Chapter Text
Qifrey knew perfectly well that he was a terrible choice for a professor. The fact that he was instituted at all was mostly because there were no laws specific enough to stop him from completing the process, and perhaps also because of Beldarut’s quiet influence.
Qifrey followed every bureaucratic step precisely and with a smile, like he didn’t notice at all how offended so many people got at the very idea of a former Unknowing daring to teach magic, and one with such an unsavory past at that. Why, you’d might as well just foist your kids over to the Brimhats! Or something like that. He didn’t listen too closely to the logic.
But of course he knew.
He also knew if he had any chance of making this insane dream of his actually happen, he would need to leave the Assembly. It wasn’t such a loss. He’d been aching to leave this place all his life, truth be told. The only real snag in his plans was that in order to start his own atelier out in the country he would need a Watchful Eye.
That would be… cumbersome.
The law was on his side, though, in this rare instance. It was at least specific enough to declare he had the right to choose from the pre-approved candidates.
He was seated now in a small room in one of the central spires, a flat and empty desk between his chair and the chair opposite him where the candidates were coming in one by one to sit and have their interview with him. The plainness of the room, the uncomfortableness of his chair, and the low glow of the magic lights reeked of administrative stuffiness.
He hadn’t talked to a single person yet who didn’t look at him with some level of distrust. There was even a thin-haired man whose lip curled slightly with repulsion during their conversation. As if Qifrey wouldn’t see it.
Why did none of them ever think he could see it?
He smiled at all of them. His questions were simple.
“What interests you about becoming a Watchful Eye?”
“Have you ever worked with children?”
“What do you think is most important to provide for apprentices?”
They mostly had boring and reasonable answers, but their stiffness was tiring, their coldness. His hope to find someone like-minded was looking impossible, but he hadn’t much been expecting that anyway. After a couple hours, he’d already adjusted his standards to just looking for someone who would stay out of his way.
The sneerer shot him a side-eyed look as he left the room after his interview, which left Qifrey smiling blandly to himself. Really, did the guy expect to get the job like that? Or had he just come here to ogle at Beldarut’s evil little protege?
“Number 5 can come in please,” Qifrey said into a small speaker glyph that was connected to a larger one out in the hall. He had a notebook open in front of him for notes but hadn’t actually written much down apart from the names people had given him. There wasn’t much else to remember.
The door opened again and in walked…
Well.
Qifrey just stared for a moment.
Then all he could do was huff out a helpless laugh as Olruggio sat down across from him.
“Think we could get along?” Olruggio asked him, slinging an arm over the back of his chair. He had simply the most self-satisfied grin on his face.
“You can’t be serious…”
“Sure I’m serious.” He tapped Qifrey’s notebook with a ringed finger. “Go on. Applicant Number 5, reporting for my interview.”
Qifrey looked down at the page, pen poised, and had to swallow down the… something that rose in his throat.
“Being a Watchful Eye is a fairly permanent job,” Qifrey pointed out.
“It also wouldn’t interfere with my freelance work,” said Olruggio. “It’s basically just what I’m doing now in a different place. And, what, a couple weeks of training before I start? I think I’ll survive, even if it’s Easthies.”
Attached to his hat, Qifrey’s old cord tassel lay comfortably against the black, as if it was always supposed to be there.
Qifrey’s shoulders slumped under the immensity of all this, and he just looked at his friend.
“Don’t look so heartbroken about a good thing,” Olruggio chastised.
“Did Beldarut put you up to this?”
“He suggested it to me,” Olruggio said. “Honestly, I’m a little mad you didn’t ask me yourself.”
It hadn’t even occurred to Qifrey that he could. Maybe that was foolish.
“Oru… You have a lot here,” he said softly. This had always been a tension in their friendship… the way that Olruggio tended to be beloved, how he had somehow managed to sneak out of their childhood with an upstanding reputation despite his stubborn proximity to Qifrey. It was a lot to just give up.
“Yeah, and I also have a lot that’s leaving,” Olruggio said.
He was giving Qifrey quite a meaningful frown now, and Qifrey finally relented, melting into a smile, small and genuine.
“Your qualifications are impressive,” he said.
“Aren’t they? And Beldarut is already bullying the Knights Moralis, so they won’t put up too much of a fuss about our frankly suspicious arrangement here.”
“It’s almost like I have some very hard-headed people looking out for me.”
