"The Heart of Glass" for arbor_vitae
Title: The Heart of Glass
Gift for: arbor_vitae
Author: holyfant
Characters: Rowena Ravenclaw, Helena (The Grey Lady), the rest of the founders
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Genres: gen
Author's Notes: I hope you like it, arbor_vitae! Apart from your request, I also based this on the information found on Rowena's "Wizard of the Month" card on JKR's website: "One of the four famous Founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Rowena Ravenclaw was the most brilliant witch of her time, though legend has it that a broken heart - cause unknown - contributed to her early demise."
Summary: "Rowena Ravenclaw was not the kind of woman to love easily."
The Heart of Glass
Rowena Ravenclaw was not the kind of woman to love easily.
Truthfully, she hadn’t realised this until Helga, looking young and small in her new professor’s robes, pulled her aside in Hogwarts’ corridors and told her: “Try to love your students a little. Try to care.” Rowena looked at her, felt something akin to indignation rising in her chest - of course she cared, of course - but then she thought of how she had privately imagined her professorhood would be (successful, talent-provoking) and how the possibility was arising that it would be different. She thought of how that felt, how she looked at her students and willed them to be stronger, better, everything they were not right now. Successful. Talented.
Successful, talent-provoking. Rowena realised she was still young and harbouring overly glamorous illusions about herself, about her skill as a teacher. Her students were struggling (and so was she).
Helga looked young and worried but she smiled a little at Rowena’s silence, put a hand on her friend’s shoulder and said: “This is everyone’s first year.” (The “everyone is making mistakes” remained unsaid but not unheard, and Rowena felt the coil of tension around her chest ease a little.)
That was when she realised she loved selectively and carefully, and maybe loved those most who made her realise how rare her love was. Helga, small and blonde in her stiff black robes, said: “Try to care about them as you care about us.”
Rowena promised to try.
*
Rowena Ravenclaw was not the kind of woman to love easily, but when the body-splitting pains had passed into a deep relief descending over every muscle in her body, when she cradled the tiny bundle of running blood and flesh and tiny fingers in her arms, there was nothing selective or careful about the swelling of her heart, the press of adult lips to impossibly soft baby head. She was holding something with a heart and a nervous system, a perfect machine of vessels and fluids and tissue - she was holding something that lived, that lived because of her and that was half of her and more of her. Rowena times two, Rowena divided by two - Rowena plus infinity. In the soft blue veins of her daughter ran something of herself that was now no longer hers.
A gift, she thought hazily, cradling her child to her breasts, a gift to do with as you please.
Helga, stumbling into the room with more towels, sank softly to the floor next to the bed. The birth had been tiring for all of them. She hesitantly raised a hand to the baby’s face, waited, and then put her hand on Rowena’s cheek instead. It was warm on the cooling sweat.
“You look softer,” she said.
Rowena smiled at her before falling asleep, feeling empty and full both.
*
Strangely enough, it was Salazar who immediately took to small Helena. Strange because it was he who had always told Rowena he would have no sympathy for her if her shameful relationship with Helena’s father turned out wrong. (They had had flaming rows over it, endless tirades of fury and curses, which used to end only when she grabbed his collar and screamed at him “But I love him, Salazar! I love him!” Somehow that made him fall silent; maybe he saw something in her face then that made him swallow the barbs of his remarks. He had been right, but so had she.) Helena was the fruit of a love turned wrong, but she was wholesome and fresh and oh so talented. Salazar taught her practically from birth and told her stories, the stories contained in the dark dusty books he loved so. Rowena let him, although when Helena was still a child she made sure to whisper stories of light and happiness at her bedside as well. She wanted her daughter’s mind to be a place of calm.
*
With the love came the fear.
Rowena had been a woman of careful, scarce love and of fierceness. A woman of intellectual passions and strength. Now she was also a mother and sometimes she found it hard to combine the two. She wanted her daughter to discover the world, and yet she tried to close Helena’s eyes to the fact that there was more than Hogwarts in it. She wanted her daughter to learn, but she wanted to shelter her from dark knowledge. The thought of having to lose Helena (to death, to a man, to a convent, to another school, to the world at large) made Rowena so weak in the knees she had to sit down in order not to fall down. Helena was a curious child, curious and cunning and charming. Rowena only had to look at her to feel nauseous with worry.
She confided all this to Godric on a windy hike to the borders of the silently sleeping forest (the outermost edge of the Hogwarts grounds, a place of ancient magic and old souls). She said to him: “I fear for her”, and he looked at her and said: “Maybe, and your fear is also of her.”
That was something that shook her, because it was so true she could only barely believe she hadn’t seen it before.
