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Olruggio is a happy drunk, meaning it isn't always clear to Qifrey just how much of Olruggio's good mood is successfully meeting a deadline and how much is the wine he's picked out to celebrate it.
Tonight he has fewer clues than normal. He and the girls return late from the day's outing to find Olruggio already in his cups. He has a glass poured for Qifrey before the girls' sleepy, shuffling footfalls have even cleared the stairs.
He grins broadly as he presses it into Qifrey's hand. "Don't give me that look," he says. "They bought it! No revisions! We can afford a few bottles of the good stuff."
"A few," Qifrey echoes, raising an eyebrow, but Olruggio's mood is inextinguishable. Let him have his good time, Qifrey thinks, and, conjoined with that thought: he'd have more of them, after all, had he not thrown his lot in with yours.
Always the one hand, then the other. Qifrey would say he's used to it, but then it wouldn't work, would it?
He swaps in water among Olruggio's generous glugs of wine, and sets out bread and cheese so he at least knows Olruggio has something solid in his stomach. Olruggio is more animated like this, uses his body more freely: he tosses his head back when he laughs, and curls his lip in an affected pout when Qifrey refuses a glass of something harder, from a bottle he fetches off a high shelf.
Watching him, Qifrey wonders whether there isn't a bit of desperation to how Olruggio throws himself, bodily, into his own good mood. It isn't the first time Qifrey's had the thought, but it occurs to him more often lately.
With the last dregs of Olruggio's silvernectar wine pooling in the bottle, Qifrey begins to clear the table. Olruggio is pink-cheeked, a little wrinkle running through his forehead like he doesn't quite grasp what Qifrey is doing. He sets a hand on Qifrey's arm as Qifrey passes by him.
"Hey," Olruggio says, squinting hard at Qifrey's face. "Did you have a good time, on your field trip?"
"Yes," Qifrey says. A tendril of panic snakes up through him. Olruggio's hand is warm through his sleeve. "You should drink more water. You're going to feel terrible in the morning."
"What's wrong?" Olruggio's grip tightens, and it's then Qifrey knows he let Olruggio drift too far out. "You're not happy. I watch you. Qifrey, are you ever happy?"
"Of course I am," he tells Olruggio, for the lancing pain of the lie. He smiles and tips his head as if bewildered.
A feeling struggles across Olruggio's face. His takes up Qifrey's hand. He's looking Qifrey in the eye when he puts his lips to Qifrey's knuckles.
"You know I'd do it, right?" His lips drag over Qifrey's skin as he speaks. "If I knew what it was that would make you happy. If you'd tell me."
Qifrey swallows. His temples have started to ache. He sifts for the right answer and comes up only with the past.
"Olly," he says, as softly as if they were still children. "You should go to bed."
Olruggio searches his face for a stricken second then lowers his eyes. His muttering is indistinct, but resembles an apology. His hand drops limply to his side, leaving Qifrey with an odd tingling where his fingers and lips had been.
"Olruggio," Qifrey says quietly. He can't even rationalize the hurt, for fear he would find too much comfort in it—just the idea that surely this much pain suffices would be dangerous.
Olruggio stands in one abrupt movement. Looking past Qifrey now, he stumbles away from the table. Qifrey takes hold of his elbow; he can't recall the last time he saw Olruggio this drunk.
"You don't need to do that," Olruggio says. "Since you've made it clear— Since you don't— Fuck."
"It isn't that," Qifrey says, helplessly.
Olruggio looks him in the eye. Bloodshot, miserable, exhausted—he wears it so naturally, Qifrey thinks even sober you could scratch at him and find this beneath.
"You don't want me."
It's like a fist in Qifrey's throat. "It isn't that," he says again.
"Ah, fuck." Olruggio shrugs out of Qifrey's grip. "I think—" he says, and his hand flies to his mouth. He gags behind his palm.
Qifrey shores up Olruggio's side and they hobble to the washroom where Olruggio hunches over the toilet, wracked by shudders as he dry heaves. It's not something Qifrey thinks he's meant to see but he doesn't look away. He thinks, horribly, of the boy Olruggio had been—bright and sly and incomparably warm—brought now to his knees by years of slow, silent degradation, being made to swallow Qifrey's hurts alongside his own.
He studies Olruggio's broad back and thinks how he could have been anything, back then, but he chose instead to be Qifrey's friend.
"I can't," Olruggio says, turning to look up at him now. Tears hold thickly to his lashes. "I need to throw up, but I can't."
