"I thought you said it was dead things you brought to life?"

"Never said it 'ad to 'ave been breathing once, did I?"

It was the first time Enoch had used his power in the four days it had been since he'd arrived in the loop and pressing his thumb to the crumbly, makeshift homunculus had felt like a long awaited relief. The burst of energy he'd felt in the centre of his chest far exceeded any other time he'd brought a clay man to life and he was sure the mouse heart within was beating twice as fast as it usually did.

It was strange to do it in the open, before the eyes of half a dozen curious others like he was putting on a show. Which, in a weird way, he supposed he was. They had all demonstrated their peculiarities, Victoria's telekinesis somewhat clumsily, and now it was his turn. Enoch left out the visual demonstration of ripping out a dead mouse's heart and skipped right to animating the already completed creature. Not least because Nigel, whose connection with animals made him particularly irritable at the idea of even eating beef, was present and even Enoch thought he could go at least a week without completely alienating himself from everybody in the house.

He'd fashioned an inferior sort of clay from the sand and crumbling cliff face but it was adequate enough to do until he found a better way of making it work. The homunculus, the size of Enoch's outstretched hand, leapt from the arm of the chair on which Enoch had sat it, and performed an impressive somersault much to the enjoyment of Victoria, Cecilia and Darcy who were watching with keen interest to see what Enoch really could do.

"I suppose it's kind of interesting." Nigel, sitting on the windowsill as the five o'clock shower of rain commenced like clockwork, spoke up and raised an eyebrow over at the other older boy in the house. "Not quite what I expected."

"Hey, that's not all I do." Enoch added a little defensively, not wanting the others to think he was just some animator of children's toys. "I do bring back dead stuff-oi!" The homunculus chose that moment to make a break for it and Enoch whistled sharply before the over energised puppet could make it more than a few metres away. It dropped its shoulders accordingly and, very humanlike, seemed to slouch as it returned to Enoch's command.

"Like animals and things? That's what you told me." Cecilia piped up where she was sitting cross legged on the floor.

"Yes, and me!"

Cecilia screamed and a few of the other kids jumped as Alexander appeared seemingly from nowhere right up behind the younger girl.

"Miss Thrush told you not to scare people!"

"Oh, twaddle. So animals and things, yes?" Alexander, not bothered in the least that he had put half of the room on edge again, addressed Enoch coolly.

"Yeah...animals..." Enoch snorted. He was beginning to tire of the endless questions, "There, done...you've seen it now."

"What about people?" Nigel asked, seeming far more interested now than he had yet and all eyes in the room turned back to Enoch who leaned over the arm of his chair and arched a dark brown eyebrow over at the older boy.

"...yeah. It's easy."

Young Victoria screwed up her nose and a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece shuddered and wobbled dangerously in its place. "Dead people? That's creepy..."

"Ain't no worse than an animal once it's dead. Not really any different."

"It's totally different." Another Cockney accent joined the conversation and nobody had to look to know it was the sour faced and gilled Oscar who strode in behind them with a slightly uppity air about him. "'oo plays around wiv dead bodies? Besides undertakers an'all."

Enoch looked coldly at him. Of all the children in the house, including the maddeningly curious Cara with her mind games, he sincerely disliked Oscar from his sandy coloured hair to his feet that Enoch would not have been surprised to discover were webbed.
"Well I was one so...guess that means, me."

A few eyebrows were raised amongst the others and Alexander and Cecilia exchanged glances as the two boys from East London stared each other down. Even Oscar had apparently not been expecting to hear that as he seemed to hesitate on whatever attempt at a witty remark he'd been about to make.
"Oh...well that's still pretty disgustin' if ye ask me."

"No one asked you." Cecilia snapped before Enoch could say the same thing and he glanced at her mildly surprised to see his own dislike of Oscar mirrored on the faces of several others.

"I'm disgustin'?"

