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ittybittywordsmith · 2 years

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couple of modern day moses’ searching for the promised land

CHAPTER ONE

Ms. Mariana Navarro James 1632 Mulligan Street New York, NY WZ10023

Ms. Navarro James,

On behalf of the Magical Congress of the United States of America, the Department of Magical Security has reviewed your application and is pleased to invite you to join us at the Auror Academy this coming fall. We are thrilled for you to join the ranks of the nation’s bravest and brightest. We look forward to your attendance on September 1st.

Mariana Navarro James has always known that she wanted to be an auror. She had declared it with utmost confidence to every vocational counselor, friend, and nosy old biddy who had inquired about her future since she was five. And of course, how could she not? What else could a kid ever dream of being when they had the Director of Magical Security as their dad and grew up snuggled against his chest, listening to him recount his adventures of the week?

(It was only in the last year or two that it had occurred to Mari that perhaps her father had tidied the stories he told her, sanitizing reality until it was an appropriate bedtime tale for a little girl. She had taken some advanced History of Magic courses in her last few years at school and had eventually come to the realization that some of the more terrible events in their recent history didn’t match what she thought she knew. Sometimes the bad guys won. Sometimes the good guys never made it home again. Sometimes the mundane becomes a nightmare. That thought had shaken her a little, but then again, she supposed they weren’t known as the nation’s bravest for nothing, were they?)

In the end, it wasn’t just the stories or the long shadow of Scott James that had drawn her to this field. Mari was eighteen, fresh out of Ilvermorny, and certain she knew what she wanted from her life. She wanted excitement, she wanted adventure, she wanted meaning. She wanted to know that the things she did made a difference. And the letter Mari had just opened in the foyer with trembling hands – it was everything she knew she wanted. The first step of the rest of her life.

So, quite rationally, her first reaction was to stuff the letter in her sweater pocket and dart out the front door before anyone had even seen that she had come home.

Mari rushed down the sidewalk she had jogged up only a few minutes before, trying hard to not look too much like she was fleeing the scene of a crime. She had no idea where she was going – only that she needed distance, room to breathe before she suffocated to death. She turned random corner after random corner with no specific location in mind, and eventually her panicked heartbeat began to calm. She drew in deep, needy breaths and slowed down, but she continued to let her feet take her where they would. What was she doing? Why was she being like this? It wasn’t like she hadn’t expected the acceptance letter, of course she had. Her dad would have told her if anything had gone wrong with her application process–

A car honked aggressively, followed by an impressive amount of swearing, and Mari jumped, jostled out of her thoughts. She blinked and looked around, taking in her surroundings for the first time since she’d run out of the townhouse. Oh. She’d somehow made it into the city proper. She must have been walking longer – or perhaps just faster – than she’d realized, to have made it this far. She almost never came out this far into the city on her typical runs. Usually she liked to use running as a way to clear her head, but the noise and distraction of the congested New York streets battled with the noise and distraction in her own thoughts, almost always resulting in nothing more productive than a pounding migraine.

Mari began to slow down, to let her brain catch up to what her feet had been doing, and was immediately shoulder checked by a woman behind her with a large purse, complete with very sharp brass hardware. “Ow!” she complained as the purse’s buckle smacked her hard enough to leave a bruise. The woman didn’t even glance back. Mari scowled, but kept up the pace to avoid being run over by anyone else. It was only a momentary distraction, but in that moment, the realization of where she had subconsciously been heading smacked into her harder than the purse.

Oh. Duh. Jacob’s apartment was only a few more miles away.

In the couple years since her brother had moved out of the townhouse, Mari had rarely gone to visit him on foot. There was a period of time after she’d gotten her Apparition license where she’d taken to popping up right in the middle of his living room, but it hadn’t lasted long – Jacob had instituted a ‘Front Door or Floo Entry Only’ policy after she’d caught him eating cold pasta in his boxers for the third time. Still, Mari felt pretty confident that she was going the right way as she took in her bearings with this new context. Oddly, she found that having this destination alleviated some of the pressure on her chest. Taking a deeper, steadier breath, Mari increased her speed to an easy jog and wound her way up the streets of New York.

