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blueheronteanookRating: Teen
Major Warnings: No Major Warnings Apply
Genre: Canon Compliant
Summary: Laird Behaim may or may not have a wicked stepmother.
Before she’d left on Friday afternoon, his mother had filled the jar with a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies, instructing Laird to finish his weekend lessons and store away any spare time before he helped himself. The note was signed with love. Her handwriting was nice, even by Practitioner standards. Laird’s mother had taught him how to write, so he had precise, if a bit girly, handwriting too.
He’d finished his lessons early yesterday, storing enough time to put him ahead of his cousins for the entire month. Heeding his mother’s wishes, he indulged in four cookies that he stacked together and bit into all at once. Laird was probably too old to be enjoying his mother’s baking, but being in both the privacy of his family home and the possession of the bottomless pit that was a teenage boy’s stomach, he really couldn’t bring himself to care. The new dilemma that pressed upon him was, as always, one of timeliness: was it appropriate to eat the cookies for breakfast on Sunday morning?
He was up to the knuckle in the jar when the Hag entered the kitchen. Laird withdrew his hand, turning so that his back was to the counter, rather than her.
“Good morning, Laird,” she said, moving through the space as if it was her own. Her feet were bare as she crossed the tile floor. The long, pleated skirt she wore was the one she must have been wearing when she came calling the night before. The button-up shirt was not her own; it was wrinkled all over, one side bunching up further where it had begun the plunge off her left shoulder to her thin bicep.
“Good morning, Miss Thorburn,” he replied through gritted teeth. Courtesy was important. Hospitality in what would one day become his home, even more so.
She put the percolator on the stove. Rose Thorburn’s hair was styled like a few of the older, unpopular teachers at school; short, high, and a few years out of fashion. He could see that the back of her head was uncharacteristically mussed, almost as if she had been shoved around while lying on her back. Laird heaved at the thought, but seeing as he hadn’t had the chance to eat breakfast, nothing came up.
She asked him, “Would you like some coffee, or are you still too young to drink it?”
“I’m almost sixteen, Miss Thorburn. And no, thank you. I don’t want it to stunt my growth.”
She shook her head and smiled, like something Laird had said amused her. “Please, call me Rose. ‘Miss Thorburn’ makes me feel old.”
Because she was.
“You think your father will want a cup? Heavy sleeper, that man is. If coffee can’t get him up, I don’t know what will.”
“Normally we go to church on Sundays,” Laird said with a glare. Rose, waiting for the coffee to finish, didn’t catch it. “My father, me, and my mother.”
“Ah, yes. Your mother always was devout. Once a month is enough for me. Do you still go when she’s not around? Because”—she feigned a glance at the wall of clocks, wrinkling her nose in fake concern—“you’ve already missed the early service.”
“We’ll go next Sunday when she returns. Possibly even for Thursday’s service, since she’ll be back tomorrow.” When she didn’t bother to respond to this, Laird added, “You don’t have to set aside coffee for my father. He’ll probably wake up long after you're gone.”
“Alright then,” said Rose, before pouring herself a cup—she knew which cabinet the mugs were in, and took her time in selecting one of the matching Niagara Falls mugs his parents had purchased on their honeymoon—and sitting down at the kitchen table. In the seat Laird’s mother always used. It could have been coincidence, with the spot being located ideally beneath the window, and the warm sunlight pouring in at this exact time of day, but nothing with Rose was ever on-accident. Evil coursed through her veins as surely as blood flowed through Laird’s. She probably adopted puppies from the local shelter, just for the private privilege of kicking them.
Laird refused to sit in her presence. He would not acknowledge her as a guest, or lend her actions any more power. If Rosee was bothered by this snub, she didn’t let on. It made Laird impossibly madder, and madder still that expressing said anger would give Rose her satisfaction. So Laird continued to stand, back to the counter and arms hanging awkwardly at his sides. He was still wearing his damn pajamas.
