no one can tell you if this is tail spin or free falling

curse you and your sudden but inevitable betrayal

2008-07-02T05:29:10Z

I just had my first driving lesson with a real instructor. My l33t driving skillz seemed to deteriorate somewhat at this time. And it was weird driving a car that, like, has responsive brakes and stuff. <3 My beast of a car.

I'm bored. So. Meme time!

Book meme

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (haha I did attempt this once. but. it's ulysses, you know?)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ship meme

"One true pairing" ship:
I'd have to say Booth/Brennan (Bones), even though I don't really want them together/think they would work?

"One true threesome" ship:
Derek/Meredith/season one!ot3 (Grey's). House/Wilson/g rated!ot3 (House). I'm serious.

"One true foursome" ship:
Derek/Meredith/Addison/Mark (Grey's). YOU GUYS.

"Canon" ship:
Luke/Lorelai (Gilmore Girls). Monica/Chandler (Friends) <3

"Not quite canon but should be" ship:
Brennan/Hodgins (Bones). They totally did it pre-series. I will not budge on this.

"If this happens I'll stab my eyes out with a spork" ship:
House/Cameron (House). I hatehatehate Cameron.

"You are one sick bastard" ship:
Miss Parker/Lyle ftw (Pretender). Shannon/Boone (Lost).

"I dabble a little" ship:
Angela/Hodgins (Bones). I don't mind it on the show, and they can be cute, but I'm not a diehard shipper.

"It's like a car crash" ship:
Mark/Addison (Grey's). Rory/Tristan (Gilmore Girls).

"Tickles my fancy but not quite sold yet" ship:
Rebecca/Justin (Brothers and Sisters).

"Makes no canon sense but why they hell not" ship:
Brennan/Sweets (Bones)!

"Everyone else loves it but I just don't feel it" ship:
House/Cameron (House). Harry/Hermione (HP). Kate/Jack or Kate/Saywer (Lost). I'm not Lost 'shippy at all. And I pretty much just hate Jack.

"When all is said and done" ship:
Miss Parker/Jarod (Pretender). And you know. Kate Walsh/Me.

"Guilty pleasure" ship:
Brennan/Hodgins (Bones).

"I can't believe I read it and liked it" ship:
George/Addison (Grey's). Ftw.

Favourite older/younger ship:
Brennan/Zack (Bones)? Liz/Future!Max (Roswell).

"My first, I could never abandon you" ship:
Lily/James (HP). And Clark Kent/Lois Lane. Obv.

Favourite devotion ship:
Liz/Max (Roswell).

Favourite never-met ship:
Chandler/Lorelai (Friends/Gilmore Girls).

Favourite abuse ship:
Jarod/Lyle (Pretender).

Favourite rape ship:
Um.

Favourite "Awwww!" ship:
Booth/Brennan (Bones). Chandler/Monica and even Ross/Rachel even though they annoyed me 80% of the time (Friends). Luke/Lorelai (Gilmore Girls). I CANNOT PICK.

Favourite perverted ship:
Miss Parker/Lyle (Pretender).

Favourite dominance!battle ship:
Brennan/Booth (Bones)? Miss Parker/Jarod (Pretender)? Um.

Fandom meme

Pick a fandom you know I know about, and I'll tell you:

01. The first character I fell in love with
02. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now
03. The character everyone else loves that I don't
04. The character I love that everyone else hates
05. The character I used to love but don't any longer
06. The character I would shag anytime
07. The character I'd want to be like
08. The character I'd slap
09. A pairing that I love
10. A pairing that I hate
11. Favorite character
12. My five favorite characters
13. My five least favorite characters
14. Which character I am most like
15. My deep, dark fandom secret

eg. Bones, Pretender, House, Grey's, Friends, Heroes, Roswell, Harry Potter, Twilight, Brothers and Sisters, Alias, Lost, Gilmore Girls. Umm. Probably many others?

I'll come back when you call me; no need to say goodbye

2008-06-12T14:58:15Z

Ok so guys. Guys. Today I was watching some Kate Walsh videos, as I am often prone to do, and while I was watching I was thinking and I thought to myself, Kate Walsh is pretty much the awesomest person alive. Because, hello. She's Kate Walsh. And then I continued thinking and I thought to myself, Emily Deschanel comes pretty close, being Emily Deschanel and all. And then I continued thinking and I thought to myself, MY GOD, WHY IS THERE NO KATE/EMILY BFFL RPF?

And and and and you know how people always say stuff like 'that is pretty much the cutest thing ever, the only thing that would make it cuter would be if they were holding a puppy' and YOU GUYS. THERE IS TOTALLY PUPPY CUTENESS RL CANON GOING ON. And it could even be Kate and Katie initiating Emily into their super cool party people club and Kate could show them all some moves and seriously. Seriously.

Somebody needs to write this fic. A somebody that is not me because I will not write RPF ever I do not think but somebody. The world would be a better place. I'm just sayin'.

On a non-obsessive, made of fannish crazy note: exams are finished! Semester is finished! I go to Melbourne in a month! Wicked tickets are booked! Yay!

and you know they can have their universe; we'll be in the dirt discerning stars

2008-05-30T07:17:14Z

and when he dies, cut him out in stars
//
by sezzie_dee
Fandom: Bones
Rating: r (because my canon’s going to fuck your canon’s shit up, basically).
Summary: “She tastes like salt and darkness and the air they almost didn’t breathe.” Brennan/Hodgins. BB, AH implied. AU to Aliens in a Spaceship.
Notes: Uh, in which I abuse brackets and turn Brennan into a probably-OOC emotional train wreck. Welcome aboard, y’all.
Brennan/Hodgins is my secret kink. They totally did it pre-series.

I just realised that it’s been, like, nearly a year since I’ve written fic. Wtf?

She spends the first night alone and at uncanny ease; Booth does not drop by, too-concerned and protective under guise of badge but calls once to tell her he’ll swing by at eight in the morning. It’s easier than it should be, she thinks, to slip the buttons through their eyelets just as any other day; to shrug the shirt from her shoulders and step out of the simple black cotton, leg after leg.

The hot water is a welcome rush against her too-small skin, scalding and powerful as it soothes her aching shoulders and washes all evidence of ordeal from her exhausted limbs. She emerges from the bathroom in a sweeping cloud of steam, billowing at her feet and returns to the kitchen only for a glass of wine.

(The first night, she sleeps. She does not dream at all.)

*

“Angela’s been great,” Hodgins tells her, the next day at the lab, maybe, or even later – still unsteady on his feet but as at home in the lab as any other place, she realises.

Brennan nods, tying her hair back.

just the same as any other day.

“Did you give her the --”
“No,” Hodgins says quickly, meeting her eyes. “No. It, uh – I just figured, she didn’t need to read it, you know. Not like that. Not when I can tell her myself, I mean.”
“I understand,” she says, and waits --

“So, uh, did you give…?”

She realises he isn’t sure who exactly, not entirely, though he’d like to assume, and she rocks on her feet, hands in the pockets of her lab coat, just once.

“No,” she says eventually, lowering her gaze. “Like you said. They don’t need to read that.”

(Nobody needs to know; not that part at least.)

*

It’s something Hodgins says that eventually makes her dig through the piles of clothing to find the pocket she’d thrust the torn pages into – that makes her hesitate with her finger on the light switch before sliding into bed in the evenings.

There’s no case, for once, and he finds her on the platform, eyes vacant and under-shadowed with fear and fatigue, and finally, he thinks, finally there’s someone who understands.

She tenses, fist clenched around the piece of paper and when he gently pries it away from her and unfolds it, his heart twists painfully in his chest.

Booth, he imagines it begins, as far as he can make out beneath the scribbling, along with several other scratched-out beginnings, nothing sounding right or making sense until the only farewells she could manage were thick and scratchy, and not at all in her usual neatness, and what the note says, even in not so many words, is: underneath it all, I’m scared. A cry, a plea, an outstretched hand of desperation and the tears are welling in her eyes when he meets her gaze.

please. save me.

“Hey, Dr Brennan?” he says weakly, slightly high pitched and nervous, almost like he’s trying to convince himself of his words. And he is, after all; merely repeating back to her everything he’s been told himself and wants to think he can believe. It’s going to be okay --

“We’re safe now. You were right. Booth found us.”
“Booth found us,” she agrees, but she’s staring blankly ahead. “And yet… and yet sometimes I’m still down there, Hodgins. I’m living, I’m breathing, I’m alive and it’s illogical, but… I can’t get out of there.”

(Because she was scared, damn it, she nearly died, and she needed the biggest freaking hug of them all – couldn’t Booth see that? Couldn’t any of them see that, without her having to speak the words?)

He wraps his warm hand around hers, stagnant on the cold metal of the table. They pause, briefly, gazes dropping to the place their palms touch and back up towards blue eyes, and before he can repeat the lie her arms are around him again, briefly, taking him back there, back to all the weight and the silence and it’s been a pleasure, but.

but I think this is goodbye.

“I’m glad we made it,” she breathes into his jacket, and smiles, shakily, and what it says to him is this: I’m fine, really, and what it means is: not at all. “I should… I should get back to work.”

