Chapter Twelve: The Letter
"So..." Sarah started hesitantly, continuously glancing up at Gaige through the corner of her blue eyes. She just wasn't sure about this girl, the one that didn't appear to have a last name, history, family, or home. Plus, she wanted to know why she was there - was it Reid? Pogue? Tyler? Whom was she at the Danvers home for?
The girl didn't seem to have any attachments to the Sons, but if anyone would find out about an attachment, it would be Sarah. Her friendship with Kate - though heartbreakingly ended - taught her many things; discovering secret crushes on the Sons of Ipswich (the actual people, not the boy band) was just one of them.
"Yes?" the brunette replied, looking rather bored while flipping through a magazine. Gaige hadn't wanted to spend any 'girl time' with Sarah, but now she was being forced into it, and was not about to act pleasant while doing so.
The blonde girl jumped in shock and happiness - she knew it! "Really?"
Gaige looked up, confused, and saw the devilish smile on the blonde girl's face. "Wait... What did I just agree to?"
Sarah giggled quaintly. "You and Pogue, right? Or maybe Ty?" When she got no reply, other than Gaige's blank stare, she started again, more unsure this time. "Not Reid, surely." she paused and turned to face Gaige fully. "...Reid?"
"Huh? I don't understand."
"That's not obvious at all.." Sarah muttered, before starting louder, in a tone which was almost too gossipy for her usually sweet and kind-hearted demeanor. "Which one are you with?"
Again, the blonde girl received nothing other than Gaige's blank stare; she was starting to think it must be her trademark look. "Look, I get it. They're all really pretty - for guys, I mean - and funny and cool and popular and sweet, but they're people too. And I think you get that. But honestly; you need to stop leading them on. Between Pogue and Tyler, they're practically eating out of the palm of your hand. I just wish you would pick one already so neither get hurt in the long run."
"Uh..." Gaige sat, stunned, on the edge of her bed. She tossed the magazine aside, no longer able to concentrate, as she was just comprehending what Sarah was insinuating. "I don't... I mean, no. Tyler's sweet and all, but.. I can't; I just can't. And Pogue? Is that supposed to be a joke? It's not funny." She shot Sarah a long, fierce look that seemed to tell the girl to back off, as she was biting more than she could chew. The brunette girl turned away, picking up the magazine while simultaneously dismissing her attention.
Caleb's tiny girlfriend watched Gaige silently, studying her, after their words had faded into silence. There was something not right about her; like something was off. It went beyond the fact that she was so obviously trying to hide things about her private life - Sarah didn't even know the girl's last name! What was so terrible about the brunette that she had to keep herself so locked up? Sarah wanted to know everything, and Gaige seemed to want to let nothing out.
After receiving nothing from Pogue about his obvious (to Reid, at least) love for Gaige worth mentioning, Caleb broke off from the group. He knew Reid and Tyler could keep up an excellent interrogation without him.
He walked into his father's old study and sat at the large desk, grateful for a room his mother hadn't attempted to redecorate after James' death. When he died officially, for the final time, his mother had gone about the house, tearing down everything that even resembled having the mark of his father on it. She only abstained from two rooms; the one Caleb was currently in, and one other of the guest rooms. Evelyn had left everything of his father's in it's proper, original space in the study - without any clues that anyone had ever been in the study besides James Danvers and James alone.
It was as though he'd never died; as though he'd never left, as though he had never Used beyond addiction. The room stood untouched and unsoiled from all of Caleb's nastier memories of his father, and he loved it. He often went in there to think, but since he'd been away at college for so long, he hadn't been inside for almost a year.
The chair still creaked as he sat down, the table top was still coated with a thick layer of dust that made him sneeze, and the stack of papers sitting atop it still teetered precariously when he breathed. Caleb's thoughts drifted to Sarah, a goofy smile stuck onto his face from the last time he'd seen her...
Reid stuck his head in the door and took one look at Caleb before smirking gratuitously. "Ooh, someone's happy! Sarah let you touch her hand?" Caleb glared at the blond, who snickered happily before leaving and shutting the door behind him.
