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The Woods stand dense and sinister in the distance. Mist swirls around the trunks, leaving ribbons caught on the ever-bare twigs to stir lightly in the breeze. Moonlight catches on the fog and imprints on it ghastly touches of silver.
Something pulls.
The trees of the Woods never move. There are no animals here, not one sign of life but for the shifting of the fog and the gentle caress of the wind. From the top of Spiral Hill there can be no lone tree set apart from the mist’s embrace. The forest stands, united.
Something pulls.
The wind wafts over Spiral Hill, loosening tendrils of fog from the edge of the Woods. The graveyard stretched beyond quivers in its bed. If Neil listens carefully, he can hear the whispers even from here.
Mary used to talk about the Woods sometimes in her lab, when she thought Neil couldn’t hear her. But Neil listened. He always has.
The ghosts whine and whirl in the wind and the cypresses, ever-bare, moan to the mourners in their graves. But still the Woods are louder in Neil’s ears.
Something pulls.
Mary’s voice screams.
Neil stumbles back. He takes one last look at the Woods and hastily turns away, almost running on his way down the hill.
A translucent shape flutters right in front of him. He nearly rushes through it.
“What’s up, Josten?” A hollow voice echoes into the night. The spectre floats mere inches from Neil’s face, a sardonic grin gaping from ear to ear. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” His laughter fills the graveyard.
Neil grits his teeth. If he had a heart, it would be beating its way out of his chest right now. “Fuck off, Seth.”
Seth’s fleeting form flickers in and out of sight as he laughs, even louder still. Neil pushes through him towards the cemetery with a sigh. The fact that Seth doesn’t follow him further is a miracle.
The wall that surrounds the graveyard is low, and slipping between the twisted bars that crown it is a breeze. The existence of the wall is nothing more than a formality, anyway. Graveyards have walls. Halloween Town’s does too. Their actual function is of little importance. Stone and steel have never kept ghosts in.
The stone path slithers between the tombs, weaving nonsensical patterns on the hillocks. Neil knows its twists and turns with his eyes closed. He has stridden across this grotesque crowd of stones too many times to count - the leaning gargoyle next to Zero’s stele - the neighing horse and its howling master on their pillars - the praying slab of stone - the skulls and the crosses and the dates, all crooked and all timeworn. He knows them all. There is one of them, however, that he knows particularly well.
Its strange shape looms over the path and the nearby graves some way off of the gates, a miniature tower, at its top a head-like room looking up at the sky, the antenna like a hat on its scalp. The undertaker did an uncanny job of reproducing Mary’s lab. It’s a perfect replica of the one Neil still lives in, up on its solitary hill. Standing in front of it now, he thinks his mother would have liked it. After spending her whole life locked up in there and trying to keep him alongside her, it is only fitting that death not take her away from her tower.
A shadow eases out from the darkness pooling at the tomb’s foot and mews Neil out of his memories. He kneels down and King creeps closer, circling his legs as she purrs and rubs her ink-like fur against him. Neil coos at her and she headbutts his hand in greeting, yowling when he dares take his hand away. Neil chuckles and starts scratching her head, then the nape of her neck, until she’s purring louder than the wind.
A flutter of wings lands on top of Dr. Mary Finkelstein’s tomb. King jumps away from Neil’s hand, and hisses at the bat with all her might. In her surprise she left the shade’s cover, baring her skeletal form to the moon. The bat whips her long wings through the air, showing off their width. King yowls, arched back - and scampers off.
“Very mature,” Neil scolds the bat, rising up from the ground. He’s about to say more, but the sound of footsteps distracts him from the bully.
There, walking up the path with his hands nonchalantly shoved in his pants’ pockets, is Andrew.
Neil watches him walk. His hair catches the moonlight like spun gold in the night, eerily luminous for the graveyard’s palid landscape. The dark shade of his clothes slices him into floating parts of pale skin. The head attached to the neck, the arm cut at the sleeve and then again by the armbands that never let the forearms breathe. The eyes are fixed on Neil.
“Hey,” Neil says easily, once Andrew’s reached the tomb.
Andrew holds his gaze for a few seconds in acknowledgement, then turns to the bat. Sir waves her wings a few times before taking off and reclaiming her rightful place on Andrew’s shoulder.
“She scared King away.”
Andrew glances at the bat, and brings a hand up to scratch under her chin. “Good.”
Neil scoffs. “You’re worse than her,” he says, smile tugging at his lips. “You know, if you gave her some time, I’m sure she’d get used to the dog smell eventually.”
“Not a dog,” Andrew drones out, looking bored but for the slight twitch of his pointy ear. “You pulled one of your seams loose.”
Neil follows Andrew’s gaze down to his wrist, and pulls it up in front of him to see for himself. The thread was indeed pulled loose. Dead leaves poke out of his arm and his hand hangs on to the thread, slightly to the left.
“It must have caught on the bars,” Neil says, sending a look over his shoulder towards Spiral Hill.
Andrew frowns, but says nothing. He grabs Neil’s good wrist and pulls him away from his mother’s grave, towards a small nook close to the gate. It’s not the first time they sit here, on the two stumps by the bending tree. It’s a private place, or at least as private as any place in this town can be. In the land of spectres there isn’t much cause to visit the dead.
The stumps are close together, enough so that Andrew’s knees bump into Neil’s as he sits down. He doesn’t move them.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re ripping them on purpose.”
Neil scoffs. Andrew pulls his sewing kit out of his pocket and extends a hand. Neil diligently drops his damaged wrist into his palm. Warmth immediately starts to bloom under Andrew’s touch, making Neil smile. It’s not often that he gets to feel this. Living bodies produce heat like it’s as easy as breathing. The organs, the blood, the muscles - they all run hot.
Neil doesn’t.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you can feel it whenever I pull a seam.”
Andrew’s fingers tighten around his wrist. He presses the needle through the fabric and out, then again and again in a pattern so closely knit it will be a wonder if Neil can so much as rotate his wrist once he’s done.
“Andrew,” Neil calls. Andrew’s hands still. He looks up, his face a too-smooth mask of nothingness. “Is Nicky back already?”
Andrew’s jaw clenches, so slightly it might never have happened. “Yes.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Fetching you,” Andrew answers.
Neil wriggles the hand Andrew still holds in his, lightly enough that he doesn’t risk making Andrew drop the needle. “You’re stalling.”
Andrew stubbornly holds his gaze for a few seconds, then looks down.
“Andrew-”
“Don’t,” Andrew warns him.
Neil sighs, and lets Andrew stitch him up in silence.
It’s easy to get lost in the way Andrew sews. His fingers wield the needle deftly, repeatedly, as precise as a metronome. The patterns left behind are as regular as the rest of Neil’s body isn’t: tight stitches, the shape of tiny crosses, trailing along every surface and holding the various pieces of fabric together as best they can. He doesn’t think there’s one seam left on his body that Andrew hasn’t fixed once.
Neil used to do it himself, after Mary died, had even done it a few times before when she wasn’t looking, but he’s never been very good at it. And there’d always come a time where he couldn’t, physically. He’s learnt to do much with one hand, but severed fingers (pieces of them, even, sometimes) remain a difficult conundrum. He still does it, occasionally, when Andrew isn’t around to help and he needs his limbs functional, but Andrew always ends up re-doing them as soon as he sets eyes upon the clumsy seam lines. Neil doesn’t mind.
Andrew loops the thread into a series of knots, then cuts the excess off with a claw. He keeps his eyes on the seam as Neil tests his wrist’s flexibility, meeting Neil’s eyes only long enough to confirm that nothing’s impeding the movements, and rises to his feet. Sir flies off his shoulder to guide the way to Nicky’s house, and Neil follows.
The face that greets them at the door is a happy one, pink cheeks and winking eye. Nicky ushers them in with excited words as the rest of the guests call out their welcomes in joyful clamor. It takes about one second for Nicky to press a glass filled with something sweet-smelling into Neil’s hand, and barely longer for Matt to grab a hold of him, engulfing him into one of his big hugs.
“It’s good to see you, buddy,” Matt tells him as he takes a step back, beaming brighter than the jack-o-lanterns on Main street. Out of the corner of his eye, Neil can see Andrew slipping by towards the back of the room, a drink in his hand.
“I saw you yesterday,” Neil points out, directing his attention back to Matt.
“And he’s been suffering ever since,” Dan chimes in, leaning a hand on Matt’s shoulder and looking up at him with a grin.
Matt shrugs. The light catches on the axe stuck in his head and Neil wonders, not for the first time, if it’s ever fallen down from up there. “Guilty as charged. But seriously, Neil, you should come over more often. You know you’re always welcome.”
That surprises a smile out of him. “I know,” he says, because he does. “It means a lot.”
Matt claps his shoulder, all smile, and they turn towards the rest of the group. Nicky’s standing in the middle of the room talking excitedly with his hands, no doubt regaling Kevin, Renee and Allison with all the details of his most recent trip to Valentine’s while Aaron stands to the side, feigning indifference but listening all the same. Neil settles next to Kevin, exchanging a nod in greeting, just as Renee asks after Erik.
Nicky’s smile takes on a dreamy air as he sighs. “Better than ever. He’s testing new chocolate recipes and he let me taste them all - some of them are down-right decadent. And I’m not saying that just because I’m biased,” he adds with a glare for Allison, who shrugs.
“All I’m saying is that if my boyfriend was a chef, I’d have brought some proof home by now,” she says, sharp teeth glistening in the dim light.
“Just you wait,” Nicky says and points his drink at her, un-winking eye narrowed, “next time I’m visiting, I’m bringing a whole box back just for you, and you’ll be sorry you ever doubted the best chocolate chef in the whole wide world.”
“I bet twenty knucklebones Allison won’t find them ‘elevated’ enough,” Neil hears Dan whisper into Matt’s ear, who grins and claps her hand. They squeezed right next to him into the loose circle.
When Dan catches him looking she wastes no time leaning closer, two sharp fangs pointing out of her shark-like smile. “You want in?”
Neil shakes his head. “I’m good.”
“Your loss,” she says, and shrugs.
Nicky’s launched into an animated debate about the merits of tangible versus intangible means of sustenance with Kevin and Allison when they turn their attention back to him. Dan immediately jumps in with a few nutrition facts regarding human food, which steers the discussion into another direction entirely.
Neil tries to keep up at first, but he can’t quite bring himself to care, and it doesn’t take long before his attention starts to wander. Kevin, too, has lost interest, and they only have to share a glance before stepping out of the circle together to join Renee on the couch. She left the conversation a short while before them and is talking with Andrew, who’s curled up on an armchair, nursing a drink. Renee acknowledges them with a smile and Andrew’s eyes trail after them lazily, but whatever discussion they’re having stays between them.
Neil tries the drink he was given earlier. It doesn't taste like much, but then again it rarely does. Kevin's bony frame is folded, more than seated, next to him, limbs like sticks and a head paler than the moon. He's finished his drink and is staring into the glass like it's got secrets to tell.
"Do you taste anything?" Neil asks. He waves his glass at Kevin, who takes it from him and tops it off.
"Yes," Kevin says, then frowns. "No. I don't know. Not like them." He tips his chin towards the group they just left. "Why?"
Neil shrugs.
"Can you?"
"Barely. Most of it just tastes like mud."
Kevin's cavernous eyes stare at him, incredulous. "Then why do you keep drinking it?"
"I never know what to do with my hands," Neil admits.
Kevin snorts. On the other side of the room, Matt claps his hand upon Nicky's shoulder, sending him toppling and laughing into Allison, who pushes him away with a tentacle stuck to his face. The incident leaves a handful of circular suction marks on both Nicky's cheek and his forehead. His smile is unaffected even as he loudly complains over the damage done to his beautiful skin, and how he'll have to wait for them to disappear before he can see Erik again, or he'll think that he's cheating. Everyone laughs.
"How long do you think he'll stay here?"
Kevin plops his chin into one bony hand. "At least a few months. It's Erik's turn to come over next time."
"Kevin," Neil huffs, then rolls his eyes when Kevin still doesn't seem to get it. "I meant in the long run."
"Oh," Kevin says. His posture sags and he turns to look at Nicky. "I don't know," he all but whispers. His eyes quickly flicker to Andrew, then away in the same breath. "But I don't think it will take long."
Andrew is still talking to Renee. He looks oddly vulnerable, folded up in the armchair as he is, body slack with yellow eyes almost half-closed. His head is leant sideways over his arm. Blond curls spill onto the dark cloth looking like wool. A huge painting of the three cousins looms behind him, their eyes shifting with every flicker of the shadows, making the real Andrew appear even smaller. Neil… wants to get closer, however absurd the urge. If Andrew would let him, he thinks he’d like to find out just how soft his hair is.
