Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The red sets her off.

Hannah’s never really liked the colour, but this is the first time she’s had a particular reason for the aversion beyond abstract disinclination.  There’s just too much of it, all confined to tidy, large-font stamps of Past Due or Final Notice against once-white envelopes, and, for a second, she can’t see past the colour.  She’s not supposed to see these --- they’re tucked in one of the hiding places Lex thinks she doesn’t know about --- and she almost wishes she hadn’t because she knows what they mean.  Not in the literal sense, though she knows that too, but in the sense of what it means for them.  Knows that it means Lex is going to be worried again.  That she’ll be working more.  That she and Ethan will fight again.  That maybe --- if worse comes to worst --- they might have to move again.

Her hands tingle as she slips the too-thick stack of envelopes back into place, as she slides the drawer shut again, as she curls them into fists and presses them against her eyes to try and drive the images away.  She pretends it’ll work --- pretends it’ll make the red go away --- pretends it doesn’t keep lingering, lurking at the corners of her vision when her eyes are open and stamped behind her eyelids when they’re shut.  She’s always been good at pretending --- that’s what people tell her, anyway --- but that doesn’t clear her vision, doesn’t even get a flicker.  Maybe it’s because she can’t stop thinking about them, visualising that mound of white parchment stained with red ink, worrying about what they might mean.

This, Hannah knows, is why Lex didn’t show them to her in the first place.

She’s crying.  Not because she’s sad: just frustrated.  They’ve finally gotten a good thing going and it’s slipping away again and it’s just not fair.  She doesn’t want to move again.  She wants to stay right here, in the admittedly tiny apartment Lex found for them, with her sister and Ethan and the life they’ve carved out for themselves.  It might not be perfect, but it’s enough and it’s theirs.

She walks to her room, not fully engaged in the motion because her thoughts are still spiralling, but she manages to shut the door and turn on the lights before collapsing onto her bed.  She usually likes the strands of white Christmas lights stretching across her ceiling --- they twinkle on bad days sometimes, like they’re trying to cheer her up --- but even they’re too much right now, so she pulls her pillow in front of her and curls around it, burying her face as deep as she can.  Her hands are still tingling, the pins-and-needles sensation somehow getting worse until they’re shaking in time with the sensation, and she flexes them to get it to go away but it won’t.

It won’t and it scares her that it won’t.  She knows that it would worry anyone --- can’t help but think of the brain specialists Lex wants her to visit if they can ever find the money for it --- but she knows, instinctively, that this isn’t a medical problem.  Knows, with some indefinable certainty deep in her bones, that this is something else.  Something more.  Something building, pulsing in her fingers with a heartbeat that definitely isn’t her own but certainly belongs to someone or, perhaps, some thing.  She moves her fingers again, winces as the sensation doesn’t go away, and she wishes, inanely, that Webby were there because she’d know how to fix everything.  It takes her a moment to realise that it’s not an inane wish at all.

“Webby?”  It’s a whisper, but the room is silent outside of the turmoil of her own head, so it’s clear nonetheless.  “Are you there?”  Out of the corner of her eyes, she can just barely see the lights twinkle again, white light playing merrily against the walls.  “I need to talk with you.”

All at once, Webby’s just… there.

Hannah isn’t sure how she knows --- her eyes are still buried in the pillow, after all --- but she does, and it helps a little.  Webby’s presence is comforting, in the way of nostalgia and silver linings and holidays, and with it comes a sense of peace, of safety, of complete and utter calm.  It’s a feeling that encourages complacency, a letting down of one’s guard.  There’s a hand in her hair, gentle fingers combing through the strands and starting to braid it, and that helps a little more because it reminds her of when Lex used to do the same.

It doesn’t help enough, though.  She knows Webby, knows how tempting it is to fall for the spell of comfort she can weave, knows how much her mind wants to listen because the alternative is too brain-breaking.  Knows how to resist when things are important, and, right now, they are.  There’s still crimson burning at the corners of her vision, a blood-red vignette smouldering with her frustration, and not even the soothing balm Webby’s presence purports to be can change that.

“Stop.”  She feels bad about pulling away, but she does so anyway, fights the urge to give in and let Webby act like her friendship can fix everything.  She doesn’t need another sleepover; she needs help.  And active help at that.  “This is serious.”

Webby is lying on the bed, white-gossamer hair splayed out as she props herself up with one pair of arms and does Hannah’s hair with another, and yet the tone gets her to sit up.  She seems taken aback --- Hannah almost thinks hurt but she shuts the thought down immediately --- and the smile drops from her face.  “Hannah?  What’s wrong?”

“I need help.”  It’s true, and she funnels every ounce of conviction she has into the comment.  Her voice breaks at some point, but she pushes on, pretends not to notice.  “Lex is sad.  And I can’t help.  In fact, I think I’m making things worse-”

She’s cut off before she can think to counter it.  “Oh, Hannah, no-”

“She thinks I’m crazy.  Everyone at school thinks I’m a freak.”  Webby’s expression shifts again, but Hannah keeps talking, pushing past whatever she might have been about to say.  “And you said this was a gift but- I- When is it going to be useful?  When are you going to be useful?”  There’s part of her that wonders if she’s going too far --- that tells her she needs to pull back --- but she can’t stop thinking about the last time they had to move, the last vision Webby had sent her, the last spitball that landed in her hair in shop class, those red-marked envelopes sitting in a pile because her sister doesn’t want to worry her, and she’s just so angry.  “You can’t do anything can you?”

“If you’re asking me for help with money, then no.”  She shrugs, and there’s part of Hannah that thinks she might be genuinely contrite, but there’s part of her that thinks back to years of revering Webby as an angel and to the disillusionment that came after and simply can’t care.  “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that,” she says, and it’s another straw slowly being added to a camel’s back.

“My powers-”

Her head’s shaking before Hannah processes it.  “No, Hannah, you can’t.”

“What do you mean, I can’t?”  She breathes, feels it rattle its way through her chest, but she doesn’t stop, can’t stop.  “You said this was a gift,” she says again.  Clings to it like it’ll solve her problems because it’s all she has left.

“It is, but there are rules.  If you go too far-”

“And helping Lex is too far?”  The red spreads, fans heat across her face.  “She’s my family!”

Webby tilts her head, expression almost pleading, and yet Hannah can’t help but think that she’s never looked more distant from her humanity either.  “I know, and I’m sorry.  I wish I could help.  I wish I didn’t have to be here-”

“Yeah.”  Hannah nods.  The red vanishes, all at once, like it was never there at all.  In its place, there is only numbness, cold and heavy.  She looks down, bites back another sting of tears, clenches her jaw.  Pretends disappointment and betrayal aren’t warring in her chest.  “Me too.”

By the time she looks up, Webby is gone.

– – – 

It’s dark by the time Lex gets home, tired and worn-out.  Hannah says hello and pretends it doesn’t hurt to see her sister looking pale and shaky and so utterly, utterly exhausted.  Ethan, when he trails in fifteen minutes later, doesn’t look much better, and she’s not sure if it’s the fact that there’s still engine grease smeared on his skin in places where he’d usually have cleaned it off or if there are bags under his eyes or if it’s both.  (She’s pretty sure it’s both.)  They’re half-dozing on the couch together by the time she goes back to her room, and the memory of the too-genuine-but-too-exhausted smiles they gave her when she said hello comes with her.

For the second time that day, she lays down on her bed and prays for someone to show up and just… fix things.  To take it all away: the problems that keep following them and the bad luck that keeps showing up.  To teach her how a gift that has only ever been a curse can be useful.  But if not Webby --- she wouldn’t help, and Hannah can’t bring herself to try and ask again, to be turned down again --- then what was left?

One of the lights pops overhead, and Hannah can’t help but look up because something feels… different.  She can’t define it at first --- the lights are a mess, frankly, arranged with the childish vision of a younger Hannah and the questionable execution of Lex, Ethan, and a few screw hooks --- but she notices, eventually, that one of the bulbs has burned out.  It compels her, in a way, like something she knows she should pay attention to even if she can’t explain why, and it’s one of the ones hanging over her bed so it’s easy enough to reach if she stands on tip-toe.  She taps it with her fingers once, twice.  

When it turns back on, it’s green.

“Well, well, well, what’ve we got here?”

The voice comes from near the door, and Hannah falls from her already tenuous stretch in surprise.  She lands on the bed and manages not to fall off, but it takes her a second to adjust, to stabilise herself, to process the figure leaning against the door frame.

They’re not human.  Not anymore, anyway.  She probably would have guessed just by looking at them, but she doesn’t have to: she just knows.  There’s a jaggedness to them, not just in the scar slashed across their face or the warped stretch of their spine, but also in the air around them, like time and space themselves haven’t yet figured out how to fit themselves around an entity that shouldn’t technically exist.  They’re holding an apple, green as the light she’d just been looking at, and it rolls from one hand to the other with a languid grace.

“Who are you?”

The thing by her door smiles a nightmare smile that somehow doesn’t unnerve her as much as it probably should.  “It’s Hannah, yeah?”

“Yeah.”  She nods, and she’s not sure why she’s answering but she is.  “Why?”

“Oh, y’know…”  They shrug, a one-sided thing that scuffs one twice-denim-clad shoulder against the doorframe.  “Heard I might be able to help, I s’ppose.”

She waits, but they don’t say anything and her curiosity gets the better of her.  “Help with what?”

They raise a hand, curl almost taloned fingers until they’re pointing in her general direction.  “Ah, well, now, that is the question.”  The apple rolls back to the other hand.  “See, Hannah, fact o’ the matter is, I just so happen to know ‘bout your…”  The finger waggles, like they’re searching for the word.  “Situation.”  The grin’s still there, lopsided and bright and toothy.  “Also just so happen to know a li’l somethin’ ‘bout how ta help, too.”

“What’s that?”

“I used to work with some people like you.  Those who’ve… got a touch o’ the gift, let’s say.  Psychic powers, visions, the works.  Some of ‘em were pretty damn strong, too.  But you, Hannah?”  They whistle like they’re impressed and Hannah can’t fight a flare of satisfaction at that.  Doesn’t try.  “You’re a damn nuclear power plant.”  The apple doesn’t roll this time; it’s tossed, flying from one hand and plopping into the other.  “Just a little untrained.  Ain’t had anyone t’ teach ya ‘bout ‘em, now, have ya?”

Hannah shakes her head.  “No.”

“I could do that.  Help ya train.  Help ya get stronger.  Make those powers o’ yours a bit more manageable, a bit more controlled.”  A moment, like they’re breathing, but she knows they’re not.  Not anymore.  “Bit more useful.  Help that sister o’ yours and her beau out there.  Whaddya say?”

Hannah looks up at her ceiling, at the lights starting to flash overhead.  They don’t feel friendly.  They feel like a warning.  “Webby said not to.”

She’s about to point to the lights, to explain why they’re flickering and what it means, to explain who Webby is, but they’re looking at the lights with an expression disdainful enough that she’s pretty sure they already know.  “Well, now, that’s true.  She ain’t one t’ encourage makin’ you stronger, though, is she?”

The lights get stronger, flicker faster.  “No,” Hannah says.

“You gonna let that stop ya?”

Hannah pauses.  Thinks about Webby, the memories of her being Hannah’s friend over the years, the memory of her just that afternoon refusing to help.  Thinks about Lex and Ethan, and the way that she can hear one of them snoring from here, and the way they’ve been working themselves into the ground and getting nowhere.  Thinks about her powers and all she might be able to do to help.

“No,” she says.  “I’m not.”

They grin.  “Atta girl.”  They toss her the apple.  “Name’s Uncle Wiley.”

It lands in her hand with a dull slap and she looks at it for a moment, considering.  She’s never been fond of red, but green… Green she can wrap her head around.  She takes a bite.  Feels the skin of it crunch beneath her teeth, the juice flooding across her tongue.  It’s sour --- more than any lime or lemon she’s ever tasted, and yet still undeniably an apple --- and she winces at the potency of it at first, but then she chews.  Then, she gets used to it.

Then, she smiles.

Chapter Text

Hannah wakes up to sunlight shining in through her window.  The night before feels like a dream, cloaked in a haziness that muddies her attempts to recall it, and she tries to claw her way through anyway, to clear the cobwebs from the corners, but it gets her nowhere.  It must be real --- she remembers it far too vividly for it to be a fabrication, right? --- and yet she can’t say for sure that it is because her brain slides right off when she tries.  There’s no figure leaning in the doorway, no trace that there ever had been.  The once-white Christmas light she would have sworn was green the night before was still burned out in the light of day.  She’s almost ready to dismiss the entire thing as a hallucination.

And then she turns over and sees the apple sitting on her dresser.

She picks it up and rotates it in her hands.  The fruit looks just like it had the night before, ripe and green and whole save for where she’d bitten into it; even there, it’s as fresh as if she’d just done so.  She rolls it across her hand like Uncle Wiley had done, feels the waxiness of the outer peel beneath the pads of her fingers, twists the stem between her fingers.  It feels real in a way that simply can’t be made-up, in a way that almost feels more weighty than everything else around her.  Even when she sets it on her nightstand and starts to get dressed for the day, she can’t take her eyes off it, can’t stop considering the implications of the fact that it still exists.

After all, if it still exists, last night was real.  If it still exists, Wiley does too.  If it still exists, those nighttime promises --- of power, of training, of help for herself, help for her family --- actually happened.

If it still exists, then so might her hope.

She tucks the apple into one oversized pocket of her flannel.  Slips her hand in after to wrap around it.  Tries to fight the urge to curl her fingers in, to carve crescent channels into the still-fresh surface of that impossible fruit.  She manages it, but only barely, and her focus is still fixed firmly on the coolness in her palm as she walks out of her room.

“Hey, Banana.”  Lex is standing at the counter, bustling her way through putting together a breakfast and two lunches.  “How was your night?”

“Good.”  Hannah doesn’t mention her fight with Webby.  Doesn’t mention Wiley.  Doesn’t mention the promise of power at her fingertips, of salvation just beyond.  She’s learned not to mention things like that, and, most days, she even manages it.  “Did you sleep?”

Her sister turns and smiles what’s meant to be a reassuring smile, even as it fails to hide the bags still under her eyes and the tired bleariness still lurking in them.  “Yeah, Banana, I did.”  Neither of them address the fact that she’s not telling the truth, or at least not the whole truth, and she’s turned back to the counter before much time passes anyway.  “Hey, listen… I’ve gotta work late tonight and Ethan’s taking an extra shift at the garage, so we might not be back until late tonight.  There are leftovers for dinner in the fridge, though, and we’ll be back in the morning, okay?”

Lex’s words blend together slightly, with the gentle slur they always take on when she’s low on sleep, but Hannah doesn’t comment on it.  She simply nods, murmurs out an, “Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Banana.  I know we’ve been working a lot lately, but I promise it’ll get better soon, okay?”

“Yeah.”  Hannah nods.  “It’s okay.”  It’s not, but not in a way that she blames Lex for.  It’s not okay because it’s not fair.  It’s not okay because she’s sick of her sister running herself into the ground.  It’s not okay because there’s no real way to stop it from happening again.  (Or, well, almost no way.  No way except the one born of shadows and limned in acid-lime light.  No way except the one sitting heavy in her pocket along with the sour tang of green apple.)  “Can I help?”

Lex shakes her head, another still-tired smile passed over her shoulder for a single fleeting moment.  “No, but thanks, Hannah.  It should just be for tonight.”  Neither of them believe it; both pretend it’s true.  “This’ll clear up soon, promise.”  She sets the breakfast plate in front of Hannah, a paper bag next to it, and sets a kiss on the crown of her head.  “I’ll see you later, Banana.”

She’s heading out of the door a few moments later.  The door closes on Hannah’s response.  “Bye.”

– – – 

Usually, school is hard to get through.  Usually, school is an exercise in keeping her head low and hoping Webby doesn’t send a vision her way at the wrong time.  Usually, school teaches her less about science and maths than it does how to avoid the bullies at lunch time, spitballs in engineering, teasing around the edges of class.

That isn’t how today goes.

Today, Webby isn’t talking to her at all, much less sending her visions.  Today, she’s largely left alone by everyone.  Today, the one person to send a spitball her way has it rebound back and smack into their own face, and she thinks that she’s the only one to have seen the flare of green light preceding it.  She reaches her hand into her pocket again right after, though she’s not entirely sure if it’s to see if the apple’s still there or as a gesture of thanks to the being that gave it to her.  Both, maybe.

Either way, she’s smiling when she does it.

– – – 

The school day ends uneventfully --- an event in and of itself --- and the bus ride is equally, abnormally peaceful.  She gets home without having to ignore a single mean-spirited whisper, without a single thump to the back of her head.  It’s… nice.  It almost makes her get why some of the luckier students actually almost like school.

Her hand hasn’t left her pocket once all day.

– – – 

Hannah’s hands shake as she unlocks the front door, something halfway between anxiety and excitement robbing her of her steadiness, and it slams when she tries to ease it closed.  She drops her bag unceremoniously against what serves as their dining room table, discards the bagged lunch Lex had given her equally carelessly on top of it.  (It’s gone untouched despite having made the trip to school and back with her, and she’d almost feel bad about it but she hasn’t been able to stomach even the thought of eating since breakfast.)   Then, she sits down.  Scuffs her feet against the wood rungs of the chair.  Thrums her hand against the table’s surface and feels the grain pass beneath her fingers.  Wills the time faster.  Feels even more anxious when, with all the success of the proverbial watched pot, it doesn’t work.

As the time draws out --- as she waits for what feels increasingly like an impossibility --- she wonders again whether she’s made it all up.  She knows, intellectually, that she hasn’t, yet the thought persists, whispering at her from the back of her mind.  What if she really did make it all up?  What if she’s just as mad as everyone tells her she is?  What if her own desperation drove her to make up Wiley, to fabricate their offer of salvation?  What if, what if…?

Her hand finds the apple in her pocket, and the doubts vanish.  She almost gives into the urge from earlier, almost lets her nails bite into it, but she pulls it from her pocket instead and sets it on the table in front of her.  It’s real, she reminds herself, and if it’s real, so is everything else.  And, as the apple sits on the table in front of her --- as the ever-sinking sun sets the sky ever closer to dusk and steadily lengthens the fruit’s shadow --- she feels calmer, somehow.  Still somewhat anxious, still over-excited, and yet… better.

Her stomach rumbles, but nausea still churns in her stomach so she simply ignores it.  She’s content just to wait, to sit in her chair and wile away the hours before nightfall.  It’s not like she has anything else to do with herself; she finished her homework at school and isn’t keen on much else at the moment.  She doesn’t know what to do other than just wait.

Her newfound guardian not-quite-angel seems to take issue with that plan, judging by the fact that the brown paper bag once holding her lunch suddenly vanishes.  It’s there one second and gone the next, food spilling out across the table in an artless cascade.

“Hello?”  Her voice echoes through the empty apartment.  She feels silly for talking to nothingness, but she can’t fight the certainty that it’s not exactly nothingness either.  “Are you… Are you telling me to eat ?”  It’s absurd --- absurd to consider, absurd to ask --- and yet she does anyway.  “Uncle Wiley?”

The bag reappears, empty and neatly folded, plopping pointedly into her lap with a dull flapping noise.

She sighs.  “Alright.”  She picks up the sandwich, unwrapping the Saran wrap covering it and laying it out neatly so it can be reused later, and pretends the idea of eating doesn’t make her feel sick even as she takes a bite, chews, swallows, repeats.

– – –

Night comes swiftly, though not swiftly enough.  Wiley had said to wait until it was dark before sneaking out; by the time it’s late enough that she’s sure it qualifies, she’s already been waiting for hours.  She’s put the remains of her lunch in the fridge with the other leftovers, stowed her backpack in her room, stuffed the bed with pillows in case anyone looks.  She’s worked open her window, too, cracking the seal of dried paint around its edges so she can shimmy out.  And, as the sky goes fully dark and the clock ticks its way closer to midnight, she finally does, glad that they’re on the ground floor of the apartment building so she can just slip through.

The pavement is slick beneath her tennis shoes, the dampness of a recent rainfall mixing with the oil soaked into the asphalt of the parking lot, and she almost slips a few times as she finds her footing.  She actually hits the ground once, the pebbled surface scratching the skin at her palm as she catches herself, but then she’s up and moving.  There’s no moonlight around her, no light to illuminate her movement, but she can’t help feeling like there’s a spotlight on her anyway.  It’s her first time sneaking out and, for once, she feels almost normal.

That feeling shatters by the time she reaches the outskirts of the Witchwood.  No one ever feels normal there, true, and yet there’s a heaviness to the air that no one else seems to notice the way she does and she’s yet to meet another person who hears the voices.  She hasn’t had to go far --- all of the apartments Lex had considered were near the woods, like they couldn’t escape their proximity to the whispering trees no matter how hard they tried --- but she’s winded by the time she reaches it anyway.  Anticipation burns in her chest just as much as breathlessness, and both sensations drive her to bending over, resting her hands on her knees, trying to just breathe.

Another flash of green flickers just in front of her.  “Heya, there, Hannah.”  By the time she straightens, Wiley is leaning against one of the trees, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of their jeans.  They still seem inhuman --- partly because she’s increasingly sure that they are now --- but their sheer existence feels less jagged, less like a seam in the universe that never healed right.  They fit with the darkness of the forest more than they had in the electric light of her room, cloaking themself in living shadow the same way they don blue denim.   “How’s it goin’?”

“Good.”  She’s still out of breath enough that her voice shakes a little, but it’s strong enough to get the point across.  “Thanks for the help today.”

They shrug.  “Sure.”

Hannah reaches into her pocket, pulls out the apple.  Holds it up.  “Do you want this back?”

They shake their head.  “Nah, g’on.  Eat it.  It’ll help.”  She hesitates, and they send her a lopsided grin built from teeth and darkness before reaching out, gesturing into the air.  An apple --- just as green as hers, acid-bright and shining in light she can’t source --- appears between long, lithe, sharp fingers.  “Take it.  I’ve got plenty.  They’re good for ya.”  The new apple vanishes again, tucked back into nothingness with another twist of their wrist.

“Okay.”  She runs her fingers over hers again.  “Why doesn’t it rot?”

Their grin flickers back into place.  “Well, now, that just so happens ta be part o’ my Gift.”  Wiley shifts, pushing themself off the tree and walking closer.  “Ain’t anywhere near as strong as yours, though.”

“I can’t do very much.”  Hannah shrugs, feels the cloth of her shirt shift with the motion.  “I have visions sometimes.  And I can talk to Webby-”

The shadows shift around them, and she can tell --- in a way that she can’t quite explain --- that there’s something displeased nearby.  Something big, and old, and powerful.  Something a bit like Webby and yet decidedly different, too.

Wiley feels it too.  She’s not sure if she’s just able to read it in their expression or if she knows it the same way she knows other things, but someway, somehow, she does know it.  “Well, now, we ain’t gotta talk about her; she ain’t here, is she?”  It’s a rhetorical question, but there’s a tenseness to the way they’re holding themself that wasn’t here before and she internalises the implicit lesson: Don’t talk about Webby.  “We’re here to talk about everything you’ve got tucked away in that noggin o’ yours.  And you have power, Hannah.  Ya just ain’t unlocked it yet.”

“How do I unlock it?”

“Take a bite o’ that there apple, Hannah.  Then we c’n get started, how’s that sound?”

She does, wincing a little at the sourness.  It goes down easier than last time, though, and she takes another bite, and another.  “You moved my lunch bag earlier, didn’t you?”  Another.

They nod.  “That I did.”

“Can I learn how to do that?”  She doesn’t know how the Gift works, doesn’t know if it’s even possible, doesn’t know what she’d do with it if she could, but she knows she wants to do it.  “Eventually, I mean?”

Another nod.  “Yeah, if ya put in a bit o’ work.  You willin’ to?”

“Yes.”  She imbues it with all the sincerity she can, prays they take her seriously.

They do.

“Good,” they say.  “Then let’s get goin’.”

They turn and walk into the Witchwood, gesturing for her to follow even as the shadows swallow them whole.  She hesitates for but a moment --- not because she’s wavering on whether to follow, but just to prepare herself --- and takes one last bite of the apple.  She drops the core on the ground.  Straightens her shoulders.  Fixes her shirt where it got messed up by her mad-dash sprint over.  Takes one final look around, one final breath.  And then, with her head held high and her back straight, she walks into the Witchwood and lets the shadows swallow her as well.

Chapter Text

The Witchwood is an odd place.  Even the normal citizens of Hatchetfield would agree --- the ones who don’t hear the voices, who can’t feel the power thrumming through the ground, who will never sense the thickness to the air around it --- and that's saying something because they don’t agree on much.  What they do agree on, sometimes, are the rumours.  Of disappearances.  Of things that cannot possibly exist and yet do anyway.  Of creatures lurking in its shadows.  Some of the rumours are even true.  

None of them are visible as Hannah walks through the woods herself, though.  Indeed, in many ways, the place is too quiet, too still.  Too hushed, like maybe something is watching and waiting and lurking in the shadows.  (She’d called them living.  She was starting to think that was less than merely figurative.)

It starts to get to her while they walk.  The ground is carpeted in the trees’ discarded foliage, once-green leaves turned dry and crackly underfoot, and she winces as her sneakers crunch against them far too loudly with each step.  She doesn’t know why it worries her --- the trees already know they’re there, and anything else watching undoubtedly knows too --- but her heart rate skyrockets in her chest at the thought that she’s telegraphing her movement to something or someone waiting beyond her line-of-sight.  She tries to slow her steps --- to silence them, or at least to minimise the crackling enough that it’s not quite so obvious --- but it doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work well.

Uncle Wiley is silent in front of her, black boots barely even skimming the forest floor despite taking larger strides than she could ever manage.  It’s a reminder, in a way, that she’s in a world she doesn’t yet understand.  That the territory she’s navigating is dangerous for all it is compelling, unfamiliar for all it’s natural.  That the figure moving, wraithlike, across the deciduous corpses of creation itself could see the threads of the universe around them.  That she might one day learn how to manipulate those threads herself, a power all to her own.

A power she wanted, and craved, and needed.

It doesn’t take long --- can’t be more than a few minutes, though she’d swear it was longer --- before they’re walking into a grove.  It’s quiet, just like the rest of the Witchwood, and yet it feels distinct nonetheless.  Like the circle of trees and fungi around them is holding something back.  Like there’s a bubble around them, protection and isolation all at once.  Like they entered somewhere indefinably else the second her sneakers left the crackling brush of the woods and landed on dead grass instead.

“Well, now, here we are.  Ain’t this a nice little spot?”

She nods.  Means it, even.  “It’s… nice.”  They haven’t left the Witchwood, and yet that circle feels like it’s distinct from the rest of the forest anyway.  She realises, then, that the whispers have stopped --- or, at least gone even quieter than they’d already been --- and she relishes in the absence for a second.  She’s never heard them quiet before.

“Nice ta have a break from their yammerin’, ain’t it?”  Wiley shifts, shoulders rolling into a stretch that, by rights, shouldn’t have worked with a human’s anatomy.  Which was… fitting, she supposed.  “Thought they’d never shut up.”

“I didn’t think anyone else could hear them.”

“Well, now, that’s true, most people can’t.  But you and I, we ain’t most people.  Folks like us…”  They gesture between the two of them, curved nails glinting in the limited light.  “Folks with the Gift… We got some fun li’l quirks along the way.  Like those voices yap-yap-yappin’ away.”

Hannah thinks of the people she’s heard from the trees around her.  The names she used to store in her memory because they were the only people willing to talk to her.  The conversations she used to have with tree people in a web woven from their own roots.  “They were people, once.  The men with the axes.  They put them there.”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“People ain’t too keen on the Gift.  Ain’t always been seen as a good thing.  I’m sure you know a li’l somethin’ ‘bout that, now, don’tcha?”

She thinks of her classmates.  Of the spitball from that afternoon, and all the others that had actually landed.  Of the bullying she’d tried to hide from her sister and Ethan since they couldn’t do anything about it, not when no one else cared.  “Yeah.”  She nods.  “I do.”

“It ain’t just the hatchetmen neither.  All sorts out there ain’t too keen on the freaks runnin’ free.”  A manic kind of glee lives in their eyes, in their smile.  Their expression is too bright for a topic so dark, too gleeful to be contemplating their own destruction.  And yet, at the same time, it’s compelling.  It’s the first time she’s found someone somewhat like her, the first time she’s really heard of The Gift as more than a euphemism for whispered, spidersilk nights.  It’s the first time freak has been levied her way less as an insult and more as a badge of honour.  It’s… oddly nice.  “Protection’s important, Hannah.  Ain’t always gonna have back-up.”

