Chapter Text
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There are hands on him, holding him down. The touch is burning against his skin, it is too much, too many people, he wants them off-
There is screaming, someone is screaming.
He fades, and the screaming goes quiet.
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His head is pounding, a hammering behind his eyes that is relentless, thudding against his skull.
There is something covering him, holding his arms in place. He writhes, tries to throw it off of him, but to no avail. This time, the screaming is his own, as he shouts and tries to break free.
He doesn’t have the strength to struggle for long, and soon the exhaustion overtakes him, and he is gone.
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He is dreaming, this time. He knows it because Olly is there, hovering over him, holding his head in place.
His vision is blurred, but he thinks Olly is crying.
He wishes it were real, that Olly was alive to weep.
He feels the tears on his cheek, and doesn’t know if they belong to him or the hallucination.
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Someone is crying. He knows it isn’t himself because it is higher, the wail of an infant.
He feels panic, but can’t place it, his mind is too fractured to grasp why. He should know this.
His thoughts are drifting like smoke, like a wildfire had torn through his mind and left him with nothing but ashes.
He waits for the smoke to clear, and lets himself drift away once more.
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The dream is back, and Olly is looming over him, pressing him down into the bed. He wails, and tries to force the thing wearing Olly’s face off of him. It isn’t Olly, it is a fake, he knows this because Olly’s dead, and this thing isn’t him.
It is holding him down, even as he thrashes and screams, wordlessly howling as he tries to fend it off.
Perhaps it is Olly’s ghost, come to take its revenge against him.
It would be deserved.
He falls still, and waits for the spectre to claim him, to enact justice upon him.
Instead, the ghost weeps.
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There are voices. He thinks he recognizes them. The words are harder to grasp, and he doesn’t really care to try and puzzle out the meaning. He lets them wash over him, pass him by without thinking too hard about that.
His head is hurting again.
Maybe he cries out, or makes some sort of noise, because the voices go quiet. Then there is a hand against his forehead, and he sighs at the feeling. It is cool, and the pain eases some. There is whispering, and air against his ear, and he is soothed back into oblivion.
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He isn’t sure how many times he drifts in and out of that blurry awareness. Time is a distant concept to him, and some flashes are brief, a handful of breaths, a spike of pain, a murmured word in his ear.
There are hands on him, too many times. He doesn’t know which ones are real and which are imagined. The crying too, is present often.
He hates it, hates the way it prickles at his skull and leaves him restless.
He wishes he knew why.
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When Qifrey wakes, it is to a pulsing headache that demands his attention, pulls him from whatever hazy sleep he’d been languishing in.
He groans as he shifts, awareness of his body flooding in, overwhelming him with sensation.
Pain is most prominent. His head, his chest, his hips. His skin is prickling, itchy all over, like he’d been dunked in hot water. And something he can’t quite identify, just a feeling of wrongness, settling somewhere between his ribcage.
But Qifrey is awake, and he is lucid. He blinks open his eye, and screws it shut immediately. It is too bright, and pain shoots back in his head. He brings a hand up to press it into the socket, and finds there are bandages wrapped around his head, completely covering his right eye.
Slowly, he opened his eye again, wincing as he tried to acclimate to the light. The room was a hazy blur of colors and shapes, but Qifrey was somewhat certain he was in the medical spire. He exhaled sharply as he pushed himself into a sitting position, his arms trembling violently with the effort.
He was shirtless, no longer wearing the plain dressing gown he remembered. There was a light blanket pooling around his waist, and he was left in only a light skirt he doesn’t remember owning.
The room was empty. He was alone.
Qifrey tried to sort through his fractured memories, bits and pieces of his feverish perception coming back to him.
He didn’t cry when the memory of Olly returned. He had known the moment he had woken up, hadn’t needed to remember because how could he ever forget?
Olruggio was dead, and it was Qifrey’s fault. It was etched into his skull, a truth not even a memory wipe would ever erase.
Glancing around, he noticed the shape of a cradle by the bed, and leaned over, but it was out of reach. Far out of the way of flailing, thrashing limbs.
