Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the fall of 1979, William Russell Graham was born to Margaret and Russell Graham in Springhill, Louisiana. He was a quiet, attentive baby. He could sense the emotions of the room faster than most adults. Most of the time, this was a good thing.

Russell (Russ) Graham was a quiet, pensive man, never one prone to anger or raised voices. Will enjoyed being held by his father, radiating calm contentedness. He would always reach for his father’s arms first, even though the man was away at work all day at the shipyards.

Margaret (Maggie) Graham, on the other hand, was not the calm, collected type. She was, in fact, quite the opposite. Her first reaction in any sort of disagreement was to raise her voice at the first sign of a fight. She was an opinionated woman, so this happened quite often. Will did not like to be held by her most of the time, reacting negatively to her outbursts with cries and wiggling, grabbing for his father instead.

Even on his own, the boy was happier than in her arms, giggling and smiling at the ceiling or the wall.

Will was two when Maggie had her last screaming row at his dad. She hated that her son was nothing like her. Hated that he seemed to hate her, and hated that she had such a stupid child to laugh at nothing. In her rage, she declared that he was no son of hers.

In an uncharacteristic outburst, Russ burst up from the couch and growled at her, “Don’t say another word about my boy.” His voice was so low it was almost to the point of gravel. “Get out of my house.”

She reared up as though struck by his tone.  Her eyes narrowed back at him.  Stomping over to the door, she paused for a moment, as though he’d change his mind.

He did not.

“Fuck you, Russ!” She screamed at him, slamming the door behind her.

His dad sighed as he sat heavily on the couch, all fight leaving him immediately.

Will cautiously toddled out from behind the door frame and over to his dad, patting him on the leg for comfort. The man looked down at his son in surprise, not having even realized that the toddler had left his room at all. He picked the boy up easily and sat him in his lap, hugging him to his chest. He placed a kiss on his head, cuddling the boy to his chest.

The two-year-old looked over his dad’s shoulder as his playmate gave him a gentle, proud smile and placed a hand comfortingly on his head.  Russ did not react visibly, but the small tremors in his hands eventually calmed to a stop.

Will smiled at them both and cuddled deeper into the warmth of his dad’s embrace.

xoOXOox

It turned out, the next morning, that Maggie took his order to get out as immediately as possible. She had packed her bags while Russ and Will were curled up together on the couch and left before they had awoken, taking their only car and not even deigning to leave a note.

Mischa was an unknowing godsend for the newly single parent. She kept the little boy occupied with drawing or blocks whenever Russ had to work and wasn’t able to afford a sitter. She’d sit with Will, praising his art or his towers and prompt him for more, “Can you make one taller?” or “I like that one. Why don’t you draw one for your papa, mažiau?”  The boy would then sit for hours, determinedly completing the challenge set before him.

That’s not to say it was entirely smooth sailing, though.

Will may have been a relatively easy child, but that didn’t make a lick of difference to Russ’ boss. The man told him to leave the boy at home or to not come into work the next day, ignoring his employees' pleas that he didn’t have anyone to watch him.

No argument worked.

Russ, unable to move them without the car he couldn’t afford, was forced to leave the boy at home, alone in his mind, rushing home for lunch and dinner everyday so the boy wouldn’t starve.  Mischa helped here, too, by giving the boy something to do in those quiet hours without his dad.

When Will started talking about Mischa to his dad, the man was torn between wondering where he’d even heard a name like that before, and praising the imaginary friend that kept him from getting lonely or wandering off on his own. He finally landed on the latter.

Putting Will to sleep every night became putting Will and Mischa to sleep and he made a point to say both names when telling them he was back from work.

Will was just pleased that his daddy was finally acknowledging his friend.

Eventually, though, Will turned five and was entered into kindergarten at the local Springhill Elementary.  Russ was finally able to go to work not worried his son was going to wander out of the trailer and into the street or accidentally set something on fire.

Mischa hovered around him most of the time, helping him with reading out loud or with counting. Other times she’d float around the class, looking at the wall art or notes on the teacher’s desk.

The teachers watched him talk to her with confusion, and he doesn’t really understand why.  None of the kids in the class say they can see her either.  He overheard one teacher call her an imaginary friend, once.

Will knew that imaginary meant fake, which meant they thought Mischa was a fake friend. But he knew she wasn’t, cause she’d tell him things he’d have no way of knowing, like what was on top of the fridge. Maybe they meant that she wasn’t really his friend but lying?  That didn’t really make sense either cause she’d been there for as long as he could remember, someone couldn’t lie for that long.

His flawed logic aside, he decided that if the other kids were going to ignore Mischa, he’d ignore them.  He couldn’t do this for his teachers, unfortunately, because his daddy told him he had to listen to his teachers and daddy was always right.

Said teachers later informed Russ about his son’s lack of friendship during one of the parent-teacher meetings. That the boy would rather draw by himself than play with the group.

“I ain’t had no friends then, either.”  He told them gruffly.  “He ain’t hurtin’ nobody, and he’s havin’ fun.  What else you want?”

The teachers sputtered and tried to point out the issue to Russ, but the man wasn’t having it.  He asked how the boy’s grades were and rested his case when they told him just how well.

Mischa watched fondly after that meeting as Will recounted to his dad all the things he did that day, all the drawings he made. A few even made their way proudly onto the fridge.

Later in the night, however, after the aspiring artist and his quietly proud father went to sleep, Mischa finds herself in a different kitchen. She was staring unimpressed at Maggie Graham as the woman chugs her wine on a friend's couch watching TV. She’d been there ever since she’d left two and a half years ago. Not even twenty minutes from her son and she hadn’t even bothered trying to visit or send a letter.  Nothing.

 Mischa agrees with the woman on one thing alone, Will was not her son.

Chapter Text

It took Russ longer than he’d like to realize his son was different. The boy seemed to be just like him when he was a kid. Preferring to be by himself than in crowds and working with his hands instead of pretending to be cowboys and knights.

It took Russ a while to figure out that his son liked to draw or play in the sand entirely alone. Exclusively alone. He had a habit of ignoring the other kids at the playground, no attempts made at making friends. In fact, he actively dissuaded the other kids from trying to play with him.

Russ knew that this was concerning, even without his first grade teacher’s warnings.

He tried asking Will to try making friends, once, when they’d gone to the local park.  To the boy’s credit he did try, but Russ could tell that his son was not having fun in the slightest.

What he did have fun doing, was drawing, building, and listening to the older women at the park chatter away at him in spanish or french.

That last one was a surprise, as he hadn’t even known his boy could understand either language, his own French was out of practice and stilted.

Still, his boy lit up when Russ put him to sleep with a kiss and a, “Doux rêves, mon chéri.”

He decided that he didn’t really care what the teacher was saying.

They didn’t have much money, his job didn’t pay very much but it was the only work he knew, but what he did have were the locations of several second hand shops and junk yards.

An afternoon and a few dollars were all he could afford to spend, but it produced several finds of worth.  A set of Legos (gently used and then given away out of disinterest) and a few mechanical toys (cars and boats with interesting fiddly bits) that worked like new with a bit of elbow grease.

Russ nodded at his work, pleased with the results.

Both Grahams had a lot of fun playing together that night.

Mischa watched, of course, with fond exasperation. She knew that child safety toy regulations were at a minimum at the moment, and she did appreciate the sentiment behind it, but Russ Graham had very little awareness as to how dangerous those toys were to a normal child. The choking hazards alone.

But she couldn’t deny the little boy enjoyed his new toys.

Chapter Text

They had to move just before school started that year, to a trailer park in Marrero. Russ’ new boss was thankfully more sympathetic to his plight as a single father, but only a bit.

Will was allowed to hang around the shop on the weekends, but during the week he’d have to fend for himself alone after school for a few hours. And due to the area, Russ decided that he’d be staying indoors.

The little boy was not pleased with this. He wanted to go fishing with his dad or hunt for plants with Mischa or find dogs to pet. He didn’t want to practice his Spanish and French again, and he definitely didn’t want to do his homework.

Mischa had only so many ways to distract the intelligent little boy the older he got.

Drawing only held his attention for so long now. And those mechanical toys had been fiddled with so often that Will could take it apart and put it back together with his eyes closed.

Teaching him Lithuanian helped some, the pronunciation being more challenging than he was used to. But what really distracted him was cooking.

They started simple, boxed mac and cheese when Russ was held up at work and canned soup for lunch on school holidays.

His father was not exactly pleased with this when he came home one night to find Will standing on a chair at the stove, stirring away at some canned chicken noodle soup.

“What’re ya doin, Willy?” he asked tensely, watching the slight wobble of the chair legs.

Will hopped down nimbly and rushed his dad for a hug.

“I’m makin dinner!” the seven-year-old declared.

“I see.” Russ said, peering into the pot. It looked fine. “And why’re ya makin dinner?”

“Cause Mischa said you was hungry after work. And she was lookin so I don’t burn nuffin.”

Russ allowed himself to be served some soup, and couldn’t deny Will did a good job. It also kept him from worrying his son was going to starve to death or something.

“... Iffen ya keep it simple, and don’t do anythin dangerous, I don’t see why you can’t cook dinner again sometime.” Russ told him reluctantly.

Will cheered, even knowing his actions would worry his dad. Cooking was kinda fun, you made things and then you got to eat it afterwards.

What wasn’t there to like.

Chapter Text

Will is eight years old by the time he realizes that his friend hadn’t changed a day since he could remember.

Eternally six years old, with loose brown hair and a blue dress, she hadn’t aged at all. His dad had grown a beard, Will had gotten taller, but everything about Mischa stayed the same, even her dress.

This is a mystery he can’t stand.

“Why donchu get older?” he asked her on one of their afternoons alone in the trailer.

She glanced up from the drawing she’d been looking at. The question seemed to have startled her.

“... I’m a ghost.” She finally responded, watching his face closely. It screwed up in confusion.

“Yer dead?!” He asked, alarmed. “Are you hauntin me?”

“In a manner of speaking.” She replied with a small smirk. “I’m not some dark spirit or anything. My soul has just bonded to yours, mažiau. I’ll be with you until the day you die.”

“Oh.” That statement probably should have scared him, but he felt comforted. “But why’re ya haunting me ? Are other ghosts around, but I can’t see ‘em?”

She releases a little laugh. “There are other ghosts, in a manner of speaking. None as awake as me, though, and they typically stick around because they had a violent end. As for why you?” She shrugs. “Could be for any number of reasons. You could be related to one of my descendants or maybe it's that special brain of yours. Who knows?”

“Whaddya mean, I’m related to one a yer family? Yer a kid.”

“Ah, not this body, mažiau.” She smiled. “One of my previous lives. There were several where I had kids.”

“How many’ve you lived? Is that gonna happen to me when I die?” He didn’t sound disturbed, just curious.

“All told, I think at least twenty, but I stopped counting after a while. And no, I don’t think this will happen to you.” She frowned. “I’m like this because of something that happened in my first life.”

“What happened?” he leaned forward, forgoing his drawing entirely.

“I suppose it all starts with a little boy named Harry James Potter…”

xoOXOox

The story of Harry Potter was fascinating, especially to a little boy. Dragons, magic, flying cars, killer trees, a living castle.

He did nothing the rest of the day except listen to Mischa tell her story, occasionally asking a question or two.

He’s pretty sure she didn’t intend to tell him everything she did. The tale seemed to leave her like one big, gasping breath, with little to no filter.

He heard about her friend Cedric being killed in front of her one year, and the next it was her godfather. The torture of her friends also slipped out, but once it was, she just continued on. She didn’t try to sugarcoat anything that just popped out. It was one of the things he liked about her.

There were a few things that struck a cord for him, though.

When explaining her friends and family she mentioned things like the Samhain or Yule rituals with suppressed longing. Her daily remembrances she talked about with a sad fondness. When he asked her about them, she explained with such a nostalgic ache in her voice that Will felt he couldn’t just do nothing.

Later in the week, when his dad was going to go shopping, Will gave him a list of things he was asking for from one of the second hand shops. He made sure that Mischa was busy looking in the pantry for ingredients to remind Russ about.

His father raised an eyebrow but promised to see what he could find.

When he got back that night, he handed Will a plastic bag.

“Don’t go startin no fires now, ya hear?” He warned the eight year old. Will nodded dutifully while Mischa's head perked up.

She followed him and his stash into his room, copying him when he sat on the floor. She watched with rapt eyes as he upended the bag onto the carpet. What spilled out was an odd assortment of items to the untrained eye.

A mostly black wide scarf, a tarnished metal bowl of some kind, a variety of colored and scented candles (of various sizes and brands, too), a handmade wooden sculpture of something vaguely human, a bic lighter, and some freshly picked leaves, probably stolen from the neighbor’s garden.

Mischa looked over his haul with wide eyes and trembling hands. She rested one over the pile of candles.

“Is this…?” She couldn’t finish the question, her voice thick with suppressed emotion.

“You were sad you couldn’t do yer daily ‘membrance ritual.” He explained, rubbing his neck a little, knowing it was red. “So I asked daddy to get you some stuff.”

“I-” She covered her teary smile with a trembling hand. “You are so-. Thank you, mažiau.” She hugged him, intangible as always, but he liked to think he felt her spirit around him.

“You gotta teach me how to do it, but I wanna help you.” He told her solemnly. She smiled gently at him.

“I would love to.” She took a deep breath and sat up straight. “Okay, take that shawl and spread it out flat as you can, then put a bowl of water in the center - yup, there is good - and put these four candles around the bowl - switch those two,” she pointed, “good. Now take those leaves, it’s pineapple sage if I’m not mistaken, from Mrs. Harris’ garden? Set them alight for a bit and then blow it out. Now, wave it over all this.”

He finished the leaves over the room and sat down across from her.

“Now, I’m gonna say the ritual, light the candle that I point to, alright.” She waited for his nod before she started.

“Hela, goddess of the underworld, hear my plea

Pass on my message of love

To those you have taken from me.”

She points to the green candle.

“Earth

For the ground in which they rests,

That once ran beneath their feet,

I beseech thee.”

The yellow candle was lit.

“Air

For the time we spent breathing in the same,

And the wisdom they passed on to me,

I beseech thee.”

Then it was the red candle.

“Fire

For the passion and love that burned within their hearts,

And for the warmth they brought into my life that I will never forget,

I beseech thee.”

The blue candle.

“Water

For the many tears I have shed,

Each a memory I'll never forget,

I beseech thee.”

She bent her head in prayer, muttering unintelligible words to herself, in what he assumed was a prayer. Will quickly bent his head, too, though he did not know the prayer.

After a moment longer, she raised her head and continued speaking.

“Spirit

Take my words with thee,

Past Hela and let them see

All that they meant to me.

Let them, for this night, roam free

Let them commune with me

Until the Witching Hour is known,

Then let them return to their earthly home.

So mote it be.”

She bowed her head once more and gestured for him to blow out the candles.

“That was easier than I thought.” Will admitted, he quickly scrunched his nose at the bizarre assault of smells. She grinned at him.

“Typically, yankee candles aren’t used. But yes, it isn’t terribly complicated.” She tilted her head consideringly. “This ritual is also usually aimed at one person in particular, but I’ve missed so many in the past years that I was speaking to all of them.”

“Is that allowed?” He asked, worriedly. She chuckled.

“There are no set rules, mažiau.” She told him. “Paganism is most often a self created belief. You chose what god you choose to invoke that ritual, what practices you want to perform. It’s not as structured a belief system as something like christianity.”

He frowned. Neither his dad or Maggie had been even the slightest bit religious. The only things he knew about christianity was that there was the God/Jesus guy and Christmas. What was structured about that?

He shook his head.

“D’you want me ta help you do this again, tomorrow night?” He asks instead.

“We’ll need to steal some more sage from Mrs. Harris.” She replied with a smirk.

Chapter Text

“Does your friend ever tell you to do things?” Dr. Carson asked, her notebook settled on her lap. Notes already filled the page from their previous twenty minute conversation.

“She sometimes tells me to brush my teeth or clean up my room.” He told her flatly, bored out of his mind. Dr. Carson frowned and wrote something down.

“Nothing else?”

He glanced over her shoulder to Mischa who was lurking with a curl of disgust at her lips.

“Nope.” He knew his friend was reading the woman’s notes with the occasional rolled eyes and scowl.

Apparently, nine years old was too old to have an imaginary friend. They’d somehow convinced his reluctant dad to take him to a free session. It being free was probably what sold it.

Both father and son knew they wouldn’t continue with this regardless of outcome, they just couldn’t afford it. For the sake of the school, however, Russ went along with it.

Mischa had many opinions about this all, none of them positive.

“Have you had any issues making friends at school?” The therapist cut through his thoughts.

“No.” Not an untrue statement, he just didn’t try to make friends. She frowned again and wrote something else. Mischa’s scowl deepened at whatever she wrote.

“Do you ever feel overwhelmed in class? For whatever reason.” Ah, this was the topic the woman really wanted to know, pen poised at the ready her notebook already.

He frowned. “...No?” She wrote something down.

Mischa scoffed, “She’s trying to get some information about your empathy. She’s gotten it written here that you’re likely on the autistic spectrum because of your trouble socializing and lack of eye contact.”

His brow raised.

The session ended not long after that and Dr. Carson led them back into the waiting room where Russ was peering over a travel magazine. He stood as soon as he saw them, quickly assessing eyes noting the barely concealed boredom and frustration on his son’s face.

Will rapidly made his way to his dad’s side, burying his face into his jacket. Russ raised an eyebrow but obligingly wrapped an arm around his head.

“Your son has high levels of empathy, doesn’t he Mr. Graham?” Dr. Carson began, her voice a little breathy from excitement. Will had to muffle a snort at that, feeling the tension suddenly enter his father’s body.

“What of it?” The doctor didn’t seem to pick up on the quiet warning in his dad’s voice.

“Well that, coupled with his autism create a very interesting mixture.” She continued, oblivious to Russ’ increasing anger. “It would probably be best if he started coming in to do some test for-”

“He ain’t a experiment.” His dad growled.

“It’s just to gauge how much-”

“He ain’t some lab rat.”

“I understand, sir, but-”

Russ, ignoring the woman, hitched Will up onto his hip and stormed out of the office. The woman called after him that she’d be alerting the school and child services. He continued walking.

They made it all the way home before any words were spoken.

“You know I ain’t lettin no one take you from me, donchu?” He said quietly. Mischa nodded vigorously over his shoulder.

“I know, daddy.” He gave his father a long hug.

“I love you, mon chéri.”

“Love you too, papa.”

xoOXOox

The next day, Russ informs Will that they’ll be moving in a week. He couldn’t really say he wasn’t expecting it, they’d been in Marrero for three years already. But the timing was telling.

“We’re going to have to stop talking in public settings.” Mischa told him with a sigh. “We don’t want this to happen at your next school, too.”

“Aren’t you gonna be bored just watching me do everything?” He scrunched his face at the thought.

“I could probably go visit my brother.” She mused. “I haven’t checked on him for a few years. Last I saw him, he was living with our uncle and aunt in France.”

“Why haven’t you checked on him?” Will didn’t understand why she wouldn’t want to. Family was precious, and what little he knew of her brother was that they were close.

“Partly because it hurt to see him stewing in anger and pain after my death. And partly because you needed me more. But if you don’t need me for a few hours a day…” She shrugged. “It’ll be interesting, I know you’ve never seen France or Italy, except in photos. Maybe you’d like to go one day?”

“That sounds fun! And maybe I could meet yer brother?”

She chuckled, “Maybe one day.”

Chapter Text

When Will had decided to add another language to the ones Mischa taught him, he hadn’t exactly considered how difficult Japanese was.

The school in Greenville, Mississippi that he’d be transferred to after their move was slightly behind his previous one in curriculum. Fifth grade math stood out as a particularly bad example of Greenville education. In order to stay entertained in class, he’d taken to practicing his Japanese writing, Mischa popping in every so often to critique his work.

It didn’t help much with just how utterly boring math was.

Mischa had kept to her promise, she stopped hanging around him all the time at school which he was thankful for. The temptation to talk to her was massive. But she hadn’t just gone visiting her brother, either. She told him that she looked in on Russ, sometimes. To make sure he was okay. She also went looking for other relatives and descendants of her past lives.

So far, he was still the only one who could see her.

When the day had ended and they were having one of their nightly before bed chats, she told him she still wasn’t entirely sure why he could see her.

“When you were born,” she added, “I was watching my brother in Lithuania and I felt this weird pull in my gut. I’d never felt something like it in all my lives or deaths. So, of course, I followed it. To you.” She ruffled his hair with intangible fingers. “Who even as a baby, stared right at me and could hear my voice.”

“You haven’t haunted other people?” That was hard to believe, Mischa enjoyed snooping around and being a ghost gave her the perfect opportunity to do just that all the time.

“Not like you.” She replied. “I’ve never stuck around this long, usually I’ve started to fade after five or ten years, but I’ve been a ghost now for thirteen. I haven’t felt even a hint of a fade starting.”

“You don’t got any theories?”

“I’ve got theories aplenty, but evidence for none of them.” He gave her a look. She sighed and expanded on that. “We’ve already talked about it maybe being a mixture of our relation and your empathy. It’s also possible that I did something in my previous life that actually affected my spirit somehow. I was a cultist.” She explained. “We practiced rituals and such, blood sacrifices, some of them based in real tradition. It could also be that you’re just the first to have latent magic in your blood.”

“Is that rare?  Magic in my blood?”

“Not so much ‘rare,’ as it is non-existent in this world. After my first life, I was removed from my own world to one without personal magic, blood magic. The only magic here was the type you got from the natural world.”

“Maybe you was put here, to bring blood magic?” Will guessed. “If it was only the nature stuff here, I mean.”

She squinted at that for a moment. “... that may be right.” She admitted. “If it were true that might mean I’m so drawn to you because you’re the first descendant of mine to have magic in their blood.”

There was a long pause as she considered this.

She finally shook her head and glanced at the clock.

“Well, that’s enough existential crisis for one night, I’d say. Time for bed, mažiau. You’ve got a full day of math homework ahead of you.” She added with a smirk.

Will turned over and groaned into his pillow.

Chapter Text

On his eleventh birthday, Will’s dad gifts him a bike. It was old, slightly rusted, and a few of the parts were missing.

In excellent condition, compared to a lot of things that they found there.

