"In which Wirt is subject to a couple of very rude awakenings."
The mattress felt like an absolute dream.
Everything felt like a dream, actually, though Wirt was pretty certain he was in the process of waking up. In the handful seconds before he opened his eyes, he caught an imagined whiff of woodsmoke, a little shoe-polish, the pastoral scent of horses and wet earth. Ever since he and his brother had first come back from the Unknown, his sleeping mind had been prone to conjuring up vivid storybook adventures in the night, and even the dreams that he could barely remember usually left him feeling transported when he woke. This morning, his senses were imprinted by an idea of wool blankets, tin ceilings, and the thump of footfalls on old hardwood floors, and he knew from experience that it would take him hours to shake the sense of being stuck with one foot outside the real.
He mushed his face briefly into the pillows and forced himself to roll over. The bed beneath him was firm and responsive, still comfortable—very comfortable—but more austere than it should have been. It was too large. The pillowcases smelled like Fels-Naptha instead of Downy, and rather than his knees hitting his bedroom wall when he curled onto his left side, they hit the soft warm mass of another human being. Greg? Who else could it possibly be?
A small grumble sounded from his bedmate. That was not Greg's voice.
Wirt finally cracked open a concerned and drowsy eye. That was not his brother's voice, and this was not his bedroom. The decor here was best described as heirloom, the style manifested in floral wallpaper, decorative moulding, and a single-pane window open to streaming sunlight and the sounds of Main Street foot-traffic. The furniture was antique; the carpets were oriental; the lighting fixtures looked to be gas. He was so taken by his unfamiliar accommodations that he almost failed to question the shape of another human being facing him in bed. A girl-shape.
A girl-shape in a state of undress. A girl-shape with bare freckled arms and red hair and eyebrows knitted up, even in sleep. A girl-shape that he had seen only once before, briefly, years ago, but which he recognized now without a second's hesitation.
Wirt sat bolt upright in bed, and the unyielding cotton mattress transferred his movement to jounce the girl from sleep. She snapped one eye open behind a snarl of auburn hair and fixed him with the immediate intent of a bird of prey.
Beatrice didn't say a single word and she didn't waste a moment. She tore the blankets away from both their bodies, curled her knees to her chest, and kicked him out of the bed, across the floor, and into the open wardrobe.
"Wirt!" she shrieked as soon as he came to rest, curling in pain away from his bruised tailbone. His elbow had made impact with the wardrobe's foot, and linens rained upon his head and boxer-clad lap. "How the hell did you—?!"
But a short rap on the door cut her off, and her expression turned so instantly sharp that even Wirt felt the importance of not vocalizing his unhappiness. She leaped out of bed and pressed her body flat against the wall next to the door, as if ready to slug someone on their way in.
"Jimmy?" The voice which sounded from the other side was deep and nasally, the address given in a tone of amusement. "What's that ruckus?"
Wirt hadn't been this confused since… the last time he landed himself in the Unknown. He raised his hands at Beatrice in a gesture of What the hell? and Beatrice's only response was to draw a threatening finger across her neck. She answered her unseen caller in gravelly tones which sounded uneasy in her throat: "All's well, Munroe. Spooked myself. Be out for breakfast with the boys in, uh… soon." She grimaced, as if waiting for her lie to be called out.
The man named Munroe didn't second-guess her, though. There was a little tease in his voice as he asked, "You got a girl in there, mate?"
Beatrice dragged her hands down her face. Wirt pulled a tea towel off of his head. "Ah-ha," she chuckled through gritted teeth, "you're not gonna rat on me, are you Muzzie?"
There was a pause, and then the man on the other side of the door let out a booming laugh. "Well, good for you, Jim! Awright, take your time, then. We'll hear about it at lunch." Munroe's departure was tracked by the sound of his amusement fading away. Beatrice slowly slipped down the wall, relaxing her grimace and pulling her fingers out of her tangled hair. She was all in white, wearing only drawers and a men's singlet, and still more dressed than Wirt was. He lifted the tea towel self-consciously across his shirtless chest.
Beatrice, who had buried her face in her hands, didn't look at him when she finally spoke again: "What. Exactly. Are you doing here."
It wasn't quite a question, and that was fine, because Wirt didn't know how to answer it. "I…" He looked around the space again, at a loss. On second examination, this seemed to be a hotel room, a few days lived-in and fairly nice beneath the loose substrate of garments and hairpins scattered across the floor. Birds twittered and church bells sounded from somewhere across town. Everything from his discomfort to the smell of food wafting through the window felt sharp and real.
He just said, "I think I'm dreaming."
"Why would you dream," Beatrice hissed, "of being naked! In my bed!"
