Me and My Best Friend Put On A Show That Would Make Freya Totally Jealous [closed post]

[summerdude]

Magnus wakes up, normal again except for how he's in an unfamiliar room. Not Galahad's old room, either. A nondescript one that, as far as he can tell, just has a bunch of clothes and stuff. Also he's wearing silky pajamas he'd never pick out automatically on his own?

It doesn't take long for him to feel like the walls are closing in on him. It's out of respect for Aornis that he stumbles out of her room through the door (barefoot and in the silky pajamas) and goes outside the normal way. Once outside, he flops into the snow, calling summer and feeling the way the snow steams against his skin as it melts.

He's not feeling totally regular again when he sits bolt upright, remembering that Drosera is probably in Galahad's old room with two people that aren't Magnus or Galahad. Existential crisis over, there's a child to retrieve! And hopefully, he'll run into Galahad in the halls.

Comments

[summerdude]

"Yeah, I think all you have to do is wear clothes and walk and lean and not smile with your mouth," Magnus says, thoughtfully. "You could kick ass at that."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I smile other ways?" This is, in all honesty, a fraction of a tease -- he's learned to pick the smiles out of Claudius' eyes and the set of his shoulders and he's fairly sure this is what Magnus means.

[summerdude]

"You're smiling right now, aren't you?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"Am I?" deadpan.

[summerdude]

Magnus rolls his eyes at him. "Obviously, dude," he says. "Look at you. That's--" he squints. "Smile number 23." (The number is total B.S.; he made it up on the spot.) "The one when you're trolling me, obviously. It's--" he taps the corner of his own eye. "There."

[onthewillowsthere]

He breaks into a proper smile, his thin mouth curving. "You're a scientist. Recording observations."

[summerdude]

"Who needs a formal education?" Magnus laughs, slinging an arm around Galahad's shoulders and pulling him into a half-hug.

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad hugs back, lifting Magnus off his feet -- maybe there are some things he likes about his own body, and the strength to do something like this is one.

They spend the next hour or so pulling outfits. It's a luxurious experience; Galahad has gotten plenty of clothes from the mansions closets for himself, but Magnus chooses more extravagantly and knows about more kinds of fabrics and styles, and he's constantly pulling things Galahad wants to touch and wear, things he wants to wear for Claudius. Galahad is aware that clothes are for affecting other people as much as for one's own pleasure (how could he not, living with Claudius, watching him so closely?), but his choices have tended to be focused. Other than at the dance, when Shen Yuan helped him dress, he hasn't tried to pick clothes with Claudius in mind. Now he has a much more vivid idea of what things he would like to wear to be admired in, to see whether he could make Claudius as speechless and overwhelmed as he was by the skinny jeans and t-shirt.

He also loves choosing for Magnus. There's an element of science to this, too: he has to take what he knows about Magnus, what he's observed and what Magnus has told him, and create clothes based on that knowledge. It's like creating a hypothesis from the given facts, and the experiment is whether he's right. He doesn't mind when Magnus doesn't like something he picked; it's more data. He loves the feeling of pride and satisfaction when he chooses well.

Eventually, though, Drosera wakes and comes off the bed to nip at their heels. She's bored and hungry and unwilling to be ignored. After they feed her a quick snack of raw fish, Galahad asks, "Do you still want to cut off your toe today?"

[summerdude]

"Yeah, might as well," says Magnus, as he finishes neatly folding the pile of clothes he's decided to keep. It's more than he expected to, but still really restrained -- he liked a ton of what Galahad selected for him, but he can't shake the feeling that more than his ten favorite items is an insurmountable excess. Heck, even when he first got to Valhalla, he only added three complete outfits (all green t-shirts and blue jeans) to the single change of clothes he had on the streets... and he didn't bother adding more to that until Alex, conspiring with Blitzen, first got her hands on his wardrobe a year and a half later.

He looks up from the clothes. "What do you think is best? Why am I asking, it should definitely be Jack, right?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"Jack knows you, and he can do it without you wielding him." Galahad could also do it, he's pretty sure, but he's deferring to Magnus.

