Ficlet Challenge #61
Title: It Only Takes a Moment
Summary: When Healer Penelope Clearwater decides to go on a harmless lunch date with a patient, she finds things spiraling wildly out of control and her life changed forever.
Characters/Pairings: Penelope Clearwater/OC
Genre: Drama/Angst
Rating/Warnings: PG 13 for werewolves and violence
Medium: Fic
Word Count: 2,601
Author's Notes: All song lyrics by Within Temptation.
See who I am, break through the surface
Reach for my hand, let’s show them that we can
Free our minds and find a way, the world is in our hands
Finding out that Kirk Bundy was a werewolf was no surprise for Penelope Clearwater. In fact, they first met when he showed up at St. Mungo’s the day after a full moon bleeding from several self-inflicted gouges. She thought he looked a bit familiar, and recalled him as a Hufflepuff who had been a year ahead of her. He didn’t look too happy to be in hospital, but Penelope made small talk and idle jokes as she bandaged him up. By the time he was cleared to go home, he was even smiling a bit.
The real surprise was that Kirk asked her out five days later. He got her address from the front desk receptionist in the guise of wanting to send her a thank you note by owl (which he did the next day), then sent her a note asking if she’d like to meet him for lunch, and the next thing she knew, she was sitting across a table from Kirk in a little café in Diagon Alley.
“You can get something more than toast, you know,” Penelope prodded gently as Kirk nibbled distastefully at his bread while eyeing her ham sandwich with jealousy.
He mumbled noncommittally.
“I can pay for it, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Kirk blushed and didn’t meet her eyes. Penelope ordered another ham sandwich and pushed it over to him. For a while, he just stared at it, but eventually decided that his hunger outweighed the small amount of pride lost by having someone else pay for his food.
Mostly, they talked about Quidditch. Neither of them really knew the other well, and it seemed like a good neutral subject. Penelope had no idea how much this lunch meant to Kirk until she was getting up to leave and he impulsively caught her arm and pulled her back to her seat.
“Wait,” he said, gulping and suddenly looking vulnerable. “I… Er, that is…Well, I know I don’t look like much, and I know that I’m not the most popular because of, you know…” He looked around the café nervously, then cleared his throat and continued on. “But if you could just look past all the bloody stupid prejudice and see who I really am, inside, would you be interested in, er, another date?”
Penelope considered for a moment. Really, he did seem nice enough, and it had been almost two months since she and Percy had broken up…
“Sure, why not?” Penelope smiled.
*****
I feel they’re getting closer
Their howls are sending chills down my spine
And time is running out now
They’re coming down the hills from behind
Penelope shivered, and not just because the night was bitterly cold. She stumbled as she ran through the empty Scottish countryside, tripping over clods of loose dirt as unnatural howls rang out behind her. It was a miniscule chance that she would actually be able to outrun them, the pair of them, but she was clinging desperately to every hope she had left. She couldn’t believe that she’d let herself be lured out to the tiny country cottage by Kirk’s friend Leo.
She couldn’t believe that Leo had actually turned out to be another werewolf, who started to transform right in front of her before she bolted out of the two-room building and started running toward where she thought she would find some sort of town. Penelope had been running for nearly twenty minutes and found nothing but more countryside. It seemed impossible that she could go for so long without encountering anything, but then again the Highlands were not the most highly populated area of Scotland.
She listened to the pounding of her feet on the ground, occasionally squelching as she hit a patch of mud, and the rustle of wildlife in the tall grasses around her. She heard her own panicked, labored breathing, which came in painful little bursts, and more howls from the creatures behind her. They sounded closer. Penelope didn’t know how much longer she could keep going. She was a Healer, not a professional Quidditch player, and keeping in top athletic shape was not part of the job. Her legs burned and throbbed from the effort of running so fast for so long, and she wanted nothing more than to collapse to the ground and rest.
But she couldn’t.
The howls sounded again, definitely closer this time. Tears of pain and fear pricked at the corners of Penelope’s eyes. The fact that she had no idea why Kirk had decided to turn on her still persistently nagged at the back of her mind, but now was no time to stop and consider it. She had to keep going, to keep running, to find civilization and safety.
