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A Thousand Shards of Glass Beneath My Skin
Topic Started: Oct 1 2011, 09:56 PM (320 Views)
Anne Kerrigan
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Her arm was pressed to his throat, squeezing the life mercilessly from his writhing body. She felt every gasp for breath, an aching exhale against her flesh, saw the piercing, fathomless eyes widen as they bore into her eyes, the lips curving, amused and warped even as he died. It enraged her further, the angled contours of her face thrown into deeper shadow. She wanted to peel the flesh from his bones, drain his vile blood from blackened veins. Show them that he could die the dog as easily as any of them. His body could twist grotesquely underneath jagged rock and his eyes could stare unblinking at the ceiling forevermore. Worms would eat his skin with mindless hunger when he was buried six feet under, just as they ravenously consumed the brilliant raven-haired girl who had sat in the second seat of the third row, behind the boy whom she hadn’t had the courage to mumble an awkward “Hi” to yet. Scraping nails could tear him apart as well, let him weep crimson tears as life seeped slowly from his body. He would drown in the torrent of blood he had stolen, the last taste of copper on his tongue. And she, Anne, would mercilessly crash reality down on his despicable head. Proof once and for all that goddamnit, Reed, you are human too!

The pulse beneath her fingers weakened, thump… thump……thump, each beat building a greater distance, increasing in crescendo to her ears as she listened carefully, holding her breath, balanced on the tip of a knife, waiting for that next to confirm he was still living. Could she kill the devil with impure hands? Seething just beneath the skin, flesh crawling with the feel of his blood flushing through arteries wrought with corruption. Her eyes deadened, void of compassion, red with lust, mirroring the spillage of crimson liquid over her hands, dripping onto the floor…

Something was wrong, however. Her fingers were lengthening, skin fading, translucent, hair darkening with ebony strands and growing, bouncing in waves past her shoulders. An eerie cackle was emitting from between her lips, unable to contain herself as Reed dropped lifelessly to the floor. There was a mirror before her, reflecting back the face of a wraith. Aquamarine stare and ruby lips, pink-stained teeth flashing behind a manic smirk, a scarlet drop trickling from her mouths corner.

She awoke with a start, choking on a scream, legs thrashing wildly beneath weighty blankets. Shivering, sweating, Anne forced herself to sit upright, eyes gazing almost fearfully into the moon-streaked room, as though she expected to find a lurking form observing her blankly from a shadowed corner.

Nothing, and yet she still felt the sinister gaze burrow beneath the tendons and sinews that kept her together. It was her own fault, Anne knew, for she could not stop herself from replaying that one moment in time, until it had become suspended, her with it.

It was becoming an obsession, a record, broken and warbling. Play, stop, rewind. Play, pause, rewind, play, pause... but never fast forward. No. The moment had to be felt in all its agonizing detail, every miniscule fleck in that stare, every imperceptible inch gained by those lips, they had to be felt, analyzed, understood. This was evil. This was inhuman. Nobody could do that right there if they felt any guilt at all. This was how a person had no conscience. And this was the alarm that was wrought with that discovery.

And she suffered because of it, for it. There was nothing else she could do, no way to change the inevitable. She understood that now. Second chances for the evil never existed; her hatred would never transform into forgiveness. The spite, the fury, her overwhelming rage, they would destroy her quicker than his crooked smirk ever could. But then, that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Perhaps it was that realization that kept her waking up in cold sweats, dreaming the disturbed nightmares of an abused woman, ones where she couldn’t separate the wraith from herself. Reed would torture her until she broke herself.

It haunted her, enclosing her in an increasingly tight cloud of despair. Each day, it became more difficult to prevent him from having the satisfaction of her two weeks notice.

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, running her fingers weakly through her dull hair. When she stumbled and winced as she placed her weight on her feet, she didn’t even notice. There were moments when she wondered how she managed to crawl out of bed at all. How had stiff legs held her weight? When had her spine straightened and curved to hold her upright? It was because she never cared to entertain those thoughts while pushing herself from the one-time haven. The dull ache of the outward scar she bore attempted to hinder her, but she ignored that as well. Her movements were fueled by a far more pressing need— to escape the oppressing room polluted by nefarious dreams, walk the silent corridors for no better reason than to blend into shadows and possibly disappear. The ebony robe lay ready across a chair; she had prepared it before ever falling asleep.

