twilight palace

Dated 2 May, 1998 (PG-13)

2009-06-27T12:27:04Z

Title: Dated 2 May, 1998

Author: Lady Altair

Summary: Severus Snape's last letter is not to anyone important.

Rating: PG-13

Notes: This was supposed to be called Climb until I heard that Miley Cyrus song. :/

Katie just tells everyone that she can’t remember anything about anything to do with the necklace and the months she spent in St. Mungo’s.

If she doesn’t remember anything until waking up in that hospital bed, she doesn't need a story to tell. It’s just easier; people are curious, people are morbid, they’d want to know, and it is so much easier to shrug and smile and pretend there is nothing to say.

Really, there isn’t. There are no words to tell. There are no words at all, there is nothing so human. There is that ripping scream that she feels fissuring her throat – she couldn’t hear anything real, see anything true, there was only some unearthly roaring in her ears that must’ve been the sound of pain crashing through every nerve ending in her body, there were only blurring colors that surely would’ve made sense if any bit of her consciousness could just stop shrieking in agony. She doesn’t want to remember that pain, it’s easier to forget the agony, that very specific sensation of wanting to die, the conviction that even if she knew two hundred years of happily ever after waited for her when the pain stopped, she’d take death just to end it a single second earlier.

She doesn’t have to remember all those long, grey months, alone and buried in her own mind, slowly climbing out of the black into the grey, up to the surface of consciousness like she was climbing out of a well. It was a long, lonely trek, clinging to a wall with precious few handholds, the memory of what pain the world held a weight tangled around her legs, the strangely soothing knowledge that if she slipped, if she let go, if she could climb no further…there would be no fall, no fear. It was death she climbed away from, that was the soft darkness she had craved while she lay broken at the bottom and that knowledge was like the comforting weight of unfurled wings on her back. But her climb was a challenge and the black grew grey with every effort and she was Katie Bell, so she pulled herself up and grinned brightly down at the dark, this day is not a good one for flying, I’ll save your wings for another.

And if she doesn’t remember anything until waking up in that hospital bed, she doesn’t have to remember how Professor Snape’s cool hands felt on her face when everything else was hellfire, doesn’t have to remember the hours (or maybe just minutes, or seconds) when there was only him and the agony, when he took the pain away and saved her life. She remembers him most clearly of all, more than Leanne, more than Harry, more than Hagrid, more than Madame Pomfrey. She doesn’t know why; the others are a few muted words, interrupted cries, a lifting sensation…just pieces, not people, fragmented by the filter of the curse. He alone stands out, the only full memory she can stitch together when she comes around to herself in the bottom of the black well. She remembers his hands gentle and firm on her face, his black eyes locked with hers, and the strangest sensation that someone was sharing her head. And in that painless, peaceful black she just wanted to fade into, that voice pulled her eyes up to the gray above her and said climb. When she turned away, when she curled up in the dark and waited for it to claim her with gentle hands, saying no, it’s too far, just let me go, he pulled her up, pulled happy memories from places she was not strong enough to reach and set them into the walls like handholds and said no, Miss Bell, you will climb, because I will not lose.

It’s all this that gives her pause, later, that makes her wonder if anything she heard or felt was real at all, and not just in her head, not just the aspects of the curse, because the man she feels picked her up and made her live couldn’t have done so, couldn’t have cared so much about some stupid seventeen-year-old Mudblood Gryffindor girl…she’d been a pawn to his plan, collateral damage unfortunate only because her tragedy had ruined his attempt. Why would he bother, why he would he not just leave her there, broken and content and finished in the dark? Perhaps he was just a figment, just a strange, delusional champion she created to save herself.

When someone asks what it all felt like, it’s easy enough to look blank and say she doesn’t remember; in truth, she’s not entirely certain it was all real anyway, and so it isn’t so difficult to pretend.

Katie sends ‘thank-you’ cards to all of the staff in St. Mungo’s, and Madame Pomfrey in the Infirmary – her mother bought them, told her it was polite. They’re glittery and bright and sweet, and there is one for Professor Snape, too. Long after the rest have been sealed and sent off, long after she has received a few replies wishing her continued health and happiness, she stares at the blank white of the inside of the card, closes and opens it a few times before leaving it. She tries a few times, even begins a few lines. Out of habit, the first word she inks onto the card is Dear, but by the time the quill is about to form the P in Professor, she’s already laughing at herself. It’s just a ridiculous idea; it’s all well and good to send something sweet and sparkly like this to the Healers, another thank you from a grateful patient to pin up at their station and smile over in benevolence, but Professor Snape? He’d probably track her down and make her eat her words - literally - and smirk at the irony if she choked on them and died.

In the end, she settles for a plain bit of stationery, with a date and six words:

14 May, 1997

Professor Snape:

Thank you.

Katie Bell

She sends the thank you and expects nothing more, and receives exactly that.

She doesn’t go to her own flat for a long time after the battle; the Healers cling to her for weeks, and she stays with George above the shop long enough that her feet learn his floor. It’s frustrating to walk in her own home again, because she trips over the mess she left and even when the floor is clear, she is still rather lost – she knew it all by sight and now that that is gone, she doesn’t know it at all.

There are a few letters on the windowsill in the kitchen, left there in all her weeks of absence. It’s probably a day before she realizes; she’s fumbling for the window latch to open it for the post owl she can hear tapping, and she knocks the letters onto the floor. She grits her teeth and feels around for her wand; she’d set it down and not made a careful mental note of exactly where. Nothing had seemed so hard when someone was around to hold her hand and steer her away from edges and obstacles; it’s only when she’s alone that the darkness feels so smothering.

She gathers the envelopes up with an Accio and sits down at the table with them. It takes a few attempts to get the spell the Healers taught her - Narro! - to work, but the letters begin reading themselves after she gets the right inflection/wand jab correlation. She hesitantly sets to making tea, still counting to herself, mapping out the flat that is somehow no longer familiar in careful measured steps.

It must be a sunny day, it must be shining in the window; she still has little vestiges of her sight, can still not-quite-see very bright light, like needles of sharp silver-grey sticking painfully in her black…she wonders if that will die, too, will fade like the vision in her left eye did during her stay in St. Mungo’s as the curse – slowed, but not yet stopped – crept across her brain, wove its vines across her face and through her nerves.

Oliver’s voice is booming through the kitchen – Katie remembers with a wry grin that he writes in stark, black, all-capital letters, which the spell seems to interpret as shouting – with a play by play of his last match. When his letter is concluded with a “I'LL WRITE YOU SOON, KATE!” she flips her wand back at the table, opening the next letter, and moves to pour the boiling water, positioning her mug and tipping the kettle carefully.

Just as she’s silently congratulated herself for her first successfully poured cup of tea, her elbow knocks the sugar bowl off the counter – her grandmother’s Delftware is in shatters and sugar granules around her feet.

And it’s very suddenly not fair at all. That she’ll never fly, never read a book, never even put on her own makeup ever again. And it isn’t fair to ask why me? when so many others could look at her and ask enviously, why you? because she is alive and sane and mostly whole. And all those little, petty things she’ll miss, it’s not fair to mourn them in company, it's not fair to miss mirrors and olive-green dresses that make her hair look so beautifully golden.

So, she’ll grieve alone. She bursts into tears, tracing the curse marks that cut through the right side of her face. She’s too afraid to walk, too afraid to step because she can’t see where the shatters are, and her feet are bare, and is this how she will walk the world forever? Always in the dark, always fearing what her next step will bring her to?

There is a sibilant voice, quiet in her kitchen. Three words and a date, no address, no signature. Three words and a date, and his voice in the darkness is so intensely familiar that she knows, for certain and for the first time, that everything he did for her was very real:

2 May, 1998

You are welcome.

And Katie recognizes where she is, understands her darkness, takes comfort in the wings still unfurled on her back – their day is not yet at hand. She turns her face up and though she can no longer see where it grows light, she can still trust. She’ll climb.

She takes a step. The ground is clear.

to be young (PG)

2009-06-13T03:58:44Z

Title: to be young
Author: Lady Altair
Summary: Because even when there's a war, even when the sky is falling and you have to be so much older than you are, you still find the time.
Rating: PG
Characters/Era: The DA during DH.

Seamus fell asleep in the common room, sprawled out in an armchair, and Lavender’s cosmetics bag was too close at hand for it not to be premeditated. She snuffed and snickered into her sleeve cuff, trying to keep her giggles masked as she painted him up in glitter and rouge, and Neville somehow found himself with a glittering green pencil of some sort in hand, drawing shamrocks on Seamus’ forehead as Lavender smudged a bit more glitter across his cheeks, her fingertips gentle around the still-bruised skin of his left eye.

They both paused a moment, looked up and grinned at each other over Seamus’ sleeping form before setting back with their dirty deed. “What’s his crime?” Neville asked, capping the dulled pencil. Lavender turned her attention back up, satisfied with the vinyl-shine peach gloss she’d just applied to Seamus’s wide-open mouth.

“Told me the other day I wasn’t wearing enough makeup and my scales were starting to show through,” Lavender informed him, swiping the wand of the lip gloss over her own mouth.

Neville nodded contemplatively, tossing his weapon of choice back into Lavender’s little bag of menace. “Don’t reckon he’ll have a thing to say about your makeup any time soon.”

“Probably not,” she agreed, settling back down into the armchair next to Seamus’ with her Charms homework.

Padma nudged her in the back, sliding a slip of parchment onto the seat of her chair with utmost caution. Susan unfolded it, reading:

So, once upon a time there was this lumpy old hag…

Susan kept her face perfectly straight, dipping her quill into the well of ink.

…who hated the whole world for being prettier than her. She drew a rough caricature of Alecto, which resembled a potato with a very tiny head and stick limbs, and tickled Hannah on the back of the neck with her quill and passed the note.

By the end of Muggle Studies class, there was a long and engaging tale of Hag-Potato Alecto and her illicit affair with Snape. Morag had drawn a particularly hilarious stick-figure sketch of the Headmaster, which resembled an upside-down mop with a large nose.

“Can you imagine how much trouble we could get in for something this stupid?” Mandy asked, almost conversationally, as they all walked to lunch, still giggling furtively over the notes. No one really replied.

Mandy began the story in Dark Arts. One day, Amycus fell in love with a merman in the lake…

She passed the note. There was another story by the time class was over.

“I like the flowers, Lavender. Very nicely done,” Ginny said, stepping back to admire their work in the dim light.

“Well, thanks! Six-point-something years of doodling in the margins of my History of Magic notes pays off,” Lavender nodded, hands on her hips. “You got the pink in the hearts just the right shade of obnoxious. Reminds me of Valentine’s Day under Lockhart’s influence, good work.”

They both froze at a slight noise, throwing their gazes around the darkened corridor. Nothing materialized, but when Ginny spoke again, it was quieter, more cautious. “Should we track a paint trail towards the Slytherin common room? Might throw the blame for a bit.”

Lavender shifted, scratching the back of her head with her wand as she contemplated their position. “Nah, don’t think they’d buy it. Anyone they might punish there has already got it bad in Slytherin. I’ll cop this one if they catch on.”

Ginny frowned a little, and made to speak, but Lavender waved her off, “Oh, hey, camera! Take a picture, quick, and let’s go!”

The graffiti on the wall was blasted off by the first class, but the photograph of it circled the Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, and Ravenclaw common rooms for a very long time. Written in lurid, glittering red letters three feet high and ringed in obscenely violet floral trim and violently pink hearts, it was rather unforgettable:

AMYCUS + ALECTO=

PUREBLOOD LUV 4-EVER!

“Truth or dare?” Ginny said, quite suddenly, in the dark of the boy’s dormitory, curled in Harry’s abandoned bed. The pause, full of whispering sheets and shifting mattress springs, wasn’t long.

“Truth!” Parvati called out, from behind the curtains of Ron’s bed.

Ginny paused, thinking of a question. “The Yule Ball! What was it like going to the Yule Ball with Harry?”

Parvati threw back the hangings, settling back onto the bed with her pillow curled in her arms. “No offense, but it was rather awful! He did not want to be there with me; found my own good time in the end, though, so I can’t be mad at him. S’pose I had a better time with him than Padma had with Ron. No offense again about your brother…speaking of, hey Lavender! Truth or dare!” She fell back over her bed, yanking open the curtains on the other side.

“With that lead-in, I think I’m gonna have to take dare!” came Lavender’s voice, not from Dean’s bed, but from the other direction; Seamus’.

“What are you doing over there, slag?” Parvati cried, tossing a pillow across the room to stir the hangings. The curtains rippled as Lavender’s hands grappled through them in search of a seam in the red velvet and she popped her head out, grinning.

“That sounds like a truth, not a dare.” Lavender grinned foxily, declining to answer with a naughty arch of her brows.

“Right then, dare you to come out from behind those curtains right now!” Parvati said. Lavender seemed to shrug and slid out from behind the curtains, moving her hands up and down to indicate the presence of clothes that Parvati had so doubted.

“Fully clothed, thank you very much. Absolutely nothing funny going on,” said Lavender, smoothing her silky pyjama bottoms over her hips smugly.

“Absolutely nothin’ fun ya mean,” Seamus grumbled sleepily, sitting up and rubbing at his pillow-creased face.

“C’mon, let’s get everyone in on this: Neville! Truth or dare!” Lavender pushed the hangings on the last bed open, hopping on and jostling the bed up and down on all fours.

A very world weary sigh could be heard over the squealing bedsprings; seven years in a Gryffindor house had taught him that Parvati and Lavender in a girlish mood were not to be deterred or distracted. “Truth.”

Lavender was prepped to pounce. “Who do you fancy most?”

After a thoughtful silence, he answered: “Professor Sprout, absolutely.”

This was obviously an unsatisfactory answer, because Lavender stole the pillow from under his head and whapped him with it. “C’mon, Nev, don’t be shy, it’s all right if you fancy the pants off me, no one could blame you.”

“No, no,” Neville said resolutely, wresting the pillow out of her hands. “Definitely Sprout. I keep on with the Herbology, just hoping, someday, she’ll realize my true feelings.”

“Can see where you’re coming from, Neville. It’s the hair, I think,” Seamus agreed. “How could you look twice at this skinny old bird—” he tossed his own pillow at Lavender, “—when Pomona Sprout is somewhere in this castle? I mean, the way her greying hair sticks out from that hat, the dirt under her nails…sorry, Lav, there’s not much to be done.”

“I understand,” Lavender said fairly, laughing herself. “Ginny! You! Truth or dare?”

“Hey, hey Brown!” Neville protested, “My turn, I’ve just confessed my secret love for Sweet Pomona, I think I should get a go.”

Lavender laughed, throwing her hands up in surrender. “By all means, Leader Longbottom, the floor is yours!”

“So, Ginny, truth or dare?”

“Well, dare,” Ginny said, flopping onto her stomach at the foot of the bed, propping her chin in her hand.

“Hmm,” Neville considered theatrically, “This has to be good, nothing but the most outrageous for Ginny Weasley…hmmm. Well, in the vein of the ridiculous we seem to have fallen into, I dare you to steal something from Snape’s office.”

There was a long pause. “Gryffindor’s sword is in Snape’s office,” Ginny ventured, with a little too much gravity.

And, somehow, nobody laughed at that.

On the first day of class back from Christmas holidays, when it had become clear Luna was not returning, Lavender and Parvati pulled their hair back and charmed pairs of ‘dirigible plums’ into earrings.

By the end of the week most of the girls from the DA had them, and the Carrows recognized it for the undercurrent rebellion it was.

“I hope they don’t scar up too badly,” Susan Bones said with passing interest, concentrating on the textbook in front of her as Ginny cleaned her bloodied ear, ragged from where Alecto had ripped the earrings out. “I have so many pretty pairs of earrings.”

“Nah,” Mandy Brocklehurst replied, who was securing a gauze pad to her own ear by wrapping spellotape around her entire head. “I’ve ripped out earrings on accident before; they heal up just fine.”

“It was brave, you know, what you did.” Ginny hadn’t had a single conversation with Michael since their relationship’s rather unfriendly end, and there was no short amount of discomfort in her words.

His mouth twitched weakly, trying to smile. “Is she all right?”

Ginny nodded. “Hannah’s brushing her hair, calming her down. She’s good with the littler ones.”

“She is.”

And that was it, there was nothing more either had to say. “Take care, Michael,” Ginny said.

“You, too. Thanks, Ginny.”

“Ugh!” Lavender cried, managing to pack an ocean of revulsion into a single sound. “You freeze right there, Seamus Finnigan!”

She pointed a cautionary finger at him, and Seamus stopped stock-still a little ways from her, his arms frozen halfway open as he rushed to embrace her. He looked down at himself in confusion. “What?”

She swept her finger between him and Neville accusingly. “You two smell awful! What have you been doing, rolling around in the Weasleys’ swamp for fun? You need baths something terrible. I feel like I need a bath just standing in the same room.”

Neville ducked his head, surreptitiously smelling himself. Seamus met her critical gaze squarely, lowering his arms. “There isn’t a bathroom in here, Lavender, we don’t have much of a choice,” Seamus explained shortly. “We’ve been washing up as best we could in the Hog’s Head, it’s not like we’re not trying! God forbid I touch you, haven’t seen you in two weeks,” he grumbled to himself.

“No bathroom?” She frowned. “Where have you been going to—ugh, nevermind. That’s a question I’m more than happy to leave unasked.” She shuddered. “Is that where that door goes, then? The Hog’s Head?”

Seamus turned, frowning in confusion. “What door?”

“I suppose she means that one that just shimmered into being over there,” Neville said sheepishly, already moving towards it.

“You mean it honestly didn’t occur to you to ask the room for a shower?” Lavender sighed. “At no point in the past three weeks did one of you think, "Well, wow, I need a shower!"? Boys, honestly. Go on then, before I pass out from the smell of you two.”

“All right,” Seamus agreed, swooping in to kiss her quickly. “Be back in a bit!”

Lavender sputtered, wiping at her mouth. “You brush your teeth, Finnigan, before you try that again!” She threw her bag down in the corner underneath the new hammock that had appeared and sighed, surveying the unholy disaster the two had made of the room.

“Boys are nasty,” she huffed, picking up a discarded sock with her wand, holding it away from her like a biohazard. The Room helpfully supplied a hamper.

“Anthony, are you trying to ask me to be your girlfriend?” Morag asked gently.

“No! Absolutely not!” The cry was so forceful and horrified that Morag pulled her hand back from his forearm, looking hurt.

“Well, if that’s what you’re saying, er—sorry, sorry,” Morag stammered, her forehead wrinkled in embarrassment and disappointment as she backed away. “I guess I should, er, be getting back to the common room. If you’re needing anything else, I’m supposing Lisa could--.”

“No, no, not like that!” Anthony said in a panic, pulling her more securely back into the niche behind the third-floor statue of Belinda the Beldam. “I don’t want you to be my girlfriend, that would be dangerous! I just, er, don’t want you to, y’know, be anyone else’s girlfriend. You know,” he finished awkwardly.

“Oh.” Morag’s face creased anew. “That’s stupid.”

“Uh, yeah, it is.” Anthony fiddled with his glasses and then shoved his hands in his pockets.

“How about I be your girlfriend, and we just won’t be telling anyone about it?” Morag proposed reasonably.

“Er, yeah. Okay.”

Morag fluttered, as though moving to leave and then reconsidering. “Okay, Anthony.” She stood up on her tiptoes and pressed a tentative kiss to his mouth. She pulled back shyly, her whole face a delicate pale pink beneath the flyaway auburn halo of curls. “Should go,” she muttered, throwing her gaze to the floor and ducking out of the niche, back towards the Ravenclaw common room.

Anthony was still pink when he got back to the Room of Requirement.

Mandy returned from her food run to the Hog’s Head with a certain inappropriate cheer about her.

The first thing to emerge from her bag was, in fact, not food but a bottle of vodka. This was followed by a bottle of gin, a bottle of rum, and two bottles of firewhisky, all of them of the cheapest and most loathsome brands available. Incidentally, there was food in the bottom of the bag, but everyone’s preoccupation with that had dissipated after the first bottle of alcohol.

“Aberforth gave you these?” Neville asked skeptically, holding the rum by the bottleneck.

“Well, no,” Mandy replied disdainfully. “I picked them up while he was in the loo, but I left forty galleons on the bar! More than enough payment for this shite! What I paid was highway robbery, if you ask me,” she finished, nobly wounded by his unspoken accusations of theft.

“This was a terrible idea, Mandy,” Neville said wearily, watching Seamus, who was dancing around with a firewhisky bottle like it was the Quidditch Cup.

“Probably not one of my wisest ideas,” the Ravenclaw agreed, taking the bottle back. “But look! Everyone’s so excited! It can’t hurt to have a party, right?”

Neville had to admit he hadn’t seen such good cheer in the Room of Requirement…well, ever. Susan already had the seal off the vodka bottle and was busily mixing drinks with one of the bottles of lemonade Mandy had brought back, handing them out to whoever wanted one (which seemed to be everyone). It somehow still seemed like a horrible idea.

Mandy transfigured a silver sickle into a silver shot glass. “Here,” she consoled, cracking the seal on the bottle and pouring him a measure. “I’m sure it’ll look smarter after a few drinks.”

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Kicking Down Castles (R)

2009-06-06T05:14:48Z

Title: Kicking Down Castles
Author: Lady Altair
Rating: M/R
Summary: His dreams are too lowly to be castles in the air. [Draco Malfoy and remedial Muggle Studies, the summer after the war.]
Notes: Oh, yeah, I did. Feel free to hate and flame, I’m curious as to how criminal I really am! :) You'll see...

[“Ugly. Witless. Mindless. Animals.” She punctuated each word with the smack of her wand against her desk top, and thus began Muggle Studies under Alecto Carrow.]

Her English makes her beautiful; he hasn’t heard the language in weeks. His French is slowly edging out of rusty, but he’s been somehow subconsciously aching for the warm friction of good, gutteral English; the Gallic rhythm slides too easily.

He never knew any of this until it’s there, she’s there at the bar beside him in tan skin and white cotton, ordering in French while her friend prods instructions at her back in English. She hands one of the drinks off to the girl with a wry smile, warns her to keep a handle on herself. The other girl just laughs, whirling off into the scattering of people in the half-empty bar, leaving the first girl shaking her head. She thanks the barman politely, her French nearly crystal but for the vague yet stubborn thumbprint of American pronunciation.

She sighs into her white wine, quietly but he’s close enough to hear. She turns and smiles as she notices the none-too-subtle attention he’s paying her. It’s an invitation for speech, and he can’t help himself. It’s hard to remember to hate her when she’s the first person in months to look at him like he’s something worth seeing.

The little bit of conversation that follows is strange and surreal; he’s never really spoken with a Muggle before, that must be why. He has a little to talk about; she has more. About her studies, her homesickness, her opinion on French culture and architecture, which buildings she thinks are particularly interesting. She has an animated innocence about her face, the wild sea-salted waves of her hair flying around her face as she tosses her head in laughter (she makes herself laugh, he certainly isn’t funny).

He’s rather fascinated. The war is over back in England, but there’s little of that innocence in anyone of her age; no one’s face is quite so moveable any longer. Smiles are weighed and brought out only for worthy occasions and those are thin on the ground anymore for people like Draco Malfoy.

She has no reason not to smile, no reason not to pull back her glossed lips and show off her unnaturally pearl-perfect American teeth. There isn’t hate or disdain or disgust twisting her mouth, she can’t find anything terribly objectionable about the bordering-on-unfriendly young man she’s speaking with (or talking at, rather). He buys her a drink just to keep her a little longer, and if she notices how he fumbles with the strange paper money, she doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t know why she’s lingering—he’s not very nice, he doesn’t smile, doesn’t follow the bar script of courtly compliments and casual touches. She’s pretty, and he’s intercepting the half-glances of interest from other men in the bar. She wouldn’t want for company, better company, if she were to tire of his struggling half-answers composed mostly of limp-wristed sarcasm, his long silences and glances away.

But she inches closer instead of backing away, a young and stubborn smile on her face and eventually, the alcohol begins to stick his eyes to hers instead of the floor, the bar, the back wall.

The evening must be growing longer, because the room is louder, they’re on their third round (she paid, she insisted) and inching closer by the sip. Her fingers not-so-accidentally brush his sleeve as she makes a point. Most of her lipgloss has faded, smudged along the series of wineglasses. She’s talking about some Muggle thing he doesn’t understand but it’s just as well; she could be discoursing at length on the number of fingers she has on her right hand and he still wouldn’t be able to tear his wine-stained thoughts from the smooth way her lips curved around the words.