“Consider it a public service.” Olruggio’s smile returned, but without teeth this time. Lopsided and fond in that way that made his eyes seem darker than they were. “You’ll be a great teacher, Qifrey,” he said.
And he meant it. He completely meant it.
Qifrey’s heart squeezed painfully, and he drew a long diagonal line through all of his “notes”.
Now there weren’t any snags at all.
~
They chose a patch of secluded country not too far from Kahln, surrounded by cliffs and shrubby hills, with a view that stretched out over a lake and then disappeared into dark trees. It was a beautiful place, this was Qifrey’s first thought. Mild weather, the air fresh and open.
His second thought was that he hated paperwork.
Olruggio had more of a brain for the small details than he did. It was partly his job as Watchful Eye but also partly his tinkerer mentality. He took the liberty of compiling all of the building regulations for a certified atelier into one schematic, and just looking at it made Qifrey’s head hurt. Olruggio first explained it all with a perverse sort of glee, then with increasing exasperation, and then finally with a gruff “we’ve been over this, Qifrey” or a “dammit, Qifrey, you can’t just have a bathhouse.”
Unsurprisingly, they were offered very little help from the Assembly, who would generally prefer for them to fail.
So they built the place themselves.
Some witch architects from Kahln looked over their plans, measured out the floorplan in the grass for them, and then also left them to their own devices for the most part. Like with any magic, it became a process of trial and error.
For Qifrey at least, they were the biggest glyphs he’d ever drawn, interspersed with some of the smallest at the same time, so that by the end of the day his arm ached at the shoulder and his wrist stung from all the tight details. He wore a loose tunic, and the hours in the sun had sweat bleeding through at his back and under his arms. Olruggio was not better off–-he kept impatiently blowing sweaty hair out of his eyes with the most amusing noises.
Their first attempt failed, and it was a prodigious failure. A little square house of brick that had taken 10 hours of their time, that had even elicited some pride and triumph, but then when Olruggio went through the final measurements it didn’t turn out quite right. The chimney was too thin for regulation, and the chimney was at the very center so that basically negated everything else.
Back to the drawing board. As the sun set orange and fiery over the lake, they tore the house down, brick and stone sinking back into the earth or poofing into oblivion as they erased glyphs painstakingly. The falling night cooled their faces, but Qifrey for one could feel a sunburn brewing in the heat of his forehead.
They reached a point of “fuck it” for the day, then went into town and got very drunk.
It was just the Unknowing part of town so no one would bother them, and they complained together viciously over the darkest beers available.
“I’m not getting drunk,” Qifrey kept saying, while getting drunk. “I’ve got too much to do, I can’t get drunk.”
“You always say that,” said Olruggio, who to his credit kept moving Qifrey’s mug to the opposite side of the table in solidarity, but then Qifrey kept pulling it back to himself again and refilling it from the pitcher.
“I don’t know how you drink so much,” Qifrey said.
“It’s a practice,” said Olruggio. “Like poetry or martial arts.”
Olruggio always got drunk faster than him, and he became quite a silly and jovial character. He started laughing too loudly. Qifrey was always more contained, and even now a paranoid part of him kept thinking things like I can’t lose too much control or I’ll spill secrets.
Secrets of witchhood around this bar full of Unknowing.
Or other secrets, just of his own.
But he never actually wound up spilling anything when he got truly drunk, except for his guts.
He threw up in an alley as they were stumbling their way home in the dark. Olruggio whistled low through his teeth.
“Give me your pen,” Qifrey rasped blearily. “I need to… Draw a cleaning glyph in the brick.”
“The brick doesn’t need a permanently seared cleaning glyph,” said Olruggio, which was extremely reasonable of him considering he could barely stand up and was basically leaning his whole weight on an empty hitching fence for horses.
But Qifrey did petulantly sit there drawing something in the dark for ages.
A small bush grew over his sick, right there in the middle of the cobblestones.
Olruggio laughed so hard he did actually fall to the ground.
They came to the water, and over on the other shore the witch side of Kahln glittered like stars fallen to the ground. The inn they’d been staying at was over there, but of course they’d missed the last ferry. They could easily soar over with their sylph shoes, but they were both too practical to trust their drunker selves with flying.
So they just sat for awhile on the edge of the black water, watching the reflective lights dance on the ripples and sobering up.
Qifrey closed his eye and pictured that patch of country they’d worked in all day… Imagined he was on the edge of that lake instead, far from everyone.
