Kit Fawkes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 04:59 pm
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 04:59 pm
Part Two: And Bids You All Adieu
Title: And Bids You All Adieu
Universe: The Kitverse
Warnings: Spoilers for Godchild, but that's about it.
Summary: The merry adventures of Kit Hargreaves, and the trouble he gets up to in the two worlds he calls home.
Notes: Part 2-B of the KitVerse; make sure to read And Miles To Go and And Bids You All Adieu, Part One first!
▶ Sixth Sense
His first thought upon regaining consciousness is that he feels so bad he wants to die, which he supposes on his second thought is a good thing because it means he’s not already dead in the first place.
He gets his eyes open halfway and realizes he’s in a bed, and a luxurious one at that, with mountains of covers and a canopy overhead and cushions as soft as clouds pillowed beneath his aching head. It’s pleasantly dark in the room, too—not enough to keep him from picking out the shapes of a wardrobe and dresser, but enough that the light isn’t streaming in and spearing him in the eyes, which is a relief because he feels as though it’d stab right through his skull if it did.
There’s a bandage on his head, he realizes dimly, which he first notices because he's reaching up to try and figure out—of all things—where his hat went. There’s a bandage on his hand, too, thin white gauze colored faintly pink from what he assumes must be blood. And he can’t feel his cane, either, which worries him a bit, but it’s hard to worry about anything when he feels so terrible, so he only closes his eyes again and sinks back into the soothing darkness of his mind as he tries to piece together what exactly could have happened.
The problem is, he hasn’t the slightest idea what did happen. He remembers the Owl, and a very long walk, and the mausoleum at the end of the world. He remembers the scrollwork doors. He remembers…feeling very sick, somehow, and wrung through, and the copper tang of blood in his mouth. But try as he might—and admittedly, he doesn’t try very hard, but only because it’s hard to think when his head is aching so badly—he can’t recall what happened after that, or how he could have ended up lying in a soft white bed instead of on a freezing marble floor.
It’s a good quarter of an hour before his answer comes, a creak of a door that makes him slide his eyes half open again. The room is blurry and spinning, but a hand—a man’s hand, too wide to be a woman’s—pushes his hair away from the bandages on his head, and his stomach flutters a little because it’s a motion that reminds him of his mother, always brushing back his bangs to peer into his eyes. He wants his mother more than anything at that moment. He’s so small, so weak—a baby kit, his mind supplies, drifting back to an evening spent hiding from a party. As weak as a kitten, that’s what he is, and he can’t feel his magic anymore.
What is going on?
For a slow, dizzying moment, he wonders if that hand belongs to his father.
“You’re up,” a voice says in a calm tenor, an effortless statement of fact that seems to soothe over his frazzled nerves. “So save us both some trouble and don’t waste time pretending you’re still unconscious, won’t you?”
It’s hard to tell if it’s a result of the knock on the head, or possibly the fact that he still doesn’t seem to be thinking very clearly, but that simple recognition of a common deception makes Kit decide to like the man, whoever he is. He rather hopes it’s his father, really; it’d be nice to know they share a sense of humor.
The mattress shifts a little as a new weight falls on it—someone’s sitting at his bedside, he thinks absently—and so he opens his eyes a little wider, trying to see who it is. It’s still hard to tell with everything in shadow, but the man must see something that startles him, because the weight abruptly shifts again, and a minute later there’s a face peering down into his own.
The eyes are blue, he thinks, or perhaps gray. They’re fair, at least, and remind him of mirrors.
“That settles that,” the man says, which draws him back out of his thoughts, even though he’s fairly certain the man was saying it more to himself than as any sort of attempt at conversation. “I didn’t think—” and he leans closer again, trailing off before finally muttering, “Who are you?”
It’s probably not the sort of question he’s meant to answer, but Kit finds himself doing it anyway. “Fawkes,” he whispers, which is the name he uses when he needs one in London. That’s what he is, he’s a fox, with a hat of red fur and ears, and he thinks his tail’s been caught in a trap.
“At least it’s not Hardwick,” the man mutters to himself, frowning, and Kit’s still trying to figure out who he is, because it’s the sort of thing he really feels he ought to know, if he’s bandaged and lying in a bed in this man’s custody with no real way of knowing how he got here.
Things are quiet another moment, the air still and stagnant, and then the man rolls up a sleeve and says, “One way of finding out for certain,” as his fingers reach for Kit’s bandaged forehead.
The fingers connect, and suddenly images are flooding through Kit’s mind—spinning like a kaleidoscope, so fast that the barrage of stimuli forces strangled whimpers of pain from his throat—the girl, the mirror, the cards, The Magician, Crispin, water, poisons, magic, London, the Owl, the party, his family, his mother, their laughter, blood in his mouth and a tomb made of marble—and it’s splintering and refracting and shattering like glass and there are eyes, green eyes, his face with green-gold eyes and he’s screaming, screaming because he’s scared to death and he wants it to stop and it hurts so bad—
His blood seems to burn as the magic tears out of it, searing along every nerve as it gathers together and lashes out in response to the invasion—get out of my head, get out of my head, get out of my head!—and the next thing he hears is the sound of shoulders hitting the wall as hot tears sting at his eyes.
He tilts his head to the side and lets out a wet cough, his eyes leaking and his head spinning, and he’s so caught up in the sensation of drowning that he almost misses the man’s stilted murmur of, “I’m sorry.”
It’s easier to slip back into unconsciousness after that, letting the soothing feeling of oblivion lift away the pain, and so he does—wondering, all the while, if perhaps this is the time he’s going to die for real.
