forthsofar | a home that rings with joy and laughter, with the ones that you love inside

Entry tags:

a home that rings with joy and laughter, with the ones that you love inside

There was nothing wrong, exactly, with the furniture in their new apartment. Some of it came with the unit, while others were ones Neil planned to bring one floor down from his old, smaller place. All serviceable, even if some of it was a little plain. It’s just that none of it was hers, a realization that only struck Rosie once her few belongings from the Home--all she had in the city, all she had in the world--were packed up in a dismally small amount of boxes in the corner of the dormitory, awaiting transport to Candlewood the next day.

She’d gone out then, intending only to spend an hour or so in the Törgt showroom--just to look around, to get some possible ideas for how to make the best of what they already had. But she’d found one piece, then another, and it had made so much sense to think about getting another bookshelf, and the desk chair in her bedroom wasn’t comfortable at all… Before long, Rosie had a slip of paper scribbled with product code numbers and a growing awareness of two things: she was about to spend a truly breathtaking amount of money, and she hadn’t the slightest idea how she was going to get any of the things she planned to buy home with her on the bus.

“You know, we offer a delivery service,” said one of the salespeople standing nearby; mostly out of helpfulness, Rosie hoped, than a slightly grasping desire to take advantage of her clearly overwhelmed state. Whatever the impetus, though, the suggestion was a good one, and she followed him to the counter, coming away a few minutes (and several hundred dollars) later with all her furniture ordered and a FLÅTTEPÄK delivery scheduled for tomorrow.

The next day, after completing the last of her discharge paperwork with Matron Robin and getting David’s help to move her few boxes from the Home to the apartment, Rosie settled in, listening for the sound of the buzzer as she made space for the things she’d so impulsively purchased. It took less time than she expected. Going to the door, she opened it wide, pausing at the sight that greeted her: not a hallway full of burly movers toting furniture, but one single, slightly weedy-looking deliveryman with a pushcart full of long, flat boxes.

“You Wilson?” he asked, starting to pull the dolly past her into the apartment. “Got your Törgt stuff, where’dya want it?”

“I think there’s been a mistake,” she said, utterly baffled as the man started piling the boxes in the middle of the living room floor. “I ordered...I ordered quite a lot of furniture, what is this? What are you doing?”

“Yeah, you got the FLÅTTEPÄK service, right? That’s this. Instructions should be in each box, hardware, everything you need.” Rosie froze, staring at him in disbelieving, dawning horror, and he snorted--a reaction she found more than a little distasteful even in the midst of everything else. “Most people have fun putting it all together. It’s one of those...like a bonding experience thing. Oh, and I’m gonna need a signature, kid.”

What could she do? She signed. And then, once he had taken his cart and gone, the door shut tightly behind him, Rosie went back to the stack of boxes and burst into hysterical, embarrassed laughter. Taking out her phone, she sat down on the floor, the boxes behind her, and took a selfie, texting it out to all her friends with a brief if frantic message: Does anyone know how to build furniture? Help!!!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Fair enough," she says, dropping the screws into his outstretched palm before shifting off to the side a little, giving him whatever space he needs to work. While using magic struck her as a bit...unsporting, maybe, it was far more straightforward than attempting to puzzle out all the wordless diagrams in the instruction booklet. More than that, Rosie wasn't about to deny how curious she was to see whatever Nick was about to do.

"Do you need me to...I don't know, do anything?" she asks, though she's at a loss for what that anything could be under these circumstances. "Or should I just sit here looking suitably impressed?" She looks sidelong at him then, smirking faintly.

"You're looking at me like I'm going to do something really impressive," says Nick, eyebrows raised. He slips the screws into place and whispers under his breath, watching as they work themselves into place. "It's not anything flashy."

It may not be flashy, but it is fascinating, the screws twisting themselves into the wood at Nick's command. His demurral, though, pokes at something a little stubborn and impertinent within her; makes her speak without much thought. "Oh, fine," she says, feigning a yawn. "How boring, to have my friend who's a warlock use magic to put together a piece of furniture, which is so clearly an everyday occurrence and definitely something that would happen all the time back home."

Rosie can't maintain the charade much longer than that, and she laughs brightly as she picks up the instruction booklet again.

Nick huffs a laugh through his nose, picking up another screw and repeating the process, the piece of furniture coming together in his hands.

"Look," he says, still laughing. "I forget that it's not common for everyone."

Rosie rolls her eyes, but there's only amusement and fondness in the action. "No, I suppose that makes sense," she concedes, reaching out a hand to hold the next piece steady as he works. "There's plenty of things I'd taken for granted back home that other people here might find strange, goodness knows."

She moves to grab another one of the screws at the same time as Nick does, their hands colliding lightly. "Oh, sorry."

Nick grins, taking the piece and grazing his thumb against her finger as he does.

"Like what?" he says, glancing up at her as he works, threading the screws into place and then whispering under his breath. "What did you take for granted, Rosie?"

Rosie smiles, faint but pleased, at the light brush of his thumb against her finger--accidental as she's sure it had been.

"Oh, I was mostly thinking of modern conveniences, really," she says, shaking her head a little as he looks at her. She really ought to have phrased it less dramatically. "Automobiles, or the fact that back home we listen to the radio and watch television or go to the cinema, or fly to foreign places in aeroplanes. Things that people here who've come from far in the past, or from different worlds without any of those things, wouldn't know anything about."

Rosie looks down, studying the instruction booklet in her lap. "Silly things like that."

"We definitely had all of those things at the Academy," he says, focusing on what he's doing for a moment. "But I know there are people from worlds who didn't. You've...never told me much about home. Where you were before this."

