A/N: In which Jace and Ral go on a date, Jace has a panic attack, and everyone has Feelings.

Chapter Fifteen

Jace found himself pacing back and forth outside his apartment. He didn't know if Ral was still in there, or if the Izzet mage had headed off to work on another project or do whatever else it was he did with his time. Report to the dragon. Fill out paperwork requests for equipment. That sort of thing.

You need to go in, Jace told himself firmly. His brain was throwing up random things Ral could be doing to avoid thinking about the actual subject at hand, which was that, for the second time in a month, he had a date with Ral Zarek.

Why should that make him nervous? Jace's palms were slippery with sweat, and he still hadn't convinced himself he wanted to go back into his apartment. For Krokt's sake, he'd been spending practically every free moment he had with Ral for the past few weeks, and this morning and the night before that, they had—a shiver that was half nerves, half lust passed down his spine. The point was that he knew that the two of them got along well. He enjoyed spending time with Ral.

Maybe that was the problem, Jace thought, tugging nervously at the hem of his cloak. He enjoyed it a little too much. It wasn't that the enjoyment was a bad thing, it was that whenever he enjoyed spending time with someone this much, bad things seemed to happen. He shook his head. He was overthinking this.

Taking one last, deep breath, he carefully completed the spell required to gain access to his apartment, and pushed the door open. Stepping inside, he could still smell a vague hint of burning, but there was a definite sense of emptiness pervading the apartment. Jace sighed, half with relief, half with disappointment, and headed toward the other side of his apartment.

He was about to take his cloak off when he caught sight of the teleportal—or what was left of it. It had been pulled halfway out of the wall, the tangle of wires entirely rearranged. "Oh goddammit," Jace said tiredly, heading over to it. Inspecting it carefully, he was slightly relieved to see that the wiring he had installed himself was intact, so that he should still be able to illuse through it and make certain he wasn't going to step into a volcano or something if he stepped through. Unlikely, though. The teleportal was, after all, Izzet technology. He should have known better than to leave it alone with an Izzet mage.

Sighing in irritation, Jace peered through the teleportal, gave the room a quick visual sweep, and then stepped through. "You know," he said, "this was installed to allow me to cover significantly more ground than just the Tenth District."

"Oh, hi," Ral said, looking up from a sort of drift of papers across his desk. "Wow, is it that late already? Sorry, meant to come back and recalibrate the teleportal, but I guess I got distracted. Fucking dragon."

"What happened?" Jace asked, leaning against the wall.

"The Firemind decided to pop his head in. Wanted to know how the flux project was going. I had to explain while attempting not to mention your identity."

"I do appreciate that."

"Yeah, well, it's not exactly altruistic. I don't need the lizard leaning on me to use my connections with you." There was an unspoken 'whatever those are' hanging in the air, and Jace was tempted to try and respond to it, but the nerves cut him off again, sending his stomach up into his throat. He sighed in irritation. Ral continued speaking. "And then Maree showed up and chewed me out for telling Niv about her project. Wanted to know how he found out. And I just—how does that fat salamander find anything out?" Ral ended with a growl and put his head down on the desk with a loud thud.

This was something Jace could handle. A mix of feelings rose in his chest, but he decided to ignore them in favor of action, for the time being at least. Crossing the room, he put his hands on Ral's shoulders. "You sound like someone who could use a distraction," he said. "How about that date?" Ral made a petulant noise, and Jace nuzzled into the back of his neck and began to massage his shoulders. "I imagine we could do something else a little later as well," he murmured into Ral's ear. The shoulders tightened beneath his hands, and Ral made an entirely different kind of noise.

Leaning back in the chair, the Izzet mage caught Jace's gaze. "We could skip the date," he said huskily.

Jace, suddenly catapulted back to the exciting morning, was tempted. But he also knew he would be annoyed at himself later if he let this opportunity slip by. "There's a plane I really think you'd like," he said.

Ral gave him a suspicious look. "You know I don't like leaving Ravnica," he said. "Besides, the last time we left, we were stranded for a week."

