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JBB: An Artblog!
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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ellievsbear
Three Goblin Art
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@ramshacklemouse
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ newweeeee intro post
✒ I'm claudie and I'm normal and can be trusted with ramshackle dorm
previously pomefioredove | est. 2024
✒ MASTERLISTS [WIP]
✒ AO3 [more writing here!]
I've had this blog since I was a teenager so the writing quality varies. I APOLOGIZE FOR NOTHING!
✒ no NSFW, no canon x canon, no child x adult, be normal about women thanks
Saw that the request where open for headcanon and I couldn’t help myself…
How would the boys react to a Yuu that likes to keep Ramshackle cute and adorable, maybe painting some stuff in more pastel tones and placing cute plushies (that remind them of each boy, for example a skull for Skully, a fox for Ernesto, etc…) around the house or even their rooms, and even placing sweet scented candles around the mannor. Just a small thought that came to e when I was remodeling my room LOL
Feel free to indulge in this! Have a nice night/evening/day/morning! Bye bye
CUTE!!!
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ a bit of a fixer-upper
summary: redecorating some ramshackle rooms type of post: headcanons characters: rollo, fellow, skully, swing information: platonic, reader is yuu, reader is gender neutral, ramshackle au, old skully (ghost)
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Rollo Flamme
To be honest, Rollo lets you do whatever you want forever
If you told him you were going to liven up his room he would be like "...Okay" and go tend to the garden to give you space
His room is kept immaculately clean and neat, so he really has no idea what you'd be doing in there (you're making it look like less of a dungeon) but he trusts you, and he also never says no to you because he is Prefect Fan number ONE!!!!
I imagine he comes back and it's exactly the same except 10% less dusty and there are some decorative throw pillows on the bed
Rollo doesn't really need a candle cause he burns incense
So it really is just some cute pillows and flowers and slightly less melodramatic Catholic angst
He compliments your fine interior decorating skills at dinner 🙂↕️
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Fellow Honest
Chains and locks his door then swallows the key
It's cute when you want to put little bows in Gidel's hair or fresh flowers on the dining table, but Fellow is a GROWN MAN and he's not into that glittery pink fruofruo stuff, thank you very MUCH
His room is FINE, he says
It doesn't NEED to be redecorated, he says
(His room looks like a tornado went through it by the way)
Foxes are territorial animals so keep your hands off his thingssss -_-
...Anyway, that lasts all of two hours and then he gets really jealous of everyone else's clean rooms and fresh flowers and vanilla honey lavender beach scented candles, aaand Gidel is pouting because he wants a cute little plush too!
So, Fellow graciously allows you in and silently tidies up with you. He lets you put one (1) nice painting on the wall, light a candle, and Gidel gets a fox and a cat plush (Fellow said he didn't want it)
Next week, you have a little handsewn Grim-shaped plush on your bed, which Fellow insists he had nothing to do with
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Skully J. Graves
Okay Skully is also with Rollo on the whole "Prefect is a perfect angel and can do whatever they want" thing
But he's also a control freak about aesthetics
So he would (for your sake) quietly sit and nod along while listening to your grand redecoration plans for his attic (new carpet, some plants, maybe a pastel wall...)
And then trails behind you making "friendly suggestions" about the schematics
For instance, well, why not a black wall? It would compliment the ghostly glow of the candlelight so much better! If you insist on color, then he's become quite fond of orange and purple over the years!
Plants? Well, what about mugwort? What about wormwood? Wormwood would grow so nicely in that corner!!!
...Unfortunately for you, Skully is a bulldozer when it comes to having his visions realized, so your plans for a cute and contemporary update are suddenly for a Halloween-themed dream room
He thanks you with a kiss anyway U_U
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Swing
Literally the only guy on this list who would be visibly excited about it TBH
0000000.1 seconds of patience until he's dragging you by the ankle into his dungeon to redecorate
The basement is a harder area to navigate, and it WOULD have taken you much longer to visualize your plan, if Swing wasn't telling you his own the whole time
It's honestly a lot of nonsense, and things that are completely out of your skill area (not to mention, budget) so, No, there will not be any slot machines or blackjack tables in the basement
You do entertain his wish for a chute from the kitchen, fixing up an old dumbwaiter
The finishing touch is some ribbon bows on the pipes (cause why not?) and a vase of flowers that'll no doubt be dead by morning
Only about one thing out of eighty that he requested, but he seems happy with it anyway (ALMOST hugs you to death, just barely remembers that you need to breathe at some point)
Erm hii
Would love a request based off the meme you made of "why does rollo flamme call you babygirl"
Untapped comedic potential i think
omg who could have sent me this .... I have no idea .....
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ princess treatment
summary: NRC students react to rollo sweeping you off your feet type of post: headcanons characters: rollo, then ace, deuce, leona, azul, and malleus being jealous asfuck information: romantic, reader is yuu, reader is gender neutral (despite the title), 'rollo is a sweetheart' propaganda
When Rollo Flamme transferred to Night Raven College after the disastrous fire lotus ordeal, they'd been expecting chaos. Vitriol, hatred, fights, magic sparks flying, and definitely a lot of arson.
The Night Raven College students greeted him with magic pens drawn, a subtle warning: try it again and you're done for.
But Rollo Flamme is, in reality, a perfectly pleasant classmate when he's not trying to uproot the way of the world. A bit introverted, maybe a little cold and impersonal, but he wouldn't so much as sneer at the Night Raven College students in passing, and so all was forgotten (or, at least, put aside).
That was, until...
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Heartslabyul
Ace and Deuce didn't like the thought of you sharing a dorm with that guy, not one bit!
It took a lot of talking (and cherry pie bribery) to get them to come around, and when a few months had passed with no incident to tell, they mellowed out
...Then, suddenly, you're inviting Rollo on all of your outings, and your trio (not including Grim) became a quartet
Tolerable until Ace and Deuce realized Rollo had not one bit of interest in them, and would only make pleasantries out of politeness, likely for their beloved Prefect's sake (he never leaves your side)
What's worse is that Rollo is doing all the gentlemanly stuff that they never bothered to- holding doors for you, pulling out your chair, offering to carry your things... why didn't they think of that!! He makes them both look like Grade A jerks without even glancing their way
Noble Bell College is all about manners and formalities, after all
They try to bounce back by doubling their gentlemanly behavior, but somehow always end up fighting about which one of the two gets to link arms with you while crossing the street, or give you his coat when it's cold
...Then Rollo goes ahead and does it anyway while they're busy bickering with one another
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Savanaclaw
Leona didn't have any interest in Rollo to begin with
Listen, he wasn't at the masquerade ball. He never broke his back weeding fire lotuses, never singed off his eyebrows while battling in the bell tower (sorry, Azul), and in Leona's world, this meant they had no personal beef, thus he had no reason to care about the strange new transfer student
He wasn't even bugged that Rollo was being a perfect gentleman for you- in fact, he thought it was a good thing. Someone has to look out for you around here
It wasn't until he spotted you walking with him in the botanical gardens, when Rollo held out an arm to stop you mid-step
Leona narrows his eyes- trouble?
...But Rollo only points out that your shoelaces have loosened, and he kneels to tie them for you without thinking twice
Something about the gesture (and how CASUAL it is) makes Leona's eye twitch
He'll have to keep a better eye on that Rollo guy...
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Octavinelle
Azul didn't like Rollo to begin with, but now he's REALLY gotten on his nerves
The once kind, helpful Prefect, always willing to lend a hand (or an arm, or a leg, or a vital organ) to a fellow poor, unfortunate student, no matter the cost to themself?
...Suddenly saying no
Azul's art of the deal falls flat when Rollo is around, who delivers that steadfast and ready "No, thank you, good day," and whisks you away before Azul can even get a word in!
Not even the tweels are convincing- Rollo always makes you stand behind him when Floyd is around, and he refuses to even look at Jade
But it's not only that the Prefect is no longer an unpaid intern because of Rollo's intervention, it's that you actually listen to him
His judgments? His decisions? His muttered comments? You respect him enough to heed his warnings without question. You must think very highly of him...
...Azul can't help but feel a little jealous of that
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Diasomnia
Malleus was ready to put that nasty fire lotus business behind him
What? You thought he would be angry, vengeful, and possessive? Have you MET the guy? He takes no pleasure in hatred, violence is only a potential necessity, and, in all honesty, he was excited to have a member of the gargoyle studies club besides himself and the Prefect
...Maybe he puts too much faith in people, sometimes
Because Rollo Flamme maintained exactly zero interest in befriending, or even tolerating Malleus Draconia, and instead prefers following in your shadow, keeping his eyes pointed at potential threats to the magicless student he so adores
Malleus had never been particularly envious of your friendships with fickle, foolish boys, and besides that, your happiness was his happiness
...But this feels like Rollo is overstepping a boundary that Malleus didn't even know was there
He suddenly feels a great urge to have you closer, to impress you, to catch your attention
His displays of magic become even grander, his acts of chivalry even more dramatic, his kindness pushed to its limit (Sebek would kill hundreds to be in your position, but he was told to hold his tongue on the matter for the time being), and yet, still, you stay at Rollo's side
Malleus doesn't quite understand it. Cold, curt, and with more interest in old traditions than magical ingenuity, he seems like the very last person that you, of all people, would get along with
...And, yet...
Rollo walks you through the courtyard with linked arms, he always lets you have your first pick of the pastries he gets shipped from home, and he's sure to wrap an arm around your waist when he feels tension in the room, as if his first priority is always and forever keeping you safe
He speaks to you in that soft tone (reserved only for you, when he thinks no one is listening), and calls you dear Prefect
It would have angered Malleus, if it were anyone else- but this is someone he's beaten in battle before.... just on a different playing field
The competition is on
I've got a handful of fics to finish but in the meantime, headcanon requests are open for ramshackle dorm and NO ONE ELSE!!!!
found that swing tsum fanart i mentioned, your DMs were turned off so hope you don't mind if i pop this one into the inbox.
swing is so fun to me since he can be both a silly billy and then in the next moment unhinged and terrifying. love a guy who can do both
(artist is yasiro56 on twitter)
THANK YOU FOR THIS. CANON !
and true. he's grown on me like a fungus, *fellow and crowley fan voice* we love a guy who can be both silly and unbelievably terrifying
quick poll...
I would start writing a lot more on this blog if I was writing more rollo fellow skully & swing (& yuu & grim & gidel & the ghosts and so on). I would also fix up my masterlists and theme. I would continue my ongoing series and still post main cast occasionally, so the content wouldn't change- except that I would be posting more often
so (hypothetically)
if I were to rebrand, which url do you prefer? what sounds catchier I guess
ramshacklecat
ramshacklemouse
button for claudie do not touch!!!!1!!
the people have spoken!
pomefioredove -> ramshacklemouse
things I would do with ramshacklies if we were in my mysterious unnamed home state together
fellow - blueberry picking summer/apple picking fall
swing - chill with the harvestmen in the cellar
grim - the sugar house
rollo - visit the church I was baptized in and show him the spot on the nice velvet carpet where I threw up
skully - laconia pumpkin festival
quick poll...
I would start writing a lot more on this blog if I was writing more rollo fellow skully & swing (& yuu & grim & gidel & the ghosts and so on). I would also fix up my masterlists and theme. I would continue my ongoing series and still post main cast occasionally, so the content wouldn't change- except that I would be posting more often
so (hypothetically)
if I were to rebrand, which url do you prefer? what sounds catchier I guess
ramshacklecat
ramshacklemouse
button for claudie do not touch!!!!1!!
scarily on my way to rebranding as a ramshackle dorm centered blog
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ ramshackle tsumpocalypse
summary: ramshackle residents reacting to you loving on their tsums U_U type of post: headcanons characters: rollo, fellow, skully, swing information: romantic or platonic, reader is yuu, reader is gender neutral, ramshackle au, a little fluff to take the edge off, reader is ambiguously young adult aged, old skully (ghost), these men are pathetic asfuck, possible ooc, for a friend :3c
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Rollo Flamme
...Was against this from the start
Could this school go ONEEEE DAYYYY without something batshit crazy happening? PLEASE?
He could cope with the annoying students (barely) and the even more annoying staff, but a little him-shaped bean falling out of the sky? Really? Really.
This would never happen at Noble Bell, he'll have you know
Nonetheless, he's been a COMMITTED caretaker, making sure to educate his tsum on the dangers of magic (and the ABC's)
It was going well, and Rollo was even beginning to enjoy having a mini-him around, until his tsum took an interest in the one person he said was strictly off-limits... you!!!
It was so subtle that only Rollo himself could recognize the signs- the glances, the grumbles, the glares at anyone (Rollo included) who dared to get too close
And then he comes into the lounge to see his tsum cuddling on your lap, when Rollo himself hasn't so much as worked up the nerve to hold your hand...
He's in his room shaking on his hands and knees in agony all night
When you ask if he's okay the next morning he tells you he just had some trouble with the fireplace
You let him lean on you for support and he is sated (for now)
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Fellow Honest
...Tried (and failed) to teach his tsum-self to do little tricks
It was too stubby to jump through a hoop, too round to perform aerial acrobatics, and when he tried getting it in costume (hand-sewn by Fellow himself), the thing took his cane and started beating him with it
Fellow had long given up on his tsum self, and so by the time Rollo was storming out of the lounge, Fellow was there to cackle about the kid being jealous of a jelly bean
...Then he caught you kissing and petting his tsum, and it wasn't so funny anymore
Having given up on his dreams of touring the world with the living hacky sack, he set out to catch it and mail it to somewhere you'd never see it again
His first attempt (hanging anvil) failed (there's a totally unrelated giant hole in the floor of the gardening shed now by the way (don't tell Rollo))
His second attempt (exploding piano keys) also failed (bomb didn't go off for the tsum, Fellow tried it, no more piano/eyebrows/nose hair)
His third attempt is drying on the side of the house as we speak, a painting of a road on the brick, his most genius scheme yet! This one will work for sure!
Concussion.
