They're not sleeping.

Sometimes it's just one of us, but tonight, it's everyone. The whole camp takes in a deep breath, exhales, and inhales again, waiting for everyone else to sleep so they can go tend to their agendas. I remember these kinds of nights from back when there was a chance we wouldn't wake up the next morning. To be frank, there's still that chance, especially after the ordeal with Adaline...

... yet we're walking right back into the fire, aren't we?

I get up. As soon as I'm out of human earshot (seeing as we're lying mud-covered, beaten, weary in our human forms, "asleep"), I materialize my ukulele, drawing it outwards from my hands, where it springs like a flower into being. The wood still feels like flesh in places, but it's a sturdy approximation of the broken one, and I've almost gotten the smell back down. Someday I will know how to become a tree, or at least part of one. Now, in the early spring, the trees, too, are in the process of becoming.

We play together. I try to put the fear creeping into my peripherals out of mind, letting it succumb to music, but someone is definitely... there. The ukulele shoots back under my flesh as Mary puts a hand around my neck and the other around my mouth.

"Don't scream," she says.

I can't.

She breathes out. Both our bodies respire in unison. "It's late. But I'm glad you're here. Red kept holding me up, but... eventually, he let go. I guess. It's okay. It's good. Things are good."

I try to drag the hand away from my mouth. The fingers are so thin for the weight they carry, but Imanage to get it off. "Mary? What are you talking about?"

"I can't live here forever," Mary says. "Something has to give eventually. Something has to break. I'll find the right way to poke someone and there'll be a hole, or an exit, and-- there's so much light out there. I want to be in the light. I want to be the fire. A tsunami. A hurricane. I want to turn worlds around me. I need to do something. Don't you--"

"You mean, you're afraid?" I ask.

"What," Mary says.

"Never mind," I say. "You know how you feel like you can't live here forever? I feel like I can't be around you sometimes. It's that same feeling. You tremble. You feel a little bit upset in your stomach, like you do when you're shifting, and you send predators on the periphery, but no one is there. It's just you and the thing that hunts, no matter where you are or what you're doing."

"I don't think we feel the same way at all," she warns me.

"I wish we did," I reply. "I think it would be a lot easier to communicate if we were at least on the same page emotionally. Or if you were..." No, of course Mary is honest with herself.

"I'm going to make things better."

"You're not."

"You can't stop me from making things better."

"There we go."

"I don't like it when you talk back to me, Damien."
"Thanks for getting that across. I don't like it when you don't listen to me."

Gillian snatches my hand in the shadows. I do not scream, because I was at least half expecting it, but I still feel my whole body shake as Mary looks at Gillian across the arc of my body. Mary's hand slides from my mouth down to my hand, where it curls in mine, and we find each other.

"Choose," Gillian warns.

"Things are about to get bloody and complicated," Mary says. "Oh, sorry. I'm excited."

When I don't answer, the pull gets more intense in both sides. "They'll come," I say.

"How soon?" asks Gillian.

"You're just a diversion, then?" Mary asks me, her mocking voice a cooing taunt.

"Do you both want me to pick a side?" I ask, hoarsely. The grip grows more strenuous. I can feel every simulated fiber of my arm tensing with the immense gravity of their affections, and my heart begins to pulse faster.

"You're my liege," Gillian says.

"You're mine," echoes Mary.

The two of them pull harder at either side. I can feel my whole self straining into parts, and at once, the two of them rip my body in half. Everything is light and pain for moments, and then I realize I'm gleaming, growing out of myself. A heat streams through my body, starting near my head and working down, and it follows down my back out to a curve in my spine, deer haunches emerging back into being. A thousand feathers spiral out in all the shades of blue the night is too dim to know, and my headache cracks into something far more brilliant as my antlers emerge, doused in fire.

I shake them off my hands. "They'll be here any minute. I just need a diversion."

"Not unless you scream," whispers Mary.