"No, I suppose I haven't," she says, leaning back against the couch as she watches him work, the table--and it was the coffee table, she realizes now, not the dresser--coming together bit by bit. "Not that there was much chance to, with...well, last month being what it was." Rosie doesn't elaborate, knowing she doesn't need to. If anyone could understand what she meant, it's Nick.

"There's not much interesting to say about home, it's just..." Rosie laughs a little. "Just Oxford, just rain, and school, and running errands for Mummy, and everything else I was used to for fifteen years." She looks over at him, thinking, weighing what more to say. "But Oxford isn't where I was right before this. It'll sound strange, I know, but Darrow's not the first time I wound up in a different world."

"Oh, really?" says Nick, raising both eyebrows as he reaches for another screw. "Now you definitely need to tell me more about that, Wilson. Because that sounds fascinating."

"It was," she says, with a pleased grin at his evident surprise. "One of the most fascinating things that ever happened to me, really."

She pauses, thinking about how best to start, how to explain something that still struck her at times as completely bizarre. She knew now she wasn't mad; couldn't be, especially not after landing in Darrow as well, the city full of people who'd had the same strange experience of being so suddenly pulled from their old lives. And Nick was magical in his own right, on top of all that--if anyone might understand, perhaps it's him. Sabrina certainly had when she'd first confessed all to her so many months ago.

"I had this neighbor back in Oxford, a professor at one of the colleges there, and I used to look in on his cat--Jenkins, not that his name's important--whenever he was away," she says at last. "One day, Jenkins just...disappeared. Nobody could find him and I was looking all over the house for him, and when I went down to the cellar, I found a...I thought it was just an old sculpture, this odd gazebo thing that an artist friend of the Professor's asked if she could store down there, but then it was glowing and there was this doorway in the middle of it that I walked through and suddenly I was in another place entirely."

Rosie stops again, as much to catch her breath as to allow Nick the chance to get a word in edgewise if he so chooses.

"That must have been...startling," says Nick, the coffee table forgotten for the moment as he turns towards Rosie and gives her and her story his full attention. "For a girl who...for someone who'd never had any experience of anything out of the ordinary?"

"A girl who what, Nick?" she asks, looking at him curiously, even a little teasing, for a moment before letting the matter drop. "No, it was terribly startling. I thought for sure I'd gone mad, going from Lytten's cellar to this little cave and back again almost as suddenly."

Rosie laughs. "Of course, that didn't stop me from going back the week after and trying to go through again. And managing it for longer, that time. Until I wound up here."

"Just someone who'd never come into contact with anything magical before," he says, rolling his eyes at her fondly. "What was it like? The place where you ended up?"

"Old-fashioned," she says. It's not quite the word she means, but it comes the closest to encapsulating at least some of what Anterwold had appeared to be at first glance. "A bit medieval, people on horseback rather than in automobiles, or soldiers with swords rather than guns, villages instead of cities. Nothing at all like home, and nothing at all like Darrow, either."

Rosie looks over at him for a long moment, then nods, mostly to herself, as though making a decision. "It was almost exactly like the society Professor Lytten's been writing stories about for ages. Same name, Anterwold, and everything. That's the strangest part about it."

"That is strange," he says, putting down the piece of the table that he's working on and giving her his full attention for a minute. "Like being in the book?"

He's fascinated, she realizes as he sets the piece he'd been fiddling with aside; an action that both surprises and pleases her so much it's nearly the only thing she can focus on for a moment.

"Almost exactly," she says. "Everything looked the way Lytten always described when he'd read me bits from whatever he'd been writing, some of the people I met had the same names as characters he'd told me about...one of them even looked a little like him, which was really strange."

Rosie stops again, looking over at him with a wry smile. "I've tried to work out whether it exists because he wrote it, or whether he wrote it because it exists, and only managed to give myself a headache."

"Probably best not to focus on that too much," he says, with a smile, definitely giving her his full attention now. "I catch myself trying to do that, sometimes. Trying to make sense of every kind of bonkers thing that happened back in the Academy, that felt so...normal at the time. Never gets me anywhere, though."

Rosie just barely suppresses a laugh at bonkers, something about the word seeming to both encapsulate and fall short as a description. For both of their situations.

"That makes sense," she says. "Especially for you. I was only in Anterwold for a few hours, only long enough to make a mess of things just before I showed up here, and I still wound up with more questions than anything else. It must be even more confusing when what you're trying to understand is...everything you once thought of as normal."

"I was raised in the Church of Night," says Nick, shrugging his shoulders a little. "Amalia did her best after my parents died, and then I was at the Academy full time and they sort of...took over. I just never thought to question a lot of it. Because it was the way I'd always been told it was supposed to be."

"It was all you knew," Rosie says, with a faint and lopsided smile. "Makes sense you wouldn't think about it, any more than I didn't think about everything my life had been back in Oxford, or Jay and Pamarchon and everyone else I met didn't seem to think anything about Anterwold or that Story they kept quoting."

She looks down and away, laughing softly. "Until, of course, someone for whom it isn't normal comes and starts asking tremendously impertinent questions."

"That's true," he says, with a grin. "Whether it's Sabrina or you, that definitely does make it easier to start questioning everything." Like Sabrina with the Feast of Feasts, or the whole Top Boy debacle.

"Thank goodness," she says, grinning back at him. "At least one of my flaws has something beneficial to it."

It's mostly sarcastic, yes, but a little true as well.

Nick rolls his eyes elaborately at her, going back to what he was doing.

"Don't be ridiculous," he says, but he's grinning when he says it.

"Oh, fine," she says, exaggeratedly put upon, crinkling her nose at him as he rolls his eyes at her.

With a laugh, bright and pleased, she turns to the next page in the instruction manual. The table's nearly built, all thanks to Nick; it won't take very long to finish up at all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

a home that rings with joy and laughter, with the ones that you love inside

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject