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[fic] [Tales of Arcadia] Second Chances 1/5
Second Chances
by K. Stonham
first released 26th February 2022
Jim's on his lunch break, determined not to think any more about kids who need better, kids who deserve better, and the utter lack of resources the state gives him to help them, when he sees a crowd gathered on the sidewalk. One person leaves, another shifts aside, and Jim can see--
A boy, playing a shell game.
His heart sinks into his feet because he cannot deal with this right now, not after the week he's already had.
But something keeps his feet rooted as the boy moves bowls, his touch light, his hands quick and practiced. He keeps up a steady patter in a voice that's still breaking.
And if Jim was anyone else, he wouldn't see it. But he is who he is, the Trollhunter, wielder of Excalibur--
--and the spark of blue light between hand and bowl is no trick of the sunlight.
It catches his breath. This boy is one of his people. Given he's probably barely into his teens, pulling cons on the streets... he needs help.
And the Trollhunter answers all calls.
Jim swallows.
Then the boy looks up, blue-tipped bangs falling into familiar eyes, and Jim has his feet knocked out from under him for a totally different reason.
"Douxie?" he whispers, unheard by any but himself.
He waits and waits as the kid shills three more onlookers out of a few bucks each. Jim's mind whirls. It can't possibly be him; Douxie died years ago, the same day as Merlin and Morgana, after knocking the Arcane Order down a peg or three. Jim barely knew him, but he saw his body turn into dust, leaving nothing behind but a bracelet, a staff, and a heartbroken dragon. Claire had been his student; Archie had insisted that he and Nari needed to travel light, and entrusted the two magical items to Claire. Jim doesn't know where she's hidden the bracelet, but he knows that the master wizard's staff hangs over their mantel to this day.
Jim swallows as the kid pockets the last of his gains and the crowd disperses. He steps forward before the kid can vanish too. "Douxie?" he asks.
The kid flinches, and looks up at him with distrustful eyes. "Care to play a game, mister?" he asks, and fuck, it's clear from his accent that he's from nowhere around Arcadia.
The eyes, the hair, the accent--
Jim's never believed in reincarnation before, but there is no other possible explanation.
"I'd like to buy you lunch and talk," he says instead. He watches as the kid goes still, assessing, and his heart breaks. There's a lot of assholes in the world, and lots of them hurt kids. He doesn't want to think this boy who looks exactly like his dead friend has prostituted himself... but the kid's just a touch too on-edge. "Just talk," he says, feeling desperate. If the boy runs, Jim knows suddenly, he will never see him again. "No strings, you pick the place, you pick the table. I'm not one of those types. I just want to talk with you."
The boy looks at him for a minute longer, no recognition in his eyes, then nods. "Fine," he says, and turns, gesturing for Jim to follow him.
They end up at a place just down the street. True to his word, Jim lets the kid pick the table and the chairs. He wishes he was surprised when the boy (Douxie) picks one with a clear shot to the front door, and makes sure Jim sits on the far side from that easy exit.
But the lure of a free lunch is clearly not something this kid can pass up. He orders a hamburger with all the toppings, fries, and a milkshake. Something that'll stick to his ribs, fill him up. Jim tries not to wonder how often he's gone hungry.
"So," the boy says once they've ordered. "You want to talk. So talk."
Jim has no idea what to say.
He draws a shaky breath and pulls out his phone. He scrolls to his photos, to his albums, and selects the one titled "GoA." From there he scrolls down to nearly the bottom. He barely got to know Douxie, certainly didn't have any pictures of him... but Steve had made the wizard take a selfie with him, back when they were in Camelot. It's the only photo of Douxie any of them have. He slides his phone across the table to the boy. "That's a friend of mine," Jim says as the boy looks warily at the device, then his eyes narrow, focusing on the picture. "Hisirdoux Casperan. He died fourteen years ago. You look a hell of a lot like him, and I have questions."
The boy's fingers linger on the phone for a second, then he shoves it away and leans back in his chair. "What, you think he's my da or something?" He snorts. "I was born in England. No chance your friend's my relly."
"Wales, right?" The boy's eyes narrow again. "Doux was Welsh, too. I know the accent." Jim takes his phone back and pockets it. "So, if you were born in Wales, what're you doing in California? And when'd you run away from home?" The boy's fists tighten, and from the way he tenses, Jim knows he's about to push back his chair and bolt.
"If you leave," Jim says, keeping his tone carefully mild, "your lunch will go to waste." The boy hesitates. "I'm not moving, I'm not doing anything," he says. "I'm just sitting here talking."
