Recovery

Amelia woke up for the third time that day, her vision foggy as she oriented herself yet again to where she was. She had been here for months as they tried to get the dosage of her treatment just right, but somehow each day it was still a surprise to find that she was in a bed at St. Mungo’s rather than in the headmistress’s quarters at Hogwarts.

All that was gone now, though. When she had succumbed so far to what was now being called the “pureblood pox” that she could no longer attend Hogwarts events or impress rich benefactors, Amelia had been asked to take a leave of absence from her post. At first, she was resistant to the idea, not wanting to let people say “I told you so” about her being too young to handle the challenge, but in the end, her practicality won out. Her fever would spike and plummet so frequently she wasn’t able to sleep, and she had turned a ghastly shade of green. She wasn’t being effective in her position, and she needed to get well.

And her mother needed her to stop making public appearances while she was that particular shade of putrid green.

So the headmistress on hiatus had been relegated to St. Mungo’s, along with countless other patients, to await the treatment that would cure her of this wretched existence. The place was crowded and understaffed, on account of many of the beds being filled by St. Mungo’s employees who had fallen ill as well, but she was given a potion to break her fever and some salve for the vertigree. However, the potion made her lethargic, so the usually alert, quick-witted Amelia had been dulled for the first few months of her stay, so much so that most of the staff needed to be told that the person in bed 3B was indeed the youngest headmistress Hogwarts had ever seen.

But even after rounds of treatment and what the healers had called a “success”, Amelia still felt more or less out of it most of the time. The only good thing about all of this was that she hadn’t been disturbed; no close friends meant no visitors, and since her mother hadn’t been seen in public since she caught the pox herself, Amelia had been gifted with the privacy she had always so desperately wanted at Hogwarts.

So why, when she woke up today, did she have the strangest feeling of… being alone?

Jack missed Nemo.

The poor girl had no idea what to do with herself. She had Matt and Merlot, yes, but they simply made her miss her roommate more. Their strong ties to Nemo, as well as Merlot's striking similarities, burrowed deep inside of her mind and heart, weighing her down and deepening the already fresh wounds. It had been awhile since he had been taken, and yet Jack felt as though she still had not adapted.

When she was not at practice or in the shop, she had taken to wandering. Simply exploring the public she had sworn to protect. She was trying to figure it out... why had she ever bothered to protect these people in the first place? They were dreadful! If they hadn't captured Nemo, Jack might have begun to understand the Death Eater's way of thinking. Maybe less was better.

Of course, this was all the desperation of a heart attempting not to mourn. Most people seemed to have written Nemo off as a loss, but Jack simply couldn't. She wasn't sure what she would do if she had too. Perhaps move with Merlot, just take to the road, perhaps invite Matt.

But Nemo wasn't dead. They were going to save him.

They had to.

She had found herself in Mungo's today, walking the halls with the authority of a former Ministry Head. She liked reading the plaques, figuring out which of her former classmates were sick, laughing at the purebloods who had mocked her for being muggleborn.

Irony was a b!tch, huh.

However, one plaque today halted her in her tracks.

Lyons, A.

Who else had such a classy name?

Jack glanced up and down the hallways. The nurses had always given her the grumpy "alright, you can stay, but no bothering patients" lecture, so if they saw her bothering the youngest headmistress in history... she'd be thrown out. Jack knocked three times, before slipping inside, quickly closing the door behind her.

She turned around. "Hi Amelia."

To shake the feeling that was oh so very foreign to Amelia, she blinked the sleep from her eyes and shook her head to clear it. When she reopened her eyes, the room was a bit clearer and her thinking a little straighter. Amelia was careful not to look to her left, where she knew there was a full length mirror waiting to give her a glimpse of what three solid months in the hospital did for one’s appearance. She had been avoiding it, but she could still tell that she had lost weight, her limbs and face even more angular than they had been before.

Instead, Amelia groped blindly for a hair tie on the bedside table and, finding it, scooped her red curls into a ponytail to get them out of her face. Then, she groped amongst the covers until she found the book she had been reading before she fell asleep, a study on muggle teaching practices and how they might be implemented in a magical setting.

