Chapter 21: Contented Wi' Little

Meli returned briefly to the Bat Cave and saw to the Colemans. It was the work of two days to establish them elsewhere and to ensure their protection, but the time passed steadily and she at last found herself at liberty to do her thinking. It was then that she came to the full realization that Snape Manor was not the ideal setting for it.

So it was, then, that she left the care of the Bat Cave in Alfred's capable hands and, with Dumbledore's permission, temporarily shifted her place of residence to the dungeons of Hogwarts.

Hogwarts was a change of setting and, therefore, a place conducive to the re-ordering of one's thoughts, but she discovered that there was one very irksome thing associated with being there: Everyone at Hogwarts who knew her for Rasa was bound and determined to pretend that absolutely nothing was amiss. Dumbledore, Snape, and Zarekael, at least, seemed more inclined to give her space to think, but the other Order-affiliated faculty actually went out of their way to make it clear that they were completely ignorant of the very thing that she knew they could not be ignorant of, for the simple fact that they were so painstakingly precise in professing their ignorance. Whether it was Flitwick going out of his way to give her a jaunty nod of greeting, or Madame Pince going out of her way to say how lovely it was that Rasa could drop by in between her many and various activities, Meli soon felt quite smothered by the shows of simultaneous support and denial that there was any reason for her to need said support.

It did not take long at all for this to take a toll on her, with the result that she had largely sequestered herself by the end of the first day there, emerging only for meals and then only because she felt that forcing herself to keep a routine and to be around people some of the time might keep her from going crazy from lack of activity.

It was this determination to be semi-social which, in fact, led indirectly to her first step toward re-balancing herself.

Meli was not at first suspicious when Zarekael invited her to tea. After all, she had met regularly for tea with him and Snape during the previous school year, and while it was more sporadic now, they still managed it from time to time. She was comforted by the timing of the invitation—what better to raise her spirits, after all, than an afternoon of tea with the closest friends left to her—but she never thought that there might be any design in it on Zarekael's part until she arrived at his rooms and learned that Snape would not be coming.

She then made up for lost time by discerning immediately what the apprentice's purpose might be…but she found that he was either hesitant or unsure of how best to introduce the subject of her suspension.

There followed, then, several minutes of Zarekael pouring out the tea and calmly engaging in inane small talk until Meli, who was, always, the more dynamically emotional of the two, cut him off with an impatient slapping of her hand on the tabletop. Zarekael paused, but his only other reaction was to blink.

"Will you stop!" Meli demanded, her voice louder than she'd meant it to be. "Just stop!"

The apprentice blinked again, but again he said nothing.

His silence irked her more than the small talk had done, and though she, at least, felt her order to be self-explanatory, she expounded. "Stop acting as if nothing's happened! Everyone's going out of their ways to behave normally, and it's driving me absolutely mad! Something happened, damn it, and I'd like it if someone besides me knew it!"

Zarekael furrowed his brow. "Would it help if I acted upset?" he asked, in honest innocence.

Meli rolled her eyes and tilted her head backward in exasperation. "No, it won't help!" she retorted, looking back to him. "Because you wouldn't be upset! Don't act upset if you're not upset. I don't want you to act upset, I want you to be upset!" She paused, noticing that he was fighting to hide amusement, and she leveled a glare without much conviction at him and stubbornly added, "I'm upset!"

Empathy buried the traces of humor in Zarekael's countenance, and he was silent for a long moment. Meli, having shot her bolt for the time being, picked up a cranberry scone and took a vicious bite out of it while he thought.

At last, the apprentice shook his head. "I wish I could offer you some reassurance that would completely comfort you," he sighed. "But the truth of it is that bloodshed can't be forgotten. It remains with you for the rest of your life."

Meli regarded him thoughtfully, nettled though she remained. He had told her nearly a year previously that he had all but murdered his own family—he had, at the very least, given information leading to their deaths. She knew now that he was older than he seemed, by at least five years…but he could still be very young; he certainly came off as young most of the time. If he truly was the age he seemed to be, his admonition didn't carry as much weight as it would had it come from Snape.

"And how long have you had to live with it?" she asked at last. "A long time? How old are you, Ruthvencairn?"

He looked her directly in the eye, the better to emphasize both the weight and the sincerity of what he was about to say. "I am seventy-six years old," he replied matter-of-factly.

There was a thick-sounding thud, accompanied by the faint rattling of china, and it was nearly a minute before Meli realized she had dropped her scone. She also had the unwelcome epiphany that her mouth was hanging open as she stared at him in undisguised shock, and she mustered the dignity to close it and to narrow her eyes to a more normal width.

