Author: Lyta Padfoot
Category: General, Angst
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the property of J.K. Rowling. Characters and situations are used without permission, no infringement is intended.
Summary: Penelope considers her namesake.
* * *
Penelope Clearwater Weasley remembered the deep, even, voice of her father reading aloud to her from his beloved books on those rare occasions when she'd been deemed her too sick to attend school. Miles Clearwater would come home early from work and bring up a tray filled with orange juice and cookies. After persuading her to have a sip of juice and half a cookie, he would then pull up a chair beside his daughter's bed and read to her, his index finger lightly tracing over the words as he went.
Penelope had always been her favorite character in the Homeric epics, and not just because of the shared name. Most female characters in Greek mythology were renowned more for their beauty than the quality their minds, but Penelope possessed both and knew how best to employ her assets. To keep her unwanted suitors at bay, she wove a shroud for her elderly father-in-law with the implication that she would choose a husband from among them when it was complete. Each night, however, Penelope unraveled her work by torchlight. For three years she deceived the men before a servant girl revealed her secret. It was from her weaving and unweaving, Miles informed his daughter on a long ago rainy day, that she earned her name, for Penelope means 'dream weaver'.
As she grew older, Penelope found other things to admire about the mythological Queen of Ithaca. Icarius's daughter, left to raise an infant alone, waited two decades for her husband Odysseus to return home to her from the Trojan War. Her own Percy had been gone just over eight weeks. He departed from their cottage on a bright autumn morning after kissing her good-bye and laying a gentle hand on her belly, then swollen with their second child. He never returned from his mission for the Order of the Phoenix.
In the two months that had come and gone since that morning, the leaves had gone from all the colours of flame to dull brown and fallen from the trees unto withered heaps. Penelope appreciated the cell system and release of information on a need-to-know basis; part of her was glad of her ignorance while the other craved every fragment of information on Percy.
People had returned after greater lengths of time, Penelope would remind herself at night as she paced the heart pine floor with their crying son in her arms. She tried to go through the activities of her day - the children helped, for it is not possible to be forever gloomy in the presence of young children. But when the children were asleep and the dark hours weighed heavily upon her, Penelope would throw on the battered blue dressing gown she was rather attached to and wander downstairs to sit in her favorite wing chair by the window. She sat with her knees pulled up and her chin resting on top of them, watching the stars until at last she fell into uneasy asleep. There were no dreams where she spent the night thus.
There were other distractions as well. With her reading glasses perched on her nose she would stitch her carefully constructed runes of protection into cloaks that would soon be worn by members of the Order of the Phoenix and try not to remember Percy's teasing about how she looked like McGonagall in those glasses. Sewing was not the sort of chore she relished, but no magic could be employed in the sewing of the runes themselves and she was one of the few skilled enough in the Muggle techniques. Her assigned task grew on her with time. There is a certain meditative quality to sewing: her world reduced to fabric, needle and thread. There was no place for other things then.
Each time she set her sewing aside, Penelope wondered if her literary counterpart found the same escape in her weaving that she discovered in sewing. Was the weaving and unweaving of the shroud what kept Odysseus's wife from going mad with thoughts of what might have happened? Penelope believed it was so, but at least her husband came home in the end. The Odyssey was complete, her own story a work-in-progress.