Chapter Text
Earth’s sky is shrouded in a billowing blanket of grey clouds, yet the air is still comfortably warm, so long as the wind doesn’t blow too hard and he keeps the jacket he borrowed from Luz zipped up to his chin. Though the layer of yarn that he’s absently working on weaving into an ever-growing multicolored blanket is also an efficient barrier against the occasional breeze characteristic of Earth’s spring season.
Camila calls it a thought quilt, or sometimes, when what troubles a person is really bad, it can be called a worry weaving. Something that you choose the colors for and the pattern is allowed to change depending on how you feel as you reflect on what’s troubling you. Requiring nothing more than yarn, a hooked human tool for the weaving, and a pair of small scissors, it is a simple, yet surprisingly effective, means for Hunter to channel his need to fidget as he mulls over… things.
When they had first arrived on Earth Hunter had thrown himself into assisting Camila around the house to support her, before quickly taking on side hustles cleaning out neighbors rain gutters, mowing their lawns, raking out fresh gravel for the driveway of The Big House at the far end of the neighborhood, and other chores. Mostly for older humans who couldn’t get the job done themselves nearly as easily anymore.
The big house paid very well whenever Hunter worked for them, though Camila strongly disapproved of the way the widow, Mrs. Williams, would insist on surveying Hunter’s progress from the porch in her swimming clothes, armed with an alcoholic human margarita and binoculars. She called Mrs. Williams ‘a cougar of the Mrs. Robinson variety’… to which Hunter still has no idea what that means but he was forbade from stepping foot inside the Big House without Camila there to protect him, and that he wasn’t to sell any more of himself other than cleaning the big backyard pool as long as Amity was there to help.
It honestly took Hunter a while, and a pointed hint from Amity (because Camila felt more comfortable explaining the situation to a girl), before it dawned on him that Camila was worried about prostitution. Amity was also the one to forbid him from resorting to prostitution upon pain of house arrest once Hunter mulled the thought over in his head a little too obviously, and she had almost instantly cottoned onto the fact that he was giving it some serious consideration.
Hunter still does not understand what the big deal was. At the castle he--… even if he was technicallyunderaged in the human realm, by State law he was at the age of consent, and it is not illegal to give “tips” to workers. Regardless, The Big House told all of her friends and it was extremely lucrative for Hunter to come around to other big houses to clean their pools, get cats down off of roofs, even water the gardens while they were away, and some houses had the sort of people living in them that Amity would let her guard down around and allow Hunter to go in alone for the occasional “last minute” emergency so long as he made sure to wear the illusion pendant that Gus was able to make despite casting magic on Earth being a little more tricky. Not impossible, but tricky.
It allowed them to make ends meet until they were able to find a way back to save Eda and the other kids’ parents, and Hunter felt good about being able to get away from his thoughts for a while, to no longer be Belos’s Golden Guard, or belong to Belos in any way shape or form.
But Camila had been told about Belos, and how he was once Philip the witch hunter, and eventually about Hunter being a Grimwalker. She worried he’d work himself sick trying to distract himself from Thinking About It, and the others, to give them credit, the others had really stepped up with taking care of the household chores. Gus in particular went out of his way to complete most of Hunter’s scheduled house maintenance so that Hunter had no choice but to get—try to get some sleep. Amity and Luz with their knitwear and quilting online shop, Vee already had a small part-time job at a record store, Willow grew a solid majority of their food, and spent so much time canning, and fermenting, and pickling that Camila now has a basement full of jars to get her through several winters of not needing to brave the cold to get to the store, and the Park household now has a pumpkin patch in the greenhouse.
He had the time, they made sure of that, to read the special audio meditation books that Vee lent him that helped her with healthy coping techniques to allow her to live normally while contending with own traumas born from being one of Belos’s imprisoned experiments. He fidgeted so much he feared he’d shake apart, despising being made to sit still when he itched to keep moving, keep from thinking too hard about how his uncle— he could still see the grove of broken masks behind his eyes, still feel the dripping slick muck of what was left of his uncle under his feet, the utter stillness of Darius’s unconscious body as he had to be dragged away… and they gave him a weaving hook, and a ball of yarn to help with the shaking, to just sit, watch Earth documentaries, and let his fingers fly over the stitches as he tries to quiet his mind so that he can finally find a moment of peace.
