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Well, here is the cracktastic HP/CSI: NY one-shot I've been promising.
Title: Whispers and Blood on the Tongue
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom(s): CSI: NY/HP
Rating: FRMAO
Warnings: Graphic sexuality and violence
Character(s): Don Flack/Rebecca Stanhope
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in CSI: NY are property of Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, and CBS. No profit is being made, and no infringement is intended. For entertainment only.
All recognizable, people, places, and events in Harry Potter are property of J.K Rowling, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Rebecca Stanhope is my creation.
Summary: At seventeen, Rebecca Stanhope fled the wizarding world forever, and at twenty-six, she is married to NYPD detective Don Flack. She has never breathed a word about who she once was or what she once did in a world unseen, but now owls have begun arriving from a past she had hoped to forget, and with the letters come the lure of old temptations.
Sometimes, she wondered if he would be so eager to touch her if he knew what she was, if he saw the secrets that lived beneath her skin like latent disease. She didn't think so. He was a creature of facts and evidence, salted and seasoned by the streets of New York and rocked in its squalid cradle. So, she kept her silence, and her silence earned her moments like these, when magic existed in the real world and it was possible to divide by two and create a whole.
His lips were hot and hungry against her throat, and from beneath half-lidded eyes, she caught a glimpse of dark brown hair and pale nape and let her fingers play over the soft strands. As he was in everything else, he was thorough in his investigation of her exposed flesh, almost greedy, and she allowed herself a throaty purr of satisfaction even as her thoughts strayed into darker fields by far.
In truth, she wondered what all of them would think if the walls suddenly came down and all cards of the Tarot grinned up at them with vulpine, leering faces. Mac, with his gruff exterior and sense of military honor, and Stella with her unspoken loneliness and independence worn like armor. Would they be so friendly if they knew of her addictions and festering wounds? Or Sheldon, with his warm smile and medical degree. What would he say if she told him that everything he took as the gospel of Hippocrates and St. John was only reassuring myth?
Bones could be made or unmade in defiance of God. She had seen it with her own eyes-it and a thousand impossibilities besides. She had borne witness to the resurrection of the dead, rooted in her chair while the bodies of those who were no more and should never have been again flexed fingers devoid of flesh and stared at the world through empty, soulless eyes. She had seen them born, and she had cut them down again with the ceaseless raising of her wand. Bones had piled at her feet in drifting dunes and ground beneath her churning wheels as she raced across blood-soaked fields under smoke-blackened skies.
Such was the knowledge that she carried, the only legacy brought from the world she had left behind, and she longed to share it. It burned on her tongue like fire and honey, but her lips had been sealed by God's fiery hand and the promised wrath of wizarding law; even if she dared flout the latter in a final, irrevocable rejection, there was no one to believe her.
Not even you, love, she thought as his hands slid down the narrow, stiff curve of her spine and his tongue found the hollow of her throat. Especially not you.
Love? It's funny the things one cannot leave behind, isn't it, Miss Stanhope? The melancholy, wistful voice of Headmaster Dumbledore startled her, and she arched beneath her husband's mouth. For all your insistence that you've left us and all that we were-what you are-behind, it isn't truly so. We are dust in your pores, indelible as the mark of time. The robes are gone, yes, and the chair that once drifted up stairs that never rested easily, but traces remain. The occasional lapses in proper American dialect for example, or your insatiable predilection for tea.
And your wands, of course.
She bristled at the mention of her wands, tucked inside a velvet bag in the bottom of the dresser, abandoned foundlings left to gather dust. Their smooth shafts had all but forgotten the possessive, spastic curl of her fingers, and her fingers throbbed with sudden yearning, as though they had remembered the caress of a cherished lover. She closed her eyes against a pang of nostalgia and the sand and sugar scald of tears and concentrated on the exquisite nip of Don's teeth on her earlobe.
I'm not Rebecca Stanhope anymore, Headmaster. I haven't been for a long time.
Ah, but you are, came the reply, and the familiar gentleness in his tone made her chest ache. Your name may have become Mistress Flack, but true magic never dies, and beneath your mathematician's skin, you are still that fierce witch-child with a lion's heart and a serpent's soul. You still watch in the dark for the menace that makes its den in the unlighted places of the world, and you still understand that which you were never meant to know. Nothing can change that, and it is useless to try. It will only cause you sorrow.
Oh, but she had tried. She had fled Scotland with the despairing cry of the broken, kicked the dust from her eggshell heels and washed it away with a torrent of bitter tears. The whipcrack report of her Apparition into her St. Augustine apartment had still been ringing in the air when she had torn off her robes and unceremoniously stuffed them into the garbage can. Her wands had been next, tossed into a drawer with a choked sob of furious betrayal, and the banishment of Rebecca Stanhope, witch and Arithmancer, had begun.
In her place had come the Muggle college student, and after that, the Muggle graduate student. The numbers ceased to sing their sacred songs to her closed eyes and trembling fingers, and she no longer followed the threads of tantalizing possibility that had once danced and writhed behind her closed eyelids in joyous invitation. They faded, lost their glorious plumage, until they were ordinary integers of ink and paper. She had lost herself in the anesthetized comfort of mundane existence.
At twenty-two, she had moved to New York for graduate studies in advanced mathematics at NYU, and though the transition from sleepy Southern town to bustling urban metropolis had been stunning, she had never once reached for the reassuring heft of her wand. She had struggled onto the subways and over the dilapidated sidewalks with stoic determination, and when winter wrapped its icy fingers around the city, she had pulled on her mittens and scarf and pushed aside all thoughts of a surreptitious Warming Charm cast beneath her clothes. Magic was a childish thing she had put away, or so she told herself through gritted teeth.
