Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In a little, pink house on a lonely hill in the exact middle of Nowhere, there live an indeterminate amount of people. 

Actually... 'live' is perhaps too strong, too definite a word for whatever resides behind the pastel plaster; they smile, they laugh, they scream, they bleed, but live? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Certainly they wouldn't know the difference.

Though, I suppose, if we are to be pedantic about such things, 'people' is just as inaccurate a term as 'live'. Maybe it is better to say 'residents'... though, if we were to drop all niceties, 'prisoners' would be just as elucidating. They don't know it—though what they 'know' precisely changes hour to hour, quick as cloud—and it is not true for all the things inside, but 'prisoners' is exact enough to be generally damning. 

In four of the rooms—two upstairs, two down—there are three residents who content themselves with the impression that this constitutes the whole house. Sometimes there will be other rooms, with other 'people' 'living' in them, and occasionally one of these three will venture up to visit these others, though never more than one at once. And the one that goes never remembers the faces of the things they meet, or their voices, though they will always keep the words. They echo about the insides of their skulls in the dark spaces between sleep and dreams and tease to life transparent flames of fear that dance coldly over their brains, full of things they can never know anything about except that they should be mortally afraid.

There's three of them. There has always and will always be three of them. It was the nature of their creation for there to be three of them.

One of them is a woven thing made out of red yarn and redder flesh parts. It is blood turned in to string and knitted in to the shape of an adult human, though nothing like a man at all. It hasn't got any bones, for one thing—just flesh and wool that operate on a system that's strictly situational. On top of its head sit two eyes the size, shape, and, oddly enough, consistency of ping-pong balls, with raised dimples for pupils. Most of the time, he doesn't have a mouth—which has no bearing on its ability to speak—but on the rare occasions when it does decide to manifest such a thing, it does so without any regard for the generally accepted composition of mouths; all the teeth are on the outside, the jaw mechanism incapable of movement, no tongue, no throat beyond the knifing grid of bones. 

(Somewhere far away—or maybe just next door—there is a basement filled to the brim with bones, all stacked in neat towers high as the ceiling, their creamy ochre full of holes. No two come from the same body and so the room has a thousand voices in it when the towers speak. 'Count us,' they say beseechingly, and once you've started you never leave. There will always be more bones.)

Another of them looks a little like a person, if a person could also be both a pig and a frog, with their skin perfectly smooth and regular and their round, bulbous nose rising seamlessly from their cheeks like a bobbing apple. It's flesh is saffron and sunlight and chillingly cold, like that of a fish or corpse. The eyes in its face never focus and seem to have taken a disliking to each other if the infrequency with which they face the same direction is anything to go by; there's something globular and gelatinous about them that's woefully reminiscent of frogspawn. If it has brains in its head they are not its own, but whose mind is truly their own anyway?

(Looking in the mirror reveals an unsmiling head. It looks like you, but it isn't and will wander off quite without your regard. 'You know these lines. You know these roles. The only way to win the game is to learn the rules.’  That is what it would say. But it is only a face, not a voice, and so it goes ignored.)

The last of the tenants in the little pink house is a birdlike thing, or a perhaps a thing-like bird, one of the two. It's a fastidious abomination, tweed blazer over midnight green feathers, over thin flesh, over hollow bones. Unlike the other two, there's nothing endemically human about this one, nothing more than the clothes and bipedalism. Sometimes it has guts, sometimes it doesn't—it knows the difference but doesn't know why such a thing would happen or which it will wake up to. When it speaks (and it does often) it's voice is a torn note put through an industrial fan; there's an ever present hint of the whine at the heart of a cyclone put through a modulator at the behest of those curious to know what the rain says.

('I'm afraid,' says the rain. 'I'm so dreadfully afraid.' And the people watching cheer and hug each other because they have made the elements talk and that is something gods only dream of.)

There are always three of them, but not always the same three, though they ever look unchanged. It's not the bodies that change, which complicates the matter of 'who's who when?' considerably. Another mind in the old body, slipped inside the skin as easily as a hand in to a glove, new memories filling out the spaces in whoever's brain is housing the new ghost. Every day brings a new dawn to the little, pink house, and a new iteration of its tenants slipping softly in to place behind their masks. New memories papering over the old, the mind growing frailer under the weight of things it knows exist but cannot see, the space for the spirit inhabiting it getting cramped in confines made increasingly small, increment by increment. Like madmen in a sorcerer's library, they read the writing scrawled across the walls, hold scraps of paper to candle light, and contort themselves in to horrific shapes to fit down passages that grow narrower by the day. They warp until their bones forget the shapes they were supposed to take, until their flesh melts beyond any hope of recognition or understanding.

What they were at the beginning they no longer are and would not remember how to be.

If they have names the version of them that remembers has long since died. If they have ever tried to ascribe names to each other, they have long since been killed for the presumption. 

They never leave the house... except for when they do, and then they are gone for hours, days, or years, to anywhere imaginable and a couple of places that aren't. They cannot go outside the house... except for the days when they do, and then the sun is hot and blinding, and the grass is made of needles, and the horizon is a wall they can reach out and touch. Nothing ever comes to the house... or at least, nothing ever comes to the door.

The residents cannot remember their yesterday. Though their yesterday's certainly remember them.

It is very difficult to talk definitively about the little pink house on the hill. Maybe it is better to not talk about it at all. 

Chapter Text

"There's something... wrong," said the voice in the dark. The room they were in was supposed to be the kitchen, but it was undecided, in the dark, as to whether or not it would commit to that reality, so the two figures sat on uncomfortable chairs at a hard, wooden table could be doing so in any potential room in their house. If either had paid attention to the corners of their eyes the would have noticed, at intervals, their beds in the corners; the bathtub by the window, iced with bubbles, tap on but never growing full; the window moving lazily about on the wall with a monotonous nonchalance like a screensaver; the trees from outside springing up wth a forest-like profuseness, the branches still waving in a non-existent breeze, birdsong, faint and fragile, caught by the twigs. They didn't notice it, which is to say they knew better than to notice it. To notice these things would be to invite further grotesquerie the way swatting a fly on a beehive invites a swarm. Each of the figures at the table was alternating between looking very determinedly in to their companion's eyes and watching their hands where they lay on the tabletop as though they expected them to do something.

Both had been sat there for a while. These were the first words spoken between them in hours.

Red Thing looked up from his study of Duck Thing's hands to where his eyes hung in the dark shape of his head. There was something in them that was damp and dismally pleading, but something else that was fierce and sharp as briars. 'There's something wrong'; it was one of his friend's favourite things to say. A good day was when he could explain what he thought was wrong—a bad day was when he wouldn't stop saying it.

At some point, Red Thing would have to ask what his friend thought was wrong and open himself up to the possibility of an answer. But not yet. Not this second, or this one, or this—and if he put it off long enough, maybe whatever was wrong would quietly set itself to rights again.

Nestled in the meat of his heart was the honest knowledge that the Crow Creature was right. Something was wrong—something was always wrong in that house, and if it wasn't the bricks and mortar it was the people.

"Is that why you didn't go to bed?" Red Thing finally asked, brokering a deal between the stretching silence and his desire to have a quiet night. The sharp thing in Duck's eyes dipped and wavered, shot through with a spasm of turmoil like a wave rocking a little boat. He was very much a little boat, half-drowned by waves, storm-lashed, surrounded on all sides by a sky and sea prone to swapping places, too stubborn to be swallowed by the waves. But there were no hands aboard, and no lifeboats; just the stuttering of yellow light through portholes and the staccato call of an S.O.S. receiver tolling its fruitless message over airwaves as empty as the sea. 

A sinking boat with no one coming. When he went, it would be as though he had never existed to the ocean at all.

"My insides don't feel right," Duck Thing confessed after a moment's pause, and Red felt something in him sag guiltily in relief. An internal wrong-thing, a thing related solely to the Duck, a thing that would not come to life with some violent demonstration if he ignored it. He could head to bed himself now, join the Yellow One upstairs in a slumber the monsters couldn't touch. Leaving wouldn't result in some sort of obscure and vicious punishment. The Feathery Thing could fend for itself while Red got some rest.

Instead he sat at the table, and the silence lapsed back over them with the cool finality of the tide coming in. The thought of leaving wouldn't really occur to him until later.

Phantom pains of all the abuse their bodies had remembered while their minds became forgetful were common. Flesh was not to be made half as remiss as thoughts and their bones were prone to telling stories in a harsh grind of a voice about all the things they had been through without their knowledge—this day the tale of how all the meat got scraped from their leg, the next the parable of the boy who lost his lungs. They each had a hundred torments to their name and not everything could be convinced to go away by whatever strictures of magic or madness were holding them in place.

Red Thing had his own list of ways his flesh had failed him without reason or explanation. His head would flare with agony—worse than any migraine or headache, worse than anything offered by any brutality sustained at his mentor's hands—and, when he looked in the mirror, he wouldn't be met by the anticipated sight of his own face; above the neck, there was a void, and a gory mess dribbled down his chest, blood, bone, and brain all glistening wetly. On those days, his thoughts would appear so suddenly and disappear so completely, it was impossible to think at all.

"What happened to them?" Was what he said instead of walking away and the Crow Creature made a noise both a huff and a scoff.

"That's a stupid question," he snapped, his reliable temper, ever-ready, flaring to life with a spark that was almost relief. "I don't know. If I knew, they'd stop feeling wrong." The flame flickered and died with a wince; Duck, with a petulant twist of his rubbery beak, folded forwards until his chin was resting on the table, arms squeezing convulsively around his stomach. "They do this to spite me."

Discomfort tugged at a strand in Red Thing's consciousness like a knot in his head threads, with the condition that he was unable to untangle it or ease the itchy ache of tension in any way. The desire to help was as intense as it was futile.

