#aro creators

“Hey, tell me again why we decided to travel in the summer?” Petra groaned for the thousandth time. “I swear, the summers have gotten hotter. Or am I just getting too old to handle it?”

“Petra, you’re only fourteen, quit being dramatic,” I retorted, rolling my eyes. “Besides, we could have stayed in Verdigris longer, but someone was getting impatient.”

“Oh, are you referring to yourself?” Petra shot back.

“Shut up.”

I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the blazing sun and squinted down the road. In the distance, I could just make out the figures of two royal guards, leaning against the façade of a local inn. Frankly, the odds of either of them being able to recognize me out of context were marginal at best, but it wasn’t a risk worth taking. (I also wasn’t quite sure how effective Bertrand’s love potions had been or how long they lasted, and I really wasn’t eager to find out.) I turned heel and retreated the way we had come, and Petra no longer needed to ask to understand why.

“You’re right, though, the sun is very bright these days,” I mused, wiping the sweat from my brow with my shirtsleeve. “Should I start wearing hats? Maybe it’d be a good disguise.”

“I think you might as well wear a big sign that says ‘Look, I’m suspicious!’” Petra snarked.

“Not any sort of fancy hat, obviously,” I huffed. “I meant, like, a straw sunhat. Like a farmer.”

Petra sputtered and laughed mercilessly, doubling over alongside me.

"What, do you think I would look funny in a farmer’s hat? I could look the part!”

“Yeah, with the bow and arrow and everything,” Petra wheezed. “Typical farmer. If I saw you walking down the street, I’d immediately think you had something to hide.”

We took a break from the sun in the shade of a tall oak tree, in a quiet corner of the town where only a few passersby came down the road. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees away from the sun’s rays, and we both sighed in relief, taking large swigs of water from our canteens.

“Have you ever thought about what comes next?” Petra asked, picking absentmindedly at a fresh bug bite on her arm.

“I mean, we should probably find something to eat, and a place to camp out for the night.”

“No, I mean in the future.”

“Not really,” I sighed. “We could go back to Verdigris eventually, hole up for the winter there. We could keep trying to blend in here, or who knows, there’s a whole world out there far beyond Amistadia.”

Petra chuckled, and I shot her a suspicious look. She raised her hands in defense.

“It’s nothing, I just never thought I’d see you without an over-thought plan,” she explained.

I shrugged. “What good did that do me before?”

So far, that summer had wrought us nothing in terms of success since we returned to Amistadia. With the royal guard now calling the shots, very little had changed, materially speaking, though their increased presence had certainly sparked a heightened sense of suspicion in the air, as though people were beginning to wonder whether they were being pinned down. Our efforts to spread the truth and connect with the rest of the Heartless had so far been significantly hampered by my ever-present need to play dead, but I was not feeling particularly deterred. There was still hope fluttering within me, alive and well, and while it was possible those wings would melt under the relentless summer sun, it didn’t matter. I would simply grow them anew again, a thousand times over if that was what it took.

“Should we keep walking? I think there’s a farmer’s market down the road,” Petra suggested.

I nodded and pushed to my feet. We continued down the street, Petra already grumbling about the sun again.

“You know, maybe I should get a hat,” she ribbed.

A light and airy chuckle escaped my lungs.

Over time, Petra grew antsy. A peaceful, quiet life of complacency—no matter how appealing from the start—was foreign to her, having been far out of reach her entire life. I felt no differently; the thought of all the people we had left behind weighed heavily on my mind, and I knew it was on hers too. We’d been part of a community that had been scattered to the wind; most of our friends and neighbors were still out there, somewhere, waiting for some kind of answer. There was a part of me that wanted desperately to stay still, to settle permanently in Verdigris and pretend as though the past had never happened. But there was another part of me that didn’t even know how.

It was thoughts like these that found me in the meadow next to Frida’s house at dawn one crystal-clear morning as the spring began to melt into summer, stringing together a crown of wildflowers to occupy my hands. I recognized Basil’s approach behind me by the sound of his slightly uneven footsteps rustling through the grass before he came to a stop beside me.

“You’re up early,” he commented.

“I was having trouble sleeping,” I replied, joining the two ends of the chain together. “Here, bend down.”

Basil obliged, bending at the hip, and I placed my finished crown on top of his head. “Crowning the king,” I thought to myself wistfully. He reached up and turned it over in his hands, examining my work.

