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The first time Morrigan Crow visits Crow Manor–and isn't that a strange thought, that she’s ‘visiting’ a place she lived in for eleven years of her life–she doesn’t even think about the baby Ivy had insensitively announced on the eve of her supposed death until she sees the silver-framed photograph of them against the jarringly cheerful wallpaper. She considers the image for a moment, but she ultimately has much bigger things on her mind, and the twins slip away from the forefront of her thoughts easily. They still linger, of course, yet another twist of the knife in her gut, yet another reminder that her family doesn’t feel her absence in anything other than relief, but they serve as just a few brushstrokes in her painting of grief for something she’d never had.
The second time Morrigan Crow visits Crow Manor, it’s more of an accident than anything. She hadn’t really meant to end up there, but, well, why not? She’s always been a little too curious for her own good. She doesn’t really have an end goal this time, but somehow she ends up in Wolfram and Guntram’s room anyway. She watches Ivy, pretty, exotic, ridiculous Ivy, look at her sons with ten times the amount of warmth and softness Morrigan had extracted from her in all the years she’d known her. Ivy’s face is half-illuminated, soft blonde hair that matches the wispy curls on the heads of two sleeping babies catching the light and giving her the gentle glow of a benevolent angel and Morrigan thinks it’s the most beautiful Ivy will ever look.
Then Ivy is gone, and Morrigan is left to puzzle out the jealousy that her stepmother has left in her wake.
She sits between the two cribs and watches her two little brothers sleep. Somehow, she knows that these two twins can garner more affection in an hour than she’d managed to in her lifetime (before coming to the Free State, that is. She’s faced so many problems and so much pain there, but she can’t deny that she is loved beyond her previous wildest dreams). These tiny, sleeping, rosy-cheeked children are thieves of the one thing she spent her childhood chasing.
She can’t bring herself to resent them.
Morrigan whispers a one-sided conversation with their sleeping forms. She doesn’t seek any responses–doubts they could come up with any, actually, although she isn’t really sure when babies start talking–and coaxes a stirring Guntram back to sleep when it seems like she might get one.
Again, as she’s leaving, the twins get put on the back-burner as her stuffed rabbit Emmett catches her eye. They’re still there, in the corners of her head, irrevocably connected to the feeling of loss she’s begun to realize will just keep coming, and this time they have much more of a leading role in her suffering as she comes to the realization that they have stolen something else from her (Was it not enough that they took her father? What could have been her mother? Her place at the dinner table? Did they have to take the tiny, tiny modicum of comfort she’d clung to throughout her thousands of lonely days and nights?).
She flees, distraught, spills her heart and tears in Jupiter’s study, where the conversation quickly turns to the other place she’d been, which was probably much more important as it could theoretically get her tried for treason.
Emmett was returned to her again not long after. The Wolfram and Guntram Crow were forgotten once again, and she let them enjoy their stolen bounty of love without protest. She’d taken one thing back–that was enough for her.
Except it wasn’t. Not quite.
Call it closure, call it curiosity, but Morrigan Crow visits the Crow Manor for a third time after a dreary Christmas with the other side of her family. Oh, it was extravagant, sure. An elegant dinner, silver-lined theatrics, four outfit changes, perfectly trimmed Christmas trees and garlands and artfully strung twinkling fairy lights.
It was dreamlike, it was expensive, and it almost-certainly required about a million hands to pull off.
It was boring.
I’ve visited two of my families today, she thinks wryly after observing the festive but conflicted atmosphere in the Deucalion in hopes of a cure to her homesickness. Why not try the third?
It’s a surprisingly short walk from the hotel to the Gossamer Line–she’s made it a few times by now, and some strange instinct tells her she could’ve found it blind if she wanted to (maybe not without walking into a few walls, though). She hardly has to think about the place she wants to go after she leans her oilskin umbrella against the platform before the tell-tale whistling fills her ears, and she shuts her eyes tightly. The navigating-blind thing only applied to the Gossamer Line, so she’d prefer to keep her sight, thanks.
