Archive of Our Own ^beta

He didn’t know why he was here.

Well, for that matter, he didn’t even know where the hell here was.

Wherever it was, it was beautiful.  A lovely glade in the midst of an autumn forest, on a hill overlooking a lake.  With just a glance, he could see a few roadways and towns scattered along the edge of the lake - and somewhere, further up in the forest, a tower of stone.

Something in his heart absolutely wrenched at that, and he knew immediately, deep in his bones, that he needed to go to that tower.  That nothing else could possibly be as important.

Why, he couldn’t fathom.  But he trusted his instincts, even when his memory was… spotty.  After all, he was Scar Goodtimes, wizard extraordinaire, famed high mage of the Vex Court.  And his instincts had never failed him.

Even if, sometimes, they refused to explain themselves.

Curious, he thought, starting to make his way across the hill at a slight angle, bearing towards the tower.  I don’t remember ever having memory lapses like this before.

Though, come to think of it, that could be due to the memory lapses.

He whistled as he walked, striking a brisk pace with his staff.  It was a lovely day for a walk.  The clouds hanging overhead were a little… ominous, sure, as was his total lack of context.  But the breeze was nice.

The sun had passed its zenith when he got close enough to see the tower through the trees.  It was still a good ways away.  And, he realized, he was getting hungry.

He searched the pockets of his robes, deep and lined with enchantments.  Somewhere in one was a couple of cookies, each wrapped, and in the other a scrap of paper.  Chewing thoughtfully on a cookie - which was surprisingly satiating, he realized pretty quickly - he unfolded the mysterious scrap of paper.

Two lines, hastily scrawled, in what he immediately recognized as his own hand.  Messy, almost panicked.

SEEK THE TOWER
THAT MOST PRECIOUS

He chuckled to himself - he knew that already; he was smarter than his past self had given him credit for.  Whatever arcane treasure was in that tower, his instincts and his past self were in agreement that it was exactly what he needed to find.

Swallowing the last bite of the cookie, he set out again at an even brisker pace.

Grian stared at the mirror, confused.

He’d woken up with a strange indefinable sense of loss.  As though he’d been dreaming of something beautiful and tender, only to forget it as soon as he awoke.

He was back in his old Watchtower.  Back in - no, he hadn’t ever left, right?  So why did it feel strange?

This was the same Watchtower he’d lived in for the past five years, ever since he’d achieved the rank of Watcher at nineteen years old.  His home.  The fulfillment of all of his ambitions.

But when he’d looked in the bedroom mirror just now, the face that looked back at him was just slightly unfamiliar.

The shape of the cheek and chin looked indefinably off to him; maybe a little less rounded around the cheekbones, if he stared at it, and something strange about the set of his jaw.  And around the corners of the mirror-version’s eyes, the skin was a little too creased - in a fine subtle way that was decidedly uncanny.

Grian didn’t have smile-lines.  He never had.  But the face in the mirror did.

The furrow in the center of his forehead was deeper, too, traces of cares beyond what Grian was used to shoulder.  And a fine hairline scar crossing one eyebrow - he didn’t remember getting an injury there; was his memory slipping?  There - on the jaw, too - another scar he didn’t recognize.

It was like he was looking at a different version of himself; one that had lived so much more than he ever had.

He shook himself out of the thought.  No reason to panic.  He must have just gone a little too long without looking at himself in the mirror, and that was why his reflection was giving him the creeps.

To assuage his worry, he allowed himself a brief search.  But everything in his bedroom was as it should be.  His meager furnishings were tidy and in their place.  Save for the stranger in the mirror, everything in this room was unremarkable.

No.  One thing.  One thing should not have been.

Tucked in the back of the nightstand’s drawer, there was a ring.  It was simple, carved from a dark, rich oak wood; a design of leaves and flowers - some small and clustered, some broad-petaled - was painstakingly etched around its circumference.

It had been carved by an amateur.  No small feat of dedication and precision, this ring, but there were clumsy edges and tiny mistakes that a professional would not have made.

It was unfamiliar.  It was wrong.  And in his trembling hands, it was humming with enchantment.

Immediately, Grian flared open one of his scrying Eyes, heart racing.  He cautiously examined the spellwork that wound itself around the ring.

Now this was the work of a master.  It was intricate, efficient, concise; not a glyph or a rune wasted.  It was beautiful.

Grian closed his physical eyes and Looked closer.  Slowly, he began to puzzle out what the spellwork was doing.  It wasn’t his, that was certain; nor did it belong to anyone he’d known.  Yet somehow he found himself reading it much more easily than he should have been able to, complex as it was.

When he'd parsed the whole thing, he breathed a laughing sigh of relief at the mundanity of it all.  The spellwork was just a ward.  It was a tightly woven harmony of abjurative and transmutative magic that wound together beautifully, all to address the fact that wood was simply not a very good material for a ring.  The ward lent resilience, flexibility, protection from wear and water.  Such magnificent spellwork for something so commonplace.

Adequately satisfied, Grian set the ring back down in the drawer.  And suddenly there it was, lightning-quick, the pang in his chest he’d woken up with.

Loss.  Yearning.  Homesickness.

It was deeply unsettling, and absolute nonsense.  He was home, after all - in the position he’d always wanted, a respected Watcher, left to his own research so long as he maintained a few arcane responsibilities.

Maybe that intricately warded ring was hiding a curse, somehow.  Something to sabotage his frame of mind.  He ought to throw it out the window.  He really, really ought to.

He couldn’t.

Somehow, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.  So instead, frustrated, he stowed the ring back in the drawer he’d found it in, shutting the drawer roughly.

If there was one piece of unfamiliar magic in the tower, anything could be compromised.  It was time for a thorough search.

The search yielded almost nothing.  There was nothing unexpected in the modest kitchen on the ground floor - the table set for one, as always, and the pantry stocked with a year’s worth of unperishables.  The study above his bedroom was untidy as usual, but every arcane instrument was familiar and where where he expected it to be.  And the open tower room, with its star charts and scrying instruments, exactly as it should be.

Yet in nearly every room he found the same particular oddity: something, sometimes multiple things, covered in a thick layer of dust.  Nearly everything was kept so clean, even the rare tomes he only touched once in a year or two, evidence of his carefully maintained routine.  But here and there he would come across some commonplace item or surface, absolutely unremarkable - a jar of pencils here, a butterknife there - that looked as if it hadn’t been so much as touched in years.  And in the back of the study closet was a nest of cobwebs so thick and dusty that Grian could only imagine the coughing fit he’d have if he tried to clean it out.

Something was wrong.  Something was wrong.

Grian sat down hard on the floor of his study.  He’d tried, in the moment just past, to retrace his steps from the day before, and he had found only void.

The last thing he could remember was setting out to report to the High Council.  But… the trees outside his window this morning were in full autumn flame.  The High Council had met in midsummer.

He could remember, if he strained, arriving at the capital, high-strung with anticipation.  That year he’d been selected to speak for the Watchers, a high honor for one still relatively new to the rank.  With great effort he remembered entering the courtyard, clutching his scrolls tightly under his robes as he scanned the crowd for potential threats.  And then… nothing.

No.  Snatches, here and there.  A smell of spring leaves underfoot.  A night spent in the aftermath of hot anger, trying hard to focus on anything other than… than what?  The window of a cottage, overlooking a garden, a feeling in his chest of - no, there it was gone again.  A late night in an attic study he didn’t recognize, scrawling new and experimental glyphs on parchment… footsteps coming up the stairs, a creaking at the door, and then - void.  Sudden and total.

There it was again, that feeling he’d woken up with.  Something precious, lost.   A heartsickness without reason.

Something had been done to him, something he couldn’t guess at yet.  Something had been taken from him.  He needed to find out what, and how, and why…

He could See no new spellwork on himself, nor in his study.  So down he went to check his bedroom again - maybe there was some enchantment on his bedding; maybe something in that strange suspicious ring.

