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Thomas had taken to calling the shadow demon that lurked in the corner of his room Virgil.
Well, it was probably unfair to call Virgil a demon. As far as Thomas knew he wasn’t from any religious pantheons, just some minor spook who wound up haunting Thomas, cursed to take his breath away once he reached nine and twenty years or whatever that Fae his mom had ticked off decreed.
But the name Virgil did fit, at least, because although it had been over a decade since he graduated high school, he could still remember Virgil had been Dante’s guide through hell.
“I get it, you’re a drama queen,” Thomas groaned into his pillow, pressing it over his face. “Now can I please stop thinking about how all my friends and family probably secretly hate me?”
Virgil very tartly sent back statistics about deaths via suffocation.
“Isn’t that what you would be doing to me anyway, if I didn’t have this on?” Thomas pointed out, tapping at his iron necklace.
Virgil billowed sullenly in the corner.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Thomas collapsed back onto his bed, rubbing his eyes. “Look, Buddy, I’m not a huge fan of this either, but it’s been a week since my twenty-ninth birthday, and I have yet to actually have a decent night’s sleep. You can’t kill me as long as I’ve got the necklace on, but I’m pretty sure I can’t get rid of you, tragically.”
Virgil sent back vague smugness.
“Yes, yes, you’re so impressive for resisting the banishing rituals, blah.” Thomas waved a hand dismissively. “But we‘re kinda at an impasse here, man.”
He raised his head and squinted at Virgil – at the darkness that ended and flowed from his form, gaunt and pale and long, with spindly limbs and huge purple eyes. His clothes were less of an actual outfit and more of an impression there was something covering him, but Thomas’s psyche has resolved Virgil was wearing jeans and a hoodie, if just for his own sanity. “You are a man, right? Male-presenting void entity? He/him?”
Virgil did something like a shrug, if a shrug had twice the typical number of joints and smelled vaguely of ozone.
“Cool.” Thomas nodded, then continued, “so, like I was saying, if we’re going to be stuck together, we’re probably going to have to learn to deal with each other. But the one thing I absolutely refuse to deal with is not getting enough sleep. So, what do I have to do for you to let me sleep?”
Virgil flashed the impression of Thomas taking off the necklace through Thomas’s mind.
“Seven billion people in the world, and I’m the one that gets stuck with the funny man demon.” Thomas ran his hands down his face. “Try again.”
Virgil hesitated, then sent a Smokey tendril out towards Thomas’s laptop.
“Oh, did you want to watch a video or something?” Thomas grabbed and booted it up, but when he went for Google Chrome, Virgil flashed a faint strain of music through his head.
“Oh, got it.” Thomas went for Spotify, then paused, looking at the being in black that lurked in the corner of his room.
“Hang on,” he said with a grin. ”I got something I think you’ll like.”
Thomas fell asleep with the chorus of My Chemical Romance’s Mama blasting in his ears, but he couldn’t remember ever having better dreams.
Virgil did love MCR, if the way Thomas was able to rest peacefully from then on was any indication, even if he did billow in confusion when Thomas tacked up a piece of paper reading the emo corner where he usually resided.
Virgil did not, however, love being shackled to Thomas, and Thomas could safely say the feeling was mutual. It wasn’t terror, exactly, although it was easy to get nervous when he considered, exactly, what would happen if the iron band around his neck ever snapped. But people can only live in one state for so long.
It’s shocking, how quickly fear can become as routine as hunger.
So no, not terror, but more like having the world’s worst house guest, who would occasionally send psychic messages about how they plan to suffocate you. Not much worse than Thomas’s freshman roommate, if he was being honest.
It wasn’t unusual for Thomas to find all the milk and the meat in the refrigerator had spoiled overnight.
Or to find mysterious, threatening glyphs splattered in dropping red across his walls.
Or to see Virgil, face gaunt and teeth sharp lurking in the periphery of his vision, only to disappear as soon as he turned his head.
Or to find I’m going to kill you :) scribbled in the fog on Thomas’s mirror, after he got out of the shower.
Thomas stared at it for a long moment. “Who the fuck taught you about emojis?”
The first year was rough, but they got used to each other, with much negotiation.
The ominous messages faded away to don’t forget to refill your meds.
The mysterious wails of the damned gave away to the sweet voice of Brendon Urie.
