Her mother mustn’t have realised she’d come in last night, because when Velma woke blearily from the sofa, it was to the sound of biting arguments on the phone. She had to blink a few times, rubbing at her eyes, to try to understand what she was saying – when she and Kaito had been kids, learning and studying Japanese in extra classes or going through bits of homework or games with the family, Mum had always taken care to neutralise her accent a little bit, and while they’d learned some of her dialect, Kimi had always been pretty strict about them learning to speak “properly”.

She never spoke English with either of them – Velma could count on one hand the number of times she’d heard Aunt Kimi actually speak English while she’d been in the same room as the woman – but had been funny about dialects.

Ginchiyo said it was ‘cause she’d brought old-fashioned attitudes when they’d left home, that she was too focused on the rules, and Velma believed that. More than once, she’d seen Kimi reflexively slap Dad for speaking Osaka-ben with Kaito when he was a little kid instead of Tokyo-ben.

She never hit Mum, wouldn’t dare, but Velma wondered if that wouldn’t have been better sometimes.

She remembered like it was yesterday, one morning, her Mum on the phone with Granny and Granda, saying something and laughing as Kimi had come in. Kimi had said in dry undertones – making sure she was loud enough to be heard – “Is she a banker, or a farmer?”

Ginchiyo had clucked her tongue disapprovingly at her – Mum on the phone had frozen, had fucking blanched, looked momentarily so fucking hurt before she’d frozen up and cooled over like a pond in winter.

Granny tried to teach her a little – tried harder, now they didn’t talk to Kimi anymore, when her personality was so overpowering compared to Granny’s, but fuck, if it wasn’t kind of hard, especially when she wasn’t used to it, especially when she was barely yet awake. Granny’s accent was even stronger than Mum’s, even though they spoke the same dialect, but Velma just hadn’t spent enough time working with it.

Shifting on the sofa, Velma leaned up on her elbows, looking into the kitchen as Mum paced back and forth, stiff as a board, her shoulders up in line with her chin, as she spoke very quickly into the house phone cradled against her neck.

Velma couldn’t make out a lot of it, but she got what it was about pretty quickly. Her mother was pale as anything, had a tinge of green about her cheeks, and Velma watched the movement of her mouth, listened for the shift in her intonation, felt a bit dizzy, listened harder.

“… too much money and… He’s making more money than ever, but that’s nothing compared to… Mortgage won’t be paid off for—”

What the fuck was that number?

“Thank you,” she heard her mother say a few minutes later, making a note down on a piece of paper. She looked fucking ashen, her hand trembling with the pen. “Yes. I— I know. I’ll try.”

“That wasn’t Granny,” Velma said after she’d hung up, and Mum jumped half a foot into the air, dropping the phone out of her hand and managing to kick it up again with her bare foot before it hit the tile, swiping it out of the space in front of her again before it could go flying.

“Jesus, Velma, would you give a woman a fucking clue?” she demanded, heaving in a lungful of air. “I could have fucking burned you to ashes, jumping out at me like that at six in the fucking morning!”

“No, you couldn’t’ve, and I didn’t jump out of anywhere,” Velma said. “Who was that?”

“None of your business. What if I’d thought you were a burglar?”

“Many burglars sleep on your sofa these days?”

“The spare room too far for you?”

“I’d have woken up the whole house on the stairs, even if the cat didn’t try to trip me up. And I was too tired.”

“Why are you here?” she asked, and there was a little colour coming into her cheeks again now as she padded into the living room, putting the backs of her fingers against Velma’s forehead. “You drove up in the middle of the night?”

“I got into Nottingham about eight or nine. I was at Hamish MacKinnon’s, didn’t drive over here until one or two in the morning.”

Mum gave her a very queer look. “Eh?”

“It’s a long story,” Velma said, wiping at her eye. “Fucking necromantic shit, brought it up here for Hamish to deal with. Freaked out a bit. Fell asleep next to his fire. We ate some food together before I left, after I woke up.”

“Necromancy,” Mum said, wrinkling her nose and twisting her mouth in distaste. “What…?”

“You don’t want to know,” Velma interrupted her. “Trust me. Who’s lending you money for the mortgage?”