It was still in good enough condition that Russ Graham felt confident in repairing it. He sanded off as much of the rust as he could, painting over it with some excess boat paint his boss had let him take home. It was practically good as new.

Having moved again, this time to Greenville, Mississippi, Will’s dad had taken a few weeks to get a feel for the new area.  Both Grahams were happy this place was so much safer than their previous trailer park.

And with this new safety, the older man decided that it was time to teach his son something his classmates had learned years ago.

He had to learn how to ride a bike.

“Hey, don’t look at me!” Mischa told him after he’d given her another pleading glance for help. He’d tipped over on his bike once more. “I never learned this.”

Will’s dad was only a bit more helpful, having learned all of this over twenty years ago and never really picking it back up again.  Eventually, however, they did get to a stage where everyone was comfortable with him riding around the neighborhood on his own.

This new freedom was amazing to Will. Instead of playing with his mechanical toys or reading, he now took the entire weekend just to ride around and explore.

On one Sunday, while most of the population was locked up in the local church, Will meandered his way through the town on his bike. He was waiting out the hour to sneak into the potluck afterwards, they were apparently having barbecue and ribs. Never something he wanted to miss.

Around halfway through his wait, he came across the sound of excited barking. A lot of it.

Dogs?

He spun his bike around and pedaled towards where he’d heard the sound.

Mischa laughed at him from her floating perch over his shoulder. She thought his uncontrollable need to stop and pet every dog he saw was ‘hilarious’ and ‘adorable.’ Still, she helpfully pointed him towards the Greenville animal shelter.

A squat little brick building with a chain link fence around a wide backyard, it was nothing like New Orleans shelters they’d passed by before, solemn and gray with little to no yard. The dogs running across the grass also looked ten times happier than the other shelter dogs he’d seen.

He hopped off of his bike and leaned it against the fence, standing next to it, watching the dogs race about. A few spotted him and wandered over to sniff curiously at the stranger, much to his delight, getting a few head sketches through the fence links before they dashed off again.

“Having fun with the dogs, huh?” A voice called out, startling both him and Mischa. A woman had poked her head out the front door of the shelter building, watching him with open amusement.

He glanced back at the dogs before nodding vigorously. From the corner of his eye, Mischa was giving the woman a considering look.

“Did you want to play with them?” The unnamed woman asked, her smile wide and kind.

Oh how he desperately wanted to say yes. Will wanted to trust her so bad. Dogs were in the equation!

Even still, he had learned stranger danger at school and from his dad. It was hard not to trust people when he could feel how they wanted him to trust them. This woman was giving him the same impulse. He was just lucky that Mischa was basically his impulse control.

“She seems okay.” Mischa told him after a few moments. “I’ll let you know if I see anything fishy.”

“...okay.” He finally said, running in the doors after her.

That, amazingly enough, did not end with his untimely murder or kidnapping. Infact, he played with the dogs for the rest of the afternoon, forgetting about the potluck entirely. They were happy, rambunctious little menaces. He adored them.

As he was about to leave, however, the lady, Ms. Stevens, handed him a few papers to give to his dad.

A quick glance at them had his eyes shooting back up to her face with surprise. They were volunteer permission forms.

“There ain’t no requirement, sweety, but you seem to like ‘em and they definitely like playin’ with you.” She told him with a smile.

When he gave the forms to his dad that evening, practically vibrating in place, the older man huffed an indulgent laugh but obligingly signed the forms. Every Sunday for the foreseeable future he’d be helping care for animals at the tiny shelter.

Will was ecstatic.

In the following weeks, Ms. Stevens taught him how to feed the dogs and make his own dog food, as well as how to train them to do certain things, like sit or shake. It wasn’t all playtime, he had to clean the cages or pick up poop as well, but Will deemed this a perfectly good trade for all the dogs.

Mischa still laughed at him whenever he got particularly excited for Sundays to arrive, but made sure to tell him she was happy he found something he adored.

xoOXOox

Because life just had a way of kicking you down at some point, a few months into his time at the shelter, one of the dogs there got sick. Cancer, he was solemnly informed.

“Betsy’s an old girl.” Ms Stevens told him sadly. “She’s lived a long life and eventually it’s just your time to go.” She looked down at his heartbroken face and smoothes a hand over his head comfortingly. “We can’t make her live forever, but we can make sure she’s not in any pain and that she feels loved.”

“Death is not as scary as you seem to think it is, mažiau.” Mischa comforted later as he was crying silently into his sheets. “I’d know better than anyone. You don’t feel pain or sorrow, you just feel at peace.”

Despite both of their assertions, it took Will another week of watching Betsy struggle around to finally agree.

“I don’t want her to hurt any more.” He solemnly told Ms. Stevens one evening, tears in his eyes.

The woman nodded back at him with understanding, giving him a comforting pat on the shoulder.

A few days later, Betsy was gone. Ms. Stevens let Will keep her collar tag and sent him home early with a note for his dad.

He put it on the table and went to his room the moment he got back.

Betsy’s name tag was clutched in his hand as he sat on the floor of his room. Mischa asked him gently what he’d like to do with it.

“Can you teach me how to do a ‘membrance for her?”

Mischa quietly helps him set up the little shawl altar, directing him to place the tag in the bowl in the center. The candles are lit and she directs him in a prayer. 

“With the energies of Earth, I am with you in spirit. Your memory will always remain with me.

With the energies of Air, I am with you in spirit. Your memory will always remain with me.

With the energies of Fire, I am with you in spirit. Your memory will always remain with me.

With the energies of Water, I am with you in spirit. Your memory will always remain with me.”

“Now just think of her and let her know you love her and anything else you’d like to say to her. Let me know when you’re ready.”

Will bowed his head.

I love you. You were a very sweet dog and I’ll miss you so much. Your puppies are so happy in their new homes, I hope you’re watching out for them. I won’t forget you, I promise.

Raising his head, he nods at Mischa to continue.

“Hail to you, Anubis, and may you protect this dog

as he runs to the afterlife.

Hail to you, Kerberos, guardian of the gates,

watcher of the land beyond,

may you welcome this dog to the next place.

Hail to you, Wepwawet, opener of the roads,

may you take this dog to stand beside you,

brave and loyal in life and death.

Hail to you, loyal one, and may you be blessed

as you run into the sunset to the west,

chasing the stars into the night,

one final time.”

He extinguished the candles and picked up the dog tag, placing it carefully on the windowsill.

The altar was quickly cleaned up and Will sat back on the floor and watched the sun set behind the tag, making it shine with brilliant oranges and pinks. Mischa sat beside him offering what comfort she could, humming a little as she brushed intangible fingers over his hair.

His dad came home not long after the sunset. Will heard him puttering about the kitchen for a few minutes, putting his things away. He could tell the moment his dad found the note, there was a long pause in movement. Then his dad’s footsteps headed for his room.

His bedroom door was carefully nudged open and his dad peaked in. He saw his son sitting on the floor, looking out the window, tears still running rivers down his cheeks.

Walking over carefully, he sat down beside Will, unconsciously flanking him with Mischa, and drew him into a hug.

A silent moment passed.

Then Will turned his face into his dad’s chest, quiet sobs wracking his small frame.

The night passed.

Then the week.

Sunday finally returned to the shelter.

And so did Will.

Chapter Text

It was an accident, but somehow, slowly, Will’s stash of dried herbs, candles, and rocks had grown from a small handful, into a refurbished suitcase worth.

Russ had taken to collecting any candles or interesting rocks he spotted at the second hand store or along the road. And scattered around the trailer, was his growing collection of plants and herbs. He had a rack especially set up for drying them in his closet. And the excess went to dinner.

Mischa had taken to showing him a new ritual every so often. Something to help a scrape heal faster or promote good dreams. They’d also continued remembrances and did a ritual for Samhain.

Will was pretty sure all of this added up to him being pagan. This brought up some important questions.

“So, you said I got magic in my blood.” He began one afternoon once homework was finished. “Does that mean I can do real magic, like with a wand?”

She chuckled at his enthusiasm. “Unfortunately, the parts that are needed to craft a wand or a staff don’t exist in this world. And your magic isn’t quite strong enough to use wandlessly. Maybe in a few years.”

He sagged in disappointment.

“I can teach you some ritual based spells?” She offered. “And I think some less powerful runes and potions could be crafted, too. Potions would take some finagling, though.”

The twelve year old perked back up.

“What can those do?”

“Well, most of the runes I know are for alerting me to danger.” She admitted. “So they're basically burglar alarms. But the potions can do a bunch of things, regrow bones, put you in a coma, make you tell the truth, and so on. Most of them need specific ingredients though, substituting them will take some work and you’ll lose some of the potency.”

“But I could still learn?”

“Oh, definitely. Divination would probably be easiest to start with, you’d just need some loose leaf tea or a deck of cards. Astronomy, too, though with your hatred of math, that and Arithmancy are probably out the window.” He went to protest but she continued on. “And I don’t remember much from either, so that will probably be more of a self study thing.”

She turned to him, finally realizing what she was saying.

“Am I getting ahead of myself?” She asked, suddenly unsure. “I’d hate to presume, but you seemed interested…?”

“I am.” He told her reassuringly.

“Okay, just tell me if something’s not interesting to you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, like I said, Divination is one of the easiest to start, I can also start teaching you to recognize certain plants and minerals and their properties. Candles too.” She mused. “From there we can work our way up to potions. Runes are a bit out there because you have to learn the individual runes before you can start runic clusters… Can you write this down for me?”

“Sure.” He quickly grabbed a notebook from his bag and started jotting everything down. “What about the ritual spells?”

“We’ll have to get you a focus of some sort, but it’ll probably take awhile for me to think up a good one. In the meantime,” She turned her focus back to him. “How would you like to learn to make a proper cup of tea?”

Chapter Text

Will cursed at his notes once more, grateful that Mischa was visiting her brother for she’d surely have scolded him for his language. He couldn’t help it, though. This equation was fighting him every step of the way.

Starting with Uruz and Isa runes were basically a no-brainer for him, meaning ‘life-force' and 'stasis’ respectively, but putting them together just created one dud after another, no matter how he oriented them. He wanted to ask Mischa.

He was not allowed to ask Mischa.

Of all the things Mischa was teaching him, runes were… challenging was probably the best word. Or maybe frustrating, in a way unlike anything else he studied. Made even worse by the fact that his main source for most questions had already exhausted her limited knowledge. In this, he was essentially on his own.

So far, he had a handful of rocks that did nothing, at least two rocks that floated on their own, one that floated in water, one that was constantly glowing a barely discernible blue, and two that were warm to the touch even when put in the freezer. None of them did anything close to what he wanted them to.

After a few more minutes of glaring at his newest failure, he glanced at the clock. With a heavy sigh, he stood up from his desk, shoving the newest rune cluster into his duds box and shoving his note back under his mattress.

He stood and stretched the kinks in his back out with a groan.

It was time to go to work.

His new job, his first job, had landed in his lap in a rather non-traditional manner. He hadn’t applied at all, his volunteering had just sort of… transformed into a part-time job at some point. Nothing major, he was essentially just doing the same work he did as a volunteer with a few smaller add-ons like paperwork.

It wasn’t a bad job either.  He liked the work and he was getting paid to do it. Not terribly much, as he only worked one day a week, but enough to occasionally spend on supplies or donuts. Or maybe a new bike, eventually.

With Mischa’s lessons he’d been needing to restock his supplies a lot more often. Making one off spells and charms for practice used up plenty of ingredients and burned his candles down to the nub.

He had, somehow, managed to find the one practicing Wiccan in the area, who, after some careful persuasion, was willing to sell him crystals, herbs, and incense on occasion. She was also willing to help him out in areas that weren’t Mischa’s forte, besides runes.

Maeve knew more about Astronomy and Tarot cards than Mischa ever had. She liked to ambush him with a reading whenever he stopped by, with the occasional set of handwritten notes on the stars or planets.

She, like Mischa, didn’t know the first thing about runes, though.

The frustration was near to killing him.

xoOXOox

It took him another three months of cursing at rocks to figure out what he was doing wrong and how to fix it. Another two to get everything ready, but eventually it was done. Just in time for Yule.

The morning of, he celebrated and exchanged a few presents between himself and his dad, managing to earn a toothy smile for his hand-painted mug from art class. Russ got him a few fun things as well, like the t-shirt that said ‘I woof you!’

But after presents, his dad sat at the table with his customary cup of coffee and his lure crafting kit. Will knew from experience he’d be sitting there for a few hours, at least.

He’d join his dad in a bit, but first he had to give Mischa her gift.

If he could just figure out how.

“So, I’ve been playing around with some runes.” He started, figuring it was as good a place as any. “And I thought to- I mean, I’ve been trying to-.” He sighed in frustration. Giving up, he shrugged and pointed to a pencil sitting on his desk. “Can you get that for me?”

“Sure.” She responded automatically, turning to do just that before she realized the futility. “Wait. What are you doing?” She eyed him suspiciously. He sighed.

“Please can you just…?”

“You know I can’t, Will. If you wanted me to turn around you just had to ask.”

“Will you please just pick up the pencil!”

“I can’t! See!” She flung her hand over the pencil and slammed her full fist to the surface of his bedside table. The pencil rolled off slowly.

They both stared at it for a moment, for different reasons.

Will was thrilled it worked, he hadn’t been entirely sure, not without testing it on her directly, but it was nice to have been an ass for nothing.

Mischa, on the other hand, was on the verge of tears. Joyful ones, true, but tears nonetheless. Will soon found himself with an armful of happily sobbing ghost girl, pleased that he could finally feel some sort of sensation from her hugs.

“You can only do it within a ten-foot radius of this stone.” He told her when she finally released him, gesturing to the smooth gray rock on a string with little symbols carved into the surface. “I’m trying to figure out if I can extend the range, but for now, I can leave this here when I’m at school for you to do stuff or I can wear it and you can follow me around.”

“I know the first thing I’m going to do.” She replied as she picked the pencil back up, a fierce look on her face.

He smiled and left her to it, knowing she’d probably be busy for a couple of hours.

Sitting down at the table, Will pulled out his own lure tying kit, and began assembling, just as his father had shown him.

Chapter Text

1993

“It’s not funny!”  Will declared desperately, burying his face into his pillow.  His voice, sadly, betrayed him, and it cracked an octave on the words.  He groaned pathetically into the fabric, Mischa’s joyous laughter arching around him.

He’d gone through health class, so he’d had a vague understanding of what was going to happen.  But understanding and experiencing were two very different things.  It also didn’t help that Mischa was entirely unsympathetic.

As she’d said multiple time (mostly as an excuse to leave him suffering alone in health class) she’d lived multiple lives, sometimes as a man.  She’d suffered through this indignity before, multiple times, the thought of which had him shuddering in horror.

Once was feeling horrible enough.

Aside from the squeakiness of his voice (easily hidden at school, because he never really talked to anyone), he was also getting increasingly more pimples that appeared just as fast as they healed, and, to his horror, hair everywhere except his face where he wanted it.

“Hey!  No brooding Mr. Broody-pants!”  Mischa grinned, smacking his leg in mock comfort.  “It’s not the end of the world!  You will live!”   He contemplated for a long moment about smothering his face into the pillow.  Or futilely trying to smother Mischa.

It would get me out of that Algebra exam on Friday, he mused.  But Dad’s bringing Ruby Tuesday’s home for dinner.  Hmmm…

“I bet you weren’t this happy when your brother went through this.”  His complaint was muffled by the cloth covering his face.  It sounded far too much like a whine to his ears.

Mischa tilted her head considering.

“You’re right.”  She agreed after a moment.  “But he’s annoyingly good at everything.  It also didn’t help much that he was selectively mute for most of the squeakiness.”

Will lifted his head from his pillow, brows furrowed.

“Why was he selectively mute?”  He couldn’t control the bafflement he felt from leaking into his voice, which blessedly didn’t crack.

Mischa hummed.  “Well, after I … died, he was sent to an orphanage.  It wasn’t a good place, somewhere you’d want to send kids.”  She considered.  “Part of it might have been trauma, my death and all,” she gestured vaguely at the air, “another part, my brother’s shear stubbornness and arrogance.”

“He’s arrogant?”

“Oh, yes.”  She nodded her head vigorously, but her accompanying smile was full of affection.  “I love him, dearly, but he is an arrogant bastard.  He enjoys lording knowledge and abilities over others under the guise of benevolence and friendship.”

Will frowned.  “He doesn’t sound like a good person.”

She waved that away.  “That doesn’t mean anything.  Good and bad, black and white, it’s nonsense.  The world is just painted with different shades of grey.” She shrugged.  “Everyone interprets these shades differently, for exactly when they turn too dark.”

“When do you think they… turn too dark?”  He asked hesitantly.  She glanced at him, spotting the hesitance immediately.  A bitter, self-deprecating smirk crossed her cheeks, entirely uncharacteristic of the girl.

“My first life?  I would have said anything against the law.”  She shook her head.  “But somewhere in all the lives I’ve lived, the experiences I’ve had, something… shifted.  Or maybe it just broke.  That definite morality I once had began to bend and tear over the years until – well.”  She let out a sharp laugh, devoid of her earlier humor.  “Hurting either me or mine?  That’s too far for me now.  That’s what’s too dark.  I don’t really care about anyone else.”

It… made a strange sort of sense.  He couldn’t imagine all the lives she’d lived had been strictly ‘moral’ people, even the small amount of stories she’d told him so far.  Even in her first, the one where she believed in that black and white mentality, she’d killed, stolen, lied, all in the name of war and protecting others.

And were he in any other mood, any other state then, he would have wanted to debate her, question her opinions until he’d sussed out every little detail out for himself.

But the existential dread the was puberty hung over him.  He was being betrayed by his own body.

He allowed his face to plant once more into his pillow, releasing a pathetic groan that traitorously jumped a few octaves at the end.

Chapter Text

1994

Right.  This should be simple enough. Will thought to himself.  I know all the theory.  I know what ingredients react with what.  Everything should turn out fine.

But still, his hand hesitated over the wormwood he’d chopped up neatly.  The water was simmering steadily, as the recipe had directed.  Mischa tidy scrawl on the margins advised him that he could prep all the ingredients before hand, so he had.  Each ingredient was neatly chopped or sliced and then placed in an individual bowl to the right of his pot on the stove.

Maybe it was because Mischa was in Italy, watching over her brother for the day, instead of watching over his first potions effort.  It wasn’t her fault, he hadn’t let her know before she’d left, but he still wished she were watching him for any issues.  For when he inevitably messed up.

Come on.  Positivity.  You’re supposed to be positive.  He coached himself.  It was the one thing he’d taken from his school councilor that week.  It hadn’t really worked so far, but he was committed to at least trying.  He couldn’t really reach the cheerful she’d been aiming for, he wasn’t a cheerful person by nature, but he could try positive.

Okay, he could do this.

As fast as he could, he grabbed the wormwood bowl and tipped it into the simmering water.  Once it was all in he began stirring clockwise, because for some reason the direction the water was stirred mattered.

Well, that wasn’t so hard, now was it? He scolded.

With the first step done, it was easy to keep his momentum going.  The dittany root was added after a few more stirs, followed quickly by the scurvygrass leaves.

After that was stirred in, he set a timer for 10 minutes and covered the mixture.

He consulted the recipe once more.

‘Add the leaves … clockwise …let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes.’  Check, check, and check.  ‘Once the mixture has steeped for an adequate time, it should become a translucent fuchsia.  At this stage, slowly add the marinated lamb heart.  The mixture should be raised to a boil, and cooked for 15 minutes.’  He glanced at the lamb heart in question.  The original recipe had apparently called for dragon heart, but Mischa’s notes had informed him that in a pinch, any heart would do.

The butcher hadn’t even blinked when the fifteen year old had walked in and asked for a lamb heart.  It had been $8.  $8 for a heart that weighed half a pound.  Oof.

Marinating it in a mixture of his own blood, vetiver grass (for it’s psychic protection), fennel (for it’s purifying properties), and water, was a little difficult to explain, but it only needed to sit for a few hours before it was ready for use.

The timer beeped in his ear, prompting him to lift the lid and slowly drop the heart in.  He was pleased to note the water was fuchsia, or at least a pink-purple that he assumed was fuchsia.  He wasn’t well versed in color theory like Mischa; his brief foray into art class was just that, brief.

He reset the timer and  placed the lid back on.  Then he went about sanitizing the empty Old Ezra whiskey bottle and stopper his dad had let him claim.  He took the cheesecloth and funnel and set that in the bottle’s mouth.

Once the timer went off once more, Will took the pot and poured it as carefully as he could through the cheesecloth, stopping any chunks from getting through.

The liquid, once it poured through was a pleasant purple color that swirled faintly with undulating silver strands.

It seemed like he’d made it correctly.  He wasn’t really in the mood to test it on himself, he didn’t quite need it just yet, but he’d like to call this a success.  Hopefully when Mischa got back, she’d agree and then he could start using it.

He pressed the stopper in with a faint ‘pop,’ and then set about cleaning up the mess he made.  The remainder of the blood mixture went straight down the drain and the foil pan he’d used was thrown out.  Didn’t want his dad accidentally using it for roast or something.

Cleaning up everything else went quickly.  He’d already had all the extra herbs packed away in his kit, and returned it to his room.  The used ones were thrown away, while the heart he was going to the pregnant stray dog living in the drainage ditch by his school.  He packed that away in a Tupperware container and shoved it back in the fridge.

All and all, it took about twenty minutes for the kitchen to be reorganized and cleaned.  Then he grabbed his completed potion and brought it to his room.

