Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nick hopes they can beat the rain, but his luck has always been more towards the shit end of the spectrum. (He landed Seiji as a roommate, after all.) When the clouds first rolled in, he hoped they would hurry. Now, he hopes they hold it in a little longer.

One day. Just one day, and they’ll be out of the state and out of the way of the storm chugging at full steam in their direction.

And, hopefully, away from the humidity.

Every breath might as well be an attempt at breathing underwater. It’s bad enough as it is, soaking through their clothes, but the December chill freezes their muscles and locks their joints. And he’s always so damn wet.

Nick can barely stand to be outside for longer than a minute. He’s been running to and from the Salle, which wouldn’t normally be a big deal if it weren’t for the ice slick sidewalks doing a number on his ankles. He slipped more in the past month than he has in his entire life.

If it gets any wetter, they’ll have to start swimming. Nick hadn’t factored becoming semiaquatic in his career plans, and he really doesn’t want to, now.

He also doesn’t want to drive long-haul through the rain. Not in a Prius.

“Of course, you would have a Prius,” Nick says, making a noise halfway between a laugh and a scoff.

Pausing in his efforts to shove the hatch-back closed without organizing their bags, Bobby levels him a narrowed look. “I’m sorry, Nick, are you being homophobic, right now?”

“No—N—Course not,” Nick says, throwing up his hands like Bobby’s pointing a gun at him. “I just mean that I—know how much you care about the environment, and I figured you would have a car that reflects that.”

Bobby squints at him. “Mhmm.”

The door latch clicks as it catches and Bobby steps back with a huff, looking mighty satisfied with himself. Nick claps for him from where he stands by Eugene a few paces away. Neither had offered to help.

“Do you think Mothman is homophobic?” Eugene asks, scratching his jaw.

“I hope not, or we’re all fucked,” Nick says. “Is that everything? Mission is a go at oh-fifteen hundred hours tomorrow?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s everything except what we haven’t packed,” Bobby says.

“Oh, word? Let’s go get something to eat,” Eugene says, clapping his hands and rubbing his palms together. “I’m starving.”

Bobby makes sure his car is locked—not that anybody’s going to steal from a Prius—and scampers over to them. “I heard the caf’s serving salmon and lentils for dinner.”

“Protein and grain? Hell, yeah!”

“First, I have to wheel by the Salle,” Nick says, starting in that direction.

“Huh?” Eugene hums, rushing to catch up to him as Bobby says, “No more practice, babe, please. The season’s over.”

“No, I’m—” He laughs, the last syllable ticking up nervously. “I forgot a few shirts in my locker that I, uh, don’t want to leave there for a week.”

They nod in understanding. “Oof,” Eugene sympathizes.

Their last team meeting of the season had been especially loaded, emotionally. Nick had been so caught up in the seniors’ heartfelt (at least for Harvard) speeches that he forgot to grab some of the riper shirts hanging in his locker. He’d rather not come back from their trip and find a monster there, chewing up his equipment.

Instead of taking the backdoor into the locker room, they walk through the empty lobby. Raised voices bleed through the salle doors and Nick’s steps falter. He can’t make out the words, but he’d recognize those voices anywhere. He’s practically been hearing them when he sleeps.

Sure enough, when he pushes the door open, Coach Williams and Seiji, in full fencing get-up, are arguing on the piste. Seiji’s face is very near pink with emotion. It isn’t hard for Nick to guess what emotion; he’s pretty sure Seiji only knows one. Their discussion dies when the door creaks open, and two pairs of eyes cut a line to the intruders.

Nick takes a timid step into the room, smiling tightly and waving. “Uh, hi. Just, uh, grabbing something from the locker room,” he offers by way of explanation.

Neither responds to him. They turn back to their heated debate, their voices carrying through the still air. The length of floor between the lobby and the locker rooms has never seemed so vast.

“You worked hard this season, Seiji. Take a break,” Williams says, crossing her arms over her chest.

Nick knows a dismissal when he sees one, but Seiji is a little slower on the uptake. That, or he doesn’t give a shit. “The number one fencer in the nation spot won’t wait for me to take a break,” Seiji practically spits, the muscle in his jaw twitching. Nick rolls his eyes so hard he nearly blacks out.

“The number one fencer in the nation spot will be waiting for you after New Years,” Williams says, her eyes cool and her words steely. “You’re not a machine, kid. You deserve a much-needed vacation.”

“My father said—”

“Your father isn’t the boss of me, and I already talked it over with your mom. She agrees with me. Even asked me to confiscate your gear until school restarts.”

Seiji sputters, “My mother—!” His mouth opens and closes while he finds and discards responses, looking for all intents and purposes like a dumb fish.

“Yes, your mother. The word of God.”

So close. The locker room is right there. Nick can almost reach out… and touch it…

“She thinks you should take a trip during your vacation, like these guys.” Williams motions to the boys trying to discreetly slip into the locker room. They stop in their tracks. “You’re going out of state this weekend, right?”

Nick is the first to rediscover his voice, answering by reflex. “Yeah. West Virginia.”

Williams turns to Seiji, again. “See? That sounds fun. You should go with them.” Nick isn’t sure what expression he makes, but he has a hunch it’s mirrored on Bobby, Eugene, and Seiji’s faces. Shock, with a little dread peppered in. “Can he tag along with you guys?”

Humiliation is the color now capping Seiji’s ears. Nick almost feels bad for him; nothing sucks as hard as a teacher intervening to help you make friends. And Nick can’t help but agree with her. Seiji does deserve a break. He busted ass for months, and Exton still beat them to Nationals. They were hard-pressed to get him to relax of his own volition.

And, dammit, when a friend asks for help, you help ‘em. Even if he isn’t asking for help and he looks very much like he would rather eat his own dehydrated piss. Seiji’s entire existence is a cry for help, Nick thinks.

“If he throws down for gas, sure,” Nick says, holding onto a cool front while Bobby and Eugene gape. Seiji’s look spells death. Nick ignores him.

Williams uncrosses her arms to dig into her pocket. “Perfect,” she says, already turning to leave. “I’ll call your mom and let her know.”

“W—Coach, wait.” Seiji sends Nick one last withering glare before rushing after Williams.

Nick doesn’t stick around to see the fallout. The others follow him quietly into the locker room, but he doesn’t get further than a few steps before Bobby says, “What just happened?”

Nick opens his locker and flinches at the smell. Eugene plops onto the nearby bench. “I think our trio just became a quartet,” he says, his eyes on Nick’s back.

“Wait, so that really happened and I wasn’t having some psychotic break? Is Seiji—Seiji Katayama, nationally ranked fencing prodigy—coming with us on our monster-hunting trip?”

“Mothman isn’t a monster,” Nick says, wadding up his stinkiest shirts and shoving them to the bottom of his backpack. They ignore him.

“Yes,” Eugene answers. “I think Seiji’s coming with us on our monster-hunting trip. Did you—No, I know you didn’t think this through, dude. He’s gonna bring down the general vibe of this bro-trip.”

“Yeah, concur. He’ll just whine the entire time about the time we’re wasting on trivial stuff instead of fencing,” Bobby says, dropping onto the spot beside Eugene. “He would use that word, too: trivial!”

Nick gawks at Bobby, whom he thought would be more on his side. “What happened to oh, Seiji’s such a dreamboat, Nick, you have to introduce me? Yeah, I’m talking to you.”

Bobby crosses his arms. “I was exposed to him for long periods of time. I think that would ruin anyone’s good opinion of him.” Eugene points at him in agreement.

Nick frowns. After spending six-odd months in close proximity with Seiji, he’d found that Seiji wasn’t always awful and could actually be—dare he say it—alright to exist around. The exact opposite of Bobby’s discovery. Not that Seiji would care what they say about him, but it rubs Nick the wrong way to talk about him when he can’t defend himself.

“Come on, guys. He’s cool to hang out with when he’s not obsessing over fencing,” he offers, shutting his locker and shouldering his bag.

“Huh. Just like you,” Bobby says as he bounces up to Nick’s side.

The Salle is, thankfully, empty when they leave the locker room, but Nick has an inkling the war is far from over. “I’m still pretty fun when I’m obsessing, too,” he defends.

“You know he’s cool because…?” Eugene asks, bringing them back to the topic at hand. “Have you ever chilled with him?”

He has not. Unless silently watching Exton matches together in their dorm counts, which he’s sure doesn’t.

“Is he even capable of chilling?”

“Listen. I’m sure he’s cool to hang out with when he’s not obsessing,” Nick says, though it sounds weak even to himself. They make faces like they don’t believe him. “How about this: he’s our teammate and he needs help and we need to bond and be a more cohesive team by next season if we want to beat Exton. Heard?”

They don’t look convinced, but neither argue. “Is that your pitch for captain?” Bobby teases.

Nick ignores him and says, “I can’t believe he’s already training for next season, though. Like, I know he’s a fencing wunderkind or something, but the season just ended.”

“Oh, so you’re telling me that as soon as we get back next week,” Eugene says, leaning forward, “you won’t be right where he is?”

Nick sputters. “At least I’m taking a few days off!”

“Trading one obsession for another,” Bobby hums knowingly.

“It!” Nick glares at him, blushing despite his best efforts. “Isn’t an obsession.”

Eugene elbows Bobby conspiratorially and says with a grin, “I don’t even know which one he’s talking about.” Bobby presses a hand to his mouth to cover his laughter.

Nick rolls his eyes. He halts in front of the front doors. “You’re both assholes. You ready to run?”

They book it back to Castello, sprinting to keep their knees from freezing over. Winded, they pause between their rooms.

“Mine?” Eugene offers. Bobby and Nick nod and follow him into his dorm. Nick claims his bed, flopping back onto it, and Bobby perches on the desk with his feet propped up by the chair.

While rifling through the dresser, Eugene finds a twenty-dollar bill half-tucked under a golfing trophy. He mutters something about his roommate and pulls out his phone. “Hey, Thomas,” he says into it. “I’m alright, thanks. No, I haven’t left yet. You forgot a twenty—yep, under Tiger. Oh, ye—Actually, can I borrow it? You know I’m good for it.”

Nick can only hear laughing on the other end, but Eugene is smiling when he hangs up. He shoves the twenty into his shorts pocket.

“Man, I wish I had a roommate that cool,” Nick says, propping his head up on his hand.

“I thought your roommate was cool,” Bobby teases, grinning at him. Nick throws him a vulgar gesture that he only giggles at.

Eugene shoves one of Nick’s knees out of the way and sits on the edge of his bed. He pulls his legs up, crossing them at the ankle. “The reservation is set for tomorrow,” he says, thumbing through the emails on his phone. “I’ll need to tell them ahead of time that we’ll be getting there late. What time should we be there?”

Nick does the math in his head. “If we leave right after school tomorrow, then it’ll probably be about… two or three. That includes time for potty breaks.” The clouds outside are a dark gray, now. “Hopefully, we won’t have to stop for the weather.”

“’Kay. So, we have the double for… That’s three nights, then.”

“A double would have worked fine for us,” Bobby cuts in, “but what about Seiji? How’s that going to work?”

Eugene and Nick share a look. “He’s not really going with us, is he?” asks the former.

Nick opens his mouth, then closes it. He finds his words on the second try. “I doubt it,” he says. He couldn’t fathom Seiji willingly riding in a car with them for ten hours, much less hunting a cryptid.

“But Coach said—”

“There’s no way,” Nick says, event though he, himself, supplied the invitation. “Seiji can get out of anything.” Through sheer force of will, if nothing else. His reputation and charming personality usually do all the work for him, though.

Bobby’s press into a grim line. “But Williams might be as stubborn as he is.”

Williams is the only person whose resolve can match Seiji’s; at least, without Aiden’s twisting words and double-speak. Theirs is always a level playing field, and Nick can never be sure of the outcome.

During the season, Williams told Seiji to help Nick better his ripostes. Told is a generous way of putting it. Watching them duke it out across the piste was like watching two bulls lock horns. Nick had held his breath. In the end, Nick’s ripostes became, as much as he hates to admit it, much improved under Seiji’s severe tutelage.

But Williams didn’t always win.

Where will didn’t work, Seiji sometimes made up for it with money. During break in November, Williams and Lewis held a training camp at a literal campground just outside state lines. (Bonding, they’d said when Nick asked why they couldn’t stay on campus. Like shoving boys in tiny tents together would improve their relationships.)

Seiji wasn’t going to sleep in the dirt under a tent, oh no. Especially not with Aiden. Williams told him he would, but she had no honest authority off campus. Seiji got a hotel room nearby.

It could go either way.

So, Nick couldn’t discount the possibility of Seiji going. Especially not with how specifically they had planned.

He sets his jaw and fishes the itinerary out of his backpack. Their Mothman Bible. Eugene scrunches up his nose at the smell. Nick flips through the pages until he finds the hotel room floor plan. “So,” he says, “how we gonna fuck this pig?”

After a thoughtful moment, Bobby opens his mouth to say something. The door across the hall slams shut. All eyes go to Nick.

“Speaking of pigs that need fucking,” says Bobby, giving him a meaningful, albeit amused look. Eugene does the same.

Nick groans as he pushes himself up. “Fine. I’ll go see what’s happening. Take care of that.” He drops the planner in Eugene’s lap. He grabs the dirty shirts out of his backpack.

“Good luck,” Bobby calls to him before the door clicks shut.

Taking a breath to gather his wits, Nick opens his door. Seiji left it unlocked. The first thing Nick sees is the white jacket crumpled on the floor, like it had been flung against the wall. Alarm bells attuned to Seiji’s moods ring in his head. His fingers twist in the fabric of the shirts.

The second sign of danger is Seiji, himself, sitting on his bed with the wall at his back and his laptop open in his lap. He’s still dressed in his knickers. When Nick closes the door, Seiji doesn’t react overtly, but Nick sees the muscle in his jaw tick. Nick notes it. Best to tread lightly.

“Coach kicked you out of the Salle?” he asks amiably enough, tossing his dirty clothes into the hamper and opening up one of his dresser drawers. Back in the first few weeks of their cohabitation, Seiji had said without mincing words that the upper two drawers were his, and that Nick could cry about it.

Seiji doesn’t answer, but Nick hadn’t expected him to.

Nick studies the room: the laundry Seiji hadn’t done, the schoolbooks stacked beside his backpack, the general laxity of Seiji’s side of the room. At odds with the preparation of Eugene’s room, and probably Bobby’s. Nick takes a peek inside the top drawer, where all of Seiji’s clothes lie folded and untouched.

Seiji’s piercing eyes are now on Nick, wary. Nick meets them, his eyebrows nudging together. He frowns.

“You’re not packing,” says Nick.

“I’m not going with you,” says Seiji. He likes to answer Nick’s questions before he has the chance to ask them. That wasn’t going to be Nick’s next question, though.

“No, you—you’re not packing at all.” Seiji turns back to his laptop. Nick’s brow furrows further. “Are you staying here for Christmas?”

Most of the other boys had already left, rightfully dismissing the last day of the week as pointless and in the way of their vacations to SoHo or Amsterdam or wherever young, wealthy boys go during their breaks. The rest, like Nick, Eugene, and Bobby, were getting ready to leave as soon as the law permitted. Seiji already missed the deadline to be the first one, but it doesn’t look like he’ll be the second, either.

Seiji scrolls on his laptop, unseeing. “Where else would I go?”

The cool detachedness grates on Nick’s nerves. “Uh, home. To your parents.”

“My parents are very busy people.”

Nick chews on the inside of his cheek. Seiji’s body is lined with tension, his movements jerky over the trackpad. “They won’t let you come home?”

Seiji’s fingers pause. His shoulders pull tight, some unbidden reaction. Nick has the distinct feeling he’s asked a question Seiji hadn’t expected, or have an answer to. He watches Seiji’s jaw work.

And in a logic-defying moment of vulnerability, Seiji says, “There’s no point. My father is in New York on business, my mother is still in France, and there’s a perfectly functional Salle here that I have the keys to.”

A familiar knot tightens in Nick’s chest. He can imagine it. Seiji spending hours on end practicing the same forms over and over again. Perhaps even Dmytro takes holidays. The image of Seiji spending Christmas alone settles in Nick… wrong. Seiji is his teammate. He can’t leave him here all on his own.

“No,” Nick says, gathering his resolve within him and snapping the drawers open. He grabs Seiji’s backpack and starts haphazardly stuffing shirts and shorts and unmentionables into it. “I’m not letting you stay here all alone so you can spend all of your time fencing. That—That’s not happening.”

“You’re not letting me do anythi—Hey, quit it! You can’t do that!” Seiji is on his feet now, rushing toward Nick.

