#wizorice

[faemytho]

Wizard/Licorice,

“I just had the terrible realization I might be in love with you and I’m still processing what that means.”

(Send me a prompt) and a ship and I'll write you a drabble!

Wizard is an adult. Though they don't appear other than being mentioned, Gingerbrave and Strawberry are adults as well.

Word Count: 1,126

"I just had the terrible realization I might be in love with you, and I'm still processing what that means."

Though the sentence should have landed heavier than it did, it simply echoed around the room, light and free and easy, like a bird on the wind. It was murmured, a train of thought that passed unthinkingly through chapped, cracked lips in the dim morning grey of Wizard's tower. Wizard himself, though similarly as tired as his companion, froze in place, the sentence murmured in unconscious, half-asleep stupor successfully beating back his own exhaustion. He couldn't possibly have heard that right.

"Sorry," Wizard said, his own voice sounding far away. "Run that by me again?"

Wizard knew that Licorice was by no means an academic. He was a dark sorcerer, an experimental mage, and they both knew why he was here. The Cookie Kingdom would not spy on itself, after all. Wizard was no fool, and neither was Licorice. Though they were both fond of finding countless ways of pissing each other off, they both knew it would be quite insulting to their respective intelligence to pretend Licorice wasn't here for the reason he was.

Wizard wouldn't call Gingerbrave stupid. Overly trusting, perhaps, but his friend was not stupid. When Licorice had approached the Cookie Kingdom all those weeks ago, claiming to have turned against Dark Enchantress and wanting a place to stay, Gingerbrave hadn't hesitated to believe him. Strawberry had been appropriately cautious, but she was content to follow Gingerbrave's decisions. Wizard hadn't been convinced, but even he couldn't find any way to persuade his friends that this was a bad idea, and so, Licorice was allowed to stay.

Wizard had been expecting the sorcerer to cause trouble. There was barely a day that went by where some incident did not occur, Licorice finding his way out of the blame each and every single time. What Wizard had not been expecting was to discover the absolute trove of magical knowledge Licorice carried with him. While Wizard learned from books, the dark sorcerer had learned his craft by simply, as he put it, 'fucking around and finding out'.

It intrigued him, and for reasons Licorice had been frighteningly vague on, the sorcerer had agreed to share his knowledge. Initially, Wizard had been hesitant to share the tower he called his home away from home, especially with an enemy who was poorly hiding under the guise of a friend, who knew that he knew. But now, it was very often they found themselves shut in the tower, debating over magic circles and some topic in magical theory, such as the proper way to invoke the dual magic of the moon.

It was a near daily occurrence by now that the grey light of dawn crept up upon them, startling them both out of a debate or research into a new spell that they would swear up and down they had just started doing after dinner. It was now, after Licorice had dumped a pile of books on the desk Wizard had sat himself down at without a word. Though Wizard's tower was typically never quiet with Licorice around, it had been oddly silent for a while, and Wizard had merely wondered out loud what could possibly be on Licorice's mind to keep the whiny sorcerer quiet for so long.

Licorice didn't seem to realize what he'd said, which wasn't really unexpected. They had both stayed up all night again, and they were both tired. Wizard was content to write it off as a simple case of mishearing what exactly Licorice had said, but apparently the sorcerer could never make things easy for him.

Across the room, Licorice's pale eyes widened, and he dropped the book he'd been inspecting the cover of. It hit the wood floor of Wizard's tower with an echoing thud, and the sorcerer whirled around to meet Wizard's gaze.

"I," Licorice said, strained and quiet in his raspy nasal voice, "I didn't- I said- Just forget you heard that."

Wizard's eyes narrowed. Why the sorcerer hadn't taken the easy way out by saying something else or changing the subject, the way Wizard had practically handed to him on a silver platter, it was beyond him. Licorice, in love with him? A laughable idea, and Wizard would have thought Licorice thought the same, were the sorcerer not practically choking to request Wizard forget he had even said the words at all.

And yet, as Licorice nervously wet his dry, chapped lips with a darting tongue, Wizard found his eyes following the movement. The sorcerer's lips were often chapped. He would know, because he'd been catching himself staring at them often, in the middle of their debates, their conversations, and right now.

"We both know I'm smarter than that, Licorice," Wizard pointed out, turning in his chair to properly face the sorcerer. If Licorice hadn't wanted Wizard to know, he wouldn't have asked him to forget. He wouldn't have lingered on the topic. He wouldn't have been honest about saying the words at all. "What are you playing at?"

The sorcerer bristled, the way Wizard had long since recognized to be a tell of Licorice's indignation. The sorcerer would yell, or deflect, or throw petty insults in the exact way that dug under Wizard's skin. It had almost become routine, the way they would argue. What Licorice would not do was look cornered, face scrunched up in an emotion Wizard didn't recognize. What he would not do was shake his head and turn away, and rush out of the room as though there were a thousand wild cream wolves on his tail.

Wizard sat there, half in shock, half exhausted from the night of no sleep. Three stories below, he heard the tower doors rattle open and shut, and he was left alone in his tower for the first time in a long time.

Though Licorice was still an enemy, taking advantage of Gingerbrave's kindness to spy on the Cookie Kingdom, Wizard would have liked to think he knew the sorcerer well enough by now. Licorice was a coward, a liar, a twister of the truth, a master at deflecting the facts and making you see things his way in a graceless verbal maneuver that somehow worked. That he would pass up the chance to lie his way out, or deflect the words, or just simply not acknowledge them, Wizard didn't understand. If it was an act or a trick, Licorice surely would have attempted to stick by the behavior Wizard knew him best by.

But instead, Licorice had acknowledged the words by asking Wizard to forget them, and fled when asked why. Wizard couldn't make sense of it.

Then, a gear shifted into place.

Oh.