Notes:
Originally, this was one incredibly long chapter, but I can't read more than ~6k words without needing a breather/chapter break, and I'm assuming you all have my awful attention span.
Also, this gets intense, so please read the second half carefully if you were not aware of some of the more grotesque and inhumane practices of the late Victorian/early Edwardian era.
Jezabel
"I'm bored," Mary complains, slouching on the chair, her neglected embroidery beside her. She crosses her arms, kicking her feet in frustration. "I don't even want to be a great lady."
"It's your inheritance," Kathrine replies, never glancing up from her own, multi-yard project of swallows flutters amidst an impossible stretch of flowers. "And a lady of this family waits to receive callers every day. It's high time you began to practice."
"Who practices waiting?" Mary says. "I'm very good at waiting already. I wait all the time."
I glance up from my newest letter to the editor of the Times, paused in thought;Cain catches my gaze with a smirk. "Have I ever told you," he starts, "about Jezabel's lady friend?"
"He's got a lady friend," Mary says, half furious, half intrigued, sliding back into her cockney. She eyes me suspiciously. "Since when?"
Kathrine, however, merely selects another color of embroidery thread from the pile beside her. "Don't be ridiculous, Cain," she says, beginning to thread it through the needle. "We all know your brother hasn't set eyes on a wo—"
"Eveline?" I interrupt with a feigned nonchalance, naming his creation and deciding not to linger on the way she has decided to distance herself from me. Your brother, indeed. Yet another who doesn't want me around. At my response, she only raises her eyebrows in faint disbelief.
"Yes, that's the one," Cain replies, leaning forward and taking no note of his aunt. "Didn't she say she might stop by?"
"She might," I say conspiratorially, as Mary claps her hands to her mouth in excitement, unconsciously swinging her feet.
"Then I should see if we have any visitors," Cain replies, setting down his novel. "It's only proper."
Kathrine shakes her head, as he turns to leave. "If only you cared for propriety." Perhaps it is fortunate that she misses his smirk of mild amusement, as he closes the door softly behind him. She has her hands full if she means to reform him.
Mary's gaze, however, keeps returning to me, despite her attempts to resume her embroidery. Half a dove stares back at me, thread trailing absentmindedly from its unfinished wing. "Have you really got a lady friend?" she finally asks.
"Don't humor Cain," Kathrine answers her. "He's been allowed to get away with far too much. Your Uncle Neil is too soft on him." She meets my gaze: "and you as well" goes unspoken between us.
The first night she showed up, to become Mary's substitute governess until Neil could locate a woman that has not encountered the Hargreaves household, she told him that he was doing wrong by not confining me to my bed until the complications cleared. And that by indulging me, he was sending me to an early grave. It's not healthy, Neil, she had said, to let him follow his whims. Today, it's no meat, and tomorrow? Tomorrow, he'll start talking about animal rights. The week after that, he'll have broken into the London zoo to let loose all the animals. He'll give Mary ideas, and then you can't put the cat back in the bag. Surely you don't want a libertine niece? Aren't Alexis's sons bad enough? Although a brief wave of pride came over me at finally being acknowledged as Father's blood, it was mixed with a sense of anger that she should allow herself to run the household, despite being an outsider. She's only the sister of Cain's stepmother, after all. Father's wife.
As I attempt to voice a suitably sharp remark, another coughing fit seizes me, and pain starts again in my chest. Again. It doesn't matter how much I rest; the pain always returns, and blood lines the inside of the handkerchief I press to my mouth. At this, Mary's eyes go wide in concern.
Kathrine glances up from her work, and then, satisfied that I haven't coughed blood all over the carpet, returns to the outline of a marigold. "You're still doing poorly," she says, with the air of one who knows best. "I suppose you still don't see the value in proper nutrition."
I am beginning to detest proper now. What a nasty little box of a word. "Cod liver oil isn't necessary," I say, with all my carefully feigned, dangerous sweetness reserved for the most obstinate of patients, as I resume the argument that I have had with her every morning since she arrived. "Certainly not for me, and certainly not for the cod. It's pure folly to think that consuming another being will bring health."
Fortunately, the arrival of the butler renders her silent; she'd hate for an outsider to hear her in an argument. Appearances must be kept up, after all. She carefully transforms her frown in to the warm smile of a gracious hostess.
