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Nox exhales and presses himself firmer against the wooden surface behind him.
He is hiding on Chase’s bookshelf, waiting for him to return. This action was somewhat difficult, not even in climbing the bookshelf, but because the bookshelf itself was decidedly void of books. Nox had navigated a little helplessly around statues, action figures, and wrestling trophies, before finally settling between a capybara shaped bookend and a bright, ecstatic photo book of some world tour or the other.
Now he is sitting and waiting. He is not too bored, because there are many things to look at in Chase’s room—posters and other decorations. It is cute to him, to look at the things Chase loves in his absence. He runs his hands up and down the firm wood of the capybara, slowly reading the dates on one of the posters.
There’s a clatter. Nox’s head snaps up, and he frowns at a spot on the carpet near Chase’s desk.
Even now, his brother Goldie has not seemed to have gotten the hang of gravity. He usually changes surfaces by simply throwing himself off of them. Now, he has gotten to his feet, and he tries to plant his hands triumphantly on his waist; he seems dizzy, though, and accidentally crosses them in front of his stomach.
Nox simply raises an eyebrow.
He is considering correcting the hero key, but he doesn’t get to it; from another place in the room, there is a hiss, another voice he recognizes. “Goldie, quick!” Silver urges. “He’ll be here any minute—”
Goldie looks at the clock, reads it, and claps a hand on his head in shock. “Egad!” he cries, and without another word, he hurries to dart under the desk.
Nox now looks across the room, at the shelf on top of the window. Violet returns his smirk and holds up the strings in her hands with a shrug.
Cccsh. Nox almost falls off of the bookshelf as the spot next to him crackles. He swings his head around, accusatory at the inanimate object sitting there—a little plastic walkie-talkie. A child’s voice is speaking through it. “He’s going into the farmhouse!” Prunella hisses, urgent. “Quick, everybody get ready! Over!”
There is another clatter from the desk as a new voice emerges, both from the walkie-talkie and across the room. “Roger that, Miss Prunella!” Goldie says eagerly. “I can confirm we are all possessed with only the greatest of stealth! Over!”
“I’m not,” says another voice. “I’m possessed with something else.”
“Broooonze, you have to say over, over!”
“I have to do nothing at all.”
Goldie seems about to say something else, no doubt encouraging and ecstatic, but Prunella cuts him off a moment later. “Guys, shhh, he’s going up the stairs!” she hisses. “I’m gonna follow him! Standby, over!”
Nox reaches over and smacks the antenna on the walkie-talkie down, so that it can’t make any noise—not that he exactly trusts his brother. Then he retreats again into the darkness of the shelf, situating himself so that he is hidden behind the book, but still able to peer around it and see.
A moment later, the door opens. Nox has always felt a little bit silly about the way all the blood seems to rush to his face whenever he sees Chase again, but he can’t stop it—even in key form, when he isn’t humanly capable of blushing, the feeling of the thing persists. He shrinks behind his hands, eyes large and shining from the darkness, a little embarrassed.
When he catches Violet’s eye again, and her knowing wink, he quickly works to compose himself again.
Chase is in his work clothes, and he’s talking to someone else. As they get further inside the room, Nox sees Prunella in his wake. She glances furtively towards the desk, then fixes her gaze innocently on Chase’s face.
“...and tell your mom if she is gonna do that, Grandpa only bakes with gluten-free ingredients, so Heather is just going to have to deal with it,” Chase is saying. He walks over to the desk, flicks on his desk lamp so he can see, and starts taking out his work stuff from his backpack. “Oh, and we aren’t free on Tuesdays, that’s bingo night and bingo night is ve—um.” Nox’s blood runs cold. Chase has noticed the walkie-talkie lying on the ground, just barely poking out from the shadow of the desk.
Goldie shrinks back as far as he can, eyes wide. Nox winces as Chase bends over and picks it up, frowning. He turns it over in his hand as if to inspect it.
Prunella has gone a little pale. She watches, eyes wide, as Chase turns slowly towards her. “Prunella…” he says.
“Um—the keys were playing,” Prunella says quickly.
“Ah.” Chase pops up the antennae and speaks into it, jokingly, it seems—“Testing, testing, one two three?”
Nox breathes a long sigh of relief, that he and Prunella have both turned their own radios off. Chase laughs into the silence and shuts it all up again, handing it back to Prunella. “Okay,” he says, and then he turns back to the desk. “But for real though, if all she wants is the shortbread ones, then—”
He cuts off again.
