Beautiful Secrets (Cranksepticeye Fanfiction)

~12.08~ Waist Deep

There was only so much trouble you could get into before the threat wasn't even a threat anymore. At some point, you'd waded so far in you had no choice but to paddle through the middle, if you had any chance of making it to the other side. It was classic Mark Logic, but I was starting to see the genius in it. Maybe you can't really understand it yourself until you're waist deep in it.
By the next day, that's where we were, Jack and me. Waist deep. It started with forging a note with one of Anna's #2 pencils, then cutting school to read a stolen book we weren't supposed to have in the first places, and ended wuth a pack of lies about an extra-credit "project" we were working on together. I was pretty sure Anna was going to catch on about two seconds after I said the words extra credit, but she had been on the phone with my Aunt Caroline discussing my dad's "condition."
I felt guilty about all the lying, not to mention the stealing, forging, and mind erasing, but we didn't have time for school; we had too much actual studying to do.
Because we had The Book of Moons. It was real. I could hold it in my hands-
"Ouch!" It burned my hand, like I had touched a hot stove. The Book dropped to the floor of Jack's bedroom. Boo Radley barked from somewhere in the house. I could hear his paws click their way up the stairs, toward us.
"Door." Jack spoke without looking up from an old Latin dictionary. His bedroom door slammed shut, just as Boo reached the landing. He protested with a resentful bark. "Stay out of my room, Boo. We're not doing anything. I'm about to start practicing."
I stared at the door, surprised. Another lesson from Macon, I guessed. Jack didn't even react, as if he'd done it a thousand times. It was like the stunt he pulled on Reece and Aunt Del last night. I was starting to think the closer we got to his birthday, the more the Caster was coming out in they boy.
I was trying not to notice. But the more I tried, the more I noticed.
He looked over at me, rubbing my hands on my jeans. They still hurt. "What part about 'you can't touch it if you're not a Caster' are you not getting?"
"Right. That part."
He opened up a battered black case and pulled out his viola. "It's almost five. I've got to start practicing or Uncle Macon will know when he gets up. He always knows."
"What? Now?" He smiled and sat on a chair in the corner of his room. Adjusting the instrument with his chin, he picked up a long bow and set it to the strings. For a moment, he didn't move, and closed his eyes like we were at a philharmonic, instead of sitting in his bedroom. And then he began to play. The music crawled up from his hands and out into the room, moving through the air like another one of his undiscovered powers. The sheer white curtains hanging at his window began to stir, and I heard the song-

Sixteen moons, sixteen years,
The Claiming Moon, the hour nears,
In these pages Darkness clears,
Powers Bind what fire sears . . .

