Fic: Drive the Winter
Title: Drive the Winter
Artist: Kaffiaulait
Author: hedgerose
Rating (art/fic if different): PG
Word Count: 6687
Warnings (if any): Implied character death (not Kurt or Blaine)
Betas: idoltina and penguinutopia. Thanks so much for everything, guys.
Fic Summary: Once upon a time there were two boys who lived in a small cabin in the woods. One of them was flesh and one of them was wood, but they lived together all the same.
Link to Art: Here, at kaffiaulait's tumblr!
Art Thumbnail:
Author's Note: How this story works: you can read either Part One first! One is from Kurt's PoV and the other is from Blaine's. At some point, you should probably read them both. You can also read this straight through, as it is all in one entry.
Also, please go and check out the full-sized image that inspired this piece over at kaffiaulait's tumblr! It's really amazing.
Part One: Blaine
Once upon a time there was a man who lived by himself in the middle of the woods. He didn't have as many friends as he wished, nor was he as lonely as he feared.
The man made puppets. Mostly ones for children, simple toys of wood, string, and wire, but he also made more complicated ones for the village storyteller, lavishly painted marionettes for festivals and feast-days. Change came slow to this part of the world where he lived, and sometimes the best entertainment to be had was at a barn-raising or a quilting bee, spinning gossip into stories and stories into legend.
In this village-- rather, a few miles outside it-- lives this man who makes puppets. He has some friends in the village and family miles outside it. It's nearly winter and the first snow has fallen just a week before.
He finds the puppet in the snow.
If this were a proper tale, the puppet would come to life as he worked. The wood would turn warm under his hands, change to skin and blood and bones, until he was fixing a real boy, not a construct of wood and string and paint. The man would feel wonder, joy at the transformation. This isn't quite that tale; magic requires a price. Instead, he sands and smooths the wooden pieces of the puppet with his hands until they are like satin under his fingers.
Still, the boy inside the puppet is blind and mute, so he waits. He's been patient for years; he can wait a little longer.
* * *
Blaine finds him in the snow.
From across the road, the puppet looks like a jumble of wooden parts-- maybe a table leg or three, maybe a broken chair-- but Blaine sees the upturned slope of a nose and hikes through the drifts to take a better look. If nothing else, the pile of wood will make for a decent fire.
It's the middle of winter and the roads haven't been cleared in a few days; Blaine wouldn't be surprised if the plows didn't make it out to Big River for the next week at least. The drifts are just knee-high, but it's a struggle to get through them in places.
The puppet is just a mixed-up collection of parts, knees bent backwards and empty eyes staring up at the sky. It's surprisingly large, far bigger than the smaller marionettes he usually works with, but it's recognizable as a puppet nonetheless.
Blaine slings his bag off his back and down into the snow, carefully shaking ice and snow off each piece of wood that he puts in his bag. He thinks that he's found all of the important pieces of the puppet, but he won't be able to know for certain until he gets home and has a chance to lay the whole thing out.
He puts the head in last, and leaves its face watching the sky. He hitches his bag over his shoulder and trudges off home through the gathering dark.
* * *
He knocks the snow off his boots on the porch before he makes his way inside, depositing his coat in the mud-room and setting his bag carefully by the front door. It's colder than it should be inside; the fire in his stove is burned down to embers. Blaine shivers, his breath clouding white in the frigid air of the living room, and hurriedly adds more wood to the fire, using the bellows until it catches and the cabin starts to feel warm again.
There's not a lot of space to heat-- the cabin is made up of the living room, half of which is curtained off to form his work-space, as well as a tiny bedroom and an even tinier bathroom. He's just happy that he doesn't have to go outside to use the facilities, like half the families in town do. When his family had disinherited him, at least they'd done it in style, tossing him into the wilderness with just his tools and a spare change of clothes, but leaving him somewhere to live. It's not much, but it's home; he sets the kettle on top of the wood-burning stove and pulls the curtain aside to clear off his work table.
He'll need space to work on this new project, so he lights a few candles and considers his worktable, which is covered in brushes, glues, and polishes. He puts them back in their proper places for the first time in weeks. His big rush comes at the Midwinter holiday, which has long since passed, but he has no excuse to leave things as messy as he has been. He sweeps sawdust into a paper bag to keep for starting the fire on days when he really is out too late, keeps the tiny pieces of wood to use as shims or for repairs.
Blaine finishes at around the same time the kettle starts to whistle, so he pours himself tea in a heavy earthenware mug that was a Midwinter gift from Quinn, the potter in town. The herbs he'd left in the cup that morning bloom out of their curled-up shapes, the sharp scents of lemon verbena and peppermint making the cabin seem a bit warmer. He wraps his hands around the mug to warm them, taking it into his work-space and setting it on top of the cabinets that hold the tiny screws he uses sometimes.
Finally, he goes back for his bag and the disassembled pieces of the puppet he'd found that afternoon.
He lays them out carefully, starting with the head. It's heavier than it should be, and made out of some wood he can't place-- not oak or hickory or walnut, nothing he's used to working with. In the soft light of the candles, the face seems more peaceful than it had outside, and he can make out a few flakes of paint from the puppet's original coloring. The paint is pale but gleaming, and there is a faint remnant of a brighter red high on its cheeks.
Early on Blaine had made the conscious decision that he was not going to talk to his puppets, no matter how lonely he got, and that the instant he did, he was going to trade for a cat or a dog or, hell, a ferret to talk with. He spends too much time by himself out in the cabin, just the trees (and the occasional bird or rabbit) for company.
So it's something of a surprise when he finds himself saying, "I wonder what your name is," to the puppet. He shakes his head ruefully at his own folly and picks up his tea, blowing over the top of the mug to cool it slightly before taking his first sip.
It's just barely not too hot to burn his mouth; he can feel it travel all the way down his throat, warming him from the inside out. He puts the mug down and nods decisively: time to get back to work on this puppet.
He matches up sections of neck and torso, finds both feet and most of the parts of its fingers. By the time he's run out of pieces, the puppet is missing its lower left leg, half of the right shoulder joint, and half a dozen finger pieces-- nothing that Blaine can't replace, even if the new pieces may be a slightly different wood. Whoever had made the puppet originally had wanted him to be able to move and bend well, based on the way that it's put together, the number of joints it has. There's care in the way that some of the pieces were turned, others hand-carved and rubbed smooth with fine sandpaper until their natural sheen needed no paint. He wonders how, if the puppet was made with such loving attention, it ended up discarded in the snow.
Now, the wood is cracked and rough, dry in some places and waterlogged in others. Blaine hums absently to himself as he works, separating the pieces out by the work that needs to be done. He'll leave the wet pieces by the fire overnight, see if time in the warmth will make them shrink back down to a workable size-- right now, they're waterlogged and swollen, and he'd rather not work on them in this state.
The rest he sets to the side. He picks up the toy he'd been working on for Tina's first child, due late in the spring. It's a carved fish; he plans to stain it in the colors of the golden trout that swim in the streams around the town.
Soon, all of the remaining light from the setting sun is gone, and it's almost impossible to do work by candle-light alone. He checks his oil lamps, just to see if the level has changed magically in the last few days, and sighs-- he has enough to get him through the next few blizzards, but not enough to keep working tonight. He sets the carving down on his work table and puts his tools back in their proper slots, then clears away the wood shavings.
He'd set the head of the broken puppet on top of the set of small tools, and just for a moment, he could have sworn that it was smiling.
