Life in Black and White
Chapter Five
The first thing Rabastan did after the full round of compliments on Hestia's appearance, her brilliant red robes and red lipstick, was declare The Leaky Cauldron far too common for the night.
He offered her his arm and she took it hesitantly, running her tongue over her front teeth. He smiled at her so happily that it interrupted her mental mantra of mistake mistake mistake and butterflies flitted up in her chest and she couldn't quite beat down the stupid grin that oozed across her face to mirror him.
The Silver Elm, the finest restaurant in Diagon Alley, already had a table for them. They were greeted deferentially, shown immediately to their seats with quiet, elegant efficiency. And then Hestia looked around, really looked around, and the butterflies fell down dead as the memories of her last meal here fell in. Then she just felt ill.
She stopped dead a few steps from the table, hauling Rabastan, whose arm she still had hers looped through, to a standstill. Rabastan turned to look at her questioningly. "Hestia? Are you all right?"
"This is a bad idea," she said faintly, feeling viciously overwhelmed. Her eyes roamed the room, found the private table in the back corner. She remembered exactly where it was, remembered exactly the way she found her way to the street from it, blind with tears and indignant fury and shame, remembered leaving a thunderstruck Rabastan sitting there abandoned, flanked by his family and completely clueless on how to fix what had been done.
"The restaurant? We can go somewhere—." Even as he offered a change of venue, he seemed to realize the huge mistake he'd made in bringing her there.
"Yes, the restaurant. And you. I shouldn't be here. This is all a terrible idea. I need to go." Hestia felt flustered, caught up in a storm of unpleasant memories.
He was already apologizing. "I'm sorry, Hestia, of course you wouldn't want to come here, I can't believe I didn't remember…I'm sorry, I just wanted to take you somewhere nice." She wanted away. Pulling her arm from where it looped around his, she turned and walked, her steps faltering, her heels were stumbling blocks and she couldn't walk fast enough, she wanted to run. She wanted away from this place, away from him, away from the almost tangible memories that tasted like iron on the back of her tongue, of his proud, cold family bearing down on her around that table in the back, those dismissive words and disdainful stares for this low and common girl of no good relations and only a rather vague, incomplete genealogy to recommend her as a pureblood. No money, no status, just the conspicuous lack of any muggle blood in the past few generations to make her tolerable; merely tolerable, not good enough for a Lestrange, not good enough for their son and brother. They had made that clear. And she had fled, too choked to hide her tears like she so desperately wanted to.
He'd never come after her.
Away from The Silver Elms was as much 'away' as Hestia could manage; Rabastan dogged her steps, so wide-eyed and honestly, genuinely sorry that her momentary resolve, as granite-strong as it had seemed under the crushing memories of rejection, crumbled before him.
"Anywhere you want," he promised desperately. "I'll never bring you back there again."
Hestia couldn't speak for a moment, trying to tamp down everything down until all she had left was a chill. Out of sheer spite, she insisted on the Chinese takeaway in Muggle Clapham. It was the only place she knew in Muggle London, and she wanted to go somewhere muggle, wanted to pull Rabastan out of his privileged world. It was senseless and mean, Hestia knew, but the blanched hesitation on his face was maliciously satisfying. "You said anywhere," she qualified breezily, adding in a suddenly hard voice, "Or I could just go home."
"But our clothes," he put in, the closest thing he dared to dissension.
"Oh, but don't you remember?" Hestia replied brightly, her loosely applied façade of cheer grating even to her own ears, as she sifted through her handbag for her wand. "I'm a common shopgirl, Rabastan! I know all sorts of spells to fix that, I've been working in Madame Malkins since the summer after fifth year. That's the first time you noticed me…I was on my knees, pinning your hem." Hestia refused to be ashamed of the job that had given her pocket money on Hogsmeade weekends sixth and seventh year, custom-tailored robes to be envied for the Leaving Ball, had supported her through her first, unpaid year of apprenticeship, and kept her in clothing she would never have been able to afford otherwise.
Her words were the end of it and her wand marked the defeat as Rabastan's expensive, well-tailored robes shortened into the sort of jacket Hestia had seen her respectable looking neighbor wearing. Hestia was good at those sorts of temporary adjustment spells from her years of summer employment, and the jacket was well-fitted and (as far as Hestia could tell) reasonably fashionable. Rabastan hunched in it like it was a potato sack with "MUDBLOOD" daubed on it in bright red paint.
It said something, or so Hestia felt, that he submitted to it without complaint. They walked through Diagon, back to the Leaky Cauldron and into Muggle London. In terms of punishments, this one was entirely fitting. So pleased was she with the cowed way Rabastan walked through Diagon in his magically altered muggle clothing that she even accepted his arm when he gingerly offered it to her. It almost seemed like a mutual win (or at least a canceling out of two supremely unpleasant situations) until they Apparated to Clapham and walked into the grimy, grease-filmed little takeaway.
