Explanations
Moving: An abandoned house, Unknown; Outside, Unknown
25th september 2003
On hindsight, I should have not said anything about life-endangering things to someone who claims herself as my mum. But then again, how would I know? Mrs. Weasley is Ron’s mum, and Andy is my aunt, and nobody else dared – or deigned – to claim such a position otherwise, whether in the magical or non magical world, for various reasons, in all my life – until now, that is.
In any case, for the next eternity, I have the dubious pleasure of being in the centre of attention for the natives, and no help from my friends is allowed, as they – or rather, my incensed, furious, flabbergasted, deeply regretful, awefully wide-eyed self-titled mum, with occasional, respectful, discreet input from her following – interrogate me about the highlights of my life’s history.
However, after that, I turn the table on them, or at least the mum, asking for her name, status, situation, validity and certainty of claim on me, family, and many, many more, including how she ended up gate-crashing my unexpected party upstairs, in a rapid-fire fashion.
In response, she stuffs everything that I got out of her pockets into a big leather pouch that she grabs out of thin air, vanishes the now-full pouch back into thin air, then excuses herself and me from the camp. We move a little outside, and she dawdles even more by shrinking my clothes to a perfect fit – without any spell or feelable aura of magic use – but there’s nothing else that she can do to postpone everything, since the view outside is still the same as before: a broken, barren street with broken, giant stone houses at either side. Only that, now, everything is bathed in dull golden light that is dimmer than the usual afternoon light at… well, on Earth.
Strange, for someone who claimed herself as my mother with all alacrity, she feels reluctant to defend her claim when there’s a chance to do so.
No, not reluctant, but… defensive? Apprehensive? – Her emotions are roiling worse than ever now, than even when I was narrating my various near-death situations, and it’s so hard to concentrate on what she’s feeling. It’s even making me dizzy!
I scrunch my nose up at her when she takes a seat on a piece of stray, more-or-less smooth boulder, reseats me in her lap, but does and says nothing else for a long, long while, just looking at me.
“An impatient one, aren’t you, aðyemma?” she says at last, scrunching her own nose, with a sad, tiny smile playing on her lips.
The glint in her eyes is dark, though, so I hesitate with a cheeky comeback that’s already balancing at the tip of my tongue. “The baby needs help,” I say instead, deciding to take a safer route against all typical Gryffindor moves, remembering that my friends are still trapped here, that I myself am still very much a hostage, despite my delight that – at long last – I can spend so much time with the cocoon. “We need to go back, too. My friends and I, I mean.”
`Oh damn, why did I say that?` I realise when her expression – not only her eyes – grows dark and tight. Why advertise to the more-or-less kidnapper that you’re going to run away soon?
“We are going to talk about that later,” she decides at length, still, so I slump in her arms, to the accompaniment of her listless, mirthless chuckle. But she doesn’t talk at all for the next while, just staring off into the middle distance, with a pained and strangely resentful mien that is a little – well, I admit, a lot – worrying.
I can’t stand it any longer when her broody mood sees her holding me tight and burying her face in my hair. The cocoon shouldn’t be broody – home shouldn’t be broody.
“Please tell me why you think I’m your child?” I insist, with my voice muffled by her oddly Earth-styled – modern non-magical-styled – jacket.
Water bathes the top of my head, in reply, and that is the only reply for a long, long time, or so it feels to me.
And then, stumblingly, croakily, shakily, she blubbers about the tie that a mother shares with her child, who stays for a year in her womb and spends the next centuries afterwards close to her for at least the reason of easy reach for breastfeeding and other forms of childcare. The child shares a measure of the link; but being largely undeveloped during gestation and some time afterwards, the strength from this end is never enough for the said child to keenly feel – to deeply mourn, should it be broken. The mother, bearing most of the link, would not be this fortunate, should the worst come to pass.
And this mother did lose a child to death, at the end of a rather senseless war against two different factions, with the other child – the twin, this child’s elder sibling if by just nearly a day – missing and officially presumed dead.
I was dead.
I am a reincarnation.