“You don’t want to know,” Mum parroted back at her, sweeping out of the room, and Velma got up from the sofa to go and wash her face, get changed, before Kaito came down to hog the fucking shower.

Kaito was not happy to see her, actually groaned when he came downstairs to Velma frying bacon and said, “God, what, you want to train today as well?”

She hadn’t slept well on the sofa, even without being woken up barely four hours after she’d laid down – Snowdrop had kept coming in and out of the room to sit with her, occasionally pawing through her hair or trying to crawl inside her jumper because being under the blanket with her just wasn’t enough, and if it wasn’t the cat waking her up, it was the dreams. Dreams of sobbing porcelain dolls, a baby screaming in the next room, shuddering quiet after it had smashed on the floor.

When her phone rang, it was coming up to eight, and there was no chance of her getting any more sleep in the guest room no matter what her mother said – two different fucking neighbours were using tools outdoors, one side overpruning his hedges, the other one mowing his lawn.

“Hi, Hamish,” she grunted, laying slices of bacon over rice before putting cucumber and spring onion over top, then sprinkling in her scrambled egg. “You okay?”

“I’m rather surprised you’re already up. I wondered if you might be free to help me this afternoon, seeing as you’re up from London,” the old man said. “I’ve this oversized dining table that needs hefting one way and the other, and I can’t use active magic to move it lest I overcharge the enchantments as I lay them – could you give me a hand?”

“I’ve got so much fucking work to do today,” Velma muttered, cradling the phone against her shoulder to roll up her maki roll. “I wasn’t supposed to be up here this weekend, Hamish, I brought my shit with me, but I can’t just take the day off.”

“Ah,” said Hamish, cooling the way he did before when feeling rebuffed, and Velma rolled her eyes at the guy’s fucking dramatics as he said, sort of icily, “Well, please, don’t let me detain you, my dear, I—”

“No, I’d still like to come over, if that’s cool,” Velma interrupted him instead of letting him get too much into his drama, “and I can help you with the table. I just, um— Can I sit at the desk in your workshop? Get through this reading when you don’t need my hands?”

“Of course,” said Hamish immediately, sounding nearly entirely nonplussed.

“But, uh, first,” Velma said, staring down at the roll on the chopping board. “Do you like, have a guest room?”

God bless the old bastard – he didn’t even hesitate in responding. “A guest room? Of course. You didn’t get much sleep last night?”

“No.”

“It’s yours.”

“Thanks,” said Velma. “I’ll be over in twenty. You need me to pick anything up for you?”

“Some whole milk would be much appreciated, and some mushrooms.”

“What kind?”

“It doesn’t really matter, I don’t think the little pricks even taste them.”

Velma chuckled as she hung up the phone, slicing up her breakfast roll, and she slapped Kaito’s hand away when he tried to take a piece.

“Fuck’s sake, Velma, it’s one bit—"

“Fuck no, you wanted a bacon sandwich, you wee prick, I made you one, you don’t get my breakfast as well!”

“Oh, Velma, give him one piece—”

“No!”

* * *

“There are five pieces instead of six because my brother took one,” Velma said, passing Hamish the tupperware as she walked past him into his guest room, which was modest, small, and extremely cosy, very warm, especially in contrast to the chilly October morning. She’d made herself another roll that she’d eaten in its entirety.

She collapsed forward onto the bed, and she was surprised into giggling when Hamish gave what must have been an order and the alastora fell upon her shoes, clumsily undoing her buckles until she could kick them off.

“Were you timing them for that?” she asked, voice muffled into the cushions.

“Yes, that little trick is ordinarily a little easier for them with laces, I think. They’re not really trained for Mary Janes. Out, you vile little demons, come and see what mushrooms she’s brought you, that’s it, here we go.”

He blew out the candle lighting dimly lighting the room before leaving, closing the door behind him, and she didn’t know how long it takes her to fall asleep, but it wasn’t long at all.

She woke naturally in pitch blackness a little after three, and only then did she wrap the woollen blanket off the bed loosely around her shoulders and trail into Hamish’s workshop, where he’d stacked up her folders on an empty desk as he attended to the table in the centre of the room.

