Broken Strings

Four inches.

That’s how long it had always been. How deep he could go, could dive before he was forced to pull up. Before his bloody f*cking fear forced him to pull up.

Hooch had always told him. “You’d be a great Seeker, Potter. You’ve got the eye. You know what you want. But you’re too scared to go after it.” She wasn’t one to mince words. But she wasn’t a philosopher either. She was speaking about Quidditch, plain and simple. But watching and looking and seeing and waiting, those few little lines became the defining truth of Albus’s life. A kid really, poised at the edge of the lake, dying to dive into the deeps but could muster only enough courage to wet his socks in the shallows. And paralysed by that fear, he hid that bone-deep desire in the contemptuous lines of his face, and turned away, with time convincing himself that he didn’t care for it at all.

Today, flying somewhere seventy feet above the ground, Albus wanted to f*ck it all.

His heart was beating wildly in his chest, almost as if going through the action when he was merely contemplating it. The ground was down. So, so, far down. Surely it would hurt? But then……wouldn’t hovering at seventy feet his whole life hurt a whole lot more?

His hands, dry as though even sweat was too afraid to leak out of the pores, wrapped around his vibrating broomstick, tightly. His stomach was tighter than it had ever been before, air leaking out of his lungs in gasps. He felt heady.

Albus dived.

The wind was cold, oh, oh so cold. It whistled in his ears, then built up: louder and louder and louder till all Albus could hear was the screaming of the wind; shouting and shrieking and turning all around him in tempestuous glee, in a last victorious trumpet that sang of freedom and liberty and letting go. The air was saying it, the clouds were echoing it, his whole life had been leading up to this. This one moment that stretched on and on till his vision blurred and his eyes watered by the sheer force of the wind blasting against them. He was almost perfectly vertical now, a straight ninety-degree dive like a rocket going in reverse.

There it was. The ground.

No sooner had he spotted it than it seemed to loom up against him, hard and unforgiving and promising hurt. Mocking his every trial. His wrists quivered, his thighs felt loosely locked around his broom, he was slipping. He was falling.

He was falling.

An instinctive twitch of his fingers. He was speeding. Going faster. He would crash. Any second. Crash………..now.

He pulled out, with a lurch that seemed to send his entire world spinning off its axis. His head swung, up was down and down was up and the fringe of his hair was skimming the grass.

His fringe was not four inches long. Albus closed his eyes and laughed.

The sound seemed to expand and burst out of him, ripping his chest, tearing his throat and breaking free. It rang in his ears, over and over till it felt like the whole world was laughing with him. Laughing till tears blurred with his vision and nothing, nothing felt sweeter.

He was laughing, still laughing when he turned the right side up, gained height and flew. Spanning miles and miles in seconds, till small boxes…(buildings?) appeared in the periphery of his vision. Flew till he felt like stopping, and when he dismounted at the door of a building and saw ‘Layabout Lane’ pasted in dilapidated letters on a worn-out sign, he was still flying.

Three knocks. Pure, distilled adrenaline simmered in his veins. “Jack?”

Jack was on edge. She waited in the kitchen, her hands shaky and uncertain. She had just returned from a hard night. She had stumbled home this morning after finding herself unfortunately involved in the deaths of Charlotte Topes and Alexis d'Eath. Though Jack led the Order, she had been so sure that her days in battle had been long over. How she found herself tangled into two in one night, she would never be able to reason out with cruel fate. She had returned, certain of her own guilt and covered in ash and blood with only her roommate to console her - the roommate she had just rowed with the previous morning over a loose Boggart.

Life was not going easy on Jack Dyllan. And it did not intend on letting up any time soon, it seemed.

Max had ducked out to do something, Jack could hardly remember what. A mug of Firewhiskey was before her - it probably wasn't strong enough but it was a start and it was warm. Besides, it was morning. She was glad it was morning. There was something so nonthreatening about the morning. Bad news was not delivered in the morning, attacks weren't planned for the early hours. Something about the morning lulled Jack into a (false) sense of security, allowing her to close her eyes at the table an just feel the home around her.

