A Matter of Life and Death, chapter 1
Jan. 4th, 2011 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
minutia_rA Matter of Life and Death, chapter 1
Chapter 2
Fandom: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2000
Summary: The summer following The Lives of Christopher Chant, Christopher
meets an old friend while investigating a mysterious death.
Thanks to:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dracutgrl and daluci
It was a dreary time at the castle. Jason had gone home for the holidays, and the Goddess wasn't back yet for hers. No one thought of giving Christopher holidays. Flavian had decided that this was his chance to teach Christopher necromancy. "Jason's got no reason to learn it," said Flavian, "but you'll need a thorough grounding in every type of magic when you're the next Chrestomanci."
Necromancy made Christopher sick. But Flavian was not going to know that the next Chrestomanci ran to his washroom to vomit every afternoon after lessons, so Christopher had been practicing his bored and stupid look as hard as he could. Nothing annoyed Flavian more than Christopher's bored and stupid look. The result was that Christopher and Flavian were getting on worse than they had any time since Christopher came to the castle.
One morning after about a week of this, Miss Rosalie poked her head into the schoolroom and said, "Gabriel's sent me to borrow your pupil, Flavian."
Flavian made an effort to conceal his relief. It made him look stuffed, instead. Christopher was less tactful. "You're taking me out of lessons?" he said. "But we had so much fun planned! Flavian was going to fetch mice out of all the traps and make them dance!"
Flavian looked a little green himself at this. Rosalie frowned. "Gabriel's got the idea that you're ready for some practical experience," she said, "so you're going to accompany me and Mordecai on an inquiry in London."
Christopher followed Rosalie out, grinning and unrepentant. Rosalie forgot to look disapproving as soon as they left the schoolroom. She had her own reasons for wanting to be out of the castle lately. She and Tacroy were going to be married in a month, and she had made it clear to her family that all she wanted from them was to come to the church on time the day of the wedding. Nevertheless, she was constantly having to deal with aunts and cousins and brothers showing up at the castle with advice, offers of help, and, in extreme cases, valises. She looked as though she would have liked to deal with them the way she dealt with Christopher's cat Throgmorten, with leather gloves and a broom.
Tacroy was waiting at the pentagram, and Christopher barely stopped himself from saying, "Where are we going today, Tacroy?" Tacroy was sensitive enough about his position in Gabriel's department as it was. After the affair with the Wraith and the Dright, he had been at the point of offering his official resignation. But Rosalie had said, "You really do owe it to Gabriel to stay, Mordecai," and Christopher had said, "Don't leave me alone with all these horrible stuffy people again, Tacroy!" Tacroy might have said no to either Rosalie or Christopher, but he was entirely incapable of refusing both of them, so he had stayed.
Christopher and Rosalie stepped into the pentagram, and the three of them found themselves in a small office. "What's the mission, Rosalie?" said Tacroy, as they walked through a narrow corridor towards an even narrower flight of stairs.
"About a year ago," said Rosalie, "a bank clerk named Richard Bede took out a thousand-pound life insurance policy from Pugh's. He died two weeks ago, the coroner said, of a heart attack. But there's a temporary office clerk at Pugh's who strongly suspects some sort of magical wrongdoing."
Tacroy's eyes crinkled in confusion. "Doesn't Pugh's have its own investigators?" he said. "Not to mention the regular police."
"Indeed," said Rosalie. "They found no evidence of anything wrong. But our temporary office clerk is the son of the Director of Pugh's, learning the business on his school holidays. He spoke to his father, and his father spoke to the Minister, and the Minister spoke to Gabriel, and here we are."
"Aha," said Tacroy.
Aha was right. This wasn't an investigation, it was an exercise in unruffling the feathers of some schoolboy who thought he knew better than anyone else. No wonder Gabriel had been willing to send Christopher along.
I saved the man's lives—seven of them! Christopher thought. And he still won't trust me with anything important! But he was too glad to be out of the castle, and avoiding necromancy, and on a mission with Tacroy again to feel really resentful.
