Wizardry

Relative peace had fallen over the Rookwood estate in southern Ireland. The sun had set prematurely, bathing the sky in an orange fire that juxtaposed itself against inky darkness, pockmarked with bright white twinkles like miniature diamonds glinting in the sky. It was a fire that was snuffed out as the Gods finished hanging the last of their nightly directions and absolute darkness fell over their world, smothering out the slithers of light that lingered. In the place of the light, wherein the sweetness of youth and kindness reined, what was moved to replace was the bitterness of mischief and fleeting cruelty, rouge-slick sneers and mirth-filled eyes, delighting in the dastardly and the debauched.

Historically, the women of House Goyle always understood quite palpably the importance of parties. There had been many a rumour that they had once been descendent of Marie Antoinette and her penchant for cake as well as many other masque-loving Queens of that era and prior. However, when one considered the fate that the Queen Marie met, it was quite easy to understand and see why the Goyle faction declared no attraction to the prospect of being aligned with the French crown. But they knew the importance of living and living large, in particular. That was what always made Goyle feasts the best any pure family could provide; but nothing could win out against their need to go to and throw parties.

Aceso Goyle was the illegitimate daughter Cian and Ariadne Goyle, the latter of whom had been married to the former’s cousin. She had not been shunned, however, as many had in the past, and had grown up in Cian’s household as a true, legitimate Goyle woman - just as, in a way, Athena had been before her. It was those kindred experiences that had drawn the girls to each other and as a result had become fast, firm friends after Athena became a Rookwood and a mother. Ultimately, it had fallen to Aceso to make her cousin remember what it was to have a good time and nudge her into the manner of living the way she had once but, of course, with the hesitance that experience had afforded her with.

But hopefully, they’d both break out of that for an evening, even if it was only for one.

What had initially been a red wine and novel evening had quickly turned into a clubbing one when Aceso appeared on the threshold of the living room where Athena had curled up, a dress bag in one hand and shoes dangling from the fingers of her other. Athena’s immediate protests that she was not a cheap tart fell on deaf ears which insisted that cheap tart was exactly what they needed for her; a complete change of raw, sexual identity. Aceso sniffed at the mummified, shadow of a woman that Athena had been reduced to and thrust the bag at her instead, demanding that her cousin slip it on and, with reluctance and much tugging of the slinking, clingy material, Athena did.

It was onto Satan’s in the depths of Knockturn Alley that they descended, leggy and made up. Cigarettes lit themselves and drinks found their waiting grasps as they were carried through the club onto the dance floor on the back of a beat impossible to ignore. Athena felt herself relax into an unfamiliar frame and allowed herself to be led around as the music changed and drifted with them, heating up in parts and slowing down at others to give everyone a breath. Then of course came the salsa, which was an eventuality more than anything else and, thoroughly stupefied by what was going on around her, Athena transfigured her dress a little bit to release at the skirt into a flowing form and found herself recalling the steps as though it was only yesterday she’d been practising them as a teenager.

Eventually though, the mask fell away with burning realisation - that it wasn’t there that she belonged. With startling clarity, Athena could no longer dance and tore from the crowd of bodies sashaying this way and that. She burst from the club and into the freezing air which cut like glass across her skin. The music died out immediately, replaced with the snarling of Knockturn Alley, the twist and turns and enveloping darkness that reminded Athena that it was no place to be for a woman alone, regardless of her ability as a witch. It bore no semblance of safety.

Athena pulled her hood up over her hair, letting out the pins as she did so and tossing them onto the cobbles. She then huddled into her cloak and began to head through the alley, her heels clipping across the cobbles. She passed beneath the watery light shining out from an old Victorian lamp and as the houses grew more dilapidated and withering under the weight of their roofs, she knew she was getting closer and closer to the old tower bridge that the Muggles had long since forgotten and the Wizards had salvaged, if you will. It was a majestic structure which shot out over the Thames under the cover of mist, allowing passage between the northern and southern ends of the city.

As Athena hurried up, desperate to get on an even turf, she heard the sudden plop of something entering the water, sliding through the encroaching silence so quickly that she doubted she’d heard it the first time at all. Then, there it was again, and again!

Athena’s eyes darted about and ... there. There he was.

“Albus?” The name left her mouth before she could stop herself. She didn’t seem to care whether she was right and, if she was wrong, what it would cost her. For a moment, however fleeting it was, in the lamplight shining from one of the crouching towers, she was sure it couldn’t be anyone else: Albus Severus Potter.

They spoke of a land.

A legend, wreathed in mist and time and magicke. An old, unimportant tale. They spoke of a land where cherry blossoms grew, where berries flourished and ripened and ripened till their colour could grow no brighter, where apples were redder than a sweet maiden's blush. Where sunlight bathed and snuck into every nook, every cranny, every second of the day. Where a day wasn't called a day, because that land had never seen nightfall.

