Penelope Jones (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
and_whatwasleft) wrote2011-12-23 05:30 pm
and_whatwasleft) wrote2011-12-23 05:30 pm
canon } { and my running feet could fly
[HAPPY BIRTHDAY throughworlds! This is written for backstory for a verse that she and energybar started, and for a pair of OCs we’re going to be writing together. This is set about ten years before the current timeline.]
Penelope Jones is born five minutes before her twin brother, Jason.
Their mother jokes that Penny fought her way out, just so that she could be first. It’s not something the little girl grows out of, and everything in the early years of her life involves her going first because she’s older, whether it’s for the last cupcake, or the first to go into a scary room. For the most part, Jason doesn’t mind.
Penny never questions why her brother lets her do the things she does. It’s part satisfaction from getting her way, part instinct to protect him, because that’s what the older siblings do. It’s not logical, in any sense of the word, but it’s emotional, deeply rooted in something that she doesn’t really understand, but she keeps it. It’s one of the so very few emotional reactions she has, and she likes that feeling. Jason is her twin, he’s part of her, and the world would be a very scary place without him in it.
Their mother says that at the end of the day, they’re always stronger together. Penny is too young to really grasp what it means, but when she takes her brother’s hand, be it magic or be it comfort, she can feel it.
***
Serinda Jones makes magic a game for her children to play.
Their father disagrees. He thinks that magic needs to be taken seriously, because it isn’t a game, and Penny is far too practical to give in to her mother’s whimsy. She takes after her father a lot in that respect, to the point where Serinda teases her for it.
“Penelope Jones, if you’re not careful you’re going to grow up a very serious child,” she says. “Children are supposed to have fun.”
Later, when life reveals just how serious it can be, Penny wishes she would have listened. But at the ripe old age of six, Penny can recognize teasing when she hears it, and pouts, refusing to play her mother’s game on principle. Jason, however, takes to it like a fish to water. He would, after all—pretending to be a magician plays right into his powers, the same power he shares with their mother. To a conjurer, everything is a game, because everything can be manipulated. Penny, she could astral project.
There’s a reason she is always the assistant.
There aren’t many memories of her mother left—the fact that she lost her so early and that she didn’t spend as much time with her saw to that—but what she does remember is warmth and color. She remembers the way she used to hold her, and the way she would use magic to make the world sparkle around them. Everything about her mother was magic, and it was beautiful.
It makes the world a brighter place. Even though magic is what took her from Penny, it’s the main reason why she could never hate it.
***
Grant Jones is the one who taught Penny to play chess.
Serinda blames him for her daughter’s pragmatic nature. She teases him that if it weren’t for him, she could have had two perfectly whimsical children, but there’s love behind it, and he never is mad at her for it. No one ever understood it, how to entirely polar opposites, both in magic and in nature, but there is never any doubt that there is love. Penny is smart enough to know it when she sees it, and this is definitely it.
She’s eight when she’s finally had enough of magic tricks and nursery rhymes, and so Grant takes it upon himself to teach her tactics. He comes home from work one night to find her sitting in the study with his chessboard, studying the pieces as though they’re some kind of puzzle she can’t quite crack. He sneaks up behind her, and hoists her into the air until she laughs and smiles when he snuggles her back against his chest.
“Well, Miss Penelope,” he says, his voice a low rumble with a hint of Southern twang. “What on earth are you doing in here?”
“I was looking at your game,” she grins, the remains of a giggle in her voice. “What is it?”
“This—is chess,” He settles into his chair at the table, her in his lap. “It’s a game. Want to learn how to play?”
She nods, and he teaches her the mechanics of the game. He teaches her that you always need to think two moves ahead, that strategy is always more important than emotion, and to think, not simply react. Her mother teaches her spells and potions, but her father teaches her how to use them. That there are rules to every game, and the rules need to be obeyed—and occasionally bent just a little.
Jason takes more to the rule bending than the actual rules, and he never has the patience for chess, but sometimes, when their father’s away on business and their mother is busy with actually being a grown up, she’ll make him play with her. She always wins, mostly because she plays by the rules and isn’t afraid to call him on when he conjures her white knight into looking like his black one.
Her father, she never gets the chance to beat.
***
The last time Penny sees her mother is the first time that she ever sees her scared.
