Work Text:
I.
Beverley Brook wasn’t supposed to fall in love with the first cute boy to sweep her off her feet. She didn’t even believe in love at first sight.
How quickly things changed, like a flash flood, there in one moment, gone in the next.
When she first saw Peter Grant, he was standing with The Nightingale on the bank of the Thames while she was defending her mama’s territory from the Thames’ boys. That was curious. From all the stories she'd heard, The Nightingale didn't play well with others. Anyone he deemed worthy of having at his side must be exceptional. As The Nightingale swept off to check the bank further upstream, she swam forwards for a closer look at his companion.
He was awfully cute, looking somewhat baffled and bewildered but insatiably curious as he directed the light of his torch across the water. He was more luminous than her in the pale moonlight and his face, with his wide eyes and parted lips, was a picture-perfect expression of excitement and awe. She laughed, increasing his incredulity, and she found she didn't want to look away as she dove back into the warm embrace of her mama's waters. She let the tide sway her gently downstream as she took in and admired the full length of his lithe, tall frame. He really was gorgeous. If she hadn't been staring at him, she would have noticed the chicken-wire anti-erosion barrier at the edge of the water. Distracted as she was, her back rammed into it and she swore. Painful and embarrassing in equal measure; it was a relief he wouldn't be able to get a clear glimpse of her in the dark. She let herself blend in with the night and dove back under the water.
Peter was fun to flirt with, fun to tease. Bev liked the adorable way he got flustered when she pressed herself against him. That hardly meant she wanted to marry him or, Mama Thames forbid, invite him swimming in her River (although on further thought, Ty was the candidate most likely to disprove of any proposed union between herself and Peter; at least mum seemed to like Peter well enough). She was young, she was just starting to figure out who she wanted to be. She was going with the flow, waiting to see where the tide would take her—ready for anything it brought her. That had always served her well in the past; moving with the flow led her to her mum in the first place, after all. She still had an entire life ahead of her—well, multiple lifetimes, if she was lucky, and Bev rather thought that she was. She had all the space and time to experiment, to have fun; she was hardly going to settle down with the first cute boy capable of resisting her glamour.
But the first time she kissed him, perched as they were on the plinth of the Seven Dials, his lips were warm and wet against her own, and there was a pleasant dip in her belly. Peter was a good kisser. He met her eagerly and tenderly and if Fleet hadn’t turned up when she had, well. She wasn’t sure she would ever have been willing to let him go if the kiss continued much longer.
Beverley didn’t believe in love at first sight. Then Peter Grant walked into her life.
II.
Peter sometimes lived in a world of his own, emotionally immature and inattentive to her needs, not at all the sort of man she ought to fall for.
Men, as a rule, were unreliable. Beverley understood this, but Peter took it to new extremes. Nine months without a single visit, not one phone call. Not even a text.
She was surprised how much she cared, how much she missed him, how angry his silence made her. They'd only kissed the once. It wasn't as though either of them had made any promises. Still, she expected better of him and knew she deserved better.
And when finally they were reunited, and he asked to speak with her privately, she smiled. She thought, she hoped—. But he only wanted to ask her about Lesley’s face. Bev liked Lesley, of course; she wished she could help, really she did, and she wouldn’t have minded him asking how to help Lesley if that hadn’t been all he wanted to talk about, if he’d given her more—given her better. Bev knew she was owed more consideration than that. Peter owed her an apology, a little consideration, a little care and attention.
There was a storm that night that flooded Rotherhithe and she never was sure how much of it was her, and how much of it was the unusually high rainfall in her catchment area. Either way, she decided, it was Peter’s fault.
The first time she invited him back to hers, he spent a good thirty minutes investigating the architecture of her 1920s semi, inside and out, narrating as he went, and she wondered what she was doing—what they were doing. He was here but he was in his own world. It should have bothered her. With Peter on his architectural tangent, half of which she couldn’t follow, he wasn’t paying her much more mind than he had when he’d left her to her own devices for nine months.
Only that hardly seemed to matter, when Peter was here and so enthused, so genuinely excited. His face was open and filled with such delight, she couldn’t help but smile. Peter told her about the architectural history of her house; she didn’t follow the journey his mind took him on, but she could share in his joy and that was all that mattered.
III.
She wasn’t supposed to fall for an Isaac. It wasn't done, it wasn't in any way appropriate. Not with the Isaacs' longstanding history of disrespect and patronising, authoritarian efforts to control all members of London's esoteric community, including the Gods and Goddesses of the Rivers themselves.
