#this ended up less shippy than i meant it to but it can def be a pre-relationship type thing

[haunthouse]

for the mini-fic prompt, might i request taagnus and #12?

12. things you said when you thought i was asleep. ( prompts — no longer accepting. )

also on ao3. major spoilers for episode 60. warning for lots of discussion of death and dying.

For all his neverending bravery, Magnus knows fear well.

It’s easy to be brave for the sake of others — getting the animals on this strange little planet he’s come to love over the past year to safety, that’s good, that’s noble, and he does it without a second thought. He does it without truly thinking of the consequences, if he’s being honest. Magnus rushes in. It’s his thing.

He ignores the shouts of Taako telling him to get his ass to the ship. Magnus’ mind shoots back to a year ago (almost exactly, he realizes); when their own planet was destroyed by this thing, this unstoppable force, none of them had been able to save it. They hadn’t even been able to try. They’d run away, only able to watch out the windows of the Starblaster as their home, everyone they knew, their family and friends and people who owed them money, were consumed. Murdered.

Perhaps if they’d had any idea it was coming, they could have defended their home, somehow. For all its faults, Magnus had loved that planet, and to see it blink out of existence like that —

He doesn’t want that to happen ever again. If that means staying behind and using makeshift weapons to kill as many of these things as he can, so be it. He’s got no illusions of his ability to survive such a thing, but he needs to protect this planet. He’ll run to catch up with the rest of them soon, he promises himself. They’ll wait for him. He believes that wholeheartedly.

And then he looks up. Against the dark sky filled with a creature he can’t really comprehend, there’s a tiny speck of light. Stubbornly, his mind refuses to comprehend it for a moment, but he soon recognizes that huh, that’s their ship. Leaving, again. Leaving him behind.

He can’t blame them — they’d tried to get him to run, too, but he’d stayed, and they’d had to leave to save theirselves, and he gets that, he really does, but he feels fear shoot through his veins regardless. The chill of being alone goes down to his very bones. All of the animals that call this planet home have fled by now, bear cubs and baby wolves all safe (or, as safe as they can be, which he suspects is not very and super temporary) in their little houses and structures, and Magnus stands in the midst of it all. A lone figure fighting. These destructive shadowy forces are surrounding him, wreaking havoc and tearing things down with what seems like zero effort, and Magnus is the last man standing in the fray.

Until he isn’t.

The last thing he sees is the Starblaster darting through the sky, away from this plane. He should be glad his friends have escaped safely, he thinks. His last thought should be one of relief.

It’s not. Instead, he dies afraid — for existence as a whole, and every other plane that this Hunger will devour, but also a selfish fear. Magnus has always thought he’d be fine with dying to help others, but the shadowy figures are going to destroy every living thing on this plane, so who has he truly helped? No one. He’s died for nothing, and it’s that thought that chills him to the core. It wasn’t meant to happen like this.

The world blinks out, and then reappears on the ship. Magnus has a black eye, and is in the same position as when they’d left, but with one notable departure: there’s tears rolling out of his wide, fearful eyes and down his cheeks.

—

It takes a while for them to find the next plane, and in the meantime, none of them are quite sure what to do with themselves.

Magnus would like to say that everything goes back to normal upon realizing their apparent immortality (or, at least, inability to die from plane to plane — but one fluke does not indicate a pattern, as Lucretia reminds them quietly, and they shouldn’t use that as an excuse to be foolishly brave. Magnus feels like that comment was directed at him, though there was no malice to it, only a soft worry that suits Lucretia well), but the vague unease of watching yet another world vanish eats at them all. Taako and Lup spend more time with each other than with the rest of the crew, as usual, but instead of practical jokes and ribbing on Barry, they whisper to each other. All of their jokes feel forced. Barry’s holed himself up with his science equipment, and Lucretia and Davenport have followed his lead, trying to understand what they’ve all seen, with very little success. Merle tends to his plants in the ship’s greenhouse, eats dinner with Davenport — the two had become much closer in their year on that plane, closer than anyone else on the ship, with the exception of the twins.

