here comes the avalanche [cordelia]

beware the avalanche
30 APRIL, 2004

It was late enough now that the evening had a healthy chill, even with the hot food and alcohol in him, and Michael was contemplating a cigarette now, in what he was telling himself was not an addicted way. He thought spring must be creeping up on them, but it was taking its sweet time; it didn’t feel like April at all, and hadn’t all month. Not that this was a bad thing – he had no love for the month of April, to which he had ascribed more power than even he could say was reasonable – but he was no great lover of change, either, and at least having consistent low points of his life had come with consistency. War’s over, he remembered telling Anthony irritably once or twice when they’d been nineteen, just to shut him up, but he’d never really believed himself.

Michael had long since accepted boredom as a fact of life; he’d first come to terms with it when he was a kid and he’d had to keep himself out of trouble while his dad was asleep. That didn’t mean he liked it; he’d have thought that experience would teach him how to handle tedium, but instead it was more like, the older he got, the fewer tricks he could still pull. If only he cared to read every book he owned.

He propped his foot on the coffee table in a vain effort to shake things up a little bit; it tided him about twenty seconds before he had to lever himself down flat, one leg up on the arm of the sofa where it was too long for the seat. He turned his head slightly to look at Cordelia working at her desk – God, for all the things he hated about his job, he was glad that he didn’t have to take it home – and succumbed at last to his need to talk. Frankly he could have been commended for lasting this long.

“All in all,” he said, “April, massively underwhelming month. Didn’t even rain.” Not in Stanley, at least.

@Cordelia Leighton

April was almost over. Michael had a thing about April, that Cordelia thought she understood but didn't try to articulate to her boyfriend. It was fear, she thought, and superstition, and ever-present trauma, all running up against each other on the calendar. It was a shitty combination. She tried to help, though she wasn't sure how.

Just being around each other seemed to help, she had thought. Eating too rich food together, drinking too sweet drinks together, smoking too cheap cigarettes on the balcony after sex together. Sitting quietly in the sitting room together, afterwards, him on the sofa and her perched in her desk chair, manuscript for her book propped on her knees and a pencil tucked behind her ear.

Didn't even rain, Michael said, his low voice rumbling in what Cordelia thought was a rather soothing way. "Should it be raining?" Cordelia asked lightly, licking her thumb and flipping the page over. "I'm sure spring flowers will be right enough without it." It had been a wet winter, hadn't it? It always felt like a wet winter, and the spring was always too beautiful afterward.

It upset her, some years. The sun would be so bright, the grass so green, that she would feel compelled to take the sky by the lapels and shake it. Why won't you weep? Cordy would imagine screaming, shaking Apollo or some other sun god so hard the light would go hazy. Don't you know what we've lost? What I've lost?

Of course, Apollo wasn't real, and this was just a fantasy. May was for drinking slightly more than usual, for being slightly more fragile than usual, and trying to pretend the world hadn't stuttered to a premature stop five years ago. Six years ago, she realized, with a sudden plummetting of her stomach. Six years. Merlin, Morgana, and Mordred.

Her eyes skipped over the same sentence again --  Cordelia blinked, narrowed her eyes to look at it again. In April, it read, any pretence that we were not prisoners in our own school evaporated. There were Will's notes in the margins, her own hand in another colour of ink already. In April, she had written.

Cordelia looked up, twisted in her chair to look at Michael. "Babe," she began, drawing the stack of paper closer to her chest. "You know how I have the travel book coming out next month, yes?" She bit her lip, looking over at him with a twitch of apprehension.

“Eh,” said Michael, which was as eloquent as he could put it. He didn’t know that it should be raining – he didn’t know that it should be anything – who was he to tell the weather what to do, outside the Ministry? – but he was pretty sure it shouldn’t be nice out. This was London, damn it.

She wasn’t looking at him to see him shrug, but he did anyway, pulled his hands up to interlock his fingers behind his head, like he was on the deck of a cruise ship and not thinking about the rain, or the lack thereof. (It’d been raining while he was tortured – he could remember, a lot more clearly than he remembered the torture itself, lying sweaty and dizzy on the floor, staring up at the phantom rain falling from the thunderclouds swirling on the ceiling of the Great Hall, and hearing it for the first time on the windows. It had felt wretched; it had felt right.)

Michael had always liked the rain; he’d used to go out and play in it every chance he got, until he’d given himself double pneumonia and his dad had started making him wear a raincoat to do that, which kind of killed the appeal.

“I dunno, spring flowers are pretty finicky,” he said, although he didn’t know if his flowerbeds were suffering from a lack of rain or from his shoddy caretaking. It didn’t particularly matter; he’d brought more than one of them back from the brink of death eyedroppering Pepper-Up potion into the soil, and he was sure he would go on bringing them back from the brink of death regularly.

