Anthem // Eva

[Altair]

Saturday, 11 November 1972
Early evening

"Bellestorm!" they shouted at the neighbouring table.

"Bellestorm, Bellestorm!"

Altair sent them a lazy eye, not bothering to get truly annoyed. He was halfway through his bottle of red wine - good red wine, considering he was apparently taking on the habit of drinking again after twenty years of going dry.

Mostly, he'd had a break because it mixed really bad with his divination skills.

Tonight was no exception.

But Altair wanted to have his own little celebration too. Because there was something in the air tonight, something that had gathered, electric, at the tips of his fingers. Something that had woken him up and made him rise from the dark cellars of Muspell, wanting to head outside.

So, tonight, he had decided on a challenge, entertaining himself by playing a little game.

He'd called it Real or Unreal?

The gargoyle-like creature with the flaming eyes peeking around the corner in the dark alley accross the street, when he looked out the window - he'd decided that was Unreal, possibly spirit. The company at the table next to him was probably Real, although he'd been considering whether the whole election thing was actually something that he'd made up in his head - had Pryce really decided it was time to move on? It was a very un-Pryce thing to do.

Then there was the fact that old students of his appeared to keep turning up. Then again, considering for how long he had taught, that also made all sorts of sense. Most of which left him alone, as he sat, dark and hooded, in a corner drinking by himself. Some had given him a curt nod of greeting. And despite how early it was, the pub was quickly filling up.

The fact that it was the first Saturday after the election, people probably had a lot to meet and talk about.

And there was another, recognisable, entering. Alone?

He knew she'd have trouble finding a free seat, looking slightly lost at that.

Catching her eye (Real of Unreal?), he motioned to the chair on the other side of his table. It was the only free chair that he could spot, so if she sat it probably wasn't because she felt like hanging out with some old, greying professor. Nevertheless --

"You don't want to sit with them," he commented, gesturing to the party that was going on at the other table.

[Eva Kedding]

Eva hesitated in the doorway, her eyes flicking briefly to the table where a rowdy group of Bellestorm’s supporters were celebrating. The last thing she wanted was to get swept up in their triumphant chatter, not after Atticus had lost. She’d spent the entire day fuming, a storm of thoughts and feelings swirling inside her—disappointment, frustration, and something darker that she wasn’t quite willing to name.

When she caught sight of him, though, her pulse skipped. Professor Altair.

The man who had vanished from Hogwarts without a trace, leaving behind a hundred rumors and whispers in his wake. She hadn’t seen him in years, and yet something about his presence was both familiar and unnervingly distant. There was a sharpness to his gaze, like he could see through the layers she wore so carefully. And the way he motioned to the seat—almost casual, yet not quite—pulled her in, like a thread she hadn’t realized she was tied to.

She knew better than to approach someone who had such a mysterious, unsettling aura, especially in the middle of such a public, charged atmosphere. But she was already here, wasn’t she? And the Bellestorm crowd was growing louder by the second, the celebratory whoops and jeers not doing much for her already sour mood.

Altair’s voice, cool and deliberately uninterested, broke her thoughts.

”You don't want to sit with them."

His words, simple as they were, carried weight. She glanced at the group again, watching as they patted one another on the back and raised their glasses in boisterous toasts. Her lip curled into a brief sneer.

"Seems like that’s their idea of a good time," Eva said dryly, her eyes narrowing ever so slightly. She walked toward his table, her steps slow and measured, though she wasn’t sure why she was drawn to it.

When she finally reached the seat, she stood there for a moment, taking him in. His air of nonchalance, the worn but still sharp edge of his demeanor, and the deep, unspoken knowledge that always seemed to hang around him.

"Don't mind me," she said, taking the seat opposite him without waiting for confirmation. "I’m just here to avoid an altogether different sort of storm." She waved her hand vaguely toward the other table, though the emphasis on the word "storm" wasn’t lost on her. "How long’s it been? Fifteen years? You haven’t changed a bit, Professor."

Her tone was as dry as the wine in his glass, though her eyes betrayed a faint, unbidden curiosity. What had brought him here tonight, of all nights? She hadn’t expected to find anyone familiar in this place—least of all him.

