Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

 Why was he so comfortable? Ogron shifted, his half-asleep brain trying to figure out why the surface under him was A: soft, and B: comfortable. He was in a dungeon awaiting his eventual death…why was he warm and comfortable?

 He rolled over and felt himself start to slip off whatever he was on, the jump-scare startling him into awareness as he scrambled to stay off the floor. 

 ‘What…?’ he mumbled, rubbing his eyes as he sat up and blinked at the the blanket over him in confusion. Where…? Ah, of course. He looked around, seeing the bright walls and furniture, the events of the past day rushing back to him. The Winx…the Winx had saved him and his friends. 

 His friends! His gaze whipped around, before he felt ridiculous for jerking around as though being electrocuted. His friends were fine, passed out on the couch just as he’d been. Duman was still clinging onto Gantlos, his entire body wrapped around him like a baby monkey, while Gantlos lay perfectly still, his hand resting on his chest, where his fingers interlocked with Duman’s. Anagan had clearly tossed and turned incessantly, his blanket mostly on the floor, while his head was half-buried under a pile of cushions.

 His breathing evening out from the adrenaline and panic that had surged through him when he’d woken up, Ogron sighed with relief, resting his head on his hand and just watching his friends sleep. The peace was almost jarring after the months of panic, fear and stress, but he was quite happy with the transition.

 ‘Oh, hey, you’re up!’ 

 Ogron yelped with surprise, whipping around and frowning at the blonde fairy that had taken it upon herself to shatter his morning tranquility. 

 Stella grimaced apologetically. ‘Ooh, sorry! Didn’t mean to startle you!’

 ‘Quiet!’ Ogron hissed, gesturing to his sleeping friends.

 ‘Sorry sorry sorry!’ Stella tiptoed over, being far more dramatic in her movements than she perhaps needed to be. ‘Do you like pancakes?’

 Ogron just stared at her for a full minute.

 Stella shifted awkwardly. ‘Just because I was gonna make some, because I figure you guys are all super hungry and stuff, but I don’t want to make something you don’t like.’

 ‘…Pancakes are fine.’

 ‘Great! Now I better get on that before Bloom wakes up and offers to help. Imma let you in on a little secret: Bloom is one of the most kickass fairies I’ve ever met, and she’s really good at a lot of things, but the girl could burn water. Not in a spell way, in a ‘trying to cook instant noodles’ sorta way. And I figure you don’t want to get welcomed to the loft by me having to get the fire extinguisher. Especially since I don’t actually know where the fire extinguisher is. Damn, that’s an oversight.’

 As Stella continued her hushed chatter, Ogron nodded in a vaguely understanding manner, though he was only truly registering half of this. Bloom…water…fire extinguisher. That felt like about a tenth of the salient points, but Stella was already talking about a k-pop band, so he felt relatively safe not trying to tease understanding out of the chatter. 

 With a weary groan, he coaxed his exhausted muscles up and off the couch, moving slowly to accommodate both the bone-deep exhaustion that was loudly protesting the movement, and his still-slumbering friends. Anagan shifted as he got up, but Anagan seldom stayed in the same position for longer than five minutes when he was asleep, so Ogron felt confident that he hadn’t roused him.

 He meandered blearily over to the kitchen, where Stella, surprisingly enough for a princess who’d probably grown up with a horde of help to carry her through life, was getting out cooking implements with ease and expertise.

 ‘You never seen a frying pan before?’ Stella teased, noticing the surprise etched on his expression. 

 ‘…No…no…of course I have…’ Ogron mumbled. ‘I’m just a little surprised a princess has.’

 Stella giggled as she procured her various ingredients. ‘I can do a lot more than people expect. I’m very self-sufficient; I just like complaining about having to do stuff.’ She spun around, apparently having changed subject for the billionth time. ‘Coffee?’

 Of all the words she’d said, that was one of the few that truly made it through the haze. ‘Please…’

 As he tried to find some semblance of coherence in the liquid he was arguably slightly (very) addicted to, Ogron watched Stella with mild, tired curiosity. He was still surprised the Winx were letting them stay here. Part of him was waiting for them to remember they had been enemies and throw them in a cell. And yet Stella…was cooking for him. Rather expertly, actually. 

 ‘Y’know,’ she said, pulling him back to reality, which was rapidly clearing up thanks to the beautiful magic of caffeine, ‘when we were first-years at Alfea, Bloom tried to flip an omelette.’ She performed an expert flip of the pan, providing Ogron with the link between this and Bloom and her omelette. ‘It wound up on the ceiling fan. Flora tried to turn the fan off, but she made it go faster, and…well, long story short, our chef wound up with an unplanned accessory.’

 Ogron snorted into his coffee, and Stella grinned. ‘Hey, y’know, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you do a laugh that wasn’t evil! I like it. You should do it more.’

 ‘Maybe if I didn’t have torture and death hanging over my head,’ Ogron deadpanned.

 Stella shrugged. ‘Who doesn’t have that hanging over them at some point? Amirite?’

 ‘I think you are in actual fact wrong…very few people have found themselves in this situation.’

 ‘Well, probably not this exact situation, no,’ Stella admitted. ‘But we’ve all found ourselves staring death in the face! I just call it Tuesday. Actually, a number of my near-death experiences have been on Tuesdays. I earned my Enchantix on a Tuesday. Okay, well, it was down to the wire, because it was going on midnight, so it coulda been Wednesday, but who has time to check a watch when they’re flying for their lives to get away from the dragon’s their bff’s bf just set on them because his ex teamed up with a megalomaniac and mind-controlled him? Oh, and also, I don’t actually own a watch, so all that is moot anyways.’

 Ogron was now semi-convinced Stella might not actually be real, and was in fact the result of one of his stress-induced fever dreams.

 ‘I’m a bit much at eight in the morning, huh?’ Stella teased, watching him try and make sense of her general existence. ‘I’ll make more sense once you eat something.’ She slid a plate across to him. ‘Go on, eat. You look half-starved.’ Well, that was because he was in fact half-starved. He hadn’t eaten anything other than the hasty snacks the Winx had brought to the Amazon in at least…four days? He realised he didn’t actually know how long they’d been stuck in that cell.

 ‘Stella…’ he started. ‘What day is it?’

 ‘Wednesday. Why?’ It was…Friday? when they got captured? Yes, Friday. 

 ‘So that makes it…’ he paused, his brain too addled to perform the calculation quickly. ‘…Four days.’ Damn. Four days stuck in the pitch black with no food. No wonder he was absolutely starving.

 Though he hated appearing desperate, his mouth was watering at the smell of food, and he rapidly gave up on attempting to appear composed, digging in with the gusto of a starving man, since he actually was a starving man. So he was just digging in with his own gusto then. Ah, the caffeine had taken enough effect for his thoughts to start rambling in order to fill silence again.

 ‘Mm…’ he swallowed, offering Stella a tentative, but grateful smile. ‘Thank you, Stella. These are excellent.’

 ‘No problem! I’ll make some more for your friends just as soon as they decide to get up.’

 ‘With the smell of food, I doubt that will take long.’

 As though Ogron had foretold it, there was a quiet, awakening snuffle from the couch, and Ogron and Stella glanced over to see Duman’s nose twitching. He shifted, cracking one eye open and glancing around in search of the smell that had roused him. 

 ‘…Are those pancakes…?’ he mumbled blearily, attempting to lift his head from Gantlos’s chest.

 ‘Mhm!’ Stella held up a plate. ‘I’ll make you some.’

 Duman’s eyes brightened at the promise of food, and he tried to lift himself up, but his arms gave out and he fell back down onto Gantlos.

 ‘Mmf…’ Gantlos stirred, blinking slowly back to awareness. ‘Duman…? What are you…’

 ‘Sorry,’ Duman apologised sheepishly. ‘I was trying to get up, but my muscles apparently didn’t get the memo.’ He tried again to sit up, to no avail. 

 Gantlos, yawning and rubbing his eyes, carefully eased himself up, bringing Duman with him until they were both sitting up, the shapeshifter leaning heavily on his boyfriend.

 ‘There we go…better?’

 ‘Mhm…’ Duman looked longingly towards where Stella was flipping pancakes, his desire to get up and walk evident. However, as had just been evidenced, he was still to weak to hold himself up, let alone walk, so he was forced to remain where he was.

 ‘You can stay right there; I’ll bring them over!’ Stella chirped, unwilling to let Duman’s illness put a dampener on breakfast. 

 There was quiet, incoherent mumbling from the pile of pillows that had started the night under Anagan, but had become a sort of soft cocoon overnight. 

 ‘Where am I?’ the pillows mumbled, being pushed aside to reveal a bleary wizard, rubbing his eyes with one hand, while his right was being very carefully cradled to protect the healing wound in his shoulder. 

 ‘The Winx’s loft,’ Ogron replied, watching worriedly as Anagan flinched at every movement of his shoulder. ‘Remember?’

 ‘Oh yeah…’ He grimaced down at his shoulder. ‘And I got shot.’

 ‘Someone remind me why Bloom didn’t heal that?’ Duman asked.

 ‘Great question. I’d be wondering that myself.’ Stella plated up another two servings of pancakes, making her way over to a very grateful Duman and Gantlos. ‘Bloom’s healing powers really more cover energy stuff. Y’know, magic, life force…all that kinda stuff.’ She handed Duman a plate. ‘Like your energy imbalance. Speaking of which, you feeling any better?’

 Her reply was spoken through a mouthful of food, and Ogron quietly facepalmed at the lack of decorum. Yes, Duman was exhausted and starving, but he could surely put off speaking until he had swallowed!

 ‘Yeah,’ Duman mumbled, swallowing. ‘A bit. Don’t feel like I’m being burned alive anymore. These are great, by the way. Thanks.’

 ‘Welcome!’ 

 ‘Oh, hey, you made breakfast!’ Flora wandered in, looking pleasantly surprised at Stella having sorted out food. ‘I was just going to do that. Thanks, Stella.’

 ‘No problem. I suggested the wizards stay with us, so I should probably be helpful. But since everyone else is probably gonna get summoned in here by the smell of food, would you be a dear and mix up some more batter? We’ve got ten people living here now.’

 ‘And one of them eats for fifty,’ Musa snarked, walking in, her hair askew and headphones hanging around her neck. ‘Morning.’ The remark was just directed at the room in general as she beelined for the coffee pot. ‘Oh thank god, you already made coffee. We fought an army and a forest fire yesterday; I barely remember what year it is.’

 ‘The hundred and fifty-ninth year of the Opal Revolution!’ Stella chirped, and Ogron raised an eyebrow.

 ‘The what now?’

 ‘Oh, sorry, here on Earth you’d call it 2024, right?’

 ‘Mhm…?’

 ‘Well, on Solaria, we have three suns that we orbit. And every few centuries, those suns align. We count that as the start of a new revolution, a new age. Each one is named after a jewel. This is the Opal Revolution, the one before it was the Topaz Revolution. About a hundred years from now, we’ll start the Spinel Revolution. I’ve always wondered what we’ll do if we run out of jewel names…make up some new ones? Feels like cheating.’

 ‘Maybe you’ll discover new jewels,’ Duman pitched. ‘There gotta be some you haven’t found yet.’

 ‘True, true…but what if we find a new jewel just after we changed the naming system? That’ll throw everything off. Fortunately, my reign’s gonna end before the Spinel Revolution, so I don’t have to worry about naming the revolution after that. But I’d call it the Jasper Revolution.

 ‘How many revolutions have you had?’ Duman asked curiously.

 ‘Sixty-nine. First was the Sunstone Revolution, for obvious reasons. Then Diamond, and so on.’

 The conversation continued, and the other Winx woke and drifted in, Stella politely shooing Bloom away from the hob, saying she appreciated the offer, but if she wanted to see a fireman, she’d prefer she just called her dad.

 This was certainly a strange situation Ogron found himself in. Safe, comfortable and protected in the home of the girls that had been his enemies for so long. His friends, though still blatantly exhausted, were safe, and despite the slight tired slur to his words, Duman was as involved in the conversation as Stella, to the point where he was pitching new things Solaria’s revolutions could be named after. Somehow Ogron doubted Stella would decide to name ages after different kinds of duck, but he was just happy to hear the energy back in his friend’s voice. After months of stress, panic and obsessive planning, Ogron finally allowed the tension to ease just a little. This was going to work. This was going to work just fine.

Chapter Text

 ‘Right!’ Stella clapped her hands, drawing the attention to her. ‘So, since the wizards are gonna be staying with us, we need to discuss sleeping arrangements.’

 ‘We’re fine on the couch,’ Anagan offered. ‘You don’t need to try and make room.’

 ‘Don’t be silly, Anagan. You need an actual bed. We have a guest room, but it isn’t really big enough for four…so I was thinking I might just crash with Flora for a while?’

 ‘Oh…’ Flora bit her lip. ‘Stella, I would love having you…but are you sure you can handle my plants? You…have a bit of a rivalry.’

 Stella huffed, rolling her eyes. ‘That was one plant, and it tried to eat my sceptre!’

 ‘It needed extra iron.’

 ‘What kind of plant eats metal anyway?’

 ‘Oh, a-’

 ‘I wasn’t really asking,’ Stella interjected. ‘I was just hoping I could stay with you since, other than mine, your room has the most sunlight?’ Flora nodded, and apparently the decision had been made. ‘Fantastic! I’ll move my stuff over, and we can get to work on clearing out the guest room.’ She turned to Ogron. ‘We made sure we had a guest room in case when we found the last fairy she could come live with us so we could keep an eye on her, but then it turned out she already had a house, so we’ve just been using it as a bit of a junk room. But we can clear it out!’

 ‘You really don’t have to do that…’ Ogron tried to insist, but he was waved away.

 ‘Of course we do. You’ve kinda been through hell, so I’d say you deserve to sleep in an actual bed.’ Ogron still couldn’t believe how welcoming Stella was. She seemed genuinely happy to have them there. It was…strange. But oddly heartwarming.

 ‘Well, thank you then.’ Ogron got up from the couch, trying to ignore the residual tremor in his muscles. ‘I’ll help you.’

 Stella grimaced, putting a hand on his arm. ‘Ogron, honey, I mean this in the nicest way possible, but you look like hell, and manual labour isn’t something I think you should be doing right now.’

 ‘…Oh.’ Ogron faltered. He wasn’t used to not having something he needed to do. ‘Well…what am I supposed to do then?’

 Stella gingerly held up a clump of the greasy mess that was unfortunately his hair. ‘…Shower? No offence, but…you kinda need it.’ Ogron was forced to acknowledge that was true. After days in the dungeon, stuck in the suffocating jungle humidity, all off the back of weeks living in the sewers, a layer of grime was clinging to him, and, now that he finally had headspace that wasn’t taken up with panic and anxiety, he realised just how filthy he felt.

 ‘You should all take a shower, get clean,’ Stella said decisively. ‘Duman, I know you can’t really stand, but I’m sure Gantlos can help. And I’ll sort out some clothes that aren’t practically adhered to your skin.’ Having seen the way Stella dressed, the prospect of her picking out their clothes brought on a sense of apprehension for Ogron, but she had already let them live in her apartment, was moving out of her room, and had welcomed them wholeheartedly. There was no universe in which he could be anything but grateful for her offer of new clothes. 

 ‘Alright. Thank you.’

 ‘No problem! Use my bathroom, just down there, and feel free to use any of my hair products; when it hasn’t gone weeks without being washed, you have really nice hair, so take care of it.’

 Ogron smiled awkwardly at the compliment. ‘Um…thank you.’

 Stella beamed right back. ‘You all go get cleaned up, and I’ll try and figure out where to put the last sixty issues of Solaria Today, a vacuum cleaner, and all our other junk.’

 Ogron headed in the direction Stella had indicated, leaving her to roll her eyes at Flora as the Fairy of Nature attempted to explain that a vacuum cleaner was in fact, not junk, and actually an important thing they’d all been looking for, so why was it in the junk room.

 ‘Can you believe they’re letting us stay here?’ Anagan asked, getting up and falling into step beside him. ‘I’m kinda waiting for them to-’

 ‘Call the Fortress of Light and have us tossed in Omega?’ Ogron finished. 

 ‘Yep, pretty much.’ Anagan winced, rolling his shoulder to try and ease his evident discomfort, and Ogron slowed.

 ‘How’s your shoulder?’

 ‘Fine as it can be…Flora gave me some painkillers, so it’s not too sore. And at least it’s not infected…’

 ‘Can’t believe Diana stopped you bleeding out…’ Ogron muttered. ‘I can’t decide if I’m more incredulous about that, or about the fact you took that bullet for her in the first place.’

 Anagan shrugged with one shoulder, leaving the other very much in position. ‘It was instinct.’

 ‘Your instinct was to save the woman that was trying to kill us? Those seem like some dangerous instincts.’

 ‘Hey, she saved me right back, so those were some smart instincts.’ Anagan nudged Ogron, smiling softly. ‘Now let’s stick a pin in the deep conversation, okay? I know you need to over-analyse, but you also need to wash, and so do I. So let’s save the question of whether or not I have a death wish for later, okay?’

 Ogron nodded, though he was still unable to shake the knowledge that Anagan could have died. They could all have died. They owed absolutely everything to the people they’d tried to obliterate. Ogron’s world was truly turned on its head. And then that head was promptly slammed into the wall. Several times over.

 ‘Stress yourself out later,’ he muttered as he went into the bathroom, trying to keep from hurling himself into the details and stress points his brain was loudly announcing, like an obnoxious newscaster broadcasting his delicate walk along the line between ‘fine’ and ‘complete emotional mess’.

 To be frank, he was utterly terrified to glance in the mirror. His gaze edged towards it, but he managed to distract himself from having to see the state he was in by noticing how ornate Stella’s mirror frame was. His brain promptly attempted to divert him, wondering whether it was actual gold - probably, seeing as how Stella was a princess - but he told it to shut up, telling himself his reflection couldn’t possibly be that bad. He looked.

 It was that bad. His hair hung in matted, greasy clumps around his face, practically brown instead of the fierce red that matched his temper. His skin was crusted with a layer of grime and dried sweat, and his normally glacial eyes were dulled, as though the ice had lethargically melted into a depressed, lost puddle.

 ‘Oh dear god…’ he murmured. Was this actually him? This wasn’t some kind of Duman prank he didn’t get? Well, Duman could barely stand, so that seemed improbable. This was him. The mighty wizard who’d brought the Major Fairies to their knees looked…dead. His power had deserted him, and now he had naught but nerves and insecurity to hold him together.

 As he gazed into the eyes of the haggard man the mirror was trying to tell him he’d become, he shook his head, tearing his eyes away. 

 ‘No…no, absolutely not.’ He wouldn’t be this…this…shell any longer! He wouldn’t tolerate this for another second!

 The clothes that had practically become a second skin were shed with a deep disgust, and he relegated them to as far from his sight as possible. 

 The water was cold, but he couldn’t wait. His expression soured further as the water ran brown, and he scrubbed obsessively at his skin until he could see the pale, creamy complexion he knew.

 ‘Thank god…’ He ran his hands through his hair, grimacing at the grease that coated his fingers, seeking the silky locks he used to take such good care of.

 When water had done its very best, his attention turned to the veritable horde of hair products and shower gels Stella possessed. This was all for one person? How long did Stella take on self-care?

 Well, he needed some help here, so he just picked out the first thing that made sense. Conditioner. Seemed like a good idea. 

 Roughly seven different hair products later, the strands of hair being washed into his face were finally scarlet once more, and the water ran clear. Finally. He wasn’t sure how long it took him to finally feel like he’d washed the past few months off him, but at long last, he felt…clean. A little closer to the man who’d appeared at Alfea months ago, believing his quest to be at an end. 

 Though…he reasoned, as he stepped out in a cloud of pleasantly-scented steam, he wasn’t that man. Not anymore. That man would have refused the Winx’s aid, refused to accept help from his enemies. He’d never have even entertained the idea of trusting them. Of course, he wasn’t sure whether or not he trusted the Winx yet. That was through no fault of theirs; it was his issue. He just…he couldn’t trust. Not easily. He had three people he trusted with his life, his heart, his trauma, and everyone else was a hazy, unnerving threat. He just…he didn’t really have a setting between trusting someone with his whole self, and clutching a metaphorical dagger whenever they drew near. But perhaps he could find a middle ground. He’d need to.

 The thought of putting his old clothes back on set disgust crawling up his spine, but, to his surprise and gratitude, he noticed fresh clothes laid out over the radiator.

 ‘Thanks, Stella…’ he murmured, slipping them on. He hated how he hadn’t noticed how unclean he was. Just how out of it had he been? 

 ‘Maybe don’t start asking that question…’

 Moment of truth. Grimacing at the thought of his previous reflection, he wiped the steam from the mirror, cracking one eye open to peek. To his eternal relief, he recognised himself. His skin was a pale cream, almost white, while his hair was red again, tumbling in its own gentle waves, rather than hanging in matted clumps. His eyes still looked lost and tired, but the relief at his gradual return to his former state had sparked a tentative light in them. 

 ‘Well look who’s red again…’ Anagan remarked as Ogron stepped out into the hall. ‘You look human again. Nice.’

 Ogron elbowed Anagan as far from his bullet wound as possible, rolling his eyes. ‘You look semi-decent again too.’

 ‘Nice to see our old friend the snark has come back.’

 Ogron smiled fondly, glancing around for Gantlos and Duman. ‘You seen-’

 ‘Gantlos has been worried sick, Duman is finally conscious again, and they’re in the shower together. I don’t know what they’re doing, and I’m not asking.’

 ‘Fair enough.’

 The two of them wandered out into the living room, stopping short at the giant pile of stuff in the middle of it.

 ‘Stella…’ Flora said awkwardly, nervously watching as Stella hefted yet more stuff out of the spare room. ‘Are you sure this is the best way to do this?’

 ‘Probably not,’ Stella admitted. ‘But I’m committed now.’ She glanced over and saw Ogron and Anagan, and her face split into a beam as bright as her sun powers. ‘Hey! You guys look great! And you found the clothes I left out. They look good on you. First time I’ve ever seen you out of black leather.’

 Ogron hopped up to sit on the edge of the couch, joining Flora in warily eyeing the tower of junk. ‘Thank you. First time I’ve seen us out of black leather in a good few months.’

 ‘I’ll sort out some stuff that’s a little more you later,’ Stella assured him. ‘Those are a bit bright for you, I can see, but they’re Brandon’s. I texted; he doesn’t mind you borrowing. I packed a bunch of spare outfits when we came to Earth, in case he came for a visit and forgot to bring clothes. You’d be amazed how often that happens. Oh!’ 

 Ogron started with surprise at the sudden stop in conversation and shift to yet another new topic. This girl changed the subject every five seconds. Thank god he had so much experience with Duman…

 Stella clapped her hands excitedly. ‘The spare room is almost clear, but I moved my stuff into Flora’s room, so I can get you two settled in!’

 Ogron yelped as Stella’s hand closed around his and excitedly tugged him across the living room and up the stairs, Anagan following after him while Flora dove to catch a plant pot that had decided it just couldn’t take life in the pile anymore, and was making a break for the glorious freedom of the rug.

 ‘Ta-daaaaa!’ Stella spun inside the doorway, while Ogron wondered just how this woman had so much energy after the harrowing day they’d all had yesterday. He was still practically asleep on his feet…

 ‘So, it’s not, like, huge, but this loft has seven bedrooms, so each one has to be economical with space. And I know there’s just one bed, but it’s big, so I figured you guys could share, and you can make like a pillow wall if you want - I can help; I made one with Brandon first time he slept over, but honestly, that came down really fast. Or I can find an air mattress or something, but you both look like you could use a proper bed, and we can’t really fit another one in here comfortably, so…’ Stella finally took a breath. Thank god; Ogron had been nervous she might pass out. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked hopefully, as though after living in the sewers and being thrown into a dungeon, they might possibly have any remotely negative feelings on an actual bedroom, with an actual bed, and actual bedding.

 ‘It’s…perfect,’ Ogron replied, unable to believe how lucky he was. 

 ‘Thank you so much,’ Anagan added gratefully, wandering inside and disbelievingly fingering the bedsheets.

 ‘No problem!’ Stella waved enthusiastically, sidling out of the room to let Ogron in. ‘Imma go give Flora a hand with that pile.’ There was a loud crash and what sounded like it was probably a Lynphean expletive, and Stella winced. ‘Hope that was nothing important…’

 Ogron and Anagan exchanged a glance as Stella hurried towards what sounded like a rapidly-developing crisis, before Anagan let out an incredulous, delighted laugh and flopped backwards onto the bed.

 ‘Oh god… I’m comfortable. I’m actually comfortable…’

 Ogron shook his head at Anagan’s exclamations, before Anagan smirked, grabbing his friend’s wrist and pulling him down next to him.

 ‘Wha- Hey!’

 ‘Comfy, right?’

 Ogron disliked being surprised, but the feeling of sinking into Stella’s mattress was so unbelievably comforting that he had no choice but to crack a smile.

 ‘Yes…’

 ‘So…’ Anagan asked, rolling over to face Ogron. ‘Which side do you want?’

 ‘We can’t just stay here forever?’ Ogron paused for a moment, thinking. ‘…Right.’

 The two of them stayed there like that for a while, just sinking into the comfort of what was apparently their new home. 

 With a tired groan, Ogron pushed himself up and off the bed, offering Anagan a hand. ‘We should go check on Gantlos and Duman. Make sure Stella’s settling them in okay.’

 ‘Because Gantlos just loves new places…’ Anagan allowed Ogron to help him up, grimacing as he put weight on his right arm. ‘He never gets stressed and wants to do a perimeter check…’

 The heap was still there when they made their way back downstairs, but Flora was in the process of spreading it out a bit in the name of structural stability.

 ‘Stella’s getting Gantlos and Duman settled in there,’ she offered as the two wizards glanced around for their friends. ‘And don’t touch any of this; I have no idea how we have so much stuff.’

 Ogron gave the stuff a wide berth as Flora tried to remember when they’d bought half of it, following the nature fairy’s direction.

 ‘You two look better,’ he remarked as he walked into the guest room where Gantlos and Duman were sitting on the bed, Gantlos listening to Stella, Duman making vague noises of understanding while passing out on Gantlos’s shoulder.

 Ogron was right; both men looked significantly better. Gantlos’s hair had returned to it’s own icy blonde, while Duman’s Mohawk had ceased its forlorn drooping, and was now doing a sort of sleepy drooping, but the pink colour had returned. Gantlos’s eyes were still tired and stressed, but his hazel gaze now stared out from clean, marble skin. Though he looked quietly distressed at the rather vibrant hoodie Stella had presented him with.

 ‘Hey! Liking the room?’ Stella chirped, perched on the window ledge.

 ‘Yeah.’ Anagan nodded. ‘It’s perfect. Thank you so much.’

 ‘No trouble! I’ve never roomed with Flora before, but I’m looking forward to it. Though, after the junk fiasco, she may not be so fond of me…’

 ‘How do you have so much stuff?’ Duman mumbled into Gantlos’s shoulder, evidently about to pass out, but intrigued enough to cling to consciousness.

 Stella shrugged awkwardly. ‘When you put a girl with a shopping addiction and a royal’s credit card on a planet full of stuff she’s never seen…stuff goes down. And that stuff winds up in the spare room. And now the living room.’ Her settling in apparently done, Stella hopped to the floor, bouncing for the door. ‘Kay! I think that’s everything! I’m gonna head back to Flora, and you guys can just yell or come find me if ya need anything.’

 ‘She’s nice,’ Duman mumbled, his words starting to slur with exhaustion.

 ‘Okay, let’s get you into bed,’ Gantlos murmured, scooping Duman up and putting him under the covers. The shapeshifter was unconscious in a few seconds, snuffling and twitching as he fell deeply asleep.

 Gantlos stroked his hair, the worried lines that were perpetually etched on his face retreating as he watched Duman sleep.

 ‘We’re going to be okay…’ he breathed, his voice shaky with relief. ‘We’re actually going to be okay.’

 ‘I think we are,’ Anagan agreed, sagging against the wall. ‘I think we are.’

 ‘Well…’ Ogron started, biting his lip. ‘We still have to deal with Morgana. We need to figure out how to stop her. And mine and Duman’s magic isn’t working properly, so that will make it harder for us to help. And-’

 Gantlos and Anagan exchanged the same look they’d been exchanging for the past few centuries, before Anagan pushed away from the wall and put a hand on Ogron’s shoulder.

 ‘We know. We know, okay? But just give yourself a bit of time to rest and not worry, alright?’ The concept was frankly rather foreign to Ogron. He always had a billion things he had to stress his way into doing, but he couldn’t see a way to get anything done right now. He was so tired… Granted, that had never stopped him before, but now…it was actually okay to stop. Other people were taking on the burdens for once. He could…rest? That felt weird.

 As Ogron deliberated, Gantlos gestured to Anagan, and the other wizard started to gently chivvy Ogron out of the room and back upstairs.

 ‘C’mon…you should get some more sleep.’

 Ogron tried to protest, but by the time he’d managed a coherent argument, Anagan had managed to get him sitting on the bed, and by the time he’d been eased onto the pillow, his argument was sleeping on the job, so he was left with absolutely no defence as Anagan had the gall to tuck the blanket over him and let him pass out without even having let him rattle off the many other things he should really get started on now that he could stand unaided. The nerve…

Chapter Text

It was not often that Ogron allowed himself the luxury of sleep. In fact, he almost never allowed it, per se. Rather, it was the case that sleep forced itself upon him when it saw the cracks left in his defences by his debilitating exhaustion, and he was overrun and forced to comply with its comatose wishes until his mind had at last regained enough strength to fend off its captor and claw its way back to the realm of the living. Which was why it was so unusual this morning that, when he stirred, his eyes cracking open and taking in the sunlight filtering through Stella’s curtains, he didn’t drag himself to his feet and force himself off to do whatever he’d convinced himself lay solely on his shoulders, and instead made a sort of irritable, sleepy noise and rolled over, pulling the blanket up over his head and passing right back out again.

 He drifted in a warm, pleasant doze for a good few hours, his self-imposed demands on his time finally shutting up under the threatening glare of his exhaustion. This was so nice… He didn’t have to worry about anything right now. Not his magic…not his fall from grace…not Morgana…Morgana, and her army of vengeance fairies…that wanted to kill them all…that he stood no chance against right now…

 Well, that had been nice while it lasted. Now very much awake and back to the stress, Ogron blinked, now actually looking at his surroundings rather than sleepily dismissing them. 

 He was in the frankly enormous bed in Stella’s bedroom, sunlight valiantly fighting its way through the curtains to try and rouse Ogron from his slumber. He hadn’t the heart to tell it his own anxiety had beaten it to the task.

 Across the bed, Anagan was curled up, the blanket tangled around his limbs thanks to the other wizard’s incessant nighttime tossing and turning. Ogron had been a tad concerned it would keep him up, but the bed was large enough that he hadn’t noticed. 

 Anagan was quietly mumbling in his sleep, something about lettuce. It was always rather interesting to watch Anagan sleep. Ogron almost found it relaxing. His friend narrated everything going on in his mind, to the accompaniment of managing to get himself into quite some of the most fascinating positions Ogron had ever seen. He had termed it ‘sleep yoga’, and Anagan had been unable to refute the title.

 The slumber-contortionist made a confused grumbling noise, blinking awake. His bleary brown eyes met Ogron’s already-frazzled blue ones, and he sighed tiredly. ‘How many things have you already come up with to get done?’

 Ogron scoffed, shaking his head. ‘Only…eleven.’