A routine had settled over her life in the past few days, one that required nothing more than four hours of sleep each night. She did not except to be discovered, did not want to be, for the hour had been struck. Her hour. The one moment where she could just exist as she was meant to. No masks, no promising words, no overt displays of bravado. It was a time where she could admit that she was not fine, that everything would not be alright. And what was more, she could show it. She could wear the smudges under her eyes like badges of honor, allow her hair to fall loose and tangled in quiet rebellion. Her robe could billow open, heedless of the chill that touched the skin underneath, clad in nothing more than her slack nightgown. For nobody would see her; nobody else was ever up.

And why should they be? They grieved together, heads buried into the crooks of necks, hands stroking backs in comfort. Friends mourning with friends, whole common rooms sitting together somberly, silently, but beneath the sorrow there was warmth in the sharing. It didn’t extend to her. Garridan was far too busy, and she doubted she would ever have the strength to fall apart in front of him. Veronica had her hospital and Andy was still lost. There were no other friends for her, acquaintances, perhaps, among the staff, but even they looked to her to remain stoic, a poised statue which they could rebuild around.

She was exhausted from carving herself out of stone.

The material slipped like silk about her thinning frame as she swept out the door, steps slightly jarred by a wound she had refused to have completely healed. How could she allow herself to be painless when that was so many students’ last feeling? The nightmares did not end with renewed sight.

When she closed her eyes she saw the fathomless blue, and when she opened them, she observed lifeless gray. Crushed bodies uncovered slowly from the rubble, arms swaying limply as they were carried out. Lips locked together forevermore, never again to answer a question, to tell a joke, to brush affectionately against another mouth. Expressions frozen in fear, dismay, the consuming sorrow only one can exude while watching death reach for them.

There should have been a deafening noise, an explosion of angry grief when their life was ripped so carelessly from their bodies. Something that screamed to the world that this girl, this harmless, innocent girl had just been murdered because she was walking down a hallway. A big, fat “Unfair!” popping like a waving flag above her head. But there wasn’t. No red arrow, no alarm for injustice. Just silence, a candle flame pinched out between two fingers, so unexceptional, it didn’t bother to coerce even a sidelong glance.

Unfair, unfair...

And when she held a frail hand, thumb caressing the skin, urging veins to push the weakening blood, felt the life slip, a whispered sigh, from the body… nothing could have ever prepared her for that. Nobody had ever told her that when she signed up to teach, she would be educating her students in death.

Her fingers trailed now along that traitorous stone, skimming over the charred remnants of spells cruelly thrown. Somewhere, beyond the fog that covered her mind, the alert part of her forced her eyes to check every crevice, every nook and cranny as she walked, seeking the errant child or the murderous bastard. She sorely missed the days when it would have more likely been the former, rather than the latter. This was the duty she must perform each night as well, guilt urging her on until she had traced every crack in every corridor of the gigantic castle. She had failed so many, was it a wonder she had failed herself as well?

The accusations seemed to echo along the walls, dogging her every movement. Caved in faces of crumpled parents looking for a place to unleash their burden of blame. She took it with her shoulders squared, apologized, for what that was worth, and said nothing more as they spilled their shattered souls on the floor.

She remembered every word.

As always, her footsteps took her to her own classroom, pressed her to enter the gloomy room, to move with shuffling steps behind her desk. Stare at the empty desks, the ones that would remain empty forevermore. She blinked, seemingly unfazed outwardly, while inwardly she was a roiling sea of turmoil.

She was waiting for an emotional wave of something to come. It gathered ominously at the edges of her mind, content to hover, driving her insane with its threat. Breaking, breaking... but not yet broken. Would she collapse in class, a mid-lecture disintegration, her words dwindling into a noiseless cry? Would her chest seize up, mouth gaping open as she attempted to draw harsh breaths into her constricted lungs? Would her fingers clutch desperately at the skin over her heart as she fell soundlessly to her knees?

If she could only cry or scream or punch something! It was just sitting there, a fetid lump of sorrow and rage gathering in her chest, poisoning her blood, defiling her heart! Why couldn’t she rip herself apart too? Why wasn’t she allowed to bury her face in somebody’s chest and sob the harsh reality of life?

Unconsciously, no, subconsciously, her eyes flew to a specific chair once filled by a devastatingly handsome man with a wicked grin and a challenging stare. A man whom she had misjudged, who had held her tenderly in arms she thought only useful for wreaking havoc. His voice, that hated tone, had been her lifeline even as her body had shut down. He was infuriating, arrogant, and he had dug his way into her skin, under her flesh, traveling to a place awfully close to her heart. She wanted to forget him, return to a time when he had been nothing more than an irritating adversary.