But not entirely. The need for it still tingles and burns beneath your fingertips like slow, killing poison. On nights when Don is pulling a double shift and his side of the bed is barren and cold, you tremble with the longing to release it just for an instant, to let it flow from you in a crackling torrent. Your bones and sinews weep with the memory of power unleashed, ozone and Hera's lightning. You were always a stubborn child, and addictions die hard.
More than once, you've found yourself pacing the rooms of the apartment and wrangling with the urge to put pen to paper and weave upon the loom of time and chance.
Not a pen, she thought suddenly, and her hand closed spasmodically around his shoulder. Don, long accustomed to the inexplicable vagaries of her imperfect nervous system, gently shrugged free. Not a pen. A quill. With a fine nib and an eagle feather just like the one poor Neville loaned me on the first day of Potions.
An image arose in her mind of the Potions dungeon, dark and cold and damp enough to make her bones throb. The only warmth in winter had come from the simmering heat of bubbling cauldrons and the forty huddled bodies that occupied the rough, wooden benches. Breath had hung in the frigid air like confessions, and spiders had dwelt in the unswept corners. Once, in that room, she had sealed her fate with the errant scribble of a jittering quill, and every night for three years hence, she had passed the hours in its drafty confines and toiled beneath the pitiless lash of the Serpent King.
Ah, yes. The Serpent King. We come to him at last, and sooner than I thought we would. Dumbledore's voice was still kind, but there was an undercurrent of brisk anticipation now, a clandestine glee that sparked a flare of resentment in her belly.
Still a master manipulator, eh, old man? she thought bitterly. That hollow runs long and deeply beneath my skin, and the echoes of its creation reverberate in my fingertips and my teeth to this day, and to recall it too clearly brings bile and wormwood to my throat. I survive because I pretend that it does not exist. It is a wound that does not heal, and you do it no favors by prodding it while my oblivious husband seduces me.
What did you expect? sneered a laconic baritone inside her head, and she moaned. I was his favorite slave for twenty years, and all my loyalty earned was excuses and recrimination and a twisted handmaiden who dogged my every step. Did you really think your three years of noble sacrifice and bumbling hindrance would be worthy of respite? Foolish chit; clearly the lessons I struggled to drum into your obdurate skull were all for naught. Only precious Potter, chiefest among his conquests, has earned that peace. He will spill my blood and strip the flesh from my bones until he wearies of me, and then I will be cast aside.
Just like you were. The reward for unwavering fealty is obsolescence, or is that a lesson Godric Gryffindor never told you?
She flinched as the memories of mud and sour Curses filled her nose. Bastard. Oh, you miserable bastard.
Don froze in the act of cupping her breast and drew away from her. "Hey, you all right?" he asked, and drew the ball of his thumb over her cheekbone. "Something hurtin' you?"
The solicitous tenderness in his voice and the stroke of his hand were a throttling fist around her heart, and only her iron will stopped her from turning her face away and cowering like a snared rabbit at the foot of the bed. The language of compassion and sweetness with no thought for recompense were rare gifts that her suspicious mind could neither fathom nor wholly accept. Don had never raised his hand to her, and even their most heated spats had never progressed beyond the slamming of a door, but even so, in the withered cockles of her heart, she was waiting for the unspoken price to be levied. Mercy was never free, and love was never unconditional.
Things my teacher taught me, she mused with cynical hysteria, and even as she wrangled with the mounting urge to bury her face into the crook of Don's neck and cry, her mouth twitched in a convulsive smirk.
Always is never always, but never is almost always never. Friends die, and enemies prosper, and the blood of the innocent looks no different from the blood of the guilty. The gods dry no tears, but they drink from them with cupped and eager hands. There are places in the world where no one can hear you scream, and sometimes, even if they can, it doesn't matter because no one can help you, or, worse yet, they don't care. Dying is not the sole province of the old, and death seldom comes with dignity or meaning. Heroes die facedown in the dirt, and villains receive state funerals. Virtue goes unrewarded, and mercy and loyalty are for fools and children.
Those were the lessons life in the wizarding world had taught her, and she held their truths inviolate. With them, she had staunched the bleeding and reinforced her towering fortress walls, built them tall and high and without doors. She had been determined that there be no second lapse into weakness. The first had nearly cost her everything, and though her body was fragile, her mind and her will to survive were not, and a lesson taught by experience was one never forgotten.
She mustered a smile. "Yeah, I'm good. Just been a long damn day in the chair."
"Oh. Well, let me see what I can do about that." He offered her a lopsided smirk and got out of bed. "I'll be right back," he said.
"You, uh, calling the chase?" She raised an inquiring eyebrow.
"Are you kiddin'? I'm just bringing in reinforcements." He cast an appreciative, lingering gaze over the thin spar of her collarbone and the soft curve of one exposed breast and padded from the room.
She watched him go in silence, lips pursed in admiration of his retreating buttocks.
Not entirely sacrosanct, those rules of yours, pointed out the primly acerbic voice of Professor McGonagall. If they were, you never would have married your Muggle. But you did.
She had, at that, and the realization loosened the squeezing, thorny fingers around her heart. She still wasn't certain how it had happened, and in truth, she dared not question it too closely, lest the fragile miracle she had fashioned for herself from the dust of shattered dreams crumble between her grasping fingers. She cradled it to her breast, protected it from the light of unforgiving scrutiny and the infected shadows of her past, and every night, when she spooned against him beneath the sheets and her obdurate, bony knees jabbed him in the kidneys in their perpetual quest for total bed domination, she prayed that it would still be there in the morning. Because the last, best lesson that the Hard Knocks School of Witchcraft and Misery had taught her was that all one held dear could be taken in the passing of a breath.
