Full Summary: Practicing Magic is punishable by death. Owning a MagicBook is punishable by death. Facilitating the practice of Magic is punishable by death. But it's not a choice for those who do. The MagicBooks choose you, and practicing becomes a compulsion. As more and more children and adolescents are indoctrinated into the world of Magic, they are pulled into a war that should not be theirs to fight. Will contain many characters and multiple pairings.

These Things We Do

Part 1: Roderich

"Gilbert!" Elizaveta called over the wall. She and Roderich had been waiting for their friend and fellow run-away for almost an hour now, and he was still on the other side. If he took any longer, their plan would fail and the three of them would be dragged back to their parents and beaten until their whole bodies were purple. "Gilbert! Are you there?"

There was a huff on the other side and she smiled. "Y-yeah," he panted. He sounded like he had been running for a while. "Stand back, I'm coming over!" Elizaveta and Roderich took a step back and not a second later a satchel flew over the stone and landed precisely where Roderich had been standing. The young aristocrat sharply inhaled and his eyes widened. The bag was followed a few moments later by the boy who owned it, landing gracefully on his feet.

"Thank God, we were getting worried you'd been caught," Elizaveta chastised, running her fingers through her newly cropped hair. Her chest was still flat so when she wore pants and her hair was short she looked like a little boy rather than a little girl. "Then we'd all be in the shit."

"Knee deep," Gilbert agreed. "And I almost was. I think my father is on to us, and he followed me around all morning. He cornered me in the library and I told him I was just nervous about exams next week. What a looser."

"Exams aren't for losers, Gilbert," Roderich said quietly, shaking his head. "They're for people who want to do something productive with their lives."

Gilbert scoffed. "Yeah, I'm a fighter, not a thinker. You of all people should know that by now." He winked. Roderich blushed.

"Anyway," Elizaveta continued, "We'd better get going. If we want to make it to the city line by nightfall we would have had to have left two hours ago." She tried to lift Gilbert's satchel and frowned. It was much heavier than she had thought it would be.

"What have you got in here, Gil, bricks?"

"Nah, just some food and a few books I filched from the library. I figured if there isn't anything interesting in them we could at least sell them for a pretty high price. They're all leather-bound." He took his bag from her and pulled himself to his full height, which was not all that impressive. He was two years younger than Elizaveta and three years younger than Roderich – who was the only of the group even having begun to go through puberty – and was therefore the smallest. "Now come on, let's go."

The hike through the woods was far from pleasant but not nearly as unbearable as the three had initially feared. They didn't run into any bears or wolves or wildcats, though the spiders were a force to be reckoned with and more than once Elizaveta had been forced to climb a tree to retrieve her youngest friend. Just as the sun set the city line came into view – a tall wooden fence with no door and no guards. They knew that traveling at night in the woods was dangerous and decided to finish off their journey the next morning. If they had not heard anyone following them thus far, they were not being followed.

They chose not to light a bonfire to cook with, Gilbert claiming to have brought freshly baked bread and spirits with him, not that spirits were all that tolerable at the tender ages of thirteen, twelve, and ten. If they wanted light later, they could make a torch. Gilbert emptied his bag on the floor, the books spilling out first, then a pair of flints and some dry wood, next three flasks of hard alcohol, and finally a large loaf of fresh looking bread. The trio licked their lips.

Elizaveta ripped the bread in two then stored half of it away for later. She broke what was left into three pieces and handed them out to her friends.

"This is good," Roderich observed as he stuffed his face, pushing his lop-sided glasses up his nose. "Who baked it?"

Gilbert preened. "I did. All by myself." He sounded so proud that neither of the other two had the heart to tell him that it left a rather bitter aftertaste.

After their makeshift meal was complete, Roderich bashed the flints together and lit a small stick aflame, so the three could check out the books Gilbert had stolen. Of the five, two were history books and one was an atlas. The young albino was happy to hear that he had grabbed the anthology of children's tales that his bedtime stories had once come from. But the last book was a mystery. It had a plain grey cover with no title and no author on the spine.