“But I am,” Nick says, twisting around and clutching the bag close. Seiji tries to wrest it from him, but pure-hearted camaraderie has turned his muscles to steel. “You’re coming with us. I don’t care if I have to tie you to the top of Bobby’s Prius.”

“No,” Seiji grinds out, desperately trying to prise Nick’s arms open. “I’m not. Give me my things.”

“Nuh-uh. Nope, not happening. You’re going on vacation with us and you’re going to have a good goddamn time, all right?”

Seiji’s arms don’t quit snaking around Nick, borderline desperate. Finally, he gets a solid hold on his bag and goes still. “Nicholas,” he says, absolutely lethal.

Nick twists to face his anger head-on. “Seiji.” Unmoving.

They stare each other down, neither willing to give any ground. Nick has never bothered to take Seiji on like this; he knows a losing battle when he sees one and would rather not waste the energy. But when he considers caving, all he can think of is that image of Seiji standing by himself in the Salle.

“I haven’t had a very good day.” Each word holds its own edge. Nick is pretty sure that Seiji would be shaking if it weren’t for his annoying self-control.

“Sucks.”

His face darkens. “I don’t like being told what to do.” A warning.

“Sucks.”

Seiji blows a hot breath through his nose, but Nick doesn’t look away. They stare at each other in tense silence for all of five seconds before Nick decides sheer will won’t win him this battle. He regroups, tries to appeal to Seiji’s fencing side.

“You want to beat Exton next season, don’t you?” Seiji’s eyebrows twitch minutely, an unbidden submission, and Nick knows he has him. “We won’t have Aiden and Harvard next year, ‘kay? And you can’t win on your own. You need the rest of us, and we need to be a more cohesive team. Come with us, have some fun, and let’s try to make this work, or Jesse’s going to beat us again.”

Seiji’s eyes narrow. Mentioning Jesse was the wrong move. “Bonding with me won’t make you a better fencer,” he hisses. He gives his bag an insistent tug.

Nick huffs, feeling some of the fight leave him. He doesn’t know how else to get through to Seiji. He presses his lips together and tries again.

“I want you to come with us,” he tells him, letting go of the bag. It falls to the floor between them. Seiji watches him warily. “Okay? Please?”

It’s not a lie. Seiji’s suspicion doesn’t disappear, but his jaw works as he contemplates. Nick blinks in surprise. Appealing to their nonexistent friendship was a last-ditch he didn’t think would work.

After a long moment, Seiji looks down, throat bobbing, and says, “Fine.”

Satisfaction jolts up Nick’s spine, and an inexplicable giddiness washes over him. He has never won anything against Seiji. As far as he knows, only a handful of people ever have. Seiji glares at him for it, but he can’t help the painful grin that splits his face in half.

Seiji shakes his head but sets his backpack on his bed and unzips it. He methodically folds and puts back the clothing Nick had manhandled. He drags an empty duffel bag Nick has never seen before out from under his bed and opens it wide. He glances at Nick expectantly. “What am I packing for?”

Nick nearly chokes. “Uh—Cold. Pack something warm. And, um, something to wear outside.”

Seiji gives him an odd look, but pulls some expensive-looking long-sleeved shirts from his drawer and folds and tucks them into the duffel. He grabs a fur-lined parka from the closet. Nick holds himself as still as possible. He doesn’t want to spook Seiji into changing his mind.

“How long will this trip be?” Seiji asks as he surveys the contents of his bag.

“Three days, not including travel.”

Seiji flicks his eyes to Nick, his lips drawing a hard line. “How long will I be trapped in a car with you?”

Nick snatches his duffel and throws it over his shoulder. “That doesn’t matter. Let’s not think about that, right now! Come on,” he says, gesturing to the door.

He doesn’t wait to see if Seiji follows and peeks into Eugene’s room. “Hey, Bobby, could I get your keys?”

Bobby’s eyebrows furrow. “Why?” he asks carefully. By way of explanation, Nick opens the door wide enough for them to see Seiji standing behind him. Bobby tosses him the keyring, nonplussed. The closing door muffles a stunned laugh.

Nick takes one look at the bags blocking the rear window and tosses Seiji’s bag in the back seat. Back in the dorm, he motions toward Eugene’s door. “We’re going over the plans, if you want to, uh…”

Seiji is already turning away. “I’m going to sleep.”

Nick rolls his eyes. He takes Eugene’s and Bobby’s incredulous looks as he walks into the room, meeting them with a steady, unbothered look of his own.

Eugene is the first to speak. “What the hell?” He sounds more disbelieving than upset.

“What happened to Seiji can get out of anything?” Bobby says, and Nick ignores the accusation in his tone.

Nick shoves his hands deep into his pockets and toes at a stain on the flat carpet. He mumbles some half-baked excuse about semantics, unable to meet their eyes but not ashamed of what he did.

“So—wait,” Eugene starts. “Is this really happening? Nick, he’s not really going with us, is he? I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”

Seiji, standing lonely on the piste.

“Yes,” Nick says, voice firm. He looks up to the both of them. They look confused, more than anything. “He isn’t going home for vacation and—even if he did, he’d be alone. He was going to either be alone here or alone at his house and I—we can’t leave him here by himself for all of break. He’s our teammate, y’know? Maybe we can’t spend Christmas with him, but we should do something—”

Bobby holds up a quelling hand. “Hey, it’s okay,” he says, sympathy ruffling his brow. “We understand. We’re just confused.”

“Yeah, how’d you get him to agree, like, willingly?” Eugene asks.

Nick chews on his lower lip and shrugs. “I said please.”

His friends blink at him, then at each other, then back at him. “Okay…” Bobby mumbles, drawing out the o. “We’ll have to adjust the plans, then.”

“On the bright side,” Eugene says, making room for Nick when he hops onto the bed, “we’ll have more money to throw around. He’s gonna add to the pool, right?”

Nick makes grabby-hands for the itinerary-bible, which Eugene passes him. “We can figure that out tomorrow. Our plans shouldn’t change too much, though, I don’t think,” he tells them, flipping through pages about expenses and schedules. “Our driving rotations will be a little shorter, if there’s a fourth shift.”

He pauses, considering. “Do you think Seiji can drive?”

“Like actually? Or legally?” Bobby asks. He doesn’t answer. Bobby shrugs.

“We’ll cross that bridge later,” Nick mumbles. “I didn’t plan for, like, places to stop for dinner or gas or anything, so we’ll have to play it by ear.”

“You planned every minute of this trip, but didn’t plan for potty breaks?” Eugene snorts.

Nick shrugs. “I didn’t plan for Seiji, either.”

“Are we meeting here or in the parking lot?” Bobby asks, hopping off the desk to join them on the bed.

“We can meet at the Prius after—”

“Why’d you say it like that? Why’d you say Prius like that, Nick?”

“Huh?”

“I drive a Prius, Nick, and that Prius is gonna take your ungrateful ass across five states for ten hours so you can chase an imaginary birdman. There’s nothing wrong with my Prius.”

Nick gives Bobby a long, flat look. “We can meet at the Prius after dismissal. I’ll have to collect Seiji, so you guys don’t have to wait for me,” he says. “We good here?”

“I can’t believe Seiji’s coming,” Eugene says. Nick rolls his eyes.

“Cool. Let’s go grab some grub. Salmon and lentils? Protein and grain?”

Eugene is nearly to the door. “Already there.”

The lights are off when he gets back to his room. Seiji’s laptop casts his face in a dim white glow. Their eyes meet over the top of his screen. Seiji looks away first. The white jacket that had been crumpled on the floor before is gone, and Seiji’s hair is damp from a shower.

They say nothing to each other as Nick gets ready for bed. As he settles under his covers, he mutters to his wall, “You’ll have fun.”

His response is a noncommittal grunt, but it’s better than none at all.

Chapter Text

“You’re stalling,” Nick says, tapping his foot impatiently.

Seiji has spent three agonizing minutes checking every drawer in the dresser and corner of their closet. “If I’m to spend three days with you, I want to make sure I have everything I need.”

Nick groans, but holds his tongue. Finally, Seiji closes the last drawer and follows him out of the dorm. He keeps a step behind, making sure Seiji is in his line of sight. Seiji puts up with it for about three seconds. “You don’t need to be herding me like a dog,” he says.

“What, I should leave you alone so you can flake on us? No, no, no.”

Seiji opens his mouth to argue, then shakes his head. This somehow feels like a loss. Nick doesn’t have time to dwell on it.

“Hurry along, chitlens,” Bobby says, waving them closer to his Prius. “There’s monsters to be hunted.”

“He’s not—” Nick starts, then decides to pick his battles.

They pile into the hatchback: Bobby driving, Eugene in the passenger seat (despite Nick’s distressed protestations), and the freshmen in the back. They’re on the road, thanks to Bobby’s, ahem, expeditious technique, in no time at all.

“Holy shit,” Eugene says, knuckles white around the assist handle. “Who signed off on your license? I’m calling the DMV.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know I passed the permit test with flying colors,” Bobby says as he switches lanes without a blinker, cutting off a disgruntled BMW that honks at them—in Nick’s opinion—more than necessary.

Nick swallows his laughter at Seiji’s generally nonplussed reaction. He hadn’t thought to warn the poor boy of the dangers of putting Bobby behind the wheel. For his sake, Nick leans over the center console.

“I’d like to make it there in one piece, if it’s possible, Bobby,” he says.

Bobby pushes him back with a hand to the face. “Put your seatbelt on!”

“Hands on the wheel!” But he’s laughing, rolling back into his seat and clicking the belt into place.

Bobby doesn’t slow down, but he quits driving like a maniac, and Nick praises the small miracles. Eugene’s grip doesn’t relax.

They filled the tank yesterday and packed snacks for the road, so they’re good to drive for maybe two hours before absolutely having to stop. Bobby, Eugene, and Nick had planned to all take a shift behind the wheel at least once each on the way up and the way back. A roughly nine-hour trip equates to three-hour shifts, pulling off when they switch to top up the tank. This way, they could avoid fatigue and related problems.

Including Seiji means another shift, if he can drive, and more funding, but that nobody can lay back and take a nap in the backseat if they need to.

“You can drive, right?” Nick asks him, maneuvering his backpack between his legs. One last briefing of their plan couldn’t hurt.

Seiji side-eyes him. “Yes, I can drive.”

“Good. Everyone is pulling their own weight here,” Nick says, pulling the itinerary out. “Bobby, did you put the address in the GPS, yet?”

“Affirmative, captain.”

“Where is it that we’re going?” Seiji asks, his brow wrinkling.

Eugene turns, measuring him up. “You agreed to come without knowing where we’re going?”

“Admittedly, it was a… lapse in judgment,” he concedes, but holds Eugene’s look. Seiji glances at Nick. “You said West Virginia?”

“Yes. Point Pleasant, West Virginia,” Nick says innocently enough, handing Seiji a length of rope to see if he’ll hang himself with it.

Seiji hesitates. “What’s in Point Pleasant, West Virginia?” he asks, and, in terms of gratification, it’s like crack.

“Oh, honey,” Bobby says, breathing a sympathetic, but long-suffering sigh.

Nick grins at him. “I’m so glad you asked,” he says, and Seiji’s face drops. “We are taking the adventure of a lifetime, undertaking a feat few have been brave enough to endure. A hunt! An improbable, nay impossible chase for that elusive creature. That which disaster follows. The winged fright of the night! The—uh, it’s—Mothman. We’re go—We’re looking for the Mothman.”

Seiji blinks.

Bobby shoots Nick a look in the rearview. “I told you not to open with that. Nobody will take us seriously if you keep saying we’re hunting Mothman,” he says.

“I thought it was good,” Eugene mumbles, twisting to dap him up from the front seat.

“When you said West Virginia,” Seiji says, having rediscovered himself, “I thought you meant a cabin in Blue Ridge. Or a trip to Camden Park.”

Eugene pipes up like it hadn’t occurred to him, “Can we go to Camden Park?” Bobby shushes him gently.

“Mothman,” Seiji says, like it’s the most ridiculous thing he has ever heard, but makes perfect sense. “You’re hunting Mothman.”

Nick’s hackles raise. “There’s enough eyewitness evidence for there to be reasonable doubt that his existence isn’t just mass hysteria,” he says, defending against an argument Seiji hasn’t made.

Seiji tilts a look at him. “You believe in aliens, too, don’t you?” he asks, incredulous.

“What? No, I don’t believe in aliens,” Nick scoffs. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Hey!” Eugene says, pointing a baselessly accusatory finger at Nick. Nick throws his hands up in surrender. “They’re out there, heard? Watch your mouth.”

Seiji glances between them all guardedly. “Is this some sort of joke?” His gaze settles on Nick. “Am I really to believe you’re spending your Christmas vacation and hundreds of dollars on, what, hunting cryptids?”

It’s Nick’s turn to blink. “I wouldn’t joke about the Mothman,” he says firmly, meeting Seiji’s challenge with equal strength.

“We really are,” Bobby cuts in, glancing at them both in the rearview. Always the peacekeeper. “We aren’t trying to mess with you or anything.”

Seiji still doesn’t look convinced. Nick huffs and rolls his eyes. He has never, not once, played a prank on or made Seiji the butt of any joke. Really, he has never given Seiji any reason to distrust him. It’s annoying that he refuses to believe in Nick.

“Here,” Nick says, offering him the itinerary. “See for yourself. Everything’s in there: schedules, info on the area, where we’re staying, what we’ll eat—hell, even when we’ll shit. Take it.”

He studies Nick warily but takes the journal and leafs through it. Within it is every piece of intelligence they need to make this trip worthwhile. Nick taped whole Wikipedia articles and archived documents to pages and squeezed notes into the margins. Tourist spots are detailed by Nick’s own hand and organized by how important they are for their goal. Several pages are dedicated to just the museum.

Seiji stops on the two-page spread of a map Nick had torn from a tourism pamphlet and littered with marker. He looks up at Nick. “So, this is serious to you,” he says rather dumbly.

“Yes,” Nick sighs. “Are you done being suspicious? This isn’t some elaborate prank just to fuck with you. We were going to come on this trip, anyway, whether you came or not.” Not everything is about you, Nick leaves out.

By no measure is Seiji conceited; arrogant, maybe, but his confidence is reasonable given who he is and what he’s done. Nick is not so disillusioned by Seiji to think his behavior is the result of an inflated ego. The only other person that makes Seiji so reflexively defensive, as far as Nick knows, is Aiden. He’s rather amiable with others, up to a point. No, this behavior isn’t because of who Seiji is, but because of who Nick is.

Seiji seems to accept this reasoning, though, and continues looking through the itinerary. Nick watches him, suddenly self-conscious of himself. That journal is a monument to an embarrassing obsession Nick has kept relatively hush-hush and could easily be turned against him and used as roast material.

Nick waits with bated breath for Seiji to—well, do anything other than consume the proudest thing Nick has ever created that won’t be seen by anybody outside this car. Seiji flips through the clear sleeves of printed pictures unbothered and unaware of Nick’s internal struggle.

Finally, his eyes flick up to Nick. “You know they make digital programs for you to do this on,” he says.

Nick grabs at the journal. “If you’re just going to be a bitch, give it back.”

Seiji holds it tighter. “No, I’m not trying to criticize you,” he says, now choosing his words carefully. “I’m impressed, actually. It’s… very thorough.”

Nick’s hand falls to his lap. “I’ve had a lot of time to put it together.”

“How long?” Bobby asks. Eugene is twisted in his seat to pay attention. Nick hasn’t told them how this all started, either.

The ceiling of Bobby’s Prius is suddenly very interesting. “Uh, a little less than a year. That’s not important, right now. You guys want to go over this one more time?” Nick says, taking the itinerary from Seiji’s unresisting grip. He must have looked his fill.

Eugene groans softly, and Bobby smacks his arm. “Yes. It’s important to be prepared,” he says meaningfully.

Seiji is the only one who doesn’t have the benefit of weeks of planning. Nick had spent days organizing every last detail with Eugene and Bobby, considering timeframes and budgets. It was damn near the most effort he has put into anything other than fencing. It is also absolutely necessary that Seiji is privy to these plans. They have a lot of ground to cover in a finite amount of time.

“First of all,” Nick says, pointing at Seiji, “it isn’t our entire Christmas vacation. We’ll be back at school by the twenty-third, and everyone will be where they need to be by Christmas Eve.”

He flips to the driving schedule, though he doesn’t need the itinerary much at all; he has it all memorized. “We were going to take three-hour shifts between the three of us, but since you’re here we can add another shift and shorten them to…”

“About two and a half hours,” Bobby helps.

