Penny 'Dred-Full
September 2004 - November 2005
They’d met through school. He’d been an assistant to the groundskeeper and caretaker, and she was a student. He only seemed to be a few years older than her, a twenty-one to her fifteen but she felt that her mind more than made up for the gap between them. He seemed to feel the same, sneaking little finger-touches, and kisses when their relationship began to blossom, whenever they passed each other in the hall, an event infrequently occurring in itself.
The first time Penelope Gray laid eyes on Mordred Deschain, she thought his raven hair was too long, much too long for a boy. To her, the disheveled mop looked like a weeping willow, the strands flowing in the wind and brushing against her cheek whenever she happened to be near him. His devil-may-care attitude hadn’t won him any favors with her either.
The rest of him was not all that bad. His frame was limber but not willowy like Tom’s had become in recent years. In fact, the two of them kinda looked like brothers if one ignored the several differences in facial and muscle structure. Both of their eyes were a dark, almost black color. Their hair matched their eyes, and both of them had a skin color that looked like they hadn’t stepped outside in their entire life. Who knew the Gray kids had a thing for the dark and brooding types? Penny on the other hand, was short, freckled, blue-eyed, and had short fiery red hair in her preferred form, a complete opposite to the man in question.
When he began to stand close to her more often after that first time, she tried to ignore him. However, when Mordred was as tall as her father’s human form, he easily stood out in the crowd of bustling students. The feeling of his hauntingly dark eyes became an itch that she was more and more tempted to scratch, to acknowledge him, to… confront him.
Penelope didn’t know what he wanted. Unlike everyone else, he was particularly difficult to read. After living with her parents, she assumed all he wanted was a quick lay with a younger body, but after a year, she didn’t think that was necessarily the case anymore.
During her sixth year, she began seeing Mordred everywhere. Whenever she would look outside the classroom window, no matter which class, there he’d be, trimming hedges, raking leaves, polishing statues. If not for how invested he seemed to be in his labor, Penny could have sworn that he was following her. He never looked at her during these times, as though he were getting her back for the previous year of ignoring him. That was fine with her.
When he started appearing during her after-school activities was when Penny began truly despising his presence. It was one thing to linger around her during the school day, but it was an entirely different thing to disrupt her extracurriculars. Whether she was attempting to translate ancient runes for fun, or brew a recreational potion, he was there, working on some seemingly unnecessary task for a seemingly unnecessary amount of time.
For example, she’d be painting a magical portrait or landscape in one of the unused classrooms with a group of her friends and he would waltz in with a tall ladder on his shoulder only to climb one step and manually replace a candle in the chandelier before packing up his things once more, an activity that seemed to take longer than necessary, and leaving. He could have used his magic, as she’d seen him do endless times when she noticed him at the end of her classes, but here, he didn’t.
Sometimes he would glance over at her, his tar-colored eyes locking with hers for a split second and a smug smirk creeping onto his face faintly enough that she was positive she was the only one who noticed. One time, he did this, only to drop the box of candles purposefully on the floor so he would then be able to stay longer and clean up the spilled contents.
Her friends would titter and fawn over the tall man after he left, gossiping about how handsome he was in a ‘broody’ sort of way or how well-endowed he probably was. While Penny could see the appeal of having a ‘bad boy’ partner, as she firmly believed her father had once fallen into that category before her mother came along, that didn’t mean she didn’t know those sorts of relationships tended to turn out badly.
Even after taking a page out of her mother’s book, “a surefire method to get some time to yourself,” she’d been informed, Penny had still been plagued by her giant spectre. Once, she’d been curled up on a cushioned window seat overlooking the grounds and suddenly he was leaning over right in front of her, cranking the creaking window open and sending a cool breeze rushing through the library. The chill crept up her bare legs, gooseflesh making her skin tingle. Mordred had brushed her shin when retracting his hand and was retreating with a poorly concealed grin on his face. His teeth were like ivory tombstones in neat little rows.
It was a chilly afternoon in November when Penelope finally confronted him. She’d been sitting for the better part of two hours in her Charms class while she watched Mordred wipe and dry the same window nearest to her desk for what the red-haired witch thought had been at least an hour and a half. His hands were turning blue and he just wouldn’t leave. So, after her class let out, she bundled herself up and went out onto the grounds, following the trail of large footprints to where he was now quickly cleaning the rest of the glass where he’d been inching along like molasses previously.
“Aren’t you cold, Mr. Deschain?” Penny raising her voice to be heard over the crisp winter winds.
It was almost too gratifying how she’d actually made him jump, his lanky frame jerking like a spooked cat. It has been enough to make her giggle. He turned around, an almost guilty look flashing on his face before it was replaced by something more blank.
“Not at all,” the deep tenor of his smooth voice curled around his slight smile, “but I have to ask the same of you,” his eyes trailed down, eyeing her bare legs submerged in a foot-and-a-half of snow.
Penny blushed, finally feeling the cold seeping into her skin. Her shoes and socks would be wet for the rest of the day if she didn’t hurry back to her dorm and change them before her next class started. Oh right, magic… A simple drying charm would do.
She shivered, “I’m fine!” she slid her knitted gloves off and held them out to him, looking askance so as not to make direct eye-contact, “Just put these on. I’m tired of looking at your frostbitten fingers…” Penny huffed half-jokingly, shoving the gloves into his chest before quickly turning away, or she would have had he not caught her hands.
The army-green accessories dangled in her clenched fists as her hands dangled in his much larger cold ones. Her breath stuttered, the vapor visibly escaping in sharp little puffs from the red lips that matched her red cheeks, nose, and ears. She was warm, even warmer than before, like a furnace. He, on the other hand, was cold. His grip was icy, his stance was rigid, and the way he clinically examined her hands was wrapped in suppressed emotion. However, his deep dark eyes were warm like newly laid asphalt on a summer day.
There was less than a foot of space between their bodies and a sharp angle between their eyes. It was here and now that Penny realized how drastic their height difference was. While Mordred had to be at least 6’3, she, on the other hand, had inherited her mother’s stature and barely cracked 5’4. She already knew she was small, but now she really knew that she was small.
Her thoughts were broken by Mordred gently lifting her hands to his chapped lips in a chivalrous gesture of gratitude. At the slow press of his skin to her pale freckled knuckles, Penny jerked but didn’t rip her hands out of his like she wanted to. Instead, she waited until he released them, which he seemed to do reluctantly. To make up for her loss of protection, she shoved her hands into her pockets and his frame jerked with silent laughter.
“Thank you, Miss Gray. This is very sweet of you,” he held the gloves up to his face and took a subtle sniff of the material, such a familiar gesture done by her father to her mother that she thought nothing of it, “I shall return them to you later this evening after dinner, if that’s alright…”
“Of course, Mr. Deschain,” she backed away slowly, knowing she would be late to her next class if she didn’t leave now.
“Please,” his dark eyes locked with her bright blues, “Call me ‘Mordred.’”
“Okay, Mordred.” She smiled shyly, testing the name on her lips as she turned away, “Good luck on the rest of the windows. Hopefully the others won’t be as difficult for you as this one was.”
She could have sworn his eyes flashed amber when he simply smiled at her in response.