Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A few weeks after Barney’s fateful encounter with Will Stanton over some of his favorite woodcuts, he was taking a fish pie—a bit burnt and collapsed at one corner, not his best showing, but it would do—out of the oven when the doorbell rang.

“Could you? Must be Will,” he said, jerking his chin toward the entry hall when Simon showed a marked lack of initiative to move from where he was drinking a glass of water at the kitchen table.

Simon grumbled; he and Bran were newly home after a double watch, and he’d just recently sat down after emerging from the bathroom. His hair still looked as if he might have stuck a finger in an electric socket.

“But surely you should open the door, dear brother, for the remarkable Will.”

Barney did not give him the satisfaction of rolling his eyes.

He and Will had been to the pub once or twice in the last month, grabbed a few coffees during particularly sleepy research afternoons. He had told Simon and Bran several stories about their conversations and meetings, and soon after the first one the jokes about Barney fancying the university curator had started. Barney had assured them that this was not the case; his protests had had minimal effect. And Barney’s youngest-sibling instincts had told him immediately that the only way forward was to pretend it wasn’t happening; in his experience, if teasing of this sort found fertile ground, it would put down roots and spread like an invasive species.

He put an oven glove down on the table to serve as a trivet—much good it would do; the table had lived through more than a decade of large men living together in a small cottage, and it was scratched like a forty-year old desk at an inner-city comprehensive—and placed the pie on it before heading for the entry hall.

Simon, ever contrary, stood up as soon as Barney did, picked up his glass of water, and followed him.

They rounded the corner just as Bran bounded down the narrow wooden stairs, running his fingers through his shower-wet hair: he opened the door with a decisive pull, revealing Will on the front step, limned by the early evening light of late spring.

“Hallo. You must be Will.”

As Barney watched, Will looked up from where he’d been untangling his hand from a shopping bag: his gaze shifted to the doorway, and then to Bran. He froze, the shopping bag twirling from his wrist, his eyes fixed on Bran’s face.

Barney watched him take in the sharp planes of Bran’s cheekbones and jaw and the way in which his white hair, somehow artfully tousled even immediately after a shower, hung low over one long-lashed, tawny-gold eye. Bran kept his hair shaved closer on the sides, longer at the top; Barney had always privately thought the effect was that Bran looked one power fan away from starring in a glam rock photo shoot. His eyes were behind the slightly tinted horn-rimmed spectacles he usually wore at home, whose old-fashioned frames gave him an air of soft approachability and intellectualism both. He was, truth be told, the most startlingly handsome man of Barney’s acquaintance.

Simon glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and grinned; Barney grinned back. A person’s first encounter with Bran was always a rather enjoyable experience when one was not the person in question.

Barney and Simon gathered from Bran’s stories that he had been an awkward child, that his nearly translucent skin and white hair had earned him teasing in the schoolyard and superstitious whispering from the elderly farmers at home. Barney didn’t truly doubt it: children could be cruel (people could be cruel), and he could remember well what that awkward pre-teenage period had felt like for him. He had to assume that Bran must have undergone a similar transformation in order to traverse the gulf between childhood and adulthood.

But in the face of Bran’s adult beauty (for there really wasn’t any other word for it; sometimes when they went out Bran would limn his remarkable eyes with a brown pencil, and the effect was nothing short of devastating), it was hard to believe that Bran might have genuinely experienced the same puberty as mere mortals. And yet Barney had seen pictures of the weedy boy he’d been; in the few photos he had framed in his bedroom, he was almost always dwarfed by Owen Davies’ stocky body as he gripped Bran in a stiff but clearly genuine fatherly embrace.

Predictably, Bran had also broadened out since then, shoulders taking on the strong lines required for firefighting. In the most recent pictures he leaned smiling over his father’s shoulders, his hip cocked out with a swimmer’s grace and his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses.

(Barney was aware that if he were under oath he would not be able to fully make an account of all of his observation of Bran as truly innocent in nature, though frankly, these days the overall experience was that of having a very handsome brother, with some moments of inevitable artistic inspiration thrown in here and there.)

Barney watched, unsurprised, as color crept into the apple of Will’s cheeks.

And then he watched with surprise as a matching splotchy red began working its way up Bran’s neck.

In a croak, almost as if he had just been punched in the stomach, Will breathed out, “Bran.”

He said it Bran, with the Welsh vowel and the slightly trilled ‘r’, and he made it sound like it truly ought to, as well.

Barney and Simon glanced at each other again: even after years of working to get it absolutely correct, they were still subject to Bran’s teasing when their mouths betrayed them, often when moving quickly between English and Welsh vowel sounds in a sentence. Bran was always happy to soothe them mockingly about not being too worried about the mispronunciation, for it stood to reason that any Englishman would have serious limitations, in language as he did in anything.

Bran took a small step back, his expression puzzled but his eyes alert behind his spectacles.

“That’s right,” he said, finally. “That’s me.” It almost sounded as if he were asking a question; there was an unfamiliar lilt in his voice, which Barney thought might be uncertainty. “Come in?”

“I—yes, thank you,” said Will.

He took a step toward the door, before Bran could fully make space for him, and as a result, the two of them had to perform a strangely intimate dance to get into the house. Barney stifled a smile; next to him, Simon gave a suspicious cough.

Taking pity, Barney cried, “Will! Welcome, welcome!”

He stepped forward, taking Will’s shopping bag from his outstretched hand; there were cans of lager in it. Will looked up at him gratefully, shooting him the wide and open smile that transformed his face. His eyes crinkled and the dimple appeared in his left cheek; Barney could have sworn he heard Bran inhale sharply.

He bustled into the kitchen before he had to start a false-cough routine himself.

Simon seemed to have the same idea; as Barney gestured to the table and asked Will if he could get him something to drink, Simon held out his hand and said, “And I’m Simon. Barnabas’ brother.”

Barney paused in the act of retrieving a beer for Will from the fridge and turned toward the table once again, more touched than he perhaps ought to be: that was Simon being an uncommonly thoughtful older brother, referring to Barney by the name he had told him he used at the university.

