Episode Ninety Three
Part One
Gwen figured that the miniature triumphs and pitfalls of life didn't really lead anywhere but to self improvement. Even then she thought the idea was pushing it. There wasn't really a goal or an ultimate mission to fulfill. Most of it was just living, breathing day in and day out with the usual humdrum that makes up a person's life. Death was the only true end to anyone's story.
And she certainly didn't believe in happy endings. The events over the next couple of years would certainly justify her in feeling so. Perhaps it was because her life was so much like a fairy tale and as a child she had read the original Grimms, not the watered down Hollywood versions so prevalent in American culture (where she had spent a good deal of her time in the dream world).
These tales didn't often end happily. People, especially women were forced back into their "roles." Many of the characters were maimed (or self mutilated) as an appropriate ending to some evil. There was magic and enchantments, fairy princesses and deep, dark evil.
It sounded very familiar to her.
The next few months would be spent drifting from here to there, trying so very hard to figure out who she was. She would quietly observe her birthday, the day of her father's death with nothing more than some shed tears and now that she could apparate there, some red roses to rest on his grave. The next year would find her taking sabbatical and arriving right back where all of this business started, still without the knowledge of who her father really was and whether or not he had been a death eater.
And all the while she wasn't exactly certain of what she really wanted. Of course, she wanted the truth, when she realized her mother had told her nothing but lies she had yearned for the knowledge being withheld from her. It was a distant star and she was an earthbound girl, who couldn't easily reach up into the sky and pluck the sparkling sphere for her peace of mind.
Yet she felt that there was something beyond the truth and the lies, something she wanted more than to have her mother back, if only to tell her the story of her life.
Part Two
The sun was striking the long rolling foothills of New York with the last of its dying strength for the day without concern for the girl who was lounging in a languid sleep. She'd been napping far longer than she intended, trying to push away the restlessness she still felt brewing in the pit of her stomach. Not even months of wandering had helped to settle that feeling. She knew why it was there, she just wasn't ready to face it.
She'd sent many owls to Harry, reassuring that everything would work out and asking that he send her best wishes to his newlywed best friends. She'd sent countless letters to Minerva, trying to arrest her fears about wandering alone cross-country. She dropped notes two and three times a day to Corwin, aiming to keep the distance between them to miles and nothing else.
Leaving him had been the hardest part of her transition but he sat her down on the edge of her bed and said with a smile. "I saw this coming from a mile away." She sat there, quiet for a moment. It wasn't so much that she wanted to leave, but more that she needed to.
"How do you know me so well?" She asked.
"It's like breathing. A little in, a lot of out." He grinned. "I figured you needed some time to sort things out. You have a lot of emotional baggage to sort through and you're not ready to share it just yet. I'm going to stay here, you're going to take off and I'm giving you space."
She rose softly, placing a hand on his thin cheek. "Thanks." Then she did what neither of them had expected, she broke down crying.
"Hey, hey." He said quietly. "Don't cry. I know you're coming back."
She held him as if this was going to be the last time. It felt like it could be. Life was such an incredible toss up and she didn't know what side of the coin she was on. Months later and she was laying on the side of a mountain in a different time zone, feeling as though she were on another planet.
She shielded her eyes from the sun with well tanned hands and opened them tentatively. The scene before her was so achingly beautiful, the curve of blue mountains holding the swollen bow of red sun as it hunkered down for the night. The clouds were wispy here and there, scattered across the canvas blue by an unpredictable wind. She sighed and raised herself off her elbows, standing for the first time in hours and finding her legs unsteady.
As the sun set she made up her mind. With enough concentration she was standing in her mother's study in the house she now held the deed for, the house she had refused to return to since her mother's death. The mountains were far enough away that a little of the courage they had given her was now waning. She had to find those papers before she lost courage all together.
She searched, feeling like Jacques Costeau under a sea of legal documents. Three days she picked through pile after pile, her head sinking from time to time trying to find a comfortable spot to bed down for the night, but she fought off the fatigue, gazing into ledger after ledger with glazed eyes and heavy lids.
It was not until she came to the bottom of the pile that something perked her interest. It was a brief note written by a Mr. Jeremiah Leandre. It was nothing more than a thank you note from a business engagement, but something about it caught her attention. She placed it to the side where she could look at it again later, when she was a little less hazy. She found nothing of legal documents pertaining to herself. Not a single scrap or certificate that might lead her any closer to the truth. She sighed heavily and decided that there was only one other person in the world who might be able to tell her things that she did not know.
But before she would approach that avenue she needed a break. While she had been "breaking" for several months the three intense days of detective work had truly exhausted her and she was more than willing to return to Corwin if only just to laze about in his arms for a few days before returning to France.
Part Three
Gwen caught her reflection in her mother's looking glass as she prepared to apparate outside the Hogwart's grounds. It caught her by surprise. She was a lot darker than she remembered being, but spending most of her time out of doors for the last three months had done that. Her hair had already passed the length it had been pre-Draco's hair cut. What startled her most was her eyes, something she rarely had the opportunity to gaze into. She was looking into someone so much older, with more experience and knowledge than she truly thought she possessed. She dropped what she was doing to get a closer look at herself.
