as above, so below - birrdie (2024)

Chapter Text

.--- ..

IX.

“Think six will be enough?” Scar asked, one hand on the open trunk and the other on his hip. Packed like sardines, six red gasoline canisters sat in the trunk of his car. Had circ*mstances been different, Grian would’ve wept over the newfound lightness of his wallet, but he figured it didn’t matter how many pennies he hoarded if he died by the end of the day. A true crescendo for the end of Hermit’s Hollow Halloween celebrations.

Six canisters, fourteen gallons. “It’s going to have to be,” Grian said.

Scar only hummed his agreement, sharing a brief glance with Grian before he shut the trunk with a thump. Grian stared at Scar’s brake lights. He didn’t just hope this worked, he needed it to work. He needed the same way he needed a lot of things growing up: desperately, already knowing somewhere in the back of his mind that it was hopeless to hope.

And they weren’t done yet. There was one other thing they needed.

Grian turned to face his house. Somehow it felt like weeks had gone by since last night, since the copycat tried to kill him in his own home. But it hadn’t even been twenty-four hours. He was still hurting, the pulsing of broken bones and split skin too fresh. He was still afraid. He shouldn’t have been here, he knew that, but he ran out of options like scraping a measuring cup along the bottom of an empty coffee tin.

Stepping over the threshold, he tried to approach it the way he would a crime-scene. Even in a short time Grian had seen a fair-share of grisly crime scenes, if not only by photos in his dingy apartment’s lamplight, studying patterns, testing himself on deduction. With an objective mind, what would he have found here? What would an unafraid, rational person think happened? A tear in the screen-door: signs of forced entry. Glass and splinters littered across the floor: clear signs of a struggle, an extended one. Red-turned-copper stains on the wallpaper: the victim was injured. The knife abandoned on the floor, Grian’s blood clotted along the blade—

The sight dropped him right back into it: the terror. The feeling of his own warm blood on his hands, the sound of his arm crunching on the stairs, the pain that bit through him as something bearing Scar’s features brought that knife through his palm. Glass digging in his thighs. Fear so strong it smothered him, like murky water filling his eyes, nose, and mouth.

Growing up, the thought occurred to him more than once that this house would end up killing him. It wasn’t so much a true suspicion as it was an instinctual knowledge, like a rabbit was born knowing it probably wouldn’t die of old age. Yet somehow he never, as an adult, expected such an instinct to be right . All of his childish musings and fears had been just that— childish. But if he was right about this, his fate at the hands of this house, how many other things could he have been right about?

At the very least, he was glad he didn’t have to face it alone. Scar followed him inside, scowling at the grisly sight. He carefully stepped over where the knife lay in the heart of the foyer, staining the runner carpet with streaks of copper.

“It looks like a horror movie in here,” he muttered to himself. “Have I told you yet how proud of you I am for kicking that thing’s ass last night?”

“Save it for when we actually kick its ass. Permanently,” Grian said, unable to look at Scar fully. He was too nervous. Every little anxious cell in his body bubbled up into the back of his throat and threatened to spew out if he so much as breathed the wrong way.

He approached the staircase, resting his right hand on the bannister. “Jimmy?” he called up the stairs, his voice dragging an empty, hollow echo alongside it. “Jimmy! Are you home?”

Nothing but the house’s empty stare responded to him. Not even the gentlest groan or shift, wood settling in the way old houses settle and breathe, or even the whisper of creaky floorboards. Grian wasn’t fooled by it, the stillness. He felt it, the house actively hiding something from him. An opossum playing dead. It knew he could finally see it, know that he knew the truth.

Scar ventured towards the living room door, peering anxiously into the room. For all they knew, they couldn’t be alone. For some reason it had come to attack Grian in his home, who was to say it didn’t come back to finish the job?

“Maybe he’s still at Joel’s?” Scar suggested.

If only it was something so mundane. “Maybe,” he said, which really meant, I hope so . “Why don’t you head downstairs? They’re in the basem*nt.”

“Say no more, partner! I’ll be right back.” Scar saluted him, an uneasy but nonetheless comforting smile plastered onto his face.

He admired Scar’s fearlessness, although at times he wondered if it was less bravery and more ignorance. Whatever it was, Scar flaunted it with ease and Grian could’ve used a little bit of it. All he could do was watch Scar’s back in awe as he disappeared down the basem*nt steps. After this was all over, Grian would have to ask him how he managed to pull it off. But for now he tacked it on the bulletin board of a million unanswered questions.

Grian turned back to the foyer, to the light fixture hanging overhead. The paint around the base was chipping, the paint discolored like there was some kind of leak hidden in the foundation. Grian clenched his jaw.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he whispered, only so it could hear. “I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

Grian searched the first floor, the kitchen, the living room, the half-bath in the hallway. Everything was as Grian had left it the night before. It didn’t look like even the police had come through to collect evidence. There wasn’t any tape, no evidence markers, no trace of anyone having been here at all, let alone Jimmy.

Calling Jimmy’s name, he searched the second floor. The bathroom. Grian’s bedroom, his evidence board abandoned on the floor, pushpins and red yarn and all. His bedroom, bed unmade and window cracked a few inches. Outside there was nothing but the cool, gray haze of the Fog. He couldn’t see the rocky waves, nor where the water met the land. A frigid breeze cooled the room, the salty air wafting in from the shoreline. The smell was so painfully familiar. It was the smell of coming home after a long day of school, of settling into bed at night when he finally felt he could close his eyes and feel safe. Though he never did, not for long, anyway.

His mom and dad’s room. The door was shut. It was always shut. He hesitated outside of it, a hand hovering over the knob. “Jimmy?” he called through the thick wood. And suddenly he felt he was ten years old again in a miserable game of hide-and-seek. “Jimmy, are you in there?”

He pushed open the door. Their bed was made. It had been for three months. Dust collected heavily on the bedside tables and the dresser at the foot of their bed. Untouched for months. Sterile, but not in a clean way. In a lifeless way. The same way a morgue was sterile.

A small golden glint drew his eye to the dresser. On it sat a small compact mirror in a golden case. Where a pallet of powder had once been was cleaned out, all used up, nothing but white dust left in its wake. Grian took it in his hands and turned it over. His face stared back at him in the small mirror, an impression of him close enough to the actual thing that it looked unassuming to the casual eye. But Grian had spent far too much time hunched in front of mirrors, confused why he never looked the way he should.

How much of his confusing childhood could be pinned on this— this part of himself he couldn’t understand, like an extra set of eyes he couldn’t see. Nauseated, he clicked it shut and tucked it away in his pocket.

Grian took a steadying breath. Fill your lungs up. Pour them out.

Maybe Jimmy wasn’t here. Maybe he never left Joel’s house. Selfishly, Grian wished it to be the case. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to face it.

He came back down the stairs. Scar was halfway through the foyer with the biggest of the three mirrors, precariously balancing it in his arms, knuckles white.

Grian grimaced. “Are you sure you got it?”

“Are you kidding?” Scar chuckled, but it sounded more like he was in pain than he was delighted. “I could do this in my sleep. I’m big, I’m strong.” Then, the bravado wavered. “What’d you find, detective?”

Grian shook his head, holding the screen door open for Scar to slip out into the driveway. “No sign of him. Not since we were here, at least.”

Scar panted as he struggled to readjust his hold on the mirror. The second he stepped outside his breath fogged and hovered in front of his mouth like white steam before disappearing over his head. “Can’t you call that friend of his? Joel? See if he’s still there?”

Grian nodded. “Good idea,” he said.

He let the screen door clatter shut behind Scar. He stared at the phone on the little table by the door. The black plastic hid the worst of it, but even from here Grian could see the bloody fingerprints on the receiver, smudging the rotary dial. Grian used the edge of his scarf to pick it up again and press it to his ear. A dull tone met his ears.

Grian dialed Joel’s family’s phone number and waited. Then, a click.

A sleepy voice. “Hello?”

“I know, I’m sorry, but I need to talk to Jimmy,” Grian said. “He hasn’t left yet, has he?”

Silence on the other end. Grian’s heart squeezed in his chest.

“Joel?”

“This some kinda joke?” he said. “Jimmy isn’t here.”

“Wh— But Impulse said you two were—”

Grian swallowed his own words. Impulse said he had seen Jimmy. And now Impulse was gone.

“Haven’t seen him, sorry. I’ll keep an eye out, but I’m not bloody going out on Halloween. You’re a cop, I’m sure you get it.”

He turned on his heel, dropping the receiver. Jimmy stood in the doorway, his shirt dirty, his hair a greasy mess. His face was turned away from Grian, his eyes averted to the ground in the way they always were. The way that always made Grian almost rabid with his desperation to change it, to undo what's been done and protect his brother the way he had failed to do.

It has to be you, don’t you understand? You’re the older brother. It’s your job to protect him.

“Jimmy,” he whispered, but he didn’t move.

Grian’s feet wouldn’t allow him to move, that primal switch somewhere in the back of his mind that screamed DANGER ! The beeping now was constant, the ache returning to his forehead in seconds of looking at his little brother. As if every nerve in his body was telling him to turn and run. He’d felt the pain before. He’d felt it almost always at the same time, in the same place, with the same person. He tasted rot on his tongue, and with the phone receiver clutched in his colorless fingers, he finally understood.

A rotten taste filled his mouth. As if the truth crawled up the back of his throat and died there.

Jimmy looked around the foyer, his face blank and eyes dark. “What happened here?”

Grian didn’t answer. He simply stared at Jimmy, trying to will away the pain behind his eyes, trying to see the warmth of his brown eyes. The longer it took the find it, the more tight his chest grew, the more desperate he grew.

