The Keepers' Evil: The Shattered Star

And you, my star, are far too perfect to be cold

It was only his house, the one that he had bought, the one that was jigsawed between two others with matching white ornate wall fittings and had a squeaky black gate that he was yet to fix. It was only his house, the one that was wedged halfway between the countryside and the city smoke. It was only his house, the one that he had bought for Josephine and watched as her eyes welled with tears as she stepped into it for the first time. It was only his house, so why did it feel so terrifyingly unfamiliar?

His fingers were sticky, stained in blood that had long dried in the frozen globules of air as he had stood before the front door to his house, too terrified to enter to find his heart who had waited up for him three hours past when he said he would have been home. He could feel the warmth of that little warm yellow light in the living room, the one that sat beside the couch and leaked from the window panes, the one that replaced the main light in the evenings because Josephine forbade that they use a light so harsh in the evening and that that one was enough.

Everything was so perfect, so in-tune with his dreams, so in line with the calm that Josephine craved, but it was him that did not fit in. He had approached his beautiful home caked in a blood too crimson to have been from a paper cut, with a shirt too creased from the dying hands of far too many, with eyes as swollen as Celeste's had been when he had left her to leave the manor. He knew that he was the very odd one out when he had mustered up enough courage to peel open the rusted gold of the lock and face his home, his Josie who leapt from her half asleep slump on the couch that she had chosen when they had first moved in.

"Merlin, Hugo! What happened?" The gasp in her tone fit into the perfect, however backward it seemed. She loved him, she cared for him in a way that calmed whatever he had seen that night. He had not even closed the door, he had not moved from the doorway either, not since his eyes had decided to fixate onto Josie, his Josie, to forget the pupils that had faded with their light as he hadn't saved them. He hadn't saved any them.

It took him several moments of stuttering and a lifetime of seconds of flickering his line of sight between Josephine's eyes and the deep splatters against his hands, before she had taken his wrists into her fingers to tug him through the house where his feet wouldn't allow. Her hands were so warm, her eyes were so beautiful, their house was so hers, and he had caused so much hurt.

Hugo was certain that Josephine had called his name as she led him with a certain urgency through to their bathroom, he was sure that she had shaken him and tapped his cheek lightly with her finger as though she was trying to wake someone who was simply asleep. His ears were so full, muffling every sound that came from his Josephine, dampening every word that he should have listened to, and he was not sure that his conscious really awoke until her hands washed his with the sting of barely warm water.

"It's not mine, Josie." He could feel her eyes attached to the sight of the pink bubbles that emanated from his fingers as he took over the motion of washing them himself, unravelling the tie from his neck in a desperation that caused it to slink onto the tiled floor beneath them. His words shook with a violence that startled Josephine, forcing her to physically recoil and jump beside him, and Hugo could tell where her thoughts lay.

If it was not his blood, it was Celeste's or Gabriel's or Corvinus', at least that is what Josephine's brain had decided to tell her. She knew that he had left for Selwyn Manor at eleven thirty, that he would not be a minute later than seven thirty home. Josephine was too meticulous about time, she counted every minute when she knew that his destination lay with one of the order, and when he had not returned until ten forty-five, her mind was forced into the scariest of places. She had not so much approved the visit to the order, she had grown wary of its safety. She would always belong to it, for Gabriel and Celeste, but she was growing scared of the pain that Hugo seemed to feel whenever he came back home.