At first, W.D. does not know how to feel about the man that keeps making eyes at his sister.
Phillip Carlyle is around their age, but he's from a different world than they are, and when he gets bored with Anne (or worse: decides that she isn't worth the trouble that their relationship would cause him)... What will that do to her?
It isn't like W.D. wants to assume that Phillip will get bored with Anne. But he comes from money, from high-class, and W.D. and Anne... they come from the people that serve drinks at their high-class parties, if they're lucky. Or, if they aren't so lucky, they're the ones that clean up after the party is over. Phillip Carlyle is used to different-he sees something in Anne, sure, but he'll get sick of just how different they are, or he'll get his fill of living dangerously, and he'll run right back to his nice, high-class life. The circus, the show, the people who perform in it-Anne-will be nothing to him when he leaves, just like when he got there.
It's not like they mean anything to him as it is. W.D. can see the way that Phillip doesn't quite make eye contact with any of them. He gives tight-lipped smiles that somehow don't reach his eyes whenever Barnum is around, but other than that, he tries not to be too close to them. Tries not to touch them. Like he doesn't want to get too close-he doesn't want to get to know them.
He doesn't care about them. W.D. knows that. His sister does, too, in the back of her head. But Phillip Carlyle is the kind of person that tends to make one forget that it's a terrible idea to be around him at all.
So W.D. keeps his mouth shut-this isn't hard. Anne's almost always talked enough for the both of them, chatter box that she is-about what he thinks. Glares at the back of Pretty Boy's (this is a decent nickname for Phillip, W.D. thinks, and, yes, maybe it is his dark humor getting the best of him, but it keeps him from telling Anne what he knows she needs to hear) head whenever he isn't looking. Sometimes he glares at him when he is looking, just to remind him that breaking his sister's heart is a very bad idea.
W.D. doesn't spend too much time wondering what kind of person it makes him. It doesn't matter. Maybe his methods are wrong, but he wants to protect his sister-he will protect his sister-and that's got to count for something. He just wants Anne to be happy. And maybe she will be happy with the attention for a few weeks, and then it'll go away, and she'll move on. He'll apologize for not telling her that he foresaw her heartbreak from the beginning. Life will go forward. They'll keep dancing with Barnum's show, and life will keep going on around them. Anne will get over Phillip.
The question of what happens if she doesn't bounce right back from the heartbreak bangs around between the walls of his skull if he thinks about it too long. Not just that, but also the image of him breaking Pretty Boy's pretty nose when he breaks Anne's heart. (W.D. really doesn't want to do something violent-it makes him no better than those thugs that roughed the crew up on the streets-but he will for his sister.)
W.D. wonders if he really will have to break Pretty Boy's nose-or at least give him a black eye, to mess up that pretty-boy-look-when Anne plops down onto his bed (in the theatre, they all have a place to sleep, and it's nicer than anything him or Anne have ever had) and says, voice frighteningly hollow, "He held my hand."
W.D. whirls around, eyes wide, the pair of pants that he's folding going limp in his hands as he processes what he's been told.
He doesn't say anything. He knows better than to try and pry things out of his sister.
She turns, and he notices that she looks different without her stage makeup on. There are dark circles under her eyes. "He grabbed my hand during that performance, it was so beautiful, and then..." she trails off, reliving the memory in her head. She jerks backward in a flinch before she regains herself, eyes going wide. "His parents looked over and he just... moved, like I'm not worth being seen with."
W.D. decides that when he sees Phillip next, he'll give him two black eyes. Who won't want to be seen with who then, huh? It's not the kind of thing he should be thinking, especially with his little sister right in front of him and so clearly in need of a pep talk or a hug or both, but it makes him feel better.
He wraps his arms around Anne and sits down next to her. She rested her head on his shoulder and cried.
It was the first time he'd seen her cry in almost ten years.
/
W.D. hated Phillip Carlyle.
He made Anne cry. Treated the rest of them like they were almost worth it, almost worthy (a marked improvement over the way he had treated them at the beginning of his job with the show), but they could never get over the line. Could never pull out that almost and replace it with some certainty. He didn't like that.
