CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Ana had plenty of work to keep her busy all winter long at the house on Coldslip, but after just a few days, she could feel herself getting restless. She didn't understand it. She had no other distractions—no TV, no internet, not even music since her shop radio was still down at the pizzeria. Her phone managed to squeeze enough bars out of the air to stream a movie, but even if she could ignore the constant freezing, stuttering and dropping, trying to watch anything on that tiny screen gave her a headache. She had literally nothing else to do except work and usually that was exactly what she wanted, to wake up, drink a pot of coffee, sweat until her muscles were putty and her brain was blank, then take a couple aspirin, smoke a joint and fall into bed. Rinse and repeat, and live happily ever after, right?
Wrong, apparently. For the first time in her damn life, hard physical labor and peace and quiet to do it in was not enough. As the week dragged on, less and less got done, until suddenly it was Friday. In a fit of self-disgust, determined to do something productive before she took her lazy ass to Freddy's for the weekend, she took the cargo truck to the Lowes in Hurricane and ordered the flooring she still needed replaced up on Coldslip. Most of it was in stock, so while they printed out tickets and hauled stuff to the loading area, Ana wandered over to look at what it would take to turn the craft room into a decent parts and services room. She got a few racks and cabinets, played some mental Tetris with the space in the back of the cargo truck, then moved a few aisles over and somehow ended up in the seasonal display area, looking at lights and ornaments and inflatable Christmas tyrannosaurs breathing fog over caroling elves…and trees.
Might be fun to have a tree. She could put it on the show stage, deck it out a little. Nothing fancy. She supposed if she was going to do that, she ought to buy a tree from the Mammon scouts, show her support and all that, but if Faust had his way—and she had no reason to think he wouldn't—the Mammon scouts were destined to disappear, with or without her support, along with the Mammon schools, the Mammon post office and…and everything else in Mammon. Besides, plastic trees were cheaper and reuseable. The fact that she didn't really want to go back to the community center and see the town tree all lit up with the angel twirling at the top holding the glowing star with his bent arms didn't factor into her decision at all.
She got a tree, started to pick out a few ornaments, then put most of them back. It wasn't just her Christmas, it was theirs too and they might like to pick out their own decorations. She kept only one, a glass bauble with a hokey winter scene on the side, along with the year. 2015, their first year together. And probably their last, but she wouldn't think about that right now.
Eventually, she visited the cashier, paid for everything, loaded it all up in the cargo truck, then eyed the remaining space, and went to the mall. She had a tree now. She was more or less obligated to put presents under it.
The last time Ana had been Christmas shopping, she'd been nine years old, running around the Mammon Mall with David, maybe with some of Aunt Easter's money tucked in her pocket so she could buy something and pretend it was from her. Being here now was…not nostalgic, not like she thought it would be. It was the wrong mall, too big and too noisy. Aunt Easter and David were gone. And she was grown up, with a grown-up's Christmas attitude, annoyed by the music and the crowds. Why had she even come here? Should have stayed home and shopped online like a normal person. Going to the mall alone during the holiday season was about as much fun as going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant by yourself.
'Or baking,' she thought, remembering Chica holding her hand as they sat together on the restroom floor during those bad detoxing days. 'Baking is just math without someone to do it for. It's only fun if you have someone to share it with.'
Corny thought. Or cheesy. Cheesy like a pizza.
But if nothing else, thinking of Chica gave her a good idea of where to start. She'd already gotten those baking mixes, but the mall had a kitchen store, the same one where Ana had bought Chica's aprons months ago, so of course Ana had to go in and just look around a little. She came out with two huge bags of cooking stuff, which seemed like a great idea at the time, but quickly started feeling too utilitarian and maybe even a little sexist. Was she buying stuff for Chica or for the kitchen? Fortunately, the mall also had a computer store, so Ana bought a tablet and spent a little time in the nearest massage chair setting it up with Chica in mind, including her own Amazon account with some hefty credit toward her own library. For Bonnie, a quick dip into the toy store for a couple Hot Wheels motorcycles and a race track, and to soften the joke, a leisurely stroll through GameStop for copy of Ride and a PS4 to play it on, along with an Xbox, Gamecube and a good stack of games for each. Freddy was a tougher nut to shop for, but as she was passing the sporting goods store, she got a wild hare of an idea for something for Mr. Faust, and while she was in there, noticed the hunting aisle. Inspiration struck and among her purchases when she walked out was a brand new pair of binoculars. Adjustable to fit even his wide-set eyes, night-vision, impact- and water-resistant and all around better than her old pair, which hopefully meant she'd get them back. It wasn't much, especially weighed against the mighty haul she'd gotten for the others, but at least Freddy would have something under the tree. Now all she had to worry about was Foxy. Foxy, who she ought to know best of all. He didn't play games, never showed much interest in movies, had no hobbies she was aware of and never asked for anything.
Except the one thing. The moving-in thing. And she wasn't doing that, so she'd better think of something else or he was getting socks.
She loaded her purchases into the cargo truck, made one final stop at the kind of overpriced health-nut supermarket where she was likeliest to check off everything on Doctor Bear's ridiculous list, and then headed for home. It started snowing on the long stretch of nothing between Hurricane and Mammon, fat flakes mixed with icy rain that worsened with every mile. When she reached the bridge that spanned the canyon, there was a deputy out there setting up a caution sign, because without Shelly around to drive the sander or the snow plow, the roads were just going to accumulate more and more ice and snow from now until it melted off, which in Mammon could be as early as February or as late as June.
'Another good reason to get out now, while you even can,' thought Ana and like an ironic echo, passed the Tudor Lane apartment complex, where someone unfamiliar with driving one was attempting to park a 20-foot moving truck. And there, in the same pleasant neighborhood where Mrs. Rutter lived, there was a new For Sale by Owner sign that Ana was pretty sure hadn't been there when she'd driven out this morning and probably wouldn't be there tomorrow, once word got back to Mr. Faust. And there, further down the road than Ana was going, but still visible over the tops of these low houses and small-town shops, was the twinkle of the community center's spectacular lights, crowned by a glint of gold—Mammon's Christmas angel, holding up the star of peace over the tree where Shelly had died.
She intended to take the truck up to the house, but she stopped in at Freddy's on the way, to spare herself having to bring the groceries back, but really just to get out of her head for a few minutes because if she went up there now feeling the way she was feeling, there was no fucking way she was not ending up in Aunt Easter's closet pulling a bottle of whisky out of a shoebox like the world's worst magician performing the world's most depressing trick.
No one met her at the loading dock, but Bonnie was almost always in the dining room, so she called out as she came in with the first load of grocery bags. "It's just me! I'm not here yet, I'm just dropping some shit off. Give me a hand?"
Her first answer was the sound of a smart-ass clapping from the show stage, but it was followed speedily enough by Bonnie coming into the kitchen to take the bags before she embarrassed herself dropping them. "Is there more?" he asked, glancing at the store room where the loading dock door was still wide open.
"Yeah, but I'll get it. There's stuff back there I don't want you to see. Not that," she said when he frowned, reminding her that the last time she'd said something like that, the thing she didn't want him to see was Blue's body. "I went Christmas shopping, that's all. I don't want you to see what I got you."
"Got me?" he echoed, ears popping up as groceries hung forgotten in his hands. "I thought we were just doing the tree thing."
"We are, but part of the tree thing is putting presents under it," she told him, unloading green leafy garbage into the cooler.
"Well, shit, I didn't leave a lot of room. Does it really have to go under the tree or can we just put stuff on a table or something?"
"Sure, a table's fine," said Ana and blinked. "Wait, what? You didn't leave a lot of room where?"