"I don't remember grabbing that one," Gilbert said ponderously as the eldest fingered the perfectly sharp edges. "I took the four books next to my father's armchair and I didn't stop after that until I was over the wall."

Elizaveta shrugged. "Maybe it was under them and you didn't notice you'd taken it."

"Believe me, Liz, I would have noticed."

Roderich blinked curiously at the book, stroking it as though it were alive. He pulled the tips of his fingers across the blank cover, leaving behind a strange gold shimmer. His brows drew together. Rubbing at the spot pulled away more and more of the gray until an entire symbol was revealed, gold, shining, and calling his name.

"Guys," he said softly, interrupting their conversation. "Look at this."

Gilbert's crimson orbs darted over the cover and he pulled back. "That definitely wasn't there a second ago. I know that wasn't there a second ago. Tell me that wasn't there a second ago."

"It wasn't," Roderich affirmed, rubbing his thumb over the newly revealed symbol. Elizaveta clamored over and hung off his shoulder, trying to get a closer look.

"What the hell is that?" She snapped, not recognizing the character as any language she'd ever seen before.

Gilbert shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. The only foreign language I know is Contemporary German and it uses the same alphabet."

Roderich frowned. The symbol was odd, certainly, but not foreign. It was almost familiar, in an unfamiliar sort of way. "I think it says my name," he mumbled to himself.

"What?" Elizaveta asked sharply, her hands on her hips though Roderich couldn't see them wile she stood behind him.

"I said, 'I think it says my name'," He repeated. He pointed to the top of the symbol, a soft, concave squiggle, and pulled it down over the hard edges of a horizontal line, trailing off into another convex hook. "Rod-er-ich." He sounded it out as he traced. Yes, it was definitely his name. He put his finger on the circle inside the convex hook and traced the broken circle in there as it pulled through the rest of the symbol on an angle. "Eld-stein."

"I don't see it." Elizaveta dismissed, moving back to her spot next to Gilbert. She pated Roderich on the head as she walked past him and he frowned at her.

"I kind of do," Gilbert said from over Roderich's shoulder. He put his own finger on the cover and Roderich flinched, as if he were touching his own flesh. "I can't explain it, but that part definitely says 'Roderich'."

The older boy gently took Gilbert's wrist and removed it from his book. He then turned it on its side so its spine was in his hand and ran his fingertips over the pages. With the movement of his hand, the book snapped open to a page somewhere near the beginning.

"Well, that…happened." Gilbert murmured, pushing himself closer to Roderich.

"Just the wind," Elizaveta dismissed, pulling out her pocket knife and whittling chip. She leaned against a tree and popped the tail end of a piece of grass in her mouth. "That book's useless, throw it back in the bag and we'll sell it when we run into a peddler."

"No," the boys responded simultaneously, garnering each other a strange look. Roderich shook it off and grabbed the small torch and held it up to the pages. There were more strange symbols on the pages and they were written so small it was difficult for the boy to see them, even with his glasses.

"I can't read those at all," Gilbert said, "Total gibberish." Roderich wondered if his young acquaintance would be able to read the words if he could see them properly. He thought glasses were for 'the stuck-up, educated, scholarly type' and constantly made fun of Roderich for his.

"I think I could read it with proper light," Roderich tried to bring the torch even closer without lighting the pages on fire. "Ah, there."

The squiggles, curves, and jagged edges were similar to those on the cover, but the shapes made sounds that he had never put together into words before. He squinted and bit his lip to be sure he was reading it right before repeating what the first line on the page said.

"Ecce meus libellus."

As soon as the words left his lips, the letters on the page lit up with a warm, red glow. A warm breeze swept up around him. The red light spread from the first sentence to the second to the third to the rest of the page and even onto and beyond the next page. The pages flipped themselves as the letters lit and pages followed. Before long, the entire book was aloud with the bright color. Something tickled at Roderich's wrist where he held the spine and when he looked down he almost threw the book into a tree. The letters were seeping off the page and crawling up his wrist, up his arm, up his neck. His arm jerked and the book should have flown off, but it was as if someone had glued it to his hand. He knew he should have been terrified, but he couldn't be. The experience was not scary, it was pleasant, as if he were being pumped full with all of the good of feelings he had ever experienced at once. "E-Elizaveta. Gilbert. What's going on?"

