Autumn: A Crow City Side Story

by Cole McCade

  His eyes widened. His breaths caught, and he looked away quickly. No. Hell no.

  He wasn’t going there.

  “You do believe,” he managed to choke out, searching desperately for something to say when every word he thought of was shoved aside by the vision of Wally’s lips parting under Joseph’s fingertips. “Seriously, Wally, you’re not British. What’s with the accent?”

  Wally drew himself up with an exaggerated gasp. “This is not British, my darling dear.” The scrape of his chair sliding back drew Joseph to look at him as Wally stood, flinging his arms out with a flourish before bringing them into bow gracefully, one hand over his heart; Joseph laughed as Wally pronounced grandly, “This is stage diction. I took a class for it at a community college in Biloxi, you know.” He straightened and reclaimed his seat with a self-deprecating smile. “I must command attention, project gravitas, entice excitement, and build an aura of wonder, mystery, and anticipation. Without those capabilities in a ringmaster, a circus is nothing but a sideshow.”

  Some note of wistfulness in Wally’s voice caught Joseph, and he tilted his head. “Why the circus, though? Of all the directions your life could take you…how did you end up there?”

  “Ah. That.” A little pinched wrinkle appeared between Wally’s brows. “You know Miriam and I were foster children, don’t you?”

  “No. I…she never let me know her, not really. Not past a certain point. Sometimes I think I loved the lacquer on the surface, and not the real woman. And, well…I’ve never given you a chance to tell me that kind of thing.”

  “I suppose I am telling you now, then. It’s not an uncommon story, really, but it does have an effect on the young and lonely.” Wally trailed off, fingers drumming to the side of his teacup, pensive gaze flicking to Joseph and then away, looking toward the window with an actor’s studied diffidence. His voice was too flippant, too glib when he said, “We never did find a permanent foster family. Simply moved from home to home, she growing wilder and more troublesome with each one as the hurt of being abandoned cut deeper and deeper. I tried to shelter her, but…” Slim shoulders rolled stiffly. “We grew up feeling like freaks. Only wanted for a short time before it was time to move somewhere else, once the luster and magnanimity and novelty of a matched pair wore off. And then suddenly I was of age and she not long after, and it was out of the foster system and into the wide world on our own, wondering what path we could follow when we only knew one way of life.”

  His hands clenched against the teacup so hard it rattled against its saucer; the little spoon bounced and tumbled off onto the table. Joseph hesitated, then reached out to rest one hand to Wally’s wrist, fingertips curling over the back of his hand and pressing against that fine, fragile white skin. Wally jerked, looking down at their hands, eyes widening fractionally—but his grip eased, and he stared at Joseph with naked longing in his eyes, something so deep that it pulled Joseph in, drawn far into the quiet, still darkness of Wally, the night of him with the quiet glow of his steady moonlight taking Joseph ever further into his yearning. And Joseph found himself compelled closer, found himself leaning in…

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. He caught himself and jerked back, his chest tight. What the fuck was wrong with him? Was he so starved for a bit of companionship, another adult to talk to, that he was…he…fuck. He pulled his hand away from Wally’s and curled it on the table; it sat there looking so fucking conspicuous, a smoking gun, and he avoided Wally’s searching, questioning gaze to stare sightlessly somewhere past his shoulder.

  “So wandering led you to carnival life?” he asked pointedly.

  “I…yes.” A sigh, faint, but Wally picked up the thread, shaking his head. “It turns out that way of life works quite well for a traveling circus. Gallifrey’s Glories, a veritable smorgasbord for the senses, a feast of the delightful and the macabre. Arrive and display your oddities, your freakishness, your strangeness and magic and wonder, then leave before everyone feels the need to wipe the stink of you off the soles of their shoes.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “Hm?”

  “Children are always sad to see the circus leave. When Gallifrey’s came to Crow City, even when Willow was barely old enough to make words she’d be miserable for days after you left, because for a little while longer the magic had been taken out of her world.”