No, nothing that he hadn’t already seen.  Though it was a bit dim in his room.  He took the ring over by the open window, to get a better look at it in the sunlight…

“Well hello there!”

A face appeared at the window; a stranger, grinning broadly.

Grian screamed and slammed the shutters.

Scar yelped, easing his landing with a quick slow-falling spell.  He landed untidily in the garden.  Pulling his feet out of a nearby rosebush, he dusted himself up and stood up.

So the tower was occupied.  From the state of the surrounding area, he’d thought it abandoned.

No matter.  A small setback, nothing more.  He would just do what he did best - charm his way into that pretty stranger’s house and steal the mysterious treasure from under his nose.

He knocked briskly on the door, readying his brightest and friendliest smile.  There was a hurried thumping of feet on stairs, and a moment later the door swung open, revealing the flustered and wild-eyed young man who’d caught him at the window.

The young man was about a head shorter than Scar; wiry, dressed in mage’s robes.  The robes were dark, embroidered with purple glyphs Scar didn’t recognize.  Light sandy-brown hair fell wildly about his face.  His eyes, ebony-dark, stared wide and angry up at Scar.  They were incongruously framed by thick dark lashes - briefly, irrelevantly, Scar thought those eyes looked as if they were meant to be seen in the soft and private glow of a hearth-fire.

“Well?!” the man bit out, and Scar realized he’d been staring without saying anything.

“Well, hello there,” Scar said with his most dazzling smile.

“Yes.   We’ve been over that part,” he hissed.  “What are you doing here, and why were you at my bedroom window.”

“Ah, yes!  Well, you see, I am a humble traveler, making his way in the world, and I seem to have lost my bearings!  I was wandering about the woods, searching for a place to lay my head for the night, when I saw this lovely tower - beautiful grounds, by the way, love the landscaping - and I thought I might see if it was empty, in which case I would shelter here!  But I see it is occupied,” he said smoothly, gesturing to the mage, “so I will trouble you no longer, unless you could take the time to direct me to the nearest town?”

The man held Scar’s gaze, some calculation playing out behind his eyes.

Scar hoped he’d played this right.  In a situation like this, when he’d already provoked some hostility, a direct request for shelter was unlikely to be granted willingly.  His best bet was to bank hard on the other man’s compassion: implicitly offer him the chance to take pity on a stranded traveler, and to do it of his own initiative.

If he was turned away, well, he’d just have to come back with a little more stealth.  Scar had no intention of leaving.

“If that’s all, then why’d you bother knocking?” the mage asked sharply.  “Could’ve just left.”

“To offer my humblest apologies for giving you such a fright, of course!  I couldn’t very well just leave without offering an explanation, now, could I?”  Scar waved his hands expressively as he spoke, trying to exude just the right amount of penitence - not so much as to be overdramatic, but enough to be convincing.

The stranger stared at him with that intense gaze for several moments longer.  Finally he rolled his eyes, blowing out a breath, and said “Fine, come on in.  You can eat dinner here and I’ll get you those directions.”  He turned and went inside without looking back.

Suddenly, inexplicably, Scar missed the stranger’s eyes on him.  “Say, I didn’t catch your name,” Scar called out after him as he followed.

“Yeah?” the young man said, spinning back around.  “Probably ‘cause I didn’t say it.”

“Scar Goodtimes, at your service,” Scar offered with a courtly bow, looking up with calculated expectance.

The mage sighed heavily.  He tapped his knuckles to the opposite shoulder in a salute that Scar didn’t recognize.  “Watcher Xelqua, Eyes of the eighth northwest quadrant,” he said effortlessly, as though he’d said it a thousand times before.

Scar felt the blood drain from his face.  Lucky the room was dim, and he was backlit, so it probably wasn’t noticeable.  He took in the revelation like a flash.

I’m in Calquax.

A strange, foreboding country - ruled by a cult of… mages, technically, but odd and terrifying ones.  Masked, robed, ruthless in their secretiveness - their elite spoke with one voice, and even their mid-ranking mages were nearly indistinguishable from one another.

Calquax was known to be impossible to outsmart.  They dealt in unobtainable knowledge.  Secret military movements, carefully guarded royal scandals, private intrigue - nothing was beyond the ken of the Calquaxian high mages.

No one went to war with Calquax.  No one knew if it would even be possible to survive such a war.

And here Scar was, high mage of the Vex Court, well past the Calquaxian border.  It was a nightmare of a political incident in the making.

Fortunately, Scar was nothing if not skilled at hiding his true reactions.  It took less than a second for him to grasp the situation enough to know he needed to play it carefully, let none of his surprise show.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Watcher,” he said, raising the mage’s hand to his lips and pressing a brief, courteous kiss to the knuckles.

So he’d stumbled into a Watchtower.  This might be more complicated than he thought.  Watchers, he knew, were the elusive arcane sentries of Calquax.  Scattered throughout the land in distant towers, they kept careful watch over happenings both physical and metaphysical.  They were paragons of vigilance.  No Watcher had ever abandoned their post.

Well.  He’d been in dicier situations before.  Probably.  This was nothing he couldn’t handle.  Whatever was in here, it must be important, right?  Regardless, he’d need to be at his sharpest to make it through this.

As he moved to sit down at the small kitchen table, something itched at the back of his mind.  Something he should’ve been remembering - something about Calquax and Watchers.

Right.  He’d been following some lead about them, back in the summer.  Why couldn’t he remember what had come of that investigation?  Damned memory lapses, he thought to himself.

As the mage pulled food out of the pantry, Scar searched his mind for any bits and pieces he could remember.  There had been… some kind of opportunity.  He remembered a feeling of excitement, of anticipation.  A journey and an invitation.  A courtyard, bustling with people; a shaded corner, perfect for getting the lay of the land, and for catching whispered echoes of conversation.

And there he drew a blank.  He could remember nothing else from that journey.

Grian puttered grumpily around the kitchen.  As if it wasn't enough that he’d spent most of the day trying to figure out what was wrong with his tower - now there was a stranger in his house.  A stranger absolutely drenched in saccharine charm, so obviously conscious of his good looks and smooth words, and clearly weaponizing them with measured intent.

This man wanted something from Grian.  Whether he really was just looking for a night’s shelter, or whether he was a smooth-talking thief, Grian couldn’t be sure.  In any case, this man - Scar, was it? - couldn’t be trusted; that much was certain.

It was a simple meal that he’d put together.  Beans cooked with dried meat, served with a hunk of bread - made from what he had in his pantry.  He hadn’t had the time to check outside to see if his two hens and his dairy goat were still there; but given that he hadn’t heard any sign of them, they’d probably disappeared.  It was a disheartening thought.  Once he had the place to himself again, he’d be investigating that next.

Without even attempting a hospitable smile, Grian brought the food and drink around to the stranger.  The man was sitting at the table, deep in thought, one hand at his chin while the other drummed a rhythm on the table.  Grian found himself noticing the long, shapely fingers; something pleasing about the way they moved when it was guileless, unconscious.

There was a dark ring on one hand.

Grian set the food down, drawing closer for a better look, his breath catching in his throat.

It all went to shit without warning.

One moment, Scar was lost in a reverie, trying to piece together fractured slivers of memory.  He dimly registered the mage setting down a plate of food on the table in front of him, and for a fraction of a second something purple flickering in the air nearby.

The next instant, Scar was being violently thrown backwards out of his chair.  His back hit the wall, hard.  Furious dark eyes and flared nostrils filled his vision.  One wiry forearm was braced across Scar’s chest, pinning him to the wall.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!”

The mage’s voice was raw and feral.  Eyes - too many eyes - outlined in purple light encircled his head.  He was breathing hard through gritted teeth.

“I - I don’t - what do you -” Scar stammered helplessly.

“DO NOT LIE TO ME.  THIS WAS YOUR DOING.”

