Hogwarts School - Elsewhere

Sometimes he could feel no beat in that lone thread of humanity; that vein ran dry, cut free, untethered from all of them and all they wished to be.

Sometimes he could feel nothing at all.

The shadows in the rafters soothed his jagged edges, a restless beast, rising like smoke, forever away, to claim for itself the solitary corners of the universe that no one else could reach. None of them ever really changed. People only got better or worse at hiding who they were. Better or worse at lying. Better or worse at obeying one’s self-preservation instincts when the injustice became too obvious to bear.

Like a habit started against one’s will. Like a curse echoing through eternity.

The annals of Amberghast family history made no note of this particular honour, their heir sent to the West Tower, the tallest, highest, furthest point in all of Harrowdown. But beyond the vagueness of this gift to him it made no mention of the reason why.

No mention of their revulsion. No mention of the horror of his endless screams.

It was all the same noise. The same echo. The same rebirth into the same tragedy.

"Stop!"

But Penny Greenberg’s endless screams, as he recalled, were absent this horror — unless one considered it horrific, her always wanting more. He was already at the bar, looking back on the scene she and some pheromone-addled leech had quickly stirred in and out of existence, his dark eyes having eased in their intensity, reading almost bored, until precisely the moment she arrived and, naturally, they draped themselves all over her—

“Animals.”

He slipped his boots back with a pair of graceful motions, soundless and completely in the dark.

“Indy—”

Something else had woken her, an impending absence they all seemed to cultivate, like mould, in the mess beneath their hearts. She reached for him, a grasping hand cast adrift in sprawling silk waves, spilling with her empty fingers over the edge of the bed—

Gone.

---

The cold, metallic lingering of death stretched itself across the threshold, the stench not nearly as unpleasant as the gormless Ministry goon gawking at him, his small eyes protruding out of his doughy face like twin beaks pecking towards some stultifyingly-ill-informed conclusion.

“Blimey, didn’t think they’d send you—”

He so hated being right.

---

Even her new perfume, much more expensive than her last, reminded him of her, of who she thought she was, was meant to be, the image she cultivated just as expertly with snarled camaraderie and cheap leather jackets as she did with lusty eyes and too-tight dresses. Her crisis of identity had seen one life merge — though crash seemed more appropriate, a disfiguring wreckage that could not make up its mind what kind of ugly it wanted to be — with another, and though undeniably she had changed and malformed herself, it was not what a sane person would call growth.

Mudblood or not, Sylvia still wanted the same things she had always wanted.

She still kept coming back.

Still couldn’t, through changing appetites, see past the hunger in her belly.

And so she came, on her knees — or on the doorstep, at least — that hunger gnawing.

“Flattering, coming from the creature looming at my door.”

The candlelight caught his dark eyes as they slid off their shadows, peering forward brazen and unblinking at the shape of her legs as they disappeared upwards towards her waist and out of view, a not altogether dissimilar vantage from the last time he saw her, similarly poised. And it was for either want or grace of those events that he let pass without mention her snooping into his mother’s excruciating attempts at poetry — an exchange that cost her far more braincells than her light but obvious-to-him inebriation.

“And looming to what end, I wonder?”

He stepped tall and broad out of the shadows, looming over her just like she really wanted. Time seemed to stretch away, on and on, until suddenly, his magic unseen, there was a click of a lock and the door fell open behind her.

“Certainly more than a kiss.”

Her talent for pointed questions had not faded with time.

Nothing had.

“So, that’s how?” he teased, eyes still steady, peering into the sky.

“By giving it a name.”

He looked at her finally, framed and lit by the soft glow of her home, his dark eyes heavy, lidded, brooding intensely with something that just like their catastrophe of a relationship did not have or deserve a name. She should have known that by now. Unlike most of them, she learned it the hard way.

Why name another thing that would only die?

“Which do you prefer—” he began to ask, his tone utterly facetious even as his eyes, having not blinked once, burned like they would never see her again.

“Inevitable or ill-advised?”

The space between them felt impossibly small, suffocating the air with the vestiges of their endless time apart, an impasse that neither of them meant to end and a truth that neither of them rushed to speak.