He watched as the two of them gripped hands, and saw the moment in which Simon caught sight of the artful splotches of ink on Will’s forearm.

“Cor blimey!” he said. He released Will’s hand and asked, “May I?”

Will turned his arm, exposing the delicate artwork on its underside. He ducked his head.

“I know,” he said, “More ink than is proper for a civilian, or so says my brother the sailor.”

Simon shook his head. “No, that wasn’t—though yes, I suppose.” He grinned. Barney knew the men in the fire brigade, many of whom also had tattoos, might have said the same as Will’s brother. “But what I was really going to say was—”

“That looks like one of our Barney’s,” said Bran, peering over Simon’s shoulder.

“One of Barney’s?” Will asked, puzzled.

The tattoo on Will’s forearm was a combination of abstract color and clean, precise lines. The color suggested, but did not fully delineate, a verdant hill, with a blue and almost-cloudless sky above it. Perched on the green crest were six people, outlined in stark shadow against the sky—a tall figure with wild hair flapping above its head; to its left, three smaller figures with hands linked between them. And to the right, another two small figures, each gripping one end of a small object (a dish or a cup or a drinking horn, Barney had theorised).

There was a story in the bodies: the two small people to the right of the taller figure slumped against one another, exhausted but clearly at peace. There was jubilation and defiance and fierce satisfaction and love in the stance of all six: Barney had, more than once, marvelled at the incredible artistry of the image. He was used to it by now, insofar as one could be used to such a wonderful piece of work, but he understood why Simon and Bran were so struck by it, seeing it for the first time.

“It’s—” Bran pointed delicately at the figures, careful not to touch Will’s arm. “This looks like Barney’s work, is all.” He looked up at them, smiling slyly. “Are you absolutely sure the two of you first met a month ago?”

Barney caught the gleam in Simon’s eye: he could see that his brother was ready to join in the teasing, but then, as one, he and Bran glimpsed the reason why Barney had not yet broached the topic of Will’s tattoo with him: the faded burn mark that was carefully disguised beneath the curve of the hill—a still-vivid pink circle, quartered by a cross.

It had the look of something that had been painful when it happened, and Barney had been at a loss to think of what accident might have made such a mark.

As intriguing and beautiful—and yes, Barney had to admit, familiar; he had been genuinely pleased to think that he and Will might be drawn to the same styles of art—as the image into which it was nestled was, Barney had figured he could give Will more than a few weeks of knowing one another before being the one to broach the subject of an unusual scar. He watched as Simon and Bran came to the same conclusion; somewhat brusquely, Simon said,

“Yes. Quite remarkable; if I didn’t know otherwise, I would have said it was Barney’s. I’ll be happy to show you what I mean later—you’ll see.”

Before Barney could protest that if anyone was going to be showing anyone anything, it would be him, thank you, Will smiled his wide smile again and said,

“Actually, my brother Max designed it for me. He’s an artist as well. But I’ll admit, I… was rather unbending about the specifications. It’s an image that has always been clear in my mind, so I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like. Unfortunately I don’t have a whit of artistic talent myself. Thank god for Max, whom I drove more than slightly mad during the process, but who was willing to compromise his artistic independence as a birthday present to me.”

“Ahh,” said Simon, finally pulling a chair out and gesturing for Will to do the same. “So you also know what it’s like to have a layabout artist for a brother!”

Barney huffed and went back to the cutting board he’d left by the sink, quickly slicing his way through a few small tomatoes and adding them to the salad he’d been preparing. He reached back into the fridge for the feta cheese, his way of making the bunch of rocket and the tomatoes he’d thrown together feel a bit more sophisticated. It was as he’d told Simon the day they had chucked that old copy of Microwave Cookery in the bin: thirty, still distant but now perfectly outlined on the horizon, ought to be some kind of deadline for learning how to host people in your home and offer them something other than packets of crisps or a takeaway. (And as Barney delighted in reminding his brother, for Simon thirty was all but beating down the door.)

“I do!” Will was saying. “Max is more than ten years older, so he was already away at art school when I was still in grammar school. But yes, I remember the smudges of charcoal on everything and the dreamy silences well.”

“This one perfected the dreamy silence when he was still practically an infant!” said Simon, gesturing jovially toward Barney. “Our mum—she’s an artist as well—was always cross and melancholy when her paintings weren’t turning out as she’d hoped. This one, though—just long satisfied sighs as he stares out the window at the mountains.”

“I think they teach you the sigh in art school,” said Will, conspiratorially. Then, equally warmly, “Though I don’t know that I can claim that I exercise much greater vigour than a dreamy artist in the day-to-day, as a mediaeval librarian. I imagine most of us look rather useless in comparison, when one’s profession is to swoop in dashingly and save lives.”

“Well…” said Simon, preening exaggeratedly, eager to pick up the joke.

Then Bran interrupted. “But there’d be na worth saving if Barney and your brother didn’t make art, or if you didn’t help preserve the wisdom of the past,” he said quietly to Will.

Simon caught Barney’s eye as he turned to put the salad on the table, and raised one delighted eyebrow in silent communication: like the blush earlier, the comment was really rather unlike the Bran they knew, who normally took every opportunity he could to gleefully point out the “rubbish and nonsense” aspects of most people’s desk jobs.

And Will and Bran had been looking at each other since Bran’s quiet interjection, long enough that Barney would have called it gazing.

“Please,” he said, hearing the hint of laughter in his own voice and covering it up with a kind of bracing cheer, “Serve yourself.”

He fanned out the cutlery he’d laid out on the table, handing Will a serving spoon. The slight tension broke: thankfully for all four of them, Barney had unwittingly prepared the least erotic meal in existence. One couldn’t gaze soulfully over a haddock and mash pie.

Or so Barney could have sworn, but Will was truly doing as fine a job as anyone might, in the circumstances. Once or twice already Barney and Simon had been able to lock eyes across the table, grinning at each other when it went unperceived by the other two: Will’s own eyes never seemed to stray from where they were drinking in Bran’s face, and though Bran was spending more time looking at the table than anywhere else, when his eyes darted anywhere it was to Will.

