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Nox felt on edge at first, despite being on the top floor of a locked home that was almost never devoid of good people—easily hidden away even if Ex Libris figured out where they were, and those chances were very slim. He knew they were as safe as they could be—both him and the other keys.
And Chase had this protectiveness over the people he cared about. It wasn't always shown outwardly, but Nox could see it in the careful way he lifted any of the keys off of the ground when he needed to. Or in the way he complained about Prunella's presence, but still guided her across the road when she walked home. Or in the way he watched over the other keys with the care of a parent and the fondness of a sibling, content to let them enjoy the sun but never quite letting his mind wander too far from making sure they were also safe.
Or in the way Chase's shoulders and jaw and face had been tense with focus and worry the entire way home with Nox on the first night—watchful and observant and anxiety-ridden—but how that tension was never once present in the gentle way he handled Nox while they ran.
Nox reminded himself of that often. All of it, which he had observed over the first few days since he had been in Chase's home, and even before while in books. He reminded himself of the fact that they were safe. That he was safe. That if anything were to make them unsafe, that protectiveness would show itself outwardly and abundantly, and Nox had no doubts about it. It was a mantra in his head—around and around—and it did help his shoulders to relax, but it wasn't so easy to soothe the habit of looking over them. The urge to duck out of sight at the sound of footsteps. The way he woke with his fists clenched. He still found himself padding along the carpet as quietly as possible, and flinching at the sound of Goldie's heavy footsteps as he ran to greet Prunella.
He knew that he was safe, but instinct is hard to unlearn and he remained highly observant of his surroundings.Far more than he needed to, he would easily admit. He spent a lot of time on the floor in the attic, or in Chase's room, and had unconsciously started mapping the places he could fit behind. The places where the floor creaked once enough weight pressed against it. He knew what parts of the room were in the shadows at different times of the day. He knew what time Prunella usually arrived. He felt an anxious knot in his stomach every time Bronze climbed into the windowsill to lounge or Silver to water her flowers.
Nox was in the tower while Chase had to do chores elsewhere in the house and he caught himself doing it again. There might be enough space beneath the desk drawers for us to fit underneath. It was frustrating. It wasn't a lack of trust—just habit; instinct— but he felt the guilt of a lack of trust. He stared at the space beneath the desk, mulling over if it was actually high enough from the floor and trying to bat the thoughts away altogether. After a losing battle—and to satiate the worrying part of him—he wandered toward the desk to see if his observation was correct. Nox had no plan to crawl beneath a desk, then or any time soon, but he needed to look at it anyway. He tried to let his footsteps make noise as he walked—tapping faintly against the floor.
Nox reached the desk and leaned down just enough to look. Sure enough—as he expected—there was plenty of space between the floor and the bottom of the desk, and he could see all the way to the wall behind it. The desk was just far enough from the wall that some light from the windows was able to squeeze behind it and a small, bright blue smudge stood out against the pale wall. It didn't register in his mind until he had stood back up. Nox furrowed his brow and steadied himself with a hand against the desk as he bent back down to look.
As his eyeline dropped below the desk, he squinted toward smudge. It appeared to be on the wall itself—and near one edge of the desk—but he could only see part of it from where he stood. Nox straightened his posture again and turned on his heel. Tap, tap, tap. The sound felt wrong to make, and he reminded himself again that it wasn't as he walked back around the desk. He couldn’t fit into the space between the desk and the wall, but there was enough room for him to peek into the gap. He pressed his head against the wall and caught sight of the smudge in full.
He quickly realized, however, that it wasn't a smudge at all. Simply smudged. It was only far enough behind the desk to be just past his reach and he could clearly see that the texture looked like…crayon? Faded and smudged with small scratch marks running across it, as if an attempt to clean it off had been made and abandoned long ago, with the desk as a means of hiding it instead. The lines were crude and shaky, but Nox could make music notes and a stick figure that seemed to be singing—its mouth a wide circle. A quiet chuckle escaped Nox’s mouth at the clunky C.E.H. written beneath it all.
(It abruptly occurred to him that he didn't know Chase's middle name. He wasn't surprised by that, but the thought had never crossed his mind until that moment. He wondered if Chase would tell him if he asked later.)
The drawing was definitely from a long time ago and Nox tried to imagine a version of the room without the desk there—replaced by a little Chase hunched over on the floor in front of a handful of crayons as he doodled his dreams on the wall. He had seen a family photo somewhere downstairs with Chase as a child—only at a glance and in passing—and suddenly he had the urge to ask for a closer look at it. Or to see another photo or two, if Chase would show him. He hummed at the thought. Nox stepped back from the wall with a fond smile on his face. He wondered if Chase had been too young to know he shouldn't draw on the wall, or if he was just old enough to think he was sneaky enough to get away with it.
By the smudging and scuff marks of that old attempt to wipe it away, Chase certainly had not been.
Nox laughed at the thought. He took one last look at the drawing, committing it to memory for no one but himself, then walked back out from underneath the desk.
— — —
It started with the crayon drawing in the tower. Next it was a scuff on the baseboard in Chase’s room.
The faded stains of smaller shoe prints.
A stiffened patch of dried glue in the carpet.
(The snagged threads of someone trying and failing to peel it out after it had dried.)
A “Happy Birthday” pencil that had rolled under the wardrobe and been forgotten.
A low scratch on the wall clearly caused by shifting his desk into place.
Nox found himself wandering around Chase’s room whenever he felt like it, if the opportunity arose. He counted the divots in the rug from long-since-moved shelves, or desks, or chairs. There were a lot of them and if he could be bothered by the effort, perhaps Nox could have even mapped them all out—named and labelled and traced onto paper like the craters mapped across the moon. There was no need for that, but he had mapped them out instinctively in his mind anyway. Landmarks on a walking path; a hiking trail; a natural wonder to trace with his eyes from above while lounging on the desk, or the bed, or from the tower’s hatch.
A Star Brigade hair tie that had fallen behind the bed.
An empty cup mistakenly kicked beneath.
Nox wasn’t a fan of small spaces by any means, but the inherent openness of the underside of a bed allowed for his curiosity to entice him without feeling as though his ceiling was collapsing. He ventured out into the dimly-lit space and found forgotten things.
A report card from the 3rd grade.
A rubber ball from a quarter machine that had since cracked from drying out.
A box or two too large for him to open, but that he didn’t really desire to invade anyway.
Chase would call him from his expeditions—under the bed, behind the desk, another nook or cranny he spotted that his boredom had called him to explore. If Nox had been lucky, he’d find a new item to tease Chase over. The report card, for example, with the clearly fake signature at the bottom followed by Chase’s mother’s actual handwriting beneath the signature line.
(His parents hadn’t been angry, per say, but he had still been grounded for the evening.)
Sometimes he would unknowingly find a story— Chase babbling away at the context for what would otherwise seem to be a mundane item. Nox would try to act bored, but the enthusiasm Chase would show—or the sincerity with which he thanked Nox for inadvertently finding a so-called “lucky guitar pick” that Chase swore was lost forever—would make it very hard for Nox to hide the fondness that always managed to ease through his facade. Eventually, Nox stopped trying.
Nox would peak at the blue smudge underneath the desk when he passed it—just as he had seen it the very first time. The bright, blue crayon, and all its unevenness and childhood joy, staining the wall of a home. The image stayed in his mind, reminding him of where he was and what had been there before and what he was a part of now.
He passed the desk again one day—walking with Silver and Violet—and snuck a habitual peek. The soft, subtle smile on his face did not go unnoticed, but Violet allowed him to think it had just that once.
It no longer crossed his mind if the space would be good for hiding.