truth hurts but secrets kill • | a r i

JULY 2001

Dennis leant on the window, pressing his brow against the cool glass as he watched the urban landscape uncurl beside the train. It was alive, he thought. Bustling, despite the bad weather. The mechanical clunks and echoes inside the train seemed so distant from the ecosystem outside.

He’d been spending a lot of time on trains in the past month; much to his shame, Dennis was still unable to apparate. Wordless magic was still a struggle for him and the cohort he was now in at school wouldn’t be learning to apparate until the following year. Portkeys to London had been expensive, but he was driven by his reluctance to stay at the summer school any more than he needed to. As a legal adult, it was easy for him to have weekends off.

Muddy green-brown eyes stared out into the dreary world outside but he wasn’t really looking at much of anything. Dennis was, as usual, caught in his own dreamy reverie. Muggle trains were so similar to magical ones, he thought distantly, but the Hogwarts Express had many distinct features. It was impossible to confuse the two.

Sometimes he found it easy to remember. Not just the sequence of events, not just the chronological order of things, but the way it felt. Rather than shifting through his memories like ordered paragraphs, he could remember the way that platform nine and three quarters had smelled. He could remember the noise and the gritty, dirty quality in the air that many train stations seemed to breed. He remembered not caring about any of that at all, of course, because it was the first time he was there as a new student and he was going to Hogwarts. To learn magic. How bright and impossible and wondrous it had all seemed back then, he thought. And how fucked up it was now.

Of course, sometimes those feelings were inaccessible. Right now Dennis’ thoughts were drawn back to his brother’s death like moths to a flame. He couldn’t help himself. It wasn’t an emotional reliving of the night his brother had left, however. No, this time it was just facts and figures; sentences on a page detailing events. He followed the thought pattern he’d been following for years. Mentally, Dennis listed the shopping items on the receipt upon which Colin had left his note. The last goodbye. His thoughts glossed over how he’d walked, hitched a ride, caught a train. He remembered the funeral and his too-big black suit; the way his mother had worn her hair.

Dennis kept copies of the newspapers that had printed photos of the aftermath of the battle. He’d cut out the parts with lists of names and photos of wreckage and preserved them almost obsessively. Dennis wasn’t sure if that was something that normal people did when their loved ones died; if it was an unusually morbid act, then he didn’t know. For him it had seemed so important to keep records of everything. In retrospect, it seemed bizarre that he didn’t even know for sure how, or where it had happened. Had it been fast? Was he alone? When Dennis was fourteen that information had been inaccessible, and he didn’t have any contact with the magical world for a year after Colin’s death. He’d made assumptions and imagined the scene and over the years he’d thought about it so much that it was almost unthinkable that anything other than his version had occurred.

A few months ago, a girl who he was supposed to graduate with had mentioned something that had dredged up his insatiable, morbid curiosity again. Dennis spent a lot of time thinking about death; probably an unhealthy amount of time, in fact. Her words had triggered something more. It had just been a throwaway sentence or two, referencing events that had happened years ago, but Dennis hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it. He’d spent a long time composing a letter to her, but eventually all he’d sent was a note with eight words written in a messy, teenage scrawl.

Ari,
Could we meet up sometime?
Dennis Creevey

He’d tacked his surname on as an afterthought, just in case there were multiple Dennises that she met up with. A part of him hated how distant he was from the graduated cohort, but another part of him had basically instigated the distance himself. It had been too hard to try to befriend them again after two years in the muggle world. After Colin’s death. Dennis and Ari had exchanged a few more letters since that first painfully short one - similarly light and pleasant - and arranged to meet today in London.

Dennis’ train pulled into its stop and he slung his backpack over one shoulder as he got to his feet. He tried to dispel the melancholy mood he was in. You don’t want to scare her away, he thought to himself. He skipped up the stairs two at a time, ignoring the people on his left and right. It didn’t take him long to get to his destination. He’d planned to meet her at a place not too far from the train station... his inability to apparate wasn’t exactly something he wanted to broadcast. She was already there when he arrived and Dennis decided that punctuality suited her.

“Ari, hi,” he said as he approached, offering a crooked smile with dimpled cheeks. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with his body; a hug felt too familiar and anything less felt too formal. “Did you want to get something to eat?” It was about the time people might have an early dinner, he guessed. Dennis adjusted his backpack and looked past the girl to a couple of small cafes nearby. Probably cafe-bars, he guessed. Thinking about the subject matter he wanted to ask about, he hoped they were heading somewhere that served alcohol. "How's graduated life?" Thankfully, he kept the bitterness out of his tone.

