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1.
The tv remained stubbornly mute, the silence growing somehow even quieter. Hugh jammed his fingers repeatedly into the rubber buttons of the remote.
"Blasted modern thing, be damned with you", he muttered, cursing up a storm under his breath. He could feel his face growing hotter by the second, bees a low buzz in his stomach getting steadily louder.
"May God himself come down to smite you, little bastard you, may he cast you into hellfire!" He shook his fists about, narrowly avoiding knocking into the perfectly polished tv screen.
The remote did not respond.
Around him, the house echoed the quiet. Miss Peregrine was out on an errand with the littles and the younger boys had locked themselves in Enoch's room with some newfangled modern game or other. He hadn't seen the girls in a while, most likely off on an adventure through the Panloopticon.
It had been an adjustment for all of them. Jacob's house was plenty big enough for their group —Hugh wondered what the Portman's had possibly needed all this room for— and comfortable to boot. It had its quirks, like the shower with water spouts in the wall which had scared him half to death or the many polished glass surfaces that drew in grimy fingerprints like a magnet.
Despite that, it was home now, and he was going to have to get used to it. The thought did little to dissipate his anger.
Instead of going through with any of the drastic solutions his mind was conjuring, Hugh sat morosely in the living room nursing his whiskey (the Portman's also owned a very well stocked liquor cabinet) and his bruised pride. He leveled another glare at the remote control.
There was a football game on he'd have loved to watch. Another glance at the clock in the living room —solid glass, no numbers, matching the equally bare coffee table— confirmed his worst fear, the second half of the match had long since ticked past, there went his afternoon entertainment.
Jacob caught him right as he rolled up both sleeves, ready to finally give the insolent appliance a proper piece of his mind.
"Woah there cowboy", his accent was smooth in that American way that Hugh still quite hadn't gotten used to, vowels drawn out around the sounds. He had both hands raised as if he was taming a bull and a shit eating grin on his face as he inched into Hugh's space.
"Let's leave my parents' belongings in one piece, if you don't mind. I don't want them coming back home to a ransacked shithole." His grin grew even wider as he spoke and reached forward to prod a finger between Hugh's ribs.
He bristled, spitting a bee in Jacob's direction. "Don't just stand there laughing, you wee bastard, help me out. The cursed thing won't work!"
He pointed the remote at Jacob's face and then back to the tv in a wide arc, going back for good measure to bop the younger boy on the head with it. He yanked the remote out of Hugh's hand and grabbed him unceremoniously by the shoulders to push him out of the way, grinning all the way through.
Within seconds, the tv sprung to life with a flash. Hugh scowled.
They sat side by side in gloomy silence, Jacob flicked idly through the channels before settling on a nature documentary. He stretched himself across the couch, looking somehow completely at ease and totally foreign, his beat up sneakers clashing with the white leather. At least he had the decency not to mock Hugh further for his technological embarrassment, though he could hardly find the grace within himself to be grateful.
On the screen, a young puffin bumbled about across the beach, its parents looking on as fondly as a puffin can. Hugh felt something tight squeezing his chest. Whiskey sloshed against the sides of his glass.
The modern world was going to be the end of him.
2.
The shopping mall was bigger than the village Fiona grew up in. The colours and screens hurt her eyes and buzzed under her skin, humming with something alive and electric. It was all too much, too loud. There were hardly any plants, just grass peeking between the cracks in the concrete, the odd dandelion here or there.
On the car ride over she had sat wedged between Noor and Emma, the warmth of their bodies —they always seemed to run warm— a comforting presence. She wasn't used to automobiles or high speed roads or billboards flashing by on the highway. It all seemed to move so fast, everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere.
She thought the mall would be solace from the busy world outside, people running errands and idly chatting with the store clerks like she and Hugh used to do at the marketplace back home. Ever since that final battle she had felt unmoored, this odd modern life so far from the one she knew. It had taken her over half her looped years in Miss Peregrine's home before the 1940s started making sense, this was a whole other beast.
