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allie-writes · 1 year

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when the storms come rolling through

Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: Gen Relationships: Agott & Coco & Riche & Tetia, Qifrey & Olruggio Other relevant tags: Fluff and Angst, Sickfic, Thunderstorms Word count: 5594 Language: English Read on: AO3

“There’s something out there,” she says, turning to Olruggio and pointing.

Riche peers over Coco’s shoulder towards where she is indicating. “Someone.”

Thunder strikes just then. Tethia feels a shiver run down her spine and concedes that she can’t stand to stay out of the wind and the rain any longer if it means only catching glimpses of what is going on outside. “Jeez, stop saying scary things!” she scolds as she runs to join the rest.

“No, but there really is someone out there.”

And—well. Peering outside, there indeed seems to be.

a thunderstorm hits, qifrey isn't home for lunch, and the girls assume the worst.

Written as a gift for @/asxyao for the whaexchange2023 over on twitter!

The storm rolls in just before noon.

Heavy, tower-like clouds hang menacingly over the atelier, harsh winds driving them over the hills like a herd of black sheep. Their inky, deep purple colour swallows up all sunlight, and midday turns as dark as night within the matter of minutes.

“Oh dear,” says Tethia, peering out the window, “I hope Professor Qifrey doesn’t get caught up in that.”

Behind her, Riche lights a lamp with a noncommittal hum. The light of it flickers.

Upstairs, unfastened window shutters clatter in the wind.

Coco sidles up next to Tethia just as the first raindrops begin to hit the windowpane. Their patter is deafening in the relative silence of the atelier. “He said he would try to be home before lunch,” she says, placing her palm against the glass. “Shouldn’t he be back by now?”

Distant thunder rumbles overhead. Tethia purses her lips and considers the heavens for a moment. The rain is quickly picking up now, the drops fat and heavy and mixed with sleet. Thin, faint bolts of lightning curl through the towering clouds like pulsating veins. Coco looks on and shudders, her hand curling up against the cold windowpane; Tethia wraps a warm, protective arm around her shoulders without a thought and pretends to not be just as scared as Coco is.

Gently, then, she uses her hold to steer Coco away from the window and into the relative darkness of the atelier. The lamp Riche lit remains the singular source of light in the room, casting elongated, warped shadows across the walls that dance with every minute flicker of the light.

Coco’s ever-concerned gaze returns to the storm raging on outside.

It’s a terrible state she’s in, tense and nervous; so, putting on her bravest smile, Tethia turns and grabs her by the arms. “There’s no way Qifrey wouldn’t have seen this storm coming on, right? He probably just stayed in town to wait it out.”

Her voice doesn’t come out sounding as confident as she’d hoped, and her fingers tremble where they dig into Coco’s sleeves, but nevertheless, her sister apprentice’s brow smooths over, and Coco gives her a feeble smile in return.

“Right.”

The mutual reassurance heartens Tethia. Letting her gaze sweep over her two fellow apprentices, she resolves to wipe the wobbly, uncertain expressions off their faces and take their minds off the situation at hand. So, Tethia lets go of Coco with a final pat to her shoulders and claps her hands. “Maybe we should get lunch going so Qifrey will have something to eat when he comes home,” she suggests, and beside her, Riche lets out a vague noise of approval while Coco merely nods.

They spend the next hour or so leisurely preparing lunch of vegetable stew with a dessert of meringue while the storm continues to rage on outside, never once abating in its intensity. Through the kitchen window, they watch as torrents of rain flush away dirt and soil and the wind’s force snap sturdy tree branches as though they were twigs. Every time one of them comments on how the storm seems to be letting up at last, how the thunder is growing fainter now, yet another stormfront always seems to be right at its heels, booming with renewed vigour.

Coco draws one uneven, wobbly magic circle after the next, even her glyphs getting messed up whenever she jumps at a particularly loud rumble of thunder. Drawing a single fire spell to heat the stockpot over has not given her so much trouble since her first days at the atelier, and Tethia watches on in worry as she beats egg whites to stiffness to make the meringue from, later. Riche stoically chops the vegetables whilst clearly trying to refrain from flinching whenever a bolt of nearby lightning floods the kitchen with a flash of glaring light.

