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“This has happened before,” Olly says.
Qifrey’s shaking hands pause on the hat, the memory erasing seal only half-way exposed. “Do you remember…”
Olruggio eyes the seal with less fear than Qifrey thinks he should, only a furrow between his brows. “No, but from the way you’re acting. And I figure you don’t carry a seal like that around recreationally. Or — without good reason, though I can’t quite, uh, see what…” He trails off. “It looks kinda familiar,” he says after a while. “Like somethin’ I was thinking about a long, long time ago, but that never… I never actually…”
“You’ve said that before. You didn’t want to explain it, then.”
With a sharp look at him — a look that snags on the leaves emerging from the hollow of his right eye before it finds Qifrey’s gaze — Olruggio says: “So then… it has happened before.”
“Yes,” Qifrey says, and he’s crying now, long-yearned for confessions clogging up his throat, “yes. Many times. More than I can count. I tried to, in the beginning, t-to keep count, but after a while… all too quickly, it…”
The tears overcome him to the point where it leaves him unable to speak.
He can never tell beforehand, which times he’s going to break. Sometimes he goes through the motions with the mechanical ease of habit, something in him gone cool and distant, like he’s outside himself and looking in on the events of his own life with faint disinterest. He has made the mistake before of thinking it means he’s inured to the whole thing by now, that it will never again shake him as it did the first time. In this much, at least, he is always proven wrong. Then there are times when he feels as fragile and unstable as the first whisper of frost over autumn ponds, only to find himself cold hard steel when the moment comes. Yet other days he thinks himself calm, steady, resigned to face what must come — what inevitably and invariably always comes — as a duty and necessity to be endured, if nothing else, another offering on the altar of the promise he once made. There are even moments where he believes all feeling has left him forever and there’s only a numb void left… and then he falls to pieces at the first twitch towards tenderness in Olruggio’s expression as he starts to understand.
“Qifrey…” Olruggio says, and there’s barely understanding yet an ocean of compassion behind his eyes. It never stops giving Qifrey a sense of vertigo, to be forgiven before he has even had the chance to vomit forth all his sins.
“It was your idea, originally,” Qifrey manages. There is something so bizarre about this happening in the living room of the atelier, before a merrily lit hearth, their bowls and glasses still on the table after dinner, as if it were any other night. There have been too many any other nights like it. “I’m… I’m not blaming you, that’s not what I mean to — but that might be why it seems familiar to you.”
“What was my idea? The — no, not the tree. This, then?” Olruggio half-reaches out as if to touch the hat, though his fingers halt just before doing so.
Qifrey takes a deep breath to tame the sob that means to steal his voice. He finds himself laughing instead, entirely without mirth. “It’s starting to become a very long story, I’m afraid. But if I were to start from the beginning… do you know how silverwood trees propagate, Olly?”
He has the telling of it down to an art, at this point, knows exactly what needs to be said for Olruggio to connect the rest of the dots on his own. It doesn’t take a lot, most of the time. Olruggio didn’t become known as one of the finest minds of their generation for nothing. Sometimes Qifrey wonders — worries — if the sheer force of repetition might leave lingering traces, wear some kind of groove of absence over time, leave a tell-tale negative space that might be read like braille and yield too much meaning, even with the memories themselves erased. Olruggio is sharp enough that it’s hard to say; once he’s found the loose thread to pull, his unraveling of the essentials of the situation tends to happen so quickly that it can be difficult to track each step from the outside.
Once Qifrey’s sorry tale is done, Olruggio takes it in silently for a few long moments. Then he says: “How long have we been doing this?”
“Since the Tower of Tomes. The first time around. You did make it there that night, you just don’t remember. I suppose you can gather why, at this point.”
“But — but that’s years, that’s almost a decade! It’s been years, and this is still the best plan I’ve come up with? Seriously?”
“Well,” Qifrey says bleakly, “you tend to only have minutes to work with each time you actually know the nature of the problem, so… give yourself a break in that regard, at least.”
Olruggio runs an agitated hand through his hair, rubs harshly at his neck. “How am I wastin’ my days tinkering with contraptions for spoiled, scheming nobles, when you’re…” Some new thought seems to strike him. He stands very still. “...Qifrey. Don’t lie to me about this. Are you dying?”
