Alastor had stopped crying years ago. Dorcas mentioned that they were just rumors. Just rumors of what Alastor and his class had done, she didn't give any details but she didn't have to. She knew. All the aurors knew. This was before it became a reputable profession. It was during the old wars. Alastor soaked in the tub and felt like he had the misfortune of being born during so many wars, always a war going on until he was old enough to fight in them himself. Dorcas didn't have to give any more details because even if she didn't know details she could sketch out in her mind what those rumors meant based on the horrors of her own auror training. They had done terrible, terrible truly awful things in his time. They had been taught a different style, a more forward way, a quicker way. A lot of people had to pay for that training including him. The good guys. He couldn't cry now. He dried out.

That's what they had called it once the nightmares started, once the old dogs started speaking and he found out that he wasn't the only one who woke up screaming or crying or back there where they didn't belong or with this person or in this coffin or. They had called it drying out when they started to lose sensation, a sense of feeling like what a normal person should feel like in certain situations. Joy at a child's birthday, fear for one's life looking down from a broom. Affection, tenderness, sadness, anger, all gone, just husk now. He thought that was funny and yet he still did feel and just couldn't or wouldn't cry. Remus had told him that he had buried the body. She was now safe and Alastor would stay grateful for Remus' kind gesture until he died. It would have been his undoing, believing, knowing that she was gone because of him. That's what Dorcas had said. She said she would never forgive Alastor. Never forgive him for saying the words, that combination of sounds that unlocked the one reason she would go into hiding in the first place. He had racked his mind over how to get her to safety. It crossed his mind to send a mark over her house but he hadn't had to and was also thankful that he hadn't told anyone about his plan though someone else had the idea.

Maybe he should have, if he had been the one to do it, she would have traveled to the other side of the world to get away from him. She would never speak to him but she would be alive and far away and safe. Now she was close and safe but not alive. Anyway. Anyway. Her home smelled clean and cold and he wasn't the romantic romantic, sentimental type which made him and her and all excellent aurors good at their job. He remembers that he sat on the edge of her bed and looked around and successfully blocked one of the last moments they had been together. Initially he told her "go for yourself" for your own safety." What a foolish choice of words and this he smiled at, she was too tired to find this funny at the time. The mark, her friend, the everything, she was just too tired. The mark is what really set her off though. There was so much miscommunication all the time. He marveled in every instance how quickly she had found out and the chaos that a misinterpretation could cause. Dorcas mind finally cracked under the weight. She was a real auror now. She would have been unstoppable if she hadn't been stopped. He could remember vaguely from training how to tell the last spells on a wand but had asked Lydia to find someone at the ministry to do it. He would send an owl to meet in a candy shop in Diagon Ally and this young man, this child, he thought, knew enough wandlore to assess in the broadest way what had happened.

There were deflections, protections and a rarely used and inconsistent deflection. Used once, followed by defenses and then nothing. Alastor had asked what the one meant. She had not attempted to kill him. You couldn't tell the speed in which the spells cast anyway but after the last deflection? Nothing. He brought back her wand and after learning what happened, after learning what really happened and leaning also that the wandlore was so difficult to interpret because it ultimately didn't matter. He had learned too late, as he was going to her that she was already going, going, going somewhere else where no magic could bring her back. He had kissed her once on the forehead and he wasn't sentimental. He blocked the idea of wrapping his arms around her of telling her how proud he was of her, of taking her face in his hands again and kissing her again. On the forehead. And hugging her again and telling her again that he was proud of her and looping on itself until he got old and died first as it should have been. Safety. What had he been thinking?

***

The words that sent her away were "do it for me". They brought tears to Dorcas' eyes. He had seen her angry and sad and scared that and this went beyond that because she folded inwards and he saw in her face many very heavy doors shut and lock after he said them. He should not have said those words and she said she would never forgive him for saying them. That's what she had said the last time they had spoken. That was the last thing she ever said to him. And he was ok with that but she was right. Surprise.

It was an old dramatic thing to do, burning someone else's wand, burning a colleague's wand. You would think with all that magic, with all the life tethered to it and all the memory it held that there would be a spark of color a sparkle, a shimmer, something to say: I acted as an extension of this person. He thought for a moment, he let himself believe that hers would turn into a bouquet of flowers like a muggle magic trick. HA. That burning it would swing a door open somewhere and she would walk in and let him kiss her and hold her and that together they would find the incantations, the ingredients to rewind everything so that when she was born she entered a world where there was no war, no job, no him. The wand was laid over kindling, some parchment, and under a log. He thought to do this in her own place but it wasn't after all, her place, not anymore. He did it at headquarters alone in the middle of the night when people were either on duty or awake pacing in their rooms or sleeping if they could anymore. He stopped himself from saying sorry in his mind. He touched the edge of his wand to the kindling and watched as the wand caught on fire and burned like everything else in the fireplace. It too, after all, was mostly wood.