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halothenthehorns · 3 years ago

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TLTNL- THE SECRET RIDDLE

Sirius detested the now familiar feeling of dread as he accepted the book from Prongs, how uneasy everyone sat on the edge of their seat, how common place it was to be starting yet another chapter with tension. It was for a random student, and that somehow made it even worse for their own past school years still somehow overlapping into Harry's life now, when all they'd ever wanted for him was a careless seven years of school free of of everything but fun. Still, he began with a forced cheerful tone of voice, no matter how dower the situation started.

Katie was removed to St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries the following day, by which time the news that she had been cursed had spread all over the school, though the details were confused and nobody other than Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Leanne seemed to know that Katie herself had not been the intended target.

Oh, and Malfoy knew, said Harry to Ron and Hermione, who continued their new policy of feigning deafness whenever Harry mentioned his Malfoy-Is-a-Death-Eater theory.

"Depends on how often you bring this up on how offended you should be," Sirius said cheekily. "Once a day is a bit much pup, you only need to repeat yourself when it's relevant."

"Hark, look who's talking!" Remus looked at him, dumbfounded he could say anything so opposite to the words he constantly spewed, or more accurately, the joke he so often threw around.

"Moony, whatever do you mean?" Sirius batted his eyes innocently, still fooling no one.

Harry had wondered whether Dumbledore would return from wherever he had been in time for Monday night's lesson,

Remus scoffed at once, the desire still very present to laugh at anyone who thought Dumbledore would be late.

but having had no word to the contrary, he presented himself outside Dumbledore's office at eight o'clock, knocked, and was told to enter. There sat Dumbledore looking unusually tired;

Lily sighed softly for him. He really was getting on in age, and was now living through the same war a second time. It would be taxing on any man.

his hand was as black and burned as ever,

"I'm beginning to worry that's going to be a permanent injury," James muttered in genuine concern.

but he smiled when he gestured to Harry to sit down. The Pensieve was sitting on the desk again, casting silvery specks of light over the ceiling.

"Are we still going through memories?" Sirius asked without much interest. "What else from his past do we really need to know?" He still wasn't entirely sure what had been relevant about the first one.

"Maybe he met someone in that orphanage he grew up in, who could be important," Lily offered.

"I can't see it," James disagreed. "If he hates Muggles, I'm betting that's where it all would have started."

"Not to mention, it's impossible to imagine Voldemort with anything resembling a friend, he just has lackeys," Remus sniffed.

Dumbledore began by asking him about his very busy week, confirming that he'd been the one to witness Katie's accident. When Harry agreed and asked how she was, he went on to explain the girl was very lucky, it had only touched the barest amount of her skin through a hole in her glove. Luckily, Professor Snape had been able to prevent the rapid spread of the curse.

"And he couldn't have taken it upon himself? For research purposes of course," James muttered bitterly. He really couldn't even think why Snape had bothered, the slime-ball had never done anything that didn't benefit him in some way.

Lily gave him a scathing look for that one though, she wished they'd show a bit more gratitude like they would any other human being doing this. She understood what had happened to Sirius and Harry last year had only worsened matters, but couldn't they at least keep it civil?

Harry asked why him? Why not Madam Pomfrey?

Phineas Nigellus' portrait called him impertinent, he'd never have allowed a student to ask such a question in his day!

"Oh how I've missed that," Sirius rolled his eyes heavily at that fart being brought up again.

Harry ignored him as Dumbledore explained Snape had far more experience with the Dark Arts.

"That is, true," Remus grudgingly agreed, though why Dumbledore had to make that sound like a good thing he couldn't fathom. After all, it was his specialty with the Dark Arts that had put him in with the Death Eaters in the first place, so clearly his superior knowledge hadn't been gained in any good light like the Order had.

St. Mungo's was sending him hourly reports, and she was expected to make a full recovery.

Harry asked where he was this weekend, but Dumbledore sidestepped, saying that would come in time.

"I should hope so, as much as he's been alluding to it from the start," James huffed, very sick of having so many answers dangled over his head.

Dumbledore pulled another vile of memories from his pocket, but Harry quickly said before he could dump them into the Pensive, telling him about Mundungus.

Dumbledore agreed he'd been made aware, and he'd gone underground after that confrontation. However, Harry need now be rest assured no more of Sirius' things would fall out of his possession.

"As if there's anything left." Sirius rolled his eyes, knowing full well any good thief would have already made off with anything of remote value.

Harry still kept going, asking if McGonagall had told Dumbledore his suspicions about Malfoy.

Harry felt an icy chill, as if a dementor had just breathed down his neck. He was just so sure, for a solid moment he was confident, but the vicious stab from within stopped him a hair's breadth before he could lock in on the idea anymore than an errant thought. He went cross-eyed, let out a vicious breath of pain, but as always was forced to wait, no matter how impatiently, for it all to make sense.

Dumbledore agreed he'd been informed, and he would be investigating anyone and everyone in Katie's accident. For now, they needed to focus on this.

Harry felt slightly resentful at this: If their lessons were so very important, why had there been such a long gap between the first and second?

"Yeah, I can agree with that," Sirius said with all the cheer he could. No one had missed Harry's little problem over there, but they were leaving him to it as clearly he was controlling whatever was troubling his mind.

However, he said no more about Draco Malfoy, but watched as Dumbledore poured the fresh memories into the Pensieve and began swirling the stone basin once more between his long-fingered hands.

Dumbledore began by reminding where the story had left off, that young Merope had been in London, expecting.

Harry asked how he knew she'd been in London.

In answer, he swilled the contents of the Pensieve as Harry had seen him swill them before, much as a gold prospector sifts for gold. Up out of the swirling, silvery mass rose a little old man revolving slowly in the Pensieve, silver as a ghost but much more solid, with a thatch of hair that completely covered his eyes.

Dumbledore explained this as Caractacus Burke, founder of the shop whence the very necklace they'd just been discussing had come from.

The man spoke, revolving slowly on the spot as all like him did in the Pensive, of her coming along trying to sell Slytherin's locket. He'd been skeptical of course, but upon finding the real thing, gave her ten Galleons for it. Best deal he'd ever made.

"That's, practically thievery!" Lily yelped in a mixture of shock and disgust.

"That's the Burke store we know and loath," James agreed, his face drawn for this poor woman who had probably never even been outside her house before all this. That ten Galleons was likely the most gold she ever saw in her life, and she likely put it all to her infant. This all managed to grow more depressing the more he thought about it, that Merope may have actually made a good mother if she'd survived.

Dumbledore gave the Pensieve an extra-vigorous shake and Caractacus Burke descended back into the swirling mass of memory from whence he had come.

Harry was outraged for that price, but Dumbledore explained the circumstances of her being alone and pregnant, desperate for anything to get her through.

Harry insisted she could do magic, she could have gotten food or anything else she wanted.

"Not necessarily," Remus frowned in confusion of Harry. "The Weasley's situation should be enough for you to realize magic doesn't make us all at ease with life."

Harry wanted to persist his point, that the Weasleys struggled for money because of spellbooks and other things they had no choice but to buy, but food and other things should come along with much more ease? Then he really realized whom he was speaking with, and shut his trap. He'd never asked Remus for specifics of his life outside of here, and he didn't feel it his place to. You didn't need to, to grasp how hard life had been on him. Merope, an unpracticed witch with no one else to help, would have it even worse.

Dumbledore agreed perhaps, but it was of his guessing again that Merope had stopped using magic when Tom Sr. left her, she no longer wanted to be a witch.

James shook his head slowly as he heard that, he couldn't even imagine it. With the way Meropes life had gone though, he could almost see why she'd think that. Still, he wasn't convinced Dumbledore had the mark on this one, he could picture any number of things going on with her situation.

It could have been more reasons, her emotions so in despair it had sapped her powers, that had been known to happen. In any case, they were about to witness the results of Merope in the act of refusing to raise her wand, even to save her own life.

"She may not have even been able to, or known how," Lily said quietly as she brushed at her hair. "Birthing a child can be quite the complicated thing, if there aren't doctors around any number of problems could arise. She may have even just been sick, not taking care of herself properly, there's really no telling what magic could have done for her even if she had been around it."

Harry quietly asked, she wouldn't even stay alive for her son?

Lily's breath caught hard in her throat, she felt smothered at the very mention of this. Her own final words echoed through her mind, that she was willing to die for her child, leaving him without his parents as she'd know full well. She had to force herself to stop there, lest the pain of it all push into the here and now, reminding herself that whatever this woman's situation, no matter how much it was like her own, had already happened. Her's hadn't. Even if she had to choose the same in the end, it would still be her choice.

Dumbledore raised his eyebrows, asking if this could be Harry feeling sorry for Lord Voldemort?

"Pity for the mother doesn't quite spew out into the spawn," Sirius huffed.

Harry quickly disagreed, he was just saying she'd had a choice, unlike his mother.

"Of course I did!" Harry's mother's voice came out a sharp snap, and he looked startled, even wounded for it. She'd kept herself very well put together, he'd had no idea what she'd been thinking of moments ago. "I could have, have-" she couldn't even say the despicable words, of letting Voldemort take him from her. "But I didn't, and I never would. There's always a choice Harry."

"I'm sorry," he whispered, the only thing he could offer for his question he hadn't really thought through. The echo of the dementors again played through his mind. Voldemort had told her to step aside, and she'd refused, hence his very life he breathed now.

Dumbledore gently reminded she'd had a choice too.

Lily's face only burned that much more, that Dumbledore had to be the one to remind him of that. The loss of the life Harry had been deprived of never got easier to hear, that his headmaster would be the one to say that to him.

So had Merope, and she'd chosen death in spite of the son she was leaving behind. He asked Harry not to judge her too harshly, she did not have the same courage as Lily Potter had.

Dumbledore rose then, and Harry asked where they were going now.

Dumbledore said into his own memory. He should find it rich in detail and satisfyingly accurate.

Sirius snorted loudly, just to help ease some of the tension back out of the room for someone else showing such a high opinion of themselves. He was still ignored.

Harry bent over the Pensieve; his face broke the cool surface of the memory and then he was falling through darkness again. . . . Seconds later, his feet hit firm ground; he opened his eyes and found that he and Dumbledore were standing in a bustling, old-fashioned London street.

Dumbledore brightly, pointed himself out, a tall figure crossing the road in front of a horse-drawn milk cart.

This younger Albus Dumbledore's long hair and beard were auburn. Having reached their side of the street, he strode off along the pavement, drawing many curious glances due to the flamboyantly cut suit of plum velvet that he was wearing.

"I'm sure he was very hard to spot, you obviously needed this guidance," James did get a chuckle out of that at least, wrapping one arm tighter still around his wife who still looked distant.

Harry complimented the suite before he could stop himself, but Dumbledore merely chuckled as they followed his younger self a short distance,

Sirius full out laughed for that, while Harry didn't look remotely abashed.

finally passing through a set of iron gates into a bare courtyard that fronted a rather grim, square building surrounded by high railings. He mounted the few steps leading to the front door and knocked once.

"Who only knocks once?" Remus muttered at that random detail.

After a moment or two, the door was opened by a scruffy girl wearing an apron.

Dumbledore introduced himself, and asked to speak to the matron. The woman appraised him for a moment before bellowing at the top of her lungs over her shoulder for a Mrs. Cole.

The boys had no more been expecting Sirius to shout that at the top of his lungs, but Lily still managed to startle hardest of all, right out of her revere.

"Was that necessary?" She demanded of him.

"Yes," he agreed without looking over, but a satisfied smirk none-the-less in place he had her full, undivided attention again.

Harry heard a distant voice shouting something in response. The girl turned back to Dumbledore and invited him in.

Dumbledore stepped into a hallway tiled in black and white; the whole place was shabby but spotlessly clean. Harry and the older Dumbledore followed. Before the front door had closed behind them, a skinny, harassed-looking woman came scurrying toward them. She had a sharp-featured face that appeared more anxious than unkind, and she was talking over her shoulder to another aproned helper as she walked toward Dumbledore.

She was prescribing new sheets for Eric, who was oozing from those chicken pox of his.

"Did, chickens attack them?" James asked slowly, with genuine concern for wherever this place was.

"No, it's a Muggle disease, makes your skin get red spots all over that itch." Lily shrugged, recalling her fascination as a youngster when her whole class had them for a time except her, even Petunia had gotten them.

"What's that have to do with chickens?" He prodded further, pleased more than anything she was back to chatting with them again without that horror of her future in her eyes, or some secret she wasn't sharing with them in her smile.

"It's more like, it sort of looks like a chickens pecked you all over," she tried to visualize it for him, but when James just looked more baffled than ever she burst into giggles and waved Sirius on.

Then her eyes fell upon Dumbledore and she stopped dead in her tracks, looking as astonished as if a giraffe had just crossed her threshold.

"That's about as likely with this man around," Sirius agreed.

Mrs. Cole blinked. Apparently deciding that Dumbledore was not a hallucination,

"I still have those moments," James agreed, deciding for now to stop lingering on the idea of a chicken chasing a bundle of kids around.

she said feebly, to come up to her office.

She led Dumbledore into a small room that seemed part sitting room, part office. It was as shabby as the hallway and the furniture was old and mismatched. She invited Dumbledore to sit on a rickety chair and seated herself behind a cluttered desk, eyeing him nervously.

Dumbledore spoke of the reason for his visit, Tom Riddle.

She asked if he was family, and Dumbledore explained no, he was a teacher and here to place Tom in his school, Hogwarts.

"I'm surprised he didn't lie about that," Harry said, wondering if all normal exchanges went like this, rather than Hagrid bursting a door down for him.

"He's no reason to," Remus reminded, "even if she went and looked it up, Dumbledore would produce some paperwork for her."

She asked why the interest, and he explained his name had been down since he was born. When Mrs. Coal continued to be skeptical of this, he produced a blank sheet of paper and handed it to her. Her eyes lost focus for a moment as she 'read' it over, but handed it back saying that was all in order.

Harry gaped at that one, looking wildly around for some kind of explanation, while they all laughed at his expression. It was still nice to see him confounded by magic.

"I didn't say it was useful paperwork," Remus said around more laughter, as if that was all the explanation needed.

Harry rolled his eyes but let it go, deciding it was enough explanation for now. Obviously he still had more to learn in his next year of school.

Then her eyes fell upon a bottle of gin and two glasses that had certainly not been present a few seconds before. She offered him a glass regardless, and he happily accepted.

It soon became clear that Mrs. Cole was no novice when it came to gin drinking. Pouring both of them a generous measure, she drained her own glass in one gulp. Smacking her lips frankly, she smiled at Dumbledore for the first time, and he didn't hesitate to press his advantage.

He asked of Tom Riddle's history? He was born here in this orphanage?

Mrs. Coal agreed, saying she remembered it clearly, that New Year's Eve. She'd just started.

"Oh good, I always wanted to know his birthday," Sirius said dryly.

"We're dishing out plenty of socks this holiday, I'm sure we can ship along a pair for him," James rolled his eyes.

"Poisonous socks," Remus muttered, causing Harry to snort in surprise and James and Sirius to exchange a heavily amused smirk. Harry clearly hadn't heard all of Remus' mutters, but he would be now.

This girl had arrived staggering up the steps. Didn't take long after that, the baby had been delivered in an hour, and she was dead in the next.

That really was just, sad. Sirius could have connected many things to the moment of birthing Voldemort into their world, but honestly the start to it all was so depressing! The megalomaniac would be carrying that on to this day and never let them forget it, it seemed.

Dumbledore asked if she'd had any last words, and Mrs. Cole spoke only of what she'd named the boy. She'd first hoped he'd look like his papa, and Mrs. Cole wouldn't lie, this mother was no beauty.

"Lovely," Lily said tartly.

and then she told he was to be named Tom, for his father, and Marvolo, for her father.

James's mouth still twisted with a nasty sneer for that. No child should be named for such a creature as that Gaunt...though he supposed if there was one exception it was Voldemort.

They'd wondered whether she came from a circus,

"Not far off honestly," Remus huffed.

and she said the boy's surname was to be Riddle. She died soon after that without another word.

No one of any of those names had ever come looking for the boy, so here he'd stayed. She continued without prompting he was a funny boy.

Dumbledore asked for specifics, and he got them. He hadn't cried as a baby-

But Mrs. Cole pulled up short, and there was nothing blurry or vague about the inquisitorial glance she shot Dumbledore over her gin glass.

She confirmed he had a place at this school? Nothing she spoke of now would change that?

Dumbledore agreed.

She squinted at him as though deciding whether or not to trust him. Apparently she decided she could, because she said in a sudden rush he scared the other children.

"Oh joy, so he really was a psychopath even as a kid," James muttered in disgust. Why were they listening to this again? It was only more of a reminder where Harry could have ended up, where he almost had and should have been rather than with those Dursleys who cared nothing for him. At least this Mrs. Cole had a clear concern for the kids in her care.

Dumbledore clarified he was a bully?

Mrs. Cole suspected it, but she'd never caught him in the act, some very nasty stories though. Billy Stubbs rabbit hadn't hung itself from those rafters.

Lily choked in shock while all of the boys grimaced uncomfortably. A murderer indeed, even as a child, for something like an animal was never a good start to life.

She was jiggered though if she could figure out how he'd done it. Then there had been that summer outing, taking all the orphans to the beach. Amy and Dennis had gone off with Tom to explore some caves, they'd never been the same when they'd come back.

Harry shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the tight pull on his mind sharp once again for something he was sure he should have been connecting with, but he just ran his hand through his hair in agitation and wished his mind to shut up with its uselessness.

She looked around at Dumbledore again, and though her cheeks were flushed from all the gin consumed, her gaze was steady. She told without remorse not many would be sorry to see the back of him.

Dumbledore explained this was not permanent, he would have to return here, at least over his summer holidays.

Mrs. Cole called that better than a rusty poker whack on the nose.

She got up then, surprisingly steady on her feet, though two-thirds of the bottle were gone, and asked if he'd like to see the boy?

Dumbledore agreed at once.

She led him out of her office and up the stone stairs, calling out instructions and admonitions to helpers and children as she passed. The orphans, Harry saw, were all wearing the same kind of grayish tunic. They looked reasonably well-cared for, but there was no denying that this was a grim place in which to grow up.

"Sounds better off than you were," Lily muttered so quietly she didn't even seem to realize she'd said it, but James heard, tightening his arm all the more around her as he realized they'd been thinking the same thing.

As they turned off the second landing and stopped outside the first door in a long corridor. She knocked twice and entered, telling Tom this was Mr. Dunderbore.

"I'm going to start calling him that," Sirius said at once with conviction.

Harry and the two Dumbledore's entered the room,

James got a good chuckle out of that.

and Mrs. Cole closed the door on them. It was a small bare room with nothing in it except an old wardrobe and an iron bedstead. A boy was sitting on top of the gray blankets, his legs stretched out in front of him, holding a book.

There was no trace of the Gaunts in Tom Riddle's face. Merope had got her dying wish: He was his handsome father in miniature, tall for eleven years old, dark-haired, and pale.

"Urgh, that's almost as bad as his squashed snake face he has now," Sirius said in disgust for Dumbledore trying to humanize this constant Bludger on their life. The full force of his words wouldn't hold though, he could deny no more than anyone this was still just a kid, even one that had already grown up to be what they knew. He wanted to hate him on principle, but while it was there, it was not the only thing he could focus on.

His eyes narrowed slightly as he took in Dumbledore's eccentric appearance. There was a moment's silence.

Dumbledore spoke first, asking how he was doing, holding out his hand to be shaken.

The boy hesitated, then took it, and they shook hands. Dumbledore drew up the hard wooden chair beside Riddle, so that the pair of them looked rather like a hospital patient and visitor.

Dumbledore continued, using his title now, but Riddle repeated this sharply. He started throwing out all manner of accusations, thinking Dumbledore a doctor? Had that women sent someone to look at him?

"I'm sure he needs it," James huffed.

He was pointing at the door through which Mrs. Cole had just left.

Dumbledore tried to politely deny this, but Riddle shouted at him to tell the truth!

"What an impertinent child," Lily huffed, thinking he could speak to any adult that way.

He spoke the last three words with a ringing force that was almost shocking. It was a command, and it sounded as though he had given it many times before. His eyes had widened and he was glaring at Dumbledore, who made no response except to continue smiling pleasantly. After a few seconds Riddle stopped glaring, though he looked, if anything, warier still. He asked who Dumbledore was?

Dumbledore repeated his title, and explained his place in Hogwarts as a teacher.

Riddle's reaction to this was most surprising. He leaped from the bed and backed away from Dumbledore, looking furious. He shouted this was some trick to get him in an asylum!

"I'd like to lock you in one surely, it's to bad Dumbledore didn't have the forethought," Remus sniffed.

Riddle insisted he hadn't done anything, and Dumbledore could ask the others for proof!

Dumbledore patiently explained he was not from an asylum, and nobody was forcing Tom to do anything.

"I know Dumbledore's calm about everything," Sirius said with only mild sarcasm, "but now I'm wondering just how many people think they're being shipped off to a nut house. Personally I wouldn't have minded so much, couldn't be worse than the one I grew up in."

Riddle sneered he'd like to see them try.

"More like try to force him out," Lily said bitterly.

"That basilisk couldn't have gotten him rather than Myrtle," James agreed.

Dumbledore continued Hogwarts was a place for people with special abilities, not a school for mad people.

"Eh," Sirius waved his hand vaguely, eyeing his best friend obviously. "A lot of them do seem to wind up there."

"You're the poster child," James agreed without looking over.

It is a school of magic.

There was silence. Riddle had frozen, his face expressionless, but his eyes were flickering back and forth between each of Dumbledore's, as though trying to catch one of them lying.

"He was, looking at, each of his, eyes?" Remus muttered in confusion.

"I don't get it, did Dumbledore have a lazy eye during this conversation..." James trailed off in confusion.

"We always knew he was mad," Sirius shrugged without concern.

He repeated magic in a whisper. That's what he could do?

Dumbledore kindly asked what was it he could do exactly?

Riddle breathed with excitement now, how he could make things move without touching them, make animals do what he wanted without training them. He could hurt people, if he wanted to.

This really hadn't been very funny to begin with, and the feeling just continued to grow worse with each passing moment this little Tom spoke.

"Bloody hell, he's a menace," Sirius noted like he was eyeing a coming storm.

"What, made him like that," Remus was grasping for words he wasn't even sure there was an answer for. "I'd have thought we'd seen evidence by now the kids picked on him because he was magic, that's why he'd hate them, but from everything we've heard it's the complete opposite. He's using magic against them because, he likes it!"

"I, I really must wonder if it wasn't that love potion." Lily said hoarsely. "I keep thinking, over and over, I've never heard of a child being conceived under the influence of one. Maybe it had, some effect on the child then."

"Oh great, so not only did she refuse to even look for an option to stay alive for the child she forced into this world, it's all her fault it was this way from the start!" Sirius was getting angrier at Merope by the second, looking for something to vent on that wasn't a kid. It still wasn't easy, he couldn't even work himself into a proper temper because the image kept lingering of some girl Lily's age, their age, without anyone to care for or turn to.

