Work Text:
(Sphinx)
You look in the mirror. You are not old or young. You’ve maintained your ageless Strider’s visage all this time. You could tell someone you are twenty or fifty, and they wouldn’t question it either way.
The boy pads silently down the hall, stops in the center of the rectangle of light that spills from the open bathroom door. He can’t see the light, but he knows you’re there by the sound of your breathing.
“Hey. Did I wake you up?”
“I wasn’t asleep,” he says.
You tried to make it happen differently this time around, but some things don’t change. He still eats whatever he pleases, edible or not. He’s still unfazed, quiet, too wise for his age. You started to panic when you found his stash of blades - a broken half of a pair of scissors, a rusted box cutter. As closely as you watch him, you have no idea where he found them.
You realize he hides things from you, and you’re not sure if it’s the same as before or worse. You weren’t cut out to be a father, and if you ever had been, Blind was as much your father as you were his.
The boy itches idly at his stomach. Nothing soothes the ever-present rash on his skin. He loved you that much.
‘It’s pretty late,” you say. “Want some company?”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
His bedroom is tidy and sterile; that’s one improvement from before. Everything has its place, neat with tactile labels where he needs them. You placate yourself with the notion that the world is at his fingertips here, trying to ignore that he was as much the master of the House as he is this small room.
He flops into bed and finds the hem of your shirt to hold onto.
“Sphinx.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to go home.”
You wanted him to have new music, smells, sounds, tastes. Family (but not the kind that Elk gave him, spread too thin), friends (but not the kind the House gave him, too embroiled in their own demons), love (but not the kind that Long and Rat gave him - something substantiative and reliable, based on more than mutual agony and fucking).
He didn’t want it, though. You left these offerings at his feet (still bare whenever he could manage), and those you couldn’t give to him yourself you brought him to instead. He regarded each one, carefully, like a trader examining goods before buying, and rejected all of them.
All of them except for you.
“Please,” you say to him, the first time out loud, “You’re still young.”
He turns his face to you, unseeing eyes and sores around them, face erupted in miserable red blotches, made worse by the red lines he’s scratched into them.
“Come home with me.”
“I’m sorry.”
You don’t remember when he stopped being the boy and started being Blind. It slipped in, one day, unnoticed by you until it was too late, until you had responded in turn, so easily, like crossing the threshold into a familiar, safe place.
(Blind)
This is a list of things you love: Touching things with your hands, touching things with your mouth, putting things into your mouth. Listening to music, creating music. Listening to conversations, imitating conversations. Finding new things on the ground and figuring out how to break them (you snap a stick, you rip a plastic bag, you drop a glass bottle, you put fabric between your teeth and pull down hard with your hands). The smell of dirt. The smell of chalk. The smell of plaster. The smell of petrichor. The smell of clay. Prosthetic arms, armless shoulders, a hairless scalp. Sphinx.
This is a list of things you like: Cigarettes, sitting on the floor, walking silently, alcohol, dope, sex.
This is a list of things you miss: Dreams, the House, the Forest, Elk, and a Sphinx both less and more indebted to you.
You were nineteen years old once, and before that you were a thousand, and before that you were ageless, and now you are sixteen and getting what you want is more difficult than ever before.
Putting your hands on new things is hard when the house is so neat. Putting things in your mouth is hard for the same reason. Conversations aren’t nearly so interesting when people are trying to interact with you. You can’t drop glass in the house, Sphinx says it’s dangerous. He gives you plastic now. There is no dirt in the house. You may not have dope or alcohol, and you have not found girls that will climb on top of you the way they did in the House, but Sphinx at least takes mercy on you and buys you cigarettes.
Of course, you have Sphinx.
He put you in schools, in clubs, in therapy, in extracurriculars for the visually impaired (you think what a wordy and unpleasant nick that would have been -- not Sightless One, but Visually Impaired One). They call you a name that isn’t yours and you ignore it, placidly, as you do to all things you can’t be bothered with.
You get in trouble, but you pull your punches and keep sharps out of it because Sphinx asked you to.
You wonder what else you have left to give him.
(Sphinx)
You oversee Blind as he files his nails with the extension on a pair of clippers. This is something you have to drag out of him over and over. Blind does not have temper tantrums like your old patients did. He walls you off instead, silent and still as a statue, and he can maintain this state for hours. It’s much worse than catching a punch or being bitten.
You can see the reproach in his lack of emotion. How dare you make me do this, we never forced hygiene on each other before.
