25 Jul 2018, 17:57
Praeteritum ad Praesens
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THE GRAY MANSE
THE GRAY MANSE
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Past to Present
Everyone's past eventually caught up with them given time, and Rasmus Gray was no exception. He had done things, terrible things in the past. The story was being told to all present within the home of Gray. The story of a man and two women who had met in the distant past and learned each other intimately well, and the story of two children separated by circumstance and underlying jealousies, untimely deaths, and tragic misfortune. The story removed a shroud that they had never known needed to be lifted, and it was all the boy, Dorian could do to reign in all the questions that lingered on the tip of his tongue waiting desperately to be asked. In attendance was himself, Celynne, his mother-stepmother Svana, one Professor Parker, and of course the man of the hour, Rasmus. The silence was a physical presence that hung like a burden on each of their shoulders as they grasped the gravity of the situation they were just now learning about. But all Dorian could do was steal a glance over at Celynne.
The present was nigh.
All had been revealed, and the more time he had to ponder it the less he believed any of it. And yet he had never known his father to be a liar. As if to crush the final remnants of his trepidation, the discreet look he gave to his mother...stepmother was enough to tell him that all of this was true. She would never appear so forlorn at the mention of a lie, and lies were something she was adept at detecting and challenging into non-being. "Y- Do you guys really expect me to believe any of this!? My mother is dead? My father is promiscuous?? I have a sister I never knew about???" Dorian's voice cracked on the word sister as he bit back tears. The back of his throat burned and his eyes stung from the unshed tears. "It's all true, Dorian." The man had not even made an attempt to deny any of it, even the part where Dorian had questioned his morality. The boy slipped into a tongue that came naturally after having had an entire conversation with Celynne in the language.
"Bovis stercus!"
"Lingua, Dorian!" His mother...stepmother...Svana reprimanded him in the same language he had just spoken, and it was then that he remembered who it was that had been in charge of his education as he got older. He looked at her, really looked at her, and for the first time in his short life, he could see all the things that didn't belong. Her strict, no-nonsense candour towards him, the way she looked at him when she thought he wasn't looking, the way she had no love for him. She did not love him. He was not hers. She could not love another woman's child. Another woman. Dorian had another mother. Another dead mother, if his father was to be believed. A final wish from the woman before death was all that had left him with a home run by a woman who hated him and a father who lied. His tears ran free now, despite himself, marking the finality of the matter as he truly assessed the words that his father had spoken, the account he had just shared. It was all far to elaborate to be a lie. Dorian believed it all.
Veritas mirabilius ficta.
What was it that he had always told himself as a personal joke as he watched all the kids in Hogwarts? Pure Blood families all had the oldest and most severely damaged skeletons to hide, and he had always been thankful that he had no such family secrets with which to contend. He had prided himself on not having the typical Pure Blood family with lives that rivalled a soap opera. Normal was a word that could be used to describe his life, aside from his mother and extended family's issues with him. Now he knew why. Now he understood. Dorian addressed her now, seeing her for the first time. Really seeing her. "Why?" The woman was watching him with hard eyes that refused to stray, judging him harshly as she had done his whole life. "Why what, Dorian? Come now. Use your words. I've taught you better than that." Even now her words were biting and cold, if not even more glacial than he remembered. "Why did you take me in? You could h- You could have..." What? What could she have?
Her blood-red lips and her blood-red dress and her blood-red shoes stood in severe contrast to the pitying look she spared him.
"You are your father's child. My husband's child. I could no more turn you away than reject my love for him. It matters not, for here we sit, all secrets bare." She looked at Celynne then, and Dorian remembered at that moment that they were not alone. Celynne and the professor were here in their home; had heard everything that was just said, and Dorian searched for the girl again and found her with his eyes. He watched her for an uncomfortably long moment, even as she might have looked at him in return. The thoughts in his mind were running a losing race, for he was mature enough to acknowledge how he felt. Imperceptibly, he muttered the words that were to revealed as parapraxis, mimicking his inner feelings. "I've always wanted a sister..." He had been nowhere near as quiet as he had thought, for the whole room could hear him in the massive space.
Rasmus was looking directly at Celynne too.
Just as Dorian said what he said, his father chimed in with words of his own. "You look so much like her at that age." The girl was being put on the spot by the two. Her brother and her father if all that had been revealed was to be believed. Her amnesia was still a prominent factor in her life, something that barred the memories that she so desperately needed to hold on to. Svana watched her son and husband with that stern gaze she always used when either of them did something she found less than exemplary. And then she stood with a click of her heels. "That's enough of that you two. Give the poor girl some time to process this bomb you found it prudent to drop on her so suddenly." The clicking of her heels on solid marble tiles grew louder and closer to Celynne. She stopped right in front of the girl and touched her shoulder lightly. "I shall have the maids prepare us a meal. Would you like anything specific?" Dorian blanched and pressed his lips tightly into a thin line.
