Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).
ooo
Summer has given way to autumn, a London autumn of sullen greys and unexpected flashes of sun between brooding clouds. In the waiting room once more, Mary smiles, thinking about the happy developments of the last week, and catches herself at it; the dark boy, Blaise, returns her smile with a cheeky wink, and returns to his magazine.
The second wave of young patients has been odd and unpredictable. Take the case in point: Blaise Zabini, who has decided that they are good friends, and in the last week, has insisted that they must be on a first-name basis. On either side of Blaise, the green-eyed Greengrass sisters, blonde and dark, regard her with the basilisk eye of genteel hauteur. (Daphne and Astoria, she recalls: Daphne is the blonde and Astoria the brown-haired sister, and they look quite ordinary, except that apparently they're something in their own world, and they make sure she knows it, too.)
Blaise, on the other hand, is something of a puzzle. He's dressed quite conventionally, in crisp dark trousers and blazer, and wearing a tie, which looks rather like a school tie, except that it has a tiny repeating pattern of stylized serpents that glow like green stars on its dark glossy silk.
His friend Daphne looked at it and raised one eyebrow, so apparently it's far from conventional in her eyes, in fact might be an irreverent joke of some sort.
Blaise has an addiction to celebrity gossip, particularly to do with the stage and the cinema, and he recently has taken to leaning on the counter and asking her odd questions. He knows about Jackie Bones, and in fact his first words to her were a polite expression of condolences, which struck her as surpassingly odd, because he had not introduced himself first.
Every day that he is there for his appointment, he makes some small-talk about the weather or the scandalous revelations of the tabloids. He asks questions, rather peculiar questions:
Is it true about flying saucers? Why saucers and not sugar-bowls?
Is the Prime Minister so named for reasons Arithmantic, and if so, what is the prime number considered so auspicious that one can stake a kingdom on it? He's always been fond of seven, and eleven has its points as well, but then fifty-three might do the trick as well. He doesn't think it's thirteen; everyone knows that's unlucky.
How does one make a career upon the stage?
On any given day, Blaise's first two queries vary wildly, and usually set her back, until someone else—once it was Granger (whom he plainly doesn't like very much) and on another occasion, Finch-Fletchley or Goldstein (whom he tolerates)—takes him in hand and explains the facts of the matter. The third question is always the same, and now he has asked three times; just as in the fairy tales, this tells her that he's in earnest.
It takes a bit of effort to wrap her brain around the notion of a wizard who wants to be an actor. She asked him if they didn't have such a thing on his side of the border, and he said, well, they did, but it was of a decidedly amateur character. Not the Royal Shakespeare Company by any stretch of the imagination.
She demurred, of course: she's only the widowed companion of an actor; she's not of the theatrical world herself; but he was not deterred in the least. Surely she knew someone…?
She referred the question, of course, to Granger and Longbottom. Granger sighed, and Longbottom, most uncharacteristically, smirked, and said he would pass on the question to the Muggle Liaison Office. Something could be done, no doubt, though the matter would be easier if it were a question of a Squib rather than a full wizard.
She reads between the lines what Addie makes explicit to her: Blaise's people are quite well-connected, and they were careful if ambiguous neutrals in the late war. Blaise's people, which is to say, Blaise's mother, who has—had—a reputation of something of a Black Widow herself. Not for her dark and beautiful complexion, but for the parade of husbands whose untimely demises left her successively wealthier: rather like Elizabeth Taylor crossed with Lucrezia Borgia. There was quite a lot of rumor about the late Magdalena Zabini, who died just after the war, of poison by an unknown hand.
From the son's manner, manic and insouciant, she wonders at his feelings on the matter. There's a giddiness to him, that places him in the Roaring Twenties, a Bright-Young-Thing frivolity that seems to mask a desperation darker than that of his pale friend, Theo, who has the melancholy droopiness of a basset hound without the canine charm. Theo's father is dead, but Mary is not sure if Theo's mourning is for his parent or for his own lost innocence. Addie has told her that the lot of them narrowly missed being shut up in prison for the rest of their lives, and are on thirty-year probation. She does not specify the crimes, and Mary doesn't ask.
Then there are the odd little ceremonies. The bulky, shambling fellow—Goyle, yes, Gregory Goyle, whom she can't help thinking of as Gargoyle—came in one fine morning for his appointment, saw Granger on duty at her little table as usual, and made a profound and archaic obeisance to her, like a knight before the throne, and declared to all assembled that he was acknowledging his life debt to Hermione Granger and (in absentia) Ronald Weasley and Harry Potter.
Not only in the spirit of post-war reconciliation, he clarified, but for the honor of the thing.
