Chapter Text
Baz
I know better than this. I know nothing good comes from it. But there’s only a week of term left and then it’ll be summer holiday. The last summer holiday that will end with seeing Snow for a new school year. He’s been ignoring me for most of this year, and it’s intolerable. I’ll take anything, up to and including Snow’s ire. And that’s the most I can hope for from him anyway. So I do the thing that I know will draw the absolute most because I want everything.
I flirt with his girlfriend.
I make myself stare at Wellbelove during classes we all share. I make sure to wink at her once when I know Snow is finally glaring at me. I sigh wistfully. I bite my lip. When a lock of her hair falls forward, I tuck my own behind my ear. I smirk at Snow when I start smelling smoke. That’s how I know I’ve got him. He’s locked on like a snake tracking a mouse’s progress through the undergrowth and waiting for the right moment to strike. I hope it’s in our room so I have him to myself.
Simon
Why can’t Baz let me get through the rest of the term in peace? There’s only a week left. Surely, he can wait that long and be a git to someone else. I don’t know why that thought would cross my mind. Of course he can’t. Baz can’t go seven seconds without being a git, let alone seven days.
“Back off, Baz!” I growl when I stomp into our room after tea.
“This is a shared room, Snow, and I was here first,” he says crisply, examining his fingernails and not sparing me a glance. “You can take your leave if you like.”
“You know what I mean, you twat.”
“No one ever knows what you mean. Your grasp on the English language is so tenuous that your own wand doesn’t know what you mean.” He still doesn’t look at me. The fucker.
“Leave. Agatha. Alone!”
“Wellbelove?” Baz frowns at me, feigning confusion. “I thought you were asking me to leave you alone. See? You need to learn to be clearer when you speak. Seven years of elocution coursework wasted. Better hope the last one sticks.”
I roll my eyes and clench my fists. “Leave us both alone. That’d be even better.”
Baz smirks coldly, a wild glint in his eyes. “I can’t very well leave myself alone. That would be an out of body experience. My elocution is perfect, but even I’m not that powerful. Maybe you could try it if you can get your wand to understand a single word you say.”
“Agatha and me!” I shout.
“No, Wellbelove is definitely not powerful enough.”
“What?”
“If I can’t spell myself out of my own body, Wellbelove certainly can’t.”
“What the…? No. Fuck you, Baz!”
Baz finally gets out of his chair and uses his full height to loom over me. I can feel myself start smoking. “That’s vulgar, Snow.”
“Can you just…”
“No, I cannot ‘just.’” He sneers.
“You know what I…”
“I clearly said I didn’t.”
“Just let me finish…”
“No point when you never say anything intelligible." His sneer has turned into a sadistic grin. He’s enjoying this.
I can feel my magic boiling under my skin like Baz just turned a stove up to maximum. What was I trying to say? “I obviously meant…”
“If it was important, you would have said it clearly in the first place.”
“Damn it, Baz!” I yell. “YOU GET ME ALL MIXED UP!” The words come out drenched in magic. I can feel it burst out of me and wind around us both. It feels like it’s scrambling my insides with a whisk. And after an awful moment, it’s over.
Baz
I don’t know what Snow’s magic did. That wasn’t a real spell. It was clearly one of Snow’s blunders where he loses control and his magic takes his words far too literally. I can’t tell what the damage is yet. The good news is that our room looks as it always does. Nothing has physically changed. That’s promising.
The dubious news is that I feel… strange. My emotions are simultaneously as intensely white hot as a welding torch and also impossible to pin down. Try as I might, all I can make out is that whatever this is, I feel a lot of it. Is that what this spell did? It mixed me up? How long will this last? Will it fade before we take our exams?
“What did you do, Snow?” I hiss.
“I… I don’t know,” he says. I can’t even tell if he’s mixed himself up too or if he simply doesn’t know what his spell did. Wonderful.
Simon
I’ve never seen Baz look so confused. He looked around the room, presumably for damage, before turning back to me. I can hardly focus on that, though, because I’m feeling… so much. My emotions have always been impossible for me to reign in. My feelings have always hit me like battering rams. But it’s always been like a tidal wave. An unstoppable force coming from one direction. It’s never been like this. I’ve never had so many different feelings hit me from so many directions at once.
I love so deeply that my chest is going to be crushed by it. Lust gives me goosebumps. Despair and loneliness twist and tangle with the love and lust like parasitic vines, blooming with orchids of fear and confusion. Grief hangs in my heart like it has a home there. Self loathing sits heavily in my guts. Disgust is its natural companion, but somehow a thread of amusement ties the self loathing to the love and lust instead. And over all of it, there looms a sense of dread.
