Giddy Brew
Chapter 9: The Pendragon Sisters
A/N: Chapter 9! Wow, I've never gotten nine chapters up on before. The most I had was eight, with Conviction. Which reminds me, I need to work on that sometime. I'm so proud of myself. I still need a beta, too. Not just for Giddy Brew, but for my other HP fics too. Email me if you want the job, my sn's on my profile.
"Casey, what's wrong with you? Aside from the usual, I mean," Frank inquired, rifling through the pages of a book with feigned interest.
Chuckling, Sylvester put in, "What else? Girls."
"Aww, shut up! It's not like you're having better luck with 'em than I am," Casey chucked Frank's book at the brunette's head.
Protested Frank, "I was reading that y'know!"
Calmly, Quant, who had been staring in a mirror at his hair for about an hour now, said, "No you weren't."
"Hush up, pretty boy," Frank rejoined snidely, and then thoughtfully put in, "No, I wasn't."
"See?" Quant asked with a self-satisfied smirk, turning back to his hand mirror.
"Ahem!" All four boys looked up at the intruding voice, "Oh, honestly. We leave you alone for a teeny, tiny hour, and look what you've gotten up to."
"They have too much testosterone, Prue," Elanore smiled sweetly, as though it were a good excuse.
"Or too little," commented Serendipity, glancing at Quant in disgust.
"Or ADD," Bobby added, coming up and peering over the girls' shoulder.
"Bobby!" Prue exclaimed, "Where have you been?"
"I was er- at the other side of the library," he shot Casey a nasty look, "The tension over here was getting to me."
"If you two don't make up soon," started Frank.
"Then you're going to do what?" demanded Casey, making a face.
"Well, I'm going to go to Bobby's Caribbean villa instead of you," Frank finished brightly.
Taken aback, Casey recoiled. He'd forgotten about that entire arrangement. Almost snottily, he replied, "Well I don't need to go to some Caribbean villa. I have my own villa in Italy."
"Really?" Serendipity plopped down beside him, eyes wide with excitement, "I have one in Venice. Where's yours?"
Prue and Elanore exchanged looks. They didn't have villas. Hell, Prue was lucky if she still had an apartment when she got home. She was almost positive her mom and dad had already forgotten the rent checks at least twice.
Hesitantly, Casey said, "Er- Rome."
Breaking away from his mirror once more, Quant interjected, "It is not."
Mock-horror written across her face, Prue teased, "You lied?"
Unfortunately for Prue, Casey wasn't quite ready to speak to her or Bobby at the moment, although it wasn't like they were particularly willing to speak to him either. Looking Serendipity straight in the eye, he veered toward a change of subject, "So I heard Polaris Morgan is carrying a torch for you."
Predictably, Serendipity turned the color of a particularly bright maraschino cherry, "He is not!"
"Yes he is," primly, Elanore sat beside Sylvester, whose entire face colored.
"Speaking of torches," Prue remarked, staring at the fairly odd couple.
"Be nice," chided Bobby, placing a hand on her shoulder, which she shrugged off quickly, "Oh, I can't touch you know that you're with the elder Hargrove?"
A slight growling noise came from the corner of the table they were crowded around, where Casey was sitting.
"No, you can't touch me because last time I came near you, my hair decided to spontaneously combust," she informed him, fingering her short locks.
Casey burst out laughing. Casting him a disdainful look, Bobby sat in the only remaining seat, near Quant, arms crossed. Searching the library for a chair, Prue noticed it was packed. Which explained why Monsieur LeFringe hadn't attacked them with a chainsaw for disturbing the peace yet. The teachers old McGonagall had chosen to serve at this school were seriously off balance, in Prue's opinion, especially LeFringe the power-tool crazed librarian. Not that any of his devices actually worked in Hogwarts.
"There's nowhere for me to sit," she complained.
"Yes there is," Serendipity grinned, conjuring a back to grow out of the maintenance stool near Casey, "And look, there's a nice space there, right next to Hargrove."
Aghast, Elanore exclaimed, "Serendipity! That's school property! McGonagall said no charming- "
"Or hexing," Sylvester said with the voice of a lovesick puppy.
"- School property," she finished, glaring at Sylvester for the interruption.
"You really shouldn't have, Sere," hesitantly, Prue looked at the space next to Casey, where Frank had used his wand to pull the chair over.
"Nonsense, sit down," the redhead commanded with a sadistic grin.
Abidingly, Prue sat. She abstained from looking at Casey, and he wouldn't look at her. Uncertain as to whether he liked this arrangement or not, Bobby said, "So, what did we find out?"
