a guide to raising perfect children
PANDORA HEARTS 57 OH MY GOD. This series. What the hell. :D :D :D *twirls* Haha, I love that I never have the faintest idea what's going on. XD
This fic! Has nothing to do with Ch. 57. ;_; I think it only has spoilers through 55 or so. It's the sequel to Steady Now, but can stand alone. Probably.
It's based on the idea that Ada is, after all, Oz's sister. So it makes no sense for Oz to be all crazy while Ada is normal, am I right? Plus, no one is normal in this series. They only pretend to be so as to shock you more dramatically later on. :D
I don't own Pandora Hearts. Thanks to zephy_magnum for the beta! ♥
A Guide to Raising Perfect Children
“Oh!” Ada sets her teacup down with a clink, more startled than alarmed. “How did you find out about Vincent?” And then she blushes.
Oz narrows his eyes and wonders if that blush was an afterthought.
No, no. He’s been spending too much time with Break, that’s all. It’s not possible to blush for effect, is it? And even if it were, surely Ada wouldn’t. Of all people. Someone innocent enough to think a relationship with Vincent Nightray is a good idea, for God’s sake. Don’t be paranoid, Oz.
“Break told me,” he says.
Ada nods wisely. “Ah, that makes sense. I guess it doesn’t hurt for you to know, but, well. I was going to wait a while before I mentioned it, since I don’t know anything really good yet.”
Oz blinks a few times as the entire order of the universe as he understood it collapses out from under him. Again. “What?”
“If he’d asked any more questions about Uncle Oscar, I would have mentioned it. To Uncle Oscar, anyway.”
“Wait, what?”
She sips her tea, innocent and wide-eyed. “Hm?”
“You’re…hang on. Are you spying on Vincent Nightray?”
“I wouldn’t say spying, exactly. I’m just, oh, keeping track of him.”
Keeping track of him. Of course. Haha, what!?
Oz takes a deep breath and tries to regroup. “So you-you don’t care about him at all. Or-”
“I suppose I do? I do in a way. It’s no different from marrying a man for his money. It’s just that I want Vincent for his information.” She nods, pleased with her conclusions. “Also, he’s fun.”
Oz feels a little faint. And almost indignant. Do you know you made me molest people for no reason over this!? “…Fun?”
“Mm. He tries to get information out of me, I give him just enough to keep him from realizing that I’m getting far more information from him. He pretends to love me, I pretend to believe him. It’s a game we play. It’s fun.”
Oz has no idea how to respond to that, or indeed to anything she’s said so far. This is not the Ada he remembers. She used to be spontaneous, but not, not…
Not this much like him, actually.
Of course he should have expected a lot of change. She was a little girl when he knew her, much less established in her personality than Gil was ten years ago. Gil is just a more bitter version of his younger self. Ada, however, has gone from being shy and fun-loving to being a ruthless spy.
His own sister is a complete stranger to him.
No. No, not a complete stranger. He knew everything about her, once upon a time. And even though she’s added to it-even though she’s added far more than Gil has-nothing’s missing. She’s still Ada. Not a stranger, just a language he’s forgotten how to speak. He frowns and focuses all of his attention on this different-but-the-same sister of his.
“You never considered that he might actually like you?”
“What, Vincent Nightray?” She’s incredulous. “Do I have black hair and gold eyes and am I named Gilbert? Of course he doesn’t care about me at all.”
This is a really exhausting conversation. “So he’s using you.”
“Mm. But for what? At first I thought it was just information on the Vessarius family-collecting information on us is a Nightray family pastime, you know. He did ask a lot of questions about you and Uncle Oscar, but it doesn’t quite explain everything. I’m starting to think he’s using me to get back at…Gil, actually. In part.”
“You just said Gil is the only person he cares about.”
“Maybe the only person he cares enough to deliberately hurt.”
“You spend time with this man willingly?”
“I told you, he’s very interesting.”
Oz wishes she wouldn’t look so earnest and sincere; it’s giving him a headache. And he shouldn’t ask. He knows he shouldn’t ask. “In what way?”
“He’s every bit as much fun to tease as Gil. If anything, he takes himself even more seriously. No sense of humor at all.”
“Right. You do know he’s killed people, don’t you?”
Ada raises her eyebrows. “So has Gil. So has Break. Haven’t you?”
