Fic: Old War Wounds: She Puts Me In A State (Harry Potter)
Title: She Puts Me In A State
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: K+
Genres: het
Recipient: rareb
Prompt: Harry Potter, Jane Walcott/Damien Bournewith, State of Shock
Summary: It’s been almost a year of tea dates and lunch dates and walks in Hyde Park and Kew Gardens and kisses behind shelves in libraries when she says, “I think you should meet my grandmother.”
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. Sorry that I'm late with the story but they were both playing hard to get and this went into a completely different direction than what I'd originally planned. I guess that's what happens when you have characters that you revisit once a year. They screw you over :P Anyway, enjoy :D
( When Sentimentent Is Left To Chance )
( Into This House We're Born, Into This World We're Thrown )
She Puts Me In A State
“She looks so great.
Every time I see her face,
She puts me in a state,
A state of shock.“
Michael Jackson, „State of Shock“
It’s been almost a year of tea dates and lunch dates and walks in Hyde Park and Kew Gardens and kisses behind shelves in libraries and a bit more than kissing - the Americans he met in the war used to call it “second base” - occasionally when she says, “I think you should meet my grandmother.”
That was a week ago, when he’d taken her to the movies, a thing that still thrills her, for all her forays into the Muggle world during the war and then to the Leaky Cauldron afterwards and suddenly she’d thrown it out there and left it out to dry. I think you should meet my grandmother.
It was so strange because she never talks about her family. A year of seeing her on a regular basis and she never even told him one thing beyond “they all died in the Blitz except Grandmere” and suddenly she wanted him to meet the fabled Genevieve Morency Walcott, matriarch of a nearly dead, hundreds of years old pureblood family. Just like that. She must have had a serious case of the bloody bonkers.
As must have he because he agreed, bloody idiot that he is and now he’s standing in front of the Walcott family’s ancient seat in Cornwall near the beach of Readymoney Cove, in new and somehow ill-fitting formal robes that cost him a bloody fortune and that he will probably never wear again. After the war, he never really got back into the magical community and he has every intention to let it stay that way.
Next to him, Jane is standing in elegantly tailored robes in a shade of dark blue that make her eyes look like a pair of sapphires and he can’t believe he’s thinking that kind of bleeding nonsense, being stone-cold sober and all that. He shakes his head, mumbling, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“You’ll be fine.” She smirks. Sophisticated, gently-bred Jane Emilia Walcott smirks at him. This is how far it’s already gone.
But then again, he already knows that sophisticated, gently-bred Jane Emilia Walcott can swear like a sailor and once braved heat, disease and war and probably would do it all over again in a heartbeat, if only she could feel so alive again. He knows it because he’s been there himself.
He hunches over against the cold wind blowing in from the sea. “I think I’ll be the judge of that.”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on, I’m pretty sure she already knows we’re here. Any minute standing around here longer will make her crankier and I’m not in the mood for cranky Grandmere.” And he isn’t in the mood for any Grandmere. He never really got over the fact that he embodies everything purebloods hate - a mudblood that chose to find work and live almost completely in the Muggle word, severing himself from the wizarding community, except the woman next to him - and he still keeps wondering if he’s just some kind of rebellion for her. Her dirty little secret that makes her feel at least half as alive as the war did. Sometimes, that thought gives him nightmares worse than any of his war memories.
“Jane, I don’t think…”
“It’s too late for second thoughts now, Bournewithe, let’s get this over with,” she interrupts him, squaring her shoulders like she’s getting herself ready for battle while knocking on the massive oak door in front of them.
There is no one answering the door in person, not even a house elf, just the door swinging open very slowly, like in one of those Lugosi horror movies. At least there’s no ominous creaking or he probably wouldn’t have been able to stop laughing for a full hour. As it is, he just moves to follow Jane into the cavernous hall that is lit by only a few candles. The only one awaiting them is a male ghost in Regency era clothing, looking stern but softening up just a little bit when he sees Jane.
“Welcome home, Miss Jane,” the ghost says and it only now occurs to him that his date, his girlfriend, really is the sole heiress to what must be a sizable fortune and was raised in this kind of big, old box, that this isn’t some museum or National Trust property to her, but her childhood home.