There, amidst the flowers and the scents, dwelt a faery. Long-limbered, bright-eyed, with gossamer-spun wings, no different than any other of her family; except in the fact that she wasn't content with bright laughter, with berries, with sweetness. She longed for darker hues only dreamt but never seen, silvery silhoettes, whispered snatches of the moonlight....except she couldn't possibly know it, because she had never seen it.

So one day, she stole away. Ran and ran, till her bare feet bled and her heart was a working anvil and her vision blurred, and she ran; and realized the reason she couldn't see so well anymore was because the light had faded, turned hues, the light had become...darker, somehow.

She looked up and beheld it. The moon, with naught of the sun's overpowering glory, just rustles of silver and shadowing everything that came under it. She wanted it. Wanted that flawed, tainted light. She flew and flew, but no matter how hard her wings beat, how hard she propelled herself off the ground, she couldn't reach it. So she followed it on foot, thinking that perhaps, one day she could come a little close to its surface.

She reached a bridge. A bridge with two tall turrets and three grand arches, cold, damp stone; she reached the middle and looked down: and there it was, the moon, rippling beneath her, within her grasp.

She jumped. The water soaked her skin, soaked her wings, seemed to soak her very bones. She dived downwards, swimming towards the light. Deeper and deeper till her chest blew up and hurt, the world grew fuzzy around the edges, till desperate bubbles escaped her lips and panic seized her heart: she was drowning and the light was getting no closer. Her head broke the surface and she looked up, at the moon which was as mockingly, achingly untouchable as always.

The banks were too steep, she could not climb up. Her wings were wet, heavy. But even if she could, she couldn't have left, not with her heart ensnared by the light and dark, all juxtaposed together. So she took hope and dived, thinking maybe this time she could break through to the other side. Again. Again. Again.

Searching. Reaching out, hands stretched to grasp the lifeline that would never be thrown, the mercy that would never come, the light that would never be, the moon that would never descend. Searching, for a path, trapped in a circle of dive and break, for eternity.

Plop.

His muscles shifted, tensed, coiled beneath his skin like a restless snake. Above it, goosebumps pebbled the surface, created by the freezing air and the magic. His magic, darting around him, tangling with the atmosphere like a tangible thing, brushing over the surface of the water in a caress that seemed so longing. A tight pull and recoil of his upper arm, as another stone sliced through the air and fell into the water.

Plop.

This was the very bridge, according to his Mum. His dead, dead Mum. The bridge where the faery had died. She didn't say that the faery died, but Albus had assumed. It was a better fate, after all. Better than searching for a path, a purpose that didn't exist, a wish that would never be satisfied. Better than being trapped in a circle. That night after Mum had told him the story, plucked out of her memories, Albus had played his guitar for the entire night.

The magic was now crumbling pebbles for him, out of the already dilapidated stone structure. He pulled his arm back, flexing, as far back as it would go. Maybe he heard the voice calling his name. Maybe he didn't. He flung the stone far out, then the magic levitated another one into his hand.

Maybe this time the stone wouldn't sink. So he did it. Again. Again. Again.

Youth was peppered in the hands, in the way lovers’ spindly fingers looped together and with whispered words they proclaimed, just as their ancestors had done, that they’d be together until death saw them part. That same lack of age was sparkling in the eyes, in the way two people would look upon each other, completely and irrevocably entranced by what they saw in each other’s gaze. Youth appeared in the way they carried themselves, as though their bodies were infinite and their souls would forever dance together in the hot dusk of summer, wriggling into the sky like the slices of the fire that sparkled and crackled from a rustic bonfire set on land that no one knew the owner of. That same youth was in the way they’d then run beneath a hail of gunshots into the stars above, terrifying them into the brush where they’d laugh and trip and fall over bracken and groping roots. That age was flawed and still is, boring deep into their flushed, smooth cheeks while the soul is chipped away at, bit by agonising bit because they were too young, too dumb, to realise what they’d done to themselves.

Wisdom appeared in the hands, in the way calluses rubbed across fingers and palms, scratching across the cheeks of children as weary eyes stared down at them, pitying their naivety. It was an expression that, for years, Odysseus Goyle had presented his granddaughter with - a grave inkling of concern but the complete and final division of any semblance of bravery enough to release her, to see her run. Her future had always been tumultuous, an impossible thing to assure her of, if she was capable of one at all, and when she finally gained one it was far from what she had imagined as a child, all wide-eyed and gap-toothed. Her Prince Charming had given her nothing. She, who had never been Cinderella, felt anew the cinders on her shoulders and the desire and impossibility to raise her children. But her heart had been carved from her chest, set upon a spike for the commons of the Rookwood lands to gasp and gawk at. What love she had for her birth family had abated and gone. What love she held for Kendall, for her married family, had long waned. Thus, she was alone.

