Chapter Text
Wirt makes… a sound at the allusion to refueling his soul. The unnatural timbre worms up from the ground and through his chest, a tectonic rumble that scruffs Beatrice at the base of her skull and fuses her vertebrae in a frozen stack. She feels The Beast’s mounting voraciousness congeal the summer air like a blood clot, solid as gelatin in her lungs—and she feels the release, his blink back into sanity, that terrible low-frequency need submerging itself back beneath the grass. Beatrice’s ears pop.
“Second lunch,” Wirt chimes, voice pitched piccolo-high. “Th-That’s a good one, Bea. Second lunch for my second stomach. Clever euphemism.”
“Um,” says Beatrice dumbly.
“You just—you said it so casually. Is that what we’re going to call it from now on? When I have to… when you… when we f-fill it up?”
Beatrice thought she was prepared for this scenario. She resolved to take on all the duties of a loyal Lantern-Bearer and steadfast friend (best friend), to treat this aspect of her relationship with Wirt as a facet rather than a chain, but… for a moment there Wirt had been genuinely…
“What was that?” she demands, a notch harsher than she intends. “Your ‘second stomach’ growling?”
Her fingernails scratch her gingham skirt into creases. That was the sound he’d made when he stalked that lost girl in the swamp. That same ravenous pressure had brewed in the atmosphere when he stole Greg away from the mill. It’s a frightening residual blemish of the old Beast—the old bastard—and it sours in Beatrice’s mouth like a bite of rotten fruit. For god’s sake, she watched this boy stand before the Appleonians with maturity and humility ten seconds ago… that Wirt, her Wirt, doesn’t slaver after oil-curdled blood. Her Wirt is genuine, sweet, clueless yet courageous, and he’s stronger than the temptation cupped between his gnarled bark-plated hands.
She knows this, because when her Wirt notes the color draining from her face he lets his precious offering roll onto the picnic blanket so he can fold her fingers into his grasp, as careful as though he’s wrapping porcelain. A gesture to comfort her—which he’s better at than he could possibly realize.
“Yeah… that’s all it is. Hunger-growls,” he mutters soothingly, irises refracting saffron and sunflower with a central pool of blue. “I guess I’m, erm… peckish? Does that make sense? I’ve been surrounded by fuel for months and no way to consume it… so I’m a little… o̠v̼e͔r̝w̼h̩e̹l̗m͖ḛd̟.”
Beatrice sucks in a breath at the abhorrence that pierces her, hearing such an earthy texture mixed with Wirt’s signature embarrassment. She has to dig around her automatic disgust to appreciate that Wirt is trying; he doesn’t want to scare her; he hasn’t lost himself. The self-deprecating smile he beams at her suggests that The Beast’s hunger pangs are less catastrophic backslide and more the cantankerous gurgles of a pet simply needing to be fed.
At least, that’s what Beatrice’s tentative optimism wants to believe. Another part of her—wary, vigilant, remembering the diseased Edelwood outside of town—frets that the void in the jar had called to its likeness entombed somewhere within Wirt.
If by feeding The Beast she nourishes the demon…
“I’ve got it under control,” her dumb unpredictable wonderful boy promises. He furrows his brow at her as if he can read each hidden doubt scrawled across her forehead, each worry she thought she’d buried in the hay last night. “You won’t have to kick my butt out here. I can… behave.”
“What do you feel when you hold the oil?” Beatrice interlaces their fingers together so The Beast can’t grab the jar and make that unsettling growl again. His knuckles are raised under her fingertips, almost thorny; the bark that replaced his skin is surprisingly smooth, like a branch polished by the weather or a wooden walking cane burnished by years of use. The whorls and edges of its surface feel like tendons and veins. Close to human. Not quite. “Be honest. Gimme all the gritty details.”
Her frankness takes Wirt aback; he swallows and his eye contact darts to the jar, to their joined hands, to Beatrice’s neckline, to her face. “I… w-want it. A lot. For a few seconds I wanted it more than anything in the world. Instinct, I suppose…” A high lift of his shoulders, as if he’s trying to disappear into his tent of a shirt. He tilts an antler apologetically to the orchard Edelwood spanned hospitably above them. “Which is gross. I realize that it’s gross, and something this barbaric shouldn’t be normalized, but… I dunno. How do I explain?” His eyebrows inch together. “Being here—being with you—takes the edge off. I can overcome the craving if I concentrate. It won’t drown me. I wonder if… maybe the oil isn’t the only thing keeping me alive anymore.”
