two in a canoe
Feb. 27th, 2023 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidewaysTitle: Two in a Canoe
AO3: Link
Rating: G
Series: Widdershins (Jack O'Malley, Widdershins Itself)
Wordcount: 2,261
Summary: Mal's stuck with the city, and the city's stuck with him. Takes a little while to work all that out.
Remarks: Look, you can't hand me a human low-key soulbonded to an urban genius loci and expect me to not go all dilated eyes like a cat on 'nip. The dialogue in the first section was actually taken from material culled from Stand Upon the Threshold. All writing is compost!
◘◘◘
"Never figured it'd all end up here," Mal murmured. "Not like this, I mean. Figured... Widdershins couldn't be anything but the worst kind of ending. Locked doors with bars on the windows an' six inches of sunlight."
None of the doors Wolfe sketched in fine pencil had windows at all, much less bars. Mal never really understood how Wolfe could pick out all the shapes inside of something and put them back together on paper, but he never tired of watching. Bold lines for one, looped around themselves in thick knots along the frame; a garden of strange and delicate flowers on the other.
Wolfe hadn't put anything of Mal's door down yet, but it wasn't like it would take long. He drew it himself to prove it, dragging spitting blue along the floor under his finger: a plain rectangle with a wobbly thumbprint for the knob.
Brow knit over his notebook, Wolfe spared this masterpiece a glance as quick as his smile, and said, "Instead you are with a key no one can take."
He hadn't drawn a keyhole, since there wasn't one. Somehow, even as the door changed or grew or whatever it did, he didn't think there ever would be.
"Huh," Mal said slowly. "Never thought of it like that. Never thought of it like that at all."
--
When Jack was little - not littlest, but not much beyond - the door had a window with bars and a big brass ring for a handle. Didn't take long to figure out he could hang his whole weight off it, feet tucked up under him and knees just dusting the floor, and not budge it so much as a creaking inch. It quickly stopped being something to try, and just became something to do when he couldn't stand the boredom one second longer.
Herself never kept a schedule. Food at the Home had come at five o'clock sharp young mister, and devil take you if you showed up late or dirty or ate it too slow. Food in the Room came whenever and dirty didn't matter - nothing did, not how bad the pot under the bed was starting to smell, nor how hungry he got in between. About the only thing that stayed the same was no one cared to hear Jack's thoughts on any of it.
Without a schedule there was just now, endless and always and empty. The rise and fall of light out the window didn't help much. There was nothing to see through the narrow space, just a long stretch of colourless brick from whatever building sat on the other side of the street. When the sun was up, he could see the same thing by looking at any other corner of the Room. When it fell down, it all turned to blackness together.
He could hear things though, sometimes. Rain. A dog barking. People walking by he didn't call out to, ever, because whatever a witch was, Herself had been pretty clear she didn't need it to have a tongue.
He buried himself in sleeping, and when he just couldn't sleep anymore he buried himself in the sounds. There was more sense to them than the light. Wasn't like a clock, exactly, but he could tell somehow: now the city was waking up and warming up; and now everyone was going places, itching his own bones with the urge to move about with them; and now it was slowing down, settling into a quiet that always made his eyelids heavy.
Sometimes it filled up more than his time. Sometimes it was like his body was made of the same stuff as the walls, and a thousand faceless people walked the streets to the same beat that moved inside his chest.
Sometimes it was like there wasn't a Jack in the Room at all.
--
Mal never asked Widdershins why it couldn't open one door for a kid swaying hungry and lonely off the handle, day after day. Same as Widdershins never asked how its witch could spend so many years walking in whatever direction amounted to anywhere else, he supposed, eyes on the horizon and fingers in his ears.
Didn't mean things weren't said. First time Mal put a hand against a door on purpose, reached out on purpose, felt the lock unlatch and the hinges swing under nothing but his wanting, on purpose-
Wolfe didn't comment when he saw the raw skin over Mal's knuckles, just came to his room after supper with salve and bandages like it was two years and a dozen crossroads ago, and the squabble nothing worse than bad decisions in a bar.
Cities didn't punch walls. They slammed doors dangerously close to fingers sometimes. Rolled cobblestones underfoot. Snuffed fires and cracked windows in the middle of a stormy night.
Nyree grinned when she caught Mal wrestling with the tail of his coat caught in a door that wouldn’t move for all the curses and cow kicks in the world, and called them both moody. "Still haven't noticed you're sitting in the same canoe, the two of you," she said cheerfully, and hauled him off for more meditation.
