blades before babes

Magnus hasn't told any of his numerous fathers his plan because he knows they'd put the kibosh on it immediately. Sunny knows, because he's doing it for her. Alex knows, because he's definitely going to be passing out in front of him. Galahad knows, because Magnus likes to keep him in the loop, and because Galahad needs to explain things to SecUnit if SecUnit notices and gets worried. (SecUnit doesn't know, up front, even though Magnus promised to tell it about dangerous activities, for essentially the same reasons he's not telling his dads.)

He takes Sunny flying around on Jack after lunch and then, when he returns Sunny to their dads, sends Jack racing around the entire diameter of their whole world a couple of times while he wrestles with Alex (in varying animal forms) and then wrestles with Alex (in an entirely different and human way). And then he spends about half an hour meditating on Sunny's siblings, and when he's so tired that he can barely keep his eyes open, he calls Jack back and returns him to pendant form, thinking Violet and Klaus. Violet and Klaus the entire time.

He can feel Alex catching his collapsing body, and then everything goes dark.

First, his dreams show him Blitzen and Samirah in the dressing room at Blitzen's Best. Sam is being fitted into her wedding dress; Blitzen has pliers out and is adjusting the chain mail lace detail at the edge of her hijab. Magnus takes a very careful mental snapshot of that so he can describe it to Alex later.

Next, his dreams show him Annabeth, chewing on the end of a ballpoint pen in one of her graduate classes. He can make out a slide about tensile strength of... something or another; in the corner of her notes, she's doodling blueprints for what looks like a truly awesome tree house.

Violet and Klaus, he thinks sternly. His dream slides past Hearthstone and TJ at the Chase Space helping some kid in the kitchen, past Mallory and Halfborn on what seems to be a date in Jotunheim, past Freya scratching the scruff of one of her cats...

...and then it slots into a scene he doesn't recognize.

Outside of a rather large hotel stand three figures. Two of them are Violet and Klaus Baudelaire, who Magnus will undoubtedly recognize, but the third is an unknown man wearing a suit with the word ‘MANAGER’ embroidered over the pocket of the jacket. A taxi pulls up, and two adults step out.

“Justice Strauss!” Violet calls at the same time that Klaus says, “Jerome Squalor!”

“I’m so happy to find you, I was afraid I’d never see you again,” Justice Strauss says as she hugs the two Baudelaires in turn. “I’ll never forgive myself for letting that idiotic banker take you away from me.”

“And I’ll never forgive myself for walking away from you children,” Jerome says, wrapping the two Baudelaires up in one singular large bear hug. “I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good guardian. As soon as I heard all about what happened to poor Sunny – Well. I began my own Baudelaire research.”

Justice Strauss and Jerome Squalor explain to Violet and Klaus how they both were researching everything that had happened to the Baudelaires, both before and after Sunny mysteriously vanished. How they ended up learning about a secret organization known as V.F.D., and that volunteers from that organization had been leaving both of them letters and notes.

“Wherever I looked for you, Baudelaires, and wherever I looked for Sunny, I found selfish plots to steal your fortune. I read books on injustice in all the libraries you left behind and eventually wrote a book myself. Odious Lusting After Finance chronicles the history of greedy villains, treacherous girlfriends, bungling bankers, and all the other people responsible for injustice.”

“No matter what we do, however, we can’t erase the wrongs we did you, Baudelaires,” Justice Strauss says, regret evident in her voice.

“She’s right. We should have been as noble as you are.”

“You’re noble enough,” Violet tells them as Klaus nods in agreement, and all four hug again.

The four, as well as the man wearing the MANAGER jacket, talk more, about V.F.D, something about a sugar bowl, about how Count Olaf has something called the Medusoid Mycelium, but most notably, they talk about how the next morning Count Olaf and his associates are going to stand trial, that Jerome and Justice Strauss and other members of the mysterious organization have compiled evidence against him, and how hopefully all of the Baudelaire orphans’ worries will be over.

“You’ll never have to hide from Olaf again, or worry that anyone will steal your fortune,” Jerome tells them, and they hug once more as a large clock in the top of the hotel chimes out.

The world starts to go dark around Magnus's field of vision.

No, no, he insists. I need to see more—

But the world is fading around the edges. Magnus gets a good look at Violet and Klaus's faces — they're healthy, though they look worried — and then all he sees is a regular dream about Drosera wearing a judge wig that looks kind of like the one Justice Strauss sometimes puts on and acting as arbiter of animal justice among the deer and squirrels and occasional goats of this world.