"That's what I said, ain't it? Corpses and death? 'Oo would want that peculiari-"

Enoch had gotten to his feet, accidentally kicking over his homunculus in the process and crushing one of its clay legs to dirt beneath his shoe. He was considerably taller than Oscar and glowered down at him, too proud to sit there and be called names by anyone.
"I'm disgustin'?" He repeated through clenched teeth, "Pot callin' the kettle black, ain't it, Fish Boy?" He heard someone snicker behind him and didn't care in the least whether they were on his side or Oscar's. With one hand he shoved the smaller boy in the chest and strode past him towards the front door into the shower of rain.

xxxXxxx

Enoch had to take classes like the rest of the children. He had never liked school when he was younger and having left it at twelve years old, he had still had more education than his father. Having to revisit the idea of a classroom environment at sixteen irritated him. It wasn't that he wasn't capable of reading and writing the King's English as well as any other kid, he had just never been interested in getting any better than he had to be to get by. He was sure that his East London speech patterns were the equivalent of nails scraping on a chalkboard to the ever properly spoken Miss Nightjar. "There is no 'k' in the word 'nothing', Mr. O'Connor."
But the cane was spared here, and no one made fun of him for being the weird boy who had no friends, and Enoch begrudgingly consented, as if he really had a choice, to learn. It was more interested too, than reciting times tables and poetry as the schooling curriculum employed by Miss Nightjar and Miss Thrush consisted in equal parts of regular schooling and the lore and history of the peculiars, or in what was apparently the 'old tongue', syndrigasti. Even Enoch took more interest in that than in Latin.

Despite the confines of the time and the area, there was no shortage of things to keep children busy and entertained. Once a week, one of the ymbrynes would take a group of those children who blended in most easily into Swansea for market, an opportunity they all thoroughly looked forward to. There was a beach walking distance that, in the warmest part of the day, the peculiars frequented with the youngest under supervision of Cara or Nigel, being the eldest. Enoch only joined them the first time on Miss Thrush's insistence when the children were putting swimsuits on beneath their clothes and the youngest gossiped excitedly as if they hadn't been to the same beach and the same ocean countless times.
"It can only do you good, Enoch, to get out with the others. Off you go now, you won't be the only one staying back if I have anything to say about it and I have a great deal." Miss Thrush smiled as if she found herself far more amusing than Enoch did. Nevertheless, he dragged his feet out the door at the rear of the cheerful group as they headed towards the cliffs.

"You can't swim, can ye?"

"'ow many times 'ave I said not to do that?" The sixteen year old sighed when Cara dropped back a few paces to walk beside him. Though it hadn't been what he was thinking about at all.

"I didn't." The Irish girl arched a red eyebrow and looked curiously at Enoch out of the corner of her light eyes. She wore a simple blue dress over her swimming costume, the sleeves of which peeked out from her dress as she walked. Her red hair fell past her shoulders in waves that fluttered slightly in the breeze from the ocean as the group walked along the cliffs. "You're from the city, I just guessed it that time."

She was right, of course. Enoch couldn't swim. The only sizeable body of water he'd been in contact with was the River Thames and no one in their right mind would have wanted to swim in that. He'd never needed to learn, and who would he have learnt from? None of his family could swim that he knew about. Just the sight of the waves tossing and washing up on the sand was foreign enough for Enoch ever to consider wanting to learn to swim in it.
Cara appeared to take his silence for Enoch tolerating her company and continued, "Well you'll have a long time ta learn. You'll have ta eventually, the Birds will make sure'a it. Most of us had to learn when we came ta the loop."

"Are you still talking?"

"You could be polite, you know, never hurt anyone."

"Don't feel like takin' the chance." Enoch shrugged but looked at her out of the corner of his eye when he didn't think she was looking. Cara was a very pretty girl, though complimenting young ladies was not something Enoch was well practiced in, nor a habit he was likely to commence. None of the girls he'd bothered to pay attention to in London had graced him with more than a scornful laugh or a turned up nose. If it weren't for Cara's very invasive peculiarity, he might have secretly enjoyed her company.

Cara's lip twitched the tiniest bit and for moment Enoch was horror struck that she might have just seen his thoughts again. But she looking forward, and hadn't looked directly at him which he knew now that she needed to do. The boy relaxed and banished any potentially flattering thoughts from his brain as he kicked a loose stone away.