The admission rings clear and pure and scatters light across the ink-dark fear that’d spilled in Beatrice’s mind. She holds her hope like a sugarcube on her tongue. “So… you’re not going to go insane if I fill the lantern? I’ll get to keep sane, tame Wirt?”
“I have no idea what I’m going to do,” Wirt replies wryly, “since, to my knowledge, the lantern has never been completely filled. I could burst into flames for all I know. Immolate like a moth drawn to a candle, or crumble into ash like that blackberry pie you forgot in the oven that one time—”
“Listen, you little shit—”
“—Or I could heal faster. Or nothing could happen at all. I never supervised the Woodsman when he…” Wirt gestures vaguely, distastefully at the vessel housing his spirit. “I’m not even sure what the ‘right’ amount of oil would be. We should definitely ration it—I’d be unforgivably irresponsible if I burned through all of this in an afternoon. You said… if you fill up the lantern?”
“You’re a big boy, and you can fuel your own soul-fire—but I’m the Lantern-Bearer, and I have to figure out what I’m doing.” Beatrice squeezes Wirt’s hands until he glances up at her from under the sweep of his lashes. “I’ll be looking after it most of the time, right? While you’re busy with Beast errands?”
“That’s true…”
“Exactly.” She lets him go with a dauntless nod. “So let me do this.”
The paranoia scrabbling behind her sternum shrinks with a whimper. They won’t be like the old Beast and unfortunate Woodsman, tied together in a dangerous dance of attrition. They are partners, both working toward mutually assured survival. Wirt won’t hurt her. She won’t betray him.
(They’re fine.)
Wirt’s dandelion stare follows her as she picks up the jar from where it tumbled next to the picnic basket. He’s silent when Beatrice brings his offering closer, waiving every opportunity to rip it from her grip… but when she unscrews the lid—opening the oil inside to the clean orchard air—that hideous seismic rumble pushes at her eardrums. Wirt parts his lips and sneers like a feline raking a new scent into its palate. His claws twitch and dig into the fabric of his trousers. “Beatrice…”
She flats her free hand on his cheek without hesitation. He quiets, features dissolving their rigidity, and tips his head ever-so-subtly toward her palm. “I’m not going to starve you,” Beatrice vows softly. “Trust me.”
The feral cats return one at a time, brushing furry cheeks against Wirt’s arms, his back, his bent knees, purring with all they have. They crowd around as Beatrice uncaps the lantern’s oil tank, tails curled into question marks, and oversee the steadiness of her hands. Sunshine filigrees their whiskers and fur into haloes. Wirt pets them unconsciously, his claws curving to scritch under chins and behind ears. The Lantern-Bearer cautiously angles the jar...
A perfect stream of viscous black arcs from bottle to lantern in an uninterrupted line, undulating like the thin body of a snake. Fuel hits the flame. Fire blooms in a brilliant gasp—no longer a sickly liquor-brown but an incandescent white-gold that shimmers against Beatrice’s skin like dawn breaking through a window. Invigorated. Heathy. Alive.
No turning back now.
“Okay, that’s probably a fair amount to begin with. Don’t want to gorge you in the first go.” Beatrice huffs a sardonic laugh, shuts the tank, and re-screws the jar’s lid—nice and secure. A scruffy tabby swipes its sandpaper tongue across her knuckles as if to reward her. “How are you feeling, Wirt? ...Wirt? Wirt? Hey, Wirt, idiot, I need you to...”
🙞 ------------------------- 🙜
For the first time since Wirt became the Beast, he experiences what it’s like for his soul to be fed.
It’s the most delicious meal he’s ever tasted, ambrosia, lifeblood, like running a marathon and soaring on a spike of shuddery endorphins, higher than the sun. He shakes violently—body accommodating to an explosion of energy—fiery heat and dark lightning conducted instantly through his livewire veins. His chest expands more and more—to shout his joy, perhaps, or to scream, or to roar, or sob—and he’s either smiling wide enough to split his face or grimacing and Beatrice’s concern-fear-dread is horribly distracting so he throws himself forward into her lap like a hound, like a wolf pouncing on a hare, squeezing her waist tight in a hug that’s supposed to ground him but actually feels magnificent.