Still, he eventually complies, then washes his hands (you don’t dare prompt him to do it more thoroughly at risk of another two hour shutdown).
He pauses for a long time, then draws his hand back and launches the clippers, full force, at the mirror. It shatters, and in the webbed cracks you see a hundred small Blinds, all with grim little smiles on their faces.
You don’t yell at him. You’re not even angry. You just sigh, and feel exhausted. You don’t know what you’re doing anymore. You’re not sure why it matters that his nails are filthy and ragged.
“I don’t like you like this. It doesn’t suit you.”
Blind is sitting on the floor beside his bed, chin on the mattress. It’s a pose he adopted from you, a long time ago, when you were both the same age.
“What doesn’t?”
“You’re not a leader anymore, just a usurper and a tyrant. Those who flocked to you out of admiration now follow in chains.”
“Dramatic. Are you channeling Jackal?”
“Don’t talk about him,” he says, so icily it gives you pause.
“You were always the leader. Not me.”
He smiles coldly, unmoving, “Who followed who to this horrible place?”
As if to punctuate it, he scratches a scab on his face, one of many, and it rips open, leaving a trail of blood behind his fingers.
You remember the wounds Rat left all over his body, how appalled you’d been. How you wanted to keep him away from her, and Long before that. It’s not so different now, he’s your captive instead, covered in wounds of his own making. You know who the real cause is. You wonder why it’s okay with you all of the sudden.
Maybe you were just jealous.
Therein lies the error: Red was right. You are Blind’s whole world, from the moment he was born until the second he dies.
The part you caught too late is that he is your whole world, too.
(Blind)
The worst part about Sphinx’s tyranny is that you will forgive it, time and time again. Some might say you have no choice, but you always have choices. You have your feet, your hands, your blades (Sphinx found one stash and thought he was rid of them, because adulthood in the Outside makes you senile and feeble). You can pour your own life out on the floorboards any time, and no one would be able to stop you.
But you don’t, because for all he’s not your Sphinx anymore, you’ve still managed to monopolize him. More than before, more than in the House, because you are locked in with each other with no distractions. No Wolf, no Forest, no Mermaid, no Rat.
You hadn’t always been a jealous god. You were many other things -- lonely, angry, bloodthirsty, miserly -- maybe, but never jealous. He made you like this.
You remember the knife and Elk. You don’t want to think about it.
(Sphinx)
The boy will be eighteen soon, and life is a bleak sort of hell. You don’t go fishing with Smoker’s dad anymore, though you talk to him on the phone when you can. You’ve realized grimly as the years pass how much of Smoker’s shit you’ve taken on. You don’t resent him for it, that’s just how it is.
You meet Smoker at a bar and he starts when he sees you. You haven’t met up in a long time.
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks buddy.”
He lights a cigarette for you, then for himself.
“Where’s your kid?”
“Home.”
“Alone?”
You see the skepticism written all over his face. Smoker thinks it’s all just one grand coincidence, that things aren’t mystical or inexplicable, that you’re just a little bit touched in the head from growing up in a place like that. He thinks that, but he avoids asking for hard truths. He doesn’t ask questions of a probing nature at all, actually.
“He’s seventeen years old, he can take care of himself for a few hours.”
His expression grows more contorted until you worry it might freeze like that. You know what he’s thinking: You couldn’t take care of yourselves when you were seventeen.
(They left us alone anyway, though.)
The lights are out when you get home. You leave them that way, wandering through the dark like you did when you were young. You try to track him by scent, but your skills in that regard have dulled exponentially.
You run into him, but you’re moving so slowly it just jostles you a bit. He rests his forehead on your chest and you hear him breathe in deep, smelling you.
His hands make their way up your chest, your shoulders, to your ears, your face. You keep your expression slack and neutral as he feels the hollows beneath your eyes, the bridge of your nose, your chin, your lips, your forehead.
“You’re so old,” he breathes, “But not as old as you would have been.”
His hands drop back to your mouth.
“Bare your teeth.”
You do, and he feels them, the pads of his fingers tracing each one. He pries your jaw open and touches the tops of your molars, lingering in the space where one was knocked out in a fight.
You make a face and spit his hand out, turning your head away, “That’s enough.”
He wipes his hands off on his jeans.
“Welcome home,” he says, flatly, and shuffles off into the dark.
You take him camping for his eighteenth. He lights up in a way you had stopped hoping for.