"Sirius." He didn't need the soft rebuke James gave, but it still helped cool him, preventing anything else that could have come next.

"I still don't see a solution in all this," Remus sighed. "Is there a cure? If there was and he'd actually feel something resembling human emotions again, would it even matter, it certainly wouldn't really make up for all the crimes he's committed."

"You'd think Dumbledore would have recognized all this himself before inviting him to learn more magic to do more harm," James agreed.

"Maybe he thought he could, I don't know, fix him, help him, certainly not make him a monster." Sirius finished, while Harry felt Remus flinch slightly beside him. He glanced over in surprise, but didn't understand that look he quickly hid from his face before the other two could see it.

Sirius certainly hadn't anymore to say on this though, what had happened, happened, and he honestly doubted he'd see anything in Dumbledore's own memory the man wouldn't have already spotted, so when no one else offered anything he kept going restlessly for this to be over. Not that anything else going on in Harry's life was much more fun to be getting to.

His legs were trembling. He stumbled forward and sat down on the bed again, staring at his hands, his head bowed as though in prayer.

He'd always known he was different, special.

"Most of our kind do," Lily agreed softly. Agreed with Voldemort of all people! She never forgot though, those years before that weird kid Snape on the block had finally tracked her down and told her what she was. How, special, she'd been, unable to help but use Voldemort's own choice of word in understanding.

Dumbledore agreed he was right, though he was no longer smiling as he told Tom Riddle he was a wizard.

Riddle asked if he was one as well, and when Dumbledore agreed, Riddle at once told him to prove it in the same tone as he'd told him to tell the truth.

Dumbledore asked if this meant he was taking his place in Hogwarts then?

When Riddle snapped of course, Dumbledore imposed on him this would then mean he would be referred to as Professor, or Sir.

Riddle's expression hardened for the most fleeting moment before he said, in an recognizably polite voice, how sorry he was, and then properly asked him to show him some magic.

"Urgh," Sirius' nose crinkled in disgust for not only that mockery of politeness he'd so used as well. He hated any idea he'd done anything remotely similar to this cretin.

Harry was sure that Dumbledore was going to refuse, that he would tell Riddle there would be plenty of time for practical demonstrations at Hogwarts, that they were currently in a building full of Muggles and must therefore be cautious.

"No," Lily corrected. "Much like Hagrid setting that grate aflame for you, a little magic is always allowed in the beginning, to ah, prove a point I should say."

To his great surprise, however, Dumbledore drew his wand from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, pointed it at the shabby wardrobe in the corner, and gave the wand a casual flick.

The wardrobe burst into flames.

Riddle jumped to his feet; Harry could hardly blame him for howling in shock and rage; all his worldly possessions must be in there.

"Oh, Dumbledore wouldn't really," James scoffed at once.

"Still, certainly not a kind trick on the kid," Sirius began, before his words caught up with him and he finished venomously, "other than this one."

But even as Riddle rounded on Dumbledore, the flames vanished, leaving the wardrobe completely undamaged.

Riddle stared from the wardrobe to Dumbledore; then, his expression greedy, he pointed at the wand, demanding where he could get one of those.

Dumbledore agreed all in good time, but for now, it seemed something was trying to escape that wardrobe.

Sure enough, a faint rattling could be heard from inside it.

A soft snort of laughter echoed around, before Remus spoke up what they were all wondering, "what did Dumbledore do?"

Sirius shushed him, they were now all listening more intently than ever. Here, something could finally show to be the purpose of all this, something Voldemort actually cared for?

For the first time, Riddle looked frightened.

Dumbledore instructed him to open the door.

Riddle hesitated, then crossed the room and threw open the wardrobe door. On the topmost shelf, above a rail of threadbare clothes, a small cardboard box was shaking and rattling as though there were several frantic mice trapped inside it.

Tom was encouraged further to take it out.

Riddle took down the quaking box. He looked unnerved.

Dumbledore asked if there was anything in that box he shouldn't have?

Riddle agreed.

Harry couldn't help half shouting in his excitement, "what kind of magic is that? How did Dumbledore even know to use that spell, to know that wasn't his?"

It was rather odd to be sure, seeing Harry getting so worked up over magic as if he were eleven himself again, but James still answered, "certainly there's a few spells one could do to check ownership of a few objects. After all Mrs. Cole and Riddle himself said, I'm not terribly surprised he's stolen things from kids as well."

Harry waved Sirius on impatiently now, knowing something massive was coming.

Riddle took off the lid and tipped the contents onto his bed without looking at them. Harry, who had expected something much more exciting, saw a mess of small, everyday objects: a yo-yo, a silver thimble, and a tarnished mouth organ among them.

The others merely looked more baffled than ever why Voldemort had cared about such things, when it had been clear nobody of significance in his life had left him any of that. Souvenirs, perhaps, from his time in that orphanage? Though they'd been given no inkling so far he valued anyone, certainly not close enough to be given a gift.

Harry however looked ecstatic, his eyes lighting with some dim understanding he couldn't yet fully grasp, but did not need any extra sense telling him to pay attention now, he was riveted.

Once free of the box, they stopped quivering and lay quite still upon the thin blankets.

Dumbledore calmly said he was to return those to the owner, and he would know if this wasn't done. Thievery was not tolerated at Hogwarts.

Riddle did not look remotely abashed;

"Of course not, that's an actual human emotion," James muttered in disgust, honestly believing Lily's theory more every line. Did he have any emotion in him? Obviously he did, as Harry had been all to painfully aware of last year, but then what was this...this lack of humanity pouring from such a young soul? There was just no way this was natural, as if he'd ever needed that confirmed considering what Voldemort was now.

he was still staring coldly and appraisingly at Dumbledore. At last he agreed in a colorless voice.

Dumbledore continued Hogwarts was a place to learn control of magic. Before, he had surely only inadvertently been using his powers for anything of ill intent, but this would not be tolerated at school.

"Inadvertently I'm sure," Sirius mock quoted.

Such acts could cause expulsion. Tom was not the first to have his magic run wild, but now he knew the truth, if this continued the Ministry of Magic would punish this severely.

"Starting with all the good threats, then," Harry huffed.

"Not that it did him any good," Remus agreed with heavy sarcasm, not missing the irony Harry had been under threat of both, where as likely the perfect Tom Riddle they'd heard of in the past never had.

All new wizards must accept that, in entering our world, they abide by our laws.

Riddle politely agreed.

It was impossible to tell what he was thinking; his face remained quite blank as he put the little cache of stolen objects back into the cardboard box. When he had finished, he turned to Dumbledore and said baldly he hadn't any money.

Dumbledore drew a leather money-pouch from his pocket, explaining there was a fund for that. He may have to buy some of his things second hand, such as spellbooks-

Riddle interrupted where to buy such things, without thanking him for the money he was now holding.

Lily tisked quietly, but considering the many unspeakable things he had, or in this case would do, it really was a passing insult to her.

He was now examining a fat gold Galleon.

Dumbledore explained Diagon Alley, he could escort him there?

Riddle said that wasn't necessary, he traveled London all the time by himself, then caught himself and more politely asked for directions.

Harry thought that Dumbledore would insist upon accompanying Riddle, but once again he was surprised. Dumbledore handed Riddle the envelope containing his list of equipment, and after telling Riddle exactly how to get to the Leaky Cauldron from the orphanage,

Lily couldn't help the clear disapproval that time though, cutting off with a heavier scoff. "He's just a boy, surely he needs supervision."

"Maybe it would have stopped him growing an early interest in places like Knockturn Alley," Harry agreed, vividly remembering their protest of his short time alone there at eleven.

"I think that's already been set in stone," Sirius disagreed with an eye roll. "Besides, the kid turned down the help, I certainly wouldn't stop him not minding himself and getting run over."

Lily turned her scowl on him but couldn't really snap for that. She still couldn't make it sit right in her head like he so clearly could, this was still just a kid.

and finished he'd have the right place when he found Tom the barman, easy enough to remember. They shared a name.

Riddle gave an irritable twitch, as though trying to displace an irksome fly.

Dumbledore caught on, asking that he dislike the name Tom?

Riddle muttered there were a lot of Tom's, before asking if Dumbledore had known his father? He'd been told his name was Tom Riddle.

Dumbledore gently said he had no knowledge of this person, and Riddle continued it must be his father. It couldn't be his mother, or she wouldn't have died, she couldn't be magic.

All five of them frowned, another wash of sympathy for the soul that was Tom Riddle. They didn't know what to call that moment. Innocence, for his lack of knowledge that even magic could never really stop that? Callousness on his mother's behalf? It was certainly a true foreshadowing of his future nature.

Riddle changed the subject then, asking about getting to Hogwarts, and Dumbledore explained that was all on the ticket, and the date of the departure from King's Cross.

Riddle nodded. Dumbledore got to his feet and held out his hand again.

"I guess I should feel flattered it's not just Hagrid who leaves out the detail about that barrier," Harry muttered for himself.

Taking it, Riddle said he could speak to snakes. Was that normal?

Harry could tell that he had withheld mention of this strangest power until that moment, determined to impress.

"Why would he think that would impress him?" Remus asked with a lingering frown for the boys logic. "He's already mentioned he could control animals at will, and Dumbledore hadn't really reacted to that. Why would speaking to a particular species be of anymore significance?"

"Your guess is as good as ours," Sirius reminded.

Dumbledore hesitated for a moment before saying it was unusual, but not unheard of. Then Dumbledore made his departure, and Harry and Dumbledore did as well, landing squarely in the present-day office.

They both sat down, and Harry said Riddle had believed that faster than him. He hadn't believed Hagrid at first.

"I'm sure a wide range of reactions exist out there," Lily agreed absently. She'd thought Snape a loon until she'd been convinced, Harry had taken some convincing, and Riddle had believed it instantly. It sort of made her want to do a study on all the varied reactions a Muggleborn could have, if it wasn't so thoroughly depressing her son had found himself in that category.

Harry then simply asked if Dumbledore had known?

Dumbledore elaborated, had he known he'd just met the most dangerous Dark wizard of all time?

"I'd, be genuinely impressed if he did." Remus muttered.

"I'm sure if he had, he wouldn't have let his life go on as long as he had," James said belligerently.

Lily wasn't so sure, thinking about what had been said earlier and Dumbledore's willingness to try and help others. What was the point of no return for him then? Was there one?

No, he had not. The evidence had been very plain and upfront there was something about him, that led him to strangling animals and seeking isolation and dominance over his peers. Harry interjected he was also a Parselmouth.

"You already knew that?" James frowned at Harry in confusion why he'd pointed this out.

"Suppose up until that point I would have thought he wouldn't realize it until later in life," Harry shrugged.

Dumbledore agreed, but his ability to speak to serpents did not make him nearly as uneasy as his obvious instincts for cruelty, secrecy, and domination.

"I'd hope so," they all muttered agreement to that.

He noticed the late hour then, and said before they departed for the night, he wanted to make sure Harry had noted a few things. Firstly, his aversion to having the name Tom.

"I'll be sure to give him a more original name," Sirius said deadpan.

"Why not even go from another anagram of his own," James answered with a smirk Lily was already trying to read around, though not before he started with, "I've noticed a certain few letters spell out the word-"

She didn't care enough to let him finish.

Harry nodded.

He also highlighted his ability of being self-sufficient. He had no help, and no want of it. Many of his current Death Eaters claimed they alone were in his confidence, but Dumbledore was sure this was an allusion. Voldemort had never had a friend, nor he believed, did he ever want one.

Putting this into the perspective of his adult self was helping them really, it certainly pushed off their confusion at that notion and put disgust right back in place discussing this vile plague on humanity in their life.

Lastly, that box of stolen articles from the children in the orphanage, his trophies, souvenirs even, of particular acts of his unpleasant magic.

"I, can see what he's going for," Remus said slowly, his eyes suddenly widening at the possibility. They'd been half right in their guess, but gotten the motive wrong then.

"I'm still not sure what the point of those are," Sirius had his head cocked to the side curiously. "So he does value objects then, nicked something from people he's murdered, maybe. Would stealing his closet full of knick-knacks of the dead put him off enough for us to kill him then?"

James laughed at the absurd way Sirius managed to phrase that, but Harry was sitting right on the edge of his seat now, his face trained on the book while his godfathers words spiraled sickeningly in his head, forbidden to look upon, longing to know.

Harry should bear in mind this magpie-like tendency, for this, particularly, would be important later.

"Well Dumbledore certainly thinks so," Lily sighed, wishing the man would just spit it out no matter the hour, this felt more important than a bedtime. She didn't like the bead of sweat her son didn't even seem aware of tracing down his taught face.

Harry was dismissed, and he got to his feet to leave. He stopped however, when he saw the ring was no longer there. He turned back to Dumbledore curiously, and asked if he'd tracked down the mouth organ next?

Dumbledore approved of Harry's guess, but corrected that mouth organ, had only ever been a mouth organ.

Harry swallowed loudly, but no one needed that to feel the tension all along the room. What else had that ring been then? Lily read the final line carefully,

On that enigmatic note he waved to Harry, who understood himself to be dismissed.

but when it yielded no good results she turned to the others for some kind of explanation that was certainly evading her.

#Harry Potter #fanfiction #reading the books #The Life That Never Lived #HP #HBP #Marauders #James Potter #Remus Lupin #Sirius Black #Lily Potter

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wardencommanderrodimiss · 4 years ago

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Witches, Chapter 29: something of an overdue talk, in a long overdue chapter.

Hey everyone! We’re back at it, hopefully, with a few orders of business.

First things first: I’d like to issue a small warning for a short discussion of past suicidal ideation that pops up during this chapter. Since this series is a retelling, generally most of you do know what’s coming up next and what we’ll run into and to brace ourselves for that. You know about the characters’ past traumas and future choices and know where that pops up, or if it becomes unexpectedly relevant or makes a new parallel, you did at least know in advance that it happened. Phoenix’s occasional oblique allusion to Edgeworth’s “choosing death”, for instance.

As this is not something quite like that and comes up more out of nowhere than usual, I just wanted to make sure that no one is uncomfortably caught off-guard. It felt like something different to me personally as I was writing - whether it’s going to strike any of you as different than other heavier material we’ve had in the past, I can’t say, but I’m erring on the side of caution today. If you’ve got any questions or concerns or anything you want done for content warnings in the future, please do come talk to me and let me know!

On two lighter notes: thank you all for bearing with me through the “oops all Fire Emblem only Fire Emblem” hiatus. It’s been a weird year, obviously. I’m hoping that I can carry on with room in my brain for both.

And finally: Happy UR-1 day! Today is, yes indeed, the exact day that Simon Blackquill is arrested for murder, and in honor of that, have a chapter where I mention him one (1) entire time.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches of Los Angeles Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

----

Golden Saturday-morning sunlight streams in through the blinds, lighting up the dust particles swirling through the air. The office is colder than Apollo expects for the end of October - colder than it was last year this time - and Phoenix is even wearing a sweater, the shining locket that Apollo hasn’t seen in a while hanging around the outside of the tall collar. “Morning,” Phoenix says, without raising his eyes from what appears to be a manila folder full of newspaper clippings he is perusing. “What’s up?”

Straight to business, then. Apollo is fine with that. He grabs the chair from his desk and drags it around, not directly in front of Phoenix’s desk, but near enough that it will be harder for Phoenix to ignore him.

“Is there any way to break a curse?” he asks, shoving his hands deep in the pocket of his hoodie. If it were this cold in a regular office on a Saturday, that would make sense; save money on heating bills when no clients are coming in. This is just - fae bullshit. The beginning of their seasonal tantrums. Winter only properly begins on the solstice, and Apollo really wishes that the fae of Kurain would respect the astronomical seasons. Stave off the snow until the end of December and end it in March. Don’t allow it to span from October to April.

Phoenix sweeps the scraps of paper all back within the folder and ducks down to set it inside a drawer. “If I knew a way,” he says, rising back up with the magatama in hand and setting it down on his desk with a hard clack, “do you think I would go around looking like I do? You don’t think I would’ve gotten this mess cleaned up a long time ago?”

He doesn’t offer Apollo the magatama for a refresher on what that mess looks like. Maybe he was just making a dramatic point with it. “Oh,” Apollo says, scratching the back of his head, faintly embarrassed by how obvious the answer is if he’d given it a modicum of thought from that perspective. “I guess not.”

“Right,” Phoenix says. “As my understanding goes, you can theoretically maybe mitigate a curse, if you layer another opposing blessing on. I am ‘lucky’” - he makes sarcastic quotation marks to ensure that the bitterness dripping from the word doesn’t go unnoticed, as if Apollo could possibly not notice - “to have known enough fae that I’m saddled with both Fortune and Misfortune, and Life and Death. But I’m also not certain that when you drop those on each other they don’t just each take their own separate niches. I’m not dead, but god knows when I try to go somewhere for a vacation or a day off, I still stumble across crime scenes like nothing else. Stunningly lucky in some aspects, and wildly unfortunate in others. You know me. I don’t need to elaborate too much, do I?”

Apollo nods.

“So that’s the theory, but I don’t think that helps anyway for your purposes, which - this is about Prosecutor Gavin?”

Apollo nods again. Phoenix sighs and rubs his eyes. “Shit,” he says, folding his hands together in front of his face and leaning his head against them. “I - believe me, Apollo, I wish I had some - I wish I had any way to help him.”

And Apollo does believe him. Apollo has to believe him, and believe that Phoenix means well, because he’d go crazier if he wasn’t reminding himself that Phoenix’s most frustrating decisions are born out of good intent. That Phoenix thinks he knows what’s best, but there’s still that old saying about good intentions.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” Apollo asks. “You knew before this. You knew before he asked you.”

Phoenix raises his head. “And what does telling him get him? Secure in the knowledge that his brother - who is already in jail by the way, don’t need any more proof of his crimes, he’s already never getting out to be able to hurt anyone ever again - hates him enough to have wished him dead?”

Basically the same reasoning that Klavier had, but Apollo has a counterargument now. “Gives him time to come to terms with it before someone dies!”

“You don’t!” Phoenix slams his palms on the desk. Apollo flinches. Of course everyone is volatile and heated over this topic, but that doesn’t make it easier in the moment that it first gets directed at him from people who are usually frustratingly calm and casual. But Phoenix winces, lifting one of his hands and dragging his fingers through his hair, and sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says, and repeats, much quieter, “You - you don’t. Or I never didn’t. I knew from right when it happened that I was cursed; I had three years between then and when Mia died - it - I could’ve had a decade, or two, and it - it wouldn’t have helped. I wouldn’t have felt any differently. Any more come to terms with it. With the thought that I - helped cause—”

His tongue heavy in his mouth, Apollo nods. “But - but wouldn’t it have been worse to find out right after she died?”

“Of course it would have,” Phoenix says blithely. “Of course that - this - is the worst possible alternative. Of course I would’ve said something if I’d known that this was what would happen instead.”

“But you have to have expected that someone would—”

“No, I didn’t,” Phoenix interrupts. “That’s not how this works. You know Klavier. You know how much he doesn’t say, don’t you? How much I don’t - you know what people like us are like. Who’s going to tell him? Sebastian forgets half the time that he even has the Sight. Kay only acts like she knows things. Prosecutor Blackquill spent until two days ago acting like magic isn’t real even when he knew we knew otherwise. Someone who means ill isn going to keep that information to use it, and not to just plainly say something.” He frowns. “Well, usually not. Unless they’re a clumsy interloper stumbling in somewhere they don’t belong and getting themselves fucked over for it too.”

“So other than Means just walking all over everything” - because he wasn’t immersed in this kind of fae etiquette, didn’t grow up in it, learned just enough to spot what he thought were opportunities and ruined himself by it - “you think every other random stranger is just going to respect all these - these weird little rules about what you don’t say?”

“Rules of engagement, basically,” Phoenix says. “Yeah, I do.”

“Prosecutor Gavin told me that you’re cursed,” Apollo says. “Don’t just tell me that’s - that’s the exception that proves the rule, or whatever.”

Phoenix’s expression, smug and trying to dampen that smugness back into something that respects the seriousness of the conversation, tells Apollo that yes, yes that is absolutely what his retort was going to be. Apollo considers screaming. “I’ve been tangled up in this for far too long,” Phoenix says. “I can promise you, I know the patterns. I know the way these things go.”

“And because you’re so much smarter than the rest of us, that makes it okay?” Apollo demands. “To take a gamble and just hope that it won’t go wildly wrong?”

And he wants to, really wants to add, I guess that’s what you do, just gamble with people’s fates, and he doesn’t, and Phoenix’s face still darkens like he knows, like he can read Apollo’s mind. Because every time Apollo ends up arguing with him, that’s always at the core. This playing card that haunts them both, burnt a bridge barely built, and they keep trying to balance on the ashen skeleton of it. “Just because Prosecutor Gavin is too fucked up about everything else to be mad at you for hiding this—”

“I did,” Phoenix says, voice low, eyes narrowed and dark as an evening’s storm clouds, “what I thought would be best, based on my prior experiences of both how curses don’t get talked about, and knowing exactly what it is like to personally live with knowing that I’m cursed. This is not something I want anyone to have to know how it feels.”

“So you think ignorance is bliss,” Apollo says. Klavier said that. Apollo wants to know how Phoenix takes that statement.

“I wouldn’t call it ignorance,” Phoenix says. “It’s not like he, or you, didn’t know what Kristoph was like until you found this out. You know the crime, the verdict, the sentencing - and everything else that Kristoph tried but failed to do. That Kristoph also wanted Klavier dead is only another small piece in the grand scheme of it all.”

Still the same argument that Klavier made; Apollo can’t imagine they discussed it. What brought them to the same conclusion? That they both have lived this strange specific kind of grief? This common ground that they share that is foreign to Apollo.

“Come to terms with - Klavier’s already got to come to terms with the rest of that,” Phoenix continues. “It was obvious during that trial how much Kristoph despised him. He knew that too. He knows that Kristoph ruined more lives than just the people he murdered - that he tried to kill more people than he actually succeeded at - cursed and tried to kill children because he couldn’t have - didn’t want anyone remaining who - who could - could… say…”

If Phoenix hadn’t faltered like that - fumbling and failing to continue, words petering out as he went back over what he just said, his eyes going wide and welling up with horror - then Apollo would have simply assumed that his thoughts were moving too fast for his mouth and he couldn’t keep them straight. It would have been easy to talk right through it, and Apollo wouldn’t think twice. If Phoenix hadn’t showed his own hand, gave the game away. Something too terrible for even seven years of professional poker to hide.

“Mr Wright?” Apollo asks, and Phoenix turns his head, glancing away away, no longer meeting his eyes when less than a minute ago he was staring him down with a cold confident glare. “What - what are you talking about? Vera, and - not someone else? Who else?”

Phoenix makes a tiny shake of his head, and even that little motion is a bright, distinct liar’s red. It lights up his eyes, too, when they dart down to the floor. “Mr Wright?” Apollo repeats. When would this have been? He casts his mind over everything he learned, just a little over a year ago, Phoenix sitting him down to explain seven years of information collected about Kristoph, what he’d done and how he’d tried to cover it up. He tried to kill Drew Misham to tie up that loose end; he cursed and poisoned Vera, two precautions because he wasn’t confident enough in the former, hoping that if she ever left the house she wouldn’t be able to speak to his identity and the forgery he requested. He killed Zak Gramarye seven years later to hide the same. He wanted to eliminate every link in the chain that connected the diary page to him. Its makers Vera and Drew, and Zak who knew he was the first attorney on the case, and then the page got to Phoenix via—

Via—

“Mr Wright,” Apollo says. His voice shakes. “He didn’t—”

“Promise me something, Apollo,” Phoenix says firmly. His mouth is drawn in a tight line but he doesn’t look stern. He looks more like he’s going to cry and is desperately trying to stop himself. “Promise me.”

“Wh - what? I can’t—”

“Promise me, Apollo.”

Not until you tell me what I’m promising, Apollo thinks, Apollo knows is what he should say. He’s been told this enough times; he’s aware of this on his own. Don’t agree to a deal before all the terms are set. Don’t sign the contract before it’s read thoroughly. Rules for lawyers and fae are the same. Just because Phoenix means well doesn’t mean that Apollo agrees with those decisions he makes; certainly not the one they have been discussing, and likely not whatever Phoenix is asking him to agree to.

“Please.”

The air in the office is so cold. Even the sunlight seems cold now. Apollo shivers, hunches himself up further. What does Mia think? Is this secret-keeping so natural to her, easy as breathing once was, because she’s fae and that’s what they are, liars by trick and by trade?

“Just promise me you won’t tell her until I do.”

His mouth dry, Apollo nods and croaks out, “All right. I won’t.”

He almost regrets pushing the issue,regrets ever asking Phoenix why he faltered. Phoenix sits slumped, his hands in his hair, and when he glances back up at Apollo, he looks so exhausted that it reminds him of Klavier last night. Burnt-out and broken, when it’s so rare for either of their masks to break. Rarer for Phoenix not to be positioning himself as the one with all the cards in hand; for him to fall apart, for Apollo to actually see him upset. “Yeah,” he whispers, soft enough that Apollo sits forward to make sure he can hear him. “Everyone involved in getting the diary page from him to me, Kristoph wanted dead, or to make sure he could silence them. Everyone who knew, even if she was - eleven years old, or eight. The girl who made it, and the girl who gave it to me. He fucking hated the Gramaryes. You think he didn’t jump at the opportunity to try and get rid of all of them that he could? That he wouldn’t cast a curse on each one who ever entered his sight?”

“And she” - Apollo’s voice cracks - “she doesn’t know? You didn’t tell her?”

“Shit, no,” Phoenix says. He sounds close to cracking, too, and when he drops his hands to his desk he starts shaking his head, his eyes scrunched closed. “Being a Gramarye has been goddamn enough of a curse for her. She lost all her family and then found out that her grandfather buried her mother’s soul in the woods because he was a monstrous son-of-a-bitch who deserved worse than getting to go out on his own terms by shooting himself in the fucking head—”

Apollo shudders. Phoenix had never before directly stated his opinion on Magnifi, but Apollo could definitely tell he held only disdain for the man. This, though, is more than disdain. This is positively venomous, and more than a bit frightening. Did he always feel like this, and hid it, or is this hatred something that has only come about since last year Trucy came back to the office with her mother’s soul in her hands?

“—so yeah, on top of that, I’m definitely going to tell her that the same man who killed her father cursed her just because of the accident of who her family is.”

“B-but—” Apollo doesn’t quite know what he’s arguing. He also doesn’t know where all of his prior conviction went. Of course Klavier should have been told - because he found out in the worst way possible - and Trucy - to take a gamble with her too - that’s got to be just as wrong— “Nine-Tails Vale,” he says suddenly. “We went there, and then there was a murder - that - that’s - is that like—”

“Like what happens to me?” Phoenix asks. “What happens with a curse? Yes. That’s how it goes.”

“And you - you’re not going to - to tell her? Ever? In case - in case something happens to her like with Klavier, or—” Too many thoughts are playing in his head, and the next one grabs hold of him and pivots him away from the point he was going to make about maybe why Trucy should know. “The concert,” he says. “When we went to the concert, Trucy and I, and Klavier was there too of course but that’s - Romaine LeTousse was murdered. They’re both cursed and they - wait, was Klavier cursed then? That was before…”

Did Klavier know when it happened? Did he tell Apollo? He’d said that Phoenix had seen him twice since the trial last October. Presume then that Kristoph cursed him then. The last time the brothers saw each other, and that doesn’t make one bit of sense.

“How could Kristoph have cursed him?” Apollo asks, and he doesn’t miss a momentary flash of panic that passes over Phoenix, his eyes popping wide for half a second and a loud, sharp intake of breath. “Klavier always has iron on him. He gave me—” He looks down at his hand, and then back up, to Phoenix’s lifted eyebrows. Apollo sticks his hand back in his pocket. “What’s the point in iron if it doesn’t actually save you from being cursed?”

Phoenix is obviously trying not to move. He knows Apollo is watching him, waiting for a twitch, anything to pounce on and draw an answer out of him. Staring steadily back at Apollo, he barely blinks; he rests his folded arms on his desk and his fingers curl just a little tighter into where he’s gripping his arm. Apollo is right to be asking these questions. He’s getting closer to something that Phoenix is hiding.

“Or it does,” Apollo says. The veins on the back of Phoenix’s hand flex from his grip. Apollo thinks about someone else with a tense hand and secrets. “And he couldn’t have been cursed then, at Vera’s trial, if it does. So then Mr Gavin hated him that much before then.” Phoenix blinks placidly, but he doesn’t adopt his lazy-eyed gaze. Too serious even for that. “And you lied,” Apollo adds. “You lied about when.”

Phoenix flinches. It’s just a tiny one, pulling his head back, the muscles in his jaw and neck tightening, but Apollo can’t miss the light show. Can’t miss that the lie is bleeding out of him.

He finds himself on his feet, not stepping any closer to Phoenix’s desk, just needing the height, just needing to move a little to stop the shaking in his hands and in his chest, a trembling that goes right down to his heart. “He knew already that he’s cursed! Why did you keep lying to him!”

“I didn’t lie to him,” Phoenix says evenly, but very quietly, and Apollo wants to go over and slam his fists on the desk and make him stop with these hollow justifications, make him face what he’s done couched in none of his winding words. “I just didn’t correct his assumption.”

“That’s lying!” Apollo shouts. “That’s still lying! That’s what happened in Mayor Tenma’s trial! Do you remember that? Do you care!”

“Don’t accuse me of not caring.” Phoenix’s voice is low, his eyes dark, staring up at Apollo. “I do care. I—”

“You don’t care about lying! But you do care about - what, about us? Doing this because you care, because you always know what’s best for everyone not to know!” Apollo throws his hands in the air. Phoenix’s brow furrows further, his jaw set tightly. “Never mind that Athena had a breakdown during the trial because Means hit her exactly where you were worried she would be! And you didn’t prepare her! Never mind that Klavier’s having a breakdown now because he found out at the worst possible time! When you could have told him! You know—”

“And if what he knows already hurt him this badly, then what do you think would be happening if he knew Kristoph cursed him years ago?” Phoenix slams his hands on his desk like he’s at the defense’s bench, pushing himself up out of the chair and onto his feet. “That his brother’s wanted him dead for that long? You think that’ll help anything, for him to find that out right now on top of all this? You want him to have that to come to terms with right now, too? I didn’t lie to him! He made an assumption that I didn’t correct because I’m not in the business of salting anyone’s wounds!”

He makes - a point. Apollo sees where he’s coming from. Why he’d do that. An additional piece of truth, yesterday the same as a salting of the wound. “But you don’t think he’s ever wondered if - if Mr Gavin resented him for that long? If he - if you would be setting something to rest, if you told him that. You can’t decide for someone else what they’re capable of handling.”

“Fair point,” Phoenix says. He sinks back down into his chair, and then motions to Apollo’s, suggesting he sit back down. “If he’d asked, I’d have told him. If he ever asks, I’ll tell him. I just wasn’t about to drop that on his head with him unprepared. Or if he asks you - I’m not asking you to swear silence to that. Shit, if you ever think that it’ll help him to know, then tell him - tell him you just found out from me, throw me under the bus and lie to make me look worse, that’s fine.”

Apollo returns to his chair, still not feeling any less like he wants to take a swing and see if he’s gotten any better at punching since last April. “You want me to lie now too?” he asks.

“I want you to use your best judgment about what he might want to know or be able to handle,” Phoenix says. “To not pile on more if he didn’t ask, if you don’t think he’s prepared. Like I said, when it comes to being cursed, I didn’t ever not know, and I know what the knowing is like. Yeah, I took a gamble that if I didn’t tell them then no one else ever would. That they’d never know, I hoped.”

He shakes his head and then leans it back against his chair, his eyes closing. “See, it’s not just grief, not at all. The woman who cursed me was someone I thought I knew. Though I’d known for a while. She had actually wanted me dead since we first met.” His eyes pop back open. “Eventually she tried to poison me, and when that didn’t work she tried to frame me for murder, and when that plan fell apart she just tried to kill me with a curse because she was pissed about it. She was a lot stronger than Kristoph, I’ll tell you that much. But Mia stepped in, and now I’m still alive and other people just drop dead all around me instead.”

He sounds almost like he is making a recitation, like he’s rehearsed it, scripted it. Apollo wonders if he’s ever told anyone else all these details, if anyone else lacking the Sight knows that Phoenix is cursed, and if he used this same script then too. He’s speaking about himself, something so personal, in a way so curt and crisp, so much more detached than he’s been speaking about Klavier, or Trucy.

Apollo nods numbly, unable to force his tongue to ask any of the questions he has.

“I could have come to grips with her hating me that long and that much - I could’ve come to terms with it and moved on. I was - well, I eventually became glad to know what she was. I could’ve been okay with all that. Eventually. If I hadn’t known about the curse. But I did and the - the knowing, the - Mia was murdered. Three years after she saved me. That long, thinking I could accept that I was cursed, and as soon as something really happened - I couldn’t.”

He presses his hands together and rests them against his chin. “And I couldn’t ever even just grieve her, because I had this guilt. That her death was my fault - I know, I know, some other man murdered her. He got to rot in jail for the rest of his life for his crimes, and he would’ve hated her whether or not I was cursed. For the things she did and because of what he was, and I had no part in any of that, but I was still - thinking, if maybe if she hadn’t ever taken me under her wing. If I hadn’t been around, maybe it would’ve been different somehow. Maybe she would have survived.”

The lights flicker gently and return dimmer and softer than they were before. Everything that gets talked about in this office, Mia hears; Apollo wonders if Phoenix doesn’t get sick of it sometimes, just want to say something without her offering input. Even if this is presumably well-meant, some attempt at comfort, the most a dead woman who can’t speak can give. Apollo exhales and can see his breath. He shivers again. “Why are you telling me this?” he finally asks.

“I want you to understand.” Phoenix rubs his hands together, a vacant look in his eyes, like he hasn’t quite realized why he’s so suddenly cold. “What it felt like, and what I’m worried about. If I’d told Klavier, or I tell Trucy - once I say something, I can’t take it back. That’s it, and they know, forever, just like I do. So I want to be sure that this won’t - I want—” He drops his hands and reaches over and picks up the magatama, idly spinning it around between his fingers. Apollo can’t remember ever seeing him this uneasy, this fidgety. “Klavier, especially, reminds me of myself when I was his age, and of a prosecutor I knew then, too. And that - recognition” - he gestures with the magatama clutched in his hand - “is not good, because we were not - okay.”

Apollo wishes he could remember with clarity all that Phoenix said to him about this time a year ago, about Klavier, about Phoenix being concerned for him. He does remember that Phoenix said something about some other prosecutor then, too, that Klavier reminded him of. Or that he was worried Klavier was going to end up like.

Phoenix inhales slowly, and says, “Six months after Mia was murdered - which was three, three and a half years after I was cursed, mind you - I lost someone else. I didn’t realize how badly he was doing - he did a good job at hiding it, and I didn’t know how to reach out. I was wrapped up in my own loneliness and depression, and then he was gone.”

He stops turning the magatama between his fingers, staring down at it for a few seconds, and then he resumes fidgeting with it. “I felt like I’d caused both of those. Couldn’t convince myself otherwise. Every other factor I knew there was, every single thing I couldn’t prevent or control, all these other things that other people did - I still thought that if I wasn’t cursed, then it could have been - just different enough that they would still be here.” He reaches up, brushing his fingertips across his temple. “Wouldn’t have been a fatal wound. Or wouldn’t have—”

He falters, staring past Apollo now, over at the window. This is the same thing he said about Mia earlier, about that sense of guilt, even knowing someone else murdered her. That he held some kind of responsibility, for a curse that seems to manifest itself as coincidence. Just coincidence, a little too often.

“They could’ve been okay, somehow, in the end, I thought,” he continues. “And instead, I was - I was there, I was still around, and they weren’t. And all I could think was that if I didn’t do something, then I would just lose the other few friends I still had - they would be around me, and they would die for it.”

“Didn’t you say that there’s no way you know to break a curse?” Apollo asks. From Phoenix’s solemn expression, he’s not going to suddenly say that there is a method, but Apollo has no idea what he is going to say. What that something he thought to do was.

“Right,” Phoenix says. “So I thought - only way to take the curse out of the equation is by taking myself out of the equation. I thought - as long as I’m not around - if I go and die, then anyone else who I love won’t. The curse will be gone, right, if death finally takes me. But the curse only seemed to hit other people, not me, so if dying was what I needed to do, then I…”

Klavier lying on the stage, wondering why it had to be Courte who died instead of himself. Phoenix’s dark, pained eyes, as he speaks again, finishes the thought in a voice barely above a murmur. “It made - made far too much sense to me, then. Was far too appealing a prospect.”

The question of what Phoenix won’t quite spell out catches sideways in Apollo’s throat, and when he tries to force it he just makes a soft croaking sound. Phoenix presses his lips together and glances away. “It’s a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he adds softly. “Klavier’s - he’s what, twenty-whatever? I was twenty-five when I—”

When Mia died, Apollo thinks, but that Phoenix doesn’t finish the thought, swallows hard and stares at his desk and says something else, makes Apollo think there was something even worse he could have said, with that implication he didn’t say. “And Trucy - she’s my daughter. I’m supposed to protect her. I took her in because I couldn’t live with the thought of anything else happening to her when I could bring her here, hope that Mia could somehow bless and protect her as much as she did me. But I can’t imagine just - I can’t let that happen to her. To suffer the way I did, to - to spend her life wondering if wherever she goes, someone’s going to die - the concert, Nine-Tails Vale, to ever - to think she can blame herself. Or that everyone she loves is better off without her. Or to—”

He blinks, fiercely, his eyes watering, and Apollo hopes he’ll never have to see Phoenix this close to tears again. Phoenix, cursed and trying - and in the case of Klavier, now failing - to shelter others from that same pain. Klavier, and Trucy, and—

“What about Vera?” he asks. “You explained to me, but did you ever tell her that she’s—” Phoenix stares at him, blinks slowly. Apollo squeezes his own eyes shut. “You didn’t tell her.” He’s unable to muster the same indignation he was before. He can’t really even bring himself to feel manipulated. Phoenix told him exactly that he was saying all this to make Apollo understand. Phoenix sought this reaction. But Phoenix’s chessmaster act has never superceded his desire to keep secrets before; there’s no way that Apollo can convince himself that this emotional vulnerability is all entirely a ploy to get Apollo to shut up. How many times has he refused to explain something and just left Apollo to stay angry about being in the dark? He has never been reluctant to do that. To just sit silent and lock Apollo out. To let Apollo hate him for his secrets.

He wanted Apollo to understand, intimately, whatever it took. So that Apollo would agree keep these secrets. So that Apollo would go along with him. And it might be concern that drives him - he cares, of course he does - but it’s still manifesting in the most infuriating ways possible. In well-meant silence.

“Would you want to know?” Phoenix asks, and that question at this time is an answer and confirmation in itself. “I know the truth is important to you, Apollo - I know it is to all of us.”

For once, Apollo believes he means it. He’d know it’s the truth because he can see when Phoenix is lying, but he’s actually convinced, this time.

“But,” Phoenix continues, “if you already know that the person who cast the curse hates you and is in jail for committing murder - already got to come to terms with that, or grieve that, or for someone else dead - you already know that truth. Would you really, honestly want to live with also knowing that you’re cursed?”

To possibly want to die because of it, like Phoenix did? Apollo opens his mouth. He wants to say yes, yes he would like to know, because that’s the truth of it and he wants to always know the truth, all of its facets no matter how ugly.

Doesn’t he?

He thinks about Nahyuta, about Dhurke, about trying to forget they ever were anyone, because that’s easier than facing the fact that Dhurke abandoned him, and they might both be dead by now. Easier than wondering whether they were human or fae or something else. He doesn’t want to know what they were. He wants to deny the dreams, to convince himself they’re nothing but the weird subconscious mash-up of memory and the fae horrors Clay has spent all these years warning him about. He doesn’t want the truth about his childhood. He doesn’t want to remember his childhood at all.

(Is it well-meant silence when he doesn’t tell Clay, or Trucy, or Klavier, about them? To not worry them about his life and his past? Or is it just cowardice on his part? Blissful ignorance.)

He closes his mouth. Thinks about the smile Trucy forced onto her face as she realized that Apollo was about to reveal to the court that her father Zak Gramarye was murdered six months before then. Thinks about how she couldn’t keep that smile forced when she found out that her dead grandfather took her mother’s soul for his own personal gain. Thinks about Klavier lying on the stage wishing that he had been the corpse there, not Courte. All the pains that truth has caused them. Is that better or worse than that alternative? Does it depend on what truth it is being hidden?

(He thinks about how long it’s been since he’s said Nahyuta’s name out loud. What color were his eyes in real life, and not Apollo’s haunted dreams? He doesn’t remember.)

“I - I don’t really know,” he admits.

The smug, victorious expression he expects never arrives on Phoenix’s face. There’s no satisfaction in winning this argument. “I’m sorry,” he says, closing his hand around the magatama. “I told you about Vera because it mattered directly for that case, but the rest of this - I wanted to shoulder it myself. So the rest of you don’t have to worry about it. I don’t want you to have to keep secrets from anyone. But I don’t know what else to do.” He forces a smile onto his face with visible effort that makes Apollo wince. Nothing masks the exhaustion written into the lines on his face. “Maybe we put our heads and together we figure out some better way to talk about it. If I ever figure that I should tell…”

He trails off, touching a finger to his locket. Tell Trucy. If he ever gains reason to think that he should tell Trucy. Would he actually run it by Apollo first, ask for his advice? The possibility of being in Phoenix’s confidence for something that isn’t a case doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.

“I still don’t think you should try and keep it secret forever,” Apollo says, “but I - I guess I see what you mean. And why you don’t just…”

Why he doesn’t just tell her. More reason that just because Phoenix doesn’t “just tell” anyone anything. For once, he’s not being a cryptic bastard.

“Believe me, Apollo,” Phoenix says darkly, “I’m always thinking ahead and trying to plan for the worst. I’m not naive enough to just hope that anything will stay one way ‘forever’. But I have to be sure I don’t make it worse, either.”

It isn’t the lack of a visual cue that makes Apollo believe him. It’s knowing him that makes Apollo believe him. Phoenix always has his eye on something down the line, playing out the plan a few steps ahead to find the complications. Even - especially - while he wasn’t a lawyer. A gambler’s steady hand holding the cards, chancing on an outcome, because the cost of doing nothing at all is even more unthinkable.

Apollo nods, more times than necessary, lacking anything else to say. Phoenix cocks his head. “Apollo, you all right?” he asks.

What the hell is he supposed to say - how the hell is he supposed to be? Fine? In what world is he possibly fine? At the end of this, he’s learned more than he ever dreamed he would from his sole initial question, but in it all, that first answer has never changed.

This is all there is. A rabbit hole of pain so unfathomably deep and winding, and in its darkest depths, the same as the answer given to him on the surface: there’s no way to break a curse. Their lives aren’t the kind of fairy tale where true love’s kiss can wake a sleeping beauty or transform a beast back to a prince - it’s grimmer than that, colder than that, crueler than that. Curses not so concretely visible but more like haunting coincidence, a ghost whispering at the shoulder with reminders of guilt. How could a man who wasn’t even there when the crime happened blame himself for his mentor’s murder? And yet, even after the killer’s confession, how could he not? How can even the curse’s caster be blamed when someone else wielded the murder weapon? And yet, how could they not share in it?

Apollo would rather someone have been turned into a frog, honestly. Wouldn’t that be easier to grapple with, a simple chain of cause and effect, and no ambiguity in who to blame.

“No,” Apollo finally says. “Not really, no.”

“I guess that was a bit of a stupid question, huh.”

Apollo nods. No kidding. What’s a better question at this point, anyway? Not what he says. “How - how can there really not be any way? For a curse to be broken, I mean.”

Phoenix spins his chair around, resting his head back against it, eyes turned up to the ceiling. Once he slows to a stop, facing the windows, he says, “I mean, maybe it’s possible there was, once, but it was forgotten. There’s a lot of magic that’s gone that way.”

He gives Apollo a moment to digest that, and then continues, “The Court’s heyday was thousands of years ago. They’re living ruins of what they used to be, and a fraction of what they used to know. Maya - you haven’t met her, she’s Pearl’s cousin - Maya’s helping me out with some matters by trying to dig up more about some kinds of magic they’ve forgotten the nuance of. But even that’s something we’ve got a hint that they knew, once. Not like—” He shrugs helplessly. “I’m sorry. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a way to break a curse.”

“Oh,” Apollo says, somewhat surprised, but pleasantly so, that Phoenix said that much. It would be typical of him just to reiterate that no, there just isn’t any way he knows, that’s all, and to skip the explanation for fear of giving Apollo false hope. But thinking about the prospect of false hope is still easier than really, truly considering the meaning of what Phoenix just said - that this, that everything they’ve ever had to deal with in regards to the fae, could have be so much worse. They could do so much worse than all this pain they’ve ever wrought - they were once so much more dangerous than this, and now their Court is only ruins. This is what they are when they are weak.

“If I do find anything out, I’ll—”

Phoenix breaks off, rising up slowly from his chair, staring at something past Apollo, over his shoulder. Apollo twists around to look, not sure what he expects to see, but it certainly isn’t Vongole standing in the doorway, her head held high, her body much more solid than it usually appears, and stiller. The wispy fur at the back of her legs and off of her tail does not stir as though she is made of mist and surrounded by a breeze that affects only her; she could almost, in this moment, be a normal dog, but for her glowing eyes and her ears so bright red as though they were dipped straight in paint.