They walked until they reached a rocky slope descending at a shallow decline to a cove below. A few at a time, taking care not to slip on loose stones, the children descended. All save for Earnest who removed his gloves and scaled down the cliff face with his adhesive fingertips like a nimble little chipmunk to reach the bottom far ahead of the others. Towels were flung to the side over rocks and onto sand in piles as the children, all apparently keen to swim, rushed to the water in their shorts and the girls, in long, modest swimming costumes.

Oscar was quite literally in his element in the water, and took great joy in staying under the water for long periods of time before grabbing some unsuspecting peculiar by the ankle and terrifying them, despite the constant chastising he received in return.

Cecilia was the only one, aside from Enoch who didn't so much as remove his shoes, who stayed sitting on a large rock on the shore. She watched a little forlornly as the others splashed around in the shallows and only went to the water to stand up to her ankles in the wash. She couldn't go into the water for fear of rusting and so had to content herself with splashing in the shallows until one of the others took pity on her and came to keep her company.

A gull flew overhead, its narrow shadow coasting over Enoch and making him look up as it squawked and collided stupidly with the cliff face. It toppled to the sand where it flapped with one useless wing in agony. The same bird that broke the same wing in the same way day after day. Enoch pushed himself up from his seat on a rock in the warm sun and wandered over to the shade of the cliff where the bird was squawking pathetically and staggering around. He cast a glance over his shoulder at the others, none of whom he thought were watching and bent down to pick up the struggling gull. Its pained squawking intensified and with some difficulty, Enoch clapped a hand around its beak and held it shut after suffering several hard nips and pecks that made him hiss in pain himself.
It wasn't going to live anyway, its wing was useless and really he'd just be putting the pathetic thing out of its misery. Without thinking twice about it, Enoch snapped the bird's neck and felt it instantly go limp and lifeless in his hands.

He dropped to his knees on the stones and sand and pulled a little knife out of his pocket. Spreading the dead bird out on its back, wings outstretched and behind a rock out of view, Enoch sliced a clean line down its feathered body. Rolling up his sleeves, he pinched his thumb and forefinger together and squished them inside the opening.

"What are you doing over here?"

Enoch jumped and cursed to himself as the flexible girl, Elizabeth's voice sounded from over his shoulders.

"None of your business, Bendy." But it was too late to hide the autopsy he was performing on the gull as she twisted right around him curiously, her blonde hair falling into his face as she did and making him hastily withdraw his fingers from the bird with a little heart between them.

"Oh by the Bird..." She gasped and pulled a disgusted face as she practically leapt away from him. "What the hell is that?"

"What's it look like?" Enoch grumbled and held out the organ towards her only to watch her jump backwards unnerved. "'ow d'you fink I bring fings to life?" He didn't bother to explain himself any further, it was going to be common knowledge eventually anyway. It was just what he did, Enoch didn't see anything wrong with it at all and tucked the little heart into his trouser pocket for later use.

Ignoring the still slightly sickened look on Elizabeth's face, Enoch curled his hands into fists to better hide the blood on his fingers as he strode towards the ocean and bent down to clean his fingers as subtly as he could.

xxxXxxx

Days blurred into weeks and into months so quickly that it was extremely difficult to keep a track of the dates as they would be passing in 1909. Where it was still, and would forever be, April 3rd, 1901, it was now the beginning of 1910 in the present. Few glimpses were allowed of the world outside of the Loop, and only ever for a few minutes at a time, never into town or within sight of people. It was a rule strictly enforced and never broken.

Some children, Nigel and Darcy among them, liked to keep track of the dates and Enoch could not possibly have failed to notice his roommate's habit of adding a mark, or a word to a large book in which he had apparently noted each day as it passed in the present for the last seven years.

Evidently the ymbrynes, being time manipulators themselves, were very aware of how much time transpired and birthdays were always observed. In the months that Enoch had lived in the Loop, Victoria had seen her fourteenth birthday, though she was immortalised here in the body of an eight year old, and Cara, her twentieth. No presents were exchanged, but each birthday merited a special cake baked by Miss Thrush herself and adorned with little wax candles.

Enoch's seventeenth birthday came and went with December which, much to his annoyance and distaste, attention was drawn to in the same manner as everyone else. To escape the unwanted, and to Enoch entirely unnecessary, ordeal, he rudely left the table and vanished into the evening to make homunculi by himself. Unsurprisingly it earned him a chastising by Miss Nightjar for his rudeness to which Enoch paid no heed whatsoever.