“Rowena,” Godric said, only barely audible over the wind, “you were never alone in this life - you had us - but now there is something else, something that bears your imprint … I am not a father for this reason: I couldn’t bear the possibility of losing a part of myself, to whatever that may be. I confess this now: it is my arrogance, my sin that I would despise a child for inheriting my virtues while not possessing my vices. It is my fear.”
Rowena felt the need to press close to him, and she did. He carefully put his arm around her, awkward in this rare moment of physicality.
“She is the most passionate love of my life, Godric,” Rowena said (and privately she wondered if she could have said this to his face, instead of to his heavy winter cloak with her eyes closed in the strange half-embrace), “but she is also my most passionate hate. I cannot teach her.”
He said nothing, but somehow she felt he understood at least a little and he, closing his eyes, put a hand on her head.
*
“Mother,” Helena said, letting the word curl upwards like a question in its own right, drop like a coin in a wishing well. Rowena looked at her, at the young woman that was her daughter. Helena was graceful in every aspect of her being - the tallness inherited from her mother, the intense gaze inherited from her father, the clear and confident voice encouraged by Salazar’s lessons. “Why have you never taught me?”
Rowena sighed, having dreaded this question ever since she had made the decision to leave the education of her daughter to the other professors.
“I cannot say for sure,” she replied (knowing it was only a half-truth), “I suppose I thought it would be better for you to receive education from people who are less biased than your mother, but still bear you a warm heart and care about your well-being.”
There was a short silence. Helena was scrutinising her mother, and Rowena felt distinctly uncomfortable under her scorching gaze; she herself knew how to read people just by looking at them and she was quite sure her daughter possessed the same unsettling ability.
“I’m not used to you not having a crystal-clear reasoning behind your choices, mother,” Helena said finally.
Feeling strange, Rowena drew closer to her daughter and put her hands on her face. Helena blinked at this unusual display of affection.
“Neither am I,” she said, “but as a parent I have learned to sometimes trust instinct over intellect.”
Helena stayed silent, and Rowena knew she did not understand and never would until bearing a daughter herself.
*
Salazar knocked on Rowena’s door one stormy winter evening. She opened it, already knowing it was him from the forceful way he had knocked, and started a little when she saw his pale, somewhat guilty face.
“I think you should have a word with your daughter,” he said.
Rowena thanked him, feeling something cramping up in her lower belly as she saw how quickly he slinked off, and went to find Helena in the library.
There was no greeting - Helena slammed a book down when she saw her mother enter and immediately started to shout.
“You were never even going to allow me to teach, were you?! You just wanted - wanted to keep me where - where you could control me! You’re afraid of me, of what I’m capable of, don’t think I don’t know, don’t think I don’t know - I could beat you! Salazar says, he -”
Rowena did the only thing she could think of to stop the words, the words that were flung into her face like poisonous barbs, that stung, that rocked her to her core - and slapped her daughter across the face.
Helena fell silent, looked dumbstruck for a moment, putting her hand to the blooming red spot on her cheek.
Then, she drew herself up her full height - quite calmly, like a giant leisurely stretching its arms after a good night’s rest - and walked past her mother without looking at her again, out of the library (out of the school, out of her mother’s life into her own, into somewhere new with something new in her pocket, throbbing like a newborn heart).
*
Helga put Rowena to bed and stayed by her side, pale and too-worried.
“You will not break, Rowena,” she whispered in the night, hands hovering over Rowena’s chest where the mother’s heart (the big, the fearful, the passionate, the enlarged, the damned, the risky, the bloody heart) was shrivelling.
Rowena dreamt of giving birth and being born and the lack of difference between the two, and the acts of love, of blood: the biting of the umbilical cord, the sleeping heart to heart with the same life running in different veins.
Something was breaking, even if it was not her will or her power.
*
“I saw Rowena’s diadem is missing,” Godric said to Helga. Salazar, brooding and silent in a corner, looked up at this.
“That’s not the only thing Helena took with her,” Helga replied sadly, thinking of Rowena and how she spoke of a heart of glass, a dark hole without blood.
They looked at Salazar, who stared back (it was then that they felt the rift beginning to show, the unspoken guilt and the spoken accusations, the words the deeds the ideas and their actions), Salazar who simply stared back and said nothing.
The heart of glass encased in flesh to break the fall. The climb into love was the descent into madness, or maybe into the silent contented lack of interest glossing over the edges of life. Helga grasped Rowena’s hand to help her out of bed, four days after Helena had gone - Rowena touched her friend and felt the dark hole, the heart of glass pull at its case. There was nothing.