That gentle, motherly tone had never been taken with him.
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✸ Veritas mirabilius ficta. - Truth is stranger than fiction.
✧Improvidus, Apto quod Victum✧
Stam: 3, Agi: 3, Str: 4, Con: 7, Arc: 7, Acc: 6
12 Aug 2018, 02:37
Praeteritum ad Praesens
Atrox melior dulcissima veritas mendaciis.
This did not seem like a real-life situation. This seemed like something from her books, the complicated and utterly melodramatic family trees of Pureblood families, the confusing puzzle pieces slipping together in a never-thought-of-before pattern, the muddling drama that resided in nearly all magical bloodlines… which, of course, she had to be a part of.
With every word uttered from Rasmus’s lips came a wave of blank memories filled, threatening to pull her away, but she did not, would not allow them to do so again, not when she needed, so badly, to know. The story… a friendship, a broken romance, a broken friendship again. The cycle of observing, inquiring, and knowing-- the wheel had indeed come full circle again, even as her head pounded in reminder of the memories that might surely crush her if given the chance. A broken something would always be repaired, and something mended would always break again-- that was how the circle spun.
But was this a story? No, this was her history, of the truth was being told, the harsh, harsh truth. Though she did not want to believe it, tried and failed to convince herself that she only did because she needed an explanation, that it was not true, too bitter to be true, she knew it was-- the little pieces sliding to fit one another, like the nitrogen bases on DNA… which most did not use as a metaphor. This was not, could not be a lie, for lies were sweet, and honesty bitter.
Atrox melior dulcissima veritas mendaciis.
She sat rigid, frozen, not saying a word, even as Dorian did the opposite. Parker would compliment her posture, she knew, if his eyes were not fixed on the wall opposite to himself and herself. Those who knew her well, not very many at all, would observe the occasional twitch of her left hand, a shake of her left arm-- her own symbol of fear, as so few knew. Other than that, her only movement was the blinking of her disparate eyes on the emerald green of her mother, the other, a normal, plain chocolate. Neither of her blood parents, if the story was true, had brown eyes, but then that was not how genetics worked. For sure, thee brown was not Asher’s with his azure eyes, but as her own irises wandered to study Rasmus, to study Dorian, she identified now what it was she had recognized in them but never quite caught.
Cel had seen herself.
The faces, the demeanor, the expressions-- they were hers, or perhaps both hers and Dorian’s were Rasmus’s. Technicalities were what her mind summoned to distract her from the numbness of shock, but details aside, the slightest bits of herself were clearly recognizable in them both, small enough to evade her recognization but now shining like a lighthouse on the sheers. Her mother-- Natalia, Natalia Flores-- no, she would call her Natalia Selwyn. Cel’s name she had kept, but it was but another lie, for it was one she had no right to in the slightest. Everything was gone…
...even her name was not hers.
But she did not have it so badly-- her amnesia, her not-father, they had taken away the lies to come, replaced them with the peace of oblivion, but Dorian had only whatever he’d been told prior to this revelation… and everything he knew had been torn down, wrecked, and completely decimated. She couldn’t blame him for his outburst like that; in fact, she knew some that would not exercise even the slightest control that he had. Her face betrayed none of the surprise she felt as Svana spoke in the Dead Language-- her native tongue, as Oxford’s professors often liked to joke, the language she’d fallen in love with before she’d even left America-- how strange it was that Dorian-- Dorian Gray, her brother-- had learned it as well. Her brother. She had a brother. She had… a blood family.
Where had that appeared out of?
It was after Parker had found her that night, caught her reaching for the pristine ivory glint of his pocket watch, and took her on a plane-- tickets courtesy of him and his quite Brobdingnagian salary-- that she’d accepted them as her family. Two months, and they knew her, she knew them, and Oxford became her home. Now, although she had found those of her own blood, the world was still a spinning mess of fact and fiction through her eyes.
Cel had never cried easily. At least, she had never cried easily for certain things. Fear meant freezing up, anger or frustration meant writing and destroying things, sadness meant listlessness, and anxiousness meant twitching. For other things she sometimes did cry: her memories, lost; her nightmares, eternal, but now she allowed a single tear to slip from and slide down her smooth cheeks from each eye: one from her mother’s green, the other from who knows where. Each contained her confusion, her anguish, her bitter acceptance of truth. Truth, like the pureness of chocolate: a dark, bitter thing, dressed up in sugar’s laces and ribbons, tempting but so, so undesirable if tasted bare. A glittering track followed each droplet of water; if observers had been present, they might have compared it to the moonlight for which she had been named. Each dropped away from her face, and she blinked once, not bothering to dry the tracks. Let them be my grief, for I only cry when I mourn.