Some witch lessons meant the hour after them would be spent with his head under a pillow, temples aching and meaningless colours dancing against the dark of his eyelids, but meditation was so easy he made it harder at first just by thinking it had to be. Instead, meditation turned out to be sitting there with nothing to do until you noticed the rhythms going on outside weren't so different to the ones happening inside, and he'd learned how to do that when he was only little.
"It's not hearing each other that's your problem," Nyree agreed. "It's listening."
"What d'you expect me to do 'bout that?" Mal said sourly, tucking a cigarette between his teeth. "S'a city, doesn't have any parts to listen with."
"Lucky me dealing with all those talking trees then, eh? Walking the easy road." She seemed mostly amused, though. There was never any getting Nyree stomping off the way he'd always been able to do with Ben. He figured it had something to do with how sticky hot it was on the islands; boiling a temper in that weather would knock anyone flat in seconds. "You've got parts, so what's your excuse?"
"Nothin' worth listening to," he muttered, and regretted it when Nyree rested her chin on her palm and raised an eyebrow.
"Think we both know that's not true," she said, not unkindly. "You want to tell me what's really got you so blocked up today, chook?"
The dryness in his mouth stuck the cigarette tackily to his lips. Today was restless dreams with bars on windows. Too many people wanting too many things and knowing his name as the one to ask it all from. Time lost in the shadowed corner of the train station, yet again, watching the carriages come in and out and timing when would be best to hop on one without catching a guard's eye. Just to prove he still could.
Who he was proving it to, he wasn't always sure.
He bent his head, told himself it was to catch the matchlight and nothing to do with ducking watchful eyes. "Got a bloody headache, alright? S'nothing. We done?"
--
"Centuries!" people were always saying. "Widdershins hasn't had a witch in centuries!"
Of course, some of them said it because they thought it was about time and would fix all the problems in the world, and some of them said it because they thought it was the way things should always be and he was nothing but a sign of tragedy and ruin. Seemed a tall order in either direction.
Ben asked once walking home, because he was Ben, if Mal had gained any insight on why Widdershins had waited such a long time to call a witch.
If it had been a bad day, spent lurking around train stations, he might have retorted that with a hundred bloody wizards about it hardly needed a witch, and anyway, any witches before him probably had enough sense to ignore the stupidity of well-meaning friends, and trusted their own instincts and run off to France for good.
It had been a pretty good day, though, so Mal hitched a casual shoulder and said honestly, "Dunno."
"I suppose it was a long shot," Ben said resignedly, and shifted the paper bag in his arms so the celery wasn't poking so insistently up his nose. "It's just such a - a gap. Whether witches were unable to reach Widdershins due to the, er, socio-political climate, or whether the anchor itself was somehow interrupting the process…"
"Decidin' it didn't want a hanger-on, you mean?" Mal said, and Ben's spirit did an awkward little flare and ripple, the way it always did when he was trying to get a sense of whether his mouth was the same size as his foot.
"I wouldn't say decided," Ben said evasively, "but, well, it has an undeniably regulatory influence on magic. It might have been maintaining a sort of balance, in its own way. It's only one theory, though, and not even the most well-supported one. Herman's works framed the original argument, after all, and it's impossible not to be aware of his biases..."
Mal had upset the balance just by existing. Pulled a whole spell apart and nearly fed the place to Sins without doing more than breathing air and scratching his armpit. The last witch had cocked it up even worse as far as anyone said, and run away to chase her mistake forever. Seemed like the sort of thing people might think wanted regulating.
He wondered if any of the people making up theories had ever found a way to ask the city if it had missed her.
--
The worst dreams weren't about any one thing in particular - not about being Jack in the Room, or getting shoved against a wall with accusations barked in his ear, or the unending night spent holding Ma's too thin hand as her spirit slowly paled and drifted apart like morning fog.
It was all of it and none of it, a thick drowning helplessness he clawed through for hours until he finally broke the surface into waking, heart hammering and legs jerking and all the world too close and heavy.
He fell out of bed with sheets dragging around his waist, bright bodies scattering in alarm - Happy's questions burbled anxiously around his ankles, meaningless noise he pushed past blind and stumbling. The window was wide open to meet him before he even reached it, cold night air drawing him in and stinging his lungs. He rasped breath in and coughed it out again, fingernails dug into the sill.