"Under the tree," said Bonnie, pointing at the dining room, and sure enough, there was a straggly white fir propped in the corner of the show stage, the splintered end of its trunk digging grooves in her nice, new, expensive poured-rubber floor. Ornaments had been improvised in the form of red-and-white striped plastic straws bent into candy cane shapes and garlands made of pop can tabs strung on wire, and to top it all off, a 'star' made of loose sticks tied together by someone who'd never seen The Blair Witch Project.
"Wow. You can take the bunny out of the craft room, but you never take the craft room all the way out of the bunny," Ana remarked, moving in for a better look.
"It wasn't just me. To be honest, when Freddy said we were doing this, I mostly went along with it because I've got literally nothing else to do. Not really a Christmas guy. Or Easter," he added as she smirked. "Halloween is more my thing."
"Really? I didn't think you liked the spooky stuff."
"I love spooky stuff. I just don't put, like, deranged clowns sawing naked ladies in half into the 'spooky' category. Also, I wasn't aware that I had to pass an aptitude test before I got to pick a favorite holiday. What's that about?"
Ana winced. "Just a dumbass gatekeeping your joy for no good reason. Sorry about that."
He nodded and brushed that off with an airy wave. "I wasn't exactly advertising it. There doesn't seem to be much point in doing that stuff when there aren't any kids around, and you sure didn't seem interested. I was actually going to ask if you maybe wanted to do something that night, but then…"
He trailed off awkwardly and in his silence, Ana could almost hear the pop of Freddy's hip failing, the electric buzz and snap as his system shorted everything out below the fault line and let him collapse. She could almost smell the burnt wires, hear the calm, measured way he asked her to help him roll over so she could check his battery.
"…everything else happened," Bonnie finished finally. "But hell, if you're down for some spooks without the chainsaws and eyeballs, save the date next year. We'll stab some pumpkins, get Chica to make you some spidercakes, tell some ghost stories…" He gave her a sly sidelong smile, casually adding, "Too bad I don't have my old costume."
"Seriously? What were you?"
"Wouldn't you like to know. I'll give you a hint: It was the only time I ever had front teeth."
"Bunnicula?" she guessed.
"For legal reasons, I have to say no, just your standard vampire bunny. And speaking of Chica," he went on as Ana mentally dressed him out in a high-collared cape, fangs gleaming in the pumpkin-light. "You should know that she is one thousand percent on board the Christmas train. She's pestering Foxy as we speak for more decorations. In fact, if you're really planning to leave and come back later, you should do that before she knows you're here. She wanted to surprise you."
As if summoned by her name like a monster in a children's book, there was Chica, pushing open the West Hall door in a bustle of excitement that collapsed in on itself at the sight of Ana with a crestfallen, "Oh poop!"
"Sorry," said Ana, raising her hands in surrender. "I'm leaving."
Chica's frustration at once turned to dismay. "Oh don't do that! We can finish decorating together. That's more fun anyway."
"Ye've a strange notion o' fun," muttered Foxy, shouldering his way in with the Birthday Booty chest in his arms. "Ahoy, lass. Ye get press-ganged into this nonsense too?"
"Sorry, Captain. This nonsense is sort of my fault. What's that for?"
"Eh. Cheap shit in shiny colors." He set the chest on the stage and flipped the lid back, picking through eyepatches and sticker books for a handful of rings with giant plastic 'gems', strings of fake pearls and gold-painted plastic chains, and of course, plenty of doubloons. He let most of these spill back through his fingers, but kept out one of the doubloons, walking it back and forth across his knuckles as he ran a skeptical eye over the tree. "Is it supposed to look like that?"
"It's…a work in progress," Chica said, climbing onto the stage to fluff some of the spiky branches and move ornaments around. "But with a little love and a few more decorations…"
"I think it's cute," Ana said loyally. "All it needs is a stander and as it happens, I have one in the truck. Stay here and I'll go get it."
Bonnie nodded and waved her off and Chica was so focused on trying to beautify the ugliest tree on God's Earth, she might not have even heard her, so her warning was mostly for Foxy, who did not acknowledge it at all. She glanced back through the Tray Return window to make sure he was still by the stage, and he was, but he noticed her peeking and his ears flicked up at a curious angle, so she couldn't say she was entirely surprised when she was digging through the Lowes' bags in the back of the truck and heard his gruff, "The hell is all this?"
She straightened up fast, trying to step in front of her mall purchases without drawing too much attention to them, and pointed at the building. "I said stay!"
"I ain't yer dog," he remarked, investigating the boxes.
"The cabinets are for the craft room," Ana said desperately. "You want to carry them in for me?"
"What's this now?" he wondered, pulling out the one box clearly labeled nine-foot pre-lit plastic holiday tree.
Ana sighed and shrugged. "You can read."
"See now, I told Fred if'n ye really wanted one, ye'd get one, but he seemed fair sure ye wouldn't." He gave her a knowing look from the corner of one yellow eye. "I could carry it in for ye. There's room enough for two."
"No. Chica's worked hard on that sketchy little pincushion and I'm not upstaging her. I figure I'll take it up to the house. Small town," she sighed. "People talk. If I'm buying all this Christmas crap, it might be nice if I've got some of it on display, on the off-chance that someone swings by to drop off a package."
"Or a postcard," he said mildly.
"It is what it is, Captain."
"And it'll go on being such until ye does something about it," he retorted and let out another barking laugh. "So it'll go on forever, most like."
"Nothing lasts forever."
"Mm." He pushed the tree back into place and unloaded the cabinets onto the flydock. "Anything else?"
"Just this." Ana passed him the stander. "And make sure there's water in the reservoir."
"So ye ain't staying?"
"I'll be back tonight," she promised. "I just want to drop this off and deal with some stuff first. Then I'm yours for the weekend."
His ears came up again. "Mine, eh?"
"All of yours," she clarified.
"Kinky, but I'm for it if'n ye are."
She heaved a sigh in lieu of a comeback and jumped down from the truck, bringing down the cargo door with a bang of finality. "I'll be back in a few hours," she told him.
He snorted and headed inside with a couple cabinets stacked on one shoulder, tail flicking like a satisfied cat. "Ye says that like ye thinks I'll wait."
"Goodbye, Foxy," she said meaningfully.
"Fair winds, luv." He winked his eyepatch. "Til we meet again."
She moved from the back of the truck to the cab and put herself on the road to the top of Coldslip Mountain. There, with a fresh skin of wet snow under her boots, she unloaded the 'work' stuff into the garage and the 'fun' stuff into the front parlor. Tempting as that boxed tree was, the weight of all the work she hadn't done over the week could not be shrugged off, so before she got into the spirit of the season, she decided to at least lay one floor in one of the back rooms. A couple hours' work, followed by some gift wrapping and tree-decking, and then she could head back to Freddy's to ooh and ahh over whatever Chica managed to do with that splintered bottle-brush Mammon grew instead of trees.
And maybe all it took was something to look forward to instead of just another item to check off on a never-ending list of chores, but Ana finally managed to shrug off the world and lose herself in work. When she emerged, it was late afternoon and the winter sun had already set. She picked her way through the dark house, stripping out of her sweaty t-shirt in anticipation of a long soak in Aunt Easter's giant tub, only to become aware of a soft glow coming from the front end of the house. Nothing alarming in that. She'd left the light on in the parlor when she brought the Christmas stuff in, she guessed, and she wouldn't have even bothered going all the way over to turn it off, so strong was the siren's song of massaging water jets, except that as she put one boot on the first riser of the stairs, she heard a rustle of plastic and a voice, humming more than singing: "Dum dum diddly dum dum…"
Belated adrenaline shot through her, even as some internal processor recognized the gunpowder-and-rum quality of a very familiar voice, and she spun around, fumbling at her empty hip for the tool belt she'd left at the other end of the house and sputtering, "What the fuck are you doing here!?"
"Told ye I weren't waiting." A few measured steps brought Foxy to the parlor's archway. He ran an appreciative eye over the view she'd inadvertently offered him and made disappointed noises when she yanked her gross shirt back on. "Now why d'ye have to do a thing like that? I deserve some sort o' reward for me efforts here."
