[tdp] avoid the pollution from this revolution [tock]

april 2002

“Oh, yeah, of course.” Edith nodded, though she had completely missed the latest thing her editor had said. “Right.” She agreed despite not knowing just what, exactly, she was agreeing to. It probably wasn’t the best method of approach, considering this was her third week of being officially, stably employed, but her mind was elsewhere. It was the fifth or sixth time she had visited the offices of The Daily Prophet. Even though Edith was now guaranteed a spot in each Sunday paper for her column, she was still using a pen name; it didn’t make sense to sense to assign her any sort of permanent workspace.

But that same rule didn’t apply to @Tock Neilson apparently, a man she had thought to be most assuredly dead until she had seen his name on a door as she walked down the hall to meet her editor. She hadn’t seen a face to place with the name, but it had to be him.

“Yup, will do.” Edith nodded again, finally understanding what she was being told. Make the corrections, have the article back by Thursday. Easy enough. She stood and offered her practiced ‘I love my job’ smile before exiting the office and setting off back down the hall. She should stop by and see Tock -- she knew she should, but she was incredibly (and believably, she though) hesitant. They hadn’t parted on good terms, or any terms really, having to split up because snatchers had caught up to them, yet again. There was a contingency plan in place, and Edith had waited for him to show up for nearly a week.

It took her a moment or two, but soon enough she had received a  resounding “No, love,” as she poked her head into the office that was clearly shared by a few people and asked if Tock was around; she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t relieved. She hadn’t figured out what she would say to him, if she could cope with something being visibly wrong with him, if she needed to apologize for letting themselves get split up in the first place. It was enough to know that there was at least one Tock Neilson working at The Prophet and that he wasn’t dead. Good enough.

She was already moving on to thinking about what to do for lunch, clearly more focused on which kebab cart she would visit rather than where she was walking -- as clearly evidenced by her head on collision as she rounded a corner. “Shit.” They were completely fine, no injuries, so that wasn’t what she was worried about. Edith had only just managed to avoid any weird catch up with Tock, even if she had wanted to do it a few minutes ago, and now she was literally running into him. “I--” she took a step back, her hand shooting up to push her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “I waited for you, I swear.”

Tock hated being at the office, though it paid his bills. He really hated the Prophet, it was in the ministry's pocket and printed whatever the ministry told it to print. What had happened to real journalism? To progress, to free speech, to getting down to the dark, grittiness that encompassed the lives of so many people Tock knew personally. Of Tock, himself, on one end. That was why he was surprised about the column, the column as he had come to refer to it. Tock read that part of the paper religiously because damn if there wasn't something good finally getting printed for the world to see. It didn't matter if it was obviously written under a pen name—he worked at the Prophet and had ways of finding out which people did and didn't exist there—it was breaking the wall down and talking about things that needed to be talked about.

It was hard for Tock to work at home. It was too quiet there, with too much to keep his mind occupied. That was where his bed was, where he kept his stash. Believe it or not, Tock didn't like silence. He liked the buzzing of the office, the chit-chat in the hallways. Silence was too loud for him to bear, it allowed him to hear nothing but his own thoughts. That was why, more often than not, he listened to music while he worked, even now. It helped distract him enough to focus. So, he came to the office to work there. He was finishing an older design this afternoon, just tidying it up for the next issue of the paper. Drawing was harder when you needed to animate it, every angle needed to be accounted for and properly cleaned up.

He had taken a quick trip to the vending machine for an energy drink—coffee was water to Tock, especially considering the amount of uppers he was usually on at any given time. Being on a caffeine high was nothing. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, his hair unwashed. He didn't grow much in the way of stubble on his baby face, but his clothes looked wrinkled as well, though they were clean. He was on his way back to the office when he collided with someone. He looked up, and almost winced. It was like seeing a ghost.

Tock had intentionally not connected with anyone he used to be friends with, for fear that he'd discover they were injured or worse. He and Edith had history, though. They were on the run together for a brief time, and he had trusted her. He was glad to see she was alive, but he wasn't ready to recount the story he would need to tell her.

“I—” He began. “I believe you.” He said quietly. He did believe she waited for him, but he hadn't come back. He hadn't been able to come back. “I got sent to Azkaban.” He said, finally, chewing the inside of his lip a bit. His stomach protested, but his mind went back there anyway. It had been so dark there, so quiet, and there was nothing but desolation inside those cells. Even so, he spoke it in a way that made it sound like it had happened to someone else, not him.

She was waiting to wake up, even though she knew that this was Tock, a living, breathing Tock right in front of her. Christ. Edith swallowed hard as she waited for him to say something; she wasn’t expecting forgiveness, or understanding, or anything, really, but it was like any word would be confirmation that she wasn’t making it all up. That he really was there. She didn’t think she needed to explain herself any further; there had been a reason he hadn’t reached out after the war, and Edith was fairly confident that the reason matched up pretty well with her own reason for doing the same.

