(Every character depicted in the story below is a consenting legal adult over the age of 18)

A/N: Being Thomas is suffering…

Also, as far as this story is concerned… its officially my newest free write. The current planned schedule is five days a week, updating Monday-Friday and taking Saturday and Sunday off. Any and all feedback is GREATLY appreciated.

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Standing there alone in the hallway after Camilla has stalked off, Thomas considers stepping back into the Mayor Harper’s room for a moment to clear up any potential misunderstanding with Eloise. After all, it was never his intention to make the poor woman think that he wanted to take advantage of her in that way.

If she really did come away from their conversation thinking he was only keeping her around to extract sexual favors from her, Thomas really did want to clear that up as soon as possible. However, two dueling thoughts stay his hand and keep him away from the closed door in front of him.

First and foremost is the possibility that Eloise didn’t think such untoward things about his intentions. There was a chance, however dismal and tiny it felt at the moment, that only Camilla had read such awful things from his words and only then because she was predisposed to distrust this body’s previous owner.

If Eloise didn’t think the worst of him and he went in there to explain that he wasn’t intending on taking advantage of her, all Thomas would be doing was putting the idea in her head where it hadn’t been before. And that would just leave the poor woman feeling anxiety she hadn’t already been feeling.

Second, in the event that she HAD come to the same conclusion as Camilla, then stepping back into the bedroom at this point to try and set the record straight would probably just come across as insincere anyways. Especially when she was tending to her ailing, dying father of all things. Barging back into what should be a safe place for her and her father to rest and enjoy each other’s company… just wasn’t the right move.

And so, in the end, Thomas sighs and lugs his pair of trunks down the hall, dragging the luggage through the house while looking for the other two bedrooms Eloise had said were available. When he finally finds a bedroom with its door open, he’s pretty sure its precisely what he’s looking for because while it looks well-kept, it doesn’t look lived in like the Mayor’s daughter’s own bedroom probably would.

As well, there’s a door next to it that’s closed up nice and shut which Thomas suspects is where Camilla has gone, taking the other empty guest bedroom for herself. With that in mind, he enters the remaining room and drags the trunks over to the wall to set them down at long last. Only then does he actually take in his surroundings properly.

The bedroom can really only be described one way if Thomas is being kind about it… and that’s rustic. It’s certainly a far cry from his apartment back in his previous life and world with all of its twenty-first century amenities, that’s for sure.

Indeed, the only light in the room is the natural lighting coming in through the nearby window. Otherwise, there are untouched candles and that’s about it. The bed, meanwhile, is… probably perfectly fine for the time period or technology level that he finds himself in. The mattress doesn’t look like much, but the blankets are clearly handwoven with care and that’s… nice.

All in all, it could be worse. The idiot who had this body before him could have gotten thrown out into the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on his back, for instance. Given how Dame Camilla clearly believed he was little more than scum, it was a wonder that wasn’t what had happened to the previous Lord Thomas Marlow.

Frankly, at this point he just wanted to know what the bastard had done before he’d gotten here. Even if he himself wasn’t guilty of any crimes the original owner of this body had committed, it would at least help him make sense of the disdain and vitriol…

Unfortunately, he doubted asking Camilla for more information would go anywhere. She seemed to be at the end of her rope with him if the brazen assault in the hallway had been any indication, so Thomas was going to do his best to avoid her for a little while. However, that did leave him with scarcely few sources for answers. So he might just have to go without knowing for a while longer, as frustrating as it was.

Huffing, Thomas drops to his knees in front of the first of the trunks and unlatches the thing, tossing it open. Inside, he finds pretty much exactly what he expected… a bunch of nobleman’s clothes that would almost certainly fit him. Probably tailored to fit his new body, in fact.

Rifling through them, he catalogues the lot, finding the action to be both a little relaxing and a little satisfying. Nothing quite like taking stock of one’s only belongings in the whole wide world, right? Once he’s done with the first trunk, he moves onto the next and finds that one filled with more clothing, this time underlayers of all sorts… and something else.