The fierce, glowering presence in the corner of his bedroom at night became a flickering light, as silly YouTube videos reflected into those strange purple eyes.
“Okay,” Thomas announced one day, coming into the living room with two mugs of hot chocolate. “The white one is mine to drink, the purple one is yours to rattle ominously. Cool?”
The mug rattled happily.
“That’s what I thought.” Thomas patted the nearest shadow.
“Virgil, I’m heading to the store!” Thomas shouted, grabbing his keys. “I’ll see you later.”
“Get gatorade.”
Thomas yelped and jumped away, whipping around to see Virgil behind him, looking vaguely shamefaced.
“You can talk?!” Thomas demanded.
“Don’t like to.” Virgil shrugged. “Words hard. Bad voice.”
“No, not really,” Thomas said, automatically, then backpedalled. “Not that I’m judging you for thinking words are hard, I just think that your voice is not bad. Good. The static thing is. Kinda. Hot.”
He gulped and stepped out the door. “I’m leaving now kthanksbye.”
He slammed the door behind him, and once he was out of Virgil’s view, he smacked his forehead against the door and groaned.
“…so I was thinking that we could get a record player for your studio, or whatever we’re calling the room you make ominous sigils on the wall,” Thomas was saying, leaned over to towel his hair off. “I’m pretty sure it’d be easier for you to work than an iPod, and–”
There was a small heart drawn on the opposite side of his mirror, barely visible through the steam. Behind it was Virgil’s silhouette, fidgeting with his elongated hands.
Something like bubbles filled Thomas’s chest, until he was impossibly light. He reached out and drew a heart of his own.
“Why are you doing this, anyway?” Thomas asked, head in the patch of darkness that passed for Virgil’s lap and toying with the end of one of Virgil’s shadow tendrils, letting it slip and twirl around his fingers. It was almost like holding hands, if your definition was loose. “What do you get out of lurking around here?”
Virgil sent an extremely flirty pulse of thought back, and Thomas rolled his eyes, flashing a grin up at him. “Besides the charming company.”
Virgil hesitated, the shadows around him thickening and cooling until they hung heavy as a thick fog. “Because,” he said, simply. “It is my nature.”
But that’s the thing about routine. It leads to complacency.
So much so, that when Thomas’s necklace broke, his first thought was vague annoyance.
His second was that the room had gotten so much colder.
He looked up, and Virgil was there, purple eyes glowing with intensity and shadow tendrils billowing forward, wrapping around Thomas until there was no light left in the room, no room, no nothing except for Virgil’s face, lit by those brilliant eyes.
Virgil’s face loomed closer, closer, and Thomas squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to flinch away. “It’s okay,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “It’s okay. I know you have to. I know it’s what you are.”
Virgil’s breath hit his face, and Thomas almost wished he could hate him, could do anything but hope that wherever he ended up, he could see Virgil again.
Virgil stopped, less than an inch from Thomas.
He cracked his eyes open, slowly, and forced himself to uncurl, to look Virgil into his strange eyes. “It’s okay, Virge.” Thomas managed a smile, bittersweet and trembling. “I promise.”
Virgil reached out one of his strange, elongated hands to cup the side of Thomas’s face. He had expected Virgil’s skin to be cool, clammy, but it was warm, tingling like an undercurrent of lightning ran through his veins.
Thomas didn’t really understand what was happening up until the moment Virgil leaned forward and kissed him. It was soft, chaste, but Thomas’s head spun with the contact, heart and lungs and mind freezing. Virgil pulled away, pressing their foreheads together as Thomas was left, breathless.
“There’s more than one way to steal someone’s breath.”
When Thomas opened his eyes again, he was alone.
It was quiet, without Virgil around.
No MCR randomly blasting through the house. No ominous chanting from behind closed doors. No spine-chilling scratches from within the walls.
Just the sound of pages being frantically flipped, the crackle of candles being burned at all hours, and the frantic muttering of a novice occultist.
“Okay…” Thomas huffed his bangs out of his eyes. “White chalk… sigil… thirteen candles… Check, check, check.”
With shaking hands, he unfolded the printed-out summoning chant he had found online and read it aloud.
Nothing happened.
Thomas frowned and said it again, louder, with more intensity.
Still, nothing.
Thomas leaned back and ground his hands into his eyes, resisting the urge to scream. “I don’t get any of this shit!”
“Yes, that is rather apparent.”