He finally captures a thought that’s been ghosting around in his head, a fully formed and fully foreign I am going to kiss you tonight, when a boy with a German gruffness in his English interrupts them, supporting the friend from earlier, who is now much worse for drink, and it’s all over. She rolls her eyes over the friend, very obviously irritated, her attention turned, and the moment slips away. When she moves to follow her friends she almost stumbles midstep, appearing to remember she’s leaving someone behind. She whirls, her face written over in apology. She scribbles something down on a damp paper napkin, a series of numbers she calls her ‘sellfone-er-moble’ number. She slides it over with a challenging smile. There isn’t a name; maybe she told him, maybe he forgot.

“I’d like to see you again,” she says.

“Well, who wouldn’t?” he drawls, not very nicely, but he manages to gentle his tone enough to be…well, not polite, but at least not entirely dismissive. He takes the napkin and doesn’t smile.

Her smile widens at this and her cheeks might be a bit pink under the tan brown and sun-painted freckles. “Well, bye!” she says to break their moment, and turns and flees behind a huge group of her friends.

It’s only after she goes that he realizes he doesn’t really know what to do with the number. It’s strange—he somehow wishes he did.

[“Intolerant monsters, they fear the unknown, the things they can’t understand. They decided a long time ago that what they couldn’t have must be evil, must be eradicated, and so here we are, cast out of the light and hiding from them.”

“But they don’t even know anymore!” Lavender Brown shrilled. “It’s all stories to them now, they don’t believe, they aren’t hunting us down! Why can’t you people leave them alone?”

“Because people like your mother can’t stop marrying them and producing halfblood halfwits like you!” Alecto snapped. “Stupid girl, they don’t need to believe. A long time ago, they decided we were the enemy. They still know it, too, somewhere! They considered us enemies, and such we will always be! They will never see their own mistakes, recognize their own foolishness. They are far too stubborn and stupid.”]

“You didn’t call me,” she accuses after a few long, awkward moments of side-by-side silence at the bar.

And how can he explain that? Anything he could say would sound cheap and only serve to anger her, even the truth: I don’t know how. It’s a good thing that it’s late, that he’s been here so long, sipping some muggle bourbon he’ll never admit he prefers to Firewhisky (he hates things that burn, and Firewhisky holds to its name; now, always, burn will remind Draco of the scarred-over Mark on his arm.) It’s a good thing, because this courage is on loan from the bottle.

He’s been back in this bar every night; the muggle behind the counter slid him a knowing smile with his drink tonight, understanding finally lighting his eyes as Draco ordered a white wine for the girl with the big group at the table in the corner, bleeding chatter in half a dozen different languages.

“I never promised to,” is what he finally replies, another truth that’ll probably make her mad but he has to say something. Her fingers tighten on the stem of her wine glass and he truly hopes she’s not as dramatic as Pansy, or the most expensive glass of white wine on the menu is about to be splashed in his face.

She turns instead, a solid kind of curiosity on her face. “So…” she trails off, shrugging her shoulders and holding up the wineglass and looking him straight in the eye. She has the slightest shine of sunburn across the tip of her nose.

“What’s your name?”he asks instead of answering the question she didn’t quite ask. “You never said.” She looks slightly taken aback, the shock on her face settling to vague embarassment.

“Oh. Sorry.” The sunburn is not the only pink on her face. “I guess that would be helpful, right?”

“Undoubtedly,” he replies.

They exchange names, and she extends a mockingly formal hand out for him to shake, a self-amused little smile on her face.

They don’t talk long, last call was looming when he ordered her wine. Her friends collect her in a hurry, all of them spurred by one boy’s casual consultation of his watch to find that, oh-god-the-last-train-is-in-ten-minutes.

She kisses him on the cheek as her friends flurry near the door, checking pockets and purses for possessions, come-on-let’s-go-it’s-a-long-walk-back-to-Nice-if-we-don’t-catch-this-train! And she’s just about to go and leave again when she bites her lip, a sure and sudden look on her face. “Since you suck at the phone…tomorrow, meet me here at noon,” she orders. “Meet me here, we can go to the beach.”

He allows himself a little smile as she goes, waving over her shoulder. He thinks of a lot of things as he walks home; he thinks of her long tan limbs and white teeth and pink lips and a hundred other lovely, desirable things before he ever thinks muggle.

[Cautioned Alecto, “Pretty muggle faces are a lure for foolish wizards, a devious attack on wizarding blood purity. Make no mistake, young wizards, the pretty ones are are just as mindless as all the rest, they are simply engineered as bait for your weaknesses! Nothing but whores and sluts, grasping for attention with their filthy bodies! Resist their siren call, keep to your own kind and let the blood run pure!”

Her eyes scanned the class, falling heavily on the halfbloods, on Finnigan and Brown and Bones, Turpin and Goldstein and Boot and Brocklehurst. “A devious ploy to water down powerful stock, to rid the world of magic with inferior breeding.” Her eyes lingered longest on Finnigan; she was itching for his dissension, anyone could see.

It was Ernie Macmillan, pure as they came, that spoke, his voice edged in uncharacteristic sarcasm. “Huh. Well, if the muggles look like this,” he gestured vaguely at his textbook, which featured very pretty, if somewhat absent-looking, muggle girls, “and the purebloods look like you, then snap my wand and sign me up.”]

He’d been considering having a drink or two before going out to meet her, once he had decided he was actually going to show up. He’d ultimately decided against the alcohol, but had immediately regretted it when they’d reached the beach, set their things down, and she’d pulled off the insanely short dress she’d been wearing and laid down on her towel.

Draco has never seen a girl in so little clothing. Never. Ever. He’s having a hard time breathing, quite certain that the ‘bathing suit’ she’s wearing is, by some Ministry law, legally obscene.

She’s chattering, laying on her back on her vivid coral colored towel, nearly having a conversation with herself in the blinding sunshine. He sits, his arms resting on his knees, staring out into the ocean and trying very hard not to look at all her pretty bare skin because it unbalances him and he’s so far away from anywhere comfortable he can barely stand it. She rolls onto her side, pushing up her sunglasses to look at him. “So,” she says, in the sort of attention-snaring way that informs him she knows he’s not really been listening, “you look awful grim. Kind of like you’re in pain, actually. On the beach. In the South of France. With awesome company. Seriously.”

Draco shrugs. “I question the bias when you qualify your own company as ‘awesome.’”

Her fingers curl around the white of his sleeve, completely uncowed, and he looks down at her. “ Aren’t you hot?” she asks, amusement and ulterior motives glittering in her smile. She sits up, sliding her hand up his arm. “Long sleeves and buttoned almost to the top, c’mon!”

Before he can protest, her hands are on his chest, working at the buttons on his old uniform shirt, a leftover from Hogwarts and plain enough to pass for muggle clothing.

“I’m going to burn,” Draco complains, drawing her eyes up to his, stalling her hands on the buttons. He doesn’t want to take his shirt off, doesn’t want to show that scar to her, doesn’t want her to ask what happened. She’s looking straight in his eyes, the muddy green of her own glittering with a flash decision.

And then she kisses him, sober in the sunlight, her hands on his bare shoulders pushing the white cotton shirt away, her arms snaking around his neck. Her lips are rough, probably sunburned, against his and it enters his mind he should be revolted, disgusted, he’s kissing a muggle, but he’s eighteen years old and it’s so hard to turn away from a pretty girl who somehow sees something worthwhile in him when he can’t find anything himself.

She laughs against his mouth, running her hands over his shoulder and up his neck to frame his jaw, pulling away. “That’s what sunscreen’s for!” she says sunnily, pulling the bottle from her bag and drizzling the cold cream over his shoulders.

In the end they compromise; the shirt stays on, but unbuttoned. If she notices the huge white scar on his left forearm in the short time the shirt is off, she says nothing.

[“Vicious, bloodthirsty little scabs,” cried Alecto in another one of her high, righteous furies against the muggles. “Violence is in their dirty blood, in their dirty nature!” Her sallow, jowly face was pink, she stalked up and down the rows of desks, whipping her wand around in a high frenzy.

“The only thing they love more than blood is burning flesh! They would set our world to fire and laugh as we blazed; we must take up our wands against them, defend our ways and lives from their malice!”

“Defend our lives and ways…” tall, regal Susan Bones echoed softly, and her voice caught the room. She stood slowly, held her chin up as raging tears burned in her eyes, her hands trembled at her sides. “You speak to us, you speak to me,” she said, so lethally calm that even Alecto seemed momentarily frozen in the ice of Susan’s might, “of magical worth and the malice and violence of muggles when the only reason my cousin Andrew isn’t sitting in this class beside me is because you and your friends culled my family when he was an infant! You would speak such to me?” she demanded, looking every inch a princess on the executioner’s scaffold.

Susan’s cries under Crucio were terrible. When the Hufflepuff was unconscious on the floor, Alecto straightened herself and turned back to the class.

“Muggle viciousness is unmatched in any other creature,” she said breathlessly, stepping over Susan on the way back to her desk.]

They always end up like this, at the end of every day. They always find a beach, whether she catches the train to Villefranche-sur-Mer or he Apparates to meet her near her student housing in Nice. They always find a beach. Mostly they just sit in the sand, sit for the sunset, and she tries to keep her mouth shut and let the moment be peaceful; most days, she ends up kicking down leftover sandcastles - she’s not very good at being peaceful. Today, she kicks her sandals and hikes her skirt and tries to wade, but a particularly strong current sweeps her feet out from under her and she lands hard on her bottom just in time to be smacked square by a wave; Draco thinks she’s crying when she struggles upright and he splashes into the surf to pick her up, but she’s laughing as she spits and sputters on saltwater.

His shoes are ruined, trousers wet to the knee. She’s soaked head to toe but she didn’t need rescuing and he’s the one who complains.

“Ruined shoes are a small price to pay,” she teases, standing over him and shaking her hair to spackle him with seawater while he pulls his shoes off.

“I’m not accustomed to paying small prices,” Draco sneers. “I find most things worth having are rather expensive.” She laughs at him.

“So go on and jump in. I’ve paid full price and it was kinda fun!” She pulls up the soaking length of her skirt and wrings it into his lap. He narrows his eyes and glares up at her and she folds down onto the damp sand beside him. “C’mon, you know you like me.”

“Like you? Truthfully, I continue to find you quite irksome and at best could categorize my actions towards you as ‘tolerant.’ Who said anything about liking you?” Draco grumbles, swiping ineffectively at the wet spots on the front of his trousers.

She pushes him back onto the sand and kisses his forehead, the dripping, wave-combed ropes of her hair falling around his face. “Y’know, I just kinda figure. I mean, you keep showing up and, for every snarky little thing you’ve said to me, you’ve never just said ‘go away’, because I totally would’ve. I have a very keen sense of when I’m unwanted.”

She collapses on top of him, and Draco exhales like she weighs the earth and is pressing all the air out of his lungs. She throws his arms around her waist and sighs, gouging her fingers through the damp sand and smearing some into his hair in lazy revenge for the slight.

The sun is setting and the sand is getting cool and he can feel her shiver at the breeze and, before he’s really thought it through, the words are out of his mouth. “My house isn’t very far from here; your bony arse will probably freeze before the train station in those wet clothes.” They both know it’s an invitation, because their days are always days, ended soon enough for her to catch the train home, and him to pretend to. It’s not as if they don’t linger, don’t find alleyways to bruise lips and rumple clothing in, don’t stumble over aborted invitations, but their days have always been days, ended by the timetables of public transit.

“Five minutes ago you act like an elephant just sat on your chest and now you’re critcizing my skinny ass,” she complains, but after only a moment, she follows up with, “Okay. We can stop for ice cream on the way.”

Draco never knew someone could be bad at eating an ice cream cone, but she really is. She manages a bigger mess than a toddler, dripping melted ice cream all down her hands and face and chest. She laughs about it, poking her sticky hands in his face as he opens the door to the muggle house he’s been renting. She pauses in her tormenting to admire the house – “Belle Epoque. And just lovely,” she muses, licking a finger.

“Maybe I should toss you in the ocean again before I let you in my lovely house,” Draco said, catching her sticky fingers in his hands and pulling them away from her mouth, pulling her in to kiss her. “You have ice cream all over you.”

“Mmm,” she murmurs against his mouth. “Makes me taste better.”

“Ugh,” he gags by way of disagreement, pulling back and pushing the door open. “Not with that terrible flowery ice cream you eat.”

“You Philistine, you have no taste.”

“I am merely of the opinion that women should smell like lavender and violet, not taste like it.” He slips up behind her, his arms around her waist and face in her hair.

[“Muggle mummies and daddies can’t love you, not really,” Alecto cooed sweetly to her second year class. “Muggles can’t really feel like we can, can’t really love like witches and wizards do. They can pretend, they can act like they love, but it’s not real. Muggles are quite incapable of loving anything, anyone.”

Abby Montgomery found her little sister Emily bawling in the Gryffindor common room that Daddy didn’t really love them, didn’t love mummy, hadn’t even loved Ben, he was just pretending, he pretended to cry and be sad at Ben’s funeral and he really wasn’t and it had to be true, it was written in a book and teacher said.

The elder Montgomery sister couldn’t make it to her seat in her own Muggle Studies class, couldn’t even sum up the presence of mind for a curse through her near-senseless rage. Five minutes before class was scheduled to begin, fifteen-year-old Abby Montgomery got a good few hits on a completely unsuspecting Alecto, wielding the hated textbook as a heavy weapon, before the Death Eater managed to raise her wand for the Cruciatus, and then another few even after. ]

They stumble their way up to his bedroom and there’s enough moonlight through the windows to keep them from the large obstacles. They pick up speed as they go, hands getting rougher, pulls on clothing more insistent, breathing growing irregular. She falls down amidst the already rumpled bedding and clothes are littering the floor like they know what they’re doing.

Her lips are still rough under his; they always are. She sunburns them, picks at them, chews on them until they’re cracked and almost bleeding. Sometimes she tastes like blood, sometimes she almost tastes like ugly memories, but then she smiles, then he moves his mouth and tastes the seasalt that seems a permanent film on her skin.

She tastes like salt and flowers tonight, the sugary stick of her ice cream catching in the grooves of his tongue. She’s got his shirt off, she’s shimmying out of her skirt, moving under him like that and he almost dies right there.

“I’ve never done this before,” she whispers, and the moon catches her eyes, wide and exhilarated.

“No?” Draco asks, and she shakes her head, and he wonders if he should lie; what’s one more untruth in everything he isn’t telling her?

He doesn’t, in the end. “I haven’t either.”

And she grins at him, mad and young in the moonlight, and he almost feels young and mad, too. They compared birthdays once; she’s older in years, almost twenty, but he sees her innocence in every smile and that has life in it yet.

Her skin is radiating the leftover sunshine; he presses his face into the side of her neck and pushes everything but her under the door.

“Tell you a secret,” she whispers, later, against his chest in the almost-morning; maybe she thinks he’s asleep. “Wanted to be in love when I did that.”

“Sorry,” he mutters back, drifting his fingertips along the arm she has draped over his chest.

She mutters some syllable of dismissal, maybe a sleepy laugh, and they both fall back asleep.

[“Most of the brutes have the barest command of language, communicating mostly through gutteral grunts and primitive gesturing,” Alecto asserted. Their textbooks, at the wave of her wand, began to spout something that might have been English, but was mostly just animal grunts and wheezes, interspersed with a few simple words.

From the back of the classroom, Seamus Finnigan snorted. “Sure, ‘n fact. Like me Muggle cousin can’t speak Irish and French better’n you can say your own name in English.”

With a furious wave of Alecto’s wand, the class watched in muted horror as Seamus’ mouth knitted itself closed.

“Halfbloods,” Alecto said coldly, her piggy eyes snapping, “are sometimes afflicted by their dirty blood, and it’s better that that sort doesn’t speak at all.”]

He doesn’t know how she keeps on talking; it’s incessant and unhurried, a big bright patchwork of verbs and nouns and nonsense stitched with ‘ums’ and ‘likes’ to keep her mouth moving while her brain funnels down more words. She’s constantly telling stories; about her friends, about her family, about the things she’s done and seen and loved and hated.

When he’s honest with himself, though, he doesn’t really mind. It’s not like she’s expecting him to listen, and the quiet lets him think too much, so he lets her keep on, tunes into what she’s saying every once in a while, and kisses her to silence when he really can’t stand it anymore.

Even when she runs out of her own words, she parrots other people’s, tells him fairytales he’s never heard (and that she’s just appalled he’s never heard—“What stupid kind of British boarding school did they send you to? Never heard of Snow White!” )

Draco laughs to himself over the witches and fairies in her tales; “Mustn’t have been a very good witch,” he teases her, straightfaced and smug, “Couldn’t even keep a dress on the poor girl past midnight, what sort of magic is that? Why does it have to end at midnight?”

“It’s a fairytale,” is her only answer. “You’re not really supposed to ask questions, you just have to believe. You pull a fairytale apart to look for logic and there’s nothing left. And why not midnight? Everything has to end, midnight has a ring to it.”

Neither of them ever really ask questions. Maybe that why he really appreciates her unceasing noise; when she’s talking about her life, she’s not prying into his. If the conversation were more balanced – if she were older, less self-involved – surely she would notice all the things he doesn’t know, the ill-fitting angles and colors that don’t quite blend. She never asks and he doesn’t need to lie. Because he tells stories too; he’s never sure if she really believes or if she’s just not asking questions, if he’s just another summertime fairytale for her.

He almost thinks to tell her the truth, to bracket it in ‘once-upon-a-time’ and ‘happily-ever-after’ and tell her everything she’ll never believe, but it’s too hard to spin his shadows in her sunshine, and he’s not really sure how he could a twist a happy ending from it.

[“Muggles have no more creative power than bugs under stones, pigs in a stye. Everything of beauty, everything of worth is of Magical origin; Muggle creation is all filth and rotten theft,” saith Alecto, who couldn’t draw, write, sing, or dance her way out from under a dead Lethifold.

Morag McDougal, as an upstanding Ravenclaw, generally couldn’t hold with the destruction of books for any purpose, but considered the sacrifice of a few paperback copies of Austen, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Twain, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Amis, Jonson, and Wolfe justifiable in the current circumstances.

Mandy helped her paper the Muggle Studies classroom in Muggle literary genius with Permanent Sticking charms, and even sacrificed a bit of her own Muggle-composed sheet music to the collage.

Muggle Studies classes were cancelled the next day; Alecto had had to be sedated, she’d ripped her fingers bloody on the walls of the classroom when her wand had done her no good. ]

Draco loves to watch her draw. She drags him out through town, her sketch pad and pencil bag in her purse, finds a building she loves and a good angle for a drawing.

She grumbles over her drawings and calls it homework, but there is love in the hand that holds the pencil. He calls her an artist in a fit of uncharacteristic affection one day, and she laughs at him. “Not an artist,” she protests, “I’m an architect. Artists are useless! Artists build castles in the air, but I’ll build them on the ground and walk in them.” She nods to herself, shading a column. After a moment’s consideration, her pencil pauses and she says frankly, “Artists are poor, too. I don’t want to be poor.” Something petty in him likes her a little more when she says that.

In the peaceful quiet of her work, he sketches too, spins modest dreams in the silence. Builds castles in the air, she would probably scorn, but they don’t seem so terribly lofty: just staying here, being this. And maybe keeping her.

No, his dreams are too lowly to be castles in the air; he builds sandcastles on the shore. Maybe the air would’ve been wiser – better clouds beyond his fingertips than sand that slips away.

Everything seems to be slipping away with the season. Maybe the days aren’t quite as warm, or quite as long, but summer is ending and they both know it. The perpetual pink of mild sunburn on her nose peels and fades even as her material footprints, her clothes in the closet and her makeup cluttering his sink, diminish and disappear.

Her favorite dress, white eyelet lace and yellow ribbons, is gone from the closet, he notices after she’s run back to catch a train to Nice to turn in a final folio to a professor. There are still things hanging there, but nothing special, nothing beloved. Things she wouldn’t mind leaving behind.

“I want you to stay.” They’re sitting at dinner. Her mobile is ringing somewhere in the mess of her purse and she’s digging out debris in search of the phone.

Her passport, with the return ticket tucked neatly inside, is the first thing on the table, an unpleasant reminder on the wrought iron of the café table.

Her rifling stops, her hands freeze in the depths of her bag, and she takes a steady breath. “Oh,” she says, sorrow at the corners of her mouth as the phone continues to sound its irritating, tinny ring. She sighs and he wishes he could find some hope in the sound but there’s none. “I just can’t.” And that’s all she says; she sums all her reasons in three words and paints her regret in economy. Her phone stops ringing.

He thins his lips; if she were still talking, explaining, justifying, he would have hope, her words a long path of uncertain destination. But she has already reached the end.

There are sandcastles on the beach that night, and she leaves them untouched, to be swept away by the tide. The two sit and watch the sunset for the first time in silence.

[“And if there is nothing else to stop you, think on this: Muggles leave. They might contain their jealousy for weeks, months, perhaps even years, but in the end, it will always overcome them, it is their nature. And what are you left with? A broken heart and halfblood offspring to dilute our pool.” Alecto strained for a sympathetic tone, trying to convince her audience she truly felt empathy when there was only disgust in her eyes, across her face.

“They leave, and that is the noblest thing they can do.”]

They begin goodbyes on the beach and Draco doesn’t touch her. She reaches for him and he flinches away, and her face crumbles like the sandcastles she’s so fond of kicking over. Then a tide sweeps it over, and she is angry.

They get into a fight, spending their last sunset snapping and sniping at each other over the roar of the ocean. She’s angry, gets angrier when she realizes how they’re wasting their dwindling words. “Why do you have to be such a jackass about it? Jesus!” she howls, collapsing down to the sand and covering her eyes with her hands.

“You’re ruining everything,” he spits back, refusing to sit. Height may not be high ground but there has to be some advantage in it.

She gapes at him. “Ruining? Sugar, I am going home. My life is not here and summer is over.”

“But I’m here!” And, really, he hates how sad that sounds. Hates that, in the end, no matter how haughty he is and what he leaves unspoken, he is begging for her to stay with him and there is no help for his pride.

He should hate her. He keeps thinking that and it never seems to stick.

Her face flows through emotions, never quite settling on one. This is the place where she should be rambling on about responsibility and reality, working herself up into a big melodramatic monologue about fate and fairness and the lives they can't leave behind because that's what she does - she talks around something a hundred times before summing up her point. This time, she only says in this tired, twilight voice he’s never heard before, “I know, Draco.” He flinches at his name – he’d mocked her pronunciation of it early on and she’d punished him with endearments ever after.

“Fine,” he bites off. “Go on and leave, seems so easy for you to do.”

“You’re making it easier by the syllable, you unbearable ass!” She folds her lips under as though to catch any more words that might otherwise fall unbidden. He stands, she sits, and neither say anything for a very long moment.

The sun is gone and he has seen the last of her.

She stands, steps up behind him and he won’t look back. She wraps her arms around him, presses her cheek into his back.

She must feel the breath he’s summoning in to speak because her arms tighten around his waist as though to squeeze it out of him and her words are as silky as sandpaper. “Shut up. Jesus Christ, just shut up.” And what has the world come to, where she says this to him?

The train she catches back isn’t the last one running, but they’ve managed some tiny bit of grace in their ending and there’s nothing that another hour can do but curdle it. She slips something into his back pocket, whispers ‘bye’ and walks. He can't even hear her footsteps receding, can't listen to her hesitate a few steps away; the roar of the waves erase her just as soon as she's pulled her hands away and she is gone.

It’s not a good picture that she slipped into his pocket; it’s not like they’re smiling lovingly or holding hands or even looking at each other. They aren’t even looking at the camera. Her mouth is open, caught unawares in the middle of a conversation with someone out of the frame and he looks vaguely sullen, standing at her back, hands in his pockets and eyes on a diagonal towards the floor. It’s an accidental shot, taken by an indifferent and most likely intoxicated photographer from the one (and only) night she brought him around to a party in the student hostel.

There’s no note on the back, nothing sentimental about differing worlds or summertime fairytales. Those words are probably somewhere in the picture’s thousand. He wants to rip it up, throw it to the surf - he even tries, but the wind blows it back and his hands lose the strength to let go.