Eventually, Agott joins them in the kitchen, coming downstairs with a candleholder in one hand and a book in the other. “I couldn’t concentrate anymore with all this racket going on outside,” she says and slams her book down on the counter with more force than necessary. “It has been going on forever.”

“Do you want to help?” Riche, who happens to be standing closest to her, asks.

Agott looks at her for a second, then at the cutting board overladen with messily chopped vegetable chunks sitting on the counter before her. Tethia peers over Riche’s shoulder to gauge Agott’s reaction—first, a little furrow of the brow, then a proper frown; a twitch of the arm, a clench of the fist. Finally, with her eyes still trained on the irregular bits of vegetable, she sighs.

“Give me your knife,” she says, and Riche seems all too happy to oblige.

Agott chops their remaining vegetables with clinical efficiency while Riche gets comfortable on a dining room chair. They work in silence for all of a minute before Agott asks, “Where is Professor Qifrey?”

“He didn’t make it home from the errand he was running before the storm hit,” replies Coco and smiles shakily. “We thought that he must have stayed in town to wait it out.”

“Yup,” Tethia interjects, “that’s why we decided to get lunch started without him, too! He’ll no doubt be hungry by the time he finally gets home.”

Agott frowns down at a halved carrot. “And why wouldn’t he have used a portal to get home if he were still in town?”

The question is punctuated by a deafening rumble of thunder.

Tethia feels like the air got knocked out of her lungs. Coco’s wand clatters to the floor next to her feet. Riche sits up ramrod straight.

Agott’s eyes flicker back and forth between the three of them, the confusion and disappointment on her face slowly morphing into worry. “You didn’t consider that he could,” she says, almost as if in disbelief.

Riche jumps to her feet and is almost halfway up the stairs before she even finishes saying “I’ll go fetch Olruggio.”

Tethia stares out the window at the seemingly endless, torrential rain and the bolts of lightning twitching across the sky. Why hadn’t they considered that Qifrey could just draw up a portal? Because the other scenario had been too comforting? Their teacher, simply held up in town because of the thunderstorm brewing overhead, safe and sound and dry and comfortable. Perhaps a little hungry by now. But safe—always safe.

“He has to be fine,” Tethia decides, just as a snapped-off branch hits the windowpane. She almost doesn’t flinch. Agott sighs, but, much to Tethia’s surprise, actually hums in agreement before getting back to chopping vegetables.

Coco bends down to pick up her wand at last. Her movements are a little jerky, but Tethia pretends not to notice and returns to whipping her now half-collapsed egg whites instead.

The floorboards above them creak—a sound that is almost drowned out by all the other creaking and banging going on around the house—and a minute later, Riche rounds the corner into the kitchen, a frazzled, clearly recently awoken Olruggio at her heels. “I got him,” she says, and curls a hand into Olruggio’s skirts as if to emphasise the fact.

“Qifrey didn’t make it home before the storm hit,” Coco says, surprisingly forceful now. Her lips twitch with how bravely she is keeping them from quivering. “We thought he was waiting it out in town, but…” “He could have simply drawn a portal and gone home through it,” says Agott, sounding mildly guilty about it as she slowly chops the last carrot.

Something outside clatters and bangs against the front door. Olruggio’s brows draw together, the furrow between them miles deep; he looks especially tired like this, the dark circles under his eyes somehow even more pronounced in the low light. Clearly, this is not the kind of news he wanted to wake up to.

His hands come to rest on his hips as he considers each girl for a moment. Then, he sighs. “I suppose Agott does have a point,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s entirely unlikely that he would have stayed in town for one reason or another, either.”

His eyes briefly flicker toward the window, narrowing just a fraction. “It’s okay to worry. I’m worried, too,” he admits. “It won’t do you any good to immediately assume the worst, though.”

Olruggio’s roundabout little vote of confidence sets Tethia’s mind more at ease than it has been in an hour. She can’t help the levity with which she points her whisk at Olruggio, then. “But you’re always worried about everything and everyone and go around assuming the worst.”

“And look at how much good that does me,” Olruggio says with a shrug, smiling somewhere behind the scruff of his beard. “I’m an adult. Worrying and bracing for the worst is what we do.”

“But you’re not assuming the worst happened to Qifrey now?” asks Coco, eyes wide and shiny.