Simon was keeping the conversation flowing around the gazing by the combined use of tried-and-true adventure stories from the fire station and questions about Will’s work at the Centre. Barney was quite certain that Simon already knew the answers to many of these from their own conversations, but he seemed to be genuinely looking forward to Will’s responses.

Eventually, Simon inevitably shared the story about the time he’d baked a pair of Bran’s glasses into a sponge in the fire station kitchen shortly after arriving in Wales—it rather bordered on a shaggy-dog tale, but Simon had perfected the delivery of the climax over the years; this, and the fact that it involved a surprisingly heartfelt moment after the glasses had been discovered in which Bran had assured Simon that the only thing that mattered to him was that they would be doing things together, and so he reckoned they had better get along, were the only reasons he was still allowed to tell it despite its length.

In the immediate pause that followed, Will turned to Bran and said, “Do you also have to wear your glasses when you’re responding to fires?”

As soon as he said it he flushed a deep red, and he curled in on himself as if he could draw the words back into his body.

“No,” Bran said cautiously. “But the protective glasses or the visor we wear as part of our gear—mine are custom-tinted, more than the usual. And my vision’s very good, actually, which is a bit rare for…” he gave an elegant wave of his hand toward his face.

Barney could see the tension in his shoulders; he realised suddenly that Bran was squaring off as if for a fight, and he wondered whether he ought to reassess his understanding of the last twenty minutes. He had thought Will had been looking so fixedly at Bran out of startled attraction, as many people did after meeting him; it had not occurred to him that Will might simply have been staring.

Barney had never been with Bran during any encounter in which people had treated him poorly or even differently due to his albinism, and he realised that if this was to be the first time, it would be a doubly wretched experience. He had not considered the possibility that the man whom he was rapidly coming to think of as a truly good friend might be what Mother had once tipsily called “an arsehole in the rough” after a bad experience with a gallery owner—the basic concept being someone who initially gave the impression of being pleasant and decent or even kind, and who only revealed themselves to be objectionable once one had “put in the work,” as Mother had phrased it.

Barney really, truly hoped Will wasn’t about to say something awful; there was a tense silence at the table.

“I apologise,” said Will. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“It’s all right,” said Bran, lifting one shoulder.

Barney rather worried that it was not actually all right.

“No,” said Will, lifting his chin and looking Bran squarely in the eye. “It isn’t. I’m offering a sincere apology. It’s none of my business, and in any case, you hardly know me from Adam, so there’s no call for me to be asking personal questions as if we were childhood friends.”

He took a breath. “I don’t know if I’m about to dig myself deeper into a hole here, but when I was a child, I actually did have a friend… the closest friend I ever had, really. And he—”

Will paused before continuing, “He was also albino, which I appreciate is rather a coincidence. We… fell out of touch as we got older, and for years afterward, you see, I wondered—I did some research on albinism at school and uni when I could, partly because my friend had worn sunglasses everywhere, and I’d read that albinism could also cause issues with eyesight and that might bar him from doing certain things. I wanted him to be able to do what he wanted. Because he already had done so much by the time we were just children, and I always feared that he would regret it if he couldn’t keep doing it all, afterward, in some way. There was… when we were children, his health was always good, you see, like his father’s before him. It’s difficult to explain. But I worried that after—that after we lost touch it might not have been. But I always hoped… And so knowing that you save lives and that you love it, that’s just brilliant. It makes me so happy to know it. Good lord, I’m making an incredible hash of this, aren’t I? I’m so dreadfully sorry.”

He was so painfully sincere that no person could have thought he’d been trying to be malicious, or even that his question had been driven by the careless curiosity that sometimes tumbled out of one’s mouth when one wasn’t attending fully to the other person in the conversation. There was silence when he finished speaking, but as Will looked up from his hands the pause was relaxed, the tension having fled the room.

“All right, English,” said Bran, calling Will the same thing he’d called Barney and Simon when he’d first met them. Barney rather thought it might be a requirement of friendship with Bran, like getting a provisional licence before the actual thing. “I believe you. Try not to weep about your boyhood sweetheart at our table, mind.”

Will’s head jerked up, indignant: Bran smiled at him, winking, and Simon and Barney joined in on the laughter when Will flushed, shaking his head and laughing himself.

Will offered to do the washing up, which Barney did not allow, though he did allow Will to crowd in next to him at the sink, so that he could enjoy the frankly stellar view from the washing-up window. The mountains loomed in the distance, lush and welcoming; Will and Barney smiled at each other as Will dried.

The four of them headed to the sitting room after; as Barney searched for a packet of biscuits in the cupboard, Simon absent-mindedly flicked on the telly. The last of the football had just finished; Milan had won the European Cup, and Arsenal—though Barney could still scarcely believe it—had finished top of the First Division after the late end of the calendar, and done so off the final kick of the season, no less. They hadn’t done anything of the sort since Barney had been a child crying into his Gunners kit; Simon, a Liverpool fan, was still grumbling about how no proper tournament ought to be decided by goal differential.

The truth was that out of the three of them no one was a truly keen football fan, but with the results of the season so tight, over the last two weeks they’d found themselves gathering around the telly to watch a match and chat more often than not. There was something habitual to it, now, and in the absence of football, Simon turned to the late evening replay of the news and left it on in the background as they settled in.

For his part, Barney was glad to let Simon, Bran, and Will do most of the talking: he found himself uncommonly eager to share his friend with Simon and Bran, and vice versa, and it gave him a warm sense of satisfaction to see how well they were all getting along.

He flicked his eyes toward the television as he listened to them. It was all a bit dispiriting: the situation with the students in Beijing seemed to be getting worse rather than better, and it sounded as if something awful was happening in the Uzbek Socialist Republic, too. The newsreader reminded viewers to tune in the following week to the Beeb’s Climate in Crisis special; Sir David Attenborough was going to explain how drought and flood and changes in the climate were putting the planet at risk.

