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Living in the human realm is…an adjustment. The rain doesn’t boil for one; Hunter still finds himself flinching when the first few droplets touch his arm or cheek.
It’s…quieter as well. In all senses of the word. No roars from ten-foot-tall beasts playing tag, no chaos of the Bonesborough market this far into the suburbs, no clanging of metal masks. There aren’t inhuman screeches at night, the ones he’d gotten used to, curled in bed willing himself to sleep through the pain of bruises left from his latest mission. But it’s also quiet in the sense of calmness, there’s less to do – days stretch on instead of blurring together - there are fewer commands to be shouted, fewer orders to fulfill. Less of Belos.
It is an unsettling weight on his shoulders.
After it all, after Belos, and the Collector, and Belos again, after fighting for their lives over and over, after Flapjack, Hunter needed some time. A lot of time. So the human realm was a good choice, not only because Luz was here but because Camila was here as well, and maybe he needed someone to take care of him for a while. He’d never admit it, but it must have shown on his face, because after it all everyone gently shepherded him to Camila.
In the early days, Hunter woke up from screaming nightmares every night, sweat drenching his shirt, and a murmur in his heart he still swears felt like the flapping of very familiar wings. He’d sit still for a long moment, inhaling lungfuls of precious air before tiptoeing to the kitchen. Luz was always there, because she had woken from nightmares too. Nightmares that left her shouting her friends’ names hoarsely over and over, twisting her blankets into an impossible cage. Nightmares that made her whisper endless “I’m sorry”-s between sobs afterwards, curled tightly under Hunter’s arm. So they kept each other company in those early hours, spent time together. A lot of time. In the kitchen, hot cocoa from Camila in hand, scribbling glyphs or talking or sitting in silence in their own private thoughts, fighting silent battles, shoulders pressed against each other, anchors.
Luz taught him the little she knew about carving palismen, and the lot she knew about being strong. And in turn, he taught her that this type of suffering isn’t something that needs to be weathered alone.
-
Things were good now. Both of them can usually sleep a full night uninterrupted. They have fun watching old movies on the couch, making silly PowerPoints, talking about their favourite books. Luz can tell her mom about her misadventures at Hexside without getting a distant look in her eye for the rest of the day. Hunter can go outside and not break out into a cold sweat immediately, waiting to be ambushed at any second.
And if they do dip, and feel the crushing loss, the dread, they hold each other and get back up. It’s getting easier now, he doesn’t feel the adrenaline rush in the mornings, doesn’t disappear from his body when Camila asks him to do a chore. He’s managing, getting better. All his emotions are being handled. When he feels sad, he comforts himself, when he feels angry, he punches pillows, and goes into the forest to yell at the trees.
Except, except. Except when he wakes up some days and it feels like he is ten feet above his body. Except when there’s an emotion he can’t name whispering in the back of his mind, crawling and leaving it’s fingerprints there the entire day. When the shame and fear and guilt mix in his chest in a poisonous brew that makes him want to curl into nothingness, makes him want to go silent for days. But Luz is doing so much better, and he is too, and so he pushes through. Because the alternative is to stick his hands in that acidic mess and then have Luz stick her hands in too because she’s annoyingly noble, and that won’t do at all. He pushes it back because it’s not as simple as fear, and it’s not as familiar as grief, and he can’t find words to package it in, and honestly, it’s very inconvenient.
So it’s: not now.
Luz will be explaining some weird human homework she’s doing, and he’ll feel his uncle’s eyes on him, sticking to his back. Not now.
He’ll be gardening in the backyard – who knew tomatoes were so fun to grow! – and he’ll suddenly feel a sticky guilt shove up his ribcage, amorphous, disgusting, and he’ll think his hands will poison the soil with the blood on them. Not now.
Not now, it’s not convenient. He keeps pushing it out. Pushing it aside.
It’s always not now until he’s shoving a universe’s worth of feelings into a tiny box. It’s not now until he breaks.
-
Now, he heads toward the scrub of trees just in front of the Noceda house. It had just been raining, because it always was in this ‘season’ - something Luz had explained that maybe baffled him a bit still. He was doing ok. Or what passed as ok these days. He was acutely aware that if he were still the Golden Guard, still his uncle’s precious nephew, this would have been nothing. The Golden Guard was ready for anything, was used to walking on needlepoints, nursing his wounds in private and burying them deep. The Golden Guard would have found this a piece of cake. But he wasn’t the Golden Guard anymore. He was Hunter, a boy with powers and a dead palisman. He was very battered and very bruised and each day felt like embarking on another unsteady sea journey, possibly leaving him nauseous, always leaving him unbalanced.
