Chapter Text
Jonah Magnus learns from an early age that the world does not listen.
He is chatty for his age. Not inquisitive, or precocious. Chatty. This is a problem, according to most everyone he meets. It certainly doesn’t help his mother’s increasingly haggard attempts to drill propriety into him.
“Hold still, darling,” she sighs, pinning him to the chair. The comb carves its way through his hair, tugging against the knots. “I can’t braid it in this state.”
“Why must you braid it at all?” Jonah grits his teeth, twisting in her grip. Sometimes he wishes there was only cruelty in her tone when she reminds him that it is not a woman’s place to ask “why?”
At first, he thinks he must be missing something. A grand epiphany that every child makes in the transition to adulthood, kept secret to preserve the natural progression of the next young soul. Jonah is terribly tired of braids, so he decides to gather as much information as he can. The more he learns, the quicker he can get on with the whole “maturity” nonsense. But it never arrives. The years pass. Each night he searches his books for an explanation, probing the minds of great philosophers or historians or priests. Each night he shuts the dusty covers with an unsatisfied huff. The scholars tell him to challenge fallacies, to question the unfounded. In the next breath, they stake the multitudinous composite of existence into shallow boundaries. All who fall outside, all who dare to exist as they are, meet punishment’s swift hand.
“Lunacy, it is,” he mutters, sprawled on the grassy hillside. His hair spills out of his bonnet in wild tangles. He takes a strand between two fingers and stares. “A man spends a lifetime studying the art of rhetoric, then promptly pitches a fit when his assumptions fold under their own girth. How can one trace a circle in the ocean, and shout at the fish for slipping away? To place utmost faith on the ink that lilts, that un-spools with the tides?”
“Mm,” says Barnabas, somewhere to his left. Jonah can feel eyes fixed on the hair dancing through his fingertips.
“As long as mother- as long as anyone talks nonsense, I will challenge it.” His hair shines in the afternoon sun, grinning back at him. He throws his arms up towards the sky, letting it fall where it may. “‘The way things are’ cannot possibly sustain any worthwhile civilization.”
This is, apparently, finally blasphemous enough to snap Barnabas out of his trance.
“Jonah,” he begins, scandalized. Shifting onto his elbows, Jonah offers him a wide smile, and the protests choke in his throat, replaced with a flush uncharacteristic of the temperate spring climate. Amused, he watches Barnabas drift, then returns fully flush with the hilltop, content to leave the silence unfilled. Barnabas may be the only one who listens, but Jonah knows it’s because he cannot truly hear. Jonah, however, can see the sunlight shining through the holes he burns with each counterpoint. If only it was his “place” to illuminate the rest of the idiots.
Mother tosses womanhood at him like a flaming olive branch. It’s hardly his fault that he refuses to catch it.
She offers him beautiful gifts. She boxes his ears. She lets him stay in the woods past sunset. At the heated end of his fifteenth birthday, she dumps his books in the creek. None of it helps, because she won’t listen. But as he lies in bed, cheek stinging, hollow bookshelf gathering dust, he realizes that talking will not get him what he needs. He will shed this barren role for the loose collection of desires that crack like weeds through his chest. Until then, he lets his mother tug him along. Doing his best to quell the nausea, he takes shelter in the translucence that conformity grants him.
Watching becomes survival. He observes how the men of this rotten world walk. How they pose. Like ravens, they croak only with those of their creed, solemn and throaty. Most importantly, he takes note of what they see. Each careful note brings him one step closer to the what he will make of this world, warped as it may be.
Appearance is as good a place to start as any.
He fishes a pair of corsets out of the attic one chilly September afternoon. Garish as they are, he knows they won’t be missed. He thanks whatever God listening for the fickle nature of fashion, and darts from the room.
The wind picks up with his breath as he jogs into the woods that border the Bennetts’ land. Panting, he finally reaches the birch tree that marks his suitcase of secrets. Barnabas had laughed at the name, though he doesn’t understand why.
Thrusting it open, he throws one corset inside, next to the partially-hemmed trousers and dress shirt. Fingers shaking, he shrugs off his outerwear and wraps the nicer of the two corsets carefully around his chest. He tightens the upper laces, somewhat clumsily, and gasps at the unfamiliar feeling of constriction. Slowly, reverently, he slides the dress shirt over his shoulders. He stares. Twists. Wishes he had a mirror, or another set of eyes. Tries to imagine the piercing gazes of men on the street. Would they see him as he sees himself? Should it matter?
