Tolivander Violets' Story entitled "Beginnings"
Beginnings
Tolly’s father, much like his own father before him, was a true believer. A believer in the Fregualitarian movement or the Cause as it was often called. But unlike his own father, a stern, almost stoic man like his father before him, Henry Violets was a gregarious storyteller. He loved a good yarn and could often be found entertaining crowds with amusing anecdotes and charming tales.
Tolly had loved his father, the storyteller. He loved to hear the stories but his favourite was the story of how his parents came to be together. It wasn’t that fancy of a story to be fair but Henry spun it well. So much so, that Tolly’s mother, Gabrielle, would have to interject little nuggets of truth to prevent the story from becoming too much of a work of fiction.
The story of Henry and Gabrielle was a family legend. After his parents’ death, Tolly would wait until his grandmother was out of the house and then he would gather up the girls, his sisters - Charity and Faith, and tell them the story as well. A nugget of memory about the two people who over time had become fuzzy and indistinct for the twins, so young when their parents were so cruelly taken from them.
This was the story that Tolly would tell:
This is the story of Henry Violets and Gabrielle LeBeau. Henry was one of the few who chose to wear his tattoo. A strange thought to many. He was a child of Lavender Birch and the Fregualitarians and at merely 16, he knew, without a shadow of a doubt that he must go out and spread the word, the message of the Cause. He was clever and yet had the ability to prevaricate, lie, to go along when he needed to pass all the entrance exams to survive the Academy. Henry volunteered to be sent. He was only one of three sent that year - two boys and a girl, all marked dominants, all sent to different Academies to spread the message of the Cause.
Henry was sent to the Academy located in the outskirts of New York City. The population of the Academy was a mix of urban youth, trendsetters from Brooklyn and most dreaded of all, the high society youth from the wealthiest families in the Country. It was considered a tough assignment for a Fregualitarian recruiter as the wealthy had a dependence factor that prevented many from being receptive to the message. Most of them had made their wealth off the very system itself so why would they want to change it. It could also be quite dangerous - the wrong word, to the wrong person and it could be curtains for the young infiltrator.
Henry entered the Academy as the blue-collar kid from the middle of nowhere. Some of the children sneered, while others simply ignored him. Henry didn’t mind. He bided his time. Quiet at first, so quiet as he figured out the lay of the land. It didn’t take long before the others, disenchanted and world-weary youth from the City, noticed that Henry’s comments, while softly spoken, were pointed and often insightful, more so than appeared at face value. Henry was subtle though, hard to tell his comments from a typically sneering teenager really, unless you were paying attention. It was hard to be sure sometimes what he really even said but he caused people to think. His own father had told him the greatest weapon he could ever have was the heart and mind of another.
Others also took note, those outside the circle forming around Henry. One of those was Gabrielle LeBeau. She was a society beauty, labelled as a submissive, and destined for the best, exactly the way she had grown up - with nothing but the best. Her future was mapped out before her and it didn’t occur to her to object. She was a trained submissive and her mother was a fierce Domme with “expectations” for her beautiful daughter.
Gabrielle noticed the new addition with interest at first and then some consternation. The new boy was certainly handsome and clever but he always seemed to be judging them, judging her. It bothered her but she couldn’t even say why. It simply did. She tried to talk to him but, convinced she was a poor candidate for the Cause, Henry didn’t bother much with her.
This annoyed the young submissive and pricked her ego as she was used to dominants fawning over her. She was beautiful after all and very wealthy. In fact, she had her pick of dominants. Henry clearly liked girls but paid her no attention whatsoever. It made her crazy. She started to preen. She dressed up for every class they were in together. In demonstrations and presentations, she was the epitome of submissive perfection. As she was praised, she would glance over at Henry to find that he wasn’t even watching. Sometimes he even had his back to her, utterly disinterested. The harder she tried, the less he seemed to care about her at all. He didn’t even seem to notice her attempts to catch his attention.
