Sohna and Vivian - My Brother's Keeper

“Virginia ...”

Wolf was not happy. He’d never trusted magic and he was absolutely sure magic was involved in what was happening, although at this rate he wasn’t sure how long he could even trust what he was absolutely sure of. It was quite obvious to him that Wendell and Rupert had forgotten something which Tony and Virginia could remember perfectly. He might have been inclined to blame their loss of memory on their injuries, except that he himself could not remember - even from one moment to the next - what Tony and Virginia were talking about (what was it again?). All he was sure of at the moment was that he must have forgotten - and this was so obvious to him that he expected that part of his memory to fade at any moment, because it was not obvious at all to Wendell and Rupert. Wendell at least, he thought, should realize it. Kings had a lot of schooling that covered things like that.

His mate’s lovely eyes had fastened on him and their clear blue gaze was almost enough to drive all the thoughts of their problems completely away. Fortunately, her words planted his feet back on the ground.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember, either,” she said.

“Well, I ...”

“Wolf!” she cried with dismay. “How could ...?”

“Oh, great!” exclaimed Tony at the same time, irritated.

“I think it’s a forget spell,” he blurted.

“Really?” asked Wendell, intrigued. “Then why hasn’t it worked on them?”

“Because they’re not from here?”

“But you’re from here and you remember,” ventured Tony.

“No, I don’t,” he admitted, “I just know that I forgot.”

“Forgot what?” asked Wendell.

“Never mind.”

“I think we should go back,” Wolf suggested. He hoped they wouldn’t argue. It had to be soon, he knew.

“To New York?” asked Wendell incredulously. “Absolutely not. I will not go back to that teeming, moralless, abode of hypocrites (no offense to either of you)!”

“Oh, no,” Tony agreed, “No, of course not, your Majesty. You and Lord Rupert need to stay here and recover anyway. But before you go - could you have someone direct me to the records room of your palace? You know, the place where all the historical documents are kept?”

Wendell frowned.

“What would you want to see that for?” he asked. “It’s just a lot of boring records - business transactions, that sort of thing.”

“Well, because we - Virginia and I at least - need to do some research on the stuff the forget spell is making you forget.”

“What forget spell?” asked the king, irritated. “I haven’t forgotten anything!”

“We really need to go rest,” put in Rupert.

“Ton-ee!” Wolf was really getting agitated now. They needed to hurry before he became as resistant to knowing what had happened as those two already were. It was really a strong spell, he thought.

To his dismay, Tony waved him away.

“Oh, that’s okay. I need to do a bit of research for my bouncy castles,” he said to the king, a smile plastered on his Jovian face.

“Yes,” agreed Wendell. “Go right ahead!”

“But I’m really going to need to go through a lot of old records, to see what kinds of materials might have been ordered in the past. You got anything like that around here?”

The king thought a moment.

“Yes, there’s a records room in the cellar,” he said. “I don’t know if it’ll have what you want, but you might try there.”

While Wendell directed a lackey to handle the situation, Tony turned to Wolf and Virginia, angling his head so the king couldn’t see his expression.

“Go ahead!” he whispered to them. “But be careful!”

In the end they just sat down on a park bench. They’d considered going back to the Grill or the penthouse, but didn’t want to get stuck talking to either Amy or the Murrays, so they’d simply gone and bought a spiral notebook and pen at a store and come back to the park. Wolf’s memory of the play and the research they’d planned to do on Grimm came back to him, he thought, rather slowly. He’d expected to be hit with it all at once as soon as he’d passed through the mirror, but he’d needed the time they’d spent shopping. And even now, as he wrote down everything he could think of that concerned their mission (as he imagined it now that he realized there was something fighting against them), he was remembering more and more as he wrote.

It had been his idea to have him write it all down - so that when he invariably forgot, as he expected to do once he returned to the Fourth Kingdom, Virginia could show him what he’d written in his own handwriting. So far he’d managed to fill nearly five pages - by making sure to include the tiniest details, though he thought it was rather disconnected because his memory was still so faulty. He’d been sure to preface the entire thing with the words:

There is a forget spell! You won’t remember this! Eventually you won’t even remember that you forgot it!
THERE IS A FORGET SPELL!!!!!!!>

He hoped that would be enough to make him pay attention, though from the way Wendell had acted, he couldn’t be sure.

