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He was dead. He was fucking dead.
Edgar stared at the limp form of Poe, his first constant companion, and felt nothing. Sure, he'd felt grief at first, then anger towards this beast that had caused Poe's death, and then finally, numbness.
The numbness was worse than the grief. At least grief meant he was still in there somewhere.
Poe's feathers were matted now, that glossy black dulled to something flat and wrong. Three years of that stupid bird stealing food off his plate and screaming at inconvenient hours and flying directly into the faces of people Edgar was trying to make a good impression on. Three years of Poe, no and Poe, stop and Poe, I swear to every god that's ever existed...
And then, finally, recently, haltingly: Poe. Hey. Good boy.
They'd been figuring it out. That was the thing. They had been, slowly and stubbornly and on both sides with considerable reluctance, actually figuring it out. Poe had started coming back when Edgar called. Edgar had started talking to him, actually talking, in the quiet hours when there was nothing else to do. It had felt, for the first time in three years of involuntary corvid companionship, like something that might become something.
And now the wing was just wrong. Bent the way wings weren't supposed to bend. Edgar had smoothed it back into place and it had just fallen again and he'd smoothed it back again, gently, the way he'd been too annoyed to be gentle for most of three years, the way he would have been gentle if he'd known...
He stood up.
The beast was still there. Still breathing. Still existing in the same world that Poe was no longer in, and something about that math didn't work, something about that equation was so fundamentally broken that Edgar felt the wrongness of it like a tooth about to come out, that pressure, that inevitability.
Twelve years old. He was twelve years old and he'd just finally, finally gotten it right, and it hadn't been enough, and there was a creature standing twenty feet away that was the reason why.
His lip wasn't trembling anymore.
"Okay," Edgar said quietly. To himself, maybe. To Poe. To the version of himself that had spent three years being irritated instead of paying attention, that had wasted three years not understanding what he had, that had only just figured it out in time to lose it.
He picked up the nearest thing that could be used as a weapon.
He stopped calculating odds.
—
The creature was not having a good day either, for what it was worth.
It had started the fight confidently enough, that was its nature, its particular brand of horrible. It watched, it learned, it became. It had tasted Kevin's gift first, which had been confusing and sonically unpleasant, a sudden involuntary blare of brass section that it was still processing. Then Roland's, that strange resonant frequency of something divine and borrowed humming under the surface. Then Monty's, the half-formed thing, the wolf that lived just under the skin and hadn't fully decided when it wanted to come out.
One by one it had collected them and turned their own edges back against them, and it had been winning, in the slow grinding way that things like it always won.
And then the crow had gotten in the way.
Now it had a problem it hadn't anticipated, which was a twelve-year-old boy, tall, thin, all elbows and sharp angles, the kind of kid that looked like he'd been assembled in a hurry, with absolutely nothing behind his eyes.
Kevin saw Edgar move and his stomach dropped. "Edgar, Edgar, wait..."
Kevin Creeley was a lot of things. Short for his age, freckled from hairline to collar, ginger in the specific way that suggested his ancestors had been trouble and he'd inherited the disposition along with the complexion. He was the kind of kid who broke things by accident and then felt genuinely terrible about it. He'd been fighting carefully all this fight, measuring his strength against the creature's borrowed version of it, trying to out-think rather than out-hit.
He threw all of that out the window and lunged for Edgar's arm.
Missed by four inches.
Edgar was already through the gap, moving with the particular horrible momentum of someone who had stopped doing the survival math entirely.
"Oh, that's bad," said Monty, appearing at Kevin's left shoulder with no clear explanation of how he'd gotten there. Montague Finch was compact and shaved-headed and had a face that suggested he was always three seconds away from solving a problem nobody else had noticed yet. He watched Edgar close the distance with the creature and his expression did something complicated. "That's really, genuinely bad, Kev."
"I know it's bad..."
"He's going to get himself..."
"I know..."
"Do something..."
"I'm trying..."
"Would both of you," said Roland Thudburry, from somewhere behind them, in the particular flat tone he used when the voice in his head had just said something useful, "shut up and flank it."
Roland was short. He was round. He had the kind of face that people looked at and thought immediately that he seemed sensible, which was accurate, and that he probably wasn't dangerous, which was very much not. He had a blade in his hand and his eyes had gone to that particular focused distance that meant he was listening to something none of the rest of them could hear.