It was a pretty fucking big table, made of heavy, solid wood.

“Fuck me,” she muttered. “You use magic to get that in here?”

“Asked the delivery boys to bring it in for me,” Hamish said. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Velma said, wiping at her eye as she dropped into Hamish’s big antique desk chair, feeling the well-worn leather cushioning under her back before she rolled it forward. “Get the delivery boys to take their shirts off?”

“Miss Kuroda, it’s getting terribly chilly out to be asking them to do that,” Hamish said dryly, but he was smiling slightly as he said it, and she watched him as he used a sharp pick to carve symbols into the inside frame under the tabletop. The alastora were scattered around the room, a few of them in a pile next to the radiator, various of them hanging from the ceiling beams like bats. “Used to be, of course, they’d just strip off without even being asked. No sense of customer service these days.”

“Chill would make their nipples harder, I bet.”

“You’d bet right,” Hamish murmured, laughing. “Not that you seem the type to notice men and their nipples, shirtless or otherwise.”

“I notice them,” Velma said as she put aside some of her books and pulled forward one of her folders, trailing down the list with her pen as she found the next thing that needed reading. “I just walk past them instead of turning to look. You always knew you were gay?”

“Since I was a boy,” Hamish said. “We didn’t have words for it, particularly – my mother knew before I did, I think. Often intervened if my father got too rough with me.”

“He hit you?”

“Yes, although that wasn’t unusual at the time. I mean more in his manner, his attitude toward me, toward my work in his shop. By the time I was seven or so, I had a good inkling that there was something different about me than most of the other boys about the village – once I had ten summers under my belt…” He trailed off, tilting his head to one side. “Well, then I was old enough not only to know I was different, but for others to know too, or to have an inkling, at least.”

Velma imagined that, imagined Hamish as a little boy near Aviemore in some near-medieval village that hadn’t existed for decades, helping his dad in a carpentry shop like this one, or helping him smith or work leather, or whatever it was his dad had done, bringing him tools, having to stand on a stool to reach the crafting table. She’d been like that as a kid, helping her dad do little repairs, or helping Ginchiyo.

Velma’s pen stopped on the page, and she looked across the room to look at Hamish properly as he kept on carving symbols into place, not looking remotely affected.

“Other boys in the village noticed?” she asked.

Hamish didn’t look up as he said, “More enticing figures than that.”

“You were ten when they took you? For— for sex?”

Hamish laughed. “Not for sex,” he said, although his expression had a modest amount of sadness in it, distant grief, as he glanced back her way. “But it was a handsome man used to entice me. And you? Figured it out from your little cartoon, did you?”

“You know, weirdly, not really,” Velma said. “Or, like, yeah, but I didn’t connect those dots until way later. I was pretty much obsessed with Scooby Doo as soon as I saw it – I remember being a kid and just being glued to the screen, sitting on the rug, colouring or doing a jigsaw or whatever and just... same episodes on cassette, again and again and again. Listened to the CD in the car. Watched all the movies, played the games, wanted the toys, a little, but it wasn’t really about that for me – I didn’t want to play with the dolls or run a Mystery Machine around, I more wanted to get the toys and then line them up on shelves where I could see them.”

Hamish’s laugh was quiet, almost fond, and she glanced around the shop even though she already knew there weren’t any paintings or photographs hanging up, knowing that while he had little personal items and antiques and stuff, none of them had names on.

It was fucked up, what happened to people taken by the fae – coming back out of time, your family long-since dead and gone, your own kids old enough to be your grandparents, but Hamish had been just a kid. His parents gone, any siblings, any cousins or aunts and uncles, any other kids he’d known – and more than that, the village he’d known, the culture he’d known, all of it.

“You sang the little jingle all the time, I would imagine.”

“Constantly. Drove my da fucking insane.”

“And he and your mother, they didn’t suspect that you were… so inclined?”

“On the spectrum, maybe, although they wouldn’t send me for an assessment. I think one counsellor when I was a kid actually implied that it was, uh, ‘cause of my genes? That autism is for white kids – I was just like that out of being Japanese.”

Hamish wrinkled his nose again and said, with withering judement. “Fascinating.”

