AN: You could say this is kinda a character study of our favorite traitor, his brokenness, madness, goals, what drove him. He's a really interesting guy, isn't he? XD Anyway, the plot is done similarly to PH, so it's like a jigsaw puzzle. You have to work it through a bit before the picture becomes clear. Done for Jack's b-day(today!). Inspired by the fanfic Hide and Seek by 1shot over on the Supernatural fandom. Read on!
Disclaimer: disclaimed.
Unfolding Time
by Starlit Skyline
Jack was standing in the forest just outside the Baskerville estate. Usually, he would have just waltzed right in, unannounced and uninvited. But Oswald had sent for him not a day ago, exactly one week after Lacie had asked him to leave. Jack had been waiting for what felt like an eternity for this day. It was snowing, like the first time he'd met her. Somehow, it seemed fitting.
This was the first time he'd actually been invited into the elusive world of the Baskervilles and it made him strangely giddy because that meant that maybe Oswald was finally warming up to him.
This thought brought with it an unexpected feeling Jack had long forgotten how to name.
He supposed it didn't matter, not after today.
„I'm sorry," Jack breathed out „Can you repeat that, Oswald?"
His friend obliged, stoic „Lacie is dead."
Oswald pushed something into him limp, unresponsive fingers and Jack could only blink as Glen's his billowing cloak vanished from his field of vision–
„I killed her."
– and his world shattered into pieces.
.
It was eight years ago on this day that the girl stood in front of him in that dingy, filthy alley in her frilly white summer dress that swayed in the icy wind and snow.
It was eight years ago today that he lost her for the first time.
.
This time it's for good.
.
„You look like a living corpse, Jack."
Glen – Levy – came into his room at some point Jack didn't remember. The former Duke's body was wrapped in bandages, priceless robes hanging from his frame as though from a coat-rack and pale hair loose and tangled. But he was smiling, which was more than Jack could ever hope to manage.
.
Maybe he didn't know how to, anymore.
.
Isla Yura's Mansion had become a battlefield and a bloody one at that. Then again, weren't all battles bloody? Didn't all life end in death and all fairy-tales in tragedy?
Maybe they didn't, but Jack wouldn't know.
All he knew was that Lacie was dead, Glen was standing in the way of fulfilling her wish. He'll do it though, even if it meant killing Oswald to achieve his goal. But Oswald was already dead, wasn't he? Glen killed him too, at the same time he'd killed Lacie. And now Jack was going to kill Glen for taking the two people he cared about most in the world away from him. He'd fulfill Lacie's wish. He wouldn't be alone anymore.
Or maybe Glen would kill him before that.
Either outcome was acceptable.
.
„Now that's she's gone, you've lost interest in this world, haven't you?"
.
„I knew she was lying."
Levy looked at him, cocked his head to the side. He wore a bemused expression on his face.
Jack smiled.
„Oswald is not a liar."
And he is as pure as he is twisted.
.
„I'm sorry," he breathed out „Can you repeat that, Oswald?"
„Lacie is dead."
Oswald pushed something into him limp, unresponsive fingers and Jack could only blink as Oswald's billowing cloak vanished from his field of vision–
„I killed her."
– and his world shattered into pieces.
.
Alice laid in a pool of her own blood on a checkered, black-and-red-floor. Her eyes were wide open and empty, her white dress was stained bloody by his sins.
„I killed her." Jack echoed, as if from a long-forgotten dream, his voice sounded distorted even to his own ears. „I killed them all."
.
His mother's hand left painful marks across his cheek. Her nails were long and unkempt. They often drew blood when her blows came to caress his face. She was a hysterical, insane woman who cared for nothing but her lover – a lover who left her and was never coming back, mind you.
Jack had tried to tell her this on multiple occasion, but she'd either completely shut down or start screaming her head off, cursing her son for ever being born.
Sometimes, Jack did that too.
He didn't scream it for the entire town to hear, didn't beat the people responsible for his state of misery – he had no one – and didn't beg and bargain and wish for halcyon days long dead–
Jack wished for it all to be over.
.
There was a body on the floor.
It was a boy, small and precious and one who'd smiled so oft at him with affection.
Jack had been the one who felled him.
„So, Glen, won't you lower that sword... before I kill your cute little servant?"
Fire crawled up the walls of the Baskerville Mansion. The place had been turned into a living hell. Shadows danced among the flames and blood. Crimson was everywhere.