Ari still remembered meeting Dennis for the first time in their first year. He'd had way more energy than she had felt equipped to deal with, but even though she knew plenty of people found him annoying, especially older students, she mostly found him okay. Even she was excited about starting Hogwarts, and learning magic, and she had two magical parents. Ari had read fairy tales too, and who wouldn't be that way when stepping into a real life one? They'd never exactly been close, but he was around.

Until he wasn't. And when Dennis finally came back, he was an entirely different person. Everyone knew that his absence and then his brother's death had hit him hard, but none of them seemed to be able to talk to him about it, and Dennis didn't seem too keen on dipping into the structure of their year's camaraderie, as fleeting and fluid as she now knew it to have been. The gap had not faded. And Ari herself...

Well. There was some guilt involved.

Between Nicole, her brother, and her own process of maturation, between the dome and the battle flashbacks, between looking at the thestrals every time the Hogwarts carriages appeared, Ariana now knew just how reckless she'd been to sneak back with Finn that day. Inevitable, and reckless. But she had, 15 years young, and what she had seen would never fade as memories should. She had wanted to talk to him about it--she owed him that chance, didn't she?--but the distance, temporal and psychological, was too much, so the Hufflepuff girl had made mental excuses. She'd never spoken a word to anyone, not even when they got to seeing each other around more often as they tackled the dome. The one time she had neared the subject, in one of her darker moods, the eighteen-year-old had cut herself off. And people who kept such core parts of themselves under wraps could maybe never be close.

So it was with surprise that she'd received Dennis's note and swiftly penned a reply, watching Titius wing off under the trees from her window in Exeter. She was perfectly happy to meet him, but there had always been this barrier, and she didn't know how it would manifest with just the two of them. She tried not to think about it as she walked from a convenient Apparition site to the designated spot, or as she saw his skinny figure approach.

"Hey, Dennis," she smiled, waving in what she hoped was as easy and casual as it looked. "Good to see you. Um, yeah, sure? That one looks all right," she pointed to one at random, noting a cute patio and a polished bar inside. "It's, um, it's..." Ari remembered getting her results from her character tests and the several warning values circled. "It's nice to have a change of scenery," she settled for, starting to walk in the direction of the cafes. "You're at...summer school, then?"

Whenever Dennis started thinking about what was going to happen after school, he ended up feeling angry and confused. No one really knew him well enough to know it, but Dennis had quite a fierce temper. The heat of his anger was usually inward-facing. He had such a love-hate relationship with Hogwarts that Ari’s mention of summer school caused a swell of angry bitterness in his chest, but at the same time, he had to remind himself it was his own fault he was still at school. When he’d talked to Dean about it, Dennis had played down the fear he felt when he started imagining life on his own, but he’d started forming thought-habits around actively avoiding thinking about it.

“Yeah, had to,” he said lightly, smile still firmly in place. The fingers of one hand nervously picking at the seams of his backpack straps gave him away though. “I mean, It’s great that I got a scholarship and it’s not too bad but, you know, it would have been great to just pass my OWLs…” Dennis shrugged, dropping his hands to his sides. He’d done so well in his first three years at Hogwarts. It was crushing to be below average with peers two years his junior… But he really had to stop thinking about the fact that he was a total failure or he’d get too angry. Don’t scare her away he reminded himself diligently. Dennis ducked his chin, watching the road beneath them as he walked for a bit before looking up at the cafe they were approaching.

“This looks fine,” he said, giving her a questioning look before the two of them headed inside. Dennis made his way to the counter, picking up a plastic laminated menu and passing it to Ari before getting his own one.

Somewhat reluctant to jump straight into the reason he was here, Dennis took a long moment pretending to read the menu while he tried to think of something to say that wasn’t ‘so did you see my brother die, or??’. He wasn’t a total anxious wreck when it came to socialising; in fact, he was very capable of small talk. Connecting past that point was where things started to get hard of the Gryffindor. He ran a finger down the laminated menu, pausing at coffee before continuing down to the alcoholic drinks section. What would Ari think if he ordered plain whiskey? The curly-haired boy glanced up at the girl he was with before looking back down at the menu. Better not risk it, he thought.

Dennis cleared his throat before ordering. “Could I order a glass of white wine to start thanks? Whatever’s cheapest.” Outside the sky was darkening from a depressing grey to a depressing black as night fell. The lights were already on inside the cafe. Dennis let Ari order a drink before the two of them made their way to one of the spare tables. “So what are you up to now? Out in the big wide world?” He asked. Dennis had heard rumours about what the recent grads were all planning, but he tried not to listen to them. He was jealous.