“And it’s not like I knew she was a dyke in the cartoon, that it was an implication or a common reading of her and Daphne or whatever – I just knew that I liked her. I liked how she was drawn, how she moved, how she talked, I liked the shade of orange. I coloured fucking everything orange, wanted orange blankets, orange clothes, orange pyjamas, orange lunchbox, orange water bottle, orange shoes, orange plates, orange cups.”

“An orange car,” supplied Hamish, and Velma grinned at him.

“Yeah, that came later. Once I got a little older, I got a little more, uh…”

“More subtle?”

“I look subtle to you?”

“Perhaps not by an average person’s standard,” the old man allowed with a shrug of his shoulders, and Velma shifted the blanket around her shoulders. “But you’ve dialled down the orange somewhat, hm? You wear orange, red, black…” He looked pensive for a moment, thinking hard. “I think I’ve seen you wear blue denim.”

“Sometimes,” Velma murmured. “But yeah, I just liked the cartoon – I don’t think I really realised I was a lesbian until I was about thirteen or fourteen, came out a little bit later. Some girl saw me in the summer, I think I was sixteen? She’d never seen me out of school uniform before, saw me dressed how I was, red skinny jeans, orange turtleneck. She was like, oh, is that why you’re so into Velma Dinkley, ‘cause she’s a lesbian too? Like a lightning strike to the head – I felt like such a fucking idiot, was laughing like a loon. I’d never made that connection.”

Hamish laughed at her, and Velma laughed too, bouncing a little in her seat.

“But yeah, my family got me Scooby Doo stuff, or just orange stuff, until I was old enough to dress myself and get my own orange shit. I used to have my hair a lot longer, more to my midback – Aunt Kimi was furious that my da “let me” cut it shorter, into such a short bob, just ‘cause I liked a kid’s show she thought I was too old for.”

“How old were you?”

“Not sure, eleven, twelve. Well before my GCSEs.”

“I can’t say I’m incredibly surprised,” Hamish murmured. “Kimi always struck me as somewhat severe – I can hardly judge her for it, liking a certain level of order, of regimented focus upon certain rules and expectations… for herself. That sort of severity applied to children, I don’t know that I would foster.”

“No,” Velma said. “She started getting pissier then, after I got my hair cut – with my brother, she got even more controlling, angrier. When he came out, that was when we cut her off – she flipped out, went fucking crazy, cutting us out of these funds that she and Ginchiyo had always had aside for us.”

“Your brother’s gay as well?”

“He’s trans,” Velma said, not without a few seconds of hesitation, keeping her gaze on the other man. It’s not like Kaito was stealth – he wore trans pride shoe laces, sometimes, little badges and shit, went in for that more than Velma ever had.

“Ah,” Hamish said. There was no sign of judgement or concern in his face, no pinch to his expression or implication of disgust. He remained quite open. “So, his, ah… I’m sorry, I don’t know the common parlance. Old name?”

“Dead name.”

“Dead name?” Hamish repeated curiously. “How morbid. He was named for your aunt, then?”

“Nah, his name was Mei,” Velma said. “Mine was Kimiko – had the same kanji as Aunt Kimi’s name and everything, but like Hell was I keeping that. We did our deed polls together, so he changed his name and I changed mine at the same time.”

“There’s a nice bit of symmetry in that,” said Hamish, sounding quite genuine about it as he gave her a small, warm smile. “Get to that reading, young lady, or you’ll complain when I interrupt you to lug this table about the place. Read aloud, even, I’ve no trouble writing these in at the same time, I’m working from a template I prepared in advance.”

“You want selections from Vertiginous Mirrors or The Order of Things?”

“Good Gods, girl, spare me the Foucault, I get enough of him already,” said Hamish, and Velma peered at him over her glasses, but no explanation was forthcoming. Shrugging, Velma cracked the book and turned to the highlighted page selection.

* * *

It was evening time when Velma’s phone rang in her back pocket – she and Hamish had carried the table down the stairs with the alastora not helping things at all, many of them sliding back and forth over the surface of the table, hanging off the legs, hanging off Hamish’s hair and Velma’s, from their glasses, their clothes.

She was a little out of breath as she answered it, holding it up to her ear. “Hey, K, what’s up?”