Blaine shrugs and rubs his hands together. You spend too much time alone, he thinks, standing up and moving back into the living room proper, pulling the curtain closed behind him. If he's lucky, last night's stew is still good enough to be warmed up for dinner.
* * *
It's a solitary life, here outside town, but Blaine rarely goes more than half a week without a visitor of some sort-- Quinn or Tina from town with gossip or actual news, a wandering musician or preacher to house for a night or three before they move on.
He's on the porch sanding one of the smaller pieces-- this one is to be a brightly-painted woman with a laughing face. He can imagine Quinn's features in the blank wood and runs his thumb briefly over the marionette's head. The sun has just begun to dip below the horizon, and it's shortly going to be too dark and cold to keep working, so Blaine puts the carving down and watches the sunset for a few minutes. Blaine hears whistling coming from the road to town, and raises a hand to the lanky man striding toward Big River.
"Evening!" the man calls back. He's got a pack on his back and shoes that look too thin for the remaining snow. Blaine waves him over to his porch.
"Headed in to Big River?" he asks.
"Surely am," the man responds, resting his hands on the railing of Blaine's porch. "Looking to settle somewhere for spring, and I've heard good things about travelers who've ended up there."
"It's another two miles into town, and you'll be more than half frozen before you make it in," Blaine says. "If you'd like, I've supper enough for both of us, and a spot by the fire, if you'd like to stay the night."
"You're too kind," the traveler says. "I'd appreciate the meal, and the fire."
"I'm Blaine," he says, offering a hand to shake.
The traveler smiles, taking Blaine's hand in a solid shake. "I'm Joe." Blaine gathers up the puppet and his tools and leads the way inside.
He has a pot of white beans and carrots on the stove, along with the last jar of the summer's canned tomatoes and the remainder of a ham hock. Blaine lifts the lid for a moment to check that they're cooking the way they should be, and helps Joe with his pack. He's got a bedroll stuffed in on top, and the pack feels heavier than it should.
"Are you a traveling bricklayer?" Blaine asks with a grin, and Joe laughs.
"No," he says, "just a man who can't travel without a few too many books." He opens the drawstring at the top of the pack and lifts out a few cloth-wrapped bundles, followed by the promised books. One of them is the Word, the book of Blaine's parents, and he bites the inside of his cheek nervously, wondering what Joe will think of the charmed carving on the lintel of the door or the marks wrought into the iron stove. Joe just smiles at him and sets the books off to the side.
"So what brings you out to Big River?" Blaine asks, watching Joe run his hands carefully of the leather covers of the books, most likely checking for damage out of habit.
"I've been out of the world for a while," Joe says. "It was time for me to take to the road again, see what's out there."
"Are you a preacher?" Blaine can't help but ask. "Not that--"
"Used to be," Joe says, interrupting him. He shrugs and looks away from Blaine. "I walked the Word when I was younger, but I've been out in the gold country too long."
Blaine hums and busies himself with dinner, fetching two of Quinn's bowls from the cabinet and wooden spoons from the jar next to the washing bowl.
He spoons the stew into the bowls and hands one to Joe; they sit on the cushions Blaine leaves on the floor for just that reason. "Thanks," Joe says, before tucking seriously into his stew.
Blaine blows on a spoonful and watches the steam, watches Joe through it. He doesn't have anything against followers of the Word, certainly, but his relationship with it is... strained. Difficult. It's hard to separate what his parents believed from what he hears from Quinn or Sam in town.
He catches sight of the pieces of the larger puppet in their basket next to the stove, at the faceless head and the small pieces that make up the puppet's fingers and hands, the wrists and elbows. He shakes himself and looks back at Joe, who has stretched out and pointed his feet at the fire, signing contentedly and setting his bowl to the side.
"There's plenty more, if you'd like," Blaine offers.
Joe smiles. "It's more than I've eaten in one meal in a week," he says, before reaching for his pack and digging out one of the cloth-wrapped bundles. He unties the wrapping to reveal a pile of paper-wrapped hard candies and tosses one to Blaine, who thanks him and sets it aside.
"So what do you do, Blaine?" Joe asks.
"I'm a woodworker," he says. "I make puppets. And spoons."
Joe picks his spoon back up and fiddles with it. "You do lovely work," he says, and Blaine ducks his head, pleased. He gets praise from Quinn and Tina and the others in town, but it's different to hear it from a stranger.
It's a quiet evening; Joe tells a few stories of his time on the road and Blaine pulls his dulcimer off the wall to play a little. At the end of the night, he leaves Joe curled up in front of the fire and goes into his own room to sleep.
* * *
In the morning, Joe gives Blaine a long string of charmed beads; Blaine sends Joe on his way into Big River with a spoon tucked into a pocket of his pack, and turns his attention back to the salvaged puppet.
The pieces he'd set by the fire to dry have shrunk back to their original size and are dry to the touch. The wood is rough and unpolished, so he starts in with sandpaper, working until there are no more splintering pieces. There are a few small pieces that have cracked, and he sets them aside for the time being, because they'll need glue to fix and he doesn't want to re-heat the glue pot today.
It's interesting to see how the puppet had been put together; there are far more moveable parts than are standard, and Blaine hasn't figured out yet how the hands and wrist move-- surely the original puppeteer can't have figured out a way to actually make them function like a real hand. He's as careful as he can be with his sanding, not wanting to take off too much of the wood-- just enough to make the puppet functional again. He wants to make it beautiful, too; honestly, this puppet must have been amazing in its prime.
He works slowly, piece by piece, comparing the fingers to each other to ensure that they all match, working the forearms one by one. It takes him a full day to finish the arms and hands; the next to complete the legs and torso. It's slow, tedious work, and Blaine finds himself wishing for some noise-- the snow outside muffles the sound of the woods, and it's too cold to expect birdsong. He sings to himself as he works-- old ballads he remembers from childhood, lullabies and a few more of the more salacious songs he'd learned from Tina on one of his rare nights in town.
He's singing one of the murder ballads (son, tell it unto me) as he works, not quite realizing it until he accidentally rubs the sandpaper too firmly against the heel of his palm, scraping away skin and drawing blood up to the surface. He hisses and reflexively presses his palm against the nearest flat surface, which happens to be the puppet's torso. He feels a tug at his hand, like something is pulling at him, and it almost feels like the puppet breathes for a moment.
Outside, there's a massive shuffling thump as the tree nearest the house rids itself of snow all at once, sending snow sliding from the eaves of Blaine's house, icicles cracking as they fall, shaken loose. He lifts his hand off the puppet's chest, cursing the weather, moment forgotten, and goes to make sure he can still get out his front door.
* * *
The next morning, he can smell the snowstorm that's sure to arrive by midday, and his larder is in desperate need of replenishing before he's stuck in his cabin for any length of time. He pulls on his thickest coat, ties his snowshoes to his pack, shoulders it and heads to town as quickly as he can, keeping an eye on the too-pale sky.
His breath clouds in the cold, puffing out in front of him as his feet break through the crust of the snow that's fallen on the road. It's not too deep right now, but Blaine is sure that as soon as the storm hits, he'll have to strap on his snowshoes to make it back home. He trades spoons for honey and cash for dried beans, a thick cured sausage, and a glass jar full of lamp oil. Quinn gives him a double-handful of lady apples and a few potatoes from her root cellar for the promise of a toy for Beth in the spring.