The former headmistress had just opened the book and found the last paragraph she remembered reading when she heard a knock at her door. A quick glance at the clock told her it wasn’t a scheduled medication or check-in time from the healing staff, so she didn’t reply immediately. However, the person on the other side of the door didn’t seem to need an invitation, and a second later the door opened and closed quickly, the room now containing two redheads instead of just one.

Jack greeted her pleasantly enough, but Amelia immediately felt self-conscious with her in the room. She knew she looked terrible, but that wasn’t the part that was bothering her. Jack looked just like her old self; healthy, whole, probably still taking on the world while Amelia had been bedridden for the last few months, fallen roughly from the grace she had enjoyed only briefly.

Amelia and Jack’s friendship had been tentatively perched on the mutual respect they had for one another. Although the girls were not at all similar in their interests or behaviors, they were both driven and, in their own respects, successful. But Amelia hadn’t even talked to Jack since she got to St. Mungo’s, and she certainly didn’t feel proud of what she was doing now. Amelia wasn’t accustomed to feeling inferior to her peers, but seeing Jack now, she had an easy enough time identifying that particular emotion.

“Um… Hi, Jaquellene,” Amelia replied, realizing belatedly (as usual) that she needed to reply here. Amelia was embarrassed that her social skills seemed to have regressed even further during these months of seclusion, so she tried to think of some way to make up for it.

“I see being muggleborn is finally working for you,” Amelia added with a gesture toward the other girl’s healthy appearance. She was making an attempt at a friendly comment, but Amelia had never been all that good at these things. She added a half-smile to try to get her meaning across.

Jack grinned a Amelia, vaguely wondering how easily she could pretend as though she were alright. Maybe there had been just enough time since Nemo had been taken to hide the fact that there was any change. A few days after the event, Jack had looked like a ghost. She had not slept in a week, had hardly ate- she had looked thinner, more gaunt, white as a sheet, and her features had cast shadows on her face. Now that she was back on the Quidditch pitch, she had a regiment of exercise and diet and had built back her muscle.

She just hoped it didn't show in her face.

Amelia looked smaller, but it had never been in Amelia's actual physicality that her personality lie. You could tell a lot about Amelia from the way she walked and held her head and, even though she had been diminished by the plague, she was not unrecognizable. Besides, Jack had seen Matt Lestrange, and that had been the worst case she had seen yet. She doubted anyone else could come as a surprise after that.

Jack glanced around and spotted a chair, quickly moving to draw it nearer the bed, though not as near as most people might bring it. Jack liked to causally lounge during conversations, so she fell into the chair, curling her legs up under her and resting her head on the armchair as she looked at Amelia. Her eyes briefly registered her own exhaustion before Amelia spoke.

Jack chuckled. "You could say that, I suppose. Of course, some of the blood manics still rant and rave how this disease proves their superiority. I think a few of them reckon they'll be getting superpowers out of this." Jack's grin held up for as long as she could, but it was fading as she asked, "How have you been?"

Without any invitation necessary, and in true Jaquellene fashion, the former Gryffindor redhead pulled a chair over by Amelia’s bed, tangling her legs up beneath her in a way that Amelia’s mother certainly would have sneered at. The former headmistress might have given the same look to Jaquellene a few years ago – and, come to think of it, she rather remembered that she did when they had first met – Amelia had grown to understand that some things about Jack were just… Jaquellene. And there was certainly no changing her.

“I don’t feel much like a super hero,” Amelia said honestly in reference to her friend’s – was she still allowed to call her that? – comment about the pureblood craziness. Amelia was pureblooded, to be sure, and her parents were rather proud of that fact. But her father had also done a great deal of research in the differences in magical ability between purebloods, mixed-bloods, and muggleborns and had come up completely empty handed every time. No statistical significance whatsoever. And because Amelia was a woman of facts and reason, without anything to back it up, she couldn’t bring herself to have that same superiority complex that many of her fellow purebloods seemed to wear like a badge.

Jaquellene’s next question came quickly after Amelia’s response, the other girl keeping the conversation afloat, as always. It was a question Amelia had been asked many times, by healers and visitors from Hogwarts staff and by her parents each time they sent an owl. There were a lot of ways Amelia could have answered that question, but she was tired. Tired of talking about her health, or lack thereof, and tired of being a victim. She just wanted her strength and magic back so people would stop walking on eggshells around her.