I’ll kill him with my own hands. A palpable hit. “He’s killed innocent people!”
“Did he think they were innocent?”
“Did he care!?”
“Well, brother mine, that is the question. One of them.”
Oh yes. Different but the same. Ada always was too curious for her own good. “How do you even get information out of somebody like that?”
“Boredom works pretty well.” Ada shrugs. “His eyes glaze over and he completely loses focus, and then he’ll answer anything as long as I keep the questions simple. And he always seems tired. Did you ever read that book about sleep deprivation as a torture method?”
Oz blinks. “I, um. Haven’t really kept up with new advances in torture.”
“Oh, I have,” Ada announces happily. “Sleep deprivation isn’t new, but it is becoming more popular. There’s a definite trend away from anything that leaves marks, and toward psychological damage!”
“That’s…nice.”
“Vincent just isn’t interested. All practice, you know, and no theory. Boys. And he hates the occult! I think he’s actually quite fragile.”
As opposed to Ada, who has apparently grown to have a backbone made of reinforced steel. “Please tell me you don’t bore him by telling him the history of torture techniques through the centuries, because it seems like that would give you away.”
Ada waves dismissively. “It just confuses him, especially if I flash cleavage while I’m talking.” She primly ignores Oz’s choking noises. “And I stick to torture devices. I don’t want to mention any techniques that I might use on him later. Obviously. But I did show him my iron maiden! That ate a whole evening.”
“You told him the history of the iron maiden.” How did she manage to sneak out and buy herself an iron maiden, for the love of God? Oz is going to have to have a talk with Uncle Oscar.
Ada giggles. “He was very…hm, dazed. But patient.”
“I can’t picture him being patient.”
“Neither could he. But he did it anyway. I was impressed. And I asked about his childhood while he was being dazed, and he told me Gil used to protect him from everyone.”
“…Really?”
“Mhmm. Gil may not remember, but Vincent does.” She considers, tapping one finger thoughtfully against her lower lip. “He’s more difficult than most. I have to be careful to annoy him just enough. And not to be what he thinks he wants, because he doesn’t want what he thinks he wants-well, but who does?”
Not Gil, Oz reflects. A sibling similarity.
“-But I can’t be too far off, either. If I annoy him too much, he’ll give up. Just enough to keep him interested.” She frowns thoughtfully into the middle distance. “A challenge,” she concludes.
She certainly seems to have gotten a lot of practice at this. How incredibly disturbing.
“Please tell me,” Oz says, “that Break doesn’t know this is a hobby of yours.”
“Of course I didn’t tell him! I mean, I hardly know him. But he knows.”
“Why does he know?”
“Oh, because he does exactly the same thing. We recognize each other.”
“Break seduces people!?”
“Well, yes.” Ada blinks. “I think he’s tried to seduce you…? He never follows through, but it’s the same idea. You should have seen what he did to poor Gil.”
No, Oz really shouldn’t have seen what Break did to Gil; is in fact dizzyingly grateful that he missed all of that, hopefully by years. (He wonders about Gil’s clever hands, and then tries very hard to stop wondering. Never follows through, she said. She said.)
He has no recollection of being seduced himself, and he definitely would have noticed something like that. Right? Right?
“I had no idea what was going on at the time, of course,” Ada is burbling on happily, oblivious. “But looking back on it…”
“Do you follow through!?”
“Like a cat with a mouse,” Ada murmurs with troubling admiration, ignoring Oz. “Poor Gil.”
“So all this time you’ve been…thieving information. With your feminine wiles.”
“Feminine wiles?” She starts laughing. Oz doesn’t see what there is to laugh about; she absolutely is using feminine wiles. She’s like a cross between Judith and Scheherazade. His own sister.
He’s trying to tell himself he’s horrified, but it feels a lot closer to proud, actually.
“I used Oz wiles just recently,” she announces cheerfully, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes.
“…Oz wiles?”
“Mm. I said I’d defend him from his enemies. I even had a sword. I thought you’d be proud.”
“Oz wiles,” Oz murmurs, smiling despite himself. “And then what happened?”
“Oh, a man almost killed me, a little girl in blue saved my life, and I fainted.”
Someone needs to do something about Ada’s inability to tell a story in a rational manner. “Echo,” Oz informs her, feeling a bit dazed. “The little girl in blue is named…did you really faint?”
