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"By the way," said the bartender, leaning heavily on the wooden counter, two fingers extended as if to hook his interlocutor on them, "there was someone in here the other day hoping to catch you on your next come-through. Something about her neighbour's house? I can give you directions to her place." The questioning lilt was courteous but unnecessary; everyone in Seafront knew by now that Nier seldom turned down a request.
"Sure, we've got time," Nier affirmed, adjusting his hold on the mountain of bags in his arms, all piled high with food and other necessities to be distributed upon his return to the village. "Right, Weiss?"
"If you insist," Weiss sighed. Once the bartender had scribbled down rough directions and bid them goodbye, the grimoire continued, "Need I remind you that we have only a handful of hours before the gates close?"
"We've got time," Nier repeated, squinting down against the backlight of the sun at the scrap of paper that would lead them to their destination before setting off toward the cluster of houses looking out on the glittering sea. "Besides, if she stopped by yesterday and was willing to wait until we came by today to get whatever it is taken care of, it can't be that urgent. If we really need to go, we'll go. We can come back tomorrow."
Weiss grumbled but made no reply. Nier grinned; a year ago it would have taken far more to convince Weiss to 'waste their time' on such matters. A year… it was strange to consider that they had spent so long in each other's almost exclusive company. Emil had insisted, repeatedly, that he would be happy to have them visit (his eager voice had sketched little scenes of books, tea, and companionship that Nier found hard to imagine for how far removed they were from what he knew) but Nier hardly found the time - or the courage. As for those closer to home, he had never been gregarious enough to offer them more than a handful of polite words; the social calculus of those sorts of casual relationships had always been beyond him.
Weiss, by contrast, was easy to talk to. For all that he spoke with elevated language, he spoke his mind and Nier felt he always knew where he stood with the grimoire. Theirs was an odd fit, comfortable for all its makeshift seams, and vanishingly rare for a man like him in a world such as this. It was discomfiting, he reflected, how these dark times made those fleeting motes of light that floated through the open windows of the house of his mind all the brighter.
The dying afternoon's house in question was a squat single-storey building of the same smooth, white stone that constituted all of Seafront's homes, unremarkable among its kin. The woman who answered the door did so with the kind of sagging relief in her shoulders that made all this worth doing. It was but a small counterweight when sized against the millstone of his failures but it was something.
"I think my neighbour's house is haunted," she said, after offering drinks and food that Nier declined without a thought.
"Haunted?" Weiss intoned, a nervous strain that Nier picked out right away raising his voice in a way that the woman took as disbelief.
"I know it sounds silly," she retorted, "but I— I've heard things. Seen things. There's something in there." She folded her arms and twisted her mouth into a frown, moulding her face into a stony mask.
Weiss fluttered in place, his pages flicking restlessly between his covers, another gesture that Nier was surprised to find he could read the nuances of as easily as an expression on a human's face, though it likely meant nothing to their host. "Ahem. I meant no offence, I was… simply surprised."
Mollified, the woman continued, "She's, ah, gone now, you see." It was a common enough situation in the after they were all wading through; he'd heard its like enough times. The fingers of Nier's hands twitched with the impulse to reach out and offer some comfort but he couldn't bring himself to complete the motion. It did not bear remarking that he understood, that he himself had spent the months directly after with his feet so firmly affixed to the war path that he had barely stopped to eat on most days. He never could make that kind of admission, here or elsewhere, he reminded himself: he needed to be someone reliable - a strong branch in the roiling rapids - lest they all be swept away.
"No other family and, well, people haven't been coming across the sea for a long time now, so it's stood empty since. That is, until a few days ago." Her hands had floated back to a neutral position on the table and she slowly began to rub at the pad of her right hand with the thumb of the left. "I couldn't sleep - my back's been troubling me - and I took a turn around the house to see if I could get settled again. I saw something moving in the shadows and… voices." She cleared her throat. "Could you just… take a look? Please?"
"No problem," Nier said, sparing a glance at Weiss as he said so. The grimoire offered no comment, though he continued to flit with a bird's nervous energy. "It's just across the way?"
The woman walked out of doors a few steps to point out the house to him - indeed, the identical house across the street, marked - he now noted - as empty by the lack of any hanging greenery around its entrance. Weiss waited until she had returned home before he addressed the matter. "Now, see here— !"
Nier interrupted before he could say much more. "If you don't want to come, you don't have to. I can handle it." Like as not he would find some stray animal inside or some few kids who thought the abandoned house their own personal playground. Even if it came to blows, he was a skilled enough swordsman to defend himself against most untrained threats.
"I am not letting you go in there alone," Weiss said, in a tone that brooked no argument; the last time Nier had hared off alone had ended in blood and tears. Nier did not argue, instead crossing the street to knock on the door - "And what, pray tell, do you think is going to respond?" "Look, it's polite, okay?" - before pushing it open.
A short entry hall, carpeted with a woven mat on which guests might remove their shoes, greeted them. The light fell strangely through the windows, forming impressions of things that couldn't be there: the shadow-shape of a docile guard dog raised its head from its paws to snarl at him. He thought he glimpsed two children running between what must be the sitting room and the kitchen, their eyes and teeth flashing. He blinked and the shadows collapsed into darkness, static. "Hey, Weiss, did you— ?"
