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(warning: death/murder on page two)

Jeremiah wakes in bits and pieces, a hand pushing at his forehead as he sits up in an unfamiliar place. There’s voices and they’re in the room with him. It takes him a moment to place them before he remembers them from the ball. One of them he had danced with, the other had just watched.

Father will be delighted to hear you’re such a gentleman.

July and September.

That they turn out to be his roommates is somehow not a surprise even if it should be.

Jeremiah feels strangely as if he has been sent to boarding school. The very place he had managed to avoid when he had been younger. There is a schedule and it is strictly adhered to with no deviations, no moments to even leave the household. He has no privacy aside from showering because even during his rest hour and the personal time before bed there is always someone there.

July and September do make for excellent conversationalists.

If he had not already been familiar with the playful banter (that came with an edge) that was common with the court (and what he had grown up with) he would have likely been overwhelmed.

You lack discipline. You lack capability.

Those had been Ezra’s words and he could not quite believe how literal they had become. Sometimes it rankled him, made him want to tense and snap, but that was likely what was wanted.

For him to push back.

He did not.

Not yet.

Jeremiah forgot, just briefly, that the magic was no longer with him. He was still chill (and becoming accustom to it; the ache less so) that he had let himself not think about his lack of protection. That injury could find him now where it had not.

He was working with a knife, cutting down the packing that something had come in that he had just finished putting together. The man does not even realize it until he feels something wet dripping down his leg, slightly warmer than his skin. It cut deep, though not to the bone, and it is long. He blinks at it a few times before things click together.

The last time he had been injured had been at Blackfriars. Not even the night of the red moon having seen him truly damaged.

July is there, never far, and she is tugging at him. Admonishing.

“I-” he starts and then stops, shakes his head. Presses his palm to the flesh to stop some of the bleeding.

It is cleaned, both July and September helping. Jeremiah is oddly silent, watches the flickering soft fire that is Ezra supervising and then taking over for the final parts. The wound is healed in a manner and it no longer bleeds. There is thin scar, burned and closed, left on his leg as a reminder.

To be aware.

“You will have to clean up the blood you spilled, dear boy.” Ezra looks to him, eyes somewhere in the fire that is his face, and Jeremiah nods.

“Of course, Father.” The words escape before he even thinks about it, not at all sarcastic or a play at something. This man, this being of perpetual fire, has done more for him than the man who was husband to his mother. Yet he was no father, not in the way that Ezra was. There had never been a moment when he had done anything so nice as tended to an injury, to look after his wellbeing compared to what would further himself.

He had never.

There had always been servants for that.

Even Ezra’s words that follow, the further admonishments, carry a tone of caring that cracks at something in him.

Jeremiah feels as if he’s falling and where he lands only Ezra knows but he will be there to see it through.

There is a shift, somewhere along the line, but he cannot place where it happens. Jeremiah knows it happened but not where. The days blur together after a certain point, the chill no longer noticed and Ezra’s presence warmer without him realizing it, and things change.

He changes.

If it was discipline he was lacking, he had found it under Ezra’s guidance. Certainly there was a sense of purpose and any time that it seemed as if he might have started to coast, to get comfortable, it was abruptly adjusted.

“It’s no good for you, son. What you do, this coasting habit of yours.” Ezra never gave him the chance to simply exist. No he was endlessly adapting his schedule and changing things around, adding more when it seemed as if he had learned to handle it.

Jeremiah was starting to enjoy it, the constant challenge, the change and push forward. It was something he had avoided in the past but now …

Now he finds himself thriving underneath it.

Perhaps the hardest thing that he had to deal with was that Jeremiah was to, in no shape or fashion, help others. His habit of stretching himself thin, of being a bleeding heart, had to be curtailed. It had not been an issue, there were not many that came to the household, and the servants were few and rarely seen. Yet there was one, some kind of humanoid otherbeing he was certain, that sometimes scurried from him.

There was a rare moment, one where he was truly alone, that he found it. It was working on a project for Ezra, as what else would he be working on, and without even thinking about it he slips in to help.

It stares at him as if not quite believing that he is doing this, helping, but Jeremiah shrugs and assists. It thanks him with a quiet word and a soft touch to his arm.

A change to the brief time before he sleeps.

What have you learned, dear boy? Ezra is beside his bed. Watches him sometimes while he recovers.

To take others under my wing, to give them my assistance, is to take on everything. Jeremiah lays there, still and not moving aside from a harsh breath that escapes every so often.

And? It is not enough of an answer.

I cannot hesitate. I cannot falter. They are under my care and to do anything less- Breathing hurts and he gasps a moment. Ezra’s hand is there, a brief touch to his forehead. It soothes.

If he understands the lesson, the point that was made, then there is no need for more and he may rest.

Jeremiah can’t remember later if he ever spoke at all.

It has become less of a boarding school and more of a home. Sister slips from his lips without thought as much as father has become second nature and sometimes, in the evenings, he dances with the twins.

Ezra seems pleased but there is something else that edges his fire. Not that Jeremiah bothers trying to place it.

There are tasks to be seen to and things to be handled.

The first thing it does is laugh at him. It catches Jeremiah off guard and he blinks in a small amount of confusion before he simply stares.

“You certainly make a better valet than you did with anything else you’ve done with your life,” the thing that wears his face says.

Jeremiah stares at him as everything settles into place. Of course he would have been replaced, of course there would be a thing that had lived his life. Something twists in his gut when he looks down at the hand of the fetch and sees the glint of gold.

A mimic of the ring he wears on his hand, though it is only the wedding ring and the signet ring. The fetch’s hand is bereft of the bone ring father had given him long ago.

That this thing had taken his place with Alg. That it was living his life and Algie did not know and-

His hand clenches into a fist without him realizing it and it is the first show of true anger he has expressed in a long time.

Ezra had taught him well. Furthered his ability to control his emotions but this-

This makes him seethe.

The thing with his smiles at him as it notices his gaze, notices that the pinch of Jeremiah’s brow drawn together and the anger that lights in his blue-green eyes.

It laughs at him again.

That was its first mistake.