“Hey, Tim,” he said quietly, trying to sound like himself. “You’re home late.”

Jimmy didn’t respond. He simply kept assessing the foyer, a disconnected look of shock. The same emptiness that took over his face when Pearl lunged at him and wrapped her hands around his throat. The same empty stare when he called the police and told them everything. He studied the shattered glass, the leak in the ceiling, the blood on the wallpaper. “I always liked the wallpaper, didn’t I?”

“Jimmy.” Grian’s voice tightened, and he was appalled at his own desperation. It would’ve only taken him a nudge to bring him to his knees, to make him beg. How willing he was to accept any lie, so long as it ended this nightmare. “Jimmy, please. Will you look at me?”

He needed to know. Without any doubts. He needed the proof.

“What is it?” Finally, he raised his eyes. For the first time in three months, they locked onto Grian’s. And he understood. He finally saw what the house had been hiding from him. They were dark. A deep shade of black, darker than coal, darker than midnight. The darkest of anything Grian had ever seen, dark enough to fall into and never hit the bottom. Bile crept up the back of his throat.

“What’s wrong, Grian?” it asked again, in that same distorted voice.

The phone clattered to the ground. Dial tone pierced the tense, thick quiet. If Grian tried he could have reached out and touched it.

Everything made sense. In a terrible, awful, twisted way. The same sort of sick satisfaction that came with solving a grisly crime— the rush of victory, of finally having an answer, immediately chased down by the horror of what had happened. The fact that it happened at all.

Pearl was right.

Jimmy tilted his head at Grian, curious through stolen eyes.

The lashing out—

A slow, predacious step toward Grian. He’d seen this posture before. The casual grace donned only by the most practiced predators.

The constant headaches around him. Jimmy disappearing in the dead of night—

Another step in the slow crawl toward Grian. When Jimmy took one, Grian took a reflexive one back, his back hitting the bannister.

The frantic desperation with which Jimmy had torn down every mirror—

Another step.

It never was able to look Grian in the eye, because it knew . It knew that he’d know—

“That’s close enough,” Grian whispered, holding his right hand out to keep distance between them. As if that would do anything to stop it. Grian already met this strength. He’d survived it once. He wasn’t sure he’d survive it again.

It was there in front of him the entire time. And Grian had done nothing but dismiss and convince himself otherwise at every possible turn. Pearl had all but begged until her fingernails scraped raw on the cement flooring. His twin sister, who loved as fiercely as she hated, who wouldn’t hurt a hair on their little brother’s head, no matter what. She would’ve rather died.

He had excused it on what? Their mother? On the ghost that haunted her all those years they lived in this house? The words she’d say against the shell of Grian’s ear? Protect him. Protect him. It needs to be you. It can’t be him. Protect him. Protect him .

She’d known it the whole time. In a way Grian had too. He was never alone in that house. None of them were. It was the curse of being a Solidarity.

It didn’t matter if Hermit’s Hollow broke in half at the faultline and descended into a void-like pit. It didn’t matter if corpses crawled from their graves and ate Hermits in their beds like turkeys on Thanksgiving plates. Nothing mattered. Because Grian’s world was ending, and it was big enough to fit in the palm of his hands.

That night on the docks. Grian’s hysteria, Jimmy’s cruel words. Only it wasn’t Jimmy’s words. For how long has it not been him? How long had his brother been gone?

Movement over Not-Jimmy’s shoulder caught Grian’s eye. Scar stood in the doorway. He didn’t look shocked. If anything he was the calmest and most resolved as he’d ever seen him. The moment their eyes locked, he nodded and flexed his fingers around his hold on the mirror. He turned it so the reflective side turned towards the copycat’s unsuspecting back. Over its shoulder, he saw it.

It didn’t have much of a body. It looked as if it was made up of smoke, wispy edges and impossibly large lines. It flickered like smoke rising from a burning candle, swaying back and forth. He’d seen it before. The last photo taken of Captain Iskall. A black shadow hunched over his shoulder, waiting. Its false reflection couldn’t catch in the mirrors. Nor in cameras. Like an optical illusion, the only thing it could fool was the human eye.

Grian wrestled his expression into something neutral. He looked this thing back in the eye. “Tell me where my brother is,” he said. He’d only give it one more chance. All other questions didn’t matter: the ‘what are you?’ the ‘why are you doing this?’. Because in reality not a fraction of it mattered if Grian couldn’t find his little brother, if his little brother’s been dead and gone for three months and Grian had no idea. If Grian had let it happen.

But the copycat wouldn’t give him a goddamn thing. It only stared emptily back at Grian, lacking all the malice it had when it had attacked him in Scar’s skin. All that was left was intrigue, fascination. Like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to eat Grian or toy with him instead.

Grian looked to Scar over his shoulder once again. This time, he made it obvious.

The copycat’s face flickered. It turned, just as Grian hoped it would. It all happened in an instant: the thing meeting its own reflection, the high-pitched, hollowing shriek that erupted from it, like three voices stacked upon one another. It writhed and jerked in Jimmy’s body, the skin rippling the surface of a stormy morning’s sea, steam rising from the surface. The sight of itself brought the creature to its knees, losing all impressions of anything human and becoming a complete animal.

Grian wasted no time. He moved around it and raced to meet Scar outside. He rushed past and bolted straight for the car, expecting Scar at his heels. But when he reached the passenger door and turned he saw Scar still standing by the front door, the mirror angled in the doorway. The shrieking carried out of the house and poured down the hill and into the street. The type of horrific sound all of Hermit’s Hollow would stir about the next day when they gathered the courage to leave their homes and resume their gossip.

“Scar!” Grian yelled, running back to his side. “Come on, we have to go!”

“Wait!" Scar kept his ground, stood it as if he was defending it with his last breath. Like a kid with a magnifying glass over an anthill, he watched with wide-eyed fascination as the creature writhed and shrieked.

It’s skin boiled, rippling between an insubstantial mass of shadow and Jimmy’s tanned skin. Empty, black eyes and Jimmy’s too-dark ones. Finally, it had enough of its torture and scrambled backwards, towards the shelter of the house. It scrambled, slowly and with a pained sound, towards the stairs where it tucked itself away and out of view of the mirror.

It was their chance. Grian grabbed Scar’s arm. “ Scar , move it!”

Grian didn’t remember getting to the car. He didn’t remember throwing the mirror in the back seat or climbing into the passenger seat as Scar peeled out of the driveway. All he knew was the numbness of his hands, the painful buzzing all over his skin, and the feeling of his heart trapped beneath his ribcage like a cave-in as he turned in his seat to watch a familiar head peeking from the upstairs window. It watched him just as he watched it, with the knowledge that this wasn’t the last time.

XXX

Her fingers felt like metal prongs running along his scalp. She pulled unkindly through the knots from a day of rough-housing on the beach. She rocked him back and forth on the old, rickety chair, holding him tight by the arms. She muttered against his ear. She, she, she.

The chair quietly groaned beneath their shared weight as she tilted them forward, backward, then forward again. It was meant to be comforting, it was meant to make him feel safe. The soft push and pull of gentle waves, of a cradle he had no memory of. He wanted that to be true. But he didn’t feel safe. Her arms tightly held him to her chest. Painfully so. Her voice was a gentle yet discordant hum in his ear, each note of her voice stabbing fear directly through his gut.

"We have to protect him,” she said. “ You have to protect him.”

Grian’s eyes water, but he didn’t let the tears fall. Not around her, never around her. He didn’t want to upset her more than he already had. His cheek was already throbbing, bright red and hot with more than just shame. The sharp shape of her hand bit into him.

“Jimmy?” Grian asked, staring past her arms straight to the floor, at where his own legs dangled from his place in her lap. He wanted to run. He wanted to run far away.

“Exactly, baby.” She pressed a kiss to the side of his head where she’d just hit him. The skin stung under her lips. “ She wants him, but she can’t have him.”

He knew what it meant, but he also didn’t. He knew that he was scared, and that by protecting Jimmy he was agreeing to something far scarier, far beyond him to understand. “But… Mom,” he croaked.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she lied. Her heart erratically thumped against his back. It felt like a squirrel trying to find its way out of her chest. Another kiss pressed to his swelling cheek. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

“I don’t want to,” he protested louder.

She simply shook her head. “Yes you do, baby.” She cooed the words into the crown of his head, as if dressing the fear up in pretty words and tender kisses made it any less scary. The chair continued to creak and groan and beg in the way Grian was never able to.

“I know it’s scary,” she said. “But that’s okay. You two are too similar for your own good. She won’t know the difference.”

“I don’t want to go,” he cried, this time unable to withhold the tears. He wanted Pearl. He wanted her arms around her instead, crushing the fear out of him. “I want to stay.”

“It’ll be okay.” Fingers scraped the back of his neck. “Mommy’s got you.”

Grian blinked. The rumbling of a car engine replaced the rocking of an old wooden chair. A seatbelt firmly strapped across his lap held him rather than uncaring arms.

The memory slipped in unannounced, in the full clarity with which he’d never been able to see prior. Whatever this gift was (Grian was more inclined to call it a curse, a burden) it fractured under the slightest stress. Once one little thing slipped through the hairline cracks, another followed, then another and another. There was no control, nothing to be done about it, no way to clog the leak. It allowed everything in, and with it came memories that eluded Grian and returned to him in only feverish glimpses of dreams, once mistaken for feverish dreams. All of it flooded him to the brim.

Now that he knew where the hole in his head was, it was far easier to look through it. As if all of the Hermit’s Hollow Fog dissipated at once, everything crystalizing until its barest, most ugliest truthful forms glared back at him.