“Always a pleasure, Bixby,” Miss Jane says and the quite audible note of sarcasm in her voice confuses him. Even makes him jealous and angry at her for a moment. He honestly wished he still had a childhood home but then again, what is a childhood home worth if there’s no one left but you and your grandmother?
There’s a kind of awkward silence for a moment in which he’s pretty sure he just saw Jane narrow her eyes at the ghost until “Bixby” finally deigns fit to utter, “And welcome to you, too,” while looking at him with a kind of barely veiled polite disdain in his face that only members of the aristocracy, can display. It seems as if they just glance you over but what they actually are doing is to tell you that you’re worth less than the dirt under the soles of their bloody shoes.
“His name is Damien Bournewithe, Bixby, and you know that. Stop that bloody nonsense right now.” Jane, as it seems, is having none of it, though. Which is exactly why he agreed to come here, after all. For her, and no one else.
However, he’d love it if they weren’t talking about him as if he wasn’t there.
Well, anyway, Bixby the Ghost still doesn’t seem too thrilled about the prospect of having to get on with a mudblood lowlife in the house but at least he looks at him again and introduces himself as, “Sir James Archibald Bixby, at your service, sir,” before turning around and floating up the left staircase, apparently wanting them to follow him.
He throws Jane a look and she reacts with silently rolling her eyes and very briefly brushing her hand against his. It could have been accidental but he likes to think that it wasn’t. He likes to think that she damn well knows what that kind of contact keeps doing to him, even after a year and the temptation to grab her and drag her into one of the rooms behind those countless doors they’re walking along is growing almost too bloody strong to ignore. It’s been a year of snogging and making out and really, a man in love has needs.
A man in love. Bloody hell.
He shakes his head, trying to ignore the disdainful stares and whispers of the rows and rows of ancestors and the strange sounds coming out of a few of the rooms behind the doors and the way that this manor reminds him of Hogwarts and seven years that always seemed like a fever dream in retrospect.
At least it’s only two more doors and then Bixby beckons them through another door that opens all on itself. Jane goes in first and he follows, walking into another cavernous room. It’s dark inside, except for the semi circle that the light of the fireplace creates. The first thing he notices after the darkness is the room’s smell; dry and dusty, like abandonment and loneliness.
When his eyes have adjusted to the semi-darkness, he can see an old sofa and an arm chair in the light from the fireplace and… “You are late again, Jane.” Ah. Yes. That must be the fabled Grandmere. Jane didn’t tell him much about her, only that she is French born and came to the country in the early 1890s for the arranged marriage with Grandfather Walcott. If he hadn’t known that, he wouldn’t have heard the very faint lilting French accent beneath the cutting disapproval in her surprisingly deep, raspy voice.
“And you are being rude again, Grandmere,” Jane just replies and he wonders if Jane Walcott might be the only person ever who dared to snap at a pureblood matriarch and come out alive.
Her grandmother doesn’t huff or give any other sign of offence, simply beckons them - or maybe just Jane because she doesn’t seem to have acknowledged his presence yet - to come closer and Jane does as she’s told. He doesn’t know how to react for a moment - after all Grandmere could just decide to turn him into a frog as soon as he makes himself known - but Jane’s little looking over her shoulder and waving him forward thing tells him very clearly that she expects him to man up and come over to her.
Managing not to sigh, he walks over to her, his leg suddenly bothering him more than it did for the entire last year. When he comes to stand next to her, he can finally see the old woman, sitting in the arm chair close to the fireplace, clothed completely in black and looking displeased. Jane, as it seems, decided not to let that bother her and simply plots on, saying, “Grandmere, I’d like to introduce you to Mr Damien Bournewithe, of…”
“I know who your paramour is, Jane.” Paramour, huh? He’ll give her bloody para…
“He’s my friend, Grandmere.” Right. A friend. Of course he’s just a friend. A friend she dates exclusively, as far as he knows, sure but just… “No, you know what, I don’t care about your delicate nineteenth century sensibilities. He’s my boyfriend. I am going out with him.”
