dear fellow traveler;

So far, the only solution she had found was coffee. Lots and lots of it. Bags blunt under her eyes after another night of tossing and turning (sleeping on her back still brought sharp pangs of pain, a reminder that became impossible to ignore), Nina slipped into the Dark Horse Coffee shop, yawning as she did. At just past 9am, it seemed that the entire town had the same idea, familiar faces packed in together. That was the problem with small-towns. Everyone knew each other. And everyone liked to gossip too. By far, the most popular topic was Adam Foxcroft’s demise - aged housewives inquiring whether their social group would put in an appearance at the funeral, elderly pensioners musing that perhaps the kid had it coming, high school students thinking about how it could have been them. It felt wrong to speculate, to discuss, to pour over Adam as if his life and privacy no longer mattered now that he wasn’t with them.

Placing her order at the counter, her eyes scanned the room, searching for an available table - a quiet (or quieter) space away from the gaggle, where her thoughts would purely belong to her. Spotting a chair at the back of the room, she figured she’d head towards it - even if it’s table was currently being haunted by someone with a half-filled mug. Approaching with the softest of smiles, her lips twinged as she spoke. “You mind if I sit here with you? I promise - I won’t make mind-numbing conversation. I just really need to sit.”

And sure enough, someone’s voice startled him out of his thoughts eventually, and he glanced over, already mentally halfway out to the door. He wasn’t going to say no, they couldn’t sit here, but he also wasn’t really in the mood for small talk with a stranger. He got enough of that at the shop. 

Except, it wasn’t a stranger. 

Wells had met people in plenty of interesting ways over the years, but grief counseling was one of the more fucked up ones. Predictably, he’d already dropped the group, but back at the beginning of his stay in Foxcroft, it had seemed like....well, not a good idea, but an idea, at the very least. It was one he revisited every few years — evidently, there was a masochistic part of him buried somewhere in there, because there never seemed to be anything helpful waiting for him in those groups. Just memories he didn’t want to revisit, and well-meaning people, most of whom had it far worse than him anyway. And anyway, when was the last time just talking about something had ever fixed it? The only kinds of solutions Wells truly understood were the ones waiting for him in his shop; the ones he could solve with grease and a wrench, the ones where the answer was easy to spot if he just looked hard enough.

Joining that group meant he had met Nina, at least. He’d always done better one on one. And because it was her standing in front of him, Wells didn’t vacate the table. Instead he pushed his things out of the way, making room for her, and gestured for her to take a seat with a slight smile of his own. She looked tired, maybe, or else he was projecting, or perhaps it was just because this was a coffee shop and everyone here was tired. 

Still, Wells found himself clearing his throat and speaking up. “How are you?” It was hard not to make that sound like a loaded question, given how they’d met. How are you, and oh, how’s that grieving going? Wells hadn’t meant it that way of course, especially because, in a way, he already knew the answer —  it was going awful, because that was the nature of grief. It was ugly. The thing was, she knew that, and so did he. It shouldn’t have felt comforting, but it was, somehow. Attempting to clarify all that would probably just make it worse though, and Wells instead settled for busying himself by taking a sip of his cold coffee, waiting quietly for her answer.

She bit her lip as she stared at the murky water that refused to drain from the machine and wondered what she was supposed to do. Machines were not her forte, so she did the only thing she could think of and wriggled herself behind the washer and unplugged it. Offering up a quick prayer, she plugged it back in and closed the lid, spinning the dial down to the appropriate setting and pressing the knob to start it. 

Nothing. 

“Shoot,” she grumbled, dropping her hands to the closed lid an sighing. A new washing machine was not in the budget but she couldn’t spend anymore time fighting with the machine right now. She resisted the urge to kick the machine out of spite, knowing that wouldn’t actually help and headed back downstairs to the bakery. Her break was over. At least she could take out her frustration on some dough. 

No sooner had she made it back to the bakery proper than the bell above the door announced a customer. She offered a greeting without actually looking over, busy putting an apron on over her clothes. When she finally looked up and saw Wells she smiled. Maybe God had answered her prayer after all. 

“Wells, good to see you,” she said, “I realize cars and washing machines are a bit different, but I don’t suppose you’re handy with both are you? Mine’s on the fritz and pushing the button harder didn’t fix it so I’m pretty much tapped out on my mechanical knowledge. Can I bribe you into taking a look? Pastries and whatever else you’d like in exchange for telling me if I just have to bite the bullet and get a new one?” 

He smiled automatically in Cassidy’s direction as he stepped in, expecting that it would be the same casual exchange between any store clerk or customer. Small towns bred familiarity though, and Foxcroft was no different. Cassidy’s question still took him by surprise.  

But Wells liked fixing things. He liked taking machinery apart and looking around inside, figuring out what was wrong and how to fix it. There was something simple and soothing about that act. It was something he’d picked up on the road, and yes, it extended to more than just cars. After all, Wells had to make each and every thing he owned last as long as possible. When it was just him, alone out there on the road, he couldn’t afford to get stranded if something stopped working, and it was rarely easy to replace anything. Besides: she was offering free sweets, and Wells was easily bribed. 