He wasn’t quite sure when Mischa would be dropping back in so he set about finishing up the essay he’d been assigned for history.

~~~

Her return was silent, almost unacknowledged, save for the quick twitch of his eyes up from his notebook.  He slid his gaze to the clock on his desk.  It was 7:28 PM, meaning she’d left Italy at … 2 AM?  What was he brother doing at 2 AM aside from sleeping?  Didn’t doctors have to come in early at like 5 AM or something?

He shook his head.

Sliding away from his desk and stretching his arms up, he turned to face her more fully.

She’d already noticed what he’d made and was peering over it carefully, lifting the top and sniffing, jostling it slightly to see the swirl.

“Sheep heart?”  She asked turning to him.

“Lamb.”  He corrected.  She nodded.

“It’s not as strong as it would be with a dragon heart, but I take it this isn’t for warding off Legilimancy.”  She said sardonically.

“I figured from what you said, it’d work for empathy, just as well.”  He agreed.

“You’d be right.”  She frowned.  “You didn’t try any of it before I got here did you?”

He shook his head.

“Didn’t know if I’d done it right, yet.”  He answered.  “Did I?”

“Well,” she began, peering at it once more, “I don’t think it’ll pass Snape’s strict grading standards, but it looks good.  Are you intending to use it as a preventative or curative?”

He considered that.

“Preventative would be nice, not having to deal with the overload of emotions for a while.  But you said it was addictive.”  He reminded her.  “So, taking some when I get too overwhelmed and avoiding eye contact is probably healthier.”

She nodded.

“I’d say so.  It’ll also last you longer.  I’d say a month or two depending on how often you use it.  You know the correct dosage amount?”

“Mmhm.  I also used my blood as an anchor in the marinade.”

Her brow shot up in surprised.  He thought she looked impressed.

“That should make it a bit more effective.  You might consider pig heart, next time.”  She advised.  “They’re incredibly similar to human hearts and so the reaction with your blood would be stronger.”

For his curiosity, he had to ask, “What if I used a human heart?”

She didn’t even blink.

“It, coupled with your blood as an anchor would basically be equivalent to using a dragon heart with no blood.”  She tilted her head for a moment before continuing.  “A lot of the older rituals and potions used the shedding of blood as a binding or strengthening.  I believe it was called ‘Life’ magic.  Eventually, though, that was replace by the more technical incantations and recipes that I learned.  That type of magic is dependent on foci.  Wands, specifically, but there was the odd witch or wizard who used a ring or staff.”

“So what are you teaching me, then?”  He squinted at her.

“Something akin to natural, ‘Primal,’ magic.”  She informed him happily.  “It’s more fluid, prone to change, and it adapts easily to the user’s will.  You can personalize spells and potions to how many people are participating, or a specific need.  It’s an incredibly powerful force under the right circumstance.  However,” she amended, “it takes time, which is where foci based magic excels.  My first life, I could heal – or harm – with a flick of the wrist and a few words.”

“Should I get a foci or some sort then?”

She thought a moment.

“Maybe.  But I doubt you’ll be able to use that sort of magic here.  There’s not enough ambient magic for it.  It would probably make your rituals more powerful, though.”  She paused for a moment before continuing.  “I think on it and tell you what I come up with.  For now, you’re fine.”

He accepted this.  Seeing it was getting late, Will turned back to his paper.  Mischa glanced once more at his Sindets Vagt potion with approval and then pulled her own notebook out and began writing.

Chapter Text

1995

“Happy birthday!”  Mischa cheered, hovering above his head at – he glanced at the clock – 6:35 AM.  Ugh.

He turned over and burrowed back under his covers, he still had another hour until he had to actually be up.  He did his best to ignore the amused breath his friend huffed out above him.  He heard the tell tale flick of the light switch.  A moment later there was an insistent tug on his blankets, and light surged over him, ignoring the meager protection his lids gave.

He whined, grasping blindly for the stolen fabric.

“C’mon, Birthday Boy!” Mischa exclaimed, patting his shoulder in mock comfort.  “I gotta give you your presents before you head off to school!”

He squinted angrily in Mischa’s direction, only slightly surprised to see a teenage girl where the six year old should have been.

He buried his head under his pillow.

“Awww.”  She moaned in mock disappointment.  “I was hoping for more of a reaction than that!  Not even a ‘Who are you?’”

“No one else is as annoying as you.”  He muttered, though through sleep and pillow it sounded more like, “N’on el’noy yu."

She snickered, though, apparently able to understand him.

“Well, at least that’s one present out of the way.”  She decided.  “But I still gotta give you your other one.  So, c’mon.  Get outta bed!”  She smacked his flannel-covered thigh impatiently.

He sighed, and after a moment sat up on the edge of his bed, groaning in irritation.

She cheered once more, doing a circuit around the room before settling down.  She plopped a box on his lap, small and neatly wrapped in a grey wrapping paper tied with a dark blue ribbon.

“Go on, open it!”  She urged, eagerly awaiting his reaction.

He favored her with a short glare, but obligingly began opening the box.

It was a jewelry box.  He frowned at it for a moment in confusion, but the strong smell of herbs and flowery incense assaulted his nose.

He recoiled, giving Mischa a long look.  She gestured for him to open it with an excited grin.

He released another sigh before carefully lifting the lid.

The culprit responsible for the smell was immediately evident, dried herbs and what he believed was potpourri sat in place of a velvet liner.  Sitting in the center, in a small nest of dried sage leaves, sat a ring.

He lifted it from the box, setting that to the side, and began studying the ring.

“It’s iron.”  Mischa explained.  “Traditionally, it’s used to ward off spirits and ghosts.  It obviously doesn’t work on me, but I thought the symbolism mattered.”  She added.  “If you look here,” she pointed, “you can see a rune I had her carve in.”

He peered at the indicated rune – which looked like the lovechild of N and H – , wracking his tired brain for the name of it.

“…Hagalas?”  He guessed after a long moment.

She beamed.

“Yup.  It’s meant to keep your spirit and thought in balance.”  She informed him.  “Runes like these you usually have to charge every so often, but with the way you’ll be using it, that’s not really necessary.”

“How will I be using it?”  He asked mechanically.

“As a focus.”  She declared.

“Oh.”  He stopped.  It took a few minutes for his brain to reboot.  “Ooooh.  For rituals.”

She nodded.  “The ring should help infuse a calm, centered feeling to you rituals and potions.  You can only do so much with ambiently powered runes, so you’ll probably still have to use you potion every so often, but this’ll let those smaller moments wash away.”

He slid it onto his middle finger.  It was still a little big, but not too much.  He’d probably grow into it soon, with the way he was shooting up.

“Thank you.”  He offered.  He was truly appreciative, and she seemed to understand this.  But just as her smile was tinged with mischief, his was awash in irritation.

“Where’d you get it from?”  He finally asked, spinning the ring idly on his finger.

“Oh, I’ve been chatting with some Wiccan’s online.”  She told him.  “While you’re asleep or at school, I find somewhere with an open computer and head into a chat room.  One of the ladies I was talking with, Lillian, makes jewelry on the side.  In exchange for a few of my own rituals and some herbs, she was happy to send that over.”

“Where do you find computers?”  He asked, perking up with interest.

“The library has one or two.  An office or a law firm usual has a couple.  Richer neighborhoods.  A few cafes have them, too.”

“Oh.”  He frowned.  “Can you show me how to get into one of these chat rooms?”

“Sure!  I’d be happy to.”  She sighed happily.  “I have to say, I have missed the internet.”

He squinted at her.

“Death and time get a little wonky.”  She waved away the look.  “You figure, my first life I was born 1987.  The one after that, 1933.  Then 1650, 2052, 1961, etc.  Most of the lives I’ve lived, I’ve had some form of the internet.  It’s super useful.”  She advised him.

“Huh.”  He shrugged, marking that for a future conversation.

He grabbed the herb-filled box and plopped on his desk, before returning to his bed, yanking the cover quickly over he head.  Mischa’s laugh was muffled by the blankets, but he was doing his best to ignore her.

His eyes closed.  A measure of sleep still fogged his mind, so it wasn’t difficult to let the fog spread.  It wasn’t long before he was drifting and drifting and drifting…

BEEP!  BEEP!  BEEP!

His alarm clock shrilled at him angrily from the foot of his bed.  The lights indicating 7:25 AM.

It was time to get ready for school.

Chapter Text

1996

“Well, Mr. Graham.”  His councilor began as soon as he sat down.  “The deadline for college and scholarship applications is approaching soon.”  A lie, there were still three and a half months left.  He was keeping track.  “With your transcripts as they currently are, I’m sure you’ll be accepted to most of the colleges you apply.”  True.  Straight A’s since kindergarten apparently looked good to schools.  “You just need to maintain these good grades until graduation.  Did you have any ideas what you’d like to be doing for the rest of your life?”

Ideas, sure.  He had plenty of ideas.  Some of them were even feasible.

He’d like to have twenty dogs and live alone in the woods for the rest of his life.  He’d like to travel the world with Mischa.  He’d like to give her a body back (One of his less feasible ideas).  He’d like to be able to turn off his empathy at will.  He’d like for his dad to live forever.  He’d like to know why his mom left.  He’d like to eat whatever he wanted without consequence.  He’d like a billion dollars.  He’d like to sleep for the rest of his life.

Okay, that last one was mainly due to sleep deprivation.

But the point still stood.  A lot of his ideas were stupid or wouldn’t go anywhere, and he was well aware of that.

Still, he had to respond.

“Uh, I guess I wanna be a cop?”  Even to his own ears that was weak.  Did he want to be a cop?  Maybe.  It looked vaguely cool.  He wanted to be a Rockstar just as much and for about the same reason.

“A police officer!”  His councilor beamed at him, sickly sweet positivity radiating off of her.  He retreated as far as he could in his creaky chair.  “What a wonderful idea!  Were you thinking of applying before you graduated?  Or were you looking to do something else?”

“I, uh, I was plannin’ on gettin’ a bachelors degree first.”  He replied uneasily.  “You need a degree to be a detective.”  He added.

“You’ve done your research!”  She commended, writing something on a piece of paper in his file.  “That’s wonderful news.  Any degree ideas, yet?”

“Not really.”  He shook his head.  His nails picked at the edge of the wooden armrest.  “Not anything specific.”

“That’s just fine.  But you should keep it in mind going forward.”  Something else was written down.  “Have you gotten any letters of recommendation from your teachers, yet?  Any plans on who to ask?”

“Ms. Daily said she’d give me a letter.  And Mr. Gonzales.”  Both nice teachers.  Both thought a lot of him, which was a pleasant feeling even if it was a lot of pressure.  Both thought the rumors of Satan worship and magic were absolutely ridiculous slander.

Okay, well, the rumors were mostly not true.  He definitely didn’t worship Satan.  He had no idea where that had come in, especially with a confirmed Satanist at this school, Jonah.  Maybe it was because they occasionally sat together at lunch?  They’d only spoken about five times in the two years he’d gone to this high school, could barely be considered ‘acquaintances.’

Nice guy, though.

“Ms. Daily, your English teacher?”  His councilor asked, jotting that down as well.  “And Mr. Gonzales is your… Chemistry teacher?”  He nodded his confirmation.  “Both sound like excellent references.  I’m sure they’ll be a great help.”

He let her platitudes roll over him, for the large part just ignoring them.  Was it time to leave, yet?

RING!

Ah, there was the final bell.

He stood and swung his bag over his shoulder, ignoring the mildly offended sputtering of his councilor.

“Sorry, I gotta catch the bus.”

He got out of the office as quickly as he could without running.  He practically ran out of the building, veering away from the bus lane and toward the woods.

A few minutes of walking led him straight to the little den hidden behind a copse of dead trees.  He swung his bag back to the ground and unzipped the top with quick fingers.

At the sound of the zipper, a round of whines and snuffling arose from the den.  He pulled out the metal bowl and bag of dog food he’d been hauling around all day.  It wasn’t the best, by far, but it was affordable and, with the addition of some of his own potions, actually nutritious.

He filled the bowl with dry food, sprinkling the potion mix over and then stirred it around.  Moments later, the first small speckled snout emerged from the dark, snuffling around for the food they knew was there.

He clicked his tongue encouragingly, beckoning the mother forward.

She knew him, knew his food was good, so she strode to him, still cautious but not afraid.  Her pups, seeing their mother trusted him, bounded out behind her.

Six pups, two girls and four boys.  All were a mess of brown and black speckles on white fur, much like their mother.  They were adorable, and if he were able, he’d take them all home and keep them with him.

He wasn’t, however.  Their landlord was allergic and wouldn’t allow any pets in the building other than fish.  He’d already vowed that the moment he got his own place, he’d get a dog or maybe even two.  Work up to that impossible dream of his slowly.

He’d have to be satisfied with this, for now.

The pups found the food and began scarfing it down with fervor.  The mom sat next to him with watchful eyes and allowed him to pet her.

Maybe I should do something with dogs?  He mused silently.  Hmm…

Vet was definitely out, as was working at the pound.  Something in animal rescue might be nice, at least the rehoming part.  He didn’t really trust himself with the rescue portion.

Animals being hurt was something that really set off his temper.

Cleaning them, healing them, fostering, that was more his speed.  Plus the temptation to hurt the owners as they hurt the pets wouldn’t be as strong.

The thought of bringing those bastards to justice is an appealing thought, though.  Maybe I should really consider police.  He contemplated that for a moment.  He shook his head.

He’d have time to think about that in college next year.  At this point, he still needed to pick which college he wanted to go to.

For some reason, Mischa wanted him to go to college in Italy near where her brother was working.  He wasn’t sure of her motives for that, whether it was just to have the people she hung around together or something else, but he knew he couldn’t afford to move to Italy for college, even if he did know Italian.

His dad had set aside a bit of money for him, but honestly, a full-ride at a good American college was really what he needed.

Hmmm…

Chapter Text

1997

George Washington University.  He had gotten in to George Washington University.

The acceptance letter had already made its way onto the fridge, proudly displayed underneath a Nawlins magnet.  It was hard to figure out who’d put it there, as both Mischa and his stoic father were practically vibrating with excitement and pride.

Next to the letter on the fridge, were his other two applications, both accepting, as well.

Given just how thrilled they’d all been when the George Washington one came, however, it was basically a forgone conclusion which school he’d be going to.

It also didn’t hurt that they offered him a full-ride scholarship, room and board included.

It was way too good to be true, Will had feared.  He thought they’d yank the rug out from under him every day, up to even move-in day.

It wasn’t until his suitcase and handful of boxes made their way to the floor of his cramped new dorm room that he could finally acknowledge, This is really happening.  I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and find it’s just been some elaborate dream.

He was in college.  A good college.  One that had a scholarship for tuition and housing and food.  One that had looked at his records and thought, Yeah, this kid is good enough to go here.

The only real downsides he could find so far were mainly to do with the dorms in all honesty.

He’d briefly met his roommate, who was nice enough but a huge party animal.  If he was the average college student Will was sure he’d be satisfied with him as a first roommate assignment.

But Will was used to only two people living in his space, and neither of them had stuff they were vehement about no one but them touching.

His roommate, Carson, asked (ordered, really) him not to touch any of his stuff.  Will couldn’t help but level the same demand.

He’d see how long the tense peace would last.

The other issue he found, was the RA.

Essentially just camp councilors who were going to school with them, most of them had some sort of superiority over the residents.  Especially the one for his floor.

Armed with an extensive (and frankly silly) list of dos and don’ts, he was given what boiled down to almost absolute power over them whenever they were in the dorms.

It also didn’t help that the guy was brimming with a smug, overconfident air at all times.

But as he and his father (with some subtle help from Mischa) put together his part of the room, he couldn’t help but hope that college was going to be the best experience of his life.

His father handed him his newly locked box of herbs, crystals, and candles to slide under his bed (unsurprisingly the bottom bunk).

He’d known, coming to school, that he’d have to be far more discrete if he wanted to avoid the reactions of his high school.  So he’d put his supplies in a locked, unmarked box, and his potions in cleaned and repurposed mouth wash and breath spray bottles in his spit kit.

Hopefully that would never catch his roommate’s interest.

After putting that away as well, he shoved as many of his books in the desk shelf as he could, leaving any extras to sit atop the box under the bed.

When he finished with that, he spun around to see what was left to put away.

He found two large, unfamiliar boxes, each covered with blindingly bright neon orange wrapping paper.

He blinked at them.  Then again, trying to process both their presence and the color.

With no small amount of effort, Will pulled his eyes from them to an extremely cheerful Mischa and an uncharacteristically bashful Russell Graham.

His father, seeing his son’s silent question, blushed a further red and rubbed the back of his neck with nervous embarrassment.

“…Ya got a full ride.”  His daddy explained quietly, head ducked down slightly.

Will blinked again.

His father’s brow furrowed as he searched for the words he wanted.

“I told ya when you were in school, that I saved college money up fer ya.”  He tried uncertainly.  “But ya got a full ride here.  An’ one’a the boys at the boatyard said his son was wantin’ a computer fer school and stuff.  I ‘membered ya sayin’ ya went to the library fer the computers.  So…”  He shrugged uncomfortably.  Mischa, who was grinning ear to ear, patted his father on the shoulder comfortingly.

Will’s jaw dropped a tiny bit.

…a computer?  His daddy had gotten him a computer?  Those things were expensive from what he knew.  How much had his daddy managed to save?

“There’s still some money left, too.”  The elder Graham continued, unaware of his son’s inner turmoil.  “Ya know, iffn ya ever feel like visit’n you ol’ man?”

Mischa, rubbing sympathetically at his dad’s shoulder with an affectionate, ‘Oh, Russ…,” went ignored as Will swept the older man up in a bone-breaking hug.

As his ghostly friend liked to say, ‘Sometimes, Russell Graham was too sweet for words.’

With a lot more blushing and uncomfortable clearing of throats, he and his father unboxed the computer tower and monitor.  It took them a while of reading the instructions to figure out how to plug it in and turn it on, but once everything was set, they pressed the power button and sat back.

It blared to life, bright and right in front of their eyes.

Chapter Text

Okay, for those of you who want the TLDR, I will be continuing this story, but I will be starting by actually attempting to edit the previous chapters, partly to get back into the groove.  I'm not abandoning it.

Hi, I'm not dead.

I... don't really have a solid reason for the unmentioned two-year hiatus.  I have a list of life events that fucked me up in many ways, deaths, moving, internship, college, etc.  It all resulted in putting me into a 'funk.'  That funk meaning in this case, lack of motivation, being tired all the time, sleeping all day, not talking to many people.  I haven't been diagnosed with anything, but I've been told that means I was/am depressed.  It's not as if I've suddenly gotten over it or something, either.  My motivation ebbs and flows, and at the moment it's pretty high.  I might even get some other writing done tonight.

On that note, my schedule for editing and updates will not be as frequent as before, seeing as I now have a job not constantly connected to the computer.  I unfortunately, in the last two years, lost the rough outline I'd made on where I wanted this story to go, so as I edit the previous chapters, you may want to got back and reread, as some new plot points might pop up.  And yes, I will be trying for a bit more of that illusive plot, but I too am anxious for Will and Hannibal to finally meet.

I will be posting in the notes at the beginning of the chapter whether the chapter has been edited yet.  I'm aiming to get one chapter done a week, but we'll see how well my attempts at consistency goes.

As always, if there are any specific events that you want to see pre-canon or any questions you have you'd like my to clarify, let me know!

Thank you for the love!

Chapter Text

College, it turned out, was not the rigid, terrifying gauntlet his high school teachers had promised.

Will had braced himself for professors who barked out rules, who would refuse to take late work and treat excuses like mortal sins. Instead, his professors acted like the class was something you showed up to if you wanted to. Not required, not demanded, just… expected. If you didn’t, well, that was your problem.

The first week had left him unsettled. His English Literature professor shrugged when Will asked if he could shift a quiz date because he’d caught the flu. “Sure, email me when you’re better.” Just like that. Meanwhile, high school Will still remembered being denied a bathroom break because it might “set a bad precedent.”

“It’s like the rules don’t apply anymore,” he muttered one afternoon, half to himself, half to Mischa, who had stretched herself out along the windowsill.

“That’s because you’re treated like an adult now,” she said, turning a lazy cartwheel in the air before flipping upright again. “Strange, isn’t it? Responsibility and freedom, all at once. You don’t handle freedom well.”

He glared at her but couldn’t argue. She had a point. Freedom meant more time for rituals, sure, but also more noise, more people, more expectations he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet.

Carson — his roommate — was nice enough in that pushy, extroverted way, but Will had already lost count of the number of drunk strangers who stumbled into their room because Carson forgot to lock the door. At least twice Will had retreated to the library with his headphones on, burying himself in a book until the muffled laughter faded from memory.

It wasn’t all bad. He’d found a quiet corner on the third floor of the library — an alcove hidden behind a row of ancient history books no one touched. Mischa liked to perch on the radiator, commenting on the weird murals that decorated the nearby stairwell. Will liked it because no one else ever came by. Sometimes he sat there hours before class, notebook open, pen hovering while Mischa hummed old Lithuanian lullabies under her breath. It wasn’t the same as home, but it was the closest thing to peace he’d found so far.

The dorm rules, though — those were another story.

The list had been long, typed in twelve-point font and stapled to his door the day he moved in. Most of them made sense — no alcohol, no smoking inside, no drugs on campus. Fine. But some of them were ridiculous.

No overnight guests of the opposite gender. No mini-fridges bigger than a cubic foot. No coffee machines.

And worst of all: No candles.

Will scowled at the paper every time his eyes landed on it. “It’s like they built this place specifically to make me miserable,” he muttered, shoving his chair back from the desk hard enough to rattle Carson’s half of the room.

“You could always appeal,” Mischa said, floating cross-legged above his bed. Her tone was light, but her eyes were already sharp with caution.

“For religious reasons,” Will mused out loud, fingers drumming against the desktop. “I could write something up, talk to the dean. They’d have to allow it, wouldn’t they?”

Mischa’s brows lifted. “And risk being branded ‘the weird kid with the candles’ in your very first semester? You only just escaped high school with your skin intact. Do you really want to draw that kind of fire again?”