I close my eyes and bury my head in my hands, overwhelmed. “I don’t feel right.”
“I don’t either.” I hear Baz sit on his bed. I copy him.
“I don’t know what my magic did,” I groan. Another wave of lust hits me, but not enough to overpower everything else. I’ve never felt this many feelings, and they’ve never been this specific, this identifiable. Other than fear and loneliness. I’ve felt my fair share of those. But fear is usually something to be managed and set aside so I can focus on fighting something. And loneliness is usually a cloud that settles around me and blurs everything else, something to be endured until it passes. All of these feelings are dynamic, weaving in and out of each other.
“It clearly mixed us up, Snow,” Baz snarls. “I can’t even figure out how I’m feeling. What’s going to happen if I try to study, huh? If this affects my rank in the class, you’d better watch your back this summer. There’ll be no Anathema to protect you.”
“You can’t figure out how you’re feeling?” I ask.
“You can?” he frowns. Anger and indignation join the barrage in my head.
“Yeah,” I cough. “It’s… I feel a lot of things. Too many things. But I can definitely identify them. More than ever. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s something. What are you feeling?”
“None of your business,” I snap, looking up at him defiantly. I can’t share half of these feelings with Baz. A burst of desire explodes in my chest when our eyes meet. I definitely can’t share that with him. “And it doesn’t make any sense anyway. I’m clearly mixed up too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I… I’ve gotta go,” I say and dash out the door. The lust dies back as I descend the stairs, and the loneliness and self loathing creep up my throat to strangle me. I want to cry, but determination wins out, thank magic.
Baz
Whatever it is I’m feeling, I know it’s bad. And it keeps on building. It’s overwhelming. I can’t begin to contain it. I tried to distract myself and give myself something to focus on by talking to Snow about the spell, but when he left, he took my one anchor point with him. The intensity washes through me and out in a burst of magic that smells like greenwood fire and smoke. Snow’s magic. What’s happening to me?
Simon
I’m only halfway down the tower when the whole thing shakes and I nearly fall down the stairs. What the fuck? I turn around and run back up. I throw open the door to find Baz curled up on his bed with his eyes clamped shut and his hands blocking his ears. He’s shimmering like I do when I go off, and waves of green energy explode out of him like flames, almost shoving me out the door and back down the stairs. I stand my ground and take out my wand even though terror nearly has me paralyzed.
“Take a chill pill!” I shout.
The energy subsides and relief washes through me. Baz moves his hands from his ears to cover his eyes. His shoulders shake. I’m embarrassed. “What was that?” Baz rasps. I think he might be crying.
“You just went off.”
“That’s what going off is like?” Baz stares at me.
“Sucks, doesn’t it, arsehole?” I say.
Self loathing dines gluttonously on regret, remorse, and shame. I’m horrified and terrified at once, completely disgusted and gutted by a new stroke of grief through my heart. Why would I feel any of this? I didn’t do anything wrong. I de-escalated. I disengaged. I walked away. Baz should be one who feels bad about making me go off all these years.
All mixed up.
Fuck.
Could it be?
No.
Impossible. (Improbable.)
I can’t tell him. Not until I’m sure.
Clearly, if Baz can go off, something about our magic is literally mixed up. I don’t know if we swapped completely or if our power and abilities are combined. I don’t feel less powerful, but my spell worked on the first try, which is not something I can generally rely upon. Did we only swap our ability to control it? No. Baz smells like smoke, like me.
If I’m right, our magic might be the least of our worries. I think… I think we might be feeling each other’s feelings. It makes no sense because I can hardly believe that Baz would feel half of the things that are crashing through my head. I never thought about it, but I suppose even evil vampires can be horny teenagers, but love? Does Baz love Agatha so deeply it feels like it’s consuming him? So intensely that he could have been thinking about her when he was arguing with me about the effects of my magic? Like she never leaves his consciousness?
I’ve never felt like that. Even at the best of times, I’ve never felt like that.
But it’s the only thing that makes sense. He said he can’t identify how he’s feeling, and my emotions are never this clear. I had no idea that anyone could experience so many things at once and still attach names to each feeling. Am I broken?