"I'm not going back," the boy says, testing.
And what Jim's about to say could cost him his job, but.... "Some people shouldn't be parents," he agrees. "My dad walked out on me and my mom when I was five. May he rot in hell."
The boy relaxes slightly. "Eight," he answers, and it takes Jim a second to remember what his question had been.
Fucking hell. Six years on the streets? That's almost half his life!
"So what was it?" Jim asks, carefully neutral. "Abuse? Neglect?" He hesitates, then adds, "The magic?"
The boy tenses again, and Jim knows he's about to lose him, so he pulls on the only thing he has to prove that he's safe to talk with about this: Excalibur ghosts to life in his hand, real and solid, laying flat on the table so that hopefully no one else in the place will notice it.
The kid's eyes go wide.
"This is Excalibur," Jim tells him softly. "The Excalibur. Only the worthy may wield it." He lets go of it, pulls his hand away from the hilt. He gestures for the boy to touch it. "If you won't trust me... will you trust it?"
Gold and green eyes are fast on the sword. Trembling fingers reach out to touch its hilt.
The instant they make contact, it's like an electric current runs through the boy; his eyes fly wide and a puff of warm air blows his bangs up.
His fingers twitch away, and he stares, first at the blade, then at Jim.
Jim puts his hand on his sword again, and wills it away before the waitress can return and stare. "So," he says conversationally, "what did the sword tell you?"
By the time their meal arrives, he has this much: the boy's birth name was Richard and he hated it. ("What, was I supposed to be Ricky?" he asked, "Dick?" And there was so much scorn in his voice that Jim had to laugh.) He refused to give a surname, and Jim hadn't pressed. His magic, which he'd tentatively been exploring for as long as he could remember, had exploded out of him one night and caused a fire. He'd fled before he could be beaten or worse. And he'd been on the move since, never looking back.
The boy eats carefully, like someone who's learned that wolfing down a big meal on an empty stomach will only make you end up miserable and vomiting. But he eats everything on his plate, down to the decorative frill of lettuce under his fries.
"Thanks for the meal," he says once he's done.
Jim finds himself fighting for the right words again. He's so sure that this is Douxie, but....
"Do you like music?" he asks.
Warily, the kid nods.
Jim pulls out his phone again, thumbs through his playlist. Ash Dispersal Pattern had only ever released two albums, now long out of print. But he has downloads of them. The Guardians get together every so often to get drinks, tell stories, and mourn their dead. They have no recordings of Draal's voice, or Vendel's, or Merlin's... but they can listen to Douxie to remember him all over again.
Jim selects a song called "lost in the BLUE" and puts it on low, putting his phone in the center of the table so they can both hear.
It's one of the group's more energetic, upbeat works. It's about hope, and love. It is, Jim thinks privately, a song about a wizard in love with his magic.
By the end of the song, the kid's tough expression has fractured, and his eyes are wet. He scrubs them roughly with his sleeve, angry and embarrassed about showing any kind of weakness.
"Would you like a place to stay?" Jim asks softly, hoping that the single moment of vulnerability will extend just far enough for his offer to catch. Gold-and-green eyes look up at him. "With me and my wife," he offers. "We have a second bedroom, and I can get a lock for the door, so you can lock it from the inside if you need."
"Why me?" the kid's voice is rough.
Jim takes a breath, tries to find the words. "You remind me of my friend," he says. "And I'd do this for the memory of him alone. But also, I work for Social Services." The boy stiffens. "I'm sick of seeing kids go through so much crap to survive, and having my hands bound by red tape. Nothing that's happened to you is anything you deserve," Jim says, with the weight of his anger at the universe behind it. The boy stares, wide-eyed. Jim breathes, tries to remember his place. "Plus, those of us with magic have to stick together and look out for one another, all right?"
It takes a minute, but then the kid nods.
"All right," Jim says, and reaches his hand across the table. The boy takes it. "We have a deal?"
"You don't pull crap, I don't run," the boy says.
Jim nods.
The boy shakes his hand.
The boy follows him as Jim pays the check, then walks back toward work. "I have to go in and let them know I'm going to be out for the rest of the day," Jim tells him at the front door. "If you don't want to come in, you can wait here, or I can take you to my car."
"I'll wait here," the boy tells him. And Jim hurries through everything he has to finish up, half thinking that he'll be gone by the time he's finished--
--but the boy is still waiting for him. Distrustfully, maybe, but still waiting.
Jim finds himself suddenly thinking of a half-feral cat.
The boy follows him to his car, gets in, figures out the buckle after watching Jim do his. "What was your friend's name?" he asks as Jim starts the car.
