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Missa is pacing.
This, counterintuitively, is a relief to Philza. It shouldn’t be. Missa’s call was low, strung tight with tension. If something weren’t truly the matter he wouldn’t have asked Phil to cut his trip short. He would have told him over the phone, instead of whispering ven, por favor. Te necesito.
The pacing eases Phil’s heart anyway. If Missa were silent and still, Phil would know fuckall what to do. But what could be more familiar and beloved than Missa in a flurry of anxious pacing? He’s muttering to himself, wearing ruts into the carpet. The purple apron with all the little candy skulls the kids got him for his birthday two years ago is cinched around his waist, where it’s likely been since dinner, or even lunch. His hair is twisted haphazardly atop his head with the single broken claw clip they share, the shadows in his gaunt face softened by the low light of a sleeping house. This Philza can handle. This he can help.
It’s a testament to Missa’s anxiety that he didn’t hear the door open, or close, or lock. At this point trying not to startle him is a hopeless endeavor, but Phil owes it to the man to make an effort.
He speaks softly. “Hey, mate.”
Missa jumps a foot out of his skin. Phil’s burst of laughter is smothered only half-successfully into a squawk.
“Sorry,” he says, grinning, “I did try.”
Missa’s frazzled, deer-in-headlights look collapses into something soft and moonlike. The weight of it never fails to humble Phil. It’s hard to imagine anyone could be worthy of being looked at like that. By the shine in Missa’s eyes you’d think he had not seen Phil in a hundred years.
“Philza.”
He closes the distance in two bounds and throws himself into Phil’s arms.
What could be more familiar: this. What could be more beloved: this, this.
“Te quiero te quiero te quiero,” Missa whispers into Phil’s shoulder. “Thank you for coming. I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do.”
Phil strokes a thumb down the ribbons of hair that have tumbled loose down the back of his neck. “Hey, hey, it’s alright. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.”
Missa shudders. Phil rocks them.
He murmurs, “The kids?”
“Asleep.”
Phil hides a smile in Missa’s shoulder. “You double checked? They’re tricky.”
Missa huffs. “I triple checked. I’m sure.”
Phil leads them to the couch. In the absence of Missa’s pacing and muttering, the only sound left is the shallow scrape of tree branches on window panes. Missa clings tightly to Phil’s hand, but otherwise holds himself apart. This is his way: he never takes what he is not given. Affection wells between Philza’s ribs. He pulls Missa close.
“I am sorry I called you,” Missa says again. “You’ve been waiting for this vacation for so long. I wanted you to have it. We were doing well, if you can believe it.”
“Of course I believe it,” says Phil. It's clear in Missa’s apology that he isn’t ready to talk about it. Under Phil’s arm, the thin bones are trembling. “What did you do together?”
“We played games,” Missa says. “We made tamales. We played music, and made masks. They put on a play for me. I got to be in it. They rescued me from vampires.”
Philza laughs.
“We spoke Spanish the whole time,” Missa says, soft and wistful. “We walked to school. I wanted to spend as much time with them as possible.”
Philza hums. The trip had been as much for him as it was for Missa—maybe more for Missa. Work kept him away across long stretches of land and long stretches of time. Phil had looked forward to some time hiking, exploring, communing in the shrines, but not as much as Missa looked forward to quality time with his children.
What could be so urgent that he gave that up to call Philza back?
“Hot chocolate?” Philza suggests.
A shuddering sigh comes loose from Missa’s chest. “Hot chocolate.”
Missa instructs Phil gently. Cocoa powder, milk, vanilla and cinnamon. The whisk scraping the saucepan. Bittersweet chocolate, cayenne pepper. Missa’s head on his shoulder.
The kitchen is spotless, each dish scrubbed within an inch of its life. Missa has been stress-cleaning. The window above the sink is so freshly cleaned that it still looks wet, the glass drying streaky from Missa’s furious wiping. With the light on, Phil can see his own ghostly reflection in the pane, and past that, just barely, the stooped shoulders of the tall trees, looming dark across the lawn.
He tips the chocolate into two mugs. To Phil’s eye it looks mediocre at best. Missa is reverent. He holds his mug with both hands.
They take them back to the couch. Missa takes a long sip, then slumps into Philza’s side.