Well, not everyone.
Olruggio’s shoulder was heavy and a little too warm pressed against his side. He was dozing off.
It felt a bit like their old adventures.
“I guess we’ll both have to grow up quickly if we expect to teach children,” Qifrey said, mostly to himself.
Olruggio just mumbled vaguely, half asleep, his head conked out in the crook of Qifrey’s neck.
“But we’ve grown up a lot already,” Qifrey decided.
They weren’t just lonely, naive boys any more. If anything, they knew and held too much, now.
The next morning they both woke up with hangovers, and Qifrey’s sunburnt face was already peeling, especially where his glasses rubbed.
Nevertheless, they went right back to work.
~
They took their building slower this time, piece by piece, painstakingly measuring and re-measuring along the way. It would take longer than one day, and they would just have to be patient about that.
They were learning.
Olruggio was there drawing at Qifrey’s side all morning, but had to disappear to meet with a client for the afternoon. Qifrey continued the work alone, with the hugely gentle winds and the bobbing flowers peeking over the grasses and the birds flying overhead.
They had a foundation now. Just a floor and an outline of bricks smattered in glyphs for stability and protection from water damage. He took a moment to walk around the whole perimeter of the house, noticing how you could tell which glyphs were drawn by him and which by Olruggio, even when they were the same symbols. It was a certain slant of the hand, a certain pressure of the pen. He realized slowly, unfoldingly, that Olruggio was here with him. Written right into the very stone.
A part of him had never been able to fully believe that, even after so many years together.
His very first friend was a boy so bright and precious he might as well have been a star fallen under the ocean… Since then, it had been so long that it felt like Olruggio had been three different people in a row, all growing out of each other. Qifrey had grown too, and the two boys, now men, simply adapted to one another, to the interplay of sameness and newness all through their adolescence. One weaved this way, the other that way, and somehow, by some miracle, they always wound up meeting in the middle again. Qifrey had spent so long being tenderly grateful for this connection that he’d forgotten to see Olruggio’s own careful happiness in it, the way he was now laying bricks with such reverence it was clear he saw this cottage as much as his own as it was Qifrey’s.
What a tremendous responsibility it was, to mean this to someone. Especially someone he loved so dearly.
Around dinner time, he went into Kahln and brought back street food, cold meat and peppers stuffed into almost comically large buns, roasted corn still on the cob, and fresh too-sweet pears as an indulgent dessert. By the time he returned to the hilltop of their not-quite-atelier, Olruggio was back and waiting for him. As Qifrey approached up the hill, Olruggio’s back was to him, sitting there in the grass in front of their low outline of stone, just looking at it, his arms loosely looped around his knees.
Qifrey wished he could see what kind of face he was making in that quiet moment alone, but another part of him feared it might be too intimate to witness.
When he heard Qifrey’s boots trudging up the path, Olruggio finally looked over his shoulder, and his face was just like it always was. Just Olruggio. So very simple and so very much at the same time.
“I wanted to help build more but I’m beat,” he admitted.
Qifrey sat down beside him, setting their basket of dinner on the ground. “I think we have a good enough start for today,” he said. “If someone didn’t know better, they might even think we know what we’re doing.”
“If I’ve learned anything from freelancing, it’s that bullshitting something is always the first step to becoming a master,” said Olruggio. He was already rummaging through the basket. He pulled out one of the pears with a greedy gleam in his eye.
“You can’t start with dessert,” Qifrey said with dismay.
“Hey, save it for the students. I’m a grown man.”
Qifrey just sort of looked at him and Olruggio scoffed.
“That face hasn’t worked on me since we were kids.”
“What face?”
“That face.”
Honestly Qifrey had no idea what his own face was even doing, but he’d let Olruggio win just this once.
After eating way too much, they laid out on their backs in the pleasantly damp clover, sated and watching the clouds drift through the still-sunny sky.
“Have you gotten any student applications yet?” Olruggio asked. He kept asking, ever since Qifrey’s professorship had become publicly official, but not every day. Qifrey got the impression his friend was strategically biting back on asking too often.
“Not yet,” said Qifrey.
The silence after that was awkward. Heavy but not wanting to be heavy and very, very aware of itself.
“They’ll come,” Qifrey said, because he thought Olruggio might need more comforting than himself on this topic. “I don’t suspect anybody who can get into one of the larger academies will even think of me, and likewise most other private ateliers would be preferred.”