"Ms. Eveline Darcy," the butler announces, without a trace of irony. Eveline smiles abashedly, her golden-green eyes sparkling in amusement and her black hair curls around her face. A modest, mauve gown covers her almost boyish figure, and she nods in gracious acknowledgement as I introduce her to Kathrine and Mary. The dress is unfamiliar to me; I wonder where Cain obtained it. Probably in London.
"She's real!" Mary whispers furiously to Kathrine, before turning to Eveline. "How do you do," she says, struck by a sudden shyness.
"She's a mute," I explain. This is almost as much fun as when I used to concoct backstories with Cassian, and we pretended to be other people, marveling at their interchangeability and resenting them for their blissful unawareness. That hideous, shallow peace, marked by a deep ignorance of the world. Now if only this charade, too, could end in a murder...
The butler comes in at the tail-end of Cain's charade, meticulously composed, to inform me that I have a call waiting. I slip past Cain, who is nibbling on a scone next to Mary's animated chattering that strikes me as just a touch lonely. The phone is heavy in my hand, as I balance the hearing and speaking parts of it. Although I doubt Scotland Yard gives advance warning to those they are about to arrest, particularly serial murderers, I wonder who it could be. And my heart sinks when I realize it is the family solicitor on the other end.
I listen to him, struck mute, as he tells me the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard; I nearly hang up on him. He tells me, in his faintly bored tone, that he recently confirmed that Mother left a house in Dorset to me. The house in the forest, my mind fills in, unwanted. For a moment, sunshine warms my skin—the blissful green surrounds me as far as the eye can see, and the rich smell of the soil hangs in the air. Then the memory recedes, leaving me in the darkened drawing room, with the heavy drapes and breakable china. I have a half a mind to ask him if he held a seance to discover such a thing, before the letter returns to my mind, unbidden. And anger tightens my chest. I resent that everyone has been privy to my business. No doubt, the letter held some maudlin plea for forgiveness and pity and all the sentiments more appropriate for a second-rate novel.
I will never forgive the woman who gave me willingly to the wolves.
The call ends abruptly as it began, but I cannot seem to register any of it. Take a look at it, the solicitor had said. But I don't want to. I don't want to go back there. I don't want to see what it has become. I certainly won't plant roses and dahlias, and make a garden about of that dreadful place. Nothing will end simply because the house has changed hands.
I'm certain Cain's behind this. It's just like him to meddle in the affairs of others. I suppose he thinks that it would be best if I had a place of my own, away from the family, but it feels as though he wants to be rid of me, and nothing terrifies me more than being disposable. That, I suppose, is how I was molded. Just useful enough to be tolerated, but not valuable enough to be irreplaceable.
How cruel to ask me to return to the place where I died.
Cain
As I stare out the train window, the rushing, grey sea of Cornwall gives way to the quaint towns dotting the countryside, and finally endless fields of Queen Anne's lace and yarrow, waving in the breeze. Mary keeps touching the window in amazement at the expanse of England, but Jezabel has been in one of his sulky moods, after Uncle Neil told him that he could not take the dog with him. Arms crossed, he's been silent the entire train ride, which has begun to unnerve me.
To try to coax him out of his temper, I settle on an anecdote I heard recently from Uncle Neil. "You contacted the London college recently?"
A brief, sullen nod.
Mary slides back onto the seat, momentarily distracted from pointing out every detail of the English countryside. "Did you? Will you really be a veterinarian?"
Jezabel shrugs, still not meeting my gaze.
"And—" I encourage, unable to keep a smirk from my lips. Remembering the exasperation with which Uncle Neil had told me what had transpired during the phone call.
Jezabel gives me a curious stare, perhaps wondering how I have come to know how his phone call transpired, before uncrossing his arms. "He told me the term starts, and," a slight pause, as he takes on a distinctly haughty look, "asked me when Mr. Disraeli would be able to attend. I told him that I am Dr. Disraeli. I did not go through years of medical school to be addressed as Mr."
"Already making friends," I add cheerfully.
A shriek from Mary interrupts us; her hands back on the window, she stares at the endless expanse of bluebells and wild garlic. "Oh, look, look! Bluebells! A whole field-full!"
And I know from his darkening face and his guarded demeanor, that we must be here.