[summerdude]

"Or would some enormous scissors be better? More controlled," Magnus says, musingly. He kicks off his latest pair of shoes -- a fun set of gladiator-style sandals Galahad had pulled, which he thinks he might actually keep, for the vibes -- and then peels off the socks he's been wearing pretty much all along, and regards his toe. Then he draws Jack from his necklace. "Hey buddy, do you think you could chop off my little toe without getting anything else?"

Jack does a little swoop. "Oh, sure, señor, I'm the sharpest sword in the Worlds. It'll be a cinch!" Then he stills in midair. "Why do you want to chop your toe off?"

"To see if I can reattach it."

"Weird," Jack comments. "Well, okay. I've destroyed a few feet in my time. Do you remember the jotunn in Flam? And how we stabbed it right in the tootsie? Man, that was a good fight. It would've been better if--"

"So," says Magnus to Galahad, sotto voce. "Jack is an option."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad gives him a yeah, okay kind of look. "In the bathroom. You can bleed into the bathtub. And there are towels."

[summerdude]

"I was thinking the same thing," Magnus nods. He sighs, and pulls off his pants, too. He's pretty sure toes don't bleed a ton, but he'd prefer not to get blood on anything nice.

Jack is still talking, so Magnus wraps his hand around his hilt. "C'mon, Jack," he says, and -- whoa! It's kind of weird to be actually wielding a sword again (by some value of wield) for the first time in months. He finds himself automatically wanting to sink into a fighting stance, but he squelches the urge with a weird little look down Jack's blade. "You're the precisest sword in the Nine Worlds, right? We only want the little toe off."

"Boss, I sewed Tiny's bowling bag, I can cut off a toe," Jack says.

This -- doesn't actually follow, in Magnus's estimation, but he does trust Jack with his life, so he just shrugs. "Okay, dude," he says to Galahad. "I guess it's all sorted. To the tub?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He nods. From something of the same impulse, he strips down to the sensible underwear -- he's certainly seen limbs cut off before, if not specifically a small toe, and he's deeply uninterested in getting blood on his clothes.

The bathroom is small and clean, and Galahad assesses it briskly. "Sit in the bath," as he grabs an armful of towels.

[summerdude]

Magnus plops himself down in the tub, and props his foot up on its faucet. "I feel like I should make a toast," he tells Galahad, wiggling his toes. "A toe-st. In case I can't reattach it. Like, 'thank you for your outstanding job.'"

[onthewillowsthere]

To this Galahad says nothing; he gets a Dixie cup out of the cabinet over the sink and fills it with water, then sits down beside the bathtub. He lines up the cup of water, one of the folded towels. Mothwing would want him to have cobwebs and moss to stanch bleeding, marigold to prevent infection.

[summerdude]

Oh, hey, Magnus recognizes that cup! Well, that style of cup. From the last time they did healings in this bathroom. Wow, things sure have changed over the past however many months... he barely even knew Galahad at the time, and now they're, like, brothers, about to cut off his toe together. That's actually so cool. He loves this guy so much.

He lolls his head back, trying to work up the nerve to let Jack rip. Obviously a toe is no big deal, in the grand scheme of things, and it'll probably barely even hurt compared to most way he's been injured before, but it also has been an awfully long time since he last died or even got injured in any major way, so.

[onthewillowsthere]

He's starting to realize that he can read Magnus, just as he can read Claudius -- it's a new realization, and quietly pleasing (he hasn't studied Magnus the way he has Claudius; he must have just learned it from being around him so much). Right now, he can tell that Magnus is -- he's nervous. He's usually only nervous when talking about Alex, the future.

Galahad leans forward towards Magnus' foot and says, softly, "It was an honor to toe you."

[summerdude]

And Magnus cracks up! If Galahad's intended purpose was to get him to relax, it worked; obviously everything will be fine since he's here with him. The only thing that could make this more reassuring would be if Galahad somehow whipped Alex out of his pocket, or whatever.

He lets go of Jack and take Galahad's hand, gripping it hard. "Just the little toe, Jack," he says, closing his eyes. "From the base of it. I gotta have enough to try and reattach it. And don't tell me when."

[onthewillowsthere]

Perfect. Galahad threads his fingers through Magnus' and holds on tightly. Since Magnus has his eyes closed, Galahad watches Jack.

