Disclaimer: Nothing that's originally from Hogwarts (or related things from the Harry Potter books) is mine. In this chapter, the only things that I own are Geillis Gaerwing, Codanna, and Geillis' parents, as well as the storyline, such as it is.
A/N: *Ridiculous Name Alert!* This chapter contains the sort of name usually associated with Mary-Sues. Do not read this chapter while consuming a beverage, as the sheer idiocy of the names is likely to cause the violent ejection of said beverage through the nose.
Chapter 5: Survivor
Seeing that nothing short of imprisonment would make Professor Gaerwing rest until she had healed, Madam Pomfrey ordered her placed in the private room. Currently, Geillis was bored out of her mind; she couldn't sleep, and nobody had thought to bring her a book. Therefore, when Madam Pomfrey told her that she had a guest, Geillis was relieved until she saw that her visitor was not the almost ridiculously cheerful Professor Dumbledore, but was instead the almost ridiculously irritable Professor Snape.
"What are you doing here?" she asked, rudely.
"Well, it certainly isn't for the pleasure of your company, Professor Gaerwing. While I was searching your classroom for clues, I found this note where your harp was. Tell me, does it mean anything to you?"
She took the paper from him and read it. Immediately her face turned pale, and she dropped the note with a gasp of surprise. "Codanna," she whispered.
"What?" asked Snape.
"Codanna Tangol," she said, her voice strained as she fought to regain control of it. "She is the one who I mentioned earlier, the one who I suspected of trying to murder me. She killed my husband, and swore that one day she would kill me, too. That's why I'm at Hogwarts. I tried to escape."
"What do you mean by this?"
"It is not a tale which I would care to relate to anybody, Professor Snape--least of all you."
"I would not particularly care to hear your tale, Professor Gaerwing, but I fear that I must if I am to understand why you believe that this Codanna Tangol is trying to kill you."
Geillis sighed; the greasy git was unfortunately once again making sense. Reluctantly, she told her tale. Five years before, she had been the new Songspells teacher at the Blueleaf School of Magic in Ontario, Canada. Codanna had been one of her colleagues, and--for a time--a good friend. Unfortunately, Geillis and her Defence Against The Dark Arts colleague had unwittingly fallen in love with the same man, the handsome Nathan Bonosares, who taught Care Of Magical Creatures. He had not shared Codanna's feelings, but had instead slowly learned to love Geillis. Two years later, they had been married. They were extremely happy together, but their happiness was cut short when, shortly after their first Christmas as a married couple, Nathan and his friend Jack Redboots (the Blueleaf Potions teacher) had been killed as they demonstrated a new potion that they had developed. A forensic examination showed that the final ingredient that they needed--a clear, colourless, and odourless liquid--had been substituted with one which would explode on contact with the others in the brew.
On the night of Nathan's memorial service, the Bonosares' letterbox had produced a note. With a trembling hand, Geillis had opened it and read:
I COULD NOT HAVE HIM, SO NEITHER
DO YOU! IT'S A PITY THAT I DID NOT
HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO KILL YOU
AS WELL. YOU CANNOT HIDE. I WILL
ALWAYS FIND YOU!
C.T.
The note had, of course, not contained Codanna's full name, but Geillis knew immediately that the other witch was the murderer. This was confirmed when the next day it was apparent that Codanna had disappeared with no trace.
"It was then," said Geillis, "that I decided that it might be prudent to do a disappearing act of my own. I changed my name to Geillis Gaerwing--"Geillis" in honour of my great-aunt and "Gaerwing" because it was my mother's maiden name--and went to visit my Welsh cousin, Julius Gaerwing. I lay low for several months, protected by a Fidelius charm. When we thought I would be safe in the outside world again, he sent me to Headmaster Dumbledore, who told me that there was a teaching position available in my field. So, here I am. You know the rest."
"Obviously, your 'disappearing act' was ineffectual. You have endangered the entire population of Hogwarts in coming here, you know."
"No, Professor Snape. I have not done so. I know Codanna, and the way that what is left of her mind works. She will try to kill me, but nobody else." She gave a wry smile. "I tend to make some fairly bad enemies."
"Perhaps you are on the verge of making another one, Professor."
"From your tone of voice, I suspect that I have."
"I was not the person of whom I spoke, Professor--what is your real name?"
Geillis remained silent. The subject of her former name was a rather sore one.
"Professor Gaerwing, I asked you a question. Or are you so dimwitted that you have forgotten your own name?" he sneered at her.
"With all due respect, Professor Snape, shove it. I have not forgotten it. However, I have my reasons for not wishing you to know it."
He raised an eyebrow. "Surely it would not matter now, if this Codanna person is the only one wishing to kill you?"
She sighed. "All right, then. Do you promise not to laugh?"
"Professor Gaerwing, do I look to you as if I were the sort of person to laugh at anything?" He deliberately glossed over the incident concerning the coconut song. Besides, he was the only one who knew about it, so it shouldn't count.
"Of course not," she murmured. "It's only that I never really liked that old name, and I was going to change it to something more sensible anyway. My parents, being called Matthias Marcus Lucas St. John Elford and Gwenhywyfawr Lavinia Marie Antoinette Elford, decided to inflict the curse of overly dramatic names on me as well. Therefore, I was given one of the worst."