“You better not be thinkin’ about leavin’ that damn bed.” Qifrey’s head snapped around, at the too-familiar voice and the blurry silhouette in the doorway.
Perhaps he is less coherent than he thought, he must still be hallucinating.
“The twins are fine, I’ll bring them over, but you’re not leavin’ that bed for love or money.” His rough accent, the teasing tone, it was all too much for Qifrey.
“Olly?” His voice broke, and he began to sob. He slumped over, but there were arms around him, holding him up and guiding him to lean into someone’s embrace. He brought his own shaky arms around him, clutching at the back of his shirt, not daring for a second to believe it. If he did, if he let himself hope, only for reality to come crashing back in, Qifrey doesn’t think he’d survive it a second time. “Is this real?” He asked, because even if it killed him he couldn’t bear not knowing.
“Of course it is,” Olly’s voice said, like it was obvious, like the last time Qifrey had held him like this he hadn’t been bleeding out, like Qifrey hadn’t felt his heartbeat stop, hadn’t seen the light drain from his eyes-
“Qifrey, hey, cmon, that’s it, just breathe.” There was a hand rubbing his back, and he heaved a gasping breath, but it caught and sent him into a coughing fit.
Eventually he managed to calm down, and managed to get his lungs working somewhat reasonably. Through it all, Olly is there. Once Qifrey’s tears had slowed, he offered him his glasses, and it brought the undeniable image into focus. Sitting on the bed was Olruggio, alive and whole and everything he couldn’t be because he had died in Qifrey’s arms.
“You alright?” It’s a ridiculous question, and Qifrey half thinks he might burst into hysterics.
“Are you really asking me that right now?” Olly laughs, and Qifrey barely dares to believe it is real. “No. I’m not alright.” His voice felt flat, betraying the tightness in his throat.
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t be,” Olly murmured, his hand still resting against Qifrey’s back. “You should probably lay back down, you need to rest.”
“Have you ever known me to rest when I should?” It is an easy quip, a weak attempt to return to the usual dynamic between the pair. Qifrey is fumbling, and he doesn’t know how to regain his bearings as his poor mind struggles to piece together reality.
“You can rest now.” Olly put his other hand on Qifrey’s shoulder, to gently push him to lay down, but Qifrey grabbed it, burying his hand in the fabric of Olly’s loose sleeve. “I mean it Qifrey, you can relax. You’re safe now, you don’t need to worry anymore.” There is something deeper in his words, and Qifrey’s eye widens slightly as he wonders. Could he mean?
No, no. He’s just trying to reassure him. It’s foolish to let himself hope for more.
Still, he looks inward, searches for the feeling of roots under his skin, leaves clogging his lungs, branches squeezing his ribs-
Olly pulls him into a hug, and he feels nothing.
Nothing.
“Olly-” he gasps out, clutching the front of Olly’s shirt, his heartrate spiking as he waits, waits for pain and creaking, for the crackling of wood that never comes. “Is it?”
“It’s gone.” Olly confirms, and Qifrey has a thousand questions suddenly bursting in his mind. “Almost took you with it, but you pulled through.”
He doesn’t know whether he is going to cry or shake Olly, demanding answers from him. How is it possible? How did Olruggio know? What did this mean for them?
It suddenly occurs to Qifrey that he had never once, not in almost a decade, let himself think about what he would do if he were ever free of the silverwood. Any daydreams or wistful thinking only let it take root, even the smallest comforts were too much for Qifrey to risk. He has never really believed he’d be free of it without his own death.
And all of a sudden, he is being asked to live that future, not simply imagine it, but to embrace it.
“How?” He isn’t sure what he is asking, but Olly hums, and answers anyway.
“It’s complicated, and we weren’t sure it would work anyway. We’ve all been waitin’ to see if you’d wake up.” His tone dipped, a hint of melancholy making itself known before Olly shook his head, continuing, “But I can show you all that later. How are you feelin’? Any pain?”