Ari winced, realizing she'd touched on a sore subject. She should have known better, but the fact of the matter was, it was one of the only things she knew about Dennis. After seven years at Hogwarts, and having played on the Quidditch team and been a prefect, Ari had sort of forgotten what it was like to interact with people she didn't know that much about, or who didn't know her that well either. Now most of her conversations were going to be like this for a while, and her natural reserve was beginning to kick in, leaving her awkward. She tried to shrug it off, searching for who she was when she was with someone like Camm.

"Sorry, that was really insensitive of me," she quickly offered, not one to beat about the bush. Mostly. There was still the matter of the secret she'd been keeping. "It was a rough year, so..." you're not the only one? I know you're really smart? What was she supposed to say? Prefect Ari knew exactly what to say to reassure struggling students. Post-Dome Ari had given up on keeping up morale. Freya did it better. "I believe in you," she settled simply, with a shrug and a brief smile. He would probably find that bizarre considering the lack of foundation she had to base it on, but she did mean it.

Taking the menu from him, she scanned the drink menu, brow furrowing. Truth be told, the eighteen-year-old didn't know how to order alcohol, and although a side glance told her Dennis was checking that section out, she didn't quite have the confidence to throw it to the wind. "I'll just have a lemonade, thanks," she smiled apologetically at the bartender before following Dennis to a table.

"Um, well," she shrugged, looking at her hands. The laminate of the table peeked back up at her. "I start Auror training in the fall. I've always wanted to do it, since...since the war," she was getting dangerously close to forbidden territory, but one on one, Ari had no choice but to be honest, "but I don't know if it's a good idea anymore. They're worried about some of my psychological markers," she said with a little laugh, looking back up at Dennis. She probably shouldn't be going here, he probably didn't actually want to talk about it, but Ari was never very good at keeping it light or masking anything. "But I'm not really cut out for anything else, you know? Seems like the best use for my talents, society-wise."

Dennis waved away her apologies airily. “No it’s cool,” he said. It was always so much more uncomfortable when people apologised to him. Dean did it too much, he thought distantly. He returned her smile but he was clearly glad when conversation moved on.

Auror training. Just the idea of Aurors and other law-enforcing ministry types had always been intimidating for Dennis. Moreso after his run in with the ministry several months ago. He listened to her talk with mild interest, trying to consolidate his few memories of her from pre-war with the auror that she was wanting to become.

since the war

Dennis’ heart gave a tight squeeze.

Her answer was a little more honest than he’d been expecting. Dennis added forthright to the list along with punctual. It had been such a long time since he’d had a conversation with this girl, or any of those people for that matter. Their whole friendship group was simultaneously painfully out of reach and to painful not to avoid. At thirteen, Dennis had been best friends with Kerr and Danny and Jeremy and he’d had a crushes on girls like Freya Trickett and Keela Doyle. If things had been different maybe it would have been him punching Danny in the common room… or him getting punched. Maybe he’d be quidditch captain or class clown or sort of funny or sort of smart or anything other than whatever he was now, which was what exactly? Sort of nothing, he thought blankly.

As it was, however, he had to make mental lists of character traits in uncomfortable conversations to keep up with former peers. Dennis waited to make sure she was finished before asking a question. “But… are you having second thoughts because of the markers or because you don’t know what else to do?” Dennis drummed his fingers against the wooden tabletop idly. Their drinks appeared shortly and Dennis was thankful for the wine. Alcohol was like a buffer; it filed down painful edges and made certain things easier to handle. He took a long sip of the wine wishing it was more acceptable to just down the glass and ask for more.

That could have gone better, but she didn't exactly regret it. The other option would have been ignoring it entirely, and Ari was far too blunt for that. But she found herself wishing she knew Dennis better so she didn't sound so empty. Maybe that was why she was offering these thoughts to him, opening herself up for inspection. While she did tend to tell people if they asked, no one had exactly asked recently. Everyone knew that it made sense. Ariana Laurier, stellar at wandwork, excellent duellist, protective, honorable, levelheaded, war veteran. Of course she was going to be an Auror. She'd be so good at it.