He let out a huff, causing the stack of papers to fall and slide across the desk and onto the floor. Caleb swore under his breath and leaned down to pick them up. He gathered them all up and attempted to stand quickly but hit his head against the underside of the desk, shocking him into dropping the papers once more.
"Fuck!" the Golden Boy exclaimed loudly, his angrier side overtaking his mild persona. He angrily rubbed at the spot where a large bump was sure to grow on his skull as he reached down to get them. Just as his fingers brushed the stack, he spotted a blank, unsealed envelope on the very top.
Caleb narrowed his eyes at it. The letter had not been there just seconds before, had it? Nope. Definitely not. He swooped the papers up in his arms again and ignored the letter, rearranging the rest of them into the leaning stack they had been in before he disturbed them - twice. He organized them neatly in the way his father had had them, and finding that the blank envelope had no place in the stack, it stayed in his lap, separate from the pile.
He stared at it suspiciously, wondering what was inside; it could be enclosing a missing part of his father's will, or a letter left for he or his mother to find. They envelope stared back at him, giving away no secrets. Caleb desperately wanted to open it, but that wasn't like him. Sure, he got curious, but curiosity killed the cat, no? Besides, that was a very Reid-like thing to do - open a dead person's mail to devise all their secrets.
Caleb didn't want to devise all his father's secrets; whatever they were, they could stay hidden away from him. He wouldn't be surprised to learn his father had a very dangerous, or possibly tragic past - however, that wasn't the truth. Evelyn had known his father for a very long time, and had told everything he had ever done to Caleb.
She wouldn't have included suspicious mail in her commentaries, though.
The only issue he had with that theory was that the envelope couldn't have been mail; there were no names or addresses on it - it was blank.
Oh, hell, he thought, throwing the letter down. If he wasn't going to open it, he certainly wasn't going to torture himself over finding out what was inside. He stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Caleb heard the papers fall again, but chose to be blind to them - he wasn't going to return to his father's study any time soon; no need to risk temptation. He walked up the stairs, ignoring Reid and Pogue's shouts of protest, past Gaige's room, from which he heard nothing, and then he entered his own room, which neighbored hers. Caleb locked the door behind himself and flopped down on the bed.
The damned letter was still on his mind. He just couldn't figure it out - it could be anything, and he definitely wanted to know what, but he didn't want to actually go through the act of opening it and then experience the guilt for invading his father's privacy.
He closed his eyes and rolled over onto his stomach, feeling something stiff and papery crackle beneath him as he did so. Glancing beneath himself, Caleb saw that it was the envelope and growled. He jumped up and snatched the it off the bed, examining it.
The envelope was stalking him! Who put it there? No one had seen him with it, besides maybe Reid, but he had left and had been in the parlor with Pogue when Caleb had stomped up the stairs - it wasn't him, and it wasn't anyone else in the house, unless someone was spying on him (which wasn't very likely). On the other hand, no one could've gotten inside the Danvers home. The house was magically protected from Using to teleport within its walls - no in or out, no room to room; it was practically foolproof.
The only solution was the envelope itself, since no one else even knew of its existence - except for the person who wrote whatever was inside of it. But the only way he could discover whom that was, would be to actually open it - defeating his entire internal purpose. Growling, Caleb tossed the white envelope across the room and stomped into his bathroom, shutting the door behind himself.
"I'm going crazy - stupid envelope. The Power has officially gone to my head, and now I deserve to be locked up!" he muttered to himself, sighing as he dipped his head under the faucet to splash his face with water.
Caleb reached out with his eyes closed to grab a towel, but instead of the plush, soft material, he had been expecting, he received the crinkling of a papery envelope in his damp hand.
Sighing, Caleb set the envelope down on the counter and opened his eyes to stare at it menacingly. It was as though the envelope wanted to be opened; the contents discovered. No, it needed to be opened, he decided, correcting his thoughts.
