Leaving - Dean Thomas
Sadie had always been very fond of letters. There was something majestic and classy about that form of communication that seemed to be lacking from the telephone saturated world in which her paternal grandparents lived. There was something about being able to see a conversation composed in ink in front of you and knowing that you could hold on to it and relive it any time you wanted that was comforting and beautiful. Even howlers had had their charm at a certain point in her life. Listening to the normally perpetually collected voice of her mother be distorted and accompanied by the attendant smoke and flames was actually entertaining.
Her days of waxing poetical about the beauty of letter writing as the pinnacle of human communication, however, were rapidly drawing to a close. Why? Because in the life in which she now found herself, letters were an unwelcome nuisance which required an answer - even when she didn't feel like doing any answering.
[more]
6 February 2010
Dear Sadie,
Here are my editorial notes on your first chapters. Well done, dear. Remember when you told me that you wanted to capture the sense of awe of history as a story and put it to paper? You've succeeded. I could not have asked for a better welcome home present after that exhausting bout of firefighting that I had to handle in the former colonies.
I hear Constance has been being her usual self. Don't let her crack you. I've seen the deadline list our dear publisher has outlined for you. Don't let him bury you. If you need more time, tell him so. He's a sweet man, but he'll push as much as he knows he can get by with pushing.
Let's get together and discuss some avenue possibilities over lunch as soon as the writing/deadline fog lifts on you a bit.
Yours,
Nat
For some reason, that completely normal letter absolutely infuriated Sadie every time she looked at it. Scratch that. She knew what the reason was. It was because it was a completely normal letter. There was something just plain wrong with receiving normal letters from Natalie after what she had seen at the Battle of Hogwarts. She was different for knowing that the woman who had given her her first job and started her on the path of making her writing dream a reality had been connected to her family all along and never bothered to tell her. It made her perception of Natalie different. It made their relationship different. Didn't it? She just couldn't go on as if nothing had changed, could she? Natalie had to have known that there was a possibility that she was going to find out, hadn't she? Why could she not simply have told her herself?
6 February 2010
Sadie,
I'm not pushing. I'm just strongly suggesting that you stop stalling and apologize to Drake. We both know you are going to eventually anyway. I'm urging sooner over later.
Then, talk to your dad. You'll feel better. I know. You know that I know, so just listen to me already. You are probably sitting in that apartment trying to drown yourself in work in an attempt to ignore the reality of your life, and it isn't working. You'll be able to concentrate much better after you deal with everything.
Adrienne
Of course Adrienne was right. Adrienne had a depressingly repetitive habit of being right. It wasn't like Sadie didn't know these things that Adrienne kept saying. She simply didn't want to acknowledge their accuracy. Her parents had actively lied to her for the entirety of her existence, couldn't she have a few days to mope and be angry over it?
7 February 2010
Darling,
I'm back from my jaunt to the continent. Everything is ship shape over there, and I hope it is here as well. What lovely surprises have you dug up for me while I've been away? I can hardly wait to hear about them all. We'll have to get tea reset with my parents as soon as possible.
I hear that Natalie has finally managed to finagle some semblance of order back into the American offices, but you musn't let her distract you. Never mind any nonsensical loyalty issues about being hired by her department first. You have developed something wonderful that will revolutionize the world of nonfiction. We can't let such a thing be wasted on mere textbooks.
Of course, we will make those as well, but this is a grand enterprise. It is far too important not to be shared with the world. You are far too important not to be shared with the world. You are going to become history yourself, deary. And I don't mean the dry, boring kind. You shall be the Rita Skeeter of your generation, and I am so proud that I can be a part of the process.
Don't forget to bring your source material with you for our meeting. Drop me an owl and let me know which day this week will work best for you.
Looking forward to it,
Constance
It was official. Constance was so not Sadie's favorite person. It wasn't that she had ever been in serious consideration for that slot (or even in the bottom tiers of the running for that matter), but she had thought that she would at least be helpful. Helpful and Constance obviously did not mix. Constance's ideas, Constance's personality, and Constance's position as technically one of Sadie's bosses were all huge, problematic whirlpools in the tranquil forest pool of Sadie's life. Which may have been the world's worst analogy, because Sadie's life at the moment was absolutely anything but tranquil. She didn't want to have to answer Constance's letter. She didn't want to have to deal with Constance. She wasn't going to deal with Constance. She was going to ignore Constance until she was forced unignorably directly into her life path and hope that something miraculous occurred to end the situation in the meantime. Yeah, she was definitely going to pay for that decision later. She knew that. Right now she just happened to not be in a mood to care.
7 February 2010
Sade,
I'm not mad, you know? I know you were just upset, and I was pushing you to deal too fast. I know you didn't mean it. You can write me back, and I won't bite your head off. I know you are sitting there in that apartment fretting about that.
I could come over again, and we could talk about things that have absolutely nothing to do with your dad. It would be nice to get to spend a little time with you when we weren't bickering.
Drake
It had been nice to spend time with Drake when they weren't bickering. It had been nice to be able to cry on his shoulder (literally) and bewail the mess that her life had suddenly become. The problem was that any attempt at conversation with Drake was going to end up where the previous one had - with lots of yelling. She was still mad, and she wasn't in a mood to be talked out of being mad. She was feeling guilty over Luna and didn't want to admit it because she might just be told that she deserved to feel guilty.
