go, can't you go [michael]

Cordelia had retreated from the castle as well. Somehow that was a surprise to Michael. He remembered thinking that things must have been bad once younger students were coming to hide, but he also remembered thinking it wasn’t smart to keep letting them in, that they were leaving even more vulnerable students behind, in even greater danger. But he hadn’t had the nerve to stay either, nor the heart to say so.

Michael picked up his mug again -- he looked at her again but couldn’t hold eye contact, so he dropped his gaze to her chin. “I hated being there,” he confessed. “I hated hiding.”

She said, I know, again, but Michael wasn’t sure she did know what he was trying to say, and he felt mildly like he’d just been condescended to. She sat slowly on the floor; he detached from the counter and sat cross-legged next to her. Without a wall at his back like Cordelia had, he felt stupid, like a lone boulder in a windy field, but he ignored the imaginary rush in his ears.

For a while he didn’t speak -- her sitting on his kitchen floor seemed like a clear sign of distress and he was loath to interrupt whatever was going through her mind -- but he reached out a hand if she wanted to take it. Finally he said, “Look -- alright -- Ginny wanted to test the waters -- I understood that -- then we tested the waters for months and I said, ‘I think we’re all pretty well aware what’s in the water now,’ but we kept testing the waters --”

He realised belatedly he was building up steam, like he was falling back into his old arguments with Anthony; worse, he was making a metaphor. He rubbed his free hand over his face, taking conscious care not to linger over his nose, and lowered his voice. “Look, I know it’s not really mature to think this way, but -- Ginny got out of the water, and I got eaten by sharks in the Great Hall, and I didn’t get to tell her I’d told her so.”

The wall was solid and Cordelia was not. Her spine pressed against it oddly, uncomfortably, and with one leg tucked under her and the other sprawled in front Cordelia felt a bit like a rag doll, tossed to the side by a careless girl - in this case, herself.

The mug of coffee had turned into something of an anchor. She turned it around and around in her hands, the handle going in unsteady circles around and around again. The liquid sloshed around in the ceramic, turning cold and colder as Cordy continued to not drink any of it.

Michael came to sit with her, cross-legged facing her and the wall, her own outstretched leg forming a second barrier between him and the rest of the house. "Sorry," she mumbled. It was unclear even to herself what she was apologizing for - for sitting? For running to the Room of Requirement? For letting the coffee get cold? For cracking the eggshell of their careful truce, forcing them to talk about the Year from Hell on a Sunday morning?

She stared into the coffee again, waiting for something to break the silence. Should it be her? Merlin, she did not have a good track record of trying to explain herself on this subject. But she should - she should try at least. Michael had been trying this whole time.

In the time it took for her to deliberate and open her mouth to speak, Michael had already started to himself. Cordelia raised her eyes, not quite to his eyes but to Michael's chest, at least, watching it rise and fall as he breathed and became more agitated. He cut himself off suddenly, tried again in a lower voice as if he had been winding up for an argument but changed his mind. Did he want to argue? Cordelia wasn't up for that, maybe. She would have been if this had been just because of the breakup, but this whole discussion had spiralled away into something else.

I didn't get to tell her I'd told her so. Cordelia snorted, though it came out more like a sniffle. "It's not mature, no," but who was she to judge? The way she had blown up at Brennan not even a month ago? That hadn't been mature at all. Still, maybe Michael had a point here - the point being the demonstration made of him in the Great Hall. "I'm sorry," she said again, curling her outstretched leg underneath her. "I don't think," she started, gaze drifting from Michael's shirt back to her coffee, the surface trembling as her own hands became unsteady. "I was - I was thinking about. Bigger waters, I guess." She winced - that had come out wrong, she wished so much she could edit herself in real-time. "I just mean - you were worried about the DA, and you were obviously right to be, way things went." If Harry hadn't come...

But. But. Cordelia bit down on her lip, hard, leaving a dent there when she finally opened her mouth again to say: "That whole time. Dad was on the run and then he wasn't. The DA - I felt like I was fighting back against that. Not just the Carrows." It sounded so stupid when she said it out loud.   

Sitting on the floor Michael let his back take on a bit of a stoop over his lap -- he set his mug on the floor next to him. She didn’t take his hand after a moment, so he let himself rub the back of his neck instead, in a self-soothing sort of gesture, even though as soon as he’d done it he was suddenly, almost painfully overwhelmed by how little he could stand it sitting like this on the floor -- with nothing around him he felt small and alone; he lifted his shirt off his shoulders and let it drape again, as though that would help.