Protection?  That sounds… nice.  Protection for her, from Brad Callahan and Max Jaegerman and all the others.  Protection for Lex and Ethan, from everything the world kept throwing at them.  Protection for everything and everyone she cared about, from anything that might want to hurt them.  No, that sounds more than nice.  “How do I do that?”

“Ya finish that apple?”  She nods.  “Good.  Like I said, it’ll do ya good.”

“How?”

“Oh, apples are good for ya!  And that one… Well, that one’s special.  Packed chock full o’ electrolytes, vitamins… all those things your brain craves.”  They summon another apple, toss it from hand to hand, make it appear and disappear and appear again.  Her eyes track its path.  If she focuses, she can still taste the sour apple tang on her tongue.  “It’s gonna help ya unlock that potential o’ yours.  For a while, anyway.  Long ‘nough for a lesson or two.”  A wink that pulls their face all lopsided, like the pieces don't fit together right and yet are being animated nonetheless.  "Ready?"

She nods.  “Ready.”

– – – 

Hannah isn’t entirely sure what she expected a lesson to look like, but staring into space and trying to fabricate some kind of barrier definitely wasn’t it.  “This isn’t working.”

“It is.  You ain’t able to tell, but-”  They grin, tap their temple, point at something she can’t see.  “It is.”

“Well, how can you tell?”

“I c’n see it.”  The words are quiet.  Simple.  Lacking any embellishment that might make her doubt, but lacking, too, any explanation for what they meant.

Hannah can’t see anything.  Not beyond the wizened, twisting trees and the desolation of a darkness she almost can’t pierce.  “I don’t.”

“You will.”  Their fingers are curved around a chain, the metal glinting as they fiddle with the pendant... or, no, not the pendant.  Two.  Flat sheets of metal.  Dog tags, she realises.  She looks away.  “Might take some time, but you’ll start ta See real soon.”

“Okay.”  She nods.  Refocuses.  Reaches out with her mind and feels the molecules of the air, the particles bouncing around one another.  The gas making up the atmosphere around them, the moisture in the air, all of it.  Pulls on them, tugging them together, trying to weave them into something less sporadic.  Something more consistent.  Something more solid.

The pendants drop, clink into place against their chest.  “Oh-ho-ho, you’re gettin’ there, Hannah.”  They’re smiling again, toothy and pleased and proud.  Their fingers twist in the air again, but it’s not an apple they make appear; it’s a knife.

She should probably be scared.  She finds herself oddly, numbly not.  “What’s that for?”

“A test.”  They reach out a hand, wave her to one side, away from the section of air she’s… altered.  “Outta the way, Hannah.”  She listens, steps away.  “Stand back.”

They throw the knife.

It passes through her shield like it’s Jell-O.  It’s not impassible.  There’s nothing hard hovering in the air, and the air hasn’t suddenly developed the ability to shatter the knife.  But the air has been changed into the consistency of honey --- enough to slow the knife to a fraction of its initial speed, enough that Wiley is able to flit their silent way across the clearing to grab it again before it falls more than an inch --- and Hannah knows that she’s the reason why.

“See that, Hannah?”  Wiley’s still smiling.  She’s grinning back.  “And that’s just the start.”

“Again?”

They nod.  “Again.”

– – – 

Fifteen minutes pass and she’s raised the shield ten times, lowered it just as many.  Every toss hits the shield blindingly fast.  Every toss ends with the knife moving, glacier-like, through syrup-thick air.  Every test ends with a smile or a clap from them.  Every test ends with a determined “again” from her.

– – – 

The shield falters, once.  The knife’s path is barely disrupted, and it’s a good thing Wiley had ensured she was out of its path from the start because it would surely have hit her otherwise.

Hannah lets her hands fall.  “I’m sorry.”

“You’re tired.”  They shrug.  “Wanna take a break?  Call it a night?”

“No.”  She rolls her shoulders, her neck.  Refocuses.  “Again.”

“Okay.”  The knife flickers back into their hand.  “Again it is.”

– – – 

By the time the sun begins to rise --- the sky just lightening from its pitch-black darkness to something slightly more purple --- the knife has found itself embedded in the air.  It doesn’t move.

Wiley’s still leaning against their tree.  “How’s that feel, eh, Hannah?”

“Like power,” she says.  And power feels good.

Chapter Text

Morning comes in a mess of too bright and too loud.

It’s a rare problem for Hannah --- she’s hardly an inveterate early bird, but she’s not exactly one for sleeping in either --- yet the rarity changes nothing about her desire to bury her head under her pillow and hide away.  The world just feels a little too much right then, and she’s not sure if she more wants to avoid the patch of sunshine blazing its way through her window or the cacophonous prattle of birds right outside; each is as oppressive as the other.  She’s entirely too tired for any of it, eyes burning under the weight of a full night’s training, and she’d rather go back to sleep than entertain even the possibility of staying awake for a full day.

She can’t bring herself to regret anything, though.  Even in the midst of her exhaustion --- not to mention a headache building in the vague vicinity of her entire skull --- she can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of satisfaction.  It feels, she thinks, like the productive soreness of well-worked muscles.  Uncle Wiley had said something similar the night before, about how she had to leave behind her teachers’ ideas of memorisation-based learning, to instead focus on getting acquainted with her powers and developing the muscle memory necessary to use them.  She hadn’t quite understood at the time, but she gets it now.

Her thoughts are interrupted by a knock at her door as it eases open.  She’s not entirely sure why she’s surprised to see Ethan walk through it so she buries the sensation, lifts a hand to wave instead.  (She resolutely doesn’t address the fact that she’d expected --- hoped? --- that the figure on the other side would bear an apple and too much denim and enough power for her to smell it in the air.  She can’t ignore how much she wants to wield that crackling ozone might as well.)

“Heya, Banana, what’s shaking?”  He’s smiling the way he always does, wide and bright and friendly.  It would make her want to smile back if she couldn’t see the strain nestled in the corners, tucked just slightly out of sight behind the concern that dominates his expression instead.  “You feelin’ alright?”

She nods.  “Yeah.”  She doesn’t tell him about the headache, not when it’d just worry him.  Doesn't mention the training session either, or anything about Wiley, the same way she’s learned not to mention Webby around Lex.  “Just tired.”

“Didja not sleep well?”  

She shakes her head.  (It’s true, in a sense, and she can’t say more, not until she knows her own abilities a little better, so a lie will have to do for the time being.)  “Not well.”

“I’m sorry, Banana.”  He frowns, and she feels bad even for that, but then he tousles her hair in a gesture so achingly familiar that, just for a moment, she forgets about everything else.  “Tell ya what… You know what today is, don’tcha?”

She’s not entirely sure she does, or, at least, not the way he means.  “Saturday?”

“You bet it is!  And that means the garage don’t open ‘til later, after Lex gets back, so how’s about a nice movie day, huh?  I’ll make up a big batch of popcorn, too, whaddya say?”

It sounds… nice.  Especially nice with the way her head’s still hurting and she just wants to sleep .  (There’s a part of her that feels guilty for the thought --- it’s not like she’s been doing work the way Lex has, or Ethan, so what right does she have to feel this tired? --- but she shoves it away the way she’s ignoring so much else for the time being, in the name of letting this temporary peace last as long as possible.)  She nods.  “Okay.”

“Alright, then, I’ll go set it up.”  His hand shakes slightly as he pulls back to stifle a yawn and then it all floods back; he’s still smiling, but she hates the façade as much as she hates why it’s there in the first place.  “C’mon out whenever you’re ready, ‘kay?”  

“Okay,” she says again, and she means it.  She’ll take the day off --- will rest and recuperate and foster the determination she can feel blazing through her veins --- so that she can spend the night training.  Reaching into her pocket is natural, as is feeling for the apple the way she’s already gotten used to doing, and it’s only when she can’t find it that she remembers having eaten it for training the night before.  She clenches her fist instead, feels her nails bite into her palm as she lets her own dedication burn.  “I’ll be right out.”

– – – 

Night comes more easily this time, thanks largely to the day itself passing in a haze of slightly staticky television and light naps.  Ethan stays with her until Lex gets home, and then Lex stays with her until she falls asleep while still wearing her bright, hideously red Toy Zone vest.  (They think she doesn’t hear their brief, whispered conversation about whether she might be sick --- how, if she is, they need to take her to the doctor’s, bills be damned --- and she knows without a doubt that she won’t let that happen.)

She can’t help a flare of guilt at sneaking out this time, but she buries it all the same.  She’s doing this for her family, after all.  They’d understand (she hopes).  Shimmying out the window is easier, both because she doesn’t have to pry open the paint and because she’s gotten used to the procedure of it.  She doesn’t fall this time either, sprinting easily across the pavement until she reaches the outskirts of the Witchwood, and she still has to bend over to catch her breath --- still grits her fingers into her thighs to ease the soreness as she does --- but practice has made that easier, too.  The atmosphere of the woods themselves don’t bother her as much either.  It’s remarkable, really.

“Think fast!”

The voice comes from behind her, familiar and startling in equal measure.  Instinct drives her --- pulls her right hand up and just behind her --- and then something lands against her palm with a gentle smack.  She knows what it is before she even looks, but she pulls it in front of her anyway, marvelling at the bright, poison green.  “Thanks.”  Lifting the apple to her mouth is familiar now, too, and so is the sourness flooding across her tongue when she does.  “Where do you get these?”

Wiley shrugs.  “Well, now, that depends.  Point is: you knew where it was without havin’ ta look, didn’t ya?”

She nods, hesitant only because she hadn’t really thought about it that way.  “I guess.”

“That’s real good, Hannah.  Real good.”  They smile, then gesture at the same path from the night before.  “After you.”

She doesn’t need to be told twice.

– – – 

“I hate these trees.”  She mutters it, partway through their walk to the clearing.  She hadn’t entirely intended to say it aloud --- wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by it, either --- but she didn’t bother to pull it back once she did.

Uncle Wiley had heard the comment the first time anyway.  (It was hard not to, with how hushed the Witchwood was outside of those whispering voices, with how quietly they were moving.  Her footsteps are quieter this time, and it pleases her even if they’re not quite as silent as Wiley’s.)  They look at her with an unevenly raised eyebrow and a lopsided smirk, like she’s said something fascinating instead of a random, spur-of-the-moment aside.  “Oh?”

“I liked them once, but…”  She shrugs.  “They’re like me, right?  You said they had the Gift too.”

She gets a nod back, from the post they’ve taken at her left.  “That’s right.”

“It could’ve been me.  They’re all just like me, but with different names and faces and stories.  It’s like walking through a tomb.”  She shrugs.  “I thought they were my friends, but that’s not it, is it?  They’re a threat.”

Wiley doesn’t immediately respond --- simply looks at her, something appraising in their expression --- but they nod eventually, and then look out at the trees.  “That they are.  World just ain’t meant for people like us.  The Gift ain’t exactly gonna make any of us friends, but it sure comes with a whole host o’ enemies, don’t it?”

“Like you said.  Freaks.”

“Yeah, that’s us.”  They grin, and too-sharp canines are just visible, glinting.  “Makes us dangerous.”

Hannah lets herself dwell, for a moment, on how much she’d do for Lex.  For Ethan.  They’re her people, and she doesn’t have many of those; there’s nothing she won’t do for them.  Nothing.  They’re her family.  They’ve had her back through everything --- thick and thin and loneliness --- and she’ll have theirs in return.  If that loneliness helps make her dangerous… Well, she’s glad of it, because it made her strong.

– – – 

They reach the clearing before long, and that peculiar, whisperless silence descends once they do.  She’s finished the apple by then --- has eaten as close to the core as she can get, just on the off-chance that it really will boost her ability --- and the remnants have been discarded somewhere in the forest so it won’t distract her.

She can’t afford distractions.  Not now.

“What first?”

Wiley is leaning against their tree again, watching her.  (Their eyes are… odd.  Layered.  There was brown there, once, but she thinks that most people would see emerald now.  And then, above all that, there’s a layer of bright, glowing green: sharper even than the acid of their apples or the poisonous lime of that distorted green Christmas light, luminescent in the way of everything Webby.  It’s… interesting, and she squirrels that information away for later.)  “Well, well, ain’t we eager tonight?”  They’re playing with the dog tags again, and the jingling metal chimes in the quiet.  “This ain’t worth rushing, Hannah.  Brain’s a delicate thing.”

“I want to learn.”

They nod.  “You will.”

“I want to learn now.”

“Ain’t gonna do any good for you to wear yourself out.”  The look with which they fix her is perched somewhere between assessing and scolding, like they’re trying to impress it upon her.  Maybe this is another lesson, another skill she has to learn, but she doesn’t have time for patience.  “But alright, you’re the boss.”  The knife appears from nowhere again, and they gesture at the space in front of her.  “Shield.”

She obliges, and it comes easier than it did the day before.  The knife, when they throw it, lands solidly in the air and sticks, unmoving.  “It’s easier now.”

They nod.  “Experience’ll help.  The switches that flip in your brain… Truly somethin’, ain’t they?”  They pluck the knife out of the air once more, then flip it into the oblivion whence they summoned it.  “S’ppose you wanna try somethin’ new, yeah?”

“Yes.”  She can manage it.  She knows she’s strong enough, and her headache’s been going for long enough that it’s not even noticeable anymore.  “Anything.”

“Alright, fair enough.”  They stroll forward, scuff some of the plant debris away from the centre of the clearing until there’s a semi-empty space there instead, and then pick up a small rock from nearby.  It’s not massive --- small enough that their fingers wrap around it easily, at any rate --- but it’s large enough that Hannah can make out the details from where she stands as they put it into the newly cleared circle.  “Summon it.”

“How?”

“How’d ya lift a shield?”

She shrugs.  “I don’t know.  I just… think of it, and then it’s there.”

“Well, there ya go.”  Wiley must catch a flash of her confusion in her expression because they laugh, wild and uproarious and not quite human in a way she can’t quite explain.  “The Gift’s a matter of belief.  Mighty powerful, in the right hands; just plain useless in others.”  They hold out their empty palm, sharp nails curling up into the air, and then close it.  By the time they open it again, the rock rests in their palm.  “Believe, Hannah.  Believe this here rock into your hand.”  Wiley’s hand closes again, then reopens, and the stone is back in that empty spot.  “The threads of the universe are yours to control.  You’ve just gotta learn how ta use ‘em.”

“Belief?”  She reaches out her own hand and closes it as tightly as possible, shutting her eyes to match.  Cultivating faith has always been easy for her, when it matters, even if it’s not in the traditional sense of the word.  It’s never mattered so much as now.  “I can do that.”

Chapter Text

Moving the stone is harder than lifting a shield, or at least comes less naturally.  Hannah stares at it until her eyes blur, crossing under the force of her own focus, but the thing doesn’t move even an inch, much less teleport into her hand.  She tries again, visualising the rock moving the same way she visualised the air condensing into her shields, but that doesn’t do anything either.  She tries once more, willing the stone to simply vanish, and huffs out a frustrated breath of air when it doesn’t even flicker.

She knows, intellectually, that her frustration is counter-intuitive --- that it’s almost certainly making the problem worse, and that a cool head can only help her ability to shift the stone --- but the fact remains: it’s a pebble, and she can’t even budge it.  She’s not even entirely sure what she’s doing wrong, and that only makes it worse because how can she possibly fix a problem she can’t even define in the first place?  Besides, it shouldn’t be hard for her at all.  Uncle Wiley had said that her power comes from believing, after all, and she’s doing that, with all her might.  She’s been doing that for longer than she can remember --- since before she ever applied the word to the ethereal figure she saw in her dreams and was asked to deny in the light --- and she should be used to wielding it by now, shouldn’t she?

“Take it slow.”  Wiley’s voice is infuriatingly calm, and it grates against the grain of her frustration.  They’re cutting into one of their many apples, juice trailing along the blade of their knife and pattering in drops against the dirt beneath their feet, motions entirely too leisurely for the urgency burning through her.  “Ain’t no rush to it.  We got time.”

Hannah shakes her head once, firmly.  “We don’t.”  The rock taunts her from across the clearing; she glares at it.  “It won’t–”  It doesn’t move.  “Why can’t I–”  If she keeps her eyes fixed on it, it has to work eventually, right?

She won’t find out.  Wiley steps in front of her instead, and she’s not sure how they got there --- she hadn’t seen them move --- but she doesn’t particularly care because it’s far more important that they’re in her way by the time they speak.  “Belief’s a hard thing to come by."  

“I can’t see.  You’re blocking it.”

Their knife flips around their fingers, complicated and dizzying, but she makes herself track the hard-to-follow motion as well as she can anyway.  “Ain’t that the way of faith?”  

Around it goes.

“Wouldn’t be hard if it came easy, now, would it?”

And around.

“Ya gotta commit, with everything ya got: gotta work at it, pour your soul into it.”

And around.

“Your very heart.  Until–”

Splat.

The knife plunges into the apple, embedded deep enough to rasp against the core, and they work it back and forth until the cut widens.  “‘Til it’s so painful deep that ya ain’t ever gonna be able to separate yourself from it.  ‘Til ya can’t think of you without it and it’s woven into the very marrow of your bones.”

Hannah still can’t see the stone, but she doesn’t care as much anymore, eyes still fixated on the knife and the apple and whatever they’re doing with them.  “I do believe.”

“You try.”  Wiley nods, and it doesn’t feel duplicitous but the words smart nonetheless.  “But it’s hard, ain’t it?  You believe, but no one else believes you.  You doubt, but it ain’t because your faith is weak; it’s ‘cause ya ain’t got enough trust in yourself.  It ain’t like you’re gettin’ anything back.”

“I didn’t ask–”

“No, no, you didn’t, did you?  You just believed.  And, for a while, you understood.  Miracles are few and far between, right?”  The knife twists again, digging further into the apple.  “But then you need help.  Again and again and again, your time of need rears its ugly head and… nothing.  You’ve gotta wonder: what’s in it for you?  Why believe in something so damn apathetic?  Why place your trust somewhere that won’t return the favour?”

“There were reasons.”  She hopes it doesn’t come across as naive as it sounds.

“Yeah, maybe.  Not that you’re told ‘em.”

It hits a little too close to home, the knife as metaphorical as it is literal.  “What’s your point?”

“Your kinda faith is built on a vacuum.  That defines it.  You believe and nothin’ happens, and you believe and nothin’ happens, and so on, ‘til ya believe that those two facts are the same.  Your faith may last, but you’re also damned sure that belief itself is useless.  And since belief is such a powerful thing: you believe the impotence of your faith into being.”  The knife twists one final time and one of the apple’s seeds falls into their hand with a jaunty, arcing hop.  “Kinda like this.”

It looks normal, like any apple seed she’s ever seen in her life, save perhaps for its brown shell being a little more lustrous than usual.  The teardrop rests in their palm for a second more before her confusion gets the better of her.  “A seed?”

“To start.  But give it what it needs and what happens?”

The seed shudders for a moment, twitching despite Wiley standing motionless, and Hannah watches.  She waits.  And, before too much more time passes, she sees a crack developing --- small at first, then widening --- starting from the root and stretching along the side.  The crack begins to split further, the sides pulling apart from each other in time to whatever was going on inside, nothing but shadow visible within until… There!  A light green tendril, thin and delicate but somehow strong all the same, uncurling from the dark confines of that brown shell and stretching out into the light and growing, growing, growing.

They’re smiling down at it, just as lopsided as usual --- like the expression itself doesn’t quite belong anymore, twisted beyond the very definitions of itself --- but she gets the sense that it’s not for her benefit so she focuses back on the seed again instead.  “Give it what it needs…”, they repeat, and that whitish-green tendril stretches even higher into the air.  “...And it thrives.”

“How did you–”

“Like I said…”  Their smile doesn’t exactly falter, but it shifts, and she feels almost bad for it but she’s not sure what brought the change about anyway.  “That’d be part o’ my Gift.”  A shrug, and then the seed gets tossed over their shoulder like so much rubbish.  “The metaphor’s what matters.  Your fledgling faith ain’t made it past a seed quite yet, Hannah.  Gotta give it time and space.  Patience.  Let it grow.”

They move out of the way and, just like that, she’s staring at the stone again.  She’s trying again.  She staring and hoping and believing again.

And it’s not working again.

“I don’t get it.”

“Ain’t gotta get it now.  Just gotta keep trying.”

“What if I can’t?”

“You can.”

“But Webby said–”

And then the ground shakes.

It’s not a gentle thing, or even a natural-seeming one; it’s the mad, frightening heave of something very old and very powerful and very angry, and all of it focused very, very intently on the two of them.  The air is thick again, and loud in a way it hasn’t been since they set foot in that clearing --- voices that overlap and interpose in a chorus of warnings and screams --- and Hannah wants to fall to her knees– or, no, she doesn’t want to fall to her knees, but she feels compelled to anyway and so she does.

Oh, that’s right.  She’d forgotten.  Rule 1.  Don’t talk about Webby.

She doesn’t see how Wiley fares through it all.  By the time she’s clawed her breathless way back to her feet again, nails digging into the rough-textured bark of a nearby tree until her legs are semi-sturdy beneath her, they’re already inches away.  The knife has been stowed somewhere she can’t see, and their hand no longer plays with dog tags; instead, one of their arms drapes itself along her shoulders and pulls her to her feet.  It’s not painful, but it’s not exactly gentle either, and the motion keeps her pointed towards the rock with an insistence they haven’t previously shown.

Something has changed, and she can’t help but think it traces back to rule number one.

“She ain’t important, Hannah.  You’re what matters here.  Times are hard all over; question is, what are you willing to do for the people you care about?”  The hand on her shoulder stays where it is, but they shift, sidling over until they’re standing behind her instead, other hand lifting to point at the stone again.  “That there’s the test.”

“I’m trying.”

“Then try harder.”

“I thought you said to take my ti–”

The hand on her shoulder tightens.  Shakes her, once, and it takes her by surprise but it focuses her again all the same and she thinks that’s what it was meant to do.  “If you really wanna get this down, you’re gonna hafta commit, Hannah.  Think of your family.  Think of Lex.  Ethan.  Yourself, too, ‘cause selflessness is only gonna get ya so far.”

“I am.”

A laugh from somewhere behind her, not quite mocking because it’s a little more… incredulous, maybe.  “Not with the kinda power you’ve got buzzin’ away up there.  If ya really put your mind to it, that rock woulda moved by now.”

“What do I do differently, then?”

“Look at it, Hannah.”  The pointing finger waggles in the air.  “Focus, right there.  Remember what you’re doing this for.”

She listens, just as she’s been doing for ages, and tries to make herself believe that it’ll work this time.

“Your sister.”

She stares harder.

“Ethan.”

The grey bends, morphing underneath her stare.  She can’t tell if it’s just the warping of her own vision or if the rock itself is changing, but she reaches for it, tries to find the seams that make the stone a stone so that she can pull on them.

“Think about what the world’s done t’ you and yours.”

She thinks the air is blurring around the stone, like a mirage, like heat rising from asphalt.

“The arrests.”

The stone wobbles.

“The debts.”

It’s vibrating now, with all the plucked-string tension she can feel vibrating through her.

“Every way that the world let ya down, again and again and again.”

She can’t help but listen to them --- remembering everything they say, as vividly as if everything had just happened --- and she wonders if that’s part of their Gift too or if their words are just bringing out a wounded, shameful, furious part of herself that she’s simply been denying for too long to remember its existence.  (What if she let that grow?  What if she let herself be angry, let herself fight against a world that had only ever spat at them?)

“Don’t ya wanna show it?  Make up for every time you’ve not been able to help?”

The memory of those red words --- past due, final notice --- bright and accusatory in the face of her utter helplessness.  (What if she weren’t helpless anymore?)

“Don’t ya wanna pay ‘em all back?  Pay back your sister for all she’s done for you, and pay back the world for all it’s done to you?”

She does.  More than anything.  It burns through her, anger and vengeance and frustration.  She’s angry more than anything these days, and she’s been trying to bury it as far as possible but now she realises: she’s been folding that fury in on itself, condensing it again and again.  That can only last so long, and now it’s just pulling everything else in and scorching that too.  (What if she just let herself burn?)

“The world doesn’t believe you.”

It’s true, but she doesn't care: she’s done disappointing people.  (The fire burns, flickering up her spine in spitting gusts of heat, fury only feeding in on itself again and again and again and again–)  “Stop.”

“What are you gonna do to prove them wrong?”

“Stop!”

The rock doesn’t vanish; it simply goes flying, whizzing through the air towards them instead of blinking into her palm.  She had only intended to teleport the stone into her hand, but it isn’t even really heading towards her.  It rockets towards Wiley instead, aimed straight for them, and she doesn’t know enough about how to deflect it to even wrap her head around trying so she braces herself instead.

“Wo-hoa!”  The exclamation sounds at exactly the same time as the rock should’ve hit them, but the projectile has somehow veered off course and been sent skittering through the nearby forest.  “There we go!”

“I didn’t mean-”  She thinks about how much unintentional force she’d imbued the thing with, and she can’t help but imagine what might have happened if it had actually landed.  “I mean, I’m sorry–”

They wave her off.  “Oh, that ain’t nothin’, don’t worry ‘bout it.”  They stroll leisurely away, peering through the woods after the stone for a few seconds.  A flick of the wrist, and then the stone is back, plopped innocently back into that taunting circle and its debris-clear outline.  “Let’s try again, shall we?”

Chapter Text

They do try again.  And again.  Some attempts go better than others, enough to lull her into the temporary, too-fleeting belief that maybe she’s getting the hang of it… and then the next crashes and burns with another drawn-out staring contest between her and a frustratingly immobile rock.  She can’t help but think back to those garish posters she’s seen hanging up in classrooms over the years, all bright colours and laminated cheerfulness.  Don’t PRACTICE until you get it RIGHT; PRACTICE until you CAN’T get it WRONG!  They’d always irked her, but never so much as now, and she almost longs for there to be one in front of her right then, just so she can tear it up.  (At that, the rock flies across the clearing again.)

She gets better, slowly, surely, and, by the time she gets back home and flops on her bed, the sun just beginning to crest the horizon, she’s sent the rock flying a dozen times.   It doesn’t taste like success, though.  She hasn’t even gotten it to teleport to her yet.

– – – 

She wakes to a hand on her forehead and a worried-sounding call of her name.  “Hannah?”

She knows the voice, and the hand --- cool against her forehead with all the gentle compassion people fail to expect from it --- and the worry, and she curls into all of them until she’s surrounded by the smell of cheap 2-in-1 hair product and the faint scent of cigarette smoke scrubbed away not quite thoroughly enough to disguise its tell-tale odour.  The embrace is comforting.  Warm.  Even the discomforts of it --- the way her skin sticks against the pebbled surface of Lex’s leather jacket, the silver snap digging into her forehead, the pull of her hair somehow managing to get caught in the zipper --- can’t override the familiar sensation of her sister’s care as she relaxes into it.

“Hannah?”  The hand combs through her hair again, catching on the tangled, half-braided mess it’s almost certainly become.  She’d gotten in too late the night before to do more than pull out the ties and unravel the ends a bit, so it’s certainly nothing short of a disaster now; brushing it later will be a pain.  Literally.  “You awake, Banana?”

She hums something vaguely in the affirmative, but the effort of actually speaking is a little too much for her.  The nod she gives is probably recognisable all the same --- or, at least, she hopes it is --- but she can’t see Lex’s face to know for sure because even a mere attempt at opening her eyes has the light scalding her vision enough to cram them shut again.

“Hey, c’mon, Hannah, look at me.  Just for a sec.”  A stroke of the hands again: calm, soothing.  Worried.  “I just have to make sure you’re okay and then you can go back to sleep, alright?

Hannah obliges, but she huffs out a breath as she does.  She doesn’t mean to be getting annoyed but she is all the same.  It’s silly, that’s all; her sister has bigger things to worry about than something so foolish as Hannah sleeping in.  She’s tired, and maybe a little bit sore, with a headache building behind the sockets of her eyes, but that’s normal.  It’s nothing she hasn’t come to expect, anyway, and it doesn’t feel wrong.

She’d know.  She’s felt wrong before.  

It was before she met Uncle Wiley and started learning from them, before she learned the right way to go about things.  She’d tried to use her powers on her own, to develop them, but she hadn’t known how to pace herself then, or how to give her brain the nutrients it would need for her Gift to stay sustainable, and so it hadn’t taken long for her to over-strain herself.  She’d tucked herself away in a bathroom for hours after, losing the battle against shaky limbs and all-consuming nausea until her teachers finally noticed and sent her home for the day.  A migraine, Lex had called it, fussing and fretting until her shift at Toy Zone started, and Hannah hadn’t tried to tell her the truth because it wouldn’t have been believed anyway.  

