Patchwork Hearts (PG-13)
Title: Patchwork Hearts
Author: Lady Altair
Rating: PG-13
Summary: What wonder can be worked with needle and thread?
Hestia refuses to touch Megan's body. All around her, bereaved fathers and wives and friends run hands over loved ones' still faces, comb fingers through hair, clutch bodies to their chests. Hestia only sits, her fingers curled into her palms and hands pulled against her chest, beside her daughter, refusing to touch.
She knows her own mind too well, knows that one touch will wipe the memory of Megan's warmth from her fingertips and she'll spend the rest of her life remembering now, remembering cool flesh and utter stillness instead of her warm, living daughter.
All around her people cry, and she hears it once, maybe more: she could be sleeping. And maybe someone might think that of Megan, but Hestia is her mother. She knows Megan's face so well and even in sleep, her face was never so slack, so motionless. Megan has smiled in her sleep since infancy, turned into Hestia's hand when she brushed it across her cheek, sneaking into her bedroom through the years in the middle of the night when she felt alone.
Megan is not sleeping. She won't turn into Hestia's hand if she should brush the hair limp across her face. Her face is white, not the warm pink that always crept up her cheeks in sleep, the only trace of herself Hestia has ever found in Megan, her father's daughter in every facet - the regrettable inclination to go vividly pink with heat, embarrassment, exertion, sleep, anger, frustration...life itself had flushed her pink. And now Megan is cold, pallid, flatwinterdeadsnow white.
Her hands cramp and her forearms ache from the clenching, but Hestia sits, alone in the muted fury of the Great Hall after the battle, touching no one.
***
"I want this office," Alasdair Diggory tells her as both of them are on their backs on the floor, staring at the ceiling, the one part of the room that isn't a disaster of the highest order. Hestia had gone down first - merely looked around the room with the broken indifference that's been her face for days, sat down on the papered floor and lain back without a word. And Alasdair had followed, perhaps not as broken, but overcome just the same.
Parchment carpets the floor, books have been ripped from their places and some even from their very bindings - the Death Eaters clearly had not had much interest in the Department of Magical Law during their occupation of the Ministry.
It's the first venture back into the once-familiar territory since Scrimgeour booted her from her job after she'd pushed Albus Dumbledore's will through the system and forced the Minister's hand into distributing the bequests as written. In other times, the dismissal would've surely been contestable - obeying the Minister's wishes was not a Juriswitch's prerogative, but at the time, Hestia couldn't be bothered to fight. There had been more important matters to attend.
And Hestia is only here because every moment at home is another moment she has to remember that Megan is dead and Sturgis is unconscious in St. Mungo's and will probably never wake. Her baby is in the ground and her best friend is gone and Hestia Jones is truly, utterly alone for the first time in thirty years. So she doesn't say a word.
"Well, no fun if you don't fight me for it. You can have it," Alasdair whispers a few moments later.
After another few minutes pass, he reaches for her hand, takes it. She lets him, but she's so absolutely empty that she doesn't know why her skin doesn't just flatten to the ground, and so her hand remains limp in his. Hestia can't even summon up the energy to turn her eyes away from the ceiling to look at him.
She's at ninety-one and still she's wondering when she's going to stop counting her life past Megan's death in hours.
Alasdair stays with her in her new office until ninety-seven.
***
The Order of the Phoenix is now composed almost entirely of redheads.
Hestia remembers very little of the vast memorial service except that and the weight of three Order of Merlin, Second Class medals in her hands. Sturgis', Caradoc's, and finally her own. It's supposed to mean something, but it's nothing but weight.
She feels almost a stranger in her own land; the Order of the Phoenix has moved and changed and died all around her until what's left are so many children with shattered-glass eyes and oceans of Weasley red hair.
She sits with Minerva, Dedalus, Aberforth, and Hagrid, each of them burdened down with Orders of Merlin for long-fallen Phoenixes, their sacrifices finally truly honored. Hagrid makes some noise about a private grave-laying after the memorial, a procession through the half-dozen or so cemeteries scattered throughout the country where their honored friends lie, but all Hestia can hear is the sound of too many medals in his lap clinking against each other like musical little death knells, can only see the five of them sitting here, when once there were so many more. She excuses herself from the foundations of their planning, though, whispering something about visiting Sturgis in St. Mungo's to deliver his Order of Merlin. Hagrid sweeps her up in a hug when she goes, doing his best to be gentle with 'bitty little Hestia' though her feet still dangle a good ten inches off the ground, and Minerva graces her with an embrace, warm despite the hard sharpness of her frame.
She hopes none of them begrudge her absence. Caradoc hasn't really got a grave, anyway, just the blank half of a double headstone he'd meant to share with his first wife. No body, no burial, and Hestia could never bring herself to take a wand to that marble, consign her hope to an empty grave next to another woman and a headstone inscribed with an uncertain date.
In the end, she buries Megan Caron Dearborn - it's only in death that Hestia can finally give Megan her father's name, the name she deserved - with Caradoc's medal in her pocket, under a pink granite headstone in the plot beside Anna Rowe Dearborn, annwyl wraig.
Now, after all these long years, Hestia finally finds it in her heart to mark up the white marble. Caradoc Llweyln Dearborn, she charms into the stone, coffadwriaeth y cyfiawn sydd fendigai.
She doesn't space it very well, half the stone still white and blank. Laying there, in the fair May sunshine, she has some despair-fueled idea of carving her own name under Caradoc's and burying herself in the empty earth. She can't count the times she sat here, in early days after Caradoc had gone, staring at the blank stone and thinking so darkly.
But Megan isn't here to cry at the winter cold and need her mama, and Sturgis isn't coming around to drag her home and frogmarch her down the hard paths. So she lies in the early summer sun and wishes it would rain, wishes she would drown.
***
Diggory never lets her skive off work - the first day she'd tried he'd shown up a little after ten, dragged her out of bed and into chambers, and he's been on her back about it since. He's always in her kitchen waiting for her on the mornings she manages to drag herself out of bed of her own volition, with tea and a blueberry muffin from the coffee shop around the corner from his posh single bedroom Kensington flat. On the worse days, he's up in her bedroom, forcibly removing her from her bed, turning on her shower, shoving her in the bathroom and barking orders through the door she can't help but follow, even though technically she's the one in charge in this twosome.