Olruggio shakes his head. Once again, something bangs up against the front door. “He can handle himself. Even had he been on his way home, he would have gone and sought shelter somewhere.”

Coco’s shoulders visibly droop in relief. “Right,” she mutters to herself, and at last turns back to the kitchen counter to resume her drawing of a fire spell.

A minute passes where the howling winds and endless rains, the banging and clanging and the sounds of their cooking preparations are the only sounds in the atelier. Something seems to hit the front door yet again.

“What do you have planned for lunch, anyways?” Olruggio asks eventually, breaking the silence as he peers over the apprentices’ heads.

“Root vegetable stew,” Coco replies and finishes up a sigil with a little flourish. “Riche and Agott have been chopping the veggies, and I’m drawing the spell to cook it over.”

This catches Olruggio’s attention. He peers down at Coco’s spell, the circle around it not yet closed, and nods in approval.

“Oh, and I’m making meringue for dessert!” Tethia adds, plucking her whisk from the stiff egg whites to show off just how nicely the foamy mass stands up in a little tower. Beside her, Agott begins to wordlessly drop the first batch of vegetables—leek, onion, celery, parsnips, and carrots, one after the other—into a large pot.

Yet again, something bangs against the front door.

This time, Riche gets up from her chair with a huff. “I’ll go see what that noise is about.”

Every eye in the kitchen follows her as she makes for the door in a flurry of skirts. “Don’t let the storm blow anything in,” Agott says in exasperation and decidedly does not look away from her vegetables.

The rest of them, however, ditch their tasks to poke their heads out of the kitchen to watch as Riche grabs the door handle tightly. Her hand trembles for a moment as the door in front of her creaks ominously, but throwing a final glance over her shoulder to make sure everyone is watching her in case something happens, she seems to steel her resolve. With a deep breath, she pushes the handle down and pulls the door inward.

Rain sprays across the floor as soon as it opens. Riche’s long hair and skirt billow behind her as she squints into the storm, and outside, before her—

Lies a thick, torn-off tree branch.

It skitters across the ground outside noisily, its twigs extending towards Riche like claws every time the wind catches them just so.

It’s almost disappointing, really. Next to Tethia, Coco lets out a long exhale, almost as though she had been holding her breath. Then, she is suddenly scrambling to join Riche in the doorway, the wind catching in her hair.

“The air is so nice,” she says, her voice getting swallowed up by the storm. And then, because it’s Coco, she takes a step outside.

She freezes up immediately.

Olruggio is over there faster than Tethia can blink. His hands are already extended to drag Coco back inside by the scruff like an ill-behaved kitten. “Come on, don’t—”

“There’s something out there,” she says, turning to Olruggio and pointing.

Riche peers over Coco’s shoulder towards where she is indicating. “Someone.”

“No, but there really is someone out there.”

And—well. Peering outside, there indeed seems to be.

It’s a little white speck that is only visible through the sheets of rain because it contrasts so starkly against the darkness surrounding it. It’s definitely person shaped. And it’s coming towards them.

“A ghost,” Riche says, flatly.

“Don’t even suggest that!” Tethia squeals.

“Damnit,” Olruggio curses.

He scrambles to grab his cloak, overcome with a sudden frantic urgency. He yanks the heavy fabric haphazardly over his shoulders, fastens it, and pulls the hood over his head all in the same breath.

“Olruggio? Where are you going?” asks Coco, stepping back inside in alarm.

Olruggio groans and pauses his hectic dressing. “Maybe you girls were right to assume the worst, after all,” he says, lips twitching humourlessly. “Please go dry yourself off, Coco. And Riche, too. Don’t go around catching a cold on top of everything else.”

“Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean we were right to assume the worst?” Tethia asks. It’s clear what he means, but—

“Are you saying that it might be Professor Qifrey out there?” Coco voices what Tethia only dares thinking.

“I don’t know,” replies Olruggio. “But even if it isn’t him, there is still a person caught up in this weather. And I can’t just leave them, can I?”

“No,” Coco agrees. She steps aside a little to clear the doorway, wringing her skirt between her hands.

“You four stay here and finish up lunch, alright?” Olruggio asks, his eyes briefly darting towards where even Agott is now poking her head through the kitchen’s doorway, frowning deeply in concern. “And don’t even think about following me.”

