Amalgamation - Tattered_Dreams - The Maze Runner Series (2024)

Chapter 1: June-July

Chapter Text

“No- no absolutely not!”

Thomas lifts his head up when he hears Mary’s voice clap over the humming noise of customers that fills the warmly lit cafe like a swarm of contented bees. There’s only actually one bee inside, and one of the Will-o’-the-Wisps has been chasing it away from the pastries for the past hour. Mary’s shout cuts across the chatter, stalling it for a second as the patrons all look around to the doorway.

It’s a bright day in June. The last of the spring's cherry blossoms blow past the windows, petals spinning in the gentle air currents and the scent of rich woodland and golden warmth spilling in through the gently parted door.

When the customers see that there’s only a boy holding a Púca standing there, they all turn back to their conversations.

The boy hoists the little creature higher up in his arms. It’s a weird thing; like a cross between a monkey and a goat….if both were demonically possessed. Its entirely covered in fur so black that it seems to absorb light. It’s got little curling horns set over drooping, rabbit-like ears, a tapering face and large eyes. The patchwork features are matched up to a body with a curving spine and long fingers, hunched over the boy’s shoulder. A tiny pair of fragile wings are folded against its back, rainbows dancing in the membranes under the lights. A long tail is wrapped at least five times around the boy’s arm.

Thomas has seen one before. Just one, but back then it had looked entirely like a goat, only the unnatural little head tilt and the way its eyes flashed for a second; glowing green and entrancing, had given it away. They’re rare out here. As creatures of predominantly Irish origin, and incredibly territorial, seeing them so far from home is odd.

Apparently this cafe of patrons has seen odder. The volume rises again as everyone loses interest. Almost everyone.

The Púca trills its wings once and gives Mary a reproachful look.

Mary squares her shoulders.

“No,” she insists. “Winston, the last time you brought one of your rescues here I had to get a new oven.”

Winston looks to be in his late teens, his skin dark and hair looking like it might have been singed at some point. He’s holding the Púca protectively and his jaw drops. “That wasn’t my fault! She didn’t mean to melt it – I told you she was sensitive.”

“You’re the one who brought a traumatised salamander in here,” Mary says, unmoved. “And now you want to bring a Celtic fortune shifter inside? No.”

“Its cold out,” Winston says.

Thomas throws an arch glance to the windows. The sky is cloudless blue and thick with that hazy feel of summer. The cafe is on the corner of a tiny little town tucked into the edge of a sprawling woodland and especially this time of year, it’s impossible to walk this close to the wild treeline without inhaling the rich, earthy textures of fresh, warm soil, thriving roots and breathing leaves. Even for someone who’s always had a particular tolerance to the cold because of what he is, Thomas knows this is not it.

When he looks back at Mary, she doesn’t appear to have so much as blinked away from Winston.

Winston says, “Its cold for him.”

Mary narrows her eyes.

Privately Thomas thinks that the creature with a fur coat has no right to be claiming its cold, but that’s just him.

Winston lifts the Púca up again, and this time it gives Mary a soulful look, its goat-like face shifting, just a little, shortening and curving until it looks lots younger. It’s a subtle but impressive display and Mary throws down the order pad in her hand onto the marbled counter by the till.

“Fine. But keep it away from the other customers. And if I find out its handing out fortunes while people try to eat then you’re both outside, understand?”

Winston nods. “Absolutely.”

Mary jerks her head to the side and Winston hurriedly makes his way to a far corner where he sits the Púca on the back of his chair. It winds its tail around the wooden rails, leans forward and starts unscrewing the lid of the nearest salt shaker.

Thomas turns back to the scattered mess on the table in front of him. His laptop is half buried under a dog-eared (the irony of thinking this amuses him more than it reasonably should) textbook and hand-scrawled notes. His phone is half out of battery already and though his earphones fell out when the kid called Winston blew open the door, he can still feel the pulsing vibrations of the sound like tiny ripples on the table surface.

It’s a song he doesn’t much like anyway.

A shadow falls across the table.

Thomas startles, head snapping up and he has to quickly force down the instinctive response; the way something feral and protective spins through his bloodstream. The wolf inside him has always been more watchful than the boy and it’s been long years of learning to balance them both.

Its Mary.

“How are you doing, Thomas?” she asks him, and her voice is gentle now, no hint of the rebuking hardness in it when accosting Winston. “Do you need another drink?”

“Um,” he says, more to fill the space than to think. He unearths the mug. “Yes, please. The same?”

Mary glances over her shoulder and waves a hand. Within moments a tiny Will-o’-the-Wisp streaks over to them; a glowing little comet above the ducked heads of the customers.

“Can you get him another one?” Mary asks it.

The Wisp pulses with tender white light. Its blue, really, but the fuzzy halo burns brighter at the heart of the little spirit, shining white in the lights of the cafe. Happiness radiates upwards from it, something Thomas has long learned that not everyone can tell. Emotions smell and taste different to him, they always have.

The Wisp floats down and though it has no distinct shape, it somehow picks up the mug, swaying a little in the air as it rises again, and then its hurrying back across the shop to the counter. It’s only then that Thomas notices a bunch of them are busying themselves with tasks there. One is still chasing a lone bee away from the icing, three more are sliding a fresh tray of gingerbread cookies into a glass cabinet and two are arguing over a whisk stuck into a vat of whip cream.

“They can be stubborn,” Mary says, noticing where Thomas’ attention has drifted to. “But they’re some of the best workers.”

“You employ them?” Thomas asks, bewildered.

It’s the first time he’s ever been here. Mary greeted him and asked his name when he entered a little more than two hours ago, directing him to this small table but since then she’s been occupied and Thomas has done rather less work than he’d planned on. Still, given what he’s seen instead, he can’t bring himself to feel bad about it. Although he feels a little bit mind-spun, he can’t help but want to soak up everything he’s seeing.

“Not precisely,” Mary hedges. She nods to the empty seat opposite him. “Can I?”

Thomas nods.

Mary sits.

“One of them came with me, a long time ago, when I was travelling,” she begins. “I settled here years back, now and since then others have just….shown up. Will-o’-the-Wisps like company; the more there are here, the happier they seem to get, but they don’t like to be idle either. They can be mischievous and cryptic, but they like guiding people. They drift off when they feel like it – they’ve led plenty of people out of the woods and they’ve also guided many a customer to the Leek and Potato Soup. They just seem at home here.”

Mary falls quiet while they both watch two Wisps upturn a jug of milk into Thomas’ mug and then a third dump powdered chocolate over the top. Another swoops in to lift it up, juggling a silver spoon as well, and then the refilled drink is being flown across the cafe and set down on the table between them.

“Thanks,” Thomas tells it.

The Wisp fidgets in the air, the pulsing light almost puffing it up and its happiness tastes like sunbeams as it blinks and vanishes. The spoon still in its grasp plummets through the air and cracks into the floorboards beside Mary’s seat with a sharp ringing sound.

“They do that too,” Mary says flatly. “I have to replace so many plates.”

Thomas sets aside his coursework, reaching for the mug. It still hot between his fingers, the spiralling steam rising from the top smelling of oranges and cinnamon. He lets the laptop go to sleep and talks to Mary.

She owns and runs the cafe, and an old friend of hers runs the bed and breakfast above it. This would all be entirely unremarkable were it not for the fact that Will-o’-the-Wisps carried the customers their drinks, or that a boy – Winston, who is apparently a regular – has taken a seat with an Irish shapeshifting spirit. A spirit who has been pouring salt into Winston’s pockets for at least ten minutes. Then there’s the little girl who inhaled her spiced soup too fast, sneezed and promptly turned into a hawk. She morphed into an emu and then a polecat before turning back to little-girl-shaped and continuing her lunch with a mildly disgruntled expression.

Mary doesn’t seem to need too much of his input, content to talk about setting up this little place in a town that’s somewhere safe for supernaturals to exist as they are. Sometimes hiding away from the world gets a little too much. (Or, in the case of some of them, a full time home if they chose not to live amongst humans at all).

“I should get back to work,” Mary finally concludes with, moving up off the chair opposite him. “I’m glad you came by, Thomas. I hope we’ll see you again.”

Thomas is already nodding.

Sure, it may not be the most conducive to getting his coursework done – and there is no way he can explain to his professor that its because he found a faerietale cafe – but there’s no question that he’ll be coming back.

He hangs out for another hour, when the afternoon lull seems to be kicking in. Tables empty around him, the patrons all making their way out to enjoy the summer sun. The little girl from before stands on the sidewalk outside the window, takes a deep breath and puffs up her cheeks. There’s a moment and then, abruptly she turns into a penguin. The two women with her share a fond look, transform into large tropical birds and pick up the annoyed penguin-shaped child tenderly between them before taking off into the sky.

Winston leaves just as Thomas starts to pack away his things. He’s still holding the Púca fondly, keeps it turned away from Mary as he waves goodbye and doesn’t appear to notice the trail of salt he’s leaving in his wake.

Mindful of his phone battery and not wanting to be caught in a town that doesn’t exist without a way of contacting anyone, Thomas makes himself weave around the Wisps tidying up the tables and ducks out of the front door.

There’s still the faintest smell of sulphur in the air from the spot the family of bird-women transformed, and a dwindling train of salt granules winds down the path, across the street and out towards the woods. The rest of the world is full of the heady scents of pollen and chlorophyll. Thomas turns his head up to where a wooden sign hangs contentedly from an iron frame welded to the roof overhang.

Safe Haven Valley

Mary’s Cafe

He’s definitely coming back.

.

It’s only the third time he’s been in but already Thomas feels like he might as well be a fixture.

He finishes his summer classes (voluntary, to be clear) on a Friday, tries to get as much homework as he can done that same evening and then packs his things and walks up through the woods when most of the students in the dorms are still sleeping off hangovers. It’s not a long walk, but some preternatural sense leads Thomas off of the main paths through the trees, into denser undergrowth and then out the other side into the winding route to Safe Haven, the town that doesn’t exist.

(Never mind that the wild nights out and parties going on around campus and in the nearby city hold very little appeal when he knows this exists, but Thomas never could get drunk anyway. The wolf in his bones shares many things with him; its vast range of sensory perception, its knack for noticing danger, its quietly observant nature, physical endurance, and in this case, its quicksilver metabolism).

It’s been three weeks since that first trip, and summer is only just starting to wane, though its putting up a fight; the ground too soft and the air too rich for autumn to sink its teeth in.

Thomas ducks into the cafe, waves to Mary, says hi to the closest Wisp (which promptly somersaults in reply, upending a cup of marshmallows over a woman shopping for a broomstick on Amazon), and then sinks into his usual seat at a table near the back.

“Morning, Thomas,” Mary calls to him. “Same?”

Third time only, and it’s already the best routine he’s ever had.

He nods, fishing out his laptop and textbooks.

A Wisp brings the drink over to him, blazing blue outline fuzzy and pulsing as it sets the mug down and then it careens off to busy itself elsewhere. Thomas pushes the laptop aside, picks up the drink, and finds himself idly people watching like he has both times before.

For the first half an hour, nothing happens.

A couple of faces are familiar, but three visits isn’t nearly enough to know the regulars, and most of them wander in, get a cup of something to go and then leave. A few tables fill up but (and it seems strange to think it because nothing in this town is at all normal) nothing actually abnormal by their standards seems to happen.

And then when it’s approaching ten thirty, as indicated by the groaning old clock behind the serving counter, the front door flies open.

Two boys enter and Thomas goes still behind the largely ignored screen of his laptop.

They look his age, and so far Thomas has only seen Winston who looks like he’s from the same generation, so instantly he’s intrigued. But that’s not what he's really focused on. There’s a blond boy; tall and lanky, his hair a honeyed mess across his forehead and his eyes sharp. There’s a quiet, clouded kind of air about him that the wolf inside Thomas can’t quite work out and it makes curiosity spill like molasses through his veins.

The wolf is smarter than Thomas when it comes to this, and he’s been using its wide range of senses for his entire life. Even if he doesn’t know the word for it, he can usually identify the type of magic. He can differentiate woodland spirits from water entities; place shapeshifters by the multitude of skins he can sense underneath the one they wear. This boy isn’t nearly so easy; the traces of him seemingly scattered in fog.

The other boy has slightly darker skin, his black hair standing up from his skull in a gravity-defying feat and his upturned eyes are bold. The natural signature he gives off is far stronger, practically rising up off his skin. It’s not a scent so much as a chemical signal; hot wine, hormones and promises.

It makes the woman by the doorway still scanning Amazon on her phone sigh out loud.

The boy darts a glance to her, looks very momentarily apologetic, and then winks. The blond boy drags him away, eyes rolling.

Thomas bites the inside of his cheek, mostly just amused, but tugs at the wolf under his skin as a precaution. It rises up obligingly, forming almost a protective barrier to his senses. He’d have probably gone mad a long time ago if he couldn’t block out all the sensory input he could pick up on, and though he hasn’t needed it much, living very much in a normal human world, the talent serves him well when encountering some….particularly inclined supernaturals.

The boy is an Incubus.

Thomas is guessing from his initial reaction that he doesn’t use the allure of what he is maliciously at all, and in fact, given that no one else has reacted to him, the chemosignals he’s putting out must be very weak. He’s either taking suppressants or he’s been recently sated.

Either way, Thomas reminds himself, it’s not his business. And if he didn’t have a wolf living inside him, he’d never have known what the boy even was. There’s a reason normal people in folklore and tales through the centuries were always tricked by Incubus and their female counterparts; it’s hard to protect yourself against the seductive grasp of their unique chemical co*cktails when you don’t even realise it’s there. Thomas does.

He feels his eyes drawn to the other boy again instead. He’s dragging his darker-haired friend up to the counter, weaving expertly between tables to get there even though – Thomas realises – he has a just noticeable limp in his left leg.

It’s clearly a hindrance to him, but the boy moves on it with such confidence anyway that it says a lot though Thomas doesn’t even know him. Its an old injury; maybe years, and one that is such a part of this sharp-eyed boy that he’s literally learned to map his life around it.

The curiosity burns deeper but Thomas averts his eyes this time. Not your business, he reminds himself. Still, the words in his open textbook blur on the page and his hearing is as good as ever when one of the boys calls for Mary.

There’s the gentle pattering sound of the bead curtain through to the kitchen as it’s disturbed, and then Mary’s voice over the quiet chatter of the cafe.

“Newt,” she says lightly. “And Minho - Do I need to spray you again?”

The Incubus makes a dismayed sound. “No. I’m….good.”

“He is,” the other one says, and that- there’s a very distinct catch to his voice; the words shaping themselves differently, lilted in a way Thomas is unused to. Newt is British.

Somehow that’s still more intriguing. How did he end up here?

Thomas looks up.

The boys are crowded together at the counter, shoulder to shoulder and there’s something in it that screams easy familiarity. Mary looks faintly amused by them.

“What do you want?” she asks. “I have cookies to get out of the oven and I’ve left the Wisps in charge of five bags of icing.”

Minho winces.

Thomas can appreciate where that’s coming from, given what he’s already witnessed.

“I think I left my lamp here,” Newt says, the words rushing out quickly on the tail of his own wary glance towards the kitchen.

“The ugly one,” Minho clarifies.

Newt elbows him.

Mary sighs, reaches beneath the counter and – Thomas tries hard not to look like he’s watching – extracts-

Well it’s definitely not a lamp.

It’s a dented old copper carafe, funnelled just a little towards the top and stoppered with a little domed lid. Still, it appears to have been buffed just on one side to a smooth shine that the rest of it can’t hope to live up to.

“The yoghurt pot was uglier,” Newt says, reaching out to take the carafe. “Had an awful draft no matter where it got left but that wasn’t my fault; the previous owner left it to me.”

Mary makes a face that’s a little sympathetic and a lot understanding. She knows, even as she opens her mouth, that what she says won’t change anything; a well-worn topic, perhaps. “You know part of being free is that you don’t actually have to carry them around.”

Newt shrugs. He opens up the canvas satchel that Thomas notices only then is hanging by his side and gently lowers the beaten up carafe into it. There’s a metallic clinking sound which confirms there’s at least one other such vessel already in the bag. Newt looks largely unaffected, something matter-of-fact in his eyes as he closes the bag and looks up again.

He says, “I still carry the chain in all the ways that count.”

Mary, smiling sadly, nods.

“What’s this?” Minho demands, and Thomas starts when he realises Minho is looking at him. “A Greenie?”

Mary sighs. “We had one Nymph show up. One time. I wish you’d stop calling every one of my new customers a Greenie.”

Minho beams in an entirely unrepentant kind of way. Then he pushes himself up off the counter and heads for Thomas’ table.

Newt rolls his eyes and tugs a plate of free cookie tasters closer to himself while Mary shakes her head.

Thomas feels an electric pulse rocket up his spine and flare out through his nerves. They're the actions of two people entirely used to the third’s antics and entirely used to seeing how it plays out again and again. The electricity in his skin settles into a buzzing insistence and the wolf in his blood snaps its teeth with glee. He met a Succubus once; it's how he can so easily recognise them for what they are, and with the resistance the wolf provides...he’s looking forward to this not being easy.

Plus. He’s not interested.

Minho sits opposite him without asking and leans forward, his eyes dark and that red wine allure spilling off of him in waves. Thomas feels it brush over his skin and feels the wolf breathe through it, cast it aside.

“What’s your name?” Minho asks.

“Thomas,” Thomas answers.

“What are you drinking?”

Minho taps his finger gently at the side of Thomas’ half empty mug, a smile curled in the corner of his mouth. Over by the counter, Newt shoots them a narrowed look and Mary catches a pot of syrup when a Wisp blinks and vanishes halfway across the gap to the fridge.

“Hot chocolate,” Thomas says. He shrugs. “With orange and cinnamon.”

“Like a little luxury, do you?” There’s an edge of pointedness dancing in Minho’s eyes, his tone practiced rather than sincere.

Thomas rolls his tongue, biting on it so he doesn’t give away his laughter.

“When it tastes good,” he allows.

He’s more aware of Newt watching them than he is of Minho’s shifting expression.

“Come here often?”

Thomas loses. He snorts and shakes his head, inhaling the spearmint tang of Minho’s surprise.

Minho blinks but he doesn’t look affronted. He perhaps looks more entertained than before as he pulls all the seductive signals back into himself and snuffs them out. Over at the counter Newt’s head has snapped fully up, expression drawn with keen puzzlement. Thomas forces himself to focus on Minho.

“That’s such a line,” Thomas tells him.

Minho shrugs, now beaming and he laughs, free and gleeful. “Usually all I need,” he says. “How are you….?”

Not affected, he doesn’t quite know how to say.

“Just not attracted to you,” Thomas replies.

Minho laughs harder.

“He’s an Incubus,” Newt calls from the counter (Thomas figures this is either common knowledge or just that it’s no more attention worthy than someone calling ‘clean up on aisle four’ in a supermarket, because no one looks up). “He’s attractive to everyone. He can’t help it. It’s sickening.”

Thomas bites into his tongue harder, figures it’s really not a good idea to call back that he’s rather more intrigued by Newt’s confusing supernatural signature than by Minho’s vibes.

“Even to you?” he asks instead, calling that across the cafe.

Mary pulls a face that seems to indicate she thinks she should have seen this coming and then ducks back into the kitchen.

Newt scrunches up his nose, twisting to face them, propping his elbow on the counter and carefully keeping weight off his left leg. “Not even if he wished me to.”

Minho sniffs, rocking his chair back onto two legs and folding his hands behind his head. He teeters there, completely at ease and says to the ceiling. “I wouldn’t even if you still had wishes. My boyfriend is a literal energy field. It’s sexy as hell.”

“Hell being the operative word,” Newt mutters, but his tone is vibrantly fond.

Minho just beams brighter still and lets the chair crash back upright.

“I’m Minho,” he says, even though they all must know its needless at this point, and he holds out his hand. The only thing Thomas can pick up from him now is a woody, fruit-laced scent and the slightly sour note of what is probably his hair gel. Thomas shakes his hand.

Newt joins them a second later with a fresh plate of cookies that he sets between them all, gently navigating around Thomas’ scattered homework papers.

“Name’s Newt,” he says, also offering his hand to shake.

Thomas likes the subdued feel of him; the way he doesn’t just pour with charged energy and yet Thomas can taste iron in his scent; the hint of something metallic that isn’t the carafe in his bag. He shakes Newt’s hand too.

“Nice to meet you, Tommy,” Newt smirks, drawing up a third chair to the table too small to reasonably fit it.

Thomas feels himself smiling back and closes his laptop.

The Wisps bring them drink refills, and then food, when the time creeps past noon, and then more drinks. Around them the cafe bustles with the daily activity that Thomas has gotten to witness just twice before. But now he’s barely paying attention.

.

“Like a werewolf?” Minho asks four days later.

Thomas left straight after his Wednesday class finished and made his way back to Mary’s Cafe without even stopping to think if this was becoming too much of a habit too fast, or if it was for the right reasons.

Newt and Minho were already there, pulled up around the tiny table in the corner with one seat empty and waiting for him. He fell into it, accepted the mug of hot chocolate with orange and cinnamon that Newt slid across to him and he never looked back.

Thomas hasn’t even gotten his notes out of his bag this time.

He pulls a face at the word werewolf, hedging his answer. “I guess?” he says. “Kind of? I don’t….it’s hard to think of it that way.”

Newt kicks Minho under the table. Its not at all subtle, nor, Thomas thinks, was it designed to be.

“Stop prying,” he says.

“You want to know too,” Minho protests, pouting a little. The entreating expression comes with a thoughtless wash of pheromones and Thomas feels the wolf bristle at the unexpected surge of it. Newt raises a cool eyebrow. Minho’s face twists into apology and the air around them clears as he reels it back in. “Sorry.”

Thomas has already guessed that Minho’s good control and the generally weak push of his chemosignals aren’t down to suppressants, which leaves the other option. And maybe that is wearing off. He doesn’t quite want to say it, though, instead darting a glance at Newt who catches his eye and nods fractionally.

“Its okay,” Thomas says, shrugging his shoulders and giving them something to refocus on. “Anyway it’s just hard to think of it as….a werewolf when it’s just….a wolf.”

Newt looks intrigued despite himself now, head tilting into the conversation and Minho’s slip is forgotten. “How do you mean?”

“Its a wolf. A completely….normal wolf,” Thomas says, a little helpless. He’s never had to really explain this before. “It’s not like I just grow fangs one day a month, or like it even only wakes up or takes over on a full moon. There’s a wolf and its as much as part of me as the human half is and its always there, always awake.”

“Awake how?” Minho asks, around a mouthful of sponge cake that a Wisp has just dropped in his hands. It might have been meant for another table where a suspicious looking man sits (he’s all in grey, a long, gnarled staff leaning against his chair back and a crooked, pointed hat upturned on his lap to hold his overgrown white beard. He doesn’t seem the kind of man you’d want to steal a cake from) but Minho doesn’t seem to notice.

Thomas swallows, fires the man a glance that he hopes is apologetic and continues.

“As in...sometimes it seems dormant and lets me just….do stuff without interfering. Sometimes it sort of takes over a little I guess. I don’t feel the cold; it just lends me its resistance to it without me having to ask. It can pick out things that are dangerous or off even if I’m not too sure why.”

“Can it read supernatural signatures, too?”

Newt’s question is low and deliberate, one he seems to already know the answer to. Thomas nods.

“Does that mean you know what Newt is?” Minho asks, and there’s a kind of caution to his question.

“No,” Thomas offers, somewhat truthfully. “Not really.”

He just has puzzle pieces; the talk of yoghurt pots, chains and wishes, paired with a signature that’s edged in metal and something smoky and indistinct. He tells them this much. “The wolf can’t name something I can’t name; it can just….pick up on more.”

Minho sits back, tipping the chair again like he did the first time they met as he eyes the ceiling with consideration. “So if you don’t call yourself a werewolf...what do you go by?”

“I’m just…. A wolf, too, I guess.”

Newt leans forwards, forearms crossing on the tiny table and Thomas finds himself acutely aware of how Newt’s thumbs press into the soft skin inside his elbows as his fingers tap on the polished wood surface.

“You said ‘not really’,” Newt points out. “But you have all the information, so why not say it?”

Thomas feels the back of his neck heat up a little and he worries at his tongue with his teeth as he tries to find a way to explain-

“Because its yours,” he decides on, a little uselessly. “It’s- you. I didn’t want to just….assume, I guess. And I don’t actually know – I have guesses but I’ve never met- so I just can’t actually know.”

Minho might be rolling his eyes. Thomas isn’t looking away from Newt to check, and he probably couldn’t see it, given the alarming angle Minho is now hovering back at anyway. Newt’s expression is quietly probing, like he’s searching for answers in Thomas’ face and Thomas just doesn’t know if he has them. But then Newt sits back, his shoulders straightening and an arm draping over the back of his chair. His own thumb print blooms, just for a moment, on the pale skin of his arm before it fades away with what might have been the faintest golden shimmer.

“I’m curious,” Newt tells him. “What’s your guess?”

“A Genie,” Thomas says, warily but taking the invite for what it is. “It’s the only reason I can think of that you’d call a jug a lamp. Though it does kind of make me question the yoghurt pot.”

Minho snorts in laughter and his chair catapults backwards, sending him careering into the floor. Two Wisps en-route to distribute refills get so distracted watching him crash down that they collide mid-air. A mug of something brilliantly purple splatters everywhere while the two little spirits start a fuzzy argument near the lampshade.

Newt just shakes his head. Thomas, alarmed, lets his attention be drawn away from Minho’s continued laughter (clearly he’s fine) to see what Newt made of it.

“I prefer Djinn,” Newt says. His face is almost evaluating, the faintest trace of a smile at the edge of his mouth. “But otherwise that’s basically it.”

“Djinn,” Thomas repeats, rolling the name around in his mouth.

“Because he’s a traditionalist,” Minho supplies from the floor, blocked from sight by the table. “Likes to bring it back to the roots of the old myths.”

“And because when enough people call you a Genie it starts to just taste bad in your mouth, however they mean it,” Newt says. Something in his tone comes out poisonous and Thomas can’t help thinking of that metallic trace in his scent.

“Minho said you didn’t have wishes anymore,” Thomas says, very quietly. Probably Newt only just heard him but Minho – whose unique supernatural biology would have evolved to let him hear the racing beat of a human heart – goes quiet and stops moving. “Is that-”

And then he aborts the question.

“Sorry. I didn’t mea-”

“I was set free,” Newt says anyway. Thomas watches the way his throat moves as he swallows. “I didn’t realise that meant losing so much of what I was.”

He lost the ability to grant wishes, that much is clear. He also ended up crippled, somehow, by the chain that had bound him to a lamp. Perhaps that was part of the cost of removing it. Or maybe it went wrong. Maybe he lost even more besides that.

And yet he’s happy; as happy as someone can be when you have to redefine who you are. Thomas knows that in a way that’s deeper than seeing it or using wolf-sense. Newt lost a lot but the freedom was worth the price.

Thomas is wondering exactly what he can say to that when someone stops by their table.

For an instant, Thomas thinks its the grey man about to start a duel over his probably stolen cupcake, but he quickly realises it absolutely isn’t.

This is someone else around their own age, only he’s easily six feet tall, built like a nuclear bomb shelter and radiating warm, skipping energy so vividly that Thomas can almost see the little arcs of kinetic light spidering across his shoulders, down his arms and around his torso. He can’t quite, but it’s an interesting feeling to know so surely that they’re there. The wolf would be able to see them.

The boy’s eyebrows are raised as he looks down at Minho, and then he transfers his gaze to Newt, who gives him a friendly smile.

“Gally,” Newt says. “About time.”

Gally doesn’t reply to that, just leans forward over Minho’s fallen form, murmurs something very quiet to him that Thomas can’t pick up, and then hauls his chair upright. Minho still looks amused when he comes back into view, the echoes of it tasting like spun sugar in the air, but his eyes are softer, coloured with fondness when they catch on Gally.

“Gally, meet Thomas,” Minho says gesturing across the small table. A waft of red wine allure follows the motion and Gally snatches his hand both lightning quick and with a gentleness that belies the corded muscle in his arms. The energy pulsing around him funnels through the point of contact, and Thomas is again struck by how he can almost see it; alive and burning white hot, choking out all trace of the pheromones Minho is shedding off.

Huh.

“Thomas,” Minho continues, and he sounds fine, normal, but his eyes are just faintly glazed, his thumb stroking the inside of Gally’s wrist. “This is my boyfriend, Gally.”

Gally rubs his forehead in what might be exasperation, but there’s a flush rising up his neck and reddening the tips of his ears. It’s actually hard to make out any of his emotions amongst the searing energy crackling around him, but Thomas doesn’t really need to read that to know he’s pleased.

“Nice to meet you,” Thomas says, because although so far very little actual meeting has happened, he’s still pretty sure that this is the truth.

Gally turns his gaze to Thomas, a smile already softening the lines of his face. Its at once a tentative and firmly self-confident thing, and it’s at that moment that Thomas realises Gally didn’t have his eyebrows raised in scepticism, but that they just look like that.

“Welcome to Haven, Thomas,” Gally says sincerely. And then, a touch awkwardly, “I’d-uh- shake your hand but-”

It really needs no explanation.

Thomas tries to wave him off with complete understanding, but he thinks it probably comes out more like a flailing mess. “No, no. That’s-fine.”

Newt visibly has to bite down on a smile. He smells like sugar and bubbles bursting in warm air.

“Are you done for the day?” Minho asks, tugging at Gally’s shirt with his free hand. Gally grabs that too. “Can we go?”

Newt scoffs, utterly unoffended. “Just couldn’t wait to ditch us.”

Minho barely spares him a half-hearted scowl, attention now almost entirely swallowed up by the six-foot-something figure of his boyfriend.

“If your own biology was nagging at you to get laid you’d want to ditch you too,” he remarks evenly.

Gally, though he flushes again, doesn’t exactly protest the point. “We can go,” he agrees. “Just want to say hi to Mary. Come on.”

He tugs on their joined hands, drawing Minho out of his seat and then guiding him across to the counter. Minho goes, bright fondness buzzing up around him.

It’s….nice to see, Thomas thinks, a little wonderingly.

He’s been thankful to stumble across other supernaturals over the years; just two of them when he was still in school, still living under his Aunt’s roof, but a handful more since then; since he followed instincts that might be the wolf’s just as much as his to this university campus hundreds of miles away. Like him, they’ve mostly been living among normal people, in secrecy, and meeting someone else who gets it is a heady feeling but fleeting too. Thomas sometimes wonders whether he’s just gotten too used to existing on his own to ever really know how to be part of a community like this.

He’s never really thought there was anywhere like it, never even contemplated there was another way (which was stupid, he thinks, in hindsight) so there was never space to miss it. Now, watching the way Minho folds himself around Gally, despite the latter’s far broader build, it sparks something in the well of his chest that might be yearning.