Baz
Snow’s spell has dialed back the intensity enough for me to be able to breathe. But only just. I still feel awful. It’s all still crackling under my skin, threatening to explode again. It seems that decreasing the pressure is enough for me to be able to name some of what I’m feeling at last: fear and anger. I think that doesn’t cover it all, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.
“I never knew it hurt like that,” I say. Snow’s face looks pained.
“How did you think it felt?” He crosses his arms and leans on the doorframe. He hasn’t even come in and closed it.
“You always seemed like your mind would blink out.” The intensity flares inside me, hot and unnameable, but then settles to a simmer with more of the fear than the anger. Curiosity is there too. But there’s still something more, and a lot of it, just out of reach.
“Do you keep your mind in a front row seat for your own head exploding?” Snow says. He still looks awful. “Anyway, if you think you have got yourself under control, I’ve gotta go. There’s too much in my head, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop you twice.”
He’s a terrible liar. Something else is on his mind, but I don’t push him. I need to lie down and recover. And then see if I can manage my homework. I nod him off and he leaves. I lay my head on my pillow and breathe, but I don’t feel relaxed. I’m jittery and determination seems to have much of the intensity under control. Will that fire never go away?
Several minutes pass like this and then I feel a wave of comfort, but also a tinge of something sour and bitter. None of it makes any sense, but I decide to take advantage of the relief and go back to my studies. All of my subjects still make sense, thank Merlin.
Simon
Regret and grief tangled with bitterness and love threaten to suffocate me as I descend the stairs again. If I’m right that I’m feeling Baz’s emotions, then none of the things I do to calm down are going to help. They’ll improve how he’s feeling my emotions and probably make him less likely to go off again, but the only thing that’ll help me is if Baz calms down. So I leave him to it.
If my hunch is correct, then my emotions are not going to match up with what I’m experiencing. It’ll be easier to tell if Baz and I are in different places and not bouncing off each other. I push through until I get to the Cloisters. I ask someone going in to get Penny for me, and she comes out in a rush.
“What’s going on, Simon? You look awful. Was there an attack?” Penny leads me on a meandering walk.
“My magic… did something,” I stammer through an onslaught of revulsion and self hatred. Who knew Baz felt this way? I always thought he only felt disgust, rage, annoyance, and sadistic amusement. How does he mask all of this behind a bored face all the time?
Penny reaches to wipe a tear off my cheek. I didn’t know I was crying, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. “Are you okay?”
“I know there’s a quota, but this actually could be life and death, and I know you love a good mystery.” I’m not lying. If Baz keeps going off, he could kill someone, whether he means to or not.
Penny rolls her eyes and crosses her arms, but doesn’t say anything.
“Baz and I had a row. He got me all flustered. Wouldn’t let me finish a sentence. I got upset and lost control of my magic when I said, ‘you get me all mixed up.’” Getting the truth off my chest to Penny is usually a relief. Now, it’s not helping at all.
“What did it do, Simon?”
“I… I’m not entirely sure,” I admit. “But it definitely mixed us up.”
“What do you mean?”
“He went off, Pen!” I say. “With my magic!”
She gasps. “You gave him your magic?”
I shake my head. “I think I may have mixed our magic. Gimme a sec. I want to try something.” I concentrate on my hand. When I open it, there’s a flame dancing in my palm. Penny’s eyes go wide and her jaw drops when I snuff the flame without a word. “Yup. I definitely mixed our magic. But that isn’t all. I’m not sure that’s even the worst of it.”
“What can be worse than having two mages who could go off like a bomb? What’s worse than Baz having access to your magic, Simon?”
Now is the time in the conversation where I’d usually feel even more relieved that Penny is taking me seriously instead of blowing me off, but I am still miserable. At least the tears have stopped.
“I am pretty sure our emotions are completely swapped,” I say.
“What?”
“I think I’m feeling his emotions and he’s feeling mine.”
Penny frowns. “What are you feeling now?”
I shrug. “I don’t know if I should say. This already feels as invasive as fuck.”
“No secrets, Simon. Since when did you care about Baz’s privacy?”
“Since I dove head first into his head and it’s nothing like I would’ve ever imagined,” I snap. I think Baz must be doing something to calm himself down because I’m starting to feel some of the fear lift off. “Sorry for shouting. I’m not used to feeling… this many things. I’m not used to being able to even label my feelings like this. I think the only reason Baz hasn’t figured out what’s going on is that my feelings are never this easy to figure out. Am… Am I broken, Pen?”
“No, Simon, no.” Penny wraps me in a hug. “We’ll figure this out. Let’s go to dinner.”