Work Text:
six segments of a satsuma.
one.
Look through the doors, out across the rolling, heaped hills, and there, between their humps, if you look hard enough, if you really, really look hard enough - there you can see Wales, dad had told me once, his hands in his coat pockets. I had squinted and squinted and squinted, searching for the elusive arc of grey, sleek bodies and spurts of water, tall and sprinkling, and frowned when I saw nothing but green grass and bubbled trees as far as the horizon, my lip wobbling, struck by the sudden thought that then, if I couldn't see them, they must all be dead.
Dad had laughed later, he admitted when I was old enough I had stopped scowling about it and blushing about it, mortified and furious with my younger, simpler self.
Then, he had only smiled, something twinkling in the corner of his mouth, and gently corrected me. Not w-h-a-l-e-s but w-a-l-e-s.
w-a-l-e-s, I had repeated slowly and carefully. Not w-h-a-l-e-s.
Years later, decades later, and the horizon still looks the same, really: the same hills, the same miniature church spires poking out of clumps of trees here and there, the same thin trails of Muggle roads snaking through. It's familiar, and that's comforting.
But.
But but but.
There's always a but, mum always says, pinning dad with a fond, pursed look - as much a joke as a warning. Somewhere, somehow, there just always is.
What is familiar becomes boring and what is boring becomes impossible: dull, dingy, full of holes and problems and a tension which resonates out of your own chest, beating a steady drill of I-don't-want-to-be-here until the pattern leaches out of you, down your tongue in waspish barbed things, in the way you shift and shift and hide away in your room until everything closes in and you clatter down the stairs (I-want-to-leave, I-want-to-leave, I-want-to-leave, I-want-to-leave) and outside into the fresh, wide air of the garden.
Today is one of those days, but there's no real way to escape.
I sit, tucked up in a wicker chair with a trio of books and a fat, embossed notebook - a present from Aunt Daphne years ago, bought in Milan, she had told me proudly, though it had meant nothing to me, really - ink on my fingertips and probably smudged somewhere on my cheek, watching as the peacocks strut across the lawn, bottoms swishing to and fro, hearing the Abraxan horses whinny in the paddock just behind the row of pine trees, and pretending, pretending I'm not watching mum.
She says it's fine, just the flu, nothing to worry about, and in our matching, solid silences and taut smiles, dad and I say the same thing: what if it isn't? What if the cancer's back? What if it's serious this time - awake this time?
Dormant had always been a sweet word until the diagnosis had come through, the province of the mice in the garden in winter, of the cats in the library, curled up on the windowsills
It had changed then, mutated into something strange and cruel - predatory; waiting to wake up, yawn and stretch and damage.
It had echoed round my head in the days after, when I walked through the corridors at school, winding my way from lesson to lesson, numb and blind: dormant dormant dormant
It's a blessing, mum had said, with her quiet, firm conviction, but dad had still cried in his study at night, sleepless and haunted - looking more and more like the photos from the end of the war, just after, from his trial and his eventual acquittal.
For now, though, we sit in ‘quiet contemplation' - the name given years ago to mum's favourite hiding place in the garden: an old, disused pagoda; bell-shaped and marbled, splashed with grey and what were now eight blooming, baby-pink and blonde jasmine plants - her wrapped in a jumper and a cloak like a blanket over her shoulders, me in my jeans and a wrinkled, ink-stained shirt, and we doze and dream side-by-side.
I'm tense and I'm loose-limbed and I want to leave and I never want to leave and I honestly don't think I know anything any more.
There's a bowl of satsumas on the table (it had used to be apples and bananas and grapes and satsumas, but I only ever ate the satsumas and so gradually, the others dropped out - bananas then apples then grapes - and now it was only the satsumas, which I ate almost religiously, absently, instinctively), and I lean forward, stretching stretching down my left hand side to grasp one. Digging a thumb nail in, I start to peel it, the smell, light and sweet and sharp, smoking through the air.
I've had an invitation, I tell her, breaking the silence hesitantly, slowly. From a journalist. He wants to ask me about the job - you know, about me: how I got it, why I got it, my opinions and things.
I stopped abruptly, awkward and my throat closed, dry and swollen.
