Chapter Text
Not everyone is lucky enough to start out as a baby – which is extremely strange for Ansel, because he wakes up one day as a random ten year old boy and he’s suddenly supposed to be just okay with that.
Fun fact: he’s not.
“My goodness,” an old lady sobs, fretting over Ansel. He’s on a shitty bed with metal frames, sporting a massive headache, and desperately in need of modern day painkillers. “Your first day at Wool’s and you’ve been hit with a football to the head. You’re awake now, dear?”
Ansel blinks. He sits up, looks around, takes about five seconds to understand his new lot in life, as some poor little orphan boy stuck in what appears to be an early twentieth century clinic, and decides to wing it. There’s a mirror stuck to the opposite wall (probably for some sort of medical reason, or for the doctors to admire themselves whilst sticking leeches on people), and he quickly looks away because he’s definitely not ready yet to digest the whole taking over someone else’s body thing.
He desperately wants to say something along the lines of what the fuck is going on, who the fuck are you, get me the fuck out of here, but he decides to go with the path that won’t get him locked up in an insane asylum.
“Who am I?” He asks.
The old lady – wrinkly, grey haired, wearing an awful white nurse smock – gasps and calls the doctor. From there, the harried doctor spends approximately two minutes checking out Ansel’s skull and asking questions about his life. Ansel squints, makes weird noises, and does his very best to earn the new diagnosis of amnesia.
Because it’s apparently 1935 in the shithole grey-skied South London, the clinic kicks Ansel out without any kind of documentation or promises for a check-up, and a stout, sour-faced woman waits outside to pick him up. Her name is Miss Cole, she’s the head matron at the orphanage he belongs to, and she doesn’t even bat an eyelash when he tells her that he’s a brand new amnesiac.
God-fucking-damn. This life might actually be worse than his last one.
With gritted teeth and a complete lack of interest in his well being, Miss Cole tells him that his name is Ansel Addison, he’s ten years old, and he arrived at Wool’s at ten in the morning then immediately got hit with a stray football from an open window. Nothing about his presumably dead parents, but Ansel can work with that. It’s definitely weird that the first names are the same throughout the whole transmigratory shtick, but he won’t poke around the cosmos too much and upset whatever higher authorities placed him here.
They arrive at a converted Victorian mansion.
“This is the boys’ wing,” the matron says once they enter the orphanage building, and nearly shoves Ansel into the staircase. “Your luggage is by my office. Right now is break time, go to the yard and come back to mess when the bell rings.”
Then she disappears. Like, actually disappears, because he whirls around and only hears the whispers of ghosts and creaky floorboards.
Ghostly apparition or not, Miss Cole is horrifically unhelpful because Ansel wanders around the old Victorian mansion turned orphanage for longer than necessary trying to find her nameplate on one of the many creepy doors (and her office is on the top floor, that bitch). He finds a big suitcase with clothes, books, and disturbing 1930s era toys, then lugs the carriage around until he finds a room in the boy’s wing with a spare bed.
It’s a small room with a wardrobe, a desk, a poorly designed rickety chair, and two metal-framed beds. The primary bed, obviously in use by another boy at Wool’s, is clean and tidy. The other bed is pushed all the way in the back corner, dusty and forgotten.
Ansel ignores the red flags and unpacks his shit.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
Holy–!
Because being frightened of creepy children is a bad sign for the immediate future, living with all these pale, malnourished freaks, Ansel turns around casually with an inquisitive smile, as relaxed as he possibly can. Showing fear in front of children means he’ll die within the first week.
There’s a small, thin boy with dark hair and wide eyes by the open door. He’s cute in the way porcelain dolls are, but also terrifying in the same way. His face looks gaunt, with dark shadows under each eye and a glumness that only comes from a tragic backstory.
“Oh, sorry,” Ansel says, acting friendly because this kid is giving him the chills. “There weren’t any other beds. I’m Ansel Addison, by the way. What’s your name?”
The boy stares, mute.
The staring becomes creepy after the thirty-second mark, so Ansel awkwardly smiles and finishes unpacking the rest of his stuff in boxes under the dusty bed, ignoring the demon child burning holes into the back of his neck. In the reflection of the thick window, he surreptitiously examines his new appearance as this random ten year old boy, and finds himself pleased with the lack of change. He’s still about the same, with light brown hair, hazel eyes, and snaggletooth.
A perfectly adorable ten year old.
An angel, perhaps.
