fanfic and original writing by ar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
witticaster) wrote2011-08-07 10:57 am
witticaster) wrote2011-08-07 10:57 am
0325
Secondhand Sebastians.
Sebastian watched his mother drive away, the blue Ford growing smaller and smaller until it was just a cloud of dust upon the gravel road as it neared the edge of the horizon. He knew he wouldn't really be alone until he could no longer see her. She might decide she missed him too much to go on by herself; she'd done so once before, when she left him to stay at the orphan home, coming back in a whirl of brightly coloured skirts and shining eyes and herding him back into the passenger's seat. It had only happened on that one occasion, but it stood to reason she might miss him again.
He hoped she might. If she let him come along to her school, he'd already decided that he would be perfectly quiet and practice his reading without pestering anybody, least of all his mother. Sebastian was not very good at being perfectly quiet--he was best at perfectly clumsy, his mother said, sometimes with a smile and sometimes without--but he had visions of being what his grandmother had called "the model child." (The model child was his cousin, Susan, according to his grandmother, and even Sebastian could not deny, in all his envy, that Susan was polite and did not accidentally shout or knock things over and always kept her clothes clean. Susan was also boring and did not like to play anything fun, but she was a better child than he for that fact, it seemed.)
When the cloud disappeared around a distant curve, though, he knew that was it. His mother did not want to take him along to Fort Worth.
It was only when the possibility of being rescued from this little, rickety old house in a sea of green pastures was gone entirely that he risked looking up at his uncles. His mother had not explained to him who they were, precisely, only told him not to ask stupid questions when they would be there soon. They had been introduced a few minutes ago, but Sebastian--seeing no point to being anyone's model child when he was being left alone--had stared at the ground and scuffed the toe of his sneaker into the dirt before going to sit with his knees pulled up to his chin on the porch steps. One was Uncle William, he thought, and that was all he could remember.
They looked his mother's age, and to his great relief, neither was looking back at him. One had hair as red as Sebastian's own, which gave them an instant sort of kinship; he was slouched in his chair, his feet propped up on the porch rail, as he read a leatherbound book. The other was large, with thick hands and curly hair, and he sat up straight, staring out into the distance. A rifle lay at his feet.
Sebastian wasn't sure which was William.
The one with the curly hair looked over at him first, Sebastian flinching back slightly at the expression on his face. He didn't look angry, exactly, but his mouth was set in a thin line and his brow dipped into a frown over his drooping blue eyes. After a moment of looking at each other, during which Sebastian wanted to tear his gaze away but could not bring himself to, the man elbowed the other and said, "Maybe you ought to get the boy something to drink, Archie."
"Hmm?" The other one glanced up from his book, wearing the owl-eyed expression of someone thrust from a dark room into blinding sunlight, and turned his head toward Sebastian. Something about the way his thin lips were tugged into a smile seemed brittle and strained, the expression his grandmother wore whenever Sebastian and his mother came to visit. "Oh--yes, that is a good idea. Would you like anything, William?"
"I'm fine." Uncle William stopped looking at Sebastian, for which Sebastian was thankful, and turned away to lean over and pick something up from next to his chair.
"All right. Sebastian," Uncle Archie said, setting his book down, "why don't you and I go into the kitchen?"
Sebastian nodded, uncurling himself from the ball he'd hunched into and following Archie in. If nothing else, he knew their names now; that was a start.
It was a little cooler inside the house than out, if only for the fact of the curtains fluttering in front of the open windows. Every room was a little dim for it, but at least the sun didn't blaze in. On the way, with every cat they passed--for they passed at least four just going from the front hall to the kitchen--Archie greeted it in a cheerful voice. "Hello, Mopsa! Hello, Peaseblossom! Hello, Hamlet! Hello, Pericles!"
"Sit down," Archie said, nodding to the round little kitchen table and chairs, made all of wood. It was a far cry from the Formica and metal Sebastian was used to, and taller than most tables he'd seen. He sat with his head resting on his arms, one cheek pressed to his forearm as he watched Uncle Archie bustle around the kitchen. He never seemed to stop moving, a wind-up toy of a man just then, though he'd been still enough when sitting outside with William.