You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, mum told me, her eyes fixed on me - steady and strong. But don't let fear stop you if you do want to do it.
Wordlessly, I nodded and picked at a thin, vein-like string digging into the satsuma.
two.
So, Padma wraps a palm around her coffee cup, steam rising from the brim in hazy, thin lines. How was the interview?
I'm not sure what to say. The truth is right, the truth is good, but the truth... what is the truth? How exactly do I fit the truth - that it had been nervous, exhausting, edged with a warmness I couldn't quite name and the feverish excitement that only came from meeting someone new who instantly clicked, sparks sputtering like a match along a tinderbox; that it had been, in the end, nearly three hours of blindly wandering chatter which somehow, sometime, had given him everything he wanted to know - into a single, simple sentence? Into something professional?
It was fine, is what I say eventually. The journalist was nice; we got on well. He didn't ask me anything too exciting.
She smiles, they went easy on you then. Sent a rookie - though, I must admit, Louis Weasley is very good. Very poetic.
I just nod. I don't know anything much about that: about poetry and poetics, about language and metaphors; setting words to shimmer and flutter in the breeze, cast in a kaleidoscope of colours which seemed somehow to sing. To me, it's something magical, more magical than magic - a strange, bold, whispering thing, conjured up directly from the ether of a person's soul.
I'd told Louis that in the interview. He'd laughed, clear and quiet and delighted. There had been an eyelash on his cheek in a fine, dark sweep, and a dusting of camel-coloured freckles up his arms, already starting to fade after summer.
How're things at home? Padma asks next, soft and gentle, and I bite my lip, a sway of irritation washing up my throat in a tall, crested swell. I swallow.
They're good, I tell her, and the words taste bad, sound bad; they ring like plastic - hollow and fake. Mum's much better now, and the Healers don't think it's going to come back.
For a moment, Padma just looks at me. I look back, the fierce September sunlight wavering through the windows glinting off her earrings and the necklace - a thin, spun-gold chain with tiny sapphire studs; a birthday gift from Susan which had made her blush - clasped high around her neck. It lights up the threads of yellow-gold in the wooden table between us, cracked and splintered, worn down on the corners from years of use, years of wear-and-tear, and sunk, fat and lazy, into the teapot as it sits on the side, glass-sided and slowly massing from a light watery sugar-brown to a deep, thick earthy colour.
I look back until I have to look away, feeling foolish and caught in a lie I don't know if I'd even made.
Is it a lie? Are things good at home?
I don't want to be there; I do want to be there; I don't know where I wanted to be. Can you even lie about things you don't know?
I should get back to work, I say, tentative and hovering, waiting for permission to go. The air is getting tighter, closer, and my eyes are darting, arrow-like to the doors over and over again.
Sure, Padma agrees and smiles a bit. Don't let me keep you.
three.
The dining room is too big for just three of us: it echoes, ominous and deep, swallowing down every sound we make in it - every word, every giggle, every clatter of cutlery on fine china dishes; even the gushing trickling of wine and water slips away, quieter and quieter until it's almost silent. It still echoes, always; a ravenous, cavernous space, with its painted grey stone walls and carved flower window-boxes.
I hate it. I've always hated it.
With its old, frescoed ceiling - fat Greek cherubs and long-haired nymphs flitting through trees, bathing in a single, water-lily-covered pool, all under the watchful gold-cast eyes of Apollo, curls down to his neck and hyacinth blossoms in his hair; a seventeenth century thing, a vivid Muggle work of lapis-laid hypocrisy - and the huge fireplace, flanked on either side by tall, wide amphora vases each with a white, white rose bush, it reaches back to the past, to some kind of glory left behind years ago, decades ago. Before Voldemort, before Grindelwald.
It was probably nice a long time ago: bright and airy, where what's hushed is loud and what's loud is hushed. Now, though, it's just cold and big and gloomy.
When I was eleven, before Hogwarts started, when I would have to leave the house for the first time, without my parents or aunt or uncle, when I would spend months and months in some other place, surrounded by other people, Dad took me round it all, solemn-faced and jaw-set.
