Chapter Text
The dark young took a lot from them.
Lui doesn't wake up after he falls unconscious on the way to the hospital. He gets placed into the ICU and then later transferred to a bigger hospital again. Initially they say he's brain dead from an infection and on life support, only to change the prognosis to unknown and on life support. He has brain activity, nearing seizures at times. They aren't allowed to visit, getting updates through their respective family.
William handles it poorly, he'd known Lui since- he'd always known Lui and declares that he's going to take care of his feral grandma and check the woods for anything that may have been left behind.
Isaac goes with him the first few times, but it becomes clear there's nothing out there and he needs time to think, and they leave him to it.
He gets that driven look to him, like he’s convinced there’s something out there, he can’t explain it in words. She asks William to keep an eye out for her dad and that snaps him out of it for a moment, he gives her a hug, promises that he’ll keep an eye open.
It's not long before an officer finds her dad, he's confused and shaken, scratched up by something but in one piece. It takes some time for him to get back on his feet, remembering the last conversation they had she asks him, what do you do when a friend won’t let something go. He gave her a pained grin and a gentle hand pat while explaining that the best thing you can do is wait and be there for them.
She wants to spend more time supporting her father’s recovery but then William doesn't come back. He had come back just fine on his own the first three days that Isaac left him alone.
One day.
They go looking for him but can't find him. They get turned around and almost fall in the river. The forest feels more violent than when the Dark Young had occupied it.
Two days.
His parents think they are up to some teenage mischief and don't believe them when they say they haven't seen William. People stop walking the streets by dusk because something is in the air. It's unnerving, they sit on her families couch late at night talking because without William and Lui it feels impossible to search the woods.
Three.
When he shows back up on the third night around dusk, sitting on his front porch and holding his phone Isaac calls him Emo Jesus. Hugs are shared but William seems worse for wear. He doesn't go back out into the woods, (Isaac had threatened to tie him to a chair if he did) but he also doesn't leave his home. They both try not to pry but they couldn't if they wanted to, William seemed dead inside.
A week passes to give him time to think and just like that, without a word, he had left Deadwood- missing when Lui is given a firm diagnosis. Post sepsis comatose-like state with irregular brain activity. Not locked in syndrome, he was never waking up but they said something was happening, wins and losses in his mind. They lost William but maybe Lui wouldn't die.
Williams parents are cagey on the details, nervous but firm. The more they pester the more that friends parent energy gives into annoyed adult energy. Norah stops Isaac short of getting the door slammed in their face the last time they try to get answers.
William’s phone is disconnected. Sending emails gets back a "couldn't be delivered" response.
They are given visiting hours for Lui, and her dad takes them out to the fancy hospital that he is being treated in for visits on the weekends. He just lays there. Scars along his face from where they removed infected tissue. No-one asks how it happened, but Deadwood always had a way of making it so adults didn't see how impossible things were that happened there. Or maybe it was just people around William who could see it.
They'd sit and talk with Lui for most of the day, it was both unnerving and hopeful, watching his eyes move under his lids like he was dreaming, the odd patterns the EEG would make, never truly repeating as something happened. Not dead yet, some less than polite doctors would say as they did their check ins. Apparently, he had a lot of near misses with seizures. Some of the staff at this hospital were apparently heroes, Deadwood didn't have heroes like bigger cities. They had William. Used to have him.
Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into a month. Deadwood stops feeling as creepy.
Isaac turns to her one day after class and says, a little spitefully, that William must have taken the horrors with him. She laughs but the conversation turns and then one word after another they find themself back out in the woods.
"Something had to have happened," Isaac says, again, as they try a path leading north from her house, a ways off from where they'd explored prior.
It's easy to try and quip, there's a hole in their dynamic where some unserious jab from William would fit. She can hear it in the air, so she does her best to echo it. What William would say to improve Isaac's mood.
"If he was here he'd agree because of how much you've been studying" Norah said, it felt wrong coming from her but, someone had to say something. He was like a ghost in the forest, the last thing left haunting Deadwood.
Isaac snorted, "Yeah, he would say that. The latest curse haunting Deadwood is that all the teens are getting A's."
Isaac looks at her, grinning something real for the first time in what felt like eons, "I think I might start going to church again."
She felt her face drop and rise before the words found their way, "I wouldn't go that far!"
He laughed at her reaction, she continued after considering her statement.
“You could if you wanted to, I’d just worry. A lot.”
“I would too,” he chuckled, the jokes keeping bad memories at bay and kept walking in peaceful silence.
William was always the one with the eyes that saw everything but Norah? She could hear a thing or two. Like the sound of Isaac's steel cap shoes suddenly kicking metal. A soft tink.