With the chills from the Thames rumbling around her, Athena brought her hands to her arms and rubbed the skin feverishly as she trod carefully across the cobbled bridge. She leaned down as she reached the side and slid the heels from her feet, discarding them to the side of her as she turned to look at Albus’ profile. Her eyebrows knitted together over her soft gaze and she was tempted, only tempted, to reach out to him and sucked back instead, drawing her hand to her chest, preventing herself from stepping over an unwritten line laid down by family feuds, differences of character and the band that was heavy on her finger. She let her fingers pick at the loop keeping the heavy gold of her necklace around her neck and in one motion she released it and allowed it to slide down the length of her arm, falling with a slosh into the water, breaking the pattern of Albus’ throws.

“They don’t ever impart knowledge to you that you can use to keep yourself, do they?” She murmured, breaking the achy silence. “Instead, we’re hurt just as they were only we lack the resolve to put ourselves back together again.”

(( Credits to Edgar Allan Poe for the last line ))

In midst of the peacefully numbing cycle of throw, watch, recoil and throw again, there was a splash in the water which made Albus blink. A dimmed sense of frustration coursed through his veins immediately, his stomach muscles tightening, toes curling within the boots; he didn’t want to break the flow. The cycle. He derived a blurred feeling of comfort from the sheer monotony of flinging pebbles into the water, savoured the ache in his protesting shoulder muscles (it had been close to an hour), welcomed the fatigue in his heavy eyelids as a result of staring at one spot for too long.

The slide of gold in the water amongst all the ripples tinged with silver, broke the trance. Reminded him that the world wasn’t just narrowed down to him and the bridge. There were other people in the world, apart from him. That meant everything that had happened was real, and not just a dream conjured by his feverish imagination. The blunted sense of frustration grew sharper.

He still refused to look at her though. If he had, then maybe he would have seen a ghost of a tentative, outstretched hand; that half-formed desire to comfort him, drowned before it could take birth. Or maybe it was better that he hadn’t, maybe he wouldn’t have been able to control himself otherwise.

They were just pretending. They didn’t have the resolve either. They just hid it better than we do.

He didn’t want to look at the woman. She didn’t do him the same courtesy. She pressed against the bridge, leaning over the side, and appeared in the periphery of his vision: a blurred outline, a blob of colour in frosted glass. Dulled recognition seeped through his mind. Athena Rookwood.

The human mind had been designed in such a cruel way, that his eyes couldn’t help but divert to her for a second, away from the waters, against all that he wanted. He saw and registered everything, her pale arms, her bare feet, the flimsy dress, the face. Dreams could not be so vivid, he had to acknowledge that she existed, now. Frustration was now a living, breathing thing: digging into his arteries and veins, clogging his blood. Damn it. He had managed to fool himself so well. So well. Until now.

But maybe…..all wasn’t lost yet. A different means could be employed, to the same end. His gaze flickered, then turned towards the woman again, scoping her from top to bottom, boring into her unafraid. Just as how he had stared into the waters, he now looked at her, analysing everything. It was a lot like reading a book and analysing its characters, getting so lost in their problems that one forgot one’s own. If by focusing on her existence, he could forget his own; then so be it.

In the fashionably-cut dress, the heels and the heavy, gold necklace; she would probably have looked like a woman ready to take on the world. But throw the necklace away, and you only saw the pale throat, realising how easily it must bruise; the bare feet resting against cold stone leeching away their warmth, the sleeveless garment only striving to emphasize how stark and pebbled with goosebumps the skin of her arms was. What was present only as a fleeting presence in her eyes at the Bistro (and that episode seemed like another dream, a lifetime away), was now bared so unflinchingly for the world to see, that he wondered at how he had ever doubted his assumptions, how he had ever missed it.

There was something else. Something disturbingly like empathy. Which meant she saw him too.

“Its easy to do it, when someone else has done the breaking.” He had expected his voice to be hoarse, or rough at the very least. It wasn’t. It was so meticulous, every consonant sound so succinct and rounded off, that it seemed like a mockery of himself. Of the pseudo dignity he was emulating so successfully, the precise sounds so completely at war with the meandering fog of his mind. “Easy to blame. Revenge and pride making up determination to mend oneself. When one has destroyed oneself….that’s when the motivation to mend……dies.”

The pebble, the last one clasped loosely in his palm, the one he hadn’t managed to let loose yet, crumbled. Under the force of the rogue magic, the one he could feel curling out slowly, uncontrollably from him, a problem he hadn’t faced in many years. If he wanted, he could almost imagine seeing it right now, like an actual, tangible thing mingling with his breath, wafting out through the pores of his hand. The grains of stone slipped through his fingers, fleeting down below to join its companions in the water.