“Oh, yes.” Ada pats her stomach and demonstrates a deep breath. “Corsets.”
To his eternal sorrow, Oz is actually familiar with how hard it is to breathe in corsets, especially when stressed. Not that he will ever, ever admit that to Ada under any circumstances. “Ah,” he says neutrally. “I assume this was at my party?”
“That’s right. Vincent called out for…Echo, was it?”
“Echo.”
Ada frowns. “What a lonely name.”
It is a lonely name. That’s why Oz insists on mispronouncing it. “It suits her.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. That’s…well. Vincent called for Echo to save me. Which, surprisingly, means he doesn’t want me to die.”
“Please don’t say it’s surprising that the man you go around with doesn’t want you dead.”
“But it is surprising!”
“Ada!”
“Really, Oz, what could he possibly want from me? He must have gotten all the information he thinks I have ages ago. It’s been months.”
“Months!?”
“Yes, you took forever to work it out, didn’t you? I suppose you’ve been busy, though.”
Is this an angry statement, or just a statement of fact? No way to tell from her expression. “Busy,” Oz repeats mindlessly.
“Maybe Vincent’s planning to eventually use me as a hostage. That could be interesting. Hm, although at that point, the game would be up, which would be a shame, don’t you think? I’d miss playing with him.”
“I could almost feel sorry for Vincent Nightray,” Oz says. A lie, of course. He’s not a bit sorry. But it doesn’t seem wise to encourage his little sister.
Who says, “He isn’t exactly suffering.”
Oz forces himself not to think about that statement in any depth. “Ngh.”
Ada laughs, but blessedly doesn’t pursue it. Instead she attacks from a different direction. “How are things going with Elliot?”
“I refuse point blank to seduce information out of Elliot, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”
“Oh fine, spoil my fun. Still, brother, I don’t think you’re holding up your end on the information gathering, and Elliot won’t even talk to me. Maybe we should get Leo to seduce information out of him.”
“Maybe, although things are a little…weird with them right now. It doesn’t seem worth it; I don’t think Elliot knows all that much. And he’ll usually just tell you whatever you-wait, we are not talking about this! God, what happened to you while I was gone?”
Ada smiles brightly and shrugs. “You were gone.”
Ah. Oz looks away, studying the embroidery on the tablecloth. Then he remembers that he’s meant to be the older brother, here, and forces himself to meet Ada’s eyes. “Did you see more of Father…after?”
“No.” She’s wearing an ambiguously pleasant expression that gives nothing away. Oz wonders if she practices that one in the mirror. He wonders if he should. “It’s not as if I missed him.”
Oz looks away again. He’s not tough enough to be the elder sibling in this relationship.
“I missed you,” she says, and Oz throws his head up so fast he puts a crick in his neck. “You were my mother and my father and my brother. You were everything to me. You and Gil.” She drums her fingers on the table: irritation, impatience. “And then you were both gone.” She frowns. “Of course I don’t blame you.”
…Meaning she does blame Gil?
Say, for the sake of argument, that she does blame Gil. Say she blames Gil, and Vincent started flirting with her and asking her questions and acting as if he might like to use her to hurt Gil. To which she responded, Go for it. Apparently.
Mental note: do not annoy younger sister, for it is clearly quite dangerous. To you, to her, to innocent bystanders.
Oz distinctly remembers Gil describing Ada as cute when she’s angry. God, this just gets more wrong the more he knows about it.
“Gil is my responsibility,” he says. Too late, he wonders if that sounded weird and jealous.
“So he is.” Ada smiles indulgently. “All yours.”
Apparently it did. Oz scrubs his face with both hands and sighs. He’ll never win any awards for being a good brother at this rate. “I’m sorry we left you alone.”
“That doesn’t help much now, does it?”
Oz laughs incredulously. Is he privileged to honesty because he’s family? “No,” he admits. “But it’s all I can do.”
“I really don’t blame you. You have nothing to apologize for, and even if you did, I wouldn’t want to hear it. I’d want you to fix it.”
Meaning she does want him to fix it. Meaning she doesn’t blame him yet. Speaking Ada language may turn out to be a lot of fun. “You acted so shy when we visited the school. What was that in service of?”