Draco sits on the beach for a while, halfway hoping for some kind of happy ending. He wants to kick down a sandcastle, to crumble someone else’s fragile figment of a dream, but the shore offers nothing - the tide has come and gone and swept everything away. A little after midnight, he Apparates back to the house, packs his trunk, and is back in Wiltshire before she’s cried herself to sleep, alone amongst her boxed-up possessions in a cramped, dingy little dorm room on the boulevard de la Madeleine.

xXx

Author’s Note: Why, yes, I totally did. I wrote an AMERICAN OFC (kind-of-a) ROMANCE. I’m still not sure it can be done, but I really tried, and am more than pleased with the result!

This has been MONTHS in the writing--literally, this is probably the most time-intensive one shot I've ever written. Inspired by all the abroad romances I witnessed in the year I was gone; you fall in love fast when you're young and short on time, and the way it falls apart when the time is all spent is seldom graceful. Twenty-one is not fond of letting go, it's easier to walk away angry.

Gone Grey (PG)

2009-06-03T03:41:37Z

Title: Gone Grey
Author: Lady Altair
Rating: PG
Summary: If you'll be color, I'll see nothing else.
Characters/Pairings: Seamus Finnigan/Lavender Brown

Gone Grey

Lavender Brown is lacking entirely in color, under the Carrows. It’s an unnatural side of her Seamus wishes he never had to know.

Strangely, when he comes back to the common room with cuts oozing blood, or weeping burns, or black eyes, he wishes she would flutter ineffectively, flap her hands like a girl and squeal about the mess. She doesn’t anymore. He almost hates the feel of her hands on him when she’s like that, when it’s all efficiency, when she’s surveying the damage done to him with this strange, absently concerned look veneered across her face—it’s like being handled by a mediwitch, she’s so detached.

He wishes she would fuss, lean over to kiss his cheek so he could breathe her rosy perfume more deeply. He wishes she would chatter in her quick, lovely English way about a litany of silly things produced seemingly from nowhere, brightly colored silk scarves from her sleeve, a light and airy chain of conversation in her bright, songbird voice. He wants her to flutter, to be girly and impractical and flighty and silly and lovely, but she’s too weighted down, they’re all too weighted down; it’s hard enough to move when they need to, there isn’t the room for hair tossing and passing notes written in glittering purple ink and that lovely rose-pink ribbon she used to wear in her hair and that he thought looked so perfectly lovely against her particular shade of brown.

She’s just so quiet and washed out, and the only thing he sees in her eyes is worry, and she hides that away under her practical concerns. He hates it, wishes he could tease her just right, make her huff and pout and sniff over the nerve, wishes he could shoulder some of her burden. But he’s carrying too much already, and his clumsy attempts to take some of her weight are brutally, practically rebuffed—she clutches her cross to her like it is some sort of prize, like it is pride and a diadem on her brow. Stone pride is her signature color now, and it is nowhere near as bright as Lavender.

“Hold still, Seamus Michael Finnigan,” she says (he wishes she would shrill, scold, berate, just she only just says) patiently, bent over the gash in his forearm. He smiles sadly at the crown of her head, admiring the way her hair falls, the little line of snowy scalp white against the brown, and tries to hold still for her.

Lavender pauses. She looks up at him, her brow furrowed in light confusion and quiet humor; such pale, bland emotions. “That was easy, are you not feeling contrary today?”

“No,” he says and, after a moment, as she puzzles over the ambiguity of his answer, he kisses her lightly on her lips. “Maybe,” he amends.

She looks stunned, her cheeks blossoming pink. He loves the color so much, he wants to put his hand against her cheeks, just to feel the heat under the pink, just to be certain. She looks down, hiding the color. “You shouldn’t tease me, Seamus, it’s not nice.”

“Is that all? No smack across the face? No snog? I figured for one or the other.” It even sounds desperate to him; be color for me, please, Lavender… if you’ll be color I’ll see nothing but you in this world gone grey.

“You want me to slap you?” she cries, looking up aghast.

“I’d rather you kissed me, but I’d settle for that the slap, if that’s all you’ve got in you.”

She doesn’t look aghast anymore, just…hurt. Deflated and faded and entirely without words. Seamus feels wretched—he wanted her to smile and flirt and maybe kiss him again, or to get indignant and just ever so offended. He wanted color in her cheeks, a chin turned up in feminine defiance and challenge. He wanted Lavender to sass him like she always had done, so they could get into one of their silly little rows that had little purpose but for exercising their voices, little purpose but to color their cheeks and bring Lavender’s face so close to his he could almost kiss her, if he only had the nerve. Instead of high color and flirty banter, she just looks like she’s about to cry grey tears; the very last thing he wants, something else to sap the color from the world.

“I’m just so tired, Seamus,” she explains to him, slowly, painfully. “I’m worrying all the time; about myself, about you, about everyone out there, everyone in here. And it was all well and good to run myself down over ribbons and say unkind things I didn’t mean to you when I knew you’d be back in through the portrait after supper. But I don’t know that anymore.” Her mouth snaps shut, grimly tight for a moment, before her bottom lip softens and she chews it slowly, not meeting his eyes. “And what if one of our stupid bits of bickering were the last thing we ever said to each other?” Seamus makes a soft, comforting noise but she cuts over him, cheeks still pink and her indigo eyes absolutely insistent as they meet his. “No! Don’t tell me it can’t happen! That sadistic—bastard,” she stumbles over the swearword, pausing. She holds up her hands, the white bandages wrapped around her palms are so familiar now that Seamus doesn’t quite cop on to what she’s shaking in his face for a good few seconds. “Carrow nails my hands to the desk at least once a week. He tortures kids until they can’t speak coherently. Don’t fucking--” (this word comes smoother) “--tell me we’re all right and nothing like that will happen, because I am not that stupid! If something were to happen to me, I don’t want the last thing I said to you to be ‘sod off, you bloody Irish scoundrel’, no matter how much we both know I don’t mean it.”

“Then you had best say something nice to me, quick,” Seamus teases her gently.

“Prat,” she manages, tears leaking out of her red-rimmed eyes. His hands frame her face in a way that feels awkward, but that he saw in a romance film one of his muggle cousins made him go with her all the way to Galway to see. It looked romantic, and he wants to give Lavender any scraps of a fairy tale he can scrounge together.

“Well, less insulting, that’s a start,” he grins at her. She smiles and averts her eyes, looking so fair and sweet he pushes his hands back to sweep through her hair, mussing her demure curls.

“Can I—” Seamus pauses, licks his lips, because he is really about to ask this. “Can I kiss you again, Lavender?”

Her eyes dart, quick and momentary, back to his face, before the bit of smile he can see spreads a little further up her cheek and she says, “Only if you mean it.” And, under her coy softness, there’s a little spark, and maybe someday she’ll toss her hair and lift her chin and denounce him as an ‘ignorant, sheep-shearing farmer’ again, so he can wonder if he should make her pretty pink mouth fall open by informing her of the cruder version of her insult…sheep-shearing indeed.

He laughs softly to himself (if you can do that when you’re so close to someone else that the laugh is really a breath on her face) and kisses her softly.

She wears the rose-pink ribbon in her hair the next day and calls him impudent when he sneaks a kiss after breakfast. It’s not nothing, especially as the backdrop goes grey.

Halfhearted (PG)

2009-03-05T04:53:07Z

Halfhearted

{patented daydream charms and spun sugar reality...george weasley and katie bell in st. mungo's after the war.}

“I made my little niece cry.” Beneath the opaque black veil, Katie sounded like she was trying to make light of the situation, trying to lighten her tone and buoy the words to mean less than they do. She was not doing very well.

“You afraid you’re going to make me cry?” He was trying to joke, too, but it fell as flat as Katie’s attempt and both of them left it where it lay.

“You never know, George. We both know how delicate you can be.” He could imagine the smile on her face…well, he could imagine. He wasn’t sure if it was under there, not sure what wasunder that veil that made her brother’s four-year-old daughter cry. There was a long, empty pause. “It’s bad, George,” she said, dead serious and with hurt leaking into her voice. “I know I wasn’t ever gorgeous…but I was pretty. I could turn a head every once in a while. I didn’t frighten small children. I know it’s so petty…” she trailed off, and both of them refused to go there. She wanted to acknowledge her petty concerns, nothing when people are missing such integral parts of themselves (like a half, a twin) but George’s hand was gentle on Katie’s. It’s okay to mourn what you’ve lost. I’ve lost, but you have too.

Something shifted under the veil, and George thought that maybe he’d just watched her paste a smile on her face. Leaning forward a little and, affecting a lisp, she said to him, “Bellth are bad luck, whath new?”

And he found a smile for her somewhere. She’d been twelve to his thirteen, bleeding from the mouth and missing her front teeth from his bat to her face at her first Quidditch practice. He’d felt sick and apologized profusely as he walked her up to the Infirmary, but she’d almost cheerfully brushed him off (as cheerfully as one could do, with a great bleeding hole in one’s head). “Thnot your faulth,” she’d whistled through the huge gap in her teeth, jangling her displaced teeth in her hand like dice. “Bellth are bad luck.” He’d not really believed her, thinking she was just trying to make him feel better about losing grip on his bat (he never did that) and slinging it straight at her face.

It seemed, however, that Katie was, indeed, somehow very attractive to whatever misfortune was lurking. If someone was injured in a match, good odds it was Katie. If someone mixed up an incantation or botched a potion in class, you could count on it being Katie’s partner, practicing on her or having her sample their attempt. Doors were flung open as she walked in front of them, steps disappeared under her feet with a frequency that was statistically improbable, and Peeves seemed to antagonize her with an elevated fury. Of course it had been her who had happened into the loo at The Three Broomsticks at just the right moment, been imperiused to carry that cursed necklace, and had that tiny rip in the fingertip of her glove, thankfully tiny enough to keep her from being killed outright.

She wasn’t clumsy or foolish or reckless. She was actually quite graceful, on a broomstick and off, and had more practical sense than most teenaged girls. It wasn’t anything she did; things just happened to her, and she bore it all with a bemused sort of smile on her face and a slight shrug as if it say “oh, what now?”

And whatever it was behind the veil was the newest addition to her streak.

“You sure you don’t want to make me cry? I’m offering up free and clear, if you can make me cry, I’ll give you a year’s supply of the daydream charms. I’m quite hard to horrify.”

“You mean that’s not a year’s supply?” she laughed, toeing tidily around his request in a way that firmly shut down any further persistence, pointing at the stack that sat on her bedside table, along with the numerous bouquets of flowers and collections of sweets.

“Only for the undedicated. Efficiently applied, you needn’t spend any time in this dreary hospital room at all.”

She paused, picking up one of the brightly packaged charms and regarding it; she held it close to her veil, and he imagined she was squinting—she was nearly blind now, the vision entirely gone in one eye and damaged in the other. She hadn’t said as much, but he figured her position on the Magpies’ reserve team was a dream flown away on the new and now-useless Nova-class Firebolt she’d been so proud of. “Thanks, George. I’ve been in here too long.” Her arms reached out and he edged into them, settling onto the side of her bed and pulling them together.

And it was all new. They’d never been this person for the other, never been this friend. Touch had always been thoughtless, playful and rough before; clap on the shoulder after a rough practice, an ambush tackle near the dressing rooms. It was always motion, never feeling. The motion was gone and George’s head spun from standing still.

Reaching under the veil (she froze) his hand found the long, thick fall of her hair across her back (still dirty blonde, he was sure) and tangled in it like an anchor. The hospital smell was sticking to her and it filled his nose a little unpleasantly, but she was warm and soft and needy in his arms. He was not sure how ‘needy’ was suddenly a positive word (before, it had always been the most damning accusation that could be leveled on a girl) but Katie needed something he could easily give.

He pretended not to notice the darker spots on the veil when they pulled apart, the damp feel of the fabric on his shoulder.

“Let’s try one of these, shall we?” she said, her tone too showily sunny to be honest. She held out one of the daydream charms. “They’re good for two people, right?”

“They only last half as long…and they sometimes get a bit bizarre, competing dreams and all that,” George warned her.

“I’m willing to take that chance,” Katie assured him, “If you’re willing to stick around with me.”

He did, and they spent the afternoon raiding desert islands under a big Caribbean moon—by moonlight because Katie’s daydream involved them as vampires and George’s buccaneer sun fried them.

She didn’t wear the veil in the daydream, but she didn’t look like herself, either. Katie daydreamed herself the cool, unnatural sort of beautiful she’d never ever been; her impossibly perfect face glowed undead-ly white as she grinned at him in the moonlight as they waded in to raid the Spanish town and, even as they meandered through their absurd fantasy, her idealized, unreal face made his heart hurt.

Their raid was a roaring success, and they sprinted through the jungle at inhuman speed, Katie dripping in gold and jewels. The cabin on their ship, The Castor, was correspondingly stuffed with treasure chests.

There was, rather awkwardly, a large, suggestive sort of bed set up. “Nice,” Katie mused teasingly, looping another strand of pearls around her wrist and digging back into one of the chests.

“I beg your pardon,” George said, mock affronted. “My daydream involved manly pirates raiding villages and snatching booty. I think you’re the one with some pseudo-sexual vampire fetish.”

“Snatching booty,” Katie snorted, arranging a gold and emerald band on her too long, too golden, too perfect hair. “That’s right you’re snatching booty, absconding back to your pirate den of iniquity with buxom wenches and snatching their booty.”

“I’d rate that merely ‘vaguely inappropriate’,” George dismissed her, lounging back with a pina colada. “But extra points for the vocabulary; ‘pirate den of iniquity’, very nicely utilized.” Katie chucked a gold chalice at him. “Hey, careful with that! You don’t go tossing around the Holy Grail like it’s a cheap bit of pottery!”

“Rate on what? You have a special set of guidelines for inappropriate language?” Katie asked skeptically, the too-large crown slipping sideways.

“Should look into making one, sounds clever,” George mused, turning the Holy Grail over in his hands. “Something to rate swear words.”

Katie nodded to herself thoughtfully. “Or the Sexual Suggestoscope…like a sneakoscope, but it goes off whenever someone’s having inappropriate thoughts.”

George burst into laughter. “That has some potential. Fred’ll have to hear about that, we can…” he broke off immediately, stricken.

Katie looked at him, her eyes wild and an apology on her perfect pink lips. “No, no,” he stalled her, a pained grin on his face. “He was alive for a minute there. It was nice,” he admitted.

That was the end of the daydream. They sat in the cabin a while longer, quietly playing around with the treasure, but all the merriment of it was gone. Even Katie’s ethereally golden hair seemed to dim.

“Not the most bizarre, but a definitely unique combination,” George mused, once they were both firmly planted back in the hospital reality.

“Vampire pirates, we sure don’t do things by halves!” Katie replied with put-on cheer, still carefully concealed beneath her rippling black veil.

“Vampirates…should put that on the packaging, that’s brilliant!” He grinned at her, his heart hurting again. He didn’t know what mask made him sadder; that cold, clean daydream beauty that was anything but his Katiebelle or the blank black sheet that hid her.

“Why don’t you take that off?” he asked her suddenly, destroying the spun-sugar façade of light humor they’d been carefully constructing. He gestured at her covered face. “I would never think you’re ugly, Katie...you can take off the veil.”

She paused long, shifting her weight around in that graceful, fluid way that was all hers, that elegance that translated so well onto the pitch. George’s heart seized at a memory: Oliver and Fred watching a twelve-year-old Katie in quiet awe at the Quidditch tryouts. Never seen anyone fly like that, Oliver had managed after a few minutes. Fred had nodded sagely. It’s Katie B-elegance.

“Why don’t you stop pretending to be all right? I would never think you’re weak,” was her gentle answer. He stared at her, quite wordless. Her shoulders shrugged smoothly, her strong, graceful hands smoothing the fabric down over her face. “Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for the both of us.”

There was that shift of black again, that pasted-on smile hidden away. “Tea should be in soon! I’ll share, it’s awful!”

He smiled back, and maybe it was a little more sincere than anyone had any reason to hope. And maybe tomorrow was a better day for the truth. They settled back to reconstruct their spun-sugar daydream and left the rest for another day.

Twelve Grimmauld Place (R)

2009-02-24T01:34:29Z

Twelve Grimmauld Place

{it's a good house for lonely people}

Hestia Jones doesn’t fall apart until she’s waved goodbye to Megan and made her way back to Grimmauld Place.

She puts Sirius to shame with her pacing, ripping through the decrepit old house in a panic. “Where is he?” she keeps saying, dragging her fingers through her hair until it’s loose from the professional twist, worrying the pewter buttons on the cuffs of her sleeves until they come loose. Neat, impeccable Hestia is a harried mess, her heels clicking up and down the unpolished hardwood floors until the noise of it nearly drives Sirius mad.

“Jesus, Hestia, calm down,” he grits through his teeth with as much empathy as he can manage, catching her by the sleeve as she strides past him in the kitchen. “He’ll turn up, I’m sure.”

“Sturgis doesn’t just not show up to things,” Hestia says around the cuff of her sleeve—in the absence of buttons to pick at, she’s chewing on the starched white fabric.

“They’ll find him, everyone’s out looking,” he tries to assure her. “He’ll come back.”

Her hand drops to her side as she looks at him. Her teeth are white against the pink stain remnant of her berry lipstick; her bright blue eyes wide beneath perfectly fanned black lashes. She looks helpless.

And then she says, very simply, “Caradoc didn’t.” Her voice is quiet, a mere breath of sound.

He’s waiting for tears, because that’s the woman he remembers from the periphery of before. But she just turns away and braces herself over the sink. The sound of the incoming floo in the parlor is like an electric shock to her body, and she sprints in her spindly heels, in a graceful years-practiced lope, to greet the news, of whatever sort there is to be had.

She spends a lot more time in Grimmauld, with Sturgis in Azkaban.

Hestia Jones is a highlight to how unkind the years have been to the last two Marauders. She’s a few years older than the two, and looks a decade younger. She’s better looking than he remembers; in her twenties, she was a little too thin and little too fussy in her dress. The gaunt, tight age of Azkaban that he sees in the mirror, the lined, heavy-eyed weariness he sees in Remus…there is none of that in Hestia. Her skin is clean and powder-perfect, her eyes bright beneath her tastefully done makeup, her steps quick and shoulders light--she must carry all her worry some other way, because it isn’t weight on her back like it is on the others. She walks with her head high and her hair perfectly styled.

It’s almost painful to look at her; she wears so little of her tragedy in her appearance, it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to resent her, almost, beautiful and light shouldered, when she walks out the door into the sunshine (or even the grey-ceilinged London rain), a free and beautiful bird.

One afternoon, both of them dusty from the continued campaign on the decrepit old house, she directs him to retrieve her wand from her handbag in the kitchen. It’s in a case in the bottom of the leather bag on the kitchen table; rolled up along with her beautifully scrolled lilac wood wand is a worn old note. It’s addressed to ‘my hummingbird’ and signed ‘Caradoc.’ He doesn’t read the rest.

He’s a little kinder to Hestia for the rest of the day, keeps the bite of his bitterness back, doesn’t resent her when she retrieves her bag from the kitchen and leaves. It’s easier to understand the way she carries herself, her shoulders light and chin held up; she carries her pain in her handbag.

She doesn’t come to Grimmauld over Christmas—she spends the holidays with her daughter at Caradoc’s parents’ house in Beaumaris. She takes the time to wish him a happy Christmas before she goes to Kings Cross to meet Megan at Platform 9 ¾. It would be a lie to say that he misses her—the house is busy and Harry is more than enough of a distraction.

But he still listens for the unique double-click of her high heels on the entrance hall. A few hours after the Hogwarts Express leaves, they sound in the hall.

Her Christmas gift is a file wrapped in tissue paper. “It’s how I’m going to clear your name, when, well, you know. I’m going to get you a lot of money, too, for wrongful imprisonment.” A sour look crosses her face. “If fucking Barty Crouch hadn’t suspended due process in the end, you never would’ve gone—I’ve been looking at these witness accounts.” She snatches the file back out of his hand, ripping the remains of the tissue away and paging through the parchment inside. “They are by no means conclusive. And your wand! A simple Priori Incantatum would’ve cleared you of responsibility!”

He can’t help but grin at her. “I don’t need the money, Hestia.”

A playful grin plasters itself on her face. “I’m gonna get it anyway, just because I can. I’m that good,” she assures him. “And it’ll teach the Ministry to go dicking about with people’s rights. I’ll get you off if it’s the last thing I do!”

Sirius snickers, and Hestia whacks him. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Black! Don’t be crass!” They laugh together.

She leaves the file. It’s not a bad Christmas gift; it’s hope, it’s a life beyond this house, beyond the fight. Most of it is too dry and legal for him to really comprehend, but in the darker hours in Grimmauld alone he sifts through the papers and it’s a little easier to smile.

She breaks up with the boyfriend he didn’t even know she had in mid-January. He breaks out a bottle of his father’s prized wine and they talk about love over it.

“Not ‘the one’?” he asks her, a little sarcastically. She just looks at him appraisingly before speaking.

“Already have my ‘one.’ Just waiting around for him to get back,” she says simply, swirling the sediment around in the bottom of her glass. Sirius falls a little awkwardly silent, thinking back to the note in her wand case.

“Not Caradoc,” she says gently, her hand reaching out to brush reassuringly against his. She laughs a little sadly. “I’m not so sad as to be waiting around for him still—I’m talking about Sturgis. He’s been my best friend since eleven—if that’s not once in a lifetime, I don’t know what is.”

After a moment, she speaks again, a little hesitantly, a little desperately. “Sirius…what is Azkaban like?”

His throat seizes painfully and he pulls away from her. “Don’t ask me that, Hestia.”

Tears well up in her china-blue eyes, the first he’s ever seen. “I’m sorry, I just—he’s not going to come back the same, is he?”

He locks himself into the room with Buckbeak, not that she tries to come after him. He can still hear her heels clicking in the entrance hall when she goes a few minutes later.

A few days after she takes an Azkaban-ravaged Sturgis home, she’s back in Grimmauld Place. She brings her own alcohol, some fancy, imported rum. She leaves it in her handbag, unopened. She’s dressed too casually to be recognizable—still neat, still put together, but her black hair is loose and he can’t recognize her footsteps because her shoes are flat.

“I feel like I’m failing him,” she says blankly, arms crossed on the table, cheek set into her elbow, looking up at him across the table. “I don’t know how to help…I just—I don’t know. I’ve taken off work, I’ve tried to be there…he doesn’t want me around. He just goes out drinking at night and goes home with strangers, stumbles in around noon and barely has a word for me.”

She looks sad and burdened, worried for her ‘once in a lifetime’. She doesn’t seem untouchable, like she always has. It’s the first time Sirius can believe she’s three years older than he. He can’t bring himself to tell her about the post-Azkaban haze of apathy, before all those years of happy memories start to trickle back, when all you can remember is everything you would rather forget.

Her hair is spilled across the wood tabletop and he pets it in an awkward attempt at comfort. Her hand comes up to his and she smiles at him wanly. They sit like that awhile, there at the table.

It isn’t love or even lust that leads them into his unmade bed upstairs. It’s loneliness, the kind that children’s letters and damaged best friends can’t quite assuage.

Hestia laughs at the pinups on his walls, twenty-year-old Muggle beauty. “You’re going to be disappointed,” she teases gently, her hand in his hair. “Babies do irreparable damage.” Her hair is fanned out against the pillow, her shirt undone just a single button past decent, blush rose lace just barely peeking out.

“Azkaban isn’t much kinder,” he replies, and the playfulness drops. He regrets the words—it was meant as an awkward apology for all the beauty those years stole from him, an awkward compliment to Hestia’s cream and curved prettiness. Her hands are gentle on his shoulders as she draws him down. Her neck is warm against his forehead and they just lay there for a moment. Her heart beats through the crisp fabric, her arms a light weight on his shoulder blades, her fingers lacing through the fine hair at the nape of his neck. It’s innocent, gentle—the comfort of a mother to her child. And he’s never had this before.

It’s not love, but it’s peace and warmth and comfort. His pillow smells like her the next night and the nightmares aren’t so terrible.

There’s too much to think about in the end as he falls—death is a Dementor in reverse, it takes away the misery and leaves everything beautiful. There’s James’ hand on his shoulder, Lily’s smile, Remus’ embrace in the Shrieking Shack, Harry’s letters.

But Hestia finds her way in amongst the rest, because falling asleep in her arms that one night is the only analogy he can find for death in his entire life—quick and peaceful and warm.