Mary, everything already is and has always been screaming, deep inside of itself. I can hear nature flooding out with noise around me, everything wanting, needing, speaking, humming... all of it trying to burst forth. All of it singing want, singing need, casting sound far into the darkness that only says survive, survive, survive. I want to live, but I also don't want us to die. I am prey and a thing past prey that doesn't hunt. Protector. We'll call it that.

Gillian's fingernails lengthen as they harden into claws, and Mary's back sprouts wings. I can't tell if they mean to attack me or each other. I step between them, as a warning, scuffing a hoof against the ground. "Don't try it," I warn, the air around me whistling with a soft, accelerating song which beats to the pace of my own heart. If only I could cover the melody with something braver... but good art must require honesty.

"Are you going to sing us to stop?" asks Gillian. Her face is half-muzzle, losing the capacity for words, and both of them are stained by the red of one of my fires. In the glint of it, the periphery, I can sense others encroaching, stirred by the calamity, or perhaps just Red, who was always going to be here, anyways.

It's no longer about stopping them now.

No longer about stalling for Red.

No longer about stalling at all.

Something breaks tonight.

I just wanted honesty.

"I guess so," I tell Gillian, and a blood of fire engulfs me as my antlers light up, brighter, and their flames rip everything apart. A wave of prismatic color tears through the three of us, and I hear two competing songs, deep in my heart. I know them both immediately as Gillian and Mary, recognize every frenetic jump and sinister repetition in Mary's, as well as the muted monotony of Gillian's, but when you pile them atop each other, you get the whole of a person, a singular thing with a beat and a rhythm, balanced perfectly.

Tears roll down my cheeks. My Veritas has faded away somewhere in the calamity, which just leaves the three of us. Gillian has been knocked over, blue fire still licking her face without burning anything. Mary is curled in the corner, doused in yellow. It frames her whole face as she stands, grabbing a tree, and I see her face cast in the waxy moon-colored fire.

"That's how you feel, Damien?" asks Mary. "Every day?"

"Is it hurting you?" I ask her. "How do you feel?"

"Whole," whispers Gillian.

"Afraid," Mary says. She puts her hand to her own heart, and then shakes her head. She laughs violently, convulsing, and is back on her knees again, her voice a disharmonious, continuous stream of terrible noise. I can practically sense it bleeding out of her, and I clutch a hand to my stomach, her pain mine for weightless moments.

Red steps out. Alex is almost on his arm, Dylan is there with his teeth bared, I can see Kali in the trees, looking back at us with amusement and disappointment both.

It all recedes.

The man in the trenchcoat and sweater bends down to me, and I realize I'm far closer to the ground than I had been. I'm holding myself in my arms, stomach clutched with one hand, shoulder with the other. I'm gripping both like I'm about to lose them. It does feel like my body might not exactly be mine right now, or maybe it's never been this much mine before. "It's been way too long for us to work this out," I tell him, weakly.

"You did a good job," Red tells me. He places a hand on my shoulder. I'm tempted to knock it off. "Your powers are stronger than you thought they were, aren't they?"

"Uh, um... thanks," I say. "Could I get a new ukulele? Maybe? Or a guitar. Alex could help me set up an amp..."

"That's what you're worried about?" he asks. His voice cracks on worried, like a string coming undone. Twang.

"It's just a joke," I half-lie under my breath.

"Damien," say Gillian and Mary. Both of them are rising to their feet, as if nothing ever happened here.

I close my eyes. "I don't belong to you, Mary," I say, "And I don't have to listen to you, Gillian. Neither of you need to protect me, and believe it or not, neither of you have ever been very good at it anyways."

"Oh snap," says Alex.

"Don't do that again," warns Gillian, raising a hand to her forehead.

"Don't!" agrees Mary. "Ever!"

"At least you can agree on something," I say, with half a smile.

We disperse into the night, to sleep. I guess we will wake up tomorrow, continue our lives, become better people, or whatever we are, at the break of morning, keep learning, keep living.

Feels like so much more than a night's worth of fear has been lifted from me.