His friend, the Widow's son, nodded in approval from his seat, his baby sister in her makeshift bassinet on the chair next to him.
Pansy, the ex-fiancée, comes to her appointments faithfully, sits on the opposite side of the waiting room from her former intended, and reads paperback books. She seems to have an insatiable appetite for Regency romances, which she consumes at an amazing pace. That is not her only occupation; oddly enough, she's also a fairish chess player, or at least that's what two of the red-headed Weasley brothers say to a third, one afternoon after she played them both in succession and won.
"Who'd have thought it?" said the tall one, Ron.
"She'll give you a fair fight, Ronnie, she will," said the brother with the missing ear. "Take her on—I've got odds on you."
"Narrow odds," says the other, pushing his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose. "Theo Nott won't play her any more. He says that there's no use in being trounced. And she's been reading up."
Apparently the Parkinson girl has overcome her contempt for things Muggle far enough to have applied for a library card, and that's her reading: Regency romances and technical books on chess. By now she has devoured the whole of Georgette Heyer and has been studying the games of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian grandmasters.
It's a different game on this side of the border, she remarks to Daphne Greengrass.
ooo
Indeed it is, Addie tells her over a restaurant dinner. On the other side of the border, the pieces are sentient and they supply the players with an unending stream of advice and commentary.
Mary thinks that would be rather distracting, and much in violation of international tournament rules. It's like something out of Alice, she says.
Their whole world is like something out of Alice, Addie says. She has been reading as well, books she borrows in no particular order from Mary's shelves: the works of Lewis Carroll, a complete Sherlock Holmes, and then the collected stories of Franz Kafka, whom she claims must have worked in the Ministry for Magic in Central Europe, for otherwise how would he know so well the workings of the labyrinth?
Addie has been rather more cheerful since Kingsley agreed to help her find her lost sisters. The search was neither long nor difficult; it turns out, apparently, that there is a discreet agency in London that sees to such cases, the non-magical offspring of magical parents.
So it was, a week ago, that Mary and Addie sat down to tea with a circle of such adoptees. They have found each other, as well: a tall, red-haired aerospace engineer named Edward Thompson, after his adopted family, though his birth-family, he lately has learned, are the very same Weasleys who are such a numerous presence in Mary's clinic waiting room; Sophia and Evangeline Ritter, two of Addie's sisters, adopted by a London solicitor and his wife, who are in their late teens now and have just received quite satisfactory results on their A-levels; the third sister, Tabitha, Addie's elder by a decade, bears another surname and is a well-established concert pianist. There's a chemical engineer named Smith, a Squib of the Prince line (an old, old family, Mary explains, whose Half-blood branch included a brilliant intelligence operative in the late war), and a clever and enterprising restauranteur named Patterson (born Fortescue). Talented, vivacious folk, all of them, ordinary but not quite.
Squibs, they call them. A disrespectful name, on the order of Muggle. However, Addie explains carefully, a Squib is not a plain Muggle. A Squib is a witch or wizard, less the full magical power, but with something beyond the ordinary human standard. That je ne sais quoi she does not specify, but Mary remembers Jackie, and the glow about her that Mary would have called magical if she hadn't recently learned what that word meant, literally understood.
A Squib, reared among magical folk, has a difficult time of it: crippled, impoverished, frequently embittered. They say that the Witch-finder General of some centuries back was a vengeful Squib, and in fact some of the older families' strictures date from that time: in some such families, Squib children are not permitted to live beyond their third year. In other cases, the practice of infanticide goes back yet further, some say even to Roman times.
A Squib, among the Muggles, has something special: nothing that anyone ever can put a finger on, but a glimmer and a glow, a special energy, an extended youth and a spry, vigorous old age. Jackie, had she not been cut down in her late twenties, might well have crossed the century mark in great good health.
As for their charisma: well, Mary most certainly can attest to that. Jackie drew her eyes and her attention, so that there was no thought of attention to anyone else on that channel.
And the other thing to note, Addie says: in the descendants of a Squib, the banked fires of magic can flare to life once more, sometimes spectacularly. There's much debate as to whether Muggle-born witches and wizards are a spontaneous arrival of magic, or only the scions of a Muggle family tree that includes a fair proportion of Squibs.
ooo
The candlelight gleams on the swinging curtains of Addie's hair, still worn at what Mary assumes is regulation length, but more stylish, somehow. More contemporary, she realizes: the angle of the cut is likely an imitation of what Addie has seen on the London streets. That soft light darkens and brightens her eyes as well, and the glow of her pale skin. There is a moment when her face seems to be shining from the inside out…
… Inconspicuous, is Addie, but nonetheless alluring. Charm, no that's not quite the word, nor is glamour, … well, those are all technical terms on Addie's side of the border, whose sense has become attenuated in the secular and skeptical world that followed the withdrawal of the witch-folk to their own enclave.