His friend’s alarm sizzles flustered-and-tasty in Wirt’s chest, sparkling New Year’s champagne. He laughs into the tautness of her stomach. Tears of relief and satiety and completeness leak down his cheeks and onto her bodice. Beatrice. She takes such good care of him and smells so good, so comforting, and Wirt feels good, and he wants to press this goodness into her heart like wildflowers between the pages of his journal. “I didn’t know,” The Beast purrs—and he is purring, which is hilarious, laughter texturing the resonant vocalization like cobblestones on a road. The vibration massages his lungs. “I didn’t know I was s-starving? I mean, I knew, but I didn’t really know, because I’m full now. I am the lake that swallowed the setting sun, overflowed with luminescence, I am the fire at the singing core of a star—”
“Are you drunk?” Beatrice asks. Her shock tickles him, and Wirt laughs harder at how she shoves at his antlers to push him off her lap. “Wirt, get it together!”
He allows himself to be shoved from the picnic blanket and onto the grass—which kisses him, hundreds of vivid green blades that cushion the angles of his shoulder blades and elbows as he spreads out his arms to bask in their tingling softness. The feral cats pile atop him in a chirping mass. As long as he’s been The Beast he has always been nature, but that oneness has never felt so achingly lucid as it does now. It’s as though he’s finally hearing a melody at full volume, one previously distant and choked to the point of nonexistence. “I’m alive,” he tells his best friend dreamily. “Alive, alive, alive.” Jitters waltz down his frame and a sort of terror grips him: what is he supposed to do with all this scorching energy?
His talons rake the grass and pierce the dirt. Red clover and orange poppy and fiery blanket flower erupt around his fingers and Beatrice grabs the front of his shirt with a gasp dragged through her teeth. The cats climb over both of them, trilling and purring. “What’s happening to you?” she demands. The wobble in her voice twists Wirt’s snickers into tremulo cries. “Did… Did we use too much? Is it the wrong oil? Damn it, Wirt, I know which tree they must’ve taken it from, what is it doing to you?!”
Her free hand slides up his neck to cup his jaw and Wirt’s eyes almost roll back from how much he can feel, how sensationally satin her skin is. In desperation The Beast takes her wrists and lifts her away from him as carefully as he can, tearing petals and leaves from the ground as he does so. “I’m fine, better than fine, glorious. It might be too much, I think? Too much. I am replete and resplendent. I’m okay, Beatrice—don’t worry. Shh.”
He leans up to cradle her face, to calm her, mesmerized by the constellations of freckles that dust her cheeks and spill down her throat like stardust. Maggots of horror-guilt eat at her and that’s not right, Beatrice didn’t do anything wrong. Only when Wirt presses their foreheads together does his Lantern-Bearer release a grit of remorse.
“I can fix this,” she says. One of her palms braces against his breastbone, either to appreciate the (thundering galloping) beat of his heart or to maintain the distance between them. “I’ll… I’ll find you another Edelwood. One that isn’t so…” Disgust. Dismay. Revulsion. Regret. “Calm down weirdo, you’re freaking me out. You said you’d behave…”
Beatrice’s pleading tone blends with the vocal celebration of the felines and the ringing of birdsong over the hill, and the applause of rustling leaves in the wind, and and and. “Beautiful!” Wirt proclaims. He hauls himself to his hooves—holding Beatrice and cackling when they trip over one another to stand—and as he beams at her he’s so thrilled his face hurts. “It’s so beautiful here! Everyone is so good, and kind, and wonderful, they accepted me like your family accepted me isn’t that that just so noble and compassionate they could have run me back into the forest but they didn’t, they know who I am and they didn’t...”
He runs out of air before finishing, which is so silly he has to gasp for oxygen until the spots leave his vision. Why is his face wet? Why is Beatrice’s lovely face so blurry? “I have to—have to thank them,” Wirt pants. “Have to do something for you, for the town, for Holly.” He can do this: he can be The Wanderer, The Blue-Eyed Buck, The Boy-Beast, The Singer, The Watcher, Gardener, and every other name he’s been given by those he watches over. He’ll be all of the things he must be. Look at how those few generous Appleonians had accepted him! Why not more of them? Why not all of them? Why not show the entire town his gratitude?
