Fic: Into This House We’re Born, Into This World We’re Thrown (Harry Potter)
Title: Into This House We’re Born, Into This World We’re Thrown
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: T
Genres: het
Recipient: rareb
Prompt: Harry Potter, Jane Walcott/Damian Bournewithe, The Doors - Riders on the Storm
Summary: Rain’s coming down in sheets and she takes it as an omen.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. This is for rareb and a sequel to When Sentiment is left to Chance that I wrote for last years Holiday Fic Request Meme. You don't necessarily have to read the first one but I'd still recommend it so everything makes complete sense.
Into This House We’re Born, Into This World We’re Thrown
“Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm.”
The Doors, “Riders on the Storm”
Rain’s coming down in sheets and she takes it as an omen. No one else would but no one else actually was any good at Divination in her year, maybe the entire school, maybe ever. A Slytherin that liked and excelled at Divination. What a joke, they said and mocked her.
They never realized how well Divination suited a Slytherin. Before everyone else, she knew a storm was coming and she prepared. She warned her family, secured her belongings, adjusted her investments to a coming war. She never saw the bloody bomb coming that hit their London house.
It’s been nine years and she still hasn’t found out why the protective charms all around the house hadn’t worked. Maybe, a little sarcastic voice sounding too much like Bournewithe throws at her, it had something to do with the Nazis being so efficient they managed to draw German wizards into their schemes without actually planning to. Or maybe they did plan it.
She wishes Bournewithe would just leave her alone. Just like he did ten days after she put him back together. Left her without a word, from one day to the next. She never heard of him again.
She keeps seeing him, though. Occasionally, hearing him, too. When her grandmother announced that she’d finally found a suitable husband for the wayward black sheep of the family, something inside of her sniggered and it sounded like Bournewithe in the library two shelves away from her with his stupid overconfident Gryffindor friends, disturbing the calm she needed to complete her homework. Making her look at him through the books, unable to draw her gaze away. He wasn’t marriage material, not even boyfriend material, not even any material according to ages of Slytherin generations all bred into her. And she just couldn’t look away.
It was like that in the war, in the tent that stank of blood and sweat and tears in the middle of the bloody desert. She’d recognized him, right the moment he’d come in on the stretcher. He’d been older than the last time she saw him, wearing a lieutenant’s uniform instead of robes, and he’d been half delirious with pain. He’d been just one of hundreds of soldiers and she tried to stay away from him so desperately.
It’s all a blur, nowadays, and she can’t remember much of what she did out there wearing a Muggle nurse’s uniform and trying to atone… trying to atone for what? Hundreds of years of Muggle suppression by her ancestors? Her own guilt at thinking she could get through this war unscathed just because of genetics? The fact that she’d managed to claw her way through the rubble while her parents and siblings drew their last breaths? Until today, she still can’t answer those questions.
It was just as well, according to Grand-mère, because she would never snare a husband to secure her future if she kept prattling on about all the blood and the pain she saw in the war. Men are warriors to Grand-mère and women do not go to war. To Grand-mère, she never went, never acquired a lifetime of hurt and shock, never did things no one at Hogwarts thought she’d be capable of.
All Grand-mère sees are all the men she spent her time with. All Grand-mère thinks she was capable of was losing her virtue in the bloody war. But all she lost was her innocence, as trite as that sounds. Her virtue, she kept all through the time she served. It took her a year after the war to lose it.
Thinking, thinking, thinking. That seems to be all she’s been doing ever since VE Day. It’s gotten even worse in the past two weeks. Being cooped up in a stuffy old house full of ghosts and curses does that to you. Thank God Grand-mère lets her keep up her “charity responsibilities” she took up at St. Mungo’s after the war, at least. Obviously, it was too much to ask for her to call her granddaughter’s occupation by its bloody name, call it a job.
She shakes her head. It’s not doing her any good, falling back into her old habits from School where she would stand daydreaming at a window or amidst shelves in the Forbidden Section or by the lake. It was a minor miracle that she managed to graduate as what the professors liked to call “the brightest witch of her year”, what with all the daydreaming and the staring at Bournewithe and the wishing he’d ask her out to the Yule Ball, just once, knowing it was stupid and against everything she had ever been taught at home.