Oh, indeed, murmured the belladonna voice of the Serpent King, and in her mind's eye, she saw the glint of a fang and glittering, oildrop eyes inside a pasty, sallow face. That lesson came the swiftest and hardest of all, and if the theory was painful, then the practical crushed you. You, the unrepentant chit with an ego as big as your mouth, who toppled a Ministry official with a display of vicious, Slytherin cunning Salazar himself would have applauded, and who charged across a cratered field with nothing but your wand and your brass bollocks and your unwitting sacrifice of fourteen, were a blubbing child in the end, a sniveling cub in a den of serpents. It stripped you of all your beloved pretensions of maturity and idealism and left you kneeling in the bloody mud with tears and blood and dirt on your face. And as soon as you could, you crawled away to lick your wounds.
Fuck you. It was savage and seething, the anguished howl of a wounded animal.
That was, I believe, entirely the problem. Dismissive and barbed with casual, cruel amusement. Isn't that truly why you left the wizarding world in your petulant wake and took your formidable skills with you? Isn't that why you muffled the persistent siren song of the numbers and ignored the burning ache of unspent magic in your wrists and fingers? Not because of the disillusionment that the horrors of war brought, but because you discovered that just because you made the hard choice didn't entitle you to whatever spoils your heart desired?
Oh, Severus, sighed Dumbledore.
Pay him no heed, Stanhope, ordered McGonagall crisply. You paid him mind for far too long, and look what it gained you. You owe him nothing, less than nothing if I may be so frank, and any road, if you hadn't gone, there would be no Muggle now.
It all came back to that in the end, to the Muggle rummaging in the kitchen in nothing but his birthday suit. He had been a gift unlooked for, and the thought of him slipping through her fingers as so many others had done sent cold terror into her belly. He was magical as a rock, and he was brash, and his vociferous support of the New York Rangers mystified her, but he was also gentle and fiercely protective of both her intelligence and her physical fragility, and nowhere did she feel safer or more cherished than when she was wrapped in his arms and listening to his heartbeat.
It had been four years since her private miracle on 34th Street, when destiny had arrived, not in a sleigh or the winged feet of Mercury, but on the tennis-shoed feet of a murder suspect hotfooting down the street in a desperate bid to outrun the long arm of the law. His hopes and left tibia had smashed against her spoked wheel when reflexes had proven too slow, and her wrist had snapped like green kindling in the ensuing tumble of tangled limbs. Don Flack had been hot on his quarry's heels, and even as she'd lain, stunned and stupid, on the sidewalk with her skirt bunched in a tumorous knot beneath her buttocks and her broken wrist sending bright flares of agony into her fingers, she'd marveled at how handsome he was.
She had meant to speak to him when the screaming suspect had been dragged away, but the city, fearing an impending lawsuit and eager to chivvy the craning onlookers away, had bundled her into an ambulance before she'd had the chance, and her only conversations that night had been with a beef-necked EMT and the taciturn, harried doctor who had set her wrist and written her a hastily scribbled prescription for manmade nirvana. Chance romance, it had seemed, was dead.
And then, Detective Flack had shown up in the hospital parking lot, nervous and sidling and lazily flipping his notebook from hand to hand. He had wanted to ask her more questions, he'd said, about the incident involving Lenny on the Lam. If nothing else, he assured her, they could get him for assault on a disabled person.
"Oh, I get my own felony category now? Hot damn," she'd retorted before she could stop herself, and the expression on his face had been so confused and quietly mortified that she'd instantly regretted it. "Look, I'm sorry. That was a binty thing to say."
He'd blinked at her, nonplussed. "Binty?"
She'd grimaced at the unintended reversion into British vulgarity. "Yeah. Yeah, binty. How can I help you?"
And so the fairy tale had begun. He'd driven her home from the hospital that night, arranging her in the passenger seat of his Taurus with persnickety care, careful not to jostle her arm or her pitifully thin legs, and when she was settled, he had gone to war with her chair. His command of invective had been impressive as he wrangled with the chair and his cramped trunk, and it had been all she could do not to howl with laughter as he'd grown more and more flustered and his accent had descended further into New York apoplexia.
She'd spent the ride home stealing sidelong glances at him as he drove and inhaling the scent of wool and cotton and polished leather, and beneath that, the musky, astringent scent of aftershave. It had produced an unexpected wave of nostalgia, and she had turned her face away to stare out the window at the artificial constellations formed by the towering skyline of the city.
Of course nostalgia found you. How could it not? Scent is the strongest sense bound to memory, and with every indrawn breath, you were reminded of wool and allspice and parchment dust and broken alliances. It was a potpourri you had long associated with security and comfort and home, first as a child at your grandfather's table, and later as the vigilant maidservant of the Serpent King, with his clacking bootheels and crooked nose and burning black eyes. But it was no longer a comfort by then. Time and circumstance had seen to that.
She pushed the intrusive thought aside. It hadn't been a comfort then, but it was now, restored to its pedestal by Don's patience. She'd sat in the car in front of her apartment for fifteen minutes, reluctant to leave despite the uneasy memories conjured by the smell inside the car. Three times her splayed fingers had grazed the cold metal of the doorhandle, only to return to her lap as a new question occurred to her. For his part, Don had watched her fumbling flirtation in amused silence, lips curled in a secretive smirk.
She hadn't expected to see him again. Her courtship plumage was as tattered and bruised as the rest of her, and years of self-imposed isolation had rendered her awkward and often garrulous, but he had called a week later, ostensibly to discuss possible departmental reimbursement for the damage done to her chair. She had been startled and secretly pleased to hear his voice on the other end of the line, and she had protested not a whit when the conversation had drifted to other topics. She had merely smiled and curled her fingers through the phone cord with girlish glee.
