Here, Now

A Mirror, Mirror & The Missing Fanfiction

Part

~2012~

Wellington, New Zealand

Gavin Danes breathed on the car window to fog it up, then ran his index finger over it to draw triangles in triangles and squiggly shapes and pentagrams and what he'd meant to be a skull but admittedly didn't really look like one. His parents always told him not to do this, especially when riding in other peoples' cars, but they weren't here. He pressed harder, spitefully, almost hoping to smudge. It would serve his parents right for sending him to the other side of the planet. Let his hosts think he'd been brought up real bad. Let Mr. Tiegan call Mom and ask her to pay to have his fingerprints scrubbed clean from the window.

It wasn't that Gavin hated the Tiegans or anything – he barely knew them. They seemed mostly okay, actually.

Ms. Guthrie (that was Mr. Tiegan's wife, only she still used her maiden name professionally, which Gavin thought might be a bit confusing, having two names) was supposed to be this really cool teacher and everything. Even if she was getting kind of old. And while his opinion on 'cool teachers', especially ones that got parental approval, was low, low, low (all the more so since those sorts always seemed to dislike him and get mad at him), he thought – grudgingly – she might be an exception to the rule.

Sure, he'd pretended not to listen when his parents told him about all the neat stuff she did as principal of Hampton Shelly, all the wonderful policies and clubs and committees she'd implemented for the comfort and enjoyment of the kids under her care, but he couldn't help hearing most of it.

When Ms. Guthrie and her husband were waiting for him at the airport, they'd managed to look happy – not at all like they were merely resigned to having some delinquent under their roof for half a year, the way he'd expected – without coming across as fake, like too-sunny social workers. Gavin might not have shown it, but he immediately appreciated the fact they knew how to talk to an older kid, instead of launching into some cringe-worthy, sugar-loaded routine better suited to meeting a literal toddler.

The impression they made – and good will points they gained – via this led to Gavin's only voluntary question to them thus far. He'd wanted to know if they had a son. They did, and his name was Royce, but he was all grown up now.

No, Gavin's problem wasn't with the Tiegans; it was that he'd never wanted to be put in the stupid correctional program (hem, Student Visitation Program) which sent troubled kids to far away schools on the idiotic belief a change in environment would turn them from bad kids into good ones.

But, of course, his mom and dad had been all gaga over the idea. Couldn't get rid of him fast enough.

He didn't care about seeing New Zealand – Gavin wasn't really a Lord of the Rings fan. His dad had taken him to see Fellowship when he was still in diapers, and he'd needed changing before Frodo even made it out of the shire. Apparently his blown-out diaper smelled so bad, the person in the seat next to them started gagging and thrust aside their popcorn, accidentally knocking another person's jumbo-size soda over, spilling Mountain Dew all over the aisle. A story his parents still toldguests about, to his endless humiliation. It didn't exactly endear him to the franchise. And no matter how great Ms. Guthrie's programs were, they couldn't be worth going to a whole other country for.

Particularly not for a kid who hated school.

Besides, it wasn't like he could do any of the fun stuff he was forbidden at home and at his old middle school. Mom told the committee in charge of the program about Gavin's hemophilia, even though he'd begged her not to. So there was a note in his file forbidding him from most sports. He wasn't even allowed on the touch football team Ms. Guthrie had started up.

He was going to be living in some stranger's house at the end of the world, in a weird-ass country where it was cold – and they had schoolwork – in August, while his friends got to enjoy their twelfth summer in Liston, Ohio riding bikes and pulling pranks like normal kids.

That was what his parents wanted. To make him abnormal and isolate him from his friends. They knew exactly what they were doing. They thought his friends were a bad influence, just because he'd gotten into trouble with them a couple of times and, ever since they'd all started wearing matching sweatshirts, his mom was convinced they were an up-and-coming gang. She didn't mind his friend Antonio so much, not since she'd found out he was also adopted, like Gavin, and got it into her head he might influence Gavin to see himself as more 'normal' (as if his adoption was the problem, in and of itself, and not his cuckoo for New Zealand puffs parents or his stupid blood that wouldn't clot on its own), but she loathed the others, said they were nothing but a bunch of little troublemakers.

Why, he wondered sulkily, still dragging his fingers on the glass, had they adopted him just to unload him on total strangers twelve years later? It sounded like bad planning to him. Let alone bad parenting.

