Work Text:
Kate stood on top of a low hill, staring down at a dilapidated old farmhouse and an even more dilapidated old barn (dilapidated was a word that Sticky had defined for her last week and she had yet to become any less delighted by it). She had sprinted up from the road to get here, outpacing Milligan in her eagerness to glimpse her new (and old) home. She didn't know what she had been expecting, but it hadn't been this.
Half of the barn roof had caved in when a large pine tree had fallen onto it. If it had ever had one of those quintessential barn doors, it was long since gone, with a gaping hole where the door used to be. The farmhouse itself was at least mostly intact apart from a few shattered windows and a sagging porch, but its paint had faded to a point where she couldn't even tell what color it used to be. The broken windows gave her a few moment's pause: it was late February, and while there wasn't any snow on the ground anymore, it was chilly during the day and below freezing at night. Not that Kate hadn't lived in more unpleasant conditions before, but she had to admit she had hoped the house would at least be...enclosed.
She heard Milligan approaching from behind her and didn't turn around. "It's going to be a bit of a project, hm?" he said lightly.
Kate smiled. She liked projects, especially ones she got to work on with her father. "First, new windows," she replied.
"Good eye." Milligan paused. "I know it's not exactly the most homelike of houses, and it probably won't be particularly comfortable for the first few weeks, but--"
"It's ours," Kate stated. "It's perfect." And she took off running down the hill, bucket bouncing on her hip, intending to make it through the doorway first.
A gopher hole in the ground, hidden by a layer of tall, brown grass, caught her foot and sent her flying. She tucked and rolled, executing a perfect forward somersault rather than sprawl onto her face.
Milligan was at her side immediately as she hopped back to her feet, ignoring the slight twinge in her ankle. He reached out to steady her, and she sidestepped away, saying "I did that on purpose, don't worry!"
If he disbelieved her, he didn't say so. They walked the rest of the way, past the barn and up to the door of the farmhouse. Kate tried the door. It was unlocked. She pushed it open and smelled musty, mildewy wood and dust. Not exactly what she thought of a home as smelling like, especially after living so many months in Mr. Benedict's house, which always smelled like old books and something sweet baking in the kitchen.
Milligan had come back here only once before bringing her, and he had gone inside just long enough to check that it was structurally sound. Nobody had ever bought it after he had disappeared and Kate had been taken to the orphanage, so the state of disrepair stemmed from an entire decade of neglect. Apparently it hadn't been too difficult for Milligan to prove his claim on it, so here they were.
Home again, home again.
It had been a long ten years.
Kate had vaguely expected to recognize the place, to have some recollection of being here, of being happy and loved and home , but there was nothing. She still couldn't remember anything from before the orphanage except for that one day at the mill pond. The farmhouse didn't feature in that memory at all.
Milligan was running his hands over the bannister of the stairs leading to the loft, checking its sturdiness. "I was thinking," he said, "we could fix the loft up to be your space. All yours. There's a bathroom up there, and we could put in a wall to make a real bedroom. You can do whatever you like with the rest of the space."
Quickly, Kate conjured up images of her own workstation outside her bedroom, filled with tools and bits and pieces to make her inventions. There was a nice big window up there, she had seen it from the outside--if she could manage to convince Milligan to let her get a falcon to train like she planned to, she could build a platform outside the window for the bird to perch on. And maybe she could install a big pole that she could leap out the window and slide down if she needed to make a quick getaway. The window would have to be built to open to the inside--
"Kate?" Milligan asked. "What do you think?"
"I love it. When do we start?"
He looked relieved. "We'll start by making a list of all of the things that need to get done, and then we can sit down and decide what order to do them in. I'm glad you didn't say you'd rather have your old room back--it was only a bit of a temporary nursery, much too small for you now."
"I had an old room?" Kate said. She frowned, looking around the front room and down the hallway that led to a kitchen she could barely see and (she assumed) a bedroom.
