Written for the Challenges from a Movie Geek Challenge
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Atonement.
She knew she shouldn't trust him, she really did. After all, he was poor and she was not, and who knew what he was thinking about that. And her father had always been suspicious of wizards; God (Merlin?) knew he had a right to be. It was almost inborn.
"He can never really understand us." His voice was pained. "Never trust a sailor on dry land." It was his favorite adage. Some things don't mix, he meant—the words he had always lived by.
But they met and she couldn't forget him. She never understood why: he wasn't sexy or arresting. He wasn't even attractive, and his name (really!) was Barty.
She'd actually snorted when she heard it, embarrassingly enough. He'd told her later, while running his finger down her cheek, that it was endearing. Flirting with him was her secret. Together was the word that broke the rules, for them, and with every giggle and touch, with every time they held hands and ran in the halls, she knew how Juliet felt. When he was her Barty.
"I will return. Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame."
She knew he would. There was no question of what would happen if he met someone else, if something happened to him. He was fighting against something she never knew the name of ("It's con-fi-den-tial," she'd said, mocking him, walking her fingers up his neck with the rhythm of the word), and she had no idea what danger was involved, but he would always be hers. Naïveté is implicit in surety, she should have known that.
She had stayed brave while he was there, calling, "I love you! I'll wait for you!" but fallen to pieces once he left, sobbing, "Come back…come back to me."
They'd eloped. It was everything she always hoped for in a wedding, simple and pure but so exciting, with promises hanging in the air around their whisper of a kiss.
Later, she remembered that day and shivered with happiness, moving instinctively closer to him, thinking that it was everything she had hoped it would be. She didn't understand, then, how anyone could get a divorce, when this world, this stable universe of love, was so perfect.
When their son was born, they named him after his father. She couldn't imagine why someone would want an afterlife then, how heaven could be better than this living, breathing form against her salt-soaked face, two protective hands smoothing her hair.
She knew Aurors often became absorbed in their work to the point of obsession, but she couldn't match the idea to Barty, which was why she missed it when it happened. His job was the other woman, it was chaste adultery, and she hated it beyond anything else; began, when he started ignoring her son as well as her, to hate him.
But when she saw her son shackled to a chair in the center of the room, his lanky innocence so stark against the Death Eaters, she trusted Barty (Bartemius).
And when he denounced him, when she heard that crack of finality in his voice, when he betrayed her like she thought he never would, she was ready for an afterlife.