He swallows, and nods.

(He knows exactly how this feels.)

*

“What is this?” he’ll ask her, after; his hands struggling with his jeans up over his hips and his head bowed, his back to her and too much and too little between them. “What are we doing here?”

She’ll kiss him first, this time – slow and sweet and nothing like what’s come before and maybe, she’ll sigh, heart wrenchingly, painfully into his ear, we’re pulling thin air out of thin air.

His eyes fall shut as he presses her back into the mattress, anger bubbling up to diffuse to her skin from his fingertips, dead and cold but burning and ohso frantic.

that’s going to bruise, and.

(He thinks he’s forgotten how to breathe.)

*

“I’m busy.”

“I’m sure you can drag yourself away from that table for a few hours, or so, Bones. Her parents deserve to know what happened to her. It’d be good for you to get away from the lab – you’ve been shut up in here for a few days, now, burying yourself in your work… all I’m saying is, not healthy.”

female. approximately thirty years in age. cause of death appears to be asphyxiation --

Booth is dressed in black and white and serenading shades of grey like it’s the levels that define him, confining all colour to the tread of his feet on the concrete, and something inside of her snaps.

“Stop babying me,” she enunciates, and scrunches up her mouth in the way that she’s practiced to show him she’s fed up with him, turning her back and returning focus to the remains.
“Hey, hey, Bones. Simmer down. You usually like to help out with this part, is all.”
“Well as I’ve explained to you, I’m busy.”
“Busy.”
“Yes.”

She doesn’t elaborate.

“You know, Bones,” he begins again tentatively, “if this is about the whole car thing, then –“
“It isn’t,” she interrupts.
“Uhuh. You uh, you sure?”
“Yes, Booth, I’m sure,” she frowns. “For me to have a fear of cars now would be highly irrational.”
“Human. It would be human.”

She brushes past him, pulling the latex gloves on with a snap and a pointed stare. He doesn’t scare, though; still keeps his shoulders square and brow furrowed, bulk tilted slightly towards her only half in softened sympathy.

“My insurance company organised me a rental. I’ve driven myself to work for the past three days, Booth. I’m fine.”

(This, at least, is the half-truth; her hands don’t shake at the wheel, and she drives with the windows down and the wind in her hair as a reminder.)

*

It’s late (after midnight on the fifth day; when did she get to lose such track of time?) when she opens the door, and she expects Booth to be standing there, tired but smiling piano forte and smelling like the lemon honey chicken and sweet and sour pork cradled in his arms.

“Booth,” she begins, voice tired, “how many times do I have to tell you that I’m perfectly capable of -” She stops, suddenly, surprised. “Hodgins,” she finishes, almost lamely, and the sentence dissipates on her tongue.

(He is the soldier that for days, months, years thinks only of his wife and of returning to her, having that seemingly unattainable dream come true and being hit with the sickening lurch somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach that is the realisation that she doesn’t, can’t, understand.)

She doesn’t understand --

“You understand,” he murmurs against the corner of her mouth, later, just where he thinks she might taste the sweetest. She’s trembling, moving so beautifully beneath him and his hands are tangling in her hair. “You understand. Angela, she – you; it was so... so...”
“Dark. It was... very dark.”

She stands almost stock still as he finally claims her lips, gently, softly, and her eyes flick backward hesitantly before closing, and she opens her mouth to him but does little else. Her hands hang by her sides as he touches her fervently, palms running over her shoulders and pushing back her jacket and when he senses she isn’t reciprocating, not completely, he draws back.

She meets his gaze, slow and steady, and when she sees the fear lingering there something twists, deep in the core of her and she tilts her head in surrender, in invitation, and her lips are back on his in an instant.

They’re stumbling backwards and her shoulders are hitting the wall with force, his thumbs rubbing circles on her stomach and she pulls back, looks him in the eye as she pulls her camisole over her head, kissing him again, hard, as soon as she’s free of the fabric. There’s his thigh between hers and the sweet friction of his jeans with her closer to the edge than she should be and a shared appreciative groan as he’s finally inside her and when he winces she pulls away, breathing heavy, with concern.

“Your leg,” she murmurs, head tilting back but he quietens her with an upward thrust.

(There’s Angela – oh god, there’s Angela – but this is something else entirely; he seeks her life and her light but goes elsewhere for understanding.)

His fingers brush the underside of her breast, and she whimpers.

“It’s fine,” he insists, and soon enough he’s coming, hard, and she’s touching herself to follow, and his legs finally give out and crumple. A pile of arms, legs, and half discarded clothing on the floor and he pushes her hand away, presses down hard on her clit and she gasps, bucking against him.

She tastes like salt and darkness and the air they almost didn’t breathe, and later when his eyes fly open from the nightmare her hand around his dick and her mouth on his is something like slow, sweet understanding.

it was dark, and the air was… it was getting thin but it felt too thick, almost, too heavy to breathe and all you could smell was dirt. dirt, and perfume…

(The light stays on. They do not sleep at all.)

*

Rinse. Repeat --

(Begin again.)

*

“Brennan.”

It’s nine days, almost to the hour and a part of her figures that giving the computer her undivided attention is somehow better than meeting her best friend’s eyes; somehow better than I’m sorry and it was never supposed to happen like this and all the jumbled tears between she wishes she knew how to let fall.

“Brennan,” Angela says again, and the pleading note in her voice is what eventually tears her eyes away from the screen, “what happened down there?”

it was dark. very dark.

“I don’t understand.”
“It’s Hodgins. He’s all quiet and attentive and to be honest with you, it’s starting to freak me out. He won’t talk, Brennan, and while I’m used to that from you, something isn’t right. With him. Something isn’t right with him and I know I should be patient and understanding but I really don’t know what else to do.”
“I’m probably not the best person to be asking for advice on relationships, Angela.”
“Not relationships. Hodgins. And being buried alive.”

She impresses herself with the ability to suppress the sharp intake of breath at the words being spoken aloud; the very small part of her that just might be growing in the knowledge of how to read people senses that it’s exactly the kind of thing Angela is looking for. Proof that she isn’t doing quite as well as she’s managed to fool everyone into thinking she is, and her heart pounds rhythmically in her chest.

“What do you want me to say, Ange?”

I was thinking maybe you could talk to him.

“Anything,” Angela whispers, wringing her hands before turning to leave. “I just want one of you to say something, instead of shutting me out like this.”

(The only thing is, she doesn’t know where to begin.)

*

Once upon a time, there was a Gravedigger.

(After all; the best place, they often say, is the start.)

*

Two weeks of clandestine ways of coping and he’s itching again, itching beneath the cast where his wound’s healing, itching for the smooth skin of Angela’s hips and her sweet, smiling mouth but Brennan’s fingers, nails angry at his back and unforgiving as they tangle in his hair, and his leg pulses painfully in reminder. He starts towards her office unsure of even his own intentions but where he finds himself is Booth --

“-- and I don’t want you to get mad, like I’m in on your territory or anything, dude, because seriously, this was the last kind of thing I saw happening, and I love Angela, man,” he says forcefully, clumsy on his feet and his limbs at a loss of what to do.
“Hodgins, what is it?”

“Me and Dr Brennan, man,” he says, finally standing still and meeting his gaze. “You gotta help me. I can’t do this anymore.”

Booth freezes, here; lets the words wash over him with a strange ease of familiarity that should be like shock and little bits of glass but instead it’s oh god, I should have known. He almost did –

(She’s stopped wearing perfume.)

“Hodgins, I don’t know what to say,” he stumbles over eventually, stunned. “Except talk to her. Angela, I mean. You’ve got to talk to her. It’ll do you both some good.”

He nods, at this; knowing it and hearing it and having someone say it – having someone else know – is like the weight crumbling from his shoulders.

like the dirt (god, he hates the word) washing sweetly from his skin.

“Dr Brennan --”
“—Bones,” Booth says, sucks in a breath and stops. His hand rests briefly on his shoulder. “Just – just sort things out with Angela, okay? I’ll take care of everything else.”

(He’s tempted, oh so tempted, to pull out the siren, but he keeps himself in check and barely lifts his foot from the gas the whole way there.)

*

When he opens the door (unlocked, almost like an invitation; he’ll still have to chastise her for it later) she isn’t anywhere in plain sight but he can hear her breathing, he thinks, a little heavier than usual and broken and irregular. He drapes his jacket hesitantly over the back of her couch.

He takes in the illuminated room, the lamps and the burning ceiling bulbs, aching a little inside knowing that it’s got this far without him realising, and almost without thinking his fingers linger on the light switch, and seconds later the room’s reduced to an eerie glow. He does hear the intake of breath this time, sharp and jagged, and he continues his quest by switching off lamp after lamp and extinguishing light after light.

She’s against the wall outside her room when he finds her, slid down to wrap her arms around her knees and her hair’s all ruffled and her eyes are wide and haunted when she glances up at him in surprise.

“Booth,” is all she says, with an underlying, desperate hint of what are you doing, but more than anything he’s glad that there’s that stronger hint of trust, too.

faith.