People like them get to live like this; open about who and what they are enough that they can find someone to love them for it.

“Sickening, isn’t it?” Newt asks idly, but his tone is heavy with the same abstract wanting that Thomas can feel prickling in his veins.

“Completely,” Thomas agrees, knowing that Newt will hear the actual truth in it.

He thinks he can see this conversation unfolding. He can practically taste salt and charcoal in the foggy question that aches at the back of his throat, and its a question, half-formed, he’s sure he already knows the answer to.

If Newt ever had it. If he had someone else to lean on like that. If it got lonely, if he had been in a time before Safe Haven. Something like that.

So instead, he doesn’t ask it.

He swallows it down, and draws up another just as Gally and Minho wave themselves out, Minho steering Gally by the waist and Gally opening the door for them. Mary ducks back into the kitchen. Five Wisps start flinging cutlery into a tray on the back wall; the ringing sound of metal almost drowning out the murmured conversation from the few tables still occupied.

It’s late in the day. Thomas has been here longer than he planned, but he makes no move to leave yet.

For the first time, it’s just him and Newt and the wanting twists, becomes less abstract as it floods his bloodstream.

“I have a question,” Thomas says, leaning forward and resting his arms on the table. Newt turns to him, expression faintly wary – likely expecting the question that Thomas has already decided to abandon – but he nods.

Thomas tilts his head towards the man in grey who has been there for some hours now and has dozed off with his face pillowed on his hat. “Is that Gandalf?”

Newt blinks. Then he blinks again. Then his expression shatters into laughter, the smile that pulls at his mouth bright and carefree.

“How long do you have, Tommy?” he asks. “I feel like you actually need a tour of the place.”

Thomas is almost entirely sure he has his entire life.

Or. well. Until his two pm class tomorrow, anyway. But it’s a start.

“I’ve got nowhere to be,” he says.

So Newt scoots his chair around the curve of the table, fits it more firmly to Thomas’ side so they are both facing the open cafe floor, shoulders just brushing. The delicate rasp of friction makes Thomas’ nerve endings fizz, even though this feels….strangely normal. Easy. They fetch some more drinks, let a young boy with seaweed in his thick mass of hair (“Baby Kelpie,” Newt supplies. “His name is Chuck.”) take the unused third seat from them and settle in to people watch.

“First up,” Newt says. “Have you ever met Winston?”

.

Newt does show him around Safe Haven.

They walk down the streets, which are mostly wonky little pavements of cobblestones that give way to dusty roads which have no paving at all and melt seamlessly into the woods when they stretch too far from the cluster of shops and homes. There’s a bakery that smells of warm bread, starch and nutmeg from all the way across the street. There’s a tiny bookstore with a plaque underneath a crooked window that says ‘Scorched Bindings’ in chipped gold calligraphy. The spidery cracked lines tracing through the warped pane of glass implies someone might well have actually tried to set it on fire at some point. A little corner flower store is teeming with plants that Thomas is pretty sure don’t actually exist, faeries tending to them with thimbles of water. There’s a general store, a grocers, a carpet shop (with a carpet in the window valiantly protesting as its rolled up for a customer and taped closed) and a nail salon boasting the best manicures for claws.

The Bed and Breakfast above Mary’s is lopsided, dormer windows sticking out at all angles and little add ons clustered against the original brickwork. It looks like a Jenga tower waiting for one wrong move to send it all crashing.

The sky has turned to pink and violet by the time they’ve looped the little town and they’re back at the edge of the woods.

“When are you back?”

Newt speaks to the treeline, not looking up at Thomas, and there’s a careful tone to his voice. Thomas stops, turning directly to face him even though Newt doesn’t so much as flinch to return the gaze.

“Soon,” Thomas says. “I-Whenever I can around classes, probably. I like it here.”

Newt breathes. His weight shifts and Thomas’ gaze jumps down to his damaged leg. He’s kept up the pace easily all around town, not complained once, and all of that just reinforces the belief that this is something that’s long been part of him.

“It’s a good place,” Newt says in reply, still in that strangely careful way.

Thomas frowns a little. He’d like to know what that means, how to get rid of it. The version of Newt who told him about all the regulars dropping through Mary’s hours earlier was free and inviting in a way that this one isn’t.

“What are you thinking?” Thomas finally asks.

Newt blinks, only now looking at him. There’s a gentle flash of surprise in his eyes and then challenge kindles there, a smirk tugging at his mouth. For the first time he looks like someone who could have made a career of twisting the wishes people named so carelessly. There’s no malice in him, but there is mischief; something that’s razor sharp under the surface.

Thomas fleetingly wonders what it might be like to cut himself on this boy.

He says, “I’ll see you around, Tommy.”

Newt’s already walking away – not towards Mary’s, but headed in almost the opposite direction – when Thomas realises Newt never answered.

“I’ll find out,” Thomas calls to his retreating back, the setting sun sliding in gold and lavender hues over his shoulders.

Newt laughs and it doesn’t sound careful.

Chapter 2: July-September

Chapter Text

Weeks start to bleed together.

The summer classes end with a handful of sit-down exams and Thomas gets just eight days of freedom before the fall semester kicks in. He has a room in a student house, so he packs up out of the dorm hall and moves just a ten minute walk away to the little narrow building he’ll be sharing with four other boys. The door opens right onto a cobblestone alley and perches warily at the top of a steep set of brick steps. The rooms are all boxy and smell of cleaning products, years of changing owners and burning sage (the last one thanks to a superstitious business student who had insisted on a different kind of cleansing when they moved in). But Thomas has a room at the front with the single window painted shut and looking down into the weary street. It’s more space and freedom than the dorm halls had been.

And it takes an easy five minutes off of his walk to the woods.

He knows there are four other boys in the house, that they’re decent people, that one of them routinely burns Weetabix (and makes the kitchen smell like charred cardboard for an hour), and that they want him to hang out more.

The thing is, it’s a lot harder than it used to be, back when the normal world was all he knew and burying the wolf inside was like brushing his teeth in the morning. He just….did it. It’s different now, being able to make the easy walk to Safe Haven around his new workload, sit down in Mary’s and feel like he doesn’t have to be careful about who he is.

That’s quickly becoming his favourite place to be. Not just Mary’s either, but the whole town.

Minho is unburdened and always up for something fun, which is somehow how they start racing around the town square. Something about insisting that wolf endurance shouldn’t parallel the stored sexual energy he runs on. So they race a lot. Minho occasionally gets too close to the edge and starts spilling pheromones during conversation (he once made a young Dryad proposition him when they were passing the flower shop) but Newt has perfected the art of texting Gally to retrieve him long before Thomas met them.

...

“Is it difficult?” Thomas asks Minho one day, laying on the grass by the stone gazebo, still out of breath from nine laps around the square. “Being what you are when you’re around normal people?”

“Sometimes,” Minho replies between his own gasps for air. “They can’t detect it, they just know their bodies suddenly really want something and they listen. And I know I’m charming but its not-- they can’t consent, really, can they? It’s why I’m happier here; everyone knows and they understand that sometimes I just can’t...”

And then Minho shifts, exhaling laughter into the sky. “Besides, if that part of me is starved it can take a lot,” he says, full of innuendo. “And humans just can’t keep up. I swear; Lesbian Succubi have it easier but for me it kind of sucks. Once. Literally. Told you having a boyfriend who runs on self-generated energy is sexy as hell.”

Thomas is laughing, probably blushing too, but already all too used to Minho’s easy way of sharing intimate details to be truly bothered. That’s when a shadow falls over him and when he looks up Newt is blotting out the sun, eyebrows raised and wicked smile playing at his mouth. Thomas forgets what they were even talking about until much later.

...

Gally works at the carpenters the other side of town. When he isn’t working he’s either making out with Minho enough to shatter the bulbs in lamp posts or idly making daisy chains while he listens to them talk or watches them race. When he is working he’s carrying entire logs around with his bare hands or else crafting anything from sturdy troll dining tables to tiny pixie bunk beds. He seems laid back and happy, when he isn’t screaming at customers to get out of the shop (who knew an acorn delivery could go wrong?), but Thomas has seen him smiling and laughing rather less than he’s seen him intensely sceptical or outright annoyed.

...

“Its his eyebrows,” Newt supplies, when Thomas comments on this. “He can’t help looking annoyed.”

Newt leans across Thomas to grab a tin of canned tomatoes from the shelf in the general store because on this day, he’s joined them in food shopping for reasons he can’t comprehend. He lets Newt lean over him though, rather than helpfully stepping back; why give that up?

“Not true,” Minho throws into the conversation, appearing with a bag of rice. “He was a government secret and they exploited what he could do. He smiles a lot more than he used to.”

Thomas is not sure if its true or not; sometimes he can taste the truth but it’s much more about the feelings of the person who’s saying it. Minho delivers this so off-hand that Thomas just can’t tell. But he figures if it is, then Gally has a right to look annoyed most of the time.

...

Still, while Gally can glare hard enough to make water freeze (probably literally), he softens around Minho in a way that still makes Thomas ache in that abstract way. Gally doesn’t talk about himself much. Mostly he leaves that to Minho, though given the way certain information is very bluntly skirted around in his many anecdotes, it’s clear they know each other’s boundaries distinctly.

...

“Its sickeningly healthy,” Newt says of it, when the three of them have walked down to the Carpentry to coax Gally into joining them for a race again. The theory is if he runs on energy then physics says he could just…..keep going indefinitely. Minho’s pheromones being a little close to the edge might be responsible for deciding to test it today, but the science has its merits.

Thomas leans himself against the table that Newt is perched on in the woodshop, carefully and – he hopes – subtly, sliding his weight into Newt’s knee. They’ve been walking a bit today and he’s overly conscious of Newt compensating for the limp even if he’d never say anything.

“It’s cute,” Thomas corrects.

Newt snigg*rs, turning a glance down at him that is unexpectedly so fond that it makes Thomas’ heart flip over. Newt shifts, and then his fingers stroke at the back of Thomas’ neck. The touch is cool but it burns hot and Thomas has to forcibly bite down on a shudder that rattles his spine. The wolf presses against his ribs, claws digging into his lungs and he wants-

“You say that now,” Newt says. His hand is gone as quickly as it was there. “Wait til they’re screamed at for public indecency again.”.

...

So Minho is great fun, Gally is complicated and quiet but Thomas likes him. Newt….

Newt is a spectrum; sharing easily facets of himself in one moment and then watching Thomas with that careful, keen look in the next, saying nothing like he wants to know if Thomas can guess.

And he’s been right before. He guessed what Newt was, worked out that he had some less than upstanding owners before he was freed, and he knows that there is more to that freedom than simply unclasping a chain. He’s guarded because he’s learned to be; that he probably wielded wishes like armour to keep himself safe.

The thing is that the more Thomas does learn, the more he only wants to guess one thing and he’s not particularly bothered if he’s right or not. He just wants permission to find out.

.

It’s a little unclear who's upset who first but all Thomas knows is that inside of seventeen seconds, the water Nymph’s outraged shrieks have completely shorted out and the pond water she’s been dripping has gone icy. Gally’s annoyed energy (apparently it really can freeze liquids) sucks all the warmth out of the cafe. Four Wisps blink and vanish, dropping all manner of things in their wake, two of which are fully frozen cups of ice tea which is apparently a bit too literal for the Gnomes who’d ordered them.

Gally’s glare is a fearsome thing, now starting to make the lights flicker, too. Thomas feels the wolf inside him rise up, burning brightly under the double fur coat it lends to him. He sees his own breath mist in the suddenly frigid air but doesn’t feel it.

Three minutes later and the Nymph possibly has hypothermia, now standing on a newly formed pond ice-rink, icicles glittering along her arms, jaw and from even her ears like pretty strings of Christmas lights. Thomas would say her lips being blue and her skin tinted grey were worrying signs but she looked like that when she arrived.

Mary plugs in a hairdryer and turns it up full blast, holding it out over the Nymph while starting to count receipts. Minho, teeth chattering just a little, gets up and slowly approaches Gally, almost like he doesn’t want to spook a deer.

Newt- Newt is freezing.

He’s hunched forwards over the table, arms folded, thumbs pressing into the crease of his elbows tightly and he’s shivering. His skin is almost colourless other than the seconds that a hapless silvery sheen flares and then dies at the hollow of his throat. He’s watching Thomas with that evaluating expression. This is one that Thomas can guess; he’s cold, very cold but he’s not going to say a word about it.

Newt’s eyebrow quirks just a little. Why not?

And that part Thomas isn’t so sure of. Newt really doesn’t complain about discomfort at all. Is it because he’s endured it before, worse? Or is it because he’d never hold an explosion of magic like this against someone. Has he maybe endured his own equivalent, or worse?

But he also realises that it doesn’t matter that he’s not sure why. It’s not important.

Thomas lifts his discarded sweater off the back of his chair and leans over.

“Take it,” he says, quietly.

Newt takes it.

Minho leads Gally outside. The rattling iciness in the air settles into something more like winter-day than stuck-in-a-freezer and that’s when Newt turns to him. He’s pulled on the sweater, and though Newt is taller, Thomas is broader in the shoulders; the soft fabric swamps him, just a bit, pooling around his wrists and gathered in folds around his collarbones.

Thomas tries hard not to think about his scent pressing into the back of Newt’s neck.

“Don’t you get cold?” Newt asks.

Thomas shrugs. Good; a question. This is better to focus on. “I can. I have. When I’m really tired, or sick, or when its really cold for too long. But otherwise….the wolf kind of lends me its fur.”

“Thanks,” Newt says softly, then he frowns. “So the fur is….what? There? Right now?”

Thomas turns his arms over, looking at them and trying to see his own skin like someone else would; the veins tracing the backs of his hands, the freckles and moles dotted like stars left out of a constellation.

“In a way,” he settles on.

Newt reaches to him tentatively, and yet there’s purpose in the motion when he commits to it, two fingers just pressing into the smooth skin of Thomas’ forearm.

There’s no golden wash, so either Newt has to be a lot firmer or its something that his skin does, not something he causes. But it’s an absent thought; a fragment of an answer to a question that’s still waiting for the rest. Thomas is more preoccupied with the violently cold burn of Newt’s fingerprints on his skin, and the way the wolf resting just out of reach whines, hating it.

It seems like a perfect excuse to fold Newts hands into his but Thomas doesn’t do it. He lets Newt draw back, eyes sharp as ever even though his breath still mists the air. The hairdryer is still going and the Nymph’s ice rink is melting back into pond water. The Wisps are on clean up duty, three carrying soaking sponges back and forth that drip just as much water as they’re picking up.

“Are you warm, or is the wolf?” Newt asks.

Thomas chews on his tongue. “We’re the same, so both. Could you grant wishes? Or the Djinn?”

Newt’s eyes flicker; understanding and pleasant surprise mixed with a darkly burning something just on the edge of undefinable. “Point taken.”

Thomas leaves the sweater with him that night.

He almost says ‘you know where I live’ when Newt offers it back, but he realises that’s not quite true. He knows of the student house, but Thomas has never really stopped to explain where it is, or what it looks like, or who else inhabits it. He doesn’t think of those things at all when he’s in Haven, and they haven’t asked. Instead he says, “I’ll be back anyway.”

Newt looks considering for a second, and then nods, zips up the sweater again and buries his hands into the pockets even though they’re in the late afternoon sunshine. Thomas isn’t too sure whether he or the wolf is more happy about it when he gets back to the student house and it really sinks in that Newt will smell like him until he showers it off. It’s possessive, and not his right, but Newt knows what he is; he knows what the wolf means and what it can sense, and still he kept wearing it. There’s consent in that.

.

The next day he’s back in Haven early, meeting Newt and Minho at the edge of the woods to help Gally move a bunch of uncut logs before he has to run back for his late morning class. His borrowed sweater is nowhere in sight and the early Fall day is crisp but bright. And yet...even this close to the woods where the air is thick with mulch, sap and chlorophyll starting to break down, Thomas can still smell wolf on Newt’s skin.

There’s careful mischief in Newt’s face when he looks over at Thomas but he doesn’t say a word. There could be lots of reasons; forgetting to scrub hard enough in the shower is one. It’s not like they can actually tell for themselves, none of them have the sense of smell to detect a transferred scent like that. Maybe it’s because the part of Newt that’s laced with Djinn magic likes sly humour and exploiting emotions...or maybe it was deliberate in a way that’s not a joke, or exploitative.

Thomas knows which guess he’d rather it was, and it means there’s still just one thing that he wants an answer to with no care for what it is.

He figures it’s probably only a matter of time before he caves and asks Newt what he tastes like.

.

The next time that Thomas meets Winston, he’s peering through the window at Mary’s and very ineffectually trying to use his slim build to block all view of the enormous creature on a leash behind him.

Thomas blinks. Mary, over by the counter, slams a pot of coffee down.

“No,” she says. Her head shakes emphatically and she makes a jabbing motion at the animal.

Maybe her voice travels through the closed door, maybe it doesn’t. Thomas has never been yelled at by her before and is not really on his bucket list. Either way, Winston seems to get it.

He shakes his head, waving his arms in something that might be designed to placate her. He might be surrendering. Or trying to take off. It’s unclear. But then he ties the leash around one of the posts outside the shop and pushes open the door.

The creature he’s left outside is ….a Chimera, Thomas thinks. It’s a mismatched, ugly thing and with the huge lion’s head and thick mane counterbalanced only by a reedy snake-like tail, it looks like running too fast would make it topple right over on its oversized cloven goat-hooves. It seems a little less than impressed, turning a circle (getting itself coiled in the leash) then throwing itself down on the pavement. Beside it, three broomsticks all floating serenely and tethered by their own leashes, skitter sideways in a panic to give the animal some room.

“What did you do?” Mary demands before Winston can open his mouth.

“He was being hunted just a couple hundred miles south of here,” Winston says, face pulling into a deep pout. “He’s only a cub – what was I meant to do?”

A cub, Thomas thinks in mild horror. It’s easily the size of a white Ford Transit. But he shoves that thought aside. Its orphaned, and maybe he’s being….Chimera-ist?

Mary sighs, shakes her head and tells Winston to sit.

Less than fourteen seconds later the door to the cafe bathrooms (yes, the bathrooms) flies open and a boy Thomas has never seen before stumbles out. He’s got dark skin and a very slight shape. He’s almost entirely consumed by a black garment with folds that seem to be either formed from vapour or dripping like tar (perhaps both at once). He keeps shoving the oversized sleeves up, heedless of the way they smoke faintly as he finds his feet and dusts off.

Then he reaches back into the bathroom and pulls forward a scythe almost twice his height. Its gleaming silver, welded to the dead black handle with what look like real bird skulls, and the arc of it is wickedly sharp. It bashes the ceiling as he grapples it out.

Mary yelps.

A man in a smock and studying Tarot cards faints clean off his chair leaving the Death one face up in his half-eaten soup.

Thomas is kind of surprised he doesn’t scream or faint as well, too busy choking on the mouthful of hot chocolate he’s just taken and still reeling from the Chimera.

“NO!” Mary shouts, brandishing the coffee pot in the direction of the….Reaper? He must be. “Jeff! I’ve told you before not to bring that Scythe in here. How did you even-”

“I’m sorry!” The boy – Jeff – bursts, hurriedly trying to scramble for the front door and not trip over his death robe or the passed out man in the process. The Scythe cuts a gouge in the ceiling, a dusting of plaster raining down into a Gnome’s bee salad. “I told you I only just got my provisional licence. Gateways to the afterlife are hard – I didn’t mean to come back in your sink.”

He hauls open the door and flings the Scythe outside.

A handful of the patrons gathered in the cafe breathe easier, although not a little group of old women in the corner playing Mahjong who have barely looked up at all. Outside the three broomsticks swoon, dipping on their ties and the Chimera makes a hissing noise like a snake being stretched out and shears its leash clean through the post as it takes off towards the woods.

“Oh no,” Winston mourns, deflating helplessly against the table.

Jeff quails in the doorway, wincing as he turns back around. A Wisp drops a cream cake into Thomas’ bag, struck dumb in the air with shock.

“Oops?”

Mary looks a hair away from having steam billow from her nostrils. In fact, Thomas isn’t entirely sure what she even is, but now he’s genuinely wondering if she’s a dragon. Before she can say anything, Newt appears in the doorway.

“Oh, hey, Jeff,” he says. “Up or down this time?”

Jeff swallows, doesn’t take his eyes off Mary and says in a mildly strangled voice, “Up. Nice old man. How are you?”

Newt’s eyes dart between Jeff and Mary, and then skip over to Thomas’ usual corner. Thomas smirks in silent greeting and watches Newt try to bite back an involuntary smile in response.

“Good that,” Newt nods. “Um. Well...hope you had a good trip-”

“I appeared in the sink.”

Newt’s eyebrow lifts. “Is it still on the wall?”

Jeff nods. Mary looks a fraction less murderous.

“Improvement then,” Newt decides. “Good talk. Tommy-”

Thomas doesn’t even need him to ask. He’s already shoving his notes back into his bag, carefully removing the cream cake first, and sliding up away from the table.

“Thomas, Jeff. Jeff, Thomas,” Newt introduces speedily when they’re all in the doorway.

“Nice to meet you,” Thomas says, a little bit on autopilot.

“Same to you,” Jeff says, still fixed solid under Mary’s glare.

“Alright, well, that’s enough of that for one day, then,” Newt decides. “Good luck.”

And he reaches out, takes Thomas’ wrist and tugs him away from the cafe.

Chapter 3: September-October

Chapter Text

Three days later, Thomas meets Frypan.

He arrives through the woods only to find Newt waiting for him, leaning on a low stone wall that curves around the edge of a little bungalow half strangled with ivy and snapping dragon plants. The early morning is a little cool but bright, sunbeams gilded as they spill across Newt’s quiet, peaceful expression and down over his shoulders.

“Come with me?” Newt asks.

It’s not until they actually pass Mary’s (and the two Gnomes outside with a wheelbarrow and several cans of paint) that Thomas realises-

“We’re not going to Mary’s?”

Newt smirks, biting at his lips to try to contain it even though he smells faintly of spun sugar amusem*nt. He glances back at the cafe and says, “She’s been arguing with the Gnomes about plaster repair since six.” He gives Thomas a sparking look of mischief, continuing on and offers, “But if you want to-”

“No, no,” Thomas hastens, hurrying to fall back in step with him. “I’m good. Where are we going?”

Newt turns his smile up to the morning sunlight. “You’ll see.”

They steer clear of the cafe and instead Thomas finds himself following Newt around Haven, dropping into numerous shops and homes. They take groceries to an Ogre living in a little pink house with begonias outside the front door, they clear a few imps out from behind a Harpy’s sofa and get given a handful of birdseed each in thanks. (“Why do you think she always has Imp Infestations?” Newt asks, rhetorically and exasperatedly as they throw the handfuls into the bird bath on the way out the garden gate). They take some sleeping powder down to a family of trolls who’s lawn has started waking up again and rearranging itself.

Then finally Newt leads them into the general store and the customer services counter at the far end.

The boy stood behind it, bopping along to the store’s music without a care has dark skin and the brightest smile, his dense hair thick at the top of his head and sheared down the sides. He smells like cooking oil, herbs and warm bread and seems to be a whole lot of carefree delight bundled in an apron.

“Newt!” He calls when he sees them coming. “I have a new recipe; I’m thinking I’ll try it out on Saturd- oh hey. You’re Thomas, right?”

Thomas nods. Newt shoots Frypan a warning look and this – Thomas figures there’s two probable reasons and he’d rather it was because Newt’s mentioned him than because Newt thinks he shouldn’t be spooked.

“I’m Frypan,” the boy says, reaching over and seizing Thomas’ hand. His smile is blinding. “It’s great to meet you, Thomas.” Then he darts a look at Newt and starts explaining his new recipe with a series of elaborate hand gestures.

Its possibly the most ordinary initial meeting Thomas has ever been a part of and he’s left wondering if it’s appropriate to ask him what he is. The wolf doesn’t help. His apron smells like leather, there’s the trace of coconut shampoo from his hair and the rest of him is ingredients and human. But its climbing steadily into September now and the wolf hasn’t been guarded around Newt for a long time so it curls up under his heart and its drowsy ease washes through Thomas’ veins. He’s alone in this, apparently.

Even though the wolf is almost always alert in the world he leaves behind most days, it doesn’t even occur to him to worry as it goes quiet and peaceful right now.

But it turns out this is the same day that he meets Zart.

(He’s heard the name before, only in passing. Gally complaining about his shipments with Minho cackling away and sharing pictures of newly made wooden chairs covered in thick moss and flowers that don’t exist.

“He’s a friend,” Newt had said of it, watching Minho fold himself around an irate Gally and murmur to him until his expression twisted with unwilling appeasem*nt. “He and Gally sort of….work together. Sometimes.”

Which hadn’t exactly explained or cleared anything up, but Thomas was distracted by the rather more pressing matter of Newt stretching flat out on the green under the sun beside him. He still thinks he could see gold dust on his skin that afternoon).

But now there’s a boy with bleached blond hair striding towards them down the tinned foods aisle, a beaming smile spread from ear to ear and his cheeks ruddy as he lifts a hand and waves.

“POCKETS!” Frypan shouts.

The boy’s hand shoots into the tunnel pocket of his hoodie so fast Thomas is a little surprised he doesn’t dislocate his shoulder. And then he’s more surprised by the thick curling creepers and lichen that seem to be growing out of the pocket. They’re latched into the worn fibres of the hoodie, twisting around the openings and spiralling down in little ringlets, leaves still unfurling towards light. His pocket is….growing.

“Hey, Zart,” Newt says when he reaches them. “Haven’t germinated anything so far, then?”

“At least I didn’t forget in the vegetable aisle,” Zart replies, sharing with them a little twist of his mouth that reads a lot like ‘oops’.

Frypan’s expression narrows. “Four crates of oranges, Zart. I had to get Winston in here with a chainsaw to cut down the trees. Brenda offered to burn them but-”

Newt turns to Thomas at this point as Frypan tapers off into silence.

“Zart is a Dryad,” he says. “It’s kind of seasonal; worse in the spring and summer.”

Zart seems to notice Thomas then, and his eyes shine (that might have even been an unnatural burst of green) as they skip from Newt, to Thomas and back again. “Yeah, its slowing up now. A few more weeks and I won’t need to carry around the pruning shears.”

Thomas blinks.

Frypan leans around him to hand Zart an oven mitt. This old, thickly padded glove also has browning and brittle remnants of creepers curled at the opening, but Zart takes it and sticks his right hand in before extending it to Thomas. Bemused and frankly beyond surprise much now, Thomas shakes it.

“Thomas,” he says.

“I know,” Zart replies. “Glad to finally meet you but I have to be quick. I was just sent to get a few things and then I have to get back to the others.”

“Boundary Day?” Frypan asks.

“Boundary Day,” Zart agrees.

Frypan ducks under the counter and reappears with a full basket load of herbs, three pale green pillar candles, seven flat rocks (one of which sighs heavily as its set under the light of the store), and twelve pastry brushes.

“Wh-” Thomas half asks, running out of steam as he eyes the collection.

Zart picks up the hamper with his protected hand. The vines in his hoodie pocket have started to flower. One of the rocks shoves another into a candle.

“The reason Safe Haven is actually safe is because a group of us were able to get together to set up a boundary through the woods,” Zart explains. “It takes a fair bit of work and has to be maintained twice a year. Dryad magic keeps the veil strong so that people like us can find it but Normans are repelled away.”

“Normans?” Thomas asks, diverted.

“Normal Humans,” Frypan shrugs. “Normans.”

That….sure. Why not.

Zart smiles and tips his head towards the basket in thanks. “Gotta redo it before Fall is here and we’re all too dormant to generate enough magic. Thanks, Fry. Nice to meet you, Thomas!”

Thomas finds himself responding likewise before he’s consciously thought it through and Zart is striding back down the shop towards the exit.

He’s almost there before he trips on a vine curled around his sneaker and knocks into a bin of baguettes that all promptly sprout a mossy coating and swell up like angry pufferfish. He wheels away from it, basket swinging alarmingly, one of the rocks screaming, and Zart reeling apologies as he clatters into a candy jar. It promptly topples and shatters on the floor despite his best attempts to catch it with his only free hand.

The liquorice all-sorts burst in every direction, flowers and lichen bursting up on their surfaces, creepers streaming like kite strings and leaving trails of fresh grass in their wake.

Zart freezes. Newt sighs.

The snack food aisle looks like someone has very hastily started creating a wooded grove in the middle and run out of steam halfway through. There’s real grass thick around the fallen jar and traversing outward in a spiky explosion pattern to where all the sweets have come to rest. Four toadstools are already an impressive size, stood guarding the broken glass. A vine tentatively reaches for the lowest shelf and a box of chocolate wafers.

“Clean up to Aisle Seven,” Frypan calls to thin air. “Zart!”

“I’m sorry!” Zart shouts back, already moving again, dashing a beeline for the exit.

Zart leaves. Six brooms march past the customer service desk and Frypan points them at the aisle. A dustpan and brush swoop through the air in their wake like two magpies in a summer sky and holding up the rear is a huge pair of hedge trimmers that snap their way along like a frog swimming.

“Gently,” Frypan instructs them. “Don’t let them get the wafers; they go up the fastest. And save the toadstools; I’ll sell those to the faeries. Keep the bread too; Trolls will pay extra for the moss.”

“Come on,” Newt says quietly, and Thomas starts at the murmur right by his ear. “Let’s go.”

He’s not complaining. Its getting later and he needs to leave soon but he thinks he’s seen enough of this for one day.

“I’ll catch you later,” Newt says in parting as Frypan directs the cleanup crew.

“Saturday,” Frypan reminds him. “You’re welcome too, Thomas!”

Thomas thanks him even if he’s not sure what it is he’s welcome to. They head down the household aisle and out the front door while one of the brooms bends over to prod at a toadstool.

(“What exactly….is Frypan?” Thomas asks Newt as they wind their way up towards the woods. Zart’s already long gone from view.

“Telekinetic,” Newt tells him. “Kind of. But arguably his best power is being able to cook literally anything.”)

.

Being at university feels more black and white than ever as the semester powers through its first month. There’s an instant when one of his professors drops a stack of papers in the auditorium and Thomas expects Frypan to open the door and send in an army of brooms and staplers to clean it all up. He gets lax with concealing himself; leaving the house later and running most of the way to his classes without feeling the strain of it. He enjoys the freedom, the way the wolf snaps in glee through his bones, itches to run itself.

(“When’s the last time?” Newt asked him once, a few days before. It’s still just warm enough to sit out in the square, the sun gentle and Thomas reclining in the grass after racing Minho. But Minho left and it’s only them, Newt sitting against the stone gazebo as the breeze ripples with the slow approach of Fall.

“Maybe the week after I met you and Minho?” Thomas speculates. “Its happy, though. It-being here is peaceful for it in a way the real world isn’t. I can’t feel it scraping at my skin so much since I started coming here.”

