Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It starts at age three.

He is slow to learn how to walk. He stumbles excessively, catching himself on the coffee table and bookshelves. His mother takes him to a pediatrician, who reassures her that it’s a delay, but delays aren’t impossibilities. She takes extra care watching over him, constantly at his side. She makes rare trips to the rickety plastic playground four and a half blocks away from their complex and watches him struggle up the steps to the slide. She counts them. Six little steps. She unwillingly pictures him slipping and plummeting every time he drags himself up them.

He is a bright child. She knows that. He chirps back in little sentences when she speaks, solves the block puzzles and toddler toys she gets from charity shops faster than she can keep him entertained. He smiles up at her so sweetly, so trusting. He’s a happy baby. A happy toddler. He smiles at strangers in church pews and never cries. She is told to count her blessings. She forces herself to. She can’t afford to let any tragedy seep into their lives like raindrops through the apartment’s moldering ceiling.

He has 20 milk teeth. It’s perfectly on track for a child his age. She lets him sit in the living room unattended while she makes dinner, once she knows he won’t run off. Grainy cartoon reruns play on the television to keep him occupied. She takes her eyes off of him for a minute, two, three—and then she hears the slam and the scream. She drops the spoon she’d been using to stir and runs to him. His face is bloodied, tiny hands clutching at the table leg as he sobs. He’s fallen, she realizes, and managed to catch his nose on the corner of the wood. Even as she holds him, consoles him and promises that it won’t happen again, he’s alright, he shakes. It’s every bit as stained as her intrusive thoughts, every bit as wrenching. He sobs into her collar. She shakes as much as he does.

She’s afraid it’ll set his progress back, that he’ll refuse to even try. She’s heard plenty from the pediatrician about anxieties and regression, how a child facing developmental difficulties can make progress and then suddenly fall backward. She fears the worst—this will set back months, it’ll make him so scared that he’ll lose any sense of confidence and cling to her. She doesn’t hate his dependence on her, she swears the opposite, really, but she’s afraid for his wellbeing.

He meets her anxious silence with the opposite. He doesn’t lean into her, doesn’t cling to the furniture to guide himself around the apartment. She’s too caught up in the euphoria of it all and the return of his smiles to notice the smaller things.

It starts at age three—the babbles to thin air, the toddles with arms outstretched to nothing the same way he does to her.

It starts at age three. He’s too small for anyone to notice.

Chapter Text

He’s four when he makes the first drawing.

He’s taken to arts and crafts more in the recent weeks, to his mother’s simultaneous joy and frustration. He’d taken a crayon to one wall and she’d had to scrub at it for half an hour before it came off. He was sweet and apologetic the entire time, though. She can’t stay upset with him.

The fridge is littered with coloring pages and drawings made on scrap paper. Most of them come from what she gives him during lectures—she’s never had to worry about him being disruptive and her professors have been nothing but patient about him being with her, but she’d rather not take her chances. She takes her notes diligently and he sits beside her, scribbling away.

She takes notice of the pattern after she’s put him to bed one night. She stands in the kitchen and stares at the papers, recognizing something in almost all of them.

Beside every image of her boy—she can tell it’s him from the crude attempts at capturing his cowlick—is a figure. She knows it can’t be her, he’s drawn portraits of her before and it looks nothing like those.

It’s tall. Pale. It looks like a person, but the face is all wrong. One blue eye, a wide crayon smile. She tries to dismiss it as a one-off first, but the pattern is clear. Deliberate. He doesn’t do it for anyone else.

She asks him about it in the morning. He smiles and tells her it’s his friend.

It keeps up at five.

He’s indiscernible from any other kid in his class. Same rosy cheeks in the chilled air, same tiny mittens around his fingers as he wanders through his kindergarten’s playground. Same tiny uniform as the other children, though he doesn’t have the words to properly express why the tiny tartan skirt makes him frown much more than the girls in his class.

Chapter Text

He’s five and he’s just learned what the term “imaginary friend” means for the first time. Politely, he disagrees with it.

It’s been a normal rainy day, which means his mother is going back and forth between the buckets she’s set out to catch raindrops and he’s sitting at the coffee table with his crayons. He picks up purple, spins it between his fingers, and then drops it in favor of blue. The television is a low hum of white noise alongside the creaky heater that still sometimes scares him and his mother’s footfalls.

There’s a piece of paper in front of him, blank and ripe for whatever his imagination can come up with. The fridge is still filled with drawings, but he knows his mother will pin this one up all the same. When it gets overcrowded, she pulls out the special envelope she keeps in her room that holds all of his other drawings and tucks the recent ones away. She says it’s to keep them safe for later. He smiles and chirps something about how they’re squirrels saving acorns for winter. She smiles back warm and safe, but doesn’t say anything about how drawings can’t keep you fed.

He drags the crayon across the page. Mother settles on the couch and ruffles his hair before watching him. He scribbles and fills in the lines, lost in it. He doesn’t think when he turns to the side and looks up at a slight angle.

“Nuh-uh, it’s gonna be a ocean,” he says, to nobody in particular. At least, nobody else in the room. His mother pauses, breathes, looks at him.

“What’s that, now?”

He turns to look at his mother, tilting his head slightly. “I was tellin’ them it’s gonna be a ocean. They thought it was a box.”

She nods like she understands. This isn’t the first time he’s mentioned “them”. She knows that this is normal—plenty of children like him have imaginary friends. Phases. This is something he’ll grow out of, she just has to be patient with him. If she lets her worries quiet down, it’s almost cute how he references “them”, the little things he comes up with.

She doesn’t know much, just the small things he mentions offhandedly like they’re fact. “Them” is fond of the tinny jazz records she inherited from her father that she occasionally puts on when cooking dinner. They like the small crop of tulips one of the neighbors keeps in her window boxes. They’ve apparently complimented her braids a few times, and Viktor smiles extra wide when he looks up at her to tell her that Them thinks she looks pretty when she smiles. Them seems to orbit around Viktor most when he’s drawing or playing, always seeming to be involved when she can’t directly watch him.

Maybe that’s what it is, she supposes. Loneliness. He doesn’t have many friends his age—she can’t afford to send him to daycare, where he could be around other children and play properly. There are a few neighbors that go to the same playground as they do, but it’s not often that they cross paths. She’d worry more if he weren’t so happy to follow her around, if he didn’t seem to walk on goddamned sunshine whenever she has to drag him along to a lecture with her when she can’t find someone to watch him. Them is something to fill a void, something that keeps her boy happy.

She swallows her anxieties around Them, lets it all be. She’s not sure if it makes her a failure as a mother to let him believe in this, or if indulging it is harmless, but he hasn’t shown any signs of struggle. She tells herself she’ll keep a close eye on him, make sure that nothing will come of this.

He fidgets a little bit and giggles to himself. “Nuh-uh. No monkeys, it’s a pirate ship.”

She smiles slightly at the half of the conversation she can hear.

“Really, now? I thought you liked chimpanzees,” she responds.

He turns fully to look at her, all big brown eyes and tiny curls.

“Them likes chimpanzees. I like or- organga- or—”

“Orangutans?”

He nods vigorously. “Yeah! They’re big! And orange!”

She slides off the couch and sits on the floor beside him, reaching out to ruffle his hair. He smiles so easily and she pulls him close to her. He’s still tiny, right now. The other mothers she’s talked to say she has to savor it while it lasts. There’s an inevitable fear in the thought of change, even if she welcomes change for the better. She wants to take the best bits of now and cut everything else away, as unrealistic as that is. They could float along on their own little ship, if things went her way.

“What’s the story on this one? Are they nice pirates?”

She asks it out of habit. He always has a story, always something fantastical in the way only a child can create. Most days, it’s spaceships and cowboys pulled from the old black and white movies he’s fascinated with. Chimpanzees are a common theme, especially after the trip to the zoo he got for his birthday last year—the primate house had been a riot for him. And, of course, there’s the ever-present figure of Them, with their lone blue eye and stark white suit.

