April Fic: Without You
Title: Without You
For: empath_eia
By: nagaina_ryuuoh
Request: Tyki + the Noah Clan, specifically Rhode, with a little Eaze on the side.
Genres: Tried hard to be disturbing, came out mostly sweetly sappily somewhat disturbing.
Rating: Let's call it PG13, for Rhode's nasty thought process.
Disclaimers: D. Gray-man and all characters and concepts related thereto are the property of Hoshino Katsura and likely a gigantic Japanese entertainment consortium. I profiteth not.
Notes: Black Tyki wanted to make this fic really, really disturbing, however the White Tyki who resides in my head insisted that no one wants to destroy the world OR harm small children in April. And he was right. Sorry for the delay.
He’d seen the boy about before, of course - it was impossible not to, seeing how he was the only child living in the small boarding-house they were all presently calling home. Mostly he could be found playing by himself in the tiny side yard, stretched out on his belly with a ball of string and the household cats, with whom he appeared to be close personal friends, or in the herb-and-vegetable plot out back with the landlady, helping her pull weeds and bind up bunches of greenery for drying and carry her basket and tools to and fro. He seemed, to Tyki’s eye, to never smile quite as much as a boy his age ought to, or to laugh, or to simply run about for no good reason and get himself underfoot. It became his habit, therefore, to bring the boy home some small treat on occasion: a perfect apple, big as a big man’s fist and red as sin, unbruised and unblemished; a tiny ball of hard rubber small enough to fit in the palm of the boy’s hand; a tart or bun fresh and still warm from the baker’s oven. The boy accepted these presents with a gravitas all out of proportion to his age - he couldn’t have been more than four or five - and a very proper ‘thank you, sir’ and sometimes a reward in the form of a quick, bright smile that lit up his whole face.
The boy’s mother was another story entirely. Tyki saw considerably more of her, as she worked all over the little mining town at an assortment of jobs in a variety of locales. He got the feeling, from her steely-eyed glare, that she didn’t much like him and might well suspect that he possessed some dishonourable intentions towards her son. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as he was deeply engaged in pretending toward general honourability just now and was thoroughly loath to louse it up, not to mention the fact that he generally didn’t favour the charms of small children, except when it came to making them smile. He suspected that attempting to explain such gradations of his character, however, would be utterly lost on her and so attempted to avoid encountering her son where she could see, thus preventing any further agitations of her spirit. A touch of charm plied upon their landlady convinced that worthy Christian widow-woman’s tongue to loosen in regards to the woman, whose name was Gwynne, and her son, who was named Rhys, after the father entombed with a half-dozen other men at the bottom of a collapsed mine-shaft. That explained much: the woman had the look about her of someone who had been very happy once, and hadn’t been for quite some time, and now could not imagine ever being truly happy ever again. Tyki suspected she had even been pretty once: fair of hair and eyes, plump and prone to smiling; now her mouth was set in the sort of firm, hard line that never relaxed into something softer even when she looked on the son she’d borne, the flesh had melted off her bones and the colour had been clawed from her hair and the lovely youth had been beaten out of her by the hard and long and unceasing working hours and the need to stretch the meagre reward she earned for all that work to provide the food and shelter and comfort for two. She was, the landlady averred, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, far too proud to accept anyone’s charity and so she set the boy to running errands to pretend the work he did about the house and for her was worth the lesser rent the woman paid.
She’d a bad cough, the woman did - a cough that wracked her whole skinny-not-slender body and, from time to time, left her handkerchief spotted with blood. It would be the death of her one day, the landlady knew it, and then that sweet little boy of hers would be sent off to live in one of those terrible orphan’s asylums with the children of debtors and dead whores. And what would become of him then?
♥
Rhode Kamelot knew, in her heart of hearts, that it was utterly and absolutely beneath her dignity as a daughter of the House of Noah to be as tooth-grindingly jealous of a little human boy as she was. He wasn’t anyone special: one of thousands of orphans from all over Europe and America left alone in the world after accident and illness took his parents, probably sickly himself, who wouldn’t even live to be an orphan grown-up if the Earl had his way. She was, however, honest enough with herself on general principles to admit that her jealousy did not arise out of some sort of misguided desire to be normal, to be just a girl in crinolines and button-boots on some street somewhere with a Mother on one side and a Father on the other and no cares in her empty little head beyond which flavour of candy to choose from the corner store and how to charm the boy she’d marry before the end of her coming-out party.
