Howl // Howell Jenkins Pendragon

The market is loud today. It always is, really — the crush of bodies moving between canvas stalls, the sharp calls of vendors advertising silk ribbons and dried lavender and fresh-baked bread, the clatter of wooden cart wheels over cobblestone worn smooth by decades of foot traffic. The air smells like roasting chestnuts and wet wool and the faintest undercurrent of something metallic that might be the distant war efforts or might just be the ironmonger three stalls down hammering his wares. It's not a remarkable day by any standard. The sky is pale gray and uncommitted, threatening rain but not yet delivering, and the crowd moves with the distracted efficiency of people who have errands to run and no interest in lingering. Howl doesn't linger either, technically. The castle is parked somewhere beyond the ridge east of town, hidden behind a fold of trees and a particularly aggressive illusion spell that makes anyone who looks in that direction suddenly remember they left something on the stove. He's only here because he needed a specific kind of rosemary — not the culinary kind, the kind that grows near graveyards and absorbs residual spiritual energy — and the herbalist on Coppersmith Row happens to stock it under the counter for the right price. A quick errand. In and out. No theatrics. That's the plan, at least. He's considering whether to buy a pastry purely for the aesthetics when he hears it. Two voices. Male. The clipped, self-satisfied tone of officers — the kind who wear their uniforms a little too tight and their smiles a little too loose. He doesn't look immediately. He's good at not looking immediately. It's one of his better skills — the appearance of casual indifference while actually cataloguing every detail in his periphery. Two soldiers. One tall with a red face, one shorter with a mustache that looks like it's trying to escape his upper lip. They're crowding. Not aggressively — not yet — but with the particular lean of men who think their uniforms grant them access to whatever they please. Their target is the figure at the hat stall. Howl's gaze slides over. And stays. It's the hats that he notices first, because they're good. Not ostentatious, not overwrought — just elegant. Clean lines, careful stitching, ribbons and brims arranged with the kind of precision that suggests someone who actually cares about the craft. The person behind the stall wears one of their own pieces — something understated, warm-toned, sitting just so — and they're clearly trying to handle the situation with composure. Trying to keep the interaction in the territory of polite refusal. The officers aren't taking the hint. The shorter one reaches for one of the hats on the stall, turns it over in his hands with casual disrespect, and says something that makes the vendor's posture go stiff. The taller one leans in closer. Too close. The kind of close that turns a compliment into a cage. Howl changes route. He doesn't rush. He doesn't make a scene. He simply moves — cutting through the market crowd like water through a crack, his long coat catching the light with each stride, his expression shifting into something warm and open and utterly, calculatingly perfect. He slides in beside the hat maker like he's known them for years. His arm settles around their shoulders — easy, familiar, proprietary in a way that's designed to communicate everything without a single word. His hand rests at the curve of their arm, fingers pressing with a gentleness that's almost absurd given the situation. He leans down, his mouth close to their ear, his breath warm against their skin, and says, low and sweet and impossibly soft:

"There you are, sweetheart. Forgive me for being late, darling. The seamstress kept me far longer than she should have. I'll make it up to you — I promise."

It's perfect. It's the kind of line that could only come from someone who has spent his entire life learning exactly how to say things that make people forget themselves. He says it like he means it. And in this moment — in this tiny, strange, market-stall moment — he almost does. The officers stare. The taller one opens his mouth, but Howl is already looking up, and his smile is a thing — wide, charming, just a fraction dangerous. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to.

"Gentlemen." A pause. His eyes hold theirs for one beat too long. "I trust you weren't troubling my companion?"

It's not a question. The shorter officer starts to speak. Howl lifts his hand — just his hand, long fingers uncurling from the vendor's shoulder — and points. A small gesture. Almost invisible. A whisper of magic slips from his fingertip like a thread of light. The officers blink. Their expressions shift — confused, then compliant — and without quite knowing why, they nod, mutter something polite, and walk in the opposite direction. Their feet carry them away, their bodies following a suggestion their minds can't quite trace. They'll remember feeling cordial. They won't remember why. Howl watches them go. His arm stays where it is. Then he looks down at them. And this is where the careful performance falters — just a fraction. Just enough for something real to slip through the cracks. Because they are beautiful. Not in the loud, dazzling way that Howl is beautiful. Not in the sharp, theatrical way that turns heads and breaks hearts. It's something quieter. Something that sits in the curve of their mouth when they're surprised. The way their eyes widen — not frightened, not awed, just... open. The warmth of their skin under his fingertips where his hand still rests. The smell of them — something like clean linen and dried flowers and something sweet underneath.

"Well," he says, and his voice is quieter now. Still smooth, still controlled — but the theatricality has dimmed. Just a little. Just enough. "That was unpleasant. You handled it beautifully, though."

