Yael Post-Round 6 Epilogue - Yaelbeth
For @lulling-riot - HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY KILLS YOU KILLS YOU KILLS YOU HUGS YOU here’s the Yaelbeth that I’ve been promising since you made the Yael comic. I used your birthday as an excuse to get motivated. I’m so smart
(Word count: 4k. Mix of canon and modern AU - ties into the first 2 Yael logs but can be read on its own—it just has references to the logs. TW list is shorter than usual but includes: recreational drug use, nongraphic references to sex, mild gender dysphoria, referenced suicide and talks about mental illness. 4k words of Yaelbeth being stupid below the cut)
“Yael.”
“Wake up, Yael.”
“Yael.”
“Yael.”
Macbeth’s voice was vaguely irate as Yael approached his desk and, without further ado, swung a leg up over the side of it like it was a horse and shimmied so he was planted firmly in the middle in a straddle with either leg hanging off the sides. Yael didn’t take offense to it. He’d learned not to, anyway. The perpetual stormcloud hanging over Macbeth’s head made him a bit of a grump–prone to scowls and narrowed eyes, gloomy, half-lidded glances and a wrinkled nose to show his typical state of disapproval. Compared to some of their classmates, Yael got the gentled version of Macbeth’s diagnosable annoyance with humanity. Him and Inna, he supposed. But Inna was too nice for Macbeth to understand at his core.
Yael understood. Not that he wasn’t nice–he liked to think he was pretty nice–but he didn’t really care about others the same way Inna did. When Inna finished his bevvy of extracurriculars, he always had someone he wanted to hang out with. Monica to stay out late in the rock-and-cement playground at their old elementary school before puberty and mental illness kicked in and life got complicated. Inna and Monica liked jumping rope, playing tag and hopscotch, while Yael would just sit and watch. Quiet. Uninterested.
Uninterested was how he felt about most people until he met Macbeth, with the exception of Naz from the experimental treatment clinic, who provided decent entertainment.
Yael plucked an eraser out from where it got wedged under his thigh and held it up like something deeply interesting and worthy of discussion, twisting and turning it in his hand. He smiled at Macbeth, the one with teeth that meant he had some grand plan in mind. “What?”
Macbeth fixed him with a deadpan stare. “How many times do I have to tell you not to sit on my desk? Your butt is crushing my papers.”
“Your papers like my butt,” Yael retorted. He grabbed the pencil in Macbeth’s loose grip and started idly scritching little doodles into the rubbery pink material of the eraser. One of them looked like it might be meant to be a cat’s face. Another vaguely resembled a marijuana leaf. “It’s Friday.”
“I have a calendar and eyes to see.”
“And what very pretty eyes they are, my friend.”
“Shut up. And stop poking holes in my eraser! What, did you forget to medicate today or something?” said Macbeth as he snatched the eraser back, which, in fact, Yael had begun to poke. Cats and weed had gotten old fast.
Yael shook his head, the same toothy smile still plastered to his face. “Wouldn’t you like to know. So as I was saying, it’s Friday. Friiiiday. Which is basically our day.”
Macbeth scrunched up his nose in confusion. “Since when?”
“Well, first off, I’m pretty sure we met on a Friday.”
“We met on a Monday.”
Yael squinted down at him. “Did we?” Then he beamed. “You remembered!”
Waving his hand– “Right, whatever. You were saying?”
“For the last three weeks we’ve smoked on Fridays. So what I’m saying is we should keep doing that. For routine’s sake.”
That earned Yael an amused snort. “Routine’s sake? For weed?”
…that was probably said a little too loudly in a religious school’s classroom. Macbeth briefly tensed, but no one appeared to be lingering. By the time Yael strutted in and took his place on Macbeth’s desk, everyone else left the study hall, eager to get on with their weekends. Nobody ever waited for Macbeth, and no one ever waited for Yael, except for each other. They were safe.
Back in fall semester when they tried kissing out, Yael would only try it in empty lecture halls after class, in the courtyard behind the big tree near the perimeter where they napped during breaks, or in the privacy of Yael’s house. His parents were doting but thought of themselves as “progressive” by leaving him alone in his room with a boy and offering him birth control tablets. To be fair, they were hippies. Weed-smoking, libertarian hippies who had a handmade sign in their yard that said, “Leave Clinton and Bush to Rot–We Want Legal Pot!” Yael never noticed that they actually misspelled Clinton with an e instead of an o until Macbeth came over to his house for the first time and pointed it out. I was just so used to seeing it, Yael had said sagely.