"Nothing," Quant stated, fluffing his hair with one hand, "Do you think Fortune likes it better long or short?"
Obligingly, Frank shook his head, prompting Sylvester to do the same, "Absolutely nothing."
"Nothing?" Elanore asked skeptically, "Are you telling me that for all the time the Forbidden Forest has been around, no one wrote a single thing about it?"
"Well, nothing that we didn't already know," replied Frank, "Did you find anything, Bobby?"
"Mm, but I'm not sure if it's important or not," he shrugged, "The information is kind of vague."
Casey stood, slamming his hands on the table, ruffling all the papers that had sat dormant there. Most of the students in the library looked at him as though he were a bug in need of squashing, making 'shh'-ing noises at him. He flipped them all off. Then, mustering up his most reconciliatory look for Bobby, he said, "Vague is better than none."
Timidly, Bobby smiled, and Casey returned the favor. Which caused Prue's hand to go straight to her neck, fingers intertwining there with a thin silver chain. Cerulean had given it to her, both the chain and the small pendant that hung there. It was a tiny silver guitar, which Prue had thought was strange, considering Cerulean didn't play guitar, Casey did. Cerulean had told her it was a family heirloom from his father's glam rock days. Naturally, a flustered Prue had explained all the reasons she couldn't accept it, although there was really only one. It wasn't nice to take other people's heirlooms. He had shrugged, saying it was cheap, and no one other than Casey would want it anyway.
"It's Casey's?" Prue had demanded indignantly, "Why are you giving it to me then?"
Cerulean flashed one of those smiles that made most girls swoon in mid-step, "He'd want you to have it. Ask him."
As always, Cerulean left Prue feeling very, very confused. All she knew was that there was no way she was asking Casey. However, now, with him standing there, hair mussed, eyes bright, roguish smile plastered across his face, shirt unbuttoned and untucked, tie slipping down his neck, and her heart beating with the speed of an Amtrak train, Prue thought she might not just want to ask Casey. She wanted to corner him in library stacks. She wanted to make him do things she usually imagined were disgusting.
"Uh, Prue? You alright?" Bobby's concerned face was hovering near hers, and Casey was looking at her out of the corner of his eye curiously.
"Fine," she breathed, trying not to blush too much.
Sensing something was up, Serendipity quickly covered for her friend, "Bobby, tell us what you found."
"Hunh? Oh, uh, okay. Well, it's this old fairytale," he scratched his head self-consciously.
Casey, who was only on the verge of forgiving Bobby, raised an eyebrow, "A fairytale? Man, you must be kidding me."
Elanore, who had been examining her nails with great interest, said, "No, wait. Fairytales, all of them, have their root in history. Every single fairytale can be traced back to a period in time where the events that occurred within it are real."
Shuddering, Frank wrapped his hands around himself, "So that old hag who ate kids was real?"
"Hansel and Gretel? Well, no. I think," she raised a perfectly manicured fingernail to her cheek, "That they are only partly true. Like, maybe the kids did get lost, but the so-called wicked witch was more of a…"
"Axe murderer?" Suggested Prue.
Twisting her blue strand of hair thoughtfully, Elanore smiled, "Could be."
"So then, what's the fairytale?" Quant asked, finally setting down his mirror.
Curiously, Frank inquired, "Did you figure out whether Fortune likes your hair?"
The black haired boy shrugged, "I decided I like my hair. If Fortune doesn't, she's obviously not the girl I thought she was."
"Probably not what you thought last night when the two of you were rolling around in the greenhouse," Casey grinned.
"Shut it, Hargrove," Bobby flashed a smile, to show his friend he was kidding and not instigate any revolutions, "About the fairytale. It was regarding these three sisters. Phillipha, Morgana, and Hysteria. Pendragon was their last name."
"Pendragon," affirmed Prue, wondering where exactly the story was going. Quant, Frank, Sylvester, and the girls were giving Bobby their rapt attention. Well, actually, Sylvester was staring at Elanore with his puppy dog, lovesick gaze, and she had gone back to examining her fingernails, but covertly. Only Casey was overtly not paying attention.
"The Pendragon sisters were the daughter of the dark witch Alcyone, supposedly the niece of Salazar Slytherin," Bobby continued.
"Ooh," Serendipity squealed, covering her face in mock-fright.
"They were, like their mother, dark witches. However, they were also born with certain defects that their mother, the pureblood activist, could not abide. These defects, in her mind, were due to the fact that her own father had been partly muggle. Although she managed to escape the muggle curse unscathed, her daughters had not fared so well. Morgana, the eldest, was born blind. The middle child, Hysteria, was born without a tongue," he made a face.
