Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Simon Snow is having a bad day.

It started like this:

He wakes to warm, yellow daylight.

Simon pushes himself onto his elbows and blinks heavily, coming back to himself in loose, scattered pieces. His night was long and full of bones and feathers and blood, broken wings, a lungful of sand and an old rubber ball. Laughter like a squealing sow. He rubs the sleep from his eyes and looks over at Baz’s empty bed, the sheets pulled flat and tucked tightly beneath the edges of the mattress.

“Fuck,” Simon groans, pressing a palm to his forehead.

He overslept.

Kicking away his duvet, he swings his legs around and tries to ground himself with the chill of the floor. It’s not as cold as he would have liked, Baz closed the window last night sometime after Simon fell asleep. He’s been doing a lot of shit like that again lately. Small, petty things Simon hadn’t noticed he’d stopped doing until suddenly they were squabbling over curtains and tying each other’s bloody shoelaces together again like fourth years.

Simon scrunches his curls, shakes them out. He’s drenched in sweat.

Breakfast will be over by the time he’s out of the shower, but with the memory of his nightmare still flickering in the dark behind his eyes, the staleness of his skin feels too viscous and yellow for him to ignore. He blinks, and his forearms are red. His mouth is dry. The spray of the water is a howl in his ears.

He arrives fifteen minutes late to Greek.

“Let’s not make this a habit, Mr Snow,” the Minotaur says, followed by one of those gross, moist bovine snorts. “Take your seat.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Simon ducks his head and turns down the aisle, kneading at his shoulder. He clipped the doorframe on his way in. Hard. It sent a bolt of tingles shooting up and down his arm, to the very tips of his fingers, and he can still sort of feel it as he opens and closes his hand, trying to stretch the ache out of it.

He cuts around the front of someone’s desk. An ankle catches him on the shin.

His entire Greek class is having a fucking fit before he’s even hit the floor. Simon lands on his stomach and blows the wind from his lungs, and his knapsack spills open beside him, sending textbooks and papers flying out. A few decent people push back their chairs and start picking things up for him. He thinks the Minotaur might be scolding him again, but Simon isn’t paying attention. He rolls onto his back and props himself onto his forearms.

Baz smirks at him with the left side of his mouth.

This is exactly the type of petty shit Simon’s talking about. And he isn’t an idiot: he knows Baz is trying to get him worked up. He loves playing his own stupid game of poke the bear with Simon’s magic, with his temper. That’s just how they are. It’s the way they’ve always been. 

But Siegfried and fucking Roy, is this really what they’re back to? When was the last time Baz tripped him?

They used to be in the habit of kicking the shit out of each other a few times a year when they were younger—it never solved anything, but their animosity was like the rising pressure before a storm, a physical thing that thrummed between them, and back then, a good swing from both sides always helped them decompress. Blow off a bit of steam and simmer down. At least for a little while.

Their fights haven’t actually come to blows in years though.

As tension between the Mage and the Old Families continued to climb and the war turned from something abstract to something real and looming, they reached something of a silent agreement to save their energy for when it would really count. Simon isn’t sure what changed.

A small brown hand falls in front of his face. He looks up at Penelope, standing there with his bag hanging over her shoulder.

“Ignore him,” she says.

He doesn’t know how. Baz lives under Simon’s skin, and he’s been there for so long that Simon doesn’t know how to draw him back out anymore, wouldn’t even know where to start.

But he takes Penelope’s hand. And she doesn’t let go, even once she’s pulled him to his feet.

Penelope spells him a copy of her notes and clips them into his duotang after class.

“I missed you at breakfast,” she says. “I had to sit alone and pretend I still had homework to do.”

He tugs the straps on his knapsack. “What about Agatha?”

“Agatha isn’t speaking to me.”

Simon frowns. “Still?”

“Still.” Penny rolls her eyes. “You know, this isn’t how I thought it would be when you finally broke up. I didn’t think we’d all stop hanging out and being friends.”

“I don’t think we’ve stopped being friends,” he says. He reaches ahead and pulls the door open for her, and they step outside into the courtyard. Their Elocution classroom is in the Weeping Tower, but Madam Bellamy likes to teach her lessons outside when the weather is all right enough for it. A clear blue sky domes over Watford today. “She’s just being a girl.”

“Being a girl.”

Simon shakes his head. “You know what I mean.”

Penelope stares at him wryly for a moment, then gives a deep, long-suffering sigh and nudges her glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist. “Honestly, Simon.” Her shoes click across the drawbridge. A merwolf stirs in the water underneath, surfacing its snout enough for Simon to hear it chuff and snarl. “Whatever her problem is, I wish she’d leave me out of it. I only have two friends!”

“You don’t like having friends.”

“Well, I don’t like losing friends, either.”

“Agatha’s still your friend, Penny.”

Madam Bellamy is by the ancient yew trees. Simon can’t hear what she’s saying to the small cluster of students that have already arrived and spread their textbooks out on the Lawn, but her fine hair is frazzled and she’s swinging a metre stick around like a wand and her smile sinks deeply into her round cheeks. Penelope pauses, so Simon stops walking, too, and turns to her with his eyebrows raised.

She has the tip of her tongue squished between her lips.

“No secrets?” she asks.

“No secrets.”

“Do you want to get back together with her?”

Simon tugs the straps on his knapsack again. “You know I don’t,” he says, and it’s true. Agatha broke up with him almost three months ago, in September, less than a week after they started school. She found Simon by the pitch, behind the football stands. He had his sword out and was working on his form. (Baz kicked him out of their room.) (Though to be fair, he did knock over a lamp.)

“Simon,” she said. “I need to talk to you about something.”

The whole thing was a bit drab. Agatha cried, even though Simon was the one being broken up with, and he tried not to raise his voice, but they were both yelling at each other by the end of it because, “You can’t leave me for him, Ags. He’s a monster!”

“We’re all monsters!”

Being broken up—actually broken up—sucked. It was like the world had shifted an inch to the left, nothing was all too different, but he couldn’t stop banging his knees on things like the empty chair at their table in the dining hall, or the books he wasn’t carrying around for her anymore, or the class he didn’t have to pick her up from before afternoon tea. But he wasn’t sad. Or, well. He was sad, but only because it sucked. It really sucked. She was his friend. Before she was any of the other stuff.

And he doesn’t miss being with her. But he misses her.