Not exactly cheery viewing, Barney thought. Then again, it also sounded as if there were some promising U.S.-Soviet nuclear talks underway, and the Netherlands had just submitted an ambitious plan to tackle contaminated waters and other polluted areas in the country. The American Voyager II had revealed more about Neptune than scientists expected on its trip past the planet; the fact that human technology had reached the other end of the solar system boggled the mind.

Inexplicably, Barney found himself thinking of his Great-Uncle Merry—not really an uncle at all, but a friend of his parents’, an Oxford don who had always seemed to be haring off on a great research adventure somewhere exotic; Barney hadn’t thought of him in ages—who used to tell him, “It’s always a balance, Barnabas. The good and the bad things: humanity crafts them together, and so we must attend to them together.”

Barney was wrapped up in the memory when a familiar head of slicked-back dark hair and a posh suit appeared on the screen. He winced.

“This tosser!” said Bran, vehemently.

Aneurin Phillips was an ambitious Plaid Cymru politician on the Gwynedd Council, a local businessman who had taken a leading role in Plaid’s recent resurgence in Bangor and Caernarfon. He was a staunch proponent of Welsh language preservation—an issue on which Plaid had Bran’s full-throated support—and of more restrictive immigration policies for the United Kingdom—an issue that was often the topic of some of Bran’s most spirited after-dinner rants.

Most recently Phillips had earned the ire of the entire Gwynedd Fire and Rescue Service when he had pushed through significant cuts to public funding for both emergency response and literacy services in Bangor: the proposal had already resulted in cancellations in programmes for the public at the University, and was affecting staffing and supply for the stations and brigades around the area. There was general agreement among firefighters across North Wales that Aneurin Phillips ought to stick to selling cars at his flashy dealership and leave fighting fires and running the country to the professionals.

“Who, Phillips?” asked Will, curiously, while Simon and Barney tried to telegraph please don’t get him started at him without Bran catching on.

“That’s right,” Bran replied. His face was taking on the fixed cast that preceded his lengthier speeches, but right as Barney was considering interjecting with an overly enthusiastic offer of biscuits, there was a knock at the door.

Simon looked at his watch, and they all looked at one another. It had just gone nine; not terribly late, but they weren’t expecting anyone.

“Who on earth could that be?” he asked. He looked at Barney and Bran in turn: they both shook their heads.

Barney was closest, so he stood up, crossed their cramped front hall, and cracked the door, asking, “Yes?” as he opened it.

“Oh, Barney!” said a familiar voice, and Barney pulled his arm back, utterly surprised, and let his sister in.

“Jane?” said Simon, sounding equally incredulous.

He stood up and hurried toward them, and Barney turned his body to let him come closer. As one, Simon and Barney caught a glimpse of Jane’s luggage: a suitcase, a valise, and her handbag. It didn’t look as if she had packed for a short trip. She was dressed in a smart blouse and trousers, and her hair was pulled up in its usual messy ponytail.

“What are you doing here? What happened? Is everything all right?” Simon sounded thunderous, which was his usual demeanour when he was concerned.

“Oh, gosh,” said Jane. “I’m so sorry. I ought to have telephoned—I thought about calling from home, and again from the station in London and again at Chester. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t; I think I feared I might talk myself out of it if I did.”

“Talk yourself out of what?” asked Barney, nudging Jane into the house and beginning to bring her things inside.

“Oh!” he heard Jane say as he bent to pick up her suitcase. “Hullo; you must be Will. Oh, that’s right—the boys were having you for dinner sometime, Simon said on the phone last week. Oh, I’m even sorrier now, to have interrupted you on top of everything else. I apologise, Will. And Barney has said such lovely things about you in his letters! Oh, no; I’m ever so sorry!”

There was something of a wildness around Jane’s eyes; Barney suspected that if someone didn’t stop her, she’d be apologising for the fact that it was spring next.

“Jenny,” said Bran, quietly.

He and Jane had always had a particular connexion; more than once, when Jane was up with them—and even in that one instance in which they had enticed Bran to go south despite his misgivings about what he’d want with the great smog of London—Barney had come downstairs to find them chatting quietly on the settee. Jane looked up at Bran now, her body and hands still for the first time since she’d come in the door.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Bran asked.

Jane nodded, making her way to the front room. Barney shut the door and put the last of her things in a neat stack by the entryway.

“I… I should be going,” said Will. He was shifting his weight on his feet, looking toward the door.

“Oh, please don’t!” Jane cried. She leapt up from the sofa, holding out both her hands to him. “Don’t let me ruin your evening; please stay. I’ll go!”

There was a moment’s pause as they all contemplated the obvious question (go where?); then Bran said,

“Nonsense. You’ll sit down. English, with me: we’ll make her a cup of tea. Give these Drews a minute to sort themselves out.”

He jerked his head toward the kitchen, and Will near-scarpered out of the room to follow. Barney turned to look at his siblings.

“Jane,” said Simon, putting on the older-brother voice that was mostly endearing but which he thought was commanding. “Now, what happened?”

Jane took a breath. She pushed a stand of hair behind her ear and sat up a bit straighter on the lumpy sofa.

“I was at the office this morning,” she said. “Working on the same account I’ve been on for the last week or so—just as normal. I hadn’t slept well and I thought I better get myself a coffee, so I went to the usual place on the corner. And as I was getting ready to walk back to the office… I don’t know. There’s a hawthorn tree that climbs over the fence at the café, and I just thought: when was the last time I read a book in the park? When was the last time I was outside?”

She looked at them, almost plaintive. Barney tried to look encouraging, and he thought Simon might be trying to do the same, though he mostly looked as if the fish pie weren’t sitting entirely right.

“I know it doesn’t make much sense,” Jane said, finally. “I just realised I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m good at what I do, and the Exchange has been growing in leaps and bounds since ’86. The work will always be there, and I could do it well. Really well. I could continue being promoted. But is it really what I want to be doing with my life? Spend most of my waking hours inside a stuffy, smoke-filled room, with people shouting as they try to turn money into more money? Suddenly it was unbearable… Oh, I know it was impulsive. But it was as if there was a wave that had been waiting to crash over my head for months, and today it did. I just thought: will the days all blur together, for the rest of my life? Will I have to keep yielding to the men who run the fund and to all the men like them, smiling and nodding politely when they say, ‘You know, Ms. Drew, we like to see our analysts in a full face of make-up, hair styled. We find that otherwise the clients don’t take them seriously’? Oh, they want to see Peters in accounting in a full face of make-up, do they? Or is it just me and Anna?” she finished angrily.

