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The scream startles Olruggio so hard he almost falls off his ladder. He was trying to reach his blasted copy of an obscure magical theory book, and of course he had, for some reason, left it on top of his bookshelf. It would have been a nasty fall down.
Instead, he quickly stumbles down the steps, his thoughts whirring. That was one of the girls, but who? Riche’s voice can’t actually be this loud, and Agetha wouldn’t sound so scared. So Tetia or Coco—and Tetia does have the flair of the dramatic, so it could easily be her, but if it was Coco—
There are so many reasons for Coco to sound terrified, and Olruggio feels ill-prepared to deal with any of them. Surely the Brimcaps wouldn’t dare attach an atelier in broad daylight, surely they wouldn’t be so brazen.
Where are they, where are they, he thinks frantically, as he finds both the kitchen and the study empty. With a flash, he remembers Coco and Tetia cajoling Qifrey into an outside lesson. It’s such a nice day, Tetia whined at breakfast. I could study all the clouds in the sky! Olruggio had snorted into his coffee when he saw even Agathe perk up in interest at the idea of going outside. They have all been cooped up for days due to constant rain, and he knew in an instant that Qifrey wouldn’t be able to say no when all four of the girls united against him.
He thought it sweet, only hours ago. He watched as his friend led his students outside, ignoring the pang in his heart calling him to join them. He had work, and he had his studies, and he had his duty. A Watchful Eye is only useful if it watches from afar and keeps a full field of vision.
Now he curses the sunny day, curses Qifrey for caving to the girls immediately, curses every Watchful Eye guideline he was forced to memorize. The outside is much less warded than the inside, and is too far away. He slams the entry door open, uncaring of its hinges almost coming off, his eyes scanning the area frantically. Immediately, Tetia barrels into him, too late to stop herself.
“Professor Olruggio!” she gasps out. She looks unharmed, but her eyes are wide with fear, her cheeks flushed. Instinctively, he places his hands on her shoulders, steadying her.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Professor Qifrey, he collapsed!” she gasps out, and Olruggio feels something inside him still into stone.
It isn’t often that Olruggio actually sleeps. Had brief meetings with his pillow — sure. Passing out on top of his work station — more times than he would like to admit. But long uninterrupted periods of rest have been a thing relegated to the past for a long, long time, much like not having to worry about his facial hair growing out of control, or having a best friend who actually trusted him.
He… isn’t being fair. A Watchful Eye must always be fair, must always be just, must always make the right decision, the correct call. It used to be so easy: make sure the girls were fed, make sure Qifrey was fed, keep an eye out on any magical experiments for hints of explosion. Qifrey trusted him to have his back, and he trusted Qifrey to… he trusted Qifrey with everything. With the girls, and with magic, and with their lives.
Then, Coco. And suddenly his job is not so easy anymore. It would be easy to blame her — he had done so at the start, much to his own shame — but Coco is a remarkable girl. She shines so brightly it almost hurts to look at her straight. It reminds him of Qifrey when they first met. Not that Qifrey was much of a bubbly, kind soul like she is, but there was something about him that shone in the exact same shade of brilliance.
That glow feels long gone, by now. Just like his days of actual sleep.
Which is why he feels oddly betrayed when the doctor at the nearby village declares that Qifrey is simply exhausted.
“What?” he asks, just to make sure he heard right.
The doctor smiles at him, and if her face is a bit pitying he’s going to pretend he hasn’t seen it. “Has he been getting enough sleep, dear? It seems like he has been eating and drinking, which is good, but I would say he hasn’t slept in at least a few days, by the looks of it.”
A few days? He shares a look with Coco, who insisted on going with him. Her wide eyes tell him all that he needs to know.
“And that’s it? Nothing else is wrong?”
The doctor shakes her head. “You can take him home as soon as he wakes up, since I doubt he would be getting better rest here than he would in his own bed. Unless there’s a reason he wouldn’t…?”
