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At the end of the day, what does he have?
Nothing. A house that is falling down. A child who is dying.
The hope that he will be one of those who are granted miracles. The dread that he will not be.
The sweet stench that lives inside him like smoke.
Cole has been in the hospital for three months when Hank moves into the house. It was meant to be a move of convenience, to be closer to his son.
It’s a mistake.
Hank knows that his compassionate leave shouldn’t be used to strip wallpaper. And the garden? The garden is the final straw. Almost. Hank wants to cry when he looks at it, a dark mess of weeds, thickened by the years.
He pulls at the brambles until his hands are bleeding and still the tears do not come.
At the bottom of the garden, there is a shed - crumbled stone and rotting wood and nails that stick out of the structure like bones through skin.
He thinks of Cole and how he promised he would make the house nice for when he returns. Not if. When.
The inside of the structure is dark beneath its sagging roof, filled to the very edges with all manner of things. Old chests; piled patio furniture, long stained green; cobwebs stretched fine and dusty in every corner. A single window, boarded up against the light.
But then, movement. Outside of the skittering of insects, the drone of flies. It’s like a breath, a cracked wheeze from human lungs.
And sure enough, moments later, Hank sees it. A figure, slumped behind a stack of newspapers.
Covered in dust as though it belongs, although it cannot possibly. Hank wonders whether he should call someone, but he doesn't know who and he doesn't know what he would say. "I think there's a stranger in my garden, but I'm terrified that it's dread and grief and the dread of grief making me see things"?
So he leaves it. He returns in the low evening light, when the sun is setting behind the tall trees.
The first few times, the figure doesn't speak, merely breathes those same raspy sighs. The only acknowledgement of Hank's presence is its steady, unblinking gaze.
It is the figure of a man, Hank presumes, and younger than his cracked breath would suggest. His face is a pale moon above the collar of his dark jacket, his skin peppered with a constellation of dark freckles, lined with a lacy film of dust. His brown eyes are dull, the whites a sickly yellow. Hank thinks it is the fourth visit, when he finally speaks.
"Food," he asks. His voice is no more than the creaking of a floorboard, a scrape of nails along soft, rotten wood.
That night, Hank brings the leftovers of his dinner to the bottom of the garden. Although he doesn’t appear to be able to move much himself - a tilt of the head, a shrug of his shoulders - he eats the proffered food from the end of Hank’s fingers. His lips are dry and cracked.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, before letting his eyes slip closed, turning his gaze away. “You can go now. I’m tired.”
Cole is getting worse, the hospital tells him. He looks tiny in his bed, big blue eyes gazing out over his bed covers. Blond curls long gone.
Hank doesn’t tell Cole about the man. But he tells him that the house is looking good - that there will be space for him when he’s better. Cole doesn’t speak, and Hank has to be content with imagining his reply.
That night, Hank takes a small plate of food to the bottom of the garden.
He pushes the door open and that familiar pale face turns to Hank, a faint sheen in the dark room.
His voice is no more than a whisper. “How is your son?”
Hank’s heart skips several beats, a sickening swoop in his chest. He has never spoken to him about Cole.
He wants to be angry. He wants to scream and cry and smash the stupid plate of food against the cinder block wall. But he doesn't.
He kneels on the floor at the man's side and offers him food from the palm of his hand.
"How did you know?" Hank asks.
"I know lots of things."
The more he visits the man, the more he begins to notice about him. His body is narrow, a thin slumped chest, slender hands that are wracked and warped around the joints. His bones creak when he moves, as though they have been long frozen in place.
"Do you have a name?" Hank asks him, one evening. Birds shuffle in the rafters, call to each other, as if warning him not to get too close.
"My name is Connor," he says, and the words seem to cost him a great physical effort. Hank imagines a smile across the plain of his face.
Hank gets a call in the early hours, telling him that Cole has been taken for an emergency operation. He drives, bleary eyed and far too fast, to the hospital - rushing to spend hours sitting in sterile corridors, dread slung over his shoulders like a heavy blanket.
Cole comes out of the operation alive, but from the sight of the nurses' faces, Hank can tell that it was a near miss.
Hank feels his life balancing on a knife edge. Every moment, waking and asleep, he is thinking about his son. He is dreaming about him. Sometimes, he thinks about Connor, lingering like a spectre at the edge of his mind.