Wirt started to protest, "I wasn't—" but she didn't seem to really care. She pushed herself to her feet and angrily began pulling on a pair of trousers which had been draped across the chair under the window. "I'm not—I'm not naked. I can't believe—I would never—I-I went to bed last night in the privacy of my own room , I had no way of knowing—!"
Beatrice rounded on him in frustration and tossed a pillow at his face. "You cannot make a single peep," she commanded as he came up gasping from the puff of feathers loosed on impact. "You will sit right there and be quiet, while I do some recon to figure how to sneak you out of here without any of the boys—"
Another brief peal of laughter sounded from the hallway, and she issued an oath and hastened to button up her wrinkled dress shirt. Beatrice snapped a pair of suspenders over her shoulders and stuck exactly as few pins in her hair as was necessary to fit the curly mass of it under a flatcap. She was dressed, not unconvincingly, as a man. He didn't have the chance to ask why before she exacted another threatening gesture at his person.
"Quiet," she emphasized once more, and then disappeared through the door, leaving Wirt completely alone, mostly nude, and still halfway seated in a wardrobe which smelled of resin and mothballs.
This wasn't the weirdest situation he'd ever been in, but it was perhaps the one he had been thrust into with the least dignity.
#
Beatrice's reconnaissance of the upper floor of the Hotel Fantaisie promised nothing in the way of opportunity to sneak someone out of her sleeping quarters. When she first arrived at the inn two days past, she'd thought herself very clever for taking the room next to the hallway lounge, the better to keep an ear out for when The Son of a Bitch planned to show his rat face again; now, the location just guaranteed that nobody could make it out her door without suffering the scrutiny of half of Mr. Rott's gang. She shuffled down the hall with her eyes keen and her hands in her pockets, heading for the water closet by the stairs. Not everyone was up yet, but Ulrich the Undertaker gave her a somber nod from the reading nook by the window, and the Jitters Twins were enjoying an early game of cards on the mezzanine above the grand lobby. Beatrice met their attentions with the same slick grin which had helped ingratiate her to Rott's Gang in the first place, then slipped into the washroom and took a moment to scream silently into her hands.
It would be bad enough for a stranger to be witnessed on the floor of the hotel reserved for Wilhelmina Rott's wedding guests. It would be much worse for that stranger to be an undressed teenage boy, seen slipping out of "Ginger" Jimmy McPoyle's room in the small hours of the morning.
Of all the stupid half-baked wishes she'd ever made, why did this have to be the one that came true?
When she'd taken care of business and made it back to Room 330 at the end of the hall, she nearly had a heart attack. Wirt had wrapped himself in a bedsheet and stood in front of the wide-open window, peeking curiously down on the bustling road below. "What are you doing!" she screeched, then clapped a hand over her own stupid mouth as she dragged him out of view and shoved him back toward the center of the room. "I told you not to let anyone see you!"
He hit the mattress hard and made the iron frame creak. "You said to be quiet!"
"Shh!"
Wirt threw up his hands.
Beatrice made a sly scan out the window herself. Fortunately, there was no sign of Rott's men on the street. She latched the pane and drew the curtains, and then it was just the two of them in a quiet room full of muted light. She crossed her arms and tapped her foot to show she wasn't fooling around.
"Alright," she said. "Now tell me why you're here. And keep it down this time."
Instead of answering the question, Wirt asked her in turn, "What are you doing?" and made a gesture of disbelief across the whole of her person. "What is this? Where are we? Why did someone call you—?"
"Jimmy McPoyle." Beatrice headed him off. She bore forward to look him hard in the eye: "Newest, youngest member of Edwin Rott's Gentlemen Gangsters, personal invitee to his youngest daughter's wedding on Sunday afternoon, and overall good stooge who doesn't invite outsiders to events where Mr. Rott is going to be present." Wirt's eyebrows raised a further tick with each new designation she applied to herself. "Which is why I'm really curious about how you got here, Wirt! Not because it'll change anything in the long run, just because knowing will be the last satisfaction I get before they feed us to the fishes!"
It shouldn't have surprised her that Wirt didn't know. Wirt didn't know anything. "I just…" He shrugged, and the sheet fell from his shoulders down around his hips. Beatrice turned away to pace the floor, trying to come up with a plan. Maybe they could toss him out the window? The flush of a promising idea prompted her to scrutinize him, hard enough that Wirt looked distinctly uncomfortable as she ran her eyes slowly from his uncombed head down to the tips of his toes. "Um." He pulled the sheet back around his collarbone. "What are you doing?"
"You're a lot taller now," Beatrice mumbled into her palm.
"What?"
She shook her head. "You won't fit into my clothes. We can't get you out of here at all until we have something to dress you in." And that realization got the seed of another, wilder idea germinating in her mind.