It didn’t take long to find the right building. Mari jogged to the front door and punched a code into the adjacent keypad – a code, mind you, that her brother had no idea she knew, which she took as concrete evidence that she would be great at investigative work.

The door swung open with a short, sharp beep!, and as she ducked inside, Mari caught her reflection in the window. She wrinkled her nose. Her hair was back to its natural color – a mousy dark blonde that Mari insisted automatically made her fifteen percent more boring in any conversation. She had gotten the hang of changing her hair color on a whim and keeping it that way without much thought before she’d even started school, but sometimes when her attention was thoroughly engrossed elsewhere, she slipped and the natural color came seeping back without her even noticing. That wasn’t something she was willing to deal with today.

Mari glanced around the lobby – once she was suitably convinced that she was alone, she closed her eyes and concentrated. With a little pop! that was almost definitely just in her mind, she felt the change take over. She glanced back in the window, and her reflection this time was sporting her pulled back ponytail in her preferred color of bubblegum pink. She managed a little smile.

Much better.

Turning on her reflection, Mari bounded up the stairs two at a time. By the time she made it to the fourth floor, she was wheezing – she leaned against the railing for a moment, fighting for her breath. It had been unnecessary and had certainly worked up a sweat, but it made her feel better to have a reason she understood for her erratic heartbeat. Mari gave herself ten seconds for her breathing to become less dramatic before she pushed herself off the railing and stumbled down the hall. She knocked at the door marked 4D and leaned heavily against the doorframe while she waited, her gaze down to the floor as she regulated her breath. One breath. Two breaths. Three. Then the door swung open.

Mari glanced up, a flippant greeting to her brother already on her lips – and immediately, she found herself snapping ramrod straight. “Atticus!” she said in a bit of a gasp. “. . . hi!”

Stupid, Mari chastised herself. Stupid, stupid. It had never occurred to her that her brother’s roommate might answer the door, and now here she was in front of him, sweaty and breathing hard and probably not the best she had ever smelled. Rationally, Mari knew it was a dumb thing to be worried about – she’d known Atticus Prewett since she was a little kid, from back when Jacob first started bringing friends home to visit over the summer. He’d certainly seen her in worse states, but that didn’t mean Mari wasn’t cursing herself for not taking the extra minute to lengthen her eyelashes or make her breasts a little perkier when she was fixing her hair downstairs.

Atticus blinked blearily at her, tugging absently at his worn, crinkled shirt. Clearly, she’d woken him up – probably better for him, really, since it wasn’t exactly what Mari would call early in the day. He gave her a lazy, somewhat confused smile, and even with the disorientation in his expression, Mari felt her stomach do a small flip in response. “Uh, g’morning?” he said, half reply, half question. He glanced over his shoulder at the fireplace in the living room, dark with cold ashes. “Is our floo out again or something?”

Mari felt her cheeks flush, but tried to comfort herself that, after her sprint up the stairs, she was probably already so red with exertion that he wasn’t likely to notice the difference. The thought wasn’t all that comforting. “Uh, n-no, I, um. . . I was, y’know, just in the neighborhood,” Mari stuttered, embarrassed. She shifted back and forth from her heels to her toes, awkward, before the words she needed finally came to her. She looked past Atticus into the apartment. “So, uh, is Jacob up yet?”

To her surprise, his expression fell. Mari’s brow furrowed slightly and she nearly asked if Jacob was alright, but Atticus spoke first. “No, he’s been at Vanessa’s all week,” he replied with a shrug. “He hasn’t been around much lately.”

“Oh,” Mari replied, her voice hitching a little in surprise and disappointment. Jacob had always been good to talk to. He never got impatient with her rambling, no matter how many tangents she went on – it was why, when her head had finally cleared enough for her to figure out where she was going, she had come here. Jacob had always had time for her. . . except, of course, that had been before he’d gotten himself a girlfriend. Pursing her lips, Mari considered heading back home – but the thought sent a panicky thrum through her chest, and she knew right then that she wasn’t ready for the scene that awaited her at home, when her parents found out she’d gotten her acceptance letter. No, Mari couldn’t go home, not yet. . . her gaze fell back to Atticus, still looking a bit like an abandoned puppy.