Barney nodded sympathetically. Jane had telephoned him the day she’d received the offer for the job; the two of them had laughed themselves silly at the section of the contract entitled ‘Personal Appearance and Grooming,’ but Barney supposed it was less funny when one had to live it.

“Anyway. I was looking at the last of the hawthorn blooms, and I thought, with as much clarity as I’ve ever thought anything, I’d like to go see Simon and Barney and Bran in Wales. I have so much leave—of course I do, I can never take a day, and neither can Anna; we’d never hear the end of it if we took the same days as the men, even though we do twice as much when we are there! So I… well, I’m not sure I’m proud of myself, but I told Mr. Banning that I had a family emergency, that I would be away for at least two weeks, and that I may need to take all my leave if things didn’t improve. That’s more than a month at this point. And then… I left. I walked home; I packed my suitcase; I went to the station. I suppose we’ll see if I have a job when I get back!” said Jane tremulously, clearly trying for a joke.

She looked at them; they looked back. Barney wasn’t sure what to say.

“Do you want to go back?” asked Bran.

He had appeared in the doorway with a cup of milky tea in hand, and he extended it to Jane; she took it with trembling fingers.

Bran sat down on the arm of the sofa and gestured for Will, who was shuffling awkwardly by the door, to take the armchair.

“I don’t know,” said Jane, in a small voice. “I don’t think so. But what would I do? What will Mother and Father say? They’ll be furious with me!”

“No, they won’t.”

The interjection came from an unexpected quarter; Will was looking steadily at Jane.

“They’ll worry about you, yes—money doesn’t grow on trees, though we’d all probably be happier if it did, and we didn’t have to spend so much time fighting for it and over it. So they’ll want to know you’ll be safe if you leave your job, and well. But I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to be unhappy. I know we don’t know each other yet, but I’ve heard Barney’s stories about them. They don’t sound like the kind of parents who would ever want you to feel the way you’re describing.”

“Oh,” said Jane, her voice still a bit wobbly. She took a sip of tea and smiled at Will. “Barney’s right; you really are wonderful.”

The same flush from earlier made its way across Will’s cheeks.

“And he’s right, you know,” Simon said briskly. “I thought… well, when I decided not to complete the clinical training portion of the degree, I thought Father would be terribly disappointed. Instead he clapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘It’s good to know yourself, son. A sleepy village surgery was never your future. Helping people while on the move will be just right for you.’ Then he told me he was proud of me, and that he and Mother just asked that I be careful when I began training as a development firefighter, because the job would be dangerous and they wanted me safe.”

“You’d never told us that,” said Barney, looking up at him.

“Never came up, I suppose,” Simon replied. He shrugged. “So you see, Janey, once you know what you want to do—or before then, if you want to speak with them—they’ll be happy to see you happy. And in the meantime you can stay with us, of course.”

“Oh, I don’t want to disrupt…”

“Ach, and I suppose you’ll be down at the Anglesey Arms instead, then?” asked Bran, rolling his eyes behind his spectacles. “You’ll stay here, in Barney’s room.”

“Oi now,” said Barney.

“He’ll kip with me or Simon or on the sofa,” said Bran, quelling Barney’s protests as effectively as if the instruction had come from Mother or his crotchety old supervisor.

Bran sometimes had that air about him, of a certainty and authority that was hard to counter.

“Only if you’re sure,” said Jane.

“Of course we’re sure!” said Barney. He wasn’t looking forward to being booted from his bedroom, but that was incidental—he wanted her to feel at home.

The four of them tried gamely to continue chatting for a few more minutes, but it was clear that Jane was exhausted after her journey, and it was getting late. Will told them each how nice it had been to meet them, and Barney walked him to the door.

“Thank you for having me,” said Will, formally.

“Thank you for coming,” said Barney, startled into an equally formal response. He grinned. “We’ll have to have you back—soon, now that Jane’s with us. You’ll like her.”

Will smiled: it was a slow, genuinely pleased smile, and Barney was helpless not to return it.

“I do like her. And Simon.” He paused, almost imperceptibly. “And Bran. So much, Barney. Thank you. Thank you for making me feel so welcome with you all.”

“Of course,” Barney replied instinctively. “I wanted you to know them, and for them to know you. And you’ll get to know Jane now, too! What awfully good luck that was, even though I’m sorry she’s had such a time of it. Thank you for being so kind to her, and for everything,” he finished. He felt oddly sentimental, joyous in that way that felt a little too big for his chest. “You won’t be rid of us now, Stanton.”

“That’s good,” said Will. He smiled at Barney, his open wide smile with the crinkling eyes. “That’s good.”

Chapter Text

Barney woke up from a dream about the 1914 accident at the Garth Pier: in it, he’d watched as a storm raged in the Menai Strait, its small fishing vessels tossed about on the waves like pieces of driftwood.

The larger ships were not faring much better; as Barney watched—in the way of dreams, at once omniscient and grounded in his dream-body, dressed in scratchy wool clothes of an almost Victorian cut—a large steamer rolled and pitched in the water, moving much too quickly, before inevitably colliding with the wood, metal, and glass of the pier. The shards glittered in the lightning as the structure splintered; a tollbooth was left half-destroyed, its inner paneling now exposed to the storm.

“Quickly now,” Barney heard, low in his ear. “Before more people are injured.”

The voice was strangely familiar; so, too, was the loping gait and the determined walk of the two people that appeared in Barney’s line of sight, one tall and one short, running down the pier as fast as they could toward the gaping damage. They leapt into the air at the point at which the destruction began, and hung suspended in the ghostly glare of the lightning before diving smoothly into the dark and churning water like seals after prey.

Barney woke.

