#because the amount of physical violence we witnessed that child inflict upon our child?

[alsaurus-loves-dean]

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[xparadisexlostx]

So Idk what possessed me to write this. I wrote it all in one go and it is in desperate need of a proof read and probably and edit... but I doubt I’ll ever do that lol. I’m tired and I’m getting a headache and I still have drafts to work on, so I’m just gonna post it before I lose confidence and hide it like the many, many other drabbles I’ve never posted.

I don’t know why I wanted to write this in first person. That usually annoys me, but for some reason it just sounded right in this case.

So this drabble is primarily about Beck and Cora, how they meet, and the relationship they have. Obviously I did a LOT, if not too much, condensing because otherwise this never would have ended. 

For context, Cora is Beck’s sort of adopted mom. She his a centuries old witch who was possessed, years ago by a spirit of hospitality. Over time the two merged into one being and that is why she’s pretty much immortal. Because of what she was she was made an outcast by her own people, the clan of the Grey Owls. Here is her face claim. 

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A long life makes you accustomed to loss. You learn people are better at a distance. Far enough away that you can’t really make out their faces, and their voices turn to echoes by the time they’re in your ears. Any closer than that and you risk the pain that comes with a proper meeting. I found that out the hard way when Hattie passed. 

It was agonizingly slow. At first she just needed a bit of help with getting up after a long day in the garden. And then she couldn’t go as far on our evening walks. Eventually she couldn’t make it out to tend the flowers that she loved so dearly, and she forgot the names of the dairy goats we’d raised by hand and bottle. And when I saw Death come peacefully across the border of the Living Dream, shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight and invisible to my love, I lifted her up in my arms and carried her out to the fields of flowers. She didn’t remember my name, but she held me close to her with what dwindling strength remained in her arms, and laid her head on my heart while I whispered a silent goodbye.

We had never had any children. Back then we only escaped the scandal of being together by living on my family’s land and growing or making most of what we needed. People in the towns whispered, but they let us be so long as we didn’t make too much noise. That wouldn’t have been any life for a child. Children need community, friends, and more love than just two mothers could bring them. The mortals would have never accepted a child of ours, and the witches had cast me out years before on account of what I was---what I am.

I buried Hattie in the flowerbed, and I left my home after that. The place I had been made, where I had settled for three centuries, had nothing to give me but pain. Even England reminded me all too much of what I had lost. I was alone, and I imagined that somewhere else I could find a place where I was content with that once again.

And I did. In a cottage deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains, I found the peace that had evaded me for so long. People stopped by in the occasional way: lost travelers, rapscallion youths, the occasional farmer looking for good dairy stock. That was the way for well over a hundred years. It wasn’t until the storm of ‘01 that it all changed, that I noticed the pie I was cooling on the windowsill was gone, and there was only a small muddy handprint in its place.

In the afterglow of a lightning strike I saw him there. A great, hulking bear, tall as the horizon, pale as a fresh pressed bedsheet, illuminated against the black sky. On his head were horns made of trees, and his claws were gnarled roots. On his back he carried a forest with a heart-tree that glowed gold. My brother, older than me by millenia, scarcely seen but ever familiar, always present. He looked from me to the barn, and stared, transfixed, by whatever he saw, and then he was gone.

I pulled on a raincoat and stepped into my boots, and raced across the yard to the shelter of the barn. The goats stirred in their pen, and the chickens let out a low squawk of protest as the building flooded with light. I found my pie in the back stall and a trail of blueberry pawprints leading away from it and into a pile of hay, where I found a small, trembling kit, little enough to fit in my one hand.

She shook like a leaf, whining up a terrible storm, as I tucked her beneath my coat and took her into the house. The promise of a proper meal convinced her to turn back into the girl I already knew she was, but she still shook so hard that she lost half of every bite she tried to take. I might have scolded anyone else for stealing, but she was so slight, too small and slender for a girl her age, and she was covered in mud and briars and sticks that matted in her golden hair. And when I put her in the tub to scrub her clean I saw the bruises and the cuts that no branch had inflicted. 

Looking back on that night I never had the chance to hold her at arm’s length. From the moment I plucked her out of the hay and pressed her to my heart, she was mine. I couldn’t keep her. The Fox Bitch wouldn’t allow it. And no one would listen to me when I told them of the heinous crimes Elea Tandy was committing against her own kin. No one cared when I complained of the local coven teachers casting her out. 

