[Fateverse Side Story: ES Bundle] Go Get Your Shovel
i feel very awkward about this one. it held me at gunpoint and made me write it. i honestly don't know what's going on here.
warnings: AU - Fateverse. rampant rule 63 lolwut. crossover with several flavors of Neil Gaiman literature, notably Neverwhere. language: g.
pairing: none/gen.
timeline: local year AD 2005, shortly after Hope and Mina drop by.
disclaimer: the original versions of Wade, Magneto, Wanda, and the Young Avengers belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me. Neverwhere, the Sandman graphic novels, and all recognizable characters and terms thereof belong to Neil Gaiman.
notes: 1) title is a reference to Paramore's "Brick by Boring Brick." 2) the twins float. i don't know why, except that floating is cool and magicky. 3) Scrimshander!Wade makes her skeleton keys out of the fingers of locksmiths. 4) a ragman (or rag-and-bone man) is, in myth, a tinker-like figure who takes old dirty rags and gives back clean ones in payment. modern-day rag-and-bone men are essentially junk collectors.
P.S. this is a world for which i have no further plans. any authors who are so inclined may write fic here, remembering that the ES bundle is pretty much a cross between the worlds of Neverwhere and The Sandman.
Go Get Your Shovel
Tamris Magnus is sixteen and has left her house a grand total of ten times. Four of those times, she snuck out. It’s only in the last year that she’s mustered the courage and defiance to pick the lock of the garden door and fly out into the night.
Before, she would only sneak as far as the garden, sitting barefoot in the grass and staring at freedom. They aren’t allowed to go into the garden without their father. Illamar, Tamris’ twin sister, says it’s because the plants draw dangerous things that their father keeps at bay. Tamris believes their father just doesn’t want to give them a chance to run off.
Today (Tonight? Who can tell, down here away from the sun?), she crouches beside the foxglove and stares at the door out. Down on the lawns, the Front Wall moans, warning away visitors. She’s barefoot. She and her sister are always barefoot; they have no shoes. Why would they need them when they’re forbidden to leave the house and hardly touch the ground in the first place?
Illy has threatened to tell their father about Tamris’ excursions. Illy accidentally made herself a boyfriend, however, and Tamris hopes being privy to that knowledge will keep her secret safe. Hard to say. Illy can do some very stupid and very mean things when the mood strikes her.
But Tamris has tasted the thrill and bustle of the Floating Market, and the yearning to go back is a heady thing which cannot be long denied.
So she stands, takes up her little bag of barter and money, and picks the lock. Beyond, there is deeper darkness, and stairs. A snap of her fingers summons a glow-wisp, and she floats along after it, toes only skimming the ground occasionally to change direction.
Some people have to ask or be told where the next Floating Market will be held. The glow-wisp just knows.
This time, the Floating Market is in an abandoned auditorium. The high windows are boarded over, and Tamris spies the flutter of pigeons in the rafters, barely lit by the lanterns and cook fires of the market. The place is crowded with people buying, selling, trading. Almost anything can be purchased at the Floating Market. There are animal vendors, food stalls, bodyguards, trinket shops… The Dream-Seller and the Lost Items Booth and the Unlikely Arms and Armourer.
As Tamris floats her way along, the Bone Collector looks up from repairing someone’s terrier and smiles a knowing little smile. The Bone Collector has been to their house several times, selling her services to Tamris’ father. She’ll keep this secret, because secrets amuse her, and because she likes knowing things that other people don’t.
Tamris needs more jewellery-making supplies. She touches down at an oddment shop and haggles for beads and bangles and bits of broken clockwork. Turning a profit is easy when you barter with spelled jewellery; it’s amazing how much people will pay for silly little enchantments. The spells are easy, too-simple levitation, tracking spells, remembrance spells-trifling things that any idiot with an ounce of magic could do, nothing compared to the brilliant things that Illy gets up to, or what the Bone Collector can do with a locksmith’s finger-bone. If she had the time and patience for it, she could set up a little stall of her own and make a fortune.
A ragman tries to sell her a very pretty dress, but she floats right on by. New clothes would get her caught immediately, no matter how much she might be tempted by iris-petal ruffles.
Her next stop is a goldsmith, for wire, and she ends up paying more than she’d like.
Beside the goldsmith is a bookman, and the old man peers at her from behind thick spectacles. “Milady,” he says, just when his staring is starting to make Tamris uncomfortable. “Could I trouble you to authenticate a manuscript for me?”
“You know who I am?” she asks him.
“Lady Tamris, heir to the House of Magnus, daughter of Elphembre the Red, who is son of Erik Ironbender,” he answers slowly and precisely. “All your family are trained in the old ways, but you would be schooled in the old practitioners as well. I can pay you for your service, of course.” He sets out three big pieces of abalone, oil-slick colours that dance in the flicker of the kerosene lantern sitting next to them.
