It is, unfortunately, Halloween.

  Elias does not dislike holidays in theory. He dislikes them in practice, the way they arrive with expectations and sugared edges and a parade of cheerful rituals that demand participation. If December is a three-ring circus, then October is a little street fair with hay bales and carved produce, and everyone is very excited about gourds. Elias has never been excited about gourds. He is, however, excited about the way the couch cushions remember his shape and tilt the perfect amount to brace his shoulder. He is excited about the blanket that learned his weight long ago and folds itself accordingly. He is very excited about not moving.

  “Elias!” Benji calls from the kitchen. Elias tells himself he doesn’t mind hearing it so often. The truth is, he minds very much—though not in the way he expected. “I need your opinion. Preferably the kind that agrees with me.”

  Elias braces himself with a hand, takes a careful breath, and eases his weight forward. The pain threads through him, sharp and thin. He rises too quickly, and the world blurs at the edges, as if the room itself is shaking its head.

  “I am coming,” Elias says, as though making a generous sacrifice. He moves carefully down the short hall, catching himself on the door frame as shock of pain moves through his back. The corners of his vision go a touch gray and then retreat.

  The kitchen smells like a productive crime scene. There is pumpkin everywhere. Not the neat, contained sort of everywhere, but sprawling, chaotic everywhere: seeds like little flat moons, orange strings clinging to the edge of the table, a butcher’s knife that looks entirely too pleased with its job. Benji stands in the middle of it all with his sleeves rolled past the elbow and an apron Elias recognizes from the back of a drawer. The apron reads BLESS THIS MESS in cheerful script.

  “There you are!” Benji says, delighted, as if Elias had been lost and he has just discovered him between the spice rack and the colander. “Come lend me your aesthetic judgment. And your hands. And possibly your soul, if you’re not using it.”

  “I am, at present, using all three,” Elias says. He approaches the table with the air of a hostage being asked to choose which finger to keep. He touches the edge of a bowl with a fingertip and the bowl, recognizing him, stops sliding about and settles obediently. “What is all this.”

  “Tradition,” Benji says. “Festivity. Seasonal glee. Also: I found this pumpkin at the farm stand down the road and it had a face. I mean it didn’t yet, but it had the potential of a face, and I couldn’t abandon it. That would be neglect.”

  Elias looks at the pumpkin. It is orange, very orange, and currently missing a top. Benji has cut a lid and set it aside treating it with the care of something far more important than a vegetable’s scalp. A little mound of seeds glistens on a baking tray.

  “The neighbors pretend this house doesn’t exist,” Elias says. “No one is going to appreciate that thing in the window.”

  “Wrong,” Benji says. “I’m going to appreciate it. You might, secretly. That’s two whole people.”

  Elias shifts his weight against the table and feels the chair bend, just slightly, to give his hip a sympathetic brace. The House is not subtle about its preferences. It likes him upright, but not too upright. It likes him sitting, but not if it means he’s uncomfortable. When he pushed too far the other day—taking the stairs as though he didn’t have a wound stitched across his back—the front hall offered him a newel post at exactly the right angle and then made the second step feel a fraction taller, as if to say: careful.

  Benji holds up a spoon like a gavel. “You can vote on the face. We have options. Classic happy. Classic spooky. Or the tragic clown option.”

  “The tragic clown option?”

  “A sad mouth but whimsical eyes.” Benji demonstrates. He is very serious for exactly two seconds and then the smile breaks in, quick as a fox darting for cover. “Or we can be postmodern and carve a perfectly normal circle with no features, and then the mind imagines a face upon it.”

  “The mind is already imagining a great many things,” Elias says. He sets his fingertips on the back of the chair, leans only a little, and tries not to make a sound that—he knows from experience—will bring Benji running with a terrible gentleness that leaves Elias feeling skinned.

  Benji notices anyway. Of course he does. He notices everything. His shoulders dip a fraction, his energy turning from shine to glow. He reaches for a dishcloth, wipes his hands, and then reaches for Elias. He does not touch him. He hovers the way you hover over a fragile cup you have no business carrying, ready to catch it and determined not to insult it with cushioning.

  “Okay?” Benji says.