He’d had a mild nightmare that night, something to do with Flapjack, and something to do with being pulled down deeper than a body should go underwater. And he’d shaken it off with prickling shoulders. He’d practiced this, and it was always hard, but he’d gotten better at it. Gotten better at stopping the nightmare from gnawing at his mind hours after waking up, days. Tracing his tattoo with a finger helped.
He can hear the birds gently singing in the morning, and the smell of fresh dew washes away the stale sleep-air about him. It’s nice.
This is his alone time, every morning. Before he’s ready to hear Luz speaking, demanding responses, before having to choose what to eat for breakfast, having Camila wait patiently, a clock ticking in his head. Hunter needs time. So much time. He always did, really. It takes him twice as long to reply to hard questions, questions about how he really felt, what was really going on. And choices are just as hard. So he takes some time in the mornings to gather himself. Breathe in the morning, and feel it in his lungs. The life of it. He loves the trees here, and moss, and green grass, he loves seeing the buds sprouting and growing and flowering. None of it asking anything of him. All he has to do is exist in this.
On his next deep breath, something catches in his throat. He can feel the insistent tapping at the back of his mind, begging to be heard. He tells himself to ignore it, not to bring out the nightmare and examine it. That the siren call is just that: seductive and dangerous and really not a great idea all-round.
He still does it.
Nothing will come of it, he knows, but he can’t help his morbid curiosity sometimes. And so he looks at it, re-lives it behind closed lids. Lets it circle round and round in his mind in a numbing vibrato, all the while begging himself to focus on the trees, focus on the leaves, and ignoring it all for thinking Flapjack should be here right now. If I wasn’t so careless he would be.
Deep breaths. Feel the solid ground under his feet. Feel the coolness of the green. He takes in slow breaths, fighting against the accusations his brain is making, against the noise. Stopping in the clearing he just walked into, trying to focus his thoughts on the present like Luz and Gus told him to do, and he really does try. Focus on the sound of the wind. Take four deep breaths. The leaves are looking blurry and unfocused, no matter how hard he squints at them. Deep. Breaths. He tries.
It never works.
Because, because. How is he supposed to fight his own mind? His own feelings? Isn’t that what ‘trust your gut’ is meant to mean? If his gut is saying that he is rotten from within, that this is all his fault, then isn’t that supposed to be true? It knots in his mind and stomach as he kneels on the grassy ground.
He’s supposed to have this under control, but it feels like his head is overheating with the overlapping thoughts and twisted reasoning and the bass notes of Flapjack, Flapjack, Flapjack. Running his hands through his hair to try to somehow slow the thoughts down isn’t helping. He can feel his breathing getting more uneven, but the knowledge of what to do about that is getting further and further away from him.
He can feel Belos' sticky hand on his shoulders. Can feel the weight of those antlers on his head all over again. It makes him want to claw at the places he feels it on. Makes him want to shake his body to repel them. And so he does, violently, because he’s alone and he needs the feeling to just stop.
And then the killing blow comes, because of course it does, because of course this isn’t anywhere near over. He’s down already, on the ground, grief and fear twisting him and then out of nowhere, a thought strikes him like a ringing brass bell.
I don’t love Luz. I don’t love Camila.
It feels like a cold inevitable dread catching up to him. Like Belos is holding his head under icy water. It feels like a claw is gripping the back of his neck, pulling his spine, infusing it with freezing electricity. It’s jarring enough to make him freeze, to make his back lock up straight.
What.
A few blessed seconds of shock before his thoughts kick in, in overdrive. It can’t be true. Right? It can’t. But the more he tries to run from it, the more his mind is saying it is true, the more his gut is twisting into that shape. He forces himself to think of them. Of Luz, laughing, calling him family, playing Monopoly with him, eating ice cream. Of Camila, bandaging his scrapes, falling asleep on the sofa while watching a movie, hugging him over and over. And none of the memories spark, come to life, make him feel warm. This is so much worse than he thought.