The sky she arrives under is still dark, but the hints of a sunrise brush the horizon. Right, the time difference. It must be early Christmas morning here. She doesn’t know how to feel about that, other than the half-formed smudge of a thought that everyone must be asleep. Perhaps with the exception of her grandmother, she’d always been an early riser, but Morrigan would rather avoid another conversation with her.
Morrigan’s first idea is, surprisingly, the twins. She didn’t have any ideas after that one, so upstairs she went, phasing through doors with more ease than she’d had when she’d first visited. Exactly two years ago now, then. Hm. Another thing she wasn’t sure how to feel about.
She reaches the door to the twins’ bedroom and abruptly stops. Both times she’d last visited she had returned undeniably more broken than she’d come. If she was being sensible, she would turn on her heel–no, she’d just call the Gossamer Line from here actually–and retreat to the safety of her mother’s bedroom.
The thing about living in the Deucalion and being part of Wunsoc, as she’s said many times before, was that the sensible voice in her head had become very quiet in the past years. And third time’s the charm, right?
She steels her nerves, holds her breath, does various other preparation rituals she’d heard referenced in books to stall for time, and finally presses through the door.
It’s rather anticlimactic. The room is dark, as was expected, and both twins are in their cribs. She carefully, quietly makes her way over to the cribs to sit between them, as she had last time. She isn’t sure what she expected to find, but she has the distinct feeling that she hasn’t gotten it yet, so she stays. And once more, she starts to speak.
“Hello again,” She whispers. “I don’t suppose you remember me from last time, do you? Babies don’t have very long memories–or at least, I can’t remember anything from when I was a baby. Well, I guess you’re toddlers now.” As she considers them more carefully, the differences start to make themselves clear. Their hair is thicker, and they’re remarkably larger than they were the last she’d seen them. She’s heard old people exclaim over how much their beloved grandchildren have grown, and suddenly she understands. She feels a strange trickle of emotion spread from her head to her throat. It’s a little too similar to guilt for her liking.
She’s halfway through an absent mental note to talk to Jupiter about it before she stops.
She clears her throat. “I’m your big sister. Our–your parents don’t like to talk about me, I’m afraid.” She has to stop again. “But it’s okay. I have other family–real family, just like you.” ,” She can’t bring herself to figure out which family she’s talking about. “So it’s okay.” She sounds like she’s trying to convince herself and not doing a very good job of it. She sighs and leans against the wall, staring at the flowery wallpaper on the opposite side of the room.
She doesn’t feel the crib to her right shift slightly as the weight inside is moved drowsily closer to her.
“My name’s Morrigan, but, er, I still don’t think you can pronounce that yet. Can you even talk yet? Surely, right?” She shakes her head. “Either way, you can call me Mog.” The nickname makes her throat constrict a little more, but she can’t think of a better one. Jupiter was right; Morrigan is a terribly difficult name to shorten.
She’s running through various possibilities in her head, none of them sounding right, when a tiny voice to her right squeaks something that sounds suspiciously like, “Mog?”
She nearly chokes, whipping her head around to face the toddler who is now certainly not asleep, sitting up in his crib and looking at her with half-closed eyes.
Her breath hitches. Half-closed button-black eyes.
Little Crowling, Little Crowling…
“Mog?” He repeats–or at least she thinks it’s Mog, it could’ve easily been Mom.
“Shhh,” She tries faintly. That’s how she got him back to sleep last time–a brief glance at the plate on his crib tells her it’s Guntram again who’s woken. He doesn’t nestle back into his blankets this time, just looks more upset. She winces.
“Yep, that’s me, good job!” She whispers encouragingly. Guntram looks slightly mollified. “Could you, er, go back to sleep for me?”
“No. Chrrr’smis,” He replies obstinately. He said Christmas, right? Then elaborates, “Pes’ns.” Presents? OH! I guess he wants presents?
“I…don’t have anything for you, sorry,” She admits apologetically.
Guntram’s eyes fill with tears. “No pes’ns?”
Another voice, to her left, sleepily echoes “No pes’ns?”
Well, now Wolfram is awake too. She turns to see an identical pair of black eyes and a head of pale blonde hair, slowly pushing himself into a sitting position. Delightful. Coming here was a great idea.