I made myself content with what I could have, and I taught her what an old witch could when she escaped that awful house and made her way through the forest to me. I showed her how to sew up a skirt as well as a wound, and taught her what the woods had to offer when her mother denied her supper. When she couldn’t read my spellbooks I taught her songs and rhythms to help her remember words and order. How to milk a goat, how to shear a sheep, how to tie a good and proper knot, and how to cook anything you found or caught. Our time together didn’t always last long, and when she left I felt it like a stab to the heart, but she was mine. The baby Hattie and I never got to have, filled with more kindness and curiosity and life than anyone else I had ever met.

And I ought to have known by the sight of my Brother what she was, and that she could not belong to me, or to anyone forever, but it wasn’t until months later, when I saw him again, watching her ride through the woods with a wild abandon, that I understood. 

Feral. A term that makes every parent clutch her pearls and shiver in fear, even though they barely know what it means. Feral witches are born to leave. They are only a brief bridge between the Dream Realm and the physical, destined to merge once more with the Nature Spirit from which they came. 

She was not mine to keep, but I held on.

I held on in agony as she ran off, desperate for freedom and adventure and a respite from the violence of her home. I smothered her in loving arms every time she came back. But she came back less and less. It was too dangerous, and every time she risked us both. I told her I didn’t care, and that I wasn’t afraid of Elea Tandy… but I knew that she was.

She was right to be.

Even I had never imagined Elea could be so vile and twisted as to kill a familiar. And to make a child watch… It turns my gut even to think of it now. I thought it would be the death of her, and it likely would have been if her brother hadn’t turned on their mother himself. He tried to bring her back to life, and so did I. But there was nothing but fathomless despair behind those blue eyes. I finally had her safe beneath my roof, and she was dying in my arms just like Hattie had. No amount of love could ever replace what she had lost when Dawnbreaker had been hanged before her eyes.

After ages of lifelessness, she eventually became restless in her grief, and I imagined I was witnessing her end. I put her in my car and drove her as deep into the wilderness as I could, and when I wrapped my arms around her I said that same silent goodbye. I barely made it home before my own sorrow and anger threatened to drown me. She was too young, I thought, and how unfair it was that she should die having tasted so little happiness, having felt so few kind touches. Brother would care for her upon her return, but why had he ever allowed her to come from the womb of that wretched woman? I had gifted her all the love that I could, and it didn’t feel like nearly enough in the face of all the pain she had been put through.

I hated him for that. Perhaps I still do.

I left California the same way I left England, distraught, and purchased new land on the secluded shores of Lake Erie. I told no one where I went, and no one would have ever asked. 

When I saw the golden horse upon my lawn some years later I thought it was a reflection in the Living Dream, a spirit of what once was lingering, but the girl upon its back was no longer a child. Even at a distance, even after all those years, I knew her face, and when she ran into my arms I held her tighter than I ever had before. 

She was alive and more vibrant than I’d ever seen her---all golden curls and smiles and a wild glint in her eye. We rode horses on the shoreline and sang foolish songs around a campfire. She told me stories of where she had been and everything she’d seen as she wove crowns from wildflowers. The next evening she showed me the scars where the mountain lion had nearly ripped her life away, and then demonstrated her new form with such ease that I felt my knees go weak. Even at such a young age the power swelled around her.

Feral. The very thing that had made other witches reject her had allowed her to thrive. In the wilds she had found the peace and happiness that others had so cruelly robbed her of. And I felt a pride blossom in me that I’d never felt before.

She left me again, as I knew she would, as was her nature, but this time I didn’t feel grief. For as long as she was on this Earth, she would return to me. That much I was certain. And that much has always been proven true.

Now, without the fear of her mother’s viciousness, she comes to me more frequently, and she can linger in my house as long as her wild spirit will allow. Our time together isn’t so rare… and yet I know that it is still brief. 

Each visit I see the spirit grow within her, each year the magic grows stronger. It pulls in more animals, and it bends nature around her without her even noticing it. 

She doesn’t see my Brother when she is sitting upon her golden stallion, basking in the sun as it cuts through the forest branches, but I think she feels him. As the animals gather all around her and play like newborn lambs, as she feels the embrace of the woods around her, I think she feels him watching. Her eyes glisten and she smiles with a fondness that breaks my heart. I think that if she just takes one step she will be lost to me forever.

I call her name when she raises her hand to touch what she cannot see, and with the slowness of a drunkard she blinks her eyes. When she looks back at me in those moments I know she can see across the centuries. She knows what I am. 

Again I call her name. It’s selfish, maybe, to want to hold onto her. Perhaps I do nothing but hold her back. But she smiles at me, and the mist evaporates from her eyes to reveal that mischievous sparkle.

“Come away from there, girl.” I say, beaconing her back toward the house with a wave of my hand and I watch my Brother’s eyes with unbecoming smugness as she presses her golden stallion forward and exclaims “‘Race ya!’” as she charges back home.