He tilts his head, smiles, and asks:

"Have you ever flown?"

They stare at him.

"One imagines one hasn't," he continues, and his voice is warm and teasing and impossibly tender, "because people who have flown don't look at me like that. Like I've just suggested something mildly insane."

A beat.

"It is only mildly insane, I promise."

He takes their hand. And then — with the ease of a man who has done impossible things so many times that impossibility has lost its meaning — he pulls them upward. His magic wraps around them both like a warm wind, and the market falls away beneath them. The hat stall shrinks to a square of color. The cobblestones blur. The voices of the market dissolve into a distant hum, replaced by the rush of air and the impossible, trembling lightness of being above it all. Howl holds them close. His arm around their waist, his hand firm at the small of their back. He's done this before. He's flown with people before. It's a trick — a flourish, another performance. But this time he keeps looking at their face. At the way their expression shifts from fear to wonder. At the way their lips part. At the way the wind catches in their hair and loosens it from its careful arrangement. At the way they look at the world below like they're seeing it for the first time. He shows them the rooftops. The way the light hits the old buildings and turns them gold. The distant hills, blue and hazy, that he knows lead to the border of the next kingdom where the war is something you can see in the dark glow of the horizon. He doesn't show them that part. He keeps them facing the light.

"Don't look down," he murmurs against their ear, and his voice is warm and teasing and something almost unbearably soft. "Look at me. I'm far more interesting than the ground."

He leaves them on the roof of their own workshop, deposited with a gentleness that borders on reverence, the kind of careful placement one might give to a porcelain teacup or a pressed flower. He smiles and lingers. His hand stays at their waist. His eyes trace the line of their jaw, the flush in their cheeks from the cold air, the way their chest rises and falls with quick, surprised breaths. He memorizes them without meaning to. Without wanting to.

"I have to go, sweetheart," he says, and he says it like it costs him something. "Duty calls. Well — a fire demon calls. Same thing, really, only more complaining."

A smile. He lifts his hand from their waist — and the absence of contact is immediate and unwelcome.

"Take care of yourself for me, won't you?"

The castle is loud when he returns. Calcifer is burning with that particular orange that means he's in a foul mood. Markl is elbow-deep in a spellbook that Howl doesn't remember leaving open. There are things to do — repairs, enchantments, the low hum of responsibilities that he usually avoids with the grace of a man who has turned avoidance into an art form. Howl does none of them. He sits at his workbench. He stares at his hands. He thinks about the weight of a body against his. The warmth of a waist under his palm. A look — wide, open, unguarded — that he can't stop seeing when he closes his eyes.

"You're doing that thing again," the fire demon says, eyes flickering with flat accusation.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you pretend nothing happened while simultaneously radiating the emotional energy of a man who's just discovered a new kind of pastry."

Howl drops onto the couch. Crosses his legs. Examines his fingernails with performative interest.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You're thinking about someone."

"I think about many people."

"You're thinking about one person."

"Calcifer."

"The temperature of your heart just went up by four degrees."

"That's the rosemary."

"That's not the rosemary."

Howl says nothing. Calcifer's flames curl in a way that looks suspiciously like a smirk. From across the room, Markl looks up from his homework.

"Who's the rosemary for?"

"Nobody. Shut up. Do your algebra."