 Anagan facepalmed. ‘Go back to sleep…’ 

 What a beautiful idea…if only his mind were on board with the prospect. Ogron shook his head, brushing his rumpled hair back from his face as he climbed out of bed. 

 ‘No…no, we need to start working to stop Morgana.’

 ‘It’s eight in the morning…’

 Ogron’s eyes widened as he checked the clock, ascertaining the truth to Anagan’s statement. He hadn’t slept this late in…um…well…actually, when had he last slept beyond six?

 ‘I have useful knowledge that the Winx can utilise to gain an edge,’ Ogron said firmly, brushing the creases from his clothes. ‘I don’t have time to sleep any more.’

 ‘Then just relax for once…’ Anagan mumbled, getting a hair elastic out of Stella’s drawer and using it to secure his dreadlocks out of his eyes. ‘You went through hell; nobody’s gonna judge you if you take a break from exhausting yourself. Take care of yourself. For once.’

 Ogron made a sort of noncommittal mumbling noise, striding (very blearily) out of the room and wandering down the stairs.

 Silence hung over the loft like the blanket he’d inexplicably chosen to shed, and he found himself wondering whether he could truly be the first one up. 

 ‘Well, if I have the time…’ he muttered, searching through the shelves until he found a pen and blank notebook. Hopefully none of the Winx had plans for this. Seeing as it was in a pile of blank notebooks, he doubted it. 

 Settling himself on the couch, he tapped the pen against the blank paper, thinking over the situation. Morgana was set to destroy humanity. He, his friends, the Winx, and their boyfriends were all that stood between her and global domination. He thought hard, attempting to summon an accurate figure for the numbers they’d be facing.

 ‘Tir Na N’og had a population of…roughly…two…hundred? And seventy? Yes, that sounds right.’ The number was quickly scrawled on the paper, followed by several more, which were quickly added up and converted into a ratio to give him some idea of the odds. Thirty to one. Easy odds for a fairy as powerful as Bloom, harder for a newer fairy like Roxy, difficult for the Specialists…

 ‘Impossible for me.’ He sagged back against the cushions, sighing miserably. Even one on one would be highly implausible right now. His magic was glitchy at best after he’d tried to absorb the spell on his chains, so his best hope would be managing to land a decent hit on an abnormally weak fairy. These odds were massively inaccurate. It appeared some tweaks would be required…

 ‘Ogron?’ 

 Ogron jolted awake, panicking for just a moment as he couldn’t see anything, before the notebook fell off his face and slapped to the floor, leaving him staring blearily around the living room.

 ‘What are you doing?’ Tecna stood in the doorway, still in her pyjamas, her pixie cut rumpled in a somehow perfectly symmetrical bed head hair mess.

 ‘Mmf…’ Ogron rubbed his eyes, sitting up straight as he picked the notebook up off the floor. ‘Strategy…we have a long war ahead of us.’

 ‘How long have you been at this?’ Tecna asked, joining him on the couch and raising an eyebrow at the scrawled notes filling most of the book. 

 ‘…What time is it?’

 ‘Eleven. Everyone slept in, after the disaster two days ago.’

 Ogron frowned. So…he’d been at this for…well, when had he fallen asleep? Ugh, he’d fallen asleep. Weak. He never let himself fall asleep. He had things to get done, and sleep wasn’t on the list. 

 ‘How long have you been up?’ Tecna asked, changing her terminology as the logic occurred to her.

 ‘…Three hours.’

 Tecna raised an eyebrow. ‘Given your physical and emotional state, while eight is a perfectly reasonable time to wake up, and would even be considered late by some, depending on age and personal circumstance, waking up that early and initiating a form of mentally taxing activity seems illogical and unhealthy.’ Following up her point, Tecna took the notebook from Ogron’s hands, pointedly closing it. ‘Top medical data conclusively proves that the appropriate course of action is for you to avoid stressful, taxing activities and get some rest.’

 Ogron attempted to snatch back his notebook and hours of strategy, but Tecna was having none of it.

 ‘Tecna! I’m fine!’

 ‘Alright, you can have it back if you can explain this page to me.’ She opened the notebook to the last full page, presenting him with an incomprehensible mess of inky scribbles, the only legible writing a large heading saying ‘Dragons?’. He…honestly couldn’t for the life of him think what that meant. Did he want them to get some dragons? That could be useful…

 His squinted silence elicited a validated nod from Tecna, the fairy closing the notebook and putting it on the coffee table. 

 ‘You should go back to bed. Get some more sleep.’

 ‘I don’t sleep at eleven in the morning,’ Ogron scoffed. ‘I’m fine. I just…need some coffee to help wake me up.’

 ‘I hear that!’ Stella strutted into the living room, her fairy pet flying after her, the pair sporting matching eye masks and slippers. ‘Good morning, you two!’

 ‘Morning, Stella.’

 ‘Good morning. Stella, will you please help me prove the validity of my argument that Ogron’s attempts at strategising are incredibly detrimental to the wellbeing of his psyche?’

 Stella, pouring out coffee, just stared for a minute. The coffee started overflowing, and Ginger began lapping at the overspill to try and prevent a caffeinated tsunami.

 ‘…Say what now?’

 ‘Will you agree with me that Ogron is tired, and should get some rest?’

 ‘Oh! Oh, that makes way more sense!’ Stella flicked her finger, summoning a rag to mop up the spilled coffee. ‘Sure, I can do that! Because I am totes with you. We could all use a damn good crash. But the sun came up, and I came up with it, thanks to my stupid job. Ugh, who made up the idea of work?’

 ‘The first recorded job was on Domino, as a gatherer for the first keeper of the Dragon Flame,’ Tecna replied, not missing a beat. ‘Sylvani Goodglen couldn’t forage for her own food while guarding the flame, so another had to gather for her. They were rewarded with special foods, and eventually with trinkets, and it’s considered the first job in recorded history, over seven hundred million years ago.’

 Stella rolled her eyes, pouring half the sugar bowl into her coffee. ‘I don’t have enough caffeine in my body to even pretend to care about that, Tec.’

 ‘I thought it was interesting,’ Ogron offered, and Tecna beamed.

 ‘Thank you! I’ve been trying to get someone else to genuinely care about that for months!’

 ‘You two are weird.’ Stella downed her cup of coffee-flavoured sugar in one go, and when she put the mug down, Ogron could swear she was vibrating a bit. ‘Anyhoo, like Tec said, Ogron, you should crash. Sleep if ya can, but if not, just, I dunno, do whatever relaxes you.’ Do…what relaxed him? How was he supposed to relax with an army of vengeance fairies that wanted him and every human dead? That was hardly a spa day. Which, coincidentally, he would also not find relaxing. People touching him was high on his list of things that easily made him freak out, right up there with plans changing at the last minute, and someone other than him being in charge and not telling him what was supposed to happen. 

 ‘…Does Bloom need help with strategy? Because I have a whole notebook of-’

 ‘No. Absolutely not.’ Tecna confiscated the notebook from his longing gaze. ‘You were passed out on the couch with this, and most of it makes no sense. This page is just a series of sketches of me. What am I even doing?’

 Ogron squinted. ‘You’re transforming the Earth fairies into digital constructs. Seemed plausible at the time.’

 ‘Tecna, can you do that?’ Stella asked, awed. ‘Because that sounds sick as hell!’

 ‘No, I can’t do that.’ Tecna paused. ‘…Probably. But that’s not the point. Ogron, all I’m saying is…just take some time to rest and recover a bit. You still look starved, and your wrists must be painful.’

 Ogron uncomfortably pulled his sleeves down to cover the bandages Flora had wrapped around his burns, pretending they were fine and didn’t sting at all, and anyone that suggested they might burn like an acidic fire was just lying.

 ‘…I don’t take time.’

 ‘Oh, it’s easy!’ Stella chirped. ‘You just don’t do anything! Easiest thing in the world, trust me.’

 ‘Take it from her; she’s Alfea’s slacker queen,’ Tecna deadpanned, getting up and slipping Ogron’s notebook back onto the shelf. ‘Eat something, and just relax for the rest of today as a minimum. It’ll help you and your magic heal.’

 Tecna had helped save him from a very painful death, so he wasn’t about to start arguing against her offer for him to rest in her apartment that she was letting him live in, but…this idea sounded massively implausible. He briefly thought that it was only one day, then he could get back to using all the energy he had on strategy, but a whole day? Be serious.

 Ogron may have set the world record for most times reading the same sentence in an hour. He’d attempted to follow Stella’s advice and ‘do what relaxed him’. Well, reading was always a good option, but only when he didn’t have a war hanging over his head. Hence why he’d only made it one sentence into the book he’d borrowed from Tecna. It seemed to have the potential to get rather gripping, but since he couldn’t get any further than the twelfth word, he’d never know.

 ‘It’s been an hour, keep at it,’ Anagan said calmly as soon as Ogron made a move to get up.

 ‘You don’t need to watch me, you know,’ Ogron grumbled.

 ‘I’m not watching you. I’m also sitting in the living room, trying to rest my shoulder, because it has a giant hole in it. I’m observing your seventh attempt to give up on reading a book, and trying to encourage you to rest instead of skim a page while trying to remember why you wrote dragons in your notebook.’

 ‘It must have been for a reason!’

 ‘I’m sure it was. But right now is not the time to worry about what that reason may be. Just get some rest. You’re exhausted.’

 ‘I’m always exhausted,’ Ogron huffed, relegating the thriller that had regrettably failed to thrill him (through no fault of its own, it was his problem) to the coffee table. ‘And I always get the job done. As I should be doing right now!’

 Anagan sighed deeply, setting his own book aside and turning his head to Ogron, avoiding jostling his injury. ‘Ogron…’

 ‘This isn’t working for me…’ Ogron groaned. ‘I get that I’m not supposed to be taxing my mind, or whatever it is that Tecna said, but…this is driving me crazy. Not doing anything. I just…I need to help.’ He got up from the couch, waving off Anagan’s concerned protests. ‘I’m just going to stretch my legs a bit. Don’t get up, you need the rest.’ Apparently he could encourage everyone to rest but him. 

 He wandered aimlessly around the loft for a while, hovering outside Bloom’s doorway, listening to what was quite certainly a strategy session with Tecna. He had helpful information; he should be involved! But Bloom had quite vehemently agreed with Tecna and Stella (and Anagan as soon as he’d come downstairs and been appraised of the forced break), and he’d quite certainly be chivvied out and told to rest. 

 He’d talk to Gantlos or Duman, but the latter was sleeping, in far more desperate need of rest than Ogron, while the former was watching over him like a loving hawk, and any interruption would not be appreciated. So, to summarise, nobody in the loft wanted him around unless he was lying about feeling his brain atrophy. Ugh, wasn’t relaxing supposed to be…well, relaxing? This was anything but.

 Lacking any other option other than lying back down or stealing back his plans book and hiding out in the broom closet (he hadn’t fallen that far. Yet), he wandered down to the pet store. He hadn’t been in here since he’d led his friends to spell the fairy pets to transform into monsters when they got hungry, and, apparently, fairy pets remembered people that mutated them, scurrying away as soon as he walked in.

 He shook his head as a kitten ran right into a wall, turning to go back upstairs, but just as his foot touched the first step, a chastising voice rang out.

 ‘Well, that was a little rude, wasn’t it, little ones? There’s no need for such a dramatic reaction. Ogron, darling, come over. Don’t let their little freak out chase you off.’

 Ogron turned to see Stella scooping the kitten up, tutting as she ran a hand through his fur. 

 ‘Well done, you’ve found the dustiest corner in the store. And now you need a bath. Thanks, cutie, my schedule wasn’t already busy.’ She beckoned Ogron over, rolling her eyes as he warily eyed the other pets, most of whom were giving him death glares.

 ‘I…don’t think they want me to.’

 ‘Oh, psh!’ Stella waved a hand, sashaying over. ‘They’re just skittish. You can’t run away from any uncomfortable interaction, Ogron. Also, you live above them now, so you should make peace.’ She held out the kitten, beaming encouragingly. ‘Go on, you two. Make friends.’

 Ogron quirked an eyebrow, and the kitten hissed, scrambling back up Stella’s arms to rest on her shoulder.

 ‘Well that wasn’t very hospitable now was it?’

 ‘I mutated them, Stella,’ Ogron sighed. ‘It’s understandable that they wouldn’t want to get near me.’

 ‘Well, you tried to defeat me and take over the world, and I’m doing just fine on my quest to befriend you, so maybe you should give it a little time.’ She picked the kitten up off her shoulders and booped its nose. ‘And you are going to have that bath! All of them need a good bath, really. I haven’t given them a grooming in days; Diana was a major kink in the schedule.’

 Ogron leaned awkwardly against the wall as Stella made her way over to her grooming station, running what had to be the bubbliest bubble bath he’d ever seen.

 Just as he was considering going back up, Stella glanced up, gesturing to a cupboard across her station. ‘Ogron, be a dear and get me the honey conditioner? I’m up to my eyelashes in bubbly pet here.’

 ‘Sure.’ He quickly located the item in question, hanging awkwardly around her station as she began washing the kitten.

 ‘So…’ Stella started conversationally, massaging the conditioner through the kitten’s fur. ‘What’s with the stressy wandering?’

 ‘I…what?’

 ‘You’re wandering around trying to find something to do. You really find it that hard to just chill?’

 Ogron shrugged, leaning back against the wall. ‘I…I’m certainly not used to it.’

 ‘I’d have thought after everything you’ve been through, you’d love a few days, few weeks even, of rest.’

 Ogron winced at the thought of a few weeks of inactivity. ‘It’s…well, I suppose it’s complicated.’

 ‘Lay it on me.’ Stella snapped her fingers, summoning a small sunbeam to carefully dry the kitten.

 ‘You don’t want to hear about it…’

 ‘Oh, don’t be silly; of course I do. You’re clearly struggling, and if talking about it can help, I’m here to listen.’ 

 That…was incredibly sweet, actually. Ogron didn’t generally confide in people, least of all people that weren’t Anagan, but he was tired enough to slip and at least give a general idea of the situation.

 ‘I’m not used to having nothing to do. I’m a leader…I’m supposed to lead.’

 ‘You can’t lead if you’re exhausted,’ Stella remarked practically, brushing the kitten’s fur to a shine. 

 ‘I don’t know if I can lead regardless,’ Ogron muttered unintentionally, wincing as he realised he’d said that out loud.

 ‘Well, that’s just silly,’ Stella scoffed. ‘You’re a great leader! It’s obvious how much your friends look up to you.’

 ‘Well look where that got them…’ His leading, his failure to stop the Winx, get the White Circle, get them all out of Gardenia…everything…had led the people he loved most to a dungeon cell.

 Stella thought for a moment, before presenting him its her brush and chivvying the kitten over. ‘Here. It’s therapeutic.’

 ‘You know this cat hates me.’

 ‘Let him smell you, and you’ll get along just fine.’

 If he got scratched, he was blaming Stella, but, nonetheless, Ogron held out his hand, allowing the kitten to investigate him.

 ‘That’s Nino, by the way,’ Stella remarked, moving onto a new pet. ‘And your leading got your friends here, where they’re safe.’

 ‘No, Bloom’s leading got them here,’ Ogron rebuffed, carefully stroking the brush through Nino’s fur. ‘I just had two panic attacks.’

 ‘Maybe they were overdue. Sounds like it, from the amount of pressure you seem to put on yourself.’

 ‘I’m not overdue panic attacks, Stella.’ Yes you are, you liar. 

 ‘You’re overdue a good rest.’

 ‘That’s what everyone in Gardenia’s been telling me…’ Ogron grumbled, and Nino made a huffy noise in what almost sounded like solidarity. 

 ‘Why are you so against it? Is it just because it’s hard?’

 ‘I…I should be helping. I should be helping with plans, with strategies, with stopping the threat that I effectively created in the first place.’ 

 Stella had been interjecting with questions and comments up until now, but now she stopped, silently listening as she massaged bubble bathe through a puppy’s fur.

 ‘I sealed the Earth fairies away, and I knew what they were like, and, let’s face it, I could have told you. Back when we were working together. Would you have believed me? No, probably not, but I still should have said something, or done more to keep them in Tir Na N’og, or had another solution centuries ago that couldn’t go so goddamn wrong! And lying around while you fix my mess is…it just…feels wrong.’ He took a deep breath, grimacing at how much he’d just said. But if he was already in this deep… ‘…Honestly? I feel like you’ll be angry with me if I don’t help.’

 Stella raised an eyebrow. ‘Ogron, we’re the ones making you take some time off in the name of not falling down. Why would we be mad?’

 ‘I don’t know. I just…feel that way. It’s irrational. I’m irrational. And utterly useless right now.’

 ‘Well, now that’s just crazy talk.’ Stella gave him a bright smile, taking on his admissions with the ease of someone used to shouldering her friends’ burdens. ‘You’re totally useful! And I don’t doubt that all your stress-plans are great. We all know you’re crazy smart, so whatever you think of will be brilliant, but I think you need a break because you look a late night away from collapse. And you should capitalise on that, because Morgana will crop back up at some point, and you need to be rested and ready when she decides to start wreaking vengeance, because we need you, and all your plans. But you gotta take care of yourself. Take it from the queen of self-care. Put the pressure aside for five minutes.’

 Ogron managed a weak, tired smile. That was…good advice. He was loathe to admit it, but his heart warmed at the words, and it almost coaxed him into accepting their truth. 

 ‘…I’m just not cut out for doing nothing,’ he sighed. ‘It takes being actually immobile to keep me in bed.’

 ‘Then do something!’ Stella chirped. ‘There’s a middle ground between trying to lead a war council and lying in silence, ya know.’

 ‘Like what?’

 ‘Well, like this! This is relaxing enough, right? I mean, technically you’re just helping me do my job, but…you seem a bit more chilled out.’ That…was actually true. He was hardly the picture of zen, but he did feel a little better. Having something to do, a task to busy his mind and hands helped keep him from drifting to his thoughts of things he believed lay solely on him. 

 ‘…Do you mind if I stay here a bit longer?’ 

 Stella’s face lit up, and she immediately presented him with a bottle of conditioner. ‘Don’t use too much.’

Chapter Text

‘Oh, how dare you! You little monster! This means war! You hear me?! WAR!!!’

 Anagan quirked an eyebrow from his spot on the couch. That was…an unusual outburst. It was coming from Stella and Flora’s room, but he was pretty sure Flora was at the barrier, ensuring Diana’s protection was happy and healthy, so who was Stella yelling at?

 Groaning slightly as he pushed himself up, trying to keep as much strain as possible off his shoulder, he crossed the room, knocking on the door.

 ‘Stella? Everything…okay in there?’

 ‘Everything’s fine, I- Oh, solar flare. No, not fine. Not fine at all! Help!’

 Anagan yanked the door open, his mouth dropping open at the sight of Stella, upside down in the grasp of a very angry plant that she appeared to be wrestling with. 

 ‘Anagan! Be a dear and pass me that pillow, would you?’

 Anagan wordlessly handed her the item.

 ‘Thank you,’ she replied cordially. ‘Now…’ Her expression twisted, and she began beating at the plant with the soft furnishing. ‘Let go of me, you overgrown salad!’

 The plant writhed, dropping Stella on the floor, its tendrils trembling with fury.

 ‘Ha! Suck it!’ Stella victoriously held up a tube of…what appeared to be face cream. ‘This is my face cream! Not your leaf wax! I don’t care how it makes you feel! It’s very expensive, and not to be used by plants! We established this when we were laying down ground rules!’

 The plant shook ominously, and Stella backed up, guiding Anagan out of the room and cautiously closing the door just as there was the sound of several things breaking.

 ‘…What the hell?’

 Stella sighed tiredly at Anagan’s question, tossing the pillow onto the couch and placing the face cream on the table.

 ‘Stupid plants hate me. I accidentally knocked a flower off, and now they all want to water their soil with my blood.’

 Anagan raised an eyebrow. ‘That…sounds a bit dramatic.’

 ‘Tell that to the hedge.’

 There were several outraged sounds from Flora’s room, and Anagan found himself wondering how sentient these plants actually were.

 ‘Ogron and I can sleep on the couch if you need your room back,’ he offered, but Stella waved him off. 

 ‘No, no. You need a real bed, and you’re settled in. You stay there, I just…’ Stella sighed, flopping dramatically backwards onto the couch. ‘I just need some way to survive…whatever the heck that thing was.’

 ‘Mist’s grasp.’

 Stella lifted her gaze, cocking her head in confusion. ‘What now?’ 

 ‘The plant. It’s an Androsi plant called mist’s grasp,’ Anagan explained.

 Stella just stared at him for a minute. ‘…How the hell do you know that?’

 Anagan shrugged. ‘I know a decent amount about plants. Ogron has his random knowledge, and I have mine.’

 ‘Huh.’ Stella sat up. ‘If you know what it’s called, is it too much to hope that you know how to tie one up and hide it in a closet?’

 ‘One: you’d just use rope. And two: don’t do that. …And if you do, please don’t tell anyone that I told you to use rope.’

 ‘Relax, I wouldn’t do that. But seriously, what’s its problem?’

 Anagan did his new one-shouldered shrug. ‘I know a lot about plants; I’m not a botanical psychologist.’

 ‘Fair point.’ Stella sighed, fingering her face cream. ‘What would a plant even want with face cream anyways? It was trying to put it on its leaves! Leaves! It woulda just got gunky, anyway.’

 ‘Maybe that’s what it wanted,’ Anagan suggested. 

 ‘What, to get covered in grease? Don’t plants have pores they use to breathe and stuff? Wouldn’t it block them?’

 ‘Well, yes, but it’d be like an anti-transpirant.’

 ‘…You lost me.’

 ‘Anti-transpirant. It stops the plant losing water from its leaves. Helps keep it from wilting.’

 Stella huffed. ‘Why would it wilt? Flora waters it every day.’

 ‘They live in humid areas; they need lots of water vapour in the air to regulate transpiration.’

 Stella’s eyes widened, then she started awkwardly fidgeting with her hair. ‘Uhm…outta curiosity…would it be bad if someone did a spell every morning to get rid of the humid air making her hair go frizzy?’

 ‘Yes.’ Anagan nodded. ‘Yes, that would be bad.’

 ‘…Ah.’ Silence. ‘…It was frizzing my hair! I didn’t think it would do anything!’

 ‘Why are you defending yourself to me?’ Anagan asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘I’m not judging you for not knowing about an obscure plant. Out of all people currently existing, I’m in one of the worst positions to judge you for anything.’

 Stella smiled sheepishly. ‘Right, sorry. Think I’m still a bit stuck on my drama. So…you think if I make it humid again, it’ll stop taking my face cream?’

 ‘Yeah, probably.’

 ‘In that case, I suppose I’ll just have to frizz my hair.’ Stella let out a dramatically despondent sigh. ‘Oh well. It is all in the name of friendship!’ That very much seemed to be the problem solved. But, as Anagan really should have learned after years and years of Ogron’s general personality, things were seldom solved as simply as common sense dictated they should.

 There was a loud thud. Aisha had been beating the life out of a punching bag in preparation for war all morning, so Anagan didn’t raise an eyebrow. Until he happened to glance out of the window and spot Aisha outside. Not kickboxing. So where was…

 ‘Stella? You and the plants made up, right?’ he called through the door. He knew she was in there; she’d gone in a few hours ago to choose an outfit for a date. Did it normally take her that long to choose clothes? That was a question he wasn’t asking.

 ‘…Stella?’ No response. ‘Stella!’

 ‘What’s going on?’ Musa wandered into the lounge, raising an eyebrow at Anagan calling through Stella’s door. 

 ‘There’s a lot of noise coming from in here, and Stella isn’t answering me.’

 Musa’s eyes narrowed, and she hurriedly knocked on the door too. ‘Stell? Stella, it’s Musa. I’m comin’ in!’ She opened the door, and both were surprised to see neither hide nor hair of the blonde princess. What was even more surprising, however, was the rather large gathering of plants all leaning up against the closet, which seemed to be…hopping.

 ‘…Does this happen to you guys a lot?’ Anagan asked in quiet bewilderment.

 ‘Getting ambushed by Flora’s plants? Yes, all the time, I’m amazed we’re all still alive. Stella!’ Musa stalked towards the plants, giving them a glare that said they could move, or be served up with croutons. Wisely, they moved.

 ‘Mother of-!’ Stella promptly tumbled out of the closet, scrambling to her feet, her eyes blazing and her arms raised in preparation for the weirdest fight Anagan had ever seen. ‘I have been nice, but this is the final straw!’

 ‘What happened?’ Musa asked, her eyes wide, but not as wide as one might expect when a princess tumbled out of a closet and declared war on some houseplants. Perhaps the Winx really did do this more often than most.

 ‘I was getting a skirt - a really, really cute one - and they shoved me in the closet! And held the door!’ The plants trembled with what looked like laughter, and Stella’s face turned puce. She whipped around, hair floating up in a golden light of rage. ‘Okay, you wanna go?! Fine! Winx Beli-’

 ‘Whoa! Whoa there, Stell.’ Musa caught Stella’s wrist, pulling her away from her new mortal enemies. ‘Chill. Remember what Grizelda taught us at Alfea?’

 ‘…’

 ‘…Okay, I was looking for a specific answer, but you seriously can’t remember anything she taught us?’

 ‘It’s not my fault!’ Stella burst out. ‘I remember a whole bunch of stuff from Wizgiz, Palladium, DuFour, Faragonda…how is it my fault that Grizelda was so boring and I had to give her a makeover in my head all the time?!’

 Musa rolled her eyes, shutting the door on the plants. ‘Don’t use your magic for petty trivialities. Slugging it out with plants counts as petty, and trivial.’

 Stella stopped glowing, but she still folded her arms and huffed. ‘Trivial? You weren’t the one stuffed in a closet.’

 ‘Have you tried asking Flora for some help here?’ Anagan offered, wondering when his life, already at the threshold of weird, had become even weirder.

 ‘A: those plants are like her children, and B: never once in our entire lives has Flora been remotely helpful when her plants get out of control! Where’s Tecna; she got trapped in a closet by those things, she’ll empathise with me.’

 ‘Working in the store.’

 ‘Thanks! Tecna! Tecna, they’re at it again!’

 As Stella stomped downstairs, Musa sighed, rolling her eyes. ‘This…this is gonna get weirder before it gets better, isn’t it?’

 Anagan raised an eyebrow. ‘Why are you asking me?’

 ‘Someone should probably talk to Flora.’ Musa’s phone buzzed, and she facepalmed. ‘And that person is gonna have to be not-me, because I’m crazy late for a meeting with Jason Queen!’

 ‘Who?’

 ‘My prospective producer! Things are a bit weird since I had a crush on him and then he got married, but he’s still helping launch my career, so…I should be on time! Back later, bye!’ Musa should probably be a bit more organised. If Ogron wasn’t finally conceding to actually get some rest, Anagan would suggest she ask him for help. If there were two things that man could do, it was obsessively panic, and organise things. He also excelled at doing both at the same time.

 The atmosphere in the loft was normal for everyone not in some way involved in the plant shenanigans. For those involved, it was hard to miss the dirty looks Stella kept tossing her door. Anagan had offered five more times to let her have her room back, but it had been made very clear that that was not on the table, so apparently they were heading for a war before their actual war. A war-m up. God, that was cringe. Anagan found himself incredibly glad only his own brain had heard that one.

 As she bustled around the kitchen preparing dinner, Flora seemed both harried and incredibly subdued. 

 ‘Hey.’

 She glanced up, managing to narrowly miss her fingers with the knife. Anagan frowned, concerned.

 ‘You okay? You seem…’

 ‘Like my friend and my plants are trying to kill each other?’

 ‘I don’t know, is this what that looks like? It’s never happened to me.’

 ‘Yes…’ Flora sighed, grimacing down at the mess of what used to be lettuce, but was now a frustratedly chopped mess. ‘It’s…not going well. I’ve tried talking sense into both of them, but…well, plants are hard to reason with, and Stella’s even worse. Apparently the plants have offended her, her honour, her fashion sense, her hair, and the honour of fifty seven of her ancestors. I’m…not sure how to fix that, honestly.’ She almost walked into the oven door, and Anagan decided maybe it was time to politely intervene.

 ‘Maybe you let me carry that,’ he suggested, crossing the room with what was regrettably the fastest speed he could manage and gently taking the oven tray from Flora. ‘You seem a bit frazzled.’

 ‘Thanks…mind giving me a hand with this? Nothing that’ll put stress on your shoulder, but I’d appreciate the company to distract me from whatever Stella’s plotting.’

 ‘You seriously think she’s plotting?’

 ‘Stella’s a lot more devious than people give her credit for,’ Flora said, completely serious. ‘You should hear about what she almost did to this witch that gave Brandon a love potion.’

 Anagan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘…Aren’t love potions illegal?’

 Flora shrugged. ‘Stuff went down at Alfea. I’ll tell you about it sometime.’ Anagan had the distinct feeling he’d find quite a large chunk of it fairly implausible, but he nodded anyway. He was rather intrigued by how a group of teenagers had somehow become the go-to heroes of the Magic Dimension. Wasn’t there a Council of Light overseeing the dimension? What the heck had they been up to? 

 ‘Tecna thinks I should put the plants on the roof,’ Flora sighed, chopping up tomatoes with sharp, irritated slashes. ‘But they’re not built for the Gardenian climate! They’ll suffer, poor things…’

 ‘Tricky situation…’ Anagan mused. ‘Out of curiosity, what are we actually cooking here, because I’m just holding stuff, and I can’t help if you don’t tell me what to do.’

 ‘Oh!’ Flora glanced around, presenting him with a spoon. ‘Stir this, would you?’ She guided him over to a pan filled with a sweet-smelling liquid filled with dozens of leaves and flowers he could only name half of.

 ‘This smells amazing.’

 ‘Thanks! Tricky to manage on Earth, but some of my plants let me take some flowers, so it’s not…too different from on Lynphea. I wanted to try and adapt a recipe from home. I miss Lynphea…’

 ‘What’s it like there?’ Anagan asked, curious.

 ‘You’ve never been?’

 Anagan shook his head, inhaling the heady scent of the broth. ‘Nope. I’ve been to Solaria, Zenith, Domino, once, before the Ancestresses…’

 Flora’s eyes widened at the last statement. ‘I always forget how old you are.’

 ‘Wha- hey!’ Anagan put his hands on his hips, adopting a mock-offended expression. ‘I’m not that old, y’know.’

 ‘Oh don’t worry, you look great for your age,’ Flora snickered. 

 ‘And after I stirred your broth…’

 ‘I’m just kidding around,’ Flora reassured him, turning back to her preparations. ‘Plenty of people I know are centuries old.’

 ‘If you say your principal who I know for a fact looks about seventy…’

 ‘I won’t name names.’ Flora casually mashed several sweet potatoes, before glancing up with a smirk. ‘But she’d be one of them.’

 ‘If I didn’t owe you my life, I hope you know I’d throw this coriander at you.’

 ‘Duly noted.’ Flora rapidly rolled the mash into long cylinders, waving a hand to send them floating one at a time into the pan resting in front of Anagan. ‘Don’t stir now. Just keep them separate.’

 ‘On it.’

 As they eventually served dinner, Anagan brought up the plants again. ‘Couldn’t you put them in another room?’

 Flora shook her head, ducking under the convoy of plates she was levitating towards the table. ‘No… Tecna hates my plants, Musa would just kill them within a few hours, Aisha might tolerate them, but she needs space to kickbox and dance, and Bloom…Bloom actually cried when we graduated and she realised she never had to live with my plants again.’

 ‘You could put them in Stella’s room with us,’ Anagan offered. ‘I’m pretty good with plants.’