Grian angled his head out the window. Endless Fog, still, shielding the sun and the passage of time. But not even the Fog could guard him from the truth this time. He hardly had enough space within himself to breathe, let alone take in the reality that his brother was gone. To stare it dead in the face.

He’d known. Of course he’d known, somewhere deep and buried. Six feet deep along with his parents, where he could turn a blind eye and never dream to dig it back up.

That being said, Grian felt himself near snapping. It wasn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when. And the passenger seat of a sedan wasn’t an ideal place for a nervous breakdown.

He couldn’t sit still if he had a gun to his head. He reached to turn on the radio. Three channels were nothing but dead air, and the fourth was a deep-voiced narrator reading the same spooky stories that have run every year for the last ten years. Just when he started telling the tale of the Gap In The Wall , Grian clicked the radio off again.

He folded himself up as much as his sore body would allow, then unfolded himself seconds after. And then did it again as he wrestled his legs to rest atop the dashboard. Only to put them back down again. It was a constant push and pull of movement, anything to let out this immense pressure building up inside of him.

He rested his forehead against the window. The glass was freezing; maybe it could freeze his thoughts in time and offer him some kind of relief. Stop everything from pouring in too fast. He bent in half to rest his head against the glove department. He sat back up and opened it, rifling through Scar’s old registration and emission papers, and then closed it again.

Nothing was comfortable. Nothing came easy. It was as if his skin was suddenly three times smaller and every inch of it chafed against him. He felt no less volatile than an exposed, active wire. Bomb-diffusing was not an elective he had the privilege of taking— it was for far more qualified and mature officers— but damn, he wished he had. He needed someone to cut the red wire out of him without setting him off.

Scar reached in with a pair of cutters and a steady hand. He rested a hand on Grian’s knee without taking his eyes off the road.

Neither of them said a word. He stared at the scarred hand on his knee. He wanted to touch it. He didn’t. He simply traced each scar with his eyes, wondering how long and painful the fall must’ve been to cut him so badly.

It was supposed to be you, y’know.

Through numb lips he mumbled, “She wanted it to be me. She wanted it to take me instead.”

“ She?” Scar asked.

“My mom.”

He remembered every second of it. Her anger, her fear. The strikes she’d dole when Grian pushed back too hard, when he paraded the name of the Weeping Lady around just to mess with her. His anger had come from her, afterall. If she wanted anyone to blame, she should’ve started with herself.

And worst of all, he remembered what she wanted from him. What she demanded.

“It haunted her my whole life,” Grian said, staring outside the windshield at the passing street-lights, no more than meager starts through the fog. “It likes sons, Pearl said. And it chose Jimmy. But my mom said I could protect him. If I… If they took me instead—

“ God, I—” Grian pressed his bandaged hand to his face, a frustrated groan torn from him. “The whole time I knew and I just— How did I not notice? He was acting weird. Hell, he tore all the mirrors down and hid them from me in the basem*nt. I thought he was just messed up. That's all I thought it was. I thought it’d go away. I mean, how much sh*t can someone go through in a three-month span without knocking a few screws loose?”

“How could you have? You lost your parents that night too,” Scar challenged. If Grian’s inner voice of reason came from Scar of all people, he had some serious issues. Though he supposed he already knew that.

Grian sat back in his seat, feeling chided. “I already failed Pearl. I’ve been failing Jimmy ever since he was born. Every second I sit in this car feeling sorry for myself, I only fail them even more.”

“Okay.”

The car jostled as Scar took a hard right-turn towards Main Street. His mind was made up, his fists tight around the wheel, his chin set tight and proud.

“Wait! Hey, what are you doing?” Grian looked out the window, at the passing lights and vague outlines of homes reduced to no more than faint blurs through the Fog. “Where are we going?”

As if he wasn’t enough of a madman, Scar answered by pressing his foot heavily onto the gas, blowing through a red light. The car sputtered as the engine roared to life. Grian immediately braced himself against the door.

“Every second, right?” Scar said, pressing his foot heavily on the gas pedal, blowing through a red light. Grian immediately braced himself against the door. “Then let’s quit f*ckin’ around. If we’re doing this, we’re going to the source.”

-- --

DON’T LISTEN TO THE MOON.

(SHE’S LYING TO YOU.)

The sign hung above the vacant counter. Grian stared at it, at the way it swung from a draft that came from seemingly nowhere. At the shaky, hand-drawn line through the bottom sentence. Now that Grian knew what it meant, the sign felt less like teasing tourism pandering and more like a genuine warning. The sharp, ringing sense of DANGER the day he’d stepped foot in here for the first time, since he overheard Impulse and the Mayor talking. It had only been a few weeks, but it felt like a lifetime away.

The Double O’ Diner was mostly abandoned despite the neon OPEN sign hung above the door. Every booth and table was empty. It made sense, Grian supposed. It was Halloween; only the truly stupid dared to go outside this morning. But even then, a song faintly played somewhere deeper within the diner, behind a set of double doors that led into the kitchen.

The only other sign of life was the three of them sat at the booth closest to the jukeboxes. Grian sat where Impulse had once sat, his hand protectively curled over a file and his head pointed out the window. What would’ve happened if Grian had turned his own head, and had minded his own business that day? Would Impulse still be here? Them, a far more selfish thought: would he have still met Scar?

Scar headed this particular meeting, thumping one of the gasoline canisters on the table in front of Bdubs.

“Not even a Happy Halloween , first? Or how about a ‘good morning’?” Bdubs whirled his head around to stare accusingly at the clock above the countertop. “It’s not even noon ! I was busy jamming.”

“Impulse is missing,” Grian said, wishing so badly he could cross his arms over his chest to complete the bad-cop-bad-cop thing the two of them were going for. The sling was less than convenient and even less intimidating.

Bdubs stared between the two of them, unimpressed. “What’s all that gotta do with me? It’s Halloween, everyone goes missin’ on Halloween,” he said, a dismissive hand cutting through the air. “Why don’t ya look for him tomorrow? I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

Scar leaned forward, bracing his arms against the table with his chin jutted and shoulders raised. It was the most authoritative Grian had seen him since that morning on the docks. He was particularly good at playing the bad cop, though that shouldn’t have surprised Grian in the least. He was good at lying.

“Answer the question,” Scar said.

“You’re asking me ?!” He hid the brunt of his grin into a curled fist against his mouth. “I was runnin’ for my damn life. Didn’t think to stop and ID the damn thing. Ain’t that your guys’ job?”

“And my brother,” Grian said through grit teeth.

The prideful glimmer in Bdubs’ cheeks dimmed. “Jimmy?”

“You know how to get into the mineshaft,” Grian said without leaving any room for argument. Not even an inch, because Bdubs wouldn’t only take a mile, if given the opportunity. He’d run the whole marathon.

Bdubs barked a near hysterical laugh, tears beading in his eyes. “You guys have some kinda death wish? You’re nuts. Absolutely not .”

“It’s pretty simple actually,” Scar said. “ We’ve never been inside, so we need a guide. You have been inside. Supply and demand. In the business we call that out-sourcing! See how that works?”

“If you guys go down there with two f*cked-up arms and a limp between you, the only thing you’ll be out-sourcing is your own funeral.” Bdubs moved like a whirlwind, even though he didn’t actually go anywhere. His hands flailed, his temper raged, and when he sank back in his chair he was winded.

“So you’ll come with us!” Scar said, somehow making a potential death-march sound like a cheery field-trip. He counted on his fingers, until he held up five on each hand. “Consider that five working arms and legs total.”

“Congratulations, you can do basic math,” Bdubs deadpanned. “Is that a psychic-business thingy too?”

“Bdubs,” Grian interjected, reaching across the table with his right hand and pressing his bandaged palm against the cool table top. “ Please. I know it’s asking a lot of you, but I’m out of options. We have a plan. A good one, but the more hands we have the better. We can end this. Tonight.”

He needed this to work. Because Bdubs was right. The two of them were nothing if not underprepared, under-armed, and out of time. Maybe the outcome would end up the same either way, but Grian wouldn’t die easily until he knew he did every damn thing he could to get his brother back in one piece. To fix what he’d destroyed.

Bdubs watched him carefully, as still and silent as Bdubs could get. He still hummed with thought, still tapped his fingers, still worked his jaw back and forth as if chewing on the words he wanted to say would make them go down easier.

“Sorry, guys!” He shook his head, throwing his hands up in defeat. “I really like the whole gun-slingin’ cowboy energy you’ve both got goin’ on here. But it’s a hard pass from me.”

“Is this how you die?”

Bdubs blinked owlishly at Grian. “Hah?”

He looked pointedly to the hanging lunar crescent over the counter. “You can’t tell me you haven’t listened to her at least once,” he said. “You know how the moon says you will die, right?”

“I see what you’re doin’ and it isn’t gonna work,“ Bdubs scoffed. “Just because it won't kill me doesn’t mean it’s any less stupid .”

He climbed out of his seat, yawning and stretching his arms high above his head. “Thanks for the little Halloween excitement, but if you guys aren’t gonna buy anything, you can beat it.”

Grian didn’t know why he had partially expected Bdubs to jump at the opportunity to take an unnatural creature that lived underneath the town head-on. In theory, it seemed a very Bdubs-friendly activity. Maybe if he asked when they were still in high-school, when he was a tad more reckless and the pain of losing Etho was fresh enough to warrant vengeance.

Etho.

He perked up and shared a glance with Scar, resting his right hand on his thigh under the table. He didn’t have to say anything; he already felt the gentle prod of Scar peeking into his head, plucking the thoughts straight from them.

The corner of Scar’s mouth twitched.