[Altair]

She fit into the atmosphere, he thought - arriving with the same tension, the same sort of unfurled potential. As though she had something brewing within her, unresolved and alive and lingering, speaking of storms. It arrived in confirmation that they were on the same page, although they appeared to respond with different moods.

"How long’s it been? Fifteen years? You haven’t changed a bit, Professor."

He felt the corners of his lip tilt upward in response to the flatness of her tone, perhaps a little inappropriately, mildly entertained.

"Oh, I have," he retorted, giving a tap to his left temple to direct her attention to an eye that gave the unmistaken impression of cataract, although that was by no means what it really was. The lifeless, cloudy grey contrasted with the liveliness of the other, blue.

Now, this was just the tip of the iceberg, the surface of the cold waters into which he had imerged himself in - fifteen years ago, indeed. He had spent most of those fifteen years sick with trying to deal with the new surge of magic that he'd unlocked (and the consequences to having lost another part of his soul, resulting in a magic both more raw, and more of a danger to himself and others).

"And you have, too. - Kedding, right?" he said, locking her in his gaze. While he did not remember her first name, he was pretty sure this was a daughter of Aubrey and Charlie Kedding - both of which he'd also taught, once upon a time way back, an attestment to his dedication to the cause, however turbulent the circumstances.

Though his dedication had never been plain and straight forward, he'd always been there wearing his dark shadow, to distract them and plant his ideas in the hope that they - good as they were, most of the time - would not end up blinded by the light.

The world was complicated. He was complicated. They were all complicated.

And the mission he'd been bestowed by the Order for the Return of All Rights had never seized. They could turn mad and light their fires around him, but he'd already burned and come back out of it and burned again.

(At the corner of his eye, the bar caught fire, flames licking bright and yellow from floor to ceiling - Kedding, Real, but fire Unreal, he thought.)

"I take it you're not too impressed with the political situation either, then?" he prodded.

And it was just like him to disappear and then resurface with some new, unexplainable sort of life. It was just like him to resurface when something was about to happen, as though he fed on the suspense of the moment and needed the charge to get pushed out of his inertia, the everlasting apathy that came as a consequence to ripping yourself apart. Now it was running through his veins, thumping through his heart.

Even negative developments held potential for positive renewal.

(It was not the people that were broken, it was the system.)

[Eva Kedding]

Eva studied him for a moment, her gaze shifting over the Professor’s features, noting the subtle changes that time had carved into him—though not as much as she’d expected. He was still the same Altair, wrapped in shadows, exuding a quiet, unsettling power that seemed to ripple through the air around him.

Her eyes flicked instinctively to his left eye when he motioned toward it, and she felt a small twinge of surprise. The clouded grey wasn’t a trick of the light or age, but something more deliberate, something magical. A scar of sorts. She’d heard rumors, of course—talk of his disappearance, of what had happened to him in the years since he’d vanished from Hogwarts—but this? This was new. Unsettling. And yet, knowing Altair as she did, it somehow fit.

She let her gaze return to his face, her own expression carefully neutral. The sight of him with that eye made her think, irrationally, that he might see more than he should—perhaps even more than he wanted to.

Kedding. Of course, he would remember that name.

She nodded slowly, acknowledging the recognition. "Kedding," she repeated. "Eva. Charlie and Aubrey’s oldest daughter." She wasn’t surprised he remembered her parents. Altair had always been keen on details, on connections others might have missed, even if those connections had sometimes been clouded in a haze of secrets and half-truths.

She felt an almost imperceptible tightening in her chest. Fifteen years had passed, but the weight of that name, of the past, always seemed to linger just behind her thoughts.

When he asked about the political situation, her first instinct was to laugh, to brush it off. But the irony stung too sharply. The election had been nothing short of a disaster, though the chaos had been predictable. The situation was broken, no matter how you looked at it. She had no patience for it, especially after Atticus’s loss. The truth, however, was more complex, layered beneath frustration and a simmering need for something—anything—to change.

Eva took a slow sip from the wine in front of her, letting the bitter taste linger on her tongue before responding. "Impressed?" she echoed, a short, bitter laugh escaping her lips. "Not quite. But I suppose I should be used to it by now."