He steps outside with a flourish of dark fabric, and the branch clatters where he tosses it out of his way. It takes no time at all, then, for his black cloak to blend into the night-dark scenery outside, and for the girls to truly lose sight of him.

The white spot in the distance remains.

Riche sneezes, suddenly, and shocks Tethia out of her stupor. It’s enough to remind her to slam the door shut and nod to herself. “Let’s get you all dried up as Olruggio said, shall we?” she says and grasps Riche by the shoulders to steer her towards the fireplace. Her voice and hands are shaking. “Agott, could you help me get a fire started?”

It speaks volumes that Agott simply acquiesces. She tosses some logs into the fireplace and draws up a spell in the time it takes Tethia to wrangle Riche and Coco out of their more-or-less soaked dresses and swaddle them up in blankets instead.

“It’s might not even be Qifrey out there,” Agott says as she kneels before the fireplace to poke the kindling fire, shifting her weight form one knee to the other. Her words are as close to comforting as they ever get, and Tethia smiles at her efforts.

“But who else would be walking here, through the storm?” Coco asks, tugging at a loose thread poking out of her blanket.

Lightning striking nearby casts the room in bright white light for an instant. Riche sneezes again.

“Well,” Agott says, getting up from the floor and dusting off her skirt, “either way, they’ll want something warm to eat when they get back in here. So, Tethia?”

She jerks her head in the direction of the kitchen. Behind her, a decently sized fire crackles cheerfully.

“Sure,” Tethia agrees. Turning back to Coco and Riche for a moment, she asks, “Do you two want some tea, maybe?”

Riche shakes her head. Coco only looks at her with big, watery eyes that practically scream if I drink anything in my current state, I’ll only get sick.

And so, Tethia ends up manning the kitchen alone with Agott. Her egg whites are still as nice as she had left them, but she cannot for the life of her muster the motivation to finish dessert anymore. Next to her, Agott calmly hangs the soup pot by a rack and places Coco’s spell beneath it, plucking her wand out of the book she had brought into the kitchen with her, an eternity ago. With a quick, jerky movement of her hand, she closes the circle and a small, neatly contained flame flickers to life.

“I’m surprised,” she says, so low that it can be for Tethia’s ears only, “by how well you are handling everything. The others seem more shaken.”

Tethia’s head spins with how quickly she turns it to look Agott in the face. Her miserable, perfect egg whites are heavy in the bowl she is cradling close to her heart.

“No way,” she laughs, and suddenly feels tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, “I’ve been terrified from the start.”

The bowl slips from her arms and clatters to the floor, staying intact by some miracle or another. Agott’s faces reddens in—anger? embarrassment?—as she first stares at the puffs of egg white on the floor, then the fat tears now running down Tethia’s cheeks unbidden.

“I’m sor—”

“Have you added salt to the broth yet?”

Agott pauses, eyes raking over Tethia for a few tense moments, then shakes her head. She turns back to the pot. “No, thanks for reminding me.”

“Thank you,” Tethia begins, wiping at her face, “for thanking me.”

Somehow, her usual platitude earns her a little smile from Agott. The silence that settles between them is laden with their shared nervousness, but companionable enough; Agott watches the soup slowly start boiling while Tethia crawls around the floor, wiping up splattered egg.

She is almost done when the front door is flung open once more, the noise of the storm outside bursting into the atelier, violent and unfiltered. Suddenly, she can’t get to her feet fast enough, and by the time she makes it outside the kitchen, Coco is already gasping Qifrey while Riche asks What happened?

Olruggio drags a sopping wet Qifrey through the doorway, supporting him by the waist despite there not being any visible injuries about him. His taller build is folded awkwardly around Olruggio, and he appears to be trembling all over. At the very least, though, he seems to be standing up on his own—his mud-caked boots track dirt across the floor wherever he steps.

“Professor Qifrey, are you okay?” Coco asks, one hand clutching the blanket around her shoulders while the other hovers awkwardly in the air, longing to reach out.

Qifrey doesn’t respond; he just sways on his feet a little and dribbles water across the floor.