But at least he got you to dedicate your afternoon to bandaging his bruises and cradling his aching head in your lap (while he smirks wickedly at his tsum across the room)
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Skully J. Graves
...Is on you like glue
His tsum? In your coat pocket. Small and quiet as a baby bat, snoozing in there all day
Himself? Attached to your side, monologuing about the great beauty of the season
Skully isn't the vindictive, angry boy you met in a book hundreds of years ago- he's an aged gentleman
That is, he's not one to get jealous over himself. There's more than enough Prefect to share, after all, as long as he...
As long as... he...
...Did that little scoundrel just kiss your hand?
His cheeks burn
His tsum is trying to... woo you!
And what's worse is, it's working! You're laughing in that lovely way! The sound only his stories of adventure and witty remarks on current Halloween trends can draw out of you!
...But Skully is a gentleman, after all, and he doesn't settle spats with fist fights
He just gives his teeny self a reminder that he could use a miniature pumpkin for the decor this year, and it is just the right size...
...And then back to linking arms and escorting you around the old dorm, talking your ear off
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ Swing
...Was about to eat his tsum before you intervened
He insisted he was only kidding (was he?) as you carried the poor thing away
After the tsum had been caught chasing the others with matchsticks and shards of glass one too many times, you decided to put it in a time-out, keeping it on your shoulder for the day
It cozied up real fast, getting comfortable in the crook of your neck while you went through your routine
After a while, Swing started following, shuffling down the hall after you, lingering in doorways and glaring at the bean creature on your shoulder
It glares back, and you let them have their little stare off until Swing grabs it off your shoulder and announces he's ACTUALLY going to eat it this time
Ensuing ten minutes of chasing him through the dorm while no one else tries to intervene (Rollo is tired, Fellow hates that guy, Skully is busy arranging his new miniature pumpkin on the porch)
Eventually you catch him (well, he lets you catch him) and get him to promise not to eat any tsums, including his own
In exchange, he gets to hang off your shoulder all day and watch everything you do
Fair enough...?
I have a few WIPs in the drafts but won't be getting to them any time soon, though I thought I would plug some of my ao3-exclusive fics that I didn't crosspost here for whatever reason (multiple chapters/gendered yuus/not x reader) since I haven't yet already
A Guy Like You
2.2k words, fluff/comedy, romantic, rollo x fem!yuu
summary - Rollo's intense crush on the Prefect has been causing fires. Who better to hype him up than his belligerent roommates?
notes - like the song! from that one movie!!!
A Villain Forgotten
20.5k words, 9/17 chapters, fluff/angst, romantic, rollo x fem!yuu
summary - Winter break with the most repressed man to ever live
notes - I have posted this one before, but it's been updated since then :) this one might actually be my favorite
Twenty Questions (And Then Some)
4.7k words, fluff/comedy, romantic, dylla spade x georgina leech
summary - Dylla is on a mission to discover the secrets her date has been hiding (and keep her date from discovering her own)
notes - most recent oneshot I've posted!
--- I plan on reposting more of my deactivated blog's fluff fics on ao3 soon, too. but that takes time and I'm currently pretty busy!
does anyone remember the dream I had where yana revealed the canon sexualities of the characters on twitter and there was so much discourse about it I got scared and woke up. I made a list of all the sexualities I could remember from the dream
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ see you on a dark night
summary: chronicling overblot yuu's descent into madness type of post: oneshot characters: skully, swing, crowley, grim, other characters implied additional information: reader is yuu, reader is gender neutral, yuu overblot AU, horror/angst, so the usual death and gore, animal (bug) death, suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, post-canon, badly constructed melodramatic prose (OH, RAGING HORROR!!)
I will wait forever.
You haven't been feeling like yourself. You must be sick.
"When did it start?"
You glance up at the floating head, body hidden somewhere behind the wall (the spiritual, ghosty thing, and supposedly the bones and sinew, too, though you hadn't found that yet. Not that you've been looking, or asking- Skully seems to like the suspense).
"I wish you'd stop doing that," you say, "The ectoplasm gets stuck between the wall and starts smelling weird. You make it very hard to clean. Anyway, I don't know when it started. A week ago, or something like that,"
Skully thinks for a moment too long. You're already halfway down the hall.
He crawls out of the wall (can ghosts crawl?) and follows, floating behind you like a particularly pesky insect. You resist the instinct to swat.
"You never clean. I've asked you to, and you never do," he says.
"Why would you care? You're dead. You're not supposed to care about anything when you're dead,"
"Well, I care. And I dare to say you should be ashamed of the state of your home... Whatever would you do if you had guests?"
"I never have guests. And you never host. So who cares?"
"I care,"
You sit on the mangled mess of plywood and pleather you used to call a sofa. Skully keeps his distance, eyeing a cockroach scuttling on the wall behind you.
"...And, anyway, it has most certainly not been a week. You said the same thing to me last I saw you,"
You ponder on that. "...A month, then,"
"And the last,"
"...Two months?"
"And the year before, and the year before that..." he pauses to stare. The cockroach has crawled up the exposed piping in the wall and is presently hovering over your shoulder. "...But I only know as much as you do. You should sleep more."
"I appreciate the concern, but no,"
The roach scuttles down your sleeve and one leg of your pants, propped up on the cardboard box of a coffee table. You eye it maliciously, and squash it under your heel.
"I've killed that same one twice this week," you mutter, stamping it with your boot until it's naught but a fine paste. "It keeps coming back. Why, why does it do that...?"
Skully frowns. "You don't think it's a different insect?"
"Oh, no, it's the same one... mocking me," you leer over the puddle of bug goo. "...With its stubbornness... stupidity... doesn't it know I'm sparing it from a much worse fate? Is it so tempted by suffering? Well, I suppose everything is. At least around here. Though, then, there's nowhere on this planet where people are sane and sensible and don't walk readily into the slaughterhouse with their big, dumb grins. Oh, I hate that look. You know the one, Skully?"
The ghost eyes your boot, as if you might try to smush him next. "No,"
"Yes, you do. Remember how we used to talk? You'd tell me about all the people who hurt you? Mocked you? Made you feel small and stupid? Called you all number of terrible things? And, oh, you hurt them. You did. I remember,"
"...That was a long time ago. I aged out of my temper tantrums,"
"And I aged into mine. What a disappointing trade,"
"This isn't you,"
You turn, swinging one leg after the other and standing in the manner of a potato sack filled with sand, not a person.
You give him a look. "Then what is me? Explain,"
Skully is silent, and you walk through him. He falters as he floats alongside you, dodging cobwebs and drips of mysterious reddish-brown liquid coming from cracks in the ceiling. Ramshackle has seen better days... supposedly.
You don't remember so well.
"I know as much as you do," he says, "But even I remember that things were better than this before."
"Before what?" you say it in a sing-song tune, more than familiar with this routine. Skully insists, you deny, he insists, you question, he sputters and shuts down like a dying engine. Which is appropriate, because, well, he's dead!
That line of thought was not your own. You can't remember the last time you could think in a straight sentence, or when at least one of the many conversations happening in your head was in your own voice.
You laugh, anyway.
Skully gives you a disconcerted look.
"Before... this,"
"Which is...?"
He looks to the dark hall that seems to stretch on, and on, and on ahead of you. Somewhere down there is a door, and somewhere through that is a set of stairs. "Whatever it is that made you like this,"
The merriment is sucked straight out of your chest, draining from you like pus from a wound, like light from the hall, dark, darker, darker...
"Don't you remember anything?"
You've been victim to these mood swings for who-knows-how-long. Most hours, you feel nothing but a vague (pervasive) sense of boredom, drawn to pointless, petty endeavors to feed the fist-sized hole in your chest, the urge to move for the sake of moving, to eat for the sake of eating, to talk for the sake of talking, and nothing more...
...Some hours, though, it all comes at once. The rage, the fear, the euphoria, the misery, that weird little full-body shiver than only seems to happen on the toilet, it bursts out of your chest in an anti-poetic flurry of bits and things, red and bloody, sour and metallic. Your emotions feel less like a part of you, and more like a nebula, inescapable, heavy, and massive. The sort of feelings that only children should have, when their emotions are too big for their bodies and they've never had one before- a feeling, that is.
Doing anything for the first time is terrifying.
Adults usually get over the little things, the scraped knees and the first-days of whatever, it all just becomes tiny blots of paint in the pointalism of their lives. Fear and anger and sadness become boring, inconsequential, meaningless things, background noise in the day-to-day of their busy work weeks, more like the engine check light being on too long than anything really debilitating. Emotion is reserved for big events and special occasions, making the movement of the soul an exquisite thing. Everything hurts more and less at the same time, the grief of a death is inconsolable, the pain of a toothache is Tuesday.
But you, you go through life feeling everything for the first time, over and over and over again. Every time you're sad, it feels like the first sadness, every time you're angry, it's the first anger, the first pain, the first fear, the first joy. Every emotion is hungry, greedy, to make you its next meal, to consume, like a black hole, stretching you into spaghetti on the event horizon. The pain of a death is no greater than the pain of a toothache. It's all the same hurt.
"...No," you decide, hands in your pockets by the basement door. "I don't think so. I only have the faintest feeling that I might've been something, once. Maybe even a person."
You cup your chin in your palm.
Something's off about the wall.
How long has it been since you've been down in the basement?
You suppose you've been busy... sealing the cracks in the ceiling (no more gray water dripping in your Spaghetti-O's) and nailing more boards over the windows.
You found a skull in the gutter last Wednesday. It's probably Skully's, though you hadn't thought to ask. You're using it as a pencil holder now.
The wall's all... brown. And crusty. Is that how it's supposed to look? You don't even remember.
You take up the big mop (the little one's jammed in the kitchen sink, only way it won't clog) and bang it against the drywall.
"Anyone home?"
No response. You try a tender, gentle knock.
"Hellooooo~?"
Nothing. FWUMP. You slam the head of it into the corner.
"I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT FREELOADER! COME OUT OR I'LL LOCK THE DOOR AND BURN THE WHOLE PLACE TO THE GROUND!" It's a half-serious threat. You could use another pencil holder.
...
...
...
"Huh," you say, setting the mop at your side and inspecting the crumbling paint. "Maybe Skully's right. Maybe I am losing it."
"Losing what?"
You turn to the basement steps behind you. Swing is standing in the doorway with a slushy from the campus convenience store.
"There you are," you say, putting your hands on your hips. "Did you go out again?"
He grins- his teeth are stained cherry red.
"What'd I say about doing that? You'll scare the civilians,"
"I think you do enough of that on your own. Besides, no one saw us,"
You give him a look. It may be past dark, but a six-foot-seven boogeyman who couldn't give less of a damn about being discrete isn't exactly hard to miss.
"Fine. It's your business, not mine," you say, following him as he walks down another flight of stairs, deeper into the basement.
"That's my jitterbug,"
You roll your eyes, tugging on the thin chain attached to the lightbulb above your head, sickly yellow-green light, faint, flickering, and dying, cascading over the narrow steps.
"Skully's been bugging me again," you say, "That's why I'm down here. If you're wondering."
"I wasn't," Swing says merrily, stopping at the bottom of the stairs and manhandling a plywood door open (tricky knob). "But we're not complaining. Are we?"
The head of his centipede tattoo peeks out from under his collar. You wave.
You follow him deeper into the basement. You don't remember if it was always like this- thousands of steps, hundreds of chambers full of rusty nails, iron racks, and brown dust, descending deep, deep into the earth- but, well, it's how it is.
Everything is just, how it is.
"What do you remember about me, before I was this?" you ask him as he moves another piece of plywood out of their path.
Swing glances over his shoulder, scrutinizing you with a gratingly unamused look.
"Nothing," he says, "You've always been this. So has Mr. Swing. There was no before."
"Hypothetically speaking, though, doesn't everything have a before? Matter can't be destroyed nor created, therefore..."
"I wish you'd stop reading those dumb books!" he shouts back with a big grin, obviously taking pleasure in trying to get on your nerves. It's working. You follow with a frown.
"I didn't read it," when's the last time you read something, anyway? You can't focus on anything while being electrocuted by all the loose wires in your head. "I just knew it."
"So, then, Doctor Science, what are you really asking?"
"What I was like. Before,"
"Before, what?"
"Before I was this,"
Swing knots his brow. "Dunno," he decides, kicking a burlap sack full of... something aside and walking deeper. "You were always this way. And what's so wrong with it?"
You linger in the doorway, boots glued to the ground.
"I'm not happy,"
"What does that matter?"
Now you remember why you prefer sharing your big feelings with Skully. Nonetheless, you persist on the spiral path Hell-bound. You could do without the lecture today.
"It just does,"
You stay hot on Swing's heels like an untrained puppy, nipping at ankles in hope of a treat.
"You complain too much. The wall was flaking today, did you see that?"
"Stay on topic!" you snap, "And I complain too much? All you do is whine about being bored and give me shit advice! You want me to stay down here forever, is that it?! You don't want me to think for myself because then I'd leave this shithole and make something worthwhile out of myself!"
Swing's smile turns, and that familiar shadow crosses his face. "You can't leave," he says, "And Mr. Swing's got no say in it either way."
You return his sullen face with a frown. "Why?"
He gives you another unamused look and keeps walking, turning back towards the darkness as if to use it as a shield.
"Why," your voice bounces against stone, echo following Swing down the hall.
"Ask your ghost friend," he says casually, "Mr. Swing doesn't want to talk about this anymore."
"I explicitly told you not to talk to him about it!"
You frown, folding your hands and steepling your fingers over the grimy tabletop, observing the ghost boy float from one wall to another in a sort of trance.
"Of all the things..."
"You haven't been very helpful. Besides, I like Swing," you pause. "He makes me feel normal."
"NORMAL!" Skully exclaims, and then melts into a puddle of ectoplasmic misery at your feet. "Oh, of all the things...! It almost makes me wish he was after my beloved Halloween again, like in the days before... and not... well, never mind, you've done it, and now I have to fix it, like always!"
