Work Text:
The walls of St Mungo's hospital are a lovely shade of pink. One of the healers who works there told her once that it was decided by one of the patients that told them once he felt comfort only around that colour. It always brings joy to Pandora, seeing it as she walks through the endless corridors and stairs every time she comes there, because she knows it’s Alice’s favourite colour too. It’s highly doubtful that Alice herself would be able to remember that, but Pandora does. Pandora remembers everything.
It’s been six months since what happened. Six months of sleepless night, fear creeping up her spine every time someone talks to her - or tries to, the inability to cry anymore and the persistent feeling that she’s the only one left, she’s still breathing and alive and has a home to come back to every time the anxiety gets too much from a simple noise she’s heard in the street, or from a random face that reminds her of someone she’s not supposed to think about. The feeling that she somewhat doesn’t deserve the privilege of surviving, that she ought to be dead just like almost everyone else is. It’s been six months since Alice and Frank got tortured into insanity.
She didn’t know about that, at first, for she remembers the day she found out vividly but not the day it happened. News of Barty being sent to Azkaban along with other death eaters is what fills her mind every time she recalls the day, just like the trumpet in her stomach and the fall of her heart at the mention of the names Alice Fortescue and Frank Longbottom. She hadn’t heard of them for days, alone in her little cottage where only the two of them went to visit her, and had spent those days worried, wondering, praying that they weren’t dead.
And they weren’t, at the end. When she read in the newspaper - asking herself how it was possible that such private conversation could be shared so easily for so many people to see - that they were staying at St Mungo’s, she immediately went there. Grabbed the first three things she saw on the counter and apparated in the middle of the ground floor. She should’ve expected it, apparition had never been her forte.
“Sorry, lady, how can I help you?” someone asked from behind. It was a healer, dressed in a green gown and with a long scar on his cheek. He couldn’t possibly have been older than eighteen.
The cracks of the wall were a darker shade of pink, more fuchsia than anything. She had to sign some documents, report to the healers who she was, make them notice that she wasn't a threat to anyone but herself.
“I want to see Alice Fortescue, if that’s possible,” she replied then, trying to smile - and failing.
Alice, as she immediately found out, was sleeping in a room on the third floor, and the healer told her to come back the next day. It had been a week since it happened, he started to explain, she had taken many potions and was stable but not enough to endure conversations, she slept for most part of the days and had difficulty with eating. He went on with medical procedures and appointments, started talking about the hospitals and its attendants, but by then Pandora’s mind had already started to wander inside her memories, and her excitement to know that Alice was alive, breathing, still a person living in the same world as Pandora, filled her whole heart.
Only the next day, when she saw her along with her now shaved hair, queasy face and distant eyes, did she realize one thing. One condition that the healer of the day before had failed to tell her, or maybe did, or maybe just assumed that it was a known occurrence everyone was aware of, one way or another. Alice didn’t remember anything.
Alice didn’t remember Pandora.
It wasn’t easy at first, coming to this realization. She whispered Alice’s name over and over again, trying to grasp the reality of the scene she was witnessing; that it was all real, she wasn’t dreaming. She went to sit right next to her, and saw her familiar necklace, the one she gifted her back in seventh year when they broke up the first time, in a way to resemble something that was lost yet needed its way to be found again. She asked, quietly, “How do you feel?” and when Alice finally looked at her, confused and ragged and drizzly, the healer told her “I doubt she’ll be able to respond.”
And it was fine, for Pandora her simple company was more than enough. Had always been.
It went in slow motion, from then on. She doesn’t remember missing a single day of visits, and went there whenever she could: first thing in the morning to bring Alice the breakfast she rarely ate, after the shift at the Ollivander shop, right before she went to bed, as a last goodbye. She always brought her a different book each week, because the sweet discovery that her reading aloud entertained Alice came up on a rainy evening when she was muttering to herself words from Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and Alice had made a gesture with her hand, which Pandora didn’t recognize at first but later found out it meant ‘Continue, I’m enjoying this. Please.’