Point is, they know where to do and say certain things and where not to.
“Just come over to my house tonight.” Yael twirled the pencil between his fingers, pausing to note the small indents and chips in the yellow paint from absentminded pencil biting. His eyes flicked up to Macbeth’s, searching. “Unless you’re avoiding me.”
“I’m not avoiding you,” Macbeth said, exasperated. With a roll of his eyes, he stood from his chair and grabbed Yael’s tie to yank him forwards and set him off balance, causing him to stumble off the desk. “I’ll go to your house. We need to stop by mine first so I can check in.”
“You can grab a few things for overnight,” Yael added, letting himself be led behind Macbeth by the still-held tie out of the classroom. Seeing Macbeth’s hesitation flickering over his face, Yael quickly added, “If you want. Just to sleep.”
So they ended up at Macbeth’s house so Macbeth could announce himself as alive and throw a few things in his overnight bag–which had also been “embellished” by Yael, who drew on it with a hot pink marker once when they were both high. Macbeth said he’d have to throw it away and get a new one. He never did.
The reason they could never actually stay over together at the Roulette house if they wanted a moment’s peace was simple: Macbeth’s family was expansive in size and in their will to intrude upon others’ privacy. Even as Yael and Macbeth packed (or, Macbeth packed and Yael sat on the bed and watched) his younger sister Mae barged in, her friend from the next town over, Miriam, on her heels. Miriam went to a Catholic all-girls’ school that operated in horror of “forward-thinking” Catholic mixed gendered schools such as the one in their town, Gardens. But then, Eden was a weird town. Veturia–another lively member of the Roulette family who spent an hour in the bathroom every other early morning, thirty minutes to smoke so it rose with the shower steam and through the vent where no one could smell it, and thirty to actually shower––once compared Eden to Clearwater, Florida. She swore on her Chevrolet that Scientology has spread to the west. At some point, Miriam got tired of arguing with her.
However, she never got tired of arguing with Yael over theology. She only went to Catholic boarding school because her parents made her–she thought the whole thing was “a giant pile of horse-fucking-shit.” Yael disagreed. This annoyed her. And thus was the greatest feud of the decade, shortly ahead of Yael and Mae’s more playful feud caused largely by Yael going from calling Mae “Margaret” to pester her to taking it a step further when she protested by calling her Margaret Thatcher.
As a journalistic family, running the county paper and fond of closely watching the news, the Roulettes naturally had a burning and intense hatred for Margaret Thatcher.
“Where are you going?” Mae asked, flopping down on Macbeth’s comforter next to Yael, who busied himself with stealing her headband and putting it on his own head.
While Miriam wrestled it from him, Macbeth zipped up his bag and stood. “Yael’s. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow. Yael, give her the headband or she’ll kill you in your sleep.”
Sighing, Yael relinquished the headband.
Miriam glared down at him, handing the accessory back to Mae. “Good choice.”
Leaving the girls in relative peace, Yael and Macbeth trekked the distance to Yael’s house in a nearby cul-de-sac. Walking in school uniform in the summer was hell, but this early in spring, it was cold enough that they didn’t sweat too badly from the sun. Everything smelled clean and fresh after the long winter. Flowerboxes had been set in windowsills outside of the neighbors’ houses, full of blooming yellow, blue, and purple buds. It looked–felt–hopeful.
Last year at this time, Yael’s only friend was Naz, who was too invested in her other friendships to tag along with him constantly. They stuck together more in junior high when Yael was enrolled in the nearest city’s mental health clinic’s new program for youth with unexplainable and undiagnosed illnesses. That was where he met Naz. Naz threw a lot of fits in the waiting room, which made him dislike her, at first. She didn’t like him either on account of that time he smashed his head against the wall and gave himself a concussion–it scared her.
You can’t be too choosey with companions in a religious town when you’re part of a shrink program, though.
Yael had gone to school with Macbeth for years, but only last summer did they actually really meet through a summertime support group their parents made them attend. They didn’t talk for the rest of the summer, but when the school year started up, they recognized one another and clicked. Yael couldn’t properly explain what drew him to Macbeth. Macbeth couldn’t really explain it either.
Fate, Yael had claimed that first afternoon they tried kissing (it was winter and Yael still had his braces in so it hurt, a little), pulling away with a grin.