Growing up, Ty and her older sisters told her stories of the Isaacs—the stuffy white men in their ivory tower, locked in their fortress at the Folly, barring entry to everyone else, dictating what the Orisa could and couldn’t do with their agreements.
She remembered The Nightingale coming to visit Mama once or twice when she was a child—the grey, haunted white man in his immaculate brown suit, out of place and out of time. He’d been stiff, thin-lipped, and polite. He was the last of his ilk and that was for the best, according to Ty. Once he was gone, so too would the Isaacs, the Folly, and all that they stood for; Ty said things would be better for everyone in the demi-monde that way. Ty had plans to help the magical community, oh yes.
None of them expected The Nightingale would take on an apprentice, and certainly, if they ever considered the possibility, they never expected he would choose someone like Peter Grant. Peter—the cute, nerdy mixed-race boy with his wit and his charm, with his community policing, with his love of learning and zest for life, with his ideals and his insatiable, contagious optimism. Peter, who didn’t lock himself up in the Folly, who brought progress and movement in his wake because he recognized the flaws in the system, believed in making the world a better place, and worked hard to bring that better world into fruition—worked harder than anyone Bev had ever known.
Additionally, Peter didn’t agree with the way the Folly’s defenses kept out the demi-monde.
“It’s not that it isn’t important for the Folly to have defenses,” he said. “It is. But what do we need blanket defense against genius loci and other members of the demi-monde for? Because they aren’t entirely human and therefore not to be trusted? I know racist bollocks when I hear it. Other practitioners have equal potential to threaten the Folly. More, in fact—Lesley and Chorley are proof enough of that. Unlike your family, who don’t mean us any harm. Even Lady Ty should to be allowed to enter. We’re a police nick, and our community ought to be granted access. How can we be part of the community, how can we serve and protect the community, if we’re holed up in here and they don’t have a way to come to us directly when they require assistance?”
Bev loved hearing him talk like that—all wise, clever words charging forward to change the world. He paused then, a little crimson creeping, rather adorably if Bev was the judge, into his cheeks. “And, you know, it would be swell if I could invite you around to mine sometime. I'm reasonably sure my girlfriend being barred entry to my home on general principle, simply because she happens to be an Orisa, isn’t how relationships are supposed to go.”
The first time she entered the Folly without experiencing deleterious effects, the doors swung open of their own accord to reveal Peter, practically bouncing with excitement (which he subsequently denied at dinner that evening, with a carefully schooled stoicism that fooled no one; when he tried to disagree, she and Nightingale glanced at each other, and they shared a conspiratorial smirk, to Peter's obvious dismay), with his arms spread open wide in welcome and a grin as wide as the ocean plastered on his face.
"Hey babes," she said. A surge of joy, not unlike the water at high tide, washed over her—not because she was inside the Folly, but because Peter was so utterly exuberant to have her step foot in the Folly. His joy was overflowing, rushing at her head on, and Bev was content to let herself be carried away. He was at his most beautiful in that moment, like the reflection of the full moon off dark, glassy water on a clear night in the country.
He held his stance in the entryway, eyes shifting pointedly between her and the doors as they clanged shut behind her, clearly expectant. She knew him well enough by then to recognize he was practically bursting at the seams to tell her something. She smirked, raising her brow at him. "All right," she said. "What is it?"
He pointed to the counterweight that triggered the mechanism, explaining eagerly and extensively how it worked. She listened patiently, nodding where appropriate. When he paused for breath, she took his shirt collar in hand and pulled him towards her, claiming his lips as her own. She told herself it was to shut him up, but—oh, how she loved this man.
Bev kissed Peter in the entryway of the Folly next to the pretentious statue of Isaac Newton, trying to ignore the glare of the ancient dead white man who hardly would have welcomed her. Fuck Isaac Newton, then. Peter Grant invited her here, and, if the way he wrapped his arms around the small of her back, pulling her close, and the way he swiped his tongue across her bottom lip were anything to go by, he was certainly pleased to welcome her into his home.
Later that night, after a successful but uneventful dinner with Peter and Nightingale in the overly large dining hall, she made love to Peter upstairs in his room. She pushed away the cold feeling in her stomach telling her she had no place being in this big, empty house, and hoped Newton was turning over in his grave.
Falling in love with an Isaac wasn’t the done thing, but Peter wasn’t like the other Isaacs. Her mum seemed to like him well enough; that had to be worth something.