The worst thing is that he still keeps her occupied, eight years later. She’d tried to find out what had happened to him, if he had any family at all left, badgering the Red Cross workers so long they nearly threw her out of their office once or twice. She never even considered resorting to Divination or locating spells. She’d been too afraid of what they’d reveal. Still is.
“Jane?” She blinks, turns around to see Head Healer Winworth give her a worried glance before schooling her features back to professional friendliness. “You look tired. Why don’t you go home?”
Because Grand-mère is waiting at home for me, with that idiot Henry James Wothering so she can “properly introduce us” and force me into a marriage befitting my station as sole heiress to the Walcott fortune, she thinks and she knows Bournewithe would have a grand old time mocking old Slytherin families. She’d join him, just to scare Wothering away.
Winworth raises her eyebrows. There’s no way she’s going to go home now. “Thanks, ma’am but I…”
“Go home, Walcott.” So. No contradicting Head Healer today. She considers doing it anyway but then again, she is tired.
She nods. “Yes, ma’am.” Winworth looks relieved and she’d probably look so, too, in her stead. Someone said she’s already slotted as Winworth’s successor and she’s very much not opposed to that. In that light, following Head Healer’s orders at least serves a purpose and she moves to pack up her bag and slips into her enchanted water repelling coat.
She could walk five minutes, use the hospital’s Floo network but all of a sudden, sheets of rain look inviting. When she steps outside on the pavement, she considers regretting her decision and using Floo after all for a second or two but she didn’t get to be a QA or just anything else that wasn’t something Grand-mère wants her to be by turning around at the smallest bit of trouble.
The only thing water repellent is her coat. In a matter of seconds, her hair is plastered to her head and she can barely see out of her eyes for all the wetness. Grand-mère would urge her to use some umbrella spell or other but Grand-mère never needs cold and a million sharp pinches to feel so bloody alive.
She’s a mess, she knows that. The Muggles call it shell shock, Grand-mère would call it hysterics, she calls it a broken heart. Years ago she decided she’d be insane if she didn’t have that after all she saw and did and was done to, so she doesn’t let it bother her. Not anymore.
At least that’s what she still keeps trying to convince herself of when she sees a figure in front of her, a slight limp in his step, shoulders hunched against the rain… coat as dry as her own. She blinks. A wizard. Something leaps inside of her, painfully jumps against her ribcage and it takes her a moment to realize that it’s her broken heart making itself known.
It’s stupid. Just because he’s the right height, the limp’s the right leg, it’s not him. It’s not Bournewithe because it can’t be and she hastens her steps, takes over the figure and keeps walking. Just walking on, welcoming the deafening roar of the rain. She needs to get away. Get away.
“Hey, pavement’s there for everyone!” She read somewhere that illusions sometimes are part of broken hearts, that sometimes the mind plays cruel tricks on the heart and makes voices sound like the one that broke the bloody heart in the first place. The knowledge is in her head, clinical, slicing through the band around her throat that makes it impossible to breathe.
It’s prodding her on, pushing her away from the voice that sounded so much like him. It’s not even remotely sharp enough to sever the puppet strings making her turn around. If this is an illusion, it’s a perfect one. Right down to the ragged breathing it exhibits and a heartfelt, “Bloody hell, Walcott.”
The rain is her best friend right now. It masks the catch in her voice when she says, “Damien?”
No more words from him - or the illusion of him, anyway - just a slow, probably painful step in her direction. And another one. And another one. Or maybe her feet carry her to him. She knows there was something she wanted to do, wanted to say if she ever found him again, something special, just for him, something she’d spent so much time on thinking it up she hadn’t even realized Grand-mère wanted to marry her off until six months ago. It’s all gone.
There’s no other way to explain why her hand seems to rise on its own account, until it touches his arm than that she’s still on puppet strings and someone with a perverse sense of humor is guiding her every move. It’s perverse that the coarse material of his coat feels just so real, and the arm she can feel beneath it and the cheek she laid her hand against. It’s perverse that she feels the skin under her hand shift slightly, that she sees him turn his head the slightest of degrees, right into her palm. She can’t remember ever having been gladder for all that rain running down her face. If she’s imagining him, at least no one will see how she cried all alone on the pavement later.
“Jane,” he says - whispers, really - and gently takes her hand and that convinces her that he must be an illusion. She can’t remember anything gentle about Damien Bournewithe. “I’m sorry, Jane.”