"Isaac wait!" She calls, eyes to the ground.
Isaac stands still, shifting ready to run, "What?"
"You just kicked something, look around and see what it was." She starts, before explaining, "Something metal, it might be a clue."
Her hopes aren't too high, it's probably just a bottle cap or something similar.
She's barely started looking across the dry ground when Isaac finds it, "Norah look! It's one of Will's rings."
And sure enough, there it is. Sitting on the ground, a little weathered with something coating the details. There was something coating it generally too, she pulls her bag off her back, still filled with school things, notes, and pulls out her water bottle.
At first, it's leaf litter and similar detritus and then, as she rubs it clean the smell of blood catches her nose and black chips dissolve into a dark red mess. When it's clean it sits in her hands, like a dead rabbit. It's a trick of the light but for a moment the blood seems to be spilling endlessly from the ring. A deep breath and it's just- just what it is, nothing more and nothing less.
"Isaac," Norah starts, "Isaac I think it's blood."
Isaac takes a deep breath in, holding for the moment everything 'went to shit'. It didn't.
"What happened to him" Isaac finally says.
There's a sick feeling in her chest, like she already knows. Isaac has that look on his face too, they both are thinking the same thing.
"Maybe that's why he left." Norah says.
Isaac doesn't ask what she means. It's all too fresh in the mind to forget.
"Should we keep looking?" Isaac asks and Norah feels herself nod.
"We have to know, for certain," Norah responds, it's a little defeated.
After finding one piece of jewellery, it's like a trail of trinkets leading down a steep path beside the hill. She fidgets with the first one they found as they go in silence only broken up by “I found one”s and “There’s another here”.
Branches are broken in places like someone used them to pull themselves up the steeper hill sections.
Branches are broken from where Will pulled himself up.
It feels intentional, or like a string of bad luck that Will had lost them all, one after the other. Which was like him- or maybe he’d had them in his pocket, taken them off to help himself climb and lost them to a hole in his jumper.
It’s a nice notion. Very William Wisp to suffer such a terrible string of luck. Simpler than the truth.
It had all but stopped snowing since they had defeated the Dark Young and the rain had been sparse. It makes the blood soaked into the soil base of the cliff stick out, unavoidable in what it is. Patches of it are clearer on rocks, the grass that's grown close is flourishing from the nutrients.
"Maybe it wasn't him," the words leave her mouth and Isaac leans down beside her, picking something up off the floor, soaked in black dried blood.
"Finished the set." He says it like a joke and it lands flat.
They stand like that for a moment looking at the last ring, her gaze turns to the rocks and she can picture his body in the center of the pool, It’s hard to say but if she had to guess it was a William shaped amount of blood.
Neither of them wakes up, the sound of bird call, a new phenomenon to the Deadwood area, calls out merrily.
The world continues to spin.
She sits down on the floor and Isaac paces for a bit.
The silence feels like it will drag out forever before she finds the power to fill it.
"Guess it makes sense, he'd know that we'd know eventually. If you can't hide the evidence, hide yourself."
She holds the ring she cleaned in her hand, it was tacky, held up better than it should have in the forest. Probably purchased as part of bulk lot that would turn her fingers green if she wore it. It was heavy, however, like good quality jewelry, his parents weren’t poor so maybe these had been a gift?
Isaac cuts into the ways she could remember Will as alive, "Maybe he was trying to protect us?"
Something about the words, the way Isaac says it breaks the careful distance she’d been holding. Once the crying starts it seems endless. Isaac comes over and holds her. They just sit.
By the time the sun starts to set she feels gross, all of the tissue packets she keeps in her bag are used and she feels gross and is still crying and Isaac is struggling to hold it together. He keeps it together despite himself.
"We should get you home." He says, voice rough and she nods.
The walk is silent. Memories flash by of all the times she could have done something, seen something, tried something. It's numbing. Feet move, one after the other despite it.
"You should," Norah starts as they are approaching her house, "You should stick around, don't do this alone."
She looks at him and he has tears in his eyes, wet streaks from where he's been crying as well. There's a hitch in his breath as he nods, the first sign that she'd seen of how this had been affecting him, too caught up in her own thoughts.
“We do this together,” Isaac says back, walking with her into her house, “The Unwitness Protection Program may be down to two,” he breathes through the pain in his expression, “two active members but we aren’t done yet.”
Her parents aren’t home, the lights are off and she begins turning them on, grabbing some tissues from the counter. She offers some to Isaac and he pulls a few free.
“Besides, someone’s gotta find Will, we can’t just leave him like that.”
Norah paused, almost flinching, “What?”
