Chapter Text
The garden was quiet. After all that had happened, that stood out more than anything. Noise. Light. Heat. Pain. And now…
Quiet.
The muted patter of mid-afternoon drizzle on her mam’s rhododendrons. The soft cooing of the doves in the eaves. The gentle rustling of the three-year old lop in his hutch.
Katie stopped and leaned against the old beech. Closed her eyes. Felt the cool breeze on her cheeks and breathed in the rich damp of her father’s precious planter boxes. The Atherton’s dog two down started to bark. Something shifted in the hedge. The muffled cadence of the wireless announcer drifted through the open kitchen window, too tinny and garbled to make out.
Her hands shook. She winced. Sighed. Inside, the charms on the garden would be letting them know she was there. They’d just had a doorbell, once upon a time. Things change.
Sarah was the first to the door. She was wearing an apron, flour handprints smeared here and there, a dusting of white splashed across her cheek. Her hair, normally so shiny and straight, was a pale riot of lanky curls looking more like dishwater than a summer’s day. Her nose was running, and her eyes were red and swollen. One sock was white, the other black. She’d gotten taller.
Her baby sister had gotten taller. When had that happened? Not at Christmas, when they’d huddled around the table and pretended everything was fine, or in August, when they’d bundled her onto the train to school with warnings to keep her head down and stay safe. Sometime in between, all at once maybe, or too gradually for anyone to notice, and now here she was, stretched and thin and looking so very grown up…
Hold on, was that…it was!
“You stole my top, you little shit,” Katie griped.
And then Sarah started to cry. And laugh. And at some point they ended up hugging out in the yard, getting progressively more wet. Katie could not possibly have cared less. She laughed too, and might have teared up a bit herself (though if anyone said as much she’d deny it, of course). None of that mattered.
How could it?
The next few hours passed in a bit of a blur. Her father found them out in the garden and shuffled over in his ancient wellies to get them inside. She took the world’s most lackluster shower to warm up and get out of the clothes she’d worn to go try and help save the world. There was soup. The wireless provided an ongoing narrative of the many, many things that were happening at the Ministry. Sarah’s pie was a burnt atrocity against the very concept of baked goods, and they threw the whole thing in the bin. They didn’t talk about what had happened, about the fact that she’d left without so much a note, that when Sarah had come back at God knew what hour, sent home from the school that was supposed to keep her safe, she’d done so without her sister.
They asked if she was alright, and she lied and told them she was, because compared to everyone else…
Well, it wasn’t that much of a lie. She was alright. Sort of. Tired. Sore. Kind of…well, kind of something. She wasn’t sure what. She’d only taken a couple of minor curses, the sort of thing that hurt less than a rough match, and she’d even got most of those sorted out before she’d come home.
She was fine. Really. Definitely. Truly. No question.
And then the fireplace flashed green, and her mam stepped through.
Katie had never been good at the whole floo powder thing. She tended to get a bit disoriented, stumble a little when the spinning finally stopped and all that. It was apparently an issue for some people. Her mam had always made it look so easy, like there was nothing unnatural at all about climbing into a roaring fire in one place and trotting out of another inferno someplace entirely else. Sarah was much the same, and no matter how much she tried, Katie could never figure out what was wrong with her that she couldn’t be like them. She was pretty sure she’d never seen her mam even hesitate.
The flames burned emerald, and her mam stumbled out. Katie stared. Took in the flyaway blonde hair, covered in grime. The murky red-brown on her hands. The half-buttoned coat, ash streaked on the robes beneath. A singed hem. Everything was…God, it was wrong.
“Mum?” Sarah called out, standing.
There was a soft hum in her ears, like a midge buzzing about. Her chest tightened. Her father tromped over to his wife, intent on helping her out of her coat the way he did every evening after her shift. Her mam waved him off.
“Katherine,” she said.
The midge got louder. Something twinged behind her eyes. She swallowed. Her hands - her stupid, stupid hands…
“Katherine,” her mam said again. When had she moved?
Midge. Twinge. Shakes. Breathe.
“Oh, Katie,” her mam sighed.
Twinge. Breathe. Warm. Tight. Close. Wet. Her mam was crying. Katie hugged her back, because what else was there to do? Mam didn’t…mam wasn’t supposed to cry. If mam was crying then…
Sometime later, when they’d both dried out, her mam pulled away.
“I’m reet, I am, honest.”
Her mam sniffled. “Aye, love…of course you are, then.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Nowt t’worry, Mam”
“Oh me? Why would I be worryin’, eh?”
“Dun’t fuss, now.”
“You’re me daughter - I’ll fuss if I like.”
“I’m fine, Mam, really I am!”
“Fine, is yeh?
“I dun’t need…”
“Don’t need what? Not fussin’ over yeh? Do you have any idea…yeh could’ve been…”
“But I weren’t, were I?”
“But yeh could’ve been! Katie, bach, yeh could’ve…”
“But I weren’t…I weren’t, Mam.”
“That’s not t’point!”
Katie flinched.
“Yer not well, Katie, you can’t just run off, I’m telling yeh.”
“Easy for you to say, int it?”
The moment she heard herself, she knew she shouldn’t have, except…well except maybe she should have, because it was easier for her mam. Her mam the Pureblood. Her mam the Healer. Her mam who could still go to work, and do her part, and didn’t have to hide like some frightened rabbit…
“Katie,” her father said from the doorway. Something shifted in her mam’s expression.