Yes. Home. With Sunny still sleeping bed, Toby curled up in the guest room, Charlie pruning plants in the backyard. This was home, and home was safe and good. She suddenly felt the edge of happiness. There were people in this place who loved her. People - the plural of person. She had been certain not more than one person at a time could stand her. Every time someone positive entered her life, someone made their exit. But Max, and Sunny, and Charlie, and Toby - the had stuck around. They had remained around her. They had decided they cared and had stayed. It was almost unbelievable. But Jack was learning to believe that not every moment had to have a backlash.

That's when she heard a knock at her door. Her head immediately rose and she stared at the unmoving slab of wood for a moment, curious and alert. And then a voice - a familiar voice though she was not sure she could definitively identify it. She rose slowly, checking to make sure her wand was on her person, and she walked over to the door, resting a hand on the doorknob. The last being to step through her threshold had been a boggart - but that had been thrown in, moreless. Still, Jack was not one to be timid.

She opened the door and found herself face to face with one of the people who had made their exit. She stared at Albus Potter with visible surprise and confusion, before finally managing to spit out the word, "Albus!..." She paused, searching for words. "What are you doing here? I mean, where have you been?"

It was several seconds, several heartbeats, before she opened the door.

“Jack.” Albus said again, just to feel the word on his tongue. It had been one month, one long long month and……..and he had missed her. His eyes scoped searchingly over her features, she was paler than ever before, edging towards pallid. Her pale green eyes, lined and drawn out. An errant lock of red hair, fleeting carelessly down the side of her face, and Albus remembered the night when he had drank himself to agony, and all he remembered of the morning was her, her making pancakes and a lock of red hair.

Somewhere, in between rushing towards the ground and feeling the wind scrape his bones away, in a moment suspended in time, his shields had crashed. His masks smashed and obliterated, lying in a charred heap of ashes. So he allowed himself to look, uninterrupted. And see the worry and the pain and the hidden accusations in the way her lips shaped his name. Albus.

“I’m sorry.” He said, and it was surprising the way the words rose so easily, so heartfelt, to his lips. “I didn’t mean to…..I didn’t do it purposely…I just…..” His hands fidgeted restlessly by his sides, his right hand rising upwards and sweeping through his locks in an unconscious, unhidden imitation of his grandfather. “I didn’t mean to go without telling you. I…I couldn’t think…I’m sorry if you’re mad…I mean, not that I’m saying that you should care…no one does.” A hitched breath. He hadn’t meant to say that. Its alright. Its fine now. The mask is gone. . “I….if it hurt you for some reason then….I’m not saying it should…though it would hurt me if it wouldn’t, I mean, not that I’m saying you should hurt..I…” A rattling breath. “Can I come in?”

He moved past her, into the house where it all had happened. There, those stairs. Where he had ascended for the first time and seen the erstwhile room of Nemo Omara, littered with bottles and razors and he had thought for a split-second that his brother’s friend had been entertaining suicidal thoughts. He smiled. Stupid. . They had hatched plots then, plots to turn around the world. And there, the doorway to the guest house where he had practically shouted himself hoarse at Jack, then confessed his biggest secret, and drank and laughed his worries away. The table, where she had served him coffee to abate his hangover. The memories.

We always think we’d look back on our tears and laugh, but we never think we’d look back on our laughter and cry.

“How’ve you been, Jack?”

((Just so you know, her new home is not the home where she lived with Nemo. When she showed Albus, she had been in the middle of moving to this house. But this is where he stayed for the night.))

Jack waited for a second, and Albus openly stared at her. She felt her eyebrows quirk together and felt her joints stiffen and her body contract under his gaze. Jack had never been much to look at and, even though she didn't really mind, it always felt strange when people looked at her, as though looking for beauty when all there was was worry lines, callouses, and agitation. It was like trying to look into the face of an old person and find any traces of youth in their face. It was uncomfortable for Jack, but she also didn't want to point the fact out.