She’s ten years-old, and there had been some kind of loud bang in the front of the house. Both of the twins had come running towards the sound, but are stopped by their mother when they get to the foot of the stairs.
“Listen to me, both of you.” There’s no magic or laughter in her tone. It goes straight down to her gut and it’s at that very moment that Penny knows something is wrong. She forces something that looks like Penny’s favorite book of nursery rhymes into her daughter’s hands, and points up the stairs. “Go, run up to your room and hide in the closet. Don’t you make a sound. Understand me?” Both of them nod, silent and unsteady, and Serinda’s hands cover her daughter’s, forcing the grip on the book a bit tighter. “Do not let this book out of your hands. Do you understand me, Penelope Jones?”
She nods again. Her full name is usually meant to tease, but she could tell this time that her mother meant business. There’s another crash from the front of the house, and a hard male scream that she immediately recognizes as her father’s voice. “Daddy—” she starts, wanting to go to him, but her mother is in front of her, and Jason’s hands are on her shoulders.
“Go! Now!”
Jason half-drags her up the stairs to their room, forcing them into their closet, and Penny curls into him, hugging the book to her chest. She’s shaking like a leaf, everything in her body telling her that this is wrong and not supposed to happen. Even deeper than that, though, is the feeling that she’s being a failure.
“I’m scared.” It’s softer than a whisper, but she’s saying it to the only person she’d be willing to admit it to.
“It’s okay. I’m scared too.”
“I’m not supposed to be scared,” she whispers, turning into him more so that her face is muffled against her brother’s shoulder. “I’m older.”
Jason’s quiet for a moment, and she isn’t sure if it’s because he’s heard something or because he’s trying to think. She’s not sure if this silence is longer because it’s silence or if it actually is that length, and in a moment, her brother tightens his arm around her and whispers so only she can hear.
“Let me be older.”
Logically, she knows that she can’t just let him be older. The rules don’t work that way. But if her father taught her anything, it’s that sometimes the rules have to be bent. She nods, his arms pull her in closer, with the book of nursery rhymes wedged between them. They stay there, curled in as tiny a ball as two children can make, until they see the flash of blue glowing orbs outside the closet door.
***
Pennbrook Jones is not the most esteemed member of the Jones family tree, but at the moment, he was all they had.
Rook, as he liked to call himself, also would never be considered a parent to the children in any sense of the word, but he taught them everything they know—both about magic and about people.
He is the black sheep of the Jones family, the one who refuses to fall in line with their ways of doing magic, even if it means having to survive on his own. He’s the youngest of the family, and the first to congratulate his big brother when he fell in love with a gypsy witch, the last of a dying line, even if it meant that the family as a whole turning their back on him. Grant and Serinda were like Romeo and Juliet, only with what, for a moment there, looked like a happier ending. Then they died, and when the will is read, the entire Jones family is stunned into silence when Pennbrook, the nomadic bachelor with a shady sense of right and wrong, is given custody.
Including Rook himself.
If there is one thing that Rook knows, however—one thing that he does better than anyone else in his family—it’s magic.
Serinda had made magic a game, wanting to keep things simple and get the twins used to their powers to use when they got older, but Rook is the one who hones that practice and turns it into skill. He rides the twins hard and fast, the way he was ridden as a child, because he knows that that’s how you survive. They’re ten years-old, but their parents were already dead. If they don’t pick up the pace, they’re going to be next. It’s balanced magic, however—spells and potions are all well and good, but if you don’t know how to think on your feet, you’ll never make it. He teaches them to looking for the magic around them, not just what they bring into a fight.
It’s a year before Penny turns the Salazar Book of Shadows over to her uncle. The enchantment her mother had put on it to make it look like nursery rhymes had ended when their mother died, and knowing what it is, she protects it with everything she has. But once she’s convinced that Rook isn’t going to turn on them and kill them, she takes it to him that night, and tries to speak with all the conviction her eleven year-old self can muster.
“You need to teach us from that too,” she says, looking him dead in the eye. “Mom would have wanted it that way.”
She half expects him to shoot her down. Rook’s penchant for sarcasm has brought things to a head between the two of them more than a few times. Jason took to Rook more—he likes games that Rook plays. Penny knows that magic isn’t just a game anymore, but it’s something Jason never seems to lose. Penny just keeps looking for the angles, and it’s hard not to see that Rook has more than a few of his own.
