Notes:

Hi you all!
First chapter of 2017! Wow! I didn't think it would go on for this long...

"Perhaps I have been all wrong for ten years," he said to himself. "Ten years is a long time. It may be too late to do anything—quite too late. What have I been thinking of!"

—Francis Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Jezabel

By the time morning stretches across the sky, a few celestial bodies stubbornly remaining, Mary creeps into my room. A soft knock announcing her presence. Hesitation on her face, as she surveys me, mute with what I suspect is her need to establish a sort of normalcy between us. If that can even be done. And yet even now, there is something different between us. It's not love, nor is it devotion. But there is something not unlike what I felt for Cassian, when I was struck speechless with just what he had done.

Perhaps that's my nature—to ignore the world until it shows an interest in me. I didn't care for Cassian, or at least, wasn't conscious about the way his constant presence had become something to me, until he had thrown himself into harm's way. I had become so cynical, that any display of love, save for Father's, was routinely discarded and dismissed. No, that's not it. Cassian had done similar acts in the past, so what, then, made his final act so different than the rest? It could not have been surprise that moved me so. No, it was the knowledge that we shared a similar past—a past of being used and discarded and overlooked. Perhaps it was his expression of an almost paternal affection for me, a desire to see me set free by my own hand—and not his.

A sort of kinship, then.

The soft morning light catches her worried face, lightening her hair, as she fidgets. Unsure of what to do next. Unsure of me. It's still between us, her friend's death. Even if we don't speak about it, it remains still, eternally present.

And then, just as before, and perhaps because of before, she takes my hand again, chubby fingers barely covering my own, and she slowly turns my forearm towards her. She lowers her guard when I allow her this indulgence, and inspects the fresh gauze I applied at Cassian's insistence. He, in turn, moves next to Mary; co-conspirators, I suspect. Her furrowed worry gives way to annoyance as she spots the disheveled braid. I had meant to brush it out, but somehow I could not bear to undo her handiwork.

"Don't they teach you how to undo braids in medical school," she quips, though not unkindly.

I shrug, uncomfortable as the object of her scrutiny.

Mary takes my silence as an invitation, and I try not to wince as she separates the strands a bit too roughly. It's still surreal, and I don't know what to make of her—or any of this. Having undone the braid, she gasps in delight as she notices that my faintly curly hair has taken on the waves of the braid.

"Oh, how grand!" And she traces a curl with her fingers. "Oh, just like Mama's hair!" Pleased with this discovery, she continues brushing out my hair, chattering on about how her mother's hair always curled when she undid her coiffure for the night. How sometimes her mother would let her brush out the day's tangles.

There's only a moment's interruption in her chatter, when she surveys her work. "It's be a right shame to put it away in a braid," she confides, smoothing down the wanton wisps that, to my amusement and Neil's chagrin, also plague Cain. Again, the feeling of being loved returns. This time, instead of frightening me with its sudden appearance, the feeling is more bearable. And I wonder if this has become our language.

"We should go out today," she says eagerly. "The roses are still in bloom, and the birds have come back—"

"And you don't want to go to lessons," I finish.

She crosses her arms in petulance. "And why shouldn't I? They're so dull."

"So they are," I agree, not particularly wanting to face Neil after my little affair. I'm reasonably certain that word has spread, and I don't have an excuse for ordering new tests done. I don't want to hear about my unfortunate nature again. And I suspect that I will have to indulge her wishes of being a family if I am to begin to make amends. That strikes me as the most important—to begin to atone for all I have done; that may prove to be an impossible dream.

And somehow, that strikes me as painfully sad.

It's such a strange experience to be in the same place Father leapt to his death. I had heard about it for so long, that I had decided that I must have known what it was like: barren, steep cliffs; an open plain of grasses cut low by a salt-soaked wind. A lonely, lost albatross, perhaps. A hard place that gave rise to a hard man.

Now that I am here, in his footsteps and yet strangely apart from him, I see that I was wrong. True, the salt settles into everything within its kingdom, and an ever-present chill from the sea sweeps and seeps through everything, but, despite the hardness of the land, there is a surprising beauty to it. Among the undulating expanse of grasses, bellflowers sleepily nod. Trees mark the horizon, their crooked limbs growing in the shadow of the wind. Near the cliffs, sea birds make their nests.

