Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story
August 2nd, 2014 — the 43rd anniversary of the death of Leon Reynolds.
This day was always the hardest. Even as it had gotten easier, even as time had done its sacred duty and healed her wounds, it was still the hardest day of the whole year. Aurora preferred to take the day to herself. Her children would have accompanied her, if she had allowed it — Circe knew that they, perhaps even more so that herself, deserved that right, but they respected their mother's wishes for peace and tranquility. Sometimes others would be there when she arrived, or would join her shortly after, but over the years, they had all dropped away quietly. All but one. But today — today Aurora could see no one waiting for her. That was fine. Some conversations were best had in private, were they not? The August air was warm as Aurora walked through the grounds of Elysium, the light breeze whistling softly through the lush green grass that surrounded tombstones and grave markers. Elysium was a beautiful place, for a cemetery. It wasn't where Aurora would have wanted her husband to be buried, but Leon had been an American hero as well as a wizarding spy, and it turned out national security still took priority in her husband's life, even after death. It took her several minutes of walking by names that had grown so familiar to her over the years, she could recite them off the tip of her tongue without ever having seen the faces they belonged to. Men and women who all died around the same time, who all gave their lives and sometimes their deaths for their people and their countries. Aurora had never learned their stories. She didn't need to. They each had their own to mourn them, after all, and she'd had her fill of tragedy without adopting theirs. So Aurora continued to walk, until she found the headstone she'd been visiting for more years than she'd even been married.
Leon Reynolds. December 9th, 1937 - August 2nd, 1971. Beloved friend, husband, and father. A hero to us all. A sigh escaped Aurora's lips — the same sigh she had been carrying around in her chest for the last forty-three years, it felt like — and she folded her hands across her abdomen. "Hello, darling. I know it's been awhile. . ."
When Aurora was twelve, she met Leon Reynolds for the first time, in a tussle with her eldest brother on the streets outside her family estate. Leon was a strange boy — grubby and skinny, with a touch of wildness about him that called to something deeper inside her. Aurora chased off her brother before he could do too much damage to this strange wild boy, and together, they ran so fast that Aurora thought her feet might very well lift right off the ground without the help of a broom at all. And just like that, he became her strange wild boy, and if her brother ever wanted to knock him to the ground again, he had to go through her.
"The children are doing well. I knew you'd want to know." Aurora spoke conversationally as she pulled the bouquet of dying flowers from the vase that had been sitting in front of her husband's gravestone for more than a decade now. The flowers had once been lovely, with large white petals — daisies, perhaps, although she didn't have an intimate enough knowledge of flowers to be certain — but they had wilted long ago, the petals beginning to curl into a dry and dismal brown. Aurora had no idea who had brought them here. Not herself, she was reasonably certain, but it could have easily been Celeste or Castor, or any of the number of random individuals she'd met throughout the years that had attributed their lives or their loved ones' lives to some action or another of Leon Reynolds. Aurora had never tried to keep track of them — the grief had been hard enough, back then, without the reminder that there were absolute strangers who knew more about that part of her husband's life than she did. "Celeste is still drawing star charts, though I find myself wondering if she will give it up any day now. New Orleans was a good place for her to settle — bright and vivacious, just like her, and just like you, really — but now that the children are all readying to leave the nest, I can see her growing antsy." Aurora twirled her wand around the vase, conjuring a new bouquet of deep red roses yet to bloom. She gave the flowers a tap, and a charm to extend their limited shelf life shimmered over the petals. It was a tidy bit of spellwork — if there was anything Aurora had learned by spending half her life in a school, it was how to keep her magic tidy. "If that husband of hers isn't careful, she'll drag him out to Timbuktu before he even knows what hit him." Aurora pulled a cloth from within her robes and began to wipe the dust from the vase. "Meanwhile Castor has thrown himself into his astrolabes. He seems to think he's on the verge of developing a new model that will nearly double how far we can project accurate astrological readings. I swear, that boy sends me a new letter about it twice a week. He's considering seeking a new patent for it." Aurora clicked her tongue and shook her head as she adjusted the vase, centering it against the headstone. She tilted her head just slightly for a moment, considering, before she gave a small, self-satisfied smile. "Still — our son, the inventor of a new and improved way to read our universe? Wouldn't that be something."
When Aurora was fifteen, she was in love with Leon Reynolds. Despite being two years older, that Reynolds boy was as good as Aurora's shadow, or so whispered the teachers at school. Aurora didn't mind. Leon still had a wildness to him, and being near it reminded Aurora that there was more to her than star charts and ink stains and her mother's expectations. Her greatest fear was June, when he would leave her behind in these cold stone walls forever, whatever he promised about summers and letters to be sent. But no matter how slow time seems, it never stops, and the day came and went. Aurora kissed him after he crossed the graduation stage before she let him go. A few days later she returned to her home estate and waited on the humid streets just outside, but her strange wild boy didn't come back that day, or for a very long time.