Oh, okay. That is actually much better. Now, if they could just stop to talk about him as if he weren’t… “You are being indecent with him, Jane!” Oh, if only that were true. “You were seen multiple times. People are talking about you. About this family!”
And about him, apparently. So, maybe this is a good time to… “I don’t bloody care!”
“But you should!” Whoa, that was one bloody hell of a roar. Seriously, this isn’t someone you should mess around with and maybe he could just creep backwards, silently leave the room… “You should care about what people are saying about you and your family. You and I are the last one’s alive and of the both of us, you are the only true Walcott still in existence. Your entire family’s honor is at stake, have you forgotten that in your little trysts and tomfooleries? Have you forgotten that your little rebellion could be costing you a marriage befitting your station? Have you forgotten…”
“I don’t bloody care about marrying sodding idiots like Mr Henry James Worthington, Grandmother! I don’t bloody care because I bloody love Damien Peregrine Bournewithe!”
Okay.
So.
First of all.
How did she find out his middle name?
And second: she loves him? How come she never said anything, how come the one person she admits it to is her bloody grandmother, how come she never said anything?
He desperately wants to say something, anything but the sudden silence after her outburst is crushing the last bit of resolve he might have had at standing up for himself and it seems even powerful enough to smother both of the women who, as he only now realized, are so bloody alike in their bullheadedness and dominance that it’s scary as hell.
Then, after what seems like a small eternity, Grandmother Walcott is the first one to find her voice. “Love is a triviality purebloods were always able to do without, Jane.”
Right. And this is why he decided to turn his back on the wizarding community even before the war. Even at Hogwarts, he was fed up with all bloody absurdities that members of all those old families were spouting. He was fed up with the fact that those inbred arseholes were considered the future leaders of the wizarding community, the men and women tasked with governing the rest of them. If he had to be governed by inbred arseholes, he’d reasoned, he’d still prefer to be able to vote for the least inbred arsehole.
These idiots were also the reason why he’d tried so, so hard to convince himself that he wasn’t rapidly falling in love with Jane Walcott back in 1942. They were the reason why he’d gone back to the front as soon as he could, to get away from her, so she could find someone she could love without reservations and pain. They were the reason why he nearly hadn’t shown her that he recognized her on that rainy evening about a year back.
And right now, he’s so bloody glad that he had, anyway.
Because dear God, Jane Walcott just told her grandmother that she loves him and his heart is bursting with all the emotions he’d thought he’d never be able to feel again after the war and he wants nothing more than to go down on one knee and ask her if she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. Because in this moment he realizes that all he wants right now, has been wanting for quite a while now is spending the rest of his life with her and maybe that’s another reason why he agreed to come here. So he could get her grandmother’s blessing.
But it seems that Jane has other ideas because her reply to her grandmother’s coolly uttered fact is, “Well, I am not, Grandmere. And I think from now on, you will have to be able to do without me. Have a nice life in this house full of ghosts and loneliness but don’t wait for me to come back. Don’t ever wait for me to come back again.”
And then she turns around on her heels and leaves the room in great long strides full of anger and suddenly, the only people left in the room are Genevieve Walcott and him. For a moment, he’s positive that he’ll end up as a frog after all but then she only fixates him with a cold French stare and says in an equally cold voice, “Mr Bournewithe. If you know what’s good for you, you will cease to pursue my granddaughter and go back to the miserable existence as a Muggle born that you came from.”
It’s funny, he thinks, that she should know so little about him that she thinks his life is anything but a miserable Muggle born existence. Or would be, if it weren’t for Jane forcing him to take her out to dates and use more of the magic he once learned at School and basically be the one bright spot in his otherwise bleak reality.
He thinks for a moment and then says, surprisingly matter-of-factly, “You see, ma’am, here’s the thing. I don’t care about what is good for me. I haven’t been doing that since before the war.” And he hasn’t. If he had, he’d never have signed up for a bloody commission and a combat command. If he had, he’d tried to go for a cushy desk posting, well behind the frontlines or maybe even back in old Blighty, as his dad used to say. If he had, he’d never met Jane again. The left corner of his mouth lifts in a half-smile. “But I found something else to care about and that is what is good for her. Good day, ma’am.”