Things with a memory of the sea… There’s a lot she could do with that.
Tamris quells a sensation of misgiving. “Show me.”
He passes her a leather-bound book.
“Feels like cowhide,” she comments. “Vellum pages…indigo ink…definitely quilled… It looks like one of Gildamont’s, to me. Look, there’s that stupid little loop he put on all his Cs.”
“Most excellent!” says the bookman with a grateful little clap of his hands.
Tamris shrugs, passes the book back, takes her payment. Behind the bookman himself, puttering among the squat little shelves, is a boy about Tamris’ age. The boy has coffee-dark skin and a shaved head; he handles the books with a protective sort of reverence. He looks up, and their eyes meet, and Tamris feels herself blush.
When she turns away, her wisp is gone. That’s a hazard of using glow-wisps…they’re easily distracted.
She wastes several long, dragging minutes hovering around the market, searching for her wisp, all the while worrying with growing urgency that she’s been away from the house too long. She finds the daft thing flirting fruitlessly with a strand of Christmas lights and gives it a scolding flick with her finger.
“Home!” she commands sharply.
Off it races, away from the market, away from the lights.
She flies through the dark and up the steps, latches the garden door, hurries for the house. The back hall is silent. When she sneaks through the kitchen, Bergan just wordlessly glances up from kneading a loaf and shakes his head.
It’s fine. Everything’s fine. She’s back.
But her father is waiting in the very middle of her room. He’s holding her jewellery-making drawer.
She can’t talk her way out of this one.
Her feet touch ground.
“You had no right,” she says, feeling her knees start to shake. “This is my room!”
“And my house,” her father calmly retorts.
“Well, I hate your house, and I’m sick of seeing nothing but the inside of it.”
“How many times?”
“How many times what?” Tamris bites out. “How many times have you invaded my privacy this year? I’m thinking it’s somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty.”
He drops the drawer with a resounding crash. A glass bead bounces away and rolls under the bed. “How many times have you ventured beyond the garden I specifically told you never to enter without me?”
She clenches her hand on her barter satchel and lifts her chin. “Four.”
“Just four?”
“If more will make you kick me out, I can lie and say fifteen.”
Her father’s expression is unreadable. “You are my heir, and as such you have certain responsibilities to our family and our name.”
Tamris points to the next room over. “I have a twin. A twin who’s a lot better at your stupid family trade than I am. Make her your heir and let me have a life!”
“You understand nothing,” her father tells her coldly. He walks around her and out the door with a swish of dark robes.
“I hate you!” she shouts ineffectually to her empty room.
When she sneaks down to the garden the next day, the door to the outside world is gone.
Tamris huddles among the mandrakes and cries the hopeless, resentful tears of a thwarted captive.
She will never see the market, with all its light and life and smells, again. She will never again see Old Bailey and his birds, or Mother Hubbard with her crumpets under the Christmas lights, or that boy at the bookman’s shop.
Hours later, she stands and finds she can no longer levitate. No matter how she tries, gravity grasps her firmly. She returns to her room and sits beside her spilled jewellery-making supplies. Her feet feel raw.
There’s a timid knock at the door. Her sister.
“Come in,” she says dully.
Illy opens the door just enough to slip in, and closes it right behind her. Wordlessly, she comes to Tamris’ side and sits close, hips and shoulders touching. “I heard you and Daddy fighting yesterday,” she offers quietly. “I swear I didn’t tell him.”
Tamris shrugs. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Now I’m never getting out of here again.”
“I didn’t tell him,” Illy insists quietly.
She shakes her head. “No. I know.”
With a little sigh, Illy puts an arm around her. “It’s not so bad here, Tam.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a boy in your wardrobe. And you’re miles ahead of me in magic. Why am I his stupid heir when you’re the one who’s good at magic?”
“Your magic stays better. And he says you were born first. Eldest is heir, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it? Grandfather likes you better than he likes me. Maybe Daddy’s trying to please him.”
Tamris snorts and flicks an amber bead across the floor.
Illy squeezes her close and chafes her arm comfortingly. “I’ve never had the courage to sneak out into the garden. Maybe that’s important, too. Maybe defiance makes you a better heir, I don’t know. And at least we’ve always got each other.”
That makes Tamris feel wretched and ungrateful. In all her years of loneliness, she’s always had her sister. She sniffles and bites her lips. “Yeah,” she says, leaning her head on her twin’s shoulder. “Cheers, Illy.”
.End.
merianmoriarty has my formal permission to pimp my fics on various comms (if/when i ever abandon deviantART, i'll go ahead and join the comms myself and take care of getting things posted in the right places). no one has permission to re-post this ANYWHERE, but feel free to share or link.
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