He crouches down in front of her, brushes a strand of hair from her eyes and smiles; extends his palm and the small, red candle flickers light across her tear streaked features. She takes it, captivated by the tiny flame.

“You’re going to be okay, Bones,” he tells her. “You don’t have to be afraid of the dark anymore.”

The seconds tick by before she finally meets his gaze, and slowly, she nods.

(What you have is faith --)

*

Her arms thread around his neck, and she extinguishes the candle herself.

(The only light left is the stars.)

fin.

as I dream about movies they won't make of me when I'm dead

2008-05-24T13:00:22Z

vinegar and dry, dry wine
//
by sezzie_dee
Fandom: Bones
Rating: pg? There’s some naughty words in there, s’all.
Summary: "He tastes like the salt of her tears and it occurs to her that this is new to both of them; their relationship has always been about facts, never emotion. Never, I loved you and you betrayed me." Brennan-centric, with implied BB, I guess, and some Zack thrown in.

Notes: Since every man and his dog has written something in response to WitW, I thought I’d better crawl out of my hole and catch the bandwagon before it left town, since I kind of missed it with the whole Sully debacle (I still have 27-odd pages of Boneless Bride in the River centric fic waiting for an ending. Yeah. Who knows when that’ll surface). Incorporates the season finale. Ouch.

I’m not overly happy with this, but I’m happier with it than I was when I started, which is something, and hey, I’m writing again.

Now I’m off to finish post-Aliens in a Spaceship Brennan/Hodgins. Oh yeah. You know you want to read it, really :)

There’s blood.

Lots of it, and later that’s all she’ll remember – impossible amounts of it, bright scarlet blossoming like rose petals and those, too; the sickly sweet scent of them invading her nostrils and making her dizzy.

The trick, a little voice tells her, is to keep breathing.

*

Angela doesn’t know what to do, at least not at first; this is a situation for which there is no five-step plan, no waiting for you to catch up because she knows, can see that Brennan is caught up, suspended in this moment as much as she can be, and through an artist’s eyes she sees the colours draining from the world.

“I suppose,” she begins, looking sidewise at Sweets, “that if this hadn’t all turned out so horribly, you’d be dying to tell them I told you so.”

Dr Lance Sweets doesn’t reply; he presses his first and middle fingers to the canvas on the wall, feels the texture of the layered paint beneath them.

The clock beside the nurses’ station seems unnaturally loud.

*

When they eventually tear her away from him - from his body, so corpse-like and not at all Booth, who has always been about life for her, life in amongst all her dealings with the dead, and she forgets about living sometimes but Booth has always been there to remind her and now he isn’t - she knows she can’t stay. Feels as if she’s suffocating, slowly, painfully, or drowning, and tryingtrying to fill her lungs with air, with life, but unable to do so, and when she makes it outside the cocktail of crisp oxygen and car exhaust burns on the way down in a way that almost makes her feel alive when she shouldn’t, not really.

“Fat Pam,” she says suddenly, jerking out of her reverie. “What happened to… to Pam, Pam Nunan, she…”
“Sweetie, she’s dead,” Angela tells her, voice gentle. “Do you remember?”

the gun, heavy in her hand but not shaking at all and steady and natural and squeezing the trigger and oh booth come on booth booth come on…

She blinks.

“Yes. Yes, I remember.”

*

Where there should be only noise, there is silence.

The screams of terrified witnesses, the gunshots, the sirens, and even now, the pulsing of the heart monitor and the blood pounding in her ears all she can hear, sense, is everything the world lacks: the sound of his voice, even in cajole; the ease of his gaze, his smile; the spice of his cologne; his hand, so warm on the small of her back and everything else familiar to her is gone.

And all she can feel is numbness.

*

There’s white, so much white it could be the heaven she knows he believes in, and yet –

I’m so sorry, we did everything we could.

There’s so much blood.

“He didn’t make it,” she repeats, and the words are like glass in her throat.

*

It takes her three days before she finds herself on Max Keenan’s doorstep, and even then she isn’t entirely sure why she’s come but she can’t quite find it within her to leave, either.

“Sweetheart,” he begins, and doesn’t finish, but she can hear it, hear the words unspoken just like she hears them from everyone else; you’re so pale, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, and maybe she has.

(or maybe, she’s about to.)

“Booth, he… he lets me hug him when I get scared sometimes,” she says, offhandedly. “I told him he’s got to stop it, but… but I really need a hug right now and he isn’t here and who… who am I supposed to hug when he’s the reason I’m…”

“You’ve got me,” her father says, and yes.

She places her hand briefly over his for a moment before rising to leave; it’s true, she thinks, that she has him now but she didn’t have him for so long, and through all that time, through all that absence, she had Booth --

“You’re right, Dad,” she says. “I’ve got you.”

She wishes she could tell him it were enough.

*

“I shot someone. Killed someone,” Brennan says eventually.

It’s day six, after, and Cam didn’t want her at the lab but she came anyway because it felt right somehow, immersing herself in death and where she should be, where she was supposed to be in his place, and it wasn’t supposed to happen like this, not at all.

Sweets regards her, desperate to meet her heavy, downcast eyes as she shuts herself down. Shuts him out.

“Dr Brennan, it was self defense. Pam Nunan shot Agent Booth but she was aiming for you, and she was about to fire again.”
“No.”
“No? Bren, come on – that’s what happened. We were all there,” Angela says, hand on her friend’s arm.
“No, it wasn’t self defense. I didn’t shoot at Pam Nunan because she was aiming a gun at me.”

She glances up now, finally, and her red-rimmed eyes are startlingly bright in their clarity.

“I shot Pam Nunan because she shot Booth. It wasn’t self defense at all.”
“Brennan, come on,” Angela says. “Brennan.”

come on booth come on wake up don’t leave me wake up come on come you cant do this nonono booth

“It was revenge,” she says, and when she closes her eyes she doesn’t see the face of the woman she killed at all; all she sees is Booth, and the blossoming beneath her fingertips and her red stained hands. “She shot my – she shot my partner.”

booth, she thinks. you bastard.

you promised.

*

“I’m not going,” she says before Angela can even get the words out. “Funerals, they don’t… they don’t mean anything. Booth is dead and I’m alive – we’re alive, Angela. None of this means anything.”

Angela can’t stop crying and Brennan knows she should comfort her because she’s said the wrong thing but she can’t, and she wishes, all she wishes is that everything could stop and go back the way it was before, before everything, when this all did mean something.

*

Fuck him, she thinks. Fuck him and his hero complex for not being quick enough with the gun, for being dead, for making her attend his fucking funeral, and dress in black and stand there, a huge beacon and feeling the whole while like all she was, to everybody there, was the girl who should have been in his place, like she belonged in that coffin more than anyone.

(that girl is still fifteen years old inside, and she scuffs her sneakers in the dirt and acts like she doesn’t care.)

And then. After all he’s put her through, she thinks. After everything. He has the fucking cheek to be alive, living and breathing and so handsome looking in uniform and goddamn him, straight to hell.

“You bastard,” she snarls, and when her fist connects with his face (so real, so warm) she tells herself it makes her feel a little better inside.

*

“Booth, I thought you were dead.”

She’s practically shaking with fury now, and although she keeps telling herself this is not rational she can’t help but tremble, clench her fists at her sides.

“Yeah, and to be honest, Bones, you didn’t seem that cut up about it,” he retorts.

She’s ready to turn and walk away now, all I can’t deal with this and you don’t understand but he halts her, stops her in her tracks with a hand on her shoulder and his finger pointing dangerously close to her face.

“You know, you’ve got a fault in your logic of your own. This whole time, all you kept insisting was how me dying wasn’t that big of a deal, all you lost was a partner. But if after three years, three years, Bones, I meant nothing more to you than that, then why are you so mad at me for not telling you I wasn’t dead because after three goddamn years you’re supposed to mean something more to me than just partners.”

It would be so easy, she thinks, to just kiss him now; scrunch her fingers at his lapels and pull him towards her, just as she did at Christmas, just like she wishes she could sometimes, even just to shut him up, and then she realises that for all its easiness, it’s too fucking complicated and too much like proving him right and not what she wants at all, not really.

Although in reality he is (right, that is – he always is and she just might hate him for it); he has found the fault in her logic just as she found the fault in Zack’s. She doesn’t know what else to tell him and so, she walks away.

She’ll be damned if she gives Sweets exactly what he wants, anyway.

*

I think you will find a home here.

She almost wishes they were children, so she could grasp his hand (oh god his hands) in hers and whisper in his ear, go silent and still and ask, ever so quietly, “What was it like, over there? In Iraq?” Wishes they had more of a friendship, and maybe underline it, ever so subtly, with what could have happened, what could have changed, what could have gone wrong so much that we’re standing where we are now, alone?

It doesn’t feel like home, not anymore.

*

“You know what, Bones? I’m starting to think you wanted me to be dead.”

booth come on booth come on come on booth you can do this booth please…

She glares at him; I’m not even going to dignify that with a response. God, she hates psychology.