He’s held himself back for seasons. They all deserve to witness the expanse of Wirt’s devotion to them.
The Beast charges away from the orchard Edelwood too fast for Beatrice to catch him. Cats shoot after their lord in a wake of tri-colored viola and fuschia godetia.
“WIRT! Where are you going?!”
He’s going to find Holly, obviously, but a fit of giggles trips him tumbling downhill in splashes of stark blue cornflower. His plunge steadies into a playful roll—cats pouncing into his arms, tackling him and the blooms he paints in a sky-colored brushstroke behind him—and Wirt realizes: this is a game. Beatrice is chasing him. When was the last time he was allowed to enjoy a game?
Wirt of the past never played sports. He couldn’t bear the shame of being picked last (the possibility of being rejected, discarded) so he avoided team games at all costs. No street soccer in his neighborhood. No kickball after class. No freeze tag in the park, despite Greg dragging him by the arm with increasingly rallying crows of “Come on, Wirt!” Now he races on frantic hooves around a bend of peridot-hued Pippins to startle an unsuspecting group of orchard workers—the captain of his own team.
“I have to get to Holly before Beatrice does,” The Beast explains in a rush to the five random horse-folk currently gawking at him as if he sprang up fully formed from the soil. One of them drops his shears. Another is losing streaky Pilot apples out of a basket that he’s half-canted in shock. It’s a wonder the one on a ladder hasn’t fallen; Wirt ensures that the tree supporting him holds that ladder firm and safe. “We’re racing, for fun, I have to tell Holly Hotchkiss how thankful I am for her and for all of you but I’m going to lose if my best friend Beatrice catches me so stall her, yeah? Oh—it’s me! The Wanderer. Pleasure-to-make-your-acquaintance.”
Most of the workers blurt “Wanderer?” and “that cuckoo redhead?” and “Miss Hotchkiss?” and “Wanderer?!” but the youngest among them, a sorrel colt, catches on immediately, the switch of his ears somewhat flustered.
“That furious-looking belle headed straight for you?” he nickers. “Might could help you out, Wanderer.”
“Great—thank you, thank you!”
And Wirt is off, leaving the tree they’d been working on fuller with fruit than before. At his back he hears the workers distracting Beatrice: her thwarted, livid attempts to get by them, her voice climbing higher with indignation. Someone makes a nervous joke about her punching them if they don’t let her through; Beatrice blusters a roar of a sigh and awkwardly apologizes. Happiness trills around Wirt in a quartet of red cardinals and chattering robins—his Lantern-Bearer is mending things on her own.
A row of Vilberie (perfect for hard cider, stout and bittersweet) notifies Wirt to the exact location of Holly and the gentlemen she’s walking with back to her Inn. Concluding that he has plenty of time, The Beast wickedly jogs serpentine through Golden Confetti and Winesap, enlisting the help of more starstruck workers as he runs.
Even the most reverent folk, the most anxious about meeting him, can’t help but play along. Wirt is so insistent about their participation in the game, after all—his laughter is positively infectious, unashamed and from the belly, and it’s impossible to recognize him as anything but Wanderer when he has songbirds roosting in his antlers and wildflowers growing, spilling, spreading out from wherever his hooves prance.
“It’s okay,” he sing-songs at doubts about the bargain. “Nothing is broken. No one has betrayed anything.” Wirt is the one making the first move (HIM! Wirt! Making the first move!) and if his playfulness is undoing the original magic that made Appleonia prosperous, well, he’ll simply weave a new and brighter spell to guard them. Aren’t the marvelous smiles of those he meets magic enough? The tolerant workers who join him, abandoning their tools in the grass for a while to romp? A few of them ask, considerately, if he’s feeling… himself, their attention on the bandages layered across his shoulder; Wirt tugs his shirt back over the wound and cries joyful tears—touched at their concern.
Word spreads quickly that the orchard spirit has come to cavort. People trickle up the orchard hill little by little, families spreading their picnic blankets in the sunshine, and soon Appleonian children are ambling alongside Beatrice to catch The Wanderer. Their little hands are full of gifts: drawings and friendship bracelets, candy and shiny buttons, offerings they’d probably been collecting in hopes that this exact day would come to pass.
