#puppetpainter

He was first drawn to them in the halls of the ward they were taken into when they were around seventeen. They were just oozing despair and it looked like an easy dinner for the spirit.

But instead of killing them as he would with any other victim, Jonathan found himself... intrigued, enchanted by Helen's lack of tone and expression. It was fun. It was new. It was a change from the screaming and mutilation he'd come to expect from those in mental care.

He studied them a LOT. He'd watch them sleep (a habit he never grew out of even years down the road), he'd watch them eat, he'd watch them live. And every day he found himself wanting less and less to see them dead.

As for Helen, the hospital was a shitty place, but at the very least it kept them alive long enough for them to snap out of whatever depressive pit they were stuck in, and the food wasn't too bad so they couldn't really complain.

Throughout their stay, Helen would always feel like they were being watched, but just brushed it off as being the meds and the security messing with their head. After all, Helen was always observing the other patients, why wouldn't someone be staring right back? It made sense in their mind, taught them to be a little more subtle with their looks.

Despite not having seen Jonathan, Helen found that their drawings began to feature an unfamiliar man. One with dark curls and glowing eyes... One who they could swear visited them in their dreams. (In sleep he sang to meee, in dreams he cameee. Sorry, I'll shut up)

So, when they managed to escape the facility after almost two years of excessive containment, Helen was greatly unsurprised to find a glowing spirit in their bedroom one evening while they were painting. It was a relief somewhat that they hadn't lost what was left of their sanity.

The dating began after a few weeks of 'flirting'. AKA Helen staring unblinkingly at Jonathan while draining people of their blood, and Jonathan eventually beginning to help drain said people by hanging them from the ceiling over buckets and delivering the buckets as gifts. And they say romance is dead.

They had a good first year, minimal breakdowns, minimal attempts, minimal police showing up at their door. All in all, a decently healthy (if slightly unstable) relationship, one built on completely unfiltered conversations and a large amount of sarcasm.

They had one screaming match right at the start, fuelled by a bad mental state and Helen's unresolved romantic issues (AKA their first ever crush mysteriously falling off a roof in front of them) but all in all it went surprisingly well.

(Side note, I thought about Love Quinn while writing that. I miss that diva so bad.)

Helen was fully prepared to have to mask up their emotions, to smile and scowl so that Jonathan wouldn't run away from their apparent apathy... Turns out that wasn't necessary at all, he caught on pretty quick to what makes them tick (in both good and bad ways).

In fact, he's one of the only people who can read them like a book, a very, very repetitive book. A book with like two facial expressions per chapter. (The expressionless sex face was admittedly a little unsettling at first) A book that he loves reading dearly.

They got 'married' on a random Tuesday approximately four months after Jonathan brought Vine home. Instead of rings they have matching scars from Jonathan's strings, they're twirled around their arms.

They 'adopted' Vine pretty quickly after the 'wedding', he fit into their routine with minimal adjustment, they just had to get used to him randomly appearing in their doorway at 2am. The kid was just as weird as everyone else in the household, and his touch aversion was never questioned, only accepted, and after a year or so he thawed out to them.