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she glanced back at the table of Bellestorm supporters, their raucous chatter now louder than ever. "It’s always the same faces, shouting the same things... while everything rots beneath them." She didn’t realize she was speaking aloud until the words left her lips, but she didn’t take them back.

She looked back at Altair, meeting his gaze steadily, though there was a flicker of something behind her eyes. She wasn’t sure what it was—perhaps something unfamiliar to herself—but she knew that the conversation wasn’t over, and the evening had only just begun.

[Altair]

They were subtle changes, he knew. Out here he looked less like someone special and more like the anonymous guy in the corner. When out like this he tended to have a signature look, tried to not draw attention. His simple, black cape was nothing compared to the intricate, shimmering thing, the one with the tree design that shone like stars, that he'd not really donned since he last taught. There was a time for grabbing onto and owning that attention, and there was a time for simply living, for testing his own waters.

"Eva," he repeated, taking the name in his mouth for what was quite possibly the first time. Still it felt familiar to him, if only because it was used as the Norwegian equivalent to the English Eve, from the biblical story of the Genesis.

Though he hardly spoke his first language anymore except for certain incantations and, occassionally, curses, it had a distinct Scandinavian feel that reminded of something he'd once called home.

Her laugh came unexpected, but not fully so. People tended to laugh when faced with something that was too much to handle at the given moment. A defence mechanism. He knew, because he'd laughed at inappropriate times too, before he'd recognised what it was. Nowadays he was mostly quiet, observing. But this, too, touched something in him.

"It’s always the same faces, shouting the same things... while everything rots beneath them."

He nodded, slowly.

And drew a circle in the air with the finger of his right hand. When he stopped, a faint circle of light remained, gently spinning. It morphed into a snake biting at its own tail - and dispersed into the air like smoke.

"It's the cycle," he said, appreciating her frankness, but he wasn't looking at her, he was looking at them.

"But it's complicated," he continued. "They're humans too, thinking and feeling and wanting change."

His hand reached for his glass and he took another sip.

"So how do we break it?"

And the look that he sent her then was not that of the professor, not that of someone of any higher authority. But it was also not of someone who was defeated - not at all, Altair felt like he was finally back on some sort of rise.

No, he was looking for the outside perspective. Something to break the brooding nihilism that was so easy to fall into when you trudged around your own, constant mindspace.

[Eva Kedding]

Eva watched as Altair’s circle of light dissolved into a delicate snake, biting at its own tail. She didn’t flinch; instead, her gaze lingered on the shifting form. There was something striking about it—the way it held space before fading into nothingness. The cycle, he had said. She knew what he meant. It was a cycle of power, of old patterns repeating themselves, of humanity’s tendency to seek comfort in repetition. There was something about the way Altair said it that felt different than most—like he wasn’t just talking about a political system or a corrupted power structure, but something far more personal. Had he been in this cycle too, in his own way?

Her fingers tightened around her glass, a gesture of subtle tension she hadn’t even realized was there until now. How do we break it?

The weight of his words lingered in the air, and she considered them in silence before speaking. She wasn’t one to dive into political matters—Bellestorm’s rhetoric, especially. But there was something about his platform that bothered her, something that made her uneasy in ways she couldn’t quite articulate.

She finally spoke, her voice soft but clear. "Bellestorm wants to take us back," she said, her eyes briefly meeting his. "He talks about returning to the way things were before, as if that would fix everything." She paused, her gaze drifting away, as if seeking some unseen answer in the distance. "But it feels like a retreat. Like we’re running from something."

The words hung in the air, but Eva didn’t need to elaborate. She knew Altair understood the kind of regression Bellestorm was pushing for. The man wanted to protect the wizarding world from what he saw as a growing threat, and those ‘others’—the werewolves, vampires, giants, and veela—were a part his list. Bellestorm talked about them like they were some kind of disease, a plague on their society, and Eva couldn’t stomach it.

Her lips pressed together, and she gave a small shake of her head. The thought of her father, her sister Joey, and all those who lived in the margins of the wizarding world gnawed at her. What would Bellestorm do to them?

