WHAT: The awkward librarian version of "We cool bro?" WHERE: The Great Library WHEN: This afternoon WARNINGS: References to the Future Vallo plot, some mild references to sibling abuse STATUS: Complete
Edwin had never been especially good at making, or keeping, friends. What attempts he’d made in his childhood had gone south quickly: his brother Walt had loved nothing so much as making Edwin suffer, and whenever Edwin had started making a friend in his childhood, Walt had either turned them against him or had scared them so badly that they’d stopped speaking to him. Jack Alston, the one friend that he’d managed to keep in his childhood, had grown into Lord Hawthorne, yet another man who had torn Edwin down every chance he got, though perhaps without so much malicious glee as Edwin’s brother had taken in the sport.
And so he’d grown up a lonely boy, and into a lonely man, right up until he’d met Sir Robin Blyth. And then he’d come to Vallo, where he’d met Gansey, and Nikolai, and Lena. And while, perhaps, he wasn’t as good a friend to them as he would have liked, given that he never wanted to overstep his bounds and make them annoyed with him (the exception, of course, being Nikolai, who had decided all on his own that he’d overstep whatever bounds he wished whether it annoyed Edwin or not), he considered them his friends and he thought they considered him theirs.
He liked Darlington, too. He’d like to become his friend, though he wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. He’d been glad when he’d come home from his trip to the future safely, though they hadn’t really spoken since. Edwin worried, a little, that Darlington was avoiding him, and then thought that it must all be in his head, and then worried that it wasn’t.
But he had cause to speak to Darlington now. He had a reason. And he could set the matter to rest one way or another.
And so he sought him out in the backroom of the library and offered him a tentative smile. “Darlington, you haven’t seen Akers Treatise on the Properties of Magic and the Natural Sciences, have you?”
Edwin Lantsov–no, Edwin Courcey again–with a smile. Darlington hadn’t seen that in a couple of weeks. He’d rather given up hope of seeing it again, in fact, given how many people were suddenly remembering what that dark future was like.
He’d been sad about it, of course; Darlington had spent most of his life just as lonely as Edwin had, for different reasons. An opportunity to make a friend who shared his interest in magic and could keep up intellectually and had a similarly dry sense of humor had seemed like a godsend. To have that snatched away by a future he’d had no part in making, and to know that, social politics being what they were, he was unlikely to make any other friends at the library now, had cause a sharp twinge of pain.
Darlington had resolved to ignore it. He still had Stern, and he had his own problems to solve. He’d be fine. He was always fine. He’d give Edwin plenty of space at work and carry on about his business.
But now Edwin was actually speaking to him, calling him by his usual name instead of a very sharp Arlington, and for the first time in a while not looking at him like he wanted to choke the life out of him with his bare hands.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone else was looking for it,” Darlington politely replied, trying not to look actively surprised by Edwin speaking to him voluntarily over something trivial. He only achieved around fifty percent success. “I have it here. Just a moment.”
Edwin’s tentative smile faltered and faded from his face. Had that been surprise he’d seen? Surprise at what? That Edwin would dare speak to him?
Edwin wasn’t sure what he’d done. Perhaps he hadn’t done anything at all, and Darlington was simply Like That. Some people were. Hell, Edwin could admit that he was often Like That. He could make unfair, snap judgements on people, oftentimes dependent entirely on if something about them reminded him of his siblings and their set.
The difference, of course, was that he and Darlington already knew one another. Their snap judgements should have been done and over with. Perhaps he’d simply decided that Edwin was unimaginably dull. Perhaps he’d tired of Edwin’s endless postulating when they’d watched the ley line aurora before he’d left. He wouldn’t have been the first; Edwin had always been bad at knowing when to stop talking about magic.
“If you’re using it right now, then don’t worry about it. Do let me know when you’re finished with it, though. There were some experiments I wished to try, but they’ll keep; I’m in no particular rush,” he said, matching Darlington’s level of politeness.
