Archive of Our Own

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He didn't know it was grief, at first.

He was seven. He didn't have the vocabulary for grief yet; for the specific kind that isn't about losing something you once held in your hands, but about losing something you were never given to begin with. The absence that predates the knowing. The hollow that exists before you even understand the shape of what should have filled it.

Easthies just knew that when he sat in the tall grass at the edge of the apprentice grounds, something in him was very, very quiet. Not peaceful. Just quiet in the way an empty room is quiet.

He knew that when he watched the other girls, the way they moved, the way they gathered with easy familiarity, the way they spoke to each other like their bodies were places they actually lived, it made something turned over in him. Something with teeth. He didn't dare to look for long because looking too long made the hollow worse.

He kept his hair long at the front, short at the back, blunt against his jaw. It was as close as he could get to something without knowing what that something was. The other apprentices didn't comment. He was quiet enough that they mostly left him alone.

Then Utowin sat down next to him without any invitation whatsoever, and everything became considerably more complicated.

"What're you doing all the way out here?" Utowin dropped into the grass like gravity had personally offended him. He was loud even sitting down, somehow. Loud in the way he took up space, in the way he breathed, in the sheer fact of his presence. "Practice ended an age ago. Everyone's at supper."

"I'm aware," Easthies said.

"So why're you still here?"

"I like it here."

Utowin squinted at him like this was a genuinely puzzling answer. Then he shrugged, apparently decided it wasn't worth arguing about, and started pulling up fistfuls of long grass and threading the stems together with the focused energy of someone who had just found a new project.

Easthies watched him without meaning to.

"What are you doing?" he asked, after a while.

"What's it look like." It wasn't a question. Utowin held up the half-formed ring of woven stems. "My sister showed me. You just— here, hold still—"

Utowin didn't ask. He just stood up, leaned over, and dropped the flower crown onto Easthies' head. Some of the flowers were already going limp. It smelled like green and dirt and something faintly sweet.

"It suits you," Utowin said, entirely matter-of-fact, already sitting back down. "You look like a girl when you sit like that. All still. Girls sit still and all girls need a flower crown to cheer up!"

Easthies' hands came up before he could stop them. He pressed the crown gently into place and held it there.

You look like a girl.

He turned the words over the way you turn something over in the dark, trying to understand its shape by feel. And the shape of it was, warm. It fit somewhere in the hollow like a key that almost, almost turned the lock, and for one suspended moment the empty room was less empty, the quiet was less hungry. And he thought that maybe— he didn't finish that thought.

"...Thank you," he said instead. His voice came out too soft.

Utowin didn't notice, of course. He was already looking elsewhere, "D'you think Master Corvin will test us on the third inscription tomorrow or the fourth, because I swear I've looked at the third one so many times the lines have stopped meaning anything, they're just lines now, you know when that happens—"

Easthies listened to him talk. He pressed his fingers into the crown and held it in place, carefully, in such way when you hold something you are afraid will be taken from you if anyone notices you have it.

The correction, though, came three weeks later.

A passing mistake by another apprentice. The bob cut, the quiet posture, it was an honest error from Utowin. However, An older sibling laughed and corrected it, and Utowin spun around with his brow furrowed.

"Wait." He pointed, which was rude, but Utowin was frequently rude without knowing it. "You're a boy?"

Easthies looked at the grass. Trying his best to elicit interest of the grass.

It was very green. He thinks it's quite pretty... and boring, but he stares and counts each one and waits for the inside of his chest to stop doing what it was doing.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm a boy." It tastes sour in his mouth and bitter in his throat.

"Huh." Utowin scratched the back of his neck. He looked genuinely, mildly baffled for a moment "Huh. Okay. My bad." And then, without even batting an eye, he moves on as if nothing had change, "You coming to practice? We're doing the forward inscriptions today, and last time you were better at them than me, and I need someone to practice against who won't go easy on me, everyone else just goes easy, and it's boring—"

That was it. The pronoun corrected, the error filed under simple mistake, the world continuing to turn. Utowin had already moved on before Easthies had even looked back up.