"With all due respect to your parents, of course, I wonder if there could possibly be a name any worse than those two."
"Oh, there is," she assured him. "My name is legally Geillis Gaerwing, but the name that I was given when I was born was Elford—Sashara Irena Lilith Lavinia Yvonne Elford."
He snorted. "I can see why you changed it, then. I have never heard of a more ridiculous name in my entire life."
"Well, 'Severus Snape' is no gem, either," she snapped.
"My name has a very long and distinguished heritage," he said, coldly. "But I have not come to discuss that with you. Do you have any clues regarding the possible whereabouts of this Codanna?"
"Only one," Geillis said, softly. "It is, however, unlikely to be useful." Before Snape could demand to know why, Geillis reached for her cloak and produced a small purple flower. "I saw this on the floor just before I touched that string on my harp."
Snape stared at the flower in horror. The flower was one which was not known to Muggles—but it grew in abundance in the garden at Malfoy Manor.
A/N: Made it this far? Then I hope it's been worth reading. A fairly lengthy author's note follows; it's mostly background on Geillis' character, which I'd been meaning to explain, and this seemed as good a place as any on account of the ridiculous names I gave to her and to her parents.
Oh, and you might want to take a good look at what the first letters of "Sashara Irena Lavinia Lilith Yvonne" spell. I'm sure you'll appreciate the sentiment.
As usual, there are a couple of references which might need some explaining. First of all, the names "Codanna Tangul", "Sashara Elford" and "Bonosares", while completely ridiculous, hold a special place in my heart. The first story that I wrote using those names wasn't really all that good, but perhaps that may be forgiven as I was only twelve at the time and I was rather new to writing fiction. It was a fantasy story, of course, and Sashara was the Queen of the Forest People (Elves) and Codanna was her evil enemy. Bonosares, now given the first name "Nathan" (don't ask), was of course Sashara's love interest. I've incorporated some aspects of these old characters into their present incarnations as Geillis Gaerwing and Codanna Tangol--Sashara's naïveté and Codanna's malice, for example--and I thought that since those old characters are part of where these new ones came from, I could use those old names as a form of homage to the past. Besides, it saved me the inconvenience of trying to find even more ridiculous names for Geillis. =)
As a note on Geillis' reaction to her old name, I think the character (again in one of her older incarnations) started to rebel when I was about seventeen or so. When I wrote things about her, it would come out as "Sarah Ellis". These stories have been unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) lost, as they were on a computer that has long since kicked the bucket, but the name remains; in my file of miscellaneous facts on Geillis, I have retained this name as the one under which she took piano and harp lessons as a child. Eventually, I came across the name "Geillis" when I was reading the book "Thornyhold" by Mary Stewart, and again when I read the "Outlander" series by Diana Gabaldon. Before I knew it, Sashara/Sarah was now Geillis, and when I went in search of a last name for her, I turned to an appendix of one of Tolkien's collections of stories--I think it was the "Silmarillion", but I'm a little unclear on that, as it's been quite some time since then. In any case, I turned to one of the Elven language sections, saw the word "gaer" for "sea" and "wing" for "foam", and poof! Geillis had a last name. For about a year and a half, Geillis just sort of floated around in my consciousness until finally I read "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". The story was suddenly there, if only in a sketchy form, but I tried pushing it down while I read the next three books. (I've been waiting for Order of the Phoenix to come out in paperback, as they're usually a bit less expensive and as a university student, there are several other things that I have to spend my money on, tuition and textbooks being two of the obvious ones.) About six months ago, I started writing this story; it's more or less finished now, and I'm not too happy about one aspect of its ending, which I resisted through most of the writing. (I'm sure that anyone reading it through to the end once I've got it posted will probably be able to figure out what it is, since it nearly happens several times but something else always manages to stop it until pretty much the end of the story.) In any case, I wanted to poke some fun at Mary-Sues using Geillis' old name, thus another reason for the use of "Sashara Elford". There are few names sillier than what I used to dream up when I was twelve.
"Jack Redboots" was also another character from those old stories. I forget, however, precisely what he did; probably he was just a messenger or something. In any case, his wife—who doesn't appear in this story—was called "Elana Indea" (which I swear I came up with about three years before I ever read anything by David Eddings, who created a character called Queen Ehlana), and she was a good friend of Sashara's.
The chapter title, "Survivor", comes from the song by Destiny's Child. I actually had the chorus stuck in my head when I was writing Geillis' description of her not-so-distant past. The idea is that she's been through a couple of fairly bad things, and she's managed to make it through so far, stubborn thing as she is.
"Blueleaf" comes from an old joke between my mother, my brother, and I. When I was little, I asked my mom what the "blvd" on some street signs meant. Rather than telling me that it meant "boulevard", she made up a meaning on the spot—"Blue Leaves; Very Dangerous."
The Blueleaf school is in Ontario simply because that's where I'm from, and I'm a firm believer in "writing what you know". I've done a fair bit of travelling, mostly in Southern Ontario, Michigan, and Ohio (though I've been to several places in Scotland and England as well), but the area that I know best is Northern Ontario, particularly the Algoma district. I figure that if I ever write anything about her again, she may end up coming back to Canada to visit her parents, so I'd better put them in a place that I know well.