“But you did, didn’t you? You wanted me to be dead because that would prove right what you so desperately want to believe in. That everybody you care about is going to up and leave you. I’m not Sully, Bones,” he says quietly. “I’m not your brother or your father. When you asked me if I would ever betray you I said no and I meant it. I’m not going anywhere.”
“But that’s where you’re wrong, Booth,” she says, shaking her head, eyes shining, wet, imploringly. And finally, he thinks. Finally there’s some emotion breaking through. “You already did betray me.”
“I took a bullet for you, Bones,” he almost whispers, in stark contrast to the last time he spoke the words, with so much more between them and far less clothes. “Zack killed someone. Why am I the bad guy here?”

He knows his mistake the minute the words leave his mouth; her eyes darken and her jaw tightens and she pulls away from him.

“Screw you, Booth,” she says, voice low but piercing even as the tears she’s been holding back for two weeks threaten to well in her eyes.

The door slams shut when she leaves.

*

He’s angry, it occurs to her later. Almost as angry as she is and although a part of her wants to believe he doesn’t have the right --

“Bren,” Angela says, and it’s that tone she uses that suggests that if it were anyone else, she’d be exasperated, but for now she’s mostly pitying, and, “You believed the guy was dead for two weeks and you didn’t shed a tear.”

Oh, she thinks, and, when. When did the world start making so much sense?

*

She visits Zack before they take him away and has to remind herself to inhale – it scares her to look at him, almost, not because she’s come to mistrust hospitals but because he’s always stood for logic for her in the way that Booth has stood for life; she looks into his eyes that have never been as calculating as the rest of him and she wonders if that was why it took her so long to figure the whole thing out.

She looks into his eyes and sees herself.

“I’m angry at you, Zack,” she says, but her voice is mournful and her arms are looping around his neck. She kisses him, there and once on each eyelid before pressing against his lips, chaste and forgiving. He tastes like the salt of her tears and it occurs to her that this is new to both of them; their relationship has always been about facts, never emotion. Never, I loved you and you betrayed me.

“I’m sorry, Dr Brennan,” he tells her earnestly, miserably, and it takes her back to a time and place where she barely knew him, when he followed her around like a well trained pet and cleaned her bones and listened intently and didn’t want to finish his doctorate because he wanted to be her assistant, her apprentice, forever.

He keeps saying it, over and over again, the apology tumbling from his lips like a despairing mantra and her fingers tangle in his hair.

“No, Dr Addy,” she says. “I’m sorry,” and as the words roll off her tongue, the room isn’t spinning quite as much as it used to.

*

It’s some ridiculous hour on the twenty sixth day, after, and it’s raining and she’s on his doorstep and pounding on the door in an urgency that suggests to him anger, but when he flings it open, hair mussed and only in boxer shorts (but those at least, she thinks, somewhere in between it all) what he finds is not at all what he expects.

She’s freezing, he notes, with her arms wrapped tightly around her body and she’s fidgeting, much like she was at the funeral, unable to keep still but oh god. The tears are pouring down her face and her eyes are wide and that shade of blue he wonders if she’s figured out he can’t resist, and when he swallows his Adam’s apple bobs uncertainly because he isn’t quite sure what he’s in for.

“Hey, hey,” he says, a hand hesitantly on her shoulder. “Bones, what the hell’s going on?”

The sob that escapes her hits him somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach, twists painfully inside him.

“Bones. Why are you crying?”

It’s moments still before she composes herself enough to answer him, her fingers wiping furiously at her face and her breath coming in ragged gasps as her cheeks tinge in a way that’s only partly because of the cold.

“Because you died,” she says, and then she thinks she must be going crazy because she’s still crying but she’s kind of laughing, too. “You died, and I thought I was never going to see you again.”

And then he’s thrown completely off guard because she catapults herself at him, and she’s soaking wet and her clothes are cold and slimy against his bare chest but he feels sort of warm inside, too. It hurts, she realises, as the numbness fades away, as the blood, so much blood, pounds furiously through her veins. It hurts, but it feels good, too.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes, warm against his neck and somehow, finally, she can tell it’s all going to be okay.

*

She feels alive.

fin.

the saddest part of a broken heart isn't the ending so much as the start

2008-05-23T11:03:03Z

Uhh, so. I disappeared for five months and stuff. Oops. Sorry about that. Uni ate me.

Anyhoo – if anything was going to bring me out of hiding, it was going to be this. And for a limited time only, complete with picspam!

This isn’t really in much semblance of an order. Bear with me.

First of all – wtf is with the title? Come on, guys. Ick. Ick central.

So I liked the last episode. Quite a bit. Not as much as The Verdict in the Story, which actually reminded me why I love this show, and not so much for the episode itself but the ending, and I was all omg yes, that’s what I’m talking about, and I rewatched it at least five times and I wishwishwish they’d only had the guts to have that as the finale. Even though that would have pissed me off immensely, I would have respected that, because dude. It’s all about the angst.

That said. I did like the finale. Even if the whole thing was one steaming pile of omgwtfbbq. Mostly because it had me on the edge of my seat the whole time and it moved me. A lot.

LOOK, LOOK - LOOK AT THEIR FAMILY-NESS.

After the initial ‘umm, why are we at Booth’s funeral? clearly Booth cannot be dead’ I went from ‘ugh dream sequence’ to ‘double ugh he’s in witness protection or some shit, could this be any tackier, Chandler?’. LAME. Rushed. Wtf. Did not love. I could have handled this scene, even if it was a bit ick, just because Emily Deschanel is made of awesome and Booth totally had that punch coming to him and Brennan’s reaction at this point was played out pretty nicely. What was not played out nicely was everyone’s easy acceptance that Booth was alive and Booth’s ridiculous ‘why are you so mad?’ bullshit. Come on, Booth. Are you serious? Booth can be dense but nobody is that dense.

There was no way that there was ever going to be enough time to deal with the fallout of Booth’s not-death and the Gormogon climax of doom, so I’m really not sure why they attempted it. It’s a shame all this really needed was one more episode to spread this shit out and it could have been ten shades of awesome (I know the whole Zack thing has everyone all flaily and OMG NO WAI and yes, I agree that it was kind of sudden and out of nowhere, but still. Let’s face it, the show has a habit of rushing things. That Two Bodies in the Lab ending that everyone loves so much? I would have liked it a whole lot more if the whole Brennan-is-kidnapped and Booth-is-heroic thing didn’t happen in the space of three minutes. So all I would’ve asked for here is one more episode. And maybe a few more hints dropped, you know?)

What I was kind of hoping for in this episode was for Booth to spend the whole time in hospital, his situation pretty unstable, and everyone trying to fit in the omgstress of the Gormogon case whilst dealing with the omgangst of Booth’s life hanging in the balance. WHY DID WE NOT UTILISE THE ANGST, PEOPLE???

So the whole storyline here was pretty shit and very much magic mushroom, but somehow it resulted in some pretty darn awesome dialogue and some brilliant acting so really, I was willing to go with it. And here is what I did love: after twice through watching I still don’t entirely understand everything Brennan is saying to Zack during the assumption/principle speech, but, “And yet you risked it all so that Hodgins wouldn’t get hurt.” OMG. IT KILLS ME EVERY TIME. ZACK AND HODGINS ARE TOTALLY BFFL.

They did a pretty good job of making everyone seem creepy and suspicious in this episode. I was beginning to accept it was Sweets (the fact that Sweets stood up to Booth? <3) even though I thought that would have been lame, and then Hodgins. Sweets bringing it up only made Sweets seem dodgy and the whole Hodgins’ neighbourhood thing was too obvious but was anyone else majorly disturbed by Hodgins’ button pushing in the hospital? SO CREEPY OMG. And they just kept zooming in on TJ’s big blue eyes. AHH. DEAD.

Oh, yeah. Booth in the bathtub. I can’t quite decide if I liked this or not, but when Brennan gets all hysterical, kinda, and they’re all like, “I took a bullet for you!” and “Once! And that only goes so far!” I totally wanted to hug them, and Emily.

Naked Booth. Hee.

So people are pretty upset that Zack is going to be like, gone, and stuff. I was surprised that Eric didn’t ask to leave the series – I assumed that was why he was being written out. So no deal on that. But at the same time the show’s been a bit lacking in Zack lately anyway. Not that I don’t like him, but. I’ll deal. AND BESIDES. YOU GUYS. IF ZACK WASN’T ALL EBIL AND STUFF, WE WOULDN’T HAVE GOTTEN THIS SCENE:

I cannot put into words my love for this.

Bones always amuses me in the way it seems to fuck up the easy, obvious stuff, like, you know, storyline. But then it pulls this kinda shit out of nowhere and you’re torn between hating the writers and wanting to have their babies. Because seriously. I love that they played on the bond between Zack and Brennan the way they did because it’s previously been somewhat neglected in the show. Zack really did adore Brennan and she always thought the world of him, too, even though she didn’t show it and she totally gave him a home. And all the stuff that they gave him and Brennan didn’t give him anything but she did, she gave him the best gift of all and SERIOUSLY GUYS. I LOVE THIS SHOW LIKE WOAH.

