Chapter Text
Sometimes, Huey still dreams of his first love.
She was the young woman who lived next door—she may have even still been a girl by some standards. She can’t have been more than a few years older than Huey himself, but to a ten-year-old boy whose life had not yet been touched by disaster, she seemed mature and kind and perfect enough to idolize. First, he loved her like he might have loved an older sister. But when the witch-hunters took his mother, she opened her arms to him as he sobbed, and the warm, sweet embarrassment he felt in her embrace may have been the stirrings of something else.
A week later, he watched blood drain from her face in terror as his mother spoke the words that would tear the village apart:
If it pleases the Inquisitors, if my innocence is proven, let it serve as proof that every man, woman, and child who accused me or testified against me participated in the Witches’ Sabbath I saw.
His mother, innocent of witchcraft, drowned with a smile on her face.
All but the barest handful of the townspeople were seized before they could leave the town square.
His neighbor, who had fed him over the past week, and washed him, and made sure he slept—who had wiped all his tears and promised him that the inquisitors would soon realize their mistake and bring his mother back to him—was bound and carried off before his eyes. A few days later, he watched her burn, her eyes wild with pain as the flames made their way up her body. Not a single sound escaped her throat.
He doesn’t dream of the rest of the village anymore. The nightmares of his mother, stripped to the waist and bleeding, faded away years ago. He no longer has night terrors in which he is accused, found guilty, and fed to the flames under the light of his mother’s final, gentle smile.
But sometimes he catches sight of his first love in a dream, and instantly he is ten years and a week old again with the world’s treacherousness laid out before him for the first time and he shouts after her why, why; but whether she is smiling or whether her face is contorted with fear and pain she never answers him before she fades into the rest of the crowd and he shudders awake to find his whole body coiled and sore.
These days, though, he wakes up beside Monica. Sometimes she’s awake already, tracing his muscles with her deft fingers, trying to smooth away his tension. More rarely, she is still asleep, and he has the opportunity to watch her like she’s always watched him. He considers those times a blessing. Maybe in another decade or so he’ll let himself do so while she’s awake, too.