"Gross," commented Prue.
"And lastly, Phillpha, the youngest, was born with strange markings all over her body. Because of their defects, Alcyone persuaded her Uncle Salazar that the girls were too ugly to look at, but that they should be allowed to live a normal life. Now it was said, that if one took up residence in the Forbidden Forest, that it would care for you. So Alcyone convinced her Uncle to build a shack, smack dab in the middle of the forest, where her girls could live without the condemnation of society."
"Pretty pompous coming from a pureblood activist," Serendipity wrinkled her nose.
"Yeah. Well, at any rate, the shack was built, the girls sent to live there, and a passage was built in Hogwarts so that Alcyone could travel safely to where her children lived."
"The secret tunnel," deduced Frank.
"Yup. As the story goes, when the girls came of age, whatever that means, they discovered the tunnel. Phillipha, too curious for her own good, wandered through it, met a muggle born wizard boy, who happened to be the bastard son of Slytherin himself, and fell in love."
"Naturally," Quant said.
"Naturally. Alcyone, enraged by her daughter's lover, turned him to ice," at this part, Bobby grimaced, "And 'kicked his loins in so that the statue shattered', into um, a million pieces."
"Ouch," muttered Casey, who finally seemed to be paying attention, "That had to have hurt like a bitch."
"Probably," agreed Sylvester, tearing his eyes from Elanore to place his hands over his nether regions protectively.
"Yes, well. Seems this was a big mistake, because in Alcyone's absence, the sisters had grown mighty powerful. They basically shishkabobbed their mother, went on a killing rampage, and were finally stopped by Alcyone's twin sister, the witch Agatha."
"The end," Prue finished for him.
"Not quite. I looked up Salazar Slytherin's family tree. The witches Alcyone and Agatha did exist, but the sisters and the boy didn't."
"I don't think the Slytherin family tree makers would put in the defects, though, would they? I mean, if you had family members you were ashamed of, what better way to forget them than pretend they didn't exist," Elanore said articulately.
Raising an eyebrow, Casey smirked, "Sounds like you've thought this over."
"Maybe," she shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly.
"I don't think that's it. The records were pretty thorough, re-written after the age of you-know-who."
"Just because the boy-who-lived was all, heroic and everything, till he turned traitor that is, doesn't mean that the records are going to be completely corrected though. Seriously, that was like, a thousand years ago," Sylvester put in, casting Elanore a look that said 'reward-me-for-that-smart-thinking'.
Elanore just ignored him.
"Oh, all this thinking is giving me a headache! Let's go have fun. Let's party, or something," Prue stood up, pushing her chair away. As an after thought, she pulled out her newly received wand, dubbed 'Balmy' as of yesterday, and undid the charm Serendipity had previously performed.
"You can go party," Casey told her icily, speaking directly to her for the first time in days, "We have to work."
"As if," she glared down the tip of her nose at him, "Like you've been working all this time."
"You've just been fiddling with that stupid necklace. What is it? Did Cerulean give it to you?"
Prue's hand flew to her neck again. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Unsure of what to tell Casey about the necklace that was supposedly his real father's; she chose not to speak at all.
"Well?"
"It's- it's none of your business," she turned on her heel and stalked out of the library. With fatigued look, Bobby stood, packing up his books and hurrying after her.
"Well," Serendipity leaned back against her chair, examining the back of Casey's wrinkled robes, "That was mature."
"Prudence has a tendency to be quite good at acting ten years younger than she actually is," Casey interjected warily.
"Isn't that what you love about her?" Serendipity taunted.
Casey glanced up, surprised, "How do you know about that?"
"Oh come on, Hargrove," Frank supplied, "You can't be anymore obvious. The only reason Gelliston hasn't noticed is because she's the thickest girl I've ever had the pleasure of meeting."
"It doesn't matter anyway," Casey groaned, getting to his feet, "She wouldn't want me, even if she did realize it."
"That's not true, Casey. You just have to try a little harder," to their surprise, Elanore had given out this bit of wisdom.
"I'm trying as hard as I can," Casey snapped.
"Then you don't want her as much as you think you do," Serendipity replied shortly, "C'mon Ellie. Let's go find some real men."
Elanore shrugged and scrambled to her feet, leaving Casey and the remaining Icemen alone in the library.
"I think this is the most time I've ever spent in this place," Sylvester mused.
Casey, Quant, and Frank simultaneously stood and left.
"Guys? Did I say something?" Sylvester wondered to the thin air.