A/N: In which Ral and Jace absolutely do not go on a date.

Chapter Ten

The small, neat side street was tucked away in a quiet corner of the Tenth District, relatively near Vitu-Ghazi. The hedges were trimmed and well-kept, and small flower-boxes were perched on the low walls surrounding the houses.

Ral Zarek looked out of place in the Selesnyan area, wearing a long red-and-blue coat with edges that nearly brushed the ground, the gauntlet on his right arm sparking erratically. He appeared to have dragged a comb through his hair, but possibly gotten bored halfway through—either that or he'd had a run-in with an electrical outlet after having done so.

Jace, himself, not without a pang, had traded his usual outfit for a much simpler one, just a well-made soft brown shirt and trousers. Unfortunately, he'd purchased them at a point when he hadn't lost so much weight, and they hung loose on his now-skinny frame. He had left his cloak neatly folded up and locked in his desk, hoping that he would be less visible that way. Though Lavinia had not quite forbidden him from going out, he suspected she would be less than pleased to find he had a—dinner appointment—with the man he had vanished with for nearly a week.

It still felt strange to be taking someone out to dinner. He didn't think he'd done so since he was with Liliana. Not to mention he hadn't exactly been in a position of importance at the time. He kept wondering what the Rakdos gossipers would say about this if they found out.

Rounding the corner, he and Ral arrived at the place that he had remembered from some time ago. Jace thought Emmara had introduced him to it originally. He wasn't entirely sure why he'd picked it, apart from wanting somewhere vaguely neutral in terms of the Izzet and the Azorius, and preferably as far away from the Rakdos as possible. After a quick glance to the side at Ral, Jace increased his pace and approached the young elf standing outside to seat the patrons.

"Good evening," he said. "Table for two, please."

She smiled at him and nodded. "Coming early to avoid the rush?" she asked, without really appearing to expect an answer. "Please follow me."

She led the two of them to a sheltered alcove tucked away by the side of the building. There were flowering vines climbing on the wall around the table, which was tucked back away from the main area of the restaurant. The elf who had led them in handed them menus written in careful calligraphy on heavy paper. Jace took refuge in his for a moment, rather thankfully. He hadn't expected to feel quite so frustratingly vulnerable. He remembered feeling giddy and elated when he took Liliana out, as if the world were spinning on the tips of his fingers, but he didn't feel that way now. Instead, nerves were tugging oddly at his stomach. Which was stupid, since this wasn't even a date.

He stared down at the menu without seeing it for several minutes, before looking up to catch Ral's interested gaze, which sent him embarrassedly retreating back into the menu again immediately.

"What made you think of this place?" Ral asked. "Ever been here before?"

"Yes," Jace said automatically. "Not for a while, though. I haven't been able to afford it."

"How did you make a living before becoming the Guildpact?" Ral asked. "You've been guildless all your life, haven't you?" It was almost an insult, Jace could tell, but beyond the sting of the words, there was real curiosity in Zarek's tone.

"Yeah," Jace admitted. "I worked as a scribe for a while."

"You couldn't possibly have afforded this on a scribe's pay," Ral scoffed. "I've had to use them to transcribe equations before. They don't earn much."

"Yes, well, I wasn't always a scribe," Jace said, scratching his nose awkwardly.

Ral leaned forward, clearly interested. "So what happened?"

Shifting in his chair, Jace reached for his water, then sighed in defeat. "I—er—stopped thinking that blackmail was an acceptable method of earning a living," he said. He didn't feel like discussing his time with the Infinite Consortium right now.

Ral, who had been taking a sip from his glass, choked, spitting water all across the table. "What?" he said. "You're joking."

"In my defense, I was sixteen," Jace responded woodenly. "And it paid well."

"I suppose it would be absurdly easy to earn a living that way as a mind mage," Ral said meditatively. "Boring as sin, but—"

"It wasn't that boring." Jace found himself bristling at this far more than he would have bristled at an insult to his youthful ethics. "I've always looked for puzzles in my free time more than in my job anyway. The Implicit Maze started as a hobby, you know."

The waiter arrived at that point, and the conversation halted while they ordered food and a bottle of something Jace suspected was going to be strong, on Ral's smirking suggestion.