Another phone call had come, and then another, and three weeks after being mown down on the sidewalk on 34th Street, he had invited her for coffee at a nearby café. She had spent that first date with her trembling hands locked around her knees to prevent them from knocking over scalding coffee with an ill-advised spasm. She had smiled and nodded, and if he had noticed that her coffee went untouched, he gave no sign. They had passed four hours in idle conversation, circled one another in cautious interest, and when he had dropped her off at two in the morning, she had done a calipering, uncoordinated jig in the complex parking lot the moment his car was out of sight.
Coffee had led to other dates and other clandestine parking lot hallelujahs, and as two months slipped into three, she had grown accustomed to phone calls from a Detective Flack while she graded papers on Quantum Mathematics and Their Practical Applications in the teaching assistants' lounge at NYU. Late-night messages on her answering machine had become the norm, and more often than not, they wound up at the café, clutching steaming cups of too-thick coffee and speaking of everything and nothing all at once, a language within a language that moved her to surreptitious joy because she had never thought to speak it.
He had thoroughly unmanned her, and she soon found herself discussing topics she had sworn were taboo. She had talked about her grandfather and life within the walls of an institution for the broken and bitter, and she had even confessed an unrequited love for a professor under whom she had once studied. It was a liberty of which she would never have thought herself capable, and it had frightened and exhilarated her.
But for all her newfound freedom, there had yet remained secrets she would never divulge, subjects she would never broach. Like Judith Pruitt, covered in her own excrement and savaged by jackals while she had looked wordlessly on. Like the Game that had moved Judith to slit her pudgy, jaundiced throat with a shard from her handmirror and bathe the room in which she had died in blood, an ineffable scarlet letter no amount of scrubbing would remove.
Nor did she speak of Hogwarts, that citadel upon the Scottish moor that she would once have died to defend. No Hagrid, no flying; no Boy Who Lived or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named; no Dark Mark emblazoned across the sky over the smoldering husks of houses and charred human remains. No war cries, no Death Eaters, no sloughed flesh squelching under foot and tread.
And especially no discussion of the unspeakable eros of casting Cruciatus on the enemy, the nigh-orgasmic explosion of power as it tore through its human conduit and the smooth grain of polished wood in a flash of red and teeth-baring fury. No mention of how it had felt to watch a human being writhe and shriek under the relentless grip of absolute power, and no confession that twenty minutes after the fact, her panties had still been clinging to her sodden sex. That, above all else, was a story that would never be told, not even from dying lips.
Six months after that first coffee, he had taken her to a night game at Yankee Stadium, and after an evening of clapping and amiable hooting and eating hot dogs in the nosebleed seats, he had kissed her in his car. He had tasted of mustard and relish and the sole beer he had permitted himself, and only the fact that a lewd and lascivious charge would have hampered his policing career had stopped them from progressing further. She had been breathless and dizzy by the time the parted, and by the time they had reached the privacy of his apartment, she hadn't given a damn about that, either.
She had surrendered her virginity on his rumpled, bachelor's bed, scrabbling and gasping and twisting beneath him and wondering just why in the hell no one had told her that sex was like being reamed with a garden hoe, or that men were heavy as they moved and thrust against you. She had said none of that when it was over, of course. She had been too tired and too sore, and besides it would have been impolitic. So, she had settled for panting against his sweat-slick chest and murmuring that he had been splendid.
As painfully enlightening as their first tryst had been, it did not dissuade her from succumbing to his subsequent advances. By the fourth time, pleasure had bloomed in her cunt and belly like the sinuous caress of choking wisteria, coiling around her legs and arms until it teetered on the exquisite cusp of pain. She had come so hard that he thought she was having a seizure, and when he had disengaged himself and asked, in a queerly reedy voice, if she needed the paramedics, she had laughed until she'd nearly wet the bed.
You'd have succumbed even if it never stopped hurting, said the phlegmatic voice of her long-dead grandfather. Sex is power. Not as potent or as pervasive as the tuning-fork thrum of magic in your veins, but potent enough. It turns you on to see the glazed, mindless arousal in his eyes as he moves against you, to hear the ragged panting as higher reasoning shuts down and he is consumed by the frenzied need to rut and claim and drive you into the bed with every surge of his hips. To surrender control is to cede your heart, and his vulnerability is a stronger aphrodisiac than the cat-tail curl of his fingers between your legs. For it, you would endure any pain.
"Grandpa," she hissed through gritted teeth, mortified that he was dissecting her carnal proclivities from beyond the grave, but she could not deny the truth of his words. Her mouth had gone dry as shale, and there was a simmering, anticipatory wetness between her legs, as though her salivary glands had picked up stakes and moved across the corporeal border.
Six months after she had moved into his bed, she had moved into his apartment, and a year after that, she had found herself at St. Patrick's Cathedral, kneeling on shrieking knees beside Don in his dress blues, her cold, twitching hand clammy and restless inside the white cotton of his glove. It had taken a conscious effort not to swoon from the pain in her knees and the chafing terror of exposure in the house of God, and as she'd wobbled and swayed next to her handsome groom and stared into the icy, blue eyes of Father Carmichael, she had been seized with the awful certainty that he knew of the voices that whispered to her with the coming of the witching hour of dragons and gnomes on spindly legs and the piteous wailing of house elves left behind.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, she had thought with frozen clarity, and it had been such a Jonathan Edwardian thought that she'd quailed beneath his searching gaze.
She'd been so distracted that she'd missed her cue, and a restless murmur of burgeoning alarm had begun to ripple through the church before the crushing grip of Don's fingers around her own had jarred her from her reverie. She'd announced her assent in a ringing declaration that had echoed through the church, and when Don had raised her veil with tender solemnity and pressed his lips to hers, she had pushed the moment of unreasoning fear from her mind.