Pandora cried, for the first time, when she read to her some experts from The Poems of Sappho, for Alice had been the one to recommend it to her, back at Hogwarts when they were young and naive and the war just a thought in the back of their minds they had the privilege to ignore. Frankly I wish I were dead was the one she particularly liked, and the one that made Pandora sob, by the end of it.
"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we sharedall the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck;"
She knew Alice couldn’t quite grasp the meaning behind those words, but she did.
Between two people, there’s always the one who forgets, and the one who lets themselves be forgotten. And it’s shameful, to be the one who remembers, from the first time their eyes intertwined to the last words whispered to each other. And Pandora knew she was selfish, knew that anything, anything, was better than death. She had witnessed death, she had grieved more loved ones that she could’ve imagined, and nothing was worse than loss. But she wondered, sometimes, quietly in her apartment during dinner, or just as she woke up, or as soon as she went to bed, why was she the one who remembered everything, and the only one truly standing.
From Regulus, who had been the first person to go, in a quiet day of December just as the year was closing itself behind blinded doors and was trying to escape from people’s mind - it was concerning, how the end of the first year of the war had brought with himself Regulus’ life, too - to Marlene, followed by Dorcas, Benjy, the Prewett twins, and at the end James and Lily, along with Peter, too. Sirius was in Azkaban for a crime Pandora failed to recognize as something a friend could do, Mary had left the wizarding world as soon as Dorcas had died, finding a world without her lover a world she did not want to live in anymore. Remus, nowhere to be found. But alone, she was sure of that.
And then there were Alice and Frank, and her, too, who felt as dead as everyone else who had lived and then sacrificed themselves for a noble cause.
And the funny thing was that the memories which haunted her mind were not the most prominent ones, or important by any means. She had difficulty even picturing someone’s hair, sometimes, or the colour of her old loved ones’ eyes. What truly stood out to her, and didn’t let her live, was the sweetness of it all. Cream tinged memories and flashbacks of a life that seemed like a dream, a life she had always agonized for, like the glint in Lily’s eyes when she completed a Potions’ assignment before her, or the smile Dorcas showed her when she played quidditch, and managed to win every time. She’s always hit by Mary’s softness, and how she used to do Pandora’s hair, together in the shiny grass by the Great Lake.
She remembers seeing James with his friends, and scrutinizing them from afar, not accustomed yet to their loudness, or the way Sirius always managed to perfectly fit his head in the crook of Remus’ neck.
She remembers Regulus, her first friend, the first person she ever confided with. When they were eleven and he had just explained to her the meaning behind those endless constellations, and how his favourite was the Leo one. Long before he chose that name, long before family lines and blood and the inability to picture a future where the both of them were together, she had told him that her favourite star was Regulus. And it had been. It was, still.
When she brought him his first binder, as an early present that was just a way to show him the love she so felt but was too scared to voice. When he cried in her arms for the first time, cursing a family that did not love him and a brother who had left. Wondering how he was supposed to live in a body he didn't recognize as his own, and the choices he had to make in order to do so. In order to live, still.
When he died, and he wasn’t there this time to witness Pandora break into pieces. Regulus. His best friend. His person.
And most of all, before her family and friends and herself, even, she remembers her.
It hits her sometimes, how little time they spent together, how the little castle they’d conjured up crumbled up in a few years. It started when she first looked at her, just as they sit together during their Transfiguration lesson on fourth year, and Pandora found out that the looming light complimented Alice’s green eyes perfectly, and with her dark hair and bangs she seemed a carved marble sculpture, shining for those who had the privilege to look at her.
There’s a picture Frank took of them once behind the greenhouse, possibly the only picture she has with Alice, despite vividly remembering the obsession Frank had with photography for the whole of 5th year. In the photograph Pandora is smiling, a shit eating grin accompanied by her eyes closed, while Alice is looking at her through glitter eyes, smiling too, with the blunt in her right hand. It's a soft smile, one reserved for Pandora only, one she found solace in when she didn't know who to look up at anymore. It’s difficult, looking at it, to believe that it would take them another year to finally kiss.
