Hey, I'm home!
I have to wait a breath or two for the nausea to pass before I can open my eyes. Hieronymous told me the reaction would wear off once I'd started traveling through the Spiral Gate on a regular basis, and it's proved largely true. Still, I'm extra careful whenever I come home - I'd prefer not to throw up all over the foyer if I can help it. I'd done it once in February, coming home exhausted and distracted from a particularly intense study session, and it isn't an experience I'd care to repeat.
The light streaming through the smoked glass walls and clear ceiling is a cheerful, ruddy orange, a nice contrast from the dour, gray Oxbridge evening I've just stepped out of. I tug off my square cap, and shake out my hair.
How did it go? Hieronymous's voice in my head.
I think I died somewhere around hour four, I think back at him, but not to worry - I came back to life as a zombie and finished.
I should hope so, comes the reply. A proper education is too important to waste on the dead. Undead is, I think, a sufficient compromise. Hungry?
Starving, I think, removing my heavy black gown. I toss it and the cap to one side, teleporting them in mid-air to my bedroom closet.
Care for anything in particular?
Human brains and the rotting flesh of innocent children, please. I'm wearing a white blouse, black skirt and tights, which, after sitting in them for eight hours straight, feel close and a bit sticky. I do a quick change, teleporting my outfit back to my room, while fetching a comfortable pair of jeans and t-shirt to wear in their place. The change is almost instantaneous, so that there's no need to try covering up, even if there had been anyone trying to peer through the windows at me. I stretch, hearing my back pop a little, then start down the steps into the foyer.
Very droll. I hope you mean it, I've been out slaughtering children just for you all afternoon. Do you know, it's terribly hard to find innocent ones these days?
I project an image of me sticking my tongue out, and head to the door by the fireplace, reaching out in my mind to determine where Hieronymous is in the house. I quickly find him in his study, which isn't surprising - despite his crack about the innocent children, he's probably been working in there all day. I know that I have to focus on the study while opening this particular door, as it will open on any room in the house, so long as one is concentrating on it. I've made the mistake of trying to go to the library while thinking about getting a snack from the kitchen, and ended up in two rooms at once. It was very uncomfortable, and took a while to sort out and put myself together again.
I'm concentrating as I reach my hand to the knob, but something makes me stop. At first, I'm not quite sure what it is - just a flash on the edges of my vision. I turn, trying to figure out what I'd seen. It's a minute before I recognize it - a splash of deepening orange light playing on the gray steps leading to the fireplace. But for a moment, it almost looked like a fan of bright dyed orange hair.
how had I never noticed that she had blue eyes?
I blink, shaking myself a little. What am I thinking - blue eyes? And why was the thought so spooky?
There's nothing spooky, it's just Hieronymous's fireplace. Sheesh.
Our fireplace, I correct myself in my head. Funny how I've lived in Revane Cottage for nearly six months, and the concept is still a little difficult to grasp. Hieronymous had insisted on it when I'd moved in around Christmas - that I ought to consider the house, and everything in it, as ours, not his.
"Even if we're not married any more?" I'd asked, grinning.
"Are you trying to hint that you'd like to be remarried?" he'd said. "I could call Petunia, I'm sure she'd be only too happy to officiate-"
"No!" I'd shouted, pushing him onto the sofa, then sitting on his lap before he could get up. "One marriage is enough. For now, anyway."
It had been a very nice Christmas - a very nice six months, really, even with the specter of my first set of preliminary exams hanging over my head - though thinking of this huge house as partly mine still doesn't come very easily.
I turn to the door and twist the knob, concentrating on the study as I do. But at the last second, I become convinced that when I open it, the door will lead to an endless hallway, studded with identical rows of doors.
Oh sh- I think, convinced I'm going to get stuck between somewhere - but to my relief, the door opens into Hieronymous's study, and I step through, solid and whole.
He's at his desk putting a set of pages in order, and gets up to greet me, making his way across the room in four long strides. He smiles, reaches out, cups my chin in one hand. "Hello," he says, then leans down to kiss me.
The kiss is open mouthed, both casual and intimate, arresting in its warmth. And when he pulls away, I forget how to breathe. I just stare at him wide-eyed until he frowns at me. "Are you all right?"
I blink, shaking myself a little. "Oh - yeah, sorry. I guess my brain kind of short circuited there."
"You must have overheated it," Hieronymous says, tapping me on the forehead with one long finger and smiling again. "What did you write on?"
"Nicholas Hawksmoor," I say, throwing myself onto the sofa. "And his theory of magic in an enclosed space - how to create rooms to enhance a spell's efficacy."
