Fitz as the gothic anti-hero love interest in his big fancy house except the monster in the attic and in the walls is his own subconscious and the complicated feelings he has for his missing bff...........
Ok ok ok.
So we have the Visitor.
She appears one night in need of somewhere to stay, and finds a huge, dark, fancy old house - more of a castle, really - along the cliff tops near the sea. She's let in by the steward, and meets Tom. He's imposing and has scars on his face and clearly a broken nose from an old wound, and allows her to stay and they have a strange dinner where he won't stop staring at her. He asks if she is warm enough.
But the Visitor is intrigued despite herself and ends up staying a while- maybe she's been ill. She hears creaks and soft steps in the walls at night, and yet she stays. As the weeks draw on, she often feels as if she's being watched- Tom is away (who knows where) for long periods of time. It happens the most often during the day, as she reads in the library or takes it upon herself to undertake some more domestic crafts- it seems to her as if the house has never had a feminine touch.
One night she finds a secret entrance into the inner walls of the house, and discovers a room of old scrolls. Each one, she discovers, is a letter to his Beloved, whom he seems to have parted with on bad terms. They seem to have had a complicated relationship, and the Visitor cannot tell what they were to each other- it seems nothing was ever consummated. He constantly refers to his own Beloved as his friend. The letters are full of anguish and self-loathing and fear longing and grief- some seem very old and others much more recent. At the end, they are always signed off as Fitz.
She enquires in her own roundabout fashion (she can be quite social and persuasive when required) after Tom from the house's staff, but not one will spill a single drop of information. Tom never brings this up, but she feels as if he knows- about her reading the scrolls, and her inquisition of his staff. They never discuss it, ever. He never questions when she will leave.
Instead, they drink their wine and eat their venison and tell stories- never about their own lives, but ones they've heard. The Visitor has always been a traveller, collecting many a tale from foreign shores that intrigue Tom. Sometimes, she can manage to make him laugh: he'll snort at a witty quip, or bark out a surprised laugh as she recites a ribauld sailor's shanty. Those chuckles are rare, precious moments she gently tucks away into her heart, jewelled and twinkling. He always asks if she is warm enough.
The weather is perpetually moody and grey here. Tom/Fitz sometimes plays the pipes, and she will carve little reliefs of local flora into the furniture. He doesn't seem to mind. They share wine and read and talk. He always says goodnight very gently as the Visitor leaves the drawing room's fire for her bedroom. He always asks if she is warm enough.
Sometimes Tom is perfectly polite and civilised, and other times there is a sinister, murderous glint to his eye or a blistering, animalistic anger that vanishes as quickly as it arrives. Tom hunts all the holding's sources of meat, and often the Visitor observes him methodically carving the carcasses, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. For some reason, these instances never wring fear from her, but instead endear him to her through a certain kind trustworthiness. A killer can protect, after all. He always asks if she is warm enough.
At night, in addition to the creaking in the walls, sometimes the Visitor often hears the creaking of the wooden stairs she understands lead to the attic. One day when the Visitor is sure Tom - Fitz - is out on a hunt, she braves the stairs and the attic with a candle, pulling the creaky stairs up behind her. The attic holds a neatly kept but old collection of scrolls and large journals, with more recently used herbs and other strange concoctions on a desk by the corner.
Next to the desk, turned toward the wall so she must carefully turn it around to see it, leaving thick, dusty prints on her fingers, is a portrait of what is unmistakably Tom - Fitz - a beautiful woman with a determined set to her jaw, and a young woman, perhaps not yet 20. The clothing is at least 50 years out of fashion.
As she voraciously scours the journals for information about this contradictory, monstrous, fastidious, caring man she has come to almost know, she realises these journals are dated to around the time of the painting, and signed FitzChivalry Farseer. The man seems to have been alive, with the same face, for an impossible amount of time.
As she reads on, she discovers a scroll more well-kept than the rest. It looks to have been handled very little, but the ink is smudged and splotched in many places.
In the attic, on that hunting day, by the candle, the Visitor reads the story of FitzChivalry Farseer and his Beloved.
Best of friends since they were children, their lives twined around the other's so tight that many questioned the nature of their relationship. He married a woman, Molly, and they had a child, Nettle. He worked for his family, of what kind unmentioned and noticeably absent. By some unfortunate circumstance, Beloved was murdered in a most brutal way in the dead of winter.
She shivers as she reads on: destroyed by a grief that his friends and landed family decry as indecent and unnatural, he will not allow Beloved's body to be burned. He raids his family's old libraries, and takes his friend's body to an unused family holding and will not leave. He knows of an old family magic of which they never speak. If enough lives are taken in exchange, one can replace death with life.