"What did you do?" she asked suspiciously, stomping over to see for herself.
He'd unboxed the tree and spread out its compressed branches. Which was fine, she guessed, but he'd also gone through all the gifts and it looked like he'd been playing with Freddy's binoculars and Chica's tablet.
He laughed at the dirty look she gave him. "What, did I ruin me surprise? Don't tell me any o' that were for me." He picked up the bag from the sporting goods store and pulled out one of the two identical wooden cases she'd purchased there. "This'n has a smidge o' me flavor to it, but damned if I can figure what ye wanted me to do with 'em. Take up juggling?" He raised his hook. "One-handed, no less."
Scowling (and now also blushing), she snatched the case away from him and shoved it back in its bag. "That's for someone else."
"Thought so. Then nothing hereabouts is mine."
"It's my first day. I'm not done yet. And you're not exactly the easiest guy in the world to shop for."
"Ain't I? Only one thing I want from me and ye doesn't need to wrap it. Oh hell, that come out skeevy," he muttered, scratching his hook across the back of his head. "Time, I meant. Time, not the other thing. Although I do want t'other thing, come to think on it, so I reckon there's two things after all, but ye still don't need to wrap 'em. Ye want me to go?"
She did, but hearing him put it so bluntly at the end of this rambling aside took a lot of the heat out of her. "It's not like I don't want to see you," she side-stepped.
"Eh, I shouldn't have let meself in," he said with half a shrug. "I been restless lately. Bon and Chica were doing their own thing and…and Fred ain't too keen on me at the moment. So's I thought I'd come lend ye a hand and a hook for a spell, only—" He laughed, spreading his arms and looking around in an exaggerated manner. "—I hadn't the first bleeding notion where ye were! I knew ye wouldn't be keen on me searching, so's I stayed put and made meself useful."
"Smart," she said. "You'd have never found me. I barely knew where I was. There's a whole wing of this house I don't remember ever being in as a kid, so I have no idea what those rooms were supposed to be before they were filled up with garbage. I've been naming them after Cluedo rooms. The lounge, the ballroom, the conservatory…so I was reflooring the billiards room," she told him. "For what that's worth."
"I'd offer to help, but I know I'd only be in yer way. Still, I reckon I could keep ye company whilst ye knock about."
"I'm done knocking for the day. I was just on my way to get washed up."
"Coo, I could keep ye company there even better."
"Yeah, let's not test your water resistance tonight, okay? But hey, since you're here," she said, thawing even more, "I think I salvaged some of my aunt's Christmas crap, if you want to pick a few things out for the pizzeria while I'm cleaning up?"
"I could do that," he agreed with a snap of his tail. "Point me to it, luv."
She headed upstairs and he followed, humming his creepy little ditty and singing the line about "rounded at rudder and bow" aloud. He stopped at the landing long enough to say, "Where's yer wee lookout?"
"Fredbear? No idea. I must have put him away somewhere when I was cleaning last week, but I don't remember where. We might see Plushtrap, though…or not," she said, reaching the top floor and switching on the left hall's lights. Plushtrap's chair at the far end was empty. "I don't know. They're running around somewhere. Come on."
He didn't answer, but it wasn't the sort of thing that necessarily needed an answer, so she was several steps down the hall before she noticed he was still by the stairs, ears up, motionless as he peered into the darkness of the right-hand hall.
"You okay?" she asked. "I was kidding. They aren't really running around. They're toys. I just put them somewhere and forgot."
One ear flicked. The tip of his tail lashed left and right and was still again. After a long, tense moment, he took one step toward her, even as he kept staring that direction. "I thought I heard," he began and then shut up as a low moan sounded, scarcely discernable at first but growing in volume as it seemed to roll toward them. Foxy backed up fast, his hand grabbing at the sword he wasn't carrying, and the moan fell away with a loud rattle, like the house was laughing at him.
"Bleeding hell," Foxy rasped, switching on his eyes to illuminate the perfectly empty hallway. "Tell me that were the plumbing."
"It is, actually," Ana said. "Remember, I haven't been here in over a month. Pipes are full of air. Every time you flush the toilet or run the sink, you get that. You are going to hear some real wailing when I get in the shower."
He gave her a sharp look. "Who have ye got flushing toilets, with the two of us standing here?"
"There's air in the pipes," she said again, patiently. "It forms pockets where the pipes bend and backs stuff up, and then pressure builds and you get this sudden movement hours later. Trust me, there's nobody here but you and me and an old house with noisy plumbing."
"Sure and it ain't that I don't believe ye, but just for the grin of it, how about ye take me on a wee walkabout?"
"You got to have the grand tour before you're convinced there aren't any ghosts using the toilet?"
His tail lashed. "And here I thought it were just the done thing when a mate comes knocking."
"You didn't knock. You broke in."
"So did ye," he countered, "but I recollect as ye still got someone to show ye around the first time ye came to our house."
True, and now she was right back with Bonnie on that first night, exploring the ruin of that childhood haven while the rain drummed hard on the leaking roof. The smell of him, coppery and sour, and how warm he was against the fetid damp. The weight of his arms when he put them around her for the first time, closing her in where all she could feel was his matted fur and all she could hear was the tick and wheeze of his strange heart beating. Singing Mia Rose as they chased each other around the Treasure Maze in the dark. Dancing in the janitor's closet. Falling asleep to the sound of his skinless fingers tapping at the stringless neck of his old guitar…
Damn it.
"Okay, fine. But seriously, this place is huge," she said, coming back to the stairs where he was still waiting. "It'll take forever to show it all off and most of it is just empty rooms."
"I'll let ye know if I gets bored."
"Don't say I didn't warn you, Captain." She flipped another light switch. The darkness fell back, nothing but a long hallway lined with closed doors. No photos, no carpet runner, no sideboard sporting a token plant to reassure visitors that someone lived here. All was sleepless and still. "Where do you want to start?" she asked.
He shrugged and aimed his hook at a closed door midway down the hall.
"Excellent choice. That was our study room," said Ana and went to open it, waving Foxy over to get a good look at the empty box of a room with a torn carpet and crumbling walls. "We had a bunch of short bookcases over there under the windows, full of, like, ZooBooks and National Geographic. Ha! And Aunt Easter got a new set of World Book Encyclopedias every year. Back before the internet was a thing, that was a major brag. We had a couple desks there where we'd do our homework and a big playmat thing in the middle of the room there, for when we had projects that needed space. There were maps—" She indicated a mess of tiny thumbtack holes on one wall, then turned to show off some damage where the sheetrock had come off in long crumbling strips. "—and a chalkboard. It was our own little schoolhouse. And for some reason, my otherwise intelligent aunt decided to store like a hundred bags of chicken feed up here and then pile tons of thrift store reject clothes on top of it. You want rats? That's how you get rats. And when they ran out of feed, they ate the books and the carpet and the walls and each other. So I had to scrape it all up and throw it all away. Moving on…"
She went back out into the hall with Foxy like a shadow stitched to her heels and opened the next door, another empty box. "This was our toy room. He kept all the good ones in his room, of course, but he had way too many, so the rest of them were here. Mainly the big ones, like the castle and the race track for his Hot Wheels, but also, like, the Legos and Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys and Capsela. Oh God, I love his Capsela sets! They had little battery powered engines in some of them and moving thingies—actuators," she corrected herself. Having met Yoshi, she now knew the right word. "And you could get remote control switches and make them move, if you built them right."
"The things ye could do with that, eh," he said quietly.