Hestia had been casually pondering their overdressed state as Rabastan released her arm to open the door for her. The chivalry that seemed to be ingrained into Rabastan was a welcome touch—Sturgis purposely shoved doors shut in her face and they'd have a laugh about it and she'd return the favor at the first opportunity, while Daniel and Alasdair would hold the door behind themselves for her to catch hold, but Rabastan had that showy, open-the-door-for-my-princess-and-stand-aside courtesy. And did Hestia love having a production made of her.
She hadn't even quite got the 'thank you' out of her mouth when straw-yellow on navy wool smacked onto her retinas with a nasty sting of the very worst sort of reality. Why had she brought them here? Of all the stupid ideas…! And it was too much to hope that…she froze in the door, Rabastan not quite stopping short enough behind her.
"Hestia!" Sturgis hadn't seen Rabastan behind her, he looked more surprised and not yet furious at her presence, although, bizarrely, there was that edge of panic on his voice, like she'd walked in on him doing something he oughtn't, or at least something she wasn't supposed to know about. Maybe that was just projecting her own panic onto him. "You look pretty!" he complimented her, recovering himself slightly. "What are you doing here, I though you were in Cardiff with…"
Rabastan gently propelled her forward, a familiar hand on the small of her back. The friendly, welcoming air in the room was blown out by an Arctic chill and, lo, how the tables had turned. Hestia had walked herself right into her own mire, the punishment she had wrought on Rabastan was coming back to her, three four, five-fold.
In his black knight chivalry, Rabastan greeted Sturgis with a courteous, starched politeness. His dark eyes flew sideways and he nodded respectfully at the companions Hestia had been too distracted to notice.
Hestia's mouth dropped open a little before she recovered enough to gasp out a greeting. "Juriswitch Meadowes, Juriswizard Dearborn, nice to see you," she managed somehow, horror digging deeper into her stomach.
Make that six, seven, eight-fold retribution. Sturgis was straw-yellow and fury-red on navy wool, now, looking ready to smash his fist into Rabastan's face and drag Hestia home by her hair. With her two immediate superiors as witnesses. It didn't even occur to her to wonder what they were doing there with Sturgis.
"It's nice to see you, Hestia, you look very pretty," Juriswitch Meadowes told her so kindly that, had Hestia not already been six feet under and sinking, it would have floored her.
Rabastan was not quite so eager to glory in Hestia's troubles as he might have been. The hand on her back curled around, his arm a support around her waist and a red cape in the face of Sturgis' bull-mad rage. "Hestia, we can find another restaurant."
"There's no need," Caradoc Dearborn (Hestia finally really registered his presence and shrank even further back, rather unthinkingly further into Rabastan's arms) said firmly, casting a censuring glance at his younger companion. Sturgis, for his part, seemed to have moved beyond his initial plan of murder-kidnapping to the all-around neater double homicide, such was the anger that crystallized his frame.
"No," Hestia said, in a voice that seemed disembodied for how insanely serene it was. "It's all right…we'll go." Dearborn and Meadowes nodded, clearly unsure of the exact circumstances but perceptive enough to grasp the skeletal outline of the situation.
As she turned, the burn of Sturgis' anger stayed in her vision, like she'd stared too long at a bright light and it was branded into her retinas, even when she closed her eyes against it.
Rabastan's arm remained around her waist and it was the only thing that kept her knees and hips and ankles locked and aligned underneath her, kept her walking and not crumpling under the litany of fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck that was twining around her head like a tourniquet. She was trying to remember the words they'd exchanged the night before, the awkward, out-of-nowhere declarations of love and 'best-friends-forever' but she had the ugliest feeling that she'd left them, trodden underfoot, on the greasy floor of the takeaway.
Rabastan was one of the few…maybe the only thing Hestia and Sturgis had ever fought over. From the moment she'd mentioned his name and their very first dinner date, Sturgis had vehemently objected at every turn, for reasons he would never quite explain. And it was the one thing Sturgis had seriously ever asked of Hestia…please don't, he'd asked her, one wretched night while she bawled in his arms—another night, after the family disaster and her tearful exit, that Rabastan didn't come after her. That family is bad news, nothing you need to be anywhere near. Don't you dare take him back, should he come crawling. You are a hundred thousand times better than that.