“You have steadier hands than I remember,” he noted. Then he smirked. “But you still aren’t very good.”

I feigned offense. “That’s how you treat my gift?”

Basil replaced the crown on his head and dropped down to the grass beside me.

After a few moments, I inquired, “Basil, can I ask you something a little bit intense?”

“Of course.” Basil began plucking wildflowers from the space around him.

“Why did I ever want to feel human?”

“What do you mean?”

I hesitated, unsure how to fathom the whirlwind in my chest into something intelligible. Eventually, I settled on, “Well, if being human is so ideal then why are we so terrible? Why do humans spread hate and lies and kill or displace so many innocent people? People have died by my hands, both directly and indirectly, and if that’s what makes me not so different from every other human then maybe I don’t want to be human at all. Maybe I just want to float aimlessly through some void somewhere and never see or be seen by anyone ever again. I spent so many years wishing I could be human instead of a monster, only to realize they were the same thing.”

Ever wise beyond his years and mine, Basil set aside his half-finished creation and reasoned, “The question is not whether humans are good or bad, but rather how to reconcile so much kindness and goodwill with so much evil. The truth is each of us has the capacity for good and bad, and having done things you regret does not make you deplorable or beyond redemption. It just makes you human. And maybe it’s like you said and being human is the most monstrous thing you can be, but I like to think it’s also the most beautiful.”

“You say that so easily,” I mused. For someone who has experienced such violence, I did not add, but Basil seemed to understand, nonetheless.

He chuckled and returned to his steady and practiced weaving.

“Over time, life puts things into perspective.”

“What do you say of love, then?”

“Love has very little to do with it, at least not in the sense you’re talking about. Heart or no heart, there’s blood rushing through your veins, isn’t there? You’re a whole person, Ace. You’re alive. That’s really all there is to it.”

“It doesn’t feel that simple,” I muttered.

Basil shrugged. “I never said it was simple.”

A few minutes passed in companionable silence as the sun started to climb over the tree line and the commune began to buzz with activity, signaling the start of a brand new spring morning.

“I think Petra and I are going to go back soon,” I said eventually. “We finished the fence.”

Basil hummed. “I thought you might say that.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” I asked hopefully.

Basil smiled sadly, fixing his gaze somewhere—or some time—beyond the horizon.

“Ace, I’m tired. I fought with all I could at the age of ten. Please understand that I can never go back to that place again. I’m just… tired.”

“I understand,” I whispered, trying to hide my disappointment, though I’d anticipated his answer.

“Besides,” Basil sat up a little straighter, “the people here need me, that’s my role in this fight. But I’ll still be here whenever you come back, and that’s a promise.”

I smiled. “You’d better keep that promise,” I warned.

The flower crown that Basil had been weaving landed on the top of my head. I turned in surprise to see a sunny grin plastered across his face, an older, wiser reflection of himself from all those many years ago.

By the time I broke through to the other side of the forest, I had worried my bottom lip into a bruised and bleeding mess, and the overgrown brambles had left angry scratches on my arms and legs. It had been a while since I’d had anything to eat or drink, and even longer still since I’d seen another person. For days as I traveled, thoughts of Swallow’s Point occupied my every waking moment. I was certain that Basil was dead, and that his final memories would be of me running away and leaving him behind.

Maybe he could have come with me, I thought. Maybe I could have saved the both of us. But it was too late for that now, and I spent every fleeting spare thought trying to convince myself that I had done what was right.

Past the brink of exhaustion, I dragged myself up the hill in front of me, past an impressively big oak tree and an old, rusty gate. At the crest of the hill, I reached a small, run-down cottage. A dirt road stretched out beyond the house, leading to a cluster of other stout buildings with stone facades and tiny gardens.

Putting an end to the consecutive worst days of my life, I knocked on the door.

And then I knocked again.

And then I knocked some more.

“Hello?” I called desperately. “Can you help me?”

I waited, but no one came to the door. It seemed like no one was home, so I turned and was about to keep walking down the road when the door opened—just a crack at first, and then wider, to reveal a bearded old man with a stony frown. He looked me up and down once, and the frown deepened considerably.

“Excuse me,” I said meekly, taking a tiny step backward. “M-My parents said I’d be safe here. My name’s Ace, and I think the whole world hates me.”

“Your parents sent you?” the old man asked. He had a gruff but non-aggressive voice to match his demeanor.