In theory, nothing changes. The forest is the forest. The wind is the wind. A grinning fool in the middle of nowhere is a grinning fool in the middle of nowhere. The trousers sit too loose at the hip, and he’ll need a hat. And a haircut. But in this moment, transgression has never felt more natural. Maybe it’s the oxygen deprivation talking, but he feels light. Giddy, even. It’s unbecoming, and he loves every breathless second.
When he calls out to Barnabas’s advancing figure an hour later, perched casually on a nearby branch, the poor sap nearly faints. Barnabas tries to hide a faint flush when he takes Jonah’s hand and clambers to his feet. Jonah graciously pretends not to notice, but files it away with a collection of longing glances and nervous smiles.
The topic of marriage falls from his mother’s lips like raindrops; light at first, perhaps over dinner, but steady, and ever growing. Barnabas is the obvious candidate, and Jonah shelters under the excuse of young love to plan his real future.
“Please, for my sake. Just pretend,” Jonah asks, clutching his friend’s hand. Barnabas’s promptly goes red and stammers out an affirmative. Jonah buries a victorious smile under the gratitude.
He slips away every morning under the excuse of courting, nowadays. Each hard-won piece of his ensemble slots neatly into the trunk. He’s risked a few visits to town here and there, in the plausible deniability of twilight. Not the safest move, but he has to gauge his chances of survival somehow. He blends into the shadows, slips neatly between cracks in the floorboards of a society that walks so, so carefully. Barnabas accompanies him, twitching at his side. Sometimes, strolling through the quiet streets, he offers an arm. Jonah always accepts.
“And how might I explain my jacket’s loss to my father?” Barnabas asks, draped across a tree branch. He waves a dusty arm emphatically.
“You were careless,” Jonah offers, seated against the trunk. The coat in question sits snugly over his shoulders as he flicks a page in his book. “You were robbed. You offered it to a poor man as an act of piety.” Though he keeps his tone even, his heart thumps against the corset. “This is the last thing I’ll ask of you, I swear it.”
Above him, Barnabas heaves himself into a sitting position. “Jonah,” he begins. Then, he pushes off the branch and drops to the ground. Brushing dirt off his trousers, he crouches next to Jonah. Barnabas meets his eyes but just as quickly looks away, biting his lip. Over his book, Jonah fixes him with an expectant look. Finally, Barnabas speaks in a rush. “I understand your desires, truly. Your passion is incredible. It’s - ah, most admirable, indeed.” He blushes and risks another lovesick glance. Jonah fights the urge to roll his eyes. “Nevertheless, I-” he fidgets with the hem of his sleeve, glancing away. “-I wonder if may be prudent to see the marriage through?”
Jonah shuts his book with a snap, indignation swelling in his chest. Before he can protest, Barnabas throws out a hand and plows on. “Come now, Jonah. With me you would have money. Security. You can be as you like in the house. Surely that is preferable to a lifetime of turmoil.” He smiles, nervous and placating. Patronizing, Jonah thinks with a snarl. “Be sensible.”
Here on the forest floor, back pressed to rough bark and dirt-stained leaves underfoot, something in Jonah dies. At the time, he understood it as his patience. But oh, how fortuitous to receive so fierce an awakening at a time of need. The wind, sweet and supplicant, untucks a lock of his hair. Barnabas’s eyes remain steady.
“Oh, Barnabas,” he sighs, letting the passion twist into something too bright to be joy. He reaches for a hand, for an artery, for vulnerable flesh to sink his claws into and pull. “Perhaps you’re right.”
The night of their wedding, he cuts his hair. It scatters like feathers onto the cold wooden floor.
He leaves the letter on the vanity, and takes everything else.
Even with Barnabas’s small fortune and his impeccable forgery skills, Jonah had anticipated the challenges of navigating a hostile world full-time. The scrutinous eye of professor and student alike feel like a challenge, and he rises each day to meet it. What he hadn’t anticipated was for university to be so noisy. Music drifts in and out of the open dormitory window. From the halls, the confident click of heels and idle gossip. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. For a temple of knowledge, there seems to be a lot less studying than he’d anticipated. A particularly strong breeze flutters the pages of his open book and his concentration.
Some fifty meters from the dormitory is an apple tree. A few students ring its trunk, swapping God-knows-what twaddle. Slung across the bough, a figure partially shaded by the leaves interjects here and there. He reaches for an apple, swatting the air idly as he comes up short. On the ground, his friend plucks an apple from the ground, and lobs it directly into his gut.
Jonah turns away, frowning. His old life is past, but. He should keep an eye on Barnabas. For safety’s sake. For his own curiosity.
The world buzzes with flies - a hollow fruit, an imitation of life. For now, he will let it rot.