He nods and scribbles again, saying, “Yeah. Nice pirates. And they fight swords all the time.”

She chuckles and nods. “I see.”

He continues, “And they go treasure hunting. And there’s lots of squids in the water that are nice and hug the boat with their tentacles.”

“They hug it?”

“They hug it ‘cause it gets cold at night and that’s warm. And the pirates give them coins because it’s nice and they can buy pretty shells with them.”

She nods along. He switches to a red crayon and draws a rough approximation of something with tentacles in the water next to the brown hull of the boat. She settles in, content.

“They don’t like squids. They think they’re icky,” he chirps.

She hums. “They’re probably smelly. You remember grandpa’s fishing gloves?”

He wrinkles his nose. She grins. The poor kid had gone running into his grandfather’s arms thoughtlessly during a visit, right after he’d come inside from processing the day’s catch. He’d been put off fish for a few weeks after he realized why his gloves were slimy. His grandparents thought it was the funniest thing, and she’d had to tell her father not to taunt the poor thing with any of the trophy fish he kept in his garage.

“…no squids.”

“No squids?”

He shakes his head. “They is right. No squids.”

She nudges the crayons closer together so they won’t roll off the table. “They are. It’s are, baby.”

He huffs but doesn’t comment. He goes back to his drawing, and she can already picture it on the overcrowded fridge. The blue will blend right in with the rest of them. It seems to be his favorite color despite the claims of yellow.

She allows herself the indulgence of holding him for a little bit longer and watching him go. Eventually, though, she has to stand and check the buckets again. There’s already too much water damage in their space. That, and she needs to worry about dinner, her homework, the shift she has at the grocery store tomorrow. She can’t exist in the wonderfully ignorant little world her boy lives in, as tempting as becoming a pirate or astronaut or cowboy is. She supposes he comes by it honestly, since she finds herself slipping into the childhood thoughts of being a mermaid when she manages to squirrel away time for swimming.

“Mama?” he looks up at her, bright and shiny and perfect.

“Yes?”

He tilts his head and smiles, smiles, smiles. She wants to immortalize this.

“They say that you’re pretty when you’re happy. They like it.”

She huffs fondly. This isn't anything new. “Well, tell Them thank you for me.”

He nods, expression serious and determined like he’s been given a mission. She walks off as he turns to the side to relay the message. Her worry fades for a moment. There’s no harm, surely, when the most his imaginary friends do is find little compliments for him. There’s no harm, surely, if it’s what keeps the sunshine in his eyes.

Viktor looks at them, and they look back. He smiles innocently and tells them that mama says thank you, and that he can add music to the pirate ship for them.

The white violin indulges him. There’s surely no harm in imagination, if it keeps him happy.

Chapter Text

The first time he does it, it’s an act of sheer stupidity.

He hates going to school. He hates the other girls there. He hates the bitter, terrible jealousy that burns in him whenever he watches the boys playing games so easily during gym or laughing together during lunch. He hates the walk to the building, hates the backpack stuffed full of books sitting next to his bed, hates his stupid uniform and the terrible, evil fucking skirt he threw into his closet. He hates most of all that he can still see the checked fabric because the door bounced off of the frame when he slammed it and creaked back open just enough.

He presses his face deeper into his pillow, trying to dam up the tears. It’s stupid. He knows that’s not how that works. He’s way too old to be crying like this, face ugly and reddened. His breath keeps catching in his throat and making awful, hoarse sobs leave him. It makes him feel malformed, small and fragile despite the fact that he’s 15 whole years old. He figures that surely, by now, he should feel at least a little bit stronger. He doesn’t.

Something takes over the horrible sadness welling in him and channels into motion, and he’s onto his feet and halfway down the hall before he registers he’s stood up at all. He feels dizzy, though he can’t tell if it’s from the tears he’s shed or the fact that he skipped lunch today, too sick of himself to even entertain the thought of trying to eat or drink anything. He half stomps, half stumbles his way to the bathroom, pointedly ignoring the fact that throwing the lock as he slams the door is functionally useless—the door hasn’t locked properly since before he was born.

He moves like something possessed, breaths shuddering and heaving as he glares at the mirror and reaches for the drawer attached to the vanity. He shoves everything aside and plucks the scissors out, hands shaking as he debates what if, what if, what if.

He’s hated his hair for so long.

It’s been long since he was small, when he could still hide behind his mother’s legs at the thought of strangers. His grandmother had always complimented it, how beautiful, how fitting for such a lovely girl. He’d loved being smaller, letting his mother card her fingers through and knowing she’d give into his begs for the intricate braids the other girls at school got. It had been this way so long, been him so long. He lets his hands shake as he debates it all, held still only by the terror of letting such a sudden change properly sink in and take shape. It’s not that he’s afraid of doing it—it’s just that it would be undeniable that he was the one to do it.

He shudders and shakes more, caught at a standstill with his own reflection and the scissors in his hand. He wants to be brave. He wants to do something dramatic, bold. He wants to be unafraid to be himself, but he’s stuck in a place of endless horrible conclusions to it all. His mother would be ashamed of him. His classmates ignoring him entirely would shift to pure ridicule. His grandparents would shake their heads in shame and sadness, saying it was such a shame for such a pretty girl to do something so rash, so foolish. He’s frozen, stuck in place as every single what if swims through his mind and multiplies, spreads, infects.

He stares at his own eyes, wide with constricted pupils. He looks like a frightened animal, not a person. It makes him feel sick all over again as he processes the sharpness of his own terror, a change from the normally subdued look he’s used to. It scares him that he’s capable of even making this expression—most of the time the mirror meets him with pure neutrality.

But the longer he stares, frozen in place with his knuckles white around the scissors, the more he feels that tugging at him, same as he does whenever he stares in empty satisfaction at the scab along his cheek. Something is meant to happen here, something is meant to change and be made correct. He has to move, break the standstill, hostage position he’s locked himself into.

He exhales, shifts, and crumbles into the vanity. He leans against it and lets himself slide to sit on the floor, sobs returning with full fury as the scissors clatter to the tile. He feels deflated, the courage or whatever had been there for a moment entirely fleeting as he leans into the wood and shakes.

He hardly registers the movement in his peripheral, already dreading what’s going to happen when his mother comes home from work and finds him like this. Surely, she’ll comfort him and hold him close to her like he’s craving, but she’ll also worry. Worrying her means another call to his therapist, which means another emergency session and another note on his record alongside all of the other things already wrong with him. It’s barely been any time since he was in about his cheek, and he’s not ready for the inevitable disappointed looks and we’ve worked on this.

The white figure settles beside him without fanfare, perched awkwardly on the tiles and looking at him with an expression he knows now to be concern, but reads best as disinterested neutrality. Pale blue-white eyes linger on his face and flicker down to the scissors before going back up.

“And What Is This?” WV inquires.

He doesn’t answer, pressed wholly against the vanity and trying to pretend that this isn’t happening. He’s normal. He has to be normal.

WV exhales audibly, something rare for them, and tilts their head. They watch him in silence for a moment.

“There Is No Shame Here,” they say, voice soft in the way it is when he knows they’re trying to be gentle with him, “There Is No Shame In What You’re Feeling.”

He shakes his head, voice still raw, “There is. It’s not normal.”

They regard him. It’s one of those sweeping looks, where he knows he’s said something that makes them think for a moment. Normally, he takes pride in it. It means he’s said something important enough to make them reconsider, something that not even WV had thought of, and they seem to think of everything.

“It’s not right,” he finds himself saying. “It’s not right and I shouldn’t feel it.”

Their expression shifts, the mask of neutrality dropping for a moment to become much more of a frown. It makes the guilt twist further in him. He’s gone and upset WV, now. That somehow feels worse than all of the incorrectness inside of him.

