Chapter Text
The tavern was claustrophobic, and smelled of stale beer.
Holland thought dryly, as he ducked in through the low doorway, that it wasn’t exactly the type of place that boded well for a fresh start. At this point, the idea of starting anew, the idea that he could exist as somebody ‘fresh’, was borderline comedic.
“I don’t know where he is.”
Kell Maresh said it without looking at him, as he scanned the tavern with a blue eye, his black one carefully hidden by thick, auburn hair. With the way that they were standing in the doorway, it might have seemed that he was making an announcement to the few dead-eyed regulars who were lost enough in life to be three pints in when the sun was this high in the sky. At least, Holland assumed from the diffused brightness outside that there was a sun behind the clouds somewhere. Truly, this London was grey, from its uneven cobblestones to the heavens above.
People were beginning to dart suspicious glances at them, the redhead and the tall, white-haired monster behind him. Holland bristled, crossing his arms and wishing he could make himself smaller. He looked over his shoulder and, on quick, nervous impulse, closed the wooden tavern door behind him before doing a scan of the bodies in the room, the bottles on the bar.
He had several options if things went awry, even without magic. Grab a bottle from behind the bar, smash it, and use the jagged glass as a weapon. Alternatively, steal one of the smoking cigars from between one of the drunkards’ lips, spill some liquor, and light the place up. But that was difficult to control, and Holland liked control, as little as he tended to encounter it.
Then again, it might just be easier not to fight at all. He had wanted to claim a bit of peace in death, but he supposed after everything went dark, even if it went dark agonizingly, the peace would come.
A fire smoldered weakly behind a grate, across the room. Its heat was nigh undetectable from where Holland and Kell stood, but Holland still found himself sweating as he shivered. He ground his teeth together to keep them from chattering, squeezing his biceps so tightly that he thought they might bruise.
Not that Holland trusted anyone, but he didn’t trust this ‘friend’ of Kell’s.
Without looking at Holland, Kell strode straight forward to the bar and took a seat, still appraising the room. Training his eyes on the floor, Holland followed, his stomach churning.
Of course Kell would choose to sit with his back to the door. Now, Holland would have no choice but to follow suit. Up until the very end, Kell couldn’t summon the will to even consider lessening Holland’s pain, even in the smallest of ways.
Not that Holland would ever expect someone to do such a thing for him. He wasn’t sure he even wanted that now. More than anything, he supposed he wanted to go somewhere where the pain would ease, where he could be alone and where no one would hurt him anymore. And the only way to ensure the pain would stop forever was dying. He had thought that the White London forest had been where he would die, but apparently Kell had to deny him even that much.
Holland kept going back there. To the forest. To his almost death. To the sweet, sweet silence of the world and his mind alike. When he had felt what he’d thought was his last breath leaving his lungs, when Kell’s footsteps had faded away and they had said their final, stiff goodbyes, he had begun to glimpse the beginning of something he thought could be called peace.
It was dark, and it was cold, but it was not pain, and therefore it was peace. Certainly, it was kinder than anything Holland had known in life. For just a few moments, he was his own.
And then, Kell had come back, because apparently, Holland could not even possess himself in death. No, keeping Maresh’s conscience squeaky clean of wrongdoing was much more important than Holland’s autonomy, and it had been too greedy for Holland to ask even to die of his own volition. Kell’s footfalls as he retraced his steps through the desolate forest had cut through Holland’s peace like cannonfire, and for the first time in a long time, he had felt something other than pain.
He’d felt anger. Nay, he’d felt fury. By the way that Kell had called him, you’d have thought that his name was “wait”. Only once had he been called “Holland”, as though his name was too filthy, too unmentionable to cross Kell’s lips, even as it was being saved.
After a pitiful struggle, Holland had gone limp in Kell’s arms like a rag-doll, and Kell had dragged him back to Red-London. There, Holland had spent a pleasant week listening to people argue about what to do with him, avoiding the trays of food that were pushed halfheartedly at him by jittery servants, and alternating between drinking caffeine enough to avoid sleeping entirely and tossing back enough alcohol to slip into a black, nightmare-free slumber. Foul though it smelled, the alcohol here was tempting enough that Holland’s fingers kept finding their ways to his pockets, searching for money that wasn’t there. Pity. It would have been nice to make whatever degradation was to come a bit foggier.