As I watched, Jack slid himself out of the chair and carefully placed his viola back where he had been sitting, He wasn't playing it anymore, but the music was still pouring out of it, He leaned the bow against the chair, and sat down next to me on the floor.
Shh.
That's practicing?
"Uncle M doesn't seem to know the difference. "And look-" He pointed over to the door, where I could see a shadow, and hear a rhythmic thump. Boo's tail. "He likes it, and I like to have him in front of my door. Think of it as sort of an anti-adult alarm system." He had a point.
Jack knelt by the Book and picked it up easily in his hands. When he opened the pages again, we saw the same thing we had been staring at all day. Hundreds of Casts, careful lists written in English, Latin, Gaelic, and other languages I didn't recognize, one composed of strange curling letters I had never seen before. The thin brown pages were fragile, almost translucent. The parchment was covered with dark brown ink, in an ancient and delicate script. At least what I hoped was ink.
He tapped his finger on the strange writing and handed me the Latin dictionary. "It's not Latin. See for yourself."
"I think it's Gaelic. Have you ever seen anything like that before?" I pointed to the curling script.
"No. Maybe it's some kind of old Caster language."
"Too bad we don't have a Caster dictionary."
"We do, I mean, my Uncle should. He has hundreds of Caster books, down in his library. It's no Lunae Libri, But it probably has what we're looking for."
"How long do we have before he's up?"
"Not long enough."
I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt down over my palm and used the material to handle the Book, as if I was using one of Anna's oven mitts. I flipped through the thin pages; they bent nosily under my touch as if they were made of dry leaves, instead of paper. "Does any of this mean anything to you?"
Jack shook his head. "In my family, before your Claiming you aren't really allowed to know anything." He pretended to pore over the pages. "In case you go Dark, I guess." I knew enough to let it drop.
Page after page, there was nothing we could even begin to comprehend. There were pictures, some frightening, some beautiful. Creatures, symbols, animals - even the human-looking faces managed to look anything but human in The Book of Moons. As far as I was concerned, It was like an encyclopedia from another planet.
Jack pulled the Book into his lap. "There's so much I don't know, and it's all so-"
"Trippy?"
I leaned against his bed, looking at the ceiling. There were words everywhere, new words, and numbers. I could see the countdown, the numbers scribbled against the walls of his room as if it was a jail cell.
100, 78, 50 . . .
How much longer would we be able to sit around like this? Jack's birthday was getting closer, and his powers were already growing. What if he was right, and he grew into something unrecognizable, something so Dark, he wouldn't even know or care about me? I stared at the viola in the corner until I just didn't want to see it anymore. I closed my eyes and listened to the Caster melody. And then I heard Jack's voice-
". . . Until the darkening bringes the thyme of clayming, at the sizteenthe moone, when the person of powere has the freedome of wille & agencie to caste the eternal chice, in the end of daye, or the laste moment of the laste oure, under the clayming moone . . ."
We looked at each other.
"How did you just-" I looked over his shoulder.
"He turned the page. "It's English. These pages are written in English. Someone started to translate it, here in the back. See how the ink is a different color?" He was right.
When the pages in English must have been hundreds of years old. The page was written in another elegant script, but it wasn't the same writing, and it wasn't written in the same brownish ink, or whatever it was.
"Flip to the back."
He held up the Book, reading,
"The Clayming, once bound, cannot be unbound. The choice, once cast, cannot be recast. A person of powere falles into the great darkening or the great light, for all tyme. If tyme passes & the laste oure of the sixteenthe moone flees ubound, the order things is undone. This must not be, the booke wille binde that whiche is unbound for all tyme."
"So there's no getting around this Claming thing?"
"That's what I've been trying to tell you."
I stared at the words that didn't bring me any closer to understanding. "But what happens, exactly, during the Claiming? Does the Claiming Moon send downs some kind of Caster beam, or something?"
He scanned the page. "It dosen't exactly say. All I know is it takes place under the moon, at midnight- 'In the midst of the great darknesse & undere the great light, from whiche we came' But it can happen anywhere. It's nothing you can really see, it just happens. No Caster beam involved."
"But what happens exactly?" I wanted to know everything, and it still felt like he was holding something back. He kept his eyes on the page.
"For most Casters, it's a conscious thing, just like it says here. The Person of Power, the Caster, Casts the Eternal Choice. They choose if they want to Claim themselves Light or Dark. That's what the free will and agency is all about, like Mortals choose to be good or bad, but Casters make the Choice for all time. They choose the life they want to lead, the way they will interact with the magical universe, and one another. It's a covenant they make with the natural world, the Order of Things. I know that sounds crazy."
"When you're sixteen? How are you supposed to know who you are and who you want to be for the rest of your life by then?"
"Yeah, well, those are the lucky ones. I don't even get a choice."
I almost couldn't bring myself to ask the question. "So what will happen to you?"
"Reece says you just change. It happens in a second, like a heartbeat. You feel this energy, this power moving through your body, almost like you're coming to life for the first time." He looked wistful. "At least, that's what Reece said."
"That doesn't sound so bad."
"Reece described it as an overwhelming warmth. She said it felt like the sun was shining on her, and no one else. And at that moment, she said you just know which path has been chosen for you." It sounded too easy, too painless, like he was leaving something out. Like the part about what what it felt like when a Caster went Dark. But I didn't want to put it out there, even if I knew we were nothing thinking about it.
Just like that?
Just like that. It doesn't hurt or anything, if that's what you're worried about.
That was one of the things I was worried about but it wasn't the only thing.
I'm not worried.
Me neither.
And this time, we made a point of staying away from what we were both thinking, even to ourselves.
The sun crept across the braided rug on Jack's floor, the orange light turning all the colors of the braid into a hundred different kinds of gold. For a moment, Jack's face, his eyes, his hair, everything the light touched turned to gold. He was gorgeous, a hundred years and a hundred miles away, and just like the faces in the Book, somehow not quite human.
"Sundown. Uncle Macon will be up, any minute. We have to put the Book away." He closed it, zipping it back into my bag. "You take it. If my Uncle finds it, he'll just try to keep it from me, like everything else."
"I just can't figure out what he and Anna are hiding. If all this stuff is going to happen and there's noting anyone can do to stop it, why not tell us everything?"
He woundn't look at me. I pulled him into my arms, and he lay his head against my chest. He didn't say a word, but between two layers of sweatshirts and sweaters, I could steel feel his heart beating against mine.
He looked over at the viola until the music died out, dimming like the sun in the window.