the icarus to your certainty, oh my sunlight

Eddie puts his hands on the gleaming crown because he’s been telling himself that this grand heist would be his last. The bells of the castle ring, and he begins to run, despite being on a roof and the alarming height between him and the ground. Eddie picks up speed. He hears Tommy’s gasp as they throw themselves onto another roof, the East Wing.

Eddie keeps the lead, only stopping once they reach the forest. The soldiers giving them chase haven’t given up, only fuelling in numbers as they ride their horses. Eddie’s satchel feels like an explosive.

Eddie tips his waterskin into his mouth, relishing the coolness on his parched lips. Water drips down the side of his chin as a poster pinned on a random tree catches his eye. It’s a badly drawn picture of him, but the reward for his head is staggering. He’s almost tempted to turn himself in for that kind of fortune.

Tommy looks at the poster. His mouth drops at the sum written at the bottom. “We’re in the big leagues now, Diaz.”

Eddie doesn’t want to be in a league of any kind, thank you. He wants to go home without having to look over his shoulder or worry about the next meal. He crushes the paper in his fist, glaring at Tommy as he does so.

“Why put up posters in the woods?”

“Please,” Tommy waves him off, chuckling. “This is why we can run circles around those grasshoppers.” Before he goes on about taverns and brothels, the cry of the chief commander pierces the forest air. They’re off again, leaping over thickets to make it difficult pursuing them on horses.

Eddie stuffs the poster into his satchel, looking over his shoulder to assess how many of them there are. The woman leading the charge isn’t wearing a helmet, her dark eyes harpooning his thumping heart. Her chestnut red horse is gaining on them. He shouts this at Tommy. “I don’t think she’s a fucking grasshopper.”

Tommy’s red in the face, as run toward a large tree that had fallen over. An arrow strikes the log. Another kisses the side of Eddie’s throat. He yanks both of them as he dives under. The tree effectively obstructs the soldiers. Tommy and Eddie shore up on a dead end, one they have to climb out of.

“You first, then you can pull me up,” Tommy says, already taking a knee.

Eddie nods, knowing that Tommy can hold his weight. He scrambles up the rocks and drags himself over the edge. Out and above, he looks down at Tommy, a gutting idea scrambling his insides. Eddie shouldn’t.

Tommy reaches for his hand.

Tommy and Eddie have mead together and trade information rather than ask coin for it like others do. Tommy makes weird jokes and Eddie puts up with it; Eddie broods day-in-day-out and Tommy puts up with it. They’re not the best for each other but they’re all they’ve got and isn’t Eddie terrible for wanting to never see him again? Because he hates the Tommy who laughs at Wanted Posters and talks like thievery is a profession fit to rise ranks in.

There’s only one reason Eddie is in the business of keeping his head down and sneaking his hands into other pockets: to provide for his son. Getting caught today would make every single thing he’s done for naught.

“Diaz—” he looks over his shoulder at the nearing shouts of the soldiers who must have circumvented the fallen tree. “Come on, Diaz, we haven’t got all day.”

Eddie stands, straightening his satchel. “Hope I’ll see you around, Tommy.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“What?”

Eddie spins on his heel and sprints off. He winces as Tommy yells his name in outrage, finally grasping the truth. Eddie could no longer feel his racing heart. Numb, he keeps an ear out for the soldiers as he slumps on a boulder. He’s losing feeling in his legs. Tommy might come back for revenge, or for the crown, or both. Eddie could go back for him. He couldn’t imagine a reason why Tommy would forgive him. Eddie wouldn’t.

The snort and neigh of a determined horse yanks him out of this trainwreck of second thoughts. He pushes himself behind the rock he’d been resting on, using the crook between rock and green vines to hide. The auburn horse is without its rider, much like Eddie. He holds his breath. It scans the area with its ears swiveling, straining to pick up a trace of him. Just Eddie’s luck to have a scarily intelligent creature on his tail.

The horse trots further away after a minute after a stiff minute of surveying. Eddie leans back and his sigh of relief punches out of him in a ooph as he falls backwards. The bigger rock with vines isn't a rock at all, but a hidden cove leading to a different part of the woods. Looking over his shoulder, Eddie slips into the unknown.