Her careful footfalls were nothing more than a whisper as she moved towards that chair, allowed her hand to linger over the top of it before finally settling her sore body into it. Straight-backed, she simply sat, unseeing, hands folded demurely in her lap, her mind far away, brow creasing as memories of him filled her. She attempted to recall that single instant in more detail despite her fuzzy brain, tried to figure out what had happened. Moved from Reed, to Cassandra, to Dylan. To Dylan.

To Dylan.

Something had changed.

For when she thought about breaking down, she imagined it being him whom she clung to for dear life.
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Dylan Reilly
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Lethally good looking.

It was one of those nights where the wind didn’t know whether it wanted to be calm or calamitous.

Unsettling lulls exploded into ferocious squalls with unpredictable inconstancy—deathly quiet one moment, and a thrashing, crashing torrential force that ripped through the leaves of the forest and turned the lake to white caps the next.

The walls of the castle were thick enough to dampen the worst of it, with only the wind’s rattling of windowpanes in hissing, little whispers giving hint to the outside tumult. The halls, otherwise, were tomblike in their silence. The staircases still. Not even the portraits made much of a sound – abandoned entirely, or framing their occupants in varying degrees of uneasy, restless slumber.

It was entirely possible that he was the only one awake.

Honestly, it felt like it might be possible he was the only one alive.

In Hogwarts. Scotland.

The whole world.

Funny. Almost. He’d loved that feeling, once. Now it just made him feel afraid.

It burned at his threadbare ends, nipped at the heels of each slow stride that carried him down corridors that looked alien in the diffuse light and still carried – despite the passage of time, the desperate cleaning – the faintest, underlying scent of burnt ozone. Acrid. Permeating. He could almost taste it on the back of his tongue.

The rubble had been cleared away.

But, so had the bodies. And some things you couldn’t fix with a Reparo.

It’s the silences. That’s what pulls the world apart. Not the storms.

He was starting to understand that.

A month ago, you could walk these halls, close your eyes, and be filled with the sensation of being inside a hive, a house of purpose and work, and now…

Now it was all muted, somehow. Muddled, like someone had turned the volume down on a stereo. A new reality: unrelenting, monstrous with unknowns. All anybody seemed able to do was try to adjust to its constantly changing wreckage and unfamiliar ground.

Dylan wasn’t very good at it.

He didn’t know how to not be good at things.

Dylan the Untouchable. Dylan the Shiny, and Sharp-Edged, and Absolute. That was what he was, the only way he knew how to navigate the world. Not Dylan in Pieces. Dylan in Increments. Dylan and all his years and delinquency and burned bridges sliding together and suddenly not fitting properly, the grooves all wrong. One lightning-flash moment, and all his breezy complacency had been torn away: not systematically or in fragments, but in one fell swoop, in one fall, in one sudden, suicidal instant.

Now he felt ripped up so badly he didn’t know where to start drawing himself closed from the exposure.

He didn’t know how to make the thoughts stop.

The flying debris – the screaming absence of sound – the fight for air – the velvet murmur – the taunting breath against his ear – her name spilling out of him like a whisper-prayer-plea – his hand the fresh red of a glistening pomegranate, split, burst open – the grasping panic – his useless limbs.

It didn’t—it wouldn’t—

It made him feel like he was pouring out at the edges. Like something was coming loose: the bars, the bricks, the locks, all his bullshit. He felt bled like a stone. Lightyears from that young, hungry Dylan who lived for a chase he didn’t want to end as time slid by on alibis and narrow alleys and sleights of hand, just for him: the trickster drifter with little more than a motorbike and string of long-owned debts to his name.

Never realizing that maybe he’d been the one who was running away, all along.

Running. Running. Always running.

Well.

That one might not have changed.

He’d made himself scarce, after all, hadn’t he, slipping away when the dust had settled, living like a ship navigating routes in order to avoid collisions.

But never really very far, though (and wasn’t that telling.) The way he’d taken to falling asleep on the staff room couch, because he couldn’t… he couldn’t bear that long walk back to Hogsmeade. The distance. Something kept compelling him to stay.

And when sleep proved elusive, when he’d hunt after it grimly and his eyes would stray to the ceiling, instead, it wasn’t thoughts of stones flickering with firelight that gripped him, but what lay six floors above them.

Or who, rather.