She asks him to stay-- he's done it before. During first few years he'd lived in Big River, when the winter had come up on them like a roaring beast, it wasn't safe for the outliers like him to stay anywhere but in town. He'd stayed on Quinn's floor, curled up in front of her fire and wrapped in more blankets than he himself owned. Ever since, Quinn had held a soft spot for him; she still thought of him as a hopeless city boy, for all that he'd lived in Big River half a decade.
But she's already got a guest. Blaine is half-surprised to see Joe folded up in a chair, sipping tea out of one of Quinn's mugs. He waves at Blaine, grinning cheerfully. He's got a smear of slip on his cheek, and Blaine raises an eyebrow at Quinn. She blushes, and Blaine laughs. "Enjoying your visitor?" he asks at the door, and she swats him on the shoulder and pushes him back out into the snow.
The wind has picked up while he's been at Quinn's, and it feels like it slides right through his coat. The snow starts once he closes the door behind himself, and it keeps coming down. Blaine shivers in the meager shelter of Quinn's front porch for as long as it takes to tie his snowshoes to his feet. He glances one last time at the sky, heavy with clouds, before he steps out onto the road.
He reaches home with no real hardship, but as soon as he's close enough to see his cabin, the snow starts coming down faster and thicker. Blaine tugs his cap further over his ears and hurries for the door, reaching it just as the wind starts to roar. He closes it quickly behind himself, shedding pack and coat before bending down to untie his snowshoes. The coals he'd left in the stove have kept the cabin warm enough that it's not freezing, so Blaine puts away the food he'd bought in town.
There's nothing to do now but wait for the storm to pass.
The wind outside picks up speed, howls through the trees, sends the last of the icicles shattering against the walls of the cabin. Blaine winces at the sound, glad for the roof over his head, sets a few small pieces of wood over the coals in the stove.
He draws back the curtain for his workshop. The large puppet is taking up most of his workspace, and his mouth twists at the unsightly brown stain he'd left on the thing's chest. He leaves it for now, taking the smaller marionette to finish in the relative comfort of the living room. This one's almost complete, just the face left to finish, and he uses his tiniest carving tools to map out the features, the hint of a smile. It's simple, and it should be enough to keep him occupied, but he keeps finding himself drawn back to the puppet in the other room.
Finally, he's done with everything but the paint, and he sets aside the small puppet.
He's left the head for last on the other puppet. He lifts it off the worktable, and just like it had on that first day, it feels heavier than a block of wood should. It's in the best shape of all of the pieces; Blaine can still see hints of how it must have been painted.
There's a crash from outside, loud enough that it can't be anything but a falling tree-- and from the sound of it, one that's close to the cabin. He sets down the head and walks to one of the cabin's tiny windows, peering outside, but he can't see anything but falling snow. It's early in the storm for trees to fall; either the wind must be stronger than normal or the tree had been weak to begin with.
He regrets for a moment not staying in town with Quinn or Tina-- town would certainly be safer than his cabin. Blaine thinks about strapping his snowshoes back on and making his way to town to stay out the storm, but he's not sure that he could even find the town with how hard the snow is coming down. If the storm lasts more than a few days-- well, he has food enough to last at least a fortnight, and water will be plentiful if he can get a door or window open.
Blaine sits back at his worktable and considers the work that needs to be done to the head. It's mostly just sanding, taking care of the rough edges and smoothing things back out. There's a crack in one of the ears that will need filling, and the entire thing needs to be painted.
He picks up the sandpaper and gets to work.
* * *
It's hours and hours before he re-emerges, shoulders and hands aching. The face is clean and smooth, soft under his fingers and the palms of his hands.
He picks it up and cradles it, thumbs over the arches of the cheeks. "I wonder what your name is," he says, looking the puppet straight in its unseeing eyes. He snags his palm against a rough spot in the back and hisses-- it's the same place he'd accidentally sanded his skin, and it's started bleeding again. He flips the head around, and sure enough, there are a few drops of his blood staining the wood red. Blaine grabs the rag off his workbench and cleans off the blood as best he can, then presses the cleanest part of the rag to his wound until it's stopped bleeding.
His joints all pop when he stands up and stretches. Most of the light is gone, and there's no way that he's going to use all of his lamp oil in the first few days of this storm. Instead, he cleans his worktable off, collecting the sawdust and putting all of his tools away. He leaves the head on the table to finish the next day, then goes into the bathroom to wash and bandage the scrape.
It's too dark to read, so Blaine sets a pot of beans next to the stove to soak, then pulls his dulcimer off the wall. He may as well get some practice in for the dances in the spring; the songs they sing in town aren't the ones he'd learned growing up, and the dulcimer isn't his first choice of instrument, but it suffices well enough. He tunes it quickly but carefully, mindful of the weather, and strums a few chords. He lays it across his lap and runs through the dance tunes, then the ballads that Tina's fond of (sweet, not all ending in death), then Quinn's favorites (far too much stabbing for his taste).
He follows that same routine for almost a week-- work on the puppet in the morning, play the dulcimer in the evenings, or read, if there's enough light. The sausage is down to an end as thick as his thumb by the end of the week, although he still has half the potatoes and a good quantity of beans and carrots, wilted though they are by this point in winter.
The storm howls on outside. The tree he'd heard the first day isn't the last one to fall; he's jarred out of his work a half-dozen times in the week by falling timber, although none of them seem quite as close to the cabin as the first had. Blaine is sure the snow must be up almost to the crest of the cabin by now-- when he opens the door all he sees is white, and he is thankful for the good construction of the building now more than ever.
On the third day he starts painting. He mixes his pigments with water until they're strong enough to be opaque, and he begins with the feet. He paints the puppet pale pink all over, head to toe. Once he's done and the paint is dry, it seems odd to leave the puppet unclothed, slouching upright against the wall, so he awkwardly maneuvers it into a spare shirt and pair of pants. He looks critically at it, because even if it wasn't his to begin with, he's the one repairing it-- then he pulls out the finer brushes and gets started on the head.
On the sixth day he lights his oil lamp when the cabin grows dark, because he's working on the face and he doesn't want to stop. He's so engrossed in his work that he doesn't notice when his the scrape on his hand re-opens and three small drops of blood fall into the paint that he's mixing for the puppet's lips. He paints it on carefully, and if it's a shade redder than he intended, then that's all right.
The last thing he does before he sleeps is paint the puppet's eyes in the same shade of pale blue that the sky had been the day he'd found the puppet. It's been nearly twenty hours since he's slept last, and Blaine bends over and rests his chin on his hands. "I wonder what your name is," he says, then he pushes himself away from the table and heads off to bed.
* * *
Behind him, the puppet's eyes blink closed and open, once.
* * *
Blaine wakes up to a quiet world.
The wind has stopped, but he can still hear the soft sounds of snow falling gently on the roof. It's still cold, but it's the kind of cold that he can imagine might be warm again someday, not the bone-deep chill of the past week.
He pushes the blankets off and away, shivering in the early morning chill, and shoves his socked feet into the slippers he'd left waiting.
The puppet is sitting upright at the tiny table in the living room, one hand left open, resting on the table like it's in the middle of a conversation. Blaine feels a prickle of nerves, a rush of fear, because that isn't the way he'd left the puppet-- he's almost sure of it. It could be, as he'd been more than half-exhausted when he'd slipped under the covers, but he's fairly positive that he'd left the puppet in the workroom.
"Hello?" Blaine says, calling softly for someone else who could have moved the puppet.
