A Glimpse of the Future
Dark blue eyes above him. Hands shaking him. A mouth yelling at him but his brain unable to comprehend the sounds. His own shaking hand rising to cup his aunt's cheek, smearing her skin with blood. Her desperate seeming scream for someone and a man dropping besides her, green eyes wide, the Smith features obvious on his face. Features similar to hers. And then he leaned down, regret on his face, fangs gleaming in his mouth...
Cinaed woke with a grunt of panic, eyes flying wide open, and then he dragging himself to the side of the bed to dry heave over the side. Nothing came up, thankfully, but his stomach muscles cramped with the effort that his body went through in response to the sick feeling that filled him in the aftermath of the dream. Vision. Whatever.
Upside of being the son of a hunter, he was faster and healed quicker.
Downside of being the son of a hunter was that he was a Wolfe and the Wolfes shared blood with the Wards. The Wards were cursed with the Sight and Cinaed had learned over the years their magic clashed with his own, so every time it activated it made him feel ill. And the meager amount of Ward magic he had inherited like to activate at random and usually just on himself.
As his body finally stopped trying to force himself to puke, Cinaed heard the guest room door open and his grandmother ask, "Are you alright?"
Reaching down to push himself back using the floor so he could flop back onto the bed, he looked towards her and groaned, "Just a vision. You know the deal."
Sighing, she stepped into the room and moved to sit on the edge of the bed, pulling a plaid shawl tighter over her shoulders against the chill in the house. Despite the building having been updated in several ways, it didn't have central heating and thus the whole house was always a touch cold in the early morning. Cinaed just sighed and lifted his left arm to lay it over his eyes as she gently laid a hand on his right and asked, "What was it? Something to be concerned about?"
He shook his head slightly and replied, "I'm not entirely sure. Sight's not always a truth anyway, just a possibility when it's a glimpse of the future."
Gran hummed and then patted his arm before saying, "Well. Come help me make breakfast as a distraction."
"Okay, yeah. Distraction."
Nodding, she rose from the bed and left the room, calling over her shoulder, "Take a shower and change your clothes first! I'll start working on the bread while you're doing that."
Once again, Cinaed knew better than to argue with his grandmother, though he didn't savor the thought of the house shower at the moment. Given the age of the place, a bath hadn't exactly been in the original plans for it, so part of the kitchen had been enclosed for that and a door installed in the wall that separated the kitchen from the main room. It had already been a cramped space with little room to turn around when he had been a gangly teen, so it was probably going to be worse. Still probably wouldn't be the worst shower that he'd taken in his life. That one still went to the clan barracks that he had lived in with three other trainees in his age range where they hadn't even had a shower curtain to hide behind.
Nonetheless, he grabbed some comfortable clothes from his bag and hopped into the bathroom. His thigh nailed the absolute shit out of the edge of the sink more than once and he had to pretzel himself down to actually wash his hair out because he was taller than the showerhead, but Cinaed managed it without serious injury. As he entered the kitchen towelling off his hair, however, he remembered a detail about his body that he wasn't sure either his grandmother or mother were going to like.
Darcy had taken him to a tattoo parlor the day after he had gotten back from his hunt and paid for whatever he wanted to get done as celebration, his treat. His older brother was very much about getting tattoos to mark important occasions in his life and Cinaed earning his place in the clan was definitely one of them. So now his entire right forearm from wrist to elbow was covered in the dark outlines of a snarling wolf wreathed in fire, all of the linework having been completed in several hours of work. The plan was to get the color done eventually on it but that was coming out of Cinaed's pocket. And he had paid himself for the ouroboros tattoo on the inside of his left wrist as a amusing riff towards the apparent bond between the Hancocks that kept to the oath that Rohan Hancóc had made to Marie Smith, keeping his ancestors in a continuous cycle around the three O'Connell siblings (he'd told Darcy that it was about unity between his witch and hunter sides).
Both of them were plainly on display as he had grabbed a loose, short-sleeved t-shirt to throw on instead of the longer sleeved henley he had been wearing yesterday underneath his coat. Gran looked up as he entered and he could tell that she saw them, her gray eyes narrowing slightly. But then she just gestured at the old fridge and commanded, "Start cracking eggs, boy, I'm almost done with the meat to set it aside to cool."