Despite that, he followed him to practice.

He did not understand, then, why the correction hurt more than mockery would have. He would spend years trying to understand it. Eventually he would come to something like an answer; it hurt because Utowin hadn't been wrong. Utowin had looked at him, genuinely looked, in the thoughtless, honest way of children, and seen something true. And then the world had said no, that's wrong, and Utowin had believed the world over what he'd seen.

As people do.

As you learn, young, to do so to yourself.

The crown dried and wilted. He hung it from the corner post of his sleeping mat and told himself it was because waste was foolish.

Easthies was seven and already very good at lying to himself, which is perhaps the only skill that came naturally to him.

As all things do when they are faced with time, Easthies, too, grew up. This was, mostly, in the wrong direction.

His body changed with the thoroughness of a natural disaster. It start slowly, then all at once, then irreversibly. He watched it happen in the way you watch a fire moving toward something you love: understanding that you cannot stop it and every inch of ground it takes is ground you will not get back.

Through the years, his shoulders broadened. His hands squared off. His jaw hardened into an architecture he had not designed and did not want. He looked in the water basins of the apprentice halls and saw something that looked like a boy, and the hollow in his chest became a hollow with an edge.

He stopped looking in the water basins.

Instead, he grew his hair. Long and dark, it past his shoulders eventually. It is such a small thing but in the mornings when he braided it or pinned parts of it, there would be moments, brief and thin, where the reflection returned something that made the hollow less sharp. He held onto those moments with a fist.

Regardless, he did not try to examine the look his long hair had given because examining it felt like standing at the edge of something very high. Where it is not dangerous because you'll fall, but dangerous because part of you wants to.

Thankfully, the other apprentices let his hair be. He was precise and exacting and difficult to bother, and people don't often poke the things they find difficult to read. He like that about human. The ignorance of a fool. 

Utowin is not foolish, though.

"Your hair is getting long," Utowin announced one afternoon, falling into step beside him with no preamble. This was typical. Utowin did not believe in preamble. "Like, really long. It's almost at your— " He reached over and flicked a strand of it. "Yeah. Almost at your shoulder."

"I know how long my own hair is," Easthies said. He's above pouting; he hopes his face is not scrunching.

"Just saying." Utowin shrugged. "It looks good. Very witchy."

"We're training to be witches." Easthies wonder if Utowin exists simply to test the limit of his patience.

"Yeah, so! You're ahead of schedule." He grinned, wide and unbothered, the grin of someone who found himself very funny. Easthies doesn't agree. Utowin then knocked his shoulder into Easthies. "How come, though? Is it a style thing or are you growing it out for a reason?"

Easthies kept his eyes forward. "I simply haven't cut it."

"For two years."

"Yes."

Utowin made a noise that suggested he found this answer unsatisfying but had decided to let it go. He did that sometimes, pushed up to a door, knocked once, then backed off when the door didn't open. Easthies had never decided whether this was perceptiveness or simple lack of persistence. But it helps regardless of what it was.

"Well, it suits you," Utowin said finally, shrugging his shoulders with ease. "Makes you look— I dunno. More like yourself, I think."

Easthies' heart made a leap. An awful, embarrassing leap.

He filed that away in the place where he kept everything else, pressed it flat, folded it small.

More like yourself.

He wondered what Utowin would say if he knew how precisely, devastatingly correct that was.

The thing about liking Utowin was that it was entirely in the wrong shape.

He had turned this problem over for years like the way you would work at a splinter: methodically, without quite being able to leave it alone. The problem was always the same, he loved Utowin the way the Ghodrey's Shining Star loves the Outsider, but the way he loved him did not fit any container offered.

The world would allow it, technically. Two men. The world would look the other way, might raise an eyebrow, might find it irregular but ultimately permissible. He knew this. He had seen it.

