#cerys does not know jenna heap is her daughter

[septimus-heap]

Have I said spyxfamily marcia/cerys au before. I'm saying it now anyway. Marcia gets to be loid and cerys is yor. And I guess that puts septimus as anya

[lovelyisadora]

Hmm do u have any hcs abt milo + marcia after he comes back in flyte? Maybe his reaction to the whole "stayed in zeldas cottage in the swamp then spent a month in the worst dungeon in the castle and also nearly died like 6 times" thing 👀 also maybe them from fyre onwards abdjdbfjr also marcia is my favourite too so I will never be annoyed that ur hcs are marcia-centric 😌😌

post flyte:

· milo has no expectations upon his return to the castle. most likely, there isn’t anyone who even remembers him. he wants to see his daughter, and maybe—maybe—find out what happened to marcia. there is no doubt in his mind that she’s still alive. she has always been capable of taking care of herself and he knows alther would never let anything happen to her. but when marcia had suddenly and with no warning ended their relationship, she had said she never wanted to speak to him again and she does not say things she does not mean. he doubts a decade has changed her mind, so he has no plans to seek her out personally. but then it’s marcia who is extraordinary wizard and not alther and suddenly he can’t breathe. to make everything worse, she is staring at him as if he is a ghost and then she hugs him, as if she never told him she didn’t love him.

· after the confusion with his daughter—jenna, the heaps named her, which isn’t what cerys wanted, but milo likes it—he hesitantly seeks marcia out again. if she never wanted to speak to him again, she wouldn’t have embraced him so hard. he needs to know what happened in the decade he was gone and there isn’t anyone else he can ask. she hardly looks at him as she tells him that it was a double assassination. that alther and cerys died the same night. he tries to get her to tell the rest. why do the heaps have his daughter. where was she that night. was she safe. were they all safe. but marcia isn’t talking.

· he has to learn what happened from the others. his daughter reluctantly tells him how marcia took her away from her parents—the heaps, she corrects herself, uncomfortable—to save her life. that together they saved her brother from the snow. that they lived in the marshes together, and then jenna doesn’t want to talk anymore either. silas asks him if he can convince marcia to see a doctor, and when milo asks why, silas shuts his mouth. “sorry, I thought marcia had—nevermind.”

· marcia doesn’t know what to think about his return. she truly thought he was dead, but now that he isn’t, everything is muddled. she had never meant it when she told him she didn’t love him. that she never wanted to speak to him again. she had only said it because he wanted children, a marriage, and he was never going to get it from her. she tries not speaking to him if only to protect herself—she is still head over heels after all this time, and whatever his feelings for her, he won’t feel that way once he sees what she’s become. but it’s hard. it’s so, so hard. because all he has to do is smile lopsidedly, all he has to do is laugh, and—“oh,” marcia thinks. “fuck.”

· marcia thinks she is so clever but milo knows her. she isn’t fooling him. she is thinner than he remembers her, bonier. she walks as if her bones were broken and put back together wrong. she avoids any mention of the decade he was gone. he tries—“marcia, why did silas think you needed to see a doctor,”—but marcia always has an excuse. she has a headache. septimus has a lesson. “goodbye, milo.”

· the only reason milo leaves again when cerys appears to him and begs him to seek out the jinn to protect their daughter is because jenna doesn’t want anything to do with him and he cannot get through to marcia. he doesn’t know where they stand. he doesn’t know if they’re friends, if they’re anything. he isn’t even sure if he can say that she’s talking to him, because she isn’t, not really. when he tells her he’s leaving again, though, it gets her attention. “you’ll say goodbye before you go?” she asks, and it’s means everything to him. his heart flutters. “and I’ll write,” he promises, and finally—finally—he has gotten her to smile.

post fyre:

· marcia was never jealous over his time spent with hildegard. she’s angry with herself and taking it out on him. a few months after his return he told her that he wouldn’t do this, whatever they were, with her again because he refuses to let her make decisions for him or shut him out. if they weren’t ever going to talk, he was done. if he was with hildegard, it meant he was done. it meant she took too long to sort herself out. but that turns out to not be the case, and while she’s still not sure where they stand, a few weeks after everything settles back to normal she seeks him out. “I’m not okay,” she finally admits, after years of pretending that she was. “I’m not okay and I don’t know if I ever will be, but I want this,” and marcia tells him everything.

