Chapter Text
GATH. Now.
Out of a dream of bloody handprints and skittering metallic ticks, Samwell Gotch lurches to wakefulness in a four-poster bed, cold sweat sticking to silk sheets. He’s still in attack mode, body tensed as if he’s about to throw a punch or land a kick. He drags a breath in through clenched teeth and tries to— tries to remember. What he’s supposed to do.
Five things he can see— the firelight from the hearth. Illuminated by that, his own hands, fisted in the comforter. The first draft of a novel sitting on the bedside table. The bedroom door, closed. The bottle of hand salve on the dresser.
Four things he can feel— the weight of the blankets on top of him. The sound of a Tyrannosaurus snoring before the fireplace— no, fuck, that’s what he can hear, he’s getting ahead of himself, focus, damn it. The blankets. The hairs of his mustache brushing against his upper lip. The— the hand— the hand suddenly grabbing his arm—
Samwell flinches violently, and Montgomery lets go.
“Sam,” he says, voice groggy with sleep. “You alright?”
It’s humiliating— it’s infuriating— to still be this fucked up after everything. To not even be able to rest peacefully in bed beside a man who has been nothing but kind to him. “Fine,” Samwell says, trying to force his rabbiting heart rate to slow. “I’m fine.”
Monty doesn’t buy it. He sits up, waking up more fully, which only makes Samwell feel like a jackass. He’s speaking in front of a crowd of lobbyists and senators tomorrow. Taking up his time like this is selfish.
“I’m really fine, Monty,” he insists, scrubbing his hands over his face. What could he possibly be afraid of? Everyone who’s ever hurt him is dead.
“You can talk to me,” Monty reminds him, not going to touch him but letting his hands sit open on top of the comforter, an invitation. Always so understanding, always so kind. Samwell’s still trying to learn how to take those things at face value without looking for the strings attached. “I’ve lived a lot of nightmares in real life. Whatever you’ve got, I can take it.”
Courtney keeps snoozing peacefully in front of the fire.
“Was it your dad?” Monty asks, carefully. Light tread.
Samwell shakes his head. No, that would be easier to explain, if his night terrors had been about that. About a father who needed him in ways no parent is meant to need their child. And Samwell had decided long ago never to need anybody, but Monty was persuasive. Showed him that needing a person is not the same as using them.
“I was. Remembering,” he admits, hating himself and his own weakness, hating the nature of befrumpled time that gave him fifteen years to learn something and then dragged him back to the same smog-choked shithole he left behind. “My time in Zood. It wasn’t always… pleasant.”
A soft exhale from Monty. “No, I don’t imagine so,” he says. “Neither was mine, though I’m sure you have stories that would blow mine out of the water.”
“Mm,” Samwell murmurs, flexing and relaxing his fists. Thinking about what it would be like if he could clench his fists and then clench the rest of himself, curl up tight like a pill bug and just condense into a ball of nothingness, too pressurized to be a person. “I spent a long time trying to find my brothers,” he says. “And, in between that, a lot of time fighting the Eyeless Hand.”
“A worthy pursuit.”
“I thought I was tracking their leader,” Samwell explains. “Never realized he was tracking me too. And when he found me…” He shudders— a jerky, juddering motion. “I thought he was going to kill me. Sometimes… sometimes I wish…” He forces down a breath and lets it out. “For some reason, I hadn’t put together that the guy running the Eyeless Hand was someone I’d known in Gath.”
In the dim firelight, Monty looks troubled. Samwell wants to press his lips to the wrinkle between his brows. Samwell never wants to touch anyone ever again. “You knew Mordecestershire?” Monty asks softly.
One of the tears he’s been holding back springs loose and trails down the side of his face. “Yeah, Monty,” he says. “I knew Mordecestershire.”
In every way a man can know another man, Samwell knew Kensington Cosgrove Mordecestershire.
GATH. Then.