He grimaced. She wasn’t wrong. He’d only barely shaken the whispers of Satan worship and witchcraft that had haunted him all four years. College was supposed to be a fresh start, not a repeat.

“So what, I just give it up?”

“Of course not.” Her grin was quick, conspiratorial. “You find other people. Local pagans, Wiccans, whatever the D.C. scene has going. You’d be surprised how many there are, and most of them aren’t bound by dorm rules. They have apartments, houses, backyards… and candles. Lots of candles.”

He stared at her. “…You’ve already looked, haven’t you.”

She smiled sweetly and drifted over to his desk, tapping a finger against the side of his computer monitor. “Bulletin board in the student union. Two flyers for open circles, one for a campus Pagan Society meeting, and a grainy printout about a drum circle that’s probably not worth your time. Or,” she added, shrugging, “we can find the groups online. Chat rooms, mailing lists. The Internet is good for more than pirating songs, you know.”

Will leaned back in his chair, arms crossed tight. Meeting strangers, revealing even a sliver of what he practiced, made his stomach twist. But the thought of celebrating Samhain without flame, of trying to work by the weak flicker of a desk lamp instead of candlelight, felt worse.

“…Fine,” he muttered. “But if they turn out to be freaks—”

“They’re witches,” Mischa interrupted cheerfully. “Of course they’re freaks. The fun kind.”

His glare only made her grin wider.

The flyer had promised “Open Circle: Autumn Equinox,” with an address scrawled in blue ink across the bottom. Will had stared at it for days, tucked it into his notebook, unfolded it again, tucked it back. Finally, Mischa got fed up with his stalling and all but shoved him out the door.

The meeting place turned out to be a small public park a few blocks from campus, tucked between an elementary school and a row of tired-looking brick apartments. He spotted them at once — maybe a dozen people gathered beneath a sagging oak tree, carrying tote bags, talking in low voices. They looked nothing like the image his classmates in high school had conjured whenever they whispered “witch” at him.

Half of them were middle-aged women in long skirts and denim jackets, the sort who looked like they worked at bookstores or elementary schools. A couple of guys around his age hovered at the edge, one nervously clutching a notebook, the other fiddling with a wooden bead bracelet.

“Breathe,” Mischa whispered in his ear as he hesitated on the path. “You look like you’re about to bolt. Don’t cross your arms, you’ll seem broody.”

“I *am* broody,” he muttered, but lowered his arms anyway.

A woman with streaks of silver in her black hair noticed him and smiled, motioning him closer. “You must be new. Welcome. I’m Laurel.” She had the kind of calm, grounded voice that instantly put him a little at ease. “We’re about to start.”

They gathered in a loose circle, hands linked where people were comfortable. Will shifted awkwardly, unsure if he should join, but Laurel just winked at him and let the gap stand. Mischa hovered at his shoulder, beaming like she belonged there.

The ritual was simple. They lit a handful of candles — actual candles, not forbidden by any dorm rule here — and spoke blessings for the harvest, the turning of seasons, balance between dark and light. The group’s energy wasn’t polished or dramatic, but it was warm, genuine.

Will felt it settle in his chest, a hum not unlike when Mischa helped guide his rituals, but fuller, as if layered with many different voices. It was strange, disorienting… and a little intoxicating.

Afterward, someone passed around homemade bread, someone else a thermos of cider. They chatted easily, trading stories about gardens, classes, families. No one stared at him. No one called him names.

“You see?” Mischa whispered, eyes bright. “Not so bad. Group work has its perks.”

He chewed slowly on a piece of bread, glancing around the circle of strangers-who-didn’t-feel-like-strangers. “Yeah,” he admitted. “It’s… different.”

Different, and maybe — for the first time in a long while — good.

It started with a dog.

A thin, speckled mutt with a crooked tail that hung around the dumpsters behind the dining hall. Most students ignored her. A few tossed fries or half-eaten sandwiches in her direction. Will crouched down one night with a stolen chicken breast wrapped in a napkin and held it out. The dog growled low, suspicious, but hunger won out. She snatched the meat and darted back into the shadows, eyes never leaving him.

“Soft touch,” Mischa teased, floating above the dumpster lid with her chin in her hands. “You can’t walk past a stray without wanting to adopt it.”

He didn’t argue. She wasn’t wrong.

Within a week, he’d memorized her routine. She came by most evenings, always alone, never barking. He started carrying extra food in his bag, little scraps from the dining hall or a piece of bread from his room. Slowly, she stopped running as far after taking it.

Then came the kitten.

It was late, nearly midnight, when he heard the thin mewling beneath the library steps. He almost ignored it — long day, two essays due — but the sound pierced through his fatigue like a needle. Kneeling down, he peered into the dark gap under the stairs. Two terrified golden eyes stared back.

“Of course,” he muttered. “Of course it’s me.”

It took twenty minutes of coaxing, the offering of half a granola bar, and finally lying flat on the cold pavement to ease the tiny thing out. The kitten was filthy, matted with leaves, ribs sharp under its damp fur. It trembled in his hands, but didn’t claw.

He tucked it into his jacket and stood, earning a low whistle from Mischa. “That’s it. You’re a beacon. Animals can *smell* the bleeding heart on you.”

“I can’t keep it,” he said, even as the kitten burrowed deeper against his chest. “Carson will kill me.”

“Carson can’t even find his own shoes half the time,” Mischa scoffed. “But fine. Shelter? Vet clinic? Or maybe one of your new witchy friends wants a familiar?”

Will sighed, already calculating bus routes to the nearest shelter that wouldn’t put the kitten down. His stomach twisted at the thought. No — he’d find somewhere safe, even if it meant lying through his teeth to Carson, the RA, and half the dorm.

The kitten sneezed against his shirt. He tightened his arms around it.

“Yeah, okay,” he murmured. “We’ll figure something out.”

Mischa just smiled knowingly, as if she’d expected nothing less.

Back in his dorm room, the lights were dim, Carson gone to yet another party. Will sat at his desk with a notebook open, the kitten asleep in a shoebox lined with an old sweatshirt. Its tiny chest rose and fell with quick, fragile breaths.

He tried to write — not an essay this time, but thoughts, impressions. The circle in the park, the way the air had felt charged with warmth and intention. The mutt behind the dining hall, watching him with wary eyes. The kitten’s desperate mewls in the dark.

For the first time in a long while, he didn’t feel like he was practicing in secret, or hiding pieces of himself from the world. He wasn’t entirely accepted — not yet — but maybe, just maybe, he was on the path there.

Mischa drifted above his desk, peering down at his messy scrawl. “You’re brooding again.”

“I’m reflecting,” he corrected.

“Brooding with a pen,” she said with a smirk. She tapped the notebook with one translucent finger. “But I like this version of you. Less ‘haunted loner,’ more ‘college witch with a cat.’ You’re practically normal.”

He snorted. “Normal. Sure.”

“Hey.” Her tone softened. “You’re finding your people. You’re helping strays. You’re… settling. That counts for something.”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he looked over at the shoebox, at the way the kitten twitched in sleep. At the locked box of candles and herbs under his bed, at the faint hum of new rituals waiting for him beyond the campus rules.

“Yeah,” he said finally, a small smile tugging at his mouth. “It does.”

Mischa leaned back, satisfied, her grin bright enough to light the room.

Chapter Text

Will woke one morning to find his desk buried under paper. Sheets of lined notebook paper, some loose, some torn from spiral bindings, drifted lazily in the air as though caught in a breeze that didn’t exist. Mischa sat cross-legged in midair above his chair, scribbling furiously with a pencil that never seemed to run out of lead.

“What,” Will croaked, still half-asleep, “are you doing?”

“Writing memoirs,” she said without looking up.

“Memoirs?” He rubbed his eyes.

“Yes. From some of my past lives. And this one, of course. Very important to document the details before they fade.” She flipped a page over her shoulder; it fluttered down and landed on his pillow. In looping script, he read: I once died under a falling beam in Babylon. The air smelled like figs and blood. My hair was very good that year.

“Mischa…”

“Yes?”

“This is ridiculous.”

“It’s history,” she insisted, wagging the pencil at him like a schoolteacher. “And you should be grateful I’ve chosen to share it. Most spirits are far too dull to keep journals.”

He picked up another page. This one read: My brother is in Florence this month. He spends his mornings at the Uffizi, sketching little details from paintings no one else notices, then spends his evenings describing flavor with the reverence most men give to prayer. He never sees me. He never has. Sometimes I sit at his table, invisible, while he eats.

Will frowned, caught despite himself. “You’re writing about your brother again?”

Mischa snatched the page with a snap of her wrist, grinning like a cat that had knocked over a vase on purpose. “You already know the broad strokes. Doctor. Europe. Brilliant. But you never ask the interesting questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like what makes him brilliant. He doesn’t just cut people open and sew them back up. He notices things. The way saffron shifts a dish. The way marble holds light. He sees beauty where other people see… leftovers.” She twirled the pencil between her fingers, smug. “Sound familiar?”

Will rolled his eyes. “You’re not subtle, you know that?”

“I’m charming. It’s different.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“And you’re intrigued.” She hugged the pile of pages to her chest, positively glowing. “Don’t bother denying it.”

He sighed, dragging a hand down his face. “I still don’t even know his name.”

“Names are boring. Details are interesting. Names pin people down. Details let them breathe.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Philosophy,” she corrected sweetly.

He shook his head, muttering, “You’re impossible.”

She leaned forward, grin widening. “You’ll thank me someday. Perhaps when you meet him.”

Will snorted, shoving back the covers. “Right. I’ll add it to my calendar, between lectures and grocery shopping. Blind date with your ghost’s imaginary European brother.”

“Not imaginary,” she sang, already turning back to her writing. “Very real. Very brilliant. Very much in Florence.”

Will shuffled toward the kitchen, deciding it was far too early to argue with a ghost who fancied herself an author—and far too early to admit that the picture she painted lingered stubbornly in his mind.

---

The apartment was small — one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen that could barely fit a table and two chairs — but it was his.

No RA taping rule sheets to the door, no roommate blasting music at two in the morning, no random drunks stumbling in to steal his cereal. Just four cracked walls and a stubborn radiator that clanked when it felt like it.

And Mischa, of course, though she didn’t count as a roommate.

He unpacked slowly, savoring the process. Candles in mismatched jars lined the windowsills, flickering with the faint sweetness of beeswax. Bundles of dried herbs dangled from a string above the kitchen sink, brushing against his shoulder when he leaned too close. A shelf sagged beneath the weight of scavenged books — folklore, psychology, whatever the thrift shop had offered for a dollar apiece. On the dresser sat his tackiest possession: a chipped ceramic dog statue with bulging eyes and painted spots. He’d won it at a shelter fundraiser, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, he’d never gotten rid of it.

“This is ridiculous,” Mischa said as she drifted past the dog, nose wrinkled. “It looks diseased.”

“It’s sentimental,” Will shot back.

“It’s hideous.” She stuck her tongue out at it and floated away.

He smiled faintly, adjusting a candle until it sat perfectly centered. For the first time since leaving home, the space felt like his own — cluttered, weird, full of quiet corners.

Still, there was a heaviness to the air, the kind that clung to old apartments. The walls hummed with someone else’s arguments, someone else’s grief. It didn’t feel clean.

So when one of the girls from the Pagan Society handed him a notecard with a “simple cleansing ritual,” he took it eagerly. Just salt, herbs, a chant. Harmless.

He prepared carefully. Salt across the windowsill, rosemary and sage smoldering in a bowl, the words copied into his notebook. He walked the perimeter of the apartment, steady and deliberate.

“Look at you,” Mischa teased, perched on the counter, swinging her feet through the cabinet doors. “Little witch in his very own kitchen. Don’t burn the place down.”

“I won’t,” he muttered, tracing the circle with care.

“You’re nervous,” she sang. “That’s good. Nervous energy makes rituals sparkle.”

He ignored her, grounding himself as Laurel had taught him, then began the chant. The first words rolled smoothly. His breath steadied. The air thickened, humming like a taut string.

And then it snapped.

The smoldering herbs flared into sudden flame. The salt hissed like acid. The windows rattled in their frames, lights flickered, and his bookshelves vomited half their contents onto the floor. The air howled with pressure, hot and cold all at once.

Will staggered back, eyes wide, pulse hammering.

Above the chaos, Mischa laughed so hard she nearly fell off the counter. “Oh, Will! You should’ve seen your face!”

“What—what the hell—” He coughed on smoke, slapping the bowl until the flames choked out. “That was supposed to be a cleansing, not a—whatever that was!”

“A hurricane?” Mischa suggested, wiping imaginary tears from her eyes. “A cataclysm? I told you nervous energy makes things sparkle.”

“You knew this would happen.”

“Of course I did.” She flipped upside down in the air, grinning smugly. “You're probably the first blood magic user born on Earth. You’ve always had too much power for little spells like this, especially with a focus. I just wanted to see what would explode first.”

He glared at her, cheeks hot, as papers settled slowly back to the ground.

“I hate you,” he muttered.

“No you don’t.” She smirked. “Besides, admit it-part of you loved it.”

He didn’t answer, because she wasn’t wrong. Somewhere under the panic and the mess, something inside him thrilled at the raw surge of power.

---

Russ showed up at the apartment first, hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders hunched against the early spring chill. He gave a low whistle as Will opened the door.

“Well, look at this. First place on your own.”

Will stepped aside, suddenly self-conscious. The apartment was clean enough, but the clutter gave it away as his. Candles lined the windowsills. Herbs dangled in the kitchen like a witch’s pantry. Books teetered in unsteady piles. The hideous dog figurine stared blankly from the dresser.

Russ’s gaze swept the room, taking it all in without comment. He only gave a quiet nod and a faint smile that made Will’s stomach knot and ease at the same time.

“Come on,” Russ said after a moment. “There’s a place down the street I want to try.”

The “place” turned out to be a small restaurant that billed itself as soul food. The walls were painted bright yellow, the tables covered in plastic gingham cloths, and the menu boasted things like fried chicken platters, collard greens, and cornbread.

It smelled fine. Not bad, just… off.

Russ poked at his plate of collards and frowned. “No salt,” he muttered. “That’s a crime.”

Will tasted his own cornbread and grimaced. “Sweet,” he said. “Too sweet. It’s like cake.”

Russ gave a huff of agreement, eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’ve had hospital food with more flavor.”

They fell into an easy rhythm, mocking each dish in turn, trading quiet jokes that no one else in the room would have found funny. Will found himself grinning more than he expected, tension bleeding away.

Russ didn’t press him about classes or internships. He asked, simply, “How’s the new place?”

Will shrugged, then admitted, “It feels… mine. Finally.” He hesitated before adding, “I did a cleansing ritual.”

Russ lifted a brow, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Did it work?”

Will thought of the rattling windows, the flaring herbs, Mischa cackling upside-down on the counter. “…Sort of.”

Russ didn’t push. He just nodded, satisfied, and went back to dissecting his fried chicken. But his quiet pride lingered in the air, warm as the sunlight slanting through the windows.

Mischa, perched invisibly on the restaurant’s windowsill, tilted her head thoughtfully. “He shines brighter than most living men,” she murmured. “No wonder you came out decent.”

Will ignored her, but his chest felt uncomfortably full as Russ looked across the table and gave him one of those rare, small smiles that meant more than words ever could.

---

Later that week, one of Will’s professors lingered after class. She had sharp eyes and an air of someone who noticed more than her students realized.

“You’ve got a mind for this work,” she said, tapping the edge of his essay. “The way you break down patterns, motives. You should think about applying for an internship with the D.C. police this summer. They could use a sharp thinker.”

Will stood there, notebook clutched to his chest, throat dry. He managed a polite thank-you, but his thoughts tumbled like stones.

That night, over dinner with Russ, he finally mentioned it. They’d returned to the apartment after another meal out, and Russ sat stiff-backed in Will’s only chair while Will perched on the edge of the bed. Candles flickered on the windowsill, throwing warm light across the clutter.

“Police work?” Russ repeated, chewing on the idea like it was gristle. “That’s a hard road.”

“I know,” Will said quickly. “I haven’t decided. Just… someone thought I’d be good at it.”

Russ’s brow furrowed, his hands folding slowly in his lap. He wasn’t the sort to give speeches. But his silence stretched long, heavy, until Will’s stomach tightened.

Finally, Russ nodded once. “If you choose it, I’ll back you.” His voice was quiet, steady. “I don’t always understand… everything you do. All the books, the rituals, the strays.” His gaze flicked briefly to the ridiculous ceramic dog on the dresser, then back to Will. “But you’re mine. That’s enough.”

Something twisted in Will’s chest. He ducked his head, words failing him.

Mischa floated nearby, unusually solemn. “I adore him,” she whispered. “He loves you without conditions, Will. He doesn’t need to understand you. That’s the most beautiful kind of love.”

Will swallowed hard, pretending to fuss with a candle wick so neither of them would see his face.

Russ cleared his throat, shifting uncomfortably, as if he’d said too much. “Anyway. It’s your path. Just… don’t let them use you up.”

“I won’t,” Will murmured, though the promise felt heavier than he expected.

The room settled into silence, soft and strange — a father, a son, and a ghost who loved them both in her own fierce, impossible way.

Chapter Text

He met her in a seminar on abnormal psychology. She laughed easily, carried a stack of color-coded binders, and asked him if he’d like to grab coffee after class.
Her name was Claire. She liked indie bands, wore silver hoops in her ears, and had a way of making even the most clinical case study sound funny. For the first time in years, Will found himself talking to someone who didn’t immediately make him feel strange.
Mischa, of course, was unimpressed.
The first time Claire came over, Mischa hovered in the corner like a sulky cat, watching the way Claire’s fingers lingered on the spines of Will’s thrifted books.
“Cute place,” Claire said warmly. “Very… you.”
Mischa rolled her eyes so extravagantly Will almost told her to stop. When Claire turned, Mischa put a hand to her mouth and pretended to gag with perfect theatrical timing.
Later, when Claire laughed at one of Will’s dry jokes, Mischa slid close and hissed, “Her laugh’s manufactured. Hear that pull at the end? She wants you to like her too much.”
Will ignored her.
A week later Claire mangled Nietzsche in seminar. Mischa, standing behind Will’s shoulder, mouthed the correction like a theatrical tutor: slow, smug, impossible to miss.
“She’s not in your league,” Mischa whispered when Claire rummaged in her bag for a highlighter. “She doesn’t see you.”
Will tightened his jaw and focused on Claire’s easy chatter. He told himself Mischa was being petty — jealous, even. But Mischa never said leave her; she didn’t have to. She hovered, cataloguing things most people missed: too much perfume, one sock slightly pulled up, a nervous nail-tapping that started whenever Claire was thinking of what to say next.
When Claire kissed him on the stoop that night, Mischa’s face didn’t flare with green; it went small and secret, like someone tucking away a private joke. She tilted her head and smiled as if she already knew the punchline.
--
The internship wasn’t glamorous. Mostly paperwork, phone calls, and sitting quietly at the edges of other people’s work. But when the detectives let him tag along to a scene, Will felt the air shift.
The first call he went on was a cramped apartment smell of mildew and copper and stale cooking oil. A young man lay on the floor, blood dark under the radiator. The detectives did their muscle memory: check locks, scan for drug paraphernalia, mutter about gangs. Will crouched a few feet back, watching the counter.
Two glasses. Water still beaded down the sides. No overturned chair. The door bore no forced marks.
He closed his eyes and let the chatter recede until the apartment’s memory settled into him like an animal curling around bone. It wasn’t surprise he felt — it was jagged panic, then something meaner: betrayal.
“He knew who it was,” Will said before he could stop himself. “He let them in. Two glasses. He wasn’t afraid until the last second.”
Two sets of eyes snapped to him. One detective scratched in a notebook. The other gave him a long, appraising look.
In the squad car home, he sat still, fingers worrying at the iron ring on his thumb — the one Mischa had pressed on him years ago — the pendant under his shirt cool against his sternum, a private anchor. A cop in the front laughed. “Kid’s a little spooky. Like he knows things he shouldn’t.”
“Psychic,” another muttered, half a joke that kept wobbling on the edge of not funny.
He felt his face go warm and looked out at the city lights.
That night Mischa sprawled upside down across his couch, hair falling like a curtain. “Spooky,” she echoed in a sing-song. “They’ve got you pegged already.”
“They think I’m psychic,” he said. “They’re watching me.”
“You are psychic,” she declared, grinning wide and wicked. “You just call it empathy. And you hate being seen.”
The weeks settled into a rhythm. Mornings at the precinct meant burnt-tar coffee and stacks of reports taller than his textbooks. He filed notes, answered phones, ran errands.
Afternoons sometimes meant ride-alongs. He sat in the back of unmarked cars, listening while the detectives swapped stories with the ease of men who’d been doing this too long. They laughed at things Will didn’t find funny, nicknamed suspects, spoke in shorthand. He rarely joined in, but they didn’t mind. Quiet, polite, sharp when asked.
They started calling him “the profiler” half as a joke.
More than once, a detective handed him a photo or statement and said, “What’s your gut, kid?”
He’d study the posture, the gaze, the space around the subject. Let the edges blur until the static of someone else’s feelings crawled under his skin. “He’s ashamed,” he’d say. Or: “She feels cornered. She’s going to lie.”
Silence. Then laughter. Psychic boy strikes again.
But more often than not, he was right.
They liked him in the way men who spend a life swapping grim boredom for adrenaline like to like each other: polite, an occasional rib, room for oddities. The rings and the thin chain he kept tucked under his shirt made people glance. Once a detective asked, “Lucky charms?”
“Something like that,” Will muttered, not meeting a face.
That night, Mischa floated above his desk, twirling lazily. “They think you’re psychic,” she sang. “They think you’re hiding something.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“You’re hiding everything.” She flipped upside down, hair dangling toward his notes. “And those rings? You might as well tattoo the word weird on your forehead.”
“They’re protections and a focus,” he snapped. “They matter.”
“Then put them under your skin, wear the focus on a chain,” She beamed, half conspiratorial, half ridiculous. “Tattoos. People don’t question tattoos. They question boys in homicide who fiddle with jewelry like nervous grandmothers.”
Will looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “I’m not getting tattooed.”
“Sharpie then,” she said briskly, and drew a mock rune along her own translucent wrist. “Temporary. Looks wicked. No questions.”
--
It began stupidly enough with a marker. He sat at his desk late, Sharpie uncapped, rings lined beside the notebook like tiny, mute witnesses. Mischa perched on the chair back, chin in her hands, eyebrows high with mischief.
“Go on,” she urged.