“Wait!” he cried, holding one hand up to Bdubs and using the other to dramatically clutch his head. “Wait. Wait, oh! Oh, I’m— I’m getting something real big here.”

Bdubs gawked at him. Subtly pointing at Scar from his waist, he yell-whispered to Grian, “What’s his problem?”

Grian hushed him, plastering on his best face of twisted confusion and concern. Scar was much better at this part than he was, but he’d watch him do it enough times to mimic it, even if it was just a crude impersonation.

“Etho.” It was the only word Scar said, and it was the only one he needed to say. It hung in the air like a knife suspended overhead. No one dared to move out of fear of disturbing it, of knocking it down. Lest it cut each of them in two.

Bdubs froze where he stood, half in retreat and half in intrigue. His fists curled and uncurled at his sides, color blanching and refilling his knuckles each time.

“What did you just say?” he said, dangerously quiet.

“Forgive me, I don’t know if I ever properly introduced myself to you,” Scar grinned his most charming grin. How out of place it was in such a tense room. “My name is Scar.”

“He’s a psychic, remember?” Grian said. “A damn good one, too.”

Bdubs huffed, trying to sound scornful but it only managed the tiniest nudge toward weary. “You’re one of those, huh?” Then he co*cked his head at Grian. “So this is the fool you’ve been prancin’ around with? Didn’t take you for a total sucker, G.”

“You never really know what happened to him— Etho.” Scar plowed through. “And that kills you, doesn’t it? Everyone else said he ran away, but you knew something else happened to him. You saw it with your own two eyes and not a soul believed you. Not where it counted. Isn’t that right?”

Bdubs snarled. “The hell is this?”

“Don’t you want to know?” Scar taunted, pressing his two fingers harshly into his temple. “I have a talent for hunches. And I have a strong feeling that whatever it is you’re looking for, you’ll find it down there.”

Grian stared down at his slung arm, feet tapping. He wasn’t exactly proud of this, but it was Jimmy on the line. And not just Jimmy, but all the people who’d already gone missing and all those at risk of falling victim to this thing in the future. What would stop it from taking another, then another, then another? There was no other option. Bdubs would have to understand or get over it.

When Bdubs didn’t immediately protest, throw his arms up, or kick them out, Grian knew they’d gotten him. A fishhook directly in his cheek.

Grian leaned forward. Scar mirrored him. “You in?”

Bdubs’s mouth flattened into a scowl. He stood beside the table and placed a hand atop the red gasoline canister, fiddling with the cap until it was loose before screwing it tight again.

“You think this one little thing will really work?” he mumbled, the closest he’d come to admitting defeat. Bdubs was too proud to say anything that sounded remotely like I give up.

“There’s plenty where that came from!” Scar sprung to his feet, twirling his keys around his pointer finger. He snatched the gasoline canister and turned on his heel. But before he made it more than a foot away from the table, he double-backed.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. “Do the mirrors in the bathroom come off the wall?”

-.--

OPEN THE DOOR.

The right answer was, annoyingly (more often than not) the simplest one. The most obvious. It’d been right here under his nose the entire time, just like everything else had been. And just like every other time he’d been entirely too blind to see it for what it was. He didn’t see things as they were. He only saw them as he was, and what he had been a little twisted, terrified thing. The poster-child of skepticism.

Every moment, every dream, every memory. Each shred of misery. They all led him to this moment: the bite of a cold metal handle against his fingers, a familiar tombstone of a door and it’s rusting yellow sign it’s epitaph:

DO NOT ENTER VOID

According to Bdubs, the moon thought him to be cursed. You’re doomed, he had said, the tinny distorted voice over the tape a constant mockery in Grian’s brain. He hadn’t understood it then. How could he already be dead when he was still breathing? But he thought he could wrap his head around it now.

He was a deadman walking. A hand on a metal door was the spade in the dirt, six-feet deep. Because this was the same as digging his own grave. Because at the end of this, it was either going to be Grian or this creature that came out of that mineshaft alive. And Grian already knew which one he chose.

All he had to do was do it. He had to reach out and—

OPEN THE DOOR.

And so he did.

All it took was a simple push.

Rather than light flooding in, the darkness sept out. Like a black hole it reached out from the doorway and sucked them in. His boots kicked up scummy, stagnant water as he braved the first few steps into the abandoned mines. Immediately he tasted grit, dust caked in his teeth and a stench of metal coating his tongue. It was all he could taste when he breathed. Like he was buried alive and the dirt filled every part of him.

Scar and Bdubs were not far behind.

Even with the peaty moisture in the air, Grian could still smell the familiar draw of peppermint. He clung to it, a piece of driftwood lost in an open sea.

Thanks to the small lights clipped to the fronts of their shirts, also courtesy of Bdubs and his teenage misadventures, Grian could make out the long tunnel that loomed ahead of them. Graffiti and other scrawled messages painted the walls on either side of the tunnel. TURN AROUND, one screamed in red. THE CANARY CALLS, read the other, the last letter smeared with what looked uncomfortably like a handprint. Wooden beams, most cracked or decaying from the middle, supported the wet, muddy walls and roof. Over and over they ribbed and repeated into the upcoming darkness, so deep and endless that the flashlights could only do so much to penetrate it. It was like walking blind into the jaw of some slumbering beast.

Grian held a hand over his mouth to block the musty taste and said, “Here.”

Scar and Bdubs each carried a mirror. Scar’s was the large one from Grian’s basem*nt, and he set it up on one side of the tunnel. Bdubs, with a mirror they’d pried off of the Double ‘O Diner’s bathroom wall, did the same on the opposite side. Both mirrors pointed down the center of the tunnel. Grian flashed his light against the glass, as if he didn’t entirely trust the reflection to be doing its job. But if he was going to be leaving his life in the hands of inanimate glass, he’d be damn sure that it was working.

It was a failsafe. If all else failed and they had to run for it, the copycat wouldn’t be able to follow them out. It’d be so repelled by the sight of itself that it’d buy them precious seconds to get out of the door and shut it behind them.

In the dusty glass, his own reflection stared back at him, silhouetted by Scar’s light behind him. He didn’t need to see his own features to know that they’d come out wrong. They always did.

The second step of the plan: they armed themselves with the gasoline. Scar and Bdubs carried two each, leaving the rest by the door, propping it in the doorway so as to keep it from trapping them inside. Grian had ditched his sling, but the only thing he could manage to carry was his pistol. And even then his grip was clumsy and weak at best. It was still entirely roo early; his body was sore and tired to the bone. A single night wasn’t enough to recoup. But it was all he had, and Grian had lots of practice in working with what he had, in making things up by the seat of his pants.

You could argue it was how he got into this mess in the first place.

If only he’d just stuck to the goddamn ghost complaints.

“Lead the way,” Grian said as he returned his gaze to the tunnel before them.

Bdubs stepped in line with him, scowling. “Have I mentioned this is a wicked stupid plan?”

“Have you got a better one?” It would’ve been foolish to disagree with him staring into the dark maw. But time was against them and, again, desperation was one hell of a motivator.

In lieu of an answer, Bdubs just shuddered and walked ahead. Grian kept close to his right, his pistol drawn, his eyes on the rocky, uneven floors beneath them. Most of it was obscured by a thin layer of ruddy water, the moisture already starting to creep in through his boots and soak his socks. Scar kept on Bdubs’ other side, his nerves far more reserved, but no less obvious to Grian.

The weight of his pistol was a comforting one. He couldn’t be caught off-guard again. Now only if had his badge on him too. With that little piece of metal he could’ve pretended it was just another day at work: another perp, another dollar, another cup of coffee. Hell, he’d even take the paperwork, too. So long as it meant he wasn’t here, unable to feel a single one of his twenty-five years. He might as well have been ten all over again, crying as his mom whispered in his ear and rocked him back and forth in that chair.

Memories were harder to keep out down here. It was like the hole in his mind had been torn open, shattering the window that filtered the worst of things out. He felt raw, exposed. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as if he were being watched. For all he knew, he probably was. The echo of their footsteps stalked them down the tunnel.

His toe caught on something hard and nearly sent him face-first into the murky pool beneath him. He stumbled and caught himself against the narrow walls, metal groaning beneath his feet as he regained purchase. It was an old rail track with rotting wooden ties. It started here next to a large lever sticking up from the ground and extended far up ahead, disappearing into the darkness and around a bend at the end of the tunnel.

Grian looked at Bdubs. “Where did you and Etho find it?” he asked.

“There’s some kinda collapsed cave around here,” Bdubs said, rolling one of his shoulders and readjusting his grip on the gasoline canister. Every inch of him screamed FLIGHT RISK, down to the unsteady shifting of his feet and the constant, antsy fidgeting of his fingers.

“You don’t seem confident,” Grian said.

Bdubs’ bitter laugh snapped out of him. “Okay, G, if you’re gonna be all nit-picky about the directions you asked me to give, I might as well just leave right now and let your sorry asses deal with it yourselves.”

Grian turned around to raise an eyebrow at him. “And walk back through the dark tunnels alone?” he asked, fanning his arm out to the endless black behind them. “Be my guest.”

Bdubs spared a glance over his shoulder, hunched over as if he feared the darkness would leap out and bite him. He groaned. “You’re the worst.”

“I know.”

“What exactly are we looking for?” Scar asked, walking close enough to Grian’s back that he occasionally stepped on the heels of his shoes. “How do we know it’s the right thing?”

Grian wished he knew, exactly. “I’m banking on the fact that we'll know when we see it,” he said with only the capacity to hope that that would be true. Despite all the research Scar and Pix had to pick through, they didn’t have one single ‘How to Hunt Changelings’ guide between them. It would’ve been far more helpful than trying to write the books themselves for the first time.