Mary says, "Thank you. It's been a lovely evening. And a lovely day."
Addie suggests, hopefully, that they might extend it, perhaps?
Mary says that the ride back to her apartment is too long; by the time they get back there, … well, and she has to get up in the morning. For work.
Addie rises, and says, "There's another way." She says, "I'm not on duty now. I wanted you to be clear on that."
Mary folds her napkin, and lays it aside; Addie has settled the bill, and it is time to go.
Addie says, "And I am not your patient. I see Dr. Rosencrantz, not you." Her eyes are even darker now, and Mary notes the rise and fall of her chest, as she breathes—more rapidly and then, carefully and consciously slowing. Training doesn't leave one in the off-hours; it's a part of body and soul.
Mary says, "Am I to understand…"
Addie takes her arm as they cross the threshold of the restaurant, and step into a margin of darkness out of range of the CCTV cameras. "If you didn't need to think about the travel time," Addie whispers, "would you consider extending the evening?"
Mary would protest that it's a silly counterfactual except… this is a witch. A rather fanciable witch, actually. Pleasant company, but with an edge, always—a kind of dark enchantment, she would say (and then she realizes that both of those words mean something, across the border, something that is far from a compliment). All of the correspondents, as well: she would say that she's charmed, spellbound…
"Very well," she says.
Addie puts an arm around her waist and draws her into what feels like an embrace, or the first figure of a dance, for they turn in place, and then there is a dreadful compression, as if she were being squeezed through an infinitely narrow tube, a scintillating darkness that whips and twists… and when her eyes open, or the darkness lifts, they are standing in the sitting-room of her apartment, with the evening lamplight cozy against the sullen autumn night outside.
Mary says, "Well." She adds, "Do you always travel like that?"
"Some find it unpleasant. And it requires skill and focus."
"It's convenient, but…" She's not sure that she should agree, in words, that it's unpleasant; Addie might take that as a slighting estimate of her skill. In any case, Nature extracts its payment, it would appear; no convenience but there's a compensating discomfort.
Addie says, "There's one more thing I should confess." She says, "I failed, you know, to save Jackie… and I failed my friend." She says, "I failed her, badly. We were… like you and Jackie, except I wouldn't … I thought I had to follow the old forms. A proper marriage. And I didn't believe her… that things were going to the bad, politically." She adds, "But things are different on this side of the border." And then with an air of ruthless assessment, in which Mary recognizes one of her own mental gestures, "I don't know if we would have made a go of it, because she … wasn't one of us, really. Her family was Dark on one side… and the other, incomers. What we call Muggle-born." That with a flash of self-consciousness, because Addie knows how Mary feels about that word.
Mary says, "And I'm a plain Muggle, and you're a witch. That's going to work out so much better, is it?"
"It's a different world over here," Addie says. "More things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy." Things have changed. She can look at that horrible boy, the Widow's son, and see him in present tense, not only a combatant but a victim of the war, like herself, and an affectionate brother to his baby sister. Family resemblance does not make one a replica of one's father or mother, but their whole world has been predicated on family resemblances, and family ties, and family hatreds, back three and four centuries. It's easier now, because she knows that her own sense of failure and guilt isn't unique in the least… now that she's been told, not in words but in hints unmistakable, that her counterparts on the other side of the border carry similar burdens, as does even Dr Rosencrantz, as does anyone who has to do with life and death—whether as combatant or Healer.
Mary nods, the tears starting in her eyes at the loss that she still does not remember.
Addie says, "I don't want you to remember… not only because it's regulation. Because I don't want you to suffer." She pauses. "Because I care for you. You stepped in, and you saved me."
Mary shakes her head. "No one saves anyone else. We do what we can. Sometimes that suffices." She doesn't need to add, and sometimes it isn't enough.
Addie says, "More than half of my family is on this side of the border, and I find… I quite like them. It's not the traditional way, at all, but that needn't be the only way."
ooo
Author's note: For Blaise Zabini's theatrical aspirations and the characterization here, I borrow from the work of Silver Sailor Ganymede; for Pansy Parkinson's chess prowess, I don't remember if the debt is owed to The Waters of March, by Duinn Fionn aka Geoviki, or to the moving (but regrettably unfinished) Language of Potions, by the same author. (Both have interesting characterizations, particularly of Pansy and Tonks.) Pansy's emotional and sexual history with Draco is modeled on the interpretation by Silver Sailor Ganymede in her collection of drabbles, The Flower and the Angel. The given name of the Weasleys' Squib son is from Arielmoonstar's The Red-Headed Boy.