When his hand first touches something hard and edged beneath the clothes, Thomas jerks back at first as though shocked. His brow furrows and he pulls his underthings aside to reveal what lurks underneath them… only for his eyes to widen at the sight of a leatherbound book.

What sort of book would the original Thomas have considered important enough to bring to Last Hope? Carefully lifting the old-timey tome out of the trunk, Thomas flips it open and blinks rapidly at the sight of handwritten words scrawled across the first page.

To his surprise, he finds he can read the words easily after just a moment… which is strange because this is his first day in this world. Then again, he hadn’t questioned how he could speak and understand their language either. As far as he was concerned, it all sounded like English to him… and the book before him read like English too.

Except this was no mere book… this was a journal.

The first entry’s date means absolutely nothing to Thomas, but the entry itself is certainly quite interesting given his current circumstances.

Father says my writing remains atrocious and must improve post-haste, lest I continue to prove a blight on our House’s reputation. I do my best but I fear I will never fully grasp the point of it.

Reading is enjoyable, but writing just makes my fingers and wrist hurt… the motions are unnatural to my hand. I feel better when I try to write with my left instead, but that has been deemed childish behavior and I am smacked upon the back of my left hand with the ruler stick each and every time until I stop.

My elder brother got me this journal and said I should start writing my thoughts down in it every day. He claims this will not only help me organize my own mind but also improve my writing through doing something actually worthwhile and productive instead of just learning by rote.

So… here I am, I suppose.

Thomas stares at the first journal entry in wordless silence for a time. He has to imagine this comes from the original Thomas Marlow, likely years in the past when he was younger. Or hopefully younger anyways. If these were the childish complaints of a full grown man who had never learned how to write properly, that would be… well, it might go a long way to explaining the disdain.

Of course, thinking about the disdain has Thomas immediately flipping through the rest of the journal, all the way to the last and latest entry. He goes past pages and pages of entries to do so but given this might be his only opportunity to find out what the original owner of this body had gone… he doesn’t mind skipping to the end of this particular book.

Finally, he reaches the latest entry. Once again, the date means practically nothing to him, though if he’s reading the biggest number correctly, the first and last entries are indeed quite a few years apart. But in the end, it’s the entry itself that grabs his attention and refuses to let go. For starters, the original Thomas’ writing truly has improved by leaps and bounds, his words much smaller and tightly scrawled across the page. And secondly…

They’ve decided I am to blame for my brother’s poisoning. Never mind the lack of proof. Never mind that there is no evidence of my involvement. I am the scoundrel. I am the layabout. I am the black sheep, nay, the wolf in their midst. So therefore I am guilty.

I care not at this point. I tried to protest my innocence to father, to mother, hell I even professed my innocence at my brother’s bedside while he lay in a deep slumber that he might never awake from. They tore me from his room when they caught me there, thinking that I was trying to smother him and finish the job.

As if I would be so gauche. Really, even if I did do it… am I to be the incompetent who couldn’t get the poisoning right the first time, or am I to be the mastermind who managed to make sure nothing whatsoever linked back to me? Bah! They should make up their damned minds!

Of course, they’ve done exactly that haven’t they? Without a lick of evidence, without a shred of proof, I am the villain in their eyes all the same. The second son who has made an attempt on my elder brother’s life to try and take the position of heir for myself.

For my purported crimes, I am to be banished in all but name to the town of Last Hope. Removed from the Capital. Removed from society. Removed from the only life I’ve ever known. They would rather leave House Marlow weak and rudderless than accept the truth that I am the last hope of a future they have left. Their eldest son likely to never wake let alone walk again and their second son sent off to the border of the Rotlands and the Duskwood to die. What is to be the future of House Harlow then? Fools, the lot of them.

 … They’ve sent Dame Camilla to escort me. I don’t trust it. She is one of my mother’s most loyal servants. And my mother has disdained me for quite some time. That disdain has graduated to full-blown hatred now that she’s convinced I had a hand in my brother’s poisoning.

It is possible… nay, it is likely even that Dame Camilla has orders to do away with me out there in the borderlands. Away from the Capital, away from polite society… accidents can and will happen. The Dame will almost certainly try to murder me before long. Justice for my elder brother requested by my mother, no doubt.