Maybe the drink he just tasted was potent enough to affect his brain. Neil flops backwards into the couch and stares at the ceiling, which was repainted pink a couple weeks ago. It’s a matter of months before Nicky moves out, of that he’s sure. If even Kevin noticed… Andrew must have, too. The signs are everywhere, whether Nicky’s aware or not, and there’s only so many photographs and Valentine’s cards Nicky can put up between the portraits he used to collect before running out of walls.
He throws a glance at Nicky, and finds him in the same spot he was before, involved in an animated discussion about Valentine’s Town with Aaron as he waves a brand new, bright red card in the air as he talks. The others listen, and comment, but it’s the two of them who have the most to tell. Aaron spent a week there a while ago, with his girlfriend, to celebrate some kind of milestone in their relationship. Neil only remembers because Andrew had spent more time as a wolf than not during their trip. Nicky had worried about him. Now, Neil thinks Nicky’s concern might have run deeper than it’d seem.
The quiet conversation on his right has died down. Movement draws his attention, and he watches as Andrew makes a beeline for the door, a cigarette between his lips. Neil shares a look with Renee, who only shrugs. The door closes behind Andrew in the same breath as Neil gets up.
The moon is grinning in the sky, fat and round as she casts yellowish light in the dark. There are no stars to be seen, but shredded ribbon-clouds roll across the sky and around its beaming form like ghosts. Neil sits on the porch next to Andrew and fills his lungs with the faint smell of smoke.
The sound of wings resonates in the night. The tip of the cigarette flares red. A flake of ash flutters down.
Andrew doesn’t look at Neil, but he holds his cigarette out to him. Neil takes a drag and savours the way it burns on the way down.
“Do you ever wonder why there are only seven doors?” he asks as he hands the cigarette back to Andrew.
“No,” Andrew answers. Smoke spills out of his nose. “Why would I?”
“Because it’s odd,” Neil insists. “Why those holidays, specifically?”
“I wasn’t aware there were others.”
“Of course there are.” Neil frowns. One of Andrew’s eyes is on him, pale as moonlight. Smoke hangs in the air. It’s so obvious, so evident - “How could there only be seven?”
Andrew shrugs. “There are many sevens. Hop-O’-My-Thumb, Snow White’s dwarves, the seven sins. It’s a lucky number.”
“Those are just symbols.”
One of Andrew’s eyebrows arcs up. “Just symbols? You live in Halloween Town. Do you really think the pumpkins are nothing more than gourds?” He says, gesturing at the Jack-o-lanterns sitting on the railing. “Symbols are essential everywhere, but especially here. They bring order to the chaos. Language itself is nothing more than a bunch of symbols strung together by the tongue that speaks it.”
“What kind of symbol is a pumpkin?”
Andrew takes a drag out of his cigarette. “How I manage to ever forget your idiocy is a mystery yet unsolved.”
Neil rolls his eyes. “So you keep reminding me.”
“The pumpkin is a head. It’s a vessel for the flame, which is the soul.” Andrew flicks his lighter on between his face and Neil’s. The flame is tripled in his eyes. After a second he turns it off and leans away to gesture at the jack-o-lanterns again. “The Jack-o-lantern is the light that guides you in the dark, but it is also the trap that mortals lay so that the souls of loved ones passed may stay awhile. When you lack a body, anything resembling one will do.”
Neil looks down at his hand, and feels Andrew’s eyes do the same. The fabric he’s made of stopped being fabric a long time ago, but it will never quite become skin. Even in Halloween Town, there’s no one quite like him. Even freaks and monsters have heartbeats.
When he looks up, Andrew meets his eyes with a pensive expression that makes Neil smile wryly. “Are you calling me a pumpkin?”
Something on Andrew’s face twitches, a flicker of emotion that’s gone in the same breath as it arrives. “You’re more doll than gourd.”
“And you’re more mutt than man,” Neil scoffs, smiling sharp. “What’s the symbolism behind that?”
Andrew bares his teeth at him.
The door opens behind them, making them both swivel backwards. Nicky stands there, awkwardly hopping from foot to foot, his happy pink winking face clashing with his body language in a way that can only mean one thing.
“Hey there, you two! I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he says grinning, with just enough cheer that it’s too much.
Neil rises up to his feet. “You’re not,” he says, and though he’s looking at Nicky, the rest is intended for Andrew. “I’ll let you two talk.”
Nicky offers him a smile that’s half-grateful, half-nervous, as he walks by. The only thing Neil hears before he closes the door behind him is Nicky’s voice saying “Nice night, huh?” with affected nonchalance.
The groups inside have changed. Dan and Matt are talking with Kevin next to the couch, while Renee and Allison stand close together by the drinks and Aaron leans against a wall with a somber look on his face, alone.
Neil opts to stay by the door himself, content to watch everyone from afar for a little while. Nothing in Halloween Town is ever well-lit, so it’s not like he can make out everyone’s exact expressions, or attempt to read on their lips, but having so many of them together like this in his field of vision is a rare and precious thing. It’s… reassuring, too. Not that there is any threat looming over them at the moment, but - Well, one can never be too careful.
They all look happy enough, with one exception.
With a sigh, Neil leaves his contemplation to join Aaron by the wall. Not exactly his first choice for company, but there are other priorities at play.
Aaron’s only reaction is to glance at him with thinly veiled contempt, and to down his glass right after that. Neil crosses his hands behind his back and leans against the wall.
“Did he tell you?” he asks.
Aaron throws another glance at him, then frowns into his now empty glass. “Yeah,” he says, reluctantly.
Aaron doesn’t look too happy about it. Neil supposes that’s not very surprising. “When is he leaving?”
Aaron scoffs, and turns to look at him this time. “Why do you care?”
Neil makes himself swallow the biting retort he actually wants to spew. “Nicky’s my friend,” he observes instead.
Aaron looks down again, voice turning bitter as he speaks. “Yeah, well. You sure have a weird way of showing it.”
Neil grits his teeth around a smile. “Are you going to leave too? Follow Katelyn home like a good dog and stay?”
Aaron fully turns towards him to glare, and Neil can see him struggling not to bare his teeth at him. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”
“That’s not an answer,” Neil points out.
Aaron’s fist clenches at his side and Neil thinks he might actually hit him, too, but it only lasts a second before he deflates, and returns to glaring daggers without any actual threat.
“Fuck off, ragdoll.”
Neil studies Aaron for a little longer, trying to decide whether pushing him might be worth it. In the end he figures that it’s not, and leaves. Either Aaron himself doesn’t know, or he’s already made his decision but is lying to himself about it. Kevin looks at him funny when he joins him, Dan and Matt on the couch, but he doesn’t ask. Neil is grateful for that, if nothing else.
He doesn’t really feel like conversing, though, so he just lets his friends’ bickering fade to the background as his gaze travels across the room. Nicky’s set up a whole church of candles in all sizes and shapes for the night, and they’ve been burning for long enough by now that the wax dripping from them has created abstract sculptures everywhere. Tormented faces look back from a few of them, and Neil thinks he can even make out a hand reaching out of one of the candelabra’s wax cascades.
Neil would never say it to Aaron’s face, but he’s not actually eager for him to leave. He knows Aaron wants to be with Katelyn, though, and the possibility that he would move out for her grows more tangible every day, especially now that Nicky’s officially leaving. He doesn’t think Aaron feels very attached to Halloween, not like the others - there’s something about him that resists. Still, it’s different than it is with Nicky, who’s been aching and aching to leave for as long as Neil has known him, but it’s… close, in a way that Neil can’t quite pin down. Something like a friction, right where Aaron’s supposed to fit.
He’s still mulling it over when Nicky comes back into the house, alone, and shoulders down. Neil is standing up and walking before he’s really thought about it. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices Renee moving in the same direction.
Nicky still has his happy face on when Neil reaches him, but his body language is louder than an alarm - he only ever sticks his hands in his front pockets when he’s anxious, and his head hangs from his neck like skeletons from a willow. He straightens it once he notices Neil coming towards him, but the smile he plasters on his face is a farce.
“Hey beautiful,” he greets Neil with forced cheer. “Are you enjoying the party?”
“What happened, Nicky?” Renee asks quietly.
Nicky’s gaze bounces off her like a rubber ball. “Nothing. I was just-”
Neil doesn’t let him finish. “He told Andrew that he’s leaving Halloween Town.”
It startles Nicky into looking at him, then at Renee as she lays a hand on his shoulder. “Oh, Nicky…”
Nicky’s whole body sags. He drops the smile, but the wink stays on. “He didn’t take it too well.”
“Are you okay?” Neil asks.
Nicky shrugs, a jerky, nervous gesture. “I’m used to it, it’ll pass,” he says a little too quickly. “I’ll just avoid him for a few days and we’ll be good as new.”
Neil shares a look with Renee. She nods.
“I’ll go talk to him.”
“Renee, you don’t have to -”
“Nicky.” She interrupts him and smiles, reassuring. “I know. But you’re my friend too.”
Nicky opens his mouth, closes it. In the end he just settles on “Thank you.”
Renee nods again, then slips past the both of them. The door shuts behind her without making a noise.
“He’ll come around,” Neil offers into the silence.
Nicky smiles, a small one that would fit his blue face better if he ever wore it. “I know.”
The viscous shuffling of Allison’s tentacles grows closer until she’s there, occupying the space Renee stood in mere seconds ago, and the bit of tension Neil felt at dealing with Nicky’s distress alone dissolves. He steps back, content to let her take over, and goes to fill Kevin in on the situation before he hurts himself trying to figure it out.
He sticks around for a while, just in case, but figures that there’s no point in staying here much longer if standing is all he’s going to do - no one really has a mind to celebrate anymore, and alcohol’s never worked on Neil - so he wishes Nicky goodbye and leaves. He has half a mind to look for Andrew and Renee, but they’re nowhere in sight, and since Renee is involved it’s probably for good reasons.
Although King usually trails behind him when Andrew’s not around, Neil’s shadow remains un-eyed and undisturbed on his way home. Perhaps the bat scared him, or perhaps tonight is a night for empty streets. There is a quiet to the air that’s more waiting than song, and the wind has stopped; the sky stretches above town like a rug and smothers the sound of Neil’s footsteps against the cobblestones. He feels oddly at peace and yet fragile, as if he was more seams than cloth and full of porcelain leaves. The lights have turned the windows into ripe, orange squares that appear as though the sinister fruits of the houses themselves, arranged like a forest with neither rhyme nor reason, the towers all crooked and the roofs distorted. They look a little like trees and a lot like people. The road winds and winds over the town, mapping a nonsensical worm that every so often will change.
(Aaron keeps track of it in his lost time, but everyone else adjusts just fine. They have no reason to hurry, outside of the parade, and precise knowledge of the layout is hardly required to lurk about. Aaron, however, never lurks.)
Neil’s house sits at the edge of town, up on the hill. It still is every inch Mary’s laboratory, even two years after her death - all steel machines and bars on the windows.
It would feel wrong, to change it now, and to what? After all this time, it’s simpler to just leave it as it is.
Neil climbs the hill, climbs the ramp that leads upstairs, and lets himself into his bedroom. The walls are covered with heavy steel plates nailed together with large bolts and the slabs lining the floor send Neil’s footsteps echoing around the laboratory. He drops his cloak on the wiry headboard of his bed and walks to the wide oval window that takes over most of the wall, peering out into the night below.
He can see the Woods from up there, like a veil of branches and fog, stretching beyond the cemetery in a blur of ebb and flow, as Oogie Boogie eats the moon and the pale, sickly glow bathing the town fades out. Neil stands there, watching between the twisted bars of his window, until all light has gone.
Darkness strikes the bell. Black clouds roll over the hills, danse like midnight. A pocket of moonlight pierces the fog where he stands. The ground is earth, hard soil frozen over and bruised with crackling leaves. A path emerges from the clouds.
He steps onto the path and the path grows further. The earth is darker here, devoid of leaves. Blackness hedges the path and blocks the eye barely ten steps forward. He follows it; the clouds part then slowly reform in his wake, creating a pocket that moves with him.
Moonlight strikes the bell. The wind lifts the clouds in front of him - woods are revealed, trees standing like rows of scorched sharp twigs, an endless prickling horizon. A purple sky stretches above: starless, flat, a lid of night. The path leads down to the woods’ edge but he stands still at the top of the hill and follows it only with his eyes. Where the path enters the woods there is a tree. His gaze stops there.
A Crow sits on a rose-apple tree. In its beak shines a red thing, too far to see.
From the path in the Woods comes up a Fox, saliva shining from its lips.
It speaks and preens and crafts a tale
That the Crow hears and promptly eats.
The Crow looks down, opens its beak -
The Fox snaps up its jaw, and in its mouth falls the Crow’s meal.
Neil wakes up feeling disoriented. A shadow in a corner of his room moves, spills over his floor and rises out of the ground. The shadow opens its round yellow eyes and mews.
Neil drops a hand over the edge of his bed. The shadow sheds its darkness-woven cloak as it proceeds to trot forward and rub its bony forehead against it. He smiles.