"So, Jace," Ral said as the waiter departed with their order. "What exactly prompted you to ask me out to dinner? You don't strike me as the type to martyr yourself for a debt. Not sure what gives me that idea. Though perhaps that blackmailing you were talking about…"

"Do I need an ulterior motive to ask you out to dinner?"

"Do you have one?"

Groaning, Jace leaned back in his chair. "You asked me first!"

"Well, I didn't expect you to agree."

The conversation paused for the arrival of their wine, which came in an unmarked glass bottle with a fluted neck. Their waiter uncorked it and quietly poured first Jace's glass, then Ral's, before leaving again.

"Got any good gossip from the blackmail years?" Ral asked as Jace took a sip. He'd been right; it was strong. Almost misleadingly so—a soft, fruity flavor burst onto his tongue at first, only followed a moment or two after he'd swallowed by the burning sensation he had expected.

"Good…what?" he echoed, Ral's words finally percolating into his head. At one point, Jace thought, he'd had a strong head for alcohol, but he hadn't had anything to drink in some time, and he wasn't sure how much tolerance he'd retained.

"You must have something," the Izzet mage grinned. "When was this? Can't have been that long ago."

"Seven or eight years?" Jace suggested. "No, gods, closer to ten. Fuck."

"So you're twenty-six," Ral said. "Good to know."

"Well, that's what I'd guess," Jace hedged.

"Oh, right. The mysterious mind mage whose mysterious past is mysteriously hidden from everyone, including himself. Tell me, Jace, did you do that to yourself?"

"How would I know?" Jace retorted, then paused. "Well, I never heard any gossip about you. I didn't know you even existed until the Implicit Maze."

"Pity," Ral sniffed. "But what about the rest of the Izzet? If you lived anywhere near the Tenth, you must have had some kind of interaction with the League."

"This may shock you, Ral, but—" Jace paused as Ral started sniggering. "Pun not intended." The sniggering continued. Jace sighed and continued speaking. "The Izzet do not actually, as a group, have a great deal of money that they are willing to lay their hands on quickly."

"Okay, admittedly most of us prefer having hands," Ral admitted. "But seriously. Don't you have any stories?"

"Um…" Jace dredged his way through his own memories and finally managed to pull up something relevant. "Actually, yeah. I think I saw his name recently, too. Bori Andon? Wasn't he the person who failed to sign your request forms properly?"

Ral nodded. "You knew him?"

"Um," said Jace. " 'Knew' is a strong word. I may have been somewhat responsible for the failure of his second marriage."

There was a pause. "That was you?" Ral snorted into his wine-glass. "Krokt, I remember that. Hell, I think I remember your letters. We all read them—Bori was one of the senior mages and I'd just joined up a year or two before. He was an asshole." Ral chuckled. "Still is. An incompetent asshole. There were five of us junior mages working for him—me, Maree, Prax, Cob, and fuck. Alena, I think? We hated him."

"You…remember my letters?" Jace echoed.

"Sure. I mean, he was careful with them, but we'd figured out how to get into his desk. If we hadn't, he'd probably have gotten us killed. Had a bad habit of sending us into disputed territory without warning us in advance." Ral frowned. "Pretty sure I still have the scar where an undercity troll tried to take a bite out of my leg."

The conversation paused again for a moment as the waiter arrived with their dinner. Jace discovered that, for the first time in several weeks, he was extremely hungry, and the steak and dumplings was a welcome change of pace from his usual sandwich snatched hastily in between signing documents and meeting with unhappy guildmages.

In between bites, Jace studied Ral, trying not to look as if he was doing so. The Izzet mage ate with an air of casual unconcern, apparently paying little attention to his surroundings. He was staring vaguely at something off in the distance and had failed to notice that one of his long sleeves was being repeatedly dragged through his soup. Jace had to smother a smile and, once again, resist the very tempting urge to peer into his companion's mind. What was Ral thinking?

Since the failure of his romantic aspirations with Emmara, Jace hadn't really thought much about the subject. He'd been too busy with his new status as the Guildpact to bother much. And perhaps he had been put off by the knowledge that almost any romantic connection he could forge would suffer from the same problems as those he had experienced with Emmara. He was a planeswalker, and, even if he never left Ravnica, there would be an insurmountable gulf between him and one of the planebound. Perhaps he'd taken to heart some of the things Ral himself had said during the Implicit Maze.