  “Okay,” Elias says, which is true in the sense that he is upright and breathing and not presently haunted by inhuman architecture. The pain is a line of ink under his ribs, but it has stopped trying to write in capital letters. “Sit me somewhere that is not directly in the splash zone.”

  Benji grins, and the whole kitchen feels a shade brighter for it.

  He pulls out a chair. The chair makes a tiny creak that has the tone of someone waving and saying, Hello, yes, I am a chair. Elias lowers himself with care. There is a moment—there is always a moment—when his body considers mutiny, and then thinks better of it.

  He breathes. The chair says, in its wooden way, We’ve got you.

  Benji slides the big bowl of pumpkin guts toward him. “Pick seeds.”

  Elias opens his mouth to deliver a case against this activity. He discovers that his mouth has no argument ready. Seed-picking is, objectively, a task not incompatible with being in pain. It involves attention without obligation. He rolls his eyes to cover the lack of protest. “Fine.”

  “Yes,” Benji says, sitting next to him with the kind of approval usually reserved for small dogs performing a trick. “Atta boy.”

  “Do not,” Elias says, “atta boy me.”

  “I would never,” Benji says, and then: “—atta man?”

  “Please leave,” Elias says, and plucks a thread of string from a small constellation of seeds. The motion sends a tug against his damaged back. A warning flare, but not the sort that demands surrender. He can do this. He can do this and be slightly irritated and that is, he thinks, a good thing.

  They work. The kitchen gets the sort of quiet Elias prefers, which is to say, not quiet at all. There are noises that mean ordinary life: the clock ticking, a distant rush of wind prying at the edges of the day, the faint complicated sounds of The House persuading itself that its bones will hold through another winter. Benji hums under his breath, a tune he heard on the radio. The tune detours into commentary.

  “If we were in the city,” Benji says, separating a clump of seeds with the focus of a surgeon, “we’d buy too many little chocolate bars and then spend the evening making eye contact with the door expecting children to manifest like phantoms. Here, we’re going to roast these seeds and then I’m going to eat too many of them because someone has to. Guess who.”

  “Is it the person presently attempting to smuggle a pumpkin string under the table,” Elias says, flicking the offending string back into the bowl. “You have the manners of a crow.”

  “Crows are noble,” Benji says. “They bring gifts.”

  “You bring me stray objects of dubious provenance and insist they are gifts.”

  “Exactly,” Benji says, beaming. “Why don’t you like Halloween?”

  “I do not dislike it,” Elias says, “when it remains confined to culinary oddities and does not require me to dress as a pirate.”

  Benji puts a hand to his heart. “You would make such a good pirate.”

  “I would be a terrible pirate. I would insist everyone wipe their boots on the gangplank.”

  Benji is still laughing when the kitchen light blinks. It is a mild blink, the sort of flicker lights might do when the wind hits a particular angle or a cloud rearranges the sky. Elias glances at the fixture out of reflex. He has learned to listen to changes without immediately suspecting an oncoming apocalypse. Still—it’s Halloween. The mind stacks the evening with stories before you even let it in the door.

  “House,” Benji says in a tone of theatrical scandal, “how dare you interrupt my bit.”

  The light stabilizes. The House does not care about pumpkins. It is wary of the knife on the table and the way Benji reaches for it with affectionate disregard. It tilts a draft under the knife, and the knife chooses to be less slippery as it moves.

  “Thank you,” Elias says, because good manners to this House are not wasted. He sorts more seeds. His hands find a rhythm. He is not, he thinks, good at letting someone fuss over him, but he is trying. It’s easier to try when Benji makes it a game. It’s easier to try when the game involves a vegetable.

  “Okay.” Benji sets the last of the cleaned seeds onto the tray like a field of little commas. “Moment of art. Face time.”

  “Don’t call it ‘face time,’” Elias says.

  “Visage consultation,” Benji says solemnly. He pulls the pumpkin into the center of the table and spins it with a gentle hand. He uses a pencil to sketch options. A cheerful triangle nose, a gap-toothed smile. He erases. He tries angled eyes that suggest mild evil. He erases. He hovers. “I want it to be friendly,” he says, quieter. “Friendly, but like it knows things. Like someone who helps you carry your groceries and also eats the souls of your enemies if required.”

