Chapter Text
Life is essentially a chess game. You have to plan and calculate and I am so lonely.
(If you play the opening wrong, the game is already lost.)
- A Softer World, Emily Horne and James Comeau
Taako is mad. Who, a discerning individual might ask, is Taako mad at? Well, several people, for various reasons.
First, there’s whoever designed his room so that it was possible to, immediately after rolling out of bed, walk immediately into a wall and bust his nose up. He’s swiping blood off his upper lip and muttering under his breath when he runs directly into the second person he’s angry at, who is a Bureau employee he doesn’t even catch the name of before they’ve disappeared off down the hall.
Then there’s Angus, who he’d been giving a lesson on magic when he’d accidentally upset the kid, leaving Taako convinced for a terrible moment that he’d made his apprentice cry. The problem there wasn’t the interaction itself. No, Angus had forgotten about it within five minutes, after Taako had ruffled his hair and directed his attention to something else. The problem there was with the extent to which, noticing the look on Angus’s face, Taako had felt like the literal worst person on the moon or, for that matter, any other planet, as a direct result of hurting Angus’s feelings. It is just not fair, exactly how far into Taako’s life this rugrat has entangled himself, and it’s definitely doing a number on his aloof cred.
So, the wall, whoever designed the wall, the random Bureau employee, Angus and Taako’s overabundance of feelings thereabout… There’s a lot to be mad at, and it continues downhill from there.
It’s not raining, planetside, but it’s colder than Taako would like it to be. A couple of failed spells and the way Magnus and Merle seem to be competently successful at everything they’re trying just puts the cherry on the bad day pie, and all Taako wants is to crawl into bed and stay there until the world has decided to revise its opinion on what kind of luck he deserves to have. (The fact that this is exactly the kind of luck he deserves is beside the point.)
Well. That’s not the only thing Taako wants, which brings him right to the top of his ‘list of people Taako is mad at today’: himself.
There’s been a cloud of weirdness hanging over Taako’s shoulders since he got up this morning. Something in him feels brittle. His breathing keeps going all shaky for no reason, and he absolutely hates the general sense of fragility that’s been clinging to him all day. It had been a… rough night. It’s not like those have never happened before, and there hadn’t been anything particularly special about this time. What’s different about this one is how he hadn’t been able to shake it off as easily as he’s been able to in the past. Bad nights are bad nights, they happen, you’ve just gotta get up and move on.
This time, he’d gotten up and been taken aback by his first instinct, which was to go find Magnus and tuck himself into the human’s side until he feels safe again, or track down Merle and sit in front of the couch while the dwarf braids his hair until he feels cared about enough to drive the dark cold clinging to his mind away. He’d been so appalled at himself for thinking that, he’d lost focus on his surroundings, leading to his very literal run-in with the wall.
What Taako wants more than anything right now is for one of his friends to give him a stupid fucking hug, and he's mad as hell at himself for it. They have better thing to do than sit around and hold him because Taako is being too pathetic to manage shit on his own when he’s been doing that for as long as he can remember. He can want them to all day long, but everybody wants things they don’t deserve sometimes, so now it’s time to buck up and deal with it.
(Also he’s already tried a couple of times to manipulate Magnus or Merle into hugging him, to no avail. His usual tricks haven’t worked, so he’s up the creek without a paddle, left to drag himself after Magnus and Merle with that horrible cold ache in his chest.)
Apparently, along the way, Taako’s been something of a, well, you could call it a nuisance. Taako prefers to call it color commentary, but Magnus and Merle aren’t amused. So much so that, once their scuffle with a supposed informant who turned on them two minutes in concludes and Taako makes one too many snappy remarks, Merle rounds on him in frustration.
“What the hell is your problem today, Taako?” he demands.
Everybody involved forgets that Merle, about two and a half minutes ago, not trusting the informant, cast Zone of Truth on the area they’re still in the perimeter of. Therefore, when Taako answers, he does so with much more forthcoming honestly than he’d necessarily planned on.
“My problem,” Taako answers in a near shout, “is that I had a really shitty night followed by a really shitty day and I walked into a wall and got tripped and messed up with Angus and it’s cold and I can’t even cast spells right and everything sucks! ”
“Taako-” Merle starts. He’s cut off by the elf in question before he can say anything else.
“And, and! And, my problem is I’m tired and stressed and upset and I want a goddamn hug because somehow you assholes have fucking conditioned me to want fucking physical comfort,” Taako spits the words like they're poisoned stones caught in his mouth, “when I’m fucking upset! And I’ve tried whatever I can think of to trick you into hugging me, and I’m usually pretty good at that, but it’s not working like it usually does and you won’t just fucking hug me already!”
