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You decided long ago that the woods are endless. Mostly because, for all that you've walked, you have never found an end. Trees pass interchangeably, infinitely, but you only ever find the same few settlements, the same few handfuls of people. The Beast's fuel comes from strangers, wanderers, people who tumble in from non-existent edges and then discover there aren't any to leave by again.
It’s the hard end of autumn and as cold as winter should become. It has taken five hours of drizzle for the water to ruin the soil, and your march has become a trudge, slick mud rising with your feet every time you take a step like it’s trying to stick you to the ground.
You don’t mind it too much; for all that the constant squelch of your steps is unpleasant, your hat and cloak keep the worst of the rain off you and the lantern’s flame is safe in its glass bubble. Your left hand is the only part of you that's warm, anything further from the lantern's handle chilled and stiff, and it unsettles you how little you mind the cold; sometimes you have nightmares that you turn to wood. You pinch the skin on your arms, roll your flesh under your fingers to check it’s still soft.
The Beast hasn’t made a comment on the weather but he’s been quiet the last few days, as subdued as the woods wrapped in fine grey mists. You miss his songs and his words, but his presence hasn’t faded without them. You will never forget how easily the hand on your shoulder can coil around your throat.
He is a constant, and you take so much from him; his threats, his pain, his love, all to work his thorns through your brain and spike the right places for the responses he needs. One day you expect vines will rise out of you to make it easier for him to pull your strings. It’s a testament to how well he’s done so far, how little you mind the idea.
There are tracks in the mud, fresh by virtue of having not faded into the sludge yet, and you can read the direction from the splattered edges. “Follow,” the Beast tells you, voice reverberating inside your head as much as out, and you do. You plod through the chill and the mud along the trail of wobbling, laboured footsteps as it begins to get darker overhead, grey fading through to night. You can't feel your feet, but you don't need to stop. Somehow, you never need to stop.
You see the firelight just as it gets too dark to make out the tracks, and you drift towards it like a shadow, hanging back in the trees as the Beast taught you to do. There is a boy bent over a little campfire, doing his best to shield it from the rain, and you can see the shivers that wrack his body even from a distance, can see the wear in his coat and the mud up to his thighs.
“This one won’t be long,” the Beast murmurs, voice soft in your ear, “The rain will dampen his flame, and he will be ours.”
You nod and prepare to wait, because bitter wind and water will do for the boy with no intervention.You bend to cover the lantern but you tilt it wrong and he gets a glimpse of the light, stares and cranes his neck to try and make out your shape among the shadows. He’s lit up by his little fire, and you pause when you see his face.
There’s something you recognise in him, something foreign yet familiar that echoes back in you. It’s the haunted, hollow stare, the restless fingers and dark bruises pressed into pale skin, the intense, aching aura. His fire isn’t as bright as the one you carry, the bags under his eyes are deeper than yours, and you think the slump of his shoulders is worse, too. He is skin and bones and desolate shadows under his eyes, half-blue with frostbite and it's a wonder he's alive.
You straighten up, leaving the lantern as is, and the Beast notes your interest. “What are you planning?” he asks, and the amusement to his tone is his approval.
You say, “I want to meet him.”
The Beast is a nightmare but you're still enough of a boy that you can go where he can’t follow. It might be the furthest you’ve ever been from him when you step out of the treeline and into the firelight and leave him in the dark, and your shoulder is cold and bare where his hand should be.
The wanderer stands at your approach, reveals all his aches in the stiff bend of his knees, and stares guarded and wary and so, so tired. “Who are you?” he demands, and you think you see a glimmer of light over him, gold and malignant, but it’s gone as soon as you look.
“A traveller,” you say, and you can imagine the Beast’s laughter in the velvet rustle of leaves that follows the latest bite of the wind. The pull of the mud doesn’t slow you as you approach the fire, the heat is weak but a blessing and you miss your own humanity as your body wakes to crave the warmth. “Let me share your fire.”
He stares, but you guess he’s too weak to fight and his fire is sputtering without his ministrations; he doesn’t have the resources to contest you and you settle yourself in front of the rough campfire while he returns to desperately trying to stoke it.
A full minute passes, and his discomfort is clear and thick between you. You sit passively while he tries to judge you, and eventually asks, “What’s your name?”
“Wirt,” you tell him, because you still remember that much. “Yours?”
“Dipper.” He glares at you like his angry gaze is the last weapon he has and it’s still able to defend him. “What are you doing in these woods?”
