He is eight years old and seated in the garden, the view of the yard something he is already too accustomed to, and yet also still unexplored terrain. His mother is seated across from him, young and beautiful with barely the start of a wrinkle, stirring a cube of sugar into her delicate cup.
He copies her, gesture for gesture as she raises it up to sip at.
She smiles, a soft endeared thing that crinkles at her eyes in silent laughter, “Tom, are you sure the tea isn’t too strong for you?”
His mother is right, of course—the bitter leaves hack at his tongue and throat, twisting his young face into a grimace. He is a Riddle, though, and it is joked by his mother that Riddle men are stubborn beasts.
“No,” he says, and his mother lifts her cup again to hide the growing smile.
“If you say so, dear,” and if he sniffs in that posh, money-bidden way as he’s seen many others do, and if his mother laughs at him for it, then, well… he is only eight, he has a lifetime ahead of him to think up a proper vengeance.
“Why do you insist on drinking your tea so unsweetened?” Cecillia despairs like the dramatic little girl that she is.
“Perhaps you could stand to lose all that sugar from your diet,” Tom, young enough to not quite know how to talk to girls yet, says. “How many cubes have you drowned your tea with now?”
Cecilia gasps, all huffy and pouting, “You rude, ghastly little thing! Don’t think I haven’t seen your own grubby little hands snatching up the last of the cakes before.”
“You’re hardly older than me,” Tom rebukes, “I may have the last of the cakes, but it is only my rightful due, when you were the first to reach for them. With how much you eat, you may as well be funding the local bakeries on your lonesome.”
“You contribute just as much!”
“That is just simple lies and slander without any proof!”
“My very own eyes are proof enough!”
And if anyone witnessed the two young heirs of wealth scrambling across the grassy ground in an undignified manner, it would only serve as a humorous tale to be told to fluster and embarrass the children.
She is a quiet thing, Tom had noted. Small and quivering with a face that would make any man’s eyes sore—that had been his first impression upon laying eyes on her. But as he stepped near the shambled shack of a wearied house, her timid demeanour quickly grew to be an endearing sight.
He invites her back to his home, helps her up his horse as though she was his maiden and he, her knight, and trots home as fast as he dares to, as weak as the girl is, sitting at his back.
His parents are far from pleased, and with a look into Merope’s large, pleadful eyes, he loudly proclaims his self-induced exile from them. The look of heartbreak and fury of equal measures should have snapped him to his senses, but instead of seeing what would otherwise be reason, he takes Merope’s hand and they are quick to elope.
He finds himself smiling, content in their new home, as his darling wife pours him a cup of tea stinking strongly of roses and sweets. He pays no mind to the sticky residue left in his mouth, the taste pungent and foreign to his tongue.
He cannot help but fall a little deeper in love.
The cup shatters under his hand, the tray of cakes and other baked goods are all messily swept to the floor and across the table with his hand.
He cannot bring himself to pretend, cannot force himself to choke anything down his throat, not with how the misty vapours of perfume wraps itself around his form so sinisterly—whether stuck in his mind or truly real, he can no longer tell.
The maid could only stare at him, frightened and startled as he stormed away from the mess in a thoughtless rush.
He pushes himself out of Cecilia's reach, pushes himself out of her gaze. He had not dared touch a thing upon entering the room, but even still, his senses are flooded with phantom touch.
His mother is furious when she finds him a little later, and he cannot bring himself to meet her eyes; he cannot bring himself to explain to her how touch has been irreversibly ruined for him. Not when the uttering of witchcraft and enchantment has him dismissed as either desperate or a lunatic, or both. Likely both.
His mother may as well have been grief-stricken, and father an ever looming presence of rage.
Tom feels like a ghost teetering the edge of them both, feeling his sanity as fragile as the glassed-eyewear judging him. He has been corralled into a meeting with a doctor for the head, under his mother's request, and predictably it ends short and certainly not well.
After that, he refused to see another one; after that, each introduction already had him envisioning his name linked to the word ‘insanity’ under the doctor’s scratching pen. Soon enough, his parents aren’t given much of a choice but to give up on the endeavour, and he finds himself settled with a routine in his newfound recluse.
This is not healthy, Tom had overheard his mother screaming and crying, shoulders shaking as she wept into her hands. In his opinion—if he could even form one after so long of listlessness and dissociation—it was a well-earned and well-anticipated breakdown after months of his continued presence wearing her down.
What if he really has been cursed? She had sobbed, loud and frantic. What if he never recovers?
His mind is simply unwell, his father had then finally snapped, patience whittled down thin. But he will heal, time will see to it.
And that had been the end of that.
He is joined by another at the family library, where he sits by the window, book lying across his lap and forgotten as he stares out the window to the cleared sky. The presence is strange, and for a long moment the reason escapes him.
He stares at his mother, who looks content for once, and realises with startling clarity that the air of perfume that often trails after her, the one she is so fond of, is missing.
