly’s arms and tell him everything — he takes a deep, steadying breath, wipes at his eyes, and says, soft now in his honesty rather than ragged: “I’d… I would always rather be here. With you.”

He expects Olruggio to ask so why haven’t you been, then?, braces himself for the answer he doesn’t know how to give, but Olruggio is the kindest person Qifrey has ever known. Whatever he sees in Qifrey’s eye, it only makes him shake his head, features creased by a wistful sympathy even clearer than his confusion.

“...spells are a lot simpler to make sense of than being a person, huh?” Olruggio offers.

I don’t deserve you, Qifrey thinks. You’ve certainly done nothing to deserve me.

“I’m afraid so, my friend,” he says, instead.

“I’m sorry, Qifrey,” Olruggio says, his merciless grip on Qifrey’s clothes keeping Qifrey from wincing away from that almost obscene-seeming absurdity, as he’d meant to. From the self-satisfied look on Olruggio’s soggy features, this was an entirely intended and premeditated element of his delivery there. Damn. Qifrey should have learned by now that he underestimates Olly at his own peril. He can and will launch an ambush at any time, and Qifrey has no defense against it.

Trapped yet adamant, Qifrey glares a warning at Olruggio’s placid, soft-eyed face. “No, don’t you dare — whatever could you possibly be apologizing to me for in all this, Olly?”

Olruggio shrugs. “I dunno. Not sorry for something I’ve done, if that isn’t what it’s about, so much as — sorry that you’re hurtin’, I guess. I’m still not sure I understand what it is, but whatever’s going on for you, it… it sounds like a hard thing to have to live with. I’m sorry.”

Overcome, Qifrey hides his face in his hands. “...I can’t believe you.”

He has to peek from between his fingers to assure himself that the strange, rusty-hinges sound Olruggio makes is laughter. It seems to be, from his heavy-lidded grin, if one produced by a sorely tried voice box. “That’s fine, ‘cause you can’t stop me, either.”

Qifrey laughs with him, lets his hands drop from his face and his shoulders slump. “Well, clearly not.”

“You wanna lie down?” Olruggio says, tugging gently at Qifrey’s clothes. “I… think I wanna lie down. Everything’s spinning.”

“Yes. Let’s… let’s lie down for a while.”

They lie side by side on the floor, among blankets and pillows. The only sound in the room, in the world, is the whisper of rain on grass from a cracked window somewhere, and the hush of their breathing. Olruggio’s breath has finally smoothed out into something calmer, falling into pace with Qifrey’s. Their hands are resting close together, but not quite touching.

Closing his eyes and tipping his head back, Qifrey says: “It really is quiet out here, isn’t it.”

“Well, yeah. That was part of the appeal, if you’ll remember.”

Qifrey smiles slightly. “Oh, I remember. And we weren’t wrong to think so. Maybe over time there is such a thing as excess even in tranquility, though.”

“Feel free to pick up playing an instrument, if you’d like, as long as you wait until I’m out on a job to practice if you settle on the violin.”

Real laughter feels strange in Qifrey’s throat, like it's working its way through layers of earth. “Now now, I don’t think the situation is quite dire enough that it need come to that.”

A startling revelation of warmth grazes his hand; his little finger has come to brush against Olruggio’s for a moment. He doesn’t know how the drift happened, if he moved his hand or Olruggio did, but his heart gives a feeling in his chest like a broken chord, a high longing chime no less earnest for its imperfection.

Olruggio, who has always been the bravest between them, links his little finger with Qifrey’s, squeezes just barely. After a moment, Qifrey swallows thickly and squeezes back, having to press down on his left eye with the base of his free hand to breathe through the unnamable swell of emotion that rises inside him.

“Without you, it’s too quiet,” Olruggio says. “That’s the first thing I keep thinkin’, every time…”

He breaks himself off, looking unhappy, like he hadn’t meant for that to slip out.