So much for a riveting conversation about Akers’ theory of thaumic tunnelling at a subatomic level. If Darlington thought him tiresome, then he’d not torture him.
“No, I’m finished with it.” Darlington picked the book up from a stack at the corner of the desk. He hesitated a moment, then held it out to Edwin. “Are we…”
It was a stupid question to ask, so he hesitated. How else was he going to find out if he and Edwin were back on friendly terms, though? Edwin was acting like it now, almost, but Darlington wasn’t sure if he should trust it or not.
“Do you know what happened in the other future?” he asked instead. Perhaps that was a better starting place.
Edwin took the book and held it to his chest as if it were armour. He recognized it almost immediately for the childish gesture that it was, but as he’d apparently forgotten how to hold a book like a regular person, he decided to not try shifting it around until something felt natural.
He tilted his head to the side and frowned, considering the question. “A general overview, I think,” Edwin said, slowly. “Not too much in the way of specifics though. I understand most people don’t want to talk about it.”
At least, no one wanted to talk to him about it. That wasn’t to say that people were deliberately keeping it from him. Darlington and Gansey had been the only two who had gone that Edwin would have considered a friend, and they both had people they were closer to who, Edwin assumed, they’d spoken of their experiences with. And he wasn’t entirely sure if he could consider Darlington a friend, even before Edwin had bored him to tears at the aurora. When, exactly, did a man know when someone had moved from colleague to friend?
“Would you like to?” he asked, awkwardly.
“Not really,” Darlington admitted with a faint sigh. “But there are things you should know.”
It wasn’t fair to attempt to continue a friendship (were they friends? It had felt like they were friends, or coming close to it, before Darlington had been whisked off to the future) if Edwin wasn’t aware of the truth. It would be better to simply get it out of the way, let Edwin get back to hating him, and maybe quit entirely at trying to have friends.
“You hated me, in the future. I was–the version of me in the future, that is–was mind-controlled by Interitus. That Daniel Arlington–not that there was anything left of him, mentally–killed your husband.”
“My hus–? Oh.”
It was a lot. A lot of information crammed into three sentences. “Do you mind if I sit?” he asked, and didn’t wait for an answer before perching on the corner of the desk. And then he took a moment to work through it all.
It was probably silly that out of all of that, Edwin kept getting caught on husband. He’d never considered marriage. It had been impossible back home, something that he’d never even considered – not after he was old enough to put aside the fairytales and to know better, at least. There was no sense in wanting something that was so completely impossible.
And even though he’d been in Vallo for a year now, where such a thing wasn’t only possible but actually entirely commonplace, he still hadn’t thought about it. He and Nikolai had discussed the possibility of children, and somehow the thought of marriage had never even entered Edwin’s head. He forced himself past the thought and took in the rest of the sentence.
“Nikolai?” he asked, and then shook his head. “No, sorry, it’s probably best if I don’t know,” he said. If it was Nikolai, he’d spend the next who-knew-how-long wondering when, and if it wasn’t Nikolai… Well, that would cause a whole set of other problems Edwin didn’t want to think about.
And then it was time to focus on the crux of the problem. The Darlington was mind-controlled and killed Edwin’s husband problem.
Edwin’s world didn’t have any true spells for mind-control – or, if it did, it was no magic he’d ever heard of before. He’d heard a little of the thralls of the future, and he was nearly certain that was impossible in his branch of magic. But there were spells that could force someone to do something they didn’t wish to do.
He couldn’t hold what someone was forced to do against their will against them. Oh, sure, he understood that emotion and logic didn’t always coincide. He’d nearly lost Nikolai less than a week ago, had healed him, fingers trembling so much that he’d had to redo the cradles five times before he’d finally gotten them right, and the only reason he’d managed the spell at all to any degree of help – healing a scrape or a bruise wouldn’t have helped at all, the condition that Nikolai had been in – had been because of the Temporal Convergence. He thought he could understand, a little, the fear and the despair that would come from losing his husband. But he would have hoped he’d know better.