"It can't copy all of us at once," Roland said, with the calm of a person relaying instructions from a higher authority. "It's distracted. Now."
The creature hesitated.
That was the interesting thing. It looked at Edgar coming at it and it searched for something to steal, something to copy and weaponize, and what it found was nothing it had a category for. Not a power. Not a gift. Just a boy running on pure undiluted grief with a specific flavor to it that made the creature, on some instinctive level, take a half step back.
Because it wasn't just grief. It was the grief that comes specifically from almost. From being right there, right at the edge of the thing you'd been working toward, and having it taken at the exact worst moment. That kind of grief had a particular sharpness to it that generic grief didn't. Generic grief was weight. This was an edge.
The creature didn't have a category for it.
Edgar didn't give it time to develop one.
He wasn't a big kid in the way that counted in a fight. He was tall but thin, all that height distributed across a frame that hadn't caught up with itself yet. He had no weight to put behind anything. What he had was the complete and total absence of self-preservation, which in a fight was worth considerably more than weight, and layered underneath that, underneath the feral, the gone, the nothing-left-to-lose, was something even more dangerous.
Guilt.
The particular guilt of someone who had been difficult and stubborn and slow, who had taken too long to meet something halfway, who had been finally getting there and now would never get to finish getting there. That guilt had nowhere to go except forward. It didn't have an off switch. It couldn't be reasoned with or redirected or copied by something that had never made the mistake of not appreciating what it had until it was gone.
Kevin moved left. Roland moved right. Monty did the thing that Monty did, appearing briefly from an angle that didn't make geographical sense, doing something fast and targeted at what Roland's voice had apparently identified as a weak point, and then was simply elsewhere again before the creature could process the input.
The creature staggered.
It wasn't enough. They all knew it wasn't enough. But it was enough to make it defensive for the first time, enough to put it reacting instead of acting, and in the space that opened up Kevin finally got around behind Edgar.
He locked his arms around Edgar's chest and held on.
Edgar thrashed like something that had forgotten it was a person. Kevin was strong, stronger than most things he encountered, but Edgar was all sharp points and no regard for his own joints and that made him unpredictable in a way that strength didn't account for. He was also, Kevin realized with a specific jolt of alarm, making a sound. Low and continuous. Not quite a word. Not quite anything recognizable. The kind of sound you'd make if language had simply stopped being a tool you had access to.
Then Edgar's teeth found Kevin's forearm and Kevin swore, loudly, which startled a short involuntary burst of trombone out of him, which startled everyone including the creature.
He held on anyway.
"Edgar." Close to his ear. Kevin tried for steady and mostly got there. "Edgar. I've got you. Okay? I've got you. Stop..."
A pause. The thrashing didn't stop but it changed quality slightly, like something underneath it had heard.
"Stop. I've got you."
Something cracked.
Edgar went limp. All at once, completely, like a marionette with cut strings, all that furious terrible momentum simply gone. Kevin adjusted his grip fast and took the weight and did not let him fall, because letting him fall was not something he was going to do.
The shaking started then. Or maybe it had been there the whole time and Kevin only noticed it now that everything else had stopped.
Edgar looked at his hands. Bleeding from three places he couldn't account for, dirt under every nail, knuckles scraped raw against something he couldn't remember hitting. He looked at them with the blank bewilderment of someone returning from somewhere very far away who wasn't sure yet what they'd done while they were gone.
Monty had drifted back. He folded himself down next to Poe without ceremony, without preamble, and sat there. He looked at the crow for a long moment. Then he said, quietly, to nobody in particular:
"He was getting really good, you know. At listening."
It was exactly the wrong thing to say and exactly the right thing to say and Kevin wanted to tell him to shut up and couldn't.
Because Edgar made a sound at that. Small and broken and awful. The sound of someone who had just heard the true shape of the thing they'd lost named out loud for the first time.
Getting good at listening.
Three years of chaos and stolen food and screaming at the worst possible moment. Three years of Poe, no and Poe, stop and why did I get the difficult one, why couldn't I have gotten a companion that just...
And then, finally, last week: Poe landing on his shoulder and staying. Just staying. Not because he had to. Because he'd decided to. The specific weight of a crow that had made a choice.