“I’m — ”

Olruggio sighs. “Stop apologizing, Qifrey. I heard you, and it’s okay. It’s alright. Alright?”

“...alright. Well, while I was out there, I did consider that there are certainly variables one could introduce that would stop the silence over the Downs from ever becoming too complete.” He takes a deep breath — now or never — and then says: “I was thinking, maybe… kids.”

Olruggio stays very still for a moment, then rolls onto his side to stare at him. Qifrey can’t help but chuckle again at the expression pointed in his direction, the squint of perfect incredulity that sits very strangely on features still marked by tears.

“You were ‘thinking kids’?” Olruggio repeats.

“Well, perhaps only one, to start with,” Qifrey allows. “No point trying to fly before I’m sure I can walk, after all, especially with a small passenger along. And I’m not talking quite overnight; I would have to pass the fifth test first, at the very least. In addition there’s the matter of getting everything in order — preparing their rooms, reading up on educational principles, putting together a lesson plan…”

“An apprentice,” Olruggio says, with the look of a man only getting on top of things through an inordinate amount of frantic and inelegant scrabbling. “You’re talking about taking on an apprentice.”

“Yes.”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Olruggio sits back up like this is something he cannot contemplate while lying down and says: “Right. Okay, alright. That’s… Just gimme a moment to catch up here. Damn. You never go easy on me, do you.”

“I’m starting to think I don’t know how,” Qifrey says ruefully. He pushes himself up to sitting as well, picks fretfully at a thread that’s coming loose at the hem of his skirt. “Do you think it’s really such an outlandish idea, that maybe I could…?”

He has thought so himself, many times over.

But the stark and inescapable truth of the matter is that he’s desperate. That he’s apparently ready to run the risk of pulling a young, innocent life down into this endless mire with him because of it probably speaks worse of him even than any mess he’s managed to concoct until now, but he’s at the end of his rope and barely holding on to it, dangling over an endless abyss. He doesn’t know what else to do. He only knows he doesn’t have it in him to put this pain into Olruggio’s eyes one more time, not for a solution that has failed due to his own frailty again and again, and if he lets himself settle into this peaceful life they’ve built the foundations for, the silverwood will claim it all for its own, and his — their — future with it. He’s all out of other ideas.

At least, in what could be imagined to be his defense, it had not come to him spontaneously, without direct and tangible inspiration. On his journey, he’d accidentally walked in on what had teetered on the brink of becoming a full on screaming match between a young master and her apprentice — as an outsider it had been hard to parse exactly what the fight was about, but the air had been electric with the building tension of it.

He’d seen the mutinous, wounded gleam on the apprentice’s face, the helpless frustration and worry verging on misery on the master’s, remembered the lines that had carved themselves deeper and deeper into Beldaruit’s features over the years and taken them from fine to drawn and pained, always seeming to gain more ground whenever his gaze landed on Qifrey for any length of time — and that, even as he was outwardly excusing himself profusely for intruding as master and apprentice both whipped their heads around to stare at him, united, at least, in outrage… that was when the whole perverse idea had taken root in Qifrey’s head. It had happened all at once, like some germinated seed that had lain patiently under the soil awaiting just the right conditions to bloom.

For the longest time he’d tried to weed the notion right out of his cerebellum again and discard it as it deserved, but every time he thought he had banished the idea for good he found it grown back the next morning, as hale and hardy and enticing as ever, promising sweetly stressful and sustaining fruit should he let it grow to maturation. With his wiser mind, he knew that fruit would be a poisoned one, a new low he had not previously allowed or imagined himself to stoop to. Olly had been just a boy when he bound himself to Qifrey’s doomed fate, but they had both been children then, and at least he had done so knowingly. What this idea promised was something more insidious, and even less forgivable.