“Most of the time? Only a little more so than you are. Right now? …a little more. I must admit.”
Glaring, eyes growing bright, Olruggio says: “Qifrey — ”
“It’s managed,” Qifrey says, because yes, that had been unfair. “Most of the time, this… plan of ours, this weight of secrets, keeps it under control. But then it… sometimes…” He sighs, moves to cover his right eye and then decides — what’s the point, at this stage. The leaves whisper between his fingers as he lets his hand drop, like they’re sharing secrets among themselves he’ll never be privy to. “Well. As you can see for yourself.”
“Is it getting worse over time?”
Qifrey drops his gaze.
Olruggio takes a gentle hold of his wrist. “Are we making it worse right now? Is talkin’ about it making it…”
“I don’t know how much worse we can conceivably make it, at this stage. Olly, I need to find the Brimhats,” Qifrey says, desperation clawing its way up his throat with the words.
Olruggio’s eyes widen with real fear. His grip shifts to hold onto Qifrey’s hand almost painfully tight, as if stopping him from tumbling over the edge of a cliff. “The Brimhats? Qifrey — no, what the hell are you — I thought you decided not to…”
Impatiently, Qifrey says: “I don’t care about my memories, but they did this to me. They put this thing in me, and only they know how they did it, and — and how I might get it out. None of the other leads I’ve ever pursued have yielded anything of use and I’ve none of them left anyway, it’s all… Olly, what else do you want me to do?”
Olruggio’s lips part as if to say something, and then he pauses, his eyes troubled as they meet Qifrey’s, which must look like that of an animal with its leg caught in a bear trap. That is certainly how he feels.
“Right,” Olruggio says eventually. “Gotta be real with you, I’m probably not gonna be chuffed about that plan when and if I hear it again, especially without the context. But I don’t have a better one for you right now, so… guess I don’t really have a right to complain, huh.”
Qifrey breathes a despairing laugh. “You are never terribly chuffed about this plan, but I’m… I’m out of all other ideas. I have no other leads left to follow, no notion what else there is to do. I… ngh…”
The pressure in his head is building until the sight of his left eye turns blurry and imprecise with it, taking Olruggio’s face from him, making him just another bleeding, indistinct shape among many. With a trembling hand Qifrey reaches out to grasp at Olruggio’s cloak, reassuring himself he’s still there, and solid, and real. Is this what it will be, down the road? Will there be a last time he ever sees Olruggio clearly? How much time does he have left, until this is all there is?
“What’s happening?” Olruggio says, his steadying hands landing on Qifrey’s shoulders. Qifrey’s legs wobble and fold beneath him, and Olruggio gives a startled sound but follows him down, breaks his fall by wrapping him up in his arms and drawing him to him. “Qifrey?”
Qifrey can tell from the change in Olruggio’s breathing that he’s about to panic, so he manages to grate out: “It’s — okay. It’s okay, it’s not happening yet, it only… hurts.”
“And in what world did you figure that means it’s okay,” Olruggio says, but with no heat. Arms still around Qifrey, he starts to move back as if to get a look at Qifrey’s face. Qifrey struggles against it, fists his hands in Olruggio’s clothes to keep him close, armed with instincts honed through years of exuberant rough housing; he still knows the way Olruggio moves by heart. Olruggio’s cloak smells like quiet fireside nights and is very soft against his cheek.
Abandoning his attempt to pull away at Qifrey’s resistance, Olruggio holds him for a while and then asks against his hair: “...is this why you tried to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“I know it… I know it doesn’t excuse it, none of this excuses… you had no way to understand, and I never know how to tell you in a way that — what to say that could… it always, I,” the words are spilling out of him like bile held back too long, and his tongue feels thick as if coated in blood, “no matter what I do it seems to, to, either I leave you and you think it’s because of you and I can’t even manage to stay away, or we have to do this, over and over and over, and I can’t ever… I’m sorry, Olly, I’m so — I should never have, I, I never meant to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. This was never what I…”
“Sssh,” Olruggio says, tightening his arms around him, “Qifrey, sssh, I know. It’s all right. It’s gonna be all right. I’m here.”