He suddenly began tripping over his words to  apologize. She chewed on her lip, her expressions shifting and changing with each word, each changed tactic. "Hey, look. I care, I just... I'm used to it, so I didn't beat myself up over it, you know?" Jack said. She had been sad for him to so suddenly exit her life, but it was nothing she wasn't prepared for. She had become accustomed to the drill, and didn't want him to feel guilty - she was too exhausted to guilt trip him.

He continued to stumble on, confusing her even more with his frantic speech. She opened her mouth to respond, though no words were there, but was relieved when he quickly asked to come in. It probably was not the best time to do so, but it had been awhile, and Jack had nothing in her left to fight. She backed up and motioned him in. "Yeah, go on and take a seat." Her hand swept towards the kitchen table, where her Firewhiskey was waiting to reunite with her.

She closed the door behind him and awkwardly hovered on the threshold, before walking towards the kitchen table and settling down at her place, wrapping her hands around the mug. "I've been..." 

Alexis crashing through the floor and being covered in debris as Jack hurdled past Alexis' Death Eater allies to get to her, only to find her pulse was gone. 


The Shrieking Shack collapsing behind her as fire overwhelmed it.


Charlotte Topez's form stretched across the atrium floor as Jack ran to it, as all the Death Eaters apparated away.


Max, twenty four hours before, telling her she was pushing him away and had no right to be mad.


Jack took a drink of the Firewhiskey and heaved a big shrug, deciding it was more work that it was worth to talk about what the past thirty six hours had been like for her. It was not as if anything good would come of telling him about it, anyway. It was something she would prefer to keep to herself for awhile. "I've been better. But, um, what brings you to my neck of the woods? Everything going alright?"

“I’m just used to it, so I didn’t beat myself up over it, you know?”

Albus looked at the window. Kept his eyes fixed, unblinkingly, on the window pane. He scoped out its scratches, the long, fragments of a cobweb hanging limply from one bar, newly cleaned curtains, a rusted, broken latch. Somewhere, deep within the recesses of his chest, there was a prick. A light, deliberate jab, like a pin-prick that stung for ages afterward. After summers, when he used to disappear to Hogwarts for months without a letter home, he never got frantic letters questioning his moods, or well-being. After graduation, when he packed up his bags and disappeared from his family’s life altogether, he never got invitations to War anniversaries, and Christmas. They smiled when he alighted upon the doorstep, and drifted back into their normal lives when he stepped out. Like a moth which was noticed but never missed.

He was used to it too.

Just…..in naivety perhaps, because Jack had been different for him, he had assumed that….

Never mind.

There was a long, heavy, awkward silence in the room after the words. Very much like the day Jack had first told him about Nemo. Albus could see a vague, blurred image of Jack’s face in the clouded glass pane, a pale apparition which flickered in the light, reminding one of a fragile, ceramic doll. He knew he would never see it again if he turned around. He also knew that Jack was keeping secrets. Again.

Like you haven’t. Before.

It was only now that Albus acknowledged to himself why he had come. He was going to tell Jack everything, about du Hunt, about the duel, about the proposal for the Death Eaters and Rebels working together. He would tell her that he was going to refuse. And this time, it would actually be the truth. No more lies.

Except…..in the short time frame from when Albus had stepped in, adrenaline running wildly in his veins, and standing before the window now, something had changed. Almost as if Jack’s casual, dark, throwaway words had struck a death gong into his chest. Rather than thumping fast and hard, his heartbeat now sounded loud and slow in his ears, echoing in the silence. Like a funeral toll.

“I came because…..” His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “I needed to tell you why I left.”

Albus seemed to be in absolutely no rush to explain why he was here, but simultaneously seemed opposed to making himself comfortable. He wavered despite the fact that she had taken a seat and invited him to do the same. Something was weighing him down, acting as an anchor that rooted him to the spot. She waited at the table with exhaustion, holding a paper napkin between her fingers, slowly ripping little circles out of the napkin and stacking them one on top of the other on her kitchen table. 