Chasing her out of his mind wasn’t possible without a heave of effort anymore. Even when he’d think he’d managed it, his palms would ache with an emptiness he couldn’t quite name, and he’d remember, unbidden, the last time he’d seen her. Carrying her to the Hospital Wing. Knowing how wrong it was to enjoy the weight of her in his arms – to savor the warmth of her, the life, the way she curled into his body, like it was instinct. Like it was the first time since a monster had stepped into their lives that she hadn’t been afraid.

It made something in his heart sting – right in the center, fine and needling as the point of an arrow. Deep down as it could go.

He’d blink them back, those thoughts, turn his stare towards the fire until his vision flared and the light made his eyes burn – stunned at his own visceral reaction, at the sudden, foreign neediness and fear that rose within him.

God, he was a coward. No wonder he’d fled.

But nowhere was safe, not really—and even there on that couch he couldn’t get away from the compressive silence that crushed down on his body. It made him hyper-aware of his own breathing: that flat, squat room and its walls that stifled everything, eating the sound. If he stayed down there long enough, he thought, he might lose his mind.

He probably already had.

There was no other explanation for how his dazed wanderings found him shaking back to focus right in front of her classroom door.

What really clinched it was that this wasn’t even the first time it had happened.

Maybe it was just a habit, now, this orbiting of her. Like whiskey, or how he couldn’t quit nicotine, or adrenaline, or, yes, running. He’d get pulled in, drawn to the window where not so long ago he’d hit a bludger straight into that very room, marveling at the chain of events that had led him back to Hogwarts to begin with. Prowling around London, provoking all the wrong people, nearly getting stabbed in an alley (several, really, if he was being honest), hiding out at Roddy’s.

It seemed almost impossible to him now that she’d walk into that pub and sit two seats away from him.

That he’d be here – the circles under his eyes a little darker, his mouth a little less quick to grin – staring at her door like it was his last real connection to anything that mattered.

That it was…

His expression sharpened, eyes narrowing in closer study.

Open?

A crack. Nothing more.

But no light spilled out from beyond it, no sounds issued forth, and the strangeness of those details had Dylan’s skin going taut with a new alertness, his hand already inching to the wand in his back pocket.

The barest brush of his fingers had the door swinging wide on noiseless hinges, and for a moment, as he stood in the entryway tensed and wary, it didn’t seem as though anything were amiss or out of place. The room was quiet and moonlit. Empty.

But then he saw her.

She was so still she almost blended in with the surroundings. An unmoving silhouette in the dark.

Every inch of him stilled. He felt afraid. Elated. Hopelessly raw.

He thought about running.

She hadn’t given even the slightest impression that she’d heard him, after all. It wouldn’t be hard—slipping off into the night again without a sound, without a hint that he’d been there at all.

But his limbs weren’t moving. A tidal pull tugged on the knot at his core.

For some reason, he felt his stare falling to the stiff set of her shoulders, squared so severely he almost ached from the right angles – and suddenly it was vital that he hear her – suddenly he was hungry for the sound of it, starving, her name half-buried in his throat. But he remembered the last time it had slipped out without thinking, the careful circuit they’d been walking around each other, every single thing they’d been through, and knew that neither of them would survive so much as a strong breeze right now, let alone that.

So, he swallowed it down. Pressed his shoulder to the jamb beside him in a careful lean that wasn’t quite as brazen as it used to be. Somehow, he managed a good impression of himself anyway.

What he chose to finally break the quiet probably helped.

“You’re in my seat,” it came, low and easy.

Without a hitch. A verbal settling-in.

He could still run. Nothing was stopping him. Nothing ever had. But there was that tug, again, that pull at the center of him, that sense of being in exactly the right spot in the world, doing exactly the right thing.

And you, Dylan Reilly, you and your exit strategy, your big escape, your well-thought out, meticulously planned decision to trade in happiness for self-preservation, it all falls away.

His eyes remained fixed on her slim form in the soft, silver light, and he stayed right where he was.

For the first time in his life, he’d found something that made him want to.
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Anne Kerrigan
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The world held its breath. So she did so as well with a vacant stare and traitorously beating heart. And therein lay the crux. What right did she have to gulp air into her lungs? Push blood through her veins? Why was it that the innocent, the pure and helpless have to die while here she remained, sinful and frail?

Frail. The word belonged in the description of a weathered, old woman who was content with life and about to embark on that next vast journey full of wonder and light. It was not an attribute assigned to a young woman in her prime. Beautiful, stern, willing to stare down wickedness to preserve future opportunities to laugh and dance and exist blissful and ignorant.