Penelope tripped on a thick outstretched tree root, and fell to the ground clutching her ankle as pain lanced through it. It wasn’t broken, she thought, only sprained. If she could just get to her feet again and fight through the pain, she could keep going. It would be all right.
The howls echoed out, ear-splittingly close, and two large furred creatures came over the ridge of the hill behind her, black silhouettes against the full moon. Penelope whimpered, now crying outright, and curled into a ball on the ground, hoping she could somehow blend into the gnarled roots of the tree and escape their notice. With growls and barks, the two creatures drew nearer, probably sniffing her out. As one of them bent over her, Penelope screamed, as if in preparation for the pain that was to come.
Just before its teeth tore into her shoulder, its lips were drawn back in way that almost gave it the appearance of a smile.
******
I see the angels, I’ll lead them to your door
There’s no escape now, no mercy no more
No remorse ‘cause I still remember
The smile when you tore me apart
In a white haze of pain and delirium, Penelope thought she could see angels. She wondered if she was going to die. She couldn’t tell how badly she’d been injured, because she had blacked out shortly after she first felt the creature’s teeth rip into her shoulder. She knew what would happen if she didn’t die, and thought that death would almost be preferable.
Her blood felt cold in her veins with fury. She had never felt so betrayed. In that moment, Penelope decided that she would not let Kirk forget this if she lived. If he tried to hide, she would seek him out. She would attack him, and prove that hell hath no fury like an angry woman, especially one who knows exactly which poisons would leave him in agony without actually killing him. She would show no mercy.
He had ripped apart her life, so she would rip apart his life. There was no going back now, for either of them.
Penelope came to with a groan, a swell of dizziness, and unbearable, shooting pain in one of her shoulders. Her hand wouldn’t work properly. Clutching her head in her unaffected hand, she slowly sat up and waited for her vision to get less hazy. Her limbs felt odd and detached, like they were being operated by someone else, and her face was flushed and sweaty. A wave of nausea engulfed her, then dissipated almost as quickly as it had come. Her blood seemed to pound through her veins with an unusual fierceness, and it was giving her a headache. There was no one else around her in the wide empty field.
With a sudden jolt of realization, everything came back to her. They were gone, and there was no one around to help her for miles. She was in no condition to go anywhere on her own, but Penelope knew she needed help urgently. Putting everything she had into the effort of visualizing her location, she prayed she wouldn’t splinch herself and Apparated to St. Mungo’s.
******
Open up your eyes
Save yourself from fading away now, don’t let it go
Open up your eyes
See what you’ve become, don’t sacrifice
It’s truly the heart of everything
It took everything Penelope had to force herself awake that first time, to push her eyes open and face the bright, sterile world outside her own mind. The first thing she saw was Healer Smethwyk standing near her bed with a grave look on his face. Penelope immediately closed her eyes again and retreated into herself once more. It was so easy to just fall back asleep.
It took more effort than she ever would have expected to get herself out of bed again, to go for walks in the corridors and gradually regain use of her left arm and shoulder, and not to simply lay there and languish. The hardest thing was coming to terms with what had happened to her.
It took four months for her to track down Kirk Bundy, by which time some of the white-hot anger had dissipated and she was less of a disposition to curse him silly and leave him writhing in pain. He was living in a tumbledown shack on the outskirts of a little village, and looked far worse than the last time she had seen him. She had learnt from certain channels that he was now affiliating himself with Fenrir Greyback.
“What are you doing?” she asked him, flinging aside the rickety door with such force that it looked in danger of coming loose from its hinges. It wasn’t a literal question.
Kirk just stared at her, mouth gaping dumbly in his pale and dirty face. “What…what do you mean?” he managed to ask after several minutes.
“Why Greyback?” Penelope asked, shutting the door behind her. “He’s scum and I’ve heard he’s a Death Eater, too.”
“What are you doing here?” Kirk snapped, apparently recovering from his initial shock at seeing her. “I thought you were…”
“Dead?” Penelope finished the question for him. “You left me that way, didn’t you? What happened to you, Kirk? You used to be sweet. You really cared about me when we first started dating. I thought you were just going through a rough patch, for a bit, and then you and your mate lured me out to kill me. What happened?”