· by this point milo has pieced together enough over the last few years to know what happened to her, even if she’s never said it herself. it’s how he knows to grab her hand in the lift, it’s how he knows to help her down the stairs after she and jenna have defeated the ring wizards. he is able to sit there and listen to her with minimal tears even though it fucking hurts, even though he's still horrified for everything she’s endured, for everything literally no one else knows about.

· they don’t really date the second time around, but he still takes her to the little theater in the ramblings. she’d liked it well enough years ago, and she likes it well enough now. he also steals her away from her desk for long walks, and slowly—so slowly—she gets over her fear of the water. he can even manage to get her to sit on the riverbank with him and dip her feet in.

· the first time she’s on his ship she’s terrified and it’s so painfully obvious, but they do not leave the quay and they do not go below deck and he holds her hands the entire time. it gets easier and easier after that

· after seven years, milo decides to return home. he hasn’t been back since he left as a young man. he casually brings this up to marcia. he wants her to go with him, and she understands what this is. this is a proposal. “milo, I am never going to go with you,” she says, and he is silent for a long time. then he presses a kiss to her fingers and steps away from her. he is going anyway. it may be some time before he comes back. this is it, then, and while he does see her again in the weeks before he leaves, it’s different.

· hours after he leaves, marcia is in a meeting with other wizards and cannot stop thinking about it. she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her, why it’s so difficult for her to be happy. she frowns, because really, what’s stopping her from being happy? why not go with milo? she can’t fuck anything up any more than she already has, he’s proven that time and time again. she’s the healthiest she’s ever been, the castle hasn’t had a crisis in years, septimus is adept enough he can hold his own for a few months, and jenna can manage just fine without her. “I’m sorry madame marcia, are we boring you?” one of the wizards sneers, interrupting her thoughts, and marcia stands abruptly, mind made up. “yes,” she says bluntly, and leaves because she is going to take a risk. she is going to be vulnerable. she is going to do something she wants to do for once, and where is septimus because someone will need to know where she’s going.

· milo laughs when his ship arrives in the first port and marcia is there to greet him. he spins her around and she kisses him and “let’s get married,” she says, and that is that

[ananas-pineapple-thing]

hey you seem to be very interested in milo, i was wondering what you think of marcilo? also how do you think his relationship with jenna becomes? do you think he'd be a better dad in the modern au? thank you!

I am super interested in Milo! I think it’s because he’s kind of an awful father and very snobby, but he really does want to be a part of Jenna’s life. He’s just too self-centered to realize that even though he would like it, Jenna does not want a lavish feast and expensive gifts all the time. I think that scene in Fyre when Jenna blows him a kiss and he gets ridiculously happy and goes, I can be her dad because she wants it is really telling. Like, his coronation gift to her in the end is huge and lavish, but it’s also really sentimental and giving the Palace part of its history back. We don’t see Jenna’s reaction to it but I’m pretty sure she genuinely liked it. I think the thing with Milo that everyone forgets is that he spent the year Jenna was born up until a bit before Flyte starts imprisoned on a pirate ship. He wasn’t cruising around, he was literally a captive. Being imprisoned right after learning his daughter and wife died for 11 years probably took a toll on how he matured. Milo acts like someone in their early twenties instead of thirties. While this is partly his personality, I think that being captive trapped him in that emotional twenty-something-year-old state, which is another reason why he can’t connect with Jenna properly. Like, twenty year old guys are dumb. He’s not ready to take the responsibility for an 11 year old that Jenna wants.

WELL THAT BLEW OUT OF PROPORTION. Anyways, this brings me to Marcilo! I think Marcia is someone who needs a partner to connect with on an emotional and intellectual level. And Milo just isn’t on the same maturity level as her. She takes more of an active interest in what Septimus’s interests are than Milo does with his own daughter. Like the scene in Syren where Septimus realizes that she had listened to all his Young Army stories down to the details of how survival kits were packed. Compare this with earlier in the book, when Milo tried to connect with Jenna multiple times and missed every single time, because he didn’t bother to know her as a person. That’s just one example of how differently wired they are. I also don’t see them clicking intellectually on the same level. Milo is definitely smart, being a sailor, but it’s a different type of smart than Marcia can connect and engage with. Them being childhood friends is really cute, and also canon! But I see them as having sort of an exasperated sibling relationship more than a romantic one. A big part of this is that there are no hints/build up to romance in the books. Before Fyre, Milo was obviously still very in love with Cerys, and brought her up constantly. In Fyre he mentions taking trips to get away from her, but in Syren, he shows Jenna a watch with the Castle time on it because he was worried about her and wanted to know what she was doing back home. He was obviously very dedicated to her, and the trips he took were to find a jinn army to protect her and their future child (because the Palace has no security??? What is up with that??). That being said, I don’t think, two years after this, he’d have moved on enough to get into another relationship. He strikes me as the type to hold onto things for a long time, for better or worse.