 ‘You really think adding those plants into Ogron’s life will help him relax to the point where he actually borders on healthy?’ Flora queried with a raised eyebrow, and Anagan had to concede.

 ‘…Fair point.’

 ‘Secondly, my room has the most sunlight in the loft, aside from Stella’s, and my plants need as much light as possible. If they’re in the shade too long, they’ll suffer, poor babies.’ Anagan slightly questioned whether the aggressive botanical assailants he’d watched Stella fend off deserved the title ‘poor babies’, but Flora knew them better than he did.

 ‘I told you I smelled food!’ Duman appeared in the doorway, half dragging, half collapsed on Gantlos. ‘And you’d have had us wait.’

 ‘Duman!’ Anagan crossed the room in a few seconds, glancing worriedly at the sweat still beading on his friend’s forehead. ‘You shouldn’t really be up. We can bring you food in your room.’

 Duman shook his head determinedly, using his boyfriend crutch to stagger across the room. ‘I wanna eat with you guys. I’ve been in bed for days, and I’m bored and I miss you.’

 ‘You get some more rest as soon as dinner’s over,’ Gantlos said firmly, pressing his hand to Duman’s forehead and frowning worriedly at the feverish heat still radiating from him. ‘You still have a fever.’

 ‘Well, you know what they say!’ Duman chirped, settling into a chair and promptly laying his head on Gantlos’s shoulder, his breathing still worryingly laboured. ‘Feed a fever with whatever the hell Flora cooked.’

 ‘That…that isn’t even close to correct.’ 

 ‘Whatever, I’m hungry.’

 Anagan laughed softly, sitting down across from his friends. ‘Nice to see being sick hasn’t made you change.’

 ‘Oh please, it’ll take a lot more than almost dying in a cell to make me listen to sense and reason over my stomach.’ Duman eyed his bowl with interest, prodding the food with a fork. ‘So, what is this, anyway? It smells good.’

 ‘It’s an…adapted version of a Lynphean dish called quiera. But made with sweet potatoes and whatever I could find at the organic market, because I didn’t bring a grocery store with me,’ Flora explained. ‘You use a sweet, starchy tuber for the noodles on Lynphea, and sweet potato is sweet, so…’

 Gantlos nodded, adjusting slightly so he could eat and support Duman at the same time. ‘Makes sense.’

 Musa and Aisha got back, followed by a loud, satisfied blonde.

 ‘I’m back!’ Stella announced, sashaying back in. ‘I bought a localised weedkiller to put around my bed, so they can’t get me while I’m sleeping!’

 Flora and Anagan facepalmed in unison, while Gantlos and Duman exchanged confused glances.

 ‘What’d we miss?’ Gantlos asked curiously as Stella hefted a sack with a toxic symbol into her room.

 ‘Stella and Flora’s plants have started a deadly feud,’ Anagan explained tiredly, and curiosity lit up in Duman’s eyes.

 ‘Really? Over what?’

 ‘…’ Anagan found he couldn’t exactly identify why the two parties hated each other. ‘…You know, I can’t remember.’

 ‘That’s how feuds usually work,’ Aisha chipped in. ‘You can’t remember who or what started it, and everyone’s just looking to get revenge for the latest offence.’

 ‘I think Stella painted them yellow,’ Flora offered. ‘That was the latest offence. But they may have stolen her phone and sent Brandon prank texts, which may explain the weedkiller…’

 Gantlos and Duman gave each other a ‘what the hell have these people been getting up to’ look, before Duman shrugged off the drama and promptly indulged his driving force through life: his stomach.

 ‘Mm! Oh, I like this!’

 ‘Coming from a man I’ve personally seen eat things he found on the street, that isn’t saying as much as you think,’ Gantlos teased softly, and Duman elbowed him with all the strength he could muster, managing roughly the force of a particularly tired kitten.

 ‘Shut up. It’s good.’

 As the others joined them and Stella finally emerged from the room, her hair messed up in a way that suggested both sides had contributed a new offence to be avenged, Anagan let his mind drift to the sun fairy’s little feud. Well, not so little anymore. It was starting to get out of hand, but there wasn’t anything he could do. Was there?

 The feud bubbled beneath the surface for the next few days, while rain that felt far too heavy and cold for California drenched everywhere and everything. In theory, Anagan liked the rain. It was calming. It brought life to nature. In practice, he was huddled up on the window seat, wrapped in a blanket, watching the continual frozen downpour warily. In practice, he hated the rain with a burning passion, and refused to get drenched. 

 ‘You know…’ Stella hopped up to sit next to him, watching the rain with a distrustful gaze. ‘On Solaria, when it rains, it’s considered an omen of evil.’

 Anagan raised an eyebrow. ‘On Earth we just consider it an omen of an umbrella.’ 

 ‘Love umbrellas…they’re so crazy! You got this fabric stick, then you push the middle and it’s like a portable tent! I wish we had them on Solaria, I’d have had so much fun… Can people really use them to fly?’

 ‘…Huh?’

 ‘Bloom showed me this documentary about a woman who could fly using an umbrella.’

 ‘Oh…’ Anagan shook his head, a smile tugging at his lips. ‘No. And that was a movie, not a documentary.’

 ‘Ah.’ Stella blushed, laughing awkwardly. ‘I thought it was about childcare in the Victorian era.’

 ‘Nope.’

 Stella’s laughed gradually died out, chivvied from her voice by a deep, tired sigh. ‘This omen shoulda come a week ago, before I moved in with Flora.’

 Anagan opened his mouth to once more assert that he and Ogron could move, but Stella waved it off.

 ‘It’s fine, Anagan.’ Stella’s lips quirked up. ‘In fact, they haven’t pulled anything for a couple days. Maybe they finally know who the boss is.’

 ‘Really?’ That sounded odd. The plants didn’t seem the type to give up easily. 

 ‘Yeah…? Why? Oh sweet Solaria, you don’t think they’re plotting something do you?!’

 That wasn’t what Anagan thought at all, but apparently it was convincing enough to get him dragged across the room.

 ‘I’ve been living with them, so everything they do is normalised,’ Stella mused, playing thoughtfully with her hair. ‘So you go in, and help me see if they’re plotting anything! You have plotting experience! You’ll know!’

 ‘I didn’t actually do most of the plotting…’

 ‘Yeah yeah, whatever, let’s go.’

 As soon as they entered the room, it was perfectly obvious to Anagan why the plants hadn’t made a move against Stella. The leaves curled, drooping in on themselves, sad and weak, while only an aneamic grey light lethargically crept through the window, as much as had fought through the clouds over the past few days. Every light in the room was switched on, pointed directly at the leaves, to minimal avail.

 ‘Ah…’

 ‘What?’ Stella demanded, surreptitiously clutching a cushion to herself as a leaf rustled. ‘What are they planning? They aren’t gonna kill me, are they?’

 Anagan’s eyes widened. Stella thought that was a possibility? …That was concerning. But he shook his head, lifting one of the leaves to feel the way it flaccidly gave in to his touch.

 ‘No…they’re dying.’

 ‘…Huh?’ Stella put the cushion down, joining him to examine the plant. ‘What, like, of guilt?’

 ‘No, of lack of light. The storm’s been going for a few days, and they aren’t used to that. They’re suffering.’

 ‘Maybe it serves them right,’ Stella huffed, folding her arms, but a flicker of guilt lit in her eyes. ‘…They’re really suffering?’

 ‘They need light; why do you think Flora’s turned all these lights on?’

 Stella bit her lip, thinking for a moment, before shaking her head. ‘Well…the Sun will come back out soon.’

 ‘Or…’ Anagan started hesitantly. ‘Why…why don’t you try and make peace?’

 Stella huffed, turning her back on the plants. ‘After all they did?’

 ‘You let the four wizards that tried to obliterate you come and live in your home,’ Anagan deadpanned. ‘You’ll seriously begrudge some plants?’

 Stella stiffened, before letting out a truly impressive groan and facepalming. ‘Damn me and my friendly nature…I knew it was gonna bite me in the ass one of these days.’ She turned her head to look questioningly at Anagan, though her feet still stayed firmly facing towards the door. ‘…Make peace how?’

 ‘You’re the Fairy of the Sun and Moon,’ Anagan replied, sitting down on Stella’s bed. How that girl had managed to fit this thing through the door was beyond him. It was almost the size of the bed she’d let him and Ogron sleep in! 

 ‘The Sun is blocked out, but…’

 ‘You want me to give them light?’ Anagan nodded. ‘I don’t know…what if they just use it to turn on me again? They’re slippery little things.’

 ‘One of you needs to take the first step, and you’re the hero of the dimension. Feels like it should be you.’

 Stella made a lot of aggrieved thinking noises, pacing back and forth while taking her hair down, tangling her fingers in it, braiding it, unbraiding it, and finally putting it into the style it had been in in the first place. Anagan would have thought it was odd if he hadn’t seen so many of Ogron’s thinking rituals.

 At last, Stella sighed, rubbing her eyes. ‘…Alright.’ She approached the plants, perching in the edge of Flora’s bed. ‘…We have our differences. We both know that. You’re jealous that I have feet and can walk around. And that I have hair, and such amazing hair at that. And I knocked that flower off, and hit you with a pillow, and accidentally got all that weedkiller on you. I mean, you did worse, but we’re building bridges, not burning them. We have no bridges, so we can’t burn them, but you get my point. Wait, do you? You’re a plant. Do you even know what I’m saying?’ She shook her head, drawing herself out of her rambling. ‘Anyway. You’re suffering, and Anagan thinks I should help you. And he seems pretty smart, so I’mma do what he says. For peace! Dawn Rays.’ Golden light spilled into every corner of the room as Stella lifted the orb of light, its glow reflecting off a thousand shades of green. Her newborn sun rose higher, the room as brightly-lit as the Sahara in abnormally good visibility.

 After only a few moments, the plants visibly perked up, their leaves uncurling to reach for their salvation, dusty green and brown shimmering into emerald and jade as Stella’s face lit up with that sunbeam smile.

 ‘They’re healing! I’m doing that!’

 Anagan had expected Stella’s help to aid in some small way over time, but this…this was truly remarkable. She was coaxing the plants back to life with only a single spell, vitality spilling from her creation. For a girl who dragged junk out into a big pile and chattered for hours on every subject from nail polish to laser beams and back to nail polish, she was powerful. Really, really powerful. 

 ‘So…’ Stella kicked her legs back and forth, fidgeting with the bedsheet. ‘…We good?’

 The plants almost seemed to confer, trembling slightly with either rage or agreement. Anagan was tempted to reach for the cushion, just in case, but as it turned out, that wouldn’t be necessary.

 In unison, every bud, leaf and stem nodded vehemently, before turning back to the sunlight.

 Anagan and Stella exchanged an elated glance, before Stella tackled him in a delighted hug.

 ‘Woo-hoo! Anagan, you beautiful genius, you were right! The feud is over! The feud is over! My bedroom is no longer the site of my eternal war against plants! Thank you thank you thank you thank you-’

 ‘Mmf- Stella, you’re very welcome, but I think you’re gonna rip my stitches-’

 ‘Oops!’ Stella quickly pulled away, patting him apologetically on the shoulder. ‘Sorry! Sorry sorry!’ She jumped to her feet, pelting out into the loft. ‘The feud is over! Peace is here! Rejoice!’

 Ogron glanced up from his book, quirking an eyebrow at Stella’s antics. ‘…Good?’

 ‘Not just good, darling! Spectacular! Your friend is a genius!’

 Anagan followed Stella out of her room, laughing softly at her excited explanation. ‘Stella and the plants are at peace. She gave them sunlight to combat the storm.’

 ‘That’s nice.’ Ogron frowned. ‘…She wasn’t getting along with the plants? How’d I miss that?’

 ‘Nobody told you?’ Anagan offered as Stella bolted downstairs, shrieking to Flora that the war was over, before having to quickly clarify she meant the war between her and plants, and Morgana was still very much planning to kill them.

 ‘Hmph.’ Ogron folded his arms. ‘Perhaps I could have helped.’

 ‘You were resting. And nobody has it in them to disrupt you finally getting some rest,’ Anagan argued playfully, moving Ogron’s legs a little so he could sit down, settling them atop his lap so Ogron didn’t have to move from his spot.

 ‘I can’t decide whether to love or blame you for that,’ Ogron sighed, but he looked so at peace that Anagan was willing to bet on the former.

 ‘So…’ Ogron shifted position slightly to be able to better see Anagan. ‘Since you saw fit not to invite me to this little debacle, care to share the story?’

 ‘Sure. So, you see…’

Chapter Text

 Gantlos had a great many ways of dealing with stress. …Alright, he didn’t. He had a few. He had two. There was Duman, and there was physically lashing out against inanimate objects. And right now, Duman was unconscious most of the time. And that lack of consciousness was what was making Gantlos so stressed. That, and the army of fairies that wanted to kill them all. And the gorge where he liked to destroy boulders was outside the barrier, so he’d be dead the moment he stepped outside the city. Well, no, Morgana would toy with him, then kill him. Dammit, he really needed a stress release, and soon.

 Flora was conducting another examination of Duman, trying to ascertain whether or not Bloom’s healing was holding up, and Gantlos had been relegated to the living room, as his worried pacing and constant questions had apparently been a distraction that Flora just couldn’t handle.

 ‘He’ll be fine, you know,’ Ogron said, watching Gantlos worriedly from the couch. ‘Flora’s a good healer.’

 ‘Mhm.’

 ‘She treated my burns, and now they’re doing much better.’

 ‘Mhm.’

 ‘She sewed Anagan up.’

 ‘Mhm.’

 Ogron sighed at Gantlos’s detached attitude, getting up and taking his shoulders to put a stop to his pacing.

 ‘G, I’m no stranger to a good, cathartic pace, but you need to relax. Duman will be fine. Bloom revived the dead with that spell, she can heal this.’

 ‘But he’s still feverish…’ Gantlos whispered, digging his nails into his palms from stress. ‘He’s still feverish, and it isn’t breaking. He can barely stand, and he’s sleeping all the time…’

 ‘He’s healing, of course he’s sleeping.’ Ogron guided Gantlos to sit, but just as he succeeded, Flora appeared in the doorway.

 ‘Gantlos?’

 Gantlos shot back up, rushing over so fast he almost tripped over an ottoman. 

 ‘What? Is he okay?’

 Flora frowned at his frazzled state, putting a grounding hand on his shoulder. ‘Gantlos…Gantlos, just breathe. Duman’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, he’s healing. Getting some rest.’ Her eyes narrowed at the dark circles worry had painted under Gantlos’s eyes like a mural of stress and fear. ‘…When was the last time you got some rest?’

 Gantlos shifted uncomfortably. He hadn’t been sleeping much. He’d been too worried that Duman might need him in the night, too scared that if he fell asleep, the last time he saw Duman before closing his eyes would be the last time. So he’d taken to lying awake, his heart trying to tunnel its way out of his chest as he watched Duman sleep. 

 ‘Hm…’ Flora frowned, folding her arms in a way that very much said that she’d just realised that everyone’s focus had been so much on Ogron and his insomnia that nobody had thought to check whether Gantlos was sleeping.

 ‘Get some sleep tonight. Duman’s okay. Really. His power is stabilising just fine, and he’ll be on his feet again within a couple of weeks. You can relax.’ Spoken like someone whose partner had never been dragged away from death’s door. There was no relaxing. Not until Duman was back to his old self, able to walk and stay awake for longer than an hour. Maybe not even then. He could relax once the war was won. Probably.

 As Flora headed downstairs, Gantlos turned his exhausted gaze on Ogron, his eyes wide. ‘…Is this what it’s like being you?’

 ‘What, drowning in stress and insomnia?’ Ogron deadpanned. ‘Yes, more or less.’

 Gantlos rubbed his temples, trying to block out the ache pounding away behind his eyes. ‘Being you is horrible.’

 ‘Yep…’ Ogron sighed. ‘You learn to live with it.’ He guided Gantlos to sit, but Gantlos ducked out of his hold, beelining for his and Duman’s room. As soon as he got inside, he sagged, whether with relief or frustration, he couldn’t tell. He just knew that the sight of Duman, curled up under the blankets, looking so small and weak, tore at something he hadn’t even known was in him to tear.

 ‘Gantlos, you should let him rest,’ Ogron advised, standing behind him. 

 ‘I know…I’m just gonna…sit with him. In case he wakes up and needs anything.’

 ‘You know I can do that, right?’

 Gantlos shook off Ogron’s offer, as sweet as it was. He wanted to be the one to stay with Duman. He needed to be. 

 The day progressed in much the same way as the previous few. Gantlos sat by Duman’s side, doing all he could to bring down his fever and feeling his hope swell and shatter every time Duman roused before passing right back out again.

 When the time finally came for everyone in the loft to retire to bed (Stella seemed to be arming herself with a gardening fork; he wasn’t going to question it), he changed into the pyjamas Stella had provided (thankfully a far less distressing grey rather than the rather vibrant green he’d been stuck in for a couple of days) and slipped into bed next to Duman. His boyfriend radiated a feverish heat, but he clung on anyway. They always slept cuddled up, but Duman was the one to snuggle into him. But Duman was already out cold, and Gantlos couldn’t bear to sleep without his boyfriend in his arms.

 As it turned out several hours later, Gantlos couldn’t sleep even with Duman in his arms. The fact that Duman was roughly the temperature of an oven wasn’t helping.

 Gantlos rolled over, rubbing his eyes tiredly, like tenderising his own eyeballs was somehow going to make him pass out. This really wasn’t working.

 As much as he hated leaving Duman, he felt like he was suffocating, and he had to get some air. 

 The rain that had been pouring down for a good few days now was still forming freezing sheets as it poured from the lip of the gutter, which had been forced to wave a white flag and simply cling to the roof for dear life, screw its actual job. Thanks to the weather’s assault, Gantlos was forced to hang back on the balcony, remaining in the weak respite of the overhang, watching Gardenia through the sheet of water and wondering when Duman would be okay again. If he’d be okay again. Oh god, what if he wouldn’t be okay again? 

 ‘Please…’ he whispered into the storm. ‘Please get better. Please be okay. Please, I can’t lose you…’

 ‘You and the rain having a good conversation?’

 Gantlos jumped at the voice, his cheeks colouring at his skittish reaction.

 ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. Figured you knew I was here.’ Aisha joined him on the balcony, quirking an eyebrow as she took in his haggard appearance. ‘You okay?’

 ‘Fine…’ Gantlos rolled his eyes at his own brush-off. Oh, who was he kidding? He wasn’t fine. He may have taken Ogron’s spot for least fine person.

 ‘No,’ he admitted, leaning back against the wall and massaging his temples. ‘No, I’m not okay. Duman is still sick, and everyone is telling me he’ll be fine, and that I can relax, but I can’t, I can’t relax, not while he’s like this, and I keep trying to sleep, but I just lie awake, just…worrying about him.’ He covered his face with his hands, groaning with the weight of every world in the dimension.

 Aisha’s expression softened into sympathy, and she put a hand on his arm. Gantlos normally disliked being touched, but she was being nice, so he let it slide. 

 ‘I’m sorry, Gantlos. That’s really awful.’

 ‘Whatever. I’ll get past it.’

 ‘It doesn’t sound like you will, not until Duman is all better, and that could be a while. You need to work some of this out now, or you’re just gonna get worse.’

 Gantlos took his hands away from his face, frowning at the suggestion.

 ‘Work it out?’

 ‘Yeah. Release some of the tension.’

 ‘Can’t. There’s nowhere in Gardenia I can use my typical stress-relief strategy.’

 ‘Smashing stuff?’

 ‘Smashing stuff.’

 Aisha laughed quietly at his admission, shaking her head. ‘Well, you can’t do that here, because Stella will flip. But I got an idea to help.’

 ‘Really?’ It was almost embarrassing the way his eyes lit up with hope. He was getting pretty damn desperate.

 ‘Mhm.’

 He started to ask what, but Aisha shook her head, guiding him back inside.

 ‘You’re exhausted and it’s one in the morning. I’ll help you tomorrow, okay? Try to get some sleep.’

 Gantlos sighed. He knew he wouldn’t get some sleep, but Aisha was insistent he try, not to mention that she’d only got up for a glass of water, so she was definitely in need of completing her sleep cycle. 

 He settled back in next to Duman, holding him close even through the fever. His head rested on Duman’s shoulder as his hand slipped into his. A weak smile tugged at his lips as he felt Duman squeeze his hand. 

 ‘Goodnight…’

 ‘Hey…’ 

 Gantlos immediately sat up at the quiet whisper. He’d failed to sleep a wink last night, and he feared he now rather resembled an insomniac raccoon.

 Aisha peeked through a narrow crack in the doorway, light spilling into the dim room in a bright shaft.

 ‘You still up to get a little help?’

 Gantlos nodded, and Aisha gave him a thumbs-up. ‘Get dressed in something you can move in and come on.’ She shut the door, and Gantlos got up, running a hand through his rumpled hair and changing as quickly and quietly as he could, wondering what on Earth Aisha’s big idea was.

 He pressed a kiss to Duman’s forehead before leaving, running his fingers through his damp hair. ‘I love you… I’ll be back later, I just need to…well, I don’t know yet.’ He grimaced, thinking. ‘Should I even leave you? You might need something…’

 ‘Go, you doofus…’

 Gantlos’s heart leapt as Duman quietly mumbled to him, squeezing his hand before gently pushing him towards the door. 

 ‘You’re stressed…do a thing…I’mma pass back out.’

 ‘I’ll be back in a heartbeat if you need me,’ Gantlos promised, slipping out as Duman rolled over and tumbled back into sleep. Gantlos fended off a million worries and questions, asserting over and over that Duman would be fine, and had actually told him to go. 

 Aisha stood waiting, stretching in the early morning light, and Gantlos glanced around for anyone else. The loft was still. When he read six am on the clock, the reason why became apparent.

 ‘How come we’re up so early?’ Well, he’d been awake all night, so it was more a question of why he was up so late. But still.

 ‘Several reasons,’ Aisha replied, slinging a gym bag over her shoulder and heading for the door. ‘First off, this is just when I get up. Palace schedule. Secondly, we’re trying to tire you out so you can sleep tonight. Earlier we start, the sleepier you’ll be. And thirdly, it’s just quieter the earlier we go.’

 ‘Quieter where?’ Gantlos asked, glancing back at Duman’s door. He shouldn’t be leaving him…

 ‘Stop worrying.’ Yet again, Gantlos started. This was getting annoying.

 ‘I’ll take care of Duman while you’re gone.’ Gantlos turned to see Ogron descending the stairs from his room. ‘Aisha found me up and already asked. I’ll look after him, and you go…do whatever it is you’re doing.’

 ‘You sure?’ It wasn’t that Gantlos didn’t trust Ogron to look after Duman, he just…what if something happened?

 ‘Yes, definitely. If anything happens, I promise I will call Aisha,’ Ogron reassured him. ‘Now go, you need to stop living as me. Trust me, it only gets worse.’

 Gantlos was chivvied out of the loft, following Aisha into the bright Californian sunshine towards…wherever they were going.

 The ‘where’ turned out to be what looked like a converted warehouse. Gantlos was no stranger to warehouses; he’d lived in one for a couple of months before Roxy had transformed. What he didn’t understand was why they needed one. And one that was in such good condition, since he couldn’t randomly destroy that.

 Nevertheless, he was letting Aisha make the plan here, so he followed her inside, raising an eyebrow at the distant sounds of fists on leather.

 ‘Welcome to my gym,’ Aisha announced, pushing open a pair of double doors and walking into a wide, plain room covered in exercise mats and…that was about it. 

 ‘Gym?’ Gantlos didn’t see workout equipment. 

 ‘I use it for sparring,’ Aisha explained, dropping her bag at the side. ‘I usually invite one of the guys to train with me, but I figured you could use this. Not to mention that we gotta war coming up, so…some basic training couldn’t hurt.’

 Gantlos folded his arms, bordering on the offended. ‘I know how to fight, Aisha. And, not to be offensive, but…’

 ‘You’re bigger, stronger, and will probably destroy me?’ she filled in, quirking her lips in a smirk.

 ‘Well…based on our previous fights…?’

 Aisha snickered. ‘God we were pathetic first time we faced off, weren’t we?’

 ‘I wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that, but…’

 ‘Chill, I know we were. But trust me…’ Aisha clapped her hands, pink Morphix bindings appearing around her fists, ‘I’m a hell of a lot better when I’m in workout gear than barefoot sandals and a miniskirt.’

 ‘Who isn’t?’ Gantlos snorted under his breath. He copied Aisha’s spell, more or less, wrapping his hands in a couple of seconds. He knew the correct way to do it by hand, but when you could use a spell, why not?

 ‘Okay, let’s get to it.’ Aisha strode into the centre of the room, beckoning Gantlos over. ‘First strike?’

 ‘Sure.’ Gantlos shrugged, though he didn’t really see how this was gonna help. He knew how to fight, as he demonstrated, driving his fist through the air towards Aisha’s abdomen. 

 The fairy didn’t waste a second, dropping down and hooking a leg behind his as her hand closed around his wrist, yanking down with all her might. Gantlos stumbled, almost tumbling to the ground, managing to catch himself at the last second. By then, Aisha had already popped back up, her failed attempt to bring him to the ground not so much as denting her resolve as a fist met Gantlos’s back. He whipped around, almost managing to return the blow in kind, meeting a rapid forearm block before a leg was coming right for his face. 

 ‘Gah!’ He fell back, almost tripping, and Aisha took her chance. Her foot hooked behind his, and he found himself on the floor half a second later. 

 ‘What was that you were saying about knowing how to fight?’ Aisha teased, and Gantlos gritted his teeth. Not the first time the water fairy had got him on the ground, but arguably the less embarrassing. At least this time he’d been taken out by an actual fight rather than a light show.

 ‘Go again,’ he demanded, climbing back to his feet. He wasn’t losing this. Not this easily.

 ‘Sure,’ Aisha agreed. ‘I didn’t come all the way over here to only whoop your ass once.’

 Gantlos huffed at the teasing, before immediately bringing his arm up to block Aisha’s first punch. He gasped as her foot avenged her punch’s legacy, driving into his stomach, and he staggered back. He was not going down again! 

 Aisha had to step back, ducking and blocking as best she could against the volley of hits coming her way, but her grin didn’t so much as falter.

 ‘Gotta say…’ she gasped out, flipping over backwards and kicking his outstretched arm away. ‘You make a way better sparring partner than Riven. But don’t tell him, he’ll get jealous.’

 ‘What makes you think Riven and I talk?’ Gantlos was cut off just as the words left his mouth, Aisha’s knee driving into his chest. As he struggled to catch his breath, he felt a weight on his shoulder, his eyes widening to see Aisha flip up and over him, her foot shoving him to the ground as she pushed off.

 ‘Are we keeping score? Because that’s two nil.’

 ‘Where’d you learn to fight like that?’ Gantlos demanded, pushing himself to his knees. ‘And why didn’t you do that sooner?’

 Aisha shrugged, crouching down to his level. ‘Well, it’s pretty dangerous to do all this in a fairy form. Heels? No thanks. Plus, the wings get in the way, mess with your balance.’ Gantlos nodded. That made sense. ‘As for where I learned, when I was a kid, my parents were strict. Lots of princess rules. I was about eleven when I found dancing, and that became an escape. I was about twelve when I was late for my dance class and sat in on a seastorm class to kill time.’

 ‘Seastorm?’

 ‘Androsi fighting style,’ Aisha explained. ‘It’s how I fight. I’ve been training for seven years.’

 ‘That’s…really impressive.’

 ‘Thanks.’ Aisha offered him a hand, pulling him to his feet. ‘You up to go again?’

 ‘Oh yeah.’ 

 Gantlos didn’t fight physically that much. His powers were a natural disaster; why would he ignore them in favour of his fists? And even when he didn’t go hand to hand, it was never fancy. It didn’t come with strikes and moves, it just came with hits. Aisha, on the other hand, was twisting like a wild wind, striking like a mad thing, and Gantlos felt the playing field swing between favours so fast it was dizzying.

 Just as he thought he had the upper hand, he felt Aisha’s fingers twist into his hair, and his vision was obscured by a sea of icy blonde.

 ‘Gak!’ There was a sharp tug, and he went down once again. Immediately, he rolled over, glowering up at Aisha. ‘That wasn’t fair!’

 Aisha raised an eyebrow as Gantlos raked tangled hair out of his eyes. ‘How so?’

 ‘You pulled my hair? Really?’

 ‘I punched and kicked you; this didn’t even leave a mark. How is this the attack worthy of disdain?’ That…was a really good question, actually. But still!

 ‘You don’t pull people’s hair in a fight; it’s playing dirty,’ Gantlos argued, getting to his feet.

 ‘Not where I’m from,’ Aisha rebuffed. ‘And there’s no such thing as playing dirty if you win.’

 Gantlos frowned and folded his arms, unconvinced.

 Aisha continued. ‘In a fight, there are no rules. You saying you wouldn’t pull Nebula’s hair to win?’

 Gantlos’s argument was slain. Of course he would. No discussion. 

 ‘Earth has such weird ideas of a fair fight…’ Aisha muttered, helping Gantlos to his feet. ‘Nothing’s fair in a fight. It’s two people trying to beat the living daylights out of each other. What’s fair?’

 ‘You are making a lot of sense, you know.’

 ‘I tend to.’

 Gantlos stretched out his already-aching muscles, dropping back into fighting stance. ‘Let’s go again.’

 Aisha smirked, fingering the tangled blonde locks tumbling into his face. ‘Didn’t we learn a little bit of a lesson about this?’

 Gantlos brushed it back and out of the way, but Aisha still shook her head, tapping the tight braided buns she’d forced her hair into.

 ‘Let me give you a hand.’ She pulled a hair elastic from around her wrist, stepping around and twisting Gantlos’s hair up. ‘There. It’s an improvement. Now you don’t have a giant glaring weakness.’

 Gantlos rolled his eyes, batting her away from his hair. ‘Gee, thanks. Most people would stop at ‘there’.’ 

 ‘Most people wouldn’t last five seconds in a fight with you.’ Aisha stepped back around to face him, adjusting her stance. ‘You ready?’

 Gantlos hadn’t been so exhausted since he’d stopped the train to save Ogron. His entire body ached, but adrenaline raced through his veins as his heart pushed itself as hard as possible to keep up with Aisha. The Androsi princess was flagging just as badly as he was, her kicks and punches becoming increasingly sluggish, but neither was willing to give an inch until the other yielded. Gantlos had lost way too many fights to the Winx; for once, he was going to win. He needed this.

 Aisha had been throwing instructions his way all day: back straight, relax your knees, always have a second strike ready, and Gantlos was hoping it’d be her downfall.

 She ducked the first punch - though her reaction was slowed enough that his fist grazed her bun - but she was tired. Waning. Utterly unprepared for the first kick he’d actually dealt.

 ‘Oof!’ Aisha tumbled backwards, rolling onto the floor as Gantlos grinned with elation.

 ‘You win…’ she muttered, shoving herself up on her forearms. ‘Nice job.’

 ‘Hooray…’ Gantlos sank to his knees, breathing hard. ‘I win…’ Since he had nowhere he had to be, he gave in to his muscles’ beseeching, sagging to the side and lying on the floor, trying to avoid thinking about the walk back to the loft. 

 ‘You’re better at this than I thought,’ Aisha remarked, copying his position. 

 ‘Same…’ 

 ‘So…’ Aisha asked tentatively. ‘It’s six pm…you spent the whole day at this…feeling any better?’

