#haycon

Risa never liked winter.

When she was in Ohio State Home 23, the cold air was always a reminder of how much she had to fend for herself. The only gifts she and other StaHo kids ever got were scratchy sweaters that felt like wearing dishcloths, and gifts from each other, hand-made, hand-spoken.

Then, she was kicking AWOL, and it was a miracle she didn't die from the unforgiving frigid chill of Ohio’s winters. Frostbite never did anything more than chip away at her fingernails, but bordering on hypothermic every day had done irreparable damage to her nervous system.

She got sick easier, she got sick harder. Forget staying warm and cozy inside a cabin with the fire burning bright and flickering across the wood—Risa stayed inside because she didn't want to catch a winter cold and have it turn much worse.

When she and Connor had their six months of isolation in Marseille, she evaded the cold and basked in the 54 degree winter days. They both found out very quickly that that lifestyle hadn't been sustainable, because they had been missing one very important person.

“You good, Risa?”

She blinked, tearing her attention away from the window. Hayden padded to the couch, sidling up to her on the couch, two mugs of a hot something in his hands.

“Yeah,” she said, relieving the tension in Hayden's furrowed brow. “Just thinking. I guess I'm doing a lot of that these days.”

Hayden hummed and handed her the mug. It was hot chocolate. Of course it was hot chocolate. There was even a snowman shaped marshmallow bobbing in the cocoa, the smile on its face slowly melting off.

“Thanks.”

Hayden abandoned his mug down on their coffee table to let the heat dissipate, and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Cabin fever, huh?”

Risa snorted. “Tell me about it.”

“Oh, I have. You're going to get sick of my voice before you get sick of being cooped up here.”

Risa took a sip of her cocoa, and it burnt the roof of her mouth. “I’d never.” She set her mug down next to Hayden’s, leaning into his shoulder. “You’re the one thing that has made this winter actually tolerable for me.”

“Awww. I'm touched.”

Risa shook her head, looking at him. “I mean it, Hayden.”

His smirk dropped a little, turning into one that was more genuine, heartfelt. He always smiled that way when Risa caught him off-guard by being completely unfeigned. Never saccharine—that wasn't her style. But she knew that admitting to him that she wouldn't have her life any other way, her life with him in it, dug so deep into his resolve that he was never quite sure how to handle it.

So he smiled a kind of sheepish smile instead and kissed her forehead. “I can only take half the credit—Connor keeps us in line.”

Connor joined them a little while later, with his own mug of cocoa and a half-melted marshmallow, and they watched the snow pile up around their tiny cabin. Completely detached from the rest of the world—but somehow, for the first time in years, Risa didn't feel that same loneliness that always seemed to creep in when the frost did.

Connor and Hayden were not the entire reason why her outlook had started to change. It helped, though, that they had been there for the past few years. It helped that Hayden kept her distracted and Connor held her during the long nights.

Hayden stays in the storks’ hideaway, and despite all his best bluster, he does not leave it. That’s survival for you, he supposes; even when you hate something, you stick with it so long as it keeps you alive. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, even when it belongs to some shadowy organization that won’t tell anyone who it is, not even Starkey. Hayden doesn’t like that degree of mystery, but he doesn’t like a lot here, and yet he stays.

It’s more comfortable than the Graveyard, at least. Maybe he’s losing his mind between Starkey’s dictatorship and the uncanny feeling that something out there much bigger and much more sinister than any Stork Club bully is pulling their strings, but it beats roasting alive in a broken down jet. 

Hayden wonders if he’ll ever forgive himself for choosing to send his friends from the ComBom to harvest camps instead of dying back there in the overheated metal shell of their favorite grounded plane. There is quite a lot for him to forget, although he can patch over any cracks with some bad jokes and sarcastic one-liners.

The Graveyard was– a lot, really. Good and bad and ugly. It kept him from the parts pirates and the Juvey-cops. It trapped him in one spot and gave him the foolish hope that he could, at any point in his life, stop running. It provided him with good friends to lose to Chop Shop knives.

Still, he misses it whenever he closes his eyes. And, if he’s feeling particularly truthful, he misses Connor more than anything. Connor wouldn’t have put up with Starkey’s sadistic, aggressive nonsense. He would have shut the whole thing down before anyone got hurt, before doctors ended up strung from the ceiling at harvest camps.

If Connor was here, Hayden wouldn’t feel as alone. He doesn’t like it. Gives him the shivers. Hayden can push away everyone in sight, can laugh and scream over his own bitter, jaded jokes, but it’s not enough. Every comedian’s better when they have an audience, and Connor listened. Even liked him better than the rest. You feel something like that and argue that you wouldn’t miss it when it’s gone.

Connor isn’t here, though, because Connor’s clever, more clever than Hayden, and he found out a way to save himself without getting stuck under the bloody thumb of Mason Michael Starkey. Hayden has no idea where he is at the moment, but, swiveling back and forth in his chair before the computer no one should let him near, he simultaneously hopes it’s close enough to touch and far, far away. Far enough away that he won’t get stuck in Starkey’s grasp. Near enough to save Hayden before he has to do something troublesome like save himself.

Hayden nudges the computer, blinking in the sudden blue glow of the screen. He navigates to the recording app, clears his throat, and presses play.

“This is Radio Free Hayden,” he begins, “and any Whollies, if you’re out there, I hope you’re listening hard.”