He wasn’t sure if that had been an almost-laugh or an almost-cry, and a glance back up at her face -- she looked sort of how he felt, like shit -- didn’t really clear it up. Even though he’d just conceded that he was immature he didn’t want to be told so. “Oh, it’s fine,” he said anyway, though he wasn’t sure if she meant the apology for calling him immature or if it was the rote sympathetic response he usually got when he brought it up. This time he did run a finger along the bridge of his nose where it crooked to the right. “Yeah, I was right,” he agreed absently.

Bigger waters, though, made sense -- everybody in the D.A. had been looking at bigger waters than Michael, and at the time it had driven him mad: just because the water was deeper somewhere else didn’t mean you couldn’t drown in like, a tidepool. Now Michael said, “I know,” to her -- not just that her father had been in Azkaban, but that she -- like so many others in the D.A. -- had only been able to deal with the overwhelming hopelessness of war by involving herself. He didn’t doubt that was why Ginny had restarted the D.A. in the first place -- that she couldn’t be wherever Harry and company had been, fighting the good fight, and had been going mad about it. “You and the rest of the D.A., I think.” At the time he hadn’t understood, but he was older now.

His skin was crawling now but if he started scratching he’d never stop. Michael rubbed his neck again, with rather more force, and said, “But -- you know -- somebody had to worry about us. And --” he gave her more of a twitch than a shrug, “I didn’t have anybody else to worry about, so I just figured I may as well.”

Her reaction times seemed to be slower now, somehow - her eyes saw Michael's hand, out, for her, perhaps. She reached a tentative hand out, but Cordelia had missed the window and Michael's hand was pulling away. She dropped her hand onto her leg, the edge of her palm brushing against the hem of her flannel pyjama shorts.

Cordelia's gaze followed Michael's fingers, remembering her vantage point on the day it was reshaped, and shuddered. She thought it was a handsome nose, a war badge, but sometimes the memory horrified her. She couldn't decide if the memory was worse, knowing Michael intimately now, or better, knowing that he was kind-of-sort-of alright all these years later. She didn't feel the need to agree with him a second time, so Cordelia put the coffee down on the outside of her leg instead, against the wall and further from Michael. 

I know, said Michael, and this time it felt like he did, actually, know, even if he didn't understand. Even if in Michael's rearview it had just been Hogwarts, just the Carrows - Cordelia frowned mid-thought. That seemed unfair. Just. As if her and Michael's shared trauma wasn't enough. The qualification shouldn't be in her thoughts here - Michael and all the others deserved more respect than that. Cordelia bit her lip. "Must have driven you mad, the rest of us fighting a proxy war like that."

Somebody had to worry about us. Well, that was true, even if it made Cordelia bristle like a teenager again. They had been looking out for each other at the time, hadn't they? Cordelia reached for her hairline again, scratched at the raised and puckered skin where some brave hair follicles had deigned to regrow. Looked at Michael's leg, on the floor beside hers. No, they hadn't been. "Should have been more than just you," Cordelia said. "Wish it hadn't just been you." 

Her hands shook, still - they were betraying her. Her body wanted to rattle like a leaf in a storm. "Cigarette?" She didn't have her wand - Cordelia pushed up onto her feet, one leg half asleep. She batted at it before half limping, half hopping into the kitchen, rattling around in the drawers for Michael's packs. "I need a smoke."

He caught her looking at him and dropped his hand away from his nose.

She bit her lip; Michael wet his own, and said, a little apologetically, “Yeah, it did.” This was all he could really say about it anymore -- he didn’t know how much of it he wanted her to know, about how devotedly little he’d thought of the D.A., about how pathetic and grasping they’d seemed to him, how resentful he’d been of the stupid cat-and-mouse game they’d trapped themselves in. Those thoughts felt seditious and cruel now -- she wished it hadn’t just been him on the other side of it, but Michael shook his head -- “Trust me,” he said drily, “I was already a lot more than enough.” At least he had been at first.

Cordelia stood up sort almost abruptly, looking for cigarettes -- Michael said automatically, “On your right.” She was limping a little -- Michael, regretting that he’d sat here, leaned to the side to grab for the handle of his utensil drawer, pulled himself up, and started after her, one hand outstretched in worry, but she seemed to be alright -- it wasn’t his kind of limp.