"Hi," a voice replies, the sound muffled, as if it were coming from a great distance. Blaine can't quite tell where the voice is coming from, but the cabin simply isn't that big, and the blizzard makes it quite unlikely that it's someone outside.
"Who's there?" he calls.
"It's just me," the voice says. "I've been here a while."
Blaine turns and the puppet's mouth is moving slowly, like it's rusty, like it's years since it spoke. Blaine is used to charms and superstitions; his mother had owned a twice-blessed mirror that she swore kept her younger and his father's writing desk had sigils carved into the legs for clarity.
This is something different, though. This is older, this is almost frightening in a way. This is wood, moving in ways it shouldn't be, and Blaine reaches for the closest thing he can think of that might have some protection for him. His hands find the string of beads Joe had left him, and he wraps them around his fingers. The puppet sighs, moves slowly. "I'm not going to hurt you," it says.
"What-- how did--" Blaine takes a step away from the table, distrustful. "What's your name?" he asks, because names have power, he knows this, and if he knows this thing's name, that might make a difference.
The puppet opens its mouth and says nothing. "I don't-- it's been a long time, I think," it says carefully.
Blaine waits, charmed beads at the ready (and a workshop full of tools that can create or destroy behind him; the oil lamp isn't lit but it's on the table between him and the puppet), until the puppet speaks again.
"I think my name was Kurt," he says, "and I was human, once."
Blaine's shoulders drop back and relax. This is a story he has heard before.
* * *
Of course, there's another story.
* * *
Part One: Kurt
Once upon a time there was a father and a son. The man's wife loved them both with all the strength in her heart, but she died when the boy was just eight years old. She'd left them with a sigh and a wish that they find happiness again someday.
The boy grew up queer, odd in the way that some boys do. He was never much interested in running in the woods with the other boys, in the games they played in the village square. He stayed away from the rest of the villagers; instead, he worked beside his father, who crafted wagons and simple machinery for the farms that lay outside the village. Where his father was solid and made serviceable, workable tools, the boy always turned out pieces with a bit more flash: finely-crafted chairs with carved spindles, ploughs with charm-work etched into the front.
There were whispers in town that the boy was a changeling, a fairy left in place of a normal human boy-- certainly, the boy looked nothing like his father. Some remembered his mother and her grace, her caring, her careful hands on the spinning wheel and loom, and those people shrugged and said he was his mother's son.
During the boy's eighteenth year, his father grew ill and weak. The boy called the doctor, but the doctor could do little for his father, and the boy fell into despair.
The boy tried every remedy he knew-- a weak tea of foxglove flowers, rubbing an egg over his father's body to draw the sickness out, every charm the boy had learned at his father's knee or his mother's side. But nothing worked, and the boy fell into deep despair.
"Surely," he said to his father, who was far beyond hearing him, "there must be something I can do."
The answer came to him all at once: the world exists in a balance, life for life. The boy could not imagine life without his father, how lonely and solitary it would be; the boy, for all that he could be selfish and aloof, valued his father's life above his own.
But for this kind of magic, nothing as simple as a blade or strong foxglove tea would suffice. The boy thought of his father's work, the wood and iron, chisel and lathe and sandpaper, and nodded decisively. If he was to do this properly, he needed to work with those tools. And his father wasn't dead-- he looked over to where his father was lying, and swallowed, because his father wasn't dead yet-- so maybe he wouldn't have to trade everything. Maybe he could keep a little life for himself.
The boy picked up a few pieces of wood and set to work with chisels and carving knives until he had his first piece done: a foot, simply done, without articulated toes or anything special. He pulled off his shoe and pressed his foot of flesh and bone to the one he'd carved of wood and felt a moment of give. He nodded to himself and got to work on the rest.
The legs were finished first, then the hips and the torso. Each time he finished a piece, he checked it against himself, ensuring it was the same size and shape as his own body. When he made the hands he was even more careful, putting together each segment and making sure that it moved like his own.
He saved the head for last. He spent hours staring at himself in the polished silver mirror, at his human face. The mirror was only the size of his palm, so he watched his eyebrows and his chin and his cheeks separately, trying to capture the truth of them, before he first set his tools to the block of wood he'd selected. He worked until his own face looked back at him, every detail the same.
Once the puppet was done, he laid it out in front of the fire, near where his father still lay, breathing shallowly but well. He pressed a kiss to his father's forehead, then picked up the small blade from his bedside table. He pierced the skin of his father's right palm, and used the blood welling there to paint spots on his own chest, the back of his neck, his lips. Then he did the same for his father; the boy held his wounded palm to his father's and let fall a single tear.
Then he laid himself down next to the puppet and whispered words into its wooden ear.
When he was done, the puppet was all that remained.
* * *
The boy's father woke up and cried, lamenting the loss of his son. Inside the wooden puppet, the boy cried as well, wishing that there was a way for him to tell his father that he was all right.
Time passed, as time does, and the man met a widow, no stranger to loss herself. The man courted her, and when the time came, he married her and found happiness again. He folded up the puppet and locked it safely in a trunk, leaving instructions in his will for the widow's son to take care with it, forever and always.
The boy made of wood fell asleep inside his trunk, turning his eyes and ears from the world, and many years passed before he thought of waking again. He was jolted off a merchant's cart and into the snow, which fell over him and melted; the grass grew and died, and the snow fell again.
It takes years, but someone finds him in the snow.
* * *
Of course, there's another story.
* * *
Part Two
Once upon a time there were two boys who lived in a small cabin in the woods.
One of them was flesh and one of them was wood, but they lived together all the same. They had met in the winter and stayed together until the spring, when their voices were joined by birdsong and the wooden boy took his first steps outside in many years. He'd been out of the world for too long, stuck in a wooden shell, until the other boy put him back together and opened the door.
He clattered and rattled and shook as he walked down the stairs and onto the ground, because he was made of wood and string and wire, not quite enough to hold himself up in the spring mud. The other boy came out along with him and wrapped an arm around the wooden boy's waist, making sure he didn't fall and cover himself in muck.
The wooden boy looked up at the trees, at the birds in the sky, then down at the first new flowers sprouting up through the last of the snow. He walked on shaky legs until he reached the first patch of flowers, then he knelt down in the snow and mud and leaned in to smell them as best he could. The other boy followed him out, walking a few steps behind, until he reached where the wooden boy was kneeling.
The wooden boy looked up at the human boy. "Thank you," he said, "for bringing me back."
The human boy looked down at the wooden boy with a fond expression. "Thank you for letting me."
The wooden boy closed his eyes, and a tear slowly wound its way down his face. The human boy brushed at it with his thumb. "You're crying," he said.
"I didn't know that I could," the wooden boy said. The human boy offered him his hands, and the wooden boy took them, allowing himself to be drawn up until they were looking at each other eye to eye. The human boy kissed his cheek where the tear had stopped, then his lips, gently, and the wooden boy shook for an entirely different reason.
He felt warmth inside his chest where there had been none before; he grasped the human boy's hands and did not hear the creak of wood and metal.
He kissed the human boy back, and felt his own lips move. He pulled back, gasping, and for the first time in many years, his lungs filled with air and he could move all of his parts, wiggle his toes in the mud and smell the trees and the flowers and the warmth of the human boy in front of him.
The human boy gasped in wonder, looking at the wooden boy, now made just as much of flesh and bone as he was. "You're alive," he whispered, as though saying it too loud might make it untrue.
The wooden boy blinked back the tears that were gathering in his eyes and kissed the human boy, soft and sweet. "I am," he said.