Every inch of the building was crawling with people, it made her skin feel sticky and her stomach turn. Jacob headed the charge, weaving deftly between people and food kiosks and shopping carts. The girls lined up behind them like ducklings, Emma first, then Fiona gripping onto her hand for dear life, then Noor with her fingers hooked around the back of Fiona's blouse and Claire perched high on her shoulders.
They were chattering away, smiles on their faces. Jacob twisted this way and that, pointing out modern conveniences and American classics.
"I swear, you need to try a slushie one of these days, it's going to blow your sugar-rationed minds." Emma grinned with all her teeth bare. Noor barked out a laugh behind her.
Fiona felt a little like she was being crushed by a hollowghast tongue.
She lasted until they stopped for a snack.
The hamburger kiosk sat smack dab in the middle of the mall, its red faux-brick walls and tiled roof a ridiculous contrast to the gleaming white linoleum floors. They'd gone from store to store, stocking up on school supplies for Claire and Emma and clothes for the lot of them. They hadn't had much success on that last front.
The modern world was severely lacking in good quality fabrics. Both her and Emma had turned their noses up at the selection on display, garish prints and low grade denim that must have been pre-worn with how thin it was. They tried store after store to no avail, eventually deciding to simply follow Claire, who was much less picky about the quality of her clothes as long as they were pink.
Noor had tagged along to take peculiar babysitting duties on her shoulders (they had found out the hard way more than one chaperone was needed) and instead had found herself face down on the floor in a Hot Topic keeping Claire's grimy fingers from reaching the shining jewellery. It had taken all four of them to keep her backmouth from wailing.
Now they stood basking in the scent of old grease and fried meat. It made her stomach turn. There was something off about it, something chemical. She could hardly see straight.
It was all so much, so loud.
Fiona couldn't feel the soil or the grass or the dandelions through the many floors of the building. The line crawled slowly along, Noor urgently whispered explanations about the unfamiliar menu items, everyone's eyes firmly glued to the boards above the counter. Without another second of hesitation, Fiona took her chance and ran.
The whole building was loud and echoey, the heels of her boots made a horrible racket against the floor. She managed to hide in a different store across the endless hallway, too afraid and frazzled to venture further out and look for the exit. Her breathing was shallow and uneven. This shop was quiet, only a few customers milled about inside. Their heads swivelled around to look at the newcomer.
She ducked away from their gazes and busied herself rifling through the clothing racks, hoping desperately there would be something worth buying in there. They felt sticky and too smooth, she understood now why Horace had insisted on buying his materials through the Panloopticon. All the fabric was too thin and flimsy and not rough enough against the callouses on her palms.
She blinked and found herself in a changing room, back firmly turned away from the mirror and her knees on either side of her head. Her memory kept skipping beats lately. She was so dizzy, her head felt stuffed with cotton, her breath now came in in heaving gasps.
Another beat. Her hands squeezed into fists, her nails leaving half moons in the soft flesh of her hands. Silver blinked up at her from between the folds of the dressing room curtain, a delicate but sturdy ring, good material, recognisable. She blinked back in return, baffled, torn out of her panic induced stupor.
Claire slipped a small white hand underneath the curtain, asking for permission. Her ringlets fell in waterfalls around her head. Her dress was crooked and smudged from where she had crawled into the small cubicle. In her tiny hands sat the ring.
She smiled with all her (too many) teeth and held the ring out to Fiona, who gauged the weight of it in her palms. Real silver. A pattern of vines wrapped around the edge of it, twisting back into itself. She couldn't help but smile back in return, at sweet Claire's burning desire to help, to make things right.
She hummed pleasantly, reaching forward to wrap her arms around Fiona's waist. Her breathing slowed, her heart warm and full in her chest, though she still couldn't shake the tendrils of discomfort that clawed at her.