“No,” he blurts out, even though he doesn’t know. Because Qifrey hasn’t been sleeping, and Olruggio didn’t notice, didn’t see. What else hasn’t he seen?
“We will make sure Professor Qifrey sleeps!” Coco promises quickly. Olruggio is sure she will waste no time in conscripting her fellow students to the task, and a small part of him almost feels sorry for the man.
Most of him, however, is stuck on hasn't slept in days.
“We don’t have to wait until he wakes up,” he declares, suddenly desperate to get Qifrey back in his own bed, under their own roof. He could make him some warming stones, and Tetia would make her special tea, the one she insists tastes like clouds. And they will take out every single blanket they have, until Qifrey will be too buried to ever get out, and he will be forced to sleep, to treat his body with kindness.
After a few more minutes of added instruction from the doctor, she bids them goodbye and leaves them be, allowing Qifrey to draw a transportation sigil. “Coco, could you go on ahead and prepare his bed for him? Make sure the other girls know the situation.”
She nods quickly, her eyes still wide, and now Olruggio can see more than just uncertainty in them, but fear too. And of course she would be afraid, he berates himself. He knows of the fate of her mother, knows Qifrey is all she has in the world. What could be more scary for a child than the possibility of being left alone?
Despite the urgency still singing inside him, he drops to one knee in front of her and places a hand on her shoulder. “He will be fine,” he makes a promise he has every intention of keeping, and no idea if he can. “You heard what the doctor said—just a bit of exhaustion. I bet he was working on some of his more ridiculous ideas and just lost track of time.”
But Coco shakes her head. “He has been sitting on the roof,” she says quietly, as if she doesn’t want Qifrey to hear her even in his sleep. “I saw him a few times, when I…” she trails off, but it isn’t hard to imagine what would keep a child like Coco up at night.
“I should have said something,” she continues, staring at the ground. “I’m sorry.”
His heart clenches in his chest. Coco—brilliant, kind, wonderful Coco, who is the first one to offer her assistance and the last one to ask for any in return—blaming herself for her mother’s fate and now Qifrey’s too…
Fuck. Qifrey sure knows how to pick all those sad little strays, him and the girls both. He tugs her into a hug, and hears her gasping in surprise, unused for such affection coming from him. “It’s not your fault. You aren’t responsible for him.”
“But—”
He leans back just enough to look her right in the eyes. “Qifrey is an adult, and you are a child,” he says, firmly. “He’s responsible for your well-being, not the other way around. You shouldn’t have to look after him.”
Coco looks at him, a stubborn look in her eyes. “Then who will?” she asks. “If I don’t, who—”
And she doesn’t sound accusatory, he doesn’t think Coco is even capable of that, but something inside him flinches still. Why didn’t you notice, he thinks again. It’s your job to see, to watch, how did you miss this-
He doesn’t let any of it show on his face. “I will,” he says. And although the worry inside of him still swirls, making him sick, he still manages to relax just a bit when Coco nods again, trusting him.
It takes Qifrey three hours to wake up. One more than Olruggio estimated, but two less than the doctor has, so he’s still counting it as his win. In that time, the girls have quickly organized themselves into a well-oiled machine, and have gathered more pillows and blankets than Olruggio even knew they had. They had tried to insist on a sleepover in Qifrey’s room, but Olruggio managed to redirect their efforts, and they were now in the study room working together on a project to encourage sleep.
As they left, he heard Tetia mumble something about finding sheep, and he simply has to hope he won’t wake up the next day to a hoard of the fuzzy creatures invading their home.
Somehow, Qifrey looks even smaller in his own bed than he did in the infirmary. Without his glasses on it’s easy to see the dark, purple indents underneath his eyes, the skin there looking paper-thin. He is paler than usual, blending into the white sheets, his hair like a halo around him. He looks almost translucent, as if he could disappear at any moment.
