Hi.

So I've got exams starting Wednesday so I'm kind of dead because AP Stats is hard. (Thank goodness it's my first exam and after that I'm in a different class next semester!) But I hope those of you who have exams around this time feel cheered up by this decently fluffy chapter. Skies know it made me smile a bit while editing it.

Chapter 10—(70)

Klaus' POV

"Give mother a kiss for me, Elias." I told my brother as I gave him a hug, "And tell her, again, that I'm sorry I wasn't able to come home for the holidays."

He nodded, "Sure thing, Klaus. Tell Selene I said 'Happy Midwinter,' and that I hope to see her soon."

"I will."

We then parted ways, Elias to catch his next train towards home, and I to the transfer station to go over into Terra. It was Friday, and classes had ended early so students could begin traveling home for the winter break.

I walked down the street, which didn't even have a hint of snow. Of course, it rarely got cold enough for snow to fall, much less stick, down in the southern part of Gedonelune. Further north, closer to the mountains, is where you'd find it. But not this close to the southern border. It was barely cold enough for a medium jacket. However, weather mages predicted that it would get snow even here, in the capital, before the week was out, but that it shouldn't last much past Midwinter, but there would be a cold front lasting a few weeks.

Entering the transfer station, I headed to the front desk and talked to the man sitting there. He directed me to the room that had been set up for me. Messaging ahead had its uses.

…. …. ….

I found myself once again walking down the long, snowy driveway to Selene's family home. It looked mostly the same, but I could no longer tell where the crash had been due to new snowfalls. I only had a bag with me, which, other than a few changes of clothes, only contained a few things in it. Including Selene's birthday present and Midwinter gift. I was only here for a few days, until the day after Midwinter. Or Crissmist. Whatever the heck they called it here in Terra.

Tomorrow was Selene's birthday, a fact that I had been unaware of until two days ago, when Merlin called me up to invite me to the surprise party they were throwing for her. Merlin hadn't been surprised when he learned of my not knowing that little detail, the date of her birth. He explained that she had never put much into it, seeing as it was only three days before Midwinter, and that they usually just gave her presents on Midwinter. I was also informed that she probably didn't even remember her upcoming birthday this year, what with everything that had gone down.

I couldn't exactly blame her for not caring too much about her birthday. After all, the traditional charity ball my family has hosted annually for five decades now just happened to be the evening of my birthday. Meaning that I had the exact same extravagant event doubling as my "birthday event" for the nineteen birthdays I've had. In all honesty, I was thinking of ways, once again, of how I might be able to get out of it. It never really worked due to the fact that my grandfather was iron-fisted about the attendance of my brothers and I (despite the fact that Elias always managed to escape after introductions). But it was always worth a try. Perhaps I could use an excuse of being in a different world and go with Selene to be with her family. Doubt it would work, but I might as well attempt it.

I saw the house come into view and picked up my pace a little bit. Despite how much of a cool demeanor I wanted to portray, I found myself excited at being able to see Selene again. It had barely been a week, but I had found myself wanting to see her for the entirety of it. And I finally could.

Going up the door, I knocked on it. Soon, I heard a muffled "I got it!" as footsteps approached it. The door opened to reveal a short woman with pale green eyes and light blonde hair. "Oh, you must be Klaus! I'm Marie, one of Selene's sisters. Come in, come in!"

I let myself be pulled out of the cold and into the overly-warm house. Of course, they were probably keeping it this way for Selene. Merlin mentioned that she'd been having a lot more trouble maintaining her body temperature, and that if it got too cold her body would rapidly heat up. None of them were sure how good it was for that to be happening, so they probably kept it a little more warm inside than they otherwise would have.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Marie." I said.

The woman beamed. "So polite! You can hang your coat on any of the hooks on the wall, if you can find an empty one, and Selene is up in her room. Philyra is in the living room playing a game with some of the kids." She turned around. "Alric! Can you come here?"

I unbuttoned my coat and carefully hung it on a hook, glad there was an empty one among the insane mounds of coats and snow gear hung and piled near the front door. A young boy whom I hadn't seen before, with hazel eyes and the brown hair that seemed so commonplace in this family, ran up to Marie. I assumed it was her son.

"Would you mind showing Klaus here up to Aunt Lele's room?" Marie asked him.

He nodded and looked at me shyly, beckoning me to follow him with his hand. I thanked Marie and went after the quiet boy. As I followed him past a room filled with people—Selene's family members—and into a hallway, I noticed an odd shape manifesting in the boy's arms, fading in and out of view.

"A wing rabbit?" I asked as we started up a flight of stairs.

The boy looked back. "Uh-huh. Her name is Sakura. Aunt Lele got her for me when I had to be in bed sick for a long time." Ah, so the boy speaks. He clearly adores his pet.