No, Rhode could admit that the little gnawing black worm in her heart arose from the fact that that sickly little orphan boy had something that she wanted solely and utterly for her own. He belonged to Tyki, and some part of Tyki belonged to him, and that was what she simply could not stand. He had Tyki all the time and it just wasn’t fair; she only got to have him when the Earl needed him for something first and he was busy and distracted and never really just himself.
Down the hall, behind a door and between walls specially constructed just for the purposes of containing him, Tyki-who-wasn’t-Tyki howled loudly enough for his voice to overcome the dampening effects of that containment, ranted something in a language that had been dead since before Babel.
Rhode shivered uncontrollably. The Earl said that this was normal, that the second awakening was sometimes like this, painful and frenzied, and that when he woke up from it, all would be well again. She wasn’t so sure. She knew some of those words herself. For the first two days after the Arks had been separated and the Earl had returned with Tyki-who-wasn’t-Tyki slung triumphantly over his shoulder, she had gone every morning to the door he was locked up behind and talked to him through it, trying to reach him, to get some sense out of him, to comfort him, to do something, anything for him, to quiet the terrible pain he was in. In return, the wholly Black thing he had become whispered things back at her, terrible things that she hadn’t now or ever wanted to hear, things that drove her away and woke her screaming with nightmares until Lulubelle had finally come and lay down with her to keep the dreams away.
Now, on the third day, she brooded over her breakfast and what she knew she needed to do and, at the same time, desperately didn’t want to do. She couldn’t reach him. The Earl couldn’t reach him. Lulu wouldn’t try unless directly ordered to do so, and she was busy with something else anyway. The rest of the family was still buzzing around the world on errands and wouldn’t be back for days, at least, and by then it might be too late.
Against her better judgment, Rhode opened a door.
Russia was, in her opinion, an unbelievably nasty place anywhere that it wasn’t tastelessly opulent - not that she minded tasteless opulence, in fact she tended toward it when she had her druthers - and this place was particularly nasty: a dirty, dusty mining town plunked down in a dirty, dusty valley next to a series of exceedingly dirty and dusty mountains that hadn’t been properly covered in trees in ages and seemed proud of the fact that everything, including, it seemed, the people was layered in a combination of coal dust and soot from the constantly-running railway. Lero, whom she’d absconded prior to departure, squawked loudly as she put him to one of his actual functional purposes, namely opening him and making him keep the constant rain of soot from settling on her hair or clothes. At this hour, the mining camp itself was all-but empty, with every able-bodied who wasn’t a cook or a drover man down the shafts digging coal out of the mountains, so there was no one about to prevent her from walking up the camp’s sole able-bodied boy and poking him sharply in the shoulder where he sat darning socks that were more hole than fabric on a camp cot.
Surprised, the boy squeaked and pulled his mask up, but before he did, Rhode caught a glimpse of his face: fine-featured, a tiny up-turned nose, a bright smile that lit up his whole face. She wanted, unworthily, to say something nasty to quench that smile, but couldn’t quite think of anything: that smile did something to her insides that made her realize, at once, that being mean to it was just...mean. For some reason, that made her feel almost sad rather than angry. And now he was staring at her over the top of his mask as though she were witch or a goddess or a princess or something out of one of those weird Russian fairy tale. “Are you Rhys - I mean, Eaze?”
He nodded wordlessly, blue eyes the size of saucers.
“And you know a man named Tyki Mick?”
Another nod and then, very softly, very shyly, “Yes. But he hasn’t been here for a very long time.”
Rhode’s jealousy rose up inside her and roared like a dying dragon. “You miss him, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Then, a little indignantly, “He said he would come back!”
“He wants to.” Rhode admitted, jealousy wrestling with honesty and losing. “He wants to come but he’s...he’s lost and I can’t find him. I need your help. Will you help me?”