Maybe he wasn’t so far off.
This spring, with Macbeth at his side, he was the least and most afraid he’d ever been. Not afraid, because he had his soulmate at his side. And he was sure of it–Macbeth had to be his soulmate. He’d always believed in soulmates, waited for one, and what would a soulmate even be if it wasn’t what he and Macbeth were?
As Miriam would say: horse-fucking-shit.
And he was also afraid.
Because he could always lose Macbeth, too.
It was the kind of thing he usually tried to calm his mind from when he smoked. When they got to Yael’s house, they followed the usual routine–got a bowl of snacks and retreated to Yael’s room to do a few pages of homework together, exchange ideas for the story they were writing (it was supposed to be a more insightful rewrite of the Christian Bible, courtesy of Yael who believed they needed one in the world–or maybe just wanted to read something that affirmed his existence and identity and didn’t find it anywhere else, so he figured he’d have to do it himself)–then light up with the window cracked open to ventilate, lying on the bed with their sides touching. They changed into pajamas beforehand so they wouldn’t stink up the uniforms and fall asleep in their slacks and shoes.
These were the moments Yael enjoyed most, these days. He never cared much for his own bedroom until Macbeth. Now it was where they sequestered from the world together; from their annoyance or disappointment with humanity as a species. However applicable.
It was also when Yael could stare without Macbeth feeling the need to perform irritation or embarrassment as he usually did. With Macbeth’s amber eyes fixed up at the popcorned ceiling, eyelids relaxed, Yael could fixate on the brown speck in Macbeth’s left iris, the tiny twin moles above his left eyebrow, the uneven texture of his lips, chapped as they were because he couldn’t drink enough water to save his life. He could marvel at the curve of his eyelashes, the sharpness of his cheekbones that granted him his intimidating quality that kept most away from him, thinking him unapproachable, though it just looked pretty to Yael. There were a lot of things about Macbeth that others found weird or unpleasant that Yael just thought were pretty, in appearance or personality. He didn’t think it was strange to call someone’s personality pretty. It was the only word he could think of for it.
Caught up in the intimate setting of the moment, Yael rolled onto his side to face his companion and curled his calf over Macbeth’s, laying his hand on the soft inside of his elbow. They’d experimented once before, so he didn’t think much of it. Just wondered if Macbeth was feeling the same as he was.
Macbeth tensed, though, picking up on the signal, and glanced down at their legs, slowly withdrawing his from underneath Yael’s. “Yael–”
“It’s okay.” Only miffed by the withdrawal of contact, Yael pulled away to his side of the bed, rolling back over onto his back and folding his hands over his stomach (which was in complete knots). He picked at the skin around his thumb, chewed on the inside of his cheek, then, realizing the thought wouldn’t go away unless he voiced it, blurted, “Is it because of how I am?”
Macbeth turned his head to frown at him, brows furrowed. “How you are?”
“Well, yeah.”
“What do you mean, how you are?”
Sometimes Yael wondered if Macbeth just forgot his differences. Not that it was a bad thing–maybe it was a good thing. He was one of the only people outside of his parents and Naz who knew about it anyway. “Because, you know, I was a girl.”
Macbeth’s nose did that scrunching thing again like he was offended at the idea. “We weren’t even friends when you looked like a girl.”
“Well you could still tell when you had your hand–”
“That doesn’t matter, Yael, Jesus,” Macbeth interrupted, huffing out an audible scoff. “I didn’t care about that. I don’t care now. We were just trying something.”
Yael flipped over on his side again, staring at Macbeth’s side profile. “You’ve been dodging me when I try to talk to you about it, though.”
Helplessly, Macbeth shrugged, which looked quite awkward from a supine position. “I don’t know what to say. I just don’t see why it matters so much. I don’t see why we have to do it to be close. I like being close to you, but I don’t like that.” He took a drag, then coughed and shrugged again. “I don’t like when people talk about it. I thought I would like actually doing it, but I didn’t. It was just… me. Okay? I don’t care that you have to–sit down to take a leak, or whatever.”
He was tense, his face angled to the window away from Yael like he expected anger or rejection. Instead, Yael just laughed. “I could probably do it standing. If I tried.”
Startled, Macbeth actually giggled for what was probably the first time in his life. “What?”
“Peeing. I could try standing peeing. You could score me on accuracy.”