Drake wasn't going to let her get by with that. He expected better from her. Adrienne did too for that matter. That was why neither one of them was getting a letter back (or an invitation over either) until she somehow managed to calm down.
No letters for her best friends because she was angry. No letter to either of her bosses because she was angry. No letter in response to the missive from her parents that she hadn't even opened because she was angry. There was a definite pattern here.
She even had a letter (also unopened) from Drake's parents. What was up with that? He couldn't just wait for her to calm down? Didn't he know her better than that by now? He had to sic his dad on her to berate her for being unreasonable as well? What was going to be next? A letter from Justin Finch-Fletchley containing a dissertation on why father's sometimes believed it was justifiable and necessary to lie to their daughters? Seriously?
She had wasted enough time on the pile of correspondence that she was not answering. She needed to get some work done. Unfortunately, she was still agitated. She needed to start with something simple. She reached for Luna's reply about Dean Thomas. That would be a simple task that she could get her work focus back with - a simple yes or no answer with a simple thank you for your time and help fired back in response. As she was breaking the seal, she remembered that she had accidentally placed her charm on this parchment as well.
I have a friend who has been helping me by finding contact information for the original members of the DA. She has managed to find details on all but one. She keeps running into dead ends when trying to locate Dean Thomas.
I understand that you were in hiding together at one point in time, and I thought I would ask if you had kept in touch. Do you have any idea as to how I might get a hold of him? Any information you have would be quite helpful. Thank you so much.
You will not be able to locate Dean Thomas. You should cross him off your list of potential contacts.
Luna was stepping out of the door of a shop in what could only be Diagon Alley. Her head was down as she looked over a piece of parchment resting in her hands. The fact that she was not watching where she was going did not seem to impede her progress in any way, shape, or form. She moved with what Sadie had dubbed in her head the usual Luna grace, and she intuitively side stepped any obstacles in her path without raising her head. She did not really look older than the Luna Sadie had watched in the last set of memories, but something seemed different. It was her clothing; Sadie decided. It looked . . . was professional the word for which she was looking?
Sadie's pondering was interrupted by a tall, young man who made his way down the sidewalk and deliberately placed himself directly in Luna's path. Was he trying to trip her? Luna stopped short just in time and blinked up at him. A smile flitted across her features as she greeted him.
"Hullo, Dean."
"Hey, Luna," the man muttered sounding entirely unconvincing. "Sorry about that. I guess I should pay more attention to where I am walking."
Luna tilted her head to the side and watched as a stream of nervous attempts to start a new sentence were tried and abandoned. "It's nice to see you," she said. "I'm running errands for work." She informed him.
"Oh, right. It's really nice to see you too." He spoke up. "I guess I should let you get to those errands."
Luna looked at him for another moment before nodding in his direction and beginning to walk away. She made it all of two steps before the man (whom Sadie was going to conclude must be Dean Thomas) reached out a hand to stop her.
"Wait." He said in a voice that bordered on pleading. The speed at which he was speaking increased while he was talking until the last few words of the sentence were almost indistinguishable from each other.
"I was thinking that I could meet you after work and take you out to dinner today. Or another time if that would be better. I know it's late notice, and I don't expect you to change your plans or anything. I just thought that maybe you might like to go?"
Whether Luna spent the next few beats trying to untangle what that mush of words had been like Sadie did, or whether she was pondering the invitation, Sadie couldn't tell. She could only see the outcome of the brilliantly bright smile that spread across the man's face as Luna replied.
"Six o'clock?"
He nodded vigorously and stood in the middle of the walk as Luna continued on to complete her errands.
Luna was dancing with Dean off to the side of an open dance floor under the stars. Streamers and lanterns decorated nearby trees, and everyone seemed to be wearing dress robes. Sadie decided that it must be a wedding.
Whose wedding it was, however, was not nearly as important as the sound that Luna was making as her dance partner spun her out and then gently brought her back to rest her head on his chest. She was laughing. It was light hearted and carefree and child like and the sound fit Luna perfectly. It sounded like the giggling Sadie had witnessed in one of Luna's early memories of her mother. It was a sound that Sadie had not heard in any of the memories since.
It could have been the fact that there had been such a cloud over the time of so many memories of Luna's, but Sadie had a niggling suspicion that that sound had been completely missing from Luna's life from the time that her mother had gone until the man twirling her around the dance floor had worked himself into her world.
There was nothing much to the memory. There was no conversation; there were no dramatic revelations. It was solely and entirely two young people dancing in the middle of a crowd that Sadie felt certain neither one of them noticed was there.
Sadie paused the playing before it could move on to the third memory. Luna and Dean Thomas? That just felt so wrong somehow. It was entirely unexpected. He hadn't so much as made an appearance in any of Luna's other memories. What about Neville? She found herself thinking (which she then corrected herself on because after all Luna had ended up married to Rolf Scamander and Sadie had known that all along and it was ridiculous to be all expectant over a romance that probably never was when you knew that the two people involved didn't end up together anyway but everything up until that point had just felt like Luna and Neville fit and Dean Thomas had come out of nowhere and it didn't even make sense given the rest of what Sadie knew and speaking of ridiculous, why in the world was she thinking in run on sentences?).