“Yes, thank you. We’ll pull over, grab some snacks, take a piss, and fill the tank when we switch. Bada bing, bada boom. Taking traffic and pit stops into account, we should get to Ohio at about one in the morning—”

“Ohio?” Seiji cuts in. “I thought you were going to West Virginia.”

Nick huffs. “Point Pleasant is on the border, we’re just going to stay in a motel on the other side of it. The Super 8—”

“We’ll be staying in a motel?”

“Yes, we’ll be staying in a motel. Are you going to keep cutting me off?” Nick glares at him, waits. Seiji presses his lips together, but keeps quiet. “As I was saying, The Super 8 motel is within viewing distance of the Silver Memorial Bridge and only a five-minute drive from Point Pleasant.

“We sleep in tomorrow because we deserve it, grab a late breakfast, and do a little exploring. Important stops include but are not limited to: the Mothman Museum and the Coffee Grinder. And, in true tourist form, we can do a little shopping, too.”

“Hallelujah,” Bobby mutters.

“Everything is within walking distance, so that makes it easier. On Sunday, we wake up at eight and check out McClintic Wildlife Management Area. Uh, there’s been a lot of sightings around there,” he adds for Seiji. He conveniently leaves out the part of their plan that involves camping. “On Monday, we do whatever we want until we leave. You get all that?”

Seiji nods. “Good,” Nick says. “Any questions?”

“Do blind people dream?” Eugene asks, scratching his jaw.

“I meant relevant questions.”

“Oh. Did you pack Fritos?” Nick digs a snack bag out of his backpack and tosses it over the center console. “Thanks, man.”

“Wave good-bye to Connecticut, boys,” Bobby says, wiggling his fingers to the Connecticut State Line sign.

-

They run out of petty conversation after about an hour. That is, Nick, Bobby, and Eugene do. Seiji keeps to himself, only speaking when spoken to and when Nick knocks his knee with his own by accident.

Silence lapses for a moment too long and they collectively declare it boring as hell.

“Find a podcast, Gene. Something educational, maybe,” Bobby says, digging the auxiliary cord out of the glove compartment and dropping it in Eugene’s lap. “I would like to hold on to the few braincells I have left.”

“Noooo podcast,” Nick says and lurches forward in his seat, ignoring Seiji’s indignant look when their knees—once again—collide. “They’re fucking boring. We’re playing ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”

“No,” is Seiji’s knee-jerk reaction. Nick makes a face at him.

Eugene scratches his jaw. “Is that really a game? I thought it was more like a sing-along thing.”

“I am not going to be trapped in a car, listening to you scream ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall in the backseat for nine hours,” Bobby says, making a gesture with his hand to emphasize his point. “No, okay? I’m not even old enough to drink.”

Nick shakes his head. “You don’t have to be—fine, forget it.”

“How would you even win that?” Eugene asks.

“Okay,” Nick grumbles. “We’ll listen to a stupid podcast, whatever.”

Bobby smiles at the road, looking supremely satisfied with himself. “Yay.”

“But at least keep it relevant. Play one about the Mothman.”

Bobby’s face falls. “Aw.”

Eugene cracks open another bottle of Powerade, despite Bobby’s warnings, and says, “Why don’t you just tell us about Mothman? Aren’t you an expert?”

Nick shrugs. “I’m no cryptozoologist, but—”

“Is that a real thing?” Seiji asks, arching a skeptical brow at him and speaking without for the first time.

“Yes, Mr. Interrupts-Me-A-Lot. That’s a real thing,” Nick says. He looks back to Eugene and Bobby. “I’m no cryptozoologist, but I can tell you what I know.

“It all started on a cold November night, nineteen sixty-six—”

“I take it back,” Bobby cuts in. “I take it back, put on a stupid podcast.”

“No, no—I’ll take it seriously,” Nick laughs. “Uh, I don’t know where the legend first came from. Every culture has its flood, you know? But, um—I’ll just start with Point Pleasant, since that’s where we’re going.”

Eugene twists around to face him, Bobby glances at him in the rearview, and even Seiji tilts his head to listen, though he’s trying to hide it. Nick thinks they’re just indulging him, but he can’t account for Seiji’s attention. Bored curiosity, maybe.

“In sixty-six, these two couples drove into the woods to get nasty and found this abandoned factory that made dynamite or bullets or something during World War II. One of the women saw this figure walking by the building, but it wasn’t a person. It had these huge shapes over its shoulders, like wings, a head with no neck, and these… glowing red eyes.”

He pauses, gauging their reactions. Eugene is chewing his chips a little slower, a shallow wrinkle between his eyebrows, but they’re otherwise unfazed. Seiji looks out the window.

“She’s the only one that saw it, the others didn’t see anything, but they decided to drive home, anyway. On the way, the thing came back, but it was using those huge wings to fly, following behind the car and making this high-pitched screech,” he tells them, sweeping his arms out like wings. Eugene has stopped chewing.

“It keeps up with them, even when they’re driving a hundred miles an hour down the road. Then, it passes them and flies off into the night.” Seiji snorts. Nick turns to him. “What? You think it sounds fake?”

Seiji looks at him coolly. “I think that that’s hard to believe,” he says.

Nick shrugs. “That’s what they thought, too. They went out again the next day to make sure it wasn’t, like, a big bird or something, and they saw it walking through a field, wings and glowing eyes and all.”

“Bullshit,” Eugene says from the front.

“They went to the sheriff.”

“And he just took their word for it?”

Bobby glances back. “I can respect that they went to make sure they saw what they saw.”

“I don’t think a word of what you said was true,” Seiji says. “There’s no way.”

Nick tilts an eyebrow at him. “Just like there’s no way you would ever go on vacation with us?” Seiji narrows his eyes but doesn’t say anything. Tastes good. “They saw the Mothman.”

Seiji rolls his eyes and turns back to the window.

-

“Listen, if we don’t pull over right now, I’m gonna burst like a damn grape,” Eugene says, crossing and uncrossing his legs. His arms are wrapped tightly around his middle.

Bobby switches lanes. “The next exit isn’t for ten miles!”

“You have three bottles up there,” Nick says, leaning over the center console and pointing.

Bobby shoves Nick back—or tries to. “If you pee in a bottle in my car, Eugene, so help me God—”

“I gotta go!” Eugene whines. Seiji white-knuckles the overhead handle as Bobby pushes ninety. “I’ll piss out the window if I have to!”

“You’ll have to wait ten miles!” Bobby zooms past a semi. “I told you not to have those Powerade!”

“I’m sorry, was I just supposed to dehydrate!?”

Nick leans over the center console, again. “Listen, Eugene. It’ll be okay. Just don’t think about waterfalls… or rain… or, like, leaky faucets.”

“Oh nooo,” Eugene moans, folding forward.

Bobby elbows Nick in the throat, and he falls back into his seat with choked laughter. “Think about deserts, or—or—” Eugene cuts him off with a pained noise.

Against all odds, Eugene holds it in long enough for them to pull into a gas station at the nearest exit. They need to fill the tank, anyway, so it works out. Eugene bolts for the restroom before they’re even parked.

“I got it,” Nick says when he spots Bobby glancing between the pump and the convenience store. He pulls his wallet out of his pocket. “Forty on pump nine, ‘kay? Grab me a snack?” He hands over the appropriate funds.

He picks up the nozzle when the screen lights up and puts it in the tank, watching the numbers tick up at an agonizing pace. With nothing better to do, he leans against the flank of the car and looks around. The station is mostly dead, except for the few rigs behind the building, but the air hums with the nearby highway traffic. Gasoline, sharp and overwhelming, stings his nose.

The sights, sounds, and smells shouldn’t be so interesting, but this is the furthest he’s been from home. He’d never even left Connecticut before, and, as thoroughly planned as this trip was, Nick hadn’t expected to take it so soon. Bobby had asked if he wanted to do something before Christmas and he had just enough money saved from cleaning Coach Joe’s ballroom.

No better time than the present.

Nick spies Seiji on his phone in the backseat, a solitary creature. He’s not sure why he bothers—it’s probably the same reason he’s always compelled to annoy Seiji—but he crosses his arms over the window across from him and leans into the car.

“Having fun, yet?” he asks.

“No,” Seiji says, without feeling.

Nick blows out a short, amused breath. “We just haven’t gotten to the good part, the real meat of it,” he promises. He squints at the sun as a dark gray cloud passes in front of it.

Seiji doesn’t look up from his phone. “You keep saying something to that effect. Do you ever plan to deliver?”

Nick stares at him, chewing on his lower lip, long enough that Seiji looks up. “This is what teenagers do, you know. I know that being a kid is foreign to you,” he teases, a smile toying at his lips.

“Teenagers waste money on frivolous trips chasing fairytales?” Seiji counters, tilting an eyebrow.

“They do dumb shit,” Nick says, lowering his voice like he’s sharing a secret. “And they have fun while they do it.”

Seiji pauses, sizing him up. Then, he turns back to his phone. He has this way of ending a conversation with a look that drives Nick mad.

Bobby walks out of the store only a minute later, Eugene following behind with a bladder now empty. He tosses a bag of Chex Mix into Nick’s chest and climbs into the passenger’s side. Nick will feel a little better with Eugene behind the wheel. He clicks the gas cap back into place and slips into the backseat.

-

“So, what is he?” Bobby asks when they’re back on the highway. “Mothman, I mean. Is he even a moth? Is he a demon? A dinosaur?”

“Fake?” Seiji adds with a pointed look. Nick pulls a face at him, but refuses to dignify that with a response. Eugene makes a rude gesture at a car that cuts him off.

Nick scratches the back of his neck. “Uh, I don’t know what he is. There’s a few theories, but how can we really be sure, you know?”

“Indeed,” Seiji mutters drily.

Nick ignores him. Bobby asks, “What do you believe, then?”

“I don’t know, I think he’s just an animal. We discover new species all the time; I don’t think that’s too far-fetched. Maybe he’s the last of his kind, like Godzilla,” Nick says.

Seiji gives him a long look. “You don’t believe in Godzilla, too, do you?”

Of course not. Godzilla was born from movies. There have never been any Godzilla sightings, and those would be hard to miss. Nick makes a dismissive gesture. “I was just using him as an example.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Nick rolls his eyes, but Bobby saves him from saying something that might (but probably wouldn’t) hurt Seiji’s feelings. “And he lives in West Virginia?” Bobby asks.

Eugene snorts. “Mothman can fly to Vegas or, like, Cancun, and he decides to stay in Appalachia? Couldn’t be me.”

“Hey, it’s almost heaven, West Virginia,” Nick says, avoiding an indignant swipe from Bobby. “He’s been spotted outside of West Virginia. There’s been sightings in Chicago”—he thumbs through pages of notes—”and Moscow. The last sighting, apparently, was in twenty-sixteen.”

“Wait, and it’s the same one from the sixties? He’s been alive and… what, fully-grown for more than fifty years?” Eugene asks with a skeptical brow.

“Well, I don’t—”

“Pokes a few holes in your he’s just an animal, the last of his kind hypothesis,” Seiji comments.

“I didn’t say it was a perfect theory!” Nick says, pulling another face at him. “But it’s the most realistic. What, are you more convinced he’s a demon? Or a dinosaur?”

“I’m not convinced it exists,” Seiji counters, crossing his arms. “Four people say they saw a monster with glowing eyes that could fly faster than a speeding car and you take their word as gospel?”

“Ah, have a little faith, Seiji,” Bobby says amiably.

Nick grins. “Yeah, have a little faith, Seiji.” Seiji narrows his eyes at Nick, but makes a gesture for him to continue.

Nick does so, “there’s also the theory that he’s an alien.”

Eugene claps his hands and rubs them together, ignoring Bobby’s warnings about hands and wheels. “Now, we’re talkin’,” he says with a devilish smile. He straightens the car and nods to Nick in the rearview. “Alright, I’m ready. Lay it on me.”

“That—That’s it.” He turns the book, opened to the correct page of notes, and shows him the tiny entry. Eugene visibly deflates, frowning at the road.

Seiji leans over. “Still more likely than him being the last of his kind.”

“Now, you’re just trying to be a bitch,” Nick says, though he’s trying not to smile. “You believe in aliens now, huh?”

Seiji tips his chin up in that way that puts Nick below his nose, knowing just how much that agitates him. “I think it’s more likely that aliens exist than that your Mothman exists.”

“He’s not my anythi—”

“Gang,” Eugene says, throwing a fist bump over his shoulder that Seiji only stares at, puzzled.

“No, no, wait,” Nick sputters, making wild gestures with his hands and twisting to face Seiji. “You don’t believe in aliens. You said E.T. was the most unrealistic movie you’d ever seen!”

“Because it is,” he says with a nonchalant shrug that still comes off as regal. “He made the bicycle fly. He can’t defy the laws of physics solely because he’s an alien; I can’t suspend my disbelief that much.”

Nick gapes, and the conversation quickly degenerates into an argument about Seiji’s coldest takes on movies.

--

The sun is slinking toward the horizon as the gas light blinks on. They pull into a Love’s station somewhere in Pennsylvania off the 76, Nick declaring it the halfway point.

Seiji makes for the store once Eugene decides on a pump, barely pausing to check for other cars. Eugene bolts after him, having consumed another two Powerades in the last circuit. Nick checks that Bobby’s filling the tank and starts for the store.

“Grab me a snack?” Bobby calls to him.

“Sure,” Nick says. “Don’t leave me here.”

“Leave you here, you said?” Bobby says, cheeky.

“N—well, yes, but there was a ‘don’t’ before it,” Nick says, biting back a grin.

Despite its rather nondescript location on a barren road beside a highway exit, the Love’s is pretty nice. Fridges stocked with drinks and cold foods, rows of snacks, racks of souvenir shirts, and aisles of candy. The bathroom tiles sparkle, and the soap dispensers actually have soap. All around, a pretty nice joint.

Nick finds Seiji leisurely browsing the souvenir shirts, pushing hanger after hanger aside. He’s momentarily stunned at seeing Seiji do something as mundane as shop for souvenirs, but soon spots the analytical look in Seiji’s eyes, like he’s a scientist studying wildlife. To Seiji, he’s a scientist studying the most perplexing creature: normal people. Nick saddles up beside him, because he can’t stop himself, pulling a shirt off the hanger and holding it out.

“I’m on island time,” he reads, squinting at the glaring orange color. He glances at Seiji. “How many of these do you think they’ve sold? Probably twelve million, right?”

No reaction. He puts it back and pulls out another. “Straight outta Harrisburg. That seems a little problematic.” Still, no reaction. He puts the shirt back.

Seiji pulls a shirt off the rack, smoothing it out and wordlessly holding it for Nick to see. In bold, purple typeface across the chest, it reads, FOR HIRE.

It shocks a laugh out of Nick, sharp and loud. He swears he sees the edges of Seiji’s lips tick up when he turns to put the shirt back, but that level expression is back in a second. It still sends a strange thrill through Nick’s body.

Nick pulls out another shirt, a white one with the words two-sweater in bold black typeface and two arrows pointing up and down. He looks from the shirt to Seiji and back. “I can’t believe they’re selling this here,” he says.

“Oh, shit!” Eugene says, strutting out of the bathroom with hands still glistening with water. He snatches the shirt from Nick’s unresisting hands. “I’m getting this.”

“All yours,” he mutters with a grin. He jerks his chin back at Seiji, eyeing the fridges. “You getting anything to drink?”

Seiji shrugs and pulls a glass door open between them, plucking a water off the shelf and letting the door swing shut again. Then, unceremoniously, he turns away and wanders down another aisle, away from Nick. It feels like a petty thing to do, so Nick rolls his eyes.

Sometimes, it feels like Nick might actually be getting somewhere with Seiji. A moment of peace will pass with no ugly comments or nasty looks. They’ll achieve some measure of amiability, and they’ll start to feel almost like friends. Then, something will shatter the moment like glass. Usually Seiji. But that has been the trend for the six months since they started living together. For all that Seiji does to piss him off, Nick wishes it would last.

He steps into the line once he’s grabbed what he needs, Seiji at his back. He pulls out his wallet while he waits, checking to see how much money he has. Two twenties sit folded within it, laughing at him. He meant to be a little more frugal, but he hadn’t had much spending money to begin with.

He pulls one of the twenties out when the cashier scans his products, because he’s always willing to spend what little he has on Bobby. Before he can hand over the bill, Seiji beats him to it, sliding his credit card into the reader. Nick stares at him, the extra beeps of the scanner barely registering.

“What are you doing?” he asks, dumbfounded.

