Necessary Monsters

Chapter 3

Summary:

"Brought her in on my shift, they did. Thought she were dead! Pale as a corpse - like there weren't no blood left in her - but twitching, like. The way I used to see 'em back when...You-Know-Who's followers were torturing people left and right. You'd see 'em twitch like that when they'd had the Cruciatus Curse used on 'em too long."

It takes twelve and half minutes to walk the road leading from the Hogwarts grounds into Hogsmeade, then a matter of seconds to apparate outside the Leaky Cauldron in London. Add four more minutes to enter the crowded pub, climb the stairs, and wind down the hall to the room at the very end, and Felix has had just enough time to work himself into a respectable frenzy.

He has never been able to pinpoint the exact date he fell in love with Juniper Windsong, so Felix can't say definitively just how long he's been planning their reunion. But it's been the highlight of his thoughts for almost a year. The perfect evening, carefully orchestrated to show Juniper how he's come to feel about her and persuade her to feel the same. Gone to pieces.

Felix slams the door, the parade of ruined moments and wasted opportunities building enough furious momentum behind his arm to rattle the frame. Throwing his cloak over the room's moldy winged armchair, he runs his fingers irritably through his hair. He should have been more direct, he berates himself, kicking petulantly at one of the chair's wobbly legs. It gives an indignant "Oi!" and scoots away from him, nearer the fire. He had hoped to let his actions explain his feelings for him, even thought he'd done a halfway decent job in spite of the evening's rocky start. But replaying their conversations in his head, Felix fears he wasn't obvious enough.

Regret beats a heartless rhythm against the inside of his skull as he perches on the edge of the rickety bed. She did want to see him over the summer, he consoles himself, that's something. And she had seemed genuinely excited at the prospect of visiting him. And there was that moment in the common room, their fingers intertwined, faces so close Felix could almost feel the nervous excitement radiating from her. He's positive Juniper had been waiting for him to lean in just a bit more, even imagines her eyes had flicked for a moment to his lips.

Felix falls back against the lumpy mattress with a groan. All that means nothing if she gets herself killed next year. Felix had so hoped finding Jacob Windsong alive would finally put a stop to her amateur investigations. But he knows with a sinking certainty, in spite of her assurances that she wants to leave the Cursed Vaults behind, Juniper will never be able to escape their web while her brother is still caught in it.

And even if she survives her last year of school unscathed, he thinks miserably, there's always her excessive number of male friends. Juniper may have little interest in them now, but Felix knows better than anyone how much a relationship can change in one term.

His brain bruised by the weight of all the things he cannot control, Felix pulls his wand out from underneath him and points it in the direction of his valise.

"Accio." he mumbles.

The bag sails halfheartedly across the room and stalls at the foot of the bed. Felix uses the tip of his shoe to edge it closer to him, his hand fumbling for the catch. He reaches in without looking and, as he does whenever he feels anxious, pulls out a sheaf of parchments wrapped in a leather tie, heavily frayed and dangerously thin in places.

He tugs at the crude binding carefully; toying, as he often does, with the romantic notion of finding a ribbon, preferably Juniper's, to replace the leather. But he's never known her to wear any kind of ribbon in her hair. And anyway, thinks Felix, as he pulls out a particularly worn piece of parchment, he doubts a hair ribbon would wrap all the way around their collected years of correspondence. He settles back against the pillow and lets the words he knows by heart soothe its anxiously racing beat.