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It had been two months since Belos’s defeat and Hunter was still learning how to exist without orders, without fear, without the constant pressure of someone else’s expectations crushing his every breath.
Eda had taken him in without hesitation, offering him Luz’s old room while she spent most of her time back in the Human Realm with her mom (though still visiting frequently). “Make yourself at home, kid,” Eda had said.
And he was trying. Trying to believe that the Owl House was safe, that the people in it wanted him here, that he wasn’t just waiting for someone to realize he didn’t fit this new life.
The house was warm in a way the castle had never been. The walls were cluttered with odd trinkets, the floors creaked, and Eda was quite unorganized, but it was home. A real home.
But even safety had its shadows and lately Hunter couldn’t escape his, not even when he closed his eyes.
Hunter hadn’t slept through the night in… weeks, maybe.
He knew the number once, had counted the days in a stubborn attempt to prove he was “handling it”, but somewhere along the way he stopped keeping track.
The nights blurred together too easily now. Every time his eyes closed something dragged him back to memories he didn’t want to return to. Didn’t want to admit still haunted him.
So Hunter worked harder. Tidied the house more. Played with King, ran errands for Eda, anything to keep moving. Anything to stay awake.
Now he lay in his sleeping bag in the dim corner of the Owl House attic staring up at the ceiling beams as if memorizing every knot in the wood might stop sleep from creeping up behind him.
Maybe if he focused hard enough, he could pretend the pressure behind his eyes wasn’t building. Pretend his limbs didn’t feel heavy with exhaustion.
He was fine. He had to be. Things were better now, after all.
So as long as no one saw him break, he wasn’t a burden.
Or so he tried to believe.
Morning came much too quickly.
Eda noticed of course. She always did.
“Kid, you look like you got into a fist fight with your own pillow,” she said as he wandered into the kitchen, his hair tangled and eyelids drooping.
Hunter forced a weak smile. “Didn’t sleep much.”
“You don’t say,” Eda muttered into her mug of apple blood before adding, more gently, “Anything you wanna talk about?”
“No,” he said too quickly. “I’m okay.”
“Uh huh.”
She let him pass but her eyes narrowed.
She wasn’t pushing him, not yet, but she was definitely watching.
King however was much less subtle. He squinted at Hunter from across the table.
“You smell tired,” King declared.
“That’s not how-”
“YOU. SMELL. TIRED.”
Hunter blinked. “I’m fine. Really.”
King didn’t look convinced.
But neither of them pried further and that was enough for Hunter. If he just held it together a little longer maybe things would get better on their own.
Unfortunately for him though, Hooty was also part of this household (well, rather, he was the household).
And Hooty noticed everything.
Every night he saw Hunter pacing restlessly across the attic floor. Every morning he heard Hunter’s slow heavy footsteps coming down the stairs.
Hooty knew Hunter kept weird waking hours but he assumed it was… well, Hunter just being Hunter. A hard worker. A very intense former child soldier with perfectionist tendencies.
He did not know Hunter was avoiding sleep.
He did not know why.
But he did know that he hated seeing Hunter look so exhausted and worn out.
So, Hooty hatched a plan.
A very thoughtful, very caring, very ill advised plan; as Hooty often does.
Hunter didn’t notice anything strange until later that night when he returned to his room.
A small plate of perfectly arranged cookies sat neatly on the floor by his door.
Hunter blinked. “What…?”
There was a typed note poking out from under the plate. He crouched down and picked it up.
"A reward for all your hard work!
Love, HOOTY"
Hunter stared at it, then at the cookies- neatly shaped and decorated to resemble Hooty’s own face with little chocolate chip eyes, tiny chocolate triangle beaks, and curved lines frosted onto the surface to make resemble feathers.
“Well… he tried,” Hunter murmured and despite himself he felt a small tired smile tug at his mouth.
“Not a bad idea,” he said aloud as he picked one up. “I could use the fuel.”
He took a bite.
His eyes widened. “…Wow. That’s actually… really good.”
He took another bite, then paused.
Something tingled at his fingertips.
Hunter frowned and rubbed the crumbs between his fingers.
Tiny purple magic symbols rose from them, little drifting Zzz’s that floated upward and made tiny snoring noises as they did so.
Hunter’s galdorstone heart dropped as dread pooled in his stomach.
“Oh no,” he whispered. “…Sleeping nettles?”
His breathing hitched.
Sleeping nettles didn’t just put you to sleep, they made dreams vivid. Too vivid. Impossible to escape.