Not waiting for her answer and not even caring about being turned into a frog or something more hideous even, he turns his back on her and walks back to the door, his leg nearly throbbing with pain, as if he just spent the entire day walking from one end of London to the next but he can honestly say that he never felt as good in his entire life as right now.
Outside, he doesn’t find Jane right away but apparently, she must have left instructions because just a moment before he manages to be stupid enough to actually open one of the other doors, Bixby materializes next to him and guides him out of the house in contemptuous silence. For a moment, he’s afraid that Jane already Apparated off the premises but he finds her standing in front of the big iron fence, looking more shell-shocked and beside herself than he ever saw her before.
It’s so bloody killing him to see her like that that he simply takes her hand with the words, “Let’s go home,” and murmurs the spell for Disapparating for the first time in over ten years.
Just barely, he manages to get them into his tiny East London flat instead of a wall but it doesn’t matter anyway because as soon as they are back on terra firma, she collapses against him and the only thing he can think of is scooping her up and carrying her over to his little sofa, the only thing that survived the hit on his family’s house back in 1941.
He sets her down and as soon as he sat down next to her, she scrambles to be as close as possible to him and he shifts her around so that she’s sitting across his lap, her face in the crook of his neck and after a moment of perfect stillness, the tears are starting to come. It’s just a slow trickle at first, turning into huge, ugly sobs in the matter of minutes and he holds her, whispering stupid soothing nonsense to her, for hours and hours, deep into the night.
And it is three in the morning when it occurs to him, after holding her while she cried so long and made fun of his middle name in between and kept apologizing to him for being such a milksop and finally fell asleep against his shoulder, that he never said it back. He consoled and chided and shushed but he never even once said it back.
Tomorrow then, he thinks, and gives her a kiss on the top of her head. Tomorrow he’ll say it back, over breakfast or when he picks her up after work or over dinner. Tomorrow, then, he thinks again as he settles back, hugging her just a little closer before closing his eyes and finally drifting off into sleep. Tomorrow, then.
~*~
TBC in Dance Up On Them Haters.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: K+
Genres: het
Recipient: rareb
Prompt: Harry Potter, Jane Walcott/Damien Bournewith, State of Shock
Summary: It’s been almost a year of tea dates and lunch dates and walks in Hyde Park and Kew Gardens and kisses behind shelves in libraries when she says, “I think you should meet my grandmother.”
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. Sorry that I'm late with the story but they were both playing hard to get and this went into a completely different direction than what I'd originally planned. I guess that's what happens when you have characters that you revisit once a year. They screw you over :P Anyway, enjoy :D
( When Sentimentent Is Left To Chance )
( Into This House We're Born, Into This World We're Thrown )
She Puts Me In A State
“She looks so great.
Every time I see her face,
She puts me in a state,
A state of shock.“
Michael Jackson, „State of Shock“
It’s been almost a year of tea dates and lunch dates and walks in Hyde Park and Kew Gardens and kisses behind shelves in libraries and a bit more than kissing - the Americans he met in the war used to call it “second base” - occasionally when she says, “I think you should meet my grandmother.”
That was a week ago, when he’d taken her to the movies, a thing that still thrills her, for all her forays into the Muggle world during the war and then to the Leaky Cauldron afterwards and suddenly she’d thrown it out there and left it out to dry. I think you should meet my grandmother.
It was so strange because she never talks about her family. A year of seeing her on a regular basis and she never even told him one thing beyond “they all died in the Blitz except Grandmere” and suddenly she wanted him to meet the fabled Genevieve Morency Walcott, matriarch of a nearly dead, hundreds of years old pureblood family. Just like that. She must have had a serious case of the bloody bonkers.
As must have he because he agreed, bloody idiot that he is and now he’s standing in front of the Walcott family’s ancient seat in Cornwall near the beach of Readymoney Cove, in new and somehow ill-fitting formal robes that cost him a bloody fortune and that he will probably never wear again. After the war, he never really got back into the magical community and he has every intention to let it stay that way.