“Are you finished?” Virginia asked him after he’d spent about fifteen minutes finally not writing anything.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I can’t think of anything right now, but suppose we go back and there’s something else? I’d forget it and never know the difference. Did you read it? Do you think that’s all?”

“Well, yes, it looks like it to me,” she said. “But if you’re not comfortable stopping there, I suppose we could spend the night here and go back tomorrow. You’d remember anything else by then, don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

In the middle of the night he remembered what it was.

He didn’t know what it was that had awakened him, but he wasn’t sorry that it had. Virginia lay beside him, asleep, and he sighed with contentment as he listened to her soft breathing and inhaled her sweet scent. In that moment, his life seemed so perfect and magical to him that he wanted to savor it forever. He glanced from the quietly sleeping form of his mate to his fantastical surroundings, lit in a ghostly glow by the ambient light from outside.

It was the light that had most impressed him at his first sight of the place - the thousands of windows glowing in the darkness. The feeling that he had come to a place where someone was home, waiting. Of course, Virginia’s scent had underlain the vision, though mixed up with the dog prince’s. But the more he thought about it the more he concluded it was part of his - their - destiny to meet here, in this place.

And that made him remember how odd he had thought it was that both the traveling mirrors led here.

He got out of bed and walked through the bathroom out onto the terrace, carrying his notebook and pen. Though he could have written well enough in just the light from the city spilling in through the bedroom window, he wanted to make sure that everything he put down was completely legible - and he didn’t want to wake Virginia. The terrace had nice hidden lights that lit the place up without blinding him. He turned them on and sat down.

Both traveling mirrors lead to New York. No one else thinks so, but I think this is important. Especially because it’s the last thing I remembered when I was writing this!
DON’T FORGET!!!!!

He sat back and read what he’d written - the entire five pages of notes. Yes, he thought. That was all. He didn’t feel like he was still forgetting something any more. Smiling, he turned off the lights and went back to bed.

Virginia stared at her naked self in the bathroom mirror. She didn’t look pregnant yet, she thought - no sign of a tummy forming or anything. Nor did she look at all fat; there was no place on her you could “pinch an inch”. Her breasts were not swelled up (although they did ache a little). Yet she had felt pregnant now for most of the week, especially today. Today she’d not only felt pregnant, but huge.

She stared down at the pair of jeans she was holding in her right hand. What had possessed her to try them on, she wondered? You wanted to prove to yourself that you weren’t getting big, so you were going to zip these up and tell yourself ‘so there!’. Except it hadn’t worked out that way. Not only couldn’t she get them zipped, but the waistband was an inch too small.

Well, they were always tight, she reasoned. These are the tiny jeans. The smallest ones you have. She sighed. Yeah, but they weren’t this tight.

She had tried to force herself into them, the way she’d seen some girls do - by laying down to zip them up - and she’d almost managed, except the way they’d felt then had made her feel ill.

That was the real problem, she thought. Everything she did now seemed to make her nauseous. She didn’t have morning sickness - she felt perfectly fine every morning - but tiny, little everyday things would bring it on: The smell of certain foods would do it (bacon was one of the worst, and she knew Wolf just didn’t understand. How could she be carrying his child and get sick at the smell of bacon frying?), but it wasn’t limited to food. For the past week, she’d been helping her father dig through stacks of paper in Wendell’s record room. And after the first day, the odor of that place, with it’s ancient, crumbling ledgers and tomes, had begun to make her ill, until yesterday, when she’d actually thrown up.

Predictably, Wolf had gone ballistic when that had happened, reacting like she might be dying of some disease, and when she’d tried to calm him down by just telling him it was the smell of the records room that caused it, he’d only said - again (she’d stopped counting how many times now that he’d said this) - that he didn’t understand why she had to help her father with his bouncy castle project. Upon reflection, she realized now that Wolf’s attitude had probably contributed a lot to her upset stomach. The first day he’d actually managed to help them a little bit - although they’d had to re-check whatever he’d looked through, since even he had acknowledged that he couldn’t reliably remember what he was looking for from one moment to the next. At least that day he’d consulted the notes he’d made in New York on his own.