Newt’s eyes are on him, dark and considering. “Does it….hurt?”

“Not really. Both of them are me. It’s just….strange, I guess. It aches, sometimes.”

“To Shift or not to?”

“Both.”

“Why don’t you do it more?” Newt’s frowning, the tang of something uncertain in the space between the words. He wonders if Thomas is afraid of what he is.

It’s far from it.

“Because the wolf doesn’t care so much about classes and homework,” Thomas says. There’s other things it doesn’t care about, too. “It’s concerned with concealment only a little more than a real wolf is; it is me, but it’s….different. I don’t care so much when I’m like that even though I know I should. It’s like being free, and human things don’t matter in the same way.”

He used to shift a lot more a couple of years before; barely even realised he was skipping classes and sleeping late, disappearing without notice until the dorm-warden intervened. So he started doing it only during holidays. And then he had decided to take summer classes and graduate early. Apparently even a few hundred miles was still too close to his Aunt when she knew where he was.

But then he found Mary’s, and he met Newt, and Minho, Gally, and the others. And the wolf wasn’t quite so loud any more.

He tells Newt all of that, too.

“Can I-” Newt starts to ask, and then stops, but Thomas knows what the question is. The wolf hums in his blood, preening and bright.

“See it?” Thomas finishes for him.

Newt’s expression is focused and still, eyes sharp as ever. His thumb presses against his mouth, shimmers with gold. Thomas wonders how hard he presses to do that. How hard he’d have to be kissed for Thomas to taste gold dust.

“Yes,” Newt says.

Thomas sits up. The wolf stretches up his spine, feels closer to the surface, wanting.

“As soon as there’s a break in classes,” Thomas promises).

But for now, this, running in human form all over campus when it barely tires him is a fraction of that freedom. It makes him feel like Minho is almost around. In the same way that classmates dropping pens makes him think of Wisps and the campus dog-walkers remind him of Winston. He thinks he sees Newt everywhere even though none of them have ever come through the woods with him.

.

It’s the first of October and Thomas is at his usual table in Mary’s.

He’s not too certain what Minho and Newt actually do. Newt seems to drift around all kinds of jobs but Thomas has never actually seen Minho work. He has a paper he has to finish in two days, so Newt tells Minho to either help or leave. Minho opts to help, which for about four minutes consists of reading Thomas’ notes out loud and offering suggestions on which bits are nonsense. After that Newt snatches them back and pokes him every time Minho so much as opens his mouth.

So Thomas is actually getting work done for once. It’s an interesting change, even though he itches to watch the cafe or Newt instead. Newt is reading Thomas’ hand scrawled notes silently while he types away on the laptop and after a few sideways glances at the closed textbook, Thomas hands it to him. Its….nice, even if he thought he’d be up until the early hours when he was back at the student house trying to actually write it.

And then someone new ducks into the cafe.

The wind is picking up; summer’s gentle spirals of pollen-scented breeze are being replaced with prickly drafts that aim for all the crevices of a room and smell like skeleton leaves and running out of time (running out of time has always had a distinct musky scent). The door snaps quickly shut on it but the girl standing there doesn’t look cold at all. She has no jacket. She’s wearing a black, thin t-shirt that has a graphic of a hand flipping someone off and it somehow matches the choppy cut of her dark hair that just brushes her shoulders. A belt is slung low around her hips with what looks like an aerosol can or tiny foghorn holstered into it.

“Oh, this should be good,” Minho says, which is the first thing he’s said in probably an hour, which is also probably a record. “Brenda!”

The girl swings around to look at them and she hesitates just a second before striding their way.

“Hey,” she says when she reaches them. Her voice is just a little smoky, like she’s been breathing in over an open fire for a while, but it comes out brisk. Thomas immediately feels like she is someone you wouldn’t want to mess around. “Any of you seen Winston?”

They all shake their heads.

Brenda’s eyes are inky as they catch Thomas’ and her head tilts. “Thomas, right?”

He nods.

“Heard a lot about you,” she says, and then is straight back to her purpose, “Do any of you know where he is?”

“Sorry,” Newt offers. “The Farm?”

Thomas knows enough by now to know that the Farm is the rescue operation that Winston runs for all the creatures he keeps finding. Thomas doesn’t know whether its an official rescue or if he’s just acquiring pets, but that always seemed like a question left for a better time.

“Checked,” Brenda dismisses. She sounds aggravated. Minho sits up a whole lot straighter in his chair.

“How long have you been looking?”

“About an hour,” she huffs. There are embers in her eyes. Thomas isn’t too sure how he thought of Mary as dragon-like before. In just a few words and barely a minute of knowing Brenda, something about her seems far more likely to actually go up in flames. “God what the hell has he found now? Jorge is going to lose half the books at this rate.”

The name Jorge rings a bell, Thomas sliding his eyes across to Newt who’s already anticipating it.

“Yeah, he owns Scorched Bindings.” He’s already talking to Brenda again, “What do you mean ‘half the books’? What happened?”

“We have a Boggart,” Brenda says, the same way someone might say ‘we have mice’. “Traps piss them off so we were trying to just….encourage it to leave but then this morning we came down and it’s literally torn the new covers off of seven books and started eating the contents page of one of Jorge’s old poetry collections.”

With each word she gets more irate and then without warning the corner of Thomas’ textbook catches light.

As in….actual fire.

Minho snatches it and dunks it out in a half cold cup of chai tea.

“Thanks,” Newt says dryly.

“Sorry,” Brenda winces, but there’s still a crackling edge to her voice and Thomas can’t help thinking of fire metaphors now; specifically logs cracking under licks of flame. “Where’s Jeff?”

“Down, I think,” Minho says. “Drunk driver.”

“How are you meant to keep track of him if his boyfriend is always hanging out in the Afterlife,” Brenda mutters, though it doesn’t really sound like a question.

“I don’t really think he’s ‘hanging out’,” Newt contributes, but Brenda doesn’t appear to be listening.

She leans over them, palms flat on the table (which starts to blacken and smoke almost instantly) and smiles in a way that flares hot with bad ideas.

Behind her, a row of plates on the counter catch fire, flames seeking upwards in twisting lashes like cobra strikes. Everyone in the cafe reaches under their seats and pulls out a shining silver fire-retardant blanket like a crash has just been announced on an aeroplane. They fix them around their shoulders, parents adjusting before helping their children, and then resume their meals and conversations. The cafe smells of charred ceramic, burned sandwiches and idle exasperation.

Evidently this is somewhat of a normal occurrence. Looking at Brenda, still smiling at them in that scalding way, Thomas can believe it.

Minho snags the aerosol can from her belt (not an aerosol, he realises; a fire extinguisher) and calmly sprays it at the plates, leaning his head on his other fist.

“What are you cooking?”

Brenda shrugs. “Want to help us chase out a Boggart?”

Thomas is already putting away his things.

He can finish a paper in the student house. He can’t exactly chase away a Boggart anywhere else.

.

So that’s how he meets Jorge properly.

They step into the book store which is a tumultuous mess of loose pages, torn covers and ripped bindings. Stacks of books teeter up from the floor and all available surfaces and yet more cluster against the walls, filling every sliver of space there is. They’re lined along windowsills, arranged up the stairs leaving just the very edge by the banister free to walk on, piled underneath the steps, on top of lamps and under chairs. One such chair is actually raised three inches off the floor by books and the cushion on it is peering worriedly (and sightlessly) over the arm, judging with some trepidation the drop to the ground.

Stale crackers with bits of mouldy cheese are everywhere, almost overpowering the smell of aged parchment and leather. It’s not quite enough, though to blot out the stronger, addicting scents of a recently snuffed out wick and stories falling out of pages.

“They repel Boggarts,” Brenda shrugs when she catches Thomas eyeing one of the crackers in alarm.

“Brenda?” A voice calls from the back room. Or, it’s probably a back room. The shop is a low-ceilinged rabbit warren of a building; tiny sections connected with wonky archways and literal holes in the walls.

“Here,” Brenda replies. “No one’s seen Winston. But Newt and Minho are here. And Thomas.”

Newt shoots Brenda a narrow look which she neatly ignores. There’s an interesting weight to the way she says his name and Thomas finds himself wondering a little more and more about exactly how it is everyone here seems to know him before he meets them.

Jorge appears in a doorway. He looks regal despite the somewhat shabby appearance, standing tall with the collar of his jacket upturned. His dark skin looks weathered and there’s silver in his hair and beard, but intelligence is a knife-like snap in his eyes; eyes that seem to match Brenda’s in a way that isn’t genetic but something far greater.

He’s holding a half eaten poetry book close to his chest and a burnished gold pocket watch is open in his palm. He snaps it closed and in the same instant the shop washes with that heady smell of a lit match; thick and rich, the heart of an uncurling flame. Warmth billows out from all the ceiling lights and handfuls of the assorted lamps and oil burners clustered on tables and shelves.

Jorge is a firestarter too.

Having all the lighting in a bookshop sourced by open flame seems either entirely reckless or entirely awesome, perhaps both at once. Jorge certainly seems far more in control than Brenda, at any rate.

(“He’s teaching me,” Brenda tells him, hours later. “But its hard. Fire listens to your heart, not your head.”

Brenda is not, yet, allowed to control the shop lighting).

So Thomas gets introduced to Jorge while they hunt the shop for the Boggart, wafting stale crackers into all the hiding places and then toppling piles of books as they manage to chase it out.

“Where will it go?” Minho asks, panting just a little as they watch it race down the street, spitting angry curses in Boggartese at them as it goes.

Brenda shrugs. “There’s a retired Leprechaun who lives down by the Ogres. He has three Boggarts; this one will probably go there.”

And that’s that.

Thomas gets back to the student house only a little later than he planned, and he’s up only a little later than that finishing the paper. He can’t stop looking at the blackened and sodden corner of his textbook as he falls asleep in the dark. It smells awful; wet charcoal and cold tea, but it’s comforting anyway. He doesn’t even care that he might have to explain it; it’s the first real proof he’s brought back with him that Safe Haven exists.

Chapter 4: October Part 1

Chapter Text

On a Sunday afternoon Thomas drops back into Mary’s after he and Minho have tried sprinting not just around the square, but all the way down to Gally’s woodshop and back. He leaves Minho outside in the biting weather, probably getting heartburn and heads directly for Newt, who’s sat at the counter instead today.

Thomas has noticed his leg acting up a little as the cold grows claws and he doesn’t come out with them as much when he and Minho are just racing each other up and down. Thomas doesn’t want to give it up; he loves laughing with Minho, loves feeling the wolf breathe and flex through the rapid beat of his heart. Even the chilly air that tastes of damp wood and broken leaves lingers in the lungs he shares with the apex predator under his skin.

(The promise he made to Newt, to show him the wolf presses ever more insistently, a vibrating, blazing anticipation.

He’s not afraid. It never even occurred to him to be afraid. The wolf started calling them Pack a long time ago, before Thomas could even realise).

But he does miss quietly existing with Newt in those same moments. So now, raced out, he seeks him out.

He tries to shake it off a little, tries to subdue the way the wolf is still quick in his veins as he drops onto the seat beside Newt. Its not working, senses on adrenaline come-down. The red ceramic of the mug in front of them is almost pulsing, there’s heat rising from the chai tea in swirling ripples that shouldn’t be visible to a human eye, and Thomas can practically taste the gold dust on Newt’s skin as he rubs the back of his neck and then presses his thumbs into the insides of his elbows. He smells like caution; the acrid tang of it smarting at Thomas’ senses, and his smile is delayed when he realises Thomas is there.

“Tommy, hey,” he says, voice snagging just a little.

Opposite them, Mary moves away and goes to distribute coffee.

Thomas isn’t sure if he’s really allowed but he suddenly finds himself not caring and reaches out to prise Newt’s fingers off of his arms. His wrists are slim, but strong, like his bones are cast iron, and Thomas is fascinated by the way Newt’s pulse flutters under his thumb; a hummingbird’s heartbeat. Newt blinks, apparently equally entranced, and Thomas has to force himself not to press down just a tiny bit harder, to see if he can make that gold shimmer appear.

“Newt?” Thomas asks instead, hoping that pressing on with his question will ground him, stop him thinking about whether Newt would bruise the same as someone else. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Newt says, even though they both know its a lie. He doesn’t take his hand back, though. His pulse is still electric.

“Right,” Thomas says slowly. He doesn’t really want to let go, but he can’t help the reproach twisting in his chest. So he sighs and says, “I need to go.”

Newt’s head snaps up. A sharp stab of fear punctures the air, smells like poison.

“What?” he asks.

“Early class tomorrow,” Thomas shrugs. He squeezes gently at Newt’s wrist and lets go. Determinedly he doesn’t look to see what the skin does, if his fingerprints are stamped there. This isn’t the moment for that.

Newt grabs his arm in the next instant; a thoughtless, stilling touch that he quickly retracts.

“Be careful,” he says.

Thomas frowns, wants to somehow tell him that whatever he’s worried about right now, he doesn’t have to be, but he just…doesn’t know.

“I will,” he shrugs instead. “I’ll be back, okay?”

Thomas heads off down the street for the woods after waving goodbye to Mary and feeling strangely off-kilter. He’s not entirely sure what just happened and he’s anticipating it keeping him up into the early hours when he hears his name called through a bitter gust of wind.

He stops, turns. Newt is hurrying after him, expression conflicted, hair blown and making him look more hassled than he probably is.

“Look. Its- I didn’t want to worry you,” Newt says when he catches up. The street is empty but for them, the wind spinning dead leaves around their feet and the skeletal outline of the trees a shroud to the suspended moment.

“You being worried worries me,” Thomas tells him plainly.

Newt bites into his lip and rubs his wrist; the one Thomas was holding. He knows he didn’t hurt him. It’s something else; the gesture quiet, almost reverent. Thomas thinks idly of how he can still feel that instinctive touch on his own arm like the nerves have been singed and almost wants to smile.

“There are Collectors in the city,” Newt says, interrupting the thought.

He delivers it like this is damning news; like it’s the final piece of evidence in a forensics case, but Thomas doesn’t understand it.

“What does that mean?”

Newt’s eyes go wide. He shivers, maybe because of the cold, or maybe because of the fear that spikes up off of him like shards of glass. He looks even more worried.

“You don’t-” he swallows and starts over. “Collectors. People who track down supernaturals to lock them up or destroy them or use them. They’re all over the world; some are freelance, some are for leisure or their own means. Some are contracted.” A pause, and then, “by the government.”

It’s strange to know without doubt that this is serious and damaging and yet….feel oddly shielded from true fear. Thomas has never known of it, lived twenty one years of his life without ever encountering mention of it. It’s hard to be truly afraid of something he just can’t comprehend.

But Newt is scared, and that means a lot more to him.

“I’ll be careful,” he says, swears.

Newt scoffs, but the sound is just as amused as it is disbelieving. “I thought Minho was reckless until I met you,” he shakes his head. “You- you’re fearless, Thomas. And it could get you killed. Or worse.”

Thomas doesn’t ask what’s worse.

Minho hasn’t said it again, but the longer Thomas has spent with him and Gally, the more that he thinks Minho was serious about him being used by the government. And Thomas already knows about Newt’s time as a Djinn chained to a lamp and passed around owners. He thinks wildly about Newt’s crippled leg and how that’s a story he still only has guesses on.

He knows what’s worse.

He steps closer, brushing his fingers over Newt’s to get his attention.

“Hey. I promise I will be careful.”

Newt swallows, considers, then nods. “Good that,” he mutters. “If you aren’t, I’ll be the one murdering you.”

Thomas finally lets himself smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Despite the cold, Newt doesn’t move until Thomas has lost sight of him between the trees.

.

It’s hard to pick up news of Collectors in the city when the campus is not directly in it, but a little way on the edge, and also when there are no other supernaturals in the area to confer with.

No one from Safe Haven seems to leave – or if they do, they don’t come this way. Thomas has never seen Winston playing with his Chimera in the park, never spotted Frypan rearranging the tinned vegetables in the corner store by the Learning Resource Centre. It makes sense, really. Supernaturals have two ways to live; in the Norman world (an expression Thomas is still growing used to) or in magically hidden communities like Haven.

While Thomas doesn’t want to just vanish in his last year of university – he’d quite like all that time and work to count for something and not have a crazy five months of his life redefine it completely – it’s easier for him. The wolf has its outlets, and he can make friends without too much caution. It’s not the same for everyone. Zart simply can’t blend into human life, Minho is too conscious of the pheromones he emits and Gally would probably either cause a power surge to a nuclear plant or a regional blackout if someone ticked him off.

He gets why they don’t leave. It doesn’t stop him from occasionally just...imagining what it might be like to see them exist in this greyscale corner of his life for just a moment.

He wonders if Minho would charm his house mates into a stupor, if Gally could just turn off the TV when something awful came on. Zart might actually bring some life back to the very dead spider plant on the kitchen counter. Brenda- well. Perhaps not. Thomas is sure the kid down the hall studying graphic design would be really keen to see Jeff’s Scythe, though.

Mostly he wonders if Newt would leave gold dust in his bed.

The point is that he doesn’t hear anything about strange people wandering around looking for weird pulses on EMF readers or reports of students going missing in dark alleys.

But the promise burns in his blood, along with the way worry had tasted like silt as it pooled around Newt in the street. He doesn’t hear of anything, but he’s careful anyway.

.

“How did you even know there were-” Thomas catches himself and lowers his voice, mindful of Gally and Minho across the wood shop. “Collectors in the city?”

Newt darts a glance past him at the other two as well but they’re both ensconced in an argument that looks and smells a lot more like foreplay. Thankfully there’s a lot of fresh-cut wood about so the rich scents of red cedar, birch and walnut are far more overpowering (and, frankly, a little unfair coupled with the way Newt smells like gingerbread and honey so close by).

Newt turns back to him ducking close. He whispers, and the words are molten down the side of Thomas’ neck. “I was warned.”

Thomas raises an eyebrow and doesn’t have to ask the question out loud.

“Come on,” Newt says, sliding down off the table. Thomas steadies him as he balances his weight back on the floor, can’t quite help the indulgence of it. But then Newt snags his fingers and tugs lightly. “I’ll show you.”

They leave without a word to Gally or Minho. Thomas hadn’t even realised how much static energy Gally was emitting until Newt slips behind him and presses him out of the door into the cold. The clean smell of far off clouds and brittle twigs lifts the pressure off of his senses and Thomas sucks in a deep breath.

“Yeah,” Newt snigg*rs. “They do that. God. I can’t imagine having your senses.”

(Djinn, Newt has explained before, have an ability to pick out emotion and extra senses to some degree. “Whatever will help us know how to sway someone toward a wish,” he’d said distastefully. But it’s not as intricate as a wolf, and it’s also partly something that Newt lost when he was set free. “I can still tell, if I try,” he had said, the sadness in it old, stale, mostly scar tissue. “But it’s a lot more muted.”)

“This way,” Newt says, steering Thomas by his waist and then shifting to walk next to him. “They’re still in town.”

.

‘They’ turn out to be two young women, both looking like they’re in their late teens to early twenties, and both of them both as beautiful as they are formidable, even in fluffy slippers and what might be pyjamas.

The first has a creamy complexion with long waves of platinum hair and large green eyes. The second has rich umber skin and her hair is a cloud around her head, fanned out like a laurel. They smell of steel and blood, meadow grass and peace. Newt introduces them both to him in a tiny little apartment above the carpet shop that’s clearly theirs; its plainly but warmly furnished and they’re cuddled together on a sunken couch under a blanket embroidered with a bloody axe, of all things, when they arrive.

“This is Sonya and Harriet,” Newt says, leaning around Thomas. Both the girls smile, the blonde one jostling the other girl tucked in against her just so she can jump up and run to hug Newt.

“I’m Sonya,” the blonde girl says, drawing away and turning straight for Thomas. Fondness spills off of them both like warm molasses. “You must be Thomas.”

He nods even as she’s dropping back to the couch and drawing Harriet in close again.

“There’s more tea in the kitchen,” Harriet says, content to be pulled in. “You can get it yourselves. What’s up?”

Newt has already wandered off and returned, holding out a cup for Thomas that he realises in just seconds isn’t tea at all but hot chocolate. It hasn’t got Mary’s orange and cinnamon, but he can’t help the bright hot flare in his chest when he takes it. He tries to hide his shaking fingers.

He doesn’t drink tea, and Newt knows it.

“Cute,” Harriet mutters, managing to sound both sincere and fed up.

Sonya buries her face in her mug but her silent laughter smells like sugared strawberries in the warm air of the flat.

Thomas coughs and absorbs himself with his own drink.

Newt ignores them all.

“Actually, Thomas was curious about the Collectors,” he says.

Thomas is expecting this to send a ripple of tension through the relaxed atmosphere, but it doesn’t. Harriet’s expression twists with something that might resemble a person’s annoyance with a fly.

Newt’s fingers sweep down Thomas’ back and he almost throws his cup in the air, but he clamps down on the sudden burning in his spine and realises Newt is just encouraging him forwards. He goes without a second thought.

“Thought we could start with you two,” Newt shrugs when they’re sitting down.

Sonya and Harriet are Valkyrie.

“It’s like being a paramedic,” Sonya says. “You have these huge shifts where you’re always on call and have to drop and run.”

But oddly, this is something Thomas actually knows about.

“When I was in high school,” he tells them, “there was a girl. She was fifteen. She was a Valkyrie.”

She hadn’t gone to school with him. She had been a Valkyrie for longer than she’d been fifteen she had been fifteen for longer than Thomas had been alive. She used to live in a halfway house in the neighbourhood. She had a pager and whenever it beeped, she would get up, pick up a ratty backpack that always weighed nothing but looked stuffed full and just….open doors onto other places in the world. She used to wear a ring. She told everyone it was the only thing she had left of her birth mother, but it was Viking silver, set with a gemstone that contained galaxies; both a gift from and a bond to Valhalla.

So long as the ring was on, she could open something as simple as a kitchen cupboard and step through it to anywhere at all.

(“Heroes and warriors,” she told him once, in a voice far older than her face, “Are not just people who wield swords or shed blood on a battlefield.”)

Thomas went missing from school one day. He claimed sickness and his Aunt had admonished him for it later, but he went with her. She was the second person he’d ever met who wasn’t just….normal. She led him to a hospital in Nepal where a little boy lost a battle with cancer. She opened a mop cupboard in a church in Italy and led them out into a cafeteria for the aftermath of a school shooting in Miami. In just one day, a handful of hours, there were seven people; all of them warriors in some shape or form, and this tiny girl in her purple socks and threadbare snoopy jumper guided all of them, one at a time up to Valhalla.

He never went there. The girl left him back in the halfway house to wait each time. Thomas never expected to go anyway. After he worked out what she was, long before she asked if he wanted to go with her that day, he read up on it. Wikipedia was wrong about a lot, but Valhalla it got right.

You don’t get to see it; not unless you’re never coming back.

Thomas tells them all of it.

And then Harriet shows Thomas that she has a necklace instead. The purple crystal, cradled with tiny swirls of silver metal, looks like a broken off shard of something far bigger, the facets luminous and universes swirling inside.

Sonya has a matching tongue piercing.

(“Rings are traditional,” Sonya shrugs. Her smile is sinful. “We’ve never really been traditional.”)

But at least it’s not like a company phone where the bosses get annoyed if you use it for your own calls or texts. Even when they’re both on call and all over the world, they get to use the portal shards to always come back to the same home in between. That’s not something that the girl he met years ago had told him, but then, she’d been alone to start with; it hadn’t occurred at the time.

With that out of the way, Harriet starts to explain that they work in alliance with Reapers a lot, as well as Grimm handlers.

“Grimm as in….Harry Potter?” Thomas asks.

“Nearly,” Sonya laughs. “Big black dog is right. They’re a warning sign for danger. Some people out there – often retired faeries or Dwarves, or Djinns – they breed and raise them and then they travel around the world on contracts with Valhalla. It helps Head Office work out where we’re likely to be needed.”

Thomas chooses not to question the concept of a Head Office in Valhalla – it rather interferes with the Wikipedia inspired image of it as a glossy, incandescent hall perched on clouds and lined with honoured fallen weapons.

“So,” he tries instead, “A…. Grimm told you there were Collectors here?”

“A Dwarf called Bruce arrived a week ago with his Grimm. He’s cute – the dog, that is. Looks like a Newfoundland. He was pointed this way after a couple of missing peoples’ cases were reported a little further south.”

“There’s been nothing where I am,” Thomas says.

Newt is quiet next to him and Thomas turns, wants him to believe it when he says, “I’m being careful.”

Newt’s knee presses into his.

“Good,” Harriet says. “Keep it that way.”

There’s a sudden beeping and Sonya whines into her tea even as she reluctantly lets Harriet sit up and give her room. The pager she pulls out looks entirely ordinary other than the fact that its spitting red sparks.

“Huh. Urgent,” Newt remarks.

“Ugh. Would people kindly just stop dying for ten minutes please?” Sonya snaps.

She stands up, sets her mug down on the coffee table and pockets the beeper. She’s still in a thick knitted sweater and fluffy slipper boots, smells like steel and toasted marshmallows as she picks up a tasselled bag and flings it over her shoulder.

“I’ll be back soon,” she tells Harriet softly, leaning forward over her girlfriend’s reclined form to kiss her firmly without a care for being watched. She pulls back, smiles once, kisses her again and then draws away with a huff. “Love you.”

She strides towards a door that definitely is not the one that Thomas and Newt came in through and pulls it open.

An ironing board falls out, smashing into the floorboards and beyond the doorway is what looks like a brightly coloured street in India. An entire, real, breathing elephant is sucking up discarded peanuts from the ground just fifteen feet off. It doesn’t seem to take any notice or concern about the door that’s just opened probably in the middle of nothing.

Sonya neatly sidesteps the collapsed board and then smiles back at them. “Bye, Newt. I’m glad I saw you. And you, Thomas!”

Then she steps into a street millions of miles away and pulls the door closed behind her.

.

“It’s hard for them, even if they get to go home to each other,” Newt says as they walk down the road, headed for the woods again. “Constantly picking up and being across the world. We tried to have a housewarming when they moved in here but Harriet got called away right in the middle and it just….we obviously couldn’t do it without her. I think they just barely get a chance to really make it feel lived in.”

Thomas remembers the blazing fondness in the hug Sonya had given Newt, the strange sense of lost chances in the way she said she was glad she saw him when she left.

“You get to see her even less,” Thomas guesses. It’s not a difficult one.

Newt nods anyway.

“I’ve known Minho longer,” Newt says. “Before we broke Gally out. And then it was the three of us for a bit, but Sonya….she’s family in another way. She set me free.”

Thomas pulls up short, a quiet ‘wow’ dropping out of his mouth and Newt stops, turns back to him. His hands are deep in the pockets of his jacket, the collar turned up against his neck to ward off the October chill. His head is tilted to the side, eyes a touch playful and amusem*nt curling in his mouth. He’s enjoying that Thomas didn’t know this.

“We didn’t know what it would really do,” Newt tells him. “She apologised a lot at first, when she saw how much it took from me, but this is still better. I’d lose all those things all over again if it meant getting to live without being bought or sold. Especially when someone pays ten quid at an auction for a priceless Arabian oil lamp made out of nine carat gold with genuine fake rubies inlaid in the lid.”

Thomas feels his eyebrows shoot up, three questions vying for his brain power first.

“Five quid?” he decides on, (and that’s a word that feels strange in his mouth) even though the words ‘genuine fake rubies’ are scrolling through his head next to ‘auction’.

But he knows neither are really important even as Newt presses his lips together around a laugh.

He knows something happened to Newt’s leg – perhaps before he was freed, if Sonya had nothing to do with it. He knows he lost some of his ease picking up senses and emotions from others, and that he especially lost the ability to grant wishes.

Those are all things Thomas knows now. The thing that occurs to him only at that moment, standing in the wind-ragged street is what else Newt must have lost with all the rest: a home.

Whether trapped there or not, and however much it changed hands on the outside, a lamp was somewhere to return to, somewhere just his, somewhere safe. By being freed, that was taken away from him. Which probably explains why he now keeps all of his previous ones, and even carries around at least one with him all the time.

(Thomas has never seen the yoghurt pot but he knows Newt has a tiny paint tin in his pocket right now).

And all at once, he feels reckless as he breathes in the skeletal woodland and the brittle wind.

“If you could wish for anything now, what would you wish for?”

Newt blinks, looks momentarily like he isn’t sure Thomas is talking to him. And then he looks lost.

“There are rules,” he says finally, sounding choked, almost like he’s on autopilot.

“Are they the same as in Aladdin?” Thomas asks.

Newt gasps in surprised laughter and something indistinct about him seems to melt open, burn bright gold.

“Yeah, pretty much,” he says. Then he looks at Thomas, laughter lingering in feeling even though the sound is gone. “What would you wish for?”

“I asked you,” Thomas reminds him.

Newt exhales into the sky. “I don’t know,” he says. “No one’s ever asked before.”

Chapter 5: October Part 2

Chapter Text

Thomas’ midterms start two days after that.

He stops to catch up briefly with his housemates when he’s back in the real world hours later. He eats with them and eventually begs off when they start playing mario kart in the living room. He stays up with revision notes scattered all over his desk until almost midnight, listening to the churning hum of noises from downstairs.

(“I have a week of exams starting on Monday,” Thomas told Newt and Minho when he left them outside Mary’s. “I may not be able to visit until they’re done. Just don’t worry if I’m not here. I’m still being careful.”

Newt looked troubled, but hadn’t protested it. Minho had seemed exasperated, but Thomas got the impression it wasn’t exactly with him.

“When’s the last one?” he’d asked.

“Tuesday morning.”

“Well, I hope we can trust you not to get into too much trouble until then.”)

Thomas falls asleep with all his notes unspooling in his brain. They turn into dead leaves and peat moss, and a Grimm that looks like Sirius Black out of Harry Potter steps through it, dragging a tarnished gold oil lamp. Its missing an encrusted ruby and the dream whispers that its important.

Thomas bolts awake at four in the morning, the wolf snapping its jaws at his ribs in agitation and a prickling unease shivering like those same dead leaves under his skin. The specifics of what he dreamed are already falling away, but he remembers that bit, remembers the dog and the lamp, and the wolf whines to go back, to check.

He doesn’t remember the last time he had a nightmare, but now there’s one lying in wait on his pillow to claim him and he’s realising that staying out of the woods won’t be easy.

.

The midterms are long, but they’re almost a welcome reprieve from frantic study and the clawing draw of the trees. When Thomas is in a huge hall full of tiny desks in orderly rows, so silent that the scratch of pens and the smell of anxiety fills all the empty spaces in his head, it stops him thinking about anything else. He knows what he’s studying; he’s lucky enough to love it, even, and that hasn’t changed just because he found something he didn’t even know existed in the last five months that turned the rest of the world to shades of grey.