"Holy shit!" Elizaveta exclaimed, drawn from her whittling by the light, dropping her knife. "What did you do?" She got on her knees and looked as though she were contemplating crawling over and pulling the book off of him, but did not. Gilbert was still at Roderich's side, and he seemed to be just as oddly at ease and mystified by what was happening as he did.

"Nothing!" Roderich said as the color and the light faded, the symbols retracting from his skin and leaving him feeling cold and empty. Roderich snapped the book shut and flipped it over in his hands. The cover was now red, his name in the strange characters now black. When he moved his hand over the side with the pages face-up, it flipped open on its own to the page he had previously been on. Ecce meus libellus was now printed in red, whereas the rest of the symbols were black.

"Specks, look!" Gilbert pointed to the older boy's free hand. The same character printed on the cover of the book was there, big, bold, and black like a fresh tattoo. Roderich held his hand in front of his face and shrugged when he could make no sense of what had just happened. "Can I see the book?" the albino asked, holding out his hand. Roderich looked offended, closing the book and pressing it to his chest as if it were his baby.

"Holy shit, Roddy," Elizaveta said, "That's a MagicBook. A real live MagicBook."

The children had heard stories of the MagicBooks before, and how only a few chosen could read them, even fewer use them. The books chose a master to be their BookHolder, with whom it would mark and share all of its secrets. Roderich had known he was different, that was why he had agreed to leave his cushy aristocratic life, but he hadn't known exactly how different he was.

"I…I suppose it is." He said softly. A MagicBook. Had Mr. Bielschmidt known that such a powerful object was in his own library?

"Wow Roddy," Gilbert sighed, a contented smile creasing his features. "A MagicBook. Do you know what that means? It means you can do magic! Show me something! Come on!"

The albino was not the brightest boy but even he should know that Roderich hadn't been passed all of the knowledge in the book in that flashy display of light. Still, it couldn't hurt to try. He waved his hand over the cover of the book and it opened again, this time to a new page. The first line on the top was a single, simple symbol. He sounded it out. "Lucis." The page lit up again, this time not with a bright red glow but with warm yellow radiance, as though the sun itself were shining from it. As Roderich lost focus the light died down and he looked back at the word. It too was now in red.

"Wow," Gilbert exclaimed. "That's pretty amazing." For once, the complement sounded sincere.

"This is bad." Elizaveta said after a moment, rubbing her chin with her finger. "The MagicBooks are outlawed. If anyone finds out, we're all dead. For real."

It was true. The magic books were as illegal as murder, and even though it was impossible to opt out of bonding to a book, just owning a MagicBook was punishable by death.

For a moment, Roderich was afraid that Elizaveta would take Gilbert and leave him to his fate. But then, Gilbert broke the silence. "Well then, I guess we'll have to keep this between us. Find a nice quiet place where Specks can practice his magic without being killed and where I can learn swordsmanship and Lizzy can…be Lizzy without anyone telling us otherwise."

Roderich smiled. "Alright."

A/N: Hello, lovlies! I hereby present you with a break from my usual melancholy. Still fluffy, but whatever. This started off as a way to procrastinate X over Y but then took a path of its own. I've got two more chapters complete and another in the works, but in no way does this take precedence over X over Y, which I have been working my ass of on! I blame by slowness on Model UN which is a LIFE EATER! I should be working on my position paper for GerogaTech right now :P But yeah, this is basically a collection of one-shots in the same universe about children and young-adults who have some kind of connection to magic (not all of them are BookHolders). I know some of the premise is kind of cheesy and that this chapter was very weak (It was a procrastination tool I don't feel like re-writing) but it does get better. Please review and tell me what you think! And please please! If you are reading X over Y, vote on my poll! It will affect update frequency! Thank you and I hope you enjoyed.

Also, if there are any disgusting and blunt mistakes, please let me know! You might get something shiny!