10 September 1942
Endymion and I almost Had Words this afternoon.
I never want to go back to fighting the way we used to; to fighting the way that my parents do, when they’re together. I don’t want that for us, so I held some things back, and he admitted he was wrong, but it was near enough to bother me, because when we let ourselves fight, we are so terrible. And I love him. I never want to hurt him. And I know he doesn’t want to hurt me.
He is right, though.
It’s strange, to think of school this way. To think about what lessons I should go to in the sense of what I will do with my life. To realise that maybe it’s no longer appropriate to keep going to something just because it is fun, if it has nothing to do with my real ambition in life, if I plan to use it only for fun…if it will set me on a path I have no desire to walk. I am not very good at artificery, though sometimes I come up with creative solutions to problems (that’s what I do in everything I’m good at, though-and better) and I am terrible at Transfiguration and if I am honest with myself I have got through Potions largely because Endymion loves me and doesn’t want me to fail. During the months we were fighting, I had a terrible time of it, and if it weren’t for Susie, who’s no longer here, I shouldn’t have made the required marks in Transfiguration and Potions at all. It wouldn’t have been my choice to drop Auror training, I wouldn’t have qualified.
And I don’t want to be sent to the front. I’m not afraid and if they truly needed me I’d go. But I’m useful in a war mostly as a warm body; my skills are better used here. And I really think leaving Endymion in Londinium alone in his current state of stability would be a very dangerous thing to do-for him, and for me, because something inside me would die if anything happened to him, and for anyone who was in the area of effect when he exploded.
I used to be a bit afraid of him myself sometimes, because he fills up my world with a range of colours and emotions I would never know without him, and because I have always had a sense that he could be terribly powerful and dangerous if he wanted to be, if he only knew how. But it seems ridiculous in the cold light of day to feel that-and I tell myself that what I was afraid of is how deep into me he can go, how strong this commitment is and how much it will shape what I make of my life.
I think my mother feels it too, and she’s nothing but afraid of it. She told me once this summer that she wondered what I would be like if I’d never met him-that he has shaped me more than she has, that he takes up too much space in my mind and that my life is in danger of evolving to suit him, not me. But the things he shows me about myself are always true.
And if he is more powerful than he appears to be, fearing him and thinking of him as other than what we are ourselves (where he can’t help but sense it, hear it) will give him no reason to love us, no reason to see our cause as his own. I was once afraid that he’d reject the Muggle side of my family, but he hasn’t; they’re important to me and he has accepted them because of it-I think he even loves them a little, chary as he is of admitting it.
I will probably drop artificery, not least because I am liable to blow myself up thinking about obscure points of law or interspecies communications or what I want to do with Endymion later or how to deal with the incubus. (It has crossed my mind to wonder if demons are innately evil or simply at cross purposes with humanity, and if the latter, can negotiation ever really work to our advantage-do we have to fight?)
I am not meant to make war. There, I have said it. Making war is my father’s job. I want to be an architect of the peace that will come to follow it. That must come. Because Muggles and wizards and faeries alike grow more and more capable of destroying one another and the world we must all learn to share. And if it is to be avoided, then it will not be through starry-eyed idealism and the belief that love and truth and goodness and rightness conquer all; it will be through pragmatism, through understanding what needs and drives are the root causes of the conflict, through learning to perceive what is there rather than what we fear, hope or expect to see, through learning to communicate persuasively and accurately using language that will mean what we mean to the person who hears or reads it, and through creating a system of law and diplomacy in which the needs and rights and truths of different kinds of people are acknowledged and handled realistically.
This, I think, is what I was meant to do.
Blowing things up is my partner’s job; he says sometimes he learns more from his mistakes than his successes. I love that about him, but he can afford to think like that because he will mostly ruin cauldrons and retorts and alembics. If I fuck up at what I want to do, the cost, I think, will be more than I care even to imagine counting.