“Good morning to you too.”
King mews again, then closes its eyes as Neil starts to scratch behind her ears. It’s a peculiar feeling, petting a skull. A part of Neil knows that this is not what it should feel like, that his fingers shouldn’t scrape against a cat’s head like that, but then King starts to purr and the feeling dissolves as quickly as it came. Neil sighs and sits up in his bed.
“I had a dream last night,” he tells the cat. “A Crow sits on a rose-apple tree. In its beak shines a red thing, too far to see,” he starts to recite, then stops. “I feel like I’ve heard this story before.”
King mews.
“Right.”
Neil walks up to his window and peers into the fog. He can barely make out the first row of trees today, yet still the whispers call to him. They’re saying something, something important, something he needs to hear, if only he could step closer… But his window is barred, and the tower is high, and his mother - his mother’s gone. There is no one else here but the whispers, calling him, pulling him - and so he steps closer.
The trees tower in front him, coated in fog. The wind howls, weaving between the trunks, tugging him forward. He steps closer. The light is growing dimmer. The fog starts to close in. In the distance a shape flickers, barely perceptible. He steps -
STAY AWAY
- back. Neil stumbles back with a gasp and the sound of his fall reverberates over the metal floor like a bell, and King yowls even louder.
The latch that keeps the railings in place over his window swings lightly in the breeze, pulled slightly loose, yet still shut. He hasn’t left his room.
You’re just hallucinating, comes Mary’s voice into the wind. Do not dwell; it will only make it worse.
Neil squeezes his eyes shut and counts to ten.
There is no rose-apple tree at the edge of the Woods. No animal. There is only fog, and the faint outline of a path that wasn’t there before.
But this is nothing new, because streets shift and move in Halloween, even near the forest.
Neil steers clear of Spiral Hill that day.
Katelyn is visiting.
Neil knows this because he saw her arrive from the Woods and kiss Aaron under the moonlight as Spiral Hill uncoiled, but he would know even if he had been sleeping.
Andrew’s restless when she’s around. He sniffs the air constantly and his claws grow sharper, his fangs longer. He paces, and when he sits his right leg jumps up and down, up and down, like he’s struggling to stay still; when he’s like this, his agitation scares even the spiders. But even without this, he would know.
Seconds after Katelyn crossed the cemetery’s threshold, the laboratory’s old bell shrieked. When Neil opened the door he found Andrew standing there, anger coiled tight in every hollow of his body.
“Andrew?”
“Katelyn’s here,” Andrew said. “I need to be somewhere she’s not.”
And so Neil let Andrew in, even though there’d never been anyone else here but him since Mary died.
In the morning he finds the spare blanket bunched up in a corner of the laboratory and Andrew sitting on the doorsteps, cigarette dangling from his fingers. Neil sits down next to him to breathe in the smoke and the morning air.
“You didn’t sleep on the operation table, in the end. Was it the restraints or the giant needle pointed at your head that put you off?”
Andrew doesn’t look at him but a huff of breath escapes his lips, making Neil smile. He taps the ash of his cigarette and takes a slow drag, exhaling it all into Neil’s face. “You’re a terrible host.”
Neil shrugs. “Haven’t had much practice.”
Andrew’s gaze is a heavy thing. It moves slowly in moments like this, loaded every time with intention. To study, to contemplate, to glare; there is a resolute purpose in the way Andrew meets his eyes always. Andrew is a man of few words, but Neil has learned over time that the way Andrew watches tells often more than he ever would.
Neil has learned to weather them, those stares, but right now Andrew’s asking something Neil does not have the answer to, nor the will to search for it. So Neil does as Neil does - he deflects.
“Why aren’t you staying with Nicky?”
Andrew’s eyes drift away. Smoke trails after them, billowing out into the deserted street.
“Isn’t that where you usually stay?” Neil insists, intent on an answer.
“Would I be here if it was?” Andrew drones out, sounding bored.
“You can’t ignore Nicky into staying, you know. You’ll have to talk to him eventually.”
“You’re assuming I haven’t.”
Neil frowns. “Then why -”
“Nicky oozes guilt. It’s all I can smell around him.”
Neil opens his mouth to press, then closes it. Andrew’s left leg is bouncing slightly and there’s something twitching at the corner of his mouth, in his hand.
“He’s not leaving tomorrow,” he says instead. “There’s plenty of time to make it right.”
Andrew just grunts in answer. Neil lets it go.
It’s strange, not being alone in the tower. Neil keeps hearing noises and expecting his mother, only to find Andrew instead.
The first time it happened he could have sworn it was Mary’s wheel chair he’d heard, squeaking up the winding ramp, but it turned out to be the wheels of a metal cart Andrew was rolling away; he’d found it in a corner of the lab collecting dust, “smelling like a dozen rotting corpses”. (Upon closer inspection, Neil identified a vial of titan arum concentrate as the most likely source of the odor, and promptly buried it along with a bucket of pungent herbs in the backyard. His mother’s sense of smell had been as bad as his.)
It happens several times after this, with smaller, innocuous noises. The sound of the door closing shut, footsteps across the iron floor, a window swinging open - the tiniest things can set him on edge if he’s not mindful. It’s a peculiar kind of haunting. One Neil isn’t used to.
King Fluffkins is disturbed too, at first - almost betrayed. She shuns Neil’s presence all together for the first couple days, taking offense to the invasion in a comically dramatic way. Still, as Neil does, so too does the cat get used to Andrew’s presence, albeit reluctantly - it’s tolerance at best, and they mostly just ignore each other when their paths cross. But Neil finds himself growing more comfortable with the unexpected company with each day that passes.
It’s nice, all in all - the late night smokes and the sound of pages turning and the faint smell of tea in the morning, lazily wafting up from the laboratory as the sun slowly rises.
It’s the fifth day of their tentative cohabitation when Andrew gets a visit. Neil finds him crouched on the lab’s floor by the operation table, looking at a tiny black dot on the floor. Andrew looks up at him and the spider immediately scurries off, disappearing under the front door with zealous speed.
“Sorry.”
Andrew shrugs and rises to his feet. “I’m going to see Bee today,” he says.
Neil itches to ask why, but the answer is not his to ask for, so he just nods.
Andrew drinks his tea. It smells sweet today, and a little tannic. Neil tries it, just to see if he’ll taste anything. (He doesn’t.)
Then Andrew’s off, and Neil is confronted with the strange feeling that is having to look at the deserted skeleton of a presence: steam coiling from the teapot cooling on the hot plate, books scattered here and there over the lab’s equipement, blankets piled up in a corner. The laboratory has never looked so lived in, and perhaps that is what prompted the emptiness to move out of the room and into Neil’s chest.
He tries to keep himself busy playing with King, then sorting out his collection of herbs, but his heart isn’t in it. In the end, he gives up. If something feels off in the tower, then he’ll just have to go bother Kevin in his own house instead.
Kevin isn’t exactly thrilled to see him standing on his doorstep, but he lets him in anyway. Zero the red-nosed cat is happy enough for the both of them, anyway, especially when a second shadow decides to pour out of Neil’s own, her eyes wide and playful as she molts her coat.
Kevin is in the middle of a “very important experiment” involving Christmas lights that Neil promises not to distract him from, even though they both know he will. They leave Zero’s tinkling nose and King’s clattering bones to play in peace on the ground floor and take the stairs.
It’s easy to get lost in the bickering and the strange but familiar atmosphere of Kevin’s own lab, his green fireplace and countless ominous books all basked in a sweet peppermint smell.
Even the Woods can’t reach him here.
The moon is out when Neil leaves. King trots next to him, slipping from shadow to shadow without a noise. Neil catches a glimpse of the Woods, wrapped in a shroud of pale moonlight, and starts walking faster towards his home. The outline of the path is imprinted on the inside of his eyelids, taunting him as it grows.
Neil is so focused on getting home that the sight of Andrew on his doorstep almost makes him flinch. He’s been out there smoking for a while, if the number of cigarette butts scattered around is any indication. There’s a book lying next to him, too, but Neil doubts it’s been so much as opened ever since Andrew stepped outside.
“Kevin says hi,” Neil says.
Andrew scoffs. “Bee does too.”
His right leg bounces one, two, three times. Neil sits next to him and steals the cigarette from his mouth to take a drag. Andrew’s eyes trail after it.
“I still don’t get why you call her that.”
Andrew looks away, leg bouncing. “She likes it, and it drives Aaron crazy.”
Neil snorts. He blows a cloud of smoke out to the sky, then hands the cigarette back to Andrew when he feels the weight of his stare back on him. Andrew grabs it with a frown and pulls, making the end flare red.
“Your house is a memorial.” The words spill out with the smoke. “You’d be better off if she’d come back a ghost.”
Neil shrugs. He’s thought as much more than once, but… “I have no use for the lab, but I wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s easier to leave it as it is.”
“Yet you don’t sleep,” Andrew counters, and looks at him.
Neil opens his mouth, then winces it shut. There’s no use lying, no matter how much he wants to. “It’s not -” he tries, and immediately falters. “It’s not related.”
Andrew’s gaze doesn’t waver. Neil sighs.
“You know I have… visions, sometimes. Sometimes I’m awake, sometimes they’re dreams.” He glances at Andrew, who just raises an eyebrow. “They’re not - they don’t bother me, usually, but…” He trails off and bites his lip. Andrew’s eyes flicker down quickly then back up in a flash of moonlight. “I don’t know why, but that one’s different.”
Andrew frowns. “It comes back,” he says, more statement than question.
“Yes,” Neil answers anyway, then shakes his head. “It’s always slightly different - there’s a crow and a fox, and every time I’m standing a little closer.” Neil’s eyes automatically fall to the Woods and he wraps his arms around himself, dropping his voice. “It happens near the Woods, right at the edge.”
Andrew follows the direction of Neil’s gaze wordlessly. He stares at the mist for a while, then turns around and holds the cigarette out to Neil, who takes it with a grateful smile.
“What is it with you and this stupid forest?”
Neil inhales the smoke and shakes his head. “My mother - she was afraid of it. I don’t know why. She made me swear never to go inside, but -” Neil glances at the faint outlines of the trees peeking out of the fog, then rips his gaze away as the whispers start to rise. “It’s not just a forest.”
“No,” Andrew says, pulling Neil’s attention to him, “it’s a threshold.”
“What?”
“Forests are thresholds,” Andrew repeats, with the same tone he uses every time he has to explain something to Neil that’s obvious to him. “It’s the scary path you have to take while traveling from the Known,” he gestures at the town, then at the Woods, “to the Unknown. It’s where people get lost, and sometimes found.”
Neil considers it. “My mother didn’t have to go in to get lost.”
Andrew looks at him. His voice is lower when he speaks - almost cautious.
“No, she didn’t.”
Neil smiles, and gives the last of the cigarette back to Andrew. “I guess it makes sense that the doors are in there, then,” he says lightly. “Do you think Kevin got lost, or found?”
“Came back, didn’t he.”
Neil hums. “Didn’t he come from the Woods originally, though?”
Andrew shrugs. “Used to be some kind of bird.”
A bird. Neil can’t really picture it, but stranger things have happened. Like Kevin trying to become Santa Claus and almost getting himself killed in the process. Maybe the flying sleigh had been the main appeal. A long-lost instinct to be airborne.
“How do you think he found his way here?” he asks eventually.
“Same way we all did.”
Neil frowns at him. “That’s not an answer.”
“How does anyone end up anywhere?” Andrew asks, and stubs the butt of the cigarette out on the stone.
Neil scoffs. “You could just say you don’t know.”
“I could, but where’s the fun in that,” Andrew drones, voice flat. Neil rolls his eyes. “You can borrow my books, when you can’t sleep,” he continues then, looking at Neil. “It’s not going to solve anything, but it’s a good distraction to keep the dreams at bay.”
Neil blinks at the warmth seeping into his chest. “Thank you,” he says, and smiles. “I’ll probably take you up on that offer.”
Andrew nods, a little stiffly, and gets up. He’s already got his hand on the handle when Neil calls after him.
“Andrew?” Andrew stops. Turns. “What kind of dreams do you have?”
Andrew stares at him without speaking for long enough that Neil is sure he’s not getting an answer. Then Andrew opens his mouth.
“Bad ones,” he says, and turns away.
The door shuts quietly behind him.
When Neil crosses the laboratory on his way to his room, he stops at the operation table and picks up a worn-out looking book. The look Andrew throws at him from his blanket nest tells him it’s a good pick.
It’s more than a week later when Neil gets a sign that Katelyn has gone home.
He’s at the cemetery collecting deadly nightshade (for a dreamless sleep, Mary had told him once) when an oddly vibrant pop of color catches his eye; a red bud blooms, hanging from the thorny branch of a dry bush nearby. The petals unfurl with delicate elegance, challenging the sickly morning light by its fire, and a potent, heady scent spills into the air, beaconing him closer. As he moves forward, however, a ghostly breeze sweeps by and the twig breaks, taking the bleeding flower twirling down with it - then suddenly up as the wind carries the strange will-o’-the-wisp away to burn the sky. Neil follows until it vanishes, abruptly snuffed out just as the Woods come into view.