Next to him, Jane is standing in elegantly tailored robes in a shade of dark blue that make her eyes look like a pair of sapphires and he can’t believe he’s thinking that kind of bleeding nonsense, being stone-cold sober and all that. He shakes his head, mumbling, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“You’ll be fine.” She smirks. Sophisticated, gently-bred Jane Emilia Walcott smirks at him. This is how far it’s already gone.
But then again, he already knows that sophisticated, gently-bred Jane Emilia Walcott can swear like a sailor and once braved heat, disease and war and probably would do it all over again in a heartbeat, if only she could feel so alive again. He knows it because he’s been there himself.
He hunches over against the cold wind blowing in from the sea. “I think I’ll be the judge of that.”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on, I’m pretty sure she already knows we’re here. Any minute standing around here longer will make her crankier and I’m not in the mood for cranky Grandmere.” And he isn’t in the mood for any Grandmere. He never really got over the fact that he embodies everything purebloods hate - a mudblood that chose to find work and live almost completely in the Muggle word, severing himself from the wizarding community, except the woman next to him - and he still keeps wondering if he’s just some kind of rebellion for her. Her dirty little secret that makes her feel at least half as alive as the war did. Sometimes, that thought gives him nightmares worse than any of his war memories.
“Jane, I don’t think…”
“It’s too late for second thoughts now, Bournewithe, let’s get this over with,” she interrupts him, squaring her shoulders like she’s getting herself ready for battle while knocking on the massive oak door in front of them.
There is no one answering the door in person, not even a house elf, just the door swinging open very slowly, like in one of those Lugosi horror movies. At least there’s no ominous creaking or he probably wouldn’t have been able to stop laughing for a full hour. As it is, he just moves to follow Jane into the cavernous hall that is lit by only a few candles. The only one awaiting them is a male ghost in Regency era clothing, looking stern but softening up just a little bit when he sees Jane.
“Welcome home, Miss Jane,” the ghost says and it only now occurs to him that his date, his girlfriend, really is the sole heiress to what must be a sizable fortune and was raised in this kind of big, old box, that this isn’t some museum or National Trust property to her, but her childhood home.
“Always a pleasure, Bixby,” Miss Jane says and the quite audible note of sarcasm in her voice confuses him. Even makes him jealous and angry at her for a moment. He honestly wished he still had a childhood home but then again, what is a childhood home worth if there’s no one left but you and your grandmother?
There’s a kind of awkward silence for a moment in which he’s pretty sure he just saw Jane narrow her eyes at the ghost until “Bixby” finally deigns fit to utter, “And welcome to you, too,” while looking at him with a kind of barely veiled polite disdain in his face that only members of the aristocracy, can display. It seems as if they just glance you over but what they actually are doing is to tell you that you’re worth less than the dirt under the soles of their bloody shoes.
“His name is Damien Bournewithe, Bixby, and you know that. Stop that bloody nonsense right now.” Jane, as it seems, is having none of it, though. Which is exactly why he agreed to come here, after all. For her, and no one else.
However, he’d love it if they weren’t talking about him as if he wasn’t there.
Well, anyway, Bixby the Ghost still doesn’t seem too thrilled about the prospect of having to get on with a mudblood lowlife in the house but at least he looks at him again and introduces himself as, “Sir James Archibald Bixby, at your service, sir,” before turning around and floating up the left staircase, apparently wanting them to follow him.
He throws Jane a look and she reacts with silently rolling her eyes and very briefly brushing her hand against his. It could have been accidental but he likes to think that it wasn’t. He likes to think that she damn well knows what that kind of contact keeps doing to him, even after a year and the temptation to grab her and drag her into one of the rooms behind those countless doors they’re walking along is growing almost too bloody strong to ignore. It’s been a year of snogging and making out and really, a man in love has needs.
A man in love. Bloody hell.
He shakes his head, trying to ignore the disdainful stares and whispers of the rows and rows of ancestors and the strange sounds coming out of a few of the rooms behind the doors and the way that this manor reminds him of Hogwarts and seven years that always seemed like a fever dream in retrospect.