Instead, however, he takes the book from her with a bit of reverence. He balances on one hand, his fingers gently running over the well-worn cover and ancient pages. And when he looks up at her again, he’s just as calm and serious as she is.
“Okay,” he nods. “I can do that.”
She doesn’t think of the fact that there are secrets in the book that aren’t meant for anyone else to know. All she knows is that Serinda had always said magic is meant to be shared, and all she had left of her mother is her magic.
That’s the magic she wants to learn.
Rook and Penny still fight for a while—they never really do learn to get along—but things get much easier when Penny learns that Rook can play chess.
***
Jason and Penelope Jones spend eight years being trained by their uncle.
Once they start mastering the magic itself, he starts on people and combining the two. Rook isn’t a nomad because he likes the lifestyle—he’s a nomad because usually in the places he’s left behind, he’s pissed someone off. He teaches them the very fine line between magic to help you and magic for personal gain, and when they turn eighteen, the twins decide to start out on their own. They know they’re going to make mistakes, but they have to figure themselves out sometimes.
Besides, Jason has a new magic act he wants them to try.
They tell Rook the night before they plan to leave. He doesn’t think they’re ready, but Jason points out they’re never going to find out if they’re always in school. Rook walks them through their first scam, making sure that they actually do know what they’re doing, and when they pull it off, he’s pleasantly surprised. He still doesn’t want to let them go—he may never be called their parent, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t home—but in the end, they have to do what they have to do.
Besides, Jason may not be the sharpest tactician in the bunch, but he’s a hell of a magician.
The night before they leave, Rook and Penny play one last game of chess. She’s gotten better over the years, but she still hasn’t beat him yet. He keeps asking her questions, making sure they have back up plans and contingencies for everything, but in the end Penny convinces him that she knows what she’s doing.
She’s eighteen and has the whole world a head of her. Maybe it’s naieve and hopeful of her, but Penny’s spent most of her life being a very serious child. It’s time for her to let go a bit.
“Just know you can always come home,” he says, and she looks up at him and gives him a small smile.
“Yeah, Rook,” she nods. “I know.”
For the first time that night, Penny takes his king.
If that isn’t a sign she’s ready to go, she doesn’t know what is.
2401 words
throughworlds! This is written for backstory for a verse that she and energybar started, and for a pair of OCs we’re going to be writing together. This is set about ten years before the current timeline.]Penelope Jones is born five minutes before her twin brother, Jason.
Their mother jokes that Penny fought her way out, just so that she could be first. It’s not something the little girl grows out of, and everything in the early years of her life involves her going first because she’s older, whether it’s for the last cupcake, or the first to go into a scary room. For the most part, Jason doesn’t mind.
Penny never questions why her brother lets her do the things she does. It’s part satisfaction from getting her way, part instinct to protect him, because that’s what the older siblings do. It’s not logical, in any sense of the word, but it’s emotional, deeply rooted in something that she doesn’t really understand, but she keeps it. It’s one of the so very few emotional reactions she has, and she likes that feeling. Jason is her twin, he’s part of her, and the world would be a very scary place without him in it.
Their mother says that at the end of the day, they’re always stronger together. Penny is too young to really grasp what it means, but when she takes her brother’s hand, be it magic or be it comfort, she can feel it.
***
Serinda Jones makes magic a game for her children to play.
Their father disagrees. He thinks that magic needs to be taken seriously, because it isn’t a game, and Penny is far too practical to give in to her mother’s whimsy. She takes after her father a lot in that respect, to the point where Serinda teases her for it.
“Penelope Jones, if you’re not careful you’re going to grow up a very serious child,” she says. “Children are supposed to have fun.”
Later, when life reveals just how serious it can be, Penny wishes she would have listened. But at the ripe old age of six, Penny can recognize teasing when she hears it, and pouts, refusing to play her mother’s game on principle. Jason, however, takes to it like a fish to water. He would, after all—pretending to be a magician plays right into his powers, the same power he shares with their mother. To a conjurer, everything is a game, because everything can be manipulated. Penny, she could astral project.
There’s a reason she is always the assistant.
There aren’t many memories of her mother left—the fact that she lost her so early and that she didn’t spend as much time with her saw to that—but what she does remember is warmth and color. She remembers the way she used to hold her, and the way she would use magic to make the world sparkle around them. Everything about her mother was magic, and it was beautiful.