You sigh, slumping, limp in your rotting chair like a true cadaver.
"Of all the things..."
The cockroach scuttles across the tabletop, and you glare at it- back again, are we?
Skully sighs as you smush it under your thumb.
"Oh, oh, it's all... What was the question, again?"
You look up. "Swing says I can't leave. Why?"
The ghost glances up from where he'd been groveling on the floor, an inquisitive touch to his features, now. "Can't leave... can't... ah, but you do go out every so often to, well, whatever it is you do. Then he must mean in a..."
"Metaphorical way?" you offer.
"Magical, I would guess. That man doesn't do metaphors. At least, from what I remember. It's been hundreds of years, after all, and he's long lost interest in me,"
"He seems pretty attached to the basement,"
"And the owner of said basement," Skully's eyes flick up to you. "What does he have down there?"
You think. Dust, debris, a wall, a freezer full of icey-pops and cold soda...
"Nothing important,"
"I suppose so. What was the question?"
"You're as bad as I am!" you exclaim, sitting up straight in your seat. "I want to know why I can't leave."
"Mm... mmm..."
He cups his chin in his palm and paces, stepping over empty air as if it were earth.
"Well, at a point, long ago, you spoke fondly of going home,"
Home? There's a "home" now? You lift an eyebrow. "This is my home,"
"Well, it is, but was it always?"
You sink back into the seat and rest your eyes. Foggy, dreamlike images of people and places and faces and names, the sort of things you see in your sleep (in the few times you sleep, that is), dance in the dark behind your eyelids. Disconnected, isolated, and, yet...
"Why couldn't I go home?"
Skully swears and mutters to himself. "Oh, sometimes I do wish I had more to my memory than candy recipes and Halloween color coordination... not that I would give that up, no, never, but-"
"Why not, Skully?"
"It was..." he pauses. "...Well, that no one could find where you came from. It's as if it never existed."
The people and places and faces and names vanish in an instance, leaving only the black emptiness behind your eyelids. You think about that.
"So it's really like I came from nothing,"
"...That's a rather... unscientific way to put it, but, yes," Skully says. "Hypothetically, magic should have been able to send you back, but..."
"Nada?"
"Well... nothing worked. Yes, that must've been what he meant. Something is keeping you here. For what, I can't imagine... but don't lose faith, dear Prefect... don't give up on yourself just yet."
You swallow the thought, suffocating it beneath your tongue. Kept, not like a trinket or a trophy, but like a... mop in the sink, because the drain's messed up. Getting ground by the garbage disposal, slowly minced away until there's nothing but meat... wood...
...You fall asleep before you can psychoanalyze yourself any more.
"But if I came from nothing, then matter really can be created?"
"Yep. And destroyed," Swing says, kicking back with his legs crossed and one arm behind his head. "You can destroy anything."
"But cosmically speaking..."
"Realistically speaking. Don't go filling your head with stuff that isn't real,"
You look up from where you're hunched across the room. Swing was never one for hypotheticals and theories. Skully's usually the one with big ideas, and Swing's about what's right in front of him. You suppose you're a little bit of both, a cocktail of their worst traits... dreamy and imaginative, single-minded and impulsive.
Your eyes drop to your hands, cold and cracked, pressed together in your lap. "How am I supposed to know what's real?"
"Guess," he shrugs, and you glare. Not a very good answer to the mysteries of the universe.
Drywall and old paint crumbles from the wall behind you. You grumble under your breath and draw your hands to your chin.
"So then I was always this way... that's what you're saying?"
He smiles. "You were always you, Swing was always Swing. We were made this way..."
"Cut from the same cloth?" you offer, but he suddenly shifts in place, uncomfortable about something. He reaches beneath the layers of his coat and pulls a cockroach from under his back.
"YOU AGAIN!!!!" you shout, jumping and jutting a pointy finger at the insect. "TORMENTING ME!!!!!"
Swing doesn't wait for you to finish your rant before popping the bug in his mouth and chewing. Your eye twitches at the slow, sickening crunch.
You sit back down. "I should've thought of that,"
He leans back into the wall with his arms crossed behind his head and a smug grin on his lips.
"I do what I can,"
White wall. White wall. Brown wall. Footprints on the ceiling. Your eyes dart from once place to the next, never staying still for more than a millisecond. A side-effect of the sleep deprivation.
"If I have to guess..." you mutter. "Then how do I know you're real? Or Skully?"
"You don't. You just decide, and don't spend so much time thinking about it. It's not good for you. Normal people don't use all their day trying to figure out what's real and what's not, they just know. So, just know. As for the ghost boy... well, he may as well be a figment of your imagination. Do you talk to yourself often?"
"No. Yes? Well, now I don't know," you say, putting your hands on your hips. "And if you're not real, and he's not real, then what am I even doing here? Why don't I ever just leave?"
"And do what?"
"Well, I don't know. Whatever. Sing. Bus tables. Learn the trapeze and run away with the circus,"
"You can't,"
"Learn the trapeze?"
"Leave,"
You narrow your eyes. "You keep saying that. Why? And don't tell me to ask someone else, I'm through with your wild horse chases. Tell me right now, why can't I leave? What's keeping me here? Where has it all gone... my memories, my dreams, my reason for living...? What have I become? When? Why? Oh, you have to tell me who did this. Was it you? Can I go back? Is there any hope? I have to know... I have to... This is not me... This is..." you sniffle, overcome with emotion again, "I need to go back..."
Quiet sniffles fade into silence as you hold your head to the wall, hands on your knees, letting tears mingle with dry paint and drip, drip, drip, red on the concrete...
"Goose,"
You look up. "What?"
Swing picks an antenna out from between his teeth. "Wild goose chases,"
You frown. "Since when do you care about grammar?"
"Since never. I'm just avoiding the question. I don't like it,"
"Answer it, and I won't ask again,"
"Hm..." he ruminates on it, "No."
You jump in place, holding out your hands and shaking as if you mean to strangle him through the air. "YOU-!!! YOU!!! YOU'RE TRYING TO MAKE ME CRAZY!!!!!!! EVIL, WICKED, IMPETUOUS THING!!! IT'S YOU, IT'S ALL BEEN YOU, HASN'T IT?!!?! YOU- YOU GOT IN MY HEAD!!! YOU MESSED EVERYTHING UP!!! YOU... YOU..."
Swing watches you jitter and jump, stomp around like a toddler throwing a tantrum, kick over paintbrushes and empty buckets, howl in agony, before finally falling your knees again, clutching your head.
He hovers over you, sucking the last cherry-flavored mush out of his slushy before tossing the empty cup aside and kneeling. He casts a shadow over your crumpled body.
"Mr. Swing didn't do this," he says, "The cracks were there long before Mr. Swing came to stay. Think. Why are you here...? Why did they bring you here?"
You ascend the basement steps, clutching your arm (sore, from lying on the floor) and limping (also the floor).
The moon is high over Ramshackle, now, casting its light into the kitchen, illuminating the silver blade of every knife, the dull edges of hacksaws and loose nails, the broken mop handle sticking out of the sink like a cross on a hill.
You take a deep breath of the stale, moldy air. You'd blocked off the vents years ago (or months, weeks, who's to say?) and so the only taste of the outside comes from the cracks in the walls and the holes in the roof, slivers between baseboards and holes chewed through plaster...
You had a rat problem before Swing moved in. Now it's only bugs.
You always remember the strangest things. The rat problem, Skully's school stories, the laws of physics... nothing good. Nothing that really mattered.
It was as if the wires in your brain, the loose ones that shake and shimmy and jig around inside your skull, dancing with the electrical current of a beating heart, would, sometimes, touch the walls of your head, and zap you with something- a sound, a dessert recipe, the smell of clean laundry, a smile, a word, or, most often, something violent and unwelcome.
Thoughts of death, of cartilage and sinew, raw muscle and bone, black thorns, gas, haze, poison, sleep, death again, and death one more time. Sometimes the dead thing was other, faceless, nameless, people. Sometimes it was you.
Those things didn't belong in your head. You were certain of that.
Surely, no one is born this broken.
"Skully?" you call out. He's not where you left him at the kitchen table. Though, his skull is still lying in the living room.
You scratch the back of your hand. You have scars, sprains, strains, aches and pains, spots where you felt stiff, spots where you felt nothing, an amount of healed injuries that no slip-ups with the can opener could explain. Things that spoke of a past, one that Skully couldn't remember, one that Swing wasn't there to witness. One that you had denied yourself, perhaps all at once, perhaps over days, weeks, years, of quiet sitting, of staying in place, watching the clock count the hours, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, midnight, one, two, three, four, and so on...
Who had hurt you?
You try to focus on anything but the fog of fugue, the fever of insanity, crossing the wires in your brain.
"Skully?" you yell, louder. Nothing comes.
What had Swing said to you?
Why did they bring you here?
Who was "they"?
Where had you come from?
What did they use you for?
Obviously, you had been hurt. And you had come to be in this place, so you had either wound up here on your own, or someone had brought you.
There's another thing- the injuries you sustained weren't normal. Not like you'd slipped on the step ladder while hanging Christmas lights, or got a little too loose with the knife while chopping up some green onion for your Sunday night noodles. These were big ones, gashes and slashes and spots where you'd been impaled, crushed, or beaten. There was no reason you could have possibly lived through any of that, even with the most experienced magical healers on standby (and no one was ever on standby for you).
If something really was keeping you here, attached to this place, then it was keeping you alive, too.
Then... you couldn't die.
How long have you been here for?
Where had everyone else gone?
Both your injuries and your house mean someone must've known you. But you didn't know them.
Not anymore.
You peer out between the boards of wood you'd beaten over the windows, twice a year every year for as long as you can remember. It's just something to do, you suppose. And you can't stand the thought of being watched.
Nothing but overgrown grass and trees. A headstone peeks out of the earth a few feet away. The branches of a dead tree extend over the hill.
You narrow your eyes and step away.
"Skully!" you shout again, to more silence. Had you been imagining him? No. No, you wouldn't...
He was real.
They were all real.
Weren't they?
You take a sudden step away from the window and slice your pinky on a jagged edge of the wood.
What comes out is black.
You stand by the stairs.
Staring at the wall.
Inspecting it.
Squinting. Tilting your head. Turning as if to retreat upstairs, and then whipping around, trying to catch it in the act.
Nothing.
You bandaged your finger in cloth, unable to bear the sight of black blood coming from inside your body. Inside you. Something inside you. Something inside the wall. Black on the wall. It's brown now. Faded.
You stand. You stare.
The wind howls somewhere above you. The shutters on the outside of the house slam.
You're losing the stare-off. The wall stays where it is, unblinking, unmoving.
"Come on. Give me something..."
What is it? An omen? A warning? A disease? Could everything be attributed to some terrible virus that turned you into a monster, that stole your memories, your sense of being, that locked you in this asylum and left you to bleed out- black?
Blood like ink? It wasn't right. Nothing has felt right in a very long time...
"Don't just stand there. I know you have something to do with this!" you shout, but not at Swing, this time (wherever he is, if he was ever there at all). "TELL ME WHAT'S GOING ON! YOU PIECE OF SHIT! WORTHLESS FUCK! FUCK! AHHHHHHHH!!!!"
"What're you yelling at?"
You spin around to see Skully standing in the doorway. He comes down the stairs, each footstep silent and painless.
"Oh, it's you," you say, returning to your great opponent (the wall). "I thought you didn't like the basement."
"I don't. But I'm not really Skully,"
"Ah, I see,"
"Yes. Why are you yelling?"
"I want answers," you say, "I want to know what this has all been for. The quiet. The loneliness. The..."
"Madness?"
"Yes, I suppose, we can call it that,"
"What's it about, this time?"
You kick a paint bucket aside and begin walking, taking yourself down the next flight of steps.
"I bled today. It wasn't normal. It was..."
"Black?" Skully's head (his body stayed on the higher level) answers.
"How did you know?"
"I know everything you know. I'm not really Skully, remember?"
"Oh, right. Well, it was black, and it wasn't really blood. I think I'm contaminated with something. I might be really sick, Skully, and who would know? You? Real you? Swing? If he was ever real at all? I might die this time. Really die, and it wouldn't matter,"
"I think it would,"
You kick the plywood door open (tricky knob) and keep going, wandering the endless maze of concrete rooms and little lightbulbs with little metal strings that give sickly yellow-green light.
"You're only saying that because you're some twisted part of my imagination,"
"Well, no. No one wants you to die more than you do. I'm saying it because it might mean something, you know, cosmically,"
You raise an eyebrow. "Be realistic,"
"You've let that Swing rub off on you too much. I'm being perfectly realistic, and we both know it," Skully's head says.
You ponder on that for a moment- is it worth taking advice from yourself? But, then, who knows you any better?
"Alright, then, explain. What thought has the back of my mind cooked up for me today?"
The floating head accompanies you down to a lower level, then deeper, deeper, further into the black abyss, rust and mold and bugs and dust and nails and hammers, hacksaws, and chains...
"You're right about one thing. What's in you isn't blood, it's blot,"
"What's that?"
"You used to know it," the head says, "But you've forgotten. You've been stuck here for a very long time, you see."
"Yes, I know, but back to that other thing,"
"Right. It's a sort of magical residue. When a spell is cast, it accumulates on the spellcaster,"
"That sounds right,"
"Doesn't it? We used to be very clever, you know," the head clears its throat. "But anyway, there are certain instruments meant to absorb that blot, called magestones. If a magestone becomes too full, the accumulated blot on the spellcaster can kill them."
"I see. And then what?"
"That's all we know,"
You narrow your eyes. "Then what was the point of bringing it up? I can't cast any spells, and as far as I can remember, I never have,"
"As much is true, but I'm afraid that's all we could find in your brain. The true answer might lie deeper, deeper than you are now in this basement, and it would take all of us a very long time to get there. There are certain things working against us,"
You raise an eyebrow. "Things?"
"The blot. Maybe something bigger,"
"But what-" but when you turn to look, there's no one there.