Each murder is listed in a matter of fact fashion. When the time came in the middle of the night after the preparations were complete, by some process or intertwinement unknown to him, FitzChivalry Farseer heaved his Beloved back into to life, but so too changed himself irrevocably.
Sobbing with relief and fear as his Beloved’s breath stuttered back into being once again, holding his beautiful head in his hands, he felt the most desperate waves of self-loathing he had ever felt in his life. How, with what he had done, could Beloved ever accept him? Beloved had always been good and principled and true. He had not even considered that Beloved may have wished to remain dead. He had taken something honest and bright, and transfigured it into something entirely unnatural and wrong. He was unnatural and wrong.
Devastated at what he'd done, he rides through the howling wind and gently leaves Beloved on the doorstep of an older couple in the area he'd known were kindly, covered in furs and blankets. He knocks on the door and watches from afar as his Beloved is taken in.
Returning to his family, he manages his life as the years pass as if a part of him has been carved away. Realising he isn't ageing, he and his wife must move away after a time, to allow their daughter a life without fear or consequence. At night, he wonders whether Beloved will ever return to him, and hates himself for wondering. He burns his letters in the fire.
After Molly leaves the world the way he should have, the way Beloved should have, he feels as if a final important piece of him has been carved away. He drifts for a time, the horror at what he had done, the lives he had deemed (and still, guiltily deemed) a worthy price for Beloved’s life, unsure of what kind of being he truly was, fresh in his mind with his new grief. Moving to the hills upon the ocean, he sets to work slowly restoring the abandoned old castle by the cliffs and its surrounding lands.
Tears gather in the Visitor - Amber's - eyes. She begins to shake and she cannot stop. The candle burns and burns as she presses her hands to her own hair and face and maps its contours like a piece of fresh wood, as each feature's exact description from the pages she had read in Fitz’s hand repeat endlessly in her mind.
She is unsure how long she stays up there, in the attic. She had been excited, ever curious, and a little afraid, about what she may discover about Tom. But it was herself. It had been herself.
She had always lived as a traveller. When one has no memories before a certain time in their life except a surety that she had been loved, and one seemed to remain frighteningly and confusingly ageless, it was much more pragmatic to never stay anywhere for too long, always assuming a different identity.
For a long time, she laid there. It was difficult to tell how many hours had passed.
After a time, she hears the creak of the attic stairs as they're hastily reefed down, then the heavy steps clambering up them. She turns toward Fitz, silently watching him, the brighter light of his lantern illuminating the room in a golden glow.
His eyes scour the scene- the journals, the painting, his recollection of their strange, unorthodox existence, untouched for years, in her hand. Her, in the middle of it all in her dress, on her back. He meets her eyes.
In an instant, his expression transforms into a wounded animal's, sick with dread. Even the noise he makes evokes this. It is as if he crumples inward in some core part of himself, and sinks to his knees.
It takes a while for her to realise he is crying. Unable to stomach this, she forces her shaky limbs from the dusty wooden floor, and crawls toward him. She cannot do anything else but reach to him and cradle him in her arms. It seems the only possible course of action as his body wracks violently with tears.
After an unfathomable amount of time, he speaks, his voice croaky and worn.
"I was so afraid. I was so afraid of myself. Of what I did."
Amber strokes his hair. As she assesses the state of him, he looks harried and old, almost. She gently presses her lips to his brow.
"Afraid of you...of my love."
Slowly, she gathers his face in her hands, encouraging him to sit up and truly look at her. He is quite certainly a mess: curly hair almost pulled free from its usual dark ribbon, caught in between her fingers and in every direction. Warm dark skin tinted a fiery red, his huge dark eyes puffy and glassy, long black lashes gathered together here and there with his salty tears. The anguish is there in his warm eyes, the self-loathing and horror at oneself from his writings scrawled in his desperately furrowed brow. His wonderfully scarred face and crooked nose, fearsome perhaps to some, but so adored by her. She lovingly wipes a tear from his eye with her thumb, caressing the side of his cheek. She smiles as he leans into her hand.
"But how very loved I must have been."
Impossibly, his frown becomes even deeper.
"My dear, how very loved you are still."
In that dark room, in that house by the sea, unceasingly grey and thunderous, they stayed for a time.
***
One day, on one of the walks along the cliffs they've taken to making a habit of, Amber and Beloved look to the sky, recalling a painting their hands gently caressed many a year ago. They ask what has occupied their mind for a while.
"My love? Would you make us a child?”