"The grandchildren are all growing like weeds — I'm sure you're not surprised, but still, it manages to catch me off guard all the time, and I see them more often than most grandmothers can claim, I think." Aurora had moved on to dusting the headstone herself. There was no need, really — either magically or otherwise, Elysium was well maintained, gravestones included — but still, it made Aurora feel better. Like there was something she could still do for her late husband. "You would be proud. Little Fae is busy working for Spirito Santo. Jeanne Marie is off putting her chaotic energy to professional use — much to Celeste's relief. I thought maybe she'd worry herself into an ulcer there for a little while. You'd think she'd have more sympathy now for how difficult it was when she was a teenager, but Celeste doesn't seem to enjoy the irony." Aurora smiled to herself as she brushed away a fallen leaf from a corner of the headstone. "Then again, I remember you used to get a little surly too, whenever I was right. And she certainly is your daughter." It was almost funny, how personality traits like that could manifest on their own. Celeste was her father's daughter, and Castor his father's son, but between them they could hardly manage a single coherent memory of Leon Reynolds. "Castor's twins graduated school this year. Calypso's ready to go out and grab the world by the horns — clever as the devil and twice as pretty, that one is. She looks so much like my mother, have I ever told you that? And Cassiopeia is going into professional quodpot. Do you remember the fights that you and Orion used to get into? You swore up and down that quodpot was the world's most useless sport — but oh, darling, how you would change your tune if you could see your granddaughter in the sky now. She's a natural — that part, at least, I'm certain she didn't get from you." Aurora sighed again, and pulled away from the headstone. It was perfectly clean now — had been clean in the first place, if that were something she was willing to admit, but now there wasn't anything Aurora could even pretend to tidy. "The others are still in school. Auriga, and Lucian, and Aquila. Even little Fox will start in a week or two. But before you know it, I'll be here again in a blink of the eye, telling you about how they're all making their way into the world themselves, young and proud and full of life. Like you and I did, not so long ago. Time is funny that way, isn't it?"
When Aurora was eighteen, she found Leon Reynolds mulling around the streets outside her family estate, casual as sin and waiting for her like it was just any other summer day from their childhood. Like there hadn’t been almost four years of absence, of grief and yearning and silence between them. Aurora had slapped him, quick and hard as she could manage, a burst of wildness that had suddenly returned to her after vanishing without a trace more than three years ago. She’d pushed him away — and then just as quickly, pulled him back, wanting nothing more than for her strange wild boy to make up for the years he should have spent touching her.
"They would have come, if they could. Celeste and Castor, perhaps even the grandchildren, if someone had asked them. If I had asked. But I didn't. I hope you'll forgive me." Aurora closed her tired eyes and took a deep breath. This was always the most difficult part — when she ran out of things to do, of things to distract her from the fact that she was standing in front of her husband's grave. In other years, she would have taken her leave at this point — but not this year. She still had more to say. "I don't quite know when I got this old," Aurora admitted to the headstone, the echo of a mirthless laugh in her voice. "Castor and Celeste have started to worry when I do things on my own — have started to worry, even, of my living in the school, as if I didn't have an entire army of house elves at my beck and call. And for this — I thought Castor was going to insist on accompanying me, really, but I suspect his wife talked him out of it. Perhaps that is selfish of me, not to bring your children here to see you. But they know where you are, and how to get here, and are perfectly competent in doing so on their own, I imagine. And you and I — well, they say parents need to take time to themselves too, don't they?" It wasn't a funny remark, not even to Aurora, but if Leon were actually here, and not merely a stone in the ground, she knew he would have smiled. "Mostly, I wanted to speak to you in private. To say the things that I have only been saying to myself for the past several years. I know you can't answer — I am not so aged out of my own wits as to expect a talking headstone — but. . . you can still listen. After everything you put me through, Leon Reynolds, you owe me this much."
When Aurora was twenty-two, her younger brother died. Little Altair, who in truth hadn’t been any smaller than Aurora herself, and only two years her junior. But he had always been clever, far too clever for his own good. His own cleverness had been his downfall — it had led to overachievement, and then to boredom, and then to experimentation. As it turned out, drugs didn’t care about cleverness, and in the end, the overdose won out. Aurora stood alone at the funeral while her elder brother supported their mother, and when Leon Reynolds showed up late to the wake, he hadn’t tried to stop her from yelling or shoving or crying. He simply waited until she wore herself out, and then offered her an escape — to run away with him, to marry him, to live with him in New York where the rest of his new life was waiting. Aurora loved her family and her home, but it was broken now, and maybe she loved her strange wild boy more, so she went.