To laugh. She no longer knew how. The tinkling sound grated. Jarred. And besides, it was forbidden to laugh in a tomb. Whether she meant the castle or her withering body… well. It was all the same.

And to dance. An irresistible urge to sway a carefree body in time to a beat. The gentle clasp of a warm, secure hand. The dizzying whirl of delight and desire. A place where embarrassment no longer existed and pride found no foothold. Where demons were no match to the unadulterated joy that exuded brilliantly from each twirling individual.

When was the last time she had danced?

With him, an unabashed voice whispered through the gloom.

Regret overwhelmed, stifling the room with its derision. Not at the partner who had swept her onto that dance floor so very long ago. No. At her life. Her stiff body held in caressing arms, willing her for once to enjoy a moment. At her insistent need to escape. Ridicule. Lecture. Run away.

Run away. Run away. She ran herself thin, exhausted, until she pulled her hair with anxiety and frustration. She ran until she fell apart, dropping with the suddenness of an exploding heart.

Where did you go, Annie? Andy. Voice unbidden. Concerned. Had sleepless nights wrested the last bit of sanity from her finally? And yet. Where had she gone? The vibrancy she once radiated had fled, leaving nothing more than a shell. Not even the Mind Healers had restored her. When the body is inflicted with unmeasurable trauma, the mind escapes to a safe place. A sheltered place where pain cannot penetrate. Such as with her brother. Five years old and laying in a makeshift fort. But he had been missing for days. He is dead!

In her classroom then, smiling triumphantly as a student successfully transfigured a pillow.

She sat in that classroom now. But she was not there. She had looked. Searched. Flinched as she burrowed deep within, grasping fingers reaching for the self she had once been. The Healer’s were wrong. She hadn’t come back. She was never going to come back. Her existence would become shadow until that too disappeared.

So when the door swung open noiselessly, when she should have been surprised and afraid and reaching for her wand, not even the smallest of muscles twitched. No tears fell down sallow cheeks, no burn of ferocity lingered in jaded eyes. The monster was here to finish what he had begun. Reed, eager to consume more than just her mind. He would not be satisfied until her body was reduced to ash as well.

Someday she would hate herself for sitting there in abject misery, resigned wholeheartedly to a fate that did not belong to her. Someday she would look back and scream at that girl to stand up and fight, even when in that distant future she would already know that it wasn’t Marcus Reed about to come through the door. Still, the willingness she felt at succumbing to death in that moment would haunt her for the rest of her life.

And the disappointment that would lance through her when she found the harmless visage of Dylan Reilly staring back would entwine a vivid sense of self-loathing within her for years. The startling realization that in that moment she wanted to die.

Oh god. Oh god.

Annie, where did you go?

“You’re in my seat.” Soothing. Easy. It was a tone that had not been forced. Had not been pondered and scrutinized. Had not been asked ‘is that something I would say?’ She could almost hate him for it. Almost. But it was not his fault that he still identified as himself. It was not his fault that he wasn’t adrift on the river Styx.

With her.

Why couldn’t anybody be with her? Help her? No. For some reason she frowned upon that. A loathsome word. Beyond reproach. So she simply stared at him. Drank him in. Wondered about him and why she had detested the man who so steadily saved her life.

He was haggard but ethereal in beauty despite his rumpled hair, wrinkled button down, careworn jeans… Effortless in his grace, the ease with which he could lean against a doorjamb and look as though he had always belonged there. A hint of mischief in the lines that crinkled at the corners of his eyes, still there in spite of it all.

In spite of it all.

And she remembered. He smelled of copper and grime. But no, that wasn’t quite right. That was her scent seeping into the front of his torn shirt as he carried her through hazy corridors. His was the scent of old cigarettes and spilled booze, halfheartedly masked under the fresh fragrance of ‘Spring flower’ detergent. She imagined an exasperated mother ensuring he did his laundry. The thought had the corner of her mouth twitching, nearly imperceptible.

Nearly. Somewhere deep inside she stirred.

Words. There had been words filled with yearning, defiance, and panic. Heartbreak. Limbs that would not respond. An urgent need to sleep. Her fingers curled in his. Curled in his shirt. Grasping at the burning emblem of strength that he transferred through sound arms as they gripped her cautiously. Warmly. Gently.

The need to live so she could reprimand him. The decision to piece herself back together so that one day she could do so again.

One day she would do so again.