Mary runs into the grasses, one hand on her hat to keep it from taking to the sky. She laughs, her braids bouncing off her shoulders as she skips. "Isn't it grand?"

"Of course." I cannot refrain from a faint smile. There's a sense of freedom here. An isolation perhaps, but also a freedom. And then I remember the smothering soot of London, and my joy fades. "I wonder how long this will last, with industrialization. We may be the last people to see this."

Mary frowns. "But Father owned the land. It's bound to the house."

I shake my head. "It's not that. It's the ceaseless tide of people. Breeding. Fighting. Soiling the natural world and turning it into London. Or any other industrial city." And that familiar bitterness returns. "Like a blight across the earth. How long do you think it will take for this place to be lit with cities and towns?" I pause, sensing her cautious silence as she attempts to fit this with her understanding of me. "There's a bird here that I've never seen. It's not in any books. Where will it live, when its land is taken away?"

"Then we must make sure that doesn't happen," she says simply, as she stoops to collect a bluebell.

"I doubt that we are a part of anything."

"Don't be silly. That's what grown-ups say when they don't want to do anything." She gives me a level look, as she stands up again. "You're alive, aren't you? So you can do something."

To my immense annoyance, I cannot come up with a suitably cutting retort.

Along the path, daisies curl upwards, amid the brown bones of the roses, all thorn and stem beneath their bristling coat of leaves. Mary inspects the roses, twisting off a few brilliantly red rose-hips. Grinning, she shows them to me, before stowing them away. Cassian, meanwhile, investigates the straggling ivy that spreads across the wall like a carelessly thrown shawl.

(Weeds. They'll wreak a good wall in months. Never cared much for them, Doctor.)

I nearly ask Cassian just how he came to have opinions about plants, even that he lived his years in a city, but I realize that there still remains so much that I do not know about him. His past is a mystery that time will not relinquish. As mine will be, one day.

Plump birds bounce in front of me, regarding me with sharp black eyes. And I reel, remembering the warmth of the parrots' eyes, overwhelmed by the acute pain of loss and helplessness.

"Are you," Mary begins, carefully, "unwell?" All large-eyed concern.

I shake my head.

"What happened?"

I avert my gaze from her, unable to tell her about my inability to save God's creatures from being ill-used. My uselessness.

A little sigh of sorrow from her, and we continue on, this heaviness between us. Hurt shining in those large blue eyes from my refusal to confide in her. Then she collects herself, tramping over in her boots over to the roses.

"Do you like them?" She stops to run her fingers along the underside of a rose; under her touch, the white petals crumble, and she frowns slightly before continuing. "Big Brother didn't have any flowers in his garden when I came here." She smiles, a little pride brightening her face. "I wanted a garden like in the stories. With roses and bluebells and tulips. And lots of birds. I never saw many birds in London."

"But it's not a substitute for you mother, is it?" I am beginning to understand what drives her fevered longing for a family.

Mary gives me a curious glance. "Do you miss your mama?"

This takes me aback. "No."

She frowns. "Was she a bad person?"

"She was weak. When you're very small, they seem the same." At Mary's inquisitive silence, I continue, bitterly. "She couldn't bear the idea of being unloved. And when Father found us, she gave me back to him."

She had been the youngest child of the family. The one overshadowed by a brother who died in infancy from scarlet fever, and a sister who married a minor noble. The one who had never been thought even worthy of attention. Father must have found it an easy matter to manipulate a love-starved child-woman into being his mistress, as disreputable as such a status was. I suppose the illusion of finally being special to someone made it easier to overlook my sisters' deaths.

(Of course, I never heard any of this from her. I had to learn it all second-hand from Neil's correspondences with the other Hargreaves. The frenzied accusations and speculation when they learned Father's mistress had finally borne a son.)

"She tried to run from Father?" Mary asks, carefully. Evidently unaware that one could even contemplate escaping Father.

I nod. "She went a few towns over, to live with a cousin. She pretended I was her daughter."