"What did you find?"
You look up from the old film tape you'd been using for suspension, testing it with a twang.
"A rubber boot, silly putty, a tea cup, shoelaces, yarn, film tape, a broken mirror, a quill, a deck of cards, an arrow, cumin, a computer chip, a disc, and this thing,"
You toss something black and stubby over your shoulder. It looks like a hunk of rock, but might have been attached to something else at some point- like a horn.
Looks sorta burnt.
"Okay," Swing says. "And what are you doing with all that?"
You narrow your eyes at the device you had pulled together and rigged to the front door.
"Isn't it obvious? See, I cleaned,"
Swing looks over his shoulder. The foyer is spotless, save for the mold in that one corner of the ceiling no one (not even he) could reach.
"For what?"
"I figure," you say, "Since I can't die under the usual circumstances, I'll have to do it myself." You punctuate the sentence by placing a tiny glass unicorn on the tip of the boot.
Swing blinks. And then he chuckles. "Well, well... not feeling any better, then?"
"No," you turn to glare. "Besides..."
You nudge the unicorn a half an inch forward.
"...It's just a little experiment,"
Swing grins, sitting at the edge of the sofa. It makes no sound beneath him. "So, then, how does the little experiment work?"
"I have a system," you explain. "When it sets off, the arrow will shoot me... I didn't have a bow."
"And what sets it off?"
"The door," you turn to the front door. "When someone comes in, it'll..."
But no one ever comes in. You never have any guests, and Skully never hosts (wherever he went off to- he's been quiet for a few hours/days/whatever).
Maybe you hadn't thought this one through.
You stand.
"Never mind,"
"You're giving up so soon? But Mr. Swing was just about to settle in! We were going to make popcorn!"
You narrow your eyes. "It's not funny! I have to know! I have to know if it's... well, whatever. I just have to know!"
"You're making less sense than usual. And the wall's cracking,"
"I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE DAMN WALL!!!" you shout. "I DON'T CARE, I DON'T CARE WHAT'S IN IT, I DON'T CARE WHAT'S IN ME! NOW I'M GOING TO GET SOME ANSWERS, FUCK, OR I'M GONNA DIE TRYING!!!! ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN THIS!!!! LISTENING TO ALL OF YOU ARGUE WITH ME ALL DAY!! FUCK!!!!!!!!"
Swing grins, gleefully. "Oh, but that's the best part! I'm not really Swing at all!"
"FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU BOTH! STAY OUT OF MY HEAD!"
"You're just yelling at yourself now!"
You stomp your foot and the floor rattles beneath you. "SHUT UP! YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO- YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! I'M SICK OF IT! I HATE BEING STUCK HERE WITH YOU CIRCUS CLOWNS! GET BETTER, GET WORSE, FIND PEACE, ENJOY THE PRESENT, WHO CARES! WHO GIVES A SHIT! NONE OF YOU WANT ME TO LEAVE! YOU JUST SIT AROUND WITH YOUR THUMBS UP YOUR BUTTS ALL DAY THINKING OF NEW WAYS TO MAKE ME MISERABLE SO I'LL STAY HERE IN THIS DISGUSTING ROTTING VILE REPULSIVE REVOLTING NAUSEATING STICKY WET SQUELCHY HOUSE WITH YOU! I'VE HAD IT! I'M SICK OF IT! I'M LEAVING- I- I'll leave!"
You stand straight and begin to pace. "I'll leave. I'll go. It doesn't matter where, does it? As long as I'm away from this house... yes, that's it! I can train myself to turn it off, can't I? I can go..."
You turn back to Swing (who wasn't really Swing at all) and there's no one there.
Grumbling, you turn to the coat closet to collect your boots. Maybe an umbrella, if it rains.
Kck, kck. You look up. A visitor? At this hour? Strange.
But, well, you did clean.
"...Come in," you say.
It's dark.
Darker than the basement.
Darker than sleep, darker than the dark behind your eyelids, darker than any dark that's ever existed.
You rub the back of your neck- sore. Did you land on your head?
The floor must've finally given out beneath you, dumb old house, and sent you tumbling down into the black abyss of the basement. Somewhere deep, somewhere not even Swing has been yet.
You sit up. The darkness extends endlessly in every direction, beneath your feet, under your nose, above your forehead. You wonder, for a moment, if the whole world is hiding behind your back, and leaping just out of sight when you turn.
Not the basement.
"Not the basement, indeed,"
You blink into the darkness. Something is coming towards you... it's light? No, not light, a person. A person with light for eyes, two twinkling yellow stars in the inky void.
You feel calm. The incessant buzz of loose wires and ebb and flow of electrical currents doesn't exist here. You must not be in your body... or your mind.
"Where am I?" you ask, "Who are you?"
"We met once before, but you probably don't remember that. It's been a very long time for you,"
"How..." you start, standing slowly. "How do you know me?"
"I gave you that house. The one you've taken such dreadful care of,"
Ah... you can make out the figure now more as he approaches, cast in green light that doesn't seem to be coming from any particular source. He's too tall, too thin, too pale, dressed in black, with a beaked mask on his face. If not for his fancy way of talking, you might've thought you'd met the devil.
"Do mind your manners. Your thoughts are quite loud in here,"
"Pardon," you say, the word coming from you with such ease it's startling. "Where is here?"
"Why, the mirror, of course,"
You look around, eyes boring into the inky, green-black void.
The man hums. "Well, a part of you is. Your body is alive, but barely. If you were dead, you would be somewhere much different... but, as I am sure you're well aware, you are quite incapable of dying,"
"Huh," you chime, "So, how'd a part of my consciousness get stuck in some mirror?"
"Walk with me,"
You obey, following the tall bird-man into the dark. "It isn't just any mirror, but an ancient, powerful artifact. You understand that when one casts a spell, that magic creates a negative residue?"
"Yes," you say, thinking back on the conversation you'd had with... well, yourself.
"Well, as magic is tied to the soul, when magical residue accumulates, bits and pieces of the soul go with it- anger, fear, joy, hopes and dreams... a tiny, imperceptible chunk of the spellcaster's personhood is lost in the magic they create, and concentrated in blot. It's quite unnoticeable to the mage. Anyway, when used, even by non-mages, magical artifacts have the same effect as spells. A bit of one's soul becomes trapped in it, and, well... here we are,"
You glance around at the big nothingness. A never-ending void of green light and echoing thoughts.
"So, you, also..."
The man nods. "Only a piece of a soul, though, perhaps, a more omniscient one. The mage I'm attached to used this particular artifact often,"
"Huh. So I was slingshot into a bit of soul trapped in a mirror cause the big soul in my body is... uh, busy?"
"I... suppose, you could call it that," he sighs. "And I suppose you have other questions for me. It's only right that I answer them."
You look up. "Who are you?"
"I was the Headmage of a very fine College of Magic..." he says. "And you were my ward."
...Huh. Huh? You were a ward? That feels... well, like another life. Something you saw on TV, maybe. But not this. Not this body, not this mind.
"What happened to me?" you ask.
"No one knew, at the time, the nature of your purpose in our world. You came out of thin air, with no home, no family, nothing to your name except, well, your name. We thought it was an accident. We never knew..."
Your spit is suddenly solid, impossible to swallow, and you choke on your own tongue. "Never knew what?"
"Well, that you had a purpose,"
"Which was?"
The Headmage seems reluctant to answer, and he begins walking again. A cane had materialized in his hand, and he swings it back and forth before the tip of his blue oxfords.
"...I suppose you're more than familiar with blot, now?"
"Yes," you say, narrowing your eyes. "I got the picture. What about it?"
"Well, sometimes..." the Headmage hesitates. "When a mage accumulates too much blot, it can... overwhelm him, shall we say. And in such cases, in order to preserve the life of the victim, certain magical artifacts may absorb some of the blot. This mirror was ours."
Your eyes widen. Then the darkness around you is... a primordial shudder goes up your spine.
He sucks in his breath through his teeth. "But there was another,"
You look back up at him. "What?"
"...You,"
Your heart stops beating (if it ever was- can bits of soul have a heartbeat?) and you're suddenly stuck in place.
The Headmage stops with you, clutching his cane and avoiding your eyes.
Your hand, or your soul-hand, or whatever the Hell it's supposed to be, is still bandaged tight. Black blood, blot, still pumps through your veins.
You were a sponge.
The nasty, greasy sponge at the bottom of the sink, the one that smelled like meat and burnt oil.
"It was never our intention. And we didn't know, until..."
You look up. "How?"
"I can't say. It couldn't be stopped. And they left,"
They. Who is they? The people Skully used to murmur about? The shadows? The strangers? The pervasive feeling of being watched, the one that followed you everywhere?
"And the wall?" you ask. The Headmage only shakes his head.
"I'm afraid I don't know. At a certain point, we stopped understanding what went on in that house,"
You wake with a gurgle.
It's not really much like waking, or at least the sort of waking you're used to, the sudden loss of air in your lungs, the constriction of your chest and the painful squeeze of your heart, the momentary panic that convulses you into a state of non-consensual consciousness...
...No, not that. You just sit up.
Your back and hair is sticky with black blood. A muddy, ink-colored bath of curdled innards under your body, seeping into the porous, splintered wood floor. That'll be a pain to clean. Skully will be complaining about that for weeks.
Scattered across the floor, some distance from you, is the arrow, soaked in blood and little bits of... well, you. Your fingers instinctively draw to your chest, and you prod around the squishy stuff there. There's a hole in your shirt, and blood on both sides, but no entrance wound, or anything that would indicate that you'd been shot straight through at all.
The front door is shut tight.
Grumbling, you scramble to stand, and use a moth-bitten curtain to soak up the remaining blot on your fingers.
You stretch. There's a dull pain in the center of your chest, just east of your heart. "Skully?" you call out.
No response.
You ascend the steps to the attic and poke your head through the hatch. "Skully?" you whisper, but the crawlspace (can ghosts crawl?) is dark. A moldy armchair sits beside a round, antique coffee table, covered in paper blueprints. Wind howls through the cracks in the wall between window and wood, and a few papers fly off the table and land in a puddle of brown rainwater nearby. You narrow your eyes and descend.
"Skullyyy!" you shout, your voice carried through the timber house with an echo. "Come ooout! I wanna tell you somethiiing!"
You're sure he would be very interested to hear that you were once someone's ward. Such a fancy-schmancy word is sure to impress him.
Still, no answer.
"Hm," you mutter, putting your hands on your hips. "Fine! I'll tell you later."
Next is the basement. Swing would be less impressed, but you had to tell someone. It was big news, after all.
You descend the crooked concrete steps, the first flight into the deep. You're sure that if you kept going, further and further and darker and darker, you'd someday reach Hell. Maybe Swing's already found it. You'd have to ask when you see him.
You pause at the wall, brown and flaking, buckets stained black and brushes crusted with cobwebs and grime kicked to the side. You briefly remember your earlier temper tantrum.
There's a dull ache in your hand, and you raise your bandaged pinky, a big bulbous wad of white cloth, comparing the color of the dry blood on the gauze to the wall. Near identical.
So this came out of you, then?
For what purpose? Fun? Sadomasochism? Modern art??
"A warning,"
You nearly leap out of your skin and whip around to see a fat... pudgy... thing pawing at your knees.
"YUCK! A RAT! I thought Swing put all of you in the blender ages ago!"
"I am NOT a rat!" it shouts back, glowing blue like some sort of... blue, glow-y thing. "I'm just a figment of your fucked up imagination! You've been in this place way too long. And when's the last time you slept?"
"Oh, joy. Another one," you say. It hurts to be so self-aware sometimes! "What news have you brought me, oh chubby one?"
"You were wondering about the wall,"
You turn back to scrutinize the dark brown ooze crusting the plaster surface, and you fold your hands behind your back as if admiring a painting in a museum.
"So I was. What is it for, then?"
"A warning. I already said. You're really bad at paying attention, you know that?"
"I have issues with memory," you concede. "But, anyway, onto the important things. Why would I warn myself with a wall of goo?"
The rat-like cat-like raccoon-like creature waddles beside you.
"You didn't want to forget what you are,"
A snort. "And I did a great job of that, clearly. I never think about this old wall. Swing's the one always bugging me about it,"
"No, not Swing," the creature says. "You."
You turn your eyes down on it. "Me... so, all this time...?"
"Well, there really is a Swing down there. Sometimes you're talking to him, sometimes you're only hearing his voice."
"How am I supposed to know the difference?"
It shrugs. "Guess,"
You grimace and turn back to the stairs, descending the next flight down. The door above you slams shut in an unfelt breeze.
The stubby cat-creature follows, walking on two feet like a little person. You might've laughed at the visual if you weren't so morose today. Moody as ever, we see.
Shut up! you think, I'm trying to have a conversation with myself!
"What about Skully?" you ask, "Is he just me, too?"
"No, but he only comes around once a year. You just have a weird sense of time,"
"I suppose you're right. Why only once a year?"
"Well, you probably don't remember this, but it was actually Halloween yesterday,"
"Wow," you say. A Halloween suicide? How festive. "Do you have a name, little not-rat?"
"Grim,"
And the festivities continue! What a fitting name for the occasion. You grin as you venture deeper into the earth, nearly slipping on every other narrow step. "That's a good one. Did I come up with that myself?"
"Thank you, and no," its little nose twitches, "We used to know each other. I used to live in this house, too."
You lose the smile. How unfortunate for the little creature. You don't think anything living deserves to be stuck here besides you, the boogeyman, and the bugs.
And the rats, but, well, those have been taken care of.
"I see,"
You skip a step to avoid a pile of red mush, and then a few rusty nails. Things that weren't here before, or that you at least didn't notice. It's impossible to tell.
You open the door at the end of these stairs and walk through a room of harnesses and electrical wires. There's a chute with a ladder in the corner that'll bring you to the room with the icey-pops and cold sodas. You could use something frozen and artificial. The house feels especially real today.
"So, then, there really is no escape," you say, sliding down the iron bars to the floor below.
