my silly words

corvids & tea [pt2]

It was almost criminally easy, really, to sneak past the snaggle-toothed woman working in the front office, although you wouldn't have guessed from the expression on Mortimer's face. It was as if he'd never disobeyed the rules in his life. London's Main Street was fog-choked today, the sky a heavy shade of gray-purple. The occasional cast-iron lamppost threw a cold, stingy circle of real light onto the cobblestones, but otherwise it was dim enough that I kept one hand on the side of the brick storefronts we passed.

"I can't believe we're doing this," Mortimer stammered for the eighteenth time, pressing annoyingly close to my side.

"Yes, well, there's no need to grind me into the walls about it," I snapped, pushing him none-too-gently away. "Please show a little restraint. This doesn't mean anything other than I want to know what happened to your father."

"I meant going to your antique shop," he said, sounding unsteady. "I don't think I've ever been there."

"Likely for a reason," I muttered, quickening my pace just a bit.

"My mother thinks she knows why my father went in there." I raised one eyebrow.

"Does she? Pray tell."

Mortimer cleared his throat. "She says that one of the items in your shop was cursed, and it dragged him in somehow. Made him disappear. She says if we find the cursed object and destroy it, he can come back forever instead of just sometimes."

I hadn't laughed so hard in weeks, and the mortally wounded expression Mortimer made wasn't helping. Passerby's heads turned to stare at me through the muffling fog.

"Cursed— cursed object?" I managed, clutching my chest.

"Yes. That's what my mother says," he replied stubbornly, stopping in his tracks with his arms folded tightly.

"Tell your mother to lay off the cooking sherry," I wheezed. "If that isn't the stupidest thing—" Abruptly, I realized that I was talking to myself. "M... Mortimer?" I turned in a slow circle under a yellow streetlamp, glaring into the tides of gray, but there was nothing; I was probably just imagining the faraway slap of shoes against the cobblestones. London suddenly felt very empty and very cold, although I wasn't sure why.

"Well, someone's a bloody arse," came an angular voice from somewhere above me. I quite nearly jumped out of my skin, searching wildly for where it had come from, before realizing with a jolt that a tall boy on a stepladder was tending to the flame inside the streetlamp.

"How— how long have you been there?" I demanded, embarrassed at my fright. He blew briskly on the fire one final time.

"Long enough."

"Don't speak to me, leery," I snapped. "I am not a bloody— that word."

"Sure talk like one, then," he replied dryly, shaking the stepladder shut with a practiced air. "'S the same with all them rich folk. Bloody arses from the day they're born." He strutted past me, in the same direction Mortimer had gone. "Sure hope nothin' happens to that little friend of yours."

I whipped around to watch him go, but the fog swallowed him whole within seconds. I hadn't even truly seen his face; just a smear of charcoal hair and worn clothing. What a crude boy. What an uneducated, filthy, coarse, crude boy.

...Perhaps I shouldn't have made the remark about the cooking sherry.

~ [] ~ 

enough of this girl.  i have had ENOUGH. everybody pls join the mortimer fanclub with him this poor soul deserves better. im also deeply humiliated at the fact that that Tall British lamp light guy was likely meant to be the Sexyman of this tale.  idk . um idk how to justify or explain that lets just pretend we didn't see it