The modern world was going to eat her alive.
3.
Hugh was out of his mind, numbingly, exasperatedly, at the very end of his rope bored.
There was nothing to do, no woods to walk through, nothing but houses and suburbs with no life and even fewer living. He could feel the cold windows of Jacob's neighbours staring back at him. He had been quarantined inside for ages now.
The younger kids had started school, the older ones were picking up odd jobs here and there to integrate into the 21st century, and Hugh grew ever more restless. Miss Peregrine wouldn't allow them to enter back into the peculiar world quite yet, wanting to give them all the experiences they could gather now that they were free to move through time as they pleased.
He itched to punch something, to take an axe to the rubble in the yard and make firewood, to scrub laundry with his mother until their hands bled. He was strung tight like a bowstring, teetering on the edge of oblivion, his body was starting to feel like a nuisance more than a tool. He wanted to till the fields, to be of use.
He had tried to go for jobs, but Florida's geriatric suburbs didn’t offer much for a farm boy like him. Manual labour jobs were few and far between and he refused to step into a modern car to commute, despite both Enoch and Jacob offering to give him lessons.
Not to mention the bees trailing ever behind him, the last interview he had gone to consisted of a lot of swatting and a seething rage underneath his skin every time the recruitment officer got too close for comfort to killing one of his bees. He'd had half a mind to set one of them on the recruiter, sting him in a really nasty place, but he didn't want to sacrifice one of his lads for frivolous revenge.
So here he was, alone on the couch once again, feeling steadily more and more like he never should have left the 1850s.
A sound from further down the house startled him. He stood and peeked his head into the hallway, peering through the open door. Horace was chopping veggies in the kitchen, muttering angrily at the bag of parsnips now strewn all over the kitchen tiles. Bronwyn stood over the sink elbow deep in dishwater.
"Oh, Hugh!", she called, dishes rattling, "Be a dear and help Horace pick those up, won't you? I'm a bit preoccupied." She raised a soapy hand, bubbles flying every which way. Her cheeks dimpled as she smiled.
He nodded and complied, neatly stacking the vegetables in a basket and placing them back down on the table. Horace patted the back of his hand with the hilt of his knife in thanks. Hugh wordlessly pulled up a second chair and started on the chicken, cleaving it with all the grace of an inexperienced butcher.
He was pretty sure Enoch usually did this, but he was off to god knows where with god knows who. Modern times had been a joy for him, shedding his usual gloomy demeanor and making an impressive amount of friends who shared his morbid interests. Hugh tried not to resent the ease with which the others move through this new world and found his strength lacking. The cleaver came down onto the chicken with entirely too much force, sticking out straight of the chopping board.
Bronwyn dried off the last of her dishes, pointedly ignoring the sparkling dishwasher hidden underneath the countertop, and settled next to Hugh. She diced the parsnips that Horace had peeled, tossing them one by one into a big pot. They made little splashing noises as they breached the surface, it reminded him of skipping stones.
None of them were quite willing to let go of long winded habits, routines, of the feeling of the world becoming real underneath their fingertips. Horace still sewed most of their clothes on a now antique sewing machine, Emma still set her curls with rollers. There were a million ways to make life easier that had been invented in the last century, they all made him feel alienated, far removed from the land and the food and himself and the tools in his hands.
He tossed the chicken bones in with the parsnips. Stock from scratch was a million times better than that dried and cubed stuff Jacob insisted on buying.
He laid his head on Horace's shoulder, who looked at him with a single perfectly shaped eyebrow raised high. Bronwyn closed both her hands around his, rubbing circles into his callouses with her thumbs. There was a scar there, from the factory, pink and raised against the pallor of his skin.
Hugh let out a deep sigh. Modernity was going to kill him.
4.
