I LIVE: Hello all, and welcome to the first chapter of Hiraeth, the sequel to Damon and Pythias. I was planning on holding off on releasing this until much later, but I just felt bad for doing so. Please, please do not expect chapters every week like last time. I hate saying that, but between family issues, college courses and other such things, I just literally have no time to write this as much as I want to. Also I'm working on some other fics that I've had on hold for years. Just know that my promise still stands; I shall never, ever drop this fic. Even in months go by with no new chapter, know that I am writing and thinking of you all!
Chapter 1
Howard stepped quietly through the apartment door, careful not to bang the suitcases he carried into any walls. Tristan followed behind, arms full of bags and trinkets, namely a gigantic stuffed dolphin that Howard had won her.
It was late into the night and the pair had just arrived back from a weekend spent at Euro Disney. It had been Tristan's gift to Howard for their two year anniversary. Howard couldn't believe it'd already been two years since they began dating. He'd gotten her a quite expensive jeweled necklace, which they'd ended up searching for frantically after it flew off her on a particularly rough ride.
Tristan now placed it carefully into her jewelry box after setting their luggage on the floor to be unpacked the next day. They were both exhausted, and immediately crawled into bed, kicking shoes and trousers off. The air in the flat was chilly, and the two huddled up together before passing out. Winter seemed to be coming early this year.
Howard found himself once again unable to sleep. He had long since become accustomed to only a few hours of sleep each night, and the shadows under his eyes were now a familiar feature. He sighed as he combed his fingers through his hair, noting idly that it needed to be trimmed soon. Funny, it seemed to grow out much quicker than it used to.
Howard rose slowly from his bed, careful not to disturb Tristan, who slumbered on. He moved quietly through the dark room, making his way to the balcony. Opening the sliding door, Howard breathed in the crisp autumn air, closing his eyes and standing for a moment in the stillness before closing the door behind him. The balcony was small, with only enough room to comfortably fit a chair, and Howard was quickly leaving permanent indents in the cushions from his many nights spent curled up on it, looking out over the neighborhood. His gaze eventually drifted, as it always did despite his efforts, to the moon. It hung high above, in the pitch black sky, its shine unimpeded by the glaring lights below.
Once his gaze was captured, Howard relaxed with a sigh of resignation, and stared upon the half-moon as it made its slow trek across the sky. It always reminded the tired man of nights long ago; of absurd comments, glares, pulled faces and laughter. Demands to close the curtains awaking him in the night, incessant whinging until he grudgingly rose and closed every curtain in the Lodge. These were all memories Howard refused to pore over in the daylight, but the moon somehow always forced them out, on nights like this, when Howard's mind refused him rest.
"Um...hi again, it's me. Just...just wondering how you were doing..."
The moon couldn't speak. Howard knew this. But just in case, he liked to talk to it sometimes, in the hopes that it might relay a message. The man's voice rose in the silence, awkward, and Howard was thankful no one else was around to hear him.
"I, uh, I'm...I'm sorry...again...I know that I keep saying I'll see you, but..."
Howard allowed himself to trail off into silence, and settled back in the chair as he listened to the sound of traffic below.
"All the things I'll never see, all the things I'll never be..."
Howard tuned his guitar strings, fingers playing over them idly as he sang in a low tone. The nights he spent staring at the moon always left him feeling a bit strange and emotional, and so he tended to spend the early morning hours strumming away on his acoustic, as he had once done as a scraggly teenager.
"All there is that's left for me is here in this eternity of isolation, isolation..."
"Well that's dreary as shit."
For about half a second Howard could've sworn it was the kid speaking. But as his eyes moved across the room, he beheld Tristan leaning against the wall with a sleepy smile on her face. She gave a quiet laugh at the man and went into the kitchen to begin her day with a mug of coffee. And such went their morning routines. Tristan prepared for her long day of dealing with the idiots at Sugar Ape magazine, which payed well but not well enough some days, in Tristan's opinion. And Howard dressed warmly for his morning of heaving bin bags with his friend Horus.
Howard rubbed at his eyes as he lay on his back, listening to the sound of Tristan breathing beside him. Two nights in a row he'd be without sleep, it seemed. Ah dammit. He really didn't want to go out onto the balcony tonight; it was fucking freezing out. Snow would definitely be falling early this year. Howard recalled a winter Sunday two years ago, when the zoo was closed and all the other keepers left quickly after finishing their rounds, and it had been just him and Vince. The boy had dragged him outside the Lodge and proceeded to smack him clear in the face with a snowball, not once, but twice! Well, needless to say, it had been war. Howard almost smiled up at the dark ceiling as he replayed his victory against the Mighty Eskimo Noir that afternoon, howling up into the sky like a child as Vince lay laughing in the snow.