"And, fortunately, no one is trying to kill me this time," Jace pointed out.

Ral sighed heavily. "Must we, Guildpact?"

"Not if you don't want to," Jace said awkwardly, the knot in his stomach suddenly curling into tightness again. His eyes slid away from Ral's, and the Izzet mage sighed again, more theatrically this time.

"Oh, all right," he said. "Just for you, Jace."

"Do you think you can follow me?"

Ral cocked an eyebrow at him. "Yeah, probably. It's not as if I haven't done it before."

"You probably remember that better than I do," Jace pointed out. "In any case, this plane isn't—far." An odd thing to say, for a journey that had no length, but it was a simple route, one that Jace had taken several times, and always from Ravnica.

Ral gave him an intrigued look. "You know, we really need to compare notes," he said. "I don't usually describe the Eternities in terms of distance in my head, but when you say that, it makes sense."

"I thought you didn't like planeswalking," Jace teased, holding out his hand.

"I like knowing things, though," Ral replied, not quite rising to the bait. His eyes had turned very bright, and he took Jace's hand quickly and tightly.

"I've often wondered if it was possible to come up with any real theories about the Blind Eternities," Jace mused, as he began to slowly prepare himself for the planeswalk.

"It would certainly help to have some kind of point of reference," Ral said, one hand tapping at his bottom lip. "I mean, two points of data is pretty worthless, but on the other hand two points of view does establish a baseline, so you could at least trust your own observations." He stretched across the desk, picking up a piece of paper. "You'd need to do something completely new with the mana equations, of course, the boundary conditions simply wouldn't hold, and I think you'd need integrate Marav's sum out to infinity…"

The ground seemed to fall away as the Eternities enveloped them both, Jace not without the sudden sensation of the bottom dropping out of his stomach. He shouldn't have been able to planeswalk this easily, but somehow the walls of the world had simply melted away.

Ups and downs pulled at him from every direction, the flare of the mana-currents bright and cold against him. In one hand, he held raw aether; in the other, he held the storm, crackling and beating against his palm. He tried to turn his head, but the Eternities refused to cooperate, as they often did, and he was forced to simply hold tight and will himself toward his destination. The storm writhed and surged, crackling up his fingers and twining through his wrist, arm, and chest, caressing the heartbeat in his ears.

His head tilted back; amid the raw, boiling chaos of the Eternities, the storm was its own chaos, an asynchronous repeated pattern that had no beginning and no end. He let it swarm and sing inside his ears, even as his feet traced out the dizzy dance that would take them safely through the spinning unreality and back—

They dropped again, and Jace wondered why he always managed to miss the ground, in the instant before he landed with a squelch in knee-deep mud. He staggered backwards, trying to regain his balance, and an arm slid underneath his back and caught him. Ral set him back on his feet and then gave him a little pat on his lower back. Jace wasn't sure if it had been intentional or just an instinctual thing, but it gave him an odd sense of being cared for. It was—nice.

"Thanks," he said awkwardly.

"So," said Ral, ignoring the thanks in favor of looking around. "Nice swamp you've brought me to."

"Oh, goddammit," Jace said tiredly. Of all the places on this plane to have landed on, he had to hit a swamp. What a fantastic way to start off their date. "Well, I doubt it's very large," he said, with forced cheerfulness, glancing up at the sky. The sun was beating down relentlessly, and Jace's already-sinking heart sank even further. He could count on one hand the number of days he had been here that the sky hadn't been covered with dark purple clouds.

"Sooo," Ral said again. "Why exactly did you want me to see a swamp, Jace?"

"Just. Let's just leave the swamp, okay?"

"Well, we could go back to Ravnica—"

Jace glared at him, took a deep breath to quiet the little screaming voice in his head, and said, "Give it a few minutes, okay?"