Macbeth rolled over to face Yael, mouth agape. “I’m not–Jesus, Yael, I’m not going to watch you pee to score you!”
Yael only laughed harder, so Macbeth laughed, too, until their stomachs hurt too badly and they wound up nose-to-nose, Yael nudging their faces together.
“That’s two times you’ve said Jesus out of turn. You’d get hit on the wrist with a ruler at school.” Yael studied his expression in response to the proximity. “Is this fine, though? Do you like this?”
Macbeth rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “Yeah, Yael. This is fine.” I like this went unsaid but hung in the air between them.
“Good. It is for me too.” Yael ducked his head further to rest his forehead against Macbeth’s collarbone, breathing deep and peacefully. “I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired.”
“I’m tired like I’m going to sleep, though.”
“You’re also always sleeping.”
“Shush. Be nice and hold me.”
For all Macbeth’s feigned grumpiness, he did.
He’s in a cafeteria, in white clothes, surrounded by more children in white clothes. Like school uniforms, but worse. Worse. He recognizes it. He knows it.
He searches for Macbeth amidst a few other brunets, but he already knows: Macbeth isn’t here. If Macbeth was here, he’d be sitting with Yael right now, taking prim bites of his food and dabbing his mouth with a napkin, complaining to Yael about music theory or singing practice but he wasn’t in music theory or singing practice. Eventually a hypothermia victim will do anything and everything on this side of irrational to try and get warm, stripping the only clothing defending them from the cold, trying to burrow in the snow and insulate. Instinct.
Yael knows these words, he knows this day, where Macbeth is absent from him.
The moment he realizes it, he jumps up from his seat, his heart seizing in his chest, breaths coming in gasps. As he darts between the tables for the exit, none of the other students look up; no orderly attempts to stop him. The kids are all frozen, immobile, their chattering mouths motionless, their eyes closed, and their heads down so they can’t see what’s happening. Only Inna, easily recognizable by his baby blue head of hair, has his chin up. Only Inna has his eyes open. And as Yael rushes for the door, those eyes follow him the whole way.
The hallway is so much longer than it’s supposed to be. Yael runs as fast as he can, thinking: he can get there fast enough, he can stop it this time. This time he can save Macbeth. This time he can stop him from doing the very thing the old Yael said would save him but it didn’t, it didn’t, and it didn’t save Nina, it didn’t save him, he’s dead, he’s already dead–
He’s dead because You Already Watched Him Die.
But he’s still running to Macbeth’s room.
And he’s still falling to his knees in the doorway, screaming.
He still finds Macbeth dead,
because You Already Watched Him Die.
And All Stories Come To An End.
He’s been here before, and he still isn’t prepared for how shocked he is when the truth of it is before his eyes.
“Yael, wake up! Hey, wake up!”
For all the time Yael slept, he did wake up, screaming.
“No, wait! Where’d he go, where’d he go, where’s–”
Hands held fast to his wrists to stop his flailing, and the size and feeling of them was recognizable enough that Yael settled, his anxious trembling stuttering in its consistency. Only when he looked up at the face above him did he feel truly calmed.
Macbeth.
Alive.
You are beautiful.
“Oh,” he croaked. “Oh. Thank God.” And he threw his arms and legs around Macbeth’s shoulders and waist, dragging him down against him so their bodies were flush together.
Macbeth didn’t struggle or tense in the embrace. He was awkward as ever with physical affection, but he tried, moving his hands from Yael’s forearms to rest against his sides hesitantly. He asked, quietly, “Was it… the drowning one, again?”
“No.” Yael’s voice was still trembling and hoarse as he spoke. “It’s this different one I’ve started getting more and more since we’ve been friends.”
“...Should I be offended?”
“No!” Yael amended quickly, “no, it’s not bad–I mean, it’s not bad about you. Well, it’s–it’s just that you’re dead.”
“Oh. How do I die?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s… bad.”
Carefully, Macbeth shifted his weight off of Yael so they were hugging on their sides instead, laying his palm flat against Yael’s upper back. “I’m not a little kid, I can take it. Anyway, it’s not real, Yael.”
For a moment, Yael debated staying silent and pretending he was already going back to sleep. But–no. Macbeth deserved to hear.
His voice a broken whisper, Yael mumbled, “I find you, and you killed yourself, and I’m too late.”
