7, 2 And 2 🥺🥺

7, 2 and 2 🥺🥺

Foxes as kids, roommates, inside Andrew's closet.

In which Neil is the monster under the bed and Andrew's closet is the only safe place for either of them.

Warnings for mentions of child abuse.

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Andrew usually hated having roommates. He had to have them when he was in the group home (no one got their own room there) and sometimes when he was with a foster family he had to share with another kid - and he always hated it. The one exception, though, was the monster that lived under Andrew's bed.

The monster wasn't like those in the scary stories and tv shows. He was a just a boy - who was actually younger and tinier than Andrew was! He had dark dark red hair and bright bright blue eyes and little black horns and sharp teeth and even a tail, and Andrew really thought that he was losing it the first time he saw him because look... it wasn't even close to Halloween and the kid had just crawled out from under his bed and then vanished again underneath it and Andrew had checked and he was really gone.

Neil (that was the monster's name) had told him that it was kind of a legend in his world (yup, his world) that sometimes a monster kid would be tied by fate to a kid in the human world. A lot of the legends apparently talked about how this was a test of some kind, how the monster kid was supposed to scare the human so bad he wet his pants or something like that.

(Andrew thought that was kinda stupid, but he supposed that lined up well enough with the stories he had heard about monsters under the bed.)

But Neil didn't want to scare anyone. When Andrew had asked Neil what he did want, though, Neil wouldn't ever answer him. He just got a little sad and a lot angry and then they'd fight and Neil would crawl back under the bed and disappear for a while.

He always came back though. And when Andrew was moved to a different house, Neil came too. Sometimes it would take a few days, and sometimes Neil couldn't get into a certain house through the space under the bed and so the doorway to his world would bring him through the closet instead, but he always came.

Which was why it made Andrew more than a little bit anxious when almost a whole month went by after his most recent move, and he hadn't seen Neil at all. He'd checked under the bed and in the closet every single night, but there was nothing. He was about to go from worried to angry when, at half-past midnight on the twenty-seventh night in the Lucas's house, Andrew heard quiet crying coming from the closet.

Andrew was on his feet in an instant, dropping his flashlight and the book he was reading on the bed, nearly tripping over the area rug, and skidding to a halt before the door before wrenching it open.

And there was Neil, curled up on the floor hugging his knees to his chest. He was crying and... and he was hurt. There was a cut on his lip and his face was all bruised and Andrew was so angry he almost slammed the door shut again.

"S-sorry," Neil murmured as he looked up, probably seeing the anger in Andrew's face. "I... I was gonna come sooner but..."

Andrew cut him off with a glare and a raised hand, telling him to wait. He then hurried back to his bed to grab the flashlight. Light acquired, he returned to the closet and Neil scooted over so Andrew could sit next to him, shutting the door to their special place.

Because you see, when Neil was there, whether it was under Andrew's bed or in his closet, no adult could get to him. The whole world outside the space shut off. If Andrew's foster parents were yelling at each other, their shouts and curses faded into complete silence when the closet door was shut or the bedskirt brushed the floor around them. If an adult came looking for him and opened the closet door or got down on their hands and knees to look under the bed, they'd see only shoes and toys and other discarded things - but no Andrew, no Neil. It was something to do with the magic that was his monster, because no one was able to see him except Andrew, and since Neil wanted to be seen by Andrew that meant that he was sorta... absorbed into that power too or something.

It meant that whenever they were together... they were both safe.

"I'm gonna kill him," Andrew promised quietly once they were both sitting criss-cross and facing each other in the narrow space.

Neil's eyes went wide, terrified, and he shook his head quickly. "N-no! No. You can't.."

"The hell I can't, Neil! You keep me safe. I wanna keep you safe too!"

They had had this argument before. When Andrew first saw the scar on Neil's shoulder and found out it was from his stupid bastard dad from the year before Neil first slipped out from under his bed. Andrew had been just a little kid back then, but he was eleven now. He could kill someone. If it was to protect Neil, he was pretty sure he could do anything.

"No," Neil said again, voice hushed even though they both knew no one on either side of their special space could hear them. "No. I... It wasn't even him. Mom..." He shook his head and rubbed his arms. That was when Andrew realized what Neil was wearing.

Normally, Neil gave off total rich-kid vibes. Even monsters had designer clothes, apparently, and Neil definitely had the monster-world version of The Gap or whatever rich people wore. But today he was dressed in drab, baggy jeans and a matching washed out t-shirt. His hair was a total mess, too, and looked like it needed to be cut.

"Neil," Andrew said, and it wasn't a question - it was a demand.

Neil grimaced, wringing his hands around his tail - a nervous habit he didn't realize he had and Andrew would never tell him about. "They... they found out... about you. About us. About... about how I can come here."

All the air in Andrew's lungs froze. It was a struggle to keep calm, to wait for Neil to continue on his own, because... because from the very first day Neil had told him 'no one can know - I don't know what they would do to us if they knew' and now that day was here and the anger in his chest was nothing compared to the fear suddenly pooling in his belly.

"Mom.. she took me and ran. So I wouldn't... so they wouldn't take me. Dad was... he was gonna give me to someone bad, someone who collects kids like me so they can find a way through and... Mom didn't want that to happen. She's protecting me..."

The protest was a weak one and Andrew pounced on it. "She's protecting you by beating the shit out of you?"

Neil bared all those sharp little teeth at him, but Andrew could never be afraid of Neil so he just glared back until his monster's resolve broke and he looked back down at his tail.

"She wants to keep me safe.. and I was being stupid..."

"I'll say you're being stupid," Andrew agreed, earning him a sharp look that he easily ignored. "Run. Come here. We'll both make a run for it together."

Neil's eyes widened. "What? No! What would we do, where would we go? You... you could get hurt! And it's not like I blend in, Andrew."

"We can travel at night. Or we can go someplace where everyone is super weird, like... like Seattle. There are loads of weirdos in Seattle, I bet no one would think twice about a boy with horns and a tail." If Andrew had been standing he might have stomped his foot.

"Now you're being stupid," Neil hissed out (and yeah, actually hissed, his voice got all... hissy... sometimes when he was mad).

Andrew grit his teeth and made a sound kind of like a growl that Neil had once complimented as sounding really monster-like. He wasn't making the sound to impress his friend right now though, he was making it because he was mad and frustrated and scared and... and a lot of things.

Then an idea came to him, sudden and bright and it was so genius it instantly flooded him with hope. His hands darted out and cupped over Neil's, holding both of them around the other boy's tail. "I know!"

"What?" Neil's eyes were wide again, but this time he leaned forward, taken up by Andrew's excitement.

"A witch. We need a witch. A witch can make you blend in over here, and maybe even help us until we're big enough to pass as adults."

Now Neil looked a little afraid, leaning back apprehensively. "A witch? There... there are really witches over here? I heard... I heard they do bad things to monsters."

"Can't be any worse than what monsters do to monsters or people do to people," Andrew reasoned, not willing to give up this opportunity. "Besides, if there really are monsters that live under the bed, there've got to be witches too."

Neil licked his lips, then looked down at their joined hands. He stared at them for a very long time before taking a slow, deep breath, apparently gathering his resolve. Then he nodded and looked up again, meeting Andrew's eyes.

"Okay," he finally said. "We... we'll find a witch. And... and we'll protect each other."

Andrew nodded back. He squeezed Neil's hands in promise. "We will. Forever, Neil. We'll always protect each other."

"Forever," Neil echoed. Then he gave a tiny, sharp-toothed smile. "And always."