“I’m not lying - I don’t understand - I can’t -”  Scar’s breath was coming in short, pained gasps.  Would this be how he died?  Blundering into something he had nothing to do with?

Grian’s hair was billowing outwards, charged by the magic he was channeling.  The number of eyes had doubled - seventeen, thirty-four, too many.   His ebony-dark eyes were livid.

“YOU HAVE STOLEN FROM MY MIND.  CONFESS BEFORE I DRAW THE TRUTH FROM YOU BY FORCE.”

“Please - I don’t know what’s happening,” Scar sobbed, gasping for air.  “Please believe me, I promise, Grian, I don’t -”

And then Grian’s form distended as dozens of blinding-white wings erupted from his back; from his shoulders, his neck.  Hundreds - maybe thousands - of spectral eyes obscured his face.  The only remnant of humanity that could be seen beneath it all was that pair of dark, lightless eyes subsumed with utter fury.

Scar felt more than heard the voice as it screamed, piercing directly into his mind.

HOW

DO

YOU

KNOW

MY

NAME

The stranger was a terrified mess.  Grian wanted to go on screaming, to fill his mind with nothing but ANSWER ME, but on some level he knew he’d be no closer to an answer if this man died of fright.  So he forced himself to go no further.  He released the man from where he’d pinned him against the wall.

With a shuddering breath, the man drew together some semblance of self-possession.  He let his robes slip from his shoulders, standing before Grian in only a blouse and breeches.  Then, as Grian Looked at him, the man let fall every piece of spellwork that was on him.  Nothing remained - no protection, no enchantment, nothing, only a frightened and vulnerable man.

Voice trembling and raw, the man asked, “You… can see and read spellwork, yes?”

Grian nodded.

With shaking hands, the man began to weave a spell, covering his own body - silvery threads snaking in bands of runes over his heart, his throat, his mouth.  Its purpose was immediately evident to Grian.  With this spell, this man was visibly binding himself to speak only what he sincerely believed to be the truth.

It was, of course, undeniably woven by the same mind that had placed a spell on the ring… the one in Grian’s nightstand drawer upstairs, and the near-identical one on the stranger’s hand.  To one who could See the bonds of spellwork, each person’s casting had an appearance as distinctive as handwriting.  This was, without a doubt, the person who had enchanted the ring that did not belong.

Only further proof that this man was deeply involved in whatever had happened to Grian.

The weaving of the spell was finished.  The man took a deep breath and met Grian’s gaze, eyes still glassy with fear.  “Can you read what that does?” he asked.

“Yes,” Grian answered.  His voice still reverberated with echoes of other voices.  “It binds you to the truth.”

The man nodded.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you,” he began, shakily, “or who did it.  I don’t have any memory of ever meeting you before.  I don’t know who you are, beyond that you are a Watcher.”  He swallowed hard, steadying himself with a bracing hand against the wall.  “I’m… missing memories,” he continued.  “I don’t remember why I’m - why I’m here, in Calquax, let alone near your tower.  I have - a note, in my writing, something about a tower, and something I’m supposed to find there.  But I don’t remember writing it.  As far as I can tell, I’m missing the last several months of memories.”

The man stepped forward, just slightly, meeting Grian’s eyes again.

“I’m not lying when I say I don’t know what you mean.  And I don’t - I don’t know how I knew your name.  I just… knew, somehow.”  He brought his hands to his head, withdrawing inward, visibly succumbing to panic once again.  “I can’t - gods.  I don’t know.  Maybe it was my fault.  I don’t know what I did, I -” He raised his head, beseechingly.  “What - what happened to you?”

Grian breathed out a sigh, sagging back into his human form.  He joined the other man with his back against the wall, and slumped down to sit on the ground.  Scar sat down with him a moment later.

Grian buried his head in his hands, ashamed now.  He’d entirely lost his composure on someone who - it seemed - might be another victim of the same curse.  No way to be sure yet, but… in any case, this man apparently didn’t know any more than Grian did.

“I… woke up disoriented this morning,” Grian began, “and I can’t remember anything since midsummer.  I’ve lost at least three months of my life.  And there’s all these little things that seem off to me, and some of them might just be my mind playing tricks on me, but some are definitely real.  Like, for instance,” he said, lightly touching the wooden band on Scar’s finger, “a ring identical to this one.  I found it in my nightstand upstairs.  I’d never seen it before.”

Scar raised his eyebrows, stretching out his slender fingers to get a better look at the ring in question.

“Huh,” he said, unsteadily.  “You know, I can’t remember where I got this…  I don’t know.  It’s pretty, though.”

“It’s got your spellwork on it,” Grian said simply.  “Just basic protection for the ring, keeping it from breaking or getting damaged.  So does the one upstairs.  So when I saw the same spellwork on yours, and on your clothes and things, I thought…”  He sighed heavily, letting his head fall back against the wall.  “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t… I thought you were behind all this.  I’m sorry.”

Scar hummed, resting his forehead on his forearms.  “That’s some impressive magic you’ve got,” he said - changing the subject.

“Mm, it’s not good for much,” he said.  “It’s all just forms of scrying, really, when you get down to it.  I couldn’t have actually hurt you with it.”

“Just known everything about me and what I’m thinking,” Scar guessed, resigned exhaustion in his voice.

This was not a man accustomed to vulnerability.  Grian should have guessed that from the second he’d introduced himself at the door.  Everything he’d done had been so deliberate, a sheen of carefully-maintained charm disguising any real feeling.

Willingly exposing himself the way he had must have gone against every fiber of his being.

The truth spell had faded naturally by now - it hadn’t been meant to be permanent - but Grian could appreciate the massive gamble the man had taken.  Something precious to him, placed at Grian’s feet, in a desperate bid for understanding.

He could’ve fought back.  Could’ve killed Grian where he stood, probably.  But he’d chosen to drop his guard instead.  It was foolhardy, and it touched Grian in a way he couldn’t begin to articulate.  And it must have left the man feeling so raw.

“I should… give you some time,” Grian said quietly.  “I’ll go tidy my study.”  He stood, lightly touching the stranger on the shoulder as he turned to leave.

Scar caught at his wrist before he could walk away.  He looked up at him wordlessly for a moment.

“Stay?” he asked, finally.

Something within Grian softened even further at that; heart welling up with some desperate tenderness towards this total stranger.

“You want me here?  After what I did?”

Scar nodded.

“You’re the only thing in this whole gods-damned place that feels real.”

So Grian sat back down next to him, wondering.

After a moment, Scar said, “You know, I always wanted to take up woodcarving.”  When Grian glanced over, he was once again looking at the ring.  “Never took the time for it,” Scar added.  “Anytime I think about putting down roots, my feet start itchin’.  Always more to do, more to see, y’know?”

Grian smiled ruefully.  “Wonder what that’s like.”

“Not much of a traveler?”

“Not so much,” he said.  “I… never really went anywhere, after I started at the academy.  Always wanted to, but never spared the time.  Needed to focus on my studies, you know.  And then once I was placed here, back in 851… well, there’s not a lot of travel that comes with this job.”  He sighed.  “But, you know, other than that it’s everything I ever wanted, so I don’t know if I can complain.”

Scar looked at him with interest.  “You’ve been living here, all by yourself, for five years?”

“Yep,” Grian said, popping the p.   “I report to my superiors with a sending-stone, and other than that, I’m pretty much left to my own devices.  Not a bad life, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

“I think I’d go crazy,” Scar said with a laugh.

“Well, can’t promise I haven’t,” Grian said, shamefaced.  After all, just a few minutes earlier, he’d tapped into ancient magic to scream at a total stranger.

Likely not a total stranger, actually… he mused, suddenly remembering the matching rings.

There was an obvious question they raised.  It was much too weighty to ask.

“Do you think we knew each other?” he asked instead.  “During the months we both lost, I mean.”