The boy’s legs were annoyingly short: he had to take four steps for every two of hers and every instant Rhode expected some other member of the family to round a corner and discover her dragging a grubby human boy through the halls of the Holy Ark, or the Earl to call for Lero, who was squawking in incoherent distress about the same. For the boy’s part, his head was swivelling around trying to see everything at once and she had to keep tugging on his arm to keep him going in the right direction, trying not to weep with frustration and no small portion of fear. She couldn’t even imagine the sort of punishment she’d incur for bringing a human into the Ark, but she rather doubted that it would end at being sent to bed without supper.
The hall leading to Tyki’s room was empty its length, but she and the boy still darted from shadowed alcove to shadowed alcove just in case some stupid maintenance mechanical should happen by and try to give the boy a bath. The door of Tyki’s door was so cold that it was actually smoking gently, colder than the ambient air temperature of the Ark by dozens of degrees; shadowy tendrils flickered around the gap at the bottom, but couldn’t make their way past whatever means the Earl used to keep Tyki-who-wasn’t-Tyki bottled up.
“Ready?” Rhode asked breathlessly, her hand on the doorknob.
The boy nodded, the set of his jaw beneath his mask determined, blue eyes the colour of steel. Rhode turned the doorknob and flung open the door.
Inside, the darkness writhed like a living thing, which it was, and Rhode grabbed the boy by the sleeve of his shirt and flung him inside, slamming the door behind him before that hungry darkness could realize its prison had been breached, however so briefly. Then she sat herself down and put her back against the door and listened, expecting screams.
♥
It happened one day while he was in the mines, and by the time he got back to the boarding-house, most of the excitement was over. The woman hadn’t turned up for the first of her several jobs and the mistress of the rich man’s house where she worked sent a servant around to complain; the landlady had opened the door and found the woman lying cold in her bed, blood still on her lips, bedclothes disordered from the last coughing spasms that she had suffered. The local priest had been summoned to take charge of the corpse and lay it in a pauper’s grave before the day was out.
No one could find the boy.
He’d made sympathetic noises to the landlady, who was utterly distraught as no one had ever died beneath her roof before, finished the decided inferior dinner that she served that night, and had gone back out for an evening constitutional that, by providence, took him past every hidey-hole that he knew the boy favoured. He found the boy hiding under an enormous boxwood hedge, grubby and tear-stained, and it took quite a bit of time and effort to coax him out, too, since he was quite convinced that he was going to be sent away to an orphan’s asylum despite Tyki’s protestations to the contrary. He personally knew enough about the contents of such places to disfavour sending anyone there who hadn’t done more than lose their parents to deserve it. Finally, the boy believed him and crawled out from under the prickly hedge and buried his face in Tyki’s shoulder and sobbed as only a very small child who watched his mother die a terrible death could. Tyki held the boy’s head in place as he darted through the back rooms of shops and the walls of the boarding-house and up through the levellers of the stairs and into his room where the others awaited his return.
There was some initial resistance to packing up and moving out that night - the money was ridiculously good at the moment, for example, and the local women cheaper and less likely to be diseased than the ones to be found elsewhere - but Tyki eventually prevailed in convincing them that leaving now and taking the boy with them was the correct course of action. He crept down the hall that evening to retrieve the boy’s few belongings and that night they caught the late train to Cardiff, their little threesome of sticky-fingered orphans now a four-man operation. Even Tyki, who had insisted on it so forcefully, couldn’t say exactly why he wanted it to be so - but he had, and now it was, and it felt right, so he also didn’t put it to any questions. The boy slept with his head on Tyki’s leg all the way south.
♥
Rhode waited, with waxing and waning degrees of patience, for screams but none ever arrived. About midday, she got up, squeaked in annoyance over the pins and needles in her sleeping feet for several minutes, and then took herself and Lero down to the dining room, where the household mechanicals had laid out a lunch buffet on the sideboard. She swore Lero to silence on the matter and so managed to dine without anyone else finding out about her unauthorized activities, then released him to go back to the Earl, and returned to her place in front of the door. It seemed to her, upon arriving, that said portal was, while still cold, not quite so cold as it had been before and as the day passed it grew warmer and warmer by slow degrees beneath her back. She hoped, in a transport of self-directed irritation, that she hadn’t missed all the screaming because she’d been too hungry to go without lunch.
The grandfather clock in the Great Hall was chiming half-past-six when someone knocked on the inside of the door and a soft voice whispered, “Girl? Are you there?”