His dad rolled up his pant legs, cuffing them once and then twice. He tapped Grian’s knee when he was done, rising to his full height and wading out into the water until it lapped at his knees.

To catch an animal, you have to go into its own territory, his father had said that evening and several other identical ones to follow.

Fishing with your bare hands wasn’t entirely synonymous with cave plundering in hopes of finding some ancient monster, but it still felt like it had to be true. Whatever this copycat was, it had to be some kind of animal, just like the three of them were, in a sense, animals. It needed to eat and heal like them. It could bleed like them; Grian had proved as much with his fine handiwork with the wrought iron. It had attacked Etho and Bdubs when they wandered into these mines. He could only assume it had something to protect here. Some kind of nest.

The deeper the dove, the less graffiti splattered the walls, the thinner the air became. Spray-painted GOD, SAVE OUR SOULS turned into nothing but the coarse edges of rock and the water that crept in from the earthy ceiling. With it came a silence most unsettling, one that not even Bdubs’ complaining could penetrate. For once, he wished for Scar’s nonsensical rambling. He didn’t care what he talked about, so long as it was loud and annoying enough to drown out the anxious pandering that sank in during silences like this. So long as it kept his thoughts from steering dangerously close into Jimmy territory.

He shook his head. Fill your lungs up, Pearl told him. He drew in a sharp breath and held it there. Now let them pour out. So he did, tilting the cup over and letting the tension and nerves spill from him in one go. The pistol steadied in his hand.

They followed the rails around the bend, and eventually the narrow tunnel opened up into a larger cavern, the roof half-collapsed with large piles of rubble and wooden debris scattered everywhere. Scar ducked his head as he followed Grian and Bdubs instead, bracing one arm against the rubble to his side, testing its stability.

“This is it,” Bdubs said, fanning his arms out on both sides and spinning in a careless circle. “This is as far as we got.

“Before you got chased out?” Scar asked.

Bdubs could only nod, the edge of his face nothing more than a dim outline from the reach of Scar’s flashlight.

Grian hadn’t known quite what he expected. Part of him hoped that the lair of a monster would’ve been everything you saw in movies, with gross, weeping eggs or sentient vines. Anything that yielded the supernatural, something extravagant and beyond belief. Something not even Grian could deny.

But the cavern was just that— a cavern. Grian felt its horror in the absences. The distinct human-shaped hole torn through the darkness, their flashlights glimpsing the things left behind: the last impressions of anything living, past or present. The rail continued on, the metal warped and rusted all over, covered in dirt and fallen rocks. To their right a large cart was turned over onto its side, spilling out massive piles of rocks and a black, chalky substance embedded into those rocks. Grian shone his light to the opposite wall where several pickaxes, both broken and in-tact, sat leaning against a sheer rock face. The metal of the picks were so old and rusted that they looked like some decoration in a museum, like they belonged on the wall of the Hollow Bed and Breakfast.

Glass crunched underneath his feet, shards leftover from smashed lanterns that sprawled across the cavern floor and suspended overhead by a few heavy links of chain. Bits of blasting wire, braided together, trailed along the edge of the wall and followed the path of the rail deeper into the half-collapsed cavern. Roots and shreds of tarp hung overhead, strung like the banners and streamers above the Hollow’s Eve parade.

It was a ghost town; a graveyard of everything that existed only to be suspended all at once. He remembered the stories. The miners disappearance, seemingly out of thin air. The searches that followed, the folklore that sprouted up: the origins of the belief that something evil lurked beneath the town’s grounds. That the overeager coal miners dug up something they shouldn’t have. Monsters or ghost stories aside, Grian never heard anything but gnarly horror stories about mines like these. They were typically abandoned for a good reason.

“Y’know, when I first moved here I didn’t expect to be illegally cave diving with a cop and a diner owner. This feels like the start of a joke,” Scar mumbled as he crept along the edge of the rockpile, keeping his head ducked and his eyes on the uneven ground beneath them. The way he stepped, stiffly and with his face pinched, betrayed the fact that he was in pain.

“Detective,” Grian corrected, a knee-jerk retort. Then, he frowned at him, trying to ignore the guilt that threatened to eat away at him. “Your leg, Scar.”

“All good, partner!” Scar smiled at him and flashed a thumbs up. Which was f*cking crazy, the fact that he was still able to conjure a smile like that when they were trapped underground, several miles into a miserable mineshaft. Despite this fact, something about it was contagious. It was a type of warmth he couldn’t help but be touched by, even in the cold, dank air. He offered Scar a wry smile in return. It was the least he could do for getting him into this mess.

An apology— a proper one— was long overdue.

“Holy sh*t! Guys, come take a look at this!” It was hard to pinpoint Bdubs’ voice where it ricocheted throughout the cramped space. But a flash of light up ahead gave away his position up ahead.

Grian and Scar followed it. Ducking beneath a low, bowed part of the cave’s ceiling, the path continued on into that direction until it met a sheer rock face that extended for what felt like miles upward into the dark. It didn’t feel possible. They couldn’t have been so far underground.

Bdubs stood facing it, the gas canisters resting at his feet. The crag looked less like the jagged surface of worn-away rock and more like strips of tree bark: thick, jagged ridges cut through the stone. And in the center of it was a deep, burrowed hole. Like it was a great big white oak drawn by Jimmy when he was a kid, a large hole in the center for the family of owls who lived inside.

Grian wasn’t anywhere near an expert in minding. Hell, he wasn’t even a novice. But the hole was smooth around the edges in a way no amount of dynamite or pickaxes could recreate. Nothing about it seemed natural, but it couldn’t have been man made either. It felt old.

“Behold!” Bdubs shouted, his voice carrying roughly through the cave. Dust snowed down from the ceiling somewhere above. “You said we’d know it when we saw it, didn’t you? Pretty sure I’m seein’ and knowin’ this bad boy.”

Grian stepped closer to it. His headache flared, each beat of his heart a hammer against his bare skull. A sharp prickle crawled all over him, nipping at every bit of exposed skin. DANGER, DANGER, DANGER, it wailed. The sensations, the aches, the shivers— all this time they’d been warning him.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he muttered.

Scar held up one of the canisters, unscrewing the cap. “It’s now or never,” he said. And he was right.

The plan was to exterminate it. They lacked some wonderful chemical compound, some Copycat Repellant, that would make their work here easy. Instead, they had gasoline. An entire wallet’s worth of it. If they struck it where it lived, hunted it in its own territory, they had twice the chance of catching it off guard. It had to come back here eventually, and when it did, they’d be ready.

They made steady work coating the place in gasoline. Bdubs focused on coating the area in front of the rock face while Scar made a trail leading back the way they came. Numbly, Grian considered that he needed to help them. There was no telling how much time they had to get it done. But he was caught, entranced by the dark hollow opening. It felt like a perfect mirror of the great white oak tree that stood in Main Street, hanging upside down with the roots raised juts of stone running into the cavern floor.

Grian’s heart pounded, a furious pace in his ears. He needed to know. He needed to see it for himself. As if tied to a string, he was pulled forward into the empty, dark hole.

One hand traced the smooth inner stone as he ventured into the darkness. He groped for any ridge, any shred of evidence of something living inside it. Something hard crunched beneath Grian’s foot. Shards of what looked like white porcelain, chipped and streaked with soot. It crunched and turned to dust under his weight.

Bones. No larger than those belonging to bats or some kind of rodent. But there were a lot of them, all left and scattered across the floor the way Jimmy used to leave food wrappers in his bedroom at the height of his teenage years. Grian held his breath and stepped over as many as he could as he crept deeper inside.

His flashlight flickered. He was plunged into darkness as it sputtered off, a terrified chill spiking through him. “No, no, no, no,” he hissed, swatting at it until the light weakly came back to life.

He turned to the side, made to leave before his light gave up on him again and he got lost inside. But something caught his eye. There was something directly in front of him. Grian tilted his head at it. It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at. This part of the rock suddenly jagged and sharp as if it’d been roughly carved away. There was something embedded into it, pale and stark against the dark stone. It was only when he, hesitantly, reached out to touch it that he realized what it was.

His fingers brushed cold, clammy skin. Freezing skin.

A hand.

It was a hand, reaching out from the stone’s surface.

Grian cried out and scrambled backwards until he collapsed against the opposite side wall. The shout was about as quiet as a bullet leaving the chamber, ricocheting throughout the nest and piercing his own ears.

“Grian?!” Scar called out to him, and with the sound came a frantic flurry of footsteps.

Flashlights blinded him as Scar and Bdubs ran in after him, their faces wide and white around the edges with panic. “Are you okay?” Scar asked.

Grian shielded his eyes and fought to regain control of his breathing. He stared at the pale protrusion from the stone. Shakily, he stepped up to it, ghosting his own fingers over there. “They’re— it’s—” Grian’s throat was clogged by dust and fear; his voice was made up of ash in taste and sound alike.

“Jesus!” Bdubs hissed, shining his light where Grian was focused. They crowded around the hand.

“They’re encased in the stone,” Scar said, voice distant and unnerved. Then, he inhaled sharply. “But the gasoline—”

“We can’t do it,” Grian said breathlessly. His plan was destroyed. He reached out and touched the hand again, the fingers thick and calloused, the skin tough and ice-cold. He searched the hand for any sign of life. And when he ghosted his touch over the index finger, he could’ve sworn he felt it: the gentle, weak throb of a pulse.

