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Olruggio knew, long before it all came crashing down, that he’d made a terrible decision. That the consequences would catch up to him, and there’d be no avoiding a series of potentially world-ending conversations.
He just hadn’t expected it to happen quite so spectacularly.
The initial idea, prompted by a suggestion from an older noblewoman who’d commissioned him for something completely different, wasn’t bad at all. He’d been working on a set of singing stones, and the lady had made an offhanded comment about the potential of magic that could make an object resonate. She’d meant it as a joke, but where she saw humor, Olruggio saw potential—and told her as much.
And just like that, he’d had a commission. And a problem.
-
Dinner has been served, the dishes subsequently scoured, and now the girls are free to spend their evening as they wish. For Agott, that means curling up on the couch with her nose buried intently in a text that should be far beyond a twelve-year-old’s reading level. For the rest, that means constructing an elaborate brushbug obstacle course out of everything in the living room that’s not bolted down.
Qifrey’s disappeared into his rooms, leaving Olruggio to make sure the kids don’t get too out of hand. Already the furniture-stacking is getting haphazard, but Olruggio reasons that it’s a learning experience. They’re discovering engineering principles through trial and error.
Which doesn’t prevent him from straightening like he’s the apprentice getting caught when Qifrey sticks his head in. “Oh!” Qifrey exclaims, surveying the progress that’s been made. “That’s very creative.”
“It’s not done yet!” Coco blurts, waving her hands as she lunges in front of their masterpiece and nearly knocking it over in the process.
“Well, I can’t wait to see the finished product,” Qifrey replies. “Olruggio,” he adds, “could I borrow you for a moment?”
“Can’t it wait?” Now he’s really playing the difficult apprentice, but he wants to see if Tetia can figure out the balancing act she’s currently attempting with the mixing bowls.
“Olly,” Qifrey says. His voice is strained, and it makes Olruggio finally look at him properly. He’s leaning out from the door frame, and there’s a bit of color in his cheeks that gives Olruggio pause. If he didn’t know better, he’d say Qifrey looks flustered—an impression that’s not helped by him stammering, “There’s… I’m having a problem.”
“A magic problem?” Agott pipes up from the couch, suddenly focused like a hound catching a scent.
“No, not a magic problem,” Qifrey says with a little titter. “Nothing you girls need to worry yourselves over. I just have some boring adult stuff to discuss with Master Olly.”
Agott’s eyes narrow cannily.
“Adult stuff?” Coco muses.
“Taxes,” Richeh announces with a sage nod.
“Taxes,” Olruggio repeats, already halfway across the room, because he’s just realized exactly what Qifrey’s getting at. “Agott, you’re in charge,” he calls over his shoulder as he grabs Qifrey by the sleeve and drags him down the hall.
-
The problem with crafting amusements for idle noblewomen, Olruggio quickly realized when he got his first commission, is that he lacks the capacity to enjoy them in the same way. Of course he understands the principle of the thing—and what young witch with the urge and the curiosity hasn’t toyed with those same principles during those fraught coming-of-age years? But Olruggio’s a professional, not a horny teenager. He’s got standards for his work. Standards that had him at his wits end, sketching vaguely in a notebook at the dining table in the deepest part of the night, when Qifrey walked past and paused.
“That won’t be very comfortable,” he’d said.
Olruggio should have know what was good for him. Should have slammed the door shut the second it opened. Should have foreseen just how dangerous it would be to involve Qifrey in this particular branch of product development.
Instead, he’d cut him in.
He told himself it was sensible. Rational, even. Qifrey could advise him on the particulars of the designs he’d put together, could catch him before he made any drastic mistakes. And it was sensible and rational, too, for Qifrey to suggest that he try the prototype once Olruggio had crafted it, reporting back with a note whose approving tone made Olruggio want to stare at a wall for an hour or so.
Olruggio’s client had loved her commission—so much so that she told all of her friends. The resulting influx of orders kept Olruggio plenty busy, but a dangerous, idle part of his mind had begun to wonder if he couldn’t improve on his initial design. He’d suggested as much to Qifrey, and with his housemate’s approval, had ventured into more complicated territory. These designs were far more audacious than the simple devices he’d begun to distribute among his clientele, many of them spurred by asides Qifrey had made in his feedback. Almost as if—though this wasn’t sensible or rational in the slightest—Olruggio wasn’t crafting something he intended to sell to the public.