“Tom Riddle,” the demon child says, finally, after a moment of churning silence.
The first thought in Ansel’s head is a reference to the Harry Potter books, but Tom and Riddle are both common first and last names respectively, so he shrugs it off and tries to pester the kid into further conversation. Turns out, Tom is nine years old, disliked by everyone at Wool’s, and nobody’s lasted in the same room with him for more than a few days.
Wow.
Okay, then.
“I’m different,” Tom mutters, clenching his fists and staring maddeningly into Ansel’s eyes, as if in accusation. “You should leave.”
Ansel frowns. “What? No. I just got here.”
The red flags are screaming at him to just silently agree and leave, but that’s the coward’s way out and everyone at this orphanage will know by the end of the day – a one-way ticket to getting bullied is to show weakness, and Ansel is more scared of being a loser than he is of one puny emo child. How hard can this be?
Tom swallows, faces the ground, and bites his lip. It’s an unerringly human action that detracts from all the other disturbing aspects of the boy – namely, the ghastly white skin – and it reminds Ansel that even the creepy children have emotions, too. So he shoves the nasty feelings down, remembers that he’s not actually ten, and tries his hand at being the bigger person.
“How about we make a deal?” Ansel says.
A hurricane swells in his chest. He’s hanging onto the precipice of a mountain, staring into the heavenly skies that threaten a fate worse than death upon him, and laughing like a fool. All at once, trivial reason flies out the room, and he’s left knowing everything and nothing. Tom is more than just a roommate; this boy is a prize to be won, an object to steal, a rose to be plucked. Ansel’s nerves are on edge as he looks at this boy, this china doll, with bated breath.
Burnt petals. Candle aroma. Old books.
Tom glances up. “What?”
The moment, the blankness in the hundredth of a second, disappears. Ansel feels like he can breathe again. So he laughs, holds a hand out, and says, “I’ll wager a bet. If I last one week in this room, you’ll become my friend. Deal?”
His chest hurts. He doesn’t know why his chest hurts, but he does know that his heart is pounding, the hairs on the back of his neck are raised, and the thunder in his ears is from more than just rushing blood. There’s something horribly, terribly wrong with the situation unfolding before the two boys, wherein Ansel must be shattering the known reality of the world with his awkward blunders, unknowingly.
And the universe waits for Tom Riddle’s answer.
The demon child stretches his fingers out to fight hidden trembles, glares at the ground, and sticks a pale, skinny hand out.
“Deal,” Tom says.
It’s easier than Ansel expects to gain compliance from Tom Riddle after their tumultuous first conversation. The boy mostly keeps to himself, doesn’t like going outside (which explains the vitamin C deficiency induced irritability), and when Ansel finally pesters the boy into a mini tour of the yard before the bell rings, said boy grumbles, murmurs nasty curses under his breath, and very slowly saunters off into the cold.
Hands in his threadbare trouser pockets, Tom stands like a gargoyle on the wet, barren wasteland of a backyard. Speaking of, Ansel doesn’t know the time or date and that’s a bit unfortunate.
“Tom,” Ansel says, looking back at his new moody not-friend.
If Tom were a cat, he’d probably hiss at him.
“What.”
“What day is it? Actually, can you tell me everything that’s happened in the past year that’s been on the news? The BBC or…”
Has the BBC even been created yet?
A brisk chill speeds through the yard, barrelling iciness into low ground. The way this shithole neighbourhood is structured means that all the nearby taller buildings with thin, narrow gaps between them direct the cold winds directly into the only open space – the pitiful existence of a backyard of this orphanage. Hot air rises, cold air falls – or so the science says, but Ansel can actually feel the air freezing up and his skin begging to find shelter inside. If his skin were any thinner it would be shredded up like paper.
He looks behind him, to Tom, glaring into the insanity of the weather. “Are you stupid or something?” The boy bites out. “You don’t know the date?”
Well…
“I’ve got struck with a football to the head, the doctor says I have amnesia and don’t remember anything except my name,” Ansel says.
Tom squints. “So you are stupid.”
“I’m–!” Wait. Right, this is a nine year old boy with zero social skills. “Fine. Maybe a bit stupid, sure. But you’re not stupid, so I’m asking you.”
Ansel doesn’t know if Tom is willing to help him or not, because at that moment Miss Cole comes out holding a large brass bell and rings it high in the air. The ding-ding-ding sounds reach the entire crevice of the cold, cold abyss, and children come flying to the back door. They’re all snot-nosed, red-faced, and glancing curiously at Ansel and completely ignoring Tom in the background. Most of the girls are younger and most of the boys are older, and they’re all pale, dirty, and skinny.
