Nicholas wakes up the next morning and wonders why there's a mirror in his bed and were his eyes always so dark – oh wait a second.
Luca was given his own room last night but he followed Nicholas straight to his bed and Nicholas shrugged it off. It's super cute how clingy Luca is.
Luca blinks back at Nicholas from the other side of the large bed and also seems to be having problems because he holds up a hand and sort of pauses, as if confused why Nicholas' hand isn't coming up.
"That's going to take a while to get used to," Nicholas muses, patting around the side table for his glasses.
Luca startles. "Oh, I thought I was dead."
"I was thinking mirror but dead is fine too," Nicholas offers up.
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"-and this is where I hide Stavros when his family storms in trying to drag him back," Nicholas introduces, gesturing at the room under the stairs because he's getting side-tracked very easily while giving Luca a tour. "He's a bit too big now but I can cram him in there when it counts."
Luca is leaning over, hands on his knees to peer inside, past various miscellaneous items that have been tossed in there. He’s still wearing the spare glasses, but Vinaya put in an order for contacts. "Now that I think about it, my hiding space was pretty big."
"How many Stavros' could you fit in your one?" Nicholas jokes.
"Three Hearth's lengthwise and two crouching Stavros' for the width," Luca muses. "Adult versions, I mean, I don't actually know how big he is now."
"He's about a Rafael minus one thumb tall," Nicholas explains. “A vertical thumb, to clarify.”
"Okay great, and what's the height difference between young and old Rafael?"
“Dunno, probably a glass. Like a full glass.”
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Nicholas opens the bathroom door after a shower, dressed in comfy yellow pyjamas with his hair still dripping, and sees Luca already making himself comfortable in Nicholas' bed. "You're back."
Luca looks up, holding a pillow. "Yeah?"
"Do you not like your bed?" Nicholas asks in confusion, squinting through foggy glasses. "You can pick another room if you want."
Luca looks around. "Oh. No, I was just…I was going to my room. In a little bit."
Nicholas shrugs and takes a running jump onto the bed. "Hey, did I tell you the time when we tried to see if unicorns could swim? I'll tell you now, it did not go to plan - entirely Thoth’s fault for not cooperating."
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“I had two adopted parents,” Luca says to Vinaya as Nicholas is getting dressed upstairs. “They were mundane but volunteered to help hide me from Xia. Mum was incredible. Ma was…nice, I suppose.”
Vinaya purses her lips.
“She had her reasons,” Luca admits quietly. “Hiding me was a lot of pressure. We moved a lot, they spent a lot of money because of the block on my magic, it had to be renewed every so often.”
“They blocked it?” Vinaya asks, eyes fierce. “This is your birthright, love. Your culture, your very soul.”
“They had their reasons,” Luca repeats and unfortunately sounds like he believes it.
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"You can call me dad, by the way," Nicholas tells Luca over lunch because it sounds great coming from his adorable son.
Jordan hums. "I don't think that's a good habit to get into considering Luca is older than you."
"People will think it's a joke," Nicholas scoffs. "For like a month I got Stavros to call me dadd-hrmmmmm…"
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"Yes, muffin?" Vinaya says with a raised eyebrow.
"Nothing," Nicholas says earnestly, peering at her with wide brown doe eyes. "Great food, mum."
Nicholas elbows Luca and Luca peers at Vinaya with wide black doe eyes. "Great food, grandma."
Vinaya lets that one slide because Luca is very sweet and so uncorrupted - unlike Nicholas.
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After exhausting all the places to show Luca around the giant manor, they head outside.
As they pass by, Nicholas pats the giant truck of a crocodile lying by the side of the biggest pond they have and it follows their path with its eyes as big as Nicholas’ torso.
“These guys are cool,” Nicholas dismisses. “I mean don’t jump in its mouth or anything but yeah, you can ride one if you ask nicely.”
Over a large sprawl of sand to soften a fall is a Loops course. The game is played on massive, twisting Mobius strips hovering ten meters in the air, slowly rotating in every way possible around a central axis. This is only a small game, with two rings, so it can only fit two on each team. The citadel plays on seven rings, so fourteen players total.