Nominally, she's Minister's Counsel and in charge of the DML. In truth, Alasdair handles the cleanup of the ransacked offices and the reestablishment of the justice system in all matters civil and criminal while Hestia sits in her newly renovated office constantly painting her fingernails to keep from pulling out her hair - though she's distraught enough to pull hair from her head until she's getting patches, she's still got enough of an autopilot to keep her hands away from herself if there's wet paint on her nails. It was actually Alasdair's idea. He's been entirely surprising like that.
That Diggory isn't raising holy hell over her position and his own subordinate one, banging on doors shouting to anyone who will listen that the Minister Shacklebolt appointed her out of Phoenix-favoritism, is rather shocking. Instead he carries on, ruthlessly efficient, sitting on the less desirable side of the desk, the less prestigious chair, and runs everything by her, signing and reviewing and ruling the DML in her name.
He looks the part, more than her, really. She's still short and pink-cheeked, looking more the secretary than the superior. He might not be much taller, but he's got the greyed, sharp, shark-eyed look about him that one expects from Minister's Counsel. And he's the one doing the job - it really isn't very fair.
"I could," she begins, her hands splayed on a scrap bit of parchment as the cherry red dries on her fingernails, but her throat is hoarse as if from disuse and she coughs. It feels as though there's a thousand years of dust and dead flies rattling in her lungs. "I could talk to Kingsley, you deserve this. You've been doing it anyway, I'm not much use."
Alasdair looks up - he's been signing her name to sheaves of work orders for some of the more damaged offices in the apprentice hallway. And then looks back down, dismissing her. "Don't be stupid, Jones. What are you going to do if you don't show up here every morning?"
Hestia's hands go to her hair, thoughts rising, of going back to Caradoc's house, where Megan's room is still as she left it, or to Sturgis' hospital room, where he's laying there, silent and fading. Helpless, desperate misery snakes through her limbs….and Alasdair's inkstained hands are on hers, pulling them from her hair, pressing them back to the desk.
He sets another pot of nail varnish on the desk. "I like the pink on you." He manages to sound almost complimentary, thinly enameled over annoyance. She doesn't make a move, a little stunned by him, so he shakes his head, scowling, before picking up the little bottle and clumsily splashing polish on her nails for her. He turns back to the work orders.
"Let's not both of us be balding, Jones. Keep your hands out of your fucking hair."
***
She's been refusing dinner invitations to the Burrow for weeks, but Alasdair's finally got sick of shoveling takeaway or his own wretched attempts at cooking down her throat and all but pushes her into the Floo. Someone catches her on the other side and props her up in a chair, where Hestia sits like misplaced baggage.
Some of Megan's friends come up and reach out hands in shared grief, calling her Mrs. Jones in a way that always makes her look to her left ring finger as she pats their offered hands and appropriate words come out of her mouth.
Funny, that - always dreamed of a frilly, flowery wedding when she was younger, wished she'd had the ease of calling Caradoc 'my late husband' instead of 'Megan's late father' when she'd grown old enough to be practical. She's never really noticed that she's on the far side of forty now and never had anything of the sort, still carries the name of a family she no longer considers her own. Somewhere along the line she'd stopped daydreaming of her day and looked to Megan's instead. Another dead dream, now.
There are tears running down her face as she idly smiles at Hannah Abbott and pats her hand, mouthing the same words she's used to shoo off the rest of Megan's friends. Hestia doesn't notice.
After that, most everyone leaves her well enough alone. Despair is catching in this crowd, and no one wants to sit too close, except for Andromeda Tonks. She installs herself on the settee next to her, just as wordless, and hands over her grandson for Hestia to hold for a bit. She closes her eyes and presses her face to Teddy Lupin's head and pretends she's twenty-four again, clutching Megan like the lifeline she is amidst an ocean of misery, pretending she knows she has something to live for.
When she hands the baby back to Andromeda, they exchange matching ripped-up smiles.
Hannah Abbott finds her again at the tail end of the party to say goodbye and, impulsively, Hestia draws her in and hugs her tightly. Hannah looks nothing like Megan, the fit of her body against Hannah's similarly short form is nothing like the feeling of hugging tall, sturdy Megan, but when Hestia is hugging her daughter's best friend, she can pretend it's just another summer visit come to an end, and soon Megan will saunter back into the kitchen and Hestia will have her daughter all to herself again, cups of tea across the counter and no more sharing with friends.
A rush of painful feelings course through her, and Hestia has to make her quiet goodbyes to Molly Weasley through a constricted throat. She goes home and sobs through the rest of the day and night, furious and desperate and yet strangely relieved she can finally cry, finally feel something. Even this pain is better than the horrible, empty nothing that's been eating her up since Megan's death.
She owls Hannah an invitation to Sunday tea. She can't begin to imagine what they'll talk about, but she doesn't want to be alone anymore.
****
Sturgis Podmore dies on a Tuesday morning.
The Healers leave them alone at the very end and Hestia crawls into the narrow bed to keep him company to the last. All the nights they've spent curled up together - he's always been her constant, steady horizon, in good times and bad.
Soul mates, Hestia thinks wistfully, pushing her face into Sturgis' chest and smiling a little. And they are, in a way that no one ever really understood; closer than kin, thicker than blood, a love uncomplicated by attraction or lust.
It was unselfish love and, in some ways, Sturgis' loss hurts more than Caradoc's ever did. She counts Caradoc's time in months, Sturgis' in decades - the love of her life, truly. She's never had to live without him, and learning how these past weeks has been a bitter winter in June.
A chubby little girl and a thatch-haired boy met on a train platform. They part ways in a quiet hospital ward in the darkest hours of a midweek morning.
"Always running ahead," Hestia whispers when the struggling rise and fall of Sturgis' chest has finally ceased and the last Phoenix has burned away in the flames of the war. She smoothes his ever-unruly mop of hair away from his worn face, kisses the lines on his brow. "I think I've missed this train, you best be waiting for me at the other platform."
When she cries for him, it's relief, because what's hurting so badly is love, filling up her chest where there was emptiness, thawing her heart where it was ice, and for the first time in so long she is grateful. She may have lost, but it is only because she has been blessed with so many beautiful, valuable gifts in her life, so much worth grieving.