"Efficacy or effectiveness?" Hieronymous asks, one eyebrow raised.
"Ideally both, but aside from a few controlled experiments, no one's ever put the theory into practice," I reply, draping my arm over my eyes. "Apparently the aesthetics of the best magic-enhancing rooms are somewhat lacking. Lots of jagged angles, every corner has to be acute, that kind of thing."
"That does sound unpleasant," Hieronymous says.
"About as unpleasant as being quizzed on my word usage right after I finish my last exam of the year," I say.
"And when, in all the years you've known me, have you ever expected me to go easy on you?"
"Mm," I say, settling into the sofa cushions a little. Now that I'm home, with all of my prelims finally behind me, my exhaustion is almost pleasant. My thoughts keep straying to the way Hieronymous had kissed me, and the effect is strange. I'm halfway convinced that he's never kissed me that way before, and half certain that he's kissed me that way every day I've seen him since I'd moved to the UK to read magical history at Oxford. My brain almost feels as though it's been split, the way I'd felt when I'd gone through the door to the library and the kitchen at the same time.
You're just tired, I tell myself. Eight hours of preliminary exam a day for five days will do that to you. "I'm glad it's over," I mutter out loud. Hieronymous doesn't answer, but picks my feet up to sit next to me on the sofa, letting them rest on his lap and cupping one ankle.
"You changed clothes," is what he says after a moment of sitting comfortably together.
"I couldn't stand them for another minute," I say. "Anyway, I hate those robes. They make me look like a garbage bag."
"I think they look rather dignified," Hieronymous replies.
"I had Lila take my picture and send it to Ellen on Monday," I say.
"Oh? What did she say?"
I snicker. "She laughed her head off. She said she took her finals in jeans and a sweatshirt."
"She might just be jealous," Hieronymous says, poking me in the calf.
"Maybe," I say. "She's a little scandalized that I only have to take exams every two years though. I don't know, I think I'd rather have exams half as intense every year."
"M.I.M. is not exactly known for its lax academics," Hieronymous says a bit waspishly. I take my arm from my eyes and grin at him.
"I'm not saying your alma mater is any slouch," I say. "Ellen complains all the time. But she loves it too, you know? Oxford's just kind of…" I wave my hands in the air, reaching for the word, "traditional. Dignified. The academic dress is a little much, though. Lila calls it 'academic drag.'"
Hieronymous smirks. "I can only imagine what Ms. Danson thinks."
"Oh, I had Lila send her the picture too. Virginia says Ellen'n'me are both crazy. She's having a marvelous time in California, camping out among the redwoods and monitoring endangered blue-throated whippoorwills or whatever they've got out there."
"I take it her apprenticeship is going well, then?"
"Oh yeah," I say. "No exams, no homework, no essays, just a lot of outdoor activity. Perfection."
"Is that right?" Hieronymous asks. "And what would you say about your own academic choice, then?"
"After forty-odd hours of preliminary exams?" I ask, eyebrows raised. Then I sit up a little, take his left hand in mine, I bring his thumb to my mouth and lick it, starting from the knuckle, taking the tip in my mouth and sucking lightly. "Perfection," I say around it.
Hieronymous doesn't react, save to lift his eyebrows a bit. "Well, we should celebrate," he says. "I decanted a Nebbiolo, if you're interested."
"Mmm," I say, "yeah."
"You have no idea what that is, do you?" he asks, giving me a side-eye.
"Nope!" I say cheerfully, "but it sounds like wine, and if so, I am into it."
Hieronymous smirks, but casts, and a decanter and two glasses appear on the coffee table by the sofa. He leans forward, still holding my calves in one hand, and pours a small measure of wine into each bell-shaped glass, then hands one to me. I examine it, holding the glass to the light, then swirling it a little.
"It's orange-y," I say. "That's interesting."
"A characteristic of many older reds, Nebbiolo in particular," Hieronymous replies. "Try it."
I scoot up a little on the sofa to bring the glass to my nose, and inhale. Then I take a sip, and roll the liquid over my tongue. "Mmmmm, that's really nice," I say, then take a larger sip. "What year is this?"
"Nineteen seventy-five."
"One of the cases your father left you?"
"Mm," Hieronymous replies, sipping at his glass. I decide not to press him - Hieronymous only talks about his late father when he's in one of his more effusive moods. Today is apparently not one of those days. "I think this ought to breathe for another few minutes, it's still a bit tight."
It tasted just fine to me, but I go along, placing my glass back on the coffee table and settling back into the sofa.
"What are you going to do with your first day of Long Vacation?" he asks.
"Some kind of vacation," I say. "I'll be spending the entire summer in that museum's dank basement."