Olruggio made an annoyed grunt of a noise, but had the good sense not to refute this. It wasn’t self-deprecation. It was just the truth.
“But you and I both know there are always children falling between the cracks in our world,” Qifrey said softly. “Those are the ones who will be my students. I want to be that kind of person, I think… Someone who can catch them.”
He felt Olruggio’s eyes on him, and turned his head in the grass to offer him a smile.
Olruggio’s expression was hard to read, but one of the little white clover flowers was blowing idly against the hair on his chin, and Qifrey thought that was lovely.
“It’s a hare-brained scheme,” Qifrey allowed.
Olruggio snorted, mouth twisting wryly. “It’s the sort of place you would’ve liked to grow up in,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I think I would’ve liked it too.”
That was a bit of a secret, just for Qifrey’s ears.
Most of the people who loved Olruggio–-and there were many of them–-didn’t know that he had also been a fiercely lonesome child. His not quite fitting in was subtler than Qifrey’s. You hardly even noticed he wasn’t the perfect prodigy, everything a Pointed Hat should be and good at it to boot.
Perhaps that was part of what made it so painful. If Qifrey had always stuck out like a sore thumb, Olruggio had always been so very invisible. Hidden under all the accepted truths about him that weren’t actually him at all.
It happened even now. Olruggio continued to be loved by many people, but he was known by far fewer.
“Our place,” Olruggio said, looking back up at the clouds. “It makes sense it wouldn’t be at the Assembly. I wasn’t sure we’d actually find one so easily though. I guess it is just a matter of reaching out and taking it sometimes.”
“How long have I been a part of your ‘we’?” Qifrey asked him, his smile big enough that it was hurting his cheeks.
“Since always,” Olruggio said. “Obviously.”
Qifrey closed his eye and felt the sun on his face.
“It’s a good place,” he said. “Our place.”
“Mm hmm.”
“Thank you, Oru.”
“For what?”
“For everything. For the whole world.”
“Simmer down a little, that might be a tall order.”
“No, this is in the past tense you see.”
“I really don’t know when you’re joking sometimes.”
Qifrey laughed through his front teeth, and kept his eye closed with the smallest thread of fear that a tear might escape if he parted his eyelids.
“I’m just happy,” he said. “You make me so happy.”
He could hear Olruggio’s flustered fidgeting in response, the shuffle of his robes.
It was a beautiful day, all day.
~
“Qifrey, get down from there!”
Today the clouds were heavy, and it was starting to rain. Qifrey was up on their new roof, hunched close to the spire of the chimney, and hurriedly drawing glyphs to keep out the water that was already beating down. Out on the horizon, the clouds were flat-bottomed and thunder-filled, and the wind was brushing his hair with a cold earnestness so much different than its usual lazy caresses these past weeks. He had a little bubble around him to repel the rain because of course he hated getting wet, even here. But something about the frantic work of his cold hands and the way his boots strained for purchase against the shingles and that distant rumbling of the oncoming storm… In a strange way, it was invigorating. He had a somewhat manic grin on his face as he scuttled along the roof like a spider.
“I’m almost finished!” he yelled, not even hiding how his voice burst out of him with adventurous glee.
Olruggio was not having it. He was down on the ground and barefoot because he’d risked an afternoon nap before the rain started. No sylph shoes meant his downfall, but it also meant Qifrey’s extended freedom.
“You’re going to get yourself struck by lightning, you absolute maniac!” Olruggio blustered. “I’m serious, get down! It doesn’t matter if rain gets in.”
“I’m almost finished, I promise!”
“Qifrey, I’m fucking serious!”
Tapping his boots together, Qifrey hopped across the long bridge to the other tower, the little hut that would be Olruggio’s workplace in this configuration. If anything, it was doubly important to protect this roof. Olruggio had been building his room with loving persnicketiness.
A stronger wind blew, scraping a few of the loose shingles clean away, and Olruggio was swearing down in the grass, stumbling around for his shoes. Qifrey pressed his notebook down hard against the stone and drew with practiced precision.
The rain fell harder with a great swell, making a clattering racket around him. Thunder boomed. Out over the lake, the first flash of lightning lit a cloud from below like a magical flame.
Qifrey was just finishing up when Olruggio finally found his shoes and leapt onto the roof beside him. He hadn’t bothered with a protective bubble himself, and he was soaked, absolutely scowling. He just about tackled Qifrey, arms wrapping around him tight, and then pulled him away, the two men half-tumbling, half-floating to the ground. It ruined Qifrey’s waterproof spell. By the time they landed hunched in the grass, they were both drenched and continuing to get a beating from the rain, falling harder and harder now.
