Keep Away

A Guinevere Jones & Avalon High crossover fanfiction

"Don't talk to me." Miles closed his locker, slung his backpack strap over one shoulder, and tried – without real success – not to make eye contact with the pretty blonde girl who looked like he'd just slapped her.

"Why?" Her blue-green eyes blinked twice, stunned, frustratingly innocent in their complete innocence.

"Because you're trouble." He readjusted the strap. "And we're not friends."

Her peach-and-cream complexion went blotchy at the insult. "I'm not trouble!"

"Look, Jen–"

"Gwen!" she snapped. "My name is Gwen."

"Whatever," said Miles, rolling his eyes. "All I'm saying is you've been at this school a week, and you already killed a teacher – I can't be associated with you."

"She wasn't a teacher." Gwen was indignant. "She was a witch." The woman had had a drawer with a magic wand stabbing through a tarot card and a half-melted circle of wax candles concealed under a false bottom. "She was sucking the life from the students, turning them old and stealing their youth."

Anyone else in Miles' place might have told Gwen to see the school shrink. Anyone else might have told her she had problems; said flat out they didn't believe her.

But Miles wasn't concerned with that sort of thing. Who said Gwen Jones – yes, he knew her name, though he pretended not to – was lying? She might be telling the truth.

Her witches might be as real as his blinding, migraine inducing premonitions of the future.

But her honesty – and her sanity – wasn't the point.

"All I know," he informed her, summoning all his strongest snark and sounding maddeningly sure of himself, "is I was getting straight As in that class, and now, thanks to you, I'm going to have to work doubly hard to suck up to a whole new teacher. My merit scholarship is at risk. My life is hard enough." He thought of the daily shoves and punches he got from kids like Marco, the sneers and shrugs from the onlookers (except, to be fair, Gwen herself, who on her first day, had cried out for Marco to stop when she saw what was happening, stupidly making an enemy of the popular girls by even noticing)... "So just do both of us the favor – stay away and don't talk to me, okay?"

"Yes – okay," said Gwen, dropping his gaze, but she said it very, very quietly.

Miles brushed past her so quickly, he didn't notice the old book she clutched in her arms, hugged to her chest, the one that had arrived at her foster home in a crinkly brown paper parcel the day before she killed the witch.

King Arthur.

Somewhere in the massive tome, there was an illustration of Queen Guinevere and the sorcerer Merlin, and – inexplicably – they were dead-ringers for Gwen and Miles.

But she wouldn't – couldn't – show him now.