What a dream, he thought, still struck by the sting of salt and rainwater on his face and his sense of awe and fear as the pier had given way, the horror as vivid as if he had just been standing there.

He supposed it stood to reason he might be dreaming about the place: the five of them had visited only yesterday, buying a weekend ice-cream at one of the kiosks, sheltering from the sun under its elegant, onion-shaped dome. Bran, Will, his siblings; ever since Jane’s arrival almost two weeks ago, they’d all been thick as thieves, something which gave Barney a profound thrill for reasons he could not yet fully explain.

The pier had only reopened the year before after extensive renovation, as well: Barney, Bran, and Simon had visited then, too, to walk along the gleaming restored structure along with seemingly everybody else in Bangor. On their outing just the day before, Barney had read a plaque about the 1914 collision and the history of the pier out loud to Jane.

And yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that these recent visits didn’t quite explain it: that he had been there at another time, or that there was some other reason why his dream-self had been called there.

“All right, Drew,” he said, sitting up in bed and running his hands back and forth through his hair. “Let’s have a chimerical check.” He smiled to himself.

The phrase had been coined by his father when Barney had been younger, for those moments in which Barney would insist they had all been somewhere before just as the family was arriving there, or when he’d get ever more vehement as he tried to convince his siblings that there must be some truth to the legends in his books—didn’t they feel it too?

Father, with his trademark, staid gentleness, would say, “Now, Barney. Chimerical check.” It was their code for remembering what was real and what was not—Barney had had as active an imagination as any child, and he had also been blessed with no small sense of stubbornness. He found it difficult, even when he was very young, to shake the feeling that he was right about it all, even if his family wouldn’t listen. And so Father would reason with him, rather than try to argue: had he ever seen, or even heard of someone who had seen, or even read of someone who had seen, a chimera like the ones in his books? And if, as Barney had to admit, he had not, didn’t it stand to reason that there could be no chimeras about, as something that extraordinary would surely draw the attention of everyone around it?

The child Barney had been had ultimately accepted this explanation, grudgingly—though as he got older he had to fight the urge to tell Father that in fact he was now reading an increasingly large number of mediaeval accounts in which individuals did claim they had seen a chimera, and a hircocervus, and a manticore, and sea monks, too.

(He didn’t think those sources had been what his father had had in mind when he’d asked the question, somehow.)

Now, with the cold damp of the dream in his bones and the echo of a beloved voice in his ear, he stood up, wriggled his body to bring it to full wakefulness, and headed for the shower.

He was already slightly late; he’d agreed to help Will with a search around Bangor’s second-hand and rare bookshops today, and there were footnotes to chase up for his research assistantship with Dr. Vasu before the end of the week. They were out of milk and laundry powder, and on his way out the door Simon had hollered, “It’s your turn to go to the shops and there’s been no milk for two days! I bloody well mean it, Barney! You go today or you’ll be out on your arse!”

Chimerical check, indeed.

They had made it all the way to Caernarfon as part of their search. Will was crouching to look at the bottom shelves of a tiny bookshop, which they had found nestled in the city walls. Before today, Barney had thought he had a nearly endless appetite for book-hunting and for time spent in the musty-smelling crannies of second-hand bookshops, but the near-military precision with which Will had worked them through the area’s offerings—including some that Barney had never heard of before, and one place that he thought no one but Will may have heard of before, since it appeared to be a collection in someone’s private sitting room—was quickly showing him that he might be, unbeknownst to himself, something of a rank amateur in this business.

“Ah-ha,” said Will, gingerly reaching down to take a book by either side of the spine, to avoid putting pressure on the binding by simply tipping it out of the shelf.

“Ah-ha…?” Barney echoed.

He didn’t know what Will heard in his voice, but he shot Barney his lovely wide smile from where he was now sitting on the floor, and said, “This is the last of it, I think. Spot of lunch before heading back to Bangor?”

Barney nodded enthusiastically. His gaze drifted to the entrance of the shop, and to the elderly owner who had been watching him suspiciously since he had come in with Will. He smiled at her; she stared at him disapprovingly, and did not smile back. Barney chortled, turning to point her out to Will.

He ducked down—

And suddenly he was struck with the kind of feeling that sometimes took up residence in his chest: the high, tight sense of panic that had no name and often no clear object, but which he and Simon and Jane all knew to listen to, though they did not speak of it.

It was the same feeling Barney had had the day Mother and Father had been in an automobile accident driving into London when the three of them had still been children; all had been fine, in the end, but Barney had known something was wrong from the moment it happened, and had waited from 2:17pm to the early evening for the telephone call that he knew would come, heart in his throat and a stone in his stomach the entire time.

When the police car had pulled up outside the house Barney had feared the worst: he and Simon and Jane had clutched each other’s hands in terror, peering out the window. When Mother and Father both emerged from the back seat, Mother with a sling on her arm and Father with a bandage high on his forehead, Jane had let out a single high sob before opening the door and running out to meet them.

Now, Barney looked down at Will’s bent head; concentration was evident in every line of his body as he curled around the book to peruse its pages. He was utterly unaware of Barney, now nearly vibrating next to him.

What could Barney possibly say? How could he explain this? If he had been with his siblings, he wouldn’t have had to say much.

Will was quickly becoming part of the small unit of people Barney thought of as his, but he did not yet know the heart of them—the heart of Barney, or the secret of the inexplicable link that he and his siblings had forged in childhood, which demanded that they trust each other implicitly (stories about chimeras aside). It would have made Simon and Jane willing to act even if Barney could not articulate the why, but Will was likely a different matter.

Alight with dread and the frustration of not knowing what to do, Barney looked at Will helplessly and said only, “Will, I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“What? I really am almost done, Barney,” said Will, smiling up at him indulgently.

But Barney was no longer listening. Will had driven them here; Simon had the car and so Will had fetched Barney from home. He thought the bus from Caernarfon to Bangor was forty minutes, and he might be able to take that. His mind cast about: the thought of trying to follow the pull of the feeling by public transport and foot filled him with despair. He had no idea of the bus and coach timetables; no sense of how long the journey might take. He barely knew the destination—he thought, however, that the feeling was calling him toward the Menai Strait.

