Chapter Text
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
—William Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun”
Like most things in Michaela’s life, the path to acquiring a doctorate starts with a letter.
(An electronic letter. Semantics.)
In 2012 she receives an email from a John Stirling, 16, that says I think we may be cousins. It’s not a joke, Michaela thinks. It’s too well researched; he’d found her shoddily coded heritage apple website to send her a message, for god's sake. Three more emails are proof enough for her to pack her bags and make the jaunt from Seoul to Scotland (she’d been learning Korean with mixed success) to meet a living relative for the first time in several hundred years.
John is sweet and far too serious for sixteen. It’s fun to have a younger cousin again, one who reminds her of her John, thirty-something generations back, before the reality of her immortality turned his love into resentment. Janet Stirling is less than enthused about her teenage son inviting a thousand-year-old cousin to dinner, though she warms, somewhat, when Michaela shows up with homemade shortbread.
Looking at the solitary line on John’s homegrown family tree irks Michaela enough to start trawling local parish archives to fill in the gaps herself. The work is slow, but Michaela has all the time in the world, and seeing the tree fill up is more gratifying than she expects. For the first time, history feels like a genuine interest rather than a series of things that happened to her. So when John suggests offhand she go for a degree, Michaela can’t think of any reasons to say no.
The bureaucracy is less painful than Michaela expects. She cashes in a favour to get her birth year quietly updated on her NRSC file (born in 1990, god), makes a trip to the Home Office for updated documents, and the rest is easy: she signs up for an Access to HE course, takes some GCSEs, and by the next September she’s back in London, sitting in a lecture hall packed with teenagers learning about Mesopotamia.
It’s good. Really good. Michaela’s been living life at leisure for so long she’d forgotten how much fun it was to do things, lots of things, all at once. She reads voraciously, writes voraciously, gets into juggling, gets a little overzealous debating a lecturer once, twice, more than a few times, gets back into baking, dips into the coffers to buy a proper house and takes up carpentry with power tools. She pays a local kitchen witch in blood and German honey to jumpstart a pair of Ribston Pippin saplings so they’ll fruit by the autumn, spends the summer trading recipes with Janet and combing through all her storage units for, well, primary source material. By the time John moves in with her to start at KCL, Michaela’s life has become a well-oiled machine of hobbies and historical research.
Her final year rolls around. Michaela drafts her undergrad dissertation proposal (selkie labourers in the Dundee whaling industry) and her mind drifts to what she might do next. Culinary school, going back to learning Korean. The Friday before the due date she’s not thinking about her proposal at all when she runs into Eloise Bridgerton outside a chippy.
“Stirling!” the woman calls, flashing a too-sharp smile, and for a moment Michaela wishes she was still paranoid enough to carry silver daggers.
(Not that she ever managed much with them. Her usual strategy was to be murdered and hope the killer walked off before she popped up again.)
But there’s no stabbing needed today. They sit in a sticky vinyl booth and make small talk while Michaela eats and Eloise inhales a blood packet and a ginger beer in quick succession. By the time Michaela is down to grease and potato bits, the conversation has pivoted to what she’s been doing for the last twenty-some-odd years. Languages, always. A stint captaining a salvage boat for Chilote water spirits. Too much time at the beach.
“I’m in school now,” Michaela adds. “History.”
Eloise stares. And then Eloise barks out a laugh, types something into her phone, and shoves the screen in Michaela’s face.
Dr Francesca Bridgerton. University of Manchester. Department of History.
Department of History.
“She’s been teaching since the turn of the century,” Eloise says to Michaela’s open-mouthed silence. “Longer than I think I’ve done anything.”
The last time Michaela talked to Francesca was in 1912. There hadn’t been an explosion so much as a slow, inevitable drift; Fran had been young—granted, only Michaela would call a supercentenarian young—and she’d found Michaela before finding the world on her own. Her leaving was a when, not an if, though it took both more and less time than Michaela expected. And so when Francesca finally disappeared somewhere without asking her to come along (Paris, for the piano salons), Michaela left a letter on the kitchen table and spent the next few years wandering south, letting the sun and the prospect of learning Portuguese smooth over the ache in her chest.
She sent a few more letters up until the shadow of the second World War, but Fran never replied and that, Michaela supposed, was as much a message as any.
Eloise leaves her outside the chippy with a knowing smile and Michaela—
Michaela heads to the library.
It’s far too easy to type Francesca’s name into Google Scholar and let two decades of self-restraint crumble under the need to devour everything she’s ever published. What Michaela doesn’t finish reading she prints and brings home; John walks into the kitchen the next morning, sees the mountain of paper and the manic look in her eye, and walks right back out. Their research interest overlaps enough that it’s a wonder that Michaela hadn’t stumbled onto her sooner. Supernatural historiography in the long nineteenth century, politicization of the occult in the British Isles, and early Sunday morning Michaela’s future plans crystallize in her mind.
When Michaela submits her proposal the next day, it’s not about selkie whalers. It’s about Regency vampires.
The years fly by. Michaela is tempted by grad school in Manchester, but the world is wide and she ends up where she wants to be. New York is charming as ever, still populated by a few faces who remember her from the mid 1800s. The Central Park fair folk, mostly, but Agatha runs a magic school in Brooklyn these days and Michaela stops by a few times a month for tea and to get blasted to bits by her students.
Through it all, Michaela writes about the supernatural in London. Francesca is reading some of it, she’s certain—at several conferences Fran makes a great deal of zero eye contact and a single citation (Michaela was third author, but still) crops up a month before her thesis submission. It makes her giddy for reasons she refuses to examine. There’s a game here, and even if she doesn’t know the rules Michaela has no intention of bending first.
Michaela defends her PhD. Michaela snags a research fellowship in London. Michaela turns her thesis into a book—and that, really, is where this story begins.