Hi! Thanks for not giving up on the long wait, I've had a crazy everything lately. But the chapter's here now and enjoy porte favore.

Disclaimer: I don't own the following characters.


8

Potions and Pasts

The grass under their feet changed into pictures. Some were black-and-white, others were in full colour. Laurel was the first to pick one up in curiosity.

"Clovis… this looks like you," she said turning the picture around to see a rosy looking baby playing with a big, colourful, plastic key ring. "You were such an adorable baby."

Clovis nodded, puzzled. Yes, that was him.

They picked up more pictures. They were all baby pictures until Pollux made a choking sound.

"Clovis, is this you too?" He asked showing a picture of a seven year old boy backed up against a playground structure, face to face with a fifth grader's fist.

Clovis didn't say anything after emitting a small whimper, but clearly it was. Connor hesitated before sitting down and looking over at the pictures.

He flipped through them. A paper mache volcano split at the ground, at Clovis' feet. There was a footprint on it.

A team picture of a group of softball players. Clovis was standing off to the side. Some kid had put his helmet on the ground to keep him from getting any closer.

A picture of Clovis and a woman with a shawl wrapped around her head, her eyes hollow. She was smiling and had her arms wrapped around Clovis. An IV unit was plugged into his hand.

A picture of Clovis in a suit standing next to a man dressed formally, a hand clamped extremely tightly over his shoulder. More people in black were milling behind them.

They were standing on piles of these pictures.

"Clovis, baby," Laurel said softly handing him a picture. Connor got a look at it as it switched hands.

A picture of Clovis in a bathing suit, with a bruise on his side.

"That was never taken in picture," Clovis said shaking his head. "Nobody… knew… I…"

"What about this?" Travis asked handing him one.

This one was of Clovis onboard the Princess Andromeda, probably in its earlier, cleaner days. He was still standing away from the crowd, except this time there wasn't even a batting helmet there. They must have downright told him to move.

Clovis made a tiny choking sound and Laurel moved to wrap him in her arm, running her hand through his hair.

"How do you feel Clovis?"

Everyone spun around to spot the speaker. A small stick-thin girl with bronzed skin and black hair put up was staring at them. Her sundress hung off of her, she must've been about six. Except for her eyes- no six year old had such bitter, clever eyes… or at least Connor dared to hope.

"How do you feel, having your entire being exposed and vulnerable?"

Chopsticks held her hair up.

"Lou Ellen?" Pollux asked.

"I'm talking to Clovis," a ten year old girl standing behind Travis said. She wore roughened up jeans and a tank top with a busted strap. The other girl was gone, and Pollux' lips were too. "How does it feel Clovis? Let me tell you how it feels like: horrible. But at least I had the decency not to twist your past. At least I showed them what was real about you, and now I can show them what's real about me."

The pictures in Connor's hands grew warm and when he looked back down, he saw completely different people and scenarios. A little girl like the one he'd just seen, sometimes with women close enough in appearance to be her aunts, and sometimes with a man who wore glasses and had a cheerful face and a twinkling brown eye.

A fourteen year old girl stood behind Clarisse and pointed to a picture.

"That was a dance recital, when I was five."

A four year old walked up to Connor and pointed the picture in his hand. "That's my dad teaching me how to walk."

The same seven year old as before, the seven year old version of Lou Ellen, stood next to Clovis.

"My reality may not be sugar coated, but I was happy and loved, and I spread happiness and love in my family in my own way. True or false, Clovis?"

"I don't…"

"Yes you know, you tune your dreams like a radio and find people's lives to watch, as if they're shows for your enjoyment. Is it true or false?" An eleven year old sitting in the middle of the group announced.

"Lou Ellen, I…"

The ground shook and Clovis actually fell to his knees.

"True or false, Clovis?" She asked again.

"True," Clovis spat out at lightning speed.

"Right. And I had a gorgeous family, and a handful of classmates who didn't mind me, true or false?"

"True," he said immediately this time. It looked like the rest of them had finally learned not to push her. Nothing like a natural disaster warning to establish limits and common sense, that's what his mamma had always said.

"I did my best at school, and that wasn't very good but I didn't fail and always made my family proud- true or false?"

"True."

"Fantastic. We're all on the same page." A seven year old next to Laurel announced gleefully.

An angry twelve year old stomped towards Clovis from between Clarisse and Will.

"So why in the world would you have spread a rumour around that I'd killed my father in a magic accident?"

The ground shook ahead and this time they all wavered.


Connor looked at Clovis, still on all four with his head bowed down pathetically. Connor felt bad for him, he honestly did. Having his entire past just blurted out? It couldn't feel good. Connor knew that there were some things that he wouldn't want people to see -especially not Lou Ellen, out of all people, no matter how much she was his friend. But he was still surprised. Clovis had started that rumour? He'd assumed that someone from Ares or Hermes had come up with that.