Word also spreads that Beatrice is a player in this great game, and not an antagonist to avoid. She’s further slowed down when foal-headed kids grab her skirt to toss flower crowns atop her bright ginger hair and flower necklaces around her throat.
The Wanderer hasn’t forgotten that he still needs to catch Holly. But when he glances back at the rainbows of blossoms embroidered across the hillside (graced by hundreds of butterflies) he thinks MORE, because Holly deserves more, and the Edelwood standing against the blue sky seems to rustle with contentment at all the beauty planted near her roots.
“WIRT, damn it, are you ever going to slow down?!”
“Language, Beatrice!”
“Don’t tell me to watch my DAMN language!”
Beatrice struggles to breathe and to hold back a smoldering coal of laughter. A lion’s mane of white, yellow, blue, and pink flowers bobs around her neck. Her multiple flower crowns keep slipping into her eyes and yet she hasn’t torn them off. She’s trying to be responsible. She’s trying to grasp the dread that hit her when Wirt’s soul tasted oil and he combusted. She’s failing.
“Run run run Bea, as fast as you can! Last one to Holly has to bow before the winner and declare their supremacy!”
“I’m already supreme, branch-boy!”
Wirt gets too cocky, taunting Beatrice around either side of a Gravenstein’s trunk. The young woman almost snatches him by the collar (almost!) until a hoard of chortling kids crowd around him to foil her. To escape, The Beast leaps at a low bough—actually leaps, as if he were a weightless fawn—and hugs it with both arms. Apples shower down and hit the earth, bouncing, rolling; children and orchard workers alike chase after the ripest fruits with incredulous laughter; Wirt throws apples into baskets, into outstretched hands, smiling like a madman and too ELATED to notice that some of his bandages have slipped loose.
He’s still sitting in the tree when the young lady he’d been aiming to gladden marches into the scene with her father and mother, the rest of her family trailing behind.
“Glory be,” Holly exclaims. “What’s all this?”
Beatrice haltingly attempts to explain—but she’s brushed aside by a Wanderer who falls out of the Gravenstein and bounces on his hooves like Greg on Christmas day. Wirt holds both of Holly’s hands and spins her around so that her flaring skirt brushes over purple coneflower and Black-eyed Susans. “HOLLY HOTCHKISS you fantastic friend! I could never thank you enough for how good your community—how good you have been to me. You’re an inspiration. Your family must be so proud of you…” Euphoric glee sputters into heartfelt weeping. “This means so much to me, so much… the flowers are for you. The apples. The...” His arms sweeps to indicate the strawberry patches that have tumbled down the grassy isle, the white-petaled raspberry canes arching between trees. For Holly. For everyone.
“Wanderer,” the filly says, abashed. When Wirt releases her she smooths her skirt to catch her breath. “Pshaw. It’s not as though you haven’t done anything for—”
She’s too adorable. Wirt hugs her close and then plants a completely platonic, wholly affectionate kiss on the velvet of her equine nose.
Holly goes stiff as a deer in headlights. Her parents clear their throats delicately. Beatrice points with a childish HA. Wirt gives the filly a brotherly pat on the back and releases her so he can clasp Mr. Hotchkiss’s calloused palm in a respectful manly handshake.
“This is very… public, young man,” mutters the palomino with a subtle fringe of worry. “Is this a farewell? Are you…” He squints, dropping his tone discreetly. “Are you in your right mind, Wanderer? Has our balance—”
Mr. Hotchkiss utters a spooked equine grunt when Wirt yanks him into a hug as well; on his hooves, Wirt is nearly as tall as any Appleonian man, and Holly’s father wears an expression of panic like the world may end. “Thank you,” Wirt says fiercely through congested tears. “I will never forget what this town has done for me, for each other. Stay true to yourselves until the end of time. If you do that, I’ll watch over this place. Always.”
Mrs. Hotchkiss gets a hug too, and then the rest of Holly’s family, and then the foals flock to him and he ruffles all their forelocks and accepts the dandelion bracelets they droop over his wrists.
They want him to meet their families, to share their picnics with him. But Beatrice seizes his shirtsleeve (at last) and Wirt spins to face her.
“Enough,” she tells him firmly, though the corner of her mouth won’t stay flat and she’s breathing so hard her panting breath fans his stupidly grinning face. “I’ve got you. Settle down, before you embarrass yourself… more than you already have.”