Seiji side-eyes him. “Wouldn’t want you to go bankrupt buying cookies,” he says by way of explanation. Of course, even Seiji’s generosity would be backhanded.

Before Nick can think of something to say, Seiji has swiped the receipt and his own snacks and is headed for the door. Nick quickly thanks the cashier, grabs his own shit, and chases after Seiji.

He can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t get him laughed at, so he tells Seiji, “Thank you.” Seiji gives him a lingering, unreadable look, but he’s the first to look away.

Bobby and Eugene have already taken up post in the backseat, and Nick spots Seiji hesitating as they near the Prius. Nick bolts for the driver’s side, making the decision that Seiji’s considering for him.

“You’ll be the anchor,” Nick says, ducking into the seat. Seiji only nods. Nick tosses the tea and Oreos he—well, Seiji bought Bobby into the back seat.

“Thanks, dad,” Bobby says, tearing the plastic open.

-

It’s almost half-past seven by the time they get back onto the highway. The pale yellow of the sunset is fading into a muted blue, distorted by the colorless clouds, and Bobby and Eugene are falling asleep in the backseat.

Nick voiced his amazement at their laziness, but Bobby threw a piece of trash at him and told him they were the ones that had driven for over two hours. They’re currently dozing together, Bobby stretched across the seat with his legs thrown over Eugene’s and Eugene’s head leaning over the back of the seat at an odd angle. Nick takes extra care to avoid potholes and swerving.

Seiji scrolls through his phone, as he’s been doing the entire trip. That is, when he’s not staring out the window or mocking Nick. On the screen, Nick can catch glimpses of videos and scoring records. He bites his tongue.

Seiji cautiously glances back at the sleeping boys in the back, then pulls his notebook from the bag by Eugene’s legs. He has long since gotten over writing in his fencing journal where Nick can see and teasing him lost its luster a while ago; a logical consequence of cohabitating for six months, but Nick is shocked for a different reason and he can’t keep his mouth shut this time.

“You brought that?”

Seiji gives him a look that tells him the question is ridiculous, which Nick heartily disagrees with. They’re going on vacation and Seiji won’t even give it a day’s rest, but… that’s actually pretty on brand for him.

Nick shakes his head in disbelief, thoughts shifting somewhere else. “Writing another diary entry about Jesse?”

Like usual, Seiji doesn’t take the bait. “Yes,” he says simply.

Nick cranes his neck to see, but, even if he didn’t have to watch the road, his visibility is shot. “How do you have anything else to write about him? The season’s over, anyway. You can’t see him compete.”

Seiji scribbles on the paper. “One of his teammates records video blogs—”

“Vlogs.”

“—yes, vlogs of their practices and posts them on YouTube.”

Nick studies him across the center console, both in awe of and concerned about his commitment. Mostly concerned. If it weren’t Seiji, that would be borderline stalker behavior. “I’m not going to try to convince you again to let loose—”

“Yes, you will.”

“—today, but maybe give yourself a break,” Nick says, glancing between Seiji and the road. “You killed it this season. The least you could do for yourself is to pause”—he looks pointedly at the journal—”your obsessing.”

Seiji doesn’t look too enthused by that, so Nick says, “Or redirect it into something more positive.”

That gives Seiji pause, and he closes his journal. “What do you suggest?”

Nick jerks his chin at the notebook. “What’s in there about me?” His eyebrows bounce.

“This again?” Seiji says, scoffing and shaking his head. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“I’m going to keep asking.” Seiji rolls his eyes, and Nick continues, “Hey, you can’t tell someone you wrote in your diary about them and expect them to not be curious.”

“I didn’t tell you,” Seiji says. “You’re nosy.”

Nick rolls his eyes. The sky darkens around them, until their visibility is limited to their headlamps’ range. Seiji doesn’t offer any info, but he doesn’t go back to obsessing.

“What were you writing, just now?” Nick asks, prioritizing the most immediate curiosity. Then, he asks, “What more could you have to write about Jesse?”

To the second question, he says nothing. To the first, he says, “He’s practicing right-handed.”

“Isn’t he always practicing to face right-handed people?”

“No, he’s practicing with his right hand,” Seiji clarifies.

Nick’s gaze cuts to him. “Huh,” he says, not knowing what to think at first. “So, he’s getting bored?”

Seiji blows a short breath that sounds like a laugh. “I hardly believe winning gets boring,” he says quietly. “I don’t know what this means. He’s too smart to try competing with his non-dominant hand. Not even Robert—”

Eugene rouses just long enough to yell at them, “No obsessing!”

Nick bites back a laugh, and Seiji—shockingly—does as he’s told. He sets his notebook in his lap, glancing to the two in the backseat.

“I’ve never gone on vacation before,” he admits with forced nonchalance. Nick can see every line of his body loaded with tension.

“You went to France.”

“That was business.” Nick stops himself before he can roll his eyes.

“So, you’ve never gone anywhere for fun?” Seiji shakes his head. Nick sits up a bit straighter. “Never? What about when you were younger? Trips to grandma’s?”

Seiji shakes his head. “Not that I can remember. I don’t know any of my extended family.”

Nick thinks that’s unbearably sad. “Well, we’re your family now,” he says, referring to the sleeping boys in the back. “Whether you like it or not. And we’re taking a family vacation.”

Seiji gazes out the window. For the first time ever, Nick may have left him speechless. It feels better to make him laugh.

“And what’s more fun than cryptid-hunting with family?” Nick grins at the road.

Having snapped out of his speechlessness, Seiji rolls his eyes. “I could think of a few things.”

“How would you know? Have you done them?” Nick challenges playfully. Seiji glares at him, without heat. Nick’s cheeks are starting to hurt. “Have you done anything?”

“I didn’t tell you that so you could mock me.”

Nick drags his tongue over his lower lip. “Then, why did you tell me?”

Seiji blinks. He looks out his window. “I don’t know.”

Nick reaches across the center console to give him a good-natured arm punch. “Hey, I’m just messing with you. You don’t need to get all mopey.”

“I don’t mope.”

“Yes, you do. You mope and you pout and you brood. Especially when I beat you at something.”

“You’ve never beaten me at anything.”

“That’s not true. I’ve gotten touches on you in practice, remember?”

Seiji gives him a flat look. “You lose every bout. Landing a few touches doesn’t qualify as beating me.” When Nick only smiles like he knows the truth, Seiji says, “It doesn’t!”

Nick’s eyebrows bounce. “Yeah, oh-kay,” he snorts.

“And I don’t mope. Or pout.” Now, he’s crossing his arms and looking petulantly childish. Nick almost laughs, but that might be counterproductive.

“Yes, you do, and you make this face.” Nick makes an exaggerated pout, jutting out his bottom lip, drawing his eyebrows together, and making cartoonish sad eyes at Seiji.

Seiji does the closest thing to a gape. He blows a short breath through his nose suspiciously close to a laugh and says, “I have never made a face like that. Not in my life.”

“You made that face last night when I so graciously invited you into our plans. God, you’re so ungrateful.”

“Invited! I was given no choice on the matter.”

Nick side-eyes him. “I don’t have any authority over you. You could have said no and stayed at King’s Row at any time, but you didn’t.” Seiji blinks once, twice at him. “So, what does that say about you?”

“You stuck to me like a leech as soon as school ended, then herded me to the parking lot like I was a sheep. I was not given a choice.”

“I think a well-placed punch in the face would have gotten rid of me,” Nick says with a shrug.

Seiji is quiet for a long moment before relenting, “I’m an idiot.” He doesn’t sound too broken up about it.

“Mhm.”

Seiji rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “You’re insufferable.”

Nick bites back a small smile. “But you’re having fun.”

Seiji gazes through the windshield.

--

Nick slams the door and stretches the ache of immobility from his muscles. A few vertebrae pop, joining the symphony his stomach is singing.

When he opens the back door, Bobby falls back, jolting awake when the seatbelt catches him. In his panic, he kicks his legs and knocks Eugene squarely in the chin. Eugene wakes with a colorful expletive and shoves at Bobby’s feet. They both look to Nick, bleary-eyed and slow.

“Come on. Dinnertime,” Nick says, ruffling Bobby’s curls.

They take their time coming to life, stretching each and every limb. Nick is patient for all of ten seconds before he nods to Seiji, stretching his arms over his head by the passenger’s side. “We’ll grab a table. I gotta piss.”

The sky is dark, but the West Virginian Chipotle they parked in front of is lit up like a football field, spotlights and everything. A direct contrast to how dead it is past the doors. All of the tables are empty, recently wiped down. The few workers waiting until closing are sitting in chairs behind the displays, each with a hand of poker cards. When the bell over the door tinkles, Nick hears arguing over who’s going to serve them.

“You ever eat here?” Nick asks Seiji, who shakes his head.

“I’ll have what you have,” he says, somewhat subdued. Nick pauses, watching him rub at his eyes and wondering at this odd little moment of trust.

“You sure? Wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of your meal plans,” he teases. Seiji gives him a look telling him he’s not in the mood to play. Nick laughs and gives him a good-natured pat on the back. “We can grab you some coffee when we leave.”

Bobby sidles up beside him halfway through his order, freshly awake and looking hungry. He points at the glass. “Get the green olives. You’ll thank me later,” he says, and Nick does so. “Are you going to order for me, too?”

By the time Nick finishes ordering, he’s about to wet his pants. Bobby notices his jittery legs as they approach the check out, Eugene halfway through ordering his second bowl. “Go,” he tells Nick. “I’ll cover you.”

Nick thanks him and makes a beeline for the restroom without being told twice. The others have claimed a table by the time he’s done, a booth hybrid smack dab in the center of the restaurant. Seiji and Bobby took the chairs, Eugene took the booth. Nick slides in beside him, popping the top off of his bowl. The others were already elbow-deep.

“Guys, we have to say prayer,” Nick says, laughing when Bobby throws a soggy bay leaf at him. Eugene and Seiji don’t even pause.

Mouth full of beef and guac, Eugene pauses to ask, “How far away are we?”

Nick checks their location on his phone. “About two hours. We’re on the last leg, now,” he says, stabbing at his burrito bowl with a fork. “Should be getting there around one, at the latest.”

Bobby groans, rubbing at his neck. “I can’t wait to sleep in a bed. Oh, my back is never going to forgive me for this.”

Seiji yawns behind his hand, and Nick kicks him under the table, saying “You can drive the rest of the way, right? I said we can get coffee, but if you can’t cut it, I’ll do it.”

Seiji gives him a dirty look and tells him, “I’m fine. I can drive.”

Nick kicks him again. “You don’t have to act tough. We’re all friends here,” he says.

“I said I’m fine,” Seiji says. End of discussion, he implies. Nick kicks him one more time, for good measure.

“Is that tofu?” Nick asks, eyeing Seiji’s bowl. “I’ve never tried it before.”

Seiji stabs his fork at Nick’s hand when he reaches for the food. “What do you think you’re doing? Were you raised in a barn? You can’t take someone’s food without asking,” he says.

Nick sucks a knuckle that got a real good poke. “If I asked, you would have said no.”

“Yes, that’s the point,” Seiji says, pulling his bowl closer to him. “Now, who’s pouting?”

Eugene points at Seiji with his spoon. “Wait, you got tofu? Over beef? Couldn’t be me.”

Bobby sighs. “Gene, I told you to get the chicken. Eating red meat every day isn’t healthy for you.”

Seiji glances between them and says, “Tofu has no cholesterol and more vitamins than red meat does. Red meat has the B12 and D vitamins we need, but for the sake of my cholesterol I avoid it when I can.”

Eugene blinks, regarding Seiji’s food with new eyes. “No shit,” he says consideringly and rubs his chin. He pauses. “But… But it’s so… boring.”

“It’s an acquired taste,” Seiji agrees.

“Like beer!” Eugene says, now grinning, voice loud in the empty building. Seiji doesn’t look wholly understanding, but he nods along. Nick looks from him to Eugene and back. Bobby does the same, before locking eyes with Nick.

One of the workers leans over the counter and calls, “So, when are you guys going to leave?”

--

Nick watches, enraptured, as Seiji methodically checks every mirror, adjusts the seat, sets up the air conditioner, then inputs the address in the navigation. By the time he starts the engine, Eugene and Bobby have fallen back asleep in the back seat.

There’s a twenty-four-hour Dunkin Donuts down the street, but the closed drive-thru means one of them will have to go in. Nick volunteers. He gets out of the car before Seiji can fish his credit card out of his wallet and returns a few minutes later, two cups in hand and pocket a little lighter.

“This is me paying you back.” Nick holds Seiji’s coffee out and jokes, “I can’t stand it when you’re nice to me.”

Seiji rolls his eyes and takes a considering sip. His eyebrows scrunch up. “How do you know what I get?”

Lightning flashes and a boom of thunder follows in the distance. Nick squints at the black sky. “A bit of whole milk and one packet of sugar? It’s not exactly DaVinci’s code.” When that doesn’t satisfy Seiji, Nick adds, “You got the same coffee every morning before a comp. I meant to tell you, having caffeine before competing probably wasn’t the smartest.”

Seiji frowns at the road as he merges onto the highway. “It calmed me down,” he says, still sounding out of sorts.

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Nick scowls. To smooth out the lingering wrinkle between Seiji’s eyes, he adds, “We’ve lived together for half a year; is it that hard to believe that I’d pick up on your habits?”

Seiji takes another sip of the coffee. “I guess not,” he says quietly.

Nick makes a dismissive gesture, throwing his feet on the dash. “Besides, I’m sure you’ve figured out all my weird quirks.”

“You fart in your sleep.”

Nick straightens. “I do not!”

“You do. I dread every time the cafeteria serves beans.”

Nick flounders like a fish, not knowing what to say. He would like to deny, deny, deny, but he can’t really be sure what he does in his sleep.

Then the corner of Seiji’s mouth ticks up, for only an instance, and Nick knows he’s been bamboozled. “Asshole,” he mutters through his smile.

“Put your feet down,” Seiji says, sounding light-hearted.

“You’re not my dad,” Nick says, not moving an inch. “And this isn’t even your car.”

Seiji opens his mouth for a snappy retort, but Nick’s phone rings before he can deliver. Nick makes a face at him and checks the caller ID.

“Hey, mom,” he says into the receiver, glancing at the backseat.

“Hey, hon. I just got off of work and thought I’d see how you’re doing,” she says, voice as soft as the night. “Wait, you’re not driving, are you?”

Seiji gazes through the windshield, pretending he can’t hear.

“No, I’m not driving. How was work?”

“Oh, it was alright, I guess. My manager’s still a shithead, but I don’t think that’s curable. I really wish people would start reading the aisle signs, too. Make my job so much easier for me,” she says, sounding worse for wear. “But enough about me. How’s your trip? I wish you would’ve taken the money.”

The last time he saw her the weekend before, she had almost begged him to take some two hundred dollars she had saved up. Nick dips his chin against his chest. “Don’t worry about that. I told you I didn’t need it.”

“Are you there yet?”

Nick fiddles with the vent. “We’ve got two more hours until we get to Point Pleasant. Bobby and our other friend, Eugene, are already asleep.”

“I’ll be quiet then, shh,” his mother jokes. Nick chuckles. “If they’re asleep, then who’s driving? Are you stopped?”

“Uh, no. Seiji decided to tag along last minute, so he’s behind the wheel right now,” Nick says. Seiji looks like he’s about to argue with him, but goes back to pretending not to listen. “You remember Seiji, right?”

“Ah, the cute roommate,” his mother says with knowing familiarity.

Seiji’s eyebrows lift, if only a fraction, and Nick starts. “Mom—Sh—Please,” he stumbles, heat rushing to his face.

Her mother breathes a dramatic, static-y gasp and drops her voice down to a whisper, though it makes no difference. “Oh, no. Did he hear me?”

Seiji takes a too-casual sip of his coffee. Nick runs his hand over his face, hoping the dark can hide the stain on his cheeks. “No, he didn’t. Don’t sweat it. Are you home, yet?” he asks.

“One stop away. You didn’t forget anything before you left, right? You have your little book, your wallet, enough shirts, your phone—well, of course you have your phone—”

A smile tugs at Nicks lips. “Yeah, I have everything. You don’t have to mother me so much; I’m a big boy,” he says, not that upset about it.

“I’m never going to stop mothering you, Nick, and you’re just going to have to accept that,” she says. “Ugh, I don’t mean to make this about me, but I’m so happy you’re finally going on this trip. You’ve been planning this for, what, a year? You tell Bobby and Eugene I said hello, you hear?”

“Yeah, I hear you, mom.”

A man speaks through an intercom on her end. “Oh, this is my stop. You ate dinner, right?”