He drew one neat symbol on the inside of his wrist. It looked exactly like a bored kid’s doodle.
Mischa burst into laughter, sliding off the chair. “Oh, pitiful! Like a middle school curse.”
“Shut up,” he muttered, scrubbing at it; the ink smeared into a gray ghost of itself.
“Try again. Bigger.”
The second try spiraled down his forearm in a sloppy line. Mischa cackled until she toppled through the desktop. He shoved the marker away, annoyed at himself and at the ridiculous little rush he’d felt.
“You need a professional,” she pronounced, still grinning.
He bristled. “I am not getting a tattoo.”
“Then stop pretending you can draw one,” she replied, already on his case. “Ask Laurel. They’ll know someone.”
“I’m not dragging the circle into my nonsense,” he said.
“They’ll be delighted,” Mischa said like she knew everything. “You’re part of them now. People love this. Ink’s a lovely offering.”
The next week, at Pagan Society’s open circle, he found Laurel by the snack table. “Do you… know anyone who does tattoos?”
Her brows arched, slow and knowing. “Thinking of ink, Will?”
His ears went hot. “Something like that.”
Laurel smiled faintly. “I’ll ask around. There are artists who do spiritual work. If you’re serious, I’ll introduce you.”
He glared at his smeared forearm and, with a reluctant breath, agreed.
Laurel kept her word. She led him to a narrow parlor between a pawnshop and a falafel place. The artist, Mara, had sleeves of knotwork and a calm way of looking at ink like it was a language, not a fashion choice. She studied his sketches without comment.
“Protection runes,” she said finally. “Old. Huh. Interesting choice.”
“They’re not a choice,” Will said.
Mara only nodded, set a stencil, and with the confident sweep of someone used to making lines mean things, she traced one of his symbols in temporary ink. Crisp, precise — nothing like his crooked Sharpie.
Mischa crowed. “Oh, Will. That looks wicked.”
He flexed his wrist. The mark would wash, but for the first time he could really see the idea of permanence without flinching.
--
Claire noticed before he’d washed it off.
“What’s that?” she asked, reaching for his sleeve.
“Nothing he said quick and flat, tugging the fabric down.
She laughed, light and teasing. “Don’t tell me you’re doodling in class like a freshman.”
“Something like that.”
Her smile faltered, just a fraction.
It kept happening. The way his fingers fiddled with the iron ring when he was nervous. The pendant he never took off. The notebooks he carried like talismans but never let her read.
“You’re hard to get to know,” she said one afternoon over coffee, tilting her head like it was a friendly diagnosis. “You listen. But you don’t… share. It’s like there’s this whole self I don’t get to know.”
Mischa hovered behind Claire’s shoulder and mouthed, perfectly pleased, “Because she doesn’t know you. She can’t.”
He squeezed Claire’s hand because it felt like the right thing and because ordinary felt like an anchoring rope he wanted to hold. But walking her home, he realized — sharply, painfully — that he’d made a line he wouldn’t cross: he had not used his empathy on her. Not once. It was a boundary of ethics and privacy and something like mercy.
Without it, she was a stranger who laughed at his jokes and learned his favorite bands. He could see how little she actually knew about him.
When she kissed him goodnight, Mischa lingered at the window with that secret smile again: not jealousy, not scorn, only certainty.
“She doesn’t see you,” Mischa murmured as the door clicked. “Not really.”
Will let his back rest against the frame, coffee-bitter doubt on his tongue.
--
By winter, the pieces didn’t fit anymore.
The internship pressed him closer to darkness — photographs spread across tables until he could almost feel the killer’s heartbeat under his skin. Professors called it intuition. Detectives muttered “psychic boy.” Whatever the name, he couldn’t deny its weight.
The idea of tattoos moved like a small, persistent hush at the edge of his thoughts: a way to house his wards where people glanced and moved on, no awkward questions about silver rings or secret necklaces.
And Claire… kind, clever, earnest. But the more time passed the more he noticed the areas where she didn’t plunge in or even just take a dip. The lack of real curiosity. The habit of filling silence with noise.
“You’re holding back,” Mischa murmured one night, sprawled across his bed. “And she can feel it, even if she doesn’t know why.”
Will didn’t answer. He wrote instead — jagged notes about casework, about Laurel’s calm voice, about choices he wasn’t ready to make.
Mischa tilted her head, fond and merciless. “Ordinary isn’t for you, Will. Not with a heart like yours — always listening, always bleeding for someone else.”
His pen dug too hard, tearing the page.
Somewhere inside, he knew she was right. And somewhere just beyond that knowing, he could already feel the end with Claire waiting, quiet and inevitable, on the horizon.

Chapter Text

The breakup with Claire was almost gentle. No slammed doors, no bitter words. Just the slow realization that they were speaking two different languages. She wanted plans for weekends and concerts; he wanted silence that didn’t feel like absence. They parted with polite smiles and promises to “keep in touch.”

For days afterward, the apartment felt wrong. The candles guttered and sparked instead of their usual steady glow, the books started looking like clutter instead of comfort. Will carried himself heavily, shoulders hunched like the air started to physically weigh on him.

At first, Mischa was satisfied with smug silence. Eventually, though, she couldn’t resist a jab. “Told you,” she muttered while stared holes into his notes.

Will didn’t have it in him. He only closed the book and sat back, eyes fixed blankly forward. “Don’t,” he said, voice rough. “Not now.”

The words stilled her. She floated back a bit, startled, and finally got a good look at him.

Mischa folded her arms, watching him trace absent circles on the desk with his fingertip. Her smirk died. Slowly, steadily, it shifted into something more akin to guilt. She floated back quietly, perching on the edge of his desk.

“I didn’t mean…” she started, then fell quiet.

Will didn’t look up. But neither did he tell her to leave.

For once, she didn’t try to advise him or tease him or anything. She just sat with him in the silence, offering he presence for as much comfort as it was worth.

--

The breakup left Will feeling tired and hollow for a while. The only thing that seemed to help was burying himself in homework and the occasional police case. The apartment still felt empty without Claire’s chatter spilling into its corners. Mischa, since that day, hadn’t piped up once to gloat or say ‘I told you so.’ She lingered quietly instead, perched in doorways or hovering just out of reach, her usual prodding missing. At times, it looked like she was gearing herself up to say something sharp, but when Will’s eyes went heavy and distant she swallowed it back, keeping quiet.

By the time winter thawed into spring, Will had started drifting more toward the Pagan Society again. He hadn’t stopped going to the once-a-month gatherings, he’d just pulled back his involvement to spend time with the police and on homework. Back at these meetings was where he found himself spending more of his time afterwards with Luca, one of the circle’s regulars.

Luca had a sharp laugh, the kind that cracked open a room, and an easy way of talking about rituals without turning them into theater. He wore his hair in loose curls, usually tucked behind one ear, and he had a knack for remembering details: the book you’d mentioned once, the herb you’d been meaning to try, the way you took your tea.

At first, Will thought nothing of it. Luca was older by a few years, already living off-campus in a walk-up cluttered with incense jars and hand-painted sigils. He had shelves full of battered occult paperbacks and a cat that followed him everywhere like a dog. He was simply one of the circle — warm, confident, good at drawing new people in.

But slowly, Will began to notice other things.

How Luca always left a seat open beside him. How his shoulder brushed Will’s a second too long during casual conversations. How he asked questions that weren’t just about classes or rituals but about the shape of Will’s life: where he wanted to go, who he wanted to become.

One night after open circle, Will walked with him through damp spring streets. Luca had a cigarette tucked behind his ear, unused, and hands shoved deep into his coat pockets.

“You’re good at listening,” he said, not as a compliment but like it was a truth that needed naming.

Will blinked, caught off guard. “I… try.”

“Don’t sell it short.” Luca’s grin tugged at one corner of his mouth, then flickered away. “Not everyone does.”

They paused at a corner where the streetlight hummed. Luca looked at him a beat too long before tipping his chin in farewell and walking on.

Will stayed there, pulse unsteady, staring after him.

From half a step behind, Mischa tilted her head, watching in silence. For once she didn’t tease or whisper her usual commentary. She only looked at her brother’s shadow on the wet pavement, and the thoughtful curve of her mouth was hard to read.

--

Mischa, surprisingly, said very little. When Will mentioned Luca’s name, she didn’t roll her eyes or pull faces. Once, when Luca came by the apartment to borrow a book on Lithuanian folklore, she didn’t hover like a heckler — she only perched quietly on the windowsill, legs folded, chin propped in her hand, studying the two of them with an unreadable expression.

He wasn’t sure why, but when Luca left, Will expected a jab, some sly remark. Instead, Mischa spoke softly, almost to herself. “He’s not ordinary.”

It was the closest thing to approval she had ever given — and it landed with more weight than all her teasing combined.

--

The internship had ended, but traces of it lingered. Once or twice a month a detective called, voice crackling through the line: Got a case. Could use your gut, kid.

Will never went in officially. No paycheck, no paperwork. Just quiet evenings in cluttered precinct rooms, photographs and statements spread like a grim deck of cards. He still worried at his rings, still caught that edge of static in his chest that meant someone else’s fear or rage was bleeding through.

He was starting to worry his protections were failing.

They still called him psychic boy. Still half-joking, half-not.

And every time, walking home through late-night streets, he felt both drained and sharpened — hollowed out, but also more precise.

Luca asked once while they were speaking over a second-hand grimoire a friend gave him why he came back from those nights looking like he’d been through a storm.

Will hesitated, then shrugged. “Work.”

Luca didn’t push. He only set a steaming mug of tea in Will’s hands and said, “Then sit. Warm up.”

--

By summer, Will couldn’t ignore the undercurrent anymore. Luca’s hand brushed his once, twice, three times. Each touch deliberate, but never pushed further. A glance that lingered a little long. A smile that seemed to be waiting patiently for something.

It unsettled him. Not in the way Claire’s chatter had unsettled him - this was quieter, steadier, harder to dismiss. A warmth that made him feel… not ordinary. Not strange, either. Seen.

Late one night, lying awake, he turned the thought over and over like a stone in his palm. At his desk, Mischa sprawled across the chair with one of her hidden notebooks, scribbling furiously. When his shifting caught her eye, she set the pencil down, studying him with a gaze that was sharper than her tone.

“Starting to understand?” she asked, her voice softer than usual.

He frowned at the ceiling. “Understand what?”

Her mouth quirked into a smile — not sharp, not mocking, just knowing. “You’ll see.” Then she bent back over her page, the scratch of her pencil filling the room like a secret she wasn’t ready to share.

--

Mischa had taken to writing like the rest of the world depended on it. Stories, fragments, half-remembered memories from lives she swore she lived before. Her notebooks, tower-high at this point, were stacked in the corner of the living room, half hidden behind a crooked shelf, guarded like a dragon guarding treasure.

“Let me read one,” Will asked once, half-teasing, half-curious.

“Not yet,” she said, drawing the latest notebook close against her chest. Her tone wasn’t smug, only firm. “Some things aren’t for you until you’re ready.”

The words lingered sharper than he expected. Mischa had always been the one who pressed through his walls, needled him past his defenses, mocked every mask. To find her suddenly holding back, keeping secrets of her own, unsettled him almost as much as Luca’s steady patience.

So his third year started in this strange, fragile balance: Luca’s laughter warming the corners of his apartment; Mischa’s pen scratching late into the night, weaving stories she wouldn’t yet share; and Will himself caught between them both, straddling worlds he couldn’t yet name.

The detectives still called sometimes, the Pagan circle still gathered, but the horizon was shifting. He could feel it waiting for him, quiet and inescapable, pulling him toward something more permanent than he had ever dared to imagine.

Chapter Text

The realization didn’t come as a lightning strike. It crept up on him, quiet but insistent, until one morning he looked in the mirror and admitted it out loud.

“I like men,” Will said to his reflection. The words felt both foreign and inevitable. “I like men.”

Across the room, Mischa was sprawled on his bed, one of her notebooks open across her lap. She froze mid-sentence, then let out a whoop of laughter so bright it startled the air.

“Oh, finally!” she crowed, clutching the book to her chest. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to say that?”

Will flushed, heat crawling up his neck. “How did I not—how did I miss it?”

“Because you were busy trying so hard to look normal,” she said, rolling over to kick her feet lazily in the air. “Girlfriend, classes, internship. You thought if you checked the right boxes it would add up to ordinary.”

He scowled at the floor, the sting of her accuracy undeniable. “You could’ve said something.”

“I did,” she replied, softer this time, though her smile stayed impish. “You just weren’t ready to hear it.”

--

A week later, Luca kissed him.

It wasn’t planned. They were walking home from circle, rain misting down around the streetlamps, their steps slow and easy in the damp night. At his stoop, Luca paused, shoving his hands into his coat pockets.

“You know,” he said quietly, “I’m not very subtle.”

Will blinked, throat suddenly dry.

“I’ve been waiting for you to notice,” Luca added, his voice gentler still.

And before Will could overthink, Luca leaned in — warm, sure, steady — and kissed him.

It was nothing like Claire’s kisses: no performance, no script to follow, no guessing at what he was supposed to feel. This was simple, grounding, like the air finally clearing after a long storm. It fit. It settled. It felt like something in him had finally clicked into place.

When they broke apart, Will’s chest felt both too tight and too wide open.

Above them, Mischa appeared in the rain-streaked window, her legs dangling against the glass. She didn’t roll her eyes or smirk this time. She only smiled- small and certain, notebook hugged close against her chest.

“About time,” she murmured, and for once it sounded more like a blessing than a tease.

--

They didn’t move in together. Neither wanted to. Will clung to his small apartment like a warded circle — his own space, his own silences. Luca’s place was warmer, louder, cluttered with incense jars and stacks of books, and always the cat who insisted on kneading your lap until you surrendered. They traded nights back and forth, independence intact.

But the rest of their lives tangled quickly. Luca was older, out for years, and he seemed to take genuine delight in pulling Will gently into the world he had only brushed against.

“Baby gay,” Luca teased more than once, ruffling Will’s hair until Will swatted his hand away, ears hot.

It started small: movies and books, names of writers Will had never read. Then it widened to friends — other Pagans, other queer voices, who gathered in coffee shops and argued about ritual ethics and politics with equal ferocity.

Mischa often lingered nearby during these nights, perched in a shadowed corner with one of her notebooks. She didn’t interrupt, didn’t tease, only watched with that curious half-smile, as though noting down the way Will’s world was stretching wider than it ever had before.

And then, one evening, came the nightclubs.

--

D.C.’s gay nightclubs were another world entirely. Neon lights and pulsing bass, the crush of too many bodies in too little space. Luca led him in like it was a second home, shoulders loose, grin easy.

Will lasted twenty minutes before the noise began to splinter in his chest. Laughter, flirtation, hunger — every emotion in the room pressed against him until his skin prickled. He downed half a drink and tried to pretend, but his hands betrayed him, trembling against the glass.

Mischa darted through the crowd like a sprite, balancing on speakers, slipping between dancers. She leaned in close, whispering with delight, “She’s kissing her ex in the corner. He’s lying about his name. Oh, Will- the drama in here could fuel me for years.”

He gritted his teeth, pressing closer to Luca. Luca noticed at once, reading the tension in his jaw.

“Too much?” he asked, his voice pitched soft so only Will could hear.

Will nodded once, shame burning hot behind his eyes.

But Luca only smiled, steady and kind. “Then we’ll go. Clubs will still be here tomorrow. You don’t have to like everything I like.”

Relief washed through him so strong it made his knees weak.

Outside, the night air cooled his skin like a blessing. Luca lit the cigarette he’d been carrying all evening, smoke curling silver under the streetlights. Without a word, he handed it over.

Will took a drag, coughed violently, and shot him a glare. Luca only laughed, slipping an arm around his shoulders as they walked.

“You don’t have to be like everyone else,” Luca murmured. “You just have to be you.”

From the shadow of a lamppost, Mischa closed her notebook and watched them with a small, approving smile. For once, she didn’t add commentary. She only looked at Will, quiet as if she knew this moment would matter more than her words ever could.

--

By spring, the police calls came more often.

It started with a disappearance. A young woman had gone missing after leaving her office late one night. Weeks passed. No ransom note, no real evidence. The detectives were ready to write it off as another runaway.

Will sat with the file in a cramped back office, photos spread before him. He pressed his hands flat against the table, steadying himself against the prickle of emotions that weren’t his. The longer he stared at the photographs, the stronger the quiet impressions pressed in on him- the careful way her shoes were left under the desk, the slight smudge of foundation rubbed into her collar in the last photo.

Loneliness. Fear. And something else- the sting of trust betrayed.

“Not a runaway,” he said at last. His voice was low, deliberate. “She went with someone she knew. Someone she trusted. That’s why there’s no forced entry, no struggle reported.”

The detective across from him frowned. “You can’t know that.”

Will tapped the corner of one photo — a half-empty mug still on her desk. “She thought she’d be back. She left everything in place. Whoever it was… she believed she was safe with them.” He swallowed, the words catching on the knot in his chest. “She’s still alive, close. A basement, most likely. Old construction. The kind that smells damp — mildew in the walls, maybe paint.” The last words slipped out of him on their own, but they felt right.

Three days later, they found her in the basement of her boss’s unfinished rental property. The walls were streaked with peeling orange paint.

The precinct buzzed with whispers after that. Some muttered lucky guess. Others weren’t so sure.

And then the calls started coming from other precincts.

We heard about the kid. The profiler. The one with the gut feelings.

Sometimes it wasn’t the emotions themselves that hit him, but the scraps they left behind. The metallic tang of fear. The weight of silence where laughter should’ve been. Once or twice, even the memory of color clung to him, like a bruise behind his eyes.

Word spread, slow but steady, until Will realized his name had become something else- a shadow reputation, half-respected, half-feared.

It never went in the reports. Officially, Will wasn’t there. But unofficially, a rumor grew legs: the quiet kid with the gut feelings. Some detectives laughed it off. Others made sure his number was written in the back of their notebooks. He was useful, and in law enforcement, useful was everything.

--

That night, the apartment was too still. The case file lay open on Will’s desk, but he hadn’t touched it since he got home. Instead, he sat hunched forward, head in his hands, the pendant under his shirt pressed hard against his sternum as though it might hold him together.

Mischa floated nearby, notebook closed in her lap for once, watching him in uncharacteristic silence.

Finally, he spoke. “It’s getting stronger.” His voice was low, rough. “The feelings, the impressions. It used to just be… hunches. But today-” He dragged a hand over his face. “I knew. I knew she was alive. I knew the walls would be orange before they ever found her. And I don’t know how. I don’t know why.”

Mischa tilted her head, eyes glinting in the candlelight. “Because you’re tuned into people in a way most can’t even dream of.”

“It’s not just my empathy.” He looked up, meeting her gaze. His eyes were raw, hollow. “It’s… impressions. They stick. Sometimes I’ll smell something that isn’t there, or get a flash of texture, like rough stone under my hands when there’s nothing there at all. I can feel it, Mischa. Like it’s crawling under my skin. I wear the rings. I keep the wards. I drink my potions and the teas Laurel gave me. And it’s still too much sometimes. What happens when I can’t push it back anymore?”

She drifted closer, perching lightly on the desk’s edge. “Then don’t try to slam the door on it every time,” she said, steady but soft. “Breathe. Anchor yourself in what’s yours. Make space to let it through on your terms. Not when it barges in.”

Will swallowed hard. “What if I’m not strong enough?”

Her hand hovered just above his shoulder, a ghost of a touch. “You’re stronger than you think. And you don’t have to carry it by yourself. Lean on the things that keep you steady. And when it’s too much, lean on me.”

His throat tightened. “I’m scared.”

Her expression softened. “Good,” she said gently. “Good. Fear keeps you careful.” Then, after a beat, her mouth curved in a small grin. “Besides, I’d hate for all my tutoring to go to waste. If you fall apart, who else am I supposed to heckle?”

Will let out a rough laugh, just once, before pressing his palms over his eyes.

Mischa didn’t push further. She only sat with him in the quiet, her presence steady and close- not mocking, not knowing, just there.

Chapter Text

By senior year, Will had learned the art of invisibility: never raise your hand too often, sit near the back, keep your answers sharp but not dazzling. He wanted to graduate quietly, degree in hand, and slip into the margins.

That lasted until Psychological Perspectives on Perception, a seminar taught by Dr. Kaplan.

They were discussing case studies on atypical empathy when Kaplan casually mentioned a 1988 paper - a short one, buried in an obscure journal - about a child who could “feel the emotions of others with unusual clarity.”

The words felt like ice water down Will’s spine. He remembered the office. The soft-spoken psychiatrist he had seen only the one time as a boy. He hadn’t known the woman had written anything. His father obviously would not have given permission and they’d moved pretty quickly after the psychiatrist appointment.

But Kaplan knew. And so did several other faculty. And it wasn’t too hard for someone to contact that psychiatrist about who the paper was about.

By the end of the week, whispers followed him. Professors wanted to talk. Some hinted about research studies, controlled environments, and publication potential.

Will ducked down hallways, skipped lectures, avoided eye contact even more than usual. He’d fought too hard to keep his empathy private and unobtrusive. He wasn’t about to let it make him a lab experiment.

And then he overheard Kaplan chatting with a criminology professor about “the boy who helps the police sometimes, uncanny insights.”

His stomach dropped.

It wasn’t just the faculty now. It was spreading. Again.

That night, Mischa lounged on his desk while he chewed his nails bloody.

“They know,” he muttered. “They all know.”

“Of course they do.” She twirled her pen. “You’re a walking ghost light, Will. You shine. People were going to notice eventually.”

“I don’t want them to.” His voice cracked.

Her smile was soft for once, almost pitying. “Want’s got nothing to do with it.”

--

Luca was the only steady thing that year. They weren’t flashy - no hand-holding in public, no kisses on street corners. But in private, they tangled together without hesitation.

Nights meant sheets kicked down to the floor, Luca’s warmth pressed against his back, the slow comfort of being seen without hiding. Will hadn’t thought himself capable of craving touch, but now he did - craved it like air.

It was on one of those nights, curled together half-asleep, that the door opened without warning.

“Surprise! Happy birthday, kid-” Russ’s voice stopped dead.