He didn't like the way that Pretty Boy treated Anne, either.
(That was mostly what he didn't like, if he was honest. Phillip could've treated every performer in their show badly if it meant he was good to Anne, for all that W.D. cared.)
But then one of those thugs lit their theatre ( their home ) on fire, and all of them watched as it burned to the ground in front of them. People are screaming, screaming, and Barnum is yelling, "Stay calm! Everyone stay calm!"
The fire is a volcano, erupting in sparks and smoke and ash and slowly destroying the first real home that so many of the crowd (now outside, sobbing or screaming or shoving through the crowd to find their loved ones) have ever known. W.D. realizes with a terrifying sense of truth that no one should be staying calm. The fire is ripping the building to pieces-it is an angry god, one of the ones that he imagined or read about as a child, and it is devouring this thing that he and so many others have grown to love. It makes it hard to see anything else, including the people right in front of him, and where's my sister, where's my sister, where's my sister-?
W.D. looks around frantically for Anne, but is side-tracked by a younger girl who is burned and looks terrified. It's then that he hears someone calls his name from the other side of the crowd. The wall of people between them opens up as people (clinging to their loved ones, holding on for dear life, coughing, faces covered in ash) step back to allow them to see each other.
"W.D., where's Anne?" Phillip shouts through the crowd. "Where's Anne, where's Anne?"
He springs up to his feet, looking around, remembering that he never found his sister in the throng of people. She's still inside, he realizes. His stomach drops to his toes. He starts forward a step, not about to waste a valuable second answering Phillip's question.
"Where's Anne?" Phillip repeats, his voice louder, more frantic, full of panic. "Where's Anne?"
W.D. plants his foot, takes another step. He doesn't get much farther before he watches Phillip take off into a burning building to find Anne.
Several pairs of hands grab at him when he tries to take off after Phillip, and the people manage to pull him back into the crowd. One of them is Barnum, one of them is a firefighter. One of them is Thom. He shouts, tugs, tries everything he can think of to wrench out of their grasps, but it's useless-there's too many of them holding him back, and they all are in better states of mind than he is (if only slightly). Thom is yelling in his ear, but W.D. can't make out what he's saying over the noise around them and the pounding of his heart in his ears.
He is eventually forced to get it back together enough to realize that that was Phillip Carlyle-who wasn't supposed to care about Anne, who wasn't supposed to care at all-that just ran headfirst into a burning building to save her.
Not thirty seconds later, Anne comes flying around the corner, into the crowd. Her shawl is in the air, trailing behind her, she's moving so fast. W.D. frees himself from the grip that Barnum has on his arm. He catches his sister in his arms. He's so grateful that she's alive that he swings her around (this is an accident-he doesn't mean to give her a perfect view of the fire still ravaging their theatre) as he hauls her further back into the crowd. His only thought is getting her away from the fire.
There's more shouting from the front, and he sets her on her feet just as it reaches an octave only available to young children screaming at the tops of their lungs. W.D. cranes his neck to see what the matter is, suspecting more injuries even as he tries to find the source of the screams. He's just in time to see Barnum himself takes a long look at his wife and daughters before doing a hard pivot and racing into the building himself.
Barnum rips off his coat as he flies past the wall of smoke. He holds it over his head-this is a smart move. W.D. is glad to know that the man at least has this much sense.
There's a roaring crash not even two minutes after Barnum disappears from view. The building collapses in on itself. The crowd sucks in a collective gasp. More debris rains around them, and a deafening silence seems to sweep over the crowd (with the lone exceptions of the weeping, the sobbing, the injured). The horde of people slowly move back for fear of getting hit by the on-fire debris falling from the sky.
Anne turns and buries her face into W.D.'s shoulder. He wraps her in a tight hug as she cries. What's he supposed to say? That the guy that he hated for her died trying to save her?
The answer to that is a definite no.