The rest of the evening had passed in too much dancing and too much wine, and she did not think of the priest again until the bedside clock had heralded the witching hour in bright, bloody digits.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, she'd thought dully, and her head had ached with the muzzy, nascent promise of a hangover. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Then Don had been on her and in her, and the melancholy had vanished in the blissful haze of consummation.
Life had settled into its trundling, uneventful rhythm. She had earned her Masters and exchanged the penniless idealism of the student for the unforgiving discipline of the associate professor, and Don had gone grimly about the business of unmasking the monsters that roamed their midst. There had been family dinners and pay raises and uncomfortable evenings spent fending off increasingly pointed queries by the in-laws about the possibility of grandchildren, and as the first year had given way to the second, the nebulous anxiety of Dark Marks and Unforgivables and unintended discovery had been usurped by the fear of the knock at the door in the middle of the night and the appearance of a grim police captain on her threshold.
Until the arrival of the owls, that was.
Title: Whispers and Blood on the Tongue
Author:
laguera25Fandom(s): CSI: NY/HP
Rating: FRMAO
Warnings: Graphic sexuality and violence
Character(s): Don Flack/Rebecca Stanhope
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in CSI: NY are property of Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, and CBS. No profit is being made, and no infringement is intended. For entertainment only.
All recognizable, people, places, and events in Harry Potter are property of J.K Rowling, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Rebecca Stanhope is my creation.
Summary: At seventeen, Rebecca Stanhope fled the wizarding world forever, and at twenty-six, she is married to NYPD detective Don Flack. She has never breathed a word about who she once was or what she once did in a world unseen, but now owls have begun arriving from a past she had hoped to forget, and with the letters come the lure of old temptations.
Sometimes, she wondered if he would be so eager to touch her if he knew what she was, if he saw the secrets that lived beneath her skin like latent disease. She didn't think so. He was a creature of facts and evidence, salted and seasoned by the streets of New York and rocked in its squalid cradle. So, she kept her silence, and her silence earned her moments like these, when magic existed in the real world and it was possible to divide by two and create a whole.
His lips were hot and hungry against her throat, and from beneath half-lidded eyes, she caught a glimpse of dark brown hair and pale nape and let her fingers play over the soft strands. As he was in everything else, he was thorough in his investigation of her exposed flesh, almost greedy, and she allowed herself a throaty purr of satisfaction even as her thoughts strayed into darker fields by far.
In truth, she wondered what all of them would think if the walls suddenly came down and all cards of the Tarot grinned up at them with vulpine, leering faces. Mac, with his gruff exterior and sense of military honor, and Stella with her unspoken loneliness and independence worn like armor. Would they be so friendly if they knew of her addictions and festering wounds? Or Sheldon, with his warm smile and medical degree. What would he say if she told him that everything he took as the gospel of Hippocrates and St. John was only reassuring myth?
Bones could be made or unmade in defiance of God. She had seen it with her own eyes-it and a thousand impossibilities besides. She had borne witness to the resurrection of the dead, rooted in her chair while the bodies of those who were no more and should never have been again flexed fingers devoid of flesh and stared at the world through empty, soulless eyes. She had seen them born, and she had cut them down again with the ceaseless raising of her wand. Bones had piled at her feet in drifting dunes and ground beneath her churning wheels as she raced across blood-soaked fields under smoke-blackened skies.
Such was the knowledge that she carried, the only legacy brought from the world she had left behind, and she longed to share it. It burned on her tongue like fire and honey, but her lips had been sealed by God's fiery hand and the promised wrath of wizarding law; even if she dared flout the latter in a final, irrevocable rejection, there was no one to believe her.
Not even you, love, she thought as his hands slid down the narrow, stiff curve of her spine and his tongue found the hollow of her throat. Especially not you.
Love? It's funny the things one cannot leave behind, isn't it, Miss Stanhope? The melancholy, wistful voice of Headmaster Dumbledore startled her, and she arched beneath her husband's mouth. For all your insistence that you've left us and all that we were-what you are-behind, it isn't truly so. We are dust in your pores, indelible as the mark of time. The robes are gone, yes, and the chair that once drifted up stairs that never rested easily, but traces remain. The occasional lapses in proper American dialect for example, or your insatiable predilection for tea.
And your wands, of course.
She bristled at the mention of her wands, tucked inside a velvet bag in the bottom of the dresser, abandoned foundlings left to gather dust. Their smooth shafts had all but forgotten the possessive, spastic curl of her fingers, and her fingers throbbed with sudden yearning, as though they had remembered the caress of a cherished lover. She closed her eyes against a pang of nostalgia and the sand and sugar scald of tears and concentrated on the exquisite nip of Don's teeth on her earlobe.
I'm not Rebecca Stanhope anymore, Headmaster. I haven't been for a long time.
Ah, but you are, came the reply, and the familiar gentleness in his tone made her chest ache. Your name may have become Mistress Flack, but true magic never dies, and beneath your mathematician's skin, you are still that fierce witch-child with a lion's heart and a serpent's soul. You still watch in the dark for the menace that makes its den in the unlighted places of the world, and you still understand that which you were never meant to know. Nothing can change that, and it is useless to try. It will only cause you sorrow.
Oh, but she had tried. She had fled Scotland with the despairing cry of the broken, kicked the dust from her eggshell heels and washed it away with a torrent of bitter tears. The whipcrack report of her Apparition into her St. Augustine apartment had still been ringing in the air when she had torn off her robes and unceremoniously stuffed them into the garbage can. Her wands had been next, tossed into a drawer with a choked sob of furious betrayal, and the banishment of Rebecca Stanhope, witch and Arithmancer, had begun.