Cam, oh Cam. How sad and lovely you are. I LOVE YOU TOO, CAM. GIVE ME A HUG.

So I’m thinking if they had have cut out all this Booth’s un-death bullshit they could have made this a pretty good episode. Not that the Zack stuff was ever going to please everyone but still. They could have made it gel more. Because apart from the whole coming out of nowhere thing, everything after that fake funeral was kind of good, yeah? I think so. We even got the typical BB moment at the end:

The only thing I think could have finished this off a bit better would have been a little, “Booth? I’m glad you’re alive.”/”Yeah, me too.” Or something along those lines. Because, hello. WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE FALLOUT, PLS.

Sigh. And there goes season three.

I am, of course, writing fic. But who knows how long that’ll take.

/obligatory.

2007-12-26T12:31:34Z

So. Merry belated Christmas and stuff, you guys!

I finally have some spare time (a whole week off work!) so I thought it was about time I posted, 'cause it's kinda been awhile. I hope everyone had an awesome Christmas. Mine was pretty average but great just for the fact that I didn't have to work. I *was* originally only supposed to work four hours Christmas Eve but surprise of all surprises I got called in early in the morning and spent the whole day dealing with annoying customers.

I had one guy abusing me because the 2L Coke was on special and, in true Christmas miracle fashion, was cheaper than the 1.25L. I explained to the guy that it was on special, no, I didn't make up the prices, and please, just be thankful and buy the bigger, cheaper one. He continued to rant. You know what he ended with? "I don't want any Coke. I just think it's ridiculous, that's all." Yeah. Awesome.

My Christmas wares included:
* House Season 3 from parents
* ACDC DVD box set from housemate
* PotC: At World's End DVD
* Transformers DVD
* Car stuff, including a new CD player, a sun shield and a street directory
* Clothes
* CDs
* New Moon (there was a sad defficiency of literature this Christmas; hopefully my birthday will yield better results)
* The mandatory truckload of fattening, sugary things.

Hmm. Today I also got my TEE results - I ended up with a TER of 95.95, which I'm pretty happy about, given my ill-timed bout of chicken pox and all. It pretty much gets me into any uni I want, anyway. Which is kind of good considering I only applied to one of them. First round offers come out January 17th or something. I'll be doing a Bachelor of Creative Arts majoring in Theatre. Yay!

I also went and saw Golden Compass today, which disappointed me immensely. Especially the end, at which I was very much "Um, wtf? Did you lose the last few pages of script, or something?" and almost wished I hadn't read the books so that I could maybe not be so unimpressed with the whole thing. However: Lee <3

It's my 18th on Saturday. I'm having an 80s themed party. Am quite excited. Yeowww!

you say your head is a prison, well then these are just conjugal visits

2007-12-03T07:46:44Z

I'm back from schoolies, y'all. I got quite sunburned, drank way too much, met some really cool people, made out on the beach in the rain at 3am, surprisingly didn't get sick of my friends and really, really wish I was still there, because last week was seriously the best week of my life. Now it's back to the gaping black hole that is real life. Which begins with telling my manager that I need more hours. Yuck. Really do not want.

Not a big fan. I mean, I dug the kiss. Mostly because it was a *kiss* (and the extended version? so fucking hot), but, it didn't sit right for me. Mostly the gum thing and Caroline's reaction when they'd cut out all the tonsil hockey, and just the general circumstances surrounding the kiss. I kind of expected to be disappointed in that sense, though, so. Meh. I'll get over it.

The scene with Sweets, on the other hand? THAT is what I'm talking about. Just how close they were sitting to each other was enough to get me giddy. "Hey! Get your own sex life!"

And, okay, yes, Booth and Parker and the Christmas tree made me go all flaily and melted snow-like inside, and "Merry Christmas, Bones!" may just have been the cutest thing ever, and Booth's expression as they exchanged thank yous/greetings/had sex with their eyes made me feel all squishy inside.

And oh yeah. Brennan/beanie otp. Srsly.

But the episode in general? Ehhh. Not one of my favourites.

I haven't watched the latest Heroes, yet, but 3x09? Ajwghwsdgiuyfgeuyf78rtgbhdadjsfgsad!!! Totally the episode I've been waiting for all season. Though I've been told 3x10 isn't quite so awesome.

Meme time!

SEVEN THINGS THAT SCARE YOU
01) Heights.
02) Elevators.
03) Not being in control.
04) George Bush.
05) Not knowing for sure what I want to do with my life.
06) Life after school.
07) Crickets.

SEVEN IMPORTANT THINGS IN YOUR ROOM
01) Computer
02) iPod
03) Books
04) CDs
05) Car keys
06) Guitar
07) Photos

SEVEN RANDOM FACTS ABOUT YOU
01) I can wriggle my nose and ears.
02) I hate pineapple on pizza.
03) I never sneeze just once - I sneeze in bursts of mini sneezes. My record is 17.
04) Many of my friends have never seen my natural hair colour.
05) I have mild OCD.
06) I own over 300 pairs of earrings.
07) Baked beans repulse me.

SEVEN THINGS YOU WISH TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE
01) See a show on Broadway.
02) Get published.
03) See the Trevi Fountain.
04) Travel the world.
05) Fall in love.
06) Open a theatre company.
07) Find Josh.

SEVEN THINGS YOU CAN DO
01) Drink my friends under the table.
02) Write.
03) Draw.
04) Play the guitar.
05) Use calculus to solve related rates :P
06) Swear. A lot. More so when sleepy or inebriated.
07) Name all the countries in Africa in alphabetical order.

SEVEN THINGS YOU CAN'T DO
01) Drink a whole can of Jim Beam & Cola by itself without getting bored with it.
02) Finish an Ernest Hemingway novel.
03) Tell time (at least, not very well).
04) Navigate.
05) Cartwheel.
06) Understand argand diagrams.
07) Stand lasagne.

SEVEN THINGS YOU SAY THE MOST
01) Wickeddd.
02) I'd tap that.
03) Sounds sexual.
04) That's really romantic.
05) You'd be devo.
06) Pretty dev about that sitch.
07) Hell [...], 'n shit.
(Yes, I pretty much sound like the biggest bogan ever).

SEVEN CELEBRITY CRUSHES
01) Kate Walsh
02) Johnny Depp
03) George Clooney
04) Emily Deschanel
05) David Duchovny
06) Chris O'Donnell
07) Patrick Dempsey

RENT! was awesome; the singing was unbelievable. And I got to meet the entire cast, including a boy I went to school with that is like, a total star now or something, and get everyone to sign my programme, and it was all round a pretty cool graduation present.

I'm thinking of writing fic, but I have so many on the go I don't know where to start.

So, flist. 'Sup?

I believe the world is burning to the ground; well I guess we're going to find out

2007-11-21T17:10:55Z

YOU GUYS, LOOK. I IS ALL GRADUATED NOW. I feel all old, and stuff.

It was last night, and it was long, and dragged a bit in parts, and it was really, really hot in those robes. There were tears, laughter, and tears of laughter, girls nearly breaking their necks walking up the stairs in ridiculously high heels, awards breaking upon presentation in true Wanneroo style and by some strange miracle I managed to make it through my valedictorian speech without crying.

CLASS

team red ♥ - [most of] the girls in my house (I'm second from the right)

AWARDS

+ top in english lit, human biology, chemistry and drama, for which I got medals
+ principal's award, for which I got a book I already have
+ academic dux, for which I got a $75 borders voucher and $1000 (but not until january. woe.)

my shiny, shiny dux medal; my marginally less shiny subject medals; my dux medal and subject medals together at the same time

BASKET

I then returned home intending to quickly scrounge together some clothes and whatnot for the after party, only to nearly break my neck tripping over a freaking hamper that had been strategically placed in the middle of my room for maximum trippage potential. You guys. My mommy totally made me a graduation basket, all Gilmore Girls-like and stuff.

bahaha my mrs dixon dart board (my year coordinator whom I hate with a passion)

I really can't believe it's over. Exams and school and everything, really. And as incredibly shit as my school is, I'm totally going to miss it ♥

Officially I'm not back from hiatus yet - I'm going to RENT! tomorrow night (VIP tickets - meet the cast backstage, yeowww) and on Sunday I'm off to Leavers, baby. I haven't caught up on the flist yet, so if there's anything important that I've missed, please tell me.

See you in two weeks!

you can't stop the rhythm of two hearts in love

2007-11-04T07:37:33Z

Happy Birthday, blademistress! *bakes ~~cookies~~brains*

Thank you for, once again, being older than me and thus making me feel marginally less old in comparison :P

Technically, I am still on hiatus. One exam down, four to go.

Do you want to know what the best feeling in the world is? It's totally knowing you never have to do chemistry ever, ever again omg.

~~Chemistry - Friday~~
Applicable - Tuesday
Calculus - Friday
Human Biology - Monday
Lit - Thursday

Eleven days and I'm freeeeee. I have unbelievable drama to rant about when I return. Like being the cool person who goes and gets herself a good old dose of the chicken pox ten days before her tertiary entrance exams and consequently missing out on exam revision, graduation assembly and graduation breakfast. Totally awesome, amirite?

could you whisper in my ear the things you wanna feel?

