A full Halloween chapter is coming! And it shall be sexy and scary and edge-of-your-seat. In the meantime, I felt very compelled to write a short drabbly thing that borders on fluff. So here it is.


I told you I would return / when the robin makes his nest / But I ain't never coming back... I'm sorry / I'm sorry / I'm sorry...

-Weezer, "Butterfly"


"Jimmy," Dandy whispered, sliding in beside his friend and pulling the covers up over both of their heads like he often did. "Oh, Jimmy, I can't sleep. I'm just so excited for Halloween tomorrow... I just can't wait to terrorize the town. That and my stomach hurts. I gorged myself on candy corn."

Jimmy forced a wan smile in the dark. Only the small light outside the window illuminated the room enough to make his profile visible.

"What is it, pet?" asked Dandy impatiently. "Aren't you excited?"

Jimmy didn't look at him. "What you said earlier," he began, "that your body holds a heart that can't love. What was that shit?" He felt the beginning of tears prick his eyes and inwardly hated himself for it. He didn't know why he was suddenly so goddamn needy, why he felt the sudden need for this psychopath to love him. It wasn't even romantic. He just felt desperate for assurance that someone in his current life cared for him, that his existence wasn't completely shallow and cold.

Dandy shrugged. "The prisoner looked right into my eyes as he died," he said, "and I felt nothing."

"And what about when I look into them?" asked Jimmy, his voice catching, turning now to face the other man. "Huh?"

Dandy's eye and lip performed that odd emotional twitch of theirs. "When you look into them I want to die," he said tensely. "When you look into them my chest hurts. Like when I cough."

"I want to die," whispered Jimmy.

"Oh, pet, please don't cry..." said Dandy with a syrupy tenderness, reaching out to wipe the tears from one side of Jimmy's face with his fingertips. Jimmy flinched but let him.

"I hate your eyes," he complained, continuing. "I do. I want the stupid ghosts gone from them, and they won't do as I say. They won't leave. I would kill over and over and over again-I would kill my own mother-to make them not haunted anymore."

Jimmy sniffled, a sound like slush on a gravel driveway. "That's not what I want..."

"Please," begged Dandy, the edge of a meltdown in his voice. "I detest crying. You're my friend. You're the only light I've ever know."

"But I haven't changed you..." Jimmy choked.

"No," agreed Dandy flatly, staring straight up at the inside of the quilt. "I'm so sorry."

Jimmy bit his lip and felt hands on his face again, drying it with a kind of clumsy tenderness that, in light of everything else, was heartbreaking.

"But I can listen," Dandy insisted, a whisper. "I can." He beamed. "Tell me about Meep, our fallen hero. Remember? I told you I want to know everything."

Jimmy did. His tales of the freak show, the squalor and impropriety of it, were wonderfully exotic to Dandy. He still would have liked to join. He didn't say as much, though. He just listened as promised, wiping the tears from Jimmy's eyes as they fell, over and over, with an odd look of wonder on his face.

They passed out side by side, sweaty-haired and akimbo and a few inches apart. He'd fallen asleep in the freak's room, mother be damned.