But he believed her, that she had waited for him. Edith nodded wordlessly, wondering if they should just stop there. Surely neither of them were in the right headspace to begin to explain what had happened to either of them; she certainly wasn’t. He didn’t stop there, though; the next five words hit Edith square in the chest, the weight of them making her forget how to breathe for a few seconds. “Fuck,” she said finally, quietly.

Those few minutes of her life were such a blur. One second the snatchers weren’t there, and then they were. Running, stunning, confusion, separation. Edith hadn’t done her part in keeping Tock safe -- hadn’t that been the whole point in hiding together in the first place? They had both finally found someone to place their trust in; Edith knew she had realized the impact of such a decision. If she had trusted the wrong person, it could have ended so much worse for her.

Tock had trusted the wrong person, apparently.

The silence was stretching out between them; what could she say? “I--” she started, unsure of where she was going with her thoughts. “I don’t know what to say,” she finished, truthfully. She wondered, almost constantly, how she could have done things differently. Had one of her spells hit him by mistake? Was his stay in Azkaban due to poor aim? She didn’t want to ask, didn’t think she would know what to do with the information if she had it.

She shifted her weight from foot to foot, still not taking her eyes off of him, as if he’d disappear again if she did. It had happened once before, after all. “Er,” she started again, changing the subject. “Good that you’re working,” she said, though she was internally cringing at the topic. How dull, how asinine, how adult. “Did not think it would be here.” She almost smiled then, as she added with a shrug, “But me, too.”

Tock’s eyes were glazed over there for a second as he remembered. He pulled himself out of it, grounding himself with the cool of his energy drink in his hand. It was beginning to hurt. He switched it to his other hand as he stood there awkwardly. He could tell things were awkward for her, too. He didn’t think it was her fault. He didn’t blame her. He blamed them. All of them who stood by and watched this happen, all of them who encouraged this to happen—anyone who wasn’t fighting. Non-muggleborns in general, sulking into silence and being thankful that they weren’t attacking them. Most of all, he blamed the death eaters, the dark wizards, those who profited on that dark time, those who made their success on the backs of miserable muggleborns incarcerated. Tock wasn’t mad at her. She did the best she could do.

He was still so angry, and so unsure of how to explain those feelings to her without making her think he was blaming her, so he didn’t. He kept them in and was thankful when she changed the topic. “Yeah.” He agreed with a nod. “I never thought that I would be working here, of all places, but it pays the bills, I guess.” He felt a little called out. Like a sellout. “I do the political cartoons.” He explained. “They let me get away with some pretty edgy stuff nowadays.” He looked up and over her quickly, wondering what she worked on.

“What about you? What do you do?” It wasn’t that he didn’t think Edith capable of writing The Column but at the same time, he didn’t even think she might be the one to write it. If anyone would, it would have been her, but he just wasn’t thinking. He was too shocked. “You’re new here, aren’t you? I haven’t seen you around before.”

Edith bit her lip, recognizing the look well enough to know he was thinking about Azkaban and she hated herself for being here at all, for making him remember. Once upon a time, she could have offered to get rid of the memories for him but now that felt just a little bit hypocritical. But he looked back at her, and she let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Yeah,” Edith laughed quietly, still keenly aware that they were standing just a few feet away from the wall of the nearest cubicle. “Money, right?” She was working for The Prophet because she wanted to, she supposed. At least that’s what she had been telling herself.

“Oh, I’ve seen those.” She cracked a smile recalling one in particular. “Must be a bitch to animate all that by hand.” She had seen Monsters, Inc. multiple times by now and had heard that even with a computer, they had to animate each and every hair of the bigger monster individually and that took hours and hours even with a computer. Still, she didn’t know any of this stuff well enough to create any sort of argument for it, so she stayed mum on the subject, instead just rolling her eyes in shared misery of the job.

Edith nodded. “Yeah, pretty new.” She caught his eye and offered him a look that said ‘I dunno what I’m doing’. “Been about a month? Six weeks, max.” It had been almost exactly six weeks and she knew it. “I’m writing a column, but I’m really only here for edits so I don’t have a desk or anything. Have you seen that new one about the Ministry?” She nodded quickly before taking a step closer so she could add in a quiet voice. “It’s that one.”

She didn’t expect him to know which one she was talking about; it was a buried column that ran on Sundays and she didn’t assume that every employee read the paper religiously. “I don’t know. Pays the bills." It was more than that, of course, but it still felt much too heavy to actually talk about.