Penny nods, once. “Good,” she says, then looks up at him. He can’t see her eyes through the light reflecting off her glasses. “You should tell her that.”

He finds her during the half-hour break between Elocution and Politickal Science.

Agatha is in the courtyard sitting on the edge of the fountain. Her hair is woven today, plaited into a cornsilk braid and pulled forward over a delicate shoulder, fastened at the end with a purple hair elastic. She looks beautiful of course—and tired. Her cheeks are pale. But there are flyaways blowing around her face and they’re glowing white in the November sunlight, and the very tip of her nose is wind-bitten and blushed pink.

“Hey,” Simon says. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Agatha looks up from her Dark & Magickal Creatures textbook.

“What do you want Simon?” she asks, her voice clipped. Bland, and surprisingly cold. Her eyes drop to his hands and she adds, “And why are you blue?”

He cringes. “Oh, uh. My pen exploded.”

Simon is the one who made it explode, but he doesn’t want to tell her that part. Agatha always gives him a bit of a shitty look whenever his magic mucks something up like this. Not on purpose—or, at least. He doesn’t think she does it on purpose. She’s just not very good at hiding what she’s thinking, so whenever Simon’s magic does something it isn’t supposed to her face always goes, ‘because he’s a Normal.’

“Just a dumb accident,” he says, shrugging off the memory of Baz and his sharp, cackling laughter. The way he tipped back onto the Lawn with his knees folded in the air while Simon stood there dripping ink from his fist. His lips curved and drawn and tight across his teeth. Pale, chapped. Slightly pink.

Simon slips his hands into his pockets. “It’s not important. Are you busy?”

“Um,” Agatha says.

“I mean—well, can we talk?”

She looks away from him. Her fingertips sweep across her forehead like she’s trying to brush her bangs away from her face, even though her bangs are clipped neatly into her braid with one of those little plastic butterfly things and he doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen Agatha with hair in her face before. Maybe it’s just a gesture. Her knee is bouncing, clicking the heel of her shoe against the cobblestone.

“I don’t know, Simon,” she says eventually, “I really have to study.”

“Please?”

Her small, pretty chin rumples.

Agatha is different. She still looks like herself—like she’s the sparkles in a glass of champagne, all willowy and blonde, crisply golden. A smooth, round face. Brown eyes. But it’s like he’s seeing her for the first time after the summer holidays again. There are all these weeks between them now, months of change, and he can see each one pressed into the narrow slopes of her silhouette.

Girls are like that, he thinks. Blink—and they’re gone.

Simon can’t help but wonder what it must be like.

To be able to turn a corner and come around the other side as someone new.

Agatha snaps her textbook closed. “All right,” she sighs, slinging her satchel over her shoulder. Simon has to take a step back when she stands to avoid taking a blow to the mouth from the top of her head. “Let’s take a walk.”

And they walk.

Through the courtyard and out again, past the inner gates. Agatha dips beneath one of the thick, black chains that stretches down from the gatehouse and steps off the drawbridge onto the bank of grass and stone that edges the wall. If they continue walking all the way around to the far east side, the bank will eventually start to taper down to the punting docks. In his sixth year, Simon once spent the worse half of a whole night shoving himself around the moat on one of those things, his wand held like a torch between his teeth, trying to study the mosaic that colours the school’s foundation for clues about the fifth hare.

It was awful, and cold, and he’s hated them ever since.

They don’t go nearly that far.

“My parents wanted me to tell you they missed you over half-term,” Agatha says abruptly, stopping. “I, um. I told them you had a mission.”

Simon looks at her. “I’ll be sure to send them a card at Christmas.”

“They’ll like that.”

“Did you do anything?” he asks. “Half-term, I mean.”

“I went shopping with Minty. She’s going to see Brooklyn with me on Saturday.”

“See who?”

“It’s a period drama starring Saoirse Ronan.”

“Oh. That’s cool.”

“Did you—”

“No,” he says, then clears his throat. “Just, y’know. Bummed around Watford.”

Agatha nods, and then they stand there staring at each other in tense, uncertain silence, because this is the part where Simon is supposed to say something, but no matter how many times he opens his mouth, he can’t seem to find the words. It’s like trying to pry chewing gum off the bottom of a desk.

Has talking to her always been this hard? He doesn’t think so. It’s—well, it’s never been easy, not like talking to Penny is easy. But that’s only because they don’t really have much in common. His best memory with Agatha is this time they stayed up too late watching Doctor Who together, and it reached those stupid hours of the morning when sounds feel too loud and everything becomes kind of funny for no reason. He wasn’t thinking about being her boyfriend, then. Or trying to figure out whether or not he was supposed to be holding her hand. He was arguing with her over whether or not Eleven is the best Doctor and trying not to choke on his orange fizzy drink, and he liked that. He liked that better.

And that’s what he wants to tell her now.

But he still hasn’t said anything.

Agatha leans against the wall. She’s looking away from him, down at her hands as she fusses with the buckle on her satchel. 

“What’s this about, Simon?” she asks, finally. A banditry of chuckledees comes to perch on the ramparts above her. Simon hates chuckledees. They’re just birds, and Penny says there’s an old mage’s tale that it’s good luck to tell a chuckledee a secret, but they’re fucking creepy. They have pink, squishy newborn baby faces behind their beaks and giggle like human children.

“I think you should sit with me and Penny at lunch today.”

“Why?”

“Because I miss you.”

Agatha closes her eyes. “Simon.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” he says, and he hates that she doesn’t believe him. He can see it on her face, the way her mouth compresses around her teeth, stretching her lips thin and her chin flat. “Penny misses you, too. What’re you even ignoring her for? She didn’t do anything. Look, I’ve. I mean, I’ve been trying to...” Simon shrugs one shoulder. “I dunno, give you time? Or whatever. But I don’t get what’s going on anymore.”

“I told you,” she replies tersely, “I told you I didn’t want to fix things, and I still don’t.”

“But that’s not what this is about. You said—”

“Said what, Simon.”

“You said you’d still be here!”

Simon drags his hands through his hair and turns away from her. He steps towards the edge of the moat, close enough for the toe of his shoe to hang above the drop and send his heart kicking in his chest, and like the flash of a camera lens going off in his brain: he is fifteen years old, stumbling back for a step that isn't there, swinging for the bannister, missing by an inch.