“Not this time.”

Desperate though she desired it, always a paradoxical creature, she wouldn’t have recognised him if he started doing what he ought to. But he suspected she might recognise what she was running from.

What he had warned her about.

Again, and again, and again.

“Next time—”

This recurring realistion precipitated no sense of victory. There had only ever been one prize.

Suddenly he began to Apparate, shadowy tendrils consuming him from below even as held her gaze, sharpening her a smile.

“Maybe.”

It was impossible to explain to someone how it felt to be haunted. Somehow you always just knew.

Why was easy for some. If he could feel the thrum of her beast then he could only imagine how obvious it was to Tala from that very first moment — the smell of blood, the light of the moon, the hollow appeals to your rapidly slipping humanity — but it had taken him nearly three decades to understand and unravel the shadow staring back at him, day after day, life after life, untethered from time, or fate, or the reach of their strings.

What was the actual difference between hard to kill and cursed to live?

What was the point of the question?

No one could take back what was lost.

His cigarette burning at her lips did nothing to dull the intoxicating scent of her perfume, his eyes lidded even in their refusal to blink, his lean forward so smooth and subtle a motion that suddenly he wasn’t close anymore but too close, feeling the charge of her skin, breathing in deeply as he met her eyes again. He tasted cardamom and tarragon, pulled fresh from the earth, soaked with rain, but it was the taste of wintergreen that haunted his memories of her. The way it swirled with his menthol. The way it clawed at him.

The way it belonged.

His dark eyes met the curve of her lips, rapt — possessive.

He let the shadow linger still over his own expression, the smile never quite shifting out of the dark and into place, something roguish reserved only for the intensity of his eyes, teasing at her even as he allowed the silence to linger, only drawn closer by her warnings, her edges.

“What gives you the impression you can hide anything from me?”

Long before she tried to protest its existence, before their eyes met and she revealed its reflection, he could see her heart thumping desperately against the stillness of her skin, tap-tap-tapping at her well-maintained facade without any real hope of shattering it, fighting pointlessly against walls designed to constrain a far greater beast. One that was not merely unfortunate or unpalatable, like her father, but unforgivable.

To every other soul in the room.

He matched her stillness completely, his towering elegance poised, primed, ready to pounce gratefully all over her first move, his dark eyes draping themselves over her as she turned finally, shifting perfectly into his alignment, into his gaze, and though he looked for the beast inside of her — never willing or able to resist the temptation to tease at it, again, and again, and again — he never saw it. Not a hint. It was just her in the untamed, untethered, and unguarded brightness of those amber eyes.

“A fitting concern—” he said, hanging the cigarette from his mouth again as he let his eyes, without ever moving from hers, sway slightly in the direction of the performative nonsense going on beneath.

“On a night dedicated to the mistakes most make.”

A shadow of a smile crept over her mouth, begging at him, as enticing and intoxicating as her proximity, aching at him, and such was their closeness that it didn’t take much, his large, pale hand crawling over the curve of her hip and twisting behind her in one fluid motion, the press of his fingertips firm against the small of her back, pulling her closer and closer with the rhythm of the orchestra.

“But this elusive heart of yours — you’re not worried that I won’t find it,” he teased, more shadow than smile.

“You’re worried that I will.”

He had laid it out for them, there and then, telling everyone that needed to hear it exactly what they needed to hear. Pryce, under the guillotine. Rivera, smiling like a halfwit in the front row, painfully oblivious. Ross, the glow of her reputation covering the insidious sleight of hand.

Bellestorm, manoeuvring into place.

Why couldn’t they see it?

Why couldn't they listen?

Fragile children, afraid of the inevitable monsters who come to feast.

That was the night Bellestorm became Minister of Magic. The night they mistook Indigo’s rare act of generosity for something merely chaotic, or cruel, or mired in self-satisfaction. Something that was subversive for the sake of it, something that lacked in meaning when it was their lacking even the faintest grasp that made this all inevitable. Telling Rivera how and when had not been enough.

The marionette could not play outside his pantomime, his charm as limp as his strings.