“You should have left me to drown,” Qifrey says bitterly. “Before you even learned my name, before I ever knew yours. It would have been better for everyone.”
He half expects Olruggio to snap at him for that, as he sometimes has before — wants him to, even, with the kind of bile fascination that makes you press down harder and harder on a bruise. But Olruggio only sighs and holds him closer, kisses his temple.
Robbed of opposition to push against to keep himself upright, Qifrey instead collapses into the embrace, his face against Olruggio’s chest. Olruggio is warm through his shirt. If it were Qifrey’s choice, he’d stay here forever, absolved of all other duty than that to the steady beat pressed close to his ear. It isn’t his choice. He may never get a choice.
Olruggio says thickly: “Um, I can’t… there’s, there’s nothing, not off the top of my head, I can’t come up with anythin’ that’d… I can’t — think…” He swallows hard. His hand comes up to cradle the back of Qifrey’s head. Then his voice returns, hoarse but true: “But… that doesn’t mean there is nothing to be done. I refuse to believe it. Just because I can’t come up with it on the spot doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Magic is for making what can’t be done into what can be, and the world is vast. We just need to…”
He trails off, what they need to do hanging between them unresolved, as it has for the last ten years.
Sitting back slightly, Qifrey too tired to stop him now, Olruggio takes in Qifrey’s face.
“What if we… what if we didn’t?” Qifrey says, with the guilty thrill of speaking the unspeakable. “What if we didn’t, this time. What if I just let it happen, and you can…”
Instead of answering, or perhaps as his answer, Olruggio wipes tears away from Qifrey’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You’ve been dealing with this alone this whole time,” he says, the distress carving deep furrows between his too-young brows like water and time shaping a riverbed. There shouldn’t have been enough time for them to make such headway yet, but perhaps there’s been enough pain. “My brilliant plan was to — I’ve left you alone with this for… stars. A decade. On purpose. How have I not…”
Qifrey lets out a gasp of a laugh, at this idea. He shakes his head. It sounds like the whisper of wind through the crowns of a forest. “Olly — if I were alone, I would not still be here to deal with it. To deal with anything, or be anything, or… This is how it happens every time. You comfort me, and I steal another bit of your life. It isn’t right, that you should still pay the price for me. The debt is too great, I can’t ever pay it back.”
Olruggio presses his lips roughly to Qifrey’s temple again, then, gently, to his forehead, thumbs brushing over Qifrey’s cheekbones as he does. He says: “You can’t steal what’s been freely given, and it isn’t a damn loan. Nice try, idiot.”
“But how can it ever be…” Qifrey blindly lifts his face to the touch of Olruggio’s mouth — he’s so warm, Qifrey feels like he’s been cold forever — and then a fresh unrelenting surge of agony splits his head open. He can’t help crying out as he curls up on himself, shoving his hand over the hollow of his right eye that is hollow no longer, tender shoots and sapling leaves wriggling against his palm like maggots ready to spill out. The pain is so intense it makes him dry heave for a moment, nausea radiating through him in cold shocks as something wriggles with expectant delight in his guts.
“Shit. The roots?” Olruggio says, sounding pained himself.
“Y-yes,” Qifrey gasps. His mouth tastes like the ocean.
“Sorry. Then I — guess we’re out of time. For now. Gimme the hat?”
“No,” Qifrey sobs; he can’t stop himself, shattering, now, when the moment is at hand once more, and reaches out blindly until he finds Olruggio’s shirt, “no, please, wait, don’t go, don’t leave me this time, I can’t —”
Olruggio brushes a thumb over his cheek, wiping away tears and something else, something that tickles against his skin. “I think I have to,” he says quietly, holding a leaf between two fingers and smiling like something hurts. “You’re shedding.”
“I can’t…”
“I’m so sorry, I — I really don’t wanna leave you like this, but… fuck me, I still don’t have any better ideas than I did at twelve, apparently. This has worked before, though, right? This has been keepin’ you going all this time? If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t even be… oh, Qifrey,” he says, when Qifrey can’t make himself stop crying, can’t make his voice anything but a strangled wail to give him an answer. Qifrey drops his head between his shoulders and slumps forward, only saved from falling face down on the floor by Olruggio quickly placing a hand on his shoulder to keep him up.
