And So Reaped
Dorcas had never felt so miserable -- and the fact she looked it, too, was no consolation. Still dressed in the bedraggled, blackened remnants of her once-so-lovely phoenix costume she sat, knees up to her nose, toes dangling off the edge of the couch on which she perched, and waited for judgement. The orange paste smeared across her burns didn’t precisely itch as it restored her blistered skin, but it did smell strongly of marigolds and flobberworm mucus, which was not, in Dorcas’s estimation, a pleasant combination.
The souring effects of guilt probably did nothing to improve it.
She should have been in bed hours ago, but she had been told to report to Order headquarters as soon as she felt well enough to walk -- so here she sat in a long hallway of the Potter Estate, waiting for Moody or Dumbledore or Alice or someone to call her in to talk about what she’d done. The gray light of predawn streaking the walls made the whole world feel liminal and half-formed. Dorcas raised a shaky hand into the thin beam and turned it back and forth, studying the way it washed the color from skin and paste alike to leave her hand looking as gray as she felt. She folded it back over her knees when she realized it was trembling.
She should have been in bed hours ago -- but she wouldn’t have been able to sleep, anyway. The sights and sounds of yesterday evening kept unrolling like a screen across her mind whenever she closed her eyes, hot and fresh and heavy. She didn’t understand. The plan had been so good. How had it gone so wrong?
The sound of a door opening jerked her from her reverie and she looked up, orange cheeks glistening. She didn’t realize that the paste had been scoured away in two thin tear tracks, giving her a hollow jagged look -- or maybe that was caused by guilt, too.
The guilt sank into her stomach like a block of ice when she saw who’d walked into the dim hallway that was hosting her penance: Caradoc Dearborn, dried blood on his robes and sticking plasters covering wounds that he apparently hadn’t had time to see a Healer for yet. Dorcas was terribly afraid that she knew why he had been in such a rush; was terribly afraid that she knew exactly what was coming next...
“Um,” she said. Her mouth was dry. She couldn’t meet his eyes. “Are you okay?"