They walked two blocks, heads down against the drizzle, until they got to the Pugh's building. It took up an entire block, had the name PUGH'S over the doors in letters taller than Christopher, and looked like a palace. A doorman in a long coat opened a door for them and they came into a lobby as big and grand as the dining hall at the castle. Rosalie exchanged a few words with a tall lady in a neat black dress, and the lady said, "This way, sirs and madam," and they followed her through an ornate wooden door.
The other side of the door was much plainer, and the corridor it led into was equally plain, with a frayed yellow carpet and a series of identical plain doors on either side. It was warm, and airless, and stank of people. Christopher sneezed. The lady opened one of the doors onto a large windowless room with files along all the walls, where a dozen men and boys bent over stacks of paper on a long table. "Oneir," she said, "the people from Chrestomanci's department are here to see you."
One of the boys along the table lifted his medium-brown head, revealing an utterly familiar face. "Oneir!" said Christopher, delighted. "Stuck in your father's office after all, are you? You can't imagine how I've missed you."
Oneir had gone so pale that for a moment Christopher thought he was spirit-traveling, and his real body was somewhere else. "How do you do, Chant," he said at last, barely above a whisper. "Thank you for coming, Mr. . ."
"Roberts," said Tacroy. "And this is Miss Lovelace."
"I'm sorry for wasting your time," Oneir finished, looking back down at his stacks of paper.
"Oneir, what's wrong?" said Christopher.
"Nothing's wrong, Chant," said Oneir, in the same low monotone, eyes firmly on his papers. "It's just I made a stupid mistake. As usual."
Rosalie narrowed her eyes and looked from Christopher to Oneir. "Mordecai, why don't you and Christopher go and have a look around the office while I talk to Mr. Oneir," she said.
Tacroy did not lead Christopher further into the offices, but Christopher didn't notice until he felt rain on his face again. "Oneir was my best friend in school," he said. "I used to tell you about him, remember, the one with the cricket book? Why wouldn't he talk to me, Tacroy? Why wouldn't he look at me?"
"I don't know," said Tacroy. "It might be the way things are at the office, or between him and his father, or any one of a hundred things that are nothing to do with you. But . . . how did you treat him, at school? I know you'd never do anything deliberately cruel, but sometimes you don't think."
Even Tacroy thought it was his fault. "I never did anything to him," said Christopher. "Unless you count not dying when he hit me with a cricket bat."
"Wait, you what?" said Tacroy.
"That time we got caught by the trap in Series Ten, remember?" said Christopher. "I woke up in the morgue. My father took me out of school after that."
Tacroy stopped still on the pavement, and Christopher had to stop with him. They were jostled by hurrying men in dark suits. It was a good five seconds before Tacroy said anything, and then it was just, "Christopher," soft and sad and shocked. It made Christopher feel like he'd been eating mermaid sandwiches, when he hadn't done anything.
"What?" said Christopher irritably.
Tacroy sighed, and started walking again. "You're telling me that the last time this Oneir saw you, he'd just killed you."
"Well, not really," said Christopher. "It's not as though it was my only life, and anyway, it was just the death I'd already had in Series Ten catching up with me."
"But he didn't know that," said Tacroy. "God, I remember what you looked like that time, the inside of your head sprayed across the carriage like a bloody rainbow. And unlike him, I really was responsible."
"Stow it--" Christopher started, but Tacroy kept talking over him.
"No, you listen for once, Christopher," said Tacroy. "Your friend, Oneir, kills you, and then what? They must have told him you'd survived after all, but he's seen you with your brains all over the field. And he knows that you don't come back to school. He must imagine you, best case, lying in a hospital bed with half your head gone, drooling and being fed with a spoon. For the rest of your life. Maybe his father transfers him to a different school where no one knows what he's done, but wherever he goes, he knows he's the boy who smashed his best friend's head in with a cricket bat. And then you show up at his office and act like nothing's happened. How do you expect him to feel?"
"Oh," said Christopher. He had been eating mermaid sandwiches. All that useless time he'd spent missing Oneir when he first came to the castle—why hadn't he ever thought of writing to him?
"It's not your fault, Christopher," said Tacroy gently. "But you've got to learn to see things from the other person's point of view. Consider it part of your training in investigations."
"Isn't education wonderful?" said Christopher.