And then Camila went a thousand steps further. She found the money, somehow, to buy him thick academic books on the history of Puritans and the human witch trials, and a book- THE book- that just… it is a phycological study on the effects that grooming and isolation have on children who were abused, and detailed suggested methods to help those same children heal, it is a book meant for students getting degrees in mind healing, but for Hunter it just…
“It won’t hurt to be able to put names to the things you went through hijo. Understand it a bit more… have an explanation.” She had said. Not realizing how badly he had needed this. To have answers, even if they were imperfect, pieced together from historical accounts and compared next to lists of characteristics and methods that manipulative abusers, cult leaders, use to keep those close to them in line. It was something. It was An Explanation to Hunter’s frustratingly unanswered questions.
The very first attempt at a worry weaving had been messy, uneven, and more than once Hunter had to use the grey cotton material to wipe away stray tears as he watched documentaries on the Salem witch trials, the English witch trials, how utterly nonsensical and pointless they were, of neighbor turning against neighbor and… nobody who faced the noose were witches. Vee had done some of her own research so she knew how to use the human library online database and all of the people who were accused and hung were just ordinary humans, people who were already part of the settlement communities, or, more frequently, newcomers from England, or anybody who wasn’t part of a very specific extremist splinter cult based on an older religion, which in turn was based on an even older religion from the region where Earth’s earliest humans first learned how to cultivate agriculture, and-…
The second attempt at a worry weaving came out a bit better, though not perfect considering that Hunter had pulled the loops so tightly while attempting to make sense of the convoluted, and utterly incoherent belief systems of his uncle’s cult culture that the resulting weave sort of curled in on itself and soon enough Hunter found himself with a purple and pink circle instead of a square. Not to say that his research hadn’t been useful, it was confusing that someone as intelligent as his uncle actively chose to ignore the blatant evidence all around him proving his old believes wrong, but it did give an explanation for a lot of his uncle’s… “quirks” to put it politely.
The third attempt happened after they had to relive the traumatic experience of fighting and defeating the Emperor (for good) a second time, finding a way back, defeating the Collector and sending him back from whence he came, this time restrained by the Collector’s own kind to prevent him from ever coming back, and through the permanent portal to the human realm Camila brought back everyone’s stuff. Darius had swiped Hunter’s second attempt and fused it with abomination clay so that he’d have a “good enough” sunhat as he and the newly formed interim Inter-Coven Council set about ensuring that there would be a functioning government to see everyone through the rebuilding and consoling process post-Emperor Belos. Leaving Hunter, Luz, and King in the care of Eda and Lilith’s parents while the other adults worked on domestic affairs, as well as with Camila, because the human world has technology, and readily accessible information that the Council could use to provide the Isles with an online databank of knowledge that anyone could access or improve upon.
It was… odd seeing Dell Clawthorne. The family had always known that there had been a human ancestor somewhere way back, but to look at Dell and see so much of Caleb, of Hunter, in him was… Hunter was just speechless.
Caleb had a child, Hunter has both descendants and predecessors who are one and the same. A family that had been there all this time. His family! Not lost or killed by wild magic, but alive and well! Still going strong through the love that had been borne from Caleb and his Clawthorne wife!
Hunter spent a long time with his red and grey thought quilt in the Clawthorne family estate. Listening to family stories and curled up beside Luz and King while Vee and Gwendolyn experimented with combining Earth and Boiling Isle ingredients into something that both he and Luz could digest. Later, when Darius and Eberwolf had secured a townhouse in the Capitol and given Hunter his own room, he made the woven cloth into a nest for Flapjack and reverently set it up on top of a filing cabinet by his desk where Hunter can easily see it from nearly every vantage point in his room so that He can hold onto the feeling of sitting next to his adopted siblings while grandparents fuss over them over pumpkin pie topped with scream berry cream and wriggle fish tacos and cooked potato wedges.