At least it’s only two more doors and then Bixby beckons them through another door that opens all on itself. Jane goes in first and he follows, walking into another cavernous room. It’s dark inside, except for the semi circle that the light of the fireplace creates. The first thing he notices after the darkness is the room’s smell; dry and dusty, like abandonment and loneliness.
When his eyes have adjusted to the semi-darkness, he can see an old sofa and an arm chair in the light from the fireplace and… “You are late again, Jane.” Ah. Yes. That must be the fabled Grandmere. Jane didn’t tell him much about her, only that she is French born and came to the country in the early 1890s for the arranged marriage with Grandfather Walcott. If he hadn’t known that, he wouldn’t have heard the very faint lilting French accent beneath the cutting disapproval in her surprisingly deep, raspy voice.
“And you are being rude again, Grandmere,” Jane just replies and he wonders if Jane Walcott might be the only person ever who dared to snap at a pureblood matriarch and come out alive.
Her grandmother doesn’t huff or give any other sign of offence, simply beckons them - or maybe just Jane because she doesn’t seem to have acknowledged his presence yet - to come closer and Jane does as she’s told. He doesn’t know how to react for a moment - after all Grandmere could just decide to turn him into a frog as soon as he makes himself known - but Jane’s little looking over her shoulder and waving him forward thing tells him very clearly that she expects him to man up and come over to her.
Managing not to sigh, he walks over to her, his leg suddenly bothering him more than it did for the entire last year. When he comes to stand next to her, he can finally see the old woman, sitting in the arm chair close to the fireplace, clothed completely in black and looking displeased. Jane, as it seems, decided not to let that bother her and simply plots on, saying, “Grandmere, I’d like to introduce you to Mr Damien Bournewithe, of…”
“I know who your paramour is, Jane.” Paramour, huh? He’ll give her bloody para…
“He’s my friend, Grandmere.” Right. A friend. Of course he’s just a friend. A friend she dates exclusively, as far as he knows, sure but just… “No, you know what, I don’t care about your delicate nineteenth century sensibilities. He’s my boyfriend. I am going out with him.”
Oh, okay. That is actually much better. Now, if they could just stop to talk about him as if he weren’t… “You are being indecent with him, Jane!” Oh, if only that were true. “You were seen multiple times. People are talking about you. About this family!”
And about him, apparently. So, maybe this is a good time to… “I don’t bloody care!”
“But you should!” Whoa, that was one bloody hell of a roar. Seriously, this isn’t someone you should mess around with and maybe he could just creep backwards, silently leave the room… “You should care about what people are saying about you and your family. You and I are the last one’s alive and of the both of us, you are the only true Walcott still in existence. Your entire family’s honor is at stake, have you forgotten that in your little trysts and tomfooleries? Have you forgotten that your little rebellion could be costing you a marriage befitting your station? Have you forgotten…”
“I don’t bloody care about marrying sodding idiots like Mr Henry James Worthington, Grandmother! I don’t bloody care because I bloody love Damien Peregrine Bournewithe!”
Okay.
So.
First of all.
How did she find out his middle name?
And second: she loves him? How come she never said anything, how come the one person she admits it to is her bloody grandmother, how come she never said anything?
He desperately wants to say something, anything but the sudden silence after her outburst is crushing the last bit of resolve he might have had at standing up for himself and it seems even powerful enough to smother both of the women who, as he only now realized, are so bloody alike in their bullheadedness and dominance that it’s scary as hell.
Then, after what seems like a small eternity, Grandmother Walcott is the first one to find her voice. “Love is a triviality purebloods were always able to do without, Jane.”
Right. And this is why he decided to turn his back on the wizarding community even before the war. Even at Hogwarts, he was fed up with all bloody absurdities that members of all those old families were spouting. He was fed up with the fact that those inbred arseholes were considered the future leaders of the wizarding community, the men and women tasked with governing the rest of them. If he had to be governed by inbred arseholes, he’d reasoned, he’d still prefer to be able to vote for the least inbred arsehole.
These idiots were also the reason why he’d tried so, so hard to convince himself that he wasn’t rapidly falling in love with Jane Walcott back in 1942. They were the reason why he’d gone back to the front as soon as he could, to get away from her, so she could find someone she could love without reservations and pain. They were the reason why he nearly hadn’t shown her that he recognized her on that rainy evening about a year back.