Something was bothering her about those memories though. Somewhere in the part of her brain that was detail obsessed Sadie felt like she had overlooked something important while watching them. She set them to playing again and tried to figure out what it was that she had noticed without processing.
She was correct (although when she spotted what it was, she almost wished that she hadn't been). There was something she had overlooked in her first viewing. Rather, it was someone.
In the first memory, he had been three or so doorways down pretending to window shop as he waited for her to approach. When Dean had come out of seemingly nowhere and pulled his accidently on purpose almost run in, he had frozen in place watching the two of them.
Sadie didn't think he could hear the words being exchanged from where he was standing, but it didn't take a genius to follow the gist of the body language. His eyes closed, and he bit his lip as Dean reached out to stop Luna from leaving. When she walked away the second time, Neville Longbottom ducked into the shop he was standing in front of to prevent Luna from noticing that he was there.
He was sitting at a table with a few busily chattering girls at the wedding. They surreptitiously tried to catch his eye and looked at him sometimes as if wondering what his problem was and why he wasn't dancing. He was too busy watching Luna to notice.
He smiled faintly as the sound of her laughter reached his ears before something in his eyes changed to an expression that could only be described as resigned. He looked away from the dancing couple he had been focusing on so intently and scanned the nearby tables. He excused himself to disappointed looks all around and walked over to ask another blond haired girl (who had apparently been abandoned at her table) to dance.
That was almost disturbing. She let the third memory play this time. It was disturbing in and of itself. Only this time, it had absolutely nothing to do with Neville Longbottom.
Luna and Dean were sitting together on a small sofa in what looked to be an equally small apartment. The furniture was sturdy, practical stuff, but the implication that the owner was not interested in the aesthetics of the place couldn't last past your first glance at the walls. Artwork adorned the walls profusely, but each piece had its own separate piece of the room. The space between kept the walls from looking busy and overcrowded, yet you could tell that each piece had been placed in the vicinity of its neighbors for a reason. The various works seemed to flow from one to the next. The effect was much like walking into a well-designed gallery.
Sadie had plenty of time to take in the full effect of what was (in all honesty) a stunningly beautiful room because the two young adults seated in the room weren't speaking. If she kept with the artist's motive of surveying the room, the two would be a tableau. They both sat sideways, so they were facing each other - Luna was looking at Dean, but he wasn't looking back at her. Dean's head was turned down. His eyes were fixed on the hands settled in his lap that clenched and unclenched in a nervous gesture. His shoulders radiated tension, and his breathing was rather shakey sounding. It wasn't anger or agitation from Sadie's perspective. He looked sad - very, very sad - and as if he were about to break down and lose his composure. Luna's eyes were wide with concern, and her hands sat in her lap clutched together as if to brace herself from betraying any impatience for him to hurry up and explain to her what was wrong.
Taking a deep breath, Dean finally decided to start speaking. "Do you know how a few weeks ago you asked me to tell you what was bothering me?"
Luna nodded in response. "You said you weren't ready to tell me."
Dean gave a half-hearted chuckle. "Anyone else would have pestered and demanded. You just let me be. Thank you for that."
Luna looked confused. "You said you needed time," she stated as if that were a complete explanation in and of itself.
"I did need time," he continued. "But I was also hoping that I could work it out, and I wouldn't have to tell you." He paused before finally looking up to meet Luna's gaze. "I still don't want to tell you. I don't want it to be this way. I just . . . I just don't know what else to do."
Luna reached over without looking and grasped one of his hands with a comforting squeeze. The gesture just seemed to push Dean that much closer to the tears he was already on the edge of producing.
"I hate this." He spat with a sudden venom that made Sadie jump. Luna just took it in stride and retained her hold on the man's hand. He clutched at it and brought his other hand up so that both her hands were caught between his own. He pulled them up and kissed the palms before placing them (still held tightly) on his lap. Luna had to edge closer in response, and Dean stared at her with a frantic kind of intensity before his shoulders slumped and his head dropped once again.
"I don't want to leave you." He muttered so softly that Sadie wasn't sure if she had heard the words or imagined them.
"Dean?" Luna questioned sounding as if she weren't certain whether or not she had heard the words either.
"I've tried so hard to get past it. I really, really tried. Everyone else seems to have gotten over it all. None of them are letting it ruin their lives. I don't know what is wrong with me. I don't know why I can't let it go, but I can't. I've tried everything I can think to do. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Everything was supposed to go back to normal once the war was over, but I'm so mixed up that I don't even know what normal is any more. Did we ever have normal, Luna? Or did we just have times when we weren't paying attention to how screwed up everything was?"
Luna looked from Dean's face to her hands still being held onto for dear life in his lap and back up again. She wisely chose not to attempt an answer. She let him continue to talk.
"I thought it would get better. Harry would fix things, and I would forget about it. Get a job. Get my girl." He paused and looked up at her with a heartbreakingly longing smile. "Everything fell into place. And you . . . you were like some unbelievably benevolent reward to make up for all the bad things that happened before. I don't know what's wrong with me, Luna. I should be so happy."