Edgar had been so careful about it. Like it was something that might spook. Like getting excited would ruin it.
He hadn't ruined it. He'd been patient and it had been working and...
Roland still hadn't moved from his position between them and the creature. But his free hand had dropped to his side, and his fingers opened slowly, and then closed again. He was listening. Whatever his god was telling him right now, it wasn't move, it wasn't finish it.
It was something else. Something that kept him standing exactly where he was, facing away, giving Edgar the only privacy available in a clearing with no walls.
The creature stood at the far end of that clearing and did not advance.
Maybe it was regrouping. Maybe it was waiting. Maybe, on some level that creatures like it weren't supposed to have, it understood that the thing happening right now was outside of its jurisdiction.
Kevin held on. The ground was cold. Monty sat next to Poe with his elbows on his knees and didn't say anything else, which was its own kind of gift.
Edgar cried. Not loudly, not dramatically, just thoroughly, the way that someone cries when the grief is too specific for performance, when it's about one particular wing smoothed back into place and one particular low chuckling croak that he was never going to hear again and three years of almost that he would spend a long time thinking about in the dark.
Getting good at listening.
He'd been getting good at listening too.
He just hadn't known that was the thing he was supposed to say.
The creature died badly, which was the least it could do.
It took all four of them, and it took longer than it should have, and nobody felt good about it afterward. That was the thing about fights that had grief in them, even when you won, you came out the other side feeling scraped hollow, like the victory had been paid for in a currency you didn't have enough of to begin with.
Kevin had a bruise forming across his forearm in the rough shape of a twelve-year-old's bite radius. He didn't mention this. He would continue to not mention this for the foreseeable future.
Monty had nearly shifted halfway through, the wolf coming up fast and unbidden at a moment of high stress, shoulders going wrong under his jacket, teeth suddenly too many and too sharp before he'd dragged it back down through sheer stubborn concentration. He stood now with his hands on his knees, breathing carefully, counting something under his breath that wasn't numbers. His jacket had a seam split at the left shoulder.
Roland had a cut above his eyebrow that was bleeding in the cheerful indiscriminate way that head wounds did, making it look considerably worse than it was. He was pressing his sleeve to it with the resigned expression of someone whose god had warned him this was going to happen and who had not adequately adjusted his footwork in time to prevent it.
"I told you to step left," said the voice, presumably.
Roland did not dignify this with a response.
And Edgar...
Edgar was sitting in the dirt next to Poe.
He hadn't moved from that spot since Kevin had set him down. He'd fought through the rest of the battle on a kind of autopilot that had been effective enough that nobody had questioned it in the moment, following Roland's directions and Monty's positioning and the general shape of a plan that Roland's god had apparently had strong opinions about. He'd done what needed doing. And then when it was over he'd walked back to the spot and sat down and that was where he still was.
Nobody rushed him.
Kevin sat down nearby. Not right next to him, close enough to be present, far enough to not be pressure. He pulled his knees up to his chest and looked at the middle distance and tried to think of something to say and correctly identified that there was nothing to say and stayed quiet, which was genuinely difficult for Kevin and therefore the nicest thing he could offer.
Roland came and stood a little ways off, which was how Roland occupied space when he was being considerate, upright, watchful, taking up his corner of the situation without demanding anything from it. He'd stopped pressing his sleeve to his forehead. The cut had mostly stopped and the blood had dried into something that would concern anyone who saw him later and that Roland would have to explain multiple times.
Monty sat back down next to Poe.
He'd been sitting next to Poe, on and off, for the whole aftermath. Not making a thing of it. Just present, in that spot, in the particular way that Monty was present when he thought something mattered.
He had a leaf in his hand that he'd picked up from somewhere. He didn't seem to know he had it. He was turning it over and over between his fingers without looking at it, looking at Poe instead, with an expression that was doing several things at once.
The clearing settled into the specific silence that follows a fight. The kind that has texture to it. The kind you can hear.
After a while, Edgar said: "He bit me last Tuesday."
His voice came out rough and strange, like something that had been left out in the rain.
Nobody said anything. Nobody moved. The way you stay still when a bird lands near you.
"I'd just..." Edgar stopped. Tried again. "I'd given him a piece of bread. Like I'd been doing. And he took it and then he bit me anyway. Just because." A pause. "I was so angry at him."
