(Un)Familiar Faces
LOCATION: McKinnon Estate DATE: March 11, 1982 @coragreengrass
Things had not been going great for Dorcas, lately. (She supposed that was fair: things had hardly been going great for the Order of the Phoenix, either, or for the Wixen World at large, but still.) She still winced at the sight of soapy water, although at least making a blithering fool of herself in front of Emma had ended with her learning that her friend wasn’t engaged so that could, at least, have gone worse...
Still, she’d needed a little bit of solace. A little bit of space. And while normally losing herself in the shops and side streets of Diagon Alley did the trick, being anxious about running into Sirius Black and having to think of something else to say to him undercut the sense of ease that that pastime usually brought, and she was too antsy to drop with ease into the pages of a comforting book (although it would probably do her good to try) and there weren’t many other places she could go and feel calm...
So she’d come to the farm. It wasn’t the best place, with the itch of the Dissendium Task Force ever-present and the chance of running into another member of the Order who might bestow a lecture for perfectly reasonable behavior...but it had space, and if that much greenery wasn’t familiar enough to be comfortable, it was also different enough to be calm. So here she was, walking in from a long walk through the trees and fields for a bracing cup of tea before she went back to the shop to at least pretend to do some of the work her parents keep pressing on her, and feeling calmer than she had in weeks...and then she spotted Cora. Or, as she’d thought of her initially, Not-Emma.
Dorcas grimaced, but forced herself to keep walking. Here was a conversation that was hardly going to improve her sense of calm, but she had managed to avoid the other witch since she’d so unceremoniously and incorrectly brought her to their former headquarters after the disastrous events at the Rosiers’ party and it was well past time to stop avoiding things, no matter how potentially unpleasant. Dorcas knew she could only hope that her mistaken recruit turned out half as well as Emma’s Sevie... “Uh, hi,” she said, mustering a smile. “Cora, right? We weren’t, uh, properly introduced and I looked uhhhh a bit different last time we saw each other but, uh...how are you settling in?” She stuck out her hand.
Please don’t be a traitor, Dorcas thought, and made herself smile harder.










