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When Hestia first saw Emmeline, there were tears in her eyes, lingering there, unshed and unacknowledged. They were pretty eyes, Hestia thought: like chestnut wood, just a shade lighter than her curtain of long brown hair. Even in a state of sorrow, she was gorgeous.
She was also, however, a visitor at Saint Mungo’s, and Hestia was a Healer trainee. This was not the time or the place to begin flirting with an attractive stranger. Not in front of the beds where the two former Aurors lay, their minds broken perhaps irreversibly by prolonged Cruciatus torture.
Hestia glanced at the bouquet of daisies on Alice’s bedside table and watched the stranger as she sat with her, speaking words of comfort.
Alice wouldn’t understand, most likely. She rarely seemed fully aware of her surroundings and regularly forgot the names and faces of her caretakers. But Hestia was struck by the stranger’s kindness as she watched from afar, and even more so by her loyalty as kept coming back to visit, at least once or twice a week, sitting with Alice and reading to her, telling stories from their shared past, or simply talking about nothing in particular.
After two months, Hestia dared to speak with her, approaching her in the hospital cafeteria when they both happened to be there at lunchtime. She gestured to the seat across from Emmeline and nervously asked if it was taken, seating herself a moment later and making an awkward introduction.
“Hestia Jones,” she said. “You’re here to visit the Longbottoms, aren’t you?
Emmeline nodded.
“It’s sweet of you to do that,” said Hestia. “If you don’t mind my asking, how do you know them?”
“We were at school together,” said Emmeline. “Alice and I were in the same year.”
“Friends?” Hestia asked.
Emmeline’s cheeks flushed, and she shook her head, suddenly looking flustered.
“Not exactly. I mean, we stayed friends afterwards. But she was my first girlfriend, back when we were sixteen.”
She looked up from the table and fixed her eyes on Hestia like she was looking for a reaction. Hestia figured that was fair enough. Plenty of people would have a lot to say about that.
Hestia’s colleagues didn’t yet know she liked women, so “hey, any idea where I can find a girlfriend?” was probably not the best response. It wouldn’t be appropriate, anyway, given the gravity of the situation.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured.
Emmeline smiled sadly at her.
“Thank you for taking care of her. Of both of them.”
“I’m just a trainee,” said Hestia. “The Healers are the ones trying to get their minds back.”
“Yes, well - I saw you getting Alice to eat the other day. You were very sweet with her. Very patient. You’ll make a great Healer, I think.”
Hestia felt her face grow warm, and she smiled shyly, unsure of what to do with praise from a stranger, let alone from this stranger.
Emmeline would spend the rest of her life praying for a miracle, but she didn’t believe one was coming. Knowing that Alice and Frank were in the care of good people who would watch over them with kindness and compassion, whether their condition improved or not, was just as important to her as the efforts to recover their sanity.
For that alone, she would have loved Hestia Jones. But as she spent more time at the hospital, she found much more to love about her than simply her gentle bedside manner. In a few weeks of meals shared at the hospital cafeteria, Emmeline learned that Hestia had a pet puffskein that she adored, grew herbs in the window of her apartment, and drew beautiful sketches of sunflowers. She saw her scowl at the headline about the Yaxley family’s latest charitable donation and scoff that everyone knew they hadn’t been under any curse. She heard her laughter, soft and bright, filling the air as a child there to visit his grandfather insisted on reading her a series of bad knock knock jokes he had written himself.
Hestia was beautiful in ways that had nothing to do with her glossy hair and curvy figure. And Emmeline couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“Hey,” she said one day, “if you’re free, there’s a lovely sandwich shop not far from here. I was thinking about grabbing dinner around seven, maybe seven thirty.”
Hestia’s eyes widened.
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“If you want to take it that way,” said Emmeline with a wink.
Hestia smiled at her, looking suddenly shy.
“I’d like that.”
Emmeline was more than just tall and slender, with the prettiest face Hestia had ever seen in her life. She was clever and charming and, Hestia suspected, far more courageous than she let on.
“You were there in Hogsmeade the day of that big Death Eater attack, weren’t you?” asked Hestia. “I remember reading about it in the paper.”
Emmeline looked at her from across the table and nodded.
“Yeah. I was there - along with Frank and Alice, and Caradoc Dearborn, and the Prewetts…”
Her eyes grew sad as she listed the names of those who had, almost every one of them, met unpleasant fates during the war.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright,” said Emmeline. “It was a long time ago.”
Hestia wasn’t sure a year counted as a long time, but she kept that thought to herself. She didn’t bother to ask whether Emmeline had been in the Order of the Phoenix. With friends like those, of course she had.
“I was on duty at Saint Mungo’s when they brought in the injured that day,” said Hestia. “I’d been working with patients for a while already, but I’d never seen anything like that before.”
Hestia shuddered, and Emmeline reached out to squeeze her hand from across the table.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s my job,” said Hestia with a shrug. “That doesn’t make it any less horrifying, seeing what people will do to each other, but…”
“Yeah.”
“What do you do for a living, anyway?” asked Hestia.
She figured Emmeline was probably an Auror, which just meant the real answer caught her even more off guard.
“I write for The Daily Prophet. ”
“Oh. Wow. That’s…”
“Not what you expected?” Emmeline shrugged. “You don’t have to be an Auror to try and do the right thing, you know. Sometimes, the pen can be mightier than the sword.”
Hestia didn’t look at Emmeline in confusion and ask her what a pen was, so Emmeline figured she probably grew up around Muggles, despite her very un-Muggle-ish first name.
“My parents are divorced,” Hestia told her later, as the two women walked down the sidewalk, each holding an ice cream cone. “My mum’s a witch, and she named me, but I was raised mostly by my dad and my Muggle step-mom. What about you?”
