Mage background tat

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

“So, what about your father?” the boy asked, as he trailed a lazy hand down Epona’s back.

It was 5 am, and they were alone by the campfire, wrapped up in the same blanket. He’d told her about his family, his Highers, his friends and his plans for university, and then kissed her for a while when he ran out of stories to tell and just wanted the girl in his arms for a while.

Then they had both stopped talking.

Now, a little later, in the quiet lull of the near-dawn, he asked Epona about her family. She wrinkled her nose a little, and kissed his chest while she tried to think of what to say.

"I never knew my father," she said, eventually. "That's rather a family tradition. I don't think my mother ever knew her father either. I mean, I know who he is. Sort of."

She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering. An intricately carved piece of jade, wrapped up in silk, delivered by a strange Chinese man on her eighth birthday. An egg for her sixth birthday, that she'd broken within half an hour, and then, whilst crying over the broken pieces, had found a doll that he'd somehow hidden inside. An emerald in a matchbox which smelt oddly of dirt and dynamite, left on the windowsil one Christmas, when she was fourteen. Those were her memories of her father. She had turned sixteen without ever having seen his face.

The boy stroked her hair, a little uncertainly.

"Sort of?"

Epona smiled.

"Sort of. He sent presents. I knew his name. Or a name, anyway. I don't think it was his real name. My mother's name is Elisa. She makes pottery; you know, mugs, jugs, piggy banks. That kind of thing. And she's double jointed. Apparently it runs in the family."

She threw the boy a mischievous glance. He went slightly pink although he tried to also look smug. He was still a little confused as to exactly how he'd ended up here, although he wasn't complaining. Jesus, how many of his friends were going to believe this?

Epona nuzzled absent mindedly. She wasn't entirely sure how this had happened either. She never was, when it came to her lovers. She rarely felt as if she chose them. Simply someone would throw her a look, or a smile, or she'd just catch the scent of them on a breeze and she'd know, like she knew when it was time to pack up camp and move on, or she knew when it was set to rain. She knew when she needed to be with someone for a little while.

The boy buried his face in Epona's hair to hide his expression and said, in slightly muffled tones, "she sounds cool. Your mum..."

Epona scratched at the back of his neck.

"Ma? She's cool. More like a sister than a mother in some ways. We lived with my grandmother, Marguerite, all the while I was growing up. Marguerite was Belgian. She came over to Britain after the War. Something to do with my grandfather, who I also never knew."

She frowned.

"I knew that he was a doctor. His name was Thomas. I don't know why they never got married. She always spoke of him fondly. She had a picture of him on the mantelpiece. "

Epona grinned. "Awful picture really. One of this really stiff, formal, black and white ones. Him with a silly expression. It...I imagine...didn't look much like him at all."

There was a brief and awkward silence that Epona hoped wasn't noticeable, before she added "I had a cousin. Tom. Marguerite always said he looked a lot like my grandfather. He used to turn up every now and then. He taught me to ride when I was a kid. And he always turned up when things were going wrong. I never knew why.

"He turned up on the same day my father arrived. My sixteenth birthday..." and then Epona was quiet. The boy looked at her, slightly confused.

"Go on..." he said, because sharing stories felt like the right thing to be doing right now, with the fire burning low and the shadows pulling in close around them.

Epona shook her head. She was seven different kinds of crazy about this boy with the serious eyes, who looked at her like she was starlight, but he didn't come from her world. He wasn't Awake, and that meant that there were stories she couldn't tell. She couldn't tell him about the three odd little gifts that her father had laid out before her on her sixteenth birthday; the wooden horse, the lead soldier and the delicate blown glass ball that fitted exactly into the palm of her hand.

She couldn't tell him about the two towers in the forest, and the white horse she had followed.

She couldn't tell him who she really was.

So she kissed him instead and told him that she could think of better things to do that swap stories, which he agreed to happily enough, and as the thin light of dawn began to slide over the horizon, she took him by the hand and lead him away to find a place to sleep.