She had known that Zarekael was at least twenty-five, but she had assumed that he was no older than her—certainly no older than Snape. In a peculiar twist, however, the son was now revealed to be old enough to be, quite literally, his father's father.

Meli swallowed and shook her head. "I had always thought of you as a little brother," she mused. "And now it turns out that you could be my grandfather."

Amusement tugged at the corners of Zarekael's mouth. "Among my own people," he told her, "I actually would be considered younger than you. Our life expectancy is about three hundred fifty, so, proportionally speaking, I'm about twenty or twenty-one."

She slowly shook her head again, feeling herself slide out-of-phase with reality as she knew it.

"And to answer your other question," Zarekael said quietly, "I have carried my first guilt for more than half my lifetime."

It had been a pattern, then. Meli ran a quick calculation in her head and felt rather ill. Assuming that he had first betrayed—or killed, for that matter; now that he hadn't necessarily been a child, it was suddenly possible—a family member at the age of thirty-five, for instance, he had gone twenty-two years between the first betrayal and the last. He'd said that he betrayed his father to his death, and she knew that his father had died when Zarekael had come to Hogwarts nine and a half years before.

Something about that bothered her, but she couldn't set her finger on it and didn't even try. The whole thing was grounds for botheration, really; her little brother was now revealed for an old man with a bloodier past than she had previously thought.

And it was Zarekael who had done these things, she admitted for the first time. She didn't like it, and she still didn't want to believe it…but she was beginning to. If she couldn't split herself, and she couldn't split Sharpie, she didn't see, logically speaking, how she could split Zarekael Ruthvencairn from the Death Eater.

He had killed the Goldens in a horrifying and calculated display of morbid creativity, and he had assassinated a government official with cold precision…but he couldn't always have been like that. Indeed, it was hard to reconcile the murderer with the man sitting across the table from her, and that in itself told her that there was more at Zarekael's core than the killer whose activities made headlines.

How did he start out? she wondered. He was so shaken to find that he'd killed twenty Death Eaters during his rage…Was his first kill like mine? Did circumstances run away and leave someone dead that time, too?

Zarekael seemed almost to read her thoughts, for he said quietly, "It was a situation not unlike yours. We were at war—I didn't particularly want to kill him, but it truly was him or me." His eyes darkened, and he shook his head slightly. "But I will forever remember how that man looked when he died."

Meli nodded absently. That was, indeed, how it had been for her. If only the Death Eater hadn't engaged her, she could have activated the ring—

She felt a wave of cold wash over her in the wake of a sudden, awful epiphany. "Oh, God," she breathed.

Zarekael looked keenly at her. "What is it?"

"That Death Eater didn't have to die," she whispered. "I could have used my ring to get away at any time—they're designed not to carry Death Eaters; he wouldn't have come with me."

"You were grappling with him—"

"That's not the point," Meli interrupted, shaking her head emphatically. "I could have gotten away before it became life-and-death."

"Neshdiana," Zarekael said firmly, drawing her eyes upward to meet his. "How long have you had the ring? Three months? This is the only type of portkey like that; it's not at all surprising that you wouldn't have remembered. When in hand-to-hand combat, your first thought is to get your opponent off of you."

"I should have thought of it," Meli insisted doggedly.

The apprentice shook his head in mild reproof. "You were supposed to think, in the space of a half-dozen heartbeats, of what it's taken you four days to realize?" he countered. He paused a moment, then added quietly, "If it's any comfort, though…at least you'll never make that mistake again."

Once was one time too many, Meli thought harshly. "It's a small comfort to the Death Eater I killed," she said aloud. "I don't even know his name!"

It was, perhaps, on the face of it, a silly thing to dwell on, but as Zarekael could no doubt have stated, names were important things; they humanized a person, turning him into more than another face in a crowd. The Death Eater she had killed belonged to someone, but to her, he would always be a random face, gasping for air as it flew away from him.

"Unfortunately, in war, that's not always an option," Zarekael told her softly. "I don't know the name of the first person I killed, either."

"And you've survived," Meli murmured.

"Yes," he replied simply.

ooo

Her talk with Zarekael proved to be addictive, and Meli found herself longing to talk with other people, not about anything in particular, but to hear their stories. Zarekael had survived, but there were plenty of other survivors in her circle of acquaintance, most notably the people she had already helped to disappear. She wanted suddenly to listen to them, to hear anything they might say that could help her, comfort her, or at least assure her that it was possible for life to continue after it had been turned upside down by circumstances beyond control.