It’s light in the room when he comes to again, and the bandage on his hand is gone. He tries to remember how long it takes to heal something like that—days, probably—and wonders how long it’s been since he last opened his eyes, or what day it is, or where he is, and it’s a lot of questions with no answers, which bothers him immensely. His head feels a bit better, at least, though the bandage is still there, and the light doesn’t sting his eyes when he opens them, so he thinks he must be recovering somehow.
His cane is in the room now, too. He can feel that familiar draw from a little way over to his left. That’s reassuring, at least.
“Welcome back,” the strange man says, which prompts him to open his eyes, and he’s surprised to see that the hand tending the bandage on his forehead is framed by a fur cuff, spotted like a leopard…and where has he seen that before?
It takes him a minute, but then he knows. “You’re that magician,” he says in a voice that croaks from lack of use. “You lifted the table on wire…”
“You thought it was funny,” the man answers, which sounds mostly indignant but there’s a strange sort of warmth to it, too, and it makes him think of Crispin smiling beneath his long white beard. “I’ll have you know it ruined my show, too.”
“That was a year ago,” Kit murmurs, leaning into the touch of the hand at his temple despite himself. “You held a grudge that long?”
Abruptly, the hand goes still. “That was no more than three weeks ago,” the man says, in what sounds like disbelief, but it’s hard to be sure.
Kit wants to shake his head, but he imagines it’ll hurt if he does, so he makes a soft noise of protest instead. “A year,” he insists weakly. “I was fifteen. ‘M sixteen now.”
“It hasn’t even been a year since—” the man begins, but then frowns and falls short, hovering over thoughts that Kit can’t identify.
So instead, he uses the moment to redirect the conversation to a topic of his own. “Stay out of my head,” he says in as accusing a tone as he can muster, which admittedly isn’t very much. “Don’t want you in there.”
“I’m not particularly eager to try it again, anyway, after the reaction I got the first time,” the man admits with another touch of that oddly warm humor. “Someone taught you to do that.”
“Crispin,” Kit answers, because saying so can’t hurt anything anyway. “Why’re you such a bad magician if you can do things like that?”
Again, the hand stills, and Kit realizes he’s scored another victory. “Why waste the energy that goes into a good trick when an audience is still willing to eat up a bad one?” the man counters.
“Oh.” Because really, that’s a good point. “Where are we?”
“A residence of mine,” the man answers. “How much do you remember?”
“The Owl took me to the end of the world,” Kit recalls slowly, retracing his steps as best he can through the haze that still seems to be weighing down his thoughts. “I went inside. There were angels…and a man. In the stone. Something about blood…and something hit me. It hurt.” His throat seems to swell at the memory. “It…crawled. It was…eating me…”
The mattress shifts as the man takes a seat. “That place was a mausoleum that belongs to the Hargreaves family,” he begins to explain, and Kit tries to collect his thoughts and focus them because it’s a story he very much wants to hear. “Whatever happened in there, it might as well have been an explosion. I was miles away when I caught sense of it.” The man pauses. “You were a mess by the time I got there. I thought you were dead at first, until I got close enough to see you convulsing. I imagine something in that tomb attacked you.” He pauses once more. “You shouldn't go there again.”
“The Hargreaves family?” Kit repeats, testing the name on his tongue. “Aren’t they…important? People talk about them.”
“They talk about the lord,” the man agrees quietly. “He had a way of making an impression on everyone he met. Whether they liked it or not.”
“You too?” Kit asks with a weak laugh, sensing where that train of thought might be going.
But to his surprise, the man only turns to look at him more fully, staring at him like he’s searching for something before remarking, “Yes, me too. From the moment I first caught sight of his green-gold eyes.”
And it only takes a minute before things fall into place, before the cold realization sets in.
▶ Butterfly
The magician’s name is Dominic Crehador, which Kit picks up almost at once; it takes him a little longer to figure out why, precisely, Crehador is interested enough in him to take care of him as well as he does, but after a while he’s able to formulate a few tentative guesses at that, too. Part of it, he’s come to learn, is that he’s apparently the spitting image of his father, save for a little extra rosiness in the cheeks and the color of his eyes. After Crehador gives him a picture to study, he starts to pick out the other subtle differences, too—the nose is a touch different, the jawline a little softer. They’re things that people might miss at first glance, things they couldn’t possibly notice from a distance, and particularly not when the similarities happen to be dressed up in what turns out to be his father’s customary attire.
Mother certainly knew more than she was letting on, he thinks a little ruefully, toying with his top hat and swinging his legs against the side of the bed. Though I suppose it’s hardly a surprise.
There’s also the fact that he’s sixteen years old, which is apparently something that completely baffles Crehador because his father was only seventeen when they knew each other. It’s a little bit strange to think that he’s only a year younger than the father he’s been looking for all this time, to be honest; still, if time stops when he travels between the worlds, then it’s not such a stretch to think that it might run differently from place to place, so it doesn’t bother Kit nearly as much as he suspects it bothers Crehador.
Then there’s the part about his training to consider, and his relative ease with the study of magic. Apparently his father was something of a skeptic about the whole business, so it tends to catch Crehador off-guard when Kit talks to him about the tricks he utilizes. He’s as interested in the piano-wire ones as he is in the real powers, honestly; Crehador’s a stage magician, and Kit learned a lot in the one night he spent watching him a year ago. He’s eager to learn more now, because any trick is a good trick and there’s always a dozen different ways it could be used if one is smart enough to find them. So he spends a goodly portion of his rehabilitation learning to pull silk scarves from his sleeves and make flowers appear from behind people’s ears, and it’s almost like life with Crispin all over again, except that Crehador likes him too much to douse him in water every evening.