Wirt isn’t embarrassed. In fact, now that Holly is skipping through the daisies with the kids and picking ripe strawberries to eat, and everybody is taken care of, he wants to do something nice with his best friend.
“Remember how we talked about visiting all the places I check on?” he asks her, vibrating. The sun has tilted enough to gild the scalloped edges of Beatrice’s flower crowns and warm her pale skin into ivory. “At the mill. At night. When I’d come home, and I told you that Merlodel has the sweetest grapes you’ve ever tasted, and Artiodale has sheep with the softest wool—”
“And Appleonia has the best cultivars in the Unknown, yep.” She leads him away from the merrily squealing younglings and their loved ones caught up in their own games of tag in the orchard; the distance she puts between him and the townsfolk who’ve been drawn to spend some time in the lazy summer sunlight helps… calm him, slightly, like stepping away from a full-swing party to clear his head. “You want to show me…?”
He nods frantically, the world shaken like chips of colored glass in a cup. “Yes. Show you. I’ll show you all of them!”
Trees drop their fruit into his waiting hands as he all but drags himself out of Beatrice’s grip—free as the breeze that busses her cheek. One by one he underhand pitches the prized jewels of this place in her direction: nacreous rosy Heart Pearl, honey-fleshed Sugarcomb, Goodnight Auroras blushed with sapphire and flecked with scarlet, tart green Lemon Pippins, spotted Confetti.
His Lantern-Bearer can’t keep up, cannot hold all the gifts he wants to pile into her arms. Beatrice punches the next apple he tosses her out of its trajectory with a laugh that she attempts to disguise as an aggravated growl. “You’re—this is—stop throwing apples at me!”
“I’m throwing TO you, not at you!” Wirt corrects her, wheezing, hardly able to see straight for the crinkling of his eyes and the way his entire body wants to collapse in mirth. “Try this one!”
He lobs a crimson fruit at her, its skin speckled with purple and pinpoint yellow. Beatrice catches it with both hands and—realizing that he’ll just throw another if she doesn’t play along—deliberately crunches into its snowy flesh. A line of sugared moisture drips down the corner of her mouth and glitters; Wirt wants to lick her chin clean. “Yep, it’s delicious. Thanks. Stop throwing apples to me, please.”
Wirt sinks his teeth into his own treat, moaning aloud at the sharpness of early raspberry and lemon that lingers in the dissolving crispness in his mouth. He takes three more huge bites (ravenous, ecstatic) and drops the rest into the grass, where sweet violet crawls across it even as the leftover seeds unfurl their pale cotyledons. “There are more,” The Beast promises in a rush. “You have to try them—they’re all amazing—you won’t find them anywhere else!”
He dashes up and down the manicured rows, reaching into branches that droop with their bounty and beg for his attention. The orchard wants to give and give and give; it thrives with its Caretaker and its generosity is reciprocated in kind—symbiosis in its purest form. A crescendo, Wirt thinks, like when an orchestra strikes the same chord and that resonance builds upon itself in a splendid wave. There’s no discord here to cut him down. To divide him from himself. He is the rustling of leaves and the blue sky, the taut skin of apples, the brushing petals of wildflowers, whole, and Beatrice is a sun that he sets himself to like the point of a compass, a guiding star. How could he ever get lost?
Respecting Beatrice’s request, Wirt does not throw anymore apples… but he does push them into her hands, and when she can’t carry any more he holds them for her so they can share, eating from the same core.
Orchard workers are going home from the day; their shadows stretch toward their houses below, and the buzz hum of them and all their relatives, friends, and beaus roams gradually out of Wirt’s awareness. He’s been trembling for what seems like hours (has it been hours?) but as his universe pares itself down to nature alone, to Beatrice and her fingers wrapped around his talons, those shakes gentle into miniature shivers that flicker down his frame like ripples down a rope. He collapses, accidentally, on his back in a thatch of clover and dandelion with an exhausted huff. “Tired,” he announces in a slurred rumble. “S’tired… where’d the day go, huh?”
Beatrice stretches out on her side next to him. She sheds her flower crowns, her chains and cables of blossoms, and piles them atop Wirt’s chest where they freshen their petals and seem as if they want to grow new roots. Her fingertips slip carefully under the edge of his collar; many of The Beast’s bandages have come undone, trailing off him like ribbons, but the wounds they protected have all scarred over. “I worry about you,” she admits under her breath. “Nothing bad happened today, and because nothing bad happened, I’m worried what’s waiting for us after this.”