She doesn’t like seeing Lex worrying that much, yet here she is, causing it again.  (The mere thought turns her stomach --- how could it not, when the entire point of all this was to remedy her sister’s fears? --- and she’d wince at it if she weren’t certain her sister would notice and worry more than she already did as a result.)  Perhaps opening her eyes is a penance: a self-flagellating kind of atonement to make up for how her own carelessness has hurt --- is hurting --- those she’s trying to protect.  Maybe that explains why she doesn’t close them again right after, even with the ambient light of the room making her vision go all bleary.  “Hi.”

“Hey, there, banana.”  Lex is smiling that soft, sad little smile of hers that Hannah hates so much, the one she thinks hides all the ugly little emotions she doesn’t want her little sister to see, and Hannah feels her own power wrench at the sight.  (What she wouldn’t give to burn away everything that’s ever fostered that look.  What she wouldn’t do to destroy it all.)  “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”  She nods, every ounce of her conviction funnelled into the gesture.  “Promise.”

“Have you not been sleeping well?”

Hannah shrugs.  “I was up late, that’s all.  I couldn’t sleep, so I was…”  A moment.  “Studying.”  It’s not even false.  “Nothing’s wrong, I promise.”

Lex looks remarkably unconvinced, and Hannah wonders if her sister’s emotions have always been this obvious or if the development of her Gift has given her better perception in the bargain.  Isn’t sure it really matters why she can sense it when all that matters is that she can.  And then Lex’s fingers shift again, catching once more on the tangles clumped into Hannah’s hair, and she changes the topic.  “What did you do to your hair, Banana?”

Hannah shrugs.  “Forgot.”

“Want me to do it for you?”  Is Hannah making up how hesitant that question sounds?  How… dare she say, plaintive?  She hopes so.  (She’s worried not.)  “Like old times?”

Whatever Hannah might otherwise have said, it’s that tone that convinces her to nod, to smile, to keep her eyes open for just long enough to agree.  “Okay.”  A nod, with the unfortunate side effect of hitting one of the very snags Lex is proposing fixing.  “Please.”

Lex’s smile is a little more real now, and it’s good to see.  There’s something soothing about it, and about the slow routine of getting ready for a sisterly braiding session.  Here, the same brush Lex has used on her hair for years.  There, the quiet snapping of elastics around Lex’s wrist.  Here, the gentle tugging of the brush through tangles Lex is worried about tearing.  There, the pull of strands being woven together.

Hannah closes her eyes against the exhaustion-sourced burning --- like someone’s cutting onions, she thinks, and then holds back a laugh at how absurd the comparison is despite it ringing true --- and lets the feel of her sister’s fingers lull her into a peace somewhere between waking and sleeping.  She’d stay in this moment forever, if she could.

She can’t.

Indeed, the process concludes altogether too quickly --- sand through an hourglass, slipping through fingers too lax for her wishes --- and it’s gone before she can think about retaining it.  The gentle tug of hair ties being secured into place pulls her from her fantasy as much as it inadvertently does her scalp, and the gentle double-pat of her sister’s hand against the newly plaited hair finishes the job.  “Want some breakfast?”

Hannah shrugs.  She’s not very hungry --- probably because of how late she got in the night before --- but she’ll need to eat sooner or later, especially if she’s going to be fighting fit for her lessons that night.  “Sure.”  She nods, smiles a little, wills it real.  “Small one?” 

The smile she gets back certainly looks real, or at least more real than anything else Lex has given her lately.  Lex lifts a hand, all rings and black nail polish that glint in the light from the garlands overhead, thumb and forefinger pressed together.  “Small one.”

– – – 

Ethan’s at their kitchen counters when they finally emerge, two steaming mugs before him.  He looks up at the sound of the door, expression splitting into his usual bright grin, but there’s concern underlying it, too, and Hannah’s getting sick of that expression with how frequently she’s seeing it.  “Hey, there, slugabed!  How’s it going?”

“Fine.”  She nods.  “Tired.”

Lex runs a hand along Hannah’s back, up then down then up again, and she leads Hannah towards the table as she speaks.  “She was up late studying, apparently, the rascal.”  Out of the corner of her eye, she can just make out a bit of silent communication between the two of them --- a nod, a shrug, maybe some silent, mouthed comments bandied over her head in more ways than one --- but they’re not quite treating her like she’s glass any longer so she takes the win.  “I’m proud of your work ethic, banana, but maybe let’s leave the studying for daytime and get some rest at night, okay?”

“You don’t.”  More of her annoyance floods into the words than she quite intends, and she can’t help feeling bad about the frozen look of half-concern, half-guilt on Lex’s face as a result.  Ethan looks like he’s about to say something --- like the only thing stopping him from defending her sister is the fact that he’d be having to say something against her, Hannah, in the process --- and so she makes herself speak again before he gets the chance, and makes sure her tone is softer when she does.  “Sorry.  I just couldn’t sleep, promise.”

No one says anything immediately, silence and stillness reigning hand-in-hand until Ethan breaks it, as he so often does.  He’s got the mugs in hand, now --- his tea on one side, teabag still resting inside the way he only does when it’s on the second or third re-use, her coffee on the other --- and he carries them to the table before setting them down with quiet little thunks of porcelain on wood.  “You’re feelin’ okay, though?”

“Yes.”  Hannah nods, decisive, and she appreciates the care resting behind the concern but wants the concern to be over and done with all the same.  “A little hungry, though?”  It’s a lie, but a small one, and she did plan on eating anyway, so she figures that maybe it’s alright.

Ethan’s headed back into the kitchen before she even finishes the sentence, pulling something vaguely eggs-shaped from the stovetop.  He’s relatively energetic about the motion --- more so than he usually is, anyway, which is saying something --- so his experimental recipe has probably gone well, for once.  (Or, at least, Lex had complimented it, which was more or less his go-to metric anyway.)  “We’ve got omelettes today!”  Some of the eggs-shaped something slides successfully onto a plate.  “And toast, but that got a little burned, sorry, Banana, and–”

He’s about to walk out of the kitchen, and she feels a pre-emptive twinge of regret about interrupting but she has to before he settles down and now’s as good a time as any so: “Can I have some coffee?”

The room stills again.

Ethan doesn’t answer, expression shifting from perplexed (in Hannah’s direction) to concerned (at Lex) and back again.  Lex herself doesn’t look much better, eyebrows lifted a little and drawn together, mouth opening beyond merely blowing on her coffee into something built a great deal more from surprise.

Hannah shrugs.  Pretends not to notice the others’ palpable concern.  “I’ve just never gotten to try it.”

Ethan looks to Lex, offering her a shrug and waiting for a verdict one way or the other.  Lex shrugs back, hesitant and equally perplexed.  “Uh…”  A nod, eventually.  “Sure, Hannah.  Ethan, you want to–”

“Yep, got it.”  He still leaves the kitchen, still sets the plate before her --- she feels slightly worse about interrupting when it’s changed nothing about what he was going to do --- but then he ducks back into the kitchen and pulls out the coffee pot again.  “You want anything in it?”

Hannah shrugs.  “I don’t know.”

It’s Lex who stands, then, and answers as she picks up Ethan’s mug and brings it back into the kitchen.  “Give her milk and sugar for her first go.  And add some to your tea, too, or your sweet tooth’s gonna hate it.”

“We don’t–”  He twists enough to take the mug, but he stares at it for a moment instead of doing anything with it.  “We can’t–”

“We do, and we can.”  She turns to go again, dropping a kiss at his shoulder on the way.  “It’s gonna go bad if you don’t use it anyway.”

“But–”

“Ethan.”

He sighs, but Lex won the battle before she even started fighting it and they all knew it.  There’s milk and sugar in his tea by the time he rejoins the table, and a very light-brown-tinged cup of coffee is set before Hannah as well.  “Here ya go, banana.”

She reaches for it, cradling the mug and its warmth-infused porcelain within her hands.  She’s not quite sure how to approach it --- whether to take a sip to find out if she likes it or to take a gulp because she’s pretty sure she won’t --- so she takes a middling sip instead and lets the bitterness turn her stomach from the inside out.

Lex is watching her closely --- too closely, maybe --- and she raises an eyebrow in Hannah’s direction.  “What do you think?”

It’s disgusting.  She’ll need the energy.  “I like it.”

– – – 

After breakfast, Lex stands in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the closed door to Hannah’s room.  Ethan’s washing the dishes from breakfast beside her, but she knows he’s waiting for her to say something from the way he keeps darting looks at her, not to mention the vaguely tense way he’s standing.  He’s as worried as she is, and she loves him for it but she also almost wishes he’d say she were being foolish.  Now, she’s even more sure that her worries for her sister have some basis, and that only kicks the concern up another notch.

“Whaddya wanna do?”, he asks eventually, setting the final dish into the drainer and then letting the water run from the sink.

She sighs.  Knows the answer, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.  Admits it anyway.  “I think we’ve gotta call Duke.”

Chapter Text

Hannah knows the knock at the door is for her before it even sounds, when it’s just the echo of footsteps in the hall: fast-paced but not with quite the level of urgency to concern her too severely.  Her skills have never really included memorising strides, so she doesn’t know who it is on the other side, but she can feel enough to know that they’re coming because of her and it unsettles her just a touch, like a chill at the base of her spine.  She burrows a little deeper into the pillows Ethan put on the couch for her, the sheets Lex had tucked her into like a nest --- or a cocoon, perhaps --- and sets down the book she’s been reading for school.

Then, she simply waits.

Lex and Ethan don’t seem surprised either.  Hannah can read them well enough to figure that they might just be part of why the knock --- three short, jaunty taps --- is here at all, and the concern on Lex’s face as she opens the door is more or less confirmation.  She’s speaking before the door is fully open.  “Hey, Duke.  Thanks for coming.”

Hannah can see him through the open door, just as she remembers him.  His nod is polite, as it always is, and he smiles his usual warm hello without hesitation.  “Hello, Lex.  Ethan.  How’s it goin’?”

Ethan waves a half-hearted little thing as Lex pulls the door open further.  “Hopin’ you can tell us that.”  She steps back.  “Come on in.  Thanks for being willing to stop by.”

“No problem.”  He does step inside, then, hands tucked partway into his pockets as he ambles through the doorway.  His eyes scan around the apartment --- a familiar sight, though the place is, no doubt, much more satisfactory this time than any of his visits when Pamela served as dubious guardian --- but they stop when he sees Hannah.  His hand lifts in a friendly wave.  “Heya, Hannah.”

She waves back.  “Hiya, Duke.”

He moves to walk further into the apartment, then pauses and looks to Lex.  “Shoes?”

“Leave ‘em.”  She shrugs, fingers fiddling with her rings like they only do when she’s anxious enough to want a cigarette but not willing to light one because Hannah’s there.  “Floor’s seen worse.”

Duke nods, then walks in and settles into the raggedy armchair-esque thing they’ve got sitting next to the ratty loveseat Hannah’s sitting on.  “I hear you’ve been feelin’ poorly.”

Hannah shrugs.  “I guess.”

“Wanna tell me ‘bout it?”

She shrugs again.  “Not much to tell.  Just tired.”

He nods, though she can tell he’s not quite convinced.  “School been okay lately?  Any of the other kids been bothering you?”

“No.”  That, she can say with absolute certainty, and so she does.  She doesn’t mention the reason for it, all denim and green light.  Doesn’t mention the apple seed she’d swiped the night before and tucked into her pocket as a pseudo good luck charm.  “It’s fine.  I like my classes.”  Without the problem she usually encounters, it’s even true.

Duke smiles.  “Glad to hear it, Hannah.”  He looks at her book.  “That for one of your classes?”

She nods.  “Yeah.”  Reaches over to pick it up, then hands it over.  The cover is damaged, half-hanging off of the roughed-up little paperback, but it’s pretty enough all the same, in its own way.  The pages feel soft, and they smell of old paper and aged ink in a way that makes her happy.  She likes to run her fingers over them as she reads.

“The Odyssey.  I read that one when I was in school.”  He turns it over in his hands a few times, then passes it back.  “Whaddya think of it?”

“I like it.  I’m not very far through.”

“Ah, fair enough.”  He sets the book down.  Waits a moment.  “You been feeling stressed lately?  Or sick?”

She ignores the memory of red-stamped envelopes and shakes her head.  “Not really.  I was just up too late.  Studying.”

“Studying?”  He tilts his head.  “What subject?”

She hadn’t planned an answer for that one.  Hadn’t thought it come up, maybe, or was too tired to fabricate one.  “Lots of stuff.”  It’s less than convincing --- she’d know that even without the rather conspicuous look Lex and Ethan share behind Duke’s back --- but she doesn’t have much else to offer.  They can’t prove she’s lying, anyway.

“I see.”  A moment, wherein he looks off to one side --- not like he’s looking at anyone, but like he’s thinking through things --- before he refocuses and asks: “And how have you been sleeping?  Any more nightmares?”

“Nope.”  That was true, too.  She wasn’t sure how much was her and how much was Uncle Wiley, but they’d gone altogether.  “No more Nightmare Time.”

He leans back at that, eyes a little troubled, but relief must win out because he nods and stands, one hand patting on her shoulder with a gentle kind of comfort.  She hopes relief won out, anyway.  “Alright, Hannah.  You get some rest while I go talk to your sister and Ethan, then I’ll be outta your hair.  I hope you feel better.”

“Thanks,” she says.

He turns away.  She picks up her book.

– – –

Duke steps out into the hallway, aware of Lex --- and Ethan at her side --- following behind him.  One of them, though he’s not sure who, makes sure the door clicks shut in their wake.  Both stay quiet, though he can tell they have questions they’re desperate to ask.  As much as he appreciates the moment to compose his thoughts --- and he does --- he still feels bad for making them wait in the process.  “Well,” he starts with, “I’m no doctor, but I think she’s probably doin’ fine on that front.  Seems tired, but not like I’d worry too much about from an illness standpoint.  Still worth keeping an eye on her, though.”

There’s relief in their expressions, but it doesn’t quite make up for how concerned they were beforehand and so some of that worry lingers.  Lex nods.  “We will.”  Unlike with Pamela, he believes it.

Unfortunately, he isn’t quite sure he believes that’ll fix anything either.

“That being said…”  He can’t help feeling bad for how the relief fractures a little with the comment, but the memory of Hannah’s voice dipping oddly low and crackly as she whispers nightmare time flickers to the forefront of his thoughts again and he knows it must be said.  “I’d like to see if a friend of mine can talk to her.  She’s…”  He doesn’t mean to smile.  He does anyway.  “She’s good with situations like this.  Might know something I don’t.”

Lex and Ethan look at each other, then nod as one.  “Alright,” Lex says, before pausing again, eyes darting away with a motion stronger than just vague embarrassment.  “Might be a while ‘fore, uh… Well, you know.  Times are hard all over and that.  Money’s a little tight.”

Duke shakes his head, still smiling, and waves off the comment.  “Don’t worry ‘bout it.  She wouldn’t take any if you offered.”  Many of her clients --- such as the term applied --- had tried.  Hell, he’d tried.  She’d waved him off and given him a slice of pie for the trouble.  “And nor will I.  You two just keep keepin’ an eye on Hannah and we’ll call it quits.”

There’s a proud kind of unhappiness in Lex’s expression, her posture, but she nods in the end anyway.  “Alright.  How do we meet this friend of yours?”

“I’ll be in touch to set a time once I know a bit more ‘bout when she’s free.”

Lex nods.  “Okay.”

Duke almost turns to go, then stops, regarding them.  Lex has her arms crossed, fingers messing with the chipped black paint on her nails, shoulders hunched and tense in equal measure.  Ethan’s got an arm around her shoulders, his other hand just as active as hers, sometimes fiddling with his earring, sometimes a strand of his hair.  It’s a far sight better than what he’d gotten used to seeing before Pamela got put away, and it’s so nice to see that he can’t help adding: “You’ve got a real good situation here.  I’m proud of you both, and I think you’re doing great with Hannah.  Let me know if there’s anything else I can do, you hear?”

They both smile, strained through the expressions are, and nod, once each.  “Will do,” Ethan says, and Lex follows it up with a quiet, “Thanks.”

– – –

Duke waits until he’s outside of the building before picking up his phone and dialling Miss Retro’s.  (He doesn’t bother with tamping down his smile any longer; the attempt wouldn’t last long anyway.)

The line rings once, then: “Hiya, Duke.”

He should probably be surprised that she knows it’s him, but he simply… isn’t.  “Heya, darlin’.”  The smile is audible now, he has no doubt.  He tries not to overthink that fact.  “How’s it goin’?”

“Oh, you know.”  There’s the sizzling crack-pop of something cooking in the background, and he makes a note to wrap up the conversation as soon as possible.  “Can’t complain.”

He’s sure she could, if she put her mind to it.  Wished she’d complain a little more.  Wished she’d tell him ‘bout herself in the process.  Tucks those wishes away somewhere deep, deep inside and pretends he’s only calling about work.  “You busy this week?”

“Well, now, I s’ppose that depends on why you’re asking.”  He thinks she’s smiling too.  (Or is that just wishful thinking?)  “I’ve got a pretty busy schedule here, Mr. Keane. Might just be able to fit you in, though.”

“Just so happens, I’ve got a bit of a situation with an old client o’ mine.  Name’s Hannah.  Fourteen years old.  Her guardians are a bit worried about her, and she mentioned something a mite concerning when I talked to her.  Might just be in need of your… expertise.”

A moment, then: “Tell me about her over a slice o’ pie once the diner closes?  Could take a look tomorrow night.”

“Thanks, darlin’.  I’ll be there.”

– – –

Hannah sneaks out as soon as the others are asleep.  She doesn’t have to double over at the edge of the Witchwood anymore, though the jog still has her breathing heavy, and she’s got a hand up to catch the apple from Uncle Wiley before they even throw it.  They sound pleased as they chortle for a moment with a laugh like something breaking.  “Yer learnin’.”

She shrugs.  “Yeah.”

“Good.”

She doesn’t need to be prompted before she’s biting into the apple, paring it down to the core before she’s thought about it.  She thinks she can even maybe, possibly feel her power jolt, running through her more smoothly with every bite, though she can’t quite tell if that’s her imagination.  Either way, it motivates her to keep eating, letting the sourness wash over her tongue and relishing in that familiar, tart bite of power and vengeance and protection all in one.

“Well, well, well!  Someone’s in a rush tonight, eh?”

Hannah shrugs.  “No point wasting time.  I’m moving that rock tonight.  Every time.”

Wiley grins, teeth pointed enough to look like the knife they throw for her.  “A’ight, then, little lady, let’s go.”  They tilt their head towards the forest, and she knows without needing to be told that they want her to go first.  “After you.”

“Okay.”  She nods, then strides off down their usual path with a confidence more genuine than she’s used to having.

Then again, perhaps that makes sense.  She knows the way by now.

Chapter Text

Practice itself goes rather well.  The process of lifting a shield is almost second-nature by now, for one thing, and the rock may not blink into her hand every time she wills it to, but she’s gotten good enough that Wiley’s told her to will it back again instead of walking it back themself.  They’re satisfied with her progress, she can tell --- as is, unsettlingly, the thing lurking in the air around them and spectating --- to the point that they’ve been talking next steps: new skills, more advanced lessons, maybe even practical applications too.

She doesn’t quite know how to reconcile that fact with her own certainty that she’s taking too long.

The days are passing too quickly for her to keep a handle on them --- she’s back to school as soon as the night ends, which means a return of regular working hours for Ethan and Lex, too --- and it’s clear that their current system for Hannah’s rather unconventional tutoring is raising too many concerns for it to be sustainable.  Add that to the fact that the month’s end is swiftly approaching, and the bill payment deadlines with it, and it’s clear that she needs to step up her game or the whole arrangement will be moot, with no one to blame but herself.

And then, of course, there’s the visit with Duke.

It isn’t a surprise that Wiley already knows about it, and they’re not particularly subtle about asking.  (Hannah’s pretty sure they lost the need for subtlety long ago, along with whatever schism cracked their soul from the world around them, and she’s glad for the lack of pretence.  Being politic has never felt like much more than pretty lies to her; this isn’t the first time she’s been grateful for their blunt honesty.)  They wait until it’s time for her first break --- an annoying, if practical, hourly hiatus that Wiley insisted she take: ten minutes of pure recovery time lest she over-exhaust herself with her own furious determination --- and simply ask, still leisurely propped up against a tree.  “How’d that visit o’ yours with ol’ Dukey-boy go?”

She shrugs.  “It was fine.  I think Lex and Ethan called him.  Wish they hadn’t.”

They nod, the motion easy.  “He say anything in particular?”

“Not really.  Asked about school.”  She pauses before messing with the stone in her hands, feeling its textured surface play beneath her fingers, wondering at how it looks so simple despite frustrating her so religiously every night.  “Why?”

“Oh, y’know.”  She doesn’t, but they’re not really expecting her to.  It’s the rhetorical tone they take on sometimes, when they’re talking more than they have to for their point to get across.  She wonders, sometimes, if they even know they’re doing it, or if, sometimes, the silence just feels a little too oppressive.  “He’s… an old friend.  Friend of a friend, too.  We ain’t exactly peaceable.”

Makes sense.  “I don’t think he figured anything out.  I have to meet with him again tomorrow anyway, though.  He has someone for me to talk t-”  She blinks.  “Wait…”  Shakes her head.  “I don’t…”  Again, like it’ll make things make sense again.  “What?”

Wiley’s pushed off the tree before she’s done talking, but she barely notices, buried as she is in questioning how.  “What was that?”  The tone is almost eager.  Knowing, too, in a way that makes her pretty sure they already have a sense of what it was.

“I don’t-”  She hadn’t been told that, had she?  She certainly can’t recall it coming up in conversation, anyway, or either family member having told her.  Definitely hadn’t heard it from Duke himself.  “What…?”

“Ohoho, you should’ve seen that, Hannah.”  They’re looking at the air around her, now, somewhere off in the middle distance between her and the trees around them.  Something gleeful writhes beyond the clearing line, all too potent, but Wiley doesn’t seem to pay it mind.  “Wasn’t kiddin’ ‘bout that power o’ yours, ya know.  Staggering.  Really.”

“But I didn’t–”

“Didn’t know it afore ya said it?”

“No.”  She’s well-nigh certain of that now, and her head twinges a little in protest.  “Stings a bit, too.  What was that?”

“Your Gift, Hannah.”  They’re grinning.  “Just another bit o’ it, comin’ to light.”

“How?”

“Well, that depends on who the person is.”  Wiley shrugs, fingers playing with the pendants around their neck again.  “Tall and short o’ it is, the universe is mighty interconnected, and it’s real hard to poke at these threads without picking some stuff up.  Most times, it starts out instinct.  Gets less accidental the more you try.”  They pause a moment, looking at her with something like assessment in their eyes as their fingers still.  “Prolly best you take another few minutes rest, though.  Takes it outta a person.”

She fights a flare of annoyance.  “I’m ready now.”

“Nah.”  A shake of their head.  “Nothin’ to be gained by rushin’.  Gotta play the long game.  Build up slow.”

For a moment, unkindly, Hannah can’t help but think that it’s like talking to Webby all over again.  “I can’t afford slow.”

“You can.  And you will.”  Uncle Wiley has only rarely sounded truly strict, but they are now, and she knows this, too, is a line they’ve scored deep within the earth.  She tries to decide whether to try crossing it anyway.  “You’re powerful, but that ain’t the same as being invincible.  Feel similar, those two, but they ain’t.”

“But my family–”

“I know.”  She must sound as angry as she wants to be, for their voice drops into something that would almost be comforting if it weren’t scraped raw with the effort of it.  The dog tags clink between newly mobile fingers.  “But there’s time enough.  And ain’t nothin’ gonna be fixing the situation if you get yourself dead first either.”

Her vision flickers red and she wants to rage.  To scream at the world, and at Webby, too.  Screams at Wiley instead since they’re the only one there.  “I can’t just wait! They need help, and I’m not able to do anything but throw a stupid rock!”  She chucks it at them for good measure, though they duck out of the way before it has any hope of landing.

“Didn’t know how to do that two days ago.”  Wiley says it like nothing more than a matter of fact, like it’s impossible to doubt.  In a way, grudgingly, she supposes it is.  “Takes time to really learn somethin’.”  A moment, and then they sigh --- deflating, almost, but not quite --- and she almost feels bad about it.  “If it helps a jot, you’re faster’n most.  Not many could pick this up in a couple days.”

“It’s been half a week,” she says, blurting it out before she can think of whether it’s wise, or even whether it’s entirely true.  She can’t regret it either, not with fire sizzling through her veins until the clearing looks utterly ablaze.  “Half a week!”

It takes a moment, but not much time passes before Uncle Wiley’s laugh ratchets out into the tense silence, pinballing off the trees and building.  “Now, lemme guess: you ain’t ever been a glass-half-full kinda girl, huh?”

Hannah doesn’t rise to it.  “The glass is empty.  I need to fill it.  That’s the point.”

“This glass your family’s, in this li'l analogy?”

She nods.

“Can’t very well do that if your own glass is empty, now, can ya?”

It’s a frustratingly accurate argument.  She kicks sullenly at the ground until the toe of her tennis shoes is covered in a fine dusting of dirt, then reluctantly shrugs.  “I guess.”  The red dies away a little, and she almost wishes it’d come back, just to feel the fire burn again.  “But breaks take too long.”

“And they’ll be worth it.”

Hannah rolls her eyes, but she’s lost the argument and she knows it.  “Fine.”

“Good.”  Wiley leans back against the tree again.  “Now, you’ve got six more minutes.  Make ‘em count.”

– – – 

The sight of Miss Retro’s diner being shut down for the evening is a very familiar one.  There’s something cosy to the atmosphere after everyone has left --- a gentle quiet that descends with the egress of the establishment’s clientele and the flip of the sign from open to closed --- when there is only the jukebox’s quiet crooning to disrupt easy conversation, and Duke can’t help smiling as he approaches it.  It’s distinctly possible that he’s spent more time there after-hours than he has when it’s open for business, and damn if that thought isn’t a bittersweet one.  

There’s no place he’d rather be, and yet it hurts a little all the same.

That sting does, at least, fade a little with the chime of the door’s bell and a wave from behind the counter.  “Hiya, Duke,” she says, and it’s like he’d never been sad at all.  “How’s it goin’?”

It’s easy to smile back at her, natural as anything.  Always has been, even when that doesn’t feel like it should make sense.  “Heya, darlin’.”  A shrug.  “Can’t complain.”

Miss Holloway fixes him with one of her Looks, like she’s staring into his very soul.  Knowing her, he’s not entirely sure that she isn’t.  Then she laughs, setting her dangling earrings dancing and sending sun-bright mirth out across the diner.  “Good to see ya again.  It’s been too long.”

“Don’t I know it?”  He does.  He’s felt her absence for far too long, like a pit in his chest, and yet he can never bring himself to break the rules of their tenuous partnership either, can never find it in himself to stop by when there isn’t work to be done.  Doesn’t think he can handle any kind rejections that might arise if he were to try.  “Good to be back,” he manages, though he can’t help thinking of Hannah’s tired face after and can’t avoid amending the statement as a result: “Mostly.”

“Tough one?”

Hard to say.  “Yeah, maybe.  Depends on whether you can help.”

Miss Holloway nods, something halfway between concern and sympathy on her face, and slides over a plate.  “Here’s your pie.  Take a seat and tell me about it.”

“Will do, darlin’.  Thanks as ever.”

“‘Course, Duke.”  Her smile is like staring into a star, but he can’t look away.  Feels his vision burn with the afterimage instead.  “Always.”

– – – 

Miss Holloway isn’t quite sure what to make of Duke’s newest case, but she’s certain that the twist it leaves in her gut is a very, very bad sign.

He’s brought her in as consultant on a number of cases before, of course, but none have ever left her with a feeling quite like this: an existential cocktail of three types of nausea, a headache, and muscle pain, all at once.  He may not remember that she was involved in all of those cases --- or may remember some other woman just to the left of Miss Holloway being involved instead --- but she recalls them all well enough to know that there’s never been a case like this.  She can always feel her power --- it thrums incessantly beneath her skin, just waiting to be let out: a reminder and a warning all in one --- but now it turns erratic, running in fits and starts that leave her jittery and on-edge.  She can’t even hold onto the calm certainty that she knows how to handle the situation because she has so few details on the matter.  There’s simply a sense that something is very wrong and the knowledge that she’s about the only one in a position to help.