All that we see or seem………is but a dream within a dream.

“Dear Merlin, what have you left for me here?”

When she closed her eyes, instead of darkness she saw light, making it impossible for her discern whether or not in the darkness of that night she truly had her eyes open and aloft over the river. When she opened what dotty clairvoyants must have called ‘the inner eye’ she found herself in Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey, peppering her feet lithely across the tiles, darting between the tombs of the kings and queens of old long forgotten but still revered in the eyes and minds of the living. She could remember the way her aunt grasped at her and hauled her to the altar, whispering over a silver rosary a prayer for each bead, for each person they’d ever lost.

She was a child then but in that inner, externally reflected world, she’d already lost her step-mother, her mother long dead, her father, given off to the Welsh Green Itch and her husband, deserting her but for the few times he desired to look in, an otherworldly figure of the mind more than her reality. Her chains were her children, forcing her feet to the ground, plying from her all of the energy she coveted in her bones, the love in the bottom of her heart and the desire to go on that her weary chest contained.

It was warm there, in the light of the coloured sun, blaring in through the stained class. When she opened her eyes, her sight was limited and her flesh crawled with the chills of the river as though she’d been doused in the murky waters. Her breath snatched in her throat and she lowered her head, her hand coming up to rub at her forehead as the whispered words parted her lips, lilting into the air laden with her heaviness of heart. There was nothing there for her anymore. Should the waters swallow her up, would there be anyone to mourn her loss? Of that, she doubted. Not even her boys would cry. She would be replaced in time. Wouldn’t they all?

“I don’t think blame or revenge makes it an easier burden to bear,” she admitted gently, her fingers flaying across wall, stretching out before curling into her palms.

“Blame provokes revenge. Revenge provokes the Ministry.”

Athena smirked despite herself and reached over her neck, tracing with her nail the runic-numeric jostle of figures she’d kept hidden, that she knew still lurked under her skin. Then of course, across the pallor of her collarbone, retorting with the similar across her hipbone. Rounded off with the Dark Mark that still stung when the Death Eaters were summoned, she was a pin cushion of memories, of a legacy she couldn’t rid herself of.

Athena dropped her hand back to the bridge, feeling the glamour spell rub off underneath the fall of her fingers, making the figures appear, stark against her skin, in the thin drizzle of light over them. She scuffed her nails across her arm, drawing up the veil that hid her Dark Mark and the branded, intertwined, red and welted ‘D’ and ‘W’. Her collarbone scuppered the magic around it and, unbeknownst to Albus’ eye, so too did her hipbone.

“They’re very good at getting their point across, the Ministry,” she commented with a heavy sigh following close behind.

“Your mob had it right, didn’t they? Fight Voldemort, be the winning side. Stamp out dark practitioners. Sort out the right from the wrong and make the wrong remember exactly what they are.”

“Have you ever been to Azkaban, Albus?” She inquired, her voice a whisper, riding on the wind.

“You get this list in your head of exactly who wronged you. Who put you there. You know who made you bleed, who made you cry. You get to remember which ruthless guard spat on you when you were down, grappling with hunger, with the memories the Dementors assault you with. You get their names, remember their faces and you forge a blood feud and you hunt them until every. last. one. is dead.”

Athena took off the last glamour spell, lingering in her palms. Pebbled scars, tallies of five in each circle, rose up on her skin and in both, three were blacked out with ink, highlighting the marked men: the dead men.

“Revenge doesn’t make you feel better. It doesn’t matter how many people you make scream...your own will still ring in your ears. Makes you feel good at the time though, doesn’t it? It’s not worth it, though. All you add is galleons to your poster.”

She shoved herself away from the side of the bridge and turned away from Albus for a moment before, against her better judgement, turned her gaze over her shoulder.

“Do you hate them?” She asked. “Your family. Do you hate them?”

She imagined it would be the irony of it all. All Purebloods hated their families. They knew the toxicity of it so they married out, as much for themselves, for their survival, as for their birth families. Yet, as always, the married family as as poor in strength of character, in love, as their birth family. Both became as twisted, as stalking, as arresting as each other.

"Because you've got no where to run, have you?" She smirked bitterly. "Neither have I."

(( OOC: I don’t know if the last part qualifies as godmode, but its up to you *shrugs* ))

“Blame provokes revenge. Revenge provokes the Ministry.”

It was starting to prick now. Wave by wave, the blurred, nebulous emotions started seeping in, each registering dimly in Albus’s brain: recognition, shock, bitterness, understanding. The last one took him by surprise, and realization clicked in his head. Realisation of the ugly, dark figures emerging on her neck.