"Where're you from?" Sebastian asked, before he could stop himself. He was never very good at asking the right questions, the sort that did get him a swat at the head, and he was full of curiosity--curiosity and some trepidation--at the way Archie spoke, his accent light and crisp. Uncle William was from Texas, for all he could tell, but Archie talked like people in the movies.
When Archie turned around suddenly, eyes wide, Sebastian felt his stomach twist; he'd remembered too late that children should be seen and not heard. But then he received a smile from the man, if still a little strained, and the gift of a glass of iced tea seemed like proof enough that he couldn't be in too much trouble. "London," Archie said, "across the sea in England. You, uh--you know where England is, right?"
"Yes." It was nebulously far away but out there somewhere, he knew.
"Well, from London." The smile on Archie's face relaxed into something closer to a grin, and his accent changed suddenly into a thicker, throatier thing. "But I was born in Scotland and lived there as a wee lad." And with a wink, it changed again, to a drawl just like William's, so far as Sebastian could tell from the few words he'd heard the man say. "And I've been living in Texas for a good long while now." Finally, back to his first voice, the one that made him sound like he should be dressed in something fancier than an old shirt and a pair of jeans. "And--ah, and yourself?"
Eyes wide, Sebastian couldn't think of anything to say in return for several moments. "I--my mother's from Illinois."
"And you aren't?" It sounded good-natured enough, but the smile on Archie's face was offset by the downward tilt of his eyebrows.
"I--I--" After a moment or two--extended by the big gulp of iced tea he swallowed--he shrugged. "I've lived lots of places."
Archie didn't say anything, long enough that Sebastian was about to burst in with something like an apology, because he'd clearly said the wrong thing, one way or another, but then--then, Archie answered, "I'm sure you have."
It was one of the saddest pronouncements Sebastian had ever heard, he thought, made nearly worse than the time he was told his little cousin, Nancy, had fallen into the river and drowned by the fact that there didn't seem to be any reason for Archie's solemn answer. Sebastian's mother told him many times that he was a lucky boy, getting to see so much of the country. When he made friends, they were always envious that he saw the inside of a classroom so rarely. There was no reason Sebastian could think of that Uncle Archie might be sorry to hear that Sebastian went many places.
After a moment or two, Archie stood up, making an effort at a smile, and nodded to Sebastian. "C'mon. We don't want to let Uncle William get lonely out there, do we?"
Sebastian supposed they didn't and only splashed a little of his iced tea out of its glass on the way back to the porch.
-
There was no television to speak of, Sebastian learned, nor a telephone, nor even a radio, though an old-fashioned gramophone stood in the corner of a room. The records near it were mostly of songs written by men with unpronounceable Russian names, or of singers and orchestras he had never heard of.
"Music hall stuff," Uncle William said when he caught him poking around for something he had heard of. It was after dinner, the sky not yet near to growing dark, but the house was already beginning to deepen its shadows, black where they had been a tepid grey-blue that afternoon. Sebastian jumped, turning around guiltily, a record by someone called George Formby slipping from his hand. "Your Uncle Archie loves the stuff."
"Oh," said Sebastian, and hastily turned around to put the record away.
Uncle William stood there a little longer, but his voice was no warmer than before when he added, "If you ask him, he might play you some."
After that, he walked away. Sebastian could hear him in the kitchen, shifting something around, and when he peeked around the corner into the room, he saw a hunk of wood, pale yellow and whittled to an edge on one end, and before it, several different tools. Uncle William sat before all of it, arranging the metal chisels before picking one up and scraping long, thin ribbons of wood off of the--well, whatever he was making.
When the sun did finally set, Sebastian was staring at the shelves in the gramophone room, packed full of books with titles he could not decipher. He read well enough that he could manage some of the words--"As You Like It" was easy enough--but most of the others were impossible. He heard steps behind him on the creaking wooden floor and turned around hastily again, this time to see Uncle Archie staring at him with the hint of a smile.
"Uncle William carried your suitcase upstairs," Archie said, holding out a lamp with a tall glass column protecting a timid little flame from blowing out. When Sebastian walked over, Archie handed him the lamp. "I'll show you where you're sleeping."