He stands on Spiral Hill and watches as the coiled earth extends its helpful arm below. He has half a mind to let himself be swept off like the flower, but the grip of his mother keeps his feet still.
The sound of wings hitting the air, followed closely by footsteps, breaks whatever link held his eyes forward, and he whips around just in time to avoid getting clipped by one of Sir’s wings as she dives upon him then settles, looking awfully proud of herself, upon his shoulder.
Andrew watches the scene play out from just beyond the graveyard wall, his brow furrowed in quiet bemusement. Neil raises both eyebrows at him in question and he takes a couple steps forward, eyes fleeting to Sir quickly then back on Neil.
“She’s never done this with someone else before,” Andrew admits once he’s close enough to let Sir nip at his extended finger. She lets out a small screech, adjusts her position on Neil’s shoulder, and tilts her head this way and that a few times. Whatever it all means, Andrew seems satisfied with it. He retracts his finger and looks at Neil, close enough to touch him too.
“You were watching the Woods.”
An observation. All thoughts of reaching out to brush a knuckle over Andrew’s cheek is swept under the rug. All Neil wants is to turn around and look at the veiled forest again. He clings to Andrew’s eyes instead.
“I was following a flower,” he says.
He knows Andrew isn’t duped by the change of subject, but if it bothers him it doesn’t show. “A flower?”
“An omen,” Neil corrects. “It bloomed, and then the wind carried it here. It was red,” he adds, because if Andrew can look at a jack-o-lantern and think soultrap, then he will understand what it means.
Andrew’s eyes widen a fraction. Neil sees the way his nostrils flare, and realizes that he’s tracking Katelyn’s scent. It takes a second, but a world of tension seeps out of Andrew’s shoulders when he’s done. Neil doesn’t need anything else to know that he was right.
“She went through a few hours ago,” Andrew says, his gaze trailing behind Neil for a fleeting moment.
Neil fights the urge to do the same. He can hear the whispers calling him towards the Woods, even now. It’s a constant buzzing in his ear. It pulls and pulls and pulls until it’s all he can think about. Sir provides an easy enough distraction, though, so he lets her nip away at his finger until she starts to pull one of the threads loose.
“Let’s not do that,” he scolds, and takes his hand away. The bat whines, softly, making him scoff. It’s enough to pull Andrew’s attention back on them.
He looks at the bat and raises an eyebrow at her, but moves on without a word when she stays put on Neil’s shoulder. He lingers a little longer on Neil, his expression unreadable. Somehow, somewhere, the urge to get closer floods him again.
It feels stronger than the whispers. Neil closes his fists and waits.
It’s almost a relief when Andrew tilts his chin towards the cemetery, effectively breaking the strange spell. They leave Spiral Hill side by side.
Clouds have started to gather by the time they arrive in sight of the gate. Neil takes them on a detour to the deadly nightshade plot to fill his small pouch, and smirks at the way Andrew refuses to step close to the “death-smelling weed”. They’ve just passed the gate and Neil’s about to ask Andrew whether he’ll stay in the lab tonight when Andrew stops in his tracks. Right next to his ear Sir lets out a worried screech, batting her right wing slightly in the air.
Neil expects to see a stranger - one of the Christmas folks, maybe - but on the road there stands only Aaron, hunched over with hands buried deep in his pants’ pockets. He looks a wreck, more so than usual. Deep purple bags weigh his eyes down. His hair sticks up in various directions and he looks pale, strangely so. Something looks odd in the way he grits his teeth, as well, and Neil doesn’t realize what it is until Aaron opens his mouth to speak and shows off a row of sharp teeth with two protruding canines.
“Katelyn’s gone,” Aaron says, fangs mangling the words. “You can come out of whatever den you burrowed yourself into.”
Andrew’s put his hands in his pockets as well, but where Aaron is using it as a way to hide his claws, Andrew’s posture only tells of indifference. It’s feigned, partially at least, but Neil doubts Aaron possesses the insight necessary to see through it right now.
“Good riddance,” Andrew responds.
Aaron snarls. Sir flaps her wing again and squeaks, but Andrew only looks on unimpressed until Aaron stops baring his teeth at him.
“You reek of her,” he says then, wrinkling his nose.
“And you of him,” Aaron spits back, a growling beneath the words.
Neil frowns. Andrew’s stiffened next to him, but his face tells nothing.
“He’s been staying with me,” Neil tells Aaron when it’s clear Andrew won’t say anything. “That’s all.”
Aaron barks out a laugh. Before he can say anything, however, Andrew’s taken a step forward and cut him off. “I’m not stepping a foot into the house until you’ve removed her stench off it,” Andrew tells him with disgust clear on his face. “Get yourself together.”
There is concern in the last words, but Aaron is too focused on the rest to hear it. He opens his mouth wide, raises his claws and growls, the wolf in him finally winning over as he starts to shift. Andrew steps back and swears, his own nails starting to grow and harden by his sides.
Andrew and Aaron start to circle each other slowly. Aaron snaps his jaw forward and Andrew jumps back, gritting his teeth.
Neil can see it, how it’ll play out. There’s something mad in Aaron’s yellow eyes, a lack of control he’s never seen from him. He’s getting ready to jump and he’s not going to hold back. Andrew’s stance, on the other hand, is calculated, defensive - he’s barely transformed but for his claws and a few patches of fur along his jaw and on the back of his hands.
If Andrew has to choose between hurting his brother and letting himself be hurt, Neil already knows what choice he’ll make. It’s not one he’s willing to see play out.
Aaron flattens himself to the ground and growls. Neil’s running before he’s had time to think twice, barely registering Sir’s panicked screeching as she flies off.
“Neil, get behind me,” Andrew snaps as soon as he notices Neil coming forward. Neil ignores him, his full attention focused on Aaron.
He opens his mouth to call out Aaron’s name, but the sound never comes out. The wolf lunges, fury raging beneath his skin.
The next thing Neil sees is his left arm, flying.
It archs up into the sky for an eternity, trailing dead leaves in its wake. Neil can only follow its trajectory with his eyes as he himself falls over backwards, then lands with a dull thump upon the leaves-littered ground.
Were there leaves here before?
He’s surprised to see that his arm isn’t the only thing that’s been ripped off; there, by the trunk of the nearest tree, lies his foot, dirt-stained and sliced at the ankle. Leaves are spilling from the cut - red leaves all over the place, an autumn sea pouring out of every piece of him, flooding the woods. The ground is soaked with it.
Where is he? The trees spin around him. The ground sways. Something - someone - is coming. He needs to run. He needs to run.
He needs to wake up.
Why won’t his legs move?
A hand on his cheeks. Heavy. Warm.
“Mum?”
“You need to breathe,” Andrew’s voice says.
It’s Andrew crouching in front of him. One hand over his cheek, one hand cupping the back of his neck.
Andrew’s face swims but his eyes drill molten gold into Neil’s.
“Listen to me, Neil,” Andrew’s voice rises again, low and steady like the earth. He presses down upon Neil’s neck, bringing him forward. “Breathe.”
Andrew inhales. Air rushes into Neil’s lungs. Andrew exhales. Air flows out of Neil’s throat.
Andrew inhales. Air rushes in.
Andrew exhales. Air flows out.
In. Out. Neil feels the heat of Andrew’s breath brush past him. Tobacco fills his nose. Andrew’s eyes shine like never-setting double moons.
“Andrew.”
The moons stay on him.
“You’re here.”
The hand at the back of his neck squeezes. “I am.”
The relief is instant. Neil has to close his eyes against the force of it. When he opens them back up he sees only the street, cobblestones and houses and the graveyard wall. There are no trees in sight - no sea of red, no severed foot. Lying on the ground next to him is his arm, torn at the shoulder and ripped at the elbow, brown leaves sticking out at the seams.
The hand at the back of his neck is lifted. When did the one over his cheek go? He misses the warmth like a limb. He makes himself think through it.
“Where’s Aaron?”
Andrew’s jaw tightens, a movement so imperceptible Neil would have missed it if he wasn’t sitting so close to it. “Gone.”
Neil frowns, looks around. There is no one else around and the street tells him nothing. He returns to Andrew, trying to think through the fog coating his head. “What happened?”
“He lost control,” Andrew says matter-of-factly. His eyes are staring daggers into Neil’s. “You decided to be incredibly stupid; he tore your arm off and fled.”
Neil shrugs. “I’m fine. A little thread and needle and I’ll be good as new. You wouldn’t.”
“I can handle him.”
“Maybe. You said he was out of control,” Neil points out, then shrugs again. “I didn’t think.”
“Clearly.”
Neil rolls his eyes and grabs his arm off of the ground. He stuffs a few of the leaves back in, then reaches for the back-up sewing kit he keeps in his sock, acutely aware of the weight of Andrew’s stare on him.
Andrew huffs and takes Neil’s arm away from his hands. “I’m not watching you sew yourself back together with one hand. You’re bad enough with two.”
“I’ve already done it before, and it held up,” Neil feels compelled to point out, but he doesn’t protest when Andrew motions him closer and starts to mend the torn out seams.
He starts with the elbow. It’s always odd, how Neil can feel the needle piercing his fabric-skin, the prickling of the thread running in and out, but not where it should be. His arm lies in Andrew’s lap, wholly severed, and yet he feels it. The awkward angle of the limb and the fabric of Andrew’s pants, the hand holding the arm in place as he sews - it’s all right there in front of him and weirdly attached to his shoulder at the same time, like an echo.
It’s not exactly pleasant, being sewn shut, but Neil would be lying if he said he disliked it. He used to, when it was Mary doing it - she always saw his fragility as a defect, a vulnerability he ought to hide. Her sewing was efficient, but rough. Andrew… Well, Andrew takes his time. He weaves the criss-crossing stitches with a gentle kind of hyperfocus, and the hold he has on Neil’s arm is just there to facilitate his task, not pin him down. In spite of the inevitable discomfort, it’s almost relaxing.
Neil is distantly aware that he doesn’t need to sit this close, not yet, not until Andrew’s done fixing the elbow and starts working on the shoulder, but if Andrew’s realized this he doesn’t seem to care. There’s an intimacy to the act that just... makes the closeness make sense, somehow.
There’s a last uncomfortable tingle as Andrew knots the thread in place, and then he holds the whole arm up. Neil tests the articulation, bending his arm this way and that in the air, and then smiles.
“Perfect.”
Andrew nods, lowering the arm. He beckons Neil even closer still and settles in front of the shoulder with one crossed thigh flush against Neil’s and the other bent up. He puts the severed arm in place and Neil struggles to find a somewhat comfortable position until Andrew grabs his wrist and brings his hand down to his folded thigh, angling the arm in a way that gives him a clear access to the shoulder. He looks at Neil once it’s done, silently checking with him, and waits for a nod to start sewing.
He starts with the upper part of the shoulder, slowly working his way down to the armpit with metronome precision. It’s a more complicated seam than an elbow or the usual wrist, which means there’s a concentrated crease between Andrew’s eyebrows. Neil stares, unabashedly, because there’s nothing else around to distract him and Andrew’s just right there.
“What does it feel like?” he asks after a while. “To be a wolf?”
Andrew doesn’t answer right away. He just keeps sewing; if Neil didn’t know better, he’d think he wasn’t getting any response at all.
“Simpler,” Andrew’s answer comes eventually. “Instincts and sensations take over, so there’s not as much room for complex thoughts or emotions.”
“But you’re still in control.”
Andrew finishes a stitch and nods. “The shift affects how I think and feel on a surface level only. The core remains the same.”
That makes sense. Neil wonders if shifting isn’t how Andrew chooses to deal with conflicted emotions sometimes, given the amount of time he usually spends as a wolf when Aaron visits Katelyn.
“Aaron wasn’t controlling it, though. When he attacked you.”
Andrew’s expression hardens. “Aaron hasn’t shifted willingly in years.”
Neil frowns. Andrew’s movements as he sews have become sharper. Quicker. Neil pushes anyway. “He’s rejecting a part of him.”
“He thinks he’s above his nature,” Andrew retorts, and lifts Neil’s arm to sew the armpit shut. “As demonstrated, he’s wrong.”
“Why?”
“You’d have to ask him,” Andrew says, dismissive. “I don’t care.”
“That’s not true,” Neil scoffs, “or you would have shifted too. You knew he wouldn’t hold back, but you still didn’t want to hurt him.”
Andrew’s glare is sharp as a dagger. Neil takes it as confirmation.
“We need to find Aaron,” he decides.
“No,” Andrew grunts, final. Neil ignores him.
“He needs you right now.” Andrew only scowls. He’s done with the armpit, and is sewing back up on the other side. There’s only a few stitches left. “You’re the only one who can show him how to be a wolf.”