Nothing was sacred in that house, not possession, not feeling, not flesh. Everything could be broken and so, in time, everything was, piece by piece. Fragmentary people hoarded their scraps with a certain flavour of desperation and despair, bits of themselves and their friends held tight even as they recognise there are things missing or broken beyond repair; protecting anything was doomed to failure, but perhaps people most of all. Red Thing couldn't remember much but, in some fold of his mind too deep for probing, he knew it had been years since he'd gone a day without seeing his friends injured.

He couldn't mend their wounds. He couldn't take the pain away. He could never stop the lessons.

Instead, he took a shallow breath, and with it the burn of his compassion, anger at his helplessness—at their complacency and complicity—and the selfish fear that something similar could happen to him if he stayed in proximity to pain for too long, and he did his best to let them go. It left him feeling both empty and full of screams. 

Their world was nothing more than a ceaseless, unquantifiable Now, proceeding apace with This Day, This Day, This, This, This without regard for past or future. The minds of the little trio were open bags on a sprinter’s back, spilling their contents in shudders and, at the end of the track, the runner would return the way they had come, carelessly plucking the things that immediately caught their eye off the floor—sometimes things lost during that run, sometimes things lost long before—and toss the oddments of memory back in the bag, mud-splattered and meaningless. 

It was evening, the end of the run. ‘Now’ was the time of collecting in their ragged scraps, their fragmentary thoughts and composure, piecing together the jagged ends of the day with patches of tomorrow and last week. By 'tomorrow', this night spent at a kitchen table in the park would be nothing more than a bitter pall over his conscious mind, leaving only the greasy bitterness of things gone beyond his power to change.

"Why are you awake?" The Crow-Like Thing asked before the quiet emptiness of fruitless feelings could solidify too much, a dismal bite to the curiosity. He was miserable; he wasn't necessarily hoping the other was lingering out of some secret sorrow too, but he certainly wouldn't have been opposed to such company. Made Of String shrugged in the dark, waited a few seconds for the atmosphere of expectance to subside, then realised The Duck couldn't see him in the pitch.

"Don't know." It seemed too small a reason once outside his head. "I was just... thinking, I guess."

"Not too hard, I hope?" Duck snarked from the level of cups and plates. "I feel rotten enough as it is."

His tone was warning and, however much the threat was diminished by the small stature of its issuer, the events it was cautioning against were dire enough to overshadow any mitigation met along the way. It irked and unnerved in equal measure, but it was far easier to feel anger than fear.

There was an art to thinking, just as there is artistry in everything either difficulty or dangerous, and this was a trade in that house well learned. Any exercise or outing of the mind was a game of whack-a-mole where the threat could appear at any time from all angles, the ceiling and floor included. All industry of thought was temptation, blood in the water for something to take notice of one casual irregularity, one misstep of imagination, one wandering idea, and then a teacher would be sent to explain the matter in torturous detail. 

"I know how to think, leave it alone. And it's not exactly thinking, anyway, it's more like listening." Duck Thing blinked so Red elaborated. "If I try and think about quiet—not, like, the word or anything, just... not-noisiness—I can hear other things. Old things."

"Well that just sounds like inviting trouble with extra steps." Duck Thing's voice was harsh and dismissive, but the look he slid his companion across the table was filled with a circumspect curiosity narrow as flint. "What sort of things can you listen to?"

Screaming, mostly. Echoing, thin screams, scraped frail by endurance, in voices he recognised, and, blind, he felt them out in his mind like a tailor assessing a length of cloth; sometimes they spiralled out in reams for hours, other times they cut off short with gurgles and chokes that caught against his fingers like a frayed seam, and sometimes there were gaps, moth-eaten holes, full of gasping and whimpers. He knew the voices; he knew them as well as he knew his own.

There was a blood-bright strand of spite in him that came to life in a taste of iron to demand that he tell Duck Thing precisely what he could hear, but it was a meaningless cruelty. For now, there was peace of a fashion, solidarity at this table in the dark, and there was nothing to gain by ruining it but the momentary pleasure of watching those two eyes widen in the face he couldn't see when he said 'I hear you—you and The Other One. I hear you in agony, I hear you wailing like tortured cats. I hear you begging 'stop' and nobody listening. I hear your past and your future.

'I hear what happened to your organs.'

No. Nothing to be gained from that, not on this night. Perhaps some other time, after the Feathery One had been sufficiently aggravating after the agony of a long day. When the guilt of snapping would be tempered by exhaustion and apathy, when he could bury his face in his blankets and not look at the hurt he knew would light up those accusing eyes.

"I can hear us," he says instead, focusing on the soft strands of softer voices. "The three of us. We're just... talking. We're waiting for a show to start but we die before it does. And then I'm in an office full of guys with my face—I'm singing them a song but they hate it so much they unravel the universe to get away. Then there's a picnic made of raw chicken, and it's bleeding, and growing feathers. I'm speaking to someone on the phone, but I keep waking up in bed covered in scales. I'm outside looking up at the moon and absolutely nothing is happening anywhere in the world. Like it all just... stopped working so that I could see the sky..." 

"Oh." The Duck Thing nodded with an expression of thoughtful investment, his tone identical to that of a person listening to the mildly interesting but quotidian matters of a housemate's day. "I had a dream like that once. I have it quite a lot actually."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I'm in an forest made of gold and amber, and black trees and white ground. It's so cold I feel like I'm dying—" (the 'again' was swallowed.) "—when I try to move, I can't pass through these beams of light. But I need to get through; I'm supposed to be looking for something, I think. Maybe someone. Oh, I don't know. Wherever I go, the trees crumple like they're made out of paper, and I'm tearing the whole forest down searching... by the time I'm done, the forest is just... just pieces on the ground. And I'm trapped there by the sunlight.

"There are people in the distance. I think they might have been the ones I was looking for. But it doesn't matter any more—the sun is setting, you see. I... I know something dreadful is going to happen when it's gone. That... that I've ruined everything by not staying where I was supposed to. And I can't move so I just... stand there and wait for it to end."

"That's nothing at all like what I said I was thinking about."

"Well, that's my version. Get your own."

"... I have, that's what started—"

"Don't interrupt me!" Crow Thing had a voice that was grating at the best of times, but rose in agitation to something absolutely unbearable, wavering and synthetic in his throat.

And it was irrational, but so was everything in that world where things happened suddenly or not at all; hatred like boiling poison in a cartoon filled up all the hollow places in Red's body, all the little nooks between his organs, until there was no room left for thought or breathing. That place had worn his mind down to the quick, down to blood-wet bones, to white nerves raw and chill as frost. He loved his friends, loved them dearly, but that love was an island in a mercurial sea that thrashed and raged without repentance or discrimination. It's waters ate up the shores and drowned whatever sparse villages had eked out a living there leaving the rocks barren, and until the tides again subsided there would be only swirling oceans of spite. And Feathers, most of all, knew how to set his temper flaring like a candle given a breath of fresh, pure air.

Before he could think or speak, before he could do anything more than feel the awful pressure of that vile anger giving way to directionless hate, Red had reached over the table, the edge of it pressing coldly in to his knee, his crimson fist around the Bird Thing's throat. They were close enough for him to finally see the details of the other's face, the ruffled green feathers and the slimy, pale workings of his throat as he opened his mouth to gasp.

Good, said the ugly look in those sharp eyes and the slight upward turn of his mouth, I know this game, I know these rules. I know you hate me and that makes all of this okay. It's okay. It was alright, if they hated each other for now. In a world of things that would rise in up ruin and monstrosity at the slightest provocation, it was safe to hate each other, and lashing out at that safe quarter was as simple and liberating as punching a wall that screamed. It was being surrounded on all sides but one by walls of broken glass and raging disorder, and driving fists in to the fourth wall's plain, stoic face in the futile hope that it could be driven back for sake of just an inch more breathing room. With magpie vivacity, the Crow-like Thing would pluck out Red's eyes, his teeth, pluck the strings from his head by their bloodied roots, and in return Red would break the other's frail bones in to shards.

(And afterwards, when they'd beaten each other bloody, they would pick themselves off the floor, lean on each other on the way up to the bathroom. They would help each other scrub blood from feathers and felt, their hands so very gentle now that their violence had been sapped away by flesh. When they, at last, dragged themselves slowly to bed, it was with the bandages the other had put there wrapped snug and careful, soft enough that they could scarcely feel the injuries. The house, the teachers... they would never offer the same.)

The Feathery One grinned up at him, ghastly in the dark, the toothy spurs in his beak wet with saliva, his eyes glassy and empty with anticipation. His body, suspended by Red, was absolutely limp, but the taller could feel the thready hammer of his pulse beat quick and joyful against his palm. Make it make sense, it said, make the pain make sense and then make it go away. And Red was about to... there would be such relief in vicious abandon, if he just—

Then a thud from upstairs, hard and sudden as a falling body.

Both combatants froze with identical flinches. Slowly, they inclined their gaze to the ceiling, which was unobtrusively blank as winter sky, with the same potential for impetuous, nonsensical violence. Nothing happened, which is to say that Nothing was an event that dragged out in seconds as torturous as days.

"It's just the Other One. He's probably wondering where we are," Red Thing finally ventured. He had a measured voice, but this came out just a touch too level, a touch to certain to be soothing. He said it as though it was something that had to be true rather than something that was.

"Yes," the Duck quivered, voice higher and thinner than ever, full of faux cheer that tasted of terror. "Yes of course. We really shouldn't keep him waiting."

Neither of them moved. It occurred to Red that he was still holding his friend by his throat. Slowly, stiffly, String Beast lowered the Crow-like Thing back in to his chair, where he curled his limbs in to his chest and cast nervously about the darkened room as though he expected the shadows to make an attempt at thieving them from him. All desire to hit him was gone, replaced with an urge to pick him up and run.