He stood abruptly, panic rising fast.
“HOOTY!”
Without warning Hooty burst through the floorboards a few feet away, his face stretched into a delighted grin.
“YUP!” Hooty beamed proudly. “ONE BITE WILL PUT YOU TO SLEEP FOR HOURS!”
“Hooty,” Hunter said, voice cracking as his vision started to sway, “sleeping nettles don’t just put you to sleep- they heighten your dreams! Hooty, don’t let me- don’t let me fall asleep-!”
But it was too late.
The world tilted and his vision faded to black.
A nightmare surged like a storm, magical and merciless, swallowing him whole.
Hunter blinked into a world that didn’t feel like a dream so much as a trap sprung shut.
It was a strange, impossible amalgamation of his worst memories, smushed together into a jagged collage like someone had taken his life, broken it over their knee, and scattered the pieces into a place he could not escape.
The air smelled of cold marble and rot, thick and stale, sinking into his lungs with every breath.
He knew this place. He wished he didn’t.
Before him stretched the Emperor’s Coven halls- endless and pristine, exactly how he remembered: polished floors so reflective they looked like still water. Gold edged banners and torches he used to light each morning lining the halls.
The place where he marched, saluted, obeyed.
The place where he never once questioned anything he was told, because questioning meant punishment. Questioning meant failure. Questioning meant he wasn’t good enough.
His boots echoed as he took a step, then another, the sound bouncing around the empty hallways.
The shadows cast by the columns seemed to stretch toward him, creeping along the floor in thin grasping shapes as though they recognized him and didn’t like what they saw.
Then, a shift. A flicker. A violent twist of the world.
The marble floor cracked beneath him, splintering like glass. The gold banners peeled away into dust. The fire in the torches diminished.
The halls dissolved into strange green trees.
The forest where Flapjack had died, where Belos had possessed his body, surrounded him now.
The trees loomed at unnatural angles, their branches twisting like accusing fingers. The leaves whispered without wind, murmuring his name as if they blamed him too.
He tried to run. His chest tightened. His pulse sky rocketed. But the trees around him morphed, now gnarled, gray, and dead.
Rows upon rows of dead trees stretching into forever, each one marked with the same golden mask.
This was Belos’s mindscape made into his nightmare. The place he had seen before but now it had no end. It stretched in every direction, infinite and suffocating
He spun around, searching for a way out but the trees shifted when he wasn’t looking, rearranging themselves like a maze mocking his panic.
No matter which way he sprinted, the world repeated itself over and over: a broken golden mask positioned below a portrait depicting many gruesome fates and trapping him in a loop of every version of himself that had ever lived and died by Belos’s hands.
And then he saw it.
A figure, the only thing not shifting in the chaos.
Hunter froze.
It was him.
Or rather… a distorted version of himself, donned in the Golden Guard uniform. Mask on. Cloak pristine. Standing straight like the perfect soldier Hunter had once tried so desperately to be.
The voice that seeped out venomously from behind the mask was Hunter’s own, but wrong- hollow and sharpened until each word cut.
“Flapjack died because of you,” It seethed.
Hunter flinched so hard his knees buckled. “No, I-”
“You’re not a witch. Or a human. You’ll only ever be his clone.”
He stumbled back, shaking his head. “Stop-”
“You're nothing without Belos. What's a trained lap dog to do without his master? His creator?"
Something in the nightmare Hunter’s tone slithered inside his ears and lodged itself in his mind with a cold familiarity. Words he’d tried to bury. Words he feared were true.
The dreamscape cracked again, shattering like someone had struck the world with a hammer.
Hunter bolted, blindly sprinting in any direction as a desperate failed attempt at escape.
The floor shifted under his feet. Stone melted into forest, then forest into castle walls, then back into unmarked graves.
The world twisted and tightened around him, trapping him in a suffocating maze of everything he wanted to forget.
And behind him, always behind him, the masked version of himself walked at the same slow steady pace.
No matter how fast Hunter ran, he could hear it:
Step.
Step.
Step.
He couldn’t get away no matter how hard he tried, no matter how fast he ran.
The shadow didn’t need to chase, it already lived inside him.
The world warped around him again and suddenly Hunter wasn’t running anymore.
His arm ignited in searing hot pain. Hunter gasped and grabbed his wrist, staring as the brand burned itself into his skin again.
Belos loomed over him, his form monstrous though his face human.