Here, he had said, pointing to the end of the dining table, is where Voldemort sat when the house was occupied during the war. Here, he had said, holding me firm at the top of the stairs to the cellars, is where the prisoners were kept - a girl and an old man and a professor of Muggle Studies. Here, he had said, his voice cracking like the chandelier on the floor; still there, shattered and broken, diamonds scattered like daisies across the marble; here is where my Aunt Bella - your grandmother's sister - tortured Hermione Granger and tried to kill Harry Potter.
(Here, Mum had told me later, holding my hand and whispering, conspiratorial and a note of pride - warm and red - running through her voice, is where your dad lied to Voldemort, to save Harry Potter.)
Then, though, with Dad, I had stood there and looked out at it - at the faded, velveteen curtains, their tassles frayed at the edges, at the white-sheeted chairs and the tables, the dust-coated candelabras and brackets on the walls; the big, broken chandelier in the centre of it all, dents in the floor underneath it, fractures racing away through slabs of stone, metal flattened and twisted, sparks from wand-fire, spell-fire scorched in black on the frame - and felt a sudden urge to say something.
Something. Anything.
I said nothing; and thought only, Voldemort. v-o-l-d-e-m-o-r-t.
You've been getting a lot of letters lately, Dad observes, and I still, my muscles coming slowly to a halt, holding firm - a tremulous and tiny pair of invisible hummingbird wings, stutter-fluttering non-stop as I search my blank white-cast mind for something to say.
Doe-like, I blink one-two-three-four-five, startled and herded, swiftly, neatly into silence; it barricades me in, a big, black looming spectre and I look down, away. There's a sudden twist in my gut and a soft, acrid guilt leaking into my stomach, making my chicken-and-tarragon-flavoured throat dry and sting.
I haven't lied, wouldn't lie - what would be the point? What would it do? Nothing, nothing and more nothing; apart from perhaps, a thick cloud-layer of disappointment which would linger for days around my parents, never rumbling or sparking, but simply, sadly present. It's just that some things when they're new are sweetest when they're private; some people, when they're new, are bravest when it's private.
Secret not-secrets.
Yeah, I say; there's nothing to be afraid of, I tell myself - in Mum's voice, that stern-sigh voice she uses when sharing wisdom, her hands pressing on both of mine as though to imprint it through the skin - it isn't bad, isn't bad, isn't dangerous. The journalist from the interview, he owled me a couple of days after to ask about... and, I gestured vaguely, swallowing; it went from there.
It. Something. It.
Dad nods, a small hum of understanding buzzing out of him. He takes a sip of water, clear and still, and sets the glass down carefully.
That's nice, he says, and there's a ripple in the way he says it which tells me that he that he's remembering the loneliness of my childhood when I ran through the garden with the butterflies in endless races I always won, and all those long, studious solitudes in the Hogwarts library until Albus Potter had sat down in front of me and declared, matter-of-fact and oddly shy, you need friends so I'm going to be one.
It's my fault, Dad had always felt, and the words are easy to read in the crinkled frown and the hunching slope of his shoulders whenever he thought it - the words too heavy and too true to say.
It's good, I murmur, giving him a smile.
Well, I'm glad to hear it, Dad's mouth curls at the corner; a joke's coming. Even if he is a Weasley.
four.
My fingers smell of satsumas and clementines: orange and sweet, that twin tangy-sugar taste lingering on my tongue as I sift through the mess of peel and rind left behind.
Romance, Albus Potter declares, is dead.
I don't look up; Linnea is laughing, I can hear her quietly sniggering behind a cushion, the fabric muffling it, hollowing out the sound so it's only the high, light notes which get through.
You're both awful, Albus mutters, but it's a half-hearted attempt to be sulky and fails to clear the first hurdle.
But, Linnea cuts back, quick and rolling through her Cardiff accent, importantly not dead. Unlike romance.
Popping open a button on my shirt-cuff, in and out then in and out then in and out again and again, I'm staring, vacant and vapid, fixed at a random point on the floor, where the colour of the carpet has faded from a deep sea-blue to a lighter, paler thing, white-tipped and worn through. It's a surreal thing, staring like that: simultaneously aware and unaware of it, possible and impossible to look away.
Tiredness crashes, wave-like, onto me and I sigh, mouth closed eyes closed, letting it drop down to soak me.