“You got me wet,” Qifrey huffed. His hair was plastered to his forehead and his glasses were askew and fogging up. Still holding his notebook, he rubbed his hair away with the heel of his hand, revealing more of his scarred right eye than he intended but it didn’t really matter. It was just Olruggio. He tried to look his friend in the face but it was hard when his nose was smushed against Olruggio’s chest.
Olruggio kept holding him, shivering.
“You’re going to get yourself killed for a fucking roof,” Olruggio said. “I can’t believe you.”
“It’s all nice and secure now,” said Qifrey. “We’d probably better get inside.”
It was a bit delightful that they even had an inside to go to now.
The windows were paned but the doors were open, and there was no furniture inside, just stone floors and walls. Nevertheless, they huddled up on the floor of the soon-to-be living room, in the dark, still soaked to the bone, with the rain pummeling the roof over their heads. Their timing was perfect. The thunderclouds engulfed the little atelier then, with their darkness and intensity.
They were safe, as the light flashed around their little sanctuary. Cold, but safe.
Olruggio dutifully began drawing drying runes.
“The chimney’s finished but I haven’t checked the flue yet so I don’t want to make a fire,” he mumbled irritably, as a big blossoming of warmth stretched across the floor, holding them both as they sat there cross-legged.
“It’s kind of nice as it is,” Qifrey said, watching the storm out of the open door, the raindrops sliding down the glass of the windows.
Olruggio gave him a long look. “I’ve always liked the way you look at the world, Qifrey,” he said. “But you worry the shit out of me sometimes.”
“I’ll try to be more careful.”
Olruggio made a scoffing noise, as if to say No you won’t, but he didn’t press the issue.
He surely planned to be there to catch Qifrey again whenever the need arose. Simple as that.
They spoke quietly, and also just sat together. The room was so large without anything inside it, only them, but it held them so simply, these walls they had built themselves. It was already starting to be beautiful, Qifrey thought. It would only continue to grow more precious, bit by bit.
It almost pained him.
When the storm started to pass, they got up and gave themselves a little tour of inside the atelier. The living room, the halls, the stairs up to the bedrooms, Olruggio’s workshop. They muttered plans back and forth. “Don’t let me forget to–” “This needs a–” “Wouldn’t this look good with–” They ended in the kitchen, and Qifrey could already imagine himself cooking Olruggio just an obnoxiously big dinner to celebrate. What they’d be celebrating didn’t matter. Just to celebrate.
He stood in the open doorway and looked out, the rainfall slowing and tentative beams of sunlight finding their way to light the grass again in gleaming patches. He imagined waiting for people to come home.
Then, he felt Olruggio’s hand on his waist. The simple warm solidity of him behind his back, his face coming to hover just slightly over his shoulder, watching as well.
It was simple contact, just like always, but for some reason… Qifrey felt if he pushed just a little, in just the right way, it could so easily turn into something more, in this moment.
He had held back on this impulse for a long time, because there were still things he knew about himself that Olruggio didn’t. It didn’t seem fair… to accept so much from Olruggio when he would inevitably have to leave him in the end. How much could Qifrey take before he was just being selfish? Before he was just hurting his most beloved friend all the more?
But oh… things felt so simple like this. And wasn’t this what Qifrey was choosing right now? To stop his hopeless striving and just live? Here and now and beautifully? For however long he could? That was his insane dream.
So he turned his head and kissed Olruggio, simply. With Olruggio somewhat shorter than him, his lips landed on the side of his forehead, just above his temple. A bit of his hair and a bit of skin and then it was over and Qifrey turned back to the doorway.
For a moment Olruggio was absolutely frozen.
“Qifrey…” He huffed a little, embarrassed, and then pressed his face into the back of Qifrey’s shoulder. “You can’t just… You just kissed me.”
“I know,” said Qifrey, grinning queasily. His heart was hammering in his throat. “That was the idea.”
Olruggio made a grumpy noise, but he also looped his arms around Qifrey’s waist, solid and deliberate. A jumpy giggle bubbled up out of Qifrey and he clamped down on it too late, his smile wobbly. They both must be red as tomatoes.
They had time… They had plenty of time.
Qifrey really believed that, back then.