And in the direction, Barney suddenly knew, of the Cathedral close. He had a flash of the Mostyn Christ: it skipped across his mind like a stone over water.

“Will,” he said, finally, coming to a decision. Will might think him mad, but Barney could not think of an alternative: he had to go. “Will, I need to take your car.”

Will, whose attention was now fully on Barney, book neatly back on the shelf, stood up and rocked back onto his heels. His brow furrowed, a single sharp line bisecting his forehead before he asked, cautiously, “Why?”

“I…” Barney’s mind cast about for a good lie, of which, he knew, there had to be many: he could say he had forgotten that he’d agreed to meet Jane, or that he had an errand to run or a meeting with his supervisor. His brain jumped from thought to thought, unable to land on anything. The frustration howled in his chest. “I’m sorry, I just need to—”

He half-turned, not sure what he intended to do, but needing to do something. Before he could make for the door to take his chances with the bus, Will took a step closer. He peered carefully into Barney’s face, studying him.

Finally, he said, “You don’t need to explain. I’ll take you; come on.”

The relief was so intense that Barney did not stop to question him: rather than reply, he whirled, fled out the door, and in the next moment was out on the street where they had parked Will’s ramshackle Land Rover. Will moved with similar urgency: as soon as he unlocked the car and both of their bums were barely on the seats, he started the engine and said, “Where to?”

Barney, once again, floundered. He looked at Will with wide eyes, and Will started the car, began driving down the street, and said, “A direction will do for now.”

“Back to Bangor,” said Barney. “Toward the water. Near the cathedral, I think.”

Will did not question him. He simply nodded, signalling the turn and pulling the car ’round without truly checking to see if someone else was coming down the road. Barney settled back in the seat, stomach churning. Will sped them down the A487; just before they could get to the set of roundabouts and exchanges by Parc Menai, Barney said, suddenly, “Here!” and without questioning him Will swung the car off the 487 and onto Penrhos Road.

They entered Bangor proper: the feeling inside Barney’s chest was all but clanging now, setting off spikes of alarm that seemed to match the thud thud thud rhythm of Barney’s heart. Will, driving next to him, had his face set in a grim frown. He followed Barney’s directions, mad as they must have sounded, without hesitation.

Barney had them go right—was it Glanadda Cemetery rather than the Cathedral that he wanted?—then left, and suddenly he knew: he knew because the smoke was thick in the air, and there was the general hubbub of fearful excitement that seemed to take over bystanders during emergencies.

A set of row houses on Belmont Street was ablaze: as Will threw the car haphazardly into park, a tyre half on the pavement, they both stumbled out and ran toward the flames.

There were police and firefighters keeping the crowd back; Barney saw men from Simon and Bran’s watch, as well as many faces he didn’t recognise. There were two engines responding: Barney thought one might have been from the Caernarfon station. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned, Will was beckoning him—Barney followed as they ducked around the crowd, past a host of emergency responders who seemed too busy to notice them, and into the shadow of a part of the buildings that was not aflame. They were distant enough to be safe, though Barney could feel the heat on his face.

Where are they? he thought, desperately.

A second later, his thought was echoed by a gruff voice: “Where the fuck are Drew and Davies?”

“Went in the front before the collapse of the middle structure,” said another voice, grimly. Barney thought it might have been Dafydd Ellis, who had lived in the cottages with them for a time. “We had a mother saying her children were still inside.”

Barney turned his eyes to the blaze. It was towering, terrifying.

He’d had a sense of the danger of what Simon and Bran did—of course he had. He had seen it in the furious exhaustion in their eyes when the brigade’s Red Watch had lost a member shortly after Barney’s arrival in Wales; Bran and Simon often brought home the smell of smoke, even after showering at the station. But only now did Barney understand the hungry, consuming force with which the two of them communed on a near-daily basis. It moved with something that felt almost like intelligence: as Barney watched, the flames in one part of the building went out, seemingly as if by magic. A moment later, there was a rumble under their feet. A window exploded outward, and the flames returned with even more fury than before. Barney watched, helpless: he felt a hand making his way into his, and he turned to look at Will gratefully. He saw him watching the blaze with his lips moving silently. Barney wondered if he might be praying: he wasn’t much for it, himself, but he found that he felt a fierce burst of gratitude for Will’s willingness to do so.

“Where are we on that water?” roared the same voice as before. Barney thought it might be Simon and Bran’s watch commander.

“The Caernarfon boys are calling in their second engine, boss,” said someone else. From the bars on his uniform Barney thought it was the crew manager.

His eyes were darting, taking in the most insignificant details with a startling artist’s clarity: the crew manager’s epaulette with its gold accents; a wind vane twirling to the right of the blaze; another firefighter’s ash-smeared cheek and the tears gathering in his eyes from the smoke.

“And ours?”

“Still no luck on the impeller pump, boss,” said Dafydd. “It was supposed to be serviced, as you know, but with the Phillips cuts there hasn’t been—”

There was a low, ominous groan from the buildings in front of them. Barney had a flash of Bran on the evening Jane had arrived, of his low voice and his broad vowels, lengthened in his dislike for Aneurin Phllips as he said This tosser. He saw Phillips’ face in his mind’s eye and felt a flood of hate for the man—genuine hatred, he thought, a feeling like acid in his chest and his veins—and then the roof of several of the houses was coming down, in a terrible shattering crash.

Barney froze in terror. Will’s hand slipped from his; suddenly, Barney saw him running toward the fire, head down and legs pumping with a familiar sort of determination.

“What the—get that civilian out of there!” roared the watch commander.

But before anyone could do anything Will had vanished into the smoke, as if the t-shirt and thin trousers he was wearing were the most sophisticated of firefighting gear.

There was chaos: men were shouting; two firefighters were running after Will; another engine was wailing toward them, now, adding to the din. Barney had a single, crystal-clear thought—what shall I tell Jane?—but he didn’t have time to dwell on the horror of it before there was more movement in front of him, and then—improbably, impossibly, how could it be?—there was Bran’s white hair, and the wail of a child in his arms. Behind him, another firefighter in full gear had a teenager slung over his shoulders in a carry.