Last night I had sat at my desk for hours, suddenly wordless, voiceless, thoughtless. Nothing seemed right - everything I tried to write sounded wrong: silly and childish, overly blunt or too serious, too poetical, comically forced as though I was trying to be someone else, use someone else's mouth and tongue and mind to say what I wanted to say.
Really, though, I hadn't known what to say. Or how to say it.
Crucial things, in a letter, I thought - blank, mindless thoughts. Beige thoughts, like tepid milky tea.
In books, in plays, everyone knows when the romance starts, when the first stirrings of something gentle and tender start to flower, budding green and pink-lipped in eyes and on fingertips, where skin brushed skin and smiles bloomed on cheeks, hidden and coy. Everyone knows, everyone sees it: it's there, bright as day, and everyone in the audience smiles with them, impatient to get to the end when he takes her hand and leans in for that first, tremulous kiss.
Everyone knows in books, in plays, in Muggle films.
No one ever knows in real life. It's nothing like in books.
Hey Scorp, Albus throws a segment of satsuma at me. It hits my shoulder, bouncing dully into my lap. Idly, I pick it up and eat it, teeth pricking and bursting the membrane, flooding my mouth with sweet, water-thin juice, sharp and sour and sweet.
Louis mentioned you the other day at the Burrow, he says. Mum was saying how you and Linnea should come for one of the family lunches sometime - y'know, the ones where Uncle Ron barbecues and Uncle Charlie tells him he's doing it wrong and nearly sets us all on fire? Well, and Louis chimed in to say that you definitely should - that if I didn't invite you he would.
So, he finishes, thoughtfully plucking the stem off a plump cherry, skin polished smooth. Looks like you're not getting out of this one. Louis always gets what he wants - comes with being charming. With a sexy accent.
Oh, I shrug a little, licking the satsuma juice off a finger. I hadn't noticed.
Half a lie is better than none; how could I not have noticed? When he had sat there for our interview, at the five subsequent coffee catch-ups afterwards, enough of a twist to the way he sounded out vowels - ‘o's and ‘i's - how on a rare occasion he'd roll an ‘r', just enough so that it stood out.
Seven years at Beauxbatons, speaking in mangled Franglais at home, the languages their own melting-pot in his head, cross-linked in ways I could never understand, and that was all he had to show for it: a French lilt when he spoke, which had never quite left.
And a flat in Luxembourg, as Albus had helpfully told me in a recent Floo call. Mainly used for quiet weekends with freshly baked bread and slow-sipping summer wines, and wildly competitive FIFA tournaments.
Can't imagine you would do, Captain Focus, Albus grins at me. With the way he lifts his eyebrows and smirks, he looks unnervingly like his mother.
He stops grinning approximately eight seconds later. When I smack him full-face with a pillow.
(I don't say anything, but I wonder. I wonder whether maybe I had noticed, just hadn't... noticed that yet. Maybe?)
five.
One arm dangling out of the window, a leg skipping along the floor - toes just touching, socks dragging through the thick, fluffy carpet - the cool glass of the window sinks through my hair to my skull to my brain inside, not yet warmed by the weak sky-blue-tinted sun. There's a breeze, fresh and cool, washing over my face, fingers too small to ruffle the pages of my book, and still, still, still clarity escapes me.
I'm not used to this, this kind of wool-stuffed feeling, scattered and messy, always jumping back to something else - someone else. I'm not the kind of person who sits and sky-watches for hours, for a single speckled owl; I've never been that kind of person, been the kind of person who smirks behind a textbook while Albus falls head-over-heels for a girl in a lemon-yellow dress or a boy with lavender hair.
I'm not turned or tumbled or swooning with delight, heart-thudding and flushed, scrawling love-lorn poetry on scraps of parchment I never send. Just, perhaps, a little discombobulated.
(d-i-s-c-o-m-b-o-b-u-l-a-t-e-d.)
Below the window, the jasmine vines are green and smooth, laden down with leaves which rustle and shiver in the breeze, whispering when I wave a hand through them, like a boat through the sea, lazy and thoughtless. There aren't any flowers - they'll blossom, sunshine-yellow and star-shaped, in winter, winding into my room on the stiff winter wind, leaving me warm and cold at the same time, the heady, spiced scent overlaying the clear-headed burst of frost.