He led Sebastian up the staircase to the second floor, pointing out the room where he and Uncle William slept. "Not, er--" and Uncle Archie coughed; Sebastian could see why, for it was quite dusty upstairs. "It's too much of a bother to keep two bedrooms clean, so we share."
"Oh," said Sebastian, and nodded. He supposed he would share with someone, too, if he could, in a house so full of creaks and dark corners. Outside the little halo of light cast by his lamp, he could imagine any number of creatures lurking, from robbers to wolfmen, and there was nothing but fields to run away to. He hoped his bedroom was next to theirs.
"We thought you might like to sleep in the tower," Archie continued, and walked him to a door at the far end of the hallway. It opened to a set of stairs, cobwebbed in the corners, leading up into darkness. "Is that all right?"
"Y--yes," Sebastian answered, telling himself he was not afraid, and looked up at Archie's face, his eyes glinting in the lamplight.
"Well, get up there," came another voice from behind him. After a breathless moment, he realized it was Uncle William, dressed in a long nightshirt that Sebastian had always thought only old people in old movies wore. "You've got the place all to yourself."
Sebastian nodded and walked through the doorway, taking the first step with some care. If he kept a tight grip on the oil lamp with one hand and the railing with the other, he would be fine. Before he moved on to the next, he looked back over his shoulder at the two men. "Good night. T--thank you for letting me stay."
"Good night," Archie told him, and turned away to walk to his own bedroom.
William followed him with a nod. "Don't let the ghosts bite."
Sebastian could hear Archie murmur, "You'll scare him, talk like that."
"Kids his age love ghosts."
"You mean Ellen loved ghosts."
And then the door to their room shut, and Sebastian was alone.
One step, and then another, he told himself. Hold on tightly to the lamp so it doesn't fall. They'll make you leave if you burn the house down and then you'll have to walk to Fort Worth.
One step, and then another.
-
In the middle of the night, he woke from a nightmare, the details of which dissolved as he blinked around at his room.
It was dark, the only glow coming from the weak light of the full moon outside, and he could not remember where he was. The quiet of the night was broken by creaks and the buzzing of insects he couldn't identify, along with his heartbeat pounding in his ears as though he'd sprinted across a field, and the dark shapes outlined murkily by the moonlight were indistinguishable and threatening. The fear he'd woken to morphed into panic as he looked around, disoriented and utterly alone.
He had to find someone, he thought groggily, as he threw himself out of bed and ran across the bare wooden floor. He stumbled over the edge of a rug and nearly ran into the side of a wardrobe before finding a set of steps. He had to find his mother, had to get out of this dark, looming world of abandoned things.
Three-quarters of the way down the stairs, his small foot landed on the edge of a step instead of the center of it, and he pitched forward, crying out in terror as he tumbled forward and landed at a heap at the foot of the staircase. Only then did he recall his uncles and the tower they had sent them to for the night, but by then, tears had sprung unbidden to his eyes, and he could not keep from sobbing in fright and pain and loneliness, curled up with his face in his arms.
He could not be sure how long he lay there, alone in the world entirely, but suddenly, Sebastian found himself scooped up and held close, a hand stroking his hair. His mother came back him, he thought, and curled in close, crying into her shirt as she hushed him and kissed his head where it ached from hitting the ground.
When he calmed enough to do more than weep, he realized it was his uncle--Archie, his mind supplied, still moving slowly--who had pulled him near. Embarrassment saw him wriggling to escape Archie's embrace, and after a moment, Archie's arms dropped away.
Uncle William was there, too, holding up another oil lamp and frowning, his face made only harder by the addition of the long shadows cast by the glow. Sebastian buried his face in his arms, unable to stop crying but wanting to at least try to maintain the fiction that he was brave, not a coward who had nightmares and fell down stairs.
It was quiet as he made his attempts to staunch his tears, and he could feel the weight of his uncles' gazes upon him. Finally, when he was fairly sure he would not cry any more, he looked back up, blinking against the light of the lamp.
It was William who spoke, frowning at Sebastian as though he'd never seen a little boy in his life before. "We'll have to look you over. Did you knock your head?"