For an instant, Rhode was too shocked to do much of anything. Then, slowly, she got herself to her knees and from there to her feet, and opened the door.
The boy stood there, demonstrably not in pieces, his mask down around his neck, looking weary but inexpressibly triumphant. The writhing, living darkness that had filled the room from floor to ceiling, that had etched things into those floors and ceilings in languages that hadn’t been found in human throats in more thousands of years than most people could imagine, was gone. Well, not gone precisely - embodied was a more accurate term, in the form of the man laying on the single intact piece of furniture, a long, low sofa, mostly covered in a blanket. Rhode stepped inside, too stunned to even be jealous, and found Tyki more asleep than awake, golden eyes at half-mast, a vision of dusky unmarked skin and a mess of hair he hadn’t had before.
“See? I found him.”
Rhode turned and looked at the boy, still too stunned for words, and nodded.
“Rhode.” Tyki’s voice was rough, raspy, huskier than it had ever been before, and it sounded as though he were working quite hard to remember how to frame what he wanted to say in comprehensible human speech. “You shouldn’t have brought him here...but I’m glad that you did.”
She nodded and her eyes, inexplicably, filled with tears.
“Eaze. In a moment I’m going to have Rhode take you home...but I have something for you here.” The boy stepped close and something passed between them, a tiny object that glinted silver in the dim light making it past the drapes covering the room’s sole window. “I’m...going to go back to sleep now for a while. But when I wake up again, I’ll come to see you. I promise. Rhode...”
“I’ll...I’ll take him right home. I promise. Tyki...are you...?” Rhode couldn’t quite put the question she wanted to ask him to words, not in front of this little human boy, but it didn’t appear that she needed to do so.
Tyki shook his head slightly and laid it back down. “Go on. Hurry - I won’t...go again...but I’m...not so sure I’m back yet, either.”
Rhode nodded and took the boy’s hand. She felt, between their palms, the ridges and contours, the shape of a silver button torn off an Exorcist’s uniform coat. A promise of a sort, and for a change, she didn’t begrudge that boy its existence one little bit.
For: empath_eia
By: nagaina_ryuuoh
Request: Tyki + the Noah Clan, specifically Rhode, with a little Eaze on the side.
Genres: Tried hard to be disturbing, came out mostly sweetly sappily somewhat disturbing.
Rating: Let's call it PG13, for Rhode's nasty thought process.
Disclaimers: D. Gray-man and all characters and concepts related thereto are the property of Hoshino Katsura and likely a gigantic Japanese entertainment consortium. I profiteth not.
Notes: Black Tyki wanted to make this fic really, really disturbing, however the White Tyki who resides in my head insisted that no one wants to destroy the world OR harm small children in April. And he was right. Sorry for the delay.
He’d seen the boy about before, of course - it was impossible not to, seeing how he was the only child living in the small boarding-house they were all presently calling home. Mostly he could be found playing by himself in the tiny side yard, stretched out on his belly with a ball of string and the household cats, with whom he appeared to be close personal friends, or in the herb-and-vegetable plot out back with the landlady, helping her pull weeds and bind up bunches of greenery for drying and carry her basket and tools to and fro. He seemed, to Tyki’s eye, to never smile quite as much as a boy his age ought to, or to laugh, or to simply run about for no good reason and get himself underfoot. It became his habit, therefore, to bring the boy home some small treat on occasion: a perfect apple, big as a big man’s fist and red as sin, unbruised and unblemished; a tiny ball of hard rubber small enough to fit in the palm of the boy’s hand; a tart or bun fresh and still warm from the baker’s oven. The boy accepted these presents with a gravitas all out of proportion to his age - he couldn’t have been more than four or five - and a very proper ‘thank you, sir’ and sometimes a reward in the form of a quick, bright smile that lit up his whole face.
