Before anyone could make a move out of the cathedral, the ground trembled. A piece of stone from the ceiling came crashing down to the floor and Ophelia had to leap out of the way to avoid being hit.
The silence of the forest changed, then. It was less of a muffled, muted silence and grew into an echoing, foreboding silence. Like the silence one would hear upon waking up to an empty world.
The ground rumbled again, shaking harder this time.
They all dropped to their knees to avoid falling over and Wyatt crept over to one of the gaping holes in the walls to see outside.
Stale wind tousled his hair.
His eyes widened as he stared out at the desolate forest, unsure of what he was seeing.
"Wyatt?" came Ophelia's timid voice.
A wall of darkness was heading toward them like a tidal wave, leveling trees and twisting up patches of dirt in its path.
The darkness was living, almost, and the closer it got the more the air filled with static electricity.
Birdie came beside him, but Wyatt hardly noticed. He was frozen in place and when Birdie yanked on his arm, shouting for everyone to find cover, he found it hard to tear his gaze away from the scene.
He couldn't breathe.
The noiselessness, the destruction, the terror was all so, so familiar.
"Wyatt!" Birdie screamed, jerking him around to face her.
Her expression was stricken with fear. "We have to hide before it tears this place apart!"
"I found a stairwell!" Ophelia called.
Birdie yanked Wyatt along behind her, dodging between rubble and leaping over fallen stone. Wyatt followed her, trying to blink away memories that kept scraping at his mind as they tried to break free from their cages.
Ophelia waved them over. Marshall was leaning against her, though with the return of energy to Gwydyr, he was able to keep himself upright.
They came to what Ophelia had said was a stairwell, but was actually more like a hatch with a steep set of steps going down into darkness.
Ophelia helped Marshall down first and the wind picked up, swirling debris around in the air.
"What is going on?" Wyatt heard Birdie murmur before a noise like a train filled the cathedral.
Wyatt had never been in a tornado before, but he knew that this must have been what all of those wild west television shows talked about.
The sound built up until it was all they could hear besides the utter havoc that the darkness wrought.
Then, just out of the corner of his eye, Wyatt saw the cat.
At first, he thought it was just his imagination, but then a voice spoke in his mind.
You've made the wrong choice, Murderer-King.
The cathedral disappeared from under him. The air tasted like smoke.
He was frozen in place, looking down at his feet. He wore moth-eaten shoes and a trickle of blood ran down his spindly leg.
No, his mind choked, not here.
He looked up.
The city around him was in utter ruin. Smoke and fog hung low in the air and clogged his lungs.
People were wailing. Screaming all around him.
And the noise. The noise.
Bombs, like the one that had been dropped on his family's apartment, were still falling all around them, whistling before exploding on impact.
In-between explosions was the low hum of German anti-aircrafts.
Then, ringing above all else, were the sirens and their tireless screaming that echoed through the streets. Over and over and over and over.
It had been going off since before the bombing started and hadn't stopped since.
Wyatt was outside of his body in an instant, watching his seven-year-old self.
His mother was next to him, trying to console him as she clutched a bleeding wound on her head. His father was nowhere to be seen.
Little Wyatt was watching everything, his eyes wide. His expression looked torn between being afraid and being overwhelmed.
Wyatt and his younger self locked eyes, neither one able to look away.
I'm sorry, Wyatt wanted to tell him. But he couldn't.
"Wyatt!"
It was Birdie.
Wyatt closed his eyes and when he opened them again, he was back in the cathedral.
Birdie was tugging on him. He could see her mouth yelling his name, but he couldn't hear it.
Finally, with a heave that threatened to dislocate Wyatt's arm from his shoulder, Birdie pulled him down a flight of stairs just as the darkness consumed the cathedral.
Wyatt and Birdie tumbled down the stairs at the same time the cathedral collapsed above them.
Wyatt's shoulder hit something sharp when he came to a sudden stop at the bottom of the stairs.
"Birdie?" he croaked, dust filling his lungs.
"I'm alright," she said, but that wasn't why Wyatt was calling to her. His mind was spinning and he felt like he was going to vomit
. "Ophelia? Marshall?" Birdie whispered.
There was no answer, but when Birdie shouted their names, a faint response came from somewhere else in the hatch.
Birdie moved over to where the dirt had caved in and pressed her ear against it. "Ophelia?"
"We're trapped," Ophelia replied, "but I think we can dig our way out the other side. It might take a while."
"Are you both alright?" Birdie asked.
"I think I twisted my ankle," Ophelia said. "But we're okay. Are you?"
Birdie and Wyatt looked up at the hatch above them, which was covered by a massive slab of stone. It allowed for a sliver of light to come through, but it would be impossible to move.
"We can't get out either," Birdie said.
"Just wait for us, we'll come to you."
Birdie backed away from the wall. "Marigold's done this. I know it. What if she's hurt? What if we're too late? I can't-- Wyatt? Wyatt, what's wrong?"
Wyatt was deathly pale and unfocused. He kept clenching and unclenching his jaw, unable to stay still.
As much as he told himself to breathe, he couldn't. He'd lost all rational focus and could only see the memories, those damned memories, replaying in his head.
He'd worked so hard to forget. To pack them away and never think about them again.
But that vision felt so real. He remembered what that moment was like--every detail. From the sound the bomb made when it crashed into the emergency stairwell, to the ringing in his ears afterward, to the total destruction of his city. He remembered thinking, I'll never feel safe again. Seven-year-olds shouldn't know how cold the hand of death feels against their skin. But Wyatt did. And as much as he tried, he couldn't forget it. He felt that same hand now, inching its way into him. He'd felt it since he arrived in Nowhere.
"Wyatt?" Birdie knelt in front of him, placing cool hands on either side of his face, forcing him to look at her.