  “I don’t believe most grocers require soul-eating,” Elias says.

  “Not most,” Benji says, “but sometimes you get a very rude melon.”

  Elias watches his face while the pencil moves. There is a tenderness that sneaks in whenever Benji is concentrated. It shows up around his mouth now, the tongue pressed absently to the back of his teeth. It shows in his hands, which have worked and worried and still move as if each new thing could be coaxed into being good.

  “Here,” Benji says, turning the pumpkin so Elias can see the sketched version. The eyes are a little lopsided but shaped with affection. The smile is a crooked curve with an almost apologetic snaggle. “He looks like… a guy who would hold a door and then blush.”

  “Mm,” Elias says. The knife sits between them. The House riffs a tiny draft across it again, like a reminder: careful. “He looks like you.”

  Benji goes still. A beat. Then that grin again, expansive, helpless. “See. You do like Halloween.”

  “I like accuracy,” Elias says, and feels ridiculous, which is an improvement over feeling delicate. “Be careful with that.”

  “I am always careful,” Benji says, and then amends: “I am sometimes careful, and when I am not, I have you.”

  “That,” Elias says dryly, “does not mean I would like to spend the evening applying bandages to both of us.”

  “Noted.” Benji picks up the knife with a kind of exaggerated respect, as if it is a ceremonial sword and the pumpkin is being knighted for services to the kingdom of Vegetables. He cuts slowly. The House tightens the air at his elbow in a way that nudges his patience. The knife does not slip. A ribbon of orange flesh peels back. Benji holds his breath through delicate parts. Elias holds his without meaning to.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  The first eye comes free, then the second. Benji lifts them like coins, the oniony scent of raw pumpkin curls up. He cuts the nose, he cuts the mouth, and when he leans back, it is a face. Silly and gentle and slightly apologetic, like a man about to ask you to watch his dog while he gets coffee.

  “There,” Benji says softly. “Hello, friend.”Elias almost snorts, but the sound catches somewhere warmer. It is ridiculous, of course, but ridiculous in a way that belongs entirely to Benji. That makes it harder to dismiss.

  The light flickers again. Only once. Elias makes the face that means don’t you dare make more of this than it is, even though they both know The House has noticed. He clears his throat. “Seeds,” he says, because that, at least, is safe ground. “We’ll roast them with—what is it you do—”

  “Olive oil,” Benji says, too brightly, playing along, “salt, black pepper, smoked paprika, a sprinkle of sugar, and the two household gods.”

  “Garlic,” Elias says with a nod. “And hope.”

  Benji bumps his shoulder very carefully. “And hope.”

  They work in the comfortable inefficiency of two people who have not cooked a thing together often enough to have that unspoken choreography, so they make do with sidesteps and apologies. Benji rinses the seeds and shakes the strainer too vigorously; a few ping out onto the counter and skitter away. The House catches one at the lip with a small nudge of air and drops it back into the bowl. Elias measures spices with the over-precise habit of a man who does not trust anything that comes out of a jar. Benji handles the tossing, with considerably less precision.

  The oven ticks as it heats, then hums softly with warmth.

  While they wait for the heat to do its work, Benji fetches a candle for the pumpkin. Selecting one that smells of cedar and something faintly medicinal, like the inside of an apothecary. He fits it inside the hollow and wiggles the pumpkin to sit properly on the makeshift saucer. The face looks stranger from this angle, the pencil lines catching stray light, eyes empty. He looks like a sleeping creature about to wake.

  “I should have named him,” Benji says, then shakes his head. “No, we can’t. That’s how you get attached. And then it goes all soft and caved-in and we have to bury him with honors.”

  Elias hears himself say, “We could name him now and pretend it is just a title.”

  Benji’s eyes leap. “Oh?” He leans one hip against the table. “What title, your majesty?”

  “Sir,” Elias says, because the pain has receded enough to let humor sneak in. “Sir Gourd Of Low Expectations.”

  Benji folds over the table laughing. It is a very fine feeling to have caused that. The warm feeling in his chest is strange, yet it fits him, as though it had been waiting there a long time.