He’s sliding down a very steep mountainside, trying to cling onto anything that makes sense. But it’s not making sense. No matter how he spins and turns the feeling, it’s the same dull, cold, vertigo. And the more he does it, the more he pokes at it, the bigger the vertigo becomes. Maybe Belos twisted him so much he can’t feel love again. Maybe he came back wrong and without a heart. Maybe this means he has to move on to another family. Maybe… Oh god, how would Luz even react? Knowing he’s felt this? How could he be this ungrateful? He'd taken so long to build this fragile, beautiful understanding between them, and now he’s throwing it to the ground and beating it to a pulp. Just because. It’s enough to make him stop breathing altogether.
What is wrong with me? What the HELL is wrong with me?
Hunter can feel himself losing control, an animal panic taking over as he crouches in the clearing, trying, begging, to ride out this feeling. The grass is damp on his legs, but he barely registers it. It’s terrifying to feel this void. No matter how much he shakes his limbs, how much he whimpers, and sobs, he feels it there, latched on. He can feel it twisting in his mind, warping it into a new shape. He’s cursed to live like this, he’s certain, to feel this guilt and weight forever. It’ll never go back to how it was before. And whenever he sees Luz after this he’ll be reminded.
He stays crouched in the clearing until the sun changes its angle, until different birds are singing different tunes. If he moves from here, something deep within him tells him things will be worse, that people can’t see him like this, that he’s weak like this.
So he stays. His breaths coming short and his hands moving on the grass and his torso rocking him through unimaginable guilt. He stays until he can see the blades of grass again, and the dandelion in front of his feet gains focus. Stays until his breaths come more evenly, but with a new weight. Each one struggling out of his ribcage, twisting around the fear bubbling in it, the uncertainty.
What now?
“Hunter? Hunterrrrr?”
Luz.
Before he can scramble back into a shadow, run, hide, something, Luz steps into the clearing from behind him, voice rising with relief and excitement.
“Here you are! You missed pancakes for breakfast, but I think I can still convince mom to-“
Her voice falters as she circles around to him, taking in the tension warping his shoulders, his tear-stained cheeks. She stands there, for a moment, before dropping to the ground beside him. A moment of silence passes between the two of them. They’re so used to finding each other like this that it’s a well-worn comforting dance. She’ll sit in silence for a bit until it feels comfortable, and then she’ll prod at him gently in her frustratingly persistent way, and he’ll open up, and they’ll talk, switch places, rinse, repeat.
But now Luz’s presence doesn’t strengthen Hunter at all. It makes him shrink down further – the absence of warmth in him, the boulder of the thought he had pushing down harder by seeing Luz so ready to help. He doesn’t deserve that, not when he looks at her now and only feels a wave of dread, trying desperately to find the thread of warmth lost in the fear.
“D’you want to talk about it? Nightmare?” Her eyes aren’t on him – they often aren’t – and she’s fiddling idly with a blade of grass.
Titan, her openness hurts him. She has no idea. Her trust in him is radiating off of her, in the unguardedness of her posture, how she’s leaning back in a way that holds no tension in her muscles. How could he ever tell her what’s going on? It makes him shrink down further, it makes his voice die on his lips. He feels the will to talk plummet slowly down his throat, feels his mouth close up, his tongue stick to the roof of it. He doesn’t know if he can speak like this. He feels it would take a herculean effort to say anything.
So he curls up further, squeezing his knees, willing his body into the smallest space, willing it to expel the horridness within. His eyes squeezed shut to try and block out the cold waves lapping in his mind, the desperate grabbing and checking to see maybe this time, maybe this time, he’ll feel something, some gratitude, some warmth, some love. Always coming up empty-handed.
After what feels like moments, but must have been long minutes – time moves too fast outside his body when he’s like this – he feels Luz stand up reluctantly and pad out of the clearing. He does not open his eyes.
He is alone again, with these feelings tangling his mind. They keep gnawing at the edges of his thoughts, too big to face head-on. If he stays here, unmoving, maybe it’ll go away. Maybe it’ll go back to how it was. If he stays here for long enough, something will happen that is not this.
Soon he picks up someone else’s footsteps coming up from behind. He hasn’t moved an inch.
“Mijo?”
Camila’s voice is an arrow to the heart. She drops into his field of vision as she crouches down in front of him, warm brown eyes he can’t bear to meet searching his face. In some ways, this is worse than Luz. She took him in when he needed it the most, gave him food, clothes, a home. He owes her. If she knew what was going through his head she wouldn’t look so concerned for him. He’s still trying to grab onto any good feeling towards her as he stares at her shoulder. He is still coming up empty, only a vast frozen lake of fear and emptiness as far as he can feel.