His vision at night was never good if there weren't people about, but he could feel Widdershins out there. Acres of rooftops, the sprawl of streets with life running all through it in noisy, demanding streams; a view he'd be looking at for the rest of his life, and he folded down, pressed his forehead into chipped paint, wrapped his arms around his head.
"Should've chose someone else." The can't, can't, can't of the dream was still all through his head, sickly sour in his throat, sweating down his back. He buried his face deeper in his arms, said muffled and desperate, "Could've chose anyone else."
A city didn't have ears and it didn't have a tongue. It had a heartbeat made of heartbeats, anchored in people and spirits and the place it had rooted in first, something deep and ancient and warm under the earth. Older than him, older than anyone in the world, and still exactly as young and new as them all.
It didn't talk, but right then, somewhere in his own open, aching chest, Mal thought maybe it said something like: No. Not really.
His laugh surprised him; more of a messy snort than anything. Figured. Maybe no one ever got to ask, not even cities.
"Two in a canoe," Mal said into his shirtsleeves, and an imaginary Nyree scrunched up her nose in a smile and winked.
He stayed there, head down on the window sill until his breathing slowed and his heartbeat matched the night-quiet one of Widdershins, and the heavy tiredness that followed bad dreams dragged at his eyelids. Felt less wrung-out and empty than that sort of tired usually was, though.
The cold air was settling into the damp under his shirt, the shivers starting to make his back ache. Toes were warm at least. Sharpey and its best mate Hotshot were curled up in the blankets again, but Happy had shoved itself with determination between the wall and his shins, a dense little chunk of spirit sprawled patiently over his feet. He wriggled his toes under it, and it blinked up at him and flapped its ears back, beaming.
Something knocked against his elbow. He looked up to find the window hinging in, pushing at him gently; might have been the wind, only the wind wouldn't have any reason to go moving so carefully as to avoid bruising. Same as it wouldn't go undoing locks and flinging windows outward all on its own, he supposed.
Mal pushed himself up, cleared his throat and rubbed his face. He hesitated a moment, hand against the sill; gave it a pat, then reached to hook the window closed, shutting out the cold.
"Alright," murmured Mal in the City. "I get th' message."
AO3: Link
Rating: G
Series: Widdershins (Jack O'Malley, Widdershins Itself)
Wordcount: 2,261
Summary: Mal's stuck with the city, and the city's stuck with him. Takes a little while to work all that out.
Remarks: Look, you can't hand me a human low-key soulbonded to an urban genius loci and expect me to not go all dilated eyes like a cat on 'nip. The dialogue in the first section was actually taken from material culled from Stand Upon the Threshold. All writing is compost!
◘◘◘
"Never figured it'd all end up here," Mal murmured. "Not like this, I mean. Figured... Widdershins couldn't be anything but the worst kind of ending. Locked doors with bars on the windows an' six inches of sunlight."
None of the doors Wolfe sketched in fine pencil had windows at all, much less bars. Mal never really understood how Wolfe could pick out all the shapes inside of something and put them back together on paper, but he never tired of watching. Bold lines for one, looped around themselves in thick knots along the frame; a garden of strange and delicate flowers on the other.
Wolfe hadn't put anything of Mal's door down yet, but it wasn't like it would take long. He drew it himself to prove it, dragging spitting blue along the floor under his finger: a plain rectangle with a wobbly thumbprint for the knob.
Brow knit over his notebook, Wolfe spared this masterpiece a glance as quick as his smile, and said, "Instead you are with a key no one can take."
He hadn't drawn a keyhole, since there wasn't one. Somehow, even as the door changed or grew or whatever it did, he didn't think there ever would be.
"Huh," Mal said slowly. "Never thought of it like that. Never thought of it like that at all."
--
When Jack was little - not littlest, but not much beyond - the door had a window with bars and a big brass ring for a handle. Didn't take long to figure out he could hang his whole weight off it, feet tucked up under him and knees just dusting the floor, and not budge it so much as a creaking inch. It quickly stopped being something to try, and just became something to do when he couldn't stand the boredom one second longer.
Herself never kept a schedule. Food at the Home had come at five o'clock sharp young mister, and devil take you if you showed up late or dirty or ate it too slow. Food in the Room came whenever and dirty didn't matter - nothing did, not how bad the pot under the bed was starting to smell, nor how hungry he got in between. About the only thing that stayed the same was no one cared to hear Jack's thoughts on any of it.