She didn’t need to speak those words. They hung between them, unspoken. The idea that anyone, especially someone with the power to sway others, would view her family and those like them as nothing more than threats to be eradicated filled her with a quiet, simmering fury. She had fought for them before—for them—not because she was a politician, not because she understood the intricacies of law or policy, but because she understood the struggle of those who didn’t fit into the neat boxes that society demanded.

She glanced back at him, her expression firm. "I may not know much about changing systems," she said, her tone thoughtful, "but I know how to fight for people. People who don’t have a voice. I just... can’t sit by and watch them suffer because someone wants to erase them."

Her chest tightened as she spoke, but she didn’t falter. There was a resolve in her that came from years of standing up for those who couldn’t stand for themselves.

The cycle Altair spoke of was real, and it ran deep. But it wasn’t just the politicians that kept it spinning. It was the people who chose to ignore the injustice, who didn’t see the cracks in the walls that were closing in on those who were already on the outside. Eva wasn’t sure how to fix it, but she wasn’t about to turn her back on the fight, no matter how daunting it felt.

Her voice softened as she met his gaze again, a quiet plea hidden in her expression. "I just want to make sure we don’t forget the ones who are already being pushed aside." She let the silence stretch between them before finally breaking it, her words more of a statement than a question. "I just want to make sure we don’t let it happen again."

[Altair]

He had not expected this. For her to turn up like this. For her to sit down in the chair as suggested and, now, to lean in to his words and his presence. A part of him, alluring as it was, wondered if there was some sort of power in him that had made this happen, that he'd somehow tapped over into his lost legilimency to convince her, in her own mind, to remain.

A different part of him felt at the warmth gathering at his chest. Altair was someone used to his dark corridors and sullen solitude, to walls barricaded with magic and an existence dependent on his condition for every passing day, the volativity of the spirits that he had summoned. He was used to living under the weight of his decisions, of guilt and shame, and the feeling of having to be a weapon - for the Supra Mortalitas, for Francis, and for Pryce.

The feeling of being turned down and abandoned when he'd needed her the most.

Unlovable.

(It had been twenty years.)

But Eva leaned into it. And while it had not been his fate to have children, and he had never thought of himself as capable of bringing them up the way they deserved, he had imagined, sometimes, what it could have been like.

Now they were two flames caught in an important moment, flickering more strongly with the added heat, the growing base of fuel.

She reminded him of all of the important things. She reminded him of his priviledge, as a man, as a pureblood. And he knew very well that he walked right through these waters, these waves - these goddamn tsumanis - with his feet dry due to an undeserved priviledge assigned to him at birth.

"Bellestorm wants to take us back. He talks about returning to the way things were before, as if that would fix everything. But it feels like a retreat. Like we’re running from something."

It was a good assessment and he leaned back, giving her space.

Continue.

"I just want to make sure we don’t forget the ones who are already being pushed aside. I just want to make sure we don’t let it happen again."

(Unreal?)

Their angles were radically different, but it did not mean he did not agree. That he could not see. That he could not feel the surge of her emotion in his chest. Continuing to grow the fire that had awakened with the election, the electricity of possibility in a moment of momentum.

And he felt a wave of gratefulness - for her presence, for the fact that he'd leaned into his own intuition and ventured into the evening. For being able to speak his mind and not be alone.

(Lately, he'd been thinking about returning to teaching and now that desire intensified. There was a good chance that things would get worse. As they always appeared to do, before they got better.

But he was done assassinating politicians.)

"I think you're onto something," he said.

Again, he raised a hand to tap at his temple.

"But we have to be smart. So hold on to that picture - imagine that he's running. What is he running from?"

[Eva Kedding]

Eva sat back in her chair, the weight of Altair’s question settling over her like a heavy cloak. What was Bellestorm running from? It wasn’t a question she’d thought to ask before. She’d spent so much of her time focused on what Bellestorm was doing—his rhetoric, his policies, his thinly veiled hostility toward anyone who didn’t fit neatly into his vision of the wizarding world—that she hadn’t stopped to consider what might be driving him.