She would honestly be happy to see Albus, but seeing him in this state put her on edge. This state was nerve wracking to Jack, especially at this point, after the battles. It was that calm before a storm, that rising action, the tension straining and preparing to snap. After the last thirty-six hours of emotional turmoil and physical challenges, Jack was not sure she could handle whatever was going to be thrown at her. Albus would never do anything to harm her, she thought, but people hurt each other unintentionally all the time. And she was afraid he would need her help, but she would be unable to deliver, which was always a fear of hers. Her eyes looked to the exits, wondering where Sunny or Max or Toby or Charlie was. Not for escape, but for comfort or relief.  

But this was Albus, Jack reminded herself. A friend. An ally. There should be nothing to try or worry her, and she should feel unafraid to reassure herself of her safety in this matter. She forced herself to relax in the presence of her friend, but ensured the relaxation with another deep drink of her Firewhiskey. He turned back to her, looking grave and burdened by the plague if information. Jack tried to keep a calm, resilient face, her exhaustion seeping through. She swallowed, before slowly whetting her lips, trying her best not to mentally prepare herself - because she didn't need to. "Okay. Why don't you sit?"

“Okay. Why don’t you sit?”

Albus walked slowly, one foot dragging over the other, the rough mesh of the carpet getting crushed under the soles of his shoes. His right hand hooked itself round the handle of another chair, plain and rickety and metallic, and he dragged it towards hers, the metal shrieking and grinding against the floor. He turned it around.

When he dropped down on the seat, it was like the world dropped down with him. Gravity tugged hard at his innards, his feet pressed flat against the floor, the force threatening to pull his head lower. Behind his eyes, he conjured images. Images to coax him, to make him actually do this. The Rebels, joyous and victorious, at the head of the nation and on every paper. Respect in the eyes of every man. Jack’s smiling face, her mischievous smile winking back at him from the corner of his vision as they took on the world. Jack being…… happy. For once.

“I’ve always been a closed-off person. I’m not someone who shows his heart to the world. You’re the only person in a long, long time who I’ve….I’ve talked to.” He raised his head, his eyes, against everything. His voice was quiet, too quiet. “Why do you think that is?”

He had stared that night too, the night after the Avariella Hudson incident, but Jack hadn’t realized it at that time. He hadn’t, either. “You’re the lone person in this world who knows that I’m not as good as I’d like to show, who knows that I study Dark Magic, and cast curses which obliterate bones and curdle blood and bloody enjoy it. Why do you think that is?”

He had drunk, and let go of his shields for the first time, and told her everything. One night to live, he had promised himself that time. Ha. And still, she remained oblivious. His voice was louder now, climbing in amplitude with every word. “You’re the only person who knows that I’ve got blood on my hands. The only one who knows that my biggest dream is to write. Why do you think that is?”

And the date. The stupid, stupid date where he realized everything and the emotions were transparent, etched in every line of his face and every word that he spoke and stupid, stupid Jack still didn’t notice anything. His eyes were burning, his skin steaming up, and he leaned forwards until he was an inch from her face and her pale eyes because if she refused to see it, then Albus would bloody well make her see. “You’re the only one who has even a frickin’ inkling that I don’t give a flying f*ck about my family.” It was cracking now, his voice, slight enough for the tremor to go unnoticed. “The only one I’ve ever played bloody friggin’ guitar for. The only one for whom I made breakfast. The only one for whom I took three hours to prepare a date. The only one I’ve showed the summerhouse. The only one who cared to listen. The only one who I cared to tell.”

His hand was tightly pressing against hers, and he didn’t even realize when that had happened. “So for one last time Jack. Tell me. Why do you think that is?”

