- this of course raises the interesting question – does taako or barry get the umbrastaff? i think barry wouldn’t be dumb enough to pick it up right after it blasted merle back, so taako gets it – but they discover during a fight that the umbrastaff is just as happy to be with barry and will roll to whomever is closest during a battle
- barry doesn’t know how to explain the loss in his chest except for what the coin tells him, but when magnus opens up enough to talk about julia, he knows exactly what he’s feeling
- kravitz finds barry weirdly familiar, even though barry swears up and down they’ve never met. luckily, kravitz can’t tell he’s a lich when he’s got a human body and even under zone of truth barry wouldn’t know he’s one himself
- aside from taako and davenport, barry has the biggest gaps in his memory – everything from the beginning of college onward is spotty
- he doesn’t really know what to do with angus or why the director let him onto the moonbase, but he flips through a couple of angus’s books so they can talk about them together. angus almost cries
- the coin warns him against wonderland, but barry isn’t about to let the others go alone. barry gives up mostly physical things. he loses his knives, his tolerance to alcohol, his sense of smell, his color vision, two toes, fifteen years, and he dislocates his shoulder and breaks a kneecap after a bad luck roll. strangely, it seems like edward and lydia don’t know what else to take from him.
- after lup comes back and after the big battle, barry tries to apologize for the way he looks – his hair is fully gray now and he walks with a limp. lup says, “if i could touch you, i would slap you,” but she’s the one who persuades kravitz that barry deserves a new body too. and when they step out the tanks… well, you know. they don’t let go.
@flygon-used-draco-meteor pointed out that if barry was the one who got thrown out of his body instead of magnus, he would just go lich form instead of being sucked into another plane and. holy shit yall
lucretia would have warned them against the red robes just in case lup was still out there or in case barry died. it’s shocking, really, once the umbrastaff has consumed edward and lydia is gone, to turn and look at the spectral form of the unassuming guy they all thought was a friend.
barry turns to them, the memories washing over him, and he struggles to stay in one piece. looking at them helps, although when he says, “do you trust me?” they flinch at his voice. merle lets out a slightly hysterical laugh. magnus shakes his head slowly.
taako narrows his eyes at him. taako, who barry had only just begun to understand before he remembered everything. taako, who still has blood on his cheek. “hang on, guys,” he says. he’s talking to magnus and merle, but he’s still looking at barry, and there’s suspicion in his face, but curiosity too. “i want to know what he has to say.”
and barry would smile if he could because – it’s a start.
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