wondrousplace | olden times for Tommy

olden times for Tommy

The great country pile isn't their speed, really.

Double had their lovely house in London, bought and paid for by their adoptive father - a High Fae of some high regard, who'd been fretting about their lands and accounts falling into strangers' hands when he passed on. It was a heartrending story, of course, and Double was...well, positively delighted to be anything the old man wanted them to be. For the right price.

Shapeshifters have long since had a bad reputation for sliding into the upper echelons this way. They hadn't been in penury to begin with, by any means, but 'lovely house in London' money and 'vast estates with mining wealth and hundreds of rate-paying tenants' money is not the same by some order of magnitude.

The old man died peacefully in his bed, well over a century old, and left the manor house and everything that went with it to their sole heir. Who is going to sell it all, eventually, but it feels tasteless not to even let their 'father's' body grow cold.

They move in after the last of their furniture has been transported, and lets the housekeeper give them the tour. They cut quite the figure: long blond hair pinned up in curls, a jacket and blouse tailored tightly to a corseted waist, the snug high-waisted breeches favoured by most males. Their tail is the most exposed part of them and the woman they're following keeps eyeing it like she's not sure if it's obscene or not.

"...show you the stables, your grace," she says, as she walks ahead to the outbuildings.

"Ah. I suppose we ought."

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He walks in looking at his feet, stumbling, looking for all the world like he'd rather throw himself out of a window. He's tired, bone tired, so tired that putting one foot in front of another feels impossible. His joints creak. His head hurts. His back feels stooped.

And then he glances up. He expects to see a lined face, grey hair, someone marked by time and experience.

Instead he sees a young man. He takes a step back in shock, looking at Double. He'd assumed they were a phantasm, and so their youth was explainable. But his own? He raises his hands and sees the same youth there. He turns around to see the elevator doors closing on his tormentors and just manages to yell: "Wait! What did you do to me? What - "

And then the doors close, and he's left standing there in the descending room.

Double doesn't touch him. That didn't go well the first time. But they do stay close.

"Compulsions can change your sense of yourself," Double says quietly, as the room starts to sink. "The way you look, where you are, what you feel...the way time passes."

"Please don't talk," he says, sounding pained as he closes his eyes again.

"I don't know what they're doing to me, but that's not what this is. They come by every decade. They come and see if I'm nearing happiness, and destroy it. Maybe this was the last time? I'm seeing you again, after all this time. Maybe it's a mercy."

"Every - decade?"

They hadn't quite understood. They'd assumed Alexandria had dragged this out for weeks, maybe months if she was feeling particularly cruel. But decades?

"...Thomas, how long ago was it that we came to Birmingham?"

"Fifty-three years. You're early. I don't understand why - am I finally really dying?"

He's asking himself as much as he's asking them, since he still seems to believe they're fake.

"Fifty-three-"

They smooth something taut and uncomfortable over their expression, a calmness that conceals a depth and intensity of rage they simply aren't used to experiencing.

"...You're not dying, Thomas. You're very much alive. I'm taking you home."

He gives them a look that clearly says that sounds like you're taking me to hell, but doesn't push the issue. What's the point? If he's going to die he's going to die. It feels like he's done it before.

He has, in fact. This is the second iteration of the illusion, which he doesn't quite remember. He just has all the leftover emotions he didn't get to deal with.

Double is at a loss, right now. They know just barely enough about Fae compulsion to know where to start. Yes, it will get better over time and yes, eventually the false time will start to fade and contract, like the recognition of a frighteningly realistic dream. But the trauma stays, the way a scar can sting under pressure, or the long-healed fracture in their tail still hurts in cold weather. How long is eventually when the false time is over half a century?

It will happen faster if the source of the weaving is dead. They know that much. Alexandria afforded herself no material protection in their vow. Idiot.

They pay the night manager too much for his silence, and guide Tommy out into a cold, dark night. It's a long quiet walk back to Watery Lane.

It's the middle of the night, and the lights are out - all except one, in front of one window. Polly is still up, praying in her bedroom, kneeling next to the bed.

Tommy looks around and thinks about how nothing has changed here. He hasn't set foot in Birmingham in all the years he thinks he's lived, so it's no great surprise, except when they come to his old home. He stops, then, and refuses to budge.

"I'm not going in there."

Double regards him for a moment, then knocks on the door, loudly.

"You won't have to," they say. "Anyone who's still awake will drag you in by the ear."

"Don't," he says, finally looking at them again. There's something haunted in his eyes, a fear that looks almost primal.

"Please don't-"

He has no time to finish his thought. Pollu has peeked through the window and seen them, and she comes running out to go and pull him into a bruising embrace. When he tries to protest she ignores him and just pulls him in closer.

"My God, Thomas - we all thought you were - thank the heavens!"

"Be gentle with him," Double says - quietly, but loud enough to be heard. "Over fifty years have passed for him within the compulsion he was under."