For a country house, it is surprisingly dark. The curtains have all been pulled shut; dust wanders in the straggling light. I suspect it looked far different when Jezabel was smaller, and I wasn't yet born. How strange to think of what preceded me. He had been alive for almost ten years before I was born. What if we had been raised together, the two unwanted children raised together? Would I have called this place home?
From his barely concealed scowl and the way he crosses his arms tightly, I can tell that this is no longer home for Jezabel. Like me, he is now a wanderer. To return to one's former home, the place that once was one's entire world, is accompanied by a strange loss: the absence of one's former self, the knowledge that one is irreparably different, the loss of the past that can never be recaptured, only dimly remembered. Walking in one's former home feels like being an impostor of who one used to be.
For Jezabel, I suppose this must be the remnants of his past, which lie abandoned to dust, littered in the various, mundane objects: where he thought he was loved by Father, where he thought the world was made of milk and honey, albeit a little loneliness too.
Perhaps, this is less of a return, and more of a funeral.
My brother will never have his childhood home again. The plants have all died, replaced by wind-borne strangers, chamomile and marigold, which now flutter in the pots. The paint will never be the same shade. The home will never be, again, but it will change. (I do not mention the rickety gate I glimpsed on the edges of the house. The paint had been nearly stripped from it, but I still recognized it, underneath the clambering, smothering ivy, as the gate to an animal pen. Somethings, perhaps, ought to stay in the past.)
He stops near a table, surveying it, and I take this opportunity to glance at the pictures nearby: a woman with light hair, wearily smiling. The tight waist and bustle date her to the 1880s; she clasps a young, laughing boy in schoolboy attire to her. Jezabel, I realize, from the shared light hair. How strange. He seems so... carefree. It's a little unnerving, actually, to imagine him as anything besides quiet, meticulous, and periodically sulky. A sharp almost-pain pierces my chest when I catch sight of the subject of the next photograph. Father. Alone. His glasses catching the glare of the camera. Of course, he has the largest photograph. Mary bounces beside me, and recognizing Jezabel in the photograph, she takes on a thoughtful, calculating look.
"You must have a birthday," she says to him, half hesitant, half thoughtful. Her chubby fingers trace the twisted frame of the photograph.
"I think he was born as an adult," I jest lightly. "He was never young."
"No," Mary continues, undeterred. "It's been a year." She regards Jezabel slyly. "You must have had a birthday, and we didn't know."
Jezabel shrugs, and it seems we will escape a lecture on the sinfulness of human beings and their ever-increasing population rates today.
"I'll find it out," Mary vows, peering into the next photograph of Father and Jezabel. The tone has altered considerably: Father looks into the camera, a self-satisfaction lacing his form, while Jezabel, in turn, has a certain blank look under the haughty set to his face. I suppose this must have been taken after he finished medical training. Mary trails behind me, as if we were in a museum. Perhaps we are. She grimaces at Father, and she clasps her arms around her in comfort.
"Come, let's see the rest," I say, suddenly eager to be away from Father's memory. Of course, there's no photograph of Jezabel's sisters. I imagine that Father must have had any destroyed long ago.
Next is the study. Closed off for more than a decade and only periodically tended, the room has a grey coating of dust everywhere. I peer at some of the titles of the books, trying to puzzle out the contents from faded leather spines. As I turn to Jezabel, to ask him about the novels, instead of his usual blank stare of dissociation when confronted with unpleasant memories, I find only confusion.
One hand on his chest and the other against the striped wallpaper, he inhales sharply, shallowly, but he doesn't seem to be able to breathe. Is it an nervous fit? I motion him towards a reasonably pleasant chair, still draped in its protective cloth like a ghost on the stage, but he shakes his head, curling on himself. And I am struck by my lack of knowledge, my inability to do anything. My mind whitens with the vast fear that I am watching him die. Mary stares at us, strangely blank. In the place of tears and anguish, she remains perfectly still, as recognition moves across her face. Her hand paused on her mouth.
How to make him breathe?
If he's not breathing, then he only has three to six minutes before permanent brain damage.
My hand brushes against a forgotten pen in my coat pocket, and a half-remembered fragment of Riff returns to me; we had just found one of the Black Rabbit's latest murder victims, a thirteen-year-old girl who wasn't breathing—almost strangled. The rope burns still red around her throat from where Riff cut her down. A few compression to her chest—and Riff cut a hole in her throat so that she could breathe again.
Could I?
