mirror shards // matthew fairchild {1}

twenty-four // the grandmother, the mirror, and the queen of snow

As a general rule, Sydney doesn't believe in God. Or Providence. Or anything like that. But sometime after Matthew has gone home, because it's getting on three o'clock in the morning and his mother will wonder, Agasha shows up at Headquarters' front door. And that's too much like an answered prayer for Sydney to call it coincidence.

"What are you doing here?" Sydney asks, letting Agasha in and immediately cursing herself for it. Agasha may be the closest thing Sydney has to a grandmother but she's lost Sydney's trust almost completely now. "How did you even get them to let you in?"

Agasha shrugs. "I wanted to talk to you. That's all." She sits down. "You've offered me a position at the Institute, so I hear."

Sydney nods.

"I was looking to get out of working for the Blackthorns anyway," says Agasha, "but this..." she smiles, shakes her head. "It's too good a coincidence, Sydney. I believe in coincidences, but this is too much like Providence." Her fingers tap out a rhythm on the table. "What's your game, Sydney? I've known you long enough to know you're playing one."

Sydney sits down. "I want to know what the Library of Bats wants from me."

There's a very long, almost melodramatic pause. Slowly, Agasha's eyes widen and her mouth opens a little and Sydney knows she's caught her.

"The Library of Bats..." Agasha starts, and then stops.

"You sent me to Romania," Sydney says. "To the Library of Bats. What do they want from me?"

"I knew nothing when I sent you there," Agasha says. "I made a guess that they might have the information you needed, and maybe you could get it, if you managed to get in."

Sydney just raises an eyebrow. She crosses her arms and sits back.

Agasha shakes her head. "Then the man you seduce on your first night in the city has connections to the Library. Then he gets you into the Library. Then you pick up a mild case of a poltergeist. Then you start getting some strange answers. Then the Library of Bats contacts me."

"So what do they want from me? What are they guiding me towards?"

"Sydney, they already have the information they need from you."

Sydney blinks. Hard. "What?"

"The Library of Bats," says Agasha slowly, "is an archive run by vampires who are millennia old. What do you think they're most afraid of?"

"I –"

"Change, Sydney. They're afraid of the world changing too much, and thus getting damaged in irreversible ways. And you – you and your siblings, you have incredible, mind-boggling power to enact change. And that terrifies them. And what terrifies them most is that you, with your power to change the future, will become pawns in someone else's campaign." Agasha puts her head in her hands. "That is why they contacted me. They'd found the information they needed – that you and your brother, you were already players on somebody's chessboard. And I'd had a hand in it and I hadn't even known."

For once in her life, Sydney cannot formulate words. It's like something huge and heavy has fallen down around her, missing her by mere inches. "What?"

"Remember," says Agasha, "when we read The Snow Queen, back when you were fourteen and you'd just discovered that obsession of yours with folklore and fairy tales?"

"Yes," says Sydney. "The full version of the story, not the one Tessa told us as children – the one where the demons build the mirror that makes you see everything as twisted and wrong, and they try to carry it up to heaven to show it to God, only for it to shatter and fall to Earth."

Agasha nods. "Among the people that Gerta meets on her journey to find Kai is a kind old woman who imprisons Gerta in her house, combing her hair with a magic comb to make her forget her quest."

Sydney swears softly, as she realizes where this is going.

"I was the old witch," says Agasha, "putting shards of the Devil's mirror into your eyes and into your heart."

"But how would you –" It comes clear to Sydney in one swift, sharp blow. "Combing Gerta's hair," she says, "with a magic comb, to make her forget." She launches up out of her chair, throws the Headquarters door open, and sprints out into the night as fast as her feet will carry her.

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Author's Notes:
Roll credits on the chapter title.