When he wakes up, he's worn out. He kisses Alex good morning (...well. Good evening) and says, with a great deal of relief and a small amount of consternation, "It worked... but I don't really understand what I saw."

Then he kisses Alex some more, and after a good few moments of getting carried tiredly away, says, "We should probably eat dinner at the cottage tonight. I have a lot to talk to Sunny about."

cw: nondescript references to Shen Yuan's death

It's different now.

Magnus isn't ignorant of the facts. He knows his own M.O. when the stuff hits the fan: run, focusing just on the next step he needs to take at every turn to keep from tripping and falling flat on his face, with a great and amorphous fear of what the future might hold looming above it all. When he was homeless, he focused on what he needed to do for his next meal, for his next park bench, to dodge the next cop who would like nothing better than to be a dick to a homeless kid with a record. He wanted to survive, but what life would look like in five, ten, fifteen years... that was never something he had the time or wherewithal to consider. His first three years in Valhalla were just battle after battle, quest after quest, an exercise in learning to trust other people again, in learning to let himself rely on them. In learning to actually live for the moment, instead of being laser-focused on each small next step forward. In not just running away to save his own skin, but to also know when to knuckle down and stand his ground and fight.

He hadn't had the time to process his mom's death until he got to Valhalla and had to process his own at the same time, and even then, the processing was curtailed by the fact that he was thrust immediately into escalating and desperate attempts to prevent Ragnarok. And even after they managed to circumvent it for at least a good few decades, there were still daily Battle Practice, and strange little smaller quests, and managing the Chase Space. Life in Valhalla -- at least for an einherji who also ran a shelter for homeless youth -- wasn't exactly slow.

That's one thing Magnus has had to adapt to, here: the slowness and openness of time. He can spend a week just teaching himself how to fix up busted old bikes. He can use his powers, not just for survival, but to grow vegetables and fruits and bodies. He's really, really enjoying learning to grow things even without alf seidr -- to just let them do their thing naturally while he tends to them the way that regular gardeners do. But with all that unstructured time, there's so much space for processing. He knows he's had grumpier spells here than he would back in Valhalla, that he's been more emotionally volatile and clingy than has typically been usual for him, or at least not since - well. Not since middle school at least. He's not ignorant of that. It's weird. It's nothing like the panic attacks that would intersperse his asthma as a kid, but it's still like something burbling up and breaking through: an off-gassing of feelings he thought he knew what to deal with.

In a way -- just like after he, himself, almost died, in those weeks when he was in the greenhouse every day just growing, growing, growing -- it's been a relief lately to have so many next steps to focus on. It's allowed him to tighten up, to keep focused and busy. There's Uncle D's garden, there's Hanguang-jun's garden, there's his own secret training with Lancelot, there's babysitting. And then, of course, there's Shen Yuan's mushroom-fruit-herb-thing body, where he spends every moment of free time, meditating and trying to share the 'summer qi' Shen Yuan had talked about as being particularly good for the bodies. He's also, honestly, been leaning a lot on Alex, spending significantly more time with him every day than they really have since he recovered from that falling sword, feeling a little guilty that he's eating into the time that Alex (and Magnus, too) likes to have to bop around and do his own thing, even though he knows Alex is more than willing to be there for him, with him. And, like, he knows that if Alex never showed up here, he could handle all of this, but...

It's one of the things that are different here, actually. Magnus doesn't have to handle it all on his own. Back in Valhalla, he had friends, and he had people he decided were family, like Hearth and Blitz and Sam. Here, too, he has friends, and people he's decided are family, like Galahad and Hanguang-jun and... well. It's a long list. He's known for years that his strength is his community, and that the best thing he can do for the world is make friends and enable those friends to shine in what they do best. The best way to save the world is as a team, working in concert.

But back in Valhalla, everyone had the same frame of reference, even if they had different attitudes and experiences and beliefs. It was normal to die and to have the trajectory of your life arcing toward the knowledge of your final death. The point was to get to a place of accepting it without letting it -- or the passage of time -- overwhelm you enough that you faded into Ginnungagap. The gods were a necessary and predictable annoyance, like Battle Practice and making sure the Chase Space didn't run out of toilet paper. Magnus knew where he stood in that world. He knew what was expected of him, and he didn't particularly care if he met or exceeded or even fell short of those expectations, as long as Ragnarok was kept at bay and he was true to himself and his people.