I haven't a scalpel or a small knife. Could a pen work? How much pressure should I apply? What if I pierce his throat completely, and he bleeds out in front of Mary? I look from the pen to his throat, to the hollow between the tendons. Surely there? The pen is light in my hand; I can hardly hold onto it. God, I wish Riff was here. He could solve this, and instead I am about to unintentionally kill my brother. I'm sure Father would find that humorous, from his place in Hell.
The pen trembles, light refracting off the metal. But if I don't try—how much time is left? I could, I could—
Before I can make a decision, Jezabel fumbles in his pocket and draws a scalpel from it. He tilts his head back, and with his free hand, he traces the hollow of his throat, settling on a spot. I realize that he must have had the same idea I had. A quick flash of sliver. A thin line reddens his throat. A single vertical cut. Then relief shows on his face, and in turn, I nearly collapse in relief. For a moment, all I had seen in my mind's eye was his bloodied throat, his life's blood spilling out from the dark hole I made. The rising and falling of his chest becomes steadier, but the slow arrival of pain makes him grimace, and he turns sickly shade of white.
And I wonder if he cut too far. Without a mirror, without any means of checking the cut before he made it, he might have severed something critical. From the incision, blood has begun to leak out, radiating across the pale of his throat. And then, without warning, his legs give way, and he crumples to the floor.
His collapse, however, breaks my paralysis.
"Ring for the butler," I tell Mary, if only to give her something to do, to feel as though she is being useful. She nods, but her eyes are still dark.
The butler helps me move his unconscious form into the another room, one better kept. Sprawled on the chair, Jezabel is disturbingly delicate, again. I preferred it when we were adversaries, and he seemed hard and unbreakable. That was all an illusion, a careful illusion driven by an insatiable hatred and bitterness.
The first order of business is to tend to the cut. I check that he's breathing, feeling his breath on my hand, before unwinding the gauze and closing the incision.
I turn to order the butler around, but he has disappeared with Mary, probably to send her down to the kitchens for a glass of warm milk, and in the absence of servants to do my bidding, I rummage in the linen closets for a blanket, hoping I don't inadvertently pick one that will send him into a temper. One with lavender embroidered along the edge seems innocuous enough, and I bring it back with me. I begin to tuck it around him, shifting his body slightly, unnerved by the frequency of his fainting spells and quietly fearing that my optimism was misplaced and that Father's prediction might come true after all.
As he begins to stir, I smooth his hair, lightly combing my fingers through it; but as I do so, a clump falls out, trailing in my hand. My heart quickens at this; surely this cannot be a good sign. He chooses that precise moment to open his eyes. A slight confusion registers on his face, as he surveys the room, no doubt conscious of the softness of the blanket tucked around him, and something akin to an innocent hurt comes over him. I suppose, in Delilah, if he had lost consciousness, he would have likely awoken where he fell, with a gash to mark the event. It is a strange feeling to be cared for, after being ignored for so long.
Then his gaze drops to my hand. Confusion returns, only to be replaced with an ominous quiet. Unconsciously, he raises a hand to his head, trailing his fingers through his hair, and then he closes his eyes in resignation.
A million words leap to my lips: you know what this means; you've done this to yourself. You're going to die soon, aren't you? And at the notion of death, at the possibility of death, a certain helplessness returns to me, and the words die in my throat. We remain there, in that heavy silence, struck by the sudden realization that everything has a price, and sometimes that price is death. I knew the effects would catch up sooner or later, but I had always thought of later as something distant, something that would never come if I didn't think about it. I suppose that's the folly of death: one spends one's life blissfully unaware of the limitations, until one finally stands at the end, at the seashore, staring at the vastness of eternity, and then it all seems too short. Not enough to justify the permanence of absence.
Not for the first time in my life, I want death to be something that affects other people. I'm half sick of it.
"Get rid of it," Jezabel says at last, not looking at me.
"It won't stop," I reply. "You know it won't."
His mouth tightens. "Aren't you happy? This solves everything." In his bitterness, there is the quiet anger again that my burden will be lifted with his death, that I can resume my life without him. Because that's what Cain did, after Abel's death. Because that's what I would have done, had he died at Delilah, thankful that my life had one less obstacle in it.
I fumble for the fragments that he told me about his life before me, realizing how this ended the way that it did. He spoke of eating as a duty, and of course, now that Father is dead, there's no point in keeping a duty to a corpse, let alone Father's. So, it quietly spiraled out of control, because no one noticed, and because he can be quite abrasive when he wants to be.