“I’m a Dark creature, I didn’t have a choice,” Kirk mumbled. “I can’t hold down a job, everybody hates me, and Greyback at least makes sure I’ve got food to eat.”
“He gives you innocent people to eat,” Penelope hissed. “You kill people, Kirk. You’re a murderer and you’re scum, too. If you’d just step back for a moment and look at your life, you’d see how bad it’s got. It doesn’t have to be this way, you know. It’ll just get worse from here. The Death Eaters will swallow you up.”
Kirk stared determinedly at the ground, looking close to tears. “I don’t have a choice,” he repeated in a raspy voice. “I’m a Dark creature, I have to work for him…”
“No, you don’t,” Penelope said clearly. “But thanks to you, now I’m a Dark creature, as well.”
She slammed the door on his horrified face.
*****
Blinded to see the cruelty of the beast
It is the darker side of me
The veil of my dreams deceived that I have seen
Forgive me for what I have been, forgive me my sins
Penelope hadn’t gone to mass since she was a little girl, and she had never been to mass at a wizarding church before. But she figured that Muggle priests wouldn’t be able to help with the things she needed to confess. They had told her at St. Mungo’s that if she made it past the first two or three months, she should be fine. Around the sixth month, Penelope hit a bleak wall and all the defenses she had worked to build up just crumbled. She hadn’t left her flat for weeks, until she decided to go to church.
There was a line of confessionals which looked much like what she had expected, except that one of them was unusually small and apparently built for house elves or goblins. Penelope fidgeted with the sleeve of her robe as she waited, then blew her nose loudly. As soon as a beaming little boy stepped out of the nearest confessional, Penelope darted inside and took a seat. The introductory formalities were comfortingly familiar, but Penelope found herself unsure of how to start the actual confession.
“You’re not allowed to tell anyone what I say to you in here, right?” she finally said.
“No. Your secrets are safe in here,” the priest reassured her.
Penelope took a deep breath, and spoke in a shaky voice, “I’m a werewolf.” She almost choked on the word, but forced herself to keep going. “I was dating a werewolf, a while ago, and it was all going fine. I mean, he started to get a bit distant, but I thought he was just having a hard time, you know? He and a friend took me out into the country one full moon, and they bit me. I… I knew what would happen. I used to be a Healer, before. I went through with it all, I even confronted my ex because he was getting in league with Death Eaters. But it never really hit me until now.
“I’m not really human anymore. That’s a hard thing to wrap my head around. But I can feel it inside me, the thing, the wolf. It’s so angry all the time. And I have no control over it on full moons. I’m trying to learn to make Wolfsbane Potion, but it’s so dangerous if it’s even slightly off and the Ministry wants all brewers to be registered but, well, obviously I won’t be able to get registered, so it all has to be illegal. I could hurt people and not know it. I could kill people, I could bite them. There’s just this, this alien thing inside my head all the time, this horrible dark side, and I can’t do anything about it.”
She broke off, crying quietly. The priest sat in awkward silence for a moment.
“My dear, it isn’t your fault,” he said finally. “You didn’t ask for any of this. No one does. But the Lord has a plan for us all…”
When Penelope left the confessional, her tears had dried and she was only sniffling. As she walked out of the church, she spotted a slim, hunched figure in one of the pews and stopped in her steps.
“Kirk?” she asked in shock.
Kirk turned to look at her, just as surprised. He was just as pale as the last time she’d seen him, but he’d had a shave and a haircut, and cleaned his face. “Penelope? What are you doing here?”
“I came to confession,” she trailed off, staring at him.
“Me too,” he said. “What you said last time… I’m not with him anymore. I’m hungry a lot, but I reckon it’s worth it in the end. Things were getting really bad. I don’t know what’s happening in the world. I know I’m a horrible person, but I just wanted to hear someone tell me that there’s still hope out there.”
Penelope nodded, mutely, and after a moment took a silent seat beside him in the pew. She gently rested her hand on top of his.
