Closed: Need to not be here.
After Susan had told Gabriel about Cecilia, he'd had a bit of a meltdown. He was man enough to admit that sometimes he fell apart over things. His triggers weren't even all that difficult to pinpoint, all things considered. There were a few that he actually hadn't had to face in years, not since his release
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"I know I didn't have to come." He did, though. Now that he was here, as much as it felt like a vice was tight on his chest, he was almost glad he'd come.
It hurt to look at her, though. Everything hurt just then, but it was worse, seeing Cecilia cough and shake. Instinctively he leaned forward and reached out, though he was sure even offering her the jacket they'd let him wear would get her pulled out of there immediately. He froze instead.
"I know what Susan said." There were a million things Gabriel had thought of and wondered about when he'd met Cecilia. She'd been from the same lifestyle that bred the prejudices that destroyed him, but she'd walked away from that. Knowing her the way he had, he didn't believe a word of it.
"What she told me the brought you in for. But I know you." Maybe he didn't. He knew a version of her when he'd been different himself. That still didn't change that he thought the highest of her. "And you don't deserve to be here."
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"I do-"
She couldn't bear to look at him.
"Gabe, all those things-" she said softly, eyes focused on the frays of her robes. "I did them-"
She had hurt people, worse- she had done it for show, for Bellatrix to see and watch and make sure that her prodigy was just as broken as she was. She had done everything she was told to do until she couldn't bear it anymore.
She had even killed for them.
"I'm supposed to be here-"
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On some level, maybe he should have guessed this. It's not like they took just anyone to Azkaban, not now. This was Cecilia though.
No one who was a complete monster could have spent so much time with him, a known Muggleborn, even after the war.
"There's more to that, though. I know there is." It was a feeling. Instinct. Normally, his instincts were the last thing he needed to actually trust, but on this he felt sure.
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Cecilia hadn't been given much of an option when she was first brought into the Death Eaters. It was either join the club or find yourself face to face with an Unforgivable (and it wasn't the fun and cuddly Cruciatus), and with the pressure she faced from her parents and her unending need to please them, Holden all but leaving her alone to deal with the legacy, she found there was really one answer.
Her life was threatened more times than she coudl count, even over the simplest things. Bellatrix loved brandishing her wand on Cecilia, scaring the hell out of the girl until she was shaking with fear and frustration. But heroes died in the war standing up for what they believed in and Cecilia was just a coward, going along with the ride until she couldn't take it anymore. She obeyed her orders until the very end, until she stopped Alecto Carrow from killing Harry Potter and her cover was blown.
"I could have fought harder-" she said, rubbing at her mouth, her hands chilled from the temperature in the room. "And I didn't-"
She eyed the itchy bleak tattoo on her wrist.
"We all have to pay for our pasts sometimes."
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Gabriel cleared his throat, trying to talk through the lump that was constantly threatening his voice and breath.
He might not know her experience, obviously he didn't even know enough to scratch the surface. He knew Death Eaters, though. He knew them well enough to know that they didn't regret things. There were a couple who seemed to feel bad for what they did to him, he could see it in their eyes. Then there were the others, the ones who didn't show event a modicum of remorse. Those were the dangerous one, the terrifying ones, the ones that he always expected to leave him for dead.
Cecilia was not one of them.
"I don't know exactly what happened. But you don't tell Death Eaters no and live to talk about it. And that's the difference."
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She watched over her shoulder for the rest of her life instead and even then it didn't do her any good. Instead, she woke up in the middle of St. Mungo's, body contorted in pain with a mark on her wrist she didn't remember ever getting and half-screwed memories of who she thought was her best friend tying her up and leaving her helpless for hours while torturing her to within an inch of her life.
And while that had scarred her enough, while the torture and the pain and the fear had brought her to panic attacks and nervous breakdowns, it still wasn't over.
"Do you want to know?" she asked him softly, eyes flickering to is slightly, weary, Cecilia sitting haphazardly in her seat, her whole body exhausted. "Do you want to know why I'm really here?"
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There weren't any open wounds, no bruises save the sallow and sunken look she seemed to be getting around her eyes from what he assumed was exhaustion. No one slept here, not really. Gabriel was half convinced that was the whole reason everyone here went insane, eventually.
He'd seen her. He'd seen her now and he knew how she was. That's why he'd come. Yet, he was still there.
"I do." Gabriel nodded, shrugging as much as he could with his muscles so stiff and gearing up the flee the way they had been since he stepped through the visitors' entrance of this hell on earth. "But it's up to you if you want to tell me. It's not exactly my business anymore." The words were a little rushed, pushed out forcibly with anxiety.
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But she felt she owed it to him after everything.
After all that he had been through.
"I was very close to becoming a Death Eater-" she told him quietly. "Before I went to Dumbledore I was doing whatever they told me to do, whatever Bellatrix Lestrange thought up. I was scared and stupid and I wanted to be alive more than stand up for anything-"
She pulled at a strand of her ratty, pale robes, her hands twitching as she curled the string around her finger.
