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August is tired of being wet.
This trip seems to have been plagued by rain, and both August and his moth are downright soggy when the latest storm finally lets up. It’s the moth August worries about more, as always. The worst August might get is a cold. The worse the moth can do is die, and August wants to put that off for as long as possible. He honestly doesn’t know how deeply the Queen Mother has attached his moth to him, how tied in to muscles and the nerves of his spine it might be. It would be like Her to make it so it could never be removed without crippling or killing him. The alternative is something he has nightmares about often, having to continue on with a corpse sewn into him, the rot seeping into his blood and bones.
So when Misty builds a fire, persuading the wet wood to burn with the flame that comes from her hands (and which puts a look of zealous longing on Brixton’s face every time Misty uses that particular gift) August immediately strips off his wet coat and sits with his back to the fire as closely as he dares, letting the fire’s heat soothe the constant ache of his muscles. He’s tailored all of his shirts to be low cut in the back to make it easier to dress, which means he doesn’t have to take off his shirt to expose the moth more directly to the fire’s warmth. He’s glad of that. There are scars that the others don’t need to see.
His companions are quiet as they tend to their tasks, mending armor or sharpening weapons. So that means August hears the sound of a shoe scuffing against loose dirt, followed by the tiniest intake of breath and a warning hiss from his moth. He knows who it is and what they’re about without having to look up from repairing a tear in his coat.
“Please don’t touch,” August says firmly.
“I wasn’t going to.” Adelia says, her tone holding a suggestion of a pout that means she had very much been about to. She sits down with a little huff in front of August, clutching Violet as always. “Does your moth have a name?”
Misty had asked him the same question, what seems like a lifetime ago now, and August gives Adelia that same answer, hoping that will satisfy her. “No. It didn’t have one before we became…. attached, and it seemed weird to give it one after. It’s not a pet after all. It’d be like naming your arm or your hand.”
“Well, is it a boy moth or a girl moth? If I had a moth and it was a boy I’d name him Mister Fuzzy and if it was a girl I’d name her—”
“I don’t know—” August starts to say, his tone sharp as the needle in his hand and his words clipped. Adelia, eyes bright and eager to talk, doesn’t seem to notice.
“Is it fun to fly?”
Misty had asked August that as well, and August had been kind and patient when he had answered her. So why are his hands clutching the edges of his coat? Why are his mandibles clenched so tight that his face aches with it?
“If I had wings, I’d fly all the time like a fairy princess—”
August means to come up with a placid lie. Instead the truth hisses though his mandibles like the venom he does not have. “It’s not fun.”
Adelia doesn’t hear him. She continues to chatter on like nothing is wrong, like this journey is a grand adventure. Misty is missing a wing and she’s nearly died and so has he, and the Queen Mother is dead and gone but August hasn’t had time to even process that and the scars are always going to be there, the pain is always going to be there and the moth will be there until he dies—
Flying hurts!! The words are a scream that he only barely manages to keep behind his mandibles, biting his tongue to keep the words at bay. The sharp sting and taste of blood stop his words, but not his thoughts. The first time was the worst, the moth tried to escape and my flesh was still raw and I could feel it straining against the stitches and it hurt! It still hurts! I fly to protect myself or to protect my friends and it always, always hurts!
“Adeeelia.” Skreev’s plaintive whine cuts into August’s thoughts and his head snaps up to look at the man. When August had last noticed him, he’d been re-wrapping his body in the strips he uses as armor. Somehow, he’s managed to catch several of the strips on his left arm in the rings on his right. He tugs feebly but can’t seem to unbind his arms, his head cocked to the side in confused helplessness. “Adelia I’m stuck.”
“Oh Skreev,” Adelia sighs, as if he’s a kitten tangled in a ball of yarn. “Hold still, I’ll come fix it.”
August takes a deep, shuddering breath as Adelia moves away, relief washing away his anger and leaving his muscles trembling. Another few seconds and he might have yelled at her despite how hard he had been trying not to. She doesn’t deserve that.
Over Adelia’s head, Skreev catches August’s eyes and winks.