He had still managed to keep this traitorous growth from finding a permanent place in the garden of his mind when, one day alone on the road, the realization finally washed over him fully that if he never went home, if he could only stay his damn course this go around, third time’s the charm, he would never again have to see Olly’s face grow slack and empty as the memory erasing spell took hold. Qifrey would never again steal the past and future of his best friend to keep himself alive like some parasitic infection in his own right. Olruggio would live his life freely, without this strangle vine promise of their youth sapping him of substance. And in that moment of perfect relief, the silverwood had seized its chance.

Only pure luck ensured that no one had been there to witness Qifrey angrily blinking tears from one eye and plucking foliage out of the hollow left behind by the other, each leaf already going sullenly autumn-limp and brown along the edges as the branch they sprung from retreated back into the shelter of his body. A few of them got in his mouth, the bitter ocean tang of tears mixing with the vegetal sharpness and rot of fallen leaves before he could spit them out. The taste had made him feel sick. Sicker.

At that point he hadn’t had much choice but to bury his face in his hands and admit to himself that for all that it was a terrible plan and he was terrible for having conceived of it in the first place, it was the only plan he had left.

The whole way back he had felt a small phantom figure walking by his side, seemed to see a tiny face turned up to him in perfect trusting expectation — suspecting nothing of the rank selfishness and desperation that had lead to their presence at his side. That he had welcomed them not with the heart of a teacher, but a thief.

I’ll do my best to get it right, he had told that steadfast, diminutive specter, ill-defined yet in anything but its utter innocence. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons, I’ll make it as right as I can. Even if the master you deserve doesn’t exist, I’ll invent him as best as I know how.

The ghost had said nothing back, of course, but it had followed him through the door to the atelier, seems now to be watching the conversation quietly somewhere out of the corner of his eye.

“No, it isn’t such an outlandish idea at the outset, I suppose. It’s just that…” Olruggio clasps Qifrey’s wrist with urgent tenderness, gazing at him with an expression that seems to hold half wonder, half warning, as if he isn’t sure whether he feels awe or fear at whatever he sees in Qifrey’s face. “An apprentice isn’t something you can run away from if something starts to get too much for you, Qifrey. You can’t keep doing,” he waves vaguely as if to take in the whole atelier, himself, the last few stuttering, graceless years of their life, “this, if you have a child who depends on you.”

“I know,” Qifrey says simply. He puts his hand on top of Olruggio’s on his wrist, squeezes it gently. “I meant what I said,” he says. “I’m staying, this time. For good.”

Still with the air of testing the ice underfoot to see if it will hold him and half expecting that it won’t, that icy depths await below, eyebrows furrowed, Olruggio says: “I’m not saying… if you think you need to carry through this whole —- apprentice idea, if this is just a way to prove that to me, that’s not…”

“It isn’t,” Qifrey assures him, and it’s good to get to be completely honest, for once. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, in fact. You may have your whole genius inventor forte to fall back on, Olruggio of the Torch,” Olruggio rolls his eyes in a comfortingly familiar way and sticks his tongue out at him a little, “but I haven’t… I suppose I haven’t quite found my calling yet, along the paths I’ve tried to seek it so far. I think teaching might suit me, though. I’m — a little excited, even.”

He is tired of trying to leave. He has to find a way to stay.

Huffing a laugh, Olruggio says: “Hey, as long as you’re excited… rather you than me, I’d prefer to keep playing around with fire. Seems a whole deal less stressful than raising a kid. You’re gonna need a contact with the Watchful Eyes, though, this far from Kalhn.”

“I will,” Qifrey agrees.

“They’re mandatory for out of the way ateliers, these days.”

“They are.”

Olruggio lets go of Qifrey’s wrist — Qifrey’s skin feels cold now, in his absence — and rubs tiredly at his red-rimmed eyes with his sleeve. “Well, probably better shoot off a letter to the Great Hall about that as soon as possible, might take a while to find someone who’s a good match. Or anyone willing to live all the way out here, for that matter.”

Qifrey quirks a smile. “I already had a very promising candidate in mind, actually.”

