Work Text:
Mr. Crow stared at the lifeless body strung up before him: Laura Vanderboom. In another life, his brother.
Not even the creeping rigidity of rigor mortis could hide how young she looked.
It helped that her and William’s appearance weren’t all that similar. Still, from his observations during Laura's youth, their souls were truly the same.
Of course they were. This was exactly what they had planned out, down to the last agonizing detail. And yet, he couldn’t help but cling to that illogical, aggravatingly human line of thought.
Because underneath, Laura and William were so alike it burned like a knife buried in your ribcage. Every second, every breath was agony, as he tried to think only of Laura. Yet every image was superimposed with the frame of his brother; they were one and the same, after all.
The way they smiled, like sunlight peeking out from behind storm-laden clouds; a rare sight yet all the more beautiful whenever it happened. Their eyebrows, always so quick to scrunch up in suspicion at the world around them. Their deep connection to the lake, unable to pull away, drawn in like moths to a flame that would inevitably burn them.
Laura was William, refracted through a warped mirror. The image distorted, jumbled—leaving behind only a vague impression of who it was meant to be.
As if the painter of their life had grown lazy, sketching the outline but refusing to fill it in. They were both of them, and none at the same time.
His great-great-grandniece.
His brother.
And now—dead.
If he had been a kinder man, he might’ve said that stillness didn’t suit her, that death looked wrong on her.
But he was a Vanderboom. They were not kind. And death had always been a close family friend. He had known it would come to this. Laura was never meant to live a happy life, the blood was always going to be there.
And yet…
This was his older brother that had always seemed so much larger than life. For so long, it had been the two of them against the world.
It was always William who comforted a sobbing Aldous with a scratched knee. It was always William who listened to his rants about the narrow-minded townspeople. It was always William who stayed by his side during their descent into Alchemy, who wiped the sweat from Aldous’s brow and took up the stirring rod when his hands ached.
It was William who drank the first dose of the elixir. William, who started to seize, whose eyes rolled back into his head as he collapsed to the floor.
It was William who died that night and it was William who Aldous spent generations trying to revive.
So many lifetimes cut short, so many sacrifices to complete the ritual.
But in the end, they had succeeded. The eldest Vanderboom had returned, born anew into the family’s youngest child.
It was with numbness spreading through his bones that Aldous realized: Laura's end also meant the end of the Vanderbooms. Aldous and Laura—the last two descendants of a cursed bloodline—meeting once more in a decaying mill at the edge of the lake that had determined their fates.
And now, only one of them had blood still running through their veins. The cycle had come to an end.
Goodbye, Vanderbooms. May you finally find happiness in death.
He swallowed the emotions, pushed away the memories popping up like cubes in the lake, and maneuvered the corpse over to the machine.
He was no longer Aldous Vanderboom. That name—and everything it carried—had been left behind in the wake of his enlightenment. He was the right hand of the ruler of Rusty Lake and he had a duty to fulfill.
Mr. Crow got back to work.