It makes the world a brighter place. Even though magic is what took her from Penny, it’s the main reason why she could never hate it.
***
Grant Jones is the one who taught Penny to play chess.
Serinda blames him for her daughter’s pragmatic nature. She teases him that if it weren’t for him, she could have had two perfectly whimsical children, but there’s love behind it, and he never is mad at her for it. No one ever understood it, how to entirely polar opposites, both in magic and in nature, but there is never any doubt that there is love. Penny is smart enough to know it when she sees it, and this is definitely it.
She’s eight when she’s finally had enough of magic tricks and nursery rhymes, and so Grant takes it upon himself to teach her tactics. He comes home from work one night to find her sitting in the study with his chessboard, studying the pieces as though they’re some kind of puzzle she can’t quite crack. He sneaks up behind her, and hoists her into the air until she laughs and smiles when he snuggles her back against his chest.
“Well, Miss Penelope,” he says, his voice a low rumble with a hint of Southern twang. “What on earth are you doing in here?”
“I was looking at your game,” she grins, the remains of a giggle in her voice. “What is it?”
“This—is chess,” He settles into his chair at the table, her in his lap. “It’s a game. Want to learn how to play?”
She nods, and he teaches her the mechanics of the game. He teaches her that you always need to think two moves ahead, that strategy is always more important than emotion, and to think, not simply react. Her mother teaches her spells and potions, but her father teaches her how to use them. That there are rules to every game, and the rules need to be obeyed—and occasionally bent just a little.
Jason takes more to the rule bending than the actual rules, and he never has the patience for chess, but sometimes, when their father’s away on business and their mother is busy with actually being a grown up, she’ll make him play with her. She always wins, mostly because she plays by the rules and isn’t afraid to call him on when he conjures her white knight into looking like his black one.
Her father, she never gets the chance to beat.
***
The last time Penny sees her mother is the first time that she ever sees her scared.
She’s ten years-old, and there had been some kind of loud bang in the front of the house. Both of the twins had come running towards the sound, but are stopped by their mother when they get to the foot of the stairs.
“Listen to me, both of you.” There’s no magic or laughter in her tone. It goes straight down to her gut and it’s at that very moment that Penny knows something is wrong. She forces something that looks like Penny’s favorite book of nursery rhymes into her daughter’s hands, and points up the stairs. “Go, run up to your room and hide in the closet. Don’t you make a sound. Understand me?” Both of them nod, silent and unsteady, and Serinda’s hands cover her daughter’s, forcing the grip on the book a bit tighter. “Do not let this book out of your hands. Do you understand me, Penelope Jones?”
She nods again. Her full name is usually meant to tease, but she could tell this time that her mother meant business. There’s another crash from the front of the house, and a hard male scream that she immediately recognizes as her father’s voice. “Daddy—” she starts, wanting to go to him, but her mother is in front of her, and Jason’s hands are on her shoulders.
“Go! Now!”
Jason half-drags her up the stairs to their room, forcing them into their closet, and Penny curls into him, hugging the book to her chest. She’s shaking like a leaf, everything in her body telling her that this is wrong and not supposed to happen. Even deeper than that, though, is the feeling that she’s being a failure.
“I’m scared.” It’s softer than a whisper, but she’s saying it to the only person she’d be willing to admit it to.
“It’s okay. I’m scared too.”
“I’m not supposed to be scared,” she whispers, turning into him more so that her face is muffled against her brother’s shoulder. “I’m older.”
Jason’s quiet for a moment, and she isn’t sure if it’s because he’s heard something or because he’s trying to think. She’s not sure if this silence is longer because it’s silence or if it actually is that length, and in a moment, her brother tightens his arm around her and whispers so only she can hear.
“Let me be older.”
Logically, she knows that she can’t just let him be older. The rules don’t work that way. But if her father taught her anything, it’s that sometimes the rules have to be bent. She nods, his arms pull her in closer, with the book of nursery rhymes wedged between them. They stay there, curled in as tiny a ball as two children can make, until they see the flash of blue glowing orbs outside the closet door.
***
Pennbrook Jones is not the most esteemed member of the Jones family tree, but at the moment, he was all they had.