“I’ve been better,” Amelia said, feigning a smile as she kept it short and simple. She just didn’t want to get into this again.

And besides, she had seen a look on Jaquellene’s face as she asked the question that showed there was something more to it than polite conversation. And if Amelia knew anything about social interactions, it was this: take what you see, and run with it to make the other person talk more than you. It was the only way she survived seven years at Hogwarts.

“But you – how have you been? Obviously you’ve avoided this particular brand of disaster,” Amelia said, gesturing to her hospital room, “But you look… tired.” The redhead tried to say it politely, but there was really no other way of putting it.

Jack grinned as Amelia admitted that she didn't feel powerful and she responded, "That's because you're intelligent. And sane. Wish I could say the same of others. Have you read the latest Daily Prophet article? Apparently, I passed Hogwarts on the good charity of the professors." Jack was already formulating her attack on Mr Franklin O'Neil for, firstly, tricking her into an interview and, secondly, besmirching her already smudged name further in new and outlandish ways. Naturally, though, the one thing he had gotten right in the article was the thing that spurred Jack towards revenge the most. She could deal with being called insane and stupid. But being accused of being in love- now that was something that got people killed.

She probably should have dressed nicer. She imagined, though, that Amelia had become very accustomed to the same old nurses' robes, the same hospital gowns, the same color walls, sheets, and food trays. Her jeans and ratty t-shirt was probably a nice fresh sight. Jack reached up to scratch the back of her neck. If she wasn't careful, she'd soon have a proper amount of hair. With all of the craziness going on, she hadn't kept her hair as short as usual.

Amelia replied simply and Jack responded with a similar smile. Jack had heard the stories everywhere, and they didn't typically vary. Jack just hoped that Amelia's case was not life threatening. The people Jack could consider friends were far and few, and with Matt sick and Nemo gone, Jack didn't need Amelia gone too.

Amelia continued on and asked after Jack, and Jack's mouth immediately opened, ready as ever to laugh it off, shake off her doubts, and assure her that there was no reason in the world that she could be anything than perfectly alright. But Amelia had noticed a change in her and she noted it, causing Jack to realize that she would not be able to simply wave it off.

Jack heaved a shrug. "Oh, just... y'know. I quit the Ministry, and I'm playing with the Falmouth Falcons now as Beater. Weasleys is busy with Christmas coming up, and it's just... mad times out there." She cratched her arm, glancing down at it. "I don't know how well you've been able to keep up with what's going on while you've been in here..." She glanced up, rubbing her arm a little bit as she tried to keep a level head. "My roommate was kidnapped by the Death Eaters so... It's been an adjustment."

“As soon as you’re in any position of relative importance, someone’s bound to throw stones,” Amelia said in response to Jack’s revelation about the slanderous articles in the Daily Prophet. Amelia had read them – there wasn’t much else to do in here but read, so she did a lot of it – but she knew they slandered Jack in the same way they had her when she first became headmistress.

“Remember how I bedded Jess Potter and two-thirds of the Board of Governors to get my position as headmistress?” Amelia added sarcastically, remembering the temper that had risen in her after reading that stupid article, and how some people had looked at her quite differently afterward. Apparently they had brains the size of the article’s text to believe something so senseless.

It was surprising how quickly Amelia was able to fall back into talking with Jess. She had basically lost what little social ground she had gained by being cooped up in here for so long, awkward even with the nurses who saw her every day. Maybe it was just that Jack was such a constant; although she had matured over the years they shared at Hogwarts, so much of her personality remained the same. She still wore those same ratty clothes that she had been wearing when Amelia first met her, the same tangled mop of red on the top of her head, the same general disregard for cleanliness. Amelia wondered if Jack thought the same of her - that she hadn’t changed at all – or if she, like so many others, saw Amelia much differently now that she had had her fall from grace.

When Jack went to reply to Amelia’s comment, she hesitated, which for Amelia always tipped her off that Jack was going to be unusually honest. She knew that look of indecision because she wore it the same way before she told anyone a real truth. Amelia wouldn’t push Jack to tell her anything, and she didn’t have to. It all sort of came out in a stream of consciousness a moment later.