Well, she was already here, wasn’t she?

Mari walked past Atticus into the apartment, perfectly uninvited. “Got any water?”

Atticus looked after her with a frown. “Sure, come on in, I guess,” he muttered under his breath before closing the door. He made his way into the kitchen. “Tap okay with you?” Mari gave an acquiescent shrug in response. She was parched enough now that he could have juiced a shoe into a glass in front of her, and she still would have drank it. He grabbed a somewhat dingy looking glass from a shelf and filled it in the sink before passing it to her.

Mari took it with a nod of thanks and perched herself on a wobbly barstool, looking around as she rehydrated. She caught sight of the living room – there were scattered sketchbook pages everywhere, covered with half-realized drawings, and a crumpled blanket and pillow on the couch. She raised an eyebrow and looked back at her begrudging host. “What, did you sleep there last night?”

Atticus cringed and raised an arm to run a hand through his dark hair, exposing a few inches of midriff. Mari tried not to be too obtuse as she stared, but subtlety had never been a great skill of hers. She’d have to work on that at the Academy. “Uh – more like I slept there this morning,” he admitted, looking a little sheepish. “I sort of hit a block with the novel, and I was up all last night trying to figure it out. All I managed was a pile of wasted paper. Normally I would have bounced ideas off of Jake, but. . . y’know. . . he’s been preoccupied. . .”

Oh, the novel.

Mari couldn’t help a sympathetic look. Jacob and Atticus had been working on a graphic novel together since they were sixteen and now, seven years later, it was still coming along at a trudge. Jacob was the writer, Atticus was the artist – and what an artist Atticus was, although Mari could never admit that out loud without sounding like a doe eyed lovesick schoolgirl. Jacob was good at what he did too, she guessed, and for a while, it had almost seemed like they might be able to actually put something together. But then they had their graduation exams, and then they’d had to go out into the world and find jobs, and then Jacob started his apprenticeship with their grandfather, and then he met Vanessa Thornwood (who Mari was convinced stole her brother’s heart, brain, and testicles to keep in a bottle around her neck), and the longer time when on, the more progress had slowed to an almost nonexistent crawl.

And yet, neither of them could give up on it. Certainly not Atticus, if his expression of tired frustration was anything to go off of. “What do you think the problem is?” Mari asked gently, her own problems already fading to a distant glimmer in her mind.

“I don’t know,” Atticus sighed, leaning against the counter with a defeated hunch to his shoulders. “I think I’m just. . . in a rut? I don’t feel like I have any new ideas, or at least, nothing worth playing out. So maybe – maybe that’s it. Maybe I’ve just used them all up?” Mari sipped her water and nodded sagely, trying not to overthink the situation. She knew Atticus only saw her as his best friend’s little sister – or, worse, as practically his own little sister. The vulnerability he was showing now was the kind that you can only get between childhood friends who have known each other almost as long as they’ve known themselves, the ones who have seen you at your worst and most embarrassing. It was the way he would have opened up to Jacob, or any of their old school friends, nothing more. He sighed again. “I know that must sound dumb – but it’s like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

Without thinking, Mari reached out a hand to rest comfortingly on Atticus’s arm. He didn’t even glance up at her touch. “It’s not dumb,” Mari said firmly, before taking a second to reconsider. “Or, well, it does sound kinda stupid–” That got his attention, and Atticus looked up at her, looking vaguely hurt. Mari winced. Oh Circe help her, why was she so bad at this? “What I mean is, uh – maybe you just need some new inspiration. Go see some new sights, hear some new sounds. Have an adventure or something. You can. . . refill the barrel, or whatever you artist types need to do.”

Atticus scoffed lightly, looking at her like she’d just suggested they picnic on the moon – a lovely idea, of course, but completely unrealistic. “I can’t just up and ‘have an adventure’, Mar. I’ve got, like, adult shit to take care of. I have a job. I have rent. And besides, what about Jake? He’ll be at your granddad’s all summer, preparing new wands for the next school year. And all of his free time is going to be spent mooning over Vanessa. It’s not like I’m going to be able to convince to just up and leave for a month–”

“So? Who needs him?” Mari replied with a sniff, slightly less enthused now that her heartfelt suggestion had been met with stark incredulity. Still, she persevered. “And I know you have all that grown-up bullshit to deal with, but come on – that’s just an excuse. You can find someone to stay in your place for a month or two, some rich kid right out of Ilvermorny or something. And as for your job, you hate that place anyways.”