  When the seeds are in the oven and the timer is set, Benji insists on carrying the pumpkin to the front window. He still asks with his eyes if he may. Elias finds it damnably unfair that so much can be conveyed with a glance. He nods once. Benji lifts carefully. The House opens the way.

  They put the pumpkin in the deep old sill and strike the match. The candle flares and then dampens to a steady glow. The face becomes a lantern, suddenly bold. The crooked smile wavers across the glass. Outside, the wind plucks the hedge and runs away cackling.

  No one will come down this lane to trick-or-treat. That is a fact. Elias still finds himself lingering by the window as if the world might forget facts for one evening and deliver the sound of a small fist on the door. He imagines the conversation.

  We have no candy, he would say.

  We do have roasted seeds, Benji would point out.

  Seeds are not—he would begin, and the children’s faces would do that thing. The thing where their hopeful little structures become ruins. Then The House, inconveniently sentimental, would rattle the pantry and shove the forgotten fudge to the front, and Benji would make three paper ghosts out of napkins and string and give them away. And the children, because children are both storers of miracles and ruthless in their judgments, would go away thinking this was a strange, excellent house.

  He is, he realizes, smiling. He stops at once and puts on a defensible expression.

  “Caught you,” Benji says, because of course.

  “I was thinking of tragic harvest failures,” Elias says. “Historically seasonal.”

  Benji leans his shoulder against Elias’s—lightly, so lightly—and looks out too. “You know,” he says after a pause, “I think you might’ve been my first crush. Back when we were kids. Weird neighbor boy with all the books. I didn’t know what to do with that.”

  Elias blinks, then exhales through his nose. “God help us both.”

  Benji huffs a laugh, still watching the pumpkin glow. “I’m serious. You were quiet and strange and smarter than anyone else I knew. I didn’t stand a chance.”

  Elias studies him sidelong. “And what exactly has changed since then?”

  That earns him a grin, crooked and soft-edged. “Not a damn thing.”

  Elias hesitates, then sets his hand over Benji’s where it rests on the sill. His grip is careful, not tight—more acknowledgment than possession. He keeps his eyes on the lantern’s crooked face as he says, “Then I suppose we both finally got what we wanted.”

  He doesn’t take the hand away. Instead, after a long breath, Elias lets himself lean very slightly back into the shoulder beside him.

  The House holds its breath so that the floor will not groan and embarrass them with an anecdote about stability. The ache in him eases again around the edges, like a dog lying down and putting its chin on its paws.

  They spend too long watching nothing much happen. The pumpkin smiles at the night. The wind smudges shadow across the road. Near the edge of the hedge, where the lane opens between the two oaks, a single leaf detaches and loops toward the ground. It is very theatrical about it. Elias imagines it has been rehearsing all week.

  “Seeds,” Benji says when the timer gives a small polite ding, he pushes away from the window toward the oven.

  Elias shifts to move with him, one hand on the sill to brace himself. The motion pulls across his back, sharp and immediate, and the wince slips out before he can stop it.

  Benji turns at once. He points at him, oven mitts dangling. “Uh-uh. You sit. Oven’s mine.”

  Elias pushes himself a little straighter, as if that alone might erase the slip. “I can manage.”

  “Sure,” Benji says, tugging the mitts on. “But I’ll do it without looking like someone just stabbed me.”

  The words are light, but not without care. Even as he crouches to open the oven, Benji’s gaze flicks back at him, shoulders taut until Elias exhales through his nose and lets his grip on the sill loosen.

  It feels like surrender. It feels like relief. Those two truths sit next to each other on the counter like mismatched salt and pepper shakers.

  Benji retrieves the tray. The seeds have gone golden at the edges, dark in places where the paprika drifted. The smell is immediate and comforting—the oil, the sweet-bitter of the squash, the warmth of spice. He stirs them, hisses when one jumps and kisses his knuckle, sticks the knuckle in his mouth, makes a face.

  “What did we learn,” Elias says.

  “That I survived against impossible odds,” Benji replies, then adds, “and that maybe I should stop touching things straight out of the oven.”

  “Groundbreaking.”