He studies between the tests, writes blindly for hours at a time then eats something microwaved in the kitchen before crashing into bed. His dreams are a colliding swarm of his own scribbled notes and textbook pages as they scatter into woodland tracks and form leaves on familiar trees. He dreams of the path to Haven through the woods most nights.

Missing it starts to burn through his bloodstream, dull and insistent with each heartbeat. The wolf grows restless.

.

Thomas gets held back after his Monday midterm by his professor.

Its for a quick review of his work (and not at all optional, as far as he can tell), which is….fine, it’s just that it’s time he’d wanted to study and he can feel the hours slipping away from him as he waits in the hall with half his class by a half-dead potted plant. Of course it’s not just him, which means that he’s still waiting by six, the sky is almost dark and he never got to his usual seat or study group in the library. He still has to stop for groceries (it’s his turn) on the way back to the house.

The door to the office finally cracks open as the wolf starts to scrape at his nerves. The musty smell of cigars and old wood polish washes out along with a weary student. He gives Thomas one of those wan post-midterm solidarity smiles and heads off.

The professor behind him is tired too; it’s practically rolling off of him. His glasses keep swooping down his nose and he looks greyer than he did just hours before.

“Thomas. Sorry for the wait, my boy. Come in, come in, I won’t keep you long.”

‘Not long’ bleeds into twenty seven minutes of his life.

.

It’s a five minute walk to the grocery store from the main campus building, and then another two minutes to the edge of the Campus town where the houses stack closer together and the streets crush in. Finally the student house is just ahead. The street lamps are all worn and dim, and they are only stationed as far as the opening of the alley; once he turns down it, the only light comes from what the moon can reach between the tall, narrow roofs.

Thomas turns onto the uneven cobblestone, just thinking about fishing out his keys and-

He freezes.

A congregation have amassed themselves on the steep brick steps up to his front door.

There is a squat little man with a ruddy face and thick auburn beard, huge golden rings on every one of his fingers. He’s holding a rainbow coloured leash probably designed for someone’s handbag Chihuahua, but it’s attached to an enormous black dog that looks more like a placid bear as it snuffles the iron rails lining the steps. There’s Frypan, trying to stop three potted plants on the neighbour’s steps from shaking, Gally making the living room light of Thomas’ own house sputter as he watches Minho with mildly concerned wariness. Minho is pacing, muttering and stopping every few seconds to make jarring hand gestures up at the front door and then down at the dog.

Newt sits on the steps, shoulders curled forwards, thumbs digging into the insides of his elbows. His bad leg shakes unevenly but despite the cold evening and the way he’s wearing only a light sweater, Thomas doesn’t think the movement is anything to do with the chill. Worry snaps, vicious and spiky on his shoulders.

Thomas blinks, words bursting up out of his mouth thoughtlessly before he can catch them.

“What are you guys doing here?”

He stumbles forwards and everyone looks up. The dog turns so fast it almost falls over on its oversized paws, its suddenly wagging tail thumping heavily into Frypan’s stomach and he folds in half with a groan. The bark the dog lets out at seeing Thomas is a booming rumble like rolling thunder that floods the alley and shakes window panes.

“Where the hell have you been?” Gally demands through a thick scowl.

Minho shifts, lays a hand on his arm and Gally’s furious, barbed energy reluctantly coils down. It still feels like springs waiting for a trigger but he looks just faintly apologetic. (Thomas doesn’t take offence; somehow, he feels like he gets it right now).

“What Gally means,” Frypan interjects pointedly, still out of breath, “Is ‘Are you okay?’”

Thomas frowns, dropping his bags on the sidewalk nearby the little man with the rainbow leash. He can’t help his eyes moving straight past Frypan to Newt, still folded on the steps and giving off a confusing signature that’s too intricate and clouded to make out. “I’m fine,” he says, “I’ve been on campus; midterms and a meeting with my professor that overran. I-”

And then he’s distracted by the huge dog as it lumbers over and shoves its broad muzzle into the bag of groceries. For the first time he registers what it really must be.

A Grimm.

There’s a Grimm laying across his front steps with a regal yet oddly bumbling air, and helping itself to a ready-made lasagne. Which means the vertically challenged little man now calmly scrolling through a twitter feed (mostly consisting of rare gold and other metalwork artefacts) on his phone is….probably a Dwarf.

(Perhaps Thomas is stereotyping, but he thinks the guess is solid even if he doesn’t smell like mines or diamond forges).

With that comes the reminders of Newt’s warnings and Sonya talking about missing persons cases, Grimms travelling the world to try to stop it before it happens. For the first honest time, an icy sensation of dread travels down Thomas’ spine because if they’re all here-

“Did- something happen?” he asks, a little afraid to know. “Is someone….missing?”

(He thinks in horror of Zart or Jeff or Winston, even though they’re hidden in Haven, and then he thinks of some person he’s never met being abducted. He thinks of the little Valkyrie girl he knew years before and what some people might do to get their hands on a ring that could take you anywhere-)

Newt pulls in a shaken breath, his eyes large under the weak light reaching them from the higher windows of the alley. He says, “We thought you were.”

It feels like there’s a knife between his ribs, silver cutting into his heart. Thomas tries to breathe around the sudden, lancing pain of it even though his lungs won’t cooperate.

“No,” he chokes out. “I’m fine. I-how, what made you think-”

“Bruce put in a report,” Frypan says, indicating the Dwarf who throws them a peace sign with two fingers without looking up from his phone. He’s on ebay now and seems to be bidding on an ornately crafted gold leaf and studded leather dog bed.

“My boy here were starting to get the Signs,” Bruce says in a voice that’s a slow rumble, stubby thumbs flying as he chases the auction. He nods his head at the dog, now splayed flat on its belly like a tremendous shaggy carpet. The lasagne is gone. Bruce continues, “I’ve been breeding Grimms since I were just a hatchling and I knows ‘em well. He’s one of my best. I put in a report all quick, like. Next thing I know I’ve got this one hammering down my door.”

Bruce jabs a thumb at Gally who merely looks up around at them all and shrugs. “What?”

“He filed a report that said the Grimm was focused in on your campus,” Minho says, waving absently at the dog. “We hadn’t heard from you in a week – we knew you were busy but….we wanted to make sure.”

Thomas looks around at all of them, a little awestruck, and the wolf inside surges forwards, glowing warm and close under his skin.

Gally had to be broken out of a government facility. Minho avoids Normans because he’s so conscious of what he is and how it affects them when they can’t know any better. Frypan knows that his telekinesis is hard to disguise in this world and Newt- Newt was enslaved for years. He thinks this side of the boundary is dangerous.

All of them have such good reason to stay away, but they’re all here; In a dark alley on a Monday night having followed an omen of doom and death with a waggy tail because they were afraid for him. They came looking for him.

Newt’s catches his eyes through the dark. Something about him is steadier, his leg finally stilled and the anxiety simmering in his scent slowly waning down. Thomas wonders if he was stupid to be even a little surprised. Newt looks fond as he tips his head in a tiny nod.

The others don’t appear to notice the exchange, Frypan stepping in to take over the story.

“We didn’t know where to go or who to ask or anything,” he says. “Why did none of you ever swap addresses or numbers? We found the campus; that’s signposted enough but they’re a secretive bunch in the administration office, even with Minho using his….anyway-”

Thomas snaps his eyes over to Minho. He intentionally did his thing on someone unsuspecting to try to find him?

Minho scrunches up his nose and shakes his head. Gally reaches out to squeeze his hand, lacing their fingers together. Thomas obliges and lets the topic go even though the bubble of awe in his chest is dripping through his veins like golden syrup.

“A bunch of students said they hadn’t seen half your class since the midterm and then pointed us to the library. A girl in there said you never showed up like you have been all week.” Frypan shrugs at them. He snatches one of the agitated plant pots from mid air as it tries to flee, setting it back down on a step. “That’s when Newt called Sonya and got her to forward the report to him.”

“Then Gally woke up Bruce and a litter of five week old puppies when we got his address and here we are,” Minho concludes.

Thomas darts a look down at Bruce, who shrugs.

“Once they was up, I was more’n happy to get old Omen on the task,” he says, with a tiny, cheeky smile, patting the dog’s rump. “Leave my wife with the Grimmlings. They ain’t got no sense of priority at that age; every little thing is a sign of the apocalypse. The howling...”

(Thomas considers questioning the decision to name the lumbering bear-like dog Omen and ultimately decides against it).

“He led you here?” Thomas asks instead. “To….me?”

“Close enough,” Minho amends. “To where your scent is strongest, I guess.”

Thomas frowns. “But- how? I’m not in danger, I think? Am I? If he could find me, wouldn’t it be….I don’t know – too late? I’d already know, right?”

Bruce snorts.

“Still got a nose, don’t ‘e?” The Dwarf asks with gruff amusem*nt. “He’s a dog, too.” He jerks his head towards the steps. “This lad here had summat a yours.”

Thomas looks up, a weird feeling like gravity or foregone conclusion settling into his bones as the wolf ripples through his nerves. This one he can guess. Doesn’t need to guess, actually.

Newt sits up straighter, letting go of his arms and his hands fall to the soft folds of dark fabric gathered over his legs. Thomas’ sweater.

Thomas is either breathing very fast or not at all.

(Colours ripple in his vision and shadows press closer. His lungs flood with the transferred smells of woods, worn brick and library books riddled with bitter midterm stress; traces of everywhere they’ve been to look for him).

“Well,” Bruce interjects, standing up off the bottom step he’s been perched on. He somehow doesn’t seem to get any taller, the dog practically towering over him as it also hauls itself up and stretches with a wide yawn. Bits of the lasagne box are stuck between its pearly teeth. “Clearly the lad is fine so we’ll be off, then. Come on you old heap,” he says to the Grimm, “bedtime for us.”

The two of them happily trudge off down the alley, the Dwarf starting to whistle jauntily and the rainbow leash swinging as the shadows fold down around them.

Thomas picks up the bags he set down, absently wondering how to explain a missing lasagne as he finally extracts his keys.

He doesn’t want to make the others uncomfortable, doesn’t want to keep them here if they don’t want to be but he also doesn’t want to just….watch them leave. Not yet. Being in proximity with Thomas’ overwhelmingly normal housemates might be asking a lot but….there are Collectors in the city and staying out here suddenly feels a lot less safe with the Grimm gone.

“Maybe you should come inside,” Thomas suggests. “At least long enough to swap some numbers.”

Frypan scoffs and lurches forward to snatch the grocery bag from him. He ferrets through it with nimble fingers, making hums of approval and bitten sounds of distaste at the items. A tin of vegetables jumps out of his way and Thomas almost smiles at the sight of it. Missing Safe Haven over the past week has become a burn in his chest but right now that’s gone. It feels kind of like it came to him.

Frypan makes an unimpressed sound. “Longer,” he says, speaking into the bag. “Is this what students eat? I hope you have a colander. Get the door open and show me the kitchen.”

.

So Frypan cooks dinner. He makes enough for Thomas’ four housemates as well, in some apology for the missing lasagne (“A dog ate it,” Minho supplies, deadpan, even though no one asked), directing all manner of appliances and ingredients around the boxy little kitchen. While he does that, Minho starts to rectify their lack of number sharing.

(“Phone. Now,” he says, making grabby hands at Thomas for it. “Come on, let’s go.”

He pulls it out and Minho takes it, keying in the passcode, though Thomas has frankly no idea how he knows it. He lets himself into the contacts list, just a little bit smug, and hops up on the counter, shoving aside a cheese grater, thumbs flying.

“I’m putting Mary’s in. And Fry’s desk at the store. Newt’s, obviously. Mine was first. Gally’s workshop. Brenda melted the last phone they had in the Scorch so that’s out-”)

The clock ticks later into the evening and the kitchen starts to smell like rosemary and hot copper rather than the stale scents of microwaved plastic and boiled water.

They’ve been in the house for an hour before a Will-o’-the-Wisp makes itself known.

Gally is enlisted to charge up Thomas’ phone battery (“What the hell, Dude, how do you let it get this low? Gal?”), which he does, blowing out the kitchen lights in the process.

A glowing, fuzzy ball of blue-white light chooses then to appear. It flings itself from the folds of Thomas’ sweater abandoned on the table, streaking like a comet through the dark. It bolts across the kitchen, leaving a blazing light trail that’s just as eerie as it is entrancing, and, with single-minded focus, snatches a hopeful pot of paprika before it can tip itself into Frypan’s sauce.

Thomas startles, staring at the little spirit as it wrestles the spice tub away from the food in mid air.

“You brought a Wisp?” he asks, voice cracking.

“Bring isn’t quite the word I’d use,” Newt hedges. “It more or less demanded.” His fingers press into Thomas’ waist. The Wisp casts a blue pallor over the room and under it a silver sheen ripples across Newt’s collarbones as he casts Thomas a sideways glance. “Mary was worried, too.”

The Wisp grapples the paprika into a cupboard and slams the door on it before zooming across to hover helpfully by Frypan. It might be missing its usual tasks back at Mary’s as it starts passing him various things, many against their will. Fry’s telekinesis seems to come with a kind of sentience for the things he animates and evidently the Wisp doesn’t trust their judgement. It seems somewhat mutual.

When Thomas watches it attempt to drag across a straining spoon that’s curved its domed head around a drawer handle in protest, he decides it’s a good time to step back.

“If anything breaks, I want plausible deniability,” Thomas says, opening the door to the hall a crack to check its clear. “Anyone want a tour?”

Minho and Gally shake their heads, cuddled together against the counters and Minho still playing on Thomas’ newly boyfriend-charged phone. Frypan nods, brushing off his hands. Minho kicks him. He turns promptly back around.

“Ye-Nah, I’m cooking.” And he snatches a dial that had already been turning itself down.

So Thomas shows Newt the house while he makes a quick trip to his room to drop his backpack. The tour mostly consists of pointing out the closed doors belonging to the other boys, indicating the bathroom at the top of the landing and then trying to memorise the way Newt had looked framed by the window next to his bed, fingers tracing along the sill. He memorises it even though he knows its something he’ll ache for when its gone.

Thomas stays by the door. He does know better than to step closer with temptation humming like a fever in his blood.

...

“I don’t bite,” Newt says, smirking wickedly at the space Thomas has left between them. “Pretty sure that’s you.”

That’s- f*ck.

Thomas bites hard on his own tongue, closing up his throat around a groan and his heart trips over. He can almost taste the smoke and metal of Newt’s scent across the shadowy space, the way its tainted with sugared amusem*nt. The wolf quakes with wanting, thinks of weeks ago, of the wild scent on his sweater branding into the back of Newt’s neck. “sh*t,” he exhales, head falling back against the wall.

He hears Newt laugh quietly, and then - “You actually have the bloody movie.”

Thomas opens his eyes. Newt has pulled Disney’s Aladdin off of his bookshelf. Thomas can’t help the strangely mixed feeling of hilarity and gravity that hits him as he looks at the Genie on the front cover. Newt holds it up, teasing amusem*nt spinning off of him.

“Did this teach you about Djinns?” he asks.

Thomas shakes his head. “No. You taught me that. But I’m listening if you want to tell me everything else wrong with it. I already know the rules are right.”

A burst of dizzying, blazing affection twists through the space still carefully between them and Thomas inhales it down into his lungs, Newt’s smirk turning molten as he nods to the bookcase. He asks, “Got any about wolves?”

So….it turns out he doesn’t know better than to step closer. He falls away from the wall to pull out a copy of American Werewolf in London and holds it out to Newt. “Its not at all accurate,” he warns, “but the transformation scene is one of the most iconic in cinematic history.”

...

There isn’t time to watch them, but when Frypan calls out that food is ready, Newt sets both the cases down on Thomas’ bed where they were sitting (“Bring them next time.”). Thomas leads him back down the stairs and the house smells of rosemary, melted butter and gold dust.

.

“We should go,” Newt says, reluctance thick in his voice.

Thomas almost holds onto him tighter, just barely managing to stop himself. His fingers flex instead, the wolf whining in his chest. He wonders if they (if Newt) have felt anything like this the countless times before that he’s said he has to leave when the sky gets dark over Safe Haven.

This already feels like a moment he’s stolen. The stiff wooden chairs in the kitchen started to agitate Newt’s leg, so Thomas pulled his seat closer to give him something to lean on and somewhere in the last two hours, the remaining gap between them disappeared as Newt turned sideways on his chair, folding into Thomas. Thomas stopped tasting scar tissue pain rippling off of him; started smelling relief and that same affection he could feel upstairs in his room. He may have stolen it, but he doesn’t want to give it up.

Thomas lets his fingers tread patterns into Newt’s ribs. His heartbeat, still tripping rapidly like a hummingbird’s, thrums through Newt’s back and melts into Thomas’ chest. The skipping race of it fascinates him. He wants to ask if it’s always like that, or if it’s only when Newt’s touched….Or, maybe if it’s only when Thomas touches him.

And he’s starting to realise, that somewhere in the last five months, he’s been rearranged around the existence of this boy. This boy with his cast iron bones and gold dusted skin, blood in his veins where wishes used to run.

He lets Newt up, watching carefully to make sure his crippled leg is stable before untangling himself from the two lined up chairs. He catches Minho giving him a look that’s only a little teasing but mostly glowing and grateful. Thomas shrugs. At this point he can’t really help it. He’s never been doing it for Minho, anyway.

Newt hangs back on the threshold as the others all file down the steps to the street.

There’s a shadow of that earlier worry in his expression, his mouth bitten, prickly uncertainty rising up through the smoky contentment that’s been spilling off of him for the last hour. Thomas hates it. (The wolf hates it, too. It paces in Thomas’ chest, snarling at his nerves until they're thready and agitated. He bites it down; doesn't want them to worry).

“I promise I’m fine,” Thomas says.

If he tries, maybe he can print the promise into Newt’s skin. If he can’t print anything else (fingerprints, bruises, teeth-) at least Newt can keep this.

The others, standing in the narrow street, seem to be pointedly ignoring them.

“I know,” Newt nods. His fingers play on his own sleeve like its a flute or a piano; the touch skipping and fluttery.

Thomas hugs him.

It takes barely a second for Newt to grip him tightly back. Thomas ducks his head into the side of Newt’s neck and fixes his arms as tight as he can around Newt’s waist so he can feel his ribs expand. Underneath that uneasy bitterness to his scent, there’s the smell of clear smoke and burning metal, and Thomas breathes it in. Newt’s hands flatten over his back, thumbs pressing into the groove of Thomas’ spine and- f*ck-

(The wolf arches its back into it and Thomas has to fight not to do the same. He thinks he succeeds).

He knows its a habit like someone tapping their fingers, or biting their lip. Newt doesn’t press hard enough to hurt himself, but this is suddenly a lot better than watching him do it to his own arms.

He wants to keep it.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” Thomas breathes to him.

“Don’t do it again,” Newt replies, but there’s something like laughter in the tone.

They both know that Thomas won’t swear to that; that he knows better when he can’t promise it. Instead, Thomas’ heart turns over when he thinks he feels Newt’s mouth press to the side of his neck. His blood burns and he pushes it aside to marvel that he can feel so surrounded by this boy; taste metal and magic on his skin, when he also feels so slim and breakable between Thomas’ hands. Its deceptive, though; nothing about Newt was made to break.

“I’m glad you’re okay, Tommy,” Newt tells him, voice dark and soft. The words slide like warm honey down the side of Thomas’ neck, pool in the hollow of his throat. “I’m really, really glad.”

Chapter 6: October Part 3

Chapter Text

Thomas finds a very unhappy pot of paprika trying to batter its way out of a kitchen cupboard at five forty seven the following morning.

It jumps out at him when he opens the door for a glass and Thomas startles, colliding with the opposite counter as wolf reflexes kick in to yank him away. He manages not to yelp, barely.

The pot hits the counter top, lid swivelling loose on the screw threads and spraying powdered spices around it in an arc. Thomas blinks. The little tub turns a circle, evidently looking around itself at the mess even though there’s nothing that could pass for eyes on it. Then it makes a break for the sink, hopping along like it’s spring-loaded.

Footsteps sound on the stairs. The paprika makes a flying leap for the draining board.

Thomas lurches forward and snatches up the annoyed tub, almost crashing over a kitchen chair in the process. He smashes his elbow into the toaster which makes an awful tinny screeching sound but manages to sweep the mess off the counter while holding the pot still in his other hand. It’s warm, despite being glass and only just touched, humming with the magic that’s given it sentience.

Thomas races up the stairs and past his housemate with it behind his back, emptying out the trash can in his room so he can set the pot into it on his desk.

“Just….wait,” Thomas half tells it.

He doesn’t even know if it can understand him. Perhaps they’re only capable of understanding Frypan. And maybe that’s more about his mind directing them than being able to comprehend words. He says it anyway though; there’s something that’s oddly thrilling about this fragment of living magic being here and he doesn’t want to just ignore it.

His phone isn’t on the nightstand like normal. He fell asleep texting Newt, so he shakes out all the bedding, unearthing the two dvd cases left there the night before. His phone spills onto the floor, pillowed by the carpet and something else hits the mattress with a gentle, metallic chime.

Thomas freezes, holding his blankets aloft and waiting, but the only continuing noise is the frustrated bashing of the paprika against the sides of the waste basket.

So he throws the bedsheets aside and-

f*ck.

Laying on his mattress is an old metal tinderbox.

The lid and sides are embossed with graceful, curling smoke-like patterns and the edges are tarnished and blackened from years of wear and soot. Thomas doesn’t own it. He’s never seen it before, but he knows exactly what it is and his heart trips over, frantic, running away from him.

This is one of Newt’s lamps.

(One slim side has been worn smooth of it’s smoke motif, polished where it’s been rubbed over and over.)

Thomas thinks of how they’d sat down on his bed the night before (because he’s clearly masoch*stic), mocking the film cases in their hands and sinking against the wall as the minutes slid by. He thinks of the relaxed press of Newt’s weight in the blankets beside him, and the way that neither of them had looked back when they left the room.

There’s an enraged bash from the paprika behind him and Thomas startles.

Lamp. In his bed. Right.

He picks up his phone, thumbing quickly back to his conversation with Newt.

Like zombies, you mean? Is the last thing Thomas had sent him.

There’s a reply there, waiting, that Thomas doesn’t remember:

No such thing as Zombies, Tommy.

Thomas barely even remembers falling asleep. The sight of the text makes him smile, but his heart is still trembling in his chest, the taste of soot and steel at the back of his throat and he quickly taps into the message box.

I think you left something here.

Then he takes a photo of the tinderbox, still sat innocently on his mattress (like it hasn’t somehow shaken him up to see it there, like it hasn’t worried Newt to discover it gone), and sends that, too.

He waits, nerves buzzing, for a long minute and then the continuing sounds of the annoyed paprika push him to start a new message with the number Minho saved on his phone as Frypan’s.

You forgot something, he keys in, quickly, It’s currently trying to escape. How do I subdue an animate spice tub?

Then Thomas forces himself to put the phone down.

It’s gone six and he has just about an hour before he needs to get to campus to register for the final midterm. He darts into the shower and back out, checks his phone, dresses and packs his back, checks his phone. He attempts to talk down the paprika to no success; there’s a shower of spices littering the bottom of the waste basket. He checks his phone again.

He can’t help eyeing the clock on his homescreen, and he can’t help remembering Newt’s face that first day when he’d asked Mary for the lamp he left behind. He’d taken it so carefully, that old and dented carafe, a kind of relief and reverence in his face as he’d put it into his bag. It hurts to think that Newt might not have noticed yet; that he might wake up soon looking for it and not even be able to get it back.

He’s wary of this side of the boundary, for good reason. It’ll be hours before Thomas can get it to him.

Unless.

Unless he goes now.

Thomas checks his phone again, eyes the clock on the screen. He knows how long it takes to walk to Haven. It’ll take less if he runs. He knows when he needs to be on campus. There’s time.

That’s when his phone chimes. He startles, almost fumbling it out of his hand and dropping it on the paprika.

It’s not Newt. It’s Frypan.

Damn. Bring it with you next time? Until then….treat it nicely? It might calm down.

Thomas winces at the furious noises it’s making. He kind of thinks that ship may have sailed.

I’m coming now, he types, aware only as he does so that he’s apparently decided. Newt left something here too.

Frypan’s response is immediate; before Thomas has even closed out of the conversation.

Go to the house at the end of Birch street. Newt will be there.

Thomas picks up the spitting paprika pot and stuffs it in his pocket. Then, rather more gently, picks up the tinderbox before he rushes from the room.

He has time.

.

The house at the end of Birch street is a tiny bungalow. In fact, Thomas realises moments after reaching Safe Haven, it’s the same bungalow, right by the woods where Newt waited for him once. (He realises this when he looks up from the Google maps search on his phone telling him the street doesn’t exist, which, of course it doesn’t, only to see the log plaque half buried in a thicket and reading ‘Birch’ in scrawling letters).

So this is it.

It’s the little sloped cottage, tangled in ivy and snapping plants, hemmed in with a low stone wall. It’s so early that it’s still cold and dewy, washed out pink light just filtering through the trees.

A little boy hurries down the road further towards the town, walking a three headed puppy that’s trying to drag him in twelve directions. Behind the low row of houses a field of glowing white Nøkken horses are being fed with organ off-cuts from the butchers. A flying carpet at least fifteen feet long careers over the crossroads towards the square with a dozen giggling school children clinging to sewn in seatbelts. It wings a corner, running a red light that spins after it, swearing violently and the swoop of air in it’s wake upsets a cluster of newspapers on a corner stall.

(Literally upset. The papers all fold themselves up to keep their pages tucked in and the man selling them pats the closest one consolingly).

Thomas has to push through the usual instinct, still, to stop and watch it all. He sets a timer on his phone so he gets back to the other world in time and puts it back in his pocket after that (carefully separate from the paprika) but he can feel it ticking down like the seconds are being wrung out of him.

He runs up the overgrown path to the bungalow. Three clumps of grass jump out of his way and, like it was waiting for it – a wild cat stalking in the Serengeti – a paving slab pounces and flattens one. Thomas raises an eyebrow, watching it sit there smugly and makes a mental note to ask later. He carefully avoids stepping on any more paving slabs as he crabs his way to the door, recessed into an alcove.

He knocks quickly, just a little guilty at the early hour.

The guilt dries up when the door creaks open.

Newt has clearly just woken up. He looks sleep-soft and hazy, the taste of dreams still on his skin and his smoke and iron scent is sharper in the narrow gap. He shimmers gold in the sliver of light in the doorway, eyes flying wide.

“Thomas? Wh-What happened? Ar-”

“Nothing, nothing,” Thomas rushes to hold up his hands, fending off the suddenly needle-like horror that stabs through honeyed air. It isn’t his. “Sorry. I-I’m not here because- There isn’t-….you left this-”

And then, finally managing to stop fumbling for words, he pulls out the tinderbox.

(Like it knows something else has taken precedence over it, the paprika pot aims a solid kick – of sorts – to Thomas’ hip through his jacket pocket).

For an instant Newt looks like he’s not even sure what he’s seeing, and then-

“I….I left it?”

His voice is stunned.

Thomas shrugs, holding it out to him. “I guess so. I mean- we met the day you left one at Mary’s, and it’s not mine so….”

Newt still looks surprised, his scent twisting with fragments of emotions too difficult to track. He takes the box. His fingers shake.

“I have to go,” Thomas says. It’s quiet, apologetic, and he hates the truth of it, knowing how the opposite made him feel the night before.

“Midterm,” Newt remembers vaguely, still staring at the box as though not sure he’s seeing it.

Thomas nods anyway. “Yeah, I’ll be back right after, though.”

Newt’s eyes finally jump up, a frown pulling at his brow and a fraying thread of alarm flicking up off of him. “Wait- If you’re coming back why did you come here now? You could be late, Thomas.”

“No, I’m okay,” Thomas says. He digs free his phone, showing Newt the timer still ticking down on the screen. “I have time. You just- you didn’t reply but….it’s your home, Newt. I didn’t want you to just wake up and realise it was gone.”

Something blazing and incandescent flares out around Newt. Even in the ribbons of pastel light and sleepy shadow of the doorway, Thomas can almost see it; this bursting wonder that ignites, fierce and fragile, like a candle wick. He can feel the wolf sharpen in his bloodstream, pulling forward at the taste of it.

Something that sounds bitten and awed cracks at the back of Newt’s throat. There’s a bolt of decisiveness that splinters through the sunlight; smells just a touch reckless. He surges across the threshold, fingers curl at the back of Thomas’ neck and Newt’s mouth covers his.

The wolf pulses, exhaling through his bones with finally.

Thomas pulls him closer, splays a palm up toward Newt’s shoulder blades, feeling them shift against the cut of his ribs as he crowds forward. Soft cotton crumples under Thomas’ hand as he kisses him back. Months of curious wanting have climbed up into sharp yearning and it slides off of his tongue as he coaxes Newt’s mouth open. Newt’s fingertips press into the ridges of vertebrae at the base of Thomas’ neck and liquid heat pours down his spine. He shivers and so does the wolf.

Newt’s real, actual taste is not too unlike his scent; iron, smoke and honey but it’s darker, richly layered with tangs of red cedar on the roof of his mouth and gingerbread underneath his tongue. He tastes like unspooling dreams and fae magic; ethereal and otherworldly, undercut with something metallic and fine. He tastes like gold dust.

Newt draws back and Thomas very nearly whines. (He’s waited long enough to find that out for certain).

He’s light-headed, pulse surging, his blood spiked and wild. He hooks his fingers into the elastic waistband of Newt’s flannel pants (a somewhat startling reminder of just how recently he woke up) and presses his thumbs into the faint lines of lean muscle over his hips.

Newt stills, breathing in harsh gasps. His heartbeat is faster than ever; frantic, the single pulses barely discernible as it leaps in the base of his throat.

Thomas asks, voice ragged, “Is this okay?”

“Is-” Newt chokes. “Is it okay? Tommy, I kissed you.”

“I noticed,” he manages. “And I’m okay. Unless that was like a one time thing or a thank you or- because that would be less awesome but if that’s wh-

Newt laughs, a small, fond sound. He presses Thomas back into the alcove of the doorway where the early light can’t reach and tempts his mouth open with his tongue, kisses him again. All thought of misunderstanding disappears, uncertainty disintegrating under the way Newt moves into him, all sleek, gossamer-gold wanting and resolution, like he’s trying to commit Thomas to memory.

His laughter tastes the same way it smells; like spun sugar and bubbles in summer air. He’s gentle but firm, fingers spreading over Thomas’ stomach to keep him anchored against the door frame. The wolf preens and lays quiet under his heart, shaking through his bones with the weight of its own coiling want. Thomas tugs once at the elastic under his thumbs and Newt obeys, weight shifting into him and there’s fire licking up through his veins-

And then a small, angry beeping interrupts them.

Thomas startles, gasping into Newt’s mouth just the second before they break apart.

