Buckshot & Wolfsbane

Rational Fears

The last time Isabeau saw Nicky, he'd had an argument with their father. It was the same one they'd had for the last few years. Nicky had been all set to take over the farm, but ever since he'd gone to school in London, he was filled with all sorts of ideas. There were places he wanted to go, people he wanted to meet. At school, Nicky had fallen in love with the theater, and he wanted to travel to New York and be on Broadway.

Their father was not having it. Nicky had gone and had his fun, and now it was time for him to settle down and work the land. But they were both cut from the same cloth, stubborn and loud and vicious.

She'd heard them from her sanctuary in the barn, up in the hayloft where she hid when she did not want to deal with the world. However, it was also Nicky's sanctuary, and he stormed inside with a huff not long after they'd stopped throwing words at one another.

"Are you up there, Bo Peep?"

Nicky was the only one allowed to call her that and come out of the situation whole. She peered down from the rafters at him, and he sighed.

"Sorry you had to hear that."

"Sorry it had to happen," Isabeau mumbled back. "Do you really hate it here so badly?"

"Is that what he tells you?"

She shrugged. "He doesn't tell me anything. When you're not here, you don't exist."

Nicky nodded, lips pressed. His red curls bounced, catching the little bit of light leaking into the barn.

He was older than her by a decade, a child her parents had issues conceiving as it was. She had come along when they had accepted they weren't going to have another.

"It's not that I hate this place," Nicky said as he climbed into the hayloft with her. She had an old quilt lying out, and the radio she'd bought from her tourist scam. "I love it with all my heart. I never used to be able to imagine living anywhere else.

"But then I went somewhere else, Bo. There's a whole world out there, and the idea of me dying in this small corner of it without having tried to see it...it makes me sick."

Her brother flopped onto the quilt, effectively crushing her back with his head.

"Ruddy bastard," Isabeau coughed, smacking his arm with her fist, not that it did much. Her brother was built like a bull. His muscle felt like brick on her knuckles.

"Such language. Get that from Tommy and his terrors?"

"Because of them, maybe." Isabeau replied, accepting her existence as Nicky's pillow. She watched Briar as he picked at his hay. He was always so finicky with his food, but Nicky could offer him batteries and the bloody horse would eat them like sugar cubes. "I could always take over. I like it here."

"You think I haven't seen all those books in your room? You want to see the world as much as I do."

Isabeau tried to shrug. "That's alright. I want you to have your dream."

"And I want you to have yours," Nicky replied, sitting up. "Tell you what, when I get to America, you can visit me."

"I bloody hope so. I'm your sister."

Isabeau hacked as her brother wrapped his arm around her neck, dragging her under his pit as his knuckles rapped against her head.

"That's precisely why I shouldn't invite you," he mumbled, chuckling as she flailed in his grip. "Last thing I need is you catching the eye of some Yank."

"That's because you want them all to yourself."

That earned her a smack on the head.

Nicky never made it to the States. He returned to London without another word to their father, and was dead a week later.