 Gantlos frowned, thinking it over. Yes, actually. He did. The stress and tension had been bubbling away beneath the surface of his skin for days now. No, actually. For weeks. Months. Everything had been a tornado of fear and worry, and he’d finally worked some of it out in a blur of fists and what he was pretty sure was going to turn into a rather spectacular collection of bruises.

 ‘…Yes. Yes, I do.’ He shoved himself up, offering a tired smile. ‘…Thank you.’ 

 ‘No problem. I’m up to do this any time.’ 

 They both got to their feet, and Gantlos sighed at the thought of the fifteen minute walk home. Aisha levitated over her bag, glancing sympathetically at Gantlos.

 ‘You know…fairies aren’t really supposed to use the ancient powers of the universe to avoid a fifteen minute walk, but…Winx Believix, Zoomix!’ She slipped her hand into Gantlos’s as her sweaty gym clothes shifted into a sparkly blue crop-top and pants, which somehow stayed free of perspiration. Damned lucky fairies.

 The gym vanished around them, and they resolved in a burst of sparkles, appearing right in front of the loft, only a flight of stairs between Gantlos and passing out. As he thought it, a smile crept across his lips. He was tired. Tired enough to fall asleep. Finally…

 ‘Hey…’ 

 Ogron glanced up immediately from his vigil by Duman’s side, his eyes widening at the sight of Gantlos practically melting in the doorway.

 ‘What happened to you?’

 ‘Aisha…you have no idea how easy that girl was going on us.’ He walked over, sitting down on the bed and stroking Duman’s hair back from his face. An excited thrill ran down his spine as he felt a slight drop in Duman’s temperature. It could just be that he was burning up himself after the intense training, but he was so certain. Duman was cooler. 

 ‘How’s he been?’ he asked Ogron, not taking his gaze off Duman’s sleeping face.

 ‘Fine; he slept, woke up for about ten minutes, ate half a sandwich, went back to sleep.’

 Gantlos breathed a sigh of relief. So nothing new. The relief was chased by the crushing weight of ‘nothing new’. No improvement. 

 ‘I need to take a shower…’ he said quietly, rising in spite of his body’s protests. ‘Stay with him a bit longer?’

 ‘Of course.’ Ogron settled back in, though Gantlos only planned to be ten minutes. 

 …Okay, it turned out to be more like twenty. He was exhausted. And the warm water felt so good…

 He was barely awake by the time he wandered back into his room, hair damp and clothes fresh. 

 ‘I’m back now…’ he mumbled, rubbing his eyes. ‘Thanks, Ogron…’

 ‘No problem…’ Ogron smiled slightly as Gantlos actually yawned. In front of him. Without immediately trying to cover it up. ‘Look who’s actually letting the world see he’s tired.’

 ‘Don’t get…smug…’ Gantlos rebuffed. ‘You’re still the team insomniac.’

 ‘True…’ Ogron gave him a quick hug as he left, opting to flick off the light. ‘Get some sleep tonight.’

 ‘No promises.’

 Gantlos really wanted to crash out on the bed, but Duman was weak as a kitten with a particularly bad cold. And heatstroke. So he opted to carefully slip under the covers, once again ignoring Duman’s furnace of a body in favour of holding his boyfriend.

 ‘You’re back…’ With a groan of effort, Duman rolled over, blinking slowly to focus through the sickness-induced haze. ‘What’d you do…?’

 ‘You should sleep…’ Gantlos started, not wanting Duman to exhaust himself, but Duman shook his head.

 ‘I love you…and I want…to hear…about your day.’ He snuggled down further under the covers, looking at Gantlos expectantly. ‘Go…on…I’m…listening…’

 Gantlos felt a wave of relief crash over him at seeing the spark of alertness in Duman’s eyes, the tired resolve in his voice. He was awake. He was talking. He…might actually be on the path to okay.

 ‘Aisha thought I needed some help working out some stress,’ he began, slipping his hand into Duman’s, his other stroking Duman’s hair as the shapeshifter blinked rapidly, keeping himself awake. ‘And…tiring myself out enough to sleep.’

 ‘You haven’t been sleeping?’ Duman’s eyes flickered with worry and guilt, and he moved closer. ‘How’d I miss…that?’

 Gantlos apparently took long enough to answer that Duman’s patience deemed it had done its duty and kicked its heels long enough.

 ‘Oh. Right. Deadly…sickness…and whatever…’

 ‘You’re getting better.’ Gantlos had stubbornly kept from believing those words every time anyone else had uttered them, but this time, he was utterly convicted that they were true. Duman was getting better. Bloom’s magic was working.

 ‘I don’t feel much better…’ An idea flashed through Duman’s eyes, and he leaned forward with all the speed he could muster, pressing his lips to Gantlos’s. ‘Mmm…’ A weak smirk tugged at his lips as he pulled back, his breath on Gantlos’s cheek just as warm as the rest of him. ‘Now I do.’

 ‘Come here…’ Gantlos pulled him into his arms, and Duman laid his head on his chest, practically purring at the familiar comfort.

 ‘So…Aisha?’

 ‘Mhm… She took me to her gym, for sparring practice.’

 ‘…I know we owe her our lives, but tell me you kicked some fairy ass.’

 Gantlos chuckled softly, admitting, ‘…She kicked mine. I won one fight. At the end.’

 ‘Oof…’ Duman patted his shoulder sympathetically. ‘Sorry… Next time…I’ll come cheer you on. Then you’ll win.’

 ‘I’d love that…’

 ‘So, did it work?’ Duman asked curiously, his words starting to slur slightly from the exhaustion Gantlos’s presence could only beat back for so long. ‘Are you…tired? Enough to sleep?’ No response. ‘…G?’ There was only a quiet snuffling in reply, and Duman glanced up to see Gantlos passed out, cuddling Duman close like a punk teddy bear.

 ‘Aw…’ Duman pressed a kiss to his cheek, before burying deeper into his arms. ‘G’night, Gantlos…you need this.’ No longer struggling to cling to consciousness’s coat, Duman passed out in his boyfriend’s arms, a smile curving his pale lips for the first time in days.

Chapter Text

 Being sick was boring. There was nothing to do! Other than ache. And groan. And once you’d spent a whole day groaning, you were kinda over it. Even if you were as dramatic as a certain shapeshifter. 

 Duman had recovered just enough to feel the crushing boredom of being bed bound. His head no longer felt like it was being run over with a truck. Just a kid on a bike. And he’d had worse. Plus, there was that time he’d actually been run over by a kid on a bike, so it was nothing new. Don’t worry about it, it wasn’t a great story. But his muscles weren’t as sore, moving was no longer an insurmountable challenge, and he was finally back to food! Oh, how he’d missed food…

 At least he was feeling well enough to finally enjoy the experience of having a very dedicated boyfriend that waited on him hand and foot. That was nice. No, actually, that was very nice. But Gantlos couldn’t bring him the ability to get up and walk. He could give a back massage that made Duman melt, but he couldn’t bring the world to him. Not that he wouldn’t try, but the last time Gantlos had attempted something that impossible…well, stuff had gone down. 

 Sunlight trickled through the window, breaking through the last few days’ torrential rain. Duman was no meteorologist, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to rain that much in California. But magic was back, so all kinds of crazy stuff was going down, as he’d seen on his scrolling of YouTube. There was really not a lot to do when you were sick and stuck in bed. Watching a swarm of ducks pick up a pretzel stand was pretty damn close to the height of entertainment. That had promptly been shared with Roxy, who’d just nodded sagely and said it was about time the ducks rose up. Duman was with her; those birds were due a glorious revolution. 

 As the rays crept hesitantly back into the corners of the room, Duman rolled over with a sigh, and a rather ‘been there, done that’ groan as his muscles protested.

 ‘Gantlos…I’m bored.’

 ‘I know…’ Gantlos sighed sympathetically, running a hand through Duman’s hair. Well, that made things a bit better. 

 ‘I wanna go do something. The rain’s stopped, let’s go set something on fire.’

 Gantlos rolled his eyes fondly at Duman’s hopeful suggestion, shaking his head. ‘A: you’re too sick, and B: the Winx are helping us, but I don’t think they’ll take too kindly to us setting something on fire.’

 Duman huffed, collapsing back against the pillows. ‘You don’t know that. Stella gives happy arsonist vibes.’

 ‘Yeah, still no.’

 ‘Mean.’ 

 ‘I’m sorry. I love you, and you may set something on fire another time.’

 ‘It’s not the same…’ Duman smirked mischievously, and Gantlos managed a tired smile back. Duman knew he wasn’t doing amazingly. The stress of his illness was keeping his boyfriend in a constant state of worry, that, thankfully, was being alleviated by Aisha and her brilliant plan for them to punch and kick each other. Duman’s preferred method of hand to hand tended to involve scratching, biting and eye-poking, but each to their own.

 ‘You sparring with Aisha again today?’ 

 Gantlos shrugged. ‘She asked. But probably not.’

 Duman propped himself up on his elbows, frowning. ‘How come?’

 ‘I should stay with you; as you said, you’re bored, so…’

 ‘Yeah, but if you stay and keep stressing every time I cough, then I’ll be bored and sad.’ He made an exaggerated sad face. ‘Look. See how sad?’

 Gantlos rolled his eyes, but a smirk tugged at his lips at the dramatic display. ‘Duman…’

 ‘Go! Fight! Win!’ Duman flopped across his lap, grinning up at him. ‘Let out all your stress! Go forth, young wizard!’

 ‘Young?’ Gantlos snorted, propping Duman back up against the pillows. ‘Think you got me confused with someone else.’

 ‘Hey…’ Duman adopted a tone of mock-warning, ‘I’m only four years younger than you, so be very careful with who you call old…’

 ‘I’m sorry. You are very young.’

 ‘Young enough to blend in with the Specialists?’

 Gantlos made a face at the suggestion. ‘…Do you want to blend in with the Specialists?’

 ‘Good answer.’ Duman patted Gantlos’s head appreciatively. ‘But you should go have some fun.’

 ‘It’s sparring, it’s not for fun. We’re readying for war.’

 ‘Then why do you get home smiling?’

 ‘…I’m happy to be prepared.’

 ‘And you’re finally less stressed. Go, you’re so tense it’s like I’m dating a rock troll. Not that that can’t be sexy, but…’

 Gantlos bit his lip, but eventually nodded. ‘…Alright, I’ll ask if I can still join her. And I’ll ask Ogron to take care of you while I’m gone.’

 ‘Don’t need a babysitter, but thanks…’

 One farewell and about five minutes of convincing Gantlos that he was fine, basically like he had the flu, no, not the flu, just a cold, barely a cold, like, hay fever at worst, Duman sagged back into bed, sighing. He wanted Gantlos to relax, and watching him cough and groan wasn’t going to do that, plus, if Gantlos didn’t relax, he didn’t sleep, and then he didn’t function, and if Duman wanted an insomniac boyfriend, he’d have hooked up with Ogron. But…

 ‘Now I’m even more bored.’ And waiting on Ogron didn’t make that any better. Ogron was one of his best friends, but good lord, the man could go on! He’d already suffered through a month of Ogron’s lectures on whatever while his leg was healing after the smugglers, and listening to runic junk again was gonna turn his brain to mush.

 However, when the door swung open, it wasn’t the familiar flash of scarlet that stepped through.

 ‘Helloooo!’ A blonde whirlwind of enthusiasm and mango shampoo scent swirled inside, flopping down on Duman’s bed. ‘Hey, honey! Ogron was taking a nap, and nobody wanted to wake him up, so guess who’s hanging with you while your bf is out?’ Stella paused for a heartbeat, before answering her own question. ‘Me!’

 Duman couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face. He and Stella had never really spoken aside from the time he’d impersonated her boyfriend for evil and such, but she seemed pretty damn fun. Plus, new person: probably more interesting than Ogron. 

 ‘Hey! Welcome to the depressing sickness room.’

 ‘Ooh, it actually is kinda depressing…’ Stella grimaced. ‘We didn’t decorate or anything. When you’re feeling better, let’s hit up the shops and make this place a crazy punk room!’

 ‘Sounds like fun. Gantlos may want us to go easy on the crazy punk, though.’

 Stella raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? With that outfit? Figured you were all into crazy punk stuff.’

 Duman smirked. ‘Nah. I’m the only crazy punk. They just let me go crazy on them when Ogron said we needed to get out of capes and armour.’

 ‘Ooh!’ Stella rolled onto her front, kicking her feet in the air as though gossiping at a slumber party. ‘You designed those looks?’

 ‘Yep; I’m the stylist you said G should change.’ He smirked, and Stella grimaced apologetically. 

 ‘Sorry, babe. I just…you sure that was your best work? Love the hat, and that belt thing is cool, not to mention that it does a nice job of showing off curves, cause he got it going on, but…what’s with the shoulder thingies?’

 Duman shrugged. Yeah, not his best work. ‘Dunno. Thought they looked cool at the time. You gotta admit Ogron and I look damn cool.’

 ‘True, though what about Anagan?’

 Duman huffed slightly. ‘The guy will help and get on board with just about anything, but apparently making me his full stylist crossed a line. I was allowed to ‘make suggestions’ for the outfit. Complete control was out of my grasp.’

 ‘Aw…’ Stella pouted. ‘Unfair. You know, speaking of your looks, I finally got em clean. Was not easy. I miss Solaria, where people do things for me. Not that I’ve ever had to try and clean clothes quite that filthy, but still.’ She turned to Duman with a sunny grin. ‘So you can have them back for whenever we need to go jump into a fight.’

 Duman tried to mirror the grin, but his usual mania was dimmed by the thought of donning those clothes, no matter how hard he’d worked on them, how much he’d liked them…he’d been kidnapped, had his leg broken, kidnapped again and almost died in those clothes. No amount of washing could ever remove the emotional stains on those garments.

 Stella, more perceptive than people liked to give her credit for, frowned immediately at his subdued reaction. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ She scooted closer, pulling her legs up onto the bed. ‘What’s wrong? C’mon, talk to Stella.’

 ‘I…’ Duman groaned, flopping back. ‘I just don’t want to wear those clothes. Not now, not ever if I can help it.’ He fingered the AC-DC t-shirt Stella (and by extension, Brandon) had lent him. ‘Though, technically, they are my only clothes that aren’t stolen…’

 ‘Borrowed,’ Stella corrected. ‘Borrowed, honey. Brandon was totally happy for you to keep wearing this stuff, and I got Timmy and Helia to lend us some stuff too until I go shopping.’ Duman knew. Gantlos had looked as though he honestly might cry with relief when he’d been able to get out of the unfortunately bright clothing he’d been borrowing. Though, actually, he might still be in Brandon’s stuff, because, having worn his form for a few minutes, Duman knew for a fact that the specialist was likely the only one with room in his clothes for Gantlos.

 ‘Sorry, I know you probably worked hard to clean those…’

 ‘Oh, psh! It was nothing! Just five hours of work! Got me out of my actual job. Bloom doesn’t know that though so…our secret. They’re not really hang out at the loft clothes anyway. But I did think you might want em back for when you guys help us out against the fairies. I guess you can just wear normal clothes?’ She made a face, and Duman mirrored it.

 ‘No way. I mean, jeans and a hoodie are practical but…’

 ‘There’s no drama!’ they chorused in unison.

 ‘Yes!’ Duman’s eyes shone at someone finally getting it. ‘We’re in an epic battle, we want to look as epic as the history we’re making!’

 ‘Nobody wants to read a history book and see the people in boring clothes!’ Stella frowned, pursing her lips. ‘So…you need interesting clothes…I assume you don’t want to borrow Specialist uniforms?’

 Duman actually gagged at the prospect. ‘I’d rather cremate my own foot.’

 ‘Same, honestly. It is a testament to how sexy Brandon is that I want to tear that uniform off him for reasons other than it being a fashion crime. So those are off the table.’

 ‘I’m insulted that you think they came near the table.’

 ‘I know, right? One of these days, I swear I’ll wear Saladin down, and then those uniforms shall be my canvas…’

 Duman didn’t know who the heck Saladin was, but he got the feeling that if Stella had set her mind to wearing him down, that poor man was rather doomed. 

 Stella’s eyes suddenly went so wide that she could’ve given owls a run for their money, if owls had money. 

 ‘Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Idea! Big idea! Great idea!’ Duman had no clue what this idea was, but Stella seemed so excited that he was just absorbing her enthusiasm. 

 ‘I love it! Let’s do it! What is it?’

 ‘What if we made some new wizard outfits?!’

 ‘…YES!’ Duman hadn’t heard such an amazing idea since Gantlos shirtless! Now there was a cure for boredom!

 Stella’s eyes lit up at his enthusiasm. ‘Really?’

 ‘Are you kidding? That sounds like the first actually fun thing I’ve got to do in ages!’

 ‘Eee!’ Stella scrambled off the bed. ‘I’ll go get my stuff! It’ll take a bit, I got a whole fashion studio in my room, but I can get it all in here.’

 ‘Or…’ Duman started cautiously, ‘what if…I just came to your room?’

 ‘Oh, honey, you sure?’ She wasn’t outright refusing. Good sign. 

 ‘I think so. I made it out to dinner the other night.’

 ‘Well…the plants have stopped trying to kill me…’ Huh? Okay, he seriously still didn’t get what had happened there. But he was damn sure weed killer had been involved.

 ‘Okay, sure!’ Stella took his arm, helping him up and out of bed. ‘Why not?’ 

 The air out of bed was chilled, bringing on shivers, but Duman pushed through, determined not to be defeated by the seven metres to Stella’s room. He’d done harder things than this. His legs had walked further, so they could just hurry up and quit shaking!

 ‘Easy does it…’ Stella murmured, draping his arm over her shoulders. ‘Lean on me, that’s it…’

 ‘Duman?’ Bloom glanced up from her cup of coffee in the kitchen, raising an eyebrow at the two of them. ‘You’re supposed to be in bed.’

 ‘We’re gonna do a thing!’ Stella chirped. ‘In my room. He’ll be sitting down, don’t worry!’

 ‘He’s really meant to be on bed rest…’

 ‘I’m fine, really.’ Duman’s attempt at reassurance was probably undermined by the sickly pallor to his skin and the sweat beading on his forehead, but he whipped out his most reassuring smile to counterbalance it.

 ‘Hm…’ Bloom took a long, judgy sip of her coffee. ‘…Fine. But if Gantlos freaks out, I saw nothing.’

 ‘Sounds like a plan!’ Stella gave her best friend a thumbs up, before guiding Duman into her room. Well, Flora’s room, technically. Hence the entire wall of plants. Meanwhile, the other half of the room was probably there. Duman was assuming. It was hard to tell under the mess of clothing thrown everywhere. Clothing, shoes, makeup, magazines, chip bags…wow, Stella seriously didn’t know how to clean up after herself. His kind of girl!

 ‘Sorry about the mess…’ Stella apologised sheepishly, sweeping a whole mass of stuff off the bed and into a heap on the floor. ‘Not really one for ‘a place for everything’ and stuff.’

 ‘The floor can be a place.’

 ‘I know, right? People are always like, ‘Stella, tidy up, how will you know where anything is?’ and they just will not hear me when I’m like, ‘I know where everything is. It’s all on the floor.’’

 Duman settled himself onto the now-clear bed, shivering slightly as Stella tucked her blanket up and around his shoulders. 

 ‘There! Toasty?’

 ‘Mhm…’

 Stella hopped up beside him, snapping her fingers, once to summon a pencil, twice to summon a huge sketch pad. 

 ‘Okie dokie, time to make some magic. Now, you know your friends better than me, so you may need to take point here. And I’ll add some of that newly-on-the-side-of-good finesse!’

 Huh, she was right. They were fighting on the side of the heroes now. That was…an interesting change. Maybe they should drop a touch of the black. 

 ‘Why don’t we start off with Gantlos? And how about, this time, we give him the capacity to breathe?’ 

 Duman rolled his eyes, but had to admit that perhaps he had gone a teensy bit overboard with Gantlos’s outfit. Just a teensy bit.

 ‘Hm…’ Stella scratched her pencil across the paper, sketching out a damn good likeness of Gantlos in a few strokes. ‘Okay…we keeping the hat?’

 ‘Definitely.’ Gantlos loved that hat. Plus, it had practical applications. If it was ditched, he’d refuse to wear the outfit. Or just add the hat on his own. 

 ‘Cool…’ Damn, this woman could draw hats? How was she doing that? Duman just always ended up giving up and scribbling over his attempts at hat-based art. 

 ‘I like a western motif…to match the hat…’ 

 Duman bounced the pitch of a black and red colour scheme right off the back of Stella’s idea, and from there, the creativity just flowed. Yes, some of it was impractical, but really, what designing session was complete without drawing Ogron in a walrus costume? And a lemur costume? That tangent went on a while, as did the finding of a location to hide the admittedly hilarious doodles. (Ogron never went into the back of Stella’s wardrobe, right?)

 But, after several hours of sketching and assorted nonsense that only they could create, Stella beamed with delight, clapping her hands as the drawings levitated up into the air in front of her. 

 ‘Oh! Oh, they’re perfect! And they totally say ‘Earth fairies, watch out, you are screwed, unless you’re Roxy, or Diana, or not fighting us, in which case, never mind, we cool!’’

 ‘They do say that!’ Though Duman somewhat mourned the loss of Gantlos’s outfit’s skin-tight quality, he had to confess, he was still very pleased with what they’d come up with. And, for the first time in days, he didn’t know what time it was. He hadn’t glanced at the clock to watch the minutes tick past in…hours? Was it hours? Whatever, he wasn’t gonna look. He was staying in this timeless void of creativity and relaxation for as long as possible.

 ‘Ugh, these are gonna take forever to make…’ he groaned, sagging back, holding up the sketch for Ogron. The outfit, sporting a knee-length deep-purple jacket and riding boots, would make him look like a pretty snappy old-timey gentleman, which, frankly, suited his personal sense of style better than leather and buckles Duman had heard him curse in the name of just about every deity there was. Only problem? The coat alone would take an age to sew. You could sew by magic, but since you still had to levitate the needle in and out of the fabric, and since Duman’s own levitation control made three-year-olds look coordinated, that’d take almost as long.

 ‘Oh, hon, no they won’t!’ Stella dived into yet another heap of stuff, yanking out what looked like a star-shaped compact. ‘Ta-da!’

 ‘It’s…I don’t get it, what is it?’

 ‘Birthday gift from Daddy.’ Stella hopped back up, summoning over a ream of fabric. ‘Observe.’ She folded over an edge of fabric, snapped her fingers to hold it in place, then snapped the object shut over it, zipping it along the fold. ‘All sewn up!’ A perfect seam rested underneath her fingers, and Duman stared in quiet awe. 

 ‘Damn, that thing’s handy.’

 ‘I know, right? How do you think I sorted our store uniforms so quickly? Top of the line from Zenith. I added the glitter.’

 ‘Figures. Felt too fabulous for Zenith.’

 ‘Zenith does plenty of fabulous things,’ Stella replied firmly. ‘It gave us Tecna.’ She paused. ‘…And this. And…and…okay, I got nothing else, but I’ll look it up. But not now! We have more important things to do!’

 ‘Guess you need to go fabric shopping,’ Duman remarked, rolling to lie on his front, his muscles quirking an eyebrow at the movement, but opting not to issue a complaint. He was honestly feeling better now than he had in days. Bed rest may be overrated. 

 Stella scoffed incredulously. ‘Fabric shopping? Far be it for me to turn down shopping, but you say that like I don’t already have a fabulous fabric archive.’

 Duman glanced around the room. Sure, there was lots of stuff, but most of the fabric was trapped in clothes already. 

 ‘…Where?’

 ‘I cast a spell hooking this closet up to my closet at Alfea, and on Solaria. I may not have passed my potions course at school, or incantations, but I can set up a space-sharing spell better than anyone. After all, I could only bring one suitcase to Earth; no way was that enough! Observe…’ 

 Duman propped himself up on his elbows as Stella swung open the doors to her closet, his jaw dropping slightly as she stepped inside what honestly looked to be bigger than the whole loft.

 ‘That’s on Solaria?’ he asked, swinging his legs off the bed and staggering after her. Yes, he was dizzy and weak, but there was a giant magical closet! He wasn’t missing that!

 ‘Kinda. I can’t leave through my Solarian closet, and technically this exists outside of space and time.’ Stella took his hand, offering support and a sense of direction as she strode through what any reasonable person would assume was a whole boutique. A single person could own this much? Half the things in here were crusted with jewels, or spun from silk! Certainly the closet of royalty…

 ‘Here we go! I keep all my fabric in here, in case I just don’t have the outfit I want and I need to make it.’ 

 ‘There are situations you don’t have an outfit for?’ Duman asked sarcastically, sifting through one of the many, many racks of clothes. Partly for support, partly because he just could not get over this place. 

 ‘This stuff is amazing…’

 ‘I’d say you can borrow anything you like, but I don’t think it’d fit you,’ Stella offered, piling up rolls of fabric, the reams following her like soldiers standing to attention.

 ‘I can make a body for it once I have my powers back.’ A lot of people would find that kind of remark weird. The number of people that had backed away from him for that… But Stella just beamed, not missing a beat.

 ‘Oh, well, in that case, once you’re back to normal, borrow anything you like! It’ll look good on you.’

 ‘You sure?’

 ‘You think I have time to wear all this? You’ll be doing the clothes a favour!’ Stella whistled sharply, and all her fabric rolled after her towards the exit. ‘Come on, material! Time to live a new life!’ Figured that Stella was the kind of girl with personification levitation.

 Once they’d got settled back in reality - which now seemed oddly small and disappointing - Stella pulled out her phone, tapping through about sixty different social media feeds before reaching a folder entitled ‘Enemies (No longer relevant)’. Upon closer examination, this was for Duman and his friends. No longer relevant? If Ogron wasn’t so exhausted, Duman would have been sharing that with him with great relish…

 ‘Why do you need a strategy folder?’ he asked curiously, grinning as he noted how good and creepy his picture was. 

 ‘Tecna got diagnostic scans of all of you, so I can use it for measurements.’

 ‘Creepy and slightly invasive! I like it!’

 Cutting fabric was apparently easier than sewing it, and the pieces fell into places far faster than Duman would have expected, but he wasn’t complaining. Gantlos would be back in an hour or so, and oh, how he’d love to surprise him…

 Stella even let him have a go with her fancy sewing machine! It was much easier than it looked, actually, and he was rather disappointed when the seam had been finished. 

 ‘Duman? Hey, Bloom said you were in here…?’ 

 Gantlos was back already? Damn, maybe Duman should have looked at the time. But time had been good to him, in spite of his ignorance, returning Gantlos to him just as Stella sewed on the final button.

 ‘Yep! Welcome home!’

 Gantlos was still slightly pink from the exertion of training, but he’d showered since his return. 

 ‘Hey…how come you’re in here?’

 Duman answered with an grin of barely-contained excitement. ‘We have something for you!’

 ‘Oh?’ Gantlos walked over, catching Duman’s lips in a kiss that reminded them both how relieved the wizard of destruction was every time he got home and saw that Duman was still breathing. ‘What do you have?’

 ‘Okay, so, well, Stella and I designed it together, and she mostly made it but I helped and she let me do a seam and she has a giant magic closet she said I can borrow from but that’s getting off topic but I probably will be a girl more frequently after I’m better just so I can borrow from her because her stuff is cute, but anyway here we made you this because our old wizard looks are so grody so here!’ 

 Gantlos looked mildly taken-aback by the stream of words, but his eyes lit with hope at the energy in Duman’ voice, an energy that had been lacking, that a day actually achieving something had done wonders to rekindle. 

 ‘…Woah.’ Gantlos accepted the bundle of clothes Duman proffered, his smile widening as he examined the garments. ‘Duman, Stella, these…these are amazing! Thank you so much!’

 ‘Eee! Try them on! I wanna see if they fit! Pleeeeeease?’ Duman whipped out his best puppy eyes, and Gantlos nodded.

 ‘Okay, give me a second.’

 ‘You can use the closet, it’s a pocket dimension that’s bigger than our warehouse.’

 Shaking his head as he walked inside a closet that appeared barely big enough to fit half of him, Gantlos muttered, ‘Nothing surprises me anymore…’

 Duman kicked his feet with feverish excitement, bordering on bouncing as he waited for Gantlos to reappear. When he did, he had to admit: he and Stella were united geniuses. And he was one lucky shapeshifter.

 Gantlos hair stood out sharply against the red shirt, which did actually allow Gantlos to breathe, decked in muted shades of red and maroon, all topped off with the hat he loved so dearly. 

 ‘Oh…you look so good!’ Duman attempted to get up, but it was getting late and he was getting tired, so it was more of a weak, dizzy stumble that Gantlos quickly put a stop to, hurrying across the room.

 ‘Okay, okay, let’s not overdo it…’ He checked Duman wasn’t set to try again, before stepping back to glance in the mirror. ‘…Wow. This looks really good, you guys.’

 ‘I know, right?’ Stella sprang up, popping up behind Gantlos in the mirror. ‘It’s mostly Duman’s design. And, I gotta say, I like it way better than your old look. No offence, but…’

 ‘We don’t need to finish that thought,’ Duman interjected. ‘But you do look so handsome in that…red is your colour.’

 ‘Thank you both so much.’ Gantlos gave Stella a grateful smile, before thanking Duman with a far more intimate kiss. 

 ‘You’re welcome! We made some for Ogron and Anagan too, plus me, of course.’ Duman beamed at the thought of the punk insanity he and Stella had created for when he finally rejoined this fight. ‘Stella let me add platform boots!’

 ‘Oh…practical…’

 ‘You’re taller than me, so when I would like to kiss you without having to go on tiptoe, then yes, they are.’ Duman grabbed the outfits they’d made for Ogron and Anagan, his eyes shining. ‘Can we go show them?’

 ‘You don’t need my permission. But you might need my arm.’ Gantlos offered aforementioned arm and Duman gratefully accepted the support, walking carefully out on shaky legs, letting Stella carry the clothes.

 ‘Hey! Ogron, Anagan! Guys, c’mere!’

 ‘Why are you calling us like dogs?’ Ogron demanded, wandering down from upstairs, his hair rumpled, suggesting that the impossible had happened and he’d actually had a nap. Whoa. Ogron was willingly sleeping? Up was down, down was up, bananas were red, day was night…madness. True madness.

 ‘Hey, you’re up!’ Anagan’s greeting was far more enthusiastic as he hurried over, beaming at Duman standing form. ‘You’re feeling better?’

 ‘Mhm! And Stella and I made you guys something!’

 ‘Really? Weren’t you supposed to be resting?’ Ogron asked skeptically, while Anagan surreptitiously elbowed him, giving Duman an intrigued smile.

 ‘What?’

 ‘Ta-da!’ Stella tossed the clothes up into the air, where they tumbled to hang before their new owners, held aloft by a soft golden gleam. ‘We made you new wizard looks! If you want to go back to your old ones, that’s fine, I got them clean, but since-’

 ‘I love it,’ Ogron blurted out, blushing slightly as Stella and Duman stared at him with delighted puppy eyes. ‘I said I liked an outfit, not that I brokered world peace, no need to look so excited.’ Nevertheless, Ogron was staring lustfully at the rich fabric, appearing far more enamoured with the outfit than he had with his former garb. 

 Meanwhile, Anagan looked absolutely delighted with the new clothing on offer. ‘Woah! You guys made this? Today? It’s amazing!’ He fingered the sleeve of the jacket, included because Anagan just wasn’t Anagan without a jacket, smiling at the quality. ‘Thank you so much.’