And they're not gone. Laying there with Sturgis as he dies, she never feels him leave. He's there, brighter than before, unravaged by war and by Azkaban, the child she met on the platform once more. She only need close her eyes to see.
****
Now, more than ever, Hestia wants to live.
She digs out all her beautiful clothing from the back of her closet, her high heels and rainbow robes, tailors everything back to her figure and shocks Alasdair into speechlessness when he lets himself in on Wednesday morning to find her making him breakfast in robes pinstriped with cherry red and patent heels to match.
"Thank you," she says firmly, sitting him down to a proper English breakfast on the neatly-set table.
"For?" he prompts, looking at the meal like he suspects she's about to off herself by poisoned marmalade and is bent on taking him with her.
"For being your prickly bastard self and not letting me wallow in grief and rip my own hair out of my head. And for doing my job."
"Are you all right, Hestia?" he asks, uncharacteristically gentle, as she sits down across from him. "I-" he hesitates, reaches out to touch her hand. "I heard Sturgis died yesterday." He clearly wasn't expecting to find her up, eager for the day.
Her face wilts a little, but she tacks up a side of her mouth into something like a smile and takes his hand. "He did. I think it helped me, though, helped me realize."
There's more than a little alarm on Diggory's face as he looks from her pristinely dressed form to the suspect breakfast on the table. "Realize what, exactly?"
And Hestia laughs, light bubbling up through the weight in her chest, foreign and lovely. "It's not poison, Alasdair, I'm not trying to kill you…or myself. I realized…I want to live. I had such wonder in my life, loved so many good people…and I can love more, and be happy, even though..." she trailed off, some of the sparkle dying down a little. "I can't have the life I wanted, but… I had so much ripped away before and I built something beautiful anyway. And I think I can do it again. I want to try."
There's a long silence before Alasdair nods his head slowly up and down a few times. "Well…in that case, you've over fried the eggs."
Hestia swats at his hand and leans back into her chair, sipping her tea, smiling somewhere behind the rim.
Not only does Alasdair gracefully hand back the control of the DML, he teaches her how to rule, teaches her to hide his own brand of steel behind her lacework and enamel. He's really far too good at the job, so Hestia goes to Kingsley and has Alasdair officially appointed as Minister's Co-Counsel.
"So you'll take the promotion now?" Hestia asks, rolling her eyes.
"Of course, now that you're not pulling your hair out by the root and making me wonder if I ought to empty your knife drawer and confiscate your wand. I was quite certain you were trying to hand off the responsibility to me so you could go home and off yourself with a minimum of inconvenience to the Department. It's not that I didn't want the job." He scratches the back of his neck with his wand, smirking at her. "I've no problem accepting now that you've got your head bolted on straight. Does this mean I get to order you around?"
"You're my peer, not my superior," Hestia informs him primly, straightening her hair and tilting her chin up at him. "We're co-counsel - I didn't give up my job, I just got you a promotion."
"Pity." Alasdair kicks his feet up on the desk. "I had some good ones."
"Gratitude is simply oozing off you, Diggory, no need to overwhelm me with thanks." Hestia picks up one of the case files on his desk, flipping through the sheaves of parchment idly. They sit in companionable silence, engrossed in their own work on either side of Alasdair's monstrously pretentious mahogany desk.
***
The Sunday teas start with just Hannah Abbott, but they don't stay small for long. Two Sundays after the first, Hannah shows up with another girl in her year who lost both her parents to the war, too, introduces her as Lavender Brown and sits her down at the table as Hestia scrambles for another of the good china teacups Caradoc's mother left to her.
The next Sunday a Hufflepuff in her early teens joins them, one of Hannah's cousins, and the next brings Neville Longbottom, his hand firmly held in Lavender's and a whisper of jealousy on Hannah's face. More follow on subsequent Sundays, invitations branching out until they can't fit at even a magically expanded table and Hestia forgoes the sit-down tea and just throws open the doors, puts out food and chairs and lets her guests wander as they will.
Hestia invites Andromeda, toting along Teddy, who is the smash hit of the afternoon, passed around amongst the attendees until he's exhausted and cranky. Hestia bites down on the pain long enough to show Andromeda to the half-painted nursery she's kept locked up all these years, Caradoc's interrupted work of love for an unborn Megan, fitted out with an unused cot under a dust sheet.
And the two women stand there over Teddy as he whuffles softly in sleep, both of them thinking of other babies, daughters raised and loved and lost, of fathers taken too soon, of their families standing on some distant platform, patiently waiting. And then they turn back to those downstairs, daughters without mothers, sons without fathers, sisters without brothers and from the tattered scraps, beautiful patchwork wholes are slowly stitched back together.
***
The year's tax assessment makes Hestia's hair curl. After the initial choking at the numbers inked neatly onto the Ministry embossed parchment, she sets the letter aside, sits down at the desk in her house and begins the long process of cleaning up her estate.
She's had legal title to Caradoc's property almost ten years now, but in the past few maelstrom months she's had his parents' estate to administer (for Megan, initially, but it's all come back to her now) and now all Sturgis' property, as well. She's been dragging her feet on dealing with it, all of the Gringotts letters piling up in one of the letter cubbies. But the simple fact is that she can't afford the tax on all the properties. Sturgis' accounts should cover this year's bill, but she can't hold on to a handful of empty houses.
Four deeds - Caradoc's countryside cottage outside Caerphilly, his parents' terrace house in Beaumaris, Sturgis' family house in Kent and his own flat in Clapham. Hestia dimly remembers earlier days, easier days, the first tiny flat she'd shared with Sturgis, hemming robes and taking measurements at Madame Malkin's to pay the rent during her apprenticeship; some other lifetime.
She sells everything but the cottage - she offers that up for rent fully furnished, packs up her things into a freshly renovated house in Primrose Hill she buys with the proceeds from the other property. The walls are white and clean, wooden floors resurfaced, and everything smells of plaster. A new clean slate, not haunted by echoes of other lives.
Hestia paints her new kitchen sunny yellow, the same cheery shade Caradoc had chosen for Megan's nursery and left half-painted when he'd disappeared. It's beautiful finished, with floral print china and ruffled white curtains and ever-blooming lilac bushes outside the window. It's the gentle sort of memory she needs, nostalgia without the bite of the stolen dreams that shadow every corner in Caradoc's pretty little house in Wales. And, for the first time, it's something she's made, chosen, done for herself, not something inherited, shared, compromised on. The china is impractical and matches nothing, the new cream sofas are going to show dirt and Sturgis would have hated the lavender color she's painted the foyer and none of it matters because Hestia likes it.
