She knew that touch could not be real. Neil could not be there with his warmth pressed against her back. All the same, Mary clung to the dream. Her finger pads dragged their delicate caress along his skin. Tears touched the corners of her eyes and hid there at the ready. Her lips dropped open, but what could she say? He was already fading. His heat, his smell, his everything… was almost gone.
Her eyes opened to a dead fire. The parlour was cold and drowned in overcast greys. It wasn't her west parlour anymore. It was theirs. Mary laid her laid back down against the carpet. She closed her eyes and tried to dream that dream again.
He squealed, like a baby piglet who backed into barbed wire. His whole body moved, every single long, awkward limb. Squirming and darting away from the p e r s o n a l touch quick as lightning, but not fast enough. "Y-y-y-y-you musn't!" he babbled. He fidgeted with his glasses, putting them right rather than letting them remain lopsided on his face. "Ah-ah-ah-I'm… you know… germs.. Mhm… Sorry, goodbye!" Florence tucked his head into his peacoat and shuffled away, much the little mouse in that tall form.
Fuck, he hated seeing her. It was impossible, even with the hundreds of halls and countless places to be, to avoid her. Gideon thought he could do it, thought he could dodge that passive face of his sister’s, but every time he saw her at the end of a corridor brought him that closer to just…
“Miss Gyllanros,” he said, a grin instantly turning up his bearded face. “What are you doing here?” In only four, casual, long-legged strides, he closed the gap between himself and the blonde Head of Hufflepuff who he happened to owe a small debt to. He stuffed his hands into his black slacks pockets. Just like that, Grace was as far from his head as a thought could be. Instead, he was flashing his teeth in a charming smile while staring down at Avery Gyllanros. "I thought you’d be gone for the holiday, what with the quarantine release and what have you."
"Jingle bells, Merlin smells, Potter laaaaid an egg…" Donovan Lewis switched back and forth between humming and singing as he made his way through the not-so-merry streets of Hogsmeade on Christmas Day. While the quarantine was over, there were still many with sick loved ones. With no sign of the cure, times were still dark.
Not for Don, though, whose life was lit up again in the most unexpected way, which is why he looked so sorely out of place what with the antlers on his head and enchanted Christmas tree sweater straining (too small) across his torso. The little ornaments changed colours, and the little lights twinkled on the knitted tree. He was the biggest idiot, standing there at the known werewolf's door, ready to celebrate with - quite frankly - the only person who wanted anything to do with him.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
His curled fist tapped hard on the wood door, and he hoped he'd been told the right address.
"It's a pretty day, Severus. Don't you think so?" The black cat winding through her legs only purred in contentment, no real answer from him, as usual. Mary leaned against the window sill, her face as passive, as expressionless as it'd been every day since that day. At least, she thought while gazing out over the expansive, snow-hushed grounds around that big, empty house, she was home. Little white flakes drifted down from the sky in the last bit of winter sun before melting on the window.
"Come away from the window now, Miss Raines!" said Mrs. Phiticus as she waddled into the room with a tray of hot cocoa and biscuits. "Can't have you catching a cold!" The edges of the Rainsworth girl's lips barely curled up. Mary moved from the window, her arm wanting to linger there, then her hand, then just her fingertips, and at last she turned toward the fire. She sat on the rug next to Severus Snape who was now cleaning his shiny, black coat. Mary ran her fingers over his head and along his slinking spine.
"Oh, Miss Mary. I found something on the door step for you this morning." He brow pressed into her narrowed blues.
"What is it?"
"A gift, it looks like." The house elf set the box at her side. It was pretty. Shimmering, blue wrapping. A glistening, silver ribbon to hold it all together. Her fingers curiously skimmed along the mystery gift before finally tugging the wrapping away. Inside, pajamas - just the sort she'd wear, in the colours she liked - and… Mary's eyes swelled. There at the bottom sat those muggle candies she liked so much. The same ones Neil bought her that night, when she tried to surprise him with that failed cake and poorly-knitted lion.
"What is it, Miss Mary?" said Mr. Phiticus.
"Neil…" she said. The house elves silenced, exchanging careful looks.
"We'll be in the kitchen, Miss Mary, if you need anything…" They parted, leaving their heartbroken master to her heartache. The sun soon died beyond the horizon, and she laid there, holding the little packages of sweets and staring at the floor, thinking, until the fire went out. Severus cried at her. He bumped her head with his. It was dinner time. Didn't she remember?
The morning sun might've come and gone without Raphael ever knowing. No windows in that room, and there was only a false one in the office, enchanted to reflect the actual weather outside. Wallas was up early (after a hard seven hours), no hangover to hold him to the pile of blankets on the floor next to the bed. And he waited, patiently, stupidly happy, in his office (again, much less an office, more like a tiny kitchenette and seating area), hot cup of tea warming his hands. On the tiny table between his chair and the other was Witch's Weekly, page open to an interesting article on muggle fascination with vampire romance. Not that his mind was really soaking in the topic. Even after tea and biscuits… Wallas could still taste him.