"You don't think we'll have... Company tonight, do you?" The Duck whispered, eying the everything distrustfully.

"I've not been thinking that hard." Not hard enough to invite anything. "We should probably go upstairs anyway—at least we know what's up there." Though he probably shouldn't have admitted to not knowing what was in the kitchen. Without looking—he didn't need to look; he knew where the other's hand was as well as he knew where his own sat at the end of his arm—Red meshed their fingers together. The feathers tickled the spaces in between the digits. "You don't usually stay up like this anyway."

"It is getting late," the Bird Thing agreed happily, eyes flickering from shadow to shadow with a hysterical fear glimmering there like tears. "Yes, yes let's go upstairs!"

Their retreat upstairs was as hasty as it was quiet, eyes closed as they stumbled up the stairs by virtue of memory, counting to twelve so that they wouldn't be tricked in to going up any more in the dark as the house shifted and stretched. The bedroom was the second door, warm under the Yarn Man's hand as he fumbled the handle open, the air within downy with sleep, heavy as poppy smoke. Sleepy mumbles came from one corner, the Yellow Thing mumbling gently in doze, making no more sense at rest than he did waking. Red and Feathers parted with the careful, awkward air of people who hadn't been aware of holding on to each other.

They dressed in the dark—or rather, Made Of String dressed, while Crow-like changed in to his pyjamas—moving quiet and careful so as to not wake the Little One.

Despite the heavy atmosphere, there was no rest or respite to be found in the bedroom. Lying on his back, String Thing scoured the ceiling for some divination whose purpose and place he couldn't determine—this was made difficult to the point of futile by the fact that the ceiling was smooth and helpful as butter. Instead, it's complete uniformity offered ample opportunity for his bored mind to open itself like a flower to whatever muted stimuli the room had to offer, and with the other occupier asleep, the only disturbance was Duck. From his corner came the restless flutter of shifting feathers and heavy scuffling of sheets as the bird tossed and turned in queasy agitation, occasionally letting out a thin mewl as he struggled from one side of his bed to the other. His guts were still decidedly Not In Him.

Red waited. He knew better than to offer—he had to, because the Bird Thing wouldn't know better than to argue if he did.

Finally there was a sigh, heavy as lead, and an aching rattle of springs; a presence slid in to the corner of String Beast's eyes muttering something in the spirit of 'move you oaf'. Wordlessly he lifted the cover and let the shadow slip in between his arms.

He folded his arms around the intruder in his bed and was reminded that the other was small. The smallest of the three. He was bird-like in ever sense of the word, with a jumble of boxy, awkward avian bones, thin and hollow, jutting from beneath skin bristling with viridian feathers so dark they were almost black. Their volume gave him bulk, but the actual body hidden underneath was a bony, little thing. The Crow Thing curled itself in to a ball, webbed feet digging slightly in to String Beast's stomach, head tucked under the nebulous plane of Red's chin, beak poking him in the clavicle. Holding him was slightly uncomfortable, with his odd angles sticking out in to anything soft and his feathers tickling every time he breathed.

Much like leaving, letting him go wouldn't occur to Red until much later, and even then there would be no heat in the suggestion.

Gently, he began slipping his fingers in between the silky head feathers of his new bedmate, their slippery cool smooth against his felt. Beneath them was a delicate skull spelt out in perfect detail by thin skin, and touching it inspired feelings both nauseous and reverent. For the second time that night, emotions surged through him with floodwater insistence, this time ones fierce and protective and helplessly fond.

Every feeling he had looked like scar tissue, shiny, pink, and senseless after this place had driven its knife in so many times, but there was flesh beneath it, red and soft. 'Red' comes in many forms. Meat and blood, certainly, but more allegorical matters too, all muddled in to the wool. Red is love, and rage, warmth and war, luck and passion. Everything was there, under a thick plastering of apathy, his feelings tangled and violent like storms within clouds. There is nothing a deeper red than hatred, nor a brighter red than love, and there was nothing the String Creature hated more than the little pink house and no one he loved more than those friends.

One day, he would leave, and that hate would cool from scarlet to burgundy, dry and dead, and if he left without his friends, those rose-bright threads of love and trust would die out too, and he would enter his freedom as a husk, greyed out by spent feeling. Was freedom worth it if he could never do this again, feel like this again? Certainly he would go regardless. But he would do anything to keep them, to take them with him.

"If we could leave here, would you? You know, if... if I ever find a way—"

"You should stop talking now, you'll get yourself hurt," Duck Thing interrupted, quiet tone brightly conversational. His clever, feathered fingers began fiddling with the strings cascading from Red's face.

"I know you hate this place too," Yarn Creature persisted. "Why don't you help me and we could—"

The fingers stroking his tendrils turned fierce and he was cut off with a lightning sharp pain as they tugged. A little harder and the brutal little magpie would steal one of his strings.

"You should stop talking. Now." Feathers' voice hadn't changed, but there was something like hot metal in its heart. The fingers were fraught with faint trembles and his tired eyes were fierce and frantic.

The hate fizzled again, but it was black smoke now, no longer thick and choking, more disappointment than anything else.

"Coward," Red breathed, and Crow-like snarled, loud enough to tear a hole in the dark like talons through leather. Loud enough to stir their third housemate.

"Oh, are we fighting now?" The Little One's sleep-lathered tones came from his shadowed corner, blearily excited. "I-I can help, if y-you like."

Duck's beak wrinkled in a frown.

"No," he said, sternness close to a snap. "Go back to sleep, this is none of your business; you're supposed to be sleeping."

"Oh. Yeah." Yellow One obligingly settled down again and Red and Duck took a long moment to stare at each other in the pitch. Reduced to his eyes, Red's pupils were sharp and hot, and there was something lean, flinty, and clever looking out through Duck's black irises.

“You keep trying to change things," the Feathered Thing finally rasped, slow and measured, voice shaking with the effort it took to keep quiet and even. "You’re always trying to… fix things, but this isn’t something that can be fixed. And if you keep trying…” His face spasmed; Red felt it clearly against his chest. “They can do dreadful thing to us. Keep to the script, stop getting things wrong—then the only awful things are the ones that were supposed to happen.”

“Worse?" Apathy of voice mandated by forces beyond his control made it easy to keep quiet, but the disbelief and anger was palpable. "What’s worse than this?”

Duck blinked and fumbled, wrestling with some internal something that surged and spasmed like a foreign beast within his chest. The lights in his eyes fractured and flickered like a guttering candle. For a long minute, he grappled with words in stutters and scattered mumbles, mind wobbly and helpless as a baby deer as it stumbled in to the dark after a noise. Against Red's chest, the bird's fidgety heartbeat began an unsteady gallop and his body, against any apparent will, performed a series of jerky struggles as though it thought the memory could be run away from.

“I… I don’t… I—I don’t quite r-remember. I-I-I broke the script. I said the wrong lines and I… they.” He squeezed his eyes shut and disappeared but for his silhouette and warmth against Red's chest. “There was beeping. And machines. Everything hurt and I was so, so cold. And they found it funny—like it was some... some big joke that I was all smashed open and dying. They didn’t let me go. I don’t think they’ve ever let me go.”

The last was delivered in something caught between a whisper and a wail, the high yowl of his voice growing louder and more stressed the more words it ground out. Leery of waking The Youngest a second time, Red Thing tightened his grip about the fragile little chest until it's pitiful rambling were cut off by simple need for breath.

“Well, maybe next time that doesn’t happen.” String Thing felt carefully through the soft, colourful haze, following the vague idea of security that never quite left him despite all the things he lost. A misty collection of office rooms, endless stairs, rooms of fractured mirrors, but also the smell and feel of city air—expansive, massive, and impatient. “I think I escaped. Or, at least I think I thought I escaped. Why do you act like we have to stay here?“

In the long moment of quiet that followed, Red genuinely believed his friend might bite him.

"You really don't get it, do you?" The Duck's eyes were hot and dark as pepper kernels, mad and bright. There was a tremble in his expression, as though he were about to break apart under the sheer force of... what was it? Rage? Grief? Madness? All of it, whipped up and frenzied. Despite all of it—he made no attempt to escape Red Thing's arms. "Everything is in its place here. I wake up. I read my paper. We eat breakfast. It's quiet for a little while and then a teacher shows up to..." Red Thing felt the trembling body held to his chest swallow hard. "And... and it's horrible. It's agony every time. But I know it's coming. I'm waiting for it every minute from the moment I wake up. And afterwards, it's over. It's over. And... and it can't hurt any of us anymore. It's not going to come back until the next day.

"In here... it's a prison but I've got my lists, and my newspaper, and my chair, and my bed, and my you and the other one, and-and... and I can sleep most nights knowing nothing bad will happen if we just don't... think about it. I know what's going to happen; I can deal with it if I know it will happen.

"Look me in the eye, String Beast. Can you really tell me you know—really know, not just hope like some mooning fool—that whatever's out there is better than this place?"

There was pain in that irritating whine of a voice, miserable, ugly agony, alongside its omnipresent cousins grief and exhaustion. And what could he offer the soul behind the voice? Suddenly his memories of Something Better, long held, felt like tinfoil treasures, old photographs blotched and indistinct with tears and growing frail in his tight grip. All his hopes were flinders of some great disaster patched in to a raft that he was asking the other to trust to bear them all out to wide, endless seas who's boarders no one knew.

"Anywhere is better than here." Red believed that completely. He had to. He had no choice. 

"You can't promise me that." Now, the Bird Thing just sounded tired. "You can't promise me we won't get stuck somewhere waiting for something worse to happen."