Maybe he’s a faerie, is what kids used to whisper about Qifrey behind his back. He was found in the forest, maybe that’s where the fae folk left him—and one day they will come to take him back. Qifrey has never indicated that he heard them—or that it bothered him, if it had, but Olruggio always hated this rumor worse than all the others. Because Qifrey is beautiful, and he shines so brightly, and even if he is of the fae folk he wouldn’t belong to them, and they couldn’t take him away again.
Lying in the bed now, Qifrey has never looked less real. Olruggio has to clench his hands tight to stop himself from clutching at him like a helpless maiden. He is well aware that he wouldn’t be enough to keep Qifrey, either.
He turns around to leave him be, but pauses at the sound of a soft groan coming from the bed. Three hours couldn’t be enough to fix days without sleep, but he is still relieved to turn around and see Qifrey moving, his blue eyes blinking up at him warily.
“What…?”
Don’t yell at him, don’t yell at him. Olruggio turns back around and steps briskly up to his bed. “How are you feeling?”
Qifrey squints at him. He looks weird without his glasses—Olruggio can’t remember the last time he has seen him without them. “Why do I feel like that question is a trap?”
Despite himself, Olruggio snorts in amusement. “Not everyone is a fan of subterfuge like you. The doctor expected you to be unconscious for at least another two hours.”
“Doctor?!” In alarm, he tries to sit up, and Olruggio has to shove him back down.
Leaning over him, he scowls. “Lie down. Or do you want to pass out again?”
Qifrey frowns up at him. “Pass out…?”
He huffs, exasperated, and moves to sit on the edge of the bed, making sure to keep one hand on Qifrey’s chest, just in case. Qifrey is sneaky and wiley—he will find a way out of the bed if Olruggio lets down his guard for even a moment. “You collapsed in the middle of a lesson with the girls. Do you not remember?” Underneath his palm, he feels Qifrey taking in a sharp breath.
“Are they alright?”
“Are they—Qifrey, you’re the one who apparently haven’t been sleeping!”
“Ah.” He feels Qifrey deflate. “That.”
“That.” He waits for Qifrey to say—anything, really, an explanation or an excuse or even a diversion, but he keeps silent, and Olruggio is forced to press further. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
Sometimes Olruggio really, really wants to throttle him. “Qifrey. You fainted in front of the kids, because you haven’t slept in over a week. The doctor said you’re lucky you didn’t start hallucinating!” When he sees Qifrey very slowly avert his gaze, he swears. “You were hallucinating!”
“Only barely.”
“Somehow, barely hallucinating doesn’t sound much better than just hallucinating.” His fingers dig into the fabric of Qifrey’s shirt. “Why haven’t you been sleeping?”
Qifrey, predictably, doesn’t answer him. “Can I at least have my glasses, if you won’t let me get up?”
“No. Answer my question.”
Qifrey sighs such a put-upon way that Olruggio almost feels offended. “You know, everyone at the Assembly already calls you my babysitter, you don’t need to provide them ammunition.”
Stung, Olruggio snaps back. “If you wouldn’t give me a reason to treat you like a child, I wouldn’t have to!”
Qifrey finally looks at him again, startled by his response. “Olruggio—”
“No, now you listen to me. You’ve taken on a new student without telling me—fine. You’ve been hiding secrets away from me—fine. But I will not let you destroy yourself for the sake of whatever quest you think you must pursue. I can’t and I won’t.”
“It’s not like—”
“Coco cried,” he cut him off again. He isn’t proud of the sick satisfaction he feels at the sight of Qifery’s flinch. “She thought it was her fault that you collapsed.”
Qifrey throws up an arm over his face. “Of course she did.” His voice is muffled, but it isn’t enough to hide the hint of guilt.
“Yeah.” He can’t be sorry at using Coco like this, not when it might be the only thing that could make Qifrey stop, for even a moment. Past experience has taught him well that he wouldn’t be.