"You take very good care of her. Her fur looks like and clean and her ears stick up. The ears of a wing rabbit don't stick up unless they're very healthy."

"Really?" He said, his eyes widening slightly.

"Really." I smiled a bit. I've never been a big fan of kids, seeing as the young cousins I had tended to be very high-energy and lots of trouble, but this one, Alric, seemed to be a calmer child. "And she clearly very much likes you. Wing rabbits are shy, and so they don't even approach many people, much less let themselves be carried around."

His cheeks reddened and he fidgeted, petting Sakura. He stopped and pointed up the stairs in front of us. "Her room is up the stairs, the door at the left."

"Thank you very much," I said. Alric ran back to where the family seemed to be mostly congregated and I began walking up the stairs. They were quite steep and led up to what seemed to be the top of the house, perhaps an attic. There were two doors at the top, directly across from one another, and, like instructed, I knocked on the one to the left.

"Coming! Though who is it? Really next to no one in this family actually knocks, they usually just come right...in…" Selene, who had opened the door to see me, trailed off of what she was saying.

"Well, not knocking doesn't seem very polite a thing to do." And so my mouth randomly blurts things out again. Wonderful. At least it isn't something that could be taken as an insult this time.

She whispered my name, seeming not to quite believe it for a moment. But then she grinned and leaped forward, wrapping her arms around my neck. "You're here!"

"I am." I replied, smiling as I hugged her back. I hadn't realized just how much I'd missed her until just now. I tightened my arms slightly, savoring the feeling of being near her.

"But why?"

"Figured that since my family usually has a Midwinter party that is deadly dull, I might as well come see how my girlfriend's family spent theirs, seeing as everything involving you ends up being incredibly interesting." It felt wonderful to be able to hold her. I hadn't really been able to do it last time I saw her, other than when we both fell asleep in Aless' castle, after…let's just say I'm thankful she can't see my face right now. It's quite an embarrassing shade of red at the moment, now. Not as bad as Elias gets, but bad enough for me. Why did the two of us have to inherit our mother's incredibly fair skin?

"I'd kiss you if I weren't sure that it would last long enough for a little too come running up telling us it's dinner time." She pulled back, grinning. "We have to keep their innocence, don't we?"

I had to laugh at that. She was clearly in a very good mood—I hadn't seen her this upbeat since before the whole kidnapping thing last book. It was nice to see her so happy.

"Sadly." I said, feigning immense disappointment.

She snickered, pulling back. "Why don't you come in my room? I can feel the cold leaking in from the north attic." She slid her hand into mine and led me only light on was a little lamp by a bed, perched on a nightstand. The door was in the middle of the wall, directly across from a set of glass doors that led onto a little balcony. It was hard to see much else, as the sun had already set and light was quickly fading.

She flipped a switch and the room lit up from lights attached high on the wall behind us. While my family's main house had the new installation of electric lighting, I knew that very few, and only very wealthy, families had this sort of thing. And it was run on separate little generators, unlike the large power plants in Terra Selene had told me about months ago. Electricity was commonplace in Terra, and it was things like this that reinforced something Selene had told me once—Terra's lack of magic had spurred incredible non-magical technological advancements, the like of which was almost unreal to someone who had been born and raised in Myula.

Her room was surprisingly big, a king sized bed pushed into a corner, with a dresser and a desk, from what I could see in the shadows, nearby. There was plenty of open space, floor-wise, but the ceiling sloped at an angle, meaning it was, in fact, the attic, or, rather, part of it. There wasn't a closet, as I now could see, but a bar attached diagonally in a corner, next to the dresser, held plenty of items of clothing on hangers. Two large suitcases were at the end of the bed, one of them open and half-filled with clothes.

"I'm surprised. It's very clean," I teased. "You always seems to be in such a mess." I was teasing, of course, because I knew firsthand how neat she tended to me.

"Mental mess and physical mess are two very different things, my dear." She retorted, poking the side of my head.

But it wasn't the sudden electric lights, the lack of mess, or the furniture that interested me—the walls, including the ceiling, were covered in seemingly random paintings. Even the floor, though they were more faded, was colorful with images of animals and swirls and other assorted things.

"I didn't know you painted." I commented.

She smiled, but there was something faintly sad in her eyes. "I don't. I'm a crap artist, you know that from my magic circle attempts. Before it was my bedroom, this was my mother's workroom. She loved painting all over the walls and sketching her way through notebooks. Said it made her feel close to a certain person she loved but couldn't see again in this life. About a year after she passed I decided I didn't want to share a room with Mer anymore, because I was tired of being crowded in with his tinkering. As you may know, I prefer more open spaces as opposed to cramped chaos. I ended up getting to have this as my new room."