Almost as if he was making something custom-fit to his best friend.
-
“You’re having a problem?” Olruggio asks once he’s sure they’re out of earshot.
Qifrey’s blush has gotten worse. He’s walking stiffly, with none of his usual fluid grace. “It’s… Well, the thing is…” He takes a deep breath, steeling himself all at once. “It’s stuck.”
“Stuck,” Olruggio repeats like the word hasn’t just clobbered him over the head.
“Stuck and stuck… on,” Qifrey continues. “So I’ll just need a look at the schematics. To be sure I can safely disengage—oh.”
Olruggio doesn’t trip over his own feet, but it’s a near thing. The worse mistake is the sideways glance he sneaks, which finds Qifrey with his eye squeezed shut and his lower lip pulled taut between his teeth. “Schematics,” Olruggio says with an outright heroic lack of hysteria. “Of course. I have them in my room.”
They’re halfway down the hall to Olruggio’s door when Qifrey lists sideways, his steps slowing as he catches himself against the wall. He bows his head low, his breath coming in shuddering pants until it’s abruptly choked away by a high whine Qifrey only barely contains behind a palm jammed over his mouth.
He just—
He—
Olruggio turns, the sway of his garments betraying that he’s already seen too much. It’s one thing to craft a device, to… perhaps imagine it being put to use, all within the safety of his own quarters.
It’s another thing entirely to see Qifrey come. To know that in some indirect way, he did this to him.
“Sorry,” Qifrey offers, chasing it with a nervous laugh as he straightens and fusses with his outer garment.
“Nothing to worry about,” Olruggio stammers.
“Schematics?”
“Schematics.”
Olruggio doesn’t wait up, blowing through the door to his room like a burst dam. “The notes should be somewhere down here,” he calls over his shoulder as Qifrey minces after him. “Go, uh, get comfortable.” Olruggio gestures up to the second level where his workspace resides. Whatever Qifrey intends to do with the schematics, it’s clear it’s going to happen here.
Which means there are precautions that need to be taken. The “Those Who Knock Will Be Cursed” sign has already proven completely ineffective when it comes to the apprentices, so Olruggio shuts the door firmly, bolts it, and sketches a quick glyph over the wood that renders it completely immobile. After a moment of quiet crisis, he adds a second glyph that will cancel out any noise that attempts to trespass the door.
A precaution, he tells himself. Certainly not something he’s devoted thought to already, under much less dire circumstances.
And his thought is proven justified not a moment later by a muffled groan that echoes against the stones of his quarters. It’s followed by a faint round of gasping, then a plaintive, “Olly.”
“One moment,” Olruggio replies. He’s lightheaded. Sword to his neck, he couldn’t possibly recall which of the folios his notes for the device are tucked away in. He knows where to start, at least: with the ones disguised by illusion magic that blends their shelf into the stone wall. Olruggio scores through the glyph, the rock and mortar giving way to the scattered stacks of notebooks and blueprints that contain every design he wouldn’t want a curious apprentice chancing across.
He shuffles feverishly through them, his palms sticking to the pages. Just last week he’d stashed these blueprints away after a discreet handoff of his latest prototype. They should be right—
“Found them!” he shouts, yanking the papers off the shelf. No time for the stairs—Olruggio snaps his shoes together and blasts up to the workspace’s second level.
The sight that greets him at apogee nearly sends him crashing headfirst back into the stone floor below.
Qifrey’s followed orders. He's sprawled on his back in the pile of pillows that litter the floor of Olruggio’s workspace, one cylindrical cushion clutched to his side, his other arm folded over his forehead. His mouth hangs open, a flush of pink tongue almost pale against the heat in his cheeks. The bindings that hold his collar together have been torn free, mirroring the splay of his legs in miniature.
His legs. His outer garment, twisted around his ankles. A blanket pulled over his lap for modesty, but somehow the suggestion of form beneath it is even worse.
