"I swear, if I'm dying tonight because of you, I'm gonna haunt your ass so hard, Harrington!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah! I'm gonna go full Poltergeist and shit!"
"Then bring it, Graveswood."
"Challenge accepted."
***
In which after years of suppressing their...
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Chapter Fifty-Nine: The Field Episode
(Will The Wise)
***
Aconite "Aco" Graveswood liked to consider herself a strong woman.
She liked to think that she was such a woman, that she was her own person, who'd chosen to say no to becoming the heir of the family business, screwing what her mother thought of her and wanted to force her to do when Aco wasn't that person, that daughter, her mother envisioned and never would be no matter how much her mother moulded her to be, had gone against the grain of what society expected her to be, and instead moved away from her hometown at eighteen and trekked across the country to pursue being a con artist and scam people—but she still had a code, and that code was do not scam from families who were obviously struggling, and to not hurt anyone. Aco knew con artistry wasn't exactly a guiltless crime, but it was less guiltless than murder or armed robbery. And above all else, she strived to keep to that last tenet of her code, to never hurt anyone, no matter how desperate she got.
Of course, she got arrested—as a con artist and blossoming criminal, Aco excepted to be busted at some point—but she could always pay her own bail—a condition of her striking out on her own, her mother's last deed regarding her metaphorical middle finger to her near-crushing expectations—and the times she got arrested were learning experiences, as was living her own. She got smarter. She started to manage money better. She never got truly wealthy, not the wealth she had as a kid—her family was moderately well-to-do from that family business of building, investing and selling homes—and certainly not the wealth she fantasised about whenever she and her sisters and brothers would watch Gilda and Jezebel and they would dress up in their mother's and aunts' fancy dresses and jewellery—well, Bella and Hazel and Percy did; Aco preferred to dress in one of her father's old suits as did Quinn—and pretend they were as famous and fabulously wealthy as Rita Hayworth and Bette Davis, but she found she much preferred living in her beat-up trailer in Forest Hills, Hawkins, Indiana, where she'd finally settled after living a transient life in the late 50s and throughout the 60s, with her records and with faulty plumbing and wiring and having just not enough money and with her side-gig of fake psychic than living in a mansion.
And though they came under her care in the worst ways possible, even though Aco knew she would prefer Bella and Ben to be alive, she would always prefer them to be alive, she much preferred looking after and raising Rowan and Alistair as if they were the kids she never had as much as they gave her grief—she supposed she gave her parents the exact same grief when she was their ages—instead of being in that fictional manor. She loved Rowan and Alistair, would give her life to make sure they lived just one more day, tried to teach them—especially Rowan, because Aco knew just how the world treated women—how to survive in the world, even if it was by shady means, sharing any skills that she'd picked up from her childhood and those years of wandering and scamming that would help them survive and defend themselves, that were important in Aco's book. That as much as she had worried about them being kidnapped, as much as she still worried if she was being true to the promise she made Bella, that she could look after them—that when Rowan and Alistair were asleep, she'd drink several glasses of either wine or vodka and smoke a cigarette outside to blur out the gnawing worry that she wasn't doing enough, that she could never do enough, that the career of scamming and lying she'd chosen wouldn't be enough to support them, that maybe what she'd chosen wasn't enough and the bills would become too much and the con would fail and they could lose everything—she still loved them, a love that outweighed the riches she'd childishly dreamed of having. A love that felt more than a love an aunt held to her niece and nephew, a love that felt like the love a mother had to her kids.