He turned his head back to look up at the ceiling – this one was just cracked plaster, no swirling thunderclouds to speak of – and bent one leg to drag his torso flatter on the sofa. He was trying to come up with a better topic of conversation when Cordelia beat him to the punch; he said, to the ceiling, “Aye, yeah, what about?” He’d already given that a courtesy nitpick.

Michael was flat on his back on the couch, one leg crooked up. There wasn't anything particularly interesting on her ceiling, Cordelia thought, though perhaps Michael found the imperfect gatherings of paint spots compelling. It didn't normally bother her, when their nightlines didn't quite intersect. Now, though, she wasn't sure if she wanted him to look at her, see her all fragile and vulnerable in her shift, or for him to continue staring at the ceiling so his gaze didn't crack her defences.

What about? Cordelia's fingers curled tighter around the manuscript. Fearing ink would run onto her finger tips, she set it down on her writing desk, drew her knees up to her chest. "It's sort of a double thing, next month," she went on, circling the point like a bug in the drain. "The book launch, and then the announcement of my next book." She tried not to emphasize any of the words in that last phrase, not announcement, not next book. Flat, light tone.

It was just telling her boyfriend about her book. It didn't need to be fraught or emotional. Unfortunately, she had kept it to herself long enough that even poking the topic was veering it that way.

"It's a memoir," she said, toes curling onto the cushion of her seat. "About. You know."

Cordelia was beating around the bush, but Michael didn’t particularly care how quickly they got to gutting the rabbit, or whatever was the subject of that idiom; for superstition’s sake, or tradition’s sake, or something, he was happy to prolong his April, on the off chance that the catastrophe he’d been awaiting all month would come out of the ceiling with half an hour to spare. He only turned his head when she said, next book, kind of flatly.

“There’s two books?” he said. “What’s next, Arizona?” He had no desire to go anywhere that looked like a Wile E. Coyote habitat. California had been bad enough. But Cordelia didn’t seem amused, so he looked back over at her at her writing desk, where she’d curled herself up like a knarl, and discerned too late that this was a serious conversation.

Which meant, for them, that it was headed only in one direction, the same way April could only lead into May. Michael looked back to the ceiling and said, “Oh,” just as flatly, comprehending it too clearly already.

Sure enough, it was a memoir, about, you know. He did know, but he said anyway, “About what?” just so she would have to say the words.

He kept his gaze on the ceiling, and focused on not breathing any more shallowly or deeply than normal, on not appearing fazed at all by what felt at once like a natural, foregone conclusion and like a betrayal, until he could keep his voice neutral enough to ask, “Why do you want to write it?” Michael didn’t even like to think about it, and had been assuming the same of Cordelia; it seemed an impossible task to put it on parchment.

Arizona. Cordelia huffed, a short breath that could have been a laugh was she not already so tightly wound. Not Arizona. Cordelia was fairly sure they would melt in that desert place. Maybe she should stick to travel, though -- travel and style and interviews with celebrities. Keep it light, keep it vapid. No more threatening letters, no more investigation, stop the process of opening her heart up to wizarding England before it could begin.

Michael was looking at her, finally. She met his eyes for a moment, all too short, before he looked away at the ceiling.

About what? Michael said, being obstinate. He knew, and she knew he knew, and he likely knew she knew that he knew. There was a vulnerability in saying, well, it, that Cordelia had hoped to avoid by mutual knowing. Michael didn't seem inclined to give her that acknowledgment. She licked her lips, finding them suddenly sort of dry. "You know," she said again, a little more insistent like the repetition would jog Michael's memory. She gave it another beat before finally saying, "The war year."

Her boyfriend kept gazing at the ceiling with a supernatural stillness that was either shock or focus. There was quiet for a while before Michael spoke again. "Why?" Cordelia repeated. It wasn't an abnormal first question, in retrospect, but she was caught off guard by it.

Why did she want to write it? Cordelia bit her lip, trying to untangle the reasons. The things she had told William, that it was important, that she needed to share before someone else tried to erase the truth of that awful year, seemed too trite for Michael when he had been there too. "Someone has to," she said anyway, lifting her shoulders slightly. "Better someone who was there does it." She resisted the urge to make it a question.

Why did she want to write it? She thought of Brennan and his stupid art exhibit, of doors locking and making her jump, of the white scars on her legs and the set of Michael's nose. "I want to get it all out," Cordelia said, on shakier, more emotional footing. "Get all the anger and fear out of me onto the page, make other people hold it for me instead." That didn't make any sense, did it? She shook her head. "I don't know. But I am. Writing it." She glanced to her manuscript, then back to Michael.