He gives Qifrey a few minutes to gather himself in silence. His heartbeat is slow and steady underneath his palm, and Olruggio can almost trick himself into thinking he has fallen asleep again. But he knows better.
“Nightmares,” Qifrey finally says. His voice is small in a way Olruggio has seldom heard. “It’s made it… difficult to sleep.”
Olruggio pauses. “You haven’t had them since we were children.” He is cautious now. They’ve never talked about the night terrors Qifrey had as a child, the ones he never remembered upon waking up but left him shivering for hours, nearly catatonic with fear. Olruggio sat with him almost every night back then, a solid and quiet presence at his side. They never talked about it, but Olruggio cherished those moments, was proud that of anyone else, Qifrey had trusted him to confide in.
Until one day Qifrey had informed him with a cheerful smile that his teacher had arranged for him to have his own private room. So I could conduct my experiments in peace, he had claimed, but Olruggio had always suspected.
And now, finally, Qifrey confirms it. “They haven’t been this bad in a while.” Meaning that they have been happening, and Olruggio was just not privy to the information.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Qifrey lets down his arm to look up at Olruggio with such a fond look that it makes him catch his breath. “So you would stay up with me all night again?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember when you broke your arm?” Qifrey asks. It’s such an inane question that it throws Olruggio off and he stares at Qifrey for a moment, confused.
“No?”
Qifrey huffs out a laugh. “We were... maybe fifteen? It was one of the first times we were allowed on our own out on a job. You fell down a mountain.”
Now that he mentions it… “It was hardly a mountain,” Olruggio grumbles. Maybe a small hill. It had been mortifying at the time, and had to endure ribbing from other students for weeks.
“You were sleep-deprived,” Qifrey continues, ignoring him. “I could see your face right before you fell. The bags under your eyes were so big it almost looked like they were the one weighing you down and throwing you off.”
Hang on. “You got the new room just two weeks later,” Olruggio says slowly, putting it all together. “You asked for it, didn’t you?” Just as he always suspected, but somehow, it doesn’t make him feel any better.
“It was putting you in danger, Olruggio. I had to fix it.”
There is so much Olruggio could say to this—so much he could scream at a self-sacrificing idiot like Qifrey. But he decides he’s above screaming at a man lying on his sickbed. It would have to wait. “So you didn’t tell me now because you—what, didn’t want to bother me?”
“Yes,” Qifrey lies. Olruggio knows it’s a lie because Qifrey looks him straight in the eyes. He always looks shifty when he’s telling the truth.
It’s clever of him to use this story. Olruggio can almost bring himself to believe him—that the trauma of that fall, so unremarkable to Olruggio that he entirely forgot about it, had been long-lasting for Qifrey. Maybe he can believe some of it, at least. That he remembered it at all has to mean something, after all.
But Qifrey is a man made of secrets, and for any one freely given, one is kept even closer to the chest. Olruggio doesn’t like it, but has grown to accept it over the years. He has grown to accept a lot of things in order to stay by Qifrey’s side.
“Budge over,” he orders, and starts pushing Qifrey around before he even comprehends it.
“Um, Olruggio—”
“Tell me that you will stay in bed if I actually leave right now,” Olruggio says. “Come on, lie to me some more.”
Qifrey, smartly, keeps his mouth shut. Olruggio rolls his eyes at him and with one last push, shoves him right against the wall. Qifrey’s bed isn’t small, but it isn’t large either, and it’s going to be a tight fit between the two of them.
Easier to make sure he stays put, he thinks to himself, and very pointedly does not think any further. He quickly disrobes his outer layer, leaving on a pair of threadbare pants and his simple undershirt.
Qifrey is watching all of this, his eyes wide. “You don’t mean to—”
“Oh, I do,” Olruggio says, and doesn’t give himself a moment to get embarrassed before getting in bed, right next to Qifrey. It’s warm under the covers, almost too warm with the added body heat. His body takes this moment to remind him that oh, yeah, he has only slept three hours last night, and could they maybe fix that now?