Someone had sent the letter, obviously Using to make sure whomever found it would read it. But how could Caleb be sure that he was the one supposed to read it? He didn't want to invade someone - most likely his father - 's privacy, and it wasn't as though the letter was addressed to anyone, not even him. It was beginning to seem more and more possible that the sender made it so the first person to find it would be forced to open it.
His curiosity out won his smarter side, and Caleb sat down on the edge of the bed, envelope in his fingers. It opened easily, barely creaking, as though it had just been written not ten minutes ago. But, as he read the first lines of the letter within it, Caleb knew it had been written a very long time ago. There was no other way his father – for judging by the handwriting, his father was surely the one that had written it - could have written so beautifully. Even in the last five years of James' life, his hand shook erratically with the Addiction's forced Aging.
Caleb swallowed cautiously out of a nervous habit and forced himself to read it, to delve into his fathers' secret past - it was possible his mother didn't even know of it.
There were only two things of which Caleb was sure when he finished the letter.
The first was that it was very, very old, possibly almost as old as Caleb himself; it wasn't dated, so he couldn't be positive, though. The second was that the letter was not for him. It was written to some nameless person, and his father hadn't even signed it. The letter was never supposed to be found by someone who could recognize it, that much was sure.
"Caleb? Babe, can I come in?" a soft, sweet voice asked from outside of his door.
His face broke into an uncontrollable smile as he quickly recognized the voice and stood up, striding to the door. Upon answering it, Sarah threw herself into his arms with a swift peck to his lips and a curious glance at the letter he still held in his hands.
"What's that?"
"I'm not sure..." he offered, handing her the mysterious letter. If he couldn't be certain of what it was for, Sarah might be able to help him, he decided.
She took it gingerly and read it once, twice, three times over, muttering the words quietly to herself. "I cannot visit any longer... Will miss you very much... Birthday..." Sarah suddenly stopped and gasped. "Caleb. This letter..."
"I know." he answered, nodding solemnly as his face fell back into it's somber mask. This was something he had never wanted to discover about James. "Sounds like a love letter, doesn't it?"
"No.." she claimed, shaking her head as she corrected him gently, "Baby, your dad wasn't cheating on your mom.. He wasn't writing to a woman at all; see? Look at the little words? And how neat his writing is? This was written to a child."
Caleb looked up sharply, startled. The thought hadn't even crossed his mind. A child? Like... He paused and searched his brain, but nothing came to his mind. James wasn't a pedophile, and it was impossible for the men within the covenant to have more than one child. It just didn't work that way. Sarah knew that, how could she even think it?
"I know, it couldn't be... But, what about another relative? Like, on your mom's side, or something?" Before she had even finished her question, Caleb was shaking his head. His mother had no relatives. She was also in a long line of only children, and her parents were long dead. He told her so, and both of them sat in silence, contemplating the meaning of the letter.
Even after an hour in which all they discussed was the letter, all he could come up with that it was written to a child - James' child. However, he was James' child. The whole 'visit' thing is what threw him off that train of thought. His father didn't have to visit Caleb, they'd lived together, then Caleb had visited him when he lived in the Colony House.
It wasn't just that, either. The letter mentioned a 'special' birthday coming up, and that he had to stay home for Christmas so he couldn't make it. Caleb didn't know anyone with Christmas birthdays, or even with birthdays near Christmas. Sarah's was in summer, and his own was in the fall. All the Sons had scattered birthdays; Pogue's in February, Reid's in July, and Tyler's in August.
Not to mention that the only special birthdays he knew of were thirteen and eighteen - Power birthdays.
Gaige lay on the couch, her head in Reid's lap as he messed with her hair. He was being a total dork. He kept pulling it out of her pony tail and piling it all on top of her head, then letting it fall through his fingers like sand before tying it up again. It was strangely adorable how he could be so easily pleased, not to mention she absolutely loved it when people played with her hair. It almost made him cute, until he opened his mouth:
"You know, the last time I had a girl's head between my knees-"
She cut him off by throwing a pillow at his face, accompanied by one from Ty and one from Pogue, too. Tyler's missed, but that's because he was situated close to Gaige, too, holding his feet in her lap on the other end of the couch. Pogue was stretched out in a rather cushy chair, looking quite long and lean. The only ones missing from their little couch-fest were Sarah and Caleb... Ew. Okay, Gaige did not want to think about what they were doing.