Mary claps her hands together in amazement. "Oh! Like in the fairy stories!"

Cassian snorts a little. (You're certainly pretty enough to be a girl, Doctor.)

And somehow, it doesn't sting as much as it did before, when Cassandra reminded me of how unwanted I was. Mother is no longer the hated figure of my childhood, the willow of a woman who abandoned her children. Instead, the stirrings of pity fills me: I remember what it is like, to cherish the lightness of being special to someone. To be noticed when no one else has taken any notice. I don't forgive her—I might never forgive her, just as Mary might never forgive me for what I have willingly done—but I no longer hate her. Perhaps that's enough, for now.

And that which is left to me is still unknown. It's a little terrifying to know that it is mostly in my power to shape, but that entails finally leaving Father, closing the door on him and his fantasies. I keep looking back in the hopes that I will catch a glimpse of how he used to be, but that man is gone, I suppose, if he ever existed. And so, is the home I had with him. A place all the more dear because it was naught but a fantasy. And I understand why Cain clung to the illusion of Riff, no matter what befell him.

I suppose we have been searching for the same thing in different places.

Cassian waits patiently beside me, as he has always done, and I see what I have squandered, in all my selfishness. Cassian will die sooner than I, and I-I have wasted a year that I cannot take back. I have wasted a year picking through my innards, trying to find answers that may not exist. I've been so foolish. I'm struck with the fervent wish to hear his voice again—not Cassandra's voice, not the dog's, but his. His boyish voice forever frozen on the cusp of adolescence. And that I cannot have.

It seems to me, that I have lived my life without my lamb in the carefullest way, dividing the world into what can be felt and what cannot. What is allowed. At the beginning of it all, it seemed fitting, that I, as a marked being, should not be able to experience the painful range of life. I had become different, soiled, and so it was easy to surrender this and that as the new walls of my world. The dream of being loved and being noticed. And yet, when I was not aware of it, the walls drew too close, and all the comforting lines started to resemble a cage. And it was too small a space to live in, but I told myself that those confines were all that was left to me.

And I no longer want to live in such a limited way.

Father might have encouraged it, but I put those walls there myself, and perhaps then, only I can remove them. But I fear it, because I have changed, and there is nothing more frightening—and more freeing than that revelation.

I throw my arms around Cassian, as if that can still time. As if that can make up for my foolishness, my selfishness. How long have I wasted when the answer was in front of me the entire time? Cassian had loved me more than Father ever did. He has loved me despite my ugly insides. He came back for me, when I thought myself all alone.

He sighs. (Took you long enough, kid. Any longer and I'd be an old man.)

"You are an old man," I whisper, though not unkindly.

As Mary and I return to the house, her arms full of wildflowers and my head full of thoughts and fears that I cannot allay, I become aware that there is another whom I miss. Oh, how foolish I've been. So painfully foolish about everything.

It occurs to me that I will never be that twelve-year-old again. That much is certain. It does not do to pine after the past, as alluring as such an option is. I have known the past, and it will not be again. Because I will not be again. I have changed, and that knowledge frightens me in its implications. There is a vulnerability—and even a certain sadness—to change. It means that, somehow, life cruelly continued, instead of having the decency to end when I thought I had become a ghost of my former self—haunting myself. And yet, I do not know what I may become.

I am different now. Made different in a thousand, halting increments. Even now, there are cells in my body that have never known Father, never known Cassandra, nor Mother, nor even Snark. Not the slipperiness of bluebells in that field a lifetime ago, when I still had the sense to run from Father. Nor the wetness of a looped, loosened intestine, like a rope, like a noose.

But they have known Cain.

The cells, I learned, do not all change at once, but in increments. The bones remake themselves every ten years, the liver in less than a year. Erythrocytes, the red blood cells, are made anew every few months. Father may still have my bones, but he does not have the rest of me. Not anymore. If I am no longer his, then whose creature am I? My own? Can anyone truly belong to themselves?