"Oh, you have no idea. I think Aunt Easter originally got them for David, but he never did much with them, especially after he got his computer. So this one summer, he was on his computer all the time and I was bored, so I started combining all the stuff, just everything, and made this huge contraption. It filled this whole room, this high, all the way around. And all it did was move his Hot Wheels cars around, but like, I had little lifts and slides and wheels and things, so the cars would go up and around and through tunnels and over bridges and…Oh, it was a whole thing. And every time I came over, Aunt Easter would have something else, Construx or Erector Sets or Pipeworks, and I'd add on another ramp or a drawbridge or something. I was building on that thing right up until the last time I came to visit. She said it was my knack. She said it was amazing. And when she ran out of room for sixty extra copies of Slow Cooker Soups fall edition 2006 and economy bags of cat litter for the cat she didn't have, she knocked it all down. She didn't even put it away, she just knocked it down and stacked stuff on top of it until it was all garbage. But you should have seen it back then. It was epic."
She closed the door, crossed the hall, opened another one. "This was the room where I slept when I visited. I suppose I should say it was my room, but…it wasn't. It was supposed to be, someday, but…" She summed up all the promises and loss with a shrug and went inside, pointing at one empty space after another. "I had a little dresser there. I wasn't allowed to keep clothes here, but I would bring some and put them away and pretend. I don't remember what I kept in the closet. Maybe just sheets and things? And a jar, just in case. Aunt Easter never put me in the closet, but you never know, do you? My bed was in that little nook there and I had some curtains hung up over it and, wow, I thought that was so swanky when I was a kid. Like a canopy bed. Like something a princess would have. But you know, I barely slept in here. In the summer, David and I slept outside in tents if the weather was good, and if it wasn't, which it usually wasn't, we'd sleep in tents in one of those other rooms down the hall. We had a bunch of big bushy fake plants and one of those lamps that spin and project stars on the ceiling, and a little fake fire, like a Halloween thing with those flappy bits of orange and yellow plastic. So stupid. But mostly, I'd sleep on the floor in David's room." She moved down the hall, reached for the door.
Foxy's cold hook slipped over her wrist, a perfect fit. "Don't," he said hoarsely. "I seen enough, luv. No more."
She almost opened the door anyway. She wanted him to see it, more than any other room, she needed someone else to see the time bubble where the absence of a little boy had been so perfectly preserved, but there was something awful in his eyes, something that made her see just how awful it really was, making all that numb hurt open up and bleed all over again.
"I wish I could show it to you the way I remember it, but…" She spread her arms in a helpless shrug. "It's not the way I remember it. And sometimes…sometimes I wonder if it ever was. Like, maybe the reason I don't remember the other wing is because it was already full of crap, so she'd locked it off. I thought she got sick after I moved away, but maybe she was sick the whole time and she just hid it from me." Her gaze was pulled to the door at the far end of the hall—a man's office which had once held doll's heads like hunting trophies mounted on the walls and still had a book tucked away in the desk, full of different kinds of trophies. David's photo was in that book, the only photo she had left of him, immortalizing the very worst betrayal from the person he loved most in the world. "She hid a lot of things from me."
A predictably uncomfortable silence stretched out.
Ana shook it off first, clapping her hands together in imitation of enthusiasm. "Well! That put me in the Christmas spirit. You ready to go get the stuff?"
He didn't bother to feign eagerness, but he nodded and followed her to the end of the opposite hall, knocking his hook once on the top of Plushtrap's chair while he waited for her to open the door. "More stairs," he said as she headed up. "How bloody big is this house?"
"Told you. There's a basement, too. Two basements," she corrected, thinking of the room hidden below the grandfather clock. "And there must be a second attic for the other wing, but I haven't found the access yet. And I've been everywhere, so that means it's boarded up and covered with wallpaper and…I'm not sure I want to find it. I've got to sooner or later, just not now. I'm dealing with enough right now."
"Aye."
It wasn't all that late, but it was December and the sun had long set. The attic was black as a Bible, with no light but Foxy's eyes shining from place to place as he looked around, throwing shadows dizzyingly on every side. Ana felt along the wall for the switch and lit the single bare bulb in the middle of the long, unfinished room. The few dozen boxes and plastic tubs she'd stored here only emphasized the emptiness.
"We used to play up here," she heard herself say as she stared at the window on the north face of the house, but it wasn't herself and David she saw in her mind's eye. It wasn't her own memory at all. Before this was ever her rainy day playground, it was a playroom of a very different kind, with an old bed that had seen a lot of use and a collection of life-sized marionettes, all of which had later been burned, all but the Puppet that had gone on to live at Freddy's after Viktor Metzger disappeared.
Foxy opened one of the tubs—a green one with a red lid, a good guess if you were looking for Christmas decorations—and hooked out a bundle of silver tinsel. "This it?"
"That and the one under it. And that box there, although I think that's mostly kitchen stuff," she said, opening it. She dug through holiday towels and tablecloths to bubble-wrapped plates with gold reindeer prancing on them and cocoa mugs shaped like Santa's head. "Yeah, I don't think any of this is useful. Fuck it. Can you get this one too?" she asked as Foxy began to stack tubs together to carry. "I'll drop it off at the thrift store next time I go to town. Oh, and there's the stander. I had one after all. I couldn't remember…and there's the wreath-box. I guess I should hang that up. And this could be something or…not. These are more tapes."
"Ye want 'em?" Foxy asked, shrugging three huge containers onto one shoulder so he could extend an empty hand expectantly. "We could use some fresh blood for movie night."
"No, I need to go through them first. None of them are labeled. They could be anything. Cartoons, home movies…" Wendy Rutter's blackmail pornography or countless others like it. "Anything," she concluded. "Just leave it for now. Looks like that's it for Christmas. Let's go see what we've got."
Once they were back down in the front parlor with decent lighting, they opened everything up and spread it all out so Ana could see at a glance what there was and wasn't. Lots of lights, some for the tree, but mostly exterior strings. Aside from the wreath, there were a handful of bedraggled plastic boughs decorated with crushed ribbons and tarnished bells. Plenty of tinsel and ribbon garlands, but the rats had gotten into that tub at some point and it was all fated for the dumpster. As for ornaments, Ana knew most of the good ones had been smashed down in the basement, so she wasn't expecting to find any at all, which she supposed made it a pleasant surprise when she uncovered a familiar old coffee can packed in with the rat crap and tinsel. Inside were dozens of string-dolls—Santas and reindeer and snowmen—and dozens more string-snowflakes whose delicate branches had come through their age in storage slightly worse for wear. She could dimly remember making them on some faraway winter's night—young Ana and young David working their way through a huge pile of colored string while Christmas music played on the radio and Aunt Easter and Erik Metzger snuggled on the sofa and watched them.
And that was it. That was all that was left of what had once been enough Christmas decorations to gag an elf. Boxes of ornaments, so many that they needed more trees every year—a tree in each parlor, one in the dining room, one in each of their bedrooms, even some in the yard, if they were sturdy—all gone.
Foxy was watching her, waiting for a judgment.
She closed up the coffee can and handed it to him. "Chica can have these if she wants them. And some of the lights. Tinsel is trashed, throw it in the dumpster. Most of this is trashed," she sighed, looking around. "I guess…salvage what you can. Or throw it all away. I'm going to get cleaned up. I'll take you home when I'm done."
No answer, but he'd obviously heard her, so she left him brooding over the tangled mess of lights and went upstairs. All desire she'd had for an extended soak in Aunt Easter's tub was long gone. She just wanted to rinse the sweat off and get out of here. She found some clothes in the closet that weren't too dressy and took her shower, expecting Foxy to walk in every second of it, but not making a plan for what to do if he did. Which didn't matter in the end, because he never did.
She toweled off, fought her wet hair into temporary submission and braided it, stared at herself in the mirror for a timeless stretch of silent non-thought, then got dressed and went downstairs.