And there were the two sides of it, clear as day—trust in a new life and fear of what might lie ahead, both equally valid, both equally necessary in the hearts of those that held them. They were both looking down a tunnel with a light at the end, but one believed it was sunlight and the other a train. Why break a gilded cage to chance the icy winds outside? Why settle for confined within filigree bars when there might be golden sunsets and fields of snow just beyond the horizon? But neither would ever know what lay beyond—be they horrors or wonders—if they didn't leave the cage, and both were aware, deep in their eternally miserable hearts, they might be wrong in their imaginings.

"But if I find a way out and it is a way out, you'd come with us?" The Red One pressed, his only response a ragged sigh that ruffled the felt of his shoulder and sounded so deeply of defeat it touched at his nerves. "You don't have to answer that."

It didn't really matter anyway— when he left, he would be taking the other two with him, whether they wanted to go or not. Whether they went to hell or heaven or some other place entirely. One day, they would thank him.

"Are you both the same?" Yellow Thing, who had not in fact fallen back asleep, piped up. He was watching them, worryingly full of questions for the late hour. Bird Thing gave a warbling sigh of annoyance and thunked his forehead against Red's collarbone.

"... What?" Yellow's sleepy face crumbled with the effort of straightening out his still-dreaming thoughts.

“You're not his bed?" It came out as a question rather than a statement. "Is… are you him and he-he swaps in to you and… and do I still get to be me?” In a tone of worried stubbornness he added. “I like me.”

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” Red Thing sighed in defeat. “And no, we’re not swapping places. He feels bad tonight, so he’s gonna stay with me.”

The Little One hummed as though he understood.

“Can I stay with you if I don’t feel bad?”

“… Sure.”

Yellow’s bedclothes shrugged themselves off the bed and shuffled clumsily forwards, presumably with a body somewhere in their centre since the gangly shape of the Other was no longer occupying its dent in the mattress. With an exaggerated care that unfortunately did not amount to delicacy, The Yellow One folded himself down on to the end of the bed, his weight mashing at Red Thing’s legs. Yellow only had four limbs at his disposal but he was making a great fuss with each of them, all the texture, rigidity, and consistency of cooked spaghetti. Eventually he settled comfortably and the floppy struggle with the dark ceased; his legs tangled boundlessly with Red Thing’s, his pillow rested over Duck’s curled legs, face buried in Red’s belly. His own duvet had been pilfered to cover the gaps left by one blanket covering three bodies.

Crow Thing gave a sleep-smothered mutter, a hand slithering from being clutched against his chest to swat limply about Yellow’s head until he encountered the boy’s ear, to which he administered an affectionate pinch hard enough to sting. With the same complete clumsiness he had displayed getting in to the bed, The Younger One fumbled about until he found the offending hand, whereupon he knotted their fingers together and refused to let go.

Sometimes they will look through each other’s eyes and see the ranks of closed doors in each other’s heads; the lights are on in the rooms inside and shadows pace about with enough vigour to send the floorboards trembling and motes of golden dust dancing. The desire in all of them to somehow escape in to the other’s heads, to press incorporeal ears against intangible doors and hear the voices coming from inside tell them all the secrets they both know and can never know. If they cannot find these things within their own heads, if they can never enter their own rooms themselves, perhaps it would be the next best thing to have these memories relayed to them like nightmarish stories by the friends they knew as well as they knew themselves (which is to say, not well at all).

Duck looked in to Red and saw a world full of things he couldn't begin to understand.

"I know I'm not... not the easiest person to live with..." If moments could be preserved, The Red Creature would have bottled that confession, framed it, mummified it and dedicated a tomb to that small-voiced admission that the vain little thing in his arms was not perfect. It was as tartly sweet as victory, the vindication and vulnerability a part of him had driven itself mad wanting.

"None of us are." Gently this time, he squeezed the Bird Thing, feeling something soft in his core ooze through the bitter apathy like dough through concrete. "None of this is easy. But you two are the least-worst things about this place. I wouldn't have you any other way."

"Finally," groused Crow, digging his beak in to his pillow's clavicle and shutting his eyes for good, "Something we agree on."

"Pancakes," Yellow's tired voice agreed with great solemnity. 

By tomorrow, they would be back in their own beds and different bits of them would be missing, and the evening might pass on to be just another the three never remembered. But for that night, for that moment of Now, with three bodies in a bed meant for one, feathers, fur, and felt intertwined and warm... for that night, it was enough. It would have to be enough.

Chapter Text

Morning was always the same. As a construct within the confines of their world, they were fundamentally interchangeable day to day, just a brightening of the sky beyond their window with no real meaning attached beyond the material fact that various torments were to begin anew. Outside, the world went from barely visible in the blackness to stark against a blue sky that was almost unnaturally bright (though 'almost' in comparison to what precisely, none of them could really say—this was the only sky any of them could remember knowing). It did this with complete uniformity, without interruption of cloud or change in routine; like clockwork, the same process of brightening happened each day at the same time, reliable as a turning wheel.

Inside the house too, things were perfectly regular. Crow-like woke first, always, and was filled immediately with the cold clarity of consciousness, his dreams rinsed from his head leaving him empty and a little shaken. Lying still after coming so quickly and completely to consciousness was not palatable, and the steady breathing of his roommates, so restful at night, couldn't still the jitters in his bones, so he would get up, quiet as he could manage, put his housecoat on, and go downstairs to fetch his paper. He would put the kettle on without having to fill it up, and the contentment of a purpose and the breathy sound of boiling water was always soothing enough that, by the time he had made three mugs of tea—one almost white with milk and sugar, one brick red, one respectable—he would feel composed enough to greet the String Creature normally when he finally staggered down.

Almost always.

On this particular day, the Feathery One woke up with the same suddenness as always, and the morning light sent a jolt of bright and dreadful cold through his bones. It was with that same sublime entirety of consciousness that he experienced the slow seizing of the marrow of every bone in his body, a contraction of the very fibre of his being. It was a withdrawing of his flesh from something unnamable, like the meat of a snail attempting to withdraw in to a shell it no longer fit. The insides of his mouth tasted distinctly metallic in a way somehow more familiar than blood. It wasn’t pain so much as it was a pressure so intense and so consuming it may well have been death. A massive, invisible hand had taken ahold of him in an irrefutable grip of iron and he could well imagine a pair of eyes, somewhere beyond the clouds, peering down at his pinned body in fascinated disdain.

It lasted for a minute and for that minute he could not move, not even to breathe. When it passed, the Bird Thing lay very still of his own volition, half-afraid the dreadful sensation would return if he twitched, half fighting to process the lingering twitches of chill, sick strangeness. 

Something Was Wrong. 

That was as far in to the thought as he could get with any immediacy. Very carefully, eyes still closed to limit the amount of stimuli creating noise in his mind, he poked tentatively at the knot of feeling and endured the mutual flinching of his thoughts separating away from the issue. At its thickest, most fibrous points, the Wrongness smelt strongly of metal—again, something that both was and wasn't blood—and scraped between the connective tissue and bone like fingernails on chalk, but the whole idea was too large and slippery to safely grapple with. Persisting would invoke monstrosity long before it did comprehension.

(Sometimes, it felt as though the abysmal terrors they faced every time an idea ventured beyond safe waters had been placed there specifically to deter certain exercises of thought, like sentinels guarding doors whose function was impossible to discern from outside. Perhaps it was not in fact each, individual, innocuous path that was prohibited, and instead where those ideas would lead if they were permitted to consider them for too long. Of course, pondering the issue in any detail would bring the whole matter toppling down about their heads, so they never got very far in any debate on the subject.)

Wincingly, Feathers peeled open his eyes and daylight stuck its fingers in to his head, scraped its golden fingernails against the inside of his skull, and pulled his brain out through its holes. The sun was curious about his brain; maybe it would hold it to the glow of its honeyed glare and be able to see the secrets writhing there like maggot shadows, or maybe it would melt it like so much butter and free him of its nonsense forever. Another shudder went through his bones, this one far more conventional than the first, the usual misery of being awake settling in. Already the brutal seizure was seeming less real.

He wouldn't think about it. He simply wouldn't think about it, and then it would have to go away.

So, Crow-like got up, as usual. He went downstairs and retrieved his paper, as usual. He pretended his fingers weren’t shaking, that his vision wasn’t filled with the hazy ghosts of shapes he didn’t want to recognise. They floated from place to place, skimming across the wet lakes of his eyes like insects in ephemeral iridescence. He pretended that his bones weren’t cold. The reality of the living room felt thin and worn, like he might put his foot through it if he didn’t treat the tight-stretched fabric with caution. He went to boil the kettle but the rasp of the bubbles against one another, usually so tranquil, so gentle to him, was beyond bearing.

With a mindless, intractable fascination, he watched the bubbles scrabble over each other in a bid to reach the surface, where they swelled and burst in to steam. Stupid little bubbles—they would have been fine if they stuck to the bottom and burned... but then we wouldn't have tea, would we?

When the kettle had finished boiling, he waited until it cooled, and then he set it heating again, masochistically obsessed with the scraping sensation on the inside of his skull as the bubbles roiled and thrashed and died. Again and again and again and again and a—

And a red hand came from thin air to snatch his distraction away. In the absence of the sound, Crow's head felt empty and hollow, like his brain had boiled down to nothing and escaped through his auricles.

"What are you doing? 'S a weird thing to do, jus’ standing there..." Red sounded perturbed and perhaps a little exasperated under the monotone and the exhaustion. "Look, go sit down, I'll make the tea since you've decided not to."