Atticus blinked in surprise. “How did you know that?”

Mari tapped the top of her nose playfully and winked. “A lady never reveals her sources.” The truth was Mari only had one source, and it was Jacob, who tended to relent information after an extended period of constant annoying questions. That was how she knew that Atticus had for a short (and surely meaningless) while dated the lovely hostess at the fancy white tablecloth restaurant he waited at. That was also how she knew they had broken up six months ago, and he still had to see both her and the bartender he’d caught her with every day when he went to work. After that, it was only a hop, jump, and skip away from the conclusion that Atticus probably hated his job.

See? She was good at sleuthing.

As for her current proposition, Atticus still didn’t look convinced. Mari had only been talking out of her ass, really, when she’d originally made the suggestion – but the more they went back and forth, the more sure she felt that this was the right option and the more determined she was to make Atticus see that as well. Her mind, unbidden, went back to the folded up acceptance letter in her pocket, and her breath hitched for just a moment. Was it possible that she could kill two birds with one stone? Before she could doubt herself, Mari spoke again, trying not to sound too eager. “What if– what if we . . . ran away? Together?”

Atticus looked at her sharply, clearly alarmed, and seemed to notice for the first time that she was touching him. He pulled away from her gently and shifted to put some distance between them. “Mari. . .”

Panic flooded her system and Mari launched into damage control mode. “Not like that!” she blurted out sharply, her voice a little higher than usual. She winced and cleared her throat before pushing through in a voice that was a closer approximation to her usual, casual tone. “I meant, uh– you’re not the only one who could use a change of scenery, y’know. I want to spend my last summer of freedom doing something– something totally insane. I want to be crazy and spontaneous one last time before I’m tied down with all of that bullshit too, and I can’t just live my life anymore. So. . . what if we went off on separate adventures, together? Just to keep each other company and make sure the other is alright and stuff? Would that be so bad?”

Atticus still looked dubious. “You don’t have school friends your own age that you would rather do this with? One last hurray and all that jazz?”

And honestly. . . Mari didn’t. Oh, sure, she had friends and all that, she wasn’t a complete loner – Vee would be down to go to Hell and back as a lark, if she asked, and the girls from her dorm were always up for a good time. But if she took this trip with them, it would wind up being something silly and juvenile – one last beat of her school days before she gave it all up. The idea of going with Atticus. . . that felt different. Bigger. Like– like the first step of the rest of her life?

(Mari might have laughed then, at how that thought now in this ridiculous context didn’t scare her nearly as much as the same thought she’d had earlier this morning, but she didn’t want to freak Atticus out by explaining, so she held herself back.)

“Nope,” Mari replied cheerily, completely confident. “Can’t think of anyone.” Atticus rolled his eyes and looked away from her, his gaze settling on the window. The view wasn’t much, just the gray stone of the too close building beside them, but Mari could tell he wasn’t really looking at it. He was considering her offer, really considering it. . . and in his own way, she could tell he needed this as badly as she did. He just needed one last push. She gave him a few moments of peace, and then wheedled in a singsong voice, “Also, I have a bank account my parents have been adding to since I was a kid that is begging to be blown through with irresponsible abandon.”

That drew an unexpected laugh from Atticus, and for a moment, Mari beamed with pride. Atticus could be so serious sometimes – it felt like a victory, to be able to make him laugh. But the joy she felt from his laugh was nothing compared to what she was about to experience in the next few minutes. “Okay,” Atticus agreed suddenly, nodding to himself. “I mean. . . yeah. Sure. Okay. What the hell, right? It’s not like I have anything to lose.”