She didn't see Foxy, but was not alarmed. She could hear him moving around on the porch, either taking garbage to the dumpster or coming back afterwards. He'd done too much with the little time she'd left him alone for her to worry about him nosing around. The tree was in its stander, positioned in front of the window where any hypothetical visitors could not help but see it. He'd plugged it in and turned the overhead lights off so its soft multi-colored glow could fight alone against the creeping dark inside the house. And while she stood there, thinking how inadequate that was, more lights came on outside. When she went to the door, there he was, standing on the splintering rail and hanging up lights.
He was doing it for her. She knew that and a part of her recognized the effort and knew she should be grateful, but somehow it was worse, seeing a single row of plain white lights under the eaves of the porch when she could still remember seeing the whole damn house lit up, every bit as dazzling as the community center, a palace made of frozen light.
Foxy came to the end of the string and wordlessly put his hook out.
Ana glanced at the open tub in the middle of the porch, pulled out another string of plain white lights and passed it up. There was one more after this, just enough to finish the porch. After that, there was what? Two strings of red, two of green, and five purples. No multi-colored strands. Aunt Easter never liked them, said they were messy. She had an artist's eye for color, could use it like any other prop to add depth or drama to a scene. Ana had no doubt that if she was here right now, she could dress out these limited resources in such a way that a young Ana wouldn't even notice how few there were.
Except that wasn't true, was it? If Aunt Easter were here right now, Christmas decorations would be the last thing on her mind, because she'd be too busy flipping her shit at seeing Foxy out of the restaurant. And she'd know he wasn't here because Ana stole him or reprogrammed him to do menial labor. She'd known Foxy was alive, that they all were. She'd known what Erik Metzger made them do after hours and she was willing to go along with it and mop up the blood in the morning, as long as it made him happy. Ana didn't even want to know the Aunt Easter she was now, after she'd lost her son, filled her home with garbage and left it to decay so she could run off with a new man, who was presumably better than the sadistic serial killer she'd been pining for, but probably not by much.
"Fuck it," said Ana.
"Eh?"
"Sorry, wasn't talking to you. Looks good," she added listlessly and trudged down the steps and over to the garage. She found an exterior extension cord and a place on the facing wall to plug it in, then took the red and green lights out to the yard and found four trees the right size to take them. So there. Red and green trees in the yard, white lights on the porch, and a multi-color tree—ha!—in the front room, shining its messy rainbow light all over.
Ana threw the purple lights in the dumpster, stood there for a few seconds, threw the empty box in there too, stood there some more, then kicked it. The dumpster, mostly empty, let out an echoing bang that should have been satisfying to hear but instead enraged her. She kicked it again. And again. And again and again and probably would have gone on kicking until either the dumpster or her foot broke, but she slipped on rage and wet snow and fell on her ass.
The snow was deep enough to soften the impact, but it didn't take much icy slush dribbling down the back of her pants to clear the red fog from her head. She sat, staring into the formless black sky as snow spun down all around her, twinkling red and green and white with reflected light. Like memories, she thought. Fluttering, fragile things with no light of their own, so pretty and comforting to look at, but they melted if you tried to catch them.
A hook presented itself. Foxy, right beside her. She hadn't heard him walking in the snow and she would have. He'd been there for a while, just watching. Still watching.
"I'm fine," she said and got to her feet without his help. She almost kicked the dumpster again, one more to grow on, but her foot hurt, and as much money as she'd flushed away renting the damned thing for this long, she didn't want to pay what the city would bill her for damaging it.
Something touched her arm. Foxy again. "Come on, luv," he said quietly. "Yer done here. Get yer kit and let's go."
"No," she said and went back to the house, up the stairs, to the purple bruise of Aunt Easter's bedroom. She flung open the closet doors, kicked shoes aside, and started pulling out boxes for boys' and girls' shoes. Aunt Easter surely had gifts for herself squirreled away in some of these boxes of ladies' shoes, but Ana didn't look for them. Fuck Aunt Easter—Fuck Marion fucking Blaylock and her smiling fucking face and her happy fucking holidays. Fuck that bottle she knew was hiding in the Gucci box marked Men's Size 12 for a man everyone but Marion knew was never coming back. Fuck this house and the sour earth it was built on. Fuck the man who had it built by squeezing blood out of impoverished, overworked miners. Fuck Mammon, founded by killers and drunks and whores, this town that ate people and shit them out and ate them again, generation after generation. Fuck everything.
"What are we doing, luv?" Foxy asked cautiously as Ana shouldered him aside and stomped out of the bedroom with her armload of boxed Christmas, 1993.
"I'm finishing," she snapped. "That's what I'm fucking doing."
That could not have made sense to him, but he asked no questions other than, "Ye want the rest of 'em?"
"No. Those are just shoes."
He gave that a moment, then followed her, several steps behind. "What have ye got there then?"
"Nothing! That's what I've got! I've got all the nothing she left behind. I've got her empty promises and her fake smiles and all her pretty little lies! She said she loved me," she spat over her shoulder as she stormed down the stairs. "She said we were going to be a family someday and she gave me toys and hugs and homecooked dinners until I believed her! And then she shit garbage all over it and ran off! The least she could have done was take this crap with her, but she left that too! She left me one last Christmas, like the stupid little notes she used to put in my lunch, like I'm supposed to think it meant she loved me." Ana hurled the boxes down next to the rolls of wrapping paper, spilling dolls and dinosaurs and cars, and swung on Foxy to shout, "If she loved me, she wouldn't have made me clean up her fucking mess! If she loved me, she wouldn't have left in the first place! If she loved me…" Her voice choked off. She grabbed her throat and shoved words through it anyway, raw and bleeding in her mouth. "…she wouldn't have loved him!"
Up until now, he had been keeping a wary distance, which was reasonable as even through the toxic fume of her wild emotions, she was aware that she had to look and sound like a crazy person, but at this final outburst, impossible understanding filled his eyes. He knew exactly what she was feeling, even if he didn't follow everything she was saying. And of course he did. He'd been left behind too, by someone who was supposed to be his family and who gave him up for Erik Metzger's poison love instead.
She could see him trying to think of something to say, but she didn't want to be comforted, especially by a man she knew had it even worse than she did. At least she'd been out in the world, trying new things and failing at most of them, but with choices and chances that he never had and never could have. He'd been locked up, living in someone else's mess until he became part of it.
Foxy gave up on words and came over, extending his good hand. "Give it here then. I'll take it out for ye."
"I'm not throwing it away," Ana said stubbornly. "It's not garbage. This was the Christmas she wanted me to have or at least the one she wanted me to find. I can't just shovel it up with the rest of it and throw it out like I didn't see it, didn't know what it meant. I fucking know. So fine. She wanted me to have this stuff, I'll let her give it to me and then I'll throw it the fuck out, because I did see it and I don't accept it."
He considered that while she tore the bulk-pack of Christmas paper open and chose a roll at random. "Yer wrapping them."
"I'm wrapping them. And don't tell me how stupid that is, because I already know, but this is how I'm dealing with it. You don't have to stick around if you don't want to. I'll see you at the pizzeria when I'm done."
After a long measured silence, she heard the soft pad of rubber-soled feet coming closer. She tensed, ready to shrug off his hand when he tried to pull her away, but instead, he took a knee across from her and all he said was, "What do ye need, luv?"
"I need tape," she muttered, swiping at her eyes.
He wordlessly cut some tabs off the roll and stuck them on his hook for easy access.
She wrapped shoeboxes in silence. The clock ticked. Foxy's cooling system pulled air in and vented it out. The tree sparkled.
"I wish I could just hate her," she whispered.
"I know."
"I want to and I can't."
"I know."
She finished the last shoebox and shoved it under the tree with the others. It made a small pile. Maybe there were other presents, too big for a shoebox, that had been lost in the hoard and thrown out already, or maybe Aunt Easter had only just started her holiday shopping when it all went bad. She'd never know, but it didn't really matter. It was here now, a broken promise taped back together and put in its rightful place, and on Christmas morning, it would all go into the dumpster and be done. Or go to the thrift store, maybe, and be some other kid's happy surprise. After all this fuckery, someone surely deserved to be happy.