"This isn't how I wanted to spend my day," Wirt complained as Beatrice took to pacing again. "I had a presentation to make for my composition class, you know, this is a school day for me. And after classes were over I promised Greg I'd take him to the activity hour at the library, and I always do the grocery shopping on Fridays so my mom doesn't have to when she gets off work… I have to get back, Beatrice."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she snapped, and waved a hand to shut him up. "What's your shoe size, in women's?"
"I've been putting off my chemistry homework for a week and tonight is my last night to—What?"
"How tall are you?" Beatrice continued, hauling him to his feet by the wrist. He squawked and dropped the sheet again. "About eighteen hands?"
"I'm six-one," Wirt said, aghast. "I'm not a horse."
She applied her good eye for dimension to the breadth of his shoulders, his twiggy arms and legs, his narrow hips and chest and his oversized feet. Obviously it would have been easier to bring Wirt to the dress shop in person, but there was a whole host of reasons for why that wasn't an option. Anyway, the Unknown was a funny place. Things tended to work out in just the manner you needed them to, if it would make for a good story. She pulled her coin purse out of the lining of her jacket and gave it a considered weigh.
"I'll get you out of here," she finally promised. His eyes widened. "And in repayment, you're going to attend a wedding with me. I'm not playing dress-up with the Gentleman Bastards here because it's fun, Wirt, they have business with me. One of them stole something of mine and I'm going to get it back."
She marched to the door with her chin up and her stride long. If she'd had more time, she would have preened at the reverence in his tone as he asked her retreating back, "What did they take?"
"It doesn't matter. That's not the point." She paused with her hand on the doorknob. "I'm going to buy something for you to wear. It might take me an hour or two. Don't open this door for anyone but me, don't let housekeeping in, and for God's sake, don't stick your head out the window again. If you have to answer a knock, try to sound like a call girl."
"Hold on," Wirt protested. He stood in the middle of the room, still in his underpants, slouched and bony and indignant-looking. "You're going to be gone for hours? What am I supposed to do until then?"
"Sit around and try to look pretty," she suggested. "You'll need to get good at that." Beatrice tossed him a careless look over her shoulder, and left the room before he could raise any objections or question what exactly that was supposed to mean.
#
In Beatrice's absence, Wirt was not content to sit around and look pretty, and he appreciated neither the condescension nor the slightly wicked undertone in her suggestion that he do so. He didn't know what sort of plan she had in mind, but he already disliked it.
He sat for a while, slouched off the edge of the bed in an intentionally unflattering manner out of sheer contrariness. When his back started to hurt, he took a few tours around the hairpin-scattered floor and then dropped to his knees to try doing push-ups, which was, as he understood it, how people occupied themselves in prison. He managed three before collapsing.
From flat on his stomach in the middle of the rug, Wirt stared forlornly at the radiator under the window and felt very sorry for himself. He was confused and concerned, but more than that, he was bored. The clock said that Beatrice had been gone for eleven whole minutes. What a life. The only thing to read in the hotel room was a worn Bible in the nightstand, with Deuteronomy 22:5 penciled in on the title page. He didn't know that passage and didn't care to hunt it down. Finally he just threw himself backward onto the disheveled bed, staring at the stamped tin ceiling and struggling to keep his eyes open. The dim light moderated his stress level and left him very sleepy.
But sleeping wasn't a half-bad plan, was it? He had a lot of nothing else to do, and the mattress was quite comfortable. He curled up around a Greg-sized pillow and sank back into the dark, anticipating how good it would feel to wake back up in his own room, maybe even without the burden of having to remember any of this nonsense in the morning.
What happened instead is that he was woken by blinding sunlight across his eyes and a croissant thrown at his face. "Morning, sleeping beauty!" Beatrice crowed from next to the window, with her hands full of drapes and her voice low-timbred. Wirt rolled frantically to orient himself in a still-unfamiliar environment, and fell off the far side of the bed. "Eat your breakfast, and then we can get to work. ...Is that a Bible on your pillow?"
"No," Wirt grumbled, and shoved the little leatherbound book back into the nightstand.
"Good. I have no use for a man with too many moral compunctions." Beatrice took off her cap and sighed at drawing her fingers across her scalp. She sat in the wicker window-chair and began eating a croissant of her own, while Wirt stayed glumly on the floor with his upper body laid across the mattress. Only then did he notice a number of bags and boxes piled next to the door, all in shades of pink and yellow. Miss Construed, read the ribbon cursive on their longest faces. He gave them a long hard look.
"I thought you were living incognito as a man right now," he said.
"I am," Beatrice responded, slapping her chest to show off how flat and masculine it looked.
"Then why...?" Wirt drew a deliberate finger toward the wares by the door and let the implied question hang. Beatrice took her time answering it. She chewed, and swallowed, and wiped her fingers on the chair's skirt and picked the crumbs carefully from her collar.