For a moment, the world stopped turning. “Really?” Mari asked breathlessly, unsure that she could actually believe it. But Atticus was just looking at her – no correcting her misinterpretation, or laughing that she had fallen for such a joke. Just Atticus, serious and somber as a headstone; except, of course, that headstones never have smiles slowly creeping into their expressions. Mari gave a wide grin in response and, to keep herself from doing something phenomenally stupid (like launching herself into his arms), she downed the whole remaining glass of water. She might have choked, but who cared about something as stupid as that at a time like this? “Okay then!” she said in a tone of declaration, jumping down from the barstool. “We leave tomorrow, first thing in the morning! Show up at my place bright and early, seven am on the dot. No sleeping in. Bring everything that you’re going to need for the next two months. And bring plenty of sketchbooks!”

“Tomorrow??” Atticus said in alarm, scrambling to keep up with Mari’s sudden decisiveness. “Like, tomorrow tomorrow? You don’t think we need a little more time to get affairs in order and shit?”

“Tomorrow!” Mari shot back in a tone that brokered no argument. She strode to the door in her best imitation of the long, confident walk her mother used when she wanted people to get out of her way. “You said you would go, and it’s too late to turn back now.” Mari opened the door, and glanced back to see an awestruck Atticus still standing in the middle of his kitchen in his wrinkly pajamas. That was a sight that she would end up seeing a lot, she suspected, over the next two months. Her grin brightened. “See you in the morning!”

Mari closed the door behind her without waiting for a response. For a moment, she didn’t move, her brain too preoccupied running over what had just happened to consider anything so much as directing her feet to walk forward. She had really did just convince her brother’s best friend, the object of her ridiculous schoolgirl crush, to run away with her to nowhere in particular for an entire summer. It didn’t feel real – and yet, it was starting to feel more real with every passing moment. She laughed and pushed herself off the door, making her way merrily back into the real world. Tonight, she would let her parents celebrate her acceptance into the Academy. Tomorrow, she and Atticus would leave everything behind. And after that–

Well, who knew what would be waiting for them after that.

#writing #my writing #tgswide #multichapter #future timeline #canon #character specific #mariana navarro james #atticus prewett #jacob navarro james #genevieve navarro #scott james #blackinkpen #couple of modern day moses’ searching for the promised land #rp #hp rp #look I wrote something how fucking wild is that

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ittybittywordsmith · 4 years

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Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

August 2nd, 2014 — the 43rd anniversary of the death of Leon Reynolds.

This day was always the hardest. Even as it had gotten easier, even as time had done its sacred duty and healed her wounds, it was still the hardest day of the whole year. Aurora preferred to take the day to herself. Her children would have accompanied her, if she had allowed it — Circe knew that they, perhaps even more so that herself, deserved that right, but they respected their mother's wishes for peace and tranquility. Sometimes others would be there when she arrived, or would join her shortly after, but over the years, they had all dropped away quietly. All but one. But today — today Aurora could see no one waiting for her. That was fine. Some conversations were best had in private, were they not? The August air was warm as Aurora walked through the grounds of Elysium, the light breeze whistling softly through the lush green grass that surrounded tombstones and grave markers. Elysium was a beautiful place, for a cemetery. It wasn't where Aurora would have wanted her husband to be buried, but Leon had been an American hero as well as a wizarding spy, and it turned out national security still took priority in her husband's life, even after death. It took her several minutes of walking by names that had grown so familiar to her over the years, she could recite them off the tip of her tongue without ever having seen the faces they belonged to. Men and women who all died around the same time, who all gave their lives and sometimes their deaths for their people and their countries. Aurora had never learned their stories. She didn't need to. They each had their own to mourn them, after all, and she'd had her fill of tragedy without adopting theirs. So Aurora continued to walk, until she found the headstone she'd been visiting for more years than she'd even been married.

Leon Reynolds. December 9th, 1937 - August 2nd, 1971. Beloved friend, husband, and father. A hero to us all. A sigh escaped Aurora's lips — the same sigh she had been carrying around in her chest for the last forty-three years, it felt like — and she folded her hands across her abdomen. "Hello, darling. I know it's been awhile. . ."

When Aurora was twelve, she met Leon Reynolds for the first time, in a tussle with her eldest brother on the streets outside her family estate. Leon was a strange boy — grubby and skinny, with a touch of wildness about him that called to something deeper inside her. Aurora chased off her brother before he could do too much damage to this strange wild boy, and together, they ran so fast that Aurora thought her feet might very well lift right off the ground without the help of a broom at all. And just like that, he became her strange wild boy, and if her brother ever wanted to knock him to the ground again, he had to go through her.