She managed --- she thinks --- to keep the unease under wraps until Duke left, pie eaten and case details imparted, with only the slight truncation of their usual companionable chit-chat to let on that something is wrong.  She hopes he didn’t pick up on it, anyway; she wouldn’t want to worry him unnecessarily on behalf of either the child in question or, worse, herself, and even hinting about her concerns could lead to that very outcome.  It’s only once he’s gone that she allows herself to slide from the bar stool and sink into a booth, hands pressed to her temples and mind desperately set to centring herself.  Her breaths shake as they rattle in and out, simultaneously too much to handle and not enough to subsist, not quite managing to feel enough.  There’s something big at play --- some great potentiality lurking among the tenuous, fraying threads holding Hatchetfield together --- and its implications are too staggering to let itself be ignored.

Unfortunately, with something so big waiting in the wings, she can’t afford to shake apart.  It’s the ugly truth of the matter that her not-quite-god-given abilities might be needed to balance out the dark forces she knows are already at work, and that means she needs to be more on top of the situation than she feels.

Miss Holloway takes a moment.

Breathes.

Pulls herself together into some semblance of meditation until her power feels more like her own and less like the neon-coloured leash she’s felt it to be since she made the deal to get it in the first place.

Breathes again.

At first, when the lights flicker, she thinks it’s coincidence.  (Foolish, that; there’s no such thing as coincidence in Hatchetfield.)

And then they flicker again and she knows it’s something more.

By the time Miss Holloway opens her eyes again, the diner is gone.  She is still, somehow, seated, though there is no trace of the diner booth beneath her and the sensation vanishes as soon as she moves to stand, but her surroundings now consist only of a pure, white, glaring light.  It’s brighter than anything else she’s ever seen --- almost blinding, and yet oddly gentle at the same time --- but there’s something familiar about it all the same.  She’s seen something like this before.  The memory, hazy though it might still be, sends a chill down her spine beneath her denim jacket before she places it.

Then she does.  She went to the Black years ago; now she must be standing in the White: entirely equal, but entirely opposite.

Her previous tour of the Lords’ domain, insofar as the term applied, had been short and not-so-sweet: a whirl of colour, bright and vicious in the void of nothingness around her, no glimpse of light to be seen.  She must simply have never made it to this part of the domain.  She certainly doesn’t remember it, if so.

She definitely doesn’t remember the being that appears before her, appearing in the ambient illumination so subtly that Miss Holloway can’t quite remember seeing Her appear, and not even past experience with the eldritch is sufficient preparation for Her arrival.  (Then again, when has such experience ever truly helped?  Meeting the Lords --- and Their influences --- has been newly unbalancing every time.)

For a moment, things seem almost… oddly normal.  Where the Lords had been loud and incomprehensible, relishing in the confused delirium they could induce in any prey so foolish as to wander into their world, She stands calm and still to one side, Her eyes fixed on Miss Holloway but Her entire demeanour innocuous all the same.  She looks almost human --- were Miss Holloway to see Her on the street without her powers to guide her, she isn’t entirely sure that she’d have thought anything amiss about Her at all --- but She’s unquestionably not.  Even looking at Her brings with it a compulsion to relax: a fuzzy-brained kind of almost-trance that would be so easy to fall into…

No.  Now is not the time for false solace.

Miss Holloway snaps herself out of it and looks at Her again, trying to see through the illusion of normalcy to figure out what is being hidden behind it.  The newcomer is garbed in white cloth so pure that Miss Holloway isn’t entirely sure it’s not glistening, two shades shy of sheer and entirely unblemished.  It blends with their surroundings, draped from Her form with all the delicacy of gossamer… which is when Miss Holloway realises that she thinks it might well be.  That comes with it a flood of other information tucked just out of sight --- lingering at the corner of her eye, perhaps, or lurking at the paradoxical blindspot afforded in plain view --- until all Miss Holloway can see is what isn’t right: too many arms buried in folds of spider silk and starlight; more eyes than a human has, and each three shades paler than anything natural; tiny arachnids scrabbling across Her skin and among the folds of Her gown; teeth sharp enough to glitter dangerously in the light.

Miss Holloway shifts just enough to be ready for whatever might be coming, then brings herself to ask: “Who are you?”

“A friend,” She says, and smiles as She says it.  It's easy to believe.  Hard to imagine being true.  “You’re safe here, I promise.  You may call me Webby.”

“Webby?”  It rings a distant bell from something Duke mentioned in his latest briefing: Hannah Foster’s imaginary friend.  “I’ve heard a few things about you.  You’re less imaginary than I’ve been told.”

A smile, dangerous in how innocuous it seems.  “I’ve heard much about you, too, Miss Holloway.  You live up to the reputation.”

“How’s that?”  Not once, in all her years, has Miss Holloway found it a good experience for things older than herself to know her name, much less to be impressed by her.  

“It is rare for someone to see through my glamour so efficiently, and without assistance.”  She drifts closer, and Miss Holloway can’t honestly say that she saw Her move.  “Your Gift must truly be a marvel.”

Miss Holloway shrugs and pretends it doesn’t sting with a bitter, well-worn persistence.  “Not much of a Gift, you ask me.”

“My brothers aren’t ones to make things easy, now, are they?”  Her laugh, much like the rest of her, sounds oddly human; unlike the rest of her, that doesn’t seem to be by design.  “I apologise for them.”

“You can’t do anything about them?”

“No.”  This comes firmly, without question.  “Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of my power to interfere so directly.  But…”  She pauses, as though She must steel herself for whatever decision she is making, or whatever sentence she must say.  Possibly even both.  “But someone I care about --- someone important in the grand scheme of things --- is in danger of making decisions I fear she shall regret.  Decisions that stand to change the face of more than just Hatchetfield, potentially irrevocably.  I have acted as much as I can within the bounds of what can be; now it is time for more direct action, the likes of which I simply cannot take.”

“Which is?”

“I know you are aware of Hannah Foster.”

Miss Holloway nods.  “I am.”

“She has undergone many trials over too few years, I’m afraid, and her rage is making her… rash.”  She says it as though She is baffled by the very concept --- hurt, yes, but utterly confused all the same --- and Miss Holloway can’t help but wonder at how much of Hatchetfield lies in such arbitrary balance.  (Intellectually, she understands --- how bizarre, to observe an ant truly understanding a circuit board and to try comprehending the shades of insanity it undergoes in the process; how simple, to pick a few as your own based on nothing more than chance --- but intellect doesn’t have much to do with it when she is one of the ants.)  “She has a very strong Gift of her own, but she has chosen to refine it through… dubious means.”

“Dubious?”  An intriguing description.  “How?”

“I believe you are familiar with my brother’s own Chosen: the entity once known as Wilbur Cross, who now calls themself Uncle Wiley?”

Miss Holloway can’t help grimacing.  “I’m familiar.  I killed them a few years ago.”

Webby tilts Her head, part acknowledgement, part concession, part hedging.  “Yes and no.”  Then, at Miss Holloway’s look: “It didn’t stick.”

“You can’t be tellin’ me they’re back?”

“They are.”  Webby says it like She’s apologetic, though perhaps that is Miss Holloway’s own imagination.  Perhaps She simply says it like it is fact, for that is what it is.  “As I said, Hannah’s Gift is more powerful than many can conceive.  She has found a way to… How to phrase it?  To Wish them back into existence, simply through the strength of her desire for guidance I myself cannot provide.”

Shit.  “What kind of guidance?”

“Tutoring, one might say.  I admit that it is working: her powers have grown by leaps and bounds over the past few days, and she has done so with caution enough that I am not in fear for her safety.”  Webby smiles, though it’s not quite genuine and Miss Holloway can’t say she blames Her for the mixed feelings.  “I am more concerned for the longer-term.  My brother, Wiggog Y’rath, has plans I cannot see, and I fear that young Hannah is involved.  Whether these plans will end up coming to fruition, I am equally unsure, and yet I fear that leaving the situation as it is would be… untenable.”

Miss Holloway nods.  “What do you want me to do?”

“Intervene.”  How… frustratingly vague.  Webby must see her discontent, for She apologises almost immediately: “I’m sorry.  I cannot tell you more, but I ask you to do what you can to stop this from happening.”

“Alright.”  A shrug.  “I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you,” Webby says.  

And then She is gone and the diner has returned.

Chapter Text

Monday passes with the kind of slowness that tells of anticipation.

Hannah doesn’t like anticipation.

She did, once, when it meant good things.  When it foretold birthdays and holidays and celebrations, before Hannah got old enough to see through the glamour of smiles and cobbled-together gifts and realise that they couldn’t really afford all those good times in the first place.  It had always been Lex that made those times good --- Lex, and eventually Ethan --- and, true, they hadn’t gone anywhere, but the shine had never been quite the same after that.  Still, she could remember the way those days always seemed to stretch on, like one of those dreams where a goal rests just out of reach and it takes ten times too long to reach it, like a prize lingering just beyond her grasp.

More recently, that kind of anticipation has always been bad; this particular day is no exception.  She wants it all over with --- wants to reach eventime just to find out what’s so damn important about this meeting that the universe has set itself to half speed in preparation for it --- but instead the day persists.  School drags on, block by block, in a swirl of lessons on which she doesn’t focus and questions that she could answer in her sleep.  Time ticks by, to some degree, but every blink feels like an hour even though it takes less than a second: sand, passing through an hourglass only in fits and starts that barely move at all.

When she gets home, the house is empty.  She wouldn’t have expected any different --- Lex mentioned that she was taking extra shifts at Toy Zone, and Ethan’s been taking on any odd jobs he can handle in addition to the garage --- but it’s a relief all the same.  Pretending that she isn’t stressed out of her mind has taken a toll, more than she cares to admit, and it’s nice to just curl up on her bed and try her hand at blocking out the world.  (It doesn’t work, mind, but it’s good to try.)

She considers trying --- just once more --- to talk to Webby.  Gets far enough as to turn over onto her back and look up at the ceiling, at the Christmas lights garlanded across them.  Stops the second she does because… Well.  Why should she bother reaching out?  When has Webby ever helped?  When has she done anything but offer up platitudes that fix nothing and ultimatums disguised as guidance?  (Is she even there to help?  Hannah’s well-aware that Webby’s powers can comfort, can soothe, can relax, can lure those she chooses into the plans she weaves; perhaps Webby isn’t any better than the forces she purports to stop.  Perhaps she is simply a little more passive about her feasting.)

Hannah’s eyes are drawn, instead, to that burned-out little Christmas light in the corner.  She hasn’t fixed it yet --- hasn’t wanted to bother her sister or Ethan, hasn’t even thought about fixing it on her own --- but she’s glad of that now.  It’s a reminder of the steps she’s taking.  A reminder that she can handle herself better already, and that she’ll be even better in a few days.  A reminder that, someday (soon), somehow, she’ll be able to help.

Still, in a morbid fit of curiosity, she stares at it even longer, half-wondering if she can relight it until the half-wonder morphs into a genuine attempt.  It takes a moment, but she manages it.  It’s easier than she thinks it should be, to pick through the threads surrounding the filament and isolate the fibrous net she needs to poke at until it glows, and the bulb pops on as soon as she does.  She starts fiddling with it aimlessly, just to see how easily it comes to her; the light flickers in response, on then off then on again, and she can’t help laughing with how simple it is.  

The laugh dies when she hears the door open.  The light does too.

“Hannah?”  Lex’s voice.  She sounds like she doesn’t know quite what to expect, even though it’s their usual routine for Hannah to get home first and do work in her room until the others join her.  (It feels like just another ticked box in favour of something big lurking on the horizon.)  “You home?”

It’s hard to work up the will to answer, but she manages it enough to call, “Back here!”  By the time she pulls herself to her feet, Lex has gotten to her bedroom door and is smiling that same worried expression her way.  “Hi.”

“Heya, Banana.”  Lex’s voice goes soft on the endearment, as it always does.  It turns something in Hannah’s stomach to hear, tinged with exhaustion as the word is.  “You alright?”

She shrugs.  “Yeah.”

Lex nods.  “Good.”  Hannah isn’t sure Lex buys it, but she must decide to bury it for some reason because she changes topics almost abruptly.  (Unfortunately, it’s not in a very unexpected direction.)  “Hey, so, listen… You know how you talked to Duke the other day?”

“Yeah,” Hannah says again.  She tries to make it sound curious enough to be believable.  “Why?”

“He wants you to talk to a friend of his.  He thinks she might be able to help.”

She can’t resist pushing back, just once, though she acts like it’s casual instead of important.  “Help with what?”

Lex falters, mouth opening around a word that doesn’t make it past her lips.  Eventually, she manages: “We’re just worried, Hannah.”  She sighs, long and slow and weary, eyes dropping to the floor for a moment as she thinks about what to say.  Hannah regrets the question.  “Just… talk to her?  Just one last conversation to have.”

“Alright.”  It’s reluctant, but there’s little she wouldn’t do for her sister --- that’s rather the whole point --- and this is practically a cakewalk.  “I’ll do it.”

– – – 

The second time the door opens, Hannah doesn’t recognise the woman who walks through.  She’s pretty, with bright orange hair that makes Hannah think of fire and large earrings that glitter in the light, and her clothes are old-fashioned enough to be striking, but Hannah notices neither fact so sharply as the sheer power that crackles through the air around her.  She hadn’t understood, previously, what Wiley meant about seeing another person’s Gift, but she gets it now: can see the bright yellow haze that cloaks the newcomer with too-sharp intensity and swirls in her wake as she strides into the room.

She smiles, and it’s friendly enough, but simultaneously too calculating to seem genuine.  “Hi, dear.  You must be Hannah, right?”

Hannah nods.  “That’s right.”

Lex, standing to one side, fiddles with her cigarette lighter, filling the room with a repetitive clicking just a little too shaky to rank as metronomic.  “Thanks for coming.  Duke spoke… very highly of you.  I’m glad you had to time to stop by.”

“Of course.”  Another warm smile that just barely misses her eyes.  “I’m happy to help.  Sorry for it being so late.”  She turns to look at Hannah again, then reaches out a hand.  “You can call me Miss Holloway.”

“Okay.”  Hannah takes the hand and shakes it, trying to stifle the briefest wince as their hands meet with a brief, staticky shock.  “Hannah Foster.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Hannah.”  Something catches her attention from over Hannah’s shoulder and she frowns, though the expression is brief and fleeting and well-hidden.  (Did Hannah see it or did she sense it?  How can she know one way or the other?)  “Is that your room?”

Hannah nods again, not particularly taken by the idea of talking, though she ends up doing so anyway.  “Yeah.  Why?”

Miss Holloway doesn’t answer.  Something about that rubs Hannah the wrong way.  “You mind if I take a look?”, she asks instead, and what can Hannah say to that?  No?

She shrugs.  “Sure.”

“Thanks,” Miss Holloway says, though it comes across as an afterthought because she’s already moving towards Hannah’s door.  Her eyes find the broken Christmas light almost immediately.  “What happened here?”

Lex has followed them, frowning, but she’s at least returned the lighter to her pocket.  “Why’s that matter?”  She bites her lip as soon as the question gets out, but she doesn’t take it back.  Doubles down, even.  “It’s a blown Christmas light, happens all the time.  We just haven’t had time to fix it yet.”

“Sorry.”  Funny, but Miss Holloway doesn’t sound sorry.  She sounds tense.  “Just routine.”  Her eyes find Hannah’s, fix on them.  “What happened, Hannah?”

“Lex told you.  It burnt out.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Look, I thought you were here to talk to Hannah?”  Lex’s concern, potent as it is, thus does not extend so apparently-far from the topic; Hannah is, selfishly, more glad of it than she can say.  “What does a light have to do with that?”

Miss Holloway nods, her smile back in place.  “Of course.  I apologise.”  Her eyes don’t leave the light.  “Hannah, I just have a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

Hannah herself just shrugs.  “Figured as much.”

“Hannah.”  Lex’s rebuke is short, sharp.  Still gentle, even in its scolding, but still a correction.  “Be polite.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”  The smile hasn’t slipped.  “So, Hannah… Duke mentioned a phrase you’d used when you met with him.  Nightmare Time, you called it.  What does that mean?”

A simple question to start, odd in how trivial and, frankly, obvious it is.  “I used to have bad dreams a lot.  We called it Nightmare Time.”  Miss Holloway nods solemnly, head tilted like she’s still listening for more information, and Hannah half-complies.  “I told him that stopped, though.  I haven’t had bad dreams in a while.”

“That’s good.”  A beat, then: “But you’ve been really tired lately, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.  I just haven’t been sleeping well.”  Hannah drops her hand to her pocket, fiddling with the apple seed.  She holds fast to the memory of her training the night before and wills it to get her through to tonight’s session.  “Why does that matter?”

She doesn’t get an answer.  Instead, Miss Holloway’s eyes have dropped to Hannah’s hand, her pocket, and she changes the topic.  “What’s that in your pocket, Hannah?”

Hannah shrugs.  “Nothing important.”

“Then show me.”

Nothing grates quite like being told what to do.  “Why?”  But then Lex frowns like she’s trying to decide which side to take, and Hannah decides to spare her the trouble, yielding the fight: “It’s just a seed,” she says, and she pulls her hand from her pocket to display the rich brown pip.  “Nothing special.”

Miss Holloway looks at it like she’s seen a ghost.  “Where did you get that?”

“Why?”  Lex’s concern has tripled, and the fact that the thing looks innocuous is probably not helping.  “What’s wrong with it?  Is it not just a seed?”

Her questions aren’t answered.  Are practically ignored.  “Hannah, who gave that to you?”

“No one.”  It’s even true; she dug it out of the apple herself.  “I kept it from an apple I ate the other day.  Might plant it soon.”

“Do you like apples?”

Hannah shrugs.  “Yeah.”  Smiles as she adds, “They’re good for you.”

Miss Holloway nods.  Straightens until she’s looking Hannah dead in the eye, somber in a way that’s ominously distinct from her smiles but not quite different enough.  “Have you met anyone calling themself Uncle Wiley over the past few days?”

“What?”  Lex takes two strides forward before she can even think about it, then holds herself back from getting closer.  “Who’s that?”

“Hannah.”

“Stop ignoring my sister.”  This, Hannah considers non-negotiable.  “You’re supposed to be here to help, right.  Try tact.”

It’s sharper than she usually talks, and Lex notices.  “Hannah,” she barks again, and the worry undercutting it doesn’t dull the sting.

“No, no.  She’s right.”  Miss Holloway nods, lifting a hand like it’ll pacify both parties.  “I’m sorry.  I was…”  Her eyes find the light, the seed, the light again.  “Caught up.  I apologise.”  A moment, then: “But do you know them, Hannah?”

“Why are you asking?”

Miss Holloway smiles.  “Why aren’t you answering?”  A moment, and it’s then that Hannah notices the woman’s fingers tapping against her bedside table.  They make a rhythmic tapping, easy to fall into, and it feels like Webby’s compulsion enough for her to almost fall in… but that makes it easy to resist, too.  “Have you met Uncle Wiley?”

Hannah tilts her head.  “That won’t work, you know.”  In for a penny, in for a pound.  There’s no way out of this that doesn’t spill some truths, and she might as well commit.  (Oddly, she doesn’t mind as much as she used to.)  “Webby taught me better than that.”

“Webby?”  Lex looks pale.  Paler than she was already, anyway, which is saying something.  “Hannah, she’s not rea–”

“She is.”  This is, at least, a familiar argument.  They’ve had it before.  “Miss Holloway knows, too.”  She can tell, the same way she knew about the meeting in the first place.  “Don’t you?”

A moment of consideration; then, a nod, with a trace of reluctance kept just out of sight.  “Yes.”

“W-”  Lex stutters over the word, looking for all the world like the ground’s dropped out from beneath her.  “What?”

“She’s met Webby too.  Right?”  Another nod from Miss Holloway.  “Is that why you’re here?”

“She’s worried about you.”  The word bears a capital Hannah’s long since stopped using, she can just tell.  “I told Her I’d help.”

Hannah snorts.  “Don’t bother; her help’s never been very helpful.”  She manages a bit of regret at the fact that Lex was finding out about the complicated web of Hatchetfield’s various entities in so confusing a fashion, but is a little more preoccupied by the newest threat, standing before her in a denim jacket that looks… oddly familiar.  “Where’d you get that jacket?”

“It’s mine.”  Odd; there’s no trace of a lie, there.  “Why?”

“Looks familiar.”

Miss Holloway frowns, head tilting again.  “So you do know Uncle Wiley.”

“Yeah.”  Hannah juts her chin into the air, shoots for defiance and thinks she hits her mark.  “They’ve been helping me.”

Lex’s mouth is hanging open, now, worry practically dripping from drawn-together eyebrows.  “What?”  Her fingers are back to worrying at the lighter again.  “Hannah, what have you been doing?”

“Lessons.”  If she tries, she can pretend that it doesn’t hurt to see Lex looking at her with such… Dare she say, horror?  (Intellectually, she knows it’s probably concern and disbelief warring with one another too intensely to separate cleanly.  Emotionally, though, it feels too much like condemnation.  She kinda wants to cry.)  “Please don’t look at me like that, Lex.”

Her expression doesn’t change.  (Hannah tries to be objective about it.  It still hurts.)  “What kind of lessons?”

Miss Holloway fields that one, and it’s the first time Hannah’s been glad she’s here.  At least Lex won’t keep looking at her like that.  “Hannah has a Gift.  She’s very powerful, and they’ve been helping her refine that.”  A beat.  “Isn’t that right, Hannah?”

“Yeah.  And I’m good.”  Lex is staring at her again.  “Please stop looking at me like that.”

She makes an effort to listen.  (It doesn’t really work.)  “Why?”

“You and Ethan have taken care of me for so many years.  Now I want to be able to help.”

“But if you’re in danger–”

“I’m not.”  Neither of the other parties in the room look convinced.  “Not any more than I would be.  Might even be safer, ‘cause now I know how to defend myself better.”  Lex looks like she’s about to cry.  “I said–”  She calms herself as best she can.  “Please stop looking at me like that,” she says again.

“I’m sorry, I’m just–”

“You’re worried.”  Hannah nods.  “This is why you weren’t supposed to know.”

Miss Holloway frowns.  “You can’t keep doing this, Hannah.  There are things at stake here that are far too large for you to deal with.”

“I understand what I’m doing.”  Hannah lifts a hand, takes a step back.  Feels something rising within her: not red this time, but green.  Embraces it.  “And I won’t let you stop me.”

Lex takes another aborted step forwards.  “Hannah–”

“I won’t.  I’m stronger now, and there’s even more to go.  I won’t stop.”  The green sharpens, strengthens her.  She welcomes it.  Pretends it’ll make up for the expression on Lex’s face.  “I said stop looking at me like that.”

And then, like that, she’s gone.

Chapter Text

Before Hannah even opens her eyes, she knows she’s taken herself to the Witchwood.  She could come up with any number of possible explanations --- the lack of birdsong overhead, the texture of the ground underfoot, the feel of the air around her --- but she knows that these sensory familiarities have nothing to do with it; she’d have known without any contextual clues at all.  It might have scared her a few days ago --- might have been too much to comprehend and sent her running --- but now?  She’s ecstatic.  This, after all, is progress.

Uncle Wiley isn’t in the clearing, but that’s fine; after so much time working with them there, she’d recognise the place anywhere and, conveniently, also knows the path in and out by heart.  She could leave if she wanted to… except she doesn’t.  She settles down onto the needle-covered ground instead.  The underbrush pokes through her jeans as she crosses her legs, but it’s not uncomfortable enough to make her move, so she doesn’t do that either.  She figures she deserves a break before setting out again, that’s for sure.

Besides, she’s got a lot to think about first, too.

Lex’s face floats in front of her, expression just the same as it had been during their meeting with Miss Holloway.  (It hurts just the same, too.)  Distance, it must be said, has lent some clarity to the matter, and Hannah has known her sister all her life: she knows that Lex hadn’t necessarily been terrified or angry, hadn’t necessarily rejected her.  Worry, concern, and shock had been more prominent than anything else (a good sign) and it has been long enough by now for Lex to have grown more certain that Hannah isn’t just losing it (not necessarily a bad sign) and yet…

And yet.

What if this is too much?  Lex has always been there for Hannah, taking care of her through so much shit that neither of them should have had to experience; life without her is incomprehensible.  Impossible.  Terrifying as she even contemplates it.  Love can’t be unconditional --- there has to be a limit somewhere; if life has taught her one thing, it’s that care can vanish in a moment if that limit happens to be reached --- and now all Hannah can think is what if this is Lex’s?

Miss Holloway was still there when she left --- or, rather, poofed away… somehow --- and Hannah has no doubt that she’s telling Lex too much for anyone’s good.  It’s admirable that she wants to help, yes, but that changes nothing about the fact that she’s butting into a situation she doesn’t understand.  Uncle Wiley had said they’d known each other in the past, but that they hadn’t gotten along; perhaps this is why she felt that the situation needed to be changed so urgently?  Or perhaps that’s Webby’s intervention, once she realised she’d lost Hannah’s ear; perhaps she decided to interfere from another direction?  Or perhaps both.  Or perhaps neither.

Either way, Miss Holloway is working off incomplete information without even realising it, and there are not-small chances that Lex is going to follow suit after whatever she’s told.  She was already worried; hearing a spiel about how dangerous Hannah’s actions --- and the company she's been keeping --- had been could only make it worse.  Not to mention the fact that Ethan will be getting home any minute and is highly likely to panic even more than Lex already had.  (This, it must be acknowledged, would not be helped by Hannah’s disappearance.)

And yet Hannah can’t simply return, either.  Can’t go back and explain until everyone’s questions are answered.  Can’t even pull herself to her feet.

Her thoughts are too loud for that, what ifs clamouring against one another without an end in sight.  What if Lex hates her now?  What if Miss Holloway finds a way to track down Uncle Wiley and force them to stop helping Hannah?  What if she can't keep learning, can’t help Lex and Ethan like she’s been trying to for so long?  What if they take away her only avenue to power?

What if?

And so she sits instead, still trying to do too much at once: to hide from the world while nonetheless trying to strategise for when she returns to it.  This goes (predictably) poorly, but she keeps at it as the sun sinks lower and the shadows grow longer, until she feels less like the world is closing in around her and more able to let herself relax into the late, late afternoon shade.  She still doesn't know what she’ll do when she leaves, but the worry feels less sharp, more muted.

She doesn’t hear Uncle Wiley approach, but she feels the ripple of their arrival as keenly as if she’d seen it.  She wonders if she would have noticed had they tried to conceal their approach, but the question goes unanswered because they clearly were not; they talk before she even looks their way.  “Hey, there, Hannah.  How’s it goin’?”

“Hey.”  She’s never seen them in daylight before --- never even seen them in light, save the artificial glow of her room’s garlands --- and it feels odd now.  “Fine,” she lies, though she knows they won’t believe it, and then adds, “What took you so long?”

She means it as a joke --- is pretty sure they take it as one --- but they answer her like she’s serious anyway.  “You should know better’n me, chief.”

“What do you mean?”

“I take it the meeting didn’t go so well?”, they ask, and Hannah can’t quite follow the non-sequitur but shakes her head all the same.  They seem unsurprised, laughing some loud, ugly, bitter scoff of a chuckle in response.  “That Holloway’s got a nasty habit o’ bein’ all righteous no matter the situation.  Frustrating, ain’t it?”

Hannah doesn’t respond directly.  “Lex knows.”

Uncle Wiley fixes her with a look that’s almost unreadable, save a bit of calculation seeping through.  “How you feein’ ‘bout it?”

She’s honest, this time; there’s little point in putting forth the charade of lying.  “Not great.”  As usual, she doubts this is new information.  Appreciates them giving her the chance to express it for herself anyway.  “Why?  What does that have to do with anything?”

“Fact o’ the matter is, you’ve walled yourself away in here for goin’ on thirty minutes now.  Well nigh unreachable, in fact.”

“But I’ve just been sitting here!”  A beat.  “Right?”

“Yes and no.”  They’re using the same voice they always use during lessons, and, dimly, she wonders why they’re so used to teaching people.  Then she figures it’s nothing to do with her and focuses on what they’re saying instead.  “You wanted to be alone, yeah?  Shut out the world, think things through, yada yada, all that jazz?”

Hannah nods.  “Yeah.  Things were just… a bit much.”

“Well, there ya go.”  They smile with too many teeth, but she barely notices; that’s just how things are these days.  “You managed it.  Tricky thing about self-actualisation: ain’t the easiest thing to avoid, ‘specially not when you’re in your own head like that.  Shields only just came down.”

“Oh.”  She frowns, trying to remember raising any.  Frowns more wondering why Uncle Wiley hadn’t just broken through.  Decides to ask.  “Why are you here now?”

