Fairytale
‘He saw her in a nightgown, not a party dress, but that did not lessen the spell she cast. They said the sleeping girl bewitched whoever looked upon her with her beauty, but what is the difference between love and lust?’
Morticia Gregel Ward, 1999
The check up was routine, and honestly, not unexpected. The Ward needed checking now that it reopened.
The Head Healer of Saint Mungo’s, Vega Lufkin, an average-sized woman with a short, dark bob hair-cut, leads the way up to the fourth floor past the rows of shouting portraits. “I really hope the Ministry finds our Wards to be in compliance with their standards, but after the conduct on this particular Ward, I cannot say I am shocked at all,” the Head Healer says in a mater-of-fact way to the ginger haired man who follows her.
“It’s always pleasant when St. Mungo’s decides to cooperate. The Head of Magical Law Enforcement has put up quite a stir, and if I just check on the patients “ to make sure no one is here that is not supposed to be here “ I think things will smooth over with the Ministry. Once again, I cannot begin to say how much your cooperation means to us,” the man replies as he adjusts his horn-rimmed glasses.
Healer Lufkin nods and shoves open the doors to the fourth floor, and after the two pass through, the doors bang shut, and the sound echoes down the white hallway. They tred over scuffed floors that are no longer gleaming white and arrive at another set of doors with the plague reading Morticia Gregel Ward hovering over them like an omen.
The man pulls the clip board away from his side, and his quill makes a quick scratch upon it as he tests the ink. “Healer Lufkin, if you are busy, and I’m sure you are as Head Healer, I should have no problem conducting this investigation.”
With obvious relief in her voice, the woman offers, “If you need me, I would, of course, insist on staying and helping the Ministry . . .”
“Nonsense,” the man insists. “I’m perfectly capable of evaluating half a dozen patients.”
“If you need anything, the Healers on the Sanguine-Levette Ward and the Janus Thickey Ward will undoubtedly oblige you,” the Head Healer says in a warm, hospitable tone with just an edge of ingratiation. Before Healer Lufkin turns to walk away, she extends her hand and says, “Mr. Weasley, we here, at St. Mungo’s, are always happy to cooperate with the Ministry of Magic. I would like to make that clear, despite some of the past dealings of former Healers.”
“Of course . . . I understand. Your willingness to cooperate will not be forgotten.”
They bow to each other before Healer Lufkin turns and walks back toward the double doors. When she disappears through them, the man looks down at his clip board. ‘Six patients . . . I could do the chizpurfle egg patient first . . .’
His eyes stop on the Ward’s name sake.
‘Morticia Gregel . . . grandfather talked about her once . . .’
Percy remembers his grandfather, rubbing his hand over his balding head, as he sat in his favorite rocking chair. Sitting at his feet, bugging him mercilessly about his days at the hospital, Percy remembers the old man telling him about his Wards and the Healers he knew.
“There was this girl . . . Morticia Gregel “ there’s a Ward named after her,” Malone Prewett told his grandson one sunny afternoon. “Poor girl . . . cursed, she was.”
Percy looks up at the engraved plague above his head. ‘He was getting old . . . died when I was six . . . he never told me she was still on the Ward,’ Percy thinks as he pushes back one of the doors to the Ward and lets it clang shut behind him. The two doors and four grey curtains seem mundane, and Percy walks to one of them and pull it open to see an empty bed. He tugs the other one open . . . no patient. With an impatient sigh, he yanks the final curtain back.
She seems like a doll. She looks like every princess in every silly story he heard told to him by his mum. ‘Mum would always read them for Ginny and make us listen anyway . . . the only good part was when the knight killed the dragon or the troll . . . I never thought about the girl too much.’
Her hair, arrayed around her like a fan, seems as dark as the ink on the clipboard . . . the clipboard that Percy lays on the foot of the bed as he approaches her. ‘I suppose there’s not much to examine . . . she hasn’t moved in a hundred years.’
Still, he reaches down and puts one hand on her cheek. Immediately, he feels a lump swell in his throat. ‘She’s so cold . . . maybe I just think I’m sweating because I would be very warm next to her . . . yes . . . yes, that’s all it is.’