You know, said Cordelia again.

Of course he knew; she probably knew he knew, she knew he knew she knew he knew, and however many tiresome iterations went along with that. They couldn’t not know what hung over their shoulders like a living shroud – they’d spent over a year now not talking about it, over a year now learning to listen for the other one’s sleights of the tongue. But Michael didn’t hedge things into his conversation the way Cordelia did – when he had something to say about the war, he could usually say it without resorting to innuendo, and usually he didn’t have anything at all to say.

She said, the war year. He said, “Mm.”

It was taking all of his willpower to prevent himself from fidgeting; he tensed his muscles one by one until they felt like they’d been strung too tight between his joints, like a marionette too stiff to move, like the slightest twitch would make a grinding sound. She said, someone has to. He said, again, “Mm.” Someone had to. It was the kind of thinking that Michael himself had been prone to, that year – somebody had to play devil’s advocate, somebody had to break the silences in Muggle Studies, somebody had to be martyred before the Carrows grew desperate enough to kill.

But nobody had to do this. If Cordelia didn’t write this book – well – this book wouldn’t be written. Who else would dare to write it for her? (For all of them?) As audacious as it was for Cordelia to write about what had happened to them, it would be unforgivable for anybody to tell it secondhand. During the war it had been necessary to worry about what their parents had been told, about what was really happening when the Carrows had someone alone, about the lies and half-truths and veiled threats they’d been told every day, but the war would be six years gone, in two days.

“It won’t make you feel any better to make other people hold it for you,” he said; in his experience that wasn’t how anger or fear worked – it was a sickness, not a breakfast; it didn’t decrease if more people shared it. But she was right – she was writing it whether or not she knew why, and Michael knew better than to think he would dissuade her. It wasn’t like he held the rights to the war. It wasn’t like she did, either, of course, but it was enough of a grey area that he didn’t think he would win any arguments there.

“Won’t tell you not to,” he said, finally; he tried to relax again, one muscle at a time, and tapped his foot against her sofa’s armrest. He couldn’t tell her not to, but he could ask, “Am I in it?”

Michael — it wasn’t a hum, more voiced than that, but it was a mumble, only a step above a grunt of acknowledgement— he was grumbling, he grumbled, twice. It could mean anything, that Mm, carefully stripped down to the plainest pitches. Cordelia found her hands pressed against her thighs, mostly bare save for the very top where the robe’s hem fell. Her fingertips ran back and forth along the faded white lines, still raised but less pronounced with every passing year.

It won’t make you feel any better, said Michael. Cordelia bristled despite herself, biting back the first reply to occur to her (yes it will, it has to), instead just frowning. “Won’t make me feel worse, either,” she said eventually, which wasn’t entirely true either. She didn’t mean for it to be so defensive, but it came out that way, spikes on the edges of syllables.

He asked if he was in it. Cordelia nodded, then, in case he hadn’t looked up at her yet, said “Yes,” out loud. It didn’t seem like enough, to leave it there, so she added on; “Doing a whole chapter on April, I think. So, I reckon you have to be in there.”

She considered offering him some anonymity, despite it seeming like a pointless exercise — still, she said “I could change your name in it, if you’d like.”

She’d taken that badly, then, but he’d had to say it, so he wasn’t sorry. Besides – the defensive tone, the delay, he was pretty sure she knew he wasn’t wrong. Unfortunately, if he said what he wanted to say (you don’t know that) she could pretty easily point out, neither did he. They weren’t exactly experts in talking about this. He’d told the Ministry lawyers more than he’d told his own mother.

(Had she talked to those lawyers? He felt like, if she’d talked to those lawyers, she would be a little less eager to put her story out there. Writing it in a book – the editing process, the necessary revisions – the worst part of the trials had been reworking his testimony. His skin had been crawling all the time.)

His skin was crawling now. He sat up, abruptly, and plucked at the shoulders of his shirt to let it settle back over his shoulders. Was he in it? Yes. He had already known that; she had known he knew it. Circling again.

“Damn me,” he muttered anyway. She seemed to have expected this reaction, and she had solutions, but what good would it do to make him anonymous? His name was on the court records. “No,” he said, settling forward, elbows propped on his knees. It made him realise that his legs were shaking – he wrung his hands. He didn’t really have any right to be this worked up about this, did he? It was six years ago. A whole chapter on April – his torture had only occupied a thirtieth of April. What was that, three percent, about?

He knew, of course, that wouldn’t be the case. He said, to the floor, “Know what you’re ganna say on it?”