I just got lost Who: Gwyneth and Alessandro Where: the Hathaway home When: not long after this
Eventually the storms abated long enough for Gwyneth to go up to her room and open the window so Ginevra could fly inside without anyone else in the house seeing her. Once Ginevra was settled and sleeping, Gwyneth went back downstairs, taking a large glass of water with her as she returned to the sun room. The storms were gearing up again and Gwyneth sat at the end of her chaise, watching the clouds move across the sky and lightning jump from one cloud to another.
Usually a flirtatious and social drunk, several pitchers of margaritas had only served to make her think more about the things that were troubling her, rather than less. Giada. Alessandro. Ginevra. It was all too much, and Gwyneth’s first instinct was to get on a plane and run away and hope that none of it followed her. But she knew it would, and it was running away from a problem that had landed her back in Scarlet Oak to begin with. So she sat, and stared, and sipped at the water in her glass while doing her best to ignore the fact that water could never just be water to her anymore.
Wandering was something Alessandro was slowly but surely getting used to. He could spend all day and all night around town but he always eventually found himself back at the same place: the Hathaway home. He’d never been here while he was alive, but now that he was dead, he was drawn to the place, for two reasons. Giada was staying here and that meant that he couldn’t stray too far from her for very long.
And then there was Gwyneth. His Gwyneth, his wife, finally in a place where he could see her and talk to her, even if she couldn’t see him and therefore wouldn’t talk back. Alessandro watched her sitting there, staring off into space. He didn’t know what was going on with the swan, though, Giada might have to explain that to him later, if he remembered to ask her. It didn’t stop him from approaching Gwyneth, kneeling next to her chair. “Gwyn,” he whispered into the silence, “what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
Not that she could hear him.
It suddenly got colder in the room, making Gwyneth wish that she’d changed into something more sensible than the bathing suit and sarong she’d been lounging in most of the day while she’d been upstairs. The storms didn’t look like they were going anywhere anytime soon, and still someone in the house had turned up the air conditioning. Ridiculous. Setting her glass of water down for the moment, she reached over to one of the nearby chairs and snagged a light throw. Gwyneth shivered once before she wrapped it around her shoulders, keeping it wrapped tightly around her.
It was only a matter of time before someone discovered the swan now residing in the Hathaway mansion and, supernatural-rights supporters on the surface or not, her parents were not going to be happy about their eldest daughter turning out to be an elemental. Gwyneth had no idea how Aldwin would react when he found out, and Kendal would undoubtedly do her best to make Gwyneth’s life difficult, as always. Melody already knew, or at least suspected, but even she had been normal once. And none of them had to bear the burden of knowing that their powers had saved them, more than once even, but had left the person they loved to die.
No answer. Someday Alessandro would learn to stop talking to the living like he was still alive and they were going to answer him back. Running into Calista had given him hope, though, hope that there were others out there like Giada. Mediums, people who not only saw him but heard him, weren’t afraid of him. Gwyneth isn’t psychic, and you know that. She would have told you if it was otherwise. He watched her get up and get a blanket, not really putting two and two together to realize that she was cold because he was so close to her.
“I would help you,” he murmured, “if only I knew how. If only I could make it so you could...” And then he spotted it out of the corner of his eye, her phone. Alessandro had practiced a few times with Giada’s phone, and he thought - he prayed - he might be able to get a message across that way. It took a lot out of him to even attempt to interfere with the living world, but for Gwyneth? He would try. Getting up, Alessandro reached out towards the phone, knowing he couldn’t touch it, but with enough concentration, he could make it do something. No ring, but it did make a beep, like that of an incoming text message.
Gwyneth was so lost in her own thoughts that at first she didn’t hear the beep. She was too busy watching the way the surface of the pool rippled in the wind and wondering if one day she would be able to do that. A moment later she shook her head, not quite able to believe that such things were possible, or at least not for her. The supernatural was intriguing and more than a little attractive in other people, but for Gwyneth it just made her feel clueless and out of place. Her concentration broken, the fact that her phone had beeped a moment ago finally registered with her and she reached for it. Grabbing it from the side table where it had rested, untouched (unlike the mostly empty margarita pitcher), she swiped her thumb across the screen to unlock it and see who might have been trying to reach her.