He broke at this point, and the long held back tears began to slide down his face.
"I see it every time I close my eyes. I'm back in those woods being chased. I can hear the killing curse that they fired at Ted. They shouldn't have gotten him, Luna. He was smarter than that. He was doing just fine until he let me tag along. He faced off with them to give me time to run, Luna. And I did. I didn't even think about it. He told me to run, and I just ran. I left him. He died because of me." His voice was getting progressively angrier as he spoke. Surprisingly, instead of becoming louder, it was getting softer all the time.
"All of it was so nonsensically stupid, Luna. I was running because I didn't know if I had to run or not. I had to run because they decided to cull people based on something so completely insignificant and arbitrary that there isn't even a way to check for it. For all I know my old man could have been a wizard, but I'll never know. And I was hunted for not knowing. What kind of world is this that I chose to leave my family to be a part of? They knew this was coming. All of them knew this was coming. The blood purity mania has been around for centuries, and it has never even occurred to any of them that they should do something to try to teach better. They just let it go. They mutter about people's private opinions and wait until it all blows up in everybody's faces to do anything about it. How do you trust a world like that? How do you trust people like that? How do you keep yourself from looking over your shoulder every day paranoid that it is all going to start all over again? I can't. I can't stop. I can't let it go."
Tears were flowing down Luna's face as well now. Or, they would have been, had her head not been buried in Dean's shoulder. He had pulled her in close and was murmuring his words into her hair.
"I'm never going to be okay here. I want to be so badly. I've worked so hard. Nothing helps. It's no use. I will never be right in this world. I'll never be undamaged in this world. I can't stay here."
The troubled young man gently kissed Luna on the forehead. "I'm going back to the muggle world. I need your help."
"I'll go with you." Luna immediately piped up in a determined tone of voice that contrasted with the tears still coursing down her cheeks.
"No!" Dean's voice was commanding and pleading all at once. "This is your world, Luna. It's the only one you've ever known. Your family is here. Your friends are here. Your life is here. You will not give that up because I'm an unsalvageable mess. I'm not going to stay here and drag you down with me. I'm not going to have you drug down by following me into a world that you don't belong in."
"What if I belong with you?" Luna demanded pulling herself out of Dean's arms and sitting with her arms crossed and eyes blazing."
"Even if you did," he said with a sigh, "that man isn't going to exist anymore."
"You don't have any right to tell me . . ."
"Promise me that you'll let me go. Promise me that you won't come after me."
"I don't chase after people that don't want me."
Dean blanched, and his voice shook as he spoke. "You should hate me. It would be easier that way. I should just let you think that that is why, but I'm too selfish for that. It's not about not wanting you, Luna. It's never been about not wanting you. I want you so much that it hurts to breathe when I think about my life with you not in it."
"Then, I don't understand."
"I may be selfish, Luna, but I'm not that selfish. It has to be about you. I could stay and let you nurse maid me for the rest of our lives. I can't do that to you. I can't let you live a life with someone who you can't trust not to break down, not to go off the deep end with no warning. Never knowing what might set me off. Never knowing how to break me out of it when I get scared and won't leave the house for days on end. Never knowing when you might walk into the house and have a wand at your throat because I've lost track of where and when I am and I'm seeing them instead of you. I'm not safe, Luna. I'm broken. I don't want to be, but I am. You will not live like that."
He held out his hand with a begging expression, and Luna caved and placed her own back in it. "It wouldn't be like that."
"Yes, it would."
"What makes you think going back to the muggle world will make it any better. Here there are people who understand. Here there are people that can help. I can help."
"It won't be better."
"What's the point . . ."
"Let me finish. It won't be better if I just go back knowing all the things that I know now. But, if I don't know it. If I don't know that there was ever any other world to know, then it will work. I won't be the same Dean that you know. That's part of why I will not let you go with me. But I should be a Dean that isn't broken."
"Should be? What if that doesn't work either?"
"It will. Because you are brilliant, and you are going to do it for me."
"What!"
"Remember the memory charm that Hermione did on her parents? I want you to do that for me. Only I want you to make it irreversible." He put a finger over her lips to stop the protest that she was about to utter. "It makes me a jerk and a cad and a lousy human being to ask it of you. I know it does. It's awful of me, and I deserve every angry, hurt word you could possibly shout at me right now. I hate it, but it doesn't change anything. I trust you. I know if you give me your word you will do it and do it right and respect my wishes and let me disappear. I know you'll give me your word because I know you. I know you will do absolutely anything to protect your friends. We were friends first. We're still friends. You're my best friend. Only don't tell Seamus because we all know how jealous he can get."
Luna shook her head at Dean's weak attempt at humor, but she didn't try to interrupt him again.
"I'm asking, actually I'm begging you, Luna, to do this for me because I have come at it from every angle there is and this is the only way. I'm asking you, as your friend, to protect me from this void I'm hovering on the edge of the only way I can be protected. I'm begging you to save me, Luna, because this is the only way that at least part of who I am supposed to be can be saved."
Luna pulled her hands from his grasp and turned away so that Dean could no longer see her face. Sadie could still see her. The tears had started up again running from underneath her closed eyelids. Sadie expected to see angry or devastated or even disbelieving. What she saw was blank.