Scar leaned back, thinking for a moment.  “I mean, we must have at least met, right?  If I knew your name, and you’ve got a ring I enchanted.”

Grian startled slightly.  He hadn’t really had time to process the implications of the name, on top of everything else.

“You used my real name,” he said quietly.  “Not many people even knew that one.”

Scar raised an eyebrow.  “You just went by Xwelker- Xekla- Xakr-”

“Xelqua,” Grian corrected.  “Yeah.  That’s the name I took on when I started at the academy.  ‘Grian’ was the name my mother gave me.  But after I started studying to become a Watcher, everyone knew me as Xelqua.”

Grian didn’t mention that only his family and his very closest friends had even known his given name, and only his family had used it.

Matching rings.  A name that implied intimate knowledge.  Traces that, more and more, began to paint a consistent picture of what they must have meant to each other.

Three or four missing months wasn’t quite long enough for them to have been married.  But they could have been betrothed.

Grian studied the face of the man beside him, whose brow was furrowed in thought.  It was a strong face, handsome, charm etched into every line.  From the moment he’d walked through the door that face had been an impenetrable mask.  Or it had been, up until a few minutes ago.

Now, though - now that the pretenses had been abandoned - Grian could see someone thoughtful, enthusiastic, a man full of love for the experience of living.   And that intelligence; the quick mind underpinning the silver-tongued charisma that seemed to come so easily.

It was possible that he could have fallen in love with this man.

Odd, though, that he’d have pledged his troth to someone from beyond the borders of Calquax.

Calquax.  Home.  My glass cage.

Behind that bitter thought was a roiling mass of something Grian had never permitted himself to name.  There had never been any point to acknowledging discontent, let alone yearning.   This was the life he’d been born to.  He’d fought tooth and nail to carve the best possible space for himself within its strictures.

No point in stoking discontent with the best life he could’ve hoped for.  No point in wondering what it might’ve been like to be able to hope for more.

No point in imagining what it might be like to run, to be free, to choose -

What happened in those missing months?

“How do you suppose we met?” the mage asked, looking over at Scar.  “You do much traveling in these parts?”

Scar had gotten lost in his thoughts, wondering why the mage had had to change his name.  Was that something every student did, or something specific to this one?  And why?

“Not… much?” Scar said, off the top of his head.  “Wait.  No.  Yes.  There was one trip, this summer actually.  I can’t remember much about how it went, though.”

“Where did you go?”

It was an innocent, obvious question, but Scar hesitated.  From what he could remember of the journey, he had set out to gather information.  How Calquax knew what they knew.  It likely wouldn’t be wise to disclose that.

Scar very quickly came to a decision.  For better or for worse, he was going to choose to trust this man.

There wasn’t… a lot of basis for that trust yet, not that he could put his finger on.  Beyond, perhaps, the way the man had apologized, and the way Scar felt inexplicably at ease around him.

Maybe it was magic.  Scar decided he didn’t care if it was.  He needed to cast his weight on something, and he would choose this stranger.  Grian.

“To the capital,” he said.  “There was some sort of event I was going to, I don’t remember what it was called.  But I was there in secret.”

Grian’s eyebrows had raised a moment after Scar had said the capital.   “Was this around midsummer?” he asked.

Scar thought back through his fragments of memories.  It was in the summer, that was for sure.  There - he could remember the warding spell he’d cast over his little campsite, and the motions of anchoring the spell to moon and stars.  He remembered where those stars had been.

“Yes,” he said after a moment.  “It would have been.  I was traveling just before midsummer.”

“The High Council.”

Scar caught his breath - yes, that rang a bell.  He’d been infiltrating the Calquaxian High Council.

The mage was still speaking.  “That’s where my memories end.  I was going to the High Council, to give the report on behalf of the Watchers.”

“Huh,” Scar said.

“I remember coming up to the courtyard, and then there’s just nothing after that, other than snatches I can’t even begin to place,” Grian explained.

“That’s it then.  I remember being in the courtyard.  And I don’t remember anything that happens after that.”  Scar’s head fell back against the wall.  This was puzzling, distressingly so, and he and Grian had specifically been robbed of the means to figure it out.

“So whoever did this to us, they’ve wiped our memories back to what sounds like the first time we might’ve met.”  Grian’s voice was simmering.  “Why, though?  That’s what I don’t understand!”

“I don’t know,” Scar said with a sigh.  “I wish I knew what they took from us.”

I wish I knew what we were to each other.

He cast a glance over at the other man, who was evidently deep in thought.  Those intense dark eyes stared ahead as though they could carve an answer out of the floor itself.  That wry, expressive mouth shaped itself around inaudible syllables as the mage held some silent conversation with himself.

You said not many people knew your name.  What does that mean for me?

Had they been… close?  Intimate?  The paired rings would seem to imply that, sure, but… it was more likely that Scar had just sold this man a ring like the one he wore.  Probably for far more than it was worth.  That was what he did, after all… charmed his way into people’s hearts and then took what he wanted in exchange for a trinket.

It was laughable to assume he’d actually managed to stay for once, to tie his heart to someone willingly.  It could only have been just another con, just another person he’d won over with false pretenses and his damned silver tongue.

Scar’s heart ached, suddenly, with that long-repressed yearning for something real.   To be seen as… whoever he was beneath all his ready words and winning smiles.

He wasn’t even sure who that person was, the “self” that lay buried under all his clever lies.  Lies that came as easy as breathing.  Whoever he was underneath all that… no sensible person could look on him with kindness.

It had always been far too much to hope for, to really be seen and still be asked to stay.  And to really want to stay - to keep from bolting as soon as things got hard.  It wasn’t worth the risk of trying.

Not that it could really be called a risk, anyway, when he knew what the outcome would be.  What it always would have been.

“Right,” Grian said, standing up suddenly.  “I don’t think we’re gonna get much farther just sitting here.  Wanna help me look around outside?”

It was crisp and clear outside, the sun creeping towards evening, sky beginning to turn golden in the west.  They walked together through a thick layer of fallen leaves, under trees resplendent in their autumn regalia.

Scar stuck with Grian - he didn’t know the territory, and couldn’t See magic the same way the other man could.  His insights might come in handy, but not if he was on his own.

Grian veered off pretty quickly to a shed built at the back of the tower.  He paused by the side of it, turning back to Scar.

“Can you check inside there?” he asked hesitantly, fidgeting with his hands.  “It’s - I kept animals in there.  Chickens and a goat.  I can’t hear them, so I don’t know -”

Scar nodded, catching on.  There evidently weren’t live animals in the outbuilding.  Hopefully they’d just gone missing, but there was no way of knowing what to expect, given the twisted situation they’d found themselves in.

He peered into the dim, dusty shed, illuminating the space with a light cantrip at his fingertips.  It was empty of any farm animals, and he relayed that to Grian outside.

As a matter of fact, every surface was covered in a thick layer of dust.  It hung heavy in the air where Scar’s robes had stirred it up, threatening to choke him if he went any further.  An angry chittering sounded from the rafters, where a small family of squirrels had made their home.

Scar backed out, muttering an apology their direction.  A heavy sense of wrongness, of foreboding, hung over him.  The air inside had smelled of rotting wood.

“Guess they’ve gone missing, or been sold or stolen, or something,” Scar said as he joined Grian again.

Grian nodded.  “Feels a bit silly to be so worried about them, with everything else going on, but I guess…”

“Makes sense to me,” Scar said.  “They kept you company, didn’t they?”  He reached out to touch the mage lightly on the shoulder, unsure how to comfort him.

“I had two cats, too,” Grian said, dabbing at the corners of his eyes.  “Almost a year old.  They go off on their own sometimes - I hope they’re okay, I don’t - don’t know what I’d do -”

Scar moved on instinct.  He pulled the smaller man close, nestling a gentle hand in his hair.  By the time Scar’s mind caught up with him, Grian’s sniffles had turned to shuddering breaths, and his hands clutched at Scar’s robes like his life depended on it.