“Give him a little. He’s had a rough go of it,” Olruggio tells her, very gently. “How about you make space in front of the fireplace for him? I’ll dry him off in a second, but…”

He doesn’t even need to finish the sentence for Coco to begin gathering up pillows and blankets, running about in nothing but her undershirt and her leggings as her own blanket joins the pile. Riche, much more calmly, arranges everything in a nest-like shape someone might actually be able to sit in.

Tethia awkwardly shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “Can I help somehow?” she asks, looking up at Olruggio and, by extension, Qifrey’s concerningly pale face, resting on his shoulder.

Olruggio blinks. “Can you get his shoes off?” he asks and adjusts his hold on Qifrey so that he can lift him, just a bit. His face turns tomato-red from the strain and perhaps Tethia might tease him about it under different circumstances, but as things are, she just falls to her knees and begins tugging at Qifrey’s filthy boots. The mud makes it hard to gain purchase on the leather and it keeps slipping from her grip, but eventually, Tethia manages to pull them off. They drop to the floor with a nasty set of squelches.

“Ewwww.”

Next, they tug Qifrey’s sodden cloak off—a feat much easier accomplished than the removal of the boots. Olruggio makes sure to angle Qifrey so that he doesn’t step into the mud on the floor all throughout their undressing efforts.

They eventually manage to manoeuvre him over to the blanket pile, Qifrey still barely responsive but going along with their manhandling without complaint. He looks small as he sits there amidst the pillows, shivering and pale, eyes squeezed tightly shut. A twig sticks out of the bird’s nest the wind has made of his hair.

By some miracle, his glasses remain sitting on his nose, only a little crooked.

“What’s wrong with him?” Riche asks at last.

Olruggio sighs and begins digging through his skirt-pockets. “I think he’s mostly just exhausted and undercooled.”

It’s clearly not everything that is going on with Qifrey, but Olruggio seems reluctant to assume more than what little he can reliably infer. So he simply gets to work drying him off and warming him up, until Qifrey stops shivering at last and relaxes back into the pile of blankets and pillows.

“And you two?” Olruggio asks, turning to Coco and Riche who are still standing around in nothing but their underlayers, gooseflesh raised along their bare arms despite the fireplace’s warmth.

“Oh, um!” Coco says and doesn’t get much further than that before a gust of warm air hits her. Her eyes squeeze shut as her hair puffs up. Riche is next, clearly happy to go from slightly chilled and clammy to dry and toasty.

“I’ll get a change of clothes,” Riche announces once she is all warmed up again.

“Me too!” chirps Coco. Then, turning to Olruggio, she asks, “Should we get extra clothes for Qifrey as well, or…?”

Tethia follows her sister apprentice’s gaze to where she is looking at the mud-flecked hem of Qifrey’s usually white skirt. It looks stiff, now that the mud has dried, and it can’t be comfortable.

Olruggio, though, shakes his head. “Thanks, but I’ll wrangle him into something clean when I put him to bed. You girls needn’t worry about that.”

“Alright,” says Riche before Coco can begin fussing, and drags her up the stairs to leave no room for argument.

Tethia hovers awkwardly by her teachers’ side now that everyone else has left. Olruggio peers at her curiously from under his overgrown bangs, heavy and stuck to his face with rainwater, and she smiles on reflex. “Um. Should I go make some tea?” she asks, hoping that, perhaps this time, someone might take her up on the offer.

“Don’t trouble yourself.”

Surprisingly, it’s not Olruggio who answers her.

Both he and Tethia startle at hearing Qifrey speak up. He looks up at them with a wan little smile, the skin of his face still pale but not as waxen as before.

“What exactly happened to you?” Tethia blurts before she can so much as think about restraining herself.

Qifrey clears his throat, which quickly devolves into a full-on cough. Olruggio looks terribly alarmed by it, his hands shooting out as if to steady his friend. Qifrey shakes his head, wheezes out an I’m okay that fools exactly no-one, and tries clearing his throat yet again.

“I had a bit of an accident,” he says, voice coming out thick and raspy. His face scrunches up in disdain when he hears how he sounds. “I thought I could get home in time for lunch, but—”

Two sets of footsteps rushing down the stairs interrupt him. Coco rounds the corner of the stairwell first, eyes going wide at the sight of a conscious and lucid Qifrey. She freezes up, and Riche, at her heels as is, promptly stumbles into her back. “You’re okay!”