Jennifer/Hufflepuff/87 points
Summary: When Healer Penelope Clearwater decides to go on a harmless lunch date with a patient, she finds things spiraling wildly out of control and her life changed forever.
Characters/Pairings: Penelope Clearwater/OC
Genre: Drama/Angst
Rating/Warnings: PG 13 for werewolves and violence
Medium: Fic
Word Count: 2,601
Author's Notes: All song lyrics by Within Temptation.
See who I am, break through the surface
Reach for my hand, let’s show them that we can
Free our minds and find a way, the world is in our hands
Finding out that Kirk Bundy was a werewolf was no surprise for Penelope Clearwater. In fact, they first met when he showed up at St. Mungo’s the day after a full moon bleeding from several self-inflicted gouges. She thought he looked a bit familiar, and recalled him as a Hufflepuff who had been a year ahead of her. He didn’t look too happy to be in hospital, but Penelope made small talk and idle jokes as she bandaged him up. By the time he was cleared to go home, he was even smiling a bit.
The real surprise was that Kirk asked her out five days later. He got her address from the front desk receptionist in the guise of wanting to send her a thank you note by owl (which he did the next day), then sent her a note asking if she’d like to meet him for lunch, and the next thing she knew, she was sitting across a table from Kirk in a little café in Diagon Alley.
“You can get something more than toast, you know,” Penelope prodded gently as Kirk nibbled distastefully at his bread while eyeing her ham sandwich with jealousy.
He mumbled noncommittally.
“I can pay for it, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Kirk blushed and didn’t meet her eyes. Penelope ordered another ham sandwich and pushed it over to him. For a while, he just stared at it, but eventually decided that his hunger outweighed the small amount of pride lost by having someone else pay for his food.
Mostly, they talked about Quidditch. Neither of them really knew the other well, and it seemed like a good neutral subject. Penelope had no idea how much this lunch meant to Kirk until she was getting up to leave and he impulsively caught her arm and pulled her back to her seat.
“Wait,” he said, gulping and suddenly looking vulnerable. “I… Er, that is…Well, I know I don’t look like much, and I know that I’m not the most popular because of, you know…” He looked around the café nervously, then cleared his throat and continued on. “But if you could just look past all the bloody stupid prejudice and see who I really am, inside, would you be interested in, er, another date?”
Penelope considered for a moment. Really, he did seem nice enough, and it had been almost two months since she and Percy had broken up…
“Sure, why not?” Penelope smiled.
*****
I feel they’re getting closer
Their howls are sending chills down my spine
And time is running out now
They’re coming down the hills from behind
Penelope shivered, and not just because the night was bitterly cold. She stumbled as she ran through the empty Scottish countryside, tripping over clods of loose dirt as unnatural howls rang out behind her. It was a miniscule chance that she would actually be able to outrun them, the pair of them, but she was clinging desperately to every hope she had left. She couldn’t believe that she’d let herself be lured out to the tiny country cottage by Kirk’s friend Leo.
She couldn’t believe that Leo had actually turned out to be another werewolf, who started to transform right in front of her before she bolted out of the two-room building and started running toward where she thought she would find some sort of town. Penelope had been running for nearly twenty minutes and found nothing but more countryside. It seemed impossible that she could go for so long without encountering anything, but then again the Highlands were not the most highly populated area of Scotland.
She listened to the pounding of her feet on the ground, occasionally squelching as she hit a patch of mud, and the rustle of wildlife in the tall grasses around her. She heard her own panicked, labored breathing, which came in painful little bursts, and more howls from the creatures behind her. They sounded closer. Penelope didn’t know how much longer she could keep going. She was a Healer, not a professional Quidditch player, and keeping in top athletic shape was not part of the job. Her legs burned and throbbed from the effort of running so fast for so long, and she wanted nothing more than to collapse to the ground and rest.
But she couldn’t.
The howls sounded again, definitely closer this time. Tears of pain and fear pricked at the corners of Penelope’s eyes. The fact that she had no idea why Kirk had decided to turn on her still persistently nagged at the back of her mind, but now was no time to stop and consider it. She had to keep going, to keep running, to find civilization and safety.