She rose. Unsteadily. Uncharacteristically. An archetype of fragility. She neared him purposefully, accepting this surreal night where vulnerability cloaked her as surely as her ebony robe. A night where a tear could finally trickle down her marble cheek.

And in that distant future she would be able to ease that self-loathing and hatred she would feel as she remembered the simple action she did next. The one that changed more than Reed ever could with the vicious slash of his wand.

The one that would change her fate.

Thin arms rose, locking around his neck of their own accord, pulling him to her, burrowing herself within him. Forgetting that she was supposed to shy away from touch and affection. Instead stealing what little warmth she could for what little time she could. And as she embraced him something eased, her lungs contracted and expanded again. The world turned beneath her feet. Her chest ached with the sorrow of thousands of pent up screams. Cries that were held in check as she felt the reassuring beat of his heart.

“Thank you,” she whispered into his shoulder, voice rough and choked and always underlain with confusion and pain. Still not hers. It betrayed her. Not the real Anne, it seemed to remind them.

So she turned away. Placed shaking hands on her desk to keep her upright. Left her back to him. Untouchable.

“Now,” she demanded, pleaded really as desperation arced brutally through her tone, “please leave.”
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Dylan Reilly
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Lethally good looking.

He didn’t know what he expected. For her to turn, probably – amber eyes set hard in that familiar, retaliatory way, sharp with disapproval, mouth gathering in a scowl at his audacious intrusion. He’d catch a glimpse of her long, swan neck and proud tilt of her chin before she unsheathed that sharp wit that hadn’t stopped beguiling him since that first day at Roddy’s, when he learned how impossible it was to take his eyes off her—even as she’d stormed off and half his vision had been blocked by the dark, dripping fringe of his hair.

They’d trade barbs. She’d scold. He’d smirk. The professor and the pirate. The scene practically wrote itself.

It seemed possible, for a moment. Her spine was a characteristically rigid parallel to the back of her chair, his form a languid lean of contradiction.

And she did turn. She did meet his stare.

But this wasn’t a scene in a play, and they weren’t the same people who’d clashed in a pub, and he only had to look at her – at the way she looked at him – to know it. Soft, fathomless, vulnerable. Bright as a wound. All her edges worn away.

Beautiful, even in her battle-weariness, and how could he be a pirate when it was her doing all the thieving? His heart from its steady rhythm. The air from his lungs. Both feet out from under him.

Even in Reynolds’ office, she hadn’t looked at him like that.

Like she was really seeing him. Like she was finally letting him in to all her softest spaces, her crippling pain. The fact that she allowed it filled him with an unfamiliar awe, a dazed sort of wonder he imagined belonged somewhere else, somewhere bigger than this room, like a cliff or a church. Was this what it felt like? This weight against his heart like a rock. Like an ingot. Throbbing and tugging, heavy and real, like he could reach up and cup it if he wanted, feel the place where he wasn’t entirely empty, where something rested.

Like being pulled perfectly into focus in a way that felt foreign from long absence.

Like mattering.

Nothing else could have more clearly proven that a change had occurred. That a boundary divided their lives, now, into a before and after, with the attack solidly in the middle.

She never would have risen so shakily to her feet, before, her eyes never leaving his once. She wouldn’t have neared him. Tolerated him.

Touched him.

He had just enough time to feel startled before her face was suddenly pressed against the hard plane of his shoulder, her arms lifting up to wind around his neck, drawing him close. Stunning him to dumbstruck stillness. Every muscle in his body coiled, his throat cinching tight, something in his chest seizing fiercely – a feeling he dimly recognized as terror.

People didn’t hug Dylan.

They slapped him, or ravished him – there weren’t really any in-betweens. He’d never sought out in-betweens. That was just who he was. All or nothing. Bet-it-all, full-throttle extremes. He’d long since ceased to crave softness from anyone. He didn’t need comfort or caring. No one was to be trusted or needed. Safety had become a foreign concept, an unwelcome stranger. Security an uneasy weight on his spine.

That was what he thought, anyway.

But then little things began to filter in past his defenses – the soft rush of her breath brushing his throat. The delicate wings of her hipbones. The way they fit, and how it felt like being put back together, melded into a wholeness he hadn’t realized he’d been lacking but knew must have been the case with the way it seemed to fill every space inside him. The warmth of it, the slow creep of comfort sinking in from flesh to bone, like the touch of sunshine after sitting too long in the shade.