They haven't even noticed that their fingernails have shifted to the length and thickness they'd grow to naturally. They're claws.

Polly pulls back and frames his face with her hands. "But your aunt Polly is still here, Thomas, wherever you've been in your head."

Again, Tommy looks like he'd just as soon throw himself in the cut than to stay here, but he doesn't have the strength to protest.

"Pol. Your body was dumped on our front steps twenty years ago."

Polly, somehow not immune to magical thinking, seems aghast that her touch and presence wasn't enough to lift this curse.

"I'm alive and well now - what can we do, Double?"

"Keep him here," Double says. "Try not to leave him alone. Compulsions are hideously powerful when they're active, but they don't last. Especially under...particular circumstances. I have to go back out."

"I'll wake the boys up," she says. Her voice is shaky but she's sure of herself.

"We'll stay with him. Come on, Thomas - you'll come back here?"

This she asks of Double.

"As soon as I can."

It starts to rain as they leave, which feels...somehow appropriate.

Cursesilver is, truly, the only reliable material when it comes to Fae. Completely immune to magic, capable of creating wounds that can't be healed; the techniques and history of its creation are lost. The humans say it was invented by their own magic users; the Fae say it was created by lower-caste Realmsfolk who wanted to use the incursion as an excuse to upset the 'natural order'.

Regardless, it's been the work of centuries to take every scrap of the stuff out of non-Fae hands, and even the Fae don't often love having it around. Rumours abound of safes buried deep in the earth, or sunk into the deep ocean hundreds of miles from anywhere.

Double has absolutely no idea if their father owned any.

The knife they threatened Hyperion with was a blunt thing they borrowed from the theatre. It would barely serve as a letter opener. The knife they liberate from Hilda's kitchen on their way back to the hotel is smaller, uglier, sharper, and just as effective when you have the element of surprise.

Alexandria wakes up when her throat is opened. Her hands twitch, and Double can even see the healing spell trying to stitch her trachea back together, but she's exhausted herself too much from the torture she inflicted on Thomas and the charms she threw at Double. They find some small, grim pleasure in the irony.

Hyperion is easier. Still can't use magic worth a damn. Looks more regretful than shocked or angry when he sees Double's face. It would have been so easy for him to just stay at home.

They leave the knife in his hand. The angle of the wound is such that it could easily have been self-inflicted. What other recourse would a Fae kinslayer have, than to take their own life in turn?

Fuck them both.

Double shifts into some unremarkable human shape for the walk back to the Shelby household. They feel...strange, hollow. Tired.

The streets seem more bleak for their recently committed acts, like the darkness is descending upon them. The Shelby house is a little lighter, with candles set on tables and lit in a few rooms. Everyone has been awoken, even Finn, and Ada has been summoned with Carl in tow. She opens the door for Trouble when they come back, and touches gentle fingertips to their arm.

She doesn't see in their eyes what they've done, but Arthur might. Polly might. In either case, they're led to the livingroom, where Tommy is sat in an armchair with his head in his hands. Everyone else is quiet, the silence oppressive, their worry palpable.

"You're back," Polly says, looking at him. "Something happened half an hour ago, but he won't say what."

When it becomes obvious someone else is there, Tommy looks up to see. The others might guess, but somehow Tommy knows. "You cut the strings," he assumes, hoarsely.

"Yes," Double says. They've retaken their true form, but certain details have been...altered. The blood on their clothes, for example. No need to upset the family's less hardened members. "They're both...dealt with."

Before tonight, they would never have imagined taking a life, never mind two. They've always been able to think and trick their way out of situations which might seem intractable to other people. They could have done the same today, if Alexandria hadn't...forced them to go to extremes. They couldn't let it stand.

Is this what being in love feels like? It's strange.

He keeps looking at them, assessing them, and then feels a shiver run violently through his body. He's sure he knows what it means, what they did.

If it's all real, of course. He still isn't really sure it is, though he's growing more sure of reality now that Alexandria is gone.

"I've been fooled before," he hedges. "Thought I knew something, only for it to change again years later."

"I don't doubt that," Double says quietly. "I can't speak for your family, and I can't even say that I'll succeed, but I will...try, to be patient. While you return to yourself."

"What do you know about this? This - what you say this is?"

It's hard even to say aloud, honestly.

"The compulsion itself?" Double asks, wanting to be sure. "Or the...the circumstances under which it was done?"

"The compulsion." If that's what it is, he clearly thinks.

"...A compulsion is any spell which affects your perception," Double says. "What you think, or feel, or how you experience the world. The Fae will say they can't 'force' anyone to do anything, but they can make you think they're the centre of your world, that you owe them everything, that it would be obscene not to do as they ask."

There's no practical difference.

A few of the family members nod their understanding, as does Tommy. This, they recognize.

"So you think they... changed how I see the world. How long do you say I've been away?"

The days he's been gone pale in comparison to the half-century he still feels he lived through. He has no realistic frame of reference.

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