2007-09-14T15:29:56Z

I've been somewhat MIA lately. Sorry 'bout that. I still kind of am.

I have two weeks left of school, four weeks until finals and six weeks until TEE. I've had an incredibly lazy/cruisy/completely unmotivated year thus far but I also know I won't be happy with myself unless I do the best that I can do. So for the time being, I'll be studying my ass off. As you all know, LJ isn't entirely conducive to such a thing. Thus:

hiatus. september - december.

I graduate on the 20th of November. On the 23rd I'll be going to RENT, and after that? Totally taking off and spending at least seven days drinking myself stupid and killing off the brain cells I will have filled up with aforementioned ridiculous amounts of study.

See you all in December, and don't have too much fun without me ♥

this swarming sea is endless; the artist alone is sparing

2007-07-29T08:01:10Z

and every man his mother and his father
//
by sezzie_dee
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: pg13
Summary: "She dreams of betrayal and an all-consuming darkness; of cold, black water that snatches at her ankles and drags her down into its depths with invisible icy talons, enveloping her and swallowing her whole." Hermione gen, with hints of R/Hr.

Post-Deathly Hallows, and thus: spoilers.

The only HP fic I’ve ever written has been MWPP-era, and even then it was long before there was any sort of reliable canon for them. I probably have no Hermione voice whatsoever, so bear with me.

I remember locked figures in the streets
Duel or embrace, I do not know
The impetuous gestures of our guide
as we came to that place where the river meets
rock, the savage boldness of the flood.
A voice saying freedom! in a tongue
I have forgotten. The wet red sandstone.
My lifelong terror of blood.
I remember the ocean licking at the lonely piers,
and the scavenged food.
I cannot remember the faces
of my father, my mother, my sister; only the places
that were not home, and the tears.

-- Gwen Harwood

*

She has exactly one magical photo of her parents.

She took it the day before she bewitched them; stole their memories, altered them, transformed the Grangers into the Wilkins and in doing so neatly bundled up and hid, protected, or so she hoped, the one part of the world she couldn’t bear to leave behind. It wasn’t something she’d consciously planned to do (though perhaps subconsciously, she had; the camera was quivering in her hands, even if only slightly) but it had felt right, prudent even, at the time.

They’re smiling in the picture, just as they ought to, with their perfect dentists’ smiles – occasionally they laugh and exchange weighty glances but the mood remains the same. They look happy, she thinks, and wonders if it has anything to do with her not being in it.

She never showed it to them, once she’d taken it, but hid it under her pillow as she contemplated an act so dreadful she wasn’t sure she’d be able to bring herself to do it, had kept it with her in her darkest moments since. She tells herself she’d thought maybe they wouldn’t care or have the time, or that the concept of living pictures of the literal sense would be rather too much for them to handle, but she knows it isn’t true, not exactly. The photo feels like a secret, a piece taken from their lives when they weren’t looking and in it was captured and preserved a moment that was real, and genuine, and just the way she wants to remember them.

They would have liked the photo, she thinks.

*

It’s far easier than she thinks it should be.

“They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.”

Her voice barely trembles when she tells them what she’s done; all too calmly takes in Ron’s quiet admiration and something reflected back at her in Harry’s startling green eyes, soaked in stars and what might be pity, if only she didn’t know him better.

“They’re safe. It’s what matters,” she says, firmly, and this is how she sleeps at night.

She wishes she were as sure of it as she was able to make herself sound.

*

She remembers all too guiltily, sometimes, the holidays spent at Hogwarts that she should have spent at home. How at first, she’d thought it just like any other place she’d been, and yet; the feeling of belonging, for the first time in her life, of friends that actually meant something, and of people that actually valued her worth far more than all she knew. How piece by bittersweetly sung piece, a school of witchcraft and wizardry, of everything her parents never were and never could be, had become her home, had raised her, had made her who she was today. How she’d never realised how disconnected it had made her from everything that should have mattered; of somehow, the very thing they were fighting for.

I’m terribly sorry, but I won’t be coming home for Christmas this year –

“An otter, Hermione?” Ron asks in amazement.

Her wand feels warm in her hand.

She ducks to avoid a swooping silver kestrel only to narrowly miss bumping into Fred and George, staring at each other in wonder at the seal and dolphin erupting out of their respective wands.

“By George --”
“-- you’re wrong, I’m Fred –“
“Who’d have thought –“
“—I can hardly believe it –“
“Marine life,” they grin in unison. “There’s something fishy going on here.”

Her Patronus glides in lazy circles around her, eliciting a delighted laugh from its conjuror and Hermione feels strangely light-hearted.

“A terrier, Ronald?” she mocks, and he offers her a lopsided smile.
“Crazy smart, are they then, otters? Bossy, too?”
“Actually, the European otter is nowhere as common as it used to be. Its habitat has been destroyed by the use of chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, and since they’re poached for their lovely pelts --”
“Rare and magnificent, then,” Ron concedes, his eyes back on the dog bounding through the air.

She beams. A silver hare skims past her ear.

All my love,
Hermione.

*

She brushes her teeth when she’s upset.

It never occurs to her that this is illogical, or unusual, and when she sees how the room starts spinning for him she’s at the bathroom in an instant, hesitant and hovering at the door.

“Do you want your toothbrush, Harry?” she asks softly, and it’s only as the words leave her mouth that she realises how absurd they sound.

Her father had told her once that there was little brushing couldn’t do – it helped with toothache, bad breath and preventing a whole range of nasty diseases. She sometimes wishes saving the world were as easy as toothpaste, rinse and repeat.

She watches herself in the mirror, when Ron leaves – eyes red and puffy, her wrist aching and gums sore from her rigorous brushing, hoping to scrub away some of the hopelessness and how empty she feels inside. Spits into the makeshift sink she’s conjured and collapses, sobbing, into her arms, toothbrush lying on the floor, forgotten.

Harry says her name quietly when he finds her, anger evaporating as he wraps an arm around her shoulders. As he would do anyone else in her position. As he would do a sister.

“He’ll be back, Hermione. You know he will,” he says, and she wants so much to believe it’s true.

He picks up her toothbrush and brushes the dirt off it. Rinses it in cold water and hands it back to her.

“I think you’ll be needing this later,” he says.

She nods, and runs her thumb across the tip. The bristles prickle against her skin.

*

The fire was still glowing warm into the night, the atmosphere all too familiar in the light of a dreadful aftermath, bittersweet victory echoing from every rafter of the school’s still-standing walls.

Ron, wearily congratulating Neville on his brilliant, loping bear Patronus and struggling to piece together a witty remark about courage and hibernation, claps a hand on his shoulder before making his way over to the couch she’s sitting on and drops, exhausted, down beside her.

“Of course, Toby was brilliant, too,” he offers, and her eyes fly to him in alarm. “I’ve heard you say it once or twice,” he admits, and she can feel her cheeks flush pink.
“I know it’s silly of me –“
“I’ve been thinking of calling mine Fred,” he interrupts. “It’d drive him mad, if he knew.”

There’s a pause, and then her face is breaking out in a radiant smile and she’s surprising them both by kissing him hurriedly on the side of his mouth.

“Er, you don’t think it’s too sentimental, then?” he asks, slightly flustered.

She shakes her head.

“Fred is perfect, Ron. Just... perfect.”

*

When she finally falls asleep it’s from pure exhaustion; lying on a couch in the Common Room with Ron wrapped protectively around her, her eyes drooping in fatigue.

In her dreams she sees herself in Harry’s shoes - walks, terrified, forward; feels the stone, cool and smooth against her palm. Turns it. Once, twice. Three times. Like the time-turner, she thinks, if only, and her head spins with the gravity of it all.

Their faces don’t bring her comfort. She writhes, horrified, at the sight of Ron’s translucent lanky form, his lopsided grin and shining eyes.

A couple, so familiar and yet not, haunting her with their empty gazes and hollow smiles that do not touch her but pass right on through.

Sees Crookshanks, rubbing against her legs, but feels no fur.

“No,” she hisses, “you’re not dead, you’re not...”

Her eyes fly open when she realises with a sickening lurch that even in death, they have no idea who she is.

“It’s okay,” Ron mumbles sleepily into her hair when she shudders violently enough to wake him. “It’s all going to be okay.”

Their hands unfurl. She doesn’t sleep again for days.

*

She puts it off for weeks. Ron doesn’t understand and she doesn’t expect him to; Harry might, though, and his gaze is all too knowing and sympathetic when it meets her own.

“I’ll go with you, if you like,” he tells her. “Or Ron. You know he will, if you ask him, Hermione – he’ll say yes in a second.”
“I’ve told him I’m waiting,” she says. “To be sure. To be completely certain that it’s safe.”
“You’re not, though,” he says, and when she looks away he thinks he might’ve seen tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Harry,” she whispers. “I’m just so scared. I feel just awful, like something bad has happened and I can’t put my finger on it. And I can’t help wondering if something’s gone dreadfully wrong, if maybe my idea was a stupid one after all --”

What if the spell didn’t work? What if they never remember me?

