Chapter Text
“Death doesn't discriminate between the sinners and the saints; it takes and it takes and it takes, and we keep living anyway. We rise and we fall, and we break, and we make our mistakes. And if there's a reason I'm still alive when everyone who loves me has died, I'm willing to wait for it. (Wait for it.) I'm willing to wait for it. I am the one thing in life I can control. (Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it!) I am inimitable, I am an original! I'm not falling behind or running late. (Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.) I'm not standing still, I am lying in wait.” - Wait For It, Hamilton
“Do you ever get the feeling something is wrong?” Darius asked. “And you just can’t shake it?”
His friends, all unfortunately busy sorting through piles of bones, paused.
Alador raised his hand like he was in class and said, “I have depression.”
“I have anxiety,” Lilith added. “So, yes. Always.”
“Does stage fright count?” Raine asked.
“Not like that,” Darius sighed. “I just…I don’t know. I keep feeling like I need to check on the kids.” Well, specifically he felt the need to check on Hunter and they all knew damn well that he meant Hunter, not the kids as a group.
“Your dad instincts are tingling,” Eda said with a smirk.
“I’m not a-”
“Oh shut up, you’re his dad.”
“Dad,” Eber growled in agreement. He signed it too, as if to make sure he got his point across.
Darius resisted the old urge to kick him.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said to the group at large. “The kids are going to be at the Owl House all day, so why am I so worried?”
“Probably because this is one of the shittiest situations we’ve ever been in,” Eda said, hand (and hook) on her hips. “And the kid’s a mess right now. We all are. Frankly, Dari, I’d be freaked out if you weren’t worrying.”
“They’ll all be fine,” Perry said with his usual reassuring smile. “You know they won’t be going anywhere. And if anything did happen, Hooty would put the place on lock-down.”
Darius did not relish the idea of entrusting Hunter’s safety to Hooty. That owl (tube?) was simply too much to handle.
He didn’t dare say so in front of Lilith. She was already looking defensive.
“I suppose,” Darius sighed. All the same, he fully intended to call Hunter once they took a break.
Then Eda’s scroll buzzed. She opened it and her eyes widened.
“Ah, farts,” she said.
“What?” Darius demanded. Ah, there was that lovely anxiety, screaming that SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH HUNTER.
Eda looked around at them all and winced. “So, the kids have gone to the Human Realm.” She weakly waved her scroll at them with a poor attempt at her usual grin. “Y’see…Hunter might have found the Grimwalker journal?”
Eberwolf loudly and colourfully swore. Raine let out a horrified groan.
Darius took a deep breath in and out. Then another. He closed his eyes and briefly prayed for strength.
Nope, no good. The panic was swelling, every instinct screamed at him to march into the Human Realm and check on his kid. (Yes, Camila was Hunter’s mom. Hunter was undeniably her child. Darius was not his dad. Hunter was still his kid. Do keep up.)
“He. What?” Darius asked through gritted teeth. Eda had the good sense to step back.
“Darius…” Raine was eyeing him warily.
Darius exploded.
“DID YOU JUST HAVE THAT THING LYING AROUND? ARE YOU BOTH UTTER IMBECILES?”
A distant part of him was aware that every volunteer in the skull was staring. He didn’t give a damn. Mostly he just wanted to keep yelling until this utter panic left him.
“Why don’t we go outside?” Lilith asked frantically, steering Darius towards the stairs. “I think going outside would be a lovely idea!”
“You’re right,” Darius said. “There’s more space to yell up there.”
The Grimwalker journal! Of all things for Hunter to find, it just had to be the Grimwalker journal, written in Belos’s own hand. Titan help them, that journal described all their deaths. Darius had only looked at the journal once, skipping right to the notes on Creed and Hunter.
Once was more than enough. The cold, dismissive way Belos described Hunter, the way Belos denied all responsibility for Creed’s murder, blaming his actions on Creed himself, made Darius sick.
“We should have ripped that damn thing up,” Darius hissed as he stormed up the endless staircase to the surface.
“We can’t,” Lilith said regretfully. “Not yet.”