Tock looked at her for a second, dumbfounded. “Oh, really? Wow. That’s, that’s great.” He said, finally. “First real honest-to-god bit of journalism I’ve seen from the Prophet in a long time. It’s mostly gossip and ads and whatever the Ministry tells it to print lately. Your column is refreshing.” He explained. “I’ve been following it.” He added, looking at her and then averting his eyes again. Wow, Edith was really here, and had been doing something that mattered. It made him feel a bit bad. His work was tame in comparison, his best work saved for his zine and the guerilla-style street artwork he had become infamous for. He never did anything too edgy for the prophet, and even so his work was often rejected for being too far over the line.
 
He looked at her again. She looked a little older than when he last saw her, but not necessarily in the physical way. She seemed to hold herself a little differently now, she seemed more a woman than a girl. He wondered how he looked to her, if he looked as tired as he felt, if he looked older, too. He supposed he would never really know. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a skeleton looking back at him, someone too thin, gaunt, with large, bulging eyes. He had never been particularly thin before Azkaban. He had always been on the plump side of average, but he was thin now by his standards. He probably looked older, too. Azkaban would do that to people.
 
He ran his hand through his dirty blond hair, nervously. He liked Edith. He wanted to talk to her more, but he felt so overwhelmingly awkward and uncertain of what to say that he felt a block in his throat. The words scrambled inside his mouth and he was struck dumb. “Well, uh, if you ever wanted to talk about… stuff… for the article, maybe, or just to chat, hit me up. My office is two cubicles over.” He bit his lip.
 
“Actually, are you busy later? Do you want to grab coffee?” He asked. “I’ve got a little work left to do here, but we could meet up for a coffee or some drinks and catch up if you want to.” He was uncertain yet if he would actually show up there or not. He might stand her up, but his mouth had a mind of its own and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. In some ways, being with her was a painful reminder of the past. In other ways, it was a flashback to the man he used to be.
 
Tock had been happier then, when he was scared of everything and paranoid and comforted by his wide circle of friends. He hadn’t seen a single friend aside from Jane and Piers since he dropped out of school, and he liked it that way. They didn’t need to know the mess he was now. The only reason he had seen the two friends he had seen was because Jane had all but forced him to sleep on her couch when he had been homeless, and Piers was always there (usually commissioning tattoos from him). Even some of his best friends, like Astrid and Justin, had fallen by the wayside. He had even neglected to reach out to his former boyfriend (and they had never officially broken up). Even so, putting this meeting with Edith off until later seemed like a good idea at the time.
 
“If you’re busy, though, we could always just do it another time. You know where I work.”

Edith half grimaced, half shrugged. “Thanks.” She didn’t want praise for it -- that was a small part of why she had left her name off of it -- and receiving it firsthand was certainly not enjoyable. “Refreshing,” she repeated, near a laugh. “For you, maybe.” She was sleeping less now than she had been before, which still hadn’t been all that much. She supposed it would have been much worse if not for Elias being right next to her and providing that overwhelming feeling of safety -- but then again, she supposed she never would have started writing the column without that same safety net.

“Glad someone’s reading it though.” That’s what it was about, right? Someone speaking up and letting people know they weren’t alone; something like that, anyway. She still didn’t have all the specifics worked out.

Everything about him screamed Azkaban, now that it was confirmed. He had looked a bit peaky without that information, but now it was all she could think about. Edith was trying not to form any real memories of him now, nothing to replace the mental picture she had of him before. She doubted she looked worse for wear -- tired, maybe, but that would be about it. Everything about him was just a reminder that she had let him down, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

She was nodding before she had really processed what she was agreeing to. Yes, she wanted to talk, she wanted to make sure that he genuinely didn’t blame her, but did she want to do that for the article? God, no. She felt almost removed from everything because nothing had been so directly related to her. Sure, she knew the people she had talked to so far and related in a way that she could empathize, but nothing had so directly involved her so far. She didn’t know if she could handle it properly.

“I-- yeah, I’m a little busy.” Edith shifted her weight to the other foot, though she didn’t look away like she usually would when she was lying. He had unknowingly offered her the out, and she had taken it without hesitation. She swallowed, running over the reasons she didn’t want to have a proper chat with him again and finding each successive thing more and more ridiculous. He wasn’t in Azkaban now; he wanted to talk; if he had wanted to yell or be mad at her, she was sure the hallowed halls of The Prophet would have stopped him.

She hesitated for another second before changing her mind. “I have to be back by on Thursday to turn my column in,” she explained quickly, knowing she’d talk herself out of it if she had the chance. “I’ll definitely need something stronger than coffee.” That and Thursdays were her evenings to herself and the opportunity to not have to explain Tock and his existence to her boyfriend was a bit of a relief -- how could she do justice to the man that she had effectively put in Azkaban with her carelessness? Plus this way, Tock would have an opportunity to cancel, too.