"Would you make it," I try, unsure and feeling quite foolish now, "your duty to me?"
He only watches me, unfathomable, unconsciously playing with the edge of the blanket. "To you?"
"Since you can't seem to do it for yourself."
"Or what?" He gives me a cold, appraising stare. "You'll make me? Have me locked up and force-fed, until I stop fighting it?"
I puzzle over his sudden accusation, stung from his implication that I would condone such acts, and I realize that, of course, he learned about that in his medical training; I remember the expose in the Times a while ago—it was quite grotesque. A metal gag that induced bleeding in the gums, the rubber tube that choked and irritated the throat as it was forced down. The woman interviewed had vomited over herself after the liquid had been poured down her throat.
"I can't see how that would help anything," I say, cautiously.
The fight slowly goes out of him, and he changes tactics, still guarded. "Are you going to tell Neil?"
"I imagine he already knows." I pause. "You're not exactly subtle about these things."
A short, sharp laugh. He crosses his arms, shaking his head slightly, clearly upset.
I wonder how awful it must be to have one's liberty be at the mercy of another. Fearing his temper, I decide to diffuse the tension. "Besides, it would be awful if you died," I add, shifting a little."You'd be a terrible ghost." My ploy works a little: he settles back, slightly, giving me a level, if petulant stare that I take as a sign of interest. "For starters, you'd smash things, if no one paid attention to you. And you'd probably get lost and torment some hapless foreigner. And set all their animals free." He smiles faintly at this, and I take it as my cue to continue. "Goats and sheep and cows, all wandering the countryside."
A silence comes over us, as he picks at the blanket, half in thought, half in the past.
"What happened?" I finally dare to ask. "You couldn't breathe. I thought..." I thought you would die.
He is silent, lost in thought. "It must have been the dust," he concludes. "It must have triggered a reaction."
"Dust?"
He shrugs. "it's not impossible."
I bite my lip in thought. "What could I have done? I thought about making a hole in your throat." At this I catch a faintly alarmed expression. "To makes sure you could breathe," I clarify, particularly keen on avoiding any misunderstandings; I've grown very fond of all my organs. It would devastate me to have them form the centerpieces of his new collection.
He gives it only a moment's consideration. "You'd have killed me." One finger trails along his throat, stopping at the hollow. "It's not a procedure for an amateur. You cannot know how much pressure to apply." Our eyes meet, as he presses against the hollow of his throat, and something stirs within me—I tear my gaze away.
"Tell me what you would have done. To fix this permanently."
He shakes his head. "There's nothing."
"You can bring the dead back to life," I say in disbelief, "but you can't do anything about this?"
What if you stop breathing again?
Uncomfortable, he only stares at the wall, frowning, and I wonder if he came here to die, not to build another life, but to end this one. I can almost hear his response: did you think this was one of Mary's fairy stories, where love cures all and pain dissolves like sugar in tea? Of course, I didn't, but sometimes, I like to pretend that death is a possibility that will never come. I know that sometimes all the joy of life does not negate the pain, the unbearable pain of awareness and the knowledge that it will all end some day. It's frightening, some days, to wake, alone, with the knowledge of death and the words never said, dried in my mouth. Even though Riff was such a presence in my life, there are still words I should have said. You were the first one who made me feel as though I was worth something. You gave me the part of my soul that Father tried to stamp out. I miss you. I miss who I was when you were alive.
I glance at the window, eager to leave this melancholy house, with the dust as thick as memories. "Come, let's see the garden."
The garden lies adjacent to the house. Overgrown grasses nod in the wind, rising from between the stones that comprise the courtyard floor. No chance of having supper outside in this condition. Mary frowns, and dropping to the ground, proceeds to pull out a handful of grasses. The dried seeds rain over her, running down her bonnet, but she does not relent, instead moving to the next with a single-minded determination. I almost pity Oscar now. If she's headstrong as a child, then she'll be quite a formidable wife.
"Mary."
At her name, she glances up at me. "I will have a place to sit outside. The weather is so nice. And we traveled so far."