A high-pitched cry of "Daddy!" pierces the air. W.D. looks up to find Barnum flinging himself from the barely-standing front of the theatre, appearing from the walls of flame and smoke like an apparition. In his arms is a half-dead (or maybe very dead) Phillip Carlyle. No, he's dead. W.D. determines. There's no way he could've survived as long as he was in there.
Charity Barnum cries out in relief. The sound of her slapping a hand to her mouth is audible, even from where W.D. is standing.
He holds his sister tighter to him. She's sobbing. Tears are running down her face. He hates that she's crying at all-but it means that she really cares about him, too, doesn't it?
Barnum carefully deposits Phillip on the ground in front of the crowd, and the people form a semi-circle around him, all trying to see if he's alright. In some ways, W.D. realizes, he really has grown on them. W.D. doesn't want him to be dead-and not just because of his sister. Because he's grown as a person, and he's started to grow on him, too.
Anne is somehow in the front of the crowd, nearest to Phillip, before W.D. notices. He does hear Barnum announce that Phillip is still breathing. The man also calls for a stretcher. And just as W.D. gets to his sister's side through the mass of people, the paramedics are whisking Phillip away on a stretcher, already losing in the race against time to save his life.
W.D. also heard Barnum say that Phillip had taken a lot of smoke. He now has a new question to let bang around the inside of his head. It's definitely an outcome he hadn't seen coming, but it's beginning to look like the reality the longer he thinks about it.
What happens if Phillip Carlyle dies for Anne? What would she do then? Would she ever recover from that?
W.D. doesn't know. But he does hold onto his sister's arm long enough to let Charity Barnum and Lettie look both of them over (W.D.'s heard that when you're really fired up, or you're smack in the middle of something bad, you may not realize that you're injured, and it's better to be safe than sorry). Once Charity steps away to examine a group of younger girls that are still crying, much to the chagrin of her daughters (who, though fairly young themselves, are still trying to calm them), Lettie gives Anne an apologetic look.
Anne hates pity, W.D. knows. Both of them can't stand the look that people get when they feel sorry for them. But, to W.D.'s surprise, Anne allows Lettie to pull her into a rib-crushing hug without complaint. Anne sobs into her shoulder for no more than sixty seconds before pulling away.
She stands there for a minute, trying to pull herself back together. Three or four deep breaths. Near-violently swiping tears away from her cheeks with her index fingers.
"I have to go to the hospital," she eventually chokes out. Her voice is thick, distant, but she sounds hollow. Tears continue to stream down her face. She stares right between W.D. and Lettie's heads. Her eyes aren't quite seeing.
The older woman glances at W.D. "Dubya-Dee, is she...?"
He shrugs a shoulder. He would love to say that he knew, but even though he's her older brother, he's still not sure. What he does know is that there's not much more endearing than the emphasis that Lettie puts on his initials. She does that to everyone-makes everyone feel seen.
Lettie takes a small step towards Anne. "I bet that PB knows where they took him, Anne," she murmurs, brushing a lock of hair out of the younger girl's face. "We'll go ask him."
This is a much easier suggestion than it would've been even a few minutes before. The group has calmed down enough, and the fire's mostly out. The traffic of rushing people has calmed down. The screaming has mostly died down, too. Now, people are either crying or staring blankly ahead of them.
The older woman takes Anne's arm and leads her towards where Barnum is standing with Charlie and Thom and a couple of police officers. Lettie shoulders through the crowd without shoving anyone. This is a near impossible feat, but she somehow manages it. When they break through the other end of the crowd, the man himself comes into view. Barnum is pointing and gesturing at the burned building, likely giving his statement.
The police officers go slack-jawed at the sight of Lettie coming up behind Barnum. She might notice, but if she does, it doesn't show-she doesn't miss a step or skip a beat before saying, "PB, I have a question for you."
Lettie's voice is authoritative and strong. W.D. wonders how she does that-how she is always so ready to meet problems head-on, how he's never seen her allow herself to be shut out or pitied or looked down on. He wonders if he could do that, too, and mean it. It would be better than just pretending he felt that way. That kind of confidence would be life-changing, wouldn't it?