All the color drains from Phoenix’s face. He snatches up the magatama and springs to his feet, hurrying past Vongole to peer into the other half of the office. Apollo rises to his feet; if Klavier was here - if he heard what Phoenix was hiding - how Apollo promised to keep it a secret—

Vongole stares at Apollo. She doesn’t move. Phoenix reappears in the doorway, curling a hand in his hair, but his face has fallen slack with obvious relief. The claws curled into Apollo’s heart unclenches. “So then what are you doing here?” Phoenix asks the hound, whose ears fold back flat against her head, though her snout does not turn to shift her attention to Phoenix. She stares Apollo down like she will pounce. “Does he send you places or did you just wander here yourself?”

“You don’t know?” Apollo asks.

“You think I’ve ever had the chance to ask either Kristoph or Klavier about the logistics of their spectral hellhound?” Phoenix asks. Apollo tries to remember when he first started seeing Vongole. Whose ownership she would have been under. How soon after Kristoph’s arrest did Klavier come back to Los Angeles?

Despite her weirdly lanky proportions, like a regular dog was put on a rack and stretched out, Vongole always moves with grace, a predator’s prowl and elegance. A monster, but a beautiful one. She circles Apollo like she intends to herd him somewhere, like she is a shark smelling blood waiting for the moment to strike. “What—” Apollo spins too, trying always to keep her in his sight. She moves just slowly enough that he can keep up, but just quickly enough that he becomes slightly dizzy in his efforts. “What do you want?”

She stops. Apollo steps forward, trying to escape her circle, but she swings suddenly to the side, throwing her body up against Apollo’s hip. He expects her to fade through him, as she does walls and doors, but when she hits him he staggers with the force of her weight. And the cold - her body is cold and it reaches straight through his clothes, cold enough to burn, ice on bare skin type of burning, and Apollo doesn’t understand. He’s touched Vongole before, without problem, hasn’t he? Surely he has. What’s wrong with her? Or is something wrong with Klavier?

She trots over to the door, standing on the threshold, staring back at Apollo with her head aloft. He can’t bring himself to move, can’t unfreeze his feet from where they are riveted into the ground. Vongole presses her ears back against her head, lowering it so that her neck is level with her shoulders, prowling again, and she makes another circle of Apollo before again stopping in the doorway.

“I think she wants you to go with her,” Phoenix says.

She wags her tail, much faster than the usual low, wide swishing path that it takes. Apollo wrenches his foot from the floor and takes one step forward. Vongole bounds through the front room of the office, weaving between magic props tossed carelessly on the floor as though she couldn’t pass through them. And she stops and waits at the door, glancing expectantly back at Apollo. He fumbles his phone free from his pocket, finding no messages waiting for him; why would Klavier do something as cryptic as sending his faery dog to collect Apollo, rather than just calling or texting him?

Unless it isn’t Klavier instructing Vongole. Unless she’s acting on her own. Or unless Klavier is in trouble.

“You’d better go,” Phoenix says. “I can lend you the—”

“It’s fine,” Apollo says. He’s pretty sure that Klavier hates the magatama, and he found him fine without it last night. And he didn’t have Vongole guiding him then.

“Let me know that everything’s all right,” Phoenix says quietly. Apollo opens his mouth to ask what Phoenix knows, why he’s so sure that this means something is wrong - remembers what Phoenix said about himself and how Klavier reminds him of himself, long ago. Closes his mouth. Knows why Phoenix worries.

Phoenix always worries. He means well. His road is paved in well-intended worry.

“Yeah,” Apollo says. “I’ll - I’ll let you know.”

Vongole waits for him only to reach the door, diving through it as his hand reaches for the doorknob. He next finds her waiting beside the bike rack, her smoky fur drifting independently of the chill breeze, and as soon as he mounts his bicycle she lopes off down the sidewalk. She never looks back at him but is obviously monitoring him in some way, her pace changing depending on obstacles and traffic so that she always remains in his sight. He follows her through the quieter (relatively, anyway) city of weekend mornings, through his usual stomping grounds, to end up on the stoop of an apartment building that is - quite frankly, not as grandiose as Apollo would expect. He presumes this is where Klavier lives.

(If it’s not, then he’s far too deep into something that it’s also far too late to back out of.)

Vongole noses one of the buttons on the buzzer at the entryway and disappears through the door. Only seconds later, too quickly for her to have physically covered the necessary amount of ground, the door clicks to unlock. Apollo enters the lobby and before he has time to take in his surroundings, she appears in front of him. Literally appears - not bounding up to him out of a wall, but materializing out of the air, white fog swirling in circles around her ankles. She directs him to the elevator, pressing her nose into the button for the fourth floor and then several times in quick succession slamming her nose into the close doors button. “So were you always like that, or did you pick up your impatience from him?” Apollo asks.

She sits down and fixes her eyes on him. He doesn’t know what that means. He’s not sure why he bothered talking to her. She can’t respond - can she understand? Does she have some way to communicate information she hears to Klavier? Surely not - hopefully not, depending how long she was in the office.

She does not move until the elevator halts at their destination, and she springs to her feet and slips through the doors before they have opened wide enough for a fully-corporeal dog of her size to pass through. But when he makes it through, she meets him right at the other side, her impatience not taking her any further down the hall until Apollo can follow right at her tail. The walls are not cracked and peeling as in Apollo’s building, but they are certainly plain - again, very much not the kind of place he would imagine Klavier to live.

Vongole throws herself through the door of Apartment 404, and Apollo waits in front of it. A moment passes, and then another. Right. Even a faery dog doesn’t have opposable thumbs to grip a doorknob. He fails to swallow his apprehension but knocks anyway. There has to be a reason Vongole brought him here. He can’t just run away from it.

The seconds crawl past. Apollo reaches up to knock again, but the door swings suddenly open, and he flinches back.

Klavier’s hair is barely held together in a ponytail, strands falling loose around his face, and he looks even more like he hasn’t slept, going by the shadows under his eyes. And Apollo never thought there would come the day that he sees Klavier in sweatpants, but - he’s still alive. He’s still intact in one mobile piece, and he’s lucid enough to look annoyed. Apollo fumbles for words, any at all, but none arrive on his tongue. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. He starts to raise his arm to point at Vongole, to blame her, and before he can, Klavier sighs, shaking his head, his apparent annoyance sliding into exhaustion, and he steps out of the doorway, pulling the door open wider, and gesturing for Apollo to come in.

[notes on the chapter]

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

10 notes · View notes

hillnerd · 5 years ago

Text

Waking Up- Chapter 2

Rating PG-13 A03 ff.net [previous chapter]

fic summary: The war is over, but there’s still plenty of battles ahead for Hermione and Ron. Her parents are still in Australia, Ron is hiding secrets, and she has to wonder when she’ll wake up and it’s not from a nightmare. My version of an ‘Australia fic’ - Romione abounds

Huge thanks to @amysthefardareismai for her wonderful indepth beta-ing, and @abradystrix for her lovely betaing and britpicking. Y'all are the best!

And thank you to the people who have read this and reviewed- I appreciate you so very much.

CHAPTER WARNINGS: cursing, graphic descriptions of violence, mentions of suicide/ideation

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Taking watch seemed so unnecessary. Hermione's spells were amazing, and there were so many extra spells to alert them to the presence of people, why did they need to sit up late into the night staring into the woods?

The first few weeks were the hardest. His shoulder was tattered, and his sanity felt like it was in the same sorry state. Had the Ministry figured out that Ron broke in? Would his family be a target now? Were any of them maimed or dead because of him? Would it make his Mum love him less than she already did?

Ron shook his head at that last thought, and readjusted the locket. That bleeding locket. Every time he wore it he could feel it scrabbling at him. Back when he had Scabbers, one of the twins had told him about a Muggle torture where they'd put a rat on the victim's stomach, put a bucket over the rat, then heat up the bucket so the rat would chew right through them. They threatened to do that to him with Scabbers a few times before he started Hogwarts. It had frightened him, but he'd never truly understood what it could feel like until he'd put on the locket.

Every time he wore the locket he could feel it, gnawing through his chest, burrowing inside him, and shredding every piece of him apart.

The things it made him think were horrid, but worse was how it made him behave. He was used to a steady stream of vile self-loathing thoughts. What he wasn't used to was being unable to hide them. The thoughts took over his very being, and he became a complete arse when he wore it— he knew it and just couldn't seem to stop himself.

On watch he couldn't even occupy himself with doing something helpful because his whole body felt so weak. He wasn't sure if it was from his injury, hunger, or the locket— but he was completely depleted. He was useless, he could tell Harry and Hermione thought so.

Every time he told them to not say Voldemort's name they'd roll their eyes. Every time he mentioned they needed food, or a plan, they'd snap at him and talk down to him like he was a naughty three-year-old. Every time he couldn't do something because of his arm they'd scoff and act like he was making excuses. He'd always felt like a tagalong, but never more than in the last few weeks.

His one solace was that none of them were being all that useful anymore. There wasn't a plan of any sort. They had no goals. He couldn't think of a good plan, and Harry was leading them to nowhere. Meanwhile his whole family could be dead. No one cared though. Why would they? They had more important things to think of than the family of a teen so useless he couldn't so much as hold a mug in his left hand anymore. If he couldn't be a shield to them, what use was he? Why'd he ever think he meant anything to them at all? He was nothing.

Nothing, absolutely uselessly nothing.

"Ron?" he heard from the tent, startled out of his revelry. Hermione stood in the tent's entrance, but she wasn't properly bundled up for the cold. She was wearing a thin nightdress that seemed to float around her, and she looked so beautiful it made his breath catch. "What are you doing here?"

"Keeping watch," he replied, giving her a quizzical look.

"Why'd you bother coming back?"

"What?" Ron asked, looking at the locket and back to her. Where'd he gone? Oh right… He'd left them.

Harry came from the tent, looking fierce and sharp eyed.

"Why are you here?" Harry spat at him, eyes giving a faint red glow. "Hermione and I were better off without you— Always have been. Everyone sees it, why can't you?"

"Merlin, you're so pathetic," she sneered.

He didn't have an answer. The locket burned through his chest but he couldn't do anything to touch it, instead he found the sword of Gryffindor in his hand.

"You just thought you'd take a nice long holiday…" Hermione trailed off, wild hair floating about her, as she stroked a hand across Harry's chest. Ron stifled a whimper. He wouldn't cry in front of her. The locket beat as one with his heart.

"Oh Ron…" she said with a sultry pout. "The only thing you can do to stop the pain is to kill him."

Yes… All he had to do was take his sword and strike him, right through the heart and—

Fuck this, wake up, Ron!

He stood and he took steps towards Harry whose haughty eyes never wavered from his own. Hermione nodded and seemed to mouth to him 'yes' as he approached with the sword. He thrust the sword forward, stabbing haltingly through the ribs of Harry's chest.

Harry's face held no malevolence now. He was back to being the scrawny specky best friend, tired, brave, kind… And now with a look of scared uncertainty on his face.

"Ron?"

Blood blossomed across Harry's chest and Hermione screamed. Harry fell in a heap and blood splattered the snow-covered ground.

Wake up! WAKE UP!

With a jerk of his leg Ron finally escaped. His left arm was entirely numb, and he clenched and waved it to get feeling in it again. It stuttered and halted as he tried to rotate it. He pressed fingers harshly into the scarred flesh around his shoulder, willing it to wake up. He'd dealt with his arm acting up ever since he'd gotten splinched all those months ago, but normally he could get feeling and use back into his arm if he kept at it enough. Pain streaked down his arm like a fresh burn, making him let out a hiss. Pain was better than numbness, he supposed. Though it hurt something fierce, he stretched his arm out at that one funny angle he knew worked to get his arm going again.

What a fucked up dream. He hated the ones that were rooted in something real.

He looked to the camp bed beside him and Harry was there, lying asleep, peacefully dozing away on a heavy dose of Dreamless Sleep. With that particular potion, Harry could sleep through just about anything. Ron reached over to check his friend was truly breathing, then checked his pulse and lifted the duvet to make sure there wasn't any blood. He felt like a wanker and a creep for doing it, but he was desperate for peace of mind.

He almost killed his best friend those months ago. Well, it wasn't really him— it was the locket - but for just an instant the locket almost made him do it. Harry had looked so afraid of him that night. He'd even jumped away when the sword came down on the locket, convinced for a moment that Ron truly had betrayed him, truly wanted him dead.

They'd never talked about it since, still had trouble believing Harry could fully trust him again. He'd gone on about Ron saving his life and destroying the locket, but Ron knew the truth. He was no hero. He was a snivelling bastard who'd almost killed his best friend in cold blood.

"Fuck…" Ron groaned to himself. He didn't want to go down the self-hating path for another night. It didn't do anyone any good. That's how the locket had gotten to him. Not able to come up with counterpoints to his self loathing, he got up from his too short bed.

He arranged the blankets so the bed looked occupied. When he left it looking empty Harry had the habit of seeking Ron out, and he didn't want Harry missing out on sleep. Satisfied with the composition of his pillows and bedclothes, he cast a spell to replicate some snores and snuck down the stairs.

He wished he could wake Hermione, wrap his arms around her and bury his face into her bushy hair, but she needed the rest too. Plus he didn't want to get flack from his sister for sneaking into her room to use Hermione as a comfort blanket. Instead he went to the bathroom for his morning shower.

As he waited for the water to warm he looked in the mirror. He wasn't as god-forsakenly skinny as he had been, but he still looked a right unshaved mess. He'd never seen an Inferius before, thank Merlin, but he imagined his pale skin and deep purple bags under his bloodshot eyes could make him pass for one. Stooping under the shower head that was at least half a foot too low for him, he twisted and waved his left arm some more. The feeling still hadn't entirely returned to the blasted thing. The last three fingers were almost entirely devoid of feeling except for the odd painful prickle in his pinky. Considering all that he'd done and survived it was a small penance to pay. He turned the knob until the water was so hot he turned red as a fresh boiled chizpurfle, but his arm and fingers had feeling and could finally move normally again.

Done with his shower he put on his watch and checked the time. Two fourteen… He briefly considered taking a Dreamless Sleep potion. It seemed to work for Harry. Usually Harry was mumbling or yelling out in his sleep, but since the war he had been rather quiet. Whether it was the potion or lack of the Voldemort connection, Ron wasn't sure. He didn't want to ask Harry— that'd just bring attention to the fact that he had been the loudest damned roommate to put up with over the last seven years.

Ron opened the cabinet and looked at the neat row of draughts he could easily take. No one could fault him for it. He hadn't slept a full night in weeks. He held one in his hand and nearly uncorked it before he stopped himself. What if something were to happen and both he and Harry were too out of it on potion to help? He'd never be able to forgive himself if something happened and he'd not been ready. He'd gone through that too many times this year. He'd never let it happen again.

Mind made up, he put the potion back on the shelf and went downstairs for his nightly vigil. Compared to his watches when they were on the Horcrux hunt, the ones at the Burrow were almost pleasant. Sure he was dead tired, lonely and felt a hollow pit of sadness— but he couldn't complain. If anything it gave him a chance to mourn in private. Any other time of day and he'd be surrounded by people that needed him to appear strong, but in the middle of the night, all expectations fell away. He could freely be a grouchy depressed git, and no one would have to suffer his ill moods. He was determined to never be the same arsehole he'd been with that locket around his neck.

He was able to look out into the night from inside from the comfort of home, with plenty of food to power him, and a handy clock on the mantle to tell him everyone was alright..

They'd removed Fred's clock hand when he died at some point, when Ron wasn't sure. He didn't want to ask. He'd entered the Burrow a few days after the final Battle, everything had been set right, the house was clear of dark spells and the ghoul's butchered body had been buried, his room was back to normal (aside from a few posters they'd been unable to clean the gore from) but the clock was missing Fred's golden hand.

Every night that Ron sat in their living room, four hands would point to 'home' and four would point to 'away', unless one of his brothers was visiting the Burrow or had a late night at work. Since the war had ended, no one's hand had been on 'mortal peril,' for which he was immensely grateful. He glanced up at the clock on the mantle to make sure this was still true and his stomach flipped like he'd taken a step and missed it.

George's hand was firmly set on 'prison.'

Alarm coursing through him. Ron bolted for the stairs when the familiar sound of someone apparating made him freeze. He glanced at the clock, hoping George had come home, or one of his brothers apparated to tell them all what happened. The hands stayed firmly in place.

Someone else had apparated onto their property. His family closed off their property to all but the closest of confidants with a series of wards, but without the Fidelius Charm in place it was possible for people with enough power or cleverness to break through.

He saw the person's silhouette, tall and quick moving towards the kitchen door. Ill-lit by the waxing crescent moon, he couldn't tell who it was. The intruder was almost at the door. There was no time to get help. Ron was by himself. The only advantage Ron had for certain was surprise. There was no way the intruder could know Ron was awake, and in the dark, no way the intruder would have spotted him.

Ron quickly perturbed the kitchen door, and crept along the wall to the scullery. He cast a silencing spell and wrenched the window open. He threw himself through it and scrambled to fit his shoulders through the narrow opening. It felt a lot smaller than the last time he'd attempted this escape route at the age of twelve. He crept as quickly as he could around the side of the house.

He peered around the house. The stranger gasped as the perturbence spell threw their hand away from the door.

Ron steadied himself, then in a low voice cast his spell. With a noise and a burst of red light the intruder was knocked off his feet, unconscious. Ron ran to the body and wrenched it over to see the slack face of Kingsley Shacklebolt.

"Oh shit!" Ron cursed, taking a few steps back. He'd just cast a Stunner on the new Minister of Magic! Would he end up in prison like George? No… Of course not. It was Kingsley… He was defending his home in the middle of the night. Surely he couldn't begrudge Ron that?

"Rennervate!" he nervously incanted.

Kingsley gave a gasp and raised his wand, pointing it at Ron.

"Sorry... thought you were an intruder," said Ron, his wand still pointed at Kingsley.

"I gathered that," Kingsley said in his low calm voice, eyeing Ron's wand with raised eyebrows.

"You need to prove you're you. Who were you with for the Seven Potters mission?"

"Hermione. We rode a Thestral together. Who were you with?" asked Kinglsey, wand still trained on Ron.

"With Tonks," he said, voice tight at the thought of her.

They each lowered their wands.

"But really, I'm sorry 'bout the Stunner," Ron said, stooping to help Kingsley stand. He was surprised to find himself a little bit taller than the Minister.

"Nothing to be sorry about. I'd have done the exact same in your position," he said, putting away his wand and giving a wince at the movement. "I didn't expect anyone to be up."

"Yeah, well…" Ron didn't bother trying to come up with a reason. "Are you here about George?"

Kingsley nodded as he brushed the dirt from his robes. "Your mother must still have that clock of hers."

"Did he blow something up? Someone up? What happened? Is he ok?" Ron prodded impatiently.

"He's safe," said Kingsley, infuriatingly enigmatic. Safe. For all that meant, George was alive but sentenced to a life in prison for Ron knew not what. Safe now. Did that mean he was unsafe before? What had George done? Ron was bursting with questions, but didn't feel he knew Kingsley well enough to feel entitled to answers. "He's not in extreme trouble either, all things considered. As for all the circumstances, I'd prefer to only tell it once. Would you like to get your parents?"

The thought of waking his brittle mother to this made Ron feel a tremble in his gut.

"I'll get Dad. Mum, she… she needs her sleep after everything..."

Kingsley nodded in agreement, following Ron into the house as he unperturbed the door and snuck upstairs to wake his father.

It was an odd sensation to sneak into his parents' room for the first time in many years. Suddenly vibrant memories of sneaking in to cuddle between his parents, and finding other siblings hogging the bed struck him as he opened the door. No matter how many kids were in their bed, they always made room for more. If they had to, they'd spell the bed wider to accommodate everyone. No one was ever turned away, no matter what.

Part of him wanted to curl into the bed and have his mum hold him and tell him all his nightmares were rubbish, there were no monsters, and everything was ok. He couldn't do it, of course. Besides the fact that he was an inch or two shy of six and a half feet and eighteen years old, he knew monsters were very real and all his nightmares were rooted in horrid memories. There also was the fact that his mother was in an incredibly fragile state, one he'd never imagined he could see her in. If anything, he should be the one holding his mum.

As gently as he could, he shook his father's arm. His dad immediately opened his eyes, but was slow to sit up, so as not to jostle the bed.

"What's wrong?" he whispered, fumbling a bit for his glasses.

"It's ok. Don't wake Mum. I need you to come downstairs. Kingsley's here," said Ron, keeping his eye on the form of his mother, hair in long braid, as she usually did for bed. She'd done that since he could remember.

His father quickly followed him, putting on a dressing gown as they went down the dark narrow hallway. Dad did the same practiced look at the family clock and gave a gasp.

"George is fine, Arthur, but that's why I'm here," said Kingsley, his voice instantly calming. "George has been arrested for apparating under the influence to the top of Tower Bridge."

"THE Tower Bridge?" Arthur spluttered, looking aghast. "There could have been hundreds of witnesses!"

"He did it so late at night that we were quite lucky. Only one person actually saw him Apparate up there and they've been Obliviated. He was seen by many other Muggles on the bridge, but they didn't see him do any magic. They called it into the Muggle police reporting there was a man on top of the bridge, and they were concerned he was a jumper— "

Dad hissed in response. For an instant Ron almost laughed. They couldn't possibly think George was going to kill himself, could they? The very thought was mental!

Someone that young wouldn't opt for death. George was only twenty— far too young for anyone to contemplate dying… But life and death decisions were the sorts everyone had been making the past few years. You could be vibrant and laughing one moment, then a lifeless corpse under a pile of debris the next. Ron could practically smell the pulverized stone, and hear Percy's wails as he held Fred. His corpse had more joy on its face than George did now.

The more he thought about it, the more terror gripped at Ron. Suicide didn't seem that far outside the realm of reality. His brother had shut down and withdrawn from everyone. The few times he'd allowed anyone to see him, which was only in Muggle places like his hotel lobby or nearby restaurants, he'd been all bloodshot eyes and dark dull looks.

George very well could be that bad off.

"He… he wasn't going to jump, was he?" Ron asked, his voice small and childlike, despite its timbre. He felt his ears turn red.

"I really don't know. He was arrested on the spot by a pair of patrol officers from the M.L.E.S. —

Magical Law Enforcement Squad," said Kingsley before turning to Dad. "I'll do everything I can to keep news of this getting around, Arthur, but I can only do so much. He still needs to be bailed out."

"Of course," Dad somberly said, dazedly turning to the stairs. "I'll… I'll just put on some clothes… I'll let Molly sleep until I know more."

"I'm coming too," Ron insisted. The thought of sitting and waiting for news at home left a clawed out pit in his stomach. He'd done enough waiting around for shitty news the past year.

"You don't need to," Dad weakly protested.

"I want to. I'm up and dressed already, and… and I won't be able to rest until I see him and know he's ok."

His father nodded in assent. Ron was glad no one had thought to ask why he was up and dressed in the middle of the night. He hadn't expected them to. Most people's odd habits were rather accepted after the war, probably because everyone was too spell shocked to take the time to notice other people and do anything about it.

He'd thought at the end of the war he'd feel relief and happiness; that he'd finally be able to smile and celebrate. So many magical folk were in that boat now. The few papers he'd looked at had smiling faces, victorious ticker tape celebrations in Diagon Alley, and people thrusting mugs into the air to toast The Boy Who Lived, victory, and whatever rubbish made people happy.