She blinks, looks down on her hand that’s clasped in his. There was another situation like this, back in North Africa. Two days after she first encountered him and tried to mend the stump back into an actual leg.
He’d been suffering, his body needing to adjust to and relax from the act of growing a new leg after the first had been blown off. There’d been fever and she hadn’t wanted to entrust any other Sister with the care for him.
He’d been a pain in the ass when he’d first arrived and he’d been hurtful to her and then he’d apologized so, so honestly and asked her to stay until he fell asleep and she’d known she wanted to be the only one being able to manage him and take care of him in that damn tent. So she sat by his cot and held his hand and kept muttering antipyretic spells while the fever had raged through his body. When it was done, he’d looked at her and recognized her. She still remembers the grateful little sigh he’d given as he’d squeezed back at her hand.
Eight days later, he’d been gone. And suddenly, it’s all back.
With a jerk, she frees her hand and takes a step back. “Sorry?” it erupts from her mouth. “Sorry?” Wild anger is bubbling up, carrying pain and loss with it. “You just disappear and the only thing you have to say after eight bloody years is sorry? It was a bloody war and suddenly you were bloody gone. I held your… your… fucking hand in that tent and I grew back your leg and I nearly got my head ripped off by Matron for taking care of you and you broke my bloody heart. And all, all you say is sorry?”
There’s more than that, so, so much more and she would have told him, illusion or not be hanged, if he’d just let her. “What am I supposed to say, Walcott? I didn’t want to go, dammit but it’s the bloody Army and when the sodding Army calls you back to duty, you go back to duty.”
Duty? The Army? Really? Really? It’s all burning inside of her now, burning bright and scorching hot. “You could have left a sodding note, you arsehole. But no, you just vanish into thin air, probably quite literally, the moment someone gives you a way out of the tent, you know, the tent where I worked. You play the suffering soldier and you draw me in and as soon as you get a chance to jump back into battle, you’re off. Bloody, bloody Gryffindor that you are, you probably couldn’t wait to risk your life again. Stupid, egoistic Gryffindor off for glory and medals. Did you even think about what it might do to me? Did you think of that? For at least a second, did you think of that?”
It came tumbling out, in one big heap and she’s pretty sure, not even half of it was intelligible and her heart feels squeezed tight, as if someone were holding it in an iron grip and she thinks it might very well be him. It might very well have always been him.
For one perverse moment, she takes an insane amount of satisfaction at the hurt she sees crossing his face. How does it feel to be me, she wants to ask but he seems to have found his voice again. “You’re a Slytherin, Jane. You of all people should understand why I didn’t leave a note.”
What the bloody sod is that supposed to mean? That Slytherins are arrogant, egoistic arseholes that don’t care an iota for the feelings of anyone except their own? Is that what he wants to say? Isn’t that what they all think of them? Always ignoring the most important Slytherin trait, loyalty. All they care about is the “cunning” and the “evil” and the “racist” and the “rich, spoiled kids” that they see in them. Angry, raw, hurt, she turns around and walks away, willing him to be an illusion to just disappear. Maybe she is better off with a fellow Slytherin, after all. Even an idiot like Worthing.
She walks on and on, and the rain keeps washing away tears she never meant to spill. Stiff upper lip is another concept Slytherins live for.
“Bloody hell, Walcott. I wanted you to be free.” Can’t he just leave her the hell alone? “Jane, I did that for you.”
Sweet Merlin. She should not turn around again. Despite better judgement, she does it anyway. “I did not want to be free, Damien. I wanted to belong. I wanted to belong to you.”
He opens his mouth but there’s no sound. Again, with the same result.
In the end, it takes four failed attempts, until he says, “I’m a mudblood, Jane,” with a painful kind of dejection in his voice. It’s not entirely because of his blood status, she can see that.
“I don’t bloody care, you bloody idiot!” She practically throws that at him, voice bordering on a very unladylike screech with all the frustration she poured into it. By now, she’s shaking, partially from cold but mostly from anger and annoyance.
He heaves deep, deep breath, like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Or carrying around an entire war with him. They wouldn’t be so different if it were so. He runs a hand through his hopelessly soaked hair and she sees a scar, starting from the back of his right hand and disappearing into his sleeve. That hadn’t been there when he was in the medical tent. She knows because she held that hand.
