LOCATION: Diagon Alley
DATE: March 7, 1982
@starbrightblack
Dorcas didn’t know what to say. Oh, she knew the rote sort of lines that one recited -- sorry for your loss, my condolences, how are you holding up? -- but those were empty words that people used to fill a silence whose bottom was infinite. Dorcas didn’t know much about grief, but she knew that much, at least...even if she’d only really learned it recently.
The problem was that that lesson hadn’t come with a subsequent chapter on what to actually say instead. The fact that Sirius hadn’t sought her out to applaud her, Benjy, and Emma’s work at the Daily Prophet offices -- something that she expected he would have been highly entertained by, in other circumstances -- told her that the Sirius Black she’d been getting to know wasn’t here right now. She wasn’t sure how to talk to this other, more sober Sirius in his place...but she knew she should try. Should have tried days ago, really, but it had been so hard...
But if it was hard for her, how much harder was it for him? So that was no excuse, either. Grimacing and making no effort to hide it (even if she’d been adept at subterfuge, this would have felt like a strange time to attempt it) she bumped her way out the door of Flourish & Blotts and walked to the bench where Sirius sat (brooding? sulking? plotting? crying? she hadn’t looked too close and didn’t want to) and plunked a cup of steaming tea down next to him. She settled herself on the other end of the age-worn bench -- close enough to chat, not close enough to crowd, hopefully; Dorcas had never been the best at judging what other people considered appropriate physical distance -- and curled her knees up to form a sort of table for her own cup. She said, “I didn’t have enough hands to bring cream or sugar, so I hope you can take it black.”
She might have levitated the necessary accoutrements out of the shop along with their cups, of course, but while Dorcas’s grasp of the Levitation Charm was strong, it wasn’t exactly steady. Steady required a firmness of concentration that she didn’t have. Levitating anything that might spill wasn’t so much asking for disaster as it was prophesying it: if Dorcas levitated a jug of milk, Dorcas was going to spill a jug of milk. End of story. So she’d carried the tea out by hand and left the cream and sugar behind.
But “I brought you tea” wasn’t enough to end this story. Dorcas blew softly against the rising clouds of steam billowing off her own cup and struggled to find words that would help. She found none so she settled for a measly, “So, um. I’m really sorry, you know, about -- well, about James. Obviously. Yeah. ‘Cause -- you know. Yeah.” She swallowed and added another insufficient, “Sorry.” So that was why people resorted to rote phrases in these sort of circumstances: there was nothing else to say. How disappointingly useless.
