Work Text:
Sophie wandered leisurely through the flowers at the edge of the Waste, very much enjoying that she was able to do so without her bones aching in protest. Though she knew now that being old wasn’t all bad, really, there were certain privileges afforded to youth which she intended to take full advantage of while she had them back. She turned her face to the sun and took in a deep breath of heady floral air.
Her reverie was interrupted by a terrible shriek from the castle. A shriek which immediately filled Sophie’s mind with visions of green slime. She had seen enough of that stinking slop to last a lifetime. Several lifetimes, in fact. Whatever had caused this tantrum, it would have to be nipped in the bud. She ran.
Flinging open the castle door, she saw Howl, freshly tinted hair still dripping, with one hand holding the bathroom door firmly shut and the other using a bit of chalk to draw some arcane symbol onto the wood.
“Howl, what is the matter with you?” she asked. She had meant it to sound soft, to approach with a gentle touch, but an exasperated edge crept through anyway.
Howl whipped his head around with enough speed to send water droplets flying and looked at her with startled, wild-looking eyes. “Matter?” He seemed to try to collect himself, but still sounded strained. “Why on earth, dear Sophie, would anything be the matter?”
“It sounded like a banshee had gotten in, for one thing. And for another, you’re putting a spell on our bathroom door.”
“Oh, yes, that.” He looked back at the symbol and encircled the whole thing with a deft stroke. “Well, since Calcifer can no longer be relied on to supply the bathroom with hot water, I thought it only made sense to come up with an alternate source. Cold water is such an awful shock, don’t you think?” It sounded like a quick lie, and Sophie was not at all convinced. He gave his head a decisive shake, drying his hair instantly, and turned toward the workbench.
As soon as his hand left the door, however, there was a loud bang that seemed to very nearly shake the door from its hinges.
Now it was Sophie’s turn to shriek. “Howl, what is going on!” The door continued to rattle incessantly.
Before Howl could respond, a voice from inside the bathroom intoned a loud, strange word which was half buried under a clap of thunder. Howl leapt in front of Sophie, arms held out as if he intended to shield her with trailing sleeves. And the door did come off its hinges then, slamming into the ground, unleashing billows of multicolored steam which smelled nearly as strongly floral as the garden outside.
Through the haze, Sophie could just make out the silhouette of a figure. It stood tall. It seemed to have great wings outstretched. It—
It was Howl.
Waving the steam from his face, he lowered those winglike sleeves and stepped past the fallen door into the main room.
“Sophie!” he cried, “Get away from that thing! It crawled out of the mirror.”
Sophie stumbled back in shock. The two Howls circled each other warily, looking very much like cats before a fight. Two Howls! It seemed to Sophie that one Howl on his own was more than enough for two worlds to share. How could Ingary alone be expected to handle more of him? The Howls, apparently having determined that neither of them was particularly keen on destroying the castle in a magical duel, stood uneasily and seemed to refuse to meet one another’s eyes.
“I must admit, I find this rather alarming,” one said.
“Oh, really?” replied the other, voice thick with sarcasm, “Do tell me more about how alarming this must be for you.”
“Howl?” Sophie asked hesitantly. They both whirled around to look at her. She thought of Martha and Lettie, how they had each taken on the other's appearance. Surely something like that was afoot. “You're not both really Howl, are you?”
“I know I am,” they said in unison.
“But I can’t speak for him,” one said.
“Nor I him,” said the other.
"If this is your idea of a joke, I don't find it at all amusing," Sophie said, warningly.
"Identity theft is no laughing matter, Sophie," said one Howl.
"And, uncanny as it may be, I find no flattery in this imitation," said the other.
Oh, blast it all, Sophie thought. Wasn’t it just her luck that something like this should happen while Michael was out visiting Martha and Calcifer was flying about who-knows-where. And who could say when either of them would be back. That left it up to her to sort this out. Her and Howl... and Howl.
“Well, you’ll just have to put your heads together,” she said, attempting to sound more confident than she felt in taking charge of this situation, “and figure out a way to fix this. I refuse to clean up after two of you.”
“I recall seeing a film like this once,” one said at length. Sophie found his use of the word “film” perplexing, but didn’t bother questioning it. Howl had such a habit of saying odd things, whether wizardly or Welsh. In this case, she could only assume he was referring to something wizardly, as that would seem to be a good deal more helpful in this situation than anything Wales had to offer.
“That’s right!” the other exclaimed. He looked at her very seriously. “Now, Sophie, dear, this is important. You just may be able to determine which of us is the real one.”
“How can I do that?” she asked doubtfully. They really appeared positively identical.
“You have to ask us a question,” one explained, “something only the real Howl would know the answer to.”
“And the imposter will have no choice but to face his own falsehood,” the other added, with a pointed glance at his double.
Sophie frowned. They both seemed dreadfully confident in their own realness. What could she ask that might ferret out the truth?
The first thing that came to mind was, “Where did we first meet?”
“In Market Chipping, last May Day,” both Howls replied immediately.
“And I’ve remembered it fondly ever since,” one continued moonily. That could be the real Howl, she thought, trying to cajole her with that girl-catching smile of his.
“Though that fondness may soon tarnish,” the other moaned. “That question was too easy. I thought you would know me better by now.” But that could also be the real Howl, guilting her and pouting like a child.