“We stopped at ten. You better eat before you get to bed, too.”

“Now, who’s mothering who?” Nick sinks into his seat, smiling despite his best efforts. He loves his mother. “So, when will you be back in the Nutmeg State? Before Christmas, I hope. I already bought the chicken.”

“We’ll be back at school the twenty-third. Should be home by the twenty-fourth. I’m serious, get something to eat.”

“Alright! At least let me get my shoes off, first.” He hears her shut the front door and turn the lock. “I’m going to go, okay? You’ll call me when you wake up?”

Nick tries not to feel disappointed. “Of course. Love you, bye.”

The car is quiet when Nick hangs up. He taps his phone against his thigh a few times before twisting around and slapping Eugene’s and Bobby’s legs. “My mom says hi,” he tells them.

Bobby doesn’t stir. Eugene’s eyelids flutter, and mumbles blearily, “Hi, mom,” before going back to sleep.

Nick sits back, trying to avoid looking at Seiji. He had to have heard every word of that conversation, there’s no way he couldn’t. Phone calls carry in silent cars, even clearer than over water. He chews his lower lip, wondering if something should be said.

Seiji breaks the silence first. “Don’t Christmas dinners usually have turkey,” he says, “or lamb?”

Nick glances over, lightning fast. “Those are expensive.”

Seiji nods like he understands. A few more beats of quiet pass. “I’ve never met your mother,” he says, then follows with the dreadfully logical conclusion, “Do you often talk about me with her?”

“I may have mentioned you,” Nick says by way of excuse, eyes burning a hole through the windshield. He’s never been an especially good liar. “She’s just good with names.”

Seiji nods, again. “You seem close.”

That puts him on the defense. “Look, if you’re going to call me a Mama’s Boy—”

“I wasn’t,” Seiji interrupts, adjusting his grip on the wheel.

Nick studies him for a long moment, trying to find any insincerity in his perfect posture. When he comes up empty, he’s not sure what to think. He takes a deep breath and tells him, “It’s been just me and my mom for—my whole life, really. I think that would make anyone close.”

Seiji nods a third time, but this one is slower, more considering. He watches the road, but half of his attention seems far away. In another country, maybe. “What does she do that keeps her so late?”

“Depends on the day,” Nick says with a shrug. When Seiji’s eyebrows twitch, he explains, “She works at a Circle K and a Fed-Ex warehouse, and her shift times are always changing. It’s a scheduling nightmare for her supervisors.”

For an instance, Nick worries Seiji will make a snide comment about their lower-middle-class status, but when Seiji speaks, it’s only to mumble, “Wow.”

“Yeah, she works really hard.” Nick turns in his seat, propping his knee against the center console. “What does your mom do? Something that takes her out of the country, I’m assuming.”

It’s an innocent question—or, Nick thinks it is—but Seiji goes quiet. His brow furrows at the road, like he’s solving an equation in his head, and says with a new softness, “I don’t know, actually.”

The air conditioner and hum of the engine muffles most of the peripheral noises, but thunder rolls through the closed windows. The low full moon hides behind Seiji, the pale light throwing his profile into sharp relief. He rolls his lower lip between his teeth. With all his pomp and condescension, Nick forgets that he’s a boy, just like him. He looks especially young, thinking about his mother.

“I’m sure she does something important,” Nick tells him, lowering his voice, “if she can’t come home for Christmas.”

Seiji shutters. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t celebrate Christmas.”

It’s a textbook deflection, but Nick only nods. Seiji’s home problems are far from his concern, but, of course, an unfortunate consequence of living with someone for so long is a specified empathy. Thinking of a young Seiji waiting for his parents to come home for a holiday, Nick can’t deny the disquiet that niggles at him.

That conversation died with Seiji’s deflection, and Nick doesn’t have another topic readily available, so he settles for leaning his head back against the window and watching Seiji drive. Fencing forced Nick to get over staring at people. Seiji has never cared about being stared at. A convenient combination, and one Nick sometimes exploits.

But it’s hard to not stare at Seiji, when the opportunity presents itself. He has a quality that demands your attention and a grace that makes you stop and observe. His presence fills up the room; Nick used to think it was suffocating, but now he believes it’s like arms wrapped around you, pulling you in, it’s like gravity. These thoughts he usually keeps to himself, though, and barely indulges them even within the confines of his head. Dangerous, dangerous things.

Seiji also looks like he’s walked right out of a damn Abercrombie magazine. Which helps nothing.

“At some point, you need to blink,” Seiji says flatly, bringing Nick back to himself. Dangerous things.

“Huh?” Nick hums dumbly. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

Seiji side-eyes him, only taking his gaze off the road for a moment. Always careful, always with intent. “Don’t look at me like that,” he says.

Nick’s eyebrows scrunch. “Like what?”

“Like we’re friends.”

Nick scoffs. “I wasn’t looking at you like that. I hate you.”

“Good. I hate you, too,” Seiji says, but amusement pulls at his lips.

This might be Nick’s favorite Seiji. The playful one, the one that peeks out when no one can see, but Nick, the one that plays the game. It seems this Seiji only reveals itself in the dark, when it’s hard to see unless you look. Nick doesn’t mean to be arrogant, but he’s sure he’s the only one with the privilege.

“What did I just say?” Seiji says. He leans his elbow against the door, resting his head on his fist and releasing some of the tension from his shoulders. His other hand holds the wheel in a loose grip.

“I’m not doing it on purpose, I swear,” Nick says, a slow grin spreading across his face.

Eugene snorts from the backseat, and Nick glances back to make sure he’s still asleep. That this fragile bubble around him and Seiji is still intact. Maybe not only in the dark. The parameters under which the boy Seiji, rather than the prodigy rich kid Seiji, will reveal himself aren’t explicitly stated—or Nick, at least, has yet to find wherever they’re written. The stars have to align. The planets must be in specific formation. Something with astrology, something totally lost on Nick, but endlessly interesting.

Seiji is already looking at him when he settles back.

“Now, you’re doing it,” Nick accuses, poking Seiji in the cheek and turning his head forward. “Eyes on the road.”

“I wasn’t doing anything. I hate you,” Seiji says without feeling. Nick rolls his eyes, but Seiji isn’t done with him, yet. He chews thoughtfully on his lower lip, then says with a rather suggestive tone, “The cute roommate, huh?”

Panic is a hot spike in Nick’s spine. “I—W—I, uhh… That’s actually our other roommate,” he says, scratching his neck, then inwardly cringes.

Seiji hums and nods, unconvinced. He takes another sip of his coffee.

--

The bubble dissolves when they pull into the motel parking lot. Not immediately. They both pause after Seiji turns the car off, before Nick opens his door. They lock eyed across the car, only for a moment, and then Nick pulls the handle and tumbles out of the seat.

Seiji climbs out with a little more poise. “I’ll check in,” Seiji says without looking at him and heads for the office. Nick shoots a quick text to his mother about their arrival.

It takes a couple good shakes to wake Eugene, but Bobby comes back to life with a soft touch and whispered word. He dislodges his knee from under Eugene’s arm and scrubs his face. Nick waits for some of the lucidity to return to his face and says, “Rise and shine, buddy. We’re here.”

Bobby heaves a disturbingly cat-like yawn and stretches his arms above his head, fists knocking against the Prius ceiling. Eugene is still figuring out how to move his limbs, but mumbles something about kayaking. Bobby rubs his eyes again and blinks blearily up to Nick. “What time is it?” he asks, throat thick with sleep.

Nick checks his phone. “About one.”

Eugene whimpers and makes like he’s about to go back to sleep. Nick grabs one of the crumpled-up potato chip bags discarded on the floor of the car and throws it at him, nailing him in the cheek. Eugene comes back swinging at air, before settling back, a little more awake. Bobby rubs his eyes for a third time and stretches his arms out over Nick’s shoulder, like a kid would.

Nick receives the message and hauls Bobby up by the middle, pretty much the only thing keeping him upright. “Gene,” Bobby mutters, waving a hand back into the car like Eugene can see him. “Gene. Get up. Beds.”

At the word, Eugene’s eyes snap open. He climbs out of the car with all the faculties of a boy wide awake and looks expectantly to Nick. “Beds?”

“Seiji’s grabbing the key,” Nick says, adjusting his hold on an all but limp Bobby. As if on cue, the boy wonder himself reappears with a few keycards in hand.

“Room two-oh-eight,” Seiji says, holding out one of the cards. When Nick reaches for it, Seiji pulls back. “I know you’re in the habit of losing but try not to lose this. A replacement costs ten dollars.”

Nick makes a face at him and snatches the keycard. A moment of vulnerable, boyish Seiji is always followed up by an extended period of focused bitchiness. Hauling Bobby upstairs is a chore, but luckily he wakes enough to walk halfway up the stairs. Nick swipes the keycard over the lock and shepherds them through the door. Bobby unceremoniously belly flops on the nearest queen. Eugene stays awake long enough to toss the cushions off the couch to pull out the third bed, then kicks his shoes off and falls asleep on the bare mattress.

Nick pulls one of the spare sheets from the linen closet and tosses it to Eugene. Instead of spreading it across the bed, Eugene curls up around it, holding it close to his chest. Nick turns to head back out and grab their stuff but pauses when he sees Seiji, blank-faced.

Nick tracks the boys gaze to the beds, two of them plus the pull-out couch. There’s no expression, but Nick can see the tense line of his mouth. Nick can almost see the math he’s going in his head. Four boys, three beds.

Seiji’s eyes cut to him. “I’m not sharing with you,” he says firmly. Where he had seemed moderately warm in the dark car, he is now ice cold. “It’s awful enough sharing a room with you on my vacation.”

The insult was completely unnecessary, but Nick bites off a number of colorful retorts in favor of brainstorming a more constructive solution. He surveys the room, considering what few options are available. Bobby in bed is all elbows and knees; Nick is pretty sure he fights in his dreams, but Bobby denies it. Bobby kicks, but Eugene is an unstoppable cuddler. There isn’t a bed big enough to keep Eugene away when he sleeps.

Seeing his hesitation, Seiji says, “I’ll go rent another room. I’m sure there’s one available.”

Nick seizes his wrist before he can go far. “No,” he says, jaw set. “Not again. You’re staying in here with us.”

The bathtub is less than ideal, so Nick really only has one option: “I’ll just sleep on the floor. Whatever.” He lets go of Seiji and runs his hand through his hair. It’s not that bad, and Nick is too tired to fight.

He smacks Seiji on the shoulder, probably harder than he needs to. “Help me with the luggage.”

It takes two trips to drag everything upstairs. Their trip is only three-odd days long, but Bobby brought two bags of clothes just in case, Eugene brought a separate bag for snacks, and Seiji and Nick only have so many hands. When Nick jokes about Seiji forgetting his fencing gear, Seiji mumbles something about Coach Williams and confiscation. Nick pulls the last bag over his shoulder and waits for Seiji to shut the hatchback.

Before he does, he pauses. “Why was it so important to stay in this motel?” He says the last word with that condescension Nick can’t stand. Seiji surveys the parking lot, the cracked pavement, and nondescript white building.

Nick turns, holding the strap of the bag with one hand and pointing with the other. Conveniently, a bolt of lightning flashes in the distance, casting the nearby steel-frame bridge in silhouette. He squints at it, like he’ll see something important. “That’s why.”

Seiji gives him a flat look.

“Come on, killjoy. I have a floor to sleep on.”

Eugene is awake when they drop the last bags at the foot of Bobby’s bed. Or, at least, awake enough to be pulling his new two-seater shirt over his head and burrowing under the sheet Nick gave him. Nick considers it, really considers it, then sees Eugene wrap his arms around his pillow in a vise grip and throws the thought out the window. Nick dejectedly switches off all the lights.

While Seiji colonizes the bathroom, Nick pulls every spare sheet, blanket, and pillow from the linen closet. He attempts to arrange them in some kind of order on the carpet, but quickly gives up. After changing into sleeping clothes, he settles into his nest, checks the weather forecast, and waits for Seiji to finish.

He brushes his teeth in record time. Seiji is still arranging his pillows when Nick returns to his makeshift bed. Thunder rumbles softly. “I hope you brought a raincoat,” Nick says, placing one of his arms behind his head. “Looks like we brought the storm with us.”

The carpet is hard, packed from years of tourism, and strangely digs into his back. Seiji sighs through his nose, and the bed creaks as he shifts. “Try not to fart,” he says.

Nick flips him the bird, knowing he can’t see it in the dark. Soon after, Seiji’s breath evens out, joining Eugene’s soft snoring and Bobby’s shifting limbs. Nick tries to relax despite his discomfort and eventually falls asleep with a reassuring thought.

Tomorrow, the hunt begins.

Chapter Text

The first thing Nick feels when he wakes up, upon seeing the top of Seiji’s head from his jerry-rigged floor bed, is surprise. It boggles him, in his half-asleep stupor, that he has managed to get Seiji to cross three—almost four—states on a flimsy whim. On a trip to hunt the elusive Mothman. Truly boggles.

The second thing Nick feels is pain. Sharp pain, dull pain, a bone-deep ache in his muscles. His neck twinges when he turns it too far to one side, and his back protests when he tries to sit up. Maybe it was a nine-hour car ride that royally fucked with his bones, but Nick’s primary suspect is the ugly brown and purple carpet.

At first, he doesn’t move. He soaks in his soreness for a few minutes, trying to figure out what woke him up before the others. It could have been the birds chirping outside, or the still-rumbling thunder. His body may have just had enough of the discomfort. Then, his phone buzzes beneath his hip.

He scrubs his face and presses it to his ear. “Hey, mom,” he mumbles.

She makes a sympathetic noise. “Stay up too late last night? Or is it actually six over there?”

Nick squints at the watery morning light coming through the far window, then pulls his phone from his face to squint at that, too. “Nope. It’s seven. Same time zone. You going to work?”

“Yeah. I just have a four-hour shift at the warehouse and then I’m free for the day. What about you? What are your plans for the day?”

Nick rests his head on his pillow, letting his eyes close. “Um, probably get coffee, first. Maybe check out the motel amenities, eat some breakfast, then explore the town. Gonna kinda play it by ear, today.”

She hums in understanding. “I didn’t embarrass you last night, did I? I know your friendship with your roommate is… shaky.”

“More like non-existent,” Nick says, feeling himself smile. “You’re fine. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Okay. Well, I just wanted to call and wake you up and let you know I got your text.”

“Ten-four.”

She chuckles. “Over and out. I’ll talk to you later, hon. Love you.”

When Nick tests how far he can turn his head, he spots Seiji awake and already looking at him. He pauses. After a moment, he tries, “Morning.”

Seiji responds by pushing back his sheets and disappearing into the bathroom. Nick huffs indignantly and rolls onto his stomach, pushing up with his arms to get to his knees with as little pain as possible. Once standing, he stretches a few of his tweaked muscles and crawls onto Bobby’s bed.

He’s spread eagle, a limb in each cardinal direction. He twitches when Nick shifts the bed. Nick shakes his shoulder and says, “Wakey, wakey. We can get Starbucks if you get up in the next ten seconds.”

Bobby’s eyes blink open and he sits up so fast their heads almost knock together. “I’m up.” His gaze lands on Nick. “Coffee.”

“Uh,” Nick stumbles, because he didn’t think that would actually work. “Actually, there isn’t a Starbucks nearby. We can still get coffee, though!”

Bobby gives him a baleful look and lies back down. “Five more minutes.”

Eugene is, inarguably, the harder party to wake up. He barely stirs when Nick tries to pry the pillow he’s hugging out of his arms, and only moves to hold it tighter. Nick tries to hit him with another pillow, to no avail. Nick tries to push him off the bed but isn’t able to move him very much. Finally, he resorts to jumping on the mattress until Eugene shakes awake, disoriented.

“Hey, buddy,” Eugene murmurs, sitting up and scratching his nose. Nick plops down beside him. Once he’s up—unlike Bobby—he stays up. He squints at the window a few feet away. “Time?”

“Time for everybody to get up,” Nick says, stretching out his legs and enjoying the feeling of a mattress beside him. “Daylight’s burning. We have a lot to do today.”

Eugene pats down the sheets for his phone and checks the time. “You kidding me, bro? It’s not even eight!”

“Early bird gets the worm,” Nick says, blinking at him. “You slept for like ten hours! Why did you buy this?” He hooks a finger under the collar of Eugene’s shirt and gives it a tug.

Eugene looks down, then gives Nick a bleary-eyed grin and says, “Ahhah. Two-seater.”

