Elizabeth Tower remembers to this day how for two long years, almost a century ago, Big Ben's chiming was gone from London. She vowed then never to let him go, and her bell has been at her side ever since.
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xXx
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Elizabeth shudders as Ben's deep ring resounds through her frame. Waves of pleasure crash into her, cascading down her impressive height and into her concrete base. With every stroke, her spire shakes, and the streets of London move below them. Her faces glow warmly in the midnight air, and a small part of her thinks how lucky she is, to have a bell so faithful to her through her long life.
A final reverberating impact sounds in the night, and Elizabeth feels the familiar sensation rush from her foundation to the tip of her spire. As the white-hot light fades, she stretches and hears her stairway creak a little. Her thirteen-foot pendulum beats softly, and she listens to the soft clicking of her double three-legged gravity escapement as she basks in the afterglow of another year gone by.
It should be a happy occasion, she muses, breaking in a new year, but Elizabeth can't help but feel each and every one of her many years resting on her stonework.
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xXx
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Victoria, her sister, is tall and stately and strong - and perhaps surprisingly bookish, but Lizzie could never find it in herself to be jealous. As sisters they've always been close, and one and a half centuries together have only strengthened their bonds.
Every time she feels like collapsing, or after she's rained on again, or when life throws a spanner in her life - any disruption of routine makes Elizabeth panic incoherently - it's Victoria who holds her tightly, tells her again and again that everything's going to be all right, listening attentively to her choked sobs and brushing away the warm rivulets that run down her faces.
Elizabeth loves her sister, loves the warm, caring side of her that many fail to see beneath her impassive façade and steel-hard will. She doesn't like that her darling little sister is so under-appreciated, while she gets all the popularity and fame. Technically, it's Ben that's famous, but it's her faces and spire that people see and remember, and it's her, not her bell, that people think of they hear of Big Ben.
And when Vicky gives her a little smile and says that it's okay and she doesn't mind and she's happy to stay in the archives and read, Lizzy can hear the slight waver in her sister's usually smooth voice, and feels all the pain her sister locks up and tries to hide away behind endless lines of numbers and words. Elizabeth wants to make her baby sister happy too, and when she cries, her tears flow for both their hearts.
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xXx
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Ben, bright and optimistic and happy, is the counterpart to Victoria's stoicism. He's loud and exuberant, and knows all of Lizzy's structural weaknesses. His tower was nearly disconsolate with worry when he returned from the Great War, and then and there they promised each other never to part again. There have been hiccups over the years, but whenever their routine is disturbed, Ben gives her his lopsided grin with his notched rim, the one that says tells her not to worry, because he won't let anything stand between them ever again.
Although long years of experience have taught him where to stop, he can't stop himself from going just a tad overboard on special occasions. If anyone were to ask, Elizabeth would note how cheesy it was, but when his steady strokes reduce her to a quivering pile of bricks and mortar, really, there's nothing else in the world she'd rather have.
Victoria pretends not to care, but when nobody is looking and her guard is down, she lets herself smile a little. Ben has been good for her sister, even if it leaves herself more than a little lonely. Unlike her fragile older sister, she knows she can deal with loneliness.
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xXx
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No-one has ever seen her cry, but in the heart of Victoria's sprawling archives, there lies a tome where all the words are long gone, the ancient paper crinkled with faded spots of washed-out ink.
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Fin.
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Author's Comments:
Hi everybody! I accidentally all my notes, so this is the second time I'm writing this comment. This is the first fic I've ever published, so yay!~
All ye who read this, beware the treachery of the backspace! (I should really disable that keybinding...)
Shout out to my lovely and wonderful mistress Cyro, who helped me beta this! (If you were wrong about the rating I will hit you!)
Yay for crackfic! I am fairly sure this is the first and only Elizabeth Tower/Great Bell fic out there, even though it's really less of a story and more of a snapshot of a story - but if you've read anything like this before, please please PLEASE tell me? :3
Now, back to the Harry Potter and Naruto~!
- Vivi