  Joseph remembered, now, one of the only times he’d come close to raising his voice to Willow. After the court battle, Walford had swept away with his carnival again—and Willow had blamed Joseph. She’d been convinced Wally was never coming back, that she’d never ride the Tilt-a-Whirl and throw peanuts for Wally to catch ever again, and she’d said she would run away like Mama. Run away and join the circus, and never come home.

  He’d been terrified. So terrified that he’d lose his daughter after he’d fought to win her again, and he’d shouted Don’t you—before catching himself, lowering his voice, and sending her to her room to cool her heels before banishing himself to his own to do the same.

  And he realized, now, that back then he’d been just as fucking upset as Willow that Wally had left.

  Left, and not stayed to ease the hurt of what he’d done.

  Wally smiled slightly, sadly. “Willow always did believe in some kind of magic.”

  “She did. Does. I wonder where she got it from.” Joseph answered that smile with a tired one of his own. “But some people do still cling to magic, even when they’re far too old for it.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know.” Had he been asked two weeks ago, in his cynicism and exhaustion Joseph would have said no. But this morning, sitting across from a man he’d hated less than twelve hours ago, sharing tea while outside the leaves began to turn toward fall…this moment shimmered with a touch of enchantment, flavored loamy and vividly bright. “But it sounds to me like you made a family that would go with you where you went, and never leave you behind. That’s magic, if you ask me.”

  “I suppose I did. But we’ve all left each other behind, now. Different lives. Different worlds.” Wally picked up the spoon he’d dropped and twirled it between his fingers. “I think some part of me fancied myself a father to them all, and sooner or later one’s children fly the nest.”

  “Where were your parents?”

  “I don’t know. We were never told, and neither I nor Miriam remember. I’m not even quite certain where we’re from; my earliest memory was Albuquerque, a foster family there, but after that there was Las Vegas, Santa Cruz, Nashville, St. Louis…we followed a path with no idea where it began or who it began with. Perhaps we were taken from them, perhaps they abandoned us, perhaps they died…but we began life knowing what it meant to be left behind.” Wally turned the spoon and looked into its bowl as if staring into a mirror. “Or perhaps I spent my life letting people go. I don’t know where the line is anymore.”

  “One you choose,” Joseph said. “The other, they choose.”

  Wally’s face fell. “But if I don’t fight hard enough for them to stay—”

  “That’s not your choice. It never is.” Joseph shook his head. “If they truly wanted to stay, they would make that decision themselves. You can’t take responsibility for what other people do.” Under the table, he shifted enough to nudge Wally’s knee with his own. “And you can’t blame yourself.”

  Wally exhaled heavily and set the spoon down, before offering a wan smile. “You have a bizarrely remarkable insight into my thoughts, sometimes.”

  “Me? You should damned well start charging for readings. It’s creepy, sometimes, how you know what’s going through my head.” Joseph hesitated, then added, “…and how you know what I need to hear.”

  “Another hazard of the job, darling dear. You learn to read the crowd, whether it’s one at a time or as a collective whole. This hive mind, and you must learn to quickly know them—and then direct them to feel as you wish them to feel.” Wally smoothed his hair back from his face. “It’s not so simple, with people you ca
re about. No amount of stage tricks can make them feel how you wish. Nor would you ever want to manipulate them in such a way.”

  Joseph didn’t know what to say to that. Not when any answer would be pregnant with potential; not with that twisting, nameless emotion inside him catching on to unspoken things and whispering formless questions, confusions into his ear.

  “Sometimes it’s a good ability to have, though,” he fumbled. “I know Willow always trusted you when she was upset. You had a way of making her forget all about it.”