He’s only taken three steps when his gaze lands on the tower, sketching a tall figure in the small forest it’s hidden in. He fills his waterskin at a nearby pond. Splashing water on his face, he breathes in and out, still looking at the tower. He doubts the Head Commander will stumble upon this place, but being out in the open without anyone to watch his six means he won’t be able to catch a wink of sleep.

And whose fault is it there’s no one to watch his back?

They must have caught Tommy, which buys Eddie some time to recoup. He soaks water into a small piece of cloth and wipes down his face. Eddie is becoming someone he doesn’t recognize. He only wants to go home to Christopher, his son.

He tried for a year, rotating between three jobs and taking care of the frail babe, but it became apparent that nothing he did was enough to pay the costs for medicine and help his son needs.

“Don’t drag him down with you, Eddie.”

He uses the cloth to clean himself. The crown is his last job. He’ll take home the money and reclaim his son from his parents.

Without Tommy, his route from here to home is disoriented. He’ll have to sell it to one of his own contacts. It wouldn’t hurt to get some rest in the tower. There’s no door at the bottom, so the only way up is by climbing. Nobody would willingly live this far off in the forest in such an inconvenient home. At least the arrows aimed for his head come in handy.

He stabs the arrows into the small gaps between rocks, starting his slow ascend. Eddie stopped believing in higher powers awhile ago, but he prays to every sun, moon and star that the arrows won’t break, resulting in his swift and horrible death.

Cleaning himself up earlier had been a waste of time, because by the time he reaches the top, he’s sweating through his clothes with vigor. He swings through the window and is so glad to plant his feet on solid ground. The dark room doesn’t provide much danger and Eddie looks out the window to marvel at the height he managed to climb. When he turns back, there’s a thud somewhere on his body, must be his head, for it fills his mind with white noise, and the instinct to pivot and defend himself turns to mush as his eyes roll into the back of his head.

Evan’s breath whooshes in and out of his chest. A man. A boy. Someone is inside his tower. He’d heard the thunk thunk thunk of climbing while he was cleaning. Evan had grabbed the saucepan of all things and stood by the window, pressing his body into the shadows.

The intruder is lying on the ground now. Evan cocks his pan back and edges closer. He checks the boy’s breathing. He’s fine. Evan’s breathing is yet to mellow, because there’s few reasons why the Outside is suddenly on his floor, and none of them are happy.

His mother is the only person he’s talked to in years. It’s lonely, but Evan understands it’s for the best. He can’t hurt anyone with his curse if he’s tucked away here. He’s also safe, he reminds himself, selfishly.

He keeps an ear out as he hauls the body into a chair, as if there’ll be men and women with pitchforks at the bottom of his tower at any moment. There are no ropes, but he has his long hair, and it’s enough to cord around the boy’s chest, arms, legs. Evan doesn’t touch him. Not the bare column of throat that’s exposed as his head is tipped back. Not the hands with perfect nails and calluses.

Evan watches the feather-light up and down motions of the boy’s chest, hypnotized by the Outside sitting in his wooden green chair. He roots around for his saucepan, refusing to take his eyes off the boy. When a whole minute passes with him groping the ground, Evan makes an annoyed noise and swivels around. After all, there’s nothing the boy can do while he’s tied up. He’d already checked his pockets for knives too, and threw out the arrows.

This is when he spots the bag the boy had brought with him. Evan scoops it off the ground and digs around. If the boy can waltz into Evan’s tower, Evan can go through his bag. It’s mostly empty. He pulls out a scrunched up piece of paper first. Sinking to the ground, he unfurls the damaged paper. It’s smaller than his canvases, but larger than his books. He runs his palms on the paper, flattening it against the ground. It’s a painting of a boy, Eddie Diaz.

The only other thing in the bag is a diadem. In his books, the gems are colorless, details and information are paid to the curves and edges of the gold. Looking at the diadem, he understands why they didn’t just paint the stones. It’s a magnificent sapphire, greedy for attention. Evan knows the type of ridges and inscriptions in the gold could tell him more than the stone ever could, but he’s mesmerized, once again, by this Outside thing.