Ron had crumpled the newspapers and set them on fire the day of Fred's funeral.

This must have been what it felt like for the Order after the first war. Yeah, they won— but it felt impossible to celebrate. So many people were dead or worse. People they knew— not some random heroes… Good friends, elves, kids, his brother… All kind, good, brave people who deserved to live.

For the survivors who knew them, it was nothing but funeral after funeral, bearing witness to breakdown after breakdown… How could anyone ever laugh again without the guilt immediately coming in, let alone celebrate? Was it any wonder George was such a wreck? He thrived on laughter before Fred's death. Even on Potterwatch, on the run and Death Eaters on their tails, the twins had been hilarious and clever.

"Did you see George?" Ron asked Kingsley.

"I did, but only briefly," said Kingsley before looking at Ron and seeming to see the hungry desperation for more information. "He was very intoxicated and was dozing in a holding cell. I had him put in his own cell, and there's someone watching him for safety's sake… just in case."

In case of what? In case George actually was 'a jumper' on that bridge? It took everything in Ron's power not to curse out loud. He and Kingsley knew one another, but not all that well and never as peers— and now Kingsley was Minister of Magic. Even if it was the middle of the night Ron didn't think it'd go over all that well to let loose a string of foul fucks, shits and buggers.

"How'd you know about him getting arrested anyways?" Ron asked, trying to distract himself from thoughts of his brother's mental state.

"I made it clear to the law enforcement staff that any notable business to do with the Order of the Phoenix would always need to be brought to me. Apparating to the top of Tower Bridge would count as notable."

"Yeah, that'd just about do it," said Ron with a shake of his head, looking for a quill. He dashed off a note to the family just in case it took a while to get George out of jail. He didn't want them to wake up alarmed at not only George being imprisoned, but Ron and his dad missing as well. He supposed he could have gone up to undo the snoring charm on his bed, but decided to leave it on the off chance he'd make it back before everyone was awake.

Dad was quickly back down the stairs fully dressed, though his thin hair was sticking up as bad as Harry's in the back.

They Flooed to the Ministry, as Apparition directly into any of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement offices was strictly forbidden by those who were not official staff of the department.

It was strangely disconcerting to not be on a deadly mission, undercover, getting his brains hexed out or getting his shoulder splinched. For the past few years Ron hadn't been to the Ministry except to break in. Part of him kept expecting someone to jump out from behind a column to arrest them all. He instinctively had his wand out until Kingsley gave it a pointed look. He quickly stowed it, his face flushing.

As they went through the Atrium of the Ministry there was a significant blank spot where the disturbing 'Magic is Might' statue had stood. Without people, and without any statue, the Atrium echoed with every footstep they took. They took a golden lift that said in a cool female voice "Level Two, Depart of Magical Law Enforcement, including the Improper Use of Magic Office, Auror Headquarters, and Wizengamot Administration Services."

The hairs on the back of Ron's neck prickled as they stepped off the lift. The last time Ron had been in this hallway he'd been Polyjuiced as Reg Catermole, stupidly attempting to make Yaxley's office stop raining. Nerveless clammy hands, so much smaller than his own massive ones, had shakily held his wand. If he hadn't been able to get that damned office to stop raining he could have ended up being responsible for the imprisonment, and perhaps even death, of Mary Cattermole. Then, just when he thought his day couldn't get more mad, his Dad had stepped into the lift.

Tension and relief had become so intermingled that he didn't know which he was feeling. For the smallest moment he had felt the childlike impulse to run up and hug his Dad, babbling about how fucked up everything was, to have his level-headed father fix it all. He'd know what to do about the Cattermoles, Yaxley, the Horcruxes— all of it!

It could have been the last time he ever saw his father. Between him, Harry and Hermione, Ron knew he was the one who would most likely die on their mission given his track record. If he could at least give his dad one last hug or find out the family was all ok… But there was no doing any of that. If he fucked up, he could get Harry and Hermione killed. He could doom everyone by being an overly emotional tit. He hadn't dared to look his father in the eye. If he had started, he didn't think he would have been able to stop from openly staring and trying to drink in one last look at his Dad. No, it had been be so much safer to just stare at his shoulder and get the fuck away as soon as he could. So Ron had avoided his father's gaze, gave his thanks for the Charm help, and darted off from the elevator, not sparing a backwards glance.

"We'll be going to the M.L.E. Court and Justice Center," his father said, bringing Ron back to the present.

With a shake of his head, he made himself focus up. The war was over. He didn't have to worry about any more 'this may be the last time I see you' moments. At least he hoped so. He had his Dad right at his side, in the same corridor, and he could say or do whatever he needed to. After all, Ron had survived all that stupid shit, somehow— others hadn't. He didn't even know if the Cattermoles were alive… and he hadn't thought of them in months. What a selfish sod he was.

Not far down the corridor was the 'Magical Law Enforcement Court and Justice Center', behind a large pair of oaken doors adorned in ostentatious carvings of medieval looking witches and wizards in various noble poses levitating scales of justice. It opened into an equally fine marbled room with many doors to courtrooms, offices and more, empty of everyone but a lonely old mustachioed guard nodding off in the corner.

Going through a door that read 'Prisoner Detention and Processing Center' the feeling was instantly different. The long arched dark-bricked room felt almost intentionally grubby, with rickety wooden seating screwed into the cheap tiled floors. At the back of the room were a series of formal wooden counters, all empty save a few exhausted-looking officials. Next to them sat a giant metal door that more resembled a Gringott's vault.

The rest of the sad-looking room looked like it could use a good scrubbing. Along the wooden rows of seats sat a few tired individuals filling out forms or listlessly staring at vault-like door for a loved one to finally be let free from jail. There was one young woman with three sleeping children piled around her as she filled out her form.

Ron accidentally caught her eye and gave a tight smile of acknowledgement. She gave a gasp and stared at him with wide eyes, seemingly recognizing him. For someone who barely was recognized by his own professors at school it was an odd sensation to have a stranger stare at him so. But then Ron realized he was with Kingsley Shacklebolt, the Minister of Magic. That must have been it, then. She was actually looking at Kingsley. Giving a wry smile at his own folly, he followed his father and Kingsley to the counter.

The surly paunchy woman sitting behind the counter sat up and gave a similar gasp as soon as she saw them.

"Mr Minister, sir!" she spluttered, sitting up high in her seat as a few purple forms flew out from around her. "H-how can I help you, sir?"

"We're here regarding a Mr. George Weasley. I'd like him processed for release as quickly as possible."

"Oh, yes, of course!" she said, gathering some forms and putting them on a clipboard with a little inkwell and quill at the top. She gave Kingsley a smile, but it had an unnatural set to it, as if she wasn't very used to smiling at all.

The packet of forms she'd gathered was formidable, and Ron could see his father looking at it with grim determination.

"Maybe I can help fill them out," said Ron, looking it over.

His dad shook his head and pointed to the top of the form— they had to be filled and signed by whoever was helping post the bail, and only them.

"Why don't Ron and I get us all some tea?" Kingsley offered. Having nothing better to do and feeling utterly useless, Ron nodded and followed Kingsley out of the processing center and down the hall to Auror Headquarters.

"I've been wanting to have a talk with you," said Kingsley as soon as they entered the hall.

Ron almost looked around him to see if Harry was there.

"We'll be needing your testimony soon for a few Death Eater trials, as well as Harry and Hermione's testimonies…"

"Oh yeah— yeah, whatever you need," Ron hastily said, putting his hands in his pockets to stop himself from swinging them at his side.

"Thank you, we all will appreciate that."

As far as talks go this one seemed rather benign. It was not like he couldn't have just said that on their way to the Detention Center.

They went past a number of cubicles to a small interview room with a cheery window displaying a sunny summer day outside the window, despite it being the middle of the night.

"I think we have a hangover potion somewhere here, too," Kingsley said, looking around the room in a few cabinets. "So, Ron, now that the war's over, do you have some plans for your future?"

Ron wasn't used to attention being on him like this and felt his ears go a bit red. The only thing he could picture in his future was Hermione, but he couldn't very well tell Kingsley that.

"I haven't been thinking much about the future, to be honest. Been more… just surviving, y'know?"

"I do, yes," Kingsley said before giving a low 'aha!' and taking out a small blue hexagonal potion bottle clearly labelled Hollace's Hangover Cure. "I imagine it will take a lot of time and rebuilding before that feeling of 'just surviving' goes away. Not just for us individuals, but our whole world. There's so much work we need to do to stabilize it, and give people faith in the institutions they once took for granted."

"Yeah, well it doesn't help the Ministry's been filled with a bunch of corrupt blood purists and puffed-up cowards," said Ron, going over to the tea station and beginning to make a pot. "At the beginning of the war I thought, 'people wouldn't let all that anti-Muggleborn stuff happen,' but they did. It all fell apart in days."

"The difference is that we now have a real chance to fundamentally improve our departments with better personnel. Most of the blood purists and corrupt individuals are in prison awaiting trial," said Kingsley, taking a seat on the edge of the sturdy oak table. "Of course, this means our government is gutted. The Auror department for example is very depleted, and we will be needing new Aurors to help round up all the loose Death Eaters, and other people who need to come to justice."

Ron nodded along, still a bit uncomfortable being alone with the Minister of Magic, even if it was just Kingsley.

"Making sure all our Aurors are honest men and women, aren't blood purists, and are able to put up with the rigors of the job… It's not easy to find good candidates."

"Yeah, I can imagine."

"A lot of young witches and wizards fancy becoming Aurors when they're young, but put them into battle simulations and they drop out rather quickly when faced with the reality of it. You've been living in those conditions for months on end, so you understand just how gruelling it can be."

''You mean barely making it to the end of the day with four limbs?" Ron said with a snort, giving his bad arm a bit of a stretch. "Yeah, not exactly something I'd recommend to most people."

"Well most people don't have your skill set. Tonks went on for days about your abilities at Harry's removal from his home last summer."

"She did, did she?" said Ron, a sad smile forming as he thought of Tonks and her infectious enthusiasm.

"She and Remus mentioned you'd shown interest in becoming an Auror."

"I… I have… I mean… I did."

Ron swallowed roughly. He didn't remember ever talking it over with them. Then again, most of the adults of the Order never had much to say to him. And he'd certainly never thought he was someone the adults ever discussed when he wasn't around. The only time they seemed to actually consider him was when they asked if he was willing to fly in that Seven Potters debacle the prior summer. Even then he was 'just another Weasley decoy.' Even Fred and George took the piss from him, saying he was just another spare Weasley for the mission.

"Given your experience and skills, I think you'd be a wonderful addition to the Aurors."

Ron's mouth gaped open. "Wha—? Me?"

"Of course."

"But they're… To be an Auror you have to be a true elite. You've got to be great at dueling, smart, a pro at defense," he rambled, going red when he realized he was explaining it to Kingsley, of all people.

Kingsley had an indulgent smile on his face.

"Sounds like your credentials, then. Plus you've probably participated in more battles than some of our current Aurors.''

At one point, not all that long ago, Ron would have beamed at such a comment. He found himself feeling more grim. He didn't like how many battles he'd been in. He wished he could have avoided them all, really.

"Now, I know you were interested in the Aurors before the war, but I wasn't sure if you were you wanting to join because Harry was, or is this a career you were seriously considering for yourself."

All the decisions Ron had made the last seven years seemed to be based around Harry or Hermione. He couldn't think of any of them that were just for him…

"A bit of both, I guess… It's always been Harry and me."

"But if it were just you, would this still be a career you'd want?"

No one had asked him what he wanted before. Not really. The only time he could think of was when he became Prefect and his mother had asked what he wanted as a gift. That had been overwhelming, and it was fairly trivial. This was a whole career!

In his career orientation with McGonagall she'd just sort of skimmed over it, her mouth going tight and an unimpressed look on her face when he said he was considering becoming an Auror. She'd gone off about what he'd need to qualify for it, and by the end of their meeting it seemed like insurmountable odds for him to ever become one. She was quick to let him know that should he fail to acquire high enough test scores, there were plenty of jobs other than Auror he could qualify for… He couldn't think of a single thing he was good at beyond chess, and last time he checked, that wasn't a career option. But here was the Minister of Magic, an ex-Auror, saying he was good enough.

He realized he'd been quiet a long time when the kettle began to whistle.

Kingsley seemed to sense Ron's mind had completely seized, and continued talking as Ron fumbled with the tea.

"So what do you say? You're as battle-ready as anyone and highly trusted— Of course the other side of it is, you've been through quite a lot in the past few years. To subject yourself to any more battles and duels... I'm not saying the Aurors are in non-stop battles, of course, but it can come with the job, and I'd understand if you'd want to steer clear of it."

Ron could walk away and odds were, he'd never have to participate in a duel to the death again. The idea was terribly tempting. He had no fucking clue what he'd do instead, or what he'd be any good for really— but he could take his time and figure it out.

"Are you…" Ron blanched and rephrased. "You're going to talk to Harry about this too."

"Yes. And a few others your age as well, such as Hermione and that Neville Longbottom. Really any of the of-age students who participated in the Battle of Hogwarts and survived it would be excellent candidates. But you, Harry and Hermione truly are the elite, in my opinion."

Harry he knew was destined for this, no matter how much Ron wished his friend would stay out of danger— that just wasn't him. Neville was never someone he'd have thought of for the Aurors, but he'd more than proved he had the grit for it. Hermione… Ron hated the idea of her stepping into danger ever again. She had just as much ability as anyone, and had been fighting right alongside Ron all those years— but he still thought of her as an innocent somehow who wasn't as hard and fucked up as him and Harry, or even Neville.

"Maybe you shouldn't ask Hermione," Ron found himself saying out loud.

Kindsley's eyebrows raised. "Oh?"

Ron flushed, knowing he'd overstepped. She'd hate him for saying something like that to Kingsley. "She's brilliant, of course, and could be an amazing Auror, but it's not what she's meant to do… She's meant to— to change the world or something. She could organize and set up the whole Ministry better than anyone, save house elves… You know, stuff like that."

"You'd prefer her safely behind a desk."

"Merlin's balls, yes!" Ron blurted before he could stop himself. "Sorry… Yes…"

"You can curse with impunity in my company," Kingsley said with a laugh, before sobering. "I'll still put forth an invitation to her for the Aurors, but I do agree— her particular skill set would do very well on the bureaucratic side of things."

"That's all I'm saying," Ron said, hand defensively raised. "I mean, of course I want to keep her away from all the action as much as I can. In the end she'll do what she wants and I'd never stop her, but really she'd be so much happier doing law-makery things and getting to use that big brain of hers. She's just not meant to be out there dodging curses and dealing with all that shit out there!"

"Are you?"

Ron hesitated.

He was so tired… but there was so much that needed to be done, so many people that needed to be hunted down so Muggleborns like Hermione could be safe. Harry would never stop, and Ron didn't think he could either, not yet at least. Thinking critically on his skill set, and not letting his insecurity rule the decision, he probably could hold his own as an Auror. Enough to watch Harry's back at least.

"Been doing my fair share of it for about seven years now… what's a few more?" he said with a shrug before his eyebrows shot up. "I haven't got any NEWTs though!"

"I'm temporarily relaxing those requirements."

"Then yeah… I'm in."

"You don't have to commit yourself now, of course. This is an important decision and I want you to take all the time you need."

Ron nodded, but his mind was already made up.

"We'd need to do just a bit of training so you're familiar with laws and everything before you're fully qualified. About seven months or so for those of you who qualify for the abbreviated training, but deputy Aurorship could start as soon as a week from now. I have some paperwork about it all to send to you, Harry and the others. You can expect it in the next day or so."

"Thanks."

With Ron's future decided, they made their way back to the Processing Center with hot tea in hand.

They found his Dad sitting where they'd left him, but he was missing the clipboard of paperwork.

"Almost done?" asked Ron.

"They're processing him. Should be done any minute," said his Dad with a wan mirthless smile. Everyone in Ron's family seemed to be a master of this smile: a 'things are fucked— what can I be but polite, and give you the worst shitty close mouthed grimace of an upturned mouth there is' smile.

"I'll see if I can hurry things along before I leave," said Kingsley, putting the hangover potion on the seat beside Ron.

His Dad thanked Kingsley, who gave a nod and went to talk to the same woman as before.

"You two were gone a while," said Dad, reaching a freckled hand over to take tea from Ron.

"Yeah, Kingsley wanted to talk to me…" Ron leaned over in his seat to put his elbows on his knees. "He asked me to join the Aurors."

His father's eyes widened a bit, but that was the only indication of surprise he showed as he took a long pull of tea.

"Did you give him an answer?" he hesitantly asked.

"I told him yes."

His Dad nodded before closing his eyes and sitting back to rub his fingers under his glasses.

"You think I should've turned him down?" Ron asked, suddenly uncertain.

"No… No, I wouldn't expect you to do that," said his Dad, giving a shake of his head.

"You wouldn't? Cause I considered it…"

"No," he said simply, taking another long sip of tea. That same tight smile was back on his Dad's face, making Ron's stomach feel cold and heavy.

"Why?"

"Because out of all my children, you are the one who always runs headfirst after danger if you think it might help someone."

Ron gave him an incredulous look. "All of us Weasleys are like that…"

"Well we all face danger head on when it comes at us, and do our part to help a righteous cause, but you? You're the one Weasley who's been chasing adventures down since the age of eleven."

"I've not!" Ron protested, feeling a rush of anger. He wasn't some adrenaline junky or glory hound. "Who the hell wants to do and see all the stupid bloody things I have? I'm not out there 'adventuring for fun' or whatever. If I never saw another bit of action again, it'd be fine by me!"

His dad had a rueful look on his face. "I should've phrased it better. It's not about you seeking out adventure to satisfy a selfish urge . It's about doing what's right. If there's the wildest hope some action of yours will help, you put your life on the line to do it. Sometimes I wish it was someone else's child who would step up instead, but…"

"Other people's children are stepping up," said Ron, thinking of people like Harry, Hermione and Neville.

His Dad gave a sigh and put a hand to the back of his neck. He looked so weary and aged, and so very tired.

Ron hated that he'd made his dad's night even worse. "M'sorry," he mumbled.

"Don't be sorry!" his Dad said with a small smile. "You should be proud of yourself! Being offered Aurorship when you haven't even graduated from school? It's quite an accomplishment."

He wasn't so sure. The bracing talk from Kingsley seemed to be fading, and the nerveless anxiety of not being enough wormed its way to the surface. After all, Kingsley was offering the position to tons of people.

"You've done so much," said Dad.

Ron gave a shake of his head and stared at his trainers. He'd barely scraped out of the war alive, and had a long list of failures: leaving the hunt, almost killing Harry, failing to save Hermione at the Manor, failing to save Fred. He failed so much and so many people.

"I'm very, very proud of you, Ron," said his father, hand clapping hard onto Ron's scarred forearm. Ron looked up from his hand to see his father had tears in his eyes.

Ron had never had his Dad look him in the eye and say something like that before. Sure, he'd congratulated him a couple of times, said he loved him and such. This was very different from those times. There were so many unsaid things in his father's look. There was a world-weary sadness shining in his father's eyes - fierce pride, fear for everything Ron had faced before, would face in the future, and so much fatherly love.

Ron felt his eyes prick with tears, and he had to look away to keep them from falling.

"Can't blame me for hoping you'd retire from danger, can you?" his Dad said, with a sniff.

Ron gave a short laugh.

"I'll be careful… I really will," Ron said, though he knew it wouldn't do anything to calm his Dad's worries.

"I know," his father said before slumping in his chair. "Oh, your mother is going to be a wreck…"

The two of them groaned at the thought.

Ron wasn't sure if she'd be proud or worried sick. Both? Either way he was fairly certain she'd be crying and screaming about it. He wasn't looking forward to that.

The sudden loud clanking of the metal door opening made them both stand up. A very scruffy looking George stumbled forward, not looking either of them in the eye as he approached, an M.L.E.S. officer at his side. He swayed a bit, and stank of alcohol and body odor. He'd looked awful coming through the door, but this was nothing compared to up close. Ron hadn't seen him in a week, and he doubted George had showered or shaved since he'd seen him last. Even at the end of the battle, completely encrusted in gunk and debris, George had looked better than this.

"Well, Mum always thought we'd end up in jail," George said with a humorless smile. Ron winced at his use of 'we.' George hadn't completely stopped using 'us' and 'we' since Fred died, and every time he slipped up it hurt.

"You two able to take him from here?" the officer asked, looking thoroughly done as George patted him on the shoulder and gave him a goofy smile.

"Yes, I signed the paperwork. We'll take him home," his Dad answered. The officer quickly extracted himself from George's grasp, straightened his uniform, and went back through the door. "Let's go home, son."

"Fat fucking chance," said George, before he let out a creaky wheezing laugh that sounded so foreign and callous, Ron couldn't believe it'd come from his brother. "Morning, Dad."

"Yes, what a wonderful morning it is," their Dad said, fixing George with a withering glare that made Ron step back.

George stupidly blinked at him, before giving another cackle.

"And Ron! You're here too! It's a fucking family re-nunion. Onion? Reooonion. That's it. How are you?"

"Spiffing," said Ron with a roll of his eyes. George reached up and put an arm around Ron's left shoulder. The sudden weight of his brother, along with the inches of height difference, made Ron stoop over in an uncomfortable lurch that made his shoulder throb in pain. "Merlin you reek, George."

"'S'no way to talk to your older brother!"

"Let's go," said Dad, putting a hand on George's elbow which he quickly shrugged off.

"D'rather sit in that cell!"

"George, I signed a surety bond that said we'd stay with you until you were sober. The bond keeps you from being able to Apparate or Floo, or even travel at more than five kilometers per hour on your own until you're sober. There's literally no way you can travel on your own right now, aside from walking."

An ugly mutinous look passed over George's face.

"M'not going to the Burrow."

"Then where do you want to go?" asked Dad with more patience than Ron could have managed.

George closed his eyes and swayed so far back that Ron thought he might fall over, but he miraculously kept his footing.

"Dunno," he said, letting out a big sigh. "I can't handle… I don't wanna be home, okay?"

"How about your hotel?" asked Ron.

George leaned back again, and Ron hissed with pain as his brother's weight twisted his arm at a funny angle a second time. The silence went on for a long time before George said, "I dunno…"

George gave another laugh and looked around as if he'd accomplished something.

Ron had to keep himself from throttling his brother.

"We're taking you to your hotel then," said Dad. They limped along with George until they were clear of the Anti-Apparition spells at the Department of Law Enforcement. They simultaneously side-alonged George to his hotel room, where he promptly threw up in the middle of the floor.

The smell of his sick was nothing compared to the smells hitting them from the room. Trays of food were growing mold and had flies surrounding them, molding towels and clothes were all over the room, and it smelled so awful Ron nearly was sick himself. Even half the bed had plates and other detritus on it.

"Oh George…" said Dad looking around the room. He gave a shake of his head and banished the filth from the bed so Ron could lay George down.