I shook my head.

“I had to run away,” I clarified vaguely. “Everyone was going to find out that I’m Heartless.” I startled at my own words. “I’m Heartless,” I repeated. I’d never said it out loud before, not even to Basil or my parents. It had always just been an unspoken truth.

The old man paused for a moment, and then he opened the door all the way and stepped aside. “My name is Bertrand,” he said. “Come inside. You look like you could use a good meal.”

With that, I stepped across the threshold and into the next seven years of my life.

  The inside of Bertrand’s house was humble, somewhat in poor shape in comparison to my family home in Swallow’s Point. There was a wood burning stove and a wash basin, and an old rickety wooden table in the center of the room that looked as though it barely saw any use. There was a cot on the far side of the room, where Bertrand instructed me to sit and rest while he fixed me something to eat. Once I had some soup and bread in my stomach and a tall drink of water, Bertrand disappeared into a room at the back of the house and returned moments later with an array of bottles, a small cloth, and a basin of water. Then he pulled up one of the dining chairs in front of me and wet the cloth before tending gingerly to my cuts and scrapes. Other than occasionally instructing me to move one way or the other, he worked wordlessly, and I sat quietly as he did so.

“What did you do to your lip?” he eventually asked, dabbing at a particularly nasty cut on my arm with liquid from one of the little bottles.

“I was biting it too much,” I explained.

Bertrand hummed and advised, “You should avoid making a habit of that.”

I didn’t respond.

“What’s in the bottles?” I asked instead.

“I’m a potion master,” Bertrand answered. “It’s useful for healing.”

“Do you help heal the other people in the village?” I wondered. After all, the best doctor in Swallow’s Point was a potion master by trade.

“Sometimes,” was Bertrand’s reply. “But they have mostly stopped asking, as I have become very busy. I am looking for a way to reverse the curse.”

“Really?” I exclaimed, lighting up. “That’s amazing!”

Bertrand chuckled somberly and didn’t say anything more on the matter. He rinsed the cloth in the basin of water, which was now growing murky. Then, he applied one of the other liquids to it and held it out to me.

“Hold this to your lip,” he instructed. When I hesitated, he explained, “It’s yarrow and chamomile. It should help with the bruising, and the chamomile may help you sleep.” He sat there for a moment and waited for me to do as he indicated before he stood and gathered up the bottles to return to their proper place.

“You should rest,” he suggested. “It seems you’ve had a difficult journey.”

I nodded and lay down on the cot. Bertrand seemed satisfied and disappeared into the back room. The cot was admittedly not very comfortable, but after all that I’d been through, it may as well have been the softest mattress in the world.

A dull sense of sorrow hung over Petra and I as we reversed course back to Verdigris, swirling like a black hole in my chest. The tree branches seemed to hang heavier than before, standing stark and gray despite their new growth. The air between us felt thicker than it ever had, and we spent many of our waking hours in tense silence. Petra’s aura had changed since we had last seen each other; she was more cautious, not so bold and brazen as she had been less than a year ago. Whereas in the past I always saw a glimmer of Basil’s childlike wonder and innocence when I looked in her eyes, now I could only see myself, and it made my stomach churn with guilt.

“Supposedly there’s some sort of provisional government in place right now,” Petra informed me glumly while we made camp one night.

“Yeah?” I glanced over at her from where I was preparing the fire. “You know anything about it?”

Petra shook her head.

“It’s only temporary anyway,” she lamented. “I’m sure that before we know it, things will be back to the way they were before. It’s not like anybody but us knows what actually happened.”

The pessimism was new, I noted. I chose not to press her for more information, and the conversation died out for the rest of the night.

Another day, Petra stalked through the woods alongside me with her shoulders hunched and fists clenched at her sides. She was noticeably on edge, jumping onto the defensive at every rustle of the bushes or passing shadow of an animal. The agonized way with which she carried herself was horrifyingly familiar. And again—there was that nagging pit of guilt swirling uncontrollably in my stomach that screamed you caused this.

“Petra,” I blurted at one point, startling her out of her own head. She glared up at me, but there was no fire in it at all.

“You know none of what happened is your fault, right?” I asked gently. “This is all on me. You did everything you could, and you saved a lot of lives that day.”

While it didn’t completely dissipate, the tension in Petra’s shoulders seemed to soften, if only just a bit. She kicked at a stray pebble in the dirt and shrugged.

