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When Edwin started school at St. Hilarion's in 1913, he was determined to read every single book in the library by the time he graduated. It was an easy way to excuse his lack of friends, because who had time for boyish camaraderie when there were books to read? He likes to think he would have made it; he was over halfway through when he died.
Now, the library is bigger; an entire wing was added in the 1970s and it's filled with books that largely didn't even exist in Edwin's day. Only a few weeks out of Hell, Edwin is still coming to terms with everything that has changed since the night he drew his last breath: advances in science and technology, momentous historical events, the countless books published. He thinks he could spend another decade in this library and not be caught up.
But he won't be spending another decade in this library. Soon, the winter holiday will be over and he and Charles will be departing campus before the students and faculty return. Unsurprisingly, Charles doesn’t want to linger here once his killers return from a holiday season spent with their families, when Charles’s own family spent their holiday burying their only son. Edwin cannot blame him, though he admits he finds the idea of venturing outside St. Hilarion’s gates overwhelming. This place is dreadful, but it’s a type of dreadful he knows. He doesn’t know what to expect from the greater world.
So, he reads as much as he can, hoping to glean as many clues as he can about this new world he's found himself in. The library is silent around him as he sits at a table piled with books, his nose buried in a novel called Lord of the Flies. With the campus empty, t here’s no one to be bothered by the growing stack of books in front of Edwin or the novel that will look to any living person like it’s floating in the air, pages flipping of their own accord.
He glances over at the armchair where Charles was sitting earlier and finds it empty. Blinking, he registers that there’s pale morning light coming through the window. Last he looked, the sun was setting. Blast, he’s done it again, read for hours on end without even noticing anything going on around him. He has a vague memory of Charles saying… something, not long ago, but he was paying no attention.
Perhaps he told you he was leaving with Death after all because you’re awful company, Edwin tells himself, stomach seeming to cramp with anxiety. Such sensations seem like they should be impossible for a ghost, but Edwin never was very good at being a living boy. Maybe he’s just as bad at being a ghost. Perhaps Charles has realized that he wasn’t lying about being terrible with people and has decided an uncertain afterlife is better than this.
Edwin should most likely go find Charles and apologize for his rudeness, but he finds he doesn’t want to move. What if Charles really has gone with Death? What if he’s left and Edwin is now alone at this dreadful school again, with no idea what to do next? What if—
“Edwin!” Charles’s head pops through the wall, smiling broadly. “It snowed!”
It’s only the years of training himself not to display untoward emotions—and that was before Hell—that stops Edwin from showing his unabashed relief. “It’s December, Charles. It does that.”
Was that too acerbic? Possibly. Before Edwin can apologize, Charles laughs, like he finds Edwin and his sharp tongue delightful. He has a tendency to do that. No one ever has ever laughed at Edwin like that before Charles, like he’s simply happy to be in Edwin’s presence, without a trace of cruelty. Edwin wonders if one of those rocks those hideous boys threw at Charles hit him in the head and if such injuries ever follow one into death.
“No, it’s proper snow, mate,” Charles says. “Come see!”
Edwin wants to protest that he has reading to do, but he’s been ignoring Charles entirely for the better part of the last day, so he should most likely attempt to show an interest in what he’s been doing. He sets aside Lord of the Flies —he turns down the corner of a page to mark his place, something he never would have done otherwise, but this school killed him and Charles, so it can take its defaced library book—and follows Charles through the wall outside.
It has indeed snowed overnight, and quite a substantial amount too, with a light flurry still falling. Were Edwin a living boy and not a ghost, the snow would nearly be up to his knees. In fact, it’s a rather disorienting feeling to be standing on top of the snow without sinking through it. Edwin feels far too tall. He takes a step and nearly loses his balance, but Charles grabs him by the shoulders to steady him.
“Takes a minute to get used to, doesn’t it?” Charles is still smiling, his grip on Edwin’s shoulders gentle. Edwin should pull away—he never cared much for being touched when he was alive—but there’s something about the electric sensation of contact with another ghost that’s quite pleasant.
Edwin nods, looking down at his feet to remind himself that they’re still there, even though he can’t feel them. “It’s an adjustment.”
Once Charles seems sure Edwin isn’t going to fall face-first into the snow, he takes a step back. Even though he appears solid to Edwin’s eyes, the snowflakes falling from the sky still pass through him on their way to the ground. He tilts back his head, sticking out his tongue, like he can catch one. He looks very young and very alive and something inside Edwin’s chest seems to clench. Charles has scarcely been dead for a week and he still seems to have so much life in him, unlike Edwin, who feels every moment he spent in Hell weighing down on him.
“Isn’t it brills?” Charles spreads his arms out and falls backwards into the snow. “Got the whole campus to ourselves, don’t we?”
St. Hilarion’s campus does look idyllic under the layer of snow, like the picturesque sort of place that parents should send their beloved sons to expand their minds. The building where he and Charles both died sits peacefully with its roof and window sills coated in white. Edwin feels that it should have a palpable air of menace around it, but there’s no sign that a boy froze to death in the attic only a week before or that another boy was sacrificed to a demon many years before that.
Edwin tears his eyes away, glancing back at Charles to find him fanning out his arms and his legs. “Charles, what are you doing?”
“Trying to make a snow angel.” Charles’s face is screwed up in concentration.
“We’re ghosts,” Edwin says, wondering if he’s forgotten.
“Yeah, but I figure if we can pick up a book, we can make a snow angel, yeah?”