Her heart beat like the hard bass of a wRock song, making her chest lift and fall with every nervous breath. Mary stared in the mirror in the men’s restroom on the sixth floor. Merlin, she was so pale. Her arms shook, stiff as her fingers curled around the sink’s edge. Her eyes looked so dull in the filtered, grey light pouring in through the high windows. Such ugly, tired bags. She stared only a second longer at her ill reflection, the same ghostly nobody who used to stare back before Neil came and changed everything. Mary dropped her head and started to cry.
“I won’t put my name here, but you will know who wrote this. I know what you’ve been doing with Neil Lockewood, Head of Law. I have proof. Should you utter a word to anyone about what happened in the forest with him, about anything that has ever happened between you, I will report your relationship to the authority. In addition, should you come anywhere near the man who’ve you’ve made an unbreakable vow to, I will not hesitate to see Neil Lockewood put away from his relations with you. Stay as far from the man I will not name in this letter as you can. If you speak even a word about him or to him, should your very existence trouble him again, I will make good on my promise.”
How many times had she read it? Three nights she’d tossed and turned. Stubborn, at first, Mary thought to find Wallas Renfield (as she could think of no other accomplice to Raphael) and let him know just what she thought of him. But on the second night, she knew there were nothing she could do without making her own situation worse, without making him do what he promised in writing. On the third night, fear overwhelmed her. The anger was flooded out. At last, Mary accepted that she wasn’t allowed to have Neil. After all, what was she really to him? He called her Mary. Nothing else. She called him Neil. Now that she was of age, she was hardly even his charge anymore. He’d done the noble thing… now it was time to do the noble thing by him, and save him from a disastrous end because of her.
Creak…
“Hello? I got your letter. Don’t you think it an…" he lifted a wet dress shoe and stared at it, "odd place to meet, Stellakov?” Mary frowned and turned, wondering where she’d heard that name before. Julien stepped with light steps through the flooded bathroom. Sink water, he hoped. He stared down at his blurry, wavy reflection in the clear pool, and quickly looked away. Such an odd invitation for Dominik to send… yet, it wasn’t the stiff school governor who sent it at all. His head lifted.
Julien’s dark eyes softened in confusion when they laid eyes on the tear-stained face of Bailey’s friend standing there in a disheveled Slytherin uniform. His eyes narrowed, but not in malice. His lips pursed.
“What…” he started, and opened his hands, palm up, as if to ask without asking, “why?” What gentle expression was given was not returned. At once, Mary’s brows dug into her reddened eyes, and her hand reached into her pocket. Julien would’ve been quicker. As he watched her dip into her robes, he never would have suspected the evil she meant to unleash. He lifted one hand, took one casual step toward the girl.
“Stupefy!” The word ripped with all the frustration and hurt and anger that’d festered silently inside Mary Rainsworth since that night in October. Her arm flung this way and that, from one corner to another. “Diffindo! Diffindo! Diffindo…” By the time she’d silenced, Julien St. Jean lay in the watery, red floor, unmoving. His eyes were open, wide, and pinned on Bailey’s friend, her best friend.
“Wh-why?!” he pushed through clenched teeth. It hurt to breathe. Across his chest, two more on his arm and leg, gashes, deep and stinging. Mary glared at him, adrenaline racing. “You hurt her,” she spat. “You touched her and…” A roar gurgled in her tight throat and she stepped near him, wand pointed at his strange, pointed face. Tears poured over her cheeks. “I’m not going to let you do that again.”
Her wand lifted high, another curse ready on her tongue.
Creak…
Julien groaned. Bailey was supposed to be waiting outside. It was only supposed to take a second… It was supposed to be Dominik with a quick word. Not this, not him losing life a little more every second, bleeding out on the bathroom floor at the feet of the Rainsworth girl. “Bailey…”
Christmas came with good news for the wizarding world. The Nef seemed to go back to whatever hell it came from, which meant the students at Hogwarts were allowed to go home for the holidays. Weird, Lane thought as she walked across the white-washed winter grounds toward her familiar haunting grounds at the forest's edge. Weird that the the plague would just… go away like that, right in time for Christmas.
Lane, of course, wasn't one of the smiling faces aboard the Hogwarts Express. Instead, she was glancing at the gamekeeper's hut as she ducked into the trees he hopefully wasn't guarding in such cold weather. The last thing she needed was that big git sticking himself in her business again, even if they had struck up a fair deal the last time she decided to smoke within a mile of his hut.