This time, in shock.
Because the lamp has just flickered ominously.
“Um?” Chase asks. He turns the lamp on and off, which works—next second, though, it has gone completely dark. “I thought this thing didn’t need batteries? Sorry, Prunella, one minute—you should ask Grandpa all this, though, he’ll be home soon—” He sweeps his notebook to the side and flips the switch a few more time, but the lamp stays dark. “Stupid crummy thing,” Chase grumbles, and then he leans down again to check the plug—the plug that is currently sitting in Goldie’s hands.
Before Chase can figure out their ploy, Nox enacts his own part of the plan. He scoots down so that he’s sitting and, with all his might, pushes the heavy book with both feet. It leans and starts to fall, and Nox dives for behind the capybara—the book falls to the ground with a crash of paper, causing Chase to look around again.
“Okay, this is weird,” he says to himself, walking over to the shelf and picking the book up. Nox stares into his blonde curls, clinging to the capybara, as Chase straightens again. He turns around and sees Prunella, still standing there. “Dude? Did you just see that fall?”
Prunella’s eyes are wide and innocent. “I did…” she says, her voice shaking convincingly.
Chase spins in a slow circle, his brow pulled together. Nox can’t tell if he’s convinced by it. Silver seems doubtful, too, that too much time might allow him to put two and two together—so she takes her own turn from under the bed, releasing a wind-up toy, which totters across the room. Chase leaps backwards, surprised, just as the lamp flares into light again.
“Okay,” he says, backing up and pulling Prunella with her, “okay, okay, okay, ghosts don’t exist, they don’t exist except oh my God they totally do.”
Violet shoots Nox another smirk and slowly raising both her arms, wound in string. Either arm is connected, through an elaborate series of simple machines engineered by Prunella, to one of the curtains.
“Oh my God…” Chase is still whispering… and then all at once, his face lights up. “Dude! This is so cool!”
Nox has to stop from laughing. He told them this would happen. The other keys were so convinced that Chase would be afraid, but Nox knew he would only be excited. Chase looks around the room, his eyes alight. “Dude,” he says again, “no way! Wait, for real? Prunella, do you think it’s a ghost?”
“Um… yes?” Prunella offers, limply progressing the intent of their prank.
Chase looks up in the vague direction of the ceiling. “Okay, so I’m not crazy,” he says. “Dude, if you’re really a ghost—you missed October by a bit, but we could totally set up a YouTube channe—”
Whoosh. Chase jumps backwards as light streams into the room from the window. Both curtains have been rapidly pulled open, practically blinding Chase, who shields his eye with one arm. “Ahh!” he cries. “Dude, what—”
“Hello, mortal,” says a dramatic voice, coming from a hazy shadow silhouetted against the window, standing atop the nightstand. “Do not run. Here you are given a choice, the only choice, to boldly surrender your mortality and bow down for all eternity…”
All of their eyes adjust.
“To Terrence,” Bronze says.
He is standing upright in his chicken mitt, only his feet visible from beneath it. Terrence fixes Chase with a beady and judgemental eye.
Chase falters.
“Dude,” he says.
Gleeful giggling emerges from underneath both the bed and the desk.
“Woooow!” Chase cries, but he’s laughing, too. He gets down to his knees and peers at Silver as she emerges from under the bed. “You guys were—were pranking me?”
“It was the bold idea of Miss Prunella!” Goldie cries, running out from his hiding place as well. Bronze sits down to shrug off Terrence and then supervises as Prunella climbs up to help Violet down.
“Yeah, the ghost idea was me,” she says, “but it was Buddy’s idea to trick you.”
Comically worn betrayal flashes across Chase’s face. He looks around; his eyes light up when he notices Nox, climbing carefully down from the bookshelf. “Here, I’ve got you!” he says, holding out his hands, and Nox permissibly steps onto his palm. There is a momentary disorientation as Chase lifts him, but Chase is good at holding him so that he doesn’t fall, and it melts away when they are stable with Nox right in front of Chase’s face. “I can’t believe you,” Chase says. “Traitor, Buddy!”
His eyes don’t scream ‘traitor.’ They are filled with the sort of affection that makes Nox feel a little bit wobbly inside.
He’s still coming to understand, fully and truly, that Chase likes him.