"What do you mean?"
"Well..." you traverse a chamber of batteries and saw blades. "For a while, I thought it was the house that was making me sick. Or something in it, anyway: the black mold, the mysterious gases, that wall... but now I know it's not the house. It's Me. Leaving might help, but the parasite is already inside of me, a part of my body, in my blood... I couldn't get it out without killing myself, and I can't kill myself, because I can't die. This universe has designated me as some kind of garbage disposal for all of its worst, and I can't reason with something on such a cosmic scale, let alone escape it. I just got unlucky, I guess. Or maybe I brought this onto myself. Whatever it is, it's Me. And if I did die, then what would happen? All of the concentrated magic and evil that's been packed into me like I'm some fucked up vacuum bag wouldn't just disappear. It's a law of physics, you know. Matter can't be destroyed, only rearranged in little space particles. Rearranged in me. It's the damn particles."
You kick through another door, the not-rat Grim close behind.
"So, then, I'd just explode into this big blotty thing of evil, and then what? The world would end. The universe as we know it,"
"You're being overdramatic," Grim says.
"Or maybe I'm being perfectly sane. There's really no such thing as being overdramatic in my position- in fact, anyone else would lose their marbles upon discovering that they've been chosen to be the flusher of all of magekind's ugliest traits. All that greed, anger, sadness, fear, insecurity, the leftover waste of humankind, all packed into one unlucky bastard..." you continue, "This isn't me. This is not me. Do I even count as a person, anymore? Did I ever at all? Who knows how much of me is this... thing, now. And, surely, it's what's been poisoning my mind, making me forget things, making me moody, violent, impulsive, angry, lonely, miserable, paranoid, and never quite sure what's real and what's not. The world's been in black and white for some time, Grim. I can't think in my own voice anymore. Everything feels... flat. Like I'm living life through a screen. I'm not in control of my emotions, my impulses, even my blood is something not of my own. This isn't me. This is that... thing. So, no, I am not being overdramatic. I think I'm handling this perfectly fucking well."
"So you're abdicating yourself of responsibility? That's not very sane of you at all,"
"What responsibility? What's my crime?"
"Look around you. Do you really think all of these things came from nowhere?"
"Yes," you say, "The basement creates itself. It came from nothing, like me."
"Listen to yourself! You used to be so smart, always talking about physics and science and hypotheticals and theories, and now you've become what you've always detested in others- small-minded, impulsive, and driven by instinct. You didn't come from nothing. You were a person, once, with a home and people who cared about you..."
"Everyone leaves," you say, stalling by another door. "And I become what I detest, inevitably. The more I avoid it, the more it becomes me. And what does it matter?"
"It matters because you're denying yourself the catharsis of believing that, one day, this could all be over. You could get better,"
"Doubtful," you say, "It's all gone. My only friends left in the world are a Halloween ghost, a boogeyman, and my own fucking brain- and I don't even like myself! Besides, who's to say that any of the people who cared about me are even still alive? Who knows how long it's been. Centuries, maybe..."
"Five years,"
"...Well, there's still no point in it. I'm no longer fit for human contact, you know as well as I do,"
You nudge the door open with the toe of your boot and step around piles of wooden crates to reach the next. Your daydreams of icey-pops have vanished into the deep pockets of your mind, and now you walk with no particular purpose at all.
"And who's fault is that?"
"Let's not play the blame game," you say, "And it's that thing. You know as well as I do that this isn't me."
You tug on the little chain connected to yet another light bulb, hanging over yet another set of stairs, deeper.
"You keep saying that, but how can you be sure? You don't even remember what you were like before,"
"You said we were smart," you say, "We knew about things."
"We still are, and we still do. How could you be having this conversation if you weren't aware of it?"
You concede. "But it's so very hard to think these days... maybe I have lead poisoning,"
"Not lead poisoning. You have blot in you, remember?"
"Oh, right. Little particles of soul," you say, "Not destroyed, but rearranged in space. In me. But, then, if that's all true, then I can't be destroyed, either."
"This was established,"
"So then I must be rearranged. The blot can't be destroyed, but I can live with it, can't I? But how does one go about rearranging a brain as messed up as mine? I suppose talk therapy and daytime TV wouldn't help,"
"I would say both of those would make you worse off,"
"Exactly. But what could I do, other than not feel or think anything again? It's impossible. It's a part of me. It's in my body, in my head... Oh, I wish someone would just turn me off for a while and... fix me," you step through another door and pause in a dark room, not even bothering to find the little light this time. "Grim?"
"Yes, Yuu?"
"I'm not happy,"
AN: if you're a cultured individual who read this and thought "wow this is sure a lot like a certain horror comedy comic from the 1990s!" then you're very sharp!!! I got the idea of yuu being a wastelock in my head and couldn't get it out (plus I never ever get tired of writing in jhonen's style of melodramatic prose). much kudos to him, and to my own brain for being such an abysmal shitshow this year that I had the necessary experience to write something like this. the roach was inspired by a fruit fly that wouldn't leave me alone while I was writing this, and the toilet humor because I'm an IBS warrior. thanks for reading my garbage
I think I made a goth reader x twst post years ago but I wanna do it again...
if you ignored the timeline inconsistencies then you could pretend See You on a Dark Night is a prequel to Ad Perpetuam Memoriam about what happened to the first yuu
i haven't said this in a long time, least of all to you and im sorry for that. but holy moly, the way you write suffering and the feeling of...hopelessness? but not despair, more like the specific feeling of recognizing being trapped forever in a crummy situation. THAT. the way you write THAT. the feeling of trappedness, is so GOOD. i feel entirely sucked into it. i feel friggin UNCOMFORTABLE AND CLAUSTROPHOBIC, and im not even claustrophobic irl. but you write it in such a good way that really really hits.
i've know 2 other writers who do so amazingly and i think you deserve being right up there with them in that regard.
really. stunning work, i've just so SO enjoyed reading your recent fics. they're very nice.
THANK YOU! U_U!!!
to cope with how bad my life got in dec-jan I've been reading/watching things I loved in the Nightmare Terror Hell half of high school (not the normal socially awkward part but the part I don't talk about and never will 🎵🎶), and through that I've discovered something very damning: the reason I feel I'm so bad at writing for this fandom is NOT because I have some mysterious disease that makes me oh-so different and special, I just tend to like stories with miserable protagonists and miserable endings, or stories with angry protagonists who claw their way out of Hell. I like stories without romance. I SUCK at writing romance (well, I'm aromantic, so it's a given, but I have made a valiant effort). I've had billions and billions of people including my own friends tell me what a miserable sack of shit I am for enjoying sadness and loneliness as themes. and characters who are bad people. I just don't do escapism the right way, I guess!
so I was very nervous to post that fic because I was anticipating people to be mad about it, and it was something very personal to me since I wanted reading it to feel the way derealization/depersonalization feels: confusing, scary, hopeless, lonely, suffocating, claustrophobic. I wanted it to be soul-crushing and scary and inescapable and sad... I'm very happy to know I did a good job! and that people don't hate me!!!
also I wanted other people to experience how reading this comic when I was 16-17 and PTSD fucked me up so bad. the feeling is indescribable
*ੈ✩‧₊˚ ad perpetuam memoriam VI
I II III IV V
summary: an invitation, two basements, a dangerous stranger, and an ace interlude type of post: series includes: epel, azul, floyd, jade, ace, crowley, two unexpected strangers additional info: platonic, reader is gender neutral, reader is not yuu, this is all AU, not making predictions for how twst will end, long chapter, possible OOC word count: 10k! holy smokes!!!
Dearest Reader,
It has been one week with no correspondence. I hope you have been faring well.
Write at your earliest convenience.
Yours.
It's sadder like this.
The black tinsel that wobbles in the wind, the orange streamers that hang from the roof and the branches of dead trees beyond the fence like toilet paper, the pumpkins, cut, carved, and lit, already rotting, their jack 'o lantern smiles turned to wet, soggy frowns.
Ramshackle looked much better when it was just boarded windows and wood rot.
Trying to stick it in a costume (fitting, for the season), put some color on the peeling paint and some smiles on the front porch, only made it feel more hollow, more distant. The fuse box had been smashed in by something- a storm, or so you had heard- and, so, no twinkling lights or inflatable Frankensteins.
For the better. Any more color and you might have begun feeling a bit nauseous.
You keep walking, crushing fallen leaves and gravel beneath your muddy winter boots (borrowed, of course, from a locker left open outside the gym).
Maybe you're only bitter- envious, of Ramshackle's seasonal makeover, while you're covered in wet dirt and welts like an unearthed corpse. You hadn't had a shower since you were kicked out of Diasomnia last week, and there was only so much that cat baths in the bathroom sinks could do.
It's a pressing matter, and it's not out of pride nor shame that you hadn't told Crowley about what happened between you and Silver. It was only... procrastination.
You start each morning by taking a solemn oath that today will be the day you track him down and ask for another dorm to infest.
And then you don't.
You don't even have to avoid him. Mysteriously, the Headmage has been missing all week. You'd even had to retrieve your mail yourself- and only for one letter, two sentences, and all the worry in the world.
You were too ashamed to write Smokey back. You couldn't bring yourself to. Every time you set out to pen your thoughts on paper, your hand trembled and your vision went all blurry and your mind packed a bag and went on holiday, leaving the oven on and the front door open, just like the owner of the boots you stole- borrowed, you mean.
And it were beginning to seem as if, every time you really tried to write, some terrible thing or another would happen. Distracted by idle chatter, interrupted by fighting freshmen, quill spontaneously bursts into flame, evil squirrels steal your paper, the mail room is locked and the key hook is just a fingertip too tall...
It's like something is keeping you from disappearing. From slipping between the words in the letters of a boy from Fleur City.
Or maybe that's just the melancholic prose of your moody, sleep-deprived mind.
You suppose it's some sort of punishment, or, at least, a warning- you know that if you really could bring yourself to write Smokey (and if your stationary would stop spontaneously combusting), you would ask his permission to leave Night Raven College.
Not that you really need someone to hold your hand and walk you out of the school gates. But it would be nice, wouldn't it?
And if you had someone firmly grab your arm and drag you out of the college, you wouldn't feel the urge to turn back.
Tink, tink, tink.
You pause, footsteps falling flat, hopelessly distracted again. What was that? An ice cream truck?
...No, that's ridiculous.
Wind chimes? A children's toy? A music box?
Each answer seems less likely than the last. You can't imagine anything as innocent as a music box existing in a messed up place like this.
It's music, though, box or not.
It's coming from Ramshackle.
The light in the upstairs window is, of course, still burning. Pale yellow and sickly, like a candle at the end of its wick. It's always the first thing you check when you come this way (which you do, even when you don't really need to). But the music is coming from the attic, without a doubt, and pouring from every window and the crack in the door...
...Unlocked and open. Has it been open before?
You blink. Someone's inside?
You turn half a foot to investigate, and immediately smack into something firm and flowery (when did you get so clumsy? Or were you always this way?)
"Headmage!" you shout, but what stumbles back and tries steadies himself with a hand on your tie- pulling you both down into the wet dirt- is no six-foot birdman.
"DANG NABBIT! I JUST HAD THIS PRESSED!"
Epel Felmier swears so fast and furiously that it makes your hair stand on end. He pats down his blazer, swiping dead grass and mud off his sleeves.
"People around here ain't got a lick of sense, that's for certain..." he mumbles, and then glances up at you. "Why don't 'ya watch where you're going?"
You purse your lips. "Sorry,"
"Tch... making a mess of my new shirt..."
You make a valiant attempt to scoot out of sight, but he catches you through the corner of his eye and traps you in place yet again.
"What've you been doing, rolling around in a mud puddle?"
You look down at your mud-caked coat and the grime beneath fingernails as if this is the first time you've noticed them. You can just leave, a voice says, You don't owe him an answer.
Another voice shouts LIE!!! With no particular purpose.
"I can't imagine Silver'd let you go tracking dirt around in that dorm," he mutters. "They're more uppity than us now, y'hear? Though that may be on account of the new management..."
Epel waits for an answer. You have none to give.
He sighs. "Well, I'd feel real bad if I left you out here in this state... what would Vil think?"
He waits for an answer again. You still have none. You have no idea who Vil is.
"Well... c'mon. Let's get you cleaned up,"
Pomefiore dorm is a lot different from Diasomnia.
For one, it's white instead of gray.
The trees have leaves and flowers (in a permanent state of early spring, according to Epel) instead of black bark and thorns.
There are fine tapestries and paintings on the walls, of peacocks and hearts instead of horned figures in black cloaks.
And there are also six-hundred and eleven exact replicas of a thin, bony boy's face on every wall, window, couch, and vase. You didn't count- Epel told you.
"Six-hundred and thirty-four when those freshmen get done with the new tapestries," he explained, completely unhelpful in lending any context to who exactly this face belonged to, and why it was printed on all the lounge robes and drinking glasses.
"...Uh-huh," you say, letting him lead you through the dorm. Every student turns to stare at you with wary eyes. No, not you- Epel. Why Epel? What could he have possibly done to these boys than was more worthy of their ire than the stranger tracking mud on the nice carpet?
"Bathroom's up the stairs and to the left. Well, one of 'em, anyway. If it's full, there are three more down the hall, and four more after that," he says. "I'll be 'waitin downstairs."
"Thanks," you say it more as a show of solidarity- your way of saying, "Hey, I don't know what it is that makes you a freak, but I'm one, too. Let's not kill each other."
You drag yourself up the glittery marble steps and walk into the first door on your left, anticipating stares and mumbles and hours of taking yourself from room to room in pursuit of one empty enough to feel comfortable undressing in.
But there's no need. This bathroom is completely empty. Makeup brushes are abandoned by open canisters of blush, vanity lights are left on, some of the claw-footed tubs are still full of bubbles and flowery perfumes. It's as if everyone was suddenly spirited away.
...It's oddly comforting, to feel as if there are fellow ghosts on campus.
