#AWNJGOHNAJO your response to the ask was SO GOOD i had to continue

[magnifiico]

@charroblanco || cont.

He’s felt a weight like this before. He’s felt—no, he’s endured—grief he’s spent his entire life convinced could never be worse. Never heavier. Never deeper, wider, more excruciating of a void in his chest. All this time, Magnifico has wondered how that could even be fair: how an emptiness could hurt so much— There’s nothing there. There’s nothing there. So why does it burn him from the inside out and spread an insatiable inferno through every bone—?

Why is he on fire? Why is he— Why is he here?

The thought process was, at the time and even now, nonexistent. He’s been working on impulse ever since opening that book, welcoming in that devastatingly powerful magic despite knowing precisely what that meant: the sacrifices he’d readily make all for the sake of—! 

Enough. Back to the present. That was then, this is now. Here.

He’s here because of so many reasons Magnifico can’t count—and so many more he doesn’t yet understand. He’s here because suddenly, inexplicably, he remembers how to breathe for the first time since that magic took hold of him, because he needs only to meet a world-ending, soft understanding in that gaze to feel his impulses have steered him right. He’s here. Because, by the end of all this, he’ll look back and think to himself, Yes, of course. Where else would I have been?

But in that “here,” and in that “now,” he holds on to even a fragment of what he’ll feel later. It’s enough to get him to stay.

“It’ll do in a pinch,” Magnifico reassures him, and though his voice is low, practically squeezing out with an effort, he spills into it a gratitude that rings there in the undertow. For someone perceptive—someone like Ernesto—it’d be difficult to miss. “The, uhh… accommodations, not the tequila. For the moment.” Clarification, that which he embellishes with a quirk of a smile that doesn’t yet manage to reach his eyes.

And with that, he sidles around the other, caring a stark little about any brush of contact. “If I’m interrupting something”—he hesitates, peers over his shoulder—“well, don’t let me interrupt something.”