Will sat bolt upright, Luca scrambling for the blanket. For one horrifying second, all three of them just stared at each other.

Russ, to his credit, didn’t shout. His face went scarlet. He spun halfway around, muttering, “Well, hell, that’s more than I wanted to see-”

“Dad!” Will’s voice cracked.

Luca groaned into his hands. “Oh my god.”

But Russ recovered fastest. He cleared his throat, turned back just enough to meet Will’s eyes, and said, “Happy birthday. Sorry fer bargin’ in. Should’a knocked.” His smile was strained but sincere. “And… hi. I’m Russ.”

Luca, still clutching the blanket over his head like a shield, managed a mortified, “Luca.”

Russ’s gaze softened. “Good to meet you, Luca. Didn’ mean ta scare either of ya. Just wanted ta surprise my boy.”

Then he cleared his throat again. “I, uh, brought you something.” He stepped back into the hall, and a small bundle of fur tumbled in behind him.

The puppy - floppy-eared, clumsy, and wriggling with excitement - bounded straight toward the bed.

Will blinked. “You got me a dog?”

Russ grinned sheepishly. “Figured it was time you got one of yer own. I know you wanted to keep all those shelter dogs when ya were younger.”

Mischa, perched on the dresser, gasped and clasped her hands like a delighted child. “Oh, he’s perfect!”

Will shot her a glare only she could see, but his chest ached with warmth all the same. The puppy clambered into his lap, licking his face until he laughed helplessly.

Luca, still pink with embarrassment, muttered, “Best fucking dad award, hands down.”

--

A few days later, Russ invited them out for lunch at his favorite diner in the area - all faded red linoleum floors and cracked leather booths.

Once the waitress left their plates, Russ fixed Luca with the kind of stare he usually reserved for only the most suspicious of coworkers. “So. Yer the guy.”

Will groaned. “Dad.”

“What?” Russ said innocently. “I just mean - yer the one keepin’ ‘im out late, makin’ ‘im eat weird veggies, huh?”

Luca grinned. “Only sometimes.”

Russ gave a sage nod, then leaned forward, lowering his voice like he was about to ask about a case file. “So, uh… how’s this gay thing work, anyway?”

Will nearly spat his coffee across the table. “Dad!”

Russ held up both hands. “Not like that! I don’ need details. God, no. I just mean… is there, like, a… process? Do ya flip a coin? Fill out a form? Or is it just- bam! -ya wake up and realize yer into fellas?”

Luca blinked, then started laughing. “No paperwork involved. More like… you notice you like someone, and eventually you stop pretending you don’t.”

Russ nodded gravely. “So no forms. Got it. That’s simpler than the DMV, at least.”

Will dropped his forehead into his hands. “Please stop.”

But Russ wasn’t done. He squinted at Luca. “Do I need to call ya somethin’ special? Boyfriend? Partner? Gentleman caller? What’s the etiquette here?”

Luca, still laughing, said, “Boyfriend works just fine.”

“Boyfriend,” Russ repeated, testing the word. He pointed a fork at Luca. “Alright. Long as yer good to him, I won’t need ma gun. That’s all that matters.”

The words landed heavier than Russ seemed to realize. Luca’s smile faltered, softened into something stunned and aching. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I will be.”

Russ clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to nearly knock his plate sideways. “Good man.”

From the booth across the aisle, Mischa lounged upside down with her notebook, grinning like the cat who got the cream. “This is gold. ‘Gentleman caller.’ I’m writing that down.”

Will groaned. “I’m begging you all to stop talking.”

But under the table, Luca’s hand brushed his, steady and sure - warmed by a kind of acceptance he’d never thought possible.

--

By spring, the pressure at school only worsened. More professors dropped hints, more whispers about research followed him. Police calls came too, more than before. Missing persons, cold cases, desperate detectives who’d heard about “the kid with the feelings.”

Will’s double life pressed tighter, closing in.

But at least, when the lights went out at night, he had Luca’s arms, Russ’s stubborn love, the warm, clumsy weight of a puppy curled at his feet - reminders that even haunted lives could hold pieces of ordinary joy.

Chapter Text

The morning of graduation dawned bright and hot, the kind of June day that made the black gowns feel like punishment. Will tugged at his stiff collar, sweat trickling down the back of his neck. The line of students shuffled forward in uneven fits and starts. Mischa floated above the crowd, blissfully unaffected by the heat, waving like a lunatic and clapping wildly whenever someone tripped or waved to the stands.

“You look like you’re about to faint,” she teased, hovering upside down so her hair brushed his shoulder. “Wouldn’t that be dramatic? Passing out right on stage?”

Will muttered, “I hate you,” under his breath.

“No, you don’t. You love me.” She spun in midair, grinning. “Smile, Will. This is the big moment. Be less… fidgety.”

When his name was finally called, the applause startled him. Russ’s whistle cut through the din, sharp and proud. Luca’s voice joined in, low but loud enough to carry. Mischa let out a shriek that only Will could hear and then did a triumphant cartwheel in midair that nearly bowled through an oblivious professor.

Bachelor of Science, Forensic Science.

The diploma was slick with his sweaty palms, heavier than he expected. But when he looked out and saw Russ beaming, Luca clapping until his palms went red, and Mischa hovering above them all with her arms thrown wide, he smiled. Not the half-curved, nervous thing he usually managed. A real smile. For a moment, he let himself believe it: maybe things were going to be okay.

--

Afterwards, they crowded into a quiet bar a few blocks off campus. The air was cool, dim, and smelled faintly of beer-soaked wood. Russ bought the first round and raised his glass high.

“To my son,” he said, eyes suspiciously bright, “who somehow managed to get smarter than me without losing all his hair.”

Will groaned into his pint. “Dad-”

Luca clinked glasses with Russ, smirking. “I think that’s his way of saying you’re the deluxe edition. Better software, same frame.”

Russ barked a laugh and pointed at him. “See, he gets it.”

Mischa perched on the back of the booth, glass raised in her invisible toast. “To Will Graham: graduate, occult dabbler, and occasional competent human being. May he never waste his shiny new degree on boring jobs or boring women again.”

Will choked on his beer. “Mischa-”

Luca nearly spit his drink. Russ only looked around, confused. “What’d you say?”

“Nothing,” Will said quickly, forcing down a laugh. Mischa winked and pantomimed zipping her lips. The warmth of it filled Will’s chest, spilling into the edges of himself until he felt lighter than he had in months.

Russ left early, muttering about opening the shop in the morning, but not before ruffling Will’s hair and saying, low but steady, “Proud of you, kid.”

Will pretended to duck away from the gesture, but the words sank deep, anchoring.

--

Later, Will and Luca drifted toward the Pagan Society’s end-of-year gathering. It wasn’t wild- no pounding music or strobe lights. Just mismatched chairs dragged into a loose circle, candles guttering on a sagging table, and someone’s dented speaker playing half-forgotten folk songs. A bottle of cider had been “blessed” before being spiked within an inch of its life.

Laurel crowned Will with a wilted flower wreath, declaring, “The graduate king!”

Will rolled his eyes, but Luca’s laugh was so bright he almost forgot to protest.

Someone tried to make a maypole out of a broomstick and scarves. Someone else started an off-key singalong that spread like fire. The air smelled of smoke and sweat and too-sweet cider.

Mischa was radiant with mischief, twirling on tabletops, whispering commentary into Will’s ear. “He’s three verses behind. That one’s about to fall off her chair. Oh, Will, I haven’t had this much fun since Rome burned.”

Will snorted into his drink, nearly choking.

By the time he and Luca stumbled back to the apartment, the night tilted pleasantly around them. They collapsed on the couch, cider-warm and laughing until their mouths found each other.

--

The morning was less kind. Will woke with his head splitting, stomach rolling. He groaned, pressing his face into the cushions.

Mischa perched smugly on the armrest, sipping imaginary tea with exaggerated elegance. “Should’ve seen that one coming,” she chirped.

He cracked one eye open to glare at her. “If you say a single word about Rome burning again, I swear-”

“Swear what? That you’ll graduate twice? Please do, I adore ceremonies.” She grinned, wide and wicked, while Will pulled the blanket over his head with another groan.

Her laughter filled the room, bright and merciless.

--

The weeks after graduation blurred into heat and noise. Professors hinted at “collaboration” with too-bright smiles, their questions dressed up as curiosity. Detectives called more often, their voices crackling down the line with quiet urgency. He rubbed the rune-ring until the skin beneath turned raw, but the pressure never relented.

At night, he and Luca sprawled across the couch, Scout wedged stubbornly between them, chewing at one of Will’s shoes like it was a prized bone. They whispered through options under lamplight- Luca tracing circles on Will’s wrist while they argued softly. Hide? Publish? Sign up officially? Each path circled back to risk: exposure, danger, the loss of whatever fragile ordinary life they’d built.

Meanwhile, Scout, floppy-eared, big-eyed, determined to patrol every corner of the apartment, was the only uncomplicated thing. They finally named him after Luca laughed one morning, watching the pup bark furiously at a suspicious dust mote. “Always on patrol. We should just call him Scout.”

Will chuckled despite himself, the sound rare and real. For a while, that small joy was enough. Luca teasing him about leaving socks everywhere, Will rolling his eyes while Luca burnt another attempt at pasta, Scout collapsing across their feet like a warm, snoring weight. Even Mischa seemed softer, her notebooks closed more often, her smile easier when she perched in the window to watch the three of them moving through their domestic rhythm.

Still, the unease grew. Strangers’ eyes lingered too long on sidewalks, whispers curled down hallways. Sometimes, when the phone rang, Will swore he could feel expectation before he even picked it up- a push between his shoulder blades, shoving him somewhere he wasn’t ready to go.

And every time Russ called -to ask about the boat shop, to joke about Scout’s housebreaking mishaps, to remind him to eat something besides toast- Will felt a pang he couldn’t name. He’d hang up smiling, but the silence afterward pressed sharp and strange.

Like a shadow he couldn’t shake.

--

Until September.

The phone call came on a Tuesday. Russ had collapsed in the boat shop, his coworker finding him slumped beside the half-sanded hull of a skiff. A heart attack. Too late.

Will didn’t remember hanging up. Didn’t remember sliding down the kitchen wall, his body folding in on itself while Mischa sobbed soundlessly beside him. What he remembered was Luca- the sudden, steady anchor of arms that caught him, held him, refused to let go as his world split open.

The days that followed were gray, airless things. Hours slipped past in fragments: answering questions he couldn’t hear, signing papers with a hand that shook too hard, watching Scout whine at the front door for footsteps that would never come back. He woke sometimes in the middle of the night convinced he’d hear Russ’s voice again, only to be met with silence so sharp it hurt.

But funerals don’t plan themselves. And there was no one left but him. Russ deserved more than an empty service.

The Pagan Society rallied without hesitation. Russ had gotten to know them over the years- teasing Laurel about her endless jars of herbs, quietly fixing a broken chair at one of their meetings, shaking his head with fond amusement when Will dragged home yet another candleholder from the thrift shop. They’d liked him for his blunt kindness, the way he treated their rituals as real even when he didn’t understand them. “Good people,” he’d called them more than once. Now they came together for him as if he were one of their own.

Laurel handled the flowers, wild and uneven, sunbursts of marigold and sprigs of rosemary for remembrance. Others gathered candles and prepared songs. Luca stayed at Will’s side through every phone call, every errand, never pushing, only steady. And Mischa, pale and quiet, drifted to his desk one evening with a notebook clutched in both hands.

“I wrote something,” she said. “A ritual. To guide him. To… make sure he doesn’t get lost.”

Will took the pages with shaking hands. The words blurred together, but he nodded anyway, his throat too tight to thank her.

The funeral was held in a borrowed chapel, its white walls softened by candlelight. The circle arranged them in a ring around Russ’s simple wooden urn, each flame a small beacon. Laurel burned rosemary and sage, the smoke curling slow and sweet. One by one, members of the circle stepped forward, placing offerings: a piece of driftwood from the river, a coin for safe passage, a scrap of blue cloth for calm waters. Someone laid down a coiled length of rope, knotted with practiced care; another left behind a small, worn tool from Russ’s shop, its handle smoothed by years of use. Practical things, things of work and calloused hands - gifts he would have understood.

When it was Will’s turn, he stepped forward with a rough strip of metal clutched in his palm. He’d taken it from Russ’s workbench — the brass plate Russ had kept bolted to his favorite boat, engraved with the words Persevere. Will couldn’t yet bear to part with it, so instead he pressed it against the urn as he read Mischa’s ritual aloud. His voice cracked halfway through, broke entirely once, but he forced the words steady again: invocations of safe harbors, warm winds, and ancestors waiting beyond the veil.

Later, after the candles guttered low and the stories wound down, Will slipped the brass plate into his pocket. He carried it with him in silence for days, fingers tracing the worn letters until they cut into his skin.

Two weeks later, he walked into a jeweler’s shop with the plate and walked out with a pendant. The brass had been cut down and mounted into a simple setting, strung on a chain he could wear under his shirt. Persevere. The word lay heavy against his chest, warmed by his skin, as if Russ’s voice had been pressed into metal.

When Mischa noticed it one night, her usual smirk softened into something quieter. She only said, “Good. He’d like that.”

And Luca, when he touched it curiously, didn’t ask. He just kissed the place where the pendant rested, as though it had always belonged there.

--

In the weeks that followed, the silence of Russ’s absence pressed harder than the professors or the police ever had. The shop was shuttered, the calls stopped, and yet Will kept waiting for his father’s whistle, for the sound of boots on the porch. Instead, there was only the weight of the brass pendant against his chest, warmed by his skin as if Russ’s hand still lingered there- or as if Will only wished it did.

But the professors didn’t relent. Neither did the precincts. His name was out there now, muttered in hallways, whispered over case files. He could feel their expectations like hands on his back, shoving him toward a decision.

One night, with Scout snoring at his feet and the lamplight throwing long shadows across the room, Will said it out loud. “I’ll join the police academy.”

Luca’s head snapped up. “Will-”

“They want me,” Will said quickly, voice rough. “If I’m in the system, maybe they’ll protect me from the professors. Maybe I’ll finally have some control.” His fingers pressed unconsciously against the pendant. Persevere.

Luca rubbed his face, exhaling hard. “Or maybe you’ll get swallowed whole. Have you thought about that? About the guns, the violence? About what happens if they find out about you- about us?”

Will’s throat ached. He forced the words past it. “I know.”

“Do you?” Luca’s voice cracked. “Because I don’t think you do. I don’t think you realize how dangerous this could be.”

Will tried to meet his gaze, but the weight of it was too much. He dropped his eyes, gripping the pendant like a lifeline. “I’ll be fine,” he whispered, though the words rang hollow even to him. “I have to be.”

From the desk, Mischa sat cross-legged, her notebook closed for once. She didn’t joke. She didn’t tease. She only watched him in silence, grief and determination knotted together in her expression, and her quiet was heavier than anything she could have said.

Chapter Text

The year began with exhaustion and another ceremony. Will graduated from the academy in late February, the badge pressed into his palm heavier than he’d expected, cool against skin that still remembered the weight of drills, firearms, endless repetition. The applause blurred, the words blurred, but afterward, alone in his room, he’d closed his hand around the brass pendant at his chest and whispered, “I did it, Dad.”

Two weeks later, his twenty-third birthday came in the quiet chaos of home. Takeout boxes stacked on the counter, Scout circling like a small furry satellite, Luca shoving the last of his belongings into the apartment with a determination that felt like more than moving boxes.

They crammed his shelves into every available corner, books spilling onto the floor until Will joked he’d need a new lease just for Luca’s library. Incense smoke curled around the edges of candlewax, filling the air with a sweetness that didn’t quite mask the sharp scent of cardboard. Scout leapt onto a chair with a triumphant bark, as if declaring the apartment his territory now.

“Congratulations,” Mischa announced from her perch on the fridge, legs swinging idly as she surveyed the mess. “You’re married now.”

“We’re not,” Will muttered, trying to make space for Luca’s typewriter between his own notebooks.

“Close enough,” she said, smirk tugging at her mouth.

“What’s that?” Luca asked absently from across the room, shoving another stack of books into an already overburdened shelf.

“Nothing,” Will said quickly, heat rising in his face. He kept his eyes fixed on the typewriter until Luca, unconcerned, went back to rearranging his stacks. Mischa only grinned wider, entirely pleased with herself.

That night, after the boxes were shoved into corners and the takeout containers thrown away, Luca produced a small cake from the fridge, its icing uneven but earnest. “For the birthday boy,” he said.

Mischa hummed dramatically, holding an invisible lighter over the candles. “Make a wish, Will.”

Will hesitated just long enough for it to sting, then blew them out. He didn’t tell them what he wished for - only that when his fingers found the pendant again, he hoped his father had heard it too.

Luca leaned against the counter, watching him. “You get quieter every day,” he said softly.

Will looked up. “And you talk enough for both of us.”

Luca smiled, but it didn’t fully reach his eyes. “Maybe. Just don’t forget to come up for air now and then, alright?”

Will laughed under his breath, deflecting, and the moment passed. But the words stayed.

--

Field training started before the exhaustion of graduation had even settled in his bones. The badge still felt alien pinned to his chest, but Rick Marlow wasted no time.

Marlow wasn’t the worst - which, by police standards, made him pretty damn good. He filed reports on time, didn’t drink on duty, didn’t throw his weight around. If he had prejudices, he kept them tucked behind his clipped professionalism. Most importantly, he didn’t waste time pretending he hadn’t heard about Will’s “reputation.”

Two weeks in, he slid a case file across the desk, leaned back in his chair, and said simply, “What do you see?”

Will stared at the folder, stomach tightening. Some days, it was easy - too easy. A suspect’s voice would hitch, or their anger would bleed so sharp it stung his tongue. Other days, especially in crowds, the noise hit him like static. Agitators stood out like frayed wires, buzzing too bright until his rings seared against his skin, protection burning thin.

Marlow noticed. He never mocked. Just passed him a bottle of water, said, “Take a breath, Graham,” and adjusted their route until the noise ebbed enough for Will to function again.

But when Will’s instincts sharpened into something clear, Marlow didn’t hesitate. He leaned into them, as though reading the tilt of a stranger’s shoulders before words were spoken was as normal as checking a license plate.

Their first real test came with a kidnapping case: a six-year-old girl, nonverbal, vanished from her mother’s home overnight. The primary suspect was her father, divorced, angry, with just enough of a record to make him convenient.

The file landed on Will’s desk, still warm from the printer. Marlow leaned across, tapping the top sheet. “She’s been gone fourteen hours. Where do you think he took her?”

Will flipped through the pages, every detail snagging like static: the girl’s room, too neat for her age; the father’s quick temper; the brittle, glassy way the mother’s words described her daughter. He closed his eyes briefly, letting the impressions settle. Sharp anger, but not cruel. Fear, but not for himself. A memory of water, cold and dark.

“Not far,” Will said slowly. “Somewhere familiar. Not to hide from her, but with her. A place he trusts.” He hesitated. “A cabin. Near water.”

Marlow’s brows rose. “He’s got an old fishing cabin upstate. Sheriff already checked it once - said it looked empty.”

“Check again,” Will said. “He’s there.”

And he was. They found the father in the cabin’s kitchen, shirt rumpled, face lined, the girl sitting at the table with her stuffed rabbit clutched tight. Alive. Unharmed.

When they cuffed him, the man’s voice broke. “You don’t understand. She’s not safe with her. That woman doesn’t feed her right, doesn’t-she doesn’t even see her.” He fought against the patrol car door, eyes wild. “She needs me. I’m the only one paying attention.”

Later, when the shouting faded and the paperwork stacked high, Will sat on the floor beside the girl. She didn’t look at him. She lined up bottle caps on the carpet edge, one after the other, her focus sharp and bright.

He watched quietly, letting the rhythm of her concentration wash over him. The evidence pressed together in his mind - the spotless room, the mother’s brittle smile, the way the girl leaned slightly toward her father even as he was dragged away.

When Marlow crouched down, voice low, “What do you think, Graham?” Will answered without hesitation.

“The father’s right. She’s not safe with her mother.”

Marlow studied him a long moment, then nodded once. “Alright. We’ll hand it over to CPS. Let them dig.”

Will touched the floor lightly, watching the girl line up another cap. He thought of himself at her age - quiet, small, unseen if it weren’t his father and Mischa - and for the first time since putting on the badge, the weight of it felt like it belonged.

--

At home, life settled into something resembling routine. Luca buried himself in teaching comparative literature, his briefcase always fat with papers, his fingertips stained black with ink by the time he got through a stack. Sometimes he came home still muttering about students who mixed up Dante and Milton, or with excitement sparking in his voice about a shy freshman who’d turned in something brilliant. He graded at the kitchen table most nights, glasses slipping down his nose, Scout curled loyally under his chair.

He worried, though. Constantly. It lived in the crease between his brows whenever Will laced up his boots, in the way his gaze lingered too long at the door. Not just worry about criminals, but about the uniform itself - the men and women beside Will, the ones whose respect might vanish if they knew too much.

“You’re staring again,” Will said one morning, tugging on his jacket.

“Because you keep saying ‘I’ll be fine’ like you believe it,” Luca shot back, tone too light to cover the edge underneath.

Will leaned against the doorframe, sighing. “I’ll be fine.”

“Promise me you’ll quit before it breaks you,” Luca said suddenly, surprising even himself.

Will blinked. “Before what breaks me?”

“I don’t know.” Luca forced a small smile. “Whatever it is you keep walking toward.”

Will didn’t answer. The silence stretched too long before he finally said, “I’ll be fine,” again - quieter this time, and less convincing.

Luca’s smile didn’t return.

Scout was the only uncomplicated thing - all floppy ears and stubborn will, dragging half-chewed socks into the hallway with great ceremony, testing the limits of every “sit” and “stay” he was taught. He grew into his paws in the most graceless way possible, a mess of oversized feet and wagging tail that refused to slow down.

Mischa drifted through the apartment like she always had, sometimes gone for days at a time, claiming she was “in Italy” with her brother. She rarely said more than that, except to repeat with unusual gravity, “His art is beautiful, but macabre.” When pressed, she only shook her head. “You’ll see it someday. Or maybe you won’t.”

Then, one evening, the thin thread of denial snapped.

Will and Luca were half-buried in papers at the table - Luca grading, Will skimming a case file - when a book shifted on its own. Not a slip, not an accident. It slid deliberately across the wood until it bumped Luca’s elbow.

He froze mid-sentence, eyes darting to the book, then to Will, then to the empty air where Mischa lounged. His mouth opened, shut, opened again. Finally, he said flatly, “Okay. So we’re haunted, now.”

Mischa leapt to her feet with a dramatic bow. “At your service.”