When he visits Connor that evening, something is different. There is a shift in the atmosphere around him, it is more purposeful, as the air pulled tight between them. He shifts when Hank enters, his face caught bright in a white beam of moonlight.
"You have to move me," he says. His voice is deeper, stronger, a timbre in it that sends sparks shaking through Hank like loose stars. "You have to move me."
"Move you where?" Hank asks.
"Out of here." Connor replies. "Please, Hank. Take me to where I can see the sky."
Hank waits until just after midnight before he even thinks about honouring Connor's request. The streets are dark and quiet, no one around. Owls hoot in the distance, a haunting, otherworldly sound.
Hank realises that he has never really touched Connor before. He has felt his tongue against the rough pads of his fingers. He imagines once that he brushed the line of his jaw, and that the skin was as smooth and powdery as chalk. But it is very real, now, as he prepares to take Connor into his arms. He hoists him up beneath his armpits first, and despite his height, he is as light as a child. Clouds of dust fall from his clothes, and his bones ache and creak in protest.
“It hurts," he mutters, his voice suddenly drawn small again. "I can't walk."
"Do you want me to carry you?" Hank asks. He wouldn't have offered before, but Connor's frame floats in his hands as light as plasterboard.
"Carry me, please." And there it is, the ghost of a smile. Hank lifts Connor into his arms, one arm beneath his knees, one beneath his arms, around his back.
His back.
That narrow back, pressed so long to the rotting walls, hidden from Hank's view. Hank is sure he must be imagining, but beneath Connor's jacket, grey with dust and wear, he feels... something. An unnatural swell of the shoulders, perhaps. Bones grown differently from birth to warp the creases beneath his shoulder blades.
He carries him gently, being careful not to put too much pressure onto any part of him. There is a heartbeat drumming in his ears, but he is unsure whether it belongs to him or to Connor.
He takes Connor to the house at the end of road. To call it a house is perhaps an overstatement - Hank knows from the talk of his neighbours that no one has lived there in many, many years. Decades probably, it has gone untouched. But it stands several stories taller than the other houses on the street, windows boarded up. Hank cannot see the roof, but he imagines splinted rafters, slanting beams of moonlight, a clear view of the night sky.
It doesn't cost him much, physically, to carry Connor the few flights of stairs that lead to the highest room in the house. But his breath comes fast, veins thrumming with the knowledge that he holds something very rare in the shaking bough of his arms.
The attic room is mercifully bright, lit by the silver-white face of the moon. Hank thinks of Connor’s face, that first day. He lays him beneath the single circular window, through which he can see a great dusty wheel of stars. His body creaks as he settles in place, but his features are clear in the light.
"Thank you, Hank," he says, his voice clearer than Hank has ever heard it. He smiles - sincere, real, not drawn just in Hank’s imagination - one slight hand raising to brush Hank's cheek. His skin is cool and dry, his touch gentle.
Hank goes to see Cole the next day. He is smaller and weaker than Hank has ever seen him, clinging onto whatever semblance of life has been granted to him. He should not have to be so strong. He is only a child.
Hank weeps for him, and hopes that he does not hear.
The next time he sees Connor, it is in a dream. Connor stands tall, not slumped as Hank is used to seeing him. He is dark haired, handsome, his clothes cleaned and free from dust. He turns his even, clear gaze towards Hank... and he wakes, breath as heavy as though he has been running.
He takes Connor food the next night, after he has been to see Cole in the hospital. When he arrives in the attic, Connor is standing, gazing out of the window at the city below him.
It feels just like a dream, but Hank knows that he is awake.
“I brought you food,” Hank says, laying the plate between them.
Connor turns to him. He is beautiful, Hank thinks, here in the moonlight, away from the dust and grime of his previous dwelling. It seems no surprise that he stands straighter, looks stronger.
“Thank you, Hank.” His voice has changed again. It sinks warm against Hank’s skin, thick and low, smooth as silk. He doesn’t advance for the plate, hungry, as he might have done before.
“Come here.” Connor extends his hand, and Hank takes it. His skin is warm to the touch.
“Are you scared?” Connor asks. Hank shakes his head. He knows that there is so much to be scared about - the roll of owls and bats above their heads, the calm of Connor’s face. All his memories of Cole.
But he feels still inside, cool waters around his heart.
“Come closer, then.”
Hank does. He steps forward into the light that seems to reflect on Connor’s skin. Both his hands, with those long, narrow fingers, reach out for Hank, his face still, the lightest, proudest smile playing at the edge of his lips.