Barnum turns around at the sound of Lettie's voice. He knows better than to test her like that, and the look on Charlie's face says that, yes, he's made the right decision, even if one of the police officers huffs and grumbles to the bald one standing next to him. "A question, Lettie?" His voice is to the point, sure of himself. But there's a twinkle in his eyes that says, yes, he's happy to make the men behind him wait.
Lettie lowers her voice, tilts her head as if to tell Barnum to move away from listening ears. Gossip is something that W.D. doesn't understand-why would anyone waste valuable time going on about other peoples' problems?-but he does know that Anne or Lettie asking about Phillip Carlyle could be overheard by someone who has less issue with running their mouth to other people. It's best to avoid that, if they can manage it.
PB points a few feet to the right, where no one should be able to hear them. He turns around and says to the men that he'd been speaking with, "I need to go address this. I'll be back in a few minutes." He glances around before putting a hand on Charlie's shoulder. "Charlie can answer any questions you've got in the mean time."
They look less than thrilled at the prospect, but Charlie's face lights up at the responsibility that PB is giving him. That trust and approval means the world to him. W.D. watches as he turns to face the police and Thom and half-shouts, "So-questions?" In his uniform, with the large-and-in-charge look on his face, he looks like a million bucks.
As Lettie leads the way to where Barnum had motioned a moment before-ever the leader, carrying herself like a queen (W.D. knows that this means head up, back straight, shoulders back), knowing exactly what and how good she is-it dawns on W.D. that Barnum knows exactly what he's doing. The corners of his mouth are tilted up from the happiness on Charlie's face.
"What can I help you with, Lettie?" Barnum turns to face them once they're far enough away that they won't be heard. He looks exhausted, and the same ash and sheen of sweat that covers his face likely covers W.D. as well.
W.D. hadn't felt the heat before, he'd been so panicked. Now that he registers how hot it is in the street around the burned theatre, he drags the back of his hand across his forehead. His hand comes back shiny with sweat.
"Do you know where they took Phillip, PB?"
Even though it's Lettie that speaks, both W.D. and PB are only looking at Anne. She winces and rolls her lips together at Phillip's name.
W.D. doesn't regret many things. He doesn't let himself. He doesn't have that kind of time-he has a younger sister to look out for, a job (well, at least, he did until a few hours ago) at the theatre, and plenty of his own stuff to deal with. He doesn't have time to think twice about everything. To let himself get so caught up in the past. There's no crying over spilled milk where he's from.
He regrets not being able to take care of his sister when they were younger. He regrets snapping at people when he's had a long day. He regrets calling Phillip Carlyle "Pretty Boy". He regrets not trying to get to know him better, not being as understanding when he realized that Anne had feelings for Phillip. He could've been a better brother.
It's clear that Barnum notices Anne's change in demeanor. He opens his mouth to ask what's the matter (W.D. can see the caring in his eyes, and he knows that PB is about to say something to Anne that'll cause her to burst into tears again, with the way that the night's been going), but after a piercing look from Lettie, he purses his lips and turns back to Lettie.
"The hospital a few streets over, a bit farther downtown." PB answers. "Do you know the one I'm talking about?" Even as he talks, his eyes dart over to Anne every few seconds. W.D. sees the truth dawn on PB-he sees the exact second that PB realizes what's going on between Phillip Carlyle and Anne.
To PB's credit, though, it doesn't show on his face beyond his widened eyes. (That may have more to do with the near-evil look Lettie is giving him, though. It half says "If you say something stupid, you will not live to regret it.")
Lettie shakes her head, but W.D. knows the hospital he's talking about. Voice low, he responds to the question himself: "I know the one you mean, PB."
"Then let's get going." Lettie's smile is small, and tight, and this close, W.D. can tell that there's even ash in her beard. She seems paler than usual, too-she wasn't in the burning theatre for long, but she still breathed in some smoke.
She gestures grandiosely towards the street where the crowd is still huddled together. The people have moved even closer together, if that's even possible. They're likely looking for comfort among each other. That's something that they've all started doing in the months since they started working together.
"Lead the way, Dubya-Dee."