For half a second, Alessandro worried that the beep he’d heard had been in his head, and that he hadn’t managed to do anything at all. But, seeing her finally react and pick up the phone, it gave him hope. Alessandro kneeled in front of her again, knowing that if he could only touch the phone, hold it in his hands, it would all be so much easier. He closed his eyes, and concentrated again - and this time it rang, loud and clear. All he needed her to do was pick up the phone and he knew he’d be able to get this to work. Thank whatever gods there were that he’d been so well versed in technology when he was alive.
There was no text waiting for her, which was confusing, and she immediately checked the battery level to see if perhaps it had been a warning beep. No, the battery was fully charged. Mildly annoyed, Gwyneth was about to turn the phone off completely when it rang in her hands. The number wasn’t one she had stored in her phone, or even one she recognized, though it registered as local to Scarlet Oak. Gwyneth hesitated for a few seconds, thinking about ignoring it - she wasn’t exactly in a state to be making small talk with mere acquaintances - but decided it would be easier to just answer it and be done with it than put it off until later. “Hello?”
“Gwyneth?” He couldn’t tell if his voice sounded any different, but to him it was almost like an echo - he could hear his voice fine, but she could only hear it through the phone. “Gwyn, can you hear me?” Alessandro didn’t wish to scare her, not really. But he had to talk to her, and he didn’t know how else he might able to accomplish it aside from going through her phone. And, until she acknowledged the voice on the other end of the phone, he wouldn’t really know if he was successful or not.
She froze the second she heard her name in that voice. His voice. They’d spent so many hours on the phone together and then in person, talking into the wee hours of the morning, that she’d never be able to mistake his voice for anyone else’s. Her hand kept the phone to her ear and for a long moment she just...stopped. When she tried to reply, no sound came out because she had forgotten to breathe. Gwyneth stayed that way until her lungs started to burn and she had to inhale, taking a long, shuddering breath. It took a few false starts, but she finally got the words out. “Alessandro? Is that really you?” She was more afraid of that answer, yes or no, than she’d been of almost anything in her entire life.
If it had been any other person, any other situation, he could have laughed. But this was Gwyneth and she looked so close to tears that Alessandro wanted to pull her into his arms and hold her like nothing had ever happened. But he couldn’t, and that thought about broke him. The first words that got out of his mouth weren’t English, but Italian: ”/Gwyn, my love, I’ve missed you./” Alessandro paused, reaching a hand up as if to tuck her hair back, only to pull away when it hit him again that he couldn’t actually touch her. “It’s me. I’m here. I can’t really explain it, but I am.” Was this the reason why he’d come back, to see her again? Alessandro could believe that. He could convince himself of that quite easily, as a matter of fact.
Gwyneth hitched a sob, hand coming up to her mouth as if she could stop any more from following it. She blinked rapidly as tears blurred her vision, sending them slowly down her cheeks instead. “Oh God.” Her thoughts raced and her stomach churned wildly. “Alessandro...how...” She understood everything he said, but she could barely manage English. “I miss you.” Gwyneth hadn’t admitted that to anyone in a very long time, and she sounded almost broken as she did so now. “Why can’t you be here where I can see you?” People always said that life was unfair and that bad things just happened, but she couldn’t accept that. He wasn’t supposed to leave her. Not like that, not that soon.
If he had a heart, it would be beating hard in his chest. If he could still produce tears, he might have been crying with her. But he was a ghost and there was nothing he could do beyond this, but it was something. It was more than either of them had had in how many years, Alessandro could no longer count them. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I am. I wish I could show you.” Maybe Calista might know how he could make himself visible again, to someone else besides a medium. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t; he had to try. “I’m right in front of you. Right next to you.” He reached out for her hand, invisible fingers brushing over her wrist. “Can you feel that?”