Rowena taught her students well, and never loved again.
-end-
Gift for: arbor_vitae
Author: holyfant
Characters: Rowena Ravenclaw, Helena (The Grey Lady), the rest of the founders
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Genres: gen
Author's Notes: I hope you like it, arbor_vitae! Apart from your request, I also based this on the information found on Rowena's "Wizard of the Month" card on JKR's website: "One of the four famous Founders of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Rowena Ravenclaw was the most brilliant witch of her time, though legend has it that a broken heart - cause unknown - contributed to her early demise."
Summary: "Rowena Ravenclaw was not the kind of woman to love easily."
The Heart of Glass
Rowena Ravenclaw was not the kind of woman to love easily.
Truthfully, she hadn’t realised this until Helga, looking young and small in her new professor’s robes, pulled her aside in Hogwarts’ corridors and told her: “Try to love your students a little. Try to care.” Rowena looked at her, felt something akin to indignation rising in her chest - of course she cared, of course - but then she thought of how she had privately imagined her professorhood would be (successful, talent-provoking) and how the possibility was arising that it would be different. She thought of how that felt, how she looked at her students and willed them to be stronger, better, everything they were not right now. Successful. Talented.
Successful, talent-provoking. Rowena realised she was still young and harbouring overly glamorous illusions about herself, about her skill as a teacher. Her students were struggling (and so was she).
Helga looked young and worried but she smiled a little at Rowena’s silence, put a hand on her friend’s shoulder and said: “This is everyone’s first year.” (The “everyone is making mistakes” remained unsaid but not unheard, and Rowena felt the coil of tension around her chest ease a little.)
That was when she realised she loved selectively and carefully, and maybe loved those most who made her realise how rare her love was. Helga, small and blonde in her stiff black robes, said: “Try to care about them as you care about us.”
Rowena promised to try.
*
Rowena Ravenclaw was not the kind of woman to love easily, but when the body-splitting pains had passed into a deep relief descending over every muscle in her body, when she cradled the tiny bundle of running blood and flesh and tiny fingers in her arms, there was nothing selective or careful about the swelling of her heart, the press of adult lips to impossibly soft baby head. She was holding something with a heart and a nervous system, a perfect machine of vessels and fluids and tissue - she was holding something that lived, that lived because of her and that was half of her and more of her. Rowena times two, Rowena divided by two - Rowena plus infinity. In the soft blue veins of her daughter ran something of herself that was now no longer hers.
A gift, she thought hazily, cradling her child to her breasts, a gift to do with as you please.
Helga, stumbling into the room with more towels, sank softly to the floor next to the bed. The birth had been tiring for all of them. She hesitantly raised a hand to the baby’s face, waited, and then put her hand on Rowena’s cheek instead. It was warm on the cooling sweat.
“You look softer,” she said.
Rowena smiled at her before falling asleep, feeling empty and full both.
*
Strangely enough, it was Salazar who immediately took to small Helena. Strange because it was he who had always told Rowena he would have no sympathy for her if her shameful relationship with Helena’s father turned out wrong. (They had had flaming rows over it, endless tirades of fury and curses, which used to end only when she grabbed his collar and screamed at him “But I love him, Salazar! I love him!” Somehow that made him fall silent; maybe he saw something in her face then that made him swallow the barbs of his remarks. He had been right, but so had she.) Helena was the fruit of a love turned wrong, but she was wholesome and fresh and oh so talented. Salazar taught her practically from birth and told her stories, the stories contained in the dark dusty books he loved so. Rowena let him, although when Helena was still a child she made sure to whisper stories of light and happiness at her bedside as well. She wanted her daughter’s mind to be a place of calm.
*
With the love came the fear.
Rowena had been a woman of careful, scarce love and of fierceness. A woman of intellectual passions and strength. Now she was also a mother and sometimes she found it hard to combine the two. She wanted her daughter to discover the world, and yet she tried to close Helena’s eyes to the fact that there was more than Hogwarts in it. She wanted her daughter to learn, but she wanted to shelter her from dark knowledge. The thought of having to lose Helena (to death, to a man, to a convent, to another school, to the world at large) made Rowena so weak in the knees she had to sit down in order not to fall down. Helena was a curious child, curious and cunning and charming. Rowena only had to look at her to feel nauseous with worry.
She confided all this to Godric on a windy hike to the borders of the silently sleeping forest (the outermost edge of the Hogwarts grounds, a place of ancient magic and old souls). She said to him: “I fear for her”, and he looked at her and said: “Maybe, and your fear is also of her.”
That was something that shook her, because it was so true she could only barely believe she hadn’t seen it before.
