Chapter Text
By morning, Phuwin had filled six sheets of paper with questions.
He sat cross-legged in front of the mirror with a cup of coffee going cold beside him and his notebook open on his knee, and he was aware that he looked, if anyone were to see him, like a person who had lost his mind. But Pond was there — Pond was still there, on the other side of the glass, though the hour seemed different for him. The candle of last night had been replaced with the thin grey light of early morning, which told Phuwin that whatever the relationship between their two times, it wasn't simply mirrored. Time moved differently in there, or at a different angle. He would work it out.
He was an architectural conservationist. Working things out was what he did.
Pond was still in night clothes — loose, pale, simple, very different from the formal layered thing he had been wearing last night — and his hair was loose, and Phuwin tried very hard not to notice that loose-haired-in-simple-night-clothes Pond was something that occupied a great deal more of his visual attention than seemed strictly reasonable for a man he had met twelve hours ago through a magic mirror.
Good morning, he wrote.
Pond, who had apparently also not slept, looked up and smiled. The smile was — Phuwin wrote in his notebook, because he was going to need to examine this later — unexpectedly warm. Like sun coming out. Troubling.
Good morning, Phuwin, Pond wrote back. I have been thinking.
So have I, Phuwin wrote. Tell me what you have been thinking and I will tell you what I have been thinking.
A pause while Pond wrote. His handwriting was beautiful — formal but quick, the brushstrokes of someone who had been trained in calligraphy but was using that training in a functional rather than decorative way.
I have been thinking that I should be frightened, but I am not. I have been thinking that this is impossible, but here we are. I have been thinking that you have a very honest face for someone who claims to be from the future, and that this is either a remarkable trick or a remarkable miracle, and that either way I am not sure I would want it to stop.
Phuwin read this three times.
Then he wrote: I have been thinking almost exactly the same things. Except about your face.
He held it up to the glass and immediately felt his ears go hot, because that was a strange thing to write to someone he had just met through a magical mirror, but Pond read it and the smile came out again — the sun-coming-out smile — and he wrote: Is my face honest?
Your face, Phuwin wrote carefully, is the face of someone who is accustomed to being taken seriously, but who, right now, is trying very hard not to look as astonished as he actually is.
Pond read this and laughed. Phuwin couldn't hear the laugh, but he could see it — the way it moved through Pond's whole face, opening it up, making it younger, making it real. He felt something warm and slightly alarming happen in the centre of his chest.
They spent the morning exchanging careful, systematic information.
Pond's full name was Pond Naravit Lertratkosum, and he was twenty-six years old, and he was a nobleman of the second rank, a position that came with responsibilities at the royal court and a household in the eastern quarter of what was then still called Rattanakosin — the same district where Phuwin now lived, which was a coincidence that made them both go quiet for a moment. His father had died three years earlier, which had left him the head of the household at twenty-three, a position he described, in careful understated brushstrokes, as "demanding." He had two younger sisters and a mother who was "formidable." He was educated in Thai, Pali, some Chinese, and a little Portuguese from the Jesuit-influenced schools that had existed in the city for decades. He was, by the standards of his time and position, exceptionally well-read. He described himself as "a practical man," which Phuwin could believe, because he was handling the situation of an impossible talking mirror with remarkable composure.
Phuwin told him about himself in return: Bangkok, 2025, architectural conservation, the old shophouse, his own somewhat formidable mother. He tried to explain, carefully, some of what had changed in the two hundred and twenty-six years between them — not everything, not the overwhelming flood of it, but some. The city had grown. The country was still called Thailand now, though that was not the name it had in 1799. The river still ran through it, which seemed to give Pond particular comfort.
Does the temple still stand? Pond wrote, and Phuwin knew which temple he meant without needing to ask — there was only one temple in this city that needed no further identification.
Wat Phra Kaew, Phuwin wrote. Yes. It is the most beautiful thing in Bangkok. People come from all over the world to see it.
Pond received this with the dignified satisfaction of a man whose whole civilisation has been vindicated.
That is correct, Pond wrote, as it should be.
By midmorning they had established several working parameters for their strange communication. The mirror seemed active whenever both of them were present and looking into it — it had, as far as they could tell, no fixed hours of operation, but it required both parties' attention to function. The light that came through was the light of the other's space, not some intermediate light. And the glass was absolutely solid — they had both tested this, carefully, and there was no give in it whatsoever, no possibility of anything passing through. It was a window, not a door.
Or so they believed, on the second day.
What Phuwin had not yet told Pond — what he was only slowly beginning to work out for himself, sitting cross-legged on his 21st-century floor staring at this 18th-century nobleman — was that he had already begun to care about what happened to Pond Naravit Lertratkosum.