He rubs his thumbs into his eyes until the memory starts to fizzle.

“We’re supposed to be friends.”

“Maybe I realised I don’t want to be friends with the Chosen One.”

Simon frowns over his shoulder at her, almost scowls. “Is this about Baz?”

“Are you seriously bringing up Baz right now?” Agatha shoves away from the wall. Above her, the banditry of chuckledees startles, bursting all at once into a round of tittering laughter as they take flight and disappear into the sky, their feathers winking from brown to blue like the flicker of an open flame going out.

“Are you with him now?” Simon asks, “Is that what this is?”

“No!”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Simon!”

“Tell me, then!” He doesn’t mean to raise his voice. “What the fuck did he say to you?”

Agatha curls her mouth, bunching her cheeks. She’s flushing all the way from her temples to her throat, but he doesn’t think it’s from the cold anymore. A line creases her forehead as she lifts her chin at him, and he wonders if she’s thinking about how much this feels like their breakup, too. How it feels like it’s happening all over again, only worse. 

This is so much worse.

“You want to know what he said?” she asks, and he wants to tell her that he doesn’t, but he can’t. He does want to know. He has to know what kind of shit plot this is and how to get Agatha away from him, because even if they’re not together, Baz isn’t—she can’t be with him. She just can’t. The thought of it makes Simon’s stomach hurt. “He told me, ‘Find some other way to disappoint your parents, Wellbelove. We all know you and Snow will be back to your golden destiny soon enough.’”

Simon covers his face.

“Baz is—he’s.” He breathes into his palms. “Baz is a prick, Aggie. You can’t listen to him.”

He can smell the ink on his fingers. 

Taste the sweat in the whorls of his skin.

“I’m not listening to Baz,” she says, “I just. I don’t want to be a part of anyone’s destiny. And, Simon. Your whole life is destiny.” She gives him a look; this sad, shitty little grimace, like he’s a child. A stupid child. The only blinky bulb in a string of fairy lights. “You were foretold.”

“But I don’t want to get back together.”

“I know.”

“We’re friends,” he whispers.

“No, Simon.” She turns. “We’re not.”

He opens his mouth, but he can’t force himself to call her name.

Agatha Wellbelove walks away with the mid-morning sun curving over the top of her head like a lens flare, the fine threads of her braid burning gold and swinging between her shoulders. And she doesn’t look back.

The Sword of Mages sticks out from the belly of an oak tree. Simon hangs off the pommel, his knees aching where they weigh against the tree’s thick snarl of roots, his forehead resting on his hands. His palms are bleeding, rubbed open and stinging raw along the tender inner curves of his thumbs, smearing blood into the leather of the handle.

Simon clenches his teeth, and his eyes, and his shoulders. Magic burns in his throat. It moves inside him the way a wave crashes against the shore of a beach, rising and falling, swelling like a tide. It chokes itself around him, coming from the Earth, from the air and the sky, from the pit of his stomach and the meat of his heart and the marrow of his bones. Charcoal on his tongue.

He isn’t good at this. Losing things. 

Losing people.

A sharp wind hisses through the Wavering Wood, stinging the side of his face with the smell of foliage, of rotten fruit and wilting flowers, the crispness of autumn.

He hauls himself up and plants a foot against the trunk of the oak, anchoring himself against it, shoving his thoughts down, down. As far as he can make them go. Then he wrenches back against the hilt of his sword and the blade splinters free from the bark with a percussive crack, spitting a shower of wood chips out behind it.

“What are you doing?”

Simon whips around.

Baz looks remarkably composed for someone with the tip of a sword poking against his sternum. But then again, Baz never really baulks at a threat. He’s standing like a statue, tall and still, imposing, his wrists draping from the pockets of his trousers like they’re made of chalk dust and silk. His hair hangs in soft, dark waves around his face. “Saving the World of Mages from unruly timber, Snow?”

“You’re supposed to be in Politickal Science.”

“So are you,” Baz scoffs. “Professor Emlyn sent me to find you. Another one of the many ill-fated joys of being your roommate.”

“Just tell him I’m sick or something.”

“And why would I do that?”

Simon glares at him, bringing his sword to rest. 

If anyone else were here right now, they’d take one look at Simon’s damp, knotted curls and dishevelled uniform, feel the bone-deep thrum of his magic in the air, and leg it back to class. But Emlyn didn’t send anyone else. He sent Baz—Christ, of course he sent Baz. Simon doesn’t care for Politickal Science on the best of days, but he actually likes Professor Emlyn just fine. He’s a short, anxious nosebleed of a man who has elbow patches on all of his jackets, and he isn’t very interesting, but he is a good teacher. He lets Simon retake tests sometimes when a poor mark falls too close to a mission from the Mage. 

For some reason though, Emlyn also happens to think the Crucible is Dante’s gift to man and fucking magic or something.

Simon tangles a hand into his hair. “Look, I—”

“Did you hurt yourself?” Baz cuts him off sharply, taking a half-step back. Simon twitches his palms reflexively, tightens his grip and ignores the way it stings.

“It’s nothing,” he says. He turns back to the oak tree. “Go tell Emlyn whatever the hell you want.”

“You’re really not coming to class?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Sod off.”

“I think that if I’m expected to lie to our teacher, you can at least tell me what I’m lying for.”

“You don’t have to lie.” Simon lifts his sword and twirls it around the back of his knuckles in a smooth, well-practised flourish. He catches it with the blade at ready, the cross-guard snug to his skin, the familiar weight of it a steady comfort. “I just said I don’t care what you tell him.”

“Well—”

He strikes the oak.

The impact ricochets up his arms and into his overworked shoulders. His elbows tremble from the strain. Simon drops his head and takes a breath, then kicks his foot into the trunk and yanks. There’s another loud crack, another spray of bark.

He strikes the oak again. “Do you ever fucking stop?”

Breathes, yanks.

Crack!

“What are you blathering on about?”

“You’re just—I can’t fucking stand you,” he growls. “You’re such an arsehole. I mean, you never know when to leave shit alone, do you?”

“Are we having the same conversation right now?”

Simon spears his sword into the dirt and turns back around. Baz has his arms crossed and his eyebrows furrowed, his gaze set like steel beneath them. Cold, unmoved. His wand is in his hand, clutched around the middle of the ivory and pressed along the edge of his right lapel.