He looks up at the drape, still drawn back and hanging open. ‘I-I should shut it . . . I wouldn’t want anyone to walk in on this examination. It would look . . . maybe unseemly, I suppose.’ Percy draws the drape shut, and the room is plunged into the ethereal blue light. Suddenly, in the silence the charmed curtains provide, Percy can finally hear his hammering heart.
He walks back over to the bed side. “Funny . . .” he remembers his grandfather talking as he smoked his pipe. “Funny thing, that girl . . . when you saw her, you wanted to love her . . . protect her. I always thought it was part of the spell, you know.”
Percy gingerly fingers her hair. ‘It’s the spell . . . yes, that’s it. It’s just the spell . . . her beauty . . . those lips . . . they’re all part of the spell. Just check the clipboard . . . say she’s in prime condition . . .’
But now, Percy stares again at the lush, red lips.
‘I never cared about the part where the prince had to kiss the princess . . .’ Percy thinks back to all the old tales. ‘I confess . . . they were never interesting . . . but I suppose they would be to a girl . . . every girl would want to be this lovely . . .’
He leans down towards her and cups both cold, marble white cheeks in his shaking hands. ‘Come on, Perce . . . she’s practically a dead thing!’
But he sticks one hand under her little, button nose. He feels the soft, damp breath against his fingers. ‘Alive . . . she is alive.’
The blood pounds in his ears. He leans closer, and curiosity eats at his conscious. ‘It’s just a spell . . . come on, get over it . . .’
He runs a finger over her lips. ‘They are as smooth as rose petals . . . come on, Perce, it’s a spell . . .’
“Poor girl, she was just dumped on our doorstep,” Malone Prewett’s voice floats back into his mind. “Her own father just sold her to us. Can you imagine? Her family just sold her . . . like some trinket. They even made me her guardian . . . I always took care of her. Poor thing never had anyone to care about her. Not really.”
He kisses her.
Really, they just barely brush their lips together, but the soft scent of her skin “ Percy cannot think what it smells like “ overwhelms him. He bends down and kisses her again, but this time with a bit of force. He does not pry her mouth open with his tongue, but he wishes she would open it for him.
He bends over, one knee on her bed, and presses himself against her. One hand slips effortlessly under her head, pulling it up towards his. One hand grips her waist, and he realizes how thin the night gown is. Chills shoot down his spine, and a deep, pulling sensation behind his naval causes him to gasp.
‘Let her go . . . dear God . . . she’s unconscious!’
He surfaces for air and stares at her eyelids . . . her eyes twitch underneath them, and a blush lingers upon her snow white face. Percy flushes and places the girl down in the bed. Readjusting his glasses, he hurriedly grabs his clipboard and flees.
‘She . . . she smells like the garden after it rains. That’s what she smells like . . . like what I smell when I smell Amortentia . . . ’
Percy wipes his sweating forehead, and tries to compose himself. He can feel how flushed he is. ‘It’s just a spell. Merlin! Get a grip on yourself, mate!’
In the room, locked away behind the charmed curtains, sweat breaks over the brow of the sleeping girl. She twitches in her sleep, and a soft moan escapes her mouth as her back arches. Her face flushes, and then, she gives a loud gasp.
Her eyes snap open.
She clasps her gut, and the warm sensations flowing though her body disturb her. She glances around the room, thankful that no one is watching her, and takes deep calming breathes. ‘Merlin . . . what a dream,’ she thinks. ‘It was so . . . arousing. I hope I didn’t talk in my sleep.’
She looks down at the night gown. ‘What is this thing? It’s a bit thin . . . and what is this place? This isn’t the Ravenclaw dorm room. What happened? Where am I?’
Morticia throws the sweat soaked covers off herself and walks to the grey curtain. She ignores the lightness in her head as she pulls the drape back. She doesn’t hear much more than she did within the curtain, but it is enough to let her know that there might be people around. She proceeds, on shaking legs, into the main Ward, but she sees no one.
‘I’m in a hospital. I know I wasn’t feeling good, but did I really get that ill? Where is everyone?’ Morticia thinks as she walks to the set of double doors. She opens them, and now, she wishes she had shoes because the tiles make her feet cold.