Usually, an insinuation that he was doing less than he should be, or that what he was doing was somehow insufficient, would have drawn enough of his ire to set him and Made Of String squabbling for a good few hours. But his words had evaporated alongside his brain. Duck Thing struggled for a few minutes—what felt like a few minutes—opening and closing his mouth as though that would inspire the familiar retorts to resume their proper place between his teeth, but every second that they didn't come stirred something anxious in his blood. By the time Feathers floundered to a stop, things had moved; he was sat in his place at the table, doll-like in his neat compliance, a mug of perfectly respectable tea placed in front of him with a sort of politely anticipatory air hanging over it. Tea was supposed to be easy—you were supposed to know what to do with it, how to make it, and at one point he had known these things. Now he sat, looking down in to the steaming liquid as it looked back up in to him, and he hadn't the faintest idea what he was supposed to do about it,

Increasingly he was beginning to get the feeling that his blood was not blood, just an inert red liquid someone else had put inside him. It wasn't doing anything, just sitting inside him and making him sick.

"You alright this morning?" String Beast was offering him a queer, sideways look. The mug before him was empty and the one set before Feather's was no longer steaming. Beneath his fingers, the ceramic was cold. Something in the kitchen smelt of toast and sulphurous eggs, turning his stomach over in his belly.

"Of course. Why wouldn't I be? Have you been speaking to The Other One?" Something deep in him twinged when he thought of his friend upstairs; he ruffled himself in discomfort, hoping he could convince the feeling to roll off like rain but, while it diminished, it didn't disappear. It sat in the empty spaces between his feathers.

"What? No why would I—"

He had been—of course he had been—and of course he was lying about it now. His eyes were full of the guilty shimmer of snagged secrets, set atop his head where someone could easily steal them if he weren’t careful. Ridiculous place to keep eyes, really.

"Those are unfounded accusations, I'll have you know!" Which accusations were they talking about? Why had Red Thing brought them up? It was far too early for this nonsense. 

Still the kitchen was filled with the shadows of things that might have existed, a masquerade of all the world’s might-have-beens, and far from being frightened of them, Feathers was beginning to become bitter he had not been asked to dance. 

(Some days had the manners to announce themselves as difficult with immediacy. For the String Thing, this was one of them; no cup of tea and an irritable, irrational housemate, all before noon. When he tried to discreetly follow his friend’s gaze to wherever it kept wandering off to, he could find nothing either interesting or moving in the corners of the room. With a deep, slow breath, he quietly shifted the structure of his mind in to conflict management, apathy glancing passively at something placatory. It did no good. It never did any good.)

"Okay mate, drink your tea," String Beast offered soothingly, thick, mitt-like hand petting gently at the Bird Thing's thin wrist. "Speaking of, someone should go wake The Other One up—shall I do it, or do you want to?"

Someone always had to go wake The Child, and that someone was usually The Duck. Usually he didn't mind the duty, which is to say that usually he enjoyed being bothered by The Child's refusal to wake as he was told. Being bothered by something so entirely benign and seeing the flickers of a childish smile at the edges of The Other’s mouth as he tried to keep his composure drew something unrecognisably fond out of him. It was a game, of sorts, to see if he could convince the boy downstairs before the food was cold or too badly congealed to be edible.

This time, the thought of going up there sent a spiral of something hot and bloody oscillating down his spine. All he could think of was that, at the top of those stairs, was a massive, damp mouth, with a pulsing throat he was supposed to walk obediently in to. Remembering the layout of their upstairs or the path to their bedroom, though he knew the route must be simple, was impossible—all the Bird could think of was teeth. 

"No. No, you go. I'm busy." With petulant officiousness, he unfolded the newspaper that had slipped beyond his conscious mind for much of the morning but remained in his hand through force of muscle memory. None of the words littering it’s surface made sense in conjunction with each other; it looked as though someone had taken the paragraphs of text and subjected them to a violent shaking.

Red One sent him another sidelong look but if he had any thoughts on the matter beyond that he kept them to himself. He vanished upstairs, and Feathers could hear them talking through the ceiling in dulcet, morning voices. He should be doing something to help, should be getting breakfast ready… he sat there, still, horribly and increasingly aware of the sudden enormity of the world around him, how little space he really took up in the kitchen. The air was cold, mortuary cold, flaxen with early morning sunlight that was tasteless and full of apathy; it wasn’t air that thought it had to sustain living things.

If he stopped breathing, if he sat there as still and silent, would it matter? Would he die? It didn’t feel like it; everything was caught, for now, in the amber of abandoned spaces, a sense of quiet reserved for the liminal and empty. Feathers rather had the feeling that, if he left it alone long enough, the whole world would shut off and leave him behind in whatever happened when things Stopped with no intention of ever resuming. It was an honour reserved for corpses.

That second stretched out to infinity, and even when it broke it wasn’t over; somewhere, behind the thin layers of reality, the veneer of normalcy, that moment of absolute nothing stretched on, some vital part of the Bird Thing caught up in its heart.

Red and Yellow did not come down the stairs, but reappeared in the kitchen anyway, sat at the table as though they had always been there, fixtures like the chairs. Both had plates set before them, whose cargo of toast and scrambled egg varied blink to blink, going all the way from empty to full again. An identical plate had been laid out before the Bird Thing’s place setting, the cold cup of tea removed, but the thought of doing anything with it was insurmountable. The idea of eating was utterly repellent.

Before, the kitchen had smelled cloyingly of toast, a sensible if overwhelming breakfast smell, but now there was… something else creeping in. Something heavy and metallic and tacky. Something so intimately familiar it was paradoxically unrecognisable.

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t—

"Don't chew with your mouth open," Duck Thing snapped at the Yellow One, whose sloppy mastication was vilely audible across the table. Irritation, red and invasive, swelled in his throat and made his already strange voice stranger.

"Sorry," The Boy mumbled, and from then on made an exaggerative (if genuine) show of keeping his lips pressed firmly together. “Can I have yours?”

Precisely ‘what’ he wanted didn’t register at first. The finger pointed hopefully in his direction did little to help. Feathers looked bemusedly down at his plate, where there lay a piece of toast with scrambled eggs clumsily arranged in a heart. That sick dread curdling his viscera deepened in to something very briefly like terror, but subsided so quickly that he was left only light-headed and a little bemused.

“No.” He slid the detritus sullenly in to the bin. From across the room, he could feel Yellow’s hungry stare prickling at his skin, searing the fine muscles of his hands where they scraped the gummy food from the plate. It clung to the ceramic, reluctant to go, it’s resistance inspiring a spiky, anxious something inside him.

The Child’s eyes were on his back. With the tender, searching affect of hands sifting through delicates, his gaze was digging through the muscle, scratching over the bone. Dispassionately, Crow-like watched his hands shake; they were fascinatingly separate from the rest of him, so completely outside his control he was convinced they had once belonged to someone else.

Perhaps they still did. Perhaps he had never really belonged to this body, and that was why it felt so determined to reject him today. 

Giving his head a forceful, little shake that sent the watery blood within his skull sloshing, drowning his brain, Feathers dragged himself back to the kitchen, which was darker than it had been. Or… or was it that it was less light than it had been? Centuries had passed with him rooted in place, and all light had died in the interim, a slow suffocation of the sun and its gauzy, gold coronas superseded by an ink dark that was not night nor anything natural. It was a blackness neither cold nor warm, without texture or taste; for something to have an identity it must have shortcomings and the quality of shadow which had overtaken the kitchen without warning or cause was complete, so deeply complete it could be nothing beyond Darkness. 

In a more philosophical mood, Duck Thing might have pondered a little more on the subject, on how nothing was worth anything without extremes. Love was meaningless if it was a constant, if it did not have the contrast of hatred to batter itself against. If a sea had no rocks to shatter itself against and no moons to incite its violence, it would lie there in eternal placidity with no more magnificence to it’s name than the merest puddle. Nothing was anything without challenge. But he was not in a philosophical mood, and thinking was dangerous, so he paid the matter as little mind as possible.

"Can't you turn the lights on?” He complained up to String Beast, who was suddenly standing beside him. From the darkness above his head peered wet, white spheres that were somewhat like surprised eyes. “Must we sit here in the dark?"

"Lights are on, mate," said the eyes. Their wobbling looked a little concerned. Idly, Feathers wondered what would happen if Red One shook his head a little harder; he could imagine the little, gelatinous rounds of flesh falling out of their shallow hollows and bouncing across the floor in to the pitch, lost forever. He would search for them, in the darkness, forever, finding only the slimy glisten of where they had touched the tiles.

"Oh." That… didn’t feel quite right, but the lights had never abandoned them before (at least, they hadn’t done so in so far as he recalled) and it had been a rather strange day. Perhaps Red Thing was just wrong, perhaps he had forgotten what real lights looked like. "Well, make them brighter then."

“… Don’t think I can…”

“Why the hell not?” This was getting ridiculous. Crow-like frowned up at the space that allegedly held The String Beast, who looked back down with something speculative darkening his pupils. It shouldn’t be so hard to get a little clarity, why was The Red One making things so hard? Something clumsy began to wrap itself about his elbow and, though it hadn’t hurt him, The Bird Thing jerked away as though it had, a yelp quivering through air that was suddenly chillingly cold. Something was touching him, why was something touching him? A brief, frantic search discovered Yellow One, only inches from his face, features arranged in to something that was likely intended to be reassuring but was far too vague to be anything but Too Close. 

He was so close. The pale, fleshy whites of his eyes were glossy with a thick, gelatinous varnishing, like something undercooked, bits of red vein sticking crookedly from the corners. His felt lips were fraught with thin cracks, the insides of which were soft and slightly bloody. Inside his mouth were dull enamel teeth, blunt but diamond hard, with no texture to their rounded uniformity, and a muscular tongue wet with hot spit. He knew what those teeth would feel like, knew the greedy clench of that soft jaw—how did he know?

—think about it, don’t think about it, don’t—

“Look, just calm down, it’s only the lights. Here—“ much to The Bird’s indignant if relieved surprise, Red snatched up the smaller’s hand in his great, padded mitt. “—let’s just go sit in the living room. Maybe it’ll be lighter in there.”