Qifrey shoots her another weak smile and nods. “I was just about to tell these two what happened,” he says, and it’s enough to have both Coco and Riche—now dressed in fresh dresses—settling around the blanket-pile to listen to whatever story Qifrey is about to regale them with. Tethia, too, sees is as her cue to settle on the floor. Olruggio finally shrugs out of his wet cloak that he had clearly all but forgotten about at this point.

“I was trying to make it home in time for lunch,” Qifrey starts again, his voice growing slightly smoother with every word, “but a particularly strong gust of wind caught me off guard, and I… well.”

I crashed.

“Are you hurt?” Coco asks, alarmed.

Qifrey shakes his head, smiling placatingly. “I managed to break my fall just fine, don’t worry. But I did fall on my inkwell.” Everyone’s eyes immediately snap to Qifrey’s hip, where a blackish stain has soaked into the white fabric. “I was a little disoriented at first, and by the time I had recovered my bearings, it had started raining, so all the paper I had brought was soaked, while my ink had dried up.”

And I was not going to try flying again.

Olruggio scoffs. “So you thought you’d walk the rest of the way? In this weather?”

Qifrey just smiles, face pinched. “Well…”

“You did make it home in time for lunch, at least. Just like you intended.”

Agott’s humourless cadence cuts off whatever apology Qifrey had been about to make. She stands leant against the kitchen doorway, frowning, while a delicious smell wafts into the room from behind her. “I couldn’t leave the stew alone over an open flame,” she says, sparing Tethia a surprisingly non-accusatory glance before sweeping back into the kitchen.

“Should we eat here?” asks Coco. “It’s warmer.”

Tethia scrambles to her feet. “I’ll help get dishes out here!” she declares before anyone even approves of Coco’s suggestion. She rounds the kitchen doorway and almost runs into Agott, who is taste-testing a spoonful of hot broth.

“I am so sorry for ditching you, earlier!”

Agott considers her for a moment, then shrugs one shoulder and dips her spoon into the soup again. “It’s fine,” she says, then holds a steaming spoonful of broth out to Tethia, cupping one hand beneath it. “Does this need more salt?”

Tethia carefully blows on the soup, then takes the spoon into her mouth. “I don’t think so.”

Agott exhales, long and relieved. “Okay, good. Help me carry out dishes, then.”

And so, she does.

They end up eating with their bowls settled in their laps, surrounding Qifrey in his blanket pile. Colour refuses to return to their teacher’s face, and he seems oddly on edge all throughout their meal, but he makes sure to compliment their cooking at length with every spoonful he eats.

“We would have had dessert,” Tethia admits, perhaps a little sulky, “had I not dropped the bowl.”

Qifrey just laughs good-naturedly in reply, though it comes out as little more than a raspy chuckle, followed by a cough.

By the time Olruggio takes him to bed, he is already running a low fever.

“No doctors are getting here through that,” Olruggio says once he gets back downstairs, nodding at the storm that is still, still raging on outside. “But it might be too late to get one today, anyways.” Admittedly, Tethia has lost track of time; it must have been hours since it got dark as night outside, so maybe nightfall had just quietly crept up on them behind the clouds.

“Will he be alright without a doctor?” Coco asks, fingers fidgeting around air.

Olruggio, surprisingly, doesn’t look too worried. “He’ll have to be,” he replies and gives Coco a light pat on the head. “We’ll take good care of him until we can get a doctor, won’t we?”

The four of them nod in unison.

“We’ll get him more blankets,” says Riche.

“And more of our soup!” Coco adds.

“And a spell to help cool him down,” Agott offers.

“And I’ll finally get to make someone tea,” Tethia grins.

Olruggio coughs to hide a laugh. “He won’t want for anything, I see,” he says, grinning. “I’ll stay by his bedside overnight in case he needs something. You girls just sleep and stop worrying.”

It’s no trouble for him, Tethia supposes—Olruggio gets most of his sleep during the day because he works so late into the night, so his sleep-rhythm will hardly be upset by keeping watch over their sick teacher. He does take his role seriously at the end of the day, reliable Watchful Eye that he is.