“Rowena,” Godric said, only barely audible over the wind, “you were never alone in this life - you had us - but now there is something else, something that bears your imprint … I am not a father for this reason: I couldn’t bear the possibility of losing a part of myself, to whatever that may be. I confess this now: it is my arrogance, my sin that I would despise a child for inheriting my virtues while not possessing my vices. It is my fear.”
Rowena felt the need to press close to him, and she did. He carefully put his arm around her, awkward in this rare moment of physicality.
“She is the most passionate love of my life, Godric,” Rowena said (and privately she wondered if she could have said this to his face, instead of to his heavy winter cloak with her eyes closed in the strange half-embrace), “but she is also my most passionate hate. I cannot teach her.”
He said nothing, but somehow she felt he understood at least a little and he, closing his eyes, put a hand on her head.
*
“Mother,” Helena said, letting the word curl upwards like a question in its own right, drop like a coin in a wishing well. Rowena looked at her, at the young woman that was her daughter. Helena was graceful in every aspect of her being - the tallness inherited from her mother, the intense gaze inherited from her father, the clear and confident voice encouraged by Salazar’s lessons. “Why have you never taught me?”
Rowena sighed, having dreaded this question ever since she had made the decision to leave the education of her daughter to the other professors.
“I cannot say for sure,” she replied (knowing it was only a half-truth), “I suppose I thought it would be better for you to receive education from people who are less biased than your mother, but still bear you a warm heart and care about your well-being.”
There was a short silence. Helena was scrutinising her mother, and Rowena felt distinctly uncomfortable under her scorching gaze; she herself knew how to read people just by looking at them and she was quite sure her daughter possessed the same unsettling ability.
“I’m not used to you not having a crystal-clear reasoning behind your choices, mother,” Helena said finally.
Feeling strange, Rowena drew closer to her daughter and put her hands on her face. Helena blinked at this unusual display of affection.
“Neither am I,” she said, “but as a parent I have learned to sometimes trust instinct over intellect.”
Helena stayed silent, and Rowena knew she did not understand and never would until bearing a daughter herself.
*
Salazar knocked on Rowena’s door one stormy winter evening. She opened it, already knowing it was him from the forceful way he had knocked, and started a little when she saw his pale, somewhat guilty face.
“I think you should have a word with your daughter,” he said.
Rowena thanked him, feeling something cramping up in her lower belly as she saw how quickly he slinked off, and went to find Helena in the library.
There was no greeting - Helena slammed a book down when she saw her mother enter and immediately started to shout.
“You were never even going to allow me to teach, were you?! You just wanted - wanted to keep me where - where you could control me! You’re afraid of me, of what I’m capable of, don’t think I don’t know, don’t think I don’t know - I could beat you! Salazar says, he -”
Rowena did the only thing she could think of to stop the words, the words that were flung into her face like poisonous barbs, that stung, that rocked her to her core - and slapped her daughter across the face.
Helena fell silent, looked dumbstruck for a moment, putting her hand to the blooming red spot on her cheek.
Then, she drew herself up her full height - quite calmly, like a giant leisurely stretching its arms after a good night’s rest - and walked past her mother without looking at her again, out of the library (out of the school, out of her mother’s life into her own, into somewhere new with something new in her pocket, throbbing like a newborn heart).
*
Helga put Rowena to bed and stayed by her side, pale and too-worried.
“You will not break, Rowena,” she whispered in the night, hands hovering over Rowena’s chest where the mother’s heart (the big, the fearful, the passionate, the enlarged, the damned, the risky, the bloody heart) was shrivelling.
Rowena dreamt of giving birth and being born and the lack of difference between the two, and the acts of love, of blood: the biting of the umbilical cord, the sleeping heart to heart with the same life running in different veins.
Something was breaking, even if it was not her will or her power.
*
“I saw Rowena’s diadem is missing,” Godric said to Helga. Salazar, brooding and silent in a corner, looked up at this.
“That’s not the only thing Helena took with her,” Helga replied sadly, thinking of Rowena and how she spoke of a heart of glass, a dark hole without blood.
They looked at Salazar, who stared back (it was then that they felt the rift beginning to show, the unspoken guilt and the spoken accusations, the words the deeds the ideas and their actions), Salazar who simply stared back and said nothing.
The heart of glass encased in flesh to break the fall. The climb into love was the descent into madness, or maybe into the silent contented lack of interest glossing over the edges of life. Helga grasped Rowena’s hand to help her out of bed, four days after Helena had gone - Rowena touched her friend and felt the dark hole, the heart of glass pull at its case. There was nothing.
Rowena taught her students well, and never loved again.
-end-