“Ya called.”  They say it like it’s simple.  

“No, I didn–”  She falters.  Feels something smooth in her hand and looks down.  Finds her hand closed around the apple seed.  Oh.  “Why didn’t you do anything about the barrier before that?”

They shrug, the same lopsided gesture they’ve made for as long as she’s known them turning into a relief because at least she still has some constants left to her.  (Perhaps that is why she found herself in this clearing: the constancy of it.)  “T’be honest, I ain’t even sure I could if I wanted to.  That Gift o’ yours?  Whoo, boy, I ain’t kiddin’ ‘bout it’s strength!  I’ll say it six ways ta Sunday: you’ve got th’ kind o’ power in that noggin o’ yours that changes rules.  Plus the moxie to not take shit lyin’ down, either.  That’s a dangerous combo there, and not to be taken lightly.”  A snort.  “I ain’t dumb enough not to quit when I’m outmatched.”

The thing in the wood heaves, then, and she can tell it’s angry but not quite why.  “What’s–”  Another shift, and the wind gusts sharply through the clearing, knocking leaves and branches to the ground in a spray of debris.  “What is that?”

Uncle Wiley looks at her for long enough that she knows to hush up for a moment; it’s one-part evaluation of the situation and two-parts evaluation of her.  They must, thankfully, decide in her favour, for they nod once, then again.  “A’ight, sure, why not?  Let’s try this.  Lesson time, Hannah.”

She nods.  “What do I do?”

“Shield first.  Keep all that debris off.”  They’re watching her closely as they say it; she can’t help wondering why.

Technically speaking, Hannah does not have to lift her hand into the air to summon a shield --- has seen Uncle Wiley do it without any sign they’d moved at all, in fact --- but she’s been doing it during their training sessions since she started so it just feels right now.  Barely thinking, she follows their instruction: eyes and hand cast heavenwards, barrier summoned (which, she’s relieved to note, holds immediately), and patience invested in waiting.

The thing outside rails.  Wiley grins.  (She doesn’t think it’s just about the barrier and once again feels the vague sensation of missing something.)  “Ain’t that a beaut.”  A clap of their hands.  “Now we can get goin’.”

“What’s out there?”  

“You sure you wanna know?  Ain’t the kinda thing for the faint o’ heart.”  Wiley snorts just after they say it, nearly cutting themself of.  “Then again, s’ppose it ain’t the most shocking thing for you, given your history.”

Hannah nods, certain.  Whatever’s going on, she wants to know.  Needs to know.  “Tell me.”  Wonders, as she says it, whether the answer will explain all the things she knows she doesn’t know about the situation.  Hopes it will.

“That out there’s my…”  They pause.  Think.  Frown.  “Let’s go with ‘boss’.  You know His name?”

“Wiggly,” she says, and doesn’t bother with wondering how she knew it.  “Right?”

“Yeah, ‘xactly.  He’s brother to that imaginary friend o’ yours, and a whole host o’ other siblings.  All of ‘em had this big fallin’ out a while ago, and She left.”

“Like I left Lex?  Or different?”

“Diff’rent, hopefully.  They’re still fightin’.”

“Oh.”  Hannah frowns.  “That’s why Webby didn’t want me learning from you?”

“Yep.”  The p pops, sharp as the cracking wood outside their little bubble.  “‘N’ the storm out there’d be ‘cause my boss ain’t too keen I let ya be in here ‘til you were ready f’r company.  He’s got some ideas ‘bout deadlines, and penalties when ya don’t meet ‘em.”  They look up towards the barrier she can’t see except for the spaces where the plant carnage isn’t.  She thinks they’re two shades to the left of disbelieving, and both shades are just plain glad.  “It’ll blow over soon enough.”

As if on cue, the shower of foliage stops right after, almost as soon as the words are spoken.

Problem being, Wiley looks confused, like this isn’t expected, and that makes her nervous.  “Is that not what you meant?”

Before they can answer, more crackling noises sound from their right, and Hannah turns to look.  For a moment, there is only the rustling of leaves and the pre-emptive bowing of tree limbs; then, someone steps free of the bushes and into the clearing.

As it happens, she recognises him easily.  Would even without the badge and gun, the uniform, the nameplate, the hair.  Would even if he didn’t have a habit of strutting down Main Street like he owned the place.

Would because Sam Sweetly was one of the dirty cops who’d tried to arrest Lex and Ethan for something they hadn’t done back in the day, and one of the handful that had gotten away with it even after Pamela Foster had been arrested instead.

Sam’s got his glasses on despite the dimming light of the woods, and the slowly dying sun glints off them until his actual eyes aren’t visible at all.  As it is, there is only his smile --- wide and vicious, somehow more natural and yet less human than Wiley’s --- spread from ear to ear.  She can tell he’s looking around the clearing just from the motion of his head, though she’s also nearly certain that he managed to (somehow) miss Wiley as they stand beside her. 

The grin widens.  “Well, hello, there.  Now, what’s a little girl like you doing all the way out here?”

Chapter Text

Hannah doesn’t answer.  Sam doesn’t seem to care.  He stands with all the cocky nonchalance she associates with him, hands near his pockets but not quite inside, thumbs poked through his belt loops instead.  She can’t help noticing --- whether due to her own observation skills or the newfound abilities that haven’t quite reached the level of intentionality yet --- that the snap holding his gun into his holster has already been undone; this she files away, not quite sure of whether she wants that piece of information because it’s a warning against him or because it’s a possible liability she can exploit if the opportunity arises.

Thus far, it hasn’t.  His hands linger too close to it for her to try grabbing for it, and he’s still a little too on-guard for that even so.  His smile is still the searing, unnerving thing it was when he arrived and, as the sun keeps dying away into the pinkish cast of a dying sky, it starts becoming all she can see.  A chill runs up her back at the sight, then travels back down again, and she would never have felt comfortable around the man but she feels --- all at once and without any warning beyond his mere presence --- decidedly unsafe.

“Aren’t you a talkative one?”  The grin sharpens.  “You must be Hannah, that right?”

She nods, hesitantly: not quite sure why that agreement would be bad to give, but undeniably hesitant to give it anyway.  “Yes.”

“Whoa, there, she speaks!  Ain’t that nice.”  The grin sharpens.  “You know, a lotta people are looking for you, honey.  Not nice, the way you ran off like this.  You’ve got everyone in a bit of a panic.”

Whatever she might be about to say in response, it gets cut off almost immediately.  "A’ight, Hannah, time for another lesson.”   It’s Uncle Wiley’s voice, somehow, coming not from their position beside her but echoing around in her head instead.  “You ready?”

She nods, as imperceptibly as she can.

“Wonderful.  We’re gonna put that mind you've got there to work, now, little lady, so get ready.”   They prowl closer, soundless against the ground beneath them, still utterly unnoticed by Sam.  Unobservant though Hannah would believe the man could be, she can’t accept that he wouldn’t notice an entire other individual if he were able to see them; something must be preventing him from doing so.  What a fabulous thing to be able to do!  “Bit hard ta explain, mind, but I s’ppose we ain’t got a choice, huh?  So.  Let's work with that Gift o’ yours.  Try ta say somethin’ to me without actually talkin’. ”

She does.  Tries to figure out how to beam “What do we do about him?” across the foot-and-a-half of empty forest between them.  Fails.

Sam’s still yapping in the background, teeth glinting sharp in the falling shadows.  It’s a distraction, and she wishes he’d just shut up.  Wishes he weren’t there at all.  Wonders if she can make that happen, but remembers that she should be focusing on something else.  Can’t quite push the idea away when he’s still rambling on.  “–and whaddya know?  Got a call from some familiar folks saying their little sister’s run away.  Now why’d you do that, Hannah?”

“Take it slow, there.  Ain’t much of a point to takin’ it quick; this kinda stuff’s not easy.  Harder ta see those threads, I s’ppose.  But your Gift is manifestation, kid.  You want somethin’ bad enough, ain’t nothin’ gonna be able ta stop ya; the universe itself’ll listen to ya.  Tell yourself good and long that you c’n do this, and damn but you’ll be able ta.”

She tries again.  Wills the same question to cross the narrow stretch of clearing between them.  Thinks it gets a little farther than last time before falling flat.

“What’s wrong, little girl?  You scared?”  A laugh: too warmly delivered for how cold it is underneath, cruel throughout.  “You should be scared.  Woods at night aren’t very safe, are they?”  The smile strengthens again, too-sharp canines glinting.  “Never know what you might find out here.”

“Ignore him.  Focus, Hannah.”

She tries.  Forces herself to look past the world itself --- a magic eye picture with hidden surprises only she can see --- to find the threads of magic running through the woods.  It makes a web underfoot, following root lines she once knew by heart and now fears by soul.  That could have been her, in another world, for those were people like her, and the thought gives her a surge of anger that she might just be able to use.  She hitches her thoughts to the emotion, tries to shove both through the narrow strings of everything, can’t fight a sting of relief when something gives.

“Lotsa threats in a quiet place like this, especially for a little girl like you.”

“Ohoho, yes.  Gettin’ there, Hannah.  Give it one more good go ‘n’ you’ll be there.”

“What are you doing out here, Hannah?”

She doesn’t answer.  Is focused too hard on threading words through the eye of a needle she can barely see, barely sense.

“You’ve got this.”

“Don’t you know how worried your sister is?  Not very nice, to run away like that.”

“Focus, Hannah,” they say again, and she manages to fight a flare of annoyance because yeah, she’s already trying to do that, and no, it’s not as easy as it sounds, but they’ve always been helpful and she knows they’re just trying to give her something to focus on that isn’t Sam.  Sam and his gun.  Sam and his scummy tirade leading up to… well, something bad.  Sam and his too bright smile that makes her skin crawl.  “One more try.  In three.”

“Talk to me, girl.”

“Two.”

“Can’t get away from this by ignoring me.  You’re in big trouble right now.”

“One.”

“Someone I know wants a word with you.”

“Go.”

That something gives the rest of the way.  Breaks.  Hannah blinks.  “Did that work?”

“Hoo, boy, did it!”   They’re not at her side anymore, melted back into the shadows she so associates with them as the light drops further, but she still smiles and thinks they can see it.  “There ya go, Hannah; now how’s that feel?”

“Good.  I wondered if it’d hurt.  Like when I focus on something for too long, or use the Gift too much, but this feels just like talking.”   Remembering Sam’s presence is as unfortunate as noticing his arrival, and she grimaces.  Tries not to let it show.  Is pretty sure her hatred of the man overrides the attempt.  “Who wants to talk to me?”

“You don’t know Him.”

Hannah stiffens at the capital letter, at the flare of pink that accompanies it.  “Who?”, she asks again, impressing some of her annoyance into the very word.  “He doesn’t work for Wiggly, does he?  It’s one of the others?”   

She’s pretty sure she knows the answer even before Uncle Wiley answers, but their words confirm it.  “Tha’s right.”

“You should know better than asking me things like that.  Names have power, little girl; you shouldn’t use them carelessly.”  In someone else, the words might have sounded ominous.  Significant.  Important.  In him, they sound like a child posturing, playing with something they don’t entirely understand.  “But He’ll be here shortly, don’t you worry.”

As if on cue, Uncle Wiley’s voice comes again.  “Careful, now, Hannah.  Our friend here’s new t’ all this.  Folks like him… Well.  They ain’t used to this kinda thing.  Folks with stronger Gifts, sure, they’re the sorts can roll with this just fine, but normal folks?  They get a touch unstable when they see evidence of one o’ the Lords.  Makes a person unpredictable.”

“What do you mean, ‘new to this’?”   Hannah frowns before she can think about it.  “Has he not been working with them for years?”

“Nope.  I’d’ve known.”   They certainly sound sure.

“But he–”   She breaks off --- glad that their illicit conversation doesn’t prevent her from changing trains of thought --- and fumbles to rephrase.  “My sister, and Ethan–  That was several years ago; why–?”

“Sorry ta say, that was just a touch o’ plain ol’ human greed.  Might be what brought him to the attentions of the Lord he serves, but not in service of Him.”

“Oh.”

Sam’s still going on and on, words a droning buzz Hannah doesn’t really care to hear but makes herself listen to anyway.  “–but if you want to meet Him, then… Fine by me!”

Hannah’s blood runs cold.  “What do I do?”

No response.

Sam grins up into the sky, aviators fallen from the bridge of his nose to lie, discarded, on the forest floor.  His eyes are visible now --- bloodshot and crazed, glinting with a brand of fanatical devotion that makes Hannah’s skin crawl even worse than his grin alone --- teeth still bared in what she’d thought was a smile but now looks more like a twisted rictus of one.

“Uncle Wiley?!”

No response.  (Have they left?  Is this a test for her, to see how capable she is of dealing with the unexpected?)

Sam’s hands lift, fervent and sure even as they shake, fingers reaching towards the sky but finding the trees of the Witchwood instead.  The vines curled around their bark start to move, crawling like snakes down his fingers, then his wrists, then looping around his elbows.  More creep slowly from the ground below, encompassing his feet in their shiny police-issue boots, and then his ankles in turn.  Hannah can’t fight thoughts of marionette strings, of puppets being made to dance to music they can’t understand; nor can she fight the sense that this is not what Sam expected to happen, even if he doesn’t seem to have noticed.

“Should I do something?”

Still no response.  (Perhaps there’s a reason for their silence.  Perhaps they’re too busy focusing on something else.)

The vines pull taught.  For the first time, Sam is shocked from whatever he’s been trying to do, eyes suddenly more human as he looks around in confusion.  (Not entirely human, though.  She can see a pinkish cloud stretching overtop them now, and she wonders if he’s become as blinded by his greed as he’s always seemed to be.)  “What’s going on?”, he asks, and no one answers him either.

“I’m here,” Uncle Wiley tells Hannah in her mind; “Don’t worry,” they say out loud.

Funny, but Hannah doesn’t think Sam is reassured.

Uncle Wiley has a knife in their hands: sharp and well-kept, even if there are flaws in its construction.  She can see what’s wrong, even if she’s not sure how: their fingers are curved around the hilt, blocking her sight, and yet she knows that the pins are misshapen all the same.  She knows, too, that this wasn’t their knife --- that it was a gift from someone near and dear at the time --- and that the knife might not be standard-issue but that it’s connected to the dog tags they wear.

Sam tries to jolt backwards as soon as he processes the sight --- as soon as he realises what the glint of metal in the darkness means for him --- but he gets barely an inch away before the vines tighten.  Another jolt, another failed attempt to get away; the vines hold firm.  “What the hell do you want?”, he asks, and the words should sound strong but they ring hollow instead.  “Where the hell did you come from?”

Uncle Wiley grins, thumbing the blade as they speak in a cold voice Hannah’s never heard from them before.  “This here ain’t your business, pal.”

“I’m here on a job, man!  I was told–”

“I know what you were told, don’tcha worry about that.”  Uncle Wiley’s laugh is sharper than she’s ever heard it, creaky and unnatural enough to sound right at home in the Witchwood.  Maybe they are.  “Problem is, this here ain’t for you or your boss to be messin’ with.”

Sam squints, expression flickering back and forth from that devout mania he’d donned before.  (How odd it is, to see a man usually so irreverent struck mad by dark religious fixation.)  “The Witchwood is His and you know it, servant of Wiggly.  You trespass on territory that is not yours by right.”  A bit of Sam-as-he-was supplants some of Sam-as-he’s-come-to-be.  “Trespass is a crime, you know.”

Uncle Wiley ignores the aside, addresses the first comment instead: “Not right now it’s not.  Nibbly has His corner of the Witchwood; this clearing is Wiggly’s.”  A tsking sound, like they’re scolding Sam, threatening for how it rests just to the left of playful.  “Shame you’ve interfered.  My boss won’t like that.  ‘N’, as it happens, I don’t either.  Bye bye.”

The knife lifts.  Traces a channel across Sam’s throat.  Carves him another smile.

This one weeps red.

Chapter Text

It’s almost funny, really, the way the sound of dripping blood isn’t particularly ominous.  It sounds like any other liquid --- the juice she knocked over the other day pattering against their apartment’s crappy flooring, rain dropping from trees after a downpour strong enough to soak them --- until you know what it is.  Until that bright, visceral (in the literal sense) red is noticed.  Until it sinks in that the viscosity isn’t right.  Until the smell of pennies --- iron, really, but who truly knows what that smells like, tastes like? --- stands out, recognisable, from the surrounding air.

The clearing smells of blood, now.

Hannah can’t think of what it smelled like before --- can only remember it in vague shades of normal and, thus, unremarkable --- but can’t help wondering whether her recollection is even accurate.  Whether the clearing were truly so normal, or if the noiselessness she’s managed to register is only the most notable of the many ways in which the clearing is contextless, distinct from all the rest of the forest surrounding it: a pocket, set aside from the rest of the Witchwood for her use and her use alone.

She supposes it doesn’t matter right then; there’s nothing contextless about it now.  With Sam’s body bleeding into the dirt, close enough that she has to scootch her trainers out of its path to avoid staining them, context abounds.  “Did you know him?”, she asks.

Uncle Wiley hasn’t moved from where they’d been standing when Sam hit the ground, not even to avoid the mess.  Blood is already soaking into denim, not to mention splattered across their boots, dripping from their knife.  Plop.  Plop.  Plop.   Like a leaking pipe.  They snort, shake their head.  “Nah.  Know a helluva lot like ‘im, though.”

“Oh.”  Hannah feels like she should be upset.  Feels like she would’ve been upset if this happened a week or so ago.  Feels like she’s stumbled her way into one of those situations she always heard about at school assemblies --- a stranger and a knife and a documented act of violence?  Isn’t this where they’d said she should run? --- and yet feels none of the panic she thinks she should feel.  Puzzles over that for a bit.

“Y’alright?”

The question feels so nonsensical that a laugh bursts out instead of an answer.  She doubles over with the force of it --- not to her knees, for there’s sense enough left in her to remember the blood --- but close, then straightens again to get the hair out of her eyes.  “Yeah,” she manages, and even she’s not sure whether it’s a lie.  It doesn’t feel like a lie, but the world doesn’t quite feel real either, so maybe her judgement is just… on the fritz.  “Yeah, I think so.”

“Here.”  Something flies towards her, without her even registering them moving; whether that’s because she’s that bowled-over from what just happened or because they truly didn’t, she can’t quite tell.  When she catches it, she recognises the feel of the apple before she knows it by sight.  “For th’ shock.  It’d do ya good t’ get some sust’nance in ya anyway; been a long day.”

The promise of food must wake her appetite, for her stomach rumbles just after, letting her know that she is, in fact, hungry, and has been without noticing for a while.  “Thanks,” she manages, already starting to eat it and, apparently, not planning to stop anytime soon.

It’s odd to think that she’d once found them deeply sour; now, she barely notices the bite.

Apparently satisfied, Uncle Wiley turns back towards the body (and what a concept to be considering in the literal flesh), eyes dispassionate as they regard the corpse of their own making.  (Again, Hannah is pretty sure she should be running.  Again, Hannah feels no need to actually do so.  Should she be?)  “Is he dead?”, she asks, and almost laughs again at the ridiculousness of the question.

“Yeah.”  Their boot finds Sam’s arm.  Kicks it up into the air enough for her to see it flop back down against the ground.  Does it again for good measure.  “As a doornail.”  Their knife’s still out, still plop-plop-plopping blood to the forest floor.  “That bother ya?”

A good question.  Hannah’s still trying to figure out the answer herself.  “I don’t know.”  She frowns, and she hopes it conveys the conflict she feels.  “It should, shouldn’t it?”

They shrug.  “Figure that’s up ta you.  What’s a should in a situation like this?  Right ‘n’ wrong ain’t clear cut enough for that.  You’ve gotta sort that out all on yer own.”  They fix her with their usual calculating look and she takes another bite of the apple while she waits for whatever question will follow.  “D’ya feel badly ‘bout it?”

“No.”  She knows it’s true, once she says it.  Feels, again, like that should bother her.  Feels, again, that it doesn’t.  “I didn’t like him.  He was a bad man.”  This, she doubts not at all.

“That’s certainly true, ‘n’ ain’t no doubt about it.”

“What did he mean, though?”  At a look: “About someone wanting to talk to me?”

Uncle Wiley must remember the knife, for they vanish it with a flick of their wrist.  (She makes a note to ask them how, later.)  “Oh, y’know, nothin’ big.  One o’ those siblings we were talkin’ ‘bout earlier.  Ain’t much more keen on you trainin’ here than your ol’ friend is.”

“But why?”

A ripple of something passes through the air: not quite warning, not quite displeasure, but somewhere between the two.  She knows she won’t get an answer even before Uncle Wiley snaps out an annoyed, “Now, that ain’t hardly a concern o’ yours, little lady, so don’tcha worry ‘bout it.  Better stop askin’.”  

A beat of stillness.  

Hannah swallows.  Nods.  “Okay.”

The silence is absolute without the sound of blood dripping to break it up.

“Good.”  Uncle Wiley looks back down at Sam once, then nods, short and sharp.  “You’re almost done, Hannah.  Only got a few lessons left ‘fore you’re done.  You still committed enough for that?”

It’s a Moment.  Like the one that took place in her bedroom so many nights ago, with a burnt-out Christmas light and a wish gone unanswered for too long.  The kind with significance she can feel, palpable as the silence that waits for her answer.  The kind that writes a path to the future all on its own.

And all she has to do is decide.

She knows that things have spiralled far further than she intended; all she wanted to do was help!  Everything that has happened since --- Lex and Ethan not being by her side, Miss Holloway getting involved, Sam being dead… all of it --- was unexpected and unforeseen.  Bad, too, most of it.  (Maybe all.)  

And yet, at the same time… Was she ready to give up?  To stop her journey down the path towards the power to protect those she cares about, just when she’s nearing the finish?  To be scared off by the consequences of decisions she still can’t regret making?  Sure, all she wanted to do was to help, but she was a naive little girl then, curled up on her bed in the passive hope that someone would come along to fix things, so unable to believe that she had the ability to do so herself that she manifested that very inability into reality.  Now, she’s well on her way towards being able to change things all on her own, and it feels good.  Almost addicting, to the point that she understands the word more than she ever has before.

Lex and Ethan will just have to understand.  After all, she’s doing this for them.

She nods.  “I am.”

“Good,” Uncle Wiley says again, as the sun’s final rays disappear in favour of darker night.  “Then let’s go.”

“What about him?”  She nods towards Sam.  “Do we move him or something?”

“Nah.” A snort.  “Leave ‘im.”

– – – 

As the sun goes down, Lex finds herself sitting in Miss Holloway’s diner.

She’s not quite sure how she found her way there --- and, judging by the look on his face as he sits beside her, neither is Ethan --- but there’s no way of denying the vinyl underneath them or the sound of the jukebox at the other end of the room.  They haven’t ordered food, she’s certain, and yet some sits before them all the same: a sweetened, light cup of tea for Ethan, a black cup of coffee for her, and a piece of pie for them both.  She has vague recollections of Miss Holloway bringing them out, but she wasn’t in the frame of mind to even look at them until right then, never mind to ask how she knew their usual orders when they hadn’t been in Miss Retro’s for years, if ever.

Miss Holloway herself is sitting at one of the diner’s bar stools, a book open before her that she has, quite vigorously, prevented anyone from looking at, including Duke, who sits at her side.  They’re talking about something, though Lex can’t quite hear what, and have been for the better part of the evening.  She hopes they’re talking about something that will help.  Can’t quite bring herself to ask.

Ethan’s not doing much better than she is.  They independently made the mutual decision to find each other’s hand under the table and she can feel his hand shaking lightly in the process.  She’s probably no different: her free hand is fiddling with everything from her rings to her cigarette lighter, and none of it is stopping the jittery feeling prickling under her skin.  His other hand is wrapped around his teacup, though he makes no more moves towards drinking it than she has her coffee; she suspects it’s more about the warmth than anything.  The illusion of comfort, of normalcy.  Of things being okay in the end.

“Did we do this?”  It’s the first thing she’s said in an hour, maybe more, and she hadn’t even planned to say it.  It’s just all she can think: one thought, running through her head on loop.  “Hannah… Why would she…?”  She can’t think of how to finish the sentence.  “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know.”  It’s not what she wants to hear, but she can’t exactly blame him; they’re in the same boat.  “I don’t think so.  She knows she can talk to us, and about anythin–”

“But she didn’t, Ethan.”  Any other time, she might feel bad for interrupting, but this isn’t any other time.  Any other time, and Hannah wouldn’t be missing.  Any other time, and they wouldn’t be so desperate as to have called the police that have only ever let them down, just on the off-chance that they wouldn't this time.  “She didn’t.  And I can’t help but think that maybe… That we could’ve done something differently.”

“Like what?”  It sounds like a genuine question.

She doesn’t know how to answer it as such, and her voice rises to suit.  “I don’t know, but we haven’t exactly been available, have we?  We’ve barely been home.  What should we have noticed?  What didn't we see because we were too focused on other stuff?  What if it’s our fault?”

Ethan isn’t the one to respond.  “It’s not,” she hears, and turns to see Duke looking their way.  (In other circumstances, Lex might have felt bad for interrupting their conversation with an argument getting too loud.  As it is, she just hopes it’s not slowing down their search for a solution.)  He sounds certain, though the effect is rather undercut by the way he immediately turns to Miss Holloway for confirmation.  “Right?”

A nod.  Lex wishes she weren’t as relieved to see it as she is.  “This isn’t your fault.  There’s nothin’ you could’ve done, and nothin’ you should’ve done but didn’t.”  She hasn’t even looked up from her book, and Lex tries to see it a little better, just out of curiosity.  Just barely makes out a cover so dark as to look black before Miss Holloway talks again.  “This is bigger than you, I’m afraid.  Big on a cosmic scale.  Very little could have prevented this.”  Then, as a murmured aside that Lex must have heard wrong: “Not even death, apparently.”

Ethan’s still frowning as he sits beside her, looking like he’s trying to puzzle through all the stuff she’s given up on figuring out.  “I’m sorry, but, if you don’t mind me askin’...  When you say Webby’s real, d’you mean that in the real-real sense or in the the-brain’s-a-fragile-thing-real sense?  ‘Cause the doctor’s aren’t really clear ‘bout that a lotta the time and I just wanna check.”

“I mean real, Mr. Greene.  Like you’re real, or I’m real.  I’ve met Her.”

“An invisible spider from outer space?  You’re serious?”

Miss Holloway laughs, though she doesn’t say it’s inaccurate either.  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at Her.  Not quite outer space, though.  More like… another dimension.  Nestled just to the side of ours.”

He nods, once, and Lex knows that look: he’s trying to remember what she’s saying and worried it’s gonna slip away as soon as he loses focus.  “And she’s what took Hannah?”

“No, that would be Her brother.”  Miss Holloway sighs, then sets aside the book.  “She has several.  And, like many kids, they’re the sort to not like sharing their toys.”

God, Lex wants a cigarette.  She channels the urge into asking, “And their toys would be…”

“This town, among other things.  They’ve taken a liking to some of the folks here, too.  But they’re… limited, you could say.  It’s not always easy for them to reach through the divide between our dimension and theirs.  They tend to try and poke more holes in it, to get more influence.  I presume that Wiggly --- that is, Webby’s brother --- is trying to get Hannah to help Him with that.”

It’s not Lex or Ethan who responds; it’s both of them, and at the same time.  “How?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”  She gestures at her book.  “This might be able to help, but this situation is… new.  Hard to navigate.  And the book doesn’t like me, which makes it difficult.”

Lex looks at Ethan; he looks back at her.  Asks, eventually, “‘Doesn’t like ya?’  What on earth does’at mean?”

She doesn’t answer.  

– – – 

Whether Miss Holloway was going to answer Ethan’s question or not, she doesn’t get much of a choice, for the dinner melts away before she can even open her mouth.  The cosy lighting of Miss Retro’s fades once more, again supplanted by the bright light of what she’s termed the White; simultaneously, the gentle melody of her jukebox is replaced by a quiet hum of nothingness.

Webby is already standing before her this time, though She looks the same as when Miss Holloway had last held counsel with Her.  She smiles, but something looks wrong about it, even as the urge to be calm intensifies.  (It’s easier to fall into that torpor this time, though it’s also easier to fight her way out again.)  “Welcome back.” 

Miss Holloway offers a nod, ill at ease.  “Hello again.”

“I apologise for the interruption.  I know that you are quite busy with Hannah’s family, and I don’t wish to delay that.”  She at least sounds contrite, though that’s hard to trust with how easy it’d feel to believe her.

“Then why am I here?”