She reached up to finger her necklace. The smell of tarnished silver was rubbing off on this one. "I'm not worried about the markers," she said quietly with a shrug. "They'll get better, and the ones that don't are inevitable. I figure if you stay in this job long enough you're bound to have some issues anyway. Do you remember Mad-Eye?" Their first Defense professor had been crazy. He'd also been an impostor, but Crouch had done a good character study on the man. "I was getting better before last year, so maybe it just takes time."

She turned to look out the window at the orange glow of the streetlamps. "I'm just tired of fighting right now," she confessed. "Seems like we're always fighting around here, and everyone has enough power at their fingertips to do damage." She wondered if her mother ever wished she'd just been a regular Muggle instead of a Muggleborn witch. She wondered if Dennis ever did. Ari muttered a thanks to the waiter who brought around their drinks and took a sip, feeling the fizz of the carbonation on her lips. "I feel like I have to do this, like it's who I am." She slid her wand out of her sleeve, displaying its handle. "See, even it knew. Rowan is protective." She laughed again, slightly, and slid it back in. "It's just...maybe I wonder what things would be like if none of this had happened. If we'd grown up like normal kids. Slowly."

She wanted to ask him something in return, but he'd been reluctant to talk about himself so far, and she didn't feel like she had the right to pry. "You know." she said, shrugging, instead. That much was clear.

Dennis felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise as she spoke. He’d recently glossed over a similar subject with Dean. They’d happily traded away their lives at the mention of that very same power, but now they lived in a world where a few words could cause unimaginable pain or someone could remove your memories. They lived in a world where a flash of green light could kill you. Dennis’ family had been torn apart because of exposure to the magical world. But, like Dean and exactly like Colin, Dennis had dropped everything to join, and then after he'd been forced out, he’d dropped everything to come back.

“I dunno,” he said, uncomfortable and unsure of how to proceed. Dennis was unused to these kinds of discussions. He didn’t spend time with people who talked about it or people who asked him about it. Dean pried so gently and was easily turned away and Dennis almost didn’t know anyone else. He was silent for a moment as he took another long drink of his wine. It was almost empty already. Dennis had never liked wine and to him it tasted like cheap, shitty nail polish remover. When he spoke, he started slowly and his gaze remained on his almost-empty wine glass. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’ve grown up too fast or too slow,” he said. Dennis wanted to elaborate, but he was having trouble translating his feelings into words. Some sort of masculine pressure kept him from opening up in the same way she had.

“Sometimes I feel so… behind?” The last word was said with bitterness. He kept his gaze downturned. Schoolwork was hard. Focusing was hard. Keeping up with references in the wizarding world was still impossible sometimes. He still slipped up, even now, and it was even harder in the muggle world. Dennis couldn’t name relevant celebrities or politicians in either world now. He’d barely experienced things like crushes or even things like friendship. He felt like a child in so many ways. The boy shrugged, deflecting with apathy. He minimised his feelings like they didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

Dennis waved the waiter back over and ordered another wine.

After he was done, he steeled himself and turned his attention back to Ari, trying to shift his mood away from bitter. Hadn’t he been reflecting feverishly on how he wanted to interrogate her only twenty minutes ago on the train? The young man straightened in his seat. “Listen, Ari. I wanted to ask you about… about the battle.” He paused, watching her face closely, “I just… at school that night you said something that made me think…” it wasn’t just what she’d said, but the way she’d stopped saying it. The look on her face. “I wanted to ask you about my brother.” Brother. Fuck, that word was still weird to say.

There was a discomfort buzzing about the two of them, like an itchy blanket draped over the the two of them sitting at the table, muffling and stifling them. Other people in the cafe buzzed, laughed. The couple at the next table over were staring into each others eyes with a dazed smile. That was the other thing, that they could all inhabit this world together and be living such different moments.

"Maybe a bit of both?" she shrugged. "I know I don't...know you well enough to say, but at least for me, I feel like...I never got the chance to do the things teenagers are supposed to do, and I got the chance to do a whole lot of things they're never supposed to have to." She shut up and took another drink, feeling the acidity of the lemon bite in an oddly comforting way. She ran her fingers over the glass of the bottle. She often drank straight from the bottle when it was soda, even though they always brought her an extra cup in cafes.

She couldn't say anything to reassure him because she felt it too, although she knew it wasn't anywhere to the same degree. Judging from the last exchange, he didn't seem to want sympathy, either, so she stayed quiet this time as he ordered another glass of wine. She met his eyes as he straightened, though.

I wanted to ask you about the battle.