He didn't think that she was going to comment on either of them until he was vigorously mixing up the eggs with a fork as she stated, "I don't care what you put on your skin so long as you come home, Cinaed, but your mother is going to have words." As his tense shoulders loosened a little, Gran added, "Your grandfather had a tattoo, did you know that? It was one of those hideous old hearts with my name in it that he got done for twenty or some odd at a hole-in-the-wall shop when he was working the docks. I loved that ridiculous thing."
"Thanks, Gran," he murmured before handing her the bowl the eggs were in so she could begin scrambling them. As she did that, he set the rest of the table and got out everything else, so when she brought them to the table, they could immediately begin eating. This time he was able to eat significantly slower and actually taste his food...and also think about one of the things he had wanted to talk to her about.
Clearing his throat lightly, Cinaed began, "So...Gran...I...well, I met her."
"Her?" she repeated, arching an eyebrow.
"Her," he said pointedly. "Niamh."
His grandmother's eyebrows flew up into her hair and she slowly set her fork down onto her plate, staring at him in surprise. "When?" she asked softly.
"When I nearly drowned when I was fifteen."
"You nearly..." Gran looked way, her eyes furiously blinking away tears and the slant of her mouth as angry as he had ever seen, and then hissed, "She never told me. Not anything more than Oh, he had a bit of a scare but he's fine. Don't worry, Maeve, I've got him. She didn't even tell me that you knew!"
Chuckling, he nodded and said, "I wanted to see if you knew during one of our calls but didn't dare risk it. Even took her number out of the phone the clan gave me and bought basically a burner to call her with. She saved me that day, Gran." Cinaed then coughed and added, "She was there. In the vision this morning."
Now his grandmother stilled and she asked, "Will you tell me about it now? Is that why you hesitated?"
"Yeah."
As she nodded in acceptance, Cinaed began, "She was yelling at me, though I couldn't hear the words. I was bleeding from somewhere because I put a bloody hand to her face. Then she called for someone else...someone that looked like her." Looking up at his grandmother, he said, "I think it was Darragh, her older brother. He looked so much like a Smith that I'm shocked other clans haven't figured out the connection...and he had green eyes."
"And Daman has blue eyes, like hers but lighter," Gran stated, her eyes suddenly distant. "And Darragh?"
Cinaed frowned and replied, "I...I think he may have turned me, Gran. In the vision."
Silence reigned in the kitchen for a long moment before his grandmother picked up her fork again and stated flatly, "The future isn't set, its just a possibility, as you said earlier. It is very likely that whatever you saw never even happens."
"Sure," he offered, even though he knew that one of the reasons Niamh was in New York City was because she was hunting down Darragh's bloodbrother and Daman's sire since they were sire and child, in the hopes that the two of them might know where her brothers were now. He had been trying to push her to finally do it since she had talked about finding them someday and she had committed to do it once he completed his hunt. If she was lucky, she could find them in his lifetime.
Cinaed picked at the food on his plate for a moment before asking quietly, "If I got turned...would you still love me?"
"What a foolish question!" she snapped, almost sounding angry. "Of course I would, boy. You're my grandson and nothing you could do could make me stop loving you. Your mother...she should but I'm not as certain. I never told her about your Aunt Niamh because I didn't think that she would believe me." Gran sighed and then added, "And after she had that affair with your father for so long...I didn't think I could trust her with the secret."
Sighing, she then reached out across the table to grasp his hand with hers and quietly said, "Don't you go looking for that future."
"Never," he swore and meant it. Yet there was a deeply sinking feeling in his gut that he maybe wasn't going to be able to avoid the path that led to that moment.
Timeframe: 2019
Location: Port Laoise, Ireland
Event: Cinaed Hancock wakes up in his grandmother's house, almost violently ill from the vision he saw just before waking. Of course, when he tells her that he knows Niamh O'Connell, he also has to tell her that she was in the vision.
Consquences: Cinaed and his grandmother Maeve have to deal with knowing that there is a future out there where he is injured enough that his adopted aunt Niamh O'Connell asks her oldest brother presumably to save him by turning him.
The product of a brief fling during a hunt between Daniel Wolfe III, a hunter, and Bridget Hancock, Cinaed grew up between both of the worlds he came from. Living first in Ireland with his mother and then Australia with his father, he has trained as both witch and hunter. Though he also, of course, has secrets that he keeps - mainly the existence of one half-cursed by the name of Niamh O'Connell, who was adopted into the Hancock family by his own ancestor centuries ago.
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