But Ral Zarek was a planeswalker. Ral would understand all the things that Jace wouldn't be able to tell anyone else. The moments of hesitation when he forgot, for a moment, what the currency was, one of the local customs. The moments of waking up dazed and disoriented as he struggled to make sure he knew where he was. The feeling—or non-feeling—of the Blind Eternities. It was just as the young leonin on Theros had said. They were—alike, in a way. They understood something that no one else did.

Jace shook his head and turned back to his dinner. What was he thinking? This—wasn't a date, was it? Not really. It was just—a dinner. He owed Ral, and it had amused him to take the man up on his first, hurried suggestion for paying him back. Jace fully intended to come up with a better thank-you at some point, probably involving redirecting some nice lab equipment in Ral's general direction. It was just a dinner, he repeated to himself. So why did he keep glancing up at Ral and feeling that sudden flip of his stomach as his eyes traced down the movements of Ral's muscular arm?

"We read them out loud," Ral said abruptly.

"What?" said Jace, caught off-guard, before realizing what Ral meant. When he did, he dropped his fork. "You read them out loud?"

"We thought they were hilarious!" Ral laughed into his soup. "They were always trying to sound vaguely menacing but they came across more like—hm—" He paused.

"A sixteen-year-old trying to sound vaguely menacing?" Jace laughed ruefully. "Still, it worked." Not that he was proud of it. But an odd feeling of nostalgia blossomed in his chest regardless.

"It worked because you had the information, not because you had a clue what you were doing."

"Well, at least you and your labmates got some fun out of them."

"Mmm," grinned Ral. "Did we ever. I take it you didn't get any money from him, though?"

Jace flushed guiltily. "Well. Not much, certainly."

"He tried pawning some of my equipment," Ral said reflectively.

"How did that go for him?" Jace asked.

Ral grinned, and lightning crackled down his gauntlet from his elbow to his fingertips. "About as well as you'd expect."

As the evening wore on, the conversation turned toward inconsequentials. Neither Ral nor Jace brought up their sojourn to the other plane, though there were a few moments that Jace suspected that his companion was thinking about it. Once, when Jace started laughing halfway through a drink of wine and choked, Ral was out of his chair in half an instant and around the table. He raised his hand to slap Jace on the back, paused, and dithered as Jace waved a hand at him and gasped for breath. As soon as the coughing fit had subsided, Ral bent over and peered into Jace's face.

"I'm fine," Jace said. "I just tried to drink and breathe at the same time."

"Well, that's stupid," Ral said, and Jace could smell the alcohol on his breath, but for some reason, he was more preoccupied with the fact that he could feel Ral's breath warm on his mouth. "Stop being stupid."

"Sorry," Jace managed. It was probably the alcohol that was making his face feel so hot.

"Excuse me," said the waiter. "Are you in the mood for dessert?"

Ral hastily made his way back to his seat, and he and Jace looked at each other. Finally, regretfully, Jace shook his head. His stomach would probably rebel if he tried to shove another bite into it, and he didn't feel like vomiting in front of Ral. "Can we just get the check, please?" He reached for his wallet and realized, to his irritation, that he'd left it in the pocket of his everyday trousers. "Actually, can you just send the bill to my office?" he asked, mildly frustrated.

"Your…office?" repeated the waiter, in a vaguely confused tone of voice.

Jace looked up. There was no recognition in the calm, green eyes that confronted him. "Yes, I'm the Living…Guildpact…" he trailed off. His papers were also in the pocket of his other trousers. He had spent so long in the ceremonial role that it hadn't occurred to him that anyone on Ravnica would fail to recognize him.

Glancing across to Ral, he saw the Izzet mage frowning as he patted down his own clothes, then shrugging and looking back at him, palms up and empty. The message was pretty clear. You were supposed to pay for dinner.

Technically, Jace supposed, the worst the restaurant owner was likely to do was summon the Azorius. Which meant that Lavinia would find out that he had snuck out of his perfectly safe quarters to go halfway across the city for the purposes of a da—a dinner. A small part of Jace noted that the amount of panic this thought stirred up was a complete overreaction. The rest of Jace responded by throwing up an invisibility spell and overlaying an illusion of himself and Ral, while the real Jace leaped out of his chair, grabbed Ral's hand, and bolted.