When he woke up on the second day, however, he didn’t remember anything. She’d shown him the notes and he’d read through them, but as soon as he put the notebook down it was as if it had never existed. After that it had gotten worse. Much worse. He’d started objecting to the time she spent in the records room. She tried to tell herself it was just the forget spell, but a small corner of her mind kept reminding her that she really hadn’t known him all that long. Suppose he was really that controlling? He hadn’t seemed like it so far, but what if he were just suppressing it? He’d told her that was what the magic shoes had done - bring out the things she was suppressing (and he’d been right; she’d tried to seduce him to get them back. The shoes had known what being near him did to her way before she had. The corners of her mouth quirked at the memory). She was getting married to him in a week. That was enough to make her nervous all by itself, and Wolf’s reaction to the forget spell only made it more stressful. She thought it was odd, her new reaction to stress. Always before, she’d just tightened up and blocked everything out. She’d get headaches from doing it, but nothing worse. Now it was as if her whole body were getting in on the act, and she wasn’t sure if it was from opening up to Wolf in the first place or some side effect of being pregnant.

It was very tempting for her to just call the whole thing off - just say no, she wasn’t getting married, not now, not ever. But she couldn’t do that - it would hurt Wolf too much, and it wasn’t fair to him for her to decide on the basis of the effects of the forget spell that he’d make her miserable. He was perfectly fine and wonderful otherwise. He’d even reminded her about the shower Amy was throwing for her, which she had forgotten about.

The shower was what had really gotten her to questioning the effect of the spell on Wolf. He’d wanted to attend it and she’d had to tell him it was a ladies-only party. Of course he’d pouted and whined a little, but it was all playful sorrow, and then he’d left her alone - sort of. Amy had asked to hold it at the penthouse, and Virginia couldn’t very well have thrown Wolf out for it when she knew he didn’t have anywhere to go. He had no friends in New York. It had occurred to her suddenly that he had no friends anywhere - he’d been in prison for nine years.

It wasn’t as if Virginia herself had many friends. Amy might have thrown her a shower, but in Virginia’s mind, they weren’t that close; Amy liked any excuse for a party. And the people she’d invited were all girls from work.

Virginia knew how she’d feel if Wolf had spent the week working on something she didn’t understand and couldn’t participate in. She’d be bored out of her mind - and she was sure she wouldn’t be as understanding if at the end of the week he’d announced he was holding a get-together for the guys in their apartment and she was expected to stay in the other room out of sight (or leave entirely if she preferred). In effect they were both very much alike in one way: they really only had each other. That made her realize he was less controlling than he was lonely. And she understood that completely.

So she couldn’t really get mad when she’d caught him spying on them at the shower. He’d effectively crashed it, but none of them really seemed to mind, except for Candy. She’d turned white as a sheet and claimed she’d forgotten an appointment and needed to leave early shortly thereafter. Now that Virginia had seen the television show about their adventure, she suspected what was the matter with Candy - she remembered the scene in the restaurant storeroom where Wolf had asked her for Virginia’s address. Annoyingly, that scene hadn’t lasted as long as Virginia had wanted it to. When she’d asked Wolf what he’d done, he’d claimed innocence - saying he’d ‘persuaded’ her to tell him. Virginia had suspected there was more to it than just that, but he seemed so taken aback by her suggestion that he’d seduced Candy that she was inclined to believe him. Maybe she really was his first. It had been hard for her to believe that a guy as sexy and charming as Wolf would wait only for her, even if he was from a fantasy-land. And he was charming. He had the girls at the shower - sans Candy - eating out of his hand. Virginia knew that, given other circumstances, he could have had any one of them.

It was at the shower when she’d first started to feel big. Not feel in a physical way, but as a mental image, resulting from a combination of Wolf’s charm on the others and the theme Amy had decided on for the party: They’d all bought her maternity clothes.