Free If You Dare (PG-13)

2009-02-24T01:14:52Z

Title: Free If You Dare
Author: Lady Altair
Rating: PG-13
Summary: She is freedom and flash and dangerous reckless youth, and he loves her down to the tread on her tires.
Characters/Pairings: Sirius Black/Motorbike

He leaves the motorbike out at the end of the drive, caressing her battered chrome, her scuffed old seat one last time, trying vainly to suppress the shudder that climbs up his spine.

The mechanic says she’s entirely fixable—a few new parts, some new paint and a bit of work and she’ll shine like new. But that’s work for someone else, now, someone who can bear to scrape out the bits of dried blood from the grooves in the handlebars, can look at her in admiration, touch the leather without shivering, can appreciate the wind in his hair and the wings she gives him, without thinking of what a long, terrible fall she holds in the other hand, if a spiteful wind caught her.

He’s too old to appreciate the freedom, the reckless joy of a good ride. That day is long past, and the old girl has betrayed him.

The old man abandons the bike by the road, with a handwritten sign: Free if you dare.

He straightens his old black suit and goes to bury his son.

Sirius Black dares.

She’s too beautiful and broken not to. He happens on her by chance, a miscalculated Portkey leaving him a few miles off course, on a rare-used country lane in Lincolnshire. He’s too swept away by her scuffed charm, her luring promise, the weathered sign—free if you dare, now that’s a challenge if Sirius has ever heard one.

A few spare pieces, a couple of handy spells, and more than a few hours in James’ garden in Godric’s Hollow, kicking around with some butterbeers and tools they really don’t know how to use, and she’s silvery new, ready to run, ready to fly. There’s little mundane about her when he’s done, and this machine-made-magic is something wonderful.

James nags him to name her; he’s the sort that always named his broomstick…she’s a lady, Sirius. You need something to coo in her ear.

But there’s no name for her. Sirius tries, halfhearted, to find something to encompass her sleek loveliness, but there is nothing. She doesn’t need a name. She is just she, and she is just his.

She really is freedom, and flash, and dangerous reckless youth, and he loves her down to the tread on her tires. There are days he can’t be bothered to shave, can’t be bothered to drag himself home for a change of clothes, but she never goes without a wax, a wash, whatever she needs to gleam black. He loves her, and she returns it, more loyal and dependable than any collection of stick-and-twigs anyone ever laid enchantment on.

There’s only one person he’d ever let take her on his own, and James wouldn’t dream of it. Lily’s more than enough woman for me, Sirius, and I think she’s the jealous sort, he claims, petting her chrome apologetically.

She is a one man bike, Sirius agrees, laughing. If she expects a return on that, she’s wrong!

But he never really loves any woman like he loves her; women are too complex, too needy, too easily broken beyond repair. They need too much, need too many things he can’t even find for himself. She just needs some oil and petrol and a bit of care to love him; he knows how to do that. And he can break her a hundred times—she can be made seamlessly new after every single accident. He envies her invincibility.

Hagrid doesn’t trust her. She seems small and capricious when Sirius offers her to him, struggles under his weight like a high-strung racehorse, her engine choking obstinately as he revs her up, whining for her Sirius. Sirius laughs hollowly as he gives Hagrid a few last minute pointers on handling her. He reluctantly hands Harry back to Hagrid, running a regretful hand over her headlamp.

Be a good girl, won’t you? he asks, a wisp of affection managing to surface in his grief-strangled voice. Just for me, get them there safe. Her engine smooths under his hand, and she purrs obediently. And safe, they arrive, and Hagrid is sure it is some special brand of magic that makes this flight so peaceful, and it is all because Sirius asked it of her.

She never quite warms to her temporary owner: he’s sure he’s too heavy, too old, lacking her beloved Sirius’ youthful abandon, and he can’t begrudge her that. But she does everything he asks, and Hagrid takes care of her for that, does what’s needed so she won’t fall to pieces, riddled with rust.

But he doesn’t have much use for her, can’t find much to love in her lifeless, clawless beauty—she’s the wrong kind of dangerous, and Hagrid is too heavily set into the ground for her to give him wings.

Free if you dare…

Harry finds the writing etched on the chrome of the front suspension, in the scrawl made familiar by the Marauder’s Map. He smiles, running a thumb over the immovable words, smudging the flawlessly mirrored chrome.

He sets the helmet (Ginny insists) on the seat and leaves her. He doesn’t quite need her wings, doesn’t crave that sort of dangerous freedom that is her gift, and that seems like a beautiful liberty all its own.

oOXOo

Halflife (PG-13)

2009-02-24T00:58:18Z

Halflife
{where were you when your life was half over? six stories, six days, six lives at the summit}

It’s a very long, ugly Monday, beginning what augurs to be a very long, ugly week. She’s almost thirteen, almost; her birthday comes with the weekend and she’s aching for it. Thirteen, finally. And somehow that seems just ever so much older, so much more mature than twelve, just because there’s that –teen in it. There must be something that comes with that suffix, and she is desperately hoping it’s grace. Every day she waits, waking up and hoping she won’t trip out of bed, that the night will have endowed her with her mother’s soft-footed elegance. It certainly wasn’t today; she bollixed up a potion because her hand got twitchy and knocked a bowl of mushy peas onto Evan Carstairs’ lap. She clambers into bed without dragging a brush through her hair.

Nymphadora’s mother is a princess, all grace and beautiful angles. And, more often than she likes to admit, Nymphadora wants to shed her ugly, clumsy duckling feathers and grow out the hair that she keeps short because she can’t help but mangle it. She wants to be a swan. She could put on a hundred beautiful faces, mirror her mother in a thousand physical ways, but there isn’t a single spell she knows that could make even the most careless movement of her hand so controlled and graceful. Andromeda moves like ink in water and Nymphadora feels like her every motion is a slog through ankle deep mud.

Nymphadora chalks her mother’s grace up to maturity—Andromeda is thirty-three, that’s ancient.

She has years to learn grace.

{Six thousand, five hundred and seventy one days}

Sirius throws a huge graduation party in his new flat, and doesn’t remember much about anything until he wakes up still drunk around four in the morning on the bare mattress, the sole piece of furniture, to find the place empty but for Mary MacDonald, who is diligently tidying the disaster.

He tries to pull some clumsy, inebriated moves on her, because losing his virginity seems like a fabulous idea and Mary is the closest thing to a girlfriend he’s ever had—the girl who lets him kiss her every once in a while, who endures his jokes without getting upset, who understands she’ll never come first. She very gently turns him away, helping him back to the bare mattress and pulling a pillow and blanket from somewhere.

Sirius is nothing if not persistent and he pushes his luck. No, she says firmly. That would be giving you my heart.

You mean you haven’t already? he asks smartly, trying to wrap his tongue around the words right.

There’s such sober patience in her eyes that he finds he can’t look into them anymore. He turns his face away and she kisses him on the temple before she sets back to cleaning. You’ve never asked for it, Sirius. I don’t think you know how.

{Three thousand, six hundred and sixty five days}

It’s a rainy day in April and, as he herds the gnome into the house with his shoe, Fred reckons he’s got maybe ten minutes before he and George (who, in this rare and particular case, is innocently and ignorantly reading a comic book upstairs) get chased out into the rain a scant few inches ahead of his mother’s ancient, heavy old broomstick.

It’s more like five, but George catches the brunt of the broomstick, having been completely unprepared for Molly bursting into their room in a rage, the gnome struggling futilely in her hand. Fred had been anticipating it, prepped to run.

Molly shrieks about abysmal behavior from the doorway and George grumbles about giving some warning next time, rubbing his bottom dramatically. Fred waves merrily back at his mother, the beatific grin on his face refusing to melt away with the downpour.

Fred takes a dive into a promising looking mud puddle and flings a handful at George, who’s still a bit sore about getting pulled from his comic book four pages from the end to get walloped by a broomstick and chased out into the rain. Good behavior is for grown ups, he figures, not eleven year olds.

And Fred never wants to grow up.

{Three thousand, nine hundred and sixty seven days}

It’s nearing one in the morning, but she can’t stop reading her Potions book. Every time she thinks to stop, makes to close the cover and put it away, some little bit of sentence on the opposite page catches her attention and she’s just lost to it.

She’s still getting used to this, to this magic. It still feels strange to say, and she thinks it must advertise her origins so plainly, that hesitation. She can pick the other ones out, the ones who walk through the castle in utter and unashamed awe.

Sev manages to contain most of it, but even he can’t smother all of his excitement. They partnered in their Potions earlier in the morning, the first time they’d actually been allowed to brew anything, and they’d both been very quietly, subtly giddy over getting their hands dirty.

It’s the dream Sev had cultivated during those afternoons hanging around the playground, it’s better.

Across the room, Mary MacDonald’s bedhangings are bleeding light from the cracks and, every once in a while, the rustle of new crisp pages, the crack of a breaking book spine. Another Muggleborn girl, likewise thirsty for the impossibilities explained in their schoolbooks.

Lily grins, finally shutting the book that will, after all, be there tomorrow. And the next day. And the next, for the rest of her life. She’s been waiting to wake up since that day Sev called her a witch. Maybe it isn’t until right now that she realizes she never has to. This is her world, too, forever, for all that she wasn’t born into it. It’s hers now, always. Always.

It’s a pretty wonderful world; magic and a friend to hold her hand through it all.

{Six thousand, nine hundred and fifty one days}

It’s the day after the full moon and he spends it lazing around his mother’s house. He feels exhausted and ill, drained from the transformation and from feeling particularly sorry for himself, chained up in the cellar instead of running free with his friends.

It strikes him, in a very strange, sudden flash, how much love costs. He’s looking at his mother across the table as she sips her afternoon tea and the cost of loving him is written in the slight lines on her otherwise pretty face. The recently widowed mother of a werewolf—he can read the weariness and grief in the weighted curve of her neck over the battered kitchen table.

It strikes him then, how much loving him costs her, because she is thirty-nine years old and far too young and beautiful to be tied down to this shabby little house, this shabby werewolf son. He hates how she never seems to see that, hates that when she looks at him her eyes are impossibly bright, filled with warmth and love and acceptance. He hates how unselfish she is.

She would be better off without him, he very quietly thinks. He’s one of the weights around her neck and he wishes he had the strength to take it from her. But he is far too selfish; too needy to walk away from his mother, too weak to break her heart and leave her better off.

Silvia gets up to wash out her teacup and kisses the crown of his head as she passes on her way to the sink and he swears he’ll never let another woman tear herself down like this for him.

{Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy five days}

He leaves white roses for Rose Evans, because she never had anything but a kind word and a gentle hand for an unlovely little boy from the wrong end of town. He leaves them because Lily can’t, and that’s mostly his fault. He drops the roses on the grass-covered grave and goes into the dark.

He kills James Potter’s cousin that night and he wishes she looked more like James, wishes her eyes were that hatefully familiar hazel; it would make it easier to glory in the way the light is wiped out of them. But her eyes are just blue, her hair just brown, and when he looks at her there, dead and emptied on the ground next to her husband and teenage children, he can’t remember where he found the rage that fueled the spell.

Again, (always), he thinks of Lily, of her eyes filmed over with disgust and shame could she see him now. And, just for a hateful flash, he thinks of those green eyes, rotting dead in the ground and thinks of relief. He hates himself for the thought, for wishing ruin on the only girl he’ll ever love. He hates more that ruin would not stop her eyes from haunting him.

He thinks to take back the flowers from her mother's grave, but by daylight they're decaying on the damp grass, and Lily's sister saves him the trouble

A Gift Freely Given (PG)

2008-12-05T19:53:50Z

A Gift Freely Given

{The world remembers a martyr, a painted icon with a golden halo. Lily Potter wasn't that.}

Lily Potter was twenty-one and selfish.

No one ever remembers that, it’s too ingrained in the age to stand out. She was twenty-one and invincible, twenty-one and obnoxiously self-involved. War didn’t change that, marriage didn’t change that…not even a child could entirely kill the selfishness woven into the twenty-something psyche. Twenty-one wasn’t quite ‘grown-up’ for Lily Potter.

They’ll paint her as a saint, a Madonna in maternity robes. Like she never made James mind Harry for a night to go out and get hammered with Mary MacDonald on her hen night. Like she never cursed into her pillow at three in the morning and let Harry cry a few minutes longer. Like she never got so mired down in exhaustion and frustration and worry, crying along with her colicky baby waiting for, hoping that James would swagger in the door with Sirius on his heels like they were coming home from a night on the piss and not espionage and danger so she could scream at them through her tears. Like she never envied them a little, out there streaking the night crimson and gold with their twenty-one-year-old bravery.

The world remembers a martyr, a painted icon with a golden halo. Lily Potter wasn’t that. She was just human; flawed. No one remembers the temper, the self-interest, the little vanities, the unforgiving nature, the grudges held (except one forgotten sister, who amplifies the imperfections to dim the glow of Lily’s dead-star brilliance).

They carve her up as their saint, the mother of the Boy Who Lived, remember her talents, her many kindnesses, but even those fade; her beautiful sacrifice is rain on the inked parchment of her life, black words—messy scrawls and scratched out sentences along with pretty turns of phrase and bits of poetry—washing out to hazy, indecipherable grey. The memory of Lily Potter is bland, unremarkable goodness.

Even her friends can’t remember her as ordinary; the years and the stories rewrite their memories, taking an eraser to them bit by bit until they’re new and perfectly familiar, clean pictures on clean white paper with no grey, stray pencil marks underneath to mark the grave of ordinary Lily.

No one really remembers ordinary Lily and it almost dulls her sacrifice. Because that flawed human girl, barely out of her teens and still trying hard to hold on to selfish innocence even as the war began to pull against her, threw herself down without a thought, traded her life for her son’s without a moment of hesitation. She loved her life; it was bright and precious and unlived. In all other circumstances, she would have held to it fast. But in that moment, for her son, it was a gift freely given.

They’ll paint Lily Potter as a saint, and anyone knows a saint would do that. It’s not even a question, and it makes it all a little less remarkable.

The Spare Princess, Chapter Seven

2008-12-05T19:30:47Z

The Spare Princess

Walden had generally steered clear of Evangeline’s potions laboratory—there had been a few subtle mentions about the precarious and sometimes dangerous concoctions she sometimes left to simmer. Though he was by no means truly barred from the room, he tended to avoid the chamber, filled as it was with delicate crystal vials and carefully temperature-charmed fires and thin glass stirring wands—all sorts of things better suited to Evangeline’s clever, careful little hands than to his own clumsy paws.

He sat with her there now, in the evening after work, in the dusty velvet divan, worn from years of use, so old that even the infrequent Scottish sun had managed to fade the burgundy fabric to a sad sort of raspberry pink. Evangeline curled up with him, her bird-boned little body in his arms and her mind a hundred miles away as her quill-clutching hand danced over parchment, writing and scratching in ink that was the same blue-black of her eyes.

Walden knew with a certainty, as he watched her work, that there was no one in the world who had a clear picture of how beautifully brilliant she truly was. He’d always known she was far more intelligent than he; it showed in her eyes, in her speech, but now he was beginning to recognize that she did not see the world the same at all. Even her family had offered only grudging, half-certain acknowledgements of her talent, a trivial and unredeeming footnote to all of her faults and shortcomings. They had tossed away a priceless gem because her setting was bent. It was clear here, as he watched her china doll face serene in concentration. Her eyes were fixed on the paper without even seeing the marks she made, she saw beyond the sketches and equations and tables and words she inked onto the vellum.

“This formula should work,” she assured him, her eyes scanning her long scroll of notes. She was curled over the stained, acid-scarred table she used as her writing desk. Her words weren’t really for him; she thought aloud sometimes, and even when he wasn’t in the room, he could sometimes hear her speaking to no one. He combed his fingers through the matte silk of her hair as he stood over her, watching her quill trace over words and symbols that meant nothing to him. He smoothed the hair back down across her shoulders and back, stepping away to let her work. He wasn’t helpful—he’d scraped through without a Potions OWL and couldn’t brew so much as a sneezing solution, but he liked to watch her while she worked. She was beautiful; anything but weak. “Yes,” she continued, sitting back. “But this has no place in the world; just the one brew and I’ll destroy the rest, destroy the research.”

Walden wandered from his place at her side, inching through the room. It was no place for him; packed with bookcases, leaving only the narrowest of aisles between the floor-to-ceiling shelves of delicate crystal and cracking leather-bound tomes and pottery and complicated-looking instruments. Evangeline was more suited to the room, she could slip like a shade between the towering cases, all silent, graceful efficiency and care. Walden had to pay careful mind where he swung his arms and how he moved, a bull tiptoeing through a china shop.

A small cauldron bubbled in one of the fireplaces that lined the back wall. The smell of it grew stronger as he approached, the steam rising from the mother-of-pearl liquid in swirling spirals. He started, nearly upsetting a basket of crumbled leaves as Evangeline slid up beside him, her hand moving up his forearm. “What’s this?” he asked, moving closer to it.

“An experiment,” she said quickly, quietly. There was that animal skittishness back again, the careful caged way she moved with her words. She was regarding him cautiously, the workings in her eyes a thousand times too fast for him to read. It was animal fear tempered with an intelligence that far exceeded his own.

“Illegal, Evangeline?” He laughed a little to himself. Leaning in to her conspiratorially, he whispered in her ear. “I’ll not be telling them, don’t worry yourself.” He kissed her on the mouth. “But I might be needing some bribing.”

Cool, soft relief melted across her tight face and the smile on her face spread like warmed butter. “Maybe it is, I don’t quite know yet.”

“Smells good,” he commented. It was an understatement; the potion smelled like heaven. “You’ve been working on this for a while?” She nodded and he laughed roughly, pulling her up against him and leaning down to breathe in the scent of her hair. “You’ve smelled just like it as long as I’m remembering! Even in the garden when I first met you, you smelled just like this.”

She turned her face up, puzzlement written on it. “I have?” she asked carefully. She had a studying look on her face, her eyes trained on him almost blankly, like she was sizing up one of her alchemical equations.

Walden nodded, shrugging. “Thought it was perfume.”

“I smell just like it? Does it smell like anything I don’t?” She questioned further, peering around him to look at the cauldron in question. Walden sniffed, putting more thought into the answer.

“Maybe a little bit like…iron.” Evangeline never smelled like iron, like rust. That was the tang in the background of the scent; it was the bite of his axe, the red of blood. He shrugged. “But mostly you.”

Her expression lightened, the shielded confusion that hung on the corners of her mouth falling free and she smiled at him in a strange, beautiful, diamond-perfect way. “I suppose I just can’t smell it anymore,” she said faintly, her face glowing like platinum in the moonlight. She crept her arms around his neck until he picked her up and held her to his chest, her silk slippered toes just brushing the scrubbed wood floor and her face tucked into his neck.

It was a strange and beautiful moment he would remember always without ever really knowing why. He didn’t hear her whisper, “I love you, too.”

Walden was sure that no further invitations to any Prince family gatherings would be issued. Between the mark on his arm and the scene at the last occasion, why would Everard bother any longer? Evangeline merely smiled and advised patience.

“Surely he can’t be having any more to do with us?” Walden muttered over a cup of tea and the crumbs of Teapot’s best shortbread. “He’s had his fun, I’m thinking he’s done with us.”

Evangeline’s face was crossed with some sad, stony expression; she looked like some angelic agent of divine retribution. “He’s never finished with anyone.”

Surely enough, an Easter invitation arrived by owl, and the hour came.

Everard was as infuriatingly jocund as ever, hiding his horns beneath a brass halo. “Walden, Evangeline, how lovely you could join us! Isn’t it just the finest of Easter morns?” he greeted them, arms spread in the wide foyer of his grand estate as though he were welcoming treasured guests and not his afternoon entertainment.

Walden had promised not to speak much—the fury that rose up in him at the sight of his wife’s old demon of a grandfather made politic words too much a hardship. It was just a touch too early for such anger.

“Beautiful, Grandfather,” Evangeline replied, meek and humble as she submitted for a familial embrace. Walden’s hands itched for destruction, his own skin crawled to see Everard’s rheumy, liver-spotted claws on Evangeline. Walden managed a semi-polite nod to acknowledge the greeting before the man led them through the painting-lined corridor to the dining hall.

The dinner was even more sparsely attended than the disastrous Christmas. Evangeline’s parents, what little refuge of decency had remained in the house, were absent; Elliot in Azkaban and Catherine having been taken in by her Macmillan relatives. Everard held court only over his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandson, the last, blighted branch of the Prince name, this once-mighty tree thinned down to these few unworthy animals.

The tree would fall tonight, hewn down by Walden Macnair’s axe.

Everard was in rare form, baiting and sniping and leering at his two victims. Evangeline’s hand steadied Walden under the table; three carefully spaced taps: almost, almost, almost. She kept her eyes trained on the fine, polished dining table, her food untouched, completely silent. Walden could not remain so still; he shifted restlessly, impatiently in his seat, struggling for the serene patience that came so easily to Evangeline, peaceful beside him.

The old demon raised a glittering crystal goblet, a blood garnet of red wine cut in a hundred facets delicate in his hand, gesturing at Evangeline. “Must be hard for you,” he sympathized, a gloating tone greasing his voice. “Easter, springtime, rebirth, renewal. Must be difficult to be barren.” It wasn’t even subtle; it was a sloppy blow, a thoughtless, desperate attack against an untouchable enemy.

And then it was time. It had been the hour, this was the moment.

Evangeline raised her head, a cool, detached indifference slack on her face. “I wouldn’t know. I’m two months pregnant.”

A tic was the only reaction Everard had, an ugly twitch in the crepe-paper skin around his eye. Her uncle laughed, guffawing doubt in the other otherwise quiet room.

Walden was just as floored. Her hand squeezed his under the table and she spared a momentary spangle of color, a smile shot sideways at him, and nodded quickly. She was pregnant.

“Let’s not be telling stories, Evangeline,” Everard chastised her. “It’s a sad fact, but that Healer we had examine you assured us you were incapable of bearing children, that you would always be too fragile. I imagine that’s quite hard for you to accept.”

“Well, then, I suppose I’m just defying impossibility at every turn today, Grandfather.” She leveled her ink blue eyes on her grandfather, meeting his gaze for the first time in her life. “You always assured us the Prince name would last forever. It’s a sad fact,” she echoed back at him, arsenic running under the satin of her gentle tone, “but that name ends at this table. Tonight.”

Her uncle and cousin began to look worried, her grandmother and aunt already casting fearful looks at Walden. Everard just scoffed his disbelief.

“Are you going to have your husband kill us, Evangeline? He’s a good duel, I’ll admit, but three Prince men? And with your dead weight to protect?” He took an arrogant, leisurely sip from his wineglass. “I don’t like your odds.”

“Oh, there’s no need for Walden to dirty his hands,” Evangeline smiled serenely over at her husband. “I’ve already killed you all, and more.” She looked meaningfully down at her untouched wineglass. "You should be kinder to the house elves; they've never thought twice before obeying me."

“The wine!” Evangeline’s aunt started screaming, red panic spreading out across her cheeks and the bridge of her pug Parkinson nose as she smashed her half-empty glass on the table. Evangeline’s grandmother, a birdlike little talon of an old woman, had fallen out of her chair, quite dead, her wineglass emptied.

“Cowardly poisoner!” Edward, the cousin, screamed, drawing his wand. Walden was too quick and Edward hit the ground, toppling alongside his grandmother.

Walden killed the Parkinson aunt just to stop her screaming. The room fell silent.

“I was kind to them,” Evangeline said softly, looking over to the uncle that remained, stock-still in his chair. “And to you, Uncle Edmund. It’s painless, just a simple poison, I promise.” He seemed quite unable to speak; his breathing stopped and there they were, a demon and two lesser evils come to exact their revenge.

Everard was grey with rage...or perhaps it was his death taking hold. He tried to speak; Walden silenced him ruthlessly, disarmed the wand that was being edged out of his sleeve. The monster had been speaking for far too long, and Evangeline had been silent all of her life. Walden helped her from her seat, offering a chivalrous arm to lead her around the table. She drifted to the head of the table with all the cool dignity of an empress ascending her dais and so she was; all the heirs to this grandeur were dead or disowned and so she prevailed.

She looked down on her grandfather, who still grasped tightly to his wineglass, curled back into this throne-like chair. “But you,” she said coldly, “For you, there is no death. Oh, your breathing will stop, and your eyes will close, and your body will die and rot away, but you are tied down. There will be nothing for you but a failed, decaying corpse. I will throw you a grand funeral…repayment for my lovely wedding, the loving gesture of a dutiful granddaughter, and I will brick you up in a grand mausoleum and you’ll exist there until the world ends. Maybe even after. You will exist, and your name will die.” She smiled softly, leaning in closer to Everard, who was visibly, if silently, fading. “Your arrogance has given me everything; my champion and our revenge. I swear the Prince name will fade and my children will build up a house from your ashes. Macnair shall be grander, more noble a house than this waste.” She drew an elegant hand back over the spilt wine and death behind her.