That first kiss - marvellous and shy and quite frankly horrible yet the best one she ever had - followed by many others, by glinting eyes and secretive smiles, by running through corridors just to skip the next class, by hands which made itself known, and went to unexplored parts of the other, making up a new religion in between the touches and whispers.
They fought a lot, in those years, for Pandora’s careless ease and unsure responses didn’t go well with Alice’s need to be in control, always, but at the end of it they always had a bed to crawl back to, if anything was to go wrong. They didn’t complement each other, as far as Pandora remembers, none of them was the missing part of the other. They were just Alice and Pandora. Pandora and Alice. And that was enough for both of them.
They broke up, once, even though calling it a break-up would be generous. Those gleamy months of the autumn after their last years of Hogwarts were the ones Pandora fails to remember the most, as they were simply casual and forgettable and so easily pathetic, really. They got back together half a year after, as they realized their differences weren’t enough to keep them apart.
Because whereas Alice was fiery, a fire waiting to be ignited, so happy to become an Auror, and fight for what was right and whatnot, Pandora deemed herself as purely selfish. She just wanted her loved ones to be okay, to reassure them that everything was about to end, too. She wanted to make herself believe there would be a time in which she could’ve live a happy life with Alice, just the two of them, distant from anyone else.
Of course, that never happened. But Pandora should’ve known from the start that it was all about to go wrong, somehow.
Now she finds herself walking through the corridor of the third floor. She takes little steps at a time, for she’s tired from the shift that had just ended, but she could probably make up the floor even with eyes closed.
“Hello, Mrs. Ollivander, how can I help you?” comes a known voice from behind her.
“Miriam!” she turns around, smiling. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me Pandora? ‘Mrs. Ollivander’ makes me sound so old.”
The healer - Miriam - grins widely, and starts walking to Alice’s room, accompanied by a cart full of every kind of potion. “As you can see, I have a job. As I do not want to lose it, I have to follow etiquette, Pandora.”
“I won’t tell anyone, promise.”
As they slowly reach the room, Pandora is hit once again with the sense of joy she feels every time she comes here. It’s scary, how much the mere sight of Alice makes her feel such strong emotions. But here she is.
“Okay, Alice is still sleeping,” Miriam sways around, knuckling up her glasses. “I figured that’s why you’re here, as that’s the same reason I’ve seen you for the past,” she pauses a bit, making a thinking face. “Three months? Maybe two.”
Pandora laughs, and nods. “Three. And Frank?”
“With the old lady. I’d tell you to go to him, but she scares me quite a bit, so I won’t follow.”
“No, it’s fine, I can wait for Alice to wake up. Do you want some help?”
Miriam beams, huffing a bit. “Oh, love, don’t worry. As I said, I do not want to lose this job.”
She starts putting potions on a shelf situated in front of Alice’s bed, while Pandora goes to sit in the chair next to her. She looks so young while she sleeps, so young Pandora wonders if she’s dreaming of dragons and stars and sirens like she used to do in her first few years of Hogwarts. Today Pandora has brought with her The Hobbit, in hope Alice will like it like the first time she read it.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” she asks then.
Miriam glances up at her, surprised, then looks at Alice. “She truly is.”
A few moments pass in silence, the two of them adjusting in each other’s presence. Pandora thinks, in a moment of long forgotten hope, that she could make a great friend out of Miriam.
“She said your name last night, by the way,” she chuckles at Pandora’s shocked expression. “After you left. I was undressing her for bed, and she said ‘Dora’. You’re lucky I heard that, because it was barely a whisper. But yeah, I thought you’d be happy to know it.”
Pandora shakes her head and closes her lids for a moment, trying to make the crinkle in her eyes disappear. When she looks up again, the world seems to have been tinged with a different colour; the walls are still pink, sure, but there’s something else in the air. Green. Hope.
She smiles. “Yeah, I am.”