So it happens once in a while I don’t write fandom things. I write things… which might become fandom-related if I change them slightly but otherwise remain strange, solitary creatures. This is one of those. Written during WordWars. It’s anyone’s guess who these characters are. Enjoy!

At the back of his throat a sensation alerts him to what he is seeking, a tickle, not quite a taste, annoying and futile to ease. Soon he catches the smell as well, and he tugs up the collar of his coat to help isolate his focus. A tiny thread connects him to his quarry, blood to blood, heartbeat to heartbeat. He jerks the thread with delicacy and, though thin, it holds.

He follows the thread, gently, gently, down darkened alleys, past shuttered facades, and empty shops. The streets are slick with a late afternoon rain, but otherwise empty. There are sounds of distant noise: hollering, the constant rattle of a homeless man’s tin cup, wheezing engines of automobiles, a midnight church bell. The thread leads him to a boneyard where headstones are scattered like raised bumps on the back of an old beast. Here the quiet does not persist, broken by a moaning wind and whispering long-ago voices.

…And some voices not whispering at all.

“It’s not deep enough!”

“I told you, I’m ten feet in!”

“Well, fuckin’ dig to twenty! We cain’t be here when the sun comes up!”

The voices fade into grumbling. He slinks by a tombstone, knowing the gravediggers won’t see him in moonlight even if he looms over them. They notice the world only through mortal eyes. Some things, no matter how mortals try and chant and invent, will always be invisible to them.

The thread gives a faint tug from one direction, a reminder that his search is not done. He twines through the boneyard, changing shape as he goes, sometimes a soft-footed black cat, at other times an old crow passing through the crooked limbs of trees; or he is the form he likes best, a man in a coat always unseen.

At the top of a hill sits a small, crumbling mausoleum. As he ghosts the hill, a smell of sweet, dank earth and uprooted grass embraces him, that of an old lover glad for his return. The thread snaps then, fraying to nothing, but he has no more need of it. The drum of his heart’s blood is strong and the other’s, stronger still.

Within the mausoleum’s inner tomb stands the thin figure of a man, defiant despite the wary hunch of his shoulders. The man’s boots jostle the curious leavings of centuries as he shuffles back a phantom step. “Why must you follow me?”

That belligerent tone should incite anger. Instead it lures him closer. “If I did not, what would happen to you?” His voice is soft, wind passing through oak.

“I’d find my way!”

“Where would you go?”

“Anywhere you couldn’t.”

He smiles. “That is nowhere.”

The man, his quarry, draws in a deep breath; his chest trembles with the effort of it. Mutely, he denies that he will always be fettered by the bond between them. A trick of fate, he had lamented once. It should have happened to someone else.

Soon this man will know the taste of bitter defeat.

There is a scratching outside the arch of the tomb. Something reminds them they are not to linger here, in the dusty beds of sleeping bones. He lifts his hand to beckon the one he sought and, when that beckoning fails, to anchor his fingers around a wrist.

The man goes with him, cursing the strong grip, recalcitrant in the slight drag of his feet. They depart the mausoleum and hill, two shapes flowing in the dark, one distantly visible—still half-mortal—and the other hooded by his own power.

A crow’s call ebbs oddly. The gravediggers, lying loose-limbed like dolls upon a mound of cold dirt and moping at their sweat, never lift their eyes from the round moon to take note of any creature’s passing. Even had they thought to care, it would not matter. They are not Other, and this glimpse of an Other world they are never meant to see.

THE END

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