“Hunter,” Belos crooned, “why are you hurting me? I only wanted to help you!”
The words were soft, gentle even, but they felt like acid in Hunter’s ears. His past self’s voice spoke next, trembling but strangled with defiance.
“You’re… you’re lying!”
Belos’s expression twisted. He spotted Flapjack clutched in Hunter’s hands and his eyes snapped with recognition, then fury.
“Caleb?!” He screeched angrily.
The mask of humanity he wore splintered, his face deforming back into the disgusting skeletal monster Hunter knew all too well.
Before Hunter could scream the world lurched again- no warning, no transition- just a violent snap.
Hunter was smaller now, much smaller. The coven scouts’s training maze towered above him, dangerous traps laid out like a puzzle no child should have been asked to solve.
The younger him triggered a tripwire. A metal blade swung down, scraping across his shoulder and cutting through uniform and skin.
The boy flinched, biting his lip so hard it bled, holding in a cry because he had been taught crying wasted time. That pain was weakness. That weakness was unacceptable.
Hunter felt the old sting even though his current body stood untouched, the phantom ache of a scar he still carried.
Then he watched the landscape change to him in his quarters afterwards, wrapping clumsy bandages around his wound with small shaking hands, alone.
Always alone.
Every tug of the bandage made him wince but he didn’t cry, even then.
He didn’t dare.
The scene where he stood shifted again, nauseatingly fast.
Hunter stood in the forest once more, this time not in control of his own body. It moved without his permission, his limbs jerking unnaturally.
He heard his own voice echo through the scene, the memory of a promise he had failed to keep:
“Don’t worry, Flap. If Belos is really here, I’ll keep you safe.”
No- don’t make me- don’t-, he thought desperately, pleading to no one in particular.
But the scene didn’t care.
Belos’s voice oozed in, cold and cruel, dripping into every corner of the dream.
“You wouldn’t want me harming your precious palisman, would you? Oh, but then again, I don’t care what you want. Goodbye, Evelyn.”
Hunter squeezed his eyes shut but it didn’t matter. He still felt the moment Flapjack’s tiny helpless body was crushed beneath his own fingers.
Crunch.
Hunter’s knees gave out. He crumpled to the ground, hands braced in the grass- or the marble- or the dirt- he couldn’t tell anymore, everything blended together. The world folded in on itself, layering trauma atop trauma until he couldn’t breathe anymore.
The masked version of himself stood nearby, motionless and silently watching.
Something inside Hunter finally cracked.
“I can’t-” His voice broke, barely recognizable. “I can’t… keep doing this.”
He pressed a shaking hand to his chest as if he could physically hold together the pieces of himself that were coming apart.
“I’m terrified,” he confessed into the echoing emptiness. “I’m terrified that if they knew- if Eda or King or my friends knew how messed up I still am, how- how broken I still feel- they’d realize they made a mistake keeping me.”
His breath hitched, shallow and uneven. The air felt thick enough to drown in.
“What if they treat me like Belos did? What if they leave? What if-”
His voice fell into a small, quiet whisper.
“What if everything he said is still true?”
The world answered with silence and suddenly, everything was plunged into darkness.
Out of the black void a flash of red appeared in the corner of his vision.
Something warm. Familiar. Gentle in a way nothing else in this nightmare was.
Hunter’s throat closed. “Flap…?” he whispered.
The tiny cardinal palisman fluttered into view, brilliant red feathers glowing like embers in the dark. He hovered before Hunter’s face, chirping softly- a melody so achingly familiar it hurt.
The distorted nightmare Hunter froze in place.
Flapjack tilted his little head, eyes bright with patient kindness Hunter did not feel he deserved.
Then the palisman spoke.
You don’t have to run from this part of yourself anymore, he chirped.
Hunter began to cry in response.
“I’m sorry,” he choked out, voice breaking. “I’m so, so sorry for what I did to you.”
Flapjack fluttered closer, pressing his little body into the crook of Hunter’s neck.
You tried to protect me. It was my choice. I forgive you, please forgive yourself.
“I-” Hunter swallowed hard against the lump that had formed in his throat. “I don’t know how.”
Flapjack hovered in front of him again, glowing brighter. Warmth pushed back the shadows and the scene shifted from an endless black void and he found himself on the gray shore of a beach, dark ocean stretching out endlessly before him.
Now, tied to his ankle was a gold string that seemed to glow against the monochrome background.
