Chapter Text
“Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back.”
Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen
This tale begins like many others of its kind so. A woman falls in love with the wrong man. Edith Stanley falls in love with a man who chooses to marry a rich woman instead of being with his penniless outcast of a lover. And so in her pain and rage Edith casts a spells that has rippled across the generations of Stanley women.
Jessica is nine when she decides that she won’t ever give herself the chance to fall in love. She won’t doom herself or an innocent man to the horrid fate that would await them. So she wants until her mother and Uncle Ned are asleep. And so she crafts a summoning spell from the old dusty books her mother barely opens.
Jessica summons her true love. She makes the spell ridiculous and impossible. It is a full proof plan. She summons a man with eyes just like the amber from the cane of the old geezer in Jurassic Park (it’s her fathers favourite movie and just the thought of him makes her ache and miss her mother who locked her heart away to survive the loss of Harrison Stanley), surnamed faster than the wind, strong enough to withstand curses and death, and find a way to make Jessica love classical music (Jessica hated the genre. Beethoven made her want to wretch and she abhorred the piano).
The spell was cast under the full moon and the apes it was written on burnt with its ashes scattered to the north wind. And because Jessica Stanley was determined to never find the man she cast a spell on herself making her memories of the day prior as dull and memorable as a ugly rock. You could never truly remove memories but they could be suppressed. The trick was to never bring attention to them and bury it under something more shiny.
And so Jessica Stanley lives her life with an uncle who is crabby and bitter and older than any mortal has a right to be. A man cursed by his sister to live with his sins. Ned Stanley, the younger brother of Edith Stanley who fought in Culluden and survived a musket to the chest with barely a scar. And she lives with her mother, a woman who sealed away her heart. Natasha Stanley loves her daughter and her Uncle Ned. But she feels no much of anything else. She knows what kindness and pity are. But to survive the loss of her husband to cancer Natasha did what many before her had done. Locked her heart away to live another day.
Years pass. Until one day a wind blows from the North. And with it brings a family with a copper haired son.