And in the end, that's how they began: two human boys, under the sun.
Artist: Kaffiaulait
Author: hedgerose
Rating (art/fic if different): PG
Word Count: 6687
Warnings (if any): Implied character death (not Kurt or Blaine)
Betas: idoltina and penguinutopia. Thanks so much for everything, guys.
Fic Summary: Once upon a time there were two boys who lived in a small cabin in the woods. One of them was flesh and one of them was wood, but they lived together all the same.
Link to Art: Here, at kaffiaulait's tumblr!
Art Thumbnail:
Author's Note: How this story works: you can read either Part One first! One is from Kurt's PoV and the other is from Blaine's. At some point, you should probably read them both. You can also read this straight through, as it is all in one entry.
Also, please go and check out the full-sized image that inspired this piece over at kaffiaulait's tumblr! It's really amazing.
Part One: Blaine
Once upon a time there was a man who lived by himself in the middle of the woods. He didn't have as many friends as he wished, nor was he as lonely as he feared.
The man made puppets. Mostly ones for children, simple toys of wood, string, and wire, but he also made more complicated ones for the village storyteller, lavishly painted marionettes for festivals and feast-days. Change came slow to this part of the world where he lived, and sometimes the best entertainment to be had was at a barn-raising or a quilting bee, spinning gossip into stories and stories into legend.
In this village-- rather, a few miles outside it-- lives this man who makes puppets. He has some friends in the village and family miles outside it. It's nearly winter and the first snow has fallen just a week before.
He finds the puppet in the snow.
If this were a proper tale, the puppet would come to life as he worked. The wood would turn warm under his hands, change to skin and blood and bones, until he was fixing a real boy, not a construct of wood and string and paint. The man would feel wonder, joy at the transformation. This isn't quite that tale; magic requires a price. Instead, he sands and smooths the wooden pieces of the puppet with his hands until they are like satin under his fingers.
Still, the boy inside the puppet is blind and mute, so he waits. He's been patient for years; he can wait a little longer.
* * *
Blaine finds him in the snow.
From across the road, the puppet looks like a jumble of wooden parts-- maybe a table leg or three, maybe a broken chair-- but Blaine sees the upturned slope of a nose and hikes through the drifts to take a better look. If nothing else, the pile of wood will make for a decent fire.
It's the middle of winter and the roads haven't been cleared in a few days; Blaine wouldn't be surprised if the plows didn't make it out to Big River for the next week at least. The drifts are just knee-high, but it's a struggle to get through them in places.
The puppet is just a mixed-up collection of parts, knees bent backwards and empty eyes staring up at the sky. It's surprisingly large, far bigger than the smaller marionettes he usually works with, but it's recognizable as a puppet nonetheless.
Blaine slings his bag off his back and down into the snow, carefully shaking ice and snow off each piece of wood that he puts in his bag. He thinks that he's found all of the important pieces of the puppet, but he won't be able to know for certain until he gets home and has a chance to lay the whole thing out.
He puts the head in last, and leaves its face watching the sky. He hitches his bag over his shoulder and trudges off home through the gathering dark.
* * *
He knocks the snow off his boots on the porch before he makes his way inside, depositing his coat in the mud-room and setting his bag carefully by the front door. It's colder than it should be inside; the fire in his stove is burned down to embers. Blaine shivers, his breath clouding white in the frigid air of the living room, and hurriedly adds more wood to the fire, using the bellows until it catches and the cabin starts to feel warm again.
There's not a lot of space to heat-- the cabin is made up of the living room, half of which is curtained off to form his work-space, as well as a tiny bedroom and an even tinier bathroom. He's just happy that he doesn't have to go outside to use the facilities, like half the families in town do. When his family had disinherited him, at least they'd done it in style, tossing him into the wilderness with just his tools and a spare change of clothes, but leaving him somewhere to live. It's not much, but it's home; he sets the kettle on top of the wood-burning stove and pulls the curtain aside to clear off his work table.
He'll need space to work on this new project, so he lights a few candles and considers his worktable, which is covered in brushes, glues, and polishes. He puts them back in their proper places for the first time in weeks. His big rush comes at the Midwinter holiday, which has long since passed, but he has no excuse to leave things as messy as he has been. He sweeps sawdust into a paper bag to keep for starting the fire on days when he really is out too late, keeps the tiny pieces of wood to use as shims or for repairs.
Blaine finishes at around the same time the kettle starts to whistle, so he pours himself tea in a heavy earthenware mug that was a Midwinter gift from Quinn, the potter in town. The herbs he'd left in the cup that morning bloom out of their curled-up shapes, the sharp scents of lemon verbena and peppermint making the cabin seem a bit warmer. He wraps his hands around the mug to warm them, taking it into his work-space and setting it on top of the cabinets that hold the tiny screws he uses sometimes.
Finally, he goes back for his bag and the disassembled pieces of the puppet he'd found that afternoon.
He lays them out carefully, starting with the head. It's heavier than it should be, and made out of some wood he can't place-- not oak or hickory or walnut, nothing he's used to working with. In the soft light of the candles, the face seems more peaceful than it had outside, and he can make out a few flakes of paint from the puppet's original coloring. The paint is pale but gleaming, and there is a faint remnant of a brighter red high on its cheeks.
Early on Blaine had made the conscious decision that he was not going to talk to his puppets, no matter how lonely he got, and that the instant he did, he was going to trade for a cat or a dog or, hell, a ferret to talk with. He spends too much time by himself out in the cabin, just the trees (and the occasional bird or rabbit) for company.
So it's something of a surprise when he finds himself saying, "I wonder what your name is," to the puppet. He shakes his head ruefully at his own folly and picks up his tea, blowing over the top of the mug to cool it slightly before taking his first sip.
It's just barely not too hot to burn his mouth; he can feel it travel all the way down his throat, warming him from the inside out. He puts the mug down and nods decisively: time to get back to work on this puppet.
He matches up sections of neck and torso, finds both feet and most of the parts of its fingers. By the time he's run out of pieces, the puppet is missing its lower left leg, half of the right shoulder joint, and half a dozen finger pieces-- nothing that Blaine can't replace, even if the new pieces may be a slightly different wood. Whoever had made the puppet originally had wanted him to be able to move and bend well, based on the way that it's put together, the number of joints it has. There's care in the way that some of the pieces were turned, others hand-carved and rubbed smooth with fine sandpaper until their natural sheen needed no paint. He wonders how, if the puppet was made with such loving attention, it ended up discarded in the snow.
Now, the wood is cracked and rough, dry in some places and waterlogged in others. Blaine hums absently to himself as he works, separating the pieces out by the work that needs to be done. He'll leave the wet pieces by the fire overnight, see if time in the warmth will make them shrink back down to a workable size-- right now, they're waterlogged and swollen, and he'd rather not work on them in this state.
The rest he sets to the side. He picks up the toy he'd been working on for Tina's first child, due late in the spring. It's a carved fish; he plans to stain it in the colors of the golden trout that swim in the streams around the town.
Soon, all of the remaining light from the setting sun is gone, and it's almost impossible to do work by candle-light alone. He checks his oil lamps, just to see if the level has changed magically in the last few days, and sighs-- he has enough to get him through the next few blizzards, but not enough to keep working tonight. He sets the carving down on his work table and puts his tools back in their proper slots, then clears away the wood shavings.
He'd set the head of the broken puppet on top of the set of small tools, and just for a moment, he could have sworn that it was smiling.