Soft golden light from the chandelier in the hall drapes over a modest dorm room with three beds. One tucked in neatly, one wrinkled and covered in socks, and one stripped naked, only a mattress, dust bunnies and pillow fluff.
"Sorry I can't get you a better room," Epel mutters, flicking on the lights. "I'd have to ask the housewarden..."
That same neatly contoured, bony face is printed on the ceiling, pointy nostrils breathing over the beds like an overbearing mother.
You- now washed, dressed in spare robes, and carrying a doggie bag containing all your belongings- sit at the edge of the bare bed.
"One of my roommates transferred out last month," Epel says, sitting on the bed opposite to yours. "So the bed'n desk are all yours."
"Thank you," you really mean it this time. Why is he being nice? Is this some kind of trick? A trap?
You should tell him you don't have any money (which is a lie, but you've gotten quite comfortable with telling those lately, especially to yourself).
"Don't mention it. I remember what it was like being a freshman..." he pauses. In a place where you felt completely foreign and everyone looked at you like you were a pile of dog poop in the street? "...Besides, Vil 'n Rook woulda wanted you here."
There's that name again. You're not necessarily as curious as you are making polite small talk- you owe him as much. Besides, you're getting tired of carrying the burden of a thousand names without faces on your back. "Who's that?"
"Old housewarden and vice housewarden. They're real busy on their student internships this year, so they don't write much..."
Epel pauses, and then presses his lips together in a thin line, as if he were suppressing a followup. You blink. Has he written his upperclassmen about the dorm management? Or the strange new magicless nuisance sitting across from him?
"...Anyway, as long as Quya doesn't find out you're here, you should be fine,"
Your capacity for politeness has has run out, and so you don't ask who this new name belongs to.
"Thanks,"
"Don't mention it," he's looking at his feet. "Really, don't."
You don't sleep.
It's equally comforting and disturbing to share a bedroom with two strange boys, though you're not at a liberty to complain. Wandering aimlessly around campus after dark and trying to catch some sleep in the library during school hours for a week (or something like that) hasn't done much for your circadian rhythm, and a mattress, a blanket, and central heating are more than you could ask for.
The hot bath with complimentary shampoo, conditioner, and body wash (seriously, what kind of school dorm has gift bags?) is a bonus.
Of course, there's always a price to pay.
This one happens to be your sanity.
"DANGIT, PUT THAT DOWN OR SO HELP ME!"
"YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!"
"SHUT YOUR PIEHOLE BEFORE I GIVE YOU A REASON TO SHOUT!"
"I'D LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY!"
"BOTH OF YOU, SHUT UP!"
"WHAT'D YOU SAY???"
"YEAH, YOU WANT A PIECE OF THIS?"
"ALRIGHT, THAT'S IT!"
You shoot up in bed and slam your cranium on the headboard, sending hot, electric shocks of pain through your neck. When the ringing in your ears has subsided and you hadn't yet vomited out of every orifice (thus confirming that you are not concussed a second time), you creep out of bed and follow the sound of spit and insults flying to the lounge, where five or six students- your dear Epel included- are beating each other black and blue over the fine sofas.
You watch, wide-eyed, as they disperse, bruised and bloody. Epel has a swollen eye- the boy he was tousling with is covered in bites.
The sound of heavy breathing fills the room.
Finally: "That was a draw," says the bitten boy.
Epel bristles like a startled cat. "IT WAS NOT! WE WON, FAIR AND SQUARE!"
A student holding an abacus studies his painted beads. "Four to six, Epel's motion carries,"
"HAH!"
"FUCK!"
You jolt at the screaming, and just barely manage to get out of the way of a few angry boys as they storm out of the lounge.
Blinking, you turn back to Epel, who's busy strutting like a peacock. Mr. Abacus turns to another boy with a notepad.
"That means we're doing the red streamers for this Halloween,"
...The what?
You forget where you are until there's suddenly an arm slung around your shoulders, pulling you into the hall.
"How much of that didja see?"
You blink back at Epel, just as lost as before. "I heard more than I saw,"
"Huh. Guess you would," he pauses. "...It's not what it looked like."
What was it, then? Pro-wrestling? A battle reenactment? A dance rehearsal?? You had no idea what happened in there.
"What was that?"
Epel sucks in his breath. For a moment, he almost seems ashamed- is it possible for a student of this school to feel remorse? "Well, since Vil's been gone, and the new housewarden's not real interested in table manners..."
The students have resorted to beating each other to resolve their problems? And you thought this was supposed to be the posh dorm.
Then again, you shouldn't be surprised. Senseless violence seems to be an average Tuesday around here.
"Don't gimme that look! I tried to stop 'em, I really did!" Epel protests. "But under all that fancy makeup and perfume, they're still Night Raven College students like anyone else..."
He begins walking and waves for you to follow. You obey- where else would you go?
Your footsteps are soft, muffled by the plush, velvet carpets, voices drowned out by the drapery. Every inch of this dorm is covered in fur, silk, and cashmere, beaded with pearls and rubies, or finished in gold. Seeing a gaggle of teenage boys bleed out over the finely embroidered cushions could have sent an interior designer into a panic attack. Maybe that would've made it more of a comedy act and less of a crime scene.
You pass two, three, six bathrooms, each full of porcelain tubs and matching vanity mirrors, each as empty as the one you'd bathed in last night. And yet still, mascara wands and eyeshadow palettes are strewn on each surface, freshly used- it's not that the students had abandoned their posh routines, it's just that they throw themselves into a fury of flying punches and pillow feathers after blending their foundation.
They don't lack tenacity, they lack responsibility.
A quality you weren't so sure you possessed, either.
"The way I see it," Epel explains, "Is the only thing that really separates the student of one dorm from the student of another is whoever's in charge of 'em. You can't blame a dog that bites, it's the owner's doing."
You appreciate the biting dog metaphor. You'd had similar thoughts about the boys here.
It's a mystery how this school functions without a counselor.
"And when there's no one in charge..." you mutter, thoughts wandering back to the cries and crunching bones coming from Savanaclaw that one night.
"I don't even wanna think about that," Epel shudders.
"Are the students here really that bad?" it's a dumb question, but one that you find walking out of your mouth before your mind can follow.
Epel shrugs. "We have a reputation," and that's all he says.
But I'm not like that, you want to say, though you're not sure.
You don't really know what you're like anymore. Your thoughts have grown fuzzy and disorganized, a sink full of moldy dishes.
And you'd hardly call yourself a student, anyway. It'd been well over a month since you'd last stepped foot in a lecture hall, and longer since a professor had looked your way.
"It ain't usually this bad. The Halloween party's just got everyone in a tizzy... it's our first one without Vil,"
Was that guy really so important? He must have been, if he kept his dorm in such strict order that it completely collapsed when a slightly less competent leader stepped in.
"How'd that other guy get to be housewarden, anyway?" you ask, recalling some memory or two of Deuce explaining that the housewardens in his dorm are chosen through a duel (how perfectly archaic).
You're not sure why you think about the things people say only after they say them.
Epel blinks. "Oh, it's a..." he hesitates. He thinks it sounds dumb- but he cares about sounding dumb in front of you, which is fun. "...An old tradition."
"What kind?"
"...Whoever can brew the strongest poison gets to lead the dorm," he mutters.
You stare back. That is dumb. Better than a duel, maybe, but how is poison related to leadership at all? Are there a lot of political assassinations in this dorm?
You wouldn't be surprised.
"Vil'd been tutoring me for months," Epel goes on, "He'n Rook really wanted me to take over after they went on."
You blink. And he didn't get it.
"And I didn't get it,"
He pauses.
"I wasn't ready, I s'pose,"
You look away. Everyone you'd met so far- Silver, Deuce, Ruggie, and now Epel- seemed to have these things thrust on them. Responsibility. Duty. Obligation. Being needed. Like the world was on its dying breath, and desperately digging its heels into whatever good- no, gullible person it could drag down with it.
Maybe everyone here starts out that way, and then when they get chewed up and spat out, they think twice about being kind the next time.
The one who came before you- the other magicless student- was one of them.
Kind. Gullible. Good, maybe, too. They just left before they could become cold and cruel like the rest.
Well, maybe. Probably. That's why you're here, aren't you? To take on the burden they left behind. It's how everyone treats you, isn't it?
Like a replacement. And a malfunctioning one, at that.
Well, you think, following Epel down a flight of stairs. They chose the wrong successor.
You were cold to begin with, and you're not going anywhere.
"Where are we going?" you finally ask, as he stops at an iron-bound wooden door and pulls a bony key from the heel of his boot.
Epel tilts his head back. "Dungeon. Halloween stuff's down there,"
You blink.
Dungeon. Halloween stuff. Right. He says it so naturally, you almost accept it until the stench of wood rot and dust hits your nose.
"I used to think it was a basement. Ya know, a cellar," he says, leading you down a spiral staircase and into the black abyss, with only the light from his phone to guide you. You can only pray he remembered to charge it last night. This would be a bad place to get lost. "For wine, and pickled things, and broken chairs..."
Used to. It's cold, and the limestone walls are rough under your palm.
"Then what's actually down here?"
He doesn't answer.
"Do they got Halloween where you're from?" Epel asks, and the question hits you like a truck. Not the content of it, or the context, but the intent. He's making small talk. It's the first time anyone had really asked you anything about your home, and really wanted to hear an answer. You almost forget how to speak.
"Yes," you say, "In some places. And there's Christmas."
"What's that?"
You blink. "...You know... Christmas?"
Epel gives you a quick glance out of the corner of his eyes. "Never heard of it,"
"Huh," you say, acting as if that hadn't been like dunking a bucket of ice water over your head.
He doesn't know it, but here, in the depths beneath the dorm, in the dark and quiet and cold, the sound of clinking chains and the feeling of cobwebs sticking to the back of your neck, he had just opened a window for you. One overlooking the world outside of this school, and the first real one. Not Foothill Town, not the alley behind the lobster bar, not the mail room- even Smokey refused to answer your questions, the ones about culture and customs and language and, most of all, magic. You had given up on that one a long time ago.
But here was Epel Felmier, talking to you, the unwanted house guest, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
"Why are you so nice to me?" you blurt out, and he raises an eyebrow.
"I'm not,"
He pauses.
"...I just got other problems,"
Somehow, that's still the nicest thing that anyone had said to you yet.
"I have another question,"
It'd been following you all day. Out of the dungeon, up the spiral stairs, out of the box of Halloween decor and (hopefully, but who's to say?) fake skeletons, red streamers spilling from between their bones like guts and gore, through the mirror portal, and, now, here.
Condensation sticks to the skin under your arms and between your thighs. The air here is salty, and lukewarm, a sharp contrast from the dry, brittle dungeon. Each breath beneath Pomefiore had you worrying that your vocal chords would shrivel up and snap like plastic- here, your tongue is swimming in sweat and saltwater.
The identical henchmen standing on either sides of the VIP lounge door give you lopsided looks- one of passive disinterest, one of bubbling curiosity.
"Azul's in a meeting right now," the bored one (Floyd, you remind yourself) says. "So, beat it."
"It's important," you say.
But it's not, not really, more of an urge you need satisfied, an itch you need scratched. Epel had cracked the window, but now you wanted to throw it open and kick out the screen.
And you had no one else to humor you.
He yawns. "Listen, I'm not in the mood for this, so get lost before I squeeze 'ya."
"Now, Floyd," the other (Jade?) tuts. "Let's not turn away a customer so soon. What would Azul think?"
"He wouldn't think anything. We tell people to scram all the time,"
"Hush," Jade crouches to your eye level, barely holding back a smirk. "You're quite the interesting one."
Says you, you want to tell him, but you hold your tongue. You've been getting bold lately- not out of newfound confidence, but restlessness. You're flighty, on edge. Something's not right. Something's not been right for a long time. "Why's that?"
"Oh, you know..."
He says nothing else.
Floyd sighs. "I'm bored. Let 'em in, for all I care, I'm getting a snack," and then he saunters off, swinging a lonely key ring around his finger.
You narrow your eyes at the key, dark brown and pine- why does it seem so familiar?- but then Jade's breathing down your neck again.
"You really want to see Azul, don't you? ...I suppose we could make a special exception and squeeze you in between appointments... for a price, of course,"
"No, thank you," you're done with taking deals from teenage boys. "I'll just wait."
"Hm. Well, I suppose it won't be too long," Jade says, standing straight. "The wish he's consulting with now is impossible to grant."
The sound of something solid and heavy being thrown on the hard floor, and of two voices shouting, carries through the door, which then flies open- missing your face by a breath.
You freeze and are suddenly met with two fiery eyes, a body suspended mid-step as if the carpet was flypaper.
Ace Trappola stares at you, his hand strangling the door knob, his breath hot and heavy on your face.
One of the leather armchairs is splayed across the office floor behind him. Azul is standing on the other side of the desk, looking flustered, and completely unlike his calm, collected self, the one that you had come to loathe.
For a moment, there's almost an understanding.
A bit like what you had felt with Epel earlier- "Hey, I don't know what it is that causes you so much pain, but I'm hurting, too. Let's not kill each other."
But then, Ace's eyes narrow, he yanks himself away from the office, and he storms off as if his heels were on fire.
Jade holds the door open and smiles merrily. "Azul will see you now,"
The soft click of the door- preceded with a devilish smirk from the doorman- follows you into the room.
Azul is standing, collecting paperweights and pens that had been scattered over the floor. The chair stays upside down.
You feel smug enough to make a joke. "Unhappy customer?"
He narrows his eyes at you, and then awkwardly sits at his desk and pretends to read through a stack of papers.
"What, have you come to mock me, too? As if my staff weren't enough,"
You have a feeling that Floyd and Jade's mockery isn't as personal as he takes it- that's just what they're like.
Maybe if he weren't so unpleasant, he would have better friends.
Maybe the same could be said of you.
Oh, well.
"No," you say, sitting in the other (upright) chair. "I just wanted to talk."