Qifrey thinks fleetingly of banging down the door of the clinic in Kalhn for an emetic. To leave Olruggio alone for even a minute is intolerable. He kneels, his hand pressed to Olruggio's back.
"Can you reach you fingers down your throat?"
Olruggio looks at him and shakes his head wordlessly, face screwed up with misery. He turns and retches again and nothing comes up.
"Okay," Qifrey says. "Okay. Let me help."
With one hand he smooths back Olruggio's bangs. Olruggio's eyes slip closed; he looks, absurdly, grateful. He angles Olruggio's head over the toilet and with his other hand slides his fingers into Olruggio's mouth. The inside of his mouth is blood-hot. Olruggio gives a weak coughs, blinking up at Qifrey. Then, unmistakably, he begins to lap at Qifrey's fingers. He groans and Qifrey feels it.
"Olly," he whispers. "Please. Let me help."
Olruggio's answer is an indecipherable smear of syllables. His eyes are half-lidded, glassy. Qifrey can't think of anything for it; he shoves his fingers further in, until Olruggio gags, until his whole body lurches and Qifrey only just manages to retract his hand before Olruggio finally vomits.
Once he's begun, the rest comes up easier. Qifrey holds Olruggio's hair back from his face, for all that's worth. It seems like a long time before Olruggio is through. He spits to clear his mouth then lists bonelessly to one side, his eyes closed.
"Sorry," he croaks. It sounds wretched, dredged up from the center of him, guilty and hopeless.
Nothing Olruggio's ever done could warrant an apology like that. Qifrey purses his lips. He doesn't trust himself to speak. He helps Olruggio to his feet, and Olruggio offers a muttered thank you. He seems more alert now, but hangdog, subdued.
They don't talk on the way to Olruggio's room. It's still cluttered with parts and prototypes from his most recent contraption. The sort of warm details of life in progress that catch Qifrey around the chest. They take the circular steps to Olruggio's bed, one shambling footfall at a time.
Olruggio drops heavily onto the mattress, still dressed. Qifrey shuffles about the room, setting a carafe of water and cup within Olruggio's easy reach.
"Do you want me to find your nightclothes?" Qifrey asks.
"I don't need to inconvenience you any more tonight."
"You're no trouble to me." He smiles and tries to make Olruggio hear him, but Olruggio's gaze rests elsewhere, someplace past what Qifrey can see.
"I'm sorry," Olruggio says. Qifrey watches his throat work. "I shouldn't have put you in that position."
Whether he means in the position to refuse him, or Qifrey's fingers down his throat, Qifrey doesn't ask. "It's alright. No harm done, in any case."
Olruggio shakes his head. "I think I made a mistake," he says, voice low and ragged. "Teaching you to smile."
Qifrey feels knocked dumb by the blow. Inside him, something moves: the sudden shriveling of a branch, or a root recoiling.
"Wasn't something you should've been taught," Olruggio continues. "Should've been something you just got to learn. So maybe now it'd be attached to a feeling, not a goal."
"It isn't always that." Qifrey's voice is strangled.
"I don't know," Olruggio says, barring his forearm against his eyes. "I don't know what the right thing is, or if I ever helped you, or why it feels like— Why you're not—"
"Olruggio." Qifrey's throat feels like it's slowly cinching closed. "Please. Just sleep. You'll feel differently in the morning."
"Yeah." Olruggio huffs a bare, unhappy laugh. "Maybe if we're lucky I won't remember a thing."
Qifrey opens his mouth but has nothing to say. He goes woodenly through the motions of bidding Olruggio goodnight. He closes the door quietly behind him and considers the bridge between the atelier and Olruggio's workshop; it seems longer than normal, the proportions oddly stretched, appearing to shrink as it goes. The distance feels insurmountable.
He takes stock, as if fortifying himself for the journey. He's exhausted. His head aches ominously—he can expect to be laid up with a migraine tomorrow. Amid everything else, he locates a slight stinging on his knuckle. Caught on Olruggio's teeth, he thinks, though he hadn't felt it at the time.
He puts his lips to the scrape, then his tongue. It tastes of almost nothing, only a vague sourness he assumes is Olruggio's dried spit and his own underlying iron. Slowly, he lowers himself to the ground. He hasn't taken a single step; his back is pressed to Olruggio's door.
Qifrey's debt compounds, hour to hour. There is no absolution in a clean slate. Despite this, he hopes Olruggio really has forgotten, come morning. It wouldn't be the first of his confessions to be undone. Among Olruggio's vices, his worst might be the belief that love can save them both, when really it's only ever saved one.