“No,” they say gently, “No. It Isn’t A Failing. It Never Was.”

He tries to internalize the words; believe them like he always does. WV is so much smarter than he is, after all. They have all the answers. He should trust that they would know the answer to all of this, believe everything they tell him. And yet, he finds himself shaking his head and shutting his eyes tight again, trying to staunch the flow of tears. He feels coiled tight like a spring, like all of it is building up inside of him and waiting to explode or cascade down. It isn’t foreign to him.

WV seems to notice.

He finds it almost ironic, them being here. He’s never known them by anything but “them”. He knows inherently that by the same logic, they exist in this negative space with him. They’re also incorrect in some way, also caught between what is supposed to be and what actually is. He feels like a hypocrite for it all—it’s so easy, so correct to address WV the way he always has. They are they way they are and nothing can change it. The thought of it all for himself feels wrong, even with the way he’s rationed everything else out. WV is allowed this because they just are. He can’t even think of allowing himself to tug on the string and follow it into the labyrinth. He knows that he is neither Theseus nor Ariadne here. There is no proper conclusion.

“The Choice Is Yours To Make,” they say. “And I Will Never Blame You For What You Decide. You Know This By Now.”

He doesn’t. He swallows bitterly, his throat still burning. WV’s face shifts to more concern and something else he can’t describe. It’s one of the few times he’s been almost entirely unable to read them. It scares him.

What he can’t see is the pain in their eyes that mirrors his own. WV holds in the words of reassurance they want to share, the simple statement of you have been here before that they believe would alleviate some of the burden. Then again, they also don’t doubt the statement’s ability to make things infinitely worse.

He moves suddenly, jerkily. He sweeps the scissors back to him in one motion, drags himself up with the counter in another. He glares back angrily at the girl staring at him.

She’s not him. She’s might have been him once, but he can’t see a future where they’re the same.

He raises the scissors to his hair and lets them cut a section loose. It falls to the pale green tiles, dark against them. He holds his breath like he’s expecting something to happen, for the world to come crashing down around him. It doesn’t.

He cuts the rest haphazardly. Crooked. Uneven. It’s a wreck, but it’s a wreck of his own making, and that makes it more comforting than what he’d been feeling before. He’s afraid of how satisfaction of some kind blooms in the hollow of his chest, how he feels something shift into place and settle just right.

WV watches for a little while, expression still unreadable. The sadness still lingers in their eyes, but something else shifts to accompany it, something much softer. They leave him be when most of his hair has been shortened. He doesn’t chase after them, appreciating the space.

He meets his own reflection and feels a weight lifted slightly off his shoulders.

His mother comes home late that night. Looks at him, shock evident but second to her worry. He knew this was coming. He hugs back tighter than she hugs him, the confessions of it all slipping past his lips with no prying. He lets it spill out of him, the cascade of acquired sins flowing out with nothing to stop it. His attempts to dam it all up are useless, in the end. She hears everything.

Tatiana looks at her son and meets his fear with no hatred. She only holds him tight and lets him sob into her shoulders like he’s smaller. It’s more than he could’ve asked for.

There’s a long silence throughout the night, picked at dinners discarded quickly. He still feels sick, and he doesn’t think anything can be done to make him better, at least not now. She doesn’t press or prod. He climbs into her bed instead of his own that night and clings to her. She doesn’t push him away.

Despite every anxiety and fear clawing at him, the sun still rises in the morning. She lets him stay home. For a little while, it’s just the two of them in each other’s orbits, like it used to be. He savors it. He knows it can’t last forever.

Chapter Text

He’s a creature of habit. Homebody, his mother said. It really isn’t his fault he prefers being indoors, not when he’s finally moved into the new apartment in Seattle and it hasn’t stopped raining for the past three days. It evokes an old sort of comfort when the drops slap against the windows, though he can’t quite leave the compulsion to check every corner for loose water on the floorboards or empty buckets that don’t exist.

He falls into the same cycle as he has the past few days; fluffy socks fresh from the dryer, his mug with a fresh ginseng teabag, and his sketchbook open on his desk. If he’s feeling particularly open, he shuffles over to the end table next to the couch and peruses the small collection of records before settling on whatever droning background noise will accompany him as he drafts. It’s comfortable. Safe. He doesn’t let the existence of a potential shoe to drop haunt him too much—he’s got a deadline next week and he doesn’t want to fall behind. He’s still haunted by the comments left when he’d taken an extra week to refine chapter 3.

He settles into the rhythms of it all. The scratch of graphite ambles alongside the drops on the windowpane, both dancing alongside the rattle-squeak of the radiator stuck to one of the walls.

He recognizes the movement in his peripheral, a slight blur of white approaching before sitting beside him on the chair he’d dragged to rest beside his desk. It was among one of the first things he did after the move, making sure it was angled perfectly so his company could sit without having their knees knock into the side panels of the desk and without having to crane their neck to see whatever he was working at. He finds it’s best for conversation this way, both of them on equal footing as he draws and they speak.

He doesn’t look up. He keeps his eyes on the paper.

“I hope that the lighting is decent here. I can switch the lamp on, if you want,” he offers.

They hum, shuffle, readjust.

“No,” they answer. “I’m Well. Continue.”

He obliges, still not looking up. They stay perched and continue watching.

“You’ll Burn Yourself Out, Doing This,” they say.

“I won’t,” he promises. He doesn’t think before speaking, already knowing that he’ll keep his word on whatever he says to them. “I need this. I haven’t had anything to do for a few days.”

They huff quietly. He doesn’t like the edge of frustration to it, but he knows they’ll be gentle with their words. They always are.

He doesn’t look up for another half hour. By the time he does, he sees their icy gaze locked onto the page between them, assessing. They’re the same as ever, even after the move. Same pressed white suit, same dark hair curling at the ends and framing their face. Same pale skin and same piercing eyes. He thinks unwillingly of the Tell-Tale Heart.

“Good,” they praise quietly. It’s familiar. They make sure to do it whenever he shares. They always have.

He offers a small smile, a nod.

WV offers the same cheshire-cat smile they always wear back.

Chapter Text

He’s six when he goes to a therapist for the first time.

He doesn’t understand what the big office he’s in is for. His mother tells him it’s a doctor, a special one meant to help him. He feels confused about it, much more used to the way the pediatrician’s office looks with its pastel walls and chipped paint. This place is more sterile. More adult. He doesn’t think he likes it very much.

The doctor that he sees doesn’t measure his height or weight. She doesn’t ask him to take deep breaths or check his ears. He doubts that she’s a doctor at all, since she doesn’t do any of the things they’re supposed to when he gets checkups. He is silently grateful for the lack of shots, though. He’ll take that with no complaints.

What she does do is ask a lot of questions. He feels awkward about it all, considering he’d been sent in to see her all by himself. His mother had stayed outside, sitting in one of the too-small chairs and giving him a reassuring, if not worried, smile. He supposes that it’s a good thing. Surely, this means he’s a big kid now.

The therapist is nice to him. She smiles wide and nods when he talks, offers him a candy from a little glass dish on her desk, and tells him that he’s doing a good job. He doesn’t quite understand how answering questions is a good job, but he takes the praise.

The first few visits to her office are boring. She lets him play with a handful of toys, but she’s more interested in asking him endless questions. He knows better than to be rude. His mother raised him better than that. She asks about WV a lot. He doesn’t like to share, and some of the things that they talk about he pinky swears not to tell anyone else. He tells her about the monster, instead. That isn’t off limits.

His favorite thing to do is draw pictures in her office. She has more crayons and markers and colored pencils than they do at home, and that means he can capture more ideas than usual. She seems to like when he draws pictures, too, always asking him what everything means. The big difference is that her questions are weird and not like his mother’s. She asks what things mean in a way that’s so different from the way his mother does, more about why he’s drawing and not what. He doesn’t really like it. She doesn’t smile like his mother does when he tells her a story attached to a drawing.