Thomas’s eyes snapped open, and for a moment, crystal-clear joy welled up inside him as he looked for Virgil.
What he found in the center of his pentagram, instead, was a rather normal-looking man in a suit and tie, adjusting his glasses and fixing him with a rather judgemental glare.
“Um…” Thomas blinked. “Hello?”
“Salutations. I believe I was called,” the man said, stiffly, then began to inspect the summoning circle he found himself within. “Oh, your form is simply atrocious.”
“I’m kinda new to all this,” Thomas snapped, then his head split open in agony.
When his vision cleared, he found the man in the tie looming over him, and he saw that he wasn’t as normal as Thomas had previously thought. Where his eyes should be were swirling vortexes of stars.
“You’d do well not to take that tone with me, human.” He adjusted his tie, then reached down to help Thomas up. “I’m nowhere near as cruel as the others you could’ve called, but I’m far from benevolent.”
Thomas bit back a snappy response and stood with a short murmur of ‘thank you’.
“It doesn’t…” Thomas swallowed and forced himself to meet those not-eyes. “It doesn’t really help if you just critique without offering any better alternatives, though.”
“Oh.” The stranger is quiet for a long moment before the stars in his eyes begin to spin. “Would you… care for assistance? A teacher?”
It was said with such hope that Thomas was nearly stunned, but not even his shock could keep him from an emphatic yes.
“Yes! Yes, thank you so much–”
“Logan,” the stranger said, and Thomas offered him a smile.
“Well then, Logan,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
Thomas’s days became filled with the studies of archaic texts, ancient sigils, and summoning chants, but his determination never wavered. Logan, for all his short-temper and condescending ways, was a good teacher, and Thomas found they warmed up to each other, especially once he introduced Logan to Doctor Who. There was none of the intensity, none of the electricity he thought of Virgil with, but still, he was happy to have him around.
“It’s strange,” Logan commented to him, as they sat in the library of dusty tomes Thomas was rapidly accumulating. “By all means, your Virgil should still be around.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas asked, squinting at minuscule lines of Latin text.
Logan shrugged. “He ‘stole your breath’, metaphorically speaking, but he was supposed to haunt you until death, correct? There was no reason for the curse to break. As far as I can tell, the disappearance– Thomas? Are you quite alright?”
Thomas was laughing, but it was bitter, heaved out through wracking sobs.
“He always tried to tell me Disney was bullshit,” he hiccuped. “He’d be so mad to know true love’s kiss really works.”
They had to wait for a thunderstorm.
It was something about what Virgil was, what element he thrived in, that required the ritual be done during a dark and stormy night. Logan declined to attend the ritual himself, citing that his teaching would of course be sufficient to ensure Thomas completed everything himself.
“One more thing, however,” Logan said, pausing halfway out the door. “Thomas, he will… he’ll have to want to come back.”
“Oh.” Thomas swallowed hard and nodded, feeling something heavy settle in the pit of his stomach. “Thanks.”
“Right, well, if that’s all, I’d rather not be late to my interview at the college,” Logan said, breezing out of the door.
“Wait, what?” Thomas blinked, but he was already gone.
Which was how Thomas found himself here, now, heart hammering in his throat as the electricity in the house fizzled out, suppressed by the wild crackle of lightning and rain lashing at the windows.
Thirty-one flickering candles – twenty nine for the years they had spent apart, one for the one they had spent together, and one for all the years they had to come, if all went well.
A circle made of chalk. An etching of a storm cloud. A silver knife spilling Thomas’s blood hot across it all.
There were words he could say, to make sure everything went well, to call on the universe to bring Virgil back, but as Thomas clutched at his bleeding palm, he didn’t care what the fates had to do with it.
So he closed his eyes and prayed that somewhere out there, Virgil could hear him.
“Please.”
All the candles in the room blew out, and for a moment, darkness.
A flash of lightning split the air.
“Thomas?”
Thomas rushed forward, and he found himself sobbing into a shadowy shoulder, ebbing and flowing but solid and real and Virgil.
“I thought you were gone.”
“I didn’t think you would want me back.”
Thomas would’ve cried at the thought if he wasn’t laughing with the sheer irony. “How could I not?” He reached up and took Virgil’s strange, beautiful face in his hands. “I love you.”
Virgil pressed their foreheads together, holding Thomas close, like something precious.
“I love you, too.”
Then he leaned forward and took Thomas’s breath away.