"Hisirdoux," Jim says. "Hisirdoux Casperan. But we called him Douxie."
The boy puts his head on his hand and looks out the window. "It's better than Richard," he says.
His and Claire's house is a modest two-bed two-bath not far from his mom's home. For just the two of them, they've never needed more space. And they've talked about having kids, but so far the conversation has stalled at not yet. Just a little more time for the two of them, before they do something they can't walk back.
Jim's pretty sure he's breaking that covenant right now. He's also pretty sure that once Claire sees not-Richard, she'll back him up a thousand percent. Thinking of which....
"Can I take a picture of you?" he asks not-Richard. "I won't use it for anything except to send to my wife, I swear. I just don't want to blindside her with you."
The kid stares incredulously at him. "You're bringing home a teenager without even asking your wife? Clearly you're husband of the year material."
Jim rolls his eyes. "Yes or no, Doux," he says, then freezes, realizing what just slipped out of his mouth.
The kid freezes too. But he doesn't protest the name, just looks away. "Fine," he says sullenly, voice breaking in the middle of the word.
Jim takes the photograph, a picture of the boy in profile. He hesitates, then types a message to accompany it: /Bringing home a stray./ He sends it, then sets his phone in the cup holder and puts the car in gear.
The drive isn't long, but it is silent, only the low murmur of the radio providing any soundtrack. He can see the boy taking in the twists and turns, the brief stint on the highway, then the exit in Arcadia Oaks proper, and the way to the house. Jim deliberately cruises past the high school and through the town square. The record shop has long since closed and been replaced by a tropical fish store, but HexTech still stands open, the taco truck still draws crowds of students, and GDT Arcane Books, most importantly for this drive, still has a black cat painted on its front door. The boy's gaze lingers longest on that as Jim drives slowly past.
Finally, though, they pull up to the blue-painted bungalow with its vibrant purple trim - a joke between him and Claire, which had made the place really feel like theirs and home. Jim has planted flowers in the front and some fruit trees and a vegetable garden in the back, and their friends are in and out all days and all hours. There's even a tunnel leading from the basement to Trollmarket. The great heartstone itself is still dead, but they'd eventually cleared out all the zombie Gumm-Gumms and moved enough wreckage that the gyre, at least, returned to operational status.
Not-Richard's face is back to being shuttered as Jim pulls in the driveway and cuts the engine. Jim knows he has messages from Claire - he'd heard the phone pinging during the drive - but he doesn't dare go to read them. Instead, he waits.
And waits.
"I don't belong in a place like this," the kid finally says.
"A place like what?"
Hands clench on the boy's legs. "Nice," he finally spits.
Jim draws a breath. And then another. "I would really," he says carefully, "like to hurt the people who have hurt you."
The boy twitches. Then he breathes the ghost of a bitter laugh. "Good luck finding all of them," he says, and gets out of the car.
Jim swallows, and follows suit.
He shows the boy in, does all the usual house tour things: kitchen, dining room, laundry, bathroom, living room.
Where Douxie's staff hangs over the mantel.
There's enough esoteric stuff in their home that it looks like just another piece of eclectic decor to any of Jim's coworkers or Claire's theater friends. They're never around often enough to realize that the thing never collects dust. And they never stay the night, so they never hear the crystal singing its low, sad song when darkness falls. The staff doesn't quite sing with Douxie's voice, but Jim knows enough about magic to know that it's protective, whatever it's doing.
Honor the magic, and it will honor you.
Upstairs are the two bedrooms and another washroom. Jim shows the boy to his, then realizes Claire left the costumes from her last play heaped on the bed. "Sorry," he apologizes, and grabs them up. "My wife's a director at the playhouse and they're renovating their storage space, so the ongoing stuff tends to get stashed here." He looks around for a second, then shrugs and dumps them on his and Claire's bed before coming back.
The kid is standing still in the middle of the room.
The room faces south and catches the best sunlight. When they moved in, Jim and Claire painted the walls sky blue, with white trim and a white ceiling. More than one guest has commented it's like sleeping in a cloud. It's not a large bedroom, and has a freestanding wardrobe because the house was built in the 1920s, when built-in closets weren't quite a thing yet, but....
The kid swallows, and looks like he wants to cry.
"It's not much, but it's yours, if you want it," Jim says softly.
The kid roughly scrubs his eyes. "You really want me to be your dead friend, don't you?" he demands, and Jim's heart breaks only a little.
He leans against the door frame. "I think you are him, come back," Jim says honestly, because lying is no place to start things. He ticks off points on his fingers. "You look like him. You sound like him. Your magic's the same color as his. How old are you?"