And worst of all, the truly embarrassing part of it — and he could see it, smell it, feel it rank in the air with every shake of the hand, raise of the glass, nod of the head — was that Atticus Rivera was barely an appetiser to him, without taste or substance, and now he had his pick of what to devour.

Beside Bellestorm, looming like the reaper’s scythe, Edward Amberghast clawed a shared smile out of him. Such was the omen’s chill it reached Indigo watching from above, almost indistinguishable from the shadows of the rafters, wallowing there alone until he heard her footsteps, his head turning instinctively towards the suffocation of her scent.

He let her hear his footsteps, even still barely a whisper of a sound.

“Doesn’t it warm your heart,” he said, not really a question, taking a long, indulgent drag of his cigarette before offering it to her, and despite the strange unbothered, untethered lightness to his tone the way his eyes held hers, burning, made it obvious who had his attention.

"You should see the one I really wanted to wear."

“Tragic. And on what do we blame that decision?” he teased, his eyes unblinking as they watched her over another swallow of wine, giving nothing away except his attention.

“You didn’t want to waste it on the kind of scum that comes to these things?”

Besides them — harrumphing obnoxiously, perhaps in response to something Julia had said — an attractive if perhaps slightly shrewish-looking woman asked too much of her own non-verbal communication.

“Oh, not you, darling—”

Stood beside, and married to, a walrus.

“—Him, though.”

"Where's your date?"

Subtle as an anvil, Julia accelerated her peacocking, exposing her shoulder, her flawless skin, as much an invitation as that wine-stained mouth of hers, twisting its sly little grin. He let his own smile tease at her, into the silence, past her next question without hint of recognition, never letting it bloom, or flourish, never exposing itself so brazenly as hers. Instead it loomed, half-formed, ready to pounce—

A shadow of a shadow.

“Jealous already? You’re supposed to at least wait until tomorrow morning.”

"It pays to be open minded."

“Better her mind than her legs.”

His body remained still against the jab in his rib, answered only with another dramatic arch of his brow, this time pointed right at her like an accusatory finger. The thanks he got for providing the antidote to her (often) prickly moods.

“I know you didn’t bring a present—”

His present, naturally, was his presence — not prickly at all.

“You should jot that analogy down for her, that might be useful.”

Before he could even begin to comprehend the abject horrors that entailed he turned back towards her, faintly rolling his eyes even as he shot a roguish smile towards another easily distracted onlooker. Did they not love these wretched people? Did they not want to respect and bless this unholy union? Did they not wonder where the third little pig had scampered off to?

“I think he has the same problem he’s always had—” he said, dark eyes half-heartedly peering around the room for alien eyes he was sure he would not see.

“His heart’s in the right place.”

Which was to say: the wrong place, with as yet no evidence to the contrary.

“You have to admire their commitment, though — how on earth are they getting through these woeful vows with a straight face?”

Was it a mole? A birthmark? Just another unfortunate part of the bride’s unfortunate face?

“Jesus, Seph—” he said, head shaking, and again, a few wayward flecks of realness creeping into his mock outrage as his golden hair fell loose either side of his face.

“Where does he meet these people? When did bohemian types come to mean the creature of the swamp?”

Two rows forward and to their left slightly, some old bint in a ridiculous hat threw so foul a look over her shoulder that he knew immediately it had to be the proud mother of the bride. To her he gave his most disarming look and eventually a wink, which surprisingly did very little to soothe her simmering fury.

“Easy to see where she gets her good looks.”

He turned away from the woman and toward his sister, sharpening talons that were already plenty sharp, sensing her smile long before it finished blossoming, meeting it with a perfectly timed arch of his immaculate brow.

“Such a tempting offer,” he said, head tilting. “And I can use the gold star to gouge out both my eyes.”

The snap-hiss of his lighter, bathing two cigarettes in its flame, drew another unbecoming look from the mother of the bride, this time completely beneath his notice as he handed one to his sister and hung the other from his mouth.

“Spare them the slow death. Why don’t you just go up there and ask her why she’s marrying a man that’s wetter than an Apparition instructor’s handshake?”

Finally they met the father of the groom, two rows ahead and to their right, glowering perhaps at something Persephone had said.