Gwen figured that the miniature triumphs and pitfalls of life didn’t really lead anywhere but to self improvement. Even then she thought the idea was pushing it. There wasn’t really a goal or an ultimate mission to fulfill. Most of it was just living, breathing day in and day out with the usual humdrum that makes up a person’s life. Death was the only true end to anyone’s story.
And she certainly didn’t believe in happy endings. The events over the next couple of years would certainly justify her in feeling so. Perhaps it was because her life was so much like a fairy tale and as a child she had read the original Grimms, not the watered down Hollywood versions so prevalent in American culture (where she had spent a good deal of her time in the dream world).
These tales didn’t often end happily. People, especially women were forced back into their “roles.” Many of the characters were maimed (or self mutilated) as an appropriate ending to some evil. There was magic and enchantments, fairy princesses and deep, dark evil.
It sounded very familiar to her.
The next few months would be spent drifting from here to there, trying so very hard to figure out who she was. She would quietly observe her birthday, the day of her father’s death with nothing more than some shed tears and now that she could apparate there, some red roses to rest on his grave. The next year would find her taking sabbatical and arriving right back where all of this business started, still without the knowledge of who her father really was and whether or not he had been a death eater.
And all the while she wasn’t exactly certain of what she really wanted. Of course, she wanted the truth, when she realized her mother had told her nothing but lies she had yearned for the knowledge being withheld from her. It was a distant star and she was an earthbound girl, who couldn’t easily reach up into the sky and pluck the sparkling sphere for her peace of mind.
Yet she felt that there was something beyond the truth and the lies, something she wanted more than to have her mother back, if only to tell her the story of her life.