———
August stays quiet throughout dinner, signaling that he’d like to take watch with just a simple nod. He manages a smile for Misty, a gentle reassurance that he’s fine, that his head is just too busy for sleep at the moment, as it often is, and declines her offer of staying up with him. He pretends that his coat still needs mending until everyone is asleep, then puts aside his needle and thread, placing his head in his hands.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
The words are shadow given sound, and if his time in the Hive hadn’t taught August that silence and stillness meant safety, he might have shouted and lashed out at the voice before realizing it was Skreev.
August’s moth hisses, wings fluttering.
“I wasn’t asking you, Mister Fuzzy.”
August stares out past the flames of the fire to where Skreev had supposedly been sleeping only moments ago. There’s no one there now except for Adelia, sleeping soundly, light and shadow flickering over her skin in the firelight. “Thank you,” he says without turning to look at Skreev, barely able to hear the words over the still rapid pounding of his heart. “For earlier.”
Out of the corners of his eyes, August sees Skreev fold himself into a sitting position. “You looked like you were going to start shouting. Adelia doesn’t like shouting. It would have made her cry.” He plays with one of the rings on his arms, tugging it idly. “I made myself a promise to tear out the tongue of anyone who makes Adelia cry. But she likes you, so me tearing out your tongue would have made her cry more, and then I would have to tear out my own tongue, and things would have gotten very messy.”
“Then it seems I have to thank you again.” August’s fingers weave invisible patterns against the cloth of his coat.
Skreev hums an atonal acknowledgement. “So why were you feeling all shouty?”
Because he’s tired. He’s tired and he hurts and there is fear buried so deep in his bones that even the Queen Mother’s corpse hadn’t been able to knock it loose. Because his dearest friend is broken and he can’t fix it. Still, he’s managed to keep his temper under worse conditions.
August looks at Adelia, sleeping peacefully in a way that he hasn’t since he himself was a child, since before he was plucked away from his parents and brought underground to live under the cruel gaze of Mother. And there it is, the answer to the question he’s been turning over in his mind for hours.
“Will you tear out my tongue if I say that for a moment I was almost jealous of her?” August asks, feeling shame at the admission wash over him in a wave warmer than the fire in front of him.
“Told you, too messy.” Skreev puts his chin in his hands, giving August a curious look. “What does Adelia have that you want?”
August shakes his head. “I don’t— it’s not this me who wants it. But she’s about the same age that I was when I was taken by the Queen Mother,” he says quietly. “And the child that I was— I couldn’t turn terror into an adventure like she does, make everything that happened around me into a story, something separate from myself that I could keep at a distance. It’s an enviable skill, one that I wish a younger me had possessed.”
“Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first,” Skreev says almost philosophically. “You must have had some other way to cope, if not stories. Otherwise you’d be broken, not just cracked.”
“I don’t feel cracked,” August says quietly, looking at Misty’s kneeling, sleeping form. She’d cried for the wing she had lost, the melodies that would be marred, tears made of dust trailing down her face. “I feel like a loose seam, about to unravel at any moment.”
“Same thing,” Skreev says with a shrug. “It’s all scars, outside or inside. But having scars means you lived long enough to have scars.” He grins, running a hand down his own scarred chest, catching the ring with his littlest finger and giving it a tug. “So what kept you going, little spider?”
August reaches into the coat still draped across his lap and pulls a small roll of leather from one of the pockets, unrolling it for Skreev to see. Inside are five sewing needles in various sizes, each made of steel of a high quality, better than any craftsman of this age could make. Beside the needles is a small pair of scissors shaped like a bird with a long neck, each feather beautifully engraved.
“Fancy,” Skreev remarks.
“Mother used to send me out into the catacombs and the underground temple to find Her—” August hears the way he pronounces the word, the twist of the honorific capital letter bitter on his tongue. He doesn’t have to say her name like that ever again, not even in his own mind. She won’t strike him for disrespect. She’s gone. She’s gone.