Isaacs hands are shaking as he wipes his face and blows his nose.
“We can’t just leave Will as one of those undead, we know how he died, fell- fell right off a cliff and we owe it to him not to let some aftereffects of the dark young drag him around- he could hurt people if they realised.”
Isaac said, anger seeping into his voice as he skipped through several stages of grief to one he could do something with.
“It’s what Lui would say, it’s what William would want.” Isaac says, “It’s. Fuck, he’d be so happy with being something that haunted this place for once. All this time spent hunting mysteries and now he gets to create them. If he was a ghost he’d be tying people’s shoelaces together.”
Norah is thinking over what Isaac had said, letting the upset rambling continue.
“Do you think the undead corpses stop ghosts from happening? Or are people’s ghosts what make it work?”
Norah’s voice is tired as she responds, “You should write that down for Lui when he wakes up.”
Isaac smiled slightly, new tears replacing everything he’d cleaned up.
“Yeah,” the humour leaves a little, “I want to do this for him.”
Norah nods, “Yeah, I’m with you.”
Isaac smiles, he’s still crying so is she, “Thanks.”
They couldn’t bury him, mourn him properly until he was actually dead and buried.
They sit for a moment at the kitchen table, sorting the crying issue out and then, when it’s time for business Norah pulls out her books for mysteries and begins writing what they already knew.
“So,” she starts, a sniffle threatening her composure but calm for now, “his family won’t spill anything, it’s been months maybe there’s something we can find online?”
Isaac looks around, “family computer?”
“Yeah, it’s in the study,” she leads the way and Isaac settles down into the chair in front of the computer.
He loads up the internet browser and the home page looks different.
“Huh,” Isaac says.
“Huh,” Norah echoes.
The whole thing looked, better? Like how pictures in “technology for dummies” looked. It was a mystery, William would love it but it wasn’t what they were here for.
“William Wisp,” Isaac says as he types, hitting enter into the search engine.
A few pages from their school show real results, Isaac clicks into it and it’s a yearly school photo. There’s a picture of him sitting awkwardly to the side of one of the rows beside him Lui is smiling. Norah is sitting, younger and more hopeful, in the front row. Isaac isn’t there, he hadn’t joined them yet when this photo was taken.
“I can’t believe he isn’t in makeup,” Isaac says and Norah looks and laughs.
“Yeah, there was a whole scene about it, teacher wiped it off,” Norah explains.
“I think that’s when I actually met him and got to know him, I wanted to explain to him that that was unfair and support him, you know?”
Isaac nods, “Yeah it’s practically assault to like, wipe something off someone’s face.”
Norah stands up straighter, passion from the day it happened remembered “It is assault! He was kicking them a bit and ended up falling on the floor and sitting there like a deflated balloon while they wiped it off.”
Isaac smiles a little despite himself, “no wonder he looks so emo despite the lack of eyeliner.”
“He took it well all things considered, showed back up after photos like nothing had happened with makeup on again, said it was probably for the best and that his mom would have had him killed if she’d gotten the pictures and he was in makeup in them too.” Norah continues to explain.
They linger for a bit, scrolling before going back to the search results.
Nothing is helpful after that point.
She lets the thoughts work together to form a plan and speaks when she has enough pieces to work with.
“I don’t think this is something we can do tonight.” She pauses, “Or tomorrow, or anytime soon.”
“We’ve got to go become private investigators or hire a private investigator.” Isaac says in agreement before adding, “Private investigators are expensive, we should become one. How do you even become a private investigator?”
“University maybe?” Norah offers, “It’s not really something you can get a degree in, but there are degrees that help make it easier to do.”
“Like a lawyer?” Isaac starts before shaking his heads, “No, maybe not, I don’t know why but lawyers make me think about bugs.”
Norah gives him a puzzled look “I would have thought that priests would give you bug thoughts, but I guess the suits could look similar?” she lets it slide, “you could go into Uni for mechanics maybe?”
Isaac leans back, “Yeah, I could, I’d like it, I think. How would that help with being a private investigator?”
“Well, I’m people and book smart, you are strong and good with cars already, and when Lui is back on his feet he has supernatural and history under wraps, so we’d have almost everything covered.”
Isaac closes his eyes.
“So, we just wait, finish school, be kids?” Isaac asks, frustrated again.
“We aren’t waiting, we’re preparing.” Norah says.
Isaac takes a deep breath and opens eyes to look at her, “okay.”
The night passes them by, a few more crying jigs interspersed by research on how to be a private detective, university courses for when they finished school, what grades they would need. A purpose to get through the grief.
Six months after Lui Duponte fell unconscious he wakes up.