Now, Kell was pushing the burden onto someone else. Someone he called an ‘old friend’, who lived in this stinking bastardization of London, far too foul to compare to Red, but far too soft to rival White. If Holland had had any pride left, he might have dreaded the ruin that would inevitably befall him here; it was one thing to face hardship in White London, a land known for cruelty, but quite another to face it in the place he’d heard Delilah Bard call “Boring London”.
Holland hoped Kell’s “friend” wasn’t worried about taking on any sort of long term burden. He intended to slip away the first chance he got and find a quiet corner to die in. It was a bit depressing, he supposed, that his body would feed the rats instead of the wild dogs that roamed the outskirts of White London, but then, it was also a fitting ending for someone who had been treated as nothing more than fodder his entire life. His life was something for others to consume, not for him to live. Now, there was nothing more than crumbs left, anyway.
And perhaps it wasn’t fair, that people like Kell and Delilah and Rhysand got to live their lives as themselves, for themselves, but Holland simply didn’t care to examine that discrepancy anymore. Although, it did make him a bit curious sometimes, wondering what kind of alien life they all lived. What was it about Holland that destined him for misery? Truly, he could only conclude that there was some essence to him, some invisible defect that everyone could see except him, that pointed him out as someone who not only could be hurt, but should be hurt.
He chanced a glance at Kell from behind greasy hair. He hadn’t bothered bathing while he’d been at the palace—seemed a bit pointless, really, when he’d be ending it all soon, anyway.
Holland was very aware of someone seated behind them getting up and moving to a more distant table. All he heard was the screech of wood on wood, and the creaking of the new chair accepting a hefty weight, but he could feel the disgusted glare that was shot in their direction.
Essence indeed.
“Would it have killed you to bathe?” Kell muttered under his breathe, covering his nose with a sleeve of his signature coat, as though he had only just smelled Holland. More than likely, it was to signal to the man across the room that it was not he, but his unseemly companion, who was producing the stench.
If only. That would have made all of this nonsense avoidable.
They waited in silence for several more minutes, or seconds, or hours, Holland didn’t know. What he did know was that eventually, the tavern door was thrown open with such force that even Kell jumped, and in walked a gangly man in a too-small jacket, huffing and puffing like he was running for his life, his face as red as the blood Kell magicked.
Maresh’s eyes lit up in recognition, and he twisted his torso to get a better look at the fellow, who met his gaze, and then Holland’s, in a half second.
“Master…Kell Maresh…” he panted, closing the door and making his way across the room to them. He gave Kell’s hand a vigorous shake in greeting, and then extended his hand to Holland, who placed his palm limply in the other man’s surprisingly strong grip. “So sorry to be late, really, I’m horrified. And this is Mr. Vosjik?”
Kell nodded. “That’s right,” he said evenly. There was a great number of people staring at them. For the first time in a while, he looked directly at Holland. “Holland, this is Edward Archibald Tuttle. He’s…well, he’s quite invested in people like us.”
Tuttle shook Holland’s hand with an eagerness bordering on aggressive.
“Yes, excellent, pleased to meet your acquaintance, Mister Vosjik. Just wonderful. Now, my cab awaits just outside, my home just a brief trip away. Nothing akin to luxury, but then, the ma—”
Kell coughed violently.
“—ah, your…work, has always come first. My work. We’ll just give you some time to get settled, draw you a nice, hot bath, and afterwards, we can discuss how lessons will proceed.”
Holland glanced confusedly at Kell, who raised his eyebrows pointedly.
Oh, Sanct.
It became painfully clear to Holland, then, that this was not charity. No, this was ownership. Tuttle would keep Holland from dying—whatever he deigned that to look like—and Holland, in penance, would give him magic lessons. Labor.
