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When the barrier comes down and they’re left to pick up the pieces, victorious and exhausted, Grey wants to sleep for a week.
Instead, he trails after Jack and Rue, pouring golden fire into the injured, soothing pain and burning out infection. If this was something he was trained to he would be able to be more efficient about it, but the only thing Grey’s trained himself to do with his magic is hide it, so he settles for being a battery. Laney twists hanks of gold in her fingers, weaves it into neat spellwork and hastily shared hedgewitch tricks, and Grey watches out of the corner of his eye, fingers aching. He runs a thumb over the place an ink splatter should be, except that in the midst of a siege he hasn’t been burying himself in gleeful scholarship.
He grumbles, automatic and thoughtless, about how he may as well help out. Not like there’s anything better to do, he mutters as sweat trickles beneath his collar, heart racing like a rabbit’s as the Elsewhere twists at his bones, a storm of fire the drop of a hand away. If I don’t help you with this now, you’ll just wake me up on your way to bed at some awful time of the morning…excuses, excuses, excuses. Grey had never wanted anyone to look to him for help with anything other than, perhaps, obscure academic debate. The location of a book in the reference section of the library, maybe; grudgingly aware that working in the Archives would likely involve a certain amount of customer service.
But Sez turns to him with the faintest quirk of an eyebrow, in the wake of a report about broken wards and unsafe conditions. She wouldn’t say anything to name him: Sez, with her rotating cast of informants and helpers understood anonymity.
Sez turns to him, flicks an eyebrow up just enough for him to know there was a question, a request, if he wanted to answer it - Sez had asked him across the room if he could help, and he found himself reaching for ink and paper, the splatter of diagrams and suggestions for improvement. Something lights up warm in his chest when he sinks power into the first carefully written ward, hidden spell-fire wrapping around a bakery’s beams to prevent any fires from getting out of control. He’d been told all the years of his childhood that mages were selfish, had to be forced to share their wonderful power, had thought on guilty, sleepless nights of the unspoken power pooling at the tips of his brittle fingers - and all it took, in the end, was someone saying please.
Some days, it’s all too much - too many people, too many expectations, too many things twisting him in different directions. Some days he buries himself in books.
This is nothing new; Grey loves reading for many reasons, will lose himself in books and treatsies and journals for the love of studying, for all the fascinating doors it opens even if just in his own head, but sometimes he reads like it’s running away - pages flicking under frantic fingers, each another shield, another fragile skin between Grey and the world.
On bad days, curled in a chair by a mountain view, focusing on every word and tearing through pages as though it was a race, Grey had been able to feel it looming behind him - a father’s pride, a sister’s fear, the knowledge that one slip was all it would take for the world to burn to dust around him.
He feels it less, now, but it echoes through him still. He flicks globs of gold at the nearest wall for light without thinking and freezes, panic turning his brain to static, before rembembering that it’s okay. He’s allowed to be a mage, to call on the Elsewhere, to use every tool at his fingertips to defend himself. He traces blueprints and scribbles down numbers for Laney and George to pour over, and for a moment expects it to be his father leaning on the other side of the workbench. He sees a woman with dark hair out the corner of his eye and turns, frantic, a name caught in his throat - and she turns to speak to someone behind her, and he’s not sure if he’s hurt or relieved that the shape of her face is all wrong.
He doesn’t know where Sandry is, and he won’t unless she wants to tell him. It hurts, to know that she could just leave. It hurts, that he doesn’t quite know if he would have wanted her to stay. He misses his sister, her cool hands and tentative smile, but to everyone other than Rupert she was a monster, and he can’t quite blame them.
(Rupert wouldn’t find this a helpful statement: Sez told him once, pointed, to call her monster not non-human, because she’d rather be known as what she is than what she’s not. Rupert didn’t think it mattered, because what was important was that she was a person. Cassandra Graves had done terrible things, but he wasn’t her judge or jury, and they hadn’t been standing in a court of law. She had been a lab-rat prisoner too, and it hadn’t been because of any of the crimes laid at her feet)
On bad days, the spectres leaning over his shoulder sometimes have different voices, now. His father is gone and Sandry’s fear is unfounded, these days, but there are still so many ways he can see everything precious to him shattering in his hands.
But Jack will gently nudge his shoulder and chivvy him into putting the book aside to eat something, will slide a bookmark between pages and tuck a blanket over his sleeping shoulders. Laney drops new books on his desk and picks his brain on diagrams and plans, suggests gleeful experiments they should find the time for. Rupert sits in peaceful silence with him, the click of knitting needles and the rustle of pages the only sound for hours.
There’s a voice in the back of his head telling him to hide, but it gets easier every day to quiet it, to say from what? and listen to the echoing lack of an answer.
He helps Sez when she asks, is given the responsibility of setting up a library for anyone to use - "I didn't mean I should run it!" he tells Sez plaintively, and Sally laughs at him over her shoulder - and wanders home through streets he first learned under siege, familiar now in a patchwork of memories. There, the building Jack insisted on helping to paint until Rue dragged him away; here, the one Grey helped yank the fallen rubble of out of the way so they could rebuild the walls without waiting for enough people to shift it all by hand. He spends his evenings curled up in the corner of their flat with a book, comfortable and content, and calls gentle fire to his unshaking fingertips to read by when it gets dark.