Magnus wanders.

They’d all seen horrible, awful things, but Magnus had been up close and personal with those sickening shadowy figures. He’d died, and that puts an isolation in his mind that he can’t quite describe — he knows, now, what it’s like to fall and stare up at the sky and know you’ll never see it again. He knows what it feels like to take a last breath. It’s terrible. The knowledge is his burden alone to bear — and at that same time that he’s glad none of the others had lived through such an event, it’s incredibly lonely.

Sleep eludes him, too — for when he sleeps, he dreams, and when he dreams, he sees destruction and death and his own death and wakes up gasping for air, or screaming, or with silent tears running down his face. The simple solution is to avoid sleeping for as long as possible. They’ve got a few year’s worth of coffee on board the ship for inexplicable reasons, and Magnus is fairly sure he blows through a year’s supply of it in less than a week, but it works. The bags under his kind eyes deepen, but it works; he doesn’t sleep for four days, and doesn’t have to deal with the nightmares.

The loneliness is still an issue, though. Everyone is preoccupied with their individual roles on the ship, but as the muscle of the crew, he doesn’t have much to do until they land on another fucked-up plane, and there’s no telling when that will happen. There’s only so many times he can wander the length of the ship without growing bored with that, too; it isn’t very big, and the view out the window doesn’t change very much from day to day. Nothing changes much, as is the nature of a spacecraft.

It’s about three in the morning by count of the clocks on the walls when he wanders into the kitchen and finds Taako sitting at the table. For once, he’s without Lup; he stands at the stove, something simmering quietly in a pan there, and fails to notice Magnus’ entrance.

“Hey,” Magnus says. Despite keeping his voice low, Taako jumps, and there’s an apology on the tip of his tongue before Taako responds.

“Hey, my man, didn’t hear ya come in! You hungry? You’re in luck, I’m cooking my world-famous cinnamon pancakes, guaranteed to blow your fuckin’ —“ Taako turns to face him, and immediately stops. “Woah. No offense, my dude, but you look like fried unicorn shit.”

Magnus huffs out a weak laugh. “Yeah, I know. Couple days of no sleep will do that to you.”

“You gotta sleep! Man, if I was you I’d be using this little lull in our mission as like, nap central. Twenty-four-seven dreamtime, that’d be the goal.” Elves don’t need sleep (even if they can sleep, technically), and Magnus knows that; he raises his eyebrows, but Taako just shrugs. “What’s eatin’ ya? Spill.”

“Just, y’know, bad dreams.” Purposefully vague — Magnus is trying not to think about the contents of said dreams, even if the memories of dying seem to haunt him even while awake. At some point on day three of no sleep he’d started hallucinating shadowy figures out of the corner of his eyes, much like the ones that had killed him; they appear now, and almost seem to be mocking him. He blinks hard, and they’re gone.

When he looks at Taako again, the elf has a level of concern in his eyes Magnus has never seen before. They’ve only known each other about a year and a half, hadn’t quite had time to bond before the mission had begun, and most of their time on the last plane had been spent on their own individual quests, but Magnus didn’t take Taako as the worrying type. Maybe he’d misjudged him, or maybe this is just a new level of awful that’s worthy of worrying over.

Either way, it’s uncomfortable. Magnus looks away, gaze directed at his own hands fidgeting on the kitchen table.

“Hang on, kemosabe. I got something that might help.” There’s loud clanging as Taako rummages through the cupboards, but Magnus still doesn’t look up until Taako lets out a loud “Ah-ha!”. In his hand is a small vial of something that looks a lot like key lime gogurt, if key lime gogurt had a soft glow to it and clear magical properties. “One sleeping potion comin’ right up.”

“You really don’t have to—“ Magnus starts, but is quickly shushed by Taako.