“What-” Newt’s perplexed frown quickly shifts to alarm as his eyes clear. His accent is thick and fractured. “Your midterm. You have to go.”

“Yeah,” Thomas says, reluctantly and through a voice that’s gone just as coarse. “I know.”

Newt makes an amused sound and his head drops to Thomas’ shoulder, apparently not noticing the easy intimacy of it. Thomas’ heart twists. It’s not lost on him; the familiarity in the action makes his blood run hot and the wolf stretch out, playing for keeps.

“You’re coming right back,” Newt reminds him. “Go. Pass the exam.” And then, “Do I get to use this as leverage now?”

Thomas would laugh if there were anything left in his lungs that wasn’t this boy.

“Use anything you want as leverage,” he breathes thoughtlessly.

Thomas’ heart turns over, feels a lot like one of the Wisps somersaulting as Newt’s mouth presses over his collarbone. It’s deliberate but delicate, so light that the wolf pacing under his skin almost can’t feel it (probably wise, it’s already snapping at him to stay), but Thomas does.

“Go,” Newt says again, drawing back. He shivers just faintly in the chilled air, not yet retreating into the bungalow. Joy is sharp and golden in his scent, tempered with his own ashy reluctance. “I’ll meet you at Mary’s later.”

Thomas rakes in a breath, tugs hard at the wolf until it quiets, listens, and then backs out of the shadow of the porch. He’s unstable for a second, the world knocked off its axis as he processes again. The world is the same, but he’s the one who feels rearranged; Newt’s taste lingers on the roof of his mouth and underneath his tongue.

The lawn is still moving, paving slabs pouncing whenever a clump of grass so much as twitches. For some reason that’s what reminds Thomas of the other thing he brought through the woods and it helps his brain switch gears.

“Oh,” he says, quickly extracting the paprika from his pocket. It’s still warm to the touch in his hand, the screw top spinning wildly back and forth as it wriggles between his fingers. Newt’s eyes snap to it, clearing as he snorts with laughter into the tranquil sounds of distant bird call and leaves whirling up the cobblestones. “Fry left this guy,” Thomas shrugs. “He’s a little upset; any ideas what I can do with him?”

.

When Thomas runs into Mary’s after his midterm it’s to find her serving a queue of dwarves. They all look disgruntled in their silence, a Wisp proudly floating beside a sign that Thomas has never seen before that says in bold letters: No Whistling.

The giveaway should have been the orderly row of pick axes left outside (nine of them) but Thomas hadn’t even been paying attention. His heart has been hammering almost double-time since the exam was called to a close and he was let out. Students were flooding the courtyard, headed for the nearest pub or stations to go home for the week break but Thomas had already been running towards the woods.

The cafe is packed, mostly with people and creatures Thomas doesn’t know, but there are a few familiar faces. Jeff and Winston are sitting at a tiny table for two by the window; Jeff in normal clothes this time but with his backpack on the floor smoking in an ominous way and spilling a puddle of tar that might be the sleeve of his death robe.

Winston is accompanied by an enormous fish tank of murky pond water and appears to be sneaking bits of his bread roll to the Kappa inside. It looks a little like a tortoise but its arms and legs resemble those of a frog and it’s oddly beaked. The dented skull where it’s meant to keep a reservoir of water is empty. Thomas doesn’t know much about the creatures other than what he’s read in mythology books, but he’s pretty sure that’s bad. A rescue, then, he figures.

Mary waves but she’s running up and down with orders. Thomas ducks around two Wisps jointly carrying a huge plate of something steaming over to the harpy in the middle table. Thomas recognises her from the day back at the start of September when he and Newt got rid of her Imp infestation.

She’s hunched over her chair, feathered wings ragged and draped in matted cobwebs, talons gripping the edge of the seat. She appears to be grading papers and has to keep pushing a pair of ugly horn-rimmed glasses up her hooked nose. Thomas edges carefully around her, too. He’s never met someone with wings before her, but he guesses the protocol is a lot like someone with a wheelchair; its an extension of them and shouldn’t be touched without express permission.

There’s a family of ogres all eating their menus, four wood nymph girls clustered around the table closest to a potted plant which has slouched gratefully towards them. The baby Kelpie, Chuck, is back; still dripping water from his curly dark hair and trailing seagrass from under the back of his sweater like an untucked shirt.

Newt and Minho are waiting in the usual back corner.

“Thomas! Finally free!” Minho crows when Thomas is close enough to spot and Newt’s head snaps up. Thomas feels his heart twist, dropping a beat as it tugs him forwards.

Minho’s scent is normal as ever, red wine and wild berries, his pheromones particularly under control as he gives Thomas a solid pat on the back and pushes a mug of chocolate at him. Newt bites down a smile even though it colours his eyes. He smells like curiosity and hope tainted with uncertainty. It’s different to when Thomas left him earlier; the interceding time perhaps making him think Thomas has changed his mind.

Thomas drops into his seat and tugs it a foot closer to Newt’s as he lets his bag slide off his shoulder.

“Why is it so crowded in here?” He asks.

The wolf is clamouring against his ribs, restless but not uneasy. There’s a kind of energy in the air; not like Gally’s heady charged arcs but something that tastes of anticipation and mounting chaos.

“Less than two weeks to Halloween,” Minho answers, fever-bright and gleeful. “The out of towners are starting to show up. It’ll get even more packed than this. Vince is already fully booked from the twenty eighth right through to the third.”

Thomas throws a glance up at the ceiling. Vince – Mary’s long term friend who owns the Inn above the cafe – is rarely seen around the town. Thomas has never met him. Still-

“Sounds fun,” he says.

“It is,” Minho nods emphatically. He leans forward in his seat and starts arranging all the things sitting on the table between them. “Halloween is all out. We set up a concert here – that’s the gazebo – and one of the locals does a tractor ride for the kids. There’s usually a hay maze in the park, if Zart managed to harvest enough of it. Jeff runs a haunted house, which is always Doctor Whale’s old place, and all of Main street gets roped off from the Scorch to the Carpentry – that’s all this – and everyone shares out their chairs and food and-”

“It’s a huge street party,” Newt interjects.

Thomas blinks down at everything Minho has spaced out on the table. Salt and pepper shakers mark the two ends of Main street, a sugar bowl as the gazebo and Newt’s half-empty Chai tea cup stationed further out as the haunted house. The propped open menu indicates Mary’s and a stray teaspoon might or might not be the tractor. Right at the edge of the table Minho has drawn a haphazard squiggle with poured salt that’s probably Zart’s maze. Thomas can almost picture it all, even through the out-of-scale model.

Newt pulls back the arm he had propped on the table, shaking salt from his sleeve. “Are you-” he begins, and then cuts himself off from asking. His gaze skips past Thomas’.

Minho shoots a look between the two of them and then, rather more carefully than Thomas was expecting, asks, “Think you can make it?”

There’s too many twisting scents in the cafe to properly make out anything subtle, but Thomas doesn’t need wolf-sense to know both of them want him to be there. Newt’s expression is quietly hopeful even as he bites his lip and waits. Thomas watches his fingers curl around his mug as he reaches over Minho’s set up to pull it free. He remembers hours earlier those same fingers curling around the back of his neck. He has to suck in a deep breath to stop himself from shuddering. He shifts in his chair again, inching closer and gently presses his knee into Newt’s under the table.

Newt blinks, eyes shooting sideways up to him and tongue flattening behind his teeth, and that- that Thomas can tell, even through the chaos of the room. It’s a blatant and crystalline rush of relief, joy and anticipation all of which smell like sugared honey, mint leaves and air before rain. Newt presses his leg back.

Thomas nods. “I can make it.”

“Good,” Minho says, as though he’s seen none of this, just beaming at them both as he shoves items back to the centre of the table. He sweeps the salt maze to the floor with an arm and a Wisp on route behind him to deliver a plate of profiteroles throws one at the back of his head. Minho barely reacts. “You’ll love it,” he says, ruffling his hair.

A shadow shifts over them a second later and they all look up just in time to see Mary setting down a small plate of gingerbread biscuits the shape of bats.

“You’re cleaning that up,” she greets them with, words aimed pointedly at Minho before she turns to Thomas. “It’s a worthy cliché,” she shrugs warmly, nodding at the bats. She still looks harried but at least the nine dwarves are going; all filing out the door with matching to-go cups and whistling loudly the second they’re in the October air.

Thomas kind of wants to question the fact that there’s nine of them but he’s not sure how to do that without sounding like he’s being stupid. He knows there’s more (he met Bruce) but it’s somehow stranger seeing them all file out towards their axes; somehow much more like a lucid faerietale.

Before he can contemplate that for long Mary waves vaguely at them and answers as though he’d voiced it- “It’s the morning shift at the mine. They sometimes stop in when the afternoon lot take over when the weather turns. Vic was dyslexic so the faerietales left him out; they weren’t always known for their representation. And Clyde refused to sign the contract to be included in the book when Jacob and Wilhelm came scouting - this is a long time ago now. Vince remembers them. They were the original nine before the dwarf race really started to integrate above ground in the early eighteen hundreds. It’s kind of homage to their ancestry that the mine employs teams of nine in a shift.

“Anyway. Last exam was this morning, right?” she asks Thomas, shifting topics as all the dwarves clear off down the street. “How did it go?”

Thomas shakes himself free of the thought of dwarf representation. He tries to focus on the question instead but honestly, he doesn’t remember much of the midterm at all. Far more than anything he recalls from the huge, cold exam hall is everything that happened before it. “Good, I think,” Thomas says, shrugging and taking a biscuit. The gingerbread is still warm, soft, and smells faintly spiced before he even tastes it. The Midterm feels so far away.

Mary smiles fondly and leaves them to break up an argument between the Wisps over by the coffee machine, one waving a chocolate eclair dangerously in the face of the other. Minho tips his chair back onto two legs. Newt leans forward, elbows on the table so that his shoulder rocks into Thomas’. All left over thought of dwarves and artillery pastry fall away.

“Hey,” Newt murmurs to him. His eyes are focused but soft, roaming across Thomas’.

“Hi,” Thomas replies, feeling himself smile as he inhales the fragrant tang of the question Newt isn’t asking out loud.

Newt quirks an eyebrow at him; one part assessing, two parts assertive. The wolf sparks under Thomas’ skin and his nerves twist into knots. He nods.

Thomas doesn’t notice him move, but in the next instant Newt is kissing him again, an invasion of his space that somehow feels like trying to hold onto smoke even as Newt teases at the seam of his mouth, thumb on his jaw with quiet strength that sends a bolt of heat down Thomas’ spine. It’s just for an instant; something like creating assurance, cementing a decision. The best one Thomas has ever made, he can already tell.

There’s a resounding crash that rattles the table and Newt draws back, already with an amused, unimpressed slant to his brow. Thomas shoots a look across the table, entirely unsurprised to find that Minho has disappeared from view.

With a handful of clattering noises he springs up, grappling his chair back onto it’s legs and waving away the alarmed looks from the surrounding patrons as he throws himself back into it. The fire blanket stuck underneath every chair in the cafe has come loose and Minho throws it onto the table.

Thomas bites into his lip (tries hard to ignore that the taste there isn’t his own) and looks back at his friend, amused and wary. He can feel the warmth of a pleased flush spreading across his skin despite himself.

“Since when?” Minho demands, waving a finger between him and Newt, blinking rapidly and rubbing at the back of his head.

Newt shrugs so Thomas delicately says, “Just today?”

Minho exhales, loud enough that it might be considered a sigh, and goes right back to tipping his chair again. “Thank god,” is all he says of it. “Don’t worry; questions will come. Enjoy my generosity while it lasts.”

This time Thomas feels himself rolling his eyes and it’s only when he’s done it he realises perhaps he’s picking up a few too many things. Newt simply says, “I don’t doubt it,” fond and wry as he slides Thomas’ mug back between his hands then reaches out to snag one of the gingerbread bats for himself.

It’s their normal, only better.

.

I still want to know what you’d wish for, Thomas texts Newt that evening, when he’s back in the grey shadows of his bedroom in the student house.

He folds into the blankets. It feels like that morning when he’d found the tinderbox, and when he’d kissed Newt in the fragile gold light at the edge of the woods is so far away. It feels a little bit like he’s lived a lifetime since then. The monochrome dark can’t quite cut away the fever-bright memory of the cafe; Newt’s knee pressed into his, the slow purpose in the second kiss. It can’t quite erode the remembered taste of belonging so surely in someone else’s orbit.

The world is silent for a long, languid stretch. Sleep starts to knead at the edge of Thomas’ mind and the rustle of leaves whispers up from waiting dreams.

And that’s when his phone beeps.

There’s one text. Thomas scans it, shakes his head and falls asleep around the shape of a smile.

What would you do with it if I told you?

Chapter 7: Halloween

Chapter Text

Halloween is two days later.

Thomas stays for his afternoon class on campus, much as the burning promise of Safe Haven’s celebration (among other things) is a thrumming beat in his veins. It won’t start until sundown, so he tells himself he’s not missing anything even though he aches to be there to see it all set up. Minho has already been sending him regular texts to keep him updated on the numerous sagas of party preparation. The wolf has been snarling petulantly in his throat at being kept away.

But he stays, and he turns in a paper early (he has no plans to be rushing back once he’s there) and then hurries to say goodbye to his housemates. All of them have plans at the local club for a mixture of fancy dress, pulsing music and severely alcoholic shots served in glowing neon test tubes. None of them ask him to join or ask where he will be instead. Thomas leaves behind all his school things, just grabs his keys, and then starts down the familiar path to the woods as the sun sinks into the trees.

The party is in full swing when he arrives.

The main street of Safe Haven is lit up with floating lanterns casting delicate pools of dancing light. The shadows are still deep and far reaching, bordering the crooked rows of buildings and swaying in tune to- is that….music?

The stone gazebo in the square has been draped with ragged bandages, shimmering streamers and dense cobweb. It’s also been taken over by a bunch of mismatched out of towners playing an equally mismatched collection of instruments. There’s a guitar with five neck shafts, five headstocks and only five strings, arranged in some kind of wonky pentagram. It is not, Thomas decides, actually a guitar. There’s also an accordion that sounds like it might be full of mice and makes a noise like an angry Dalek every time its pressed together.

Keeping impossible tune with this are the wailing cries of a woman nearly six feet tall in a shimmering black gown and wearing unearthly makeup that makes her skin look powder white. The wolf winces.

“Every year,” an annoyed mummy says (Thomas startles when he realises who’s stood there, but by now not much really shocks him). The mummy shakes his head, stripping off a loose trail of bandage from his forearm and then winding it several times tightly around his head – presumably to muffle his ears. “Every stinking year. The cliché is not worth my eardrums.”

There’s a long suffering sigh and a female mummy totters up alongside them wearing a pair of earmuffs that are physically trembling. She says, “Arnold, you don’t have eardrums.”

(It seems hypocritical but Thomas doesn’t comment).

“I used to,” Arnold protests, but he allows the other mummy to tow him away by his unravelling wrist.

Thomas blinks after them.

“Arnold and Margo,” a voice says to Thomas’ right, and he wheels around to locate it, since they seem to be talking to him.

The square is bustling; all kinds of colourful stalls, games and tables clustered between the draped trees and bolted benches but the wolf zeroes in on the voice with little effort.

Thomas’ attention lands on a young woman just a few yards away, wearing a delicate kind of smile that’s both serene and incredibly sharp. She’s in a dress that looks like a waterfall, shades of blue shifting and shimmering, turning to white where it touches the grass, and an opal necklace that looks like heavy water droplets laid over her pale, almost translucent skin. She nods in the direction the mummies left. “They come every year but they’re not fond of Banshee music.”

The girl’s voice is strange; sounds like golden honey, like whiskey spun into a storm cloud and the soothing rush of an ocean on a beach. The wolf considers it narrowly, fur prickling up even though there’s nothing exactly there for it to repel. Thomas just trusts it’s judgement and shakes his head like he’s trying to shake cotton loose.

The girl’s smile shifts, spreads, becomes something gentler.

And then another girl joins them. This one is slight, all slim, elegant lines but bundled into a cable knit sweater and tattered skirt. She’s barefoot despite the cool evening air, her skin warm bronze and with a greenish flush. She has a face that’s timeless; age like some kind of distant concept to her elfin features. It’s only when she sweeps her hair from her eyes and reveals actual pointed ears that Thomas thinks maybe that mental description of her is an apt one.

“You’re such a cliché,” the elf says to her friend. “Honestly. Also I signed you up for karaoke.”

The girl in the water dress raises an eyebrow but a tendril of smug delight curls up off of her. “The least you can do, since you interrupted,” she says.

The elf rolls her eyes hard, amusem*nt and exasperation like sugary citrus. “There’s a wolf under his skin,” she says. “It was never going to work on him.”

Thomas blinks; delayed, syrupy shock rocking through him and he’s about to ask how she could even know that (let alone what exactly was meant to work) when-

“Thomas!”

He recognises Minho’s voice easily despite the girls, the murmur of the crowd and the persisting screams from the Banshee’s performance and spins to find him.

He’s darting through the cluster of people milling the street, quick as ever on his feet as he waves and beams at Thomas. He ducks past a family of ogres all munching on toffee apples, nearly trips over a gargoyle on a pair of crutches (he’s using them to swing along his paralysed stone legs) and then skirts a wide berth around a group of nymphs. Even Thomas is well aware by now that they seem to have weak constitutions for Minho’s particular pheromones.

Finally Minho crashes into him, Thomas already laughing as he reaches to steady and set him upright, the wolf pushing upwards still more to ward off the rich wine and berry scent washing through Minho’s skin.

“Sorry,” Minho starts, retracting himself and Thomas grips just a touch tighter on his shoulder, smiling as he waves off the apology.

He stays steady until Minho sucks in a breath and relaxes again. The pheromones cut out sharply anyway, but there’s no lingering regret or shame on him when Thomas let’s go; he smells relieved, pleased, the promise of fun bubbling up into the night air.

“Are you in a rush?” Thomas asks him.

“Of course,” he replies. “We have lots to do and we’re running out of ti- oh, hi Beth, hi Rachel.”

The girls nod in reply.

“I’m Rachel,” the elf offers to Thomas, apparently taking pity on him. “She’s Beth. How are you, Minho? And Gally?”

“Great,” Minho says. “He’s around somewhere. You came out a long way, didn’t you? Did you bring your brother?”

Rachel waves a hand somewhere vaguely off down the street. “Aris is here somewhere. Spiking the punch bowl or setting people’s lawns loose.”

Thomas feels relieved he can finally hear that and simply share Minho’s little pulled expression of ‘oh, great’ since, having helped Newt sedate a lawn over the summer, he’s not a stranger to the concept.

“Well,” Minho says, and he claps his hands together before snatching Thomas’ sleeve. “Lots to do. Enjoy the party.”

Thomas lets himself be towed off, throwing just one look back at the girls. Beth pokes at Rachel’s knitted sweater and the elf swats her hand away with an eye roll. Before he can think to ask Minho who either of them are – or more pressingly, what – he’s almost pulled off his feet as Minho diverts violently to the left.

“Jesus Min- What-”

“Shh, keep moving,” Minho says hustling along behind a row of waiting fireworks. They’ve been lined up in order of detonation for the show later but until then have nothing to do. One of them sneezes as they pass and the one next to it hurriedly stamps out it’s sparked fuse. “Scarecrows,” Minho says a moment later, in explanation, tugging Thomas faster.

Muffled surprise slides down Thomas’ spine but his steps don’t falter. “Sc-that’s a thing too?”

Minho carries on regardless. “Yeah. Old Pagan animation rituals; there’s sentient colonies further south. A tour group of them come up every year.”

Thomas looks up and around, trying to spot them.

“Are you scared of them?” He asks blankly.

Minho stumbles on a clump of grass that jumps out in front of him. Thomas almost trips over him and in the moment that he catches sight of Minho’s face it looks like-

“Are you blushing?”

Minho flushes darker. “No.”

The wolf chuffs in Thomas’ lungs, amused as it inhales the scent of the flat lie.

Thomas bites his lip on a smirk. Minho rolls his eyes and tugs him onward but that’s when Thomas actually sees the scarecrows.

It’s just a family of them, so maybe the rest of the group has split off. There’s a tall and spiky male-looking one with one leg of his old denim overalls thickly stuffed and the other deflated on its stick. A squatter one stands beside him in a weathered and sunbleached dress with a moth-eaten straw hat and two children watch the disaster banshee performance with rapt attention. They all have pumpkins for heads and the taller of the kids is holding his sister’s head on top of his own while her straw-tufted body sits in the grass playing with the leaping clumps.

It takes Thomas a second to realise it’s so she can see the banshee sing through the cluster of party goers.

They also have a dog.

“They have a dog,” Thomas tells Minho, dumbfounded.

“Roscoe,” Minho nods without looking up, expression twisting. “They got him re-stuffed two years ago and he’s been rowdy ever since. Must have been a bad batch of straw. Don’t get too close; no telling what he might think of you.”

Thomas swings his gaze away from the dog sewn out of burlap with buttons for eyes and wagging his mop-head tail to give Minho a look of alarm.

“Calm down,” Minho rolls his eyes. “You could take him.”

“But you’re afraid of them,” Thomas points out, since this seems like something worth noting. (Regardless, the wolf has already dismissed Roscoe as any threat without even perking it’s ears).

Minho looks slightly awkward though. “Not afraid exactly,” he says. “Uh...they’re a bit...sensitive to my- uh- anyway. Let’s go.”

Thomas kind of really wants to ask but he knows far better than to do it, so he nods and turns them away from the square, pushing Minho ahead of him by the shoulders towards the shadows reaching out from the trees. And if he makes a point to press his fingers into Minho’s shirt until Thomas stops feeling the tang of caution flicker up, then it’s because Minho needs more people who don’t shy away from him even (especially) when he’s closer to the surface than usual.

“So what are we doing first?” Thomas asks when they’re well clear of the scarecrow family. And then, because he can’t hold it back any more, “And where’s Newt? And Gally?”

Minho doesn’t quite bite back his smirk in time, but he also doesn’t call Thomas out for clearly tacking Gally on as an afterthought. “Gally was helping to put the last touches on the maze,” he says. “Newt was helping Mary with something; he said he’d catch up to us as soon as it was done.”

It sends a buzz of anticipation spiralling up through Thomas’ nerves like static discharge.

“Let’s start with finding you a drink,” Minho suggests.

.

There’s a lot of places to get a drink.

Tables set up all down main street are laden with all kinds of different refreshments. Minho steers them clear of a few more dubious looking things including mason jars of pond water (“Troll specialty,” Minho tells him), and toadstools smeared with guacamole (“You know, I’ve never actually asked about that one”). They end up, predictably, in front of Mary’s where Minho ladles out a violently purple concoction into a plastic cup shaped like a tiny, perfectly round sphere. It yawns as the drink hits it, allowing itself to fill up then sealing shut again as Minho hands it across.

“Try that.”

Thomas takes it, frowning and dubious, but the cup opens with a little whine as he raises it and through the hole that forms in the top, the pungent smell of fruit blended with something that might be ethanol assaults his senses. The wolf recoils.

“Uh,” Thomas just manages not to cough, lowering it again. “It, um. It’s a bit strong?”

Minho takes it and sniffs to test himself. “Aris got to this,” he decides a second later. And then he tips it back and swallows the cupful in one go.

His eyes promptly fill with water and he wheezes, thumps himself in the chest, and then refills the little sphere.

“Bottoms up,” he says, eyes still running, handing it across again.

And, Thomas figures he might as well. His sense of smell is strong but his metabolism is fast and whatever this kid Aris did, it’s not likely to actually affect him for long. He tips back the glass and the purple drink sets his throat on fire as it goes down.

Minho claps him solidly on the back as he splutters and sways, the ground tilting and warping under his feet as the table seems to shy away from them. His head feels foggy for a second and the wash of warm lantern light in the street swims emerald as pins and needles prickle at his fingertips. The row of crooked buildings down the street are doing a Mexican wave and lampposts are leaning away from the road. It’s like looking through a fish-eye lens.

“Elves,” Minho says, accompanied with an eyeroll that takes the edge off of his exasperated tone. “Just because they need toxic waste or battery acid to get drunk...”

Already the wolf feels thick and bold in Thomas’ veins though, rushing forwards to soak up the alcohol before it can really seep in. The street comes back to normal colour gently. The buildings stop moving, the ground slowly levels out and lampposts reluctantly stand up straight in his vision as the haze clears. The scoured feel at the back of his throat thins out to a faintly sour aftertaste. Minho’s eyes are still glassy, but he’s no longer swaying and his expression is steady as he hands Thomas a bottle of water this time. He smirks.

“Drink that instead,” he says. He sounds fine, too; maybe his metabolism isn’t as quick as a wolf’s, but he does have a resistance of sorts.

Thomas downs half the bottle, mostly to wash out the lingering taste of-

“What was it?” he thinks to ask then.

Minho is already moving away, beckoning Thomas to follow.

“Fruit punch,” he says over his shoulder and yeah; that much Thomas had guessed. “The alcohol is Elven moonshine. It’s….” Minho seems to search for a way to describe it for a moment before giving it up as a lost cause. “Anyway. Aris usually brings some when he’s in town. In small doses it’s fine; Gally put some into a batch that we made for a party one year. Granted none of us have all our memories from that night but it tasted great.”

While he’s talked, he’s led them across the square and now he comes to a stop the far side of the gazebo.

Spare equipment and instruments are laying about for the next sets in the concert but they’re roped off to avoid being tripped over (a gnome and a faun appear to be arguing over a matching pair of microphones in the midst of it). The rest of this side of the lawn is a riot of cheers and the sharp smell of harvest. Glowing orange lanterns hang from the lowest boughs of the trees that circle the grass, and the shadows pool thick and black right where their light can’t reach which makes Thomas feel instantly cut off from the rest of the town.

Three tables are arranged in a line, all bearing a huge, stainless steel bucket. Towels are everywhere, as are barrels on barrels of ripe apples with yet more lying discarded and bruising in the grass.

The festive, competitive tang in the air is infectious. “Is this-”

“Apple bobbing,” Minho confirms with relish. “Yes. Every year. You can’t have Halloween without bobbing for apples.”

There are queues up to all of the tables; the motley assortment of visitors ranging wildly but all of them taking a go with someone stationed the other side to check there’s no cheating. A scarecrow leans over the bucket for his turn only to lose his pumpkin head in the water with a thick sploosh. The half-drenched guy stationed there quickly snatches out the gargling squash and hands it back before waving him off. At the next table one of the water nymphs has her entire head submerged, her body folded almost in half over the bucket and a chorus of jeers have kicked up from the line.

“Hardly fair when they can breathe in water,” Minho points out, shrugging like he agrees.

An older man steps up to one of the tables and transforms into a pelican on the spot, snatching up six apples in one go before the assigned referee can grapple his beak open and shake out the fruit. He turns back in a mad flap of wings, his greying hair dishevelled and sends a wink at the next person in line. The referee, still brushing feathers off of his clothes, hands the shapeshifter a red card and waves him away.

“Can’t try again until next year,” Minho translates, nodding towards the man as he heads off for something else to do.

He bypasses a group of people hanging just on the edge of the darkness by the trees, and one of them reaches out to give him a high five. The group all share the same milky skin; like silvery moonlight, their features both ageless and stagnant, and they watch the unravelling competition with keen, fathomless eyes. One of them is snatching bites from a stick of cotton candy that’s nestled with what might be spiders.

Thomas decides he’ll give up trying not to ask questions for tonight; there’s too many unusual things and people in town because of the celebration and he wants to know about it all. He gestures vaguely in the direction of the isolated group, “Who are they?”

Minho follows his arm and barks a laugh when his eyes land on them.

“Vampires. Always the same bunch. They’re from Louisiana. They’re not allowed to play any more; they got red carded too many times. Their teeth pierce the apples; makes it dead easy to lift them out. Clint brought in the clause about….six years ago now, so they couldn’t use that to cheat - but he kept finding fang marks in the apples.”

“How did he stop them playing then?”

Minho’s still snigg*ring when he says, “It’s holy water.”

Thomas finds himself staring at the buckets again with a new kind of awareness, even though they look completely ordinary.

“It’s the good stuff, too,” Minho adds. “Clint ships it in from Romania. Blessed on the home turf and everything. He used to get the local priest to do it but it only gave them a little sting so-”

But that’s when Minho cuts himself off and claps his hands on Thomas’ shoulders. His eyes flash with mirth.

“Well. Your turn then, let’s line up.”

Thomas can’t fully remember how he ended up standing next in line for the apple bobbing. He must not have protested when Minho steered him over, but before he knows it he’s sucking in a breath and dunking his head into the bucket. His hands grasp the steel edge, the surprise of the wet chill rocketing down his spine as gooseflesh. It doesn’t stay. The wolf is quickly there, hot under his skin and unamused at the taste of fructose sugars and metal in the water.

Despite the tang of it, being submerged is oddly peaceful, and it’s easy to pick up an apple when he braces it on the bottom.

He pulls himself upright a moment later, full surround sound sinking back into his brain as he leaves the water behind. He bites down on the apple to break off a chunk before handing the rest to Minho. He’s soaked, hair dripping steadily down his neck into the collar of his t-shirt and since this can be soundly blamed on Minho anyway- he shakes his head violently.

Minho’s laughter turns to a shout of mock dismay and Clint – the guy who had to rescue the scarecrow – throws a towel over Thomas’ head.

“Nice work, Thomas,” Clint’s voice says, muffled. “Next!”

Thomas scrubs at his hair, laughing as he listens to Minho bemoan getting splashed.

“I leave you alone for five minutes-”

The voice splinters through Thomas’ amusem*nt, ignites it into something vivid as his stomach swoops. He tears off the towel just as Newt stops in front of them, eyebrow raised.

“Did he tell you the holy water stung him?” Newt asks, lilting his head in Minho’s direction.

Minho’s attention snaps up and he drops the hem of his t-shirt where he’s been inspecting the high velocity water spatter pattern. “No, actually, but that’s a good one. I may use that.”

Newt rolls his eyes.

“I barely had to convince him,” Minho continues. “He wanted a go.” Thomas thinks it would be more accurate to say he wasn’t averse to having a go, but he thinks the technicality will be lost on Minho right now. “Dog genes,” Minho shrugs, now affecting a mock tone of pity. “He can’t help it.”

Thomas hacks a cough when he inhales too sharply. “Wh- I’m a wolf. Not a...Pomeranian.”

“Pics or it didn’t happen,” Minho says flatly, biting into the rest of the apple Thomas handed him. The world smells of fructose sugars, pumpkin seeds and hilarity, burning bright. “I’ve seen no evidence so far. If I threw a stick would you fetch it?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas says, biting down an answering laugh and trying to keep his face straight. “If I shoved it u-”

“There are Children here,” Minho gasps abruptly, cutting him off with a fake scandalised expression.

“Something that’s never stopped you before,” Newt points out dryly.