Olruggio lands so hard his jaw clacks shut. So hard he’s forced to buckle one knee and spared a bruise by one of his cushions. Any embarrassment he might have felt at the blunder barely has room to take root, and Qifrey certainly didn’t notice. “Here,” he grunts, laying the wad of notes on Qifrey’s lap.
Qifrey ducks from the shelter of his elbow and tries to push himself into a seat. Something about the movement has unintended consequences, a faint mm slipping out of him as his eye goes wide. “Thank you,” he says faintly. “I can probably… You don't have to…”
Olruggio clears his throat. “I can give you your privacy, but I should stay in earshot, right?”
Qifrey blanches. “Maybe… Maybe that’s for the best,” he says after a too-long moment where Olruggio realizes he needs to get out of the range where he can hear the faint strains of exactly what’s going on underneath that blanket.
“Help yourself to anything on the workbench,” Olruggio says with a shaky gesture. “I'll leave you to it.”
He tries not to act like he’s bolting. He also tries not to act like he’s taking his time. The net result makes him look like he’s forgotten how to walk entirely, but again—Qifrey’s not paying attention. Still, he aims not to trip down the stairs.
Which isn’t to say he makes it all the way down them. Once he’s safely belowdecks, Olruggio slumps against the wall. He scrubs both hands through his hair as if he can somehow puppet himself back into sanity.
A bitten-off whimper from above makes that all but impossible.
Olruggio knows which problem he needs to focus on. Something’s gone catastrophically wrong with the device, and it’s his responsibility to make sure it never happens again. Right now he can only speculate, but that requires him to think about the mechanics of what he's built and how it could get stuck in Qifrey's body and that means thinking about exactly what he intended when he designed the instrument of his best friend's immediate torment.
At first, it had been about refining a product. About making sure the people who commissioned him were getting his best possible work. He could point to the orders that kept coming in as word of his miraculous amusements spread among the nobility, evidence of the pressure on his shoulders. But if he was being honest, the first device he’d sold was all they were asking for. Going above and beyond—building this new, far more complicated design—had been about Qifrey.
About wanting to please him.
A muffled thump from upstairs. Olruggio fights down the urge to ask if everything’s okay. It plainly isn’t, but he’s not taking one step closer unless Qifrey asks.
Was this really easier than telling him? Olruggio thinks, screwing his eyes shut as he grinds his head back into the stone. Maybe even showing him? Even as he asks the questions, he knows the answers will never come. All these years, he’s wondered why they kept doing this dance. Why they’ve done everything but admit something unshakeable has grown between them. Some days he suspected it was their responsibilities to the girls, others he got a creeping feeling that something else entirely was stalling Qifrey’s hand. When he’d hinted he was interested in testing Olruggio’s amusements, Olruggio had wondered if this was him testing the waters. He’d tried not to disappoint.
And instead, it’s all blown up spectacularly in his face. The best he can hope for now is that Qifrey safely disengages the device, allows him to destroy it, and they never speak of this again.
“Olruggio…”
A shudder runs up his spine even as an undeniable heat flexes at the core of him. He’s hearing things. Or Qifrey’s let something slip that he didn’t mean to. He can’t be—
“Olly, please. I need your—hrk”
He climbs dutifully back up the stairs like a man going to the gallows, his focus pinned on his feet as if daring them to betray him. There’ll be no going back after this—only living with the shame of it. The shame of what he’s done to Qifrey. The shame of what it’s done to him, the unrestrained heat now flushing through his body just from imagining what he’s about to see.
He looks.
And shame leaves him entirely. There’s no room for self-consciousness—for any sense of self at all—at the sight of Qifrey teary-eyed, legs splayed, hunched over himself with a diagram balanced on one thigh and a long, thin file sawing haphazardly at the blunt end of the device sticking out out of his hole.
Olruggio rushes to his side, dropping to his knees. “Hang on, hang on,” he stammers. “There’s an easier way. If you don’t mind me touching—”
“Please,” Qifrey gasps.
He can process all of this later. Olruggio pulls the file gently out of Qifrey’s hand. As if it was the last thing keeping him upright, Qifrey slumps back over the pillows, both palms now flattened over his face as his chest heaves.
