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Their house had never been awfully big or messy, but cleaning after four girls was still no small undertaking. So on a regular basis, Olruggio watched Qifrey find a reason to get his little students out of the house for the day and start deep-cleaning every nook and cranny. Today was one of those cases and Qifrey had send the girls out to get apples for a pie he was planning to make.
Usually, Olruggio just let Qifrey get on with it without interfering, too busy with deadlines or catching up on what little sleep he got. For these more extreme cases it was better to not be in the way anyway. But he had just suppressed the urge to chuck his latest project against a wall, after he had somehow worked himself in circles and come back to the exact problem he had thought he had solved a week ago. And there was not better way to procrastinate than to be busy with something else and so he joins Qifrey in his endeavors.
They start with the common areas. After washing the dishes, dusting every surface they can reach and some they mostly can’t and trying to keep the brushbug from getting hair all over the counters and tables they just cleaned, Qifrey fills a bucket with water and Olruggio starts mopping the floors, clearing away tiny muddy footprints in the entryway, where one of the girls had rushed in without taking her shoes of, and a rather suspect stain in front of the stove.
While Olruggio mops, Qifrey sticks magic circles to any furniture to move them out of Olruggio’s way. They are almost done with the common rooms, when Qifrey removes one of the magic circles from a chair and instead of gracefully landing on the floor, it crashes into the bucket full of now dirty water. Both of them scramble to pick it up and stop the dirty water from ruining their freshly cleaned floors and Olruggio knocks his knee into the corner of a table in the process. He’s getting too old for this. Qifrey manages to right the bucket and avoid the worst of it, but when he gets back up, he nearly slips on the wet floors and Olruggio reacts just in time, before Qifrey knocks the bucket over again. He wishes, he could say that he catches Qifrey in a suave and gallant way but instead only manages to awkwardly push Qifrey upright be the shoulders.
They just stand there for a moment, breathing heavily, before they look at each other and start giggling. “Let’s move on to the girls’ rooms, before we take the whole house down,” Olruggio suggests and Qifrey just starts giggling again.
Next they start on the girl’s rooms. Olruggio starts with cleaning away wax paper, that had once been packaging for those candies Tetia likes and that she had apparently tried to hide under her bed.
Qifrey is at the girls’ desks, sorting unclosed practice circles. He seems to barely need to glance at them, easily telling Coco’s clean, straight lines form Agott’s meticulous symbols and effortlessly recognizing Tetia’s little embellishments and Richeh’s tendency for experimentation in the circles. Between the pages Olruggio can see doodles, that have nothing to do with their studies, of dragons, of the flowers that bloom outside their house, of little animals that are not quite identifiable and of each other.
It reminds Olruggio of him and Qifrey at that age, trading increasingly silly drawings of the other back and forth, adding mustaches or horns or bigger ears with each version, until it eventually devolved into a scuffle.
Afterwards Qifrey beelines towards Olruggio’s room and Olly tries to stop him.
“Oh, we don’t need to do that, I can just do it later myself!” Olruggio tries and attempts to drag Qifrey back by his arm.
Qifrey just gives him an amused grin. “Oh? Is there anything I shouldn’t see? Are you keeping secrets?” Qifrey asks and when he says “secrets” he leans in and whispers it like something scandalous, clearly making fun of Olly.
‘Nothing, but the mess I’ve been trying to avoid this whole time,’ Olruggio thinks to himself, but Qifrey has already entered his room, before he can think of anything else.
Submitting to his fate, he follows Qifrey.
Olly’s room turns out to be less work than he had feared, even if he spends most of the time stuffing unfinished work into random drawers, when Qifrey has his back turned.
This does not stop Qifrey from making fun of him, when they finally move on to his room.
“See, mine isn’t half as bad as yours,” he says and his playful grin does something to Olruggio.
Instead of acting on it, Olruggio just snorts and says: “Well that’s because I confine my mess to my room and you carefully spread yours over the entire house.”
Qifrey shoves his shoulder in retaliation but can’t defend himself against the accusation.
Quickly they fall into the same rhythm they had in the other rooms. They clean away clothes and Qifrey strips the sheets of the bed and hands them to Olruggio.
„You know this is kind of nice.“ Sometimes it seemed to Olruggio like it had been ages since they had worked side by side like this.
„Since when is cleaning your idea of a good time,“ asks Qifrey teasingly. But at Olruggio’s serious look, he admits: „It is.“
Qifrey smiles but it seems more forced than Olruggio likes to see. So he does the only thing he could think of to get that look off Qifrey’s face. He lets the sheets drop to the floor and reaches down to the pile of pillows they had made when freeing the bed.
With a dull „whump“ the pillow hits Qifrey directly in the face. He looks taken aback for a second before he starts laughing and reaches for the nearest pillow to hit Olly in the shoulder with it. Olruggio tries to hide behind the bed and Qifrey takes chase, pillow in hand.
Somehow they both land on the still unmade bed, play-fighting. Qifrey keeps trying to gain the upper hand and turn them around, but he is laughing too hard to gain any real leverage.
Olruggio looks at Qifrey’s genuinely laughing face and simply can’t help himself. Still pinning Qifrey’s hands above his head he leans down and kisses Qifrey.
The laughter makes it a bit awkward for a second, but Qifrey quickly got where this was going and wrapped his arms around Olruggio after they where let go. Olruggio just lets himself savor having Qifrey in his arms for a moment.
It’s been so long that they had a moment like this. He loves the girls but sometimes it surprises him how loud it has gotten in this house. He still remembers when Qifrey brought home his first student and they had to get used to having someone else in the house. Now he barely recognizes their little place anymore without someone running through the kitchen, without a choir of giggling from the other room or tiny muddy footprints in the entryway, because someone had been in too much of a hurry to take their shoes of.
Even when Qifrey had decided to become a teacher and Olruggio had decided to follow him as his Watchful Eye, he had never imagined that it would turn out like this and for a moment there seems to be too much happiness for his tired body. He presses closer to Qifrey, like he can direct all of it to him instead. He kisses him again, deeper this time and Qifrey kisses him back and Olruggio loses himself in it for as long as he’s allowed to.
Afterwards they lay side by side on the still unmade bed, sheets still forgotten on the floor, where Olly let them fall. The rest of the house could wait for a bit.