It was probably a testament to the number of terrible things that had happened to them in the past few days that they made it two blocks away from the restaurant before Ral slowed down, dragging Jace to a halt with him, and said, "What exactly was that about? You know, if you didn't want to pay, there are easier ways to avoid it."

As soon as he stopped running, Jace found himself gasping for breath, and he leaned sideways against the wall, chest heaving. "Oh Krokt," he said miserably. "Fuck. I'll need to pay them back. Fuck."

"Is there a reason that you, the extremely powerful mind mage, didn't just go into the waiter's head and convince them of the actually true fact that you are Jace Beleren, the Living Guildpact?" Ral asked.

Jace looked up at him and opened his mouth to retort, then shut it again. "Uh," he said, then straightened up and put a hand to his forehead. "Shit."

Ral started to smirk, but the smirk turned into a grin, and a moment later, he was leaning back against the wall, laughing so hard he could barely stand. He opened his mouth, apparently to speak, but all that came out was more laughter. After a moment, Jace started laughing as well. "I never claimed not to be forgetful," he managed between gasps.

"Guess I'd better walk you home, then," Ral smirked. "We wouldn't want you getting lost."

Jace looked down to see that, somehow, they were still holding hands. Well, fuck. So much for "not a date." He sighed, but didn't take his hand away as they began to move in the direction of his office. Ral's hand tightened for an instant in his, but the lightning mage didn't let go either.

They walked in somewhat companionable silence down a number of twisting streets until Ral said, "I did say I'd walk you home, Beleren, and while I know you enjoy working long hours, perhaps something of a break is in order."

Jace paused for half a heartbeat, then shrugged. If Ral weren't completely trustworthy, he could easily have left him to die on the other plane. And it wasn't as if he'd see something he shouldn't. "My apartment is connected to my office." It was on the tip of his tongue to invite Ral up for coffee, but he wasn't quite ready to take that step. "I'll let you see it sometime."

"How generous," drawled Ral. "I'm sure your living quarters are—"

"—covered in artifacts from various different planes, whose functions are quite mysterious? That no one else on Ravnica has ever seen, much less touched?"

There was a speculative pause. "All right, you've got me, I'm interested."

"Good," said Jace, a sudden surge of warmth pooling in his stomach. "I—had a lot of fun tonight, and I'd—well—like to do it again sometime."

Ral was two or three inches taller than he was—most people, Jace felt, were two or three inches taller than he was—so he had to look up slightly as he pressed a quick kiss onto the corner of Ral's mouth. Not quite daring to look back and see how Ral had taken it, he immediately started to hurry away down the sidewalk, warmth blooming in his cheeks and adrenaline surging in his stomach

"Hey, Jace—" Ral's words and hand on his shoulder stopped him before he got more than two steps. "Hold still," the Izzet mage said, and Jace froze instinctively, confused and slightly alarmed. Ral's hand on his shoulder pulled and twisted, and he overbalanced and fell backwards, only to land securely in the crook of Ral's other arm, staring up in surprise at the lightning mage's grinning face.

"If you're going to kiss someone," Ral said. "Do it properly, Beleren."

Jace had less than a second to react, and then Ral was kissing him hard, lips moving roughly against his own. The stubble on Ral's chin scratched his, which was a new experience. Really, everything about tonight was a new experience, Jace thought hazily, before the feeling of Ral's lips stole the last of his ability to think. Ral's tongue slid across his lower lip, and his hands tangled in Ral's hair, coarse and sparking with tingling pinpricks of electricity. Ozone and salt burst across Jace's tongue as his lips parted and Ral's tongue lathed briefly through his mouth before withdrawing. Ral nipped briefly at his bottom lip, then set him back on his feet, but Jace's knees buckled, and he had to clutch at Ral's shoulder and lean forward to steady himself. A solid hand under his elbow held him securely.

Jace swallowed several times. "Right," he managed. "I'll remember that in future."

Ral was looking extremely smug. "Anyway," he said. "Have a good evening, Beleren."

Stepping back, Jace took a deep breath, trying to slow his racing heart. "You know," he said, before turning to leave for a second time, "you can call me Jace."