He keeps making the same drawings and playing the same games with his therapist. In a way, he’s almost glad she can’t see the way WV always glares at her with nothing but venom in their cold eyes.

Chapter Text

Subj: Manuscript I

To: Hargreeves, Viktor

Hello, Mr. Hargreeves,

            The staff at Pluvium Press have received your manuscript, and after consideration, would like to speak with you about the possibility of partnering to publish. Please reach out at your earliest convenience.

Marcene Lindbeck (She/her/hers)

Human Relations

Pluvium Press 

Chapter Text

He doesn’t remember what, exactly, led to him having to go to therapy. His mother, however, does.

She’s always watched him like a hawk. Even after he made it over the hurdles he’d had as a baby, she still felt the primal anxiety that something could go wrong at any moment. She was doing this alone, after all, and there was only so much only she could provide. She feels foolish for thinking that it would be as open-and-shut as it seemed on the surface.

He’s six. He’s had his imaginary friend for three years. She knows this, knows “them” and all the little things they love. He’s still so eager to share whenever they have something to say, whenever something seems to get their attention. His drawings still feature the figure in a white suit and their blue eye, sprinkled throughout the pictures of mundane things.

She’s almost unnerved by how often they show up—smiling in between rows of cheerful houses with colorful roofs, standing beside the two of them in a drawing of the nearby park, attending a coveted trip to the zoo. She would be more worried if she didn’t feel so guilty that “them” is his only friend, the only person—thing—he can regularly talk to outside of her. She knows that logically, she needs to nip this in the bud. She tries, but he seems twice as determined to bring them up in conversation afterward. He’s defensive, protective of them like a favorite toy. It sways from cute to concerning rather quickly.

But “them” isn’t what makes her pick up the phone. The antler monster is.

His mood shifts dramatically, one day. He goes from her ray of sunshine to silent overnight. She tries to give it benefit of the doubt; he seems tired and must’ve had a long day at school. One day turns to two, two turns to three, and suddenly he’s been quiet for an entire week and she’s borderline panicking. It feels unnatural for a six year old to appear as sullen as he does, as closed off and reserved.

She calls her own mother first, desperate for answers. His grandmother attempts to convince her it’s a phase, yet another delay in the form of the rebellion she claims every child goes through when they’re a toddler, pushing every button and testing every boundary. She wants to believe it, but this isn’t remotely like that. He’s still well behaved, just distant. She’d understand this all if he were a teenager, hell, she’d understand if he were a tween.

His silence breaks suddenly in the middle of the night.

She wakes up to shrieking coming from his room, a visceral sound that makes her hair stand on end and makes every atom in her body feel like they’re thrumming. She nearly trips in her rush to get to him, stumbling through the dark to reach him.

When she throws the door open, she finds him curled impossibly small under his blankets, tiny body heaving for air. She comes to his side and lifts him up. He clings to her like she’ll disappear, and she clings back just as tight. She tries to console him, but he’s stiff with a terror she can’t understand. After a few minutes, he’s sick from it.

She keeps him home from school the next day. He’s clingy, quick to upset if she leaves his side for a second. She bends to him easily, her own anxiety spiking at the thought of leaving him unattended for any span of time after last night. Images of his tiny nose, bloodied, flash into her mind—the outcome of any potential negligence on her part. He has gotten hurt before, and she knows he can be hurt again. They settle into something familiar, safe; reruns and his favorite blanket on the couch. After a little while, he’s calm enough to ask for his crayons and some blank paper. She obliges without thinking.

She stays with him as the standard fare plays out. A castle with a dragon perched on top, a sailboat, a rather abstract tiger.

She hesitates before speaking. “Love?”

He looks up at her. She hates the dark circles that are so prominent under his eyes.

“…do you remember what made you so upset?”

He shakes his head and turns back to his paper, scribbling.

She sighs, hesitating before asking the question that’s been burning in her mind.

“Was it them?”

He pauses, grip on the crayon tightening. He shakes his head vigorously, keeping his head down. She’s not easily convinced.

“Are you sure? Sweetheart, you can tell me, if—”

“It’s not them,” he snaps, laced with venom. She’s taken aback by the sound of it. “It’s the monster.”

She pauses and tries to think of any “monsters” he might’ve referenced before. She remembers something about squids, but that hadn’t been met with nearly the same energy as he has now. She’s drawing almost an entire blank aside from the presence of “them”, but she knows it wouldn’t go over well if she tried to get him to talk about the possibility of his “friend” being harmful.

Her worry must be evident in her silence, because he looks up and his eyebrows draw together. He looks back down and scribbles quickly before taking the paper and showing her.

The drawing is still crude, though he’s only gotten better the more art he makes. Still, the image is clear enough. She sees a figure that decidedly isn’t “them”, but instead a new one. Something in a tattered blue sweater with a ragged set of mismatched antlers on its head, eyes drawn in a familiar piercing blue. His lines are angry, frantic, almost. She takes the page from him and looks at it before looking back at him.

“It’s mean,” he says, pathetically. “I don’t like it. They can’t make it go away.”

She tries to maintain a calm, even tone. “Did it hurt you?”

He shakes his head. “They said they won’t let it, but it’s scary. It just stays under the bed and breathes too loud. I don’t want it there, mama.”

She nods like any of this makes sense. Her eyes dart to the page, the monster he’s drawn. It’s definitely not like anything she would’ve cooked up as a kid, and she wonders what source material could’ve possibly inspired this particular creation. She doesn’t think he’s even seen a set of antlers in real life—the only place that could possibly have them is his grandfather’s garage, but she knows that he doesn’t own a set. He’d never shut up about them, if he did.

“You said that it isn’t them? It’s something new?”

He nods. “It’s bigger than them.”

She almost wants to laugh in some form of bitter absurdity. Them isn’t very tall to begin with, if his drawings are in any way accurate. Of course, any adult is tall to him, since he’s a tiny thing. A monster under the bed is much more common than most of the other imaginary things he comes up with, but the appearance of it still worries her.

“How about this,” she says, reaching out to cup his face with one hand, “you and I can camp out here tonight. I’m sure that the monster will think you’ve left, and it’ll move right on.”

“You promise?”

She nods sagely, acting as if she’s even remotely an expert on all of this. “Oh, of course. Monsters have short attention spans. They’re like the dinosaurs in that one movie you like. If it can’t see you, it’ll think there’s nothing there.”

He nods like it makes perfect sense. She can’t tell if this counts as lying to him, or if it’s the best course of action. It isn’t the first time she’s felt entirely out of her depth with him.

His smiles return that night, when she helps him built a fortress out of blankets and pillows in the living room. She holds onto that tight and tries to swallow the anxiety that rises when she slips away for a moment for call the number she’d had hidden away when “them” became more prevalent in his day-to-day.

His first session is two days out. She prays the monster under his bed leaves them by then, but she has her doubts.

Chapter Text

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Of all the booths at Pluvium Press’s yearly comic festival, you’d be remiss to skip over the gems in their new and upcoming section. I’ve been an avid fan of everything the publisher has backed in recent years, from Holt’s Gear-Dynamo to Jennings and Bart’s Vipergirl. Pluvium has been a staple of indie darlings, and this year’s lineup was no different and no less promising. I had the privilege of getting to talk to some of the press’s new cohort and get to know some of the new faces in their lineup for the first time, as well as getting to see the other highlights offered at the festival.

…

One of Pluvium’s latest and greatest creators is one Viktor Artyomov, known more under his pen name as Viktor Hargreeves. Artyomov is fresh to the scene, bringing a new kind of horror to the table with his breakout, Hell Home. The project originally started as a webcomic posted on his personal website before being picked up for a full run with Pluvium. I had the chance to talk one-on-one with him about his process and any upcoming projects.