Blaine shrugs and rubs his hands together. You spend too much time alone, he thinks, standing up and moving back into the living room proper, pulling the curtain closed behind him. If he's lucky, last night's stew is still good enough to be warmed up for dinner.
* * *
It's a solitary life, here outside town, but Blaine rarely goes more than half a week without a visitor of some sort-- Quinn or Tina from town with gossip or actual news, a wandering musician or preacher to house for a night or three before they move on.
He's on the porch sanding one of the smaller pieces-- this one is to be a brightly-painted woman with a laughing face. He can imagine Quinn's features in the blank wood and runs his thumb briefly over the marionette's head. The sun has just begun to dip below the horizon, and it's shortly going to be too dark and cold to keep working, so Blaine puts the carving down and watches the sunset for a few minutes. Blaine hears whistling coming from the road to town, and raises a hand to the lanky man striding toward Big River.
"Evening!" the man calls back. He's got a pack on his back and shoes that look too thin for the remaining snow. Blaine waves him over to his porch.
"Headed in to Big River?" he asks.
"Surely am," the man responds, resting his hands on the railing of Blaine's porch. "Looking to settle somewhere for spring, and I've heard good things about travelers who've ended up there."
"It's another two miles into town, and you'll be more than half frozen before you make it in," Blaine says. "If you'd like, I've supper enough for both of us, and a spot by the fire, if you'd like to stay the night."
"You're too kind," the traveler says. "I'd appreciate the meal, and the fire."
"I'm Blaine," he says, offering a hand to shake.
The traveler smiles, taking Blaine's hand in a solid shake. "I'm Joe." Blaine gathers up the puppet and his tools and leads the way inside.
He has a pot of white beans and carrots on the stove, along with the last jar of the summer's canned tomatoes and the remainder of a ham hock. Blaine lifts the lid for a moment to check that they're cooking the way they should be, and helps Joe with his pack. He's got a bedroll stuffed in on top, and the pack feels heavier than it should.
"Are you a traveling bricklayer?" Blaine asks with a grin, and Joe laughs.
"No," he says, "just a man who can't travel without a few too many books." He opens the drawstring at the top of the pack and lifts out a few cloth-wrapped bundles, followed by the promised books. One of them is the Word, the book of Blaine's parents, and he bites the inside of his cheek nervously, wondering what Joe will think of the charmed carving on the lintel of the door or the marks wrought into the iron stove. Joe just smiles at him and sets the books off to the side.
"So what brings you out to Big River?" Blaine asks, watching Joe run his hands carefully of the leather covers of the books, most likely checking for damage out of habit.
"I've been out of the world for a while," Joe says. "It was time for me to take to the road again, see what's out there."
"Are you a preacher?" Blaine can't help but ask. "Not that--"
"Used to be," Joe says, interrupting him. He shrugs and looks away from Blaine. "I walked the Word when I was younger, but I've been out in the gold country too long."
Blaine hums and busies himself with dinner, fetching two of Quinn's bowls from the cabinet and wooden spoons from the jar next to the washing bowl.
He spoons the stew into the bowls and hands one to Joe; they sit on the cushions Blaine leaves on the floor for just that reason. "Thanks," Joe says, before tucking seriously into his stew.
Blaine blows on a spoonful and watches the steam, watches Joe through it. He doesn't have anything against followers of the Word, certainly, but his relationship with it is... strained. Difficult. It's hard to separate what his parents believed from what he hears from Quinn or Sam in town.
He catches sight of the pieces of the larger puppet in their basket next to the stove, at the faceless head and the small pieces that make up the puppet's fingers and hands, the wrists and elbows. He shakes himself and looks back at Joe, who has stretched out and pointed his feet at the fire, signing contentedly and setting his bowl to the side.
"There's plenty more, if you'd like," Blaine offers.
Joe smiles. "It's more than I've eaten in one meal in a week," he says, before reaching for his pack and digging out one of the cloth-wrapped bundles. He unties the wrapping to reveal a pile of paper-wrapped hard candies and tosses one to Blaine, who thanks him and sets it aside.
"So what do you do, Blaine?" Joe asks.
"I'm a woodworker," he says. "I make puppets. And spoons."
Joe picks his spoon back up and fiddles with it. "You do lovely work," he says, and Blaine ducks his head, pleased. He gets praise from Quinn and Tina and the others in town, but it's different to hear it from a stranger.
It's a quiet evening; Joe tells a few stories of his time on the road and Blaine pulls his dulcimer off the wall to play a little. At the end of the night, he leaves Joe curled up in front of the fire and goes into his own room to sleep.
* * *
In the morning, Joe gives Blaine a long string of charmed beads; Blaine sends Joe on his way into Big River with a spoon tucked into a pocket of his pack, and turns his attention back to the salvaged puppet.
The pieces he'd set by the fire to dry have shrunk back to their original size and are dry to the touch. The wood is rough and unpolished, so he starts in with sandpaper, working until there are no more splintering pieces. There are a few small pieces that have cracked, and he sets them aside for the time being, because they'll need glue to fix and he doesn't want to re-heat the glue pot today.
It's interesting to see how the puppet had been put together; there are far more moveable parts than are standard, and Blaine hasn't figured out yet how the hands and wrist move-- surely the original puppeteer can't have figured out a way to actually make them function like a real hand. He's as careful as he can be with his sanding, not wanting to take off too much of the wood-- just enough to make the puppet functional again. He wants to make it beautiful, too; honestly, this puppet must have been amazing in its prime.
He works slowly, piece by piece, comparing the fingers to each other to ensure that they all match, working the forearms one by one. It takes him a full day to finish the arms and hands; the next to complete the legs and torso. It's slow, tedious work, and Blaine finds himself wishing for some noise-- the snow outside muffles the sound of the woods, and it's too cold to expect birdsong. He sings to himself as he works-- old ballads he remembers from childhood, lullabies and a few more of the more salacious songs he'd learned from Tina on one of his rare nights in town.
He's singing one of the murder ballads (son, tell it unto me) as he works, not quite realizing it until he accidentally rubs the sandpaper too firmly against the heel of his palm, scraping away skin and drawing blood up to the surface. He hisses and reflexively presses his palm against the nearest flat surface, which happens to be the puppet's torso. He feels a tug at his hand, like something is pulling at him, and it almost feels like the puppet breathes for a moment.
Outside, there's a massive shuffling thump as the tree nearest the house rids itself of snow all at once, sending snow sliding from the eaves of Blaine's house, icicles cracking as they fall, shaken loose. He lifts his hand off the puppet's chest, cursing the weather, moment forgotten, and goes to make sure he can still get out his front door.
* * *
The next morning, he can smell the snowstorm that's sure to arrive by midday, and his larder is in desperate need of replenishing before he's stuck in his cabin for any length of time. He pulls on his thickest coat, ties his snowshoes to his pack, shoulders it and heads to town as quickly as he can, keeping an eye on the too-pale sky.
His breath clouds in the cold, puffing out in front of him as his feet break through the crust of the snow that's fallen on the road. It's not too deep right now, but Blaine is sure that as soon as the storm hits, he'll have to strap on his snowshoes to make it back home. He trades spoons for honey and cash for dried beans, a thick cured sausage, and a glass jar full of lamp oil. Quinn gives him a double-handful of lady apples and a few potatoes from her root cellar for the promise of a toy for Beth in the spring.