Instead of suicide, Kell had given him slavery. Because that was what this was, wasn’t it? There was no agreed upon price, no escape in sight, Kell was selling him back into slavery to this stammering fool of a man and Holland was supposed to feel grateful. Only a man who had never been a slave, only a pampered prince who still believed that suicide was the greatest pain a man could ever know, would truly believe that to be charity.
Irritated, Holland forced himself to nod at Tuttle. It was unclear whether he was sweating so profusely because of his arduous journey or his excitement. The latter suggested a possibility that settled in Holland’s stomach like acid: even the man who Kell was pushing him off on didn’t want him, only his magic.
Which, of course, Holland no longer had.
A part of him wanted to throttle Kell and demand why this foolishness was better than leaving him to die in quiet dignity in the forest. But, of course, he couldn’t do that here. Holland got a sense, from the darting glances and the judgement even the drunkards had for him and Kell that this was not the best London in which to commit faux paus.
“Well then,” Kell addressed Holland haltingly, “this is goodbye.”
Holland looked at the prince blankly, feeling nothing even remotely akin to sentimentality at their parting. There had been a time, once, when he’d drawn a parallel between their lives, had thought their magic connected them by an invisible thread. But now, Holland didn’t have magic anymore. And now, he knew that he and Kell were absolutely nothing alike. Kell Maresh and the rest of the world existed on a different plane from Holland. Such was the way of things. He had been through enough to know that much.
Holland nodded at Kell, meeting his eyes for what would become the last time. Kell had explained everything before they left: this was probably the last contact they would ever have. Even if Kell visited Grey London in the future, he was not likely to seek Holland out. It was a chance to build a new life.
It was a chance for Red London to rid itself of Holland Vosjik once and for all, without weighing on Kell’s conscience. Or, while weighing on it as little as it could, when he was abandoning Holland with a total stranger in an unfamiliar world with no possessions, no money, and no prospects. Really, it was a messier suicide than the ones Holland had been planning in his mind for years. One last ‘fuck you’ to the man without whose help Red London could not have been saved.
Not that Holland thought he deserved any better. He didn’t. Again, there was simply something inside of him that made him destined for this sort of thing. It could not be that the entire world had treated him cruelly until this point. No one’s life was that awful unless they deserved it. It was, as he had long known, a flaw inside of him. A taint in his blood.
Kell slid off his bar-stool, a shadow of irritation crossing his face before quickly disappearing. It occurred to Holland, too late, that he was probably expecting a ‘thank you’.
Well, thought Holland, the prince can suffer having his expectations thwarted just this once.
He watched Tuttle shake hands enthusiastically with Kell once more, thanking him profusely, Holland assumed, for all of the magic lessons that would never exist in his future. Kell returned the thanks in earnest, and, finally, managed to free his hand from the taller man’s grip.
With one last look of something in between scorn and pity towards Holland, Kell Maresh turned to go, slipping out of the tavern into the Grey London fog, which had gotten so thick that Holland only was able to watch his retreating back for two steps before he was completely obscured. A perfect day to disappear without a trace.
Strangely, the room seemed smaller when Kell left. The pathetic fire across the room crackled sadly, and the man who had moved away from Holland and Kell earlier gave a belch dangerously close to a retch, before positively keeling over in his chair, crashing to the floor and spilling beer everywhere.
No one moved to help him, though several of the other drunkards did turn a disapproving eye towards his splayed form and the dark puddle growing around it. Holland wondered, with a scoff, how many of them were telling themselves they were not at least that bad yet.
Tuttle’s face had a twinge more pity in it than that of the other patrons, but that didn’t prompt him to offer help. Instead, with the primary object of his affections gone, he turned to Holland with eyes like great, golden, stars. Holland had seen it happen a thousand times, but he wondered what they would look like when the warmth drained out of them. There was a profoundly naïve softness to them; in spite of Kell’s obvious disdain for the man, Holland thought they were actually quite similar. Clueless men whose greatest hardship in the world was being told no.
“Now then,” Tuttle said brightly, hopping on the balls of his feet, “shall we?”
Holland didn’t nod, didn’t say no, didn’t question. He did what he knew how to do, and silently obeyed, slipping away into his new master’s world.