She had been suspended from active duty, but that was a very different thing from ceasing in her activities altogether. She wouldn't be rescuing anyone anytime soon, but she now had plenty of time to check in on the people she'd already disappeared. She thought long and hard about it before making the actual decision to do it, but she at last concluded that if she went on her visits with the intention of listening and synthesizing what others were saying, rather than escaping from her own thoughts, it couldn't hurt, even if it didn't help, her thinking process.

So it was that she had a pleasant, if extremely odd, visit with Aldarion Everett, and then endured an afternoon with the Llewellyns. Eventually she worked her way down the list of people until she reached the last name she'd written down—the last person she wanted to see at the moment. She had promised to check in with him, though, so she set her jaw and apparated to her last destination.

Molly Weasley was delighted to see her and knew, even before Meli introduced herself, exactly who she was. Dudley was at school and wouldn't be home for another hour, and while Meli wanted nothing more than to have it over and done with so that she could leave, she forced herself to be calm and to make her routine inquiries of Molly while she waited.

As low a state as she was in, the foster mother's answers only made her feel worse. Dudley was having the expected adjustment problems, and he had thrown himself into his schoolwork to compensate. Even after entering a strange school halfway through the term, he had brought home top marks almost from the beginning. While she was happy with his academic accomplishment, Molly worried over Dudley himself; he never spoke of his parents, and to her knowledge, anyway, he hadn't made any friends. The boy was doing well on the surface…but he was not happy.

"I don't know your story," Molly concluded, "or where you've come from, but I wish you'd have a talk with him. The rest of us have done our best, but somehow I think you could do better."

Meli looked at her in ill-disguised mystification. She was a protection agent, not a counselor, and beyond that, she was a damaged person who had just been made aware of the extent of her brokenness. She couldn't cheer herself up—what the hell was she supposed to do for Dudley Dursley?

He was another person about whom she had been wrong. She couldn't say so aloud, of course, but it was the simple, shameful fact that she had once made it her mission in life to humiliate Dudley at every opportunity. If Molly had known who it was that was asking for help, it was a sure bet that, far from making such a request, she'd have set the family ghoul on her visitor.

Meli saw readily enough that this was an opportunity for penance, but she didn't feel up to the task, and she certainly didn't feel worthy of it.

But in the meantime, seeing Molly's worried countenance and anxious eyes, what other answer could she give?

"I'll talk with him," she said quietly, "but I make no promises."

Molly nodded and parted with a grateful smile. "I understand," she assured her.

The two of them sat in the Burrow kitchen, sipping tea and chatting for a further half-hour, at the end of which time Dudley arrived home.

One look at the boy's face told Meli that, somehow, impossibly, Molly's instinct had been spot-on. He wore the same mask she had donned at the age of twelve, and his eyes held the same hollow look of living death that she still saw in her own.

He had lost a significant amount of weight in only a month's time, with the result that his skin had not quite caught up and hung slightly, like an ill-fitted garment. Gone also was the swagger Meli had always associated with him, replaced by a cowering posture and a meekness in his movements that made it quite clear that he had no wish to be noticed, or even seen.

Molly, of course, had no intention of cooperating with that wish. "Dudley, dear," she said, as soon as he came in, "this is Anne Eliot. You'll remember her from Hogwarts?"

Dejected Dudley might be, but he was still sharp. "Yes, of course," he answered, in a voice every bit as hollow as his eyes. He mustered a smile. "It's nice to see you again."

Meli responded with a smile as broken as his was, and Molly, after seeing Dudley settled with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits, left them to talk.

"How are you, Dudley?" Meli asked after a moment. She had no illusions about his answering truthfully, but how else was she to begin?

He shrugged listlessly. "Fine," he replied. "School's all right, and Mrs. Weasley's a great cook."

Meli nodded slowly and braced herself. "But not as good as your mum?" she suggested carefully.

Dudley narrowed his eyes in pained confusion. "Why would you ask?" he inquired.

Damn. He was at least as far buried as she had been, and it had taken the concerted efforts of both Fell twins and Professor Snape to snap her out of it. How could she, by herself, even hope to make a dent in him?

Well, that was something they had in common. At least she could start there.

"I ask," she told him, "because that was one of the first things that bothered me."

He stared at her. "Mrs. Weasley's cooking?" he said, more bewildered than ever.

Meli smiled in spite of herself. "No," she countered. "My foster mother's cooking. She did quite well…but she wasn't my mum."

It actually was true, oddly enough. She hadn't lived with the Staffords very long at all, but some part of her had taken it to heart that these were her parents, and when she thought of home cooking, it was still Bianca Stafford's lamb stew that came first to mind (followed closely, admittedly, by Mrs. Cameron's lemon curd). Alexandra Fell made an excellent hotch-potch, but it had never tasted quite right, for the simple reason that she was not Meli's mother.