They get to work, then, heating up soup and boiling water, carrying blankets upstairs and fussing over spells. Agott naturally attracts Olruggio with her spell-drawing, getting pointers here and there only to end up with an idea too similar to the cooling pad Coco had made for Qifrey, back at the Auditorium. “Maybe a regular throat compress will do,” she ends up griping, before tossing in the towel for the time being and leaving for her room.

Tethia is the last of the girls to head upstairs, her herbal tea having steeped for well over ten minutes. She grips the teapot with a rag, holding two mugs by their handles in her other hand, then carefully waddles up the stairs.

She’s surprised to hear the low murmur of a conversation coming from Qifrey’s room, having expected him to be asleep for some reason, despite knowing that the other apprentices must have visited him only minutes ago. But he isn’t speaking with any of them—instead, it’s Olruggio’s voice that answers his sore-throated, croaked words in a soft, gentle tone.

The door is left slightly ajar, so Tethia can make out snippets of their conversation even as she approaches.

“—with the rain. The wet and the cold, especially,” says Qifrey, voice thick with something other than a cold. Olruggio only hums in reply, and there is fabric shifting for a moment. “I simply froze up.”

“It makes sense that it could dredge up bad memories,” Olruggio says.

Qifrey sniffles, and Tethia’s heart breaks a little at the sound. “I wouldn’t have ended up getting sick, had I not lost it like that. I can’t remember the last time it got this bad.”

“You haven’t been sleeping much lately, have you?”

“Well…”

Tethia peers through the gap in the door, then, not wanting to interrupt. The tea in the teapot sloshes against one side as she stops in her tracks.

Olruggio is bent awkwardly over the bed, Qifrey’s face pressed into his shoulder. He is shaking again, just like he had been when Olruggio had first dragged him back inside, and his thin, trembling fingers seek purchase on Olruggio’s back. He is not sobbing—nothing loud or open or honest—and Tethia doubts that he would let anyone but Olruggio know that he is crying at all. Instead, he hides all his grief inside the loose drape of his best friend’s shirt.

The thin little smile Qifrey had put on for her and the rest of the girls suddenly flashes before Tethia’s eyes. She inhales shakily and pretends not to feel the sting of tears as they blur her vision for a moment.

She feels as though she is seeing and hearing things not meant for her to witness.

“I’ve got you,” Olruggio promises, and squeezes Qifrey tightly before sitting back in his chair. He doesn’t just mean for the duration of Qifrey’s sickness. “I’ll be here all night, so if you need anything, just ask.”

Qifrey, too, sits back on his mattress, face a splotchy red. “I think I should probably drink something,” he says, rubbing his nose, and Tethia sees that as her cue.

She knocks the back of her mug-holding-hand against the doorframe, nudging the door open with her foot. “Did someone say they wanted to drink something?” she asks more cheerfully than she is feeling, the tea sloshing about the pot yet again. Some comes spilling out of the spout and dribbles to the floor. “Whoops.”

Qifrey makes a grab for his bedside table and—oh, he hadn’t been wearing his glasses, had he? “Thank you, Tethia,” he says with his weakest smile yet. He reaches out to pluck the mugs out of her hand. Tethia dutifully pours some tea into it as he holds one out for her to fill up.

“You’ll get well again in no time,” she says as she steadies the pot in her hands. She does not know the whole story here, nor the reason for Qifrey being so shaken, but…

“Everyone gets sick sometimes, so you don’t have to be embarrassed about it. We’ll take good care of you.”

Qifrey’s expression crumples from his shaky smile into something genuinely touched. Some non-feverish colour rises to his clammy cheeks as he can do nothing but nod. In the chair by his bedside, Olruggio snorts and takes the spare mug from him. “You heard her,” he says and tilts his head in Tethia’s direction. Then, he relieves Tethia of the teapot as well. “So stop pulling stunts like you did today and get well soon.”

Qifrey chokes out a laugh.

Outside, the whistling winds fall silent.

#fanfiction #witch hat atelier #wha #tetia wha #coco wha #agott arkrome #agott wha #richeh wha #riche wha #qifrey #qifrey wha #olruggio #olruggio wha #word count: 5k+#i forgot to post this here for like. two weeks. teeHEE :3c

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