Ari bit her lips. For a moment images flashed up instead of the cafe. Darkness and flashes of spells. Her own bravado overlaying her fear. The pounding in her chest, which started to respond for a moment. That was what she usually thought of, but looking at Dennis, she saw instead his brother's face overlaid on his, their similar features accentuated. Ariana knew he was watching her and she knew something changed in her eyes, but she kept them on him. To look away would feel too weak, and dishonest. He deserved to know whatever he wanted to.

She took a deep breath and then a drink, wondering if alcohol really helped with this kind of thing. "I said something about being on the grounds that night, didn't I?" she said quietly. She steeled herself and took another breath. "What do you want to know?"

“Yeah, you did,” he said quietly, in a voice that was too soft and too important to be heard in a busy little place like this one. Her words had already confirmed things for him. He felt a little breathless for a moment before he made himself break eye contact.

What did he want to know? Everything. What had she seen? Did she know how Colin had died? Morbidly, Dennis’ thoughts went to other places. What had the environment felt like? How many deaths had she seen? What did the air taste like? A part of him felt like there would be some satisfaction in being able to relive that night, at least for him. He wanted to know what Colin had felt like. Scared? Elated? Had he shown up and realised that a year without using a wand was not conducive to staying alive in such conditions? Had he saved lives or died straight away? The Gryffindor wanted to know. He wanted to feel it.

Dennis plucked a toothpick from its container in the centre of the table and began methodically picking dirt from underneath his bitten fingernails. “You know, they never thought to tell me how he died.” Dennis paused for a moment, shook his head, and then kept going, getting increasingly agitated. “Like… why would I possibly want to know such an unimportant bit of information…?” He looked back up at her, but didn’t stop what he was doing with his hands. Maybe it was because they’d been away from school for a year, he thought. Magic was a thing of the past and maybe they’d just grouped him in as a muggle with his parents. “My parents didn’t know, y’know. I mean they were supportive, but they didn’t know anything about magic. I dunno if they could.” And the ministry didn’t care. No one came to tell him what had happened or what his options were. He was lost in the system.

“I - ow!” Dennis looked down at his fingers, surprised to see a little red dot blooming under one of his nails. He dropped the toothpick and rubbed his finger with his other hand. “…I dunno. I suppose… did you see him that night?”

Ari held her breath as Dennis began to talk about how he'd learned about Colin's death. Part of her felt angry, and her new affiliation with the Ministry didn't exactly help matters. A lot of people had died that night, a lot of grieving families needed to be visited, but really, how dare they treat it so callously? Colin had been 16! As if from far away she remembered Edmund yelling at her. You could have died! What would we have done? Apparently they'd never have known enough to grieve properly. Then again, did they even know? There had been so many people, so much chaos, so many spells. Sound that was overwhelming, muffled by necessity by the pounding of blood in her ears.

She realized her hands were shaking a little and stilled them on the table. "Careful," she murmured, knowing she could fix the tiny wound instantly and figuring a boy with as many scars as Dennis seemed to have would hate the idea. "I...I did," she admitted, trying to catch his eye and then looking away. "I always wanted to talk to you about it," she said, her breath catching in her throat. "But it never really seemed like a good...idea, or time, or whatever." She waved her hand helplessly, trying to reference the nebulous distance between them.

"I saw him twice," she finally said slowly, looking in the direction of Dennis's chest. "Once, ahead of me, sneaking back after they forced everyone underage to evacuate. He was one of the first to move. And once...in the middle of the fight." Her voice fell to just above a whisper at the end, and she fell silent, waiting for Dennis to guide her where he needed her to go. Her thumb traced anxious circles on the lip of the bottle.

“It’s fine,” Dennis said, his voice a hard dismissal. Another time he might have felt bad about being impolite, but right now maintaining niceties was the least of his worries. The hard line of his jaw was clenched and he found himself leaning forward a little. He didn’t know what he felt. Something like anger and something like excitement, but darker and more urgent. Dennis squeezed his injured finger with his other hand as he listened, clinging on to every word.

She’d always wanted to… Dennis lingered on those words for a moment before moving on and following her sentences like a trail left just for him to find. His heart was beating loud and fast. One of the first to move? Of course he was. Of course. Dennis couldn’t have imagined Colin’s unbridled enthusiasm after a year of being useless and kept away from his friends. He was reminded of the small room that he and Colin had shared in the year he’d returned to muggle school. The quiet was oppressive. It was cold. Smelled of dust and old wood. He remembered the way that Colin had quizzed him. Helebore or hemlock? he’d asked, Flux weed or foxglove? Endless lists of names and spells were promises that things were going to be Okay^TM. The boys had been sure that they’d be there for a few weeks or a month, max.