Scar held him close and wept, silently, for the unfairness of it all.

It wasn’t long after that that they found the barrier.

They’d meandered out about half a mile from the tower, when suddenly, Scar walked face first into something he couldn’t see.  Grian laughed at his startled yelp.

“You didn’t warn me about the invisible wall!” Scar said, rounding on Grian with mock indignation.

“I didn’t know it was there!” Grian protested, laughing.  “It wasn’t there anytime I can remember!”

Scar put a hand out against the barrier.  It felt… inviting.  Comforting.

Familiar.

His smile vanished as his stomach twisted with a sudden cold fear.

At his side he saw the flick of purple that marked one of Grian’s scrying Eyes, and heard a sharp intake of breath.

Scar leaned his head against the barrier, screwing his eyes shut, wishing he didn’t know exactly why Grian had reacted like that.

Quietly, he said, “It’s mine, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”  Grian’s voice was choked, small.  “It is.”

Scar let out a horrible shuddering breath as his knees gave out from under him.  He slumped to the ground.

Grian sat down next to him.  “You didn’t know, I’m assuming?”

“No.  No.  I didn’t.  I didn’t know.  I can - I can prove it, if you - if you’ll give me a moment.”  Trembling, breathing fast, Scar started to weave his truthbinding spell once more.

Grian’s hands caught at his wrists, stopping the spell.  “It’s okay, Scar,” he said, moving to look Scar full in the face.  “It’s okay.  I’m sorry.  I believe you.”

And Grian just sat with him for a while, as Scar came back from his panic.

It was a wonder, to be trusted like this.  To be comforted.  Scar couldn’t help wondering if maybe all of this was his fault, and the thought made him sick to his stomach.  He was terribly afraid that he didn’t deserve the mage’s kindness in this moment.  And oh, how he wanted to deserve it.  To know for a fact that he wasn’t the reason for Grian’s fear… to find whoever did this to them and make their life a living hell.

Eventually, when Scar was feeling more himself again, Grian spoke up.

“If it’s yours, are you able to dispel it?”

“Theoretically, yes,” Scar answered, “but I’d need to know exactly what it is I cast, first.”

“Well, I can help with that.  The gist of it is, ‘no creature living or undead shall pass through this barrier,’” Grian said as if reading from a textbook.  One eye of purple light hovered above his head, scanning back and forth across the wall.

Scar’s eyebrows shot up.  “Right.  That does help.  Uh… how close does it look to this?” he said, flicking up a warding spell over a small area in front of them.

“Oh, gods.  Well… there’s a couple runes that are the same?”  He pointed to a spot in Scar’s spell, then flushed when Scar reminded him that he couldn’t see what Grian could.

Grian pulled out a small notebook and started making sketches from the invisible wall.  But when he showed them off, Scar couldn’t make heads or tails of them.

“This isn’t any kind of notation I’ve ever learned,” he said apologetically.  “Can you tell me what it means?”

“Right, okay, so… this section right here is defining the physical region, yeah?  It’s pretty much a basic dome, a good bit taller than the tower.  Best I can tell, it goes miles down that way,” Grian said, gesturing vaguely in the direction Scar had come from that afternoon.  He tapped another set of symbols with the end of his pencil.  “And this right here sets the parameters for what can and can’t pass through.  Like, I said ‘no creature’ earlier, but that was generalizing.  There’s a lot of specifics on things like… size and body plan and diet and such.  No predators above a certain size and no humanoids, but insects and squirrels and stuff can get through.  But the way it goes about defining that for the sake of the spell is really complicated.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Scar said, nodding.  Barrier spells that specific were pretty advanced magic.  It was a little impressive, if he was honest with himself.

So Grian explained the details of the spell as best he could while Scar jotted down notes in Grian’s notebook.  Every so often, he would cast a miniature barrier near them so Grian could compare the two.  Finally, well past sunset, Scar had managed to produce a spell that Grian declared “an exact replica, as far as I can tell.”

Scar stood before the barrier, drawing a deep breath.  He placed both palms up against it, felt the hum and shape of his own magic beneath his skin.  The magic swirled in currents around his fingertips as he hooked them, cautiously, into the fabric of the woven spell.

He felt it take.  He’d figured out the spell - he could work with it now.  All that was needed now was to detach the spell from its celestial anchors.

Finding the locations of the anchors would take some trial and error, since he didn’t know today’s exact date.  Fortunately, Scar knew his star charts.  He was accustomed enough to casting warding spells that he had memorized the movements of the celestial anchors he used the most.  He’d just pick a date from this autumn, try assuming the positions from that date, and if it didn’t work, try all the other days this autumn.

It didn’t work.

It took a while to work through all the days he thought it might conceivably be.  He tried some of them more than once, but nothing took.  Nothing.  He pulled and pulled on the fabric of the spell.  The anchors held firm.

“It’s not working, Gri,” he said finally, exhausted.  “I can’t - I think I’ve got my star charts wrong.  I can’t find the anchors.”

As they’d worked, Scar had explained the principles of anchoring a warding spell to Grian, who was already somewhat familiar with the concept.  So Grian readily grasped the situation.

“What do you need to sort it out?” Grian asked.

“Star charts, from today’s date.  And, uh, to know today’s date.”

“No problem,” Grian said, flashing Scar a sudden sharp grin in the moonlight.  “I’m pretty good at stars.”

Grian couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride as he let Scar up the stairs to the room at the top of the tower.  Now this was his domain.

The room was open from waist-height to ceiling on all eight sides, with shutters to close it off if need be.  But at the moment, the shutters were rolled up to the ceiling, and the night breeze was deliciously cool as it tousled Grian’s hair.

A few star charts were scattered around on the desk that wrapped beneath half the windows.  Grian gathered them up for reference; after a moment’s thought, he also pulled an almanac out of the bookcase.  Then, a few enchanted stones to focus his scrying.

He stood in the center of the room with the stones arrayed about him and took a deep breath.  Spectral wings unfolded behind him as he tapped into something deep and ancient.  His senses were heightened like this - which meant that, as he delved further into his Watcher magic, he caught what Scar whispered under his breath.

“Stars above, you’re beautiful.”

Grian could feel a pink flush dusting his cheeks.  It was the last thing he felt before his mind dove into the night sky.

It was a feeling like no other.  Galaxies; nebulae; far-distant worlds under their own strange suns; all wheeling past him in a dizzyingly glorious dance.  Seeing the cosmos like this never failed to take his breath away.  It was like drinking liquid awe, potent and undiluted.

After a few euphoric moments, Grian steadied himself.  He was here for a reason.  Sparing a single Eye for the charts and tomes spread out by his physical body, Grian read the face of the heavens.

And then his heart stood still for a moment.

He must be missing something.  No.  He looked again, and again - checked what he saw against chart after chart, desperate for a different answer.  But it was no use.  There was no mistaking what he’d seen in the stars.

He collapsed back into his physical form in an instant, dropping to the floor like his strings had been cut.

Scar was at his side a heartbeat later, steady arms holding him close, gentle fingers combing through his hair as Grian took in great sobbing gasps of air.

It took a while before he was able to speak; his heart slammed against his ribcage as if it was trying to break through.  He clung to the fabric of Scar’s robes, tucking his head under Scar’s chin to feel the gentle rise and fall of his breath.

“Scar,” he whispered, finally.

“Hmm?”

“It hasn’t been a few months,” he stammered.  Scar’s arm around his shoulders tightened just slightly.

Grian took a deep breath.

“It’s been seven years.”

Scar hadn’t said much, just let out a gasping groan as though he’d been punched in the stomach.  He’d buried his face in Grian’s hair and held on to him, unmoving, for what felt like ages.