Finally after nearly a year of classes together, the two were paired together for a demonstration. It was an examination in fact, one that they were required to practice before the actual presentation. The rehearsal room had minimal supervision, one lax Teaching Assistant who spent most of her time texting and only really bothered to watch the kids who weren’t doing well.
Henry had been annoyed at having been paired with Gabrielle. He felt his time was better spent elsewhere, on potential recruits for the Cause, and not some society brat who filled her empty head with learning her lessons by rote and didn’t have a single interesting thing to say. She was nothing more than what society had deemed her to be and this irritated him immensely. The “puppets” he called them. He attended the rehearsal room begrudgingly, in a mood but determined to suck it up, get through it and get back to the important stuff.
Gabrielle, on the other hand, was determined to impress. She made sure she was dressed perfectly, hair done, make-up on and she knew she looked beautiful. She walked into the rehearsal room feeling absolutely confident that this time Henry Violets would finally look at her, notice her but as she walked into the room, she could have sworn that she saw him roll his eyes. Something strange happened to her in that moment. Something that had never really happened before. She became angry. Genuinely, absolutely, full of rage, could break things, if looks could kill, he’d be buried already ANGRY. Henry seemed to mock her with his every half-hearted instruction and his utterly disinterested eyes. His instructions were stupid, as if he was just trying to be annoying.
It all came to a head when the Teaching Assistant stepped out of the room for a few minutes. Henry barely noticed actually but Gabrielle had. Just to screw with the pretty puppet girl, he ordered her to lick his shoe.
With a glare that he didn’t bother to notice, Gabrielle leaned forward and did as he instructed. Bored and determined to be irritating, Henry then ordered her to lick the floor and seemed to smirk down at her as he said this. Beyond enraged now, Gabrielle bent again as if she were going to lick the floor when at the last minute she turned her head and closed her teeth around Henry’s right ankle. She bit down and hard - hard enough to leave deep teeth imprints in his skin and only barely stopping at breaking it. Then she leaned back, looked up at him with a sparkle of fury in her eyes and replied as calm as a cucumber, “Yes Sir.”
To her undying shock, Henry threw back his head and burst into laughter. He laughed so hard that he had to sit himself down on the floor. He laughed and laughed until finally he stopped and caught his breath. He sat up and looked Gabrielle in the eyes, properly, for the very first time, and said with a wide grin, “Well I’ll be damned, I guess there is more to you than I thought. I think I owe you an apology.” Gabrielle couldn’t have been more surprised by this response - the laughter and then the direct look, the clear gaze from a boy who hadn’t seemed to even consider her before.
That moment changed everything. Gabrielle was challenged by Henry at every turn - her beliefs, her behaviour, her very way of life - all turned on its head. Her plan for her future seemed almost ridiculous in the face of Henry’s passions. Henry for his part had to reconsider his views on the society kids that he had largely ignored in his recruitment campaign. He stopped seeing them as mere puppets and instead as people.
They became friends, good ones, and Gabrielle found that she loved it - arguing with Henry, getting to have an opinion and having that opinion taken seriously. Slowly, she became a true believer. She stopped considering having the “right” thing to say and started to really think about everything. Not worrying about being perfect was a release that she hadn’t even known she needed. And when she stopped being “perfect”, Henry finally saw that Gabrielle was in fact incredibly beautiful. The more opinionated she became, the more Henry seemed to adore her. He liked the woman he found under her shell - she was sassy and interesting, thoughtful and kind, fierce and proud. A woman he fell hopelessly, madly and utterly in love with.
The Christmas before graduation, Henry proposed to Gabrielle and to her family’s horror, she said yes. They concluded an official claim to meet society’s demands and burned the collar on the first night in their new home back in Lavender Birch. On their wedding night, Gabrielle told Henry to take off his wedding ring as she had had a message engraved. Henry hadn’t noticed. He never took off his ring. Curious, Henry tugged off the ring and held it up to the light. The words epitomized the exact reason he loved Gabrielle so much for there it was … on the inside of his wedding band, “If given the chance, I’d bite you again. But harder this time.”
(1729 Words)