 ‘No problem!’ Stella grinned at the two wizards’ obvious appreciation, even if Ogron was trying to pretend he wasn’t childishly excited for new clothes. ‘We had fun! Plus, it’s always nice to go into battle dressed as snappily as possible. It tells your opponents not only will you crush them, but you’ll be doing it with style.’

 ‘I have one too!’ Duman added. 

 Ogron and Anagan exchanged a glance. ‘For…fighting?’ Ogron clarified, his voice tinged with surprise.

 ‘Yep!’ Duman smirked at their questioning expressions. ‘What? You didn’t think a little sickness was keeping me out of this fight, did you?’

Chapter Text

 War was a long game. A very long game. The sort of long game that left the side of good (and morally kinda grey) kicking their heels in search of something to do with themselves while the fate of the world rested on a precipice. It was a time for dramatic moments. Important meetings. Strategising. Earth-shattering revelations. 

 In the absence of such things, Stella had organised a movie night. 

 ‘I really do think there are better things to do with our time than watch…’ Ogron paused, unsure of the movie. 

 ‘Legally Blonde,’ Stella filled in. Ogron looked a tad ill.

 ‘…That. We are at war, Stella. So Reese Witherspoon can wait for another day.’

 ‘You see any warrior fairies hanging around?’ Stella demanded, already setting up the living room. A movie night was just a few inches from a slumber party, and any decent party planner knew to be prepared for a movie night to turn into a slumber party. Everyone spread out on the floor and couch? Late at night? With popcorn and a movie? Any idiot could see where that could go. Hence, the dozens of cushions thrown everywhere, and the blankets strewn across them. 

 ‘Hm…’ Ogron fingered the soft furnishings like they might be concealing a devious agenda. 

 Rolling her eyes, Stella plumped a cushion for maximum support. ‘Wow, Ogron. Honey, you never been to a party before?’

 Ogron made a few annoyed huffing noises that Stella translated as ‘No, I’m a mess of social anxiety and pretending to be better than everyone else so nobody can see how broken I am inside, but I desperately want to have fun for a change.’ Well, luckily for him, he’d met the right princess! Stella specialised in getting people out of their shells and into the magical world of having fun.

 Speaking of people whose shells she’d helped shed, Tecna wandered in, quirking an eyebrow at the set up. 

 ‘…Stella, are you certain we need all this? We’re just watching a movie.’

 Stella flicked her wrist to hang up some fairy lights, eliciting eye-rolls from the two cynics she was desperately trying to help, and a delighted clap from her little bunny helper.

 ‘What do you think, Kiko?’ She cocked her head. ‘Too much?’

 ‘Yes,’ Ogron and Tecna answered in unison, while Kiko just shook his head.

 ‘You’re right. Too little!’ A quick spell later, and the lights sparkled in every colour of the rainbow. ‘Much better!’

 ‘For a movie night?’ Tecna asked, frowning. 

 ‘For Legally Blonde!’ Stella argued. ‘That’s basically a religion!’

 ‘Solaria has a different definition of religion to Earth…’ Ogron muttered, hopping up onto the arm of the couch to watch Stella’s preparations. 

 ‘Say what you will about this, but I just know when someone fun comes in here, they are gonna say-’

 ‘Holy blazing Phoenix, this place looks amazing!’

 Stella nodded smugly at Duman’s reaction. Finally, someone saw what she was going for here.

 ‘This is gonna be some movie night.’ Duman flopped back onto the couch. Stella had just arranged that, but Duman was sick. She could give leeway. Also, she didn’t really want to find out what Gantlos did when someone berated his ill boyfriend. Tear into them and maybe blast them to the Sun, if he was a half-decent partner.

 ‘I know, right? And Ogron thinks this is too much.’

 Duman rolled his eyes, turning over onto his stomach, relishing in his returning mobility. ‘Ogron thinks any form of activity beyond curling up in bed with a book and no need to get up is overkill.’

 ‘Well, tonight, you are going to have fun with your friends,’ Stella announced, countenancing no argument. Ogron needed to relax, and she wasn’t leaving anyone out tonight. 

 ‘Flora!’ 

 Flora jumped with surprise as Stella whipped around to point to her.

 ‘What?!’ There were a few awkward moments as she stood to attention before remembering they weren’t actively doing a war right now, so she just settled for looking a bit thrown. 

 ‘What is the status on snacks?’

 ‘Um…we have some?’

 ‘Excellent! Tecna!’

 Tecna simply quirked a brow from her spot at the kitchen island.

 ‘What is the status on Netflix?’

 ‘We’re still successfully hacking and parasitising off Mitzi’s account.’

 ‘Wait, what?’ 

 Stella didn’t have time for Ogron’s incredulity. ‘Fabulous!’

 ‘Roxy’s on her way over,’ Bloom announced, reading a text on her phone as she walked in. ‘Wow. Stella, we’re just watching a movie…’

 ‘Duman likes it. None of the rest of you have taste. Speaking of taste, Flora, we’ve got enough of those snacks for everyone, right?’

 ‘Mhm.’

 ‘What did you get?’

 ‘Stella, when you said I was in charge of snacks, I was sort of under the impression that that meant I was actually in charge…’

 Stella clapped her hands, cutting Flora off. ‘I just need an answer, Flora. We have T-minus forty-seven minutes until we hit play, I need to know our status!’

 Bloom huffed. ‘And yet, when we were trying to track down Roxy and Gantlos on the docks, your idea for where they were was, ‘Around.’’

 ‘That was close enough.’

 ‘They were sailing away! They weren’t even around!’

 ‘Not the time, Bloom. What it’s time for is pyjamas! Pyjamas and Legally Blonde! Courtesy of that manipulative little woman, Mitzi.’

 Bloom couldn’t help but crack a grin at Tecna’s continued hacking of her high-school bully’s Netflix account. Like the heroes of Gardenia were paying for Netflix. And like Stella would ever pass up the chance for petty revenge. 

 ‘Wait, so I did hear that right?’ Ogron frowned at the two girls. ‘You steal your Netflix from someone?’

 ‘Mitzi. So not just anyone.’ Stella smirked at Ogron’s dumbfounded expression. ‘What…? You didn’t think we were all paragons of virtue, did you? Hell, Bloom randomly attacked Sky’s girlfriend in freshman year.’

 Ogron’s mouth actually dropped open, while Duman shot to his feet, staggering and being steadied by an equally shocked Gantlos.

 ‘Whoa, for real?!’ Duman actually looked excited at the revelation. ‘What, like, just jumped her? You just got so much more interesting…’

 Bloom blushed bright red, mumbling awkwardly about the Trix. ‘It’s…not something I’m proud of.’

 ‘Why?’ Duman asked curiously. ‘Didja lose?’ 

 ‘Duman!’ Gantlos hissed, glancing awkwardly to Bloom. 

 Ogron rolled his eyes. ‘She’s the Fairy of the Dragon Flame, Duman; of course she didn’t lose.’

 Gantlos facepalmed. ‘Not why he needed to stop…’

 Unperturbed by the revelation that the leader of the heroes of the dimension was in fact technically a criminal, Duman flopped back onto the couch with a grin. ‘We really don’t know you girls, huh?’

 ‘Maybe if ya did, you wouldn’t have rocked up to Alfea and blown your whole plan,’ Musa remarked with a hefty dollop of snark, snatching a chip from the bowls Flora was setting up as she wandered in. 

 Ogron turned red, hiding his face by staring at Stella’s second favourite throw pillow as though it was the most fascinating thing in the world. Which, obviously, it wasn’t; then it’d be her favourite. Duh. 

 ‘You guys led us to Roxy in the end so…’ Gantlos smirked a little. ‘Did we really screw it up?’

 ‘You really think our fighting was headed anywhere good for you guys if your boyfriend hadn’t gotten kidnapped and made us all do a team up?’ Musa replied, dodging Flora trying to swat her away from the snacks and purloining a whole bowl of popcorn. ‘You guys were screwed.’

 ‘Oh yeah?’ Gantlos frowned. ‘We weren’t doing so badly.’

 Musa snorted. ‘Yeah…whatever you gotta tell yourself, cowboy.’

 ‘You really think you’d have won?’

 ‘Think…know for a fact…’ Musa smirked, and Gantlos scowled.

 ‘If you ever want to test that little theory…’

 ‘Okay, this isn’t going anywhere good…’ Flora quickly interjected by snatching back her bowl from Musa and giving them both a very stern look. Stella wasn’t sure what it was about Flora’s stern looks that could make people stop fighting and fall silent, but she’d never been able to replicate it. Which she supposed just meant she was going to have to employ Flora at her royal court when she was older to make all the courtiers shut up.

 ‘I know you’d have won,’ Duman whispered up to Gantlos, drawing out a small smile. Stella was personally of the opinion that Musa was right, they’d been whooping wizard ass, but she didn’t need a fight started over it. Frankly, this was the best outcome she could have hoped for. Trucing with the wizards was pretty great, and, now that they weren’t trying to kill each other, she honestly really liked her former enemies. Ogron was an overly-analytical insomniac that was willing to help out with just about anything to feel useful, and reticently allowing her to try and teach him about the wonders of relaxing  and taking care of oneself, Gantlos she hadn’t really hung out with, but she liked the guy, liked his straight-talking nature and the fact he’d stop a train with his bare hands to protect the people he cared about. A girl had to respect that. Anagan had saved her from getting murdered in her sleep by plants, and Duman was rapidly on track to become her partner in crime. She’d always wanted a partner in crime! She’d have given the role to Brandon, but since he was her jail pickup since she’d got drunk in college and sort of maybe a little bit stolen a cop’s car, it just didn’t work for him to be in jail with her. She wondered if Gantlos would pick her up from jail if she got arrested next to his boyfriend…Brandon could use the help…

 ‘Okay!’ Seeing Aisha and Anagan walk in, Stella clapped her hands, drawing everyone’s attention to her. ‘Roxy will get here in about ten minutes, and then we are go on movie night, so if everyone could go change into pyjamas, and make them as cute and cool as possible, please, go, and let’s make this the best movie night ever!’ Stella was a firm believer in friendship rituals like this. They helped people bonds to feel closer. And everyone being in pyjamas just helped make it all more casual, more intimate. If all went well, tonight would cement their bonds of friendship and make them all the more prepared for friend stuff, like sharing secrets and fighting a massive war!

 Slight snag. Mitzi was apparently not as dumb as they thought, and they appeared to have been locked out of her Netflix account.

 ‘Maybe it’s just a glitch?’ Stella suggested as Tecna tapped pointlessly at her tablet. 

 Her phone buzzed, and she checked her texts. (Yes, she had her phone, she couldn’t leave it alone, Brandon might call with an emergency, or to say that that new jacket she bought him really was green and not teal, in which case, she would be having words with Amazon Essentials!)

 Her lips pursed as she read the text aloud. ‘Suck it, losers, you really think I wouldn’t notice you were using my Netflix account? PS, Stella, saw Brandon in his new green jacket; I like it, but it’d look better on my bedroom floor, don’t you think?’ Stella almost turned puce. ‘I knew it! I knew it’d be green! Those internet liars! Also, sexual innuendo about my boyfriend.’

 ‘Damn…’ Duman let out a slow whistle. ‘Never met that girl, but she sounds god awful.’

 ‘And yet, smart enough to lock us out of her Netflix,’ Tecna sighed, discarding her tablet. 

 ‘Well, looks like movie night is dead,’ Ogron remarked, sounding very much like he was trying hard to sound disappointed. ‘Well, since we’re not doing this, I’m going to go work up a plan for-’

 ‘Ogron, you sit yourself back on this couch right now.’

 Ogron grumpily sat back down, glowering at Stella as she frowned, thinking through her options. She had really been looking forward to screwing Mitzi over…and Legally Blonde was only on Netflix right now…she could buy it, but she didn’t feel like shelling out money for a film tonight. She wasn’t cheap, she was just planning to get her own Netflix subscription at some point, so what was the point? They had DVDs, but nobody knew what they did, or why they physically existed, and Stella was a tad scared to touch them. They looked like magical artefacts… They could use her StarStream subscription and watch a Solarian movie, but when on Earth… 

 ‘Oh! I have an idea!’ She scrolled through the ninety apps on her phone and opened Disney Plus, connecting to the tv. ‘I have a movie!’

 ‘If you make me watch a rom com…’ Gantlos started, sounding mildly disgusted, but Stella held up a hand. 

 ‘This look like a rom com?’

 ‘…The Avengers?’ Ogron raised an eyebrow. ‘…You watch Marvel films?’

 ‘Watch em, love em, practised the Black Widow hair flip in the mirror for over an hour. I used it in a fight, actually. Remember, that one time, I flew in just after you found Roxy? The hair flipping?’

 ‘Oh my god, I remember that!’ Roxy snorted. ‘I thought you were insane.’

 ‘Insanely cool?’

 ‘Nope, just insane.’ Roxy shrugged. ‘Gotta admit that the cultural reference was oddly reassuring, though.’

 Stella beamed, before glancing to everyone. ‘We all good with this?’ A general noise of agreement came from the group, and they started on the film. 

 Stella loved this movie. The action, the drama, literally anything Scarlett Johansson did. Everyone else seemed to have varying opinions. Bloom and Duman looked utterly gripped, Flora was evidently distressed any time somebody died, Musa was just watching Chris Hemsworth, and Roxy was sneakily feeding snacks to the fairy pets that had set up camp on her. Everyone else just…looked appropriately invested. 

 ‘You know, this hits different now,’ Bloom remarked as Loki started mind controlling people. ‘Didn’t seem so bad, then you wind up in their shoes, and it’s like, ‘Damn, mind control is actually pretty hellish’.’ That remark garnered a few raised eyebrows from the members of the group that hadn’t been there for the Dark Bloom debacle. 

 ‘Ugh…’ Stella grimaced, flinching as the Hulk, well, Hulked out. ‘Look at that. Losing a perfectly good outfit…you know, turning into a giant green monster really is sucky, I feel so bad for the guy. But Y’know, at least nobody on his own side is trying to kill him…’

 ‘Why would they?’ Roxy asked curiously, barely able to see past Belle, who’d decided her face was a great spot to stay safe from the gamma rage monster.

 ‘Oh, you know…mind control, Valtor…stuff like that.’

 Roxy and Gantlos exchanged a ‘Do you know what the heck she’s talking about?’ look, and evidently, neither of them knew what the heck she was talking about.

 By the time they reached the finale, Stella should have been gripped. And she would have been, if Tecna wasn’t just visible in her peripheral vision, on her phone. Her phone. They were watching a movie for Solaria’s sake!

 ‘Tecna!’ she hissed under her breath. ‘Tecna Voltax, put the phone down, we are watching them beat up aliens!’

 Tecna sighed, rolling her eyes. ‘Stella, I’m not massively inclined to watch something we basically lived; you don’t see me watching a documentary of someone backing up their pc, do you?’

 ‘No, but that sounds like you.’

 ‘Wait, wait, wait…’ Ogron hit pause, freezing the screen on a rather unfortunate shot of a war beast exploding. ‘What do you mean, something you’ve basically lived?’

 ‘Aw, come on! This is the climax, people!’ Bloom huffed, but was ignored. 

 Tecna put her phone down (thank god) and turned to face Ogron. ‘Freshman year, these witches called the Trix stole Bloom’s Dragon Flame and made the Army of Darkness, this huge, creepy army of magical bugs and other creatures, and we, along with the other magic students, had to fight them all off. I’m just saying, when you’ve actually lived through an invasion by a hivemind of monsters, watching it just isn’t that exciting.’

 ‘You fought the Army of Darkness?!’ Stella had never seen Ogron look so excited. ‘The legendary embodiment of evil?!’ 

 ‘Yeah…you didn’t know that?’ Stella asked, starting to feel her attention teasing itself away from the movie and across to this. 

 ‘Mm-mm.’ Ogron shook his head sharply. 

 Musa cocked her head in confusion, pausing in trying to toss popcorn into her mouth. ‘How do you not know that? It’s where we made our names as the Winx. Course, we weren’t really the Winx til Aisha joined and we scrapped with Darkar.’

 Had Ogron been drinking water, he would have spat it all out then and there. ‘Lord Darkar?! You’re nineteen! How have you fought the source of all evil?!’

 ‘I’m twenty, actually,’ Stella chipped in. ‘I repeated a year at Alfea cause I kinda got expelled for blowing up a classroom.’

 ‘Nineteen, twenty, same difference, why were you fighting the Lord of evil?!’ 

 Stella exchanged a glance with her friends, and they all sort of responded with the same shrug. Why had they fought Darkar? Why them, and not the Company of Light? …Well, they’d been available, and people had repeatedly failed to keep them out of fights. 

 ‘Well, we kinda got a bit thrown into the fighting gig when my ring got stolen by these witches called the Trix freshman year,’ Stella explained. ‘We broke in, stole it back, whole buncha other stuff went down, Bloom came home, the Trix stole her Dragon Flame, then we broke into Cloud Tower again with the help of this big yellow ogre that used to be evil but then joined our side, and we tried to get the flame back but it didn’t totally work but we got Riven back, because, long story, but before Musa he dated this chick called Darcy, who was one of the Trix, and he was kinda evil but also not and we found him in all this gross trash and we made up but there was so much trash that it totes took me out of it and then we had to hightail it back to Alfea cause Red Fountain, where the guys went to school, had been totally wrecked and the Army of Darkness was marching and we all stood up and screwed with them, while Bloom went under this lake to talk to her dead sister then she got her flame back and kicked Icy’s ass - Icy was the leader of the Trix - and they got arrested and sent to Lightrock and we didn’t get to keep the duck.’

 Silence. Musa chewing. More silence. 

 ‘…Your freshman year?!’ Ogron burst out incredulously, a sentiment chorused by Roxy. ‘You did all this your freshman year?!’

 ‘Mhm! And, can you believe it, we still passed all our classes!’ Stella paused. ‘…Okay, most. We got extra credit for saving the universe, and I still barely scraped through.’ It wasn’t that Stella was dumb. Far from it, she was abnormally intelligent with a strong creativity, there was just something about test-taking that had never vibed with her. Her mind was big, and vibrant, and filled with (semi-useless) information; she was supposed to put all that onto a piece of paper offering her four choices? No way, no how.

 ‘Why…how?!’ Ogron demanded, looking mildly aggrieved to not have a notepad to take notes. ‘Why didn’t your teachers handle it, isn’t Alfea full of strong magic users?’

 ‘Oh yeah…’ Musa raised an eyebrow, finally attaching herself to the conversation rather than her popcorn. ‘Remember when you four rocked up and all those super strong fairies and wizards came pouring out to whoop your asses? Oh, no, no, wait, hold up.’ 

 ‘…Touché.’ Ogron bit his lip, frowning. ‘So…what else have you girls done?’

 ‘Oh, lots of things. We’re kinda a big deal in the Magic Dimension.’ Stella grinned, seizing her phone and ignoring Tecna’s complaints over how she’d been banned from her own phone. ‘Check it. Kinda a celebrity.’ She proffered the screen to Ogron, and he took it curiously, raising an eyebrow at the image of Stella and a very awkward Bloom sitting slash cringing on a couch that really was just as plush as it looked, conversing with the most famous chat show host on Solaria.  

 ‘This…is you on a chat show?’

 ‘No, that is me making a gigantic fool of myself,’ Bloom corrected, flicking her finger and whipping the phone out of Ogron’s hands. ‘Imma take that before you figure out it’s a clip…’

 ‘It wasn’t that bad, honey…’ Stella reassured her, but Bloom steadfastly insisted on clinging to the phone like it was her long lost child that had a lot of dirt on her. In all fairness, it had kinda been that bad, but best friends were nothing if not good at lying to spare their friend’s feelings. 

 Musa lacked such skills. ‘Pfft. It so was. They asked about your feelings towards Diaspro, you got awkward and fidgety for two whole minutes then blurted out that you probably wouldn’t screw her.’

 ‘Those weren’t my exact words!’ Bloom’s cheeks burned brighter than the Dragon Flame as Duman struggled to hold back a laugh. 

 ‘I dunno who Diaspro is, but…she’s missing out.’ 

 ‘Uh…’ Bloom cocked her head, torn between being flattered or even more awkward. ‘Thanks?’

 ‘No problem.’ Duman offered a thumbs up while Gantlos quietly facepalmed. ‘So, who is Diaspro?’

 ‘She’s this princess that Sky was engaged to,’ Bloom explained. Yeah, that was pretty much it. Stella would have said ‘psycho drugging bitch’ instead of princess, but, in all fairness, the girl had kinda been screwed over by the narrative, so she’d be nice and hold her tongue.

 ‘Ooh!’ Duman’s eyes lit up as he put some pieces together. ‘This wouldn’t be the girlfriend you attacked in freshman year, would it?’

 Bloom looked away. ‘…Maybe.’

 ‘Woah woah woah…’ Roxy turned on her side, staring at Bloom in what…looked a lot like awe. ‘You just attacked Sky’s girlfriend? Like, for a reason?’

 ‘I…thought she was one of the Trix.’ Long pause. ‘…She wasn’t.’

 ‘Damn…so did you go to jail?’

 ‘Nope!’ Stella grinned. ‘She didn’t even get a detention! There were zero repercussions! Can you believe that?’

 Ogron blinked. ‘…No.’

 ‘Aw, c’mon!’ Roxy flopped back down onto her beanbag with a dramatic groan. ‘You get to assault people with no recourse, and I wind up suspended for smuggling one tiny poisonous snake into school!’ She glanced back up at them, rolling her eyes. ‘Poisonous snakes get such a bad rep, Y’know. They didn’t choose to be able to kill someone in one bite! And this one was missing a fang, and it was little! It needed help! And the janitor chased it with a damn broom!’ Stella quirked an eyebrow. It was probably good for Grizelda’s blood pressure that Roxy had issued a hard pass on Alfea - though the girl would fit in damn well at Cloud Tower. Could a fairy study at Cloud Tower? She had once…the lack of natural light in that place was just horrid, but some people seemed to like it. 

 ‘Diaspro turned out to be a little crazy anyways,’ Musa acknowledged. ‘She teamed up with Valtor and drugged Sky with a love potion then tried to get us all killed.’

 ‘Can we just take a moment to acknowledge that not one of the guards were drugged?’ Aisha interjected. ‘Sky just started yelling that we, the heroes of the dimension, including two foreign dignitaries, were witches and had to be killed, and they went, ‘Oh, okay, sure, whatever, cut their heads off.’ I mean, I’m just saying…Samara and Erendor were totally waiting for a chance to behead us.’

 ‘They’re not that bad…’ Bloom mumbled. Everyone exchanged a glance. They kinda were.

 ‘Wait, is Erendor the pushy jackass that showed up at the bar a few months ago?’ Roxy asked. ‘Just before I got all possessed and tried to murder the wizards?’

 ‘Yes, we all remember that, don’t need to relive it…’ Ogron muttered, blushing slightly at the memory of being owned by a teenage girl. 

 ‘Yep, that’s him! King Jackass himself.’ 

 ‘Stella! That’s my future father in law you’re talking  about!’ Bloom chastised.

 ‘And…?’

 ‘And…he’s a jackass.’

 ‘Exactly.’

 ‘So…’ Anagan began, thinking something over. ‘If Sky’s dad is a king…and he’s a prince…you’re from Gardenia, right? Not to be offensive, but…he doesn’t sound like someone that would let his son be with…uh…’

 ‘A muck-raking unwashed commoner?’ Bloom filled in with a grin.

 ‘No! No, I just mean…’ Anagan scrambled for words, but Bloom just burst out laughing.

 ‘His words, Anagan, not yours!’

 ‘He called you that?’ Roxy gasped, looking two minutes from starting a fist fight with a king. 

 ‘Yep. To my face. Preceded by ‘Sky, son, consider forgiving Diaspro, she’s a fine young woman, and the drugging was just a lapse in judgement, these things happen.’’ Bloom rolled her eyes, laughing softly at the lunacy of it all. ‘Funny thing: the whole dimension already knew I was a princess.’

 ‘You’re a princess?’ Gantlos looked her up and down, apparently trying to consolidate the image of a regal, elegant royal with the young woman tying her hair back with a rubber band and wearing a sweatshirt adorned with anime characters and salsa stains. ‘…Are you sure?’

 ‘Gantlos…’ Anagan muttered, making an ‘are you serious’ face Stella had found herself on the receiving end of a great many times. 

 ‘No, no, that was pretty much my reaction,’ Bloom laughed. ‘Once all the war stuff had died down, and I could breathe again, I spent like an hour looking in the mirror, trying to figure out what part of me was remotely regal. Turned out, none of it. I was insecure about not acting regal until I took Stella to Burger King and watched the Princess of Solaria eat a double cheeseburger in three bites.’

 All eyes swivelled to Stella, who just tossed Duman her phone in response, flashing a sunny smile as her screen demonstrated a selfie of her right after the aforementioned meal. Ketchup-y. ‘I regret nothing.’

 ‘Damn…’ Duman tossed her phone back, letting out a slow whistle. ‘You got some killer confidence, Stell.’ 

 ‘Thank you. I got a lot of it after this whole debacle where I got cursed and turned into a giant frog monster thing by my dad’s girlfriend.’

 ‘…What kind of bloody madness do you people get up to?!’ Ogron demanded incredulously.

 ‘Well, she had teamed up with Valtor.’

 ‘As in…Valtor?’ Anagan clarified, eyes wide. ‘The all-powerful sorcerer that decimated Domino?’

 ‘Domino’s back, btw,’ Musa mentioned, and all wizard eyes widened. 

 ‘B-but- it got destroyed!’

 ‘Nope, Ogron. It got frozen,’ Stella corrected, though she’d frankly thought the same thing for a super long time. ‘And then Bloom’s sister ghost gave her a mask and stuff and we went to Obsidian and fought this witch and all her bugs and Riven tried to kill Musa, but he was hypnotised, so they’re cool. I mean, not now, they hate each other, but they got past the attempted homicide, because who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, been hypnotised into trying to kill someone? Anyhoo, Sky pulled this magic sword outta this magic rock, and then the Ancestral Witches got all destroyed and stuff, or at least probably, hope that madness doesn’t pop back up at some point, and now Domino is back and better than ever, replete with princess!’ She swept a hand towards Bloom, who offered her most regal wave, which…frankly looked a lot like a bird on acid, but it was alright-ish.

 ‘…Oh of course!’ Ogron facepalmed, grumbling into his hand. ‘You have the Dragon Flame, only Domino royals have that, I just assumed the flame had found some new holder since its planet was dead…’ Frankly, so had the rest of the dimension. There had been a shedload of people looking for whomever the Great Dragon might have bestowed their flame on next, but, after dozens of government investigations, a few bounty hunts, and one investigation show that had gained a surprising cult following but no Dragon Flame, everyone had come to the conclusion that the Dragon Flame was just dormant, while it had, in actual fact, just been hanging out doodling fairies and trying to generally pass as plausibly human. Doomed quest, since she wasn’t, but now she was doing so much better, since she’d become an ass-kicking super-heroine.

 ‘So…’ Ogron began, curiosity lighting up his eyes. ‘If you’re Dominian…how did you wind up on Earth? And…how’d you wind up on Magix?’

 ‘Oh, well, that’s a great story,’ Stella replied, managing to quiet down so Bloom could tell it, because this was her story, even if Stella was really great at stories and never left out the super important details. …Okay, one time, and she’d totally called Brandon to warn him about those trolls. He was fine. 

 ‘Well, when my planet was attacked by Valtor and the Ancestral Witches…’ Bloom began, adopting a classic storyteller voice, the sort of tonality she used when reading her mythology books aloud. ‘My big sister Daphne sent me through a portal to Earth to keep me safe. There, I was found in a burning building by my dad, Mike. He and my mom adopted me, and I…was pretty…normal-ish for sixteen years. Then I found Stella fighting an ogre in the park, and, well, then common sense pretty much gave up and died.’ Stella remembered that. That guy had totally messed up her hair! Oh, and also almost shattered half her bones, but nobody could see her bones. Knut was lucky he was nice now…

 ‘I jumped in with no idea what I was gonna do, and luckily for me and all the bones in my body, my magic activated, and I saw them off. Stella told me I was a fairy, brought me to Alfea, and then all hell broke loose, and three years later, here we are!’

 ‘Oh, so, getting attacked by randos and getting dragged into magical shit is normal?’ Roxy asked with a hint of sarcasm to go atop her whole bucket of sarcasm. ‘I mean, no offence, dudes.’

 ‘None taken,’ Duman replied. ‘Rando is one of the nicer things I’ve been called.’

 ‘I don’t know if I’d say normal…’ Bloom thought it over. ‘More…like people won’t be blown away when they hear about it. Ogres are pretty normal. Oddly more normal than goth wizards.’

 ‘Pff.’ Musa snorted. ‘Depends what planet you’re on. Melody’s got a fair few subcultures…’

 ‘Okay, so, unless you were in a goth bar on Melody, ogres are more common than goth wizards,’ Bloom continued, tossing Musa an eye roll. 

 ‘Or an arcade, the street, one of our temples…’ Musa continued, and Bloom threw a handful of popcorn at her. 

 ‘Yes, thanks, Musa.’

 Musa shot her a wink, snapping up the popcorn that had landed on her face. ‘Y’know…’ she began, turning to the wizards. ‘All this talk about how Bloom wound up on Magix got me thinking…how the hell did you four manage to mistake the crazy famous princess of Domino for the last Earth fairy? I mean, that was a pretty dumb mistake.’

 Ogron blushed, glancing away uncomfortably. ‘Anyone could have made that error…’

 ‘Yeah, but you did, so how’d you do it?’

 Ogron sighed, hiding behind his hair. ‘We don’t need to discuss this…’

 ‘Uh-uh-uh!’ Stella shook her head, settling in for a good story. ‘We spilled our tea, now you spill yours!’ She scooped up one of the bowls of popcorn, gesturing for Ogron to begin.

 Since Ogron seemed to be in the middle of trying to vanish into thin air, Duman started in his stead. ‘So, great story. We were being all awesome and fairy hunt-y, and we caught Morgana and we were all like ‘Yeah, great job, guys!’ but Captain Killjoy here was all like, ‘Gentlemen! I checked with my magical doo-dad, and it says we aren’t done, there’s still one last fairy!’’

 Ogron’s head snapped up, the redhead coughing and sputtering at Duman’s terrible impersonation of his accent. ‘I do not sound like that, Duman!’

 ‘What are you talking about? It was like I freakin’ cloned you.’

 ‘You sound like…like…’

 ‘Like if the King of England got stuck in a vacuum cleaner?’ Bloom filled in.

 ‘Yes!’

 Duman beamed. ‘Great, I was going for that!’

 ‘I thought you were going for my voice?’

 ‘King in a vacuum cleaner is fun. Your voice is boring.’

 Ogron looked affronted, but had apparently lost his shot at telling his own story, as Duman leaned up against Gantlos and continued. ‘Anyway, so, instead of just chilling and having a party and all getting celebration wasted, Ogron made us all scour the world for the last fairy. Which was totally useless by the way, and we shoulda just lived our lives and set stuff on fire, but anyway. Like three years ago, we felt fairy magic in Gardenia, probably when Bloom fought that ogre, so we high-tailed it over here, but by the time we showed up, there was like, zero magic. Just tiny little wisps.’

 ‘Then there wasn’t zero magic,’ Ogron interjected, but was quickly hushed up.

 ‘Shh, Ogron, it’s quiet time for you. Kept happening, we’d sense something, show up, then it’d be gone. After the latest occurrence, we scoured the whole city, but nobody would believe us when we asked about fairies, which I guess means we did our job pretty damn well, and then Gantlos solved all our problems!’