The River, ever flowing, was never still, never stagnant. As Mama Thames and her daughters gushed and splashed across the city, they brought renewal with every change of the tide. Out with the old, in with the new. London, the great diverse, metropolitan city it was always meant to be, her Rivers teaming with new life, their ebb and flood its heartbeat.
In spite of, or perhaps more accurately because of, being the newest Isaac in half a century, Peter was as much part of that ever-changing heartbeat as Bev and her sisters.
IV.
The first time she saw him cry, it broke her heart.
Peter had a unique way of dealing with emotions. This largely consisted of Peter not dealing with his emotions—of ignoring them and burying them as deep as he could, or of deflecting them with cheeky comments. His cheek was one of her favourite things about him, but there came a point it wasn't reasonable. He never talked about Skygarden or the pain of Lesley’s betrayal. He smiled and made his jokes, and kept on pretending everything was fine. In a way, she admired him for it—that strength to pick himself off the ground and keep going after the unimaginable betrayal.
At the same time, she didn’t understand it. Fucking unnatural, she told him. If it’d been her, half of London would have flooded out. Maybe that wasn’t any better as a coping mechanism but it was her natural response. She was symbiotic with her River and she couldn’t help the water surging in response to her emotions. When it came to displays of emotion, they were polar opposites: Peter was the pond, calm and silent and still, but oh so beautifully brimming with life; she was the rushing river's rapids. Maybe neither of them had the right approach, but Bev knew complete suppression of feelings wasn’t healthy for a mortal. Peter needed to express himself before he did himself some serious damage, she decided.
Once she got him going with the tree, once she saw that he was finally starting to loosen up and release some of those pent-up emotions, she left him to it. What he was experiencing was private and she wouldn’t intrude on that. She went back to the cowshed, waiting for him to tire himself out, keeping an eye on him from a distance to make sure he didn’t hurt himself in the process. Through the door, she heard his cries and bit down a sob herself. He needs this, she thought. That didn’t make hearing him in such pain any easier.
When his cries subsided, she slid outside and padded on bare feet toward him. He was huddled at the base of the tree, sobbing quietly into his knees, arms wrapped tightly around his legs.
“Oh, Peter,” she said fondly, taking his hands in hers. She pressed a soothing kiss to each bruised and bleeding knuckle before lifting him and carrying him back to the cowshed, cradling him in her arms as she did. He was bigger than her, but what was the use of being a River Goddess if you didn’t pick up a few perks along the way?
She laid him gently on the bed and sat beside him, stroking his hair as he fell into a deep sleep.
V.
“You fell for a mortal,” said Ty. "You weren't supposed to make the same mistakes I did."
“Yeah, I did," said Bev, indignant because where did Ty, of all her sisters, get off telling her not to date a mortal.
Ty sighed. “You understand what that means don’t you, Bev?”
“Better than you do,” said Bev.
Ty was the oldest and she considered it her sacred duty to make all the mistakes first so her sisters didn’t have to, so she could protect her sisters from harm. But that didn’t mean she was always right, or that she had all the answers. It wasn’t Ty who’d spent nine months living in the country with the Thames’ boys; it wasn’t Ty who lived and worked alongside their country cousins, sharing in the knowledge they had to offer. Ty had her dreams and her plans for the demi-monde, but she stood tall on the outside looking down at all of them, remained on the outskirts at the top of the hill—ironic, Bev thought, considering most of the Tyburn was underground—in her eight million Georgian Terrace with her perfect bloody husband. Ty had build herself a moat of posh respectability. She was out of touch with the lived experiences of most of the demi-mode.
Not Bev. Bev had lived among their cousins, intermingled, asked questions, listened, and built bridges.
So Bev knew that Peter being mortal wasn’t the deal-breaker Ty made it out to be; the matter was a great deal more complex than Ty understood, which she might've known if she hadn't been too proud to ask. And even if it was that simple, it wasn’t Ty’s call to make. Ty's assumption that her experiences with loving mortals was universal amongst immortals was the real mistake. Besides, the dating pool was a bit slim if Bev chose to limit herself only to immortal beings in the demi-mode. She meant well, but Bev was growing tired of the repetitive and misguided Big Sister talks.
If one day she lost Peter, it would be worth it all, to have him here now—to have him and hold him and love him for as long as she could. Surely, in spite of her fear of losing her babies before her time, Ty could understand that; surely she must feel the same way about George, Steven, and Olivia. How could she not?
*
Beverley never expected Peter Grant. He was everything she shouldn't fall for. But that was just it, wasn't it? He was all those things, and he was so much more.
She was never supposed to fall in love with him, but that couldn't be helped. He was impossible not to love.