She hears the doors open behind her, and she turns her head to look. A ginger haired man with horn rimmed glasses walks through them, but at the very sight of her, he drops his clip board and staggers back into the doors with a thud.
His face is the color of his hair now, and Morticia flushes. ‘Am I some type of ghost? What got under his skin?’
She feels the funny, warm feeling in her gut again when she says, “I . . . what am I doing here? I haven’t seen anyone else . . .”
“You . . . you’ve been asleep,” the man stammers as he readjusts his glasses and tries to compose himself, but Morticia can see he is still flushed and red. “You’ve been here . . . you need to see Healer Lufkin.”
“Wait!” Morticia shouts. “Explain this to me. Where have I been? Tell me.”
The man glances around, as if watching for someone to Apparate in and save him. When no one appears, he says, “Y-you were cursed. You’ve been asleep for over a hundred years.”
“What?” Morticia says, and a laugh escapes her mouth. “What are you playing at? I . . .”
She is about to contradict it when her gut clenches up again. She knows, in some way, that it is true, but she does not know how or why she knows it. She stares at the man, her mouth open, and the smile from the little laugh still lingering on her face.
“So . . . it’s true then?” she asks in a softer voice. “My parents . . . my friends . . . all dead, aren’t they?”
The man gives a quick nod. It is then at the girl looks above his head and reads the golden plague. “Morticia Gregel Ward . . . they locked me up, didn’t they?”
As she rests her eyes on the man’s pale, freckled face, she can see him sweating. ‘He looks as if he caused me to fall into some cursed coma . . . that’s just silly.’
“You aren’t a Healer, are you?” she asks, and he shakes his head. “Well, who are you?”
“I-I’m Percy Weasley . . . I’m here inspecting the Morticia . . . well, your Ward . . . on official ministry business,” he stammers as he thrusts his hand towards her. They shake, and his palm is slick with sweat.
Morticia shakes her head. “No need to be nervous, Percy. I . . . what do I do? They don’t teach you how to deal with this type of stuff in school.”
The man tries to smile, but it looks like a grimace. “I suppose not . . .”
“There you are!” a woman shouts. “Did you find the Ward satisfactory, Mr. Weasley?”
Morticia gives the man a quizzical look, but he flushes bright red again as he looks over her head and makes a gesture towards Morticia. “She . . . you see Heaer Lufkin . . . she’s awake.”
Morticia turns around to look at the short woman with a bob cut striding towards them. When she sees Morticia’s face, she cries, “Good Merlin! She’s . . . you’re Morticia Gregel!”
Morticia’s lips curl into a smile. “That would be me,” she says, and a bit of sarcasm creeps into her words. ‘Who do they think I am? Of course I’m Morticia Gregel . . . the girl who is over a hundred years old.’
“We must discuss what to do with you,” Healer Lufkin says as she strides over to the pair. She looks above Morticia and addresses Percy. “I hope the Ministry won’t look badly on this . . . I personally consider it a bit of a miracle.”
‘Glad to know her reputation with the Ministry is all that is on her mind,’ Morticia thinks dryly as she turns her gaze back to Percy. She crosses her arms across her chest, which she realizes seems quite exposed in her night dress. She realizes Percy follows her motion, and he flushes and adverts his eyes to the ceiling.
“Of course not,” Percy speaks to Healer Lufkin now. “She’s quite fine . . . I mean, it’s a stroke of good fortune.”
“How did you wake up?” Lufkin asks Morticia.
Morticia remembers the arousing feelings, but she does not blush. “I don’t remember,” she lies, and when she says this, she glances up at Percy, who is mopping his brow with his sleeve. “I don’t remember . . . but what am I to do now? Do I have any family left?”
Lufkin shakes her head. “The Gregels never had any more children. There are some remaining descendants, on the Black side . . .”
“I don’t want to impose,” Morticia says, but she can feel the sinking in her gut. ‘My family really is all gone. Just gone.’ “I’ll just stay here.”