The course was made to help people practice for duels because the first thing that happens during a mage duel is to move the surroundings to give yourself the advantage. Cover to hide behind, a higher slope, and it’s constantly shifting throughout the entire duel. Loops mimics the changing nature and eventually became so popular as a field that it became a sports game.
Nicholas wants to play against Luca because they’re both on the school team for InCore. It’s one ball per team but since only the two of them are playing they stick with one ball and Nicholas tosses it at Luca.
They help each other up with levitation spells and stick to the gravity of the rings, running around to figure out their placements. Luca ends up clutching the dense rubber ball on the base of one loop. Nicholas stays upside down at the top of the second, looking up at Luca.
“Are we counting to three?” Luca asks.
“Three!” Nicholas cheers and launches himself up, jumping high and tucking his legs in so the gravity loses its grip on him and he plummets down through the rings, backflipping so he can hit the wide strip on his feet and immediately falls into a roll to absorb the impact.
Luca is already sprinting up the ring towards the first brightly lit goal.
The loops rotate slowly, both along their circumferences, and around each other on a central axis, plus the flat rings twist as well. The make-shift sphere is a headache to try and keep track of everything, so the best plan is to just focus on the goals, which are bright round spots that appear on the loops
The goals move every time they’re hit, a few appearing at once. Not just every time the ball hits them, but also when a player does so you can move the goal or guard it depending on the kind of playstyle. Luca pulls back an arm to throw the ball at the goal but Nicholas’ shoe comes flying overhead and hit it instead, the bright spot vanishing and appearing across the Loops course.
“Pretty sure that’s illegal!” Luca calls, tucking the ball back under an arm and leaping across to the other ring that’s slowly shifting away.
“House rules!”
Nicholas and Luca are both the kind of players who refuse to use tactics and just go for it. Luca doesn’t want to tackle or shove Nicholas off the rings so they’re jumping from loop to loop, sprinting after each other on twisting paths and getting rebounds from goals.
It’s 10 points per goal and officially the game stops when both balls hit the same goal simultaneously. They only get to 40-50 because Nicholas has a bad habit of jumping into free fall and hurling the ball halfway down before then figuring out how to land, so Luca calls the game to an end before he gets an anxiety attack about his dad dying again.
They end up eating donuts huddled together on the rooftop with a blanket wrapped around their shoulders and fall asleep up there, Luca's cheek mushed against Nicholas' shoulder and Nicholas leaning on Luca's head, both their glasses pushed askew, chocolate smeared at the corners of their mouths.
Jordan has to levitate them down to get them into their beds for the night.
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“How did you like the floating island?” Jordan asks, passing along a cup of hot chocolate he made from scratch to Luca while Nicholas is out helping his mum with grocery shopping.
“It was…” Luca trails off with a shrug. “Big. Magical. I met my best friend there.”
“Doesn’t sound like you enjoyed it though?” Jordan muses. “Nicky told us about what the older Stavros said, so I suppose this is third-hand accounts now but it seemed like you had fun times.”
Luca nods with a wooden smile.
“You don’t have to tell me, I just want to know more about you,” Jordan admits. “And, if there’s anything we can change, you just let me know. Ayads might not have the most power but we are respected.”
Luca takes a sip so he can think a bit longer. “I only told Stavros about the good things. He was going through a lot, trapped in…well, he already hated missing so much of my life. I didn’t want to make it worse.” He shrugs. “I don’t like to linger on the bad anyway.”
“Tell me about the good then,” Jordan suggests. “I’ll tell you some of my stories too. Honestly, Vinaya in school? Absolute horror, Nicholas gets it from her.”
Luca laughs. “Yeah? What’d she do?”
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Nicholas stands from the couch and so does Luca.
Nicholas picks up his glass of water from the other side of the coffee table, just too far from him to reach without getting up, and sits down again.
Luca also sits down, reassured that Nicholas isn't leaving the room.
"You good?" Nicholas asks, amused.
"I was stretching," Luca says, trying for casual and failing.