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
“Shut,” Phil says fondly. Then he says, “How bad is it?”
Missa’s voice shakes, even if his hands around the mug do not. “Very bad.”
“Then maybe you should say it real fast. Get it over with. Like ripping off a band aid, yeah?”
Missa does not say it very fast. He does not say it at all. He pulls away, and for a second Phil thinks he pushed too hard, too soon, but Missa is only reaching for the drawer in the coffee table. He’s pulling out a piece of construction paper, hastily folded. He’s passing the paper to Philza, and then he’s looking around the room furtively, as though for someone hiding: at the corners, at the shadows. At the window with the scraping wooden fingers.
Chayanne is pacing.
They waited until Pa checked that they were asleep, and then they waited until he checked a second time, and then a third. The door went click and Chayanne leapt from his bed and started circling the room. His cape flutters behind him. His skull mask is askew on his head. He says he thinks clearer when he’s wearing it, the same way Tallulah does when her hair is braided and she’s pulled on her hat.
They can’t risk turning on the light without alerting Pa, but Tallulah can see Chayanne by the moonlight pouring through the window. She likes that window, usually. She likes that the moon passes by it so clear and bright when it’s full.
She doesn’t like it right now. It lights up the trees, and the dark spaces between them. At least it’s closed and locked tight.
“I thought we said no drawings,” Chayanne says, finally.
“I didn’t think anyone would see it.” Tallulah draws her knees up. “I just wanted to show the others, so they know what to look out for. I was going to rip it up after.”
They all agreed, every kid in class. No drawings unless they had to for school. And in that case, only happy things: rainbows, puppies. Maybe Chayanne beating up Mr. Quackity, if they thought they could get away with it.
The rule doesn’t apply to Richas. Richas can’t help it. Just like he can’t help the strange things he says when he draws, or the jagged lines, or the violent colors, or the way Mr. Quackity folds the paper up tight and hands it to Richas’ pais. They would all talk for so long after school. No one wanted that for their parents.
But they hadn’t seen what Tallulah saw. She needed them to know. She needed to warn them.
Chayanne asks, “Did you talk to it?”
Tallulah frowns. “No. I’m not dumb, Chay.”
Chayanne stops pacing. “I know you’re not.”
Tallulah twists her fingers the way she’s seen her pa do. She wishes she had a cup of his hot chocolate. It always makes her feel better. She would even take it the way Papa makes it, a little too watery and a little too bitter. They would chew marshmallows and laugh at each other’s chocolate mustaches, and it would be like what happened today didn’t happen at all.
But it did happen.
“Did it,” Chayanne says, stops, starts again, “Did it look…familiar to you?”
Shiny black eyes and a stitched on smile. Familiar. Like a bad dream.
She doesn’t want to say it. She doesn’t need to.
The bed bounces as Chayanne sits next to her. He folds their fingers together. It’s more comforting than any hot chocolate could ever be.
Tallulah says, “It didn’t say anything. It just watched me.”
It watched her for so long.
Philza presses his mouth into his hand. It hides some of the shaking.
“She saw it?” he says. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. Minutes at least. On the coffee table his mug has stopped steaming. “Like this, in the fucking woods?”
“Yes,” Missa whispers. “Not here. At school. Then she—she drew this, and Quackity caught her. She was going to show the other kids.”
Phil drops the drawing back on the coffee table. Along the creases it folds feebly in on itself. He feels sick from staring at it. He can’t stop staring at it.
“We’re having a meeting tomorrow,” Missa says.
Phil tears his eyes away. “Who?”
“Everyone.”
Everyone. Every scattered person, everyone who couldn’t stay or couldn’t bear to. Luzu, Spreen, Rubius. Etoiles.
“It’ll be nice to see Etoiles again, at fucking least,” Philza says. He sounds strangled. Missa’s arm is around his shoulders. When did that happen? Keep it the fuck together. “This happened at the school? And no one else saw it?”
“It was at recess. They were playing hide and seek.”
“The kids or the teachers? Because the teachers sure as shit weren’t watching our kids!”
Missa stares resolutely at his hot chocolate. Philza blinks, and blinks again. He sees the shine to Missa’s eyes, the wobble in the tight line of his lips. The pale of his knuckles on dark ceramic.
