Work Text:
Part of a Pair
A Mirror, Mirror Fanfiction
~1996~
Ordinary people, untwins, seek their soul mate, take lovers, marry. Tormented by their incompleteness they strive to be part of a pair.
– Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.
Nicholas did not have a lonely childhood. You could hardly call a childhood in which you were never left in a room alone lonely; a childhood spent with the best tutors in Europe, servants, loving parents, and four beautiful sisters, all looking out for your best interests, an entire empire – a country, a kingdom – weeping and praying for you when it was announced in the papers you were ill, was not lonely.
Never until the days when Sir Ivor would let him see no one except Campbell for the occasional game of backgammon did Nicholas experience what could rightly be called loneliness.
And – in truth – the novelty of loneliness was such an intense shock to his system, it nearly drove him mad. He'd been beside himself with desperation when he'd spied Jo and Louisa clamouring over the garden wall to peer down the well – children he could be friends with!
Real, living children like himself!
What it was Jane Eyre had said of the red room? Of her aunt's locking her up in it? That it gave her nerves a shock of which she still felt reverberations in adulthood?
Pangs of mental suffering, Charlotte Bronte called it, and Nicholas feels fairly certain his time too much alone under Sir Ivor's care rattled his nerves in a similar way.
He has been living with the Tiegans for a year now, in a different time entirely from that in which he grew up, and yet – if it can be avoided – he seldom opts to be alone. Nicholas, still to this day – to this very hour – can't help looking askance at any closed door as if he is afraid it mightn't necessarily open again, when next he tries the knob.
Still, for most of his happy childhood – the parts of it unmarred by attacks of haemophilia – Nicholas did feel as if something – someone – were missing.
He would look at his parents and see they were two. Of course, this is natural, as most parents generally are two separate people except under circumstances which used to be a great deal more extraordinary, more unusual, when Nicholas was a child than it is in the time his teenage self now lives. But then he would look at his four sisters and realise they, as well, were set in pairs of twos.
The Big Pair and the Little Pair.
Olga and Tatiana were one unit, Maria and Anastasia the other.
And it would strike him, like a blow to the heart, now and again, for no reason at all, how brutally unfair it was he hadn't a brother, or another odd sister out, to complete a pair of his own.
From time to time, he could play at being Anastasia's other half, but they both knew – on a deeper level – the connection between them, strong as it was, wasn't the same as between her and Maria.
Their hearts always knew the difference.
Alexis – that was who Nicholas was back then – never said a word to anyone about his yearning after a state of being in a pair, in a state of faux-twinness, but he tried whenever possible to fill in the space where his other half should have been, if the universe had been fair enough to give him one instead of leaving him as a single in a world of doubles. With Kolya Derevenko, his doctor's son, he came closest to the desired state, but they could not be together as often as his sisters were, as often as his parents were. They loved one another dearly, inventing games and worlds only understood within the privacy of their shared minds, calling each other by their names spelled backwards and writing letters in code, but they were always torn apart before they could solidify into a proper pair.
Nicholas was gutted whenever Kolya could not play with him, but he never pretended, not to himself or to anybody else, it was at all the same thing as when Maria and Anastasia were separated, such as the time Maria accompanied their parents to Yekaterinburg leaving her other half behind.
Shortly before the night he was woken up, the night he was put in peasant clothes and found himself in need of rescue by Sir Ivor, Nicholas had been – once again – trying to fill that hole in himself with the company of Leonid Sednev, the kitchen boy. He often felt the boy was humouring him, the connection between them was not real as it was between himself and Kolya, but it was something – in a life where it felt more and more as if he had nothing – and he clung to it with everything in himself until the guards told him and his worried parents one horrid morning Leonid had gone to visit his uncle.
A strange thing, that, when Leonid's uncle was already dead.
By the time Nicholas learned his family had died shortly after he was rescued in 1918, he'd quite given up the idea of ever finding the other half of himself. He was resigned to having a space in himself never to be filled. With so many other miracles, particularly the magic mirror which brought him to Jo and ultimately restored his signet ring to him though it did not allow him back into his own time with it, he was mostly satisfied.
One cannot have everything. Sir Ivor, oddly enough, was right about that – even kings must lose in difficult situations. Some hopes were to be given up for lost.
But these days Nicholas finds himself realising something quite remarkable. He has become part of pair, almost without noticing it was happening.
He and Jo Tiegan sign cards and letters together as JN without spaces to indicate they are in fact separate persons. They go to school together and have their lessons during the day and play and do activities with the same friends in the afternoons when school lets out; they sit by each other at the table for dinner and exchange whole jokes with mere flickers of glances. They sneak out of their rooms across the landing (his shared with her brother Royce) to meet on the stairs and whisper for hours after they are supposed to be asleep. They sit outside and name what stars they know on clear nights, and they play board games and watch TV on rainy ones.
She's his best friend and he's hers.
He is finally, finally part of a pair, no longer a single entity wondering why he was halved; his striving is ended, and he is contented.