Anyway, this six-month stay in Wellington was supposed to show him there was life beyond their neighborhood and introduce him to new people. As far as Gavin was concerned, there wasn't much point to meeting new people if you were never going to see them again after six months, only his mom – claiming to be at her wit's end, not knowing what else to do for him, croaking about how she didn't want to see him in the electric chair someday (Gavin tried telling her, according to Antoino, criminals in Ohio hadn't been strapped down to fry since, like, the 1970s or something) – started crying and locked herself in the bathroom when he pointed this out. His red-faced dad had demanded to know if he saw what he was doing to his mother, to which he'd snapped he wasn't blind, duh, and got himself grounded indefinitely.

He hadn't even gotten to say goodbye to Antonio, or to slug him one on the arm for telling him to share that useless crap about the electric chair, which sucked.

Gavin had been sinking lower and lower into the back seat after smudging up the window, vaguely wondering if the Tiegans were watching him in the rearview mirror, but he scooted upwards again when he saw the house they pulled up to.

A big yellow one, right next-door to Hampton Shelly. The principal's designated home for as long as she was employed there.

"You know," said Gavin, feeling oddly cheery as he remembered the Tiegans probably didn't know he was supposed to be grounded, "your house looks just like the one from Bad Taste?"

That was the one Peter Jackson movie Gavin liked. Even if it came out like a million years ago or something. He wasn't allowed to watch those sorts of movies, of course, but Antonio's parents had the VHS in their collection and, during a sleepover one time, the two boys smuggled it down into the basement with the old TV that had a built-in VCR. The moment the house blew up was Gavin's favourite. He doubted the roof of this near-identical house was going to do any exploding, much less get taken over by aliens, but he thought the resemblance was cool anyway.

Mr. Tiegan said he'd never noticed.

Gavin let slip a small smile. Because at least Mr. Tiegan knew what he was talking about. He'd definitely seen the movie.

As Mr. Tiegan, who told him now he could just call him Andrew if he wanted, was getting his suitcase, Ms. Guthrie was leading him up the stairs to the porch. He waited a second, expecting her to take her keys out, only for her to reach for the door without having to unlock it first.

Gavin looked at her, surprised. Didn't they lock doors in Wellington? Unless... Was someone home? Did anybody else live with them? He'd thought – after they said their son was a grownup – it would just be him and them.

Ms. Guthrie understood. "My daughter's upstairs." She added, "Your room'll be right across the landing from hers, if you need anything. It used to be Royce's bedroom, of course, but since we've started this new Student Visitation Program..." She trailed off. "Well."

Gavin nodded. He hadn't realized they had a daughter. Then, he hadn't asked. He'd asked if they had a son, and they'd answered the question, telling him about Royce. Maybe he should have just asked if they had any kids period.

He wondered what she was like, the Tiegan-daughter.

But he didn't really have much chance to linger over wondering about her before he was hustled in past the little vestibule, then through another door, guided by Ms. Guthrie's gentle hand on his shoulder, just barely touching him but somehow urging him on firmly into the house, nonetheless.

And that was when he saw her for himself.

She was standing on the stairs, apparently having heard them come in. Her hand hovered absently over the banister without her fingertips ever making any kind of real contact. She had short hair – probably the same length as his own – and wore black jeans with a navy sweater. The white, triangular tips of the untucked shirt under the sweater stuck out beneath the blue woolen hem with awkward creases like an improperly folded paper fan.

For some reason the shape of her on the stairs like that, casual as it was, struck him as being pretty. Enough to draw his gaze and keep him, momentarily, from trying to look at anything else, anyway.

Gavin thought her lips moved, thought she said something when she first saw him standing there, but he couldn't be sure. The sunlight was hanging low, late in the day, and it blurred her features a little on the step she stood on.

But when she took a single step down, nearer him, a strange sort of glow still hanging about her, and he'd blinked to adjust his eyes from outside, a strange disappointment wrung Gavin's insides.

Because she wasn't a kid at all.

She was a grownup person.

Another adult.

Not a young adult, either, not college-age. He didn't think she looked old – she was still really pretty close up – but if he had to guess, he'd begrudgingly have admitted she must at least be nearing thirty.

"Gavin," Ms. Guthrie said, "this is my daughter, Jo." She seemed not to see – at least not straightaway – the light briefly flaring in Gavin's face immediately go out and her own daughter's face drain of color in turn, like she was looking at a ghost. "Jo, this is Gavin Danes."


~1995~

Wellington, New Zealand

Nick's ring clinked against the top of Jo's chest of drawers as he let his hand fall despondently.

"Leave the ring," suggested Louisa. "Come back to my time. Papa will find you somewhere to live."