He did.
And when he saw the concern in her eyes, something broke inside of him.
Wyatt had carried sadness with him for so long that he didn't even notice it anymore. Until now. He'd been storing observations that he kept in a file cabinet inside his brain, all marked "to-examine".
It was all a way to ignore the things he'd been through.
But now, he couldn't ignore it anymore.
He melted against Birdie, who wrapped her arms around him. For a moment, all he could do was attempt to draw in ragged breaths.
"It's alright," Birdie whispered. "You're okay. You're safe."
It was those two words that released all the tears he'd stored up over the years.
Birdie held him silently, allowing her own tears to drip into his hair as she pressed her cheek against it.
He felt like a child crying on his mother's shoulder. He supposed that, in a way, he was a child. For the first time, he felt like he was allowed to be. He was just a scared little boy who'd lost everything and seen too much. A child who'd never been a child. Not really.
"I'm terrified, Bernadette," he whispered hoarsely. "I don't want to die."
Even though that made Birdie cry harder, Wyatt found freedom in those words. He'd finally admitted the truth to himself instead of running, running, running. He'd been scared when he was seven and he'd never stopped being scared since.
Finally, Wyatt sat up and drug his sleeve across his face. He leaned against the cool earth behind him. He took a deep breath, feeling infinitely lighter than he had in a long time. It was a strange thing, considering he was trapped in a dark hole, buried beneath the rubble of a cathedral, waiting to be rescued by a ghost and a teenager.
Birdie sat next to him, her cheeks blotchy with tears.
"Can I hold your hand?" she asked quietly.
Wyatt found himself smiling. "Always."
They intertwined their fingers and sat quietly for a moment. There was a third type of silence, Wyatt realized. The type of silence that came when one was forced to wait on something they had no control to hurry along. It was a peaceful sort of silence.
Wyatt was ready to tell someone the truth. In fact, he felt that if he didn't tell someone right then, he might burst into a million pieces. He was so tired of carrying it around.
He was glad Birdie was the one there to listen.
"When I was a kid," Wyatt began, which was one way he'd never started a sentence before, "I lived in apartment building 7D on the second-to-top story. I'd go to the schoolhouse behind a delicatessen three days a week, Monday through Wednesday. The other days I'd help my father at the mill. It was a Tuesday when we heard on the radio that there might be a German airstrike near our city, but no one thought much of it. There was always some German airstrike near some city. But that day, it was real. The sirens started going off, just like they always did, and Mother got our bomb shelter bag to take with us. It had games and snacks and water, just in case we were down there a long time.
"We were waiting in the hall because it always took a while for the entire apartment to evacuate. We'd have to wait in line because there was only one emergency exit. Our neighbors, the Janssen's, were behind us. Her daughter, Julie, and I would walk to school together most days. Mother turned around to tell Mrs. Janssen that the sewing pattern she'd lent her was beautiful. Mrs. Janssen took in a breath the answer her, but a bomb was dropped on the balcony beside us." Wyatt swallowed hard before continuing. "It took out their whole family right there. It almost got Mother, but she was standing behind one of the concrete supports in-between the drywall."
He leaned his head back against the wall, looking up at the sliver of light above. "I don't think anybody knows what the blink of an eye really feels like until it happens. The Janssen's were there, then they were gone. We almost got run over when everybody panicked trying to get out before another bomb hit, but the planes had already moved on. The city...it was all but leveled."
He forced his jaw to relax and added, "The end."
Birdie's grip on Wyatt's hand was tight, but she didn't say anything immediately. Wyatt was glad.
"Thank you," she whispered. And that was it. Wyatt was grateful for that, too.
After a few more minutes, Marshall said from the other side of the wall, "We found an exit, but we'll have to remove some rubble. Just hang in there." And then he disappeared again.
Birdie sat up and regarded Wyatt seriously. He loved the way her mouth frowned when she was being serious. "I meant what I said about your sweater vests."
Wyatt laughed. Not because what she said was particularly funny, but because he felt free. "I know."
He sat up too and brushed away a smudge of dirt on her cheek with his thumb, allowing his hand to rest on the back of her neck. "And I think you're the best writer the world's ever seen. I even think you have the ability to pull words out of people who didn't know they had any in the first place. Like before. Like now. I never knew what love felt like until it felt a lot like you."
Birdie placed her hand over his, leaning into his touch.
Wyatt tilted closer until they were only a breath apart, but Birdie hesitated.
"Don't kiss me unless it's a promise," she said.
Wyatt smiled. "It's a promise, Bernadette Penny. It's forever, if you want it."
One time, when Wyatt had first moved to Nowhere, Hal had put him to work in the tomato garden. Up until that point, Wyatt hadn't used a shovel, much less any other tool. He'd been unsure of the task at first. It seemed too unpredictable, like too much responsibility. But as the hours dragged on and Wyatt finished planting the last of the saplings, he knew he'd found his purpose. He knew he'd started something that would end with beauty. He'd never been more sure of anything else than the fact that he wanted to be a farmer.
That was this kiss.
It was surety. It was fingers tangled in hair. It was sadness mixed with hope. It was Birdie Penny whispering three words against Wyatt Best's skin and Wyatt responding by kissing her again.
The forest had predicted his death, it was true. He couldn't say that he was fearless, but knowing that he'd had the privilege of loving Birdie, even for a moment, he was less afraid than he ever had been before.
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Welp, it finally happened!!!!! I have waited an entire year and a half to write this chapter! I have had to carry around these two secrets for this long and honestly, I deserve applause. Thank you, thank you.
~What'd you think of Wyatt's backstory?
~AND THE KISS??
~Any general thoughts on the chapter??
Thank you guys SO MUCH for reading!