But there is something else, something entirely in my power to make different. I had mistaken this for weakness for so many years, despising the bonds of humanity as a sham, when I was truly afraid of its power. I cannot change the past, but I can amend what is left to me. Part of me fears that this is a trap, as it always does, and part of me trembles at this power, this feeling I cannot name that hid itself as hatred for all these years. Because there was nowhere else for it to hide.

And the longer I examine it, more it starts to resemble a sort of love.

For a moment, it seems as though I am peering inside my heart—the dusty, cadaverous monstrosity that it is. I pass through, the walls an angry rust from the years of jealousy, until I come to the little room; a child's nursery with its stainless door ajar. Spotless from all the energy I have expended in remembering it. The view of the forest, and the shelf full of fairy stories. The bed where I thought I must surely die from the pain of it all. The model ships and the plucked flowers on the windowsill. It seemed expansive and boundless when I was a child, but I know better now.

Inside the nursery, tracing the borders of the known world is my twelve-year-old self. An atlas propped on a pillow, and the summer's light catching on the knee-length shorts and starched shirt. Oh, how Hannah hated that I loved the forest; she often wished aloud that I had found a cleaner interest.

And yet, for all its nostalgia, the room no longer holds any promise of what could have been, and now merely exists as a mausoleum for what never will be. And as I move to close the door, he rushes to me. Alarm on his face. If I close the door, then no one will remember him, and I will have to surrender that too. Hannah's dead. Snark's dead. Mother's dead. Father's dead. I outlived them all, in spite of my wishes to the contrary. How perverse.

I search his eyes, wide with worry, and I have half a mind to tell him everything that will happen. To tell him that he will suffer—oh God, will he suffer, and God, in all His infinite generosity and wisdom, hardly keeps his oaths—but in the end, in the end, he might be happy again. The words, however, live and die in my throat, and so I do not. Instead, I back away, shaking my head, unable, or unwilling, to keep the fantasy alive anymore. And I close the door on him, unsure if it is an act of preservation or forgetting.

Perhaps it can be both.

And I am afraid of just what I have done, afraid and relieved and broken and whole.

Cain

They're all watching me. My children. Bottled and corked and stoppered against all of eternity. Waiting. A collection of poisons passed down from father to son. Strychnine, a poison from the Far East. Introduced to Her Majesty's realm by William Palmer, another murderous physician, in 1856. It's a dramatic poison that brings about uncontrollable spasms and eventual asphyxiation. Its quieter cousin, cyanide. First used to color wallpaper blue, then appropriated by the military. White arsenic—Father's favorite. The inheritance powder, as it's popularly known. I wonder still how much arsenic has accumulated in my body; if it was enough to render me anemic and sickly six years ago, then how much of it still affects me today? Unconsciously, I examine my fingernails for the horizontal, white lines of arsenic poisoning.

("Nothing to be afraid of," Father told me, one of his reassuring smiles across his face. "Just God reminding you that there are clouds in the sky and furrows in the fields.")

I suppose it's in the Hargreaves blood to have collections: I keep the family collection, while my brother used to take mementos from particularly intriguing victims. I never did ask what became of his sordid hobby, if disembodied eyes and lungs and hearts and intestines are still floating, bobbing in an abandoned, pristine lab somewhere. Probably underground. How gruesome. And yet, is that not a perfect match for the horrid thoughts in my mind? Is that not proof of my inheritance? How much must I surrender to avert this legacy? Whom must I sacrifice?

I long for Riff's strong arms, to shield me from my heritage. His soft words and gentle heart. I am so weary of measuring words, all to please the people who would have preferred I had died at birth.

The Lord knows all the plans that He has made, the plans of "hope and a future," but I see none. I see a battle that cannot be won, an inheritance that cannot be discarded, and an ever-present poison in my veins. Is that all that became of Cain? A cautionary tale? An object of hatred and pity? Did Cain ever, in the empty wilderness he was condemned to, ever glance back and wish he could put down the stone that slew his brother?

Selecting one of the older additions—the peeling label calls it Widow's Flower—for study, I decide on a quiet afternoon of testing it, and the antidote naturally, on some of the hens raised for this purpose. Although the birds will be safe, until their time has come, I will keep my ongoing experimentation a secret from Jezabel. I'm fairly certain he'd liberate them—and then liberate my veins if he ever found out. And the thought of my brother saddens me, for I have tried and failed to reach him. I cannot bear this alone, and yet, it seems that that is my lot. Love is not a state of being, but an action.