“Hey.” Philza softens. He pries the mug from Missa’s hands and replaces them with his own. “Hey, mate, come on. It’s not your fault. There’s nothing you could have done.”
“You didn’t see the way they looked at me. When I first saw the drawing, when Quackity told me what happened—” A reedy laugh scrapes from Missa’s mouth. “I wanted to go into the woods and tear that thing apart. I did not want my kids to see me like that.”
Philza presses a hard kiss to the side of his head. “Hold onto that. We’re going to need it.”
“You didn’t see it,” Missa says again. “The way Tallulah looked at me.”
Tallulah buries her face in her knees. “I made Pa cry.”
“Pa cries about everything. He cried this morning, dropping us off. It’s not your fault. You know whose fault it is.” Chayanne’s voice is hard and sure. “It’s not a big deal, okay? The adults will stop caring, like they did last time.”
But it is a big deal. Tallulah knows it by the way Mr. Quackity went so pale and his eyes went so wide. She knows it by the way the whole class got sent home early. She knows it by the look on her Pa’s face. How he covered his mouth, how he turned around as though she wouldn’t see him shaking.
And she knows by the way Chayanne speaks, right now. The two of them can fight all they want over little things, unimportant things. But he’ll never blame her for something that matters, even if it’s her fault. Especially if it’s her fault. It’s the only thing he would ever lie to her about.
“So maybe the adults won’t stop caring,” Chayanne admits. “Maybe that’s a good thing. Now they’ll go into the woods and find it. Papa will rock its shit, like Technoblade. Like this—”
Chayanne jumps up and grabs his sword. He slices the air this way and that. A smile teeters onto Tallulah’s face. Chayanne glances at her. His sword drops to his side.
“It’s okay if you cry,” he says.
She won’t. Her eyes hurt but they’re not wet. She can’t remember ever crying, not in eight whole years. She’s wanted to—when she twisted her ankle falling out of the big tree at school, or when she and Richas fought over Tio Bad, or when Dad and Papa got so upset over her drawing. The first one. The one with the dragons.
She wanted to cry every time. But whenever her eyes got heavy and hot, the inside of her chest would get cold and the inside of her head would get angry, and she’d think, I spent my whole life crying. No more.
She never told anyone she thought that. Not even Chayanne.
“We need to do something,” Tallulah says. “Or it’ll come back.”
Chayanne nods. “Did you get to show the others?”
Tallulah shakes her head. “We have to tell them.”
Chayanne nods. “We will. We’ll tell them at school tomorrow.”
“I don’t think we’re going to school tomorrow,” Tallulah says.
Chayanne thinks on this. “We’ll tell Pa. He’ll tell the other parents, they’ll tell the others.”
“Pa already knows. So does Mr. Quackity. So do all the parents. They didn’t tell anyone.”
“Then…” There’s confusion in Chayanne’s voice. Tallulah can imagine the little line that digs between his eyebrows when he’s thinking. It’s the same line in between Papa’s eyebrows, in between hers.
“I don’t think the grown ups are going to do anything, Chay,” Tallulah whispers.
“The fuck they won’t,” growls Philza. He’s on his feet. He’s not looking at Missa, because if he was he’d be glaring, and Missa doesn’t deserve that. “All this, and you think they’ll do nothing?”
“They don’t want to—what is the phrase—tip the boat. They don’t want to break the deal. You know this. They think it’s dangerous.”
“Our kids are already in danger because the deal is already broken,” Phil hisses. “The deal was always going to fucking break, I told everyone that. We couldn’t trust them back then, we can’t trust them now!”
“I’m with you,” Missa says. He crosses the room and lays his hands on Phil’s shoulderblades. The extra weight is familiar. Phil takes deep breaths. His heels touch the floor.
Something scrapes outside. His head whips around—just the tree.
Phil takes a deep breath. He takes another. He reaches up and finds Missa’s hand. Squeezes hard.
“Tallulah and Chay.” There’s a croak in his voice. “Are they scared?”
“They’re kids. What do you think?” Missa laughs, exhausted and unhappy. “They’re not afraid of anything. Que Dios nos ayude, it would be easier if they were.”