"Do you think we can get him into a new room?" Ron asked.

"It is a bit late in the night for that… Plus it's a Muggle hotel, so that complicates payments quite a lot."

Ron looked around the room, realizing how much work it would take to clear it of mess if he was to try and keep the various plates and towels instead of just banishing them all, when he saw the extra door in the room.

"George, where does that door go?"

"Wha'door?" his brother moaned, eyes closed tight.

"The one next to the-the shiny box thingy on the table."

"Telly."

"Yeah, tell me."

George gave a grunt and opened his eyes enough to roll them.

"Box thingy's a telly, sod!"

"Oh it's a tellyvision!" Dad enthused.

"Not now!" Ron gritted out. "The door next to the telly-thingy. It goes to another room, yeah?"

George gave an unhelpful shrug.

"What are you thinking, Ron?" asked Dad.

"I'm thinking we can break into the room next door and put George up there for tonight— meanwhile we can clean up his original room."

"When room service is available we can get some clean sheets and such for this room," Dad replied.

Ron gave a nod and did a Hominum Revelio on the room next door. It was thankfully empty. They unlocked the door and floated George over. Despite his weak protests, he was asleep and snoring away within minutes.

Cleaning the grotesque room was a task akin to the scrubbing of Grimmauld Place, but they found their rhythm, and by the time the sun was close to rising, the room was clean enough that Muggle housekeepers could easily see to clearing away the now spotless dishes and stack of still slightly mildewy, but folded, towels.

Out of anything to do, father and son sat on the end of the semi-clean bed that still needed new sheets.

"Well, that's about as done as we can do until the housekeeping staff is available," said Dad, giving his glasses a polish. "You should probably get back home. I can stay here and tend to George."

"No I'll stay," Ron volunteered. He didn't like the idea of returning to the house with nothing to occupy him, or worse, having to tell his mother what happened to George. "You have to work today, don't you? And I don't have anything."

"I suppose it's best I tell your mother anyways."

"Or maybe we could put off telling her?" Ron asked hopefully. "I mean, she's just now doing okay…"

"It'd be difficult for her to not find out in some way, though," said Dad with a shake of his head. "There's no way I can lie to her about something like this."

"Well, maybe we can put it off until everything with George is a bit more settled?"

Dad gave a sigh, rubbing the back of his neck.

"I... suppose. If she hasn't seen the note you left yet."

George chose that moment to stumble into the room, squinting at them.

"Well, I need to get a move on if I'm to retrieve that note before your mother sees it… Going to be a long day," Dad said, giving a low grunt as he stiffly rose.

"Sorry," George mumbled.

"Yes, well, we have a lot to discuss later, don't we?" said Dad, lips forming a tight line, before Disapparating from the room. Ron and George were alone, the latter pale and wincing at the lights of the room.

Ron got the hangover potion from his pocket and handed it to George, who downed it in one go and immediately regained the color in his face.

"Oh that's loads better," he said, standing tall, though still many inches shorter than Ron.

George looked around the room, embarrassed and most likely stunned to be able to see the floor.

"Thanks for cleaning up… getting me and all... "

Ron gave a nod, not quite able to bring himself to look his older brother in the eye. It was easy enough to just go through the motions and clean a room up, but now, just sitting still, it was a lot harder not to feel the dangerous stillness in the room, or to ignore how wrecked George looked.

He imagined his brother on top of the bridge, drunkenly swaying on the edge. His throat tightened until he could barely swallow. He wanted to ask George about it. Wanted to push him against the wall and tell him what a sorry sod of a brother he was, and drag him back to the Burrow. Or just hug him tight and beg him to be ok.

"You — you need some tea," Ron mumbled, looking about the room for a kettle, and willing his eyes to stay dry. Spying a plastic kettle in the corner, he waffled about with the unlabelled buttons on it, but nothing happened. It took a lot of prodding before he realized it wasn't plugged in. "And you need a shower. You smell like a troll."

"Of the two of us, at least I don't look like one," George replied with a frown.

"I can get us some food and tea while you're showering," he said, ignoring the dower look on George's face. "How do I do that room service thing?"

"With the phone— but I'm not wasting my time trying to teach someone thick as you how to use it."

"I know how!" Ron answered back, more curtly than he intended, taking the phone off the receiver. It had been years since he'd touched a phone, but all the loud sounds he'd detested then were the same with this phone. It made the familiar horrid tone in his ear. This one didn't have the dial of numbers like the one he'd used in Ottery St Catchpole, just plastic buttons. "What's the number?"

"Zero..." said George, looking at him with a scrutinizing look. He sat down heavily beside Ron. "When'd you learn to use a phone?"

Ron put his hand over the receiver. "Like four years ago. Hermione and I practiced using the phone every summer since third year."

Ron pressed the zero button, and the phone made a sound signaling a connection was in progress. A clipped female voice answered.

"Here at Crandon Inn, your comfort is our pleasure—"

George did a wanking gesture as the woman said pleasure. Ron worked hard to swallow a laugh and keep his composure.

"Er, yeah, I need to order— " Ron began, but the voice on the other line barged ahead.

"To speak with the front desk press 1. To speak with guest services press—"

"When did all this 'phone practice' take place?" George asked. "I know we would have taken the mickey for calling Hermione every summer. How'd you keep it from us?"

"You never paid attention to me," Ron said shortly, putting the phone back to his ear.

" — ning press five. For travel accommodation services press—"

"I've always paid very close attention," said George. "At least when there was something as juicy as 'phone practice with Hermione' to make fun of."

"To speak with billing press seven. To speak with maintenance press eight."

"What button do I press for food?" Ron stage whispered to his brother who was smirking.

"I thought you said you knew how to work a phone."

"I do! I missed the number because you've been talking nonstop! Which number?"

"Press nine."

Ron pressed nine.

"Here at Crandon Inn, your comfort is our pleasure. To speak with the front desk press 1. To speak with guest services press 2."

Ron pressed the button again, but all the menu did was repeat itself.

"Are you sure it's nine?"

"Yeah," George said with raised eyebrows. "At least I think it's nine for food."

"You had a million plates in here! How do you not know the number by now?" Ron groused.

"Press nine again. It should work."

"Here at Crandon Inn, your comfort is our pleasure. To speak with the front—"

"It's just repeating itself again."

"Are you sure you pressed nine?"

"Yes!"

Ron pressed nine a few times for emphasis.

"Here at Crandon — Here at Crandon — Here at Crandon — Here at Crandon Inn, your comfort is our pleasure. To speak with the front desk press one."

"Once more. With feeling!" George said wearing, a broad smile on his face, leaning over to press the button for Ron.

"Oh you arsehole! Fuck off before I hex you!"

Ron gave a scowl and aimed an ill-aimed punch at George. Even in his dehydrated state, George was able to easily dodge him and scamper to the bathroom, a grin on his face.

"You better be showering in there, because you've been making my eyes water!"

It wasn't until the water was running, and food was ordered, that Ron realized he'd seen his brother genuinely smile with mischief in his eyes for the first time in a month. It was irksome that George acting normal meant Ron was a target for teasing, but he'd much rather that than any alternatives.

The food arrived, as well as new sheets, by the time George had finished his long shower.

George had little to say as he began his meal at the desk, so Ron sat across from him on the bed and went off for a while about what he'd been up to at the Burrow as well as his and Kingsley's chat.

"So you're going to be an Auror?" George asked rather quietly.

Ron gave a shrug. "Yeah, looks like it."

"Well at least I have three years to get used to it... That's how long the training is, yeah?"

"Usually, but… He's cutting it all short. I'd be a Deputy Auror in a week or so as soon as I fill out all the paperwork. Full fledged Auror in like seven months."

"But— But you're only seventeen!" George spluttered, dropping his egg-laden fork.

"Eighteen," he replied, warily eyeing his brother.

George abruptly pushed his chair away from the desk and paced to the window. He wrenched open the curtains and stared at the view, his arms crossed.

"Why you?" George rasped out, before turning around to glare at Ron. "Like, why the fuck would Kingsley ASK you?"

Ron's fist clenched, and the cold uncertain feeling swam its way down from his stomach to his feet.

"You're only a kid! He can't be serious! You've only just barely survived this stupid bloody war, and he's trying to put you on the front-line again, and doesn't even have the decency to properly train you!"

"He said he reckoned I'm— I'm good enough given what all I've been up to…" Ron muttered, feeling his earlier confidence shattering under George's acerbic gaze.

"And you! You stupid wanker, you said yes!" George swore, kicking over a chair before giving the wall a hard punch that left a dent in it.

Ron didn't dare move from the bed as he watched his brother's furious reflection in the window. He wished his own senses would flood with anger at the insination he was basically curse fodder. He wished he had a ready defense of his abilities and that he could proudly state 'of course Kingsley chose me, I'm fucking amazing.' There was nothing but roiling uncertainty and hurt washing over him. He couldn't be mad and couldn't defend himself with conceit he didn't feel at all entitled to. Would it be this way with everyone he told of the Aurorship? Them mourning him as a lost cause or raging at him because they knew he'd fail?

"Do you want me to go?" Ron asked, carefully rising from the bed. George didn't make a sound, but turned and strode towards him, the same raging look on his face. Ron flinched, readying himself for a blow that never came. Instead he found his ribs crushed into an embrace. Shocked, it took a moment for Ron to free his arms enough to hug his brother back.

"You better keep yourself safe," George mumbled into his shoulder, his hold painfully tight.

"Course," Ron swallowed.

George finally broke the embrace, but kept a hand firmly clamped on Ron's shoulder, finally looking him in the eye. "I mean it."

"I know," Ron said, his voice tight.

"Blimey… An Auror… And you didn't even finish school!" George said, a small smile on his face. "Become Ronnie the War Hero and they just offer you the prestigious jobs, hmm? "

Ron looked to the ground, blanching at the title of hero.

George elbowed Ron in the side a bit. "I might not be as heroic as you, but maybe I can finagle an attaché position or something."

"Kingsley's offering it to anyone who fought at the Battle of Hogwarts and is of-age. I'm nothing special."

"Oh c'mon, Ron," said George, giving a roll of his eyes.

Ron just stared at him. There was nothing to say. They both knew it was true. Ron might have stood beside a lot of special people, but there was absolutely nothing special about him.

"Want to show me how this tellything works?" Ron asked, walking to the box and tapping on some of the buttons that didn't seem to do anything.

"Naw, I'm knackered," said George, taking his wand and spelling his fist print out of the wall. "I'm just going to sleep last night off. You should go home and get some sleep yourself."

"I'm fine, I can stay."

"To watch me sleep?" George asked, before crossing his arms. "Or are you just wanting to play babysitter?"

Ron didn't have a proper answer for that, and knew his worry was showing on his face.

"I'm fine, Ron."

"Then why'd you go to that bridge?" Ron hoarsely asked. He hadn't really meant to say it. He didn't want to push his brother too far.

"I dunno. I was pissed," said George in a hardy sort of voice. He tousled a hand through his hair before giving a forced smile. "Had a right nice view, didn't it?"

Ron didn't smile back, and his brother's expression faded into a hard look.

"You'd better get back to the Burrow, before Mum worries," said George. He sat on his bed and turned out the lights with a flick of his wand, leaving the open window curtain the only light in the room. "Get yourself some real food instead of this hotel muck."

"You could come round and have some real food too."

George bit his lip before giving an uttered, "Maybe…"

Ron stood frozen. "You won't do last night again, will you?"

"You mean get pissed as all fuck? Yeah I imagine I will," George bit out, but his expression softened when he looked at Ron again. "Not doing it anytime today, though. I'll… just be here."

That had to be good enough.

Ron leaned down to give his brother a hug that was lightly returned.

"Now fuck off, I need to sleep." said George, giving him a flash of teeth and a punch to the arm.

Ron closed the window curtain to enclose the room in darkness, and Apparated to his room at the Burrow.

The bed was still arranged to look like he was asleep in it with the snoring spell sawing away in a passable imitation. He stopped the snoring spell, put his wand on the bedside dresser, pushed the blankets out of the way, and stripped down to his boxers. As he laid down he felt his whole body sag with relief to finally rest a bit.

He had just begun to pull his covers into place when the door quietly opened.

"Oh good, you're awake!" Harry had a tenuous smile on his pale face. He was looking rather relieved and in need of cheering. As tired as Ron was, and as much as his body protested, he sat up and gave a squinty eyed smile in return.

"Yep, I'm awake!" Ron tried to enthuse.

"We put some breakfast aside for you with a warming charm," said Harry, sitting on the camp bed.

"Cheers," said Ron with a nod.

"I think this was the first time you've had a lie-in since last summer. Makes things feel a touch more normal."

Ron gave a distracted hum and grabbed the jeans he'd just been wearing moments ago, jerking them on to avoid Harry's gaze.

"Ginny thought it might do us some good to leave the house a bit today."

"Sounds good. You haven't been out of the house except for funerals and Hogwarts rebuilding," said Ron, looking about for the shirt he'd been wearing earlier.

"And you've not left here except to see George last week…" Harry added, speculatively eyeing him. "So maybe we could all go out somewhere."

"Yeah fine."

Ron finally spied his shirt. It was wadded up in the low-ceilinged corner just beyond Harry's camp bed and knelt down to retrieve it.

"Maybe we can all go down to the village?" asked Harry.

Ron's voice suddenly felt strangled. "The village?"

A skittering frenzy of fear lapped at him. His fists clenched and he rose so sharply he immediately bashed his head against the ceiling with a horrible crash that left him seeing stars.

"You okay?" Harry asked with a laugh, giving Ron's back a pat.

A chill went up his spine at the touch on his back. He quickly lurched away from it, nearly punching out at Harry, but covered the action by giving his head a rub.

"Yeah, I'm just..." Ron managed to let out, tightly gripping his shirt and willing himself not to freak out because he'd been touched. "Just too bloody tall for this room."

"You're too bloody tall in general," said Harry, a grin on his face. "If not the village, we could play Quidditch or see how the Lovegood's rebuild is coming?

"Quidditch sounds good," Ron answered, putting his shirt on and hoping he sounded casual. Harry idly chatted about what he'd been doing that morning, giving no mention of George or Ron's mum. Dad must have gotten back in time to get rid of the note. Even if he was entirely sleep deprived Ron felt immense relief that he wouldn't have to deal with that business anymore for the day. [NEXT CHAPTER]

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AN: Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed it please let me know w/ your words! :)

#romione #ron weasley #harry potter fanfic #hermione granger #harry potter #waking up #george weasley #my writing #my fic #fanfic #fanfiction

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dreamcatcherjiah · 5 years ago

Text

Looking at the face of your daughter made everything so much more real. She had just turned four, a few months ago, and she was already growing up so much. Her hair was let loose and spread over the pillow, and her eyes were half-open the light fluttering between her long lashes, as her little chest moved up and down. The extent to which your feelings had grown for the little girl in a few months was unbelievable. You could say, without the shadow of a doubt, that you would do everything in your power, give up your life so that this little girl could have a happy life. Looking at her, your heartbeat accelerated and your breath caught in your throat. Some days, when she showed you a full-toothed grin or told you how she had made uncle Kookie laugh so much he spat milk out of his nose, some tears came to your eyes. How had you managed, being such a plain human being, to be lucky enough to call this marvel your daughter? Yoongs calling her his daughter continuously had done something to you. That word gained a special meaning for the both of you, something so sacred that made the two of you agree to pause anything that could develop between the two if it could affect her.

But now you knew, yours and Yoongi’s relationship was nothing but something the three of you should treasure. You were a little family. Not perfect, but there were endless amounts of love. And at the end of the day, that is what matters.

Seeing Yoonji peacefully sleeping, you kissed her forehead and walked slowly out of the room. Watching her sleep always made you happy, but today there were things you had to attend to. The letter addressed to you and Yoongi as “Kang Yoonji’s parents” sat at your coffee table since you cleaned the leaving room after dinner. The white paper was a stark contrast against the mahogany table Namjoon bought as a housewarming present. If you were to be honest, you weren’t really looking forward to reading that thing. It was written in the all too familiar handwriting of the real parent of your child, and that alone filled you with such anxiety you couldn’t properly function. But you couldn’t put it off any longer. If things went well tomorrow, like Yoongs predicted, Yoonjinnie would be, to all concerned, your daughter. And you could not in good conscience keep ignoring the last thing her father wrote. Just waiting for Yoongi to arrive was excruciating, looking at that envelop and imagining the multitude of things that could be hidden there.

Finally, the lock emitted the beeping sound you knew to be Yoongi pressing the code and it took you less than a second to snatch the envelope from the table and jump into his arms. His shoes were still on his feet when he circled you with his arms.

“I knew it. You’ve been stressing all day about it, haven’t you?” He asked, with his face hidden in the crook of your neck, and his hot breath sent shivers down your spine. His voice, you noticed, sounded tired and resigned. It was then that you realized he had been stressing just as much as you had been.

Without giving you time to think, he kicked off his shoes and, picking you up, took you both to the sofa, sitting you on his lap. You weren’t about to complain, having him near you would make whatever was inside that letter much more bearable. His presence tended to have that effect on you.

“I think we shouldn’t delay this much longer, Yoongs” you said, your voice diminished with the anticipation.

“Yes, love. That would be a good idea…”

However, neither of you moved to open the letter, looking at it the same way the both of you had looked at the adoption paper that day so many months ago. There was anticipation, of course, but also some fear mixed into that pot that were your feelings that night. What could Mr. Kang have had to say to the both of you that hadn’t been said that day at court when the lawyer read his words? You were still expecting someone to knock on your door and tell you the adoption had been all a joke and that your baby girl wasn’t really yours… But that hadn’t happened and your baby girl was secure in her little bed, dreaming away the night, so that couldn’t be it. Looking at Yoongs, his eyes never leaving the letter in your hand, you understood. This was it, again. This was the adoption all over again. But that’s okay, the three of you were together and that was alright.

Your fingers opened the envelop before your head knew what was going on. From the package fell two small objects and a letter. One of the objects was a small locket with a picture of Yoonjinnie the day she was born with her mother and father, with the inscription FOREVER OUR ANGEL engraved in the silver surface. You couldn’t stop the tears from falling, and Yoongs cleared your cheeks with his rough but gentle hands.

“We’ll keep it for her,” he said “and when she’s old enough, she’ll know how much we all love her. She was lucky enough to have two sets of parents who love her to death, my love.”

The second little object made you cry even harder, you remembered the day that picture had been taken. Yoongs had been complaining that you were spending too much time with the baby, a 13-month-old Yoonji at the time, and refused to leave your apartment until it was time for Mr. Kang to pick his daughter up. When that time had come, Mr. Kang had found the three of you knocked out cold on the sofa, cuddling. Apparently, he had printed the picture and in the back, in his, all familiar handwriting were the words: Mom and Dad loved you from second one, Yoonjinnie. Love them back as much, my little angel.

Your tears were now impossible to stop, and you really weren’t trying anymore. What was happening? It looked as if Mr. Kang had been planning the adoption from the second Yoongs and you had waltzed into his and his daughter’s life. If that was the case, you didn’t really know how that made you feel. How desperate could a man be to do something like this? “Stop over-thinking stuff, Y/N. Just read the letter, please.” His words, tense and curt, brought your attention back to the letter in your hands. You nested your head in Yoongi’s shoulder, and with his warm breathing gracing the top of your head, you began to read the letter out loud.

Dear Min Yoongi and Y/L/N Y/N:

I am aware of how unsettling this letter must seem to you but bear with me a little. Yoonji’s story is not one of happiness, at least it wasn’t until you met her. I am not writing this letter in hopes of provoking pity in you. I have been around you two for only a couple of months and I can certainly say that I have never seen anyone look at her with as much love as you two do. That is why, at risk of having you reject her, I have decided to appoint you her legal guardians in case something happens to me, and I fully intend to prepare the adoption forms as well.

You see, in our family, we are prone to ill health. Yoonji’s mom couldn’t survive giving birth to her, suffering a heart attack. God, this sounds awful and pitiful. How have things come to this? I am just going to tell you, but, you two, don’t you feel pity. What happened, happened, and we the living can do nothing more than move along with life, living it to the full.

Nearly two years ago, my little sister arrived in my doorstep drenched and with a pregnancy test in hand. She had just gotten a job in a good company and was well on her way for a promotion. Until some imbecile got her pregnant and left. You must understand how a single mother would have been treated if word got out, so we made preparations. We were going to move to the country and pretend Yoonji’s mom was a widow, living with her brother to raise the child. In the end, we didn’t need those preparations at all, because my sister couldn’t go through delivery. Happily, the child did make it. So instead of my sister, I became the widower and registered Yoonji as my daughter. I repeat I am not writing this with the thought of guilt-tripping you into taking care of my niece, nothing further from the truth.

I could see, from the moment both of you saw Yoonji that you would be what she would need in case I was no longer there. As I said, ill-health runs in the family. The both of you will take care of her, I know it. And once you realize it, you’ll also take care of each other.

Hoping this never reaches your hands, Kang Taejun.

You couldn’t believe what you had just read. If it wasn’t because it had been your voice reading it, you would never have guessed this to be the truth.

“He was a fucking nutcase!” Suddenly yelled Yoongi, which startled you into slapping a hand over his mouth.

“You’ll wake up Yoonji, and I doubt you want to explain it to her any time soon, so shut it.”

“Don’t you see what he did there, Y/N? He was trying to avoid prejudice and scrutiny and instead of putting Yoonji up for adoption, he leaves her with two strangers, unmarried and not related to her in any sense?!” Yoongi was getting angrier by the second, and you could see where he was coming from. But in this case, he was not right.

“Yoonji would have never been put up for adoption and you know it. Neither of us would have allowed it, and we would have fought them tooth and nail for that little girl.” You were putting your foot down tonight. You knew, deep down that Yoongi didn’t mean everything that he was saying, but it was out of the love that you felt for him that you wouldn’t let him go any further and say something he would regret. He loved Yoonji with everything he had, from the first second she had looked at him, and you were not gonna let some blind angry feelings break that for him.

“You are still not seeing the point here, Y/N! Okay, so let’s see what happens in a couple of years when Yoonji has to go to school and we have to deal with a pack of entitled vultures, who will make our daughter’s life hell, just because her situation at home is not the normative one. I am not getting shit from anyone, Y/N. NOT WHEN IT COMES TO MY DAUGHTER!”

You didn’t want to yell back, but you couldn’t for the life of you see the problem. It made sense that the two of you weren’t married. You had just started living together after adopting Yoonji and had accepted your liking of each other only recently. You hadn’t even told each other the three-lettered word, aside from Yoongi’s favourite pet name, the word love hadn’t even been mentioned. So what the hell was his problem now?

“We’ll cross that bridge when we have to, Yoongs. Besides, I don’t want to argue tonight. We know now why Mr. Kang did what he did, and that should be enough for now.” Yoongi however, didn’t seem to hear you, too busy mumbling.

“This is NOT how I wanted to do it, Gods Namjoon is going to kill me when he finds out… well, him and the rest, for not being in the fucking loop…”

“Yoongs…? Are you okay?” You asked unsure.

