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“Wiiiiiiill! William! Where are you? Are you in your room? Tide told me to tell you that tomorrow is your day for laundry!” Dakota shouted down the hallway, on a quest to find his ghostly friend.
He’d texted him and had searched the bottom floor and was now kicking the bathroom door open, calling for him. He peered into Vyncent and his rooms since they were first down the hallway and he wasn’t there either.
He’d left to go to the convenience store about an hour ago and Dakota knew he came back because his busted converse were sitting with everybody else’s shoes next to the door but it was sort of unlike what he’d seen of William’s behaviour so far to not let anyone know where he was going or where he was.
As he approached the other boy’s door he saw that it was cracked open slightly and the light was on. Found him! He kicked the door open and opened his mouth to announce his presence but he cut himself off when he realized that the other boy was in the process of shimmying into his boxers. He screamed and Will turned around, yelling at him.
“AH! AHHHH!!”
“Dude! Get out! I’m changing!”
“Shit! Sorry Will!” He slammed the door shut, a strong grip on the doorknob keeping it closed while a blush settled over his cheeks. He stayed there while he heard the rustling of clothes on the other side, and a thought entered his head. Did William have tattoos? Not that he was looking! But before he was shooed out his eyes had caught black lines covering Will’s shoulder and more on his thigh.
He heard an awkward cough from the other side of the door and a soft “you can come in now!” right after. He loosened his grip on the doorknob and pulled the door open slowly, peeking into his room.
“Sorry for not knocking, sometimes I forget that people who live together typically close their doors when they don’t want them to be opened.” He mumbled while staring at the carpet of William’s floor to avoid his embarrassment though his words were sincere.
“It’s fine, you just caught me by surprise was all, and you don’t have to hang out just at the door you can come in,” He brought his eyes up and William gestured for him to come in. He had pulled on a pair of black jeans littered with rips on them and he was in the process of pulling a grey shirt over his head. “What do you need?”
The red-haired boy’s eyes wandered around the rather plain-looking room, taking a moment to stop and look at the few posters and decorations Will had put up since he got here a couple of weeks ago. “Oh, Tide was just telling me to tell you that tomorrow is your day for laundry rotation.”
Will nodded, and an awkward silence hung in the air. Dakota generally didn’t care whether things were awkward with people or not because he was great at conversation, but for some reason it was different when he was around William. The boy finished putting his shirt on and stood equally as awkwardly with the clothes he changed out of in his hands. “Soooo, was that it or–”
“Do you have tattoos?” Dakota blurted out, looking surprised with himself. William’s eyebrow raised and he narrowed his eyes at him.
“If I say yes, are you gonna get all weird and preachy on me about how my body shouldn’t be tainted and all that bullshit?”
Dakota shook his head quickly, putting his hands up. “Whatever you do with your flesh vessel is your own business bro, I’m just curious, you’re 16, right? How’d you get them?” Will seemed to let out a breath he didn’t seem to know he was holding, relaxing his tense posture a bit at Dakota’s very neutral reaction.
“I–Um, yeah, I’m 16, I have a couple and I got them from a friend back ho–I mean, Deadwood.”
“Can I see them?” If Dakota cared for social cues at all he may have been a little more worried about coming off too forward, but he was very curious. He sat down on Will’s black-and-blue bedsheets with spiderweb patterns on them, looking at him with his ‘Dakota puppy eyes’ according to what Tide called them. Will hesitated to answer, looking not quite uncomfortable but more unused to the idea of someone praising him for the art he chose to put on his body who wasn’t one of his UPG friends from back home.
He mumbled something about needing to be more confident if he was going to be a hero and hesitantly nodded, sitting down next to his new teammate. “The first one I ever got was kind of stupid, I was obsessed with ghosts and the paranormal as a little kid so when I was 11 I looked it up on the internet and gave myself a pretty shitty stick-and-poke of a sheet ghost on my ankle,” he rolled up his pants to just above his ankle, showing off a very messy and faded patch of ink that very vaguely looked like the shape of a ghost.