“Hermione, they’re your family.”

She turns away; his words make too much sense.

*

“The Horcrux –”
“—I’m fine,” she says. “Really.”

He nods, and knows well enough to leave it alone.

Though truth in truth that was a completely different matter; weeks later and she’s only lying to herself in pretending she can’t still hear its nasty whispers in her ear, cruel and sharp and jabbing into all the right places, worse than any Dementor has ever made her feel.

They’re dead, the both of them. You killed them, and now they don’t even know who you are. Wouldn’t have remembered you anyway, nasty, horrid, ungrateful girl. Happiest they’ve ever been, other side of the world.

They always were better off without y --

She turns her head sharply, and he knows she isn’t really.

They don’t know they have a daughter.

His hand closes gently around her own, and she is grateful.

*

It’s days later when she wakes, cold beneath the sheets, and presses herself against Ron, presses her lips urgently against his until there’s nothing left between them. She trembles, and his hands find hers in the dark.

“Hermione --”

Alarm; what’s gotten into you?

“Ssh,” she hushes him, eyes burning into his imploringly.

He nods, and her mouth, her hands, her skin are hot against his own.

*

The owl is charcoal grey, when it arrives, and not at all snowy like it should be; its doleful eyes bore into Harry and even still he cannot bring himself to move. Its claws leave the ghost of a scratch on her fingers as she breaks the orange wax of the Ministry’s seal.

“Order of Merlin, First Class,” she says, quietly, the parchment dry in her hands, but she knows his response before he can formulate it.

“—there are others more deserving.”

Their scars, both physical and otherwise, pulse painfully in memoriam.

HERE LIES SEVERUS SNAPE,
WHOSE COURAGE WAS SURPASSED ONLY BY HIS CAPACITY FOR LOVE,
AND THE BEST OF WHOM MANY NEVER KNEW.

*

The wind is slow and eerie, but lacks ice, and Hermione sheds her scarf and coat as she trudges wearily up the hill.

There’s an explosion of light and the faintest of rustling sounds and suddenly, she’s caught in a cloud of luminous swallowtail butterflies, swarming around her and lilting in her ear in Fleur’s throaty, accented voice. She swats at them in agitation, her fingers threading through the wisps of nothingness and her eyes roll at Ron’s obvious wonderment at the tiny, flitting creatures of their own accord.

Sacrifice, rings the reminder. We didn’t get here on our own.

Bill’s smile is calm and easy when they find him, his hands as rough and careworn as his kind features, illuminated by the flattering silvery glow. She can see Harry in the distance; Snape’s tomb stands proud and regal against the sunrise, the white marble cold beneath fleeting fingertips that whisper of death and so many regrets, of the single stemmed flower carved into the unforgiving surface.

“Australia,” she murmurs, not having to turn, but sensing Ron’s presence beside her. “I’ve heard it’s nice, this time of year.”

One year, she thinks. Perhaps it’s time.

*

She finds them in Sydney, on the outskirts of the city where the traffic isn’t nearly as horrid; their hair is greyer than she remembers, faces more wrinkled than she can recall. Her breath catches like broken glass in her throat when she hears, at last, the voices that have haunted her dreams – singed around the edges with the hint of a new accent, as if the charm made them susceptible to picking it up somehow, and yet still inanely familiar, but their eyes --

“They’re not the same,” she says, and the words end there.

*

Somehow, the thought of tearing them away from this strange and wonderful new life in which they appeared to be thriving seemed even more awful than pushing them into it in the first place.

(Surely they’d never forgive her. She could barely forgive herself.)

“Look at them. I’ve never seen them like this. They’re – they’re happy.”

They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.

Ron’s hand tightly squeezes her own, and she wills the tears not to fall.

*

Her house is empty, when she finds it – the place she used to call home, boarded up and wasting away, flowers still blossoming and running up the walls, shedding their petals as if on an unmarked and untended grave.

“Expecto patronum,” she whispers.

She wonders if it’s silly, to feel an odd sort of attachment to the ghostly creature that was so much a part of her and to which she owed so much; to almost love it like a friend and to want to name it in her head like a pet, like Crookshanks was to her, like Hedwig was to Harry if she could bring herself to think of it.

She finds herself calling upon him when she’s alone, or feeling lonely, his name echoing around the recesses of her mind and her fingers wrapping absently around her wand, so tempting beside her.

She slides against the door. The otter curls softly around her feet, and it’s almost like she never left.

*

She hadn’t been a planned child.

Her parents had told her this not out of spite, but rather conversationally, with kind eyes and warm hearts and the reassurance that she had never been a regret of theirs, per se, and Hermione has never felt resented, or unwanted in any way.

There are notches, on the door frame; the only markings in an otherwise pristine house, neat and modest but tastefully furnished, that mark the months and how she’s grown, from taking her first bold steps to a begrudging moment before she first left for Kings Cross Station all those years ago.

And it’s funny, she thinks, how the strangest things can be so defining, and the errant shopping list she finds in her hands is everything she loved and hated most about them.

Bread
Avocado

Shampoo (Mione)

It’s at this she almost weeps, for being so fussy with foods, and for her mother for being so understanding when it came to her head of unruly hair. For toothpaste and braces and the shortening of her teeth, and her fingers press against the ridge of her no longer oversized incisors with guilt.

She turns the list over in her hands to find another, tracing the scratching of her father’s humdrum doctor’s handwriting in the paper, a collection of titles with all but the last crossed off. He’d kept at it, she realises, heart swelling in her chest, when suddenly, she recognises the final item.

You deserve this far more than I, the letter had read. Keep it, I’ll read it when I see you at Christmas.

She tears her room apart looking for the tome but finds it, buried beneath dust-laden spell books and assorted potions ingredients, the metallic glint of the bookmark winking at her from its near-final pages.

It falls, gently open, in her lap.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom was a loaded pistol. Lying, hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

She doesn’t even notice the tears are falling until the printed black words blur beneath them.

*

She goes often with Harry to visit his parents’ graves; her and Ron each to their separate ways, and he with Ginny and their mother. Their hands clasp with the ease of old friends who have fought and lived out their lives side by side, and she feels as if she knows the flesh there, in both moments of warmth and clamminess, as if it were her own.

They lay their wreaths, offer their prayers.

There’d been no body to bury when Sirius had died, but a statue has since been erected and it is here that they pause for a minute or so in silent respect.

Those nights Harry dreams of a stag and a doe running free; of a bounding black dog and a wolf at their side and a moon that never grows full.

Hermione dreams of betrayal and an all-consuming darkness; of cold, black water that snatches at her ankles and drags her down into its depths with invisible icy talons, enveloping her and swallowing her whole.

Those nights, she barely sleeps at all.

*

She still remembers her very first trip to the library.

She’d hesitated a little, her tiny hand clasped in her father’s larger one and an overwhelming feeling of awe as she gazed up at shelves upon shelves of what had to be more books than there’d ever been stars.

“Can I read one?” she’d asked.
“You can read as many as you’d like.”
“I want to read all of them,” she’d announced determinedly, and her father had laughed.
“All of them? It’d take you an awful long time to read all of them, don’t you think, Hermione?”

She recalls pausing at this, perhaps her lip twisting in contemplation, her hair definitely in two thick fly-away braids.

“Not for us,” she’d quickly decided. “We’ll read them together.”

Childish dreams, she thinks.

She develops the film the Muggle way, surprised her hands still know their way around the dark room.

The chemicals burn at her lungs, and it’s almost like breathing fresh air again.

*

A river, she dreams, dark and tumid, death and ice seeping into her very pores. The feeling of suffocation, of drowning, of pockets of air screaming for release and lungs that are about to explode and writhing, hopelessly, no way to tell which is up, and then --

A flash, and a brush of the dampened fur, sleek and streamlined through the water like lightning, like quicksilver, and she’s struggling up, up, up until a hand wraps rigid around her own. Being pulled, waterlogged, from the blackened depths and huddling on the riverbank, eyes frantic but heavy lidded as they search for the animal they so strongly believe saved a life.

So sad, so graceful...

Her eyes fly open in the dark.

*

A different darkness, now: a seemingly bottomless lake, eyes clamped tightly shut.

She struggles within herself.

(The movement in her limbs is gone.)

*

Harry marries Ginny on a warm day in May; Hermione plays the bridesmaid in a dress of powdered blue, and Harry’s cousin Dudley comes and hovers awkwardly in the back. Ron’s the best man, of course, and they can all hear in his voice that he’s not entirely joking when he light heartedly warns Harry he’ll hex his eyebrows off if he ever hurts his little sister.

Molly sobs and dabs at her eyes through the entire ceremony and nobody’s entirely surprised when a few months later, Ginny announces she’s pregnant. Harry looks pale and nervous but giddily happy and Hermione squeezes his hand comfortingly, is still curt but civil to Ron in the weeks that follow until he can barely take it anymore.

“Hermione,” he bellows down the table at her one evening, his tone exasperated but hesitant, “marry me, would you?”