“It’s not working, I’m afraid.” Charles is making a great deal of progress on learning how to navigate as a ghost, but he still has frequent slip-ups. To Edwin, it seems that he’s fine when he’s not thinking about it too closely. But when he second guesses himself, he has a tendency to sink through the floors accidentally or walk into a wall that he meant to phase through. Yesterday, he spent a frustrating fifteen minutes trying to pick up a book before Edwin distracted him by reading aloud to him. Only then was he able to successfully handle the book.
Charles sighs, gazing up at the gray sky. He’s still smiling, but there’s something distant in his eyes. “Seems like a waste. Used to love playing in the snow, but hated the cold. But now that I can’t feel the cold, I can’t play in the snow.”
“You didn’t care for the cold?” Edwin asks, at a loss for what else to say, then could kick himself.
“Yeah, even before…” Charles waves his hand, as if to encompass his death. “I’d go outside to build snowmen with the neighborhood kids, but I wouldn’t even make it an hour. I hated the way the cold made my hands feel, you know? All stiff. And my nose would run and my eyes would water. Bloody miserable.”
Edwin thinks of Charles, huddled in a blanket, shivering and miserable. What a beastly way for anyone to die, but especially a boy who didn’t like being cold in the first place. “I never minded the cold. It was the heat I could never stand. I despise sweating.”
Charles’s eyes crinkle as he looks at Edwin. “Can’t imagine you sweating, mate.”
“Luckily for both of us, you’ll never have to.” Edwin sniffs.
Charles giggles and for a moment, Edwin pictures him with cheeks flushed from the December chill, snowflakes caught in his dark curls and lashes. He remembers watching the other boys at St. Hilarion’s roughhousing in the snow back in his day, trampling across the pristine sheet of white as they hurled snowballs at each other. He’d never been even remotely tempted to join in—Simon and his friends didn’t need any more excuses to throw things at him—but he can clearly imagine Charles among their ranks.
As Charles looks back up at the sky, Edwin bends and picks up a fistful of snow, lobbing it at Charles. It isn’t much of a throw, as athletics have never been a strong suit, but it flies right through Charles’s chest, hitting the ground below him. Charles turns to look at him with wide eyes, and for a moment, Edwin thinks that he’s judged this situation wrong and has managed to mortally offend Charles. He’s opening his mouth to apologize when Charles’s lips stretch into a grin and he lets out a whoop, leaping to his feet.
Charles doesn’t hesitate as he gathers up a fistful of snow, tossing it at Edwin. But Edwin grew very good at dodging in Hell and avoids it with an easy sidestep. Instead of looking frustrated, Charles just laughs delightedly as he scoops up another snowball. They carry on like for several moments, giggling as they scramble through the snow, tossing snowballs at each other. The snowballs don’t actually make contact, passing right through each other harmlessly, but Edwin prefers it that way. He doesn’t think he could throw something at Charles that would actually land.
As Edwin hurls another snowball, Charles steps backwards, vanishing through the wall into the library. The snowball hits the brick wall right behind where Charles’s head just was.
“Charles!” Edwin plants his hands on his hips, perturbed. “That is extremely unsportsmanlike!”
He receives no response.
With a huff, Edwin begins striding towards the library. He’s two steps away from the wall when there’s a rustle above him. He glances up just as a sheet of snow falls from the library roof, directly onto his head. When the snow has passed through him to the ground and he can see again, he sees Charles, perched on the edge of the library roof and grinning mischievously.
“Think that means I won, mate,” Charles calls.
“By what criteria?” Edwin demands.
“The criteria that I just dropped a shit ton of snow on you.”
Edwin opens his mouth to argue, then begins to laugh. He laughs like he hasn’t since before he died, or perhaps ever. He never would have wanted to draw attention to himself by being so loud, not at St. Hilarion's and certainly not in Hell. Charles is laughing too as he leaps down from the roof of the library, landing gracefully on his feet next to Edwin. Charles’s laugh is as bright as his smile and after all that time where the only laughter Edwin ever heard was his captor’s cruel, child-like giggling, he’s so glad he gets to hear it.
This time, when Charles falls backwards into the snow and fans out his arms and legs, the snow moves with him.
“You just needed to stop thinking about it,” Edwin says, unable to stop smiling.
“Easy for you to say, mate. One of these days I’m going to stop concentrating on not sinking through the ground and end up right to the center of the earth.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“But you don’t know it’s impossible.”
“Charles, I will not let you sink to the center of the earth.”
Charles turns to grin at him. “Know you won’t, mate. Now you try.”
Edwin does not see what the point of making a snow angel is, but he finds himself unwilling to say no to Charles when he’s smiling like that. So he settles down on the ground and copies Charles’s movements. He cannot feel the cold, damp snow shift under him, but he can tell from Charles’s cheer that it’s working.
When Charles clambers to his feet and helps Edwin up, they look down at two snow angels, side by side. Edwin’s is smaller than Charles’s, as his movements were a bit more contained, and Charles’s is a bit lopsided, but in Edwin’s opinion, they’re very fine snow angels.
Charles bumps Edwin’s shoulder with his own. “Hey, look, we managed it, didn’t we?”
Edwin bumps him back. It’s easier than he thought it would be to touch Charles Rowland. “That we did.”
***
When they leave St. Hilarion’s, the snow angels outside of the library remain. Edwin knows that no one will think anything of a pair of snow angels. They’ll vanish when the snow melts, or when more snow falls, or when a group of living school boys trample over them carelessly on the way to class. Still, it almost feels like a shout of defiance, leaving them behind in this place that took so much from both him and Charles. It feels like sending a message.
They were here. They left a mark. And, perhaps most importantly, they were together.
***