But the shape was still wrong.

He did not want to love Utowin as a boy loving a boy. That was not the love he had. The love he had belonged to the part of himself he kept folded small. The she he had no permission to be. He wanted to love Utowin the way she would have. With hands, he didn't flinch away from looking at. Standing beside him, not as what the world had made him but as the person who had almost existed in the grass at seven years old, before the world corrected her out of existence.

He wanted things he couldn't name cleanly because naming them required first admitting they were real. And he desperately wishes she isn't real.

Worse of all, the Utowin who laughed too loudly, who bumped his shoulder into Easthies when he walked beside him like closeness was simply a natural condition between them, had no idea.

Of course, he had no idea. Why would he? Easthies had spent years making sure he had no idea. He wore the armor too well, had polished it too carefully, and the armor looked just like distance, just like calm, just like the particular stillness of someone who had everything under control.

But under it all was just a boy who could not stand to be in his own body and could not stand to be near the person who made that impossible to ignore.

Utowin would say something that meant nothing. Something about the practice session, something about food and Easthies would feel it like pressing on a bruise. Not pain, exactly. Worse than pain. That ache of something almost right, something close enough to what you wanted that the distance between almost and actual becomes unbearable.

He thought sometimes about what it would feel like to reach for Utowin's hand.

Not from inside this body. Not like this.

In the way she would have. If she'd been allowed to exist. He thought about that version of himself, and the thought was sweet in the way something beautiful going bad is sweet, like overly ripe fruits, edging away from rotting. So he pushed it down, down, down, into the place where he kept everything else.

Somehow, he doesn't think it can hold much more. 

They found him on a night that was not so remarkable.

Just a day that had accumulated. A day where he had caught his reflection unexpectedly, at the wrong angle, in full light, and the distance between what he saw and what he was felt not like a gap but like a canyon. Vast and permanent and uncrossable. A day where he had sat through a long supper watching Utowin laugh at something across the table, head tipped back, entirely unself-conscious in his body the way he always was, and felt the ache bloom outward from the center of him like ink in water. Dark and spreading and impossible to take back.

That day, he ended up walking into the dark without meaning to.

The voice that came from the tree line was measured. Soft and persuading.

"You seem like someone who wants something changed." The figure said, with its face covered by a large hat, a circling symbol resembling an eye stared back at Easthies.

He should have walked away. He knew, even in that moment, that he should walk away. Could feel the knowledge sitting in him like a stone, but he did not walk away. He stopped and listened.

"There is magic," the figure said, stepping into the lantern light, "that the lawkeepers call forbidden. But who made those laws? And for whose benefit?" A pause, perfectly timed. "There is magic that can do what ordinary contraptions cannot. Magic that changes what the body insists upon. That makes the world perceive what is true. You could step into it. You could be seen, finally, as what you actually are."

Easthies' hands had gone cold.

"I don't—"

"You do," the figure said. Gently. Gently, which was the most dangerous part. "You have always known what you needed. The contraption you've been taught simply refuses to provide it and calls that refusal wisdom. I don't believe that's wisdom. You don't, too."

And the terrible thing that would sit with him like a stone in his throat for years afterward was that it wasn't entirely wrong. The forbidden magic was wrong, the methods were wrong, the people offering it were wrong in ways that went deep and dark. But the wound they had identified was real. The need they named was real. You cannot lie to someone about pain they have actually been living in. The lie only works around the edges, in the offered solution.

Easthies stood there for a very long time.

He thought about the flower crown, dried on the corner post. He thought about Utowin's shoulder against his. Casual, easy, the kind of easy that felt like water to someone who'd been thirsty their whole life without knowing it. He thought about the word she, turning slow and warm in the dark like a coal he'd been guarding in his chest since he was seven years old. If he let it go out, there would be nothing left down there at all.

But,

What if it worked?

What if you could just—

Easthies reached for the vial

"Easthies."