“— To find her treasures,” August says with only the slightest tremor in his voice. “She didn’t want this, but she didn’t destroy it either, like she did with other things that displeased her. She let me have it. Until I found Misty, this was the greatest treasure I ever found. I taught myself how to sew using the clothes the Queen Mother stripped off of her victims. That’s how I learned that if I kept my hands busy, it made everything—” He gestures with all six of his hands. “It made everything less, for a little while.”
Skreev nods. “You make such pretty things,” he says, touching the woven, beaded collar that Adelia had asked August to make for him, an adaptation of the talismans of protection that August’s grandmother had taught him to make so long ago.
“Thank you,” August says, trying not to notice the very suggestive way Skreev is fingering some of the beads. Then, because it seems like the thing to ask, “How do you cope?”
“Hmmm?” Skreev tilts his head. “Before I found Adelia? The usual sorts of ways I suppose. “Drugs. Alcohol. Pain.” He grins. “I don’t always have money or barter for the first two, but the third is free.” He gives the ring in his chest another tug, harder than the last.
August wonders, not for the first time, if there is a story behind that ring. The ones in Skreev’s arms seem like a simple, if extreme body modification, but the one in his chest feel somehow different to August. That’s not the question he just asked though, not the answer he’s looking for at the moment. “What about after Adelia?”
“Oh, the exact same things,” Skreev says matter of factly. “There’s just a fourth thing now. Maybe the best one.” He looks over at Adelia, his normally manic grin becoming something less sharp for a moment, glass with the edges smoothed away. “If I can make her smile, the world feels just a little bit less shit.”
August, thinking about Misty, about all the smiles they’ve traded back and forth over the months, feels himself smiling now. “She’s lucky to have found you.”
Skreev shakes his head. “I’m lucky to have found her,” he corrects August, turning to face him. “And you’re lucky to have found both of us.”
August gives a huff of a laugh. “I just realized, I think this is the most— lucid conversation I’ve ever heard you have with anyone?”
Skreev claps a hand over his mouth, rocking back and forth as he holds back a rusty knife of a sound that takes August more than a moment to realize is laughter and not sobs.
“That’s one of the things I like about you,” Skreev says through his fingers, laughter turning into muffled, high pitched giggles. “You’re so funny.”
August gets out half a chuckle before Skreev moves, fast as lightning in shadow. Suddenly, there’s a hand on his thigh and Skreev’s face is extremely close to his own.
“If you ever need something else to occupy those busy hands of yours with,” Skreev whispers huskily, so close that August can feel Skreev’s lips brushing against his with every word. “The shadows can hide a lot of things, if I ask them nicely.”
Thought and breath stutter to a stop as August’s heart races. For the first time in forever, it’s not out of fear. All he has to do is lean forward and—
“Skreev?” Adelia’s voice is the smallest August has ever heard it, trembling as if on the verge of tears. “Skreev, Violet had a bad dream.”
In the space of half a blink, Skreev pulls away from August and does a leaping tumble over the fire, rolling to Adelia’s side. “Shhh, it’s all right, Skreev’s here now to keep all the monsters away—”
It takes a long time for Skreev to soothe Adelia back to sleep, and August doesn’t know if he’s grateful or disappointed when Skreev falls asleep beside her instead of coming back to August’s side of the fire to pick up where they had left off.
August hadn’t been close to anyone in the Hive, not really. Mother’s captives, even the more interesting ones, usually bored her within a few weeks and became food in short order. The few that hadn’t…. There are names August has made himself forget, faces that he only recalls now in nightmares, because Mother had never let him have anything that she hadn’t given him, not friendship and certainly not more than that. But she’s gone. She’s gone and this— this is something completely new.
You need to sleep, August tells himself. The darkest part of the night is over, and so is his watch. Yet how can he sleep now with so many thoughts inside his head? He feels his fingers twitching, shaking even as he clutches at his own arms to make them stop. He needs something to put his energy into, and in a flash he knows exactly what.
The cloth that August pulls out of his bag, that he had asked Snyx to get for him, had been meant for another purpose, he vaguely remembers. Had it been new pants? It doesn’t matter now. He takes out a small notebook from one of his coat pockets, does a few quick sketches, and sets to work.