Without a schedule there was just now, endless and always and empty. The rise and fall of light out the window didn't help much. There was nothing to see through the narrow space, just a long stretch of colourless brick from whatever building sat on the other side of the street. When the sun was up, he could see the same thing by looking at any other corner of the Room. When it fell down, it all turned to blackness together.
He could hear things though, sometimes. Rain. A dog barking. People walking by he didn't call out to, ever, because whatever a witch was, Herself had been pretty clear she didn't need it to have a tongue.
He buried himself in sleeping, and when he just couldn't sleep anymore he buried himself in the sounds. There was more sense to them than the light. Wasn't like a clock, exactly, but he could tell somehow: now the city was waking up and warming up; and now everyone was going places, itching his own bones with the urge to move about with them; and now it was slowing down, settling into a quiet that always made his eyelids heavy.
Sometimes it filled up more than his time. Sometimes it was like his body was made of the same stuff as the walls, and a thousand faceless people walked the streets to the same beat that moved inside his chest.
Sometimes it was like there wasn't a Jack in the Room at all.
--
Mal never asked Widdershins why it couldn't open one door for a kid swaying hungry and lonely off the handle, day after day. Same as Widdershins never asked how its witch could spend so many years walking in whatever direction amounted to anywhere else, he supposed, eyes on the horizon and fingers in his ears.
Didn't mean things weren't said. First time Mal put a hand against a door on purpose, reached out on purpose, felt the lock unlatch and the hinges swing under nothing but his wanting, on purpose-
Wolfe didn't comment when he saw the raw skin over Mal's knuckles, just came to his room after supper with salve and bandages like it was two years and a dozen crossroads ago, and the squabble nothing worse than bad decisions in a bar.
Cities didn't punch walls. They slammed doors dangerously close to fingers sometimes. Rolled cobblestones underfoot. Snuffed fires and cracked windows in the middle of a stormy night.
Nyree grinned when she caught Mal wrestling with the tail of his coat caught in a door that wouldn’t move for all the curses and cow kicks in the world, and called them both moody. "Still haven't noticed you're sitting in the same canoe, the two of you," she said cheerfully, and hauled him off for more meditation.
Some witch lessons meant the hour after them would be spent with his head under a pillow, temples aching and meaningless colours dancing against the dark of his eyelids, but meditation was so easy he made it harder at first just by thinking it had to be. Instead, meditation turned out to be sitting there with nothing to do until you noticed the rhythms going on outside weren't so different to the ones happening inside, and he'd learned how to do that when he was only little.
"It's not hearing each other that's your problem," Nyree agreed. "It's listening."
"What d'you expect me to do 'bout that?" Mal said sourly, tucking a cigarette between his teeth. "S'a city, doesn't have any parts to listen with."
"Lucky me dealing with all those talking trees then, eh? Walking the easy road." She seemed mostly amused, though. There was never any getting Nyree stomping off the way he'd always been able to do with Ben. He figured it had something to do with how sticky hot it was on the islands; boiling a temper in that weather would knock anyone flat in seconds. "You've got parts, so what's your excuse?"
"Nothin' worth listening to," he muttered, and regretted it when Nyree rested her chin on her palm and raised an eyebrow.
"Think we both know that's not true," she said, not unkindly. "You want to tell me what's really got you so blocked up today, chook?"
The dryness in his mouth stuck the cigarette tackily to his lips. Today was restless dreams with bars on windows. Too many people wanting too many things and knowing his name as the one to ask it all from. Time lost in the shadowed corner of the train station, yet again, watching the carriages come in and out and timing when would be best to hop on one without catching a guard's eye. Just to prove he still could.
Who he was proving it to, he wasn't always sure.
He bent his head, told himself it was to catch the matchlight and nothing to do with ducking watchful eyes. "Got a bloody headache, alright? S'nothing. We done?"
--
"Centuries!" people were always saying. "Widdershins hasn't had a witch in centuries!"
Of course, some of them said it because they thought it was about time and would fix all the problems in the world, and some of them said it because they thought it was the way things should always be and he was nothing but a sign of tragedy and ruin. Seemed a tall order in either direction.
Ben asked once walking home, because he was Ben, if Mal had gained any insight on why Widdershins had waited such a long time to call a witch.