 Gantlos frowned, confused. ‘Uh…what now? I went to a bar because I was frustrated and wanted to distract myself.’

 ‘Shh…’ Duman whispered, putting a finger to his lips. ‘I’m bigging you up, as is my job as the boyfriend. So, Gantlos went to this bar and met this guy, who had got outta prison a couple months before, and all the people at the bar said he was crazy - the guy, not Gantlos, the only crazy Gantlos is is crazy sexy - and he was crazy cause he kept telling anyone who’d listen all about this teenage girl who’d saved him from his own arson by controlling the flames.’

 Bloom’s eyes widened so much that Stella almost thought they’d somehow fallen into a cartoon. 

 ‘Bonner and Brown’s driver! I’d almost forgotten him! He set my mom’s shop on fire to scare her out so his conmen bosses could take it over and build a supermarket!’ Oh, Stella remembered that! Bloom had come back from that with the revelation that she was adopted. 

 ‘Yeah, he said something about a supermarket,’ Gantlos concurred. ‘I was mostly just trying to get him to talk about the girl, which we now know was you.’

 ‘And he told you?’ Flora asked.

 ‘Mhm. Everyone else had written him off as crazy; he was so grateful that anyone actually wanted to listen to him that he spilled everything he knew. Including the address of the flower shop. We used that to find out who you were and where you lived, but when we staked out your street-’

 ‘Which we now realise was creepy and we’re really sorry for,’ Anagan interjected apologetically.

 ‘-you weren’t there. We tried to sense you, but nothing.’

 ‘Then this whiny bitch showed up and spilled where you were!’ Duman added. Whiny bitch? Who was that? Oh, wait, they were on Bloom’s street. So it was probably-

 ‘Your neighbour, I think. Screechy voice that made my soul hurt.’

 ‘Mitzi,’ all the Winx chorused in unison. Was helping evil wizards a criminal offence? Ignore that Stella herself had done it and they weren’t even really that evil, maybe she could send Mitzi to jail!

 ‘Oh, the Netflix girl?’ Ogron asked. ‘Yes, the text you got seemed to be of the same tone…she demanded to know why we were on her street, asked if we’d got lost from a Black Veil Brides concert.’

 ‘Think she meant it as an insult, but, honestly, I’d love to have been at a Black Veil Brides concert,’ Duman chipped in. ‘I asked if she knew where Bloom was, she said you weren’t at a special school for people with mental issues called Alfea.’

 Anagan facepalmed, sighing. ‘Duman…you don’t have to use her exact words…’

 ‘What? We all know she’s a bitch, what’s the problem?’

 Bloom snickered. ‘Oh god…oh god, that’s so Mitzi!’ She giggled, shaking her head. ‘So you guys came after me…based on the word of a rambling crazy man at a bar…and my high school bully?’

 Ogron stammered a few awkward sounds, before burying his face in a cushion.

 ‘Yep!’ Duman grinned. ‘Boy, was that a dumb decision. Stupidest thing ever, specially since the actual last fairy on Earth was actually in this city the whole damn time! Right, Rox?’ He ruffled Roxy’s hair to assert his point, and Roxy hit him with a cushion.

 ‘Don’t ruffle my hair, I’m not a dog. It’s a source of daily disappointment.’

 ‘Fair enough.’ Duman, his need to ruffle hair apparently insatiable, promptly messed up Gantlos’s hair, earning an eye roll as Gantlos blew his bangs back out of his eyes.

 ‘So that’s how you guys messed up so badly…’ Tecna mused. ‘But how come you didn’t research Bloom at all? Find out who she was, what she was?’

 The answer came in chorus from all four wizards. ‘No access to the Magix Net.’ That…that was such an obvious answer. Of course they couldn’t research; other than the connections Tecna and Timmy had set up, Earth had no access to the Magix Net. How would the wizards have looked into Bloom?

 ‘That’s kinda frickin’ hilarious that you guys got misled by Mitzi,’ Musa snickered.

 ‘Yes, my failure is hilarious, can we move on?’ Ogron grumbled into his pillow. Anagan patted him sympathetically on the arm. 

 ‘So…you girls have fought the Army of Darkness, Darkar, and Valtor?’ Gantlos asked, his normally unimpressed tone belying some of his surprise.

 ‘Yep! And you guys, and Morgana and Nebula,’ Stella replied. ‘And Bloom and Flora fought some ninjas once, too.’ She smirked, quirking an eyebrow. ‘So now you guys know how we wound up as the Winx…why don’t you tell us why you wound up as the Wizards of the Black Circle?’

 Silence settled over the room. There was a general understanding by now that the wizards’ motivations were rooted in the fairies’ general lack of regard for the mortal world, but they hadn’t actually shared the story yet. And since tea was being spilled, Stella saw fit for it all to come out. She wanted to know!

 The wizards exchanged glances, and Ogron very pointedly looked away. ‘Well…the fairies have always been like this, most of them, we didn’t like how they treated mortals or other magical races, we did something, we became the Black Circle. Story over.’ Well that was a very short story.

 ‘Aw, c’mon, there’s gotta be more to it!’ Stella pressed. ‘We answered all your questions. You just…saw some bad stuff was going down and decided to imprison a whole magical race? That’s the whole story?’

 ‘Yes!’ Ogron snapped. ‘I don’t want to discuss this further, please.’

 ‘People have personal motivations for what they do,’ Tecna interjected, and Flora shook her head, shutting the conversation down. 

 Silence reigned supreme for a minute while Stella debated just resuming the movie to get out of this.

 Duman glanced around and shrugged. ‘Sometimes they used to hunt me for sport.’ 

 Everyone shifted uncomfortably with that revelation.

 ‘…What? You asked for personal motivations. I’ve had that in mind when I ripped a fair few wings off.’ 

 ‘…Yeah…’ Bloom muttered. ‘Yeah, I’ll bet you did…’ 

 Well this got uncomfortable fast. Now Stella started to understand why Ogron might not want to talk about this. She shuddered slightly at the thought of the fairies being so…so horrible! 

 ‘…How come they were like that?’ she asked quietly. She…she needed a reason. After spending four years at Alfea having fairy values professed at every turn, she needed an explanation. 

 Gantlos shrugged, glancing longingly at the paused movie and the quiet evening they’d been supposed to have. ‘God complex, more or less. When you’re the prevalent magical species on Earth, you can do whatever. You set yourself up with your status quo, and you can crush the people that try and upset it.’ 

 ‘Prevalent magical species on Earth…’ Tecna murmured thoughtfully. ‘I guess that might explain it. On other planets, then dark and light keep each other in check. If Earth had a magical imbalance, that might explain why fairies would be able to act like that with no repercussions. Imbalanced magic usually has serious consequences for the inhabitants of a planet.’ She frowned. ‘…It also might explain why Earth has far more serious issues than other planets.’

 Ogron sighed. ‘Yes, you noticed that…it’s not really a magical imbalance, there was barely any magic. It’s more that…humans couldn’t use magic to develop.’

 ‘Why couldn’t they use your kind?’ Flora asked. ‘After all, magic is magic…’

 ‘Didn’t trust it, didn’t want us near them, couldn’t show them anyway or risk people remembering magic and some idiot trying to free the fairies.’

 All the Winx looked away awkwardly.

 ‘…We are so sorry for releasing all the fairies, by the way…’ Flora mumbled, and Ogron sighed.

 ‘Not your fault, I should have explained. Now, if we are not going to watch the self-assured man in the gaudy armour blast the only interesting person in this movie, I am going to retire for the night.’

 ‘But-’

 ‘I’m too tired for this, Stella. Goodnight, all.’ Everyone exchanged glances as Ogron headed upstairs to crash out in what was a very un-Ogron-like move. Was he really that sensitive about his backstory? Damn.

 ‘I didn’t mean to freak him out…I was just curious.’ Stella sighed, flopping back against the couch. ‘Did something bad happen to him?’

 ‘Yeah, kinda,’ Duman replied.

 ‘Duman, not your story,’ Gantlos chastised lightly. ‘If you want to know, you girls will just have to wait for Ogron to trust you enough.’

 Musa rolled her eyes. ‘Uh…we saved his life, think that’s a decent thing to earn trust.’

 ‘It isn’t that simple,’ Aisha interjected, getting up from the couch. ‘If he doesn’t want to say, we need to respect that, and trust that he wouldn’t withhold anything we need to know.’

 ‘Just think of him like some kinda stray cat you gotta sit back and let come to you,’ Duman offered in an analogy that seemed to delight Roxy. Of course, if Ogron was a stray cat, he’d love Roxy and do anything for her. Their current relationship seemed to be best described as friendly tolerance. 

 ‘Well, I’m getting up at six to go train,’ Aisha announced, heading for her room. ‘Thanks for the movie night and share time, night!’

 ‘Well then I gotta go crash out too.’ Musa hopped off the couch, taking her popcorn bowl with her presumably to practice her ability to catch it in her mouth back in her room. ‘I got a recording session tomorrow. Goodnight, crazy people.’

 ‘Night!’ Stella frowned. ‘Wait, why did I answer? I’m not crazy…’

 ‘Goodnight!’ Duman waved as enthusiastically as someone recovering from a lethal illness could manage. ‘I know why I responded; I’m as nuts as they come.’

 ‘Alright, crazy wizard, let’s go, you need some sleep.’ Gantlos scooped Duman up, carrying him towards their room. ‘Night.’

 ‘Aw man! I wanted to stay up and hear about what Valtor’s like.’

 ‘Another time. One where you aren’t falling asleep on me.’

 ‘I am not, shut up.’ Duman was, in fact, falling asleep on Gantlos, but nobody but the blunt blonde himself would say it aloud. 

 Everyone else dispersed, heading their separate ways, and Stella sighed. She cast a glance to the tv, grimacing at the frozen frame of the alien blowing up. Had that been there the entire time they’d talked? Damn. Why couldn’t it have paused on a shot of Chris Hemsworth?

 ‘…We need to finish that conversation sometime.’

 Stella glanced up, seeing that not quite everyone had headed to bed. Bloom was still sitting at the end of the couch, clearing up popcorn kernels with magic, incinerating the ones that had fallen on the floor, feeding the rest to Kiko and Belle. 

 ‘Hm?’

 ‘The conversation. About why. I trust them, I do, I really do, but…I don’t love keeping secrets. If we’re all working together, then I want to know why, sooner or later.’ She burned a kernel away to nothing, watching the bright flames with a cautiously mesmerised expression. 

 ‘Yeah…’ Stella bit her lip, though she didn’t much like the idea of poking the bear and potentially setting it on their new friendships. ‘Yeah, we should.’ She got up, turning the to off. ‘…You coming to bed?’

 Bloom shook her head, sinking deeper into the couch. ‘Nah…just…just gonna stay up a bit.’

 ‘Kay.’ Stella was careful not to rouse Flora as she settled into bed, nodding cordially to the plants so as to keep up good diplomatic relations. ‘Goodnight, crazy war plants…’

Chapter Text

 …The hell was that? 

 Anagan lifted his head from the pillow to stare around in bleary confusion. What was happening? Why was there music? Musa? No, no Musa had agreed not to play anything loud before nine am, to try and let the wizards rest…and this seemed to be…be coming from outside?

 Carefully clambering out of bed as slowly as possible to leave Ogron asleep (thank god for those earplugs), Anagan staggered to stare out of the window. The early dawn light left him even more confused. It couldn’t be later than six! What was happening?!

 ‘And IIIIIIII…will always love you….’

 This had to be a dream. Had to be. What was the weird jealous specialist doing shout-singing outside the loft? Why? Why?!

 ‘Hey!’ A few seconds later, Anagan zipped outside, grabbing the stereo from Riven and hitting the off button.

 ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Riven glowered at him. 

 Anagan ignored his evident ire. ‘What in Darkar’s name are you doing?! It’s six in the morning! Exhausted, stressed people are trying to sleep!’

 ‘You can sleep another day; I’ve got a fairy to win back!’ He drew breath to start singing again, and Anagan clapped a hand over his mouth.

 ‘I swear I will start a fight here and now if you wake Ogron up.’

 ‘Oh yeah?’ Riven batted Anagan’s hand away. ‘Bring it! I can take you any place, any time!’

 ‘Except all those places and times you failed to take me before,’ Anagan muttered, levitating the stereo up in the air as Riven attempted to reclaim it.

 ‘Those sound like fighting words to me!’

 ‘Riven?!’ Musa, her hair rumpled, an eye mask half over her face, stared out in shock at the scene. ‘I thought that was your tune-deaf voice! What are you doing?! People are trying to sleep! Me included!’

 ‘You wouldn’t answer my calls or reply to my texts, and you won’t speak to me at the bar!’ Riven argued, giving up on his stereo. ‘I had no other choice!’

 ‘You coulda just given up! Since we’re, y’know, broken up! Which was your choice, by the way!’

 ‘I didn’t even say break up!’ Riven spat, and Anagan backed up slightly. ‘I said ask your friend Jason to support you, and that I was leaving!’

 ‘Oh, and with an attitude like that, how could I do anything but fall on my knees and beg for your hand in marriage?’ Musa snarked. ‘Go home, Riven.’

 ‘Not until you hear me out!’

 ‘Not gonna happen!’

 ‘Hey! Hey!’ Anagan clapped his hands, gesturing to the windows of the loft. ‘People sleeping, remember? Could you two try and keep…whatever this is…quiet?’ 

 He was met with a slew of shouted explanations and what felt like insults. Seriously, what was the deal with these two? They’d argued like this during the smuggler debacle too…were they still a thing? He should ask Stella, she’d know…

 ‘Okay! Okay…both…good points…I think…but can you please keep it quiet? Ogron is sleeping past four! Do you know how rare that is? If we keep this up, he might actually develop healthy sleeping habits!’

 ‘You say that like I care about what Ogron does,’ Riven snapped, jumping for his stereo.

 ‘Oh, you don’t care about other people, what a surprise.’

 The stereo was forgotten in favour of unleashing another stream of yelling in response to Musa’s sarcasm, and Anagan almost screamed into his hands.

 ‘Stop! Stop, enough!’ Oh, for- 

 Technically, nobody had forbidden Anagan from using his dark magic. There were no rules against it, not even now he was on the side of good. Was it probably discouraged? …He had no idea, honestly, so he was just muting the pair of them.

 A snap of his fingers later, and Musa and Riven were yelling like a couple in a silent movie. Silently. 

 ‘Anagan!’ Musa undid the spell on her a heartbeat later - of course she did, she was the Fairy of Music. He couldn’t compete when it came to sonic magic. ‘You can’t just mute us!’

 ‘You are not listening, and you are going to wake up the whole street.’

 ‘True…’ Musa acknowledged with a sigh. Glancing to Riven trying with all his might to make a sound, a smirk tugged at her lips. ‘Aw, cat got your tongue?’

 ‘I’ll lift the spell, I promise, just calm down,’ Anagan begged. ‘Just talk. Talk without yelling. Please?’

 Riven huffed, but nodded. Anagan lifted the spell, and he spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Musa…I am trying to prove how I feel about you.’

 ‘What, that I get too much sleep? What do you think, that we’re in a movie? Nobody ever wins anyone over like this, Riven; it’s just annoying! Send me an email!’

 ‘You won’t read my email!’

 ‘Exactly!’ 

 ‘You’re the Fairy of Music; how is this not romantic to you?’

 ‘How is butchering some poor writer’s lyrics supposed to be romantic?’

 ‘I’m laying my heart on line!’

 ‘It’s six in the morning!’

 Why Anagan had thought they might stop yelling, he had no idea. 

 ‘Okay…okay…guys…’ He glanced up to the sky. The rain, which had been falling all week (and Anagan was more and more convinced was coming from the very angry women with the power over nature) had taken a small break this morning, but the dark clouds rolling back in suggested that it had been a simple intermission in the storm.

 ‘Guys…guys, we should…we should go inside…’

 More yelling. More. A bit more. Thunder. The reader can deduce what happened next to send everyone scurrying inside like drowned rats.

 Anagan bit back an ‘I told you so,’ instead focused on shutting the door and keeping the ‘couple’ quiet now they were inside. 

 ‘Alright…Riven, why are you here? Quietly, please, people are sleeping…’

 Riven folded his arms, clutching his stereo to himself with a huff. ‘I was trying to be romantic. Plus, this was the only way I could be sure she’d hear me.’

 ‘I don’t want to hear you!’ Musa growled, wringing out her hair. Over Riven’s stereo. Mature. ‘Riven, I don’t care who called this relationship, but it’s over, I’m through, we’re not getting back together, okay?’

 ‘Musa…’ For the first time, Riven actually looked hurt. ‘Musa, please, just hear me out…’

 ‘Why, so you can tell me I was throwing myself at Jason and didn’t devote my entire life to being your girlfriend instead of my lifelong dream that also just so happens to be my mother’s legacy?!’

 ‘You were kinda throwing yourself at-’ Anagan gave Riven an incredulous look that rapidly shut him up. ‘…Nevermind.’ With a sigh, Riven got back to a somewhat less insulting argument. ‘Look, Musa…please. Please just listen to me. I can’t give up on us…’

 ‘I already have.’

 The look on Riven’s face was like a kicked puppy. Despite his irritation with the guy, Anagan couldn’t help but feel bad for him.

 ‘Musa…’ he started hesitantly. ‘Could…could it hurt to listen to him? Just give him twenty minutes of your time, hear what he’s got to say.’

 Riven’s face lit up, while Musa looked suddenly nostalgic for when it was acceptable for her to blast Anagan. 

 ‘Yes! Musa, I promise, if you hear me out, we’ll be back together before-’

 ‘But!’ Anagan interjected, holding up a hand to cut Riven off. ‘If Musa hears what you have to say and still wants to stay broken up, then you have to respect her decision. If she’s done what you asked of her and listened to you, and she’s still happy with her choice to end things, then you have to accept and respect that. No more gestures, no more yell-singing.’

 Musa’s eyes sparked with interest at that suggestion. ‘I hear him out, he shuts up and leaves me alone?’

 ‘If that’s what you want.’ How had he got himself involved in this? Well, they were adults, they could sort it out on their own now.

 ‘Wait. Anagan, maybe stick around? I could use someone impartial to call Riven on all his bs.’ Or not.

 ‘I…I…’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Alright, fine. I’ll be your moderator.’ It was hardly a new role for him. He’d helped with a fair few couple’s spats in his time, but nothing that started with a stereo at six in the- actually, no, wait, scratch that, yes, he had. Duman had weird ways of apologising…Duman and Riven should never become friends…

 ‘But you guys have to keep it quiet.’

 ‘We can go in my room,’ Musa offered. ‘It’s pretty soundproof, so as to avoid everyone hating me and my violin practice.’

 Riven opened his mouth to argue, but Anagan quickly shut down an argument over room choice. ‘Sounds great.’

 Musa’s room could easily be confused with a music studio. She had an actual miniature recording booth set up. How Riven could ever have questioned this girl pursuing a musical career…it made Anagan wonder if he might possibly be a bit of an idiot.

 ‘Alright, onion head…’ Musa flopped back onto her bed, crossing her arms and regarding Riven the way one might regard a bug you didn’t want in your room, but couldn’t quite be bothered to squash. ‘Talk.’

 ‘Musa, we’re great together.’

 ‘Objection.’ Musa raised a hand. ‘At what point were we great together?’

 Riven seemed at a complete loss. Not a great start.

 ‘We…Musa, I’d die for you. You know that, from that time I almost did.’

 ‘Bloom would also die for me; I’m not hooking up with her, though.’ 

 ‘Maybe keep the sarcasm to a minimum,’ Anagan suggested, carefully guiding the conversation in a more productive direction. Riven looked surprised by his interjection, but pretty happy. And a tad smug.

 ‘Musa, I’m really sorry, I was a jerk to you-’

 ‘You really were.’

 ‘Yes, I know, that’s what I’m saying.’

 ‘You can’t really say it enough.’

 Riven’s eyes narrowed. ‘It’s not like this is entirely on me, you know.’ Oh, that was a bad move…a fair one, but a bad one…

 Musa’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Excuse me?’

 ‘You did have a thing for Jason!’

 ‘I so did not!’

 ‘Then why’d you cry when he sent you an invite to his wedding?’ Oh, snap.

 Musa’s eyes widened, and she looked away, fuming. ‘I…didn’t know you knew about that.’

 ‘I’m not saying this was all your fault, but you don’t need to make me out like I was some kind of fifth Wizard of the Black Circle!’

 ‘Hey!’ Anagan crossed his arms. ‘Let’s keep from dragging anyone else into this, okay?’

 ‘Fine…’ Riven moved on. ‘We’ve always been pretty on and off, Musa, I didn’t mean to make us off for good…’

 ‘If you’re on and off, maybe you guys need to think about why you can’t commit to being on,’ Anagan interjected quietly, and both parties frowned, confused.

 ‘What now?’ Musa asked, raising an eyebrow.

 ‘Why do you keep being off if, as Riven says, you’re great together? If you were really endgame, you wouldn’t keep breaking it off and fighting. Don’t you think?’

 Musa and Riven both fell quiet, in thought.

 ‘I mean…Bloom and Sky have ended up on and off too…’ Riven tried. Well that was a whole different can of worms, and one Anagan wasn’t interested in opening.

 ‘Are you Bloom and Sky?’

 ‘God no.’ Musa shook her head. ‘I’d sooner be an empty soda can in the gutter.’ Bit harsh, Bloom and Sky honestly seemed to have a pretty decent relationship. Aside from something about an ex and a stalker phone call, but Anagan didn’t listen to gossip. 

 ‘Right. You’re Musa and Riven. And Musa and Riven always end up off again, so maybe that’s a sign you should just…stay off?’

 Objection!’ Riven glowered at Anagan. ‘The mediator needs to be impartial!’

 ‘Not if he’s right!’ Musa rebuffed.

 ‘No, no…’ Anagan conceded. ‘He’s right, I should be impartial. Apologies.’

 ‘Ha!’

 Musa sulked, and Anagan fought the urge to roll his eyes. Not a ‘Ha!’ sort of moment. That was just crowing, while Musa was sulking like her car had been stolen. These two were ticking emotional time bombs, and putting them together was set to level a city.

 Riven took a few more moments to bask in his meaningless victory, before clearing his throat and continuing.

 ‘Musa, I get we didn’t start off well, but-’

 ‘Didn’t start off well? You ignored me for a freakin’ war criminal!!’

 ‘Hey! I didn’t know she was a war criminal! I just thought she was a hot chick that saved my life!’

 ‘Her friends tried to murder us!’

 ‘Well I didn’t know!’

 ‘You betrayed us all!’

 ‘We weren’t even friends, who the hell was I betraying?!’

 ‘Sky! Brandon! Timmy!’

 ‘That’s like betraying your co-workers!’

 ‘Me!’

 ‘We weren’t dating!’

 ‘And life sure was easier!!’

 ‘This is getting off topic,’ Anagan interjected, casting a quick glance at the door in case all this yelling overpowered the soundproofing and roused the others. ‘But…seeing as how you two just devolved into an argument this fast, over…well, I’m not totally sure, then…despite my impartial nature, I’m…edging towards Musa.’

 ‘Ha!’ What was it with these two and crowing over minor, unimportant victories?

 ‘But I haven’t even been able to make my case yet without getting talked over or criticised!’ Riven snapped.

 ‘Fair enough…make your case, Riven. Musa and I will be quiet.’

 Riven looked a tad thrown by being given the floor; perhaps he found it easier to communicate when someone was arguing and getting his hackles up.

 But nevertheless, he took a deep breath.

 ‘Musa, I love you. I know I…don’t always show it in the traditional way…and we’ve had a lot of ups and downs, and a lot of those are on me, but I’m trying to mature, I’m trying to be better. I don’t want to lose you, you’re creative, and smart, and funny in a sarcastic way…we have the same sense of humour, we get each other, and I mean, the sex is pretty amazing-’

 Anagan looked at him incredulously, and he quickly changed tack.

 ‘Not about the sex, though, just a side note… We stayed together for years, Musa, because we always make it work…because we love each other.’

 Musa bit her lip, deep in thought as Riven waited, breathless.

 ‘…I do love you, Riven.’

 Riven lit up.

 ‘But I don’t want to be with you.’

 Riven’s face fell.

 ‘But…but if you feel the same…’

 ‘It isn’t as simple as me loving you, Riv. Sometimes…sometimes people love people that are bad for them. It’s…like a drug, and I can’t walk away. But I have to. Because I can’t keep doing this, I can’t keep crying over a guy that, trying to change or not, treats me the way you do. I deserve better, I deserve someone I can talk to without overthinking everything I say because what if I’m judged? What if I annoy you? I need a guy that I feel totally at ease with.’

 Anagan nodded along to her every point. It was all valid. She did deserve better. Riven, meanwhile, looked crushed.

 ‘But…’

 Anagan sighed, interjecting. ‘Riven…the deal was she hears you out, and if she still says no…then you have to respect her choice.’

 Riven stammered out a few awkward attempts at starting a rebuttal, but Anagan had him. He’d agreed. It seemed to Anagan that he wasn’t used to this. To Musa actually calling quits, forever. Most likely, he’d come to the loft expecting an argument, then falling right back into old patterns, maybe make out. It was hard, seeing a man with his heart crushed across his sleeve, but you couldn’t just fall back into relationships because ending them hurt. 

 ‘…When did you guys get together?’ he asked quietly.

 Musa and Riven exchanged a glance. ‘Uhh…second year of high school. Why?’

 ‘Well…that’s quite a while. You’ve been with each other while you figure out adulthood, and you develop an attachment, being together during that time. A lot is changing, for both of you, lately, you’ve graduated and moved to a new planet, you might both have been…clinging onto one of the few things that still feels constant, familiar. Because, well, you don’t want another new, scary thing to deal with. This is hard, and painful, but it’s familiar, and there’s a comfort in that familiarity. So…Riven, Musa, you…might not still be in love. You’re just…accustomed. And seeking security in what you know.’ That was a bit of a shot in the dark, but not all that unrealistic, really. They were barely adults, living turbulent lives. Trying to find new love would feel hard…and being surrounded by strong couples wouldn’t push the idea of being single.

 Musa and Riven sat in silence for a while, thinking it over. Musa absentmindedly plucked at a string on her guitar, the note reverberating through the room.

 ‘…You might be right…’ she admitted eventually. 

 ‘…Sounds kinda dumb,’ Riven muttered, picking at invisible lint on the bedsheets. ‘I mean, Musa just said she loved me too…’

 ‘And maybe she does. I can’t read your minds, I’m just offering an opinion.’

 ‘I do,’ Musa confirmed. ‘But I also love popcorn shrimp.’

 ‘So? Then kiss me and eat popcorn shrimp.’

 ‘I’m allergic to shellfish.’

 Riven took a moment to let that sink in. ‘…You saying you’re allergic to me?’

 ‘I’m saying that I like things I shouldn’t, that can be pretty damn bad for me. And part of me wants to do nothing but have sex with you and eat popcorn shrimp, but I gotta listen to the part of me that says all that ends in is me bloated and crying after a screaming match. So that’s why it’s over.’

 ‘It’ll take time to get over,’ Anagan added as Riven looked set to start crying. ‘And it’ll hurt for now. But you can’t give up your whole lives on a broken relationship because you’re scared to hurt for a while. Do you really want to be thirty and still be fighting over music producers?’

 Musa immediately shook her head, while Riven looked pensive.

 ‘I mean…the problem would be solved if she’d just stop flirting with the guy…’

 ‘No, it wouldn’t. Riven, even if Musa dressed as conservative as they come and barely looked Jason in the eye, you’d still get jealous. Don’t you think?’

 ‘Well he probably wanted to have sex with her!’

 ‘He was engaged! And why the hell does it matter if a guy wants to have sex with me, Riven? Lots of guys do, I’m a stone cold ten! But those are their thoughts, I can’t go into their heads and drag them out. If you feel insecure about the idea that I might sleep with someone else, then you don’t trust me. And then the relationship is already broken anyway.’ Musa’s expression softened as she saw how miserable Riven looked. ‘Look…Riv…I’m sorry. Believe me, if I thought we could work at this and end up as perfect as Tecna and Timmy, I would. But I can’t live the rest of my life wondering when we’re next gonna go from love to hate. I can’t be watching what I say to my producer, worrying you’ll read it as me inviting him to bed. You’re always going to be special to me; you were my first love aside from music. But I’ve heard everything you have to say, and…I’m more confident than ever in my decision to end this.’

 Riven sighed, a sigh with all the weight of a broken heart. ‘…I…guess I have to accept that. …Musa, you’re always going to be special to me too…I’m sorry I ruined this.’

 ‘We’ve both screwed up. Let’s just…move on as best we can.’

 Riven nodded, getting up from the bed. ‘…Okay…yeah. I’ll…see you around when we’re in life or death situations, Musa.’

 ‘See you around.’

 Riven left the room, and Musa’s expression crumpled. 

 ‘Dammit…that was so hard…’ A few big, round tears rolled down her cheeks, and Anagan’s heart twisted.

 ‘I know…but you made the right call.’

 ‘I know…’ She brushed at her tears, reaching for a pair of cherry red headphones. ‘Thanks for mediating, but…can I be alone for a bit? I need to drown my sorrows in death metal.’

 ‘Of course.’ Anagan left Musa to her misery music, coming into the living room to find Riven at the counter, staring sadly down at the tomato sauce stain he and Flora forgot to clean up after dinner last night.

 ‘…Musa had a dress this colour…’

 ‘…She still does…it’s probably fewer than five metres from you.’ Anagan sat down across from Riven. The guy could really act like a jerk sometimes, but he’d really loved that girl. And honestly, Anagan wasn’t really someone to needle the ways someone had screwed up. (Especially since trying to steal the magic from a sixteen year old probably trumped being a tool to your girlfriend in terms of screwing up, so who was he to talk.)

 ‘…Thanks for mediating, or whatever. You did a pretty decent job keeping us from fighting.’ Riven took a deep breath, breathing back tears. ‘Maybe this was a good thing…closure, or whatever the hell they say you need…’

 ‘Mhm.’

 ‘But sweet dragon it sucks…’

 ‘Oh yeah. Trust me, breakups are horrible. And there’s only one way to get over them.’

 ‘Liquor? You’re over twenty one, you could buy some.’

 ‘Yeah no.’ Anagan shook his head. Why anyone thought deliberately imbibing poison and endangering your life was a good way to get over a romantic failing, he’d never know. He should ask Gantlos, he frequently drank when such things happened. On the other hand, the man had a monster tolerance, so he’d never seen him get drunk…perhaps it was just the aesthetic of the activity, rather than the liquor itself.

 ‘Time. Time can get you past these things. And maybe one day, you’ll be marrying someone-’

 ‘Mus-’

 ‘Not Musa. And you’re gonna look at their face, and you won’t even remember feeling like this, because you’ll have ended up exactly where you were supposed to be.’

 Riven seemed to think it over. Perhaps he was still picturing Musa’s face under a veil, but that was expected. He’d see her face for a long time, they’d been through a lot together. But he was finally accepting it was over, and that was the first step to healing. 

 ‘But until then, you want to drown your sorrows in an ungodly amount of ice cream?’

 ‘Oh great dragon yes.’

Chapter Text

 ‘You guys! You guys you guys you guys!!!’

 Ogron glanced up from his coffee, quirking an eyebrow at the ball of enthusiasm that usually went by “Stella”.

 ‘Yes? Us guys are listening with what little hearing ability you’ve left us…’

 ‘It’s stopped raining!’ Stella squealed, pointing out the window like a child excited for the ice cream van. ‘It’s sunny! You know what that means?!’