Still -- Jesus Christ, he knew so little about her wartime. What he’d heard the night they’d met, when they’d both had enough to drink not to mind sharing, had been enough to convince him not to ask again -- to convince him that it was similar enough to his. “You okay?” he said. He’d stood up too quickly too -- his head was light, like he’d bled all of his energy out while he was sitting on the floor, talking about this. The thought made him feel antsy again, but if he started itching now --

Their mugs were still on the floor -- he leaned down to rescue them, set them side by side on the counter where she had unloaded a pack of his cigarettes, and fished one out for himself too. He didn’t want to dig out a lighter and he’d left his wand on the table; he turned on a stove burner to light it.

Michael tried to reassure her, like the threat of it all was still some salient, immediate worry and not years behind them. Cordelia let out a little hm, a small acknowledgement of what he had said as she pushed to her feet. She didn't agree with that, but what was the point in arguing it?

"Right, thanks." The right-hand drawer slid open -- she wondered if Michael had smoked as much before he met her, wondered if it was her fault his lungs were coated in tar. It was still so easy to poison herself, in so many little ways -- it was one thing if Michael was drowning memories as she did, another if she had put another tool of self-destruction in his hands.

Her hands were shakey, trembling as she tossed the pack onto the counter. Cordy kicked out her leg a few times until the pinpricks went away and she could stand properly. "I'm fine," she mumbled. She was fine! She was fine, there were just memories threatening to catch her up in a tidal wave and drown her. She had been treading water too long, it felt like, to remember how to swim when it all came crashing down.

Michael deposited the coffee mugs onto the counter, helped himself to a cigarette as well. He flipped the stove burner on, stuck the tip of his cigarette into the flame. Cordelia did too, letting more of the tip burn than she would normally before raising it up to her lips. Cordelia sucked in, mouth and lungs filling with acrid smoke, and closed her eyes. Let out a low breath, feeling guilty about letting the scent of burning tobacco linger in Michael's house. He must be shaken too, to be smoking inside.

When she opened her eyes, Cordelia's gaze floated back to her boyfriend's face. Something in her expression crumbled -- her eyes were wide, the corners of her lips twitching. "Sorry," she managed. "This is -- Merlin, it's just a wedding. I'm sorry." She felt like she had broken something, broken the fragile understanding that had kept the war out of their conversation for months. She wasn't sure that was all she had broken.

Cordelia was kicking her leg around a little, more like it had fallen asleep than like it was painful -- Michael steered clear and went around to stand next to her, his arm almost touching hers, close enough that he thought he could almost feel her goosebumps. It was cold, suddenly, in the kitchen; he was let his hand linger a little long by the lit stove to warm it, and moved it out of the way only when he noticed Cordelia waiting to get at it.

He took a long drag off his tab, turned his head to blow the smoke away from Cordelia, turned the stove off.

A part of him wanted to make excuses for himself, for smoking, for how he’d been behaving all morning. It’s just been a while since I had to think about this. That wasn’t true -- he thought about all of this all the time -- but it had been a while since he’d said so. After a point he’d started to think it was unfair of him to use it as an argument, just because it was the one card he had up his sleeve that nobody else could possibly play. Maybe he’d made a mistake, and maybe he’d been selfish or stupid or cocky, but he’d suffered for it, and not many wanted to argue with that.

Besides -- it’d been five years. Michael knew that, even if he still remembered it, even if his thoughts still took him back there when he let them run unchecked, even if he was still so obsessed with it that he wasted this much of his life just sitting with his memories, unable to stop himself running them in his head -- God -- he knew that, as much as this mattered to him, as much as this was the most important thing that he’d ever done, it was just a drop in the bucket for most everybody else. He’d made that mess -- he had to stop dumping it on other people’s lives.

Even Ginny.

It must have been pretty obvious what he was thinking about -- as soon as Cordelia looked back at him, she looked like she was about to cry. “No,” he said, “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sure what for, but he was. “You know,” he said after a moment, “Look -- I reckon it’ll be fun, the wedding -- I just --” he rubbed one hand over his face again. No way could he write to Ginny and explain this. “Did you put down for a plus one?”

She looked back at Michael, felt like in that instant she could see all his reluctance in the way his lips were drawn, the way he held the cigarette in his hand. Her face must have looked as miserable as she felt, because Michael said I'm sorry within a second. Cordelia pressed her knuckles against her cheek, taking another drag off her cigarette instead of saying anything. It was easier to fill the space between them with smoke, rather than words. She breathed out away from him, which gave her an excuse to look away. She didn't want to see her misery reflected back at her right this moment.