He couldn’t blink, eyes now pinned down so irremovably on the figure, the only thing that could be seen clearly in the damp fog. He wanted to look away, wanted to twist and rip his gaze away from the runes; runes he had once thought of as beautiful but now seemed nothing but a stamp, a blotch of ink marring human skin, a charred brand that ruthlessly marked a human life for its own. But he could no more look away than she could remove it, remove the green snake lolling out of the skull in the mockery of a tongue.

She spoke, her head tilting to the side unconsciously, leaning forward dangerously. Albus couldn’t look at those dark eyes now, asking questions, stating, saying mad, mad, deranged words with a composure and a voice that regretted and gloried in equal measure. Couldn’t face the naked truth. So he diverted his eyes to her neck and in a half-remembered moment, wished he hadn’t; the pale moonlight threw her complexion into stark relief, her collarbone jutting out almost unhealthily from her neck. Those numbers. He echoed them inside his head, and absently wondered if she did the same each day. Algiz. Eihwaz. Hagalaz.

Wish. That stupid, craving, greedy emotion, expanding and snatching with knobbly hands and hope-filled hearts, greatest curse on the human heart. He wished. What not for? Wished that things hadn’t been this, had been that. Wished that he hadn’t sealed himself away, pushed James to greater, more desperate heights, reducing Lily to a bleached, resentful shadow like himself. Wished that he could still muster sufficient emotion to care, to hate; rather than regard with hollow indifference. Wish that he wished for revenge. It would give some point to this useless excuse of a life. Wish that he had been wrong all those years ago, when he had with childish contempt decided that people established and kept up with relations for the sake of it; because he stood here now, having tried despite everything, failed, and back to square one: retreating in the safety of a tattered mask.

But wishing was futile. It took you nowhere. Left you nowhere. So he discarded it now, savagely, tossing it over the bridge to sink beneath the depths. Twenty two years of wishing was twenty two too much, for a lifetime.

“You’re asking the wrong question.” He raised his head, the flickering moon-shadows melding with his hair, green spots of light shining behind the ink-black. He bared his teeth in a smile. “You and I both know what really matters is if they hate us.”

Why he used the plural, he wouldn’t know.

Albus stepped forward, breath escaping as puffs of crystallised breath from his numbed lips. The smile had gone, if it had ever been there. It was freeing, uncaring, doing this with a stranger.

Doing what?

His hands rose, heavy as frozen blocks of lead, entrapping her icy fingers before she could withdraw them. His hands were still, curiously warm; and tingling as he felt the heat drain away slowly into her cold palms. His eyes gravitated towards those palms. A callused thumb, his own, stroked fleetingly over the abrasions, the cuts, the scratches.

“Maybe its time we stopped running, then.”

Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine. His staff had snakes wrapped around it, denoting the simultaneously poisonous and healing effects of Parselmagic. Magic stirred around them now, every goosebump frittered with current, every breath heavy with charge. The air grew colder. Laden with soft, barely there, sibilant hisses that twisted into your ears into a never-ending, never-changing song: like a snake biting its own tail.

His thumb brushed over the coarse skin again, and tingled: the scars on the pale skin started withdrawing, shrinking into themselves, disappearing. Soon they were nothing but faded white lines, scored against a palm, memories of a distant nightmare. His eyes rose up and met darker ones, just for the fragment of a second.

The hissing stopped. It had been his voice, he realized rather vaguely. He dropped her hands.

(OOC: So, I haven't read this - do I ever read my posts? - but it seemed at the time to be a crazy stream of consciousness so that works for me. It is Thea's head I suppose. Anyway, pfft, no godmodding. I loved it! He hurts me in the feels.)

Hate was defined as ‘intense dislike’ but what the writers had always failed to note was the inevitability of side-effects that would eventually come to wound the one that chose to hate more than the object of that loathing.  All that energy put into violence of feeling left them breathless and weary but empty, lonely, without anyone’s arms into which they could collapse. Thus, there they both stood, two victims of their own hate, wondering whether, perhaps indeed, they truly were hated just as they hated those who should have loved them, who they should have loved. So instead of hiding their heads in the hair of the lovers, of the necks of those who loved them unconditionally, they stood, shoulder to shoulder on a bridge of souls; where no one trod anymore.

“Don’t we both know the answer already?” Athena asked quietly with a small sardonic smile of her own pecking at the sides of her lips.

Athena’s gaze flicked quickly to Albus when she felt his fingers close around her hands, his skin burning a path across hers. She stifled the hiss of surprise threatening to break from her mouth and looked at him dolefully, letting her wrists soften and her hands relax in his. Her old and creaking, wounded heart had sped up in her chest; dithering wildly and sending blood coursing up to the surface of her pallor, warming her cheeks despite the wind.  Her eyes closed involuntarily as her skin fizzled beneath the touch of his thumb across her palm and she couldn’t help but lean closer, her body wriggling with a sudden need which she hadn’t realised prior to that moment. She desired touch, his touch, but Merlin just the feel of another human being, the graze of harshly snipped nails or the bruise of a sudden kiss, both or either she didn’t care - under his hands she felt alive again, as though she truly did live and breathe.