Jack remembered smiling, more out of some twisted reflex than anything else.
„What's wrong Glen? Why don't you hurry up and drop that sword? I really don't want to... hurt you like this."
And Jack might have meant that, if he'd known what he'd meant to say by that. Did he mean it? Why did it hurt so much, if he didn't? Jack flinched, uncertain, the burning inside his chest – had he inhaled too much smoke, why did his heart feel as though it itself was burning? – was surely not due to his friend's – friend? Even after all this? Yes, forever. – furious and wounded expression.
But any affection Jack might have had for the man is soon left as broken and as bloody as Glen's corpse. His severed head – and really, wasn't Miranda supposed to be the one doing this? – hit the floor with a echoing thud and then, silence. Nothing but silence and endless night.
And Jack thought – you started all of this – and started to hum an all too familiar tune.
.
I finally understand why she lied to me.
.
His Father – Father, what an ironic title – was shouting at him. Jack couldn't help the thought that his parents must have been a match made in Heaven. Really.
„You insolent brat! What were you doing sneaking into the Baskerville Mansion?!"
Jack was used to being yelled at, so he blocked the man out for the most part and wondered childishly how much more screaming it would take for the pulsing vein on the Lord Vessalius's face to burst.
„This can only end badly for us!"
Years later, Jack would hate the man all the more for being right.
But us hadn't been the Vessaliuses. It had been Lacie, Oswald and Jack.
.
He was crying, Jack realizes belatedly, after all was said and done and there was no going back.
He was crying, hunched over and clinging to his best friend's stone-cold body even though he'd been the one to murder him.
Jack held the corpse close, closer than Oswald had ever allowed them to be in life and spared a moment to regret.
Jack spent the next hundred years trying to forget that moment.
.
Oz was laid out before his feet, sobbing. He was a pitiful thing, but an excellent tool and an amusing toy. He was the only weapon Jack needed in his crusade. The wild beast he needed to tame in order to rescue his princess, so to speak.
But Jack wasn't saving any princesses, he was ending the world – which was, really, the next best things.
„All the people you love and the people you wish to protect..." he'd said to Oz, chuckling, and it somehow reminds him of Levy and how he'd give the cruelest of news with the brightest smile.
„All that you have achieved... it's all fake."
–Hey, Glen, why are you so angry?
„You've never really had..."
–Don't you get it?!
„...anything to call your own."
–I don't. I just wanted to make Lacie's wish come true, and yet you...
„You are nothing."
– no, you are, Jack.
–And in order to do that... In order to do something as trivial as that, you wouldn't mind destroying the whole world?!
„Because you destroy everything."
–Exactly.
.
Torture.
He could almost see her, head bowed before her brother, her Lord Baskerville from the moment she died, and she was–
„Lacie Baskerville."
Alice!
–relieved and–
Oswald was dead.
„Your sin is..."
–Glen. This was the moment of his birth.
„And all those children were cast into the Abyss by their relative on the day they became Glen?"
It's torture.
.
Borders blur between their souls like expired ink on ancient, rotting paper.
.
„Oswald is looking for a way to atone."
.
Oz was smiling up at his Uncle as the man came in carrying a large cake. Jack was alone, his mother was out whoring herself and there was no one to remember that it was his birthday today except for himself.
Ada and Gilbert cheered and begun to sing. He heard the song in the endless night, dotted only by the smallest glimmers of snowflakes.
Oz thought he's never been happier than he was now and made a wish to last forever, then he blew out the candles. Jack didn't believe in happy endings.
– and the world shattered into pieces.
.
He thinks himself free.
He is broken.
He feels alive.
.
„That's the same song... you were singing when we first met, isn't it? What's it called?"
„You should ask my brother. He's the one who wrote it, I just added the lyrics."
Oswald's embarrassed. Jack could barely suppress a grin and Lacie laughed outright.
„I never thought of a title. You can choose one if you like."
„Then how about Lacie?"
.
This was the first time he'd actually been invited into the elusive world of Baskervilles and it made him strangely giddy because that meant that maybe Oswald was finally warming up to him.
This thought brought with it an unexpected feeling Jack'd long forgotten how to name.
He supposed it didn't matter, not after today.
„I'm sorry."
– and his world shattered into pieces.
.
All Jack had to do to find his friend, as it turned out, was to follow the music. Lacie never led him astray, even in death.