And mostly she'd trade her lovely little house for five minutes of her family back, and some days it makes her jaw ache to look around her house and see only herself in the furnishing, but sometimes it's almost fun to be so selfish, a small compensatory luxury.
On the first autumn nights she spends in the house, she throws open the French doors and sits at her new kitchen table with a book she's not reading and tea she's not drinking and, for the first time in years, Hestia remembers what peace feels like.
***
Charlie Weasley has been speaking to her in The Maen-Llywd for a good five minutes before Hestia realizes two things; that he's not got the faintest idea who she is, for one, and that he's trying to chat her up, for another.
The Maen-Llywd Inn had been Caradoc's favored local; Muggle, but loyally patronized by a few Catapult fans and players on occasion. She'd been in town, showing out the cottage to a young couple, glowing and thrilled over the shining new wedding bands on their left hands and the prospect of playing house. The sight of the two of them in her and Caradoc's little country home, dreaming and planning, was a bittersweet burn at her eyelids that had settled into a firm desire for a drink and distraction.
She'd been sitting alone at the bar over her first Bulmer's when the flesh-and-blood ghost of Gideon Prewett appeared at her side and shocked her out of her skin. She'd nearly upset herself out of her chair, but managed to catch herself on the lip of the bar and she'd thought at the time that the hand Charlie brought to her waist to steady her was simple friendliness. "Sorry," she'd smiled sheepishly, calming her nerves with a healthy swig of cider. "Startled me a bit."
He didn't introduce himself or ask her name, which lulled her into the false sense that Charlie knew who she was. He'd apologized for startling her, and then asked her what brought her out this evening. It had been a fairly commonplace conversation, with Hestia explaining her new responsibilities as landlady (leaving out all the overly familiar details that had driven her to the drink, of course), easily mistaken as suitable for the peripheral acquaintances they were - they'd met, once or twice, briefly, in the Burrow or Grimmauld, though, were it not for his unmistakably Prewett looks and Arthur's gentle blue eyes, Hestia might have been in the same boat as he.
It's not until he leans in with a roguish smile that is far more Fabian than Gideon and expresses his wishes that his landlady were as lovely as she is that Hestia finally realizes they're not reading off the same script and her mouth falls open.
Hestia breaks into a fit of absurd giggles, like the schoolgirl she hasn't been in nearly thirty years, covering her mouth with her hand. "You can't possibly be flirting with me!"
His grin clearly speaks otherwise. "And why is that?"
"Charlie Weasley! Stop that this instant!"
And now it's his turn to be shocked, because he's looking at her with new eyes…and still clearly drawing a blank. "How do you…we've met?" He doesn't go red like she imagined he would, though perhaps he's shameless enough to escape any sort of embarrassment.
"Momentarily introduced, at the least, I'd imagine," she informs him, emptying the dregs of the Bulmer's bottle into her half-full pint glass, breathing through the last tide of giggles. "Mutual acquaintances. Like Albus Dumbledore. And your mother." She raises an eyebrow in implication, and he raises his, finally, in understanding. "Hestia Jones, Minister's Counsel, formerly of the Order of the Phoenix." She sticks out her hand, which he takes, still searching her face for familiarity. "So, Mr. Weasley, what brings you out this evening?"
He hasn't his younger brother's taste for underdogs, apparently - jerks a thumb back at a table of lads dressed in Catapults colors, all of them clearly watching the interaction with a dedicated interest. "Old Gryffindor teammate flies for Caerphilly, went to watch a match. We all decided you were by far the prettiest bird in the place, and none of them had the bollocks to do anything about it."
"If you've a taste for plump old hens, I imagine," Hestia says cheerfully, holding her drink up in toast.
Charlie grins back amiably, clinking his pint with hers and holding her gaze in a proper salut. After taking a sip, he leans in, the grin on his face subtly but most markedly changed. "You're hardly a plump old hen, little bird."
A tiny memory replays in her head, of Molly Weasley at the battle, her wand raised and maternal, protective fury on her face, except it's Hestia herself standing at wand's end, and the words are wrong: not my son, you bitch.
***
On Megan's nineteenth birthday, Hannah comes to tea. It ends in tears, but Hestia and Hannah don't spend it lonely. Hannah falls asleep on the sofa, tears and wine and the advancing hour weighting her eyelids. Hestia puts her up in one of the spare bedrooms that night, gives her a key in the morning, and things sort of go from there until it's not just her house any longer, there are footsteps on the floor and voices in the air and someone to come home to in the evenings.
It's easy to fall back to being a mother, and Hannah doesn't seem to mind.
***
Every week, Hestia intends to frame another photograph and hang it in her office. From all the years of her life, all of her loves framed in silver and gold and wood and porcelain on the walls of her office tucked so close to each other that, someday, there won't be any wall left, just Megan and Caradoc and Sturgis and Hannah and Molly and Arthur and Dedalus and Charlie and Dorcas and Andromeda and Edgar and Sirius and Teddy and Alasdair and Nymphadora and Anne and Ivor and Alice and Remus and, and, and…one happy memory every week, hung up on her wall.
She starts with two, simple and beautiful, her starting scrap and her first patchwork family, two photographs framed on the wall behind her desk.
The first is from Caradoc's thirty-seventh birthday, his last, the two of them in his parents' kitchen, Caradoc holding his mum-baked, candle-crowded birthday cake up for the camera, Hestia perched beside him on the laminate countertop, hands braced against the lip of countertop, head tilted against his shoulder, candle-lit grins on the both of them and Hestia's stomach showing just the slightest swell of pregnancy. A perfectly still Muggle photograph, the only one she has of her first family, she and Caradoc and Megan, almost together for one frozen, golden-lit moment.
The second is framed in silver, and this one moves - the waves of the Brighton shore roll in and out, blue against the blonde of the sand, silent wind whips against them. She stands with Sturgis, her arm tossed around his waist, Megan held against his chest, grabby toddler hands balled up in his t-shirt. The first family she'd stitched back up from tatters, eighteen years of her life made whole and happy.
They're more bitter than sweet still, a pinprick of remembered loss to her heart, but someday all they'll be is beautiful.