Ah. So that was it. "She was talented. They're very pretty pictures."

"Yeah, they are." She led me over and sat on her bed, patting the space next to her. I sat and she spoke again, "I'd offer you a chair but, other than the fact that I'm usually the only one in here, I'm waiting for Mer to move out so I can steal the incredibly comfortable sofa from his room. I mean, it's wasted in there, always covered in inventing crap."

I had to chuckle at that.

We started talking, and it felt so easy, so…comfortable. We sat there on her bed and caught each other up. I told her about all the things she needed to catch up on at the academy—"Blech. Just how many tests have I missed? And then there's the aptitude test, to boot!" she kept whining—and she told me about what she was reading in her mother's journals and letters.

"I've been reading the letters along with the dates they match with in the journal." she said, pulling the journals and a stack of paper, the letters, from a drawer in her nightstand. "I've got a cousin out there somewhere, I hope, who might not even know they have a family!" She was excited, speaking quickly. I was glad she was speaking in Myulan instead of Terran. "I'm also learning so many things about my mother, too. But, I almost feel like I'm...missing something. A key detail that could connect a lot of the things she talks about. My mother, and her sister's letters, keep mentioning things in a way that almost seems like they were code words for something else...and there's a person, their brother, who they call Wil. I feel like it's sort for something, same with Lia, since Lia calls my mother 'Rora' when her full name is Aurora. They're all sibling nicknames." She was making this face of extreme concentration, one that was really cute, if I was being honest. It's far better than her irritated face, though that one does have its charms…

Shut up, head. Shut up. Not the time.

"You said your mother left Myula...when?" I asked her.

"1982," she paused. "1482. It would be 1482 in Post Dimensiva. It would've been 1982 here, though. Its 2017 here, which means it's… 1517 in Myula. Uh…mental math…mmm…about 35 years, I think? You might want to check my math."

I had gotten the number a while before she ended up figuring it out. "Yes, it would have been about 35 years."

35 years…something sounded familiar about that number. 35 years, Aurora, leaving in secret…disappeared…Vanished. Could it be?

"From what I've read, the first few letters were Lia begging for my mom to return, that they would find some way out of her having to marry someone they call 'Berdolt'. Lia said Wil was going frantic trying to find her. In my mom's journal entries of the same time, she was often writing about Randy, the man she eloped with, the father of my brothers. She really loved him, Klaus. She mentioned how she gave up a life of money—from what I can tell, she was some sort of noblewoman—and comfort and ease, for him. But she also talked about Berdolt, saying she would 'never marry such a man as he' and she was 'never leaving Terra'. Eventually her sister stopped begging for her to come home, and the letters become more friendly. I've read up until a year or before my birth, right before she was pregnant with Mer, from what I can tell. So, as the years went on, Lia started talking more about other things, clearly responding to things my mother said about my brothers growing up. She mentions Wil often, giving my mom updates on how he's been. It sounds miserable, and Lia asked my mom so many times to contact him and tell him she's okay. But from what my mom wrote in her journal, she was convinced Wil would take her back to Terra if she ever sent anything to him. There was a stack of letters at the bottom of the box I found addressed to Wil, all dated. There are exactly 6 of them, and I think she only wrote maybe one a year. They're all in envelopes and sealed with wax and everything."

She trailed off, looking dazed.

It was curious, how all these dates seemed to line up with something I'd learned about at least once a year in school. And the names seemed familiar, and maybe they were part of this thought of mine. But I'll keep it to myself for now. It can wait until Selene catches up with her schoolwork and it isn't the holidays.

"Do you think she ever intended to send them?" I asked instead of what I should have probably asked.

Selene shrugged. "I don't know. The most recent one—because they all have dates written on the outside—was written when I was six, shortly before my mother fell ill."

Valya 001: Incidentally, I'd skipped breakfast that morning, and I got a tummy ache afterwards. It was worth it though. I won the dare (my friend had wanted to see who could eat more, so they bought like fifty, and they had to bow out at 20), so there's that. I'm glad you liked last chapter! I hope this one, with the reunion of the dynamic couple, was up to standard. And for the tempers, I've got several Gryffindor friends who have tempers, and more that have very little of a temper. But when they get mad, they're more likely to blindly throw a few punches or yell a bit. As opposed to a typical Slytherin's anger, where they like revenge served cold and anonymously, Gryffindor's are usually more up front with it. It's just a general thing, not always applicable to specific individuals.

Missmoppit: I'm glad you liked it! Don't worry, Selene is going back in a couple chapters. Hope you liked the Selene-Klaus reunion!