 ‘All the condensed water in the atmosphere over Gardenia fell as precipitation?’

 ‘No!’ Good god, this girl was excitable.

 ‘What does it mean?!’ Duman asked excitedly, sitting up straight and practically wagging a phantom tail in anticipation. ‘What does it mean?!’

 ‘It means we can go outside without coming back like drowned rats, which means…we can go to the beach!’

 Ah. Ogron returned to his coffee, focusing on coaxing his mind and body to functionality through the mystical caffeine elixir. ‘Ah. No.’

 Stella grinned ominously. ‘Not a question.’

 ‘Beach day?’ Musa nodded slowly. ‘I could use a beach day. Sounds like fun.’

 Ogron shook his head. ‘Then all of you have fun, I burn.’ A tube of sunscreen appeared beside him in a burst of golden sparkles.

 ‘Let me introduce you to a fascinating invention we like to call sunblock.’ Stella gave him puppy dog eyes. ‘C’mon…the only time all of us have hung out at the beach together was when Aisha flung you guys into the ocean…and Gantlos and Roxy weren’t even there, since he was holding her prisoner and stuff.’

 Gantlos shifted awkwardly at the reminder of his previous misdemeanours. ‘…Really sorry about that…just…so Y’know…’

 ‘Yeah yeah, honey, we know, now c’mon! Who knows when it’ll start raining again!’

 ‘Hopefully before you talk me into this.’

 ‘So you can be talked into this?’

 ‘I-’ Ogron facepalmed. ‘Dammit.’

 ‘Beach day, beach day, beach day…’ Stella began the chant, and Ogron tried to hide behind the cereal box. 

 ‘Beach day, beach day, beach day…’ Duman joined in after only a few seconds, before Bloom was involved, Aisha, Musa…ugh, dammit, Stella was dragging everyone but him and Gantlos into this. He exchanged a helpless glance with Gantlos, hoping for some solidarity, but Gantlos looked convinced just by the enthusiasm in Duman’s voice.

 With a sigh, Ogron relented. ‘…Beach day.’

 Ogron disliked the beach. Except, of course, on those nice days when it was stormy and raining buckets and so grey the world seemed practically monochrome, and one could bundle up and go for a beach walk alone with one’s thoughts…but, regrettably, the beach today was not one of those beaches. There were far too many people. Wearing far too little for him to feel comfortable looking at anyone, so he was simply staring down at the sand on their walk to what Stella claimed was ‘the perfect beach spot.’

 ‘Ta-da!’ Stella planted her umbrella in the sand, spinning around to display the soft stretch of sand. ‘The perfect spot.’

 ‘It is pretty perfect…’ Anagan agreed, surveying the sand. ‘…It’s busy today, how come nobody else took it?’

 ‘Oh, I asked an army of crabs to reserve it for us.’

 Everyone turned to see Roxy jogging over, Artu jumping in and out of the water behind her. 

 ‘Hey, Roxy.’ Bloom paused. ‘…Did you say crab army?’

 Roxy nodded, waving to the hidden horde of crabs behind the rocks. ‘Hey, guys! Thanks so much!’

 The crabs clicked their claws, scuttling over to where Roxy passed them a huge bag of what was apparently crab food, patting each tiny crustacean on their shell.

 ‘They scared anyone off in exchange for food and affection,’ Roxy explained. ‘I do it whenever I want a spot, and I let Stella in on my secret.’ Well, wasn’t that clever? And…slightly brutal if one happened to try and take this stretch of beach.

 ‘…What do they do if someone else tries to take it?’ Ogron asked, his curiosity getting the better of him. One of the crabs snapped its claws, showing off a torn piece of a beach blanket like a trophy. Oh. Cool. Very brutal. He approved.

 ‘Don’t ask questions, Ogron,’ Roxy replied, shooing the crab off after his friends. ‘Now, we’re having a beach day!’

 ‘You got it! Thanks for coming! And hi, Artu!’ Stella waved to Roxy’s dog, who ran around greeting everyone, until he came to Gantlos, at which point both parties issued the other a menacing glare, backing away slightly. Huh. So apparently those two still had a grudge. He could tell why Artu would dislike Gantlos after the wizard had stunned him…why did Gantlos dislike him so much? Ogron couldn’t really remember. He’d say he was sure there was a good reason, but, the fact of the matter was, there seldom was, Gantlos was just a man that liked to hold grudges. Over almost nothing. The Winx were now exempt, having saved Duman, but apparently the dog was not. 

 Growls were exchanged, before both parties moved away.

 ‘Damn…’ Musa muttered. ‘Can you guys feel the drama?’

 ‘Speaking of drama, here comes your ex,’ Stella announced, waving excitedly to where yet more people were arriving. Wonderful! Ogron just loved hanging around people! It invigorated him! Oh, wait, no.

 The specialists arrived in a flurry of kisses, hellos and body spray, and the perfect beach spot was rapidly filled up with people. Ogron, not really wanting to do any specific beach activities, set himself up as far from the water as possible, glowering at the sea. He hated the water. Why anyone would choose to go in it was utterly beyond him, that was something that could kill them! They could die! It was like playing hopscotch over lava, but what did he know, he was only the second smartest person here. 

 Thankfully, he’d brought his salvation in the form of several novels borrowed from Bloom, and one of Stella’s beach umbrellas actually made this situation tolerable. So long as nobody would hear him, he might actually say sitting in the shade, reading and ignoring everyone, was actually enjoyable. Not that he’d ever let anyone know that, that was all the encouragement they’d need to start making him be social. 

 As the day drifted on, the sun warm on his skin, his eyes started to droop, and he found himself lying back on the sand. He used to abhor napping…but this felt very peaceful. 

 ‘…I wanna do it.’

 ‘Seriously?’

 ‘I’m sick…let me have this, please?’

 Gantlos rolled his eyes. ‘Duman, you can’t bury Ogron in the sand.’

 ‘It’ll be so funny!’

 ‘…Well, yeah, kinda, but he’ll freak.’

 ‘That’s part of what makes it so funny.’

 Gantlos sighed, shaking his head at Duman’s antics. ‘…Fine. You can bury Ogron in the sand. But he has to be able to get out of it.’

 ‘Sure sure.’ Duman scrunched his face up in concentration as he shoved himself up from the sand, stumbling and almost faceplanting back into the beach. Seeing that Duman was likely to do himself some kind of injury, Gantlos got up and let him lean on him.

 ‘Aw, you’re helping with the prank!’

 ‘Nope. Not complicit, I’m just overprotective. I’m not having you fall on a crab because you have to pull a prank when you’re sick.’

 Duman put a finger to his lips as they neared Ogron, carefully getting on his knees and hiding a snicker as he began to carefully scoop the sand. It was very evidently slow going, but the anticipation kept him laughing quietly, while Ogron dozed away through the whole thing.

 Gantlos shook his head, sighing at the scene, though something about Duman pulling a prank on Ogron made him smile. He’d been so scared Duman might never be able to do this again, and he was there, happy, smiling, scooping sand…slowly…this was going really slowly. 

 Gantlos rarely contributed to any of Duman’s shenanigans. But today…perhaps it was the happy atmosphere, perhaps it was Duman being in a good mood, or perhaps he was just feeling mischievous, but he wandered over to where Tecna and Timmy were constructing an architectural masterpiece of a sandcastle.

 ‘…You guys have an extra spade?’

 Tecna raised an eyebrow. ‘…You want to build a sandcastle?’

 ‘What? No.’ Gantlos shook his head. ‘But if you need someone to smash it later, I’m really good at that.’

 Tecna thought about it for a moment. ‘…Can you make small quakes to test its structural stability upon completion?’

 ‘Sure. Can I have the spare now?’

 Tecna handed it over, and Gantlos walked back to Duman, tapping him on the shoulder. 

 ‘Got you something.’

 Duman’s face lit up. ‘Oh…oh, this makes this way easier. Thank you!’ He gave Gantlos a quick, quiet kiss, before resuming his work with the sand, merrily burying away.

 ‘So, you ever surfed before?’

 Anagan nodded. ‘I have some experience.’

 Aisha nodded approvingly. ‘You got a spell to summon a board?’

 Anagan shrugged helplessly. ‘No, not really. Kinda, but I don’t have much faith in it.’

 ‘That’s okay, Aisha can call you one up,’ Nabu offered. ‘She’s got a great Morphix board spell.’

 Aisha gave a thumbs up and called up a pink, translucent surfboard in Anagan’s hands. ‘And now…last one to catch a wave is a sea slug!’ Her feet dashed lightly across the sand, and Anagan and Nabu exchanged a look. On the one hand…Nabu had formerly been Anagan’s enemy and was showing him incredibly amnesty, so letting him run to the water first would be the right thing. On the other hand…Anagan didn’t want to be a sea slug.

 ‘Sorry, man!’ Anagan zipped across the sand, diving into the water right after Aisha.

 Nabu hurried right after him, hopping right onto a surfboard he called up with his magic. Were Nabu less of a stand-up sort of guy, Anagan would think he was using magic to make it go faster and pass Anagan in the water. And if Anagan wasn’t quitting the supervillain gig, he’d totally take that as an invitation to use magic to influence their little contest and leave them both in the foam. As it was, however, he was playing fair, today. 

 And he was kinda getting owned. How the hell were they both so good at this?! He’d learned surfing on actual Hawaii, before it’d even become popular. They’d been on vacation, so obviously, he’d been trying to get a little space from Ogron complaining that it was too hot and they should just go get back to work. He loved Ogron, but sometimes…sometimes he was Gantlos and Duman’s job. 

 The water was cool, droplets spraying up and teasing him in a gentle spray. He popped up onto his board, easing into the movements of the wave. He couldn’t keep up with Aisha and Nabu, least of all the tricks Aisha was pulling, a few of which enlisted her powers, swirling and spiralling on waves all her own creation, but it didn’t matter. He was surfing to his own ability, no pressure, just fun and-

 He almost paused as he realised.

 This was…this was fun. With the war, hell, with the hunt…he couldn’t remember the last time he, or any of the others, had just truly had fun. They’d had snatches, days of rest, down time…but this was the first time he’d felt himself being swept up in the childlike excitement of simple fun. Well, not all that simple, he was actually pulling off some pretty tricky moves, but still. It was nice…

 And all they had to do to reach a life full of moments like this was stop the army of fairies out for blood. His mood started to slip again, thinking of all they still had left to-

 Wait, was Duman burying Ogron in the sand?

 Was…was Gantlos of all people helping him?

 ‘You know, Brandon…’ Stella remarked, lazily trailing a finger through the sand, watching the sunlight bob on the waves like the diamonds in a necklace, ‘…this has worked out way better than I’d expected.’

 ‘The beach day? Sunbeam, since when do you doubt a beach day?’

 ‘Not the beach day.’ She lay down, rolling onto her stomach and turning her head to look up at Brandon. ‘This whole roommates arrangement. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I expected them to take a knife and stab us while we slept or anything, but still…’

 ‘Do you even know where you keep the knives?’

 ‘No, so if they did stab me with them, kudos to them, they’d know my place better than me.’ She stretched out, wriggling her toes in the sand. It was kinda chunkier than on Solaria, but just as beautiful. ‘…I honestly really like living with them. Ogron’s this helpful little bundle of nerves and ideas, Gantlos and I don’t really hang out, but he’s so protective, Anagan’s so sweet and helpful, and Duman’s as crazy and creative as me. They’re not just allies now, Brandon. They’re my friends.’

 ‘This has gotta be the craziest friendship story in history.’ True. They’d tried to destroy them all, and steal Roxy’s wings, but now they had a better understanding of the whole thing, albeit without any of the wizards’ personal ties to any of it. But crazy was her middle name! Well, no, it was Clio, but that shared the first letter of crazy, so it’d look the same in her initials.

 Duman covered his mouth to hide a snicker. Don’t laugh now! If he laughed now, Ogron would wake up, and it’d ruin his masterpiece!

 Ogron lay, perfectly asleep and snoring, under a heap of sand, only his head and hair on show, red locks spilling over the sand as though he’d fainted and hit his head on a very unfortunately-placed rock. Duman, never one to do things halfway, had become incredibly…artistic, with the sand, to the extent Ogron now resembled a mermaid, clad in a surprisingly stylish top fashioned from shells, seaweed, and part of Tecna’s beach towel. No, Tecna was not getting that towel back, and no, he did not regret it. This sight was too beautiful to let something as small as guilt over destruction of property taint it.

 ‘…It’s so beautiful I might cry…’ he murmured reverently. Gantlos fought an eye roll.

 ‘Duman, I’m so happy you’re happy, but…seriously? You don’t think the shell top is a bit much?’

 ‘What, you think I should have made Ogron a topples mermaid? That’d be a bit weird, G, not gonna lie.’

 Gantlos paused. Thought about it.

 ‘…Yeah, fair point.’

 ‘C’mon, you gotta admit…’ Duman leaned closer, clawing his fingers into the sand to avoid toppling over. ‘This is funny.’

 Gantlos pulled his hat down slightly to hide his face, the signal that meant: ‘Yes, I find it hilarious, but I can’t say that because I’m cool and stoic and I don’t pull stupid jokes because I’m the stone-cold second in command.’

 ‘Ogron…mermaid Ogron…swimming through the sea…singing ‘part of your world’ like Ariel…’ Duman teased, and Gantlos snorted. Ha!

 ‘Okay, it’s a little funny. It won’t be when he wakes up.’

 ‘That’s when it’s the most funny! Hold on, I need a phone, you got a phone?’

 ‘We lost our phones about two bases ago, remember?’ Right, dammit! That had been a good phone, too…it had had all his favourite instagram posts saved. And his pictures of - oh, damn, hopefully nobody found those.

 Stella and her phone were all the way down the beach, but, thankfully, snarky salvation walked past in that moment.

 ‘Musa! Musa, hey, Musa!’ he hissed, trying not to wake Ogron up. ‘Over here!’

 ‘What is it-’ Musa saw Ogron. Musa stopped. Musa collapsed into the sand, choking on fits of laughter so intense they seemed set to snap her swimsuit. ‘Oh sweet Melody…that’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’

 ‘I know, right?! But shh, shh; I need you to take a picture before he wakes up!’

 ‘He’s gonna freak out, you know.’

 ‘I know, babe, but when I’m old and grey and only turning into geriatric cats, I need to be able to look back and smile fondly at the sight of Ogron, in all his sand-sculpted glory.’

 Gantlos sighed, recently. ‘Fine…but I’m not protecting you from his wrath. ……..And send me that photo if I ever get a phone again.’

 Musa scrambled for her phone so quickly she almost dropped it on a chillaxing crab, jabbing in her passcode. ‘Okay…’ She positioned it like a photographer. ‘Smile!’

 Duman tugged Gantlos into the picture, tossing up a peace sign, and Gantlos snorted, that tiny little half smile Duman loved so much tugging at his lips. For most people, that was mild amusement. For Gantlos, on a scale from bored to fits of laughter, that was at least one fit of laughter.

 Musa snapped the picture, and Duman grinned like a maniac. This was the greatest thing to ever exist. Never had he known joy of the breed he experienced as Musa turned the phone around.

 ‘…I can die in this war now, my life has peaked.’

 ‘Don’t kid,’ Gantlos huffed, almost elbowing him, but more focused on subtly biting his finger to keep from laughing, shoulders trembling.

 ‘You’re laughing!’

 ‘I- shut up! I’m not!’

 ‘If I tickled you right now, you’d be giggling jelly.’

 Gantlos’s eyes narrowed. ‘You tickle me in front of Musa, we’re gonna have problems.’

 Thankfully for their relationship (Duman was unsure how far he wanted to push his ‘deathly ill’ privileges), there was a quiet, incoherent mumbling behind them.

 Duman whipped around, ears pricked excitedly as two hazy blue eyes fluttered open. Glanced around. Two hands twitched in the sand. The eyes widened…then narrowed.

 ‘Oh you’re kidding me…Duman!! The hell did you do?!’

 ‘Made you the finest fish in the sea!’ Duman burst into fits of laughter so intense it made his stomach hurt, aching as though it might split clear apart.

 ‘Wha-?’ Ogron caught sight of the fine curves sculpted atop him, cheeks colouring in irritation. ‘Ugh! Duman! This isn’t funny!’

 ‘Yes! It is!’ Musa had been forced to join Duman on the sand, leaning over and gasping for breath at the expression on Ogron’s face. ‘Nothing has ever been funnier!’

 Gantlos looked away, covering his mouth, entire body trembling with the effort of holding back the laugh that tried to claw out of him like a wild thing.

 ‘…Seriously, Gantlos? You too?’

 ‘I don’t- know what you’re talking about…’ Gantlos mumbled, words stifled through his hand. ‘This is incredibly…juvenile and…not funny at all…’

 ‘Oh for- you’re all children.’ Ogron shoved himself up, brushing off an hour of Duman’s hard work. Fine, Duman would be a child. He hadn’t got much of a chance, and kids always seemed to be having way more fun than adults anyway. 

 ‘Aw, man…’ Duman pouted as his efforts tumbled back to the beach. ‘You wrecked it.’

 ‘Yes,’ Ogron huffed, brushing sand from his book and cracking it back open in the way he did to signal a conversation was over. ‘Now we can forget about it.’

 The three of them exchanged a look. More giggles were restrained. Ogron glanced between them, suspicion clouding his gaze.

 ‘…What?’

 Musa choked on laughter, flipping her phone around to show Ogron the picture.

 ‘…If I hadn’t known you both since I was eighteen, you’d both be off the team right now.’

 ‘Aw, you know you love us…’ Duman teased, attempting a hug but only managing a sort of one-armed flop, tired out from all his sand work earlier.

 ‘I know nothing of the sort. That sounds like dreadful misinformation, you should find whomever is spreading such nonsense and have them arrested for libelling me. And, Gantlos, I expected better.’

 Gantlos shrugged. ‘…It was maybe a little funny.’ In a quiet little apology, he dusted the rest of the sand off Ogron with a quick tremor. ‘The picture stays between us.’

 ‘Why do I never get embarrassing pictures of you people doing things?’ Ogron groused, dusting off the sand Gantlos had already dusted off. 

 Duman shrugged. ‘I can’t be embarrassed.’

 ‘You struggle with working a camera phone,’ Gantlos added, earning a glare of undying enmity.

 ‘I wanna pitch in too, but I don’t know you well enough,’ Musa chimed in. ‘Something something…I dunno, Anagan would never do anything all that embarrassing.’

 ‘Oh, well, you clearly don’t know about all those walls he’s run into,’ Ogron huffed. He winced. ‘…Apologies to Anagan, he’s not an immature child that plays pranks, I shouldn’t have brought him into this.’

 ‘Aw, c’mon, Ogron…don’t get too huffy. What did you expect when you fell asleep on a literal giant sandbox within twenty metres of me?’

 ‘…A nap.’

 ‘You got one. Come on…this was a little funny.’

 Ogron pouted. Awkward moments didn’t tend to be his idea of funny. However, one thing that frequently seemed to tug at his smile…revenge.

 A handful of sand hit Duman square in the face. The world went beige. Not beige! That was the least awesome of the colours.

 ‘There. Now, we’re even.’ Ogron smirked. ‘Or perhaps we’re not, and someday, sometime when you’re not ill, then I will strike with revenge so potent, ballads will be sung of it.’

 ‘Sick; what kinda revenge vibes? I can get working on those ballads,’ Musa volunteered. Apparently, she was on nobody’s side here, and just sitting back to watch the situation like a very odd sitcom.

 ‘I shan’t spoil such things. But know it will be swift, and creative.’

 Duman, unlike most people promised a wizard’s wrath, kicked his feet excitedly. ‘Fun! We haven’t been in a prank war in centuries!’

 ‘Wha- no! This is not a prank war! This is vengeance!’

 ‘Will this vengeance involve physical comedy of some description?’

 ‘I…well, maybe-’

 ‘Prank war!’

 Gantlos shook his head, sighing. ‘Keep the prank war of vengeance on hold until after our actual war, guys.’

 ‘Hear that, Duman? As soon as humanity is no longer at risk of slaughter, it is on.’

 The sun was starting to edge towards the horizon now, creeping closer and closer towards bed, like the introvert at a party that was glad they’d been invited and didn’t want to appear rude by leaving, but was completely done with all this social nonsense and was making a break for it.

 Before the sun could hop on its couch and change into sweats, Stella wanted one last snatch of beach day memories, before they all drifted home to find sand in crevices they didn’t even know existed.

 ‘Okay, the rules are simple,’ Aisha explained, flicking her wrist to summon a net across the beach. You have to hit the ball over the net; if it hits the ground on the other side in bounds, your team gets a point. If it goes out of bounds, the other team gets a point.’

 ‘This…just sounds like volleyball,’ Roxy interjected. ‘You said this was from Andros?’

 ‘Are you allowed to hit the ball with your feet in volleyball?’

 ‘…Not technically, I don’t think.’

 ‘We play with mermaids on Andros, and since they use their tails, we-’ Aisha flipped over onto her hands and gave the ball and firm kick to send it bouncing over the net. ‘-can use our feet. But! You can only use your feet if both hands are on the ground. One hand off the ground, it’s a penalty.’

 ‘You are seriously overestimating everyone’s core strength…’ Roxy muttered as Aisha effortlessly flipped back.

 ‘Okay! Anagan, Flora, Brandon, Stella and Riven, you guys be one team, and Sky, Tecna, Roxy, Bloom and I will be the other. Timmy, you referee.’

 ‘Does Timmy even know how to play this game?’ Duman asked from where he’d been relegated to the sidelines, since jumping around and hitting a ball wasn’t exactly the safest of activities when recovering from a near-death experience.

 ‘Yep! I’ve spent enough long weekends on Andros or afternoons at the lake with Aisha to know a foul when I see one. And I brought Sadie, so nobody’s getting away with anything on my watch.’

 ‘I’m sorry, who now?’ Ogron glanced around, wary of any further people intruding upon his very limited personal space. ‘This beach is too full, we can’t have another person here, I will throw myself in the ocean.’

 Brandon shook his head. ‘You don’t need to go that far, Sadie’s not a person.’

 Timmy looked horribly offended, face contorting in a shocked gasp. ‘Excuse you! Sadie’s a new member of this team, I won’t let you make disparaging remarks like that!’ Timmy reached into his bag, pulling out a small, rounded drone. ‘Meet Sadie! My surveillance drone! I built her so we wouldn’t have to keep sending Riven into life or death situations so he can tell us how many security cameras there are.’

 ‘Not that I didn’t love being the team canary in a coal mine,’ Riven chipped in. ‘It was super great. Loved how high my life insurance got.’

 ‘Sadie’s gonna help me referee; she’ll watch from the top, let me know if anyone’s trying to get away with anything sneaky.’ Timmy tapped the drone twice, and Sadie beeped cheerfully, hovering up and into the air, blue lights flashing with anticipation.

 ‘So…to clarify…you didn’t feel like breaking this drone out in the war we were fighting, but a beach volleyball game-’

 ‘It’s not volleyball.’

 ‘A beach volleyball game felt like the time we really needed this?’ Ogron asked, incredulous.

 ‘Well, we were in the middle of a lot of fights.’ Timmy shrugged. ‘I didn’t have time to finish her. Plus, this is a great beta test! Okay, Sadie! Watch the game, and let me know if anyone commits an infraction.’ Timmy made an ‘I’m watching you’ gesture towards the others. ‘Nobody’s getting away with anything on our watch, believe me…’

 That slightly ominous warning out of the way, Stella took her position on one side of the net, tossing a wave to their audience of people that were either too ill to play, didn’t like games where they could get hit in the head with a ball, or just didn’t feel like falling in the sand.

 The second the ball was in the air, Aisha’s team obviously took the lead. Aisha was a star at this game, she’d taught them all how to play. Even Roxy’s lack of experience wasn’t slowing them down; she had simply employed the strategy of blindly hurling her arms around when the ball came close, and that seemed to be working.

 Flora managed a shaky little handstand as the ball came close, getting into the spirit of the game and lashing her legs forward, tumbling into the sand, but, miraculously, getting the ball over the net, where it was instantly spiked back by Tecna.

 It soared over their heads, arcing exactly for the one spot none of them had been guarding, sailing towards a point with the pinpoint accuracy only ever afforded by Tecna. Everything moved in slow motion, until a flash of magenta hair dove towards it, sand flying up as Riven’s hand met the ball, smacking it hard into the air. Towards the net. Down, down, down…it wouldn’t make it over the net!

 Not on Stella Allbright’s watch! She may not know how to stop the inter-species war going on right now, but she sure as hell could stop the other team scoring a point!

 Out of nowhere, she ducked past Anagan, hopped onto her hands, tightened up her core with all the strength of her ab workout videos, and boosted the ball over the net with a quick little bounce. 

 It dropped past Bloom, her hand whipping out just a second too late, and sand flew up like a boulder had hit.

 ‘Point! That was our point!’ Stella shrieked with excitement. ‘We scored! We scored! We scored first!’

 ‘We’re awesome!’ Riven high fived her, almost breaking out into a little celebratory breakdance. 

 ‘Uh…guys, you only scored one point…’ Timmy broke in awkwardly. ‘It’s still first to five points.’

 ‘Let us have this, Timmy…let us have this.’

 ‘Okay, Riven, but you’ve had this…so back in positions, please.’ Timmy blew the whistle he just apparently carried around with him all the time for some unknowable reason, and it began again!

 Aisha’s point. Tecna’s point. Anagan’s point. Flora…didn’t get a point, she was just working really hard not to hit anyone in the face. Riven’s point. Aisha’s point. Aisha’s point again. Brandon’s point.

 The ball hit Anagan’s hands just seconds before it would have dropped to the sand, soaring back over the net, hitting the sand, scoring the final point, but-

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep! Beep beep beep!

 Sadie shrieked, bright lights flaring, and Timmy blew his whistle. 

 ‘Time out! Time out, Sadie saw a foul!’

 Anagan groaned, facepalming, while Riven looked about as angry as was suitable for being told the bank was repossessing all your assets for no reason whatsoever. Not so much a volleyball game. Sorry - not-volleyball. 

 Timmy scrutinised the little screen Sadie was projecting, frowning. 

 ‘Anagan, foul. This screen shows your instantaneous speed at twenty-five miles per hour. That’s above normal human speeds, magic use disqualifies that point.’

 Anagan sighed, grimacing, while Riven dropped to the sand dramatically.

 ‘Argh! Dammit!!! Damn you, Sadie! I knew that robot would turn on us!’

 ‘…Riven, it was just a foul, no need to get so worked up.’ Brandon looked at him with concern. ‘You good?’

 Riven seemed to realise he was on his knees over a volleyball game, and cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘Yeah, yeah, totally good…I’m great, I just…get really passionate about this sport. And sand, that’s why I’m down here…with the sand…’

 ‘Sorry, guys,’ Anagan apologised. ‘I promise I didn’t mean to, I just kinda…slipped into it.’

 ‘Oh, no worries!’ Flora smiled. ‘It’s just a game, after all.’

 ‘Tell that to Riven,’ Stella muttered. That guy worried her sometimes…

 ‘Wait, did we officially ban magic?’ Brandon asked. ‘Is it officially banned in the game?’

 ‘On Andros, usually, yeah,’ Aisha replied. 

 ‘Usually?’

 ‘Well sometimes both sides can use it…to make things more intense…’

 Riven leapt to his feet. ‘Then no foul, we didn’t clarify! Totally our point, great game, everyone!’

 ‘Riven, the point is still null, shush,’ Timmy ordered.

 ‘I don’t take orders from you.’

 ‘Which one of us is in the super high special Morphix referee chair, Riven?’

 Riven went quiet.

 ‘I think you guys should use magic.’ Duman’s ears were pricked up at the idea, eyes bright. ‘I mean…one point left in it? The tensions rising high enough to bring my disappointing hair clone to his knees? Go nuts!’

 Everyone exchanged glances. On the one hand, the specialists didn’t have magic…so it might not be fair…but they looked just as enthused as everyone else.

 ‘Referee’s ruling: magic is permitted in play!’ Timmy blew his whistle. ‘In Duman’s words: go nuts!’

 Oh, it was on.

 ‘Hope you guys brought sunglasses!’ Stella spiked the ball, beaming blinding rays of sunlight behind it, creating an impossible hit. Nobody could see the ball to strike it!

 Tecna adapted right away, detecting the position of the ball on her computer, which she just…had, apparently, and diving, catching it just in time. She struck it back up, leaving Aisha to spike it back over the net, now able to see once again.

 It would have been game over, but Stella’s side undeniably had the most useful magic for volleyball: Anagan’s speed. Sand flew everywhere in a trail like he was the roadrunner, and the ball barely had time to take a gander at what lay on this side of the net before it arced back towards the others.

 As it soared towards the edge of the court, Roxy shouted, ‘Crabs! Assemble!’ A horde of little clawed helpers surged from who-knew-where, bouncing the ball atop their claws and giving Sky plenty of time to get there and hit it back over. 

 ‘Why haven’t we been doing this the whole time?!’ Stella exclaimed. This was way more fun! A seagull intercepted the ball, it came across sticky with Morphix, at one point the literal Great Dragon, creator of the dimension, was in the game, almost melting the ball and delivering one of the best spikes Stella had ever seen! Best! Sport! Ever!

 ‘Come on, Flora! You can win this!’ Helia cheered as the ball arced towards Flora. The seagull Roxy had employed to act as her own personal anarchist dove, beady eyes fixed on the ball, but Flora was ready. A palm tree burst from the ground, fronds unfurling from nothingness into rich, vibrant green, as Flora hopped atop it, riding it up like an elevator. Time seemed to gain breath on to hold it. Stella clutched Brandon’s hand, heart hammering wildly as though they were back in a world-ending fight, and not a game they’d all have forgotten about in a month.

 Aisha dove. Sky dove. The Great Dragon dove. 

 But the ball dove faster.

 ‘Point, Flora!!!’ Timmy yelled, jumping up from his chair in excitement. ‘Point Flora! The game is over! The…uh…team on the left win!!’

 ‘Dude, whose left?’ Sky asked.

 ‘Wha- my left! The team on my left! The team Flora’s on! They win! Not your team.’

 ‘We woooooooooooooooon!’ Riven screeched, elatedly running around the whole court, high-fiving anyone who’d extend a hand, except Musa, whom he cordially walked past, giving just the suitable amount of cold shoulder one should afford one’s recent ex. 

 ‘We won!’ Brandon chimed in. ‘Oh yeah! Nice one, Flora!’

 Flora, true to form, had hidden slightly behind her hair at all the attention, but Brandon did receive a happy little smile. Helia was far better off, though, as he received a rather long kiss. Very long. Maybe they needed a beach house or something so those two could get a room. It was always the quiet ones, huh…

 ‘Good game,’ Aisha acknowledged, beaming despite the loss. ‘We should definitely play with magic for the whole game next time, that was freakin’ awesome! Other than the part where you blinded us…’

 ‘Felt like a good play at the time.’ Stella hugged her, panting slightly from the exertion. She was glistening! Glistening! Not sweating, a princess never sweated. Glistening was elegant and sexy. Though seriously, she needed to go jump in the sea.

 As everyone fell into the tired chatter that usually settled in towards the end of any activity, the sun crept past all their guards, dipping its toes into the sea and finally, finally settling down for the evening.

 Despite herself, Stella yawned. She was so tired…but she didn’t want to go home just yet…this was such a lovely day, after all…

 ‘…Hey…who’s up for a bonfire?’