He knew she was right. That didn’t make it easier.
He glared over his shoulder at Eda and Raine. “He’d better be okay,” he snarled, pointing at them. “Or you’ll have me to answer to.”
“If he’s not okay,” Raine said. “I’ll never forgive myself.” To their credit, they looked Darius in the eye; their tone was matter-of-fact.
I’ll never forgive myself.
Darius knew the feeling.
Eda eventually got hold of Camila; she was on her way home and invited them all over.
Honestly, ridiculous as it may have been, Darius was grateful for the invitation, the approval to go to her home. He would have felt wrong just barging in, even if it was to check on Hunter and his friends. Besides, if they were all going to swarm in, he was sure that (at the very least) the Noceda kids would feel better with their mom there.
Upon arriving at the Owl House, Darius had continued his rant. (Lilith called it a lecture. Darius told her to shut up.) Eda and Raine had, to be fair, allowed it. Raine nodded along as Darius shouted and Eda waited it out with surprising patience.
“I should have put it away,” Eda said when Darius took a break to catch his breath. “That’s on me. I left it out on the desk, I…” She sighed heavily, rubbing her forehead. “Well shit. I completely forgot about it.”
They’d all been baffled when Raine went upstairs and found the journal on the floor.
“Didn’t Luz say that Hunter took it?” they asked.
“Maybe they put it back on their way through the portal?” Perry suggested. Raine shrugged, eyebrows pinched, and went back upstairs to hide the journal. When they were done, they came back downstairs. They didn’t say where they hid it and no one asked.
“So…Human Realm?” Eda asked.
Darius had seen pictures of the Human Realm, courtesy of Hunter, Eda and Luz. But this was his first time seeing it in person and, even in such dreadful circumstances, he had to do a double-take when he walked through the portal door.
The grass and trees were green. The sky was blue. There were no giant bones sticking out of the ground.
It was one thing to see photos. It was another thing entirely to see it in person.
Eber sniffled, looking around warily. “The air smells different,” he said. “Sort of…Cooler.” He made a confused little noise and climbed onto Darius’s shoulders. Birds chirped in the trees; some looked familiar, but others were so oddly plain. No flowers snapped at them as they passed.
A butterfly (lacking a gargantuan head and glitter) fluttered past. Alador immediately turned to watch it with a happy gasp. He only managed two steps in its direction before Lilith grabbed him by the arm.
“No,” she said tiredly. “We don’t need a repeat of our school trip to the castle.”
“I wasn’t lost for that long,” Alador grumbled.
“You were missing for six hours,” Perry pointed out.
Despite himself, Darius smiled. He remembered that trip well; poor Bump nearly had a heart-attack between Alador vanishing and Eda’s usual antics, now backed-up by Raine’s own brand of chaos. Indeed, one minute Alador was there and the next minute he was gone. As the hours passed, everyone's panic grew. Perry paced back and forth, certain that Alador had gotten himself thrown in the dungeons. (Even Odalia had been worried, back when things were easier, way back then before everything went wrong.)
Belos himself had found Alador, closely examining a pair of rare butterflies in the castle gardens. Darius remembered how Belos had chuckled, sounding so warm and amused, as he gently steered Alador towards a totally frantic Bump.
“Children,” the Emperor had said. “They have an insatiable need to explore.”
He’d sounded so friendly, so very kind. Darius remembered how awed he’d been to be in the Emperor’s presence. The Emperor himself had helped search for his best friend! How insane was that? Emperor Belos walked Alador back to their group and, according to Alador, told him some facts about the butterflies he’d found.
Even Eda, always a rebel, had been amazed.
“Ah,” Belos had said, catching sight of Eda and Lilith. “You must be the Clawthorne sisters.”
Lilith had squeaked, falling into a deep bow. Eda saluted Belos with her usual grin, winking at him like they were old friends.
“I expect great things from you all,” Belos said to their class at large. They’d all bowed as he left. Bump leaned against the wall, weak-kneed with relief that everything had worked out.