Her eyes wandered to the rowdy table across the room, where Bellestorm’s supporters were still toasting their victory. The noise had faded into the background, but the energy of it lingered, prickling at the edges of her awareness. What were they running from? What fear had Bellestorm tapped into so effectively that it had swept him into power?

She exhaled slowly, her gaze drifting back to Altair. Once a professor, always a professor. The thought brought a faint smile to her lips, unbidden but not unwelcome. She hadn’t expected to see him tonight—hadn’t expected to need him, either—but here he was, coaxing her thoughts in directions she hadn’t considered. This conversation wasn’t about finding answers, not yet. It was about asking the right questions.

Eva tapped her fingers against her glass, her mind racing. "Change," she said at last, the word soft but deliberate. "He’s running from change. Or maybe… from what change could mean for people like him."

The words hung in the air for a moment, and she turned them over in her mind. Bellestorm’s fear wasn’t just about werewolves or vampires or giants. It wasn’t even about the creatures themselves, not really. It was about what they represented: a challenge to the status quo. A disruption of the old, comfortable order.

She thought about her father, a werewolf who had spent most of his life fighting for the right to exist without fear. About Joey, her sister, who had inherited their father’s lycanthropy and was already learning what it meant to live in a world that viewed her as a threat. She thought about the vampires who had petitioned for safer blood banks, the giants who wanted nothing more than a place to call home, the veelas whose allure was seen as dangerous rather than beautiful.

"Maybe it’s easier," she said slowly, her voice thoughtful, "to pretend the world is simple. That there are clear lines between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Maybe Bellestorm is afraid of what happens if those lines disappear. If people like my dad, my sister… if they’re no longer something to be feared, but something to be understood."

Her words faltered, but the thought remained. What would it mean for someone like Bellestorm to face that kind of change? To see the cracks in his worldview and know that the foundations he’d built his identity on might not hold?

She looked at Altair again, the unspoken question clear in her expression. Could fear alone explain it? Or was there something deeper, something darker, that Bellestorm—and the people cheering his name—were running from?

For a moment, she let the silence stretch between them, the weight of their conversation pressing down like a storm gathering on the horizon. Finally, she leaned forward slightly, her gaze steady.

"If he’s running from change," she said quietly, "then what does that mean for us?"

[Altair]

Patience was not his virtue. Had never been, not as a student, nor as a professor. In case of the latter, it had made him too hard, to angular in his dealings with the students. Rather than build up them he'd used them selfishly as a source to knowledge, to build a case of his own.

That conscience floated through him now, and he let it linger. To feel at the degree to which he tried to assign guilt, and how this was, most of all, directed to himself. There were a couple of ways of interpreting it. He could either read himself as a person that stole the ideas of others. Or he could be more generous, and take into account the degree to which he tried to place them on an equal footing as himself. Because their thoughts and emotions mattered to him.

Like most things, it was hardly ever so clear cut. He did not believe in the blacks and whites. But introspection was useful, sometimes.

"He’s running from change. Or maybe… from what change could mean for people like him."

He could tell that she was thinking, and so, he let her.

What he really needed was input, something new to add to the problems that he had engineered in his mind, a fresh breath of something that could brush against them and topple them over and give way to solutions that he'd previously thought impossible.

However, there was also the fact that he was somewhere between thirty and fourty years her senior. And the ideas of rich, old, white men had a tendency to become rigid, to calcify, stale and settle.

"Maybe it’s easier to pretend the world is simple. That there are clear lines between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Maybe Bellestorm is afraid of what happens if those lines disappear. If people like my dad, my sister… if they’re no longer something to be feared, but something to be understood."

He gave a slow nod in signal that he was following. It was, in part, a wise assessment, but he feared that they were on their way to settling into another old pattern.

Altair made a motion with a hand and his circle reappeared, shimmering against the surface of their table this time.

"I tend to try to flip things on their head," explained, with a mild smile. "To try to understand what's going on in their minds and hearts. So, from that viewpoint, it looks to me like we have two groups that are rooting for what you call change. Now, the way you describe it, one of those is going backwards --"

He gave the circle a spin.

"-- and the other is going forward."