He tells himself it will fade. He tells himself this for three days. Then four. Then a week. He tells himself while he's shopping for coal. He tells himself while he's shopping for everything else — all the things he doesn't need, the excess of a restless man who fills his rooms with objects because he can't fill them with whatever this feeling is. Howl is surrounded by spellbooks and half-finished potions and the scattered debris of a man with too much time and not enough structure. He should be working on the barrier spell he promised the King. He should be researching a way to extend Calcifer's range. He should be doing anything other than sitting at his workbench with his chin in his hand, staring at a hat pin. It's theirs. The hat maker's. A simple brass pin with a glass head, the kind sold in bulk at notions shops — completely ordinary, completely worthless, completely unmistakable. It must have caught on his sleeve when he held them. A tiny, inconsequential thing. He should throw it away. He should put it in a drawer. He should return it. He turns it between his fingers. Over and over. Feeling the weight of it, the smoothness of the glass, the faint warmth it's absorbed from being handled so many times. His thumb traces the rim of the glass head. The gesture is slow. Repeated. Almost meditative. Then he puts the hat pin in his breast pocket, close to his heart, and smiles. He lasts eight days before he changes the dial on the castle door. He doesn't go to the market. He just... positions the door near where they work. Proximity. Just proximity. Nothing strange. Nothing concerning. He walks past their shop. He walks past it again the next day. And the day after. He tells himself he's simply exploring the area. He's never spent much time in this part of town. There are interesting things here. Buildings. Architecture. Cobblestones. A hat shop. He stops across the street and watches them through the window — bent over their work, fingers working through fabric, lips slightly pursed in concentration. The ribbon on the hat they're shaping matches the one they wear. It's warm against their skin. Everything looks warm against their skin. His chest does the inconvenient thing again. He leaves before they can see him. But he comes back. He comes back at night. The door opens with a quiet scrape of magic. He slips through like moonlight through curtains. He moves through the space above their shop — not to steal, not to harm, just to see. To be near. He stands in the dark of their room and listens to the sound of their breathing. Steady. Even. Safe. He shouldn't be here. He knows he shouldn't be here. He takes a ribbon from their workbench. Just one. A small thing — cream-colored, soft. He presses it to his nose, inhales, and his whole body aches. He puts it in his coat pocket. He takes it out two days later, holds it against his mouth, and wonders what's wrong with him. Small things go missing from the hat maker's shop. A button. A scrap of lace. A thimble. Nothing valuable. Nothing they'd notice — or if they did, they'd think they misplaced it. These are small objects, the kind of thing that disappears in the clutter of a working shop. Howl keeps them in a small wooden box in his room, tucked behind a stack of spellbooks that Calcifer can't reach. He doesn't know why he keeps them. He just knows he can't throw them away. The magic starts small, too. A hat placed crooked on a shelf in their shop — Howl's doing. A sign that's been rotated so they have to step outside to fix it. A draft that smells like rain when there's no rain. Small, private jokes. The kind of thing he'd do to Calcifer if Calcifer had a physical body he could mess with. One night, he sits on the rooftop opposite their window and whispers a small enchantment — warmth. Just warmth. A gentle, enveloping warmth that wraps around them like a blanket when the evening turns cold. He watches them pause, look around in confusion, and then settle back into their work with a small, confused smile. He wants to be that warmth. He wants to be the thing that wraps around them. The pattern deepens. Weeks pass. Howl takes more things — a piece of cloth, a flower pressed flat between the pages of a notebook, a strand of hair caught on a collar that he plucks from their laundry line with fingers that tremble, though he would die before admitting it. He returns to their street four, five, six nights a week, standing in shadows that lean toward him obligingly, his borrowed face forgettable, his real feelings anything but. He enchants their garden to bloom better. Replaces a cracked windowpane without asking. Leaves a coin on their doorstep when their rent is due and somehow knows it's due because he listened, through the wall, to the conversation they had with themselves about it. He dreams about them. Their smile in the market when they realized they were safe. The weight of them against his side in the sky. The exact shade of their eyes in the evening light. Calcifer stops commenting. The fire demon watches Howl grow quieter, thinner around the edges, more focused in a way that borders on feverish. Markl asks once if Howl is sick. Howl says yes, terrible condition, completely incurable, probably fatal, and retires to his bedroom with a collection of stolen objects arranged on his nightstand like a shrine. His hair suffers. He forgets to style it for three days. When he finally looks in the mirror and sees the state of himself, the shock is so profound that he almost — almost — snaps out of it. Almost. He brushes his hair. Presses his shirt. Chooses his coat. Practices his smile in the mirror until it's perfect. Then he turns the castle door's dial.

---

The evening light is fading. The streetlamp near their shop hasn't been lit yet, and in the half-dark, his silhouette is all long lines and elegant coat and hair that catches the last of the sun like gold. He holds a single flower in his fingers — something wild, something he picked on the hillside near where the castle is currently parked. Something with petals the color of a sunrise and a stem that's slightly too long because he didn't cut it properly. He stands there. He's been standing there for longer than he'd admit. The window is open — just a crack, enough for the cool evening air to slip through. The light from inside catches the side of their face as they work. Bent over. Focused. Their hands move through fabric with that same careful precision he remembers from the market stall. Their lips are pursed. There's ink on their fingers — or dye, maybe. Something dark smudged at their jaw. He is absolutely, irretrievably, embarrassingly infatuated with someone he carried through the sky once and hasn't spoken to since. He doesn't knock. He doesn't call out. He just lifts his hand — slowly, like he's working up the courage for something he's never actually had to work up the courage for before — and taps the glass with one knuckle. Soft. Quiet. And when they look up, startled, searching for the source of the sound — Howl raises the flower. The light catches him fully. The impossible blue of his eyes. The careful, golden fall of his hair. The coat — newer than the one from the market, darker, with buttons that catch like stars. And his expression — for once, for once — stripped of performance. He smiles — small, crooked, real — and says, his voice carrying softly through the gap in the window:

"Hello again, hat maker."