Olruggio’s hand moves from Qifrey’s shoulder to the back of his neck, warm and steady.
“Qifrey,” Olruggio says, gently touching Qifrey’s face to tilt it up, so they’re looking at each other. “Qifrey, look at me. I need you to listen to me for a moment.”
Qifrey pants for breath, but does blink his eye clear to do as Olruggio says. Olly asks for so little, and for even less Qifrey can actually give him. It feels almost obscene to not give him what vanishingly little is within Qifrey’s power to grant.
Olruggio looks at him very seriously, pain crinkling his eyes — but not only pain; there’s a great, implacable determination behind that, an everburning flame Qifrey has never known to falter or dim even once, after all this time. If it ever goes out, all the stars would go out with it, and Qifrey has no idea what he’d do then. He hates and loves that fire like nothing else: it lights his way, and it’s burning Olruggio down from the inside out, day by day.
Feeling like a moth before a forest fire, some idiot creature moving towards the wondrous light uncaring of its own imminent destruction, Qifrey keeps his eye on Olruggio’s. His familiar features are still slightly blurred, though less so this close up.
With a great deliberateness, as if magic might be called through words as truly as through ink, Olruggio cradles Qifrey’s face in careful palms and says: “It will be worth it one day.”
“Olly…”
“I promise you. I know it hurts. I can see how it hurts. But one day all of this will be worth it. And I’ll be here with you all the way until then. I won’t leave you. No matter how many times we have to do this to get there, no matter how many times I forget. I’ll always find my way back here. We’ll fix this.”
“I don’t believe you,” Qifrey says, and it feels like the greatest betrayal among so, so many, but he’s so tired he doesn’t have it in him to lie. Olruggio promised him once that he wouldn’t have to lie anymore. “I don’t think… I don’t think I believe you anymore.”
“That’s alright,” Olruggio says. “You won’t have been able to believe me for every moment of every day of ten years, Qifrey. Nobody could. But you’re still here. We’re still here. That means I don’t need you to believe me, as long as you keep going anyway.”
“Did you know back then, what a horrible thing that is to ask of someone?”
“Yeah,” Olruggio says sadly. “Yeah. I think I did.”
Qifrey’s breath leaves him in tight, cramp-like stutters. His heart beats so hard against the restriction of roots winding itself around it, it feels like an alien thing in his chest, a trapped bird desperately beating its wings in a futile attempt to free itself. He drops his head, unable to find the strength to hold it up.
Olruggio asks: “Will you still do it?”
“Yes,” Qifrey whispers.
Olruggio rests his forehead against Qifrey’s. “Thank you.”
They breathe together like that for a little while.
Then, feeling the branches press against the inside of his ribs until they might crack, fragile trellises to carry and contain such a weight, when finally he fears the roots will spill over and embed themselves deep into the ground beneath the atelier and crack the foundations irrevocably on their way down, Qifrey fumbles for the hat. He finds the flap hiding the spell more by touch than by sight. Once he’s got the seal out in the open he finds that he can’t distinguish the details of it, it’s just a smear of black and the barest threads of white that swim into each other. His hands shake. “I need to — activate it, but I can’t… I can’t see very well like this.”
Olruggio takes the hat from him, their hands overlapping briefly as he eases it from Qifrey’s grip. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll do it.” There’s a pause. “Huh. Hell of a thing, ain’t it. It’d almost be beautiful, if it weren’t so… well. Y’know.”
“There’s only one line that needs to be connected,” Qifrey says. He’s shaking all over now. “I need it to — to be quick to deploy, sometimes.”
A soft huff of laughter. “I don’t see why, if push comes to shove you run faster than me. Your legs are so much longer than mine now.”