He felt himself easing, slowly. Felt that seized thing in his chest begin to unknot, unlock, like the moment before the rollercoaster drops – no pressure, no pain, the wind against his cheeks, gravity relaxing. Fear melting into wonder. A revelatory piece of a much larger truth.

That this wasn’t an in-between. It was an on-the-way.

A what-they’d-lost heading off toward what-they-were-yet-to-have.

A hello.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice breaking the quiet—so achingly, tortuously soft, so tremblingly genuine, so foreign from what he’d come to associate with her. With himself.

It made him want to merit it. Made him want to be the kind of person who could deserve that kind of gratitude, because he didn’t, really—not when every single motivation in that office—every desperate exhalation, his forced bravado, the way he’d clutched her to his chest—had been the most selfish things he could think of. How even now the words reappeared in his mind, strung together like a rosary, a litany he repeated again and again and again.

Don’t leave. Don’t go.

Stay. Stay stay stay stay stay...


But already she was pulling away from him, sliding out of his reach, taking her warmth with her, igniting a struggle within him—violent longing and forced restraint. He had to allow it. To let her retreat back to her desk, her distance. Her shuttered, solitary life. She’d sent him reeling too entirely to do anything else.

“Now, please leave,” her voice came again, a subdued, bleeding-raw rasp that filled up the space that had widened between them.

Jolting him, a little. In the span of a few seconds, she’d gone from turning his world on end with the heart she’d somehow let him into to shoving him out the door like there’d been a security breach.

Any criminal worth their salt knew what to do in such a situation. It involved high-tailing it out of there, before law enforcement showed—not sticking around to have a chat with the likely-to-become-far-less-charitable-at-any-moment guard.

But his feet were fixed as solidly in place as the stare he had yet to tear from her.

And he knew he couldn’t leave her this way. Hunched over like that. Exhausted and brittle and too close to beaten.

And fuck the police, right?

“Right,” he said aloud, neutral. “Looked very important, whatever it was you were doing. Alone. In the dark.”

Something scheming began to take over him, something a little reckless, a little defiant, and he felt oddly determined, now, as his stare lingered on the waist that was even more reed slender than usual… the wan complexion… the way she looked like she was burning her candle from both ends and simultaneously trying to crack it open to find another piece of wick in the middle.

Honestly, it sort of infuriated him.

Good. He could use that, too.

“Merlin forbid I keep you from it,” he went on, the tone taking on the faintest sardonic edge. As he spoke, he eased away from his stance in the doorway, entering the room with a slow, ruthless sort of conviction. “I mean, who needs sleep, right? Decent meals…”

He didn’t stop until he came to the desk she’d been sitting in when he’d first come upon her—the desk he’d kissed her in, once. Now, he merely leaned back against its smooth surface, all crossed arms and insolence as he stuck what would surely be an incredibly risky landing.

“Common sense.”

One goal. That was all he had now.

Make her laugh. Make her bristle. Make her yell. Hate him. Anything.

Just get through.

To.
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Anne Kerrigan
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Hunched over. It was how she began and ended each day. Shoulder blades protruding in grotesque imagery of a fallen angel. Rib cage bent from the strain of responsibility that lay across her shoulders. Back bowed from the unbearable torment she put herself through. Poised as an unbreakable boulder during the day, breaking and redirecting the tide. Yet at night she relived it. Haunted. Forcing her traumatized mind to pace through the events with unforgiving precision. She was sure that by doing so, she might yet heal her fractured mind.

It had not occurred to her to seek help from another. Though, even if she had, where would she have found it?

Aurora, the Divination professor, with her profound sensibility was being monitored under a constant sleeping draught due to her propensity to shriek uncontrollably. Delores, one of her few friends among the staff, had been fine up until the moment she had discovered the youngest death, an eleven year old twisted disturbingly amongst the rubble. Now she was mute, merely following and mimicking the habits of others where before she had led the charge. As for the Headmaster, he had lost the sad twinkle in his eye and replaced it with something forbidding and tragic.

No. There was no help, no solace to be found in Hogwarts. She would have to glue the pieces back together herself.