  They spread the seeds to cool. Elias taps one with a fingernail. The House directs a tiny, cool thread of air across the tray. Benji properly thanks it. He has learned. He will never be consistent about shoes or dishes but he is consistent about the things that matter to this place—gratitudes, acknowledgments, the way he turns the deadbolt twice because the House prefers the sound of double assurance.

  They take a bowl of seeds to the sitting room. Elias settles into the dip his body has trained into the couch, easing back carefully so he doesn’t tear anything. Benji chooses one corner that lets him tuck himself sideways. The blanket climbs into his lap with the will of a friendly, heavy cat. The House, never subtle, sets a glass a little closer on the table. Elias rests his fingers against it for a moment in something like a thanks, then leaves it where it is.

  They eat. The seeds crackle between their teeth. Benji makes a face of exaggerated pleasure for the first one and then eats them too quickly for theatrics for the next dozen. He pauses only to check on the candle in the pumpkin, which is doing its job with devotion.

  “Tell me a ghost story,” Benji says.

  Elias raises an eyebrow. “We agreed to no work after sundown for two weeks.”

  “A fictional ghost story,” Benji clarifies. “One that ends with the ghost making you tea and doing the washing up.”

  “That seems like propaganda.”

  Benji snorts. “Fine, I’ll start. Once upon a time there was a pumpkin who wanted to be a lamp. He practiced by sitting in the window and looking very bright. Everyone said, ‘That’s a pumpkin,’ but he said, ‘No, I am a lamp,’ and he believed it so hard that when someone finally put a light inside him, he already knew what to do.”

  “That,” Elias says, “was… something. I’ll give you that much.”

  Benji throws a seed at him. It lands on Elias’s shoulder and stays there, caught in the wool. Neither of them moves it. It feels, absurdly, like a medal issued for bravery in the war against seasonal activities.

  “Your turn,” Benji says.

  Elias considers. He has never been comfortable making up stories. And the ones he knows are either too real or too dull or both. But the pain has pulled back to a reasonable perimeter and the evening has spread itself out like a calm tablecloth and Benji is looking at him as if he is the most interesting person in the world. He could try.

  “A man lived in a house,” he says, which is an awful way to begin a story. “And The House was… not haunted. Just itself. It liked the man. It wanted to keep him. Not to trap him, but to make sure when he came home there would be bread and tea and walls that didn’t mind shielding him from the cold. And one day, the man brought home a fox who had learned how to walk on two legs and tell jokes—”

  “Rude,” Benji says, delighted.

  “—and The House didn’t like the fox at first. The fox left mud on the floor and knocked into the corners. But the fox made the man laugh and sometimes he cooked with too much salt and sometimes not enough, and he talked to The House like it was a person, which it was not, but it liked that anyway. And eventually The House put up hooks by the door for the fox’s coat and made the kitchen a little wider in the places where the fox kept bumping.”

  Benji is very quiet. The seed on Elias’s shoulder chooses this moment to fall off and disappear into the blanket. Elias pretends not to notice. He keeps his eyes on the pumpkin in the window, its crooked face lit by the candle inside.

  “And then?” Benji says softly.

  “And then it was Halloween,” Elias says, “and they carved a pumpkin and The House put its seals in the windows a little tighter because the wind was nosy that night, and the fox was ridiculous and the man was an idiot, and when the lamp went out, no one was frightened. They went to bed.”

  “Ah,” Benji says. “A domestic ending.”

  “There are worse kinds,” Elias says. He clears his throat, the way one does when one has said too much and regretted exactly none of it.

  They sit with that for a while. Elias eventually leans his head back and closes his eyes. He does not sleep. He is not good at sleeping when his body is still filed under the category of Safe? Maybe. He listens with the same alert posture he applies to everything.

  The candle in the front window burns steady. Outside, the night does its night business. There’s a small sound in the hall that might be the coat rack righting itself after an overconfident shift of weight. The House draws a breath and lets it out in the timbers.

  The candle gutters once, and Elias glances up. Benji notices too, but neither of them stirs. The flame steadies again, as if reminded of its job.

  For a moment Elias could almost believe the pumpkin is listening—the crooked grin in the window a little too watchful, the light inside it a little too steady. The House feels it too, but not with alarm; only the kind of attention it gives to a creak in the floor or a new shadow on the wall.