"Jeez, Garwin," she mumbled without removing her head from his lap, "Couldn't even keep it in your pants long enough to get a ring on her finger?" she asked lazily, already knowing the answer but not caring; he was a playboy and everyone knew it. His fingers felt to good on her scalp, it was distracting her from making intelligible insults.
"Pfft. Nope. I'm not the one girl kinda guy, but - Hey! I totally solved your problem." Reid remarked with and easy grin, looking down at Gaige with a smirk while retracting his hands from her hair.
"Hmm?" she asked, reaching her hands up to search for his missing fingers. "What's that?"
"You don't have a last name! You could just have mine. I bet you'd be a hot housewife." he chuckled seriously, while Gaige snorted and Pogue choked on his soda.. It was gonna take forever to get the resulting image out of his head. All he could see were black high heels, long legs, and an apron... Oh, shit.
"No, thanks. It'd be too silly. Gaige Garwin? Ew. I sound like one of those people that like alliterated names!"
"What's your middle name?"
"Ev- I mean, Eva." she caught herself with wide eyes. They couldn't know her middle name; her standard 'Danvers' looks, place in their home, the fighting with Evelyn - none of it could be considered just a coincidence any longer if they found out. Pogue raised his eyebrow at the stuttered name, but she couldn't see it.
"Gaige Eva Garwin." Reid wrinkled his nose. "That does sound that bad. How 'bout Gaige Simms?"
"Better. Not fab, but okay." she joked with a smile and wink at Tyler, whose face had long since gone a darker shade of red than he had ever seen.
"Gaige Parry?"
She mulled it over and shrugged, not wanting to admit how good it actually sounded to her ears. Pogue sat in stony silence as he waited for her answer, but never received one. He thought it sounded great, in fact.
"Gaige Danvers." Reid paused and smiled. "Gaige Eva Danvers. That sounds great!"
Gaige froze. Evelyn stood in the doorway, looking down at them, with an angry look on her face. She looked about ready to blow. That is, until Reid cut off whatever she was about to scream with, "Hey, Mrs. D! I think Gaige should marry the Golden Boy so she can have your last name. It sounds really good. Gaige Danvers. See? It's almost natural."
They watched speechlessly as her mother blinked once, twice, then walked out of the room without a word. Reid snorted. "Caleb's mom is so weird. She never used to be that way. She used to be cool. Made cookies an' shit."
"No, Reid, she never made cookies. The house chef made cookies." Pogue corrected, remembering anything that had to do with food better than anyone.
"Well, what happened to him? They were fucking good."
Gaige let out the breath she'd been holding since Reid first said her name - her real name. It did sound good, didn't it? Almost natural, as Reid had said - almost. Too bad no one could ever know that it really was her name; natural indeed.
"Say, isn't Eva short for something?" Pogue asked slyly with a twinkle in his eye that tipped her off. He was so on to her - Gaige was dead. She was going to have to be really, really sneaky.
"Nope. Evie." she stated, still nervous and stuttering out short, quick and easy sentences. "Thats it. Like Eva Longoria. Nothing left over. Nothing to hide."
"Really? I thought her real name was Evelyn." Tyler said suddenly, shocked. Everyone in the room froze, and looked at Gaige, then back to where Evelyn had been standing just moments before.
"Wouldn't it be cool if you guys were related? You'd like, share names."
Uh huh, sure. It would be super cool, Gaige thought. If only...
AN: Now, who liked it? The whole letter idea was given to me by the super dooper faithful reviewer, hpswst101 - LOVE HER! I know I do lol. Btw, if you want to check out this song I had on repeat the entire time I wrote this, its called "All The Things She Said" by t.A.T.u.
Edited: 7/11; looking back on this, I'm shocked at how flat and annoying I made Sarah. She's really not that bad of a character in the movie. I believe I held a grudge on her or something, because she was just terrible before I edited. I'm hoping she's slightly better now.