Yet here Dylan was, standing in her classroom, shattering her grip on the division between reality and fantasy. Dylan whom she had sworn would extricate her from the thousands of shields she had needed to construct around her prone form. Instead she fought him once again in all her fragility and vulnerability, afraid of letting him in again, afraid that he would spurn her. She could feel him now, an undeniable truth that she had attempted not to acknowledge these past few days. His casual stance was intimately known to her, as well as the echoing lilt of his voice. She could enter a room and understand that he was there without having to search for him. Not that she did search, mind. And she realized that he had not yet left, could feel the intense burn of his stare as though his pure regard could bring her back. Reverse time. They could go back to a simpler moment where he could exasperate her and she could indignantly scold him. Nails bit into the hewn surface of her desk, shoulders tightening even further. Marcus Reed had ruined that. She would never be that Professor Kerrigan again. Hell, she was hardly even Anne.

“Right,” his tone emitted, calm, collected, him and yet not him. She envied his ability to still be whole after the attack. Wished she could encase herself in the confidence of her identity. Yet her values had been shaken, her morals scattered. Right had been confused with wrong and vices now prevailed.

“Looked very important, whatever it was you were doing,” he continued, relentless. “Alone. In the dark.” She flinched visibly, absorbing his words as they were meant to be. A frontal assault. She whirled, chest heaving, heart constricting, throat narrowing, and eyes burning. A storm cloud of emotions chased their way through her expression. Still she was disconnected, nerves refusing to link brain to body, body to soul. Her essence, aura Aurora would have corrected her, remained a ribbon of lifeless grey.
He didn’t understand. She was doing something important alone in the dark. She was breaking herself in an effort to keep herself from breaking apart. But she couldn’t explain that to him. It sounded absurd even to her.

“Merlin forbid I keep you from it,” his voice derisive, cutting through marrow to bone, “I mean, who needs sleep, right? Decent meals…” She blinked her sunken eyes, following him further into the room, an unsure puppy on a leash. It was easy for him to demand she sleep, but he was not the one with blue-eyed monsters imprinted on his eyelids. Meals were a luxury now, ones that she picked at when necessary or when asked of her. Yet hunger was a foreign beast that no longer plagued her. Without the reminder, was it truly her fault if she had slacked on providing her body nourishment? And if she had not been so caught up in a world constructed of her own selfishness and vanity, she may have noted Dylan’s haggard visage with telling depressed circles of his own highlighting dulled eyes. She might have redirected the question back at him, condemned him for hypocrisy.

“Common sense.” He shot the words at her as if hammering in the last nail of a coffin. Arrogant, confident in his barbed words. It should have infuriated her. What did he know of common sense? Dylan, the man who had smacked a bludger towards the school. The man who had danced drunkenly on top of a table with his finger around the trigger of a harpoon. The same one who had run towards her, not away in a fateful tower. Who was he to challenge her? And yet, who was she to challenge him? A girl who had defined her life from intelligence and morality and practicality. Who taught that everybody should exercise good judgement. Who turned her back from it now, recognizing it as weakness. What good was common sense when your enemy was impulsive, destructive, unstructured, vicious? When he could kill innocent eleven year old children for absolutely no reason? Where was the common sense in that?

She huffed out a sigh, harsh, grating, and scornful. “Common sense,” she repeated, bitterness both painful and poisonous seeping into her tone. “Common sense was difficult to find Before.” Before. Hard capital B. It was a word heard often now and needed no clarification. There was Before Reed and After Reed. She hugged her ebony robe closer still, staving off a chill in fear that if she started to shiver she would never stop. Shock and trauma and tragedy. Those were her replacements. Her new demarcation. She shared it with so many now. She wasn’t even unique.

“It certainly doesn’t exist now.” Resentment, dry and unerring in her voice.

She neared him, staggering slightly, peering up through hooded eyes. For some reason she kept wanting, almost needing to be closer as if by being so she could grasp parts of his warmth and wholeness. She could steal some of his confidence to chase away demons of doubt. The smallest hint of longing gleamed in her haunted gaze as she wondered what it would be like to be held for the first time. Cherished. Protected. To feel strong arms supporting and shoring up all the broken pieces before they could be swept away. She could scream and cry and soil his shirt with anguished tears while a tiny fist clenched in the material to keep him there. He could lend her strength. She wouldn’t have to be alone.

Before she could fully seek comfort, though, that hard, sullen girl yanked her back.

“Why are you here?” she asked instead, a spike of temper breaking through for the first time to color her tone, “Come to scold? Mock? Kick me while I’m down?” For a moment she had risen, wrapping a tall, formidable form in a cloak of fortitude. It was merely a shadow of who she had once been. And it was gone before it had truly molded.

She collapsed back in on herself. When she spoke again it was in a choked whisper, sad weariness overtaking her as if that tiny show of emotion had exhausted her.

“Why are you here?”
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