“The next two I got on my 14th birthday and I actually really like them,” he shifted his pants on one side to show a tattoo of a maw of sharp teeth on his right hip and stood up for a moment to pull the other side of his pants just enough to show off a compass with a chain that formed a heart on his left hip. “I really like vampires so I got one on one hip and a compass on the other as a matching one with the old friend that did it—I had to keep them in places where my parents wouldn’t see them so I got them on my hips so I could hide them with pants.”
He sat back down and lifted his shirt just up to the middle of his ribs and there sat a drawing of a snake coiled around itself, nestled just below his chest. “This one’s my second favorite that I have, I did admittedly get this while I was incredibly drunk close to my 15th birthday but it surprisingly turned out really well. It’s Valerie, the ball python I had for most of my childhood.”
Dakota reached out and touched it which William responded to by flinching and jumping back, almost falling off his bed.
He quickly apologized to Will and took his hand back to give him space, vividly remembering all of those times his aunt had explained to him how certain actions can be interpreted in different ways then he intended them. “Sorry! Sorry, sometimes I forget that other people don’t like getting touched—I haven’t been around people my age in a long time, can I touch it?”
Will held his breath, and hesitantly scooted back to where he was sitting. “Uh…Yeah, sure? it’s okay, you just surprised me.”
Dakota reached out and was immediately aware of how cold the other boy’s skin was, definitely to an inhuman degree. He ignored that though and ran his fingertips gently over the snake’s body. “Woah,” he whispered in awe as he felt the texture, for some reason he thought tattoos would feel a certain way but it just felt like smooth skin. The hero-in-training was essentially cradling his chest. William was embarrassed at the way he leaned into the touch of a boy he barely knew but his warm hands were comforting.
He eventually pulled away again and Dakota quickly took his hand back and put it in his lap, rocking back and forth lightly as he excitedly waited to see if he had any more tattoos.
“Last two,” he stood up, pausing before he continued. “I have to take my pants off for one of them, you’re not gonna be weird about that, right?”
“Oh, I’m AroAce! Flirting is gross and I don’t do crushes if you’re worried about that.”
“…….Good to know.” He nodded and pulled his black jeans down on his right thigh and pulled up the side of his boxers where there was a beautiful drawing of a wolf skull from the side with the outline of the wolfs head over it. It was a large jump in quality from his other ones and almost looked professional.
“This one’s from last year and I found an apprentice who was looking for people to practice on and I told him I was turning 18 the next month and he never asked for ID, I think it’s fuckin’ sick, I love wolves.”
He continued to rock back and forth, “You are so much cooler then I thought you were!” William looked at him, a little confused on whether to be offended or feel complimented so he chose to ignore it, turning around and slipping his arm out of his shirt.
“Besides the one on my rib that I didn't really think about the placing of I try to keep them all out of view but I always had a very specific vision for this one so I said fuck it and vowed to only wear T-shirts that covered my shoulders and chest until I turn 18.”
The last one was considerably larger then all of the other drawings on him. It was a longsword with roses that intertwined in front and behind the blade, the vines coming together to cover the hilt that rested just above his bony shoulder blades and the actual blade of the sword running between them and stopping just above the middle of his back. “That's beautiful,” he whispered; he’d been on his own for so long that things like tattoos only existed as a concept to him, not an actual thing on someone’s body. “Can I touch this one?”
William’s shoulders visibly tensed, almost attempting to hide the drawing. Another long pause, and a small sigh that sounded frustrated.
“Don’t say yes if you don’t want to, I’m really bad at all the social cue stuff so sorry if I weird you out.” Dakota had long stopped apologizing to others for his own weirdness but he really wanted to connect with William, he was shrouded in mystery and strange behaviours and for the first time in a long time he actively wanted to have a friend who was nothing like him.