And he'd meant that, too. And she'd promised. And here she was, throwing it all back in his face. It was hard work to get Sturgis angry but when he was angry, he was enraged beyond reason and it wasn't a huge stretch of the imagination to believe she'd go home to find her things dumped in the hallway and the wards changed out. That's what he'd done when he'd caught Aidan cheating on him and he'd seemed rather less infuriated about that.
He'd never been angry with her before, and she trembled at the rage she had always told herself she would never do anything to warrant. Hestia had stumbled on an ultimatum and, by sheer ridiculous circumstance (and maybe a few poor choices on her own part, she would concede), chosen wrongly. Even looking at Rabastan, who was doing his best to look chastened and somber though Hestia could tell he was only barely restraining that smirk of smug, possessive triumph from spreading across his face, as he steered her back to Diagon—she knew with a stark and simple certainty that was like a slimy rock in her stomach that he was wrong. She ought to be jerking herself out of his gentle-handed grip, kicking her shoes off and flat out running back to that takeaway to throw herself prostrate before her once-in-a-lifetime best mate and ruin her third-favorite dress robes on the filthy floor and beg forgiveness.
Instead, though, she just listened to Rabastan mull over options for dinner, clinging to him because it felt like it was all she had to do, because he was relatively dry land and 'any port in a storm' and other such sad, desperate rationalizations. Still, he noticed her distress through his triumph. He hugged her closer, pausing on a street corner, waiting for the loud muggle vehicles to stop for them. His hands found the sides of her face and directed her gaze up at him, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones. "I love you, Hestia," he told her simply, kissing her gently.
It was the scene Hestia craved. It was storybook romance and love and beautiful clothing bright against the grey London street. It was heartbreaking.
They didn't go to another restaurant. Rabastan took her back to his townhouse in residential Diagon and Hestia made herself absolutely sick over how absolutely right making love with Really-Wrong-Rabastan felt. It shouldn't feel right at all, she thought, feeling a little less miserable than any common slag like her had any right to feel. But she couldn't leash the happy little smile that melted across her face as Rabastan wrapped his arms around her, pressing his nose into her hair and settling in to fall asleep. Loving Rabastan wasn't enough, but it wasn't nothing, either.
"I'm so sorry, Hestia," he whispered in her ear. "I don't care what my family thinks and I'm sorry I let them say those things. Rodolphus and Bella can fuck right off; I wouldn't touch any sister of hers with a ten-foot-pole. Lucius Malfoy can have Narcissa Black." Hestia's throat hurt too much to talk, because he seemed so sincere.
It really wasn't fair. Because, fuck her life, she loved Rabastan for all his faults and wretched family, stupid as that made her. Maybe he wasn't her 'once-in-a-lifetime' but Hestia had always thought that loves were rather like dresses—there were a great many that didn't fit, some that did but not quite right in the hips or the bust, some that looked pretty, and the few that you never wanted to take off…but no particular one you were absolutely meant to wear, the end. You tried them on until you happened on one that you liked enough to take home…that didn't mean there weren't others out on the racks somewhere, but you were content enough with yours to stop looking.
She loved Rabastan…but she loved Sturgis more. She knew that in a serene, cemented way that was not open to further discussion. Sturgis was the once-in-a-lifetime in a way that no lover could ever be, the best friend most people never got to have. He would always be the choice, so long as she was forced to make one. She'd always known that, and Hestia was not entirely sure how she'd got herself into this position.
She woke up to a magnificent bouquet of flawless cream roses and smiled sadly at Rabastan, who seemed to be too thrilled with her presence to see the truth behind the expression.
She cleaned herself up as best as she could in Rabastan's bathroom, not quite sure how the same spells she used to clean and press her robes at home just didn't seem to work right, as though universe was conspiring to block her escape from the shame of going to work in the same clothes she'd worn the night before. Maybe it was her imagination, but she looked just unkempt enough for everyone at work to know how much of a slag she really was, that she was in a row with her best friend over a man and couldn't go home. The robes weren't really work-appropriate, even with the adjustments she managed to make to them; darkening the crimson red to maroon, raising the neckline, extending the hem with a few reasonably long-term charms that wouldn't fade on her in the middle of the day. They were tart robes and there was no real way around it. It was tailored in every seam.
And Juriswitch Meadowes and Juriswizard Dearborn were sure to know. Hestia cringed, her cheeks burning with furnace fury at just the thought of working with them. She could only imagine what Sturgis had said after she'd fled.
It didn't matter, in the end. No one had a spare thought to even glance at a lowly apprentice like Hestia. Juriswizard Henley had been found dead in his house along with his wife, a frightening conjuration in the sky above their home, a snake and a skull written above the building in glittering verdant stars and haze and the Department of Magical Law was a confetti storm of chaos.
Ophion Selwyn was laughing in his cell.