"The children are doing well. I knew you'd want to know." Aurora spoke conversationally as she pulled the bouquet of dying flowers from the vase that had been sitting in front of her husband's gravestone for more than a decade now. The flowers had once been lovely, with large white petals — daisies, perhaps, although she didn't have an intimate enough knowledge of flowers to be certain — but they had wilted long ago, the petals beginning to curl into a dry and dismal brown. Aurora had no idea who had brought them here. Not herself, she was reasonably certain, but it could have easily been Celeste or Castor, or any of the number of random individuals she'd met throughout the years that had attributed their lives or their loved ones' lives to some action or another of Leon Reynolds. Aurora had never tried to keep track of them — the grief had been hard enough, back then, without the reminder that there were absolute strangers who knew more about that part of her husband's life than she did. "Celeste is still drawing star charts, though I find myself wondering if she will give it up any day now. New Orleans was a good place for her to settle — bright and vivacious, just like her, and just like you, really — but now that the children are all readying to leave the nest, I can see her growing antsy." Aurora twirled her wand around the vase, conjuring a new bouquet of deep red roses yet to bloom. She gave the flowers a tap, and a charm to extend their limited shelf life shimmered over the petals. It was a tidy bit of spellwork — if there was anything Aurora had learned by spending half her life in a school, it was how to keep her magic tidy. "If that husband of hers isn't careful, she'll drag him out to Timbuktu before he even knows what hit him." Aurora pulled a cloth from within her robes and began to wipe the dust from the vase. "Meanwhile Castor has thrown himself into his astrolabes. He seems to think he's on the verge of developing a new model that will nearly double how far we can project accurate astrological readings. I swear, that boy sends me a new letter about it twice a week. He's considering seeking a new patent for it." Aurora clicked her tongue and shook her head as she adjusted the vase, centering it against the headstone. She tilted her head just slightly for a moment, considering, before she gave a small, self-satisfied smile. "Still — our son, the inventor of a new and improved way to read our universe? Wouldn't that be something."

When Aurora was fifteen, she was in love with Leon Reynolds. Despite being two years older, that Reynolds boy was as good as Aurora's shadow, or so whispered the teachers at school. Aurora didn't mind. Leon still had a wildness to him, and being near it reminded Aurora that there was more to her than star charts and ink stains and her mother's expectations. Her greatest fear was June, when he would leave her behind in these cold stone walls forever, whatever he promised about summers and letters to be sent. But no matter how slow time seems, it never stops, and the day came and went. Aurora kissed him after he crossed the graduation stage before she let him go. A few days later she returned to her home estate and waited on the humid streets just outside, but her strange wild boy didn't come back that day, or for a very long time.

"The grandchildren are all growing like weeds — I'm sure you're not surprised, but still, it manages to catch me off guard all the time, and I see them more often than most grandmothers can claim, I think." Aurora had moved on to dusting the headstone herself. There was no need, really — either magically or otherwise, Elysium was well maintained, gravestones included — but still, it made Aurora feel better. Like there was something she could still do for her late husband. "You would be proud. Little Fae is busy working for Spirito Santo. Jeanne Marie is off putting her chaotic energy to professional use — much to Celeste's relief. I thought maybe she'd worry herself into an ulcer there for a little while. You'd think she'd have more sympathy now for how difficult it was when she was a teenager, but Celeste doesn't seem to enjoy the irony." Aurora smiled to herself as she brushed away a fallen leaf from a corner of the headstone. "Then again, I remember you used to get a little surly too, whenever I was right. And she certainly is your daughter." It was almost funny, how personality traits like that could manifest on their own. Celeste was her father's daughter, and Castor his father's son, but between them they could hardly manage a single coherent memory of Leon Reynolds. "Castor's twins graduated school this year. Calypso's ready to go out and grab the world by the horns — clever as the devil and twice as pretty, that one is. She looks so much like my mother, have I ever told you that? And Cassiopeia is going into professional quodpot. Do you remember the fights that you and Orion used to get into? You swore up and down that quodpot was the world's most useless sport — but oh, darling, how you would change your tune if you could see your granddaughter in the sky now. She's a natural — that part, at least, I'm certain she didn't get from you." Aurora sighed again, and pulled away from the headstone. It was perfectly clean now — had been clean in the first place, if that were something she was willing to admit, but now there wasn't anything Aurora could even pretend to tidy. "The others are still in school. Auriga, and Lucian, and Aquila. Even little Fox will start in a week or two. But before you know it, I'll be here again in a blink of the eye, telling you about how they're all making their way into the world themselves, young and proud and full of life. Like you and I did, not so long ago. Time is funny that way, isn't it?"