In her place had come the Muggle college student, and after that, the Muggle graduate student. The numbers ceased to sing their sacred songs to her closed eyes and trembling fingers, and she no longer followed the threads of tantalizing possibility that had once danced and writhed behind her closed eyelids in joyous invitation. They faded, lost their glorious plumage, until they were ordinary integers of ink and paper. She had lost herself in the anesthetized comfort of mundane existence.
At twenty-two, she had moved to New York for graduate studies in advanced mathematics at NYU, and though the transition from sleepy Southern town to bustling urban metropolis had been stunning, she had never once reached for the reassuring heft of her wand. She had struggled onto the subways and over the dilapidated sidewalks with stoic determination, and when winter wrapped its icy fingers around the city, she had pulled on her mittens and scarf and pushed aside all thoughts of a surreptitious Warming Charm cast beneath her clothes. Magic was a childish thing she had put away, or so she told herself through gritted teeth.
But not entirely. The need for it still tingles and burns beneath your fingertips like slow, killing poison. On nights when Don is pulling a double shift and his side of the bed is barren and cold, you tremble with the longing to release it just for an instant, to let it flow from you in a crackling torrent. Your bones and sinews weep with the memory of power unleashed, ozone and Hera's lightning. You were always a stubborn child, and addictions die hard.
More than once, you've found yourself pacing the rooms of the apartment and wrangling with the urge to put pen to paper and weave upon the loom of time and chance.
Not a pen, she thought suddenly, and her hand closed spasmodically around his shoulder. Don, long accustomed to the inexplicable vagaries of her imperfect nervous system, gently shrugged free. Not a pen. A quill. With a fine nib and an eagle feather just like the one poor Neville loaned me on the first day of Potions.
An image arose in her mind of the Potions dungeon, dark and cold and damp enough to make her bones throb. The only warmth in winter had come from the simmering heat of bubbling cauldrons and the forty huddled bodies that occupied the rough, wooden benches. Breath had hung in the frigid air like confessions, and spiders had dwelt in the unswept corners. Once, in that room, she had sealed her fate with the errant scribble of a jittering quill, and every night for three years hence, she had passed the hours in its drafty confines and toiled beneath the pitiless lash of the Serpent King.
Ah, yes. The Serpent King. We come to him at last, and sooner than I thought we would. Dumbledore's voice was still kind, but there was an undercurrent of brisk anticipation now, a clandestine glee that sparked a flare of resentment in her belly.
Still a master manipulator, eh, old man? she thought bitterly. That hollow runs long and deeply beneath my skin, and the echoes of its creation reverberate in my fingertips and my teeth to this day, and to recall it too clearly brings bile and wormwood to my throat. I survive because I pretend that it does not exist. It is a wound that does not heal, and you do it no favors by prodding it while my oblivious husband seduces me.
What did you expect? sneered a laconic baritone inside her head, and she moaned. I was his favorite slave for twenty years, and all my loyalty earned was excuses and recrimination and a twisted handmaiden who dogged my every step. Did you really think your three years of noble sacrifice and bumbling hindrance would be worthy of respite? Foolish chit; clearly the lessons I struggled to drum into your obdurate skull were all for naught. Only precious Potter, chiefest among his conquests, has earned that peace. He will spill my blood and strip the flesh from my bones until he wearies of me, and then I will be cast aside.
Just like you were. The reward for unwavering fealty is obsolescence, or is that a lesson Godric Gryffindor never told you?
She flinched as the memories of mud and sour Curses filled her nose. Bastard. Oh, you miserable bastard.
Don froze in the act of cupping her breast and drew away from her. "Hey, you all right?" he asked, and drew the ball of his thumb over her cheekbone. "Something hurtin' you?"
The solicitous tenderness in his voice and the stroke of his hand were a throttling fist around her heart, and only her iron will stopped her from turning her face away and cowering like a snared rabbit at the foot of the bed. The language of compassion and sweetness with no thought for recompense were rare gifts that her suspicious mind could neither fathom nor wholly accept. Don had never raised his hand to her, and even their most heated spats had never progressed beyond the slamming of a door, but even so, in the withered cockles of her heart, she was waiting for the unspoken price to be levied. Mercy was never free, and love was never unconditional.
Things my teacher taught me, she mused with cynical hysteria, and even as she wrangled with the mounting urge to bury her face into the crook of Don's neck and cry, her mouth twitched in a convulsive smirk.
Always is never always, but never is almost always never. Friends die, and enemies prosper, and the blood of the innocent looks no different from the blood of the guilty. The gods dry no tears, but they drink from them with cupped and eager hands. There are places in the world where no one can hear you scream, and sometimes, even if they can, it doesn't matter because no one can help you, or, worse yet, they don't care. Dying is not the sole province of the old, and death seldom comes with dignity or meaning. Heroes die facedown in the dirt, and villains receive state funerals. Virtue goes unrewarded, and mercy and loyalty are for fools and children.
Those were the lessons life in the wizarding world had taught her, and she held their truths inviolate. With them, she had staunched the bleeding and reinforced her towering fortress walls, built them tall and high and without doors. She had been determined that there be no second lapse into weakness. The first had nearly cost her everything, and though her body was fragile, her mind and her will to survive were not, and a lesson taught by experience was one never forgotten.
She mustered a smile. "Yeah, I'm good. Just been a long damn day in the chair."
"Oh. Well, let me see what I can do about that." He offered her a lopsided smirk and got out of bed. "I'll be right back," he said.
"You, uh, calling the chase?" She raised an inquiring eyebrow.
"Are you kiddin'? I'm just bringing in reinforcements." He cast an appreciative, lingering gaze over the thin spar of her collarbone and the soft curve of one exposed breast and padded from the room.