The very edge of the garden was peaceful. Well, as peaceful as could be with the horrible noise the modern age made, car tires screeching in the distance, the tv playing from inside the house. Somewhere in the distance, a child cried for its mother, voice high and shrill. Fiona missed the lonely Irish hills, the sounds of the sea in Cairnholm. She couldn't even hear the plants growing here.
Somewhere behind her, Miss Peregrine hiked up her skirts (they were too dark in colour and the fabric too heavy for the oversaturated Florida weather) and crossed the grass. Her limp had gotten worse, Fiona could hear the hitch in the rhythm of her steps.
"Miss Frauenfeld, do you mind if I keep you company?"
She tilted her head without looking up, her hands buried to the wrists in the wet soil. It had rained last night, a loud thunderous storm that put all of them at ease. Well, most of them, Noor and Jacob had paced the hallways in distress, checking and rechecking the windows and the doors. The rest of them slept peacefully, thunder resounding like bombs in their dreams. She hadn't slept that well since the war.
The shifting and rustling of wool and cotton tore her our of her musings. Miss Peregrine didn't speak, she sat next to Fiona in the grass —surely staining her skirts— staring out at the forest. She dug her hands deeper, uprooting clumps of weeds.
Plants here felt different. They were unwilling to share their secrets, harder to coax into shape, to curl their leaves around her forearms and let their blossoms bloom across her palms. She was desperate to learn their language, but all they did was shy away from her. She missed the unblemished countryside of her home more than ever, the wild thistles and hawthorn and clover. Here nature had been scared into submission, her heart ached with it.
Everything was noise and concrete and wet humid heat that made her curls heavy and limp. She hid behind the curtain of them now, concealing her face from Miss Peregrine's shrewd eyes, twinkling where they had turned towards her.
"Is there something on your mind, my dear?"
And oh, to be known, that hurt more than anything. Her chest heaved as she drew in a shaking breath, the grass around her sprouting dog roses in her distress. They had been blooming white instead of pink lately, she didn't know how to fix it. Fiona wondered for a second if the rain had started up again, willing it to wash her away, when she registered the warm wetness of tears on her cheeks.
With great effort, she swallowed it all back behind her mangled tongue and shot Miss Peregrine a shaking smile, afraid even now of being vulnerable in front of her mother, this woman who had gone through hell and back to get them here. She looked so small in her mourning clothes, her hair loose around her face. There were wrinkles and folds she had never noticed before. How ungrateful must she have appeared, how spoiled? She was just a child, getting her Sunday clothes dirty in the muck.
She was homesick, terrifyingly, nauseatingly, irrepairably homesick for a time and a place she could never get back to. The weight of it all hung over her like a funeral shroud, she wished suddenly that Florida had churches made from wood and straw, a nice bog to bury her.
The words were heavy and distorted when she spoke, throat raspy from disuse. "Every'ing's fine, Miss. Don' you worry about me now."
Fiona knew for certain the modern world was going to kill her.
+1
It's dark out when they meet, secretive despite it all. It makes her feel twenty again, really twenty, for the first time. Hugh's bees buzz happily despite the late hour, settling on the edge of his jaw in wriggling lines. She feels lighter than she has in a very long time.
The house is finally asleep. Claire had insisted on a bedtime story, crawling inbetween her and Hugh in their large kingsized bed and delaying their evening plans. Fiona had nearly dozed off herself, Hugh's lilting accent and the warmth of their bodies against her familiar and soft. He'd nudged her awake with that impish grin of his plastered firmly on his face.
Claire was dead to the world, snoring loudly from both mouths with her arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. They'd gently tucked her in, Hugh pressing a kiss to her forehead, and snuck giggling out the door into the garden.
There they stand in their nightclothes, moonlight reflecting off their wide smiles as Fiona throws her head back and spins around and around and around. She whistles a sharp note and points a hand at Hugh and then herself, counting down from three on her fingers before taking off in a wild sprint towards the forest.