“I talked to Agatha today.”

Baz rolls his eyes. It’s a whole full-bodied affair. He tips back onto his heels, rounds out his shoulders, tilts his chin up enough to stretch the skin of his neck thin. Simon can see the contours of every bump and groove in his throat, stacked together in a pretty ladder up to his Adam’s apple. (What a melodramatic twat.) “Crowley, I should’ve known,” he says. “Well, at least we know the sky is still blue.”

Simon clenches his teeth. “She told me what you said to her.”

“I didn’t say anything to your precious little girlfriend, Snow.”

“She’s not my girlfriend anymore.”

“Well, that’s hardly my fault!” Baz snaps, his hair shifting around his face. It swings down to brush the sides of his nose and he sweeps it back with his fingers like he’s in a fucking shampoo commercial or something. “I haven’t said five words to Wellbelove since... bloody hell, I don’t know. September, probably.”

“We’ve been broken up for months.”

“And so what? Are you throwing a fit right now because you wanted me to go gallivanting into the sunrise with her?”

“No!” Simon folds his hands around the back of his neck, digging his knuckles against the base of his skull. His undercut is soaked flat with sweat. “No, that’s not it. I just, fuck. She doesn’t want anything to do with me now.”

Baz twists his mouth, his nose. His bottom lip disappears between his teeth for a moment before he goes to speak and comes back out looking like it lost a fight for its lunch money. Chewed swollen, dark pink.

“Oh, please,” he says, and his voice is cut down into a razor-thin whisper. Simon can hear the scrape of each syllable as it slides through the tight lines of his teeth. “You and Wellbelove will be back to frollicking in meadows together in no time.”

“I don’t want to get back together with her.” Simon shakes his head, dragging his fists around to press into his eyes. His magic is pooling in his empty stomach, churning and molten. He feels ill with it. Maybe it’s a good thing he missed breakfast. “But I’ve known her for forever and I really like her family and she’s just done with me now, like. She doesn’t even want to be friends. Because you—you freaked her out! What’s all this bullshit you’re on about destiny anyway?”

Baz doesn’t reply.

In the sudden quiet, Simon can hear the distant whisper of the Wood, a gabble of magickal creatures and small animals moving about, the whistle of afternoon songbirds. His lungs are heaving like he’s been running, like he’s an exhaust pipe that pumps chestfuls of hot, acrid magic instead of fumes.

He drops his hands away from his face and reaches for his sword. Baz watches him with a chilly, disinterested expression.

Why the fuck is he still here?

“Go away.”

“You can’t keep blaming me for all your problems, Snow.”

Simon swings his sword up and balances it on his shoulder. “Know what I don’t get?”

“Should I start alphabetically?”

He ignores him. 

“You’re all over my girlfriend for years,” Simon says, “but now me and Agatha are done for good and all of the sudden, what? You’ve gone and lost interest?”

Baz’s knuckles twist white around his wand. “And clearly the only explanation is that it has to do with you, is that it?”

He shrugs. “Isn’t it?”

“Crowley, you’ve lost it.”

“You’re being elusive.”

“It’s evasive, you dolt.” Baz makes a face at himself. “And I’m not. Being evasive. You’re just a moron. A conceited moron. We’re not all characters in the Simon Snow show, believe it or not. Not everything has to do with you.”

“I think you’re hiding something.”

Baz makes an odd, strangled sound in his throat. His nose bunches into a snarl, the corners of his mouth drawing up. “You know what I think?” he hisses. “I think you can keep looking for excuses and blaming me all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a royal cock-up. Face it, Snow. You’re an embarrassment. You’re a worthless magician and a laughable excuse for a hero, you couldn’t even cast a simple playground spell today without blowing something up!” 

He flicks his wand at the blue stains on Simon’s hands. Simon flinches despite himself.

“You refuse to accept that she just doesn’t want you, but your own parents didn’t even want you, Snow, so why would she? Why would anyone?”

This time, the silence is suffocating. Simon is alone with the sound of his blood pounding behind his ears and the shiver of his magic going out like a damp fuse, hunkering down over his bones, sitting heavy in his joints. And it’s almost funny the way Baz is the one who lurches back, as though he’s been struck, while Simon holds his sword and his ground and his breath, his tongue.

“Snow—” Baz stops, licks his lips.

He looks suddenly so very unlike himself. A sharp edge rounded down to a dull corner.

Nothing but match smoke and cracked varnish.

“Fuck off, Baz.”

He does.

Simon Snow is marked absent in Politickal Science.

By midday, Simon is starved sick. A tension headache throbs between his temples, his exhaustion drumming through him like a second heartbeat. 

He probably looks like he’s gone half-mad, charging across the courtyard like this, with ink and blood and mud on his hands, dripping sweat from his brow in the dead of November. Blazer off, collar popped. His necktie shoved into his pocket. A group of first year students give him startled, bug-eyed stares and plenty of berth as he passes.

Simon pauses outside the Weeping Tower. Two years ago, during the summer between his fifth and sixth year, the Mage banned mobile phones at Watford. Called them a security risk. At the time, Simon wasn’t bothered—well, okay. He still isn’t bothered, not really. He doesn’t like texting. And even if he did, he doesn’t have a mobile. But right now, he kind of wishes he did, and that they weren’t banned, because he wants to text Penelope. He wants to ask her to meet him out on the Great Lawn and have lunch together with him in the sun where he won’t have to think about Baz, or about Agatha, or about anything but Earl Grey tea and buttered bread and fresh honeydew melon.

His stomach groans. Simon tips back his head and groans, too.

Conversation spills from the dining hall. A flood of voices and laughter, the warm smell of oven-baked applesauce, strawberry vinaigrette, fried tomatoes and rosemary. The kitchen is still in full swing and his cheeks flush from the sweltering heat of it as he steps inside, holding the door open behind him for a trio of third year girls to come through.

Habit has Simon looking over at Baz’s table before he can catch himself, and of course Baz is there, already staring at him, pulling apart the top of a blueberry muffin with the narrow tips of his long, pale fingers. A carefully blank look on his face.

Simon snaps his eyes away and scans the room for Penelope.

He spots her on the far side of the dining hall. Two full plates of food and a textbook are spread out on the table in front of her, the latter pages of which have been stuffed thick with Post-it notes, crunched over highlighters and brightly coloured pens instead of bookmarks. 