Suddenly, he got up from the couch, taking you with him, and putting you back on it once he was standing. He was now towering over you, with his eyebrows in a frown and his dark eyes looking straight through your soul. His hands were balled in fists, and his pulse was beating like crazy in his neck, so much you could see it from your position below him.

“Yoongi, I don’t know why you are so upset about this, but it is completely unreasonable!” You started, trying to calm his breathing down a bit by reaching for his hands and stroking them calmly. That didn’t seem to do the trick, because his pupils dilated so much they nearly ate the iris completely.

He freed one of his hands from your grip, and with it, removed some stray hairs from your forehead. The look on his face had somehow changed into such an intense look of affection that you felt your heart aching for him. All the confusion, the rage, the fear that you could have seen before if you looked at him in the eyes, were all gone now. Now he was looking at you with such devotion-filled eyes, with his heart open for you, you were missing words to describe it. His eyes spoke volumes while his hand moved from your forehead to your cheek in a feather-like caress, and then to your neck, where it stayed, moving up and down and sending shivers down your spine. When you realized your eyes had closed on their own accord, you opened them again to see Yoongi kneeling in front of you.

“Have I ever told you how deeply I am in love with you?” He asked, bringing surprised tears to your eyes. “I don’t think I have, haven’t I? Well, I am telling you now. I have only told you bits and pieces, in those quiet moments after sex, where you have me at your mercy and I don’t know what I am saying… you must be a sorceress to have coaxed that out of me so easily…” he chuckled to himself. “Ever since Yoonji was very little, seeing you taking care of her made my heart swell so much I sometimes doubted it would keep beating. Soon I started dreaming that someday, even if not with Yoonji as our daughter, I would win your heart and be able to have a family with you, just like we had been doing for the last four years. Fate is funny, you know? I feel terrible somedays because I can’t help but think that if I hadn’t wished so strongly for a family with you and Yoonji, Mr. Kang would still be here. But in those bad days, I come back home, and Yoonji tackles my legs in a hug and tells me her “I LOVE YOU DADDY”, and you smile at me with that face full of happiness, and I regret nothing. I guess what all of this comes to mean is that I really do love you, with all my heart. You have been the love of my life from the moment you entered it and will continue to be it for as long as I live. You are also the mother of my child, the best mother she could have wished for. What I am trying to say in this roundabout, chaotic speech is that, if you’d have me, I want to spend the rest of my life with you, I want to raise our daughter together in that normative environment, not because we have to, but because we love each other so much that we cannot be apart. I want to have children with you Y/N. Me, Min Yoongi, because I’ve fallen in love with you and nothing more.”

Through the tears, you saw him pulling a small blue box from his jacket and open it. It contained the most simple and beautiful ring you had ever seen in your life, a thin rose-gold band with a small bow in the middle decorated by a solitary stone. It was so beautiful, and it represented your relationship so well, it made you cry harder. You just hugged him so tight, throwing your arms around his neck, whispering a hundred million little yes in his ear, while he unhooked your arms from him, and put the ring in your finger, kissing your knuckle above it. His eyes were glistening with unshed tears, and the emotion in them told you, not as a revelation but more as a little secret, that yes, this was the man you were going to grow old with.

“Can I hear it once more, my love? Will you marry me?” He asked, his voice now cracked.

“I’ll marry you, I’ll raise Yoonji alongside you, I’ll have children with you, I will grow old with you, and I will love you through it all, my love.” You said, finally connecting your lips with his in a kiss that felt new and sacred, as something neither of you had felt before but a kiss that changed things forever.

🎐Bubbles (Yoongi!Producer x Reader!Writer)

Bubbles Masterlist

Part 18

Plot: Yoongi, a famous music producer, and y/n, a writer, had been neighbors for a couple of months when Yoonji and her dad moved to the apartment in between the two. Due to some unbelievable coincidences, these two weird incompatible people were appointed baby Yoonji’s babysitters. What will they do when something happens to Yoonji’s dad and she’s left alone in the world?

A/n: Wow that was intense!! I sincerely hope that you liked it, and was worth the delay!! If you want to tell me what you thought about it, I would really appreciate it!! And because here in Europe is still October 13th, HAPPY JIMIN DAY 🥺 💖I hope all of you are having a great weekend and I love you all UWU💓💘💝💖💗💞💕

Send me an ask if you want to be added to the tag list.

Love 💜🌙

Tag list: @daydreamindollie @live-2-fangirl @mizz-kraziii @rjsmochii @jiminslovly @igotarmyofarohas @desteweirdo @chewymoustachio @lvnakook @sugapaste @salty-for-suga @expensive-grl @threedecadesofawkward @elegantfanshoelover @jisnuq @krystalizando @littlestsweetpea28 @chogiyeol-utopia @delilaahbards @agusttaegid @thebookishnerdsblog @kisskissshutmydoor @httppbaby @girlwith-thecinder-blockgarden @mabel-k3 @thenocturnalreadingotaku @midnightxxxmemories @tirednation @jayhope88 @peachesandviolets @tremendousminyoongi

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lucacangettathisass · 5 years ago

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how the light gets in (ch.7)

SUMMARY: After your home is ransacked by a group of strange men, you and your cousin are taken in by a group of outlaws. And that’s when the trouble really starts.

PAIRINGS: John Marston x Fem!Reader, Arthur Morgan x Fem!Reader

CHAPTER ONE, CHAPTER TWO, CHAPTER THREE, CHAPTER FOUR, CHAPTER FIVE, CHAPTER SIX

TAGGING: @mountainhymn if you would like to be added to the tag list lmk!

NOTES: aayyyeee another update! man this leave is doing wonders for this fic lmao. slight tw for low self esteem, it’s only one incident bust just to be sure! as always please Reblog and be sure to send me any comments and questions you may have! have a nice day!

There was fire everywhere.

No matter where you looked you were met with flames so hot that you felt all the moisture in your mouth dry up with a single hacking breath, and the metal of your locket melting into your skin, becoming a part of your flesh.

You tried to run, but the flames were everywhere, obscuring your vision so badly you couldn’t even tell where you were. You brought your hands to your eyes, wiping away the tears, trying to find some way to see clearly. When you opened your eyes, you could just make out a silhouette among the flames, standing completely still.

Elated at seeing someone else, and terrified for their safety, you rushed to them. You couldn’t remember ever being able to run that fast, it felt like you were flying.

“You need to get out!” You somehow managed to force the words out of your smoke clogged throat, if it was only just a strangled sounding cry, sounding like a particularly sick cat. “You-”

The silhouette turned, and you froze in place.

Standing before you amidst the flames, was Jake.

His hair seemed lighter in the light of the fire. His eyes were empty, containing only reflections of the flames surrounding you both.

“JAKE!”

You tried desperately to run to him, but with each breath he seemed to be getting further and further away. You helplessly held out your hands, hoping that if you stretched hard enough, you would be able to grab some part of him.

Then, all at once, you were in front of him.

The flames still raged, but you could no longer feel the heat.

Head spinning and stomaching flipping, you gripped Jake’s shirt, staring up at him with wide eyes. “Jake! Where’s Sadie? We need-” You stopped mid sentence when you a drop of blood fell on your cheek.

You watched in horror as blood began to flow out of Jake’s mouth, like a waterfall. Holes appeared in his forehead and stomach, dark and gnarled around the edges and spilling just as much blood.

Within seconds you were knee deep in Jake’s blood.

You screamed, clawing at Jake’s shirt, trying to get a grip so that you might climb onto him and he would put his arms around you, like when you were a child.

But he remained still, and when you looked into his eyes, you saw your tear streaked face, mouth open to let out your horrified screams.

You woke with a start, heart pounding.

You whipped your head around and held your breath, expecting to see flames.

But there weren’t any.

Everything was fine and normal, because it had all been a horrible nightmare, and now you were awake and back in Colter.

“You ok?”

With a slight jump, you turned to see Sadie looking at you with worry. You glanced around and saw the other women had more or less the same expression.

Face flushing, you nodded quickly. “Of course.” Your voice sounded strangled, like in your nightmare, and you coughed to try and clear your throat.

As your heart slowed and the biting cold chased away the dream memories of the searing flames, you saw from the corner of your eye Sadie shifting closer to you. “What happened?” She asked, and you knew it would be pointless to pretend you were ok.

“I just...I had a bad dream.” You instinctively moved closer to Sadie’s side, leaning against her as she puts an arm around you. “I’ll be fine.”

For a while the two of you sit together in silence. You thought back to your childhood, where most days you would run into Sadie’s arms, sobbing over how one of the local children had tormented you. It was apparently a favoured hobby of theirs. In this moment, you felt the same kind of helplessness and despair that you had felt all those years ago. You thought you had grown out of it, but clearly not.

You brought your fingers to your locket, and wished that your mother was there to give some kind of guidance and comfort. Of course you knew that was pointless, what physical comfort could the dead provide after all?

You were pulled out of your melancholy by the arrival of food, brought in by Mr Matthews, Mr Pearson and, to your surprise, Mr Escuella.

While the older men went to the other women, Mr Esceulla approached you and Sadie, bowls of stew in each hand. “Hope you haven’t gotten sick of venison yet.”

You sat up straight, quickly smiling as you took both bowls, handing one to Sadie. “Of course not.” You assured him. “Thank you Mr Escuella.”

You expected him to leave with Mr Matthews and Mr Pearson, but he sat in front of the fire instead. Deciding that it wasn’t your place to question his whims, you began to eat, all too aware of the cold stare Sadie was sending Mr Escuella.

Now that you were able to get a closer look at him, you found Mr Escuella to be good looking. He kept his hair in a ponytail, which was something you were unused to seeing on men, but it suited him rather well. His finely trimmed facial hair indicated a sense of pride in his appearance and that he took care of himself. This was something you were used to seeing, but only in polite society, and it had never before occurred to you that outlaws and the like could be as well groomed as that crowd, but this whole experience was doing a lot to alter your previous world views.

“You settling in ok?”

His question brought you back to earth, and you nodded, still smiling. “Yes, everyone has been very kind and accommodating. Thank you.”

Mr Escuella snorted. “Not everyone.”

You furrowed your brow. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I was talking about Micah.” The tone Mr Escuella used indicated that while they were in the same gang, there didn’t appear to be any kind of friendship between Mr Escuella and Mr Bell. Of course, the interaction they had while you were checking up on Mr Marston was a decent indicator of that too. “Listen, like I said, he’s a jackass. If he gives you any trouble tell one of us ok? Most of us don’t like him so we won’t mind shoving a boot up his ass.”

To say you were surprised would be an understatement. The other women, mainly Miss Jones, had also told you to confide in them should the men prove annoying, and you of course knew that Sadie would be more than willing to lend an ear (and no doubt fist), but to hear one of the men, especially one that appeared to be as well respected and esteemed as Mr Escuella, say such a thing took you aback.

“It’s really fine Mr Escuella.” You assured him. “I didn’t take any offence to what he said.” In truth, you still didn’t know what he had meant. Sadie apparently did, but she still didn’t explain it to you, and you thought better of asking, lest it upset her.

“Still, it would be nice to have an excuse to knock him on his ass.” Mr Escuella pulled out a cigarette case, a rather fine looking one, and opened it, pulling one out. “You want one?” He extended the case to you.

“Oh no, I don’t smoke.” You smiled, feeling yourself warm at Mr Escuella’s friendliness. “But thank you.”

Mr Escuella nodded. “What about you?” His gaze shifted to Sadie.

She remained silent, only eating and glowering at Mr Escuella.

“Alright.” Apparently unfazed, Mr Escuella returned the cigarette case to his pocket, and pulled out a match. He struck it against the heel of his boot and lit his cigarette, tossing it into the fire.

The flames stuttered a little, and you flinched.

If Mr Escuella noticed, he didn’t react. “You did a good job with John.” He took a puff on his cigarette. “The stitches look real clean.”

A flush came to your cheeks, and your smile grew. “That’s very kind of you to say Mr Escuella.”

“Where did you learn to do that?” He looked you up and down. “You don’t seem like the type to get into scrapes with wild animals.”

“No, but an old friend of mine is.” You laughed lightly. “He loves to hunt, and has more boldness than sense, which isn’t a good combination. He would get wounded so often that learning how to tend to those kinds of injuries properly became something of a necessity.”

Mr Escuella chuckled, the sound coming from deep in his chest, and you bloomed with pride knowing that you did that. “Yeah, that’ll do it.” He took another drag. “Where’s he?”

“Russia.”

Mr Escuella raised a brow. “That’s pretty far.”

“His parents wanted him to return home.” You explained. “They felt he had spent enough time here.”

A pensive look came over Mr Escuella’s face. “Yeah. It can be hard being away from family.”

You remembered what the other women had told you about Mr Escuella, how he had more or less been forced into exile for rebelling against the government, leaving his family behind. He hadn’t seen them in years, and their fates were a mystery to him, just as his was to them. That was a despair that you knew was heavier than most. You wanted to say something, maybe even touch his arm or shoulder, but there was too much space between the two of you, both physically and in the sense of status, for you to properly do so. And of course Sadie.

“So what else did you boys find at that O’Driscoll camp, aside from the one we got in the barn?”

Everyone turned to Miss Jones, who was looking eagerly at Mr Escuella.

“Explosives and plans for what was supposed to be their next big robbery.” Mr Escuella sounded rather smug, and you didn’t blame him. You imagined it would’ve been quite the feat. “We must’ve killed a couple dozen of them, but it looks like it’s going to be worth it, because now we’re the ones who’re gonna be robbing Leviticus Cornwall.”

“Mr Cornwall?” You raised your eyebrows and you could almost feel your ears physically perk up at the name. “You’re going to rob Mr Cornwall?”

“Well not him directly, just one of his trains.” Mr Escuella took a drag of his cigarette, regarding you with a curious gaze. “Sounds like you know him.”

“Oh, well, not really.” You felt your face flush again, but this time it was embarrassment rather than happiness. “I only met him once a few years ago, but he left a rather distinct impression. I’ve seen him a small handful of times since, but we never spoke for very long.”

Mr Escuella seemed pensive again as he nodded. “Well, I better get back to the rest of the guys.” He rose to his feet, taking one last puff of his cigarette before it too was tossed into the fire, adding a slight tobacco scent to the air. He turned to you. “Like I said, if Micah gives you any trouble, just get one of us and we’ll take care of it.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary Mr Escuella, but thank you all the same.”

He nodded, his expression clearly showing that he didn’t believe that all, and left the cabin.

“Looks like Javier’s got his eye on you.” Miss Gaskill said teasingly.

You stared at her with wide eyes and flushed cheeks. “Don’t be ridiculous! I’m sure he was just being kind.”

“Oh yeah, Javier’s real good at being kind, especially to women.” Miss Jackson added, before bursting into giggles along with Miss Gaskill.

“Leave it alone you two.” Miss Roberts interjected, although she too seemed rather amused. “You’re gonna scare her.”

“If he tries anything he’ll be the one that’s scared.” Sadie said gruffly, which only made Miss Gaskill and Miss Jackson laugh harder.

“Oh Javier’s harmless, really.” Miss Roberts said. “I mean, he likes women well enough, but he’s respectful too.”

“He’d better be.” Sadie glowered at the fire.

“Sadie please, he really was just being friendly.” You said, in an attempt to calm her. Really, you did find the idea of Mr Escuella finding you attractive to be not just laughable, but utterly impossible.

Since when did good looking, well groomed men like him show any interest in ugly girls like you?

You were in the middle of hearing Miss Roberts regale the story of Jack’s first steps, which was funny as it was adorable, when you all received another visitor.

At first you didn’t look up, as you were too wrapped up in the story to really care about anything else, until you heard your name being called. When you did look up, you saw that Mr Escuella had returned, and everyone was looking at you.

Immediately you felt the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. You had no idea what was going one, but you doubted that it was good. “Is everything alright Mr Escuella?” You asked, trying to remain calm to hide how scared you really were.

“Dutch and Hosea want to talk with you.” He said.

You felt your throat and lungs constrict like in your dream as every worst possible scenario ran through your mind.

“What do they want with her?” Sadie was on her feet and wasted no time in getting to your side, glaring fiercely at Mr Escuella. “She hasn’t done anything!”

“It’s nothing bad.” Mr Escuella said reassuringly, no doubt seeing how badly things could go if he wasn’t careful. “They just want to talk. That’s all.”

Swallowing thickly, you slowly rose to your feet. “A-Alright.”

“I’m coming with her.” Sadie said firmly, still shooting daggers.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” Mr Escuella sounded hesitant, and you didn’t blame him, with the way Sadie was looking at him. “Look, she’s going to be fine. Nothing will happen to her, you have my word.”

“Why should the word of a criminal matter to me?” Sadie hissed.

The atmosphere became tense, and you felt your heart pound against your rib cage.

“She won’t be going far.” Mr Escuella said, calm yet firm. “Just a few yards, if that. If anything happens to her, you can do what you like to me.”

Sadie continued to glare.

“She’ll be fine Mrs Adler.” Miss Grimshaw spoke up, clearly seeing that this wasn’t going to go anywhere without outside interference. “Just let her go. She’ll be fine.”

Sadie clenched her jaw, and for a moment you wondered if she was going to argue. But she didn’t.

Tentatively, you approached Mr Escuella. Out of the corner of your eye you saw Sadie try to reach for you, but Miss Roberts grabbed her wrist just in time. You tried to remain calm, despite feeling distinctly like a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf.

Mr Escuella held the door open for you, and when you were both out in the cold you let him lead you to Mr Matthews and Mr Van Der Linde.

“You’re really not in any trouble, I promise.” He said.

You nodded. “I’m sorry about Sadie.”

To your immense surprise, Mr Escuella chuckled. “Ah, don’t worry about it.” He said, and he sounded very genuine. “Listen, I get where she’s coming from. If I was in her place, I wouldn’t want you out of my sight either.”

An immense wave of relief washed over you, and you were even able to smile. “Thank you for being so understanding.”

Mr Escuella smiled. “Don’t worry about it kid.” His voice was kind, almost gentle, and you felt yourself becoming more and more endeared to him.

Just as he said, the house where Mr Matthews and Mr Van Der Linde had moved into wasn’t that far, making Sadie’s concern seem like a major overreaction. And just like before, Mr Escuella held the door open for you.

“Thank you Mr Escuella.”

You stepped inside, and was greeted by a burst of heat. For a moment, you held your breath.

“Here she is Dutch, Hosea.”

The two men looked up, and you saw that they were sitting in front of a contained fireplace, and you were able to quell your fears.

Mr Matthews smiled kindly at you. “Are you cold? You can come closer to the fire if you like.”

You eyed the dancing flames, feeling your heart rate spike. “I’m fine Mr Matthews.”

“Well if you change your mind, just take a seat.” Mr Matthews gestured to an empty chair off in a corner, beside a doorway, where Mr Morgan suddenly appeared.

“Oh, Mr Morgan!” You didn’t know he had taken up residence in the same house as Mr Matthews and Mr Van Der Linde, and seeing him made your face flush from surprise. “How are you?”

“Fine.” He was regarding you curiously. “So, I hear you know Leviticus Cornwall.”

For a moment, you were so wrapped up in your surprise, that you didn’t realize what he had said. “Oh well, I-I wouldn’t say that I know him.” You looked back over at Mr Matthews and Mr Van Der Linde. “Is that what this is about?”

“Yes.” Mr Van Der Linde’s eyes roamed over you, and he had the same look of curiosity as Mr Morgan. “Javier told us you met him once, and that he made quite the impression.”

“I-Well yes, that is true.” You kept your eyes on Mr Van Der Linde, although you couldn’t ignore Mr Morgan’s gaze, or the heat that rose up your neck because of it.

“Now see, that is what interested me.” Mr Van Der Linde smiled in a way that you couldn’t quite describe. “How did that happen?”

You hesitated. “Well, it’s a bit of a long story.”

“We ain’t goin anywhere.” Mr Morgan was leaning against the doorframe, the collar of his heavy blue coat partially obscuring his face, and making his already striking eyes even more disarming. “So go on.”

“Don’t rush her Arthur.” Mr Matthews gently scolded. “I’m very sorry about him, he forgets how to behave sometimes.”

“Th-there’s no need for apologies Mr Matthews.” You were only just able to tear your gaze away from Mr Morgan to look at Matthews when you spoke, but you still felt his eyes on you.

The feeling of being a rabbit in a wolf’s mouth had returned, but it was...different, somehow. Tinged with something you couldn’t name.

“Well, if you truly wish to know…” You trailed off, looking from Mr Matthews to Mr Van Der Linde and back again.

“We most certainly do.” Mr Van Der Linde replied, looking very eager.

You sighed. You supposed that they were all going to find out eventually, might as well make it now.

#john marston x reader #arthur morgan x reader #red dead x reader #red dead fanfic #red dead redemption fanfic #fic: how the light gets in

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atlas-of-a-human-soul · 6 years ago

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The Princess, pt.4 (S.M.)

Summary: After being separated, Shawn begins to question his feelings for the princess, most importantly, he begins to question hers.

Warnings: angst

Word count: 2500

The Princess Masterlist

A violent shiver shook you from your head to your toes as you walked back to your quarters with a quick pace. It was hard to focus as thoughts of your past, present and future all fought for a space in your head, while your heart just needed a break. It needed a break as it was already broken in pieces, completely dysfunctional, shards of it dragged away from you and lost forever. Not only did you lose Shawn, a man you could see yourself spending a lifetime with, but you almost lost Philip as well.

„A wise choice, my dear.“ The Queen had a smug smile on her face, Harry was utterly confused while Meghan seemed to be in shock.

„Let's not pretend I had any other choice.“ You responded sharply, your eyes narrowed at the old woman before you with disdain.

„Oh, there was...but you and I both know how that would have worked out.“ She snickered like it was all just a joke to her. Your life was just a cruel joke she herself carried out without any remorse.

„Oh yeah..I know. I know how people who are strong and brave enough to think with their own head end up...Dead in a car accident.“ You spat, using air quotes on ‘accident’. Harry's head snapped in your direction, the wheels in his head turning once he realized what you were insinuating. His mouth was open, while Meghan clung to his arm, unaware just how serious the situation was.

„Everyone out!“ The Queen ordered, her merciless gaze set on you. The room emptied within moments, but you stood your ground.

„How dare you?!“ She began, getting up to make herself seem a little more intimidating.

„I spoke the truth. We both know it...Lady D. wasn't the only one, isn't that true? My mother was your victim as well...hundreds of others.“ You held your head high, defiance oozing out of you with every breath you took, with every beat of your heart.

„You will keep you mouth shut!“ She waved her index finger at you, her lips set in a firm line.

„I will. Not for you, but for my brothers. They don't need to have this whole thing break their hearts all over again. You took their mother from them, my mother from me...now you've taken love and my choice of future. So congratulations, you've won.“ You spoke, your voice cracking at the end. She caught on to it and smiled like she enjoyed seeing you in pain.

„Mr. Mendes has been escorted out and will be leaving England tomorrow night.“ Philip's voice echoed in the empty room, hitting you straight in the heart like ricochet bullets.