The boy’s mother was another story entirely. Tyki saw considerably more of her, as she worked all over the little mining town at an assortment of jobs in a variety of locales. He got the feeling, from her steely-eyed glare, that she didn’t much like him and might well suspect that he possessed some dishonourable intentions towards her son. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as he was deeply engaged in pretending toward general honourability just now and was thoroughly loath to louse it up, not to mention the fact that he generally didn’t favour the charms of small children, except when it came to making them smile. He suspected that attempting to explain such gradations of his character, however, would be utterly lost on her and so attempted to avoid encountering her son where she could see, thus preventing any further agitations of her spirit. A touch of charm plied upon their landlady convinced that worthy Christian widow-woman’s tongue to loosen in regards to the woman, whose name was Gwynne, and her son, who was named Rhys, after the father entombed with a half-dozen other men at the bottom of a collapsed mine-shaft. That explained much: the woman had the look about her of someone who had been very happy once, and hadn’t been for quite some time, and now could not imagine ever being truly happy ever again. Tyki suspected she had even been pretty once: fair of hair and eyes, plump and prone to smiling; now her mouth was set in the sort of firm, hard line that never relaxed into something softer even when she looked on the son she’d borne, the flesh had melted off her bones and the colour had been clawed from her hair and the lovely youth had been beaten out of her by the hard and long and unceasing working hours and the need to stretch the meagre reward she earned for all that work to provide the food and shelter and comfort for two. She was, the landlady averred, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, far too proud to accept anyone’s charity and so she set the boy to running errands to pretend the work he did about the house and for her was worth the lesser rent the woman paid.
She’d a bad cough, the woman did - a cough that wracked her whole skinny-not-slender body and, from time to time, left her handkerchief spotted with blood. It would be the death of her one day, the landlady knew it, and then that sweet little boy of hers would be sent off to live in one of those terrible orphan’s asylums with the children of debtors and dead whores. And what would become of him then?
♥
Rhode Kamelot knew, in her heart of hearts, that it was utterly and absolutely beneath her dignity as a daughter of the House of Noah to be as tooth-grindingly jealous of a little human boy as she was. He wasn’t anyone special: one of thousands of orphans from all over Europe and America left alone in the world after accident and illness took his parents, probably sickly himself, who wouldn’t even live to be an orphan grown-up if the Earl had his way. She was, however, honest enough with herself on general principles to admit that her jealousy did not arise out of some sort of misguided desire to be normal, to be just a girl in crinolines and button-boots on some street somewhere with a Mother on one side and a Father on the other and no cares in her empty little head beyond which flavour of candy to choose from the corner store and how to charm the boy she’d marry before the end of her coming-out party.
No, Rhode could admit that the little gnawing black worm in her heart arose from the fact that that sickly little orphan boy had something that she wanted solely and utterly for her own. He belonged to Tyki, and some part of Tyki belonged to him, and that was what she simply could not stand. He had Tyki all the time and it just wasn’t fair; she only got to have him when the Earl needed him for something first and he was busy and distracted and never really just himself.
Down the hall, behind a door and between walls specially constructed just for the purposes of containing him, Tyki-who-wasn’t-Tyki howled loudly enough for his voice to overcome the dampening effects of that containment, ranted something in a language that had been dead since before Babel.
Rhode shivered uncontrollably. The Earl said that this was normal, that the second awakening was sometimes like this, painful and frenzied, and that when he woke up from it, all would be well again. She wasn’t so sure. She knew some of those words herself. For the first two days after the Arks had been separated and the Earl had returned with Tyki-who-wasn’t-Tyki slung triumphantly over his shoulder, she had gone every morning to the door he was locked up behind and talked to him through it, trying to reach him, to get some sense out of him, to comfort him, to do something, anything for him, to quiet the terrible pain he was in. In return, the wholly Black thing he had become whispered things back at her, terrible things that she hadn’t now or ever wanted to hear, things that drove her away and woke her screaming with nightmares until Lulubelle had finally come and lay down with her to keep the dreams away.
Now, on the third day, she brooded over her breakfast and what she knew she needed to do and, at the same time, desperately didn’t want to do. She couldn’t reach him. The Earl couldn’t reach him. Lulu wouldn’t try unless directly ordered to do so, and she was busy with something else anyway. The rest of the family was still buzzing around the world on errands and wouldn’t be back for days, at least, and by then it might be too late.
Against her better judgment, Rhode opened a door.