Nick rolls to his feet and grabs Eugene’s arm. “Whatever. Get up. I was being serious about having things to do. I think they’re serving breakfast downstairs,” he says, trying to pull him up. “Bet they have donuts.”

“Food? Donuts?” Eugene asks, conceding and stumbling off the bed. “Bob? Food? Donuts?”

Bobby answers by groaning and pulling a pillow over his head. Nick snorts and digs through his bag to find a change of clothes. “I didn’t know you were such a morning person, Bobby,” he teases. Bobby throws that same pillow at him.

Nick is tugging on shorts when he hears the shower cut on. He starts mentally planning around how long Seiji will take getting ready. He pulls on a hoodie and looks to where Eugene is tripping over his floor nest.

“Dude, you slept here?” he asks, detangling his feet from the sheets. Nick gives him a grim look. Eugene nods to bathroom door. “Should we wait for him?”

Nick makes a dismissive gesture. “He’ll still be in there by the time we get back.”

The downstairs restaurant is mostly empty when Nick and Eugene get down there, save for a few employees and fewer guests. They do their best to look inconspicuous as they pile a variety of donuts into their arms and leave, only to come back a few minutes later to grab cups of steaming coffee.

Sure enough, the shower is still running when they finish their breakfast run.

They shove Bobby to the edge of his bed and organize the donuts on spread napkins. Nick surveys their haul over the comforter. “What do you want, Bobby? We got powder, Boston cream, chocolate cake, chocolate filling, and—what is that, coffee?” he asks, licking vanilla frosting off his thumb.

“Cinnamon,” Eugene corrects.

Bobby pushes himself up on his elbows. “Jelly-filled?”

“Jelly-filled?” Nick says, looking at Bobby like he’s never seen him before.

Eugene shrugs. “Different strokes for different folks,” he says, passing Bobby the appropriate donut.

They chomp on donuts and sip their coffee until the shower cuts off, then they pause to see if Seiji will rejoin them. Nick knows better, though, and hangs over the edge of the bed to grab the planner from his bag.

“Did you guys want to rent the equipment tonight or tomorrow morning? We should do it tomorrow morning,” Nick says, pulling his phone out to look up a vender he wrote into the book.

Bobby uses his thumb to wipe jelly from his lip. He makes grabby hands for his coffee, and Eugene, being closest to the side table, hands it to him. After taking a prolonged sip, Bobby says, “Are we still camping?”

Nick gapes at him, affronted by the very suggestion that camping isn’t mission critical. “Why wouldn’t we?” Bobby points to the window, darkened by the overcast skies. Nick shakes his head in dismissal. “The forecast says there’s only a thirty percent chance of it raining tomorrow. We’re fine.”

Seiji walks out of the bathroom sometime after that, changed into clothes Nick hadn’t seen him grab. His hair is freshly styled, neatly swept aside and completely opposite to the others’ bedheads. He pauses when he sees them staring at him.

“Coffee?” Nick offers, pointing to the fourth, untouched cup on the side table. “Donut?”

“No, thank you,” Seiji says with the same polite voice he uses on strangers.

Then, Bobby takes Seiji’s coffee and downs it. “Okay, captain,” he says to Nick. “What’s first?”

-

“Would you stop that?” Bobby says from behind the wheel, sending Nick an impatient look. Since they got into the car, he’s been leaning his chair forward and back in tiny increments, trying to find a comfortable position.

Nick winces when a vertebrae tweaks in pain but leaves the seat controls be. “Sorry! My fucking back hurts,” he says, a bubble of annoyance rising in his chest and bursting just as fast. “Because someone was a big baby.” He doesn’t see Seiji rolls his eyes, but Nick knows he does.

“I would have shared with you,” Bobby says.

It’s a sincere statement, but Nick scoffs. “And attacked me with those weapons you call elbows? Appreciate it, but I’m good.” Bobby folds his arm, inspects one of said weapons.

Eugene leans forward, levering himself with Nick’s headrest. “You could have slept with me, bud,” he says good-naturedly.

“I love you,” Nick says, “but you nearly strangled me last time.” He had nightmares about anacondas.

Bobby clucks his tongue. “Testy.”

“Why is this bridge so important that we stayed in a place where you had to sleep on the floor?” Seiji asks when they pass under the first steel beam. Nick hadn’t expected him to be curious, but the look on his face confirms whatever questions he has are reluctant. He’s probably been sitting on this since last night. Eugene presses his face against the window to see above them.

“Oh, this is the Silver Memorial Bridge,” Nick says. “Memorial, because the first Silver Bridge collapsed back in the sixties, killing some fifty people.”

“That’s so sad,” Bobby mumbles, frowning.

“It’s not going to do that again, is it?” Eugene asks, eyes darting for any sign of compromised structural integrity.

Nick shrugs. “Could.” That doesn’t seem to reassure Eugene.

“Importance?” Seiji repeats.

Nick shoves down any and all irritation caused by Seiji’s tone, and instead focuses on the answer. “People reported seeing the Mothman around here a few weeks before the accident. He was just hanging out up there.” He points to the overhead beams.

“Mothman killed them!?” Eugene says, now looking into the sky.

“No,” Nick says, then backtracks. “Well, I can’t be sure. I like to think that he was trying to warn someone. To keep people from dying.”

Seiji scoffs. “Is it the city inspector? How could an animal, as you believe it to be, know a bridge’s instability better or faster than a human would? And if it were so intelligent, why not try to report it to the proper authorities? I’m sure Animal Control isn’t a concern for it.”

“Birds know when there’s going to be a storm. Dogs know when someone’s about to have a seizure.”

“Birds can sense changes in barometric pressure and dogs can smell pheromones we cannot. There is science to explain those.”

“Well, maybe not a warning. He could be, like, an omen or something.”

“So, which is it? An animal or an omen? It can’t be both.”

“What? Yes, it can. A black cat crossing your path is an omen.”

“A black cat doesn’t know, nor can it affect a person’s luck. A person’s luck cannot be changed by an animal crossing their path, by breaking a mirror, or by opening an umbrella indoors. Luck isn’t even real.”

“Now, you’re just trying to argue with me.”

“I’m not arguing with you, Nicholas, I’m correcting you. Your logic is faulty and your story is full of holes.”

“It isn’t a story, it’s fact!”

“It’s a reach, at best.”

“You’re pissing me the fuck off.”

“Kids!” Bobby cuts in from behind the wheel. “I will turn this car around if you don’t cut it out.” Nick—reluctantly—settles back in his seat, arms crossed over his chest and glaring out the window. Seiji adopts a similar posture. Bobby gives him an incredulous look.

He didn’t start it. He never starts it, but nobody would ever punish Seiji. Nobody would touch a figurative hair on his stupidly neat head. Blatant favoritism, really.

“So,” Bobby puts gently, drawing Nick’s attention back to what’s important, “what makes you think Mothman is trying to help people, not hurt them?”

It’s an indulgence, at best. Probably even patronizing. But Nick starts talking, anyway.

-

Museum is used in perhaps the loosest definition, but the Mothman Museum makes up for its unorthodoxy with charm. The little brick-and-mortar building, flanked by an intersection and a vacant shop, could easily be missed, were it not for the bright, over the top signs stuck to the windows. The World’s Only Mothman Museum, one says, with a graphic of the elusive creature. Nick’s pulse races just looking at it.

Before he can lose himself in the paradise, though, he first has to make it past the incredibly distracting statue.

“Whoa!” Eugene is caught in its trap. “Look at the gains on this man! What do you think he benches? Three? Four hundred?” He squints up at Mothman’s steel abs. “Four fifty, at least.”

Seiji tilts his head at the likeness in consideration, then looks to Nick. “I don’t recall any mention of it having chicken feet.”

Eugene laughs. “The chest hair on him! He’s definitely taking something. No wonder he killed all those people on the bridge; he was roiding!”

“He didn’t kill them,” Nick says, ignoring Seiji.

“I don’t think those wings are capable of flight, Nicholas. There’s too many holes,” Seiji argues in bad faith.

Nick makes a face at him. “It’s an artist’s rendition, smartass.” Seiji doesn’t look convinced. “How about you try making a realistic Mothman?”

“I’m not in pre-school anymore; I no longer entertain fairy tales.”

At this time, Eugene has circled around to check out Mothman’s lats. “Whoa! Mothman’s dummy thick! How the hell does he have so much cake?” Bobby hurries to see for himself. “Double-cheeked up on a Saturday morning.”

Bobby cocks his head admiringly at the statue’s gleaming glutes and says nonsensically, “I miss Dante.”

“Yo, he walks in the room and his ass walks in five minutes later.”

Nick already studied the statue at length from his dorm while he compiled his bible, so he’s not as awed as Eugene and Bobby. However, he can’t deny the somewhat captivating quality of witnessing the full glory in person. The sun glinting off the welded lines, the grime wedged into the imperfections, the piercing amber eyes. It’s an experience.

“Is he naked? Where’s his junk?” Eugene points between Mothman’s legs.

“You want to see his penis?” Bobby asks incredulously. He gives the statue another considering look.

“I wanna know if he’s packing!” Eugene says with a laugh, knocking a knuckle against Bobby’s chest like they’re sharing an inside joke.

Bobby tilts an eyebrow at him. “Do you think he fucks?”

“The Mothman does not fuck,” Nick asserts.

“I think he fucks,” Eugene says, grinning.

Seiji slants a look at Nick and mouths the words, he fucks. Nick grabs Eugene by the collar and pushes him toward the museum.

-

The museum smells like cardboard and glass cleaner, and Nick adores it the moment his shoe meets the smushed carpet.

They’re not alone; a few people are scattered about. Presumably, a few are workers, and most are chatting each other up, rather than inspecting the artifacts. They all look like locals. One person offers a hello! and a wave when they walk in. Otherwise, the gaggle of boys is largely ignored.

They scatter in the wind. Or, at least, that’s what it feels like to Nick. He loses himself inspecting the cases of newspaper clippings, photographs, art. A few have copies in his itinerary-bible, but he reads them again for the sake of it. Monster No Joke To Those Who Saw It, one headline reads. 4 More Say They Saw Red-Eyed ‘Whatever,’ another says.

He’s three displays deep when he notices Bobby beside him. When he checks his phone, almost forty minutes have already gone by. Bobby smiles at him and says, “Having fun?”

“This is like heroin,” Nick tells him, gesturing broadly around them. The resources for his preliminary research had been sparse and sometimes conspiratorial. Talk of supernatural creatures and connections to religion. None of that is here; just cold, hard facts.

Bobby squeezes his arm. “I’m so glad you’re having fun. That’s what this is all about, really,” he says, then looks past Nick to something in the corner. “Now, could you get a picture of me with the hottie over there?”

Nick follows his gaze to the mannequin dressed in a dark suit and fedora. Bobby grabs him by the wrist and leads him over to it, carefully stepping around the Men in Black infographic to sidle up beside the mannequin. He fixes its hat and tie, then throws an arm over its shoulders, puckers his lips, and cocks his hip. Nick laughs as he captures the photo. Bobby bounces off to show Eugene as soon as the phone is back in his hands, leaving Nick to return to his obsession.

The brand-new evidence, its existence unbeknown to him before he first spots it, is the collection of police depositions, behind a pane of glass and just out of reach. Original, handwritten, and goddamn gorgeous. First-hand accounts, from the mouths of those first witnesses, reported to the police in the sixties. He had only gotten anecdotal accounts. This… Nick’s Eden.

“Eat your fucking heart out, Seiji,” Nick mutters under his breath.

Seiji’s selective hearing makes an unfortunate reappearance as he steps up to Nick’s side. “Did you say something?”

Nick quickly recovers from momentary shock to swing his arms out toward the display. “Feast your eyes,” he tells Seiji with a crooked grin. “Here’s your hard proof.”

Seiji studies the pages and opens his mouth, but falters when he looks back to Nick. Whatever he was going to say he bites back in favor of giving the police reports another thoughtful look. He tilts a restrained eyebrow at Nick. “I’ll need a bit more than that to believe in the monster under your bed,” he says.

“He’s not a monster, okay?” Nick says, making a gesture between them. He scoffs. “You won’t believe in the Mothman until he’s ballroom dancing with you, will you?”

Something close to amusement plays across Seiji’s face: the tender skin around his eyes tightens and the corners of his lips pull in just the slightest. He folds his arms behind his back and steps around Nick, spotting something more interesting across the shop. As he passes Nick’s shoulder, he leans over, breath ghosting Nick’s ear, and tells him, “Let it know that I prefer the Waltz.”

Then he’s gone before Nick can think of a snarky comment. Left staring after Seiji’s back and trying to shake off the sudden fluttering in his chest and the feeling that the joke is on him, Nick scowls at no one and mutters, “I will not.”

It isn’t until a wall of displays later that Nick catches sight of Seiji again. Shockingly, he’s with Eugene, chatting up an older lady wearing a shirt with a printed Mothman. Nick wanders over, fitting between his two teammates to effortlessly slip into the conversation.

“—the dog right off the sidewalk and tried to carry it off. Only thing that saved the poor pup was the leash clipped to my belt, but, sheesh, for a split second, I thought it was gonna pull me along with it,” the woman is saying, rubbing her soft upper arm. She has a slight accent, something southern, from Alabama or Louisiana. “I thought it was one of them big birds at first, y’know? Maybe a vulture that ate a funny lookin’ squirrel or somethin’, but when it looked me in the eyes, I knew.”

Eugene knocks his knuckles against Nick’s sternum. “Mrs. Jenny says she almost got killed by Mothman when she walked dogs, like, fifty years ago,” he explains.

Mrs. Jenny goes red. “It wasn’t fifty—”

“And she almost got taken back to his lair and eaten!” Eugene grabs Nick’s shirt sleeve.

Nick gives her an appraising look. “What did he look like?”

She shrugs her round shoulders. “Couldn’t tell ya. It was dark, and all the streetlamps went funny. Best I could tell, it was big. Like, high-school quarter-back big. And it had hands, but it picked up little Scrappy with its feet, for some reason. Kind of like a bird. But it didn’t have much of a neck, just like my ex-husband—”

“Wait, why wouldn’t he use his hands to pick up the dog?” Eugene cuts in with a frown, leaning closer to Mrs. Jenny. “He has two functioning hands but grabs something with his feet? Does he use his hands to walk?”

She blinks at him. “I don’t know. It didn’t exactly occur to me to ask, at the time,” she says, her soft accent stressed by the slightest bit of sass.

Seiji is uncharacteristically quiet at Nick’s side, studying the woman with an almost detached gaze. Nick can only guess at what he’s thinking, but—knowing Seiji—it’s probably along the lines of “total bullshit.” Still, he doesn’t try to challenge this woman. Seiji slides Nick a sour side-eye when he catches him looking.

Nick switches back to the woman. “Do you know where he came from? Or where he went?” Nick asks, trying to commit all of this new intel to memory so he can write it into his notes later.

“I couldn’t hardly see,” she says. “The streetlamps started flickerin’ like strobe lights at a Dave Matthews concert. I couldn’t see where it went, but I heard it fly over the trees. The sound of its wings—there ain’t nothing like it. I heard a jet break the sound barrier at an air show some years ago, and it made me think of that thing’s wings.”

Nick’s fingers itch for a pen and his notebook. For the life of him, he can’t remember why he thought it a good idea to leave both objects in the Prius. “The Mothman is documented to interact with electronics around him,” he notes. He doesn’t know what to say about the second observation; he never found anything about the sound of Mothman’s wings in his research. Why didn’t he bring his notebook?

He digs desperately into his pockets, then pokes through Eugene’s. Surprisingly enough, his search rewards him with a Super 8 motel pen tucked into Eugene’s back pocket. Nick spares Eugene a brief, questioning look before uncapping the pen and scribbling on the inside of his forearm.

uses feet like bird, he writes.

affects electricity

“The Dave Matthews Band uses strobe lights?” Eugene asks.

eats dogs??

wings

“When you said that the Mothman flying reminded you of a jet breaking the sound barrier, what did you mean? Did he break the sound barrier or something?” Nick asks, tapping the end of the pen against his wrist.

Mrs. Jenny gives him, and his improvised paper, a considering look. “I said the jet reminded me of Mothman,” she clarifies. “And no, but it sure sounded like it, over and over again, one after another.”

sound like jet

“Just about went deaf. Car windows on the other side of the street started rattling.”

loud, Nick scribbles, then underlines it.

“Had the dogs goin’ wild, but they were spooked before the damned thing dove for ‘em. They started whinin’ and tryin’ to scatter. Nearly lost my arms trying to keep hold of ‘em,” Mrs. Jenny adds with a queer tone.