“Nonsense,” Percy says in a slightly squeaky voice. Morticia and Healer Lufkin turn to look up at him. “My grandfather . . . Healer Malone Prewett . . . he said he was your legal guardian. I suppose . . . since we’re cousins of the Blacks, too, that my mum wouldn’t mind having you.”
Morticia tilts her head as if to reexamine Percy from another angle. “I don’t want to impose,” Morticia says in a soft, but steady, voice. When she says this, though, she feels the warm tugging in her gut again.
“Nonsense,” Percy waves his hand, and his voice is steadier now. “My mum misses having a full nest.”
“Well, it’s settled, then,” Healer Lufkin says. “We’ll just get the girl dressed and sent an owl.”
The Burrow, Several Weeks Later
She sits on a rusty, upturned bucket, fingering the lacey hem of the deep crimson dress tied close to her body with a white sash. The setting sun seems to turn the white daisies to gold, and she wonders is she, too, looks golden in the sunlight.
‘I suppose I won’t know . . .’ Morticia thinks as she pulls her eyes upwards. ‘I wonder when I’ll have to go back inside. They probably won’t let me free for long . . .’
She looks up when she hears the pop. A lanky figure strides up across the Apparition boarder. She watches him approach before she stands up, and when she does, she notices he stops walking for a moment. She pulls up the hem of her skirt, to keep it from dragging, and stride down to meet him halfway to the door.
“I’m a bit late . . . busy night, you know,” Percy says when she is within conversation distance.
“Your mum saved you food,” she replies as she brushes several stray hairs out of her face. Before she can stop herself, the question pressing so deeply upon her, the problem she realizes she has secretly been wanting to confess, bursts from her mouth. “Do you think I should go back to school?”
“I know mum wants you to,” he says as he stuffs his hands inside his pockets, and then, his eyes dart around. “Umm . . . I suppose we could chat “ ”
“In the garden? I suppose you will want to eat first, though.”
“What? Oh, well . . . it sounds very important . . .”
They stroll towards the garden and lean against one of the house walls. The view is only of the house shed and some of the fields beyond the hedge, but the spot seems secluded in the twilight. “You were saying?” Percy asks after a moment.
“They want me to go back to school, but I was wanting to get my own place . . . a job as a clerk at some place on Diagon Alley, or something that I can manage,” she explains, and she watches him nod in agreement.
“I think you can do a bit better than some store clerk. I know several people who need secretaries right now at the Ministry. I suppose I could put in a good word for you,” Percy replies, but he doesn’t look down at her.
She smiles. “That would be nice. I did want to work there . . . my dad said he would get me a job. After I make some money, I was going to get my own place in London.”
“Oh?” Percy now turns to her, and she can only nod. “You could write a book,” he suggests as he looks up above her, as if he had made the suggestion to himself instead of her. “You could make loads of money with your story. It certainly wouldn’t hurt, and I think it would help if you were a bit famous.”
A wry smile pulls at her lush lips that seem the same color as the setting sun. “I really didn’t want to keep my name. It sounds odd when people use it . . . and I do not want to be That-Dead-Girl for the rest of my life.”
“You’re not dead!” Percy exclaims before he can think. Then, as if catching his mistake, he stammers, “What I mean is you . . . you could really use this to your advantage. You could build quite a career out of it.”
She sighs. “I do not want it that way . . . I want to be normal, but I cannot understand how to do that when everyone I knew is dead. That’s why I don’t want to go back to school. Everything will just remind me of all my dead friends.”
Now, Percy sighs, and she looks up at him, but he is staring at something in space that she suspects does not exist. “Lots of people are dead. You can’t really escape the reminders.”
“I read about the Wars,” she whispers as she looks down at her skirt and the mud below her feet. “I’m sorry about your brother, by the way, and I feel a bit grateful I missed it.”
Silence passes between the pair, and only the songs of the birds, as they lay themselves down to bed, sound in her ears. She listens to the sound of her breathing, and a question rises in her mind like a bubble surfacing from the depths of the ocean.
“That day . . . in the hospital . . . you said you were doing an inspection,” she says in a slow, deliberate voice. “When you were in my room, could you tell?”