Another gesture, and the circle changed directions.

"Now, this to me looks familiar - what I see is black and white, backwards and forwards, good and bad. If one direction equals us, and the other equals them, how do we move away from the us-them dynamic?"

He made another gesture, and the circle became a ball and, as it took on more and more details it became apparent that it was a tiny sun. Even a few tiny planets appeared circling it, and some of these planets had little moons. They appeared to have taken on a life of their own, going in circles within circles. But he didn't look at them, he was staring at the table surface for a moment, searching for words that would let her know that she did not find her thinking wrong. Simply, that he thought there was much more potential out there to be found.

"What I'm wondering is this: If we are more complicated than that, how will pushing us into the same framework contribute to breaking that cycle?"

Of course, this was also deeply entangled with the matter of emotion, of humanity - that very real, raw thing that defined them.

"But also, what if we imagined that they were as afraid of us as we are of them? Could there be a way to learn to understand why they were afraid? And how could we go about making us into something to be understood rather than to be feared?"

His gaze lingered on her now, a sheen of silver in one eye.

[Eva Kedding]

Eva’s eyes followed the shifting pattern of light and shadow Altair's circle cast onto the table. His words stirred something inside her - something deeper than her frustration with Wizarding Britain; something she hadn't allowed herself to consider before.

An "us vs. them" dynamic was easy to grasp. It really was light and dark, black and white. Bellestorm's rhetoric seemed to rely on it, pushing division, fear, and superiority. However simple these ideals were, they could also be its flaw. People were so much more than lines drawn between "us" and "them." Eva had spent years resisting that very separation, fighting for those who didn't fit into the boxes the world tried to shove them into.

Altair's question still lingered: How could they move away from that divide? How do you get people to see beyond the fear of things they don't understand?

Unfortunately, there wasn't a simple answer. The fear of the unknown is often ingrained - taught from childhood and reinforced by those who don't want change to happen. But what if the answer wasn't just about overcoming fear? What if the answer was about inviting people into a new space - a space where fear didn't have to rule them?

"What if fear itself is the problem?" she spoke quietly, more to herself than Altair (though she knew not much got by him). "What if we could show them that what they fear isn't as dangerous as they think, but only a shadow cast by their own doubts?"

She paused. She considered her own experience, how members of her family were (and continue to be) treated as outcasts, made out to be demons for something they couldn't control. How many others were in that same position, struggling to survive in a world that had already determined their place in it? She knew the challenge wasn't just about making them seen and heard; it was getting those in power to listen without judgment, and without automatically shutting them down.

Could it be done? Could you open the hearts of those who were comfortable in their way of thinking, their ignorance, their fear? It seemed like an impossible task, but she had seen it happen before - small shifts in perspective that happened when people allowed themselves to actually listen. To see the humanity in others would allow them to be viewed as equals, not threats. However, that was the difficult part. It required patience and empathy - qualities often lacking in those who felt they had things to protect.

Back to Altair's challenge. He wasn't pressing her for answers, but Eva understood what he was trying to do. He was pushing her to explore this for herself, to make connections between the complex emotions of fear, change, and understanding. She knew better than to think that he was looking for a simple solution; he wanted her to see the larger picture.

She met his gaze again, and in his silver-tinged eye, she saw something familiar - an unspoken idea of the struggle they both faced. Perhaps this was the true lesson: not to solve the problems of the world in a single conversation, but to begin to see them differently. To understand the layers of complexities that lie below the surface of every person's fears.

Continuing her earlier musings, she spoke again - louder this time. "It's about opening hearts, I think. Letting people feel safe enough to listen, to understand. To do so without judgment and without the need to protect their own beliefs so fiercely."

Her words trailed off, unsure if this was the direction he was trying to lead her. She wasn't even sure that she had answered Altair's question completely, or even at all. However, she felt that she was beginning to understand the kind of change that was possible—one that didn't only challenge the old ways of thinking but changed the way people saw each other in the first place.

"Anyhow, I think that's a place to begin," she finally said, with some confidence. "Showing them that the other side isn't a threat. That what they are really afraid of is a story, a rhetoric, that they've been told."