A Solemn Speech
A Mirror, Mirror fanfiction
~1999~
Four years have passed since her adventures travelling through time and Jo Tiegan still feels wild tingles running from her wrists to her fingertips, shivering through her limbs like miniature bursts of lightning under her skin, when she stands at the corner of Riddiford and Adelaide.
Riddiford Street is miles out from the Tiegan house – there's no antique shop on this strip now, just a CD outlet, but Jo still comes here sometimes, to think, to remember.
She doesn't bring Nicholas with her when she does.
Because it's not special to him the way it is to her, and she's reached the conclusion it wouldn't be exactly fair to expect him to feel anything for a building he's never been in.
Although this is the first place she ever saw him, it's not the first place he saw her. Nick has no memory of being old, of running a shop, of guarding Louisa Iredale's mirror from all harm for three-quarters of a century, keeping it nice for her. Maybe, if Jo knew all that rather eccentric old man only she can remember – not even Andrew will never be able to recollect him again – had planned, in another timeline, she wouldn't have a standing tendre (as Nick playfully calls it, by way of teasing her, whenever she mentions where she's been after borrowing the family car and driving out here) for him. It's doubtful she'd have been keen on his scheme to take her from her parents at the age of fourteen so he could make her Tsarina of a country in the midst of a bloody revolution... But she hasn't the foggiest notion he ever planned any such thing, and it's nothing but water under a bridge which was never built now, so that's all right.
At any rate, Jo knows she'd won't be seeing the old man again for a very, very long time – not until Nicholas (and she, too) has grown old, years and years and years in the future. And – at eighteen, he only twenty – she wouldn't have it any other way.
Still, she comes here every once in a while. Usually with no purpose to her visit beyond a kind of demented nostalgia.
It's only for a moment or two, breathing in deeply and looking at the blurred reflections on the windowfront, remembering her first meeting with the man whose younger counterpart would become one of the most important people in her world.
Jo's heard it said – though from where, exactly, she's uncertain, it's just one of those things – when you meet the love of your life, time stops.
She knows for a fact that's nothing, a load of bull.
Because there were some six hundred clocks of various sizes in old Nicholas' shop; and she remembers hearing every single one of them still readily ticking away the hour, not ceasing in their punctuation of the passing seconds even for the slightest moment, when they first locked eyes.
Time doesn't stop.
Not ever.
This knowledge doesn't make Jo unhappy. It never has. Why would you need time to stop when you can go back in it and fix what goes wrong? When there are such things as second – and third, and fourth, and fifth – chances.
It's rare for her – after she gets out of the car and stands at the lights – to even cross the street and go inside; after all, the CD outlet's interior bears no resemblance to the shop she remembers, so she likes it far better outside looking in, especially on a hazy day when she can't see the business signs clearly.
On this bright, warm January day, however, she's got a reason for coming – an order to pick up – and she crosses and goes inside.
There's a bell that rings when she opens the door, but it's not the jingly sound she remembers from when this shop was under very different management, more of a shrill buzz, an electric bell.
The guy behind the counter hands her a jewel case wrapped in crinkly metallic wrapping paper.
"You're sure it's the right one?" Jo asks as she takes her wallet out of her denim jacket pocket. "It's a Christmas gift."
"You havin' a laugh?" With a glance at the wall calendar, he adds, "Christmas is over, girlie."
Jo's nostrils flare – she resents his tone. Not to mention being called 'girlie'. "Not for him it isn't, okay?"
The guy must think she's nuts, but she doesn't bother explaining herself. Doesn't bother telling him Nick's Russian Orthodox; that, for her boyfriend, Christmas is on January 7th.
Nicholas wakes on what for him will always be Christmas morning, though the Tiegans have already hadtheir celebration back on the 25th of December 1998, with a barbecue out back and a plastic tree in the lounge room whose uncooperative blinking lights almost made Andrew and Catherine give up and pitch the whole thing in the rubbish bin more than once.
He's surprised to find a shimmering parcel on the pillow beside his head, and Jo sitting at the foot of his bed with the corners of her mouth curling upwards like a contented little elf.
"What's this?"
"A present," she says, simply. "For Christmas."
His cheeks go slightly pink. "I don't have anything for you."
"Yeah, well, I'm not Orthodox," she reminds him. "It's notmy holiday." She gestures at the gift. "Come on – open it."
Nick is surprised – and a little puzzled – to find a plain jewel case and an unlabelled CD, the kind Jo's friends are always burning their party mixes onto, within, but sensing there's more to this than meets the eye, that Jo has gotten him something she thinks he'll really appreciate, though he can't understand why yet, he climbs out of bed and takes it over to the stereo on the other side of the room.
The ensuing audio is shaky – it goes in and out with a pulsing, uneven base – and the speaker is talking in French rather than English, so Jo has next to no idea what is being said. But the minute she sees Nick's blue eyes brighten with recognition, unshed tears shining in them, she knows the bloke at the CD outlet got her request right, that it's exactly what she'd wanted to give him for Christmas.
When he finally manages to speak, slightly choked, Nicholas gazes at her and murmurs, "That's my father."
"They said it's the only known recording of his voice." Jo shrugs modestly. "It came up in some archive. I couldn't work out what he was saying, but I figured..." I figured it would mean more to you than to anyone else.
"It's a speech about the army – my father was delivering it to the French president." A trace of marvel enters his tone as he adds, "I never imagined I would hear his voice again."
The audio is very short. It's already concluded. But Nicholas plays it over again and comes to sit on the edge of the bed beside Jo. He places his arm around her shoulders, holding her close against his side, and rests his temple against hers, closing his eyes.
Thank you.
For the tiniest instant, it's like he's sitting in the room together with both his girlfriend and his papa on Christmas morning.