He'd lingered too much on it. Feared that he would somehow be rejected if he returned, that the ill judgement he had displayed in nearly giving himself over to Chaos would somehow have affected his bond with the place whose name he bore, and that his cowardice in fleeing and abandoning Carterhaugh the Wonder and Carterhaugh the Knight for so long would have compounded the issue.
As if he had broken something fragile and special, and had lost this, too, when he gave up his old life in fear of being found and taken against his will by the Negaverse.
But he knew, deep down, that he needed to come back here. That it was somewhere special and important, to who he was as a Knight.
That he wasn't going to fix his mistakes by running away.
His previous visits had been brief, and they were so long ago, the memory felt hazy. It hadn't felt so important, then, because he'd been a foolish person who didn't understand what it meant to carry a Knight's starseed and be bound to a Knight's duty. But he knew better now, and he could only start making up for it by taking the first step.
This visit, from the very beginning, felt...different.
At the least, when he'd been here before, it certainly hadn't been covered in snow.
It still looked like a ruin, and the extensive gardens surrounding the manor house were still barren and bare, but...the few inches of snow that sat on everything made the whole place seem even more magical somehow. The special blessing of a winter night, snow falling undisturbed by humans.
There were no footprints marring it, no plows to push it aside. Just peace and quiet.
Carterhaugh loved it. Somehow, he hadn't been sure what to expect from his Wonder, hadn't really known if it would change with the seasons. Something about learning that it did just made him more enchanted by the place. Would it be different again in the springtime? He'd heard of life returning on other worlds; would it, perhaps, return to his?
He hoped so. The idea of this place with birds chirping and bees buzzing through the garden felt...right.
He walked forward on the path leading to the manor house; he'd mostly spent his time outside before, in the gardens, but they were dormant now, and while the idea of sitting out in the snow was pleasant, it wouldn't let him see more of this place. Really begin to connect with it.
He owed Carterhaugh the Wonder that, after all his neglect. Owed it as much attention as he could give, since he had waited for so long to start trying. Perhaps he couldn't undo all the time he had spent away, but he could, once again, recommit himself. He'd done well to showing up for his duties on Earth, fighting monsters there and even helping to clear the Chaos from a Senshi's homeworld so that it could thrive again. And if he could do that for someone else, surely he could do it for himself, for the place he was pledged to, as well.
He pushed open the door to the manor house--it was in surprisingly decent condition for having been abandoned for so long, he had to admit. As he stepped inside, he found himself in a warm looking entry hall, and his eyes moved to one of the grand, lovely windows in the wall--
He gazed out the window, a warm mug of tea in his hands. The snow fell steadily--there would be few visitors for the next few months, while Carterhaugh's legendary roses laid dormant, and there was naught to be gained from their healing magic.
He was prepared, he knew. He'd preserved more than enough of the Carterhaugh roses top last him until they bloomed fresh in the spring. But there was a prickling of anxiety, nonetheless. It would be a shame, if all Missouri's efforts to save him came to nothing because he ran out of the tea he needed to keep back the poison Medb's assassin had slipped him. He had no proof, of course, that it came from her--but it simply made sense.
Tying up the loose end he represented.
He sighed, and stood up, and a jolt of pain ran up his spine. Another sip of tea quelled it, but it didn't quell the aching bitterness in his chest.
And then Carterhaugh was back in the present, staggered by whatever he had just witnessed.
Memories. He knew they existed, that others experienced them, but this was the first one he'd gotten himself, and it felt so...strange. So entirely out of context. Just a snippet of whoever had come before, and a sense of such deep bitter, abiding pain--physical and emotional--that it made Carterhaugh's chest hurt, in the present, a thousand years removed from whatever he had just experienced.
And what was that name? Missouri? A fellow Knight? And Medb...there had been such a complex swirl of emotions, there. Loathing and bitterness and sorrow and a tinge of aching longing, all together in one.
Whoever she had been to the previous Carterhaugh, it had been complicated.
So many tantalizing secrets, so little context to explain any of them. Ugh, Carterhaugh wanted to know more, now. But he suspected that attempting to force it wouldn't go anywhere; the memories would come or they wouldn't, and he would just have to deal with that, as little as he liked the idea. Perhaps if he spent more time here, he would come to understand more of what his predecessor had been thinking. Why he had seemed so...angry. So unhappy.
Why he'd thought of assassins, and why he was so worried about running out of tea--brewed from magical roses that apparently grew at this Wonder, which was new information, he would have to look for those come springtime. The memory certainly suggested they were dormant in the winter...
("What makes you pull the rose, the rose?
What makes you break the tree?
What makes you come to Carterhaugh
Without the leave of me?")
(The song came unbidden, a beloved little beauty and the beast tale. A man trapped by a deal with a fairy queen, freed by love. Maybe it was applicable. Maybe not. Carterhaugh couldn't be sure, and there certainly weren't any answers apparent.)
He wondered, as he walked towards the doors at the west end oft he entrance hall, if his previous self had ever wanted to run away. If the weight of responsibility--surely much stronger in the Silver Millennium, when this Wonder had undoubtedly been a more active place that hosted people other than its Knight--had ever tugged him down and left him feeling like he wasn't up to the task. Or if, perhaps, there had been other things that contributed to the wormwood brew in his chest, that bitterness that had permeated even the brief memory Carterhaugh experienced.
Perhaps their struggles were different. And it hadn't really been any weight of responsibility that had made Carterhaugh run. He'd wanted to save a girl, but he'd nearly lost himself in the process, and one of the many things he'd realized in his self-imposed exile was how foolish that had been. The weight of what he might have become sat heavy as lead on his shoulders--how much of himself would Chaos have burned out? What kind of person would it have turned him into?
The idea of becoming someone he couldn't recognize anymore terrified him, if he was honest. It was the thing that had sat heaviest next to his guilt for almost giving up. Would the Negaverse have turned him into a killer? He liked to think no, because he had no particularly strong urge to do unnecessary violence now and he seemed almsot not meant for it, with magic designed to inspire and not to harm, but who could even know, really?
Roads not taken and all.
He pushed the doors open, and found himself in a library, or some kind of records storage space--he wasn't sure. The shelves were lined with books and scrolls, and some had fallen to the floor, as if they'd been hastily looked through. The shelves themselves were beautiful, solid wood and decorated with carved roses that matched a motif he'd already noticed in other places at the wonder.
Carterhaugh couldn't say what it was that drew him forward, to one particular rose at the corner of one particular shelf, but he ran his fingers over it, and felt--something odd.
He put a little pressure on it, and there was give. So he pushed.
The shelf next to him slid aside, revealing a door cut into the wall--some kind of secret passage?
Instantly, Carterhaugh was captivated by curiosity. He pushed open the door, and stepped into the secret room beyond.
[wc: 1534 words]