You’ve never run into anyone who’s actually asked you that before, because it’s such an accepted part of the Unknown that everyone just is. But he’s waiting, and worse, he looks like he wants a real, logical reason. You tell him, “Because I promised I would stay,” but don’t take much satisfaction from the irritated twitch of his mouth.
There’s more left to him than you thought there was, he’s wasting heat and breath to speak and you’re impressed, really, and you want to encourage him, want to know more about this familiar stranger who’s destined to die in the woods. “Why are you out here alone, so far from shelter?”
“Because,” he starts, and stops with a shake of his head. You say nothing, and eventually the silence prompts him to try again for all that he’s struggling with the words; “I needed to get away from home, before… anything went… wrong.” For a second after he finishes, Dipper's eyes flicker yellow, pupils elongating - but he blinks, and it's gone without a shiver of response from him. You wonder if he knows.
You just nod, because it feels polite, and stretch out your fingers to the fire. You know it’s a mundane heat, no charm or soul tied to it, but it’s giving you a gift your lantern never has and you feel oddly fond of it. Dipper watches it, cracking the knuckles of his left hand, then his right, in careful order.
You are not a proper ghost of the forest yet, and while it takes you a while to recognise the empty rumble in your gut, you do eventually remember you need to eat. Dipper does not look like he has eaten in a week and you’re at his fire so it seems fair to share your food. There’s a little dried meat, prepared in warmer seasons when longer days meant more time, and it’s what you pick at when the Beast doesn’t feel like hunting for you. “Would you like some?” you ask, holding out a few strips.
Dipper eyes them and for a moment you wonder if he’ll refuse out of mistrust or pride or anything else less important than biological imperative, but he snatches them up, takes a tentative bite, and then your suspicions are confirmed as he shoves dried meat in his mouth, starvation overwhelming every lesser urge.
You eat your share more slowly, pass over a few more pieces when Dipper’s done, and wonder if the Beast will mind you prolonging your prey’s existence. You suspect he won’t, not while the lantern is as full of oil as you keep it. The season’s turning to winter soon, anyway, and you will be spoiled for edelwood and he can thrive.
“Is there more?” Dipper asks. You shake your head, a brief refusal – your stores won’t last forever – and for a second he looks actually angry, golden eyes gleaming with entitlement, but it passes and they turn back to brown and he nods in some façade of understanding.
The rain fades to less than a drizzle, though the drip of water doesn’t quiet down. Every so often, you can see Dipper’s head snap sharply to the side as he tries to track something just out of sight. You’re so used to the Beast that you think you can sense him as his shifts around, and you don’t laugh at Dipper’s attempt to follow him through the shadows. The night is so impenetrable that everything outside of the little circle of light might as well not exist.
His weak little fire eventually starts to fizzle, and you’ve become so accustomed to the warmth that you don’t want to spend the night without it. “Wet wood won’t catch properly, but I can chop more,” you offer. He looks at your axe as though it’s the first time he’s seeing it, and he scowls like he’s mad at his own lapse in judgment in letting you near.
There is no denying the dying fire, though. He opens his mouth, but his answer comes out as a distorted echo, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.” His grin shows more teeth than you’re used to seeing, and he clicks his fingers, gas-flame blue overtaking the struggling fire, burning hot and bright and eating up the last of the wood without weakening.
As soon as his pupils thin, Dipper looks sickened, buries his face in his hands. You give him a moment, scavenge some sodden branches from the undergrowth and throw them to the blue fire just to be proper, and you consider Dipper carefully. You’d known the two of you were alike.
Pity wins out in you first, and you circle the little clearing, drop down beside him. The tree he’s sitting under has him mostly dry, and you’re not sure if the shakes running through him are still from the cold. “I could teach you how to make a fire properly.”
He doesn’t respond for a moment, and you wonder if he’s thinking the same thing as you – that there’s not much point teaching him anything, not now – but he straightens up, shrugs his agreement.
You show him how to stack the branches properly, emphasising what the best way to light the fire would be if every bit of wood in your demonstration wasn’t sodden. He tries to copy your example, but his hands are unsteady, too rigid from chill, and the pile he builds collapses.
"My sister would be better at this," he says with a strange, shaky laugh. He doesn't look at you and you're not sure if that means he's not talking to you, because social norms are a very distant memory, but he glances at you sideways and tries to smile. He fails, expression wobbling, looks away.
You hear a heavy inhalation, but he manages to keep himself together, and you’re impressed. A few more steady breaths, and then he turns back to you, looking determined to distract himself, and asks, “Do you have family?”