Rook, as he liked to call himself, also would never be considered a parent to the children in any sense of the word, but he taught them everything they know—both about magic and about people.
He is the black sheep of the Jones family, the one who refuses to fall in line with their ways of doing magic, even if it means having to survive on his own. He’s the youngest of the family, and the first to congratulate his big brother when he fell in love with a gypsy witch, the last of a dying line, even if it meant that the family as a whole turning their back on him. Grant and Serinda were like Romeo and Juliet, only with what, for a moment there, looked like a happier ending. Then they died, and when the will is read, the entire Jones family is stunned into silence when Pennbrook, the nomadic bachelor with a shady sense of right and wrong, is given custody.
Including Rook himself.
If there is one thing that Rook knows, however—one thing that he does better than anyone else in his family—it’s magic.
Serinda had made magic a game, wanting to keep things simple and get the twins used to their powers to use when they got older, but Rook is the one who hones that practice and turns it into skill. He rides the twins hard and fast, the way he was ridden as a child, because he knows that that’s how you survive. They’re ten years-old, but their parents were already dead. If they don’t pick up the pace, they’re going to be next. It’s balanced magic, however—spells and potions are all well and good, but if you don’t know how to think on your feet, you’ll never make it. He teaches them to looking for the magic around them, not just what they bring into a fight.
It’s a year before Penny turns the Salazar Book of Shadows over to her uncle. The enchantment her mother had put on it to make it look like nursery rhymes had ended when their mother died, and knowing what it is, she protects it with everything she has. But once she’s convinced that Rook isn’t going to turn on them and kill them, she takes it to him that night, and tries to speak with all the conviction her eleven year-old self can muster.
“You need to teach us from that too,” she says, looking him dead in the eye. “Mom would have wanted it that way.”
She half expects him to shoot her down. Rook’s penchant for sarcasm has brought things to a head between the two of them more than a few times. Jason took to Rook more—he likes games that Rook plays. Penny knows that magic isn’t just a game anymore, but it’s something Jason never seems to lose. Penny just keeps looking for the angles, and it’s hard not to see that Rook has more than a few of his own.
Instead, however, he takes the book from her with a bit of reverence. He balances on one hand, his fingers gently running over the well-worn cover and ancient pages. And when he looks up at her again, he’s just as calm and serious as she is.
“Okay,” he nods. “I can do that.”
She doesn’t think of the fact that there are secrets in the book that aren’t meant for anyone else to know. All she knows is that Serinda had always said magic is meant to be shared, and all she had left of her mother is her magic.
That’s the magic she wants to learn.
Rook and Penny still fight for a while—they never really do learn to get along—but things get much easier when Penny learns that Rook can play chess.
***
Jason and Penelope Jones spend eight years being trained by their uncle.
Once they start mastering the magic itself, he starts on people and combining the two. Rook isn’t a nomad because he likes the lifestyle—he’s a nomad because usually in the places he’s left behind, he’s pissed someone off. He teaches them the very fine line between magic to help you and magic for personal gain, and when they turn eighteen, the twins decide to start out on their own. They know they’re going to make mistakes, but they have to figure themselves out sometimes.
Besides, Jason has a new magic act he wants them to try.
They tell Rook the night before they plan to leave. He doesn’t think they’re ready, but Jason points out they’re never going to find out if they’re always in school. Rook walks them through their first scam, making sure that they actually do know what they’re doing, and when they pull it off, he’s pleasantly surprised. He still doesn’t want to let them go—he may never be called their parent, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t home—but in the end, they have to do what they have to do.
Besides, Jason may not be the sharpest tactician in the bunch, but he’s a hell of a magician.
The night before they leave, Rook and Penny play one last game of chess. She’s gotten better over the years, but she still hasn’t beat him yet. He keeps asking her questions, making sure they have back up plans and contingencies for everything, but in the end Penny convinces him that she knows what she’s doing.
She’s eighteen and has the whole world a head of her. Maybe it’s naieve and hopeful of her, but Penny’s spent most of her life being a very serious child. It’s time for her to let go a bit.
“Just know you can always come home,” he says, and she looks up at him and gives him a small smile.
“Yeah, Rook,” she nods. “I know.”
For the first time that night, Penny takes his king.
If that isn’t a sign she’s ready to go, she doesn’t know what is.
2401 words