He still hasn't figured out where, exactly, he fits into this world. It's not a bad thing — it might even be a good one — but it is different. And not just because there's actual adults here who don't all suck, and who genuinely seem interested in making sure Magnus doesn't have everything on his plate for the first time since his mom died. There are also so many different perspectives and frames of reference and attitudes, enough that it's not really clear to Magnus what people are bent toward here. If there is a shared goal, or if everyone here is also just taking each next small step. There's no Ragnarok here to prevent, no definitive conclusion to work toward or to try and move away from, no concrete clear enemy to fight. It's destabilizing for a guy used to worrying about the future, even if most of his attention is focused on carefully making sure that the ground is solid for each next step forward but not being able to attend to whether it's taking you closer to or further from your final destination. Something is happening, but why? How do they stop it? How does Magnus hype up his community so they can save the day? What is there even to do to save the day? He can help bring Shen Yuan back, but what if more people get attacked? Magnus really, really doesn't want to be right about being the only person who can survive that kind of thing.

Also, it's too small to effectively just run from the danger and keep running. Not that he wants to. He likes the community he has here, likes that — even though sometimes he forgets — there are people here he trusts completely. But sitting with it,with the uncertainty and danger, is hard. And the more people challenge his assumptions — about what he's responsible for, about how the world works, about when he should set down his own load and trust himself to rely on others — the harder it is to know which next step to take.

It was like that when he first got here, too, when he kept trying to pray to Frey. He can't remember when he stopped doing that. Since Easter, maybe? And even before that he was praying less and less, and turning to the people here more and more. Things here are different. He's known that for months as he's tried to search for meaning, some endpoint, in the wake of deliberately giving up on Valhalla, but he's really feeling it lately. Running, one step at a time, might not work anymore.

He doesn't know the right play, though. And so he leans on Alex. He grits his teeth and grimly trains, harder than he ever has before, with Lancelot. He ripens Shen Yuan's body, sometimes with Luo Binghe there (usually in silence), sometimes alone. He works in the greenhouses with Claudius and the garden with Uncle D. He hangs out with Sunny. He watches Galahad and Hanguang-jun train as he takes Drosera out to try and teach her how to hunt. It's still the cool part of spring, but the best part is teaching Dro to fish — he can stick his feet in the frigid water and calm down enough to catch his breath, and laugh at the way she splashes in the shallows of the lake. He tries to picture what the future might look like.

It's different here. So many people are mortal; so few people look at him as a final bulwark against the crumbling of the world. The strength of Alex's sensitive clay-working fingers is the same; so is the sparkling, teasing light in her eyes as she ribs Magnus into getting out of his own head. The belief he has in the strength of his community hasn't changed — his greatest talent is, he thinks, still being a good friend to his friends.

"So maybe that's the next step," he tells Drosera as she stumbles out of the lake, beak dripping, a squirming fish caught tight in one talon. "Maybe I work on being a better friend."

baby kill!!! she tells him, proudly, utterly unconcerned with his inner turmoil as she bites the head off of the fish.

Magnus takes a deep breath and lets it go slowly. The amorphous fear that swirls around him and inside him loosens for just a moment, and he stands in place, watching Drosera eat the fish, watching Galahad and Hanguang-jun train up the hill, watching Laertes and Sagramore make their way into the woods and Mothwing come out of the foliage on the other side of the lake and Susan bustle past with her bow and quiver and the flash of color in Grantaire's window that means he's setting up his easel. It's a chilly morning, but the sunlight is getting warmer and warmer. He can feel it on his hair, trimmed again by Alex just that morning.

He wraps his hand around Jack and Hanguang-jun's jade token alike, closes his eyes, and breathes.

After the talent show is over, once the anxiety and embarrassment coursing through Magnus's veins subsides, he walks the halls of the Mansion.

The day went... okay, he thinks. It's the longest he's spent inside since he passed out after the zombies, but between the open air and the convivial atmosphere of the show, he managed without any huge claustrophobic flare-ups.

Jack is still off-pendant, hamming it up with the stragglers. Magnus is happy to let him do his own thing. Jack deserves a nice life, even if his current master is fight-averse at the moment.