Just -- Merlin, was this what it was always going to be, to them? A year locked away, only to be spoken of in bursts of anger and sorrow, knocking them both to the ground with the force of memory? How could they, how could she keep on like this, pushing the pain and the grief and the fear back onto a fifteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy that no longer existed? How did Ginny and Harry manage it? Did they? Did anyone?

Did you put down for a plus one?

Cordelia blinked, staring at Michael as she tried to process the question. It took her a minute, trying to yank her thoughts back to reality, back to what Michael asked. Had she? She must have, she felt like she could recall writing a dainty little checkmark on her RSVP. She nodded, slowly. "I think so," she hedged, "I'd have to check my diary to be sure, but. I think so." Was her diary here? She tried not to fill it in when Michael could see, it made her feel like she was hiding something, but she was planning to head back to London in the evening, anyway.

"But," Cordelia hesitated, "I could always bring, you know, Duncan. To report on things. You don't have to come 'cause of me." It hurt to say -- she still felt his reasons for not coming were stupid, but. But she was tired, and she didn't want to guilt him into this, had never meant to. Just had wanted him to come, that was all.

Her fingers curled around the cigarette, the lit end brushing slightly painfully against her knuckles. Cordelia pulled in a breath. "I'll take this outside," she said quietly, moving to the back door.

She had to check her diary -- that, for no particular reason, made him want to smile. Of course Cordelia had a fucking diary. Michael never had -- he didn’t trust himself to keep a book of inside jokes with himself, when he was already this insufferable -- but Cordelia, from the way she spoke, the way he’d gotten used to… it wasn’t hard to imagine that she was good at that, that she could put her thoughts onto a page without their forming an incomprehensible snarl.

But Michael was still too highly strung to smile, so he just nodded and looked away; his gaze followed the smoke curling up from his cigarette, and he was struck suddenly with the realisation that they were smoking in his kitchen -- abruptly he leaned over the sink and opened the window. He was looking out pensively at his sad potted plants and his wheelie bins when she spoke again.

If she let him beg out of it again, he didn’t think he’d have the moral character not to do it. He shook his head -- “It’s about time I cleared the air anyway,” he said, and added hastily, glancing over at her again, “With Ginny.” His kitchen he’d have to clear soon, too, but if she still wanted to smoke in here --

She didn’t; this time Michael did smile, half for relief and half with affection -- she knew him so well. “Thanks,” he muttered. He couldn’t tell if she wanted him to come with her, but then he didn’t think he could make himself go anywhere yet either -- he wanted nothing more than to stand here, like he was bolted to his kitchen floor, and get his head working proper again. He looked back out at his yard and said, “Go on, I’ll just... clean something.”

Cordelia went; the back door closed softly behind her and Michael took another long drag off his cigarette, blew it out the window this time, then -- with a short shake of his head -- put their mugs in the sink.


OUT

She gave him an out, and he refused it. Cordelia wanted to hug him again, but her hands weren't steady enough, she would get ash on his shirt. He was going to come to the wedding, she should take that win, ugly as it felt, and go. Cordelia kissed him lightly on the cheek as she passed him and left him in the kitchen to... clean, something. No doubt the ash she had already littered on the kitchen floor, and the smell of burning tobacco. At least it would be just her that stunk when she returned. Michael's place smelt of pine, most days, pine and cleaning agents. It had grown on her -- it smelt like safety and care.

The back door shut lightly behind her. Standing in the yard in bare feet, toes curled in the grass, Cordelia took a long, long drag off her cigarette again, blowing the smoke into the summer air. A bird chirped, somewhere, bright and cheerful. Cordelia sighed, arms wrapped around her torso tightly. This was -- this was what she wanted, right? For Michael to come to the wedding. To be seen on his arm, to be able to drink freely and dance and just be happy in the warmth of Ginny's happiness.

She hadn't meant for the conversation to go so sideways. But -- she hadn't run. Not like with Brennan, not like with other boys, and neither had he. She risked a glance over her shoulder, through the back window. Michael was putting both of their mugs in the sink. Her heart swelled up at the domestic motion -- Merlin, she loved that man.

Cordelia let herself smile as she raised the cigarette back to her mouth, turning back to face the chirping birds and summer morning.


/fin