Nick looks up for a moment, studying her. He had never read anything about any interactions between Mothman and other animals during his research. Instinctive fear could suggest a supernatural element, but animals can get spooked by anything. Most wildlife turns tail and runs as soon as they see a human. Mrs. Jenny was probably scared shitless when she saw Mothman, too.

When Nick runs out of space on his own arm, he continues writing on Eugene’s arm, ignoring the renewed concern in Mrs. Jenny’s eyes. Eugene barely complains, only making a slight noise when the cold ink marks his skin.

scares animals

could mean nothing

predator?

“And he just flew off? He didn’t try to attack you or anything?” Nick asks her, looking up from Eugene’s arm.

She opens her mouth to respond, when the bell over the front door tinkles and a man calls across the museum with a cackle, “You messing with the tourists again, Jen?”

“I ain’t messing with nobody,” Mrs. Jenny snaps, affronted. “Choose to believe me or not, but that don’t change the fact that I met Mothman.”

The man waddles closer, carefully unzipping his rain jacket while carrying two cups of coffee. He laughs from his round belly and says, “Yeah, and I spent a week in Cancun with Michelle Pfeiffer.” He hands her one of the steaming cups and then turns his attention to the audience. “Grain of salt, boys. Don’t let yourselves be fooled by a silly story.”

Mrs. Jenny gapes at him. “It ain’t some silly story, Thomas,” she says, giving his name a little extra spice. “You can read the police report for yourself.”

Thomas twirls his finger next to his ear with a conspiratorial grin for the boys. Mrs. Jenny’s expression twists from irritation to hurt, and Nick suddenly wishes to be anywhere else. “I cleared their psych eval,” she tells Thomas in an earnest, hushed voice.

Thomas turns his back to the boys to say something Nick doesn’t even want to hear, and Nick wastes no time wondering if the others share this unwelcome feeling. When he grabs them each by the wrist and pulls them away from the pair of arguing natives, neither resist. They follow him with little resistance.

“It’s been twenty-six years, Jen,” he hears behind him. “You need to move on.”

They nab Bobby from the tiny souvenir section and dip, the bell tinkling behind them. Nick got to see most of the museum, but he would like to stay a bit longer to peruse the displays and inspect for any missed details. But Eugene starts acting like they never feed him and all bets are off. All things considered, though, he learned way more than he thought he would. Evident by the ink on his and Eugene’s arms. Speaking of which, they’re going in the wrong direction.

“We parked over there,” Nick says, throwing his thumb toward the other end of the block.

“Yeah, but that café we want to go to is right here,” Bobby says, tucking his hair behind his ear and pointing to the building across the street. “The Coffee Grinder, right? We don’t need the car.”

Nick glances down the road. “I need my notebook.”

“You need it?” Eugene asks, holding his stomach like it’ll run away and find a new owner to feed it.

Bobby elbows him in the side, earning an incredulous look. He tosses Nick the keys and says, “We’ll grab a table, then. And don’t forget to lock it.”

Nick offers his friend a two-finger salute. He doesn’t forget to lock it, and finds his friends barely passed the threshold of the Coffee Grinder. They pick a table that seats four beneath a window, Bobby on one side and Seiji and Nick on the other. Nick’s lower back screeches at him when he sits and he grumbles his complaint. Eugene doesn’t bother with the seating; he’s already ordering catering for one.

“What is that?” Nick asks, spotting a shopping bag hiding between Bobby’s boots that he somehow missed before.

When he reaches for it, Bobby swats at his hand. “Paws off!” he says, pointing an authoritative finger at Nick’s nose. “That’s none of your beeswax, alright?” Nick surrenders, his survival instincts beating out his curiosity, once again.

“You want a cup?” Bobby asks Nick when one of the workers offers them a pot.

Nick shakes his head, already flipping through his notebook to find the appropriate page. He clicks his pen and starts transcribing the notes on his arm while the finer details are still fresh in his mind.

“This is cute,” Bobby says over a steaming cup, admiring the quaint café.

Seiji pours himself a cup of black coffee. “There was a place like this that I went to in Paris last year,” he says, mentioning France for the fortieth time this semester alone. It’s always Marseille this and Bordeaux that. It would be awfully Nice if Seiji could visit a different country. Nick doesn’t bother rolling his eyes.

“What was it like?” Bobby says, turning toward Seiji. Nick spares a moment to gape at Bobby; he can count the number of times Bobby has engaged Seiji in conversation on one hand.

Seiji takes a sip of his coffee and makes a face. “They had better coffee.”

“No,” Bobby laughs, “I mean Paris. I’ve always wanted to go there.” He inches forward in his seat, sets his elbows on the table.

Seiji pauses a moment, contemplating Bobby. They’ve never particularly interacted much outside of necessity during the season. Nick can’t blame Seiji for being wary, though he definitely does.

“Did you go to the Louvre? Notre-Dame? Versailles?” Bobby presses when Seiji opens his mouth.

Seiji sets down his cup. “I did go to the Louvre, yes. The gardens are gorgeous after dark,” he says. “My parents chartered a boat to take them down the Seine, all the way to the English Channel.”

Nick wonders if he had been invited on that boat ride but bites his tongue. Seiji’s family dysfunctions are none of his business. “Wow,” Bobby says with stars in his eyes. Nick elects to ignore their bonding moment in favor of finishing up his notes.

As he’s dotting a few more i’s and crossing the last of his t’s, a clowder of boys a few years older than them slides into an adjacent booth, laughing with a volume and ease that suggests familiarity. Locals, Nick’s mind supplies him just as one of said locals turns in his seat and leans toward him to ask, “Is that your silver Prius that I saw you get out of?” There’s a mocking edge to his smile.

Nick snaps the notebook closed, now on high alert. He remembers kids like these in Hartford, always looking for the next innocent stranger to clown. Tourists are a favored target. “You saw me get out of it,” he counters with a level look. “So, I’m sure you can figure it out for yourself.”

The boy leans back, throwing his hands up in surrender and sharing an amused glance with the friend sitting across from him. “Don’t see many Priuses around here.” Nick sends Bobby a pointed look that is very much ignored. “Where are you guys from?” the boy then asks.

“Greenwich,” Bobby tells him before Nick can answer.

Greenwich, the first boy mouths to his friend, who hides a laugh behind his hand. The one sitting on the other side of the first boy mutters, “Trust fund kinds,” just loud enough for Nick to hear, and he tries not to feel wronged by that. He turns in his seat, summarily dismissing these small town boys, but the first boy and apparent ringleader won’t allow it.

“What brings a couple of blue-blooded sons like yourselves to our little slice of heaven on this”—he glances at the dark clouds through the storefront windows—”lovely day?” the first boy says, hunger twinkling in his eyes. Nick had been too much like these kids back in Hartford, and even at King’s Row, in the beginning. The desire to laugh at the wealthy for their status is still a little too familiar for his taste.

Nick opens his mouth to offer a fiery retort when Eugene beats him to it, slipping into his seat with two Cubans, an Italian, and a Greek Salad. “Do you guys think Mothman’s a vegetarian?” he says, pausing to take a sip of his water. “Or does he eat at all?”

The fourth local, who had stayed out of the conversation so far in favor of stirring packet after packet of Sweet N’ Low into his cooling coffee, pipes up, “He definitely eats ass.” Eugene pauses to contemplate.

“Oh, it’s Mothman is it?” the first boy says, grinning like the perfect joke just fell into his lap. Taking on a conspiratorial air, he adds to Nick and Bobby, “You’re a few months late for the festival, I’m afraid. That’s when he’s most active.”

“Really?” Bobby, bless his sweet heart, can’t recognize that they’re the subject of that perfect joke. He nudges Nick like they could be onto something. “Have you guys seen him before?”

Nick locks eyes with Seiji, an understanding connecting the two. Only for a second, before Seiji returns to inspecting his cuticles. “Oh, yeah,” the first boy said and lowered his head like he was sharing a secret. “Nobody around here really likes to talk about it, but we’ve all encountered him one way or another.”

Bobby nudges Nick again, encouraging. Nick chews on his cheek for a moment before carefully asking, “What’s your story, then?”

All pretense falls away from the boy’s face. So fast, Nick’s blood runs cold. Deathly serious, the boy leans ever closer, arms braced on his knees, and whispers to Nick, “He tried kidnapping my sister.”

Nick’s eyebrows tilt up to say, really?  The boy nods gravely. “Yeah, really. Came in through her window, tried to take her right out of her bed,” he says. Nick reevaluates his preconceptions of these boys, if only for a minute. Maybe there was something meaningful here, after all. Maybe they weren’t all bad.

“Almost convinced her to elope with him in Vegas, too, if I hadn’t stopped him.” Or not.

Nick sits back, verily annoyed. He doesn’t care about some stranger clowning on him, but he’d rather not have his time wasted with unhelpful jokes. But these boys aren’t finished, yet.

“We’ve all got Mothman stories, right guys?” the first boy says to his friends, grinning big.

“Fuck that guy,” the boy sitting across from the first one says with feeling. “He fucked my mom. Tore my family apart.”

Nick hopes they’ll grow bored soon. The boy sitting on the other side of the first one leans forward and says, “He took my SAT for me, got me a fifteen-sixty.”

“See?” the first boy says. “What’s yours, Kyle?”

The fourth boy, who is well on his way to turning his now cold coffee into a flavored Redbull and has remained mostly on the outside of his friends’ antics, mumbles without looking up, “Helped me file my taxes.”

“Pete Miller, you better not be drivin’ all our customers away.” The waitress who had brought them coffee a few minutes earlier stops by Nick’s seat, a hand on her hip and fire in her eyes. The first boy, Pete, frowns at the woman—who is barely five years older than him—but there’s something soft about the edges of it.

“Lay off, will ya. We’re just trying to give these out-of-towners a warm welcome,” he says without conviction. His friends all avert their eyes, finding interest in the scratched tabletop and passersby.

The waitress scoffs. “I swear, Petey, we’ll go out of business if you keep pesterin’ every tourist that walks in here,” she says. “Go home, the lot a’you. I know y’all have homework you haven’t done.” She begins to turn toward the fencers and Bobby.

“We’re on vacation, Becca,” Pete says, though he and his friends look about ready to leave.

She points an acrylic nail at him and warns, “Don’t make me call your mother.”

Holding onto rebellion, they don’t leave. Pete rolls his eyes and makes a show of grumbling, but he and his friends duck their heads together and all but forget about the tourists. The waitress rolls her eyes one last time.

“Sorry, fellas. Hope they didn’t spoil your lunch too bad,” she says with an apologetic smile. Her nametag reads Rebecca J.

Eugene shakes his head, chipmunk cheeks full of lettuce and cherry tomatoes. Bobby confiscates the vinaigrette he’s drowning his Greek salad in with a nauseated look. Unfazed, Eugene gives Rebecca an enthusiastic thumbs up.

“’S an odd time o’ year to be visitin’ Point Pleasant,” she says amiably and takes the open seat to Nick’s right, her back to Pete and his friends. It must be common, here, for workers to sit and chit chat with customers. She crosses her arms over the table, looking right at home in this little café in this little town. But her smile is warm, and her statement sounds like a question.

Nick shrugs. He can’t imagine any other reason for their being there, and everybody else figured it out rather quickly. But she must be giving them the benefit of the doubt, so he might as well offer her the same thing. “We’re on a hunt.”

She pauses, pondering his answer. “Not much to hunt ‘round here,” she says carefully, already catching on.

“What we’re hunting,” Bobby offers, “is a little more on the… mystical side.”

Seiji cuts in, picking at his pristine cuticles, “he means fake.”

“The mothman isn’t real—I mean—he is! He isn’t fake,” Nick huffs, glaring at his teammate. Seiji only lifts an eyebrow.

“Oh,” Rebecca says with a new tone, leaning back in her seat. Her crossed arms now rest over her stomach. The air shifts. The clouds outside suddenly seem darker. “Mothman.”

Bobby seems to notice the change, too, shooting Nick a glance. Her smile has dimmed, wobbly around the edges. She studies the worn tabletop with a certain intensity, an expression Nick can’t quite name. Disappointed? No. This has nothing to do with them. Even as she sits in front of them, her head is miles away.

Nick waits for a moment, but when she has nothing more to say, he tells her, “We just got into town last night.” Annoyance, maybe? Plenty of tourists probably pass through just for the local legend; it must get tired. But she isn’t irritated in the slightest. She’s sad. “We talked to Miss Jenny at the museum. She told us a little bit about what happened to her when she was a teenager; her encounter.”

“You’d be surprised how many of these folks have stories to tell,” she says with a forced chuckle and unconvincing nonchalance. It could be nerves. She still hasn’t looked up from the table.

Haunted, Nick realizes with a start. She looks haunted.

He leans toward her, ducking his head to chase her gaze. If he doesn’t want to scare her off, he has to tread lightly. But that has never been his strong suit. “Do you have a story?” Nick asks.

She looks up, shocked that he would ask a question that would so obviously follow her vague statement. Her mouth opens and closes a few times, reminding Nick of a fish and a cornered animal all at once. “W—Uh, what? M—Me? My story?” she says, eyes bouncing between Nick and the front counter.

Bobby waves his hands at her to calm her down. “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” he quickly mentions with a nervous smile.

“I—uh,” Rebecca stutters, fingers digging into her sleeves.

“Careful,” Pete mutters from the nearby booth. “Or they’ll give you four more padded walls.” The malice and mocking in his voice is lacking; rather, it sounds almost like gentle caution. Rebecca doesn’t acknowledge him, but the subtle shift in her shoulders tells that she heard him. Pete doesn’t try to reenter the conversation.

Rebecca forces a strained smile. “You boys really should stay away from that sorta tomfoolery. It’ll rot your brains,” she says, and anxiously wipes at the table with a napkin. Her chair screeches against the linoleum. She stands, muttering something about coffee refills. In her hurry, she knocks Seiji’s untouched coffee with her elbow. A few drops spill onto the table. “Son of a biscuit—so sorry, lemme clean this up for ya.”

“It’s okay,” Nick assures her for Seiji, who looks rather stunned at her behavior. He shares a glance with Bobby. “We’re, um—We’re going to check out the TNT area tomorrow, actually.”

Rebecca stills. Seiji’s cup hovers a few inches above the table, frozen in her hand. Eugene has now paused his feast to watch the chaos. Nick pushes on, “Have you, uh, been there before?”

Thump, the porcelain murmurs against the table when she places the cup down. Rebecca takes several breaths, her lips tight. Nick wouldn’t have asked her if he’d known she would react this way, but he’s never known how to stop when he’s ahead. Her smile is gone.

The first drops of rain patter gently against the café windows. Rebecca doesn’t sit again, but the tension lining her body eases. The coffee machines whir behind the counter. The bell over the door tinkles as a pair of locals escape the rain, laughing to themselves. A cold gust through the door sifts through Nick’s hair, sending a chill down the back of his neck.

Finally, Rebecca releases an even breath and says, “Y’all got no business going over there, you hear?” Nick’s mouth falls open, then shuts with a click. She continues, “It’s private property. Steer clear of it.”

“But—” Nick starts.

“I don’t want to have to call the sheriff about a couple of rowdy tourists trespassing on private land, now,” she says, rising to stand on steady knees. “But I will.”

She returns to her work without waiting for a response, mouth set in a line. Nick stares after her, brow tight and rattled. Eugene resumes his meal with loud crunching. Rebecca was open and amicable up until Nick asked a personal question, and her mood took a total one-eighty when Pete made his funny little remark. Nick can only guess at what he meant by four more padded walls, but what he comes up with only leaves him more confused.

Fingers snap an inch from Nick’s nose. He startles, blinking at an annoyed Seiji. “Quit ignoring me,” Seiji says, ruffled.

Nick almost apologizes. “Did you say something?”

Sometimes Nick wonders if Seiji can see his own brain with an eyeroll that refined. “You didn’t tell me we would be committing crimes on this trip,” he says, crossing his arms.

Irritation flares in Nick’s chest for a moment. He waits for it to temper before saying, “We’re not.”

“She said—”

“Shut up.”

Fortunately, and uncharacteristically, Seiji does so. Bobby takes a sip of his coffee, the third one so far today, and eyes Eugene chowing down on his second Cuban. “I’m guessing the food is good?” Bobby says.

“That was weird,” Eugene says with all the grace of a baseball bat, gesturing at the counter with his sandwich.

“Yeah,” Nick says, scratching his jaw. “It was.”

Rebecca was real cagey up until Nick mentioned the TNT area. That’s when she shifted from evasive to confrontational. Threatening them with the authorities was extreme. But it also seems like a hint, if unintentional. Nick opens up his notebook, once more.