The canteen inside is a bit warmer because of the kitchens leaking heat into the hall. The old, old ladies serving dinner toss down a cup of hot soup, a bread roll, and an interesting mush of colour that must be either vegetables or mushrooms – it’s a bit hard to tell at this point – and Ansel smiles and thanks them but they all just stare at him blankly.
So much for cuteness.
“So, Tom–.”
And nothing.
Ansel completes a full circle, walking with his dinner tray, but Tom’s disappeared. It’s a small hall, but Ansel can’t see his roommate sitting down at any of the tables in the centre – that is, until a puerile voice behind him says a few particular words.
There’s a tall, lanky boy around his age with freckles and dirty blond hair. “The freak isn’t allowed to eat in the canteen this month,” he says.
Oh no. Tom’s even worse than an outcast. He’s a social pariah.
“Oh my,” Ansel says, widening his eyes appropriately. “I didn’t know that. He’s my new roommate so I was trying to be friendly.”
The lanky kid snorts. “Tough luck, that.”
So Ansel sits down at a random table with boys and girls around his age and tries his hand at being conversational and friendly. It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, but none of them scream at him to leave so he takes it as being in their good graces. There’s Dennis (the lanky kid), Billy, Eric, and Amy – all in late primary school – and a few other older kids with bruises on their faces and dirty fingernails. This is in contrast to what Ansel remembers his first impression of Tom, a boy with combed back hair, hands scrubbed raw, and a terrible disliking of anything outdoorsy.
The children tell him things about Tom, terrible things. He’s being punished this month because Miss Cole caught him talking to a garden snake the other day, whispering like a demon from a Lovecraftian novel. But before that, Dennis says quietly, little wittle Tommy Widdle scared away his previous roommate because he made the wardrobe shudder and groan. And last summer, he touched a flower whilst he was angry about something and it wilted in his hands, right before everyone’s eyes.
“He’s not right,” Amy says, hushed. “Isn’t there any other bed?”
Eric coughs back the rest of his soup and slams the bowl on the table. “There’s four in my room, but we’ve got a fireplace so it wouldn’t be too bad to have an extra on the floor.”
“Yeah,” Amy says. “Stay away from that freak, or you’ll regret it.”
Fuck.
Fuckity fuck fuck, fuck on a stick, fucking hell, Ansel’s going through another existential crisis because all of his effort to befriend the poor emo kid is the exact opposite of what he should’ve done to avoid being bullied. It’s difficult to tell if Tom is the victim or the menace in this situation, but either way, sticking to his new roommate spells out bad news.
So Ansel crinkles his eyes in his best approximation of a smile and says, “I’ll try to survive the first week in my room. If it gets bad, I’ll remember that, Dennis. Thank you.”
Dinner ends splendidly.
The demon child returns to the mess to deposit a clean tray to the kitchen workers, then scurries off, quick as a mouse, before most people spot him. He’s slight and sprightly, a spirit in the wind, hardly there and not at all. For the two hours after dinner, an assigned study time for the children in school, Tom is nowhere to be found. Miss Cole drops off a set of ancient school supplies and a uniform on the canteen tables where they work, and without any homework to go off on, Ansel picks through the mouldy pages and does his best to understand what the hell kids in the 1930s are learning.
I have a bachelor’s in physics, Ansel thinks. What the fuck is this?
It’s similar enough to his previous education at primary school from the twenty-first century, but still somehow absolute shit in comparison.
“Did you also forget how to read, Addison?” Miss Cole says, lurking behind him.
He resists calling her a slur. “No, ma’am.”
She clicks her tongue and wanders off, leaving him to stare at the same page over and over again. Not out of an inability to read, but because Ansel’s bored out of his mind and wants nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep for an entire day straight.
At a questionably dark hour of the night, a maid named Martha starts turning off the dingy electric bulbs and the children shuffle properly back into their rooms.
Tom waits, sitting on his neat bed, reading a large and ugly tome.
“The British Encyclopaedia of Marine Animals, fifth edition,” Ansel reads from the spine.
The demon child looks up, slams the book closed, and the light on the ceiling flickers ominously. He scowls at nothing in particular then reopens the book and ignores Ansel fantastically. How rude. But there’s nothing to be done except rest from the events of the day, so Ansel falls into bed with great drama and a groggy sentence or two, telling Tom to turn off the light once the boy also goes to sleep.