He runs too fast and trips too often, over roots and rocks and uneven earth. His knees are skinned and bleeding, but he gets right back up, crashing into a tree trunk. He actually laughs.
You frantically knock an unidentified mushroom out of his hands on its way to his mouth. You are more forgiving about the handful of clay from the riverbank, which he turns over with his tongue again and again, savoring the feel of it.
The two of you combined make one fully functioning human body, so as a team you build a fire, giving Blind directions when stacking the kindling becomes too precarious for your prosthetics to manage.
Blind lights cigarettes for both of you, puts one in your mouth and the other in his, and then sits quietly, crouching barefoot by the fire taking thoughtful puffs. You can see the ridges of his spine jutting from the curve of his back. His clothes fit him better than before, are in better shape, but it doesn’t change the reality that you see. He is a wild thing, creature of the forest, and always has been.
“I love you,” he says, as carelessly as a comment about the weather. It makes your heart hurt.
“I love you too,” you tell him, the truest words you’ve ever spoken.
You don’t go to sleep until it’s nearly dawn, and when you do, he crawls into your sleeping bag with you, wraps himself around you and tucks his head beneath your chin. For a moment you are two boys, nine years old, sharing a narrow couch in Elk’s room by the open window. It’s too hot to sleep so close, but you don’t move away, because the other boy is the first pair of hands you’ve ever had in your life, and he makes you feel safe.
(Blind)
You bring the Forest back to the house without realizing it. It is messier now than it used to be, though you can’t quite explain how. The bathroom begins to smell of earthy mold. You peel your tactile labels off your things one by one and eat them, which is a slow process, because they are difficult to chew.
You pull the mattress off your bed and drag it ito Sphinx’s room, pushing it up against his bed, and things begin to fall into place.
Sphinx brings home a carton of cigarettes and bottles of wine. You feel your way through the kitchen drawers for the corkscrew and pour glasses for the both of you. You drink and smoke the days away. Sphinx goes to work less and less, then not at all.
You begin to hold your own private Fairy Tale Nights, for just the two of you. They start out innocuous, stories from the Outside that typical children learn as they grow, but the House slowly bleeds into them, at first a passing mention before taking shape fully.
The first faces to pop up in your stories are the ones who left the house. Smoker, Black, Red. Eventually older faces pop up -- the Sleepers, Ginger, Rat, Humpback. Noble makes the penultimate appearance, and then, finally, the grand master storyteller, Tabaqui himself stands front and center.
(Sphinx)
Rent is two months late and you’re running out of groceries. Going outside seems less and less possible. You wonder where this fear of it came from. You’ve seen it for yourself. Nothing is dangerous, nothing will hurt you.
Blind isn’t out there, though.
(Blind)
You pluck out a tune on the old guitar - it’s not the one Jackal brought to the Stuffage, but it plays the same. Sphinx is laying on the floor beside you, legs outstretched, and your toe is touching his ankle as a quiet assurance of his presence.
Out of nowhere, Sphinx speaks up.
“Okay, Blind.”
Your fingers still over the strings.
“Let’s go home.”
(Sphinx)
He holds onto your shirt the entire ride in the taxi. When you finally roll up to the old address, it’s unrecognizable. A new neighborhood with new families everywhere you look - but it’s unmistakable, this is the place.
You get out of the taxi and Blind follows. The door shuts, and the driver takes off, and then it’s the two of you, looking haggard and out of place in the middle of a rosy and straight-laced suburb. You didn’t bring any luggage. You didn’t even make Blind put on his shoes.
“Do you know where to go?” You whisper, because inexplicably, you are petrified.
Blind pauses for a long moment, then nods. He leads, and you follow. Blind’s Tail.
It’s the last thought you have on the Outside.
--
Two boys sleep fitfully on a couch by an open window on a summer night, one armless, one sightless, both whole in the presence of the other.
Sphinx steps out of the diner, disoriented for a moment before his eyes settle on Blind, sitting on the curb and smoking. Heart in his throat, he rushes to sit beside him.
A changeling and his companion, sometimes a human, sometimes a cat, walk side-by-side down the road. You get the idea that they might have been intimidating, once upon a time. These days, if you cross the path they’ve left, tracks still fresh, you get a sense of longing so lovely and painful it steals your breath.
Wait a moment, recover, and let these feelings sink in. You’ll recognize them all. You are in love, you are conflicted, you are hopeful, you are brave.
The figures are long out of sight, and you don’t know them, but you wish them well all the same.