She finally understood the mirror dream, if only for a single moment. She was looking at someone she didn't know. She knew it was her own reflection, but she did not see herself in the reflection at all. She saw a stranger staring out of eyes that looked so damned familiar. She saw with some amount of discomfort that she didn't look much like her father anymore, nor even her mother. She was taking on very fey qualities that they LeFey line did not own. She was looking more unsellie and that unsettled her more than anything Mage could tell her now.
She tore herself away from the queer image presenting itself for her inspection. She had read "The Sorcerer's Stone." She didn't want to waste away before a mirror that could do nothing more than show you things you didn't rightly understand.
Within moments she was trouncing across the grounds towards the castle that had become home. School was just now starting and students were strewn across the lawn, enjoying some after lesson fresh air while the weather still supported such action. But no one noticed Gwen, whether because she was so concentrated on Graves that she did not notice them, or because she was hiding herself without realizing.
Graves however, was nowhere to be found.
Several professors looked up in surprise from their paperwork, to find Guenivere sticking her head through a door, giving the room a good looking over and promptly removing her head to continue the search. Only one professor stopped her dead in her tracks by standing immediately and casting an immobularus spell on her legs.
The professor in question of course was Snape and he whisked her into the room with another spell, sitting her at a desk with no word as to his sudden desire to have her at his rapt attention. She sat looking at him with stormy eyes and it was no surprise to him that the words flowing steadily from her mouth were words you would only imagine a sailor using.
He set his wand on the desk before her and sat calmly on the nearest chair. "When you are quite finished Guenivere I have some things I'd like to ask you." He said in his softest possible tone.
His soft words stopped the flow instantly, damming forever a diatribe of nastiness she would never have the gumption to utter again. Snape spoke immediately, not wanting to spoil this window of opportunity. "I am unaware of what has prompted your return but I feel the timing too perfect to be believed."
"What timing?" She asked cautiously. She hadn't really been keeping up on what was going on in the wizarding world, other than what Harry wrote her and she supposed that Graves had never included details about Hogwarts business because he didn't want to worry her needlessly.
Snape smiled grimly. "I have discovered one of your old friends haunting our fine old castle here. I would've killed him on the spot except that he was speaking to Dumbledore and I thought murdering him in front of the headmaster was just poor show."
"Which old friend?" Gwen intoned carefully, fully aware that her face had gone white and that beads of sweat were now popping up along her brow line.
"A former pupil whom I had thought dead. I suppose of course you knew all along that he was here. It seemed only logical. You certainly do have a talent for picking the most impossible beaus."
"You don't mean to say Corwin Graves?" She asked, treading a very thin line.
"I do indeed. You might tell him that should I find him again I will not be so quick to contain my temper or my wand."
The thin line she had been walking suddenly gave way beneath her. "Contain your temper?" She huffed. "You have never bothered to before. Why start now?"
Snape looked at her surprised. She had taken many liberties in speaking her mind before now, but never while she was being held captive by a man that she knew had been a death eater. He snatched his wand hastily from the desk and released her legs. "You are free to go." He spoke, dripping acid slowly down her spine with his tone. He turned away from her, hoping that she would leave without further incident. He couldn't take much more before he snapped.
She stood and glared at him, her eyes flashing with the soul burning embers that her temper rekindled. Severus had never seen her temper fully unleashed. He had only ever seen tiny bits of weak anger being lashed out. "You might have realized Severus that I don't deal well with anger, and threats on my friend's life anger me beyond measure. I don't believe it should be Graves who treads carefully. I believe it should be you."
He grabbed her wrist with his free hand, twisting it cruelly and raising his voice. "I don't take to threats Ms. LeFey and I suggest you not make them in my classroom."
He released her, realizing just exactly what he had done. She stumbled back, rubbing her bruised wrist and feeling somehow that she had failed him and what was worse that he had failed her.
Part Four
Gwen found Graves not long after, holed up in her room even after all the months that she had been away. She sensed that he felt safest here, it was the one haunt he could roam about freely, no fear of being discovered. At his request Dumbledore had kept the room for Gwen, feeling that she would come back.
"Oh. He's got a wicked temper." She said after having relayed the incident to Graves.
"Yeah he does." Graves said with a huff of forced laughter. He wasn't terribly surprised and cursed himself for not being as careful as he usually was. He still felt that Snape's behavior toward Gwen was uncalled for, but he wasn't about to say so. Gwen would deal with it when she wanted to and not a minute sooner.
"Oh shit." Gwen said, her face falling, her anger forgotten.
"What?" He asked concerned.
"He asked me if I ever wondered where I got it from. Oh shit."
"What are you on about?"
"But that can't be." She said, truly flabbergasted. "That can't be. No fucking way."
"What?" He yelled, trying to shake her from her odd rambling.
"Snape might be my dad." She said softly.
Graves actually laughed out loud. "You're exhausted. Go to bed."
"You're treating me like a five year old again."
"Yes I am. Now just get in your jammies and tuck in."
"But what if…"
He cut her off. "You have said some real fucked up things in your day and I have gone along with them, but this… this is ridiculous."
Gwen realized he was right when she was too tired to argue otherwise. He tucked her into bed and curled up beside her not much later. Whatever had put that thought into her head would have to be sorted out in the morning of a fresh, new day.
