Work Text:
On the day Philip Wittebane is born, the cattle grow sick.
As he grows, bad omens stick to him like tar. Harsh winters and crops failing. His was a difficult birth, and no child comes after him.
He first hears of witchcraft when he is two years old.
He grabs at something with the wrong hand, and Mother hits him. That, she tells him, is the sign of a witch, and he's already a devil-touched child. If he gives into that temptation, he'll surely fall to sin, and she might as well have him hanged there. He's dragged out to the old birch tree, rope far too long for any sort of execution tied round his neck and the branches. he's left there, until the cold hurts his skin, but he doesn’t cry. He sits quietly and recites what he heard at the sermons in his head.
(Caleb finds him out there, cross legged and calm in the snow, and unties the knots, brings him back into the warmth of the hearth. In the warm fireside light, he looks much how Philip imagines angels to be. Hair and skin so pale as to be lighter than the snow outside, silver eyes almost red, face kind and loving.)
Philip is a good child. He is obedient. He does not have to be told twice.
(He catches himself straying still, early on. When he is six, he holds his palm out over the fire until it blisters and burns and waits for it to scar. His fingers don’t bend properly without pain after that and it allows him to quash his sin before he commits it.)
Philip is still six when he first sees a witch hanged. It's done in the centre of town, and Caleb tries to cover his eyes, but he can still listen, the swinging of the body and choked gasps for breath. It doesn’t scare him, it doesn’t excite him, it doesn’t make him feel anything.
He doesn’t feel much of anything at any time, really. Perhaps it is because he really was devil-touched. He does not know how to smile or laugh, not until Caleb teaches him. He does not talk much, apart from single words. He does what he is told, to the letter, not out of any affection for Mother or Father but simply because that is what he is told to do. He spends whatever time he can reading the Holy Book. Caleb gets him more literature but he finds it hideously boring.
He is a good, obedient child who does not act out, but he is too much of one. He keeps his eyes down, never cries, never speaks until spoken to and even then often rarely replies outside of a nod or shake of the head, eyes still fixated on his work or his dog-eared Bible. He hears the town compliment Father on having such a well behaved child, not like the other one. They do not know that Philip is not good, just incapable of bad. Perhaps he is touched by something more holy than the Devil.
(He just wants to be like everyone else in the town. He doesn’t want to be on those gallows. He doesn’t want to be a blight. He doesn’t want to be a question mark. He tries so hard to copy everyone else, to be like them.)
Caleb approaches his nature with a saintly patience, no matter what it is. Despite being his opposite, loud where he is quiet, emotional when he is empty, sinner when he is saint, he gives nothing but unconditional love, unlike Mother or Father. When work is done, when Mother and Father aren’t watching- because, of course, they wouldn’t approve- they go out into the forest and Caleb teaches Philip the things adults would not want him to know. Mostly, he teaches him fun.
Caleb always asks Philip what game he wants to play. It's always the same. Witch hunter. Sometimes, Philip is the witch, sometimes it's Caleb, but most of the time they hunt for invisible witches out in the forest together.
With Caleb, Philip feels free. Of course, he is not, eyes of God always upon him and Mother and Father not as oblivious as he’d hope. Caleb always takes the blame, and as the boy who falls asleep during sermons, who can't ever stop talking, flaps his hands and rocks back and forth and makes strange noises, takes to womens work like duck to water yet seems utterly hopeless on the matters of the theological, he’s usually the one to get the punishment. sometimes Philip is forced to watch the beatings. sometimes, he isn’t allowed, and Caleb always is quieter than usual those days, more bruised, and Philip clings to him and doesn’t let go because it is the only thing that makes him smile again.
Caleb's smile is infectious, his laughter, his babbling. Around him, only around him, Philip can copy it. It feels like a poor mimicry, but it feels different to the numb he's used to, and he likes it. He learns to copy it away from the games, learns to get his way with a smile and a kind word the way Caleb already mastered, but it doesn’t feel the same.
They never end up catching any witches, but one day, when Philip is eight, they find a cat. Imagining it's a witches cat, Philip hits it again and again and again and again with his stick, until he is covered in blood and other things and the yowling and clawing stops and Philip feels powerful. Caleb asks why he did it, looking queasy. “Because I could,” Philip says, and it does not make his brother react in the way he would like.
He learns to get better at that. He does not want Caleb to leave him, so he learns the things to say that make him refuse to. The things to do. It gives the same sort of feeling as the cat, and Philip finds he likes this feeling too.
