shesepankh | ghost

Kindergarten teacher Renée Higgenbotham Swan (36) was killed in a car crash one mile from her residence in Phoenix, AZ, January 9, 2005. She is survived by her daughter Isabella (16). Her service will be held at -

Bella has the entire obituary pasted into a page of one of her compilation notebooks but tends not to re-read past the first lines. It's repellent. The concept of obituaries is repellent. The funeral is over. Renée's vibrant brief life has been summed up over the course of a paragraph, and is also over.

Bella pretends to sleep on the plane. Her neighbor is talkative and she doesn't want to say shut up, my mom just died, because - what if it doesn't work? What if this news doesn't have the power to bludgeon everyone else into stunned silence the way it does Bella?

Charlie collects her. Charlie hugs her. Charlie doesn't make her talk. Good wonderful understanding quiet Charlie does not say a word. He takes her home. Her room's where she left it last August.

It's raining.

Bella stays home, moving in, moping, for a day, and then she shows up at school, gray-faced and withdrawn. First class is English. Okay, whatever.

The teacher wants her to introduce herself. Bella wants to yank on the skinny end of his tie until he regrets making her.

She stands at the front of the room and says that her name is Bella Swan and she's moved here to live with her dad. The teacher makes an impatient go on gesture and she stands there for a moment before robotically saying the same thing she produced at the beginning of the year in her old school in Phoenix when they were doing go-around-the-room-and-share-facts. "I'm one of those people who actually likes Shakespeare."

He lets her sit down.

She sits.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sundayfish

"Can you tell which side of the family?"

From:

castmyown

"Not unless I went and got another separate medallion of the right type and tested it on you."

Edited Date: 2014-05-05 11:42 pm (UTC)

From:

sundayfish

"Mm. But it's not normal for magic wingy things to pass out, you're sure?"

Here's the house. He parks. He gets a shock blanket out of the trunk, wraps Bella wings and all in it, and hauls her out of the car.

From:

castmyown

"Quite, my sister and I are - magic wingy things and neither of us did."

Darren will help with carrying her if he can and it's not in Charlie's way.

From:

sundayfish

Charlie manages to get the door open without Darren's help. He deposits Bella with exquisite gentleness on the couch. He points Darren to a chair. He closes the door. He sits at the chair nearest the Bella's-head-end of the sofa and adjusts the blanket so it's not over her face.

From:

castmyown

Darren sits in the chair. He is not really up to talking, right now, but he keeps giving Bella worried glances, every now and then.

Within ten minutes, the doorbell rings.

From:

sundayfish

Charlie gets up to answer it.

"You Darren's father?"

From:

castmyown

The man standing there looks nothing like Darren, but he nods. "I am, yeah. Vernon Sanders, nice to meet you, but wish it was under better circumstances. May I come in? I don't know how much you know but I seriously sympathize with 'my kid has wings and is magic' so I'll try to explain er - gently?"

Edited Date: 2014-05-06 12:00 am (UTC)

From:

sundayfish

Charlie lets him in.

From:

castmyown

And in he goes.

"Hi, dad," says Darren. He looks like he needs a hug.

So he gets one from his father. "Hey, sport. It's okay."

Darren nods, then goes back to being silent and miserable once the hug ends.

"Right then," says Vernon, finding a spot to sit. "How much do you know, and how much would you like me to tell you?"

From:

sundayfish

"Ideally Bella'd be awake and telling me what she's planning to do with the wings and - whatever else. Failing that I want to know what she can do if she feels like it. What the situation for her is now."

From:

castmyown

"Well I don't know your daughter, but - she can now turn into a sphinx at will, if she has the medallion. Or, pick and choose parts of a sphinx to have, like the wings. If she doesn't have the medallion, she will default to being a sphinx, because of hokey magic that was disguising her as a human all her life. That just got broken, now she is a sphinx that can turn human. Due to it being a sphinx in particular, she's likely to be extremely magical. I think in healing magic, but there's probably some others she'll get naturally. So she will be able to fly, heal, and probably after Darren geeks out about magic with her, lots of other things."

From:

sundayfish

"Why's this such a surprise, why wouldn't I know this was a thing that might happen? She in danger if people find out, that why it's secret?"

From:

castmyown

"It's likely that she could be, yeah. It's why it's not on neon signs everywhere. Lots of people won't take their neighbors being gryphons very well, and all. Some kids go through their turning and their families completely freak out and disown them, or throw them out, or a variety of other nasty things. That's not going to happen here, is it?" asks Vernon, carefully.

Edited Date: 2014-05-06 12:17 am (UTC)

From:

sundayfish

Charlie shakes his head. "Still Bella, isn't it?"

From:

castmyown

"Yup," says Vernon, pleased with this answer. "Good on you, I freaked when I found out about this."

Darren manages a little smile, from his cloud of misery over there.

From:

sundayfish

"Not saying it's not unnerving as all hell, but it's still Bella, or looks to be anyway."

From:

shesepankh

Bella stirs. She stretches a wing; it unfurls the blanket. She yawns an almighty cat-jawed yawn. She looks blearily around her surroundings. She inspects her wing.

She notices that Charlie and Darren and a stranger are present.

"Uh."

Edited Date: 2014-05-06 12:23 am (UTC)

From:

castmyown

"Yeah, it is," agrees Vernon. "Still completely her."

Then Bella wakes up.

"Hi," says Darren, guiltily.

"Ah, she wakes," says Vernon, amused. "Well. Nice to meet you, I'm Darren's father, Vernon."

"I'm glad you're okay," adds Darren, to Bella.

Edited Date: 2014-05-06 12:26 am (UTC)

From:

sundayfish

"Bells," says Charlie, hugging her.

From:

shesepankh

"Hi, Dad." She rids herself of wings and hugs him back. "I think I'm fine but I don't know why I keep losing consciousness. Thanks for getting me home, Darren. Nice to meet you, Darren's dad."

From:

castmyown

Darren nods. "I couldn't just leave you there..."

"I would have had to make the parental expression of fatherly disappointment," says Vernon dryly. "Also his conscience would have kicked the crap out of him."

Darren snorts.