Will winced, waiting for the explosion. But Luca only blew out a long breath, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and muttered, “I should have known. Nothing about you is normal, Graham.”

To Will’s shock, that was it. No shouting. No freaking out. Just weary acceptance, as though a ghost in their kitchen was the logical next step. With pagans, maybe it was?

And after that, things shifted.

Mischa began leaving pages on Will’s desk, not from her endless notebooks of supposedly true stories, but from something new: fiction.

“If I’ve got a resident lit critic under my roof, I might as well use him,” she quipped, dropping a sheaf of pages with a flourish.

Will groaned, but Luca picked them up with genuine curiosity. He sat on the couch, red pen in hand, and read them like he would a student’s submission. He scribbled notes in the margins, debated pacing and dialogue with unexpected passion. Mischa, to everyone’s surprise - including her own - actually listened.

“You cut my favorite line,” she complained one night, holding the marked pages up like evidence.

“Because it killed the rhythm,” Luca replied calmly after Will translated for her. “You can’t just wedge in a clever phrase because you like it. It has to serve the story.”

Mischa scowled, then muttered, “Fine. But I’m keeping the line in my director’s cut.”

Will watched the two of them argue over imaginary drafts like this had always been normal - his boyfriend critiquing his ghost’s short stories, Scout snoring at their feet - and felt, for just a moment, like the apartment had become something sturdier than survival. Something like home.

--

The year wound on in that strange balance. Days were filled with patrols, paperwork, and the steady pull of other people’s feelings. Nights softened with Luca’s laughter, Scout sprawled underfoot, and Mischa muttering about character arcs from her latest draft.

The Pagan Society became their touchstone - monthly circles where Laurel pressed herbs into Will’s hands “for grounding,” where someone always smuggled in cider, where Luca ended up pulled into debates about mythology and meaning with members new and old. For Will, those nights felt like breathing space, reminders that his life stretched beyond uniforms and case files.

Grief still lingered like a bruise, but so did joy, fragile and stubborn. By the year’s end, Will had learned what it meant to hold both at once - the living and the dead, the ordinary and the impossible, all crammed into the same small apartment, sustained by the odd little family they had built around themselves.

Chapter Text

Publishing a ghost was a lot harder than expected.

Mischa’s ‘debut novel,’ Great Hollow Creek, arrived as a stack of spiral notebooks and loose papers Will found piled on the desk one morning. Each page was scrawled in her tight, looping script, dated like journal entries.

“When Lawrence Falls, a painter, moves to the sleepy town of Great Hollow Creek…” Luca read aloud from one of the pages, brow furrowed. “Is this – ah – autobiographical?”

Mischa grinned. “No. It’s therapy.”

The story unfolded like a confession – a quiet painter, a diner waitress, and the soft decay of small-town secrets, all written in a voice that felt older than her ghostly form.

Luca took up the pen once more, acting as her free editor, while Will handled the logistics. Between the two of them, Melissa Wright – Mischa’s nom de plume – slowly became a published author. Luca submitted the manuscript to small presses and a local indie distributor. Will designed the minimalist cover: a cup of coffee bleeding into watercolor trees.

When the proof copy arrived, Mischa held it with both hands, revenant. “You know,” she said softly, “I never thought I’d live to see my name in print.”

“You still haven’t,” Will murmured, smiling faintly.

She stuck her tongue out at him, but her fingers lingered over the glossy spine like a prayer.

--

Life outside their strange apartment spun on, faster than either of them could quite keep up with.

Luca’s teaching schedule filled every available hour – lectures, student conferences, endless stacks of essays that bled red ink under his pen. He’d come home late, humming half-remembered folk songs from class discussions, the smell of chalk still clinging to his sleeves.

To Will’s surprise, Luca had built a life beyond the two of them – friends from the Pagan Society, a small orbit of artists and academics who laughed too loud and loved too openly. They pulled him out to queer clubs downtown, places where candlelight flickered against mirrored walls and the air shimmered with perfume and heat.

He always asked Will to come. And Will always declined.

“I’d only end up watching you from the corner,” Will said once, trying to make it sound like a joke.

Luca, halfway through zipping his jacket, smiled faintly. “You don’t have to watch. You could dance.”

“You know I can’t,” Will said, voice quiet but final. “Too loud. Too much.”

The pause that followed was soft but heavy. Luca sighed, not unkindly, tucking his scarf into place. “Yeah. I know.”

He kissed Will’s cheek before he left, and for a heartbeat, everything felt like it used to – simple, close, safe. But the door shut behind him, and silence rushed in like tidewater.

They made a compromise: Luca would go out once or twice a month; Will stayed home with Scout, or picked up extra shifts at the precinct. It was fair. It was reasonable. It worked – on paper.

To make up for it, they planned weekends away. Shenandoah became their ritual: tents and river water, the sharp smell of campfire smoke in Will’s hair, Luca laughing at his terrible marshmallow technique. Sometimes they talked for hours, letting the night air soak their words. Other times, they sat side by side in silence, watching mist crawl up the ridgelines.

The silence wasn’t hostile, not yet – but it had weight. A slow gravity that gathered between them, shaping itself into something Will couldn’t name.

He told himself it was just life – work, exhaustion, too many nights spent apart. But when Luca laughed at something he couldn’t quite hear, or when Will woke alone to the faint smell of Luca’s cologne fading from the pillow beside him, he felt that gravity tug a little harder.

And so, without meaning to, Will leaned more into work.

Marlow signed the last of the Will’s field training paperwork with a grunt, then said, “You’re officially a real cop now. God help you.”

Will had grown used to the rhythm of their partnership – Marlow’s dry humor, his steady patience, the way he never flinched from Will’s silences. They spent hours in the cruiser, the low hum of the radio filling the space where conversation should go. Sometimes Marlow told stories about his twenty years on the force: bad calls, small victories, the absurdity of it all. Other times, he just let Will think.

One night, over greasy diner coffee, Marlow said, “You ever notice how this job eats at people?”

Will glanced up. “I’ve noticed.”

“Yeah. You’re sharp enough to see it. Just make sure it doesn’t eat you too.”

Will tried to smile. “I’ll be fine.”

Marlow huffed. “That’s what we all say before the job makes us liars.”

The year blurred through calls, reports, quiet hours in the squad car. Marlow became something like a steady point – not quite a father figure, but something close enough to make Will ache.

By December, Marlow’s retirement paperwork was approved. They celebrated at the local cop bar – the kind of place that smelled like beer and old victories. The precinct raised their glasses. Will clinked his halfheartedly, feeling the hollow echo of goodbyes that came too easy.

When the crowd thinned, Marlow stayed behind, nursing a final drink. “You’re good at this, Graham. Too good. But this city’ll grind you down. The brass already has their eye on you – all those reports, all that intuition.” He studied him, eyes narrowed. “If you’re smart, you’ll get out before they decide you’re either a miracle or a problem.”

Will frowned. “Get out?”

“Transfer. Different precinct, smaller department. Hell, different state.” He leaned back, smirking faintly. “Go be a normal cop somewhere before D.C. chews you to pieces.”

The advice settled in Will’s chest like a stone. He didn’t answer. Just nodded, too tired to explain the pull in his gut that whispered he was already half-eaten.

Later, lying awake in the apartment, the words kept circling him. Different state. Smaller department. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere that wasn’t here.

Mischa’s voice drifted from the corner, low and almost fond. “You’re thinking about something, aren’t you?”

He didn’t deny it.

“You should talk to him,” she said.

Will’s fingers brushed the brass pendant at his throat. “Not yet.”

“Coward,” she teased, though softly.

Maybe. But when he imagined Luca’s face - the lectures, the students, the friends who pulled him laughing into the night – Will couldn’t bring himself to break that orbit. Not yet.

He lay back, eyes tracing the cracks in the ceiling, the hum of the city below like a restless pulse. Somewhere, beyond all this noise, he could almost hear the slow drawl of the South, the memory of warm water and cicadas.

New Orleans.

The thought came quiet, but it stayed.

--

At home, the air had shifted in ways Will couldn’t name.

They still laughed, still shared meals, still loved - but sometimes it felt like muscle memory, the echo of a rhythm they’d once known by heart. Luca’s laughter still warmed the room, but it didn’t quite reach the corners anymore.

He came home later from campus dinners, smelling faintly of wine and rain, his voice soft with exhaustion. Will stayed up later too, polishing his boots until they gleamed, re-reading case files he’d already memorized. They spoke, but their words skimmed the surface - careful, polite, safe.

“How was work?”

“You look tired.”

“We should plan another trip soon.”

Each phrase a fragile truce, a way of not asking the question that hung between them: Are we still okay?

When Will finally told Mischa about Marlow’s suggestion, she didn’t look surprised.

“New Orleans,” she said, voice soft. “You’ve been thinking about it since Russ.”

He nodded, staring at the pendant against his chest. “Maybe it’s time.”

“And Luca?”

Will rubbed at his ring, the metal warm from his skin. “I don’t know what he’d say.”

“You could ask,” she said gently.

He didn’t. Not yet.

The year folded itself toward winter, toward quiet. The apartment filled with the low hum of the heater, the faint sound of Scout dreaming at their feet. Christmas lights flickered against the window glass, throwing fractured color across the room.

Luca had fallen asleep on the couch, papers fanned in his lap, his hand curled loosely where Will could have reached for it but didn’t. Mischa hovered near the bookshelf, silent for once, her eyes fixed on him with a kind of sad understanding.

Will sat by the window, watching snow dissolve against the glass. Beyond it, the city glowed – distant, untouchable. He thought of the South: of cypress trees bowed over still water, of air so thick with summer that breathing felt like memory. Of home, and what that word meant now.

He pressed his palm to the glass, felt the cold bite through his skin.

“Maybe it’s time to go home,” he whispered, and the words left his mouth like a promise – one he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep.

Chapter Text

By early spring, Will couldn’t stand the silence in his own head anymore.

He found Luca in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, sunlight pooling against his shoulders, sleeves rolled up as he rinsed out the coffee pot. Scout dozed at his feet, tail thumping lazily. The domesticity of it made Will’s throat ache.

“I’ve been thinking,” he started.

Luca hummed without looking up. “That’s never good.”

Will almost smiled. “About moving. Maybe… back south. New Orleans.”

That got Luca’s attention. He turned, brows drawn. “You’re serious.”

“Yeah.” Will rubbed the back of his neck. “Marlow thinks the department here’ll eat me alive. Says if I move, I can reset expectations. Be just another cop instead of—”

“Instead of the guy who reads people too well?” Luca said, soft but edged.

Will nodded. “It’s not just that. I grew up there, for a while. It’s familiar. Feels like… maybe I could start over.”

Luca stared for a moment longer, something flickering behind his eyes. “When were you going to tell me?”

“I didn’t know how.” The words fell heavy. “I didn’t want to hear what you’d say.”

“That’s not fair, Will.”

“I know.”

The silence stretched until the clock ticked loud enough to fill it. Finally, Luca said, “Give me a few days to think.”

He left the kitchen, coffee forgotten, Scout padding after him.

--

For days, Luca’s absence filled the apartment even when he was home. He moved quietly, deliberate as a ghost. The space between them thickened - full of half-started sentences and aborted touches.

When he finally spoke, it was late. Will was at the table, turning the brass pendant over in his fingers, the metal warm against his palm. Luca stood by the doorway, hands in his pockets.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said - echoing Will’s words from before, but his tone was steadier, practiced. “And I need to say this right, so… don’t interrupt.”

Will set the pendant down. “Okay.”

Luca took a breath, gathering the words like notes in a lecture. “We’ve been growing apart for a while. You’ve been quieter. Eating less. Sleeping even less than that. You talk about work, but it’s like you’re somewhere else when you do. I know asking you to quit isn’t realistic, but…” He trailed off, exhaling. “I can’t build a life with someone who’s unraveling, Will. And I can’t keep pretending I’m not unraveling with you.”

The words landed gently - too gently for how much they hurt.

“So what are you saying?”

“I think we need to break up.”

Will’s first instinct was to argue - to ask for time, to promise change. But hearing it said aloud… it loosened something in him. A truth he’d been holding back for months.

He nodded once. “Okay.”

Luca blinked, as if he’d expected a fight. “That’s it?”

“Yeah,” Will said quietly. “That’s it.”

Mischa didn’t say anything for a long while afterward. When she finally did, her voice was small. “Guess I’ll have to find another editor.”

He tried to smile at that. It didn’t stick.

--

The weeks that followed felt strange - too quiet, too neat.

Luca’s things disappeared one at a time. A mug left behind for a few days, then gone. His bookshelves emptying shelf by shelf, leaving faint dust outlines against the paint. The couch cushion where he used to sit sagged differently now, as if still trying to hold his shape.

They didn’t have a dramatic goodbye. He handed Will his spare key, kissed him once - soft, tired - and said, “Take care of yourself.”

“I’ll try,” Will had said. It was the only honest answer he had.

After that, the apartment was only his again. His and Mischa’s.

Mischa took it harder than he expected. For days after Luca left, she hovered around the half-bare living room, staring at the spaces he’d once filled.

“He was my editor,” she said finally, sitting cross-legged on the coffee table, her hair falling into her face. “Do you have any idea how rare it is to find someone who knows pacing and metaphor?”

Will smiled faintly. “You could still talk to him.”

She frowned. “Without you translating? It’d be a little one-sided.”

He didn’t answer.

Mischa sighed and leaned back, eyes flicking toward the door. “You know, I liked him. He treated you like you were made of something human.”

“I am,” Will said, but even to his own ears, it sounded unsure.

She tilted her head. “Then act like it.”

He didn’t. Not right away.

--

The Pagan Society adjusted faster than he did. Laurel and Amber pretended nothing had changed, steering conversation toward safe, neutral topics. But when Will came alone to the next meeting, carrying Scout under one arm, there was a subtle shift - sympathy, understanding, space made quietly for grief.

Laurel pressed a small bundle of rosemary into his palm. “For letting go,” she murmured.

That night, Will found Mischa perched in the window, chin in her hands.

“You’re really not going to call him?” she asked.

“He deserves peace,” Will said. “We both do.”

She watched him for a long moment, then nodded. “So what now?”

“I don’t know.” He rubbed the brass pendant between his fingers, the word Persevere catching the lamplight. “But I think I’m starting to.”

Mischa offered a small, crooked smile - the kind she only used when she didn’t want him to see how sad she really was. “You always do.”

Scout barked softly from the doorway, tail wagging, and for a fleeting second, the apartment didn’t feel empty - just waiting.

A week later, he drove out to Shenandoah alone, Scout in the passenger seat, the sky pale with early morning. He camped by the creek Russ had once taken him to fish in, the air sharp with pine and memory.

As the sun set, Will sat cross-legged by the fire, a simple cord of twine between his hands. He whispered a few words Laurel had given him, names and goodbyes mingling until they blurred. Then he cut the cord clean through, tossed the pieces into the fire, and watched the smoke curl upward.

For the first time in months, the silence that followed didn’t ache. It just was.

--

It took months for the silence to settle into something livable.

By spring, Will had stopped checking the mailbox for Luca’s handwriting. Scout had grown leaner, faster, more attached. Mischa stayed close, quieter than usual, her voice softer - a little faded around the edges. Sometimes she still set a second mug of coffee on the counter, forgetting that the ritual no longer included anyone living.

“You’re both terrible at being alone,” she said once, perched on the arm of the couch.
Will just nodded. “Yeah. We are.”

He threw himself into work. The cases, the reports, the steady, grinding routine of being useful. But late at night, when the apartment dimmed to just the hum of the fridge and the sound of Scout’s paws shifting in sleep, the thought crept back: Maybe Marlow was right.

The D.C. precinct was eating him alive, one case file at a time. Every day felt heavier, every suspect clearer than he wanted them to be. It wasn’t just empathy anymore - it was exposure. Raw. Unfiltered.

One afternoon in June, he sat by the window, coffee cooling beside him, the radio muttering low. Mischa was stretched across the sill like a cat, sunlight cutting through her shoulder in faint streaks.

“You’re thinking about it again,” she said.

“About what?”

“Leaving.”

He didn’t deny it. “New Orleans keeps coming up.”

“Because of Dad?”

“Because it’s home,” he said quietly. “Or it used to be.”

She studied him, the faintest smile on her lips. “Then go. Maybe ghosts need new places to haunt.”

--

He started the search halfheartedly - a few calls, some real estate listings, mostly excuses not to commit. Then, one humid afternoon, his phone rang.

“Will Graham? This is Tom Reilly - I worked with your dad back in the day. Boat repair, mostly. Heard you were thinking of heading south again.”

Will straightened. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

Tom chuckled. “Small world down here. Your realtor mentioned your name at lunch. Said you were looking for something out by the water. Thought you’d wanna know - Russ’s old fishing cabin? Still standing. Little rough around the edges, but I’ve been keeping an eye on it. Could let it go for cheap.”

Will’s breath caught. He hadn’t thought about the cabin in years. The cracked dock. The smell of cypress and river mud. His father’s laugh echoing through open water.

“I’ll take it,” he said before he could stop himself.

Tom laughed again. “Don’t wanna see it first?”

“I already have,” Will said.

--

By late summer of 2005, he was gone.

The drive south felt endless - Scout curled in the passenger seat, Mischa flickering in and out of the reflection on the window. She hummed softly, a tangle of radio static and old Cajun lullabies Russ used to whistle when the nights got too long. The further south they went, the heavier the air grew, thick with cypress and memory.

The cabin looked smaller than he remembered. Weather-beaten, half-swallowed by moss and cypress roots, but still standing proud against the slow bend of the bayou. He spent the first week coaxing it back to life - sweeping out years of dust, patching the roof, clearing out spiderwebs from the rafters. The plumbing rattled like an old ghost before surrendering to water again.

Mischa followed him room to room, nostalgia stitched with melancholy. “He’d like this,” she said once, watching him hang the brass pendant on a nail by the door before tucking it back beneath his shirt.

“Yeah,” Will said softly. “I think he would.”

The days found a rhythm. Morning fog curling low over the water. The hum of insects and the gentle slap of waves against the dock. Scout darting through the tall grass, barking at frogs and chasing herons that barely bothered to move. Mischa sometimes drifted across the porch railing, watching the world settle into its swamp-slow pace.

The people came next - quietly, like the tide.

Mrs. Thibodeaux, who ran the little grocery in town, recognized him the moment he stepped through the door. “You’re Russ Graham’s boy,” she’d said, her accent honey-thick. “He used to come in for chicory coffee and those awful canned sausages. Said they tasted like home.”

Will smiled faintly. “He lied about that.”

She chuckled, pressing a jar of pickled okra into his hands. “Then you take this. For remembering.”

Next came the Boudreauxs, a couple who lived a few cabins down - both retired teachers, both sharp as tacks. They invited him over for gumbo and gossip one evening, their kitchen filled with laughter and the sound of an old radio crooning Louis Armstrong. “Russ pulled my boy out of a ditch once,” Mr. Boudreaux said, raising his glass. “Wouldn’t hear a word of thanks. Just said, ‘Keep your tires outta the mud next time.’”
Will smiled, the memory of his father flickering sharp and kind all at once.

By August, he’d joined the New Orleans Police Department.

His new partner, Joe Bianchi, was everything Marlow wasn’t - talkative, nosy, perpetually optimistic in a way that bordered on reckless. He was from Baton Rouge originally, loud with family stories and opinions about everything from gumbo roux to college football.

“You’re a weird one, Graham,” Joe said once, watching Will trace the grounding rune on his wrist before a call. “But you’ve got instincts like a bloodhound. Freaky good ones.”

Will didn’t bother explaining.

Joe stopped asking where his hunches came from after the second case - a missing person found in the exact stretch of swamp Will had pointed to on a map, the body discovered within an hour.

They worked well together - Joe the talker, Will the quiet one. Joe charmed witnesses; Will saw through lies. When Joe cracked jokes to break tension, Will pretended not to laugh. When Will froze at the edge of a crime scene, overwhelmed by the emotional static bleeding from it, Joe wordlessly handed him a bottle of water and stood guard until the noise faded.

On their good days, it almost felt like friendship. On the bad ones, Joe just gave him space and pretended not to notice the way Will’s hands trembled after certain calls.

The bayou life suited him better than it should have. Mornings started with coffee on the porch, Scout dozing by his boots. Evenings ended with cicadas singing loud enough to drown his thoughts. And through it all, Mischa stayed - flickering just beyond the edge of lamplight, her voice carrying faint over the water.

“This place feels alive,” she said one night.

Will glanced out at the trees swaying under moonlight. “It is.”

She smiled, faint and wistful. “So are you. For now.”

--

The storm broke the city open.

By late August, New Orleans wasn’t a place anymore - it was a wound. The air stank of salt and gasoline, of rot and panic. Sirens never stopped. Neither did Will.

He’d stopped counting the hours somewhere between the second levee breach and the third evacuation order. The police radios hissed constant updates - looting uptown, shots fired in the Quarter, missing kids in the Superdome. Every voice on the line was frayed.

Will’s amulet was hot against his chest, pulsing faintly as if trying to keep pace with his heart. The potion he’d taken at dawn had burned off hours ago, and now the noise was back - a thousand emotions slamming into him at once: grief, hunger, rage, despair.

Even the city itself felt alive and bleeding.

Joe found him knee-deep in water behind a half-collapsed warehouse, flashlight cutting through the dark. A body had washed up against the fence - swollen, half-buried in debris. There’d been five like it that week. Maybe more.

“You sure you wanna do this one, cher?” Joe asked, voice rough from too many sleepless nights and bad coffee. “You look like you ain’t slept since the storm hit.”

“I’m fine,” Will said automatically.

Joe gave a humorless laugh. “Yeah, you say that like it makes it true. Ain’t foolin’ nobody, man.” He crouched beside the body, shining the light along the edges of the wound. “Jesus, Mary, an’ Joseph… that ain’t storm damage. Somebody dumped him.”

“Bodies are turning up everywhere,” Will said, his voice hollow. “The flood’s pulling secrets out of the ground.”

Joe crossed himself. “Ain’t just the flood, no. My grandma used to say when a storm like this tears through, it shakes the gates between things. Lets the dead walk too close to the livin’.”

Will glanced at him. “You believe that?”

Joe snorted. “Hell, I live here, don’t I? You stay long enough in this swamp, you learn there’s things you don’t mess with. Some folks pray to Jesus, some to the loa. Me? I figure coverin’ both bases don’t hurt.”

He paused, squinting at the faint glow of Will’s amulet beneath his shirt. “That charm you wear - that’s Hoodoo work, yeah? Got the feel of it.”