  “Smoke and mirrors, distraction and bright colors,” Wally said with an airy gesture. “But yes…it has had its uses. After Gallifrey’s ill-timed sojourn in New Orleans…after Hurricane Katrina. I had to hide my own grief behind smoke and a smile, until that smile reflected on every face around me. So many grieving, so much lost. We lost everything.” Wally’s lips thinned, creases in the corners of his eyes. “Or…I lost everything. Miriam spent as much time running from the circus as from anywhere else, and by then she’d already decamped to try to be someone and something to you. While I held down the fort, until suddenly the fort was drowning…and I had to figure out where home might be.” A quiet, forced laugh. “Crow City seemed a good place to start. And I suppose deep down…I’ve always longed for somewhere to stay, and someone who would stay with me.”

  Every inch of Wally’s face was a study, a story, years carved in the faint lines shaping the narrow, elegant planes of him. His lowered lashes were the dark and spidery cobwebs of memories gone to dust; his mouth was the soft and folding valves of a pulsing, broken heart; his brows were the peaks of mountains that pressed down on him with the weight of the loneliness pulsing off him, quiet and steady and ever-present.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Talking about this upsets you?”

  Wally barked a sour laugh. “Which part? The part where everything I’d worked to build died in a single cataclysm, or the part where I realize I had very little to lose in the first place and no one who bloody cares?”

  “Walford…”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.” Quick, a brushing gesture as if brushing it all away. “Bloody hell. Barely speaking to each other, and I’m pouring years of pure tosh all over you.”

  “No. It’s all right. I wanted to know.” And he felt terrible, that his questions had pulled such pain out of Wally, eating away at that ever-present warmth. “I’m sorry for digging. It keeps throwing me to realize how long I’ve known you, and yet tried not to know anything about you, even if it was hard to avoid.”

  “Why would you want to know anything about the man who tried to steal your daughter?”

  “Yeah,” Joseph said. “Something like that.”

  “I…” Wally fiddled with the handle of his teacup, turning the cup around and around with a finger hooked in the handle’s curve. “I know it doesn’t excuse what I did, but…I only did it because Miriam asked.”

  Joseph shrugged.

  Wally cocked his head, blinking. “…you don’t seem particularly surprised.”

  “I had guessed. That kind of underhanded move was her trademark. She wouldn’t even talk to me about custody after her ploys to get Willow to drop me like a bad habit didn’t work. I learned early on Miriam wasn’t very interested in parenting.” Joseph spread his hands. “You were the perfect solution, when she decided the cripple couldn’t raise a kid but she didn’t want the problem.”

  Wally somehow managed to twitch his moustache without moving a single other part of his face. “I despise that. That she saw Willow as a problem. That she saw you as a problem.”

  “There was a lot to despise. A lot to love, too. But I…damn it, I’m sick of talking about Miriam. Let’s not. Ever again, if we can help it.”

  “She’s my sister, Joseph. As damaged as she is, I still love her,” Wally said, slow and reluctant. “I appear to have difficulty letting go of loving someone.”

  “Loyalty isn’t such a terrible thing.”

  “It is when I use it as a club to hurt myself, again and again. Hopeless causes. I am ever and always attracted to hopeless causes.” That cup was spinning and spinning again, the gold-leaf edges flashing, the tea inside spiraling into a whirlpool, as if Wally wove a strange spell, swirling magic into the teacup with his deft movements and low, halting, achingly quiet words. “…I couldn’t let go of loving you, either.”

  On the last word, Wally stopped, and Joseph’s world stopped with him; the teacup stilled with a rattle as sharp as a tolling bell calling the hour and the day that his heart halted in its place, gripped by a fist of numb incomprehension.

  “…what?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE IT WAS. IT HAD come out just like that, before Wally could stop it.

  God, he wished he’d stopped it.

  For a second Wally had enjoyed a brief shock of elation. He’d said it. He’d said it, and the sky hadn’t opened up to bring down fire and storm to condemn him and take this moment away from him. But Joseph was staring at him now, blank-eyed and frozen and expressionless, and that was somehow worse than the careful diversions or laughter or even outright derision he’d come to expect.

