Guests For Tea
A Mirror, Mirror Fanfiction
~1995~
Old Nicholas hummed softly to himself, a Russian lullaby his mama used to sing to him, as he set out the tea-things. Very English, these china teacups (apart, that was, from the pattern, which had taken inspiration from Eastern Europe); Mama would have approved of them – he knew she would.
For, the way nearly everything in his backroom reminded him of his childhood, had been placed there for the very purpose of doing so, he was certain the cups would have reminded her of her own with Great Grandmama Victoria.
Everything was going according to plan. Tonight, Jade would follow the instructions he'd given her, go through the mirror, and change history.
In a way, that meant tonight was his last night on earth as the person he'd grown up to be.
Good riddance.
There was nothing about the last seventy-six years he wanted to keep. No one he wanted to hold onto. Even the shop, for all the effort he put into it, was only ever a means to an end. The exceptionally rare occasions when what he did inside this place wasn't directly related to keeping the mirror safe for Jo and then giving it to her – as he finally, finally had this week – had only ever been a way of filling in the time. His life – his real life – had ended when the drum in 1919 hadn't gotten hotter, when he'd chosen the wrong neutralising agent.
He'd stopped right there, at sixteen, permanently.
Physically he was altered by the years, of course, he'd have turned ninety-one in less than five months, if things continued on as they were, and his always stubborn mind was made all the more rigid with determination and loneliness, but otherwise he was still very much the same sad boy – the tsar without a kingdom – who'd climbed out of the well to face a trio of disappointed, crumpling faces.
He shook his snowy head. He didn't want to think about that now.
The bell over the door made him start slightly, frowning. His shoulders quivered underneath the jacket of his pinstripe suit.
It was too early for Jo's parents – for Andrew and Catherine – he knew the exact moment they'd walk in and was going to be waiting for them.
"I'm closing momentarily," he told the customer who'd waddled in unconcernedly.
She was a large woman, slightly beyond middle-age, with an unfortunate polka-dot hat and lipstick in a muskstick hue of pink (a colour also favoured by Jade's mother, the old man recalled with a shudder) smeared unevenly and partially on her teeth.
His polite – albeit icy and utterly unfriendly – hints for her to leave didn't work, and he resolved to permit her to purchase one of his least favourite clocks she kept eyeing – what did it matter, anyway? It would probably disappear after tonight. Still, the frustrating creature refused to be gone, to take herself off, wandering about clutching – in a loud, crinkling fashion – the brown paper he'd wrapped her new clock in, browsing and sneezing and looking at him over her shoulder reproachfully as if he were personally the cause of her allergy attack.
"Perhaps you ought to return to your home and take some Loratadine."
"What's your hurry to be rid of a paying customer, lovey?" She sounded bitter and sarcastic. "Not like you're going for a night on the town after this."
An old codger like him, she meant.
Nicholas didn't exactly bristle at the insult. He smiled and looked amiable, watery blue eyes gone quite shiny – which, if she'd known him, she would have deduced was far worse.
"As a matter of fact," he said, his liver-spotted hands folded over each other, "I'm expecting guests for tea." His brittle smile was tight, spread thinner than wartime-rationed butter on toast. "My prospective in-laws."
Never mind if all went according to plan they wouldn't even remember they had a daughter called Jo when this was over – let alone that he planned to marry her. Never mind it was mostly a way of keeping them out of the house while Jade played her part (he couldn't very well expect the girl to judo her way through two adults as well as Royce to get at the mirror). It was nonetheless glorious to see the woman reel back, huge-eyed, and nearly drop the clock.