He’s real. The Damien Bournewithe in front of her is real.
Another sob tries to make its way up her throat but she won’t let it, choking out, “Damien…” the same moment he says, “I’m so, so sorry, Jane,” and this time she doesn’t interrupt him. The shock of realizing it’s really him renders her speechless for a crucial moment. “I’m sorry I left like that and I’m sorry for taking so long to find you. I… Jane… let’s make a fresh start. Let’s leave this behind us and try again.”
As if that ever worked. She can’t remember any “fresh start” that ever worked the way it was supposed to be. It always ended in heartbreak. She had enough of that for the next ten years. “Just tea, Jane. When you feel ready. Just tea to get to know each other.”
Tea. Tea doesn’t sound so bad. Tea sounds like a hot cup thawing her frozen hands and a fireplace thawing her frozen feet and conversation thawing her frozen heart. Tea sounds marvelous. She still has to ascertain herself. “Just tea?”
He nods, slowly taking one step after another towards her. “Just tea. Wherever and whenever you like.”
Wherever and whenever she likes. A small smile overwhelms her inner walls and makes it onto her face. “I know a place nearby. Muggle, no wizards and they make a wicket cup of Darjeeling.”
There’s a strange, disbelieving look on his face when he asks, “Are you… sure? Do you have anywhere to be there? You looked so purposeful when you… nearly ran me over.”
She thinks of Grand-mère and her big house full of dreadful, ages old secrets and Henry James Worthing sitting on the old chintz couch in the main salon, waiting to bore her to death. She thinks of the possibility of this becoming her future, until death do us part. She has to suppress a shiver, so she can give him a small, honest smile when she says, “No. Nowhere to be right now. I’m free.”
“Very well,” he replies with a small smile of his own and it looks as if he’s missing practice with that just like her, “I will follow where you lead.” So. Tea room it is, then. Tea room and a fresh start. Maybe she and Damien will be the exception to the rule she always witnessed. Maybe they can get to know each other and maybe they can mend each other’s broken hearts. After everything they had to go through, they’d most certainly deserve it.
~*~
TBC in She Puts Me In A State.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: T
Genres: het
Recipient: rareb
Prompt: Harry Potter, Jane Walcott/Damian Bournewithe, The Doors - Riders on the Storm
Summary: Rain’s coming down in sheets and she takes it as an omen.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. This is for rareb and a sequel to When Sentiment is left to Chance that I wrote for last years Holiday Fic Request Meme. You don't necessarily have to read the first one but I'd still recommend it so everything makes complete sense.
Into This House We’re Born, Into This World We’re Thrown
“Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm.”
The Doors, “Riders on the Storm”
Rain’s coming down in sheets and she takes it as an omen. No one else would but no one else actually was any good at Divination in her year, maybe the entire school, maybe ever. A Slytherin that liked and excelled at Divination. What a joke, they said and mocked her.
They never realized how well Divination suited a Slytherin. Before everyone else, she knew a storm was coming and she prepared. She warned her family, secured her belongings, adjusted her investments to a coming war. She never saw the bloody bomb coming that hit their London house.
It’s been nine years and she still hasn’t found out why the protective charms all around the house hadn’t worked. Maybe, a little sarcastic voice sounding too much like Bournewithe throws at her, it had something to do with the Nazis being so efficient they managed to draw German wizards into their schemes without actually planning to. Or maybe they did plan it.
She wishes Bournewithe would just leave her alone. Just like he did ten days after she put him back together. Left her without a word, from one day to the next. She never heard of him again.
She keeps seeing him, though. Occasionally, hearing him, too. When her grandmother announced that she’d finally found a suitable husband for the wayward black sheep of the family, something inside of her sniggered and it sounded like Bournewithe in the library two shelves away from her with his stupid overconfident Gryffindor friends, disturbing the calm she needed to complete her homework. Making her look at him through the books, unable to draw her gaze away. He wasn’t marriage material, not even boyfriend material, not even any material according to ages of Slytherin generations all bred into her. And she just couldn’t look away.