When Aurora was eighteen, she found Leon Reynolds mulling around the streets outside her family estate, casual as sin and waiting for her like it was just any other summer day from their childhood. Like there hadn’t been almost four years of absence, of grief and yearning and silence between them. Aurora had slapped him, quick and hard as she could manage, a burst of wildness that had suddenly returned to her after vanishing without a trace more than three years ago. She’d pushed him away — and then just as quickly, pulled him back, wanting nothing more than for her strange wild boy to make up for the years he should have spent touching her.

"They would have come, if they could. Celeste and Castor, perhaps even the grandchildren, if someone had asked them. If I had asked. But I didn't. I hope you'll forgive me." Aurora closed her tired eyes and took a deep breath. This was always the most difficult part — when she ran out of things to do, of things to distract her from the fact that she was standing in front of her husband's grave. In other years, she would have taken her leave at this point — but not this year. She still had more to say. "I don't quite know when I got this old," Aurora admitted to the headstone, the echo of a mirthless laugh in her voice. "Castor and Celeste have started to worry when I do things on my own — have started to worry, even, of my living in the school, as if I didn't have an entire army of house elves at my beck and call. And for this — I thought Castor was going to insist on accompanying me, really, but I suspect his wife talked him out of it. Perhaps that is selfish of me, not to bring your children here to see you. But they know where you are, and how to get here, and are perfectly competent in doing so on their own, I imagine. And you and I — well, they say parents need to take time to themselves too, don't they?" It wasn't a funny remark, not even to Aurora, but if Leon were actually here, and not merely a stone in the ground, she knew he would have smiled. "Mostly, I wanted to speak to you in private. To say the things that I have only been saying to myself for the past several years. I know you can't answer — I am not so aged out of my own wits as to expect a talking headstone — but. . . you can still listen. After everything you put me through, Leon Reynolds, you owe me this much."

When Aurora was twenty-two, her younger brother died. Little Altair, who in truth hadn’t been any smaller than Aurora herself, and only two years her junior. But he had always been clever, far too clever for his own good. His own cleverness had been his downfall — it had led to overachievement, and then to boredom, and then to experimentation. As it turned out, drugs didn’t care about cleverness, and in the end, the overdose won out. Aurora stood alone at the funeral while her elder brother supported their mother, and when Leon Reynolds showed up late to the wake, he hadn’t tried to stop her from yelling or shoving or crying. He simply waited until she wore herself out, and then offered her an escape — to run away with him, to marry him, to live with him in New York where the rest of his new life was waiting. Aurora loved her family and her home, but it was broken now, and maybe she loved her strange wild boy more, so she went.