“I’ve grown,” Minho says, so throwaway that it’s clear he doesn’t even expect to be believed. He doubles back though, gesticulating wildly with the half eaten apple as he asks, “But really, how do we know? You could have been bitten by a Pomeranian.”

“A French bulldog called Gabby, actually,” Thomas says, truthfully. “Once.”

This information seems to stall Minho and the buzz around him settles into genuine curiosity. Thomas has seen it enough; he’s used to this between them now from the long summer days when they’d laugh and mock each other only to slide easily into more significant topics whenever they came to mind.

Next to them, a faintly amused frown pulls at Newt’s brow. “A bulldog?” he asks, mildly incredulous.

Thomas winces. Gabby had been young, seven weeks old, but even then the wolf inside him had known she was defective from birth; her senses hadn’t developed right and she had never been able to pick up on the creature under his skin the way her litter had. She’s the only dog who’s ever bitten him. He tells them this with a small shrug and Minho nudges his arm.

“Knew you were a dog person.” He turns to stage whisper to Newt, “He’s part bulldog.”

Thomas shoots him a withering look. Newt snorts and flicks him hard across the bicep.

(“Better than a terrier,” Newt mutters anyway and the words are a smothered laugh.)

Minho, entirely unaffected, bites off another chunk of apple and turns back to Thomas. Through the sharp cut of fruit sugar newly in the air, he can already taste the realness of the next question.

“Is there actually a difference, then?” Minho asks as he swallows his mouthful. “Between a wolf that’s been bitten and one who’s...just born that way?”

“As far as I know….all wolves are born,” Thomas says carefully. There are limits to what he knows, but when it comes to what he is, he learned a lot where the wolf couldn’t tell him. “We’re not- none of us are….bitten.”

“Myth?” Newt half asks, unsurprised. (They all get used to separating the truth from the fiction).

Thomas gives a small shrug-nod. “Yeah, it’s popular mythology. To make people keep their distance, I think. I mean; we’re not dangerous in that way but we are still something feral underneath.”

“Probably something that wolves started themselves,” Minho says, voice just touched with something wistfully understanding. Thomas thinks that if anyone might wish they had any control over their own mythology to the history of mankind, Incubi would be high on the list. Minho shakes himself, though, and Thomas smells fresh mirth in his scent, citrus and sugar, before he ever hears the laugh in the next words.

“So you’ve never bitten anyone then,” Minho says, shaking his head and flicking apple seeds on the grass. “Disappointed, Thomas.”

But Thomas’ tongue feels suddenly thick at the back of his throat as he swallows involuntarily. The faded memory of a time before crosses the back of his brain, silky and whispering, a rush of blood, a wolf wearing a boy’s skin, teeth that are his but don’t belong to him, the pulse he clamped them over-

“No way,” Minho says, eyes going round. “You have?”

There’s a stab of interest from Newt, clouded but precise, and the tang of it has the words falling forward.

“We don’t bite to turn people,” Thomas says again. “That’s myth but ….well….the instinct is there, I guess, because…. it’s still a wolf and that’s still me.”

Minho squints. “But if you don’t bite to turn then-Oh.”

His pheromones flicker, rich wine and grape scents fluttering upward before Minho pulls a face; mouth pressed, eyebrows high, and they blink out again.

Newt clears his throat next to them and Thomas looks up, only to inhale the scent of metal and intrigue simmering off of him in the night air. Newt looks back and it makes it hard to miss the deliberate spike of sense-memory that is thrown his way like a javelin. It embeds between his ribs, fills his lungs and spears out through his veins; the second-hand taste of white hot wilderness and an earthy addiction.

Thomas almost chokes on his next breath. It’s Newt’s memory of him; something so vivid that the phantom of it is tangible to the wolf. It ripples through muscle and bone, a whine curled on it’s tongue. Thomas has to force the pulse of it down hard but Newt can tell anyway.

He smirks, his eyebrow lifts and then he turns to include Minho as he says to the both of them, lightly, “If you’re both done then Gally’s finished with the maze. He’s going to meet us by the tractor ride.”

Minho manages to somehow bite off another mouthful of apple obnoxiously in Newt’s face.

.

Thomas had been under the impression that a tractor ride was….well. A ride on a tractor. Or at least on a trailer pulled by the tractor.

“Those are flying carpets,” he says, even though he’s fairly certain that much is very obvious.

“Yes,” Minho agrees readily. Newt’s mouth twists as he forcibly presses down another smirk and Thomas blinks across the road again.

There is a tractor, so that much is at least unsurprising. It’s a shiny red thing with wheels almost as tall as he is and a single blazing headlight that’s carving a cool yellow path through the night-time. It smells, even from the other side of the street, of gasoline, freshly turned earth and root vegetables.

But it’s not pulling a trailer.

Tethered to the ball hitch at the rear of it are three flying carpets, all of them bucking and pulling on their leashes like unruly horses and making the entire ensemble look not unlike a chariot in reverse. There’s a long carpet runner that’s fraying at the edges, a quirky faux fur area rug in a giraffe pattern and an elegant Arabian mat with tasselled corners. As they watch, a stout little witch steps up next to the tractor and smacks the wheel arch three times.

All of the carpets fall quiet, floating down to knee level and flattening out obediently for the line up of party-goers to start climbing on.

Gally wanders up to the three of them, energy twisting in easy, flickering coils over his shoulders, arms behind his back, just as the tiny witch hoists herself into the tractor seat and gives the headlight a smack this time.

It grumbles to life, sounding more than a little put upon and pulls away from the curb, carpets in tow and passengers all cheering and giggling.

“You got him to apple bob,” Gally says when he stops beside them, apparently taking in Minho’s still drying t-shirt and Thomas’ equally damp hair.

But before Minho can turn on him with any kind of retort, Gally sweeps his arms around to present him with- a pumpkin. It’s not been carved; rather, its been cut in two, separating the bottom half from the top and sticks have been skewered into place around the edge to hold them separate, leaving room in the middle to rest a painfully orange tea light candle. A pumpkin carousel lantern.

Thomas has barely a split second to think it’s a kind of cute gesture before-

“You asshole-” Minho bursts, emphatic stress on the insult even though he breaks right after to snort in laughter, shoving the pumpkin away and making Gally’s expression break into hilarity that Thomas doesn’t often get to see. He finds himself smiling automatically and the wolf glows in his chest. Minho tries to put Gally into a headlock.

“Come on,” Newt says, his voice lowered, more for them than the other two. Thomas twists to him. “There’s more to see.”

Newt reaches out to take his hand and Thomas tangles their fingers together thoughtlessly, the glowing, golden pressure in his chest swelling further with the way Newt’s scent spikes with happiness. Newt tugs him along, and Thomas goes, Minho and Gally slowly falling into step behind them, Gally still snigg*ring and Minho trying to maintain a scowl. The pumpkin lies abandoned on a refreshment table.

.

They get as far as rounding the corner back to the square.

Minho wheels around, under Gally’s arm which stays looped over his shoulders and gives Thomas a bright look. “You’re coming to the haunted house, right?”

And before Thomas can reply, Minho is flat on the floor, barrelled over by-

A pig.

Yes, a real pig. Thomas does a double-take but it’s still there.

It’s snuffling loudly, ears flopping into its face and wildly fighting against the taut pull of what looks like a dog harness that’s been duct taped to adjust for it’s huge girth. It has a pair of fluffy black and white wings that are flapping chaotically, shedding piebald feathers all over Minho and the asphalt of the road and it squeals indignantly, trotters narrowly avoiding areas that Minho would probably like to keep injury free.

Thomas is entirely unsurprised to follow the harness line up and find Winston (being dragged) on the other end.

“Winston!” Gally barks, somewhere between aggravated and astounded.

“Sorry! Sorry, I’m sorry!” Winston shouts, skidding closer as the pig gains traction, shoving it’s flat nose into Thomas’ leg and almost taking him out as well. “Denzil, no!”

“You called it Denzil?” Minho wheezes, scrambling out from the trample zone and taking Gally’s arm to haul himself back to his feet.

Winston finally reaches them, sweating and with all his weight braced back on his heels so far that if the line snapped he’d probably fly a good few feet. He’s slowly reeling in the leash on the pig as though he’s caught something while out fishing and, slower still, he’s winning; the pig scraping backwards towards them, squealing ever louder.

“The name?” Newt asks, but it’s directed at Minho. “The name is the part you’re questioning?”

“It’s Winston,” Minho shrugs, like the person in question isn’t standing in the middle of their circle on the street with his hands full. “I thought I’d start easy.”

Newt considers, and then does a half nod-half shrug motion like that’s actually reasonable.

“I didn’t name him,” Winston says quickly, before he can be asked again.

The pig is finally close enough and Winston throws himself forwards to get a firm grip on the harness itself, panting with the exertion. It huffs a deep, stubbornly annoyed breath and sits on Winston’s foot. The wings fold up primly, like feathers aren’t sticking out at odd angles and now that it’s not bulldozing them it looks almost tolerable; the wide black body, banded with pink skin and huge triangle ears folded half over doleful eyes.

“What on earth-” Minho starts instead.

Winston shoots him a blank look. “He’s a British Saddleback Winged pig,” he supplies, frowning like it should have been obvious.

One part of it certainly is.

Gally blinks, tilting his head to observe the animal with reluctant curiosity. “I thought they were a myth,” he says.

Winston frowns even deeper and a little thrum of pouting offence taints the air over his shoulders. “They’re British,” he says. “Not myths.”

Newt rubs at the bridge of his nose. “I think he meant the winged part.”

Oh, Winston mouths.

“Why did you bring him to a street party?” Thomas finds himself asking, eyes dubiously on the disgruntled pig. Winston’s farm is on the edge of Haven specifically for the purpose of giving him somewhere to keep all the creatures he finds.

Minho snorts loudly before Winston can answer. “Don’t joke,” he says. “He’ll stop bringing them to public places when-” and his eyes flicker wickedly down at the British Saddleback pig, irony and humour twirling upwards. “When pigs fly.”

Winston lurches forwards, clapping his hands down over Denzil’s huge ears and pressing them into his face. He gives Minho a look of reproach, apparently unaware they’re all staring at him.

“Don’t say that,” he says, hushed. “It bothers him.”

Thomas finds his gaze drawn down to the pig again; the heavy, fed-up way it’s slumped over Winston’s foot and the broken feathers littering the ground. Thomas has seen birds up close before, been stood nearby, both as a human and in wolf-skin, as they’ve thrown themselves into the air. Birds smell like ozone. They smell of sky, trapped between their primaries and of clouds in the hollow of their spread wings. The pig doesn’t smell like the sky at all; just the stale, faded memory of thinner air.

“He can’t fly,” Thomas says, guesses, though it doesn’t come out like a question.

Newt shoots him a sideways look.

“No,” Winston confirms, which has all the gazes snapping back to him as he stands up straight again. “I mean – not now. He will, eventually. I liberated him from a sky racing circuit. He was the only one I could get to. They clip the primaries of all their pigs in the off season so they’re less work to keep. It’s barbaric. When his new flight feathers grow back in he’ll be good to go again.”

“When you say ‘liberated’?” Gally asks leadingly.

“I freed him.”

Minho lifts an eyebrow. “Is that Winston for ‘Stole’?”

Winston sniffs, presses his lips tight together and doesn’t reply. Instead he says airily, “Anyway, I’ll just take him out of your way-”

And with that he sets about hauling on the harness again, getting Denzil back to his feet more, Thomas suspects, through the pig’s own annoyance with the tugging than any degree of strength on Winston’s part.

Denzil goes from reluctantly placing his legs underneath him to zooming full pelt between Minho and Newt, ears flapping. Winston yelps, a noise that’s higher in pitch than he’d likely ever admit to and goes skidding in the pig’s wake.

A troll just barely leaps out of the destructive, feathery path in time, towing along three shell-shocked billy goats and clutching his mossy chest in fright. A sparkling sash is draped over his shoulder, easily readable even from down the street: Best Nursery Tale Costume.

Thomas shakes his head. He probably earned it. Thomas isn’t even sure where you can buy a billy goat around here.

Minho turns back to Thomas and says, like the past five minutes didn’t even happen, “So. Haunted House?”

.

They get tickets from Jeff even though Gally points out that no one actually checks they have them, and meet Zart outside of the rundown, distinctly haunted-looking Victorian house that is Dr Whale’s property. The steep gabled roofs have gone crooked over time, dormer windows jutting out from the shingles like they’re going to fall. There’s an actual spire, ironwork parapets along the gutters and a groaning, lopsided porch that wraps around the lower floor, recessing the front door into the angular folds of the walls.

A Wisp hovers helpfully in the blackest part under the overhang, it’s glowing blue light bobbing next to the open entryway. It would make everything look even eerier; pallid light flickering against the discoloured window panes, but it’s buzzing with tangy, excitable energy which rather ruins the effect.

“Are you coming in with us?” Thomas asks when Zart’s greeted them cheerfully. (He waves at them, in the middle of pruning toadflax creepers from between his fingers with a pair of old shears like some people might cut their fingernails).

Zart shakes his head, throwing the clippings away where they take root and sprout in an overgrown flower bed. He stuffs his hands and the shears back into his pocket, which seems to be growing slower than the last time Thomas met him.

“Oh no,” he says. “No, I don’t- I don’t really do hauntings. Um. I….sort of….give Alby hayfever?”

“He’s had a cough for the last hundred and thirty seven years,” Gally points out. “I hardly think you’ll make it worse.” But he doesn’t try to change Zart’s mind and they enter without him.

(“Frypan is banned because the kids used to say he was making stuff move, not the ghosts,” Newt tells him.

Minho follows up with, “And Brenda is banned because last time someone tried to scare her- well….it wasn’t pretty.”

Gally winces and Thomas wonders briefly who he has to question to get that story).

The Wisp does a happy somersault as they all pass by it and then blinks and vanishes, leaving them to the viscous dark.

Alby is the ghost on shift this year. He dutifully follows them from room to room, rattling chains, stamping on stairs and occasionally throwing things. The first few times an unlit candle or throw cushion sailed past them with a wide berth Thomas just assumed Alby had terrible aim, but in the dining room he spots an X marked on a wall and half hidden by a heavy curtain. When Alby hits it dead on with a glossy plate that bounces rather than shatters on impact, Thomas realises his aim is fine and that he clearly just has a script to follow.

The entire experience is accompanied with Alby’s thick, chesty cough which gives away his location every forty seven seconds, and at one point, Newt holds out a tissue for him mid-ominous-cupboard-door-slamming.

Minho stuffs his hand over his mouth, hilarity stabbing into the gloom through his scent. Gally thumps him on the back, the magnetic energy field around him leaping with his exasperated amusem*nt, the most alive thing in the old house. Thomas buries his own smile in his sleeve.

He can’t wait to come back next year.

.

They pass the tractor en-route to the square, carpets laden with children and cut a path through a lawn where a game of musical chairs is in progress in the middle of a faerie ring made from wildflowers and pebbles. (“Lawn Roulette got too dangerous,” Minho tells Thomas as they pass. “So the fae suggested this instead.”) There’s a wingback armchair, a three legged stool, three folding beach chairs, two wooden seats that might have come from Mary’s and an enormous toadstool.

The pixie music cuts off as they pass and there’s a mad dash of satyrs, harpies and dryads for the seats still in the faerie ring. The toadstool hops out of the game, leaving them one short and Newt snatches Thomas clear of it’s path only for them to run bodily into Frypan.

He’s holding four toffee apples and a stick of cotton candy (mercifully free of spiders) and beams at the four of them.

“We need teammates for a moonshine tournament,” he says by way of greeting. (If his eyes catch on Newt’s fingers still looped around Thomas’ wrist, thumb tucked against his own, then he doesn’t mention it).

Gally’s eyebrows rise but his expression is sharp and gleeful. Minho lets out a hoot of joy and snatches the candy away.

Thomas bites his lip. “Uh. I can’t get drunk.”

Frypan wheels on him, shoves the toffee apples into his free arm and claps hands on Thomas’ shoulders. He’s buzzing with skipping delight; just a little too loopy to be totally sober but it’s just a flickering edge in his scent at the moment. Mostly he smells like leather, warm yeast and sugar.

“None of us really can,” Frypan says. “And that’s just what you need if you’re going to beat Brenda.”

.

They get caught up in a minor scuffle out by the gazebo once they’ve all dispersed from the moonshine table. Frypan is the wobbliest but even he’s walking off the toxic effects of the Elf alcohol. They stop in the square to watch the end of a karaoke session from a faun playing a set of panpipes (“What a cliché,” a nearby harpy scoffs, disdain dripping down her hooked nose) while doing some kind of riverdance on his cloven hooves.

And then it happens just as the performer changes.

The faun bows and clops out of the gazebo to make way for the next performer. It’s a Leprechaun who immediately launches into an Irish jig, shining golden coins spilling out of his pockets and raining down around his feet. A scarecrow near a cart of toasted walnuts lets out a sigh that releases a cloud of hay dust into the air and whirls around to leave.

He spots the harpy and flinches, diverting to give her a lot of room despite her folded wings and stumbles over his own legs in the process, toppling directly into Thomas.

He’s so lightweight; just burlap and straw on sticks and overbalanced by the squash head. Thomas just sets him straight and steps back but the scarecrow is already turning around, apology on his carved mouth and that’s when he registers Minho stood at Thomas’ shoulder.

He goes stiff as a board on his wooden frame and a gush of pumpkin seeds spill out of his neck hole to the ground like someone has just scooped out the inside of his head in a carving contest. The sweet smell of wheat straw flares up as the scarecrow blushes – candle light glowing through his wide eyes. Apologies stutter out as he dashes backwards, hands clamped around his own neck so tightly that Thomas isn’t sure if he’s just trying to hold in his seeds or actively attempting to choke himself.

In the next instant he’s gone, leaving a trail of pulpy pumpkin and wheat fronds on the pavement.

Thomas turns to Minho, aware he’s doing a bad job at concealing his alarm. He hadn’t been sure what he was picturing when Minho said scarecrows were sensitive to him, but this wasn’t it.

Minho winces, “I hate scarecrows.”

.

“We’re ditching you,” Newt announces cheerfully.

It’s getting late, but the moonlight is singing in Thomas’ bloodstream, the frenzy of the party a pulsing beat under his skin and he’s in no rush to return to the student house. It’s not like any of his housemates will be home yet either.

Minho rolls his eyes. “Surprised it took this long,” is what he says. “Have fun. Remember there are children about.”

Newt waits until Minho has steered Gally away and Frypan has thrown an arm over Brenda and they’ve all headed for the tractor before he leans close and says, “Not in the hay maze, there aren’t.”

Thomas can taste the questioning intent in it; words like honey and opportunity. It feels a bit like freedom after so long tangled with people and so many new, impossible things. The wolf keens in his chest, muzzle pushing between his ribs, seeking.

Subdued with an easy enjoyment and wonder all evening, his heart now stumbles into a staccato of a beat, anticipation splintering through his bones.

Newt’s pressed close, waiting, tendrils of yearning licking into the air between them. Thomas wants to kiss him again. The fixed certainty that he’s allowed to, would be encouraged, even, is a heady, dizzying rush in his bloodstream. The feral coil of the wolf is hot under his skin, so close to the surface.

“We should go there,” Thomas says, even though it feels like his throat has closed up. “Definitely.”

“Everyone should see a hay maze on Halloween,” Newt responds agreeably, like they don’t both know neither of them will be looking at much of it at all.

The hay maze is closed off to under eighteens after the eleven pm cut off and with the hour fast climbing towards one in the morning, the maze is both unmanned – the little podium by the entrance absent of it’s Goblin attendee – and shrouded in a blanket of silky darkness.

If there’s anyone else in the maze with them, they’re off in their own corners so far that Thomas can’t hear or smell them at all. The bales are stacked a good eight feet high, the corridors between them narrow, grassy and strewn with loose stalks. Lanterns are stabbed into the walls periodically, stuffed full of fireflies which glow up as they step closer. With just a few turns it feels like they’ve been entirely cut off from the world.

So when they round a bend and Newt pushes him up into a wall, Thomas goes. The bales absorb the impact, shaking loose pieces of hay as Thomas tugs Newt after him, fingers hooking through the belt loops of his jeans and twisting into the woven fabric of his sweater. Newt’s fingers lock around his wrists and his heartbeat floods into the fragile skin there, begging and helpless. Thomas opens his mouth under Newt’s, lets the taste of him spill at the back of his throat.

Newt kisses him until the world goes soft and hazy and out of focus. He stays pinned like a spread butterfly on glass in the slight give of the wall, immobile under the iron strength of Newt’s grasp. He exhales starlight, shaky and craving when Newt breaks away to trace his mouth, open and exploratory down the cord in Thomas’ neck to the hollow where he can hear his own electric pulse.

His senses are muted; pliant under the cloaked weight of the magic humming up through Newt’s skin. The wolf is lax and loose-limbed in the pit of his stomach. He wonders absently if Newt will leave a mark; if he has thought about it the same way Thomas has caught himself wondering what colour Newt would bruise under his tongue.

Gold flares behind his closed eyelids; part sensation and part memory.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” Thomas breathes.

Newt hums in invitation. The vibration skitters across Thomas’ collarbone. He lifts his head, falls still.

“Your skin goes gold sometimes,” Thomas manages to say. The words feel heavy, the tang of wanting at the back of his throat. “How is that? Like- what does it-how does it happen?”

Newt draws back, just a little. His fingers trace patterns into Thomas’ sides over his t-shirt, the ridges of his ribs and the taut skin over his hips, dragging cotton with him, but there’s enough distance to let night air rush between them. It settles the swirling fog of the world and lets Thomas see the way Newt’s eyes shift into focus, still wide and blown in the dark.

He says, like he’s trying to give it a proper answer despite his distraction, “It always has. Part of it is Djinn magic, what’s left of it. It’s...hard to explain. Like some of me remembers even though other parts are gone.” His head tilts. “It- it really fascinates you, doesn’t it?”

“A bit,” Thomas lies.

Newt considers him for a moment, and then something settles into his face, decisiveness that’s sparking and intent. “There’s something I want to know, too.”

“Ask.”

“What you said to Minho, about biting,” he starts, which instantly has the wolf raising its head. “Is it...is that both of you – the instinct? How does that work?”

“It comes from the wolf,” Thomas says, “but sometimes it’s me, too. It-….depends.”

“On?”

Thomas worries at his lip, trying to word it carefully. “If I’m angry I’ve never wanted to attack with teeth but other times….lines get blurred.”

There’s that same stab from earlier; interest and jigsaw pieces falling into place. Recognition is a delicately muted spark in Newt’s eyes, heat touching his scent as he asks, “Can I?”

Thomas’ heart leaps and the wolf inside it claws into the frantic walls, a scraping sensation bolting down his spine.

“Yes,” he says, automatic, before it occurs to him that maybe he should offer some warning as well. “I’ve – just. The reaction is-”

“I’ll find out,” Newt says, unconcerned. Something about that touches the nerves at the back of Thomas’ neck.

“Not now?” Thomas asks, when Newt makes no move to follow through.

“No,” Newt says, half a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. He leans close again, a slow shift that presses his thumbs deliberately into grooves of muscle between bone that frame Thomas’ diaphragm. He can’t inhale without breathing into Newt’s hands. “When the wolf inside you isn’t waiting for it and you won’t try to brace yourself against it. I’m not afraid of you. Is that okay?”

It hadn’t even occurred to Thomas that he would be, but it’s one thing to ask about the wolf in conversation and something else to push it for a reaction with no warning or knowledge of the response. The wolf sits stone-still under his heart, trilling with smug, approving delight and Thomas tries not to let that same elation spill into his human bones. He’s nodding.

He thinks of everything Newt is – of the bloom of magic under his skin, the traces of it still in his veins, and the scars left behind when it was taken; the crippled leg and the weight of a lamp in his pocket.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m not afraid of you, either.”

Newt swallows, his eyes skip down, teeth worrying at his lip and the air between them colours with heartache.

“There are things you still don’t know,” he replies.

Thomas shakes his head. He knows the weight of secrets, and the damage they can do. He knows the perils of blind trust, but he also knows enough about Newt, has guessed enough and unless the things Thomas doesn’t know mean he isn’t that person then- “It doesn’t matter. I know you’re still you, whoever you were before, or whatever you lost.”

His knee rocks into Newt’s and they both know he’s not just talking about the wishes.

“I don’t need to know how,” he says. “It’s your life, your story to tell, and you don’t owe it to me. But it wouldn’t change my mind.”

“Sure about that?” Newt asks, and Thomas wouldn’t need wolf-sense to pull the bitterness from the words.

It’s been a matter of days since they’ve been more, but Thomas knows. The wolf calls Newt Pack, ears flattening with the drive to comfort. He wants to press words in until Newt believes that he’s more than the gouges in his bones, the gaps that were left when the chains fell away. He’s still a whole person, and learning the stories carved into those wounds doesn’t change anything about who he is now. He’s someone that Thomas wants to keep, for as long as he can.

He says, soft and fixed, “I’m sure.”

Newt lets out a breath and kisses him, exhaling into Thomas’ lungs with a kind of reckless awe.

It would be so easy to sink into him. Thomas wants to, but he knows that right now he shouldn’t. The conversation, short as it was, had been more meaningful than he’d expected it to be and he doesn’t want to feel like he’s trying to bury it or ignore it. He wants the conviction of it to be the thing that he carries out of here, something even more lasting than the taste of smoke and iron at the back of his tongue.

Newt appears to think the same, though, because he draws gently back a moment later.

“Hey, Newt,” Thomas starts, short of breath. “What would you wish for?”

Newt makes the pressed sound of a snort of laughter. He says, “Right now? Less restraint.”

It’s far from a serious answer; certainly not the one that Newt has never actually given him since the first time he asked, but he didn’t expect it to be, either. It drew a laugh instead and served a better purpose even though Thomas can feel the thread of truth to it.

Before he can reply, though, the buzz of reciprocal wanting leaving his head fogged, there’s a shift in the distant feel of the world. He can tell someone is approaching before he can hear them with human ears.

His fingers squeeze at Newt’s waist, breath catching in his throat. The wolf’s hackles raise, a prickly sensation in the small of his back, but then the scent catches; funnelled towards them by the narrow walls, and the wolf huffs in flat petulance instead of warning.

Thomas nods towards the far corner and Newt steps back to turn to it, recognising the change without question. He flickers; going from molten to focused inside of a heartbeat.

That’s when Minho rounds the bend at the end.

He’s walking blind, hand clapped over his eyes dramatically and an exaggerated expression of distaste on his face underneath it, head tipped high back. He knocks into a wall, lets out an ‘oof’ and then an even quieter ‘ew’ and finally stops. Thomas doesn’t ask how he found them.

“I am so sorry to interrupt,” he says, comically nasal with his palm clamped half over his nose. “Believe me I wish I wasn’t but we need your help. Denzil escaped.”

Chapter 8: November Part 1

Chapter Text

“This says that one theory was a dead body getting possessed so it would rise again as an incubus. That’s false,” Newt says.

“Very false,” Minho confirms lazily. “I think even Normans decided not to go through with that one for long. They’ve got enough reanimated dead myths without adding mine. Okay this one says Aladdin made Genies famous.”

Newt lifts his head from its resting place on the back of Thomas’ shoulder. “You just made that up.”

Minho’s fingers start flying across the screen of his phone, tongue poking between his teeth.

“Mmmm, no,” he denies. “It’s right here.”

“You’re literally typing it out,” Newt says flatly. Thomas twists in the bracket of Newt’s legs to catch the withering look that accompanies it.

Gally, laying with his head in Minho’s lap, snorts and pinches him around the ankle. Minho reacts by kicking at him half-heartedly, evidenced by the way he misses and instead knocks a plant pot to the ground.

A faerie who had apparently been sleeping off the Halloween festivities tumbles out of the folds of the petals, along with handfuls of loose soil. He stumbles upright, one wing sputtering to life faster than the other and then yawns widely as he takes off and drifts away, keeling towards the right in a way that looks more drunk than strong air currents.

“Should he be flying?” Thomas asks, when it seems like no one else will.

Newt shrugs and his head drops back to Thomas’ shoulder. “If he’s still over the moonshine limit he’ll be pulled up. The Goblin patrol are pretty hot on it the morning after a party.”

“No one wants a repeat of twenty thirteen,” Minho adds, not looking up from his screen as he continues to type. “Some kind of hen night-bridal shower thing and twenty harpies got blitzed on straight whiskey, woke up in the park afterwards and then tried to fly home. The whole town got woken up when one of them crashed headlong into a tree and disturbed a dormitory of sprites.”

“They were really out of it for whiskey,” Gally adds, eyes closed as he speaks. “They were definitely doing some bird-seed that night, too.”

“No one wants that,” Thomas agrees, with just a touch of sass. Minho’s nose scrunches up as he swallows a smile but he’s still too busy to bother with a proper retort. Newt smirks into the side of Thomas’ neck, his mouth pressing a soft, private kiss there as he resettles, curved around Thomas’ back.

It’s early, still, the morning light pale and washed out, the sky still a hazy kind of blue and a nip in the air.

Thomas never left.

Winston’s winged pig had half the town running around helplessly for almost two hours before Mary appeared with a huge bowl of truffles and inside of ten minutes was handing the leash of the sedated saddleback over to Winston with a deeply affected sigh. By the time he had gotten Denzil back to the farm (borrowing one of the flying carpets to transport the snoozing creature), and half the visitors had either packed up or headed for Vince’s inn, it was the early hours of the morning and Thomas had never wanted to leave them less.

So they picked their way through the leftover chaos and detritus of a Halloween well-celebrated, finally climbing up the steps of the abandoned gazebo and dropping onto the benches there. Tired as they were, the adrenaline was taking too long to fade; the traces of it left buzzing in Thomas’ bloodstream, skittering across his nerves. Minho had a feverish brightness to his eyes and Thomas barely had to touch the wolf’s senses to see the flickering darts of living energy twisting around Gally like comets in orbit. Newt felt like slowly melting gold as he folded around Thomas on one of the two benches under the open air roof.

So they stayed awake, slowly watching the sky start to touch with light behind the silhouette of the trees.

And somewhere in that time, the game (if it could be called that) had begun when Minho pulled up wikipedia on his phone and turned to Thomas to say, “Howling. At the moon. Is that a thing you do?”

So now the clock in the corner of his phone screen is telling him it’s almost six am and he has wikipedia open on their page about Incubus and Newt is reading bits out close enough that the words slide down the side of Thomas’ neck.

“Mine says Magneto is the coolest X Man,” Gally inserts.

Which-

Thomas isn’t sure how since his eyes are closed, his arms are folded and if he even has a phone that he wouldn’t accidentally short out or overcharge until it blew up then it’s not here now.

It’s not any of those things that Minho addresses, however, when he finally looks up from his own screen to give his boyfriend a deeply insulted look.