These milestones had crept forward with trepidation and then whooshed past them and left them cold. He’d spent his days in muggle school (cobalt or chromium?) and Colin had gone to work his soft hands at a factory processing thermoplastic polymer. Time had worn the edge from his brother’s enthusiasm.

What a waste.

For a moment, Dennis could hear the creaking of the old wooden stairs and the hum of the failing lightbulb in their bedroom before a bright, melodic laugh from two tables over cut through his thoughts like a knife. He was breathless. Dennis waited for her to keep going, to give him something more, but he felt like she was teasing him, waiting for him to pull each answer out slowly and painfully. His patience disappeared quickly. “What did you see?” He asked impatiently. It was obvious to him that she had more to say.

So he was leaving it up to her. Did anyone get training in this? Like the Ministry official who had informed the Creeveys of the death of their son and brother--had anyone thought to tell him about the right way to break the news? Ari had always wanted to talk to Dennis about that night, and admittedly had made a dozen excuses in the past, but now, in the moment, she found that something about his demeanor made her feel as though she was standing on a slippery surface. The intensity of his attention unnerved her; there was something dark about it, something that she couldn't help but wonder if she should feed. Ariana was a loyal girl, and morality mattered to her. But which to be loyal to, what her...friend, she supposed, she would still call him that, wanted from her, needed to hear, or the instincts that informed her there might be something just as immoral as moral about this disclosure?

But it was too late now--the map to everything was written all over her words and her eyes, and Ariana knew that she'd started something that she couldn't stop. "It wasn't...for long," she started, wanting to qualify her words for some reason. To numb and soften the certainty she was about to convey, the image he would be able to construct in his mind for the first time. She knew that Dennis had taken up photography with Colin's old camera, had seen him around, capturing images. She knew she was about to fill in the blankness that the official had given--either that, or Dennis's imagination. Ari had a nagging feeling that whatever she said could only disappoint the Gryffindor. "I was trading curses with, I think a Death Eater and someone managed to hit him with a Stupefy, so I locked him with a full body-bind for good measure." She knew it didn't really matter to Dennis, but she couldn't bring herself to just...say it, coldly, clinically. "And I looked up, just to see who had cast it and...instead I saw right past her. There were...so many spells flying in that area, I was a little ways from the edge of this cluster. I..."

She took a deep breath. Sometimes fireworks that flew too straight reminded her of that moment, the flashes in colors of spells and shouting. So chaotic that she had been scared often to cast a curse until fired upon. "It was like...fireworks, I couldn't not look. And I just--one of the flashes was white, and bright, and I just recognized his face--I spent all night scanning faces, hoping to see someone I knew so I knew not to hurt them. Then someone moved in front of me for a moment, I wasn't that close to where he was--" Another breath, this time shuddering a little. She grasped the handle of her wand for a moment, remembering. In the night as a whole, it hadn't been the most shocking thing she had seen. That was the worst part. But now, slicing it out of its continuum, of the ties that bound it in time, it became the most consuming thing, the memory like a bubble she was pressing her face into, dimming the lights in the cafe around them.

Her voice had dropped low and quiet again. "And it all happened so fast. I didn't see who cast it, but there was a...a green light." The significance of that would strike him. "I did see Professor Orchid, he'd cast something--it must have been a conjuration or something, he must have known what he was trying to block. Or maybe it was just a countercurse. It...wasn't fast enough."

Ari felt like she'd released a phantom into the air between the two of them, hovering. She hoped desperately she was bringing some peace to someone in some way. "That's all," she whispered finally. "Someone hit me with a Crucio just then." She rubbed her left arm, which had been hit by a more physically damaging curse later in the night. Someone had saved her from certain death, dispatching the caster before they could do more than cause pain. She'd been lucky. And how could Dennis look at her when she'd survived and Colin had not?

Dennis felt like there was a gulf of years stretched out between them. It was tangible. He was here, in this cafe, shockingly present and she was the one that was gone, reliving moments from years ago that she didn’t look like she’d ever shake. Dennis wanted so desperately to be able to share them with her. He wanted immersion. Over the past few months, as his thoughts had overlapped and her words had rung around in his head - around and around and around - he’d been fixated on this conversation. He’d drafted it up in his head in moments after nightfall, before sleeping. Imaginary scripts filled the time between sending the first note to this girl and this current meeting.