Not trusting his voice to remain steady, Sebastian nodded.
Sebastian watched his mother drive away, the blue Ford growing smaller and smaller until it was just a cloud of dust upon the gravel road as it neared the edge of the horizon. He knew he wouldn't really be alone until he could no longer see her. She might decide she missed him too much to go on by herself; she'd done so once before, when she left him to stay at the orphan home, coming back in a whirl of brightly coloured skirts and shining eyes and herding him back into the passenger's seat. It had only happened on that one occasion, but it stood to reason she might miss him again.
He hoped she might. If she let him come along to her school, he'd already decided that he would be perfectly quiet and practice his reading without pestering anybody, least of all his mother. Sebastian was not very good at being perfectly quiet--he was best at perfectly clumsy, his mother said, sometimes with a smile and sometimes without--but he had visions of being what his grandmother had called "the model child." (The model child was his cousin, Susan, according to his grandmother, and even Sebastian could not deny, in all his envy, that Susan was polite and did not accidentally shout or knock things over and always kept her clothes clean. Susan was also boring and did not like to play anything fun, but she was a better child than he for that fact, it seemed.)
When the cloud disappeared around a distant curve, though, he knew that was it. His mother did not want to take him along to Fort Worth.
It was only when the possibility of being rescued from this little, rickety old house in a sea of green pastures was gone entirely that he risked looking up at his uncles. His mother had not explained to him who they were, precisely, only told him not to ask stupid questions when they would be there soon. They had been introduced a few minutes ago, but Sebastian--seeing no point to being anyone's model child when he was being left alone--had stared at the ground and scuffed the toe of his sneaker into the dirt before going to sit with his knees pulled up to his chin on the porch steps. One was Uncle William, he thought, and that was all he could remember.
They looked his mother's age, and to his great relief, neither was looking back at him. One had hair as red as Sebastian's own, which gave them an instant sort of kinship; he was slouched in his chair, his feet propped up on the porch rail, as he read a leatherbound book. The other was large, with thick hands and curly hair, and he sat up straight, staring out into the distance. A rifle lay at his feet.
Sebastian wasn't sure which was William.
The one with the curly hair looked over at him first, Sebastian flinching back slightly at the expression on his face. He didn't look angry, exactly, but his mouth was set in a thin line and his brow dipped into a frown over his drooping blue eyes. After a moment of looking at each other, during which Sebastian wanted to tear his gaze away but could not bring himself to, the man elbowed the other and said, "Maybe you ought to get the boy something to drink, Archie."
"Hmm?" The other one glanced up from his book, wearing the owl-eyed expression of someone thrust from a dark room into blinding sunlight, and turned his head toward Sebastian. Something about the way his thin lips were tugged into a smile seemed brittle and strained, the expression his grandmother wore whenever Sebastian and his mother came to visit. "Oh--yes, that is a good idea. Would you like anything, William?"
"I'm fine." Uncle William stopped looking at Sebastian, for which Sebastian was thankful, and turned away to lean over and pick something up from next to his chair.
"All right. Sebastian," Uncle Archie said, setting his book down, "why don't you and I go into the kitchen?"
Sebastian nodded, uncurling himself from the ball he'd hunched into and following Archie in. If nothing else, he knew their names now; that was a start.
It was a little cooler inside the house than out, if only for the fact of the curtains fluttering in front of the open windows. Every room was a little dim for it, but at least the sun didn't blaze in. On the way, with every cat they passed--for they passed at least four just going from the front hall to the kitchen--Archie greeted it in a cheerful voice. "Hello, Mopsa! Hello, Peaseblossom! Hello, Hamlet! Hello, Pericles!"
"Sit down," Archie said, nodding to the round little kitchen table and chairs, made all of wood. It was a far cry from the Formica and metal Sebastian was used to, and taller than most tables he'd seen. He sat with his head resting on his arms, one cheek pressed to his forearm as he watched Uncle Archie bustle around the kitchen. He never seemed to stop moving, a wind-up toy of a man just then, though he'd been still enough when sitting outside with William.