Kensington wasn’t quite like any of the other “lovers” Samwell’s father sent him home with. On the whole, they liked to pamper him and ply him with food and drink before pulling him into their chambers to do the things their wives or husbands wouldn’t do. They liked him docile and submissive, obedient, adaptable. They liked him quiet and they liked him clean.
Kensington liked his boys to bleed.
He didn't call Samwell a boy either, which suited him fine. Not like he’d felt like one since Mother died. “You’re a fine young man,” he said, dragging cold fingers down Samwell’s bare chest. “A fine specimen.”
Specimen, Samwell would learn later that evening, meant something very specific to Kensington Cosgrove Mordecestershire. It meant frigid steel tables and sharp scalpels, bright lights, needles that numbed his body to the pain but not to the horrible sense of wrongness. As Kensington peeled back the layers of flesh and fat to get at his squishy internal organs, Samwell learned what exactly it was that constituted deranged science.
“A pity your father made me promise not to permanently alter you,” Kensington sighed, threading his fingers through Samwell’s exposed ribs. Samwell was dimly aware that none of this should be possible, he should have passed out from shock or blood loss, but something in the machine he was hooked up to kept him awake and alert for all of it. “I have this hypothesis about inserting pumps in the lungs to respond more favorably to the Queen’s smog. Oh, well.”
He pictured going home with something foreign lodged in his chest, getting sewn back up with something that didn’t belong rattling around inside of him, and it was enough to make tears leak from the sides of his eyes.
And when Kensington said, hand plunged up through Samwell’s ribcage, that his anatomy looked gorgeous, it was the first time anyone had ever used that word to describe him.
The worst part wasn't seeing his own innards grasped slippery in Mordecestershire’s hand. It was all terrible. The worst was after, once he’d been stitched back up from groin to sternum and sent home, when he wept in his father’s arms.
“I know,” Longspot soothed. “The old chap’s always given me the heebie-jeebies, too. I wish I didn’t have to work with him, honestly, Samwell, but with you heading off to university in the fall and no one to help with the accounts, I need his funding.”
Don’t become angry, Samwell reminded himself. Don’t lose your composure. “I can… I can stay,” he managed. “Another year.”
“If you think that would be best,” his father said. “And then you don’t have to go and see that nasty man again.” And Samwell wept, nodding his head. He couldn’t go back, couldn’t just lie there and let himself be dissected and vivisected again and again. What if Mordecestershire started taking pieces out and refusing to put them back in? How much more could he possibly lose? “There, there,” Longspot said, drying his tears. “What do we say?”
Samwell let out a shaky breath.
“Thank you, Father.”
The morning after, at the breakfast table, Maxwell was chattering away about his trip with Grandfather. “The bosun tried to put me on her back and go and see the balloons,” Maxwell revealed, voice a conspiratorial whisper, eyes huge.
“Tried?” Samwell teased.
“I couldn't go!” Maxwell insisted. “I— I’m to stay on the ground.” And then he glanced around the dining room. “I wanted—” His mouth snapped shut, eyes on Hatwell buttering a piece of toast at the far end of the table.
You should go, Samwell thought. To see the balloons, to sail the skies. To university. Get away from this place.
There was a lake behind Grandfather’s house that the Gotch boys used to go swimming in. Father always harped on them about dirty water and diseases, and how if they were so inclined to train in the sport of competitive swimming, there was a perfectly usable pool at the country club, to which they all had inherited membership. They could swim neat laps beneath fluorescent lights with the smell of chlorine burning their nostrils.
Samwell and all his brothers much preferred the lake.
They’d play rough, sometimes, though he tried to rein his younger brothers in as much as he could. Still, it was never long that they were playing in the water before Maxwell would clamber on top of Wealwell’s shoulders, Johnwell atop Roywell’s, and Hatwell atop Blanewell’s for a three-way chicken fight.
Samwell always arbitrated.
Hatwell was vicious in his attempts to knock the other boys into the water, even delighting in grinding Blanewell down into the muck and silt. Despite Hatwell’s ruthlessness, Maxwell usually emerged victorious because he had the good sense to pick Wealwell as a partner, who doesn’t have many skills but is exemplary in holding another boy on his shoulders, standing tall and never, ever falling down.