“They’re alive,” he choked out. The hand was too dense to be Jimmy’s, the fingers not nimble enough, the surface not smooth enough. Jimmy hadn’t been doing dock work long enough to earn the rough calluses that went along with it. Grian didn’t know if he found that discovery reassuring or harrowing. This living piece of a thing in the wall wasn’t Jimmy. But it also wasn’t Jimmy. Where the hell was he, then?

“We gotta get them out,” Scar said, stepping forward and splaying his hands out on the stone, searching for anything: a weak point, some secret crevice.

We’re in a coal mine,” Bdubs said, clearing his throat. “Let’s take pickaxes to the damn thing and bust them out of there.”

Between Bdubs and Scar, Grian wasn’t sure they would be enough to break through the thickness of the stone. But there was no other option. If there was the tiniest, most miniscule chance that they were alive, that there were others buried in this stone somewhere, he had to take it.

They hurried for the pickaxes, gathering them from where they were resting against the cavern wall. Scar made the first strike, hauling the rusted pick over his head before slamming it into the stone above the hand. A large chunk broke off and fell in pieces at their feet. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t fast enough. They were working on borrowed time; any second they could be discovered and they’d be nothing more than an extra embellishment studded in the wall. A deer head stuffed and mounted over a mantlepiece.

“I’ll keep watch,” Grian said, double checking his pistol was loaded before slinking out towards the entrance of the nest.

“Yeah, very convenient for you,” Bdubs snarled. “Don’t have to do all the hard labor.”

“Quit complainin’ and start digging,” Scar snapped.

He paced back and forth, eyes on the dark wreckage surrounding him. The cave was still and silent aside from the heavy breathing and hauling of Scar and Bdubs’ pickaxes against the wall. He examined the patterns carved into the rock face, each curve and edge so similar to that of a tree that Grian felt he could reach out and touch it and expect to feel the fragile coarseness of bark.

Then, his flashlight flickered. Once. Twice. A familiar pain began to creep into Grian’s temples. His heart dropped into his stomach. Every inch of his body stood on end, a rush of adrenaline turning the rest of him ice-cold as the heat flared in his chest.

Grian barely managed to pry his mouth open.

“Guys, I think something’s—”

All the lights vanished at once. They were plunged into complete darkness. Grian suddenly remembered climbing up to the roof at night, when the house felt too heavy, when he was too afraid. When he’d crane his neck up and stare at the sky for some means of escape. Only for the empty, cold, starless dome to stare back down at him. The crushing, painful feeling of being utterly alone. Not even a shred of light to keep him company in that empty house.

Metal striking the ground reverberated through the cave. Bdubs cried out, Scar cursed. Grian didn’t dare move. There was something with them. He felt it in every direction, a slow painful crawl toward him, pressing closer and closer with each second.

Soft shuffling came from somewhere behind him. Quiet, rapid breathing. Warm breath against the back of his neck.

“Grian?” Scar whispered against him.

A discordant rattling noise snuck into the cave. Something that wasn’t human nor natural. It wasn’t a draft whistling through the narrow tunnels or rocks shifting and settling. It was sharp and shrill. A wounded sound. The wail he’d heard the moment he angled a mirror at the copycat.

They’d run out of time.

“Quiet.”

Grian kept still, stayed quiet. He only hoped Bdubs and Scar had the sense to do the same. He strained his ears to listen for the sounds of the creature approaching, soft pattering against the stone walls, floors, and ceiling. The shifting of water, as if something was drifting right over it, no more than water against the surface of a pond. A faint, eerie trill tickled the back of Grian’s ear. A puff of cold air struck his nape. Not Scar. Not anymore.

He lost his nerve. He spun on his heel, fired a single bullet blindly into the dark and bound forward into the darkness.

The tense silence of the cave snapped in two. An animalistic, shrill screech split the air like a lightning strike over a still sea. Still not because it was calm, but rather because it was at the eye of the storm. The briefest glimpse of stillness before the worst of it rolled through. Grian grappled through the darkness, tripping over rails and rocks and lumps of coal as he frantically scrambled to get away from the sounds of the air shifting all around him. Grian grappled for the wall, anything to tether him in the infinite blackness. His heart thundered in his ears, adrenaline numbed his fingertips and tightened a band around his chest. It was here— he could feel it, he could feel it in the splitting of his head, as if his skull were the grounds of Hermit’s Hollow themselves, ready to swallow him whole.

Ahead of him, the shadows rippled, a break in the darkness that could only be made by an even deeper black. Grian ran his hands over the stone. If the nest was here and he was facing out, then the exit had to be on his left, right? He pushed off the wall and ran that direction, navigated by blind hope. Immediately he crashed into who could only have been either Scar or Bdubs.

“Grian?” A hand grasped his wrist through the darkness. Warm, fleshy, alive. Peppermint and relief alike flooded Grian’s nose and mouth.

“Scar,” he gasped. “Where is it?”

“I don’t know.” Scar pulled him close until they were back to back. He could feel Scar’s heart beating furiously through his chest.

“Bdubs?” Grian whispered.

Scar’s fingers tightened around Grian’s wrist. “I don’t know,” he echoed, quieter this time. More afraid.

He could only hope he was okay. He was only down here because Grian had lied to him. Grian didn’t want to believe one goddamn thing the moon said, or what Bdubs said the moon said, but this time he granted it permission to comfort him. This wasn’t how Bdubs died. He never said it wasn’t how Grian died, but he’d known that going in. Grian signed his death certificate the second he opened that door, and he was okay with that. So long as Scar, Bdubs, and the others would end up being okay.

They idly turned in circles, back-to-back, neither willing to fully let the other go. They wandered blindly through the dark. No matter how desperately Grian slapped his flashlight the bulb wouldn’t spark back to life. And no matter how long they lingered down there, his eyes wouldn’t adjust. Cold, impenetrable black encroached upon him in all directions.

It wasn’t the kind of emptiness you could hold. It wasn’t the absence of something where there once was, like a hole dug from the dirt, it only is because of what was. Rather, this cavern’s emptiness stemmed from never having existed at all. A black-hole, no dirt to be dug, only space to be consumed. As if instead of being excavated out of the ground itself, it was the earth that formed around this single, blackened space. A void, for lack of a better word.

And lost in it was the sound of being hunted. Grian’s skin had crawled with the sensation of being watched too often to not recognize it the second it returned. Ants skittering across his skin, eyes raking over every inch of him, even in the darkness. The air howled and split with low trilling as the creature surrounded them. Circled. Like vultures ready to pick at a not-yet-dead body.

A few blind steps through the dark, back to back. “We need to try to get back to the— woah!”

Grian’s heart plummeted as the ground disappeared from beneath his feet. The rocks and dirt gave way, the earth crumbling apart with a sound that rivaled thunder. He lost his grip on Scar when they fell, sliding straight into a dark nothing below him. Scar’s startled cry echoed along the shaft’s walls. Rocks scraped the expanse of Grian’s back raw and bloody, every bump sending a sharp pain shooting up his tailbone. He tumbled head-over-heel until he eventually rolled to a stop at the end of a steep slope, colliding hard against another body.

“Ow!”

Grian untangled his limbs and sat up, coughing the dust from his lungs and shaking the dirt from his hair. “Scar?” he rubbed the dirt from his eyes, clambering over his body. He grabbed onto what he could only hope were Scar’s shoulders and jostled him. “You okay?”

“I feel like a bowling ball,” he whined.

Grian huffed. “Think we’re more like the pins.”

“What the hell was that?” Scar sat up, using Grian’s arms as guidance for which way was up and which was down. He steadied himself against Grian’s shoulders and together they managed to shakily climb to their feet.

“It collapsed right out from under us,” Grian whispered, letting Scar go for a second to pat himself over for injuries. His back stung terribly and his casted arm ached. Maybe he had a few scratches to his face from stray rocks, but nothing new was broken, and he could stand on two feet.

He steadied himself with a breath, craning his neck back to try to get any kind of sense of bearings. The darkness was no less impenetrable several feet deeper. He could no longer hear the trilling and rushing of a shadow ripping through the caverns. But the silence was no more comforting. He still felt like he was being watched.

“Scar?” Grian waited. He reached blindly around him in all directions, shuffling his feet, but he felt nothing but the black suffocating him. “Scar. C’mon, now is not the time to play a prank.”

Nothing. The silence faced him, more terrifying and ugly than anything else. Panic wedged in his throat. Either the air was considerably thinner down here or Grian was one tiny nudge from completely losing his mind. Or both— both could also be true and Grian was just double screwed.

He was just here. Grian had just had hands on him. Where could he have gone?

Desperation snuck in, tasting all too similar to terror. “Scar!”

“I’m here.”

Grian whipped around to where the sound came from. A light flickered, the flashlight pinned to Scar’s chest. It was angled up toward his face, illuminating the sharp edge of his jaw and casting deep shadows under his eyes. That way, Grian couldn’t make out the exact color of his eyes. But there was no mistaking the blank expression he wore, the most disturbing mask of them all.

“Scar?” Grian hesitantly stepped toward him. His head throbbed the closer he got.

Coldness seeped into Grian’s bones. He froze, pulling his arms back in toward himself.

Scar stepped toward him, his head co*cked to the side.

Grian took a blind step back.

Grian grit his teeth. He clutched his pistol at his side, but he couldn’t raise it. He knew he couldn’t shoot it. Not when it looked like him. Grian’s nerve was only so strong, and it didn’t allow him so much as to ghost his finger over the trigger.

“I like you,” it said in Scar’s voice, a deep, hollow mockery of the real sweetness of the thing. “You’re so miserable.”