At the time, Darius had been amazed. Simply amazed. Full of hero worship.
Now, he wondered if Belos considered killing any of them, even then. Had he wanted to hurt Alador for being somewhere he shouldn’t? Had he caught wind of Eda’s rebellious nature and immediately pegged her as a danger? Had he looked at Darius, Perry, Raine, at any of their classmates, and thought about petrifying them?
Creed hadn’t been the Golden Guard yet; he wouldn’t be assigned the position for another three years. But he would have been in the castle. Darius wondered what he’d been up to that day. Had he heard about the missing Hexside student? Had he helped look for Alador? Perhaps he’d been out on a mission, not in the castle at all.
Darius wished he could ask. Oh Titan, he wished he could ask Creed if he remembered that day.
The Human Realm was odd. Charming, but odd. He eyed the odd contraptions (Cars, Hunter said they were called cars) in front of so many houses, but they didn’t move. (Hunter told him they couldn’t move on their own; they had to be “turned on,” and then someone had to drive them.) The houses weren’t too different from the ones in the Boiling Isles, though many of them were so…Plain. No bright colours or stained-glass windows.
He still couldn’t get over the green grass. That had to be the weirdest thing about this place. Why was it green?
It wasn’t a long walk to Camila’s house, but with so many new sights, it felt long. Alador wasn’t the only one getting distracted; Eberwolf kept sniffing everything, commenting on the different smells and sounds that only he could pick up on. Perry stared at the bright blue sky and wondered aloud what kind of weather humans had.
“Get this,” Eda said. “They don’t have gorenadoes or painbows. They have things called tornadoes and rainbows.”
Perry shook his head, looking lost. “How strange,” he said.
Did Darius even want to know what a tornado was? Probably not. And rainbows just sounded made up.
They approached the Noceda house (a neat little building with yet another car in front of it, and a simple but quite pretty garden) and Eda knocked. Only a moment later, Camila answered the door. She looked tired.
“Ah, there you are,” she said with a smile. “Come in, come in. Vamos.”
Darius could smell flowers and old cooking, and could hear the kids’ voices drifting up from the basement. Sitting at the kitchen table, looking utterly exhausted, was Hunter.
He took one look at them and winced. “Ah, crap,” he muttered. He immediately blushed and frantically began to apologise. “I don’t mean that in a bad way! I just mean- oh crap. Um. Hi? This is embarrassing.” He stood up, hurrying towards the kitchen doorway. “I’m going downstairs.”
Darius hugged him. Usually, he hugged Hunter with plenty of warning and he was pretty careful about it. This time, he didn’t even think; he just pulled the kid into his arms and held on tight.
He fully expected Hunter to flinch or push away. He didn’t. Instead, Hunter clung to him just as tightly.
“Are you okay?” Darius asked quietly, barely above a whisper; there was no way for the others (except Eber) to hear.
“No,” Hunter whispered back.
Darius had expected that answer, but it still broke his heart. How was he meant to fix this? How was he meant to make this better?
Short of travelling forward in time so that the Golden Guards’ funeral was done with, he couldn’t see a way to make things easier. And, as far as he knew, travelling forward in time was impossible. Time pools only went backwards.
“You’re going to be okay,” Darius promised him, because it was the only thing he could think to say. Hunter would be okay. No matter what, Darius would make sure of it this time.
Hunter looked doubtful, but he nodded. Without another word, he went downstairs to his friends and sisters.
Darius watched him go with an ache in his chest.
When Darius looked at Camila, she was watching Hunter leave too, her hands over her heart.
“How is he?” Perry asked gently.
Camila sighed. “Well, he’s agreed to therapy,” she said and something in Darius’s chest loosened. Therapy. Good. That was good. “I just…Do any of you know a therapist in the Boiling Isles?”
Darius did not. However, he could easily get a list.
Surprisingly, Lilith spoke up.
“Actually,” she said. “I do. Steve recommended him to me. I only had a few sessions before the Day of Unity, but he was a tremendous help.” Her smile was shy, awkward. “I can give you his number? Or I could take you to his office when you have a free day?”