They passed a man with a pushcart selling ices, and Christopher got a strawberry one, and Tacroy got a blackcurrant one, in spite of the rain. By the time they were back in the small office they'd set out from—which turned out to be the London office of Gabriel's department—Christopher was feeling a bit more human. Rosalie arrived shortly afterwards, and swiped Tacroy's ice.
"Were you able to persuade young Mr. Oneir to come out with his suspicions?" Tacroy asked her.
"Not exactly," said Rosalie. "But I was able to persuade him to come here on his break and talk to us then. I gather that whatever roused his suspicions is something he doesn't want to become office gossip."
Tacroy screwed up his eyes at her. "You're laughing at something," he said. "Is it funny office gossip?"
"I'm not laughing," said Rosalie, sucking on her ice.
"You are," said Tacroy. "I can tell."
And the oddest thing was, she was. Her mouth wasn't smiling, but her cheeks dimpled. Christopher had never suspected Miss Rosalie of having a sense of humor before.
"Mr. Oneir wouldn't say a word about his suspicions," Rosalie said. "But he did finally tell me how he knew Christopher."
Christopher and Tacroy frowned at each other. That was not funny. But Rosalie didn't catch it, and kept talking. "They were at school together," said Rosalie, with an unladylike snort. "Oneir used to do Christopher's magic for him."
"That was before Dr. Pawson figured out about the silver," Christopher said, annoyed.
"And in exchange—" gasped Rosalie, passing the ice back to Tacroy before collapsing in a chair in a fit of giggles, "in exchange—oh, dear, Christopher, I'm sorry—Christopher used to do Oneir's maths for him."
And that was all, aside from helpless laughter, that could be got out of Rosalie for more than a minute. Eventually she sat up and wiped at her eyes with her handkerchief. "It's funny, you see," she explained, "because you're going to be the next Chrestomanci, whereas Oneir is going to be the next Director of Pugh's."
"Is it?" said Christopher.
Rosalie and Tacroy looked at each other over Christopher's head. Rosalie snorted again. Tacroy didn't make a sound, but his eyes screwed up so tightly they nearly disappeared. On the whole, Christopher decided he had preferred it back when Tacroy was unlucky in love.
Chapter 2
Fandom: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2000
Summary: The summer following The Lives of Christopher Chant, Christopher
meets an old friend while investigating a mysterious death.
Thanks to:
dracutgrl and daluciIt was a dreary time at the castle. Jason had gone home for the holidays, and the Goddess wasn't back yet for hers. No one thought of giving Christopher holidays. Flavian had decided that this was his chance to teach Christopher necromancy. "Jason's got no reason to learn it," said Flavian, "but you'll need a thorough grounding in every type of magic when you're the next Chrestomanci."
Necromancy made Christopher sick. But Flavian was not going to know that the next Chrestomanci ran to his washroom to vomit every afternoon after lessons, so Christopher had been practicing his bored and stupid look as hard as he could. Nothing annoyed Flavian more than Christopher's bored and stupid look. The result was that Christopher and Flavian were getting on worse than they had any time since Christopher came to the castle.
One morning after about a week of this, Miss Rosalie poked her head into the schoolroom and said, "Gabriel's sent me to borrow your pupil, Flavian."
Flavian made an effort to conceal his relief. It made him look stuffed, instead. Christopher was less tactful. "You're taking me out of lessons?" he said. "But we had so much fun planned! Flavian was going to fetch mice out of all the traps and make them dance!"
Flavian looked a little green himself at this. Rosalie frowned. "Gabriel's got the idea that you're ready for some practical experience," she said, "so you're going to accompany me and Mordecai on an inquiry in London."
Christopher followed Rosalie out, grinning and unrepentant. Rosalie forgot to look disapproving as soon as they left the schoolroom. She had her own reasons for wanting to be out of the castle lately. She and Tacroy were going to be married in a month, and she had made it clear to her family that all she wanted from them was to come to the church on time the day of the wedding. Nevertheless, she was constantly having to deal with aunts and cousins and brothers showing up at the castle with advice, offers of help, and, in extreme cases, valises. She looked as though she would have liked to deal with them the way she dealt with Christopher's cat Throgmorten, with leather gloves and a broom.