He finds himself depending heavily on his weaving in order to keep impulse to fidget until he drives himself crazy at bay. It’s almost addicting how being given something constructive to do with his hands can relieve the near-constant bubble of panic in his chest, so he practices until he feels confident to go big for a proper thought quilt and not a circular piece that are appropriated to line Eberwolf’s sleeping basket. After all, Hunter has a lot of uncomfortable private things that he needs to think about, and making a blanket that is his and his alone feels less weird somehow. He associates his work with whatever he had been thinking about when he’d made it and some of the things he contemplated over feel raw, painful, and it is very weird seeing Ebberwolf snuggle up under a teal and blue woven yarn circle that Hunter associates with thoughts around the realization that, though it had to have been painful, his uncle had more control over his (apparently self-inflicted) cursed form than he had let on. That his human form had stopped being his ‘true’ form a long time ago. That the scars on Hunter’s body-… the things Belos put Hunter through in order to have the perfect protective big brother replacement when Belos could easily take care of himself…
It was just too weird. Better to have a personal blanket that would be stored amongst Hunter’s other bed linens. Whether or not it will ever be used is yet to be determined, but that is not the point of a worry weaving. It’s almost like a spell, but for the mind, a chant of prayers through the action of the hook and yarn creating something that is bound together with itself, trapping all of the pain and the confusion into each stitch, and best of all it will never give up it’s secrets. Giving Hunter the privacy he needs to look as normal as possible while he weaves and his thoughts turn over and over again. Nobody suspecting what goes through his mind.
And Hunter has a lot to contemplate these days. So there might be another quilt, and maybe even another once this one becomes too big to be easily transported from place to place.
Which brings him here. To sit at the base of the statues of his ortet and his uncle and think very hard about his existence as a Caleb improvement. Allowing his mind to ramble on all over the place without needing to concern himself with having a particularly orderly train of thought for the present moment.
He’d brought along a foldable chair for this occasion so that he could sit without throwing out his back. A side-effect of being reportedly the youngest Golden Guard in history. Even as an artificial construct his bones and parts of his anatomy are still very… human. Ironic that the same ingredients that gave him resilience against the heat of the boiling sea didn’t extend to gifting him the same resilience necessary for the soft tissues to withstand constant acrobatic use. Like the creature that came from the boiling seas who can swim and climb and move it’s whole life without getting a stiff neck just through the act of sunning itself on a rock.
It’s probably one of the many reasons why no previous Golden Guard lived to see old age. They kept being worn out and broken up until it hurt too much to move. There have been talks between the adults over the fact that he can’t stand sleeping in a bed right now. No one would have minded as much seeing as how some days of the week he stays over at Darius’s and Eberwolf prefers their basket, while other nights of the week he spends them with the Owl Lady where everyone constructs their own nests, but Hunter has managed to somehow hurt himself just through the act of sleeping alone, and he had no choice but to confess that right now beds made him feel as though he was going to sink into the soft mattress and suffocate for some bizarre reason that he can’t control.
To be fair, his nest at the Owl Lady’s house never gave him nearly as many problems, because Camila works in the human version of a healing coven and a beast coven, so she had known to give him the special pillows that she had used during her pregnancy, and the orthopedic friendly ones that her late husband had to use whenever he got an injury from his dangerous profession. Eda herself has a wealth of advice on how to deal with exhaustion and chronic pain from her own curse, and because the Clawthorne clan is a prominent palisman carving, sort of half-wild group that have often dealt with the very same creatures that Hunter is made from, he’s been given potions that help with his headaches, lotions that soothe the soreness of his abused hands, and Luz-the part-time Clawthorne- has been giving him swimming lessons, because the heat of the boiling sea along with the benefit of being weightless in the water feels really nice on his abused joints.
But Hunter doesn’t want to hurt Darius’s feelings by pointing all of that out. Sure, it’s not always as easy as it was with Camila, or even with Eda, those two always wind up finding out about things that Hunter is not even aware of as an issue and just… well not everything can be fixed, but they do their best to make things easier, or teach him the right words to describe the nameless… things… the things that he’s been going through but doesn’t know how to articulate them in a way for Darius to understand. That was his uncle’s greatest tactic to keep Hunter in line; to recognize the things that have been done to him and he had been carefully kept away from the words that would allow him to properly recognize that what was being done to him wasn’t normal or even something that he needed to run away from because making Hunter feel pain and fear is not how uncles are supposed to show love.
Among… other things.
Hunter pauses in his work with the yarn to stare up at the statue of his… origins. Looking bold and heroic, and nothing at all like the glimpses of him that he and Luz had seen in the Emperor’s mind, or the photocopies of the memory photos that he and Luz had extracted from their brains one night when Camila was pulling an extra shift and neither of them were able to sleep without her in the house to ward off the memory of his uncle’s monstrous form… stalking around in the woods… lurking in his former childhood home next door…
He shakes himself back to his original train of thought.