“Brother! It wasn’t in service of anything! I was shy. I hadn’t seen you in ten years. I thought…”
She looks down at her lap, twists her fingers together awkwardly, and bites her lip.
Ah, there’s my little sister. “You thought I wouldn’t recognize you.”
She nods.
“I thought you wouldn’t remember me.”
She looks up and smiles, carefully, consciously unlacing her fingers and forcing her hands to be still. “But look. We were both wrong.”
Yes. Yes, we were both wrong.
“Anyway…that was real. So it’s different.”
Oz blinks. “Real?”
“Mm. When…when I’m with Vincent, that’s not really me? It doesn’t exactly count. It’s an act, a game. When you came to visit, that was real.”
“I see.” The actress is shy, but the character she’s playing isn’t. That makes sense. And how much has she been acting today? “I’m sorry,” Oz says hesitantly, “we haven’t talked much since.”
She shrugs. “We’re busy. I’m as guilty as you.”
“No, you’re in school. You can’t just-”
“I make time for Vincent, don’t I?”
“Argh!”
Ada blushes theatrically. Definitely theatrically. So you can fake a blush. Now that’s upsetting.
Okay, actually Oz has faked blushes himself, but he was already in an agitated state at the time. He was just misusing the blush that was already there. He couldn’t sit cold and blush on cue the way his sister apparently can. It’s creepier the way she does it. Really.
“There’s possibly something very wrong with both of us,” he points out.
“Dear brother, I don’t know if you noticed, but our upbringing was a little strange.”
They both smile, and sit gazing at each other for a while in companionable silence. So this is Oz’s sister. All grown up.
“Um. Oz?”
“Yes?”
“Is that a, um. What is that? On your neck?”
“Nothing,” Oz says definitively.
“Only it looks like a bite mark.”
“Ha ha.” Oz tugs at the collar that was supposed to be hiding the damn thing. “Imagine that.” It’s unfortunate, but he’s going to have to kill Alice when he gets home. He’ll miss her when she’s dead. “What happened was, I fell down the stairs.”
Ada covers a smile with her hand, ladylike. “I see,” she says. “Stairs.”
“And I ran into a door. Doorknobs are very dangerous for necks.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“It’s hard to be so accident-prone.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Thank God for that.”
She laughs. Not the light, girlish laughter she’s used up to now, either. The best adjective to describe it, Oz thinks, is raucous. He pouts and wrestles with the temptation to say, I did it for you. He manages to keep quiet in the end because when you stare at a sentence like that, all alone and out of context, it looks pretty incredibly creepy.
And besides, it’s not true. He can really only blame Ada for the timing.
“I should head back,” he cuts into the laughter with an aggrieved sigh. “And I’ll report to Break that you’ve got everything under control and aren’t being taken advantage of. If he doesn’t know it already, which I’m starting to doubt.”
Ada giggles, and Oz smiles back at her. His femme fatale sister. Which is kind of fantastic, from a certain, extremely improper point of view.
He makes his way to the door, but hesitates before walking through it. “I think I’m actually glad,” he says. “I’m glad you’re my older younger sister now.” He smiles at her faintly quirked eyebrow. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you grow up, but…we’ll probably have a lot more fun this way.”
Ada smiles-the first one of this variety he’s seen today. The evil, catlike smile she used to use after she’d done something especially awful, like bullying Gil into a frilly dress. “You have no idea how much fun we’re going to have, brother,” she murmurs.
Oz grins. As children, they were always on the same side, no matter what, even if they were mid-feud. Apparently that’s still true. Still the us to everyone else’s them, even after ten years.
Watch out, world.
* * *
Oz returns to the Rainsworth estate just as everyone’s sitting down to lunch. It’s the usual demented scene: a room like a work of art, a gracefully arrayed table, delicious-smelling, attractively presented food-and the effect utterly ruined by the diners. Alice has a mountain of meat in front of her, and is devouring it as if starved. Gil is dubiously poking at a salad, apparently suspecting poison. Break is playing with his stockpile of cakes and Sharon is delicately eating her one. It’s hard to spot, but Sharon usually ends up eating more of Break’s cake than Break does.
Oz knows these people very well. They’re a language he’s learned inside out and backward, and never forgotten.
Break and Sharon both turn to him with matching deeply worried expressions he has no trouble interpreting. He shakes his head at them. “She’s doing it on purpose, you know.”