In the silence that follows his outburst, Taako is left facing his friends, shoulders heaving with every harsh breath he forces through his lungs. The huffs of air sound ragged and choppy, and Taako is ignoring the burning feeling in his eyes, the blur at the edge of his vision with truly herculean effort. His hands are balled into fists at his sides, and there’s a steady stream of an angry tirade blazing in his mind, calling himself every awful word and cruel name he can think of for admitting that to them, Zone of Truth or not.
Now he’s standing there causing a giant scene over nothing, and this is just too much to ask Magnus and Merle to deal with. They’re going to leave, he’s really done it this time, and now-
“So,” Magnus says, and the amount of cautious concern on his face is painful to look at. “Do you want that hug right now, or…”
“Yes!” Taako snaps, humiliated by the way his voice breaks on the word.
In the first moment of good luck that’s happened all day, Magnus has reached him, pulling Taako in gently against his chest and settling his arms around the elf’s shoulders and back, before the tears actually break free. Taako unclenches his fists, settling his hands against the back of Magnus’s shirt. He plans to very deliberately act like this is no big deal, to keep his reciprocation of the embrace as superficial as possible, but he soon has his hands clenched in the fabric, fingers digging into Magnus’s back. It’s a losing battle Taako is presently involved in, trying to keep himself under control, struggling with keeping everything he’s been feeling wrestled down and locked up somewhere nobody else can see it.
It’s hard to pretend everything is just fine when Taako is fighting like hell to keep himself from crying while Magnus holds him tightly. As Taako’s breath hitches, Magnus moves a hand to the back of his neck, thumb rubbing in small, gentle circles. He’s got absolutely no right to be this good at hugging people, Taako decides in a fit of annoyance. This wouldn’t be happening if this dumb human didn’t have this dumb hug magic. He feels cared about, like he could completely lose it right now, break down sobbing in Magnus’s arms, and Magnus wouldn’t even mind, and it’s scaring the hell out of him.
“This is stupid,” mumbles Taako, pretending his voice doesn’t sound damp. “I’m being stupid.”
“No you’re not,” Magnus replies, giving him an extra squeeze.
Taako makes a wordless sound, chin digging into Magnus’s shoulder.
"You’re allowed to want things, Taako.” The voice, just above Taako’s ear, is quiet and kind. There’s a note of pain in it that Taako just makes out, a veiled anguish that Taako hates himself for being the cause of. “I’m so sorry you thought you couldn’t just come to us, to me, when you wanted a hug, of all things. I’ll hug you every day if you want. You don’t need to trick me into it. I love you, we love you, you're our family."
And I think I love you guys too, that's why this is so fucking scary! Taako almost shouts at him, barely managing to keep the words inside with a heroic effort involving burying his face in Magnus's shirt.
Of course, Magnus takes this opportunity to completely misinterpret the silence. He pulls Taako gently back from the embrace, though maintaining contact lest Taako perceive it as some kind of rejection.
“We do!” he insists, holding eye contact and giving the shoulders beneath his hands a tiny shake. “You matter to us so much, you’re our family. We love you. Right, Merle?”
A couple of seconds span between when Magnus directs the question to the cleric and when Merle answers. Despite the pause and the hard look leveled at Merle by Magnus, Taako can’t even manage to brush Merle’s gruff response of ‘yeah, right’ off as coerced or to make him feel better. If there’s one thing Zone of Truth is good for, it’s circumventing your own brain’s frantic scrambling to prove to itself that you’re worthless and unwanted.
Magnus nods, satisfied, then turns his attention back to Taako.
“You believe us, right?”
When Taako averts his eyes and nods his head, saying, “Yeah, I think I do,” it’s mostly to make that awful anxious concern on Magnus’s face go away. In his justifying the answer to himself, he neglects to factor in that the whole Zone of Truth thing still applies to him, too.
Another nod from Magnus. “Good, good.” He surprises Taako then by pulling him back into a hug, tucking Taako into his arms, making him feel small in a way that would make him nervous enough to bolt if it was anybody else.
Unbeknownst to him, there’s an argument going on above Taako’s head. Magnus and Merle are silently bickering, mouthing back and forth and glaring at each other.
‘Come over here,’ Magnus is telling Merle, who rolls his eyes in response.
‘Do I gotta.’
‘Yes! Now come! Here!’
It’s too frail a situation, Taako too vulnerable and upset right now, for Merle to bluster his way through protests for too long, and he gives in after that.
Merle walks over to the two of them, and Magnus stoops enough to bring him into the hug as well. Taako doesn’t say anything, just shifts as one of Merle’s stout arms wraps around his lower back. Neither Magnus nor Merle moves to break contact before he does, and it means more than Taako will admit that they wait and allow him room to decide when to pull away.
“From now on, Taako?” Magnus says, catching Taako by the arm as they turn to resume their journey. The smile on his face belays the slight chastisement in his tone. “All you’ve gotta do is ask.”