“Because the situation has changed.”  Webby takes a step closer this time, a near-soundless rustle of spidersilk and too many scampering legs.  “Another of my brothers has gotten involved.  Nibblenephim sent one of his many minions to track down Hannah, and He was successful.”

“And Hann–”

She lifts a hand: partly soothing, partly impatient.  “Hannah is fine.”

“Good.”  A moment, then she nods Her way.  “Good.  Then why tell me?”

“Because the reason that plan worked is that Hannah is in a place of power for Nibblenephim.  While he may, like all my brothers, indirectly influence the world as we know it, he may only directly interfere with mortals already in his domain.”

This is the problem with eldritch beings: they don’t have the best handle on the importance of time.   “Which is?”

“The Witchwood.”  Less than surprising; there’s always been something wrong with that place.   “It is a place of great power, which makes it an ideal place for the refinement of a Gift like Hannah’s; it is little wonder that Wiggog Y’rath would choose it as a… training ground for lack of a better word.  But if they have already moved on from it --- which they must have, by now --- then we must be nearing the endgame, if not already there.”

“Which would be…?”

“I’m sorry.”  Webby shakes Her head.  “I do not know.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

Another too-compelling smile.  Miss Holloway wants to believe it.  Makes herself push past the urge.  “No,” Webby says at last.  At least She’s honest.

Miss Holloway nods.  “Thanks for the informatio–”

She’s back in the diner before the word ends.

Chapter Text

When Miss Holloway starts moving, it’s a sudden thing: a burst of frenzy born from… Well, from nothing, so far as Duke can tell.  One moment she’s sitting on one of the diner stools --- eyes slightly distant at worst, hands still against the pages of her book --- and the next she’s halfway across the room, darting through the swing door to the pantry and returning with a duffel bag gone lumpy from the weight of whatever irregular objects occupy it.  Had Duke thought about it, he might have considered taking the opportunity to look at the mysterious book and its weathered pages… but, by the time he even thinks about the fact that the opportunity to do so is resting before him, Miss Holloway has returned, snapping it closed with the brisk flap of old parchment and tucking it underneath her arm.  (Then again, who’s he kidding?  He almost certainly wouldn’t have looked anyway, not when she’d asked him to refrain.)

Lex and Ethan are still sitting in their booth, looking slightly bowled-over, but even they’re not so out of it as to miss the flurry of motion; she’s on her feet before a few seconds have elapsed, and he’s clambering up just behind her.  An anxious “What’s going on?” is asked to the room as a whole, and Duke can’t quite tell which of them asked it.

Besides, Duke has his own questions to ask because he’s rarely --- if ever --- seen Miss Holloway look like this: pale and shaky, bearing a twist to her mouth that tells of determination laced with too much uncertainty for comfort.  “Is something wrong?”

“I spoke to Webby.”  She pauses only long enough to look at all of them once more, and then she’s briskly unzipping the backpack and pawing around inside.  She makes one pass, another --- is she looking for something, or just making sure that everything she needs she has?  Duke can’t quite tell --- and then the book is stowed inside too and the zipper is pulled closed again with the rasp of metal teeth.  “We need to hurry.”

Lex falters at the name --- gives that same look of half-confusion, half-denial that she always gets whenever Webby’s name comes up --- but it vanishes almost immediately.  “Why?  What’s going on?”

“And wait, whaddya mean you talked to Webby?  You didn’t even leave the room!”  Ethan frowns, turns to Lex.  “She didn’t leave the room, did she?”

“Nope.”  Lex shakes her head.

“So how–”

“She’s not of this world, remember?  I didn’t need to go anywhere.”

“What, so, you’re getting visions or somethin’?”  Ethan sounds concerned, though Duke can’t quite tell if those worries are for Miss Holloway or about her.  (Duke’s own are easier to categorise, for they rest fully in the former category.)

“You could say that, I suppose.”

Lex, already standing by the door and ready to go, crosses an arm across her chest.  “It doesn’t matter how he said it.”  It might sound harsh were the other of her hands not still entangled with Ethan’s own.  “I want to know how you’d say it.”

It is, perhaps, not Duke’s place to interject, but he can’t bring himself to hold back.  Miss Holloway is still looking strained --- a fact that seems like it’s worsening the longer they delay --- and he’s simply not the sort to look past that.  “I’ve got my car,” he says instead.  “It’ll seat everyone, Hannah included, and it’s subtle enough that no one should see it comin’.  We can talk on the way.”

Miss Holloway nods.  (He desperately hopes that he’s not making up the quiet sort of gratitude that populates the look she sends his way after.)  “Good plan.”

“Alright.”  Lex is frowning even as she says it, tossing Ethan his jacket --- previously draped around her shoulders --- for him to use on the way.  “But you better actually answer them this time.”  She says it rigidly, like she’s drawing a line in the sand and expecting it to be obeyed, but Duke knows her well enough to see the contradictory tension underneath it and read it as the posturing it is.  (Not for the first time, he regrets how quickly she had to grow up over the years, for her to hide vulnerabilities behind offensives.)

The diner bell jangles harshly with how forcefully Miss Holloway pulls the door open.  “I will.”

“Then where are we going?”

“The mall.”

Duke’s the last one out the door, though he doesn’t ease the door closed as he usually does; the deadlines they face are too non-negotiable for excessive caution on that front.  “Lakeside?”

A nod.  “Yes.”

“Why there?”  Lex tugs on the handle of the car.  Stops short with a jerk when it doesn't work.  “Door’s are locked.”

“Oh, right, sorry.”  Duke tosses Miss Holloway the keys; she swipes them out of the air with an easy grace.  (It’s not the time, but he relishes the ease of their cooperation, then feels guilty for even taking the time to consider it.  Bigger things are at stake.)  “I’ll take the back.”

She smiles, almost bright enough for him to not notice the darkness surrounding them, still all-too-worried.  Then it falters as she explains, “The Lords have places of power in town, and these are the locations at which Their rituals are most able to succeed.”

Ethan’s turn: “Rituals?”

“In a sense.”  A cacophony of car doors closing, until everyone’s tucked inside Duke’s old station wagon and Miss Holloway’s driving them out of the parking lot.  “There are… rules.  This isn’t a clear situation, you know.  This isn’t just written down somewhere, not in its entirety.”

Ethan again: “But your book–”

Miss Holloway’s voice is different here, harsher.  “Is different.”  The station wagon zips around a corner, fast enough for their own momentum to tug them to one side, then the other.  They’re at the roundabout, then, and a quarter of the trip’s already elapsed.  “It contains some of this information, but not enough.  Nothing specific.”  No immediate questions follow, and Duke gets the sense that she’s glad of that.  “The Lords are able to influence our world, but not directly.  They’re… trapped, in a sense, and hindered by the fact that Their presences are too otherworldly for most people here to comprehend.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning your brain would fry like a flapjack if you looked at one of ‘em for too long.”

Lex, sitting shotgun with her knees tucked up in front of her and her fingers picking at her fingernails, tilts her head.  “I don’t get it.  Hannah and me, we both saw Webby.”

“Yes, and I don’t have all the answers you might want on that.  Maybe it’s your Gifts–”

“I don’t have any Gift–”

“You do.”  Miss Holloway sounds certain, not at all undercut by another sharp turn of the car.  (Half of the journey, gone.)  “I’d’ve said so from the start.  And even if I weren’t sure: if you saw Webby, you do.”  Lex doesn’t answer, so she goes on: “As I said: maybe it’s your Gifts or maybe it’s something just about Her, but She’s different.  Her brothers can influence things — poke a little here, prod a little there; make sure things go according to Their plans depending on their respective…”  A snort.  “Skillsets.  And They can take servants, sometimes, if someone catches Their attention.  But They can’t manifest, for the most part.”

“And I suppose I don’t wanna know what that for the most part means, huh?”

“I don’t think you do, Ethan,” Miss Holloway says, though she does add: “But I’d definitely recommend not strolling through the Witchwood during the Honey Festival.”

Ethan’s mock-salute is a worn-down thing.  “Will do.”  He looks slightly haunted by the comment.  Duke can’t say he’s much better off himself.

“But then these rituals…”  Lex’s fingers have left her nails and started messing with a strand of her hair instead.  “They’re why Wiggly needs Hannah?”

The answer isn’t immediate, but it’s regrettably affirmative.  “I believe that Wiggly is trying to bring Himself into our world more directly.  Or, at least, to gain more influence over it.”

“And Hannah–”

“Yes, I believe He intends Hannah to help with that.  Her Gift is, as I understand it, uniquely positioned to help with such a ritual, particularly if she’s been extensively developing it further.”

Three-quarters of the trip down.

Duke’s never been good with going into tense situations without a plan as guidance --- it’s why he reviews his case files so thoroughly before talking with anyone about them, why he tries to know a situation inside and out before going in, because what if something goes wrong and someone gets lost along the way? --- and the mall is getting too close for comfort given that they have none.  Add to that the uncertainties about what they’re walking into, and it’s no wonder that he’s next to interject.  “Then what do we do?”

There’s nothing quite so chilling as Miss Holloway’s answer being, “I don’t know.”

“What?”  Lex has abandoned her fidgeting in favour of staring, deeply unhappy, out into the car.  “You said you knew what was going on!”

“I do.”  A tilt of the head.  “Mostly.”

“I can’t lose Hannah, do you understand that?”  If they weren’t in a moving car, there’s little chance she wouldn’t be climbing out of her seat already.  “I need to know what to do, here!”

Miss Holloway shakes her head, but there’s something… off about it.  Duke doesn’t like the gesture, even though he doesn’t know why.  “You and Ethan are staying in the car.”

Neither looks happy, now, though it’s Ethan who gets the first word in.  “No, ma’am, we’re not.”

“Listen, I appreciate the help you two–”  Lex acknowledges both of Duke and Miss Holloway without really looking at either.  “–have given us, but that’s not happening.  I’m going in after my sister.”

Duke can’t help but agree with Miss Holloway’s, “It’s dangerous–”

“No shit, but I’m coming in.  And so’s Ethan, right?”

A nod.  “Right!”

The mall’s in sight now.  “I don’t know that we can win this.”  It’s sobering to think --- to hear --- and Miss Holloway says it like they’ve already lost.  (Perhaps that explains the chill running down Duke’s back.)  “I’ve fought this Wiley before.  I won.  I killed them.”

A beat.  “Then how–”

“They came back.”  

The car falls silent for a moment, and then hushes further as Miss Holloway pulls into a parking spot and turns off the engine.  Then, she turns in her seat, eyes finding each occupant in turn.  “I won’t stop any of you from coming in.”  Is he making up the way her eyes seemed to briefly linger on his?   “But it’s going to be dangerous.”

“With respect, ma’am,” Ethan says, teeth worrying at his lip but voice steady, certain.  “Lex already said it.  We’re comin’ in.”

Lex nods in turn.  “That’s my sister in there.  I’m not leaving her.  Not right now.”

Duke smiles.  “Guess it’s all o’ us, then, eh, darlin’?”

Miss Holloway nods.  Smiles.  (Duke pretends he can’t see how it longs to be a frown.)  “Well, okay then.  Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

Hannah’s never been to Lakeside Mall after-hours before.  

There’s something uncanny about the place when it’s not meant to be seen.  She can discern familiar details, of course --- passageways she’s explored while waiting for Lex to get off shift, stores she used to peek at with wide-eyed curiosity --- but they’re distorted by the shadows.  Usually-busy rooms stand empty and locked.  Every gate is closed against possible intruders: iron lattices stretching across thresholds and locked by padlocks.  The lights have been turned off without anyone there to need them.  Were it not for the flashlight Hannah holds, the darkness would be absolute, and she clutches it closer to ward off the gloom.

The hush, too, is intimidatingly complete.  With only Uncle Wiley’s ever-silent stride for company, the ringing echo of Hannah’s tennis shoes on the slick floor alone disrupts the hush.  Between this and the lighting --- for Uncle Wiley carries no flashlight, nor seems to need hers --- it almost feels like she's the only living thing in sight.  (It occurs to her only then that she might well be.)

“Where are we going?”, she asks, and her voice echoes as much as her step, cascading off into the distance.  Something is watching them, she knows --- can feel it in a squirming uneasy niggling at the back of her neck, the crawl of her skin --- though she couldn’t quite guess whence the feeling is coming.  “How long?”

“There’s a few paths to take yet.  You’ll know it when we get there.”  It’s frustratingly vague, but she can’t be sure they even know the answer themself, so she keeps a hold on the urge to push.  “And as for the time… Well, that ain’t the easiest thing ta answer either.”

The sensation of being watched hasn’t faded.  Might have gotten stronger.  Her pace trips a little faster and she pretends she can ignore it.  “Why not?”

The look they give her is a warning, cautionary in the hair-trigger way they always seem to be.  (She wonders who’s aiming.)  Whatever they see, they say simply, “Tell me when ya figure it out.”

– – – 

“What’s the plan?”  The air isn’t warm --- not quite cold, true, but still brisk --- but everything else about it feels like summer anyway; there’s a waiting, watching kind of stillness, like nights of firefly-studded velvet and muggy air and timelessness.  Lex shivers, less from the chill than from the dread-like something that has buried itself in her stomach, and her words go choppy from it.

Miss Holloway, already a stride in front of her, doesn’t seem to feel the same, or at least hides it better.  The bag she packed is slung over her shoulder, still unopened, and she’s making for the door like it better not exist by the time she gets there.  “First, we find a way in.”

“Well, that’s easy!”  Ethan’s grinning as he says it, but it’s the kind of grin that she knows conceals unease, worry, distress.  “Lex here’s got keys, ‘cause of her job.  Right, babe?”

“Oh, shit, yeah.”  She fumbles for the keyring at her belt, blunt nails rasping against rough denim as she unhooks it from her belt loop and hands it over.  “The big one’ll get us in.  I don’t have the keys to the stores though.”

“That’ll work.  Ready?”  The door’s unlocked before she gets a response, and then they’re all filing inside.  

– – –

Hannah understands, now.  They can’t have spent more than a half-hour roaming these hollow halls, but it feels as though hours have passed.  The halls had always been a touch confusing, yes, but now they verge on labyrinthine: an endless, spiralling nest of twists and turns and out-spurts that can technically be taken and yet would lead to the same place all the same.  Something builds --- not just the watching but something else, something baked into the air around them --- and it feels like they’re not just walking; they’re being led.  Pulled along their fractal path by something waiting at the end.

She can’t quite tell what time it is anymore.  She doesn’t wear a watch --- hasn’t since the cheap dime-store wristwatch she’d gotten from Lex for Christmas went out on her a few years before --- but she’s not sure that would’ve helped anyway; Uncle Wiley does wear a watch, and it’s long-stopped, frozen at 7:06 on the dot.  (She wracks her brain, trying to remember if that’s new and coming up empty.)  Her internal clock is equally bamboozled.

She doesn't bring it up again.  They don’t proffer an explanation.

– – – 

“Where are we going?”  Lex whispers without even thinking about it, still too uncertain about everything going on around her for being too loud.

It’s unnerving that Miss Holloway doesn’t have an immediate answer.  “That’s… complicated.”  Duke tilts his head, and she must notice the subtle reaction because she elaborates almost immediately.  “How big is Lakeside Mall?”

Duke shrugs.  “Not that big.  Hatchetfield’s a small place, and we’ve a mall to suit.  Why?”

“We could walk down any hallway, in any direction --- could zig-zag or double back or take every right turn or walk straight --- and we’d end up in the same place that doesn’t quite exist. And time… doesn’t really work.  A hallway feels like an hour; three feels like a second.”

“How do you know?”  It’s Ethan who asks.  Lex is glad he did because she had the same question but not the words.

Miss Holloway sets down her duffel bag, unzipping it.  “I can feel it.”  A pause, then a look at Lex: “Can’t you?”

– – – 

When they stop, it’s just before the food court.  The hallway tiles haven’t yet transitioned into the rooms’ more square-based patterns, and Hannah kicks her sneakers against the floor, listening to the squeak.  Something electric has settled at the base of her spine, tension emanating from it with a persistence that should, by rights, concern her but instead just makes her excited.  One way or another, she’s been working towards this day for a week.  One way or another, today is a test of her power, a test of whether she has the ability to make a tangible difference.

One way or another, this is anticipated.  (And this kind of anticipation, she likes.)

Uncle Wiley grins as they look at her.  Their teeth shine bright white in the gloom, angular features jagged and sharp and dangerous in a way that makes her think of a shark: too-dark eyes --- someone else’s eyes --- paired with a surface that looks smooth until flesh meets sandpaper skin.  “Ready?”, they ask.

“Ready,” she says, and her nod is certain.

– – – 

“What’s in the bag, darlin’?”

“Supplies.  They might be useful.”

Lex can’t fight a frown.  “What do you mean, supplies?  That book, or–”

“The book, yes, but not just that.”  Miss Holloway has removed the tome again, setting it to one side, but, true to her word, she reaches back in again and starts feeling around for something else.  “More importantly,” she says, and whatever she pulls out glitters an insidious black in the dim lights, “I need this.”

Eventually, Lex realises: she’s holding a blade.  It’s wickedly sharp, with jagged edges where bits have either chipped off accidentally or been serrated intentionally, and the chill of it reaches all the way across to room to where Lex stands.  She doesn't like the blade, she decides, but she makes her peace with it as she has with so much else; if it helps Hannah, it’s worth it.

– – – 

They don’t quite take the step before Hannah feels something shift.  Uncle Wiley must feel it too, for they stop in their tracks and twist to look over their shoulder.  (It should, perhaps, say something that she can’t be bothered by the unnatural way they do it, the way their head turns too far around on their neck.)  “Well, ain’t that a bitch.”

“What was that?”

They don’t immediately answer.  There’s silence in the interim, split only by the tinny, disjointed sound of muzak from the food court they’re about to enter.  Hannah recognises the song, somehow, though she can’t for the life of her remember what it is; it simply strikes whatever chord means familiar in her head.  She starts to keep track of the beat as well as possible --- the only sign of time passing left to her --- and then falters as she processes that it doesn’t really matter.

The watcher in the shadows is back, worse, but she ignores it.  “Uncle Wiley?”

They look over at her, expression a shuttered kind of startled, like they’d forgotten she was there but not so entirely as to let it show.  “We’ve got guests.”

Hannah blinks.  Realises.  “Lexi,” she breathes.  “She has keys.”

“Yer sister’s got a Gift of her own, yanno.  Ain’t too surprisin’ she’d find her way here.  It’s just a mite unfortunate that she happened to bring a guest.”

“What do we do?”

“We go on ahead.”  Uncle Wiley gestures towards the door, grin still in place.  “After you, little lady.  We’ve got work to do.”

– – – 

“Where did you get that?”  Lex really doesn't like it.  Her skin crawls just looking at the knife, even worse than it does with the thing (or things) she’d swear are watching them from the shadows, and she shuffles idly away from it without letting herself think about why.

Miss Holloway shrugs.  The zipper of her bag rasps closed under her fingers and then she’s standing again, book in one hand and dagger in the other.  “Around.”  Lex opens her mouth to fight the vagaries, but doesn’t get the chance.  “We gonna sit here and chat about it or do you want to find your sister?”

Lex doesn’t point out that, sometimes, following the wrong person can make a situation worse.  Doesn’t point out that she doesn’t know Miss Holloway from Adam and has nothing but Duke’s word that she’s trustworthy.  Doesn’t do anything but nod.  “Hannah.”

“Good.”  The book falls open in Miss Holloway's hand.  The dagger slices into the pad of her finger until blood beads up.  Duke watches with an expression on his face like he wants to rush over and stop her but doesn't dare, and Ethan looks away despite their mutual need to know what’s happening.  “It’ll take a moment, but I’ll be able to track them down in a moment or two.”

Duke frowns, though Lex can’t tell if he’s frowning at the injury or the confusion.  “I thought you said the halls won’t lead anywhere but towards ‘em?”

“In theory, yes.  But the Lords don’t want us here, and they can try to keep us out all the same.  I don’t think you want to see them make the attempt.”  A nod, all at once, from everyone involved.  “I should be able to break into the Bastard’s maze before He notices I’m there–”

“Who’s?”

“The Bastard of Time and Space.  He’s… difficult, to say the least.  One of Wiggly's brothers.”

Ethan frowns.  “But if he and Wiggly don't get along, then how’s it happenin’ that they’re workin’ together?”

“Rituals are… complicated.  I wish I could explain more, but there simply isn’t the time.  Later, perhaps.”

Lex nods, though the motion is grudging.  (She tries not to admit to herself that she’s on-board with getting out now and asking questions later; the air itself feels wrong.)  “I’ll hold you to it.”

“Very well."  Miss Holloway nods.  The drop of blood falls from her finger, but, somehow, never hits the ground.  She’s moving before Lex can speculate about it.  “Onwards, then.”

– – – 

The food court’s tiling is covered in standing water.  There’s not much --- not so much as to be deeply concerning, perhaps, but more than there should be --- and it claws at Hannah’s shoe as she moves.  The liquid is murkier than it should be, too, dark black against grey laminate, and it smells like what she imagines a swamp would: thick and muggy and stagnant.

“Here it is.”  Uncle Wiley doesn't comment on the water, just as they don’t comment about the time problem, or the eyes.  “This is the place.  Whaddya think?”

She’s pretty sure they mean literally --- an assessment of the environment, the ambience, the room --- but she can’t bother with stuff like that.  She’s so close to having all the power she’ll ever need to protect her family, and trivialities like aesthetics weren’t her priority right then.  “I feel ready.  What do I have to do?”

“You’re gonna open a door to another dimension, Hannah, easy as that.  My boss… Well, He’s real keen on visitin’.”

“How?”

“Believe, Hannah.”  It sounds so simple.  “All ya gotta do is believe.”

Chapter Text

Lex can feel Hannah somewhere in the mall.  It sounds impossible --- like something she might read in a fantasy novel, or a kid's book, not something she'd expect from real life --- but there's no other way to explain the way something keeps tugging at her.  It feels like a thread woven into her very being: a tether, stretching off through the shadows, or perhaps a rein, trying to steer her down a different path.  Perhaps it should scare her, as with so much about the here and now of things, but the feeling is tied so irrevocably to Hannah that Lex can't bring herself to fear it.

Then again, maybe she's entirely wrong.  Miss Holloway, leading the pack, seems to know what she's doing.  She has an easy kind of confidence to her, like someone so sure of what they're doing and how they're going about things that even the thought of questioning them feels absurd; Lex, still baffled by the idea that Webby is real, never mind all the other revelations of late, certainly isn't of a mind to try.  Miss Holloway doesn't have a thread pulling her along --- or, at least, not a visible one --- for she's led, instead, by a red light that blossoms from the cut on her finger and carves a path through the darkness.  The glow brightens with every drop of blood that falls and falls and never hits the floor, and Lex knows, somehow, that it's feeding something beyond the bounds of what is known and understood.  Feels it in a gut that writhes with every drip, worse even than it's been all night, and the rising sense of predators in the dark.  (There has been no explanation of what Miss Holloway might be doing, or how she's picking their path.  The one time Duke asked, he'd gotten back a bitter smile and a wry, " What, haven't ya heard of a hunger for knowledge before?" that told them all not to ask further.) 

Whatever Miss Holloway is doing, she's certainly not going in the same direction as Lex's sense of where to go; in fact, they might even be going the opposite way, for the tugging seems to grow more insistent with every step.  It's enough to override the urge to stay quiet lest she distract the closest thing to an expert that they have, enough to unstop her mouth and get her to ask, "How do you know which way to go?"

When she gets an answer, it isn't a clear one.  "Are you familiar with the concept of a labyrinth, Lex?"

"Some.  Might want a refresher, though."

"Oh, wait, wait–"  Ethan frowns, brow furrowing.  "Big swirly path with lotsa dead ends so ya get real lost, right?"

Miss Holloway shakes her head without looking back.  "Not quite, though you're close.  That's a maze.  The point of a labyrinth isn't truly the same thing as a maze, which has all those dead ends you're talking about.  A labyrinth is a single path, looping in and around and on again.  There are no junction points, no dead ends; there is only the path, and it can take you on a journey for as long as the designer wishes."  She pauses, then laughs, still just shy of bitter.  "I suppose there are two paths, if you really want to think of it that way: the path forward, and the path back.  It's still dancing to someone else's tune, though.  There's still no real way out."

Lex nods her understanding, even as a frustrated-sounding, "Your point?", slips out.

"My point," Miss Holloway returns, "is that I know the way to go because there is only one way to go."

"And the light show?"

"A safeguard.  Think of it as... insurance.  That the labyrinth won't become a maze."

"But–" 

The breath has left her before she can get any farther, sapped from her with another tug of the thread she'd swear she feels as real as anything, and then she's stumbling back before she can think about it.  Her hand reaches out instinctively, catches on the wall and its shoddily applied coat of grey paint, tries to stabilise herself even as she can feel the world spinning around her.

"–x!"  She doesn't quite process when Ethan reaches her side, but his hand finds her arm steadily enough to get her focusing back on the world around her.  "Lexi, what's wrong?"

"Nothing," she tries, though the word sounds wrong as she says it.  "I don't--"

"Tell us."  Miss Holloway is firm as she says it, voice sure and certain.  It's not the kind of command one just ignores.

Lex waits until she's a little more steady on her feet to answer, but she does all the same.  "I feel... something.  It sounds crazy, I know, but--"

"Tell us," Miss Holloway says again.

"It feels like... a rope, or something.  Pulling me back that way."   Lex juts a thumb towards the passageway they've just left, back along the walk they've just made.  "It feels like Hannah."

There's a frown on Miss Holloway's lips,  like she's contemplating something she very much doesn't like, or worried about something yet to come, and Lex doesn't like it.  Especially doesn't like it with Hannah somewhere on the line.  "You're sure?"

"Yeah, why?"

"No reason."  (Lex doesn't believe her.)  She drops her hand, and the red light vanishes, swallowed by the dark.  "Lead the way, Lex."

She blinks.  "What?"

"Go on.  We're following you."

"But–"

Ethan's still got his hand at her arm, helping her balance, and he smiles through whatever confusion he's feeling.  "You've got this, babe," he says, and she appreciates it even knowing that he doesn't know what's going on any more than she does.  "We're followin' ya."

– – – 

It feels odd, leading the way.  Lex has never truly thought of herself as the leader type --- never been the sort to try and take charge of anything, not even a group project in school --- and had certainly never thought she had any reasonable claim on authority.  Even the responsibility she'd taken on in the wake of Pamela Foster's truly terrible parenting was accidental, and certainly nothing at which she thought she did particularly well, even though she tried her best.

Leading the way through an abandoned mall after hours, trying to find her missing sister and with three people at her back, everyone and everything nearby watching the moves she makes?  Certainly not the kinda thing she’s used to.

Besides, there’s enough creepy about the whole place that she doen’t much want to be walking first.  The shadows --- already bad from the start --- feel like they’re getting worse.  Hungry.  Crowding in around their little party with an insistence that tells of something alive.  They had light enough to see, bolstered by hers and Ethan's cigarette lighters (unless the fuel eventually decided to run out), but the darkness licked away at them like it might erode the illumination with enough persistent effort.  (One of the lights flickered, early on in their path, and Lex wasn't ashamed to admit that her heart had stalled in her chest at the mere thought of their only guide vanishing all at once.  She prays it doesn't happen for real.)

She keeps walking, though, pace steady as she tries to pick her way through rooms she only dimly recognises, if at all.  For all the time she's spent working here, there is too much different now --- too much unnatural about the way everything has shifted, warped by something she doesn't want to know and yet is marching towards all the same --- for her to know their path as anything other than the labyrinth Miss Holloway says it is.  (Some of the rooms don’t even look slightly familiar, cast in unnatural hues, crawling with impossible things that she sees out of the corners of her eyes and yet can't see head-on, things that cannot be and have never been and yet, she knows, always were.)

It makes her think, momentarily, of Webby.  It has been so long since she saw Her --- so long since she thought of Webby as anything other than a long-faded by-product of a lonely, shitty childhood, something grown out of whenever she reached a point stable enough to forget past crutches --- that she can't even remember what Webby looked like.  (If she tries, she can remember white.  Light: pure and bright and achingly comforting.  The kind of belonging she imagines when religious folk talk of Heaven, but better for how it didn't come with a cost.)  She can't help wondering what would have happened if she hadn't grown out of Webby.  Hadn't stopped believing in her.  Hadn't (apparently) pushed her away.

Then again, it's no use dwelling on the past.  Lex focuses on Hannah instead.

Nonetheless, no one said that self-assurance was something she has in spades.  She can't fight a slightly tremulous (even if she won't be admitting that), "What if I'm wrong?"