"Yes," the grimoire whispered, a high register of fear thinning his voice. A halo of darts of coalesced blood-and-word coiled into being at Nier's shoulder, dyeing the darkness a deep red. By this light, the pair advanced, following the insubstantial forms of the children into the kitchen.
The table was littered with the detritus of lives inconsistent with the neighbour's account of the life of the woman who had lived here: a large pot made to serve a group (thoughtfully laid on a trivet), cutlery for four, workbooks and pencils, a chipped vase in earthen brown and dull yellow haphazardly filled with dirt and a wilting baby blue eyes, all spread on a tablecloth stained here and there with old sauce. Unlike what he had spied of the other rooms, the window was covered with a thick sheet, repurposed. From the deeper darkness, four sets of yellow eyes fixed on Nier, the tallest of them dropping the cheap ceramic bowl in its hands as they flinched in fright.
"Weiss!" The command was unnecessary, as the darts were already flying, pinning the two large shades to the wall. Two slashes of Beastlord were all it took to fell them. They didn't even fight back. The twins (he could not think of them as anything else, though he wished he could) turned as if to flee; they didn't make it past the low arch that led out to the hall. The vase smashed in the chaos, spilling the flower beneath his boot where it smeared when he turned, breathing hard, to search the strange shadows for further danger.
Instead, his attention fell on the dark toss of blood across the table, browning where it soaked into the pages of the books and soiled the tablecloth. On some inexplicable impulse (Yonah, he was thinking of Yonah's diary, left open to the last entry on her still unmade bed) he picked up the slim tome.
Without thinking he parted the spine like meat beneath a paring knife and thumbed through a selection of pages in the middle, spotting handwritten notes in fading ink, doodles in the margins, all in a childish hand. The proper contents of the bloodied book were illegible. The alphabet used by its writer was unfamiliar, the language thus a lost cause. Too roughly, he set it down, just barely resisting the urge to crumple its pages in his hands. Weiss winced at the sound and it was like nothing so much as a slap in the face. He balled his hands into fists to keep them away from anything else.
Nier only realized he had been digging his nails into the lines of his palms when the grimoire laid a hand - weaved of the blood dripping from Beastlord's edge to the limewashed mortar between the stones of the floor - on his forearm. His gaze slid toward the regular movement of the twining runes, a counterpoint to the uneven roar of his heart in his ears.
"Nier," he said. Its single syllable sounded alien, even in the voice of his most constant companion. That name belonged to someone else. "Nier!" Weiss repeated, a creeping edge of worry in his tone that Nier felt the urge to slice himself to ribbons on.
"Yeah?" The word was just a noise, something to fill the space, his eye did not move from the hand against his skin.
"Are you… with me?" The grimoire's tone was soft, the crinkle of his pages like the furrow of a brow.
He cleared his throat, wet his cracked lips, but still his voice broke on his reply. "Yeah." With a great effort, he gulped down an uneven breath and dragged his attention away from the book, away from the table, to Weiss' stark white cover.
"It was an awful thing to witness," Weiss ventured, trying to ground him in the present moment, gruesome as it was, "this… playacting at being human. I'm not surprised you're shaken."
Nier thought of the maelstrom of fear in the ch— in the smaller shades' eyes for a moment too long, one foot hanging over an abyss into which if he let himself walk he would fall and fall and fall. "I—" He made another attempt at breathing and found it easier, looking away from the grotesque tableau of bodies that, in this darkness, would never fade.
In one sweeping motion he pulled the sheet from the nails that bound it to the sil, flooding the room with light and the ocean's breeze; the shades burned, screamed. It was just mimicry, just his own fallacy of anthropomorphism, he told himself. They were not people. "Right," he said, breathing shallowly but breathing. "I just wasn't expecting… We haven't seen them do that before." But, he reflected disjointedly, still floating just to the left of himself, there were so many things the shades did after that they'd never done before.
"Indeed not," Weiss said, dismissing the blood-and-word hand the moment it no longer registered to Nier's senses as a comfort. "These times grow stranger and stranger, it seems." His words had a pinched quality to them, or perhaps a sharp deliberateness, that suggested he had wanted to say something else.
For a lack of anything to do with his hands, he began to fold the sheet that twisted in them, the motion a familiar one about which he did not have to think. "Thanks." Weiss's gentle bob dipped low, a mid-air stumble that drew the ghost of a smile to Nier's lips. "For… helping me keep it together."
"Think nothing of it," the grimoire said, floating closer to his elbow, that willingness to be near him more than he could ask for in the wake of what he had perpetrated (they were just shades, he shouldn't be so unsettled). The undercurrent of those words was You would do the same for me, were I in need of aid. He would, of course; it did not need to be said.
A comfortable silence lingered between them as Nier placed the sheet over the table like a shroud. Weiss was the one to break it, deliberately slipping into the learned cadence of banter to turn Nier from these grave thoughts. "Shall we? I'm sure that woman will be glad of the news that these creatures are no longer lurking across the way and, as I said earlier, we are expected back at the village."
"Yeah, let's go home," Nier said, as he stepped across the threshold of the ruin they'd made and put it from his mind.