Truth or Dare

James, for a moment, though he could be prepared for anything. Compared to the others, he'd begun to take pride in the fact that he was particularly unruffled by all of the new and different occurrences, but seeing a tent walk over on chicken legs was not what he expected to see with his own two eyes. This was very unfamiliar magic.

Frozen, he stared as it sat down, as the others crawled in, as they talked behind the curtain and seemed relatively fine.

But he couldn't seem to move. He finally tore his gaze away from the tent and looked down at his feet, frowning. Why was he freezing up? He wanted to be brave. Brave like his papa.

He forced himself to take a stiff step forward, using the movement as momentum to take another, and another. He made it to the front of the tent and peeked in, trying very hard to keep his face from revealing how startled he actually was.

"I don't think it's a good idea to sit in it," he said. "We don't know whose it is. Or who else has sat in it."

Boris, retroactively bashful by his show of brotherly emotion, was thankful that James had interrupted before anyone could acknowledge it.

"Of course we know who sat in it. It was Baba Yaga."
Boris tried to deliver his usual spooky show tone, but he failed, snort laughing it halfway through.

Boris wasn't even trying to trick people anymore. By this point, he had settled for annoying.

James frowned, his expression turning to annoyance as his brows angled down.

"Your mom's Baba Yaga," he snapped. "I'm still not sitting in it."

Damascus' eyes widened solemnly as he followed this exchange. Maybe James did have a point: if Boris hadn't been the one conjuring things, it meant that something else was at play, and had to be listening to them.

Maybe it was the forest itself.

Instead of voicing this possible revelation, Damascus got distracted, as per usual.

"Boris, your mother is Baba Yaga?" He asked incredulously. "Is that why you know so much about her?"

Boris knew so many tales of Baba Yaga, because he had been frightened with them by his parents, his brother, and the Russian boy down the road, and then consoled himself by scaring other children.

"No, she's not." Boris sneered. "If anyone says that again, I'll fight him."

How dare James say something like that about his mother? (Damascus didn't know better, and was thus forgiven.)

"Your mother's Baba Yaga." retorted Boris.

James narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils, staring at Boris.

“Yeah. She is, and she’s coming to eat you and get her tent back.”

Edward crossed his arms as James and Boris bickered. He always hated when people made fun of moms - his mom was the nicest person in the world, and other moms had to be almost as nice as his mom was, too.

(They couldn't ever be as nice as she was.)

"You shouldn't joke about moms like that," Edward said, frown still on his face. Schadel stared at the three from the sidelines, confusion written across her face.

"I don't have a mommy," she informed there, plopping her pile of flowers down onto the ground. She started making a flower crown after sitting down on one of her crowns. If she had been paying attention to James's comment earlier, she seemed to have completely forgotten it now. "Or a daddy. I just have my big brother."

James's frown slowly faded. He wasn't being serious, and he didn't think he'd been hurtful. He was pretty sure his mom would just think it was funny that he said she was Baba Yaga, not that she knew who that was either, but he could see her playing along. Pretending to want to eat him or something. That would've been fun...

He wished she was here.

His eyes fell to the ground, staring at the bottom of the tent with his head still poking in.

"Oh," he said to Schaedel. "Is your big brother nice?"

Schadel gave a big, eager nod.

"He is!" she said. "His name is Alexander Baines right now, but it's really Blanx. I'm not supposed to tell anyone, but you're my family, so you have to be his family now, too!"

James wasn't sure that was how things worked, but he supposed adoption by association wasn't out of the realm of possibility. At this point, the tent hadn't eaten anyone yet like Boris said, and though he knew it was just a story, he was still wary. This forest had been doing weird things, and no one knew how to get home yet.

He pushed back the flap of the tent and stuck one foot in, still wary. Maybe it was just waiting for all of them to enter before it trapped them.

"So if Blanx is my family now," he said to Schadel, "Does that make my mom and dad your guys' mom and dad too?" he asked, his voice going up in pitch as a very clear indicator of his confusion. "Like, if we're all brothers and sisters now..."

Spoiler

THIS DREAM THAT WE THOUGHT WE WERE SAFE TO FORGET, TO BURY AND SAY OUR ADIEUS

ON THE DAY OF THE FOOL, DEATH WILL TURN A BLIND EYE, AND YORICK WILL DUST OFF HIS SHOES

WHEN THE REAPER DOTH LAY DOWN HIS TERRIBLE SCYTHE TO FOLLOW THE WARM WEATHER WEST

YORICK, PUT BACK ON YOUR DANCING SHOES, AND RISE UP TO CALL FORTH THE NEXT.