Silence for one heartbeat, two-
“Is she really?”
Oz has never heard Break sound so delighted, so apparently he didn’t know. Sharon gives a horrified giggle and claps her hand over her mouth to stifle it.
Oz sighs. “Yes, really. She claims she learned from the best, which is to say you, Break.”
Break sniffs. “I don’t go around sharing my technique.”
“By observation.”
“But-oh. Oh, but she was very…young.”
At least Break now looks as disturbed as Oz feels. Oz can’t decide if he wants to get Break alone and grill him about whatever it was he did to Gil, or if he’d prefer to leave that a mystery forever.
“Well, that’s good news, Oz.” Only Sharon would call this good news. But it’s true that it could have been much worse. That Oz expected it to be much worse. “Come sit down. You must be…tired. After last night.”
She might just mean the long day he had with Break. That would be a very possible interpretation of that statement. Her sly, delighted expression, unfortunately, can only be taken one way.
Oz really, really should have shut the door last night.
He’s put off facing the music as long as he could. He tells himself to man up, and turns to face those most affected by last night’s meltdown.
He went to Alice’s room after he left Gil and stayed until almost morning. Then he went back to his own room and slept for two hours before he had to get ready to see Ada. No dreams that he remembers; that’s what complete exhaustion will do for you.
He shouldn’t have gone to Alice. Of course, he shouldn’t have jumped Gil, either. In fact, his behavior in general has been pretty questionable lately.
Alice, of course, is of the opinion that nothing remotely unusual has happened any time recently; she glances at him in her usual half pleased, half ferally possessive manner before turning back to her food, which is clearly more interesting. They’ll just have to have that talk about bite marks some time after lunch. But all seems well there.
Gil, meanwhile, is refusing to look at anyone. He didn’t look up when Oz came into the room, he didn’t comment on Ada, and he hasn’t asked any questions. None of this is normal Gil behavior.
Well, that can’t be allowed to go on.
Oz marches over to Gil’s chair, and Gil turns to him in apparent reflex. Oz leans down and kisses him on the mouth in front of everyone, thereby killing all conversation at the table.
The silence doesn’t last long, more’s the pity. “Oh my,” Break says in an obscenely delighted tone. From the sound of it, this is turning out to be the most hilarious day of his life. Fantastic.
Oz pulls back and studies Gil, who’s stupefied beyond his ability to cope. But not upset anymore-just hideously confused. That’s all right, then.
Gil taken care of, Oz makes his way to Alice, tugs gently on her hair until he’s distracted her from food, and kisses her, too. To keep things balanced. To make things clear. Oz admires his sister, but he has no intention of twisting his love life into a pretzel of lies and madness to match hers.
Alice catches his lower lip briefly between her teeth before releasing him with a puzzled frown. She studies his face uneasily, as if looking for something and not finding it. But she shrugs and returns to her meal without comment. Apparently whatever Oz is missing isn’t worth worrying over.
“You didn’t bribe her with food, did you?” Sharon asks in a hurtfully cold and suspicious tone. It’s very Sharon to be more worried about Alice than Gil, when Gil is about a thousand times more likely to be victimized.
“No,” Oz answers quickly, a little afraid for his life. “I just asked!” In fact, Alice had been distressingly unfazed by the idea. Dwelling on that will only make Oz wonder whether Jack taught her more than just dancing, which is why he’s not going to dwell on it any more than he is on Gil’s clever hands.
Anyway, Jack wouldn’t have. That would’ve been wrong beyond belief. She was a child then, and Jack was an adult, and Jack…wouldn’t do that.
Would he? The man who willingly spent all his time with the Baskervilles. The hero who killed his own best friend.
That was a hundred years ago; you can’t do a thing about it now. Let it go. Accept.
Sharon narrows her eyes, but nods reluctantly. Happy for now. Oz is sure she’ll interrogate Alice later, and she may yet kill him. But he really is innocent. This time. For a given value of innocence.
He walks away before Break has a chance to comment (again), tousling Gil’s hair in passing and making him jump, continuing all the way to his borrowed room without a backward glance. He closes the door and locks it behind him, then collapses on the bed and laughs hysterically for half an hour.
If Sharon’s watching through his shadow, he hopes she’s enjoying the show. His life, God knows, is a spectacle.