"It was painted green. You don't remember?"
"I don't remember the house," Kate admitted. Then she paused. "But I remember remembering it."
"You--"
"At the orphanage," she said, keeping her voice light and airy with a significant amount of effort, "when I was three or four, you know, I could still remember it. I tried to run away and find it once. Of course, I was too far away. Dozens of miles. And my sense of direction wasn't as good as it is now. But I tried, because...I really wanted to go home." Kate forced a laugh. "I hated sharing a room with five other girls! So I guess I must have remembered having my own room, and missed it. Got into a ton of trouble, though, so I didn't try again until I decided to join the circus."
"Kate," Milligan said softly.
She recognized the tone as the one he took when he felt guilty about having not been there for her. It was interesting how well she could read her father after only three months of knowing who he was. He was a secret agent, a trained spy, a master of disguise, and yet he was still an open book.
"Don't you dare get all mopey on me," she teased. "That's an awful way to spend our first minutes home." Springing into action, she rushed up the sturdy wooden stairs to check out her new room. "You can figure out what needs to be done down there!" she called down. "I'll make my list up here and then come join you!"
"Just be careful!" Milligan replied unnecessarily.
The first few days flew by in a blur of repairs and trips to the hardware store and more repairs and hurried meals and finally collapsing into a sleeping bag at night in the back bedroom, the only room without broken windows. Kate was so exhausted those first couple of nights that she fell asleep instantly and wasn't even distracted by her own whirling thoughts.
That wasn't the case on the third night.
They had been building her bedroom wall that day, and she laid on her back in the sleeping bag a few yards away from Milligan, who was snoring softly, thinking about how soon she would be sleeping in her own bed. Her own bed, in her own room, in an entire floor of a house (even if it was just a small loft) all to herself. She hadn't slept in a room all on her own since…
Well, since she was two, and was sleeping in this house, in the nursery that was really a tiny little study next to the main bedroom. Kate was independent, of course. She had spent much of her childhood lonely and isolated and feeling abandoned, but she had spent so little of it really alone . In the orphanage, she had always shared a room with several other kids, and in the circus, she had shared trailers with even more folk. At the Institute and at Mr. Benedict's house, she had shared a room with Constance. She wasn't exactly going to miss sharing a room with the cranky, ill-mannered, messy three year old, but...she was going to miss her .
Suddenly, Kate was fighting back tears. She had avoided feeling sad about leaving her friends while she was moving out, teasing the boys when they looked downcast and promising to write them letters. Constance had been so grumpy that it was all Kate could do to swoop in and give her a quick goodbye kiss on the head before getting snarled at. "I'll miss you, too, Connie-girl!" she had said cheerfully. "Don't forget to write!"
But they didn't even have a mailbox yet for her friends to send letters to. Kate was cut off from them completely, and it had been...a long time since she had felt this lonely.
When the tears proved to be stubborn and didn't stop falling, Kate slid out of the sleeping bag, grabbed her bucket out of habit, and crept out of the room, closing the door behind her as silently as she could. She left the house and sat down on the edge of the droopy porch (it had been given a lower priority than most of the interior projects). Finally, she allowed herself to bury her face in her arms and let out a few quiet sobs.
Kate didn't cry often. She didn't see the point. It was a waste of water, and it made her eyes and her head and her nose and her stomach hurt, and it never got her any sympathy at the orphanage. The adults usually ignored the crying children, waiting impatiently for them to be quiet again so they could wash their faces roughly and lecture them about accepting their circumstances. There hadn't been much to cry about at the circus, and even when she was upset, there were always distractions. Distractions were better than tears any day.
This time, though, she decided to let the crying happen, just for a little while. That way those feelings would be gone, and she wouldn't have to worry about them welling up during the day when Milligan could see them. It didn't occur to her that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing for him to know that she was upset. That simply wasn't the way Kate Wetherall thought about things.