Agatha is sitting across from her, sipping a bottle of peach juice.

Humiliation flushes his skin like a fever. He feels suddenly queasy with it, standing there across the room from her, trying to pretend he doesn’t notice the way Baz is still burning a hole through his skull, while their argument flickers through him in soundless stop-motion frames. There’s a cramp in his stomach shaped like summertime, like long fold-away tables and plastic forks and paper plates, but Simon doesn’t want to be near the kitchen anymore.

He needs fresh air.

He needs an open sky.

Agatha’s eyes land on him, and her shoulders go taught, cinching down like a bowstring. She starts reaching for her plastic bottle top, and Simon looks at Penny. Scratching something into her notes, too absorbed in being ambitious and brilliant and all swotty and shit to notice the turmoil happening over her head. Her hair is tangled up into a huge, fluffy ponytail and her mouth is moving, she’s talking. And she’s smiling.

And she doesn’t like losing friends.

That thought is what turns Simon from the table. He takes two sandwiches and a bottle of water from the serving line, and he knows it isn’t enough, he’ll be starving again before teatime, but that’s a problem for later.

For now, he just wants to go.

Simon stretches his legs through the heather.

He tugs off his jumper, pillows it beneath his neck.

His sandwiches are coronation chicken. Stuffed with fresh lettuce, buttered on both sides, prepared with flaked almonds and sour apricots. Sauce drips down his chin and he catches it with his thumb and licks it off, even though his hands are still disgusting, and the tangy flavour quells some of the emptiness he feels in his stomach, his heart. He loves food. And as he looks up at the sky with cold fingers and hot, itchy cheeks, he wraps himself in that love like a cloak in the winter.

A colony of jack-o’-lops lives in the warrens out here, beyond the wall and away from the Wood. They sleep during the day, but sometimes when Simon has a nightmare that wakes him before dawn, he’ll watch them from his window, blinking orange and pink through the hills like city lights. Jack-o’-lops are like rabbits, only they’re the size of English bullies and their fur glows like a firefly. Ebb once helped him sneak out after curfew to see them up close when he was thirteen and the whole thing was bloody brilliant.

All the flowers bloom tall and downy and in bright, vibrant colours from the dust that falls off their fur while they wander, the ground shimmers with it during the day, and the breeze always smells faintly like pumpkins.

Simon takes another bite of his sandwich.

And then he hears the Mage start calling for him.

“Simon, here you are!”

He calls back, “Sir!” as he’s sitting up. A bite of chicken and lettuce droops from the corner of his sandwich, slopping onto his trousers. Simon crams the rest of his lunch into his mouth, and waits to finish chewing before he continues, “I didn’t know you were back.”

Back at school, he means, but also back in England.

The Mage has been in Wales since October.

Things have been kind of... weird between them lately. The Mage asked him to leave Watford before the start of this term and it’s like they’re always on the cusp of an argument now, the Mage refuses to let it go. As Simon watches him hike over the mounds, the brass buckles on the calves of his boots clinking, woven scabbard shifting, he can already hear the fight unfolding over again in his head: A secure place. Private tutors. Away.

“I’ve only just arrived. Tell me, how are you, my boy?” the Mage says, dropping a hand on Simon’s head, pushing back his curls.

A chill shoots through him. The Mage is his guardian, but he never presents himself as a father, or as family, or as anything other than an ally. Even when he was a child, they’d always been men at arms together. (“This is war,” the Mage is always telling him, “and war isn’t going to wait for you to grow up, Simon. You have to take it by the reins while you can, learn to hold on before it’s big enough to trample you.”)

But then sometimes he does things like this—the Mage is rubbing his thumb at a spot above Simon’s eyebrow and he can feel a bit of dried mud crumbling off his skin—and it’s never a good sign, the sudden affection. It always precedes bad news.

Penelope calls it a honeypot.

Simon ducks his head until he’s too far to touch, sinking back into the thick of the field. He likes the way the grass and flowers fold around his shoulders, how it feels like being swallowed by the Earth, held by it. Like it might just let him keep slipping down, and down, and down, until he disappears completely.

“Uhh,” he says, shaking out his hair, brushing crumbs from his thighs and pollen from his elbows as he climbs to his feet. “Good, yeah. I mean, yes. I’m all right, thank you.”

“Anything to report?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Good.”

The Mage pinches his chin in the notch between his thumb and forefinger, looking at Simon in silence. A troubled wrinkle settles between his eyebrows. Sunlight is breaking golden-orange against the coarse strands of his thick, brown hair, bronzing his silhouette. He always looks one good life lesson away from being the protagonist of a children’s picture book. A real swashbuckler.

Simon picks up his jumper and pulls it on over his head. “Should we go to your office, sir?”

“No,” the Mage says, turning away. “No, I think it might be good to talk here. Did you know I used to come out this way when I was a boy, Simon?”

“No, sir.”

“The solitude. It’s good for a man’s focus.”

November cuts them with a cold breeze.

“Right,” Simon replies tightly, dropping his gaze. Around his knees, the heather billows, heaving wind through the stalks like the hills are a chest breathing beneath him. He chews the inside of his cheek. “Look, if—” The Mage tilts an ear in his direction. “Sir. If you’re going to ask me to leave again, my answer is still no. I know you’re worried about safety, but. There’s only been one attack this year, and I mean... My marks have even been better and, and I just think—”

“Simon.”

He plucks a twig from his sleeve. “Sir?”

“I’m not here to talk about that.”

Simon looks up, staring into the Mage’s sharp, steady face. Something grim is always lurking behind the impatient blue of his eyes, but he appears sincere, the corners of his mouth have softened.

“Then?” Simon asks. “Is it the Humdrum? Have you found something?”

The Mage reaches for him, grasps his upper arms.

His hands are kind of like Simon’s. Broad, heavy palms that are thick and rough with calluses. His thumbs press down into the hollows between Simon’s collarbones and his shoulders like he’s trying to punch a set of holes through him. “Simon,” he says again, seriously, dipping his head forward, “you trust me, don’t you, my boy?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Good.” The Mage nods, his fingers biting, almost bruising. “You’re a good boy.”

And Simon smiles. A real smile, because he doesn’t know yet what the Mage is about to say next, and those words do mean something to him. Something they can only ever mean to boys like him. Boys who start with nothing and nobody to love them. Boys who are named by a marker and raised by a dozen careless strangers.