Schadel thought for a moment, and then gave a big, enthusiastic nod. "I think so!" she said.

"But if James's mom and dad are our parents too, now," Edward started, "doesn't that mean we're sharing all of our parents? So my mom is everyone else's mom, too?"

Schadel tried to count how many parents she would have if that was true, but gave up when she realized she didn't know if Damascus had parents. "That's so many parents," she said quietly in awe, laying back and letting her bundle of flowers fall dramatically on her chest. "I don't even know what I'd do with a single parent!"

Spoiler

THIS DREAM THAT WE THOUGHT WE WERE SAFE TO FORGET, TO BURY AND SAY OUR ADIEUS

ON THE DAY OF THE FOOL, DEATH WILL TURN A BLIND EYE, AND YORICK WILL DUST OFF HIS SHOES

WHEN THE REAPER DOTH LAY DOWN HIS TERRIBLE SCYTHE TO FOLLOW THE WARM WEATHER WEST

YORICK, PUT BACK ON YOUR DANCING SHOES, AND RISE UP TO CALL FORTH THE NEXT.

The tent was a cosy size for the six sleeping children. Cozy meaning, nobody could roll over. It was both a comfort, and a curse.

Boris waited in the dark for the whispering, the hushing, and the stirring to die out. And then, he waited to wake up. That was how he'd get home, after all. But the trouble with waking up was that one had to fall asleep first, and the ambient noises of the forest only grew more insistent the more he tried to concentrate.

Boris had never been lost for this long before. Never so dark. He may have started in the woods of his home in Prussia, but where-ever he had ended up, it was off with the fairies.

Maybe he'd come home like Rip Van Winkle, to a world that didn't recognise him. He'd come home, and nobody would be there.

But Sigmund would be there, in his mind's eye, looking for his little brother until the end of time.


Boris drew the blanket over his little shoulders, stood up slowly, and crept over the others the best he could.

He sat on the log by the dead campfire. It slowly caught alight, as though it sensed him near.

"Shush," he whispered crackily. "Not now."

And it vanished into specks of ember.

Damascus was admittedly confused when all of his new human friends (and John-Watson) laid on the floor and stopped moving. It happened slowly at first, but then the tent was filled with breathing that didn't sound the same as before. He curled in a corner of the tent, copying the humans, but his eyes remained open and straining against the dark of the night.

The forest sounded a bit spooky around them, and he shivered a bit at the thought that it reminded him of home. Was this how spectors felt after they died? It wasn't very fun to be scared.

After awhile of laying there, still and mulling over his thoughts, the demon child heard some rustling, and he slowly looked over to see the small shape of one of the boys pick it's way over the pile of bodies. He was instantly relived, and sat up to start making his own way outside the tent.

It was Boris, barely visible in the strands of moonlight peeking through the trees. Making his way slowly over to the logs, he hopped a bit to avoid the baby trees and spiky balls, and eventually ended up beside the other boy.

"What are they doing in there?" He asked, eyes wide and earnest in the darkness. He hadn't quite mastered whispering, but still knew enough to lower his voice a bit. The night called for it, after all.

Boris paused. That was Damascus' voice, behind him. He could already feel himself tearing up a little bit. He didn't want Damascus to see it, so he answered without turning around.

"They're sleeping," he whispered back, trying to keep his voice level. "Humans do it at night, so they can have energy to be awake during the day."

Agh. It was hard to keep the crackles down when he had to whisper everything. He hugged his knees where he sat, and tried to distract them both by asking a question.

"Don't you get tired sometimes?"

Damascus frowned at this, still a bit confused. There was so much he didn't know about humans or Prussia. "Sleeping..?" He tried out the word in his mouth and plopped down on the log next to Boris.

"What is.. tired?" He paused and hummed, thinking. Humans had to sleep to save energy. "I don't think so, no. Maybe I just have so much energy I never have to sleep!" He beamed at this, proud. That had to be pretty cool, right?

"So.. why aren't you sleeping, Boris? Do you have lots of energy too?" He chirped, excited at the prospect of having something in common with his brother.