“A bit,” he admits, though he doesn’t think he could care less at the moment. “You’re sure? It’s all gone?”
“Every last bit. We made sure there was nothin’ left of it.” The confirmation hits him, and Qifrey all but collapses, slumping forward and leans entirely on Olly. “Qifrey?”
“I never thought-” He doesn’t know what to say, what he was going to confess in that breath. There was so much to say, a million little things he’d hidden over the years, so many secrets that had piled up he couldn’t fathom where to begin. “Oh Olly.”
His voice breaks, but he does not cry again, though it is a close thing. He can say nothing else, simply burying his face in Olly’s chest and letting himself be held.
Exhausted, it is not long before he slips into sleep, finally able to rest without fear.
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The next time he is awake, Olly is still there, and he finally gives Qifrey a brief, confusing explanation of the scheme they’d made to rid him of his lifelong affliction.
It had been Beldaruit’s plan, and he’d been the one to bring it to Olruggio, to share the secret Qifrey could never tell. Apparently though, it had been Agott that had given him the idea. She had been showing off the spell she’d made, and had confessed to the Wise how she loved the sigils of animals, and it had occurred to him that such sigils not only gave a spell shape, but also let them target specific things.
He wasn’t sure that would be enough, and so they needed to weaken the seed as much as possible. That part had been Sinocia, she’d made a tincture from thornapple and mugwort which when ingested, would induce nightmarish hallucinations. It left Qifrey wondering how much of what he remembered was real, or a figment of his torment.
Olly was the final piece, using the spell from Beldaruit to systematically target and burn the Silverwood out of him, like a controlled wildfire inside of Qifrey to eradicate the parasite. He could tell it was simplified, and part of him noted down that he would need to ask to see the seals they’d used later, but for now it would do.
What did it matter how, as long as he was free? So much he had never dared to let himself dream about was suddenly possible.
What would happen now?
“I have so much to tell you,” he murmured, leaning his head on Olly’s shoulder. They were sitting side by side on the bed, Qifrey feeding Willa as best he could. It seemed his supply was finally starting to come in, and his daughter ate greedily. It was an odd sensation, a sort of tugging and prickling. Olly was holding Mulo, trying to coax the baby into opening his eyes. He was being stubborn about it, even though Willa would sometimes open hers for minutes at a time. At Qifrey’s comment, he glanced over, then sighed heavily.
“Aye, suppose you do. You don’t need to right now, we’ve got all the time in the world, now.”
“I know,” he disagreed, “but I need to. I need you to know.” A lump grew in his throat, but Qifrey pressed on. “I need you to understand, before you decide if you ought to forgive me or not.”
A small nod from Olly was all he needed. Qifrey laid it all out before them, confessing the pact they’d made, the truth behind their tassels, the countless times he’d had to steal Olruggio’s memories, all of it. Finally, Olly would get the truth he’d been owed for so many years. He kept back nothing, brought all his sins to the light, let Olly see the truth of Qifrey’s crimes against him.
“Should’ve known it was my idea,” was the first thing he said once Qifrey was finished. “Though I wish I’d have found somethin’ that didn’t require you sacrificin’ yourself like that.”
“Me? If anyone was sacrificing themself, it was you!” He couldn’t help but protest, wondering how Olly came to that conclusion.
“You’ve denied yourself any comfort, any real peace for most of your life, all because I was too selfish to let you go. What are a few memories from me compared to a lifetime holding everyone at a distance?” Olly looked like he wanted to say more, but Mulo began to fuss, so instead they traded babies so their son could be fed. They’d still need bottles in a bit, but Qifrey would feed them first, as much as he could. “You don’t have to do that anymore. I’m sorry it took me this long to come up with somethin’ better.”
“Are you really apologizing?” He smiled ruefully, looking down at the baby nursing in his arms. “Olruggio, you have saved me again and again, more than you know, and now? I can hardly comprehend how great a gift you’ve given me.” Warmth bloomed in his chest, and for the first time, Qifrey let himself dream, and believe it could come true.
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