"That it?" Foxy asked after a moment of silence.
"Yeah. No," she said, looking over at the spoils of her mall spree from a lifetime ago. "Let's leave it on a high note, at least. And you can tell me what else I can get Freddy, because this is all I could think of." She held up the binoculars, then repacked them into the box Foxy had opened, and started wrapping it. "Maybe I could find someone on Etsy to sew some new bow-ties. I doubt anything off the rack is going to fit him. Or a new microphone? It's not like he spends his free time singing, but he's still carrying that broken one around with him, so maybe? Or what about, like, a little keepsake box for all that stuff he's got inside him?"
"I think he'd rather ye didn't acknowledge that lot at all. They ain't happy memories."
She almost asked why he was still carrying them around then, but got hit with a bolt of pure irony before she did. She nodded instead and wrapped some more presents, avoiding looking at the ones already under the tree. "So what should I get him? You know him better than I do. What does he want?"
"Nothing ye could wrap. And ye've already done it anyhow. Strong doors, home secured, family safe from harm. There ain't nothing he wants more than that."
"Maybe Backgammon?" she muttered. "He's got that old-school board game vibe. Didn't he say he played cribbage?"
"Don't know if he said it, but I know he did. Used to, anyhow. With him what made us." Foxy scratched at his chest, looked at his hook, then put more tape on it and held it stoically out as far from his body as his reach would allow. "That were a long time ago, but aye, he may still have some feeling for the game."
"And what about you?" she asked after some internal wrestling. She hated having to admit she didn't know him well enough to figure out what he wanted on her own, but it was that or socks. "And don't just give me one of those Hallmark card non-answers. I'm serious."
It was hard to read his expression, but his tail twitched at the tip, proof of some internal wrestling of his own. She let him think about it, clenching her jaw to the point of pain to keep from pestering him, and concentrated on wrapping. She'd nearly come to the end of the presents when he suddenly said, "If'n I tells ye, ye don't get to question it."
"Promise," she said and crossed her heart, adding the Bunny Scout finger-hop for good measure.
He snorted through his speaker, then grew about as serious as she'd ever seen him. "I wants a blanket and a pillow. Real ones, the same as ye'd find on any real bed. No, ye promised," he said sharply.
She reluctantly shut the mouth she'd opened, yes, to ask him why when she knew damned well.
"And a bed," he went on, glaring at her. "Even if it ain't but a mat on the floor. It don't have to be fancy, so long as it can take me weight."
"And mine?"
"Ye asked what I wanted."
"Why stop there? You want some curtains to go with it?"
His ears flattened. "Yer questioning," he warned.
She bit back the next thousand or so things she wanted to say and kept wrapping.
"If yer going to sulk, forget the whole thing," he said.
"I'm not sulking."
He snorted again, muttering, "Stone me for thinking that cozying up me digs might make the one person what comfort matters to keener on visiting 'em."
"Now who's sulking?"
He showed her some teeth and gave her some tape.
She focused on wrapping, no longer a fun distraction but only one more job in a place where the work was never done. The instant the last bow was on the last jar of artisanal cake mix, he took it from her and shoved it into a box where he'd been packing all the others.
"Done," he said gruffly. "Are ye baking cookies now or can we go?"
"In a minute," she said and scooted unnecessarily over, patting the boards where she'd just been in silent invitation.
He vented his cooling system once, huffily, and again, softly, and came over to sit beside her. He looked at the lights of the tree and she looked at the ghost-lights of the tree's reflection in the black window glass.
After a lot of time and too many false starts for such a stupid little thing, she said, "Thanks for being here."
He put his arm around her. His hook was cold where it touched her bare skin, hot where the point scratched her.
"And don't take this the wrong way, but I wish you weren't," she said, refusing to look at him, not even his reflection. "Not here. Rider's right. This house is poison. And when I'm here, I'm poison. I hate what this place does to me. I hate what it makes me do to you. Please don't come here anymore."
He made a sound that could have been a laugh with a little more strength in it. "Sure, tell me all that and then ask me to leave ye here alone. Come with me then. Eh? Come away with me, luv, and stay away."
"I can't."
"Course ye can! Ye ain't homed here! It be a choice yer making every day to sit and steep in this rot when ye could stay with us." His ears lowered. He touched her face, made her look at him. "With me."
"It's my home."
"It's rooms! Ye said it yerself, it be naught but rooms ye don't even half remember! What's stopping ye from walking away? What's stopping ye from burning it down, for that matter? Ye can leave it all, right now, tonight. Light a match and walk away. Ye never has to set foot in this place again and ye can be with me."
She groaned and shrugged out from under his arm.
He let her, but caught her hand and held it tight, saying, "I know the cabin's small, but I can break the table down and haul it out. We can set something up on deck for the wherewithal we don't mind others hearing, maybe make a little more space in the hold down below. Hell, tear the whole ship down and build back anything ye want. We'll save the lintel, eh? We can make it work. We can have our own home, just us two in a place where we both fit."
"Don't do this," she said and despite all her best intentions, her temper rose up and fell out. "Why are you always doing this? Why do you have to own me before you feel like we're together?"
To give him credit, he made an effort to laugh his way out of the fight before it could start. "I be having a romantical moment here, woman. What part o' that does ye object to, precisely?"
"The part where you expect me to give up and move in with you just because we fuck once in a while. And yeah, I get it, we've been whatever for a while now and maybe you thought I had expectations, but I'm perfectly happy with the way things are."
"If ye say so."
"And don't get passive-aggressive with me. I'm not in the mood."
"What's yer rather, luv? For I could be aggressive-aggressive, but ye won't like that neither."
"I don't want to fight."
He looked at her, barked a laugh. "Are ye sure?!"
Guilt twisted in her guts, disguised as annoyance. She scooted back, as much to put distance between them as to square off face to face instead of side by side. "Look, I like you. I like talking to you, I like hanging out with you, but—"
"Since when?" he demanded, still trying to laugh, even as his ears snapped flat. "When were the last time ye come to sit up with me and just chat or watch a flicker without the whole damn lot o' them chaperoning, or do anything at all but the only thing? And not thirty seconds after the fun is done, yer gnawing yer arm off to get away from me!"
"Maybe that's because you can't go more than thirty seconds without asking me where our relationship is going! Damn right I'll gnaw my fucking arm off to get away from that! If I wanted a boyfriend—"
Too late, way too fucking late, her head caught up to what her mouth was doing and shut her up, only to have Foxy nod once and calmly finish, "—ye'd still be with Bonnie."
Something very much like panic surged up and came out as, "Isn't that the only fucking reason you're asking? So you can tell Bonnie you got the gold medal in whatever stupid race you think you're running?"
Foxy stared at her for a few seconds, then turned away, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. He said nothing, only nodded very slightly now and then as he agreed with whatever was going through his head.
Ana stared at the floor, slightly dizzy and sick to her stomach, trying to wonder where those ugly words had even come from, but she knew better. They'd been in her all along, squirming around below the surface of her other thoughts where she could pretend she couldn't see them. Now they were out and she could tell him she didn't mean it, but it would only be throwing a lie on top of the hurt.
"I'm not saying it'll never happen," she muttered when the silence had grown too thick to breathe. "I'm just saying, stop trying to make it happen. I'm not ready and I shouldn't have to make excuses for that."
He nodded again, but she wasn't sure if that meant he was agreeing or not. "I know I'm pushing. And the timing's bad, I know that too. Maybe if I had even half a hope ye'd ever make a move without a nudge—"
"That's not fair. I made the first move, didn't I?"
"And tried to unmake it, as I recall."