When Reynie cried, he didn't try to hide it. Sticky would, but he was never very successful. Constance cried like the three-year old she was, often and loudly, and then got angry about how often and loudly she was crying. Kate had no problem with other people crying. She was great at giving hugs and cheerful enough that she could usually get them to smile within a minute. But she never really let any of her friends see her cry. It wasn't her style.
Thinking about her friends, of course, sent her into more tears. Her sobs were getting louder now, and she was shivering because oh right , it was February, and it was probably only 20° out, so it was cold , and the shivering made the crying worse and then the tears dripping onto her hands made her hands cold, and she couldn't stop crying, and this was why she shouldn't have let herself cry in the first place , how could she have been so stupid...but getting upset with herself only made her cry harder, and harder, and--
"Kate?"
She would have frozen at the sound of Milligan's voice and wiped away all her tears and pretended to be absolutely fine, but for some reason she couldn't. Kate let out a frustrated sob and doubled over with her head tucked into her arms.
There was a moment of hesitation. It wasn't like Milligan knew how to handle this situation any better than she did, but some sort of fatherly instinct took over and he sat next to her and swept her up in his arms.
"I'm fine," she sobbed.
"I know. It's cold, though, let me keep you warm," he murmured, and she let him hold her just to keep her warm because that was easier than letting him hold her because she was crying, even though it amounted to the same thing.
Kate sobbed until her stomach hurt and she was hiccupping, and then she kept crying until she physically couldn't. She was still shivering uncontrollably, though she didn't think she was cold anymore. "I want to go inside now," she whispered weakly when the tears had finally dried up.
Milligan scooped her up and carried her inside, and she didn't even protest. He sat down on the floor of the bedroom with her, wrapping a blanket around her tightly. "I don't want to ask you to talk to me if you aren't ready, if you don't want--" he started.
"I miss my friends," Kate blurted out. "And...and I want to stay here with you but I miss them and I couldn't sleep and I was just going to get some air and…"
Milligan's hand cupped around her cheek, calloused and warm. "What can I do, Katie-Cat?" he asked softly.
She almost burst into tears again. She didn't know how to answer that. Kate had always solved her own problems, and this was exactly that. Her problem. Something she had to deal with herself, or...or she thought she did. "I don't know," she whimpered, sure that she sounded pathetic. "I...I wanna go up and keep working on the wall, I want to do something, I can't…"
"Kate, Kate, it's two in the morning. We worked all day. You're exhausted. It wouldn't be safe for you to be using those tools until you've slept," he told her.
She knew he was right. "But I can't sleep !" she wailed. "That's the problem!"
Looking helpless and a little bit panicked, he took her hand and held it tightly. "Can we take a walk instead? If you need something to do?"
Catching her breath and trying to calm down, she nodded. "Okay. A walk would be okay."
Milligan took their coats down from the hooks on the wall and tossed Kate's to her. She caught it as she stood up and slipped it on, then grabbed her belt and put that on as well so she could fasten her bucket to her side. One of the things she loved about Milligan was that he didn't ever act like her bucket-carrying was strange. He had once asked if she would rather have a specialized utility belt since it would be less bulky, but had understood completely when she explained that the bucket itself was one of the vital tools. Despite the decade apart, they understood each other.
Kate led the way on their walk. The fields around the old farm were overgrown and frosted over in the night chill, and the stars were out in full force with only a sliver of moon to dim them. She looked up, trying to recall the constellations that Reynie and Sticky had pointed out to her a few times, but she only recognized Orion (she was a warrior with a cool belt, too) and Gemini (which had stuck in her mind ever since the message Mr. Benedict had sent, so early on in their mission, informing them of the revelation that he had a long-lost twin brother). The sparkly band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky distracted her from her constellation search, and she walked without looking down at her feet, following its arc.
She didn't realize where she had walked to until she heard Milligan make a soft sort of gasping sound next to her and looked over at him, then over towards what he was looking at.