He sat, slowly, and there seemed to be a loud heartbeat in every moment of silence, though Jack could not confirm whether it was hers or his causing all the noise. Something was in the air, some sort of tension, that was setting her ill at ease. Jack just wanted to go to bed, or to watch a stupid movie, or cuddle up with her pets and her family and eat ice cream and pretend there was no death, or battles that took life and forged rivalries, or politics that took every ounce of humanity in a person and drained them. Jack wanted to have a peaceful morning, but this tension was promising her otherwise.

She reached out to her mug and took a sip, trying to steady her nerves the best she could, hoping nothing would show. She could not hide how tired she was, but she could easily hide everything else. And she was not hiding from Albus, but she was hiding the part of herself she was ashamed to show anyone. The Jack full of fear, and doubt, and anxiety. She, herself, did not want to see that Jack, and she definitely did not want anyone to be a firsthand witness to that person either. The Firewhiskey did what it could to boost the appearance of confidence and collectedness, but that other Jack was still there, lurking beneath the surface, traitorously desiring to burst out.

She kept her cool though, and Albus began talking. She had wondered what had spurred Albus to begin opening up to her, but she assumed it had begun because she had opened up to him. She had opened up to him because he was a familiar face. The family of someone like family - that made him family, sort of. But he had gone further. He hadn't opened up, he had spilled out. He had spilled the sort of secrets people didn't spill, the secrets people died trying to protect. Jack had told so few of Vito, and had only done so out of obligation of friendship. So perhaps that was why Albus had told her of Dark Magic, and of murder. Because, by that point, they were friends. And friends told each other the parts of themselves that was too hard to tell anyone else.

But all the other things. The little things. The date. The salads. The summerhouse. The guitar. None of that was obligated by friendship, or by openness. They were too small to be obligations that must be fulfilled, and too small for Jack to have considered until Albus made her realize how big they really were. She swallowed and looked down, to see that Albus had seized her hand as he had taken her down his train of thought, trying to get her to see what was probably clearer to anyone else who had ever been in this situation. But, Jack didn't know if she wanted to hear it. Because when people began considering each other as more than just friends, everything changed, and everything went terrible. They turned their back on you when they heard you secrets. People stole them from you. And it always ended in a good bye you never wanted to say.

As Jack looked at Albus, she could not say for sure why she didn't want him to say what he was about to say. Partly because she didn't know how she would respond. She had never considered anyone after Nemo, and she didn't want to see what would happen if she did. But more than that, she didn't want to say good bye to Albus. Because, no matter her response, there was too much of a chance of her losing a friend she had grown to really care for. And that risk was too much for her right now. It had always been her greatest strength and her greatest weakness - the girl without friends had nothing and no one to lose. But give her someone to lose, and she would do anything to prevent it.

"Albus," Jack said, shaking her head, her expression cautious as her mind begged him to leave it there.

It was getting colder.

The beads of sweat, dampening his erstwhile warm shirt were cooling rapidly, and a chill dug its way through his spine. He was shivering, and not even feeling aware of it, the shudders breaking their way through his skin. It was like the metallic high of adrenaline dying off after a dank silence. Like the cold chill of the battlefield after the fight was over and men lay dead in the grass. Like the funeral stillness when one jumped off a cliff in search of flight….and found nothing but ground.

Albus Potter’s life had been a long, indeterminable stretch of days, punctuated with people here and there but mostly….nothing. He lived because he had life and had to live because everyone did it. He just didn’t know why they bothered. What was so exciting about it? What made them care? What was there to look forward to? Albus Potter lived because he had life. Not a goal. Not a purpose. Not meaning.

But…but now he knew. Now he got up in the morning and didn’t find himself longing for the end of the day. Now he saw the sunrise and saw people and didn’t find their conversations, their actions meaningless. Now he didn’t lie flat on his bed and stare at the ceiling for the whole day. Now he heard songs, and liked them, and heard jokes, and found them funny, and read books, and found them thoughtful. Now he didn’t find every second a burden, and instead planned and strategized and looked forward to the future. Now he didn’t say to the mirror that he was Albus, and leave it at that. Now he was the Rebel leader, and the author of a political book, and a man who had found a road at last.