Grian was grateful for the comfort, the proximity.  In the years of his life that he could remember, he’d rarely been touched since he left home - and in the five years he remembered since he became a Watcher, not at all.

But there had been seven missing years since then.  And, unexpected as it was, Scar’s arms around him soothed some frantic instinct in his mind; calmed something that had always been wound tight to the point of breaking.  The animal parts of his mind and body knew being held by Scar, knew that it was safe and good and - home.

Seven years… that’s long enough, Grian thought, as the rough texture of Scar’s ring brushed against the nape of his neck.  No wonder I could read his spells so easily.

Scar followed, dazed, as Grian led him by the hand down to the second story of the tower.  It was late into the night at this point, and both of them were exhausted.

Gathering his courage, he’d managed to ask, “Can you See the magic that’s on us?”

“No,” Grian had answered.  “It wasn’t cast directly on us.  Whoever did this must have put the spell on a magic item, or used a potion or something similar.”

Like the crystals I use in so much of my spellcasting, Scar thought miserably.  He felt numb and overwhelmed, searching hopelessly for some shred of proof that this wasn’t his doing.

When they reached the second-story landing, Scar stopped, pulling Grian to look at him face to face.  He brought Grian’s hand up to his throat and, as the man looked up at him with concern, held it there while he swore a solemn vow.

“Listen,” he said, “in case it turns out I was the one who did this…”  Grian was shaking his head, alarmed, but Scar soldiered on.  He took a deep breath.  “You can kill me.  I swear I won’t resist.”  In that instant the magic of the vow took hold, winding itself around Grian’s fingers and extending itself through Scar’s throat, his heart, his lungs.

Grian looked devastated.

“What did you just do?” he whispered, horrified.

“Exactly what I just said.  If you try to kill me, I won’t be able to resist,” Scar said numbly.  “I’d more than deserve it, if I did this to you.”

“Scar.”

“Look, it’s just -” Scar stammered, beginning to lose his composure.  “If there’s a version of me that hurt you like this, for whatever gods-forsaken self-absorbed reason, I can’t - I can’t live with that.”

Grian’s hand had crept from Scar’s throat up to the back of his neck, fingers gently curling into his hair.  His thumb moved over the line of Scar’s jaw in a slow caress.

“I’m not letting you do that, Scar,” he said quietly.  “Take it down.”

On some unconscious instinct Scar’s hands had found their way to Grian’s waist, and now they tightened in the fabric of his robes.  “Please, Grian, I don’t -”  He swallowed hard.  “I don’t trust the man I’ll be when this is all over.  I don’t know what you think I am, but I’m not good.   I’ve never in my life cared about someone else more than getting what I was after.”

“But you care about me now, yeah?” Grian said, tilting his head to the side just slightly.  “You’ll still remember that when we get our memories back.  And I can work with that.”

Scar meant to dig his heels in.  He really did.  But looking down at those dark-lashed eyes, staring up at him full of something indecipherable, Scar could feel that this was a losing battle.

“I’m not as helpless as you seem to think I am,” Grian continued.  “And I think you’re underestimating how stubborn I can be.  I’m not moving until you drop the spell.”

Scar sighed heavily, hanging his head in defeat.  As Grian leaned forward to rest his forehead against Scar’s, the threads of the spell unraveled.

“There you are,” Grian whispered, tangling a hand in Scar’s hair.

With a gut-wrenching sob, Scar sagged forward, letting his weight rest on Grian.  “Please… just don’t let me hurt you,” he begged.

“I won’t,” Grian promised, and held him close with a tenderness Scar knew he didn’t deserve.

Seated at the kitchen table, they laid their plans for the next day.  Now that they knew the date, Scar intended to dispel the barrier first thing the next morning.

“I’ll set off this direction,” he said, pointing at the map Grian had laid out in front of them.  “I should be able to get to my workshop within a few days, especially if I can hire out a horse.  Hopefully the workshop’s still there.  I’ve got better tools there, and it should help make headway on this.  I’ll come back as soon as I’ve got an idea of what’s going on.  Come find me if I don’t.”

Come with me, he wanted to say.  Or was it Run away with me?  Leave this whole place behind, forget being the people we used to be.  You’re the only one who’s ever looked at me like that.  I’d let it all go if it meant you’d stay with me.

“Will you be alright here in the meantime?” he asked instead.

Because if he were to say what he wanted to say, lay his heart bare in this moment, he feared the pain of rejection might just break him entirely.  And he needed to hold together so he could fix this.

Grian nodded slowly, concern flitting across his brow.  “Yeah… I think so…” he said, sounding uncertain.

“I could put up some wards for you, if it would help you feel safer,” Scar offered.

“No, that won’t be necessary,” Grian said, getting up from the table.  “I’ll see anything coming from miles off.”  He clapped Scar firmly on the shoulder, saying, “It’s really late.  You should get some rest.”

When Scar glanced up, Grian was looking somewhere else, not meeting his gaze.

Grian rolled out some blankets on the hard wood floor of the bedroom, trying not to think too much.

Scar’s implicit rejection had stung in a way he wasn’t quite prepared for.  Was it a rejection, or did Scar just not consider that Grian might be up for the journey?  Did he think he wasn’t capable enough for it?  Or did he just… not want Grian to come?

Thinking too much.  As usual.

He hurriedly changed into his nightclothes, then stepped out of the room.  Scar was waiting there, dressed in an ill-fitting set of nightclothes - Grian had a spare set he’d been given that were too large for him, but not quite large enough for Scar, it seemed.

Scar went for the bedroll at first, until Grian redirected him.

“You’re taking the bed,” he said.  “You’ll be doing a lot of traveling and you don’t need any extra aches and pains on top of that.”

So Scar tucked himself into Grian’s narrow bed, while Grian laid down uncomfortably on a too-thin stack of blankets.  He folded his hands across his midsection and tried to quiet his mind for sleep.

“Hey, Gri,” came Scar’s voice from the darkness, the nickname sparking something like a candle flame in Grian’s heart.

“Yeah?” he said, sitting up to look at Scar.

Scar had pressed himself up against the wall, taking up as little of the bed as possible.  He’d pulled the blankets back to show the open space.  And he was looking at Grian with a silent invitation in his eyes, throat bobbing subtly as he tried to speak.

Grian put a hand on the bed.

“You sure?” he asked, and Scar nodded.

So Grian climbed up onto the bed and laid down with his back to Scar.  There wasn’t enough room for there to be space between them - it was a narrow bed even for one - so they were close together by necessity.  Grian held his breath and tried to relax.

Hesitantly, Scar laid a feather-light hand on Grian’s waist.  “Is this okay?” he whispered, barely above a breath.

“Yeah,” Grian whispered back.

Scar’s arm slipped around his waist, and Grian found himself relaxing into something that felt as natural as breathing.  He leaned against Scar just slightly, and felt the other man lean into the touch, with a quiet exhale breathed into the night.

In the morning, Grian woke up alone.

The place beside him in the bed was still warm, but barely.  Grian rushed out of the room and stumbled down the stairs, careless in his hurry.

Scar was downstairs at the kitchen table, tearing into a hunk of bread.

“I thought you left,” Grian said, panting.  He leaned over to catch his breath.

Scar set the bread down.  “I was planning to say goodbye before leaving,” he said apologetically.

“Good,” Grian said, and joined him at the table.

He wished there were something he could do to stretch this moment longer.  Delay the inevitable, somehow.

Maybe they would get their memories back and find out they’d been little more than strangers after all; that the ring had just been a trinket and the name had been gotten through trickery.  Maybe this would all be over soon and Grian would be back to his unchanging dutiful existence.

For just a little longer, it was nice to believe maybe he’d found a way out.  Maybe he’d lived.

Scar’s breakfast disappeared in just a few more minutes.  All too soon, he was gathering up his pack to head out, and Grian was walking him to the door.