"Don't answer me tonight." Dean was telling her. "Think about it for a few days. You'll know that I'm right."
The memory faded and Sadie found herself crying as she stared at the still bare wall in front of her. She had been very wrong. There had been nothing simple about Luna's answer at all.
Next
Her days of waxing poetical about the beauty of letter writing as the pinnacle of human communication, however, were rapidly drawing to a close. Why? Because in the life in which she now found herself, letters were an unwelcome nuisance which required an answer - even when she didn't feel like doing any answering.
[more]
6 February 2010
Dear Sadie,
Here are my editorial notes on your first chapters. Well done, dear. Remember when you told me that you wanted to capture the sense of awe of history as a story and put it to paper? You've succeeded. I could not have asked for a better welcome home present after that exhausting bout of firefighting that I had to handle in the former colonies.
I hear Constance has been being her usual self. Don't let her crack you. I've seen the deadline list our dear publisher has outlined for you. Don't let him bury you. If you need more time, tell him so. He's a sweet man, but he'll push as much as he knows he can get by with pushing.
Let's get together and discuss some avenue possibilities over lunch as soon as the writing/deadline fog lifts on you a bit.
Yours,
Nat
For some reason, that completely normal letter absolutely infuriated Sadie every time she looked at it. Scratch that. She knew what the reason was. It was because it was a completely normal letter. There was something just plain wrong with receiving normal letters from Natalie after what she had seen at the Battle of Hogwarts. She was different for knowing that the woman who had given her her first job and started her on the path of making her writing dream a reality had been connected to her family all along and never bothered to tell her. It made her perception of Natalie different. It made their relationship different. Didn't it? She just couldn't go on as if nothing had changed, could she? Natalie had to have known that there was a possibility that she was going to find out, hadn't she? Why could she not simply have told her herself?
6 February 2010
Sadie,
I'm not pushing. I'm just strongly suggesting that you stop stalling and apologize to Drake. We both know you are going to eventually anyway. I'm urging sooner over later.
Then, talk to your dad. You'll feel better. I know. You know that I know, so just listen to me already. You are probably sitting in that apartment trying to drown yourself in work in an attempt to ignore the reality of your life, and it isn't working. You'll be able to concentrate much better after you deal with everything.
Adrienne
Of course Adrienne was right. Adrienne had a depressingly repetitive habit of being right. It wasn't like Sadie didn't know these things that Adrienne kept saying. She simply didn't want to acknowledge their accuracy. Her parents had actively lied to her for the entirety of her existence, couldn't she have a few days to mope and be angry over it?
7 February 2010
Darling,
I'm back from my jaunt to the continent. Everything is ship shape over there, and I hope it is here as well. What lovely surprises have you dug up for me while I've been away? I can hardly wait to hear about them all. We'll have to get tea reset with my parents as soon as possible.
I hear that Natalie has finally managed to finagle some semblance of order back into the American offices, but you musn't let her distract you. Never mind any nonsensical loyalty issues about being hired by her department first. You have developed something wonderful that will revolutionize the world of nonfiction. We can't let such a thing be wasted on mere textbooks.
Of course, we will make those as well, but this is a grand enterprise. It is far too important not to be shared with the world. You are far too important not to be shared with the world. You are going to become history yourself, deary. And I don't mean the dry, boring kind. You shall be the Rita Skeeter of your generation, and I am so proud that I can be a part of the process.
Don't forget to bring your source material with you for our meeting. Drop me an owl and let me know which day this week will work best for you.
Looking forward to it,
Constance
It was official. Constance was so not Sadie's favorite person. It wasn't that she had ever been in serious consideration for that slot (or even in the bottom tiers of the running for that matter), but she had thought that she would at least be helpful. Helpful and Constance obviously did not mix. Constance's ideas, Constance's personality, and Constance's position as technically one of Sadie's bosses were all huge, problematic whirlpools in the tranquil forest pool of Sadie's life. Which may have been the world's worst analogy, because Sadie's life at the moment was absolutely anything but tranquil. She didn't want to have to answer Constance's letter. She didn't want to have to deal with Constance. She wasn't going to deal with Constance. She was going to ignore Constance until she was forced unignorably directly into her life path and hope that something miraculous occurred to end the situation in the meantime. Yeah, she was definitely going to pay for that decision later. She knew that. Right now she just happened to not be in a mood to care.
7 February 2010
Sade,
I'm not mad, you know? I know you were just upset, and I was pushing you to deal too fast. I know you didn't mean it. You can write me back, and I won't bite your head off. I know you are sitting there in that apartment fretting about that.
I could come over again, and we could talk about things that have absolutely nothing to do with your dad. It would be nice to get to spend a little time with you when we weren't bickering.
Drake
It had been nice to spend time with Drake when they weren't bickering. It had been nice to be able to cry on his shoulder (literally) and bewail the mess that her life had suddenly become. The problem was that any attempt at conversation with Drake was going to end up where the previous one had - with lots of yelling. She was still mad, and she wasn't in a mood to be talked out of being mad. She was feeling guilty over Luna and didn't want to admit it because she might just be told that she deserved to feel guilty.
Drake wasn't going to let her get by with that. He expected better from her. Adrienne did too for that matter. That was why neither one of them was getting a letter back (or an invitation over either) until she somehow managed to calm down.