Not in any dramatic way. Not yet. It was quieter than that.
It was in the way he found himself, while making lunch, composing questions to ask Pond that afternoon. It was in the way he looked at his notes from the morning and felt something between intellectual excitement and something warmer and more personal. It was in the way he had photographed the maker's mark on the mirror's frame first thing that morning and spent two hours trying to identify it, not purely for the conservationist's reasons but because he wanted to understand what this object was that had given him access to this person.
He took a photo of his cold coffee and his scattered notes and sent it to his best friend Aon with the message: Something has happened. I need to tell you about it but you are going to think I'm insane.
Aon, who had known Phuwin since they were eleven years old, replied: I already think you're insane. What happened.
I found a magic mirror in my basement, Phuwin typed.
I'm coming over, Aon replied.
Phuwin looked at the mirror. Pond was there, reading something — a book, or a document, held at an angle that Phuwin couldn't quite make out. In the morning light of 1799, he was very still, and the loose hair framed a profile that Phuwin made himself stop looking at because Aon was coming and he needed to formulate a coherent explanation and not just sit here staring at a handsome nobleman from two centuries ago like some kind of fool.
He went to make more coffee.
He was back in front of the mirror within four minutes.
Pond looked up as though he'd sensed the return of Phuwin's attention, and that small act — that particular quality of awareness, the way Pond's eyes came up from his reading and found Phuwin's face in the glass as naturally as a plant turning toward light — did something to Phuwin that he was not, at twenty-four years old, entirely equipped to handle.
He held up his notepad. My friend is coming. She thinks I am insane.
Pond wrote: Is she a good friend?
The best, Phuwin wrote. She will probably try to examine the mirror.
Tell her I say she is welcome to try, Pond wrote, but I have been examining it from this side since midnight and have found nothing that explains anything.
He says welcome to try, Phuwin told Aon twenty minutes later, standing in his living room while Aon walked slowly around the mirror with the expression of someone trying to find the projector.
"It's a real mirror," Aon said.
"I know."
"Like, old. Very old." She was a materials scientist by training and was already touching the frame with the careful hands of someone who respected old things. "This teak is — God, this is ancient. And this glass —" She peered at the surface. "This is not modern glass."
"I know."
"And there's a person in it."
"His name is Pond. He's a nobleman. He's from 1799."
Aon stood up straight and looked at Phuwin.
"Okay," she said. "Okay." She pulled out her phone. "I'm going to need a month to think about this. But right now I want to see him."
Phuwin turned to the mirror. Pond was watching with great interest — he could see Aon now, and his expression was of careful, calibrated fascination. He wrote something and held it up.
Your friend has the face of someone who will demand answers before she believes in anything.
Aon, reading over Phuwin's shoulder, said: "Oh, I like him. He's already figured me out completely."
Phuwin translated this. Pond wrote: She is welcome. Ask her what she thinks of the glass.
And so began the second day of the strangest and most important thing that had ever happened to Phuwin Tangsakyuen.
That evening, after Aon had gone — after she'd taken seventeen photographs and made twenty pages of notes and had a fifteen-minute note-exchange conversation with Pond herself, during which they apparently discussed the properties of mercury glass, which Aon said was what she suspected the mirror was made with, and which led Pond to explain certain things about the craftsmen who had made it for his family that Phuwin made careful notes of — Phuwin sat alone in front of the mirror in the lamplight.
Pond was there. His evening, apparently, corresponded with Phuwin's evening, most of the time, though not always. He had changed back into the formal clothes — tonight something deep blue, with gold at the edges — and his hair was back, and he was sitting in a chair that Phuwin could just make out, ornate and low, the kind of thing you saw in museum displays of period furniture.
They had used up today's fresh paper with Aon's conversations.
So they sat, for a while, without writing, and just looked at each other.
It should have been awkward. It wasn't.
The candlelight on Pond's side made everything amber and soft, and Phuwin's lamp on his side was warm too, and in the meeting of those two lights in the glass there was something that Phuwin thought, with the part of his brain that was not being carefully practical, was almost beautiful.
Pond tilted his head slightly, as though asking a question without words.
Phuwin smiled.
Pond's face did the sun-coming-out thing again.
Phuwin pressed two fingers to the glass. Not quite a wave. Something quieter.
Pond looked at the gesture for a moment, then mirrored it — two fingers against the glass on his side — and there was something in that small symmetry, those two hands meeting at the surface of two centuries, that made Phuwin's chest ache in a way he was absolutely going to think about later and absolutely not going to think about right now.
"Goodnight, Pond," he said to the glass.
On the other side, Pond's lips moved.
He didn't need to be able to hear it to know what it said.
---------------