Utowin's voice. Just that, from somewhere behind him. Just his name, in that voice, and the way Utowin said it, terribly quiet, which Utowin almost never was. It was the quiet of someone who is frightened and refusing to show, that stopped him cold.

Easthies turned.

Utowin was at the edge of the clearing, breathing like he'd run. Hair wild, expression complicated, and beneath the complication and the fear was something raw and young that Easthies hadn't seen on his face in years.

"Come on," Utowin said. Breathes labored. "Let's go."

"You don't understand —"

"Yeah, I don't, you're right, I don't. And I don't have to understand, come on." He stepped forward, into the space, planting himself between Easthies and the figures with the graceless determination of someone who had not thought this through and was going to do it anyway. "I don't understand what's going on. Tell me later. Right now we're leaving."

"Utowin—" Easthies tries to retort because how dare he, how dare he come here and make it about rescue, make it about being pulled back to the life that felt like a cage —

"Easthies." Utowin's voice dropped, the loudness stripped out of it, and what was underneath was quiet and serious and somehow worse than shouting would have been. "I don't know what they told you. I don't know what they're offering. But I know them— I know what they are and I know what they take —  We need to leave." The strange figure merely glee at the sight as if they're some entertaining show. It boils Utowin's heart terribly.

"They can fix it." Easthies words cracked as it comes out. He hadn't meant for them to crack. "There's something— there's been something wrong with me since I was a child and nobody— the contraptions we made, it doesn't— it can't— and they're saying they can fix it, and you're asking me to just walk away—"

"There is nothing wrong with you!" Utowin's voice trembles with frustration.

"You don't know that—"

"I know you!" Utowin said, loudly, like volume was a form of conviction. "I've known you since we were seven years old and you sat in the grass looking like you'd rather be anywhere else, and there has never been anything wrong with you, and whatever they told you there is— they're lying. That's all they do. They find the thing that hurts and they lie about it." His jaw tightened. "Please. I'm asking you. Please come on."

The word please was not one Utowin used.

Easthies stood in the dark and breathed and hated everything. He hated the figures, hated the night, hated the hollow in his chest and the body encasing it and the world that had made both of them wrong. In the end, Easthies stepped out of the circle because there was nothing else he could do, because something in him would not let Utowin stand alone in the gap.

He walked past Utowin without looking at him. His face was doing things he had no control over and he would not let Utowin see them.

He walked. Utowin's footsteps followed. He did not try to catch up. He's just there; steady and close, the way they had always been, the way that was the best and worst thing about him.

I hate you for finding me, he thought. I needed you to find me. I cannot have what I want, and you will never know what I wanted, and I am so tired of carrying this alone.

He walked and said nothing

Ever since that day, he became strict.

It started as a performance. Then it became real, the way things do when you practice them long enough. The rules of the witches became something he could hold when everything else was too difficult. It is precise, clear, mapped at every edge. He knew the prohibitions, and he knew their reasons, and he knew, better than most, what it felt like to stand at their boundary, wanting with everything in you to cross.

He did not cross.

He had decided, in the years after that night, that what the Brimmed Caps offered and what he had wanted were not the same thing, and that they would never be the same thing. You could not take yourself by force. You could not rip the world open and demand it give you what it had withheld. The shape of you, arrived at through violence, even the most desperate and private violence, even violence aimed only inward, was still a shape broken open and pressed into a mold it had been forced into. It would not be right. It would not be her. It would be something else, wearing the surface of her like a mask.

He had told himself this enough times that he believed it.

Most days, he believed it.

Then there were other days.

Days where he woke with the hollow cavernous and the armor thin, where the body he inhabited felt like a borrowed coat he had been wearing for decades. Stiff, wrong at the seams, too wide in the shoulders. The weight of continuing to wear it was simply overwhelming. He did not make much of those days. He dressed, and he worked, and he applied himself, and by evening, the armor had thickened again, and he was fine.

He was always fine.

He was so consistently fine that he had begun to worry it was a symptom.

