#jakeming

for @grimmtober day 23: cemetery! missed connections and almost-jakeming

~~

William finds Snow’s grave on his second day in this terrible future. It’s nothing special. Just a plain headstone. There are flowers on it, but they don’t look fresh. White roses.

He stares. This can’t happen. He won’t let it. The future can be changed. He has to believe that.

“Will?” The voice sounds like someone who’s seen a ghost. It’s close enough to his own name that he turns.

Jacob Grimm. Relda’s forgotten (erased) son. William recognizes him, though he looks as haggard as Relda herself. He’s got a week’s worth of beard, and his eyes are ringed with dark shadows. His nose looks as if it’s been broken again since William saw it a few days ago (fifteen years ago). His hair is longer, but still blond. Still flyaway, wild.

“Oh,” Jacob says. “Oh. Right. Daphne said—You’re not. Of course not.” He shakes his head, but keeps staring at William. It’s like he’s looking at a ghost, drinking William in.

“I’m dead, then?” he asks.

Jacob quirks a very small smile, and jerks his head in a ‘follow me’ gesture. He walks off, to a newer part of the graveyard. They pass an awful lot of graves. Many of them have names William recognizes. Too many, and they’re all recent.

William’s grave has forget-me-nots growing over the earth. It’s not fresh-turned, but it’s recent. It’s jarring, seeing his own name on a rough-cut slab of granite, ‘William Charming’ with no birth or death dates. Which makes sense. Nobody knows his exact birth date, even him. They went and changed the calendars after he was born, so nothing quite lines up.

Jacob stares at the grave for a long time. William watches him.

“Were we… friends?” he asks.

“Something like that.”

William can’t quite wrap his head around that. Allies with a Grimm, yes, in the face of a war, that makes sense at least. But friends? And with someone who did something so heinous Relda had him erased from all their minds? He wonders what happened in the past fifteen years to turn him into the kind of person who’d be friends with someone like this.

Jacob, hands still in the pockets of that ridiculous coat, stands staring at the grave for a long time. William, at last, leaves him alone with the memory of someone William is not yet, cannot be yet.

~

This future is dark. So many of the people William knew and loved are gone. Dead. And those who aren’t? Half of them are enemies, and half are shadows of the people he knew.

But he came here, somehow. And it becomes evident, as things continue, that something is happening in the fabric of reality. Rips are opening up everywhere. He can go back. And if he can go back? Then he can fix it.

He fights. He trains. He learns. He gets to know Daphne because she is a bastion of magical force in this future, and she is the one who can help him go back. She is nothing like the child he remembers. Her haircut is the same as Snow’s has been (was. Snow is dead, here and now) since the 1920s. 

Jacob tells him, one day over dinner, that she cut it when Snow died, that she was as shaped by that death as William himself was (the William that William is not, the William that he could become). Jacob doesn’t wait to be asked this. Nor does he wait to sit down across from William at a table in the mess hall. He keeps looking at William like he’s a ghost, but he goes out of his way to be friendly with him.

William appreciates this. Everyone is busy, and he knows this. He tries to make himself useful, and he usually doesn’t let his own ego get in the way. He knows how to act in wartime. Jake is a welcome presence, though, helping William find his footing. Appearing out of nowhere and explaining schedules and rotations and training regimes.

They become, somehow, friends. Jake may look at William, still, like he’s expecting something that William doesn’t know how to give him, but he never asks for whatever it is. They go on patrols together, and Jake tells him everything he knows about the Scarlet Hand, and the way the world became what it is today. Not all of it is useful, and he doesn’t have all the answers, but William listens anyway.

It’s nice to have someone who understands him. Nicer still to understand them back.

~

Jake dies alone. They find his body in the woods, riddled with arrows. He died with a smile on his face. William doesn’t know how to deal with this. He throws himself into scouting missions with more force than ever and doesn’t speak to anyone. He will make it home, and he will keep Jake from dying.

Two days later, Sabrina and Daphne Grimm appear, fresh from his own timeline.

~

Jake looks at him like a stranger, like a near enemy. And William will not change that, even though every time Jake says “Charming” like it’s half an insult, he aches to hear that same voice call him Will. William sleeps on their couch, and Jake questions Sabrina and Daphne’s judgement, and when they get up in the morning, William still feels Jake’s gaze on him like a stranger as they make their separate cups of coffee.

Snow is alive. And Briar is alive. And they are, neither of them, anything to each other. He should know less than nothing about Jake. Jake should think of him only as some asshole he knows. The women they love are alive. This is all that bound them together.

It isn’t. Jake is, even under all that grief, funny and resourceful, and desperate to be loved.

But William cannot tell him what happened. And he can’t long for that future, where Jake lost so much, and died full of arrows, alone in the woods.

Charming: What bro

Jake: Tell the whole world we’re bros

Charming: [whispers] We’re bros

Jake: Why’d you whisper, bro?

Charming: Because you’re my whole world, bro