Author: Lady Altair
Rating: PG-13
Summary: What wonder can be worked with needle and thread?
Hestia refuses to touch Megan's body. All around her, bereaved fathers and wives and friends run hands over loved ones' still faces, comb fingers through hair, clutch bodies to their chests. Hestia only sits, her fingers curled into her palms and hands pulled against her chest, beside her daughter, refusing to touch.
She knows her own mind too well, knows that one touch will wipe the memory of Megan's warmth from her fingertips and she'll spend the rest of her life remembering now, remembering cool flesh and utter stillness instead of her warm, living daughter.
All around her people cry, and she hears it once, maybe more: she could be sleeping. And maybe someone might think that of Megan, but Hestia is her mother. She knows Megan's face so well and even in sleep, her face was never so slack, so motionless. Megan has smiled in her sleep since infancy, turned into Hestia's hand when she brushed it across her cheek, sneaking into her bedroom through the years in the middle of the night when she felt alone.
Megan is not sleeping. She won't turn into Hestia's hand if she should brush the hair limp across her face. Her face is white, not the warm pink that always crept up her cheeks in sleep, the only trace of herself Hestia has ever found in Megan, her father's daughter in every facet - the regrettable inclination to go vividly pink with heat, embarrassment, exertion, sleep, anger, frustration...life itself had flushed her pink. And now Megan is cold, pallid, flatwinterdeadsnow white.
Her hands cramp and her forearms ache from the clenching, but Hestia sits, alone in the muted fury of the Great Hall after the battle, touching no one.
***
"I want this office," Alasdair Diggory tells her as both of them are on their backs on the floor, staring at the ceiling, the one part of the room that isn't a disaster of the highest order. Hestia had gone down first - merely looked around the room with the broken indifference that's been her face for days, sat down on the papered floor and lain back without a word. And Alasdair had followed, perhaps not as broken, but overcome just the same.
Parchment carpets the floor, books have been ripped from their places and some even from their very bindings - the Death Eaters clearly had not had much interest in the Department of Magical Law during their occupation of the Ministry.
It's the first venture back into the once-familiar territory since Scrimgeour booted her from her job after she'd pushed Albus Dumbledore's will through the system and forced the Minister's hand into distributing the bequests as written. In other times, the dismissal would've surely been contestable - obeying the Minister's wishes was not a Juriswitch's prerogative, but at the time, Hestia couldn't be bothered to fight. There had been more important matters to attend.
And Hestia is only here because every moment at home is another moment she has to remember that Megan is dead and Sturgis is unconscious in St. Mungo's and will probably never wake. Her baby is in the ground and her best friend is gone and Hestia Jones is truly, utterly alone for the first time in thirty years. So she doesn't say a word.
"Well, no fun if you don't fight me for it. You can have it," Alasdair whispers a few moments later.
After another few minutes pass, he reaches for her hand, takes it. She lets him, but she's so absolutely empty that she doesn't know why her skin doesn't just flatten to the ground, and so her hand remains limp in his. Hestia can't even summon up the energy to turn her eyes away from the ceiling to look at him.
She's at ninety-one and still she's wondering when she's going to stop counting her life past Megan's death in hours.
Alasdair stays with her in her new office until ninety-seven.
***
The Order of the Phoenix is now composed almost entirely of redheads.
Hestia remembers very little of the vast memorial service except that and the weight of three Order of Merlin, Second Class medals in her hands. Sturgis', Caradoc's, and finally her own. It's supposed to mean something, but it's nothing but weight.
She feels almost a stranger in her own land; the Order of the Phoenix has moved and changed and died all around her until what's left are so many children with shattered-glass eyes and oceans of Weasley red hair.
She sits with Minerva, Dedalus, Aberforth, and Hagrid, each of them burdened down with Orders of Merlin for long-fallen Phoenixes, their sacrifices finally truly honored. Hagrid makes some noise about a private grave-laying after the memorial, a procession through the half-dozen or so cemeteries scattered throughout the country where their honored friends lie, but all Hestia can hear is the sound of too many medals in his lap clinking against each other like musical little death knells, can only see the five of them sitting here, when once there were so many more. She excuses herself from the foundations of their planning, though, whispering something about visiting Sturgis in St. Mungo's to deliver his Order of Merlin. Hagrid sweeps her up in a hug when she goes, doing his best to be gentle with 'bitty little Hestia' though her feet still dangle a good ten inches off the ground, and Minerva graces her with an embrace, warm despite the hard sharpness of her frame.
She hopes none of them begrudge her absence. Caradoc hasn't really got a grave, anyway, just the blank half of a double headstone he'd meant to share with his first wife. No body, no burial, and Hestia could never bring herself to take a wand to that marble, consign her hope to an empty grave next to another woman and a headstone inscribed with an uncertain date.
In the end, she buries Megan Caron Dearborn - it's only in death that Hestia can finally give Megan her father's name, the name she deserved - with Caradoc's medal in her pocket, under a pink granite headstone in the plot beside Anna Rowe Dearborn, annwyl wraig.
Now, after all these long years, Hestia finally finds it in her heart to mark up the white marble. Caradoc Llweyln Dearborn, she charms into the stone, coffadwriaeth y cyfiawn sydd fendigai.
She doesn't space it very well, half the stone still white and blank. Laying there, in the fair May sunshine, she has some despair-fueled idea of carving her own name under Caradoc's and burying herself in the empty earth. She can't count the times she sat here, in early days after Caradoc had gone, staring at the blank stone and thinking so darkly.
But Megan isn't here to cry at the winter cold and need her mama, and Sturgis isn't coming around to drag her home and frogmarch her down the hard paths. So she lies in the early summer sun and wishes it would rain, wishes she would drown.
***
Diggory never lets her skive off work - the first day she'd tried he'd shown up a little after ten, dragged her out of bed and into chambers, and he's been on her back about it since. He's always in her kitchen waiting for her on the mornings she manages to drag herself out of bed of her own volition, with tea and a blueberry muffin from the coffee shop around the corner from his posh single bedroom Kensington flat. On the worse days, he's up in her bedroom, forcibly removing her from her bed, turning on her shower, shoving her in the bathroom and barking orders through the door she can't help but follow, even though technically she's the one in charge in this twosome.