Now, he waited impatiently for her to get to the point, but at the same time wanted her to keep talking; he needed her descriptions, the expressions she made as he drew out sentence after sentence from her like blood with a syringe. He needed the images that were burned in the the back of her eyelids to be translated into something he could feel. Burning things, sparks. Wandlight. Destruction, noise, blasts, pain, rubble. He wanted to know about everything. The gaps between her words felt like wasted hours. Still, Dennis waited for more. Her descriptions were so vague. It wasn’t fast enough. It all happened so fast. He wanted to push her for details but then she said that that was all and mentioned something about crucio. He felt his hands shaking at the edge of the table.

It was some great injustice that she could sit here in front of him talking about the battle while Colin could never talk about anything ever again but he tried not to blame her for it.

“That’s it?” He asked, his voice sounding hard and distant. Maybe it was the dull, beating pulse he could hear in his ears, drowning out his words. Dennis could hear his breathing too; it was faster, louder than it should have been. Colin - had he looked tired? Sad? Happy? Dennis couldn’t imagine his big brother looking very serious at all - even after he’d come home after a long, tiring day at work, he’d been smiling. He remembered with a shock that Colin had been younger than he was now. Every time he thought about their ages it shocked him; Colin had always been his protective older brother. His big best friend. He should be twenty now. And Dennis should have graduated.

Then - suddenly - it was his first year at school again and he was sitting, soaking wet - no one had remembered to do a drying spell, and he didn’t even know that one existed - as he told his older brother excitedly about falling into the lake. He knew that he would never know the meaning of loneliness - no one had to say so, it was just so clear in the way that the Gryffindors had cheered for this small, wet child and the way his brother was grinning at him like an idiot. It was his second year, a Saturday, and Dennis was signing his name underneath his brother’s trying to copy his handwriting exactly. He would join any club (or in this case, army, apparently) that Colin did, join his brother in anything. Anytime. Next year we have to stay at school over Christmas, Colin had said. Dennis didn't approve - Christmas was for family - but Colin said that it would be magical and Dennis clung to that word like a prayer. That was in the home they’d grown up in on Christmas day in his third year, the last one before.

And in all the months and years since then, Dennis had segmented his life into various befores and afters. Before Colin had died. Before he’d come back to Hogwarts. After he’d moved back home. After he’d left again.

“He was stupid to go back,” he said, his voice agitated but his volume low. “He hadn’t touched his wand for a year. Stupid.” The last word came out with such vindication that he surprised himself. "You know he drove there? In a car." Idiot. Dennis would have followed him blindly, as he’d always done. That was undoubtedly why Colin had gone without him. His fingers pressed hard into the edge of the wooden table; his knuckles were white. It was still so real to him. He’d relived those memories so many times - tried so hard to encase them in glass - that he’d probably shifted them into something that didn’t match what had actually happened. He’d thought about Colin’s stupid voice so much that there was no way the memories hadn’t been tainted. He couldn’t possibly have kept the exact timbre or tone without hearing it. Still, to him it was real. It felt more relevant than most of the last three years.

Dennis' new wine had come and mechanically he took his glass and downed the whole thing. He needed another one. Maybe five more.

"That's all I saw," she clarified, distantly and feebly. She felt like nothing would ever be enough for Dennis when it came to this matter, nothing short of pulling Colin's memory from his long-gone mind and laying it in a Pensieve for his brother. Maybe not even that, because a memory that he could enter into over and over was one in which he could see Colin over and over, trapping him even more than he already was in the past. Suddenly she imagined Kate sitting in front of her instead, with that same look in her eyes, and guilt singed her stomach.

Ari saw him closing in on himself and she wished she could break through for just a moment. Dennis didn't want care or concern or assurance. Even the truth--Colin wouldn't have wanted this for you, made certain in her gut by the overlaid image of her sister's face on his--would ring harshly.

"He fought for a long time before it happened," she said quietly, as gently as possible, trying to shake her own trauma from herself so she could be here, in the present. "We were all stupid." She agreed. They had been. They'd all been blind, especially the youngest ones, but even the older ones, who didn't know what they were getting into. The only ones who couldn't be were the survivors of the other battles. Neville. Luna. Ginny. Harry and Hermione and Ron. The veterans of the first war. "Stupid, but...brave, and believing. Dennis, I don't think he--" she closed her eyes, saw the flash, felt her heart clench. Gritted her jaw. The horror. But only one in a string of dozens. "He didn't look...pained, or scared, to me." They'd been so stupid, but even in the horror Ari could remember the way the conviction had steeled her bones, had run through her veins like hot metal. It had mattered. And she didn't know who she would be if she had stayed. She believed the same of Colin.