They started walking. The air was heavy with moisture, to the point that it was almost difficult for Jace to breathe, something else he hadn't experienced on this plane before, though he supposed it made sense for the humidity levels to be high in a place where thunderstorms were nigh-constant. After less than thirty seconds, small swarms of biting insects descended. Jace found himself cursing under his breath and trying to come up with some kind of spell that would run them off, but nothing immediately came to mind. Somehow, he suspected his usual summons wouldn't be very good at dealing with mosquitos.

Ral glanced over at him, then reached for his belt. "Good thing I didn't take this off," he said, pulling off something that looked like a lantern, but had wires running across it in every conceivable location.

"What is that?" Jace asked.

Lightning ran like water along the gauntlet into the object Ral was holding, and something in the center ignited, burning with a clear, white flame. The outside crackled with electricity. The small insects, abandoning their pursuit of the two planeswalkers, dove toward the light, and a moment later there were a number of small, pathetic zapping noises. Ral smirked. "Traipsing through one swamp getting eaten alive was enough for me," he said.

"What?" Jace asked.

"Oh, right, you were unconscious, weren't you? Let me explain to you something about the trouble I had to go through to find you on the Plane of Cats and Gods."

Having no good response to that, Jace continued slogging, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He tried desperately to come up with some kind of topic of conversation, but his mind was frustratingly blank, as blank as the infuriatingly clear sky above them. After another few minutes, Ral spoke again. "Not to be picky or anything, but did you have anything planned for this date other than slogging through a swamp in the middle of nowhere? You may not have realized this, but I am not actually much of an outdoors person."

"Neither am I," Jace said irritably. "This swamp wasn't here last time."

"It appeared just to spite you?"

"Yes!" Jace ran his hand through his hair, then sighed. "No. Obviously not. But this is definitely the worst landing I've ever had here. Usually I'm near one of their villages." He paused. "I'm sorry. I'm really—I thought this would be nice."

"Why this plane, anyway?" Ral asked, apparently ignoring the apology.

Jace looked up at the sky, willing clouds to appear, but they steadfastly refused to do so. He sighed, thankful that at least he had put a mud-repellant spell on his cloak after the numerous times it had been made nearly unsalvageable. Then he looked around. The cloak might be salvageable, but the date was not. He bowed his head in defeat. "It's usually not sunny," he said. "In fact, I've only seen it not thundering once before, and I know what you're like about storms, so…" he trailed off.

To his surprise, Ral chuckled. "That was—thoughtful," he said.

"Thoughtful?" Jace echoed in some surprise.

Fiddling with his belt, Ral shrugged. "Yeah. Maybe—we could come back some time? Just because we were unlucky once doesn't mean we'll be unlucky again."

"I am so sorry," Jace blurted. "This whole thing is a disaster, I should just have let you stay on Ravnica, and—"

"Oh, shut up," said Ral, but his voice was kind. "Don't make a fuss, Jace. I needed to test the bug zapper anyway."

Jace glanced down at himself, at the stains of mud on his trousers, and his water-filled boots, and had to laugh. "I'm a mess."

Ral's hand slipped beneath his chin, cupping his face and turning it upward. "Yeah, you are," he agreed. "So, why don't we go back to Ravnica, get some shitty street food, and fuck our brains out?" His voice was light, but his hand was trembling slightly, and Jace realized suddenly that Ral was nervous as well.

"Yeah," he agreed. "And discuss theories of mana conduction in the Blind Eternities."

"Sounds like a plan. Well, come on then."

It took longer this time for Jace to prepare and reach for the Eternities, but it wasn't difficult. The journey back was even less eventful than the one the other way had been, and this time they actually landed on the ground, not far from Nivix. The sun was low in the sky by now—odd how time sometimes ran differently between planes—and the streets were changing from day business to evening, lights winking on all over the city. The shouts of the vendors now proclaimed goods of a slightly different nature, and the hot, greasy smell of sizzling food pervaded the air around them.

"So what are you in the mood for?" Ral asked. "Shitty knedliki, shitty topinki, or shitty polevka?"

"Yes," Jace said absentmindedly, then paused. "Oh. Sorry. Let's do knedliki, it's probably the easiest."