"Let me tell you why this is worse than you think it is," Lou Ellen's younger self said. "For starters, as if everyone at camp wasn't mistrustful enough about the children of Hecate, now they are all under the impression that we have enormously disastrous accidents with our magic on a regular basis, and that we cause casualties and don't know how to handle ourselves. Now we have people like her," she waved her hand towards Clarisse, "who get pissed when we use magic because they're scared of what damage we may cause. You retreat into dreams and dance the day away. So you may not know this, but it stinks to be the child of a minor god right now- and it will for just a bit longer, if we're lucky. Ergo usually we stick with each other, and if we decide not to than at least we stay civil."

A three year old girl appeared behind Clovis and he jumped and spun around as soon as the little girl in pyjamas spoke up. "Do you want to know what the worst part is?"

She starred Clovis down until he answered.

"Yes," he said.

"Sorry?" She asked.

He met her eyes. "Yes."

The little girl pinched her lips and blinked a lot before doing anything. The pictures slipped out of Connor's hand and fluttered away. All of the images did, like a flock of butterflies. Their backs were different shades of grey, and when all of the nuances were put together and specially arranged, they created a new black and white, crisp-clear picture.

Lou Ellen, eight years old, had her arms looped around the neck of an incredibly frail and definitely incredibly sick man. He was bald, pale, and his smile looked completely fuelled by some outside force. Lou Ellen, Connor dared to think. The man's shirt hung on him loosely, and an IV pole wasn't far behind.

Connor's heart sank through his chest and into his stomach where it shriveled up and dissolved a bit. No, a lot once he put A and B together.

"My dad was diagnosed with anaplastic thyroid cancer when I was six, when it'd spread to his lymph nodes and made these lumps. When I was seven it spread to all these different parts of his throat- larynx, oral cavity, nasal cavity, you name it. When I was eight it spread to his lungs and I lost him."

Her eyes were haunted. Clovis fell back on his butt and put his head between his knees, as if all of his mistakes were suddenly crystal clear and he felt the weight of Lou Ellen's world fully, plus the weight of his own.

"Funny thing that is," a six year old manifestation said. "I watched my father die, was orphaned and pitched into the foster system, only to be accused of slaughtering him seven years later. I'm not going to deny it. I caused some minor burns before I realised that I could control my magic. But I didn't kill my dad, something much less pleasant and quick did."

Connor couldn't take his eyes off the bitter little girl, the one who had been told that her father was critically ill; Clovis, who had just been told how badly he'd screwed up in the world and was crying for probably a thousand other reasons; and the hovering photo of Lou Ellen and Mr Parmar. Happy, little Lou with happy eyes; and her father. That twinkle in his eye was familiar to Connor. It was his favourite part of Lou. It only popped up when she told a story and loved every second of it, or when he awed at some charm she cast, or when she was with one of her brothers and sisters. It was a happy twinkle, a hopeful twinkle, a very beautiful twinkle in a million ways.

"It's ridiculous that you're the one twisting the story around when, from what I understand, you lost your mother the exact same way."

Clovis shook his head, face still hidden.

"Don't shake your head just because reality's ugly. You and I went through the same thing. The exact same thing. In the same state. I cannot press the matter enough. Only three things were different: the type of cancer, how long treatment lasted, and I was three years younger or so," Lou Ellen said. "You and I are so alike, you and I have cried for so many of the same reasons, you and I both spent so much time in a hospital and on our knees trying to pray the good back into our lives and the bad out of our parents… It's ridiculous that you get to throw my past out in the open and twist everything that it is. It's ridiculous that you get to make me look like a villain when really, all I did was lose a hero."

Clovis was crying. Connor heard it clearly now.

"I didn't know," he said.

"Which is why you should've kept your mouth shut," an eight year old Lou Ellen nearly screamed at him. Clovis cried harder. "When you don't know something you keep your mouth shut- that is common sense."

Lou Ellen didn't care that Clovis was crying and that was scary to him. Then again, when you exposed someone's past and made parts of it look worst... did you really care about how they had cried?

"But since you can't manage to do it yourself, let me be the first to have the honour of making sure that you will never make someone feel like they come from nowhere, that their past was nothing and that what they'd done and been through carried no weight!"

Pollux' lips reappeared, Clovis' lips disappeared and Lou Ellen vanished.

When Connor obeyed to Travis' gesturing and pressed his ear to the ground, he heard crying.

Was it really that bad that he cared about both Lou Ellen and Clovis crying? After all, he hadn't been a saint to land here either.

He didn't care. Lou Ellen was crying alone, and maybe that made the difference.