"You said the connection feels like Hannah?"

"Yes."  (This is a fact, immutable and undeniable.)

"And what does that feel like?"

"It's..."  Safe.   "Gentle.  Familiar."  Brilliant in the way of bright pastels: energetic and yet calm all the same.   "I can't quite explain it but... I used to braid her hair on the weekends, and it feels like that."  Dust motes dancing in a patch of sun.  Fingers wending through hair.  Voices chattering in soft, gilded silence.   "Why?"

"You know your sister better than anyone, Lex."  Miss Holloway smiles, wistful but not defeatist enough to concern Lex either.  "If anyone can break through the ritual, it's you."

Duke breaks in, the first thing he's said in a good long while, face looking baffled enough for everyone there.  "I thought you said–"

"I know."  Her interruption is hasty, yet soft, like only a yet-unvoiced time pressure is prompting her to do it.  "Things have changed."

"But–"

"I'll explain later."  Her smile is tight.  (Something twists in Lex's stomach to see it.)  "Promise."  (Duke doesn't seem to believe it.  Lex wonders, briefly, whether that later will ever come.)  "For now, we have to find Hannah.  And Lex can show us how."

No pressure.

Chapter Text

It works.

Somehow, impossible though everything seems, it works.

There's a moment --- too long a stretch of time to truly qualify, and yet almost certainly too short to be anything but --- where Lex can't fight the certainty that she's leading everyone astray. That whatever feeling she's got about where Hannah might be, it's a spurious one --- or, even worse, one fabricated by the things that lurk in the shadows all around. That, just perhaps, the one saving grace left to her name isn't grace at all, but the sadistic machinations of some aeons-old proto-being's version of entertainment made manifest. (She's never truly been one for belief, not when it's served neither her nor hers well in the past. There's simply never been much point.)

Lex follows the thread anyway. Focuses on the feeling she can't source and lets it guide her through the darkness. Follows the feeling she can't quite trust, even as it stretches on and on and on. Ignores the fact that there's no end in sight --- ignores the thought that this might be little more than a malicious game --- because neither possibility has anything on the fact that her sister might wait at the other end. Because, even with all her sense screaming at her that she shouldn’t, her senses nonetheless insist she should. Because Hannah being safe matters more than the laws of Lex's past. (She still has to pretend not to find it weird, of course, even though she does, but it's a small price to pay.)  And then they walk through a door --- the right door, for all Lex's gut and Holloway's expression scream that it's nothing but wrong --- and there she is.

Hannah.

She seems fine, is the good news.  She's standing in the centre of the room, entirely of her own accord, and her eyes may be closed but not in a way that suggests she's hurt or unconscious; she merely looks focused.  The slightest twist rests at her brow, subtle if potent, and the intent that lurks behind it has her teeth worrying at her lip and her fingers twitching at her sides... but that, too, is a not unfamiliar sight, after years of watching Hannah study for exams and the like with exactly that expression on her face.  There just happens to be enough subtly menacing about their surroundings that the uncanniness makes Lex's skin crawl.

She doesn't realise that she's called out Hannah's name until Miss Holloway says something from behind her --- "Wait," she says, and it sounds like it's under water --- until a hand grabs at her arm and holds her in place.  Tearing her attention from Hannah long enough to listen feels wrong, too, like being asked to ignore a limb.  She does it anyway, though.  There is, after all, the off-chance that there's something she needs to hear before the single step she's already taken turns into a full-fledged run to her sister's side.  (It's a low chance.)

"Wait," Miss Holloway says again, and her hand is like iron on Lex's elbow.  Even if she were going to try to bolt, she's not sure she even can.  "She's not the only one here.  Take it slow."

"But that's Hannah you're talking about.  I'm not just going to leave her there!"  Ethan nods along from her side, though he's not yet walked into the room, and she'd appreciate the gesture if it were any other time but now she can't bring herself to acknowledge it.

"I know."  She at least does.  Or seems to, anyway.  "I wouldn't ask you to.  But I am telling you to take this slowly."   She holds up her other hand before Lex can argue.  "There's a lot here you don't understand.  I don't even know all of what's going on here, and I've been doing this a lot longer than you."

Duke is still frowning, just barely visible at the back of their little party.  Lex hadn't seen him drop back that far --- hadn't noticed whether it were a conscious choice --- but there's trouble in the almost turbulent expression on his face.  He's always been so easy-going, even in the depths of his concern, that it rubs her the wrong way to see him worried.  It keeps her focus enough that she's genuine surprised when he has enough levity or mental space or something to chime in.  "More things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio?"

Miss Holloway's grip slackens, and Lex takes advantage enough to squirm away.  (She wonders, briefly, if she'd forgotten Duke was there.  If she doesn't want him there.  Judging by the expression on her face, the latter possibility might well be true.)  "Exactly," she says, and it's not as convincing as she likely hopes.  Perhaps she knows it, for she turns back to Lex with an uneasy grin.  "Now.  Take it slow."

For a moment, Lex has half a mind to ask for the knife Miss Holloway carries.  The idea of having something good and sharp is an appealing one, and whatever blade Holloway has seems sturdier than Ethan's long disused pocketknife.  But --- and out of what may be decorum but is more likely something along the lines of unease --- she doesn't.  She won't swiftly forget the visceral urge to look away that fills her whenever the knife flickers into view, or the stomach-wrenching nausea when blood hit its surface.  She isn't exceedingly fond of the idea of touching it.  She turns away instead, trying to pick her way across the floor as swiftly yet (grudgingly) carefully as she can.  It's the first time that night something has come easy.

That probably should have clued her in to the fact that things were soon to go wrong.

Of course, in all the ways she could have foreseen things going wrong, a blinding flash of light taking over her vision was not remotely one of them.  It staggers her more than anything else could have; after all, anything else --- an interruption, an attack, another vocal aside from her own party --- might have been expected.  Would at least be in the same realm of possibility as all the things she feared might happen and for which she's pseudo-prepared herself.  Wouldn't be a random star-bright blast from nowhere that wipes out her vision in one fell swoop and doesn't give it back.

It's an odd sensation.  Trying to look around fails abysmally each time she tries, for, though she can feel the motion of her head, nothing changes before her eyes.  Trying to walk forward provides only the sense of movement without any semblance of a noticeable result.  Rubbing at her eyes does nothing, and neither does closing them, for the white persists even then.  The same with blinking, and with squinting, and with anything else she tries.  Before long, it's less unnerving than it is frustrating, concern fading a little as nothing happens, aggravation mounting with the sense that all she has to do is open her eyes to be able to see, even as she knows it's a lie.

She doesn't have to wait much longer after that. For a moment, all is as it has been since the world vanished; then, there is a woman standing before her and Lex is... calm. Peace runs through her. Around her. Settles into her skin and seeps even deeper, until her bones are filled with a languid sort of torpor she doesn't want to dispel.  Her hands drop to her sides, fingers still, and they no longer worry at anything because there's nothing to worry about.  There is only the woman in white: beautiful and serene and so instinctively comforting that Lex can't bring herself to care about the too-many arms and too-many eyes and too-many legs, that she can't even define worry at all, that she can only bring herself to smile and sink deeper into a peace she never wants to leave, that will stretch on and on, and on, and...

"Wake up, Alexandra."  The voice reverberates from too many mouths, clicks with unseen mandibles as it's spun out on gossamer-thin serenity.  "Now is not the time to sleep."

"But I like it here."  She does.  It's calm in the White.  Peaceful.  Like a soft blanket of snow, so blindingly white that you just want to close your eyes and rest for a while.  "Can't I stay?"  She was worried about something before --- about many things --- but she can't remember what anymore.  Thinks she prefers it to being so stressed all the time.  "Please?"

The woman pauses, then asks, "Would you be happy here?  Just like this?"

"Ye-"  Lex stops.

"Alexandra?"  She tilts her head --- heads --- and waits.

"I-"  She wants to say yes.  Her brain is whispering it to her, in a quiet, dulcet undertone not strikingly dissimilar from the woman's, reverberating with something very Else.  "I don't-"  If she says yes, she can stay.  And yet: "I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Because-"  She doesn't have an answer, not really, but she can feel something stopping her.  It wrenches at her heart, at her gut --- writhes whenever she considers actually saying yes --- keeps her from crossing the threshold of whatever waits on the other side of that three-letter word.  "Because-"  Because the more she thinks about the White, the colder it seems.  The lonelier it seems.  "Hannah," she says, and it's more of a murmur than anything but it wakes her up more than their entire conversation until then has managed to do.  "Where is she?"

The woman --- who, without whatever mesmer had claimed Lex before, she realises must be Webby --- smiles.  "Hello again, Alexandra."

The name stings.  "It's Lex now."

"Very well."  A nod, unbothered and acquiescent.  "Lex.  I needed to speak with you, and so I brought you here.  We can't stay long, and I'm sure you wish to get back to your sister even sooner than that."

Lex's nod is sure.  Certain.  "Yeah."  A beat.  Can't help asking, "What was all that about?"

Webby answers before Lex can wonder if she has to refine her phrasing, smile unshifted.  "I needed to know." 

"Know what?"

She doesn't answer. Or, at least, doesn't answer directly, since Lex can't quite rule out the idea that everything is an answer with Webby, even as nothing is. "Not much longer now, Lex. There are trials ahead, and they are for you as much as they are for Hannah. There are paths ahead, and they are as much for me as for any of you. There are prices ahead, and they are as much for my brothers to pay as for all of us. I merely needed to know what threads I had to pull."

Lex frowns. "Then you know what's going to happen? You can tell me what-"

"No." Webby interjects before Lex can finish her sentence, head already shaking. "I cannot. But I know things now that I didn't know before."

"And that gets us...?"

"Everywhere and nowhere, Lex. Further than where we were. Not as far as we need to go." She smiles, and the calm threatens to return, stealing over the edges of Lex's mind on silken feet. It takes work to shrug it off, to avoid the charms, but it's easy to think of Hannah and easier still once she does. "It's a complicated web, you know. But a pattern is developing."

Trying to get answers isn't working.  Lex tries a different route.  "Why don't I remember you?  I mean, I remember you as an imaginary friend, but not as... as real."

"You did.  And then you forgot.  It's the way of things."

"That's not helpful!"  There's desperation clawing at her now, visceral enough --- potent enough --- that not even Webby's artificial calm can break through.  Lex needs answers, a way to save her sister, something instead of the enigmatic crypticism of someone she hasn't known for years, since before she was truly herself.  "Can't you tell me something?"

"Yes."  Webby nods, the motion almost too gentle to be perceptible, to the point that following it almost lulls her off again.  It's like trying to follow a fan blade spinning overhead, eyes tracking the path and blurring with the ease of it, mind going blank of everything but that whirring calm.  Lex fights against it again, but gets the sense that it'll do her no good to try, not with how heavily it bears down upon her.  "The stakes are still high, Lex.  Go to your sister.  Stop my brother.  Try to help her.  And..."  She pauses.  Laughs a scintillating kind of laugh: there and yet not.  "Beware of what seeds may do."

"Wha-"

"Farewell, Lex.  I wish you luck."

Lex resolves not to blink --- to hold onto the skin of this White-scorched world until she gets something more useful --- but then her eyes close of their own accord and the mall has returned.  Here, the tacky murk that coats the floor, cold despite shoes and double socks.  There, the god-awful muzak wending its distorted path from tinny, popping speakers.  Here, the abandoned remnants of food court displays and rotting, spoiled food.  There...

"Hannah!"

She remembers herself with the sight of familiar, lopsided braids and a brightly coloured flannel.  She shakes off the lingering unease of the journey, the remaining calm from Webby --- ignores everything around her other than a face she knows better than her own and a love fierce enough to burn --- books it over without even looking back to make sure the people she came with don't object.  (It doesn't matter if they do because, right then, Hannah matters more.)  Lex's hands find Hannah's head before she can worry about whether it's wise or not, fingers twining into the hair she'd braided so recently even as it's mussed and tangled now, lips instinctively pressing a kiss to her forehead.  (It feels like coming home.)

Hannah stirs, eyes opening, and she smiles.  She looks like herself, so much so as to take Lex's breath away.  "Heya, Lexi.  I missed you."

Chapter Text

The relief hits Lex all at once.  More than anything around them --- the creepy mall, Hannah's notably (and eerily) missing teacher, her own cobbled-together rescue party --- it is the fact that they've found Hannah that nearly overwhelms her, that almost sends her to her knees in the ice-cold muck beneath them.  Even when she manages to hold back, it's only because she engulfs her sister in a hug instead, needing to feel her real and breathing and okay in her arms.  

"God, Banana, I've been worried sick!"  She tries to keep her voice from seeming angry --- from seeming anything but relieved --- and she prays it works.  Might even have managed it, since Hannah doesn't pull away.  "You okay?  Are you hurt?"

Hannah shakes her head, and her smile is her own, familiar and serene.  "I'm good, Lexi."  Her hands are tangled in Lex's jacket as keenly as vice versa, their arms tight around each other for a moment longer.  And then Hannah steps away --- smile unchanged but so oddly confused --- and she tilts her head.  "Why are you here?"

"To find you, Banana!"  It seems so obvious that she can't quite keep that feeling from seeping into her voice.  "Ethan and I've been looking for you all day; we were worried!"

"Oh."

Hannah doesn't immediately say anything else, and Lex feels a frown on her own face before she can restrain it.  "What?"

"Nothing, I just-"  She pauses.  Bites her lip.  "I thought you might be mad.  At me."

"No, not mad, never mad.  We're just worried right now.  Anything else can wait."  Lex waits a moment, then follows it up with an as-soft-as-possible, "Why are you here, Hannah?"

"I'm training!"  It's the first truly enthusiastic thing she's said all conversation --- probably much longer than that, really --- and her smile isn't quite the gentle thing Lex is used to.  It looks too eager for that, too hungry.  (Lex thinks, for a moment, that Hannah's eyes flash poison-green, and it makes her blood run cold before she can remind herself that it was probably just a trick of the light.)  "Or... I was.  I suppose things have gone a bit further than that now."

A slight rustle of movement sounds from behind them --- from the door that she'd just come through, the one at which she'd left the others --- and she thinks she hears the quiet sound of Miss Holloway murmuring something even as she can't make it out.  Hopes it's not meant for her, since she has bigger things to worry about.  "Oh?  With-"  She pauses.  Fumbles for the name from earlier.  "Wiley?"

"Yeah."  Hannah nods.  "They've been helping me."

"Helping you with what, Hannah?"  Lex keeps her voice light as she asks it.  Tries not to let the slowly burgeoning panic slip through.

Hannah doesn't answer.  Or, at least, doesn't say anything.  Instead, she lifts a hand and displays it like a stage magician, waggling her fingers to show there's nothing hidden in it and then easing it closed.  Then, she shakes it, and re-opens it, and shows off the apple seed that now rests on her palm.  (Without being bidden, Webby's words ring in Lex's ears.  "Beware of what seeds may do.")

"I don't-"

Hannah tosses the seed over her shoulder before Lex can finish her sentence, briskly enough for it to land behind them with a gentle plop.  Then she waits for a moment.  And then --- without another word, without even closing her hand --- the seed is back.  Hannah didn't even twitch; Lex hadn't blinked.  Hannah's hand was merely empty and then it wasn't.

She grins.  "See?  I've learned so much."

It says something about the past few days that a magic trick born of literal magic, being performed by her own baby sister, barely even shocks her anymore.  "And where are they now, Hannah?"

"Uncle Wiley?"  She frowns, and Lex agrees with the expression even as their motives differ.  (Lex's frown stems more from the buzz of power that accompanied the name, like the air is thinning slightly, like a great potential lingers beyond what she can see.)  "Around.  Why?"

A shrug.  "Just... Just curious."

Hannah takes a step back.  "Why?"  She notices the people behind Lex and --- whether she's processing them for the first time or only just deigning to react to them --- stares at them for a moment, eyes darting back and forth, from them to Lex and back again.  "What are you doing here, Lexi?", she asks again.

The nickname stings, just a little, but there's no protest to be offered; after all, Lex has no answer to make up for the fact that they're there to put an end to whatever is going on.  In the end, she doesn't bother trying.  "We were worried," she says instead, slightly helplessly, and the distance between her and Hannah feels too big but she can't close it either.  "We just wanted-"

"To stop us?"  Another step.  This time, Lex follows.  "To stop me?  Don't you trust me, Lex?"

If she thought the nickname smarted, the lack of the nickname is even worse.  "I do.  Of course I do, Hannah."

"But?"

"But..."  And there's no getting out of it, so she simply commits.  "But I don't trust them."

"They've helped me!" Hannah's expression is two shades shy of betrayed, and it wrenches at something in Lex to see.  "What's untrustworthy about that?"

"I know-"

"Why are you really here?"

"Like I said, we were worried-"

"But I'm fine!"  She sounds like she means it.  It doesn't entirely settle the churning of Lex's stomach.  "What has she been telling you?"  At Lex's look: "Miss Holloway over there."

"She mentioned a ritual."

"She's right."  Hannah nods, eyes still pinned on Lex, fingers tight around the apple seed she still holds.  "I'm strong enough now.  And it'll help."

Lex lifts her hands, reaches for Hannah even as she knows she won't be able to reach her physically unless she reaches her emotionally.  "Do you even know who they're working for?  What this ritual will do?"

"I know."  Hannah's chin juts up, defiant, and yet there's no sign that she's lying.  No sign that she's pretending for the sake of saving face.  (And that might just be more frightening than if she'd been entirely uninformed.)  "I know who Uncle Wiley is.  Who they were.  It's easy now, to see the tracks that history has run, and I can almost, almost see where they will go.  And I know about Wiggog Y'rath."

Just the name leaves the air shuddering, and it's real enough to send ripples cascading along the surface of the cold murk underfoot.  Lex's stomach lurches, and she feels like she's going to fall with how violently it robs her of her balance.  "And you're helping anyway?"

The answer isn't immediate, but it's honest.  "All is not as it seems, Lex.  If you'd just trust me-"

"I do trust you.  It's Wiley I don't trust."

A laugh sounds from just over Lex's shoulder, and she whirls towards it before she can even think, just in time to catch the tail end of an almost-jovial, "Well, now, that ain't very nice."  The thing speaking isn't human --- has too many teeth and too-sharp nails, is too wrong a being to rank as anything of the world and yet too uncannily similar to rank as anything else --- and she jolts away as soon as she registers their presence.  "Don'tcha know it's rude to talk about someone behind their back?"

Lex doesn't respond directly.  Just shifts away and manages a cautious, "Wiley?"

They bow, the gesture filled with a dramatic kind of antiquated elegance: a taunt as much as a civility.  "The very same."  Without even straightening, they turn their head: eyes finding Holloway, sharp fingers waving.  "Hiya," they say, and they follow it up with something else but Lex must not process it because the letters slip away as soon as they're said.  She doesn't come back to herself until Wiley has straightened up again, but their focus hasn't shifted.  "Though I hear it's Holloway now?"

There's nothing polite about the response.  "I killed you."

"You did!"  It's an oddly gleeful agreement, for the topic at hand.  "Very rude of you, y'know."

"How are you back?"  Her words grit themselves out between clenched teeth, and that knife is back again, though it's tucked behind her back more than it is proffered as a threat.  "Explain that to me."

"Oh, I owe that to my new friend Hannah."  Lex looks away from Wiley for just long enough to gauge Hannah's expression.  She doesn't seem surprised, is the thing.  Doesn't seem anything but proud.  "She made a wish.  Just so happens t' be a powerful thing, yanno that?  And my boss... channelled it, shall we say.  Took that formless little bit o' power and used it to bring none other than yours truly back from the frankly unnecessary levels of dead ya chose t' make me."  They wave, fingers waggling gleefully, just as taunting as before.  "And now here I am!  Back in His employ.  Back fer another round at the title."

"And the ritual?"

It's Hannah who answers.  "Not something we'll be explaining, thanks."

Lex steps forward again, wincing as Hannah skitters further backwards in response.  "You don't-"

"I do understand."  Hannah's shoulders roll back, straightening in something that's half defiance and half defence.  "I'm supposed to bring Wiggly here."

"And you're just going to do that?"

"Like I said," Hannah says, and her eyes find Wiley's long enough for them both to nod agreement to something unspoken.  "All is not as it seems."

And then all hell breaks loose.

Chapter Text

Even if pressed, Lex couldn't say who'd started the fight. It might have been Wiley, pulling something at the junction of a sneak attack and an obvious feint. (Lex might not know them very well, but they remind her of an oil slick all the same --- bright and showy; variegated enough to draw the eye and distract from the cloying, underhanded surprise it truly is --- and her skin crawls with the comparison.)  It could have been Holloway, foreseeing violence and choosing to hasten it.  (A risk, that, but Lex hardly knows Holloway any better than she knows Wiley, and what little she knows lacks any sort of personal attachment beyond Duke's easy affection for her; she might just take such a risk, if the stakes were right, or even just because.)  It's even distinctly --- unsettlingly --- possible that something else did it, with some meddling interest in the fight and enough power to actually do something about it.  (The eyes still linger around them, with a creeping, crawling sort of inexorability that nests at the base of her spine and tastes like burnt sugar when it meets the power in the air.)

Either way, the effect is undeniable: a clashing, dissonant screech of metal on metal.  It rends the air just as thoroughly as the blades --- and their owners --- seek to rend each other, and the sound slams into Lex's ears with force enough that she wonders whether they’ll bleed.   The black blade --- still as unsettling as Lex found it last --- seems almost glad of the use, and Lex would say that it practically glitters with anticipation except that it projects its glee as a darkness more complete than the lightlessness around them. (Twenty-four hours ago, she'd have called that impossible; how much can happen in so short a span of time!   It’s not the first time she's regretted the loss of innocence, but it is the first time she's been cognizant of the real-time loss of her own.)

The next clash comes mere moments later, equally loud and (somehow) twice as vicious.  Instinct drives Lex in response; she grabs her sister's arm, turns around, and runs.  She's not sure what her plan is --- isn't really even sure she has one --- but getting her sister somewhere safe is high on the list of priorities.  The door behind her still stands open, threshold broken only by Duke and Ethan, and whether she wants escape or allies, she runs towards it --- towards them --- with Hannah in tow.  Her thoughts blur a little with the speed of her desperation, but there's cognizance enough for fixation, for knowing that all she has to do is get out, get away, get through that door and they'll be safe.  That they’ll make it to the other side and stop worrying about nightmare rituals and cosmic stakes and-

And Hannah stops.

She more-than stops: she wrenches her hand from Lex's with an insistence that feels unshakeable and stares at Lex like she's gone traitor with the simple act of trying to keep them safe.  "What are you doing?", she asks, like she no longer recognises whoever stands in front of her, like she cannot conceive of a world in which Lex would pull her to safety without a second thought.

"Please, Hannah, we're not at the door yet; we're not safe."   It's still in sight, and only the need to keep Hannah in her sights keeps Lex from staring at it: a few feet away and remarkably sinister for something that seems so much like salvation.  "We'll talk outside, I promise, but-"

"No!"   The look worsens, somehow, despite Lex's previous certainty that it could do no such thing.  "I can't just leave."

"It's dangerous here, Hannah.  If we stay, y-"  She pauses.   Shifts the word slightly to the left.  "We might get hurt.  We don't have to go far: just to the hallway, and-"

"If staying is dangerous, then how can we leave?  The fight's not even gonna touch us.  And I could stop it if it tried to."  (There's an easy kind of confidence to the words, beneath the shaking amalgamation of fury and concern that has taken over.  However much Lex fears her sister's change, she can't help a bit of pride as well.)  "We have to help!"

"Miss Holloway can handle herself.  She told us to get you out if something like this happened, and I'm not going to-"

"I don’t mean helping her!"   Hannah turns, and Lex fears, for a moment, that she might just run out into the fray again.   (She doesn't, but it still looks like a near thing.)  "Why do you even trust her?"  It sounds genuine.   It sounds angry.  It sounds tired.

"Because she came here to help us save you!"

"Then she shouldn’t have bothered."  Hannah's lip curls a little with the force of it, eyes glittering, and Lex isn't sure she's ever seen her sister look like that but she knows she never wants to see it again.  Hannah's wasn't a face meant for savagery.  "It's not like her slate is clean enough to be throwing stones."

Duke's moved closer to them, Lex thinks, because he hears Hannah and his voice follows hers before Lex gets the chance.  He sounds confused, and upset, and worried, and all the infinitesimal shades among them.  "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean that her deal isn't much better than mine, and that knife is bad news any way you slice it."

Ethan snorts a short, sharp, stifled kind of amusement before he can help himself, even though it's not the time.  Then he asks, "How do you know, Banana?"

"I can see it.  Just like I can see everything about her deal with-"

Lex blinks.  Can't quite figure out what it was that Hannah has just said.

"Oh," Hannah breathes.  Her eyes are wide, mouth opened slightly, and she must have cut herself off to say it because no one else seems to have heard the rest of her sentence either.  "I see."

Ethan raises a hand, slowly, timidly.   His smile is an awkward thing, and a little self-deprecating, and Lex aches at how familiar it is because god she needs something known.   "I don't, Banana, I'm sorry.  Can you explain it a bit more?"

She shakes her head.  Changes the topic.  "Never mind.  But I'm not just going to stand here and not help."

Lex bites her lip but can't bite back an unavoidable, "But-"

"No!"  Hannah turns.  With her back to Lex, only her profile visible thanks to how she's twisted her head slightly over one shoulder, she looks fierce.  Capable.   Powerful.  (Lex hates it.   Is glad of it.  Loves her sister and misses her in equal measure.)  "They helped me.  If you really trust me, you'll trust me on that."

Lex pauses.  Breathes.   Reaches out.   She's not entirely sure of her plan --- not certain whether she's going to keep fighting back or acquiesce, whether her hand seeks to hold fast or squeeze her blessing into familiar fingers --- but it's too late.  Her hand skates along Hannah's wrist for only a moment before they run into something that shouldn't be there.  Something she can't even see but can feel and sense.   Something large, too, for it doesn't exist merely at Hannah's arm; it's much closer to a wall, tall and wide and sturdy for all she can't see its might.

"Sorry 'bout the shield," Hannah says.  "But I figured you'd do something like that."

And then she walks away.

– – –

There's something almost soothing about fighting.  For all the tension has been burning under Miss Holloway's skin since she stepped foot inside the mall --- for all the stress of an uncomfortably one-sided understanding of the situation, cosmically speaking --- the actual fighting comes almost easy.  It still has its difficulties, of course, whether due to her opponent’s tendency for underhanded blows or the fact that they'd once been professionally trained, but the rhythm of trading strikes is almost second nature now.  Perks of her job, she supposes: there's no shortage of wars to wage, of grindstones against which to hone herself.

She could do without the repartee, though.

It's not that trading harsh words is that different from trading physical blows --- both wound with the sharp-edged slice of glass against too-thin defences --- but she's always preferred doing to talking.  Hers is a world built upon the acts she can perform, upon the sacrifice plays she can run; hers is not a soul that sings with well-timed barbs, or any interest in crafting them.  This is why her lips are a curl when she bites back a retort, when she ignores a dig that skates just a little too close to a part of her not yet armoured enough. It's why she sometimes gets caught off-guard enough to falter. To slip. To almost feel the sting of a knife strike that actually lands. (It hasn't happened yet, but she knows it's only a matter of time. Something's gotta give.)

Wiley's grinning through it all.  It's a wide grin, like it's been carved into place, but the clean, sharp lines of a surgical scalpel this is not.   Rather, it's a wide wound, jagged and weeping, and it twists only wider when they almost land a strike.  Creeps higher when a taunt cuts a little too close, too.  Theirs, she knows, or perhaps remembers, is a way of words --- not solely, for they wield their knife like it's an extension of their arm and smile like their teeth are blades too, but cuttingly all the same --- and goads flow like honeyed venom from between too-sharp teeth.  "Don't tell me you're losin' your touch now, friend-o. Not with all these folks ridin' on the line! Makes a fella think 'bout those three gals from a while back. You remember?  Failed 'em back then; gonna fail 'em again now?" Her blade strikes theirs a moment too slow, too light, and the force of maintaining the block anyway sends shock-waves through her arm. "Be a real shame fer you ta miss the ritual, too, yanno. Gonna be glorious."

She doesn't answer.   Her eyes are fixed on their blade, and her attention is fixed on how to counter it with her own.  She merely grits out a grin gone bloody from their fight and snarls with the force of it.

In comparison, their moves are almost disparaging.   Slow, they are, and cocky, but with enough skill lurking beneath the showman's facade to defend the ease, and enough experience to be unpredictable.  "Ooh, now, that one got a little closer.  Trouble is, ya killed me once, and I ain't really of a mind to go back to that state o' not-bein'."