What I have been assuming as a dream – the cocoon, the cocoon-mate, the shakes and shock and pain and pleas and worried urges – is instead a memory, but not of me inside Lily Evans’ womb, nor of that dark day when I lost my parents – James Potter and Lily Evans, my human parents.
It is a snippet of a memory that I somehow retain from my previous life, about – as the mum (`My mum?!`) tells it, semi coherently – the end of the war, when she and her guards must wade through a knot of enemy troop and, while her guards were occupied, an enemy commander that headed the troop managed to sneak in and bash her pregnant belly with his mace, causing her to deliver her children mid-term and almost then and there, even though the protective wards and armour she focused on that part of her body managed to save their lives. Laughing wetly and hollowly, she describes the low blow as “a lesson for a greedy, barbaric, podgy tyrant not to pick fights with Asgard,” which suggests to me that the basher didn’t know that he was trying to kill a pair of unborn babies and their mother.
Still, I’m not going to forget that name: Asgard.
I’m not going to forget the name of the children – her spouse’s children – who spirited my former self and my twin away from her almost right after she had delivered us, either: Helblindi and Býleistr. We are going to have words; although, secretly, I do agree with Helblindi that my mother’s life is worth trading off with mine, whatever they did to affect that, which most likely ended up with me dead and this blubbering mess clutching me alive. After all, how many times have I thought that Lily Evans would have a better job fighting against Voldemort if she were alive in my stead?
This mum (My mum! I have a mum! Even if she’s the mum of my former self – still two peas in a pod, or maybe two selves in a soul.) might not appreciate the thought, nonetheless, given how she’s been insisting so many times that outliving one’s child is the most horrible thing a mother would feel, and given how she’s raging against the two absent children right now. I had better be silent about it, at least till I can meet the two aforesaid – or aforeranted, rather – children.
Or pass a message to them, come to think of it again, since I do have responsibilities to the two Houses I am the head of, back on Earth.
And speaking of the location, “Where are we? I mean, on what planet, if we aren’t on Earth?” It should be a safer topic to discuss, right? Something that still pertains to my current… host… and her background? I really, really don’t want the cocoon to keep being a mess like this! (After all, if even the cocoon is a mess, then what about little, insignificant me – the proverbial caterpillar encased in it?)
And, “Ýmirheim,” she says. “It is known largely as Jötunheim among those on Earth who put us as legends some time ago, and also to the Asgardians. This specific area used to be a town. Most of the adults went to war on either side. The ones left were the pregnant, the children and the adolescents, with a handful of capable adult guards to supplement the pregnant in keeping them all safe. And then a splinter company among the Asgardians landed here and… Loí probably can see what happened next.”
`Legends…,` I groan inwardly, even as I nod tentatively to the implied question at the end. Then, “Were there any survivors? Aside from the baby, I mean?”
“There were, although most of them were ironically from the war-front.” The mirthless chuckle makes a return, and I’m beginning to despise it heartily.
But she answers when I ask; not with platitudes, not with “when you are older” rubbish, not with evasions, not with half-truths – and is it not an astonishing finding, that I can feel it when somebody is not being entirely truthful? Her mechanical words – forced out of her with an almost tangible pain – and demeanour makes her feel distant, but it also makes her view me as, if not an equal then someone close to it.
It’s good, when talking about difficult matters like this. She can return to being my indulgent cocoon once we’re reunited with the others. She’s still being my cocoon, anyway, since she hasn’t let me slip anywhere from her arms.
And now, “What are you? What am I now, for that matter? My friend Luna calls you and I ‘the blue angels’…. Well, and what are you to those who’re holding my friends and the baby? And how did you come here? I didn’t see or hear or feel anything when you came – so quickly, too!”
“Amma and Loí, little kip,” is what she says.
Well, there is still this, too, admitedly: her absurd insistence about this odd way of addressing ourselves, which sounds much like a little child and a doting adult talking to each other, to me. I’m beginning to think that she won’t be the cocoon if she doesn’t insist about this.
And she won’t answer my questions, either, apparently, if I don’t comply.
So, “Please tell Loí, Amma.”
I never, never would have expected her to start weeping again, though….