  “Joseph…?” he ventured, even if speaking felt fraught as lighting a match in a room full of high-yield explosives.

  Joseph tilted his head, looking at him strangely. “You love me,” he said, toneless and quiet.

  “I…” Fuck. Fuck. Oh, he was getting liberal use out of that word right now, and he repeated it over and over in his head even as he forced himself to drag out a simple honest mutter of, “Yes.”

  “As your brother-in-law.”

  “Fuck.” Wally closed his eyes, pressing his face into his palms and struggling to breathe, but he barely managed a sort of panicked hyperventilating. There wasn’t enough air in the room. Wasn’t enough anything, and his skin prickled with popping beads of sweat, his stomach roiling with the kind of awful sick, fatalistic terror he hadn’t experienced since the first time, as a very young man, he’d stared into the jaws of an angry tiger and the tamer had told him she was fresh off the truck, not even trained, and hungry. Back then the terror had been exhilarating, the excitement of the unknown, but there was no excitement here when Wally knew exactly how terribly it would end and the only thing unknown was whether or not he’d completely ruined whatever chance he and Joseph had at a budding friendship.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered into his palms; he couldn’t bring himself to lower his hands and see that look on Joseph’s face. “No. Not as my brother-in-law. Not as my brother. Not as my friend.”

  He didn’t expect anything. Nothing except Joseph reminding him it wouldn’t, couldn’t happen, and walking out. So when rough fingertips touched the back of his hand, his heart gave a single violent slamming thump as if swelling to bursting, and he jerked. That touch firmed, and then a warm hand curled around both of his own and gently pulled, coaxing them down, the contact charged and breathless when Joseph’s hands were so broad, so rough, and so often Wally had wondered how it must feel for that large, weathered palm to cup his cheek. He resisted…but then let Joseph ease his hands down from his face, leaving him no choice but to look at the man sitting at his kitchen table and staring at him as if he’d shaken his world.

  “Tell me how, then,” Joseph murmured, letting his hand fall to the table.

  Wally stared at him. “You know how,” he rasped, then really took in the look on Joseph’s face, the sort of blank, blindsided confusion of a man who’d been in a car crash but the reality of it hadn’t sunk in. “Oh, bloody hell…you don’t. And here I thought I’d been so daftly obvious, I simply… You’ve no idea how long I have loved you, do you?” When Joseph only shook his head, Wally sank back in his chair. Frustration tasted sour on his tongue, frustration and bittersweet amusement, and he laughed. “Oh, dear. You truly don’t. I’ve…I’m not quite certain if I’ve loved you or simply wanted to love you, but you would never let me close enough. So I stood at a distance an
d wondered how it would feel, to be allowed near you. To be allowed to feel that love.”

  “I…”

  Joseph’s hand still rested on the table, and it slid closer to Wally’s—and Wally hated how sensitive he was to every little thing.

  Because the moment Joseph caught himself, stopped, and pulled back with his fingers clenched, Wally’s stomach just dropped.

  “I don’t understand,” Joseph whispered.

  Of course you don’t. Of course you don’t, how could I be so stupid…

  “I watched Miriam ruin you,” Wally said, and hated the note of pleading in his voice when he didn’t even know what he pleaded for—but he couldn’t stop it any more than he could stop the words spilling past his lips, as if someone else had hold of his mouth, his voice, his thoughts and moved them with a quiet desperation. “I knew as soon as she saw you, she would have to have you, and here I was…watching, wishing, wondering. Wondering if there would even be enough pieces of you left to stitch back together, once my sister was done with you.” Wally felt an utter traitor, but it was hard to know Miriam and not know the truth of her. “She does that. Breaks men like toys, then leaves them on the floor once they’re no longer fun to play with. You’re the first I ever wanted to save from that. I saw you that day, sitting in the audience and staring up at the high-wire like she’d hypnotized you, and I only thought…”

  What he’d thought every time he’d seen Joseph for the rest of his life. What he thought even now, even though he knew it was hopeless.