That’s the last part of it, he suspects, in a vaguely intuitive sort of way that he can’t quite explain. Crehador likes him. It’s something subtle, something in the corners of his eyes and the way a friendly warmth seems to creep at the edges of his smile, but after a while Kit begins to pick up on it. Crehador likes him a lot.
It’s probably only to be expected, since Crehador is also something of a hedonist, but while he does suspect that the magician is looking after him as a sort of implied favor to his father, he also suspects that Crehador’s interest is a sort of implied way of needling at his father, too. Having heard his father’s thoughts on the topic of magic in general, Kit suspects he wouldn’t take very well to hearing that his son had such a knack in it. The fact that Crehador only encourages him and helps to facilitate those pursuits is, he imagines, just another testament to the man’s somewhat arrogant sense of humor.
Which is fine with him, really, because it’s a sense of humor he shares. Maybe it is a magician thing, after all.
It’s nice to hear about his father, though, even though Crehador’s retellings of his pursuits are entirely biased, and not always in a good way. It’s comforting to hear the stories as he recuperates, especially because he’s starting to miss his mother and nothing reminds him of her so much as hearing a good story does. It’s also nice because it gives him things to file away for later, like when the magician starts getting on his nerves or takes his hedonism a little too far, because then Kit simply does something that his father would have done in the same situation and laughs at Crehador when he slips and mistakes the one for the other.
He’ll never get used to being called “Earl”, though. It’s such a foreign title, and frankly it’s a little beneath him. He’s a prince, thank you, and he’s going to be a king someday. Or at least, he could if he wanted, which is effectively the same thing.
It takes him a while before he’s steady enough to walk again, and another few weeks before he thinks he’s truly back to his usual self. Having Crehador go mucking around in his head when he was already hovering on the brink of death wasn’t exactly the most conducive thing to getting well, but once he gets past his annoyance about the whole business, he sort of understands why the magician did it. He’s heard about the organization called DELILAH now, learned a bit about their research from the things Crehador has told him. It’s hard to blame him, understanding that.
His father is dead, and he could be his father’s twin. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone attached to his family had been raised from the dead and made to live again.
When he’s well enough again, Crehador takes him to see his father—or, at least, the place where the magician last saw his father. The tower is still in pieces, the rubble transforming a once-pretty area into a rocky wasteland. It will be a long time before the destruction is cleaned up and removed, he thinks as he catches hold of the brim of his hat to avoid losing it to the wind. Beside him, Crehador is ostentatious as ever in his fur-trimmed coat and hat—which, Kit suspects, the magician chose on purpose, as just one more way of deliberately annoying the lingering shade of his father.
He still has family in London, Crehador tells him as they go. She’s an aunt by the name of Merry; after further inquiry, Kit realizes she’s the blond girl with the cards. It’s rather a relief that he won’t have to marry her, after all—he’d admittedly been a bit concerned about that.
Somehow, though, he doesn’t want to see her, and he suspects that Crehador doesn’t want to, either. The Hargreaves family is caught up in a flurry of infighting, he tells him, and the last thing they need is a surprise claimant to the title of lord. Kit really doesn’t want the title, anyway; it’s too permanent, too binding, when all he wants to do is finish the adventure he’d begun all those years ago, since the day he first looked into Merlin’s Mirror.
But he’d like to meet his Aunt Merry someday, he thinks. Perhaps someday he will.
But for now, they go to the remains of the tower and stand at the edge of the rubble, and Kit tries to imagine a structure reaching up to the heavens, a grand stone monolith where his father’s great battle finally came to its conclusion. He wants to believe his father was a hero, and he thinks he must have been, if only because he can’t imagine his mother loving anyone less than one.
They stand there in silence, and then suddenly Kit feels something, and he can tell from the way that Crehador stiffens at his side that he feels it, too. And it’s the magician that sees it first; his hand falls on Kit’s shoulder as he points across the rubble, silently, guiding his gaze to the two figures standing together at the other side of the wreckage.
There’s a man with skeleton arms, Kit realizes as he looks. And there’s a man who could be his twin.
Crehador once told him that the souls of the dead linger near the final resting place of their bodies, which means they must be close to them now—because they’re here, they’re really here, and this is the moment he’s been aching for all this time, the moment he’s been simultaneously anticipating and dreading for years upon years.
The figures draw closer, and the first thing Kit sees of his father is astonishment reflected in green-gold eyes, and the horrible, heartwrenching realization hits him all at once.
He never knew about me.
“Crehador,” the shade that is his father says in a surprisingly strangled tone, keeping close to the skeleton-armed man’s side as they approach. “What is this?”
“As I understand it,” Crehador answers in that deliberately flippant way, “This is someone who’s been looking for you for quite some time now, Earl.”
Kit swallows hard, trying not to quake in his coat and tails as he searches for words, but his father isn’t saying anything; he’s only looking, staring at him the way everyone stares at him, as though they're looking right through him without ever seeing him. But there's something more to it, and Kit sees that, too: he's staring like he’s as fixated on Kit’s eyes as Kit is on his own.
“I’m Christopher,” he says at last, barely managing to get the words out without squeaking. “Kit. Mother…Mother always called me Kit. That’s me.”
“Rosella,” his father whispers, the word barely audible under his breath as a translucent hand comes up to cover his face. He’s quiet a minute, and then suddenly he’s looking up at the skeleton-armed man, eyes searching, face reflecting some unreadable emotion. “Did you know about this?”
But the man only shakes his head, which seems to do nothing to ease his father’s distress. “Damn it all,” he hisses under his breath, clutching at his hair once again. “I never—damn it!”
And suddenly Kit feels as though he should bolt, because of all the ways he'd pictured this moment going, this is far from one of them, and he doesn't know what it is but it's something, it's him, his father is angry because of him and this was a bad idea, a stupid idea, this is all his fault and he wants to shrink back or cower or disappear, or perhaps he should just run away, far away, be anywhere other than here at this moment—but then Crehador’s hand touches his arm as if to steady him, to soothe his frantic train of thought, and Kit can only watch in bewilderment as he remarks dryly, “Keep that up, Earl, and he’ll think you don’t want him.”
For a moment, a single fleeting moment, a look of something like fury flickers over his father’s face. But then, as quickly as it appeared, it’s gone—and what’s left is something much softer, something hollower, that makes his father look years younger than he is.
“She named you Christopher?” he says at last, in a thin, gentle voice.
Kit nods, perfectly silent, because he knows he couldn’t get words out if he tried. He doesn't want to speak, doesn't want to see that fury flash across his father's face again, but he tries to make himself stand without cowering as every bit of his stance asks the question he can't make himself say.
Do you hate me, father?
His father looks up, looks him right in the eyes, and this time it feels as though he’s seeing him for the first time as slowly, sweetly, like the sun breaking from behind a cloud—his expression softens further, and his lips turn up in a smile.
“It’s a good name,” his father says.
▶ Belief
It’s a good place for a family, the land of Daventry.
Crehador helps them all get home, which is only slightly to his father’s chagrin; his powers as a medium aren’t enough to send people between the worlds, but they’re enough to teach Kit how to carry two souls along with him when he goes himself. And it’s not nearly as strange an experience as he was expecting, really, because he quickly comes to learn that Riff is a part of his father and his father is a part of him, so in a way it makes sense to have them all together as one when he bids Crehador farewell and drops back into the void between the worlds.
Things haven’t changed a bit since he left, even though he thinks he’s been gone for months and months; his father mentions something about it simply being the way travel between the worlds works, and Kit thinks to himself that he’ll be demanding a lot of explanations from his parents in the near future, now that they’re all together again to tell them to him.
They go silently up to his mother’s room, treading softly up the steps into the tower because it’s still the middle of the night, and then Kit and Riff wait quietly at the door as his father slips into the room. It’s almost funny, the face he makes as he picks his way over to the bed, because his mother’s room is the same mess it’s been for as long as Kit can remember, and the look on his father’s face says clearly, some things never change.
He and Riff avert their eyes for a moment as his father regards his sleeping mother, but then they glance at each other and, as one, sneak peeks back again as he leans down, resting one translucent hand on her cheek as he brings his lips to meet hers.
By all rights, she shouldn’t feel the kiss—it comes from a ghost, after all—and yet like the sleeping princess of the story, her blue eyes flutter open, and it only takes an instant before it’s apparent that she knows.
“And Merry said you never keep your promises,” she whispers, her voice warm and heavy with sleep.
“I know better than to break one to you, princess,” his father murmurs back. “I’d never hear the end of it if I did.”
He’s quiet a minute, the air warm and rich with the affection flowing between them, and then at last he adds the statement Kit knows has been coming since the afternoon at the fallen tower. “You never told me.”
“I didn’t know,” his mother answers, her eyes soft. “Not until after I’d already…”
His father nods, as though it were the answer he’d expected all along. “You named him after me.”
“He looks like you,” his mother replies, and she’s clearly waking up now, because her sense of humor is beginning to show in the lilt and cadence of her tone. “Even a little handsomer, I should think.”
“You stubborn girl,” his father says, as quick as casting a spell on reflex.
“You insufferable boy,” his mother retorts without missing a beat, wearing a smile that makes it clear she’d been trying for that response all along.
“We’ll just be going,” Kit says quickly, because he’s old enough to know flirting when he hears it, and as happy as he is to see his parents reunited, there are some things that a child simply doesn’t need to see—and from the way his mother and father are looking at each other, he’s willing to bet that their reunion is going to quickly escalate into one of them.
He shuffles Riff down the hall, thinking of families and kingdoms and the countries on both sides of the mirror, both a part of him, both drawing him in—and both, in their own way, his home. It’s not such a bad way to end an adventure, he muses with more than a touch of pride as he rolls his shoulders and feels the magic, golden and bright, thrumming through the midnight air.
They’re halfway through the throne room, heading toward the kitchen for a late but much-deserved snack, when he stumbles and nearly falls; upon catching himself, he realizes he’d misstepped somewhere on the stairs, and his left shoe has come untied.
“Let me,” Riff says with a fond, knowing smile, and pats him on the shoulder before reaching down for the offending laces.
But Kit raises a hand to stop him, shakes his head, and offers his father's oldest and most faithful confidante a smile. “That’s okay,” he says, “I can take care of it on my own,”—and crouches down to remedy the situation himself instead.
▶ Ball
Crehador is waiting for him when he steps out of the mirror, dressed to kill in his hat and coat and tails. His manners are as impeccable as the press of his pants; his wit is as sharp as the figure he cuts. It’s chilly in London now, so he’s added a cape to his ensemble, the high collar tucked snugly around his chin to help ward off the evening breeze. It’s all black, of course, because that is the fashion, but it’s also all black because he’s living a memory tonight: there’s a story that once came to an end in London, but tonight is the night when the sequel begins.
He steps onto the street, tipping his hat to the magician waiting for him, and carefully hides a smile as Crehador’s eyes flicker over him and absorb the sight.
It’s silent between them a moment, but he is unperturbed as he waits it out. He is nothing if not patient, after all.
And then, at last, Crehador lets out a laughing, disbelieving scoff. “Two of you,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m letting a monster loose in London tonight.”
“You couldn’t stop me if you tried,” he answers smugly, taking the reaction as the highest of compliments. “Now have the carriage brought around, or we’ll be late for the evening ball.”
“I don’t take orders from aristocrats,” Crehador replies.
“You’ll never be rid of us, Crehador,” he says devilishly. “We’re going to haunt you forever.”
Crehador glares at him, and he promptly flashes an innocent look, one that fools neither of them.
“Let’s go,” Christopher G. Hargreaves says, seventeen years old and ready to see what London’s future holds in store for him, and emphasizes the command with a motion of his cane—and his father’s graceful smile.
~
BACK TO PART ONE
Universe: The Kitverse
Warnings: Spoilers for Godchild, but that's about it.
Summary: The merry adventures of Kit Hargreaves, and the trouble he gets up to in the two worlds he calls home.
Notes: Part 2-B of the KitVerse; make sure to read And Miles To Go and And Bids You All Adieu, Part One first!
▶ Sixth Sense
He gets his eyes open halfway and realizes he’s in a bed, and a luxurious one at that, with mountains of covers and a canopy overhead and cushions as soft as clouds pillowed beneath his aching head. It’s pleasantly dark in the room, too—not enough to keep him from picking out the shapes of a wardrobe and dresser, but enough that the light isn’t streaming in and spearing him in the eyes, which is a relief because he feels as though it’d stab right through his skull if it did.
There’s a bandage on his head, he realizes dimly, which he first notices because he's reaching up to try and figure out—of all things—where his hat went. There’s a bandage on his hand, too, thin white gauze colored faintly pink from what he assumes must be blood. And he can’t feel his cane, either, which worries him a bit, but it’s hard to worry about anything when he feels so terrible, so he only closes his eyes again and sinks back into the soothing darkness of his mind as he tries to piece together what exactly could have happened.
The problem is, he hasn’t the slightest idea what did happen. He remembers the Owl, and a very long walk, and the mausoleum at the end of the world. He remembers the scrollwork doors. He remembers…feeling very sick, somehow, and wrung through, and the copper tang of blood in his mouth. But try as he might—and admittedly, he doesn’t try very hard, but only because it’s hard to think when his head is aching so badly—he can’t recall what happened after that, or how he could have ended up lying in a soft white bed instead of on a freezing marble floor.
It’s a good quarter of an hour before his answer comes, a creak of a door that makes him slide his eyes half open again. The room is blurry and spinning, but a hand—a man’s hand, too wide to be a woman’s—pushes his hair away from the bandages on his head, and his stomach flutters a little because it’s a motion that reminds him of his mother, always brushing back his bangs to peer into his eyes. He wants his mother more than anything at that moment. He’s so small, so weak—a baby kit, his mind supplies, drifting back to an evening spent hiding from a party. As weak as a kitten, that’s what he is, and he can’t feel his magic anymore.
What is going on?
For a slow, dizzying moment, he wonders if that hand belongs to his father.
“You’re up,” a voice says in a calm tenor, an effortless statement of fact that seems to soothe over his frazzled nerves. “So save us both some trouble and don’t waste time pretending you’re still unconscious, won’t you?”
It’s hard to tell if it’s a result of the knock on the head, or possibly the fact that he still doesn’t seem to be thinking very clearly, but that simple recognition of a common deception makes Kit decide to like the man, whoever he is. He rather hopes it’s his father, really; it’d be nice to know they share a sense of humor.
The mattress shifts a little as a new weight falls on it—someone’s sitting at his bedside, he thinks absently—and so he opens his eyes a little wider, trying to see who it is. It’s still hard to tell with everything in shadow, but the man must see something that startles him, because the weight abruptly shifts again, and a minute later there’s a face peering down into his own.
The eyes are blue, he thinks, or perhaps gray. They’re fair, at least, and remind him of mirrors.
“That settles that,” the man says, which draws him back out of his thoughts, even though he’s fairly certain the man was saying it more to himself than as any sort of attempt at conversation. “I didn’t think—” and he leans closer again, trailing off before finally muttering, “Who are you?”
It’s probably not the sort of question he’s meant to answer, but Kit finds himself doing it anyway. “Fawkes,” he whispers, which is the name he uses when he needs one in London. That’s what he is, he’s a fox, with a hat of red fur and ears, and he thinks his tail’s been caught in a trap.
“At least it’s not Hardwick,” the man mutters to himself, frowning, and Kit’s still trying to figure out who he is, because it’s the sort of thing he really feels he ought to know, if he’s bandaged and lying in a bed in this man’s custody with no real way of knowing how he got here.
Things are quiet another moment, the air still and stagnant, and then the man rolls up a sleeve and says, “One way of finding out for certain,” as his fingers reach for Kit’s bandaged forehead.
The fingers connect, and suddenly images are flooding through Kit’s mind—spinning like a kaleidoscope, so fast that the barrage of stimuli forces strangled whimpers of pain from his throat—the girl, the mirror, the cards, The Magician, Crispin, water, poisons, magic, London, the Owl, the party, his family, his mother, their laughter, blood in his mouth and a tomb made of marble—and it’s splintering and refracting and shattering like glass and there are eyes, green eyes, his face with green-gold eyes and he’s screaming, screaming because he’s scared to death and he wants it to stop and it hurts so bad—
His blood seems to burn as the magic tears out of it, searing along every nerve as it gathers together and lashes out in response to the invasion—get out of my head, get out of my head, get out of my head!—and the next thing he hears is the sound of shoulders hitting the wall as hot tears sting at his eyes.