"Talk?" he snorts, pretending to sign a blank sheet of paper (which he yanks out of view when he notices you looking). "I don't talk. I deal. I barter. If you want a fair transaction, you come to me. If you want to gab about your day, you find a therapist."
Or a friend. But he wouldn't know much about that, would he?
"It's not really the philosophical kind of talk," you say, recalling your first fateful offer from Azul. "It's just a question."
He glances up at you over the rim of his glasses. Slowly, he sets down his pen and folds his hands under his chin. The light in the room seems to dim, as if something big and hungry was swimming over the ocean above and blocking out the sun.
"And why, pray tell, would you come to me for that?"
"Because," You just want the satisfaction. "You know a lot of things."
Azul seems satisfied enough with that answer, though his annoyance lingers. You try to tell yourself he's just worked up after whatever had happened with Ace. Nothing personal. Just like his bodyguards. Nothing personal.
"The library is still open to students at this hour," he states, speaking like a search results page rather than a person.
"It's kind of a big question,"
"Big as in, existentially?"
"No, more like... geographically,"
Azul raises an eyebrow, and for the first time in the brief time you had known him, he smiles. Really. With no fine print or loophole hidden behind his teeth.
He thinks you're being funny.
"Well, fine. Just this once," he says, "Ask me your question."
Your mouth hangs open for a second, dry and unprepared. And then:
"What do you know about Christmas?"
It sounds even dumber out loud than it had in your head. You had no real urge to celebrate the commercial holiday, cartons of expired eggnog and carols on the radio that get stuck in your head for days, but it was the first important difference of the many mundane differences between this world and the last, and you had to know.
How far are you from home?
No, not that. You hadn't thought about home in weeks.
It's more like this:
How far are you from yourself?
Azul blinks. "...I've never heard of anything like that. Is it a food?"
His confirmation of Epel's window felt like pure relief. Like falling asleep after a long day, like quenching your thirst with cold water after running a mile, like The End, like rest.
"A holiday," you say, "A big one."
"Well, a variation of it may occur in pockets of the world," Azul says, pushing his glasses up with his pinky. "But it's nothing I'm familiar with. Does that answer your question?"
He's smiling again, strangely (but it's been a very strange day, anyway).
"Yeah, I guess so," you pause, feeling only half satisfied by his answer. And then you feel something else- something warm, salty, and smug, something that reeks of cologne and the sea. Being near these boys, observing them, their empty eyes, their restricted manners of speaking, makes you a sort of mirror to them- it happened with Riddle, and a bit with Ruggie, too. With Smokey, in your letters, and with Silver, in your silence.
Now, with Azul, you feel insecure and self-important. "You've been a real jerk to me, you know that?"
Azul's smile wavers. "Pardon?"
"It's like you want me to suffer," you say, "Like you want me indebted to you or something. I talked to Ruggie."
Azul stands and takes a step towards the imposing vault that sits in the back of the room, silent and unsettling, like a bigger, meaner bodyguard. He withdraws a handkerchief from his pocket and begins to shine the handle.
"I wouldn't go around asking busboys important questions,"
You narrow your eyes. "You really think I believe that crap about honoring deals? I know what I saw,"
"Do you, though?"
He tucks his handkerchief back in his pocket. The glint in his grin is dangerous again.
"I have no reason to give you special treatment," he says, "Unlike the others, I'm not caught up in some fairy tale where all my dreams come true just because I want them to. Do you believe in work, Not-You? Hard work? Do you believe people are born with purpose? Prescribed purpose by others? Or that they make it? Well, my purpose is to work. No good things in life are free, and the free things aren't worth the price you pay later on... everyone here learned that the hard way, not too long ago."
He pauses to sit. "In fact, I told the gentleman who was here just before you the very same thing. You reap what you sow."
You want to stay firm, but your glare falters. What he's saying isn't untrue, even if you're not committed to the idea of it yet.
Azul sighs in response to your pensive silence.
"And for your information, I have no interest in your services. But I am interested in keeping you away from that dorm,"
You look up. His expression has become stone cold and serious, though there's a touch of melancholy in the twitch of his fingers.
"Some memories are better off forgotten."
You may not have concussed yourself this morning, but there's still a few hours left in the day.
You've begun keeping count of all the times you'd nearly been decapitated and/or bludgeoned in Pomefiore:
When Epel asked you to get more boxes out of the dungeon and you almost slipped on the spiral stairs,
When a second year carrying a ladder turned to wave at his friend and nearly took your head off,
When you really did slip down the stairs (in the lounge, this time) and just barely avoided landing in a comfy pile of light bulbs.
Violence seems so much less appealing when it's not a quirky remark or an unpleasant daydream, when it's coming at you like an unleashed dog on an empty sidewalk and you're wearing roller skates. You've been struggling to swallow ever since that sophomore almost decapitated you.
You're trying not to think of it.
How much of a living, breathing, bleeding thing you suddenly seem.
The ignoramus attitude of the student body had slipped from between your fingers and fallen into the cracks in the tile of Heartslabyul, Savanaclaw, Octavinelle, and Diasomnia, and you had been seen and touched and spoken to in a manner that almost implied understanding, something like five times now, by boys who knew you weren't what they wanted, but could find some other use for you, anyway. Silver, Ruggie, Azul, Smokey, and now Epel, making you walk to the school store for an extension cord.
It was a bit of a mystery, how suddenly the seasons had changed. The trees bereft of their foliage, the grass dry and dirt wet, the clouds that seemed to drape over campus like a shroud over a grave, the actual graves, cracked and faceless from the wind and rain...
Your hand trembles around the handle of the plastic grocery bag, fingers pushing through the thin stuff as if they were breaking through the surface of the sea.
Something's not right.
And it's you, sure. You're the stranger, the unwanted house guest, the elephant on campus, the unsure breath between the words of boys who would never love you, never know you. You didn't belong. You had figured that out in the first ten minutes of being here.
But there was something else. The trail of blood that had been left for you, clues to a crime no one had witnessed, or at least thought about. The hollowness of it all- of the school, of the students, of Ramshackle dorm, as if they were missing a vital organ, a cog that had been keeping the whole thing ticking. Maybe more than one. There were more than one pair of shoes to fill on campus, after all, yours just happened to be the biggest. Azul's comment confirmed this- they were avoiding you, yes, but also the thing behind you. It's what they looked at when they wouldn't meet your eyes. The shadow that rode on your back everywhere, that wasn't there before- something that had attached itself to you like a fungal infection. Something that had been wandering aimlessly on campus until you showed up and claimed it.
You were a host for their guilt.
Of what? It still wasn't much of a murder scene, despite the coffins and graves and the light in the spooky old house.
Something's really not right.
They resent you for it. Or are at least cautious. They never answer your questions, not that you ever try to ask- but that word, that name, that title that rises to the surface like a dead body on a lake, You, it came through to you anyhow.
They didn't want to talk about it. Or you.
And you had to know.
Untangling the wires of your brain has gotten harder.
You feel less sure of who you are every day. But you have a motive, now, no matter how the world is trying to keep you from pursuing it, to keep you from asking questions, to keep you from escaping.
Tink, tink, tink. There's that music again.
You stop and turn to stare over your shoulder, at Ramshackle dorm. There's the light in the upper story window, sure, but there's an orange-ish something coming from the attic now, too.
You narrow your eyes. What is Azul trying to protect?
What are all of them trying to hide?
Plunk. You drop the extension cord on the pavement and turn to the Queen Anne-styled house, rolling up your sleeves and muddying your winter boots.
Door's locked. Windows are boarded. You tug at the gutter to see if it'll hold your weight, conspiring to climb to the attic, but no such luck- it creaks, groans, and crumbles like it was made out of wet paper.
The doors are solid oak, both front and back, and you only hurt your foot trying to kick them in.
You're nearing your limit, about to give in and return to Pomefiore, when you spot something shiny and flat in the grass.
A piece of rusty sheet metal? Two pieces of rusty sheet metal? With handles? And a broken chain laying in the flax a foot away?
Epel's earlier prose about wine and pickled things and old, broken chairs comes to mind. A cellar. The old dorm has a cellar. Of course.
And where there's a cellar, there has to be stairs, and a door, and a kitchen from where wine goes and pickled things come. And somewhere around there, an attic.
You nudge open the door with the toe of your boot and crouch, peering down the stone steps- it's pitch black. But you're sure enough that there will be slivers of moonlight coming from tall windows to guide your way, and so you take a deep breath, leaving the double doors wide open behind you.
It's impossibly dark.
Your hope-slash-delusion about there being windows in the basement was built off of a hunch, and not anything substantial, though your gut had never been so wrong before.
Well, there's a first for everything.
You take it one toe at a time, nudging into the darkness to keep from walking into anything sharp and pointy.
Brilliant idea, you mock yourself, Get impaled in a sweaty old basement that smells like ham and pennies, and no one will ever find your body.
Not that anyone would look for you in the first place. You left the extension cord outside, and one extension cord is all you're worth here.
The toe of your boot hits something solid. A shelf, you think, or the leg of it, and you casually maneuver out of the way, grabbing at nothing in the pitch black of the basement. At least you haven't walked face-first into a wall yet.
And at least there are no rats or giant spiders.
...Well, none that you can see.
CRRR-KAH!
You freeze at the noise. A shelf tipping over? The house collapsing? A rat?
Summoning the motivation to turn, you look over your shoulder.
The dumb cellar doors had fallen shut. Of course. You should've found something to prop them open with, especially on a windy night like this, but you didn't think of that. You consider retracing your steps to push them apart and then continue your foray into the abyss (they are your only opening to the outside world, after all, the single source of light in the dark basement), but then there's another sound.
The shuffle of chains. The clink of metal on metal. The scrape of something moving across the floor.
Not like in Pomefiore, where the breeze from your bodies and the wind of the world above had disturbed the old, abandoned chains hanging from bars on the wall like party streamers.
This sound moved with purpose.
You think you would've preferred rats and giant spiders.
The sound comes closer, and you take a cautious step back- CRKK! You step on something long and thin, and it makes a sickening crack beneath your heel.
That was definitely a rat.
But then there's a fluorescent green light coming from your foot, and when you look down, there's a glow stick under your boot.
Cr-crk!
Crk!
C-crik!
Crk!
Crk!
Yellow, orange, red, pink, green, all shades of the neon rainbow illuminate the dark, smelly basement, from shelves to tables to the rafters overhead. It's poor light, but it's light nonetheless.
"Well, well, well, what have we here?"
The last crack is followed by a loud fwmp. Something massive is sitting across the basement floor, legs crossed, chin held in one impressively big palm.
You blink.
This is... not ideal.
You had had your thoughts and theories about Ramshackle, and you had certainly wondered if there was still something living in it.
You've never hated being right so much.
"Lookie here, Mr. Swing's got a visitor! It's been a loooong time since I had a visitor," he pauses to grin. "Or is it dinner?"
Your eyes widen, and he barks out a loud laugh. It shakes the entire basement. You cling to the shelf behind you.
"Visitor," you say, forcing yourself to keep your cool (you haven't been practicing your poker face in awkward situations for two months just to slip up now). "...Nice to meet you..."
Your eyes dart to something long writhing beneath the collar of his shirt. You grimace.
"...Both."
Swing blinks back at you. Then, with another grin, he lights up like a Christmas tree, the neon colors of the basement dancing under the shadow of his brow.
"...Visitor it is. Dinner isn't usually so polite,"
You swallow the bubble of bile that'd been rising in your throat. Maybe the reason no one would let you in here is because of the squatter situation?
...No, they wouldn't care about that. If they even knew there was someone down here at all.
"No one comes down to visit Mr. Swing anymore," he sighs, and the thing coiled around his neck and collar worms around in agreement. "Not even the ghosts."
Literally or metaphorically? You wonder if this Mr. Swing is the same sort of thing Sebek is- you'd never asked, but the pointy ears, the fangs, the inhuman pupils... lots of Diasomnia students looked like that, now that you think about it. It's probably the same thing that gives some people animal ears.
Better not to think too much about the logic of a magical fantasyland.
"Not since... tch, well, Mr. Swing doesn't care about that," he says, standing again, the top of his head grazing the tall ceiling of the basement. "Wanna play a game?"
"No, thank you," you say, sticking your foot out with your tongue- that is, verbally navigating around the conversation while you maneuver around the cellar, eyeing the door. "I think I should go."
You've become very fond of finding excuses to leave. Unbirthday parties, equestrian club meetings, lectures and library study sessions... maybe you didn't hide those letters because you didn't really care if Silver found them. Just another excuse to get out and go. Go where? You hadn't figured that out yet.
You thought it might've been to Smokey, but now you're not so sure. The school doesn't seem so keen on letting you leave it.
Neither does Swing.
He frowns at your suggestion, turns, and then- with one hand- bends and twists the metal handles of the cellar door into a mangled knot.
He sits down with a smile. "Now... wanna play a game?"
You stare. For once, you have nowhere to go- and there's no amount of etiquette loopholes you can jump through here.
Not with someone who obviously doesn't care for things like social awkwardness.
You sit on the dirty cellar floor, far from him as you can manage. Closer to the glow sticks scattered across the dirt and stone, you can make out the water damage on the walls and the decades (no, centuries) of weather and wear on the dorm.
"What kind of game?"
You might've had a chance at winning (or at least at understanding the rules of the game, if he wouldn't keep changing them and insisting that this is a version of poker from a country that no longer exists), but you aren't all that interested in it to begin with.
At least Swing promises not to bet anything "serious" on it- he says he's in the "spirit of the season", whatever that means.
He mentions he's expecting a guest on Halloween.
"We already thought about keeping you to use as bait, but we don't think that'd work again," he explains. Again. Sure. If you weren't so used to feeling like a ghost in every conversation, you might've been uncomfortable with the way he keeps talking to the open air, as if there was someone else in the basement with you.
"I fold," you say for the thousandth time, admitting an easy defeat. Swing hums- he hasn't mentioned your lack of enthusiasm yet. He seems to enjoy winning.