“I think I'm getting a bit too old to get away with using that stuff still,” she offers the excuse with an apprehensive smile at his inquisitive glance, and his eyes widen fractionally with surprise. “I'm no longer so young and youthful, you know.”
His chest warms, blooming with the strange sensation that comes with fondness, and he quickly turns his head away as his eyes burn with it. If his mouth is too heavy to speak, then it is neither the fault of manufactured or natural fragrances dragging his tongue slow.
He cannot help but observe her from the corners of his eyes, where she sits undeterred by the lack of proper response; her entire presence has him jittery, a soft edge of curiosity.
There are no flowers for her to gently caress and adjust in distraction, not with how he'd demanded for all flora to be vacated from his room and hall, not with how he refuses to stand in the well-pruned garden with the nearing of spring and summer.
There is no tea for him to offer her, with how many cups he'd broken in reckless bouts of mania, and how he refused to stay in the presence of any brewed leaves. Steam continues to be a fickle sensation, and liquids steeped with any flavours even moreso.
And yet, despite it all, his mother looks perfectly content to just sit with him in silence.
Dawn finds Tom in the kitchen, a blend of dark brew simmering in a pot, and his father, eyes heavy with sleep, pauses by the threshold.
“Coffee,” Tom supplies, offering the man a hesitant, stilted smile.
His father stares at him, and then nods; “I find it to be much more enjoyable with a slice of cheesecake.”
Tom doesn't have any cheesecake served for him, but he could only stomach a few sips of the coffee anyway before the sparse sugar overtook his taste buds, so it really didn't make much of a difference in the end.
He doesn’t dare touch the drink again for a long while, not after how his mind had been sunk into a daytime nightmare; he would call it a miracle that he even remembered his father’s words—the attempt had been an endearing suggestion as it revealed the man’s worry—but the conversation had followed him into every corner until the day he finally gave in and swore he could plucked up the courage to try it.
Which leads him here, in his bedroom away from eyes that could witness him embarrass himself yet again for the umpteenth time. And though he resides alone and in privacy, he could not help but hesitate in weakness; unlike the last time he had attempted this, he knows that this has been stirred without sugar. A mistake he had made, thinking it would be of little difference.
The heat scalds past his mouth and down his throat, but it is a good reminder that pain can touch him, that he is no longer stuck in some living purgatory of contentment and comfort. He is touchable by reality, and in turn, he can touch the world.
It is not quite his preferred way of having tea, after all, it is not tea, but the coffee is dark and bitter all the same—earthly rich tones almost too overpowering on his tongue and nose. It is nice to be able to properly swallow down something that is not a simple water for the first time since he has returned.
He eyes the carefully cut triangle, and carves a small mouthful out of it, cruiosity outweighing his wariness. He hadn’t needed to bother, as it turned out that father had been right, after all; the cheesecake is a nice neutral savour next to the bitterness of the coffee.
He spends his winter away from Little Hangleton in their family’s holiday house, far up North. It does him good to be away from where it all started a whole year ago, but it just as much causes him undue anxiety, a reminder of how he’d run off away from his hometown in the first place. Still, the house is familiar enough to ease his jittery nerves, and he spends it mostly contently alone, only to be surprised with a visit from Cecilia.
It is stilted, awkward, and she fills the time with gossip of other ladies, and their gossiping of their husbands. Tom does his best to follow, nodding along and throwing in his thoughts every now and then, but he has never been close to his elitist peers to make an interesting enough conversational partner.
Cecilia doesn’t seem to mind, and so he allows himself to relax, the stress fading away into distant memory. The grins come easier, and shared laughter falls naturally off their lips in appropriate sync, and by the end of it all the time has passed for her to go without either noticing.
Cecilia hesitates, hand hovering for a moment before finally landing as a gentle touch to his arm. It is the first time in the last four months that they’ve made physical contact, and guilt violently rips away his breath.
Their eyes meet, and Cecilia squeezes the hand at his arm gently, regret pooling in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Cecil,” the nickname falls off his lips with an ease similar to breathing, and she smiles sadly.
“Not your fault, Tom,” and even long after she has left, he stands by the open door with a myriad of wistful, swirling emotions all culminating into grief.
Grief for what could have been—because in some other life, he thinks he could be happily married to the girl who once teased him until he cried, and the girl who defended him against the ones who have made him want to cry.
He thinks he could have fallen in love, easy touches and small peppering kisses, hugs around the waist and tugs on the hands—he could have kissed her just now at the door, her imminent engagement or not, had his body not frozen as his mind was wracked with fear.
He thinks he could have fallen in love, he thinks he was in love, he thinks he will never stop loving the girl who never shied away from squabbling with him, the girl who still tries to stay by his side in his moments of need.
He grieves it all, and the only one to bear witness is the snow, and it is the only witness he does not mind because the snow is a mere brief visitor, one that will have well forgotten this moment come the next morning.