“You take care, Scar,” Grian said at the threshold.  “And come back safe, yeah?  I’ll hunt you down if you don’t,” Grian said with mock sternness, jabbing a finger at Scar’s chest.

Come back for me, he thought, wishing hard.

Scar caught Grian’s hand and held it for a brief moment.  “I’ll do my best,” he said, low.  Without breaking eye contact, he pressed a deliberate kiss to Grian’s knuckles.

And then he was off, striding down the path without looking back.

Grian’s heart hurt terribly.  He went back inside and sat down on the floor and ached.

The road stretched on ahead, dreary.

Scar was not accustomed to feeling like this when he left a place.  It was always the start of another adventure - always something new and exciting around the bend, just waiting for him to stumble into it.

Not this time.

He missed that old ramshackle tower already, with its books and its arcane knick-knacks and Grian’s quick smile lighting up every corner.

And of course that was the heart of it.  He missed Grian terribly; missed his ready wit and his unwarranted kindness and the way he’d fit so perfectly in Scar’s arms.

Of course he loved Grian; desperately, hopelessly loved him.  And as soon as he figured out how to fix this, he’d find him again and see if there was any chance.  Even if there wasn’t, at least he’d get to see him one more time.

"Scar!"

For a moment Scar thought he was hearing things, deep in his lovesick reverie.  But no - there was a voice on the wind behind him.  Someone was calling his name.

Grian was calling his name.

Scar turned around in an instant, unable to stop the grin that lit up his face as he saw the mage running recklessly up the road a ways off.  Red-faced, hiking up his robes with both hands, and shouting out, “Scar!”

Scar hurried back towards him, and a moment later Grian crashed into him, arms around his neck pulling him into a bone-crushing embrace.  Scar held Grian just as tightly, burying his face in the crook of his neck.  He felt Grian’s pulse hammering fast and hard against his lips where they rested.  Every instinct in him wanted to kiss that pulse point, to kiss every inch of his skin, to never need to let go of him again.

Grian pulled back, dropping down to stand on the ground again - Scar hadn’t really realized that he’d picked him up.  Grian stood, still out of breath, silent for a moment, though his throat and jaw worked as if he were trying to say something.

Scar was happy to wait.  It gave him just a little more time to try to memorize how it felt to have those deep dark eyes holding his gaze.

Finally, Grian spoke, his voice trembling.

“Stay."

In that moment, Scar felt like a million sunrises.

“Alright,” he said, breathless.  Some part of him felt that, maybe, he should have put up more of a fight… but that part didn’t matter at all right now, he decided.

Surprise registered on Grian’s face.  “Really?” he asked.

Scar rested his forehead against Grian’s.  “Really,” he said.  “Grian, I’ll stay for as long as you want me.”

Grian let out a low, trembling exhale.  One of his hands slid down the inside of Scar’s wrist, pressing palm against palm.  The pads of his fingers rested warm and tingling against Scar’s fingertips.

“Do you mean that?” he asked, barely above a whisper.

“I do,” Scar said.

He could feel the way his breath slid over Grian’s lips as it left his own.  His free hand, the one on Grian’s waist, flexed just slightly.

“Careful making promises like that,” Grian said in a low voice, lacing their fingers together.  “I’m a greedy man.”

“I’m counting on it,” Scar murmured.

“Think I might want you for the rest of my life.”

“Good,” Scar growled, and closed the distance.

There was a moment at the beginning, maybe, when the kiss was soft and slow.  Then Grian’s lips took Scar’s like a wildfire - greedy, relentless, and all-consuming.   Fireworks exploded in Scar’s gut.  Nothing existed except for Grian’s mouth on his, his hands in Scar’s hair, his tongue shoving hot and insistent past Scar’s teeth.

Scar gave as good as he got.  He wasted no time in claiming the depths of Grian’s mouth with dizzying, wild abandon, like a starving man gorging himself at a feast.  The hand at Grian’s waist was pressed tight to the small of his back now, holding him as close as he could.

Grian clutched at Scar’s robes, at his hair, anything he could get his hands on as he moaned into Scar’s mouth.  Scar caught his lower lip between his teeth and nipped just hard enough to be felt, drawing an even louder moan out of him.

“Stars - you’re so perfect,” Scar panted against his lips.  “Need you so bad, angel.”

“You have me,” Grian said, breathing hard.  “Any way you want me.”

Scar’s vision swam for a moment.

“Let’s get back to the tower,” he whispered, low.

For the second time since they’d met, Scar was shrugging off his robes in front of Grian - or, more accurately, trying to as best he could while Grian’s lips were still attacking his.

“Y’know - sure hope - we were close like this before,” Scar panted.  “Could be a little awkward if we get our memories back and we were just coworkers.”

Grian drew back, looking up at him with a funny expression.

“Scar, I’m pretty sure we were married.”

Scar felt a wash of some indefinable emotion at that.  “You really think so?” he asked after a moment.  “You’d want someone like me?”

“Yeah.  Obviously.”   Grian pressed open-mouthed kisses to the underside of Scar’s jaw.  “Rest of my life, remember?”

“I think -” Scar stammered, “I think the thing I was supposed to find here was you.  I think the note meant you.”

Scar remembered for a moment how he’d come here, blindly trusting to his past self’s instructions.  Suddenly doubt seized him - was Grian doing the same?

“I - is that why you said that?  Why you kissed me?  Because we might have been - married?”

“Scar.  Scar.”  Grian quirked an eyebrow drily, trailing a finger down Scar’s throat to rest a palm on his chest.  “If you thought any of that felt like obligation…”

Scar barked a sudden laugh.  “Yeah, okay, that’s fair.”

“Right now, I don’t really care what we were before,” Grian said, looking up at Scar with hungry eyes.  “The person I am here, now, wants you.  All of you.”

Scar took Grian’s lips again with a low growl.  Why had they still been talking, anyway?

“Good,” he whispered, and pulled Grian onto the bed.

A few hours later, Grian woke up from a light doze.

He was sore and happy, and the scenario he found himself in was a familiar one: lying with his head pillowed on his husband’s chest, feeling the steady rise and fall of Scar’s breathing as a gentle hand traced leisurely caresses over his shoulder.  Still groggy from the nap, Grian tilted his head up to take in Scar’s smile.

“Well hello there,” Scar said, a fond smile in his eyes, and Grian knew he was back too.

He groaned, burrowing his face into the crook of Scar’s neck.

“Scar, this was such a stupid idea…”

Scar laughed, sudden and loud.  “Hey, c’mon, it was your idea!”

Grian sat up, glaring at Scar with mock indignation.  “No, don’t say that like you weren’t a part of this too, mister!  This would have been literally impossible if you weren’t immediately on board with the whole stupid plan!”

Months Ago…

“Hey, Scar, look what I found!” Grian called out excitedly from the attic.

When Scar made it up, Grian was grinning broadly, holding out a colorful small banner with a distinctive emblem on it.  Scar’s eyes widened as he recognized the souvenir.

“Oh!  That’s from the day we met, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” Grian said.  “In fact, I think this is the exact thing you bought to try to act natural when you saw I’d spotted you, right?”

“Gods, you’re right, it is,” Scar said, easing himself into a sitting position next to his husband.  He leaned against Grian’s shoulder to get a closer look at the banner.  “It’s so funny to think about that now.  You hated me so much back then.”

“Well, in my defense, you were trying to overthrow my home country’s government,” Grian said, leaning back against Scar, smiling up at him.

Scar laughed, letting out a joking gasp.  “You’re still holding a grudge about a little thing like that?”

It was entirely playful, a well-established piece of banter.  Calquax had never been good to its citizens, not by a long shot, and Grian was no exception.

The beginning of their acquaintanceship had been fraught, but before long, Grian had come to be more than happy to help Scar and his associates take Calquax down from the inside.  Without his help, Scar was certain that the empire might never have fallen.