“Hey, can’t have a valuable member of our squad passing out in the middle of the mission, yeah? What if we land planetside and you’re fuckin’ half-dead and we’ve got no one to defend us against whatever bullshit we run into there?”

Magnus has no response to that. He watches Taako mix the green vial with a few other things, completely in his element with the ingredients, and eventually a smoothie is placed in front of Magnus. He downs it in one gulp, ignoring Taako’s warning to “slow the fuck down oh my god”.

Immediately, Magnus feels woozy, and standing up takes an amount of effort he’s nearly incapable of. He feels Taako drape one of Magnus’ arms around his shoulder, supporting him as best he can (which isn’t much, being a lot smaller, but Magnus appreciates the effort) as they walk back to Magnus’ room. The potion works fast — Magnus’ eyes are drooping before they even get there, and upon arriving, he immediately collapses on the bed, pulling Taako down with him. He’d normally apologize for that, but he’s already out cold.

—

His first thought upon waking is of thanks, because his sleep was blessedly dreamless for once.

His second is an apology, because his arms are still wrapped tight around Taako. He starts to say something, but stops, noticing the elf’s closed eyes and even breathing. He seems to be asleep, and Magnus would have to be a huge douchebag to interrupt that — and there’s a lot of things Magnus is, but he’d like to think he isn’t that.

Besides, Taako looks peaceful.

Magnus tries to pull his arms away, at least, but Taako snuggles further into them. While Magnus is absolutely sure Taako would never do such a thing when awake, it does feel nice to have another person next to him; Magnus hasn’t had anything like this in a while, isn’t close enough to any of the rest of the crew for things like cuddling, and there’s a certain softness to it all that makes his heart feel warmer, chasing out the chill of the last few days. It narrows down his awareness to the current moment. The last few days, his thoughts have been filled with the big picture; him dying, worlds dying, the cycle repeating and the IPRE helpless to stop it, but right now he’s occupied with this — Taako curled up in his arms, blankets tugged up haphazardly over them, sleep clinging to the edges of his mind in a way that’s fuzzy but not unpleasant. The soft light of stars coming in through the large window of the ship. Taako’s golden freckles close enough to count.

Magnus starts murmuring quietly for lack of anything else to do. Things he’s been wanting to say but couldn’t really tell the rest of the crew — he wouldn’t want to burden them, after all, and he hadn’t even died permanently, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Now, with Taako there but not listening, he feels like he can at least say it aloud. Perhaps there won’t be a response, but that’s probably for the better.

“Being there, when those — whatever they were — came down and started fucking things up, it was — terrifying. It was really, really scary. I don’t blame you guys for leaving, you did what you had to do, but I — I remember dying, Taako. I remember it. And I came back, and that should be what matters, but I thought that was it, and there’s — there’s so much left I wanna do, y’know? Granted, most of it involved our planet, which — is gone, I guess, fuck — but still. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the shit I’ve never done, and how all the stuff I do to protect people ends up being for nothing. I mean, we can’t die now, apparently, so what do you guys even need me for? I’m just here to save the rest of you, but we don’t even need that. And I can’t fight whatever it is that’s out here eating planets, so what can I do?”

He sighs. Venting is helping far, far less than he’d hoped; instead, it’s filling him with new fears, and he wishes he could go back to sleep and ignore it all. He closes his eyes, and spends a few moments in silence before speaking again, even quieter.

“I understand if you guys gotta leave again, next time, if there’s a next time — gotta do what you gotta do, and all, I get that — but just. Don’t let me die alone again? I don’t — I don’t want to die alone. Not again.”

He slips back into sleep pretty soon after, but as he does, he thinks he hears a whisper from beside him. “You’re not alone,” spoken quietly in Elvish, Taako’s breath ghosting across his shoulder as he says it. “I promise.”

Magnus isn’t sure, when he wakes again, if he dreamt that voice — but even if he did, it’s a nice thought, a sharp contrast to what his dreams have been lately. He isn’t alone. That’s enough for him.