"Did you know?" The breeze picked up into a short gust at her question, like the air itself could sense her agitation. Aurora didn't even know exactly what she was asking. Had Leon known — what, exactly? That he had sired a child on some nameless woman on another continent? That his child would one day go on to wreak the worst destruction magical America had seen in decades? That Aurora would one day be summoned to the presence of the Director of Magical Security and asked with pitying eyes whether she could identify her husband as the father of another woman's child? She shook with her rage and indignation, but closed her eyes, taking a deep, steadying breath. Her anger wasn't the point here. "Would you have told me, if you'd had the chance? I can't imagine you had the opportunity. They say he's a little younger than Castor, and when you left, Castor wasn't — well, I suppose that hardly matters. Because I don't think you would have told me. You never wanted to tell me things, when they were hard. You always ran away when things were difficult, and blamed it on your job, your unknowable life that I could never be a part of, and I always took you back. Did you think I wouldn't have taken you back after this? You were probably right, but that doesn't make you any less of a Circe-fucked coward over it." Aurora bit down hard on her lip and looked away, trying to reign in her anger. It took her several long seconds before she could continue in a more controlled voice. "I didn't tell them." Castor and Celeste, she'd meant, and the grandchildren in turn. Hadn't told them about their father's betrayal, about Scott James sliding a picture before her and explaining that the man who had just struck such a blow against their nation had come about as part of her husband's infidelity. "How could I tell them? I raised them to idolize you, damn you. I told them you were a hero. And what's worse, I believed it. I let it dictate my life. The impossible standard of Leon Reynolds, war hero. Martyr. Love of my life. And now what have you left me with in my final days? Leon Reynolds, traitor. Adulterer. Liar." Aurora spat the words, feeling her rage draw tears to her eyes, but she didn't dare cry. She had never cried when she and Leon fought — only after he was gone, and had left her to pick up the pieces of her life alone, as she always did. "And of course, in a true coward's fashion, you went and died, and don't even have to deal with the consequences of this mess you've made. Damn you."

When Aurora was twenty-nine, she and Leon had a fight that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She had always hated this career of his, no matter what Leon preached about truth and justice and serving his country. She loathed this agency that had swept her strange wild boy away from her before he’d taken more than two steps from the graduation stage, that continued to take him away from her night after night, week after week. The nights when he returned home to her were the easiest — all she could remember was how she loved him, how she missed him, how to get lost in him, and after Celeste, the sounds of him murmuring stories in the dark as he tucked her into bed filled Aurora with a contentment that felt like it would never fade. But inevitably the nights when he would leave would come — those were the hardest. The incessant tapping of the owl at the window, and the feeling inside her heart as she watched him walk away into the night. Once, she fought back and asked him to stay — for her, for their daughter, for their growing family. The back and forth grew so loud, Aurora thought it would wake Celeste, and by the time the man who had once been her cherished strange wild boy strode into the night, she was not sorry to see him go, and not sorry that she didn’t tell him about the subtle swell of her belly.

"But do you know what I think I'm most angry about, Leon?" Aurora had grown quiet in her words, so intent was she on this lifeless gray headstone before her. A flock of hippogriffs could have begun mating rituals just behind her, and she wouldn't have noticed. No, she needed to have it out between her and her husband — even if he did quite conveniently happen to be dead. "If we put the lying, and the cheating, and the fact that you apparently fathered a mass murderer aside — I think what I'm most angry about is that you never did live up to your promise. Do you remember it, darling? I was standing in a cemetery just like this, after Altair. . . and you said that we could make a life worth living together. But we didn't, did we? I made it. We made Celeste, and Castor, but you were never there for them. You were never there for me. All those promises, and what did you ever give me? A lonely house, a cold bed, and an ugly headstone." How many years had Aurora wanted to say such an unthinkable thing out loud? All those years she had let those thoughts fester with the guilt inside of her. Not anymore. Not after this. Leon Reynolds, Circe rest his soul, did not deserve her guilt. "I love you," Aurora Belmont Reynolds whispered into the warm August air. "And I miss you. But the thing is, my darling — I missed you before you were dead."

When Aurora was thirty, an unfamiliar man showed up at her door and brought news that shattered her world. Her strange wild boy was dead in some strange wild land across a sea, and he would never return to her arms again. Their last words were argumentative, and mean, and full of hurt — but how could they have known it to be their last fight, their last conversation, their last chance to embrace, slipping through their fingers? Knowledge was power, they said, but what power could there be in knowledge that arrived too late? It took Aurora days upon weeks upon months to come to terms with the reality — that Leon would never be more than a figment of their daughter's memory, and a stranger to their son. It was cruel, and unfair, and all Aurora had left of the strange wild boy she'd loved all her life. It may have been Leon's story, but it was Aurora's to tell.

Tell his story she had — except she hadn't known quite all of it, had she? She hadn't known the full truth of the man she had always considered the love of her life. But she did now, and she had questions. And if she was being honest, it wasn't Leon she had come here to speak with.