Beautiful Secrets (Cranksepticeye Fanfiction)

~11.01~ The Writing on the Wall

In the morning, I had no idea where I was. Then I saw the words covering the walls and the iron bed and the windows and the mirrors, all scrawled with Sharpie in Jack's handwriting, and I remembered.
I lifted my head up, and wiped the drool off my cheek. Jack was still sacked out; I could just see the edge of his foot hanging over the side of the bed. I pushed myself up, my back stiff from sleeping on the floor. I wondered who had brought us down from the attic, or how.
My cell phone went off; my default alarm clock, so Anna would only have to yell up the stairs three times to get me up. Only today, it wasn't blaring "Bohemian Rasphody." It was the song. Jack sat up, startled, groggy.
"What happ-"
"Shh. Listen."

The song had changed.

Sixteen moons, sixteen years,
Sixteen times you dreamed my fears,
Sixteen will try to Bind the spheres,
Sixteen screams but just one hears . . .

"Stop it!" He grabbed my cell and turned off, but the song kept playing.
"It's about you, I think. But what's the Binding the spheres?"
"I almost died last night. I'm sick of everything being about me. I'm sick of all these weird things happening to me. Maybe the stupid song is about you, for a change. You're actually the only sixteen-year-old here." Frustrated, Jack flung his hand up in the air and opened it. He closed it into a fist, and banged it against the floor like he was killing a spider.
The music stopped. There was no messing with Jack today. I couldn't blame him, to be honest. He looked green and wobbly, like Mark did the morning after the morning Savannah had dared him to drink the old bottle of peppermint schnapps out of her mom's pantry, on the last day of school before winder break. Three years later and he still wouldn't eat a candy cane.
Jack's hair was sticking out in about fifteen different directions, and his eyes were puffy from crying. So this was what he looked like in the morning. I tried not to think about Anna and what the hell I was going to pay when I got home.
I crawled up onto the bed and pulled Jack into my lap, running my hand through his crazy hair. "Are you okay?"
He shut his eyes and buried his face in my sweatshirt. I knew I must reek like a wild possum by now. "I think so."
"I could hear you screaming, all the way from my house."
"Who knew Kelting would save my life."
I had missed something, as usual. "What's Kelting?"
"That's what it's called, the way we're able to communicate with each other no matter where we are. Some Casters can Kelt, some can't. Ridley and I used to be able to talk to each other in school that way, but-"
"I thought you said it had never happened to you before?"
"It's never happened to me before with a Mortal. Uncle Macon says it's really rare."
I like the sound of that.
Jack nudged me. "It's from the Celtic side of my family. It's how Casters used to get messages to each other, during the Trials. In the States, they used to call it 'The Whispering.' "
"But I'm not a Caster."
"I know, it's really weird. It's not supposed to work with Mortals." Of course it wasn't.
"Don't you think it's a little more than weird? We can do this Kelting thing, Ridley got into Ravenwood because of me, even your uncle said I can protect you somehow. How is that possible? I mean, I'm not a Caster. My parents are different, but they're not that different."
He leaned into my shoulder. "Maybe you don't have to be a Caster to have power."
I pushed his hair out of his eyes. "Maybe you just have to fall for one."
I said it, just like that. No stupid jokes, no changing the subject. For once, I wasn't embarrassed, because it was the truth. I had fallen. I think I had always been falling. And he might as well know, if he didn't already, because there was no going back now. Not for me.
He looked up at me, and the whole world disappeared. Like there was just us, like there would always be just us, and we didn't need magic for that. It was sort of happy and sad, all at the same time. I couldn't be around him without feeling things, without feeling everything.
What are you thinking?
He smiled.
I think you can figure it out. You can read the writing on the wall.
And as he said it, there was writing on the wall. It appeared slowly, one word at a time.