“That’s not what I — that isn’t how…”
“Ssh, I know. Just a joke. A bad one, I’ll grant you. Hm. Yeah, I think I see the trick of it. Listen, Qifrey, I — ” He hesitates, gazing at Qifrey for the space of a held breath. Qifrey quivers — not with a human tremble, but the apogee of tension right before a bud yields to the call of spring and breaks open, a process too natural and basic even to be called instinct. They might have left it too long this time, he realizes.
As if he can sense it too, somehow, Olruggio says: “I’ll catch up to you again. We’ll figure this out. Just… just hold on for me a bit longer.”
“Wait, Olly — ”
But Olruggio has already placed the hat on his own head, and his body goes limp, falling to the ground like some essential animating force has left it. It’s all Qifrey can do to lunge forward to try to break his fall, stop his head from hitting the ground. In his arms Olly’s weight is slack and leaden, the hat slipping partway off and revealing his ashen face. Qifrey removes the hat and lowers him to the ground carefully, struggling to breathe, struggling to find the will to. When he touches Olruggio’s face there’s no reaction, and his skin is cool and clammy, half-way to a corpse.
He collapses over Olruggio’s still form and cries and cries and cries so bitterly against his chest he’s almost afraid he’ll throw up. Leaves rain softly all around them.
His entire being throbs as if with a whole body migraine. Something keeps writhing beneath his skin, in his guts, behind his eyes, but it’s in agitation and disappointment now, a withering, everything wilting and withdrawing back towards the safer, more sheltered core. Setting his jaw, he gets out the special bottle of conjuring ink he keeps for this purpose. With a distant, clinical precision, he lets tears roll down his cheeks until they drop and he can gather them up in the bottle. His misery is hardly a finite resource, but there’s no sense in being profligate even so. Waste not, want not. The inexplicable tears from his missing right eye fall from the shrivelling leaves like dew, leaving behind a smell of rot.
He carries out this bleak ritual — this mingling of blood and tears, cruor and dew reunited for a purpose without comfort — until the ink itself seems diluted by it, until his lungs burn and there’s a very real risk that Olruggio might wake up while Qifrey’s still crying, and have a lot of questions. Questions that may set the whole cycle off once again, with nary a chance to breathe between them. It has happened once or twice, and it always makes the whole thing take on a sheen of tragicomedy — some great cosmic joke played on the both of them, though only Qifrey ever gets to the sickening punchline, and he never feels much like laughing.
Quirking a grim, humourless smile, Qifrey tucks the ink bottle safely away and closes his eye for a moment, wills his head quiet and barren and cold until it starts to take. After drying his eye, his cheeks, his jaw, with his sleeve, he dares to look at Olruggio’s slumbering form on the floor. He’s so still.
Qifrey indulges in resting his hand near Olruggio’s mouth to assure himself he’s still breathing. He always finds himself wondering where Olruggio goes, in that dark and lonely place beyond consciousness — whether the oblivion happens all at once, a light snuffed out instantly, or if the mind walks back along its own pathways and trails in the process of wiping them out, retracing its footsteps and undoing their meaning as it goes. Sleep is crucial to the forming of memories. There’s a strange poetry to the idea of it serving as the medium through which they are unformed, as well.
He wants to lie down next to Olruggio and sleep himself, sleep however long it would take to forget it all, to wipe it all clean, to let them start again — sleep forever, nestled close to the curve of Olruggio’s body like he had when they were boys, out on some grand adventure.
But he has miles to go still, and promises to keep. So he gets up, gets the broom from the kitchen, starts to sweep up the fallen leaves while Olruggio sleeps on alone.
— — —
Olruggio wakes with a low, tremulous groan that bespeaks a tremendous headache and shifts like he’s not particularly happy to find himself returned to his body or to wakefulness, especially a body and wakefulness currently in residence flat out on the floor. Even with a pillow tucked under his head and a blanket over him, it can hardly be a comfortable awakening.
“Welcome back,” Qifrey says. He’s curled up on the couch, pretending to read.
Olruggio pushes himself up to a sitting position with a ponderous gingerness, like that of a man afraid his limbs might disattach themselves from his trunk, were he to move too suddenly. “Sweet silver lights above,” he whispers thinly once he’s upright, dropping his head into his hands like it’s unconscionably heavy. “I didn’t have that much, did I?” he says, with an edge of plaintiveness. “It was only a couple of drinks with dinner.”