And right now, he’s so bloody glad that he had, anyway.
Because dear God, Jane Walcott just told her grandmother that she loves him and his heart is bursting with all the emotions he’d thought he’d never be able to feel again after the war and he wants nothing more than to go down on one knee and ask her if she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. Because in this moment he realizes that all he wants right now, has been wanting for quite a while now is spending the rest of his life with her and maybe that’s another reason why he agreed to come here. So he could get her grandmother’s blessing.
But it seems that Jane has other ideas because her reply to her grandmother’s coolly uttered fact is, “Well, I am not, Grandmere. And I think from now on, you will have to be able to do without me. Have a nice life in this house full of ghosts and loneliness but don’t wait for me to come back. Don’t ever wait for me to come back again.”
And then she turns around on her heels and leaves the room in great long strides full of anger and suddenly, the only people left in the room are Genevieve Walcott and him. For a moment, he’s positive that he’ll end up as a frog after all but then she only fixates him with a cold French stare and says in an equally cold voice, “Mr Bournewithe. If you know what’s good for you, you will cease to pursue my granddaughter and go back to the miserable existence as a Muggle born that you came from.”
It’s funny, he thinks, that she should know so little about him that she thinks his life is anything but a miserable Muggle born existence. Or would be, if it weren’t for Jane forcing him to take her out to dates and use more of the magic he once learned at School and basically be the one bright spot in his otherwise bleak reality.
He thinks for a moment and then says, surprisingly matter-of-factly, “You see, ma’am, here’s the thing. I don’t care about what is good for me. I haven’t been doing that since before the war.” And he hasn’t. If he had, he’d never have signed up for a bloody commission and a combat command. If he had, he’d tried to go for a cushy desk posting, well behind the frontlines or maybe even back in old Blighty, as his dad used to say. If he had, he’d never met Jane again. The left corner of his mouth lifts in a half-smile. “But I found something else to care about and that is what is good for her. Good day, ma’am.”
Not waiting for her answer and not even caring about being turned into a frog or something more hideous even, he turns his back on her and walks back to the door, his leg nearly throbbing with pain, as if he just spent the entire day walking from one end of London to the next but he can honestly say that he never felt as good in his entire life as right now.
Outside, he doesn’t find Jane right away but apparently, she must have left instructions because just a moment before he manages to be stupid enough to actually open one of the other doors, Bixby materializes next to him and guides him out of the house in contemptuous silence. For a moment, he’s afraid that Jane already Apparated off the premises but he finds her standing in front of the big iron fence, looking more shell-shocked and beside herself than he ever saw her before.
It’s so bloody killing him to see her like that that he simply takes her hand with the words, “Let’s go home,” and murmurs the spell for Disapparating for the first time in over ten years.
Just barely, he manages to get them into his tiny East London flat instead of a wall but it doesn’t matter anyway because as soon as they are back on terra firma, she collapses against him and the only thing he can think of is scooping her up and carrying her over to his little sofa, the only thing that survived the hit on his family’s house back in 1941.
He sets her down and as soon as he sat down next to her, she scrambles to be as close as possible to him and he shifts her around so that she’s sitting across his lap, her face in the crook of his neck and after a moment of perfect stillness, the tears are starting to come. It’s just a slow trickle at first, turning into huge, ugly sobs in the matter of minutes and he holds her, whispering stupid soothing nonsense to her, for hours and hours, deep into the night.
And it is three in the morning when it occurs to him, after holding her while she cried so long and made fun of his middle name in between and kept apologizing to him for being such a milksop and finally fell asleep against his shoulder, that he never said it back. He consoled and chided and shushed but he never even once said it back.
Tomorrow then, he thinks, and gives her a kiss on the top of her head. Tomorrow he’ll say it back, over breakfast or when he picks her up after work or over dinner. Tomorrow, then, he thinks again as he settles back, hugging her just a little closer before closing his eyes and finally drifting off into sleep. Tomorrow, then.
~*~
TBC in Dance Up On Them Haters.