Hare and Hatter
End of part two! Part three coming up (as soon as tech week is over and I get to refind this mystical creature called free time). Thank you to everyone who reviewed and please tell me what you think of this chapter.
Part Two
Chapter Twenty-eight
On returning to the Rainsworth household Break had fallen right into bed, exhausted by power overuse and the stresses of the day. It was only late the next day that he woke, he was just in time to throw clothes on and make it to afternoon tea.
As he had left his room he'd noticed that Liam's coat was on the floor with the rest of the clothes from the Barma visit he'd tossed off. He fished it out and folded it over his arm. If Liam didn't make it completely impossible he'd give it back to him over tea.
No one seemed to have expected him to actually make it to tea, Sharon had to ring for a servant to bring an extra setting and chair when he arrived. It was only after Break settled into his place that he had the opportunity to scan the table. There were all the usual that he'd expected, Sharon, Oz, Gil, and Alice, though the fact that Oscar had come to visit was a bit of a surprise. But he did not see that one person he needed very badly to see.
They were all watching him, all waiting for him to say something.
"Where is Liam?" he asked.
All around the table there was a sudden outbreak of eye avoidance and feverous fiddling with things on the table.
Eventually Sharon sighed and said, "He's with Lord Barma, at the Barma estate."
He frowned. "But he came back with…" and then he played the last night's conclusion back in his head only to realize that he was wrong. That Liam had not left the theatre with them.
When he rose from the table Gil, of all people, reached out to shove him back down into his chair. He looked surprised at how easy it was.
"You aren't going to the Barma estate." Oscar said flatly.
Break glared at him. "Do you have any idea what is going to happen to him?"
"No," Oz interjected. "And if someone could fill me in I'd appreciate it."
"I don't know either." Alice said.
Ignoring the interruption Break continued to glare at Oscar. "I am not going to leave him there."
Gil had kept his hand on his shoulder and shoved again as Break tried to rise for a second time. "He told me to make sure you didn't go."
"He's a self sacrificing idiot." Break snapped.
"Think for a moment," Oscar said, "If it was possible to just to storm in there and drag him back to safety would we just be sitting here?"
After a moments thought Break sighed and relaxed back into his chair. He reached out and claimed a cake for his own. "I dislike this." he said, what was an understatement for quite how badly he was feeling at that very moment. He hadn't even noticed Liam was there…
"What's going on?" Oz demanded. "Is Mister Liam in trouble?"
There were looks around the table before Break said succinctly, his voice low with restrained anger, "Yes."
Lord Barma stared at the small, bloody smear on the floor of the entryway and the earring that lay in the middle of it. He sometimes admitted that he had a rather overactive temper that snapped far too quickly. This was one of those times.
It was true that his servant had betrayed him but it was not as if he hadn't known that he had been loosing the loyalty of Liam for some time. It should not have come as the surprise it had been when the man had intervened on Xerxes Break's account.
He was the March Hare's after all, no matter how much they had tried to keep the two apart, the power of the chains had still called the two together. Perhaps all the work he had done to keep them apart was to be in vain.
If that was the case then he had truly failed in his effort to keep the boy alive. If Hare and Hatter came together Liam would die.
Soon.
Slumping down onto the floor was easier than making his way to the bed; those were three extra steps Liam didn't think he could manage. Everything ached.
That was only to be expected after what had happened. Never before had he seen Lord Barma quite as angry as he had been before. Usually his Lord had more sense than to strike his face -facial bruises on one's servants were hard to explain away- but he must have been truly furious that he'd defied a direct order to protect Break. Or just angry enough to forget that one rule.
Hopefully there would be nothing else required of him tonight, he'd barely been able to drag himself off the floor when Lord Barma, apparently disgusted, had turned his back on him and dismissed him with the flick of a hand.
He'd gone to the kitchens first, staggering, propping himself up with the wall most of the way, driven more by habit than by reason. There was safety in the kitchens, people who would help and he that was what he needed at that very moment -his head was still ringing from impact with the ground and the arm he wasn't using to prop himself dangled limply. It didn't feel broken, but when he'd fallen (the first time) he'd hit it strangely on the floor catching himself and it had gone numb after that.
There would be Agathea and Catherine in the kitchen.
Expect that there wasn't.
Dimly he remembered, leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen, that this was the one week of the year that both women had leave to visit their families in the country. The woman in the kitchen had babbled at him in a startled way, she was probably a cousin or niece of Agathea who usually asked one to come in to mind the household while the housekeeper was away. He even though he'd met the woman before he couldn't be exactly sure his assumption was right, his glasses were somewhere on the floor in the hall since he'd been in too much of a hurry to get away to locate them so the woman's face was a fleshy blur.
She might have been able to do something, but from her shrieks of panic it seemed unlikely. With him standing there bruised and bloody it was understandable but at that very moment panicking was completely unhelpful. He'd turned on his heel without even saying a word to her and dragged himself through the mansion to where his room was.
Now that he was on the floor it was strangely comfortable, the coolness of the floorboards felt pleasant against his throbbing head. The cold almost made the stinging of his earlobe go away. When he reached up to touch it he found his ear and that side of his neck was bloody, he had a dim memory of putting a hand on the floor to push himself back up and feeling the metal of the ring of one of his earrings under it as he sat up. He must have ripped it out of his ear in his hurry to get away. That certainly explained the pain.
Maybe he had hit his head harder than he'd originally thought. Lying here until he could think clearly was a good plan.
"You really are an utter fool."
No other voice, at that very moment, could have made him sit up faster. For a moment his head spun but when the world settled back down he frowned toward the window, where the voice had come from. There was a person sitting on the windowsill. One with white hair.
"…Break?" he asked cautiously. "No, surely not even you would be stupid enough to come here." But how many other people did he know that would be sitting on his windowsill?
"Of course I came to visit you," Was that Break smiling? It was hard to tell. "You are, after all, a dear friend."
That was odd, with the exception of the one time with Lord Oz Break wasn't given to proclamations of friendship. "I'm not your friend. And how did you get in here?"
Break waved a dismissive hand. "Details, details. That's hardly important. What is important is what you did for me. You shouldn't have disobeyed your master, not for me."
"I know. I shouldn't have." he said,.
"Ah, but had you known what I didn't tell you, would you still have defended me?" Break asked and his tone was somehow too intent, too expectant.
Wishing for his glasses Liam leaned forward to get a better look at Break. "Why do want to know? I mean, it's over, there's nothing I could do to change it even if I wanted to."
"Oh, so you would want to?" Break pressed. "If you'd known what I truly was you would have never gone against your Lord?"
"Did you really go to all the trouble of sneaking in here to ask me that? What's the point?"
"Well, to know, of course!" Break swung his feet back and forth like a child, tapping his heels against the wall that held the window and, knowing Break, probably leaving marks on the wall from his boots. Then he added, "Information is the key to everything!"
That was odd, it barely sounded like Break at all. In fact- Liam glared at the man sitting on his windowsill. "You're an illusion, aren't you?"
In answer Break smirked, "You shouldn't have saved me." Then he threw back his head and laughed, loud and raucous and insane, dissolving down to dust in seconds. The sound of his -its- laughter lingered in the air long after the illusion was gone.
Liam slumped back to the floor, suddenly aching all the more. He lay there, one the floor, with one arm over his eyes, for some time.
Alone.
Except for the whispering… the faint whispering, that came from somewhere far off and yet felt very, very familiar.
"I… want…"
"Who is that?"
"Ha…"
"Hello?"
TBC
End of Part Two