———
“August, why is your moth making that sound?” Misty asks.
“Because—” August stifles a yawn. “Because it’s hungry. I’ll feed it in a minute, I just have a little more embroidery to do here—” He looks up suddenly, blinking in the light of their campsite. Misty’s face is looking down at him, concerned and fond. “When did it become morning?”
“When the sun came up,” Misty says, and laughs her rockslide laugh. “Did you stay up all night working on— what are you working on?”
“It’s—”
August’s moth gives another thin shriek and starts pulling on August’s hair.
“Ow!” August waves one of his free hands in the moth’s direction. “Can you just wait five more minutes? I’m almost done and I don’t want to accidentally get blood on this!”
“Ummm, I think it’s eating you hair now.”
“Okay fine. Misty, can you feed it please? You know how much to give it.”
“Can I feed him?”
August looks up at Adelia as she rubs at her eyes, which are lightly shadowed in the weak morning light. Her voice, usually as bright as birdsong and just as chirpy, is subdued.
“Please? I’ll be careful, and I promise not to touch him, even though he looks really soft.”
“It’s not as soft as you think,” August says, who still remembers the last time he had pet a moth, back when he had found the underground garden where the cave moths had lived, before he had told the Queen Mother about them. He casts a look over at Skreev, who is still sleeping and who he’s sure will kill him if his moth takes off one of Adelia’s fingers, then looks at Adelia’s hopeful face and sighs. “All right, you can feed it. Misty, can you show her how?”
“Of course.” He hears the stone on stone grinding of Misty kneeling, and the slight tug on his pouch of meat. “Now, just hold your hand flat—”
August concentrates on the last embroidered swoop, his silken thread shining against the gray cloth. He focuses on the aether, putting just the tiniest extra bit of it into the thread for a brighter sparkle, then ties the last knot.
“Oh!” Adelia gasps. “Mister Fuzzy, you have a very long tongue! And so many teeth!”
“Mister Fuzzy?” Misty asks as August checks the straps on his project.
“August said he doesn’t have a name, and if I had a moth I’d call him Mister Fuzzy, so that’s what I’m calling him.”
How hard would it be to make some sort of moth doll? It’d probably be easier to give Violet moth wings. August scribbles down a few more notes and carefully tucks away the biggest fabric scraps for use later, throwing the smaller bits into the fire, which he sees now has burnt down to embers.
“That’s a very good name,” Misty agrees, and August sighs again, because if Misty likes it, that’s going to be the moth’s name now, no matter what he thinks. Ah well, there are much worse things in the world.
“Okay, all finished,” August announces. “Adelia, can you come see if this fits you?”
“If what fits me?” Adelia steps back into August’s line of sight just as he holds up the pair of wings he’s (apparently) spent all night making for her.
Adelia’s shriek of delight wakes the entire camp, causing Snyx and Idyl to shout in alarm, while Brixton grumbles and Skreev comes to instant, silent alertness, his eyes immediately locking in on Adelia.
“Oh August! They’re beautiful! And they have patterns on just like Mister Fuzzy!” Adelia wiggles into the fabric straps that August had sewn on before darting forward to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “You’re like the fairy godmothers in my books!” She takes off running around the camp in circles, her wings fluttering. “I’m a fairy princess!”
Skreev looks over at August with a clear expression of gratitude on his face, and while August hadn’t made the wings to please him, he still appreciates the sentiment. He winks at Skreev with the eyes on the left side of his face.
Skreev winks back with a laugh before catching Adelia up and tossing her high in the air. She laughs in sheer delight, her smile nearly as big as his.
“Did August just wink at Skreev?” Brixton asks.
“Did Skreev just wink back?” Idyl shivers. “Of course the two creepiest ones are flirting. Uhhh, no offense, August.”
“None taken,” August replies.
“August, what does ‘flirting’ mean?” Misty asks, all innocent.
August starts laughing as he leans against Misty. No doubt there are terrible things ahead, but right now, the weight of their mission, of his memories, of everything feels a little easier to cope with.