The girl had apologized from the beginning, before Virginia had opened the first present. She’d said she’d decided on the theme based on something she’d overheard Virginia saying at the Grill - and if she’d gotten it wrong, they’d take everything back. But she hadn’t said more than that, leaving it as a surprise for when she opened the first box. Virginia had been almost dumbfounded at the contents, but she’d managed to tell Amy that yes, she’d gotten it right and not to worry. Of course, when Wolf found out what the presents were, he was ecstatic, which only charmed them more. But if that wasn’t enough to make her feel huge, she had her first doctor’s appointment right afterwards. She and Wolf had gone together, and she’d enjoyed seeing which of the two men was more surprised at their second meeting, deciding Dr. Oberon won that honor. But beyond that, the doctor had confirmed beyond all doubt that she was indeed pregnant. Not only that, but he’d managed to press on her stomach in certain way and tell her she was ‘very full’. Those words still echoed in her mind, as did his pronouncement that her baby was due around the first part of June. There had been a woman in the waiting room who had brought her new baby with her for her postpartum checkup. Looking at it, Virginia wondered how she was going to go from getting queasy from everything she saw or smelled to that by the beginning of next summer, when so far there was no visible change in her body. Or was there?

She looked down at the jeans again. No, she thought. There’s not really a change you can see, but there is a change. ‘Very full’ - what a way to put it. She bit her lip and sighed. June, she thought. Wow.>

Tony carefully measured off the sections of the records room and marked them, first with chalk and then with string. It reminded him of pictures he’d seen of an archaeological dig, he decided, and the analogy made smile. Oddly enough, it had been Wolf who had come up with the plan. Not that Tony had liked it at first - it meant he’d have to go through everything he’d already discarded - again. But the more he thought about it, the more the plan made sense, given what they were fighting.

He’d gotten very discouraged in the past week. Not only had he found nothing but stacks of bills of lading and other equally interesting documents, but Virginia had gotten sick and Wolf hadn’t helped the situation by whining constantly about how much time she was not spending with her fiance; in fact, on that last day before the those two left for New York, when Virginia had gotten sick to her stomach Tony had nearly been ready to call it quits, he’d felt so guilty for forcing her to search with him when she’d told him all week that the smell of the room made her nauseous. He’d taken her comment as the kind of thing a pregnant woman says, not really assigning much importance to it. Christine had complained of similar ailments when she was pregnant with Virginia, but she’d never actually gotten sick. But then Christine had pleaded illness for many things. Now he felt guilty for brushing off the both of them. He hadn’t been very happy with Wolf’s behavior, either, although Virginia had kept assuring him it was only a result of the forget spell. It wasn’t until they’d returned, however, that he’d actually believed it.

During their stay in New York, Wolf had written a virtual book of directions about how to beat the forget spell. It involved sectioning the room off and then going through each section one by one, marking them as they finished. That way, the critical part would not be overlooked. Wolf had written down that he suspected it already had (Tony couldn’t talk to him, by now he’d forgotten again, although he was staying out of the way now since Virginia was no longer helping). He’d also written a massive apology on the first page, not so much to Tony as it was for anything and everything he’d ever done to upset Virginia. Reading it, Tony thought it was so effusive that it should surely be good anything Wolf had done wrong during three or four past lifetimes.

His thoughts were interrupted by Virginia, standing in the doorway. She was holding a metal bucket.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he told her.

“No,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about what Wolf said about how what we’re looking for is trying to make sure it doesn’t get looked at. And I think I can save us a lot of time.”

“How?”

“When I had to run out of the room the other day,” she began, “Where was I standing?”

He looked around, then pointed to where she had been, by the side of a map cabinet. It wasn’t a place he’d marked with the string as of yet. He planned on getting to that later. She nodded.

“What’s the bucket for?” he asked her.

“Exactly what you think it’s for,” she replied.

“Oh, no. You are not going to work in here.”