"You talk too much."

They laugh.  "Oh-ho, she speaks!"  They shrug, the gesture transferred easily into a lift of their blade that knocks hers out of the way.   "You just need ta lighten up!  So damn serious all the time, just like someone else I know.   'S gonna be the death o' ya!"

She doesn't immediately respond.  Their blades clash twice before she tries, and she waits until they've broken apart to say it.  They're circling opposite one another like predators --- teeth bared, claws just extended enough to draw blood but not quite sinking into prey --- and it's only then that she opens her mouth with the hope of wounding.  She doesn't like to think of herself like cruel, and yet she knows she's aiming for a weakness all the same.  "'Someone else you know?'   And who might that be?"

Wiley's smile doesn't falter so much as shift, fangs bared in the most literal sense she can imagine.  (Somehow, it doesn't feel like she's landed a strike.  It feels like she has, at best, done nothing.  It feels like she has, at worst, followed them directly where they wanted her to go.)  "An old friend."   Their knife lifts again --- half demonstration, half threat, all malice --- and the blade points her way.   "You're a lot like him.  Never ended too hot for 'im, though.  Might wanna change careers."

"Like you did?"

The grin doesn't shift, but they fold at the waist into a half-bow that scorns any semblance of respect.   "Yeah, 'xactly.  Like I did."   The knife hangs in the air, ready and waiting.  "Done yappin' yet?"

Miss Holloway nods.   Lifts her own blade.   "And waiting," she says, and then the fight resumes.

Chapter Text

The end, when it comes, is dyed in blood.

– – –

It's a unique sort of torture, watching Hannah run away without the ability to follow.  Lex has never been the sort to take shit lying down, and this is no exception; she's hurled herself against the world enough for her soul to bruise with the weight of it, and now she hurls herself against whatever invisible boundary has been drawn between her and her sister and prays for it to yield.  Ethan's helping, as much as he can, and Duke is trying to find a different way through, but none of them can be said to be successful with the odds staked so thoroughly against them.  There's not even the satisfying shake of their desperation clattering against the lifeless enemy they fight, for, whatever Hannah has done to the air, it deprives them of any sense of victory at all.  There is no rattle of a door's hinges fighting against the blows, nor any quake of a wall trying not to buckle; there is only silence in the discouraged wake of people entirely unsure whether they're doing anything at all.

It doesn't stop her, though.  Lex pulls in a breath of too-stagnant air and readies for another pass.

– – –

Time has always been a funny thing.  It's hard to truly process how the whole idea works, even for those as old as it is.  One may, after all, experience what one has yet to truly understand, and it is hard to say when one truly knows it.  Too much lurks beneath the surface of what is taken for granted; too little can be learned about the core of a thing so unknowable that even its brethren cannot truly comprehend it.  It is underestimated by the ancient --- by the unknowable things that mark their days in whole volumes of inexorable existence --- and over-weighted by the young, mewling little things that live and breathe and die so unremarkably between the pages that make it up.   

Only time itself knows its own depths.

– – –

The Black Blade is unsettlingly eager.  It takes active will not to notice, to ignore the cloying, vacuous pull of its hilt on quickly numbing fingers, and Miss Holloway sells every ounce of surety she's got to do so; after all, it's hard enough to keep her focus without the visceral, tendon-deep need to win the fight.  The Blade has always been a hungry little thing, forged in enough darkness that to use it for good feels antithetical --- anathema --- to its design, and she simply can't afford to ignore the implications of that fact, no matter how much she doesn't want to think of it.

She should be grateful.  It's not like she hasn't had practice with hard truths, after all.  She's long forgotten the feeling of a clean soul.

No, she knows that it's a matter of time before the Blade has its way, and she knows, too, that this is as good a cause as any for giving in.  Uncle Wiley is a danger --- to a greater degree than perhaps anything else on their side of the dimensional cleft --- and Hannah an innocent drawn into a game she doesn't (can't) understand.  To ignore either fact in favour of mourning necessary violence would be to make herself party to anything that followed; to keep her hands clean of blood would do nothing but let the rot sink in even deeper.

Miss Holloway's hand tightens around the blade.  Secures the still-freezing metal between prickling fingers and readies herself for the next strike, the next taunt, the next opportunity.  Ignores the way the blade still sings with the rhythm of a beating heart and wills herself to acknowledge that, however this ends, someone won't be breathing by the end of it.  Hopes against hope that she has a say in who it is.

– – –

In a way, the end was inevitable.  There are many paths leading to it, yes, but there's a predictability to it all the same.  A certainty.  Some might call it a moral, inscribed by the universe, or a god, or pure chaos.  Others might call it nothing at all: a coincidence, a fluke. 

– – –

Duke watches.

It's all he seems to do these days, and the thought puts a sick twist in his stomach, but there's nothing to be done; even if he had the ideas, he's on the wrong side of an impossibility to put them into practice.  (There's the barest hint of deja vu as he thinks of it, like his bones are already aching from fruitless railing against things that must always be and yet can never be understood, but he can grasp the sensation for only a moment before it slides away.  What an odd thought.)  Ethan and Lex still vent their frustrations against the very blockade he's trying to find a way around, and there's a part of him too tired for the belief that there's anything he can do but he has to try anyway.  Has to fight against the certainty that they've already lost.

And yet, through it all, Duke watches.

– – –

In the space between universes, a weaver holds strands between sharp fingers and pulls at threads that She sometimes even understands. If asked, She'd call it a loom.

– – –

The fight has stretched on for too long already.

Miss Holloway can feel the time etching itself into the air around them in the hollow, echoing chimes of a grandfather clock that does not exist.  Whether it's due to the power thrumming through her veins or the pulse of blood under her skin she can't tell --- perhaps it's neither, threaded into the air around them more viscerally than she realises, in the most literal sense of the word --- but it's there and she can't avoid dwelling on it because it informs her every move.  The Blade in her hand sings with the same tone, though this, she knows, calls only to her: a dodge on the tick; a feint on the tock; a breath in the uncomfortable pause in-between.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Tick.  Tock.  Breathe.

– – –

There are fractures in a wall between the dimensions that does not exist.  In many ways, they mirror the hairline cracks being broken into a wall that should not exist but does anyway, suspended between sister halves of the same love.  One must shatter, no doubt, though which will break first, nobody can know.

– – –

Lex is out of breath now, though she can't quite tell whether the breath is being driven from her lungs by the force of her battering at the invisible thing before her or by how terrifyingly close Hannah has drawn to the fighting.  The impossible boundary between them feels like a taunt, for it feels like she could just reach out and grab Hannah --- could hide her away from the dangers around her (them) --- except for how much she can't, and so she throws herself and her frustrations against the wall instead.

A breath, fortifying and never quite deep enough.  A charge, blind and unrestrained.  A short, sharp stop as her shoulder checks the edges of something she can barely map.

A breath.  A charge.  A stop.

A breath.  A charge.  A stop.

A breath.  A charge-

Something gives.

– – –

It was always going to work out like this.  What strength can mere dimensions hold when weighed against a sister's love?

– – –

What happens next comes swiftly.

Another charge, this time through open air.

A shout. 

"Hannah!"

A look, at exactly the wrong moment for one blade.  A strike, at the right time for the other.

– – –

It is randomness and it is design.  It is intentional and it is happenstance.  It was always to be and it never has been.

It is a ghost in the machine, and there was always darkness caught between the gears.

– – –

The Blade slides home with a sickening sort of squelch and the gasp of a breath no longer needed.  It's not the first time blood has stained the faded blue strands of an old denim jacket, but it will be the last.

Chapter Text

There's a stillness in the After.  In the span of time between the thump of a body falling to the ground and Hannah's shriek of grief.  In the moments where Lex can't quite tell what's happened and her mind is racing to catch up.  For those few frozen, waiting seconds, there is only the sense that something momentous has occurred, even without any knowledge of what has happened or what the stakes were or what this --- whatever this is --- might mean, long-term.  She merely stands, eyes fixed frontwards lest she miss something that will clarify what's happened, body still bent towards Hannah like her own personal True North, and tries to see.

Miss Holloway won, of that Lex is certain.  There's no blood on her save for a few nicks at her knuckles and a wayward slice along her cheek, and the audibly ragged breathing that shakes her shoulders is clearly only that of exertion, not injury.  The blade is still clutched in her hand, though it now drips blood not her own, and its sinister surface shines a little darker with every spattering drop that meets the oil-slick filth under her feet.  That Duke has already run to her is no surprise; he waited only long enough to make sure that the fight had concluded before hastening over and trying to help.  That Holloway has not told him to stay back is as clear a sign as any that it concluded in her favour.  Lex doesn't fight her relief at that: lets it flow through her instead, sunshine bright and soothing in a way that's been all too rare lately.

She almost regrets the relief when Hannah falls to her knees.  It's a graceless motion, and the ripples of it course through the standing muck on the mall's tile floor as surely as they're felt in Lex's soul.  This is not a passing grief, and even Lex's certainty that Wiley's continued presence was a threat can't sway the equal certainty that they've taken something important from Hannah in the process.  Not for the first time, Lex feels the hollow weight of missing something.  There must be a reason for Hannah's wild collapse --- for the silent tears running silvered trails down her cheeks --- and to know that such pain is necessary for them to ensure Hannah's continued safety tears viciously at something in Lex's chest.  It feels wrong to have wrought such devastation with only the need to keep her little sister safe, and yet there's no way she can see this having gone differently, so instead she pays tribute --- or, perhaps, penance --- to what they have done by watching its aftermath.

Hannah herself doesn't move.  Her hands are limp at her sides, only half-visible as the black water oozes over them and paints her skin, but she doesn't even seem to notice.  Doesn't notice, either, the way the fluid starts oozing away again, somehow draining in a way it hadn't been able to before, in time to a muting of the muzak and the slow waning of that eerie watched feeling and an overall easing of how damnably uncanny everything felt.  Hannah's eyes certainly don't seem to regard the coating of fluid left on her skin after with the same disgust Lex feels, anyway... or, rather, doesn't regard it at all, for her eyes --- as with her bowed head and bent back --- are busy regarding Wiley.  Absent the camouflage of the darkened muck, Wiley's blood is visible: a darkened pool of tacky, already-congealed red, shot through with too much green to be natural.  Judging by how Hannah stares at it, this sickens her far more than anything else around them.

Miss Holloway at least has the grace to look guilty.  She stands awkwardly where she is --- separated from the crumpled heap of Wiley's corpse by only the few feet she'd staggered back as the body fell --- expression as conflicted as Lex feels when she regards Hannah.  She must consider reaching forwards, for her fingers twitch and her hands jolt up a few inches, but they fall again right after. Why, exactly, she decided against reaching out physically, Lex can't tell, but perhaps it's to do with her desire to reach out verbally instead.  "Hannah, I'm s-"

"Stop."  It's a hiss more than anything, sibilant and harsh.  Hannah doesn't turn towards Holloway to say it, but her expression twists with the snarled-out words and Lex thinks Miss Holloway sees it anyway.  Definitely feels the weight of it, at least.  "I don't want to hear it."  Her voice has gone thick, too, beneath the menace.  "You killed them."

Guilty, Miss Holloway may well feel, but she juts her chin higher with the accusation anyway.  Whatever Duke might be about to say in her defence --- and he was, Lex can tell --- she cuts it off.  Accepts the words calmly.  Returns them with a sedate, "I did what I had to do."

Hannah doesn't respond directly. She holds herself like her silence is a refusal to dignify the words with an answer.  "You don't understand.  You think you know what's going on, but you don't.  They were helping me."

It's the second time she's said something of that sort.  It's the first time Lex has been able to ask what she means.

The look Hannah gives her when she does hurts.  (Then again, what doesn't these days?)  "It's too late.  Don't you get that?  You're wrong about what was going on here."

Miss Holloway still hasn't moved, but she interjects all the same.  "I don't know what they told you was going to happen, but you can't trust what they said.  Wiggly is too powerful-"

"Not right here.  Not now."  Hannah shakes her head, and there's a resoluteness to it.  A certainty.  "He can't do anything to me."

"You can't comprehend the depths of power at His command, Hannah!  The things He's capable of-"

"Are limited."  Hannah laughs, but it's more of a scoff than anything.  A huff of bitter amusement.  "You really don't get it, do you?  The Lords in Black are stuck.  They can poke through and influence us, but only the people who are already close to them.  The ones most closely aligned with them.  They're railing at a crack between the worlds that they cannot cross, and, without bridges --- without us --- they've only got..."  She pauses.  Laughs again, short and sharp and brittle.  "Tantrums."

"Then why-"

Whatever Miss Holloway was about to ask, Hannah doesn't let her finish.  "And then there are those of us who have Gifts.  We're closer to that crack.  Closest to the Lords.  They're our sponsors, and we're their tools or their pets or their experiments.  And most of the time, that's not enough to bring them across.  That's why they need rituals, or sacrifices, or..."  Another pause, though this one is to look at Wiley again.  "Disciples."

When she continues, her words trip faster than ever, though they brim with frustration all the same.  "My Gift comes from Webby.  It's why I could see her.  And it's because of that sponsorship that Wiggly can't control me like you think he can.  We had a plan."

Miss Holloway frowns.  Tilts her head.  The silver loops on her ears catch some spray of ambient light with the motion, and they scatter too merrily across the room.  "What was that plan?"

"Gone, now."  Hannah's glare is back.  "That's all you need to know."  She stands.  The seed is still resting in the palm of her hand and, as her fingers go to close around it, Lex reaches out. 

"Wait," she manages, and is relieved when Hannah doesn't shake it off.  "The seed."  There's no response.  Lex can't help wondering how long Hannah would let the pause go without speaking.  Doesn't think she wants to find out.  "I talked to Webby."

Hannah's expression shutters.  "Oh?"

"She said..."  A pause.  Should Lex even mention this?  Hannah is already so upset, and yet-  No, she must at least try.  "Be careful what seeds may do.  Do you know what that means?"

A beat.  Hannah's expression looks as confused as Lex's --- a relief --- until something almost like recognition threatens to dawn --- very much not.  Whatever dim understanding Lex might have seen, it's gone within seconds, tucked out of sight without even a trace left behind.  "No.  What do you think it means?"

Lex frowns.  Looks to someone more in the know --- Miss Holloway --- for help and fails to make eye contact.  Gives up and just... points.  "Do you think you should keep that?"

"It won't rot."  Hannah's shoulders roll back, chin jutting up.  "I won't let it."

"That's not what I mean.  Just..."  Lex sighs.  She hasn't truly cried in years, but she feels like doing so now.  Pushes the thought away and tries to go along with the conversation like something hasn't fractured between them.  They're still sisters, she knows, and, angry as Hannah might be, Lex can't doubt that their bond still exists; she just fears that she's hurt her sister in a way that won't easily be forgiven.  "Leave it?"

Hannah just looks at her.  "This, too?  Really?"  And then, before Lex can even respond.  "Fine."  Her hand lifts, open-palmed, and the seed flies through the air for the second time that day.  Plop, Lex hears, dim and distant but real.  "Happy?"  And then Hannah is turning, walking towards the door with her hands shoved deep in her pockets and her shoulders drawn tight up around her ears.  

She looks the very picture of a sullen teenager.  Lex wishes that were all she was.

A breath of stagnant air rattles through Lex's lungs, and she pretends it's that which makes her queasy instead of everything else.  Her legs are shaking underneath her --- the loss of her adrenaline, probably, draining away from her alongside all of her stress --- but she tries to steady herself all the same.  Tries another breath like it might work this time even though it hadn't last time.  Fights the urge to pass out by remembering how filthy the floor is.

Ethan steps over, eyes about as troubled as hers and yet comforting in his way.  "Give 'er time," he says, hand running the length of her arm from shoulder to elbow and back again, and she leans into the gesture, letting it soothe her shakiness.  She lets her head fall against her shoulder for a moment, lets someone else share the weight... And then she straightens up and pulls in a ragged breath.

"Yeah.  Yeah, you're right."  She smiles.  Pretends it doesn't come across as teary.  "Everything's gonna work out. Right?"

"Right," Ethan says.  He almost sounds like he believes it.

Chapter Text

In the Witchwood, there is a tree.  (That it is a tree is irrelevant.)

Technically, there are many trees, and none of them are particularly notable.  There are tall trees and short ones, wide trees and slim ones.  There are deciduous trees, with their coats shed as easily as the wind that gusts through them, and there are evergreens, which stand solid and reliable and unchanging.  There are maples and dogwoods and oaks and beeches and about any other kind of tree that can be imagined.   There are so many trees, in fact, that it's easy to get lost among them, until the worry isn't missing the forest for the trees so much as it is seeing only the forest's magnitude and not its complexity.  (Webby sees the complexity.  Winds the roots along weaving fingers until they form a tapestry of beating hearts that She once knew.  Feels the thrum of every great potentiality course through the web that She has made.)

This particular tree is a small one, with bark so new as to feel tender to the touch.  It could hardly be called a tree --- it is more a sapling than anything --- and the leaves are a young, gentle sort of pale that evokes springtime despite how cold the air has turned.  It should not, by rights, bear any, for apple trees are deciduous and its leaves should have long since dropped, but it does all the same.  The tree was planted by something that was not human and never would be but had once held human form all the same; that they should not have cared for planting seeds had no effect, for here it grows.  (That the tree is young, and frail, and impossible is irrelevant.)

The tree --- no, the sapling --- grows in a small patch of soil not far from a well-trodden clearing with a worn rock at its centre.  The land it occupies would not be fertile even without the latent impossibility of the tree, for the sapling has been planted at the base of too many well-established growths to truly flourish; it is dwarfed by the giants on either side, without the nutrients or sunlight or hydration that every growing tree needs, and thus the impossibility compounds.  It is older than it should be: taller than any week-old sapling can be.   If it continues at this rate, it will bear fruit within the year.  (That the tree may yield more apples, more seeds, is irrelevant.)

Someone walks through the forest.  Her sneakers are scuffed and worn, with dirt caked along the sides and grass stains marking the toes.  The cuffs of her jeans are dirty too, dark where droplets of dark water have been sprayed across them in a scuffle that has long since died down, and perhaps this is why she pays no mind as branches snag at them, as her footsteps --- calm, but rapid all the same --- leave them buffeted by twigs and small stones.  One piece of debris manages to tear all the way through, taking off a piece of darkened denim, and she doesn't glance at it.  Doesn't slow.  She walks towards the tree with a purpose that doesn't waver, doesn't doubt, doesn't flinch.  Doesn't do anything but drive her forwards.  (Her clothing --- and the state of it --- is irrelevant.)

At long last, she stands before the tree.  (This is relevant.)  She was always meant to stand there, though she believes that she has never done so before.  (She is wrong.  She has stood there before.  She will stand there after.  She has never stood there and yet she always does and yet she will never do so.)  If you asked her how she knew to find the sapling, the likelihood that she could truly answer is low.  In many ways, she didn't know the way at all.  (She was drawn by the very threads meant to push her away, and it is almost amusingly ironic except that Webby is older than mirth.)

When Hannah Foster stands before the sapling, she is power-limned and confident in the way she's longed to be for so, so long.  (Perhaps this is the mistake that Webby made: letting Hannah see the web and not the chelicerae.  Perhaps She pulled the wrong threads.)  Her power is no longer the pure, blinding white of spider silk and starfire, but neither is it the acid-bright green of a poisoned apple: it is her own, and she has come into it as surely as she has come into a ruthlessness that Webby should have seen earlier.  (She forgets, sometimes, how small the world seems without centuries of context.  She has seen the world come about alongside Her, and to be born into it partway through --- to exist with all the transience of a breath --- must be a strange sensation indeed.  It may be the only mystery left to Her, and... well.  She forgets sometimes.)

Hannah smiles at the tree.  The expression is filled with a kind of familial fondness, and it sticks around as she speaks aloud, shattering the silence that accompanies her now.  "Hi, there."  (Her words are irrelevant.  It is only the fact that she says them at all that matters.)  "Aren't you a nice little thing?"  She crouches before the tree.  Lifts a hand to run along one tiny branch.  "Did you know?"

There is no sound to answer her.  There is nothing in the Witchwood to make a sound.  There are only silent trees with mouthless, screaming roots that cannot be heard, and soil of a darkness enough to conceal the blood that stains it, and Webby, watching from the centre of a web She can no longer entirely control.

Hannah keeps talking anyway.  "When you showed me that seed --- when you let it grow in the palm of your hand, when you tossed it over your shoulder like it was nothing --- did you know what you were doing?"  There is still no response.  (This, too, is irrelevant.)  "I don't think so.  I think you just... did it.  I'm not even sure you knew it'd keep growing, huh?  I didn't know what it'd mean either."  She smiles again, and her hand drops from the leaf.  "But I know, now.  My sister said it, didn't she?  Be careful of what seeds may do.  She said Webby told her that, but... Well.  I wonder if either of them really know what that meant.  It's not a metaphor.  It's literal.  Because a seed --- with a little bit of concentrated power imbued within it and enough will to defy the odds --- can do something very special, can't it?  It can grow."  She stands.  Backs away.  "Wake up."

Something shifts.  The universe buckles for a moment, rocked by the weight of those two words.  And then there is someone else in the clearing, leaning against a tree like it's keeping them up.  Maybe it is.  They look more human than they have in a many a year.  Look less human than ever before, too.  "Heya, Hannah."  Their fingers are wrapped around an apple, nails sharp as they bite into the sour flesh.  "We're makin' a habit o' this."

"I did it on purpose this time.  And Wiggly wasn't involved, either, so He doesn't matter anymore.  He's lost His foothold, so to speak."  Hannah turns, waves.  "Hello again."

"How's the sister?"

Hannah looks away.  (This is anything but irrelevant.)  "I love her.  I always will."

Uncle Wiley nods.  Waits.  Eventually asks, "But?"

"But she doesn't trust me."  Hannah's face is tense.  Grim.  Her lips purse with a kind of steel she's always had but rarely broadcasted.  "She doesn't know what's best for our family.  It's like you always said: I can't trust anyone but me."

"Yeah, I said it.  Stand by it, too.  But you ain't ever needed me to tell you that.  You knew it long 'fore I ever showed up, even if ya didn't wanna admit it."

"I suppose so."  Hannah nods.  "But now I know I know what's best."

Another beat.  "Which is?"

"The same as before.  The ritual isn't necessary anymore, with Wiggly out of the way.  He can't reach either of us directly, now that I... severed the link, I suppose.  Means we can focus on other stuff.  My Gift.  Power.  Enough to keep everyone safe from everything that tries to hurt us.  Enough to keep me from losing anything ever again."  Hannah smiles, and it's not what it used to be but it's still undeniably her, uninfluenced by anything but a past that has writ itself into her soul, has shaped her decisions.  (This is relevant.)  "Enough to tie up loose ends." 

Uncle Wiley bites into the apple, and its bitter sap drips acid to the ground below.  "Like what?"

"Pamela. We heard from the jail earlier. She's up for parole." Hannah gestures with a ripped-open envelope, swiped from one of Lex's hiding spots, then tucks it back into her pocket.  She's certain it won't be missed.  "Whether she gets it or not, she won't be coming home.  We can talk next steps after."

"Alright."  There's no sign of perturbation about the comment.  No sign of anything but agreement, or resolution, or anticipation.  "When do we start?"

Hannah shrugs.  "Now."  She pauses.  Reaches into her pocket and finds the knife she knows will be there.   Her hands skate against the surface, catching only slightly on the occasional divot, and then she pulls it out.  Offers it forward.  “Here.  This is yours, right?”

“Right.”   They take it, with something that would almost verge on a smile in someone slightly more human.  “Thanks ever so much.”

Hannah nods.   Tosses her head over her shoulder.  “Let’s go.”  She turns.   Walks away.

Webby watches her go.

Chapter Text

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When Hannah made her wish for guidance --- and because her powers are rooted primarily in imagination --- she accidentally imbued it with sufficient power as to allow it to alter the world around her.  It wasn't much, for she hadn't yet mastered how to control her Gift, but it was something.

Meanwhile, Wiggly really, really wants to be manifested (e.g., Black Friday) and, since Hannah's wish was directionless (or even slightly anti-Webby), he was able to intercept it.  Hannah's primary gift is manifestation, which means she can will things to happen (canon); additionally, given that she's apparently got a really powerful Gift (also canon), and since she's just basically rejected Webby, Wiggly sees this as an opportunity to get himself willed into our world.  He has limited ability to affect what's happening in the real world except through the actions of his disciple, so he ties that wish (already in our world) to the (dead --- killed in a duel with Holloway --- but also already in our world) Wiley and brings them back to life (has canonically happened in Witch in the Web) with the idea that they'll train Hannah to his side and manifest him.  Until then, he's kinda stuck railing against the world through a teensy little crack in time and space, so only a bit of influence can get through and affect people who are already susceptible (e.g., Linda in BF).

I have (as starpirate knows) many thoughts about Wiley, and generally view them through one of two lenses: either "Frankenstein" Wiley (Wilbur went through the portal and had his brain so utterly snapped that Wiley is truly invested in the LiB's agendas) or "violin" Wiley (hard to explain but, my theory is basically: the B&W is tied to all the timelines so that, when Wilbur went through the portal, all versions of him did so.  Thus, Wiley isn't so much one entity as they are a great potentiality of all the Wilburs Wilbur ever could have been.   Wiggly has fine-tuned this potentiality to suit his purposes, and this is Uncle Wiley, but sometimes those settings have to be adjusted again, like tuning a violin that's sat around a bit too long.  This allows some elements of better/more Good versions of Wilbur to exert more influence on the Uncle Wiley persona they generally are).   This universe is based around violin Wiley, so they're generally the Uncle Wiley of canon but dying and coming back to life has messed with their settings a bit, and they're able to pursue some agendas of their own.  

Additionally, while Wiggly was the one directly responsible for Wiley's resurrection, Hannah's power got involved too, so her personality got put into the mix as well; this story is thus a corruption story in both directions, for Wiley is, themself, being influenced by Hannah's continued development of her Gift.  This means that there's some uncertainty as to why they take certain actions in this story.  Did they have her eat in chapter 2 purely because they needed her to be strong for training, or was there some genuine concern for her well-being there?  Did they push her to take breaks in their training solely to make sure she didn't fry herself before the ritual, or was it, too, more genuine concern?  That's reader's choice :)

However, there's only so far those settings are to be allowed to swing, and the fact that Wiley's resurrection was at Wiggly's hands --- er, tentacles? --- means that he still has sizeable control over the situation.  (Not the same as before, but some.)  So, threaded throughout these scenes, Wiley is also weighing the fact that they cannot act too extensively beyond the bounds of what Wiggly wants them to do.  This culminates in the scene in the forest where they know they've pissed off Wiggly and want to test how Hannah holds up against the (severely limited) power displayed in his tantrum.  And she is capable of holding him off.  (Note: Wiggly is an eldritch being and so Hannah could absolutely not hold up against the full concentrated power of Wiggog Y'wrath.  However, he is, at present, locked in a different dimension, so she's chilling.)

This changes things.  This means that both Hannah's and Wiley's goals can be fulfilled in one fell swoop: she can refine her power to the grandest it'll ever get, and Wiley can get her to use the ritual to sever Wiggly's influence entirely.  By initiating the ritual and then stopping it at the critical point --- before Hannah can be overwhelmed by Wiggly and before he can fully come through --- they can boot Wiggly back to his earlier powerlessness, boost Hannah's power, and sever Wiggly's influence on Wiley.  (And, if it fails?  Well, then, Wiley was always acting as the devoted disciple and thus has not incurred their master's wrath unduly.)

But then Lex shows up with Miss Holloway in tow and Wiley loses.  The ritual fails, but that was never the point anyway; the problem is that Hannah has lost (1) a pillar of support, whether healthy or not and (2) an avenue towards power.  She needs that power --- to protect her family, she says, though we don't know whether that's still her only reason... hence the fact that we, as readers, do not see the story from Hannah's point of view since the ritual began --- and so she'll do what it takes to get those things back.

Thus, our epilogue.  She knows her Gift, now, so she can bring Wiley back with only a bit of their power... which she can find in the apple seed from chapter 5.  Most importantly, without Wiggly's intervention, neither of them are beholden to him anymore.  Wiley can operate relatively freely (save for whatever influence Hannah chooses to exert...  which is also reader's choice, depending on your cynicism) and Hannah can continue to train until she's got all the power she desires.

A happy ending?  Not truly, but an ending all the same.  

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I hope you liked this little summary of the proceedings within this story... Hope it cleared some stuff up, too!  All the best :)