She asks him to stay-- he's done it before. During first few years he'd lived in Big River, when the winter had come up on them like a roaring beast, it wasn't safe for the outliers like him to stay anywhere but in town. He'd stayed on Quinn's floor, curled up in front of her fire and wrapped in more blankets than he himself owned. Ever since, Quinn had held a soft spot for him; she still thought of him as a hopeless city boy, for all that he'd lived in Big River half a decade.
But she's already got a guest. Blaine is half-surprised to see Joe folded up in a chair, sipping tea out of one of Quinn's mugs. He waves at Blaine, grinning cheerfully. He's got a smear of slip on his cheek, and Blaine raises an eyebrow at Quinn. She blushes, and Blaine laughs. "Enjoying your visitor?" he asks at the door, and she swats him on the shoulder and pushes him back out into the snow.
The wind has picked up while he's been at Quinn's, and it feels like it slides right through his coat. The snow starts once he closes the door behind himself, and it keeps coming down. Blaine shivers in the meager shelter of Quinn's front porch for as long as it takes to tie his snowshoes to his feet. He glances one last time at the sky, heavy with clouds, before he steps out onto the road.
He reaches home with no real hardship, but as soon as he's close enough to see his cabin, the snow starts coming down faster and thicker. Blaine tugs his cap further over his ears and hurries for the door, reaching it just as the wind starts to roar. He closes it quickly behind himself, shedding pack and coat before bending down to untie his snowshoes. The coals he'd left in the stove have kept the cabin warm enough that it's not freezing, so Blaine puts away the food he'd bought in town.
There's nothing to do now but wait for the storm to pass.
The wind outside picks up speed, howls through the trees, sends the last of the icicles shattering against the walls of the cabin. Blaine winces at the sound, glad for the roof over his head, sets a few small pieces of wood over the coals in the stove.
He draws back the curtain for his workshop. The large puppet is taking up most of his workspace, and his mouth twists at the unsightly brown stain he'd left on the thing's chest. He leaves it for now, taking the smaller marionette to finish in the relative comfort of the living room. This one's almost complete, just the face left to finish, and he uses his tiniest carving tools to map out the features, the hint of a smile. It's simple, and it should be enough to keep him occupied, but he keeps finding himself drawn back to the puppet in the other room.
Finally, he's done with everything but the paint, and he sets aside the small puppet.
He's left the head for last on the other puppet. He lifts it off the worktable, and just like it had on that first day, it feels heavier than a block of wood should. It's in the best shape of all of the pieces; Blaine can still see hints of how it must have been painted.
There's a crash from outside, loud enough that it can't be anything but a falling tree-- and from the sound of it, one that's close to the cabin. He sets down the head and walks to one of the cabin's tiny windows, peering outside, but he can't see anything but falling snow. It's early in the storm for trees to fall; either the wind must be stronger than normal or the tree had been weak to begin with.
He regrets for a moment not staying in town with Quinn or Tina-- town would certainly be safer than his cabin. Blaine thinks about strapping his snowshoes back on and making his way to town to stay out the storm, but he's not sure that he could even find the town with how hard the snow is coming down. If the storm lasts more than a few days-- well, he has food enough to last at least a fortnight, and water will be plentiful if he can get a door or window open.
Blaine sits back at his worktable and considers the work that needs to be done to the head. It's mostly just sanding, taking care of the rough edges and smoothing things back out. There's a crack in one of the ears that will need filling, and the entire thing needs to be painted.
He picks up the sandpaper and gets to work.
* * *
It's hours and hours before he re-emerges, shoulders and hands aching. The face is clean and smooth, soft under his fingers and the palms of his hands.
He picks it up and cradles it, thumbs over the arches of the cheeks. "I wonder what your name is," he says, looking the puppet straight in its unseeing eyes. He snags his palm against a rough spot in the back and hisses-- it's the same place he'd accidentally sanded his skin, and it's started bleeding again. He flips the head around, and sure enough, there are a few drops of his blood staining the wood red. Blaine grabs the rag off his workbench and cleans off the blood as best he can, then presses the cleanest part of the rag to his wound until it's stopped bleeding.
His joints all pop when he stands up and stretches. Most of the light is gone, and there's no way that he's going to use all of his lamp oil in the first few days of this storm. Instead, he cleans his worktable off, collecting the sawdust and putting all of his tools away. He leaves the head on the table to finish the next day, then goes into the bathroom to wash and bandage the scrape.
It's too dark to read, so Blaine sets a pot of beans next to the stove to soak, then pulls his dulcimer off the wall. He may as well get some practice in for the dances in the spring; the songs they sing in town aren't the ones he'd learned growing up, and the dulcimer isn't his first choice of instrument, but it suffices well enough. He tunes it quickly but carefully, mindful of the weather, and strums a few chords. He lays it across his lap and runs through the dance tunes, then the ballads that Tina's fond of (sweet, not all ending in death), then Quinn's favorites (far too much stabbing for his taste).
He follows that same routine for almost a week-- work on the puppet in the morning, play the dulcimer in the evenings, or read, if there's enough light. The sausage is down to an end as thick as his thumb by the end of the week, although he still has half the potatoes and a good quantity of beans and carrots, wilted though they are by this point in winter.
The storm howls on outside. The tree he'd heard the first day isn't the last one to fall; he's jarred out of his work a half-dozen times in the week by falling timber, although none of them seem quite as close to the cabin as the first had. Blaine is sure the snow must be up almost to the crest of the cabin by now-- when he opens the door all he sees is white, and he is thankful for the good construction of the building now more than ever.
On the third day he starts painting. He mixes his pigments with water until they're strong enough to be opaque, and he begins with the feet. He paints the puppet pale pink all over, head to toe. Once he's done and the paint is dry, it seems odd to leave the puppet unclothed, slouching upright against the wall, so he awkwardly maneuvers it into a spare shirt and pair of pants. He looks critically at it, because even if it wasn't his to begin with, he's the one repairing it-- then he pulls out the finer brushes and gets started on the head.
On the sixth day he lights his oil lamp when the cabin grows dark, because he's working on the face and he doesn't want to stop. He's so engrossed in his work that he doesn't notice when his the scrape on his hand re-opens and three small drops of blood fall into the paint that he's mixing for the puppet's lips. He paints it on carefully, and if it's a shade redder than he intended, then that's all right.
The last thing he does before he sleeps is paint the puppet's eyes in the same shade of pale blue that the sky had been the day he'd found the puppet. It's been nearly twenty hours since he's slept last, and Blaine bends over and rests his chin on his hands. "I wonder what your name is," he says, then he pushes himself away from the table and heads off to bed.
* * *
Behind him, the puppet's eyes blink closed and open, once.
* * *
Blaine wakes up to a quiet world.
The wind has stopped, but he can still hear the soft sounds of snow falling gently on the roof. It's still cold, but it's the kind of cold that he can imagine might be warm again someday, not the bone-deep chill of the past week.
He pushes the blankets off and away, shivering in the early morning chill, and shoves his socked feet into the slippers he'd left waiting.
The puppet is sitting upright at the tiny table in the living room, one hand left open, resting on the table like it's in the middle of a conversation. Blaine feels a prickle of nerves, a rush of fear, because that isn't the way he'd left the puppet-- he's almost sure of it. It could be, as he'd been more than half-exhausted when he'd slipped under the covers, but he's fairly positive that he'd left the puppet in the workroom.
"Hello?" Blaine says, calling softly for someone else who could have moved the puppet.
"Hi," a voice replies, the sound muffled, as if it were coming from a great distance. Blaine can't quite tell where the voice is coming from, but the cabin simply isn't that big, and the blizzard makes it quite unlikely that it's someone outside.