The Mage continues, “I can always count on you. You know how to do the right thing. Everyone likes to think they have what it takes to do the right thing, but they rarely do, Simon. True righteousness comes at a cost, it is a sacrifice to be good. It is the willingness to make hard decisions when nobody else can.”

“I know, sir.”

“We’ll head for London in a half-hour, then. I’ve already signed you out of your afternoon lessons, but if this all goes smoothly, we should be back in good time for you to still attend Astronomy if you’d like. Go clean up. We’ll meet outside the—”

“Wait,” Simon says. Then, quickly, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. It’s just, you still haven’t actually told me what we’re going to London for.”

“You trust me, Simon.” 

It isn’t a question this time.

“Sir,” Simon says, and his voice is almost too low to hear beneath the drone of the hills, the way the wind howls between them, the rustle of the heather moving through the tallgrass. He... wants the Mage to stop touching him. “Why are we going to London?” he asks.

Something dark passes over the Mage’s face—there and gone in a blink.

He drops Simon’s shoulders and takes a step back, bringing one of his hands to rest on the hilt of his sword. Simon’s eyes flick down, following the movement. “Mitali Bunce is under arrest,” he says, and for a moment, the world spins out of focus. Simon can feel his pulse beating in his forehead, behind his cheeks, under his tongue, as the Mage’s words sink in.

Mitali Bunce is under arrest. Mitali Bunce is under arrest. Mitali Bunce is under arrest.

And the Mage wants Simon to go to London with him and be the one to arrest her.

“That’s Penny’s mum,” Simon replies slowly.

“Simon—”

He shakes his head. “You have to talk to the Coven.”

“Simon.” The Mage frowns. “They’re my orders.”

What?

“No.” Then, “Why?”

“Treason.”

“Treason?” Simon jerks back. “She’s—no. You’re wrong, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t.”

“But she has.”

“No!”

“You,” the Mage says, “seem to have become very fond of that word lately.”

“This has to be a mistake.”

“Mitali Bunce is hiding something! She has refused direct orders from my Men, from myself, a written appeal from the Coven—she is under suspicion for the potential harbouring of illegal magickal objects. She is breaking the law. Tell me, do you know what happens when an adult breaks the law, Simon?”

“I don’t care, I. You can’t make me do this!”

“Simon Snow, I am—” The Mage cuts himself off. His mouth snaps shut so fast Simon hears the click of his teeth, his lips press together into a hard, thin line, his moustache bending around them like a birdy bracket. The Mage scrubs a palm over his face, then draws it up and through his hair. “I am the Mage,” he says evenly, “and the headmaster of this school. And your guardian, in case you’ve forgotten how it is you’re here at all. You asked me to let you stay at Watford this year, and I’ve allowed it. But this is not up for debate.”

His words settle into the air, the finality of them stuck, hanging there between them. A putrid taste clings to the back of Simon’s throat.

The Mage gives him one last long, inscrutable look before he starts back down the hill again. 

“Remember,” he yells, “goodness is sacrifice, my boy. You’ll understand one day.”

Watford is full of places to hide.

But Simon ends up standing by the outer gates anyway. He presses his forehead into the heavy, black metal bars and feels the wards buzzing at him, huffing around his face like big, blind guard dogs. He isn’t crying, but he’s panting like he does when he cries. He feels like there isn’t enough air in the world to soothe the ache in his chest.

There is nothing for him out there, beyond the gates. This is supposed to be his place.

His hands twist into the front of his jumper, pulling at the knit. Simon looks like someone dragged their wrist through him while drawing up his final lines, his edges are a smudge of peach-coloured ink, and he thinks, ‘I hope I’m far enough away from the school,’ and then he thinks, ‘I hope I’m close enough for someone to find me,’ and then he thinks, ‘I hope no one ever finds me again!’

And then he isn’t thinking.

There’s never anything to think about when he’s going off.

Daylight. 

Warm, yellow.

“Miss Christy?”

Simon pokes his head into her office.

The Infirmary is a narrow and vaguely pill-shaped room, with wooden floors and tall walls made out of a hundred shallow drawers, no bigger than the length of a shoebox, each one fixed with its own silver ring handle. There’s an uncomfortable leather bench in the corner that’s always covered by a sheet of wax paper, and three pink chairs are lined up outside the main door. In the last seven years, Simon has probably spent more time here than in his own bedroom. (Christy used to tease him something awful about it when he was still a littlun.) (“Maybe the Crucible should’ve cast us together instead, huh there sweetheart?”)

Christy is hunched over at her desk, doing paperwork in the company of at least a dozen takeaway coffee cups. Her hair is twisted up into this big, messy heap on the crown of her head and she’s wearing an old Watford FC hoodie pulled over her peppermint scrubs.

“Miss Christy,” he says again. “Sorry to bother you, miss. I’m—well, I know I don’t usually come in about this sorta thing anymore, but I went off yesterday and I think I might’ve been blacked out for a while after. I just woke up out on the Great Lawn.”

She doesn’t look up.

“Miss Christy?”

She doesn’t stop working.

Simon pulls his lips between his teeth, bites them into a line, and forces himself not to call her name again. Penelope is always telling him that he needs to learn to be patient, to wait for things. She thinks his brain might move too fast or something. That there’s a part of him always living in fight or flight. His weight tips back and forth from one leg to the other.

It smells like a Starbucks supply cupboard in here.

Christy sets down her pen, stretches her wrist, then flips her paper and goes back to writing.

“Well, I’m probably all right.” Simon clears his throat. “I mean, I’ll just sleep it off. Sorry again to bother you, miss,” he says, and he expects that to be the moment Christy finally acknowledges him, for her to lift her head and blink like she’s coming out of a dream and smile, pleased to see him even though it probably means Simon has busted his lip or been pushed down the stairs again. But she doesn’t. Christy stays writing, and Simon bangs his thigh into the arm of one of the pink chairs on his way out.

Christy has never turned him away like that before. He doesn’t know if that event counts as being turned away, whatever the fuck that was.

She’s always been kind to him. Christy is kind to all of the students of course, even Baz, but the thing Simon has always really liked about her is that she never makes him feel like it’s his fault for getting hurt, she doesn’t make him take responsibility for every bruise and broken bone. (Even when those bruises and broken bones are his fault.)