There are a lot of things on Magnus's mind. Fake-flyting in front of what he assumes was most of the Mansion was bracing, in a way. He doesn't miss fighting, or training to fight, every day, but he does miss the camaraderie that comes with being on a side and working with others to win. He feels the loss of his friends back home acutely, more acutely than normal. He wishes that Hearthstone and Blitzen, in particular, were here: unlike his other friends, they're not really warriors, but they can fight. He wants to ask them how they navigate the world, knowing that Ragnarok will come. Knowing that, as mortals with nonhuman lifespans, they'll probably not live to see it. It's not something they've really talked about before. Survival, yes, but not the big picture. Not what it all means.

He's finding it harder and harder to stomach his destiny. Can he stay here forever? He misses traveling. He misses being able to nip out for fresh falafel with his friends; he misses the Chase Space and the kids who flow in and out of the doors; he misses taking a wrong turn and ending up in a totally different part of the World Tree. His life has never been this stationary before. Even as a kid, his mom would take him camping nearly every weekend. Being so sedentary... he's not certain that he likes it. He feels a little trapped here, with no way out.

But he does like the people here. If he left, he thinks he'd miss them as much as he misses his people back home. And he can't fathom letting Jack back into the Nine Worlds if keeping him away means Ragnarok is indefinitely postponed. There's no easy answers.

As he ruminates, Magnus's wandering feet take him up the stairs and down another hall. They pause at the door to his room. He takes a deep breath and pushes it open.

It's clear people have been in here. The space has been neatened; someone has fixed the window. His plants are alive. Galahad has definitely rummaged through his books and his clothes; Magnus can see the voids left where certain things have been relocated to his outdoor hide-out.

He takes a deep breath and goes inside.

His first stop is the plants. He can't really read plants like Ragnelle can or anything, but he runs his fingers over the leaves and, on a whim, calls on them to grow a little. He thinks that maybe, without really realizing it, he's been doing that all along... or had been, when he was still living in this room: they've grown less in his absence than he expected. It's weird to think that, in the absence of his own daily regeneration, he's been using his alf seidr without thinking about it or even really realizing that's what he's been doing.

The view out the window beyond the plants is calm. It's clear that they're settling down toward winter: most of the leaves have fallen from the trees. It looks like a cold wind is blowing. Branches are twitching, and off in the distance, there are ripples on the lake. There's a chill when he presses his fingers to the glass.

When he closes his eyes, he sees his atrium back in Valhalla. It's always a breezy summer day in there, the trees strong and the grass soft. Nothing really changes in Valhalla. Not like here, where so many days run together but there's still a strange momentum to everything. Like stuff is moving and shifting, and since he's caught in the current, he's changing with it. He thinks, sometimes, about how Alex has the same atrium. About what it means. About what would happen if he went back and suddenly there was a mismatch. He wishes he could reach her, somehow. He wishes he could show his room back home to his friends here.

It's still weird, in a way, to be a guy who has a regular place to live. This room still feels like his, for all that he's almost reached a point where he's spent as much time avoiding it as he did living in it. A place to come back to; a place he can call home. But it's still so different from his room in Valhalla. Oh, sure, it's extremely sparse and incredibly neat. He makes up for the fact that this space doesn't have an off-set space to sleep in by putting all clutter in areas that you can't see from the bed, and by keeping the bed close to the windows. But he needs that open sky, right now, much more than he needs shelter or home or a single place to go back to. He needs exit routes and trees and walls that don't close in on him. The walls in this room -- they lean; they loom. They press. They're pressing right now, tight enough that they trap the air in his chest, and he can't shake himself loose to breathe.

He has to get out. He has to go. He'd thought, after that day, maybe -- but he can't be here. He's alone in here; there's no space. Jump, he hears his mom saying. Run. I'll find you after.

This time, at least, he doesn't crash through a closed window, breaking glass as he leaps blindly and trustingly into a fray. This time, he pushes it open and climbs out onto the roof. He sits on the steep slope of it, arms wrapped tight around his knees, shaking and staring off at the trees, willing himself to calm down and grow up. It's so stupid that being inside bothers him this much. It's so stupid that he can't just grow a pair and deal with his shit and move on and have fun. It sucks that he can't handle spending any more time than it takes to have a cursory shower in the shittiest easy-access locker room with extreme bad-shelter vibes in this place. He'd thought today might change things, and sure, he lasted longer than usual, but this fallout is a lot worse. He still can't catch his breath. He still can't stop shaking. He wants to be ready to be where all his friends mostly are, most of the time. He wants to know the path he can take to reach readiness. But he doesn't, and he's not, he's not, he's not.