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The unfortunate thing about Pelican Town, Clint thinks, is that once people form a certain impression of you, it is usually considered unmalleable and not worth the effort of reforging. You see that man there? He's the blacksmith. Glum, asocial, a running gag for how not to talk to women. Tools are all he's good for.
It is a total bummer, to put it mildly.
For example, tonight is Spirit's Eve, the first since Clint had been accepted into the Adventurer's Guild and thus permitted to assist the very serious task of wrangling 20 lbs of skeleton into a cage, and somehow despite all the progress he had made, the villagers who bother to notice his uniform keep assuming it is a costume.
“Hey nice cloak,” Abigail says in passing, clanking dramatically in what appears to be full plate armor, not that she thought to commission it from him. “Did you get that from the Spirit of Eve that took over the old minidisk shop in Grampleton?”
Clint huffs. “Marlon said it was originally Bear Claw’s, who was slain by…”
Abigail’s face scrunches momentarily in a townie-typical blend of boredom and confusion before Leah drags her off, the latter giggly from cranberry wine.
“Who was Bear Claw?” someone asks near his shoulder. Clint definitely does not jump and let out an unmanly squeal.
Elliott stands next to him, sipping daintily from a goblet of wine so as to not smudge his dark red lipstick. He’s dressed in a late 19th-century suit in emerald green that matches his earrings, his black top hat reminding Clint distantly of an old children’s story, too far back in his memories to place.
As with everything Elliott, Clint can never tell if the man is mocking him in that elegant, overstated manner of his or if he’s genuinely interested in anything Clint has to say. “Nothing,” he grumbles, “just a dead guy.”
“Did you know him?” Elliott asks, staring with those unnerving green eyes over the rim of his goblet.
Clint fusses with his hood, tempted to draw it over his face and flee into the darkness. “He died before I was born, I think. Shadow brutes, Marlon said, but he took a lot of them down with him.”
“And how many have you slain?” Elliott covers his mouth, laughing a little. “Oh dear me, that was incredibly rude of me to ask. My apologies; the wine appears to have gone to my head.”
It’s enough to nudge a wry smile out of Clint. “You’re good. I haven’t killed any of those, really. The best I’ve been able to do are some slimes and bugs. It took more strength than I thought to wrangle those measly skeletons into the cage.” He inclines his head at the macabre display in the town square, carefully guarded by a relief pair from Castle Village for the festivities.
Eyes landing on the skeletons, Elliott raises an eyebrow at Clint. “You aren’t giving yourself enough credit, you know. I would have been hewn to smithereens by such monsters.”
The way he says it—genuinely, and without the barest shred of duplicity—smacks Clint with the realization that Elliott has never been mocking him. Not now, nor in the past, either. He’s simply like this, the town’s odd and owlish hermit-author. That Elliott immediately believed Clint had the capacity and gumption to take down something as daunting as a shadow brute warms his forge more than he’d like to admit.
Elliott drains the rest of his wine and sets it on the table, dabbing around the edges of his mouth with a handkerchief. “Care to join me in the maze?”
“The maze?” Clint hasn’t cared to patter around the Wizard’s handiwork since childhood, when an errant spider popped out of its animatronic cycle at the worst possible time and made Clint and his sister run shrieking back to town.
Elliott wraps his arm through Clint’s, as if they are going on an old-timey garden stroll. (To Elliott, maybe they are.) “Of course. With such a strong and brave adventurer of the guild with me, I find myself feeling equally brave to dare tread the dread labyrinth in search of the fabled Golden Pumpkin.”
Strong and brave. Huh. The words seem contrary to everything ever said about Clint, but he allows Elliott to drag him along, figuring it has to be better than drinking the dregs of his pumpkin ale, waiting for another person to ask what he’s cosplaying.
“I do think we might be lost,” Elliott says, after they pass the house with the chicken feet for the third time. (It figures that even with the help of another adult, Clint would be miserable at this part of Spirit’s Eve, too.)