“Where will we end up, though, if we do?”

A Parselmouth had always been considered a blessing, not a curse in darker circles but certainly not for the reasons the ‘greater good’-chasing white wizards would have people believe. It was old magic that was largely forgotten so found itself inherited through lines that refused to forget like the Gaunts and, by extension, the Potters. But not only was it a method of communication but it healed and it was a skill that had all but disappeared in the remaining lines it sprang up in. As the magic flickered and bounced around them, Athena felt her muscles soothe her defences weaken voluntarily as she found herself gravitating towards Albus and the magic that he exuded.

Like that, the abrasions were gone, mere memories that slunk away beneath the surface of her skin, known only perhaps to her and, newly, to him - to those she allowed to see them. But as quickly as they disappeared so too did his hands and Athena stole back hers, stung by the sudden loss.

Athena brought her palms up beneath her scrutiny and sucked in a breath as she brought her fingers into the curving middle of her hand, feeling the way her skin roved across her muscles and bones unabated by welt or scars. They were just lines, barely visible in the dim light.

Questions balanced themselves unsteadily on her tongue but only one scrabbled past.

“Why?”

(( OOC: Its perfect. ))

"Where will we end up though, if we do?"

His hands felt cold now, the magic dead and long-gone, the warmth stolen by the palms of a stranger. He exhaled, and felt something tug at his chest, a tight knot so highly coiled and twisted around itself that he hadn't even realised it was there. It was now, after the magic had breathed out through the Parseltongue, that he realised how tightly wound up his shoulders had been, how taxed the tendons and muscles running through his back. They were weary now in the aftermath of the spell, loose and frayed; and Albus felt the overpowering urge to let his knees buckle and sink down to the ground.

He pressed back till his shoulder blades hit the stone bridge, feeling the damp soak in through his shirt. The rough stone grazed and caught at the cotton material as he shifted down, and felt the bump as the stone floor hit the base of his spine; settling his senses. His legs stretched out in a parody of lazing comfort, his head tilted back to watch the moon.

"Somewhere. Anywhere." So calm, so settled, that voice of his. For a second, that thought incited a spike of incensed, black-hot rage; pure self loathing coursing through Albus' veins. He closed his eyes. "Any place would be better than.......this."

His eyelids drifted open, watching the girl stand over him, staring at her own hands. She looked white, and vulnerable, and cold. She looked nothing like Athena Rookwood, and yet......

"You see Albus....nothing is ever lost in this universe. Matter, energy, magic. Magic once spent in transfiguring a feather to a bird, conjuring a rose....is held within the confines of the object, or dissipated into the air.....hidden, latent....but never lost. But that doesn't always mean it can be brought back. Destructive magic seeks to wipe things out, give pain. A small part of your magic is eroded away, gone for good when you perform them.

"Healing magic...is different. Every time you heal someone, you're giving them a small part of your magic, a small part of yourself, to keep. It lives inside them, that magic, and helps them grow, and so it lives on. That's why Healers are so whole. Because a small part of them lives on happily in every person they have ever healed. No part of them ever goes to waste."

"Don't let yourself go to waste, Albus."

And yet....she was the first person he had ever healed.

"Why? Because not everything in this world can be healed, Athena." The name left his lips, for the first time, soft as a breeze. "So the things which can be healed, should be."

His hand stretched out, patting the ground next to him with roughened fingers. An invitation to sit down beside him, feel the grounding stone beneath. Above them both, the moonlight filtered through the darkening clouds, tendrils of silver straying down and winding round stone and skin.

"And the greatest thing of all which can't be cured....human desire." He welcomed the fading touch of wry amusement, draining more out of him that it gave, but coldly comforting all the same. "The deepest...most desperate desire of our hearts. How we cling to it, drawing it against our chests, as if it were a secret worth hiding. As if it ever had a chance of being fulfilled."

"You have one, don't you?"

(I dislike you. I was sitting around doing my homework, singing along with ABBA and then I saw your post and before I knew it I had half of mine typed out. How did you do that you mystical wizard of writeristic wonderfulness? I love you. :3 Althea upsets me inside. *touches chest* In here. D': )

“Only one?”