  Elias lets the thought sit and then reaches for another seed.

  Benji cracks one between his teeth and squints at him. “Hate to say it, but we’re extremely cute right now.”

  “God help us,” Elias says.

  “We could put on a movie,” Benji says. “One of the cheesy ones. The kind where teenagers go into the woods for no reason and we yell at them not to split up and then they all split up immediately.”

  “We could,” Elias says. He is not opposed to yelling at fictional teenagers. He is, however, cruelly aware of his own limits. “Or I could give in to being old and horizontal.”

  Benji laughs, soft. “Bed, then.”

  “In a minute,” Elias says, because stubbornness is a precious, foolish gem. He eases himself further down into the couch. The ache takes this as an invitation to be kinder. He closes his eyes. The House dimly approves by lowering the light in the corner lamp a notch.

  He must drift for a very short time because he returns to himself at the brush of a throw being arranged more carefully. Benji has that face he wears when he is fixing things—the line between his brows, the mouth that refuses to be solemn and fails. He tucks the blanket so it touches without trapping. He turns the lamp even lower.

  “Benji,” Elias says without opening his eyes.

  “Hmm?”

  “Don’t blow out the pumpkin.”

  There is a paused laugh in the air, then the quiet shape of a smile. “I wasn’t going to. He should get to do his job.”

  “Good,” Elias says, and lets go a little more. The edge of the world softens. He hears Benji move to the hall, hears the soft thump of his socks on the floorboards, the creak of the floorboard that is absolutely theatrical on purpose. The House likes to be dramatic about certain planks. It enjoys theatrics.

  He hears the front door lock checked again, the kitchen light turned down, the oven knob touched and reassured, yes, you are off. He hears Benji pause by the window. He hears a voice, quiet and ridiculous: “Happy Halloween, Sir Gourd.”

  The House absorbs the blessing. The pumpkin glows with warmth.

  In the near-distance of sleep, Elias hears the wind try out a howl and abandon it for a sigh. He hears, or imagines hearing, the old life clearing its throat outside like someone about to sell you a story at your own doorstep. Inside, the new life does not bother to answer the door.

  He is still not good at holidays. He is not good at a great many things that involve closeness. He is, however, unexpectedly good at being on a couch while someone roasts seeds and makes a face at the window and tells a story where The House is not haunted but companionable. He is very good at not moving when moving would undo him. He is practicing being good at letting someone else move around him without flinching.

  He opens his eyes once more because he always will, because vigilance has earned the right to stay. Benji is in the doorway, half turned back, the lamp behind him, his face gilded at the edges.

  He comes back—three quiet steps, the weight of him soft in the room. He leans down and presses his mouth to Elias’s. It is not long, not demanding, only the kind of kiss that leaves its warmth behind. Elias feels it settle through him, loosening something he usually keeps locked away.

  “Happy Halloween, Elias,” Benji murmurs.

  “Mm,” Elias answers, quiet but certain enough.

  Instead of leaving, he lowers himself onto the couch, fitting easily into the corner beside him. The blanket shifts to cover them both. Elias lets his eyes close again, the warmth at his side unfamiliar but steady. It is an odd feeling, this sense of safety. Odd, but not unwelcome.

  The couch breathes under them like a creature content to be domestic.

  The House listens. Then it draws itself closer about them both the way a larger animal might curl its tail around a smaller. The pumpkin smiles at the dark and does not mind rotting slowly if this is the work it gets to do.

  Elias sleeps, which seems to him like a miracle and will always, possibly, be one.

  In the morning, there will be wax pooled like a coin at the bottom of Sir Gourd’s belly, and a trail of paprika on the counter that’ll stain it for days, and a seed that has somehow lodged itself in the cuff of Elias’s sleeve like a souvenir. And there will be Benji in the kitchen discovering that pumpkin seeds do, in fact, go soft overnight unless you cover them, and The House will push open the pantry and suggest the stale cookies that can be salvaged with heat.

  But that will be the first of November, and tomorrow’s concern. For now: a pumpkin in the window, The House being The House, and two men who are very nearly, almost, just about, fine.