Gwyneth waited to see if anything would happen, looking around as if he would suddenly materialize in front of her. But nothing did, and he didn’t. His voice was there, in the telephone, but that was it. She shook her head because at first she couldn’t speak around the lump in her throat. It felt like she was letting him down, like she was doing something wrong and if only she were different, better, she could do it right and feel him there with her. “I’m sorry.” Gwyneth didn’t know what else she could say to that. “I can’t-- I’m so sorry.”
Alessandro’s hand dropped away from her face. “I figured as much,” he said, quite softly. “I thought that - if I tried -” He shook his head, trying to think of what else he could do to prove he was real. “Don’t be sorry, my love. It’s not your fault.” It wasn’t his either, but then again, he was the one who had died that afternoon. She’d been stronger than him in that respect, and he was glad for it. “I am here, though. In your family’s home. Downstairs, I think. You’re sitting by the window, watching the rain come down.”
“How is this possible?” It wasn’t curiosity about the mechanics of it all that pushed her to ask, but her desperate need to cling to whatever she could of him. And maybe there was more. “How long have you been here?” She was too overwhelmed to doubt him, too drunk for any skepticism or logic to break through the wall of emotion that surrounded her. But she couldn’t bear the thought of him having been there the whole time, five long years when she could have been talking to him instead of missing him fiercely. There were a lot of things Gwyneth knew now that she hadn’t when he’d died, but how she could be talking to her late husband on her cell phone wasn’t one of them.
“I don’t really know, myself.” Alessandro didn’t want to question it too much right now. Anything was better than what he had before this - it was terribly lonely to be a ghost, even more so for him. He didn’t like to be by himself when he was alive, and as a ghost it just made this trait even more miserable. “I came here to the States with Giada,” he said. “How long have I been like this... I do not know. I remember - I came back to the house. Our house, back in Italy. It was empty, cold, everyone gone. I didn’t know where you were.” Typical Alessandro, always talking, talking, talking, probably giving her more information than she wanted to know, than she was ready for. In the moment, he didn’t care.
Those six little words cut right into her. I didn’t know where you were. “I couldn’t... I couldn’t stay there, Alessandro. Not without you.” Not with empty rooms echoing back at her all the time. She still owned the house, and paid for its upkeep, but it wasn’t home without Alessandro. It hadn’t been home for a long time. “It’s been five years. You’ve been gone five years.” Just under it, actually, but it felt longer than that, most days. And shorter than that on others. Gwyneth wasn’t sure how she’d made it five years without him. Apparently she was better at distracting and deceiving herself than she would’ve thought. Then something about his mention of Giada stuck with her. “Does Giada know you’re here?”
He could see how it hurt her, written all over her face. Alessandro would have taken this all back if he could have, made it so he survived that afternoon and they both made it to shore and now they’d be looking back on that day and laughing. That would never happen now. “I don’t blame you,” he murmured, “I never did. I just - I was so lost.” It was because of the head injury, because he’d died. Five years since the accident - had Giada told him that before? She might have. “My memory is not what it used to be,” he admitted softly. “So much between that day and now is lost to me. And yes, Giada knows. She would like to pretend otherwise, I’m sure, but she can see me.”
Gwyneth was far more inclined to be disaffected or depressed than angry, but Giada? Giada could make her angry. She completely ignored the fact the fact that she never would have believed Giada if she had told Gwyneth several years ago that Alessandro’s ghost was hanging around; before the Light of May she’d had no clue such things were possible, and Giada was the type to try to hurt Gwyneth by making something like that up anyway. “Has she known this whole time? Has she always been able to see you?” The thought of missing out on talking to Alessandro all that time was physically painful and for a moment she thought she might actually throw up. How might the last five years have been different if she’d been able to talk to him like she was now?