He thought—

He doesn’t know what he thought.

Simon turns into the stairwell and starts down them two at a time, letting the impact of each step punch into his heels. He tries to focus on that instead. On the jolt of his knees, the drop of his stomach.

Things he can feel.

Feelings he can control.

He probably should go back to his room. Scrub off the smoke, sleep a while longer. He can’t remember the last time going off knocked him out cold for so long—it used to happen a lot, before. Back when he was eleven. His body was smaller then, and weaker. And his magic was still so new and impossible to control, it would crackle and burn and tear itself from his skin like it was trying to brand him with its fingerprints. But how long has it been now? That feels like the sort of thing he should remember, but... well, it all starts to blur together after a while. His whole life is one long smear of dark creatures and hidden rooms and flaming gates.

Simon heads for Miss Possibelf’s classroom instead.

Because the only thing he wants right now more than a warm shower and a soft bed, and maybe a hot cup of tea, is Penelope Bunce.

Most floors in the Weeping Tower don’t have a beginning or an end. The stairwell opens in the middle, and it doesn’t matter what way someone chooses to walk, eventually, they will end up back where they started, even though the hallway never seems to bend or twist in another direction.

This isn’t true of the fourth floor, however.

Magic Words is at the end of a long, windowless bell-curve; the walls are stone, the floor is polished wood. Thin shadows stretch and flicker all around him as he passes in and out of the dim, blue-ish glow of the lanterns. Penelope finds the fourth floor unnerving. She says the dark makes her feel like something bad is always about to happen. But Simon kind of likes it. The strange, pale colour of the fire is comforting, in its own way.

“Comforting?”

“Yeah, I mean. It’s a bit like moonlight, isn’t it?”

Simon can hear Miss Possibelf’s voice through the door.

Fourth period will be ending soon, so he doesn’t bother to knock. Instead, he hangs back against the adjacent wall where he knows he’ll be out of the way when the bell tolls, and slides down to sit with his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in the cup of one dirty palm. Day-old sweat covers him like a layer of cling-wrap. His fingers are still blue. His necktie is still wadded up in his front pocket. Grass stains darken the knees of his trousers.

Maybe he should have taken a shower first after all. He’s been trying not to think about what happened yesterday, but it’s hard to keep his mind from wandering back when the memory of it is all over him. Every time he blinks—he sees Agatha’s braid swinging between her shoulders. He blinks—he sees that strange, broken look on Baz’s face. He blinks—he sees the Mage.

He will have been to London by now, Simon realises. Which means Penelope’s mother is in the custody of the Coven. Not as one of their trusted voices, but as a criminal. As a traitor, by the Mage’s order.

Is Penelope even going to want to see him? She knows he would never do anything to hurt her family... but he is still the Mage’s Heir.

Simon startles when the door opens.

The short break between classes is normally a busy clamour, full of laughter and shouting, stray pencils rolling between shoes and crumpled balls of paper flying overhead as friends spot each other from opposite ends of the crowd. Today, it is unsettlingly subdued. Nothing but a murmur of conversation and the shuffle of knapsack straps, a tide of voices barely loud enough to rise above the distant toll of the Chapel bell.

Baz walks by as Simon is getting to his feet, but he doesn’t do so much as glance at him. He has his head down and his earphones on, that ugly yellow Walkman he showed up with back in sixth year clipped to the side of his belt. The wire is tangled into a real bird’s nest about halfway up, the bulk of the knot bumping against his chest in time to his stride. 

Simon watches him disappear around the bend of the corridor.

Turning back to the Magic Words classroom, he waits for the last few students to clear from the door before stepping up to rest his hand on the frame and lean around the threshold, his eyes going first to Penelope’s desk, and then to Miss Possibelf’s. It’s not unusual for Penny to loiter for a while after a lesson, she likes to stay behind and ask questions. But save for Miss Possibelf, standing with her back to him, watching a cleaning spell work its way down the blackboard, the room is empty.

“Miss Possibelf,” Simon calls out. “I had to go to the nurse’s. Did Penny get my homework for me already?”

Miss Possibelf doesn’t reply.

His stomach drops.

Sometimes, Simon can feel a fight before it happens. Like the incoming attack is a breeze against the back of his neck. Magic will flare up into his skin so sharp and fast it makes the roof of his mouth tingle, his lungs bloating with the scent of ash and ozone.

Whatever he’s feeling now is like that.

A wrongness thicker than glass.

“Miss,” he calls again, quietly. Approaching her, slowly. “Miss Possibelf?”

“Knock, knock.”

Simon turns around.

“Madam Bellamy,” he says.

“Honey,” Miss Possibelf says.

(The first time Simon heard her call her that, back in second year, he asked Penny during afternoon tea if they were a couple and she laughed at him so hard she blew a fun-size M&M out her nose.) (But how the hell was he supposed to know Madam Bellamy’s first name is Honey?)

“Are you all right?”

“You know, that’s funny,” Madam Bellamy replies lightly. She’s wearing a heavy, dark brown cardigan over her blouse today, the yarn a dense, tight knit covered in a fuzz of tiny golden threads. She draws it closed across her stomach as she speaks, folding her arms to keep it snug. “I was here to ask you the same thing.”

Miss Possibelf dips her chin. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’ve been around for far longer than it looks. As terrible as it sounds... Well, these things do happen.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that makes it easier for you?” Madam Bellamy asks, tilting her head. “I know you better than that, Theresa.”

“That’s not how I meant it. It’s just hard to focus on myself when I can see how much the students are hurting. They’re afraid of what this means for all of us.”

“Basilton didn’t say a word in class this morning.”

“No,” Miss Possibelf agrees. “Not for me, either.”

Simon stands between them, glancing back and forth as their conversation is carried over his head. He swallows against the panic in his chest, the mounting pressure of it smothering the space behind his ribs into something tight and shallow.

“Miss Possibelf?” he says. Throat dry, pinching. He can’t breathe. “Madam Bellamy?”

“Come have a walk with me,” Madam Bellamy says. “Just to the yew and back. We have the time. I think we could both do for a bit of fresh air, don’t you?”

“Mm... You’re probably right.”

“Aren’t I always?”

There is something uncanny about the way Miss Possibelf moves. A weightlessness to her. She walks without making a sound, her steps falling like sunlight through a window. As she circles around her desk, Simon cuts into her path. 