"Where're you from?" Sebastian asked, before he could stop himself. He was never very good at asking the right questions, the sort that did get him a swat at the head, and he was full of curiosity--curiosity and some trepidation--at the way Archie spoke, his accent light and crisp. Uncle William was from Texas, for all he could tell, but Archie talked like people in the movies.
When Archie turned around suddenly, eyes wide, Sebastian felt his stomach twist; he'd remembered too late that children should be seen and not heard. But then he received a smile from the man, if still a little strained, and the gift of a glass of iced tea seemed like proof enough that he couldn't be in too much trouble. "London," Archie said, "across the sea in England. You, uh--you know where England is, right?"
"Yes." It was nebulously far away but out there somewhere, he knew.
"Well, from London." The smile on Archie's face relaxed into something closer to a grin, and his accent changed suddenly into a thicker, throatier thing. "But I was born in Scotland and lived there as a wee lad." And with a wink, it changed again, to a drawl just like William's, so far as Sebastian could tell from the few words he'd heard the man say. "And I've been living in Texas for a good long while now." Finally, back to his first voice, the one that made him sound like he should be dressed in something fancier than an old shirt and a pair of jeans. "And--ah, and yourself?"
Eyes wide, Sebastian couldn't think of anything to say in return for several moments. "I--my mother's from Illinois."
"And you aren't?" It sounded good-natured enough, but the smile on Archie's face was offset by the downward tilt of his eyebrows.
"I--I--" After a moment or two--extended by the big gulp of iced tea he swallowed--he shrugged. "I've lived lots of places."
Archie didn't say anything, long enough that Sebastian was about to burst in with something like an apology, because he'd clearly said the wrong thing, one way or another, but then--then, Archie answered, "I'm sure you have."
It was one of the saddest pronouncements Sebastian had ever heard, he thought, made nearly worse than the time he was told his little cousin, Nancy, had fallen into the river and drowned by the fact that there didn't seem to be any reason for Archie's solemn answer. Sebastian's mother told him many times that he was a lucky boy, getting to see so much of the country. When he made friends, they were always envious that he saw the inside of a classroom so rarely. There was no reason Sebastian could think of that Uncle Archie might be sorry to hear that Sebastian went many places.
After a moment or two, Archie stood up, making an effort at a smile, and nodded to Sebastian. "C'mon. We don't want to let Uncle William get lonely out there, do we?"
Sebastian supposed they didn't and only splashed a little of his iced tea out of its glass on the way back to the porch.
-
There was no television to speak of, Sebastian learned, nor a telephone, nor even a radio, though an old-fashioned gramophone stood in the corner of a room. The records near it were mostly of songs written by men with unpronounceable Russian names, or of singers and orchestras he had never heard of.
"Music hall stuff," Uncle William said when he caught him poking around for something he had heard of. It was after dinner, the sky not yet near to growing dark, but the house was already beginning to deepen its shadows, black where they had been a tepid grey-blue that afternoon. Sebastian jumped, turning around guiltily, a record by someone called George Formby slipping from his hand. "Your Uncle Archie loves the stuff."
"Oh," said Sebastian, and hastily turned around to put the record away.
Uncle William stood there a little longer, but his voice was no warmer than before when he added, "If you ask him, he might play you some."
After that, he walked away. Sebastian could hear him in the kitchen, shifting something around, and when he peeked around the corner into the room, he saw a hunk of wood, pale yellow and whittled to an edge on one end, and before it, several different tools. Uncle William sat before all of it, arranging the metal chisels before picking one up and scraping long, thin ribbons of wood off of the--well, whatever he was making.
When the sun did finally set, Sebastian was staring at the shelves in the gramophone room, packed full of books with titles he could not decipher. He read well enough that he could manage some of the words--"As You Like It" was easy enough--but most of the others were impossible. He heard steps behind him on the creaking wooden floor and turned around hastily again, this time to see Uncle Archie staring at him with the hint of a smile.
"Uncle William carried your suitcase upstairs," Archie said, holding out a lamp with a tall glass column protecting a timid little flame from blowing out. When Sebastian walked over, Archie handed him the lamp. "I'll show you where you're sleeping."