Russia was, in her opinion, an unbelievably nasty place anywhere that it wasn’t tastelessly opulent - not that she minded tasteless opulence, in fact she tended toward it when she had her druthers - and this place was particularly nasty: a dirty, dusty mining town plunked down in a dirty, dusty valley next to a series of exceedingly dirty and dusty mountains that hadn’t been properly covered in trees in ages and seemed proud of the fact that everything, including, it seemed, the people was layered in a combination of coal dust and soot from the constantly-running railway. Lero, whom she’d absconded prior to departure, squawked loudly as she put him to one of his actual functional purposes, namely opening him and making him keep the constant rain of soot from settling on her hair or clothes. At this hour, the mining camp itself was all-but empty, with every able-bodied who wasn’t a cook or a drover man down the shafts digging coal out of the mountains, so there was no one about to prevent her from walking up the camp’s sole able-bodied boy and poking him sharply in the shoulder where he sat darning socks that were more hole than fabric on a camp cot.
Surprised, the boy squeaked and pulled his mask up, but before he did, Rhode caught a glimpse of his face: fine-featured, a tiny up-turned nose, a bright smile that lit up his whole face. She wanted, unworthily, to say something nasty to quench that smile, but couldn’t quite think of anything: that smile did something to her insides that made her realize, at once, that being mean to it was just...mean. For some reason, that made her feel almost sad rather than angry. And now he was staring at her over the top of his mask as though she were witch or a goddess or a princess or something out of one of those weird Russian fairy tale. “Are you Rhys - I mean, Eaze?”
He nodded wordlessly, blue eyes the size of saucers.
“And you know a man named Tyki Mick?”
Another nod and then, very softly, very shyly, “Yes. But he hasn’t been here for a very long time.”
Rhode’s jealousy rose up inside her and roared like a dying dragon. “You miss him, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Then, a little indignantly, “He said he would come back!”
“He wants to.” Rhode admitted, jealousy wrestling with honesty and losing. “He wants to come but he’s...he’s lost and I can’t find him. I need your help. Will you help me?”
The boy’s legs were annoyingly short: he had to take four steps for every two of hers and every instant Rhode expected some other member of the family to round a corner and discover her dragging a grubby human boy through the halls of the Holy Ark, or the Earl to call for Lero, who was squawking in incoherent distress about the same. For the boy’s part, his head was swivelling around trying to see everything at once and she had to keep tugging on his arm to keep him going in the right direction, trying not to weep with frustration and no small portion of fear. She couldn’t even imagine the sort of punishment she’d incur for bringing a human into the Ark, but she rather doubted that it would end at being sent to bed without supper.
The hall leading to Tyki’s room was empty its length, but she and the boy still darted from shadowed alcove to shadowed alcove just in case some stupid maintenance mechanical should happen by and try to give the boy a bath. The door of Tyki’s door was so cold that it was actually smoking gently, colder than the ambient air temperature of the Ark by dozens of degrees; shadowy tendrils flickered around the gap at the bottom, but couldn’t make their way past whatever means the Earl used to keep Tyki-who-wasn’t-Tyki bottled up.
“Ready?” Rhode asked breathlessly, her hand on the doorknob.
The boy nodded, the set of his jaw beneath his mask determined, blue eyes the colour of steel. Rhode turned the doorknob and flung open the door.
Inside, the darkness writhed like a living thing, which it was, and Rhode grabbed the boy by the sleeve of his shirt and flung him inside, slamming the door behind him before that hungry darkness could realize its prison had been breached, however so briefly. Then she sat herself down and put her back against the door and listened, expecting screams.
♥
It happened one day while he was in the mines, and by the time he got back to the boarding-house, most of the excitement was over. The woman hadn’t turned up for the first of her several jobs and the mistress of the rich man’s house where she worked sent a servant around to complain; the landlady had opened the door and found the woman lying cold in her bed, blood still on her lips, bedclothes disordered from the last coughing spasms that she had suffered. The local priest had been summoned to take charge of the corpse and lay it in a pauper’s grave before the day was out.
No one could find the boy.