„You are dismissed. Pack your things.“ The Queen told him and your heart dropped.

„What are you talking about?!“ You shouted and she turned to you with pursed lips.

„Philip here is fired for not doing his job properly.“ She replied and your jaw dropped.

„You can't do this!“ You ran to her, grabbing her arm. She yanked her arm out of your grasp and sat back on the throne.

„Mind your tone! Show some respect you spoiled brat! I can do whatever I want! I'm the Queen of England!“ She shouted.

„Perhaps, but you still need me for whatever plan you have. I will not do it without Philip by my side. I can promise you that!“ Your voice was dangerously low, confident and prideful. The Queen knew you weren't bluffing, and it seemed she was thinking about your words very carefully. Although she was not pleased, eventually she caved in.

„Fine. Philip stays, but there will be another to keep an eye on you. Wouldn't want you getting hurt or lost again, now would we?“ She had that damn smile back on her face and you knew this was the best you were going to get. With a nod, you turned around and walked out of the throne room.

That's how you found yourself hurrying back to your bedroom, just to lay your head to rest before your legs gave out. You've lost far too much today, but even with all that in mind, you would still do it again. For that small piece of paradise Shawn had showed you, an eternity in hell seemed like a fair trade. Walking into your room, Philip followed quickly.

„Princess, I must give you something.“ He spoke in a hushed tone and you turned around, your face twisted in an angry scowl, pain radiating through your body and showing in the unshed tears that clouded your vision.

„What? After today? No warning? Nothing? I trusted you!“ You yelled at him and he closed his eyes for a few moments.

„I had no choice. My loyalty is to the crown.“ He spoke and you looked at him in shock.

„Your loyalty is to me! ME! I have a damn crown!“ You slammed your hand on the table next to you, pain shooting through as you did.

„But she is the one sitting on the throne.“ He responded quietly, averting his gaze elsewhere, clearly ashamed of his actions against you.

„How long?“ You asked and he looked up. „How long have you known about the arrangement?“ You crossed your arms over your chest and he exhaled loudly.

„Since the Queen's birthday. The gentlemen was present that day.“ He replied and you swallowed thickly.

„I cannot believe you've betrayed me this way.“ Your voice was hoarse and weak, a lump in your throat constantly present since the moment you and Shawn have been discovered.

„Please take this.“ Phillip extended his arm, opened his hand and on the palm of his hand laid a small pendant. It was silver with an S on the front, a little piece of parchment sticking out from it.

„What is that?“ You took a step closer to examine it.

„Young Shawn begged me to give this to you. Apparently it's very dear to his heart and there's a little note in it too. It's meant to be a reminder of his feelings for you and a symbol of hope that you will be liberated and united once more.“ Philip explained and you took the small pendant in your hand, running your fingertips over the S, your bottom lip quivered.

„Leave.“ You ordered and Philip complied.

Plopping down on your bed, the soft mattress made it seem like you were floating on a cloud, the small pendant in your hand burning at your mind to open it. If it was dear to his heart, it was all the more important to you. It was the only thing of him you have and it was a painful reminder of all the things you'll never have. Opening the locket, a small piece of paper fell on your chest. Unwrapping it you furrowed your eyebrows in confusion once you read the content. A series of numbers. Was this a code or something else? Was it his phone number?

While you were busy figuring out the hidden message Shawn had left you, he himself was losing his mind. He paced back and forth in his hotel room, his head in his hands, his usually perfect curls were a mess. He wondered why you chose your title over him. Sure, it's not like you've know him long, but he believed you two shared a connection. A connection that was so rare it may come once in a lifetime if you're lucky enough. The kind you dream of, hope for, even tho' there's no guarantee it exists. He was confused,angry, scared, devastated and lost. There were too many emotions hitting him all at once that he could barely breathe as even the thought of you in that palace, alone, with no one on your side gave him a panic attack. He could tell you were unhappy in that place. Hell, you even told him you'd do anything to get away from there if you could, so why didn't you take that chance when it had been offered to you? His mind was plagued with thoughts of people and things he had no control over. Who were they trying to marry you off to? Were you really doing that? Better yet, how can he stop it? He needed to talk to you, at least once more..face to face. That way he'd know he tried to do something instead of just letting you go. He needed to fight, but how could he do that when he had to leave for New York in less than a day and there were a few guards in front of his door specifically told to make sure he leaves the country without contacting you. Giving that pendant and his number were the only thing he had thought of, but even that wasn't a guarantee. If Philip chose not to give it to you, he'd lose his only chance to ever talk to you.

3rd person POV

It was a torturous night for both of them. Neither Shawn, nor the princess got any sleep, both cried into their pillows, hoping the other one was safe and sound. It was a tragic turn of events, to tear apart two souls that craved each other more than life itself. Separating soul flames would never amount to any good, for the souls or the people that surround them. Such pain and anguish will take over, hollowing them out until there's nothing left but a void of darkness humanity has seen only a few times before. Yes, no one knew soul flames were real, nor that the princess had found hers, but some will soon notice how empty her eyes are despite the smile on her face.

The following morning, Shawn was escorted to the airport, and all but shoved into a plane. On the other side of the city, the princess was preparing to meet her fiance, her heart and mind elsewhere. Will there ever be some way to reunite these young flames again, or will all be lost in the fire and turned to ash and dust?

Shawn couldn't hold back tears as the plane took off. He watched the city below him become smaller and smaller until he couldn't see anything anymore. For Shawn it had felt like his body was leaving, but his heart and soul stayed behind..with her. She had such a hold on him, but didn't even realize it. Hell, even he didn't realize it. The Princess took him to different places and dimensions he had never imagined and he knew he'd never find a girl like her again. She was different, not for the obvious reasons, but her upbringing might have had something to do with it. She was brave and kind, selfless and witty, intelligent and artistic with such dreams and passion that Shawn had never seen. She had confidence written on her forehead, her ambition clear in the way she held herself, her rebellious side obvious in that mischievous glint in her eyes. Yes, she had him from the moment they met and it was clear to him that he needed her. He needed her and the thought of her with someone new made his stomach turn.

In just a few days, her face was plastered all over magazines, her smile so bright Shawn could feel his heart breaking in ways he never knew were possible. She was smiling, but that smile didn't quite reach her eyes. The man next to her seemed to be genuinely captivated by her and Shawn didn't like it. He watched the video of their brief outing, pausing as it showed her, placing his hand on the screen while his heart clenched and twisted in pain. Shawn was scared she would forget him, fall for the pompous, posh man who clearly already wanted her as much as he did. He sighed heavily, swallowing tears before slamming his laptop on the bed in frustration.

Days passed, weeks followed. Shawn was traveling and playing his music, while the princess attended her brother's wedding with her new suitor. The smile on Shawn's face was fading fast, often traded for a scowl or a straight line and no one knew why. He was often sulking in the corner, his songs always consumed with pain, he even put Mercy back on his set-list. On the other hand, the princess seemed to be glowing, happiness radiating from every pore on her flawless face and Shawn gave up on the hope of ever being near her again. She was untouchable to him and he knew it. She seemed happier without him and as selfish as it sounds, it killed him everyday to see her move on while he was stuck in the abyss, staring at the never ending darkness she had caused.

It was a stormy night, almost 6 weeks without her and Shawn was fighting yet another sleepless night. His breathing was fast and shallow, his chest rising up and down like crashing waves on the shore. He had been staring at the ceiling for hours when the silence quickly faded and his ringtone sounded. Sighing, he reached over to grab his phone and picked up without a second thought.

„Hello.“ He answered, his voice tired and laced with what seemed to be unimaginable anguish. The line was silent, just a slight pitter patter heard in the distance. Shawn furrowed his eyebrows in confusion, checking if the line was dead for a moment before putting the phone back to his ear.

„Hello?“ He repeated, but got no answer. „Who is this?“ He questioned, growing frustrated with the caller, but something told him it wasn't a stranger. He could hear soft breathing come through and he just knew.

„Y/N?“ His voice cracked as his heart picked up the pace. He jumped up and started pacing his room.

„It's okay. You don't have to say anything, just listen.“ He swallowed thickly. „I want you to know that I still....I still feel the same way, even if you don't. I'm not gonna say it unless I'm saying it to your face, but you know exactly how I feel.“ Shawn spoke, his hands were shaking in anticipation. He needed her to say anything, just to hear her beautiful voice once more. 'Please say something, please, talk to me beautiful' he begged in his mind and almost like she heard his prayer, she came through.

„It's mutual.“ Were the last words he heard before the line went dead and Shawn was left clutching his phone in his hand at 3 am in a hotel room of an unknown city. Her voice sounded broken and torn as well, like she herself was still suffering. It sounded like a completely different person than the one in all the photos and videos that were circling the internet. Shawn had finally realized she never moved on. She still loved him and now he had some hope to cling to. Maybe it wasn't over for them yet.

#shawn mendes #shawn mendes x reader #shawn mendes fic #shawn mendes x y/n #shawn mendes fanfiction #shawn mendes angst #shawn mendes au #shawn mendes fanfic #the princess #shawn mendes imagine

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lesiasmadness · 7 years ago

Text

I turned your kindness into poison

The nights in summer don’t give the world much time to breathe. Overwhelmed by the sunlight the Earth holds it’s breath waiting for the twilight. Than it can finally breathe the sigh of relief, filling the aire with the leftover heat, along with the singing of birds and smells of herbs. This suffocating heat stays until only a few hours are left before the sunrise, than fades away and lets the world breathe the fresh cold breeze. It was at this time of night Cuphead found the Inkwell forest to be at it’s best. The atmosphere finally matched the colour palette the moonlight graced the world with: cold and yet soft, calming and pleasant to the tired eye of a sleepless loner. Cuphead opened the window of his room, finally letting out the heat that tormented him throughout this night of tossing and turning in his bed with no hope of falling asleep. Now the chilling flow of aire wrapped around him in a gentle embrace, and the forest lullaby filled the room. The singing of crickets, rustling of the leaves and the songs of toads replaced the never ending static noises and whistling in Cupheads ears, and the sound of waves brushing gently against the shore completely washed away the aching of a body struggling to fall asleep.

And yet, it was not the sweet sensation of his body finally shutting down Cuphead waited for that filled him. Instead, he felt a fresh wave of energy. Refreshed, as if he slept through all night, he stood by the window, more awake than ever. A spark of adventurous mischief lit up in Cupheads mind and he decided to go for a walk in hope of tiring his body to sleep. Cups sat on the windowsill and turned to face outside, his legs already touching one of the bushes in Elder Kattles garden, but than stopped to take one last look at his room before wandering off. Now that the walls of this room weren’t leaning over him the room itself seemed peaceful. The moonlight gave a silver-blue outline to everything it touched. While in the shade, where the lines were blurred, the memories of the past came to life as Cupheads mind let the imagination do it’s work where eyes couldn’t. Every corner of this room once had more than one tiny world created by the imagination of the cup brothers when they were younger. Now, in the dim lighting of the night, the silhouettes of dragoons, knights, vampires, brave plane pilots, evil scientists came to life once more, but much less bright, almost invisible, much like ghosts. The imaginary figurines danced their grotesque moves, but never left the shadows, as that’s where reality sharpend the smooth lines of perception and only let one see what’s really there. But the real picture was just as whimsical as the make-believe one. This room never changed much, so every tiny detail was a reminder of good ol’ times. Two beds by two sides on the room were surrounded by all sorts of sports equipment, toys or the remains of whatever hobby the cup brothers picked up and eventually dropped. On the walls hung white sheets of paper with childish paintings on them, though it was impossible to make out what was drawn. Cuphead could picture them from memory anyway. Even though the bedroom was a mess in general, Cupheads bed seemed to be on a higher levels of chaos. Clothes lied here and there, pens and torn pages were scattered on and under the bed, quite a few books were hidden under the pillow. The pillow itself was half way out of the pillowcase, the blanket was stuffed into the space between the bed and the wall. A far more organized sight lied on the opposite side of the room. Near Mugmans bed books were stocked into neatly arranged rows. There were 10, maybe 15 books of all sizes. Mugman could be reading 3 of them in one day, switching between geology studies, romance novels and history books without giving it much thought. The other books he just forgot to bring back to the library or left near his bed to reread later. Beside books there were boxes of board games, laying just as organized. Between them notebooks and photo albums were shuffled in. All Cupheads friends envied him for having a brother who would keep the room tidy. But in reality, sometimes Mugmans belongings were much more of a bother than Cupheads were. Mugs was found of collecting all sorts of trinkets. He had a collection of old keys, lockets, sea shells, all of which he would forget about in few month. And that knick-knackery would get scattered all across the room over time. When tidying the room, those things were the biggest bother. Even now as Cuphead looked around he saw few marbles glistening from under Mugmans bed. Cuphead shook his head and got ready to jump out into the garden when his eyes locked one something in the room and he froze. He looked at his brother sleeping soundly in bed. If it was anyone but Cuphead looking, the sight wouldn’t be an eyecatcher. Mugs slept like any other person: lied almost still safe for the motions of breathing. Yet for Cuphead it was unusual to see his brother sleeping so calmly. Cups stepped back into the room and leaned on the windowsill. “Mugs, are you asleep?” - Cuphead whispered, afraid that the answer will be “I was before you asked me”. But the answer never came, so Cuphead allowed himself to speak up. “I’ll take it as a "yes”. That means you don’t mind me babbling over here. After all out of all the people I know you’re the hardest one to wake up. A whole jazz band playing it’s loudest wouldn’t be able to make you wake up.“ - Cuphead didn’t whisper anymore, but spoke as softly as he could. A part of him wished that his brother only pretended to sleep and was actually listening, but that wasn’t possible since in that case Mugman would have stopped him from trying to sneak out. "You’ve been crying in your sleep a lot lately though. I’m not even sure you remember all those times when I woke you up to calm you down. And far, far too many times when I didn’t wake you up and just listened to you sobbing. I said ” lately", but really I don’t know how long ago it started. It’s possible you always cried in your sleep and I just didn’t know. After all not so long ago, I used to sleep just as tight as you do. But look at me now: I hardly get any sleep. No wander: basically killing so many people and being through literal hell does wanders to your ability to stay up. Or rather inability to stay asleep. It doesn’t help that almost every night you call the names of the ones we fought and cry for their forgiveness. You know as well as I do that they are alive and well. Or at least most of them are. And we basically did them a favour by freeing them from their debts. But you still blame yourself even more than I do myself. And what scares me the most is that it’s impossible to tell that your consciousness is eating you from inside. It’s impossible to tell because you always stay as cheerful as you’ve been… Impossible to tell if you’re anyone but me. Because I hear you cry every night. And it scares me to no extend. I’m not scared of you blaming yourself for hurting all of those people. You’ll get over it, I know you will. Not completely, but at least partially the guilt will be gone. That’s not what concerns me. What does terrify me is that you’re so good at hiding it. How can I know if you carry any other guilt on your consciousness? In fact… A thought came to my mind not so long ago. It chills me down to my bones. I remembered that I did hear you cry in your sleep one time when we were younger. Do you recall that day before Christmas eve? When we… I mean when I decided to find our Christmas presents and peek inside? We were too young to wrap the presents back up properly, so surely later that day Elder Kettle found out. He scolded us bad. I was used to such things, besides,I knew that the next day was Christmas eve, so he wouldn’t stay mad at us then. So I didn’t give it much thought. But you were always a crybaby. You cried every time Elder Kettle got mad… Even when you weren’t the one being scolded. I also always dragged you along into trouble so you had plenty reasons to brake in tears. That time, however… That time we both stood there, in frond of Elder Kettle who was boiling with anger… And you just took the scolding silently. You didn’t even shed a tear. It confused me so much. We got sent to our room, and I asked you to forgive me. It was my second time asking you for forgiveness. Just few days before that I got us in trouble and when you started crying, I said I was sorry for getting you into trouble. I don’t know what made me realize I it was my fault, but I did say sorry. So I decided that I should apologize that time as well. I asked for forgiveness, but you said I was okay. For some reason, you didn’t cry, you weren’t even looking upset. You smiled at me. We went to bed that night. And just before falling asleep, on the edge of my hearing ringed a quiet noise of sobbing. I shrugged it of as just being a dream. I’m still not sure if I heard that for real. The next day though I woke up and saw you sleeping of the couch in the living room. Elder Kettle always let us sleep there and stayed there, if we had a nightmare and came crying to him. Which means maybe you did cry. I always found it strange: why would you cry in the night? You were always a crybaby, why would you be shy of tears that one time? For the longest time I thought that you were just afraid to cry in front of me. I did tease you for that sometimes. I felt a bit guilty about that. You still did cry whenever there was a reason, even the most significant one. Remember how you spilled paint on pretty leaves you gathered in the forest? That got you in tears, he he. But… You stopped crying at times when I got us in trouble. You were never clearly mad or upset. To be honest, I let myself be even more mischievous because of that. I started taking your kindness for granted. Until that one thought struck my mind. One single thought made me fear your calmness. I thought: I apologized to you when we wwere kids for getting us in trouble because you started crying. The next time you didn’t cry at all. What if… What if you didn’t want me to apologize? What if you didn’t want me to feel bad? You always tried to make me happy, so seeing that I get upset over you crying made you stop crying? Well stop crying when I can see that is. What if that was the first time you started blaming yourself for making me apologize, not me for making you cry? What if that was the start of your habit of taking all the blame for yourself? Many years passed since then until the next time I saw you cry in the night. Many years passed, and one day I got us into the biggest mischief of our lives. I dragged you into the devils casino and bet our souls. We ran home. We told Elder Kettle. I fell on my knees. I cried like never before. I begged you to forgive me. And than I saw the biggest wander of my life: you took me by the shoulder, made my stand on my feet, looked me in the eyes and smiled. You smiled! You said it was all right! I just stood there, tears dripping down my face, mouth hanging open, completely frozen by what I just saw. How was it possible? I literally dragged you into hell! I ruined your life, I did it out of my own greed! And yet “it’s alright”, you said. Impossible… But now I realize that that moment of science I wasted on being amazed was my last chance to fix what I’ve broken. Well, not fix, but at least prevent from breaking completely. I should have told you, I should have shouted, I should have begged for you to hate me! I should have made you blame me, I should have convinced you that I was the only one responsible. I know you wouldn’t be able to stay mad… So at least I should have made you accept my apology. But I didn’t. I stood there, silent, stared at you smiling, I let you hug me, I let you waste your kindness on me… And by that I turned your kindness into poison which burns you from the inside till this day. That night we settled down in the forest to get some sleep and patch ourselves up after our first few contracts collected. We decided to take shifts at keeping the fire we set up. You said you’d take the first turn watching the fire. I tried to fall asleep. Off course, I couldn’t. Not after what I’ve done. When some time passed you thought I fell asleep… That’s when I heard to cry. Quiet weeping at first, than chocked moans, than straight up crying, than hysterical sobbing, than violent coughing… It seemed to go on forever, and yet I didn’t get up to comfort you. I knew you’d rather think that I didn’t see you cry than be comforted. So I gave you the pleasure of thinking that you were unheard. Hearing you cry was unbearable. It wasn’t a cry of someone who has to deal with their soul taken away. It was a cry of someone who despises themselves for what they have done. I heard the disgust you bear for yourself for pointing your fingergun at someone. You’d gladly go straight to hell and not bother with gathering contracts if it was only your soul on the line. But it was my soul as well, so you pushed through. You fought. And for every fight you hated yourself even more. And yet somehow once the sun was up and I came up to yoy you smiled at me again. “How did you sleep, brother?” you asked, your voice still hoarse after a night of endless crying. I lied… I said I slept horribly… While really I didn’t sleep at all, I heard your every last sob. I was destroyed. And yet you smiled. You always kept smiling. You greeted each new person with a smile, you moved with energy, you cheered me up my every step… I turned you into an expert liar, haven’t I? This habit of yours… Never letting me hate myself, was it my fault you got it? (I wish you could hear me right now, brother.) Was it because of me always making you share my punishment? Or was it because you grew up way faster than me and started taking responsibility when I couldn’t? Or was it because you’re just too kind? Now that the hatred you bare is spilling out through your tears in your sleep I can finally see what has been going on this whole time. Since we were little you decided that every trouble I caused was your fault. Your fault for not stopping me. So you decided to not let me worry about you crying. Because you thought I didn’t have to worry about something that was your fault. So you kept the cheerful mask on for me. This went on our whole lives. You mastered the art of deception, your disguise is perfect. You chime with love for life while really all you feel is anguish because of everything you think you’ve done. You’re just too much of a loving brother to let yourself blame me. But after our little adventure to hell and back this hatred became just too much. So in your sleep, when you can’t keep your guard up, you finally let go of your cheerful facade and cry. If I didn’t let you take responsibility for my every mistake, if I wasn’t such a pain all the time, if I could be more caring and noticed your suffering, if back then, when you said it was okay I sold your soul, I made you think otherwise, if only I was a better brother, you’d be okay. But now, because of me, you’re broken. Because of me, you’re poisoning yourself with your own kindness. I want to change that. I want to make you love yourself again. I’ll try my best to be the brother you deserve, even though nobody can be that good of a brother. I want to say that I will fix you. But that’s impossible. A person can’t be fixed. You won’t just “become okay”. Even if you glue together the pieces of a broken cup, once the tea inside becomes to be to much to bare, it will sip through the cracks. Just like tears. No matter how much I try, I can’t undo all the damage you’ve caused yourself because of me. And even so, I won’t be able to even try that hard. I’m a bad brother, and my best try will be miserable compared to your attempts to shield me from guilt. But the fact that I can’t fix you, doesn’t mean I won’t try. Just… Just know that I’m trying. It may not be apparent. After all, how much can an idiot who couldn’t see his brother fade his whole life do? I know that you won’t accept my attempts at first. But if you’ll refuse to get better, I’ll tell you that you being hurt makes me hurt. That shall make you care for yourself, right?“ For some reason, Cuphead expected an answer to his last question. But only silence followed. Was it selfish of him to hope that his brother was listening? Cuphead came to the conclusion that it was once he looked at his brother again. Sleeping so soundly. He has the right for at lest that much, at least a night of rest to escape the endless self destruction. Cuphead stepped away from his brothers bed, inched as quietly as he could until hitting the side of his bed with the back of his legs. Exhausted from all the emotion he unleashed and had to restrain to mere whispering, he collapsed on his bed. Finally, he could rest. He fell asleep at last. Now nothing but the lullaby of the forest ringed in the silence of the room. Just in few hours the sun will come and wake the restless cups of their slumber to chock them with summer heat and their own thoughts for the day once more. But for now, fresh aire filled the room. And in the dim lights of the moon lied hidden something Cuphead couldn’t see in his rush of confessions: his brother smiled in his sleep.

Have you ever been afraid of how you impact people around you? Okay, okay, I'm sorry. I was going to make a cute fanfic but it turned into angst really quickly and I couldn't stop it т_т Hope you enjoyed reading anyway!

#cuphead #cuphead don't deal with the devil #angst #mugman #fanfic #Lesia writes

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