(Although I do think in the scenario where they are a couple, it’s fun to think about Septimus being jealous that Marcia is Jenna’s stepmum but just his mentor)

As for his relationship with Jenna, as of canon in Fyre and THM it does get better! A big part of this is probably the realization he has in Fyre that if he wants to connect, he has to do it on Jenna’s terms. I think that he makes an effort to find out what Jenna’s interests are and the kind of gestures she finds nice instead of obnoxious. I also think that he doesn’t try to replace Silas, who is Jenna’s dad, but finds his own relationship with her that probably consists of playing cards and talking history and looking at shiny things. When she’s older, Jenna probably coordinates nights out where she hangs out with Silas and Milo, doing something that they all enjoy. The Septimus Heap postal system is whack, but I like to think that when he goes on long trips, he starts making an effort to write her letters, and she keeps every one of them. I also think that they have long talks about the kind of person her mum was how they are similar, when she’s older and especially after she passes the age Cerys was when she died.

In a modern AU, I think the one thing that would change would be the lack of communication when Milo is on some trip. I think he’d call Jenna all the time when she’s in class and then be confused when she doesn’t pick up because she’s in class. He’d also probably book plane tickets to another continent as a surprise and not get that Jenna can’t go because it’s the middle of the school year. Other than that, I think their relationship would be really similar, with Milo having to learn the same things! I do like the idea of Jenna being Indian on Milo’s side and them connecting big time through that, because Milo can ramble about the culture all day and Jenna wouldn’t mind because she actually wants to know this. I also really like the idea of Milo taking her to India and like, trying to buy her a bunch of things and being very, very obnoxious about it, and Jenna has to suffer through it because it’s a foreign country she can’t just run off.

I hope that answered your question!! I wrote a LOT, but that’s because I have Feelings about Jenna’s parents. Thanks for the excuse to talk about them!

[ananas-pineapple-thing]

hey you know what makes no sense? that cerys’s character in fyre had to be destroyed in order to cement jenna’s place in the heap family.

hey you know what would have made so much more sense? cerys’s being exactly what jenna was told she was like all these years by milo and alther and aunt zelda. she’s almost exactly what jenna thinks she would be like as an adult, and she’s adventurous and brave like milo always said she was. and when she comes to take jenna on that trip, there’s no grandma or anything, just cerys knowing she gets jenna for one week only, so when she appears, she thanks the heaps for loving jenna when she couldn’t, not in a way that implies jenna was a burden. when she becomes solid on that boat, she hugs her daughter and they explore the palace together. and when it’s over jenna really knows what it means to be queen now, she understands all the history, and she understands her mother and milo too. she understands that a life with them was something that was stolen from her, and she understands how lucky she is too have gotten a new one. and maybe in the end cerys says that she isn’t allowed to appear to jenna except on midsummers day, so after jenna visits the dragon boat every year, cerys appears to her and milo, and they sit and talk. jenna’s not replacing sarah or anything, she’s claiming her birthright, the right to know her mother.

and she understands now that she can have two families, two dads and two mums. sometimes she dreams about growing up with cerys’s touch instead of sarah’s, milo’s trinkets instead of silas’s books, with little sisters instead of older brothers. and she knows milo does this too, and he’s been grieving this for the years before he finally found that his twelve year old daughter didn’t die after all. and this brings them closer, because jenna understands exactly what it is he lost. and that’s when jenna really is ready to be queen, because she understands that while her brothers aren’t princes and her mum isn’t a queen, cerys was and that’s one part of her jenna can have, and she should take as a gift instead of a burden.

making cerys awful didn’t help jenna’s relationship with milo and the heaps at all. making her the character we already knew would’ve strengthened it.