Strangely enough, Utowin was still a present element in his life, in the way that Utowin was structurally incapable of being absent from anything he had decided was his business. They had grown into something that was not easily named. Not quite the uncomplicated friendship of childhood, not quite anything else, something that had been through fire and come out the other side changed in its chemical composition.

Easthies was aware, always, with the low-grade awareness of an old wound, of the exact distance between himself and Utowin whenever they shared a room. The way Utowin's hands moved. The angle at which he tilted his head when working through a problem. The particular laugh he reserved for things he found genuinely funny versus things he found merely amusing.

He was aware that this awareness was not simple friendship, and not the love between men the world would have permitted, and not anything he could act on.

It was hers. The love was hers. It had always been hers. It had preceded the rules, predated the knowing, had been alive in the grass at seven years old before he'd had a single law memorized. And he could not touch it. So he left it in the deepest room, in the dark, where things grow pale and persistent without light. Still, she stubbornly, infuriatingly alive despite every attempt to make her stop.

"I've been thinking," Utowin said one evening, "about that night."

"Don't."

"I do, though. I think about it." Utowin turned his cup in his hands. "I've been thinking I was wrong. Not to come— I'd do that again. But I dragged you back, and I didn't once ask you. I didn't ask what it was. What was it you needed so badly?"

Easthies said nothing.

"...I was so afraid," Utowin said, and that landed with unusual weight, because Utowin said that word like it was unfamiliar in his mouth, like he was handling it carefully. "I just— I saw you there, and I was afraid, and I made it about getting you away from them, and I didn't—" He stopped. "I don't know what I could have done differently. I don't know if knowing would have changed anything. But I should have asked. I should have asked you what was wrong."

What was wrong?

Easthies looked at his own hands on the table. He had made his peace with his hands, mostly. It had taken time. He looked at them and thought: these are my hands. I have had them my whole life. They have done good work. They are mine.

He did not always believe it. But he was trying.

"You wouldn't have understood," he said.

"No," Utowin agreed, simply. "Probably not. But I would have tried."

That was the thing about Utowin, Easthies thought. That was the thing that he had never been able to fully armor himself against. Utowin was not perceptive, not subtle, not the kind of person who sensed things unsaid.

But he was trying, always, genuinely trying, in the blunt and imperfect way he tried at everything. This relentless good-faith effort was almost impossible to not reach toward; it is stupidly impossible for Easthies to ignore.

"There is something," Easthies said, slowly, "that I have wanted for a very long time. Something I decided I could not have." He pressed his fingers flat against the table. "I have made my peace with it."

"Yeah?"

"Most days."

Utowin was quiet for a moment. Which was unusual enough that Easthies looked up.

Utowin was watching him with an expression that was... careful. Utowin was not often careful. He looked like a person holding something fragile that he'd only just realized was fragile.

"Is it something I did?" he asked. "Or didn't do. Or— is it something about me, is what I mean."

"No," Easthies said.

"You sure? Because—"

"Utowin." He held his gaze. "It's not you."

"Okay." He nodded slowly, like he was testing the weight of it. "Okay. And it's— it's not something you can tell me yet."

"It's not something I have the words for yet," Easthies corrected. "And I won't say it recklessly..."

Utowin looked at him for a long moment. Something moved in his expression that Easthies didn't entirely have the vocabulary for. Then he nodded once, sat back, and picked his cup back up.

"Alright," he said. Simply. No argument, no pushing, no asking around the edges of it. Utowin is terribly kind in that way.

They sat together in the quiet. The night settled around them, and Easthies breathed and let himself, just barely, lean into the warmth of being known imperfectly, incompletely, and only at the edges.

It was not what she would have wanted. Not the shape of it, not the body he was in, not in the form the love had to take.

But Utowin was there, had always been there, would probably always be there in that infuriating devoted way of his. And the hollow in Easthies' chest was not full. In fact, it would never be full; he had accepted that. He hopes it is enough to satiate her.