And underneath that, I want to be cared for, rather than the caregiver. Why am I not allowed this? In a few years' time, I will come of age and inherit Father's assets and reputation. And then, my life will be lived in the narrow lines of the aristocracy: parties, Parliament. Idle flattery and investments. Nothing of what gives my life such spark—to set the world, if only for one life, to right by bringing criminals to justice. Father might have escaped, but I can ensure that no others do.

I don't want any more children to have my past if I can help it.

As I pass through the house, the emptiness of the halls draws my attention. Usually, Mary can be found, carefully evading from her governess, or engaged in some menial activity, but her absence pains me, and against the part of me that argues that for a simple explanation, a tremor courses through me. Surely my brother wouldn't harm her to make a point? Even as the question arises, the terrible answer and the terrible past reveals itself.

I stop Uncle Neil in the hall. "Where's Mary?" I ask, trying to quell the rising, frantic energy in my body. "With her governess?"

"I haven't seen her today. Miss Pritchett says she's been hiding for a few hours now."

"Shouldn't Mary have had luncheon yet?" At his frown of understanding, I continue. "Where's Jezabel?"

Uncle Neil gives me a cautious stare. "What are you suggesting?"

I only shake my head. "It's nothing."

Panic overtakes me as my old fear resurfaces. Visions of Mary dead. Mary with her eyes cut out. Mary eviscerated, an empty stare the only remainder of her humanity. I reel from the horror, my breath fast against my hand. I have nearly reached the hall, to inquire as to my brother's whereabouts, when I find Jezabel, preoccupied with shaking out his coat.

"It rained on the way back. Everything is wet." He grimaces. "Cassian has gone in search of a fire to lie beside."

"Where's Mary?"

"I took her out," he says nonchalantly. "It was her idea." He surveys my distraught face, and that familiar coldness returns to his voice. "You don't trust me. You never have, have you?"

"I have good reason to."

"And that's what become of your resolution to forge your own fate, then?"

"I'm not certain that you're the best person to tell me to throw off the shackles of fate." I pause, the unspeakable welling in my chest. "You don't understand these people. You can't fathom what it feels like, to be judged for your behavior. You don't have to relinquish anything. You can have whatever you want, but I—" My hands tighten. "I have to live up to their ideals, or they'll hound me. They'll hold Mary hostage, keep her from being received properly. I have to give up everything. My freedom for her. That has always been the price." I think of Emmeline, lying dead with her opened throat. The one I was forced to become engaged to, in exchange for Mary's formal adoption.

He watches me, bitterness moving across his face. "So you'll give me up, too?"

I avert my gaze, unable to answer. "You make it sound so simplistic. It's not a life for a life. You're free, and I'm not. And that's the difference between us."

"No," he retorts, in his dangerously soft tone, "the difference between us is that you're wanted."

At this strange statement and the jealousy that trails behind it, like a ghost, I cannot help but feel a twinge of sadness. "The world is not black and white. There are some people who can't bring themselves to love back."

"And I'm one of them?"

"I don't know."

"Don't play the coward now. You decided about me a while ago." At my questioning stare, he continues, and for a moment, his bitterness gives way to a melancholy anger. "You left me. I waited for you, but you left me."

And I realise that my nightly absence has been the source of our strife. A trifle, really. But it must have been exceedingly pleasant to have someone after all this time. Someone to be near. My absence must have been interpreted, eventually, as a rejection, and everything after that must have succumbed to confirmation bias.

"That is what's been bothering you?" I pause. "You had the dog to keep you company. Don't you prefer the company of animals to humans anyway?"

For a moment, it seems as though he means to say something, but he closes his mouth, shaking his head slightly.

"It's for the best," I add, stiffly. "You don't understand how the family can be."

As I turn from him, his hand moves, so slightly that I might have missed it. It moves to catch my own, but fails. I recognize my gesture, the gesture that I must have done a hundred times with him, in his, and a thousand questions spring to my lips. He, however, only stares at the distance between us, lost to some resolution. He pauses to say something, fumbling with the words, but only silence comes of it. He draws another breath—

"I miss you."