I almost begin to tell her to leave it to the gardeners we will have to hire, but her stubbornness is deeply endearing. Frowning, Jezabel only watches her, his arms crossed. He's still terribly pale, but stubborn enough to stay standing. It's a cut, he said, not a battle wound. His spite to prove me wrong seems to have given him a bit of strength. As I crouch beside her, I call out to Jezabel. "Come now, why don't you be the judge? Who can pull up more, Mary or I?"
With a haughty look that tells me that I have lost my mind, he shrugs and sits down beside us.
The pile among us begins to swell with grasses. Jezabel checks periodically to see how quickly I am progressing, while Mary moves undeterred by soil speckling her pinafore and forearms. I suspect that when I return, I will receive a prompt scolding from Uncle Neil for letting her dress become so dirty. A squeal, and Mary falls backwards, her arms firmly wrapped around a particularly dense tangle.
"Careful!" I begin, but she only shrugs the grasses aside, dusting off her dress. Then as she moves to return to her task, she pauses, frowning as she surveys something near her shoe. "Oh," she says abruptly. "Oh, look!" Wiping off some of the dirt, she then offers her find to me: resting in her chubby palm is the nearly perfect circle of a fossilized creature.
"A snail fossil, I suspect," I tell her.
Not to be beaten at any sort of scientific inquiry, Jezabel examines it for his expert opinion, and he confirms it reluctantly, to my amusement.
"When did it live?" she asks us.
"Before there were people," I reply.
It's Mary's turn to thoughtfully nod, as she pockets the fossil. "How grand," she says softly to herself. "Fancy that. A world without people."
Suddenly alert at the possibility of converting another to his cause, Jezabel opens his mouth to begin one of his favorite diatribes, the despoiling of the natural world, but I intercede in time. "Surely, Mary is about to best me."
"Maybe," he replies, with a grin. "You're not used to working those delicate muscles of yours."
"Says the man who had a fainting spell earlier."
At this, Jezabel is at a loss for a suitable retort, and it's my turn to smirk; I return to my task, smugness lightening my heart, but my sense of superiority does not last long. A tuff of grass, trailing its long, thin roots, lightly smacks my head, sending dirt down my neck, and when I look in Jezabel's direction, he is suspiciously focused on a nasty patch. Moved by a sense of childishness that I thought I had lost, I select one of my recent victims and return the gesture. A gasp, as soil speckles his hair, and I brush away some of the dirt from me. He gives me an appraising gaze, as if determining the most appropriate revenge, and I wonder if this is about to devolve into a series of flying wild grasses. And then, just as I am reaching for another uprooted grass, preparing myself for the inevitable outbreak, he sits back, breathless, stains on the knees of his trousers from impromptu gardening, and grins.
It's contagious to see him so happy; I cannot suppress a grin of my own. I wonder if he ever had petty squabbles with his sisters, like ours. I had always imagined them to be older, but he must have some memory of them.
"I won," Mary announces, beaming. "I pulled the most."
Jezabel surveys her bales of wild grass. "So, you did," he says quietly.
When the butler returns to inform us that supper has been prepared, growing flustered at our impropriety, the courtyard has been laid bare, save for a pile of wilting grasses in the corner. And as we take our supper in the cooling breeze, as the sky begins to darken, a sense of victory steals over me.
Notes:
Oh, look. All my fav tropes made a reappearance. Plus cross-dressing Cain. Fancy that. ;) Honestly, I think Mary is about to end up a seriously radical, and rad, lady because of her brothers. I am always here for platonic sibling bonding.
This was supposed to end on an unsettling note, but I did not have the heart to ruin their happiness, so that section got moved to the next chapter, when misery returns and there is much pain. *Much* pain. You know the pattern by now. Let's be honest, you all know I only have two writing modes: disproportionate amounts of pain and platonic happiness/bonding.
Also, public service announcement: please, if you learn anything at all from this fic, besides knowledge of the void that awaits us all, please do not perform a cricothyrotomy with a pen. Especially without a medical license. This is a very bad idea, and it is one of my least favorite tropes. Cricothyrotomies were around as early as the 1800s, but they were not done with ballpoint pens, unless the doctor really hated you and had access to a time machine.
The historical realities of force-feeding were based on the account of suffragette Constance Lytton. Go read it if you'd like to not sleep tonight.
There's a nod to one of my fav fanfics for this tiny fandom, Behind Glass Bars, in this chapter. I really could not help myself.
As always, my eternal love and gratitude to my readers. I'm eternally humbled that anyone is interested in this fic. Feedback is always cherished.