It is a very strange thing.
Nox doesn’t let him off easy, though, by allowing his own affection to come through his eyes. He crosses his arms stubbornly and says, “I am being framed.”
Chase giggles. “Right, uh huh.” He lowers his hand to the ground so that Buddy can step off, and Buddy does not mind being away from Chase’s body heat at all, whatsoever, anyone who says that is ridiculous. “It’s okay,” Chase says, like it’s a casual thing, “I’ll forgive you and forget about it, ‘cause I like you.”
Nox’s ears, were he human, would have glowed bright red.
It was a clever thing to say, because the conclusion of the sentence distracted Nox from the lie that was the beginning.
“Hey Buddy, are you busy?”
Nox looks up. He’s lying on his stomach on top of a book, reading. Reading is difficult when you are a key only because you have to remove yourself from on top of it to turn the pages, and Nox wants to lay down, which is why the book isn’t propped up. He marks his spot by folding over the corner, with great difficulty, and then looks up.
Chase’s torso is poking up out of the staircase that leads down to his bedroom. He crosses his arms on the lip of the attic floor and smiles at Nox. “Hi,” he says.
A strange jitter seems to run through Nox’s entire body. Like the ring of a metal bar when you strike it against a pole. “Hi,” he whispers.
With a grunt, Chase heaves himself fully into the attic and swings his legs around so that he’s facing Nox properly. “I have a surpriseee,” he smugs, reaching into the same cyan bag which he once gave Nox, full of treats.
Nox’s eyes widen. “A surprise—?”
“Look!” And Chase pulls from his bag a chocolate bar.
Nox is well acquainted with chocolate bars.
He likes them.
“You—what is—” he asks haltingly, frowning at Chase. Chase laughs, the sound filling the room, and pokes it in the direction of Nox. It’s not a King Bar; it’s thicker, and Nox can’t read the wrapping from here. After a moment he realizes the outer cardboard label has already been removed, so that the chocolate bar is only wrapped in gold foil. It looks… fancy. A fancy gift.
“It’s for you,” Chase says, “you big doofus.”
Nox raises an eyebrow. “And this is not a poisoning scheme, after the whole… ghost… event?”
Chase just laughs.
Nox hesitates, then reaches out with two tiny hands. Chase makes sure he is fully holding it before letting go, but Nox stumbles anyways, the chocolate bar taller than he is. “Okay,” Chase says, “I’m leaving. Gotta go now, work to do.”
Nox hides the flash of dismay and confusion behind the chocolate bar, because it is admittedly a little embarrassing and he doesn’t want Chase to know just how much of a reaction that coaxes from him. He can’t help his bottom lip from protruding, though, as he sits down on the tower floor and watches Chase slowly pick his way down the tower ladder.
That quietly betrayed feeling is still in his stomach by the time Chase is gone. Nox looks down at the ground, then out the windows, then at the chocolate bar.
He sighs and unwraps a corner. Well… it was nice of him to get Nox a gift, anyways. He probably does have work to do.
Still pouting, he takes a bite—
“AAAAUUUUGHHH!”
Chase cackles all the way back up the ladder. He throws his shoulders above the edge and watches as Nox flails away from the chocolate bar like it has burnt him. “What’s the matter, boo?” he asks, as Nox stares at the chocolate in horror and slowly lets his tongue fall out of his mouth.
“Athle fuh wih tah,” Nox spits out.
Chase laughs and holds something up. “It’s baking chocolate,” he says, letting the cardboard box catch the light from the windows, foil letters glinting. “Most of it doesn’t have gluten, but I don’t eat it, because—they don’t—” He bites back another laugh as Nox works the taste out of his mouth—“Put any sugar into it.”
Nox’s head jerks up, accusatory. He simply allows his mouth to contort itself for a minute, hoping some sort of clever response will make its way through, then finally manages, “Boo.”
Chase giggles again and regains the tower, watching as Nox walks over to him and heaves himself on top of his knee. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, your ghost prank. You shoulda known who you were dealing with, Buddy, I don’t just take that sort of stuff and roll over! I needed to have my revenge!”
“So it was poisoned,” Nox grumbles, fixing himself on top of Chase’s shoulder and glaring across the room at the bar of chocolate.
“Pfft,” Chase laughs, as Nox poutingly curls into his neck, “don’t be too bitter.”