It was the end of winter 1910 when the rule that was never to be broken, was bent a little.

"Oi..."

Enoch's thumb paused over the clay chest of a homunculus the size of his hand where he had been about to give it life when the bedroom door opened and closed at the other side of the room and Nigel came in. Enoch turned and looked over his shoulder, hooking an eyebrow up in expectation as the older boy sat down on his bed with a squeak of springs.
"What?"

The scruffy haired boy cast a furtive glance at the closed door before flashing a very fox-like grin at Enoch. "Keep your voice down if anyone can hear, but we're gonna get a look out tonight."

It took Enoch a moment to work out what he meant by that but the moment he did his other eyebrow shot up and disappeared behind the curls hanging over his forehead. After a few months of living in the Loop, Miss Thrush had declared that Enoch had been in need of a haircut since he arrived, which he had quite probably been overdue for many months before hand, and all but forced him into a chair to neaten and trim his hair into what she deemed presentable for a young man.
"You're what?" He asked, more than a little surprised at what Nigel had just suggested.

"Get a look out...you know, outta the Loop tonight. Not for long, you gotta be out for quite a while 'fore age starts catching up."

Enoch still stared at him dumbly. He had picked Nigel Adersee as a stickler for the rules, except perhaps where his animals in the house were concerned. "You?" He sneered doubtfully and when Nigel opened his mouth to contest the remark, Enoch quickly added. "Nah, nah, nah...whose idea was it?"

The older boy closed his mouth and his ears rapidly reddened much to Enoch's amusement as he looked over Enoch's head at the wall and muttered quietly, "Liz..."

"Right, that sounds more like it." Enoch snorted and rolled his blue eyes. In recent months Nigel and Elizabeth had become something of an item. They had begun to slip off together when they hoped not to be noticed, when in reality, everyone noticed. They almost exclusively sat together at meals and concocted blatantly transparent excuses to go off alone which didn't even fool the youngest children.

"Anyway, that's beside the point. Are you in?" Nigel quickly dismissed Enoch's comments with a wave of his hand and his hazel eyes drifted over to the pile of clay that was half a battalion of Enoch's soldiers. "When the Birds have gone to their nest, so ta speak. Liz sai-I mean, they shouldn't even know we've been gone."

"You want someone ta crash yer date? I ain't playin' chaperone."

"It's not-do you wanna come or not? Just us three, any more than that and someone's gonna blab."

Enoch considered the idea. The future wasn't so distant for him as it was for the others, and even then, little had changed between 1901 and 1909 enough to be significant. He suspected it was born more from a desire to leave the Loop for a little while than to see the present day. But the idea of breaking the rules for a little while appealed to his nature too much to resist.

"Yeah...alright."

It was after midnight when a little tapping on the window and a muted hoot roused Nigel and Enoch both from their silent stupor in their beds. Nigel sprang to his knees on the mattress and opened the window to admit a handsome barn owl which hopped onto the windowsill and addressed him directly in its own language.

"Charles says their asleep now, come on, let's go." Nigel hissed across the room to Enoch who had already thrown back his covers and sat still fully dressed on his bed.

Enoch shook his head at Nigel as they both slipped on and laced up their shoes.
"Charles? Do you name every bloody fing?"

"I don't need to name them, they already have names. And you name your...things..."

"I do not, I give em ranks, they're soldiers after all."

Grabbing their coats and hanging them over their arms, the two boys slipped quietly out the door and down the stairs silently. Every creak of the floorboards underfoot seemed magnified in the otherwise silent house as they snuck downstairs into the entrance way.

Elizabeth was waiting there for them, wearing her coat and boots and an excited smile, but she wasn't alone and Nigel had to look twice when they saw Cara standing there beside her.
"Wha-"

"She knew was I was I doing. Cara and I don't have many secrets, she wanted to come too." Elizabeth hissed and Cara bounced on the balls of her feet and grinned when Enoch sighed in response.
"I suppose no one's got many secrets from you, 'ey?"

