Marcia sighed. the Castle was a mess. The Custodian guards had been oppressing the castle, her people. Their so-called "Young Army" was a disgrace, the boys weak, defeated, and lonely. They didn't even have names! Now that Marcia was finally done setting up a government for the castle, undoing as much of the harm as she could in only a few short weeks, she turned her attention to the boys.
There was, luckily, a mostly complete register of the boys' birth families. She had simply organized the proceedings day by day, telling each child their name, and to collect their few belongings. These appeared to consist only of a blanket and a toothbrush, but she suspected that it would make the transition easier to have a familiar blanket, no matter how worn. The problems came after that.
Some of the boys didn't have any records. For these, Marcia had managed to find foster homes. Some of the Castle inhabitants were more than willing to take in a child. A few families were unwilling to take back their children. This was the saddest to Marcia, as the young army kids were the sweetest, most frightened things, and they deserved a loving home. Marcia was able to find homes for these boys as well, but she wept at the thought of a parent rejecting a child. There was one boy, however, who for some reason, Marcia could not seem to convince to leave.
He had no records, and she had taught him a simple charm when he had woken up screaming from a nightmare. From then on, the child simply would not leave her side. He would not speak, and he hid from adults whenever possible. Marcia was stumped, so she simply continued to place children in homes, set up appointments for them, and deal with all the other remnants of the Custodian Guards.
But when she tried to place the boy in a home, he refused to leave. The child hid behind her skirts, and spoke for the first time in Marcia's presence, begging her not to send him away. She let it go.
That night, Marcia brought him to the wizard tower. He had shown a surprising talent for Magyk, and he was growing on her, even if Marcia refused to admit it. He was the last boy to be placed, and Marcia told herself it was only temporary, but soon found herself revising that idea.
As weeks went on, Marcia found herself slowly coaxing the child out of his shell. He still refused to speak to her but would sometimes use his voice when learning a new charm, and she thought that was a good first step.
Two months after he came with her to the wizard tower, Marica found herself listing off names to a child in desperate need of one. There were many good, decent names on the list, or at least Marcia thought so, but he didn't react at all until she was done reading the list off, and getting desperate, pulled down a book at random. It fell open to a page describing a dragon tamer of old, by the name of Theodore.
"How about it? You could be Theodore, and there are plenty of nicknames available there too, Ted, Teddy, Theo..."
"Theo. I want to be Theo."
It was a good name, although Marcia did hope that Theo wouldn't go the same way as his namesake, who, upon further inspection, seemed to have been killed by a dragon he attempted to train. Marcia brushed this off because, after all, there hadn't been any dragons for centuries, and there was no way Theo could possibly run into one.
About six months after Marcia took Theo in, she decided it was time to "pop the question," as it were. Theo had become quite talkative in the short time she had spent with him, and was quickly blossoming into a curious, intelligent, and perhaps an overly thoughtful nine-ish year old. His handwriting had been atrocious until Marcia, in a fit of restlessness in the night, had discovered Theo in the library trying to teach himself to write, endlessly copying pages from complicated texts.
The next morning, Marcia had gone to one of the castle schools and picked up spare copies of the handwriting books that nearly every student had worked out of for the last 400 years. (With revisions, of course.)
She and Theo had established a good rapport, Marcia thought, as she dug out the Flyte charm to give to him. Soon, she had sat down with Theo in their living room and tentatively started, being careful to speak calmly, because as improved from the scared little boy as he was, Theo hadn't Magykly gotten over his many years with the Young Army.
Marcia explained the role of an apprentice, what he would learn if he said yes, the details of an apprentice dinner, and more, before finally making sure to stress that nothing would change if he said no.
"You will always have a home here, Theo, and you saying no now doesn't even mean you are saying no for good, but I would very much like it if you would be my Apprentice. What do you think? "
Notes: Thanks for reading! The summary and tags will be updated as I write more, but the fic should include a healthy dose of Marwick, Beetle, and the Heaps as it progresses. LMK what you think!