He led Sebastian up the staircase to the second floor, pointing out the room where he and Uncle William slept. "Not, er--" and Uncle Archie coughed; Sebastian could see why, for it was quite dusty upstairs. "It's too much of a bother to keep two bedrooms clean, so we share."
"Oh," said Sebastian, and nodded. He supposed he would share with someone, too, if he could, in a house so full of creaks and dark corners. Outside the little halo of light cast by his lamp, he could imagine any number of creatures lurking, from robbers to wolfmen, and there was nothing but fields to run away to. He hoped his bedroom was next to theirs.
"We thought you might like to sleep in the tower," Archie continued, and walked him to a door at the far end of the hallway. It opened to a set of stairs, cobwebbed in the corners, leading up into darkness. "Is that all right?"
"Y--yes," Sebastian answered, telling himself he was not afraid, and looked up at Archie's face, his eyes glinting in the lamplight.
"Well, get up there," came another voice from behind him. After a breathless moment, he realized it was Uncle William, dressed in a long nightshirt that Sebastian had always thought only old people in old movies wore. "You've got the place all to yourself."
Sebastian nodded and walked through the doorway, taking the first step with some care. If he kept a tight grip on the oil lamp with one hand and the railing with the other, he would be fine. Before he moved on to the next, he looked back over his shoulder at the two men. "Good night. T--thank you for letting me stay."
"Good night," Archie told him, and turned away to walk to his own bedroom.
William followed him with a nod. "Don't let the ghosts bite."
Sebastian could hear Archie murmur, "You'll scare him, talk like that."
"Kids his age love ghosts."
"You mean Ellen loved ghosts."
And then the door to their room shut, and Sebastian was alone.
One step, and then another, he told himself. Hold on tightly to the lamp so it doesn't fall. They'll make you leave if you burn the house down and then you'll have to walk to Fort Worth.
One step, and then another.
-
In the middle of the night, he woke from a nightmare, the details of which dissolved as he blinked around at his room.
It was dark, the only glow coming from the weak light of the full moon outside, and he could not remember where he was. The quiet of the night was broken by creaks and the buzzing of insects he couldn't identify, along with his heartbeat pounding in his ears as though he'd sprinted across a field, and the dark shapes outlined murkily by the moonlight were indistinguishable and threatening. The fear he'd woken to morphed into panic as he looked around, disoriented and utterly alone.
He had to find someone, he thought groggily, as he threw himself out of bed and ran across the bare wooden floor. He stumbled over the edge of a rug and nearly ran into the side of a wardrobe before finding a set of steps. He had to find his mother, had to get out of this dark, looming world of abandoned things.
Three-quarters of the way down the stairs, his small foot landed on the edge of a step instead of the center of it, and he pitched forward, crying out in terror as he tumbled forward and landed at a heap at the foot of the staircase. Only then did he recall his uncles and the tower they had sent them to for the night, but by then, tears had sprung unbidden to his eyes, and he could not keep from sobbing in fright and pain and loneliness, curled up with his face in his arms.
He could not be sure how long he lay there, alone in the world entirely, but suddenly, Sebastian found himself scooped up and held close, a hand stroking his hair. His mother came back him, he thought, and curled in close, crying into her shirt as she hushed him and kissed his head where it ached from hitting the ground.
When he calmed enough to do more than weep, he realized it was his uncle--Archie, his mind supplied, still moving slowly--who had pulled him near. Embarrassment saw him wriggling to escape Archie's embrace, and after a moment, Archie's arms dropped away.
Uncle William was there, too, holding up another oil lamp and frowning, his face made only harder by the addition of the long shadows cast by the glow. Sebastian buried his face in his arms, unable to stop crying but wanting to at least try to maintain the fiction that he was brave, not a coward who had nightmares and fell down stairs.
It was quiet as he made his attempts to staunch his tears, and he could feel the weight of his uncles' gazes upon him. Finally, when he was fairly sure he would not cry any more, he looked back up, blinking against the light of the lamp.
It was William who spoke, frowning at Sebastian as though he'd never seen a little boy in his life before. "We'll have to look you over. Did you knock your head?"
Not trusting his voice to remain steady, Sebastian nodded.