“I don’t really think it’s your fault, either,” she admitted, “in retrospect. I was mad that you didn’t come back for months; I thought you just did your damage and disappeared, like you didn’t care.”

“I wanted to come back,” I insisted. “I had a gaping wound in my chest!”

“I know that now,” Petra shot back. “So, I’m not mad. I know who the real enemy is and has always been, trust me. It’s just a lot, for me to process.”

“Believe me when I tell you I understand that completely,” I huffed.

“You know…” Petra shoved her hands into her pockets. “After all this time you still never told me what happened. With Basil, when you were little.”

I shrugged.

“Well, it’s his story,” I pointed out. “If you want to know so bad, ask him yourself.”

 “Do you think he would tell me?”

“Probably not.”

Petra sputtered indignantly and shoved me to the side, grumbling to herself with her arms crossed over her chest. But she didn’t press any further, and the silence that dropped into the gap was warmer than the one that had come before.

A beat passed, and then Petra teasingly asked, “So, can I see the scar?”

"Huh?” I did a double-take and glanced down at her. The playful smirk on her face and the faint flicker of tenacity in her eyes, however infuriating, soothed the swirling unease in my gut just a little.

“What? No.” I shook my head vigorously and turned front.

Petra bust out laughing, bright and clear. I smiled to myself.

Yeah, we’d be alright.

 * * *

  Unsurprisingly, Basil was stunned beyond belief to open the front door and find that I had returned so soon. He joked something like, “When I said you’d be back, I didn’t mean right away,” but something in the way he glanced between Petra and I told me he knew something had gone terribly wrong.

Frida welcomed us both with open arms, and once we had introductions out of the way, Petra and I relayed the story over bowls of soup that we barely touched. The entire time, I felt like I was going to be sick with guilt—this must have been evident on my face, as I could feel Basil eyeing me from across the table even as Petra prattled on and her words turned to cotton in my ears.

“Ace?” Petra beckoned, jostling me out of my stupor with her elbow. “Are you okay?”

My stomach lurched. I sucked in a deep breath and looked over; her expression was tight, brow furrowed. My hands were shaking, so I quickly hid them under the table. Basil’s eyes bore holes in my skull. Frida was at the kitchen counter, cleaning up.

“Yeah, I’m alright,” I replied unconvincingly. “Don’t worry about me, Petra.”

“No thank you, I think I will continue to worry about you.”

“Hey,” Basil called softly from the other side of the table. I looked up to meet his eyes, soft with concern.

“I feel awful and we’re talking about people I don’t know. I can only imagine how much you’ve been bottling up,” he said. “It’s okay to grieve, Ace. I promise.”

Petra reached under the table and slid one of her hands into mine, and that was all it took. Something in my chest ripped open and everything came gushing out all at once until I was sobbing myself raw and ragged in the middle of Frida’s kitchen, with Petra squeezing my hand and Basil rubbing gently at the space between my shoulder blades. Frida wiped my face as I wept, and the three of them remained there beside me without judgment as the grief spilled out of me, until I finally stopped crying and asked Frida if she could make me some tea.

 * * *

  Petra and I returned to our old tricks, helping neighbors with chores in exchange for other favors, or sometimes for nothing at all. Our preferred pastime was working in the community garden, and that spring, we planted several new beds and committed ourselves to single-handedly repairing the weather-worn fence to keep the animals out.

“Do you think the others are okay?” Petra wondered aloud one afternoon, holding a fence stake in place while I hammered it into the ground with another piece of wood.

I paused my hammering and replied, “I would hope so.”

“I worry about them,” Petra mused. “I wonder what Amistadia is like now.”

“To be honest, I’d be scared to find out,” I admitted, straightening up and stretching my shoulders. “I guess I’m still a coward.”

Petra frowned, looking at me curiously.

Then, she said, “You were never a coward,” and did not elaborate as she walked away to grab another wooden stake from the pile.

I often wondered idly about Esther, and whether she’d found peace, and Knife Boy, and whether he’d found what he was looking for. Sometimes, I even thought about Swallow’s Point, and Carita and Marcus and the rest, and wondered if they, too, could change. The nightmares never fully went away, but they became more manageable, and the pangs of grief and guilt I’d been amassing for years slowly faded to a dull ache.

We planted a small herb garden at the back of the garden plot, and I privately dedicated it to Bertrand. It was an apology and a thank you all at once.