“Something like that,” Will said.

“Well, you keep that close, hear? City’s mean right now. Too many spirits stirred up, too many folks losin’ their damn minds. Storm pulls up the dead, pulls up worse, too.”

Will almost smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m more worried about the living ones.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, standing with a grunt. “But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference ‘round here.”

They hauled the body up onto the truck bed, both men silent except for the sound of the water sloshing around their boots. When they were done, Joe leaned against the doorframe, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Y’know, Graham,” he said finally, voice low, “before the storm, I just thought you were another quiet cop with too many thoughts in his head. But now?” He looked him over, eyes narrowing slightly. “Now you look like you’re carryin’ the whole damn city on your back.”

Will didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The city was in him - every scream, every prayer, every desperate heartbeat trapped in floodwater. Even Mischa’s ghost had grown quieter, as if the dead were too crowded to speak.

That night, back at the cabin, Will scrubbed his hands until the sink ran pink. The bayou was bloated, water pushing up against the porch steps. Scout paced restlessly, whining at the windows.

When he stepped outside, the air buzzed with heat and decay. Fireflies drifted low over the flooded reeds, their light flickering like breath. Somewhere in the distance, the faint hum of a generator carried across the water.

He crouched on the porch steps, elbows on his knees, and pressed his palms hard against his temples. The noise didn’t stop. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw faces - drowned, broken, half-buried in the silt. He could feel their stories, the panic before the water rose, the violence that came after.

It was too much. Even for him.

When Mischa finally appeared, it was faint - like a reflection in stormwater.
“You can’t hold this much, Will,” she said softly. “Even the river has to spill somewhere.”

He didn’t answer. Just stared out over the flooded bayou, where the city’s ghosts drifted between the cypress trees, indistinguishable from the mist.

--

The water had gone down, but the city still smelled like mold and memory. Every shift felt like digging through someone else’s ghost.

Three months after the storm, Will, Joe, and three other detectives sat hunched in a booth at Mama Ruth’s, one of the only diners in the parish stubborn enough to open its doors again. The neon sign still flickered, the coffee was strong enough to melt spoons, and the air carried the mingled scents of fried catfish, chicory, and bleach.

The case spread across the table in a messy fan of photos and notes - four bodies pulled from the bayou, each one marked with strange, ritualistic carvings.

Joe was halfway through his second bowl of gumbo, stirring lazily. “Told y’all, this one ain’t just another junkie killing. Look at them cuts - ain’t random.”

“Looks like alligators to me,” said Detective Morris, the transfer from Chicago. He was big, square-jawed, and about as subtle as a battering ram. “Bodies sit in swamp water long enough, they’ll start lookin’ like they’ve been hexed too.”

Joe gave him a side-eye, unimpressed. “You ever seen a gator make a pattern like that, cher?”

Morris shrugged. “I’ve seen rats chew drywall in straight lines. Nature’s weird.”

Across from him, Anita Delacroix snorted into her coffee. Born and raised in the Tremé, she wore her hair in tight braids and kept a gris-gris bag tied around her wrist. “Nature don’t do that. That’s human work - or somethin’ close to it.”

“Voodoo?” Morris said with a smirk.

“Vodou,” she corrected sharply. “An’ no. This here’s Hoodoo, maybe. But it ain’t right. Not like this.”

“Christ,” muttered Rene Broussard, the oldest of them, gray at the temples and always smelling faintly of tobacco. “Whole city goes underwater, and y’all still find ways to make it spooky.”

“Storm didn’t wash away the spirits, Rene,” Joe said, dunking cornbread into his gumbo. “Just stirred ‘em up.”

Will sat quiet at the end of the booth, picking absently at the label of his coffee cup. The conversation hummed around him like static. His amulet was warm beneath his shirt - a low pulse, steady but warning. The air felt heavy in his lungs, the psychic noise still thick around the city even months later. So many people grieving, rebuilding, remembering. Too many impressions in the water.

He glanced at the crime photos again - the angles, the markings, the faint circular shapes carved just under the ribs. The patterns itched at his mind, half-familiar. Not random. Not natural.

Joe noticed his silence. “You see somethin’, Graham?”

Will hesitated, thumb brushing his ring. “They were meant to be found. Whoever did this wanted an audience.”

“Ritual killer, then,” Morris said flatly.

“Maybe,” Will murmured. “But not for the reasons you think.”

Before anyone could press him, the diner door creaked open. The bell above it jingled, soft and homey. Three older folks came in - a woman in a Saints jacket and two men in work boots. They stopped short when they saw Will.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the woman, breaking into a grin. “That’s Russ’s boy, ain’t it?”

Will blinked, surprised, then smiled faintly as she swept over. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You don’t remember me, do you? Ruth Fontenot. Used to run the bait shop down by the docks. Your daddy used to fix my old skiff every spring.”

“I remember,” Will said softly. “You gave me a paper sack full of beignets once for helping him haul the engine.”

Ruth laughed, the sound bright as her smile. “And you ate every one, if I recall. You got his eyes, you know - kind, but tired.” She patted his shoulder. “I’ll send y’all another round of coffee. On the house, for Russ Graham’s boy.”

The men with her nodded in greeting, one of them tipping his cap. “Russ was good people. Kept my trawler runnin’ through three hurricanes. You ever need a hand, son, you just ask.”

“Thank you,” Will said quietly, and meant it.

As they moved on, Joe leaned toward Morris with a smirk. “See? Told you. Russ Graham fixed half the boats in this parish. Boy’s got good blood in him.”

“Blood don’t solve murders,” Morris muttered.

“Maybe not,” Anita said, “but blood remembers things.” Her tone made Morris glance up warily, unsure if she was joking.

Joe clapped Will’s shoulder. “Don’t mind him, cher. He don’t know no better. Ain’t his fault he from a place where they think the dead stay buried.”

Rene grunted. “All I know is, whoever’s makin’ those marks on them bodies better pray the bayou swallows him before we do.”

The conversation drifted back to theories and suspects, but Will stayed quiet, staring through the rain-fogged window. Across the glass, he could just make out the shape of the bayou beyond - dark, still swollen, full of secrets that refused to stay buried.

The hum of the diner faded to a distant buzz. Somewhere beneath it all, he could almost hear the whisper of the river, thick with silt and memory.

--

The storm season had eased, leaving behind the smell of wet pine and river silt that clung to everything. The fishing shack still leaned a little to the left, but the new tin roof no longer leaked when it rained, and that counted as progress.

Will had fallen into a rhythm - slow, deliberate, the kind that didn’t ask too many questions. Mornings started before dawn, coffee boiling black and bitter on the stovetop while Scout pressed his nose to the screen door, waiting for their walk.

They’d follow the narrow trail through the cypress trees, fog curling low around their boots, the air alive with insects and the distant croak of bullfrogs. Scout hunted for crunchy leaves — the ones that snapped loud under his paws — pouncing like he’d caught something important. Will let hin, smiling quietly, a rare, unguarded thing.

When the sun burned through the fog, he’d fish off the dock. The bayou water shimmered dark and sluggish, rippling only when gar broke the surface. He wasn’t much for catching, he threw most of them back, but he liked the waiting, the silence. The reflection of the trees looked like another world beneath him, one he wasn’t sure he’d ever stopped falling into.

At noon, he’d return to the shack, clean up, and mix another batch of potion at the kitchen table - the bitter, metallic smell of it clinging to the air. The brew hissed faintly in its copper bowl, thick and red-brown, the lamb’s heart simmering down to pulp. Scout always sat at his heel, patient as a saint. When he was done, he’d scrape the leftovers into his bowl, and he’d eat contentedly, tail thumping against the floorboards.

“Circle of life,” Mischa had said once, perched on the counter, her reflection ghosting in the old tin kettle. “If you squint.”

Will snorted. “That’s a generous squint.”

She’d been showing up less during the day lately. Said she was keeping an eye on her brother - Will suspected that meant Luca more than anything else. Still, she always came back for dinner.

Evenings were quiet, their ritual simple. Will cooked - fish or gumbo, sometimes both - while Mischa hovered near the radio, switching between stations until she found something old and bluesy. She’d hum along, sometimes out of tune, sometimes right on the note.

They talked about small things. About Scout’s misadventures with the neighbor’s chickens. About how the air here tasted different than anywhere else. About how Joe swore the gators were learning to pick locks.

Once, she asked softly, “Do you like it here?”

Will paused, the ladle still in his hand. “I do,” he said. “It’s quiet. Honest. My dad would’ve liked that.”

She smiled faintly, watching him stir. “You sound like him when you say that.”

He looked over his shoulder. “That bad, huh?”

“Not bad,” she said. “Just… sad.”

He didn’t answer.

After dinner, she usually lingered on the porch while he cleaned up, her form glimmering faintly in the reflection of the bayou. Sometimes she’d hum an old lullaby; sometimes she just listened to the cicadas.

On nights when the moon rose high, Will would sit beside her with a book he never finished reading. The dogs barked far off in the parish, the frogs louder still. Life here was strange and simple, but it fit him in a way nothing else had.

And yet - in the hush between sounds, the air sometimes pressed heavy, like it was listening. He’d feel it on his skin, a faint, electric weight. His amulet would warm against his chest, steady, protective.

Mischa felt it too. Once, without looking away from the water, she murmured, “The bayou remembers more than it should.”

Will glanced at her, the moonlight catching in her pale outline. “So do I.”

She smiled, small and knowing. “That’s what worries me.”

--

The city was still half-drowned. The tourists had started to trickle back, but the bones of Katrina still showed in every street - sagging porches, gutted storefronts, waterlines that refused to fade. Whole neighborhoods smelled of mildew and diesel fuel. The air hummed with rebuilding, with rot, with grief.

The police never slept. There were too many cases - too many missing, too many dead. The bayou gave up bodies almost daily, the water unearthing what the storm had buried. Some were storm victims, some were not. Some had been down there long before the levees broke.

Will had stopped counting the hours he worked. The potion dulled the noise but couldn’t drown it completely. Each day bled into the next — endless paperwork, endless field calls, endless flashes of feeling that weren’t his own.

He was standing ankle-deep in silt behind a collapsed house when it happened again - a flicker, a breath. The world shifted. The air shimmered with memory.

For an instant, he saw them: two men dragging something heavy through the muck, voices low and hurried. The image blurred, snapping back to the present with a sound like water rushing from his ears. The weight of fear lingered in the air like smoke.

Joe’s voice broke through. “You good, Graham?”

Will blinked, nodding once. “Yeah. Just… caught the smell.”

Joe eyed him warily, wiping sweat from his neck. “You get them bad feelings again?”

“Just impressions,” Will said. “Leftovers.”

Joe clicked his tongue, muttering, “Ain’t natural, pickin’ up on ghosts of things that ain’t yours.”

“Not ghosts,” Will said, crouching by the mud-caked tarp. “More like memories that forgot they were supposed to fade.”

“Uh-huh,” Joe said, skeptical but uneasy. “You talk like my grandmama. She used to say water keeps what it likes.”

Will half-smiled. “She wasn’t wrong.”

Joe made the sign of the cross. “Man, you give me the creeps sometimes.”

By dusk, the crew had cleared out, leaving the site to floodlights and the whine of mosquitoes. Will lingered, filling out his report beside the cruiser while Joe argued with two other detectives - locals both, born-and-bred Louisiana men who still left rum out on All Saints’ Day and never whistled after dark.

“Man’s cursed,” said Ruiz, a wiry cop from Treme, jerking his chin toward Will. “Ain’t nobody supposed to just know where bodies at.”

“Cursed or blessed,” said Big Al, heavier set, deep drawl rolling slow. “Ain’t for us to say.”

The outsider, Morris, scoffed. “You superstitious bastards. You’re actin’ like we’re huntin’ voodoo zombies instead of serial dumps.”

Al turned his gaze on him, unimpressed. “Boy, you spend a few months in this parish, you’ll learn that disbelief don’t make nothin’ less true.”

Joe chuckled low, nursing his coffee. “Ain’t that right, Graham?”

Will looked up from his notes. “I’d say it’s true whether you believe it or not.”

Morris snorted. “You sound just like them.”

“I work here,” Will said simply.

The conversation ended there.

Then a flicker caught his eye - a water stain along the wall, shaped like a man’s hand. The moment he looked at it, the room dimmed just slightly, the world bending at its edges. For half a heartbeat, he smelled gasoline, heard a faint scream. Then it was gone.

He stared at the wall a moment longer before shaking his head and taking another bite of gumbo.

Outside, the cicadas started up again. The world went on turning, heavy and alive.

--

The motel smelled like mildew and bleach - one of those off-brand places that still hadn’t replaced half the storm-damaged carpets. A buzzing fluorescent light flickered above the door, cutting the night into uneven shards.

Room 6B. The shouting hadn’t stopped.

“Hell, Will, if one more couple tries to kill each other over a FEMA check, I’m packin’ up and movin’ to Lafayette.”

Will gave a tired half-laugh. “You’d last a week.”

“Three days, tops,” Joe admitted. He ran a hand down his face, eyes red-rimmed. “Alright, partner. Let’s get this over with.”

Will knocked on the door. “NOPD. Open up.”

The voices cut off.

A muffled shuffle, then a woman’s voice, raw from crying: “He-he’s got a knife!”

That was all it took. Will shoved the door open, Joe right behind him.

The room was chaos. Furniture overturned, a lamp broken on the floor, the TV still playing a muted infomercial about power tools. The woman huddled near the bed, one arm bleeding where she’d been cut. The man stood near the bathroom door, knife in hand, eyes wide and wild - not with anger anymore, but with the terrible, brittle fear of someone cornered.

“Sir,” Will said, voice low and steady. “Put it down.”

The man’s gaze snapped to him. And in that instant, the world shifted - the edges of everything sharpening, sound flattening to a hum.

Will felt it. The flood. The man’s panic, the woman’s terror, the dizzying overlap of guilt and love and despair. It crashed over him before he could brace for it, dragging him under.

He didn’t mean to hurt her. He just wanted her to listen. Just wanted her not to leave.

Will stumbled a step forward, hand out, the gun forgotten at his side. “Hey, hey. It’s alright. You don’t have to—”

The man flinched, saw movement, and the knife came up again - a glint of steel, a jagged reflex.

Joe’s shout tore through the static. “Will!”

Will barely had time to move. The knife punched into his shoulder, deep, sharp, cold. The impact drove him back a step, the breath tearing out of him. He heard Joe shout his name - a sound that came from very far away.

For an instant, everything slowed. The colors dulled. The man’s face fractured into a dozen different expressions - guilt, grief, fury, terror - all of them crashing into Will’s mind until he couldn’t tell where they ended and he began.

Then came the jolt - the sound of Joe’s taser cracking through the air, the smell of ozone and sweat. The man hit the floor, twitching, knife clattering out of his grasp.

Will staggered, catching himself against the wall. The pain bloomed slow and mean through his chest and arm, his vision tunneling in and out.

“Jesus Christ,” Joe muttered, kicking the knife away before cuffing the man’s wrists. “You alright, Graham?”

Will blinked down at the spreading red on his shirt. “Yeah,” he said, but it came out thin, breathless. “Just a scratch.”

Joe gave him a look that said he wasn’t buying it. “That ain’t no scratch. Sit your ass down before you fall over.”

Will tried to protest, but his knees folded on their own. He sank to the carpet, the room spinning. The empathy storm still raged, fragments of feeling echoing in his skull - panic, love, guilt - none of it his, all of it too loud.

Joe crouched beside him, his voice gentler now. “Hey. Breathe. You did good, alright? You stopped him. Just breathe.”

Will nodded vaguely, pressing his hand tighter against the wound. His blood felt hot, sticky. The world shimmered.

Outside, the sirens began - distant, drawing closer. The motel light buzzed overhead, stuttering between gold and white.

Joe’s voice cut through it one last time, steady as an anchor. “Stay with me, partner. Stay with me, yeah?”

Will tried to answer, but his mouth wouldn’t form the words. The last thing he saw was the red-and-blue flash of lights against the wet asphalt outside, bright enough to burn through his eyelids.

Then the world went out.

--

He woke to fluorescent light and the antiseptic tang of the hospital. The ceiling tiles swam in and out of focus, each breath shallow against the dull ache in his shoulder. His badge lay on the bedside table beside a half-empty cup of water and a pile of discharge papers.

The first face he saw was Joe’s. His partner looked like hell - unshaven, uniform wrinkled, one arm in a makeshift sling from a scraped elbow.

“Well, look who’s back among the livin’,” Joe said, his usual drawl cracked by fatigue. “You scared the piss outta me, you know that?”

Will’s throat was raw. “Sorry.”

Joe snorted. “Sorry, he says. You took a knife to the shoulder ‘cause some jackass couldn’t keep his temper in check. Ain’t your fault.”

Will offered a faint, lopsided smile. “Still hurts like it is.”

Before Joe could answer, the door opened. Captain Delaney stepped in, hat in hand, eyes lined with exhaustion that had nothing to do with age. “Graham,” he said, voice low, careful. “Glad to see you awake.”

Will tried to sit up, grimacing. “Captain.”

“Take it easy.” Delaney hovered by the bed. “We’re… making some changes downtown. You’ve done good work, but after this—” He hesitated. “The department therapist thinks you need time. Maybe more than time.”

Joe straightened from his chair, voice sharp. “You can’t be serious. He got stabbed doin’ his damn job, and now you’re benchin’ him?”

Delaney sighed. “This isn’t about punishment, Bianchi. It’s liability. He’s not cleared for duty. You know how it is.”

“I know bullshit when I hear it,” Joe snapped. “Y’all just don’t like what you can’t explain.”

The captain’s expression didn’t change. “I’m sorry, Will.”

Will stared at the badge on the table. It caught the fluorescent light, gleaming dully. “Don’t be,” he said finally. His voice was quiet, but final. “You’re not wrong.”

Delaney nodded once, relief and guilt warring in his eyes, then left.

Joe stayed. “You gonna let ‘em do this to you? Hell, if it were me—”

“It’s not worth it, Joe.” Will’s tone was tired, but steady. “You’ve still got work to do. I don’t.”

Joe ran a hand through his hair, pacing once before dropping back into the chair. “Damn it, Graham. You’re one of the good ones.”

Will almost smiled. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”

When Joe finally left, muttering something about checking in later, the room fell silent again.

--

Back at the cabin, the world felt too still. The swamp hummed with frogs and crickets, the air damp and heavy. Scout dozed near the window, tail twitching in sleep. Mischa sat by his bed, legs crossed, chin resting on her knees. She looked more solid than she had in months — the edges of her form clearer, her presence warmer.

“You should’ve known better,” she said gently, not unkindly.

“I did.”

“Then why didn’t you stop?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. She knew.

Her expression softened. “Luca did say the police would eat you alive.”

Will looked out the window, watching the cypress trees sway against the dusk. “Maybe he was right.”

“Maybe,” Mischa agreed softly. She smiled, sad and small. “But you lasted longer than he thought.”

He huffed a quiet laugh. “That’s something, at least.”

When the wound finally healed enough for him to move freely again, he drove into town and found a tattoo shop still open on Magazine Street. The artist, a broad-shouldered woman with kind eyes and half her head shaved, didn’t ask questions when he showed her the sigil.

He rolled up his sleeve, the antiseptic sting familiar now, and watched as the needle traced black lines into skin. A grounding rune — protection, focus, a promise to himself.

Mischa stood behind him, her reflection visible in the mirrored wall. Her voice was soft. “It suits you.”

Will flexed his fingers, watching the ink settle. “Let’s hope it works.”

Her smile reached her eyes this time, small but proud. “It will. You’ve needed it for a while.”

Outside, the air smelled of rain and magnolia. The city murmured quietly around him — rebuilding, aching, alive. Will pressed his wrist against his chest, feeling the pulse beneath the new mark.

He wasn’t sure if it was healing or surrender, but for now, it was enough.

--

The rest of 2006 passed in slow recovery. The world outside the bayou kept moving, rebuilding, but Will didn’t feel the need to chase it anymore. He lived off his savings, careful and quiet, the cabin slowly settling back into a rhythm that felt almost like peace.

The mornings were the best. Mist hanging low over the water. Scout bounding through reeds after frogs or ghosts of scents long gone. Will sat on the porch steps with his coffee, notebook balanced on his knee, and watched the sun burn gold through the cypress trees.

He wrote.

Not all at once, not easily, but enough.

At first, they were small things — notes on profiling, essays about emotional resonance and behavioral instinct, the kind of academic writing he could send to his alma mater without too many questions about his “hiatus.” Then came the bigger project — the one that crept up on him. A novel. Maybe a confession. He wasn’t sure yet.

The protagonist was a detective — tired, lonely, half-unraveled by empathy and duty. A man who understood everyone but himself. The story didn’t move in straight lines; it drifted, looping through memory, guilt, and fog. He wasn’t writing to publish, not really. He was writing to see what might still be left inside him.

He tried journaling too, at Mischa’s insistence.

“It helps,” she said, perched on the counter one evening, flipping through one of his notebooks.

“You never read what you write,” Will countered.

“Because it’s mine,” she shot back, smirking. “Yours is for posterity. Or therapy. Whichever comes first.”

He laughed — a rare sound lately — and went back to writing.

Some nights, she stayed up with him, her translucent reflection curled beside the lamplight as she scribbled longhand on paper that never quite stayed solid. Other nights, she vanished for hours, claiming she was visiting her brother or keeping an eye on Luca. When she returned, she never said what she saw — just hummed softly as she drifted across the porch rail, watching the bayou breathe.

Scout was the most predictable thing in Will’s world. He learned new tricks, chased dragonflies, and trotted proudly home with sticks twice his size. On lazy afternoons, Will took him walking to the neighbors — older folks who still remembered Russ Graham and told stories about him between cups of chicory coffee. They asked after Will’s work, his father’s boat, his mother’s family. He answered when he could, listened when he couldn’t.

Joe called now and then — never about the job. Just to check in.

“Y’all eatin’? Keepin’ that mutt outta the crawfish traps?”

“Mostly,” Will said. “You still raisin’ hell with the captain?”

“Always. Someone’s gotta.”

The calls were short but grounding, reminders that the world hadn’t forgotten him, even if he was happy to let it.

At night, when the air turned cool and the frogs sang from the shallows, Will sat at his desk with a candle guttering low and wrote until the lines blurred. The words came easier than he expected — not like speech, but like breathing.

Sometimes Mischa would drift close enough to read over his shoulder. “You made the detective too sad,” she’d murmur. “Give him a dog, at least.”

“He’s not ready for one,” Will would reply.

“Neither were you,” she said, smiling faintly.

He couldn’t argue with that.

By winter, the cabin felt like a living thing again — quiet but not empty, haunted but not lonely. The hum of the bayou replaced the city’s sirens, and for the first time in years, the silence didn’t feel like punishment.