Hugh careens through the underbrush right on her heels, crying out about her unfair advantage. The vines weave patterns around her bare feet, catapulting her forwards in leaps and bounds. His heavy footsteps grow quiet, she can hear him cursing in every language he knows as he tries to push the saplings she leaves in her wake aside.
Her breath burns in her throat, every muscle pulsing with the effort as she pushes further and further on. Her legs can take it, though she knows she will have to recuperate all week. She doesn't slow down. The thrill of the chase is reverberating all around them. Hugh whoops and cheers and crashes into a tree and cheers some more.
The full moon is bright, even this deep into the woods. She glides a hand along the trees, beckoning them to move their leaves aside and pour light into the dark corners all around them. It reminds her of Cairnholm, even though the moon was much smaller then.
Before she knows it she's on the beach, bursting out of the treeline with a line of flowers right behind her. She cannot help herself, spinning and spinning and shouting at the top of her lungs. The waves crash, Hugh's footsteps echo. She feels so free, so intoxicatingly free.
Hugh tackles her to the ground with a shout, their momentum sliding them a few metres across the beach, limbs all tangled up. There's sand in her underclothes and behind her teeth and in her hair.
"Well hello lover", he quips, "Fancy seeing you here." His voice is unbearably tender.
She laughs and laughs and laughs.
There they lay, his head on her chest, both of them heaving as they catch their breaths. The moonlight washes the whole world blue and grey and silver. A lonely star flickers above them, persevering through the light pollution.
"Forever", she speaks into the space between their bodies, one of the few words she can get out without stumbling over its syllables.
"Forever, forever, forever." Her voice catches. Hugh presses his hand in hers, traces patterns up her arm that follow the faded white of her scars. She tightens her other arm around his waist.
"Forever", he whispers back. His lips move against her collarbones, she can feel the heat of him in every fibre of her being.
Forever. It carries more truth than ever now, in this unfamiliar world where there are no more threats, no more prison, no more loop. In the distance, she can hear the beachgrass whispering her name.
Hugh pushes himself up on his elbows despite her whine of protest. His gaptoothed grin is bright, goggles askew on the top of his head from their tumble through the sand.
"I brought something for you my love."
She tilts her head in surprise, mirroring his movements as she attempts to sit up straight.
From his pocket, Hugh takes a small rectangular device. It glints in the moonlight. Fiona can't make out what it is, leaning closer to inspect it. Hugh presses a button on the side, and with a click and a hum a lense protrudes from the box.
"Oh, pic'ures!", she exclaims, reaching over tentatively to poke at the camera. It's much smaller than the ones she's used to. She points a finger at the sky with a frown, hoping Hugh will catch her drift without her having to mime and garble her way through her phrases. She needn't hope. He knows her through and through.
"Don't worry mo bhláth, it's a digital camera. Noor tells me that means it's supposed to work just as well in the dark as in the light." He sticks his tongue through the gap in his teeth, his brow furrowed in concentration.
"Though I would have preferred her to have told me how the blasted thing works…"
He fumbles around for a second, then holds the camera in front of his eyes and presses another button. A triumphant noise escapes him. She's momentarily blinded by the bright flash of light, blinking rapidly.
He holds the box up so she can see her own confused and bleary face staring back at her from the small little screen. She looks like a right spectacle. Her eyebrows are scrunched up and her hair is going every which way, a strand of it sticks to her lips. The flash from the camera and the moonlight have cast her in harsh highlights that make her eyes look huge.
She can't help the joy that escapes her then, loud and raw and real, almost bending double with the intensity of it. It all comes flooding through her in a burning rush, their wild chase through the woods, her ridiculous face on the glowing camera screen, the ever present ache in her tongue and her bones and her heart, Claire snoring back at home, the concrete and the beachgrass.
Fiona lays her head back in the sand, pulling Hugh along with her. His face is so close to hers, it hardly takes effort to fully close the distance. He tastes of honey.
She thinks the modern world might just turn out to be okay.