Or maybe he's as disinterested in the game as you are.
"Mr. Swing hasn't seen you around before," he says. "How many years've they been gone?"
You blink, looking up from your hand of cards. "Who?"
You had almost forgotten, for a moment. You answer your own dumb remark before he can.
"Don't know. A few months,"
"Mhm," he hums. "And how've you been faring in their place?"
Your fingers curl around the cards, wrinkling the corners. Your vision tunnels, closing in on the ace of spades in the center of your hand. "Hm?"
Mr. Swing whistles an unfamiliar tune, folding and shuffling his own hand of cards. "Only wondering if the voices have started for you, yet," He's suddenly very lucid.
You look up. "What?"
"Or was it dreams?" he asks. "Mr. Swing's memory is not what it used to be."
The enormous head of a centipede peeks out from under his collar, nods, and then scuttles back inside his shirt. You stare.
"Dreams," you repeat, your eyes falling to your cards. "No, no dreams."
"No, it was voices. Sure of it now. They were always muttering about the voices. Or voices in dreams," he says. "Big whoop. We all have a little something whispering in our ear... don't we?"
The centipede circles the sides of his neck and hides behind his ear. You frown.
"They... You... was hearing things? In dreams?" you ask. "Like, the other students?"
It's not a ridiculous question. You had been haunted by the faceless names and the nameless faces that had been following you from orientation. Sometimes, in the moments between sleep and wake, you can hear Riddle scolding your posture, or Azul sneering at your weakness, or Silver's silence. And, as you had first noted with Riddle last month, you'd begun adopting those neuroses and personality traits against your will. Soaking them up, like a sponge.
You suppose that since the students here take so much of your waking thoughts, they'd easily creep into the sleeping ones, too.
But Swing only shrugs. "Never said. But Mr. Swing could tell they weren't all there at the end,"
You raise an eyebrow.
"They went home," you say, "Or..."
They died. Your heart stops for a moment. You don't say it. You don't want to.
It would mean that everything you had experienced here- the stares, the sighs, the painful pause between the breaths of boys who could never meet your eye- was meaningful. Justified. An open wound still bleeding, and you had been blind to it. Willingly, maybe.
It would mean that the anger and guilt and resentment that had been piled onto your back one after the other, the collective misery of a campus that had made you its beast of burden, was necessary.
Needed, but not wanted. That's what you were, and always would be.
You were serving a sentence on someone else's behalf.
Maybe it was a crime scene, after all, and you were the closure. You were being framed for a murder.
"No," Swing says.
He tosses his cards on the cold stone between you, scattering a hand of queens, kings, and aces. He could've won at any turn- he was drawing this out on purpose.
"They left,"
You look up. They went home, after all.
That's even worse.
Then it was all for nothing.
"Where did they go?" Your thoughts wander to Fleur City, to Smokey's letters, to the palpable pain in each word. To his responsibility. His duty to shield you from the secrets of this world.
And so far, he had done a wonderful job. After all, the moment you stopped writing him, you end up playing poker in a basement with a squatter.
Swing shrugs again. "Never said,"
You raise an eyebrow. Even this stranger's words and manners were beginning to rub off on you, and you feel a bit bolder than before. "So they just... what, walked away and never came back?"
"More or less,"
You blink. More or less?
How... anticlimactic.
"One day, You. Next day, no You,"
"They didn't tell anyone where they were going?" you ask.
"They didn't say they were going anywhere at all,"
"So they just vanished,"
He shrugs again. You take that as a yes. Or an "I don't really care, but probably."
You look down at your empty lap. They didn't go home. They didn't die. They just... stopped existing altogether. Disappeared into thin air.
Your thoughts touch on the doggy bag of paper and quills sitting in a Pomefiore dorm right now. To the stolen boots on your feet.
"They didn't take anything," you assume, not ask.
"Mhm," Swing says, "And no one's been here since."
So that's it.
Your eyes drift up, not to the something foul and brown dripping from a crack in the ceiling, but to the something beyond.
A bedroom. A bed. Two, probably. A desk, a chair. A dresser.
A light.
You weren't allowed in because you would soil it. Ruin it. Put your filthy letters in the drawers, track your dirty feet on the rug. Dig up the graveyard they had made of it.
You look back to Swing, whistling while taking rat skulls and spools of thread from his pockets, looking for the card sleeve. He seems to be enjoying the company.
"Why?" you ask, without any particular reason.
He hums. "They couldn't handle it,"
The responsibility? The pressure? The guy living in their basement?
Or... was it possible that they had been othered, and burdened by this otherness, like you?
You blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, as if this stranger would have any answer to give. "And I can?"
Swing smirks. "Dunno. Maybe. Maybe not. Mr. Swing thinks you're a fighter. Mr. Swing thinks you figured it out long before they did,"
Too many "its" in this conversation. "Figure what out?"
"It," he repeats. "Why you're here."
A few cards slip from between your fingers and flutter to the floor, rolling off the toe of your boot. A queen of hearts, a seven of diamonds, and a five of spades land in a puddle of brown water beneath you.
"I don't know why I'm here," you insist.
"We think you do,"
What does it matter what he thinks? He doesn't know you, nor does he care to- he was joking about eating you not twenty minutes ago!
"We think," he says, "You know that they need little things like you."
"And that's a bad thing," you state, not ask.
He shrugs. Your eyes dart to the side. Needed, but not wanted. That's the first thing you had figured out here. Everybody needs you, but nobody wants you. Nobody thinks of you, nobody looks for you. That's the second, and the reason you had begun unraveling. This place needs strong people to keep the gears running. Without them, it's chaos. That's the third.
But that's only about you. Nothing to do with You.
You look back at Swing. "They weren't from here, either. Were they?"
He confirms with another apathetic shrug, though he's been glancing at you out of the corner of his eyes with a subdued curiosity- like he's observing a bug on the wall.
"But they were brought here. So was I," you pause. "Needed. Needed..."
"Mr. Swing thinks you have some people to talk to. Starting with that Headmage of yours," he says, plucking the remaining cards out of your hand and slipping them into one of the large pockets of his coat.
"And you'll come back, won't you?" He asks. "At least before Christmas?"
The hairs on the back of your neck raise. But you don't have time for questions- not now. You should climb out the window while you still can.
You stand. He doesn't stop you. "I will,"
You're not sure of that, but you'd really like to see the sky and breathe fresh air again. You'll smell like mildew for days after this.
Another reason to be thankful for Epel and his dorm's thousands of baths.
Swing tears the basement doors open for you and you climb out into the night, nearly knocked unconscious by the cold, sharp autumn air pouring into your lungs.
With a loud creak, the doors shut behind you. You wonder how long Swing has been down there, and if anyone but You knew he was down there at all- better not to bring it up, just in case.
He may have joked about eating you, but he was still the only sensible person in this place.
...Maybe that's a bad thing.
As soon as you catch your breath, you turn on your heels and begin walking back to the path, intent on having both a bath and a bed to sleep in tonight.
Got to sleep. Got to eat. Got to find Crowley...
The wind is cold. Every breath is like an ice bath, a sharp contrast to the muggy, suffocating air of the cellar. You step ahead, turning around the corner of the dorm, where-
What's that?
You stop just a few steps shy of the porch.
There's something on it. Wide-eyed and startled.
You stare.
It stares back.
The space between you is blue.
You've never seen a cat with a forked tail.
Is that normal here?
Then, with a flick of its fiery ears, it steps back into the dark of the porch and disappears.
You stay still for a moment longer before your feet remember that it's below freezing and these boots are old, worn, and not really winter boots at all. You'd grabbed the wrong pair. Typical.
Midnight. No, just past.
One-ten in the morning.
Security efforts are always doubled at night. Between the hours of final curfew and first light, forty-five ghost guards, hired from the yellow pages of Crowley's one-hundred year old phonebook, keep their undead eyes eternally peeled for miscreants on campus.
But good as they are, Ace Trappola knows how to get around them. Which corridors will be empty, which paths less taken, which doors unlocked... and for no innocent reason, trust him, he's heard it. The ghosts might not catch him, but Housewarden Riddle would.
Tonight, he doesn't care about being collared.
Tonight, he's had enough.
Trey had once warned him that the walls of Heartslabyul dorm are thin as paper, and Riddle's hearing is positively inhuman- he could catch a dormouse in the cupboard by the sound of its heartbeat. Ace has to take extra precautions, carrying his sneakers under his arm and sliding across the smooth tile in his socks to muffle his footsteps, until he's outside.
There's never any wind in the pocket dimension that houses Heartslabyul dorm. Ideal for unbirthday parties (no lost napkins or overturned tablecloths) and for painting the shrubbery, not so ideal for hiding the sound of a second year sneaking to the back door.
The mirror chamber is swarming with ghost guards- duh. Any clueless freshman attempting to get out for a midnight snack on campus would try to take the main door (er... not that Ace has ever been caught doing that, no siree). Luckily, every dorm comes with five or six... fire exits, so to speak. That is, emergency exits that exist in between bookshelves and tea cupboards in case the main mirror portal weren't an option. Spells weaken. Magic fades. Someday, some poor sap will try heading to class and walk face-first into a cold brick wall.
And portals aren't easy. That's two, three months of repair. Crowley couldn't relocate an entire dorm for that amount of time, and, thus...
Fire exits.
The one Ace has chosen is at the end of the hedge maze, a path he's memorized by heart. It's the one he used to use to sneak out for snacks and midnight strolls on campus nearly every night.
It spits him out behind Ramshackle.
No longer in the pocket dimension that houses Heartslabyul dorm, the wind sticks dead grass and nettles to his coat. He pats himself down and keeps moving, taking extra care to avoid the cellar doors protruding out of the earth only a few paces ahead.
Yuu had never really told him what was down there, but he trusted them enough not to doubt their word.
He keeps on, kicking a pinecone across the gravel and dead grass until he's back on the main path. He takes his usual route around the back of the school, through a washroom window, and up a narrow, nearly crumbling set of stone stairs that had been blocked off with a "under construction" sign since before even Trey had enrolled, and then to the imposing pair of double doors he had never seen in this light.
Yuu was usually the one who spoke to the Headmage. Not him.
Ace supposes that's just what he's here for.
He doesn't knock- it's not worth it. He knows Crowley will be here, because Crowley nearly never leaves.
The doors open quietly, no creaks, no groans, no scrape of wood on stone. Ace peers into the candlelit darkness.
"...Trappola," Crowley greets him, calmer than Ace had expected (where was the girlish scream and long lecture on disrespecting the rules?) "You're up rather late. What time is it, now? Nearly nine?"
"One in the morning," Ace answers. "Where have you been? I've been trying to talk to you for like, two weeks now."
Crowley sighs and slumps forward, cupping his chin in his palm and nudging a quill around his desk. Bored. "Oh, yes, I see. Azul has already filed a complaint and demanded compensation for the damage to his VIP lounge,"
Ace frowns. "What? No, it's not about that," he wants to yell at the old man to focus, but he holds his tongue. He knows that Crowley can get scary when angered. "I want to talk about them. I want to talk about Yuu."
The golden pinpoints within the depths of the mask obscuring Crowley's face dart up.
"Oh?" he asks. "And what about them?"
Ace grits his teeth. That tone. Casual. Unbothered. As if Yuu were just any student. As if they had just gone home for winter holiday. As if they were never really there at all.
"It's not fair," he blurts out. "All that crap you put them through. The impossible tasks, the shitty dorm, the... the responsibility you put on the shoulders of someone who could barely take care of themselves, let alone everyone else! And to-"
He pauses, swallowing a hot, salty mouthful of saliva.
"To just let them do nothing- get coddled by everyone like some... some glass... thing! It's not fair. It's not fair!"
Crowley says nothing. He simply holds his chin in his palm and stares. Still as a statue.
His lack of reaction makes Ace's anger more volatile, more violent, tearing out of his throat like vomit.
"Giving them a proper dorm, letting them skip class, hand-delivering their mail, Crowley! Don't think we don't know about that! It's insane, you're insane! Don't you see what you're doing?"
A pause. Ace takes a hard, deep breath.
"Don't you think that Yuu might've stayed if you'd treated them half as well? If you let them do whatever they want? If you-"
"That's quite enough," Crowley says, standing to his full height, dark and intimidating in the dim light.
Ace takes a step back, but the Headmage only withdraws a box of matches from his desk and then walks to the window to light another candle. Warm, yellowish light flickers across the dark of his mask.
"I cannot change the past, Mr. Trappola. It's rather immature of you to throw such a tantrum over what cannot be controlled."
Ace glares. "But if you would just-"
"Obviously, the responsibility was too much. I see that now," Crowley murmurs, waving out his matchstick and admiring the blackened, burnt remains between his fingertips. "For all of you."
Ace glowers, but retreats, bowing his head. For all of you.
Riddle. Leona. Azul. Jamil. Vil. Idia. Malleus.
And, then, Yuu.
"It's not like that," the ginger mutters, more to himself than the Headmage.
Crowley slips the matchstick into his pocket and sits. "You're right," he says. "It was quite different, indeed. But the responsibility I gave to Yuu was no greater than what I gave to the housewardens. And they only had one member of their dorm to look after."
"Don't act like-"
The Headmage raises a clawed finger. "One must ask oneself," he says, "If it was not the position that wore them, then what was it?"
Ace frowns. "They didn't have magic,"
"True, true, but perhaps that wouldn't have mattered. Perhaps that was a strength, rather than a weakness," Crowley says, drumming his fingers on the desk- each metal talon making a sharp click against the wood. "Perhaps we all overestimated their ability to handle it."
"The magic?"
"No," the Headmage says, leering forward. "Not the magic. The burden. Of shouldering the sadness of an entire student body."
AN: I struggle to write swing because the translations of the event vary WILDLY from one another, so I don't have a very good grasp on his "voice" yet. if this turns out to be horribly OOC or just bad, then that's on me and I apologize taglist: @agaygothicsunfish @miri-riyin @cyraris @strawb3rryshortcake13 @twst-migraine