The next Glen was young, a teenager still, yet he had all of Glen's wounded fury and brooding quiet. Jack found the sight almost too painful to watch. But he observed nonetheless. He watched from behind Oz's – his – eyes and hid in the nooks and canniest of the Chain's soul. There was a strange feeling, bitter-sweet yet not unwelcome, in seeing the man he used to call friend trapped within a body of a angst-y child.
Somehow, Jack was glad he found Glen before Glen had had a chance to even search for him.
It made things easier, because if it had been any other way Jack doubted he'd had had the will to seek Oswald out.
In the end, he need only follow his precious Lacie.
.
She smiled up at her brother „Let's get this over with, once and for all."
.
This time it's for good.
.
They were in the garden, the three of them, and the day was bright and merry and Jack grabbed Lacie's hand and tugged her into a wild dance. She laughed and joined him in the sun. She turned slightly, and yelled over her shoulder. „Come on, brother, come join us!"
.
„I only needed you by my side!"
.
Gilbert was crying. It was a familiar sound and Jack recognized it effortlessly even after a full century had passed. He roused from his place within the recesses of B-Rabbit's mind, moving closer to the surface of their consciousness.
A scene came into view, bright from the sunlight of mid-afternoon and smelling of sweet, sweet spring flowers. It makes Jack's chest throb with a long-forgotten longing.
Gilbert's round face, stained with fat tears and snot, swam into view. Jack found himself chortling at the sight. Some things never really changed, now did they?
He saw a hand reaching out to the boy, and realized with some surprise that it was his own.
„Gil, you're such a cry-baby!" Jack's mouth moved, but Jack was not the one who'd spoken. Jack was not himself anymore.
Oz's little sister, or his great-granddaughter or whatever, echoed her big brother's statement with all the conviction of a four-year-old. „Cry-baby Gil! Cry-baby Gil!"
Which subsequently lead to even more blubbering, B-Rabbit's sighs and awkward back-patting until something else came around to provide as a distraction. It had come in the form of a colorful butterfly little Ada chased after, making the boys chase after her as well so she wouldn't wander off unsupervised. And Jack couldn't help the bitter thought that Alice would have killed to even go outside. The thought was gone as quickly as it came, leaving Jack to wonder at it.
He brushed it off soon enough, though it remained to crawl and shift under his skin every so often and whisper, eerily, in to his ear: that the two boys playing tag should have been Vincent and Gil and that his place was beneath the shade of the trees, next to where Glen dozed peacefully, and not in here in the prison that was his body.
That bliss was long lost to the ages and Jack knew he could never have such moments again. Oz could and because of that, Jack was envious of him.
But no, Jack would have Lacie again, and in the end that's all that mattered. Lacie would fix everything.
For now, Jack was content to sit back and watch the children play.
.
Oswald pushed something into him limp, unresponsive fingers and Jack could only blink as the other's billowing cloak vanished from his field of vision–
„Could you repeat that, Oswald?"
Like the remnants of a life long dead.
.
Jack didn't know who he was anymore.
.
„There's really no way to bring Lacie back?"
„No." said Glen, and it was almost like he was uttering someone's death sentence – perhaps his own – with the way he suddenly withdrew into himself, as though to shield himself from his own words.
Jack smiled, Lacie's memories swirling in the void that was his rib-cage.
Those feelings that changed everything...
„Then I'll just... bring the world to you."
...I think that was a mistake.
.
Then he remembered himself, then he forgot.
.
„I wish all this..."
He'd said that once, said it to one Arthur Barma.
„Arthur, is your work going smoothly?"
Jack wondered if his descendant was as easily manipulated as his ancestor. He wondered if Rufus was as kind.
"...was nothing but a ridiculous fairy-tale."
.
All things have their time, Jack learnt. The almost silent tik tik tik of the clock had became his anchor to the world just as much as the notes of Lacie his pocket-watch played for him, to remind him he was still alive though everything he had lived for was dead.
Lacie was dead.
Oswald was nothing but a memory of a friend and halcyon days laid to rest.
Glen was his greatest hindrance, one he wishes not to see ever again yet desperately wishes for the contrary.
Oz was his sharpest sword, weeping tears of crimson at his command.
Alice was nothing but a horrid reminder of how things could have been.
And Jack Vessalius was here and nowhere.
And he had all the time in the world.
AN: Don't forget to drop me a review and tell me what you think! Please?