He turned slightly, and Barney’s every muscle sagged with relief when he saw the DREW across the uniform’s breast.

He looked again, eyes roving the street: and then there was Will, a little dusty and worse for wear, but otherwise looking much like he had in the bookshop. As Barney watched, he ducked out of sight and around the corner, and a minute later he reappeared by Barney’s elbow, saying simply, “Thank god.”

Barney gaped at him.

He didn’t say What did you do? or Where have you been?, for both seemed like silly, if not ridiculous, questions. So he just watched, still frozen, as the men of the Blue Watch enveloped Simon and Bran, clapping them on the back: the medical personnel rushed in, and as they took Simon and Bran and the people with them to the waiting ambulances, Will slipped an arm around Barney and helped him to follow.

A few hours later Barney found himself ambling his way toward the hospital canteen, already savouring the coffee he intended to order; his only requirement would be that it was the largest they could offer.

He was still weak with relief at the thought that both Simon and Bran were in one piece: he was thinking he might as well order a horrid hospital pudding to go with the coffee, as a kind of mid-afternoon celebration. Equally wonderful was the fact that the two young people with whom Simon and Bran had emerged would also be fine: the oldest had sustained minor damage to his lungs from smoke inhalation—he’d been found shielding his younger sibling in the bathroom, wet towels covering them both and the tap running—but everyone would recover.

The doctors were saying that protective gear or no, damage could not be ruled out in Bran’s or Simon’s case, either, and it sounded as if they would be on paid leave for at least a week of recovery. Barney had left Jane, who had arrived seemingly minutes after they’d telephoned, to wrangle the doctors, Bran and Simon, and the rest of the hospital and fire brigade staff with her trademark efficiency. One had to know one’s strengths, and coordinating a large number of shouting people, including two stupidly proud men protesting that they did not need any rest, was not his.

The sense of relief was as all-encompassing as the panic had been.

As he rounded the corner he caught sight of Will’s brown hair, its blonder strands glinting in the fluorescent hospital light. As they’d followed the ambulances to the hospital Will had told Barney that he’d unthinkingly run closer to the building to see if he could see anything; he reassured him that what must have happened was that Barney had lost sight of him in the smoke, ash, and chaos. It sounded plausible enough, and Barney—even if he could swear that Will had not in fact been in front of him on the street the entire time—was not currently in a mood for nitpicking. He felt loose, relaxed and magnanimous in his joy.

He nearly called out to Will from the intersecting corridor before he realised that he was bent toward someone else, speaking low and with intent. There was an air of barely-leashed violence about him, and an expression on his face so unlike any Barney had ever seen that something—he could not say exactly what—made him stop and take shelter behind the wall, just out of sight.

When he recognised the person to whom Will was speaking, he gave a start: it was Aneurin Phillips, in his posh suit and his slicked-back hair, seemingly not bothered about loitering on a hospital floor that was only housing Bran and Simon due to Phillips’ ill-thought-out policies. Barney had no idea what he was doing there, but he had more than half a mind to make sure that Phillips would shortly be elsewhere.

“Now, now,” Phillips was saying, a smug and oily grin on his face that Barney couldn’t place. If Barney had been forced to describe it he would have said that Phillips seemed to be mocking Will, except… What possible reason could an upstart local politician have to antagonise a university librarian? “There’s no cause to get so upset.”

Will, shoulders nearly shaking with what seemed like rage, said, “He is my own. They are my own. So I advise you to heed my warning: approach them again at your own risk. If you even think of harming them—”

Phillips laughed, his handsome face creasing as he threw his head back, everything about his posture a stark contrast to Will’s demeanour.

“Oh, is the pup threatening to bite? Down, boy: your master has forsaken you, and your prince does not know you to look at you. Poor Will Stanton, the youngest of the old—forgotten, bound to those who are not bound to him, and so, so alone.”

As Barney watched, trying to make sense of what Phillips was on about, Will drew himself up, and Barney’s eyes must be playing tricks on him from the exhaustion and his earlier panic, because for a moment Will’s face lit up not only with fury but with a fierce light. It was as if the sun had risen again, in the middle of a hospital corridor, with the sole purpose of casting a ferocious glow across Will’s features.

“My claim to him surpasses memory,” he said in a resonant voice, and Barney saw Phillips shrink back, uncertain, before he forcibly schooled his face back into a cocksure expression.

His certainty lasted only a moment: Will leaned forward, almost nose-to-nose with him, and though there was no reason for Phillips to fear him, Barney could have sworn that fear was exactly what Phillips was feeling.

“My claim to him surpasses memory,” Will repeated, more intently than the first time. He grinned savagely at Phillips before adding, “And you would do well to remember that forgotten does not mean defanged.”

He started forward, almost as he were about to chase Phillips down the corridor, though of course that was a ridiculous notion—but before Barney could make sense of it, Phillips scoffed, turned on his heel, and moved swiftly toward the exit sign on the other end of the ward. His shiny shoes clicked on the lino.

The fight seemed to go out of Will immediately: whatever strange trick of the light had cast his face into sharp relief faded, and as he turned and caught sight of Barney, Barney lifted one hand in an awkward wave.

Will opened his mouth; closed it. Barney began to ask, What was that about?, but he found himself mimicking Will, closing his mouth before he could speak.

Something about Will’s face—a deep tiredness, the kind of exhaustion and misery that didn’t feel as if it belonged on the face of someone their age—stopped him. And Barney thought of Will saying, “You don’t need to explain; I’ll take you,” a few hours earlier, and of what would have been if Will had not trusted him in that moment.

Barney knew that he had not exactly done anything to help, standing there in shock as the fire blazed with his brothers inside, and yet to not have been there… it would have been unbearable.

There would be time though for questions later. Barney smiled at Will, trying to communicate how grateful he was to him and for him. And then he said, “I’m headed to the canteen for a coffee and some horrible pudding. Would you like to come?”