During work one day, Caleb takes the time to carve out a wooden mask from leftover oak, blank-faced and horned. It is a gift perfect for a cursed thing such as Philip. He likes to imagine that with the mask on it can store his sins, and as such he can take it off to become normal like he always wanted. Useful. Obedient but not too quiet. Whatever a human should be.
It's not that he doesn’t have doubts. Privately, he finds the ideas he hears about the women to be quite frankly ridiculous. Mother had always been more iron-fisted, more determined than Father ever was, and they say Caleb is practically a woman in their whispers, and he's superior to anyone in this town. He hears worse about sodomites, and, well, Philip's not naïve, he sees how his brother gets breathless at the sight of another boy as easily a girl, and if God would damn Caleb for that it would not be the God Philip worshipped.
But just because there may be things wrong does not mean that Philip would throw out the good with the bad. Why would things be like this if it weren’t in some way good? It must be him who was the problem, when he stood out tugging on his hair and not speaking and getting lost thinking through the scriptures in his mind. He gets his own share of discipline when he doesn’t manage to quell the devilish behaviour in him, even as Caleb begs mother and father to punish him instead, it was his fault for being a bad brother, and he walks with his own share of bruises sometimes.
Caleb cries and screams and curses whenever he is punished, but Philip just stays silent, obedient. He thanks Mother and Father for setting him right each time, even if he does not feel improved by it. He has learnt it makes things easier next time.
(When he chops wood, he imagines the logs as Mother and Father's skulls. If he could cleave through them, perhaps he could run off with Caleb and they should never have to be apart. No, that was merely a childish delusion. Philip is ten years old, and he tells himself to never think of such things again.)
He still plays witch-hunter with Caleb, of course. Witches are not a childish delusion, no more than the Devil himself is. He views it as training, for when he grows up he vows to kill all witches. Caleb laughs at that, says he won’t believe it until he sees it, and Philip promises he'd drag Caleb from his very grave to see it if he needed to.
He means it.
The two of them keep each other’s secrets. Caleb keeps his mouth shut when Philip burns half-carved furniture, transfixed by the dancing flames. He likes to imagine them as a witches pyre, like he hears they do back over the seas. He doesn’t know what it’s like, outside of the Colonies, but he hopes they have the same caution as here. Philip keeps his mouth shut when Caleb sneaks out in the middle of the night, returning hours later with clothing askew and face flushed.
(Once, instead of leaving, he catches Caleb trying on one of Mother's dresses. When in the woods the next day, he asks if Caleb really does want to be a woman, his sister and not his brother. In the space away from eyes, he would call them as such without a care, as either way they were his beloved sibling. Caleb shook his head. “I feel like a piss-poor man,” he admitted, tongue as vulgar as he pleased, “So I tried being a woman. I don’t think I'm either.” Philip shrugged. He understood that. Both the role of man and woman seemed equally foreign to him, but if people expected him to be a man he'd play along.)
By the time Philip was twelve, they'd settled into a careful routine, one he was comfortable with. One he didn’t expect to be shattered so quickly.
It happened in the middle of the night, where Caleb shook Philip awake. This was abnormal, for Philip normally didn’t sleep. That alone should have been a sign of the worst, but Philip had almost forgotten he was a bad omen.
“There's something I found I think you'd like to see, brother,” he said. “Come with me!” and Philip followed, because he'd follow Caleb into the depths of Hell if he'd asked.
They walked deep, deeper into the woods than they ever had before. Philip held onto his mask tightly. Perhaps it could protect them in the dark.
When they came upon a clearing, they finally saw what Philip first thought was a girl, red haired and scandalously dressed, freckled face looking to be the same age as Caleb, seventeen or so. And then she twirled her fingers in a circle, and fire danced in her hands, and he realised this was a demon. A tempter. A witch.
“Don't worry, we're safe,” Caleb whispered, a look in his eyes that wasn’t horror. “She's not like what the scriptures say. I think she might be blessed by God, not Satan, for what she does are surely miracles and not curses.”
Philip might not be naïve, but Caleb was. Poor, poor Caleb, taken in by a tempter, his innocent soul at danger by no fault of his own. The only thing to do to save his soul would be to eliminate the thing in the shape of a human. Spare the rod and all.
Philip followed his spell-bound brother, but he had no plans of ever becoming entranced like he. Instead, he curled his hands around the mask, and quietly prayed for his brothers salvation and the strength to do what he must.