Disclaimer: I own nothing except for the plot. (There's a plot?)
Cat and Mouse: The Chase
By Ela-chan
Exactly who's the cat, and who's the mouse?
Chapter Six
Shrives and Why I hate her so
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"Be sure to keep a good eye out tomorrow, Jay,' Father whispered in my hair as he kissed me goodnight. His lips upon my forehead were startlingly cold, but the warmth of his smile settled around me, and worry flew from my mind like a dove released. "And be sure to watch where you cross, all right? Wouldn't want you to be caught between two broomsticks or anything like that now, do we?"
Just because I'm bloody sixteen and that my Father still tucks me in every now and then doesn't mean that you can laugh.
Father allowed himself a little chuckle, one that I found myself smiling genuinely at. The sound was exactly the same as when I was not even a year old; that deep, comforting rumble: the sound just before a cold rainfall was to commence.
A strange, vague emotion that I haven't felt in a long while jolted in my naval, causing a crinkling of puzzlement and memory across my forehead. Images of the past flitted behind my eyes half-heartedly, trapping my mind in a place where I once thought I would die.
It was a month after Mother married Father, and exactly a week before Dad died.
You see, when Mother married Dad, he already had an illness that was diagnosed to be fatal. It was a brain aneurysm, one that he was born with, and was too late to heal when they actually spotted it during his twenty-fifth year of Life. By then, the aneurysm had already grown beyond anything Dad's doctors could help, and it was announced a helpless case. Mother cried for weeks. I never pitied her. I know. I couldn't believe it, either. I got the heftiest and longest scolding when I screamed out 'Bullshit!' in her face when she told me. Maybe that's why my hearing's not much of a help sometimes.
Nevertheless, despite all the warnings Dad's doctors scolded him with, Petunia was born, and, well, one could say she was – and still is, mind you – a walking miracle.
Mother insisted I call her a 'walking miracle' instead of my very creative 'limping penguin with epilepsy'.
During Mother's seventh month of pregnancy, she was diagnosed with Preeclampsia, and the doctors were almost certain both Mother and baby weren't going to make it. Mother – according to her, anyway – went into labour two months before her due date, positively catapulting Dad into a severe heart-attack, one that sent everyone else into a flurry of panic and confusion and whatnot. On top of the worry Mother had over her and her baby's lives, she added some extra lung power when she heard her husband was having a heart attack.
It wasn't exactly the most prettiest of sights. Doctors from hospitals never did look at her the same again.
But, as Mother said, Lady Luck seemed to have been on their good side that day. The delivery went as smoothly as one could ever hope for despite the circumstances, and Dad got through his third heart attack-alive with the price of half his body becoming paralysed.
Two years later, Dad's condition neither improved nor deteriorated. Petunia was a plump little baby horse – err, girl – with lustrous – insert gag here – golden locks, and Dad's honey eyes. Mother said that Petunia was wondering where her Dad was, and that she – Mother, that is – was too afraid to tell her daughter that her Dad was going to die any day now.
Fear?
My Mother?
She-who-hung-my-underwear-above-the-steaming-pot-of-spaghetti-so-that-it-'dried-quicker'? The one person on earth who can smile through seven straight hours of 'Les Miserable' and can still tell me what to do rather than trip on her heels and die?
Yeah. I can take that.
It had been two and a half weeks since anyone had seen the sun by then. The clouds were grey and low and impossible, almost to the touch and rumbled through and through the day like it had an implausible case of pregnant PMS. Rain patterned the glass windows like little bird feet in snow from East to West Wing and showed no signs of stopping its bitch fit any time soon.
On January sixteenth, Dad's paralysed fingers twitched. A pen was given to him within the time span it took Petunia to find a flirting victim, and Dad wrote:
'I want another baby girl.'
Mother wept even harder if it was even possible. She, of course, agreed. Sperm was collected from Dad, and doctors fertilized an ovum within Mother.
I point blank refuse to gain a mental image as to how that was to occur. I'm too young, I tell you. And if someone in their right minds would even dare to mention how this process was to take place, I will disfigure their wands, and not in the literary sense, mind.
Scared?
Mate. Run for the hills.
So. Sometime later, guess who was born?
Lillian J. Grey.
And guess who named her?
Dad – who was once known as 'Father' before Mother's affair came into light – did.