They had always been my favourite - my flowers, mine; so much so that I'd cried as a kid when my parents had sighed, tutting and clicking, when they'd seen the vines creeping over the open windowsill, tumbling like long arms down the window-seat and onto the floor.
I'd sulked for days, until Mum brought me a bowl of satsumas and jelly and a single, purple-pink orchid to look after.
Now, the orchid sat on the mantelpiece in my room, suited and booted in a green glass vase which glimmered.
(Louis likes orchids, though his favourite flowers are sunflowers. He'd told me that on our most recent - eighth; eighth and longest, eighth and dinner-esque - coffee catch-up. I'd come home and stared at the sunflowers in grandmother's walled garden for a full twenty-five minutes, hands in my pockets for fear of doing something stupid - like cutting one down - before walking away, tumbled and turned and discombobulated.
d-i-s-c-o-m-b-o-b-u-l-a-t-e-d.)
Dear Scorpius, I trace the letters on the piece of parchment sticking out of the pages of the book, traitorously familiar and sticking my eyes to them. Dear Scorpius. Dear. Dear Scorpius.
The sweep of the ‘s', the looped hood of the ‘a' and the flicked dot above the ‘i'.
Sunshine on white-blond hair,
Banks of tall, pointed pine,
A long walk once,
And your hand in mine.
Poetry, I now know, is more powerful than I'd thought: more magical, more mysterious. Like a code you can't decipher, but where it's so intricate, so beautifully made, you sigh and smile nonetheless, understanding nothing .
Ignorance is bliss, only it's not.
Sometimes, I wish I'd been a Gryffindor. I don't tell either Mum or Dad this - though I think they wouldn't mind. But sometimes I wish I'd been a Gryffindor, so I had a kind of well to tap into, a mantra to repeat over and over again, to remind myself of what I am, what I have, even if I don't think I am or think I have it.
It'd have been easier, I think, if I'd been braver: winding my way through school, head up and chin high, hearing the hisses of Death Eater and murderer coward Death Eater following me down the corridors, snake-like and armoured.
It'd be easier to listen to people twice my age, three times my age, tell me how I can't do my job - shouldn't do my job - because I'm an agent (for what, no one ever says), because my Dad means I'm incompetent to do it.
I'm not my father, I'd shout if I was braver. Stand up and scream it so everyone heard. I'm not my father.
The power of youth is in being better than their parents, Dad had told me once.
I'd always thought it was the power to change things.
Change for the better, Louis had said. Our tenth coffee-catch up, in Luxembourg, surrounded by pigeons and spindly metal-tables.
Swinging my legs out of the window, so I sit half-in and half-out, balancing uncomfortably on the stone ledge, my feet buried in jasmine creepers, I take a breath and flip through the book to the letter, holding it fast to the page.
Change for the better, I think, and smile.
six.
Seagulls squawk, free-wheeling in long, languid banking sweeps, cartwheeling over sprays of saltwater beaks full of fish; their grey-splashed wings outstretched and casting shadows on the sand far down below, passing overhead like quick, noisy clouds.
The beach is quiet, abandoned in the drizzle of a fierce summer rain, light and drenching, trickling down my back in tiny, slender rivers drop by drop.
It should be cold, should be making me shiver, shudder and wish, wistful and downcast, of warm fireplaces and climbing orange-red fires slowly lifting water off my skin; mugs of hot chocolate, thick and creamy, radiating in between my hands, lulling me gently towards sleep.
It should be, but instead I'm thrumming, heart-kicking and jumping, filled with a nervous excitement which bubbles and boils in my stomach.
I want to run.
I want to leave, I want to stay, I want I want I want.
(Louis is next to me, almost shoulder-to-shoulder and we're walking down the beach, almost out of sight of the house, both bare-headed and umbrella-less and stupidly unthinking.)
Rounding a corner, we're hidden from view of the house by a rising cliff-face, carved out over years and years by the sea, rough and scarred, pebbles and lumps of rock littering the soft sludgy sand underfoot. I stumble, Louis laughs a bit and grabs my arm, fingers locked around my wrist.