"Did you know?" The breeze picked up into a short gust at her question, like the air itself could sense her agitation. Aurora didn't even know exactly what she was asking. Had Leon known — what, exactly? That he had sired a child on some nameless woman on another continent? That his child would one day go on to wreak the worst destruction magical America had seen in decades? That Aurora would one day be summoned to the presence of the Director of Magical Security and asked with pitying eyes whether she could identify her husband as the father of another woman's child? She shook with her rage and indignation, but closed her eyes, taking a deep, steadying breath. Her anger wasn't the point here. "Would you have told me, if you'd had the chance? I can't imagine you had the opportunity. They say he's a little younger than Castor, and when you left, Castor wasn't — well, I suppose that hardly matters. Because I don't think you would have told me. You never wanted to tell me things, when they were hard. You always ran away when things were difficult, and blamed it on your job, your unknowable life that I could never be a part of, and I always took you back. Did you think I wouldn't have taken you back after this? You were probably right, but that doesn't make you any less of a Circe-fucked coward over it." Aurora bit down hard on her lip and looked away, trying to reign in her anger. It took her several long seconds before she could continue in a more controlled voice. "I didn't tell them." Castor and Celeste, she'd meant, and the grandchildren in turn. Hadn't told them about their father's betrayal, about Scott James sliding a picture before her and explaining that the man who had just struck such a blow against their nation had come about as part of her husband's infidelity. "How could I tell them? I raised them to idolize you, damn you. I told them you were a hero. And what's worse, I believed it. I let it dictate my life. The impossible standard of Leon Reynolds, war hero. Martyr. Love of my life. And now what have you left me with in my final days? Leon Reynolds, traitor. Adulterer. Liar." Aurora spat the words, feeling her rage draw tears to her eyes, but she didn't dare cry. She had never cried when she and Leon fought — only after he was gone, and had left her to pick up the pieces of her life alone, as she always did. "And of course, in a true coward's fashion, you went and died, and don't even have to deal with the consequences of this mess you've made. Damn you."
When Aurora was twenty-nine, she and Leon had a fight that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She had always hated this career of his, no matter what Leon preached about truth and justice and serving his country. She loathed this agency that had swept her strange wild boy away from her before he’d taken more than two steps from the graduation stage, that continued to take him away from her night after night, week after week. The nights when he returned home to her were the easiest — all she could remember was how she loved him, how she missed him, how to get lost in him, and after Celeste, the sounds of him murmuring stories in the dark as he tucked her into bed filled Aurora with a contentment that felt like it would never fade. But inevitably the nights when he would leave would come — those were the hardest. The incessant tapping of the owl at the window, and the feeling inside her heart as she watched him walk away into the night. Once, she fought back and asked him to stay — for her, for their daughter, for their growing family. The back and forth grew so loud, Aurora thought it would wake Celeste, and by the time the man who had once been her cherished strange wild boy strode into the night, she was not sorry to see him go, and not sorry that she didn’t tell him about the subtle swell of her belly.
"But do you know what I think I'm most angry about, Leon?" Aurora had grown quiet in her words, so intent was she on this lifeless gray headstone before her. A flock of hippogriffs could have begun mating rituals just behind her, and she wouldn't have noticed. No, she needed to have it out between her and her husband — even if he did quite conveniently happen to be dead. "If we put the lying, and the cheating, and the fact that you apparently fathered a mass murderer aside — I think what I'm most angry about is that you never did live up to your promise. Do you remember it, darling? I was standing in a cemetery just like this, after Altair. . . and you said that we could make a life worth living together. But we didn't, did we? I made it. We made Celeste, and Castor, but you were never there for them. You were never there for me. All those promises, and what did you ever give me? A lonely house, a cold bed, and an ugly headstone." How many years had Aurora wanted to say such an unthinkable thing out loud? All those years she had let those thoughts fester with the guilt inside of her. Not anymore. Not after this. Leon Reynolds, Circe rest his soul, did not deserve her guilt. "I love you," Aurora Belmont Reynolds whispered into the warm August air. "And I miss you. But the thing is, my darling — I missed you before you were dead."
When Aurora was thirty, an unfamiliar man showed up at her door and brought news that shattered her world. Her strange wild boy was dead in some strange wild land across a sea, and he would never return to her arms again. Their last words were argumentative, and mean, and full of hurt — but how could they have known it to be their last fight, their last conversation, their last chance to embrace, slipping through their fingers? Knowledge was power, they said, but what power could there be in knowledge that arrived too late? It took Aurora days upon weeks upon months to come to terms with the reality — that Leon would never be more than a figment of their daughter's memory, and a stranger to their son. It was cruel, and unfair, and all Aurora had left of the strange wild boy she'd loved all her life. It may have been Leon's story, but it was Aurora's to tell.
Tell his story she had — except she hadn't known quite all of it, had she? She hadn't known the full truth of the man she had always considered the love of her life. But she did now, and she had questions. And if she was being honest, it wasn't Leon she had come here to speak with.