Tainted Purity || Benjy & Glenda
Glenda’s heart was racing, ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum, as she caught sight of him. She averted her eyes instantly and attempted to pick up her pace. But Diagon alley was so full of people it was difficult and Glenda had lost her vigor over the weeks of hospitalization. She was so strong once, it felt like a million years ago to her now, that fit and in shape and sassy Glenda was dead. Dead like her parents, dead and buried. As she tried to push her way through the crowds and weave between bodies she could feel it, the bile rising in her throat. Glenda had reached out to Benjy, the one person she had complete faith in, to help her and he’d ignored her, thrown her aside as easily as the trash on thursday evenings. Glenda had never believed herself to be so worthless, she had always insisted she was meant to be something and would shut it in the face of anyone who disagreed. But now, after the weeks in the camp, the weeks in Mungo’s, she was defeated. If Glenda had cared what Benjy thought at all anymore she’d be so embarrassed about how she looked now, how she sounded, who she was. She was afraid to face him, would he laugh at her in triumph? She wouldn’t be able to handle that and she wasn’t willing to fall apart in public. She knew if he caught her she would, she wasn’t ready, she was fragile. Glenda had fallen to pieces, carefully glued them back together, but she wasn’t dry yet and any application of force would send her to the floor again. So she ran away, took flight, with her heart pounding so loudly in her ears she couldn’t hear him calling her name. Her name sounded twisted in his mouth, garbled and wrong and it struck her as if he’d slapped her. For a moment she froze right there in the middle of the street, eyes wide open, mouth hanging in shock. But what was she feeling? Confused, hurt, angry, all these emotions cycling through her head and her heart. She regained herself and began to move again until she found herself in a corner between two shops. It was darker there, cooler, and she could finally attempt to take a breath.
But then she was on the move again, she had to get away, out of Diagon Alley, unreachable. But her short legs were failing her and after the choas of the first moments of running she was fatigued and then the coughing started up again. People began to move out of the way as she covered her mouth, feeling as if she was about to leave one of her lungs behind. She took a deep breath, stopped for a second and willed herself not to turn around. If she did, if she looked at his stupid sad little face she’d break and she couldn’t, she just couldn’t. Still, the urge was so strong and as the crowd thinned she felt a tug on her arm. She flinched, human contact wasn’t welcome anymore. Glenda had never been the touchy feely type, she rarely hugged anyone or felt the need to and after the summer she’d had she would be happier inside a plastic bubble, or one made of something stronger. Glenda wanted the world at arm’s length, and the people in it too. Her arm tingled where he’d touched her, it was insistent and uncomfortable and she wrapped her arms around herself. As if she could hold herself together, like duct tape on a box fit to burst. How long would she be able to hold on? But then she couldn’t help it, she turned to face him. If she didn’t do it now she would have to when she went back to Hogwarts. Wasn’t it better to get it out of the way now? Could it hurt less or would they end up blowing apart the entire street with the ensuing confrontation? Glenda’s magic was out of control these days, just as her emotions were. Her mind was not her own, her body was not her own. Glenda was down the rabbit hole.
As she saw him her eyes widened in shock. He was shabby, tired, wounded. What could have happened to him. For half a second she wanted to reach out to him but the instinct disappeared as the anger flared once more. She didn’t care that he was hurting, she didn’t care what he had done to get those cuts and bruises, she didn’t care because whatever it was it had been more important than her and so maybe he deserved it. That thought made Glenda mentally scold herself but she struggled between the guilt and feeling pity for him and the growing intensity of her rage as he stood there looking so ragged. And then her bod yacted of it’s own accord, her arm lifting without her consent, reaching up to his face. A sharp smack rang out across the cobblestones as her hand collided with his cheek. She’d slapped him. She didn’t remember doing it but his cheek was red and her hand was throbbing. She turned to run again as hot tears began to pool in her eyes. Glenda felt ashamed and all she wanted to do was run and hide.