"Or," offered Jo, smiling hopefully, "if you want to stay in this time..." She motioned between herself and Tama. "We can help, too." After a long moment, considering, his blue eyes flickered to her. He looked at her so sadly she couldn't help blurting, "What? What's the matter?"

But Tama understood. Or at least he guessed. "You decided, right?"

"Yes – I want to go back." He wasn't certain he did, really, but he couldn't envision staying here, in this time where – until tonight, apparently – there had been another version of himself, an old man at an antique shop, still living.

Jo's face fell, and Nicholas – digging the hard soles of his boots into the carpet – narrowly resisted the urge to go to her and take her hands in his, to murmur apologies and sad farewells, maybe even – when he inevitably gave up on all that rubbish – to beg her to come back to 1919 with him. He might have done, if he hadn't seen her father in here a moment ago and shaken his hand, seen his happiness in giving Jo a present from something called a CD outlet. It would be different if he could offer her all of Russia as recommence for leaving behind a loving family, if he could make her the next tsarina, but to ask her to leave them and offer her nothing but the probable charity of Joshua Iredale? To, in turn, burden Louisa's father with another displaced person – quite apart from just himself – who'd also need shelter and clothing and protection? How could he do that?

They had already said their goodbyes – before the mirror repulsed him, refusing to let the recovered signet ring through to 1919 because it was still in the slowly detoxifying drum. They'd kissed (their second and last kiss) and held each other's hand for as long as possible – until the distance between where Jo stood and the mirror, which Nicholas was approaching, finally forced them to let go.

There seemed to be little to gain by doing it all over again.

He slipped off his ring, set it on her chest of drawers between the mirror and hairdryer, cast Jo one last – rather sorry – look, stuck his hand through the glass, and vanished.

Jo's chin trembled. Her eyes filled with tears, making everything go blurry. She couldn't help it. Tama's hand on her shoulder – where it'd been resting ever since Nick's fingers slipped from hers – squeezed sympathetically. Louisa looked as though, confronted with Jo's crumpling face, she regretted suggesting Nicholas come back to 1919 at all. Without her suggestion, without her promise her papa could find him a place to live, mightn't he have stayed here after all? Her mouth formed a regretful O, but Jo, as Tama hesitated to let go of her, shook her head. It had been Nick's own choice to leave. There would be time for grief over his choice later. For now, she had to stand back and let Tama and Louisa have their goodbye. She might want to be selfish, to see only her own pain – it was her instinct, her natural tunnel vision – but she forced those feelings away with a hard gulp and a lie blurted to Tama that she was fine.


~1919~

Something in the room crashed. There was the distinct sound of glass breaking. In his too-large nightshirt, the one Sir Ivor gave him which was always slipping off his shoulder, just as it was doing now, Nicholas bolted upright in bed.

"Mr. Iredale?" he called into the darkness.

Something scuffled, but there was no answer.

A lump settled into his throat. "Louisa?" His hand reached out, feeling for the tiny knob to adjust the gas lamp by the bed. "Louisa, are you there?" A thin ring of light spread out from the lamp, illuminating the bed but not much else of the room. Most of his surroundings were still only shadows. "Louisa, are you there? Louisa, if that's you, please just answer me."

Another scuffle.

The lump in his throat hardened painfully, sore with a strange, foolish hope. "Jo?"

Nicholas hadn't asked her to come with him to 1919 tonight after making the choice to return, the choice not to stay with her, but – in this frightening moment – if she should appear here, having come through the mirror on her own... He had lost so much, been through so much, he was not at all certain he could send her away.

If Jo came out of the shadows, her face illuminated in the gaslight...

Someone did emerge.

But it wasn't Jo.

A muscular man, his sleeves pulled up past his biceps almost indecently, stood hulking over him.

Nicholas frowned, blinking. There was something familiar about this man. He had seen him before... Where? Where could they have met? He imagined this face under the red-banded cap of a Bolshie, a well-starched collar under that big chin...

"You're the Bolshevik who told me to dress." The one who'd woken him and said they were going on a long journey. "You gave me peasant clothes and put me on the cart." His blue eyes bulged. "Before they came after me; before Sir Ivor–"

"The name's Gary, kid." The man drew an object that seemed first to glitter in the lamplight, then to glow. "And you're a hard one to track down through history, Alexis Romanov. Once you get yourself lost, I mean. You know that?"

"I don't understand," blurted Nicholas, wondering how they'd got into this house, past Mr. Iredale and Mrs. Whitelaw and Ani... He was supposed to be safe here. "What can you–?"

"They weren't supposed to chase us, and you weren't supposed to run off with Sir Ivor."