And Everard Prince died, there in his throne, the last of his name, helpless before the kitten and her manticore champion.

Evangeline’s face turned up to Walden’s as he tucked his wand back into his sleeve. She smiled softly up at him, and he leaned down and gently kissed her.

“A baby?” he asked.

She smiled. “Yes.”

He swept her up against him, carefully gentle. After a moment, she stepped back away. Walden wielded the wand he had stolen from Everard. “Morsmordre!”

The constellation, green haze and pinpricks of light, rose in the air to hover over the house. Walden cast the wand aside and shared one more smile with Evangeline. Then she started screaming.

The Daily Prophet called the fate of the Prince family a tragedy.

A truly frightening blow from the Dark, they wrote. Mrs. Evangeline Macnair, the last surviving heir, discovered her family murdered on Easter morning when she and her husband, the respected Ministry employee Walden Macnair, arrived for a holiday luncheon. The attack has been credited as the work of You-Know-Who’s followers, and investigation continues.

The funeral was widely attended and took place on the 23rd of April, a Friday.

Evangeline threw the paper into the rubbish bin, along with a worn, stained old Potions book: Devotios, Amortentia, and Variations.

The tea tasted funny; somehow bitter, lacking the sweet cloy he'd grown to like over the months. Walden shouted into the kitchen for Teapot. “The tea’s wrong again! I haven’t had a decent cup in weeks!”

Evangeline ambled into the dining room, resplendent in forget-me-not blue maternity robes. “Is there something wrong, Walden?” she asked, pausing in the doorway.

He jumped up, out the new, wide throne that stood at the head of the table. They’d burned Everard’s chair. In a few steps, he charged over to her and escorted her to the long seat they shared at the head of the table, sitting down beside her only when she’d assured him twice she was more than comfortable.

She took a sip from his teacup. “It tastes all right to me,” she told him, her eyes trained on his, studying his face. "It tastes normal...Teapot was making it funny before, I thought you didn't like it?"

“I got used to it...It just hasn’t been the same, not since we moved here.” He cast his eyes around the huge hall, once again assessing it appreciatively. Evangeline shrugged, leaning into him, pressing her face into his shoulder. “Must be the house,” Walden decided, leaning over to press his face into her hair.

“Do I still smell good?”

“Perfect.” Walden smiled into her hair, running a hand over the swell of her stomach.

“Perfect,” Evangeline echoed, smiling.

xXx
THE END

The Spare Princess, Chapter Six

2008-12-05T19:28:01Z

The Spare Princess

The one called Lord Voldemort rose, and the pureblood circles shattered, struck through with change and new politics. The families realigned, reformed, two new rings of power in the elite, smaller and more tightly bound. The first, the larger of the two, bowed and scraped to the rising black, the new dark lord. The second, the smaller, was subdivided in itself; the majority—the Macmillans, the Bones, the Greengrasses, the Potters, the Longbottoms, the Prewetts—found the whole situation deplorable. The rest of the second comprised itself of a few families, namely the Princes and the Blacks, who had more objection to the bowing and scraping inherent in any ‘lord’ than with the creed of blood purity and domination he espoused. As Everard Prince so coolly and condescendingly told Abraxas Malfoy, “I do not know about Malfoys, but even the lowest of Princes is too high to kneel to anyone, especially such a self-aggrandizing creature of uncertain blood and no respectable family as this so-called 'Lord Voldemort'.

Everard Prince, in his ancient and unshakable pride, would bow to no one. Walden Macnair had been bowing most of his life, it was no hardship to bow to this new master, to pledge himself to this new allegiance, especially as it seemed to offer him the most for his trouble.

But still. He would have stayed true to the high and unworthy Princes if Evangeline had asked it of him.

Bright, rare sunshine made her a silhouette in her window seat in the west-facing sitting room and he could not read her face. The shadow was as black as her hair and they bled together. “I would be defying your family, Evangeline—they would make you feel it.”

There was nary a pause in her reply. “You are my family,” his shadow replied, not even looking up from the book in her lap. “Do whatever you think is best. I do not doubt your judgment.”

He followed Abraxas Malfoy, though he knew the man had only invited him into the circle to spite old Mr. Prince; it didn’t quite matter. The new master was a horror to behold, more serpent than man, but Walden was quite accustomed to ugliness and he didn’t flinch at the subhuman figure he knelt before. Something pressed at, pressed through his mind and that he flinched at. The Dark Lord pulled at memories of torture, of murder, of hate and lust and loathing and resentment and rage and jealousy…and grinned. Then he pulled at one of Evangeline; Walden snapped in response, trying to pull away. The creature laughed at that and pulled a hundred more, a hundred moments that Walden had once thrilled in the sole ownership of.

Lord Voldemort withdrew, his gash of a mouth drawing into a cold-blooded grin. “Your loyalty will win great things for her. And you are a loyal one, aren’t you, Walden Macnair?”

The Mark burned into his arm, and he gritted his teeth against the scream he wanted to unleash. He Apparated into a forgotten clearing deep in the Forbidden Forest after the meeting and brutally exterminated the two giant spiders who had the poor luck to cross his path before he went home, too afraid of how he might injure Evangeline if he returned in such a wounded animal rage. His arm still burned, as though the Mark was searing down past flesh and into bone and out the other side, but worse still was those hundred pieces of Evangeline that were stolen, jealous greed over what was no longer solely his. That burned worse than the Mark.

He hacked at the spiders until his hands stopped shaking, and then he went home to her. She was still awake, waiting for him, and he sat up all night with her, his back against the old, carved wood of the headboard, Evangeline in his arms, her featherlight fingertips tracing the Mark as he told her about everything he had been promised, everything he hoped for.

It was under this lord, he hoped, that he might give her back all she had lost when her grandfather had thrown her to him: her status, her wealth, a grand, beautiful home, beautiful clothes at her whim, and new jewelry that Walden could admire her in without Everard stealing into his thoughts and washing her out. “I swear, Evangeline, I will build you a name worth carrying and our children will have a family to be proud of. No one will ever pity you again,” he swore to her in an unnecessary whisper.

She remained quiet throughout all of his words and promises, and she remained so, but she trembled in his arms and pressed her face closer into his neck. “What is it?” he asked her, his rough hands combing through her hair, the strands of it catching on the axe-worn calluses.

“Nothing,” she whispered.

When his hands crept up under her nightgown, her own followed them to stall his path, and she drew herself ever-so-slightly away. “Not tonight,” she said softly. “I’m bleeding,” she added, quiet and humiliated.

“Again?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

“…Yes,” she replied slowly, hesitation and fear creeping into her voice. Not pregnant. Another month gone by and she still wasn’t pregnant. “I’m sorry.” Her voice came low. Her hands slid from where they clung to his shoulders, and she curled them close to her chest, drawing into herself.

They didn’t speak any more words after that. He fell asleep somehow angry with her. Didn’t she see? Everything he was doing, all he was suffering…it was all for the family they would have, the one she was so slow in giving to him. He was trying to give her everything she had once had and more, and she couldn’t give him this one thing he wanted? Couldn’t give him children, a line of descent to build a name for? Immortality, really; that was what it was to found a family, for his name to endure.

He was quiet in the morning, as well, not speaking to her until he finished a cup of Teapot’s too-sweet tea. He felt calmer after it, and the fearful rigidity in Evangeline’s posture thawed as his quiet anger faded. “I’m sorry,” he apologized carefully, between sips of tea. Evangeline looked entirely relieved, a smile on her face as she shook her head to say no need, no need, it’s nothing. “There’s no hurry, really,” he continued on. “You’re so young, we have years,” he assured her. She nodded along in quick, appeasing agreement.

Another month went. And another. And another. Once he began to notice the time, it seemed to pass so much more quickly. He didn’t even need to ask anymore. Evangeline got nervous around him every month, skittish, waiting for the question and having only the same answer, the same disappointment.

And then, at the cold, awkward Christmas dinner that they had somehow still been invited to at the Prince estate, Everard cast a cruel, devious glance between his granddaughter and her husband, a malicious plan forming. The dinner was sparsely attended—Eris, Eirene, and Emmeline had all married into families that, for varying reasons, no longer kept company with the Princes. Everard held court only over his spinster sister, his two sons, their wives, Edmund’s son Edward, and Evangeline and Walden. He had a limited number of victims, and seemed to be calculating the best way to extract as much possible amusement from them as possible.

“A sad Christmas, with no children to brighten the hall,” Everard remarked with exaggerated disappointment. Evangeline went grey in her seat and next to her, Walden tensed. “Surely next year, Evangeline, next Christmas?” he asked facetiously, another great show. “Surely! A Macnair son to carry on such a worthy name!” It was so laced with sarcasm and mockery and malicious amusement that it was impossible to misunderstand. All the pieces fell into place, heavier than Walden ever could have imagined, and the delicate framework of the life he had been engineering buckled under the weight of it all and his vision went black.

The wedding. The jewelry. The marriage contract. This was the great punch line and it felled him.

Evangeline sat frozen next to him, fear scrawled into every broken line of her body.

They had given her to him because she was useless, she was the end. Everard had given her the jewelry because she would have no children to inherit it, it would be back in the Prince vault the moment she died with no blood of hers to lay claim to it. Everard had not bothered to disinherit her like her sister, like her cousins, because whatever little things she troubled herself to claim from her Uncle Edmund or cousin Edward would revert when the jewelry did.

Walden thought he had been gifted the beginning of a line, of a name. He’d been given the end of one. Old Mr. Prince gifted no one a rose…here were the razor thorns for his lovely little shadow.

If Walden had been able to see past his blinding rage to notice anyone but his petrified wife, he would have seen the cruel, pleased expression on Everard’s face. Evangeline’s father was wretched, somewhere between complete and utter hate and unadulterated terror for his daughter’s sake.

(The next morning saw Elliot Prince brought in by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement for the use of the Cruciatus curse and attempted patricide. He was later sentenced to life in Azkaban.)

But Walden could not see past the damnation of every plan he had so carefully cultivated. He nearly dragged Evangeline out of her seat, pulling her along behind him as he thundered to the door, past the anti-Apparition boundary. Everard's demonic laughter followed them all the way.

Evangeline collapsed on the floor of their kitchen, clutching her bruised wrist, silent but for the shallow, panicked breathing of deathly terror, a tangle of black hair and evergreen silk on the ugly wood floor.

Walden could not speak. Or think. Or move. There was only fury. It burned.

No. That was his arm, his Mark. It burned vivid, calling him to service. He thrilled to it—his hands itched to wreak disaster and ruin as effortlessly as Everard’s words had toppled all his grand plans and ambitions. He left her there on the floor, Apparated straight out of the kitchen, away from the remains of his crumbled hopes.

The night quelled some of his rage; the screams and the blood and the pleas for mercy, for life, for husbands, wives, children, parents. It felt good to destroy, ruin, steal, spoil, maim. He reveled in it, destroying lives under the emerald green glow of the Master’s conjured constellation.

The grey, overcast morning light crept across the kitchen when he returned, casting long, vaguely defined shadows over the floor. Evangeline still lay where he’d left her, her face a few streaks of washed out white between the thick, obscuring shadow of her hair. She was asleep.

He took tea at the kitchen table—Teapot hopped nimbly over his unconscious mistress to deliver the sick-sweet brew Walden was actually beginning to prefer.

Though she didn’t move at first, he knew the moment she woke. The slack in her muscles tightened up, her breathing quickened—she was an animal hunted, cornered, once again the vixen in the trap. He set down his tea cup and, in a few strides, crossed the floor and carefully gathered her up, trying not to pull at any of her scattered, tangled hair.

Settling into his favorite armchair, he pulled her close against him, trying to soften her fright-frozen form. “I told you,” he whispered gruffly, pressing his nose into her hair, “You will never have a reason to fear me, Evangeline. I promised you and I am not so low a man to not keep my word.”

She looked up at him with wide, unbelieving eyes. “I thought you were going to kill me,” she managed to say, almost choking on the end of it.

“No,” he whispered. “I could never…” he trailed off. “No.”

She curled in closer, pressing her face into his neck, still breathing through her fading panic. “That’s what my family thought you would do when you found out.”

Some faint flicker of rage flared through him, but Evangeline’s slowing breathing, the delicate fragrance of her hair, the weight of her against his chest gave him pause, cooled the blind passion into something more useful.

“Your family,” he began carefully, calmly, certainly, “They are going to pay.”

Evangeline was quiet a long moment and then, in a strange, new steel and venom voice that was not quite unfamiliar, she said simply, “I know how to make them.”

The Spare Princess, Chapter Five

2008-12-05T19:08:43Z

The Spare Princess

The Princes treated him no differently, after all that. He still did not belong and was made to feel it perhaps a little more than before. The men seemed eager to emphasize the fact that his marriage had done little in their eyes to better him. It had been a convenient disposal of a surplus and substandard commodity that had cost them little, a gesture lacking in sacrifice. “How is your poor dear wife?” was the rare and only question directed at him, forgotten on the fringe circle of the Pureblood society.

Everard took the keenest interest when other matters failed to amuse him sufficiently. “And how is my darling granddaughter, Mr. Macnair? Elliot, my son, have you heard lately from Mrs. Macnair? You must miss her so terribly…Macnair, have you given thought to starting a family, yet? I should so enjoy a new great-grandson or –granddaughter getting into things!” And then he would smile his nasty, bladed smile.

Evangeline’s father was the only one whose regard had significantly changed, and that was decidedly for the worse. The loathing in his eyes—a blue of a similar shade to Evangeline’s—had not waned, still glittered as dangerously as ever. Elliot’s saving grace in Walden’s eyes was the fact that he loved his daughter…for as much as Elliot loathed his son-in-law, Walden felt nothing but a little respect and pity for the man who so keenly felt his failure to protect his youngest daughter. He could not fault the man for considering him an unworthy husband for his daughter—that was the pure and simple truth.

Elliot and his wife and two daughters seemed the last bastion of decency and good breeding within the Prince household—Everard’s casual cruelty and disdain for blood bonds permeated his line. The Prince daughters, all married off in the higher echelons of society, were all the sort of petty, backbiting bitches Walden couldn’t bear, who tattled and gossiped and put on ugly veneers of pristine politeness. The single (legitimate) male grandson, Evangeline’s cousin Edward, was a snivelly and weedy man with close-set dark eyes and already-thinning black hair, with not enough of his grandfather’s calculating, manipulative intelligence and more than his fair share of his arrogance and pretension.

The Prince family was decaying, Walden privately thought, whittling themselves down on the inside, the malicious Prince streak turning inwards and hacking away at the bonds that held respectable Pureblood families together. Even Severus Snape, the half-blood son of Evangeline’s disowned Aunt Eileen, for all his dirty blood, was a more honorable, respectable wizarding specimen than his legitimate cousins.

And they thought Evangeline, his sweet, beautiful wife… they thought her a waste of pure and noble blood.

Walden mentioned the man over the dinner Teapot had made for them one night. Evangeline had nothing but kind, complimentary words for her illegitimate cousin, though she didn’t know him very well. “He tried to come speak with my grandfather right before Emmeline’s wedding—Grandfather had the house elf turn him away at the door, saying he was no kin of ours.” She grew quiet.

Walden hadn’t pushed for anything more, wasn’t sure there was anything more she had to say. He drank some of the wine—it wasn’t very good, had a strange tang to it. Cheap, he realized disgustedly. He downed it anyway.

Teapot did all the cooking and cleaning around the house. Evangeline, even had Walden considered it an appropriate task for his high born wife, was not capable of the spells. Her wand magic was severely lacking, he’d discovered. She could cast only the most basic of spells, and not to great effect. Her cousin Eirene had announced snottily over a family dinner that everyone had thought Evangeline a Squib until she’d made it to Hogwarts and proved herself “moderately capable of concocting a potion.”

Her Potions aptitude was an understatement, Walden found. Evangeline had carefully asked permission to seek employment in a Potions shop in Inverness—which he had immediately and firmly denied her, no wife of his would dirty her hands if he could help it—before contenting herself with a small laboratory in the unused storage room off the kitchen. She was more than ‘moderately capable;’ she was rather gifted in the subject and her study gave her a way to occupy her time. Walden generously stocked her laboratory as well as he could afford (perhaps a little better than he could afford) and felt rather pleased that he could do something to make her happy.

It was not a bad life. Evangeline seemed perfectly content in his home, however lacking he thought she must have found it. She was always there to greet him in some glittering bit of jewelry, to sit with him in his study and learn how to work the finances—though she seemed more adept than she let on at first—to lay in bed beside him. His whole house smelled of her, from the pillows on their bed to his own clothes in the wardrobe.

He was more careful with her than he had been at first. Walden reserved his rougher attentions for his girl in Knockturn, though it was no longer quite as satisfying. Her lacquered blonde hair was gummy and uncomfortable under his fingers, the waxy red lipstick left stains and her cheap perfume clung like dead flowers and ruined the light notes of Evangeline’s smell that laced the threads of his robes. Her playful taunts and fighting and her wanton, classless behavior grew wearisome, though the bruises he left grew more colorful as his patience with her grew short.

The rough, painful sort of violent sex he’d always pursued seemed lacking, missing Evangeline’s voice, her shy smiles and embarrassed whimpers and delicate fingertips on his face and in his hair. He missed the way she curled up to him in the dark, her cheek to his chest, her soft white arm across the hard muscles of his stomach. There was none of that quiet possession here; this was base and vulgar and not half as enjoyable as it had once been.

The Knockturn girl had never quite got over Walden’s marriage to a woman who was not her and was bitterly jealous of his new wife. She made the mistake of mocking Evangeline one evening, her shiny red lips twisting nastily as she grinned at him. “That’s right,” she purred in his ear, her hands fisted tight in his hair. “That little wife of yours can’t do this, can she? Won’t give you what you want, what you need, will she?”

He’d beaten the whore to within an inch of her life for daring to speak so of Evangeline. She was a gutter rat mocking the elegance and grace of his beautiful black swan, and he felt no remorse leaving her in her Knockturn hovel, bruised and broken and crying pathetically, whimpering some weak-voiced threats of revenge.

He would always be a monster, make no mistake.

Walden had carefully erased every trace of the whore from himself and gone home to find Evangeline asleep in their bed. He tried to let her sleep, tried to slip into bed, but she woke and grinned at him sleepily, reaching her arms out for him and she smelled perfect, felt warm and soft in his arms. He smiled back at her, hands petting her long, soft hair as she fell back asleep on his chest.

He kissed her awake in the morning, leaving tiny light kisses on her eyelids and forehead and cheekbones and jaw and neck just because he knew it would make her happy and she would smile for him. A smile on her face satisfied him more than a bruise on any whore’s. He hitched up her virginal white eyelet lace nightgown and he made love to her in the grey morning sunshine, and he enjoyed it because she did. Every giggle and whimper was a triumph, every time he made her sigh his name the best victory he’d ever won.

He didn’t leave a single unsightly bruise on her pale perfect skin and that was winning, too. He found joy in making her happy, satisfaction in giving her pleasure, and if that was not love then it was the closest Walden Macnair would ever come to it.

Evangeline found their marriage contract in the pile of papers on the floor beside his desk one day as she reorganized his records. She frowned over it, reading the tiny, elegantly indecipherable Italian script. She looked up at him from her seat on the ancient, battered hardwood floor, the parchment settling onto her lap with disbelief on her face.

“That’s odd…my grandfather disinherited all my cousins when they got married—he put it in their marriage contracts. It basically cuts them off from coming back to claim any of the Prince fortune when he dies—everyone in my family is more than petty enough to squabble over baubles and bits just to be nasty. He wants it all leveled on my Uncle Edmund, and then on my cousin Edward. He doesn’t want it split up, which is…” She grew painfully quiet.

“Never mind,” she said quietly, putting the parchment into a file that she labeled appropriately and filed away. Walden did not ask.

After she’d retired, though, he had gone through the file and reread the marriage contract—he hadn’t paid close attention at the signing of it, and was rather concerned with what had upset her in it.

There was no clause in the contract that disinherited Evangeline; there was no mention of anything of the sort.

Walden didn’t see anything at all. It was just a marriage contract; it itemized the contents of her dowry—he didn’t know how he’d missed the descriptions of all the jewelry Everard had given Evangeline to take with her into her marriage. There was nothing about it that seemed unusual at all, down to the clause that restricted the inheritance of the Prince jewelry and the rest of Evangeline’s dowry to blood descendants.

He took a sip of his tea-and-brandy as he perused the contract again. He wrinkled his nose, cursing the house elf under his breath. The damned rat couldn’t make tea to save its life, couldn’t seem to resist over-sweetening the brew no matter how many times Walden howled about it.

Evangeline was warmer than usual when he came to bed. In the morning, when he woke, the arm that was listlessly draped over his chest was burning, and his little shadow swan was grey with fever. He found the box of poisoned chocolates from a sweet shop in the deeper reaches of Knockturn Alley in the kitchen, his name signed to a note he did not write. Walden burned them, his hands steady in his rage.

Evangeline did not die. Walden would never have let her. He wasn’t ever even afraid she would, though for days she lay unconscious, stripped of all strength and burning with fever while everyone around her—the Healers, her distraught sister and father and mother—spoke in ‘ifs’. Walden thought only in ‘when.’

He disappeared for a few hours one night, but no one noticed.

There was a Ministry investigation into the source of Evangeline’s poisoning. It was quickly determined she must have mixed something wrong in her laboratory and the case was closed. Some of her vicious family laughed at her ineptitude.

When she woke he was there, and she managed to smile at him. Walden smiled back and sat down on their bed and cradled her up against him and ran his fingers through the greasy, unwashed lengths of her hair. “You don’t have to sit up with me,” she whispered, his shirt grasped weakly in her fingers. He hushed her and kissed her hair and she settled against his chest, falling back into an easier sleep.

Everard Prince had given a kitten to a manticore the day he had given Evangeline to Walden Macnair. He was a monster, make no mistake.

A landlord in Knockturn grew impatient when the rent never came in and the tenant never came back. Good for nothing whores, they were always wandering off or getting arrested. He sold off what possessions of hers were worth anything and let the dilapidated flat out to another girl, hoping this one would be better about getting the money in on time.

The Spare Princess, Chapter Four

2008-08-07T23:17:36Z

The Spare Princess

Evangeline was nothing like any woman Walden had ever touched, nothing like the hard-eyed witches who worked and frequented the pub in Knockturn that he liked. Soft flesh that his fingers dented into instead of the bone and sturdy muscle construct of the dancers, straight, satin-black hair—not like the glossy blue-black of his own, but a matte coal black that he almost expected to rub off on his hands when he touched it—in place of tawdry, lacquered blonde curls, clean pale skin instead of the heavily done glamours and waxy red lipstick that stained his mouth worse than blood.

Strangest and most unusual of all—she yielded when he pushed, didn’t struggle or fight him with a smug grin twisting painted lips like they did, knowing how well he liked it. He pushed and she fell without protest, quietly and unquestioningly acquiescing to every slight, unspoken demand. He found himself pushing harder than he had intended, just to see if she would protest. But though her breathing grew strained, though she bit the inside of her lip in discomfort and even pain, though she flinched minutely against his hands, Evangeline never ever told him ‘no.’ He wondered if she knew the word.

The morning sun through the big window lit the forming bruises on her body as she lay asleep, exhausted and battered in the brand new silk sheets that had been a small part of her dowry. He didn’t like the purple and blue on her skin—it wasn’t so much fun, really, hurting her. She didn’t cry or protest, didn’t squeal theatrically like his girls; she was still the vixen in the trap, already too wounded to cry at the new onslaught. It was almost a relief—if she would have played with him, struggled and cried like he liked, it would have been harder to restrain himself, harder to treat her like the wife she was and not the whores he liked.

It was a strange irony that brought him somewhere between fury and laughter—the Princes had given him this fragile doll with a smug sureness that he would shatter her into pieces, but he rather suspected he couldn’t. They’d handed him a toy they’d already broken themselves and he was entirely sure that there was no better way to break Evangeline than the way she’d already been broken.

Evangeline smiled hesitantly when she woke, blinking self-consciously as she rearranged the sheet and smoothed her hair, a charcoal scribble across her face and shoulders. “Good morning,” she ventured bravely, after a long moment of his silent scrutiny.