She watched him go in silence, lips pursed in admiration of his retreating buttocks.
Not entirely sacrosanct, those rules of yours, pointed out the primly acerbic voice of Professor McGonagall. If they were, you never would have married your Muggle. But you did.
She had, at that, and the realization loosened the squeezing, thorny fingers around her heart. She still wasn't certain how it had happened, and in truth, she dared not question it too closely, lest the fragile miracle she had fashioned for herself from the dust of shattered dreams crumble between her grasping fingers. She cradled it to her breast, protected it from the light of unforgiving scrutiny and the infected shadows of her past, and every night, when she spooned against him beneath the sheets and her obdurate, bony knees jabbed him in the kidneys in their perpetual quest for total bed domination, she prayed that it would still be there in the morning. Because the last, best lesson that the Hard Knocks School of Witchcraft and Misery had taught her was that all one held dear could be taken in the passing of a breath.
Oh, indeed, murmured the belladonna voice of the Serpent King, and in her mind's eye, she saw the glint of a fang and glittering, oildrop eyes inside a pasty, sallow face. That lesson came the swiftest and hardest of all, and if the theory was painful, then the practical crushed you. You, the unrepentant chit with an ego as big as your mouth, who toppled a Ministry official with a display of vicious, Slytherin cunning Salazar himself would have applauded, and who charged across a cratered field with nothing but your wand and your brass bollocks and your unwitting sacrifice of fourteen, were a blubbing child in the end, a sniveling cub in a den of serpents. It stripped you of all your beloved pretensions of maturity and idealism and left you kneeling in the bloody mud with tears and blood and dirt on your face. And as soon as you could, you crawled away to lick your wounds.
Fuck you. It was savage and seething, the anguished howl of a wounded animal.
That was, I believe, entirely the problem. Dismissive and barbed with casual, cruel amusement. Isn't that truly why you left the wizarding world in your petulant wake and took your formidable skills with you? Isn't that why you muffled the persistent siren song of the numbers and ignored the burning ache of unspent magic in your wrists and fingers? Not because of the disillusionment that the horrors of war brought, but because you discovered that just because you made the hard choice didn't entitle you to whatever spoils your heart desired?
Oh, Severus, sighed Dumbledore.
Pay him no heed, Stanhope, ordered McGonagall crisply. You paid him mind for far too long, and look what it gained you. You owe him nothing, less than nothing if I may be so frank, and any road, if you hadn't gone, there would be no Muggle now.
It all came back to that in the end, to the Muggle rummaging in the kitchen in nothing but his birthday suit. He had been a gift unlooked for, and the thought of him slipping through her fingers as so many others had done sent cold terror into her belly. He was magical as a rock, and he was brash, and his vociferous support of the New York Rangers mystified her, but he was also gentle and fiercely protective of both her intelligence and her physical fragility, and nowhere did she feel safer or more cherished than when she was wrapped in his arms and listening to his heartbeat.
It had been four years since her private miracle on 34th Street, when destiny had arrived, not in a sleigh or the winged feet of Mercury, but on the tennis-shoed feet of a murder suspect hotfooting down the street in a desperate bid to outrun the long arm of the law. His hopes and left tibia had smashed against her spoked wheel when reflexes had proven too slow, and her wrist had snapped like green kindling in the ensuing tumble of tangled limbs. Don Flack had been hot on his quarry's heels, and even as she'd lain, stunned and stupid, on the sidewalk with her skirt bunched in a tumorous knot beneath her buttocks and her broken wrist sending bright flares of agony into her fingers, she'd marveled at how handsome he was.
She had meant to speak to him when the screaming suspect had been dragged away, but the city, fearing an impending lawsuit and eager to chivvy the craning onlookers away, had bundled her into an ambulance before she'd had the chance, and her only conversations that night had been with a beef-necked EMT and the taciturn, harried doctor who had set her wrist and written her a hastily scribbled prescription for manmade nirvana. Chance romance, it had seemed, was dead.
And then, Detective Flack had shown up in the hospital parking lot, nervous and sidling and lazily flipping his notebook from hand to hand. He had wanted to ask her more questions, he'd said, about the incident involving Lenny on the Lam. If nothing else, he assured her, they could get him for assault on a disabled person.
"Oh, I get my own felony category now? Hot damn," she'd retorted before she could stop herself, and the expression on his face had been so confused and quietly mortified that she'd instantly regretted it. "Look, I'm sorry. That was a binty thing to say."
He'd blinked at her, nonplussed. "Binty?"
She'd grimaced at the unintended reversion into British vulgarity. "Yeah. Yeah, binty. How can I help you?"
And so the fairy tale had begun. He'd driven her home from the hospital that night, arranging her in the passenger seat of his Taurus with persnickety care, careful not to jostle her arm or her pitifully thin legs, and when she was settled, he had gone to war with her chair. His command of invective had been impressive as he wrangled with the chair and his cramped trunk, and it had been all she could do not to howl with laughter as he'd grown more and more flustered and his accent had descended further into New York apoplexia.
She'd spent the ride home stealing sidelong glances at him as he drove and inhaling the scent of wool and cotton and polished leather, and beneath that, the musky, astringent scent of aftershave. It had produced an unexpected wave of nostalgia, and she had turned her face away to stare out the window at the artificial constellations formed by the towering skyline of the city.
Of course nostalgia found you. How could it not? Scent is the strongest sense bound to memory, and with every indrawn breath, you were reminded of wool and allspice and parchment dust and broken alliances. It was a potpourri you had long associated with security and comfort and home, first as a child at your grandfather's table, and later as the vigilant maidservant of the Serpent King, with his clacking bootheels and crooked nose and burning black eyes. But it was no longer a comfort by then. Time and circumstance had seen to that.