[summerdude]

Jack, being Jack, strikes swiftly. It feels like a pinch, and then Magnus's body is flooding with the heat that always follows an injury, so fierce and distracting he barely makes out the soft sound of a dislodged toe hitting porcelain. "Fuck," he breathes, choking back a groan and then wondering why he's bothering to swallow the noise -- it's not like he's trying to keep a second arrow from hitting somewhere fatal during Battle Practice so he can swing his practice sword at a few more einherjar before he succumbs. "Holy Helheim. Ow." He grits his teeth and opens his eyes. Yup, there's a bloody toe-stump at the end of his foot. Wait, where did his toe go?

[onthewillowsthere]

It's not the worst wound he's ever seen, not by a long way. It's bleeding a lot, but wounds at the extremities always bleed more than wounds on the trunk -- especially the feet. He reaches for the towel--

--and sees the river at Corbenic, his mother's castle. The land is barren: the fields are empty, as in winter, with occasional broken stalks of wheat or corn blowing in some ill wind; the trees have lost their leaves, and no birds sing. Though the sky is cloudless, it's a yellowish color, the way it turns sometimes right before a storm; the air smells like lightning. The castle keep is looks as it should, but there are no people coming and going, no smoke from fires, no sounds. The river is grey, and on the river is a coracle.

In the coracle, there is a man.

The man is dressed in a loose robe, his shoulders draped with a cloak, and on his head is a circlet studded with jewels, their settings worked to look like stars. He has a net in his hands, and he throws it into the water and brings it back in again to the boat, over and over; every time it's empty. Just as the fields are a wasteland and the animals on the earth are silent or gone, the river yields no fish.

The man looks up when he hears Galahad approach, and brings the coracle over to the shore. Galahad waits for him to stand, but instead he hooks the net at the side of his boat, and throws open his robe.

The Fisher King's groin has no male organ, but a deep gash, a mirror of the wound in Christ's side. It's a deep cut, from which blood continually seeps, and Galahad understands: the land is empty because the Fisher King is empty; it's an impotence that has begun in him and seeped forth like blood. This is what God has prepared him for -- not just to heal a man, but to heal the earth, to heal this kingdom, to undo its maiming so that its life can begin again. This is the quest he's forsaken. It's a suffering that has no answer except the Grail. Only with the Grail and the blood of Christ within it can this body be anointed with health.

Galahad can say nothing. What can he say? Tell the Fisher King that he can't heal him because he's fallen in love? That even before he was in love he broke his vow of chastity and lay with a man? That his quest is over?

The Fisher King smiles at him. "You look so much like your mother."

Galahad says nothing.

"Come here, boy. Let me see you better."

He takes a reluctant step forward. His eyes keep straying to the gash between the Fisher King's legs.

When he's close enough, he drops to one knee, and the Fisher King takes hold of his chin and turns his face back and forth, as if searching for something there. Galahad is rigid.

"Come inside," the Fisher King says at last. "The Grail is within."

"I can't," Galahad answers.

"It's time."

"I'm not--"

"I know the prophecy. It's time."

Galahad's ears are ringing. If Magnus is talking, he's missed it entirely.

[summerdude]

"...ly it's not that bad," Magnus is saying. "I'm just out of practice. Maybe I should cut off appendages more often, just in case, so I can stay in practice." He's rambling, he knows he's rambling, but he's trying to distract himself from the throbbing as he half-sits and scrabbles through the blood that's trickling down the side of the tub to try and find his toe, still clinging to Galahad's hand with his other hand. "Wait, maybe I should have prayed to Njord first? Oh great Njord, god of the wind and the seas, ...grandpappy... you of the glorious feet, the most glorious feet of all the gods in all the Worlds, please help me make my feet glorious again. I'll, uh, tell everyone how great your feet are if you do. Thanks, your grandson, Magnus-- Oh, there it is -- amen."

[onthewillowsthere]

He crosses himself reflexively, and finally remembers to press the towel up against Magnus' foot.

[summerdude]

"Dude," says Magnus, who has retrieved his toe and is looking at it. "I think that's bone." He glances over -- he hadn't thought Galahad was squeamish about blood, but he's looking a little peaked? "Are you okay?"