In the meantime, Olruggio assesses the damage with a clinician’s eye as he binds back his sleeves. The device was supposed to be simple to use, which he’s now realizing is not a synonym for foolproof. The principle had been to design something that could be completely hands-free—that would maintain its position once activated and do all the work for you. To that end, its base has a bulbous knob that can be turned in one direction to activate the glyphs within the device and turned back to deactivate them.
It’s turned back. But the device is still vibrating. Still oscillating, flexing up and down as it fucks into Qifrey. And, worst of all, still holding itself in place, making it impossible to dislodge until the magic is disengaged.
Something must have completed the circle independent of the knob’s mechanism, making it irrelevant. Which makes the next logical step prying the knob free so he can interrupt it manually. Qifrey clearly had enough presence of mind to put that together, looking at the schematics, but not enough to figure out it could be done in a far easier manner than sawing through it. Now he’s created a raw, ragged edge in the device’s material that teases dangerously close to his flesh with every thrust.
Shifting over to kneel between Qifrey’s legs, Olruggio considers his options. Qifrey’s left him with very few. “I think I have to—” he starts.
“Do it,” Qifrey orders roughly. “Do it, do anything you need—oh, Olly—” His back arches, heels digging into the floor.
What Olruggio needs is for him to hold still. He settles one unsteady hand on Qifrey’s hip, more to let him know he’s there than anything else. His skin is fever-warm, Olruggio’s thumb catching a hummingbird flutter that rushes through his abdominal muscles. His breath hitches, and when Qifrey tries to writhe, Olruggio leans gently over him, the jut of Qifrey’s hipbone fitting into the cradle of his palm as he presses down.
Qifrey groans, but Olruggio won’t give him an inch. Keeping him pinned, he takes hold of the file and jams it into the seam of the knob. The pressure shifts the device’s trajectory, and Qifrey’s noise hits a high note. “Sorry, I’m so sorry,” Olruggio pants as he levers into the gap. “Just let me—”
The knob pops free. Olruggio releases Qifrey immediately, leaning back on his haunches as he tries and fails to find anything to look at that isn’t the utter mess he’s made of his best friend. “It’s still…” Qifrey whimpers, “...still going.”
“I just got the knob out of the way,” Olruggio confirms. “That should have interrupted the glyphs, but they’re active, which means the ink’s been etched where it shouldn’t be. There’s one in particular—if I can scratch that one out—”
“Olruggio,” Qifrey warns.
He gets the message—and a shiver, a casualty of Qifrey’s tone. “Help me out here,” he says, pulling over a thick, sturdy cushion and holding it out to Qifrey. As Qifrey gets it situated under his hips, Olruggio grabs a quire off his workbench and completes one of the glyphs, an orb of light blooming overhead.
Editing an active glyph is fraught work—work he’ll need to be precise about. One wrong move and he could change a keystone instead, mutating the device’s function instead of interrupting it. That kind of mistake could make this so much worse.
And it’s the kind of mistake that feels inevitable, staring down the barrel of Qifrey’s splayed legs. Olruggio can tell he’s trying his best to keep still, but a hand on the hip isn’t going to be enough to give him the precision he needs. “I’m going to grab it,” he says—partly as a warning for Qifrey and partly so he can’t back out of what he’s about to do.
Qifrey nods once, sharply.
Olruggio slips his fingers around the device’s shaft. It’s slick, difficult to grasp, and he’s forced to dip lower than he’d anticipated, low enough that his fingers end up pressed against Qifrey’s flesh, low enough that he’s practically pushing into him with every attempt the device makes to follow through on its next thrust. Qifrey’s helplessly fucked out, loose and wet enough that he could, and Olruggio tries to let that stay a mercy—confirmation that he’s not hurting him—rather than anything else.
Tries , the operative word.
The groove Qifrey carved in his rabid attempt to saw through the device comes in handy after all—Olruggio’s able to push his thumb into it to firm up his grip, and it’s only then he feels in control enough to lean in close, the light moving with him as he lines one eye up with the hollowed-out core of the shaft that conceals the glyphs.
Focus , he begs himself.
Qifrey whimpers. Clenches. Olruggio can practically taste him in the air.