 Half an hour later, they were all settled in in the twilight, a cracking little blaze twisting and tumbling over itself, courtesy of Bloom. To everyone’s delight, Roxy had raided the bar storerooms for marshmallows, which she’d stashed there a good long while ago, and Stella was now watching hers be perfectly toasted, caramel brown creeping across the sugary surface. Perfect!

 It was too hot when she put it in her mouth, but she styled it out. Yes, she blew sugar slightly across herself, but she didn’t sear her tongue off, so…well done her. 

 It was a truly beautiful sight to behold, really…she still remembered fighting here, on this very beach. She remembered Aisha hurling the wizards into the sea, remembered her heart hammering, scared for her life, for all their lives. And now…they were all so relaxed. Everyone looked so happy… Duman was falling asleep on Gantlos while Bloom watched them with big ‘you guys are so romantic for goth wizards!’ eyes, Anagan, Flora and Helia were deep in conversation, laughter breaking out intermittently, whilst Ogron had wholeheartedly been absorbed into Tecna and Timmy’s little circle of abnormal intelligence. Her father had told her once, the best way to deal with an enemy was to make them an ally. They’d gone a step further.

They’d made them their friends.

 ‘Soooooo…’ Stella sidled up to Ogron as he braided his hair back for sleep, blinking back the tiredness clinging to him from the long day. 

 ‘…Soooo?’

 ‘You have a nice beach day?’

 Ogron paused. Thought about it. ‘…It wasn’t the most horrible thing to ever happen to me.’

 ‘So you’re glad you listened to me?’

 ‘…Well, I wouldn’t say glad…more that I don’t regret it.’

 ‘That’s just another way of saying glad, Ogron.’

 ‘Agree to disagree.’

 Stella giggled; he’d had fun. She knew it. Definitely more fun than he’d have had sitting alone in the loft all day, allowing his mind to dwell on the impending war.

 As she headed for her and Flora’s room, she turned back in the doorway. ‘Goodnight, Ogron. We should do this again sometime.’

 ‘…Perhaps. Goodnight, Stella.’

Chapter Text

 ‘…What are you doing? I thought we took that notebook away.’

 Ogron shrugged, not looking up from his obsessive scribbling in the notebook Tecna was pretty sure they’d hidden on the top shelf of the airing cupboard. In a box. Under a stack of blankets. 

 ‘I found it.’

 ‘Why are you back to obsessively writing plans?’ she asked, sitting up straighter on the couch. She’d thought he’d been doing so well since Stella had found him a stress outlet in the store…

 ‘Bloom has a plumber in the store. I can’t help out down there and I need something to do.’ He frowned, turning the notebook sideways to squint at his own handwriting. ‘…Tecna, if you saw a plan that just said-’

 ‘I don’t know why you wrote dragons, Ogron…none of us ever will. And spending further time trying to find out why is wasting resources.’ Tecna levitated the book out of his hand, earning the soft noise of irritation she’d learned came whenever one tried to take away Ogron’s stationary, or the haircare products of which he’d become so fond.

 ‘Don’t look at me like that; this is regression in your quest to overcome obsessive planning, and I’m not going to sit back and watch it. You need another outlet.’

 Ogron rolled his eyes, subtly playing tug of war to try and recover his notebook.

 ‘Tecna…I already have an outlet. It’s just temporarily at risk of flooding, so I am falling back on plan B. Now give me back my plan B!’

 Tecna sent the notebook to live underneath a huge pile of old textbooks in her room. Ogron pouted.

 ‘Plan B is no good for your mental health.’

 ‘Neither is sitting here alone with my thoughts. Watch, they take me to bad places.’

 ‘I’m certain you can keep control of your own thoughts, Ogron.’

 ‘Oh, really? Observe.’ Ogron closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘I’m thinking about cucumbers. I quite like cucumbers, I think we might be almost out, though. Flora should buy some more, but the store might be out, because there’s a deadly thicket around the city, keeping out killer fairies that want my head, so food shipments might struggle to get in, and I’m in no real position to help, because my magic is still barely functional, so if we all wound up in a life or death situation, I’d have to stand there helplessly and watch you all die, then probably get beheaded, and now I want to cry.’ He opened his eyes, looking at Tecna with irritation at his train of thought. ‘See? Told you so. Bad places.’

 Wow. That was…truly impressive. And disturbing. His train of thought was a Zenithian lightning track right to catastrophe.

 ‘…Yes, you were right, that was a quick trip to anxiety.’

 Ogron nodded. ‘Mhm. So may I have my notebook back now?’

 Tecna bit her lip. Thought about it. 

 ‘…No. You get strange and manic when you go into that planning mode, we’ll find another way to occupy your mind.’

 Ogron got up. ‘I’ll just go hunting for it-’

 ‘What? No! No, I’m helping! Give me a moment. Hey, Alexa!’ Tecna greatly disliked the lack of courtesy afforded to the little ai assistant that lived on their coffee table, but it refused to answer her when she politely inquired if it was available to help, as was custom on Zenith. Standard precaution: if the robots ever rose up, they wanted to be on as good terms as possible. She’d tried to contact the owner of Alexa to warn him of the failings in his design, but apparently he was busy doing something with a questionably shaped rocket, so Earth might just be doomed to an Alexa uprising.

 ‘What are good ways to distract a temporarily weakened wizard with anxiety and a stress outlet rendered off-limits by a plumber in the store and a war on the horizon?’

 Alexa was silent a minute. Tecna was silent. Ogron edged towards the door.

 ‘…Take a walk?’ Well. That was very disappointing next to Zenithian ai. On Zenith, her assistant would have accessed all of Ogron’s medical files and run through a full mental care plan. Earth was severely lacking. She blamed data privacy laws.

 ‘Wow.’ Ogron raised an eyebrow. ‘…You managed to stump the ai.’

 ‘It was a very reasonable question.’

 ‘You’re still much too new to Earth, Tecna.’

 ‘Well, still! You heard Alexa.’ Tecna got up, brushing the creases from her clothes more for the psychological aesthetic than anything else. ‘Take a walk.’

 ‘Tecna, even Alexa wasn’t confident in that idea.’

 ‘She also can’t hover or do chores, I wouldn’t worry.’ And so Tecna began the awkward, somewhat tedious process of herding Ogron out of the house and towards that irritating place with no WiFi: the outside. She’d been informed of its health benefits a great many times, so she always made certain to go stand outside for at least twenty minutes a day and get some ‘fresh air’, though analysis of air in her room showed it was composed of all the same elements as the air on the roof, so whatever these mystical health benefits of outside air, she had no idea what they were.

 After finally reaching the doors, Tecna stepped outside. Two seconds later, her hair clung to her like fur on a drowning rat, and she had to jump back inside, glowering at the rain clouds covering the city. Microchips! Why didn’t Alexa warn her? If ai said to take a walk without stipulating the need for extra equipment, one should be able to walk right outside in only the clothes on one’s back. Amazon was going to be getting quite the email from her…

 ‘Umbrella or surrender?’ Ogron asked with a slight smirk. In response, Tecna pointedly grabbed an umbrella from the rack, brandishing the duckie-adorned plastic high above her head in threat to the rain. No condensed atmospheric vapour was going to keep her down. She’d survived Omega, water in its harshest, coldest, most generally unpleasant form! Rain? Don’t make her laugh. 

 ‘Come on, Ogron. For your mental health!’

 ‘My mental health is hissing and scratching at you like a very angry cat, Tecna.’ Despite the protestation, Ogron wound up being pulled outside regardless, to stand in the rain, arms folded, sporting the sort of expression Tecna usually saw on Stella’s face when she’d stood in line for two hours for ice cream, only to be informed they didn’t have strawberry. Except…more aggrieved. About twenty percent more aggrieved. 

 ‘This isn’t distracting me, Tecna.’

 ‘Well you’re not walking yet.’

 ‘If you try and make me walk, I will walk myself into a puddle, and then you will be liable to pay my hospital bill when I contract pneumonia, which will be sky-high thanks to the deplorable healthcare system in this country. So, in the name of your finances, please may we just go back inside, warm up next to…wherever you’ve hidden my notebook.’

 ‘What about the park? We could go to the park and-’

 ‘We can go to the park if you can tell me you moved to California and actually own Wellington boots.’

 Two minutes later, they were inside again, Ogron wringing out his hair despite the utter lack of any water in it. Tecna assumed it was mostly for effect.

 ‘Well shoot…’ she sighed. ‘That didn’t work…’

 Neither did meditation. Television. Pottery. Quiet reading. The last one seemed like a shoo-in, but it turned out Ogron got far too invested in his stories, and the peace had shattered around chapter nine, at which point Ogron had begun verbally chastising the villain for being so dreadfully incompetent and bad at their job. (Granted, they were implausibly incompetent and stupid, how was the hero ever going to improve with stakes so low?)

 Still, the store - and bossing people around, which was not currently an option - seemed Ogron’s only stress outlets. The less said about her attempt at painting to relax, the better.

 So, Tecna fell back on the only thing a girl could do in her position.

 ‘Get out of the store.’

 ‘I…what now?’ The plumber, Dan, from Dan’s Plumbing, a beautifully and concisely named business that, as one could perhaps glean, consisted of a man, Dan, possibly short for Daniel, who was good at plumbing, looked up, staring at her like maybe she was a little bit weird. 

 ‘It’s been two days, and you haven’t fixed the pipes. I have a very anxious wizard upstairs who needs this, not to mention that we’re feeding ten people on the income from this store. I need this fast tracked, and, regrettably, Dan, you are clearly not the guy for that. So thank you for your assistance, we appreciate it, but we’re done here, and we’ll call this an even four hundred.’

 The very satisfied way Dan left made Tecna wonder if maybe, just maybe, she had overplayed for what he’d done so far, but dwelling on what-ifs was a highly inefficient use of time. 

 ‘…Tecna?’ Bloom asked hesitantly, walking in past Dan. ‘…Did you just fire our plumber?’

 ‘He was taking too long, and Ogron’s still on the hunt for his notebook. I need the store open again as soon as possible, for his mental health.’

 ‘…Have you considered just…just destroying the notebook?’

 The thought actually hadn’t crossed her mind yet. There might be something of use in there, after all…and as much as she hated to admit it, she wanted to know what ‘Dragons!’ was in reference to as much as the next fairy, wizard, or whatever. But…maybe…

 ‘Perhaps you could burn it?’ She’d seen Bloom burn plenty of things. Shoes, dresses, books, eggs, water…she still didn’t know how she’d burned water, she hadn’t even been using magic. Just…a stove. Not even a magic stove, just the loft stove. It was in her folder of unsolved mysteries, along with how Stella maintained a supermodel skinny body, but ate as much as Brandon most days. So far her best guess was high metabolism. So burning shouldn’t be an issue for Bloom; however, as soon as she suggested it, her eyes did a shifty, uncomfortable little flick, like the tail of a wary cat, and her entire demeanour shifted to the best position possible to leave the room.

 ‘Yeaaaah…yeah, I could…burn it…but, I mean, don’t we wanna know why he wrote dragons? Or…how the plan with the…with the thing? And the stuff? How that ends? I mean, it was a real page-turner!’

 ‘I didn’t know you’d read the plans.’

 ‘Oh yeah! All the time! Favourite book! Actually, I’m gonna go…read it. Again.’

 ‘But…I hid it.’

 ‘That’s okay, I totally forgive you, anyway, good luck with the plumbing - I assume you’re fixing that?’

 Tecna nodded, filing Bloom’s odd little skittish fit away for later analysis. For now, she had a new, and way better, plumber to call.

 ‘Tec…’ Timmy nudged the pipes awkwardly with his foot. ‘…You know I’m not really legally qualified to fix plumbing, right?’

 ‘But you can, you fixed your sink.’

 ‘Any guy can fix a faucet.’ Tecna doubted that highly. Sky’s attempt at fixing the sink at the cafe Bloom had worked at their first year had left them all on the edge of their seats for days to see if insurance would cover holes punched in the wall by highly-pressured water. It had not. Sky had had to pay for all repairs, on pain of banishment from the establishment. 

 ‘Look, I just need this fixed quickly. Ogron’s becoming obsessive, and Alexa is zero help.’

 ‘I don’t like Alexa,’ Timmy admitted. ‘Sadie tried to strike up a conversation, and all she said in reply was ‘There are no Chinese restaurants with that name in your area.’ Sadie tried to play it cool, but I heard her sad bleeping…’ What a rude ai. Tecna was no social butterfly personally, but she was still always courteous. She wasn’t quite sure why they kept her around by now, if Alexa was going to be so terribly rude all the time. But with how rude people were when asking her advice, perhaps it was only to be expected.

 ‘Tecna, if Ogron’s only way to feel calm is to be down here, maybe there’s some deeper things you need to address.’

 ‘Obviously, but every therapist I’ve called was booked. Also, Ogron may have actually hissed at me when I suggested therapy.’

 ‘…Like a cat?’

 ‘Exactly like a cat. Like a very angry cat. That doesn’t want his mental health issues addressed.’

 ‘Well, you can’t force him…maybe he’ll do better after the war, wars are stressful…’ Timmy began inspecting the pipes, knocking on a few things, scanning a few things; frankly, Tecna had no idea what it all was, she was really more of a digital girl. Copper pipes and gigabytes weren’t exactly related. But Timmy was smart, smart enough that he had once taken over for Codatorta as substitute teacher for maths class. Admittedly, Codatorta was more of a ‘punch it until you find a solution’ sort of guy, so not all that qualified to teach a math class in the first place…

 ‘…Tec, this is still gonna take a while to fix. There’s a burst pipe, and…someone appears to have been randomly screwing and unscrewing bolts on the hot water tank. It’s really damaged it, I don’t even get why someone would do that…’

 Tecna’s best guess was Stella, either freaking out and trying to fix it, or Musa, deciding that she didn’t need men to solve any of her problems, as she had a number of times since her breakup, and trying to fix it herself. Then blaming it on Stella. 

 ‘Okay…so I still need an Ogron fix, then…’

 ‘Well, why not try your way of relaxing? When we have a big test, or a war criminal trying to murder us? You can always calm yourself down.’

 Tecna’s eyes went forty percent wider than usual. ‘Timmy, you’re a genius! Even more than the Zenith Institute for Intellect said you were! That could work!’ She gave him a big kiss on the cheek, before turning and running for the stairs, then slowing down to a steady walk to actually take the stairs, because nothing was worth snapping her neck over an extra metre per second. 

 ‘I am? Great! …Tec? …Tec, did you call the plumber back, or do you still need me to fix this?’

 When nobody answered him, he sighed and shrugged, turning to Tecna’s duck, Chiko.

 ‘Well, buddy…looks like once again, the household repairs are up to me…’

 ‘Ogron, I have a plan!’

 Ogron yelped with surprise when Tecna came bursting in with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for Stella or Bloom. Wow, the others had really rubbed off on her. She’d even lost her monotone! Was she wasting energy on inflection? She should look that up…

 ‘I also have a plan…several, if you would just give me back my-’

 Tecna didn’t let him finish, because if she did, she’d just say no anyway, instead holding up a plastic box adorned with the imagery of a slightly less than modestly dressed woman holding an implausibly large sword, flanked by various mythical creatures of varying accuracy. 

 ‘…What…is that?’

 ‘Knights of Aurea! It’s a videogame where you fight monsters, fight wizards, fight all kinds of things and blow them all up with crazy magic spells and hit them with crazy weapons! It’s an excellent stress reducer while Timmy works on those pipes.’

 ‘Wait, why is Timmy-’

 ‘He’s qualified.’

 There was the distant sound of spurting water and swearing that Tecna opted to gloss over.

 ‘Look, we’ve tried all day to get you to de-stress and put you energy into something, painting seemed to be working until you started planning in pictograms…’

 ‘It still turned out artistic.’ That much was true; Ogron’s half-finished plan involving what seemed to involve some hippogriffs - not native to Earth, nor legal to import - a collection of phantoblades, and just a large, dark mass of frustrated scribbling, was in fact on par with some of the modern art Tecna had seen on Earth. She still didn’t understand it, but she’d never been very artistic. If Bloom told her it was art, she’d accept it and move onto something important.

 ‘Yes, it did, but you also tried to set it on fire when you couldn’t think of an end to the plan.’ Thankfully, they’d been saved from the incredibly sensitive fire alarms going off by the fact Ogron was still very much magically weakened, so fire blasts were still regrettably outside his remit. Throwing the canvas had not been. Nor had throwing the paint brushes. 

 ‘This is a good stress outlet, trust me. It really helped with my anger issues.’

 ‘…You have anger issues?’

 ‘Had. I became very emotionally volatile when I first joined the group. I was using rampant hyperbole, I knocked a salt shaker off a table in rage, I even got huffy!’ Such emotions were wildly out of control on Zenith. Though she’d seen Musa throw a couch out the window using magic during one of her fights with Riven, so perhaps on Melody, such things were ordinary.

 Tecna sat down, flicking her finger to slide the game disc into the terrestrial gaming device. No immersive vr headset, but she found this quaint way of playing to be quite charming.

 ‘Tecna-’

 ‘No arguments. We’re trying this.’

 ‘Tecna-’

 ‘Look!’ Tecna held out the controller. ‘You can play as a studious warrior mage! With a chainsaw!’

 Ogron looked to the screen. To the great, noble warrior brandishing a chainsaw. To the promise of nonviolent - at least in real life - release. 

 A fire lit.

 ‘I will destroy all my enemies.’

 In the immortal words of Stella: there was no possible way this could go wrong.

 Seven hours later, and Aurea had a new level nineteen warrior mage with both an enchanted chainsaw, and several raven sidekicks Ogron had just picked up on the way that would peck at his enemies for him. Tecna was relieved they were on the same side, fighting for conquest and glory - she’d hate to face Ogron in the virtual arena. Sure, she was three levels above him, but the speed at which he was speed-running the game…truly remarkable. But, he appeared far, far less stressed than earlier…excellent!

 ‘On your left! On your left!’

 ‘I’m perfectly aware of what is on my left, the ravens have it! Watch out for the fellow on your right, I believe he would like to give you an abdominal piercing with his spear!’

 ‘Well that would be very unsanitary; I’d better avoid that so he won’t face litigation.’

 As their enemies fell, both players bumped up a level, prompting the same celebratory high-five they’d managed to perfect five hours ago. High fives were hard, someone always accidentally hit someone else in the face, or hit too hard, or accidentally hit the self destruct button for the building. Two hours to perfect was some kind of record.

 ‘Level twenty!’ Ogron fist-pumped the air, and Tecna grinned to see him smile, a real, happy smile, not a manic smile of underlying mental health issues. He’d shed his sweater a while ago, now content to play in just a t-shirt; it was the first time she’d seen his arms. Not that she was noting the event on the calendar or anything, it was just interesting. 

 ‘You hungry?’

 Ogron nodded distractedly, attempting to solo the dark ruler of the dark forest, who likely needed to come up with some newer, more creative names for himself and the things around him.

 ‘Mhm. I’m in the middle of something, though, I can’t get up.’

 ‘It’s fine; I perfected snack-summoning thanks to Stella.’

 Tecna snapped her fingers, and a large bag of chips she remembered buying and stashing in the cupboard appeared in front of them.

 ‘Now that’s some useful magic.’

 ‘You don’t have a snack spell?’

 Ogron shrugged, failing to levitate a chip out of the bag, appearing torn between pausing and eating, or continuing and starving. 

 ‘I just forgot about food until Anagan made me eat.’

 ‘Flora and I had the same relationship.’

 ‘Oi!’ 

 Tecna and Ogron exchanged a glance. What had ticked off Duman?

 There was the muffled sound of sniffing, before someone banged on the door.

 ‘I smell salt and potatoes, give me back my chips!’

 ‘I’m sorry, your chips?’ Tecna flicked her finger, unlocking the door, allowing a very irritated shapeshifter to walk-stumble through. ‘Last I checked, I bought those, put them at the back of the cupboard, with a note that said ‘Tecna’s’.’

 Duman shifted awkwardly, caught out. ‘…Would you believe me if I said I couldn’t read it? Reading is hard…I’m very sick…’

 ‘Not too sick to go rifling through the top cupboards. The chips are ours, you can go find your own, Duman.’

 Ogron very pointedly ate one, smirking. Duman made a very questionable hand gesture at him. Tecna got the distinct feeling the two of them greatly enjoyed arguing over every little thing. Similar to Musa and Riven, but…without making anyone want to beat themselves senseless with a lawn chair.

 ‘Fine…….’ Duman flopped against the doorframe dramatically. ‘But I hope you guys feel guilty when I die of lack of potato and artificial flavourings.’

 ‘I’ve already written your eulogy,’ Ogron quipped sarcastically. ‘I was thinking I’d open with: ‘He truly excelled at annoying me.’’

 ‘You wouldn’t have said that two weeks ago.’

 ‘Yes, but now you’re on the mend and I can go back to saying all my thoughts.’

 Duman rolled his eyes, straightening up. ‘What are you guys doing, anyway? You’ve been closed off in here all day.’

 ‘Tecna got me into this video game…’ Ogron replied, increasingly distracted as the game picked the pace back up again. 

 Duman’s eyes went wide. ‘…You’re playing a videogame? You agreed to ‘waste your time on an endlessly meaningless lack of accomplishment?’’

 ‘Well I wouldn’t call it that…’ Ogron killed several enemies (and one person that was actually on their side, but Tecna didn’t really mind - that guy was slowing them down.)

 ‘Yes you would! You called it that when it came out! Well, not this one exactly, but the whole concept!!!’ Duman’s Mohawk had in fact gone slightly prickly with irritation. ‘I said how cool it was, and that we should all play, and you said no! No, no, no, no, no! What, is Tecna’s word better than mine?’

 ‘Duman, can we have this discussion later, I’m in the middle of something here…’ Ogron aligned himself against the game’s final boss, much to Duman’s chagrin. ‘Die!’

 ‘This came out twenty years ago! We could have been doing this for twenty years!’

 ‘Duman, I’m trying to focus here…’

 ‘And I’m mortally wounded by my so-called best friend!’

 ‘…Isn’t Gantlos your best friend?’

 ‘I can have more than one best friend, don’t change the subject!’

 ‘…Is…everything okay in here?’ Gantlos poked his head around the door, raising an eyebrow at his exceedingly huffy boyfriend. ‘Why are you guys yelling?’

 ‘Ogron has betrayed me in the most profound way a wizard can!’

 Gantlos looked moderately concerned a moment, then seemed to remember this was Duman, and Duman…had something of a flair for drama. 

 ‘Oh really?’

 ‘He’s playing video games with Tecna! Tecna! After years of saying no way, now how, he wayed and he howed! He wayed and howed hard!’

 ‘Duman, those aren’t…those aren’t words…’ Tecna interjected. She was, however, ignored. Apparently this was a private wizard spat.

 ‘…Okay…’

 Ogron sighed, glancing up from the screen for just a moment, before being wrenched back by the allure of glory in virtual battle.

 ‘Duman, if you want to play with us, you can.’

 ‘No! You hear that? That’s what I’ve been hearing since the nineties!’ Duman crossed his arms, prickling up into a grumpy ball of ire. Apparently Duman took either video games or being ignored very, very seriously. ‘I need some time alone.’ With a huff, he stalked from the room, leaving everyone in awkward silence a moment.

 A second later, he poked his head back in. ‘…Gantlos, c’mon, alone time.’

 ‘Oh, right…’ Gantlos moved to follow him. ‘…Duman, would it help if we borrowed Bloom’s computer and we played together?’

 ‘Oh, sure, now everyone wants to play with MohawkMan99 - that’s my username, no, I can’t believe there were ninety eight other MohawkMen either - but when I stole that Baldur’s Gate prototype-’

 ‘Wait, you did what?’ Tecna asked, attention dragged from the game. 

 ‘See, now you’re all interested!’

 ‘In my defence…I didn’t know you then.’

 ‘No excuse!’

 ‘I played that game with you,’ Gantlos argued.

 ‘Babe…sitting there and asking ‘What do I do now?’ for an hour isn’t playing. You didn’t even kill anyone.’

 ‘The real thing is just more engaging.’

 ‘Wait, what?’ Did he just say-

 ‘Don’t worry about it.’

 Ogron rolled his eyes at the pair of them. ‘Could you two perhaps avoid debating the fine ins and outs of real versus virtual assassinations right here? I’ve been informed this is my mental health time, I need immense focus.’ Not quite the point of mental health time, but it still seemed to be working, so Tecna wouldn’t say anything. 

 He turned to Tecna, one eye still on the screen.

 ‘So, what do I do now?’

 Ah, a moment for her true wisdom…

 ‘Kill. Everyone.’

 Ogron looked rather taken aback. ‘Oh- but you’ve all been so very good to us-’

 ‘No no no no - not us, the enemies in the game.’

 ‘…Oh. You should have been more specific.’ Tecna wasn’t sure she really had needed to be…though perhaps the intensity in her voice had been a little much for game instructions.

 Duman glowered at the pair of them as they leapt into action together, letting out an aggrieved animalistic hiss.

 ‘I hate all of you!’

 Gantlos quirked an eyebrow.

 ‘Well I’m very sorry to hear that. I suppose that means you don’t want your bedtime hug, then?’

 Duman’s eyes rapidly went wide.

 ‘No no no! Not you! Not you, only them!’

 ‘Ah, I see. In that case…’ Gantlos folded him into a big hug. ‘You seemed like you could use it early.’ It was in fact, almost eleven, so maybe not that early…wow they’d been playing for a while.

 Duman made a satisfied sort of grumbling noise, clinging to Gantlos like a koala bear. 

 ‘I’m sorry it took Ogron so long to play video games, Duman.’

 ‘Yeah…’ Duman huffed quietly. ‘He’s mean.’

 ‘He’s also six feet away from you…’ Ogron muttered, executing a move combo that was made all the more impressive by the revelation he’d never picked up a controller before.

 ‘Whatever.’

 ‘Whatever yourself. …I’ll think of a better comeback when I’ve finished here, so…just hold that thought.’

 As Tecna’s bedroom had apparently become some sort of vortex, sucking in wizards left right and centre, Anagan wandered past, pausing at the very intense koala cuddling in the doorway. Then freezing at Ogron in front of the screen.

 ‘Oh for- who got Ogron addicted to video games?! I’ve been keeping him away from those things for centuries!’

 Duman turned. Slowly. Menacingly. Like a villain in a horror movie who had just been informed the crazy axe murderer store was all out of crazy axes.

 ‘…You what?’

 Ogron, unconcerned by the very angry head turn, didn’t even look up from the screen. 

 ‘I’m not addicted to anything!’

 ‘Would you care to look at me and say that?’

 ‘…No.’

 ‘Would you care to press pause and go for a walk?’

 ‘No.’

 ‘Would you care to press pause at all?’

 ‘…No.’

 ‘You’re well on the Ogron path to addiction, give me the controller.’

 ‘No!’ Ogron practically hissed, clutching his controller like Golem with the Ring. ‘Leave me alone, I can’t lose this one!’

 ‘You just need to pause it; you’ve been at this all day! It’s bedtime.’

 ‘I’m an adult, Anagan, I don’t have a bedtime.’

 ‘That’s not what you said when you researched obsessively and determined a regular sleep schedule was vital to your efficient functioning. Remember? You made one of those walls with all the red string, and a very impassioned speech.’

 ‘A wizard reserves the right to change his mind. Look, I was very sleep deprived when I did that, so it doesn’t count!’

 Anagan folded his arms, giving Ogron a look that could only be described as ‘deeply parental and disappointed’.

 ‘Do you plan on putting the controller down and getting some sleep tonight?’

 Ogron paused. Turned away slightly.

 ‘…Yeeeeeessss?’

 ‘Do you swear it on our lifelong bond of friendship and trust? And those marker pens Bloom got you for organising?’

 Ogron huffed, deftly avoiding the actual question.

 ‘Look, you’re making this a bigger deal than it needs to be! Look! Look at Duman!’ He gestured dramatically to Duman, who was still clinging to Gantlos like a very possessive koala. ‘He seems to have a problem, you should help him!’

 Anagan was not one to be so easily distracted.

 ‘He has a boyfriend. You have very visible veins in your eyeballs. Come on, you’ve been doing so well with getting enough sleep, please don’t ruin it by developing a video game addiction…’

 ‘Anagan, I’m fine! And as your leader, you cannot decide on my bedtime! …Or…enforce any I may have previously suggested in a fit of exhausted delirium.’

 Anagan sighed, the towel edging dangerously close to being thrown in.

 ‘Fine…but don’t come to me at four in the afternoon tomorrow because you’re so tired you can’t see your hand in front of your face, because I won’t be tucking you in.’

 Duman snickered. ‘Yes you will.’

 ‘…Okay, I probably will, but the point stands!’

 Ogron glanced up, the game at a slow point.

 ‘I’ve never done that.’

 ‘Yes you have. I put you to bed, made you tea, and let you sleep for thirteen hours, which wasn’t easy. Do you know how many Duman catastrophes I had to prevent? He tried to learn to play the cymbals.’

 ‘I could have gone pro if you didn’t give them to chairty, too.’ Duman huffed. Somehow, Tecna doubted that highly…

 ‘I think you must have hit your head on a hunt, because I don’t recall that in the slightest,’ Ogron argued, starting to turn back to the game.

 ‘Pretty sure you were bordering on delirious, so I’m not surprised. Duman has video footage, though.’

 And there it was. The one thing strong enough to snatch Ogron’s attention from the screen. He too took on the slow head tilt of a sudden revelation, gaze locking onto Duman, who suddenly appeared to remember a very, very important place he definitely had to go to.

 ‘…What?’

 ‘Uhhhh…Gantlos, it looks like we may need a quick exit…’ Duman grabbed his phone from his pocket, throwing it across the room. ‘There’s the footage, be distracted!’

 Ogron dove for the phone as Duman hopped up into Gantlos’s arms for his escape; apparently, Gantlos moonlit as a spontaneous escape vehicle, who knew?

 ‘Damn you, Duman!’

 Anagan rapidly levitated the controller away as Ogron dove across the room for the phone, catching it just before it would have hit the floor.

 ‘I have it! …How the bloody hell do you turn this thing on?’

 ‘You don’t know how to work a phone?’ Tecna asked, dumbfounded.

 ‘I have a psychic link between me and my best friends, and also Duman, why would I need a tiny box mortals can listen to me through? I don’t need my conversations tapped by the FBI.’ Never one to quit in the face of a challenge, he began pressing buttons. The wrong buttons, but still.

 ‘No…no, Ogron just…just press the button…the other button…’ Anagan, for reasons unknown, had decided to jeopardise his sanity and try and coach Ogron through turning it on. ‘That’s the camera…’

 ‘I got it!’ Ogron held the phone aloft, like some great hero with a mystical treasure. ‘Okay, so I just-’

 The phone made the snapping sound of a picture, and Ogron looked to them both with the confusion of a man who really would have preferred to stay living in the age of messenger pigeons.

 ‘…It says it made a screen shot.’ He held up the phone curiously. ‘…What screen did it shoot?’

 Anagan quietly facepalmed. Well, it looked like Tecna had a lot more work to do when it came to Ogron and tech…

 Two days later, and Dan of Dan’s plumbing had been called back in, since it turned out that, despite his skills, Timmy doing repairs of this calibre was actually slightly illegal, the store was dry and open again, and Ogron was right back to his old routine, albeit with a slight return of the dark circles. Perhaps in future, video games were best left alone…

 Or at least played for less time.

 Unless they were on a roll.

 Or had no other commitments.

 Or Anagan was out and wouldn’t stop them. 

 They still had a final boss to beat, after all.