The question then becomes… do I even bother trying to escape at this point? It might be easier just to give up and let it happen, in the end.

Thomas stares at that last line in silence for a lot longer than he probably should. Then, he re-reads the last entry what feels like half a dozen times. Finally, he goes through the handful of entries immediately preceding it, basically working his way backwards in the timeline to figure out what’s going on.

By the time he’s done, Thomas finds himself in desperate need of a lie down, so he sets the journal aside not even half-finished and flops down onto the bed. As expected, the mattress isn’t nearly as comfortable as his twenty-first century sensibilities are used to… but its better than nothing and frankly he’s too shell shocked to care all that much anyways at the moment.

After all, he’s just learned a lot about his current situation. For one, apparently he’s here in Last Hope because the previous Thomas Marlow had poisoned his brother. Or been accused of poisoning his brother? Admittedly, it wasn’t entirely clear.

At no point in the journal entry does the previous Thomas outright say ‘I didn’t do it’. To be fair, a journal isn’t supposed to be a plea for innocence, so that’s fair. But his wording in some places is just… needlessly strange.

He seems very focused on the lack of evidence… and maybe Thomas is reading too much into it, but his predecessor seems more upset that they’re condemning him without proof over the fact that he’s being condemned at all. As though he HAD done it but had done it cleanly enough to get away with it… only for his black reputation to see him blamed anyways.

The later entries in the journal preceding the last one aren’t very helpful either. The only real thing that Thomas gleans from them is that his predecessor is indeed a pompous, spoiled, arrogant asshole. A ‘bad egg’ is the vibe he gets, if you will, and that’s from the original’s perspective! Maybe the rest of the entries will paint a clearer picture though. Maybe once he reads through the entire journal, it’ll become more obvious what’s actually going on.

However, one other thing about that last entry has him too jittery and anxious to do anything but lie back and stare up at the ceiling. That final part… about the original Thomas’ mother seemingly sending Dame Camilla with him in order to ensure he never left Last Hope alive.

… Could it be true? Could that be the reason there was a woman with a sword one room away from him right now? Not to serve him nor protect him, but rather to watch over him… until a moment presented itself where she could kill him.

Fuck, that would be a really shitty way for things to end. Get yoinked from his old life, which while admittedly a bit shitty, wasn’t all that bad in the grand scheme of things. Get punted into a new world and a new life in the body of some fucking noble who may or may not have poisoned his own brother. And then get cut down by the knight who has been sent along with him before he could even get his bearings.

… No, even if the previous Thomas’ musings were true and not just the fatalistic ramblings of a man realizing his life is over… she wouldn’t do it right away, right? She couldn’t. Otherwise she would have just killed him on the carriage ride and Thomas never would have woken up in the first place.

Oh god… what if the only reason he HAD woken up in this body was because its previous owner was already dead? What if Camilla had actually already tried to kill him once and it had only failed to take because Thomas had been brought in to take over the dead body?!

No… no, that didn’t make sense either. She hadn’t acted surprised by him waking up, nor had she tried to rectify things by using that sword of hers on him. He was just catastrophizing at this point, assuming the worst based on limited information.

There was no proof or evidence that Dame Camilla even was here to kill him so-

Knock! Knock! Knock!

The sudden knock at his door jolts Thomas out of his thoughts, which he suddenly realizes have been going around in circles for so long that the light outside has begun to fade and the midday has given way to the late afternoon.

Jerking up in the bed, he stares at the closed door to his room, feeling a spike of fear. What if its Camilla? What if she’s come to kill him after all? Should he flee through the window? Should he make a break for it and escape like the previous Thomas had suggested?

What the fuck should he do?!

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A/N: Poor Thomas. Guy just needs to take a chill pill, but the hits keep on coming… not to worry though! We will be past the angst and into the fun stuff sooner rather than later!

Please let me know what you think either on Patreon or Discord! Your feedback, suggestions, and ideas for this story are keeping the inspiration flowing in a big way!