"And you didn't let me, so here we are." That sounded better in her head, for the split-second she thought of it, than in the open air, with him staring at her. "And that's fine, isn't it? There's nothing wrong with keeping things—"
"Secret."
"Casual!" she insisted, which was almost a save until she said, "It's a little too late to keep it secret, thanks to you."
His ears flattened. "Ye want it secret? Is that what ye want?"
"You know what? I don't know what I want. There. You got me to admit it, congratu-fucking-lations. But I know what I don't want, and I don't want a commitment right now so stop trying to bully one out of me!"
"I ain't asking for yer bloody hand in marriage! All I want is for ye to make a wee bit more time for me, woman!"
"A wee bit?! You just told me to burn my house down and move in with you!"
He rolled his eyes savagely and spat, "I didn't tell ye to do any such thing. I merely presented the option and I'd do it again! Yer miserable here and we all know it, so why not move in with us?"
"Us? Or you?"
"Oh, is that what's holding ye back? Ye'd do it in a heartbeat if'n I weren't part o' the equation?"
"I didn't say that."
"Ye ain't not saying it!"
"Yeah, I've been not saying a lot of stuff lately trying to make you happy, but you just want more."
He looked away, ears in constant motion, then abruptly flipped onto his feet and stalked away, only to turn just as suddenly back with his arms open, snarling, "Hell, woman, do ye want me at all?"
Her throat tightened. "Of course I do."
"Because I want ye," he said, like she hadn't answered at all, or like she had and he was pretending she hadn't because he knew it for a lie. "I love ye."
"You don't have to!" she blurted desperately. "Jesus Christ, where is this coming from? When did I ever say you had to love me? Why do you always have to take more? Why can't we just have this?"
"What the hell is this?" he threw back at her.
"Why does it have to be anything?" she asked…no, shouted.
And he shouted back, "Because if it ain't, it's nothing! And if fucking nothing's what it takes to make ye happy, push on! I been the nothing folk fuck long enough!"
He stormed out. She didn't watch him go. The door opened, slammed, and she was alone. The tree sparkled—red and yellow and green and blue and purple. So much purple.
Well, so that was probably that. They said the third time was the charm, maybe she should start an affair with Freddy, see if she could either get it right or burn it down so spectacularly that she finally got it through her stupid head that some people didn't get the happy ending. Some people were just designed to make things worse. If she wanted to fix this, really fix this, she should just leave. There had to be someplace on this stupid rock far enough away that she couldn't fuck anyone's life up.
She thought of the bottle upstairs in Aunt Easter's closet. Good whisky, twenty years in the barrel, twenty more in a shoebox. She could almost taste it on her lips already. It would go down just as smooth as tears. And would it solve anything? No, but it would give her something else to get sick on other than self-loathing and shame, and tonight, that was enough.
'Remember when you used to drink to have fun?' she asked herself suddenly in Rider's voice.
She supposed it was a joke, but in that moment…no. No, she really couldn't. This hadn't been fun for a long, long time. Damn it. And damn her. And just…damn everything.
She got up and went outside, going through the motions like one of the grandfather clock's fairy tale figures, knowing he was already far away.
Except he wasn't. He was right there on the porch, leaning over the rails on one bent arm, watching his other hand walk a doubloon across his knuckles like it was the only thing to watch in the world. He didn't look at her, which was fair. She couldn't make herself look at him too much either.
She waited for a bit, then squared up and got the fight started. "This is the part where you call me a bitch."
"I ain't doing that."
"I deserve it," she admitted tightly. Too tightly. Damn her dead mother and the hand that taught her no one wanted to hear her little bitch-mouth whining. "I could have found better ways to say that—"
"Better ways," he mused. "But ye'd still say it, eh?"
She raised her hands a little, let them drop. "Shouldn't it have been said? Isn't that the problem here, that I waited this long to say it?"
"Say it all then. No quarter between pirates."
"We're fucking, Foxy, we're not dating," she said, not cruelly, but as the calm, honest statement it was. She wasn't trying to hurt him. These were not weapons, only facts and she spoke them without sentiment. "I don't date. I never have and I don't want to start. I don't know if that's really what you thought this was or if it's something you thought I wanted, but either way, just so we're on the same page here, it's not."
"Not from me."
"Not from anyone!"
He laughed, not in a mean way, but a real laugh, short and dry as it was. He flipped his doubloon, caught it between two fingers and studied it, glinting in the cheerful Christmas lights. "So ye don't want it, do ye? Pet names? Someone to snuggle up on when ye sleep? A special song ye call yer own? Ye don't want none o' that?" He glanced at her, yellow eye alight with humor. "Who did ye call t'other night, luv? Whose voice did ye have to hear calling ye his baby girl when ye felt lost and alone on yer own front porch?"
"Leave him out of this."
"Just so's we're clear, luv. On the same page. Ye go to him when yer hurting. Ye go to him when yer happy. Ye go to him when yer bored and just want someone to help ye pass the night, and he don't even have to take yer clothes off to do it."
"Stop it."
"Me?" He chuckled, flipped the doubloon in the air and started it walking across his knuckles again. "I'm yer light switch, that's what I am. I ain't yer friend. I ain't yer lover. I sure as hell ain't yer man," he said, not cruelly. He wasn't trying to hurt her. These were not weapons, only facts and he spoke them without sentiment. "I'm just there to put yer lights out on them bad nights when ye can't sleep. Yer only with me as often as ye are because…because they're all bad nights these days. And I'm part o' that, ain't I?"
"No," she said at once, shaking her head emphatically. "This is not your fault. None of this is your fault."
"No, it ain't," he agreed, "but ye likes a little roleplay in the bedroom, don't ye? And I can't help but note ye casts me in the role o' ruthless ravisher more often than not. Just in case ye should want someone to blame when ye has yer second thoughts later, eh?"
"I never blamed you. Yeah, you're good at the rough stuff and yeah, I prefer it that way because I suck at pillow talk and I don't like being naked and I fucking trust you to break me down without hurting me. Yeah, you're my light switch. And when nothing else in the world can shut the crazy off in my head and let me sleep, you can." Ana gauged his mood, decided it was going about as well as anyone could expect and cautiously dialed up the heat. "But damn it, you don't get to change the rules just because you're bored by winning all the time."
"Is that what ye think I'm doing?"
"Well, if it's not, then I guess I don't even know what the fuck you think you're doing when you say no one has to know and then you spill your guts to the others and let me deal with the fallout, all so you could stroll up to me later and say, 'Hey, now that all your other bridges are burned, why not move in with me and really rub it in his face?' Don't shake your head at me!" she snapped, feeling her loosening grip on this whole situation slip even further. "You set me up and you know it! You didn't even tell me you did it, so I could at least brace for the blowback. Hell, you still haven't told me you did it, but you expect me to forgive you and move on?"
His newly-flexible lip curled. "What makes ye think I expect any such thing?"
"Because that is the normal progression of things that normal people do when one of them does something wrong," she hissed back at him. "You want to pretend we're dating or what the fuck ever fantasy you're living in, then you got to play by all the rules and not just the ones that get you laid. So admit it and apologize or tell me you didn't do anything wrong and see what the fuck that gets you."
His flat ears swiveled on their pins, away from anger but not quite all the way to remorse before he brought them up again, jutting forward in challenge. He straightened, catching the doubloon mid-flip in his fist and then throwing it, bent, to the ground between them. "Ye've got a lot o' damn nerve," he growled. "Ye done the crime with me, last I checked, but sure, for all the piss-nothing it be worth, I told him. There. Now does it really matter that bloody much?"
"Does it matter?!" she echoed incredulously.
His ears flattened. "Well, why should it, eh? Why wouldn't ye want it known, unless yer afraid o' hurting yer true love's feelings!"
He put a little sneer on 'true'. Not a lot, but it was not her imagination and oh, it was not going to slide on by unchecked.