“Hey, you still at that antique shop? Do you wanna get some chicken, ‘cause I— fuck, hey!”

Velma jolted at the sound of Kaito shouting, then at his sharp sound of pain, hearing a car horn honk loudly and realising she wasn’t just hearing it through her phone but also through the shop window, and she immediately ran out into the street.

She flipped off the cunt in the 4x4 who was wailing on his fucking horn – Kaito was sprawled on his side on the black and white painted surface of the zebra crossing, grabbing at his hair where blood was staining the tarmac and the fleece of his hoodie.

“Why weren’t you wearing your fucking helmet?” she demanded when her gaze landed on his skateboard, thrown against the pavement edge on one side of the road – the prick in the 4x4 was still honking, although looking a bit more panicked now and visibly wishing he could reverse and drive the fuck away. “Hamish!”

MacKinnon was hovering in the doorway of the shop, looking pale as a sheet, and Velma could see the alastora swarming behind him like shadows in the night but not able to cross over the door’s border – after looking like he was steeling himself for something, he stumbled onto the pavement and came forward, leaning over Kaito on the zebra crossing, his hands aglow as he murmured the words for some diagnostic spell she was unfortunately used to hearing performed, not by Aunts Kimi, but by doctors at magical hospitals.

“The fuck is your problem?” she demanded, slamming her palms against the 4x4’s shining hood. She could feel her palms searing with heat, nearly enough to mark the black paintwork on the car. “What, you wanted to kill a kid?”

“He swerved in front of me!”

“It’s a fucking zebra crossing!”

“Velma,” Hamish said loudly over Kaito’s groans of pain and complaint, with a sort of exaggerated calm, “you’re not going to win a physical encounter with the man’s vehicle, and I’d rather you didn’t pull him out of it either. Come and hold your brother’s hair out of the way for me, would you?”

Velma muttered under her breath as she came and did as she was told, holding back Kaito’s hair and, mostly, blocking the view from the idiot driver and other people in the street who were desperate to get a glance at the kid on the ground as Hamish healed the nasty graze on his head shut.

“He gonna have a concussion?” she asked.

“Could do,” Hamish murmured. “What’s your name, young man?”

“Kaito,” he said, blinking up blearily at him. “Are you the old guy with the demons?”

“Less of the old, if you would,” Hamish said. “Can you stand?”

Kaito sat up, pressing his fingers against his forehead. He’d lost a good bit of blood, Velma thought – enough to make a Hell of a mess on the pavement. What the fuck kind of moron wore his elbow and knee pads and not his fucking helmet, skating down the fucking street, on his phone?

“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” she told him.

“The fuck?” Kaito retorted. “It’s a fucking zebra crossing, he—”

“Children,” Hamish said loudly. “In the shop, perhaps, rather than here in the street with this gathering audience?”

“I’ve called an ambulance,” said a student-looking young woman in a camel coat helpfully as Kaito stood to his feet.

“Good, they’ll be here in forty minutes or so, then,” Velma muttered. “Is anything else hurt?”

“No, just my head,” Kaito said.

“Get in the fucking shop,” Velma told him, and as he bent to pick it up, barked, “you leave that fucking skateboard where it is or so help me, I’ll fucking—!”

“Okay, okay, I’m going!” Kaito snapped, his hands up as he walked into the shop, and Velma took a picture of the 4x4’s number plate, even as the fella in the driver’s seat tried uselessly to hide his fucking face.

“Hamish,” Velma said, “I need to call our dad, do you—”

As she turned to look at him, the old man abruptly collapsed to one side, his head resting in the now-congealing pool of blood that her brother had just left there.

“Fuck’s sake,” she muttered, putting her phone in her back pocket. “Don’t you fucking go anywhere!” she ordered the fella in the 4x4, and surreptitiously shot two balls of flame beneath his tyres, making the rubber melt sticky into the tarmac before she slid her arms under the unconscious Hamish’s back and lifted him clean off the ground.

“Gosh,” said the helpful student. “You’re strong, aren’t you?”

Sticky with her brother’s blood and carrying the old man in her arms, it wasn’t even in her to flirt with the woman as she trudged across the road and into the shop again.