“I doubt he’d be happy to see me right now.”
“I think you’re the only person he wants to see right now,” Neil counters.
“Wrong,” Andrew says, bitterness laced with the usual boredom.
He doesn’t say who, but Neil hears it anyway. He shakes his head. “She’s gone, and it’s not the same. You’re his brother. I doubt he can replace you that easily.”
“Stay still,” Andrew snaps. Neil begrudgingly stops trying to turn around to face him. “He’s distancing himself from me.”
“And you aren’t?”
“It’s not the same,” Andrew says, stubborn, as he knots the seam firmly into place. He starts to get up, but Neil grabs his arm to keep him at eye level.
“No? Really, Andrew? Because as far as I know, you’re not the only one who was raised by Nicky. Have you even talked about him moving out with your brother?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Andrew snarls, shaking Neil’s hold and rising to his feet. Neil is quick to follow suit. “I would never leave him. What does Aaron care? It’s only a matter of time before he leaves to go live in Snow and Sparkles Town with his girlfriend.”
“Has he told you that? Have you?”
Andrew stiffens. They glare at each other like this for a while, standing and unyielding in the empty street.
A howl, haunted and agonizing, breaks the silence.
For all he’s said, Andrew immediately bolts in the direction it came from. Neil rushes after him and through the graveyard gate on reflex. By the time he’s caught up, Andrew is already half-shifted.
They don’t stop until the back wall comes into view. Andrew, now covered in fur and running on all fours, leaps over the fence like it’s nothing. Neil is slower to climb it, but Andrew hasn’t gotten much further when he’s done.
Aaron is lying in a heap just under Spiral Hill, howling with all he has. It looks like he fell from the edge, but Neil doubts that’s what’s really wrong - because something is clearly wrong. Aaron is spasming in and out of a full shift, fur and claws growing thicker one second only to resorb the next as he writhes on the ground, howling in pain and anguish. Even only half shifted, he looks more like a wild beast than Andrew as a full wolf.
As soon as Spiral Hill is lowered, Andrew runs down the slope, Neil at his heels. He hesitates then, and turns his large head towards Neil, tilting it at the ground as he scratches it with one paw.
“I’m not coming any closer,” Neil assures Andrew, who huffs in response. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the Woods extending long fingers of mist across the darkness. He forces himself to focus on the werewolf twins.
Andrew approaches Aaron cautiously. He grunts at him and whines, head lowered and ears flattened. He narrowly avoids a swipe from his brother, but then he growls and recognition flashes amidst the pain in Aaron’s eyes. He whimpers, a broken, anxious sound, and Andrew gently headbutts his flank, huffing in his face as he lies against Aaron’s side. The spasms slow down; Aaron starts to breathe slower, and his body relaxes visibly as Andrew brings his snout to his forehead and breathes against his face.
A last tremor shakes Aaron’s frame, and all traces of his human form vanish. Andrew sighs, and Aaron lets out a small, relieved whine in return. Neil smiles as they rub heads together, then tangle their limbs into a drowsy pile of dog.
A string of whispers breaks the spell. It pulls at him, sharp enough to drown out whatever Mary could have to say. Neil steals one last glimpse at the Woods, and decides to back off. He doubts Andrew needs him to stand guard.
Now that the situation is defused, however, there’s nothing that can chase the dream, or the Woods, out of his mind, no matter how far away from them he goes. The two are tied, he knows as much. And dangerous. Still - he needs to find out more, or he doubts he’ll ever sleep again.
Fortunately for him, the lights are on in Kevin’s house. Asking a few questions can’t hurt.
The doorbell screams when he pulls on it. It’s a stupid design, in his opinion, and way too loud, but Kevin’s fond of it. Go figure.
To Neil’s surprise, it’s not Kevin who eventually opens the door for him, but Nicky. His painted-on smile widens at his sight, and he announces Neil’s arrival loudly enough that no matter where Kevin is in the house, there’s no doubt he heard him.
“What a good surprise! You’re always a sight for sore eyes, Neil,” Nicky goes on as if he hadn’t just yelled louder than even Wymack’s loudspeaker. “It’s a shame, I was just about to leave,” he sighs, and steers Neil towards the stairs. “Kevin’s up in his lab cooking something.”
“Wait, Nicky,” Neil interrupts, stopping in front of the stairs. “Could I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure! I have a couple of those,” Nicky responds easily.
Only a handful of the living room’s candelabras have been lit, and their glow barely reaches half of Nicky’s face. Still, he looks relaxed, and not at all like the guilt-ridden mess Neil expected from his conversations with Andrew. But then again, it’s been a while since Andrew actually crossed paths with his cousin, so it’s not that surprising that Nicky would have pulled himself together - he’s always been stronger than either twin tends to give him credit for, anyway.
“Have you talked with Andrew since the party?”
Nicky’s smile takes on the air of a grimace. “Only once,” he says, and sighs. “It did not go very well.”
“And Aaron?”
“He told me that he respects my decision,” Nicky starts, a little hesitant. “But it’s never that simple with him. Why?”
“Are you going to visit, after your move?” Neil pushes on, ignoring Nicky’s question. “Will they be welcome in your home?”
Nicky’s unwinking eye widens. “Of course! What kind of question even is that?”
The obfuscation in Nicky’s voice makes Neil smile. “I think you should consider telling them that.”
“Isn’t it obvious? Besides, I doubt that kind of sentimentality would go over well with either of them.”
Neil shrugs. “I can’t say for certain - I never had the kind of family the three of you are,” he concedes, crossing his arms over his chest. “But it might help to make it clear, just to be sure. They care about you a lot.”
“I know,” Nicky says, stepping closer to rustle Neil’s hair. “Thank you, Neil. We’re lucky to have you. I’ll try following your advice,” he adds, and drops his hand. “And just to be clear, you’ll always be welcome in our home, too. If you ever want to escape the two demons, you don’t have to think twice. I know they can be a bit much.”
“Thanks, Nicky,” Neil says, swallowing around the unexpected lump in his throat. Nicky grins. “You don’t think Aaron’s going to want to move out too, once you’re gone?”
“Because of Katelyn?” Nicky asks, then shakes his head. “I doubt it. She visits way more often than he does, and Aaron - well, I don’t think Christmas Town’s for him. Don’t get me wrong, Halloween will always be my home, and I would have never moved out if I hadn’t met Erik, but…”
“You love it out there,” Neil finishes.
Nicky shrugs, looking relieved that Neil isn’t going to admonish him for it. “It just feels right. And I think Aaron probably needs a little more time to realize it, but he belongs here.”
“I don’t understand why he won’t accept it.”
“Me neither,” Nicky admits. “But give it time. He’ll figure it out.”
“If you say so.”
“I know so. I practically raised them,” he says, smiling like he’s just told a pretty good joke. Then he adjusts his coat, and turns towards the door. “Anyway, I better be on my way - lots of stuff to pack up. Bye Neil,” he says, waving, before cupping his hands around his mouth and yelling his goodbye to Kevin, only to receive an even louder response.
Neil snorts.
Nicky shows off his winking eye, and then he’s gone.
Kevin’s lab smells of gingerbread cookies this time around. Neil finds Kevin with his bony hands wrist-deep into a large bowl of dough, elongated frame curved over the countertop in an almost exact replica of the position he usually adopts to scare little children. His hollow eyes are fixed on a sheet of paper pinned to the wall - likely the recipe. Judging from the green ink and readable handwriting, he must have gotten it from Jeremy.
“Don’t hover,” Kevin admonishes as Neil tries to peer at the mixture he’s kneading ever so intently. “Just - find somewhere to sit and don’t touch anything. I’m almost finished.”
“Sure,” Neil scoffs, but he does sit down.
The fireplace is burning pink this time. It casts a strange hue over the many rows of tomes and the various instruments lining the walls, making the whole thing seem a little unreal. Neil cannot feel any heat emanating from the flames, either.
Neil has almost resigned himself to spending the whole night watching Kevin struggle to beat a bowl of dough into shape when Kevin finally lets go and sighs, satisfied. He flattens the dough with a rolling pin, and then starts rummaging around for the set of cookie cut-outs Jean and Jeremy got him last Christmas.
It’s not until a quarter of an hour later (“No, Neil, I can’t just pick any shape, there’s a logic to it!”) that the cookies are, at last, ready for the oven.
“Congratulations on being the slowest baker in all the lands,” Neil yawns when Kevin sits down on the chair across from him.
“Science takes time,” Kevin says, but graciously spares Neil the whole lecture. “Why are you here?”
Neil lifts one shoulder as he stares into the fire, chin in his palm. “Can’t I just visit a friend?” he asks, then glances up at Kevin. “Your fire has no heat.”
“I’m aware,” he says, and frowns. “You haven’t tried to ruin my experiment, which you always do, so you must want something.”
“Touché,” Neil concedes, and straightens up on his stool. Kevin asked for it, so he might as well dive right in. “I was wondering if you remembered your arrival here. In Halloween Town. I’ve only heard the others mention it in passing, but everyone agrees that you came from the Woods.”
As soon as Neil starts talking, Kevin stiffens. When he speaks, he sounds cautious. “I don’t remember it well.”
“But you do remember something.”
Kevin’s mouth thins into a straight line and he folds his arms over his chest, staring at a point just left of Neil’s head.
“Kevin -”
“Why do you want to know?” Kevin interrupts him.
“I’ve been seeing things,” Neil says slowly, briefly closing his eyes against the urgency that dwelling upon his visions brings. “About the Woods. I can hear them calling me, almost all the time. My mother did too. It’s how she died - she could always hear them, but two years ago it got worse, until it was too much.” Neil can feel the seams in his hands strain as he grips his knees. He forces himself to relax, and looks away from the fire. “She was terrified of the Woods, Kevin, and it killed her. I need to know why.”
Kevin looks like he’s going to be sick - or as close to sick as a skeleton can be, anyway. He has retreated all the way into his chair, and the light from the fireplace only serves to make him appear even thinner.
“I didn’t know,” he says, voice hollow as a tomb.
Neil sighs. “No one does. Just tell me what you know.”
Kevin brushes a knobbly hand over his brow and nods. “Okay. Okay. I don’t - It’s all jumbled. But the whispers, I used to hear them too. I was fleeing from them when I found the doors.”
“Do you still hear them?”
“Sometimes. On very bad days.”
“Can you understand them?”
Kevin nods again, more out of nerves than acquiescement. “They want me to return what is theirs.”
“You took something?”
“Yes. Me.”
“You don’t belong to them.”
“Maybe not anymore, but I did,” Kevin says, shrugging. “It doesn’t matter to them anyway. No one leaves.”
“But you did,” Neil says, feeling obliged to point out the obvious.
Kevin’s gaping mouth twists into a grimace. “And then I helped Jean do the same.”
“I imagine they didn’t take it too well.”
Kevin shakes his head. “No. They want me - they want the both of us to come back.”
“Do you?”
“I used to,” Kevin says, and flinches at his own admission. “You have to understand - when I first came here, it was awful. I was always thinking about it. I missed it, more than anything in the world - the Woods and the others and everything else. It wasn’t rational.”
“The others?” Neil asks, frowning.
“I was - the memories are fuzzy, but Jean and I, we were part of a whole. Part of a flight. We were never alone.”
“So you really were a bird.”
“Yes. I don’t know how, but I managed to flee. I think Zero showed me the way.” He glances at the cat’s sleeping form, all curled up on his cushion with its red nose like a star. Then he turns to Neil again, and gestures at himself. “When I got here, it was like I’d never been a raven at all.”
“You were a raven?”
“Yes. I thought I’d mentioned it.”
“You didn’t,” Neil says, then shakes his head. He needs to focus. “What about Jean? You said you helped him.”
“I think so, but I can’t remember. According to Jeremy he just - showed up one day in Christmas Town. Renee was living there at the time; she’s the one who found him.”
“Do you think he remembers anything you don’t?”
“Don’t,” Kevin says, voice curt. His mouth is a thin, straight line.
Neil raises his eyebrows. “What?”
“Don’t ask Jean about the Woods.” It sounds halfway between a plea and an order. “He hasn’t been out as long as me, and he’s not as recovered as I am. You have no idea what it’s like. Just - let him forget in peace, please.”
“Okay,” Neil relents.
Kevin sighs. “Thank you.”
Neil shakes his head. “I’m the one who should be thanking you. I think I’d better go, though. I have to check on Andrew,” he says, and rises to his feet.
Kevin straightens in his chair. “Did something happen?”
“It’s fine,” Neil says, then turns to leave. He stops before the stairs. “Kevin?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you stayed,” he blurts out.
Kevin’s smile is small, but valiant all the same. “Me too.”
Everything Kevin told him spins in his mind. He tries to make it fit into something coherent as he walks home, but it just raises more questions. Everything he’s seen and dreamed of whirls around him, invading the streets like ghosts as he tries desperately to focus.