William turned to look back at him. “No—no, sorry for making you think that was directed at you. I got the tattoo because it covers a pretty nasty scar which I used to get made fun of for a lot so it’s just a little hard to believe anyone would find it….cool….you can touch it if you like, I need to get over that stupid fear.”
He reached out and touched his back like if he pressed too hard he might shatter like glass under his fingers. He admired the vines at the hilt that started just below the nape of his neck and the guard extended out on his shoulders and his hand flinched when he touched the rough uneven skin of scar tissue. It was blended so seamlessly over the tattoo that he didn’t even notice it, and he traced it over his back and down the length of the hilt. It was rough and bumpy, the skin was uneven and pulled at weird angles even though the scar itself was almost a straight line and it looked like it had either been infected at some point or reopened after the initial infliction.
“…..gnarly…is it a cross?” Dakota asked with curiosity, but he felt the skinnier boy’s back muscles stiffen over his hands.
“I don’t want to talk about it, please don’t ask.”
“Got it.” He stored that information away for later, noticing that just past the end of the blade were a set of tiny numbers and a word.
Romans 6:23. Weird, but he’d google it later.
He took his hands off and Will pulled his shirt back down, adjusting it and turning to face him again. “That’s the tattoo tour, I hope it didn’t disappoint—but please do keep it a secret.”
“My lips are sealed! I’ve noticed a lot about you and if I wanted to snitch I would’ve done it already.” He said completely earnestly.
“Like…like what?” Will asked nervously (almost panicky), grabbing the beaded bracelet on his wrist and twirling it.
“The first week I noticed that when everyone goes to bed you sit outside the windowsill and smoke, the second week I noticed that you were dead when you cut your finger while we were helping Tide and no blood came out, and today I noticed your tattoos. Before you freak out I’ll say it again: I won’t tell anyone because it’s none of my business, the only thing I ask is if you can smoke facing the opposite direction because I sleep with my window open and the smell makes it hard to sleep.”
Despite saying he wouldn’t tell anyone Will still looked mildly terrified, Dakota having just dropped 2 out of 3 of his biggest secrets he was currently hiding like it was nothing. “You really just….noticed? Like, completely out of the blue?” He questioned.
“It’s no secret that theirs something weird about me. When I was little a doctor told my Auntie that I was autistic but we couldn’t afford the price of occupational therapy and accommodations and before we knew it I’d lost her too and I was out on my own so I didn’t really ever think about it that much until I started interacting with kids my age and realized that I was different. Not good, not bad, just isolated from them. I didn’t know how to play their games or talk to them in the “normal” way that they wanted so I spent a lot of time observing people from the sidelines and I learned how to pick up the small details. People think I’m stupid or treat me like I’m 5 because I talk weirdly and am really energetic, but I use that to my advantage. Plus I like being weird, life is a lot more exciting when you choose to ask the weird ghost living in your house about his illegal activities then to sit in my room and pretend I know how to do math homework.”
His expression changed from mildly terrified to actually thoughtful, thinking about it for a moment. He even paused the twirling of his bracelet to process the words.
“I get it. I mean, I don’t get how you do it but the being weird part. Being an outcast kinda changes you as a person, I’d know being the only openly queer and sin-loving person in my small religious hometown.”
Dakota stuck his hand out, smiling widely. “High-five! To bring freaks!”
“…to being freaks.” William mumbled to himself as he completed the high five.
“I’m gonna go now because being inside small rooms too long makes me antsy, but it was nice to learn a little bit more about you Wispy, if we’re gonna be heroes that save the world together I want to get to know the real you.” Before he knew it Dakota was saying goodbye and walking out his door, shutting it and leaving him standing in his room thinking about how in 15 minutes he’d shared more information with a kid he met a couple of weeks ago then he had during the 10 years he knew the Unwitness Protection Program. His life seemed to never stop getting weirder.