Sometimes, when he sleeps, he's a child again, fragile, curled knees to chest. He's still a child, even awake. Seventeen years is just a fraction of the time he might be given, even though Horace knows - with where he is, with what he's become - its much, much less. Life expectancy is something pushed to the side, forgotten about in the invincible teenage years. When Horace thinks about it, he's alright with a shorter time - he knows he had a choice, and he made it. Regrets shouldn't cling to his broad hands like wet sand, dirtying each unscarred knuckle. But maybe they will, later. {you will regret,} Jannisari whispers like some dying memory inside his head, faint and billowing like stale smoke - and she's always a whisper, thin and reedy with disappointment and didn't she choose him? There's an odd sense of betrayal at her words, but she also tells him he can be something greater. For now, it is too soon to regret, and he thinks that this is maybe where he needs to be; that for once in his short, unassuming life he can be useful. Better, different. The idea that handing a child a weapon makes them an adult is laughable. Horace knows he is a child and yet something more. 

But when he dreams, he's only a child, soft and unformed. Horace doesn't look out the windows at night anymore. "God knows if you've been bad," his grandma said before turning up the volume on her soap opera. "He's always watching." He wonders if there's god in the way the trees move, with their deliberate slowness and their root-gnarled steps. If he doesn't blink he can see it, their slow-as-seasons movement, but in that heartbeat of closed eyes they are gone. "Don't lie Horace, there's nothing there." In their yellow eyes that watch him, the withered faces like dark moons that press against his window, he wonders if they are gods. Perhaps they are waiting for him to slip up, to do the wrong thing... then what? No one ever told him what happens when the gods come to your bed at night and feather their thin, horrible fingers against the glass. He lives in fear of bedtime: not of sleeping, but of not sleeping and seeing. The window is at the foot of his bed - he rearranged his room the other day, short, child-fingers clutching at his heavy bedframe, but the room is so small and the glass panes are so large. Maybe it was better when the window was at his head. He moves everything again, and again.

At the table tomorrow, Thanksgiving set for two, he will say he is thankful for thick curtains and thicker glass. Grandma Dora will ruffle his hair, laugh, and tell him he means windows, because that is what glass and curtains are. No, it is not the same, Horace shouts with the high-pitched voice of a boy not yet twelve. He is thankful for only that, for glass and curtains, but not for windows. Never for windows with eyes that do not sleep and forests full of shadows he is told are not real. There is a heavy silence that stretches between two people like the span of their ages and then she asks, calmly, if Horace would pass the corn. She says she is thankful for him. 

He remembers all these things when he sleeps between the bare concrete walls. 

And suddenly, Jan is in his dream-room too - glacier pale eyes watch him, assessing. Horace is found wanting. And the other man says nothing, but Horace knows what he's thinking: 'a pleasant enough distraction, pardner. ' Jan's face curves into the sort of satisfied smile he's come to expect and if he could, Horace would reach out his out hand to touch the corners of that mouth; his own gritty fingers dark and dirty-looking. Maybe there's secrets behind Jan's smile and maybe there aren't, but he feels like he could slip, fall so easily into whatever Jan asked of him. It is not a comfortable feeling, but it is. If Jannisari were here, she might call him weak. Or she wouldn't; she would call him strong and build him up block by precious block only to tear small holes in his framework. Horace does not blink and his blue eyes can see the root-thin branches unfurl like tired, torn sails around those pale shoulders. They tangle with the gaudy jewelry, snake down his white, white coat. Horace pushes up his glasses, the only movement he's made. Jan looks so fragile, but he mouths the words 'I don't need you'. There's a sense of doom weighing down his eyelids and they burn from it; finality pools in the corners of his eyes and he blinks. And, like the moving trees, Jan is gone. 

One night, the night of his birthday, sweet 16, he'd left the window open - a misstep, a silly mistake brought on by the fact that grandma had let him have a little too much beer and, tittering drunk herself, had sent him to bed. The cool wind plays with his long hair and he sighs, thinking everything, for once, is alright. He makes hazy plans to meet Darren tomorrow. They'll kiss and trace lazy circles into each other's skin in secret. Horace wakes up to thin fingers touching his face, sliding across his jawline to dance around his throat. They leave a fine line of dirt across his sleep-still skin. Yellow eyes burn into his half-opened blue ones. He screams, once, fear pounding in his blood, and she comes running, even when drunk. And although she crashes through the door with a speed he's never seen, it has already vanished, leaving only waving curtains. Horace is banned from drinking. 

Every time he gets a new piercing, the pain reminds him he is not dreaming. He fancies he can see their bright eyes even though the curtains are closed and he tugs on his ear once, twice, and the brilliant pain of it shoots into his head. Horace has always found it funny that such a pain could make him nauseous and he swallows the bile in his throat. His windows are locked, he's safe, so he tries to sleep. The piercing gets irritated, and in the morning, he squeezes out pus. It's a fair trade, he thinks. 

One day a girl at school looks up at Horace and the lazy curve of her mouth says, "Me, too." And she's beautifully blonde with whiskey-brown eyes that turn just gold enough in the afternoon light and they hold each other's hands when they walk home. She lives on the forest's edge, close and not-close to him. Horace thinks maybe she sees the shadows move, too. September is his first girlfriend and they kiss under the shade of a tree (so fitting isn't it?) and when dusk creeps through branches his fingers clutch at her a little too tightly, maybe. She takes all his firsts and she tells him later, after a year, that she was lying. Horace kisses her and forgives her, he'd forgive anything, but she leaves anyway. It's sad, but expected. By then, Horace has learned to shut up completely about the yellow eyes and still-as-death faces. Eventually, he doesn't miss her.

He startles, heart pounding from memories and Jannisari is listing off the medical uses of camphor. {there is an imbalance in you,} she suggests. He ignores her and fumbles for his glasses.

Awake now, Horace still remembers their shining eyes, and he is suddenly grateful that this room does not have a window.