It was like that in the war, in the tent that stank of blood and sweat and tears in the middle of the bloody desert. She’d recognized him, right the moment he’d come in on the stretcher. He’d been older than the last time she saw him, wearing a lieutenant’s uniform instead of robes, and he’d been half delirious with pain. He’d been just one of hundreds of soldiers and she tried to stay away from him so desperately.
It’s all a blur, nowadays, and she can’t remember much of what she did out there wearing a Muggle nurse’s uniform and trying to atone… trying to atone for what? Hundreds of years of Muggle suppression by her ancestors? Her own guilt at thinking she could get through this war unscathed just because of genetics? The fact that she’d managed to claw her way through the rubble while her parents and siblings drew their last breaths? Until today, she still can’t answer those questions.
It was just as well, according to Grand-mère, because she would never snare a husband to secure her future if she kept prattling on about all the blood and the pain she saw in the war. Men are warriors to Grand-mère and women do not go to war. To Grand-mère, she never went, never acquired a lifetime of hurt and shock, never did things no one at Hogwarts thought she’d be capable of.
All Grand-mère sees are all the men she spent her time with. All Grand-mère thinks she was capable of was losing her virtue in the bloody war. But all she lost was her innocence, as trite as that sounds. Her virtue, she kept all through the time she served. It took her a year after the war to lose it.
Thinking, thinking, thinking. That seems to be all she’s been doing ever since VE Day. It’s gotten even worse in the past two weeks. Being cooped up in a stuffy old house full of ghosts and curses does that to you. Thank God Grand-mère lets her keep up her “charity responsibilities” she took up at St. Mungo’s after the war, at least. Obviously, it was too much to ask for her to call her granddaughter’s occupation by its bloody name, call it a job.
She shakes her head. It’s not doing her any good, falling back into her old habits from School where she would stand daydreaming at a window or amidst shelves in the Forbidden Section or by the lake. It was a minor miracle that she managed to graduate as what the professors liked to call “the brightest witch of her year”, what with all the daydreaming and the staring at Bournewithe and the wishing he’d ask her out to the Yule Ball, just once, knowing it was stupid and against everything she had ever been taught at home.
The worst thing is that he still keeps her occupied, eight years later. She’d tried to find out what had happened to him, if he had any family at all left, badgering the Red Cross workers so long they nearly threw her out of their office once or twice. She never even considered resorting to Divination or locating spells. She’d been too afraid of what they’d reveal. Still is.
“Jane?” She blinks, turns around to see Head Healer Winworth give her a worried glance before schooling her features back to professional friendliness. “You look tired. Why don’t you go home?”
Because Grand-mère is waiting at home for me, with that idiot Henry James Wothering so she can “properly introduce us” and force me into a marriage befitting my station as sole heiress to the Walcott fortune, she thinks and she knows Bournewithe would have a grand old time mocking old Slytherin families. She’d join him, just to scare Wothering away.
Winworth raises her eyebrows. There’s no way she’s going to go home now. “Thanks, ma’am but I…”
“Go home, Walcott.” So. No contradicting Head Healer today. She considers doing it anyway but then again, she is tired.
She nods. “Yes, ma’am.” Winworth looks relieved and she’d probably look so, too, in her stead. Someone said she’s already slotted as Winworth’s successor and she’s very much not opposed to that. In that light, following Head Healer’s orders at least serves a purpose and she moves to pack up her bag and slips into her enchanted water repelling coat.
She could walk five minutes, use the hospital’s Floo network but all of a sudden, sheets of rain look inviting. When she steps outside on the pavement, she considers regretting her decision and using Floo after all for a second or two but she didn’t get to be a QA or just anything else that wasn’t something Grand-mère wants her to be by turning around at the smallest bit of trouble.
The only thing water repellent is her coat. In a matter of seconds, her hair is plastered to her head and she can barely see out of her eyes for all the wetness. Grand-mère would urge her to use some umbrella spell or other but Grand-mère never needs cold and a million sharp pinches to feel so bloody alive.
She’s a mess, she knows that. The Muggles call it shell shock, Grand-mère would call it hysterics, she calls it a broken heart. Years ago she decided she’d be insane if she didn’t have that after all she saw and did and was done to, so she doesn’t let it bother her. Not anymore.
At least that’s what she still keeps trying to convince herself of when she sees a figure in front of her, a slight limp in his step, shoulders hunched against the rain… coat as dry as her own. She blinks. A wizard. Something leaps inside of her, painfully jumps against her ribcage and it takes her a moment to realize that it’s her broken heart making itself known.
