Word Count: 1,588
Archive: DarkMagick.net, Apollymi’s Grimoire, and Archive of Our Own. Anyone else wanting it, please ask first. I’ll probably say yes, but ask first…[endsection]
Joshua was never going to breathe a word to his brother about how terrified he had been arriving at the Robicheaux home: a long month short of six years old, short, scrawny, underfed, and half wild. The entire trip from Missouri to Louisiana had been Monsieur Robicheaux informing him in increasingly vile and rude ways about how Joshua wasn’t to expect anything of this new home; that his wife was taking the boy in because it was the Christian thing to do, not because she wanted him, even if she had been the one who had sent Monsieur Robicheaux to retrieve him; that he was going to be raised by a nanny he had already hired, a stern woman who wasn’t going to take any nonsense from him but was going to keep him in line; that if Le Bon Dieu was willing, this would be the last Monsieur Robicheaux would ever have to see of Joshua.
After a long talk like that, he had fully expected Monsieur Robicheaux’s wife to hate him on sight, and he got the feeling that she had expected to as well. Instead, she had taken one good long look at him the minute Monsieur Robicheaux physically dragged him in the home, one big hand wrapped completely around his arm and pulling hard (he had had that particular bruise for weeks), and declared him to be her ‘pauve ti bete’, and she had immediately set to babying him like he was one of her own. Even Ma hadn’t babied him the way Maman Arthémie Robicheaux did; Miss Ethel certainly never had been able to. Hell, he had thought for nearly a year that ‘mon pauve ti bete’ was just how you said Joshua in Louisiana French.
Maman Arthémie had set to feeding him almost from the moment he had walked—been dragged—in her front door. She had also despaired at his lack of winter clothes, never mind that Louisiana winters weren’t nearly as bad as the winters in Saint Louis and he hadn’t lost any extremities to the cold yet, and she had promptly wrapped him up in Goodnight’s old clothes that he had long since outgrown. He had felt like a blonde, silk-wearing, perfumed whirlwind had descended on him, leaving him uncertain which way was up and which way was down, and it had taken him until he had been recovering from the long day alone in his new (surprisingly large) bedroom before he realized that he had just been more or less adopted; he never even got to meet the nanny who was supposed to raise him, because Maman Arthémie had dismissed her by the next morning and ended up taking an approach to raising him that was just as personal as it had been for her own real, blood children.
Of course, that made him a damn usurper in the eyes of his newfound big brother and big sister. Colette had been the baby for years, and she and Goodnight had liked it that way. She had been nearly twelve and Goodnight almost thirteen when Joshua showed up and basically stole their Maman. For all that he had latched on to Goodnight after his second night and followed him around like a little shadow, it had taken a week for his brother to actually start speaking him and another week for it to be politely without Maman Arthémie threatening to wash his mouth out with some strong lye soap. It hadn’t exactly endeared him to Goodnight that most of Joshua’s vocabulary at the time at consisted of swear words that he got away with using because he ‘didn’t know better’ or a similar explanation.
Colette had come around to him first. That, or she had realized that he wasn’t going away any time soon and she might as well get used to him. Three weeks after he arrived in Louisiana, she had decided she liked him well enough to start assisting her maman in feeding him up. By another week after that, she had started favoring him a few smiles here and there. Within two months of him becoming a Robicheaux, Colette had been treating him like he had always been one.
It took Goodnight another month and a half, to which Joshua had despaired, because he had desperately wanted his new big brother to like him. It wasn’t as if Monsieur Robicheaux liked either of them all that much. The only one of his children that Monsieur Robicheaux cared for had been Colette, and even that was in a distant sort of way. Monsieur Robicheaux made no bones about why he hated Joshua, given his bastard status, but he had never really made heads or tails of why he had hated Goodnight. Maybe he had cottoned on that Goodnight preferred men to ladies, a fact Joshua had picked up on fairly early on himself, but maybe it was something else. Maybe the man had just hated children.
He was never going to tell his brother that few of the bruises he had worn throughout his early childhood had anything to do with playing, no matter how rambunctious he got to being. Monsieur Robicheaux had never forgiven Joshua for existing and for taking away the respect of his other children, never mind that Joshua had literally had no choice in either matter. He had been fond of reminding Joshua of this at any given moment, though especially if they were ever alone.
Joshua had learned early to take care to not be alone with Monsieur Robicheaux if he could avoid it, and he learned that only certain people counted as far as ‘not alone’ went: Goodnight, Colette, Maman Arthémie, Nana Jolie, and any houseguests that might show up. He had learned those sorts of lessons early, from the minute he could walk: never be alone with someone who wanted to hurt you. The Robicheaux household had just reinforced those lessons. Spending so much time with Goodnight as a child had been equal parts self-protection and fascination. It had hurt so much those three and a half months that Goodnight held that grudge on him, but at least Goodnight was never cruel, just dismissive. Maman Arthémie had taken Goodnight to task over his attitude a time or forty, but honestly, Joshua hadn’t cared too much, as long as Goodnight didn’t send him away, which thankfully he rarely did.
Of course, Goodnight was always the overdramatic one of the three of them, so he waited until Colette’s birthday in April to start giving Joshua the time of day. To this day, he was glad that Goodnight hadn’t waited until his own birthday in June to give him a chance. His little heart might not have lasted that long in anticipation. Of course, it had been in the middle of Colette’s party, with all her town friends gathered around the table while he and Goodnight had hung back trying to avoid as much of the loud giggles as possible, when Goodnight had busted out with that ridiculous nickname for him. Colette had taken to calling him JoJo almost immediately after accepting him into the family, but until that day, Goodnight had spoken to him only when absolutely necessary and never by name.
In the middle of that party, he had gotten a nudging elbow in the side, accompanied by a whispered “Hey”. He had been a little confused at first, to say nothing of trying to hide that he had been sore in that area already, thanks to Monsieur Robicheaux’s last drunken rage. He couldn’t think of who might have wanted his attention, but then he had glanced over at Goodnight, who had been sitting right next to him and grinning fit to be tied as he commented, “Think we should leave the ladies to their party, T-Jo?”
He had been around Louisiana folks long enough by then to know that the ‘T’ was a shortened form of petit. It made sense to him, logically speaking, because he was still really short, but it had still taken him a moment to process that Goodnight meant him. Once he finally realized it, he had damn near broken into a squeal that would have put Colette’s town friends to shame and had to bite it down hard. As it was, he had managed a grin of his own, a little gapped because he was starting to lose some of his baby teeth, and said just loud enough to be heard, “But I wanted a piece of cake.”
“You know good and well that Cooky’s saving you a piece or two in the kitchen,” Goodnight returned. “Let’s go get it.”
From that night until a couple of years later, when a eighteen year old Goodnight—who had, by then, ‘Goody’ to Joshua and no one else, for only a few days less time than he had been ‘T-Jo’—had left with their father for the war, they had been practically inseparable. He had come up with excuses to sneak over to Goody’s room at night, just in case Monsieur Robicheaux got too drunk one evening and wanted to whale on the bastard child. He might not have fit in well with Goody’s sophisticated friends when they were visiting, not in the least of which being because he was between five and ten years younger than most of them, but they had accepted him well enough. Or at least they had tolerated him, and that had been good enough in his book.
[section=Footer Notes]28 January 2017I am so sorry. I meant to put this out yesterday, but work seriously got away from me. By the time I realized I hadn’t posted it, it was… well… today. I’m going to try to keep this on every other Friday after today. I thought setting the date to Katsuko’s payday would make it easier to remember. We’ll see.
~Adora[endsection]