Penelope tripped on a thick outstretched tree root, and fell to the ground clutching her ankle as pain lanced through it. It wasn’t broken, she thought, only sprained. If she could just get to her feet again and fight through the pain, she could keep going. It would be all right.
The howls echoed out, ear-splittingly close, and two large furred creatures came over the ridge of the hill behind her, black silhouettes against the full moon. Penelope whimpered, now crying outright, and curled into a ball on the ground, hoping she could somehow blend into the gnarled roots of the tree and escape their notice. With growls and barks, the two creatures drew nearer, probably sniffing her out. As one of them bent over her, Penelope screamed, as if in preparation for the pain that was to come.
Just before its teeth tore into her shoulder, its lips were drawn back in way that almost gave it the appearance of a smile.
******
I see the angels, I’ll lead them to your door
There’s no escape now, no mercy no more
No remorse ‘cause I still remember
The smile when you tore me apart
In a white haze of pain and delirium, Penelope thought she could see angels. She wondered if she was going to die. She couldn’t tell how badly she’d been injured, because she had blacked out shortly after she first felt the creature’s teeth rip into her shoulder. She knew what would happen if she didn’t die, and thought that death would almost be preferable.
Her blood felt cold in her veins with fury. She had never felt so betrayed. In that moment, Penelope decided that she would not let Kirk forget this if she lived. If he tried to hide, she would seek him out. She would attack him, and prove that hell hath no fury like an angry woman, especially one who knows exactly which poisons would leave him in agony without actually killing him. She would show no mercy.
He had ripped apart her life, so she would rip apart his life. There was no going back now, for either of them.
Penelope came to with a groan, a swell of dizziness, and unbearable, shooting pain in one of her shoulders. Her hand wouldn’t work properly. Clutching her head in her unaffected hand, she slowly sat up and waited for her vision to get less hazy. Her limbs felt odd and detached, like they were being operated by someone else, and her face was flushed and sweaty. A wave of nausea engulfed her, then dissipated almost as quickly as it had come. Her blood seemed to pound through her veins with an unusual fierceness, and it was giving her a headache. There was no one else around her in the wide empty field.
With a sudden jolt of realization, everything came back to her. They were gone, and there was no one around to help her for miles. She was in no condition to go anywhere on her own, but Penelope knew she needed help urgently. Putting everything she had into the effort of visualizing her location, she prayed she wouldn’t splinch herself and Apparated to St. Mungo’s.
******
Open up your eyes
Save yourself from fading away now, don’t let it go
Open up your eyes
See what you’ve become, don’t sacrifice
It’s truly the heart of everything
It took everything Penelope had to force herself awake that first time, to push her eyes open and face the bright, sterile world outside her own mind. The first thing she saw was Healer Smethwyk standing near her bed with a grave look on his face. Penelope immediately closed her eyes again and retreated into herself once more. It was so easy to just fall back asleep.
It took more effort than she ever would have expected to get herself out of bed again, to go for walks in the corridors and gradually regain use of her left arm and shoulder, and not to simply lay there and languish. The hardest thing was coming to terms with what had happened to her.
It took four months for her to track down Kirk Bundy, by which time some of the white-hot anger had dissipated and she was less of a disposition to curse him silly and leave him writhing in pain. He was living in a tumbledown shack on the outskirts of a little village, and looked far worse than the last time she had seen him. She had learnt from certain channels that he was now affiliating himself with Fenrir Greyback.
“What are you doing?” she asked him, flinging aside the rickety door with such force that it looked in danger of coming loose from its hinges. It wasn’t a literal question.
Kirk just stared at her, mouth gaping dumbly in his pale and dirty face. “What…what do you mean?” he managed to ask after several minutes.
“Why Greyback?” Penelope asked, shutting the door behind her. “He’s scum and I’ve heard he’s a Death Eater, too.”
“What are you doing here?” Kirk snapped, apparently recovering from his initial shock at seeing her. “I thought you were…”
“Dead?” Penelope finished the question for him. “You left me that way, didn’t you? What happened to you, Kirk? You used to be sweet. You really cared about me when we first started dating. I thought you were just going through a rough patch, for a bit, and then you and your mate lured me out to kill me. What happened?”