Nominally, she's Minister's Counsel and in charge of the DML. In truth, Alasdair handles the cleanup of the ransacked offices and the reestablishment of the justice system in all matters civil and criminal while Hestia sits in her newly renovated office constantly painting her fingernails to keep from pulling out her hair - though she's distraught enough to pull hair from her head until she's getting patches, she's still got enough of an autopilot to keep her hands away from herself if there's wet paint on her nails. It was actually Alasdair's idea. He's been entirely surprising like that.
That Diggory isn't raising holy hell over her position and his own subordinate one, banging on doors shouting to anyone who will listen that the Minister Shacklebolt appointed her out of Phoenix-favoritism, is rather shocking. Instead he carries on, ruthlessly efficient, sitting on the less desirable side of the desk, the less prestigious chair, and runs everything by her, signing and reviewing and ruling the DML in her name.
He looks the part, more than her, really. She's still short and pink-cheeked, looking more the secretary than the superior. He might not be much taller, but he's got the greyed, sharp, shark-eyed look about him that one expects from Minister's Counsel. And he's the one doing the job - it really isn't very fair.
"I could," she begins, her hands splayed on a scrap bit of parchment as the cherry red dries on her fingernails, but her throat is hoarse as if from disuse and she coughs. It feels as though there's a thousand years of dust and dead flies rattling in her lungs. "I could talk to Kingsley, you deserve this. You've been doing it anyway, I'm not much use."
Alasdair looks up - he's been signing her name to sheaves of work orders for some of the more damaged offices in the apprentice hallway. And then looks back down, dismissing her. "Don't be stupid, Jones. What are you going to do if you don't show up here every morning?"
Hestia's hands go to her hair, thoughts rising, of going back to Caradoc's house, where Megan's room is still as she left it, or to Sturgis' hospital room, where he's laying there, silent and fading. Helpless, desperate misery snakes through her limbs….and Alasdair's inkstained hands are on hers, pulling them from her hair, pressing them back to the desk.
He sets another pot of nail varnish on the desk. "I like the pink on you." He manages to sound almost complimentary, thinly enameled over annoyance. She doesn't make a move, a little stunned by him, so he shakes his head, scowling, before picking up the little bottle and clumsily splashing polish on her nails for her. He turns back to the work orders.
"Let's not both of us be balding, Jones. Keep your hands out of your fucking hair."
***
She's been refusing dinner invitations to the Burrow for weeks, but Alasdair's finally got sick of shoveling takeaway or his own wretched attempts at cooking down her throat and all but pushes her into the Floo. Someone catches her on the other side and props her up in a chair, where Hestia sits like misplaced baggage.
Some of Megan's friends come up and reach out hands in shared grief, calling her Mrs. Jones in a way that always makes her look to her left ring finger as she pats their offered hands and appropriate words come out of her mouth.
Funny, that - always dreamed of a frilly, flowery wedding when she was younger, wished she'd had the ease of calling Caradoc 'my late husband' instead of 'Megan's late father' when she'd grown old enough to be practical. She's never really noticed that she's on the far side of forty now and never had anything of the sort, still carries the name of a family she no longer considers her own. Somewhere along the line she'd stopped daydreaming of her day and looked to Megan's instead. Another dead dream, now.
There are tears running down her face as she idly smiles at Hannah Abbott and pats her hand, mouthing the same words she's used to shoo off the rest of Megan's friends. Hestia doesn't notice.
After that, most everyone leaves her well enough alone. Despair is catching in this crowd, and no one wants to sit too close, except for Andromeda Tonks. She installs herself on the settee next to her, just as wordless, and hands over her grandson for Hestia to hold for a bit. She closes her eyes and presses her face to Teddy Lupin's head and pretends she's twenty-four again, clutching Megan like the lifeline she is amidst an ocean of misery, pretending she knows she has something to live for.
When she hands the baby back to Andromeda, they exchange matching ripped-up smiles.
Hannah Abbott finds her again at the tail end of the party to say goodbye and, impulsively, Hestia draws her in and hugs her tightly. Hannah looks nothing like Megan, the fit of her body against Hannah's similarly short form is nothing like the feeling of hugging tall, sturdy Megan, but when Hestia is hugging her daughter's best friend, she can pretend it's just another summer visit come to an end, and soon Megan will saunter back into the kitchen and Hestia will have her daughter all to herself again, cups of tea across the counter and no more sharing with friends.
A rush of painful feelings course through her, and Hestia has to make her quiet goodbyes to Molly Weasley through a constricted throat. She goes home and sobs through the rest of the day and night, furious and desperate and yet strangely relieved she can finally cry, finally feel something. Even this pain is better than the horrible, empty nothing that's been eating her up since Megan's death.
She owls Hannah an invitation to Sunday tea. She can't begin to imagine what they'll talk about, but she doesn't want to be alone anymore.
****
Sturgis Podmore dies on a Tuesday morning.
The Healers leave them alone at the very end and Hestia crawls into the narrow bed to keep him company to the last. All the nights they've spent curled up together - he's always been her constant, steady horizon, in good times and bad.
Soul mates, Hestia thinks wistfully, pushing her face into Sturgis' chest and smiling a little. And they are, in a way that no one ever really understood; closer than kin, thicker than blood, a love uncomplicated by attraction or lust.
It was unselfish love and, in some ways, Sturgis' loss hurts more than Caradoc's ever did. She counts Caradoc's time in months, Sturgis' in decades - the love of her life, truly. She's never had to live without him, and learning how these past weeks has been a bitter winter in June.
A chubby little girl and a thatch-haired boy met on a train platform. They part ways in a quiet hospital ward in the darkest hours of a midweek morning.
"Always running ahead," Hestia whispers when the struggling rise and fall of Sturgis' chest has finally ceased and the last Phoenix has burned away in the flames of the war. She smoothes his ever-unruly mop of hair away from his worn face, kisses the lines on his brow. "I think I've missed this train, you best be waiting for me at the other platform."
When she cries for him, it's relief, because what's hurting so badly is love, filling up her chest where there was emptiness, thawing her heart where it was ice, and for the first time in so long she is grateful. She may have lost, but it is only because she has been blessed with so many beautiful, valuable gifts in her life, so much worth grieving.
And they're not gone. Laying there with Sturgis as he dies, she never feels him leave. He's there, brighter than before, unravaged by war and by Azkaban, the child she met on the platform once more. She only need close her eyes to see.