“And what’s that meant to mean?” The tone was colder. Sharper. Had a bit of a warning to it. On a better day, she’d had listened.
“It’s different for yeh, isn’t it?” Katie snapped. “You’ve got yer job at t’hospital, they need you…”
“That’s enough of–”
“No, David…let her talk. I’d like to hear this.”
Sarah shuffled uncomfortably, and her father looked as though he very much wanted to intervene. Katie’s jaw clenched, and she felt her ragged nails digging into her palm. She paused. Took a breath. Let it out. Her mam waited.
“It was the right thing to do,” she said finally. “They called…I answered.”
For an instant, something that looked like respect. And then it was gone, replaced by something else. Something harder. Uglier.
“You answered,” her mam echoed softly. “And you helped, did you?”
Katie froze.
“Alex,” her father tried to cut in.
“You went up to that school, knowing what was coming, knowing what you’ve gone through, knowing what you’ve lost…
“Alex.”
“...knowing exactly what you can and you can’t do…”
“Alexandra, that’s –”
“...did you think, even for one second that…”
She wanted to scream. To cry out “Of course I did!” Somewhere in her she could feel the words bubbling up and over.
I thought about all of that, she wanted to shout, I thought about my friends, and I thought about Sarah, and I thought about what they did to Dad, and I thought about you, she wished she could scream, I am so damn done with thinkin’ about all of it, I am so damn done with bein’ afraid, I am so damn done with watchin’ t’world fall apart around me.
The words were there, I’m sick o’it, I am! Sick t’heart, sick t’mind, sick t’death o’seeing folk suffer and die and no one doin’ nowt about it. I’ll not stand fer it, not fer one more minute, not one more second, I’ll not stay quiet, I won’t, not when I still got a voice and summat t’say, and if that means I end up in t’muck, well…so be it!
In the aftermath, no one would have said a word for a long moment. Her family would have stared at her and she’d have glared back. She’d have been on her feet, breathing hard, wrung out and raw, but somehow, for once, she wouldn’t have been shaking.
But she didn’t say any of that. She didn’t rant, she didn’t shout them down or tell them that when there’s a question between doing what’s right and staying safe there’s not really a choice at all. She didn’t jump to her feet and glare them down, and in the end, she hands were still shaking.
“I…” she started. Stopped.
“Well?”
Katie swallowed. Closed her eyes. Took a breath. When it came down to it, it didn’t really matter. There was only one thing to say.
“It was the right thing to do.”
Her mam sighed. Seemed to fold in on herself. Her father crossed the room and sat down beside her. Placed one calloused hand on her shoulder. Sarah nodded to herself.
“Of course it was,” her mam muttered. “But yer my daughter, and if I have to choose between you and…”
“Yeh don’t get to. It were my choice, not yours. I chose. I stand by it. I’d do it again.”
For what seemed like years, her mam didn’t reply. And then, she shook her head. Chuckled softly to herself. Said, “Don’t I know it? You always were too headstrong, weren’t yeh?”
“Can’t imagine where I got that from.”
“Aye…from yer da, no doubt.”
Sarah snorted. Her father protested his innocence in the matter. Somehow, Katie found herself laughing, and then her mam was too, and all of a sudden things didn’t seem so bad. They were together, they were safe, and in the end that’s what mattered.
Wasn’t it?
It certainly felt that way for the rest of the night. Her father threw something together for tea while her mam went to get cleaned up after her shift. Sarah sent off a letter to her boyfriend to make sure all was well with him and his family. They sat and ate and talked but didn’t really say much. In the background, the announcer on the wireless talked about how there was an awful lot going on all at once and nobody could possibly expect to keep up but they’d do their best to do just that. Katie sat, and talked, and ate, and listened, and through it all she kept thinking we made it, we all made it, we really did.
But in the back of her mind, another voice reminded her that no, they didn’t. Not all of them. Because somewhere in the midst of coming home and having it on with her mam and being so, so grateful that she’d made it through and her sister had come home safe, she’d almost forgotten.
Almost, but not quite. It had been so easy, in the moment, to not think about all that. About the heat of curses passing a hair’s breadth from her face, about the sharp sting of a thousand shards of burning shrapnel, about the deep, hollow ache of running, running, running, so much running, and so much fear, and so much rage, and hurt, and everything else all at once, until it all blended together into … what?
Duck, run, fight, cry, breathe, curse, curse, curse, curse. Heat, light, pain, too fast, too slow, too much, too much, too much, never enough, breathe, breathe, breathe.
Fred was dead.
It hit her about halfway through her third cold cup of tea.
Fred, her friend, her mate Fred, good old Fred, Fred Weasley,
Dead.
It didn’t make sense. Of course it didn’t. How could it? He was…Fred was…God, how could she even begin to say…the way he ruffled her hair. The quirk of his mouth just before he lied. His laugh. His stupid fucking laugh. Nobody was alive like Fred.
Fred, dead.
Fred.
Dead.
Ridiculous.
Her mam got called back in. Her father helped her back into her coat, and made her a cup of coffee. Sarah went to bed. Katie sat, staring, trying not to remember. It wasn’t so easy anymore.
At some point, she fell asleep.