“Sure, I can take a look at it,” Wells said. “Do you have a tool kit, or should I grab the one in my car?” He didn’t strictly need to carry one around with him at the moment — Foxcroft was small enough that he could get most places just by walking, and it would make more sense to leave those kinds of things at the Wicked Wrench. But years on the road had trained Wells, and he was used to keeping everything he truly needed in his car, or at the very least, in a bag he could easily grab on his way out the door. He still hadn’t fully unpacked, and he probably wouldn’t. What was the point, when he would just have to throw everything back in a duffel and head out within the year?

The newspaper that laid out the details of event laid under his arm as he walked down the street. It had taken some time, but there was finally something new about the mysterious case. Sure, it wasn’t exactly what Levi wanted, a new suspect or evidence would’ve been ideal information to be released, but he couldn’t afford to be too picky. The funeral would have to do, it would be a nice feature story to tide people over until he could finally get his hands on something good. 

It wasn’t long until Levi was just outside the studio. Levi constantly had to remind himself that this was only temporary, that he wouldn’t be doing this for the rest of his life. But with each morning that he walked into the studio, the harder and harder it was to still believe. As his hand reached out to pull the door open, something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. Turning his head just enough, he realized who it was that he had saw.

“Not too often I see you over here… You lost or something?”

So, while the rest of the town was presumably banding together in the face of their loss, Wells kept to himself. It seemed to be working so far. It also meant that he’d spent even more time avoiding people lately though, occupying his time in the room he was renting or at work, and as Wells turned the corner, he realized an unfortunate side effect of that — he didn’t strictly know where everything was in town yet.

A voice caught his attention, and as Wells turned, he frowned vaguely in the other man’s direction. “Actually, yeah,” Wells admitted. It wasn’t that he had a bad sense of direction normally (how could he, with how much time he spent traveling?), but there was something especially confusing about Foxcroft.  Or maybe he was just tired. Wells glanced over, registering the studio in front of him, and sighed. “I was looking for Dark Horse Coffee.” He knew he’d passed it a few times, but normally Wells stuck with the terrible, cheap coffee he could brew at home, and he hadn’t paid the coffee stop much attention. The whole point of Foxcroft was to save money, not spend it. Still, he’d stayed up late the night before, caught up in yet another bout of sleeplessness, and the thought of starting the day with an unpalatable cup of instant coffee was too much to bear. “Am I at least sort of near the right street?”

“I’d walk, I would run but I’d die before I would get to you. There’s no way I’d get to you. The roads have fallen off this earth. There’s no way I would get to you in time, no way I’d get to you.”

WELLS DONOVAN / TWENTY-SEVEN

↳ LORE

Who are you? You’re not attached to this place like everyone else. You weren’t born from the darkest depths of the swamp. You are a traveller, never staying in one place for too long. You were never good at goodbyes, so you decided you’d never say one again. Keep moving, keep to yourself, keep your heart locked. You had one place in this world, but now they’re gone – gone, and you’re alone.

WELLS DONOVAN IS A WYRTH. 

↳ HISTORY

One person anchored Wells to this world. When he was young, Wells’ parents died in a car crash, but he still had Whitney. He and his twin sister bounced around from home to home. It didn’t matter where they were, because they’d found a home in each other. When Whitney came home broken-hearted, Wells was there with a shoulder to cry on. When Wells got into a fight, and some kid punched him and broke his nose, Whitney was there with a bag of frozen peas. They were inseparable – until the world decided to separate them itself. It wasn’t fair. Whitney didn’t deserve to die. Wells was there, holding her hand as she drew her last breath in a hospital bed. Some drunk driver hit her with his car and drove away. Since then Wells has been alone – maybe not literally, but he’s certainly felt alone. When he turned eighteen he left his foster family, never really feeling connected to them anyways, and took what little money he had and kept driving. When you drive as much as Wells does, you come to learn a few things about cars. Every few years when he was low on money he’d get a mechanic job in some nowhere town and spend around a year there until he could pick up and keep driving again. Little did Wells know how much his year in Foxcroft would change him. 

It was September when Wells came to the tiny, cursed town. He set himself up in a motel and got a job at the Wicked Wrench. It was supposed to be just another town, just another stop on his long drive to nowhere, but it became so much more than that. Later that month some kid was found in the swamps. Wells saw how much it rocked the town. People came into the shop in tears. Some lady asked Wells if he knew him; it seemed like everyone did. It seemed like all small towns were like that – everyone knew everyone. Wells underestimated Foxcroft. He didn’t understand that people didn’t just know everyone because it was a small town, but because Foxcroft was very much alive. It pulled people in, had a way of keeping them there, connecting people. It was unlike any other town he’d been to, and Wells wouldn’t notice it until it was too late and it’d sucked him in too. 

One yellow bike. That’s all it would take. It showed up, bent and broken, at the Wicked Wrench one day. No one knew who dropped it off. No one seemed to know who it belonged to, and so the bike just sat there. Wells couldn’t have known that it was Hazel Abrams’ bike. He couldn’t have known that the yellow bike was what killed her. Wells had no idea who Hazel Abrams was. He might have heard her name once or twice, but he’d heard so many names in his life, and forgot even more. There was nothing about her name that should have stuck with him. Her initials, on the other hand, were etched into the handlebars along with “D.L.”