It’s stupid. Just because he’s the right height, the limp’s the right leg, it’s not him. It’s not Bournewithe because it can’t be and she hastens her steps, takes over the figure and keeps walking. Just walking on, welcoming the deafening roar of the rain. She needs to get away. Get away.
“Hey, pavement’s there for everyone!” She read somewhere that illusions sometimes are part of broken hearts, that sometimes the mind plays cruel tricks on the heart and makes voices sound like the one that broke the bloody heart in the first place. The knowledge is in her head, clinical, slicing through the band around her throat that makes it impossible to breathe.
It’s prodding her on, pushing her away from the voice that sounded so much like him. It’s not even remotely sharp enough to sever the puppet strings making her turn around. If this is an illusion, it’s a perfect one. Right down to the ragged breathing it exhibits and a heartfelt, “Bloody hell, Walcott.”
The rain is her best friend right now. It masks the catch in her voice when she says, “Damien?”
No more words from him - or the illusion of him, anyway - just a slow, probably painful step in her direction. And another one. And another one. Or maybe her feet carry her to him. She knows there was something she wanted to do, wanted to say if she ever found him again, something special, just for him, something she’d spent so much time on thinking it up she hadn’t even realized Grand-mère wanted to marry her off until six months ago. It’s all gone.
There’s no other way to explain why her hand seems to rise on its own account, until it touches his arm than that she’s still on puppet strings and someone with a perverse sense of humor is guiding her every move. It’s perverse that the coarse material of his coat feels just so real, and the arm she can feel beneath it and the cheek she laid her hand against. It’s perverse that she feels the skin under her hand shift slightly, that she sees him turn his head the slightest of degrees, right into her palm. She can’t remember ever having been gladder for all that rain running down her face. If she’s imagining him, at least no one will see how she cried all alone on the pavement later.
“Jane,” he says - whispers, really - and gently takes her hand and that convinces her that he must be an illusion. She can’t remember anything gentle about Damien Bournewithe. “I’m sorry, Jane.”
She blinks, looks down on her hand that’s clasped in his. There was another situation like this, back in North Africa. Two days after she first encountered him and tried to mend the stump back into an actual leg.
He’d been suffering, his body needing to adjust to and relax from the act of growing a new leg after the first had been blown off. There’d been fever and she hadn’t wanted to entrust any other Sister with the care for him.
He’d been a pain in the ass when he’d first arrived and he’d been hurtful to her and then he’d apologized so, so honestly and asked her to stay until he fell asleep and she’d known she wanted to be the only one being able to manage him and take care of him in that damn tent. So she sat by his cot and held his hand and kept muttering antipyretic spells while the fever had raged through his body. When it was done, he’d looked at her and recognized her. She still remembers the grateful little sigh he’d given as he’d squeezed back at her hand.
Eight days later, he’d been gone. And suddenly, it’s all back.
With a jerk, she frees her hand and takes a step back. “Sorry?” it erupts from her mouth. “Sorry?” Wild anger is bubbling up, carrying pain and loss with it. “You just disappear and the only thing you have to say after eight bloody years is sorry? It was a bloody war and suddenly you were bloody gone. I held your… your… fucking hand in that tent and I grew back your leg and I nearly got my head ripped off by Matron for taking care of you and you broke my bloody heart. And all, all you say is sorry?”
There’s more than that, so, so much more and she would have told him, illusion or not be hanged, if he’d just let her. “What am I supposed to say, Walcott? I didn’t want to go, dammit but it’s the bloody Army and when the sodding Army calls you back to duty, you go back to duty.”
Duty? The Army? Really? Really? It’s all burning inside of her now, burning bright and scorching hot. “You could have left a sodding note, you arsehole. But no, you just vanish into thin air, probably quite literally, the moment someone gives you a way out of the tent, you know, the tent where I worked. You play the suffering soldier and you draw me in and as soon as you get a chance to jump back into battle, you’re off. Bloody, bloody Gryffindor that you are, you probably couldn’t wait to risk your life again. Stupid, egoistic Gryffindor off for glory and medals. Did you even think about what it might do to me? Did you think of that? For at least a second, did you think of that?”