“Let me see you,” he ordered. With next-to-no hesitation, Evangeline dropped the sheet, swept her hair back, perfectly and immediately obedient. He ran a hand down her neck, over her shoulder. A wince flashed across her face, just a moment of surprising pain, and then it was gone, her face a replica of what it had been even as he prodded her bruises.

“You tell me when I’m hurting you, Evangeline. Don’t let me do this to you.”

A frown compressed her forehead, her thin black brows pressing down. “But—” she began, the first whisper of anything less than unquestioning obedience.

“I don’t enjoy it,” he explained, more honestly than anyone—including himself—would have expected. “You stop me, say no, say something—you’ll be doing us both a favor.”

Disconcerted, Evangeline nodded. “Of course.”

Walden growled at her. “Don’t say ‘of course,’ say no.” He pulled her up against him, fingers pressing hard into her arms, her back. “Tell me no, say no, whenever you want, whenever you mean it.”

Her eyes were wild now, confused. Eager to appease him, the word was quick out of her mouth. “No!”

Even that felt like a loss; the word was empty, it was just more obedience. He let her go and she shrank back a few inches, her arms curling over her chest protectively. He was scaring her, her wide eyes roved over him like he was about to pounce on her.

“I don’t want to…” He stopped. That was probably a lie. “I don’t mean to hurt you, so you tell me when I’m doing it. You’ve probably been told I’m a monster, but you will never have a reason to fear me.”

It was beginning to rain outside, and it pattered on the windows, the only sound in the silence. “I don’t think you’re a monster,” Evangeline said, her voice drawing his eyes up to her face, which was looking guilty for whatever reason. Her hand was on his arm, trailing up, white and fine boned against the tanned, scarred, corded length of his arm. She was on her knees beside him, and her face pressed in close to his.

“Then you are very wrong,” he said roughly. He was a monster, he was a great handsome monstrous beast and he was proud of it, there was no point in leading her to believe anything else.

“No?” she said, more of a question than any sort of statement, as though testing her voice. “No,” she practiced firmly. She smiled softly at him. “No,” she said sweetly, and shyly pressed her mouth to his.

He pushed her away, more firmly than he’d intended. “What?” she asked, a thin, uncertain smile threatening on her face. “I thought I was the one saying ‘no’?”

“Don’t be clever,” he groaned, falling back against the pillows and letting her lighten the mood.

“But I am clever,” she protested, leaning over him with a slight but widening smile on her face and her eyes bright with mock innocence.

“Are you?” he said tiredly, shielding his eyes with his hands.

“Mmm,” she murmured what sounded like an affirmative, settling back into the pillows herself, and the two fell into a sort of dozy silence in the grey, rainy light of the morning.

Teapot, the house elf that was another part of Evangeline’s dowry, bustled in with breakfast a few minutes later. “Good morning, new Mistress and Master! Master Ev’rard is sending me down to take care of you!” Teapot set the tray up beside their bed and wandered around the room, picking through the discarded clothing that littered the floor. “Would the Mistress like to see her jewelry? Master Ev’rard sent down the chest with Teapot,” the house elf squeaked, picking up the tattered remains of Evangeline’s white satin negligee with no hint of embarrassment, though Evangeline flushed pink and pulled the silk sheets tighter around herself. (Walden had found his hands ill-suited for the tiny fastenings and grown impatient with the flimsy bit of underwear, the first of his many instances of misconduct.)

The house elf didn’t wait for an answer, instead levitating what looked like an antique chest on legs through the door to settle by the bedside. Evangeline frowned as the elf finished her quick sweep around the room and disappeared. Walden took a heavy drink of the tea the elf had left and grimaced—too heavily sweetened.

“This chest is very big,” she began hesitantly, edging to the side of the bed, her hand on the lock. It fell away under her touch; some sort of blood enchantment, no doubt. Walden slid up behind her as she lifted the lid up and she gasped; he thought it was from his touch for a moment, but at the first glance of the chest’s contents changed his mind.

Diamond and opals and emeralds and rubies and sapphires and a dozen other precious stones Walden couldn’t name glittered up from the black velvet that lined the chest like multicolored constellations in the night sky. Wonder and worry threaded her back in taut lines, her shoulders held stiff. After a few long seconds, she reached out to touch one necklace, some silver metal laid in with emeralds and diamonds.

“This was my cousin Eirene’s favorite necklace, she’d be so furious if she knew…” she whispered, tracing the woven silver carefully. “My grandfather is very particular about the jewelry we take with us when we marry,” she explained, still fingering the jewelry. “He wouldn’t let Emmeline or Eris or Eirene keep anything they liked, just the old, gaudy pieces we all hated, and just a few pieces for each. There must be two dozen pieces in here.” She sounded nervous; she pulled her hand away from the necklace like it was going to bite. “And it’s everyone’s favorite things…Emmeline loved these earrings, Eris wore this locket all the time. Maybe a mistake, my grandfather couldn’t have meant to give us all of this, this has to be a quarter of my family’s jewelry.”

This was no mistake; Everard Prince did not know the word. This was just another carefully constructed humiliation, this was the overdone wedding all over, another prodding joke, but the punch line in this particular cruelty was harder to find. There was a note in Evangeline’s hand, pulled from where it had been tucked along the side of the chest.

For the new and most deserving House of Macnair, was written in Everard’s hand. May the many future daughters of your line wear them with dignity and pride in their noble ancestry.

Frustrated fury arced through Walden’s head. Another backhanded gesture with clouded motivations. What did old man Prince find so amusing as to toss away a fourth of his family’s jewels on the joke?

More commonplace anger replaced it; if they were nothing else, they were unsubtle reminders of everything Walden could not give Evangeline. Her wardrobe of exquisitely tailored robes hung beside his frayed Ministry issue, and now this grand fortune would sit in its chest in his sad little cottage, rarely worn, its beauty wasted. There was no manor for Evangeline and her finery, just this cold, empty exile in cold, empty Scotland with no one but her monster of a husband for company.

“Put this on,” he ordered gruffly, picking up an amethyst and onyx necklace that caught his eye. There was a moment’s hesitation and he wondered, with an edge of amusement, if she was contemplating another use of her ‘no’ but she obediently pulled up her hair and let him fasten the collar of precious stones and silver around her white, elegant neck. His hands rested on the sides of her throat, the gemstones cool under his palms. Evangeline reached up to touch the necklace.

“This one’s always been my favorite,” she said quietly. “Eris never let me wear it, never let me even touch it.”

“You wear something every day,” he ordered her solidly. “These are yours now, I don’t ever want to come home and find you without one of these on.”

“If you’d like,” she replied, a little dazed, looking over her shoulder.

“Yes,” he said firmly, pulling away. “Turn around, let me see you.” Evangeline obediently clambered around from where she’d been seated on the edge of the bed.

She was beautiful, a shaded charcoal sketch in black and white and grey, a shadow in the corner. The necklace circled her throat in heavy black with tiny sparkles of deep violet, the bruises on her body bloomed like blue and purple roses on white canvas. The amethysts lent a violet cast to her deep blue eyes and she was entirely his.

If she had not been beautiful, the fact that he owned her would have made her so, but even as a thin, self-conscious smile, spread across her face, Walden burned to touch her, this prize no one could ever take from him, to feel that soft flesh bend obediently to his, to drag a few more of the hesitant, surprised shudders of pleasure out of her.

She must have seen everything in his eyes—they were probably transparent with lust—because she took a careful breath in and found her way into his arms, and his hands came up to grasp her hips with almost a mind of their own. Her hands were on his shoulders, her bruised and swollen lips hovering an inch from his ear and her soft warm breath and the smell of her hair seized him up—she smelled faintly sweet, like her floral perfume, but he thought he could smell a little of his own spicy soap and leather smell overlaying it, and another wave of possessive desire spiked through him.

She lay her head on his shoulder, one hand meandering down his back in a path that left fire in its wake, the other threading up into his blue-black hair; he almost asked her to pull on his hair, to dig her short neat fingernails into his back until iron red welled around her fingertips and ran down his back, catching in the scars like a stream around rocks.

Instead, he skimmed her body as gently as he knew how, his hands laying whispers up and down her sides until she shivered. She pushed on his shoulders until he was on his back, propped amongst the pillows. She averted her eyes shyly as she straddled him with none of the practiced ease he was so accustomed to in women.

“Am I doing this right?” she asked, his shadow of charcoal and violet spoiled by the pink flush of her cheeks.

Something warm and affectionate bubbled up from some unknown part of him at the sight of her intense concentration. “You can do nothing wrong,” he assured her, smoothing the gravel of his voice as best as he could.

Evangeline shifted her weight to her hands on either side of his head, her soot-black hair falling down like a curtain around his head and there was nothing but her in his world. Her face took on a serious, grave cast. “I can do a lot of things that are wrong,” she said strangely.

The way the words fell from her mouth sounded wrong, with the grim look on her face. But then the bruised flesh of her lips pressed to his and it was all he could do to hold himself back, to be gentle with her. Her hands were in her hair—surely, surely they would come away dirty this time, like he’d thrust his hands into a blackened fireplace—and she was soft and warm above and underneath and around him.

It was not everything he wanted—far, far from it—but from the way she sighed he could almost forget that. Every gentle, shy caress of her hands wrote I belong to you over and over, and that seemed like enough.

The Spare Princess, Chapter Three

2008-08-07T23:13:37Z

The Spare Princess

Their wedding was magnificent, the like of which had perhaps never been seen. The Prince ballroom was turned out in silver and pale green, the meal lavish, the music ensemble in the corner nearly an orchestra, the flower arrangements beyond imagination. It was beautiful, utterly fitting of a most beloved and cherished daughter to a noble and deserving man.

It felt like some cruel, ugly joke being played. From the wicked grin on Everard Prince’s face, that was exactly as it was intended, though for whom, Walden wasn’t entirely sure. He rather thought, though, that he was the butt of the joke; the groom was, in Walden’s opinion, enough of a humiliation for Evangeline, and he came quite inexpensively.

Evangeline walked down the aisle, shoulders curled in under the too-wide grins of her family, her face held for forward and her eyes unseeing as she walked the long aisle flanked by a dozen faces lit in mean-spirited glee. She looked porcelain in her pearl-white gown; breakable beautiful, a statuette on his great-aunt’s mantle that he wasn’t to touch with his rough, clumsy-strong hands. Elliot walked her down, his gaze locked on Walden the entire length of the long silver carpet. Utter loathing was not quite strong enough a word for the hatred Evangeline’s father conveyed in his eyes. It was the look of a man who would, without much of a thought—before or after—kill him unpleasantly, if he did not fear the consequences so greatly.

The consequences sat in one of the front seats, looking for the entire world like a proud patriarch. It didn’t take much looking, though, to find the spiteful turn to Everard’s smile and the devious glint in his sharp black eyes. People called Walden a monster, with his bulk and his axe and his taste for excessive bloodshed in the line of duty, but another sort of devil—a subtler, crueler sort—sat on Everard Prince’s shoulder; torturing animals was one thing, torturing your own kin, your own blood was quite another, as far as Walden Macnair was concerned. What good was pure blood if you weren’t loyal to it?

Walden stood before this great, cold assembly, in the only robes he’d ever worn that weren’t too tight across the shoulders, weren’t too short in the hem, and tried to look just as cold and proud as those who watched. He was a pig in a bowtie, paraded for their amusement, but he didn’t have to dance.

Elliot’s hand was like an icy rock as it found his, guiding it to join Evangeline’s with none of the hesitation Walden knew the man was feeling.

Then the man was gone, leaving only Evangeline there beside him, her tiny white hand in his axe-callused ones and the official speaking some disgustingly ironic drivel about love and commitment with his mouth written into an equally ironic line.

Evangeline’s eyes were nailed down to the floor. His fingers surreptitiously found her wrist; her heartbeat was fluttering. She had lain calm in this trap, helpless but hopeful; now the hunter came, the end was inevitable, and she flailed silently, frightened and doomed. A vixen with her foot in a trap, and he was the hunter come to claim an ill-won prize.

Her vows were not hesitant. They were spoken in the same steeled voice as she had used that day to bring up the simple subject of their impending marriage. He felt strangely proud of her. His, too, were spoken in as stern and serious a voice as he could manage, his accent burring deeply where Evangeline’s soft English accent had slid around the words.

The ‘kiss the bride’ almost froze him, though. It was only by Evangeline’s doing that they were spared an embarrassing hesitation. Her hands did not shake as she reached them up to his jaw, tilting her beautiful diamond face up as her hands gently guided his face down to hers. It probably looked like a very sweet, loving, appropriate kiss. It felt like nothing; Walden liked teeth and pressure, liked little grasping hands pulling at his hair and demanding, he liked things that almost hurt, liked hurting in return. Evangeline might as well have blown a puff of air across his lips for as much as he enjoyed kissing her. But it looked like everything it was supposed to be, and he appreciated the gesture for that.

The cruel joke continued on in the smiles of her family (and her family’s friends) as they greeted the guests at the reception. Some held pity in their eyes when they looked at poor, delicate Evangeline and the handsome, rough behemoth that towered next to her, but most just had a sort of malicious amusement in their smoothly delivered congratulations. The compliments on the beautiful bride and the handsome groom seemed somehow backhanded, and there was a certain superiority in their congratulations to him, especially. Congratulations, they seemed to say, you’ll find the catch in this bargain soon enough—because there’s always a catch, didn’t you know. Enjoy what you can, while you can.

Evangeline didn’t say much through dinner, and only looked up to meet his eyes a few times. She didn’t eat much either; merely picked around her plate with her fork when she needed something to do.

They danced once at their wedding, the traditional opening to the festivities. Evangeline struggled through, her breathing getting labored as the steps added up, and Walden’s hand on her waist grew more and more supportive. Hawk eyes surrounded them, waiting with bated breath for Evangeline to make a misstep.

She didn’t. She managed through and even managed to reach up at the end and pull down his face for a chaste kiss on the cheek, a flourish at the end of their performance. Her smile was a little wan as they returned to their seats.

A few of her relatives came to ask Walden’s permission to dance with his bride. The appropriate answer—‘of course’—stalled in his mouth when he looked at the way Evangeline’s already-tired face fell, the way the predatory, cruel smiles spread across the men’s faces as the music struck up fast. There was no shortage of spite in this family, it seemed; the Princes seemed to subsist on it.

His usually slow temper took hold and sudden, raging, possessive anger boiled through him. Here they stood, at his wedding, seeking to humiliate his wife. Evangeline, for all her weaknesses and failings, was his wife now, and no pampered, useless relative of hers was going to make a mockery of her now. What was his was precious, and Evangeline was the greatest, the most valuable of his possessions.

“No,” was his short, rude reply to their politely phrased requests. “I’ll be keeping my wife right here where she belongs.” They seemed taken aback at his impolitic behavior, their smarmy grins wiped off their faces in surprise, but none had the nerve to press further—Walden’s impressive size was good for something.

Evangeline’s hand found his under the table. Though she did not look up at him, her fingers wove themselves through his and squeezed lightly in gratitude. Walden pulled her hand out from under the table and kissed her knuckles. Her eyes flew over to him, her attention captured.

Evangeline smiled beautifully at her unexpected champion, the first expression on her face that was genuine; not polite or expected or choreographed. It looked like some grand accidental victory Walden had stumbled upon with his simple, selfishly motivated gesture. Her happiness was dazzling.

And then Everard breezed up, his cat-eyed wife on his arm. “Ah, the happy couple. Evangeline, dear, won’t you thank me for finding you such a wonderful husband? So attentive, everyone’s abuzz! Won’t even let you out of his sight for a dance or two.”

Evangeline smiled, a veneer of placid, long-practiced politeness that crystallized the warm grin she’d graced Walden with. “Grandfather, I am very grateful. This wedding is a dream, truly.” She was the picture of deference, but her hand—still wrapped in Walden’s under the table—tightened in some unidentifiable emotion, strong but near perfectly veiled.

They didn’t stay long at the reception held in their ‘honor’. There was nothing really there for them; catty cousins offered Evangeline congratulations that sounded more like smug condolences and more loyal friends filed by in various states of distress and dismay, and Walden heard a hundred sly, thinly veiled references to Evangeline’s “fragile” state. The only ones with anything kind to say at all were the few friends she had in attendance; Regina McMillan, a plain friendly girl who, though visibly distressed in Walden’s presence, managed to put on the friendliest smile Walden had seen all night as she offered very sincere hopes for their future happiness; Evangeline’s elder sister Emmeline too, the newly married Mrs. Vance, had similar wishes.

There was a sad softening of Evangeline’s face as she watched her elder sister walk off with a wave and a pitiful smile, across the ballroom to meet her husband. Emmeline and Richard Vance were obviously in love, had been on their own wedding day, that silver-and-black affair where Walden had first heard Evangeline’s name. Resigned, hopeless, half-hearted jealousy was written across Evangeline’s face as she sat next to her new husband.

A name surfaced like driftwood in his mind; he wondered if that Abbott man who’d offered for Evangeline’s hand and been refused was on her mind right then, if he was the light of the quiet regret in her dark eyes.

At a quarter past eleven, Walden carefully broached the subject of retiring. Evangeline, having just been accosted by a near-tearful friend of hers who’d barely managed to wish them happiness, seemed only too eager to escape from this nightmare parody of a wedding.

Walden had only his small, ocean-beaten home on the cliffs to bring Evangeline home to. It seemed symbolic, that strange dichotomy of the palatial ballroom of her grandfather’s manor to the warm, lived-in kitchen he Apparated into, Evangeline’s arms securely wrapped around him for the Side-Along.

From the joy that shone on her face, though, he might have brought her to the grandest palace instead of his shabby little house in the empty, cold north of Scotland. Only after she’d gone through two of the cupboards did she remember herself and look back for permission, an embarrassed look on her thin face.

He laughed, the sound a little forced. “Go on ahead, it’s all yours now, too.” She grinned at him and turned back around to poke through the kitchen.

“I’ve never had anything be really mine,” she said quietly, leaning over the sink to look out the window over it, her feet drifting off the ground as she put her weight on the counter. Looking at her, the sentiment echoed in his head. He'd never had anything worth having until Everard tossed her down like a unworthy scrap to a faithful dog.

She looked terribly out of place there; the wrought-silver band, inlaid with diamonds and pearls, she wore in her dark hair was probably worth more than the house itself, maybe even more than the land it sat on, to say nothing of the rest of her jewelry. Her wedding dress was pearlescent, shimmering white amid the battered wood of the cupboards and floor. She was the grand centerpiece of everything he had ever achieved, the pristine pureblood princess who was no longer out of his reach.

Walden Macnair was in the habit of taking what he wanted, and none too gently. But he would be careful with her, he swore to himself as he reached out to brush the fabric of her sleeve, leaned down to press his face into her hair. This was no girl off the street to be treated as he saw fit, this was another creature altogether; his wife. She stiffened, curled her shoulders down in not-quite-surprise but managed to soften herself out of the unwilling rigidity as Walden’s hand curled around her hip, crushing and snagging the delicate silk of her dress with his work-roughened hands. Evangeline seemed to know perfectly well what was expected of her and went limp, falling back against him obediently.

“Is the sea truly so beautiful from your bedroom window?” she asked quietly as he pulled the sleek dark hair away from her neck. Her pulse hummed under his mouth where he kissed her throat, panic beating against her obedient shell.

“Not so beautiful as you,” he breathed into her ear. “Would you like to see?” She shuddered, a pause before nodding.

And, christ, was she beautiful. She was his great aunt’s precious porcelain statuettes made flesh and pressed into his clumsy hands. Evangeline was nothing he was ever intended to touch, just to look at and admire, because she was meant to do nothing but be beautiful and someday break.

But she was his now, and Walden knew how to treat valuable things.

He took her words for what they were: acceptance, permission, surrender. She was light as a china doll in his arms and he would try not to break this toy because he knew he would never ever have another like her and, worse, he knew that was exactly what they all expected him to do.

Chapter Four: The Shade in the Corner

The Spare Princess, Chapter Two

2008-07-26T03:17:31Z

The Spare Princess

Chapter Two: The Thorn Price

Evangeline was not as small as he had imagined; he’d seldom heard her name without some variation of ‘frail’ or ‘fragile’ tacked onto it somewhere. But she didn’t seem noticeably smaller than any of the other Prince daughters. It was relative, of course. Most women seemed the same size to Walden: smaller. Everything else filtered down into two distinct categories: attractive or not. And Evangeline was, he noted with some relief, very beautiful. She smiled at him politely as he approached, awkward in his ill-fitting robes, too tight across his broad shoulders.

“Hello, Mr. Macnair,” she greeted him kindly, her eyes dark in her pale, thin face. “Would you like to sit down?” Her long-fingered, lily-white hand swept in a graceful arc to indicate the seat next to her on the stone bench. The chaperone was duly introduced as Aunt Ermengarde and furthermore ignored by Evangeline. Walden rather suspected it was easier that way; the old woman was shooting venomous glances down at the girl. Whether envying her youth or the fact that the girl had narrowly escaped sharing her lamentable fate, there was nothing pleasant or familial in the coolness between the two, but Walden was quickly learning that was nothing uncommon in the Prince clan.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice sounding rough and uncultured even to his own ears after the soft, educated tones of hers. It was just as well she had some grace to her manners, because he had none.

She was a lovely little hostess, polite and calm. He didn’t speak much and he didn’t need to; she neatly kept the conversation up without seeming overly chatty or gossipy, pausing every once in a while to ask his opinion on this or that, all in a soothing, mellifluous sort of voice that was almost like white noise. She seemed to have an endless supply of appropriate conversation topics, all of which skirted neatly around the reason for the both of them sitting here in this garden, the unpleasant Aunt Ermengarde in a chair to the side, eyeing them beadily.

After her father’s display of disdain and disapproval, he had been expecting some sickly little waif, corralled against her will and cowering before him as she cried helpless, lamb-to-the-slaughter tears. Most people, women especially, cowered anyway; he was frightening, huge and imposing and possessed of a very dark, heavy manner that brooked no frivolities. But Evangeline seemed perfectly at ease, dwarfed beside him yet with a strength of presence that seemed to shine from the hairline fractures in her chipped china shell.

She almost seemed to enjoy his company, from her light touch on his arm and gentle smiles up at him, but he wouldn’t allow himself to imagine things were as easy as all that. This was a gift from old Mr. Prince, this beautiful little creature who smelled innocently of lilacs and honeysuckle, and that old devil gifted no one a rose unless its thorns were sharp as razors.

The afternoon darkened into evening, and Evangeline suggested a walk through the hedge maze. The walk, slow and short though it was, with the spinster Aunt trailing a few steps behind them, was Evangeline’s first demonstration of weakness, the thorn price for her beautiful face and kind ways, for she had shown nothing but good manners and fine breeding in their conversation on the bench. Her pale face went grey with exhaustion mere minutes after they had risen to walk arm in arm into the maze, her breathing rasped as she drew it quick and shallow as though she couldn’t quite catch it. He slowed to accommodate her, stiffened his arm to take more of her weight.

The old aunt clucked unkindly behind them, a sort of dismissive, disgusted exhalation at Evangeline’s weakness. The girl’s grey-pink lips drew into a line and she pressed on. Walden felt a strange mixture of respect and disappointment; both unusual sentiments for him in the first place, even more extraordinary twined so closely together. She struggled bravely even as her body failed her, and there was some nobility in that. But he could not deny the disappointment; this fragile girl was more than he had expected, but so much less than he had hoped, as well. She might try, she might fight, she might have the strength of mind and character to be great, but in the end, she was not much more than a pet to be coddled and cared for, and Walden Macnair was no gentle master.

They turned a corner and the conversation turned with them. “So, we are to be married in the fall,” Evangeline said, breaching the one subject they’d been pretending didn’t exist. She’d gathered her breath along with her courage and, though her face remained ashen grey, her voice was strong and sure.

He thought about lying, giving her some pretty phrase about ‘if it pleased her’ or that it ‘was his honor’ but already he knew she would not appreciate such false words. It pleased her grandfather and Walden knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Though Everard’s gift might be chipped and damaged, it was beyond anything he ever would have had on his own, and Walden was a man duly appreciative of valuable things.

Walden settled for the truth, simple as it was. “Yes.”

Evangeline smiled, approving, and her eyes glittered up at him in a way that was anything but breakable. “And I think we shall do very well, Mr. Macnair.” And, he found quite to his own surprise, he very much believed her.