Blinking at him in surprise and maybe a little dismay, Olruggio says: “You do? Is this someone I know, or somebody you met out on the road? Were you thinking Alaira might agree, I thought she was keeping busy?”

Qifrey gazes at him steadily and meaningfully until Olruggio’s poor brain — which really has had enough to deal with for one night, maybe Qifrey should have held off on raising this subject until tomorrow — finally seems to catch up to what he’s saying. His eyes go comically wide and saucer round.

“Nah,” Olruggio says, with some twitching, half-formed gestures that never resolve to coherence, “nah, you’re not saying — you weren’t really thinkin’ — ”

“I truly cannot think of anyone else I’d entrust the role to with more peace of mind or heart,” Qifrey says serenely.

“I can’t — look at the state of this place, look at me,” Olruggio says, waving around wildly at the chaos, his deep rich voice rising almost an entire frenzied octave. “I haven’t eaten a vegetable in the last fortnight, Qifrey! I haven’t slept in three days and had nothing to eat but thornbark tea and dry flatbread for three more than that and I’ve barely done laundry since you left, I can’t be responsible for a child!”

His panicked gesticulation escalates such that it almost causes him to topple over, like the tribulations of this night have finally vanquished him, and Qifrey hurriedly reaches out to steady him. Olruggio is breathing quickly and his eyes are very big.

Qifrey’s fondness for him is so warm beneath his breastbone, like a small sun that warms and doesn’t burn. “You won’t be responsible for them. Not on your own, anyway, we’d be two adults with one child to look after. Surely we could hope to make use of the numbers advantage, if nothing else.”

“Qifrey, this is…”

“You don’t have to agree to it, certainly not tonight,” Qifrey says. “I know you’re busy. I know it’s a lot to ask. You are the person I trust the most to do it, but I’m sure we’d get used to having someone else around as well, if you’d really rather not do it.”

It would be… incredibly inconvenient and difficult on several levels completely divorced from the constant anxiety and annoyance of a stranger in the house, as well as the matter of what to do if this stranger started to figure out his ever-growing list of secrets. A complication to be much unwished for, certainly. But Qifrey hadn’t been so arrogant or so presumptuous that he had built this whole idea on the assumption that Olruggio would agree to his proposal.

Olruggio groans: “It ain’t even about that, it’s more like… how’s anyone who knows us even a little ever gonna believe I have a shot in hell at controlling anything you get it into your head to do?”

“Not a lot of people know me,” Qifrey says. “Come to that, I don’t think a lot of people really know you. I’m going to speak to Beldaruit about all of this — if I can get him on board, the whole process will hopefully be a lot easier than it otherwise might have been.”

Beldaruit’s name leaves Olruggio blinking. “Oh,” he says, “you are serious about this.”

“I am.”

After a while Olruggio offers: “...you know, I’ve gone on dumber adventures with you. I don’t see why this one should be an exception.”

Qifrey laughs. “A ringing endorsement, truly.”

“Gimme a break, you just dropped a lot on me all at once, alright.”

“Yes, that I did. Thank you, for — for bearing with me.”

Olruggio shrugs. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re gonna have to have some long talks about the details of this before it all kicks off for real, but if you’re really sure, then… hell, why not. I’ll walk this path with you, too. To the end, and back, with every detour I’m sure will happen along the way. Wherever you wander, let me wander too. Let me walk beside you. That’s all I ask.”

“Olly…” What frightens Qifrey the most isn’t that Olruggio doesn’t know what he’s asking for, but the sense that he somehow does.

With a lopsided smile Olruggio holds out his hand, the offered clasp of Covenant seeming to make Qifrey’s heart shudder in his chest, as if trembling, at the last, before a great leap. “Shake on it?”

How?! Qifrey thinks, in despair, in affection so great it pains him to hold. How are you like this? How are you still like this? How are you still here, after everything I’ve done?

How could I ever think I could bear to let you go?

He takes Olruggio’s hand, warm and strong and very gentle, and shakes on it.