But if he had known what was going to happen next, he wouldn’t have.

There is no way to describe the feeling of having another person walk through him, other than as a painful, gripping cold. He can’t tell what direction it’s coming from, if it is on his skin or beneath it. Deeper, within his bones. The shock punches through him, buckling his knees. A perverse emptiness settles within the shell of his shape.

Simon tears in a breath, chokes for air. For warmth. For something, anything other than the howling, frigid dark that’s found him. His forearms twist like smoke curling off the end of a wick, his lines and colours blown from their edges.

He hears Miss Possibelf’s voice from behind him now: “Should we collect Anthony as well?”

“Best not,” Madam Bellamy replies. “You know how he is.”

The door clicks shut.

Simon is left gasping in the silence. 

Simon has Magickal Theory with Miss Twilling fifth period, but when the next bell tolls, he goes straight to Penelope’s Linguistics classroom instead. It’s one of the few classes they don’t share this semester. (One of the few classes he doesn’t share with Baz, either.) (Baz should be in Latin right about now.)

He stands at the front of the room, watching people take their seats. It almost feels like he’s about to give a presentation, except for the part where nobody is looking at him.

Nobody, as far as he can tell, can see him at all.

Mr Whortleberry comes in and nearly shoves an arm through Simon’s stomach reaching for a stick of chalk. He writes 52-64 on the blackboard, then props one thigh up on the corner of his desk and starts reading down the attendance sheet.

Penelope’s name is called three times.

He looks for her in all the places he thinks she might be.

And then he looks for her in all the places he doesn’t.

At the end of the period, after sweeping the grounds from the west wing of the library all the way to Ebb’s barn by the eastern wall, he goes back to the Weeping Tower and takes the elevator up to his Magickal History classroom.

Baz and Agatha both show up.

Penny doesn’t.

Miss Farroway takes attendance, and Simon’s name isn’t called at all.

There has to be somewhere he’s missing.

Football practice is already in full swing by the time Simon gets there. He climbs across the stands, up to his usual seat at the very end of the second to last bench, and sits with his back against the safety rails.

Being here always used to help him think. Fifth year is, technically, the year Simon had to return the Legacy blades to the Eternity Stone, but whenever he thinks about fifth year, the first thing that comes to mind is Baz. That was the year Simon thought he might be able to figure out all the Old Families’ plans if he just paid close enough attention to him... and then he started catching Baz sneaking down to the Catacombs after supper, and Phillipa Stainton lost her voice, and suddenly making sure Baz remembered to turn up to his footie games four times a week didn’t feel so important anymore.

He forgot how much he actually likes coming to watch the team play.

Down on the pitch, a handful of smaller, younger boys are collecting the orange and purple pylons they were using to run drills, while Baz and another bloke, a seventh year, stand on opposite sides of the halfway line picking teams. Baz has a teal pinnie pulled on over his football kit.

Simon looks towards the Wavering Wood.

It is still warm and golden on the outside; bruised with its autumn foliage and thick, off-coloured lichen. A cluster of mushroom sprites with soft, light brown caps are kicking around the detritus near the forest’s edge, searching for a place to burrow for the coming winter.

Penny could be out there. He hasn’t checked the Wood yet.

He turns back to watch the first kick-off.

Baz’s team is defending. A yellow pinnie is standing near the centre point of the field, bouncing his weight back and forth between his heels. He steadies himself as the rest of the players fall into position and Coach Mac raises his hand, ready to begin.

The whistle blows.

Instead of sending the ball back towards his team, the kicker decides to take a hard shot straight for the goal. It falls short two-thirds of the way there and a teal pinnie catches it against his chest, then passes it to Baz, and he takes off down the edge of the sideline with it like a bullet.

Part of Simon hopes Penelope is in the Wavering Wood. At least that would mean she’s still here, and that she hasn’t been spirited away by the fucking Insidious Humdrum again. 

The only reason she was brought along when it happened last time is because she was touching him, but the Humdrum’s powers are unprecedented. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Nobody knows how it does the shit that it does, or why. The only thing anyone does know about it is that it’s eating their magic, and getting stronger by the day. And super evil. So who’s to say taking her once, even by mistake, isn’t all it needed to be able to do it again? Maybe it has her number now, too, and whatever the fuck is going on is its doing. 

It knows Simon never would have gotten away without her last time.

If Simon was the Humdrum, that’s what he would do. Try to separate them.

A yellow pinnie steals the ball.

Baz stumbles and tries to pivot around, but his cleats slip out from under him and he hits the ground, hard. Simon cringes, sucking in a sharp breath through his teeth. 

It’s not the first time he’s seen Baz go down during a game. This is football afterall, and he plays like a demon. On the opposite side of the pitch, the attacking team has all the momentum now, yellow and teal pinnies are weaving around each other while the ball flies between them in streaks of black and white. No one else has noticed yet that Baz isn’t getting up. 

He doesn’t look hurt. He’s just... lying there. On his back, staring up at the sky with his knees bent and his arms crossed over his forehead. Grass pokes through the ink spill of hair spread out above him and curves up behind the shells of his ears, around the slopes of his shoulders.

The whistle blows again.

“All right, Pitch?” 

Even from his place in the stands, Simon is able to catch the slow, heavy bob of Baz’s throat as he swallows. The steady rise of his chest as he draws in a breath. He flexes into a sit-up, then lets his arms fall behind him to support his weight and calls back a firm, “Yes, Coach!” before pushing himself to his feet.

The attacking team is given the free kick.

Simon gets up and climbs over the safety rails, dropping down to the Lawn on the other side. Landing makes his whole body hurt, old aches and pains flaring through all the narrowest bends and creases of him, but that’s what he was hoping for. Sometimes, it is all he has to remind himself he’s still alive. Simon lets himself sink into it for a moment, lowering one knee to the dirt and bowing his head.

It is impossible to search the entire Wavering Wood. The environment is too thick with magic, the old and unpredictable kind that used to belong to faeries and fable creatures and all other manner of strange, lost things. Penelope says there are even parts of the Wood rumoured to be untouched by magicians, hidden meadows and ancient groves and brooks that babble of the future, sequestered away because they never stop moving and changing, because they do not want to be found.

But he has three hours until the drawbridge goes up.

Three hours is long enough for him to try.