Our Times They Are A-Changing
A Mirror, Mirror fanfiction
~1994~
The chip had not been there before.
This, Nicholas knew for certain.
He had been very careful with the mirror ever since Louisa left it in his keeping for Jo – its condition had been as close to perfect as when it resided in the Iredale house, the very place it was destined to return to next year. Polished and shined and kept well away from the rabble that would occasionally descend like harpies – who, always, it seemed, wanted to buy it and did not understand the meaning of Not For Sale, even when you wrote it up in big block letters and sounded it out for them phonetically, like a kindergarten teacher – upon the shop during the worst of Wellington's tourist season, Nicholas was fanatical about letting no harm come to it.
Everything in his life depended upon Jo's having this mirror and going back in time – everything!
There were many things in life a stressed haemophiliac, even one trying to be careful, might go a bit mad and take a dangerous risk with; but, for him, the mirror was not one of these.
Nicholas knew the mirror's every groove and divot better than he knew the back of his hand. Better, truly, in that he was more aware of exactly when the glass had gotten age-spotted (for all his daily polishing and shining could do) than he was of when the liver spots had appeared on his hand.
It was funny, the way you could know you were getting old without knowing you were getting old.
His eyesight was failing on some level, but he always saw the mirror clearly enough – it was this which gave him hope, a hope he absolutely clung to, he would, however cloudy his usual day-to-day vision could be at times, indeed have a moment of perfect clarity and see Jo when she came into the shop.
So he knew – for a fact – the chip had not been there yesterday.
There had been no recent accident to cause it, either.
He'd not bumped it, nor let a patron wander too far into the Staff Only portion of his shop (the staff meaning himself, never anyone else, but staff sounded grander than did manager or owner, more formal, and he liked that sort of thing), given the shop was closed yesterday – he'd had a medical appointment.
Jo had done it.
Nicholas knew the chip off the mirror was her doing – and a cricket ball her instrument of choice – in the past automatically, the way a person knows, almost on a subconscious level at first, when they have a loose tooth wiggling about their gums or a twitching muscle about to cramp up.
So.
Another thing was being changed as they inched closer and closer to their amended future.
He himself had already set many little amendments in order, for their future good – introducing Leonie to Dennis Coigley, so he would have Jade, who had not existed before, for instance.
However slavish his devotion to the mirror and its well-being, however he doted and loved the thing for what he knew it would bring him someday, he never for a moment forgot he was unable to pass through it – forgot its rejection of him – forgot if he wanted to regain what was lost the first time around, when he was sixteen years old, he couldn't do it without assistance, without a helper.
Jo, it would seem, was making an alternation of her own somewhere in the past.
He ran his old, calloused fingertips along the chipped wood – rather a large section, now he studied it – being careful not to cut himself or get a splinter, and wondered at its purpose; and hoped the change boded well for all he planned to make happen next.