A tall, lean man in faded jeans, a well-worn white button-down shirt, a loose tan suede jacket and a pair of steel-toed Wolverines that had seen better days appears in the Sorting Room. He looks around and runs a hand through his scruffy blond hair in puzzlement, and then his blue eyes fall upon the table of application forms. He ambles over, picks
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Camilla hasn't seen him since he went off to rehab on Francis's dime. Hasn't seen him in the flesh, that is. She saw him in Galadriel's mirror. Sometimes she wishes she hadn't. Repulsed by the way he lives. The choices he's made, if you can call them choices, that easy slippage ever further into dissolution -- the very opposite of Henry's rigor.
He's a mess, by her lights. He's as beautiful as he always was, in spite of all the hard living. He's ... well, he's her twin.
She hesitates in the door of the Sorting Room. She wants to run far away, fast. But her eyes take him in, thirsty.
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He debates not speaking to her, pretending he didn't see her. If she'd left, he wouldn't have called her back.
But she doesn't leave.
"...Camilla?"
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Something like dread seeps through her at the thought of telling Henry about this particular arrival. It seems almost less terrible to tell Charles that Henry's come back from the dead.
For a moment, Camilla considers the possibility of leaving Hogwarts altogether. Leave the both of them. But where would she go? And she'd miss Henry. That's why she came here in the first place.
And in the meantime, while she's wasting time on these thoughts, Charles notices she's there.
He calls her Camilla rather than Milly. That's a blessing, isn't it?
"Charles," she says. Her own voice sounds both flat and hollow to her, somehow, when she says it. "How did you wind up here?"
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He shrugs. "Beats me. I don't even know where 'here' is. Sure doesn't look like anyplace I remember us ever staying, not Virginia or Vermont." A thought suddenly pops into his head. "Say. I wouldn't happen to be dreaming all this, would I? I mean, unusual setting, strange questions, you...Freud would have a field day."
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"Pepper. Jack. Cheeseburgers. They are godly. You bite into one, and angels sing. Good choice."
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He laughs. "Some parts of it there are, I've lived in those. Traded up to an exurb outside Austin at the moment, so I've kind of got the best of both worlds. Small towns at my back and a big city in front of me."
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"What's your notebook half full of?"
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"You don't kill these days like you don't drink," he said. "That mean you used to kill, though, dunnit?"
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"Figuratively speaking," he says with a light, charming grin. "Let's just say I know what it's like to have murder in my heart, shall we? That and the drinking, they're kind of related."
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"Yeah, yeah, murder in your heart, darkness in your soul, and all that bullshit," Provenza said, waiving his hand dismissively. Charles' charm had no effect on him. "Thing is, there ain't no 'figurative' when it comes to dead. You either are, or you're not. I think you're full of shit, and there ain't not figurative about it."
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It takes a lot to stun Henry Winter, but Charles' arrival has managed it. A million insults that he can think up--none are more damning than the fact Charles now works at a bar.
He crosses his arms, not looking a day older. Charles should stay away from Camilla if he knows what's good for him. But he almost never did. None of them did.
He has the advantage of being dead. 'Hello,' he eventually says in his cultured voice. 'How many years has it been, Charles? I'm curious.'
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Then he remembers Camilla's sly look, closed off from their connection, and it all becomes sickeningly clear. Goêteusis. A different approach. Henry or Henry's ghost, here.
Still, here is the very last person he'd ever want to see again standing before him. Isn't there something that's nagged at him all this time, an answer that Henry took to his grave? He clears his throat and finally croaks out the question.
"Why, Henry?"
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Here he smiles, a little, though he is reeling from the shock of seeing Charles here--a curse upon whichever house he ends up in--because that means Camilla will be pulled to someone who is not Henry. It was always better when there were just the two of them.
'Sin happens because loss of control is almost irresistable. That is why.'
Henry hopes he's answered the question. Not.
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The scene flashes before him again as it has a million times since: himself, incapacitated by Henry; Richard's voice, I've been shot, as if from a thousand miles away; hotel security or police or God knows who pounding at the door; Henry's I love you to Camilla, with a kiss; and then the impossibly loud roar of the gun.
"Why did you do it, Henry." He's not sure he wants to know. But he has to ask.
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