He hadn’t compiled a list of why, and how, and when, he felt what he felt for Jack Dyllan. He didn’t think how pretty she was, or how strong, or how understanding. It was simple. For him, she brought change. For him, she was change. And something screamed, yelled, died in his mind at the thought of letting it go. Of letting it all go. And bloody, bloody hell but he was….he was….scared. He couldn’t let it go, couldn’t . He couldn’t go back to breathing when he had just started living. He couldn’t.

Her face started clouding up, closing off, shaking it all, brushing it all , and his mind went blank with fear. No. No, no, no. He had taken such an achingly long time to take that step. So apprehensive, so fearful, so reluctant. Heart pounding, legs quaking he had stepped off the edge, blind and trusting and defying every instinct that he possessed, every logical thought that he owned, keeping faith in the fact that there would be someone at the bottom. Because when it happened in books, when the hero conquered his fear, he won everything, got everything. It couldn’t possibly be that in reality….all of it were lies.

His hand was tight enough to cut off her circulation. His knuckles were going white. Everything will be alright. Everything. You just see. He jumped off.

Two words. Two small, condemning words that were surely, surely too quiet for her to sense the crack in them.




“Please, Jack?”

((I think Kat-Car should jump in soon, and then Max can follow after))

Jack had struggled with a lot of things in her life. She had struggled being the magical one in a very conventional family, and being ostracized for it. She had struggled living in a rather loveless home, with little support of any kind. She had struggled in school, trying to balance her need to be different with her secret desires to not be the outcast. She felt torn between her disdain for people and her inexplicable knack for getting wrapped up in their problems. She struggled leading Potter's Army as she went through a moral crisis on her own. She struggled leading as Quidditch Captain, as she was the only one with passion or drive. She struggled in the Triwizard Tournament, with not a friend to cheer her on.

But that had all been gravy in comparison to the few times her heart or the hearts over others had become involved. Jack had never been a touch-feely sort of girl, and had not been raised in a home prone to bouts of affection, or even open communication. So it had been the strangest situation to find herself suddenly romantically involved with the heir of the Greyback clan. Never before had her hand found solace in another's hand, and never before had a pair of lips brushed hers. She had never dealt with the strange conflict of caring for someone and being afraid to care for them. But that had passed with ease, for Ariel had moved on when he had learned her horrible secrets - either disgust for her or disillusionment of her, she would never know the cause of his disappearance, but she trusted he had left when it was best.

And Nemo. For months she had quietly understood that what she felt for him was love, and had been happy to simply exist with the personal happiness of the internal glow that such a feeling inspired in a human being. She had been happy to continue calling the man she loved her best friend, her flatmate, because she knew she was those things. She never knew if there were others - women who filtered in and out, or perhaps even more. All she knew is when she said she loved him, he said he loved her too. But there had been nothing more. It had ended there. And maybe something could have happened had she not had to clear him out to save him.

But this was new. For Jack had not begun to consider Albus in that capacity. She had been pleased to be in his presence, reassured in his company, and happy to be an important influence in his life. He was gripping her hand with the strength of someone dangling over a cliff, unwilling to let go of their lifeline. His voice begged for a rescue, a safety, but she did not know that she could provide it. Would it be fair to give him an answer before she knew it herself, even if she wished it could be favorable for him? Was that enough to imply more? Jack stared at Albus, her eyes pleasing for him to take this burden from her and let what they had already to be enough, but the desperation in Albus' eyes was evidence enough that she could not ask to be relieved. It was he that needed the relief.

"Albus," Jack croaked back, hating that she could not definitely give him the answer he wanted. Give me more time, she begged. She needed time to see the way that worked for them all. She dropped her gaze and put up a hand, where it hesitated. She put it forward, paused, and then dropped it on top of his hand, still looking down at her lap with the intent of never looking up again. "You're the only friend I have." Max was mad at her - he surely considered her no friend of his. In that case, Jack only had one friend. And she didn't want to ruin that.