"Fifteen," is the immediate answer. Too quick to be true. Jim looks flatly at him until the kid wilts. "Thirteen," he mutters. "Fourteen in May."
"You're the right age to be born after he died," Jim says. "So, yes, I think you're probably him come back. But even if you're not," he says, careful to make this his main point, "this room is yours anyway. For as long as you want it."
The kid looks at him, then away out the window. "Say that when your wife's home."
"My wife was his student," Jim tells him. "She'll take you in for the memory of him, nothing more. Hell, she'll take you in just to make sure you have a decent teacher for your magic."
Gold and green look back. "No one's that nice."
Jim swallows, and hates the world. "Some people are," he says, hating that this child hasn't met enough good people to be able to trust anyone. "Tell you what. Do you want to shower, and I'll wash your clothes? We can get you some more tomorrow, and you can wear some of my spares in the meantime."
A wary nod. Jim has the feeling the kid wouldn't be accepting this from anyone else, but, well... he has Excalibur. And whatever not-Richard got off the sword, it was enough for him to know that Jim, at least, was trustworthy. "You can call me his name if you want."
Oh bloody hell. Jim has no idea how to approach this part of the conversation. "If you want to take his name for your own, you can," he says. "Douxie was a good man. Also an irritating fuck sometimes, but that might have just been me being a teenager," he admits. "But don't," he says, "take his name just because you think I want you to be him. He deserves better than that. And so do you."
A long, silent moment, before the kid looks away again. "It's better than Richard," he repeats, and that's the end of it.
Jim leaves clean clothes - underwear, a shirt, and shorts, all of which are certain to be too big on the kid, so he adds a belt onto the pile - together with a clean towel on the toilet lid, and goes downstairs for a while, pulling ingredients out to start in on dinner since he's home early. When he hears the shower turn on, he goes back up and collects the pile of clothing left in front of the bathroom door, and tosses them into the washing machine.
Then he sets his work laptop on the dining room table, unlocks his phone, and sees what Claire has to say.
Most of it's what he expects: an incoherent string of exclamation marks, a "where did you find him? is it him? does he remember?" and finally a "call me!"
He fulfills that last one, listening to the water rushing through the pipes. Claire answers right away - either rehearsal's in a break, or she's really prioritizing this call. Jim has the feeling it's the latter. "So?"
"Is reincarnation a thing?" he asks her first, because Claire knows more about magic than him, actually having it and actively studying it.
"Nobody knows for sure," she tells him. "Is it him, Jim?"
Jim sighs into his hand. "He's got blue magic, a Welsh accent, and he's a dead ringer for Douxie," he reports. "He's also thirteen years old, and a runaway since he was eight."
"He's in the system?" she asks.
"He's in our shower," Jim reports. "He trusts me because of Excalibur, but, Claire, he's half-feral. If he is Douxie, he certainly doesn't remember it."
She's silent for a minute. "He's been living on the streets?" she finally asks.
Jim nods, forgetting that she can't see him over the phone. "I think he's gotten the worst possible experience of humanity."
"Fuck." He can tell by her voice that she, too, is hoping this is their friend come back... and that she knows far too much about what he sees at work. Then her voice firms up. "Well, we'll just have to show him that people can be good, too, won't we?"
Jim smiles. "I love you," he said.
"And don't you forget it," Claire clips back, half a laugh and half tears. "Rehearsal's going well, I should be home on time."
"Knock on wood," Jim replies, and hangs up.
Eventually the shower stops running, but Jim doesn't stop typing. Even if he's not physically in the office, he still has a caseload and paperwork to fill out and sign off on. And if in between he's running a search for a missing boy named Richard from five years ago... well, that's his own business.
He needs to get foster care licensing fast. He knows what it takes, he's pretty sure that his and Claire's home checks all the boxes, but there's the in-home interviews and psych assessments... fuck. They should have done this years ago, but there had never been a need, so....
He wants to help this kid, whether or not not-Richard is Douxie. But Jim also needs to do this at least semi-legally, so the kid can't be taken away. He knows the system, he knows how it works, he's good at this. And he thinks he can call in a few favors from coworkers who are just as frustrated with it as he is. Nothing illegal, not skipping any steps, just... expediting them.
Right. Get licensed. Track down not-Richard's birth family, find out what's going on there. Get the kid into school and get him a therapist. If his birthday's in May, he's probably going to be a year behind all the ex-changeling familiars in Arcadia Oaks, but if he can test into high school in the fall, Jim can probably rally his little sibs, and Claire hers, to close ranks around him and help him adjust....