“It won’t take long. And if I’m right, this might even pinpoint what we’re looking for.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I felt bad all week, but it was never so bad that I couldn’t get up and go out for a breather,” she explained. “It did get worse, but all I needed was more frequent breathers. Until Tuesday. It came on very suddenly. I’ve thought about it, and I think it might have something to do with the forget spell.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. How do you know you just didn’t happen to get sick then?”

“Well, I don’t. But if that’s the case, I should be fine today in that same spot. I feel okay now - a little queasy from the smell, I guess, but not bad. It shouldn’t hit me just walking across the room when I haven’t been working in here at all. But if it does affect me, then that’s a good sign it’s the place, right? I mean, what better way to make sure I don’t look there.”

“Virginia ...”

“Look, Dad,” she said, “I want to do this. Just if it happens, make sure you search the spot. I don’t want to go through it for nothing.”

Reluctantly, he agreed, deciding that the sooner she got it over with, the better, before she spent so long a time in the room that she really got sick again. She walked over to the designated area and took a deep breath. Tony didn’t expect anything to happen, so he was doubly surprised when her face drained of color and she set the bucket down to vomit into it violently. He waited a couple of moments until he was sure she’d emptied her stomach, then grabbed her and rushed her out of the room - all the way outside. She was shaking as he set her down.

“Virginia, are you sure that doctor said you were all right?” he demanded. “Or do you think this could be some reaction you’re having to the baby being half werewolf?”

She looked at him coldly.

“It’s a reaction to the forget spell, like I told you,” she stated. “Please don’t make my having to go through that a worthless gesture!”

“You want me to go look there,” he said.

She nodded.

“You know, according to Wolf’s plan, I won’t get to that part of the room for a couple of months. Looking at the stuff out of order is just going to hold us up more.”

“Dad, that’s all the more reason to look at it now! Don’t you see? If the stuff doesn’t want to get found, it stands to reason that it’ll make sure it’s the last thing you look at?”

He sighed.

“You know,” she went on, “You’re resisting this idea, just like Wendell and Rupert resisted you going in the records room until you fooled them about it - and just like Wolf was resisting the idea of me helping you.”

“I am not.”

“So will you look there?”

“You’re the stubborn one, you know that?”

“No, Dad, I don’t have to be stubborn. It doesn’t have to use my stubbornness against me. All it has to do is use my screwed up sense of smell to make me puke. So will you look there?”

“Where you puked?”

She smiled.

“Yes.”

“Are you okay now?”

“Yeah, now I’m fine. I’m not even queasy.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, you know.”

“Well, it’s too late. I did. So will you look there?”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll look there.”

He almost didn’t. By the time he returned to the records room, he was thinking only of continuing with Wolf’s plan, but the incongruous sight of the iron bucket tugged at his memory. X marks the spot, he thought. He walked over to it and then he remembered what Virginia had asked him to do. He glanced around. Well, that does make it repulsive, he thought. But that’s what it’s supposed to do, I guess. So where’s the most repulsive place to look? Directly under the bucket! It was sitting on top of some leather-bound tome the size of an old-time ledger, its cover crumbling with age. Daintily, he picked up the bucket by its bail handle and set it aside. He considered taking it to the far side of the room, but realized just in time that he’d probably forget to come back if he gave into that desire. So, keeping his eye on the old journal, he set the bucket as far away as he could without actually moving. Then he knelt and opened the book.

The entries were hand-written, as was everything else in the room. But Tony couldn’t read them; they were written in German. It took him a moment to figure that out, with the old fashioned script letters, but that’s what it was. He’d found Grimm’s notes, or at least the notes of some German-speaking person who had visited the Fourth Kingdom, he decided. Happily, he picked up the whole thing so he could carry it to another room for examination (away from the bucket). To his surprise, beneath it, laminated to the floor, lay the crusty remnants of an aged fragment of brown paper, a few sepia letters - not in German - still legible upon it:

...hill...world of old
...story...untold.

A kingdom...thrived
...barren

Basquel Queen...
...end...love’s great pain

...one last spell

...my heart...
...kingdom fell ...

...hand...his life
...she was...

...must...peace
Ere...