“Oh, yes please, Lilith,” Camila said. “That would be a big help.” She leaned against the counter, already looking less tense.
“And the other kids?” Eda asked. “Did they say anything?”
“Willow explained to Collector what a therapist is,” Camila said. “He seemed to understand. Gus said he thinks therapy is a good idea for everyone.”
“Agreed,” Perry said. No doubt he'd be asking Lilith for that therapist's number too.
“I think Amity will want to talk to you about it,” Camila told Alador. Alador nodded, expression resolute. “As for King, I think he just wants to hug everyone until they feel better.”
“That sounds like King,” Eda said with a fond smile.
“And Luz…Ay, she won’t say much. But she seems…” Camila waved her hand uncertainly, searching for the right words. “Before, she was sad. Now she’s quiet again, but it’s different. And she won’t take her eyes off Hunter.”
“I can try and talk to her too?” Eda offered. Camila nodded, squeezing Eda’s shoulder.
“Well, I won’t leave everyone standing around,” Camila said, clapping her hands together. “Would anyone like pizza?”
“What’s pizza?” Alador asked.
Camila paused, tilting her head. Slowly, she started to smile. “Oh, I think you’ll like it,” she said. “Anyone have any allergies I should know about?”
They all shook their heads. Camila picked up her phone and ordered many of these ‘pizzas.’
Eda was smirking, rubbing her hands together in glee. That did not reassure Darius in the least.
As it turned out, pizza was delicious. Humans certainly were inventive with their food. It was no griffin steak, but it was good.
Eberwolf devoured his slices with gusto. He signed to Camila, “Delicious!” Darius translated and Camila beamed.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I’m glad you like it. The kids became obsessed when they first tried it.”
“I can see why,” Perry said. He ate with much more sophistication than Eber (not that the bar was high on that front) and looked at the boxes the pizzas came from with endless curiosity.
Eda poured ketchup (not tomato blood) all over her slices, as well as extra cheese. She was nearly as messy as Eber.
Camila chewed slowly, looking thoughtful. She sipped at her water and quietly asked, “And how is the excavation going?”
“It’s…Going,” Lilith said. She poked at one of the little peppers on her pizza. “It’s slow but steady progress. We’ve even managed to identify a few Grimwalkers; of course, we can’t be completely certain with many of them, but a few were surprisingly easy to identify.”
The child Alador found was named Winter. Darius promised to never forget that.
They still hadn’t found Creed, but Darius wouldn’t rest until they did.
“We still need a name for the Grimwalker we found in the lab,” Raine said quietly. Darius tried not to shudder. That was a sight he wouldn’t forget any time soon. A rotten corpse, too similar in appearance to Hunter…
He shook his head, trying to banish the image from his mind. It was easier said than done.
“A name,” Camila repeated softly, sadly. She stared at the table; her determined frown was exactly like Luz’s. “I think I can help with that,” she said, looking up, a steely glint in her eyes. “I still have my old books of baby names. We’re sure to find a good one for him.”
It was plain to see where Luz got her big heart from.
They still had so many skeletons to remove from that dreadful pit. Most of the ones that had been taken away still needed to be identified; the team of witches and demons working on it was confident they could at least identify most of them. They could use the ages of the bones and Belos’s notes to try and narrow it down. A few of them even had identifying features, such as changes in uniform, obvious causes of death, or little trinkets they’d hidden in their clothes. (Like poor Winter with his bunny toy.) But there were still so many to go. They still needed a name for the Grimwalker in the lab. They needed to find Creed. They needed to try and find where Caleb Wittebane belonged.
There was so much to do. It seemed like their work never ended.
But they could do it. They would. They would fix this massive wrong, this sin committed by Belos over and over. They would give the Golden Guards the burial they deserved.
They would ensure the children never entered the skull again.
They couldn’t undo what had been done, but they could make sure it never happened again.
Darius had not saved Creed when he needed saving. He had not saved Hunter; his friends had. Flapjack had. Hunter had even saved himself.
Darius would save them this time.