"Us? What do you mean, us?"

"Me and Hodge." The object shone menacingly in his hand. "You and your sister – we were supposed to leave that house with you both. Alexei and Anastasia. You getting away with some random conman and growing up in New Zealand, that got a lot of attention from the wrong people in the future. What were you trying to do, get us thrown in Time Prison?"

Nicholas flung back the covers. "I'm getting Mr. Iredale." He called into the dark beyond them, as he swung his leg over the edge of the bed, trying to leap to his feet, "Mr. Iredale!"

A shorter man blocked his path. He had one of those glowing things, too. "Not so fast, kid."

"Joshua Iredale can't help you," said Gary. "You're coming with us. No good fighting it. We've gotta make up for lost time."

Hodge snickered at that. As if it were a joke.

"I don't–" Nick's chest heaved, anxiety pumping through him. He'd thought he was intimidated by Sir Ivor, who was strong and swam and fenced and was ruthless, thought he was safe now he'd been arrested – these two men were much worse.

And all they cared about, he knew it from one look into Gary's face as it settled into a satisfied leer, was selling him to the highest bidder, too. They were no more noble than Sir Ivor in their intentions.

"Mr. Iredale!" he shouted over his exposed shoulder, desperate.

"Take it easy. Don't worry" – even Gary's smirk was beefy – "you won't remember a thing. Time to set it right and get rich."


~2012~

The hardest part for Jo, in moving on, was not understanding what happened.

She got the message plain as day Nicholas preferred to go back to his own time – that was clear enough, she wasn't a moron – but why had he vanished so completely? Why couldn't she find out what became of him?

Why couldn't she have that little bit of closure?

After going through the mirror, followed by Louisa, there hadn't been the slightest trace of him anywhere in History. Worse, she'd woken in the middle of the night, squinting through slits in the dark because of her puffy eyes, to find the mirror itself gone. Vanished. Just as he and Louisa had.

A day later, she'd made her way back to Respected Elders, the antique shop where she'd been given the mirror, wondering if she'd find Nicholas there as an old man, having grown up in New Zealand again, hoping to ask him why the mirror had gone, but it was still only a CD outlet.

Even though she told herself it was better this way, better she wouldn't have to be confronted with an elderly Nicholas after the younger one left her, the wave of sadness which struck her standing alone on the corner of Riddiford and Adelaide with her face buried in her hands said otherwise.

For years afterwards, Jo'd scoured every history book mentioning Russia, hunting for any small sign he'd reclaimed his throne. There was nothing. She resorted from there to madly researching anything she could find on every Alexei Romanov impostor who'd made their claim after 1919, thinking one of them might not be an impostor – one of them might be Nick.

That was a dead-end, too.

Nor could she find any record of him connected to the Iredales. Louisa was surprisingly well-documented, as the daughter of Joshua Iredale in her youth and a famous aviatrix under her married name, Wentworth, but there was nothing about the boy her father was supposed to have helped. Not so much as an extra claimant on his taxes in 1920 differing from 1919. Nicholas might never have existed. Might never have come to New Zealand.

She wished she could reach back in time and strangle Sir Ivor for having burned up any record – including tickets and dated stamps – of his supposed 'ward' travelling on The Neptune.

There had been a guest book aboard the ship, and it was on display in the Maritime Museum, but Nicholas could hardly have signed it while locked in his cabin, prevented even from seeing the dazzling display of florescent fish the other passengers leaned over the side to catch a glimpse of.

Early on, Nick's erasure from seemingly all of time and space was a source of constant distress for Jo, yet the passing of seventeen years can dull anyone's pain as they go on. A tender, sad ache remained and likely always would. She guessed it was the same for every girl concerning her first love, first real heartbreak, with or without time travel involved. True, she couldn't see a photograph of him in a book or magazine or online without betraying a slight reaction – typically a sharp intake of breath and a speeding heart it took forever to slow – even after almost two decades... But whole days – sometimes a full week, if it was busy enough – did pass now and then where she barely thought about him at all. And if he had a tendency to pop up uninvited in her dreams with aggravating frequency, heedless of the fact she was over him during her waking hours, that was her own private business.

In 2007, when the bones were found, Jo didn't know what to think. She didn't want to believe those burned fragments were Nicholas – her Nicholas – somehow never having escaped with Sir Ivor in this rewritten history, but the DNA testing was said to be conclusive and almost beyond doubt. She had a bad few months, relapsing into sadness. In her worst moments, she cried as she hadn't cried for him since she was a teenager. The guy she was seeing at the time, some bloke a friend from an art class introduced her to the year prior, finally decided he'd lost patience with her moods and broke up with her.

