A Peculiar Time in 1944 - A Millard Fanfic (Miss Peregrine's Home) #wattys2020

Chapter 63

"It occurred to me that it had probably been a lot of years since he'd seen a girl outside of those who lived on Cairnholm. But what chance would someone like him have with a normal girl anyway?

"Don't look at me like that." He said.

"Like what?"

"Like you feel bad for me."

"I don't" I said, but I did. Then Millard stood up from his seat, took off his coat and disappeared. I didn't see him again for a while.

{Jacob Portman and Millard Nullings, pg 194 book 2}

AN: this is the passage that really broke my heart. I kept on re-reading it just feeling sorry for Millard. Eventually this paragraph led me to put my foot down and say Enough! I'm giving Millard someone who loves him for everything he is! And thus Aurora Abbott was born!

Millard and Jacob rode in silence for a while after the girls left. He was in the middle of reading the tale 'The Fork-Tongued Princess' making notes on scrap paper of what he wanted to annotate since Bronwyn had forbid him from actually writing in the book.

'The princess knew she could use her acidic venom to burn through the lock of her cell door and escape, but instead she waited, hoping her father might come to his senses and forgive her.' He read to himself There used to be a highly acidic liquid you could buy on the peculiar black market. He wrote on the scrap paper he had, The bottles were wrapped in snakeskin, and the stuff inside could burn through metal. It was called Princess Spit – in honor, no doubt, of this tale. After a number of unfortunate incidents involving its misuse, peculiar authorities shut down its manufacture. These days, bottles of Princess Spit are rare collectors' items.

"How did we all get to be peculiar in the first place?" Jake asked breaking the silence.

"No one's certain. There are legends though. Some people believe we're descended from a handful of peculiars who lived a long, long time ago. They were very powerful – and enormous, like the stone giant we found. The story goes that over the years, as we multiplied, our power diluted. As we became less powerful, we got smaller too." Millard explained.

'That's all pretty hard to swallow." Jacob said, "I feel about as powerful as an ant."

"Ants are quite powerful, actually, relative to their size."

"You know what I mean. The thing I really don't get is why me? I never asked to be this way. Who decided?"

Millard knew it was a rhetorical question and Jacob wasn't really looking for an answer but eventually Millard's brainiac nature won out and he answered anyway. "To quote a famous peculiar: At the heart of nature's mystery, lies another mystery."

"Who said that?"

"We know him as Perplexus Anomalous. An invented name, probably, for a great thinker and philosopher. Perplexus was a cartographer too. He drew the very first edition of the Map of Days, a thousand-something years ago."

Jake chuckled, "You talk like a teacher sometimes. Has anyone ever told you that?"

"All the time." He answered, "I would've liked to try my hand at teaching. If I hadn't been born like this."

"You would've been great at it."

"Thank you." He said before going quiet, his mind drifting into a daydream of what could have been. He could have gone to school, been able to look at his reflection in the mirror, could have become a professor at any ivy league university of his choosing. But would he have ever met Aurora? No, he decided, not even normalcy and having his dream of teaching in reach would have been worth trading her. "I don't want you to think that I don't like being invisible. I do. I love being peculiar Jacob, it's the very core of who I am. But there are days I wish I could turn it off."