Welles: So, we’re only three issues into Hell Home. It’s pretty early into the run—what are you looking forward to sharing with us the most?

Artyomov: Oh, wow… ah, I’d say that I’m looking forward to some of the family dynamics going forward. I think that it’s definitely one of the more fun aspects of it all.

Welles: For sure! There’s definitely a charm to the way you write the interactions between characters.

Artyomov: Believe me, they’re not as charming when you have a block going.

Welles: True that. I have to ask, do you have a favorite?

Artyomov: Probably predictable, but Clover. I think that he resonates with a lot of people—that inner kid we all have, you know?

Welles: For sure. I’m firmly in Lycan’s camp. Who doesn’t love a classic vigilante?

Artyomov: That’s the fun of it, I think. Taking what’s classic and subverting it.

Welles: Speak of classics, what’re some of your inspirations for Hell Home?

Artyomov: Oh, gosh, that’s a hard one.

Artyomov: I’d have to say some of my childhood favorites—I loved old sci-fi movies. My mom had to deal with me watching nothing but Invasion of the Body-Snatchers for a week straight when I was 12.

Welles: That’s incredible.

Artyomov: But more than anything I think I owe it to my muse. They definitely know who they are. I can’t say who it is, though.

Welles: Bit of mystery. I like it.

Unfortunately, both Viktor and I had to go separate ways after this. I can’t tell you for sure where Hell Home is going to take us, but I can confidently say I’m ready for both the journey and the destination. I wait eagerly for issue #4, on sale at local comic shops starting November 8^th.

Chapter Text

The walk to the press building is short. He likes that.

His apartment is only six blocks away, a strategic play since he still doesn’t have an American driver’s license. He doesn’t mind walks to places he needs to be, and he knows he’s got the safety net of the metro through the city if need be. He appreciates the simplicity of his routine for small things like that.

The building itself is big, all shiny glass and metal. He has his own office now that he’s there in person rather than sending things in remotely. It’s tucked away in the corner of one of the floors, the sliding door marked with his name. He feels almost insecure about how bare his desk and walls are in comparison to the other artists’, with their posters, stickers, figurines all scattered around and taking up space. It toes the line between utter chaos and the kind of lived-in only an artist can achieve, each little element representative of something meaningful. Tiny gems of inspiration tucked into their own personal corners and motivating them to keep going to spite the clutches of burnout. Or something like that, he thinks.

The new routine is easy to adjust to. Welcome, almost, with the way he’d felt aimless after unpacking his clothes and furniture. Being outside the house is better than being kept in. He knows that.

He doesn’t want to let himself forget it.

Chapter Text

Page 23

Panel one: Starboy and The Whisper hold hands in the foreground as The Doppelganger and The Crow sit in the background with their ice cream.

Panel two: The Whisper turns to Starboy.

Whisper: It’s a shame that we couldn’t stop the fire before it got to the eastern wing. Those portraits were beautiful.

Panel three: Starboy looks pensive as he continues holding her hand.

Starboy: Less casualties this way. The art doesn’t matter as much as the people in the gallery. You did incredibly.

Panel four: Crow and Doppelganger turn to look at each other.

Panel five: Crow gags dramatically. Doppelganger grins from behind his mask and playfully punches his shoulder.

…

24

Panel one: The Wanderer and The Lycan look out at the ruins of The Venhurst Gallery’s eastern wing, reduced to ashes. Only a lone frame seems to have survived the rubble, its gold tarnished.

Panel two: Wanderer steps closer, inspecting it. Lycan hangs back.

Lycan: I don’t like it. Seems like a coverup, don’t it?

Panel three: Wanderer’s eyes as they focus on the ruined painting.

Panel four: Wanderer looks up.

Wanderer: For once, I agree with the paranoia. Something sinister is afoo

She snorts from beside him as he types.

He stops dead, glancing over.

The Girl sneers back, letting herself fall back into the chair beside his desk. He hadn’t realized she was there, let alone watching him write. He hates how silently she moves around. He seriously needs to get her a bell.

She looks the same as she usually does—just about 13, long dark hair falling down her shoulders and the familiar navy uniform pressed and spotless. He notes that she’s chosen to let her dark circles be especially prominent this time. He’s grateful that she’s like this today and not like any of the other iterations he’s seen. He’s not sure if he has the emotional bandwidth for anything but Girl, classic flavor.

“’Something sinister is afoot’,” she mocks. “They really do hand out degrees to just anyone, don’t they?”

He sighs and hits save before she can do anything else. He’s too tired to deal with this right now.

“It’s a stylistic choice—”

“Stylistic? It’s trite. You’ve always been horrible at this, but wow,” she snorts, “this is a new low. I bet your editor is loving this.”

He takes a deep breath and shuts his laptop, setting it aside. There’s no way he’ll be able to work with her in one of her moods. At best, she’ll keep running her mouth and make it impossible for him to focus. At worst, she’ll act out more, and he doesn’t want to test his apartment’s insurance policy this early on into the lease.

“You know what WV says about this. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t—”

“Oh, please,” she snaps. her eyebrows furrowing and her lip curling slightly. “That works for you, because you’re functionally and emotionally a severely challenged toddler. I’m not five.”

He stares at her blankly. He almost gets a remark in about how she’s the literal child here, but he holds it in. Instead, he stands with a sigh and walks off to the kitchen. It’s best to ignore her when she’s being a brat, anyway.

The Girl watches him go and huffs. She leans back into the chair, letting her hair fall in front of her for a moment before sweeping it aside. He keeps an eye on her as he starts the kettle and gets his favorite mug out of the cabinet. She stays in place for a shockingly long amount of time, and he can see the gears turning in her head. If she were a cat, her tail would be lashing back and forth wildly. If she were a cat, he muses, she’d have clawed up everything in the apartment by now. She’d probably do the same as-is.

He waits in the silence as the water boils and is careful to take the kettle off the stove before it can whistle too much. He’s found that she hates the sound just as much, if not more, than he does, and he doesn’t want to give her another reason to throw a fit. He pours out the right amount of water for his tea and then waits.

He glances at her occasionally, just to make sure she isn’t trying to sneak up on him. She’s not a stranger to doing it, especially not when he’s around something as hazardous as hot water. WV never outright says they think she’s doing it to be malicious, but the tension is obvious. They’re not fond of The Girl, either. He takes a bitter vindication in it, even if he feels guilty when there are silences like this.

In the quiet moments, he can sometimes fool himself into seeing her in a literal sense: a gaunt teenage girl perched on WV’s chair staring at his hardwood like she’s trying to burn a hole into it with her mind.

If he were feeling generous, he’d call the look haunted. Disturbed, more likely. As much as he dislikes her, as much as he’s come to distrust everything she does and thinks and just is, some primal part of him feels the urge to reach out. Check on, console, care. He shakes the feeling out before it can fester any more.

Logically, he should’ve seen it coming. This was his first proper writing session since he’d moved into the apartment, and she was bound to bother him during it. She’s never been fond of comics, and he’s well aware that she has zero respect for art. He’s offered olive branches in the past, and nothing seemed to appease her. She hates violin, hates comics, and most of all hates anything and everything he makes. The sky is blue, water is wet, and The Girl was always going to seek him out the second he got into a rhythm with the latest draft.

He avoids looking at her entirely as he takes his tea to the plush armchair resting in the opposite corner of the living room. He settles in and goes for his phone out of habit, determined to avoid any form of interaction with her.

The Girl glares back with cold brown eyes but doesn’t react. It’s almost out of character for her.

Chapter Text

He’s still adjusting to the layout of his new apartment. He’s in that phase where it’s still entirely possible for him to turn and end up in the wrong room by mistake, and it’s moderately irritating.

He lets the particular ways the floorboards squeal underneath him help him remember where the rooms are. It’s probably the strangest way to go about it, but the sounds are distinct enough that it helps the process along. It’s not like he’s sharing the space with anyone who would find it bizarre, anyway. He’s free to do things his own way.