Alessandro was aware that his daughter wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and that the two of them had never gotten along well while he was alive. He’d always thought it was because his children had a hard time accepting that he’d remarried, though he’d never really intended to replace their mother. Cristina was the first love of his life and she was gone, Gwyneth was the second, and he wasn’t going to stop fighting for her simply because he was now a ghost. “For a while,” he said. “I did not know about it until -” Until I died. “- Until I came back. It took me awhile to find them. Giada, she’s - well, she listens to me now more than she used to. I knew she could lead me to you.”
Gwyneth might be a water elemental, but at that moment, she was sure she could set Giada on fire with her anger. “Why--” She was too choked up for a moment to go any further. “Why didn’t she tell me before?” It was a rhetorical question more than anything; Gwyneth could come up with half a dozen reasons why Giada had never said anything to her. Some of them would even be understandable, if Gwyneth wasn’t busy grieving her husband a second time. Giada had always hated her and hated her being with Alessandro, and with Giada and Lorenzo living with their uncle and Gwyneth soon fleeing back to the States, it was easy to avoid telling her or letting it slip. “Am I really that horrible a person?” Nevermind that Giada was clearly there for a reason, and if Gwyneth had been sober and thinking clearly she might have realized that even Giada’s dislike of her wouldn’t be enough to bring her to Scarlet Oak just to screw with her.
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me either, before this.” Alessandro would like to say he knew his daughter’s every action by heart; that he could explain why she did the things she did to anyone’s satisfaction. The truth was, he didn’t. Alessandro wasn’t the world’s best dad, but he was trying. Sometimes it was just hard being that he had no body to speak of and even though Giada could actually see him, that didn’t always speak for much. He did know his children had always been lukewarm about Gwyneth, in spite of how in love with her Alessandro himself was, and that was likely why it never came up. It wasn’t exactly the conversation you just picked up the phone and had with your step-mother, after all. “You’re not a horrible person. Gwyn, my Gwyn, you never were.” Now, more than ever, Alessandro just wanted to hold her. Like, by doing so, he’d somehow make this better.
Gwyneth was overwhelmed. Finding out she was an elemental, getting a familiar, talking to her dead husband while her step-daughter presumably spent all her time in a guest room upstairs... She couldn’t handle it. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she didn’t even bother to brush them away. For the moment she was beyond caring if anyone came in and saw her like that - drunk, crying, and clutching her phone like it was a lifeline. Gwyneth didn’t think of herself as a horrible person normally, but she still didn’t quite believe him. If he’d been there, if he could wrap his arms around her, she would have taken him at his word in an instant, but without a body she couldn’t be comforted by his presence. All she wanted now was to sleep, to succumb to unconsciousness so she wouldn’t have to feel so wretched. But she couldn’t bring herself to hang up on Alessandro, not when she’d missed hearing his voice so much.
It didn’t matter if he was alive or dead, if he had a heart to break or not, Alessandro never liked seeing Gwyneth cry. Right now was no different, and it was only made worse by the fact that he couldn’t make it better in the state he was currently in. He couldn’t hold her, he couldn’t kiss those tears away, he couldn’t do anything. That was the most frustrating part. At least she seemed to believe he was really there now, even if he had a pitcher of margaritas to thank for that. Alessandro still reached up for her, trying to touch her, though she couldn’t feel it. The connection to her phone wouldn’t last much longer, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to get it back right away. “I love you,” he whispered. “Always have.”
“I love you too,” she answered between deep, shuddering breaths, eyes going wide when the connection seemed to break up, a static she’d never heard on her phone before. Gwyneth pulled it away from her ear to look at the signal only to find every bar strong despite the weather. She brought it back to her ear and the static was even louder, turning into a high-pitched whine before cutting out completely. Her grip on the phone didn’t loosen, even though she knew that he was gone, and something told her he wasn’t calling back. Curling up on the chaise, she held the phone close to her chest like a security blanket. “Always will.”