Clint throws his hands up. “It doesn’t make any sense. I can hear people on the other side of this hedge. So there must be a gap…”
With more patience than Clint could ever assume a person in proximity to his anxious frustration could have, Elliott waits while Clint paces back and forth. Clint pokes at another portion of the hedge, testing a suspicion he has about the Wizard’s tricks. His arm passes through.
“Aha!” Not waiting any longer, he grabs Elliott’s hand and pulls him through the covered spiral, the darkness clinging to them in a way he distinctly doesn’t like. (There’s a reason he still insists the Farmer clears floors 30-39 of the Mines each year.)
Once they exit into the blue glow of spirit torches, Clint realizes two things: 1) the sounds on the other side of the hedge weren't from other villagers and 2) he left his battle hammer at his seat in the town square.
A mummy and a golem slowly approach, promising their painful deaths.
“What the hell, Magnus,” Clint swears, pushing Elliott behind him. I’ll put the maze together, Lewis, only there’s a secret to it that involves a chance of fatalities, maybe maiming if they run fast enough.
“Would this be helpful?” Elliott hands him a small piece of metal, sharpened to a nasty point on the end. “One never wears a hat without a hat pin.”
Clint would rather have a blunt instrument, but Marlon did insist he pass that grueling training on daggers not that long ago. It’ll have to do. He readies the pin, steadying his breaths, and tells Elliott, “If anything happens to me, you…”
Lifting a perfectly groomed eyebrow, Elliott replies, “Run like the hounds of hell are after me?”
“Exactly.”
The mummy and golem are close enough that they can see the hate glowing in the monsters’ eyes, the arms outstretched to grab them. Clint hefts all of his bodily weight at the mummy with an unintelligible battle cry, knocking it down and stabbing the golem’s heart with his free hand.
There’s an odd mechanical grinding noise beneath him and he looks at the mummy, its wrappings falling apart and revealing the wires and metal underneath. The golem is similarly malfunctioning, twitching on the ground.
“Animatronics,” Clint growls. “He might have posted a sign about it… or something.”
Elliott plucks his hairpin from the golem’s chest and hums. “In all fairness, I did note a sign about monsters, but it only wrote about their deadly nature.”
“Well, I feel stupid now.”
Pulling Clint to his feet, Elliott places his hands on the blacksmith’s shoulders and says, “Not stupid at all. You were ready to lay your life down for me at the barest hint of a threat, solely armed with a brass hairpin.”
The way he’s staring makes Clint’s neck heat, his face redden. “Um, well…”
Without Clint quite noticing, Elliott has steadily backed Clint up against the hedge, still holding his shoulders. And at this point, Clint has another set of realizations: 1) Elliott looks like he would very much like to kiss him and 2) Clint is actually… pretty okay with the idea? Well, it’s not as though Clint never figured out some things about his particular alloy of sexuality before Elliott came along. (Isaac exists, after all.)
And then there’s that damn lipstick of his, stark in the lamp light. Clint wants to drown in the dark wine of them, see if the taste of Elliott’s drink still remains in his mouth once he’s done.
Elliott tilts Clint’s jaw up, bringing their mouths together, warm as coals in the late autumn night. Clint would never consider himself an expert on kissing, but with the intoxicating way Elliott kisses, well… He thinks he might understand, just a little, why all the girls were tittering and sending heated glances Elliott’s way when he moved into town. Elliott deepens the kiss, one hand greedily crawling its way under Clint’s tunic, another gangly leg propping itself between his thighs. The prickly hedge digs into Clint’s bared skin beneath his cloak, but at this point, he wouldn’t even notice if someone lit the damn thing on fire.
Afterwards, Elliott offers Clint his handkerchief. “Dear me, you have a little…” He fights back a laugh. Clint rubs off what appears to be a canvas’s worth of lipstick from his face and neck, if he could describe Elliott’s face like a canvas. A painting by one of the greats, a god framed in a gallery worth more gold than he could ever make in his lifetime, surely.
Doffing his hat, Elliott adds slyly, “Well, intrepid adventurer, care to guide me home?”
They sneak out of the festival, breathless shadows under the full moon.