Kevin looked at the dirt between his knees.
"And then yesterday he sat on my shoulder for an hour. Just. Stayed there." Edgar's voice did something unsteady and recovered. "Didn't steal anything. Didn't scream. Just sat there. I didn't move the whole time because I didn't want to..."
He stopped.
The leaf turned over in Monty's fingers. Over and over.
"I didn't want to spook him," Edgar finished, very quietly.
Roland's jaw worked. He looked up at the sky, briefly, with the expression he sometimes got when his god was saying something he wished it hadn't.
"What," Edgar said flatly, noticing. Because Edgar always noticed things, even now, even like this. Maybe especially like this.
Roland hesitated. That was unusual enough that it made Kevin look up.
"He says," Roland started, then stopped. Chose his words with visible care. "He says the crow knew. What you were doing. He says animals know when someone is trying."
The clearing was very quiet.
"That's not..." Edgar's voice cracked. He pressed his mouth together. "That doesn't..."
"I know," Roland said. "I know it doesn't fix it."
"Then why say it."
Roland was quiet for a moment. "Because it's true. And you deserve to know it's true."
Edgar looked at Poe. His expression was terrible in the specific way that relief and grief look identical when they arrive at the same time, when you're given something you needed and it hurts just as much as not having it.
He reached out and touched Poe's feathers. That ruined glossy black. The wing that kept falling wrong.
"He was so annoying," Edgar said, and his voice broke completely on the last word, and he didn't try to stop it this time.
Kevin moved closer. Not saying anything. Just closing the distance until his shoulder was against Edgar's shoulder, solid and warm and present, and Edgar didn't pull away which was probably the most vulnerable thing Edgar Allen had ever done in any of their collective memory.
Monty set the leaf down carefully next to Poe. Like a small deliberate thing. Like it meant something that he hadn't decided the meaning of yet.
Roland sat down, finally, folding his short round self into the dirt with the air of a person whose god had told him to stop standing at attention and just be here, and who had, after a brief internal argument, conceded the point.
The four of them sat in the dirt in the cooling afternoon and nobody said anything for a while, and that was okay. That was, maybe, exactly the right thing. Sometimes there isn't a next thing yet. Sometimes the next thing has to wait while the current thing is still happening, and the current thing was Edgar Allen saying goodbye to a crow who had been a disaster and a menace and who had spent his last weeks learning to stay.
After a long time, Monty said: "We should bury him."
Not a question. Not a suggestion. Just a fact, offered gently, the way Monty offered most things.
Edgar didn't say anything for a moment.
Then he nodded.
They buried Poe at the edge of the clearing, where the roots of a big oak made a natural border, because Monty said birds liked high places and this was the closest they could do. Roland said something over the grave in a low voice that wasn't quite a prayer and wasn't quite a conversation and was probably both at once. Kevin, who had been holding himself together with considerable effort since approximately the moment Edgar had started crying, lost the battle briefly and won it back and pretended neither had happened. Monty arranged the small cairn of stones with the focused seriousness he brought to everything that mattered.
Edgar didn't say anything at the grave. He stood there for a long time. His hands were still scraped up, still dirty. He hadn't let anyone clean them yet. Kevin suspected this was going to be a fight for later.
Finally, Edgar crouched down and said something very quietly to the small mound of disturbed earth. Too quietly for any of them to hear.
Whatever it was, it was between him and Poe.
Then he stood up, and he looked at the three of them, and something in his face was different, still raw, still hollowed out, still clearly not okay in a way that wasn't going to resolve quickly. But present. Back behind his eyes in a way he hadn't been for the last hour.
"Okay," Edgar said.
Just that. The same word he'd said before the fight, but entirely different.
Kevin stood up and brushed the dirt off his knees. "Okay," he agreed.
Monty fell into step beside Edgar without being asked, which was very Monty. Roland took the other side, which was very Roland.
Kevin took the back, because somebody needed to watch behind them, and also because Edgar didn't need to see the expression on Kevin's face right now, which was the expression of someone who had watched his friend fall apart and come back together and felt the specific helpless tenderness of that and had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
They walked out of the clearing together.
Behind them, at the edge of the oak roots, a small cairn of stones caught the last of the afternoon light.