“Hunter? Can I sit here?” She points at the spot in front of him, just after the dandelion. He nods, not really knowing what else to say, to do. Willing his heartbeat to just slow down.
They sit in silence for a while, Camila watching the treetops while Hunter continues staring at the dandelion.
He knows he should be making it better, smoothing over this whole situation, and a wild thing inside him is begging him to throw himself at Camila and ask her over and over if she loves him, if he is safe. But he can still hear the echo of Belos in the air, and it’s vibrating through his bones and he can’t concentrate. He distantly notices he’s shaking again, holding himself tighter, the shame bubbling up inside him.
“What’s wrong? Nightmare?”
She already knows the set of his shoulders so well. It should make him feel seen, understood, but it just makes him feel like more of an ungrateful monster.
“Want to talk about it? Luz seems to think it’s a real bad one this time.”
She wiggles her eyebrows to lighten the situation, and Hunter can’t help if something in his chest loosens a bit, seeing her hopeful eyes, her gentleness. She’s always so patient with him. Waiting for him to find his words when his uncle would just dismiss him if he felt he was taking too long, bringing him hot cocoa when he would wake up in the early hours, teaching him patiently to use the sewing machine in the basement. Her kindness is unfamiliar but it softens him, makes him feel warm for the first time in a while. Even when all he can feel deeply is numb, it thaws his base need to be cared for.
He lets out an involuntary laugh, and the feeling of letting go makes something inside him lose its footing, sends it slipping down an unfathomable landslide. He cuts himself off with a heaving sob.
She doesn’t know half of it, and it’s going to break her when she finds out. It’s enough to make his mind spiral again. Before he can cut the words out, package them and bury their bloody footprints deep in a corner of his heart, he gasps out.
“I just- I- I don’t want to lose you”
It’s all he can say without it being too much, and it’s already too much. Who is he to ask for affection now? Begging like a lost child, begging like a kid on a stone dais, grabbing the cream robes of a towering figure. Titan, he wishes he could wrench this frantic dread out of his chest and hurl it deep into the woods. Camila doesn’t need to deal with this, she needs to be there for Luz.
But he can’t stop thinking about how he’ll be alone after this, if he truly reveals what’s going on in his head. And as much as he tries to keep the threads under control, he’s unraveling. He can’t be alone again. He distantly notes that there’s a sound escaping his throat, a keening, a whimper, like a trapped animal.
“What’s going on honey? What do you mean?” Camila doesn’t move from where she’s sitting, but he can feel her lean forward a bit, soft eyes searching his face gently, voice unwavering.
His entire body is fighting a war: unburdening himself, letting go, confessing or keeping it in, protecting them both from the hurricane he’ll unleash. He twists his hands in the grass, puts his weight on them, drags them back and forth. The pressure is grounding, but he feels words bubbling up unbidden anyway.
“It’s- I’ve been having- thoughts. And I don’t know if they’re true or not, and they’re terrible, they’re-“ Titan, why is he saying this? Is this even coherent to anyone?
And before he can bite down on his own tongue, the rest escapes him in a messy, bloody rush.
“They’re telling me that I don’t love you and Luz. And- and- I just can’t bear it because what if they’re right? What then?”, he grinds out.
He knows he’s tightening his arms around himself, knows he’s rocking his body again. But he allows himself that, anything to get through this feeling. If he feels his uncle grabbing his arms to stop his movements, yelling at him to stay still, he ignores it, welcomes it, lets it mix with the shame and fear and hurt he’s already feeling.
“I can’t hurt you like that, and what if I’m wrong and I lose you? What if I change my mind? I don’t know if I can feel things correctly anymore, maybe I just can’t love- maybe I’m still possessed, maybe- I don’t know-”
Something has gotten deeply out of control inside him. Things that have been frozen in his heart are breaking – feelings that have calcified by how many times he has touched them in the past years, threading fingertips over them, locking them in place, quietening their howls. They’re breaking and breaking and coming out of his mouth.
“I- I feel like some strange experiment someone abandoned halfway through and I can’t- I can’t-“, he can’t finish.
The breath is being stolen from him, from the pressure and guilt settling on his chest. From the great end-of-the-world feeling that’s blanketing him. He can’t breathe. He hears himself pathetically wheeze over and over and over.
