Hippocrates ~ December 6th ‘79 ~ Daisy & Atticus
perennialgrace:
besnatched:
Atticus gave a disdainful snort. It was just a tad louder and more dramatic than necessary, but he was working under extenuating circumstances here, some melodrama should be forgiven. “Of course we’re no friends,” he confirmed, “who would even believe such a stupid thing?” Another snort. “Other than my colleagues, but they don’t know any better.”
Which left, well, the bigger problem. He thought of sitting at the edge of her bed, but she might just kick him off, or throw something at him. Atticus got himself a chair instead and flopped down on it, arms crossed in front of his chest. Some measure of truth might work best here. All the best lies had some truth to them. “I’m here because I’m curious.” He shrugged. “I don’t know anything about what happened to you, and I don’t like it. I thought I would be able to learn more right from the source than by filtering through gossip and rubbish newspaper articles.”
It had to be the most honest he had been to Daisy Hookum in a good long while, Atticus thought sourly. And of course she wouldn’t appreciate it, she never did, but he could only hope she would accept this truth. Probably not. Good deeds were never rewarded, after all.
Atticus again had that look like he might sit down on the edge of her bed. He wouldn’t dare, though, she’d kicked him as hard as she could if he tried, and surely he knew that? She nodded firmly as he grabbed a chair instead, dropping into it with a sulky expression.
“Curious? she repeated tonelessly, not sure what to make of the explanation. It was probably a lie, he was a liar, but it was just callous enough to ring true. “You’re curious about what happened?” She glared at him. “What do you think happened? One of your mates kidnapped me and tortured me for three days!” Her tone had started off biting, meant to impress upon Scabior how stupid a question it was, but her voice broke somewhere in the middle.
She swallowed heavily, tugging the neck of her hospital gown higher up her throat. It was, so far at least, doing a good job of hiding the heavy bandage that covered the burn on her chest. “You should go ask whoever did it, if you’re curious,” she said bitterly. “They’ll probably tell the story much better than me.”
“They’re not my friends!” he spat, and that, at least, was the truth. It gave his indignation some extra strength and righteousness. Whoever had taken Daisy Hookum, they were unlikely to be friends of his. He had exactly three friends within the Death Eaters, maybe only two even.
Atticus took a deep breath, he closed his eyes and focused on calming himself. He could do that. He could be calm. He could... oh who was he kidding. He was good at being logical, but he did have a temper, even if he could usually keep himself from acting all too much on it. “Fine, you got tortured,” he said, and then added, “and I’m sure that’s all kinds of terrible, I don’t doubt that.” His chin went up a bit. “But I didn’t do it, and there’s no point to yelling at me about it. I was just asking.”
He could even bring himself to feel justified in feeling like the injured party here, though he avoided looking too closely at the state Daisy was in. She was no Muggleborn or Muggle, she was a half-blood like him... But she’d made the wrong choices, so it was her fault for being stupid, right? But if he hadn’t befriended Evan as a boy, if he hadn’t had that in...
He squirmed, and looked away from her altogether. “It was a terrible idea trying to talk to you,” he muttered. “You probably don’t know who captured you anyway.”