Rose had retrieved the Sunday paper at some point, and was reading it between sips. From this angle, Laird could see that there was a chip on the rim, which marked the mug as—of course—his mother’s. Laird had attempted to jump on her back one morning nearly ten years ago, and she’d knocked it against the counter in surprise. She’d reassured a weepy Laird after the fact that she liked it more, now that there was a story to go along with the new imperfection.
When Rose had gotten tired of reading the paper—and when Laird was tiring of playing sentry—she asked in that rich accent of hers, “Do you have any plans for the rest of your Sunday?”
The answer was a silent and obvious “no,” but Laird replied, “We might go to a lake outside of town and spend the afternoon fishing.”
“Might” was doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Fishing was an activity Laird and his father enjoyed in his youth, before Malcom Behaim had passed (and passed his mantle onto his son.)
Sensing the insincerity like she’d sensed the exact cup and seat to use, Rose said, “Oh yes! He used to love taking you out when you were small enough to fit in his lap. I always offered to let him use one of the streams on my property instead of making that long trip out of town, but he insisted that the journey was part of the fun. I suppose it’s a good thing that my own children have expressed no interest in the sport. I couldn’t fish if I had been born with rods for arms!”
Laird forced out a laugh. Rose smiled again, the expression as unfit for her face as cashmere was for a pit viper.
“Your father is a good man.”
Aimon Behaim was—choices made prior to this morning’s events aside—but this was not Rose’s right to know. They were Behaims, and her a Thorburn. Any further intermingling would only risk dragging their family down to her level.
If Laird cared a fraction of a centimeter for her as a person, he might have wondered at the state of her own parentage; whether she had a father at all, or if it was just a vagrant passing through, as the fathers of each of Rose’s hellions had been. What sort of man would be willing to be with a diabolist? What sort of man could raise a creature as vile as Rose? And if all that was as Laird had assumed, then how much worse had Rose’s maternal predecessor been?
Laird refused to feel pity for the monster that begot more monsters. Quite diplomatically, he agreed, “He is. I can only hope that one day I will make him proud.”
“And how do you plan on accomplishing that?”
Like hadn’t Laird asked himself the same question every day. He raised his chin and set his shoulders, trying to emulate the confidence his father and his father before him naturally carried.
“I’m the greatest chronomancer of my generation already. Provided I continue to excel at my lessons, I might go to Toronto or Montreal for further schooling, and return to take up my father’s spot and strengthen the family line here in Jacob’s Bell. The agreements regarding property and practice haven’t been updated in almost a century. We need to renegotiate and reassess what the town means for all of us. Roaming packs of goblins, banished fae, independent practitioners—these things are examples of unnecessary mess. They sully the credibility and reputation of the families that have spent centuries investing in Jacob’s Bell. The Behaims, the Duchamps”—Laird bowed his head—“even the Thorburns.”
“You speak of ancestral obsolescence, but the solutions you propose are no different than what your grandfather and his contemporaries wanted to implement. Carrying on tradition, so to speak. You think that’s what would make your father proud?”
Now that she’d finished off her coffee, Rose brought the mug to the sink. She was still barefoot, in a stolen shirt from Laird’s father. Her very presence mocked the sanctity of the home, and now she dared mock the filial loyalty of Laird?
“I think I know my father better than you,” he spat.
Rose paid him no mind. She moved from the sink back to the stove, and retrieved the percolator. When Rose was sure that Laird was watching her, she upended the whole carafe onto that clean tile floor.
She had made a cup for Aimon after all.
“Oh goodness,” said Rose in a dangerously facetious voice. “You said your mother returns tomorrow? The coffee stains will have set in by then.”
Laird stared at her in disbelief. Rose stared back.
When looking back on this moment later, Laird would wish that it had been a compulsion. That there had been some sort of spellwork, or a summoning, or any sign that pointed to magical coercion on Rose Thorburn’s part. But the truth was that this woman, half Laird’s size and strength, had intimidated him with words alone. She had not threatened to unleash a demon upon the house, nor did Laird think she would—and this was what made his compliance so much worse.