Tacroy was waiting at the pentagram, and Christopher barely stopped himself from saying, "Where are we going today, Tacroy?" Tacroy was sensitive enough about his position in Gabriel's department as it was. After the affair with the Wraith and the Dright, he had been at the point of offering his official resignation. But Rosalie had said, "You really do owe it to Gabriel to stay, Mordecai," and Christopher had said, "Don't leave me alone with all these horrible stuffy people again, Tacroy!" Tacroy might have said no to either Rosalie or Christopher, but he was entirely incapable of refusing both of them, so he had stayed.
Christopher and Rosalie stepped into the pentagram, and the three of them found themselves in a small office. "What's the mission, Rosalie?" said Tacroy, as they walked through a narrow corridor towards an even narrower flight of stairs.
"About a year ago," said Rosalie, "a bank clerk named Richard Bede took out a thousand-pound life insurance policy from Pugh's. He died two weeks ago, the coroner said, of a heart attack. But there's a temporary office clerk at Pugh's who strongly suspects some sort of magical wrongdoing."
Tacroy's eyes crinkled in confusion. "Doesn't Pugh's have its own investigators?" he said. "Not to mention the regular police."
"Indeed," said Rosalie. "They found no evidence of anything wrong. But our temporary office clerk is the son of the Director of Pugh's, learning the business on his school holidays. He spoke to his father, and his father spoke to the Minister, and the Minister spoke to Gabriel, and here we are."
"Aha," said Tacroy.
Aha was right. This wasn't an investigation, it was an exercise in unruffling the feathers of some schoolboy who thought he knew better than anyone else. No wonder Gabriel had been willing to send Christopher along.
I saved the man's lives—seven of them! Christopher thought. And he still won't trust me with anything important! But he was too glad to be out of the castle, and avoiding necromancy, and on a mission with Tacroy again to feel really resentful.
They walked two blocks, heads down against the drizzle, until they got to the Pugh's building. It took up an entire block, had the name PUGH'S over the doors in letters taller than Christopher, and looked like a palace. A doorman in a long coat opened a door for them and they came into a lobby as big and grand as the dining hall at the castle. Rosalie exchanged a few words with a tall lady in a neat black dress, and the lady said, "This way, sirs and madam," and they followed her through an ornate wooden door.
The other side of the door was much plainer, and the corridor it led into was equally plain, with a frayed yellow carpet and a series of identical plain doors on either side. It was warm, and airless, and stank of people. Christopher sneezed. The lady opened one of the doors onto a large windowless room with files along all the walls, where a dozen men and boys bent over stacks of paper on a long table. "Oneir," she said, "the people from Chrestomanci's department are here to see you."
One of the boys along the table lifted his medium-brown head, revealing an utterly familiar face. "Oneir!" said Christopher, delighted. "Stuck in your father's office after all, are you? You can't imagine how I've missed you."
Oneir had gone so pale that for a moment Christopher thought he was spirit-traveling, and his real body was somewhere else. "How do you do, Chant," he said at last, barely above a whisper. "Thank you for coming, Mr. . ."
"Roberts," said Tacroy. "And this is Miss Lovelace."
"I'm sorry for wasting your time," Oneir finished, looking back down at his stacks of paper.
"Oneir, what's wrong?" said Christopher.
"Nothing's wrong, Chant," said Oneir, in the same low monotone, eyes firmly on his papers. "It's just I made a stupid mistake. As usual."
Rosalie narrowed her eyes and looked from Christopher to Oneir. "Mordecai, why don't you and Christopher go and have a look around the office while I talk to Mr. Oneir," she said.
Tacroy did not lead Christopher further into the offices, but Christopher didn't notice until he felt rain on his face again. "Oneir was my best friend in school," he said. "I used to tell you about him, remember, the one with the cricket book? Why wouldn't he talk to me, Tacroy? Why wouldn't he look at me?"
"I don't know," said Tacroy. "It might be the way things are at the office, or between him and his father, or any one of a hundred things that are nothing to do with you. But . . . how did you treat him, at school? I know you'd never do anything deliberately cruel, but sometimes you don't think."