Her first letter arrived three days after that meeting in the gardens, elegant calligraphy that took him far too long to decipher spidered across the rich vellum page.

Dear Mr. Macnair,

It is my simple desire that I should know you, if just a little, before I am to bind myself to you as your loyal wife. If it is not too forward of me, I would propose an exchange of letters, if your schedule should allow such an expenditure of your time for me.

My mother suggests that I write to you of myself, that you may know me better, as well. It seems not unreasonable to me, but I would not trouble you with such things if that is not your wish.

Yours faithfully,

Evangeline Ariadne Prince

The quill he put to paper to write a reply was hesitant.

Dear Miss Prince, he wrote in his heavy-handed, parchment-ripping print.

There is not much to know about me. I write my own history, there is nothing put down that is not in my own hand. Whatever it is you would like to know, though, I would be more than happy to tell you.

And it would be nice to hear about you, it would not be trouble at all. All I know about you is that you are beautiful and your eyes are blue like how the North Sea looks from my bedroom window during a storm and I have seen enough in them to think that anything you might tell me I would not find unpleasant.

Your servant,

Walden Ian Macnair

Her reply was not long in coming; he imagined there was not all that much for her to do that would keep her from writing.

Dear Mr. Macnair,

Your kind words are unwarranted but very much appreciated. Soon, though, I imagine we shall stand together in your home by the North Sea and you will realize how my eyes fade before the beauty of the water.

And, if you would know of me, I will begin. My name is Evangeline Ariadne Prince and I am nineteen years old, the youngest daughter of Elliot and Catherine Prince. I enjoy reading, Ice Mice are my favorite sweet, and until you came along, I was meant to remain, useless and alone, in my grandfather’s house until I withered away in bitterness and old age.

Perhaps the most important thing that you should know about me is that I am deeply and eternally grateful to you for the chance you have given to me, and will do everything within my (perhaps woefully limited) power to bring you the sort of happiness and opportunity you have given to me. There is nothing else I can commit in mere ink and parchment that can give you better insight into me than that, so I will say nothing else and hope that what you find when we meet again is sufficient.

I look forward to our wedding day with great anticipation, and hold nothing but great hope for our future together.

Yours Faithfully,

Evangeline Prince

Words were not Walden’s strength; a dozen sheets of ruined starts filled the rubbish bin next to his desk.

In the end, he posted a letter of plain words and plain sentiments, for he was nothing if not a man of simplicity; all of his clumsy attempts at the flowery and elaborate rung false and empty.

Dear Evangeline,

Your gratitude is a pond and mine is the Atlantic. It is truly my honor, and while I am not good with words, I hope my future actions will, someday, show some fraction of my high regard for you.

Unworthy but yours,

Walden Macnair

Chapter Three: The Unexpected Champion

The Spare Princess, Chapter One

2008-07-25T23:18:17Z

The Spare Princess

{Half-blood servant Walden Macnair has had a faulty prize thrown into his lap; the frail society daughter, Evangeline Prince. The courtship and marriage of a half-blood monster and the fragile, pureblood princess who wasn't good enough for anyone else.}

(Chapter One: A Kitten for the Manticore)

It was at the engagement ball of her elder sister where Walden Macnair first heard of Evangeline Prince.

The patriarch of the Prince family held court at a table along the side of the ballroom. He gestured expansively over the whirl of merriment and color. “A fine affair,” he proclaimed with no small amount of pride, looking around. It truly was nothing less than grand, a white marble ballroom adorned in silver and black, all the finest families of Wizarding Britain in attendance. The old man, dressed in simple but magnificently embroidered black robes, cast a veiled, malicious glance over at his youngest son. “The last one I’ll wager we’ll be seeing for a Prince girl, isn’t that right, Elliot?” Everard Prince said over a glass of scotch, and the younger of his two sons stiffened, his own glass of scotch sloshing slightly in the glass as he did.

“There’s still Evangeline, Father,” he corrected, with the hesitant, already-defeated air of one being cornered into an argument had (and, as a matter of course, lost) many times before.

“Ha! Evangeline, poor girl!” the old man scoffed theatrically and without any sympathetic meaning whatsoever, looking around those seated at the table to the other men sitting with liquor in their hands. There was a cruel light in his eyes and a mean curl to his lip as he carried on with this charade. “And who shall she marry? What man is there for her? Abraxas? Would Lucius like the poor little thing for a wife? You, Renaud, would she do for Rabastan or Rodolphus?” There was a smug sort of satisfaction in his voice; this was nothing more than a carefully constructed humiliation, the prodding of an open wound, for his younger son. This Everard Prince was not a man who put much stock in familial affection. “There are none left with blood fit to mingle with our line, Elliot, none that would have her.”

It said something that, though Macnair sat in their midst, the closest thing he had to a wife was the young dancer from a sleazy pub in Knockturn deluded enough to think she might get a ring and a moderately respectable name from him and persisted accordingly. He was good-looking and young, with a decent job in the Ministry of Magic. And no one cast half a glance in his direction, a half-blood of unremarkable name and lineage, when the question of suitable husbands for this last Prince daughter was raised. These men might pour out an extra measure of scotch and allow him amongst them in the guise of an equal, but he was no man for any daughter of theirs, even one so unmarriageable and pitiable as Miss Evangeline Prince.

“Frail little thing,” Abraxas dismissed her, picking up his cue from Everard with similar smug eagerness. “Pretty enough, I will give you that; quite the fragile little beauty, Elliot, so like her mother! But best to let that sort of blood flow no further. Things can deteriorate in just a few short generations, we must always be looking forward.”

Familial honor and bloodpride drove her father to speak. There might have been no husband for his poor, frail Evangeline, but the slight on her blood, on his blood, could not be ignored. “She’s very gifted, fragile as she is. Her skills in Potions and Arithmancy run unparalleled. She’s not ungifted in Transfiguration, either.”

Wendell McMillan, who’d remained uncomfortably and increasingly angrily silent as Elliot’s father had started in on the youngest Prince son, picked up in his friend’s defense. “Miss Evangeline is quite good friends with my Regina; a very polite and well-bred girl. A credit to her noble family,” he vouched staunchly, squaring his shoulders and meeting Old Man Prince’s beady black eyes straight on.

Everard barked hoarsely, wheezing on his laughter. “Of course she is, Wendell, a most dutiful and obedient daughter.”

Edmund, Everard’s eldest son and heir, had inherited already the cruel streak so obvious in his father. He turned to his younger brother, with that same sort of smug, ugly smile their father had employed. “And she will serve our house well, Elliot. There will always be a place for her here, rest assured, brother. The Prince family does not abandon its loyal daughters and sons.” He smirked, reveling in the unsaid: loyal, if worthless.

“A pity really, such a waste of good blood,” Everard muttered, draining the dregs of his scotch and standing to return to the ballroom, dismissing the gathering to the larger affair whirling around them in vibrant colors and lively conversation.

Not a few weeks later, Macnair passed word to the Prince family of an impending Ministry ‘inspection’—funny the useful things you could overhear in a lift—and Everard was very grateful. Or at least he seemed so, in his slick, understated way.

Over drinks in the drawing room of the Prince family estate, Everard set his younger son choking as he calmly announced, “Mr. Macnair, I would like to give you Evangeline.”

“You what?” Elliot sputtered, red-eyed from the burn of alcohol in his windpipe, as his brother looked on in amusement.

“I’m giving him your daughter for his wife, Elliot, if he’s not foolish enough to refuse her hand,” Everard repeated as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“You’d give a kitten to a manticore,” he spat, glaring over at the brawny giant of a man stuck uncomfortably into the chair across from him. “Give a Prince daughter—my daughter—to a half-blood butcher! You must be mad to think I’ll allow that!”

“You must be mad to think you have a choice, Elliot,” Everard said lightly, taking a leisurely sip of his brandy. “I’ve found a husband for her, son, you should be thanking me.”

“If you were going to allow my daughter to marry so beneath herself, you might’ve approved the suit of that Abbott boy last year. At least he has a respectable reputation.” Elliot Prince’s eyes darted over to the man sitting silent in his chair as though he’d protest the slight on his name and character. Walden met the gaze with an imperceptible shrug.

He did have a reputation, and he was proud of it; a friend of the High ring of purebloods, a brutal, violent hand of their wills. His reputation was feared, respected, and that was a great deal more than anyone ever expected from a too-handsome man of no name, mixed blood, and uncertain character.

Everard scoffed. “Those blood-traitor Abbotts—Evangeline’s children would’ve been marrying mudblooded filth, Elliot, passing down our noble line to ill-deserving, dirty-blooded whelps!”

“Your daughter married muggle filth, Father, or are we still pretending Eileen’s dead?” Elliot roared, enraged, his sense flying out of his head as unwise words likewise flew from his mouth.

Everard’s face went stone-frozen, the only motion a twitch in the grey, crepe-like skin around his eyes.

“You speak that name in my house?” he asked his youngest son, cool and deadly. “I have no daughter.”

Elliot scoffed, too far gone in his anger (because, despite the steel and tissue paper layers of nobility and tradition and bloodpride, Elliot was not like Everard; he loved his daughter and would not sit back and watch her handed off to a butcher-monster-halfblood as a token of passing gratitude) to stop now. “Of course, and that pure Prince blood you put so much stock in isn’t, right as we speak, flowing in the veins of her muggle-fathered son! All of this already on our name, and you denied my poor daughter what happiness she would have found with that boy, a pureblood who would have her, only to give her to this!” he hissed. Elliot was out of his seat, brandy glass clutched tight in his hand. For a moment, it seemed as though he was about to toss the alcohol at his father, but he only smashed the glass down onto the thick carpet. It didn’t shatter dramatically, cushioned by the priceless Persian rug, but it did break and the liquid wicked away into the carpet.

And Elliot left. The room was still but for eyes nervously glancing sideways at each other, at old man Prince, waiting for something to happen.

The pause was very long. And then Everard Prince turned back to Walden. “Mr. Macnair might be unworthy of our dear daughter, but he’s willing to climb, isn’t that right?”

“Anything to maintain your good graces, sir. The honor of your blood for my children is a great gift, indeed,” Walden rumbled, inclining his head respectfully. Everard barked a laugh.

“Indeed it is, Mr. Macnair, indeed it is. There are sweet rewards for those of good mind and character. You’ll do for her.” Old Mr. Prince laughed to himself as he called for his wife to begin the arrangements.

And so, a few days later, Walden found himself shunted into the back garden of the Prince estate, in nicer robes than he’d ever worn in his life, and approaching the girl, posed statue-like on a stone bench by the rose bushes and chaperoned by Everard’s sour spinster sister, who would be his wife.

Chapter Two: The Thorn Price

In Pieces (T)

2008-06-30T22:41:41Z

In Pieces
{three conversations between tom riddle and death. 'i cast aside what is weak, it is not worthy of me.'}

He stands over the bodies and is not sure if he regrets. And a woman walks into the room and he raises his wand again without a thought. The same deathly green flashes a fourth time, flooding the room, but the figure remains upright, with no thud on the rich carpet to signal a fall.

She stands yet when the light abates, and Tom is wordless in horror and reverence and envy—she stands untouched. She is beautiful like he has never seen, unearthly, her hair black and her eyes as green as the death he has just set at her. He remembers a little of her face because it is a dream of his.

And she speaks, her voice soft and gentle as she stands above his father and grandparents. “Perhaps you should come with me,” she says in a voice that is too understanding and kind in the face of this callous destruction to be human, her eyes on his and her small white hand held out.

And Tom draws back away, for he fears Death enough to know her on sight—she wears as her face the dream of his mother, when he was young and had no truth to ruin her. She is beautiful weakness. Her eyes are as green as fresh grass in springtime, but he sees only the deadly green he deals. “Will you not come, then?” she asks sadly, her gaze turning down to the floor, to the shells abandoned on the plush Persian rug.

“I’ve killed before,” he crows, “I feel nothing.” He holds his head high and refuses to look down.

“An ordered death. You did not watch me take them, removed as you were, and you regretted for a moment, didn’t you, if only for an instant.”

“I do not regret. I am above such weakness.”

Her eyes search his. “If you were,” she begins calmly, “I would not be here. I cannot take by my own force. You regret, if only in the smallest part of you. Come with me now, I am not the monster you fear. I only fix what is broken, and you are missing pieces, Tom, and you will throw away more for your fear.”

“I cast aside what is weak, it is not worthy of me.” His grip on his wand tightens.

“All right then,” she nods, her hair falling across her death-green eyes. “I shall come to you again—if not by your will, then by another’s. There is no such thing as forever, Tom. I hope we shall be friends someday, I hope you will walk with me yet.”

He turns from her and walks away.

“Are you here for him, then?” he scorns, insubstantial but not dead--she cannot have him--in the nursery of the Potters’ cottage. The baby is squalling in the background and two bodies lay on the floor.

Death picks up the screaming child from the cot and he calms in an instant, a content smile on his face as she cradles him into her silver-white robes. “I thought maybe you would come with me now,” she replies, smiling down at the little boy, slowly fading back into sleep.

“You cannot take me!” he cries in defiance, in triumph. “I’ve tethered myself down to this world, pulled myself away from your claws.”

There's mournful rebuke in her tone, the soft scolding tone of a mother reaching out to calm a screaming toddler only to be batted away in the throes of the tantrum. “Broken yourself again, Tom.” He snarls at the name. “You can come with me still. You can be sorry, you can regret. You can choose.”

“You can take that and leave.”

“No, he’ll stay for a while. He has a few things to do yet, and this life is not without its joys.” She kisses the mark on his forehead and puts him back in the cot, and he begins to stir fretfully once out of her arms, reaching back up for her to take him along with her, not wanting to be left behind. “Maybe next time you’ll be wiser.” And she goes, and he leaves as well, unable to stay any longer in a room filled with his shameful failure.

He is in too many pieces at the end. She walks along the remaining illusion of Kings Cross to the maimed, ugly red infant crying pathetically underneath a bench. Even still, too fragmented to speak, he shrieks louder as he struggles away from her hands when she reaches to gather him up. But there is no escape from Death this time, he is laid low and there is no one to reach down so far for him but her.

She cradles him gently, wrapping up his fissured, mutilated little form into the platinum white of her pristine robes, smiling down at the wretch in her arms because he is as precious to her as any of the others she has carried on. And he stops screaming, soothed in the arms of the supposed nightmare—she is no nightmare, she is a warm and beautiful dream that one so unloved as he could never have imagined.

“See, there, I am not so terrifying. My, now, are you in pieces…let’s go find some spares for you, shall we?” She cradles him on her shoulder like a beloved son and the station fades around her as she walks.

Defy

2008-06-24T03:08:50Z

Defy

{sirius, marlene, and the motorbike: defying death, gravity, and muggle traffic laws. after all, better to jump than to fall}

Sirius lets Marlene drive his motorbike, just the one time, and regrets it.

She keeps to the road, ignoring his instructions on how to activate the flying charms on the bike. She keeps to the road, weaving through muggle traffic to a symphony of blaring horns and shouted profanities.

Marlene doesn’t need the charms to fly; the muggle machine underneath her is magic enough. She defies gravity and muggle traffic laws. The wind combs her hair back into his face, and he presses closer to her to keep the long strands of it from whipping into his eyes.

She whoops in exultation as she cuts off a lorry, her head tilted back so far she couldn't be paying mind to the road, and Sirius yells along with her, undecided if the cry was terror or exhilaration. His arms curl tighter around her as she takes a turn far too fast; the gravel crunches under the wheel and for a few moments he’s just waiting for the bike to skid out from under them, to throw their bodies across the pavement and cheat some Death Eater out of the satisfaction. But she rights the bike as it miraculously manages through the turn and roars off onto the straightaway, the engine screaming as she accelerates past sanity, far far into madness.

He’s reckless, but he’s never enjoyed a ride like this before. Marlene is throwing everything she has (and everything he has, in truth) under the tyres of this motorbike, daring the world to catch her up. And he’s just along for her mad ride.

He leaves her, windblown and strangely bright-eyed, in front of her shabby little block of flats in Liverpool. She grins at him as she goes, and there are grey lines streaming from the corner of her eyes back to her temples and into her hair where the wind forced tears, where her overdone makeup bled in defiance of gravity. She looks alive like she never has. Never again, he cautions her, leaning over the handlebars, you’ll run her into a wall. And she grins brighter, not even trying to deny it, maybe even a little bit proud. You’ll kill yourself someday, McKinnon, you're gonna jump one day and there's gonna be nothing to catch you, he mutters as he kicks the bike back to life.

Well, then, maybe I'll be growing wings, she sings back to him, reckless and alive and irreverent, as she climbs the concrete steps. And if not, better to jump than to fall!

It’s the best ride of his life, the only one where he isn’t steering. And, as he rides home through the clouds, he wonders if that’s what love is like, sitting behind someone and holding tight because you know they’re going to take you on some adventure, somewhere beautiful and dangerous you couldn’t ever find on your own.

He shakes the thought off, tossing it from the bike somewhere over Leeds. It apparently grows wings, though, and finds its way back to him eventually, catches up to him as he stands alone under a grey sky in Stirling, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, next to Marlene’s fresh grave. He lets it alight for a little while, long enough to admit ‘maybe’ and entertain a little of what might have been before it all hurts a little too much for Sirius Black and he shrugs it off and gets back on the bike.

He goes Marlene’s way, weaving through muggle traffic at breakneck speeds, the irate horns and cursing like background music. She spurs him faster because he wants to show her what she showed him that one day, that one ride, because there’s almost a moment when he can convince himself she’s sitting behind him, her fingers dug into his hips, her laugh in his ears over the rush of the wind, but of course that smoke-and-perfume smell that sticks in his nose and dredges up all the painful, pretty memories is just exhaust and wishful thinking.

(Sirius doesn’t really like the memory. He only knows it’s beautiful because Azkaban steals it from him.)

1000

2008-06-17T05:08:32Z

1000
{we build our own heaven of a thousand little joys. one-thousand word vignettes on heaven and happy moments for the first order of the phoenix}

She’s one two three four fingers old and Martin is her world. It’s magic, how her legs seem to lengthen; she can always catch him, even when he says he’d run like it was the devil on his heels and not his little sister, her thin braids slithering across her thin shoulders. Marlene is fair certain that Martin is magic. He carries her piggyback to their grandparents’ cottage when the sun sets behind the Cairngorms. It’s summer and she’s forgotten that he has to go back to school soon. She’s forgotten and it doesn’t matter at all, she doesn’t worry.

There aren’t parents here, no arguments to drift through walls at night, no Mam who yanks the comb when she brushes Marlene’s hair, no Da to criticize Martin until his shoulder stoop and his eyes get sad and heavy. There’s just Martin and Granny (who has the gentlest hair-braiding hands ever and kisses them goodnight) and Granda (who leaves them sweets in their coats and calls Marlene his darling little redbird and doesn’t need any proof to know that Martin’s the finest lad to ever draw breath) and the Highlands to run through while the sun lasts.

Granda reads her stories…muggle ones, since that’s what he is. His stories are about rings and witches (evil ones, not ones like her) and talking trees and lions and worlds behind wardrobes. She remembers those because they’re her favorites.

One summer, she has to visit him in the muggle hospital in Glasgow, which smells funny and is scary white and green. Her mam says he’s going somewhere, and she asks him about it when she’s sitting next to him.

He laughs and says he’s going through the wardrobe. She crawls into bed next to him while the grownups get coffee and, grateful that he still smells like pipe smoke and peppermint in this sharp, nasty-smelling place, falls asleep.

Someone carries her off while she sleeps; when she wakes up she’s at home in Stirling and Da says Granda is gone. And Marlene completely understands why everyone’s crying. She cries too, she wants to go with him.

(Years later, even when she understands, when she knows better, there’s still some part of her that believes Granda got through the wardrobe.)

Maisie Hill chooses her over James Fitzpatrick in a pick-up football match, even though Maisie fancies James and he’s a much better player than Marlene, and it’s only because they’re best friends.

“Let’s be brave—not reckless, Miss McKinnon—in GRYFFINDOR!” the hat calls out, and Marlene can’t ever quite forget the roar of applause from the table awash in red and gold, the one-armed hug from the fifth-year girl who scoots over to clear some room for her.

She hugs Martin when he graduates from the Auror Academy, and Gideon bustles in and the three arrange themselves for a photograph. Marlene links her gangly, thirteen-year-old arms through theirs, and grins because the world is uncomplicated and the day is beautiful and Gideon thought her dress robes were pretty.

She loves him right then. Loves him with all the earnest intensity of a girl who’s never had her trust broken, and he loves her too. And it might not last (it doesn’t) and it might be foolish (she wakes up alone), but that night, when she shows up at his flat and he lets her in and they leave their mourning for Martin at the door to be picked up later, it seems perfect.

(Marlene can never quite decide if she regrets losing her virginity like that. Maybe she would’ve liked dinner and roses and a relationship, an awkward smitten boy and not a sad, serious man, but something stalls her from ever tagging the memory with ‘regrettable.’ It was love right then and though she’ll spit venomous words at Gideon later, she’ll never say ‘I regret.’)

Marlene tries heroin once and loves it. She feels like someone new, someone free and (ironically) clean. There’s no sorrow or pain or worry for a little while.

Marlene tries heroin once and never does it again. She considers it her one perfect high and leaves it at that.

Sirius wakes her up one morning. “What are you doing today?” She has nothing to do and he has cancelled plans and it’s a beautiful day and his motorbike is parked outside her flat.

They get high in Sefton Park and while away the sunny, warm spring day doing nothing. He pulls her into his shoulder and she doesn’t complain. She has his bruises on her neck and he carries her piggyback to the takeaway for dinner, pushes her on the swing and curls up with her in the grass when the sun gets low, gives her his leather jacket against the evening chill and pulls her arms around his waist when he gives her a ride home on his motorbike.

It’s one perfect day, better than all the nights out and all the sex, and she feels like she belongs to someone for a little while and it doesn’t matter if she’s fucked up because he sure as hell is too.

When he drops her off and kisses her goodbye (and leaves the jacket, he says he’ll be by later, maybe tomorrow night) she hopes (for the first time in a long while) for something. She hopes for another day like this one.

Marlene finds a muggle brochure for some South Pacific island in a Liverpool gutter and swears to herself she’s picking up and moving there when the war’s over. It’s the first time she’s ever thought when the war’s over like it's something she's going to see. She sticks the paper to her bathroom mirror.

For Now

2008-06-07T03:45:26Z

For Now

{the phoenixes know nothing if not how to say goodbye. seven farewells that were and weren't}

It’s Maggie’s idea, the memory spheres, the goodbyes. Funny, really. She’ll die a few days after she brings the cardboard box filled with crystal spheres to the Order meeting, die without ever having recorded one of her own. A lot of people will half-forget about her, like all the rest of the Order members who died before the photograph was taken; she’s just a half-blood shop girl in her mum’s Hogsmeade location and not especially precious to anyone else in the Order. She didn’t do anything extraordinary, didn’t save any lives in splashy, spectacular ways, didn’t even get to stand among the rest of the Phoenixes and smile for a frozen memory; and for most, she’ll fade from recollection, her loss eclipsed by the hundred tragedies, small and great, that will follow.

She shows them all how to work them, her royal-purple fingernail varnish chipped and her numerous messy bangles clinking against each other on her thin wrists as she demonstrates. Maggie manages to lighten the mood (it’s a little morbid, really, what she’s suggesting) and repeatedly refers to everyone having a good laugh in fifty years when they root their recorded goodbyes out of a wardrobe, an unused and forgotten relic of a war long since won. That some of these messages will have to be played, that some voices will sound when their owners are dead and gone, is a truth better left till tomorrow. There is a price to be paid, they all know this.

The meeting, the demonstration, is the last time a lot of them see her alive. They’ll all see her again, of course. A few will find her ravaged, near-unrecognizable body in the back room of her mother’s shop; Fenrir Greyback loves his skinny, childlike little girls. The rest will see her reconstructed for her own funeral, face clean of her glam, gaudy glitter-makeup and her hair a solid dark brown, no long run through with chunks of platinum and pink. They’ll witness the horrible row her parents have at the wake, her muggle father in brutal, angry agony, raging at his witch wife and her strange, ugly world, the world that killed their daughter two weeks after her twenty-first birthday.

If she said any goodbye, no one can find it. Maggie left a number of the memory orbs scattered around her room in the flat above the shop, mixed into the mess of David Bowie and T. Rex albums and neon clothing on the floor. All of them are blank.