He tilts his head to the side and lets out a wet cough, his eyes leaking and his head spinning, and he’s so caught up in the sensation of drowning that he almost misses the man’s stilted murmur of, “I’m sorry.”
It’s easier to slip back into unconsciousness after that, letting the soothing feeling of oblivion lift away the pain, and so he does—wondering, all the while, if perhaps this is the time he’s going to die for real.
It’s light in the room when he comes to again, and the bandage on his hand is gone. He tries to remember how long it takes to heal something like that—days, probably—and wonders how long it’s been since he last opened his eyes, or what day it is, or where he is, and it’s a lot of questions with no answers, which bothers him immensely. His head feels a bit better, at least, though the bandage is still there, and the light doesn’t sting his eyes when he opens them, so he thinks he must be recovering somehow.
His cane is in the room now, too. He can feel that familiar draw from a little way over to his left. That’s reassuring, at least.
“Welcome back,” the strange man says, which prompts him to open his eyes, and he’s surprised to see that the hand tending the bandage on his forehead is framed by a fur cuff, spotted like a leopard…and where has he seen that before?
It takes him a minute, but then he knows. “You’re that magician,” he says in a voice that croaks from lack of use. “You lifted the table on wire…”
“You thought it was funny,” the man answers, which sounds mostly indignant but there’s a strange sort of warmth to it, too, and it makes him think of Crispin smiling beneath his long white beard. “I’ll have you know it ruined my show, too.”
“That was a year ago,” Kit murmurs, leaning into the touch of the hand at his temple despite himself. “You held a grudge that long?”
Abruptly, the hand goes still. “That was no more than three weeks ago,” the man says, in what sounds like disbelief, but it’s hard to be sure.
Kit wants to shake his head, but he imagines it’ll hurt if he does, so he makes a soft noise of protest instead. “A year,” he insists weakly. “I was fifteen. ‘M sixteen now.”
“It hasn’t even been a year since—” the man begins, but then frowns and falls short, hovering over thoughts that Kit can’t identify.
So instead, he uses the moment to redirect the conversation to a topic of his own. “Stay out of my head,” he says in as accusing a tone as he can muster, which admittedly isn’t very much. “Don’t want you in there.”
“I’m not particularly eager to try it again, anyway, after the reaction I got the first time,” the man admits with another touch of that oddly warm humor. “Someone taught you to do that.”
“Crispin,” Kit answers, because saying so can’t hurt anything anyway. “Why’re you such a bad magician if you can do things like that?”
Again, the hand stills, and Kit realizes he’s scored another victory. “Why waste the energy that goes into a good trick when an audience is still willing to eat up a bad one?” the man counters.
“Oh.” Because really, that’s a good point. “Where are we?”
“A residence of mine,” the man answers. “How much do you remember?”
“The Owl took me to the end of the world,” Kit recalls slowly, retracing his steps as best he can through the haze that still seems to be weighing down his thoughts. “I went inside. There were angels…and a man. In the stone. Something about blood…and something hit me. It hurt.” His throat seems to swell at the memory. “It…crawled. It was…eating me…”
The mattress shifts as the man takes a seat. “That place was a mausoleum that belongs to the Hargreaves family,” he begins to explain, and Kit tries to collect his thoughts and focus them because it’s a story he very much wants to hear. “Whatever happened in there, it might as well have been an explosion. I was miles away when I caught sense of it.” The man pauses. “You were a mess by the time I got there. I thought you were dead at first, until I got close enough to see you convulsing. I imagine something in that tomb attacked you.” He pauses once more. “You shouldn't go there again.”
“The Hargreaves family?” Kit repeats, testing the name on his tongue. “Aren’t they…important? People talk about them.”
“They talk about the lord,” the man agrees quietly. “He had a way of making an impression on everyone he met. Whether they liked it or not.”
“You too?” Kit asks with a weak laugh, sensing where that train of thought might be going.
But to his surprise, the man only turns to look at him more fully, staring at him like he’s searching for something before remarking, “Yes, me too. From the moment I first caught sight of his green-gold eyes.”
And it only takes a minute before things fall into place, before the cold realization sets in.
▶ Butterfly
Mother certainly knew more than she was letting on, he thinks a little ruefully, toying with his top hat and swinging his legs against the side of the bed. Though I suppose it’s hardly a surprise.
There’s also the fact that he’s sixteen years old, which is apparently something that completely baffles Crehador because his father was only seventeen when they knew each other. It’s a little bit strange to think that he’s only a year younger than the father he’s been looking for all this time, to be honest; still, if time stops when he travels between the worlds, then it’s not such a stretch to think that it might run differently from place to place, so it doesn’t bother Kit nearly as much as he suspects it bothers Crehador.
Then there’s the part about his training to consider, and his relative ease with the study of magic. Apparently his father was something of a skeptic about the whole business, so it tends to catch Crehador off-guard when Kit talks to him about the tricks he utilizes. He’s as interested in the piano-wire ones as he is in the real powers, honestly; Crehador’s a stage magician, and Kit learned a lot in the one night he spent watching him a year ago. He’s eager to learn more now, because any trick is a good trick and there’s always a dozen different ways it could be used if one is smart enough to find them. So he spends a goodly portion of his rehabilitation learning to pull silk scarves from his sleeves and make flowers appear from behind people’s ears, and it’s almost like life with Crispin all over again, except that Crehador likes him too much to douse him in water every evening.
That’s the last part of it, he suspects, in a vaguely intuitive sort of way that he can’t quite explain. Crehador likes him. It’s something subtle, something in the corners of his eyes and the way a friendly warmth seems to creep at the edges of his smile, but after a while Kit begins to pick up on it. Crehador likes him a lot.