Distantly, he could hear—

“But it is light in—“

“Shhh, I know, I know…”

—but it was easy to disregard it as a breathy commentary from the shadows. Nothing to worry about. Red would never lie to him, the Little One would never hurt him, memories were never real…

(Carefully insistent, Yarn Man took The Child’s hand and used it to pull the other around so that he and The Bird were not on the same side. He put his body between the two and silently wondered at the fact that Feathers had not seemed to notice the grip on his wrist was a restraint.)

Hidden deep within the darkness of missing memory were hard edges and straight lines, shapes of doorways leading on in to spaces where there used to be floors, and ceilings, and rooms. In the silence there was breathing, the wretched gasps of things that might have been living, might have been people he had once known; they followed him as he staggered about in the halls of his own fractured mind, letting him catch glimpses, from the corners of his eye, of the unfamiliar ruins of their faces and hear the garbled murmur of whatever gruesome stories they had to tell. Their lives were in another language, leaving him only the voices by which to recognise their meaning, tones of sorrow, hatred, and rage. He knew them, once.

Buried deep in him somewhere was the reason he sometimes looked at Yarn Creature and felt entirely and completely alone; why the Yellow One sometimes sat staring down at the pages of a book, frowning as though there were something beyond the letters he had expected to see; why he blinked from moment to moment with nothing in between each instant and heard the echo of a resonant voice inviting him on a journey; why blank pages were threatening; why looking in to the sky at night sounded like ice on a nerve; why glass was made of a sweet glisten you could feel deep in your muscle; why the others seemed so familiar to him, meant so much, when he could barely remember their names.

Somewhere inside his mind—a mind he barely recognised—was the reason his body was full of teeth.

Red’s tight grip on his wrist and long stride meant that he couldn’t falter, and so he didn’t, even though the sudden agony of the red-raw flesh was searing. Looking down, he could see them in the periphery of his vision, the teeth. He knew that’s what they were, though he knew not how he knew or why they had come to be; it was just another thing that indisputably Was and would not be made otherwise. Two inches long and enamel pale, they sat in his skin like maggots, attached to no jaw and at the behest of no mouth that he could see, and yet they were mobile and alive. Every so often, they would nestle deeper, an uncertain, thoughtful movement as though an unseen someone was shifting their jaw in anticipation or consideration. It was just enough to provide a constant reminder of something inside him, tearing in to him slowly.

String Thing’s hand slipped out of his and, with a couple startled blinks, Feather’s realised they were standing before their chairs, their places for that day and all others. Losing Red’s hand felt somehow a greater loss than just a hand and, for a moment, he was tempted to snatch it back to regain whatever it was that was now drifting irretrievably away from him, but he didn’t. He never did. That wasn’t how the game was played.

He sat down. He had forgotten his paper, and his fingers felt empty without it. It was beyond fetching, however; the teeth bit down at the thought of movement, opening gashes in his sides, in his arms. Blood poured out of them, darkly staining the wood of his chair, but nobody said a word.

If no one said anything, did it really happen? Are moments undocumented still sacred as points in time, or does meaning rely on notice, on the weight of a knowing eye to pin each scrap of happenstance against the vast, velvet swathe of time and space?

Maybe that was why their memories returned, out of synch, to visit them. Maybe they’d been too stupid, too self-absorbed, too blind to understand the important bits the first time around. Maybe he wasn’t really bleeding—maybe he was alright after all.

With a movement like a sigh, the teeth needled just a little deeper, pulling apart flesh made of jewel-bright bubbles of blood, and slick viscera that knitted him together in chains.

—it, don’t think about it, don’t think—

The day passed in starts and stutters with no impression made on the memory. Fleeting moments of This and That, impressionistic glimpses of a world outside a mouth from between the slow, relishing champ of jaws. At some point, Feathers was convinced there had been a lesson, but he would never have been able to say what it had been about or whether he had done everything right and the tender, blank spot in his mind was just another source of sickness in a day sour with malaise.

It was meal time again. Lunch time.

Back in the kitchen again, Duck Thing frowned down at a plate of sandwiches whose contents he couldn’t remember, or maybe had never known, and tried to will himself to play normal and eat.

Louder in his ears than it would have ever been elsewhere, the sound of his skin tearing was thick and damp, the tenor of wet fabric being slowly rent apart. Moving slowly, almost gently, the teeth were tender as nails through hair as they raked through the meat of him, his ripe-fruit innards ever more visible, glossy in the light. Blood had drawn an icy diagram through his feathers, dividing him up into segments like a diagram in a butcher’s shop, tucked behind the counter so people could point at which bits they wanted from the trays below. 

Which bits in the trays had been part of him? All of it? None of it? It didn’t matter. All of it was gone in the end, sold off to the highest bidder. Everything that made him up spirited off far away, and he could never put himself back together.

"You're doing it again!"

"Doin' what?" Yellow asked, full of counterfeit confusion, food caught between his teeth in an amalgam of slime, spittle wet and frothy at the corners of his mouth. 

"The chewing!" The Boy blinked up at him, stupid, doe-like gaze soft and wavering; it stressed something in the Bird Thing's chest until it creaked, the sight of all that softness. "Stop chewing so loudly! You horrible little monster, you’re doing it on purpose."

"Hey!” Red Thing’s voice floated in from nowhere, scandalised and chastising. “Don't be like that! What's got in to you today?"

‘In to him’? The teeth quivered and clenched, demanding he keep their secrets. 

"Nothing!" How did he know? Could he see? No, no, he would have said something, he would have done something. String Beast wouldn’t leave him like this, all torn and tattered and half-eaten. "Nothing's wrong. There's nothing wrong with me, leave me alone."

—about it, don’t think about it, don’t think—

And so he didn’t. He retreated, and withdrew, and yielded, and conceded ground to whatever force encroached him, and he Did Not Think.

(The Other Two left the Duck Thing alone in the kitchen after that outburst. Whenever something mildly interesting happened, Yellow would go to the door and retell it to the blank-faced Other sat at the table in marble placidity. The stories were long, rambling, usually both inaccurate and incomprehensible, and hawkishly observed by the Red Thing, who sat in his own armchair and waited silently for the peace to splinter. It was a bitter inevitability, and every muscle was tense with the waiting.)

Not Thinking was not so easy as it might at first, in principle, seem, or at least it was not a feat Feathers found easy and his vanity commanded he set the precedent for universal experience. The mind is an eternally clever thing, like a puzzle that will keep trying to put itself together despite the pieces having no picture to display; it must be occupied with something, no matter how trite or terrible. And there were only two things that could be thought about with any reliability in that house…

Every day, they woke up and learnt about the other two in between the lessons, and every night the carefully woven tapestry of determinedly hoarded memories unraveled themselves, leaving them sat amidst meaningless piles of string in the morning light. In the aftermath, they followed the leads of tangles and knots, trying and failing to put each other back together. They didn’t know each other, not really, but there were things that felt… familiar… like they were right, and the others knew. They had struck against something solid in a dark labyrinth and clung to it, unable to recognise what it’s contours described and unknowing if they would ever find it again.

Sometimes Crow-like would catch Yellow One looking at him out the corners of his eyes and, where they should have been vacant as empty rooms there was thought and feeling. They would catch sight of him and, for just a moment, there would be an exchange, an understanding neither of them could parse. It was a conversation conducted between them but without them. Always—always—there was guilt in Yellow’s face, despair like a shudder, contrition like tears; he would look at Feathers with a completeness of remorse made terrifying by the mutual inability to recall the injustice done.

“I’m sorry,” whispered the haunted, hollow look in The boy’s eyes. “What did you do to me?” Cried the Bird Thing’s thoughts in silent, never-voiced response, both lament and question. If he had asked, Yellow One would tell him in a heartbeat, but he never did…

They never spoke of it. Of any of it, any of the half-remembered, oft-forgotten things. That conversation would require acknowledgment of far too many things, risk too much, for any of the three to consider it truly worthwhile, the momentary comfort of finally being certain punished thoroughly and scraped out of them with sunlight. But whenever something went wrong, Bird Thing was left to wonder… is this what you meant? Is this what you have to be sorry for? What did you do, what did you do, what did you do?

This. The Child had done this. Of that, Crow-like was suddenly icily certain. Whatever ‘this’ was, it was the Yellow One’s fault.

Clattering drew him from a reverie like a sleeper waking, and Duck Thing found the world, once again, different from how he had left it. The windows, which had until that point been holes in the consummate blackness, had finally succumbed and filled with dark, the ink of inside flooding the sky. The whole world felt close and heavy, gathered about the house, spectral spectators weighted with eagerness. 

The Other Two were back. He could hear them more than see them; such incidental, unthoughtful scuffling should have been unidentifiable, but to him the soft, inconsequential sounds were recognisable as a fingerprint. He knew them, by the sounds of their breathing. He would know them anywhere. And now they filled him with dread.

“What…w-what are you doing?” He asked, and if nobody noticed that his voice quavered, that it was weak and tired, then it hadn’t really happened. Red Thing tossed him a glance.

“It’s dinner time mate.” There was some pity in his voice. Flat, chill, distant pity, like a smooth pebble at the bottom of a deep, saltwater pool whose depths were numbingly cold. From the fridge, he took a tray of sausages, pale as fat, dead, inert, bloated things with dark marbling through their bellies. They disappeared in to the oven, but the smell of them, greasy and heady, only grew stronger, slinking in through the nostrils and curdling the brain in to a sort of placid, sick terror.

The Child took up residence at his spot on the table, gracelessly intercepting the escape of an armful of potatoes he seemed to intend to turn in to chips. Clumsily, with a sharp knife whose glinting edges speared Duck Thing with flashes of pure terror whenever they caught the light, Yellow began carving the spuds in to irregularly shaped fingers. Crow-like felt the splits in his skin gape, his bones sighing blood through the cracks.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t leave. He didn’t want to do this anymore.