Guntram starts to sniffle. Morrigan puts her hands up in alarm. “Hey, hey! Don’t cry!” An idea struck her. She didn’t have presents, but she could make them. If she was going to be tutored by a serial killer every day, she was going to at least get some free gifts out of it. “I do have presents. Just–” She realizes suddenly that she has no idea what her brothers enjoy, “--here, what do you want for Christmas?”
“Horsey,” Guntram declares.
“Puppy,” Wolfram follows a few seconds later.
“Horsey.”
“Puppy.”
“Horsey!”
“Puppy!”
“HORSEY!”
“PUPPY!”
“Shhh!” Morrigan hisses. “You can have both, just...shh!”
“Both?” Wolfram inquires.
“Yes, yes, just give me a moment!” Morrigan hums Morningtide’s Child more than a little nervously as she makes her way to the wall opposite them. The wunder seems to flock to her frantic energy, dancing around her like a frenzied swarm of bees. She considers, for a moment, making physical replicas of their respective wishes. But she isn’t sure how Ivy and Corvus would take to mysterious objects appearing overnight. She settles on something more entertaining, but far more…ill-advised, as well. Probably something she shouldn’t do in a flammable house–as Ezra Squall had so kindly demonstrated. Definitely something that would keep them quiet, though.
She breathes flames into her cupped palms, letting them die down to sparks before she spreads her arms wide and turns her hands upwards. The fires grow again into flames, then sculpt themselves into a horse and a dog, one animal per hand.
She makes them dance through the air, leaping and spinning like a bizarre ballet of fire and smoke. It isn’t perfect by any means. She’s tired, and fire is erratic. It doesn’t always want to cooperate. But wunder is there to help her when the blaze licks a little too close to the ceiling. Collaborate, don’t control, she hears from a corner of her brain that sounds suspiciously like Squall. She listens. She asks wunder, What next?, and it responds gleefully. She has to rein it in on a few of its wilder escapades.
After a bit she considers herself confident enough to look at her audience. Both boys are enraptured, the firelight reflected in their shining black eyes. She feels a surge of warmth, of kinship, every time her gaze lingers on the similarity. She assumed they’d be blue–it certainly seemed to run in the family. Both Ornella and Corvus shared the ice-blue shade. She’s fairly certain a lot of the portraits in the Hall of Dead Crows had the same color painted into their irises. But no, the twins had taken after her. She doesn’t try to stop the nonsensical swell of pride that bubbles up. The animals do a particularly elaborate pirouette in response, earning a giggle from Wolfram. She thinks she hears one of them mumble an awed, “Shiny.”
Her head snaps to the door as she registers the sound of footsteps near the door. The flames fizzle out with a hiss, and she quickly cloaks herself in shadows. She doubts whoever it is will be able to see her, but it’s better safe than sorry. Especially when trying not to alert one’s previous family that one has faked their death and is currently living in a place none of them have ever heard of and being trained by both the most prestigious organization in said place and the place’s number one terrorist. Especially then.
Ivy opens the door a moment later to a few confused mumbles from the twin. Guntram reaches through the bars of his crib in Morrigan’s direction. She feels her heart clench.
Morrigan doesn’t think she can stand watching the Crow family gearing up for a giddy Christmas morning of torn wrapping paper and cookies. Not when–Can I get a surprise this Christmas? Just a small o–yep, it’s time to go. She’d go home to a ridiculously festive hotel and a full stocking and probably some sort of extravagant, strange gif–no, wait. She’d go home to a tastefully festive gilded house with…maybe not a stocking, but definitely gifts.
She hesitated for one moment longer, then she heard Ivy’s delicate “Good Christmas Morning, my darlings,” and she was much more ready to go. She squeezed her eyes shut and pictured her oilskin umbrella, listening to the shrill whistle of the Gossamer Line that, for once, wasn’t returning her in a worse than she’d come.
No, she thought as the rush of Wunder whisked her away, she didn’t feel worse. She didn’t feel better either. Satisfied was a better word for it, an appetite that had been quelled.
She returned to Darling House, flopping onto her too-soft bed in her lacy bedroom, and considered the fact that she technically had three families. Three families, and she’d managed to make herself an outsider in every single one.