"Your internship is rather prestigious; I seem to recall you saying that if you didn't receive it, you would throw yourself into the Thames."
"Doesn't mean I can't complain about it now that I've got it," I say with a smirk. "Tomorrow though…. Sleep in, I guess. Oh - Lila asked me to have lunch with her. She had another fight with Gillian; I think she wants to take me through the gory details."
Hieronymous grimaces. "Can you get out of it?"
"I don't want to get out of it," I say. I'm actually quite grateful to Lila and Gillian, rancorous though their relationship can sometimes get. Lila had been my roommate in my first year at Oxford, but although we'd agreed to room together for the second year too, our plan changed abruptly when Gillian had presented Lila with the keys to her apartment as an early Christmas present at the end of Michaelmas term. Lila had been in raptures, but I hadn't, as she'd left me with two alternatives - find another roommate at the last minute, or give up the room entirely to a set of students on the waiting list.
I'd told Hieronymous about my predicament while staying at Revane the next weekend, while trying to teach him to cook pasta puttanesca - Hieronymous is utterly worthless at making anything edible except French press coffee and toast, the latter of which he burns half the time. I'd been chopping garlic, complaining about how the rest of my friends, comfortable in their own living arrangements, were making concerned faces at me but not lifting a finger to help find someone to room with or another place to live, when Hieronymous had said quietly, "stay here, then."
I'd whirled around, my knife still in hand, and nearly stabbed him with it. "You're serious?" was all I could think of to say.
Hieronymous had only shrugged. "Why shouldn't I be serious?"
I'd only gawked, clutching the knife as though someone might try to wrest it from my hand at any moment.
"I'm serious," Hieronymous had repeated. "Please stay here. I like the house better with you in it."
I'd dropped the knife, and we'd forgotten about the pasta until the pot had boiled over.
Six months later, I haven't gotten tired of living at Revane with Hieronymous - even if he never did learn how to cook - so I figure it's the least I can do to let Lila blow off some steam with me at lunch.
"I haven't seen you all week," Hieronymous grouses.
"You can meet me after, we could do something fun. Take me to the Tate Modern or something."
Hieronymous snorts and mutters something about modern art under his breath. He affects not to like it, but I've discovered that this is largely a front.
"Please?" I say, grinning. "They brought back the Joseph Beuys retrospective - I want to see it before it goes to Paris next month. Oh - you don't have to work, do you?"
Hieronymous smiles at the question. "Actually, I finished the draft this afternoon."
"What?" I say, sitting up, all thoughts of Joseph Beuys banished. "You didn't tell me!"
"I was going to," he replies. His eyes are cast modestly down, but his smile is pleased.
"That's amazing!" I say, throwing my arms around his neck. He hadn't said anything, probably because I was stressed enough over my prelims, but I could tell from his pacing this week that he'd been worried he wouldn't meet his editor's deadline, which is next Tuesday.
"It's still quite rough," Hieronymous replies, winding one arm around my waist. "Are you going to proof it?"
"Yeah, tomorrow," I say.
"Start Sunday; you deserve a day off."
"I wanna read it though," I say, brushing one strand of hair back from his forehead.
Hieronymous snorts. "Two pages in, and you'll say that you're bored out of your skull."
"That's what you need me for - standard Hieronymous-to-English translation to keep your readers from falling asleep," I say, then give his shoulder a squeeze. "Seriously - that's incredible. Congratulations."
"Don't congratulate me until it's actually finished," he replies, pretending to be annoyed. "And anyway, it mightn't sell. There isn't exactly a market for a treatise on black magic esoterica, particularly from someone who's strayed as far from academia as I have."
"You got a publisher, didn't you?" I ask. "I'm just glad you picked it back up after so long." Hieronymous had been working on a proposed manuscript on black magic the year we'd been married, and had had to drop it when he'd rushed back to England, just before the death of his father. It had taken him four years to pick it back up, and another year to finish the draft that had expanded into a full textbook. "I bet by next year it's required reading at M.I.M. at least."
"Hm," Hieronymous replies. "Your confidence is inspiring, as ever." He only sounds slightly sarcastic.
"Think this is ready?" I ask, pointing to the wine glasses on the table.
"I suppose so."
"Well then, cheers," I say, leaning forward to take both glasses and giving his to him.
"To the foreseeable future," he proposes with a half smile, and we both sip from our glasses. I have to admit that he was right about the wine - just the few minutes wait has made the flavor fuller, more complex. There are times when I despair of learning all there is to know about wine - it's the sort of intricate, constantly shifting subject on which Hieronymous seems to thrive, but I find all the information one needs to keep in one's head - vintages, vineyards, terroir - confounding. Hieronymous is constantly telling me to be patient with myself, that I have plenty of time to learn, but patience can be difficult to come by.
We sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes while I try to catalog the impressions I'm getting from the wine. But before I've finished, Hieronymous interrupts.
"D'you ever think that we ought to get married again?"
I start at the question. In the four years since our divorce and the almost two years since we started seeing each other in the UK, he hasn't ever mentioned marriage to me except as a joke. Faced with a serious question, I find myself unsure of how to answer. He waits for me, expression carefully blank.
"Uh - well yeah, actually, yes," I stammer. "But I dunno, I mean-" I stop, sucking in my breath and holding it for a few seconds, hesitating before I decide to just come out with the truth. "If I get married - again - I kind of want my parents to be there this time. And I haven't figured out how to tell them about you yet."
"Ah," he replies, still not giving me any indication of how he feels about this disclosure. "Family does complicate things."
"It's worth it though. I mean even if they are a little hazy about me when I'm not around, I still want them to be as much a part of my life as they can be. I just don't know how they're going to react when I introduce them to the British viscount who's nearly twice my age."
"Even though you're no longer a minor?"
I shrug. "It's different with parents. Dad especially. To him, I'm still his little girl, you know?"
"Not really," Hieronymous replies.
I don't know how to respond to this, so I sip at my wine for lack of anything else to do.
Hieronymous lets out a breath. "I did not mean that to sound self-pitying, Eliza, I mean that I honestly don't know. I've been on my own since I was eighteen. I never knew my mother, and I hadn't spoken to my father until just before his death. And even then..." He lets himself trail off with a slight grimace. "I suppose what I mean to say is that although my circumstances have been less than ideal, I understand what you're telling me. If you want time, you have it."
"Thank you," I say.
"It's interesting," he says, swirling his wine slowly around his glass, examining the color in the orange light shining through the windows. "Family, I mean. The idea that chance - the accident of birth - throws a group of people together, and they're supposed to love each other unconditionally for their entire lives. I've never quite understood it."
"I don't think anybody really understands it," I admit, treading as carefully as I can with my words. "I mean, I don't really. I love my parents a lot, sure, but that didn't stop me from leaving them. For magic, for England, for-" I stop myself before the next word I'd been meaning to say comes out - for you.
"Even so, you're meant to leave, are you not?" Hieronymous asks, tilting his head a bit. "It's all part of the natural progression. Grow up, leave home, venture out, start a new family. But keeping your parents in it. Every happy family, alike."
"And every unhappy family, unhappy in its own way," I finish, and Hieronymous gives me a smirk. "But it sounds like it's only fair, right? You get one family by chance, and one by choice. And about an equal chance of being happy with either of them."
"That does sound reasonable," Hieronymous agrees. "A second chance for everyone, if they choose to take it." He takes another sip of wine, closing his eyes as he does, swallowing slowly. "I suppose I'm saying that I'd like to. Take it, that is."
"What-" I start, not quite understanding, but wanting to.
"Married or not married - I don't particularly care one way or the other," he says, then turns to look me in the eye. "Be my family."
I stare at him, mouth parted, eyes wide. "I already am," is what comes out of my mouth, and this time it's Hieronymous who takes both wine glasses and sets them on the table before taking my face in his hands.
But when his mouth closes on mine, I jump back as though I've been shocked.
"Eliza-" Hieronymous says, but I barely hear him. My brain seems to have been split violently in two. Part of me felt Hieronymous kiss me, and part of me felt his fingers on my mouth, pushing me away.
"What was that?" I ask in a half whisper.
"What-" Hieronymous starts, but I hold my hand up, stopping him.
"What happened to twenty-six?" I say.
Hieronymous stares at me, uncomprehending.
"You said go away," I insist. "Until I'm twenty-six. What happened to twenty-six?"
"I don't-" Hieronymous says, but I'm already looking wildly around the room. Part of me recognizes it as my home, and part of me doesn't recognize it at all. Or rather, it does - but the recognition horrifies me so much that my brain shies away from it.
"Why are we here?" I ask. "How can you stand to be here?"
"Eliza, this is our home-"
"It's a slaughterhouse!" I shout, my voice suddenly and shatteringly loud. "Mrs. Craft died here! And Beardy McHaggis and all the guests - and your father - and - and Violet!" My voice breaks on the last name, panic clawing its way up my throat.
Hieronymous blinks. "Who?"
I scramble backwards on the sofa, kicking Hieronymous in the leg as I struggle out of his arms. He lets me go, backing away himself, concern knitting his brows.