He’d made sympathetic noises to the landlady, who was utterly distraught as no one had ever died beneath her roof before, finished the decided inferior dinner that she served that night, and had gone back out for an evening constitutional that, by providence, took him past every hidey-hole that he knew the boy favoured. He found the boy hiding under an enormous boxwood hedge, grubby and tear-stained, and it took quite a bit of time and effort to coax him out, too, since he was quite convinced that he was going to be sent away to an orphan’s asylum despite Tyki’s protestations to the contrary. He personally knew enough about the contents of such places to disfavour sending anyone there who hadn’t done more than lose their parents to deserve it. Finally, the boy believed him and crawled out from under the prickly hedge and buried his face in Tyki’s shoulder and sobbed as only a very small child who watched his mother die a terrible death could. Tyki held the boy’s head in place as he darted through the back rooms of shops and the walls of the boarding-house and up through the levellers of the stairs and into his room where the others awaited his return.
There was some initial resistance to packing up and moving out that night - the money was ridiculously good at the moment, for example, and the local women cheaper and less likely to be diseased than the ones to be found elsewhere - but Tyki eventually prevailed in convincing them that leaving now and taking the boy with them was the correct course of action. He crept down the hall that evening to retrieve the boy’s few belongings and that night they caught the late train to Cardiff, their little threesome of sticky-fingered orphans now a four-man operation. Even Tyki, who had insisted on it so forcefully, couldn’t say exactly why he wanted it to be so - but he had, and now it was, and it felt right, so he also didn’t put it to any questions. The boy slept with his head on Tyki’s leg all the way south.
♥
Rhode waited, with waxing and waning degrees of patience, for screams but none ever arrived. About midday, she got up, squeaked in annoyance over the pins and needles in her sleeping feet for several minutes, and then took herself and Lero down to the dining room, where the household mechanicals had laid out a lunch buffet on the sideboard. She swore Lero to silence on the matter and so managed to dine without anyone else finding out about her unauthorized activities, then released him to go back to the Earl, and returned to her place in front of the door. It seemed to her, upon arriving, that said portal was, while still cold, not quite so cold as it had been before and as the day passed it grew warmer and warmer by slow degrees beneath her back. She hoped, in a transport of self-directed irritation, that she hadn’t missed all the screaming because she’d been too hungry to go without lunch.
The grandfather clock in the Great Hall was chiming half-past-six when someone knocked on the inside of the door and a soft voice whispered, “Girl? Are you there?”
For an instant, Rhode was too shocked to do much of anything. Then, slowly, she got herself to her knees and from there to her feet, and opened the door.
The boy stood there, demonstrably not in pieces, his mask down around his neck, looking weary but inexpressibly triumphant. The writhing, living darkness that had filled the room from floor to ceiling, that had etched things into those floors and ceilings in languages that hadn’t been found in human throats in more thousands of years than most people could imagine, was gone. Well, not gone precisely - embodied was a more accurate term, in the form of the man laying on the single intact piece of furniture, a long, low sofa, mostly covered in a blanket. Rhode stepped inside, too stunned to even be jealous, and found Tyki more asleep than awake, golden eyes at half-mast, a vision of dusky unmarked skin and a mess of hair he hadn’t had before.
“See? I found him.”
Rhode turned and looked at the boy, still too stunned for words, and nodded.
“Rhode.” Tyki’s voice was rough, raspy, huskier than it had ever been before, and it sounded as though he were working quite hard to remember how to frame what he wanted to say in comprehensible human speech. “You shouldn’t have brought him here...but I’m glad that you did.”
She nodded and her eyes, inexplicably, filled with tears.
“Eaze. In a moment I’m going to have Rhode take you home...but I have something for you here.” The boy stepped close and something passed between them, a tiny object that glinted silver in the dim light making it past the drapes covering the room’s sole window. “I’m...going to go back to sleep now for a while. But when I wake up again, I’ll come to see you. I promise. Rhode...”
“I’ll...I’ll take him right home. I promise. Tyki...are you...?” Rhode couldn’t quite put the question she wanted to ask him to words, not in front of this little human boy, but it didn’t appear that she needed to do so.
Tyki shook his head slightly and laid it back down. “Go on. Hurry - I won’t...go again...but I’m...not so sure I’m back yet, either.”
Rhode nodded and took the boy’s hand. She felt, between their palms, the ridges and contours, the shape of a silver button torn off an Exorcist’s uniform coat. A promise of a sort, and for a change, she didn’t begrudge that boy its existence one little bit.