mirror shards // matthew fairchild {1}

eighteen // me and my choices

Sydney wakes flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling of her room. Her entire right arm is in pain. Her first thought after pure relief is, lucky I'm a southpaw, followed shortly by, what the hell happened?

"Hello?" she tries. Her voice is raw, hoarse, quiet.

"Melbourne?" On the floor below the bed, Matthew jerks awake and whacks his head against the bedside table. "Ow! Are you alright? I mean, obviously not, but...you know what I mean?"

"My arm hurts."

"No kidding. The iratzes wouldn't take, the bone was broken and needed to be set first. Tessa fixed it and put on some fancy healing rune that'll make it heal faster but she warned us that you'd be in pain the entire time."

Sydney lets out a heavy breath and stares at the ceiling again, getting up the courage to ask the question she almost doesn't want an answer to. "Cordelia?"

"Just fine. Lucie helped to get her out of the river, I'm not sure how, and I took her back home with Thomas and Christopher. You, however...we're going to have to put off finishing what we started in the hallway." Matthew reaches out and takes Sydney's hand, the one that isn't currently in a sling. "You're injured, and I've worried myself to death. You're speaking to my ghost, I'm afraid."

"It was that bad?"

"Will and Tessa told me you were delirious when James brought you home."

Sydney looks at him sharply. "What do you mean, delirious?"

"You were completely unresponsive, Sydney. And you kept saying, 'We have to fix this. We have to put it back.'"

"Don't. Don't say those words, Matthew." Sydney turns her head away from him, looking out the window, where dawn is beginning to rise.

"Sydney? Are you alright?"

"Obviously not?"

"What can I do? I'd crawl in with you, but I don't know how good a hug would be for your arm."

"I think it's time I told you a little more of that Romania story."

Sydney can sort of sense Matthew nodding. She squeezes his hand, and looks for a place to begin.

Days Past: Târgovişte, Romania

Of course Emil is jealous. You'd be a fool to expect anything else. But Emil is only jealous, and not stupid or judgmental or angry.

"It's your life," he tells Sydney, "your choice. From what little I've seen and heard of this Pavel of yours, he seems like a good man. If you want him, I'm not going to stop you."

Dorina is furious, but nevertheless, Sydney moves out of the Institute and into Pavel's flat.

They have to get a water closet for her.

Sydney helps build it.

After that, life is good. No, better than good.

Pavel takes Sydney to meet his vampire-mother. She cooks human food, the recipes centuries old but still delicious. And she offers to help Sydney with her research.

Sydney spends her days in the stacks of the Library of Bats, with its dark, twisting passageways hewn right into Romania's stone belly, and her nights in Pavel's bed, drunk with lust and pleasure. She patrols with Adriana and Emil and Nadia, and the five of them (counting Pavel) go out for nights on the town at Elisabeta and the various taverns.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually Sydney's days of research at the Library of Bats come to a close.

Pavel takes Sydney to see Duşan Badea in prison. He holds Sydney and comforts her after Badea screams at her and calls her "spawn of the Devil" and is carried away by the guards.

But once Sydney's research is done, once she has found everything there is to find and pieced together all the pieces she has and they have solved the mystery, she and Pavel find that the Zmey Research Project was the only thing holding them together. Without it, they have nothing to talk about, no real interests in common. They move through the motions of a life together, but even their sex feels empty.

They knew it wasn't built to last anyway. New Years of 1903 rolls around and Sydney will be returning to London in three months, so Pavel and Sydney decide to part ways before their distance turns to dislike and one of them truly breaks the other's heart, or worse.

After that, Emil takes an interest in Sydney again. For three months, he courts her informally, with chocolate and books on socialism and Slavic mythology, with sewing patterns from Paris and fine tea imported from England. Despite his kindness and his sweetness and his many other charms, Sydney still does not fall for him as he'd hoped. Adriana, it seems, remains deeply in love.

Four days before Sydney leaves for London, the Stoica twins throw a party at Elisabeta to celebrate. Emil and the Stoicas get gloriously, trainwreckishly drunk. Sydney has her three sips and switches to coffee.

And then Emil approaches her. His cheeks are flushed, from drink and from nervousness, and he wobbles a bit as he walks, but miraculously does not trip.

"Sydney, this is something that for the last little while I...I have been wanting to ask – Sydney, I think that I – oh, bother. What I'm trying to say is, well...Sydney, I'm – I'm asking for your hand in marriage."

Because Emil might be too drunk to make good decisions, much less remember his actions in the morning, and because Sydney does not love him, and because Adriana does and she is standing right there, Sydney very gently turns him down.

Now

"Please tell me Emil didn't do something unspeakable and stupid," says Matthew.

"No. He would never." Sydney looks over at him for the first time since she started telling this story, and finds his jade eyes wide with concern. "I told you," she assures him, "it was an accident. And it was my fault, mostly." She tips her head back against the pillows. "You saw how I got on the bridge, and at Battersea, and at the Park. I...check out, and..."

"You did something to yourself in the process?"

"No, but..."

"You got wound up into that –"

"I think," Sydney murmurs, "it's time for you to stop asking questions." She sits up a little, reaches out onto the nightstand, and frowns as her fingers brush empty air. "Math? Where's my comb?"

"What comb?"

"The ivory comb, with the red threads wrapped around the spine, that I always wear. It was a gift from Agasha. If Mama had taken it out of my hair she would've put it on the nightstand, so where is it?"

"It wasn't with you when I carried you off the bridge," Matthew says. "It must've fallen into the river."

"Oh, well." Sydney shrugs. "C'est la vie." She's going to miss that comb – it was a gift, and Agasha's the closest thing she has to a grandmother, after all.

_____________
Author's Notes:
"I wouldn't be so sure of me, Cordelia, or my choices." – Matthew himself
Next week: the significance of Sydney's magic handbag. Or, I steal a plotline from the fic I'm writing on AO3...again (I recycle stuff a lot, alas & alack)