It still remains inconvenient, though. He ends up going into the study instead of the bathroom by mistake a few times at night when he’s got all the lights switched off, and in his tired state it frustrates him a lot more than it logically should. He prefers keeping his utility bill low, though, and elects to suffer through the confusion until the habit of going to the right room builds up enough.

On a night like tonight, though, he wishes he’d left the lights on.

He stands in the doorway of his bedroom and looks out into the hall.

An imposing figure stares back at him from down the hall, moonlight hitting their back and illuminating the outline of broad shoulders. Immediately, he knows that it isn’t WV.

He freezes like a deer in headlights, heart jumping into his throat. They stand still, staring each other down and waiting for someone to make the first move.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. It’s far from the last time it ever will, too. He knows that they’re fond of the dark, fond of hiding themself in the shadows. He knows that he can’t logically fault them for it—WV has stated before that the darkness tends to be comforting for them, after all—but he can’t deny that there’s still some primal part of him that assumes the worst whenever they show up.

Antlers, of course, doesn’t give half a shit what he thinks and continues glaring at him from across the hall. Their head shifts and the moonlight catches their eyes just right, making them gleam in the dark. He shudders subconsciously. He knows that ultimately, he’ll be alright, but he can’t help being afraid. Antlers tends to have that effect on him no matter what the context is. Things aren’t much better in daylight, when he can see the full amalgam of whatever Antlers really is.

Antlers makes a huffing noise, low and deep. They breathe heavily, a ragged gasp as if every attempt is painful, and then lower themself a bit, squaring to pounce. He jumps in place before scrambling back into his bedroom and slamming the door.

Antlers thuds against it with a vengeance, growling lowly at him from the other side. The door shudders with a few more slams before they seemingly give up, a sound somewhere between a sigh, scream, and animalistic cry leaving them before the telltale thuds of their footsteps carry down the hall. The slight click accompanying each one tells him that Antlers has elected to go on all fours. He sighs heavily, one hand resting at his chest to try and slow the jackhammering of his heart in his chest.

It's not often any of them get this… active. He wonders what he could’ve done to set them off.

Chapter Text

He starts violin at 10.

He wants to take credit for the decision, say that it was him who wanted to do it, but he knows that he didn’t choose the instrument for himself. It’s appeasement. He’d done it because of WV.

He won’t dare say a word about that to them, though. They’re so much happier now that he’s picked it up, their eyes much brighter than usual and smiles much wider. He doesn’t want to take that from them or be the cause of any distress, so he stays quiet. He just wants them to look at him the way that they did when his hand hovered over the instrument’s case for the first time, a cautious sort of hope flickering beneath the constant—and though it feels incorrect to say it—neutral smile they always give him. It doesn’t feel dissimilar to the way his mother looks at him when he does something exceptionally good or impressive.

It started because of the assembly all the children in his grade had been called into. The music program came to do a demonstration; all of the older kids sat in a neat arch with their instruments poised like weapons and him in the crowd. It was beautiful, as beautiful as a grade school performance can remotely be with the inevitable sour notes and out of tune strings. He liked the orchestra the best, though the brass had appeal to him. WV had been there the entire time, sitting poised and at attention. He almost thought they looked the way his grandfather’s hunting dogs did whenever they were barely restraining themselves from chasing after a lone, stupid rabbit that had wandered too close to the property.

He took a flyer from the band director. WV had seemed overjoyed.

Now, with the case sitting on his bed, he doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into. It’s a borrowed violin—there was no way he’d be able to have a new one of his own, and the band director had eagerly told his mother that he could take an instrument home with him so long as he joined the program. He chose violin. It was the only one WV had lingered on longer than a moment, eyes almost hungry when they did.

He's not stupid. He knows more than adults think he does, including WV. He’s recognized the same hunger in his mother’s eyes when they pass people that are her age or when they walk past the building she goes to swim at without stopping. He understands starving for something like that, even if he hasn’t felt something akin to it yet. He can see the burning that WV feels, even if he also knows they were doing the thing where they try not to lead him to a specific answer. Even then, he has a violin in his room and a sense of responsibility to it all.

He flips the latches holding the case shut and pushes the lid up, looking down at the instrument. It’s a pretty shade of brown, warm and almost amber along the body. He can see a few places where there are wear on it, the slightest chip in the wood on the left side that suggests the violin was well loved by a prior child… or tossed around haphazardly. He reaches out hesitantly to touch the bow, pulling away when his fingertips run across the horsehair for a moment. He doesn’t know why, but it makes him shiver. He can’t tell if it’s the same feeling he gets when clothes and fabric are all wrong and it makes him agitated, or something entirely new. Either way, he’s not a fan.

He plucks at one of the strings and lets the sound linger in the room for a moment. It doesn’t last long, but he tries to find something within it. Surely, there’s supposed to be a moment of recognition or some kind of spark here. That’s what WV’s reaction had led him to believe—there was supposed to be something special in violin, but instead he feels nothing. He silently wonders if this is a failure on his part. Maybe he’s too dense to see what they do, too dull to find beauty in it. Maybe, he worries, he’s done something wrong by not existing perfectly on the same wavelength. It’s entirely possible, he muses, that he can be different from WV, after all.

He's meant to start his lessons in a few days. His mother had been excited about it, telling him that he could make new friends through the orchestra and find other kids who liked music as much as he did. He didn’t want to make her upset by saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it, after all, and he desperately wants to keep the approval he’d gotten for making the choice. That terrible ache in his stomach that his therapist has described as anxiety flared up at the thought of disapproval, and he’d gotten that awful sense of repetition. He knows, somehow, that he was here before.

He keeps the complaining to a minimum and works on what the band director had shown him when he’d come in to sign up. He feels awkward as he frees the violin from its case and tries to situate it properly so the chinrest doesn’t feel incorrect, but he can’t seem to get it placed in a way that doesn’t make him feel like he’s trying to pop his shoulder out of the socket. He readjusts a few times more with a slight huff before finally getting into a position he’s comfortable with. Hesitantly, shakily, he retrieves the bow and draws it across the strings. He winces as the screechy sound that comes from it, a far cry from anything musical at all. He’s well aware that these things take time, that with practice he’ll be able to turn the sound into something even remotely classed as music, but it still wounds some pride he didn’t know he had.

He doesn’t say anything when he starts his violin lessons properly and starts going to orchestra meetings. He doesn’t complain about the way his fingertips ache as he starts to learn and swallows WV’s assurances that, with time, he’ll develop callouses that’ll make the pain lessen. He notes the wording but doesn’t open his mouth about it. He just holds onto the time that WV gives him and plays for them. It makes them happy. That’s a good thing, and it means he’s doing a good thing. They seem happiest when they can point out technique and other small things to him, even if it’s overwhelming. He can keep practicing so he’s good enough for them.

He keeps practicing in between doing his homework and making more drawings. It makes his mother happy to see him interact with other children for once, minimal as it is, and it makes WV happy to be close to music, even if they can’t touch the violin themself.

He can do this one thing, even if it doesn’t feel right. He lies to himself. It can be a compromise in his head, even if that isn’t what it is in reality. It makes the others happy. That’s what counts, right?

Chapter Text

This isn’t the first time he’s seen her.

It’s fourth period. He’s supposed to be focusing on making corrections to his essay about the allegory of the cave. He is doing anything but that, right now.

She’s standing in the hall, staring into the classroom from one of its windows. He wouldn’t question it if he hadn’t already seen her before, noticed the way she stands out just enough compared to the other students. Her uniform being off is one thing, but it’s like something about her below the surface is meant to catch his attention and make everything else fade away. It’s that same tunnel vision feeling, where all he can see is one thing.