When they were done chicken fighting, Hatwell would sulk and start playing a new game by himself, in which he tried to drown his brothers. Playfully. Samwell once had to haul Maxwell to shore and give him chest compressions until he coughed up a gout of lakewater, all with Hatwell in his ear complaining that he was “just playing” while Wealwell vomited in sympathy.
Samwell can remember one day, hot and humid, when the only relief from the stifling heat lay in the coolness of the water. He’d gotten firmer with Hatwell than usual, yelling at him for how hard he’d shoved Johnwell so close to the rocks at the edge of the lake. Hatwell had stalked him through the water, splashing him occasionally, hurling cruel remarks over his shoulder about how skinny Max looked in his gentleman’s swimwear.
Before Samwell knew what was happening, he was underwater, stronger hands holding him down, the dark lake pressing around him from every angle. He kicked out at Hatwell but couldn’t force him to loosen his grip, couldn’t wriggle his head back up above water. His lungs burned and his eyes bulged. He could see the surface of the water just above him, so close, so close but so far away. He struggled, thrashing in Hatwell’s arms, but without a full gasp of air, without any leverage, he was at his younger brother’s mercy.
And just as he felt the lack of oxygen starting to black out his vision, Hatwell pulled him back up. He broke through the surface of the water, gasping and choking and deliriously relieved. Fear made him feel like a prey animal, floating in the circle of Hatwell’s arms. “See?” Hatwell hissed. “I’m just playing. I know not to go too far. I pulled you back up, didn’t I?”
Samwell shook, suddenly freezing cold and teeth chattering and still much too close to Hatwell.
“Say thank you,” Hatwell prodded.
He always was, truly, Longspot Gotch’s son.
“Thank you,” Samwell forced out through the shivers.
It’s that day that he finds himself thinking about now, whenever Hatwell comes to mind. He remembers the feeling of being shoved down beneath the water, held down, and then yanked back up.
It was like that when he died on the Straka.
Hatwell knocking into him, smashing into his head and dropping Samwell immediately. He was dead. He was out of the fight. Maxwell and Wealwell were going to die because he wasn’t strong enough for them.
And then, all of a sudden, he felt Hatwell die and he was back up, hale and healthy. Brought back from the other side of the veil because his brother was dead. Because Monty’s dinosaur killed his brother.
The memories twine around each other like Zood and Zern— the day Hatwell nearly drowned him, the day Hatwell killed him. Pushing him down only to pull him right back up again. The mingled terror and relief and shame of being pulled back up and breaking the surface of the water.
Courtney rumbles and comes to join him at the window now, nuzzling against his shoulder. “Hi, old boy,” Samwell murmurs, scratching the T. Rex at the back of his head. “I’m alright, I promise.” Courtney warbles and presses his snout more insistently against his chest, snorting out a puff of warm breath. “He was a monster,” Samwell says, but the words feel flat. “You did the right thing.” More scritches.
Hatwell was the one who made Samwell a big brother in the first place.
He never in a million years wanted to feel this way— safe, at peace, because Hatwell was dead.
When he was being forced under the water, he didn’t want Hatwell to die. He just wanted to breathe. He wanted the same thing when Hatwell killed him.
There was some fantasy where, once out from their father’s influence, the curse would be broken and Hatwell would turn back into the sweet, curious kid he was when he was five years old. Like there was ever a way to go backwards. Samwell watched his little brother go from a nice kid to a mean one, to a cruel teenager, to a callous and evil man. And always, at the back of his head, hoping he would turn back around before it was too late. (Didn’t he pull Samwell back out of the water? Wasn’t he redeemable, somehow?)
(His mother’s voice, kind, cloudy through the fog of time. “Look at him go! Where’s he— ? Oh, he’s going to Samwell! He’s crawling to his big brother, aw, look at him chugging along. Go get him, Hatwell! Go get him!”)