As if reading his mind, Qifrey says: “I find it quite hypocritical for you to scold me about my sleeping habits, of all things.” Despite his prickly words, Olruggio can feel his body slowly relaxing against his. Qifrey always was weak to simple body contact—the tough part was getting him to accept it at all.
“Yeah, yeah, you always prided yourself on making miracles happen,” he grumbles. He hopes none of the girls see them like this. He expects he will feel much more embarrassed than Qifrey ever will.
Now it is Qifrey that shoves him back a little, but only enough to make himself space to turn around, lying on his side to stare at Olruggio. They’re so close that Olruggio could count each individual lashes, if he lets himself. It would be so reckless, to let himself. “We aren’t children any longer, you know.”
“I’m much more aware of that than you seemingly are, thank you.”
Qifrey laughs—not one of his usual boisterous showman’s laughs, but a smaller one, that Olruggio remembers from summers spent picking berries with scraped knees and fingers stained with ink. The sound gets lost in the space between them, and Olruggio hoards it away, greedy for those memories. “You have become a fine adult, Watchful Eye Olruggio,” he agrees.
Olruggio feels himself blush, of all things. “Shut up and go to sleep, idiot.”
“You can’t call me an idiot and then cuddle me to sleep.”
“We aren’t cuddling, you—” he flusters, stopping only because Qifrey is smothering his laugh into his pillow. “You were a lot easier to handle when we were children, anyway.”
“I was, wasn’t I,” Qifrey smiles, something wistful at the corner of his eyes. “It’s very generous of you to have put up with me for so long.”
Even though he can tell Qifrey is still teasing, Olruggio frowns. “Shut up, ‘generous’ my ass. I’m here because I want to be here, okay?” If he means Qifrey’s remote and secluded atelier, or his bed—that’s for Olruggio to know, and for Qifrey to never, ever ask.
“I dream of roots,” Qifrey tells him, still looking at him with that far-away look in his eyes. “They wrap around my ankles, my wrists, and they drag me—” he catches himself, perhaps only just realizing he has been saying it outloud. He is still pretty sleep-deprived, after all.
Olruggio has always known the story of how they found Qifrey, but like so many other things it was left entirely unspoken between them. With a grunt, he turns himself around as well, the opening glyph to Qifrey’s closed one. He brings his hands forward and clutches at Qifrey’s wrists. They’re so delicate his entire hand closes around them easily, and he can feel his pulse against his fingertips. “There.”
Qifrey blinks at him owlishly. “There what?”
“No roots can grab at you now,” he says. After a moment of thought, he brings his legs between Qifrey’s, making sure to intertwine them as much as possible. “Not there, either.”
Qifey’s breath catches in his chest, his eyes wide. Curiously, miraculously, a hint of red travels across his cheekbones. Olruggio thinks he can count the amount of time he has seen Qifrey blush on one hand, and he delights in it, even as he keeps a serious look on his face. He refuses to back down from this, refuses to let Qifrey return to nightmares where he’s taken, and no one stops it.
“Olruggio…”
“You stay right here,” he tells him. “And you let me hold you, just for a while.”
“Until I fall asleep?”
Forever, forever. “Until you get enough sleep that you don’t faint in front of the girls again.”
Qifrey sighs. “I have to apologize to them.”
“Later. Sleep, now.”
“As you insist,” Qifrey says, but Olruggio can tell his eyes are slowly shutting close, the heartbeat against his fingertips slowing down. “Thank you, Olruggio.”
“Idiot,” Olruggio grumbles. “Just tell me next time.”
“I will,” and he falls asleep with that one last lie curling on his tongue. Despite his own exhaustion, Olruggio stays awake for a while longer, his fingers still curled securely around Qifrey’s wrists.
And then, they sleep.