Sophie felt foolish and cross and distraught all at the same time. Was this really just some quizzical game to him? “Stay in two, then, for all I care!” she snapped, “One of you go be Wizard Pendragon and the other be Sorcerer Jenkin, and I’ll call the both of you Horrible Howl.”
“You wound me, Sophie,” one said nobly as the other turned toward the workbench. The first moved quickly to block his path. “Oh no, you don’t. Whatever you are, I won’t have you touching anything in my house.”
“Your house, is it?” the other challenged, “That’s a bold claim for someone who was only in the mirror until a moment ago.”
Hackles raised, they began to circle one another again. This was getting out of hand.
“Oh, will you stop it!” Sophie commanded, “I can’t keep the two of you straight when you carry on like that.”
Shockingly, the two Howls obliged, albeit begrudgingly and with suspicious glances at the other. Sophie scanned desperately, looking for any small discrepancy, anything that might tell her which one was really her Howl. Or at least help her tell them apart.
She noticed something then that she hadn’t before. One of the Howls had immaculate shining fair hair while the other had an almost imperceptible amount of chestnut brown peeking out at the roots. Of course Howl had been tinting his hair when he’d suddenly become two. Maybe if he wasn’t so vain and duplicitous—
And all at once a sickening realization hit her.
She had a memory of a few days previous. Howl had weaseled his way out of something. She found it embarrassing that she couldn’t even remember what it was now, but she did remember how fiercely it had irritated her and how she had channeled her feelings into aggressive scrubbing. Her reign of tidying terror eventually brought her to the bathroom. The annoyance hadn’t subsided; if anything, it had grown. She found herself glowering at the shelf strewn with Howl’s cosmetics. A packet at the front was mysteriously labelled “Clairol Nice’n Easy.” Sophie gave a great harumph. At that moment, she did not find Howl particularly nice, nor did she think him very easy to deal with. She muttered ferociously about hypocritical two-faced men and it was a wonder the daggers from her eyes hadn’t shredded the packet then and there.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that you might both be Howl. Or parts of him, at least. And I think it might be my fault.” She recounted her bout of vengeful cleaning, and, to her dismay, they seemed to agree with her conclusion.
“The beautiful maiden, yet every bit as quarrelsome as the old crone!” exclaimed one Howl.
“I must have been too unnerved to look at you properly,” said the other, examining his double closely for apparently the first time, “How could I have missed Sophie’s signature?”
Sophie felt they were beginning to gang up against her, and she did not care for that at all. “Alright, I was angry and it must’ve gotten away from me somehow. I can admit that. But how do we put you back right?”
“I should be asking you that,” said one Howl.
“After all, Mrs. Witch,” continued the other, “you’re the one who laid the curse.”
Though she really did feel badly about the whole thing, that put her squarely on the defensive. “I didn’t mean it as a curse,” she huffed, “and even if I had, I can’t say you didn’t deserve it. All your disguises and slithering and sneaking around. Maybe it serves you right to have to face yourself.”
“So you tore me asunder to show me the error of my wicked ways!” proclaimed one Howl melodramatically.
“And put me positively beside myself with contrition!” said the other, with matching melodrama.
“Be serious!” Sophie admonished.
“I am being serious,” began one Howl, “I’m sure I can unwind the spell, but since it’s your work—”
“It will be much quicker if you could tell me which direction to go about it,” the other finished.
So Sophie tried her best to recall exactly what she had said during her scouring tirade, while one Howl clattered about the yard, constructing some apparatus, and the other sat at the workbench, scribbling various symbols and notes onto a scrap of paper. They explained in turns that they were setting up a framework which would help guide the reversal of the spell, but that it would be up to Sophie to power it. She asked how she was supposed to do that and was informed that that was the point of the framework. It wouldn't really matter exactly what she said, as long as she put every bit of her will behind it and believed it entirely. This all made her very nervous.
Soon enough there was a pane of glass, etched with the symbols one Howl had been scrawling, being held up by a metal stand in the middle of the room. Howl stood on either side of it, facing himself. Each placed their hands against it so they would have been palm to palm if not for the glass separating them. The whole assemblage began to glow faintly.
And that was her cue. Sophie still wondered if she ought to say something poetic, something filled with pomp and circumstance, something like a proper spell. But that simply wasn’t her style.
“Let’s be done with this nonsense,” Sophie said firmly, trying to channel her intent in the way Howl had instructed, “I’ve had quite enough of you thinking you can be two people at once. Now, pull yourself together!”
The glass vanished in thin air and when Howl’s hands met, the glow became blinding. The room seemed to sway violently like a ship on rough seas. Sophie gripped the stair bannister to keep from falling over. She squeezed her eyes shut against the light. An uncomfortable pressure built up in her ears. She was certain that something must have gone terribly wrong.
But suddenly the pressure released with a pop, the swaying ceased, and she opened her eyes to see Howl stumble in the middle of the room.
Vain, melodramatic, hypocritical, singular Howl.
She was so pleased, she ran and flung her arms around him, nearly bowling him over.
“I might be upset if I wasn’t impressed,” he said, regaining his balance and returning her embrace. “You continue to confound and astound me, Madam Sorceress.”
After that, Sophie joined Michael in his magical studies, to gain better control over her natural ability and hopefully limit the accidental spell casting, and Howl took to keeping his cosmetics locked in a magically-protected box, just to be safe.