“Firstly, that’s a lie,” he says. “And Magneto isn’t even an X Man. Secondly, we’re studying serious stuff here, Gal.”

Thomas would be inclined to debate that as well but watching Gally’s face morph into a smile as the field of energy around him softens to something more like pulses of light than spiky zaps is a bit distracting. It’s heartening to watch; to see the way they fit into each other; the whole parts and the jagged edges, so much more than their biology.

Gally snorts, unfolds his arms and lifts a hand up to his still closed eyes, fingers tense around open air to mime holding a phone. “Oh look, Magneto says this is serious, too.”

Minho yanks on his thumb and Gally barks a laugh even as his body bows up off of their bench while he wrestles back his hand.

Thomas’ phone bleeps and he looks down at it, seeing the new message from Minho sitting there, a link in the box. He clicks on it without a second thought and he’s dropped into another Wiki page – this one under the entry for Jinn and it takes very little scrolling to find a hastily added sentence in there:

‘But no one had any real idea about them until Disney’s Aladdin was released and the voice of Robin Williams taught the world that Genies, among other things, live in lamps, have terrible taste in home décor, that rules apply to wishes to ensure children grow up right, that you’re not a real Genie without a goatee or an earring and that it’s not even a bit R-rated for someone to rub you off.’

Over his shoulder, Newt makes a choking sound and swears colourfully.

Minho beams.

“Really?” Newt asks, in a tone so withering Thomas is amazed the surrounding lawn doesn’t immediately turn brown and die off. “And you say you didn’t just write this?”

Thomas tries to edit it out and runs into a log-in prompt.

Newt makes an aborted noise of resignation. “Don’t. The only people who even have Wikipedia accounts are trolls.”

Gally turns his head and opens his eyes, eyebrows slanting alarmingly as he frowns. “I thought you said that Mary found a bunch of gnomes editing that page on ponds with the correct conditions to keep a waterdragon?”

“She did,” Newt agrees, slowly, confused, before he seems to realise- “No. I mean trolls as in internet trolls not- nevermind.”

“Gnomes did that?” Minho asks, looking reluctantly impressed.

“They don’t seem the type,” Thomas agrees, trying to picture any of the ones he’s met taking the time to mess around on a Norman website like that.

“They were teenagers,” Newt shrugs. Thomas feels the shift of it; ribs and stomach, against the plane of his back. He’s also realising it’s even harder to picture adolescent gnomes than it is gnomes editing Wikipedia. Do they still have beards? Is their hair still white? Is he being Gnome-ist?

Newt finishes idly, “You have to forgive them some of their crazier ideas. Too much toadstool toast, and it’s boring growing up pond-side.”

Thomas doesn’t want to know. He ducks his head back down to his phone, scrolling idly past the recent addition to the page, listening vaguely as Minho wonders if Newt just accused him of being a troll.

“But a very pretty one,” Gally replies in a tone that suggests he knows it’s expected.

“I have a question,” Thomas says, distracted by a picture of an old lamp in a photograph captioned ‘Traditional Vessel’. “How many lamps do you have?”

Newt tips his head to look at him, impossibly close.

Gally sighs on the opposite side of the gazebo. “Lot of questions in one, there.”

Thomas frowns at him, perplexed. “What does that mean?”

“Well,” Gally shrugs, “Do you want to know how many he’s lived in, how many he keeps, or how many he has for sale?”

Thomas almost headbutts Newt spinning on the bench to look at him.

“For sale?”

Newt’s teeth press into the seam of his mouth, his eyes contemplative before he says, slow and methodical, “I collect lamps. Some were mine. I had the option of changing homes between owners and some owners insisted on it. Once one of them gave me a new lamp with each wish they used up. That’s rare. A couple of times my owners performed eviction rituals hoping that if I had a new lamp, they got new wishes.”

A humourless smirk flitters across Newt’s face, and there’s an edge to it that, like months before, makes Thomas really see the Djinn in him. It brings a thickness to the air, like a gathering storm. He says, “It didn’t, for the record.”

But then the expression is gone like it was never there, clouds cleared out, and he shrugs. “A lot of the ones I have I never actually lived in.”

“Never?” Thomas asks. Then why…

Newt’s expression softens at the edges, like he knows what Thomas won’t ask.

“I started collecting them when I was still bound,” he says. He rests his jaw back over Thomas’ shoulder and the words press patterns into the groove of muscle there as Newt talks. “Djinn evicted like I was, ones that managed to get free and had no need for them, a few that were enchanted and never used.” Newt’s voice is wistful and Thomas wonders if he’s remembering the first lamp he saved, the first time he decided to hold onto a discarded home. “Almost anything can be enchanted,” Newt continues, clearing his throat. “And Djinn exist across the globe in all kinds of cultures that trace millenia back. So there’s a lot out there.”

“And you just collect them?” Thomas asks.

“Refurbishes them, too,” Minho puts in.

Thomas blinks.

His mind is taken over with the image of Newt turning smoky, shrinking to the size of a stamp to fit into the old copper carafe and running around with a feather duster and a mallet getting rid of cobwebs and beating out the dents.

Newt smirks like he knows exactly what Thomas is imagining.

“Not quite,” he says.

“Not any more,” Minho adds again. Newt shoots him a look that is perfunctorily ignored. “There were a couple he bought unfurnished from that absolute tool in Argentina.”

Newt scrunches his nose up with the reminder.

Thomas takes a moment longer to get over the fact that it’s apparently possible to buy an unfurnished lamp.

“So,” he broaches finally, “How many are actually yours?”

Newt hesitates, but he’s still warm and pliant against Thomas’ back, still smells a little like maple leaves, roasted walnuts and meadow hay. Then he twists his cheek onto Thomas’ shoulder and says, “Do you want to see them?”

Thomas hasn’t actively thought about it before. Of course he knew, but it seemed like something so personal; something he didn’t have a window into. He would never have asked for it, but now that it’s been offered there’s only one answer.

“Of course.”

He glances out of the shade of the gazebo to the pastel light of dawn creeping across the grass, hearing the starting chorus of songbirds as they begin to wake.

“When?”

“Now?” Newt says.

His arms tighten around Thomas’ waist and then quickly release like it was a slip he hadn’t meant for. It’s already morning. It’s not worth rushing back to the student house now. Thomas sent a text to the group chat while half of Haven were still trying to round up Denzil so either way, he’s covered.

“Now is good,” he says, and with the firm decision that keeps him here; this side of the boundary, and with Newt, he feels the wolf stretch under his skin, languid and content.

“Great,” Gally says into the tranquil stillness (even the grass clumps have worn themselves out with the festivities. One looks like a perfectly ordinary sod of earth, were it not for the fact that it fell asleep right on the top step of the gazebo). “Then we’re off. I need sleep.”

“You can run on barely any,” Minho grumbles, but he accepts Gally’s hand up off the bench and then yawns at the kiss pressed to his forehead.

Thomas can sense the shift, just, like a sheer veil in the hazy light. It’s the way Minho draws at the brightly alive energy orbiting Gally, balancing it out between them. It stabilises until the pressure soothes to almost nothing, just a delicate thread on a feedback loop.

“Mary’s later?” Newt asks.

“See you there,” Minho says. He throws a salute to his brow and then prods Gally down the steps ahead of him, carefully navigating around the sleeping grass clump. The two of them pick their way across the square and out of sight.

“Are you sure you want me to see?” Thomas asks, because he has to be sure; wants to offer a last out, if Newt wants to take it.

But Newt nods into his neck, inhales and then, when the air has gone still again, untangles himself.

“Yeah,” he replies, climbing to his feet. “And anyway, we should sleep, too. This bench is hardly comfortable for that.”

Newt must be able to read the way Thomas’ spine twinges with the idea of laying down to rest – that alone, considering he’s been awake for nearly twenty four hours – or perhaps the rush at the thought of where. Newt smiles and reaches to pull at his fingers. “Come on, Tommy.”

.

Thomas wakes up twisted into Newt’s couch, stretched as much as possible down the length of it and held in place by a sleeping Newt. He’s a warm, solid weight, pressed as far into the back cushions as he can get to fit them both on. His arm is curled against Thomas’ ribcage, the speeding pulse of a resting heart-rate on the inside of Newt’s wrist is an amplified echo in Thomas’ chest.

The muted patch of a new November sun across the pale carpet looks like it’s been soaked in. The fall smells of brittle tree sap, harvest and bite in weather, dripping in around the window panes. A collared dove blinks dolefully on the ledge and then takes off into the sky, wings beating a rush of air into the flower box he’s raided for nesting twigs.

“What time is it?” Newt murmurs into the back of Thomas’ neck and – oh – the clouded, worn lilt to it sends a wash of liquid warmth right over the nerves clustered at the top of his spine. It’s a conscious effort, for a moment, not to let his back arch into it, more feline than lupine, and Thomas mentally shakes himself.

He’s used to waking up alone. So is the wolf. It’s not that he thought it would go wrong; he would never have let himself fall asleep so close if he really thought he’d wake up with the wolf too hot under the surface, ready to lash out. It’s just that he wasn’t quite prepared for the opposite; to wake up to the wolf still drowsy and content even under the press of Newt’s arm and surrounded by strange scents.

It’s too much to think about right now, though, while he’s still shaking off the mania of Halloween and while Newt’s distractingly close. Time. He was asked the time.

“I don’t know,” he says, delayed.

Newt doesn’t comment on it. “Can’t you….smell it, or something?” he asks instead, voice still rough, coloured bright with teasing.

Thomas snorts. “I can’t smell the time of day. Hold on-”

He leans outward, over the yawning chasm that is the gap from the couch to the coffee table, and snatches his phone from it before he can lose his balance. Newt tugs him back, laughing quietly into his shoulder.

“It’s almost noon,” Thomas says, thumbing the screen to bring it to life enough to read the clock. “Damn. Weren’t we supposed to help with clean up?”

“It doesn’t start until two,” Newt says, muffled. “Not even the Mines have a morning shift on the first of November. The only people awake are the ones who don’t sleep and the ones who can’t.”

“Which are we?” Thomas whispers, full of pale golden mirth.

“The ones who have better things to do,” Newt replies. He pushes his weight up, folds over Thomas and kisses him.

Thomas hears his own muffled sound of surprise and the way Newt swallows it, licking into his mouth, coaxing him easily apart. He drops his phone somewhere. Newt’s fingers curl around Thomas’ wrist, stroking over the tendons there like he’s playing a violin even though the world is suddenly drowned of all noise. The strange smells of Safe Haven and the little cottage all seep away, replaced with Newt; his sleep-warm weight and the cloud vapour traces of dreams and Djinn magic.

He tastes like Halloween but just faintly stale. Like sugary spun candy, the bold notes of pumpkin spice, and smoky, toasted walnut with hints of elven moonshine that’s sharp on his tongue hours later. Neither of them have brushed their teeth but if Newt doesn’t care, Thomas isn’t about to argue.

Time turns to liquid and he doesn’t know how long he stays there, tracing the roof of Newt’s mouth with his tongue, trying to learn his taste and the way he likes to be kissed (not deep or searching or drawn out, but fiercely, leadingly, demand touched with playfulness and edged with teeth). There’s a wolf breathing in his bones, hot in all the places that Newt closes into him, nerves catching and lighting up like firework displays.

Newt pulls back to snatch in a breath and Thomas rocks upward, tugs him back, sucking marks down his throat with eyes open so he can watch the way Newt’s skin blossoms gold.

“Holy sh*t,” he gasps, mouth wet in the groove of Newt’s collarbone, already too busy kissing harder to fully form words. “That’s hot.”

Newt’s breathes a laugh and wedges his knee between Thomas’.

Thomas almost chokes. He flattens his tongue and sucks again, tastes salt on Newt’s skin. There’s the faint trace of metal, and when he swallows, the echo of a racing heartbeat. He hopes it stays, he wants it to, wants to finally know if Newt bruises gold. Newt makes a soft, broken sound, muffled by the arm of the couch and Thomas tries very hard not to smile.

He probably fails, because a second later Newt’s fingers tighten on his wrist, hard, and – oh that’s- something- he suddenly feels liquid and boneless (which is somewhat of an ironic pun that Thomas can’t focus on enough to make).

“Don’t be smug,” Newt tells him, accent slurred and low and thicker than when he woke up.

“Sorry,” Thomas replies, without meaning it.

Newt pinches his hip and Thomas jerks, accidentally rolls his hips into Newt’s and then does it again very much on purpose when it makes a very British swearword spill out of Newt’s mouth. He doesn’t exactly have time to feel smug about that, though, because Newt flattens him back into the couch, his knee pressing Thomas’ legs open properly now, and then he sinks into him, heavier, firmer than he looks like he could be.

That’s even more of something. The room starts to warp, colours melting as his blood runs almost too hot for human veins to cope. Thomas twists, seeking friction, choking on air when he gets it, going the rest of the way to hard quick enough that he can feel the bloodrush searing him.

Newt kisses his open mouth, tastes more like purpose and knotted want than anything left from Halloween. He rocks forward (and good to know Newt is just as gone), fingers raking over Thomas’ wrinkled t-shirt as he traces them over his ribs and then-

Then they both nearly topple off the couch.

The tightness in the air cracks, like the way pressure breaks with a strike of lightning and they’re both laughing suddenly, breathless and ragged. They lurch against the slipping cushions to haul themselves away from the drop and in to the cradle of the couch back. Thomas’ is still strung tight, his blood humming and thick as molasses in his veins, drugged with a slow, syrupy kind of arousal that’s survived the near fall. It’s morphed instead, slid into a heady mess of want and mirth that’s almost feverish with how freeing it feels as his body calms down.

The sun has shifted.

“Come on,” Newt says then, finally, slightly raw as he prods a finger into Thomas’ ribs and moves off of him. “I need tea.”

Thomas sucks in a breath as Newt’s weight lifts, and he flings an arm over his eyes. “Gimme a minute,” he says, and listens to Newt’s snort of laughter and the pad of footsteps as he heads off.

.

Thomas is smiling as he rolls himself upright three minutes later, standing up in front of the couch and stretching his back until he can feel the knots there pull out. He still feels overwound; would gladly have stayed spread under Newt until the November sun fell right over the cottage, but he pushes that thought down. He rubs at his eyes, and follows after Newt into a cramped little kitchen that seems like it fits the lopsided bungalow exterior far better than the living space.

There’s little wooden cabinets, a ceramic butler sink and worn brass fittings. A pot rack hangs in the middle of the room from the beams in the ceiling, half lost among bundles of suspended herbs, creeping plants and wooden windchimes. A window wedged between two cabinets peers out over the wild front garden, ivy and snapping plants clustered around the sill, two of them in a fight over one hapless spider.

Newt has pulled out mugs and set a copper kettle over a ring on the stove to heat. He hangs a bag of tea in one of the mugs, the paper tab left hooked over the rim, and he drops powdered cocoa into the other.

“Come on,”Newt says again, while the kettle is still warming up, too far from the boil to even hum, let alone bubble. “This way.”

And Thomas remembers then how this invite even began. His stomach swoops, caught somewhere between anticipation and nerves. He knew the moment he set eyes on the tinderbox that it was something meaningful, so he understands the reverence in this, the vulnerability of it, too, even if he doesn’t quite understand what he’s going to see until he does.

The room is at the back of the bungalow. Creaky floorboards are bedded down by old rugs, stony walls lined with shelves upon shelves and the ceiling is vaulted, leaving exposed beams that are strung with chains of lights and more prehensile plants. Some of them might even have actually grown in through the roof. There is a crooked wooden door in addition to the one they came through, a single window covered by a shade, and three skylights the sun drips through like warm honey.

There are lamps everywhere.

There are ones Thomas recognises – the tinderbox, the carafe, the yoghurt pot he’s been told about and the tiny paint tin. There are many more he’s never considered. A mason jar with a label saying it contains strawberry jam, a bottle of Mr Muscle kitchen cleaner, a two litre bottle of Diet co*ke, a ceramic teapot painted with fig leaves and wisteria. There’s a little wooden treasure chest the size of a pack of cards, a polished hip flask, a snuff box and a crystal decanter with a giant ruby inlaid in the stopper. There’s a full size metal dustbin with a domed lid spray painted on the side with a game of hangman and a colourful ‘f*ck off’.

Newt says, “This is all of them.”

He stands tucked into the door frame, expression pensive and scent clouded. His tone rests somewhere between a statement of fact, unassuming pride, and tentative uncertainty.

He’d know if it wasn’t all of them and the hesitation feels familiar, just a different flavour of vulnerability. Whatever still lingered from waking up on the couch leeches away, replaced with a crisp, cool feeling of reverence that slides under Thomas’ skin like a glacier on the move.

“Can I?” he asks, nodding at the threshold.

Newt nods.

Thomas steps inside.

There’s sand between the floorboards and he wonders if Newt brought it on purpose.

He steps carefully, moving between the shelves; wall mounted ones, free standing ones, ones that look hand-crafted from driftwood and others that look precisely designed. At the back of the room is a craft table, shoved into an alcove that barely fits it, laden with DIY tools from the mallet Thomas pictured earlier to elaborate scales and wacky devices that resemble EMF readers.

“You don’t refurbish them?” Thomas asks, glancing back.

Newt smiles, and there’s something a little nostalgic in it, tainted with a sadness that tastes like silt. He shakes his head. “No. Not any more. I can’t ever enter a lamp again, but there’s still things I can do to help.”

“Never again?”

He repeats it, but it doesn’t sound like a question in his head. He’d realised weeks ago, standing outside of Sonya and Harriet’s that being free meant Newt losing his home. He just….perhaps hadn’t processed that fully until he was stood here.

Newt just shakes his head again. Neither of them need him to verbalise why.

“So what do you do with them?” Thomas asks instead.

There’s a spray can behind the mallet that says it’s anti-rust. Beside that is a tub of metal polish with a microfibre cloth that’s worn smooth. The scales aren’t holding anything at all, but they’re canted sideways so far it looks gravity-defying that they haven’t toppled onto the floor.

Newt takes a step into the room.

There’s a hazy kind of aura around him as he drifts under a skylight and the pale halo of it remains even as he moves into the shadowed wall.

Thomas is half expecting him to speak slowly again, in that measured way of carefully choosing words, but he doesn’t. The silt has gone, replaced with a delicate, sweet tang that feels like carbonated fizzy drinks bursting at the back of Thomas’ throat. Newt smiles as his fingers trace over the nearest shelf, the room smelling like fondness and a touch of excitement.

“Magic weighs differently, depending on how you use it, or what it’s for,” Newt says. “Lamps have to fit certain regulations, technically. It’s for safety and to avoid detection, that kind of thing- I’m not talking about how big they are or what they look like,” Newt clarifies, amused when he catches Thomas looking sceptically around the room. “The regulations aren’t so tangible.”

Thomas lifts his head and isn’t sure if he’s joking or honestly guessing when he asks, “How much do wishes even weigh?”

Newt catches his eyes. “A lot,” he says. “Or nothing at all. It depends who you ask, or what question you’re asking.”

He lets it sink in for a second and then continues, “I’m more focused on magic leaks. Old lamps, or ones badly enchanted can leak. Humans don’t know what that is. They can’t taste it or see it – they barely believe in it at all – but they can sense it, sometimes, in their way, without knowing what to call it.

“It’s why weird stuff sometimes gets auctioned really high, or why some people just can’t part with things.”

“So you can….seal them somehow?”

Newt makes a half nod, half shrug motion. “More or less.”

“So is that….what you do?”

Thomas looks around the room, starting to see the organisation in it. Sections for lamps that look like junk (a music box that won’t even close looks like something that should have a huge leak problem), shelves for ones that look wildly expensive or pulled straight from the pages of a faerietale. There are rows of entirely plain odds and ends ranging from new looking (a travel toothbrush container) to obviously pre-owned (a snap-shut glasses case with worn away initials). There are ones Newt seems to have fixed, and ones he probably has yet to get to, some likely rescued from auctions not unlike his own ill-fated one.

He had vaguely wondered what it was exactly that Newt and Minho even did. He’s maybe stumbling on that now.

“I guess it is,” Newt says. “It’s….something, anyway.”

Which is half an answer, maybe.

“How do you live off of it, though?”

The expensive shelves range from all kinds of things from all walks and cultures and time periods, none of which could have been very cheap to get hold of.

“I don’t do it just for me,” Newt says.

He weaves around the shelves, passes Thomas and taps a honey jar behind him. There’s some of that quietness back in his tone but he still sounds feather light and unguarded. “This one is still inhabited. Kind of. The Djinn is between owners right now and she moved into a liquid soap dispenser while I take care of a leak in this.

“Some of them aren’t enchanted any more. Most are, they’re just vacant. Djinn that got moved on – one way or another.” Newt gestures widely at the room. “Most will be sold to other Djinn who need somewhere safer – if their enchantments are wearing down, if they have drafts or the item itself seems to get passed around a lot.” Newt hesitates for a second and a spike of vulnerability cracks down to the floorboards before he says, “I sell to owners, too. If it’s to protect the Djinn.”

Thomas doesn’t know nearly enough to judge him.

It’s quickly becoming clear that this is a vastly more complex and tangled aspect of what Newt is than he first thought. Although he knows Newt does carry a lamp with him all the time to help lessen the loss of it, he had never even considered it might be far more than that, too.

Perhaps he should have.

Newt is a lot stronger than someone might assume if they saw him; this tall, slender boy cast in shades of gold with a hummingbird heart and a limp in his step. It makes sense to Thomas that he’s someone who escaped the prison of his kind and started using his life to help others like him. Not all of them had a Sonya to wish them free.

“So there’s a whole market in lamps?” Thomas asks, and then, because he didn’t know that, “How many are yours then? Like-”

“The tinderbox is,” Newt says, words rushing forwards, a faint flush high on his cheekbones as his scent twists with the sunny smell of precious metal melting down. “A lot. I’ve lived in a lot of places and I tried to keep them all after. There’s just...more that aren’t mine.”

.

“Hey, Newt? Can I….show you something?”

Newt looks up, the mug of tea half tilted between his hands, afternoon sunlight pooling on the counter, dripping down the kitchen cabinets and lifting the cool autumn smell of snapdragons into the air from the plants just outside the window.

Thomas meets his eyes, and the wolf’s ears twitch up, nose pressing hot between his ribs as it catches the intent. Something of that must show in Thomas’ human face, because Newt’s eyes jump to the living room just beyond the arched doorway, flit across the counters of the kitchen and then back out to the tiny hall.

“Here?” he asks. “Is it- are you….okay with that? You wouldn’t rather be outside?”

“It’s the same to me,” Thomas shrugs. “Well. No, I prefer being outside, I guess, but it’s just a preference. Anywhere works fine. This is actually better, maybe. If….if you want.”

“I want.”

Newt sets down the mug and twists his fingers together like he isn’t sure what to do with them. A mess of apprehensive interest skitters off of him, like rebounding raindrops on concrete. He sounds certain, though, unafraid like the caution is more out of concern for Thomas than himself.

Thomas swallows. People being concerned for him isn’t something he’s been wholly used to. Not like this. His aunt’s concern for him was a very distant, clinical kind of thing, incomparable to the weight in Newt’s eyes.

“Do you- do I need to do anything?” Newt asks.

Thomas stands up, careful to move around the stool he was on without stepping closer. Newt isn’t afraid, but he doesn’t want to risk anything.

Don’t leave , he wants to say, but the words clog at the back of his throat and he swallows the selfishness of them before they can reform. He shakes his head.

“No,” he manages instead. “You don’t need to do anything.”

He steps through to the living room, Newt in his wake, and kicks off his sneakers. He’s a little tempted to at least remove his t-shirt, too, but he figures that’s something best left for another time.

“I’m still me,” he says, turning so that he’s looking at Newt when he says it. “Don’t be afraid.”

And then he lets the wolf slide through his skin.

Shifting isn’t difficult. It doesn’t hurt, or even feel like he’s being contorted into another shape. It’s never felt anything like that - nothing anyone could get right in the movies he watched growing up, or the books he read. Even his earliest memories of Shifting, often by accident, are painless, fearless, like the movement between sitting down and standing up.

There were the times he just changed skin in the space between dreams and the waking world, even as a child so young he still needed a footstool to reach the bathroom sink.

He was always both. One version is not more him or more real in the same way that neither half of someone genderfluid is a lie. He’s a boy and a wolf. One shape simply melts into the other.

The wilderness is a blood rush; feral and hot, adrenaline soaking his bones and settling again under thick fur in a new language.

One moment he’s watching Newt with human eyes, the next he’s a wolf.

He can feel his own heartbeat against the carpet fibres through the pads of his front paws, the return pulse as he shifts his weight and stabilises. His eyes adjust faster; the world tinted in vibrant shades and colours that don’t exist to his human half.

He’s a full grown Timber wolf in the confines of a cottage room and there’s a boy- pack-Newt-his – that he can’t- won’t scare. He lowers to the floor.

There’s more raw, contained power in these muscles even though they’re leaner. His bones are not as dense and his body feels lightweight and agile in a way the human can’t match even if it can borrow reflexes. Everything about Thomas like this is built to predate.

He keeps his tail low and his ears folded softly down; everything as submissive as possible. Will not scare him.

Newt tilts his head, eyes sharp. He smells like the burn of curiosity and the silky rush of awe.

Thomas’ senses are stronger like this, more than new colours.

There’s sensation in the fibres of his fur, delicate enough to pick up air currents; scents fill his muzzle and rush straight into his lungs, flashfire past his brain, turning them to sense-memory. They’re not new, but the processing is different. Sounds, though...They have a different pitch and add a whole new range that’s usually out of reach. He can hear the electronic whirr of the tv plugged into the wall just as easily as he can hear Newt’s steady breaths, the slip of each inhale through the soft shape of his mouth. It all slides through the delicate bones of his inner ears, waves turning to percussion to recognition.

“Thomas?” Newt asks, slowly, carefully, his voice saturated with the kind of stillness that a person uses to approach a frightened rabbit. Like he thinks Thomas is the one who could be scared. Thomas recognises it, though; the clipped lilt of the accent. Familiarity washes through his bones.

Thomas sinks to the carpet, folds himself up as small as a mature grey wolf can get and nods his head against the floor.

Newt exhales – awe, Thomas can taste it – and steps closer.

The boy in Thomas’ heart holds his breath.

He is lupine, not canine, not a domestic hound, but Thomas finds the muscles he needs, feels the ripple of them down the curve of his spine until his tail can thump once against the side of the armchair. Encouragement. Thomas thinks of the night before, of Minho joking about dogs, and the memory sits oddly in his head; an unfamiliar shape but still his.

The boy inside laughs at the reminder of it and the pulse soothes his blood, seeps through skin and settles into the fur between his shoulder blades.

Newt steps again, and again, when Thomas stays still, and then, with barely a hint of true hesitation, sinks to the carpet facing him. He folds his legs under his lean frame, back curved and shoulders in, like he’s trying to be smaller, too.

Thomas can’t tell him with this voice box that he doesn’t need to.

Slowly he lifts his head and scents at the air, pulls deliberately, looking for an okay.

The smells burst into colours at the back of his throat, twist into tastes as they spin through his vision.

There’s the smell of dust and stale shadows, outdated sunlight in the fibres of the living room. There’s the tang of tea and pollen spores drifting from the open doorway to the kitchen, the crackling, changing wash of autumn in notes of decay and renewing that seep in at the edges of the windows.

Newt smells the same, just sharper than ever. He is magic and fragments of sleep, tinted with the carbon edge of his still-present curiosity and that feeling like a waterfall that’s his quiet fascination. He’s smoke, snared in the folds of his clothes and metal rising from the warmth of his skin and-

and Thomas .

Underneath it, or layered over it, or just laced between those things like he’s been stitched into the fabric of who Newt is….he smells like Thomas.

(The human, the wolf, it doesn’t matter-).

He holds his breath, forces himself to stop pulling at the air. His paws tense, claws curling into the carpet.

Newt doesn’t even spare them a glance.

His head tilts, something impossibly gentle about it.

“You can understand me, you just can’t speak, right?”

There’s body language that he can replicate, where speech fails. Thomas figures out the unnatural motion of his head. He nods.

A smile brushes across Newt’s mouth. “Did you...try to wag your tail?”

Thomas folds his ears back – when did they prick up? - and lets his head drop heavily back to the ground.

Newt smirks and quickly tries to smother it, but Thomas has already inhaled the sugar-bright burst it brings. Amusem*nt is something from the human, it’s not a lupine thing and it’s heady, almost drugging, to have it soak his lungs.

“You can get up,” Newt says, then, expression soft again. “I’m okay. Don’t…worry about me.”

His heart is as fast as ever; flickering in the side of his throat and between the tendons of his wrists, but it’s normal. There’s no lie there.

Thomas sits up.

His clothes rake at him underneath his skin; clothes that were on the boy. Magic may take care of what he wears or holds during the Shift, but it does so by trapping them inside the new shape, not visible, but a phantom tactile reminder. His shirt tugs at his shoulders, not designed for forelegs, his jeans are twisted into folds at his pelvis. He can’t feel the carpet in his hind paws because the sensation is muffled by socks.

It’s easily ignored, just a small nagging at the back of his mind. He shoves all the sensations away.

Then he stands, finds his balance easily on four long limbs, the weight of his tail swaying at his hocks and keeping him steady. Its not unfamiliar; he is a wolf, always was, it’s not like borrowing the shape of something else.

He turns a circle and pads the long way around the coffee table where his phone still sits (the boy inside sighs as it throws out the errant thought that texting would at least be a way to communicate). Thomas huffs through his nose.

He doesn’t have thumbs; Newt will have to stick to yes or no questions.

He completes a circuit of the table. The abandoned couch where he woke up is so close as he walks in the space between it and his phone, the same one he had leaned over not long ago in the boy’s shape. It still smells languid and rich; sleep and slow burning want just barely hanging on. Thomas brushes against it, feels muscle twitch all down his ribcage as the scents transfer, catch into his fur.

When he’s stood behind Newt, he stops again.

The boy knows that Newt isn’t afraid; says it patiently, reminding in a language that Thomas understands but can’t recreate. But all things feel fear. He’s an apex predator and it’s hard to truly believe that what the boy in his bones says is true.

Until he’s watching it.

Newt doesn’t turn to him. His eyes are closed, head tipping up, just a little, expression serene, sunlight sliding down the curve of his back, split into two rivers by the ridge of his spine.

Thomas shuffles closer.

It’s intentional; the noise in the gait, the unevenness. It’s intended to forewarn.

Newt still doesn’t move until Thomas is right there, ducking his head to press his nose into the loose folds of cloth over Newt’s ribs, then further until he meets the firm plane of muscle.

And then he does startle. He snatches in a breath, and twists, a brassy note of irrational hilarity puncturing the air.

It’s not fear, even a little – but he’s also the boy, and the boy traps a smile between his teeth because he recognises it, and so Thomas does too, even if its not a language that’s his.

Newt is ticklish.