“What?” Percy’s voice squeaks as he asks the single word question.
She looks up at him, but she cannot tell if he is blushing because the sun is hitting his pale face and turning it the color of his hair anyway. “I never told the Healer how I felt when I woke-up,” she explains. “I . . . I was aroused.”
She sees his eyebrows shoot up, and he jerks his head away so he does not stare at her. She sighs and says in a clipped voice, “I told you because I thought you might have seen . . . might have seen something different that caused me to wake. I . . . I woke sweating . . . and I was flushed all over, but my lips were wet . . .”
He jumps a bit, and she feels the pieces fall together in her head. “Ahh . . . so you kissed a comatose girl? Did you do -- ”
“No!” Percy exclaims as he rocks back on his feet. He turns to look down at her, and she thinks he must be red, even though she cannot tell, because he looks severely embarrassed. “I . . . it’s the spell, you know . . . my grandfather did say it made you irresistible . . . I know, I was a bit sleazy “”
“I was going to use the word degenerate,” she replies tartly.
“That, too . . . I . . . I’m sorry for it. I really could not help myself,” Percy stammers as he continues to look at her with his hands stuffed into his pockets.
“I would not be sorry,” she replies. “I wanted to thank you for your degenerate act . . . it woke me like nothing else probably would have done. I don’t think anyone would buy the story, though.”
He shrugs. “I think you should still write it down . . . maybe write a tell-all about those people you knew . . . a bet a bunch of them became famous.”
She giggles and says, “I could . . . but I do want to be normal.”
“Average is a bit over-rated, if you ask me,” he gives his opinion without a hesitation, and she feels herself grinning.
“So it’s good that I am abnormal?” she asks teasingly.
“Yes I “ wait! No, what I mean is . . .”
She giggles and says, “It’s fine . . . I’m only teasing. You know,” her voice drops a bit and becomes more serious, “you aren’t personally responsible for me just because of what happened. Do not feel you owe me anything. Don’t try to lie that you haven’t been around almost every night just because you love your mum’s cooking, either.”
“I do love my mum’s cooking,” Percy replies, but then, he rushes forward and says, “but you’re right . . . I suppose I did feel responsible to take care of you. I mean, I did wake you . . . I suspected that’s what did it, but I obviously didn’t want to say anything to the Healer. Well, can you imagine it? She would have -- ”
She grasps his hand, and he whips his head towards her. She takes his gaping jaw as a sign, and she presses her lips to his. Immediately, as if she has triggered a reflex, he grabs hold of her waist and presses her into his body. She can feel herself smiling, and after a moment, they part.
He is speechless, and she can only laugh before she explains, “I just wanted to know what it felt like . . . by the way, that could wake any lady from a slumber.”
She knows he is blushing, but the sun has concealed his embarrassment. She sighs and shakes her head. “Am I that unattractive now that I’m not irresistible?”
“What? Oh, no . . . well, it’s not the same as the spell . . . but what I mean is that you’re still very pretty, but if I wanted I could go “ no! That’s not what I meant “ ”
She grins, and presses his hand into hers. “I understand. I’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way.” She reaches for him again, and there is no real fight as he intertwines a hand in her hair. She feels a smile upon her lips when his tongue parts her lips, and after a time, they part, and she takes a deep breath to gain her bearings.
“You seem quite good at ‘the old fashioned way,’ Morticia,” Percy says in a low, slightly husky voice.
She wrinkles her nose. “Please . . . don’t call me that. I can’t bear it.”
He shakes his head. “What can I call you? What where you going to change your name to?”
She shrugs. “I was going to use my middle name . . . it’s the only one that’s not on a Ward sign. I suppose I would keep my last name. Gregel isn’t too conspicuous.” She looks up at him and tilts her head to one side, and her dark hair swings with it like a curtain. “What do you think of Audrey Gregel?”
He shrugs, but she feels his hands gripping her waist. “It sounds a bit less morbid than Morticia . . . less stogy, too. As long as you like it, Audrey.”
She cannot hide the bright smile upon her face. “Fine . . . that’s fine,” she murmurs as she pulls his head down towards her again.