"It's too easy," I whisper, my arms prickling with gooseflesh, with a terror I can't fully comprehend.
"Are...you making some sort of comment on my virtue?" Hieronymous says, trying to make it into a joke, trying to hide the hurt in his expression, not succeeding.
I stare at him. "You never forgot Violet," I say. "Not even when your father memory spelled you. You never forgot Violet."
Hieronymous places one hand over his mouth, breathes out. "All right," he says. "I think you've been under a great deal of strain this past week - I apologize if I've added to it. I think that we should both calm down, go to bed, and in the morning-"
"And Emmy never forgot Damien," I say, no longer listening, instead trying to work out this strange knot that seems to have surfaced in my head.
A sound, muttering, and I look up to see Hieronymous casting a calming spell in my direction, and I slash with my hands, blocking him. "No!" I shout. "Emmy never forgot Damien! And you never forgot Violet!"
Thoughts crowding through my head, jostling each other from both halves of my divided brain.
He said he can't be with you because you're only seventeen
(no you're twenty-one, you're in college what)
his father was killed here you watched him die
(I never met his father he died before I came here)
he wouldn't even write to you wouldn't even say
(he asked me to be his family!)
A moan escapes my mouth as I press my palms against both sides of my head, trying to hold it together, trying to keep it from splitting physically in two.
"Eliza, please-" Hieronymous says, reaching his hands out toward my shoulders.
"Don't touch me!" I scream, sitting up on the arm of the sofa. "I never forgot you! I never forgot you, and this - isn't you! You're not real!"
Hieronymous freezes, but the pain in his face is a wound in my own chest, so I close my eyes, clenching my hands in front of them to block out even the light from the room. "You're not real," I moan, "you're not real, you're not real, you're not real-"
A soft pop, and suddenly I'm being cradled in something soft and infinitely yielding. I slowly take the heels of my hands off of my eyes and open them, but all I'm taking in is black.
"Well," a soft, thrumming voice says around me. "You win."
It takes me a few seconds to realize what's just happened, and when I do, I let out a low, guttural howl that ends in a sob. I can still remember everything that had happened in the five year illusion that had been placed in my head - and losing it brings an almost physical pain.
"What's wrong?" the voice says. "Do you want it back?"
I have to physically bite my tongue to keep myself from saying yes. I roll in the creature's grip, writhing, but no matter how I move, I can't seem to dislodge myself. It's just as well, I think, as I slowly begin to calm, I have no idea how far I am from the ground.
"I can give it back to you, if that's what you want," the voice says. "Now that you've won, I can give you anything you want."
I can't speak. I focus on breathing - filling my lungs with air, letting it out again, filling, out.
"Just say so," the voice says, caressing. "Say what you want and I'll give it to you."
In. Out. In. Out. In. "No."
A strange contraction around me, as though the creature's grip has tightened. "But it's what you want, isn't it?"
In. Out. In. "No," I say, "it's too easy."
"I don't understand," the creature says. "I did what you wanted. I fixed him for you."
"I don't want him to be fixed," I say, my voice hoarse.
"No-o?" A sibilant suspicion in the voice.
"No," I say. "I love him." The moment the words come out of my mouth, I realize that they're true. I love him. I don't know how I know I know it, but I know.
A pause. Take into the air my quiet breath.
"And that means I love him for who he is," I say. "I don't need him to be fixed, or changed or anything - I don't even care if he loves me back. I just-" breathe in "I want to have the chance. To be with him for real."
"What do you want, then?" the voice says, and its lower registers rumble through my spine.
"What I asked you for," I say. "My chance. My magic. Give it back to me. Everything else - I'll do myself."
"Well," the voice says, "all right."
I close my eyes, marveling at how little my view changes as I do. "It's funny," I say, half giddy with my own triumph. "you'd think you would have tried a little harder not to lose."
A low rumble that I recognize as a chuckle, moving through me as the creature moves.
"Just because you've won," it says, "what makes you think that I've lost?"
When the creature stabs me through the chest, just below my sternum, I have just enough time to register the shriek of pain that erupts in my throat before all is darkness and silence.
AN: Hi everyone! I'm so happy you've been reading BTSS. I'm writing to say that I will likely be taking a brief hiatus once chapter 38 (the next chapter) is posted. The issue is that I have a very limited schedule in the next couple of months to continue the writing and editing that needs to be done with this story. Please know that I haven't lost interest in the story - it will continue. I just need a bit more time to give the next act the care and attention it deserves before it gets published. Please check my profile or visit my tumblr, .com for updates. Again, thank you so much for reading, it means the world to me that you are reading and enjoying this story.