"Who's there?" he calls.
"It's just me," the voice says. "I've been here a while."
Blaine turns and the puppet's mouth is moving slowly, like it's rusty, like it's years since it spoke. Blaine is used to charms and superstitions; his mother had owned a twice-blessed mirror that she swore kept her younger and his father's writing desk had sigils carved into the legs for clarity.
This is something different, though. This is older, this is almost frightening in a way. This is wood, moving in ways it shouldn't be, and Blaine reaches for the closest thing he can think of that might have some protection for him. His hands find the string of beads Joe had left him, and he wraps them around his fingers. The puppet sighs, moves slowly. "I'm not going to hurt you," it says.
"What-- how did--" Blaine takes a step away from the table, distrustful. "What's your name?" he asks, because names have power, he knows this, and if he knows this thing's name, that might make a difference.
The puppet opens its mouth and says nothing. "I don't-- it's been a long time, I think," it says carefully.
Blaine waits, charmed beads at the ready (and a workshop full of tools that can create or destroy behind him; the oil lamp isn't lit but it's on the table between him and the puppet), until the puppet speaks again.
"I think my name was Kurt," he says, "and I was human, once."
Blaine's shoulders drop back and relax. This is a story he has heard before.
* * *
Of course, there's another story.
* * *
Part One: Kurt
Once upon a time there was a father and a son. The man's wife loved them both with all the strength in her heart, but she died when the boy was just eight years old. She'd left them with a sigh and a wish that they find happiness again someday.
The boy grew up queer, odd in the way that some boys do. He was never much interested in running in the woods with the other boys, in the games they played in the village square. He stayed away from the rest of the villagers; instead, he worked beside his father, who crafted wagons and simple machinery for the farms that lay outside the village. Where his father was solid and made serviceable, workable tools, the boy always turned out pieces with a bit more flash: finely-crafted chairs with carved spindles, ploughs with charm-work etched into the front.
There were whispers in town that the boy was a changeling, a fairy left in place of a normal human boy-- certainly, the boy looked nothing like his father. Some remembered his mother and her grace, her caring, her careful hands on the spinning wheel and loom, and those people shrugged and said he was his mother's son.
During the boy's eighteenth year, his father grew ill and weak. The boy called the doctor, but the doctor could do little for his father, and the boy fell into despair.
The boy tried every remedy he knew-- a weak tea of foxglove flowers, rubbing an egg over his father's body to draw the sickness out, every charm the boy had learned at his father's knee or his mother's side. But nothing worked, and the boy fell into deep despair.
"Surely," he said to his father, who was far beyond hearing him, "there must be something I can do."
The answer came to him all at once: the world exists in a balance, life for life. The boy could not imagine life without his father, how lonely and solitary it would be; the boy, for all that he could be selfish and aloof, valued his father's life above his own.
But for this kind of magic, nothing as simple as a blade or strong foxglove tea would suffice. The boy thought of his father's work, the wood and iron, chisel and lathe and sandpaper, and nodded decisively. If he was to do this properly, he needed to work with those tools. And his father wasn't dead-- he looked over to where his father was lying, and swallowed, because his father wasn't dead yet-- so maybe he wouldn't have to trade everything. Maybe he could keep a little life for himself.
The boy picked up a few pieces of wood and set to work with chisels and carving knives until he had his first piece done: a foot, simply done, without articulated toes or anything special. He pulled off his shoe and pressed his foot of flesh and bone to the one he'd carved of wood and felt a moment of give. He nodded to himself and got to work on the rest.
The legs were finished first, then the hips and the torso. Each time he finished a piece, he checked it against himself, ensuring it was the same size and shape as his own body. When he made the hands he was even more careful, putting together each segment and making sure that it moved like his own.
He saved the head for last. He spent hours staring at himself in the polished silver mirror, at his human face. The mirror was only the size of his palm, so he watched his eyebrows and his chin and his cheeks separately, trying to capture the truth of them, before he first set his tools to the block of wood he'd selected. He worked until his own face looked back at him, every detail the same.
Once the puppet was done, he laid it out in front of the fire, near where his father still lay, breathing shallowly but well. He pressed a kiss to his father's forehead, then picked up the small blade from his bedside table. He pierced the skin of his father's right palm, and used the blood welling there to paint spots on his own chest, the back of his neck, his lips. Then he did the same for his father; the boy held his wounded palm to his father's and let fall a single tear.
Then he laid himself down next to the puppet and whispered words into its wooden ear.
When he was done, the puppet was all that remained.
* * *
The boy's father woke up and cried, lamenting the loss of his son. Inside the wooden puppet, the boy cried as well, wishing that there was a way for him to tell his father that he was all right.
Time passed, as time does, and the man met a widow, no stranger to loss herself. The man courted her, and when the time came, he married her and found happiness again. He folded up the puppet and locked it safely in a trunk, leaving instructions in his will for the widow's son to take care with it, forever and always.
The boy made of wood fell asleep inside his trunk, turning his eyes and ears from the world, and many years passed before he thought of waking again. He was jolted off a merchant's cart and into the snow, which fell over him and melted; the grass grew and died, and the snow fell again.
It takes years, but someone finds him in the snow.
* * *
Of course, there's another story.
* * *
Part Two
Once upon a time there were two boys who lived in a small cabin in the woods.
One of them was flesh and one of them was wood, but they lived together all the same. They had met in the winter and stayed together until the spring, when their voices were joined by birdsong and the wooden boy took his first steps outside in many years. He'd been out of the world for too long, stuck in a wooden shell, until the other boy put him back together and opened the door.
He clattered and rattled and shook as he walked down the stairs and onto the ground, because he was made of wood and string and wire, not quite enough to hold himself up in the spring mud. The other boy came out along with him and wrapped an arm around the wooden boy's waist, making sure he didn't fall and cover himself in muck.
The wooden boy looked up at the trees, at the birds in the sky, then down at the first new flowers sprouting up through the last of the snow. He walked on shaky legs until he reached the first patch of flowers, then he knelt down in the snow and mud and leaned in to smell them as best he could. The other boy followed him out, walking a few steps behind, until he reached where the wooden boy was kneeling.
The wooden boy looked up at the human boy. "Thank you," he said, "for bringing me back."
The human boy looked down at the wooden boy with a fond expression. "Thank you for letting me."
The wooden boy closed his eyes, and a tear slowly wound its way down his face. The human boy brushed at it with his thumb. "You're crying," he said.
"I didn't know that I could," the wooden boy said. The human boy offered him his hands, and the wooden boy took them, allowing himself to be drawn up until they were looking at each other eye to eye. The human boy kissed his cheek where the tear had stopped, then his lips, gently, and the wooden boy shook for an entirely different reason.
He felt warmth inside his chest where there had been none before; he grasped the human boy's hands and did not hear the creak of wood and metal.
He kissed the human boy back, and felt his own lips move. He pulled back, gasping, and for the first time in many years, his lungs filled with air and he could move all of his parts, wiggle his toes in the mud and smell the trees and the flowers and the warmth of the human boy in front of him.
The human boy gasped in wonder, looking at the wooden boy, now made just as much of flesh and bone as he was. "You're alive," he whispered, as though saying it too loud might make it untrue.
The wooden boy blinked back the tears that were gathering in his eyes and kissed the human boy, soft and sweet. "I am," he said.
And in the end, that's how they began: two human boys, under the sun.