Even Tacroy thought it was his fault. "I never did anything to him," said Christopher. "Unless you count not dying when he hit me with a cricket bat."
"Wait, you what?" said Tacroy.
"That time we got caught by the trap in Series Ten, remember?" said Christopher. "I woke up in the morgue. My father took me out of school after that."
Tacroy stopped still on the pavement, and Christopher had to stop with him. They were jostled by hurrying men in dark suits. It was a good five seconds before Tacroy said anything, and then it was just, "Christopher," soft and sad and shocked. It made Christopher feel like he'd been eating mermaid sandwiches, when he hadn't done anything.
"What?" said Christopher irritably.
Tacroy sighed, and started walking again. "You're telling me that the last time this Oneir saw you, he'd just killed you."
"Well, not really," said Christopher. "It's not as though it was my only life, and anyway, it was just the death I'd already had in Series Ten catching up with me."
"But he didn't know that," said Tacroy. "God, I remember what you looked like that time, the inside of your head sprayed across the carriage like a bloody rainbow. And unlike him, I really was responsible."
"Stow it--" Christopher started, but Tacroy kept talking over him.
"No, you listen for once, Christopher," said Tacroy. "Your friend, Oneir, kills you, and then what? They must have told him you'd survived after all, but he's seen you with your brains all over the field. And he knows that you don't come back to school. He must imagine you, best case, lying in a hospital bed with half your head gone, drooling and being fed with a spoon. For the rest of your life. Maybe his father transfers him to a different school where no one knows what he's done, but wherever he goes, he knows he's the boy who smashed his best friend's head in with a cricket bat. And then you show up at his office and act like nothing's happened. How do you expect him to feel?"
"Oh," said Christopher. He had been eating mermaid sandwiches. All that useless time he'd spent missing Oneir when he first came to the castle—why hadn't he ever thought of writing to him?
"It's not your fault, Christopher," said Tacroy gently. "But you've got to learn to see things from the other person's point of view. Consider it part of your training in investigations."
"Isn't education wonderful?" said Christopher.
They passed a man with a pushcart selling ices, and Christopher got a strawberry one, and Tacroy got a blackcurrant one, in spite of the rain. By the time they were back in the small office they'd set out from—which turned out to be the London office of Gabriel's department—Christopher was feeling a bit more human. Rosalie arrived shortly afterwards, and swiped Tacroy's ice.
"Were you able to persuade young Mr. Oneir to come out with his suspicions?" Tacroy asked her.
"Not exactly," said Rosalie. "But I was able to persuade him to come here on his break and talk to us then. I gather that whatever roused his suspicions is something he doesn't want to become office gossip."
Tacroy screwed up his eyes at her. "You're laughing at something," he said. "Is it funny office gossip?"
"I'm not laughing," said Rosalie, sucking on her ice.
"You are," said Tacroy. "I can tell."
And the oddest thing was, she was. Her mouth wasn't smiling, but her cheeks dimpled. Christopher had never suspected Miss Rosalie of having a sense of humor before.
"Mr. Oneir wouldn't say a word about his suspicions," Rosalie said. "But he did finally tell me how he knew Christopher."
Christopher and Tacroy frowned at each other. That was not funny. But Rosalie didn't catch it, and kept talking. "They were at school together," said Rosalie, with an unladylike snort. "Oneir used to do Christopher's magic for him."
"That was before Dr. Pawson figured out about the silver," Christopher said, annoyed.
"And in exchange—" gasped Rosalie, passing the ice back to Tacroy before collapsing in a chair in a fit of giggles, "in exchange—oh, dear, Christopher, I'm sorry—Christopher used to do Oneir's maths for him."
And that was all, aside from helpless laughter, that could be got out of Rosalie for more than a minute. Eventually she sat up and wiped at her eyes with her handkerchief. "It's funny, you see," she explained, "because you're going to be the next Chrestomanci, whereas Oneir is going to be the next Director of Pugh's."
"Is it?" said Christopher.
Rosalie and Tacroy looked at each other over Christopher's head. Rosalie snorted again. Tacroy didn't make a sound, but his eyes screwed up so tightly they nearly disappeared. On the whole, Christopher decided he had preferred it back when Tacroy was unlucky in love.
