Hazelthorn

by C.G. Drews

He swallows thickly. “I can’t leave Hazelthorn.” “I have half a plan.” Laurie is staring very hard at the old bloodstain on the carpet. “I know you can’t leave.” He says it as if he knows Hazelthorn made the decision long ago.

AHHHHHHHH

“If I help you to the bathroom, I’d need to touch you. Is that okay?” The fact that he asks brings such brilliant and violent relief that Evander can’t hold back the choked sob. He nods.

“This is not,” he mutters, “what I wanted to be doing with your mouth.”

“I nearly drowned in the garden that night,” Evander whispers. Laurie’s head tilts toward him, a frown leaving a divot between his brows. “You should’ve called for me. If you put my name in your mouth, I will always listen.”

Oh god i do not trust him

Evander’s fingers slip from Laurie’s, his palm too clammy with sweat. He is not a bird meant for flight; he is broken wings and forgotten petals left to dry between pages of an old book and he doesn’t know how to believe he could be anything else.

“Say my real name,” he snarls, “you absolute coward.”

It wasn’t a kiss. It was revenge and it was starvation and it was obsession.

He barely notices the way Laurie isn’t responding to any of this.

Wait, you know how he said the old lawyer had a stroke? What if he was poisoned?” “Circumstantial evidence though.” Laurie sounds distracted.

HMMMMMMMM

“You can’t read, can you?” Evander says quietly.

“Evander, he wasn’t fucking nice to you.” There’s sudden venom in his voice. “He tortured you. He locked you up and drugged you and punished you for not being … being ‘normal.’ I used to wake up at night and hear you crying and crying, like a haunting that never ended. You think he’s nice because he gave you presents and said you were ‘good’ after you did what he wanted. You think he’s nice because you don’t know anything but pain.”

“Trying to stay away from you. I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours.”

But this is the will. The real will. Evander skims the pages fast, his heart a staccato beat in his throat, his fingers trembling slightly as he claws through the legal jargon until he finds the name of the single heir—because Byron had never wanted to divide this property up amongst his family. Laurence Evan Alexander Lennox-Hall.

The world blurs, listing sideways as metal fills Evander’s mouth. He is a … situation. To be disposed of. It’s him, not Laurie, who was always meant to die.

“There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I’ve carved out for you. I knew I’d cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch, but I wanted to.” His voice unravels, massacred on yearning. “Let me ruin myself on you.”

“I never tried to sacrifice you, because I was sacrificing me.” Each word shatters as it hits the ground. “I asked the garden for you. Then I dug you up.”

Part of him had always known there was a monster locked behind the walls of Hazelthorn, a secret overgrown with ivy and hemlock and the sharpened tips of holly leaves. He just hadn’t thought it was him.

No wonder he failed at being normal, no matter how he tried. He is not even— human He is all— monster monster monster

It all fits together with shocking, crystallized clarity and he should laugh at how oblivious he was to not see himself for what he truly is. A boy with no past, who was so feral he had to be “taught” how to act. A boy they kept locked up, sedated, hidden away. A boy with thorns for teeth and a taste for flesh. Just like the garden.

“I think when you get overwhelmed, your brain shuts down to give you a break and the garden takes over. And the garden just really fucking hates Lennox-Halls.”

“I d-don’t want to be this,” Evander whispers. A pulled-up root from an ancient, eldritch garden of horrors.

“You’re trying to grow another Hazelthorn?” Confusion furrows Evander’s frown even deeper. “But you can’t.” “Not with a normal cutting from the plants, that’s for sure.” Dawes’s smile is private and reserved, as if the joke is not worth explaining to someone as stupid as Evander.

HE WANTS YOU

Byron had been cutting out his ribs and experimenting with them for years, telling him the surgeries were for his own good while choosing bones Evander wouldn’t be able to see he’d lost so he wouldn’t understand what was happening to him. Keep him confused, disorientated. Keep him quiet.

But Evander can’t do it. He has always been drawn to Laurie, addicted to him, and it is only now that he understands why. He belongs to this boy in the way a flower belongs to its god.

But all Evander can focus on is Laurie’s cry and the way it turns to gasps, short and muffled and— Cuts off with a crisp finality. It will live in him forever, that cry, the desperation in it, the sheer undiluted fear. He will be forever haunted by that pain.

They’re just threatening him. They won’t actually do it. They won’t. They— Dawes snaps the pruning shears closed over Evander’s wrist.

Because he’s not human. So it doesn’t matter what they do to him. He is bleeding rage and murder and fury all over the floor.

“Thank you for coming to eat,” Evander says. “And be eaten. Long may you rot.”

“I think I did it,” he says as the room folds into hysterical chaos. “I think I killed Byron Lennox-Hall.” He pauses, poisonous petals unfolding in his throat, before he whispers, “And the rest of you too.”

Once upon a time, a door was unlocked and a monster slipped out of its ivory tower. The garden did not step into him, but rather stepped out of him.

Only Laurie stood in this garden as a child and cut himself open and wished for a friend with full understanding that it would be monstrous. And he didn’t mind.

Evander is a name that no longer fits him. He is— “I said, Look at me, Hazelthorn.”

“What did you call me?” “Hazelthorn,” he whispers. With a broken cry, Evander runs forward and slams into Laurie like a thunderstorm finally wearing itself out.

All he says, his voice soft and reverent and broken all the way through, is, “God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him.”

He thinks, perhaps, he is meant to be feral and loud and sharp and angry.

So I dosed his tea and then unlocked your door. It wasn’t a great plan, I know, but I didn’t have time to think.”

He already knows what it is to be buried alive, but maybe he was never scared of it. Maybe he missed it.

Laurie murmurs something that sounds like “I told you, right from the start, I wanted Hazelthorn.”