But leaving was not in the script and there had to be three of them for dinner to work, and so he sat.

Done with its work, the timer dinged, but the silencing of the persistent oven humming uncovered a second sound, one that was altogether more obscure and chilled the blood for reasons inexplicable. Beeping. Perfectly regular. Just quiet enough you could pretend you were able to ignore it. But it would not be denied; it crept in through the ear and sat within the brain, convincing the heart to follow its even tempo. The slowness should have been soothing, but the enforced regularity with which the blood slunk through the veins was sickening.

"What the hell is that beeping!?" There was nothing in the corners of the room, nothing in the doorways, the sky outside the windows was dark… but something was watching him, he was sure of it. Still buried in him, the teeth trembled as the something laughed.

"It's... it's just the microwave..."

Things were different again. The potato slices were gone and the room smelled of fat. The knife was over on the counter. The sausages languished in their tray, burn-victim black. All of this was barely visible. The two people watching him were barely visible.

"No it isn't! You’re lying to me—stop lying to me!" He was screaming—he couldn't stop screaming—feet planted on his chair to be eye level with String Beast. And the beeping persisted, needling deeper with every instance.

Made Of String just stared at him with eyes that said he was unrecognisable. Suddenly, the darkness in the pupil reeked of repulsion and, under their stare, Bird Thing found himself feeling… smaller. Less.

Bits of him torn off and taken far away so that he couldn’t put himself back together… and nobody noticed or cared because why would they? Because, in the end, everyone else got what they wanted…

“I… I’m...” Suddenly mortified, he dropped back down in to the chair. The words ‘I’m sorry’ wouldn’t come; he grappled in the empty space where they had been feeling strands of remorse slip through his fingers like pieces of someone else’s hair as they stood up and walked away. After a time, Red’s eyes slipped off him in pale disinterest and a rage so strong it was sickening shot through Crow-like in a bolt of hot metal; look at me! I’m not finished, I’m not done, why are you ignoring me? Look at me, please look at me.

Were things real if they weren’t observed? He didn’t know, he didn’t know, he didn’t know how he was supposed to know…

Feathers’ head panged in a manner completely unlike a headache, one that made him suddenly and completely aware of every dent and divot in his skull, the whole, bony affair a solid and enduring ache. Darkness had exhausted its ability to ease it and he felt once again as he had upon waking that morning—hollowed out by golden hands and filled with foreign things made of pain. Oblivious, the Other Two continued their bustling, putting together a meal; the kitchen was filled with steam that swirled against the dark in chalk-powder swirls, and the savoury reek of cooking meat. 

The two sat down to eat. It was repellently fascinating to watch, which the Bird Thing did, compelled by reasons entirely beyond his control, his attention a thread thrown between the rigorous gears of a merciless machine.

Relentless, Yellow opened his mouth. His teeth came down on another morsel, cleaving through the fibres of meat with sickening ease. Spit had built up in the corners of his mouth, something The Boy was apparently unaware of, and every motion of the jaws made it glisten, greyish ooze cloudy with the detritus of whatever he was eating. And the noise—the noise… like boots in wet earth, a muddy suctioning sound, a ferocious mulching of an entire world with mechanical ambition, a sound growing gradually wetter as everything submitted to its fate in an unidentifiable miasma. Teeth clicked together every so often, and it seemed a threat, a reminder of their sharpness, of their hard and brutal edges. And then the Yellow Thing swallowed, a thick sound, one with a sinuous effort behind it, and the grisly affair was over… until he picked up his fork and began rummaging about his plate for something else.

Bird Thing watched, appalled beyond reason or explanation, and desperate to be somewhere else.

There was a sick rising in him, like bile, or another seizure, or a surge of the tide. It was irrepressible and massive, dredged from the most intimate corners of his being, all the blood and organs forcing themselves upwards in violent insurrection, little more than flotsam in this grotesque oceanic upheaval. If he did nothing, he would drown in his own body without ever saying a word.

He... he was just going to tell The Boy to stop chewing again. That was all. 'Just stop chewing, please stop chewing'; those were the words he thought were in his throat. He could feel the familiar shape of them in his lungs, felt his awkward, stiff mouth form around them as he opened it to speak—

"Get the hell away from me, you bastard!"

That wasn't what he meant to say. But it was too late now, and, before he could fix it, more words were pouring out. He was back to standing on his chair.

The Yellow One had done something to him. He knew it as well as he knew his name.

"I know what you want, sick little beast, and you can't have it! You can't have me!" Something was slipping, and moving had made it worse; his blazer was heavy and dark with gore and his tendons were weighty pains upon his bones.

"Wha-" The Boy was looking at him, shocked… but the accusation had touched something soft and flinching deep within him and sent it in rippling retreat like a sea creature slipping in to its cave. Incrementally, the beeping grew louder; smashing his palms against his auricles did little to muffle it, succeeding only in sending a splatter of warmth against his face.

"Shut up! Just shut up!" 

With a worried severity, Yellow put both his utensils down. Across from him, String Beast was as brittlely tense as fracturing glass.

"Am I did somethin' wrong?"

That face, that face… yellow and hazy, it was the one that floated on the edge of his consciousness, revolving in the periphery of this pain like a satellite in orbit.

"You know you did. Don't sit there and look at me with those eyes—you think I don’t know, you think you can trick me. I know. I know you want me dead!" 

A buckling knee forced him down from the chair in a wobbly collapse that sent a shudder through all the disparate bits of meat clinging to his bones. Without the vantage in height, Yellow seemed suddenly towering, the extra inch he had in height an irreconcilable difference between them. The Child’s face was too distant for Feathers to see the confusion in it.

"No!” The shock in the voice was almost offence. “No, I don't—"

"Mate, calm d—"

"SHUT UP!" Oh god, he was dying. This had to be dying, this complete collapse of his being. Nothing else could be so consummately terrible. Every breath was a wheeze with no air in it, his throat a knot of spiky, inscrutable aches, his lungs barbed masses that quivered and clenched. His skin—the skin he still had, heavy and thick with wet—was writhing, sloughing off his bones in heavy matts of blood and tissue and gore, and he could hear the dismal splatter of it falling to the floor. What few feathers still clung to him were fletched with crimson strands of viscera.

Fixed on him, Yellow's eyes were dull and rheumy, fascinated by the blood splattered tiles with something like desperate want, fiercely hungry with no thought or soul behind it. With a gait that staggered more than it walked, followed by the dismal, damp sound of meat hitting tile, Crow-like flinched back from the Other Thing’s fascination, until there was nowhere left to retreat to and he fell back against the preparation counter so heavily the door of the cabinet jarred against his spine. Another fillet of flesh slipped out from beneath his blazer, and every nerve ending in his back sang with cold.

Yellow knew something, felt guilty for something, and here he was—dying, destroyed, bits of meat to be picked at and snacked on until there was nothing left. Nothing left. There’s was even less of him than there was before; everything that made him up spirited off far away. Carried off in the mouth of the Yellow Thing.

"Don't act like you don't know what you did—you know, you have to. Don't act like it was nothing. I am not nothing."

They were looking at him like they didn't recognise him, like he was the monster.

"Nobody wants to hurt you—" String Beast's voice was soothing as rain on a window pane, which is to say it's comfort was meaningless in the face of the fact that going outside would result in getting soaked. It was a gentleness that said, implicitly, you are trapped. He was standing, a huge shape in the shadows.

"I can feel the mouths in me. I can smell my skin in their teeth, his mouths... “ Crow-like raved, his mind dissolving between his frantic hands like he’d picked up a sandcastle to show them, unaware it would crumble when moved. Made wavering and strange by a red delirium, String Beast loomed monolithic, and the sight of him sent a pulse of grief and despair through him so powerful he could only read it as rage. “It's your fault—you left me with him!" 

Because Yellow never looked so sadly at Red, never looked at him like he was something he’d broken and failed to stick back together, but when Feathers looked at the biggest one in moments of clarity it would strike him how much he shouldn’t be. How he shouldn’t be looking at his friend at all, because he wasn’t supposed to be there. Not any more.

Red’s indifferent face—hard to read on the best of days, impossible to understand in the dark—reeled back in complete incomprehension, and the Bird Thing’s despair came alight like tears of kerosene. How dare he. How dare he pretend not to understand. How dare they both. 

Yellow—and Duck Thing couldn’t have said what his face looked like, could no longer see his face—made as if to come closer, and the fear came back colder than before. Arms, more bone and clumped feather than flesh, flailed in something wild and helplessly negatory. Something silver fell from the counter.

"Stop it! Get away from me, you wretch! Get away or I'll... I'll…” There was a knife in his hand; he couldn’t remembering having picked it up, but it was there, a cold reassurance. “I'll kill you."

The statement was smaller, flatter, than he had expected, after all the shrieking. It was dull and factual, like the silver of the knife, breathless as though he were the one who had been stabbed. He didn’t want to, he didn’t; even if he hated them, he didn’t want them dead. But when had that ever mattered?

Such a petty thing, want; it wouldn’t keep him alive.

There was silence, complete, pearl-white, dead silence. The calcified remains of noise, rough with panting breaths. In it, the wet clicks of The Child blinking were unseemly loud.

Somewhere, something was still chewing on a bubble of gristle. Yellow Thing’s jaws were not moving, his mouth empty.

"I-I-I don't u-understand..."

"Liar. But you can't fool me. I'm never going to be fooled by you again. You’ll see; I'll get you before you can get me—see how you like being the one in pieces."

"That is enough."

The words only registered after Crow-like had already moved, after he had already pushed past ‘enough’ in to whatever lay after. Red Thing was strong, Yellow was unpredictable, and Feathers was fast, but the thing that mattered—that always mattered—was Red Guy was strong. The largest and most powerful of the three. In a hurried, jerky lunge like a marionette pirouetting on a broken string, the Duck Thing lunged towards Yellow only to have something connect clumsily with his wrist, spinning the knife from his hand. The ‘something’, of course, was Red, who was reminded, the second his felt touched bristling feathers, that he could break both his companions apart like so much kindling if he ever felt the urge.