She’s smiling at him. She isn’t like WV—they always smile at him, rarely breaking it unless something is incredibly wrong or he’s upset them somehow. He’s seen her emote on the full spectrum, though it seems that she slides between extremes with ease. One moment, she’ll smile at him like she’s in on a joke that he will never understand, the next she’s glaring at him the way an owl watches an unsuspecting field mouse. He doesn’t like the way that she looks at him, ever. Not even when she seems to be in a rare good mood.

He tries to ignore her, focus on the notebook paper in front of him. His hands shake slightly and he tries to force himself to do the eight-count breaths his therapist has had him practicing. If he ignores her, she’ll go away. She isn’t real, anyway. She’s imaginary. He repeats the affirmations over and over again to try to make them sound like truth.

She moves closer, stalking, almost. While WV seems to glide room to room, seamless and elegant, and Antlers seems to stampede from place to place like a wild animal, she seems to move with a sense of deliberation too refined for his liking. She doesn’t move like a person, she moves like the concept of a hunter given form. She isn’t poised, and she isn’t an animal about it. She’s some terrifying in-between, and it makes him all the more nervous. He doesn’t know what she’s capable of or what she even wants from him.

He keeps repeating the mantras in his head. He feels a little like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, chanting desperately over and over about how he wants to go home. Unfortunately, he knows that this isn’t a dream he can wake up from or some sweet fantasy land he’s lost in. He almost wishes that it all operated on that logic. He’d relish the idea of tossing a bucket of rainwater onto her and Antlers and watching them melt away. He doesn’t think he’d mind talking animals, either.

He flinches when she moves to stand over him. She doesn’t say anything as he keeps shakily revising, trying so hard not to look up and give in to her. She watches in silence for a moment, contemplative.

She slams her hand into the back of his head and makes his nose smack into the wood of the desk. He grimaces in pain and lifts his head back up, one hand moving up to gingerly assess the damage. She puts her hand back in place and forces his head down, lowering herself slightly to meet his eyes.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it. They all think you’re crazy, anyway.”

He stays still, heart jackrabbiting in his chest. She’s right.

Of course she’s right.

Chapter Text

The three of them don’t get along, even on the best of days.

He probably should say four, but he doesn’t feel like he should include himself in the group of them. He’s always been the outsider, somehow the oddball despite the fact that he’s the normal, tangible, real one out of them. He doesn’t entirely want to be involved, either, since two of them aren’t above actual violence to prove their points and make their discontent known.

Antlers has settled into the new apartment, finally. They like to wander into the corners and closets of it, curling up tight in spaces that are far too small. He can’t find it in him to complain when it seems to be the only thing that keeps them wholly sated. He can survive a few unintentional jump scares if it reduces their activity around the house, even if he can never understand the appeal of cramming into a tiny closet or underneath a bed. The thought makes his skin crawl. The only other thing they’ve done of note is leer at the house sparrows roosting outside the windows, but he isn’t terribly shocked. They're noisy little things, and he’d be annoyed at the constant chirping if he didn’t tune it out in the mornings. Antlers seems either incapable of doing so or so determined to unnerve the birds despite being invisible to the world at large that they don’t let up on it. That is, when they venture out of their hidey-holes scattered around the apartment.

Girl is… Girl. She’s still a jackass. She’s gnawed through his drawing tablet cord in an attempt to force him to interact with her, woken him up in the middle of the night for fun, and gotten up to her usual brand of awful. He isn’t shocked. He tries to stifle the slightest bit of sympathy that tries to bloom in his chest for her when he recognizes some of the behaviors as obvious signs of stress—it’s uncanny to recognize his own nervous habits reflected in her perfectly. He has to restrain himself from worrying over her like his mother did him when he sees her digging her nails into her arms or very obviously biting too hard into her cheek. She’s made it obvious that she doesn’t appreciate fawning. He hates that he has to remind himself, rather than just knowing it intrinsically.

WV takes it the best. Of course they do. They’re the one who encouraged him to move when he’d mentioned wanting to be closer to the press’s headquarters for work, so obviously they’d be fine with it. He appreciates the routine they share, drafting sessions spent with his muse comforting while the others still process the change. He knows that they try to keep the peace, but WV is only one person. They do enough trying to reign in the others for him. He has to try and man up enough to handle it himself at some point.

“You’re a pretentious fuckwad, is what.”

He looks away from the window he’d been staring out of at the sound of her voice. He sighs and decides to step out and see what’s going on now.

“You Forget Yourself,” WV responds. When he steps out into the living room, he sees that they’re perched in the chair beside his desk while the Girl glares at them from the entryway to the kitchen.

“Oh, yeah, I forget,” she sneers. “God forbid one of us is actually honest around here. You’re too busy watching over ickle baby Viktor to face the facts.”

His expression goes flat immediately. Of course he’s getting dragged into it.

“I Don’t Appreciate The Insinuation.”

Girl leans against the doorway, rolling her eyes. “What, does he have you feeling for him, now? Can’t even handle getting his precious feelings hurt?”

“I’m right here,” he deadpans.

She looks at him, feigning shock and wide eyes. “Wow. You can still talk. I really thought that they’d be doing that for you, too, since you’re such a spineless, pathetic—”

WV stands, gaze hardening and any trace of humor leaving them at once. “Enough.”

It takes a moment to register, but he shivers as the room drops in temperature. That’s one of the few things he doesn’t like about WV, but he knows that it isn’t a conscious choice. He just wishes that it didn’t make his utility bill steeper.

She practically snarls before schooling her expression. “Fine. Whatever. Defend him. See if I care.”

She turns and stomps into the kitchen. He knows that if he turns to look for her, she’ll be gone. He still doesn’t perfectly understand how the three of them operate, but he’s familiar enough with her to know that she has a flair for the dramatic and loves making her exits like that. She looks like a teenager. It makes sense enough, if you ignore literally every other aspect of how insane it sounds.

He turns to look at WV. They meet his eyes and the annoyance fades out of them, returning to the gleam he’s usually met with.

“This Will Pass,” they offer. He nods and tries to believe it.

Chapter Text

He’s not sure when he starts writing the story.

It starts like this: there is a family. The father is not kind. The mother is not real. The children are all broken in ways they cannot understand, nor can anyone attempt to chart out clearly. They have gifts that nobody can understand, and there is something miraculous in their existence. There is a boy in that family named Clover, and he is not special.

He isn’t sure where it comes from. It starts as a series of daydreams he comes up with during the most boring bits of class—he’s always been prone to wandering, but this time it has slightly more structure. It creeps up on him slowly, and before he knows it, his aimless doodles in the margins of his notes have direction. Drive. Form that he didn’t know existed in his imagination.

He draws Clover first. He’s small. Sad. Cloaked in too-big sweaters and constantly hiding behind messy bangs. It’s obvious to him that it’s a self-insert, but there’s also something below the surface Clover has that he doesn’t. He keeps drawing him.

The other characters come into his mind the same way Clover did, sudden and almost demanding. Soon his notes are entirely vandalized and he moves onto the sketchbook his mother had gotten him as a birthday present. The usual guilt he feels at filling the pages leaves him briefly as he sketches out the shapes of each one, too absorbed in the task to beat himself up about “wasting” the expensive paper.

WV watches from a distance, intentional to not interrupt him or influence anything. Girl joins them not long afterward, also observant. They don’t speak, just watch as the drawings slowly become more and more familiar to the two of them.

Neither says a word to him about the things he’s drawn up in his head. They just keep watch and hold their breath.

Chapter Text

He learns to hide the wounds they leave him with quickly.

It’s one thing when it’s something he’s done unintentionally—blunt nails or sore fingers can be passed off with only moderate concern, since his mother and therapist are accustomed to them. The scratches and bruises that Girl or Antlers leave him with when they’re in particularly bad moods are much more difficult to explain away. He learns how to hide things properly from them, an unintentional lesson that serves him well.

It helps him with the rules. At least, he calls them rules. At some point, he gets a strange determination about him to try and catalog it all in a notebook, writing down anything that seems like it’s of enough note or consistency to fall into the unspoken rules between the four of them.