Tom Riddle doesn’t sleep.
Probably.
Ansel wakes up in a fit, half-asleep and thirsty. There’s a gas leak or something, because he hears hissing in the corner, so Ansel sits up and blinks out the bleariness, only to witness a giant green snake at the foot of Tom’s bed, with said boy hissing at it, spitting out funny throat noises and coughs. Now, seeing a giant fucking serpent in one’s room is a cause for concern, but Ansel isn’t a screamer. Deep down, he’s afraid, but like anybody in his situation would do, he crawls back under the covers, shuts his eyes, and does his best to fight against the scary night in the safety of his bed. He imagines confronting Tom and the snake, staring into the beady eyes of a creature and the wide, fear-struck eyes of a friendless nine year old boy, and screaming profanities at the top of his lungs. Tom, you freak, he imagines himself saying, and moving rooms the next morning.
All of Dennis’ warnings come back to mind, and a memory of flipping through fantasy novels and sighing over character descriptions bangs on his skull, but nothing makes sense at the moment so Ansel throws the whole brain out and starts anew.
He eventually falls asleep again, and finds himself waking up to the morning light and people upstairs getting ready for the day.
On the other side of the room, Tom is pulling on a school uniform. There’s a flicker of shadow – a tail, perhaps – under the other bed, and it takes a treacherous minute for Ansel to muster up the courage to step onto the floorboards, vividly imagining a monster coming out from underneath to tear up his ankles, in which Tom finishes dressing up.
“You’re so slow,” he says.
Turns out, it’s early December, and the cold seeps into every crack and fissure of the walls. There are white puffs of breath even inside the orphanage rooms, and Ansel struggles to pull on the grey and red uniform with dodgy, leaden fingers. It doesn’t snow in this part of the country, and instead the only beauty of winter they see is the soot-infused black snow on the pavement, turning to ugly slush from pedestrian wear.
It’s cold. It’s so much colder than he could’ve dreamed of. The outside world is harsh and unforgiving, and Ansel can barely feel his extremities on the walk to his new primary school.
South London in 1935?
Shit.
Completely shit. Absolutely horrendous. Just flat out bad.
There’s something Ansel’s grandmother used to say, to visualise a fire in his mind and he’ll trick his mind into believing himself to be warm. It never worked, of course, but fresh out of options and currently freezing his toes off, Ansel starts building the image of a great, roaring fire. First, the wood – cherry wood, or smokey hickory – then a sparking match, with flickers of embers falling off the thin stick. Then, by magic, the match finally lights and it’s dropped into the basin of wood. The fire crackles at first, investigating its new environment, spreading into the deep lines of the chopped blocks, finding fuel and energy in its home. Then the wood gives in, lets the fire embrace it, and orange-red wisps emerge into the still air. The flames dance, up, up, and up, higher and higher, until there’s yellow in the middle and the logs start glowing and Ansel’s fingers burn in the heat.
He blinks. There’s something different about him now.
“Addison, do keep up,” Dennis says, in front of him.
He’d prefer to walk with Tom, but his grumpy roommate apparently walks by himself ahead of the pack, eager to get to the classroom before the teacher even arrives.
The school has heating, maybe.
Oh shit.
It’s no longer cold. The weather must’ve cleared up, because Ansel stretches his fingers from his pockets, completely rejuvenated, unable to feel the prickling pain of the chilly morning.
He keeps the visualisation of fire in his mind’s eye, tending to the crackling fire pit by adding new logs every now and then, and pretending to savour the smell of smoke and cherry ash. His body feels looser and free, no longer stiff from the icy air, and his jaunt to campus isn’t so bad anymore, ignoring the ugly grey views.
St. John’s Boy’s Academy houses primary and secondary education, and it’s full of rowdy, milling kids. Quite a few boys are wearing obviously second-hand clothes – given the poor neighbourhood, it’s surprising how many new uniforms there are – so Ansel and the other orphan boys fit right in. He goes to his Year 6 class, makes a few friends, and instantly blends in with the droll of the room. School is a nice change from Wool’s, at least, and he blanks out for the rest of the day, numbingly taking notes in a used-then-erased notebook and replying to his teachers in an imitation of his classmates’ thick Cockney.
Then the school day is over and the fantasy ends.