Hunter half suspects that his uncle had commissioned the statue of Caleb and him, given how wildly idealist the portrayal is in comparison to reality. It would be just like Belos to try to carve what his perfect older brother was supposed to be like out of stone, as if it would somehow make Belos’s conviction that his older brother was corrupted by the Boiling Isles for daring to allow his brother to have a life that didn’t revolve around Belos.
Caleb, the ortet, the… older brother who Hunter desperately hopes never knew, on a spiritual level, of what kind of things his baby brother liked to do with all of the copies he made of him. Terminating every grimwalker and starting over and over and over again until Belos could finally possess a version of Caleb that Belos approved of. One who would never ask questions, have a basic set of morals, or did anything that Belos didn’t want from them at any given time.
It is a cold, gnawing sense of wrongness knowing that Hunter was Belos’s favorite because Hunter both looks the most like Caleb, and, according to that one memory that Belos had taunted them with, Hunter was the only one who managed to become an expert at doing whatever Belos wanted without Belos having to spell it out for them. Taking whatever Belos felt like doing to Hunter at any given point in time without growing resentful, because Belos had been Hunter’s whole world and Hunter…
Hunter didn’t have the right framework to understand that he’d been conditioned to become invested in something that Hunter was both too young to fully consent to, and also was nothing but a lie, because just like with Caleb, when he was no longer what Belos had wanted from him he was thrown away. Entirely conditional. Not unlike how the Collector viewed mortals in general, just… not in a twisted child-like way, but in a very adult way.
An adult who knew exactly what he was doing. Knew that Hunter had zero knowledge of literally anything, and so he didn’t question anything until Flapjack began to gently point out that some of the things that he’d seen Belos do was odd, and prompted Hunter to begin questioning why his uncle kept insisting Hunter’s identity be kept a secret when at the same time he kept sending Hunter out of the castle on dangerous missions.
Of course Flapjack doesn’t know the fullest extent of what was going on yet. Maybe he suspects more went on in the Emperor’s personal apartments, but Hunter gets the impression that Flapjack may not have thought of every horrible thing that Belos might be capable of aside from the parts that came with ample evidence. After all, Hunter didn’t and still hasn’t found the correct words to describe certain things without sounding too vulgar, like a inarticulate child, or insane.
Though… to give himself some credit, long before Camila’s books, with their examples and definitions, and a comprehensive appendix, some semblance of clarity did have a way of creeping past Hunter’s absolute denial and left him… aware that some topics just should not be brought up around the other Coven Scouts. Belos may have had a lot of control over Hunter’s life, but it wasn’t perfect control. Belos needed Caleb to be his protector after all, and in order to do that Hunter had to go away from the castle for long periods of time for training and missions. Hunter himself often disobeyed Belos in order to desperately search for a cure to his uncle’s illness, and in doing so he did run into the fact that what was being done to Hunter behind closed doors of the castle’s innermost sanctum would end up with people trying to take Hunter away from his uncle if they ever found out about it.
Hunter… cannot know the full extent of what Belos’s relationship was with Caleb. That information died with Belos. Though Hunter is fairly optimistic that being the older brother had protected Caleb to a degree, and, hopefully, most of his younger brother’s more… troubling predispositions remained unknown to Caleb. Perhaps some of it only developed later on down the line as Belos had to dig himself deeper into his delusions in order to keep justifying to himself that he was still the hero and not the villain. Maybe by the time Hunter came along his uncle had lost the plot so badly that his delusion-addled brain had twisted what it meant to have a favorite Grimwalker beyond the original intent. How Belos could preach things like justice and protecting the helpless so ferociously, and yet… still have it in him to be so criminally evil.
Behind his sunglasses his eyes flick over to the statue of his uncle when he was a young man, not too much older than what Hunter was when he’d been made the Golden Guard by the looks of his face, despite the body having been carved to look like that of a man’s.
Lilith says that he used to have a beard that was so ugly it made it look as if Belos had a bunch of wooly rats stuck to his lips. That the slim elegant figure Hunter sees in Gravesfield was actually a smelly hermit that lived in a cave and only came out to terrorize towns like a pathetic cryptid who never got the memo that hewas the monster and not the civilized townsfolk he hurt. Luz drew him a picture once, and Hunter can’t deny that facial hair did not suit his uncle’s face.