Laird reached past Rose, retrieving the sponge from the sink. He ran it under the tap, wrung it out, and got on the floor, one knee at a time, to begin scrubbing.
“Tradition,” Rose said, “is a binding like any other. You give your childhood innocence to your family. You agree to attend school for whatever knowledge set they believe will serve them best, and you agree to return home afterwards, where you will remain for the rest of your mortal existence. You let them marry you off to whomever they please, and then you agree to produce children who will do the same. Remember this, Laird Behaim. It does not matter whether you spend your days scrubbing floors, or running the Council of Jacob’s Bell. If you uphold tradition, your life will be wasted in servitude.”
A tear slid down Laird’s cheek, landing on the tiles below. He scrubbed it away with the rest of the coffee stain, hoping that Rose could not see it from her angle above. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d seen him cry.
Around seven years back, one of Sandra Duchamp’s uppity third cousins had unleashed a Mare on the children of the rival practitioners of Jacob’s Bell. All of the affected children were too young to understand why they were experiencing a rash of horrible dreams, nor were they able to articulate to their parents what was going on. Grades dropped. Households suffered. One of Sandra’s other third cousins tried to kill herself. In the end, it was Rose Thorburn who’d disposed of the Mare and caught the perpetrator, whom the Council allowed the Duchamps to deal with in private. The Duchamp girl hadn’t been seen nor heard from again, and the whole incident faded from memory, like the very bad dreams that caused it.
It wasn’t clear whether or not any of Rose’s freak children were affected by the attack. And if they had been, it didn’t matter. Only Laird and Aimon knew that the reason Rose had deigned to intervene was because Laird, after one bad dream too many, came running to his parents’ bedroom—his father’s demesne—with tears streaking down his still-chubby face. His father had let him onto the bed in that moment of vulnerability, something for which Laird would forever be grateful. The moment after, not so much. Because there was a warm body on the other side of the bed, and Laird’s mother had left for Toronto the day prior. No one had ever brought it up. Perhaps that made it worse. Laird had slept easy every night since, knowing that once in a blue moon, there was a diabolist creeping through the halls of his childhood home.
Laird wiped up the last of the spill. He dropped the sponge back in the sink, and finally took a seat at the table, while Rose remained standing. He made a fool of himself and his family name, trying and failing to pretend there was anything he could do about her now.
Rose approved of his handiwork. “I told you earlier that your father is a good man. It would do you well to remember that only you have the choice to be a good son.”
A good son by whose definition, Laird did not know.
While he stewed in this advice, Rose busied herself about the kitchen, noticing the cookie jar at last. The inscription on the jar exclaimed, “Take As Many As You Please!” so she retrieved a cookie for herself, and bit into it. Laird watched as she considered the taste.
“Walnuts,” she said.
“Yes,” Laird replied. “It’s a part of my mother’s recipe.”
“They really are quite good. What a shame that my youngest is allergic.” Rose dropped the cookie into the trash can, wiping her hands clean. She emptied the rest of the cookie jar into the can too, only stopping to read Laird’s mother’s note while returning the empty jar to the counter, just three centimeters shy of where it had originally rested.
“Well?” she asked, referring to his lessons and time management. “Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Rose. “That means we have time to start with mine later today. Provided you’re not too shaken by the introductions, you might still find the time to go fishing with your father afterwards.”
Laird watched Rose go, shoes slipped on before she disappeared out the door, his father’s shirt still hanging loose off one thin shoulder. He could only hope she’d change before he came over.
A/N: Hey all, longtime Dreamwidth reader, first time poster :) Rae let me know that Pact content is now allowed on the Blue Heron Tea Nook and invited me to crosspost my stuff over from AO3, so here I am. LMK if there's any formatting issues, and I'll fix them up. I'm hoping to get some other Pact writers over here soon--can't wait to see where this Otherverse community goes!
no subject
Date: 2023-07-07 08:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-08 10:10 am (UTC)The relationship between Rose and the Behaims has always been an enigmatic one, even with the very defined scraps we do see of it. Laird, uh, sure is having a time of it, here, huh?