“I’m sorry for my future self’s behaviour,” he said, after several long moments of turning over every aspect of the problem in his head and examining it from every angle he could think of. “I think it must have been hard for him… for me? But I doubt very much your future self had consented to have his mind controlled, and I’m even more certain that you hadn’t. I shouldn’t have… I am sorry if I was cruel.”
Darlington wished he weren’t so pathetically relieved that this Edwin didn’t seem to have any problem with him, even knowing the truth. He’d been cast adrift from his own world twice in a row, once to Hell and now to Vallo, and it left him feeling unmoored and alone. He hadn’t wanted to lose a friend, and it felt good to have one back, even if he was supposed to be able to carry on perfectly well on his own.
“Not cruel, just cold,” Darlington replied. “I understood why you felt the way you did, so I strove to give you as much space as the mission allowed.”
Which was also what he’d been doing since he returned. He hadn’t been sure of what the Edwin of his own place and time knew or recalled, so it had seemed best to continue to the policy of leaving him a wide berth. It wasn’t what he’d like, but disappointment was Darlington’s oldest friend of all, one he was well used to living with.
That, Edwin thought he could understand a little better. He couldn’t begin to try to contemplate how or why he did the things he had done in the future – there were ten years of missing memories there to make sense of his choices – but perhaps the idea of having someone he considered a friend kill his husband… Well, it would be painful enough to want to end the friendship altogether.
But all that was in a future that would, hopefully, never come to pass. They’d done what they could to prevent it. They had found the simulacrum. They’d destroyed it. The threat should, hopefully, be passed.
“Is that why –” Edwin started, and then stopped. How did someone ask someone else have you been avoiding me without making all sorts of unjustified assumptions about their relationship?
“I’m sure I appreciated the space,” he said, somehow managing to feel even more awkward.
“It prevented you from actually murdering me, at least,” Darlington dryly replied. The wry tone dropped quickly, though, and approached something more honest. While still treading carefully, Darlington was beginning to find his footing in this conversation. “If you’d like me to continue giving you space here, knowing what you do now, I will. If you aren’t back to loathing the sight of me, though…I’d hoped to invite you and Nikolai to have dinner with Alex and me? To celebrate being back in the world.”
"I would like that." Edwin smiled, and his shoulders relaxed, right until he realized there were two ways to take that. "The dinner, I mean. Not the space."
He made himself shut up before he could start babbling about the fact that he did like space, just not more than usual. Darlington already likely knew that.
"I will speak to Nikolai, but I'm sure he'd like it too." In fact, he'd probably be elated that Edwin was asking him to a social occasion, instead of it always being the other way around.
“I’ll have to talk to Alex, too—I didn’t actually bring it up with her yet,” Darlington admitted. He hadn’t been sure it was something he’d be able to do. The fact that he could, though, made him smile right back at Edwin. “But she’s feeling better now, and I’m fairly certain the only time she’s ever turned down free food was Hell’s pomegranate trees, so she should be an easy sell. I can text you about times and restaurants after I ask her?”
“You’ll want to warn her of the fae of this world, then,” Edwin said. “But yes, please. I’ll text Nikolai to let him know too.”
Were you supposed to thank people for not actually hating you? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so. “I”m glad we had this talk,” he said instead.
“I am, too.”
If they hadn’t had it, Darlington figured they would have spent the rest of their lives being coolly polite to one another, with Edwin never knowing why a budding friendship had failed to blossom. That was the hazard of two very correct people who hadn’t much practice with friendship attempting to befriend one another.
On the other hand, if they hadn’t had this talk, Alex or Nikolai probably would’ve kicked one or the other of them in the pants and forced them into another one. Still, it was nice to have been able to do it on their own terms, in their own way, without having to make a thing out of it.
With a faint smile and a weight lifted from his shoulders, Darlington gave Edwin a nod. “I need to get back to work, and I expect you do as well, so…I’ll see you soon.”