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The first frost sets in and he layers his shirts. It's practical, walking to school in the morning. Winter creeps about him, but the younger is undeterred, flopping himself into a bank and making snow angels on his belly. Jason Funderburker stays inside, in his warm terrarium. No one wants to wake up to frozen frogs.
He pulls his coat around himself tighter.
Winter scares him. Cold air makes him sleepy, makes him shiver, the winds make goosebumps raise on his arms. It terrifies him.
He sits down at the base of a tree to watch the younger play, and the crunch of snow beneath him is now dead leaves in the wind, twisting and turning in the bed he made, his body drifting softly into that good-night and it's like he's been shocked, his limbs twitching, brain screaming at him to stay awake.
He shudders off a nervous sweat and stands.
The trees have no faces here. There are no eyes in the woods but there are eyes in the halls, whispers in the corners where his own eyes can't see. There are stares and caught-off-guard glances and "hey, Wirt" drawled from Jason Funderberker-With-an-E, and he hates it all. He was not drowned, he was alive, and standing before them and here they are, talking about him like the third-cousin at the family reunion that No One Talks About.
He hates the drawl more than anything. Not the drawl itself, but the name they speak.
He hates the cloud of dread that clings to him like smoke over the waters. The therapy and the medication can soothe his frantic heart and the nightmares and the looming figures hanging just behind him, but they cannot soothe the eyes, the dozens and dozens of eyes, and the ears, always seeing watching listening
The sound of his name strikes a horrified chord in him.
In the bath he thinks about them: the "how are you doing" and the "morning, Wirt" and the "seeya around" and everything in between. He thinks about the in between.
( somewhere that doesn't exist, the Beast suggests their pity, or maybe that they wish he'd drowned )
The water he drains is lukewarm. He cleaves to the warmth like a newborn to its mother: first the towel, then the blankets. When the bathroom is vacated, the younger draws faces in the steamy mirror as he brushes his teeth. They talk about Beatrice, sometimes. Not tonight. Tonight he goes to bed early and lies awake in the moonlight.
Like some flashlight hanging in the sky, some phenomenally huge torch in the night it shines, touching on all but a few hidden corners, illuminating everything in the room.
He wonders if the light can see him.
That pair of lights forever snuffed out cannot find him here, but the ever-watchful eyes can. He knows they see him. He wonders if they can hear him. He wonders if they can see the ground crumbling under him to swallow him into the pit of the earth. He wonders if they know the crippling fear of being seen, being heard, the horror that runs through him when Sara says his name at the lunch table.
He can face his duties as the older sibling, but he cannot face the dread of being perceived, in any form.
Wirt knows now, or thinks he knows, why the Beast hid himself away, unseen.