“I’m a Dark creature, I didn’t have a choice,” Kirk mumbled. “I can’t hold down a job, everybody hates me, and Greyback at least makes sure I’ve got food to eat.”
“He gives you innocent people to eat,” Penelope hissed. “You kill people, Kirk. You’re a murderer and you’re scum, too. If you’d just step back for a moment and look at your life, you’d see how bad it’s got. It doesn’t have to be this way, you know. It’ll just get worse from here. The Death Eaters will swallow you up.”
Kirk stared determinedly at the ground, looking close to tears. “I don’t have a choice,” he repeated in a raspy voice. “I’m a Dark creature, I have to work for him…”
“No, you don’t,” Penelope said clearly. “But thanks to you, now I’m a Dark creature, as well.”
She slammed the door on his horrified face.
*****
Blinded to see the cruelty of the beast
It is the darker side of me
The veil of my dreams deceived that I have seen
Forgive me for what I have been, forgive me my sins
Penelope hadn’t gone to mass since she was a little girl, and she had never been to mass at a wizarding church before. But she figured that Muggle priests wouldn’t be able to help with the things she needed to confess. They had told her at St. Mungo’s that if she made it past the first two or three months, she should be fine. Around the sixth month, Penelope hit a bleak wall and all the defenses she had worked to build up just crumbled. She hadn’t left her flat for weeks, until she decided to go to church.
There was a line of confessionals which looked much like what she had expected, except that one of them was unusually small and apparently built for house elves or goblins. Penelope fidgeted with the sleeve of her robe as she waited, then blew her nose loudly. As soon as a beaming little boy stepped out of the nearest confessional, Penelope darted inside and took a seat. The introductory formalities were comfortingly familiar, but Penelope found herself unsure of how to start the actual confession.
“You’re not allowed to tell anyone what I say to you in here, right?” she finally said.
“No. Your secrets are safe in here,” the priest reassured her.
Penelope took a deep breath, and spoke in a shaky voice, “I’m a werewolf.” She almost choked on the word, but forced herself to keep going. “I was dating a werewolf, a while ago, and it was all going fine. I mean, he started to get a bit distant, but I thought he was just having a hard time, you know? He and a friend took me out into the country one full moon, and they bit me. I… I knew what would happen. I used to be a Healer, before. I went through with it all, I even confronted my ex because he was getting in league with Death Eaters. But it never really hit me until now.
“I’m not really human anymore. That’s a hard thing to wrap my head around. But I can feel it inside me, the thing, the wolf. It’s so angry all the time. And I have no control over it on full moons. I’m trying to learn to make Wolfsbane Potion, but it’s so dangerous if it’s even slightly off and the Ministry wants all brewers to be registered but, well, obviously I won’t be able to get registered, so it all has to be illegal. I could hurt people and not know it. I could kill people, I could bite them. There’s just this, this alien thing inside my head all the time, this horrible dark side, and I can’t do anything about it.”
She broke off, crying quietly. The priest sat in awkward silence for a moment.
“My dear, it isn’t your fault,” he said finally. “You didn’t ask for any of this. No one does. But the Lord has a plan for us all…”
When Penelope left the confessional, her tears had dried and she was only sniffling. As she walked out of the church, she spotted a slim, hunched figure in one of the pews and stopped in her steps.
“Kirk?” she asked in shock.
Kirk turned to look at her, just as surprised. He was just as pale as the last time she’d seen him, but he’d had a shave and a haircut, and cleaned his face. “Penelope? What are you doing here?”
“I came to confession,” she trailed off, staring at him.
“Me too,” he said. “What you said last time… I’m not with him anymore. I’m hungry a lot, but I reckon it’s worth it in the end. Things were getting really bad. I don’t know what’s happening in the world. I know I’m a horrible person, but I just wanted to hear someone tell me that there’s still hope out there.”
Penelope nodded, mutely, and after a moment took a silent seat beside him in the pew. She gently rested her hand on top of his.
Jennifer/Hufflepuff/87 points