****
Now, more than ever, Hestia wants to live.
She digs out all her beautiful clothing from the back of her closet, her high heels and rainbow robes, tailors everything back to her figure and shocks Alasdair into speechlessness when he lets himself in on Wednesday morning to find her making him breakfast in robes pinstriped with cherry red and patent heels to match.
"Thank you," she says firmly, sitting him down to a proper English breakfast on the neatly-set table.
"For?" he prompts, looking at the meal like he suspects she's about to off herself by poisoned marmalade and is bent on taking him with her.
"For being your prickly bastard self and not letting me wallow in grief and rip my own hair out of my head. And for doing my job."
"Are you all right, Hestia?" he asks, uncharacteristically gentle, as she sits down across from him. "I-" he hesitates, reaches out to touch her hand. "I heard Sturgis died yesterday." He clearly wasn't expecting to find her up, eager for the day.
Her face wilts a little, but she tacks up a side of her mouth into something like a smile and takes his hand. "He did. I think it helped me, though, helped me realize."
There's more than a little alarm on Diggory's face as he looks from her pristinely dressed form to the suspect breakfast on the table. "Realize what, exactly?"
And Hestia laughs, light bubbling up through the weight in her chest, foreign and lovely. "It's not poison, Alasdair, I'm not trying to kill you…or myself. I realized…I want to live. I had such wonder in my life, loved so many good people…and I can love more, and be happy, even though..." she trailed off, some of the sparkle dying down a little. "I can't have the life I wanted, but… I had so much ripped away before and I built something beautiful anyway. And I think I can do it again. I want to try."
There's a long silence before Alasdair nods his head slowly up and down a few times. "Well…in that case, you've over fried the eggs."
Hestia swats at his hand and leans back into her chair, sipping her tea, smiling somewhere behind the rim.
Not only does Alasdair gracefully hand back the control of the DML, he teaches her how to rule, teaches her to hide his own brand of steel behind her lacework and enamel. He's really far too good at the job, so Hestia goes to Kingsley and has Alasdair officially appointed as Minister's Co-Counsel.
"So you'll take the promotion now?" Hestia asks, rolling her eyes.
"Of course, now that you're not pulling your hair out by the root and making me wonder if I ought to empty your knife drawer and confiscate your wand. I was quite certain you were trying to hand off the responsibility to me so you could go home and off yourself with a minimum of inconvenience to the Department. It's not that I didn't want the job." He scratches the back of his neck with his wand, smirking at her. "I've no problem accepting now that you've got your head bolted on straight. Does this mean I get to order you around?"
"You're my peer, not my superior," Hestia informs him primly, straightening her hair and tilting her chin up at him. "We're co-counsel - I didn't give up my job, I just got you a promotion."
"Pity." Alasdair kicks his feet up on the desk. "I had some good ones."
"Gratitude is simply oozing off you, Diggory, no need to overwhelm me with thanks." Hestia picks up one of the case files on his desk, flipping through the sheaves of parchment idly. They sit in companionable silence, engrossed in their own work on either side of Alasdair's monstrously pretentious mahogany desk.
***
The Sunday teas start with just Hannah Abbott, but they don't stay small for long. Two Sundays after the first, Hannah shows up with another girl in her year who lost both her parents to the war, too, introduces her as Lavender Brown and sits her down at the table as Hestia scrambles for another of the good china teacups Caradoc's mother left to her.
The next Sunday a Hufflepuff in her early teens joins them, one of Hannah's cousins, and the next brings Neville Longbottom, his hand firmly held in Lavender's and a whisper of jealousy on Hannah's face. More follow on subsequent Sundays, invitations branching out until they can't fit at even a magically expanded table and Hestia forgoes the sit-down tea and just throws open the doors, puts out food and chairs and lets her guests wander as they will.
Hestia invites Andromeda, toting along Teddy, who is the smash hit of the afternoon, passed around amongst the attendees until he's exhausted and cranky. Hestia bites down on the pain long enough to show Andromeda to the half-painted nursery she's kept locked up all these years, Caradoc's interrupted work of love for an unborn Megan, fitted out with an unused cot under a dust sheet.
And the two women stand there over Teddy as he whuffles softly in sleep, both of them thinking of other babies, daughters raised and loved and lost, of fathers taken too soon, of their families standing on some distant platform, patiently waiting. And then they turn back to those downstairs, daughters without mothers, sons without fathers, sisters without brothers and from the tattered scraps, beautiful patchwork wholes are slowly stitched back together.
***
The year's tax assessment makes Hestia's hair curl. After the initial choking at the numbers inked neatly onto the Ministry embossed parchment, she sets the letter aside, sits down at the desk in her house and begins the long process of cleaning up her estate.
She's had legal title to Caradoc's property almost ten years now, but in the past few maelstrom months she's had his parents' estate to administer (for Megan, initially, but it's all come back to her now) and now all Sturgis' property, as well. She's been dragging her feet on dealing with it, all of the Gringotts letters piling up in one of the letter cubbies. But the simple fact is that she can't afford the tax on all the properties. Sturgis' accounts should cover this year's bill, but she can't hold on to a handful of empty houses.
Four deeds - Caradoc's countryside cottage outside Caerphilly, his parents' terrace house in Beaumaris, Sturgis' family house in Kent and his own flat in Clapham. Hestia dimly remembers earlier days, easier days, the first tiny flat she'd shared with Sturgis, hemming robes and taking measurements at Madame Malkin's to pay the rent during her apprenticeship; some other lifetime.
She sells everything but the cottage - she offers that up for rent fully furnished, packs up her things into a freshly renovated house in Primrose Hill she buys with the proceeds from the other property. The walls are white and clean, wooden floors resurfaced, and everything smells of plaster. A new clean slate, not haunted by echoes of other lives.
Hestia paints her new kitchen sunny yellow, the same cheery shade Caradoc had chosen for Megan's nursery and left half-painted when he'd disappeared. It's beautiful finished, with floral print china and ruffled white curtains and ever-blooming lilac bushes outside the window. It's the gentle sort of memory she needs, nostalgia without the bite of the stolen dreams that shadow every corner in Caradoc's pretty little house in Wales. And, for the first time, it's something she's made, chosen, done for herself, not something inherited, shared, compromised on. The china is impractical and matches nothing, the new cream sofas are going to show dirt and Sturgis would have hated the lavender color she's painted the foyer and none of it matters because Hestia likes it.