Focus . He lines up the file. Eases it into the trembling entrance, not daring to touch it to the inner walls of the device until he’s sure of his placement. One ring—that’s all he has to break to end this.
Beneath him, Qifrey goes tenser and tenser. “Olly,” he chokes.
Olruggio tightens his grip. Qifrey twitches against him.
With one decisive move, he grinds the file down.
Qifrey shouts. For a terrifying moment, Olruggio fears he’s missed—an impression at odds with the device, dead in his hand, finally slipping free from Qifrey’s body in a sudden gush. “Olly, oh, oh, thank you thankyouthankyouthankyou,” Qifrey babbles as he shudders, his legs still splayed, some of it plainly exhaustion, and some of it—
Olruggio wasn’t aware his face could get any redder, but the flush that fills his cheeks now is downright scalding. One wrong move, one gust of wind in the wrong direction and he’s in danger. “Sorry,” he blurts, tossing the device in the vague direction of his workbench. “Oh stars above, I’m so, so sorry, Qifrey.” He rears back, but a hand closes around his wrist before he can bolt.
“Thank you,” Qifrey repeats hoarsely. “Olruggio—”
“This is all my fault—”
“Olruggio—”
“I’ll make it up to you, let’s just get you cleaned up, and—”
“Olly.” The hand around his wrist goes dizzyingly tight. He finally dares to meet Qifrey’s gaze. Horrifyingly, there are tears leaking from the corner of his eye. “I’m okay,” Qifrey says gently once his breathing’s evened out. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”
“It was my device—”
“Which I broke—”
“It was a bad design—stop laughing.”
But Qifrey’s let go, scrubbing his hands over his cheeks instead as he tries to tamp down on a hysterical giggle. “Sorry,” he hiccups. “It’s just…”
“...a little ridiculous,” Olruggio finishes. “I mean, how did you even manage to wear the glyph into…”
Qifrey’s gaze darts sheepishly askance.
Ah. Well.
“Wait here,” Olruggio says, offering him the blanket he discarded. “Take the bed. Let me get a bath going and make sure the girls haven’t gotten too out of hand.”
Qifrey nods. Olruggio can see the exhaustion starting to win in the droop of his eyelid and the way his head has started to look unsteady on his neck. He swaddles the blanket around himself, kicks free of the clothes he stripped off, and lets Olruggio help him to his feet and over to the suspended, cushion-strewn hammock, where he settles in one graceless slump.
Throwing himself into his self-appointed tasks is a relief. By the time he’s got the basin filling and the heating stones activated, Olruggio’s fairly sure his heart rate’s settled. He sticks his head in the living room just long enough to confirm that Agott’s held down the fort with aplomb—though it’s going to take hours, in all likelihood, to deconstruct the other girls’ masterpiece and get the furniture back in order. He also has quite a laundry day ahead of him, he thinks as he slips back through the door to his quarters.
And quite a conversation ahead, but not tonight. Tonight he checks the water temperature, then climbs back up to the loft, where he’s surprised to find Qifrey drowsy but awake, still swaddled in his blankets. “Bath’s ready,” Olruggio says softly.
“Mm,” Qifrey hums. “You know, I’ve been thinking.”
“That so?” Olruggio replies, all of his regained composure threatening to evaporate in an instant.
“I have some suggestions for improvements. On the next iteration of the device.”
“That so?” he repeats, biting back, What do you mean “next iteration?”
“Well, as tonight’s little misadventure has proven, relying on a physical switch to engage and disengage the glyphs is risky. Perhaps the glyphs could be activated… remotely.”
“A second device to activate the first by using magic to direct the ink for the glyphs inside. Handheld, then? So that the point of failure isn’t…”
“Between my legs, yes,” Qifrey says flatly, and Olruggio barks a short laugh. “And,” he adds after a moment, “so that perhaps… a partner could…”
Oh. Oh.
“Just a thought,” Qifrey adds with a downright cheeky smile as he clambers out of the hammock, still wrapped in the blanket, and makes his way over to the stairs.
Olruggio watches him go. He scans the chaos of his workspace—the soon-to-be-laundered pillows, the scattered schematics, the culprit lying guiltily where he’s tossed it under his workbench—then tips his head back to the stones overhead and sighs, “Sensible and rational.”