It's a breathless, stricken half-whisper, and I wish, instead, he had broken something, struck me, threatened my life. Anything but this. Because this means that time caught up with both of us.

That something melted.

I search his face, search that disarming look of childlike vulnerability for the answers neither of us possess. Half apprehensive, and half ready to surrender to the promise of being together. "You're having one on me," I reply, uncertain of myself now. My chest heaving. "Is that it?"

"I miss you," he repeats, only slightly more firmly. I'm reminded of the strange time he only screamed "no" at me, as if that was what he had been wanting to say for a while. And I realize that it must have returned—his ability to connect with humanity, not just animals. That he had decided to let me in.

"Do you, truly?" My voice shakes under the strain. "Do you?"

I throw myself into his arms, crying and crying and crying, like the lost child that I am. I don't know who I'm crying for, him or me. For the boy who hid his humanity, or the one who was forgotten. Or for the implacable march of time, that stole and returned in equal measure.

Jezabel, however, stiffens in shock, clearly not expecting my sudden embrace, and I wonder if I have made a fatal error in judgement. I wait for the warmth of my opened veins, but it never comes; instead I become aware of the loudness of his heart. I inhale the scent of the sea that permeates his clothes, his hair, his skin. So unlike Riff's ever-present smell of lavender and soap. The first time, being with him reminded me of Riff's tiny medical cabinet, the holdovers from a promising career cut short: the harshness of chemicals unnaturally concentrated. How strange that change is inevitable.

"You're not about to stab me, while going on about our impossible love, are you?" I ask, dryly. Trying to draw attention away from my childish trembling.

"You really shouldn't give me ideas."

And I only laugh. Relishing the sensation of being held, I rest my head on his shoulder, running my hand down his back. Then, I smooth the hair from the nape of his neck, gathering it over his shoulder. In turn, he searches my face, lips slightly parted, for answers that neither of us possess. And there is a moment between us, a silence that he takes for something, but what I cannot name.

"It's true that we shall be monsters cut off from all the world; but on that account," he quotes, "we shall be more attached to one another."

I recognize it immediately as from Frankenstein. And to mask my surprise at the show of comfort, I turn to jesting. "When did you learn literature?"

He rolls his eyes at me. "Really now. Do you think I spent my life elbow-deep in corpses all the time?"

"Just most of it."

He give this some thought. "Fair enough," he concedes, and I cannot suppress a smirk. As I content myself with running my fingers through his damp hair, he adds, more quietly, "You made me like this."

In reply, I only shake my head, unable to tell him that if he has changed, then it is under his own power. My heart trembles at the thought of being together again, to be whole again, and I cling to him, lost in the warmth of being.

We are curled together, all limbs and warmth and the thrilling sensation of skin against skin. The linen of the bed, a pleasant addition to the smoothness of his skin. Outside, the rain keeps time, ticking down. If Uncle Neil was pleased to see us together again at supper, he said nothing on it. I suppose even he must see the foolishness of trying to separate us. Even so, we've taken precautions against anyone finding us. Both our bedroom doors are locked, despite the odd glances we are sure to receive in the morning.

My hand trails across his face in quiet communion, and as I move to brush away the hair which has fallen across his neck, the silver of a scar peeks out from under his dressing gown. He notices my heavy pause, raising himself up, slightly, and the printed silk slides down, baring one shoulder. His lips parted.

And for a moment, I wonder just how dangerous such a love could be. There shan't be any children from this, no Biblical revenge cast down from the heavens. If we do so, then we do so of our free will—and not what Father did to Mother. He said that he had wanted to test the boundaries of her love, but this is within ours. Even then, should I?

I try to calm the quivering in my heart and the flush of heat, whenever he stares at me so. The ever-present question between us again—and then he shakes his head. And I breathe normally again, with the decision made. As I curl into his body, his hand over my waist, a certain peace comes over me. And a strange longing enters my head. He has spoken of his own scars, but I have never seen them in their entirety. Are they similar to mine?