The ravens make sense. He’s heard caws before, trailing in the echoes of the whispers. But what does it mean, that a raven could shed its feathers and turn into a skeleton or a Christmas elf? Were they all ravens before? But no, that doesn’t make sense. Kevin remembers. Jean remembers. None of the others do. And yet Neil knows, knows that they were all something else before. No one is born in Halloween. They all arrived, somehow.
All Neil sees when he tries to remember are the Woods.
Suddenly, Neil stops. He can see the path from here, between two crooked houses. It’s snaked its way halfway across the hills, and it’s coming for his tower. But who is making it grow?
The whispers call to him. Neil steps forward, then grits his teeth and looks away. He has to go home.
Andrew is standing at the foot of the hill with Aaron behind him, still covered in fur. His presence surprises Neil, at first, but it makes sense that Andrew wouldn’t want to leave him alone.
Neil smiles at Andrew. He gets a small nod, barely perceptible.
“Are you leaving, or staying?”
Andrew frowns. Neil shrugs.
“I don’t mind either way. There’s room enough for the both of you in the lab, if you’d rather stay.”
Aaron huffs out a heavy breath and headbutts Andrew’s hip. Andrew grabs his brother’s head and pushes it away.
“If you’re okay with it.”
“I just said I was.”
Aaron huffs again and bumps into Andrew, then starts walking up the hill. Andrew goes to follow, but Neil catches him by the hem of his t-shirt.
Andrew turns around, raising one questioning eyebrow.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not the one who was attacked,” he points out, unimpressed.
“I know,” Neil says, but he doesn’t let go of Andrew’s shirt. There’s something else - something else pushing him. There’s an urgency in Neil’s mind, but for all he’s clinging to Andrew he cannot seem to figure out why.
Andrew stares at him. He waits, at first, but when words refuse to leave Neil’s lips he looks down and grabs Neil’s hand in his own. He makes Neil let go of the fabric, but doesn’t drop the hand right away. Neil looks at him looking at their hands. Andrew’s face is impenetrable as a fortress.
He’s about to say something - he doesn’t know what - when Andrew abruptly lets go and turns around. Neil watches him walk all the way up the small hill and through the door, and then drops his eyes to his hand. The urgency remains, coiled in the hollow of his palm, but he’s helpless with it. All he can really do is hope to sleep on it.
Darkness strikes the bell. Black clouds roll over the hills, growling low with their bellies full of whispers. A pocket of moonlight pierces the fog where he stands. The ground is earth, hard soil frozen over and bruised with crackling leaves. The clouds part to reveal the path he has tread upon many nights.
He steps onto the path and the path lengthens. The earth is softer here, littered with rotting leaves. His feet gently sink into the earth a little more with each step. There is no use trying to see where he’s going - blackness hedges the path and blocks the eye barely ten steps forward. He lets the clouds and the moonlight lead the way. The clouds crowd his progression but do not hinder it.
Moonlight strikes the bell. The wind lifts the clouds in front of him to reveal the vast expanse of the Woods, standing like a wall of cold fire in front of him. The sky above is bruised purple from the pain inflicted every night by the sharp branches of the trees. The path leads down to the Woods’ edge and he follows it with the clouds at his back. Where the path enters the Woods stands a rose-apple-tree. He stops there.
A Crow sits on the rose-apple tree. In its beak shines a red thing, too far to see.
From the path over the hills has come a Fox, saliva shining from its lips.
It does not speak or craft a tale
Its verb halted by a criss-crossing thread.
The Fox looks up, growls a low tune,
And climbs the tree with his maw sewn to mute.
“At last you’ve come, oh brother mine,
Let us rejoice as you resign!”
Did the Crow speak, and fed the Fox
A rotting red thing: that was his heart.
Neil wakes up with a start. He sits up, careful not to look out the window, and breathes until the familiar setting stops looking like an illusion. Still something tastes foul in his mouth.
The sound of the front door closing shut breaks through the haze, and he’s walking down the ramp before he’s had the time to think about it. When he steps outside, however, it’s not Andrew he finds standing on the doorsteps.
He shuts the door on his disappointment, but it comes biting in his voice. “Tired of hunting your own tail?” he asks Aaron, who glares at him.
“Fuck you, Josten. I can still bite your arm off like this.”
Neil snorts. “Like I’d care.” He waves his left hand in front of Aaron’s face. “I’m not made of flesh, remember? I’m not as easily crippled as your lot.”
“I could bury your arm somewhere you’d never find.”
Neil smirks. “It’d dig its own way out of the earth.”
Aaron grimaces, looking disgusted. “Gross.”
Neil shrugs. “Is it?”
“Yes,” Aaron exclaims, raising both arms in the air. “Everything here is. You all drop eyes from your sockets, and drink blood and keep axes stuck in your skulls like it’s normal, but it’s not.”
“But turning into a wolf is?”
Aaron grabs his hair with both hands. “No, it’s not. Of course it isn’t! It’s weird.”
Neil raises his eyebrows at him. “So?”
Aaron drops his hands, shoulders sagging as he leans back against the door and looks up at the fat, bright moon. “Why doesn’t that confuse you? How can any of you not see that none of this is right? I can’t be the only one.”
“Of course it’s not right,” Neil scoffs. “This is Halloween. Pumpkins scream in the dead of night and trick-or-treaters make you die of fright.”
“None of this makes sense.”
“Must everything make sense?” Neil shrugs. “Sure, we’re gross and scary and weird. We’re monsters of shadow and fear. And we celebrate that. We have fun being scary, but have you ever seen any of us hurt anyone? Really hurt.”
“No. But the other worlds -”
“They’re just as weird,” Neil counters. “What, do you really think a big red man riding a flying sleigh and sliding down chimneys with a bag full of gifts is a normal thing?” Aaron looks like he wants to argue. Neil doesn’t let him, but he softens his voice. “Do you seriously think you don’t belong here, Aaron? Because everyone else thinks you do. I don’t know what you’re struggling with, but you’re clearly a part of Halloween. Running away won’t change that.”
“Nicky’s leaving.”
“Nicky isn’t running away,” Neil points out, not missing the way Aaron winces, “he’s trying to find himself. And he’ll always be one of us, anyway - there’s more to family than belonging to the same realm.”
Aaron gags. “Ugh. Next you’re going to tell me we’re brothers.”
“In your dreams, Minyard.”
Aaron shudders. “In my worst nightmares, you mean.”
“You’re a dick. But I do mean it when I say that you belong here.”
Aaron opens his mouth, then thinks better of it. He looks up again at the moon. “I’m sorry about your arm.”
Neil shrugs. “I’m not.”
Aaron scoffs. “You’re an idiot.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Aaron looks over his shoulder, as if he could see through the door. He opens his mouth again, but then frowns.
“I’m going back to sleep,” is all he says.
Neil hums. “Good night, mutt.”
“Good night, ragdoll.”
The door closes shut with an agonizing creak. Neil smiles and sits on the doorstep, letting his eyes wander. It’s a quiet night, and the moon sheds an opal glow over the slate roofs. King’s tail is a question mark hanging out of his own shadow, her big yellow eyes a reflection of the light shining from above. She rubs her head against Neil’s leg and purrs. A slither of cloud passes and shadows fall upon the barren hill, swallowing the pathway up out of sight. When light returns upon the laboratory’s domain, something has changed.
Where once the pathway turned only left and into town, there now lies a junction.
Left into town - or right into the Woods.
Neil jumps up, scaring King away.
The shift in his dream did mean something after all.
He knew this, of course. Neil has seen enough omens in this life that he knows how to recognize them by now. The thing is - he’d hoped. For all that he wants answers, such an invitation to seek them has all the markings of a trap.
Neil climbs down the hill slowly and stops at the junction. The path into town is paved, but the uneven cobblestones stop dead at the Woods’ path’s border. It is made of dirt, tamped down and sinking slightly below ground level. The dirt is raked with hair-thin sinews, just as the earth on the hillside is. The graveyard’s, too.
A flutter of fur mews from Neil’s shadow. It’s a shrill and worried sound. Neil shushes it out of habit, but his attention is focused on the ground. It does not look like the path he follows in his dreams. There are no leaves here, no soft soil to sink into. And yet…
Neil brings his hand to his mouth, feeling the edges of his lips. There are threads woven on every inch of him, but not here.
He can hear his mother’s voice screaming in his head to keep away, keep away and never look, but his mother is dead. Listening to her won’t bring her back.
Something - someone - tugs at the edge of his cloak. Neil pulls the fabric forward in a sharp motion and steps onto the raked-dirt path. Instantly the whispers start rising. Muffled caws and rattling leaves and a hundred jumbled words. They call him.
The wind picks up. It pushes him along the path from where he froze, and Neil has no choice but to walk if he doesn’t want to tumble. His cloak wraps around him, flapping furiously in the wind like a helpless pair of wings; his hair flails and whips at his face, covers his eyes in blood-red waves every time he takes a step. The Woods are coming closer.
A breath escapes his throat, raspy and hoarse, rusted wheels squeaking in the far reaches of his memory. Pain blooms in his ankle and Neil drops to the ground, cradling it.
The wind doesn’t let him rest - it pushes and pushes and roars until Neil is forced up and walking again. The Woods loom over the hillside, tangled with a haunted shroud of mist. As the wind moves along to rush Neil’s steps forward, it fails to pick up what Neil has left behind.
A tiny red pouch, with a needle and thread pinned inside.
Neil stops resisting. There’s no point. He lets the gales push and the whispers pull, until he’s standing right at the edge of the forest. The dense wall of mist and bark opens up to let the path snake past. The fog swallows it all barely ten steps forward.
A threshold, Andrew called it.
Neil looks to the side and lets his hand graze the rose-apple-tree from his dreams. There is no crow sitting here, but the croakings drowned in the whispers have grown louder. The wind has stopped.
Neil closes his eyes. His mother’s voice has left. There is a hollow where it was, wide, gaping, pulsing like a heartbeat Neil hasn’t felt in a long time. It’s not his - it will never be his. He has seams where he should have blood, leaves where he should have flesh, and a patchwork of fabrics for a skin. Only living things have hearts.
Neil opens his eyes and takes a step into the forest.
He crosses the threshold.
As soon as he enters the Woods, Neil knows he’s made a mistake.
The ground may have been innocuous on the other side, but it is shifting underneath him now, rippling the thick carpet of leaves and caving in under his weight, so that Neil has no choice but to keep moving forward if he doesn’t want his feet swallowed. The moon only reaches the ground in feeble rays, treacherous fragments of light that serve the elusive shiftiness of it all as the mist covers everything with a generous layer of humidity, hanging low. The bare branches gash the fog without mercy, tearing through it like claws, shredding tendrils out of the mass and unraveling a second, more sinister forest of illusions and smoke. Trying to avoid those ghastly branches is a battle already lost, and yet every contact sends shivers running down Neil’s spine. He would hurry, but the path twists and turns too unpredictably for him to run in the near-darkness, and he doesn’t trust the ground on either side to hold his weight.
Humidity has soaked through every inch of him by the time he realizes that the moon isn’t breaching the forest’s realm anymore. It stops him in his tracks, but the feeling of sinking below ground forces his feet to move again. There is no light falling from above anymore. Instead, a faint, pale glow seems to have spread among the trees, emanating like a reverse shadow from the mist.
It doesn’t make sense. The part of the forest that leads to the seven doors isn’t like this - none of the others have described it that way. It’s just a forest. But something does not sit right. Neil couldn’t tell how long he’s been walking if he tried, but there’s something almost - familiar. Has he dreamed about the Woods before?
No. He’s always stayed out of it, awake or asleep. Still, there is something he knows about this place. It itches and twitches in his mind, a maggot of a feeling that refuses to dig deeper.
There’s something here.
A shadow - right there in front of him, veiled by the mist.
Terror seizes Neil’s mind, freezing him in place. But no - he doesn’t recognize the shape.
It hunches forward. The body looks a little wrong; the arms hang low, the legs seem crooked. Through the fog, it appears to be leaning most of its weight on some kind of stick.
The whispers have come back, furiously so. Cawing flutters swarm the canopy. Neil opens his mouth, but the noise instantly engulfs his mouth, fills his throat. He can only walk as the whispers crowd him, down the path that has suddenly stopped bending and is now headed straight towards the blurry shadow of a shape in the mist.
The cawing gets louder with each step. The leaves, the ground clings to his feet, slowing him down. His body is weighted with moisture.
As the shadow grows clearer, so too does a pungent smell. It grows stronger and stronger, fighting Neil’s crippled sense of smell until it’s all that Neil can focus on. It’s a familiar scent, but the name is slow to excavate out of his flooded mind.
Titan arum. Corpse flower.
The source of it is quick to reveal itself: the shadow is a corpse.