No letters for her best friends because she was angry. No letter to either of her bosses because she was angry. No letter in response to the missive from her parents that she hadn't even opened because she was angry. There was a definite pattern here.
She even had a letter (also unopened) from Drake's parents. What was up with that? He couldn't just wait for her to calm down? Didn't he know her better than that by now? He had to sic his dad on her to berate her for being unreasonable as well? What was going to be next? A letter from Justin Finch-Fletchley containing a dissertation on why father's sometimes believed it was justifiable and necessary to lie to their daughters? Seriously?
She had wasted enough time on the pile of correspondence that she was not answering. She needed to get some work done. Unfortunately, she was still agitated. She needed to start with something simple. She reached for Luna's reply about Dean Thomas. That would be a simple task that she could get her work focus back with - a simple yes or no answer with a simple thank you for your time and help fired back in response. As she was breaking the seal, she remembered that she had accidentally placed her charm on this parchment as well.
I have a friend who has been helping me by finding contact information for the original members of the DA. She has managed to find details on all but one. She keeps running into dead ends when trying to locate Dean Thomas.
I understand that you were in hiding together at one point in time, and I thought I would ask if you had kept in touch. Do you have any idea as to how I might get a hold of him? Any information you have would be quite helpful. Thank you so much.
You will not be able to locate Dean Thomas. You should cross him off your list of potential contacts.
Luna was stepping out of the door of a shop in what could only be Diagon Alley. Her head was down as she looked over a piece of parchment resting in her hands. The fact that she was not watching where she was going did not seem to impede her progress in any way, shape, or form. She moved with what Sadie had dubbed in her head the usual Luna grace, and she intuitively side stepped any obstacles in her path without raising her head. She did not really look older than the Luna Sadie had watched in the last set of memories, but something seemed different. It was her clothing; Sadie decided. It looked . . . was professional the word for which she was looking?
Sadie's pondering was interrupted by a tall, young man who made his way down the sidewalk and deliberately placed himself directly in Luna's path. Was he trying to trip her? Luna stopped short just in time and blinked up at him. A smile flitted across her features as she greeted him.
"Hullo, Dean."
"Hey, Luna," the man muttered sounding entirely unconvincing. "Sorry about that. I guess I should pay more attention to where I am walking."
Luna tilted her head to the side and watched as a stream of nervous attempts to start a new sentence were tried and abandoned. "It's nice to see you," she said. "I'm running errands for work." She informed him.
"Oh, right. It's really nice to see you too." He spoke up. "I guess I should let you get to those errands."
Luna looked at him for another moment before nodding in his direction and beginning to walk away. She made it all of two steps before the man (whom Sadie was going to conclude must be Dean Thomas) reached out a hand to stop her.
"Wait." He said in a voice that bordered on pleading. The speed at which he was speaking increased while he was talking until the last few words of the sentence were almost indistinguishable from each other.
"I was thinking that I could meet you after work and take you out to dinner today. Or another time if that would be better. I know it's late notice, and I don't expect you to change your plans or anything. I just thought that maybe you might like to go?"
Whether Luna spent the next few beats trying to untangle what that mush of words had been like Sadie did, or whether she was pondering the invitation, Sadie couldn't tell. She could only see the outcome of the brilliantly bright smile that spread across the man's face as Luna replied.
"Six o'clock?"
He nodded vigorously and stood in the middle of the walk as Luna continued on to complete her errands.
Luna was dancing with Dean off to the side of an open dance floor under the stars. Streamers and lanterns decorated nearby trees, and everyone seemed to be wearing dress robes. Sadie decided that it must be a wedding.
Whose wedding it was, however, was not nearly as important as the sound that Luna was making as her dance partner spun her out and then gently brought her back to rest her head on his chest. She was laughing. It was light hearted and carefree and child like and the sound fit Luna perfectly. It sounded like the giggling Sadie had witnessed in one of Luna's early memories of her mother. It was a sound that Sadie had not heard in any of the memories since.
It could have been the fact that there had been such a cloud over the time of so many memories of Luna's, but Sadie had a niggling suspicion that that sound had been completely missing from Luna's life from the time that her mother had gone until the man twirling her around the dance floor had worked himself into her world.
There was nothing much to the memory. There was no conversation; there were no dramatic revelations. It was solely and entirely two young people dancing in the middle of a crowd that Sadie felt certain neither one of them noticed was there.
Sadie paused the playing before it could move on to the third memory. Luna and Dean Thomas? That just felt so wrong somehow. It was entirely unexpected. He hadn't so much as made an appearance in any of Luna's other memories. What about Neville? She found herself thinking (which she then corrected herself on because after all Luna had ended up married to Rolf Scamander and Sadie had known that all along and it was ridiculous to be all expectant over a romance that probably never was when you knew that the two people involved didn't end up together anyway but everything up until that point had just felt like Luna and Neville fit and Dean Thomas had come out of nowhere and it didn't even make sense given the rest of what Sadie knew and speaking of ridiculous, why in the world was she thinking in run on sentences?).
Something was bothering her about those memories though. Somewhere in the part of her brain that was detail obsessed Sadie felt like she had overlooked something important while watching them. She set them to playing again and tried to figure out what it was that she had noticed without processing.