Rasmus-- he did not seem like the young man, inexperienced in the world’s biting viciousness, that he had described. Age really did seem to change people-- now he was solemn, serious, and saged in his pale grey-blue eyes. How strange it was to think that she had a father somewhere, one other than Parker, the one Asher could never be, one by blood-- so peculiar, such a strange feeling. The clips, the snapshots of her memory showing Asher through her young eyes clearly revealed that he was naught but her mother’s spouse, and she knew no other parent now than Parker’s wisdom-- it certainly was quite incommodus now, thinking that there was, in flesh and blood, a father-- a true father-- before her, mere feet away.
Svana-- in the short time in which Cel had known her, Svana had struck her as a sharp, composed, and collected woman, a little harsh and a little cold. She could pass, Cel could see, as Dorian’s blood, and yet there was something about the way she looked at her son that made Cel believe quite easily the opposite. It was apparent; she did not so love the boy as her husband did. And yet-- yet she noticed Svana’s motions, her clipped words, her straight-backed disposition. No, she was not frozen in ice, after all; her love for her husband was true, even as she spoke so bitingly, so venomously, toward Dorian.
Dorian Gray. Throughout the school year she had heard of him quite often, Dorian’s done this and Dorian stand that, Dorian's gotten himself into detention again, Dorian the troublemaker. He was Eris’s friend, after all, and her group of friends included quite the characters. She hadn't known him of course, and perhaps she'd seen him in the hallways, she spotted him during mentoring, but prior to the train, she never held a conversation with him in her life. Nobody could guess her, the introverted, quiet, quick-witted Ravenclaw to be sharing blood with this flamboyant, rule-breaking Gryffindor...right?
She had pondered her family as her curious mind did, wondered if Natalia would ever come back before the memory of her mother's death come came to her, asked herself why the coldness of her father - stepfather - in her presence existed but the thought of everything bad before her, them...
Yet...no, her memories were not revived.
Cel knew now. Oh, but she understood, realized what had happened, how she came to be, whatever else this...this soap opera had in store, but the memories - they were not simply what happened, but how they happened. And still there was the question of how she had ended up stealing Porter's pocket watch, how she had received her amnesia; no not all her questions had been answered, for some could not be answered by this one Rasmus Gray. But she still was grateful, grateful for the thirst for comprehension that had been sated. No, only Natalia and Asher, her mother and not-father, could answer the inquiry still in her mind, but Natalia was dead, and she would not, could not bring herself to approach Asher… wherever he even was in the world. Her need to know would never leave her, she knew, only lessen in her mind, even if Natalia somehow returned from the dead.
Five words drew her wandering mind, lost in mist and werifesteria, back into conversation. “I’ve always wanted a sister,” Dorian-- Dorian her brother, a sibling of blood, of whom she knew nothing of except hearsay, slight observation, and the fateful meeting on the train-- was saying, and Cel could feel the numbing heat blossoming in the pale skin of her face. The temptation to snap back a rejoinder, a “Well then, lucky you,” was overtaken by years of trained control that she exercised constantly, but also by her dizzying thoughts. A sister; that was who she was to someone now-- she’d been someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, someone’s pupil, but she had never been anyone’s sister. A filiia, an amica, and a discipula, but never a soror... She had the right to that title now. It was good, she supposed, that he did want a sibling, but her dazed mind lingered naught more than a second on the notion that had been presented, only focusing on the two pairs of grey-blue eyes fixed upon her face and the intentness with which they studied her.
She took after her mother? Perhaps, perhaps not-- the faces in her flashbacks were often too blurry to make out, even as she recognized them intuitively, somehow. Her mother, Natalia Selwyn… her mother, whose face she would never know, even as she recalled the details, even though she remembered the colors. Black hair, check. Green eyes, check, at least partially. Asian? Half check. But more blood rushed in her cheeks as she shrank back against her seat, apprehensive under their combined attention.
Again she was grateful as Svana intervened. Perhaps she was also kind, after all, in some situations; she revised her original impression on Dorian’s mother-- stepmother. Half-surprised at the query proffered to her, Cel blinked slowly for a moment, giving herself ample time to contemplate the question. The words came out uncertainly anyway, but they were true. “Apium- some celery sticks and chocolate might be nice,” she murmured, but upon seeing Dorian’s white face, she added, “...Sed quidni, why not ask Dorian?”
The stage was set. The mis-en-scene was in order. And now she was to observe this, perhaps be a part of it as she was certain she had no choice in even as she attempted and failed to deny it, and analyze the situation-- what she always did with confusing things, even as she knew this was not her typical confusing thing.
This incommodus.
Reducio
Better the bitter truth than the sweetest lies.
Celery
But why not
Unpleasant, untimely situation-- difficult to translate
Celery
But why not
Unpleasant, untimely situation-- difficult to translate