The light flickered, then reappeared only to reveal the Copycat standing inches in front of him. The false warmth of Scar’s hand touched the underside of his chin, angling his face up. A cruel smile spread across Scar’s face. “I forgot how much fun this was,” it said. “You really like him, don’t you?”

Grian couldn’t back away anymore. His back was against the wall. His heart threatened to kill him where it was stuck in his throat. “What the hell are you?” he managed through grit teeth.

The light died again, plunging him back into the cold darkness. The fingers under his chin disappeared. The air moved around him, as if the cave walls were shifting side to side like the hull of a ship. Grian stumbled to the side, a desperate scramble to escape through the dark.

“Grian?”

There was no mistaking Jimmy’s voice, even if it was nothing more than an awful, hollow replica. He knew it couldn’t be the real thing. He’d been fooled too many times. Shame on him. He wouldn’t let it fool him again. Grian scrunched his eyes shut and focused on the pain pulsating through his temples, grasped onto that deep-seated aversion coiling in his body each time the creature came close to him.

He felt its body— Jimmy’s body— all around him. Tall shoulders, long arms, reaching for him in the dark. “Grian, where’d you go?” Jimmy’s voice echoed all around him, seeping into his ears, crawling across the surface of his brain. No matter how much he tried to shut it out, it collapsed in around him, deadlier than any cave-in. “Why didn’t you come home? Why did you run away?”

“Stop,” Grian clenched his gun and lifted it blindly in the dark. “Stop it. What do you want?”

“I just want us to be a family again, Grian.” Arms wrapped around his neck and yanked him backwards, crushing him against a copy of his brother’s chest. They wrestled back until the two crashed into the cavern wall, the Copycat twisting Grian’s wrist sharply and making him drop his pistol. It disappeared into the darkness at his feet. Jimmy’s chin dug sharply into his skull, his arms tight and unrelenting around his throat. Grian grappled for its wrists, but it was far stronger than he was.

“You got away from me last time,” it said into his ear, pressing hard on his windpipe. “It’s been fun. But I think I’m done playing now.”

Pressed this close to it, Grian felt it: this dark hunger that chewed at him. It wasn’t his hunger. This thing was starving, and every miserable second Grian spent around it, that hunger was curbed more and more. As if suffering was its sole meal.

Grian made a pained noise and thrashed his body as much as he could to the side but to no avail. If he could see much of anything, his vision would’ve started to go all splotchy. Grian could feel the weightlessness feeling starting to creep into his head and rush in his ears.

Think, he begged his brain before it lost the last of its wits. Think!

It felt all too familiar. Held onto too tightly, so tightly that he’d bruise if it didn’t kill him first. The fear, so deeply rooted like it was coded in his DNA, but so childish that he was a fool for feeling it in the first place. The rush of blood in his ears by the second sounded less like the furious pace of his heart and more like the harsh rocking of an old, rickety chair.

Mom.

He let go of Jimmy’s arms, fumbling instead for his pocket. Trembling fingers clasped around something small. His mother’s compact mirror. Just as the light on Grian’s chest flickered once again he thrust the mirror over his shoulder, directly in the Copycat’s face.

An ear-piercing howl rattled through his bones, ricocheted along the precarious cave ceiling and floor. Rocky faces and dripping stones shook, dust raining down and stinging Grian’s eyes. The arms let him go, shoving him forward until he caught himself on an opposite wall. The mirror clattered from his hands and disappeared somewhere in the darkness, but he wasted no time fumbling for it. He picked himself up and sprinted down a tunnel he glimpsed through the barest flickers of light.

It chased him through a long, tortuous labyrinth of wrong-turns and barred-off vertical shafts. All the while he felt it right at his heels, the dark twisting and splitting as the monster of shadow clawed after him. Rather than something hiding inside of the darkness, the Copycat was an extension of it. He remembered the form of it in the mirror, in the photograph. A shapeless form, a black mass that reeked of hunger and misery. Where darkness was, it followed. A flow of water. Grian had no hope of outrunning it.

He slapped a hand against the flashlight to his chest and it flickered back to life. It revealed the opening of the tunnel up ahead, where it poured out into a large cylindrical cavern with huge layers of scaffolding extending the entire height of the sheer rock faces. Pockets of coal stuck out from the rock, piles of it spread everywhere along the ground. Black blast marks coated every inch of the walls, several piles and cart-fulls of coal loaded up. Frozen in time. Never to be loaded into the lifts to be brought in at the end of the day.

Grian sprinted toward the scaffolding. His feet splashed in something as thick as it was dark. No longer was it stagnant, brackish water, but rather oil. It clung to his shoes and threatened to drag him down to his knees.

He grasped the cold, rusting metal framework and hauled himself up onto the first level. Like a precarious staircase it spiraled up and up to a larger landing, the head of the cliff face near the ceiling of the cave. He threw himself up layer after layer, the entire foundation shuddering beneath his weight as the Copycat latched onto the first platform.

Grian’s heart hammered, his breath stung in his lungs. It didn’t matter how dangerous this was, it didn’t matter if he was cornering himself. All that mattered was getting away. He risked a glance over his shoulder. It was no longer Scar or Jimmy. But Impulse. Cropped hair, wide shoulders, unkind eyes. It crawled with superhuman speed and strength up the scaffolding. It gained on him quickly, Impulse’s large, thick hands reaching out for Grian’s dangling ankles. He struggled to lift himself up on the next platform. It grasped onto him, yanking him down. Grian struck the scaffolding with a gasp, the wind knocked from his chest.

Gasping, he craned his neck up. The creature had a firm hold on his leg, dragging him closer to it. The manic smile looked painful on Impulse’s usually calm face. It looked elated. It looked starved , like the freshest meal had been plopped onto its plate. Grian cried out and blindly reached above his head, grasping a piece of the scaffolding’s railing.

“Grian!” cried a voice overhead.

He could hardly see in the dark, but above him was a face. Pale and sharp through the otherwise impenetrable dark. Standing at the top ledge of the cliff was Scar, his eyes wide, his chest heaving with each desperate gasp for air. A small golden light flickered in his hand. He dangled it over the edge of the scaffolding. A small flame. A lighter.

Scar stared at him expectantly.

The mines. Oil. Coal—

What was it Pix had said about firedamp?

All it takes is a spark.

Grian’s eyes widened. The Copycat tugged on Grian’s leg with every ounce of strength it had. Grian’s hand, pained and bandaged, slipped from his grip on the scaffolding. It licked its lips and dragged him dangerously close to the edge of the scaffolding.

Grian steadied himself. Fill your lungs up. He drew in a sharp breath, slow and painful in a way that stretched his chest to its limit. Pearl might not have been there with him to tuck her in bed and clamp her hands over his ears, to scare off the monsters hidden in his closet. But she didn’t need to be.

Now pour them out. With a slow, purposeful exhale, Grian coiled his free leg up and, with every last piece of strength he had left, kicked the Copycat directly in the chin. It stunned it, the grip on Grian’s ankle releasing. It scrambled backwards, tipping over the rail and off the scaffolding entirely, collapsing in a painful heap to the cavern floor beneath.

At the same time, Scar dropped the lighter. Grian didn’t see it fall, but he didn’t need to. As soon as it struck the ground, the entire cave erupted.

Heat. It was the only real thing Grian could put his finger on as the darkness seemed to collapse in on itself and the air set alight. Heat licked at Grian’s face and hands as the flames burst across the cavern floor, catching on the stagnant oil pools and exploding through the open air and across the coal deposits. At the center of it all, the creature. It was built of shadow again, its hollow eyes staring up at Grian as it shrieked and writhed in the flames, trapped in a vat of its own creation.

The explosion had rattled the scaffolding’s foundation, the rocks at its base starting to slide and crack into pieces. Grian fumbled to his feet and clambered the rest of the way up. The metal groaned as it began to bend in and crack at the base, the first few flights collapsing inward. Scar reached over for Grian’s hand, grabbing onto him tightly as he jumped the small gap between the final landing and the cliff-face where Scar stood. The rocks nearly gave out beneath him where he landed on the closest ledge, but Scar held onto him tightly. He all but trapped Grian in a headlock to keep him from falling backward.

His skin burned. His lungs were full of smoke. Each breath seared a new kind of pain through his chest. The creature’s wails echoed so loudly through the cavern that the ceiling started to tremble, rocks and dust raining from above. Grian poked his head over to the edge to watch it writhe and disintegrate in the mass of flames.

Scar grabbed him by the bicep. “We need to go!”

He knew it was true. It wouldn’t take long for the flames to spread; there was no way of knowing how much firedamp lingered in these caves. For all he knew it was no more than a ticking time bomb right under everyone's feet. It was insane not one person feared this instead of the Weeping Lady or the Hollows.

It was difficult to tear his eyes away. He wanted to watch. Like it seemed to glean so much satisfaction from Grian’s suffering, he wanted to do the same to it. He wanted to watch it writhe and melt away into nothing but smoke and ash, the shadows torn apart by the bright, furious flames lashing at it. No, it was less wanting to watch it disappear and more of a visceral need. He needed to know it was done; he needed to know it wouldn’t return.

But he wasn’t prepared for its final stand. For the crying of several familiar voices overlapping, the constant shifting of skin as it bubbled and melted away. Impulse’s cry of pain, Scar’s twisted mouth, Jimmy crying Grian’s name, Doc’s desperate gasping for air.

Grian grit his teeth and climbed to his feet, pushing through the pain. He allowed Scar to pull him away, despite the way bile crawled up the back of his throat, despite the way all tears that threatened to burn in his eyes were evaporated by the intense heat blistering from the cavern floor.