The day had passed by in a millisecond, one of warmth, boyish cheer, and companionship, and now Ansel walks out the tall gates, wishing for more, to not go back to the darkness of Wool’s and Miss Cole. He might understand Tom a bit better now.
Most of the boys stay behind to play football in the school yard, so Ansel could go back inside and stay for an extra hour, but he catches the glimmer of brief sunlight flashing on dark, silken hair, and quivering shoulders, and Ansel darts off.
“You look cold,” Ansel says.
Tom kicks a piece of black ice-sludge off the pavement. “Fuck off.”
He doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he stays silent, but walks next to Tom anyway. What’s the deal with this Riddle guy, anyway? Everyone hates him or fears him (or both), snakes barge into his room, and he speaks in tongues. There’s a memory banging inside Ansel’s brain, something caught on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t quite pull it out yet. Denial, maybe?
Ansel wiggles his fingers mysteriously and pulls on a smile. “Oooooh, maybe I’ll teach you my fire magic.”
“Your–.” Tom splutters. He looks even more upset, impossibly so, and turns his head away. “Don’t be stupid, Addison.”
“You can call me by my first name,” Ansel says. “Ansel. A-N-S-E-L.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because…” He wracks his brain. Friendship? Not there yet. General good vibes? Tom probably hasn’t smiled since 1930. Roommate camaraderie? Compassion? Politeness? “...politeness. Manners. Um.”
The boys walk in awkward silence.
The weather feels so nice and warm, Ansel’s skin tingles from the heat, and the blood rushes freely through his fingers and toes, but Tom is bundled up in his coat, shaking to bits. Is Tom sensitive to the temperature? Or is Ansel’s mental visualisation of a fire pit working better than expected? His uniform blazer is almost too hot now, so he shrugs it off and hands it to his shivering not-friend.
Tom scoffs. “I don’t need your pity, Addison.”
Whatever.
Then more strange things occur that night, because the slithering and hissing noises return in the dead of the morning, and a heavy weight settles on top of Ansel, but he ignores it and tries to go back to sleep. This happens a few more nights in a row, and Tom seems more and more frustrated each morning at Ansel’s reluctance to move out. The other kids at the orphanage give Ansel a wide berth, with the more days that pass, but there’s no bullying or mean words said to his face. He’s not quite the social pariah as the obvious example, but everyone is wary of him, tentatively tiptoeing around him, paranoid of what he’ll do next if he hasn’t broken down so far.
The thermostat by the backdoor at Wool’s reads two degrees, which shouldn’t be right, because Ansel can barely feel the cold anymore.
On Saturday, there’s no school, so the entire afternoon is booked off for general play time. The children below twelve aren’t allowed to leave the gates, which must be miserable for them, but it’s not like there’s anywhere for the older kids to go. The neighbourhood is dangerous, the parks are frozen over, and the only people around are poor factory workers and malnourished beggars. The orphanage workers are decorating the halls with bits of glittery tinsel and green paper, however, which provides minimal festive cheer. Yearly donations from the wealthy Londoners means there’s always charity gifts to the children at Wool’s, or so Ansel hears from Amy and Eric’s tales from last Christmas – in the form of a prepackaged sugar cookie, a pair of socks, or a new pen.
Then the pleasant Saturday is ruined when a little girl named Rose-Marie spots a snake in the back of the yard. She screams, high pitched and shrill, catching the attention of Miss Cole.
“Missus,” the girl blubbers before running away.
And the woman sees the snake.
Ansel watches from the sidelines, from where he was trying to build a snowman with the limited sludge-y ice. It melts immediately in his hands, but hey – the effort is what counts. He somehow dragged Tom outside today, mostly because he tricked the boy into rambling about his marine animal book, and maybe because Tom is a lonely kid who doesn’t mind the socialisation as much as he pretends to.
Miss Cole looks at the tiny garden snake with brown and black scales, then cranes her neck like an owl to stare at Tom, several metres away. “Mr. Riddle, come with me,” she says, spitting her words.
Wait, no.
Tom, on instinct, takes a step forward. Ansel reaches out, on instinct, to pull him away. His skin is red-hot in comparison to the blue-cold of Tom’s hand, and the demon child gasps and stutters at the temperature difference. Is this the first time they’ve exchanged skin to skin contact?
“Mr. Riddle,” Miss Cole says. “Must you keep bringing those foul creatures into these grounds? Come with me, now.”