Howard rose from the bed, moving almost without realising it to the bedroom doorway. From there he crept in blackness down the hall, opening the next door after his. He was careful of the low creek it omitted if he opened it too quickly. Had skillfully mastered this journey in the night without waking Tristan. Howard slid silently into Vince's bedroom, closing the door and moving to the bed, where he sat down on the neatly arranged duvet, unused for so long. Everything in the room had gathered a fine layer of dust, but Howard could never bring himself to clean it, or allow Tristan to, as she often tried. She couldn't stand the sight of all this dust just gathering. Howard had at least agreed to gather all the boy's belongings into boxes and put them away in the closet for safe-keeping. One such box was small and contained many of Vince's drawings and writings, and Howard kept it underneath the bed for nights like this.
Reaching down, Howard pulled the box up and beside him, opening it as he turned on the small lamp beside Vince's bed. It offered enough light in the darkness for Howard to gaze over the contents of the box. It was almost a ritual, the way Howard picked up sheet after sheet, gazing upon the pictures or words scrawled across each surface, every now and again encountering a paper plate. The pile in the box dwindled as the one beside it on the bed grew, and time passed quietly for Howard as he lost himself in his memories. Finally he came to the bottom of the box, and Howard took a minute to stare down at the small, tattered black notebook that gazed stoically back up at him. It was Vince's, of course, the one he'd scribbled in before Howard had gotten him the pink book, which unfortunately had been lost long ago to a little thing called an 'Howard got pissed and chucked it out the car window'.
Eventually Howard moved once more, reaching down to pick up the notebook and open it to the first page, filled with messy school notes on math. The boy hadn't been very good with division or percentages. And then came the first of the little drawings, crammed into corners against the schoolwork, and eventually just becoming pages filled with animals and humans and creatures somewhere in between. There was one particular drawing that always captured Howard's attention. A rather intricate pencil sketching of a man with a wolf's head, entirely in shadow aside from the eyes, which were blank white circles. Interrupting the menagerie of freakish images was an occasional short Charlie adventure, usually only taking up half a page, and littered with pencil and pink marker depictions of the weirdo. Howard had grown a distinct dislike of anything involving Charlie, and so never stopped to read the words on these pages, simply moving on with little more than a glance.
Howard could almost pinpoint the moment when Vince had come to live with Howard, because the pages now contained almost exclusively drawings of the zoo animals and fellow keepers. There were a few little Naboos and Bollos and even one of Cooper. Lemurs and ocelots dotted the pages, and in one corner sat the zoo's old lion, done up as Adam Ant. There were also drawings of Howard, pink balloon and all. Howard could never really figure that one out.
'Why a pink balloon? I mean really, now. He draws everyone else with faces except me.'
Howard mentally shook his head as he turned another page. He was always taken by surprise at the bright red as it struck out at him in the dim light. Even after all this time, Howard was still befuddled and a little scared of this particular piece of paper, on which was the rather crude drawing of a man. Or at least, it seemed to be a man. The lines were incredibly sketchy and muddled, like Vince's later drawings became. Howard remembered something Ms Rose had said a year ago when looking over the pink book. Something about the erratic lines of Vince's later drawings being a clue into the increasingly delusional way of his mind. Or something like that. Truth be told Howard had hardly been listening back then, too stressed and worried over the upcoming court date.
Howard breathed out a long breath as he scanned the drawing for the hundredth time, looking for any kind of clue as to who it might be, or even what Vince could be trying to portray. The warped man lay splayed out, long limbs almost making a star. His face held no features, but he had a short spikey mop of yellow crayon atop his head. The rest of the page was rather hard to make out as it was so marred with red marker. Red starting at the man's torso and flowing down over his legs and onto the rest of the page in chaotic blotches and scribbles. It was so thick it bled into the next several pages, which held little more than a few half-hearted doodles. Three pages later and things seemed to back to normal, with a large colored picture of a bloke in rags holding a guitar, the moon accompanying him on the top half of the page with the words 'filthy face' scrawled over it.
After this it became the usual weird animals and occasional people to finally nothing but blank sheets. Howard placed the book and the rest of the paper neatly back into the box, closing it and tucking it away back in the shadows under Vince's bed. Howard then got up, turning off the lamp, and made the return journey back to the soft breaths of Tristan and the black ceiling above him.