"Can I? Can I see them?"

For a moment, that reserve returns to him, and I regret my question, sensing that I have found the limit to our regained closeness. He tries to ascertain my motives with a searching stare of his, but then he decides something. What, I cannot tell. And with that, he slowly disrobes, and for some reason, I help him, freeing his skin until his body is laid bare to me, and we are both before each other, both undressed. I pause at the gauze around his forearm, as my old worry returns. Surely not? Surely, he wouldn't?

"It was an accident."

His stiffness on the matter tells me that I have nothing to gain by questioning him, but I cannot suppress the slight guilt in my heart, as misplaced as it is. And my fingers, in turn, fall down the sharp, artificial line across his center. And I try to imagine what it must have been like, to awaken in intense pain from being cut open and the knowledge that someone's hands have rummaged inside one's body. That someone has broken the boundaries that delineate the insides from the outsides. From oneself and others.

My thoughts turn inward, as I follow the curve of another raised, ropy scar, a spillover from Father's punishments. If there is a story on my body, then what would it say? I suffered? I lived? That despite it all, I lived? And I trace them, absentmindedly, trying to reconstruct the sensations—the pain, the quiet horror. The isolation. And for a moment, I am twelve again and a ghost made pale by arsenic, and it is all too much. I clutch at him, forgetting myself, afraid of what we have done, and afraid that Riff was wrong about me.

I suppose that, if a maid were to intrude on us, it might be taken as confirmation of my inheritance. But it is not. This is deeper than the bonds of the flesh. This is something that stirs in my bones and sets my heart alight. Everything is bearable in the knowledge that I am not alone in my experiences. That if this poison runs through my veins, then it runs through his as well. I do not fear tainting him with my poison—unlike Riff.

I used to keep myself awake, praying fervently for understanding the way that some men pray for love. And when I could not find understanding, I sought the pleasures of the flesh to ameliorate my solitude. My exile that I have only realized lately was self-imposed. And I wonder if my brother has also come to that realization. I remember what it was like, to try to reach out to those I had not dared to love, because everything I loved was taken away. And it's a frightening notion to have a body that won't last and memories that won't persist. And if there is a story that will be told about me, years and years from now, it will be only hearsay. Half a story to accompany a portrait. Even my words will not last, for the learned men all say that, eventually, the sun will become like Chronos, eater of its own children.

I try to forget my fears in the warmth of his body.I still do not know what to make of this almost-closeness that neither of us can relinquish. It's not brotherly love, but we might get there yet. We have the same soul, whatever it may be.

As I continue to touch his scars, I realize that in some places, his nerves have been deadened. Like mine. A mischievous thought leaps into my mind, and to test my theory, I run a quick finger from one of the deadened spots to an unblemished patch. His gasp of half-shock and half-delight confirms my suspicion. A faint flush on his face. He takes in a breath, unable to suppress a wanton grin.

"What was that?" he manages, his chest heaving.

Smirking, I repeat it, moving my fingers across his back. Starting at a shoulder, and slowly trailing along his back, resisting the urge to trace my path with my mouth. The muscles of his back tremble and his tendons twitch under the stimulation, and I cannot suppress a strange satisfaction that I am the source of his pleasure. I follow the scars to the unmarred places again and again, delighting in his soft gasps, ignoring the ensuing flush of heat in my own body.

And we fall down, laughing and laughing at our foolishness.

Notes:

I love writing about the Cornwall house. We never see it again after the early volumes of the series, because all the action gets moved to London, and I think that's a real shame. Cain canonically burns down the London residence to spite Evil Riff, and after re-reading it, I was annoyed none of the characters remembered that the ancestral home was in Cornwall, and they just moved in with Uncle Neil instead. Or at least, I think they did, because the new house shown was in/near London and not the Cornwall place.
It's also entirely possible that I am giving this too much thought. Anyway...
So, scar-touching is my fav trope for the fandom. That and hurt/comfort.
Today's bible quote's from Jeremiah 29:11. ("For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.") Chapter title comes from Proverbs 17:17 (A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.)
Thank you for continuing to read! I'd love to know what you thought!