At the other end of the string Hunter found the golden guard version of himself also tied at the ankle a small distance away, the two of them connected. His mask was off now, discarded on the beach and Hunter could see his old dark scar jutting from his cheek down to his neck that had since been replaced by the scars of Belos's possesion.
Just try, Flapjack sang.
Hunter looked at the nightmare version of himself, really looked. At the version of himself shaped entirely from fear, guilt, and someone else’s expectations. The version he thought he had escaped but had only buried.
He rose slowly to his feet. His legs trembled but they still held his weight.
He moved towards the nightmare version of himself, who no longer looked menacing but instead just looked sad and hollow. A reflection of the person Hunter had once been while still under Belos's cruel command.
Hunter stood face to face with himself now, Flapjack perched reassuringly on his shoulder.
“It wasn't your fault,” he said softly, voice steadying even as his hands shook. “You're safe, now. You don't have to be a soldier anymore.”
Then he reached out, and hugged himself. Both Hunter's shed a tear in the embrace.
Hunter had always hated himself for his past, always blamed himself for the things he had done to serve the emperor. For once, he let his feelings of self-blame fade away into something softer, kinder. Acceptance.
He couldn't change his past, but for the first time he accepted that it wasn't his fault. It never was.
When he opened his eyes again he found the past version of himself to be gone. He stood alone near the rocky black cliffs, aside from his trusty cardinal companion.
Flapjack took off from his shoulder and circled above him now, chirping softly, singing a tune of always with you. Love you.
Hunter crouched to the ground and picked the golden guard mask up from it's place forgotten in the sand, cracks now spread across its golden surface.
Then, he moved to the water and let it drift away into the ocean. He breathed a sigh of relief as he watched the black waves drag it away and swallow it into their depths.
The ocean air was calm and cool and the scene around him on the sandy shore was peaceful where the nightmare once stood.
Hunter exhaled, and finally, maybe for the first time in years, he was completely relaxed.
Hunter’s eyes fluttered open as he blinked into wakefulness, not panicked for once.
Eda and King were at his bedside, staring at him with wide, worried eyes. Hooty was there too, his long body hovering over him a little too close for comfort.
“Hunter?” Hooty said immediately, “I am SO SORRY! I didn’t know the cookies would- well I did know they’d knock you out but I didn’t know you’d have a BAD time and-”
“Hooty,” Eda snapped softly. “Let him breathe.”
Hunter dragged in a steadying breath. His heart still raced but the crushing terror from the nightmare had loosened. Released him. Left something raw but lighter in its place.
“I’m okay,” he whispered, and for once he didn’t say it to hide anything. He blinked, wiping at the corners of his eyes. “Really. I… I’m okay.”
Hooty sniffled. “Are you sure? I didn’t mean to scare you! I only wanted you to get a good night’s rest and feel appreciated because you work so hard and I-”
“Hooty,” Hunter said again, quiet but firm. “You did help me.”
All three froze.
Hunter swallowed, voice soft and steady. “I’ve… been afraid to talk about things. About what happened. I didn’t want to be a problem. Or make anyone worry. And I guess I kept… running from it.”
King crawled closer, resting a tiny paw on Hunter’s arm. “Hunter… you’re never a problem.”
Eda nodded agreement, “Kid, we don’t love parts of you, we love all of you.”
Something in Hunter’s chest cracked open at that, warm and fragile in the best way.
Before he could respond Hooty surged forward with a wail and wrapped the entire sleeping bag- Hunter included- in a giant, feathery, mildly constricting hug.
“HOOTY!” Eda protested.
“No, it’s okay,” Hunter said, giving a shaky laugh. “It’s… actually okay.”
King scrambled in too, climbing into Hunter’s lap.
Hunter let himself sink into it- the warmth, the closeness, the knowledge that they weren’t leaving. That they never had been.
He spent the rest of the day wrapped in blankets on the couch and letting King curl against him while Hooty rambled apologetically nearby.
He didn’t do chores. Didn’t force himself to keep moving. He just rested.
And for once, he let himself be taken care of.
Night fell gently over the Owl House.
Hunter stood at his window, the cool breeze brushing against his face. The stars glittered faintly above the forest and he watched them fondly.
He touched his shoulder, right where Flapjack used to perch.
“I won’t forget,” he whispered to the night. “But I won’t punish myself anymore.”
The wind shifted, warm and soft. Just like the brush of a small cardinal's wings.
Hunter closed his eyes.
That night, for the first time in too long, sleep took him gently.