Where is the evidence? Where is the fight? Where is the burning, unyielding, passionate little boy with snarky, witty remarks? Where is Ansel’s evil roommate, who reads too many books in his free time, makes faces when he thinks no one’s watching, and whispers to snakes like a gossipping housewife when no one else is awake to judge him? Because all there is right now is a cold, dead ghost of a boy, sauntering emptily towards a woman with too much and no fear, in rehearsal of something he’s done a thousand times.
The sludge by Ansel’s feet has melted down into a surprisingly warm puddle. He looks down, looks back up, and grits his teeth to say no.
“Tom’s been with me all day,” he says, and the thunder is back in his ears again, heart pounding. “I’ve got no clue what you’re saying about him, ma’am.”
A coward wouldn’t do this. A coward would sit still and pretty, twiddling his thumbs and befriending Dennis and Amy. A coward would ignore the world.
Fresh cotton. Autumn leaves. Glass teapots.
The universe takes a bite, chews it about, and spits out the remaining vestiges of Ansel’s sanity, because memories fly at him all at once. The mental fire tricks never worked in his previous life, because no matter how hard he tried, it was always so cold. Tom and Riddle are common names, but not so common once put together. The second World War awaits at the dawn of the decade’s turn. There’s sparks in his veins, there’s anger in his mouth, and there’s dread in his heart.
But change doesn’t happen overnight. Miss Cole drags Tom away, the boy too afraid to resist, and the other kids outside realise the shift in allegiance in Ansel Addison.
There are several things he understands at once, and none of them are pretty.
The punishment for scaring other kids, no matter what cause or situation, is being locked up in the garret for a few hours. Ansel hears it’s cold and dreary, with the rattling winds and loose rafters, so he paces in their bedroom, waiting for Tom’s punishment to end. The poor boy hadn’t got dinner either, so he tosses a stolen bread roll in the air, playing with it, waiting endlessly.
Finally, hours after curfew, the creaky door opens slowly.
A bell, from a distance away in the city, chimes.
“Tom,” Ansel says. “Are you alright? I’ve got a bread roll for you, don’t tell anyone.”
He thinks he hears him mutter I’m not hungry, fuck off, but the noise is diminished in the wake of the heavy storms outside.
“Tom?”
Silence, again. He’ll just have to wait.
The cold, cold boy grabs the blanket on his bed, ready to sleep, but then pauses in the darkness. He drops the blanket, then grabs it again, and lets his fists shake in the air. “Why are they…” Tom whispers, trailing off. Why are they warm?
Ansel sits on his own bed, watchful.
Tom scoffs, scowls, and makes huge gestures with his arms, nearly crouching down in burning fury. “Why–?! No, how? Why are you pretending to be so nice? What’s in it for you? What did you do to my bed?”
He looks fragile, this china doll boy, in all his wild emotions. Ansel could breathe on him and that precious face would break into a million pieces.
“I told you,” Ansel says, and mimics his earlier, silly finger wave from six days ago. “Magic.”
Tom’s face turns unreadable. “You weren’t having a laugh.”
There are many things Ansel understands at once, and none of them are pleasant. Transmigration into another body, in this exact timeline, at this location, has more meaning than he’ll ever know. It can’t help but be anything but magic, and the warmth in his body against the December weather assists the theory. He’s young; he’s ten, almost eleven perhaps, so his hypothesis can be further proven down the line, but he’ll bet an owl will come knocking at the door within the academic year. People don’t just transport across realms, it just doesn’t happen. And if it does, then they can’t visualise fire in their minds and cause a threadbare blanket to be as warm as a furnace.
It’s not supposed to happen, but it does.
“No,” Ansel says.
The city bell chimes again, loud and obnoxious.
“It’s midnight – Sunday,” Ansel says, quiet. “It’s been a week since our deal.”
Heavy breathing. Unfallen tears. Excitement beyond reason.
“You’re like me,” Tom says. “You’re different.”
No and yes.
Is this how reincarnation works? Endless, dreadful terror? Chills racking down the spine, blood curdling in its arteries, bones cracking under the sheer weight of death-defying pressure? An unsaid promise already forms at the lips of fate. “I suppose so,” he replies, swallowing away the bile. “We’re both… magic.”
If Ansel’s stuck here, rooming with the devil incarnate, then the bravest thing he could do is to befriend him and turn him to do good.
The demon child breaks out in the barest of smiles, the first light that’s washed over his face in many years, and finishes the hand shake.
Friends.