She finally said, "You remember that creepy circus we had to escape from, back in the day?" and Wirt's stomach plummeted. "The one that wanted a talking bluebird to bring in the crowds, and kidnapped Greg to use him as a clown?"
Wirt choked, "No."
"Of course you do," Beatrice insisted. "And in order to infiltrate the organization you had to disguise yourself from head to toe, completely unrecognizable, and the best way to do that was to wear—"
"No — "
"—a dress." She stood up pertly and began hauling bags into the center of the room. "And it worked! Why put in the effort to come up with a new idea when you've got an old one with a good track record?" The first parcel she opened contained a large floral sun hat, trimmed in red ribbon and chrysanthemums. As Wirt crawled atop the bed, she handed it off so he could get a good look.
"These Gentleman Gangsters are the sorts of jerks who would never suspect a girl of anything," Beatrice enthused as Wirt struggled to count the sheer number of flowers on the brim. "That's how I got this far with 'em."
"As... a man?"
"As a girl disguised as a man," Beatrice said smugly. Wirt didn't have the energy to explain to her why that didn't make any sense, because the important thing was to establish that he would not be wearing a dress again. He opened his mouth to state such, but had to cut himself off in order to avoid a faceful of the brown wig she had just tossed at him underhand. Beatrice began unpacking the bags, and her momentum built with each withdrawal.
"Stockings to cover your stupid hairy man-legs—" She threw the box at him, "gloves to hide your stupid hairy man-arms—" He managed to catch those before they hit them in the nose, "and a high-collared dress to cover your stupid lumpy man-neck." She pulled the gown from the box and draped it across her front with a flourish, and not without a little pride. It was a trim thing, not too frilly. White cotton with a bodice of red-accented damask.
Wirt's first thought was that it wasn't as bad as he'd expected. Tasteful, even. His second thought was, "Wait, you want me to wear this to a wedding?"
"That's the idea, dummy, haven't you been listening?" She pulled it fully from the box and laid it out on the bed. "You have no idea how lucky I was to find something that was halfway nice and also wide enough to fit your stupid—"
"Beatrice. It's white. You can't wear white to a wedding." She looked down at the dress again and her expression turned stricken. How could a girl not know something like that? How had he wound up in the position of having to enforce nuptial etiquette? He was having a terrible day. "This whole plan is ridiculous. I'll—I'll just hide in here until the ceremony's over and everyone leaves and nobody will have to know—"
But Beatrice said through her teeth, "I already told them about you."
"What?"
She tossed the garments down onto the bed next to him with a look of genuine distress. "I ran into Yorick and Manslaughter Mickey in front of the bakery while I was carrying a bunch of bags from the dress shop! What was I supposed to say? 'Yeah, fellas, I bought these lacy white pantalettes for my ma?'"
Wirt might have curled up and died then and there. "Why did you buy any pantalettes at all?"
"And the story just snowballed!" Beatrice cried, seeming not to care very much about keeping quiet when she was the aggrieved party. "That you were this sweet young thing I met in the market last night, all in rags and in need of a good hot meal—these guys are married, you know? They can be romantics. And you were such a peach, so I didn't know for sure that you were a prostitute when I invited you over last night but I figured it out pretty quickly when—hey, no!" Wirt made an actual, definitive move toward the hotel room window. He intended to fling himself from it, and if he died on impact, so much the better. Beatrice took him by the arm and hauled him back around to face her with a grim expression.
She informed him, "We're engaged." Wirt blinked at her once, and slid his gaze longingly back toward the third-floor window. "No," she said again.
His voice was hollow: "It's for the best."
"It's not the best for me," Beatrice groused. "If throwing a naked scrawny nerd out the window served my purposes I'd have done it already!" She shoved him back toward the bed, and he accepted her manhandling with defeated grace. "So—Jimmy McPoyle proposed to a hooker this morning, twelve hours after meeting her, and now she's his plus-one to Wilhelmina Rott's wedding. That's the story and we're sticking to it. And... I guess we're going back to the dress shop to buy something you can actually wear to the event." She pulled the lacy pantalettes from their bag, gave them a look of mild disgust, and threw those at him as well. He didn't bother to catch them this time. Beatrice crossed her arms and glared out the window, seeming to expect Wirt to do something.
"Well?" she finally snapped. "Are you gonna doll yourself up, or do I have to do it for you?"
He had no real fight left in him, but he wasn't going to make her terrible plan any easier to pull off, either.
He made her doll him up.
I can't say this was a great idea and I'm not absolutely sure where it's headed. The third parties on the periphery of this fic's creation shall remain unnamed, but they know who they are and they most certainly know what they did.
The "creepy circus" referenced in this chapter is semi-canon. Read Circus Friends, available from Boom Comics, to learn more about Wirt's history of dressing in drag.
Current rating is T, but this is subject to change. Wirt is 18+, to be safe. Beatrice is eternal.