A/N: This is sort of a mix of the musical stage-play and the book. I imagined Winnie and Jesse to look more like their musical counterparts (Winnie's a redhead), and Hugo exists, apparently, but Winnie's ten (not eleven) and her father isn't dead, also Miles had a daughter (Anna) like in the book version as well as the son Thomas from the musical.
Nothing To Be Done
A Tuck Everlasting fanfiction
One-shot
Bang!
Winnie screamed as she collapsed, knees-first, into a loamy patch of earth near the spring, near the tree marked with a T – water dribbled out both sides of her mouth. She inhaled and exhaled raggedly, soon set to coughing – her lungs burned; it was difficult to breathe.
Beside her, the man in the yellow suit lay dead – half his face was blown off from the fired shotgun.
The sight of blood pooling over bright yellow cloth – looking oddly like decorated hot dogs from the fair, smeared with red ketchup and yellow mustard – of splattered brains, and of the one glassy, wide-open eye on the side of his face which hadn't been torn asunder by the shot, made her turn her head, scream again, and then, falling forward onto her elbows, dry-heave.
It might have been better if she'd managed to really and truly vomit. Who knows but that it would have been the saving of her.
Mae had tried to stop the man from taking her, she'd gone for Angus Tuck's shotgun – intending, in a protective motherly gesture, only to strike him with the stock, rather than to fire upon him, to prevent his taking Winnie – only it hadn't been where it was usually laid and the delay had given the man time to make off with the child and drag her – kicking and flailing and biting his hand, which kept clamping over her mouth, continuously – from the house, through the woods, and directly to the spring.
Of course, they'd – all of them, herself, her husband, and the boys – followed in a great hurry once they found the shotgun.
Despite hating violence, Mae would have shot sooner, indeed as soon as she was in sight of them, if she could have been certain of not accidentally hitting Winnie instead of the man in yellow.
His wicked scheme had been to force the poor child to drink the water so he could use her as a demonstration to sell it. Children, he had said, with an absence of conscience that had chilled Mae's soul, were much more appealing, anyway.
As Winnie lifted her head, she saw Jesse, ahead of the others, rushing towards her with his hands held out. "Winnie! Winnie Foster! We're coming Winnie – you're safe now."
She jerked back and stared at him as one dazed, stopping him in his tracks about a foot away from her. Four words to change everything came from her quivering lips.
"Jesse, I swallowed some."
The Tuck parents froze – they wanted to ask what she meant, only it was obvious, wasn't it? That sick monster in the yellow suit – that corpse by her side – had forced the water into her mouth, before Mae shot him, she'd tried not to drink it, but – ultimately – she had.
With the delay and confusion, it was actually Miles who wound up reaching Winnie first, before Jesse, and he put his arms around her and held her as he would have held his daughter – his beloved Anna – stroking her red hair and murmuring and clearing his throat in a repeated, soothing fashion as he would have for Thomas if he'd come upon the boy crying after a skinned knee or bad scare.
This was probably for the best – Jesse might have been Winnie's favorite of the two, generally speaking, but it was Miles – fatherly, gentle Miles – she needed most then.
Jesse wouldn't have known what to do for her, too shell-shocked himself.
Miles understood – as Jesse could not, as Winnie herself would now never fully comprehend, though she must feel it as a hole in her soul for the rest of her life – the full extent of the horrible thing done to the poor, poor girl.
He knew, of course, Jesse had wanted Winnie to drink the water; he knew his brother longed for someone to share his life with and had taken a shine to Winnie, and naturally he'd disapproved as much as their parents did, but at least the plan there was for her to wait until she was seventeen before she drank.
If she really had swallowed the water, she would be a little girl forever. She would be ten years old – at the cusp of eleven – until the end of the world or beyond.
Jesse might have inadvertently gained his longed-for partner in crime by the wicked deed of the man in the yellow suit, but it wouldn't be the equal partnership – the future wife eager to follow him to Paris and Madrid and beyond – he'd no doubt imagined; she would be an enteral kid sister.
Miles couldn't help feeling sorry for Jesse in light of this, for he saw – or thought he saw – how it must be; one of two ways.
Either Winnie would be an adoring puppy who followed him around forever, or – if she became disillusioned with her endless childhood, an adult on the inside as she could never be on the outside – she must surely resent him one day.
With their hot temperaments, Jesse and Winnie would be the dearest of inseparable friends – the strangest looking pair ever seen – or else, with the passing of time, the harshest of enemies; there was no in-between possible.
What had been done to them, the horror visited on them both, with this one brutal act, was dreadful to ponder.
Finally letting her go, hearing the baying of dogs and the sound of hooves – a hint the constable and his bumbling young deputy, probably only a little older than Winnie herself, were nearing – he looked to his parents.
"Ma," he said, grave. "Pa."
Now Jesse was the one kneeling beside Winnie and taking over for Miles, pressing his forehead against hers and whispering – his voice gone unnaturally high and squeaky – that it was going to be all right.
"We have to take her with us," said Tuck, coming and taking her hand, urging her to her feet after prying her free from Jesse's grip. "She's one of us now. Her folks won't understand why she doesn't get any older." With a sidelong look at the dead man, in lower tones: "Lucky bastard."
Tears rolled down Mae's face. "Her parents, Angus – oh, her poor mother and father and–"
"Granny," offered Winnie, squeezing Tuck's hand and being led off, away from the nearing hubbub, very willingly, nonetheless. "It's my mother and father and my grandmother – Granny – at home."
And none of them would ever know what happened to her.
Hugo Jackson, the deputy, would never know the future the man in the yellow suit – whose body was presently to be the first dead body he'd ever seen (at the sight of which, unlike Winnie, he would manage to vomit) – had stolen from him with a single rough command as he'd brought the water to the kidnapped girl's mouth.
Drink.
A/N: reviews welcome, my reply could be delayed.