She smiled a little, sliding down next to a man she felt she had the right to call her friend. However, in her experience, friends had never suited her well. Relationships were mutually beneficial to Slytherins. What she gave was taken without mercy and what was given to her fell to ash in her hands. Lovers were gleaned from their arms by confidents, livelihoods gambled away by meddling men with suspect intentions. They’d always been taught to be the strongest, wealthiest, most charmingly backstabbing person in the room. Athena felt like she’d been the pincushion all along. She was a torn and tired sheet whistling on the back of a breeze, clinging with her last might to a washing line that could take no more amidst the socks and the t-shirts and trousers. Yet Albus, he’d healed her in some small, pivotal way. She didn’t feel whole but the warmth still simmered in her veins as though his hands still grasped at hers. Only, they did not and the warmth was chased away, carried off on the back of the breeze darting across the water.

A little space persisted between them despite Athena’s desire to lean into him and take comfort. To have another human being as lost as her made her feel somewhat found. Where he’d found her, she wasn’t sure - somewhere between the apothecary and now. Once she would have prided herself on being unreachable in a sultry manner. Now, her distance was out of fear and out of a desire to fly under the world’s radar - the Ministry, her family, her husband, her children. Yet she still desperately wanted to be found, to be held, to be loved. She doubted she’d ever really known what any of that felt like. Her precious weeks and months with Kendall ended in a manner only befitting of his father and, thus, in stepping into Cordelia Rookwood’s cobwebbed shoes she became her. The only fate Athena escaped was that of a broodmare; for she’d already provided her heir and her spare.

A sigh broke past her lips and she flurried her fingers through her hair, pulling the curls out and back into themselves, letting them bounce around her cheeks where they belonged. She reached down and smoothed out the skirt around her legs afterwards, not sure whether it was out of desire to remove a chill or perhaps, instead, just give herself something to do. In the end she tipped her head back against the pillar and looked over at Albus.

“I want to run away, Albus,” she whispered, his name on her lips weighing lighter against her tongue every time she used it, shedding him from his hero name and replacing him with the Albus she knew.

“I want to run away as fast and as far as my legs can carry me.” She crossed her arms around herself, sealing herself, as though by keeping her arms there over her middle she’d stay together despite her seams beginning to show.

“Or start over or go back and fix things or something.” She laughed a breathy, humourless chortle and sighed, closing her eyes ever so slightly.

“Anywhere is better.” She agreed belatedly. “But they say the grass is greener, don’t they, on the other side? Mine’s brown and dead. I’d like to see something green and sprightly looking.” She smiled a little, a little more light in her eyes, but still, cynicism prevailed.

She looked down at her hands, tracing over her palms where she knew the scars where, still, lurking beneath her skin despite the magic.

“I made those to remember.” She murmured, placing her words carefully, unsure what to divulge - whether scraping the barrel to see what was left that she hadn’t was worth it. “To remember each person. Coloured them when I got my revenge. Wasn’t worth it,” she shook her head, the words in her mouth turning her stomach. “And you took them away.”

It wasn’t an accusatory statement and neither was it one of thanks, merely quiet wonder as she rubbed her fingers across her palms. He couldn’t cure all her ills though. No, they ran deeper than her skin.

“Merlin, I think turmoil is an addiction. What was it Freud said, was it him? We’ve got a death instinct or... or something like that. I don’t know. Everything I’ve ever done has hurt me or those I loved to the point where there’s no one left. Everyone leaves. Everyone runs away - saving themselves. All I want. All I really want is one good reason not to hurl myself off of the bridge and into the abyss with the stones and the chain and everything else.”

She rubbed her hands across her face, pressing furiously against her eyes in an attempt to wipe them free of some unseen blight - tears, perhaps.

“Any normal person would say, your children, live for your children.” She looked at Albus pointedly. “I bet you’re thinking it, too.” She shook her head fervently. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t be that unselfish. I’m a Slytherin for god’s sake.” She laughed despite herself, moving her hands over her eyes still. “I have an awful sense of entitlement.” She paused, frowning into her hands as she dropped them back into her lap.

“I never wanted to be a mother. It just came with the territory. I thought to myself, that’ll be the way to do it. This is a good thing, unexpected and horrific though it is. I’ll try to be good. I’ll be better than good. I’ll make sure I’m pretty and pleasant as much as that killed me.” She smirked sardonically. “And I’ll be the best mother. I’ll cook and I’ll play with them and I’ll teach them music and literature and languages and I’ll be so good and they’ll love me. Kendall will love me. And then...and then, I’ll take my father-in-law’s girls and I’ll love them as my own and teach them how to look after themselves and I’ll make sure they’re happy and loved and then he’ll love me. So, they left too. Off to Barbados or Venice or wherever the hell those men go with their mistresses and their absinthe and their shoes.”

Athena lifted her head; inclining it, proud to the end.

“Then there’s you, Albus Potter. Who in Merlin’s name are you?” She smiled a little, unable to help yourself. “And who are you, Athena Rookwood, you should say back.” She lowered her eyes. “I don’t know. But I bet you’ve got one hell of an opinion of me now.” She snorted.

She crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head towards him, quirking her eyebrows upwards.

“What do you want?” She whispered. “In that mystical head of yours, in those eyes I can’t read. What’s the real want there? Really.”

(( Ten days for this reply. I'm SO sorry. ))

“I want to run away, Albus.”

He inhaled, just for a second.

I know. God………I know.

Run, without knowing a destination or a place to rest or something to fear or look forward to. Let the road sweep your feet like a river and carry you wherever it pleased, without a care in the world. Break all shackles and run, till your breath starts coming faster and your lungs fill up with air never breathed before and the land and sky merge into one and you feel free. Free.

Every word seeped into his ears, strike after strike, emotion after emotion, and all that was left to do was to bask in the surrealism and wonder that he had never asked for this. The last question had been a joke. A poor, ill-made one……but a joke all the same.

Yet it had been given. To him. Albus could value that.

“I do have an opinion.” The voice was roughened, and calm and took him by surprise. It was his own. “Would you like to hear it?”

His head turned to the side, watching the profile of the woman beside him: proud, vulnerable, bitter, hopeful, so typically, purebloodedly Slytherin and unflinchingly baring her soul for the world to see. This world, of bridge and water and moon and magic, and a woman demanding judgment.

Right now, not even a Muggle deity had the right to judge her.

“It’s the duty of every parent to take care of their children. Love them, protect them. But I do fail to see why parents must live and die for their offspring while said children are free to accuse as they please and detach themselves at will and fly out of the nest whenever they like, as if the parent had nothing better to do than ruin half his life bringing up someone who never considered him as his own.” The words were sticking in his breath, like pebbles in the grain ingested, impurities that could not be hidden. Scenes flashed across his mind: words flung out in anger, doors slammed, curses and expletives muttered against a father, long dead. By him. “But it goes both ways. Simply bringing a child into this world, or taking ‘responsibility’ of one, isn’t where duty ends. And if it does, then there are no excuses for that.”

Somehow, unknowingly, his gaze sought out those eyes. Not the brightest in the world, not the fairest. Maybe that was the point. There was no point lingering on something that was already perfect. “Maybe you are selfish. Maybe you do want to run. But maybe….the point here is that….” Their breaths were falling in tandem. “You didn’t.”

An owl winged over them, hooting in the silent night, shadow frisking over their faces.

Albus turned his eyes away, looking past the bars against which they were leaning, down into the water. The stone was beginning to warm under his feet. “Besides, the entire thing is overrated.” If we couldn’t find a place in home, how could we anywhere else?. The last words were a mere breath. “Take it from someone who’s done it.”

And felt like a coward his entire life.

.

.

.

No more.

“There’s a place.” Something said suddenly, using his voice without his permission. Using his memories. Of a gazebo, will-o-wisps….magic and fleeting glimpses of red hair. The place where he realized that his emotions had a name. His throat tightened reflexively, but his voice would not stop. “There’s a cliff nearby, with a thirty foot drop, atleast. I go there to watch the water sometimes.” Dryness itched at the back of his pharynx. His throat worked, once, twice; to stem the flow of words or to go on, he wouldn’t know. “Thirty feet. Water.” Yes, yes, he had already said that. Then what. Then what? “My Aunt Hermione believes in reason. In worth. She says every life is worth something, everything has a reason, that the biggest crime is having something inside of you that will fulfill that reason and….letting it go to waste.” Yes, something was definitely using his voice. He didn’t remember it ever sounding that……certain, about something. And his eyes were pulled back to hers again, like poles of a magnet, and he didn’t remember that happening either. He could only stare fixatedly at the image of his own green eyes, clear and irrevocable, formed in her irises. “I go to the cliff when it seems too hard, and I stand an inch before the edge to remind myself that there is no beginning after death. Just a clean, swift end. So every time you feel like tossing yourself into the abyss, look beyond how deep and high it is; look at the water and see the reflection of the person who you are wasting.”

”What do you want? In that mystical head of yours, in those eyes I can’t read. What’s the real want there?

In the aftermath of that…….for a second, Albus nearly betrayed himself.

But then, it was easy to remember. The way he had poured sweet, blissful liquor down his throat that night, shouted till his voice ran hoarse, opened all his secrets to the woman who he knew now didn’t care. Couldn’t care. It would be so easy again, to make the mistake a second time. But even in this muted world, caught in night-time, blurred in fog, he was hard-pressed to. Jack Dyllan had taught him better.

But he had to say something, anything, and mind leaping to the last thought that had flashed through his mind, words fell from his lips. “I loved her.”

Later, much, much later, Albus would never really know why, on casting around for a secret that was safe to tell, he chose to speak the one thing he thought he would guard to his grave. Which was….supposed to be important. Some things were better left uninvestigated.