They waited in line at the nearest vendor, and Jace found himself staring dreamily at the line of lights along the rooftops in the distance. The smell of fried knedliki wafted to his nostrils, as well as the smell of sweat from the close-packed bodies around him. The murmur of Ravnican life surrounded him, and he felt connected to it—not in a bullshit Selesnyan way, just a sudden sense of home and rightness. And yet, for once, the planeswalk hadn't felt so oppressive. Instead of noticing the wrongness of the other world, he noticed the rightness of his own. It was—

Jace shook his head in consternation. Those weren't his thoughts. He looked over at Ral, who was also staring vaguely into the distance. He hadn't meant to intrude and wasn't certain how it had happened. Maybe the Blind Eternities had broken down his mental barriers, or maybe he'd just been spending too much time with Ral in the past few days. Either way, he needed to be more careful—he couldn't just go waltzing into Ral's head whenever his concentration faltered.

Ral glanced over questioningly, and Jace felt heat rising to his face, shook his head slightly, and looked away. Before he could embarrass himself further, they reached the front of the line, handed over a few zinos—thank god Jace actually had money on him this time—and came away with a basket full of the hot, fried dumplings, half of them filled with meat, half with thick, sweet paste.

As they crossed the street towards Nivix, there was a strange, heavy tension in the air, and as they paused for a moment to look at one another, brilliant lightning sparked across the sky, answered almost immediately by an angry rumble of thunder. Ral's eyes reflected the stormy sky, and Jace didn't know whether to step forward or backward. In the end, he stood dithering, and it was Ral who closed the gap between them, stooping slightly until they were nearly nose to nose. "Looks like we get that thunderstorm after all," he said with a sly grin, and Jace swallowed, a shiver running down his spine. "C'mon, let's go eat dinner and watch the show."

The fried dumplings were hot and greasy and delicious, and there was something very exciting about sprawling on the floor of Ral's lab with all the lights out, staring out at the tumultuous sky. Jace found himself sighing in lazy delight. All right, so the date hadn't gone exactly as he'd planned—but he'd enjoyed himself, and one sidelong glance at the rapt lightning mage beside him told him that Ral had as well.

As lightning spidered across the sky again, Jace popped the last of the knedliki into his mouth and scooted across the floor towards Ral. Tentatively, he laid his hand over the other man's. There was a pause, and then Ral turned towards him, lightning reflected in his eyes again. Jace had time for a soft intake of breath, and then Ral was kissing him hard, one forceful hand on Jace's back holding him close.

If the previous night had been tentative, and this morning heedless, this was—intense. Jace felt himself slowly but steadily tipping over, until he was on his back on the floor with Ral pressing down against him. The breath rose choked and fast in Jace's throat at the taste of ozone on his lips, and again that strange feeling was rising in his throat. Tears blurred his eyes, and he frantically tried to swipe them away, terrified that Ral would get the wrong idea.

His genius idea might have worked, if he hadn't managed to bash Ral in the side of the head with his arm. "Ow," Ral said, sitting up. "What the fuck, Jace?"

That damned tightness in his throat, welling up the way it had the night before. Out of fucking nowhere. Desperately, Jace tried to reach into his own head and turn off the feeling, but he couldn't get the focus for it.

"Mother of—" Ral cut off whatever he had been about to say. "What did I do?"

If he squinted his eyes shut very tightly, the tears stayed inside. "Nothing," Jace managed to get out through gritted teeth. "You didn't do anything. Just give me a minute."

There was a chilly silence. "Yeah, okay, sorry," Ral said in a flat voice. "I'll just go over—"

Eyes still tight shut, Jace reached up and grabbed his arm. "No. Just—" he sat up and found both hands balled into Ral's shirt front, which was embarrassing, but not embarrassing enough for him to let go. "—give me a minute."

There was another pause, a more considering one this time. Gingerly, Ral put a hand on Jace's shoulder. "Yeah, okay," he said again, animation returning to his voice. They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring out at the thunderous sky. The tightness in Jace's chest eased, his breathing deepened.