Camila’s eyes grow serious and tension mounts on her shoulders. She shifts from mother to nurse in a heartbeat. It’s in the efficient staccato of her next words, in the set of her jaw.
“Hunter, mijo, I need you to breathe.” She puts her hand to her own chest as if to exemplify.
He stares and stares at her, uncomprehending. How? There are horses galloping in his chest, there are stones on it. How do you breathe around this crushing dread?
She closes her eyes once, a steeling breath. Somehow there is still sunlight, somehow the birds are still singing. When she opens her eyes again he can feel them settle on his face, and her voice comes out gentle.
“Hunter close your eyes, ok? Trust me? Close your eyes and think of the trees around you, listen to all the birds. Can you do that?”
He does.
It’s dark, and he hears his breath struggling in and out of his lungs like a broken machine. His mind is racing and burning and drowning because he just told Camila everything. But he can do this. Someone is telling him what to do, and he can do it. Trees. He thinks of the forest around him, of the trees that have stood here probably for centuries. Their roots all tangled with the earth, holding it, cradling it.
The birdsong brings a sick little pang to his heart, but he wheezes through it, lets it wash over him. Dealing with that piece of grief, at least, he’s had practice. The overlapping chirps are a cacophony of the best kind: each song clear and individual, each existing at its own pitch, a frequency he can bear.
“Good. Now imagine you’re alone with these trees, just you and them and the birds. Feel them breathing with you, big steady breaths. All you need to do right now is breathe with them.”
A deep breath. He’s done this before with Camila, especially in the early nights in the human realm, where closing his eyes for more than an hour felt like a cosmic impossibility. She’d walk him through his breathing, manually resetting what his lungs couldn’t control. He wants to be better than this by now. Wants to be able to calm himself without it feeling like the painful reverse of drowning, but he does as she says because he is drowning.
Another breath. Everything starts fading into the background. He’s alone, and the trees are asking nothing of him. There’s still the cold dread at the back of his neck, clinging like a spider, but he tries so hard to force his breath through it. He can follow these instructions. He will follow these instructions.
Slowly, steadily, his mind drifts from the icy place it had stuck itself in, to the trees around him. Their rustling and the heady scent of forest cradle his thoughts. They are constants and yet so alive. Taking years and years to grow, to change shape, twist and untwist. He breathes. And breathes. And for a long while that’s all he does – thinking of roots, and bark, and leaves.
Camila’s voice gently brings him back to the clearing.
“Hunter?”
She hasn’t moved from where she had first sat down, something Hunter is grateful for. He’s too drained to do anything other than open his eyes, look at the stupid dandelion in front of him. Wait for judgment. It comes in a soft voice.
“Honey, I won’t pretend to know what you’ve gone through, but I do know that you are a wonderful boy. And the fact that you are so upset about this has something to say about how true those thoughts are.”
The words wash over him, and maybe it feels a little like forgiveness, maybe it feels like being given a clean slate, maybe it feels like someone has finally, finally, given him some solid ground to step on.
“There’s been a lot of changes, and you’ve been left alone to figure out who you are. And that’s so,” her voice cracks, “so, hard to go through.”
“But we’re here for you, Hunter, and I know that’s terrifying to hear. But we are. And we love you, and we’re not going anywhere.”
He can see her hand gently place itself palm up next to the dandelion, an invitation, an acceptance. He can see her soft brown skin, not bony, not ragged, not harsh, not corrupted. And for once, there are no alarm bells ringing in his head.
He takes her hand and holds on for dear life.
It feels like fresh air can finally enter his lungs. He’s here, and she is not running away. She pulls him close into a tight hug, his knees producing sad twin cracks from being in the same position for so long. He rests his head on her shoulder and lets silent tears fall into her big woolly jumper, feels her solid build hold him up, hold him steady.
It’s an intense overwhelming relief, almost too sharp to hold, to be told he is right, and good, and safe. Having that ugliness exist in the world - defined with clear edges, not blurred and twisting with other thoughts in his head – and having it be stared down and embraced and loved.
He knows it’s not over, and he knows the thoughts will come back to haunt and taunt and pester all over again. But he has this little ledge to cling to now, if anything else. Camila did not leave him here alone.
They sit in the clearing, embracing, for a few long minutes until the wave passes through Hunter. Until the warmth is steady in his chest.
“So, how about those pancakes?” she whispers.
And it’s nowhere near breakfast time anymore, and it’s completely ridiculous. But he sniffles out yes, beaming with his whole heart.