She blinks at him, drinks in the shocked expressions of those around her who are waiting for the explosion and sets her fork calmly down upon the table, taking a rather large sip from her goblet.

“Oh, alright then,” she concedes. “If you insist.”

Ron nearly slides from his chair in relief.

(She bites her lip to hide the smile.)

*

Ginny gives birth to a baby girl in the third week of April. It’s her idea, and not Harry’s, to name her Lily, and Hermione watches with a smile at his awe as her tiny hand wraps around his index finger.

She and Ron are named godparents, of course, and when just over a year later James is born, Neville and Luna join their mismatched family as godfather and godmother respectively and the six of them meet for coffee in a cosy place in London after the ceremony.

“When are you due?” Luna beams at Hermione when they have a quiet moment; Ginny and the boys are giving a terrible rendition of Hoggy Warty Hogwarts in light of Neville’s new teaching post and Hermione almost drops her ceramic mug in shock.
“Excuse me?”
“Your little one. I suppose you’ve still got awhile now, but I can tell by the cloud of Kindledrones you’ve got fluttering by your left shoulder, you see.”

She opens her mouth to point out that there’s most likely no such thing as Kindledrones when without warning, she is overwhelmed with the insistent conviction that Luna is completely, incorrigibly and undeniably right. She checks her left shoulder before she can stop herself – there is, of course, nothing there.

“Oh,” she says weakly, and sets the cup down.

(Well. This complicates things, she thinks.)

*

It was the principle of it all, she realises eventually, with the dread growing in her stomach like an infectious ulcer, seeping with acid burning her up from the inside out. She’d taken away their choices; denied them her own faith and in essence disowned them, denied herself the right to know them any further.

“It’s all very well for you to say, Ron,” she tells him shrilly when he pushes it, “but you’re not the one who has to piece things back together: you can’t finite incantatem away the fallout, you know.”

She wishes he’d snap back at her the way he used to, back before his gaze became so sympathetic and understanding, putting everything down to hormones, before the world turned upside down on its axis and spun impossibly fast around her, back when things had made sense.

She thinks of the time turner, still hidden away, somewhere, if it’s survived everything the way she’s managed to and isn’t lying in pieces, sand falling between shards of unshattering glass. She could go back, if she wanted to, but she knows she can’t, knows they’ve already come too far to try to change it all. Knows she risks undoing everything they’ve accomplished if she sets one foot wrong.

Victories, Dumbledore sagely informs her, are far too often hollow.

She hates that for all the rotten awful things he’s done, the late headmaster remains the voice of reason in so many of their heads.

*

It’s a year later when she can’t help but go back, seek them out and see how they’re doing away from it all, away from her, away from the thorn she believed she’d been in their side and the daughter they no longer knew. She starts, though; drops her wicker basket in alarm and a thousand tiny, insignificant items scatter at her feet.

Of course, she’d never meant for them to see her --

“Is she yours?” Monica Wilkins asks, smiling kindly at the photo that had landed at her feet, bending to assist in gathering up the spilt belongings, and Hermione is flustered like she’s never been.

It isn’t her, a fierce voice in her head whispers, and she shakes it distractedly, as if to rid herself of the thoughts.

Not anymore.

“I mean yes, she is. Mine. My daughter. Rose,” she stumbles, aware that her voice sounds strangled, and nothing like her own. “Her name is Rose.”

You, she thinks, I named her for you.

“She’s lovely. My husband and I never had children. We’re just we’re so busy; we’re both dentists, you know, and we never really had the time.” There’s a wistful air to her, and a sombre pause before she glances up, as if snapping out of a trance, handing the photo back. “Lovely,” she repeats. “You’re a very lucky young lady. I’ll bet she has your smile.”

Hermione blinks, presses the photo absently to her chest as Monica rests a fleeting hand on her shoulder; feels her heart swell almost painfully in bittersweet joy, the pure torture of being so close and yet so far away.

“You really do have beautiful teeth,” Monica murmurs as she continues down the sidewalk, and there’s nothing Hermione can do to stop the hot flood of tears streaming down her face.

This time, she doesn’t even try.

*

“I always knew there’d be a day when I wouldn’t want to go back,” she says, quietly. “And I really didn’t think it would matter. I suppose I always took it for granted that they’d be there, in the background.
I think it hurt them, seeing me so happy there. Like Hogwarts was giving me something they never could, and that I resented them for being so normal.”

(“Just how much of what’s been going on did your parents actually know about, Hermione?”)

“It’s not abandoning them, this way. They don’t even know I’m gone.”

(They don’t know they have a daughter, you see.)

*

“I’m sorry, the time, I didn’t think --”

(Ron’s away on Ministry business again, Rose seven months old and crying at her mother’s breast, sleeping fitfully and twisting in distress in her waking hours – she doesn’t know what else she can do --)

“My daughter,” Hermione continues on, “Rose – you probably don’t remember but you saw a picture of her, once - she’s teething, you see. Just two, the lower central incisors -” she almost chokes on the terminology, the only words that seem to be left between them, “- and she’s experiencing a little discomfort, of course, nothing unusual, but... last week there was nothing but gums and today I woke up and there they were, these two, perfect white teeth. Perfect,” she whispers. “And I just... I just wanted to tell somebody. Somebody that would understand.”

She doesn’t register at first how her hands are trembling, how her lip is about to and her eyes are very near to glistening with tears. But Rose is stirring in her arms, almost as if she senses something’s changed and her voice catches hot in her throat.

There’s several seconds’ silence on the other end, and she’s ready to hang up, realising her own stupidity and apologising profusely for her silliness.

“Brushing,” comes a quiet reply before she can disconnect, and Hermione almost believes for a second that it really is her mother she’s speaking to, a Rosemary Granger and not a Monica Wilkins because her voice is soft and ohso maternal, and she imagines she can hear it almost wavering with emotion. “You should start brushing them, right away. It’s never too early. And avoid fluoride while she’s still young – it can cause...” - and here her voice really does falter; she knows she’s not imagining it. She swallows -- “it can cause discolouration.”

She lets out a breath that sounds halfway between a laugh and a sigh.

“Thank you,” she murmurs into the phone. “You don’t understand what this... thank you, so much.”

*

Photo albums from a summer so long ago keep her company in the cold winter months; with her second pregnancy she craves not fine foods but the taste of France, of the sights and the smells and the endless countryside. She crosses Les Misérables from her list and when her son is born they name him Hugo meaning bright in mind and spirit. Harry and Ron shake hands while Ginny coos, Hugo’s eyes blue and wide with wonder.

She’s quiet in her maternal affection, oddly withdrawn and often silent and she can sense all the questions Harry wants to ask her before he has a chance to string together words.

“I understand, now,” she says from her place by the window. “I took their choice away and I shouldn’t have. It was my mistake all a long, you see; I always told myself they wouldn’t understand.”
“You saved their lives, Hermione. You did what was right at the time.”
“No, I did what was easy. Dumbledore was right - there’s a difference.”

She’s pacing, now, distraught, and when she finally turns to face him he can sense she’s fighting tears.

“I’d die for them. Give my life in an instant and there wouldn’t be any hesitation because there’s no question to it. You’d do it too - any of us would. It’s burned into us, and not just by what your parents did, Harry. It goes deeper than that, and I took that away from them.”

He understands, now, she can see it in his eyes.

(The understanding; yes, this the most painful of all.)

“I... I just... I’m sorry, Harry, but I think I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind.”

He nods and leaves; Hermione’s sobs echo down the hallway after him.

*

Rose makes Prefect in her fifth year at Hogwarts, and on the first of September Wendell and Monica Wilkins receive a package in the post with no return address, the handwritten street name and numbers on its front impossibly scrupulous and neat. The leather-bound cover of A Tale of Two Cities emerges from the brown paper, its gold-leaf title glinting in the early morning sunlight.

(It’s something they understand, you see.)

They stare for a moment at the book, at the unmoving (for why on earth would not be, they think) photograph pressed in its opening pages, of themselves and a scene they cannot remember and yet know in their hearts.

“Dickens,” Monica murmurs eventually. “Have you read it?”
“No,” Wendell replies, “though I’m sure I’ve always meant to.”

The pages turn easily in his large hands as he sits by the hearth and opens it to its first, the golden glow of the firelight flickering across his aging features.

*

“Rose, you mustn’t glare at your father like that; Hugo, you’ve got dirt on your nose, come here. And don’t let anybody tell you that you aren’t good enough, will you, and of course we want you to try hard and do well, but you know we’ll love you no matter what – you don’t have to be brilliant, your father’s only joking, of course - he wasn’t as clever as he always makes out, you know.”
“Mum,” Hugo hisses, dragging his trolley along in sharp tugs of annoyance, “stop it. Stop being so overprotective.”
“Stop being a git,” Ron supplies, cuffing him upside the head.

“I’m your mother,” she tells him, hand pressed to his cheek where he allows it to linger for a few seconds before swatting it away. “It’s my job to protect you.”

*

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

*

“—and remember to come home for Christmas.”

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

The book closes, and she smiles.

*

fin.