A part of Hunter itches to gently rib the man for ever thinking that a beard was a good idea, another part of him is too terrified to even comprehend what sort of punishment he’d be inflicted with if he dared be so casual when uncle wasn’t requiring Hunter to be so familiar with him.
…And there is still a part of Hunter, the part that Hunter wants to scrub away, that lingers on his love for Belos. Despite how badly having context to what was done to him has soured how Hunter looks back on his own life to realize with absolute horror that it had all been a twisted mess of lies and loveless deceit. Thattwisted part of him still can’t help but think about a time in his life where he would have told Belos that he looked so much more distinguished and handsome without having an ugly rat beard hiding his smile.
Hunter wonders if previous Grimwalkers were treated to the exact same degree that Hunter had been, or if it had only been a select few of Belos’s favorites. If maybe some of them had done what Hunter was unable to do and through training or missions they were able to piece together the fact that what was going on at the castle wasn’t right at all and voluntarily fled into the forest, or tried to tell someone, or even tried to kill their uncle in order to make sure it would never happen again. He doesn’t know if it’s jealousy over not being special enough, or envy that the others actually had it in them to break away from uncle on their own. Belos having admitted that Hunter was better than the other copies doesn’t sit well given the irony that it had been Belos himself who severed Hunter from his life, not the other way around. Belos didn’t have to shove the truth at Hunter and Luz, Belos didn’t have to break the illusion that he’d constructed for Hunter out of spite for something that wasn’t their fault in the first place.
He could have easily spun the whole situation into his favor, make sure that Hunter would come back to him and Hunter would be none the wiser, and yet…
But that wasn’t the point of Hunter’s existence, the sigil was a failsafe in case Hunter didn’t automatically agree with Belos on everything no matter how much it deviated from the lies Belos told in order to make Hunter believe that they were doing what was right for the continued future of the Isles. …Arguably his uncle was worlds more tolerant of Luz being “a misguided human” than he ever was of Hunter, being only part human, but every bit of a child literally born from the Boiling Isles itself. A place where Belos could try to run from the consequences of his actions by creating the ideal Caleb that would never leave him. Fall at his feet and beg Belos to keep him around, to always allow Caleb, the perfect Caleb, to serve Belos’s every need.
Unlike the past Grimwalkers Hunter probably wouldn’t have fought back if Luz wasn’t in danger. Or may he would have? It’s hard to tell sometimes. He was so wrapped up in devoting every piece of himself to Belos that surviving that horrible night would have honestly depended on just how much he could stand being without a large layer of denial to keep pretending that his life was charmed and not at all a nightmare. To stay blind to all of the signs that Belos was not-… that Hunter was living with a monster, instead of having to live with knowing the true reality of it all, and struggle to come to terms with it like he’s having to do right now.
Turning his attention back to his yarn weaving, with the human name for the technique of using a hooked tool escaping his mind at the moment, Hunter steadily makes progress as he wrestles with knowing that he should be celebrating having the freedom to bury Emperor Belos and move on with his life without the man looming over his every waking and sleeping moments. He should be happy, relieved. He should be going out and doing everything possible to forget Belos ever existed! Heck, he’d done a modest amount of trying to do just that when he’d been the big house neighborhood’s pool boy!
Yet he can’t get himself to stop mourning the fact that his uncle had denied Hunter the opportunity to have an uncle. In the same sense that King and Luz get to have an aunt Lilith, or even in the same sense that Hunter currently has with the adults in his life. Complicated, but in a way that Hunter doesn’t have to bend over backwards to justify the nature of their interactions to himself, for the first time in his life he is with people that care about him and take care of him in all of the ways adults are supposed to do.
Which is another thing that Hunter struggles with. He has been told over and over again every time he tries to repay everyone’s kindness that adults are supposed to be the caretakers, the protectors, not the other way around.
And Hunter really doesn’t know what to make of it whenever it’s spoken out loud like that. As if it’s only now that people have decided that having a kid go through Emperor’s Coven training to become the Golden Guard is abnormal beyond measure. Only now do people call the Emperor out for how Hunter was treated. Only now are people sitting Hunter down and telling him that what he’s used to doing isn’t normal for a kid his age.
It’s… all so very… odd. Before, when Hunter had been the Golden Guard it wasn’t seen as bad. He was a prodigy. A spoilt prince. No one questioned it, even if they knew. No one called it bad or harmful. It was all…
…Normal.