And mostly she'd trade her lovely little house for five minutes of her family back, and some days it makes her jaw ache to look around her house and see only herself in the furnishing, but sometimes it's almost fun to be so selfish, a small compensatory luxury.
On the first autumn nights she spends in the house, she throws open the French doors and sits at her new kitchen table with a book she's not reading and tea she's not drinking and, for the first time in years, Hestia remembers what peace feels like.
***
Charlie Weasley has been speaking to her in The Maen-Llywd for a good five minutes before Hestia realizes two things; that he's not got the faintest idea who she is, for one, and that he's trying to chat her up, for another.
The Maen-Llywd Inn had been Caradoc's favored local; Muggle, but loyally patronized by a few Catapult fans and players on occasion. She'd been in town, showing out the cottage to a young couple, glowing and thrilled over the shining new wedding bands on their left hands and the prospect of playing house. The sight of the two of them in her and Caradoc's little country home, dreaming and planning, was a bittersweet burn at her eyelids that had settled into a firm desire for a drink and distraction.
She'd been sitting alone at the bar over her first Bulmer's when the flesh-and-blood ghost of Gideon Prewett appeared at her side and shocked her out of her skin. She'd nearly upset herself out of her chair, but managed to catch herself on the lip of the bar and she'd thought at the time that the hand Charlie brought to her waist to steady her was simple friendliness. "Sorry," she'd smiled sheepishly, calming her nerves with a healthy swig of cider. "Startled me a bit."
He didn't introduce himself or ask her name, which lulled her into the false sense that Charlie knew who she was. He'd apologized for startling her, and then asked her what brought her out this evening. It had been a fairly commonplace conversation, with Hestia explaining her new responsibilities as landlady (leaving out all the overly familiar details that had driven her to the drink, of course), easily mistaken as suitable for the peripheral acquaintances they were - they'd met, once or twice, briefly, in the Burrow or Grimmauld, though, were it not for his unmistakably Prewett looks and Arthur's gentle blue eyes, Hestia might have been in the same boat as he.
It's not until he leans in with a roguish smile that is far more Fabian than Gideon and expresses his wishes that his landlady were as lovely as she is that Hestia finally realizes they're not reading off the same script and her mouth falls open.
Hestia breaks into a fit of absurd giggles, like the schoolgirl she hasn't been in nearly thirty years, covering her mouth with her hand. "You can't possibly be flirting with me!"
His grin clearly speaks otherwise. "And why is that?"
"Charlie Weasley! Stop that this instant!"
And now it's his turn to be shocked, because he's looking at her with new eyes…and still clearly drawing a blank. "How do you…we've met?" He doesn't go red like she imagined he would, though perhaps he's shameless enough to escape any sort of embarrassment.
"Momentarily introduced, at the least, I'd imagine," she informs him, emptying the dregs of the Bulmer's bottle into her half-full pint glass, breathing through the last tide of giggles. "Mutual acquaintances. Like Albus Dumbledore. And your mother." She raises an eyebrow in implication, and he raises his, finally, in understanding. "Hestia Jones, Minister's Counsel, formerly of the Order of the Phoenix." She sticks out her hand, which he takes, still searching her face for familiarity. "So, Mr. Weasley, what brings you out this evening?"
He hasn't his younger brother's taste for underdogs, apparently - jerks a thumb back at a table of lads dressed in Catapults colors, all of them clearly watching the interaction with a dedicated interest. "Old Gryffindor teammate flies for Caerphilly, went to watch a match. We all decided you were by far the prettiest bird in the place, and none of them had the bollocks to do anything about it."
"If you've a taste for plump old hens, I imagine," Hestia says cheerfully, holding her drink up in toast.
Charlie grins back amiably, clinking his pint with hers and holding her gaze in a proper salut. After taking a sip, he leans in, the grin on his face subtly but most markedly changed. "You're hardly a plump old hen, little bird."
A tiny memory replays in her head, of Molly Weasley at the battle, her wand raised and maternal, protective fury on her face, except it's Hestia herself standing at wand's end, and the words are wrong: not my son, you bitch.
***
On Megan's nineteenth birthday, Hannah comes to tea. It ends in tears, but Hestia and Hannah don't spend it lonely. Hannah falls asleep on the sofa, tears and wine and the advancing hour weighting her eyelids. Hestia puts her up in one of the spare bedrooms that night, gives her a key in the morning, and things sort of go from there until it's not just her house any longer, there are footsteps on the floor and voices in the air and someone to come home to in the evenings.
It's easy to fall back to being a mother, and Hannah doesn't seem to mind.
***
Every week, Hestia intends to frame another photograph and hang it in her office. From all the years of her life, all of her loves framed in silver and gold and wood and porcelain on the walls of her office tucked so close to each other that, someday, there won't be any wall left, just Megan and Caradoc and Sturgis and Hannah and Molly and Arthur and Dedalus and Charlie and Dorcas and Andromeda and Edgar and Sirius and Teddy and Alasdair and Nymphadora and Anne and Ivor and Alice and Remus and, and, and…one happy memory every week, hung up on her wall.
She starts with two, simple and beautiful, her starting scrap and her first patchwork family, two photographs framed on the wall behind her desk.
The first is from Caradoc's thirty-seventh birthday, his last, the two of them in his parents' kitchen, Caradoc holding his mum-baked, candle-crowded birthday cake up for the camera, Hestia perched beside him on the laminate countertop, hands braced against the lip of countertop, head tilted against his shoulder, candle-lit grins on the both of them and Hestia's stomach showing just the slightest swell of pregnancy. A perfectly still Muggle photograph, the only one she has of her first family, she and Caradoc and Megan, almost together for one frozen, golden-lit moment.
The second is framed in silver, and this one moves - the waves of the Brighton shore roll in and out, blue against the blonde of the sand, silent wind whips against them. She stands with Sturgis, her arm tossed around his waist, Megan held against his chest, grabby toddler hands balled up in his t-shirt. The first family she'd stitched back up from tatters, eighteen years of her life made whole and happy.
They're more bitter than sweet still, a pinprick of remembered loss to her heart, but someday all they'll be is beautiful.