Dudley's eyes showed life at last, in the form of open surprise. "You had a foster mother?"

She nodded. As long as I keep it general, it should be safe, she thought. There were hundreds of orphans made back then. "My parents were murdered by Death Eaters during the First Rise," she replied aloud. "They were Muggles, and their daughter was a witch—that was their crime." One of them, anyway, she amended silently. "A wizarding family took me in as if I'd always belonged to them," she continued. "But it wasn't the same—it never could be."

The boy was silent for a long moment, and then he said the last thing Meli would ever have expected: "That's why you were so upset about the rings."

Her jaw dropped open in unconcealed surprise, and she didn't even try to save face by pretending it was a yawn.

Dudley smiled ruefully. "It just made sense," he explained. "If the rings were designed to take us to you, it stands to reason you'd be interested in meeting the people who'd use them." He sobered. "And it makes even more sense that you'd care so much about our having them." He shook his head. "You gave up because it was obviously pointless, but I saw you crying when Dad threw you and the other fellow out—and I heard the row with the police afterward."

Meli came within an inch of grinning outright. "I am sorry about calling your dad a marmoset," she said.

He let out an amused snort. "It was funny," he replied simply.

Silence reigned again for a time, and again it was Dudley who broke it.

"How did you survive?" he asked quietly. "How can anyone live through having their life ripped to shreds and being thrown into the world like this? I mean, the Weasleys are great," he added hastily, "but nothing they do can put the pieces together again."

Meli regarded him thoughtfully. How ironic that he was asking her the very same question she'd been asking everyone else. Surprisingly, though, she found that she had an answer. "I stopped thinking of it as survival," she told him after a moment's consideration. "I figured out that if I was always looking backward at what had been, there was no honest chance of my looking forward to what could be. I resolved to look at this as a completely new life, in which I chose what I kept and threw away the rest." She shook her head slowly. "You can't change the past, Dudley—not the bad things, and not the good. If you hold onto the good and work at doing even better, you'll do more than simply survive.

"It was a song, of all things that drove the point home." She raised her eyebrows. "Are you at all familiar with Robert Burns?"

Dudley shrugged. "Read a bit of him in school," he replied. "He's the one that wrote about love being a red rose, right?"

Meli smiled. "That was him," she affirmed. "I had a heavier dose of him than I would ordinarily have done; my foster mother was a Scot." Two perfectly true statements that hadn't a thing to do with one another, but that technicality was entirely beside the point. "He wrote a song that I discovered about the time my parents died, and I've kept it with me ever since."

"What song?" Dudley asked.

"'Contented Wi' Little'," Meli answered, then, without awaiting any reply, sang the first verse for him:

Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair,
Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care,
I gie them a skelp, as they're creepin' alang,
Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang.

Then, perceiving that he had probably only caught one word out of three, she translated with a wry smile:

Contented with little, and joyful with more,
Whene'er I'm acquainted with sorrow and care,
I give them a swat, as they're creeping along,
With a bowl of good ale, and an old Scottish song.

"A silly little song carried you through it?" Dudley said, almost scornfully.

"I never once said that," Meli countered. "What carried me through was an attitude that happens to be reflected in that silly little song. I had to make the choice to have that attitude."

"Easier said than done," Dudley muttered.

"Much more easily said than done," Meli agreed seriously. "And not done all at once in any case." She stopped suddenly as a peculiar thought suddenly clicked into place and inspired a sobering epiphany: She was, in a very real sense, right back where she had started sixteen years before. If ever she was reacquainted with sorrow and care, it was now—and if ever her world was turned on its head, it was most certainly now.

And now, as before, she had to choose what she would hold onto and what she would leave behind, and whether she would look backward or forward.

And this can't—won't—happen all at once, either, she thought.

Whatever external evidence she gave of her epiphany, Dudley clearly picked up on some indication of it, for she saw that he was watching her very closely, as if trying to discern her precise thoughts.

"It doesn't ever get easier," he said softly. "Does it."

Meli shook her head. "In a given situation," she replied, "it becomes easier over time simply because it becomes a habit. The problem, really, is that life will never become simpler." She offered him a mirthless smile. "In fact, it's ironic that I'm having this conversation with you just now, because I'm in a situation of having to choose my attitude." Her smile turned a bit truer. "The best reassurance I can give you is that you won't be in a constant state of crisis unless you're a particularly unusual individual."

"That's fair, I suppose," he allowed.

A part of Meli wanted to continue the conversation, but another part of her considered that the time had come to leave Dudley to his thoughts. What those thoughts might be and what direction they would take, she couldn't entirely say, but she had, at least, done as she'd promised: She had tried.

Even Molly could ask no better of her.