The first one to play is Benjy Fenwick’s. There’s no family to play it to, thank God for small mercies. It’s only a few of them, gathered around in the small Order gathering that’s passing for a funeral these days. There’s not really much to bury, in any case, and no grieving, delicate family members to need the closure. The Phoenixes know nothing if not how to say goodbye.

It’s a quick, general farewell. Benjy’s not much for flowers and eloquence and there’s really not much regret. He’s tired and he’s old and he misses his wife’s fussing, strangely enough, misses the decades-dead little sister and the rest of his long-gone family.

You’re the most family I’ve had since Rosellen died, so thanks for that. The voice seems to hesitate. I can’t be that sorry, and I figure I must’ve gone down in some way that made it all worth it.

One more pause, before he finishes: Alastor, if I’ve gone first, I’ll see you soon, friend. I’m sure they’ll be waiting with me. Just don’t be in too big a hurry, Kitty won’t thank you for it.

Best of luck to you all. Benjy coughs, and his voice stops, and the faint buzzing sound in the background clears as the sphere deactivates.

Marlene’s is obviously coerced. C’mon McKinnon, just say something. Sirius Black’s voice is the first thing to sound out of the crystal Gideon Prewett found hidden in her long-dead brother's room.

No one notices how terribly rigid he goes, his jaw setting together almost painfully, when Sirius’s voice rings through the room.

Christ, all right, Black! There’s a shuffling noise, like the crystal changed hands, and Marlene’s voice resounds, more clearly this time.

Hi. There’s a rather awkward pause. This is clearly unrehearsed. Well, I’m not particularly planning on dying, but should it come to that…bye mam, da. Thanks for…whatever you did, raising me and all. Sorry I’m getting in the habit of fucking things up, sorry I’m not coming to any birthdays or dinners, sorry sorry sorry.

Those in attendance look around as Marlene’s Highlands lilt reels on her quick apology to her parents: they were buried this morning as well, beside her, beside her years-buried brother, and the McKinnon name is dead with the four.

Marlene sighs impatiently, I’m thinking that’s enough, Sirius? That’s a goodbye…

Nothing to say to me, then? Sirius’s voice is distant, tinny in the recording, almost mocking as it goads her on. To the back of the room, the living Sirius is regarding the sphere with a growing unease

You’re an obnoxious arse and a desperately easy pull. And you smoke shite cigarettes. Now fuck off! Then there’s a whirring (like air whistling by, the sphere’s been thrown) followed by a thud and a muffled Fuck, Marlene! In the back, in the shadow, Sirius gets a strange look on his face and his hand drifts to his shoulder, remembering.

And then the sound dies. That’s the end, that’s Marlene’s coerced goodbye. The room empties out, and Gideon recollects the sphere. He leaves it on for a little while, hoping for a little more, just one more whisper of his name.

He waits in vain; there’s nothing more in the sphere, and there’s nothing left of Marlene for him beyond what he can find in his memories.

The first few minutes of Edgar’s message is to his family. There’s a respectful sort of silence for what’s left of it; his elder sister Amelia sits silent, while his brother holds tightly to his infant daughter Susan, asleep against his shoulder. The rest, Edgar’s wife and their four children (young, tragically painfully young) lie alongside him.

His is the message everyone wishes they were eloquent enough to say. It’s brave and sure; he’s so certain that this is all worth fighting for and that he does not regret any of it, even though it has been the end of him.

More than a few wonder, though, if he’d still think it all so noble and worthy if he knew how death would come: not just to him, but to his wife and innocent children, from the ten-year-old Melissa, waiting for her Hogwarts letter, to the four-year-old Andrew clutching to his soft-toy clabbert, all killed mercilessly one night and left where they fell under the sickly green glow of a false, ugly constellation.

Three-month-old Susan wakes towards the end of the recording, fussing. Only when she begins to bawl into the dead, respectful silence does her father dissolve into tears for the family lain low, for his dying name.

Edgar's wife has the last word, her voice soft and sweet and beautifully hopeful. "It's just for now...just for now."

Dorcas Meadowes kept one for Fabian, and everyone listens, in the Burrow after they bury the brothers. He says nothing of her in his goodbye, and Dorcas sits in blank, betrayed shock until Molly pulls her aside after and presses another into her hands. Molly’s had it in keeping, in a little box with a letter in a cupboard out of the reach of Bill and Charlie’s curious hands, magnetized towards the fragile and breakable. She listens alone, it’s meant only for her.

If you’re listening to this, it begins, we’re not married. I was going to make another after I married you, if you’re hearing this it means I never got to. Dorie, I’m so sorry, love.

Dorie sits alone, listening dumbly, a single streaming thought in her head: notfairnotfairnotfair.

There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t give for you, his earnest voice carries on, and I regret so much that you’ll never be my wife, never carry my name, my children.

These goodbyes are supposed to be peace, supposed to be closure, but the empty hole in the pit of her stomach (the one that seems to expand with every breath she takes in an existence without Fabian) just fills up with anger. What the fuck kind of world is this?

Dorie’s never felt so angry in her life. Angry with Fabian, herself, the world, just angry in a vast and despairing way that seizes her up. Her limbs don’t seem to work, there is no thought that can manage to complete itself in her head—everything falls to pieces before it’s even finished.

And suddenly, all she wants in the world is her mum. The anger drains out of her, and liquefies all her bones with it and she collapses back onto their bed in a puddle of despair (she prefers the anger—at least it filled that cavernous empty with something, at least she could feel something.) Dorcas just wants her ordinary muggle mum and the ordinary muggle life she’d turned her back on at eleven. She wants the nice, soothing lies mums always tell: that this isn’t the end of the world and that tomorrow maybe food will taste like food and not ash, that maybe there’s something, somewhere, in this great and beautiful world that might begin to fill her up again.

She hasn’t got that, though, and so she curls up in a bed that still smells achingly of Fabian and sets the sphere’s sound to loop and falls asleep to Fabian’s voice. I love you, Dorie. I love you I love you Iloveyouiloveyouiloveyouiloveyou. The words run together in her head; he says other things too, practical things about moving on and loving again and fighting and strength, but it’s nothing she wants to hear right now.

When Sturgis suggests, a few weeks after Caradoc’s gone missing, that they should listen to his recording, Hestia goes white, her hands frozen on her swollen abdomen. And everyone shuts up.

A few days later, when Hestia’s left after the tea Sturgis and his sister invited her to that evening, he finds the crystal set on a table near the front door. There’s a scrap of parchment there under it in Hestia’s spidery hand: I can’t listen to this yet. I’m not quite ready to let it all go.

It’s a makeshift sort of memorial, a few Phoenixes gathered around Sturgis’ kitchen table, the sphere set in the middle.

Caradoc’s voice speaks of no one and to no one but Hestia and the little baby girl she’s still carrying. It’s a message for only those two, the woman he loves (or is it loved? No one’s sure on the appropriate tense) and the daughter that isn’t even born yet. They listen until the end, waiting for something else; there is nothing for anyone but the woman who least wants to hear it.

He tries to give it back to Hestia when he comes to see her and Megan a few days before Christmas. He holds it out and Hestia turns away hastily, picking the brand-new Megan up from her cot and acting as though she never saw the orb. Her voice is rushed, hurried, forced when she grinds out some pleasantry, offers Caradoc’s daughter out to Sturgis to hold.

When he makes to leave a little while later, Hestia whispers in a low voice, maybe I’ll ask for it back someday. And then, like she hadn’t just spoken, she launches into ‘best Christmas wishes!’ and hugs him tightly at the door.

Sturgis keeps the goodbye for her for years. Hestia keeps her desperate hope alive instead and never comes to claim it.

Someone thinks to claim Lily and James’ from the blasted-out shell of their cottage. There’s a short argument between a few members before they’re activated—some say they should be saved for their son (when he’s old enough to comprehend), for Remus (gone abroad, gone away).

Those views are in the minority. It doesn’t matter in the end.

There’s only unnatural static recorded on the spheres, whatever words of farewell there might have been wiped away in the cataclysm that all but leveled the house, leaving only an orphan where once there was a family and a monster. It’s haunting and empty, with a few snatches of what sounds like breathy, broken whispers drowned under the grey, lonely noise.

“That’s enough of that,” Alastor Moody rasps, breaking the horrified trance of his colleagues. And he smashes the spheres and that is, indeed, enough of that.

Finding Silver (PG)

2008-05-16T14:28:01Z

Finding Silver

{there are a lot of silver linings to be had. percy's just trying to find his}

NOTE: This piece is not related to my other Percy-fics. I know a lot of my pieces tend to interweave and/or take place in the same sort of 'universe', if you know what I mean, but this one is entirely separate! I wanted to play around with some of JKR's post epilogue reveals, of which I am generally not a fan of, but this was fun.

A week after they bury Fred, Percy visits the grave. It’s a beautifully sunny day and even the scattered grey rain clouds are sparse, casting the rare, roving shadow over the rows, sprinkling down light, misty rain and little girls in the village over the hill scan the sky for rainbows. It’s that sort of day. There are a lot of silver linings to be had. Percy’s trying to find his.

It’s a scarce hunting ground in the graveyard. Fred’s headstone is before him, neatly carved and simple; just the name and the dates, as no one wanted to make the decision to add anything else.

Percy just stands before it, hands in his pockets, his eyes trained on the granite, the sun warm on his scalp. This isn’t a goodbye—can you ever really say goodbye to someone like this? This isn’t guilt—he’s beginning to work through that, if only for Molly’s sake; she’s already lost a son, no good to sacrifice himself on useless, wasteful guilt. It’s just a visit, really. If anything, maybe he’s looking for direction (not that this is a good place to come for it, but he’s not sure there’s anywhere better). There’s a lot of direction at work—they’re putting the pieces of the Ministry back together, and he’s never had more work, more responsibility, more purpose. It’s when he comes home he’s a little lost.

Graveyards are supposed to be peaceful. Instead, the air is rent with an infant wail, an angry, helpless scream that pauses only for a scarce few seconds, just long enough for a deep, silent inhale. Irritation and slight worry (who leaves an infant crying like that? In a cemetery?) sharpens a point and his gaze darts around, following the sound.

He can’t see a thing, the rows of memorials obstructing the view, so his feet carry him to the source.

There’s a woman sitting on the ground, her back to a tombstone, the child whose shrieks are ringing through the otherwise empty, peaceful cemetery of Ottery St. Catchpole is curled on her chest, its tiny face flooded with furious red and crinkled up in woe. She’s utterly silent as her little boy, dressed in a little green sleepsuit sprinkled with blue stars, writhes in misery on her chest, bawling.

Percy loses his nerve and, hoping she hasn’t heard his approach, makes to turn and go.

“I’m sorry,” her voice calls out, surprisingly steady and strong. “He has colic and there’s nothing that will stop him screaming.” She’s looking at him when he turns around to look, and though there are vague traces of tears down her face, she seems composed enough. She looks very, very young and terribly exhausted, her eyes ringed under with purpling smudges, sitting there in the grass, a headstone behind her and a red-faced, very unhappy baby in her arms.

“It’s no problem,” is all that he can summon up. He’s frozen in spot.

“My husband was much better at this,” she explains quietly, looking up at him. "All I had to do was hand him Daniel and he’d quiet right down.” That’s all it takes, the tenses she uses in the sentence, and Percy knows exactly whose grave she’s leaning against. “I thought he might quiet down out here.” She gestures vaguely at the new grave. With a little bit of squinting through his spectacles, he can read part of the inscription over her shoulder: Samuel Fawcett. The neighbor boy Charlie’d gotten into trouble with now and then before Hogwarts. His mother had given the boy a scolding or two alongside Charlie; unlike Charlie, he’d always seemed genuinely repentant. “Now there’s a nice boy,” his mother would murmur. He was the kind of boy who brought your mum flowers from his mum’s garden when he stayed over for dinner.

He’s still standing there, not really knowing why, when the rain starts to mist down. “Should go in,” he mumbles, turning to go again.

“It’ll clear in a little,” she says, her voice thin and clear like a ceramic bell. She seems very sure, although she wraps a blanket tightly around Daniel, cuddling him to her chest. “Why don’t you sit down?”

It seems like a sound idea. He sits down next to her against the broad headstone. “How old is he?” he asks. That’s the question you ask with babies, he thinks. It’s what he remembers hearing over and over again when he went shopping with his mum when Ginny was a baby. The crying has mellowed slightly, no longer so insistent and shrill.

“He’ll be three weeks on Friday.” She smiles down at the infant, still fretting softly in his warm, dry cocoon.

They sit in quiet for a while, the only sound the crying that begins to gradually pick up again as the rain cloud scoots away into the blue sky, leaving the sun to shine back down. Then her hand is on his arm. “Here,” she says, and offers him the baby. He takes it without thinking.

Percy has always been awkward. He thinks too much, preferring process to instinct. He hasn’t held a baby since Ginny got big enough to squeal ‘no!’ and wiggle like a flobberworm. He thought he would be awkward with babies. It would just be another thing on the list.

The little boy settles into his arms like he belongs there and after a moment the crying ceases altogether.

"I like to think he misses his father,” she says, looking over at her calm son in Percy’s arms. "But babies don't know the difference at this age." She smiles very sadly up at Percy, settling back against the headstone, her fingers braiding themselves into the short grass at her side.

He’s a little boggled. Who is this woman, handing around her newborn son to strangers in a graveyard? “What…why—” he breaks off asking, his eyes still locked on the little breathing bundle in his arms, as the boy’s eyelids slide shut.

“You seemed like you needed a silver lining. You seemed sad.”

“Aren’t you?” he asks, his gaze training back on the tracks down her cheeks.

“Well, yes, of course.” She has such a peaceful voice. “I've just lost the boy I've loved since I was fourteen. My son will never know his father in anything but photographs and sugared-over fairy tales I'll tell him at bedtime. My husband kissed his week-old son goodbye and marched out to die." There is a long, painful pause, and she digs her fingers into the grass. Her voice is composed when she speaks again. "But sadness is like rain. And that,” she gestures to the now-sleeping baby in his arms, “is my sun.” She grimaces, crinkling her nose up, and points up to the sky. “I meant like that sun, not the ‘my child is a boy’ son. Pardon the pun, that was entirely unintentional. I meant, in my overdone-metaphor gone horribly wrong, that he’s going to make a rainbow for me.” She shakes her head, a little smile threatening on her face. “I’m not normally this trite, I’ve just been talking to him a lot lately." She smiles down maternally. "Haven’t had many real conversations, and that all sounded very meaningful when I was telling it to myself a few days ago, and Daniel hasn’t got the verbal skills to set me straight. Let me try again…without another metaphor.” She clears her throat, casting her eyes upward in recollection.

“Some sadness is good, because good wouldn’t be good without it. But you need to have a reason to see the sadness through, to make it out the other side. That’s mine, that’s what me and Sam made and I can’t think of anything more worth seeing the bright side for. Maybe you haven’t found yours yet; I thought I’d share mine until you do.” She finishes with a grin, and he sees maybe a flash of what she’ll be when the rain cloud’s shadow is past.

She’s not tranquil, or peaceful. She’s bright and funny and beautifully contagious, the person who dislikes few and makes you feel special in a crowd. She smiles, her long brown hair falling across his arm as she reaches a finger over to stroke Daniel’s cheek, tucking the blanket more tightly around him.

“What a strange place to make a friend,” she muses, leaning back against the granite. Her eyes are a hazel of the more bluish variety and Percy has the strangest idea that if everything he already has to see through isn’t silver enough a lining, bright enough a sun, then it’s this woman sitting beside him, the boy in his arms.

“I’m Percy,” he manages, trying to return some sense of reality to this almost-surreal encounter.

“Audrey,” she returns. They sit quietly until the sun grows too low to warm them any longer, and then Percy walks her home.

NOTES: To credit. This piece was inspired by a photograph I saw of a war widow lying prostrate on her husband's grave. It broke my heart.

I'm also playing around with my lj layout. Linking things and tagging and putting in headers and stuff. I'm trying to make this as accessible and prettyful as I can. :0)

Plagiarism

2008-05-15T23:24:05Z

Cauterize got plagiarized. Not only did this person attempt to pass my work off as their own, but absolutely butchered it in the process, either trying to make it less obvious that it was stolen or attempting to 'fix' it. I don't understand why people do this. How can you be proud of something you stole?

~~As of this posting, it hasn't been taken down yet. I'm hoping my post to the entry will effect some change.~~ Woke up this morning to find the entry was deleted. If the offender happens to be reading this, thanks and I really hope this is the last time anything like this goes down. It's angering and stupid; you will get caught out eventually.

I thought it was funny at first, but as I read through what had been done to my work, I just got angry and disgusted. How dare they? I worked hard on that piece, and considered it one of my finest, and here it was, my words and work rearranged and characters changed and additions made and pieces taken away; here it was, ruined. I would've rather had a simple cut-and-paste case, wouldn't have been nearly so offensive.

Ugh. I can't even begin to describe how little respect I have for this person. I'm really hoping they take MY work down soon; it's an embarrassment and if it remains up for much longer I will be reporting it to stop_plagiarism and lj management. I don't want to make it any bigger of an issue, so I would prefer not to pursue it any further but, make no mistake, I will. In the end, it's my work and I will defend it as long as I need to.

I Ask Only This (PG)

2008-05-12T22:10:15Z

I Ask Only This
{My little dove, she croons to her baby, it can be repaired. Barty Crouch's mother picks up the pieces.}

This isn’t the life intended for her. Eleanor had been young and bright and beautiful once, in love with a clever, brave young man, and the whole world had been set down before them. And then there was an accident, and then there was no more clever, brave young man.

She marries Barty because she can’t bear to be alone and, of all the men who court her, she is sure this one will never love her. It all seems less complicated that way. She’s known love; it seems mostly composed of disappointment and pain.

She loves her son from the moment he is born, from the moment she feels his warm, soft, breathing weight in her arms.

Barty can’t spare a glance for the infant they’ve named after him. His eyes are only for her. The childbirth was hard; Eleanor’s always been frail.

When she thought he couldn’t love her, she was very wrong. This cold, stern, proud man would fall at her feet if it pleased her, give her the world if she asked.

She asks for nothing, and wonders aloud, in her son’s nursery while her ambitious husband is out, why he would love her and not the little miracle she’s given to him.

My little dove, she croons to her baby, crying over a shattered vase. It can be repaired.

The first time Barty comes to her, his eyes tear-filled and remorseful, a still-warm, bleeding pile of flesh and fur in his hands, she believes him. Can you fix it?

An accident. An accident, she tells herself. No, she says. This I cannot repair.

When Mrs-Remington-from-next-door’s cat goes missing, and she finds ginger hairs stuck to Barty’s jumper, she knows.

Eleanor Crouch cries all day in her austere, empty house, her husband at work and her son at the village school.

She knows Barty is wrong. He doesn’t love her, is cold as his father, lacking even the pieces of humanity and decency that make Eleanor’s husband so devoted to her. She loves him anyway, and it is like a vice on her heart.

Disappointment and pain, is there any love not wrought with these?

When they sentence her son, when he cries out for her and she is helpless, she falls apart. How has it come to this?

Her husband is steel. He cries only when they’ve come home, and he mourns only for her pain.

When he protests, Eleanor says, I ask only this. You would offer me the world, I ask only this.

His protests die and he looks at her and she realizes for the first time how well he knows she does not love him.

All right, love. It’s defeat.

She goes willingly into his arms and they both cry amidst the cruel ruin fate and love have made of their lives.

He barely looks at her when she takes his place. He isn’t grateful, he doesn’t care that she is laying down her life for his.

It doesn’t even matter. She can’t leave him here, can’t let the Dementors corrupt what little soul he has in him. He's missing so much, she'll let him keep what he still has.

She loves her husband for the first time as he closes the cell door.

He can’t possibly hear the thank you she whispers, can’t perceive the gratitude in her every thought.

She dies alone, but it’s really just as she lived, and she’s never felt as light she does when Death comes to free her from the horror of Azkaban.

She wanders out of the light of her own volition. She’ll come back, if she can.

There’s shuffling in a tiny corner of the infinite dark, the tinkling of glass shards shifting on cement.

Mother?

And Eleanor kneels down beside him at he tries to pick up the shards, as they melt through his hands as though only shades.

My little dove, she soothes, her hands reaching down into the dark. The shards don’t melt through her hands, two heal to one in her palm.

Can you fix it?

I’ll try. And she will, Eleanor will try.

…I’m missing pieces, mother. Don’t leave me in the dark.

The pieces come together in her hands; there are so many but they have the time. It’s all right, love, we can share some of mine.

Light As She Goes (PG)

2008-05-12T21:48:19Z

Light As She Goes

{Not many will find her name on any memorial, not many will remember. She's just a nameless, anonymous casualty, but even in her last moments, Lisa Turpin can't regret.}

Her name, whatever it is (she can’t remember it at this point, and the time she could spend casting around for it would be wasted, and she hasn’t any to spare), will be on the memorial. This is one of her last thoughts.

It probably won’t mean much to many people. Just a few scratches in granite or marble on some plaque or statue or monument. Just a few scratches to fade away in time, lost amongst the many, pale underneath the names of the great.

Not many will care. Eyes will skate over the scratches on rock meant to sum up her every breath, her every action, and they will be nothing within a week, a month, a century. She should care, she thinks (it’s almost a distracted thought, because the soft warmth of her dirty, muggle-bred blood is running away from her over the flagstones, she’s growing cooler and someone something’s creeping towards her.)

She should care, she’s sure.

She doesn’t.

She doesn’t give up easily, but she lets go gracefully. She won’t beat at a closed curtain. She’s taken her bow, it’s time for a world outside the theatre.

And she is only a name on a yet-to-be memorial to a war still hours from conclusion. It doesn’t matter at all. Next year some muggleborn eleven year-old will wander across this spot and not know, marveling over this new magical life, this fairy tale somehow made real.

She laughs a little to herself even as her vision voids to black. She thinks of all of the muggleborn kids who are going to walk this castle, cross this floor grouted with her blood, and decides that’s a better memorial than any etchings in marble, no matter how grand.

She doesn’t need a name for that (it’s just as well, she’s not sure anyone knows it anyway.) She’s sure she wouldn’t have thought anything like this an hour ago, when her remaining in the Great Hall as students were evacuated felt more like an inability to move, a complete paralysis of mind and body, than anything resembling bravery.

And then she breathes one last time. On the exhale, she wonder if, when Wayne Hopkins told her she looked like a Granian under the influence of the tact potion she’d brewed disastrously wrong, and then subsequently waxed poetic on ‘the most magnificent of the winged horses’, he meant he thought she was pretty.

It’s not a very dignified last thought (especially in light of the epiphany-like understanding of a certain kind of immortality in her second-last) and if Lisa’d had another, she would’ve thought so. But there’s a warm little light of memory as she goes, and, all in all, it isn’t a bad note to leave on.

When The Free Summer Comes

2008-04-08T22:01:05Z

When the Free Summer Comes

{The empty spaces, the quiet where there should be voices are like scars, too, ugly rents of malformed healing, and they're more painful than the ones she wears inlaid in her flesh.}

Lavender Brown is unashamed of the scars that rip down her back from the column of her neck to the flare of her hip.

She knows she would have been, once. There is a girl, a tiny remnant living in a tiny pit in her chest, who still is. That girl wants to throw on the thickest jumpers in the dullest colours, pull up polo necks in July, tug her sleeves down to her wrists and arrange her hair to cover the tiny whispering scars that start just under her jaw, threading out like ugly vines, thickening down into the red ropes of tissue that flow down her back. She wants to crawl away and disappear, because all she had was ‘pretty’ and that’s been ripped away.

But that girl is so quiet and weak; gone, changed, buried by Greyback, or maybe even before, by the Carrows, or maybe it was just the way she struck her head on the stone floor of the entrance hall when the balustrade had crumbled behind her and she fell so, so far. But there is little schoolgirl left in Lavender Brown, and when the free summer comes and the DA reassembles in its incompleteness (the empty spaces, the quiet where there should be voices are like scars, too, ugly rents of malformed healing and they're more painful than the ones she wears inlaid in her flesh), she dresses in jeans and loud crimson silk, a halter that ties in a bow at her neck and falls away to leave her ravaged back and shoulder uncovered. She ties up her hair and glosses her lips and wears her tarnished beauty with burning pride. It is not in Lavender Brown to be ashamed.

She wears the rest of her scars in her eyes, but everyone she knows wears them there. She smiles and laughs and it isn't the same, but at least it's free.