#scribbings

But as Angus spends more time at the Bureau, he begins to notice things.

He notices the way that Taako never seems to let the umbrastaff stray far from his reach, though he doesn't seem to do it consciously.

He notices the way the Director looks at the Reclaimers sometimes, with such sorrow and longing in her eyes that it hits Angus somewhere deep in the chest, reminds him of the way he felt the year his parents died, when all he could feel was the hole in the world where they used to be.

He notices the growing urgency in the way the Director talks about the relics, the way she stares at the sky at night sometimes when most of the base is asleep, like she's counting the stars.

He notices all these things, but he doesn't say anything, because he doesn't know what any of it means yet.

He's sure he'll get there in the end. He's good at patterns, after all. He files them away in his mind, building the patterns piece by piece, and he says nothing.

Then he has his magic lesson with Taako, and all the patterns he has been building in his head shift.

When the Director came into the dining hall that day and stopped dead at the sight of the letters on the wall, at first he thought she was just horrified at the violence of it, mystified as he and Taako was at what L-U-P might mean. But then she kept staring, and the way her face changed the longer she looked at those letters made him wonder if maybe there was more to it than just dismay at property damage.

By the time she left, stammering an answer to his question in a flustered way he'd never expect from her, Angus's mind was spinning with new questions.

He has always trusted the Director implicitly, believed everything she told them about the relics and the Bureau's mission. He is too young to remember anything about the Relic Wars, but from the stories the others at the Bureau have told him, they were just as awful as the Director says they were.

But he has seen the way that she looks at Taako and Merle and Magnus, and he has seen her growing anxiety over the search for the relics, and he saw, today, how shaken she was by the word that Taako's umbrella wrote on the wall.