Chapter Text
Nish managed to close his eyes just in time. The gunshot rang out and he felt his head explode for just a second before-
A train whistle. That wasn’t right.
Sunlight blinded Nish as he blinked his eyes open, trying to figure out where he was. He was dead, surely. Were those metaphors about the supposed journey from the land of the living to the world of the dead grounded in more reality than Nish had ever guessed?
“Mr. Sengupta, I wasn’t aware that we would be traveling back together.”
He’d heard that before, a long time ago, and yet, there it was again, like it had never been said before. And there was Mrs. Drummond-Ward and Rose standing before him, like they had been when they’d left the Hotel Portofino for the first time. Looking down, Nish saw his own belongings beside him, just like he'd set them when he’d first gone to Turin. But that wasn’t right, none of that was right.
Nish stood up and looked around almost wildly as a strange realization set in. He wasn’t dead. He was at the train station in Portofino. And he was leaving for the first time. Again.
“Are you all right?” Rose asked in that sweet voice of hers.
“Yes,” Nish answered, certainly too quickly and exuberantly. Yes, he was all right. He was alive, alive and back to where everything had begun, back to before it was too late. He felt dizzy, delirious almost as he sank back down into his seat with a relieved laugh.
He could feel the pair of women judging him, one harshly, the other with genuine concern, but Nish, for once, didn’t care what anyone thought of him. Whatever had happened to him there on that station bench - a vision of the future, a glimpse into a parallel life - whatever it was he had been granted some gift of sight and he had never been more grateful for anything. He was alive, he was still alive, and he was determined to keep it that way.
“No, I’m not traveling your way,” Nish said, suddenly remembering the question he had been asked initially, and the kind of answer he had given once before, but this time he meant it in a completely different way.
Nish stood up and collected his things before giving a curt head nod to the women, offering no further explanation for his behavior as he exited the station, determined to catch the carriage that had dropped off the Drummond-Ward's and use it to return to the Hotel Portofino.
He just managed to get to it in time, having to run a little catch up to it as it began its departure, but the driver recognized Nish and pulled to a stop for him to climb in. Once inside, Nish collapsed in the seat, his head on fire as he tried to process what was happening and what he was going to do.
He had to do things differently, he knew that much. But why was he going back to the hotel? He had acted on impulse at the station, trying to make the opposite decision to the choice he had made before, but what was waiting for him at the hotel?
Lucian. Lucian was waiting. He hadn’t gone back to England yet, hadn’t gotten married yet, hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be undone. He’d been given a chance, somehow, in some way, to change things, to live his life differently, and perhaps that different life would include his best friend this time around. What if Nish was being given a second chance not just at life, but at love?
Back at the hotel Nish rushed upstairs towards Lucian’s room, crashing more or less in through the door.
“Nish?” Lucian asked, standing up from the bedside he seemed to be sitting on in reflective silence.
“Don’t marry her,” Nish said as he moved across the room towards his oldest friend. Lucian was almost too shocked to speak.
“What?”
“Don’t marry Rose, you’re going to be miserable, and she will be too, and you don’t deserve that.”
“Nish, what’s gotten into you?” Lucian asked, placing his hands on Nish’s arms to hold him steady and get a good look at him.
“You don’t want to marry her, I know you don’t, and you know you don’t, so don’t. If I get a second chance then so do you.”
“Calm down, what are you talking about?”
Lucian forcibly guided his friend to sit on the bed he himself had just been seated on while he stood and stared down at him. Nish felt rather like a schoolboy again, being scolded for misbehaving, but he could see this from Lucian’s point of view. To him it had been such a short time since the engagement was announced and Nish was headed for Turin, but to Nish it had been an actual lifetime and there was really no way for Lucian to know, or even guess at, what Nish was going through.
“Did something happen?” Lucian asked while Nish tried to organize his thoughts enough to make anything he said sound coherent and sane. “Did you see Rose at the station? Did she say something?”
“No,” Nish replied. “Well, yes, I saw her and her mother at the station, but no they didn’t say anything to me about any of this.”
“Then... what’s going on, why are you so upset about this all of a sudden?” Lucian asked, settling down beside Nish on the bed. “You were fine when you left-”
“No, I wasn’t,” Nish interrupted. “I keep pretending I am, but I’m not.”
“All right, then tell me what’s actually wrong, it can’t be my marriage upsetting you this much.”
“It is. And it isn’t. I’m sorry, I know I’m not making any sense to you, but you have to believe me that you can’t marry Rose. Or you shouldn’t, at least.”
“It’s already been arranged, Nish, it’s too late,” Lucian said, both gently and firmly, confused about how to approach this unorthodox conversation.
“It’s not, you can call it off, you can change your mind.”
“But I haven’t changed my mind,” he said. “You have, clearly, but I haven’t.”
Nish stood up from the bed and paced across the floor to the other side of the room, a finger in his mouth as he bit at the nail. None of this was coming out right. He wasn’t sure what he thought was going to happen. Was Lucian supposed to immediately take Nish’s advice and just call off the wedding? Tell Rose and his parents that a friend of his decided he didn’t like the match after all and assume that spoke for itself as reason enough to cancel?
“I saw something at the train station,” Nish started, still facing out a window instead of Lucian. “A... I don’t know, a dream, maybe. But it made me realize that we’re both making a mistake, we’re both going to end up with the wrong people. You don’t love Rose, and I might love Gianluca but he’s going to lead me down the wrong path and-”
“What?”
Nish had forgotten, at just the wrong moment, that Lucian didn’t know yet why he was going to Turin. But that was what he’d come back to do, wasn’t it? To tell Lucian the truth. At least part of it.