“Mm, nah, I forgave you as soon as I realized it would get me out of that hellhole,” Grian replied.  “Drudgehole?  Oppressive-homogeneity-and-control-hole?”

The corners of Scar’s lips were twitching.  “Those are some of my least favorite kinds of hole, for sure,” he said with a smirk.

Grian groaned loudly and threw the banner over Scar’s face.  It quickly devolved into an impromptu wrestling match.

After a while, when they had settled down, Grian found himself reminiscing again.

“It was such a ride, you know, getting to know you back then.  You kept surprising me in the most exciting ways.  Still do,” he added.

Scar hummed, pressing a kiss to the top of Grian’s head.  “I know what you mean.  It’s kind of nostalgic to think about, you know?  Meeting you for the first time, and how quickly I felt like I had to know absolutely everything about you.”

Grian snuggled a little closer into Scar’s side.  “Yeah, like… don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t give up what we’ve built for anything, but sometimes I almost wish I could meet you for the first time again, if that makes sense?  So I could experience getting to know you all over again.”  He thought for a moment, tracing his fingers over Scar’s chest.  “It’s sort of like… you can only read a book for the first time once, right?  And you can reread it over and over again and love every bit of it with all your heart, but you only get that first discovery once, and it’s really nostalgic to look back on later.”

He trailed off.  Scar didn’t say anything in response right away.  Grian looked up and saw Scar deep in thought, wearing the distinctive expression he always had when he was brainstorming.

“So technically, that’s actually… not impossible,” he said.  “I’ve actually done that exact thing with a book before - temporarily removed my memories of it so I could reread it for the first time again.  And then I’d reach the last page and set it down and bam!   The spell would drop and I’d have all those memories back, plus the memory of the second first time I read it.  So, you know.”  Scar looked down at Grian, a little conspiratorial.  “Meeting for the first time again would be totally doable, in theory.”

“Huh.   How would that… work?  You know.  In theory.”

“Well, if you were working with people who’d known each other for… oh, let’s say, round about seven years… and those people had been a significant part of each other’s lives for pretty much all of that time… then you’d need to account for the fact that said hypothetical people would likely lose pretty much all memory of those years.  And you’d want to have safeguards, and a well-defined end condition, as well as a failsafe to end the spell within a certain time frame, like a week or two, if the condition isn’t met before then.”

“When you say ‘end condition’... would that be something like a true love’s kiss?” Grian asked, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

Scar immediately and visibly ran several mental calculations.  “So it could definitely be a kiss, yes.  But good luck defining ‘true love’ with my sort of magic.  Though… I guess you could do something like ‘a kiss in which both parties have positive feelings about it’?  Release of endorphins is a lot easier to detect.”

“Hmm.”  Grian thought for a moment.  “Theoretically speaking… could you define a buffer period after the end condition?  Like, have the spell end several hours after the condition is met.  You know, to leave room for if things were to… escalate.”

“Oh, that’s totally doable.”  Scar was in full brainstorming mode now, thoroughly enjoying the arcane puzzle Grian had proposed.  “Also, you’d want to have failsafe end conditions too.  Like if either party got legitimately hurt, or developed genuine intent to harm the other or themselves, or things like that.”

“Yeesh, good call,” Grian said, wincing.

“We’d probably want to be in a remote location, too, just so we wouldn’t run into anyone,” he added after a moment.  “It’d be kind of awkward if someone came across the two of us acting like we didn’t know each other.”  The couple who’d been instrumental in overthrowing the Calquaxian government together were pretty well-known, after all.

“You know, I think your old Watchtower would be great for that, actually,” Scar said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.  “It’s pretty far from basically everything.  And it would be a familiar location for you, too.”

Grian nodded.  “I like that idea.”  He shifted a little to look Scar in the eyes.  “Do you think… are you actually interested in doing something like that?”

“I think so, yeah!  It’s a little nuts, sure, but the more I think about it the more I want to see if I could pull it off.  Plus,” he said, smiling at Grian, “I like the idea of meeting you all over again.”  He kissed Grian on the forehead again, ruffling his hair affectionately.  “We’ll just have to spend a while planning, just to make sure we’ve accounted for as many contingencies as possible.”

Present Day…

Grian slumped back down onto the pillow, covering his face with his hands.  “Ugh, there was so much we didn’t account for.  Why are we such idiots?”

“Oh, I know,” Scar said, rubbing Grian’s shoulders.  “I think we’re just too clever for our own good.  You knew something was wrong right away, yeah?”

“Yeah.  My face was older, there were a couple little spots we forgot to clean, and I found my ring.  Oh!” Grian exclaimed suddenly, and then he was clambering over Scar to get to the nightstand drawer.  He felt around futilely for a moment, not able to see from his position, until Scar had mercy on him and reached in to grab the ring out himself.

Grian held out his left hand with a grin, and Scar slid the ring he'd made onto Grian's finger obligingly.  “Better now?”

“Much,” Grian said happily, twisting the ring idly.  He snuggled back down onto Scar’s chest.  “Sorry for screaming at you in eldritch Watcher form, by the way.”

Scar didn’t reply right away.  When Grian looked up, his lips were twitching slightly.

“You should do that again sometime.  That might’ve been the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Scar!” Grian protested, whacking him with a pillow.

“Whaaaat?  Can’t a man think his husband is the sexiest person alive?”  Scar tried to take the pillow for himself, which quickly turned into a wrestling match.

In a calmer moment after the tussle had passed, Grian turned pensive.

“I don’t think I’d want to do this again anytime soon,” he mused.  “I… didn’t like being the person I was before I met you.”

“Same,” Scar agreed, squeezing Grian a little tighter.  “I genuinely forgot how much I hated myself back then.  It was pretty rough being back in that version of me.”

“Gods, Scar, when you bound yourself to let me…” Grian’s voice broke, and he burrowed into the crook of Scar’s neck.

Scar held him close.  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, kissing Grian’s hair once, twice, again.

“Me too,” Grian whispered back.

“I’m not sorry we did this, though,” Scar amended.  “It was good.  Sure, it got a bit dicey in places, and it wasn’t quite what we were expecting, but… I think it was good.”

“Yeah,” Grian agreed.  “It’ll make a fun memory after a bit, and I’m glad we went through with it.  Definitely happy to be back now, though.”  He leaned up to catch Scar’s lips in a tender kiss.

“Love you, Scar,” he whispered.

“Love you too,” Scar whispered back, kissing him again.

After a few long, leisurely moments, Grian sat up.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m about ready to get back home,” he said, stretching.  “Gods, I miss Pearl and Maui something fierce.”

“Still think it’s a bit weird that you named your cat after your sister,” Scar said, laughing.  “Oh!  Tomorrow, do you want to go meet that pair of kittens the neighbor’s trying to find homes for?”  Scar stood up and started to dress as he spoke.  “They’re so cute, G, they won my heart as soon as I saw them.”

“Sure,” Grian said, wriggling into his robe.  The Watcher cloak he folded and left in a drawer.  It wasn’t needed anymore.  “The real question is, how will Jellie feel about a feisty pair of kittens running around?”

“She’ll get used to it,” Scar said with a grin, pulling on his shirt.  “You don’t think five cats would be too many, though?”

“We’ll make it work,” Grian said.  He grabbed Scar’s hand, matching his grin.  “Now take us home.”

“Gladly.”

And in Grian’s eyes, ribbons of light wound around them as Scar wove a teleport spell to bring them back to their cottage.

There was a blinding flash, and then they were back in their living room, sunlit, cozy, and well-loved.

“Back home from our grand adventure,” Scar quipped.  “And almost time for lunch.”

“I’m gonna go let Joel know we’re back early from our ‘vacation,’” Grian said, pulling on his walking shoes, “so he doesn’t have to come feed the cats the rest of the week.”

“I’m assuming we’re not planning to tell anyone what we were actually up to?”

Grian laughed.  “Definitely not,” he said.