She was correct (although when she spotted what it was, she almost wished that she hadn't been). There was something she had overlooked in her first viewing. Rather, it was someone.
In the first memory, he had been three or so doorways down pretending to window shop as he waited for her to approach. When Dean had come out of seemingly nowhere and pulled his accidently on purpose almost run in, he had frozen in place watching the two of them.
Sadie didn't think he could hear the words being exchanged from where he was standing, but it didn't take a genius to follow the gist of the body language. His eyes closed, and he bit his lip as Dean reached out to stop Luna from leaving. When she walked away the second time, Neville Longbottom ducked into the shop he was standing in front of to prevent Luna from noticing that he was there.
He was sitting at a table with a few busily chattering girls at the wedding. They surreptitiously tried to catch his eye and looked at him sometimes as if wondering what his problem was and why he wasn't dancing. He was too busy watching Luna to notice.
He smiled faintly as the sound of her laughter reached his ears before something in his eyes changed to an expression that could only be described as resigned. He looked away from the dancing couple he had been focusing on so intently and scanned the nearby tables. He excused himself to disappointed looks all around and walked over to ask another blond haired girl (who had apparently been abandoned at her table) to dance.
That was almost disturbing. She let the third memory play this time. It was disturbing in and of itself. Only this time, it had absolutely nothing to do with Neville Longbottom.
Luna and Dean were sitting together on a small sofa in what looked to be an equally small apartment. The furniture was sturdy, practical stuff, but the implication that the owner was not interested in the aesthetics of the place couldn't last past your first glance at the walls. Artwork adorned the walls profusely, but each piece had its own separate piece of the room. The space between kept the walls from looking busy and overcrowded, yet you could tell that each piece had been placed in the vicinity of its neighbors for a reason. The various works seemed to flow from one to the next. The effect was much like walking into a well-designed gallery.
Sadie had plenty of time to take in the full effect of what was (in all honesty) a stunningly beautiful room because the two young adults seated in the room weren't speaking. If she kept with the artist's motive of surveying the room, the two would be a tableau. They both sat sideways, so they were facing each other - Luna was looking at Dean, but he wasn't looking back at her. Dean's head was turned down. His eyes were fixed on the hands settled in his lap that clenched and unclenched in a nervous gesture. His shoulders radiated tension, and his breathing was rather shakey sounding. It wasn't anger or agitation from Sadie's perspective. He looked sad - very, very sad - and as if he were about to break down and lose his composure. Luna's eyes were wide with concern, and her hands sat in her lap clutched together as if to brace herself from betraying any impatience for him to hurry up and explain to her what was wrong.
Taking a deep breath, Dean finally decided to start speaking. "Do you know how a few weeks ago you asked me to tell you what was bothering me?"
Luna nodded in response. "You said you weren't ready to tell me."
Dean gave a half-hearted chuckle. "Anyone else would have pestered and demanded. You just let me be. Thank you for that."
Luna looked confused. "You said you needed time," she stated as if that were a complete explanation in and of itself.
"I did need time," he continued. "But I was also hoping that I could work it out, and I wouldn't have to tell you." He paused before finally looking up to meet Luna's gaze. "I still don't want to tell you. I don't want it to be this way. I just . . . I just don't know what else to do."
Luna reached over without looking and grasped one of his hands with a comforting squeeze. The gesture just seemed to push Dean that much closer to the tears he was already on the edge of producing.
"I hate this." He spat with a sudden venom that made Sadie jump. Luna just took it in stride and retained her hold on the man's hand. He clutched at it and brought his other hand up so that both her hands were caught between his own. He pulled them up and kissed the palms before placing them (still held tightly) on his lap. Luna had to edge closer in response, and Dean stared at her with a frantic kind of intensity before his shoulders slumped and his head dropped once again.
"I don't want to leave you." He muttered so softly that Sadie wasn't sure if she had heard the words or imagined them.
"Dean?" Luna questioned sounding as if she weren't certain whether or not she had heard the words either.
"I've tried so hard to get past it. I really, really tried. Everyone else seems to have gotten over it all. None of them are letting it ruin their lives. I don't know what is wrong with me. I don't know why I can't let it go, but I can't. I've tried everything I can think to do. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Everything was supposed to go back to normal once the war was over, but I'm so mixed up that I don't even know what normal is any more. Did we ever have normal, Luna? Or did we just have times when we weren't paying attention to how screwed up everything was?"
Luna looked from Dean's face to her hands still being held onto for dear life in his lap and back up again. She wisely chose not to attempt an answer. She let him continue to talk.
"I thought it would get better. Harry would fix things, and I would forget about it. Get a job. Get my girl." He paused and looked up at her with a heartbreakingly longing smile. "Everything fell into place. And you . . . you were like some unbelievably benevolent reward to make up for all the bad things that happened before. I don't know what's wrong with me, Luna. I should be so happy."
He broke at this point, and the long held back tears began to slide down his face.
