Work Text:
Davina’s goals in life had never been straightforward. As a toddler she had wanted an ice dragon for her birthday, when she had been five she had wanted to be a bookfighter. At ten, boxer.
At eighteen, she was apparently now the matron of a halfway house.
“You’re not a matron,” Will said, when she had said this aloud. “And keep your voice down, do you want the Stink on our backs? There’s two Wintersea Party defectors. They’re going to be seeking asylum, and they’re going to be informing on some stuff first but we just need to get them in and settled.
“Does Wunsoc know you’re doing this?” She eyed Will’s shiny badge, still pinned to her lapel.
“Whom do you think is organising it? There’s… possibly some difficulties, that’s all. You have your First Aid qualification, don’t you?”
She nodded, “Are they ill?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Honestly, Dave, no one’s telling me anything either. I just need someone to stay with them for a month, make sure they show no signs of illness or disease or infection, yeah? Also, if you could give them… a dummies guide to Nevermoor or something so they don’t start screaming when they see a wunimal out and about that would be great. And then I’ll come pick them up again. Alright?”
It sounded weird, and vaguely illegal, but those were both things Davina liked. She also liked the cheque she had just been handed, with more zeroes behind the first number than she could have possibly dreamt of for a job that was just babysitting two grown adults for a month.
How hard could it be?
“So the unnimals… they can talk?” the twin with messy hair blinked at her. She knew their names, and she was pretty sure that this one was Guntram Dove - poor bastard that he was for being saddled with a name like that - but she was still going to have to get them to wear name tags if she didn’t pick this up soon.
“Yep,” she said, trying not to roll her eyes. Honestly, what sort of hellhole was the Wintersea Republic if they didn’t even know what wunimals were? It was hardly Dove twin A or Dove twin B’s fault - Divine Thing she had to learn their names. Dove definitely wasn’t their surname; they always took too long to respond to it, but that made sense. If she had been defecting from an enemy nation, and had been relevant enough to be shoved into a political party at the age of… sixteen? Seventeen? She could see why they had picked up such things.
“Why?” asked his brother, the far more taciturn Wolfram. She wondered how much of a pair of pricks their parents had to be to name their baby Wolfram when they were from Great Wolfacre. Also, did they have a secret third sibling called Batteringram, because she could well believe there was some sort of theme going on here.
She shrugged, “Why not? That’s just how they are.”
Neither of them seemed satisfied by this but she didn’t particularly care. She was more concerned about what the hell she was going to tell the bartender she’d been chatting with at the Pecking Order when she next dropped in where she had even been for the whole past month. “What’s Great Wolfacre like anyway? What town are youse from?”
“Jackalfax,” probably-Wolfram said. “It’s boring.”
“Dull as a rock,” his brother agreed. “Nothing ever happens there. Both of us went to boarding school in the capital of course, but even being on a schedule where you get so much classwork to do you can’t breathe is more interesting than that place.”
“Yikes,” she said, thinking back to her own house. By the time she had hit seven or eight, even Hawthorne had moved out, but her siblings were all bright and busy, popping round for dinner here and there, teaching her how to throw a punch, or predict when it was going to rain or the best put-down for that annoying cunt in her maths class when she was fifteen that would be cutting enough to make him cry but not offensive enough to get detention for. Was it just Wolfram and Guntram at home? Did they have no other siblings? For some reason their faces looked vaguely familiar to her, something in the line of their jaws and their identical crooked noses, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe they just had those kinds of faces.
The next thing she learned about the twins was that they had grown up in a household posh enough to be in the bloody Silver District.
Had they ever washed a dish? No. Made dinner? No. Cut a vegetable? No. Cleaned a bathroom? Absolutely not.
She was there to take care of their alarmingly frequent nosebleeds, headaches, and make sure they didn’t burn down the house if they did try to cook. As housemates went? They were okay. The paycheque made it sweeter. There was a lot she was willing to put up with that she absolutely would not have had that beautiful piece of paper not been cashed at the bank already.
But it was lonely. They were… fine as conversationalists, but being with twins was like hanging out with a couple, where you were obviously the third wheel. They could read each other like a picture book for toddlers, and she just wanted to speak to anyone else.
So when Hawthorne dropped into her bedroom at three in the fucking morning, she barely even complained about it.
“This has to be paying pretty well for you to agree to do it,” he said, raising his eyebrows out the door.
Davina fiddled with the latch of her window, but she was pretty sure that the oaf had broken it. How could a man married to one of the most prolific pickpockets in the Free State be so bad at breaking and entering? “You’re gonna pay to fix this.”
“Who are they?” he asked, crossing his legs on top of her bed.
“How do you even know about it?”
He shrugged, “I’m in Wunsoc? I know things? They tell me stuff?”
She snorted, “Aye, sure.”
“They so do. And so do Mum and Dad when they tell me you’ve gone for a month where you can’t really come home for dinner and it’s important and comes with a paycheque that is frankly obscene.”
Dave had seen her brother’s paycheques from the dragonriding stables, from the gambling companies, from his sponsorship deals? Hers was… a fraction of that cost. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. Yes. It’s for Wunsoc, or whatever. Will needed me to do a favour.” And frankly, she owed Will more than a favour or two. She needed to start paying her back.
He made a face, “I hope you don’t mean Will Gaudy.”
“Who? No, her name’s Wilhelmina Shanks. You probably don’t know her, she’s like… ten years below you in the school. Anyway, she’s smuggled in two Wintersea defectors, and I’m… acclimatising them to the place. Will drops off the groceries twice a week, and in a couple weeks she’s picking them back up to take to Wunsoc properly. They’re informing, I think?”
“Two of them?” he frowned. “What are their names?”
“Why would you need to know their names?” She frowned at him. “I doubt Morrigan knows them, or Lam.”
“They might do!” he said. “Or maybe so I can look them up and check they’re not weird murderers or something, I don’t know.”
She rolled her eyes, “They’re too young for your unit-sisters to know them, I mean. They’re teenagers. Wolfram and Guntram Dove.”
His eyebrows shot up, “Twins?”
“Yes,” she said. “Why-?”
“I’m gonna come back,” he said quickly, spit flying from his mouth as he made his way back to her window. “At a more hospitable hour, and I’m going to bring Morrigan with me, okay?”
“No,” she said, but he was already halfway out the window. He was gone before she could even say, “Not fucking okay.” within earshot of him.
When Dave saw Morrigan and Hawthorne approach the door seven hours later, having been awake the whole time, because heavens knew how she could ever fall asleep after that, she let them in immediately. Not letting them in might create a scene. And she did not need the Stink showing up at any scene.
“Morning Davie,” Hawthorne bent over to ruffle her hair, but she caught his arm. Morrigan snorted into the back of her hand, but she could see the tightness around her eyes and the way the skin around her mouth was all bitten.
And then she looked at her face again. And she saw what she had been trying to see for the whole time she had known the twins.
“Holy fuck.” The words fell out of her mouth before she even knew that she was saying them. Raising her voice, she called into the living room, “Guys? There’s some people you should probably meet here.”