“I was going to Turin to join the resistance there. But I was going more specifically to be with Gianluca. Because I love him, or I did. Do? But, I can’t. I can’t go there because I know what happens now, what happens to him and me if I go there. Maybe I can’t prevent his death, maybe preventing mine won’t save him, but I have to hope it will.”
Tears had found their way into Nish’s eyes as he spoke and he could feel Lucian’s eyes boring a hole in the back of his head from the place on the bed where he was frozen.
“What... What is all this? What are you talking about Nish? Please just sit down, relax, something’s wrong, I don’t think you know what you’re saying-”
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Nish said, finally turning around to face Lucian, taking a seat in the chair opposite the bed. “And you don’t have to believe all of it, but I just need you to know what I saw. Can you just listen to me, to the whole thing, and then we can talk?”
His voice was shaking, and Lucian looked so confused and concerned, but he had to do this, so he held the other man’s gaze until he nodded in agreement. Then Nish told him all of it, from beginning to bloody end, as much as he could remember. Lucian didn’t really react to anything, sitting stock-still through the entirety of Nish’s narrative.
“-I closed my eyes and heard the gunshot and then... I heard a train whistle and I woke up at the station.”
Nish wanted to say more than that, but he’d run out of words and instead let a charged silence fill the air as he waited for some kind of reaction from Lucian. It took some time before the other man managed to work out that he was expected to say something, likely waiting for Nish to offer some kind of explanation for what he’d experience, but Nish didn’t have any to share. This was the truth as he knew it.
“It’s... It’s just a dream, Nish,” Lucian finally said, much to his companion’s disappointment. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It wasn’t just a dream, Lucian, I know what dreams feel like, this was different-”
“You’re tired, maybe you’re sick, I don’t know, but this is absurd, you have to see that.”
“I know this sounds crazy-”
“Good, I’m glad you agree-”
“-but what if it is real?” Nish continued, ignoring Lucian’s interruption. “It felt so real, Lucian. What if this is a second chance, for me, but also for you? You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to marry her-”
“Just stop, Nish!”
Nish wasn’t used to hearing Lucian shout. The two rarely argued, and even then the pair never raised their voices, preferring the usual British method of short, tight-lipped conversations that only the participants could identify as an argument, but this wasn’t an argument. This was Nish making a fool of himself and Lucian trying to make him stop, and Nish felt the bile of regret filling him inside.
“I’m sorry,” Lucian said shortly after his outburst, his face dropped into his hands, pressing his elbows into his knees. “This is just... I don’t think you know what you’re saying, Nish. You’re not yourself right now, you’re saying things that don’t make sense, that you don’t mean to say. Just go back to your room and lie down or have a drink, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with any of this.”
It seemed useless and even antagonistic to try and say anything, so Nish did as he was told and removed himself from the room. Back in his own room, the unrenovated attic studio that only family and friends could use, Nish sank onto his familiar yet foreign bed and tried to process what he had done and, perhaps more importantly, why he had done it.
He’d told Lucian the truth, the truth about who he was, how he felt, at least about Gianluca, but this time he wasn’t bloody and broken and it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder if that would make a difference. Part of Lucian’s reaction was certainly due to his disbelief of Nish’s inconceivable story, but how much of it had to do with this separate revelation?
What was Lucian thinking, now alone in his room? Was he thinking back through the years of their friendship, seeing their time together in a new, untoward light? Had their time together become suddenly sullied? Who would they be to each other now? In Nish’s vision – dream? – he and Lucian had grown apart as a result of location and circumstance, and he had been trying to avoid that this time around, but it seemed he had just found a new way to strain their relationship, this time making their problems personal rather than a matter of time and space. It had hurt Nish to be separated from his friend when they were on good terms, he wasn’t sure how he could bear it if they parted ways only because Lucian hated him.
The thought of Lucian feeling anything resembling ‘hatred’ towards him sent Nish into an emotional spiral he wished he’d had before bursting into Lucian’s room. What had he been thinking? Of course everything he’d said had sounded absurd, borderline insane, to Lucian. How was Lucian expected to react to any of that? On the whole his friend had actually, in hindsight, behaved admirably in the face of shocking lunacy.
That’s what it was, after all, wasn’t it? Now Nish had some distance from the experience, and someone else’s thoughts on it, he felt less confident about his initial assumptions. It might have been just a dream. It certainly made the most sense for it to have been a nightmare brought on by a combination of nerves about joining up with other revolutionaries in Turin and discontent at the prospect of Lucian’s impending nuptials. It had felt so real at the train station, so like a foreboding warning which required immediate action, but now, back at the Hotel Portofino, staring at the ceiling in the dusty attic, it all grew less important and more ridiculous as the sun began to set in the window.
He’d ruined everything for nothing, he decided. Lucian might chalk the rest of his antics up to some heat or exhaustion related hysteria, but even if he pretended Nish’s confession of his amorous affections for Gianluca were a part of that, he would never really believe it. The reality of that predated Nish’s perceived premonition and even if both of them agreed to forget all about that, their relationship would never really be the same again. Lucian would be on the lookout now for signs of inappropriate attachments on his part, and he would find them because Nish did love Lucian, and even if he hadn’t said that much, he felt it wouldn’t take long for Lucian to work that part out himself. All the little things he had done over the years that had gone unnoticed – asking to inspect Lucian’s wound, offering to help with his ties – would now be under scrutiny. And it was his own damn fault for deciding now was the time to be impulsive after years of carefully crafted subtlety and introspection.
Nish didn’t rise for dinner, deciding to take Lucian’s advice and simply rest for the remainder of the evening. Perhaps he was ill, sick with something he would have detected as a malady in someone besides himself, and he would find relief from his fears and confusion through an early night. His attempts at sleep were fitful but eventually he managed to block out the swirling emotions he was wrestling with and let the darkness take him for a thankfully dreamless sleep.