It’s probably only to be expected, since Crehador is also something of a hedonist, but while he does suspect that the magician is looking after him as a sort of implied favor to his father, he also suspects that Crehador’s interest is a sort of implied way of needling at his father, too. Having heard his father’s thoughts on the topic of magic in general, Kit suspects he wouldn’t take very well to hearing that his son had such a knack in it. The fact that Crehador only encourages him and helps to facilitate those pursuits is, he imagines, just another testament to the man’s somewhat arrogant sense of humor.
Which is fine with him, really, because it’s a sense of humor he shares. Maybe it is a magician thing, after all.
It’s nice to hear about his father, though, even though Crehador’s retellings of his pursuits are entirely biased, and not always in a good way. It’s comforting to hear the stories as he recuperates, especially because he’s starting to miss his mother and nothing reminds him of her so much as hearing a good story does. It’s also nice because it gives him things to file away for later, like when the magician starts getting on his nerves or takes his hedonism a little too far, because then Kit simply does something that his father would have done in the same situation and laughs at Crehador when he slips and mistakes the one for the other.
He’ll never get used to being called “Earl”, though. It’s such a foreign title, and frankly it’s a little beneath him. He’s a prince, thank you, and he’s going to be a king someday. Or at least, he could if he wanted, which is effectively the same thing.
It takes him a while before he’s steady enough to walk again, and another few weeks before he thinks he’s truly back to his usual self. Having Crehador go mucking around in his head when he was already hovering on the brink of death wasn’t exactly the most conducive thing to getting well, but once he gets past his annoyance about the whole business, he sort of understands why the magician did it. He’s heard about the organization called DELILAH now, learned a bit about their research from the things Crehador has told him. It’s hard to blame him, understanding that.
His father is dead, and he could be his father’s twin. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone attached to his family had been raised from the dead and made to live again.
When he’s well enough again, Crehador takes him to see his father—or, at least, the place where the magician last saw his father. The tower is still in pieces, the rubble transforming a once-pretty area into a rocky wasteland. It will be a long time before the destruction is cleaned up and removed, he thinks as he catches hold of the brim of his hat to avoid losing it to the wind. Beside him, Crehador is ostentatious as ever in his fur-trimmed coat and hat—which, Kit suspects, the magician chose on purpose, as just one more way of deliberately annoying the lingering shade of his father.
He still has family in London, Crehador tells him as they go. She’s an aunt by the name of Merry; after further inquiry, Kit realizes she’s the blond girl with the cards. It’s rather a relief that he won’t have to marry her, after all—he’d admittedly been a bit concerned about that.
Somehow, though, he doesn’t want to see her, and he suspects that Crehador doesn’t want to, either. The Hargreaves family is caught up in a flurry of infighting, he tells him, and the last thing they need is a surprise claimant to the title of lord. Kit really doesn’t want the title, anyway; it’s too permanent, too binding, when all he wants to do is finish the adventure he’d begun all those years ago, since the day he first looked into Merlin’s Mirror.
But he’d like to meet his Aunt Merry someday, he thinks. Perhaps someday he will.
But for now, they go to the remains of the tower and stand at the edge of the rubble, and Kit tries to imagine a structure reaching up to the heavens, a grand stone monolith where his father’s great battle finally came to its conclusion. He wants to believe his father was a hero, and he thinks he must have been, if only because he can’t imagine his mother loving anyone less than one.
They stand there in silence, and then suddenly Kit feels something, and he can tell from the way that Crehador stiffens at his side that he feels it, too. And it’s the magician that sees it first; his hand falls on Kit’s shoulder as he points across the rubble, silently, guiding his gaze to the two figures standing together at the other side of the wreckage.
There’s a man with skeleton arms, Kit realizes as he looks. And there’s a man who could be his twin.
Crehador once told him that the souls of the dead linger near the final resting place of their bodies, which means they must be close to them now—because they’re here, they’re really here, and this is the moment he’s been aching for all this time, the moment he’s been simultaneously anticipating and dreading for years upon years.
The figures draw closer, and the first thing Kit sees of his father is astonishment reflected in green-gold eyes, and the horrible, heartwrenching realization hits him all at once.
He never knew about me.
“Crehador,” the shade that is his father says in a surprisingly strangled tone, keeping close to the skeleton-armed man’s side as they approach. “What is this?”
“As I understand it,” Crehador answers in that deliberately flippant way, “This is someone who’s been looking for you for quite some time now, Earl.”
Kit swallows hard, trying not to quake in his coat and tails as he searches for words, but his father isn’t saying anything; he’s only looking, staring at him the way everyone stares at him, as though they're looking right through him without ever seeing him. But there's something more to it, and Kit sees that, too: he's staring like he’s as fixated on Kit’s eyes as Kit is on his own.
“I’m Christopher,” he says at last, barely managing to get the words out without squeaking. “Kit. Mother…Mother always called me Kit. That’s me.”
“Rosella,” his father whispers, the word barely audible under his breath as a translucent hand comes up to cover his face. He’s quiet a minute, and then suddenly he’s looking up at the skeleton-armed man, eyes searching, face reflecting some unreadable emotion. “Did you know about this?”
But the man only shakes his head, which seems to do nothing to ease his father’s distress. “Damn it all,” he hisses under his breath, clutching at his hair once again. “I never—damn it!”
