Work Text:
Evander is crying again. Laurie can hear him, and he shouldn't be able to. They're separated by a full floor of the house, by hallways and locked doors and a darkness that lies like a heavy blanket over the halls. Darkness which presses at the sockets of the eyes, which seems to seep into the lungs when you breathe.
And yet, Laurie hears him. He turns over in bed, nestles further under the blankets. It's wrong, that sound, in Hazelthorn. Laurie would certainly never dare to cry like that. When Laurie cries, he smothers it, clamps hands around his nose and mouth and tries not to breathe too much.
Not Evander, though. Evander is sobbing like a drowning victim, all gasping, choking, desperate breaths. Laurie doesn't think he could make such a shamelessly despairing noise if he tried. It sounds like it hurts.
He should leave it alone. Isn't that the lesson his whole life has tried to pound through his thick skull? Just leave it alone. No good has ever come from trying to change anything.
The last time he interfered with Evander was when he made him, and he saw how that turned out for both of them. If he just falls asleep, he'll wake to silence, and then Evander will once again be the imaginary friend Laurie outgrew. He will once again be nothing but silence, silence, silence, the empty void at Laurie's side, the soft, tender socket of a pulled tooth.
Heaving, from upstairs. It hardly even sounds like crying anymore. It sounds like he's going to puke.
Laurie turns over again, onto his other side, knees drawn up to his chest.
What would he even do? It's not like he can actually talk to Evander. He doesn't have the key to his door, and even if he did there would be hell to pay for opening it, and even if he did Evander would—
He doesn't actually know what Evander would do. Eat him, maybe. Or hate him, which would be worse.
The heaving evens out into something more sustainable, a rhythmic sob just barely audible from Laurie's room.
He cannot sleep. He cannot stomach it. Stupid, soft-hearted, defective Laurie has never had the stomach to do the sensible thing.
He cannot read, either. Or not well, anyway. He understands how written language functions in theory, can identify letters and tell you what sounds they make as well as any toddler, but when you string them together in a row, they never actually create meaning. Sometimes, with effort and focus and a clear head, he can make a pretty good guess of which words they correspond to, but that's not the same thing as being able to read them. Not like everyone else in the world seems to be able to.
Evander can read, though. Laurie knows this because his grandfather mentioned it, once. He was using it to taunt Laurie, of course. Even that half-mad monster upstairs learned quicker than you.
It is possibly also a method of taunting him that Laurie has books in his bedroom. Picture books, chapter books, middle-grade adventure books, classics—easy enough to differentiate by the size of them, the art on the covers. Perhaps they were given to him in a spirit of sheer hope, but he suspects not.
Laurie gets out of bed and goes to his shelf. He can't read, but he has favorite books. Some of them have pictures.
He grabs the one he likes the best, has liked the best ever since it appeared on the shelf to mock him. Laurie is good at grasping tenderness from between the thorns.
Based on books he's been read in school, he knows that this one is Rapunzel. After the first time he heard the actual story, he came back here and stared at the title on the cover until he could see the shape of the word. Long, bracketed by the firm lines of the R and L, mostly uniform in the middle but for the dip of the P's tail. Or so he now understands.
He didn't, the first time he read it. He'd had no idea what the title was, what any of the words said, how the story went. His grandfather certainly never read it to him, though he was once backhanded for asking.
No, Laurie had not known what it was about, but he had known that it was beautiful. Full-page oil-paint illustrations of a girl with impossibly long, strawberry blonde hair, imprisoned in a tower, staring despondently out of windows. The old woman who'd stolen the girl as an infant watched her grow up, sitting by as the child tripped through a landscape somehow both desolate and wild, at once devoid of life and miles from civilization.
The girl cowered and covered her ears as the old woman cut off her hair. She first feared, and then embraced the young man who visited her. The fabric of her dress, the boy's clothing, the old woman's cloak rippled in a wind that Laurie could all but feel.
Laurie still can't put his finger on why exactly this book is his favorite, except that it's beautiful. Perhaps it's only that he can track the narrative through the paintings so easily.
Evander's crying has not abated. How can he possibly have the water in his body, the air, to cry like that? How have the walls of this house not closed in and smothered him years ago, the way they've smothered Laurie?
How cruel, how thoughtlessly brutal Laurie was when he made a wild thing, a thing of blood-soaked dirt and thorns and teeth, and condemned it to live in this house. Evander would probably have been happier choking to death on garden soil. He would have suffocated a great deal faster, at least.
Laurie knows which floorboards creak, but it's mostly pointless information, given that it's pretty much all of them. He doesn't know if his grandfather fully comprehends what he's doing by teaching Laurie to be quiet, quiet, quiet. To slip through this house like a ghost, to flit between these hallways without disturbing anyone, is no small task.
But, Laurie supposes, a child who gets into trouble you never have to know about is better than a child who behaves, but makes you watch.
He creeps down the pitch-black hallway, stepping lightly, slotting the sides of his feet against the baseboards of the wall to be certain he remains on the most stable part of the floor, the part that moves the least. His fingertips trail lightly along the wall at shoulder height to prevent him from carelessly bumping into a picture frame in the dark. It's an odd, precarious way of walking, but he's long mastered it. The book is tucked up under the armpit of his bad arm, the cuffs of his pyjama pants dragging behind his bare feet.