"I can't help it sometimes." She whispered in her Irish lilted voice and Enoch was about to respond before Nigel shushed them and opened the door.
"Okay, okay, whatever. But let's go before the Birds wake up. Come on."

The group didn't speak until they were halfway across the field between the house and the Loop entrance when Cara chimed in from where she had fallen into step with Elizabeth right behind the boys. "You don't really think much 'as changed do ye?"

"It's only a few years for me," Elizabeth shrugged, "No I don't think so. I just thought it would be fun to get out. No one's going to know."

It had been far less again for Enoch who had been tempted to join in solely by the prospect of bending the rules a little, and possibly, if he could manage to do so, replenish his stock of hearts somewhat or at least exercise his peculiarity.

They entered the rocky opening in single file with Nigel at the head followed by Elizabeth, Cara and Enoch at the rear until finally they emerged into the bitter sea side chill of winter.

"Look at the house!" Cara said, loudly over the wind and shower of rain they had emerged into and the other all turned to look at the dilapidated, abandoned ruin that was the fine, warm farmhouse they lived in.

"You 'ad to pick a night it was rainin'..." Enoch grumbled and flicked up the collar of his coat.

"You can go back in you're just going to complain." Elizabeth snapped, "I want to see what the house is like now!" She made the executive decision on behalf of the four of them by grabbing onto Nigel's unresisting wrist and pulling him along behind her as she jumped over the remains of the gate and started to march through the overgrown meadow separating them from some form of shelter.

"Don't look much like anyfin'." Enoch muttered as they stumbled through the overgrown hay and through the doorway where the front door had been torn from its hinges and lay flat on the floor.

"It's dry though." Nigel said quietly and Enoch looked around at the others with a frown. A distant, curious sort of expression had formed on their faces, as if looking at something that was only half familiar. Enoch suspected they'd never been in the house on this side of the Loop before.

"I know..." Cara said after a moment, answering someone's thoughts aloud and Nigel placed a foot on the stairs onto to sink ankle deep into it as the water logged and rotten wood cracked beneath his boot.

They took seats on the floor in what remained of the sitting room where Nigel and Elizabeth promptly entwined themselves closely together, to wait out the worst of the wind and the rain, unless within the hour that Cara suggested they stick to, it had not stopped and they would be forced to return to the Loop just to be sure.

"If you could keep the snoggin' to a minimum, I'd be mighty grateful." Enoch rolled his eyes at the teenagers from where he sat apart from the others leaning up against a ruined couch.
Nigel pulled a face as Elizabeth pushed back his soaked hair from his eyes and snorted at Enoch's surliness.
"I think you're just jealous."

"Not particularly."

"But just a little." Everyone turned to look at Cara and three pairs of eyebrows raised at her when she promptly turned pink and hastened to clarify. "Not me. I meant Enoch."

Nigel and Elizabeth's heads swivelled back to Enoch again as if watching some ball game and Nigel's lips twitched as he struggled not to start laughing. "I'm sorry, what were you saying?"

Enoch was still staring at Cara like she had sprouted a second head. "'Scuse me? I ain't no such fing."

"Oh. My mistake." She shrugged casually and turned her intense gaze around the room, pretending to be keenly interested in the crumbling stone.

"Anyone ever tell you about this thing called privacy, love?" Enoch snapped, his ears undeniably pink in embarrassment and, not for the first time, he found himself despising the red head's peculiarity.

"So she is right?" Elizabeth chirped gleefully and snaked around Nigel in a position that looked thoroughly uncomfortable, to get a better look at Enoch's rapidly reddening face. "The Tin Man does have emotions."

Enoch got to his feet and stormed from the room in a huff, throwing a surly glare at Cara and conjuring an obscene gesture to the forefront of his mind should she be inclined to read it again. Cara blanched and shot him a disgusted look in return to make it clear she had seen it.

He stomped over the fallen front door and out into the wind and rain, which had lessened ever so slightly. Enoch intended to go right back to the Loop and be by himself, no longer in the mood for exploring the present day, or night, with a group of people who thought they knew him after a matter of months. However he didn't get further than a matter of metres in front of the house before the high pitched and desperate scream of some unfortunate creature pierced the night.