It warred within her, that conviction and the shame it made her feel, thinking such a thing while sitting here with Dennis when he couldn't have gone if he had wanted to. Someone who would give anything to change part of his past. Maybe even to extinction. She swallowed and waited for the barrage she probably deserved.

Dennis wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the smell of cheap wine hanging heavy in the air around him. He’d been so sure that something like this would be satisfying, but instead he just felt… mostly empty. The parts of him that felt anything at all were angry. It wasn’t a passionate or cold sort of anger, but somewhere in the middle - or outside - of those descriptors. It was heaving and churning and threatened to wreak destruction but at the same time it was compressed and knotted. Dennis felt like he would turn himself inside out trying to work it out or control it. He felt a little inside-out already.

She was useless. Well, not her, but - this. Her words, her memories. They didn’t do anything for him. He wondered if anything could. If she told him exactly how his brother looked when he’d died he’d want to know what his brother had been wearing, or what precise shade of green the killing curse was. If she told him about that then he'd want to know if it had knocked him back like a kick to the chest or sort of passed over him like a whisper. Dennis felt like a blank silhouette; this whole thing had hollowed him out and now he was just empty outlines against a dark, angry background.

Dennis remembered that day in the Hogs’ head with extreme clarity. Hermione - who he’d had the biggest crush on in his second year - bringing out that list of names for them to sign. In the name of (or the pretence of?) teaching them spells that weren’t being taught in school, Potter and his friends had laid down the foundations for what had come. The whole thing had been so enchanting. Starting a rebellious group in school and learning magics above and beyond what he would have been taught in regular class, how could they say no? The roguish, underdog, cruelly spellbinding nature of the thing had lured them in. Then, years later, whoever had called Dumbledore’s Army on the night of the battle had gotten his brother killed. Colin had hero-worshipped Harry Potter and the rest of them to his death.

And Dennis would have done the same if his brother had let him.

“Brave and believing?” He echoed back, overlapping a little with the part where she’d described his brother’s dying face. His frown intensified as emotional tectonics shifted under the surface. Less empty, more heat. Then again, with sharper sarcasm, “…Brave and believing.” Brave and believing. The words rung through him, each a dissonant note plucking at his volatile emotional state. What the fuck did either of those things have to do with it? Brave just meant stupid if you were brave and then died pointlessly. It probably wasn’t a good Gryffindor thing to think, but he didn’t care. That ridiculous talking hat had wanted to put him in Ravenclaw anyway. And believing? Well, shit, that was even worse.

Dennis knew that it was all for the greater good and that they’d all “won” in the end, but for him it didn’t make a difference. There was still something twisted about taking kids and turning them into soldiers. Harry Potter and his friends - and whoever had been directing them, Dumbledore? - had made decisions that had left people like Ari just pretending to be fine and people like Colin dead. As far as he was concerned, all of these “little” consequences stacked up against them in the right or wrong scales. Fuck the greater good, honestly. Dennis' hands were clenched at the edge of the table and his whole body was tight, like he was ready for a fight. He didn't even notice that the cafe was quieter now or that Ari was clearly suffering.

“Fuck believing,” he said, short syllables punctuated with emotion; slight pause between the words to make his point. “Fuck brave.” Stop. You’re not angry at her. "Kids fighting for their lives? Do you realise how fucking ridiculous that is?" He remembered screaming questions into the night as he chased after the car. "It doesn't matter that he believed." Searching frantically for that gold coin; dropping it with a yelp because it was so hot. "He was a stupid kid who had no fucking clue what he was getting into.” Dennis’ voice began to crack, it was thick with emotion and the feelings were making it hard to speak. Still, a harsh frown cut his freckled face and his jaw was set. Dennis wasn’t being quiet now. A few people were watching their table with wary disapproval.

If you stay in this job long enough you're bound to have some issues anyway, she'd said. Well Dennis didn't know how she could stay. He was so disillusioned with the ministry and the entire magical world. The teenager knew that everyone had lost someone, he didn’t need to talk about Colin to get his point across; she already knew. After the war everyone had buried friends. But Dennis said it all anyway because it wasn’t like losing everything gave anyone any perspective. And he wasn’t angry at her, but she was here, so that was where his rage went.

“We used to nick coins to play on the shitty pinball machine in the corner store,” he said, his voice pained, “his biggest fear was never hitting five foot four.” It was so bizarre to be able to feel so much even after all this time.