The comforting hand on his back fell away. Then he felt a weight slump against him. Wong looked down to find mussed black and silver hair pillowed on his shoulder. Stephen was out for the count, asleep or unconscious. He wasn’t sure which.
With one last heartbroken glance at Cora’s body, he turned his thoughts to the living. She would have wanted that. Stephen’s pulse jumped a warm and regular rhythm beneath Wong’s hand, although gently shifting him and calling his name provoked no response. Wong looked around, but the other sorcerers were all occupied, either with aiding their fellows or being removed from the scene. None spared a glance for the two men sitting against the stone wall of the corridor.
It was up to him then. He shifted onto his knees (he was getting too old for this). He certainly could have used magic to levitate Stephen, but after what the other man had done today that felt too impersonal. Carefully, he placed his arms under Stephen’s body, and lifted. He did have to use some magic, although less than he should have. He was glad that Stephen had managed to find his answers, but Wong wished he had done so before running himself so far into the ground.
Stephen’s head lolled against Wong’s chest. The librarian paused for a moment, standing quietly as the post-battle chaos swirled around him. The practitioners of the mystic arts were not entirely ascetics (Wong appreciated some material pleasures, his one-time words about detachment aside), nor were they ignorant of the world at large. But a certain degree of self-awareness and self-control was encouraged.
And yet, gazing down into the other man’s face, Wong’s emotions swirled as turbulently as the movement around him. Stephen drove him to madness on a good day. He was stubborn, reckless, and annoyingly self-sacrificing. But he was also, deep down, a good person.
And Wong found he cared about that person. As a friend, certainly. And perhaps sometimes, as something more. It made his heart heavy to see the spreading grey at Stephen’s temples, to feel how easy it was to lift the other man and know it to be due to months of self-neglect.
He pressed the softest of kisses to Stephen’s brow. He doubted anyone would notice in the midst of the tumult, but he found himself not carrying if they did. Perhaps not carrying if Stephen noticed either. Then he strode through the crowded space, carefully cradling his burden.
FINIS