If it had been a bad day, spent lurking around train stations, he might have retorted that with a hundred bloody wizards about it hardly needed a witch, and anyway, any witches before him probably had enough sense to ignore the stupidity of well-meaning friends, and trusted their own instincts and run off to France for good.
It had been a pretty good day, though, so Mal hitched a casual shoulder and said honestly, "Dunno."
"I suppose it was a long shot," Ben said resignedly, and shifted the paper bag in his arms so the celery wasn't poking so insistently up his nose. "It's just such a - a gap. Whether witches were unable to reach Widdershins due to the, er, socio-political climate, or whether the anchor itself was somehow interrupting the process…"
"Decidin' it didn't want a hanger-on, you mean?" Mal said, and Ben's spirit did an awkward little flare and ripple, the way it always did when he was trying to get a sense of whether his mouth was the same size as his foot.
"I wouldn't say decided," Ben said evasively, "but, well, it has an undeniably regulatory influence on magic. It might have been maintaining a sort of balance, in its own way. It's only one theory, though, and not even the most well-supported one. Herman's works framed the original argument, after all, and it's impossible not to be aware of his biases..."
Mal had upset the balance just by existing. Pulled a whole spell apart and nearly fed the place to Sins without doing more than breathing air and scratching his armpit. The last witch had cocked it up even worse as far as anyone said, and run away to chase her mistake forever. Seemed like the sort of thing people might think wanted regulating.
He wondered if any of the people making up theories had ever found a way to ask the city if it had missed her.
--
The worst dreams weren't about any one thing in particular - not about being Jack in the Room, or getting shoved against a wall with accusations barked in his ear, or the unending night spent holding Ma's too thin hand as her spirit slowly paled and drifted apart like morning fog.
It was all of it and none of it, a thick drowning helplessness he clawed through for hours until he finally broke the surface into waking, heart hammering and legs jerking and all the world too close and heavy.
He fell out of bed with sheets dragging around his waist, bright bodies scattering in alarm - Happy's questions burbled anxiously around his ankles, meaningless noise he pushed past blind and stumbling. The window was wide open to meet him before he even reached it, cold night air drawing him in and stinging his lungs. He rasped breath in and coughed it out again, fingernails dug into the sill.
His vision at night was never good if there weren't people about, but he could feel Widdershins out there. Acres of rooftops, the sprawl of streets with life running all through it in noisy, demanding streams; a view he'd be looking at for the rest of his life, and he folded down, pressed his forehead into chipped paint, wrapped his arms around his head.
"Should've chose someone else." The can't, can't, can't of the dream was still all through his head, sickly sour in his throat, sweating down his back. He buried his face deeper in his arms, said muffled and desperate, "Could've chose anyone else."
A city didn't have ears and it didn't have a tongue. It had a heartbeat made of heartbeats, anchored in people and spirits and the place it had rooted in first, something deep and ancient and warm under the earth. Older than him, older than anyone in the world, and still exactly as young and new as them all.
It didn't talk, but right then, somewhere in his own open, aching chest, Mal thought maybe it said something like: No. Not really.
His laugh surprised him; more of a messy snort than anything. Figured. Maybe no one ever got to ask, not even cities.
"Two in a canoe," Mal said into his shirtsleeves, and an imaginary Nyree scrunched up her nose in a smile and winked.
He stayed there, head down on the window sill until his breathing slowed and his heartbeat matched the night-quiet one of Widdershins, and the heavy tiredness that followed bad dreams dragged at his eyelids. Felt less wrung-out and empty than that sort of tired usually was, though.
The cold air was settling into the damp under his shirt, the shivers starting to make his back ache. Toes were warm at least. Sharpey and its best mate Hotshot were curled up in the blankets again, but Happy had shoved itself with determination between the wall and his shins, a dense little chunk of spirit sprawled patiently over his feet. He wriggled his toes under it, and it blinked up at him and flapped its ears back, beaming.
Something knocked against his elbow. He looked up to find the window hinging in, pushing at him gently; might have been the wind, only the wind wouldn't have any reason to go moving so carefully as to avoid bruising. Same as it wouldn't go undoing locks and flinging windows outward all on its own, he supposed.
Mal pushed himself up, cleared his throat and rubbed his face. He hesitated a moment, hand against the sill; gave it a pat, then reached to hook the window closed, shutting out the cold.
"Alright," murmured Mal in the City. "I get th' message."