And suddenly Kit feels as though he should bolt, because of all the ways he'd pictured this moment going, this is far from one of them, and he doesn't know what it is but it's something, it's him, his father is angry because of him and this was a bad idea, a stupid idea, this is all his fault and he wants to shrink back or cower or disappear, or perhaps he should just run away, far away, be anywhere other than here at this moment—but then Crehador’s hand touches his arm as if to steady him, to soothe his frantic train of thought, and Kit can only watch in bewilderment as he remarks dryly, “Keep that up, Earl, and he’ll think you don’t want him.”
For a moment, a single fleeting moment, a look of something like fury flickers over his father’s face. But then, as quickly as it appeared, it’s gone—and what’s left is something much softer, something hollower, that makes his father look years younger than he is.
“She named you Christopher?” he says at last, in a thin, gentle voice.
Kit nods, perfectly silent, because he knows he couldn’t get words out if he tried. He doesn't want to speak, doesn't want to see that fury flash across his father's face again, but he tries to make himself stand without cowering as every bit of his stance asks the question he can't make himself say.
Do you hate me, father?
His father looks up, looks him right in the eyes, and this time it feels as though he’s seeing him for the first time as slowly, sweetly, like the sun breaking from behind a cloud—his expression softens further, and his lips turn up in a smile.
“It’s a good name,” his father says.
▶ Belief
Crehador helps them all get home, which is only slightly to his father’s chagrin; his powers as a medium aren’t enough to send people between the worlds, but they’re enough to teach Kit how to carry two souls along with him when he goes himself. And it’s not nearly as strange an experience as he was expecting, really, because he quickly comes to learn that Riff is a part of his father and his father is a part of him, so in a way it makes sense to have them all together as one when he bids Crehador farewell and drops back into the void between the worlds.
Things haven’t changed a bit since he left, even though he thinks he’s been gone for months and months; his father mentions something about it simply being the way travel between the worlds works, and Kit thinks to himself that he’ll be demanding a lot of explanations from his parents in the near future, now that they’re all together again to tell them to him.
They go silently up to his mother’s room, treading softly up the steps into the tower because it’s still the middle of the night, and then Kit and Riff wait quietly at the door as his father slips into the room. It’s almost funny, the face he makes as he picks his way over to the bed, because his mother’s room is the same mess it’s been for as long as Kit can remember, and the look on his father’s face says clearly, some things never change.
He and Riff avert their eyes for a moment as his father regards his sleeping mother, but then they glance at each other and, as one, sneak peeks back again as he leans down, resting one translucent hand on her cheek as he brings his lips to meet hers.
By all rights, she shouldn’t feel the kiss—it comes from a ghost, after all—and yet like the sleeping princess of the story, her blue eyes flutter open, and it only takes an instant before it’s apparent that she knows.
“And Merry said you never keep your promises,” she whispers, her voice warm and heavy with sleep.
“I know better than to break one to you, princess,” his father murmurs back. “I’d never hear the end of it if I did.”
He’s quiet a minute, the air warm and rich with the affection flowing between them, and then at last he adds the statement Kit knows has been coming since the afternoon at the fallen tower. “You never told me.”
“I didn’t know,” his mother answers, her eyes soft. “Not until after I’d already…”
His father nods, as though it were the answer he’d expected all along. “You named him after me.”
“He looks like you,” his mother replies, and she’s clearly waking up now, because her sense of humor is beginning to show in the lilt and cadence of her tone. “Even a little handsomer, I should think.”
“You stubborn girl,” his father says, as quick as casting a spell on reflex.
“You insufferable boy,” his mother retorts without missing a beat, wearing a smile that makes it clear she’d been trying for that response all along.
“We’ll just be going,” Kit says quickly, because he’s old enough to know flirting when he hears it, and as happy as he is to see his parents reunited, there are some things that a child simply doesn’t need to see—and from the way his mother and father are looking at each other, he’s willing to bet that their reunion is going to quickly escalate into one of them.
He shuffles Riff down the hall, thinking of families and kingdoms and the countries on both sides of the mirror, both a part of him, both drawing him in—and both, in their own way, his home. It’s not such a bad way to end an adventure, he muses with more than a touch of pride as he rolls his shoulders and feels the magic, golden and bright, thrumming through the midnight air.
They’re halfway through the throne room, heading toward the kitchen for a late but much-deserved snack, when he stumbles and nearly falls; upon catching himself, he realizes he’d misstepped somewhere on the stairs, and his left shoe has come untied.
“Let me,” Riff says with a fond, knowing smile, and pats him on the shoulder before reaching down for the offending laces.
But Kit raises a hand to stop him, shakes his head, and offers his father's oldest and most faithful confidante a smile. “That’s okay,” he says, “I can take care of it on my own,”—and crouches down to remedy the situation himself instead.
▶ Ball
He steps onto the street, tipping his hat to the magician waiting for him, and carefully hides a smile as Crehador’s eyes flicker over him and absorb the sight.
It’s silent between them a moment, but he is unperturbed as he waits it out. He is nothing if not patient, after all.
And then, at last, Crehador lets out a laughing, disbelieving scoff. “Two of you,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m letting a monster loose in London tonight.”
“You couldn’t stop me if you tried,” he answers smugly, taking the reaction as the highest of compliments. “Now have the carriage brought around, or we’ll be late for the evening ball.”
“I don’t take orders from aristocrats,” Crehador replies.
“You’ll never be rid of us, Crehador,” he says devilishly. “We’re going to haunt you forever.”
Crehador glares at him, and he promptly flashes an innocent look, one that fools neither of them.
“Let’s go,” Christopher G. Hargreaves says, seventeen years old and ready to see what London’s future holds in store for him, and emphasizes the command with a motion of his cane—and his father’s graceful smile.
BACK TO PART ONE