"Of course it hurt his fucking feelings, which is why you fucking did it, and—"
Foxy was nose-to-muzzle with her in an instant. "No, it weren't!"
Ana pushed her face forward, closing what little distance he'd left between them. Softly, but with a hammer delivering every word, she said, "Which is why you fucking did it."
He didn't deny it again and although he didn't back off and didn't drop his gaze, her eyes could detect the faint ruddy glow of a guilty flush beneath the new fur covering his tufted cheeks.
"Whatever Bonnie thought we were and for that matter, whatever I ever thought we were is not the fucking point and you had no goddamn right bringing it all out in the open to hurt him—Yes, you did!" she snapped as he opened his mouth. "You hurt him, you meant to hurt him, you knew it would hurt him, and yeah, okay, fuck me too because I knew it would hurt him and I knew it was coming out sooner or later, but you made it happen and you did it to hurt him, to punish him—"
Now Foxy backed up, but although he shook his head, he didn't look at her when he did it.
Ana advanced, staying right up in his face as he visibly fought not to react. "—because for a few months, in total ignorance, I gave him the one thing—one thing!—that I won't let you take. The fact that I gave you everything else meant nothing if you couldn't have that too! You're not in love with me and you don't want me to love you, you just want more than Bonnie got!"
"Back off me!" he snarled and shoved her.
If Ana needed a reminder of the elemental disparity between a human and an animatronic, she got it. She did not stagger; she flew. She hit the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of her and slid down to land with a jarring thump on her butt, staring up at him with wide eyes as he paced around the porch, dragging his hook across the rail and punching once at a corner post (it bent, splintered chucks popping out in back, and the porch's sagging roof visibly dropped an inch on that end), before finally going quiet, leaning on the rail in nearly the same place and position as she'd found him, scratching grooves into the rotting wood.
"I done it," he said dully. "All right? I done it. I had the knife and I stabbed it in him and gave it a twist, sure, and what's more, there's a purple part o' me that longed for that moment, that drank it up like rum and laughed while all the rest o' me were sick with it. He told me once, ye know…Bon, I mean. He told me ye could tell which one o' them made me, and at the time, I didn't think much more than it were a pretty fair jab for a bloke what weren't much good at making 'em, but he were right." He was a quiet a moment, apart from the scraping of his hook, and finally uttered a short laugh. "I'd take it back if I could. Ain't it funny? After all the wicked things I done—and lord, girl, that's a long list—that's the one thing I'd take back. I wish I could say it was because I hurt me brother who were trying so goddamn hard to love me, but is it? Or is the only reason I'd take it back just so's I never had to know…how bloody awful I really am…Don't," he said, no louder, but with an edge on it. "Don't tell me I ain't, just let me talk."
Ana closed the mouth she'd opened for clumsy sympathy and slowly climbed to her feet.
"Ye has to believe me, Ana, even if I never said a word to him and it were all still a secret, I'd still be with ye now, saying all the rest of it just the same, because Bon or no Bon…" His hook came to rest, then slipped off the rail and hung at his side in defeat. "…I want ye. And yer right, it ain't enough just to have ye for an hour in the dark where nobody knows it. I need more. I need ye every minute. I need ye where the whole damn world can see!"
"You said—"
"Sure I said, because I thought I could, but I was wrong, girl!" Foxy turned on her, ears flat, eyes burning. "I told him and damn me for that, but even if I'd loved him as he deserves, I'd have still told him, because I didn't want to sneak around anymore! Because this—" He seized her just to slam her back into the wall with himself slamming up against her, his weight and his heat and the ruthless promise of his passion bearing down on her, inescapable. "—is nothing," he growled, moving closer, even closer, "without this."
He kissed her before she could say no (and she would have, maybe). His mouth was new in its dimensions, textures, taste, but worse, new in its hunger. He kissed her like she was new, like he'd never had her before and would never have her again. He kissed her, and God help her, she let him. By the end, she couldn't even be sure she wasn't kissing him back.
"I told ye nothing had to change," he whispered, slipping his hand—soft with new fur, rough with old knowledge—up to cup her breast. "I never should have said that. It were a lie newborn in me mouth, luv. Of course it had to change. I were changed." His hand moved, finding her heartbeat. His claws flexed once, twice, in time with her fear. His eyes stabbed into hers, never blinking, daring her to argue when he said, "Ye changed me."
"Don't say that," she whispered.
"S'truth. What I'd give if it weren't," he added sourly, "but it is and here we be, with a chance to start over clean and leave me old ways with me old skin. I ain't perfect." He thought about it, shrugged. "I ain't much o' a prize a'tall, and ye know it better'n anyone…and I'm glad of it. Aye. I'll never hide me scars from ye, girl, and ye never has to hide yours from me. We can be broken together, eh? And who knows? Mayhaps we got enough broken parts between us—"
He stepped back and offered that shiny, shiny hook. And she took it.
"—to make something whole," he murmured, pressing the words home with a kiss. "Something new and just for us. I love ye. That don't have to be secret and it don't have to be a shame. I love ye. Come away with me, luv. Come to me cabin and call it yer own. Don't just lie down with me, sleep with me. Just the one night, eh? Just to try it on and see how it fits."
She thought about it, but the thought was wordlessly, formlessly awful. His embrace was as good as chains and there were teeth in his kisses, and although she didn't say anything, his brand-new sensor pads must have felt the tension in her body as she planned her escape, because his arms tightened briefly before he shoved himself away. He went back to pacing, tail lashing, while she smoothed out her clothes and wished she was dead.
"Yer bleeding," he said suddenly.
She checked her bandages, glanced at him, then followed his nod to a fresh cut on her arm. She shrugged and pulled her sleeve down to cover it. "It's nothing. I'm fine. And it's not you," she said hoarsely. He deserved a hell of a lot more than that, but that much was all she could give him and even that much hurt. "I shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have done any of it and I don't know why I did, but it wasn't because I thought you didn't matter. You're not nothing, you're not just…there for me to use. I'd never do that to you. I'm a piece of shit, but I'd never do that."
"Ah, hell, girl." His cooling system vented. He went back to leaning on the rails, leaving room for her to stand beside him but not looking to see if she did.
She didn't want to, but she'd hurt him enough for one day, so she went, unavoidably brushing at his arm with hers. The way he leaned into it only made her feel worse and she couldn't look at him, which was fine, because he wasn't looking at her either.
"I know ye better than that," he said finally. "Shouldn't have said it. Never thought it. S'truth, I didn't even know it were in me until it came out."
"Funny how that works, isn't it?" Ana said dully.
"Funny. If I had all night to plan it out, I couldn't have picked a worse, wronger…meaner thing to say. And everything I did plan, everything I meant to say…" He drew his hook across the air, cutting that line of thought and letting it sink. "I don't need curtains," he said with a kind of defeated determination. "Promises. Special names, special songs, none o' that. Hell, I don't even need to be the only man in yer life and I will never tell ye to cut t'other loose, never."
She glanced at him against her will and found him looking back at her, yellow eyes catching the twinkle of the lights so they almost seemed to be guttering like candles, like the last light inside him was going out.
"Aye, I mean it. Be with him if that's what ye want of an hour, but when yer with me, want me! Ye ken? I has to know yer with the one ye want when ye lie down with me, and I ain't just the mistake ye can't stop making." He looked at his hook, held it up between them so they could both see the blood drying on the tip. "Or the knife ye use to cut yerself."
She looked away.
He bumped her arm and waited until she looked back. "I ain't trying to hurt ye. I just want ye to be happy, even if ye have to be happy with him. I'd rather see ye happy with him…than alone with me." He caught her chin on the curve of his hook before she could drop her gaze. She thought he had something more to say, one more twist of the knife, but he kissed her instead and then let her go. "Now fetch yer kit out, luv, and let's go home." He managed a crooked smile. "Before one of says something we don't mean."