Thomas snorts, followed by a huffing, curled sound that treads as close as he can get to laughter. Newt finally turns to him. His elbow clamps in to his ribs to guard them and his eyes are wickedly amused, touched with a facade of disapproval.

“I’m sure that’s cheating,”

Thomas flicks his ears up, turns them to sharp pricks as his head lifts.

He’s taller than Newt, still folded on the floor, easily close enough that when Newt reaches up slowly, he barely has time to inhale before there are fingers skating across the fur at his throat.

Maybe he doesn’t realise how easy it is for wolves to pick up scents. Or maybe he does, and that’s the point.

There’s wondering in the touch and it gradually grows bolder, Newt’s breaths coming sharper by increments as his fingers curl in the marbled hairs, seeking to learn, not just to feel.

Thomas can already taste the Djinn magic soaking in, left behind, an imprint the same way he’s caught the scent memory from the couch. He pushes himself into Newt’s hand and stills again.

A tiny tremor of something sad clouds the hazy wonder filling the air.

Before Thomas can worry that he caused it, Newt says, very quietly, eyes on his hand, buried in Thomas’ fur, “You’re pack animals. And you’ve never had one. Do you get touch deprivation?”

Thomas shudders.

It’s Newt’s touch stills now and he looks Thomas in the eyes.

It’s not an easy yes or no answer, though.

The boy doesn’t feel deprivation, not the same way, both because there’s still a human part to him that doesn’t need it like that, and because he has humans around him anyway. But Thomas, like this….

Maybe he does.

It’s not something he’s thought about before. When there is no one willing to reach out and touch him, there was no way to know if there was a void there to start with, and yet he and the boy are still the same, he’s still awake and alive and there and he knows he has something of a pack in Newt, in Minho and Gally and even Frypan and Brenda.

He’s not been deprived of that just because he’s been in a different shape.

Thomas whines at the back of his throat because he can’t answer it.

But it makes Newt’s expression fold, spikes of pinprick sadness falling across the carpet. They’re almost visible to Thomas; shining like dropped thumbtacks.

Thomas shakes his head, stepping backwards, just once, not quite enough to loosen Newt’s grip. Newt frowns, thoughts moving behind his eyes but no recognition of what he meant.

Thomas can’t tell him, doesn’t know how.

The boy reaches for Newt between the bars of his ribs ineffectually.

Thomas rolls his head and retreats again. He can’t communicate it, but maybe he can distract. He paws carefully around the end of the couch where Newt sits, hand dropping to his lap and pokes his head into the kitchen.

The flagstone floor mocks him.

He has good grip, but trying to step too fast on any kind of slippery surface is a sure way to end up sprawled on the floor. He’s done it before and it wasn’t something he’d planned on telling Newt at least for a while.

He’s considering doing it, though, if only it’ll make Newt smile and forget the question he just asked.

But before he can actually step over the threshold-

“How much do they get right in Omegaverse fiction then? Do you go into heats?”

Thomas almost falls over and he’s still stood on the carpet.

The sadness bursts like a balloon and Newt’s laughing suddenly. Thomas takes a moment to realise he’s stood half wedged in the doorway, legs splayed to keep him barely upright and his ears have shot back, pinned in abject shock.

He turns to stare at Newt and it makes him aware his jaw has dropped.

(He’s been avoiding that; trying not to show his teeth at all, but Newt just seems to be laughing harder).

He shakes himself, has to lap his tongue to force his jaw closed, and sits firmly down in the doorway. He pulls up the flattest look his lupine features are capable of.

The boy in his chest, he realises then, is also laughing, though there’s a flushed warmth to it that Thomas knows is somewhere between human mortification and a belated intrigue. The last emotion catches, converts to words as the boy pushes it through his bloodstream-

How on earth does Newt know about Omegaverse to start with?

Thomas can’t ask it. He stores it away for later.

“That’s a no, then,” Newt says finally, teeth tugging at his mouth as he stops laughing and the air settles around them. “What about...Pack bonds?”

The boy refocuses at that, something startled fluttering out through his nerves and Thomas realises- has he never actually talked about that before? Has he never told Newt?

He nods, firmly, brings his ears forwards again, lifts his head.

“So they’re real? Or you have one?”

The questions pile up and Newt shakes his head the second he’s asked them, realising it’s no good. He starts again. “The bonds are real?”

Thomas nods.

“And... do you have a pack?”

There’s hope there; something that comes back to the earlier question, the moment of misunderstanding and the memory of shining stabs of sadness on the floor. He wants to think he got it wrong, and he didn’t, not completely, but this is a question that has an easy answer.

Thomas nods.

He lays back down, and shuffles forwards, stretching out his spine into the carpet until his paws are just shy of Newt’s knee. He lays his head down over them and looks up.

Newt releases a shuddering, long breath. Relief and that same, silky cascade of awe pour from him and he reaches out again, less tentative this time, burying his fingers in the thick guard hairs at the ruff of Thomas’ neck. His shadow falls across them and Thomas breathes in.

(Maybe he doesn’t need words for this part).

Seconds tick quietly over for the space of ten of Thomas’ heartbeats. He knows the sound and the pattern of Newt’s heart but he keeps time better with his own.

And then Newt sits back, and slowly rises to his feet.

He sways, just a little as he finds his balance and Thomas’ eyes snap to his leg.

A growl coils at the back of his throat and he forcibly swallows it (can’t-won’t scare him) but now that Newt is standing again, there’s a darkness radiating from his bad leg; the one that Thomas knows is bad. It’s dull and old; lasting damage and scar tissue but with something twisting and shapeless that tastes of magic underpinning it. He knows this is a source of pain the same way he can sense death approaching a sick animal, the same way he evolved to find chinks in armour and weakness in prey.

Newt isn’t prey, and the dormant pain stirs fury through Thomas’ veins.

Newt blinks at him, eyes shrewd, and his gaze darts to the side.

“You can…tell….can’t you?”

Thomas swallows another growl. His nod this time jars the back of his neck.

Newt sighs, but his face isn’t sad, or scared, or pained. He smiles slowly. “Makes sense,” he says, mostly to himself, it seems, and then- “I’m okay, Tommy.”

Thomas tilts his head and wonders whether to believe him.

Newt skips subjects, and since he let Thomas avoid the earlier topic, it cuts up from the boy’s instincts as a fair trade.

“Do you….” His expression twists with ironic humour. “Bloody hell it’s like having a dog. Do you want to go outside?”

Thomas huffs and stands, stretching his spine again and shaking free the stillness before he registers what Newt asked.

Outside.

He hasn’t been outside like this in a long while, since before he stumbled across Safe Haven.

Newt apparently doesn’t need him to signal this time. Maybe it’s written on his face and Newt is learning to read it, or maybe he just goes with the obvious choice. He crosses the room, pulls back a floor length curtain not far from the tv stand and unlocks a glass door behind it.

Autumn air thrashes inside as he pushes it open. Dying leaves and grass gasping for life storm into Thomas’ lungs as the chorus of birds rattle louder than before into the coil of his ears, the notes shifting into shapes and colours.

Thomas brushes past Newt’s bad leg – knows he can’t draw away pain the same way he can draw away scents, but absently wonders if he can leave something behind instead – and then trots down into the wild back yard.

The grass is dull and overgrown, going ochre and burned umber in places. The trees sag, like they’re beaten down by their own leaves sapping their energy to hold on longer. The hedgerow at the back is still thick, dying from the inside out. The smells leak into the air as the vegetation disintegrates.

It would be sad and appalling if Thomas couldn’t also smell the vitality under the earth; a vast network of it like a complicated spiderweb, feeding into the roots and stems, slowed by the cold but biding its time.

Underneath the decay the earth smells new.

He pads into it, breathing deep, content just to feel open air in his fur again.

A mouse darts through the undergrowth near a wooden bench, it’s racing heartbeat sending ripples of pastel glowing light over it’s tiny dust brown body. Above, a magpie cuts through the branches of a maple leaning over from the neighbouring fence, an ebony-ivory flash. Rainbows dance off of the feathers and Thomas pricks his ears, turning towards it to hear the curling whisper of air between the flared primaries. It turns it’s wing into a bend and rides a current around the tree, swooping out of sight.

Thomas can usually hear them coming. The only creature he’s never been able to hear are owls, who are silent in a way the rest of the world is not.

Even trees make sound when they breathe.

But he’s not infallible, and he’s distracted, which is why he doesn’t hear it approach, only hears the screaming cry that cracks like a whip and shatters the quiet.

Thomas wheels around, a snarl tearing from between his teeth before he’s thought about it. The hairs between his shoulder blades stand on end, licks of protective fury travelling down his spine and clawing into his limbs. He plants himself, hackles raised in the grass, between the noise and the door where he left Newt.

There’s another piercing scream and Thomas finds the source of it.

He’d forgotten that in the fields behind Newt’s home, someone in Safe Haven kept a herd of Nøkken horses.

It looks like a little brook horse; more of a pony, really. It has an unruly mane and little fluted ears with a pair of flared nostrils. It’s an unearthly, glowing white that leaches the colour from the hedge it’s snaked its head over. The eyes are liquid black, gleaming with defensive malice.

Thomas raises his hackles some more, snaps his teeth once, lets his shoulders sink lower to the ground.

He’s rational, despite the energy surging in his nervous system. It’s a warning, a threat. It’s not prey the way a natural horse would be. A natural horse would have bolted the second it caught his scent. (He’s upwind, he realises. It’s why he can’t smell it but the Nøkken smelled him). This one is a predator, too, in it’s own way. Thomas doesn’t know enough about them, though, not enough to drop his guard.

“They’re a bit grouchy,” Newt says, from behind him, almost like he’d just guessed where Thomas’ mind went. His voice is even, unfazed, and his heartbeat doesn’t betray any fear. “But they don’t have the same bloodlust that unsocialised Capaill Uisce do. He’ll go away. I think you just startled him.”

I startled him? The boy in Thomas’ chest repeats, incredulous.

Thomas rolls a disbelieving noise at the back of his throat that is as close to the language as he can manage.

He still hears, feels, Newt’s amusem*nt, the mosaic of his scent against the duller colours of the open world. He can feel him piece together what the noise meant.

He’s right, though.

The Nøkken snaps three times against the hedgerow and Thomas recognises that language easily; not an attack but a warning the same way his snarls are. Then it retreats with a pitched squeal and canters off out of sight.

Thomas rises up again, lets the last of the unexpected tension diffuse down through his paws into the soil.

He looks around.

Newt is leaning against the glass door, arms folded across his chest, thumbs pressing into the creases of his elbows again. He’s smiling, head tilted, sunlight gilded in his tousled hair.

There’s quite suddenly a whole lot less appeal in standing here as a wolf.

Barely a moment after he’s thought it, the Shift grabs hold; a slow melt between shapes even though it feels more like the world reforming around him. Thomas sheds the wolf-skin and has to catch himself as he stands upright on two feet again.

Newt breaks away from the door just enough to stand straight, and then stills.

Thomas flexes his fingers, shaking away the phantom memory of blades of grass between them, then jostles his shoulders to feel his spine shift. His clothes feel resettled again, now they’re not trapped under a skin they’re not meant for, contorted to a shape they don’t fit.

He doesn’t know where to start, or what to ask first.

“Omegaverse?” is what comes out of his mouth, a memory in a different shape.

Newt snorts. “You’d be amazed what you stumble across when you’re looking for werewolf mythology. Are- you okay?”

Thomas has all of a split second to wonder where the question came from before he realises he’s still rolling his shoulder.

“Oh-uh. Yes.” Well – this is definitely something he can share that’s true. “If I wear clothes when I Shift they sort of….come with me. Just... stuck, like they’re still on a human body. It kind of feels weird.”

Newt’s eyebrow lifts. His tongue coasts along the seam of his mouth and Thomas can’t help his eyes following the path of it.

“So isn’t it easier to not wear them?” he asks.

Thomas shrugs. “Yeah.”

Newt doesn’t ask why he chose this instead, just shrugs back and says, “Hm. Next time.”

Which makes Thomas inexplicably think of the fingers in his fur, the question that came with them.

“I’m not….deprived,” he says finding it’s an awkward word to wrap his tongue around. Newt’s expression sobers. Thomas is still standing in the grass but can’t bring himself to move, not yet. “It’s just complicated. You can’t really miss something you never had and I know I’m okay like this. The wolf….it’s always been okay because we didn’t know anything else, I guess. It’s just not an easy answer.”

Newt looks contemplative, and then a little appeased.

“More importantly,” Thomas says. “You’re ticklish.”

Of all things, this is what makes Newt’s eyes jump up to his. Thomas is already smirking, can’t help it. The wolf preens under his heart, content and gleeful.

“I’ll lock you out,” Newt says idly.

Thomas darts a glance to the door behind him, tries to assess the gap from the beginning of the patio to his place in the grass. Too far.

Adrenaline whispers at the base of his spine. “You wouldn’t.”

Newt moves.

Thomas reacts. He knows he’s not close enough to prevent it but it’s instinct anyway. Only he realises a split second too late that Newt played him.

He doesn’t retreat and bolt himself inside the house; he surges towards him instead, collides with Thomas in the grass and (stronger than he looks, iron cast bones) they both go down. Newt did it on purpose, was ready for it, but Thomas feels all the breath rush out of him and the world goes hazy and over-bright. Newt’s weight stops him dispersing into atoms.

He’s pinned on the lawn, caged in place with Newt’s knees either side of his waist when his senses slide back. Newt’s fingers twist around his and he leans forwards, his other hand skating down Thomas’ ribs, searching.

Thomas isn’t ticklish, but he closes his eyes and breathes in the dying fall, the iron and sugar tang of Newt and happiness, and he’s content to let him try.

…

Thomas catches the door to Mary’s and ducks inside, holding it out for Newt to slip in behind him.

Minho is already there, at their usual table in the corner, yawning widely and tipping his chair back on it’s legs. Gally turns away from the counter, carrying a plate of biscuits and pastries over to him. Mary looks up at the sound of their arrival and a smile spreads across her face as she waves and absently bats a Wisp away from the tip jar.

The atmosphere in the cafe is distinctly ‘post-rager’. Gally aside (who seems fine), everyone looks wrung out and weary at best, and hungover with somewhat sickly complexions at worst. That’s not excluding the Pond Sprite over by the back window who looks worse than all of them combined and brings a new level to the expression ‘green around the gills’.

(He does have actual gills).

The tables closest to the bathrooms are the busiest.

“Hello, boys,” Mary greets them when they approach, sounding bright enough but wincing when another Wisp sets down a pitcher of orange juice too loudly. “Had a good night? How was your first Halloween with us, Thomas?”

Thomas tries not to look too much better off than everyone else on account of the wolf’s metabolism, but he doesn’t think he manages to keep the sheer joy in his voice down. “It was amazing.”

Mary slides her eyes across him, catching them in the space at his waist where Newt’s fingers linger on the creased fabric of his sweater, as though he’s simply forgotten to remove them, or like perhaps he was delaying it.

She visibly tries to bite back her smile, but she can’t hide the rush of sugared happiness that leaps into the air around her and twines with her subtle usual scent of sweet tea and rye bread.

All she says is, “I’m glad.”

Behind her a Wisp throws a teaspoon into the stainless steel sink and it clangs off of all four sides, the noise reverberated by the deep bowl and everyone in the cafe flinches. The spikes of pain shoot off of them and Thomas feels them like pinpricks in his skin.

Mary rubs between her eyes and gently reaches out to take a packet of honey and lemon tea off of one of her other helpers. “I’ve got it,” she tells the Wisp, who pushes the teacup closer instead, apparently hard-wired to be helpful in it’s own way. “Maybe you lot should steer clear of that corner.”

She sets about making up the order and waves Thomas and Newt off with a hand wielding a tea strainer. “Sit down; on the house today. The Wisps will bring your usual.”

Thomas knows better, by now, than to try to argue. Smiling his thanks, he glances over at Minho, still yawning and teetering dangerously, then flicks his eyes back at Newt.

Newt raises an eyebrow, amused and expectant, and then, with a stab of hesitance, his hand falls away from Thomas’ waist as he makes to move forwards.

Thomas catches it. He laces their fingers together, thumb finding a home on the inside of Newt’s wrist where he can feel the skip of his heartbeat.

Newt’s eyes flicker and then, of all things, a faint flush spreads across the delicate bones of his cheeks and he ducks his head, smiling to himself. He smells of warm, quietly pleased delight.

Minho gags loudly across the room.

Newt’s colour dies down and he flips him off. Thomas lets himself snort in laughter as Newt tugs him forwards, weaving between tables.

“Sickening,” Minho says, when they join him and Gally.

Newt couldn’t look happier.

Given that ‘sickening’ is the main word Newt so often uses to describe Minho and Gally, Thomas figures Minho couldn’t have picked a better compliment and he knows it.

“Have a biscuit,” he says, gesturing vaguely at the table. “And tell Gally no one is meant to be this functional after Halloween.”

Newt takes one of the oat cookies on top of the pile and lifts the same eyebrow at Minho this time.

“He runs on life energy,” he says, flatly. “Eventually you’re going to have to get used to the fact that he’s a morning person and a night owl.”

Gally looks like he might laugh or protest, it’s hard to tell which, but he clearly bites his tongue to stop himself from doing either.

“I chose wrong,” Minho laments.

Split decision forgotten, Gally immediately snatches his gaze up, levelling a look at Minho that’s clearly significant enough that he blushes and snaps his mouth shut.

Newt whistles pointedly at his biscuit before taking a bite.

A Wisp pelts through the air towards them, dropping a mug on the table with such gusto that it skids along, knocks into a salt shaker and slops hot chocolate onto one of the pastries. It doesn’t appear to notice, puffing itself up proudly and fidgeting in delight.

Thomas thanks it, trying to drag his mug closer subtly so the Wisp won’t notice the mess.

It pulses delicately with happy white light and promptly zooms away again, just barely evading a wizened old man’s cane as he uses it to prod suspiciously at the lumpy cushion on the chair he’s chosen.

Thomas vaguely wonders if Wisps can be impaled or if they’re not corporeal enough for that.

It’s made him look up from the table, though, so he inhales the cinnamon and spice steam from his drink and starts to take in the rest of the world.

There’s the deeply nauseated Pond Sprite, slowly eating a bowl of algae porridge; a troll wearing a huge pair of earmuffs who looks wildly hungover and a family in the corner that Thomas recognises; two women with a small girl between them, all eating some kind of sushi. The girl looks wide awake, talking rapidly as she stabs her food but her moms wince with every scrape of the fork on the plate, bags under their eyes and shedding tropical bird feathers from heck-knows where.

Tucked in as far from the wall of windows as she can get, is the Banshee from last night. She’s hunched over in a chair, pale fingers around the mug Mary had been stirring honey and lemon tea into, inhaling from it with a pinched expression. (It’s hardly surprising she has a sore throat given the unearthly decibels she reached). Clustered into mismatched chairs around her are another handful of familiar faces; the apple-bob cheating Vampires. None of them seem to be hungover, but there’s a shredded packet of Ricola throat drops on the table and there is no sound at all from their corner.

Minho catches Thomas looking and winks as he finally tips his chair forwards back onto all fours.

“Brings new meaning to the phrase ‘deathly silence’, doesn’t it?” he asks.

It’s probably inappropriate to laugh.

Thomas manages not to. Barely.

He rolls his tongue, swallows some of his drink and turns his attention away from the exhausted and mildly delirious atmosphere suffusing the cafe as everyone sort of quietly works out of their Halloween induced fogs.

“Is this part normal, too?” he asks, determinedly not looking towards the back table again.

“That hickey on your neck isn’t,” Minho answers evenly, as though this is a perfectly reasonable, expected answer.

Thomas rolls his eyes. “I mean the post-party haze,” he says.

He doesn’t even bother to try covering the mark up, a little because Minho has clearly already seen it but there’s also the part where he isn’t totally sure where it is and Minho would probably look all too knowing if he got it wrong. Mostly, though, he doesn’t bother because he loves the flash of pleased smugness that rolls off of Newt.

“Oh, that,” Minho says, waggling his eyebrows in an entirely overdone way. “Yeah, that’s normal, too. Even if they’re not susceptible to Elven Moonshine there’s usually something available somehow that trips you up. That troll over there definitely caught some pixie dust and faeries really can’t handle anything with caffeine in it. The witch who lives on Blackfield lane always makes pumpkin cakes and she definitely bakes at least half of them with birdseed. It does a number on Harpies.”

Gally swipes a biscuit from the plate and shrugs, which tells Thomas that none of this is news to anyone (he just avidly hopes he didn’t accidentally take anything that might have had algae in it). “Just watch out for the fae,” he says. “They’re too small to hold their moonshine. The odd one might still fly into you until late on the third.”

Before Thomas can comment on that (a good thing, maybe, as he’s somewhat lost on what he’d say beyond ‘hey thanks for the heads up’), the cafe door swings open, tossing a token blast of November air across the room; the smell of skeleton leaves and chlorophyll, edged with just a little chill that’s lasting despite the sun.

Thomas isn’t wholly sure why he’s expecting Winston, but it definitely isn’t him.

It’s a girl.

A young woman, actually; probably around his own age. She’s strikingly pretty the way that dangerous things are; a warning against getting too close just as much as a temptation. She’s willowy and tall, her skin milky pale. Her hair is raven black but also dripping wet like she just stepped out of a shower. It’s hanging in long tendrils down her back and offsetting the shocking blue of her eyes.

She’s wearing unremarkable clothes that are soaking up the water and there’s a thick waterproof grey jacket of some kind thrown over her arm.

“Who-” Thomas half asks before Mary appears to notice her, just standing inside the doorway and leaving a puddle.

“Teresa!” Mary beams. “Hairdryer?”

“Thank you.” Teresa smiles; a small thing, warm and unassuming tucked in the corner of her mouth. She looks more approachable that way, far less remote and inhuman. She waves, an equally small thing, and drips some more on the floor, her jacket slippery with water in the crook of her elbow.

She crosses between tables, careful not to brush against anyone and takes the blowdryer Mary holds out over the counter.

Thomas feels Newt’s hand shift around his just before he reaches his free one over to nudge Gally.

“Hey,” he says, softly. “Looks like the tides changed.”

Thomas frowns at them.

Newt tugs his lower lip between his teeth, considers and then decides, “I’ll be easier for her to tell you, I think.”

Minho looks around, tipping his chair back again as though this will make his voice project better when he yells across the cafe, making everyone flinch again, “Yo! Teresa!”

She looks up, eyes jumping right over the eclectic mix of customers to land on their table where they promptly roll at Minho. There’s clear exasperation aimed at the way he’s waving on his reared back chair but distinct fondness, too. She flicks her gaze past him, nods at Gally and at Newt and then stops on Thomas with a new, narrow look.

Thomas swallows.

He can hear the loud whir of the hairdryer too potently in the morose silence. Unlike Chuck, the baby Kelpie who sometimes stops by, it actually seems to be doing it’s job; her hair is no longer dripping onto the floor, beginning to lift into thick waves though it’s no less black.

“You’re going to break your neck,” Teresa says finally, swinging her attention back to Minho.

“We’ve told him,” Mary puts in, sounding like a long-suffering parent. “Tea? Water?”

Teresa lowers the hairdryer so she can crane her head around Mary to the drinks board on the back wall. The blast of hot air from the dryer head sends a Wisp cartwheeling backwards into a cream cake.

“I’d actually love a milkshake,” she says. “We don’t have anything like that over the summer.”

Mary nods, smiling as she moves to another of her machines. “You got it. On the house.”

“Come sit,” Minho calls over to her, garnering more than a few dirty looks at the volume. Thomas thinks he just hears Teresa mutter something that sounds like ‘indoor voice’ but it’s swallowed in the sound of the blowdryer too fast to know for sure. “You need to meet Thomas.”

Teresa doesn’t respond. She finishes casually blowdrying her hair until it’s not even damp. A few people come and go. The troll with her earmuffs heads out into the daylight, yawning and leaving moss on the door handle. Zart slips in a moment later, waves at them brightly with far less vines poking from his sleeves than usual, and then goes to join another Dryad snacking on a maple leaf sandwich.

Finally, Teresa flicks off the hairdryer and then sets it back on the counter where a Wisp goes to put it away. Another swoops around it to hand Teresa her milkshake; a tall, fluted glass almost overflowing with viscous pink froth.

It smells sharply of fresh strawberries when she claps it down on a coaster next to their plate of biscuits at the table. She snatches an empty chair from nearby, drapes her jacket over the back of it and then sits down with them.

She’s finally close enough for Thomas to pick up a defined scent that’s hers; salt water and melting ice, petrified wood and shifting, changing magic with no shape of its own. She smells wild in a way that’s familiar and bone-deep.

She shoves Minho’s chair forward unceremoniously, and he almost faceplants into the pastries.

“How’s it been?” she asks, stabbing a purple bendy straw into the milkshake. She stares at them all over the top of it as she bites on the protruding end and the drink starts to go down.

“Warm,” Gally supplies.

“Eventful,” Newt offers. His hand squeezes Thomas’.

“Chaotic,” Minho sniffs. “You missed Halloween.”

Teresa spits out the straw and lifts a delicate eyebrow at him. “Intentionally.”

“Anyone ever tell you you’re no fun?”

She rolls the straw around the rim of the glass until it’s back in front of her and shrugs. “On occasion. Their loss. What happened at Halloween?”

“The usual,” Gally shrugs. “Minho ran into a scarecrow.”

Minho shoots him a filthy look.

Teresa snorts so hard she blows bubbles into her drink and pushes it away, coughing. Her reaction seems to appease Minho somewhat.

Newt pushes a napkin towards her and his voice tips towards sincerity when he speaks. “How long are you here for?”

Teresa calmly flattens the napkin on the table and then picks up her glass, stamping it into the cloth three times, overlaying the circular base so the condensation soaks in a Venn diagram that forms a perfect triquetra.

“In this cafe? The next five minutes.” She flicks her gaze over to the front wall of windows and back. “I said I’d stop by and see someone when I got here.”

She says it not unkindly, and Minho responds with the same, measured tone, “Good to know we rate lower in your priorities.”

“You don’t rate in them at all,” she says, playing with the straw again. “I’m gracing you with my presence. Is Fry still in the store?”

“Day off,” Gally puts in. “It’s the first of November. But you’ll find him there tomorrow.”

“Winston still adopting dragons?”

“Don’t joke,” Newt mutters around a rueful half-smile. “It’s the one thing he hasn’t found yet.”

A smile washes across Teresa’s face. She nods quietly to herself and then flicks her eyes up to Thomas where they lock, more solidly than any gaze she’s offered so far. Her eyes are still so blue; sharp and turbulent, no effort made to conceal the gleam of quick intelligence under the surface.

Thomas is aware he’s staring back.

She’s from the sea, that much he can work out. A mermaid, perhaps? Or another sort of water spirit. She smells like the ocean, not like any contained body of water; tainted by earth and banks. She isn’t a Naiad or an Undine. As far as he knows, they hold to fountains, wells and lakes. A Nereid or a Rusalka, perhaps, or a Siren?

He isn’t sure, but it seems rude to crook his neck and squint to check for gills.

Gally smirks across the table at him like he knows Thomas is curbing the impulse.

He lets it go, swallows and waits.

The Banshee and her vampire companions move tables as the sun shifts around outside, rays stretching greedy fingers for the furthest corners of the cafe. They take their throat sweets and the tea with them. Zart and his friend both leave, stepping into the street and shaking pollen spores from their hair. A harpy, a dwarf and a pixie all show up together, cradling their heads and groaning out an order in a way that’s almost pitiful before they sink into the closest seats they can find. No one bothers them.

Teresa doesn’t seem phased by the lull that drops over their table, and despite the strange weight of her evaluating gaze on him, it’s...strangely comfortable. The five of them pick at the biscuits as Wisps float about and occasionally refill their mugs. The door swings open, always with a new taste of November, and the customers shift around them.

Something about Teresa’s quiet attention seems like a test, and Thomas gets the distinct feeling he’s passed it when she finally speaks to him.

“So you’re Thomas?”

He’s slowly adjusted to everyone somehow knowing who he is in Safe Haven, before he ever sets eyes on them, but Teresa has apparently only just even arrived in town so-

“How-”

“He called you Thomas,” Teresa says plainly, jabbing her bendy straw at Minho. It drips pink milkshake onto a pastry but she still returns it to the glass with serene slowness. “So I’m assuming that’s you.”

Thomas shakes himself. “Yeah, that’s me. Hi.”

She raises an unimpressed eyebrow at him, spears her milkshake and bites on the top of the straw again.

Newt makes a pressed noise, somewhere between a sigh and a snort and says, patiently, “She’s being difficult.”

Her mouth twists, teeth flashing around the crushed straw and she looks pleased that he’s said it.

“So what do you do, Thomas?”

She pushes the milkshake away again, stamping out another triquetra on the napkin even as she reclines in her chair. She doesn’t appear to notice or care that her jacket is still wet and probably soaking her sweater as she leans into it.

“I’m in university,” he says, picking his way around the answer because he gets the feeling she picks her own way around truths. “What do you do?”

There’s a flutter across her expression, a twitch of her fingers, and something about her softens, just a fraction, her scent curling with the gentle, fragrant notes of a kind of starting acceptance.

“I’m a marine biologist,” she replies, which in it’s own way, doesn’t really answer anything, either. “So you and Newt have been together for...how long?”

Thomas blinks, startled, suddenly feeling Newt’s fingers through his acutely, as though it’s new, even though they’ve been interlocked since they sat down. They’re under the table, how does she even-

“It’s….recent,” Newt hedges, thumb tapping on the inside of Thomas’ wrist. Then he turns to Thomas, hooking his ankle through the cross bar between Thomas’ chair-legs. “She can pick up scents.” He doesn’t say ‘ like you ’ and though Thomas hears it, he wonders if Teresa does.

“ She is right here,” Teresa says loftily. “But yes, I can. Newt’s scent has never been quite like that, and I can smell the metal on you from here.” Thomas bites his lip, not sure if he’s pleased or mortified and then- “Also you have like...three hickeys so-”

Teresa casually sucks up the last of her milkshake.

Thomas thinks he’s closer to mortified. (The wolf avidly disagrees).

(Okay, so he’s a little pleased).

Teresa pushes back her chair and stands up, leaving her empty glass behind. She scoops the heavy grey jacket from the chair and leans towards Thomas. Her eyes are fearless, genuinely kind but touched with warning, her expression gently blank.

“I like you,” she says, decisively. “It was nice to meet you, Thomas. But if you hurt him, I’ll drown you.”

Thomas swallows. Teresa stands back. She’s completely dry now. She says her goodbyes, and heads off towards the front door where she slips into the November afternoon and walks off down the street without putting on her coat.

“Well,” Minho says to Newt, prodding the abandoned milkshake away from the biscuits. “That was quite an offer. I think that’s the nicest she’s ever been to you.”