There is no other way to describe it. The distance is short enough now that there can be no denying the sluggish aspect of the skin or the holes burrowing through the flesh. The arms themselves hang in tatters from elongated sinews, limp pieces of muscles dangling from them like grapes of grotesque leeches. The whole body seems to sag over the knotted stick it clutches in both hands, themselves a mangy lace of flesh stretched over brittle bones.
This state of decay should remind him of Renee, with her greenish skin and falling eyes, but it doesn’t. Nothing about the corpse in front of him is undead. It never stopped rotting. Rot - that’s all it is. It’s not alive the way zombies are, and yet it is not truly dead.
It stands.
It moves.
It watches, if the soggy, rolling eyes fixed on Neil are any indication.
The caved-in jowls shift, rattling the jaw, and it speaks.
“Finally,” the corpse rasps. A clamor of caws answers in kind. Wherever the voice is coming from, it isn’t vocal cords.
The corpse plants the stick forward and drags his body one step closer. The jowls shake and part in a gorish smile. “Good night, Nathaniel,” the corpse rumbles. Every leaf in Neil’s body crackles. “It is so kind of you to join us. I thought you would never accept our invitation.”
Neil wants to run. He has never wanted to run more than he does in this very moment. But his feet will not move. They have sunk ankles-deep into the ground and there’s no strength in him to pull them out. He grits his teeth.
If this is what Kevin doesn’t want to remember, he can’t blame him.
“Not much of a choice, was it?”
Shadows dash quickly through the branches from behind the corpse, spreading on both sides of him. Croaking echoes through the forest.
“And yet you resisted.”
“My mother warned me against talking to strangers.”
A squelching sound. One of the corpse’s jowls has come loose. It droops, inverted and upside-down, from the mangled jaw.
“You would do well to remember your place, Nathaniel. My patience is not to be tested.” A concert of caws bursts out from all around them, snuffing itself out as soon as the corpse opens its gruesome mouth. “This is my realm. You would do well to remember it.”
“And who exactly are you?” Neil asks, jutting out his chin.
The corpse’s eyes roll wildly in their sockets, a deep, hoarse sound rising from its battered ribcage. Neil shivers, then almost falls forward as something sharp collides with his back, snatching his cloak away.
The corpse straightens up with a cavernous groan. Stretched to its full height it towers over Neil, the flaccid, sagging flesh hanging like overlarge clothes from his frame.
“I am what festers when rot is left to gangrene on its own,” it booms, awakening caws in the wake of its echo. “I am the mold growing in the dark corners of your room, in the stagnating waters of your sewers and the cadavers you don’t bury. I have burrows in the sockets of your eyes and under the surface of your nails. I am Life when life has given up, and I am Death when death hasn’t come yet. I am always and everywhere, and this is my realm.”
A wave of black feathers rises from the branches. It swirls, spinning around Neil and the corpse in a cacophony loud enough that it chokes him.
“Join us. You have no choice.”
The corpse’s voice whirls with the ravens and ties itself around Neil’s neck. He makes himself speak anyway.
“There is always a choice.”
A rumble, deep under his feet. The ground shifts with it.
“If you refuse, the ground will swallow you from toes to scalp, and you will join me then.”
Neil tries to pull his feet upward, but the soil doesn’t yield. There is no escaping this.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he spits anyway.
Another rumble ripples through the earth, nearly knocking Neil to his knees.
“You should be.”
“You think so?” Neil barks out a laugh, struggling against the whirlwind of noise and movement around them. “Have you looked at yourself? You’re just a sack of dead meat wandering alone in the woods. You act like you’ve got an army at your feet, but all I see around you is a bunch of very loud feathers. Tell me, did you erase their minds because you were too afraid that they’d realize how weak you are and turn on you, or were you just jealous because your brain rotted out before you even died? I can’t make up my mind.”
In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the smartest move.
“Ravens!” the corpse roars, and the whirlwind descends upon him.
Everything goes black.
The water is clear. Coolness wafts gently from it, and the brook babbles across the small pond. He crouches close to the edge and drinks his heart content, then settles to lie down on the soft, green moss. A peaceful breeze blows through the trees, chatting quietly with the leaves as it carries birds from copse to grove. It lightens the veil of warmth cast by the sun, and makes it flutter so.
He dozes, on and off, here by the pond. Occasionally one of the water-dwelling bugs will find its way to his ear or his nose, or the end of his tail, and he will twitch it away or roll around until he can sleep undisturbed again.
Eventually, Hunger starts to make itself known. The fox shakes the sleep off his fur and leaves the pond in search of prey.
He sniffs the air, tastes it. Afternoon - humid - earth - green - fluttering meat. The fox follows the last scent through the forest. He stays face to the breeze and keeps his mouth open in case another prey happens to dwell closer. The Hunt has started.
The prey is a bird. Small, inexperienced. It will not make for a large meal, but it will be joyful. The fox progresses slower now, careful. A bird will fly if it is frightened.
There. He can see it. Hopping on a moss-covered rock with a bug in its beak, fluttering in sunlight. The fox crouches low and waits for the bird to spot another bug.
It doesn’t take long. The bird twitches its little head to the side, away from the fox.
He leaps.
Miscalculated. The bug was further away on the rock and the bird hopped just enough away that it has the time to fly off before the fox snaps his jaws. Carried away by the momentum, he tumbles down the rock, and then down a steep slope a bush had hidden from his sight. He lands, dizzy, on a patch of dandelions. The seeds burst up in a flurry, and he sneezes them off his nose.
Afternoon - dandelions - earth - green - fluttering meat meat meat.
The fox turns towards the heap just a few ways off. Its stink overwhelms his nose and sticks to the inside of his mouth. This is a big pile of meat. He approaches. The legs are bent in painful ways. Death bugs buzz all around. The grass does not smell of green here.
A flutter of wings in the distance. Caws flying closer.
Large walking meat and metal metal metal and boom.
A clamor bursts out of the trees, but the detonation does not crackle through the air for them. He knows. The Hunter does not care for fluttering meat. It wants him.
The fox leaps over the rotting heap and dives into a dense copse. He dashes through a bush and jumps over a rock, then bolts straight for a wild boar track through the undergrowth. The sound of his own heartbeat pounds loud in his ear, choking him. He has to run.
He bursts out of the undergrowth. A sound like the end of the world rips through the air and explodes into a tree just to his right, sending fragments of bark flying through the air.
He makes a sudden turn left and bounces against the side of an old stump to climb a landslide slope, not taking the time to stop for air once he’s up. He pushes through dry thickets and sheds wisps of fur upon wild thorn bushes.
As the shrubs start to thin out, so too does his cover. Another salve of the Hunter’s weapon whips through the air. It booms and burns and hurts the forest all around him. Bark bursts off the trees like fireworks.
The grass is gone. There is no leaf hanging from the branches now. The Hunter grows closer. He has longer legs and thunder trapped in his hands.
Suddenly, the edge of the forest.
Neil scrambles to a stop. There is no cover here. He has to go back into the Woods.
A scraping noise makes him look up.
A Crow sits on a rose-apple tree. In its beak shines a red thing, too far to see.
The tree is dead. So are all the others. The fox steps closer to the tree, for Hunger has come back roaring in its belly.
The fox looks up. The raven opens its beak and it lets out an awful sound.
On the ground just next to Neil falls the Crow’s meal.
The fox jumps back.
Rotten rotten rotten fluttering death rotten Hunter.
A bullet tears through the edge of the Woods and makes a bouquet of dirt fly off of the ground. He needs to flee.
He cannot.
The rot has spread from the Crow’s meal and it is spreading still, sinking the ground underneath Neil’s feet. He struggles and trashes about and flails, but cannot budge. The rotten ground engulfs his limbs.
Finally, the Hunter emerges from the Woods. He has hair the color of fire and a cleaver in his hand.
Nathaniel doesn’t even have the time to scream before the ground swallows him whole.
Something is wrong.
Neil isn’t a fox anymore, and he’s positive that he’s not underground, but something is still terribly, awfully wrong.
He realizes what it is when he opens his eyes, and the whole world appears both sideways and unusually closer to the ground.
He got decapitated.
There is no other explanation for the way he can feel both everything and nothing from his neck down.
He gasps, and chokes on air. He can still breathe.
It’s not the first time this has happened, is it? Was the cleaver in the Hunter’s hand sharper than the ravens’ beaks? He can’t tell. His memory is an autumn storm of flying leaves.
His torso has been severed into two. He can feel it, that huge tear down the middle. It’s where the most leaves have spilled.
“Ah, good. You’ve woken up,” the corpse rumbles. Its feet and the end of the stick come into view. Somehow, the smell hits worse.
Neil focuses on his hand, the one he can see close to his face. It lies palm up on the ground with two fingers missing and half a thumb. A deep gash runs along the hollow of his palm. The other hand is somewhere behind him, further. It’s in a worse state than the one he can see.
The arms haven’t had much more luck. Neil thinks he can remember trying to protect his face with them, but he can’t be sure whether that memory dates back to today or long before. Either way they’re lying in tatters now, more a scattered pile of leaves with a few pieces of fabric thrown over them than anything. The legs fare slightly better, but trying to move them is still useless. The only thing he really manages to twitch are his eyes, two fingers and a few toes. There’s no salvation there.
A tremor agitates the corpse, accompanied by the sound of crackling bones and mindless croaks. Some kind of liquid falls to the ground in front of Neil, and he almost gags when he recognizes it for what it is: a piece of skin, putrefied into goo.
“Do you acknowledge the power that is mine, now, Nathaniel? Do you cower before me?”
There’s no use trying to meet the corpse’s eyes from where he is. Neil settles for glaring at its fetid, melting feet - or what’s left of them, anyway.
“My name is Neil,” he forces out. “And I’m not afraid of you.”
Another awful tremor shakes the corpse. Neil realizes after a beat that this is how it laughs.
“Then you’re even more stupid than I thought. It’s a shame, really.”
If Neil had the mouth of a living, he would spit at its feet.
“The only thing that’s a shame is your existence. Even the maggots thought you were too disgusting.”
Silence. Then the terrible, terrible noise of a sack of rotten meat folding itself to the ground, followed by the sight of its two glassy eyes slumped over the edge of their sockets.
“I chased the maggots away myself,” the corpse rasps, almost softly. “I refused to die. And because I willed it, the forest allowed it so. You have no idea what it takes to defy nature itself.”
“I died once,” Neil retorts. “You don’t see me bragging about it.”
“And I will see to it that you never will,” the corpse rumbles. It unfolds its sagging mass slowly, losing bits and pieces that fall down to the ground with nauseating sounds. “Ashes to ashes, and the leaves to the soil. You will make fine compost indeed.”
The corpse raises the stick off of the ground in a rain of unidentifiable fluids, then plants it firmly into the earth. The soil starts once again to rumble.
Panics floods Neil’s cotton-numbed mind. He’s going to be swallowed again, and this time he won’t come back. He tries to move again, desperately, but all he manages are a few twitches across his various body parts. If only his arms were whole - but no, he wouldn’t still have eyes if he hadn’t raised them.
The ground rumbles again, and this time Neil feels it soften beneath him. He wants to scream. He did scream then, when he died the first time. How his mother managed to make a body out of the parts the Hunter made of him, Neil will probably never know.
When he feels the ground start to cave in under his weight, he thinks he might scream this time too.
Except -
Except the shifting stops. A flapping sound pierces the air and the corpse cries out, and the ground becomes solid again.
Without the support of the stick, the corpse falls to its knees. The bone in one of his forearms shatters and he sags even closer to the ground.
“Ravens! Catch this bat!”
There is a swelling of wings and caws, and then the flock departs. The silence left in its wake is deafening.
A bat.
Neil closes his eyes.
A growl fills the quiet, followed by the loudest howl he’s ever heard.
Andrew found him.
No amount of twitching can get his head to turn around and check, so he’s left with the much more unpleasant sight of the corpse as it trembles and crawls backward, losing several chunks of meat with every jostling of its mass.
It stops moving after Andrew leaps at him to rip out his throat.
It trembles, one last time, then falls to the ground in one squelching heap.
Neil watches as Andrew shakes the rotten pieces of meat out of his mouth and gags, then retches over the corpse.
He watches as Andrew shifts back, quickly, to his mostly-human form.
He watches as Andrew whips around, only to freeze at the sight of Neil’s scattered body.
He says, “Hi,” then.
Andrew’s eyes shift from the full expense of the damage to Neil’s head with lightning speed. He stares, unmoving, for a while. Then something breaks, and he drops to his knees in front of Neil.
His hands are gentle as they pick up his head. The palms cup his cheeks and the fingers weave into his hair gingerly, as if he could break again. Andrew’s face would almost be blank if it didn’t look so shattered.
“I’m fine,” Neil tells him. He keeps his voice soft, colored with relief. “Nothing a little thread and needle can’t fix.”