You get a weird sense of discomfort, the feeling of something that you have deliberately avoided thinking about for so long that you’ve forgotten the original reason to forget. “It doesn't matter.”
"How can it not matter?" he asks, and you’re taken aback by how disgusted he sounds with you.
"It just doesn't," you say. You don’t tell him that you lost that kind of memory long ago, and he fumes, body heat clearly the only reason he’s not shifting away from you.
There’s a rustle louder than the others, the hollow whistle of wind sounding loud and despondent from the dark behind you. Dipper shoots up, but you’ve heard the breeze hit the Beast enough times to turn more sedately, get the briefest glimpse of two burning eyes before he blinks and becomes invisible.
“What is that?” Dipper asks, and it’s the first time you’ve realised that he doesn’t have a weapon, but is still fragile and human enough that he might need one. Whatever’s in him flickers, a hazy burst of blue and gold, but it doesn’t linger and the Beast doesn’t reappear.
You tell Dipper, “That was the Beast,” thinking it may ease his nerves, but it just has him rounding on you with that same tired suspicion you faced when you first stepped out of the treeline.
“And what,” he asks, stressing each syllable as though a clear question will produce a clear answer, “Is the Beast?”
"He's the Beast," you supply unhelpfully, because you do not actually know and you haven't ever needed to question it. "I fuel his lantern." The boy's eyes light on the lantern beside you, but you do not hold it up to show him better. It's too precious to be a curiosity. "And, your demon?"
He blinks wide-eyed, like he didn’t think you’d know, like he doesn’t recognise himself in you. But it relaxes him again, the strangest admission bringing him some kind of calm. Maybe he likes to know he’s not the only one being consumed. "Bill," he tells you, and you're surprised to hear a name. "Bill Cipher. He... I made a deal with him."
"What for?" you ask.
He shuts his eyes, shakes his head. "For myself," he mutters, and you don't know if he means what he gave or received but you don't think it matters. “Now he keeps trying to get in my head.”
“I think he’s in your head,” you murmur, “I think he’s trying to get out.”
Dipper gives you a long, dead stare, and you realise that nothing you could say to him could scare him worse than what he has thought of himself.
The blue fire does not burn low, and you think it’s the heat and the food that made you human enough to need sleep as well. It’s a comfort to you, knowing how near the Beast is, but he’s still part of the unknowable dark to Dipper, and he doesn’t shift away from you even as you both lean back against the tree. The night chill promises to keep everything damp until the next rain can start, and the feel of soft person instead of gnarled wood against your side is odd but welcome.
You spend the night with your cloak swept over Dipper's shoulders, pressing him close against you to try and keep him warm while he shakes and breathes little puffs of frost onto your collarbones.
You don’t sleep often, but it’s always the same dream when you do, screeching metal and over-bright lights and absolute, overwhelming fear. You wake at the end with your heart racing, and it’s so alien, you’re a part of the woods and have nothing to fear, but it feels like you did, once. The Beast normally calms you, but for the first time it’s not him beside you after a dream, it’s Dipper, still clinging hopelessly to your warmth and dreaming some fearful thing. His eyelids flicker constantly, his fingers twitch, and it’s harder to make out in the early morning light but you think he’s haloed in gold once again.
You leave before he wakes. For an odd half-second of sentiment, you almost left him your cloak, but you don’t, of course, you need it more. You pick up your axe and your lantern, skirt the fire that never went down, and you slip back into the trees.
The Beast is at your side in a heartbeat, hands sliding back into place on your shoulder and hip, almost constricting tight and you missed this, the steady touch and the pressure, and the smell of the forest wrapping you up and encompassing you once again. You feel like a ghost, and you feel invincible, and you lean against the Beast as he slowly starts to steer you away.
The grey sky trembles, and you feel a fleck of water hit your nose. The night felt long enough that the morning seems bright and strange, but there’s still work to be done. There are no footsteps to follow in the soft ground, but you heft your axe and follow the Beast. You move away from Dipper, and you picture him waking alone, blue light glinting in his tired eyes, picking himself up and stumbling off into the woods.
“Will he become an edelwood?” you ask.
“It depends,” the Beast replies, and you missed his sonorous rumble so keenly, “on which spirit wins in him.”
You think that if you find him as an edelwood, you’ll leave a marker where he lay. You know his name; you could do it. Commemorate the only other boy you know with a beast burning in his head.
You’re glad you stopped to speak with him, and you’re glad the forest swallows you whole.