He could hear Macbeth’s surprised inhalation in the quiet of the room. It was cold. They forgot to close the window before sleeping. “Oh.”
Yael exhaled harshly. “Yeah. Oh.”
He whined when Macbeth extricated himself from the tight hug, only reassured when Macbeth propped himself up on an elbow and pulled on Yael’s arm to get him to do the same. “Look, I know you know I have… like… some issues. With… depression, or whatever. But that doesn’t mean I’d actually do that. You know?”
“I know.” Yael mimicked Macbeth’s position, though his limbs still felt weak with fear. “It just feels so real. Like… it really happened a long time ago, or something. And… come on, we met over the summer in a support group for suicidal teenagers. Can you honestly blame me for being worried?”
Macbeth’s eyebrows twitched, upset. “It’s not like–like I don’t worry for you, too.”
Despite how close they were, it… honestly hadn’t occurred to Yael. He must’ve looked surprised for a moment, because Macbeth’s frown deepened into something more distraught. “Do you seriously not know?”
“Despite your name, Macbeth, you haven’t ever seemed quite as fixated on death as me.”
“Not death,” Macbeth protested. “More like… I just worry about your wellbeing. That’s what people are supposed to do for one another when they’re close, right?” He rubbed his head between his eyes like he was contemplating something great. “...I don’t know. I think maybe we’re supposed to worry about each other. Maybe we’re supposed to tell each other that kind of stuff.”
Vaguely less miserable, Yael smiled weakly. “Why? So I can make sure you know I’m haunted by your imaginary death and make you worried too?”
Macbeth shoved his arm. “No, idiot. I just didn’t think about it before. You don’t even know I worry about you. Or that I’d miss you if you died.” He paused. Quietly, he said, “I’d miss you if you died.”
I have missed you.
Yael sniffled so snot from his crying didn’t drip out of his nose and nodded, mouth trembling. “I’d miss you if you died too. So don’t.”
Macbeth smiled, a small, barely there thing. “And you don’t, either.”
“We’ll get really old together. And escape from here, like–go somewhere really great. Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll write our book. And get rich for it.”
“Obviously.”
“And we can… hey, we can get a kid someday!”
“...Do we have to do that part?”
“And run a pot farm. Have a big house from all the book money somewhere in Europe.”
“And we’ll…”
“...and…”
Do we get an “and” this time?
Do we get an “after”?
Before
“Yael!”
“Hey, Yael, wake up!”
“What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you.”
Like emerging from cold water and drawing your first breath after struggling under the surface for so long, Yael wakes with a start, his eyes flying open to welcome an open blue sky, and—
It’s not.
It’s not.
It’s not him.
It hasn’t been him for a long time, it can’t be—
Macbeth’s golden eyes, not one golden eye but two, stare back at him. Yellow and purple flower petals have blown with the breeze into his dark hair, like a scattered version of the flower halo Yael once made for him. Somewhere within those eyes, Yael can see his own disbelief—elation—reflected, shining like the light of the brightest star in the universe.
“Oh, hey,” Macbeth breathes, tilting his head to the side as if in wonder. “You’re finally here.”
Yael’s mouth is not filled with blood.
He is not blinded by stage lights.
He is not staring into one blue eye and one gold.
He’s just Here.
Finally.
Finally.
With a wail, he launches himself at Macbeth, tackles him to the ground, and buries his face in his neck.
“I’m sorry,” he hiccups, tears streaming down his cheeks in rivers. “I’m sorry, I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry, I’ll never let you go again, never, never, I promise—“
“It’s fine. Hey.” Macbeth clings to him tightly, eyes squeezed shut. “It’s fine. It’s fine.”
How long they lie there relishing their continued existence no longer matters; they have all the time they never had.
No matter how long it takes them to embark down the path again and let go of one another’s hand, step into the great unknown of a new life, it doesn’t matter.
Somewhere, they get an “and.”
They get an “after.”
And in every “and” and “after” and “before”—
They’ll find each other.
And when the boy with the blue eye is ready,
they’ll find him, too.
NOTE: In case the timeline confused anyone: in chronological order, Macbeth. You know. Died. Yael died sometime after him in Round 6. The last scene was Macbeth welcoming him to the afterlife, and afterwards is when they’re reborn into new lives where they will be able to live peacefully, based on the modern AU world shown in the official Wiege episode!! Thank you for reading and HAPPY BIRTHDAY NAD TWIN BESTIE