Andrew squeezes his eyes shut. He looks pained. Neil studies his face, his neck, every inch of Andrew he can see from where he is, but he finds no sign of harm.
“Thank you for finding me,” he offers. He willed his voice still, but it betrays him and breaks over the last syllables anyway.
Andrew’s eyes flutter open. “You’re an idiot.”
Neil smiles. It tears at the small cuts that got clawed into his cheeks, but he barely registers it. “Sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
“I didn’t know what I’d find.”
Andrew’s jaw flexes. “But you knew it’d be dangerous.”
“Yes,” Neil admits. “You should probably burn it down. I don’t think decapitation is enough to kill that thing.”
Andrew throws a disgusted look over his shoulder, a sneer distorting his face for a split second. “Whatever it is, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever smelled.”
Neil tries to shrug, and feels stupid when it doesn’t yield much result. “Whatever it was, it’s nothing more than a corpse now. It’s long past time it died.”
“And fire will do that?”
“If you burn the place where it died as well, it should.” Neil frowns. “I think.”
Andrew scoffs. He opens his mouth, then closes it as something grabs his attention outside of Neil’s current field of vision. “Bee?” A silence. Then: “Tell them to hurry up.”
The faintest scuttle travels to Neil’s ear, and then silence. Andrew’s eyes flicker back to him.
“Bee?” Neil asks.
Andrew nods. “Aaron got back-up.”
“While you rushed in here alone.”
“Look who’s talking,” Andrew counters, cutting.
Neil sighs. “I didn’t exactly have a choice. I would’ve given in sooner or later, with the visions I’ve been having. Did you find my sewing kit?”
Something sharp flashes across Andrew’s face and his hands clench around Neil’s face. “I did.”
Neil frowns. “What -”
He doesn’t have the time to finish. The beating of wings comes rushing at them, followed by a loud thud and a few worried screeches.
“Is that Sir?”
Andrew looks in the direction of the commotion, and a dark flurry of wings is quick to settle upon his shoulder. She looks unharmed, but exhausted.
“Is she alright?”
Sir chirps and flaps her wings, almost clipping Andrew’s cheek in the process. He clicks his tongue at her and she promptly folds her wings against her, squeaking in response.
Andrew nods. “She’s fine. Just tired,” he says, then drops his gaze back on Neil. “She brought the branch back.”
“It’s probably safer if it’s burned, too.”
Andrew grunts in agreement. He looks tired, and like he rushed straight out of bed to the forest.
“How did you know I was gone?”
“Your cat woke me up. Wouldn’t stop whining until I stepped outside.”
“And you saw the path.”
Andrew frowns. “There was no path. I followed your scent to the forest and then it was gone,” he says, voice distant but fingers digging into Neil’s scalp. “Like you’d vanished out of existence.”
If Neil was able to, he would grab the hands framing his face. He would hold on for dear life until even the mere possibility of his disappearance was wiped out from Andrew’s mind. He settles for what little reassurance he can provide.
“Andrew,” he says, and waits until he’s certain that Andrew’s focused on him. “I’m fine. I’m not leaving. Not now, and not ever.”
A flicker in the facade, there and then gone.
If Andrew had something to say to that, he doesn’t get to. A wave of tiny spiders floods the place, bringing Aaron’s back-up in its wake, and a storm of voices and movements takes over.
It all happens in a blur. There is more than a little disgusted gagging at the corpse’s smell, and an equal amount of choked-up gasps at Neil’s scattered state, but it’s not long before Wymack rounds up everyone and starts assigning tasks - at least Neil thinks that’s what he’s doing. He can’t really tell. Andrew doesn’t join the fray, and no one asks him to. He is the eye of the storm, and the only thing Neil wants to focus on.
Once everyone’s dispatched, Abby remains at their side. She has Andrew put Neil’s head back on the ground, and together they begin the painstaking task of gathering both Neil’s parts and his stuffing in one place.
He’s blanked out during most of the sewing.
Getting his body back is odd. So many new seams pulling with every little movement. He feels brittle, weak. Keeping his balance is tricky at best and he has to lean on Andrew to keep pace with the rest of the group.
Stepping out of the forest is worse. He has to stop at the edge. He doesn’t trust the ground to support him and he keeps flinching every time he catches movement in the corner of his eye, certain that it’s a raven about to dive. Andrew has to hold his hand to get him to cross, and Neil clings to him like a lifeline all the way into town.
He’s too out of it to protest when he notices Andrew’s dragging him in the direction of his own house instead of Neil’s. Andrew’s bed is big enough for two, so that’s where they sleep. Andrew instructs Neil to take the side closest to the wall.
Neil doesn’t dream.
When Neil wakes up in the morning, Andrew’s hand is still clasped into his. They’re facing each other, mere breaths apart.
Light slants into the room through the wooden shutters, white as a ghost. Sleep has softened the drawn features of Andrew’s face and smoothed out the crease between his brows. He looks peaceful, comfortable. His hand is lax in Neil’s.
Neil easily escapes the grip. He slips out of bed slowly, careful not to make the mattress dip and bounce. A far-away want calls at him to stay, enjoy the mellow morning and cozy comforter that’s worlds away from his own iron-grid bed, but the need to leave is stronger still.
He walks out in a daze. The paved streets and crooked houses go by in what feels like half a second, though it has to be more than that. The hills barely register in his mind either.
All he cares about are the Woods.
There is longing in the sight, but he doesn’t know what for.
The past he glimpsed at?
The myriad of lost sensations being a living, heartbeat-having thing running through the forest brought him?
Kevin, Renee, Andrew - even Bee; they all came from the Woods. There’s no doubting it now. If all forests are thresholds, then perhaps it guided them here. Or they might have found their way all on their own.
Could Neil reach green again, if he were to run long enough?
Maybe. But what would he do with grass and birds and ponds, with a body such as his?
Those things are for foxes, and for the boy he was before his father chopped him up into pieces.
Is this what his mother thought about, when she got lost in her own mind? Or was she haunted by something from her own past?
The dreams never showed her to him. He has no idea how she made him once more, all on her own in this strange place.
She sewed him out of his father’s life.
Was it the Hunter she thought about, when she locked Neil up in his room? The image is still sharp in his mind. The light reflecting off the blade, hair like fire and eyes of ice.
His mother kept Neil’s. Did it remind her of the hunt through the Woods when she looked at him? Did she want it to?
Fingers touch his hand. Two sets of them, uncoiling the clenched fist by his side.
Neil’s thoughts reel to a stop.
He sighs. The breath takes a cloud of fog out of his mind.
“Good morning.”
“Leave a note next time,” Andrew says. The tone is bored, but the way his fingers intertwine with Neil’s speaks of something different.
Neil closes his eyes and curses himself.
“Shit,” he says aloud. “I’m sorry, Andrew. I didn’t think. I just…” He’d needed to see the Woods. To hear the absence of whispers. “I wasn’t going to leave,” he finishes, needing Andrew to know.
Andrew squeezes his hand.
“Just don’t do it again.”
Neil squeezes back and nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak.
He opens his eyes back up. The Woods are still wrapped up in a sea of mist, treacherous and sharply jagged. The silence is relieving and disquieting at the same time.
“They’re gone. The whispers, the ravens. All of it.”
His voice sounds hollow even to him.
Andrew tugs lightly on his hand, requesting Neil to turn around and face him. Sunlight, pale and still drowsy, makes his hair gleam. He looks almost spectral. If it wasn’t for the hand interwoven with his, Neil would think him an apparition.
Then Andrew brings his free hand to the back of Neil’s neck and pushes it down, bringing their foreheads together.
It’s a familiar gesture. It tugs at Neil’s chest and makes warmth bloom from every point of contact.
Neil hums as his eyes flutter shut, smiling. Content. When he opens his eyes back up, conflicted emotions are warring upon Andrew’s face. Neil squeezes their hands together, and Andrew’s expression levels out.
Andrew’s voice is soft, his gaze unwavering as he speaks.
“Yes or no?”
Neil blinks.
“Yes.”
When Andrew tilts his chin forward to kiss him, something slots into place.
“Oh,” is all Neil is able to say. It was nothing more than a peck pressed upon his lips, but he feels breathless anyway.
Andrew raises an eyebrow at his eloquence, but the affected nonchalance is no match for his flushed cheeks.
“You like me,” Neil whispers. He’s too awe-struck to pull off the teasing tone he intended.
Andrew huffs a breath out of his nose. “Shut up.”
Neil’s smile is wider than the sky. “Gladly,” he professes against Andrew’s lips and they’re kissing again, lips and lips and tongues until it’s the only thing left in the world that makes sense.
Neil is tempted to say that it’s the only thing worth making any sense at all.
He might be biased.
The devil’s trumpets flower, dried two full moons ago, floats at the surface of the water briefly before sinking to the bottom, weighed down by the moisture it absorbed. Its shape does not awaken vivid images into Neil’s brain. Its color does not spread to the room, or to Neil’s hands. The petals do not turn into a pair of night-black wings, nor the smell to that of rotten flesh.
The flower stays a flower. The tea remains just tea. Neil sighs, and forces himself to unclench his hand. He drinks the tea. It burns, but doesn’t taste.
The cup clinks against the metal tray. The sound fills the empty room until it stops being so empty anymore.
“Hello, Your Majesty,” Neil greets his doubled shadow.
King purrs under his hand and headbutts his shin, then jumps out of the shadow and over to his bed. She curls up in a patch of frail sunlight. Neil gives her a good scratch behind the ears, then leaves his room without shutting the door, just in case King would want to actually walk around instead of hopping from shadow to shadow as she usually does.
He hears no whispers anymore, but the forest still calls to him sometimes. Abby told him that a few of the Woods’ leaves might have gotten mixed up with his when they sewed him back together. That they are all that the Woods want. All he can do is wait for the leaves to become his more than the forest’s, and drink the potions she prescribed him as the town’s resident witch. Andrew makes sure he follows her instructions to a T.
Down in the laboratory, he finds Sir hanging from the large, sturdy lamp that used to always loom over the operation table, but has recently been relegated to Andrew’s reading light. He clicks his tongue at the bat and she drops from her perch, flipping around mid-air to fly up to his shoulder. She chirps at him for chin scratches he’s happy to provide as he stares at the blanket nest and the ever-growing piles of books.
It’s been two weeks since Neil wandered into the Woods looking for answers; one since Katelyn decided to visit Aaron again. In that span of time, Neil has slept in a building that did not also house Andrew exactly once.
He might be biased, but two weeks still haven’t changed his mind.
“What do you say we go look for your dad, Sir?”
He assumes the excited squeal he gets in response means she agrees.
Outside, the sun is slowly taking his leave for the day. Sir traces lazy rapacious circles above him as he walks. She only takes the lead when he needs to take a turn. After a while, however, it becomes clear that they’re headed for the graveyard, so Neil stops waiting for instructions at every junction that meets his path.
A soft wind blows forth from the Woods, carrying only silence. Shadows stretch thin across the cobblestones, all wrapped and wobbly, and capricious candles have already started casting flickering light out of a few narrow windows. Spectres sweep the sky, and spiders scuttle in and out of sight through every groove and crack.
He finds them just outside the gate. Whatever they’re saying is inaudible over the music played by the town’s band, who likes to practice by the graveyard, but neither of them looks angry, as Neil apprehended they would. Aaron does look frustrated, and Andrew is frowning, but that could mean any number of things.
Neil has almost reached them when Andrew suddenly takes off, barely meeting Neil’s eyes as he brushes past. Neil turns a questioning look on Aaron, but all he has to offer is a shrug.
“I told him I’m not leaving, and that Katelyn wants to move into Halloween Town. One of those things didn’t please him.”
“Pity. I’m sure you’d have made a wonderful elf.”
Aaron gags. “I swear you’re always trying to fuel my nightmares, Josten,” he says, but there’s no heat behind the words. “She told me the same thing you did, you know. Katelyn,” he adds when Neil raises an eyebrow, then sighs. “About this place being more of a celebration of weirdness than anything else.”
“Told you so,” Neil says, and grins.
Aaron scoffs. “Oh, fuck off. Don’t keep my brother waiting for too long.”
Neil turns around, half-expecting Aaron to be joking, but sure enough there’s Andrew, standing there with his back against the cemetery’s low wall, waiting. Neil feels a familiar warmth unfurl. He’s pretty sure he’s smiling.
He’s distantly aware of Aaron muttering something under his breath, but he lets it go. If Katelyn’s moving into the twins’ house indefinitely, there’s another discussion he’d much rather be having than listening to anything Aaron might have to say.
He doesn’t try to hold off his grin as he walks over to Andrew, which earns him an eyeroll and a cheerful squeal from Sir. She trades shoulders in a flutter of wings, landing on her favorite perch with a series of small chirps.
“What are you smiling at.”
Neil shrugs. It does nothing to dim the warmth he can feel expanding in his chest. “You waited for me.”
Andrew doesn’t deny it.
They walk home together.