Chapter Text
Walt keeps journals.
It began when English dripped as ink onto a page and gained a mouth in young Walder's mind. He wrote for practice, then for pleasure, then to bleed his humors into an order the barbers failed to achieve. Words gurgled out of his head like sick, and afterwards, just like his first misadventures with too much wine, made him feel better. For a while.
He finishes the first slim volume in a few months. In a year, he has filled another. More human languages gain speech through letters in his head. (“Latin! Greek! Marry, Walder would be a scholar!” say his friends, to which Blinky and Dictatious puff proudly and say nothing–except hand him more primers.)
Centuries pass. He writes a library, kept by Dictatious, then Blinky, stashed safely in Trollmarket, found by Barbara during one long night of troll studies. She stretches her legs, stepping to one of the high stacks, and touches the name in familiar Roman capitals.
“Are these yours?”
Walter rolls his head round on his shoulder, heavy eyes snapping open when he sees what she’s holding.
“Ahah, I see you’ve found my journals,” he says, rising quickly, grinning with just too many teeth as he gingerly takes the book from Barbara and pretends to leaf through it. “I haven’t seen these in ages,” he lies.
She catches on, and lets go (keeping enough to remember), slowly tracing the gilded letters on the spine of another volume. “How many are there?”
He puts back the one she took. “Too many, ironically, to remember.”
“Do you write them all in Troll?” she asks. (Those parts she’d glimpsed were all sloppy, slanted, and pressed hard into the page, like the letters had fallen from a height and broke where they lay; the journal she’d picked was almost completely in Troll.)
“Not all.” He selects a book from a higher shelf, brightening as he flips through its pages. “This one is from my travels. See here,” he tilts it her way and points to a passage, “I spent some time touring Italy—before it was Italy,” he chuckles through his nose.
Barbara traces after his fingers, taps a word. “You were in Verona?”
“Fair Verona, yes! And Milan, then Venice, then Florence and Rome. The Renaissance was blooming, you see—even Gunmar took interest, though much less, I think, in the arts, than the arms. Ah!”
Walter lifts both pointer fingers and scrambles across the room to a high cabinet. Inside are tall, skinny sleeves of loose papers, some gilded, some wrapped in cloth, some held together by straining ribbons. He hums, trailing a finger over the many-colored spines, then slides one out and fairly hops back to their table.
“Grant, I was—am not—an artist, but on a few occasions I made the acquaintance of apprentices from certain workshops, who, when plied with enough vintage and company, were happy to share their masters' secrets!”
He opens the wide cover and page upon page of sketches, and diagrams, and scribbled, wine-stained notes flutter out of the sleeve. Some are signed, in tiny letters, in Troll.
“Oh,” sighs Barbara, ghosting her hand across the old parchment. “Walt, these are amazing.”
His eyes twinkle as he lifts one up, a sketch of a horse and rider with a wicked, bladed device attached to the saddle.
“Milan, 1485.”
“Da Vinci?”
He nods, and raises another, an architectural draft.
“Rome, 1518.”
Barbara bites her lip. “Miiicheeelangelo?”
“Yes! You know your Masters!”
“These can’t be–”
“Originals? Heavens, no! Copies, as close as I could get them.”
Barbara grins and shakes her head, turning to the rest of the collection.
“I can’t believe—I just can’t believe it! All the history you’ve seen…” Her eyes darken and she frowns, reeling in what she’d earlier caught and let swim, now pulling it firmly up where she can see it. “Walt…so much history. Not all of it— I mean, how much of it…?”
“Was bad?” he finishes, and a cumulus mass, of a darker, lightning-lit kind passes quickly over his own face, before he brushes it away and smiles at her, sad, but not too sad, charming and full of comfort. “It’s history,” he says, gathering up the sketches and folding them back in their sleeve. “Not ancient history, mind you,” he laughs, “but a turn of the wheel as wonderful and horrible as any century.”
He puts back the art book and returns his journal to the shelf. Barbara follows, still holding onto her catch. (The longer she looked, the uglier it grew, captivating and terrible; trying to look away, its image morphed in her mind, twisted and bloated to something she felt was realistic, and feared hardly approached reality.)
She plants her feet behind him, curling her fingers into twitchy fists at her side. He starts at her closeness when he turns around, frowning when she opens her mouth as though to speak, then closes it, and again, like she has been reeled in on a hook and cannot get the words out to demand release.
“Barbara,” he says, touching her arms, rubbing tentative lines over her scrubs with his thumbs. “Darling, what’s wrong?”
She bites her lip, wrapping her arms around herself ‘til she can touch his hands with her own. Meeting his eyes, her thoughts flood against her closed lips and threaten to seep into the air between them.
How long have you had nightmares? How often do you not sleep? How many wars have you had to fight in? How many battles? How many injuries? Are you ok? Please, promise me you’d tell me if you were ever not ok.
“Promise to…read them to me sometime?” she asks. Walter smiles, sad, but not too sad, takes her hands and squeezes them.
Nomura, tiny Nomura, in a tattered, pink kimono, holds onto him for dear life and begs him not to go. “Let the big ones fight! Don’t leave, big brother!”
Blinkous, waving a scrap of destroyed training dummy, blocks the portcullis and refuses to move. “Walder, you must speak to someone! If not me, perhaps Vendel. Draal! Nomura! Anyone!”
“Someday, darling. Perhaps someday.”
Barbara’s line jerks, snaps, and something large uncoils and draws a wake across the water. She blinks, and lets Walter lead her back to their table. He picks up the amulet and shines it on a page.
“Now, back to the care of troll versus humankind.”
“I thought we were talking about changelings?”
“We were, yes, but the text keeps them separate.”