They ran. Through tunnels and slow, half-collapsed caves, they ran until Scar found what he was looking for. A small light ahead streaming from the ceiling. Here, the walls were less stone and more dirt, water and sewage pooling at their ankles. Three small holes of light shone down on their faces. The slightest draft wafted over Grian’s skin.

A man-hole cover.

Between the two of them they managed to pry it open and shove the heavy lid to the side. Scar boosted Grian up with interlaced fingers before climbing up himself. Grian did what he could to help with one broken arm, grabbing Scar by the scruff of his shirt and pulling with every bit of strength he had left, which wasn’t much and left him a trembling, useless puddle of limbs on the damp asphalt.

Main Street loomed around them. Cold, empty, and dark, old abandoned decorations from the previous night’s festivities hung overhead. A banner that read: CELEBRATE TO SPARE YOUR SOULS hung listlessly in the wind. It was all Grian could stare at as he sprawled to the ground. The wind was cold, the air even more cruel. The night’s air bit at Grian’s exposed arms, but soothed the flash burns to his face and hands.

The sky was starless tonight. The moon conquered the night sky, her gaze hollow and focused on Grian. He stared up at it, a silent challenge. Was he meant to die down there? Or was it true that the worst of the damage had already been done? Had it all been for nothing? The questions nauseated him. His head spun.

If he closed his eyes and ignored the burning of his face, hands, and lungs he could’ve pretended he was up on the roof. Things always felt simpler up there, when Jimmy or Pearl lay beside him and he could count the stars, draw their own constellations out of them. But the body beside him didn’t belong to Jimmy or Pearl. It was Scar, through and through, sitting with his breath shuddering and heavy, one hand on Grian’s chest as if he feared he’d disappear into the moon-lit darkness.

For three months all he felt was a constant pang of pain, reminding him of what he failed to run away from and warning him of the mess he was walking straight into. He should’ve been relieved, now that it was gone. Breathing should’ve come easier, his chest unburdened with the darkness that lived beneath his feet for two decades.

But instead of relief, there was just numbness. They had shot that medicine into his hand to numb it for the stitches, and it felt like someone took a hundred of those needles to his chest, his heart, his brain. All he could hear was the ghost of crackling flame and that thing’s screech of pain as its face flickered between each one Grian knew and loved.

He draped an arm across his eyes, shoulders trembling.

A shadow draped over him. Peppermint stung his singed nostrils. “Grian?”

“Is it done?” he mumbled.

“I don’t know,” Scar answered honestly, kneeling clumsily beside him. “Do you feel any different?”

“No.” Grian pulled his arm down to look at Scar through furrowed eyebrows. “I don’t feel much of anything.”

“I think that’s okay, too.”

Green eyes flickered. Chapped lips pulled at the corners to a wry smile. There was a cut on his head, soot staining his cheeks and neck, scorch marks and grime coating his shirt. Grian mustered what energy he could to lift a pained hand to wipe at some of the dried blood clinging to Scar’s temple. Scar tilted his head into the touch and reached up to take Grian’s hand into his own.

“I’m okay,” he assured. “We made it. You did it.”

“Where’s Bdubs?” he croaked instead of giving into the incredibly irritating urge to burst into tears.

“Hopefully he’s already at the door. You led the Copycat away from us and we went back to the nest to try to get them out. He should’ve had a straight shot out,” Scar said, offering a hand to him. The two held tightly onto one another as they slowly climbed to their feet. Grian grabbed Scar’s biceps; Scar held Grian with one arm around his waist. He didn’t know who was supporting who more.

Grian held tightly onto Scar, afraid he’d be taken away the second he let go. “You didn’t go with him.”

The real question could be left unsaid: why?

Because Scar always knew how to hear what Grian couldn’t— or didn’t want to— say. His fingers twitched against Grian’s hipbone. “I had to make sure you were okay,” he said.

“What you did in there,” he wheezed. “That was genius—“ A stumbling step. “And brave—“ another step. “And stupid.”

Scar’s chuckle vibrated through Grian’s shoulder and chest. “I try.”

Together they made a broken machine of tired limbs and heavy hearts that limped down the street. Not a soul was out, not a light glared from the shop windows. It was as if the town was sleeping, as if the greater power slumbered in the wake of the battle underground. Even the Fog had thinned, nothing to obstruct their view straight ahead along Main Street.

They supported one another down the street and around the bend. Guided by only the moonlight they came upon the sidestreet where the alley dipped into the alcove that housed the door. Grian licked his lips. They tasted of metal.

“Thank you,” he said through a wince as they came down the stairs.

Scar didn’t say anything, and Grian didn’t have to look at him to tell he was smiling.

Sure enough, as they staggered down the steps into the alleyway, the first thing he saw was Bdubs. With his back to them, he obstructed most of the view, but even in the dark Grian could make out the shapes of several bodies tangled and stacked together. Legs, arms, pale cheeks.

Scar didn’t seem as shocked as Grian felt. He left Grian to hold himself up against the wall as he bounded toward Bdubs, fluttering frantically over the bodies with uncertain hands. “Are they okay?” he demanded from Bdubs, who only sat in numb silence.

Grian’s jaw fell open. “You got them?”

Bdubs turned toward him. There was a head cradled in his lap. Grimy fingers sorting through tangled, silvery hair. The man’s skin was near the same lifeless shade, his eyes peacefully shut as if he were asleep. He lay in Bdubs’ lap, arms limp over his middle. Grian knew that face. He’d seen it in glimpses in the halls of high school, tucked near Bdubs in whatever shenanigans they dove into.

Etho.

With Bdubs’ shoulders turned, Grian could finally see the faces of the others, all piled together like it was something as harmless as a slumber party than the real, ugly truth. Grian scanned each face with bated breath, more afraid than he’d felt in that tunnel, more afraid than he’d been with the Copycat latching onto his ankles. This was real. This was final. He’d already survived. He wouldn’t outlive his little brother.

A girl with a splay of freckles and ginger hair tied messily in tangled pleats. Her white-and-green cardigan and white skirt stained and torn. Gemini Tay.

Her sleeping head rested on another’s chest. A thin man with a tumble of brown hair and a beard, wearing a blue button-down. Pix?

Folded next to him, another man with a wider stature, a bright yellow fisherman's jacket pulled over broad shoulders. A wool-knitted cap coated in something that looked like oil. A flat expanse of skin where his left eye should have been. Captain Iskall.

All three missing people. They were here. They were here, all their chests rising and falling in shallow breaths. But they were breathing. They were breathing, they were alive, and Grian had found them.

That could’ve only meant that—

He saw it. A shock of blond hair. Grian’s knees nearly buckled. Scar reached for him on instinct, but he stepped out of reach. He couldn’t think to breathe, he couldn’t think to speak. It was all he could to carefully step over the bodies towards the one closest to the door, propped up against it with his chin resting against his chest.

It wasn’t until he was right there, those sooty blond locks in reach, that Grian fell to his knees.

“Jimmy?” he mumbled.

He reached out. Jimmy looked so fragile, like an old battered doll left in the basem*nt too long to collect dust. Like the old papers of his childhood workbooks where all he did was write about how great of a big brother Grian was. Where he wrote of a Grian he wished existed instead of the one he got. He looked as frail and see-through as paper, his skin pale, the shadows heavy under his eyes. But when Grian splayed a hand out over his cold chest— Jimmy’s chest, he felt the slow rise and fall. He felt the gentle throbbing of a heart.

The damn inside of him shattered. Whatever numbness encompassed him broke apart, no better than the glass bottled he used to shatter against the rocks along the shoreline. Every inch of grief, fear, and relief permeated him all at once, a flood of water and flames alike filling him to the complete brim. Grian grabbed a hold of Jimmy and tightly bundled him up in his arms. He was nothing but a heavy deadweight, and every inch of Grian screamed with pain at the force of it, but it didn’t matter. He needed to hold him.

“You idiot,” Grian muttered, smothering his face into Jimmy’s dirty hair. “You idiot , you’re so—” his voice broke into pieces. “You’re so stupid, how did you— how did you get—”

The body in his hold twitched. Grian pulled back to see Jimmy’s forehead creased, his eyes rolling beneath their lids. “Jimmy?” he whispered, tapping his cheek. “ Jimmy !”

In the dark those eyes slit open. Brown eyes. Kind, scared eyes that stared up at Grian like they couldn’t process what they were seeing. Jimmy’s brow furrowed slowly, as if relearning how to use the muscles again. “Grian,” he whisper-croaked, his voice terrible and made of gravel. He looked Grian dead in the eye, and Grian knew. “You’re here?”

“I’m here,” Grian whispered, tears immediately springing to his eyes. He cursed them; he wanted to see Jimmy— the real Jimmy— unobstructed, he wanted to stare his fill until Jimmy got embarrassed and shoved him away as he always did when he was being overbearing. He wanted Jimmy to lash out at him, to bare those teeth and flaunt the attitude Grian knew he could. He wanted every part of Jimmy, he wanted to be sure those pieces were still all there.

“Why—” Jimmy coughed and licked at his chapped lips. “Why’re you cryin’?” A shaky hand reached up to hold Grian at the shoulder— it was as much of a hug as he was going to get.

“I’m just really happy to see you,” Grian laughed, tears beading from his cheeks and peppering Jimmy’s sooty face. They carved little clean paths through the dirt coating the crests of his cheeks.

Jimmy stared up at him, confused and exhausted. But he held onto him in return as tight as his weak muscles could manage.

It was all Grian could do not to lose himself completely. He broke down in tears, clutching Jimmy like a lifeline, cradling the back of his head. “I’m so sorry,” he blubbered, pressing a kiss into the side of Jimmy’s head. “It’s okay. You’re okay. I’m here.”