He glances at the boy in his chair, still sleeping. Evan’s breathing is finally an eerie calm. He takes the poster and goes to stand behind the chair. He turns the paper upside down and holds it alongside the boy’s face. Not a monster like Evan, but not entirely an Outsider it seems. The boy—Edmundo Diaz—is a thief, pitting the Outside against him too.

Evan is quick after that. He puts the things back in the bag and hides it under the staircase. There are other places, but Evan worries the men who come to refill his supplies and pantry at night could find it. Placing the loose stair back into place, he allows himself a small bit of hope.

Evan must be losing his mind.

To pass the time, Evan has his projects. Evan's newest and simultaneously oldest project is charting the floating lights. He had many projects you see, none that took him this long, but still filling the time. That is his life. Finding a project to spend days drowning in, without food, without sleep and most importantly without the coffin of loneliness suffocating him. Usually his projects are safe like constellations, the mysteries of the sea, natural disasters.

The floating lights have marinated in his body into something frightening: hope.

There it is again, that thought. He springs to his feet and continues the cleaning that had been abruptly paused. Washing plates give his hands something to do. It helps dampen nervous energy into something manageable. He can’t allow it to swallow him whole. There’s no time to hide in his bed, cry and exhaust himself ruminating all the ways things could go.

He had tried begging his mother to go see the floating lights year after year. She usually visited the day after though, which made the whole endeavor as well as the berating that followed, pointless because the lights only appeared once a year on his birthday.

His birthday is tomorrow, which is why he is cleaning. Mother can point her ire at anything, Evan has learned. His curly locks, that refuses to be tamed and does not look much like her straight silky hair. His chattering, that gets ahead of itself because speaking to someone that’s not him is a breath of fresh air and he would like to drown in it, even if it meant Mother rubbing her forehead. There are other things, like how clean the rooms are, what he cooks, which are easier to fix. This is why Evan had started cleaning.

He scrubs the dishes harder. Once he’s done with that, he makes eggs and toast on a new pan, clumsy making the meal he eats every day as he tries to double the portion. It brings the scary Outside back to the front of his thoughts. There’s a boy in his tower. There’s an Edmundo Diaz with brown hair and brown eyes, age 20, wanted for general roguish behavior, in Evan’s tower.

“What the fuck.”

Evan knows. Because, what the fuck. When he rolled out of bed this morning, he had expected tackling the dust on the beams and coaxing spiders to leave for the next few days.

“Is this… hair?”

Evan spins around. The realization that the voice hadn’t been his own head shocking his body into action. His hands tremble as he grabs the pan he’d kept nearby. He points it at Edmundo Diaz.

“Struggling- struggling is pointless,” Evan says, watching Edmundo Diaz test the strength of the binding, grunting as he does. Evan feels like he’s attuned to every single noise the Outside makes. It’s a good thing he prepared what to say. He steps out of the shadow the kitchen alcove provides. He clears his throat. “I know why you’re here and I’m not afraid of you.”

Edmundo Diaz stops tugging and pulling, letting his eyes rove over Evan. It sends a chill down Evan’s spine. Those brown eyes of his widen, and Evan has to stop letting these minute ticks in Edmundo Diaz’s face distract him, if he’s ever going to see the floating lights.

The floating lights, yes.

“What?” Edmundo Diaz manages to say.

It's a good thing he's pretty. “How did you find me?”

Edmundo Diaz glances at the window, his brows flattening. “I wasn’t looking for you.”

Evan tries to ascertain the truth of this statement. While his hope burgeons with every minute, the teeth-aching doomed assumption that Edmundo is here to hurt him, drag him out by his hair and call him a monster, is still alive. It chomps at the bit to maul his hope, tear it apart for the crime of existing. “Who else knows my location, Edmundo Diaz?”

The fact that he knows Edmundo Diaz’s name makes his brows furrow, neutral expression vanishing. “Alright, blondie—” he drawls.

“Evan.”

“—Here’s the thing. I was in a situation. Running— gallivanting through the forest. I came across your tower and… my satchel.” Edmundo Diaz’s brows shoot up high, and Evan files this face as one of realization, understanding that Evan had found the poster identifying him. Edmundo Diaz groans. “What do you want?”