Not even a month after my birth, it seemed Mother was becoming impatient with Dad's disease. So, being the ultimate insatiable ass that she was, she sought out another partner, and not only did she do this while her own husband's life was dangling by the thinnest of thin threads, she married him privately with my tiny body in her arms.
She was Mrs. Grey and Mrs. Evans all at once.
And that was the seed from which my hatred for her blossomed.
Dad died in hospital just seven days after Mother married Father, and the affair was the last thing he heard of when he took his last breath. Mother didn't cry. Father was guilty. Petunia ran away from home. (Okay, she didn't run away. She only got as far as the gardens before collapsing into hysterical tears.)
I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was three weeks old for chrissake! My five pence bet would be that I was very, very busy licking my crib bars and sucking on things preferred not to be mention for the whole world to hear.
I grew up thinking Father was Dad. Mother had forbade Petunia to tell me what had happened and that she herself would tell me 'in due time'.
Yeah, bloody right she would. She told me, all right, on my seventh birthday. I never forgave her for not telling me sooner. I never forgave her for betraying our family. I never forgave her for not comforting Petunia when she cried over his death. I never forgave her for killing Dad.
"Jay? Are you crying, darling? What's wrong?"
I felt a sudden wash of guilt engulf me, so much so that it showed itself in solid form. I could not stop the tears.
"No, Father. Just something in my eye."
"All right, Jay," he said softly, knowing that it was a moment where I preferred not to talk about anything anymore, much less about the reason as to why I was weak enough to cry. "Remember what I said. Be careful when you go to Diagon Alley tomorrow, all right? Good night, my darling. I'm sure you'll sleep well."
I didn't. He lied.
Even though the face of Dad never really, permanently set itself into my mind like it did in Petunia's, nightmares and dreams of him plagued my mind as my tear-flooded eyes fluttered shut. My bony fingers clung desperately, angrily, sadly to the silken texture of my childhood blanket, and I murmured Dad's name all through the night.
What I thought to be his face haunted me, and I did not wake the next morning.
I'm sixteen, reader. I shouldn't be thinking about a dead father I wouldn't even recognise if I died myself and he showed himself to me and what my mother would do to my otherwise healthy body at the next 'outing' she brings into our home / museum. It wasn't natural for a girl my age to be so worryingly concerned about these things. I should be anxious about the state of my split-ends, dry palms, breaking nails, bad breath, bad kissing, boys, Potter and his Marauders. That's the way it should be, but I don't know why it isn't and why it is. That's really the sum of my life. A hyperactive inhuman ball of 'why' and 'why not' that harasses me in the middle of the night when I'm most vulnerable. Not only am I to deal with the constant taunting of my Mother day in and sometimes day out, I'm substantially subjected to being mentally tortured with a depressing past I can't even fully fucking remember.
I tried waking up in the morning, but it didn't work. Scratch that; it wouldn't work. Honest to God, I wanted to resurface from sleep, I really did. But something, or someone, was restraining me, as though they had struck in the night, bounding me to the bed by whirling tight leather strings all over my body and over my sense of … well, sense of sense, really. It sounds like I had been raped, but thank whatever deity out there that I felt unviolated and whole and that I could probably stand without completely shredding what was left of my hymen.
It's a dark place in the mind, did you know? Like a blank, void space of nothingness invaded by trickles of black and grey and white. All those colours – excuse me, shades – entwined and groped at one another, as though reaching for a secret they had within their reach. It was cold, too. Not physically cold where I could grab any body to heat my own and tell them to shut up when they uttered an arrogant 'Excuse you, young lady' or even a 'And you said we couldn't bang in the Charms closet'. It was … kind of like a liquid, plastic-like coolness that hovered and lingered between freezing point and comfort zone for a waterfall. It was odd to be trapped in my own mind and not feel remotely scared out of my skirt. I fleetingly, half-heartedly, curiously wonder what's wrong with me, the same way I would wonder why silver bullets killed werewolves and not bronze.
Right now, though, the only thing I can properly think of is how much Mother would be scared and haunted by a déjà vu likely to come back to her. And I just hope the devil himself will come and shove his ugly face through the curtain while she's attempting to clean them and scare, no, beat the living crap out of her with his on-fire fork. Honest to everything I've ever stood for, I hope she's scared for someone other than herself for once, and feeling like a normal, helpless human being.
Mother, wherever you are right now, you deserve this inexorable pain and I hope it scars you for life just like you've scarred me with Dad's.
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