“My parents are a witch and a wizard,” said Emmeline. “Not the obsessive pure-blood sort, thank goodness.”
As she watched Hestia take a bite out of her ice cream cone, Emmeline couldn’t help wondering something.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but have you ever dated a woman before?”
Hestia shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
“No. I’ve always found women more attractive than men, though. Why?”
“It’s just, I know the Muggle world looks at all this a little bit differently. Not that we’ve got it all perfect in the Wizarding world, either, but one of my exes was a Muggle, and… well, I just wondered. Sorry if that’s crossing a line.”
Hestia took another bite of ice cream and looked thoughtfully out at the buildings that surrounded them. It was a long while before she spoke.
“My family would be fine with it. But yeah, it’s a bit more taboo there. Which I never really understood, to be honest. If everyone’s so obsessed with bloodlines…”
Emmeline nodded, savoring a bite of her own ice cream before she answered. The taste of chocolate lingered in her mouth.
“It’s only a few pure-blood families who care about that, though,” she said, “and mostly only for people with their own status. Nobody gives a damn who half-bloods and Muggle-borns pair up with. Frankly, nobody gives a damn if some of the pure-bloods take lovers in secret, either - especially not if there’s no chance of illegitimate children.”
“That sounds miserable,” said Hestia.
“Yeah,” said Emmeline. “It does, doesn’t it?”
The thought of only halfway being with the person she loved most, always coming in second to her lover’s husband and being forced to pretend they were nothing more than acquaintances, was not something she had ever been willing to accept.
“That’s not why you broke up with Alice, is it?” asked Hestia, her eyes widening.
“No.” Emmeline shook her head. “Alice and I were together openly, and she didn’t care what anyone thought about it. It just didn’t work out.”
Hestia looked profoundly relieved.
“But I was in Slytherin,” Emmeline went on, “and my best friend was disowned by her parents because of who she married. I’ve unfortunately had a front row seat to a lot of nonsense that should’ve been left behind in the nineteenth century.”
Slytherin? Hestia could scarcely believe it. She hadn’t given much thought to what House Emmeline had been in, but if someone had asked her, she would likely have guessed Gryffindor, or perhaps Ravenclaw. It was almost impossible to reconcile Emmeline with the Slytherins Hestia had known in school, arrogant bullies obsessed with their own family names and determined to squash everyone else under their heels.
“Oh, you look shocked,” said Emmeline softly. “Sorry. I probably shouldn’t have just sprung that on you out of nowhere.”
“You’re being serious, then?” Hestia asked. “You were in Slytherin?”
Emmeline responded with a rueful smile.
“We’re not all bad, you know.”
“I didn’t mean… I’m sorry, I -”
“Oh, it’s alright,” said Emmeline. “You graduated in the middle of the war, didn’t you? I finished school just a few years into it. Not that the whole House wasn’t already a mess, but - just, from what I’ve heard, things got much worse as it went on.”
Hestia nodded.
“That whole little gang of wannabe Death Eaters…”
“Yeah. We had those in my day, too. Lucius Malfoy, Bellatrix, the Lestrange brothers…”
“You’re sure about Malfoy?” Hestia asked, her eyebrows rising in alarm. “He wasn’t under the Imperius?”
Emmeline looked very certain as she nodded.
“Nothing I can prove, but yes.”
“Huh. He’s a good liar.”
Hestia would have liked to think the man was genuine, if only because of his generous donations to Saint Mungo’s. But it didn’t occur to her to doubt Emmeline’s assessment of him. Somehow, even after only a short time, she found it easy to trust Emmeline’s judgment.
The sandwich shop became their regular go-to spot, and the two women met there every few days to share lunch or dinner. Emmeline brought her favorite mystery novels and read them while she waited for Hestia to arrive. They talked about everything from their shared love of Quidditch to their favorite colors.
“Deep silver-blue, like rain at midnight,” said Emmeline. “What’s yours?”
“Gold like the sunrise. Not yellow. That red-orange color - you know what I mean?”
“That’s beautiful,” said Emmeline with a smile.
You’re beautiful, said the voice in the back of her head, bringing a warm flush to her cheeks.
Hestia leaned forward across the table and held Emmeline’s hand in her own, and Emmeline felt her world burst forth into sunlight again for what felt like the first time in an eternity.
“I’ve got too many exes,” Emmeline confided later, glancing self-consciously around her living room, trying not to let her nervousness show. “I’ve never made a relationship last more than a year.”
“Why do you think that is?” Hestia asked, looking at her like she was a puzzle to be solved.
“I’m a workaholic,” said Emmeline. “I’ll put my career first sometimes. That’s just who I am, but I’ll try to find a balance. I’ll try not to get so lost in my work that I forget about you - about us.”
Hestia smirked.
“I won’t let you forget,” she said smugly. “Maybe you need someone to pull you back sometimes, remind you there’s more to life than that.”
“And I’ll keep secrets from you,” Emmeline warned her. “I won’t tell you everything I did during the war, but none of it’s anything awful, just still very classified. I’ll always be scheming and making backup plans for backup plans, because that’s just how I’ve lived for the past - oh, Lord, has it really been a decade?”
“You graduated in ‘72, right?” Hestia asked. “So - yeah, I guess it has.”
She didn’t look at all put off by what Emmeline was saying.
“Do you think you can give this a chance?” Emmeline asked. “Because if any of that sounds like more than you can handle, just let me know. I won’t hold it against you.”
In response, Hestia took her hand, their fingers intertwining, and reached up with her other hand to brush back a lock of hair. She leaned forward and pressed her lips against Emmeline’s, soft and gentle.
“I think you’re incredible,” she said. “And you’re not going to scare me away.”