Wirt opens his mouth to inform her that he is AMAZING and very strong and more powerful than he’d been before the oil and there is nothing for her to worry about but Beatrice gives him this look with her hazel eyes, irises the color of sunshine on a creek, bronze-and-blue-and-green, and his heart stops. “Every time I think I’m getting the hang of you, you surprise me with something else,” she says.
She brushes his hair back from his too-warm face, tenderly, exasperated, stealing The Beast’s words before they’re nascent syllables upon his tongue. Was this truly the same young woman who had tried to dash his brains against the barn’s floor? The same friend who’d locked her hands around his throat in rage? He cannot imagine these hands ever hurting him again. “I am a man of mystery, changing as the seasons,” Wirt quips eventually. “If… if it consoles you, I can’t get the hang of you either. Tigress. Lantern-Bearer. Bluebir—”
This time she cups his jaw to lock it closed, the same way she shuts Rusty up when he barks too long at squirrels outside. “Okay, ‘Tigress’ I like. That one you can keep—privately, to yourself, when nobody else is around to hear you. We’re not doing pet names.”
Wirt struggles to grit out that she calls him Beast and Beastie whenever she feels like it, but he supposes that those are his actual titles, so that’s fine.
His best friend releases his face with a smart pat on the cheek and settles back on her elbows. A million sentences are spun behind her lips and Wirt is primed to listen to each one, rapturous, until the redhead’s attention leaves his dazed rosy eyes and floats toward the wide branches of his crown.
“Oh,” Beatrice whispers. Her fingertips glide along an outer tine of his left antler and caress something there. “Your leaves.”
Wirt doesn’t wait for an explanation. He yanks a flat smoothness from his antler (wincing, though it hurts no more than tugging on a single hair of his scalp) and holds it before his eyes: an oaken-shaped leaf with faint serrations biting the lobes, dyed deep plum around the edges, bleeding into copper-green toward the center and along each delicate vein. Darker than those of the orchard Edelwood. More lavish than the brittle dried-blood, red-brown of common Edelwood. Colors that belong solely to Wirt.
When he twirls it in the sunlight, the leaf’s underbelly glimmers gold.
Wirt has never liked any part of his Beastly self—not until Beatrice gave him a reason to feel anything other than corrupted, malformed, ugly. He considers this leaf (his foliage) and quirks a shy smile. “Suits me,” he murmurs, and lets the wind carry that shape of purple-green-gold away.
“Hey, Beast?”
The fireworks crackling within his ribs fizzle into sparklers that he could hold in his talons. His limbs relax, boneless molasses, while everything is still far too much and yet perfect. He hiccups a sodapop giggle. “Y-Yeah?”
A palm on his face, warm, he nuzzles into it and Beatrice sighs and the sigh is Monarch butterfly wings vivid and sharp against a blue sky.
Shame-regret spills into her harried emotions, greying their color. Beatrice thinks she has to make up for something, as if Wirt hasn’t forgiven her completely, as if her mistakes could outnumber his. “Today was… fun. I’ve never seen you so free, so… so not giving a crap about what anyone thinks. You looked happy, all seize-the-moment and fearless and…” She chews the fullness of her bottom lip. “It was all way over the top but I hope, when you’re sane again, you don’t regret it. Letting yourself feel joy, I mean. Letting other people see and feel that joy, too.”
Wirt cranes his neck around to moon at her. “Beatrice, I lo—”
She claps a hand over his mouth. Her rage is scorching; Wirt wishes to bask in it like a cat in a sunbeam, soaking it up until he burns. Her silent command to stop talking prompts him to smile under her palm…
Until her attention is stolen by a new change in the orchard. As though The Wanderer hasn’t blessed the vast hillside enough today.
Blossoms of alabaster white and amorous magenta flutter in an apple-perfumed breeze, for miles and miles and miles. It looks like snow and swan feathers, like scraps of velvet scattered across a rainbow tapestry. Petals spin from heavy branches to settle on grass that bounces with Wirt’s diaphragm as he chuckles, delirious and delighted at what his oil-drenched repletion has created. A grand finale.
The forever-fruitful orchard is blooming.