"But when I was supposed to let the Death Eaters into Hogwarts, I couldn't do it- I just-" she paused, eyes flittering back to the stone floor below them. "Well, I started working for Dumbledore and I thought I did a really good job of keeping everything quiet- I thought that whatever sort of weird double agent thing I was doing- it just worked-"
Too much time went on and Cecilia got comfortable.
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He looked down, but it hardly mattered since his eyes had fallen closed. It took a moment, but he pulled it off, pushed everything back into the cubby hole in his mind where he kept everything he didn't want to deal with. It would probably end up backfiring in his face later, but for now, he managed not to make a bad situation worse.
"You just made my point. You didn't want to die." People did all manner of terrible acts when their life was on the line. He'd made promises he couldn't keep and begged, offering to do anything to get out. None of it had worked, but that wasn't the point.
"You had a line, Cecilia. Maybe it was - " Gabe choked a little and cleared his throat. A double-agent. She'd been a double-agent for Dumbledore. Merlin. They'd only been children, basically, back then. " - Maybe it was late, but it was there."
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She wasn't sure what she was doing, why she couldn't stop the words from tumbling from her lips. Gabriel didn't need this. He didn't need to be here. The last thing he needed was to find out that the girl he used to love had done all the terrible things she was accused of. He needed to be home or with Susan or somewhere where Cecilia didn't matter to him anymore.
She shouldn't have mattered to him in the first place.
But she couldn't stop.
"I'm here now because someone found out-" she told him. "He found out what I did and when he couldn't have me dead he decided to put me in here."
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It was strange that they found themselves here. If anything, Gabriel had always been the more broken one of the two. He was starting to realize how wrong he'd been when he'd thought that. Maybe he wasn't actually more broken; Cecilia just hid it better.
"Call me crazy - everyone does - but it sounds like you made up for that." Maybe there was no making up for the things done during the war, but they were so young then. Gabriel couldn't imagine anyone doing any differently than she had. "You don't deserve to be here. You can tell me all manner of horrors you did, but this is a revenge tactic. That's what it looks like from here."
Considering where he'd been at the time, what side of that whole mess he'd been trapped on, he thought his opinion counted for something, even if just trying to give her some peace of mind.
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It was both punishment and revenge, a sort of justice in Lucius Malfoy's eyes, all of it wrapped into a single sentence. Life. That was the going rumor. The Aurors that were still questioning her, coming in every few days to talk about the confession from Lucius, asking her to relay everything that had happened, that was the threat. And Holden kept telling her to keep quiet. To withhold any real information until they could somehow build a case for her release.
"Do you see this?" she asked him, raising her hand out to him, her wrist turned up so that he could see the tattoo etched into her wrist.
"I thought I could hide in plain sight but it didn't work. Gabe, I'm so sorry- I'm so sorry I never told you about any of this-"
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She'd had to deal with one with missing pieces, though, so that wasn't the most shocking thing. It maybe made a point about why exactly he'd had to come. He'd needed to check in on her, and he'd needed to know how much truth there was in the accusations.
Now that he knew, he still didn't believe it. He wasn't sure anything ever could make him believe it.
"Why would you have told me? Honestly?" Shaking his head, he shoved a hand through his hair, nervous and agitated. "You know what would have happened if you had." The break would have been worse, more jagged and difficult to heal on all sides for both of them.
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She had fallen so deeply and strangely in love with him from the moment she had walked into his hospital room. It was always her biggest risk but she couldn't help it, she had always wanted so desperately to be loved in return that she was constantly putting her all into every relationship. It left her with a tremendous amount of heartbreak in her life.
Until George.
And she realized that he might have been the first person to love her the same way in return.
"Gabe, there was a moment when I thought we'd-" she shook her head. "It doesn't matter now but I couldn't have lived with myself then if I had continued to lie to you."
She rubbed at her wrist with her bound hand and frowned.
"This is from Lucius Malfoy," she told him. "A reminder of what I could have been. He's the reason I'm here, you know."
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"Don't feel bad about that, okay?" He tried to smile for her. It only worked a little, the corners of his lips turning up in something more sad than anything else the gesture might imply. "I couldn't have handled it then. It's better that you never said." Hell, he couldn't handle it now, not really. Gabriel was riding such an edge and so close to falling off of it and plummeting into those moods he couldn't break himself out of. If that's how he felt now, had she told him any of this back then, he wasn't sure he would have been able to come back from the seeming betrayal of it.
"I heard." Gabriel hadn't gone digging on his own. The Prophet even seemed too big for him sometimes. Susan breaking the news to him about Cecilia had been a big enough problem. He'd made the mistake of walking Diagon Alley, hearing too many things that the decision to see Cecilia had taken over before he could really evaluate how stupid of an idea it really was. "But I didn't really get why he was naming you. Why now." He still didn't.
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It still twisted at her insides to think about, still made her feel sick every single time she remembered that day. He had taken advantage of her in every way possible, betraying her trust of Draco and forging these brutal memories of her friend torturing her for hours on end then contorting those memories into something else.
All for what?
"Whether alive or dead at this point," she said, bitterly. "So, the next best thing is to have me here-"
She rubbed at her temples.
"I'm just lucky we're separated most of the time."
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