“Will you help me with my jacket?” Hank doesn’t answer, merely runs his hands over the square edge of Connor’s shoulders, down the length of his forearms. His fingers hook into the lapels, and Connor winces, ever so slightly, as he pulls the garment off.
Hank knows exactly what is going to happen before it does. Although he can’t remember, he knows that he has dreamt it.
From Connor’s back, burst through the back of his shirt - wings. Wings. Not white and soft as if he were an angel, but real, thick-feathered, green and navy and burnished gold. They’re tall, taller than him, taller than Hank. Vast and shadowy as he spreads them out before the night sky.
“Connor?” Hank hears the name float from his lips to the ground between them, reverential, lighter than any feather.
“It’s me.” Connor holds his hands out again and Hank takes them, clasping them to his chest. “It’s me.”
Behind him, the wings stretch out, two great shadows.
“You’re beautiful.” The words fall from Hank’s lips before he realises they are free, taking flight into the cold air between them. Connor tilts his head.
With a sigh as light as the moonlight, he takes Hank in his arms. Suddenly, Hank is the one who is weightless. His feet leave the ground as Connor lifts him, allows him to take flight; effortless, free.
Everything leaves his mind for a long moment and they hang suspended in the quiet night air, the bats circling above their heads. The owls call to one another, soft, dark sounds.
When Connor sets him down, Hank wonders if this is the last time they will see each other. Connor presses his lips - soft now, no longer dry and cracked - against the edge of Hank’s cheekbone.
“You’re a good man, Hank.” He says, mouth close to Hank’s ear. “Take care of Cole.”
Hank turns to leave, not wanting to look back over his shoulder lest he tear whatever veil that Connor has wrapped around his shoulders.
But at the last minute, he cannot help himself. He turns back and Connor is standing at the window again, great grey wings settled and resting behind him. He does not disappear, become ghostly, turn to a pillar of salt. He smiles, instead, and raises one of his hands.
Goodbye. Hank thinks. Goodbye.
But it is not the last time he sees him.
The last time is in a dream. Or perhaps it is not. Hank’s life has been so strange over the past few months, thrown into such extremes of light and dark that the line between reality and imagination has become blurred.
He sitting in Cole’s hospital room. Or perhaps he is asleep in bed. Either way, he sees Connor again, standing at Cole’s bedside, wings unfurled like the darkest guardian angel.
His face is calm, amber eyes filled with an aching tenderness for the boy, this boy Hank is sure he has never met. Hank wonders if Connor will just watch, watch Cole’s figure prone in the shadow thrown by his wings.
He watches for a while, but eventually, he takes Cole’s hands, lifts them from where they are folded together, too small across his chest. As you would lay in a coffin.
Cole opens his eyes, and watches Connor. Hank wonders if he will be scared, but like Hank was, he seems calm. Accepting of this presence that he has been graced with.
Cole sits up in his bed - Hank’s heart clenches, he has not seen that in weeks.
And Connor takes him. As he did Hank, wraps his arms and wings tight around him until all Hank can see is their turning forms, all he can hear is the steady beating of someone’s heart, as if his head is laid against their chest. He knows it’s his own; he wishes it were Connor’s.
Hank wakes. Or he doesn’t wake. He doesn’t know. Either way, Cole is lying back in his bed, blue eyes wide, and Connor is gone.
“Dad?” Cole’s voice rings clear in the silent room.
“I’m here.” Hank touches Cole’s hand, balled into a fist at his side.
Clasped in his little, white fingers is a single feather, as long as his forearm, the colours of every precious jewel gleaming within it.
Cole gets better. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it is a gradual returning of the life that has been sapped so unfairly in the past months. His eyes clear, his skin brightens. His hair begins to grow back, gossamer-fine at first. The doctors are unable to explain the reasons for his sudden recovery. Hank asks them not to question it, happy just to hold his son again, to see him walk and run. To see him laugh.
He takes him home through a rush of autumn leaves, Cole’s tiny hand in his own. Cole never mentions Connor. Hank wonders if he remembers at all.
And over time, as Cole grows older and stronger, Hank begins to forget too.
In the daylight hours, at least, when the sun beats on the back of his neck. But in the cool of the night, with the moonlight white on his skin, he remembers. He remembers by the starlight.
That face, pale and beautiful, the soft press of lips on his cheekbone. Wings, stretched out, as wide as the night sky.