With a creak the door opened into a house that was anything but fancy, old in style and old in construction, it was a tall ceilinged Victorian style detached, but now it was also his. It was livable now after a good thorough refurbishment which had set him a little lighter in the pocket. Liveable was all it was, empty of furniture and fittings and with dusty floorboards which needed a good sweeping after the damp had been treated and the walls replastered.

It smelled like an old library combined with an art workshop, the sharp bite of newly dried paint still playing on his senses. Smell was important and it felt good to try and travel the place simply by following the paths and origin of each scent as best he could. This was the empty bones of a thing, long abandoned, without personality or vitality and he felt a kinship to the ancient emptiness of it. The front bay window looked out onto a small front garden littered with jungle plants still and the kitchen looked out on a tangled mess of a garden which reached a ways back and had been the main reason for choosing this out of all the potential homes in the entirety of towns.

No one knew he had it, at least no one in his immediate acquaintances, not Melvin and not Rodney. For now it was his and if he’d chosen to he could have walked out of Melvin’s room tomorrow and into this little house, letting the empty rooms upstairs stay empty and untouched while he lurked inside the bones of a non-home and remained a non-person. But he knew that in the end he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t keep it from the others because he didn’t have the fight in him to keep the walls up and keep the minions out. Melvin would follow him and he would never really let go of Rodney.

Though really he didn’t know if they’d come or if they had their own ideas. He hadn’t asked them after all, he hadn’t sought their opinion or their input on what the house should look like or the location. He hadn’t wanted any input but his own for this, some deep part of him deciding it was important that the bones were his, that the skeleton of it all was something he would want. That way what grew there would be his to covet and examine like mould growing on a fallen tree.

The bare lightbulbs cast a stark and harsh light through the rooms and his shadow cast wild silhouette across the smooth walls. When he moved it was like a ghost, fearless but silent through the rooms, despite the solitude seeing no fear in the unknown and dreading ultimately only what was known to him. Shadowlings didn’t scare him with Butch’s newfound strength and he intended to extinguish any lingering squatters with the same ferocity he levelled at his own weaknesses and imperfections.

It was a house but it wasn’t a home and almost certainly would never be one now. Homes as far as he was aware consisted of a mother, a father and their children. He could be a man but no longer a father, the only wife he wanted did not belong to him and his children were all long wayward and would be stepchildren unwelcome in any family he tried to craft. So it was a house, and it would always be one, a shape which mimiced what it should be the same way his shape mimiced humanity. It was fine, it was something he could live with. The furniture would be what it needed to be rather than what he wanted it to be, likely affordable on their limited salary and with the dubious tastes of the others factored in alongside it all. He would not be able to dictate every choice and they would have their own rooms and their own decisions to make. He would control only this, only the start and only the fact that it would try to be what it could never be.

The garden he was most excited about, insofar as he was excited about anything, keen to see if he could make anything grow in the tainted soil and even if he would not grow anything edible, he wanted to create beauty in this place, something lingering and Eden-like. It was a private aspiration, to recreate Milton’s garden and one he would have time to do if he lived here.

It was getting dark and he knew he should have been at America’s already to try and get a few glimpses of the lights flipping on, the signs that she or her lodger were at home and alive, but for the first time in a long time he stayed his impulse in favour of something better, nothing more than a few moments longer in a place where he could feel his future standing on the cracked paving stones of a scruffy and overgrown garden. It was momentum.