“Jack I’m… I’m sorry,” Amelia said, fumbling for words. She wasn’t the person people told their troubles to; most people were too scared she would shoot ice daggers at them to be giving her a taste of the touchy-feely. Amelia wanted to be able to comfort Jack, but… she didn’t know how. She was looking straight at the girl who had always been so strong, like Amelia, but was now in a position that she couldn’t control.

It was funny how life just kept taking Jack and Amelia, two completely different girls, in such similar directions.

“I read the article,” Amelia said, finding words in facts, “I read about Nemo’s kidnapping, but I… I didn’t even know you knew him. If I had known he was your roommate, I would have… certainly would have… owled, at the very least.”

“Can I… I mean… is there any way I can help?” Amelia inquired gently, not wanting to push Jack further into this conversation than she wanted to go.

Jack smirked at Amelia's words. "I was shocked really. You must have borrowed a Time Turner to help you get around as much as you did. You really spread your wings, didn't you?" This was comfortable. Jokes, prodding at the press, feeling superior to and above all of the nonsense that was constantly being smeared all over the world in swirls of dazzling ignorance and sparkling stupidity. Yes, this felt so much better than feeling as though you have been bested. Jack grinned over at Amelia. "I shouldn't have been surprised at the volume. You've always been thorough."

Amelia was sorry. Jack didn't want Amelia to be sorry. Jack only wanted the assholes who had taken Nemo to feel sorry. Amelia hadn't kidnapped Nemo, she couldn't have helped recover him in any way. Jack would never want a friend to feel sorry for something they shouldn't be sorry for.

"No, no, it's okay," Jack assured Amelia. "I mean... eventually, either I would be taken or he would. An owl wouldn't have done anything. Besides, you were tied up here." Jack smiled weakly. "There's nothing anyone can really do. We're working on recovering him, though."

Amelia was bad at feelings. They were illogical, and therefore fell out of her realm of expertise. She was good at a lot of things; the obvious ones, like magic, organization, and being alone, but she had also surprised herself at being rather good at teaching, and even, when she was pressed, at leading.

But Amelia was not good at feelings.

With careful observation, Amelia was able to determine that the expression Jaquellene was trying to mask was… sadness. Or disappointment. Or desperation. Or loneliness.

Why were there so many damn feelings anyway?

Whatever the feeling was, Amelia didn’t like that Jaquellene was experiencing it. There were very few people Amelia liked, and this girl was one of them. That placed an undue amount of pressure on Jacquellene to be happy so Amelia wouldn’t have to worry about her.

But now she was worried.

Friendship is hard, Amelia thought, wanting to know what to do to make Jacquellene feel better, but stuck for too long before she found a response that would, she supposed, suffice.

“I don’t like that your friend was taken,” Amelia said honestly, and then continued honestly,” But I’m glad it wasn’t you. If there is anything I can do, anyone I can talk to, to help you get the bastards who took him, you have to tell me. A defunct headmistress probably doesn’t amount for much, but I haven’t been doing nearly enough with my parents’ money and influence all these years, so it’s probably high time I put it to a better use than Yule Ball gowns and perfume I never wear,” Amelia finished, wanting to make Jacquellene smile with the reference to her mother’s absurd priorities. She didn’t think it would work, but she had to try.

Because, she thought she had read somewhere, that is what friends do.

Jack was puzzled. Why would Amelia wish Jack was safe, as compared to Nemo? Logically, society had a lot less to lose if Jack were gone. At the time, she had been Head of the Department for Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures- the only real secrets of that department were the ones Jack was keeping from her own employees. But Nemo had a grasp on the status of the most dangerous criminals in Britain, as well as the defenses the Ministry had in place for its citizens.

It took a moment for Jack to process this seemingly obvious slip in Amelia's logic- Amelia was never illogical. She was never illogical, so Jack was trying to see what angle Amelia was looking at this situation fro- oh. It was because they were friends. Jack often forgot the such familiarity fostered partiality. She was always caught off guard when she found herself favored by those she considered her friends.

Jack smiled. "Thank you. I don't think much can be done really. With no real clue as to who took him, or even a motive behind it, little action can be taken." She grinned a little, though- it was always amused Jack that the things most girls would kill for were at Amelia's constant disposal, and she seemed to be wholly uninterested by them. "Maybe we could put those to use when the time for revenge rolls around."