WHO: Little John, Lyra, Marian, Art, open later? WHEN: Thursdays 19th May WHERE: NOT the Parsonage WHAT: Honey I lost the kids WARNINGS: Treacle
Little John stepped through the door after his children, stepped out of the wardrobe made by Stutely’s hand, and stepped into an empty house.
It was the Brooklyn cottage he’d shared with Elaine, all those years ago. It was the house he expected to come back to, there was no doubt about that, and for the first moment he cast his eyes around as the memories of this place rushed back. With a soft “huh,” he enjoyed a quick, sweet wash of nostalgia for the early days of his life with Elaine, one that passed as he stepped further into the room and realised quite how empty it was. The second “huh” was not so soft.
“Ash?” His voice was greeted with silence. Huuuh. “Bear?” Not silence – the cottage walls couldn’t keep out the sounds of the city, traffic like a rough wind coming in from every side. Little John strode toward the hall and looked out, both ways. No children. The kitchen with its hanging pots and herbs, the cosy sitting room with its fat armchairs draped with crochet throw rugs, the rooms he was planning on converting quickly to teenage bedrooms, even the attic with its dust mites dancing lazily through a sunbeam— no children.
Alright. Alright. Stay calm and think. It had been a mighty long time since Elaine had opened a doorway to this world and perhaps she was a little rusty, and they had stepped out somewhere else. Perhaps their excitement had pulled them one way and his expectations had pulled him another. He did not think it was likely they had stepped out anyplace dangerous – Elaine’s magic would never be that rusty – and they were sensible, capable kids, but he was supposed to be with them.
Little John checked the knife in his boot and did one last thumping run around the inside of the house, making the pictures shake a little in their frames, before ruling the cottage out completely and bursting out of the front door—
Where he stopped, short, because a young woman was standing on the garden path, her hand on the open gate like she was just about to leave. She turned at the crunch of his boot on the path, blinked in surprise before a grin, a little nervous but a bright one all the same, spread over her face. “Oh hey,” Lyra said, pushing the gate closed again with a foot kicked out behind her. “I thought no one was home.”
“I wasn’t,” Little John said, honestly but not really thinking about his riddle of an answer as he looked at her. Lyra looked different in his memory, but this had to be her. The hair was so distinctive, though in every story he’d told his children about her she was in her red hoodie, it had become so characteristic that seeing her without it made him wonder if it was her at all… but the hair really was so distinctive. “Lyra,” he said, just a little amazed to see a face he wasn’t related to after so long, but then, quickly, “Did you see two kids come out? Teenagers, a boy and a girl?”
“Uh no?” Lyra replied, and from the growing intensity of the hmm, shit expression on his face she figured this was not a super good time. “What’s going on?”
“I have to find them,” Little John said, cutting through the garden to look down the side of the house, as though the kids would have squirreled themselves in the narrow space. “Ash? Bear??” There was no reply, not even when he put his fingers in his mouth and did their emergency I am not joking, it’s dinnertime, get your butts outta the woods whistle.
Still no reply. Hm. Shit.
He turned back to Lyra, trying to figure out where she fit. “Did you need something? Are you okay?”
Lyra blinked at the question cuz well… yeah technically? She wasn’t not okay right now, cuz right now there was no risk. Right now she was standing on a garden path in the middle of Brooklyn in broad daylight, dead sober, wearing what was by all accounts a pretty potent anti-faery blessed space necklace, in the company of someone who’d yeeted her redcap across a party. Pretty safe, right?
But there was a niggling feeling inside her that it wouldn’t be enough. That one day some door was gonna open and through it she was gonna hear the most intoxicating music and she was gonna be tempted and when someone unfurled their hand to beckon her in to dance she was gonna take it, no matter how many extra knuckles that hand had. She didn’t, like, want to? She didn’t wanna leave her life and she didn’t wanna lose time and didn’t wanna get hurt – but she hadn’t wanted to end up in hospital with alcohol poisoning either, and she had not been able to stop herself then, had she? What if some door did open and the draw was too strong and there weren’t no one around to hold her back? I got restraint she'd told Rosario, but they both knew that weren't really true.
Rosario had said ask Elaine, and Avery had said talk to your fairy tale friends and so here she was for answers, though she doubted Elaine could answer the questions that unnerved her the most. Why would I want this? What is wrong with me?
So like, she wasn’t totally okay, either. But Lyra stuck her thumbs through her belt loops and shook her head. “Just had questions, but nada that beats missing kids— You want help? They in trouble?”
Little John hesitated a moment, trying to lay out a plan that would fit her into it, but nothing immediately came to mind. “No, there’s no trouble, and I’m sure there’s only a couple of places they could be,” he hoped, anyway. When Marian and Elaine had stepped through, all those years ago, they’d stepped through at the Parsonage, though the Fox, with Elaine’s trust in Rob and Marian, was another possibility. “You head home,” he said to Lyra, giving her a squeeze of her small shoulder as they stepped out of the gate and onto the cracked sidewalk. “And I’ll drop by your place to catch up on things.”
“Suure,” Lyra was scanning his face, trying to work out what was going on. It didn’t feel like trouble but something sure was up, and she was just a little stung that she wasn’t allowed to immediately know. But – fine, fine she could wait. “I moved since you were last at mine. Message you my address, kay?”
“You got it,” Little John agreed, making a mental note to check his letterbox later. The last two decades, if he’d wanted to leave a message for Elaine, he’d tell it to a blackbird, or write it upon slip of paper and roll it into an acorn, leave it on her dresser for her to find when she woke. Somewhere in the back of his mind there were memories of more appropriate real-world ways to send messages, but they were right in the back. This moment, he was just trying to remember which way to turn, at the end of the street.
And then at the end of that one.
At least when he hit the edge of the Green-Wood Cemetery, he felt a part of himself relax. Yes, he’d cut through this green oasis every time he made his way to the Fox, he’d stumbled back home through it with a few pints in his belly afterwards. Yes, he remembered the red oaks and Norway maples, the pines and the beeches, remembered where each sat on his mental map with a confidence that no longer existed on city streets.
He closed the distance to the Fox – nearer to him than the Parsonage – quickly after that, and seeing the boarded up front of the building again hit him with a mix of the same nostalgia and familiarity as his cottage and the trees of the cemetery combined.
And Little John kept on feeling that way as he gave a cheerful knock, excited despite his worry, and stepped through the side door— and not half a dozen strides in found himself lurching upwards by one foot, the movement strangling a holler out of his very surprised throat.
Now, he’d taught the kids how to set this trap, he’d let them use him as practise (the twins were particularly good at knots - they’d invented several of their own and he couldn’t have been prouder) and he’d been lurched upside down a lot in the last decade. Some skills it was worth risking groin injuries to impart. So he could have handled this, absolutely, if he hadn’t also found himself the victim of a slow waterfall of treacle, spilling down his body from some clever mechanism he couldn’t see up on the rafter from which his foot hung.
“ART!” he bellowed, swinging, and followed it up, just to be safe, with a “MUCH, what the FUCK?”