“They say we get worse at processing alcohol as we age, perhaps it’s time you cut back a bit,” Qifrey says tartly, turning a page blindly, and Olruggio snorts.
“Hardi har har. Damn. My head.” Olruggio lets his forehead fall into his palm. After a moment he adds, uncertainly: “Were we… did we talk about something, before I — dozed off? It feels like there was somethin’…”
Pretending to look up from his book in surprise, Qifrey says: “Hm? Oh, yes, we talked, a little. Not about anything important, though, to my recollection.”
“Huh. Okay. Merciful passage of stars, my head is killing me. I know I’ve only got myself to blame, before you say anythin’ —”
“I wasn’t going to,” Qifrey says quietly.
“But… we have any tranquileaf tea on hand?”
“We ought to, I harvested a batch just the other day. Don’t get up, I’ll get some for you.”
Olruggio makes some grateful if indistinct noises from the floor as Qifrey puts the book aside and leaves the room.
In the kitchen, unwatched, Qifrey takes a moment to close his eye and breathe out. His own head is still aching like someone has driven a knife through his right eye socket and is twisting it around and around. The tranquileaf he’d already applied had not taken the edge off in the slightest, so he forgoes a second dose. He’ll simply have to live with it until it decides to pass.
“Thanks,” Olruggio says when Qifrey hands him the steaming mug, knocking it back very nearly in one swallow and hissing between his teeth at the heat as it goes down.
“Careful, don’t burn yourself,” Qifrey scolds, while Olruggio grimaces.
“Too late. Wasn’t that bad, though, no need to fuss.” Olruggio finishes the last of the tea and then delivers the empty mug into Qifrey’s waiting hand outstretched for it. Their fingers brush against each other over the cooling ceramic. Olly still looks ashen and drawn. He rubs at his eyes roughly, leaving them redder and tireder even than they had been. “Ngh. You don’t need me for anythin’ right now, do you? ‘Cause I think I’m just gonna try to… grab a nap until the tranquileaf kicks in, if that’s alright.”
“Yes,” Qifrey says, holding the mug between his palms to feel the last warmth fade from it. “You should get some rest. Nothing needs doing that cannot wait until you feel better. I’ll get started on supper, in the meantime.”
“‘Mmkay.” Olruggio crawls his way onto the couch in a rather piteous crablike fashion and collapses there. He gives an appreciative sigh when Qifrey grabs the blanket from the floor and drapes it over him. His eyes are already slipping back closed. “Wake me if you need help.”
“I will,” Qifrey lies, and begins his retreat to the kitchen, where he won’t have to control his face anymore.
“Hey, hang on, what’s…” Behind him, Olruggio lets out a surprised, slightly raspy chuckle. There’s a rustling, as if of… Qifrey freezes in place.
Olruggio says: “Huh. Guess we got a free sample with our last order from Nolnoa.”
Qifrey forces himself to turn around. Olruggio is slowly twirling a silvery leaf, dry but unwithered, over and over between his fingers, looking at it thoughtfully.
Making himself create a sound that could be mistaken for laughter — he thought he had gotten them all while tidying up, damn it all — Qifrey says: “So it seems. Must have tucked itself in between the samples of new paper types I got.”
“Guess so, huh.” Olruggio absently brushes the leaf over his mouth, tracing the tip of it over the gentle bow of his top lip. Qifrey breathes. “They never mention that part in the poems, do they. The silverwood maiden must’ve had a hell of a time of it, come the end of summer every year. A martyr to her tousled boughs all autumn.”
“Well, she wasn’t without aid. Sail sleeping skies, the stars like sailing ships,” Qifrey recites softly. “‘Till, rapt in branches, set course for world adrowse…”
Olruggio, eyes growing heavy, gives a small drowsy smile of recognition. “To pass the gift of night to silverwood lips, and… You know, I think I dreamt of a silverwood, once,” Olruggio mumbles, but when Qifrey has regained his voice Olly has already slipped over the edge into the chasm of sleep once more, the leaf still held just barely between sleep-slackened fingers.