There are some consistent rules, like the fact that nobody else has ever seen one of them, even when they’re wandering beside him in public like WV does or weaving through crowds to claw at him like the Girl. No matter what, they’re intangible to everyone else. That, or they choose to be. Nobody else has ever been touched by one of them or reacted when brushed past, and it leads him to believe that there’s either something wrong with him or a conscious choice by the others to only ever touch him, to only ever hurt him. He thinks it resembles a ghost story. They’re attached to him, part of him, maybe, and only impact him directly.

The rub of it is that he’s seen Antlers and Girl interact with things that aren’t him but also aren’t other people. She’s shoved breakable things like glasses or pottery off of shelves to get him in trouble before, though it seems to take more effort for her to do it than it would him. She’s also been able to grab at him harsh enough to bruise—and he knows the bruises are real, considering the way his mother had reacted when he made the mistake of letting his sweater sleeves roll up too much—but he doesn’t know if it takes effort for her to do it the same way it does to reach out and touch the more real, tangible aspects of the world. Antlers is similar, though they have a tendency to interact with doors and windows more than objects.

WV is the outlier.

They don’t touch anything, and they rarely touch him. He could confidently list off the times that they’ve actually made contact with him, and he knows it isn’t the sort of thing that would leave him easily. WV’s touch is like ice, but that description feels lackluster to describe what it actually is. It feels closer to the time he’d needed a tooth extracted and the resulting sudden rush of Novocaine in his jaw, how it’d felt like ice filling in cracks he didn’t know he had and expanding. He remembers reading something about that in science class, water’s tendency to erode no matter what form it’s in.

Their touch is rare. Conditional, maybe. He’s held their hand the most, and he wouldn’t dare think of doing the same with Antlers or Girl. He muses that it may be because they’ve known him the longest and had the most amount of time to warm up to him and tolerate the things about him the others seem to hate. The memories are hazy, but he knows that WV has been there since he was small. He can remember rare instances of cold hands lifting him upright when he stumbled or gently clasping his tiny fingers after he begged for something to cling to. It’s become rarer as he gets bigger, and there’s almost no reasoning behind when they do it now. He tries to figure it out in his notebook with a chart, but finds it pointless after he ends up with a nightmarish amount of columns.

What confuses him most is their hesitance to interact with objects, considering the way they look at his school violin. They use the same terms as his teachers, gently correct posture and technique with what sounds like experience. If they are indeed a ghost, he assumes they must’ve been a musician in life. That, or some kind of teacher. They hesitantly reach out at times in attempts to correct him before pulling back. It makes him wonder if they avoid touching the instrument on purpose, or if it’s a sort of resignation towards even attempting. It feels wrong to ask them outright, and he’s never seen them attempt to touch anything else, so he cautiously assumes the latter.

He keeps his observations to himself. The notebook stays hidden in his backpack at all times, away from where the others will bother with it or his mother will find it by accident. He writes in it for months, recording everything diligently in an attempt to understand it all. He does what his therapist suggests when something makes him anxious—identifies, catalogs, and then tries to find the different conclusions while making sure to avoid catastrophizing. He doesn’t find much success in trying to explain the three of them that way, since they don’t seem to care about the rules of their own existences nearly as much as he does.

It's an anxiety that he can’t explain to anyone, since there’s no way to explain that he has three ghosts or two parasites or something so very, very wrong with him that makes him see people that may or may not exist without sounding utterly deranged. He wonders idly if he made them up in his head most days, if they’re the byproduct of something worse.

[He struggles with this thought excessively, even when he is years older and deeper into therapy than his teenaged self ever was.]

He tries not to stress himself out over it too much. His therapist has tried (and mostly failed) to dissuade him from assuming blame for factors out of his control, but he feels compelled to take the fall for the things that feel abstract and is literally forced to assume blame whenever the others act out. Part of him thinks it’s fair enough, since nobody else can see them and somebody ought to clean up the mess. Guilt by association exists for a reason, and he’s the only person in the world that can be associated with Girl or Antlers or WV. Still, part of him thinks the entire thing is a mess he never asked to be part of, but he’s still aware of how his hands are stained, even if it isn’t as much as theirs.

He knows better now than to raise the alarm about the things they do. He can hide bruises beneath layers of clothes—in fact, he can hide more than that, and it satisfies something in him—and he can hide dark circles from a lack of sleep behind makeup. He doesn’t enjoy doing it, but it’s one of the few things that WV can offer him outside of violin lessons. He adds a note about it to the rest of them. It might explain the constant dark rings surrounding WV’s eyes, or they may be wholly unrelated. He tries not to focus on the way WV seems almost relieved when he comes to them with questions about foundation or eyeshadow or whatever else he needs to know to hide something. He thinks of it as another good thing that he’s doing, another way to bond with them that isn’t centered around music.

They see it as an indirect mercy, though they don’t tell him that.

He keeps his notebook safe at all costs and keeps writing things down so he’ll remember. It’s the first big secret he manages to keep from all of them. Even WV.

Chapter Text

The halls are lonely. They’re lined with portraits of people that are long dead and adorned with animals that are much more tangibly gone. Clover hates this place. He has been here his whole life. He doesn’t know anything else.

The halls of their apartment complex are long and run-down, half of the floorboards starting to rot and the rest stained. The sconces along the middle barely function on the better end of the spectrum and have long-dead lightbulbs with a coating of dust along their tops on the worse end. Viktor does not hate this place, because his mother is here. He has known other places, but none as well as this.

Clover has five brothers and one sister. They are all special. He is not. He was born on accident.

Viktor has no siblings. His mother didn’t even plan on having him, but she never tells him that. He figures it out by himself once he’s old enough. He knows he is not special.

Clover plays violin. He is good at it. He enjoys it.

Viktor plays violin. He is average. He cannot discern if what he feels for the instrument is hatred, resignation, or neutrality.

Clover leaves his home when he becomes an adult. He does it because he cannot stand the way the hallways suffocate him and the way his father looks at him. He misses his mother. He misses the way he felt connection to his siblings when they were young. He misses his father’s other creations, outwardly as monstrous as his children were on the inside.

Viktor leaves home after the funeral. His grandparents invite him to stay with them. He cannot stand the sadness in their eyes. He writes back to his publisher and takes the position they offered at their headquarters in America despite how afraid he feels to do so.

Clover is too trusting. It gets him hurt.

Viktor knows better than to trust charming strangers. The others remind him every time he meets someone new. It’s the one thing he trusts all of them to be genuine about, with the desperation in their eyes as they urge him to pull away from anyone new. He listens. They know better. He wants to avoid whatever scares them.

Clover falls in love twice. Both of his lovers eat him alive, consuming all that he can give them and leaving nothing of him in their wake. The first tears him to shreds with delight and takes great interest in all of the things he’s hidden and had hidden deep inside of him. The second devours him whole but does it sweetly, eating him away until something new is left, instead. He longs for the feeling of her teeth around his throat, and he longs for the venom of the first—the fever it brings on is preferable to being cold in the first place.

Viktor doesn’t fall in love, at least not with people. He’s too lost in his art to find time for somebody else, even if he wishes he weren’t so lonely. He doubts he could form a lasting relationship, anyway, what with the others causing trouble even on the days they’re calmer.

Clover loves his sister, even if the love itself is flawed.

Viktor has never had a sister. He will never have a sister.

Clover is a jealous animal under the façade. Don’t let him fool you.

Viktor doesn’t think he’s a jealous person. He doesn’t remember writing that in his notes on Clover.

Clover is always the bomb. He knows he’s the bomb.

Viktor isn’t a bomb. Who wrote this?

Clover ought to know better and know by now that this is all his fault.

I didn’t write that. Someone’s been tampering with my notes, or—

You’ve been here before.

Have I?