Jim sighs, and blows his bangs upwards as he realizes that he's getting way ahead of himself and that this plan depends on two things first: discussing this with Claire. And discussing it with the kid himself.
Who comes walking down the stairs, barefoot and clad in Jim's clothes. As expected, they're way too big. The shirt has been left loose, hiding and concealing, but from what Jim can see of his collarbone through the neck hole, the kid's small and skinny even for thirteen. Well, if there's one thing Jim's good at, it's making good food.
The boy sits warily at the other end of the table. Clean, his skin is paler, but also ruddy; he's clearly taken the opportunity to give himself a thorough scrubbing. His hair's still damp, but the blue hasn't run. Jim's helped Claire dye her white streak; he can't imagine dying his hair while homeless was the easiest thing for the kid, but it was clearly important enough to him that he'd persevered. Another tick mark in the "probably Douxie" column.
"So," Jim says, then stops. It's too soon to talk about fostering yet, not until Claire is back. "I was planning ratatouille for dinner. That sound okay?"
A wary expression. "What's ratatouille?"
"Mainly tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, bell peppers, with some onions and garlic," Jim lists off. The boy makes a face. "Tell you what, I'll make it and you try it. You don't like it, I'll make you something else."
"That's fair." Fingers drum on the tabletop.
"Do you want to help make it?" An appalled expression. Jim laughs. "All right, tell you what. You said you like music, right?" A wary nod. "Ever played a guitar?" Shake of a head. "My wife took up acoustic for a few years before she got too busy. You want to try your hand at it?"
And the wide-eyed response that gets him sends Jim down to the basement, where Claire's guitar still sits in its case in the corner. He hauls it upstairs and opens it. It looks all right despite the years of neglect. A set of picks are still nestled into the lid of the case. "Have at," Jim says with a gesture, and goes into the kitchen.
He keeps an eye and an ear on the kid as he slices and chops.
The guitar is pulled carefully out of the case and settled across the boy's lap. It looks almost too big for him. Reverent bare fingers strum across the strings, and are followed by a frown before the boy starts fiddling with the tuning knobs.
Jim's got the pan in the oven by the time the boy's finally satisfied with how the guitar sounds. He considers his fingers for a minute, then picks out one of the picks, and begins to try to play.
His fingers are clumsy, and it's clear his ear is superior to his ability, but nonetheless he sets his jaw and persists in trying. It's not music he makes, not precisely, but it's certainly practice. Jim practiced strikes and blocks until his arms ached. He practiced slicing and dicing until his fingers bled.
It's clear that this boy knows that scales, to music, are the same building blocks that Jim's spent a lifetime building up in the kitchen and on the battlefield. He keeps practicing, low sounds of the vibrations of plucked strings, until the front door opens, nearly half an hour later, and he jolts out of his trance, the pick clattering to the floor.
"Jim?" It's Claire.
"In here," he calls, and goes to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room.
Claire appears around the corner, and her eyes go first to him, then to the boy sitting at the table, frozen solid, still clenching her guitar like it's a lifeline or a shield. She draws a breath, her eyes widening, then says shakily, "Okay, the picture's one thing, but you really do look like Douxie."
The boy's drawn up into himself again. Jim, with his experienced eye, can see it. He's not sure if Claire can.
Claire lets her breath out, then, reading Jim's expression, holds out a hand. Purple-black magic bubbles to life over it. "So, hi. I'm Claire, and I'm a shadowmancer."
The boy's gaze locks on to this proof of her magic. Has he ever met anyone else with real magic before? Jim wishes he knew, but from the way the boy's eyes are drawn to it, like a moth to a flame, he's guessing the answer is no. Jim's been part of a magical community, living in a town that knows about and accepts magic, for so long that he's almost forgotten how terrifying it was getting introduced to something not normal.
And this kid's been all alone with his magic all his life.
He must have been terrified.
The boy slowly holds out his own hand in response to Claire's. And magic the color of a clear summer sky bubbles sluggishly to life, nowhere as easy and controlled as Claire's, but definitely there.
Claire's breath catches again, but she manages to smile.
"I'm...." The boy seems at a loss for a name, and Jim can clearly see him rejecting the name Richard. His eyes flicker to Jim, and he thinks he can see the offer from earlier go through the boy's head: that he can claim Douxie's name if he wants it. But only if he wants it for himself, not as something to buy him a place here.
"You can call me Douxie," the boy says, and that is that.
Author's Note: Reni riffed on Honey's CarterDoux universe in the Discord server and it turned into a plotbunny for me....