“They’re scared,” Tallulah says.
“Pa and Papa aren’t scared of anything,” Chayanne says.
Chayanne is the bravest person Tallulah knows. She takes all her problems to him first, even before Papa Philza. There’s no one she’d rather play knights and Technoblade with. Or swim in the pond with, or make up stories with, or share secrets with. If there’s something Tallulah doesn’t know, Chayanne will know it, and if he doesn’t, he’ll know whether to ask Papa, or Pa, or Tio Bad, or Tio Fit, or even Mr. Quackity. He has a magic sword that can fight off her nightmares. There’s a song on Tallulah’s flute that can fight off his.
He’s the best big brother anyone could ever have. Dad and Papa make her feel safe, but Tallulah would never feel safe again if she did not have Chayanne by her side. He is her favorite person.
But sometimes, she thinks she sees things clearer than he does.
“They are scared,” she says quietly. She knows Chayanne doesn’t like to think of their parents as anything less than fearless warriors. She hates that she has to be the one to tell him otherwise. “Remember when I fell through the ice? Or when you ran into the street to get my flute? Or—” Her voice tries to quit on her. She forces it out. “Or when we used to play dragons?”
Chayanne stares down at his fists. His mask throws his face in shadow.
“They’re only ever scared for us,” Tallulah says. “They didn’t do anything when Richas first started drawing. None of the grownups did. They still don’t.”
Chayanne breathes in. He breathes out. He looks down at his sword.
He says, “Then we have to protect them.”
“What do we tell them?” asks Missa.
“The truth,” Phil says. “What we should have done when Richas first started all those drawings. I don’t give a shit what the others think. They won’t keep me from talking to my own fucking kids.”
“You’re sure?” Missa says.
Phil turns under Missa’s hands. They slide with him, resting lightly on his shoulders. Phil says, “Keeping them in the dark doesn’t protect them. It just means the lights are off when danger comes knocking.”
Missa’s mouth hardens. “Then we tell them.”
Relief blooms in Philza’s chest. He wraps his arms around Missa’s waist and pulls himself close. Missa is the taller of them, though not by much. Just enough to rest his chin on the crown of Phil’s head if he cranes his neck. He’s thin and bony everywhere—Phil finds comfort in all his sharp angles. In the way Missa’s arms come around his shoulders, like there’s nothing more natural. He smells of old things and earth. Ancient paper, peat moss. In another life, Phil has thought that Missa smelled like the sweeter side of death.
“I’m glad you were here with them,” he says.
“I’m not. I wish it was you. I didn’t know what to say to them today. We had dinner in silence. They didn’t even ask for five more minutes before bed.” Missa sighs. “You would have comforted them. Made them feel safe.”
Over Missa’s shoulder, Phil can see the drawing fluttering on the coffee table. The tree scratching at the window. He tries not to look.
“I wouldn’t have,” he admits. “I would have fucked right off into the woods and gotten my ass abducted, probably. Left them alone.”
He pulls back. Frames Missa’s face with his hands, rests his thumbs in the pockets of his cheeks.
“You were here, Missa. You did keep them safe.”
Missa tips their foreheads together. They breathe in time.
“Come on. I want to see my kids,” Phil murmurs. He doesn’t open his eyes.
“You want to tell them now?” Missa says, laughing in disbelief. “Wake them up and give them nightmares when they go back to sleep?”
“We’ll tell them in the morning. I just want to see the little shits,” Phil admits. “Give me a break. This whole thing scared the shit out of me.”
Missa leads the way down the hall, pulling Philza by the hand. The fear has finally left his face, leaving it soft, shadowy and adoring. “I’ll protect you.”
There’s a draft coming from under the kids’ door, as though someone left the window open. Phil will close it, and then he will tuck his kids in, and tell them stories to send them to sleep, safe and peaceful for one more night. He’s sure they’re still awake. Missa only checked three times.
Missa opens the door. The room is quiet and dark. The first thing Philza sees is the moon, bright and full in the open window.
A breeze rolls through and past them, down the hall and to the living room, rustling a piece of paper on the coffee table. In it are tall black trees, and between them: a white bear smiling out, with black eyes and a stitched on smile.