A mill pond.
The little mill itself was covered in ivy, and the water wheel was even more deteriorated than the barn. The pond was frozen over. Kate had the sudden urge to reach out and grab Milligan's hand and cling to him. He clung back. They were both silent for a minute, until Kate said, "It's smaller than I remember."
"You're bigger than you used to be," Milligan replied, his voice slightly hoarse.
"I guess that must be it." Because the mill had been her only memory of her life before the orphanage, it had expanded in her mind. The tiny pond had seemed like the ocean, like the whole world. It was big enough to be two whole years worth of memories, of love, of a life she couldn't quite picture anymore. As she gazed at the frozen pond, a question popped into her head and she blurted it out. "Do you mind me still calling you Milligan instead of Dad? It's not your name, it never was, and I just realized it might be kinda painful--"
"It's alright," he reassured her.
"I think I might be able to switch to Dad someday but I don't think I'm there yet, and Milligan is just how I think of you--"
"Kate, it's alright," Milligan repeated. "I don't mind. That's...it's my name now. I wouldn't want to go back to the name I had before. It doesn't seem to fit me anymore, and...and being Milligan is just a reminder that I held onto some part of you even when I had lost myself."
She squeezed his hand. "Good. Okay. Glad to have that sorted out."
"I have to say, this isn't how I imagined coming back here with you," he said quietly.
Kate paused. "How did you imagine it?"
"I thought it would be sunny, for one thing. The pond wouldn't be frozen, of course, and we could swim."
Glancing up at his face, she saw a wistful, distant expression. He was clearly picturing it in his mind, overlaying the image before them with what he wished it was.
"I wouldn't change it," Kate said.
"No?"
"No. It's perfect. Just like the house. We're finally back, and if we had waited until it was sunny and warm enough to swim, that would be, like, three months from now," Kate said pragmatically. "Which would have been way too long. And now we can come back whenever we want, and we can watch the ice melt, and…" She heard Milligan sniffle. "Are you crying?"
"Just a bit." He wiped his eyes with the hand Kate wasn't holding.
"Why?"
"I'm sorry it took so long for me to keep my promise, Katie-Cat. I'm so sorry."
Kate frowned. "It wasn't your fault !" she said, so loudly and vehemently that both she and Milligan flinched slightly at the passion in her voice. "You keep apologizing and I finally get why it's been bugging me-- you shouldn't be apologizing to anyone! Yeah, I lost you, but you also lost me . We were taken from each other! It's Mr. Curtain that should be apologizing to both of us, but because he's such a...such a... ugh , Constance would be able to think of the right insult, and she could make it rhyme, too, but I can't think of a rhyme that means something like 'someone so evil and incapable of feeling bad about hurting someone that he's just a completely hopeless case'."
Milligan's shoulders were shaking. With alarm, Kate thought for a second that she had made her father actually sob , but then she heard his laughter. "You're right, of course, Constance has such a way with words. Oh, Kate, Kate, but so do you ." He turned to her, tilting her chin up gently. "I can't promise I'll stop apologizing, not because I think it's my fault but because I am sorry that this happened to us. It isn't healthy to hold grudges, against ourselves or other people...but I think we can make an exception for Curtain, as long as it doesn't overwhelm us."
She smiled up at him. "Better to be angry at someone who deserves it than at ourselves," she said.
He tapped her nose. "Exactly."
Suddenly, Kate yawned. She tried to cover her mouth, but it didn't go unnoticed.
"Time to go back to bed, I think," Milligan told her.
"Oh, alright," she said good-naturedly. He put his arm around her shoulders as they turned and walked away from the mill, and she grinned at him. "Can we come back tomorrow? I want to see it in the sunlight."
"Of course we can, Katie-Cat," Milligan answered, and both of them felt the weight of the exchange--not a weight added, but a weight lifted, leaving them with a lightness to their steps that hadn't been there before.