"I see it every time I close my eyes. I'm back in those woods being chased. I can hear the killing curse that they fired at Ted. They shouldn't have gotten him, Luna. He was smarter than that. He was doing just fine until he let me tag along. He faced off with them to give me time to run, Luna. And I did. I didn't even think about it. He told me to run, and I just ran. I left him. He died because of me." His voice was getting progressively angrier as he spoke. Surprisingly, instead of becoming louder, it was getting softer all the time.
"All of it was so nonsensically stupid, Luna. I was running because I didn't know if I had to run or not. I had to run because they decided to cull people based on something so completely insignificant and arbitrary that there isn't even a way to check for it. For all I know my old man could have been a wizard, but I'll never know. And I was hunted for not knowing. What kind of world is this that I chose to leave my family to be a part of? They knew this was coming. All of them knew this was coming. The blood purity mania has been around for centuries, and it has never even occurred to any of them that they should do something to try to teach better. They just let it go. They mutter about people's private opinions and wait until it all blows up in everybody's faces to do anything about it. How do you trust a world like that? How do you trust people like that? How do you keep yourself from looking over your shoulder every day paranoid that it is all going to start all over again? I can't. I can't stop. I can't let it go."
Tears were flowing down Luna's face as well now. Or, they would have been, had her head not been buried in Dean's shoulder. He had pulled her in close and was murmuring his words into her hair.
"I'm never going to be okay here. I want to be so badly. I've worked so hard. Nothing helps. It's no use. I will never be right in this world. I'll never be undamaged in this world. I can't stay here."
The troubled young man gently kissed Luna on the forehead. "I'm going back to the muggle world. I need your help."
"I'll go with you." Luna immediately piped up in a determined tone of voice that contrasted with the tears still coursing down her cheeks.
"No!" Dean's voice was commanding and pleading all at once. "This is your world, Luna. It's the only one you've ever known. Your family is here. Your friends are here. Your life is here. You will not give that up because I'm an unsalvageable mess. I'm not going to stay here and drag you down with me. I'm not going to have you drug down by following me into a world that you don't belong in."
"What if I belong with you?" Luna demanded pulling herself out of Dean's arms and sitting with her arms crossed and eyes blazing."
"Even if you did," he said with a sigh, "that man isn't going to exist anymore."
"You don't have any right to tell me . . ."
"Promise me that you'll let me go. Promise me that you won't come after me."
"I don't chase after people that don't want me."
Dean blanched, and his voice shook as he spoke. "You should hate me. It would be easier that way. I should just let you think that that is why, but I'm too selfish for that. It's not about not wanting you, Luna. It's never been about not wanting you. I want you so much that it hurts to breathe when I think about my life with you not in it."
"Then, I don't understand."
"I may be selfish, Luna, but I'm not that selfish. It has to be about you. I could stay and let you nurse maid me for the rest of our lives. I can't do that to you. I can't let you live a life with someone who you can't trust not to break down, not to go off the deep end with no warning. Never knowing what might set me off. Never knowing how to break me out of it when I get scared and won't leave the house for days on end. Never knowing when you might walk into the house and have a wand at your throat because I've lost track of where and when I am and I'm seeing them instead of you. I'm not safe, Luna. I'm broken. I don't want to be, but I am. You will not live like that."
He held out his hand with a begging expression, and Luna caved and placed her own back in it. "It wouldn't be like that."
"Yes, it would."
"What makes you think going back to the muggle world will make it any better. Here there are people who understand. Here there are people that can help. I can help."
"It won't be better."
"What's the point . . ."
"Let me finish. It won't be better if I just go back knowing all the things that I know now. But, if I don't know it. If I don't know that there was ever any other world to know, then it will work. I won't be the same Dean that you know. That's part of why I will not let you go with me. But I should be a Dean that isn't broken."
"Should be? What if that doesn't work either?"
"It will. Because you are brilliant, and you are going to do it for me."
"What!"
"Remember the memory charm that Hermione did on her parents? I want you to do that for me. Only I want you to make it irreversible." He put a finger over her lips to stop the protest that she was about to utter. "It makes me a jerk and a cad and a lousy human being to ask it of you. I know it does. It's awful of me, and I deserve every angry, hurt word you could possibly shout at me right now. I hate it, but it doesn't change anything. I trust you. I know if you give me your word you will do it and do it right and respect my wishes and let me disappear. I know you'll give me your word because I know you. I know you will do absolutely anything to protect your friends. We were friends first. We're still friends. You're my best friend. Only don't tell Seamus because we all know how jealous he can get."
Luna shook her head at Dean's weak attempt at humor, but she didn't try to interrupt him again.
"I'm asking, actually I'm begging you, Luna, to do this for me because I have come at it from every angle there is and this is the only way. I'm asking you, as your friend, to protect me from this void I'm hovering on the edge of the only way I can be protected. I'm begging you to save me, Luna, because this is the only way that at least part of who I am supposed to be can be saved."
Luna pulled her hands from his grasp and turned away so that Dean could no longer see her face. Sadie could still see her. The tears had started up again running from underneath her closed eyelids. Sadie expected to see angry or devastated or even disbelieving. What she saw was blank.
"Don't answer me tonight." Dean was telling her. "Think about it for a few days. You'll know that I'm right."
The memory faded and Sadie found herself crying as she stared at the still bare wall in front of her. She had been very wrong. There had been nothing simple about Luna's answer at all.
Next