(A great schism opened in Red’s gut as the little figure before him stumbled to one side. His arm bent crookedly at the elbow and forearm, odd inhuman angles suddenly contorting the flesh, bulges of bone barely restrained by the jacket. He knew this would end badly; there was a storm-cloud calm in the inevitability of it finally happening. Yellow clutched at his leg, flinching hard away from his mangled friend. The Bird Thing looked limply from his arm to the taller of his friends, his blank, dead eyes recognising neither. ‘I’m sorry’, Made Of String thought, but what good would it do to say such things now?)

Distantly, Feathers listened to his hollow bones give sticky snaps as they broke apart, but there was no pain attached to the sound, no feeling tied to the sight of his arm lying strange, mangled, and immobile at his side. 

Betrayal, he recognised distantly, felt like being winded. An unexpected failure of something reliable and vital. 

Red wasn't supposed to do that… Red wasn’t supposed to hurt him. Had he got it wrong? No. No, Yellow was the one who hurt him, and Red was… Red was…

He was supposed to make it better, wasn’t he?

Crow-like looked up uncertainly. Between him and Yellow stood the String Beast and, to the soft shattering of the last vestiges of his security, he realised that maybe he had lost his friend after all, even if he never left.

There were three of them, always three of them, and right now that meant two against one. Being three meant sides, meant there was never any impartiality, but he was tired, so tired… he didn’t want to fight two of them. He couldn’t fight two of them. The knife was gone in the dark.

"Are you in on this too? You want a piece of me?!” Feathers screamed up a the towering shape of the Red One in the dark, watching the world blur as a wet veil came over his eyes. His whole body was soaked with blood, drenched in it, half frozen with it. “Here! Take it! Take it!" 

He would give them what they wanted. He would give them whatever they wanted.

Because his flesh was cheap, only shy of worthless by virtue of the fact it could be eaten, could catch in teeth. It would fill a stomach and then he'd finally be part of something worthwhile, and the thought made him sick with rage. With shaky hands, he began to scrape strips from his limp forearm, along the red-raw rents the teeth had opened in him earlier. Crimson slivers splattered to the ground in between them, marbled with tendon, limp as fish skin. Yellow gave a wail that might have elation but could have also been terror.

Desperately, Feathers looked up at String Beast, whose eyes were both wide and white enough to be seen. Whatever he had hoped or feared to see there—pleasure, satisfaction, disdain—wasn’t there. ‘What have you done?’ despaired the look on that face-that-wasn’t-a-face. ‘Oh dear god, what have you done?’

Duck didn’t know. ‘Enough’, he hoped.

“Is that what you want? Is this what you want? Will you leave me alone now?" There were tears on his face and a wet hitch in his shrieks, but he couldn’t remember crying. "Just take it and leave me alone, leave me alone, please leave me alone, please..."

Ashamed to be seen with him, the bones of his forearm broke apart, slipped from senseless fingers and skittered away over the tiles. Defenceless and unwilling to fetch it back, unable to offer anything without it, Bird Thing scrubbed desperately at his face in an attempt to get rid of the tears—unseemly, unscripted things—to push them back up inside his eyes; but his hand was sodden and clumsy, smelled of salt and iron.

Yellow reached out. The precise intent of that action was beyond determination, but the fact of the matter was that his hand slid in to Feathers’ peripheral view, where it should not have been. There were no words left in the Bird Thing, only screams, and they poured out, high, shrill, and dreadful.

Greedy, grasping hands, inside him, inside him, inside him. Had to get them out, get them out, get them out out out—

(Within his beak there were calcified formations that weren’t entirely like teeth but not dissimilar enough to stop them doing much the same job. They were buried in something bleeding, something screaming. He wanted to feel sorry he’d hurt them, but he couldn’t. He wanted to let go, but he couldn’t do that either.)

From a distant, dusk-lit place, there was a crack like a gunshot, and then night billowed across the sky. Red's fist struck against the Bird’s temple where the bone was thin and brittle as china. There was another thud and crackle as the spindly figure smashed against the wall, and then the Bird Thing couldn't move, couldn't even think about moving, or recognise that the inability was there. The world had shuddered and fallen sideways with all the awkward, staggering gait of a wounded man collapsing in to a wall for support. It wobbled in and out of cohesion as though it only existed in the slowly stilling ripples of a fathomlessly deep pond.

Too hazy to be fully cognisant anymore, too full of the champ of teeth and the glisten of spittle to recognise anything, Crow-like watched half-familiar shapes move across the room from where he lay. Once upon a time, in another place, another life, he thought he might have known them. The little one was clinging to the bigger but broke away, jerky and frightening, coming closer to his resting place with out-stretched arms. Greedy arms—expectant, covetous. With what strength he had left, Feathers offered it a tired snarl, and the bigger one snatched the smaller back.

(Yellow Guy sobbed, torn between going to his ruined friend and letting Red drag him away from danger—and it was still danger, even of a boneless and bleeding sort. Made Of String kept a tight grip on The Child's arm and never took his eye off the crumpled thing at the foot of the far wall.)

Through the floor, the tiles of which were a numb cold against his cheek, the Bird Creature felt the vibrations of footsteps leaving him. The thing that was, in their world, of greater permanence than walls and floor gave a sniff and shut off it’s light and left them be. Feathers took his first full breath that day and felt no better for it.

The Other Two were gone and it was too late to tell them he was sorry. He was always sorry.

Slowly, the ghostly sound of unseen chewing faded, as did the beeping. The kitchen swam murkily back in to existence, decked with nighttime windows and the disrupted trappings of dinner, only slightly disarrayed from how it was when he saw it every day. Bitterness moved through him in an idle, passive wave, like a surge of the tide in the deep; everything was over and he couldn’t even feel pleased. There wasn’t enough of him left for it. Feathers shut his eyes.

He was tired of this life. Where was his next one so he could do something better with it?

"Get up." The voice was familiar and once would have been soothing to hear, but it’s owner had clipped it in to hard, impassive angles that made the straight edges flat and unwelcoming. Feathers screwed his eyes shut and would have pretended not to have heard, but the last of his thoughts were trickling out of his cracked beak and he was too tired to stop them. In a vacant way, he was almost interested in what they had to say. 

(He hoped they were his thoughts. They were certainly in ‘his’ head. If someone else’s thoughts were in his head… was it really his head after all?)

"You're so stupid. You think he's a boy, you think he's our friend? He's a beast. He has a hundred mouths and a thousand greedy throats. Every time I wake up, for a few seconds, there are teeth in me—he eats pieces of me while I sleep. My bones are so cold—there's no flesh on them any more."

"Get up." The answering voice was colder. 

"One day he'll do it to you too.” The threat tasted like turpentine, acidic and flammable. He would have gagged on it if he could. “He'll eat me, all of me, and then it'll be your neck on the line. Maybe you'll care then."

"Get up."

"Why did you leave me?" And that was the last of it; his mind submitted itself to a hazy wordlessness, and he wouldn’t have been able to speak further if he had wanted to. 

(Feathers didn't sound like himself anymore; his voice was small, meek, slurred, and it made Red Thing flinch. By universal agreement, they didn’t speak about these things, and he was glad of it precisely because he didn’t know; he had no idea, in the brief times he remembered leaving, of how he did it or why.)

With the uneasy gentleness of someone being very careful, a hand cradled the side of Duck Thing’s face and raised it off the tile, dragging his body along with it until he was sat up like a marionette with all its strings badly mangled.

"I didn't. I didn't leave, I'm right here. I'm here and I'm not going anywhere. I promise." He sounded like he was asking the other to believe it and, tiredly, Duck Thing knew that neither of them really could. "Now, get up."

(Maybe it was him that was inside someone else’s head. Maybe when they forgot him this would stop.)

Red took him to the bathroom and washed the blood off his face, mindful all the while of his broken neck. He bound the awkward, ragged stump of his arm in towels and reassured the Bird that it would come back by morning, the uncertain certainty of their condition casting shadows on his eyes. He took them both to the bedroom, tucked the smaller figure in, then stood at the foot of his bed looking as though he wanted to say something; he left without a word and was asleep in minutes.

Crow-like neither moved nor spoke, and thought about promises. About what they wanted.

Such a petty thing, ‘want’. It wasn’t a need, just a desire, like a trite piece of something shiny cosseted in a nest; they would be worthless, all those carefully treasured wants, if he let things fall apart.

And as he lay there listening to the others sleep, he knew as completely and concretely as he knew anything in the world that this place would be the death of him regardless of wants or promises. He could lie there and play the game, make himself mindless and compliant, the perfect doll with no thoughts in its hollow head, and in the end none of it would matter. He would survive for them to kill him, live until it was time for him to die. Already he was forgetting why he should be so afraid of the Yellow One, the night sighing amnesia in to his blood.

(One day, he vowed, with the last breath of that memory, one day he would find out for the final time what had happened to him and what role The Child played. On that day, he would forgive him and they could both leave it behind. He held on tightly to the idea of that day as it faded; he knew he’d never get a chance to see it.)

They built empires on the idea of each other, and the slightest tug of the house’s strings could bring them crashing to their knees. It was the way of things. And he was the one for whom revelation spelled only death, inevitable and patient, just waiting for him to stop.

"One day, there'll be nothing left of me," he spoke aloud to an empty room with three bodies in it, and felt the silent, rapturous agreement of the furniture and inescapable walls. There was peace in finality, he supposed; peace enough to let him shut his eyes and begin again.

One day, he would be gone, and in the interim he would never be able to describe if that thought filled him with ecstasy or dread.