"All right, I've had a minute," he said, after a further pause to make sure that the strange feeling was entirely gone. "Now what were we doing?"

Ral gave him a strange look, but leaned forward with a leer. "I think," he breathed in Jace's face, "there was about to be a good ending to a good date."

This time when Ral pinned him to the floor, the only change in Jace's breathing was to allow the moan to escape his throat.

Jace woke shivering, the light touch of cloth around him not enough to cut away the chill. He sat up in confusion and had to struggle his way out of the constricting folds of his cloak. Managing that, he realized that he was naked, and the events of the previous evening came back in a rush. Well. That had been—enjoyable. He was going to have bruises soon, though. Maybe the floor hadn't been such a fantastic idea.

Drawing his cloak around him more tightly, Jace went searching for his lover and his clothes. The clothes were easy—they were still lying scattered around the base of the chair where Ral had dropped them. The lover was only slightly more difficult, primarily because his lamp appeared to have burnt out. Ral was slumped over the desk, having apparently fallen asleep while working on another experiment. Jace found himself smiling stupidly as he stared at Ral's face, illuminated by the glow of the instruments.

He hadn't expected this, whatever it was. Every twist and turn of the past few weeks had pushed them in this direction, but each one had been unexpected in its own unique way. It had been quite the ride, Jace thought, but well worth it. He stooped over Ral, brushing his dark hair back from his forehead, and pressed a kiss to his temple. The lightning mage mumbled in his sleep and shivered slightly. Jace shook his head. Of course Ral hadn't even bothered to put on a shirt. That might have taken three seconds away from whatever idea had dragged him back to the lab table in the first place.

Unfastening his cloak from around his shoulders, Jace carefully tucked it around Ral instead. He was thirsty and suspected he would need a glass of water before falling asleep again, which was mildly irritating, since it meant wandering around Nivix in the middle of the night. Well, never mind, he thought, as he pulled on his shirt and trousers. A simple illusion should be sufficient to keep his identity concealed if he happened to run into anyone.

Yawning, he headed out the door of Ral's lab into the bright corridor beyond and stood blinking for a moment at the sudden increase in light. As he turned away from the door, he nearly bumped into someone who had been standing near it. The Izzet scientist was short, and for a moment he thought she was a goblin, but as she looked up at him, his brain rearranged her features correctly, and he realized he was looking at a small human woman wearing an extendable lens of some kind over one eye.

"Oh," said Jace. "Um."

"Evening," the woman said. "Are you Zarek's new—uh—" Pause.

Jace felt his cheeks growing warm. "Yeah," he said hesitantly, after a moment. "I am Zarek's new 'uh'." Good thing he'd put up that illusion before leaving Ral's lab.

"He's said a lot about you."

"Has he?" Jace was suddenly concerned.

"You're guildless, right?" Her eyes were bright and intense. "You know, if you're really as good with the flux machine as he says, there could be a place in the League for you."

Jace was beginning to feel slightly trapped, but he tried to ignore it. "I'm, um, flattered," he said finally. "I'd rather not make a decision like that in the middle of the night, though. I just came out to get a glass of water."

"Follow me, I'll take you to a drinking fountain." She beckoned with one hand and took off determinedly down the hallway. Jace followed, slightly reluctant, but hoping that once he got the drink, she'd let him head back into Ral's lab. It had to be something like two in the morning. Why was anyone even up?

Jace shook his head. He was often up at two in the morning—why would he expect members of the notoriously unstable Izzet to have a reasonable bedtime?

"Here," the woman at his side said, stopping suddenly. She made a vaguely theatrical gesture to the side, and Jace's gaze automatically followed. There was a moment of confusion as he registered the empty darkness at the side of the passage—a doorway, not a drinking fountain—and then something hot and bright and electric made contact with his side. A brief buzzing pain swept through his body, and everything went black.

Maree stared down at Zarek's new boyfriend, whose illusions had vanished with his consciousness, taking in the thin, blue tattoos, the shirt and trousers decorated with curving white, eldritch runes. "Oh fuck," she said.