When she scoffed over their last split cheque how she couldn't believe he didn't want to see her again because she was a little depressed, he said she should look into medication.

"Yeah, you know what?" She'd gotten up, tossed twenty dollars on the table while he was riffling through his wallet like it had magically shrunk and he couldn't find his money, like his thumbs were too big to reach into the slots and pull out a damn credit card. "Fuck off, Roger."

In her darkest hours, she could almost have wondered if she was crazy. If maybe her wanker ex was right. If there had never been Nicholas, or the mirror or Louisa, to begin with. But Tama still had his memories of the other timeline, too, of Louisa and Nick. He rang her when the bones were found, Tama did. Not to tell her everything was all right – of course it wasn't – but just to be there on the other end of the call.

And then, there was the signet ring.

Unlike the mirror, Nick's ring hadn't vanished, but it changed – it became transparent and glowed with a strange light.

Usually, Jo wore it on a chain around her neck under her clothes, but more and more often she forced herself to leave it in her jewellery box, as if by not keeping it close, she could prove she was over its former owner.

Once, during a sleepover when they were seventeen, her best friend Mia opened a drawer she'd stuffed it inside (she didn't buy a proper jewellery box until she was almost twenty) while hunting for a Texta for some stupid game they were playing, and she'd tensed, joints locking in place as she leaned forward, petrified she was about to be asked why something under her wad of jumpers and socks was twinkling like fucking Tinkerbell.

It turned out, however, Mia couldn't see the ring or the glowing light it emanated. Neither could the other two Hampton Shelly girls in her bedroom that night. No one except for her and Tama could.

It was like a ghost ring.

How fitting...

Unwilling to let herself mope over a ghost, Jo moved on with an almost manic fervour. Despite her backslide in 2007, a relapse that could have happened to anybody, she couldn't be accusing of not living her life. She had a degree in art. There were at least two other 'Rogers', and although those relationships didn't end as dramatically as the first – at least, she didn't tell either of them to fuck off or wind up resenting them for being cheap, insensitive bastards – they still ended. She moved back to Sydney – much to her parents' disappointment, since Catherine's job kept them in the old yellow house, sorry to lose her no matter how many times she assured them she was just across the Tasman if they needed her – where there was next to nothing to remind her of the mirror or 1919.

It would always matter, of course, the way important things did, but she couldn't see the good in wallowing.

Returning to New Zealand for a visit that happily coincided with a guest staying with her parents, some kid from Ohio, Jo only thought about how much help she'd be able to give her mum. Catherine wouldn't admit it, but she was getting older. And Andrew had, as he always did, his newest book to churn out – his publisher always gave him hell for missing deadlines, no matter how unreasonable they were or how severe his writer's block happened to be this time. Royce wasn't home at the moment – he was in Auckland, last Jo heard from him. So it was a stroke of luck, really, she'd be there for a couple months.

It never occurred to her she'd see a ghost walk in.

Until she did.

Her heart dropped into her stomach – the instantaneous sink so sudden, so fast, she was half convinced she heard an actual splash, if it wasn't just her ears ringing from the shock – the moment the little boy wearing a puffy zip-up jacket and grey-and-red Buckeyes beanie came through the front door.

Jo didn't necessarily disbelieve in reincarnation. Even before the mirror and time travel, she'd believed in a lot of things, and her experiences had only broadened the possibilities for those beliefs. What she did disbelieve was reincarnation identical to your previous life, outside of a movie trying to utilise the same actor in dual roles. This wasn't a case of a returned soul in a new form, some transmigration thingy, and ghost though he undoubtedly was in this house, he was nonetheless a solid one made out of flesh and blood.

He was younger, twelve instead of sixteen, and she didn't know how that happened, much less why he was American, but she knew him.

Knew it was him.

Those blue eyes staring up at her were unmistakable.

"Nick," she breathed inaudibly, halting in place, then she stepped down shakily, almost missing the step.

"Gavin," Mum said, "this is my daughter, Jo."

Jo felt like she was a scuba diver coming up to the surface way, way too quickly. God, she still couldn't catch her breath! Even after her head stopped spinning and the stairs and doorway straightened out. The house – the world – was one big fun-house mirror. It was like Nicholas had shrunk and she was a freaking giant. She felt inexplicably ashamed of simply being. Sorry for every minute of growth she'd had since 1995. Sorry for not being fourteen. She knew it was stupid, totally irrational, but she felt it.

"Jo, this is Gavin Danes."