It came tumbling out, in one big heap and she’s pretty sure, not even half of it was intelligible and her heart feels squeezed tight, as if someone were holding it in an iron grip and she thinks it might very well be him. It might very well have always been him.
For one perverse moment, she takes an insane amount of satisfaction at the hurt she sees crossing his face. How does it feel to be me, she wants to ask but he seems to have found his voice again. “You’re a Slytherin, Jane. You of all people should understand why I didn’t leave a note.”
What the bloody sod is that supposed to mean? That Slytherins are arrogant, egoistic arseholes that don’t care an iota for the feelings of anyone except their own? Is that what he wants to say? Isn’t that what they all think of them? Always ignoring the most important Slytherin trait, loyalty. All they care about is the “cunning” and the “evil” and the “racist” and the “rich, spoiled kids” that they see in them. Angry, raw, hurt, she turns around and walks away, willing him to be an illusion to just disappear. Maybe she is better off with a fellow Slytherin, after all. Even an idiot like Worthing.
She walks on and on, and the rain keeps washing away tears she never meant to spill. Stiff upper lip is another concept Slytherins live for.
“Bloody hell, Walcott. I wanted you to be free.” Can’t he just leave her the hell alone? “Jane, I did that for you.”
Sweet Merlin. She should not turn around again. Despite better judgement, she does it anyway. “I did not want to be free, Damien. I wanted to belong. I wanted to belong to you.”
He opens his mouth but there’s no sound. Again, with the same result.
In the end, it takes four failed attempts, until he says, “I’m a mudblood, Jane,” with a painful kind of dejection in his voice. It’s not entirely because of his blood status, she can see that.
“I don’t bloody care, you bloody idiot!” She practically throws that at him, voice bordering on a very unladylike screech with all the frustration she poured into it. By now, she’s shaking, partially from cold but mostly from anger and annoyance.
He heaves deep, deep breath, like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Or carrying around an entire war with him. They wouldn’t be so different if it were so. He runs a hand through his hopelessly soaked hair and she sees a scar, starting from the back of his right hand and disappearing into his sleeve. That hadn’t been there when he was in the medical tent. She knows because she held that hand.
He’s real. The Damien Bournewithe in front of her is real.
Another sob tries to make its way up her throat but she won’t let it, choking out, “Damien…” the same moment he says, “I’m so, so sorry, Jane,” and this time she doesn’t interrupt him. The shock of realizing it’s really him renders her speechless for a crucial moment. “I’m sorry I left like that and I’m sorry for taking so long to find you. I… Jane… let’s make a fresh start. Let’s leave this behind us and try again.”
As if that ever worked. She can’t remember any “fresh start” that ever worked the way it was supposed to be. It always ended in heartbreak. She had enough of that for the next ten years. “Just tea, Jane. When you feel ready. Just tea to get to know each other.”
Tea. Tea doesn’t sound so bad. Tea sounds like a hot cup thawing her frozen hands and a fireplace thawing her frozen feet and conversation thawing her frozen heart. Tea sounds marvelous. She still has to ascertain herself. “Just tea?”
He nods, slowly taking one step after another towards her. “Just tea. Wherever and whenever you like.”
Wherever and whenever she likes. A small smile overwhelms her inner walls and makes it onto her face. “I know a place nearby. Muggle, no wizards and they make a wicket cup of Darjeeling.”
There’s a strange, disbelieving look on his face when he asks, “Are you… sure? Do you have anywhere to be there? You looked so purposeful when you… nearly ran me over.”
She thinks of Grand-mère and her big house full of dreadful, ages old secrets and Henry James Worthing sitting on the old chintz couch in the main salon, waiting to bore her to death. She thinks of the possibility of this becoming her future, until death do us part. She has to suppress a shiver, so she can give him a small, honest smile when she says, “No. Nowhere to be right now. I’m free.”
“Very well,” he replies with a small smile of his own and it looks as if he’s missing practice with that just like her, “I will follow where you lead.” So. Tea room it is, then. Tea room and a fresh start. Maybe she and Damien will be the exception to the rule she always witnessed. Maybe they can get to know each other and maybe they can mend each other’s broken hearts. After everything they had to go through, they’d most certainly deserve it.
~*~
TBC in She Puts Me In A State.