His heartbeat in his ears, his breathing the shallow mouth-pant of a hunted thing, the shadows swarming ominously at the corners of his vision, Laurie follows the sound of crying.
It's louder near Evander's door, and Laurie almost chickens out. He's always been a coward anyway, a soft, sweet thing waiting to dissolve in someone's mouth, but he cannot ignore it. He cannot leave it alone. He's always got to press on the bruise. It's the only impulse stronger than the cowardice.
He kneels down beside the door, three inches of solid wood separating him from a monster, from the closest thing he's ever had to a friend.
Friend.
He barely got the chance to speak to Evander.
His pulse won't sit still. He can feel it in his neck, in his chest, in his throat and pounding against his temples like a fever.
He presses his forehead against the cool wood.
He cannot read them for himself, but he knows stories well enough. And in stories, monsters locked away do not cry like that. They do not cry like their hearts are broken, like their throats are torn up raw inside, like they're trying to dehydrate themselves to the point of unconsciousness so the world will fade away. Even the princesses in their towers cry demurely, like Laurie does, a few drops of water down their faces which might be hastily wiped away at a moment's notice, nothing which might inconvenience anyone else.
He's never heard anyone else cry like Evander cries.
"Evander?" He whispers. Even that cuts through the night like a floodlight. He feels so exposed, his back to the empty dark of the hallway, his head bowed, but he does not move. He does not move even as he convinces himself that each passing second is the last one, that any moment now someone will grab him by the hair or the collar or the scruff of his neck and haul him up, and then he'll be beaten or locked somewhere for weeks and weeks or forced to eat things again, or, or, or—
But nobody comes. He would hear their footsteps on the floor. They're never as careful as Laurie is.
Faint shuffling behind the door. A change in breathing, but he can't tell if it's better or worse.
Laurie opens the book. A purely symbolic gesture, as he could not possibly read it in the dark even if his brain functioned as it ought, but he wants Evander to hear the ruinously loud rustling of the pages.
"Once upon a time…"
He makes up the rest. Half-remembered snippets of the Brothers Grimm version, which he knows he holds in his hands, and the Disney version, and a couple of other bits and pieces. Like the words he sometimes manages to recognize, he knows the shape of this story even if the particulars evade him. Sometimes the shape is enough.
He keeps his forehead pressed to the door, his voice barely above a whisper. There's a sound that might be Evander getting closer, a faint hiccuping like he's swallowing his sobs, and then after a time he falls silent.
Laurie wishes he could see him. Not even touch him, he wouldn't even ask that much, but just to see him as he—what, matches Laurie's posture, with his forehead pressed against the same spot? Or sits with his back to it, arm around his knees? Or curls up, maybe, like a real, proper child being read a real, proper bedtime story.
Poor, poor Evander. Poor, poor Evander who might love Laurie. Laurie asked for someone who would love him, and there Evander was, whole and perfect in the dirt. Or perhaps poor, poor Evander who would shred Laurie to strips given half an opportunity, bite him open and put hands and teeth and tongue inside him, chew up his organs and floss his teeth with tendon.
Laurie isn't entirely certain the two are mutually exclusive, actually. But he's certain which one he deserves.
The faint shuffling sounds of Evander getting comfortable have all fallen away. Laurie can't hear him breathing anymore. He longs to brush Evander's hair back from his forehead, to run a fingertip down the bridge of his nose, to allow the strange, feral creature behind the door to curl up heavy and warm in his lap—is Evander warm to the touch? He supposes he doesn't know. There was no time to find out. But the inside of his mouth was feverishly hot on Laurie's wrist, the one time they had the chance to touch.
The best he can do is finish the story. It finishes with happily ever after, because they all do. The last illustration in the book is of Rapunzel and her prince sitting with a pair of fat, coddled children in the open air. So Laurie says happily ever after and tries not to think about it, because if he thinks about it, he won't be able to make himself say it.
He falls quiet. The silence echoes through the hallway, rebounds on itself, hits his ears like murky water. And then again, "Evander?"
Nothing, nothing, nothing but silence. Void. An imaginary friend who Laurie could just as easily have hallucinated, faded away to leave him alone in the dark.
There is a monster behind the door. There is something hungry and inhuman and wrong, dangerous, a poisonous carnivore masquerading as a human being, whose entire existence is a flytrap made just for Laurie, a pretty flower drawing him close so it might clamp him in its waiting jaws. Laurie thinks he's finally finished crying himself to sleep.
Laurie can't leave, though. He can't leave him with nothing. Laurie only feels really alive when he gets to go outside, or to school. Anywhere but here. When he imagines Evander, locked in his room all the time, nowhere else to go and no one else to be, it makes him sick. He'd rather die.
Wincing at the sound, Laurie rips a few pages from the book, the lines as straight as he can make them. The little girl skipping across a fallen log. The young woman staring out her window. The young man sneaking in. The old woman cutting her hair off. The crying reunion with her prince. The two children on the balcony. He doesn't need eyes to do this. He knows the order those pages appear in by heart.
He slides them through the tiny sliver of air that he and Evander share. He doesn't know what he means by it. I'm sorry, maybe, or You aren't the only one locked in this house, or maybe just, I was here. I was real. We are not imagining each other.
He sneaks back to his bedroom on silent feet and crawls into bed.
It's easier, now that he knows Evander is sleeping, too.