My heart skips a beat.
(So cliché. So poetic. So
true.)
It's my turn then, and I lace our fingers together, quick and easy, and don't look at him - I don't want to see if he hates it, if he didn't think that this is how it would go. I'm too afraid.
Change is better, I remind myself, the words sounding foolish, fleeting and weak. Change is better (but does that mean this change in particular?).
We stop, Louis tugging on my hand to pull me to a halt, and then there's a line of warmth running down the whole length of my side, from shoulder to hip and he's there, right there, closer than he's ever been before, with his head on my shoulder, dripping water onto my coat, wet hair slick and straight and shining, and I can hear how he breathes, feel how he smiles. Somehow.
In front of us, the sea is greyscale, flecks of green and blue here and there like flashes of colour on a raven's wings, and it rocks to and fro and to and fro in a gentle, constant tick-tock, like a clock in a hallway, reverberating through the whole house. A white sail flutters on the horizon, miniscule and faint, a spot against the hazy white-grey-blue of the sky, the sun washing it all in a thin yellow-ish glow.
It's tranquil and peaceful and oddly comforting and in that moment, I find something like power, something like bravery.
The power of youth, Dad had said.
He hadn't said how it was strange: quieter than expected, determined and relaxed with a certainty born from hesitancy, from a possibility of better, something different, sweeter. Like swapping satsumas for clementines.
Is it my turn now, to be brave? To ask for something different? How are you meant to do this - how do people find romance, get it and tame it, mould something beautiful out of a handful of sounds and a crush of letters?
How are you meant to explain something which feels nothing like how people tell you it should feel?
(A storm of butterflies in your stomach: Albus. I just knew, like I'd been struck by lightning, I just knew: Dad. It grew, slow and steady, rooting itself deeper and deeper until I couldn't remember a time without it: Mum.
And me? A sickly sweet taste at the back of my throat, the sudden thought of what it would be like to kiss him, the stupidly unthinking thought that I didn't want to let go of his hand; those minutes spent in front of the sunflowers imagining cutting one for him, planting it for him.
Daydreaming of evenings in front of crackling fires, sitting with him on the window-seat, legs over the edge, surrounded by spirals of perfumed flowers; basking on the veranda with Mum and cups of bone-china tea, Darjeeling with milk and half-a-sugar; sitting in the dining room, me and Dad and Mum and him, and somehow the laughter never sunk in, always bouncing off, ringing round like bells, bright and cheerfully clattering.
First love is a rush, a wild thing you fall into headfirst and drown in seconds; it pulls you under, siren-esque and strong, and it leaves you with a swimming head, bruised heart and blackened, blue-tipped fingers.
Maybe it isn't love, I had thought. Maybe it's not that. Maybe it's just a different kind of friendship.
Or. Maybe it's not. I don't know. Not yet, anyway.)
Do you want to get dinner sometime, I say - and it's easier than I ever thought it would be. Is this what it is to be brave, to hold your voice steady even as your heart pounds and you think your palms are sweating, impatiently terrified of what happens next?
I risk a look at him, just to see. Just to see.
He's smiling, that glitter-eyed, blue hydrangea smile, blossoming slow and soft, with his bubbled gilet unzipped, his yellow-checked shirt clinging to his skin, dyed halfway translucent. The sun is lighting his hair up in silver-water-gold spikes, the shaved sides fuzzy and white, like a broken radio.
Time stands still.
Yeah, he says quietly, watching me. I'd like that.
(I still don't know what the power of youth is - is it being better than our parents, is it the natural, cyclical change we bring, is it the drive and determination, is it how we are there, free of the scars our parents have, free to look forward and further, to run that bit closer to the horizon?
I don't know. I think I'll never know and that's okay.)
The sun sinks in the sky, falling in an elegant, curving arc; drowning, drowning in the sea, black-grey-green and lapping at our feet, sloshing up and over into our shoes, drenching socks and toes, wrinkled from the water and so very, very cold.
It's stopped raining and the on-rushing night is cold and clear and glass-glittering.
Sunshine on white-blond hair,
Banks of tall, pointed pine,
A long walk once,
And your hand in mine.