Every single time he had mistaken someone else for Glenda before felt so much like that sensation one got when climbing the stairs, expecting one more stair to be there, but then finding nothing but empty air. There was that split second of expectation, a flash of hope that the heel would find level ground, a stability, up one level higher, but then the foot would just slice thin air, and pass straight through the height your mind expected the next stair to be. And then that moment when the heel finally collided with stable ground a level lower instead was like a jolt of electricity, like a harsh slap of the wind, a dump of cold water. And this, this wasn't different from all those times before. The moment he grasped at her wrist, it was like he had lifted his foot up to climb one stair. There was that frozen second where hope and wishes and pleas crashed over him like waves on the shore, filling him, washing over him. That frozen second stretched, turning into an eternity all on its own. His palm was prickly, pins and needles cutting through his skin as he held on, not wanting to let go until he saw for himself if this girl was another one of the ghosts that had been haunting him, another product of his insanity. And all the while his face was painted with his desperation, his eyes clouded. And then she turned around.
For the first few seconds, he just stared at her, that part of his heart that had been disappointed repeatedly before still expected this to be another trick. He stood there, his hand still around her forearm, waiting for that skin under his to vanish, expecting her whole figure to just evaporate, to leave him standing in the middle of Diagon Alley, holding on to fragments of his insanity. But she didn't vanish. She stayed. One, two, three seconds passed and she was still standing there, still looking up at his face as if she herself couldn't quite recover fast enough from the surprise. And then he just looked back, he just looked at her, his eyes drinking in every inch of her face. That part of his brain that had been yearning to see her, to make sure that she was still okay, still alive, still breathing, pushed him to gaze at her features. From her eyebrows, he took in the way they furrowed, to her eyes, registering the look she had that he'd never seen in them before, and the way the corners of her lips turned down disapprovingly at him. And it was then that he pieced together the look she was giving him. It came to him a milisecond after the slap rang through the air and ripped through his face, causing the already painful cuts and wounds on his cheek to sting anew, some of the covered ones even beginning to bleed again.
She was angry at him. Disappointed.
And all he was, was confused. And worried.
That slap was like that jolt of electricity after realizing that there were no more stairs in front of you. It was a moment of clarity that could wake up even a man that hadn't slept in a decade. It was supposed to hurt. It should have hurt more than all his other wounds combined because those wounds he had were inflicted by enemies, and this slap was given to him by someone he held as one of the dearest to him. And frankly speaking, it did hurt, but more than pain, it filled Benjy with confusion, especially since he could still see the look of anger that she had burned him with even as she moved to turn around again. That moment felt so much like the wobbling of a boat in the middle of a storm. It was dizzying, nauseating and scary because any moment and the boat would flip and he would be left drowning in the harsh waves of Glenda's anger. And truth be told, if this had happened a few months ago, he would have let her go, would have given her the space that she obviously needed, but this was today. And after losing her without any knowledge of her whereabouts for the past several weeks, he wasn't going to let her get out of his sight again. He had promised to protect her, to look after her. He promised not only to Rita, but also to Glenda, and to himself. He wasn't going to break that. Not ever. So with the sting of her hand colliding with his cheek still resonating all over his face, he took advantage of his legs that were longer than hers and even before she can go far, he was stopping her again.
"No, Lenny, wait," he pleaded, his voice breaking, still clouded with confusion, but even though he didn't know what he had done to warrant her anger, he was already sorry. Even though he didn't know the reason as of yet, he already felt the urge to apologize just for the fact that he had obviously caused her to want to slap him. "Please don't go. I don't know what...what happened. Where have you been? Since when are you back? I...I tried to find you, tried to track you, even though your letters had stopped coming and..." He still hadn't turned her back to face him. He didn't feel like he deserved to force her to turn back to him when she obviously couldn't take the sight of his face. "Are you..." he began, thinking of asking her if she was okay, but even he knew that was a stupid question. The panic was bubbling in his blood, filling his veins, and he was stuttering, stumbling over his words, not knowing which ones to speak first. "I don't know what I did. Why are you angry? What did I do? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Does...does your hand hurt?" His hand that was once again enclosed around her wrist travelled down to her own hand, the hand that had slapped him. And then he was holding on to her better, his fingers locking around her hand, the tips pressing gently onto her palm, trying to sooth the pain that slapping him had put on there.