Café worker acted suspicious, told us to stay away from the TNT area. Could be a clue?

Noisy vinyl interrupts his thoughts as the local boys shuffles out of their booth and head for the door. Nick watches them run through the rain until they’re out of sight. After a moment, he adds under the first line, Locals make jokes, but seems like they know something.

“Is it really private property? Where we’re going tomorrow,” Bobby asks when Nick closes his notebook again.

“Not where we’re going,” Nick tells him. Bobby nods.

Nick inspects the Super 8 motel pen he’d taken from Eugene in the museum. “Why were you walking around with this, Eugene?”

Eugene’s gaze bounces between Nick and Bobby, one cheek fat like a chipmunk’s. He doesn’t bother to swallow before saying, “You guys don’t walk around with pens? What if you have a great idea in a place with no pens?”

“That’s what the Notes app is for,” Bobby says.

Eugene blinks twice, then frowns and goes back to chewing. Nick feels dumb for not thinking of that, either.

-

“So, I think it’s about time you told us where this all started,” Bobby says, wringing his hair with a hand towel. They’d waited far too long for the weather to not clear and ended up running through the rain. Bobby whined about his wet interior and mildew and his hair while Nick whined about his back, and Seiji complained about them both. As soon as they’d gotten back to the motel, Bobby disappeared into the bathroom for an emergency rescue mission.

Eugene had been resting on the couch bed, the sheets tangled in his legs, but he rouses when he hears conversation. He props his head up on his hand.

Nick stalls, flipping through pages of his notebook. “Um, what do you want to know?”

“Uh, everything. Duh,” Bobby says, twisting his hair up in the towel. He chases Nick’s gaze. “Hey, I know that look.” He puts a finger in Nick’s face. “You’re not getting out of it this time. Come on, talk to Bobby. Spill the beans.”

Nick gnaws on his lower lip, busying himself with a quick survey of the room. Seiji offers no refuge, sitting on the other bed with his sucked feet beneath him and watching some video on his phone. Probably one of the vlogs with Jesse. Rain pitter-patters against the window, tapping out a rhythm of inevitability.

Fingers snap in front of Nick’s nose. “Nick,” Bobby brings Nick’s attention back to him. “What’s wrong? Why don’t you want to tell us?”

Wringing his hands, Nick shrugs. “It’s not that I don’t want to—”

“You sure?” Eugene pipes up.

“Yes. I just—” Damn. Planned this whole trip but forgot about the part where he would have to tell his friends about the origin and catalyst of this totally-not-obsession. There are no notes in his notebook for this. “It’s not something I’ve told anyone else.”

Bobby scoffs, falling to his side on the bed and propping himself up on an elbow. “I should hope not. You haven’t told me, and as your best friend, I should be the first one you tell,” he says.

Eugene’s eyebrows scrunch up. “Wait, what makes you his best friend?”

“I met him first.”

“Technically, I met him first,” Eugene says, placing a hand on his chest.

“Technically, you were a dick to him in the very first interaction.”

“It was a harmless joke! And he turned out fine.”

Nick chops the air between them with his hand, interrupting their dumb argument. He would have been content to let them duke it out and forget about their questions, but the present thread leads to nowhere but destruction. “Shut up. You’re both my best friends.”

Bobby sticks his tongue out at Eugene, but that seems to satisfy them both. Heaving a deep breath, Nick considers where to start. He might as well tell them; it will hurt nothing. And they— he’s sure they will be open and understanding. Maybe.

“I, uh…” Nick runs his fingers through his hair. Bobby lifts a brow. “I had this dream. Like, a really weird one. The kind where you don’t remember it when you first wake up, but it all comes back to you hours later in pieces.”

Both Bobby and Eugene sit patiently, quietly intent on Nick. He can’t tell if they’ve checked out yet.

“In it, I’m in a forest, in the dark, completely alone¾And it’s quiet. Like, really fucking quiet. No bug noises or anything. Only the wind and this, like, repetitive thumping. Just—thump, thump, thump, thump, in my head. And I’m—I know that I’m alone, but I have this feeling that there’s something nearby, and it’s watching me.”

“Spooky,” Bobby mumbles.

“Yeah. I look down at my feet, and when I look up again, I can see something in the trees. Something dark. Big. I can’t see what it is; I can only see that it’s shaped sort of like a person, but everything’s all wrong. It’s got these weird things like wings in the silhouette, and no neck, and these dark red eyes. AndI just get this overwhelming feeling of dread. It was horrible. It ate me up inside. I knew this thing was heading toward me, and I knew it wanted to hurt me.”

Bobby blinks at him, eyes wide. “Is that when you woke up?”

Clothes rustle as Seiji shifts on the adjacent bed.

Nick nods. “Mhm. Right before it was close enough for me to see.” Rubbing his face, he continues, “It seemed so real. When it started coming back to me, it felt like a memory. But, I’ve never been in a forest.” Even now, it still feels too recent.

“And then you started obsessing over Mothman?” Eugene asks.

“Uh, no. I didn’t do anything for a few days, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. It stuck worse than the time Aiden got gum in that Sophomore’s hair. Everywhere I went, I felt like something was waiting for me right around the corner. I’d wake up, scared, and go to bed the same.” Nick swallows to soothe his dry throat. The hotel A/C unit makes a noise hauntingly similar to a death rattle. “Then, I went to a psychic.”

Seiji laughs, a humorless note. “You’re joking.”

Nick’s head snaps up. He doesn’t know how long Seiji has been listening for, but Seiji’s full attention is on him. He scrambles for a witty retort, but what comes out is, “I’m not.”

“You had a nightmare that caused you intense stress, and your solution was to seek out a psychic?” Disbelieving.

“There was no seeking out. She was doing tarot readings at a fair in Hartford that I went to with some friends,” Nick explains while making a face at him. “It was $15 for a session, and I thought, fuck it. A psychic couldn’t make it any worse. Boy, was I wrong.”

Bobby slaps his knee few times to draw his attention. “Well, don’t keep me waiting! I’m on the edge of my seat here,” he says. Eugene doesn’t match the enthusiasm, but he watches Nick attentively. Reactions far from Nick’s expectations.

“She said that something was coming for me,” Nick tells them, worry lining his forehead. He can still recall the way her face scrunched up, the warning in her voice. She seemed confused more than anything, staring down at the inverted moon and hermit cards and the upright tower card with enough intensity that Nick expected them to catch fire. Be careful, he remembers her gravely saying, on your journey, as what you see may not be what is there. A chill runs up his spine.

Bobby blinks. “That’s it?”

Frowning, Nick says, “Well, she said more, but I don’t remember every detail of the session.”

“She say what’s coming for you?” Eugene asks.

“I don’t think it works like that,” Bobby says.

Nick shrugs. “She didn’t.”

“Of course, she wouldn’t,” Seiji says, watching them like he’s disappointed. “Crystal balls and tarot cards are scams. Palm readers, too. Psychics only tell you something vague enough that it could come true. Something’s coming for you? That could mean anything; Your poor grades might be catching up with you. I think it’s more unlikely that she meant a nine-foot winged monster with no neck.”

He’s not wrong, though Nick wouldn’t admit it with a gun to his head. Nick only took the psychic’s warning with a grain of salt. What really motivated him was the tickle in his thoughts, the heat on the nape of his neck like something was watching him. Not watching, exactly. More like tracking.

“Anyway, it only took a few Google searches to confirm what I thought, which was that what I saw in my dream was the Mothman,” Nick tells Bobby and Eugene. Seiji turns back to his phone with a minute shake of his head. “I still had this funny urge, though. I saw him in the dream, but it felt so real that I—I needed to know if he’s really… real, I guess.

“So, I started writing everything down,” he finishes, hands twisting in his shirt. Thunder booms outside.

They had been so patient and open-minded while listening to him, but they could change at any moment. He had been ashamed of all of this before; he hasn’t even told his mother. To Bobby and Eugene, he presented the vacation as a fun trip, an inside joke sometime down the line. He has been afraid then, too, that they’d think he was crazy.

“That’s pretty rad,” Eugene comments, shocking him. “It’s like you have a quest. Like in Lord of the Rings.”

“Yeah,” Bobby says, clapping his hands together. “That makes us the Fellowship.”

“I call Gandalf.”

“Why do you get to be Gandalf? Nick should be Gandalf. You’re Gimli.”

“I’m okay with that. Nobody tosses a dwarf-ass mufucker.”

Warmth swells in Nick’s chest as his friends’ conversation devolves into arguing over who a rather unenthusiastic Seiji would be in the fellowship. Both of them had chosen to waste money on a meaningless three-day trip like this rather than spend that time with their families before Christmas. And they’re willing to indulge Nick’s sort-of obsession with very few questions or concerns. He couldn’t ask for better friends.

They decide that Seiji is Legolas. When asked for his reasoning, Eugene says, “Ears.”

-

The floor nest doesn’t feel as terrible the second time around, but Nick can already feel a bit of the long-term impact in his back. The rain eases through the early hours of the night, but the thunder only get worse. Every now and then, a nearby boom will rattle the window.

Nick doesn’t know when he fell asleep, but Eugene’s soft snoring is competing with the noisy A/C when he wakes up. His phone reads midnight, on the dot, when he squints up at it. He has to blink a few times to make sure that’s right. Pushing himself up onto his hand, he peeks over the edges of the beds. Bobby is sound asleep, but Seiji’s bed is empty, the comforter neatly folded over the pillows.

Nick grew used to the obsessive tidiness on the other half of the room, but seeing the bed perfectly made and the floors cleaned had him thinking Seiji was preparing to move out for the first few weeks. He shouldn’t be surprised that his Type-A personality would extend to vacations and hotels, but it’s somewhat dismaying. Seiji can’t even relax and cut loose on his vacations.

Scrubbing dried saliva off his chin, Nick swallows a few times to fix the dryness in his throat. He must have been sleeping with his mouth open.

A moment of peace passes, before realization stabs Nick through the chest like a hot and sweaty knife. If Seiji isn’t in bed, he must have gotten up at some point, and he would have to pass Nick’s nest to go anywhere. So, he must have spotted Nick, slack-jawed in his sleep with some drool sliding down his chin. The trail ends halfway down his neck. Nick slaps his cheeks to get rid of the heat. He could die from the embarrassment.

He checks the mini fridge for something to drink, only to find it empty. He briefly considers the bathroom sink, but decides to minimize risk and buy something from the vending machine by the front office.

The air is thick, when he steps outside, and the cold sends a shock through his body, but that’s not why he halts with the door against his back. No, he stops because he spots Seiji only feet away, staring back at him in an aborted starting position. Like he’d been… The stun mirrored on Seiji’s face is quickly replaced with accusation.

Nick throws his hands up. “I didn’t know you were out here,” he defends, though he knows he did nothing wrong. Seiji doesn’t own the planet, even if he acts like it most days. “I’m just going to grab a drink.” He pats the wallet in his pocket for emphasis.

Seiji says nothing, but keeps staring, so Nick awkwardly side-steps him and hurries for the stairs. Thunder claps nearby, making him jump. He glances over his shoulder as he crosses the parking lot, an itch at the base of his neck. He taps his foot as he eyes his selection of beverages, wondering why Seiji was up past his bedtime and out in the cold. It almost looked like he was practicing his form.

A dollar-fifty later, a Dasani clatters into the bin. Wind rustles the tree leaves nearby. Nick’s gaze shifts to the dark on his right, where the lamps don’t reach. Something there shifts in the shadows, but when he squints, there’s nothing.

Nick prowls up the stairs, careful to keep his footsteps light and quiet. He stops halfway up, just far enough to peek his head over the floor. Seiji lunges forward, his arm outstretched and his back to Nick. He isn’t wearing a jacket, only a plain white t-shirt; the only thing between him and the wet cold. Maybe Aiden’s right and he is cold-blooded. He can’t see Nick, but if Nick leans a bit over the railing…

Seiji’s arm is long and elegant before him, outstretched toward an imaginary opponent. His slender fingers hold and invisible handle, placed perfectly enough that Nick wonders briefly if he’s actually holding an épée. His leading leg bends at a perfect angle, while the trailing leg forms a stable base. Shoulders turned just far enough to guard his front without exposing his back. With his limited visibility, Nick can’t see Seiji’s face, but he knows what he would see if he could. Etched determination and monster calculation. His form, his concentration. Everything about him. Flawless.

Even against the backdrop of an Ohio motel. The dissonance is jarring; like seeing a poodle digging through a city dump.

Nick watches with a sense of familiarity. He’s well-acquainted with Seiji’s fencing infallibility. The image of Seiji on the piste is carved into Nick’s long-term memory, but he’s still starstruck every time he sees the live performance.

Seiji lunges, then retreats, going back and forth with his opponent. He pivots, avoiding an imagined strike, and extends his make-believe épée like he’s making a touch. A moment later, he flinches back, then rests a hand over a spot on his chest. Nick blinks. Seiji's imaginary opponent got a touch on him.

Something must have slipped out. Maybe a gasp, but more likely a laugh. Seiji twists, eyes finding Nick immediately. His initial shock is immediately replaced with annoyance. Too late for Nick to try to make excuses.

He eases up the rest of the staircase, taking a long draw from his Dasani. It tastes like pennies. “You’re not supposed to be practicing. Aren’t you grounded?” he says.

“I am not grounded,” Seiji replies indignantly. “I’ve been compelled to take a short hiatus from training by my mother.”

Nick makes a dismissive gesture with his free hand. “Same dif. Shouldn’t you be in bed? Your bedtime was, like, three hours ago.”

“Victory never sleeps.” Nick rolls his eyes. “Maybe you would know that, if you ever won anything.” He squints at Seiji. A weak dig, half-assed and without enthusiasm; and Nick should know better than to go head-to-head with Seiji. But dammit if he’s never one to back down from a challenge.

Nick sets the Dasani down in front of their suite door, dead center. The middle of the strip marked. He settles opposite Seiji, extending his hand and sinking into a starting position. Seiji considers him for a moment, stony-faced. Nick almost thinks Seiji won’t accept his challenge. But dammit if Seiji isn’t as hard-headed as he is.

Pretz?

Seiji lowers into his starting position. He raises his hand, his imaginary épée at the ready. Nick’s heart thumps harder. The corner of his mouth ticks up, he can’t help it. Seiji spots it. His eyes narrow. Thunder rumbles.

Allez!

Nick is the first to move. He lunges, épée pointed at Seiji’s chest. Seiji expertly parries. Nick knows how the ricochet would feel, were their épées real. He places his hand over collarbone, where the point of Seiji’s blade would have landed. Seiji steps back, unimpressed. Nick lunges first again, aiming low. Seiji parries and counters again, imaginary point pressing into Nick’s navel.

They go back and forth a few more points. Nick doesn’t keep score, but he’s losing. Not without a fight, though. There have been a few near hits, but Seiji is just as good at pretend as he is at the real thing. This game is almost as frustrating as the real thing. If this were a real match, or even a practice match, Nick might get angry. At himself, at Seiji, at the sport. But it isn’t real. So, there are no rules.

Nick gasps. Straightens. “I just got a touch.” Seiji falters, hand lowering and brow furrowing. “That’s a touch. I got a touch.”

“No, you didn’t,” Seiji says adamantly.

“I did.”

Seiji looks down in disbelief, like he could see some offending mark on his t-shirt. “Where?”

Nick crosses the few feet between them, until their toes nearly touch, and presses his fingertip to Seiji’s sternum. Two inches below the hollow of his throat. Seiji swallows. Nick can see his pulse in his throat, a steady beat. He wonders if Seiji can see his, too.

When Seiji tilts his head down to see where that finger landed, Nick flicks him with it. Not hard, just a light flick on the tip of his nose, but Seiji jolts. He blinks at Nick once, twice. Looking, to Nick, like a confused cat. A laugh slips out before he can stop it, short but bright. Seiji has never looked so human. Even while looking like a cat.

Seiji’s eyes narrow. You’re annoying, they tell Nick. He steps back. “Pretz?” He settles into his starting position.

That superhuman focus is back on Nick, and it always makes him feel tingly all over. He backs up with his heart beating a little harder. Seiji’s face is hard, but when Nick gets ready for another round, he can see the corner of Seiji’s lips turn up.

Allez!

Chapter Text

hey guys!! uhhh my laptop kinda started falling apart (thanks apple!) so i can't really write anymore. i still want to finish this and i'm going to!! but for the time being i'll be on hiatus. hopefully i can get a new laptop soon and when i do i'll let you know. thanks for the patience and i'm sorry i write so slow D:

Sent from my iPhone.