She pushed the intrusive thought aside. It hadn't been a comfort then, but it was now, restored to its pedestal by Don's patience. She'd sat in the car in front of her apartment for fifteen minutes, reluctant to leave despite the uneasy memories conjured by the smell inside the car. Three times her splayed fingers had grazed the cold metal of the doorhandle, only to return to her lap as a new question occurred to her. For his part, Don had watched her fumbling flirtation in amused silence, lips curled in a secretive smirk.
She hadn't expected to see him again. Her courtship plumage was as tattered and bruised as the rest of her, and years of self-imposed isolation had rendered her awkward and often garrulous, but he had called a week later, ostensibly to discuss possible departmental reimbursement for the damage done to her chair. She had been startled and secretly pleased to hear his voice on the other end of the line, and she had protested not a whit when the conversation had drifted to other topics. She had merely smiled and curled her fingers through the phone cord with girlish glee.
Another phone call had come, and then another, and three weeks after being mown down on the sidewalk on 34th Street, he had invited her for coffee at a nearby café. She had spent that first date with her trembling hands locked around her knees to prevent them from knocking over scalding coffee with an ill-advised spasm. She had smiled and nodded, and if he had noticed that her coffee went untouched, he gave no sign. They had passed four hours in idle conversation, circled one another in cautious interest, and when he had dropped her off at two in the morning, she had done a calipering, uncoordinated jig in the complex parking lot the moment his car was out of sight.
Coffee had led to other dates and other clandestine parking lot hallelujahs, and as two months slipped into three, she had grown accustomed to phone calls from a Detective Flack while she graded papers on Quantum Mathematics and Their Practical Applications in the teaching assistants' lounge at NYU. Late-night messages on her answering machine had become the norm, and more often than not, they wound up at the café, clutching steaming cups of too-thick coffee and speaking of everything and nothing all at once, a language within a language that moved her to surreptitious joy because she had never thought to speak it.
He had thoroughly unmanned her, and she soon found herself discussing topics she had sworn were taboo. She had talked about her grandfather and life within the walls of an institution for the broken and bitter, and she had even confessed an unrequited love for a professor under whom she had once studied. It was a liberty of which she would never have thought herself capable, and it had frightened and exhilarated her.
But for all her newfound freedom, there had yet remained secrets she would never divulge, subjects she would never broach. Like Judith Pruitt, covered in her own excrement and savaged by jackals while she had looked wordlessly on. Like the Game that had moved Judith to slit her pudgy, jaundiced throat with a shard from her handmirror and bathe the room in which she had died in blood, an ineffable scarlet letter no amount of scrubbing would remove.
Nor did she speak of Hogwarts, that citadel upon the Scottish moor that she would once have died to defend. No Hagrid, no flying; no Boy Who Lived or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named; no Dark Mark emblazoned across the sky over the smoldering husks of houses and charred human remains. No war cries, no Death Eaters, no sloughed flesh squelching under foot and tread.
And especially no discussion of the unspeakable eros of casting Cruciatus on the enemy, the nigh-orgasmic explosion of power as it tore through its human conduit and the smooth grain of polished wood in a flash of red and teeth-baring fury. No mention of how it had felt to watch a human being writhe and shriek under the relentless grip of absolute power, and no confession that twenty minutes after the fact, her panties had still been clinging to her sodden sex. That, above all else, was a story that would never be told, not even from dying lips.
Six months after that first coffee, he had taken her to a night game at Yankee Stadium, and after an evening of clapping and amiable hooting and eating hot dogs in the nosebleed seats, he had kissed her in his car. He had tasted of mustard and relish and the sole beer he had permitted himself, and only the fact that a lewd and lascivious charge would have hampered his policing career had stopped them from progressing further. She had been breathless and dizzy by the time the parted, and by the time they had reached the privacy of his apartment, she hadn't given a damn about that, either.
She had surrendered her virginity on his rumpled, bachelor's bed, scrabbling and gasping and twisting beneath him and wondering just why in the hell no one had told her that sex was like being reamed with a garden hoe, or that men were heavy as they moved and thrust against you. She had said none of that when it was over, of course. She had been too tired and too sore, and besides it would have been impolitic. So, she had settled for panting against his sweat-slick chest and murmuring that he had been splendid.
As painfully enlightening as their first tryst had been, it did not dissuade her from succumbing to his subsequent advances. By the fourth time, pleasure had bloomed in her cunt and belly like the sinuous caress of choking wisteria, coiling around her legs and arms until it teetered on the exquisite cusp of pain. She had come so hard that he thought she was having a seizure, and when he had disengaged himself and asked, in a queerly reedy voice, if she needed the paramedics, she had laughed until she'd nearly wet the bed.
You'd have succumbed even if it never stopped hurting, said the phlegmatic voice of her long-dead grandfather. Sex is power. Not as potent or as pervasive as the tuning-fork thrum of magic in your veins, but potent enough. It turns you on to see the glazed, mindless arousal in his eyes as he moves against you, to hear the ragged panting as higher reasoning shuts down and he is consumed by the frenzied need to rut and claim and drive you into the bed with every surge of his hips. To surrender control is to cede your heart, and his vulnerability is a stronger aphrodisiac than the cat-tail curl of his fingers between your legs. For it, you would endure any pain.
"Grandpa," she hissed through gritted teeth, mortified that he was dissecting her carnal proclivities from beyond the grave, but she could not deny the truth of his words. Her mouth had gone dry as shale, and there was a simmering, anticipatory wetness between her legs, as though her salivary glands had picked up stakes and moved across the corporeal border.
Six months after she had moved into his bed, she had moved into his apartment, and a year after that, she had found herself at St. Patrick's Cathedral, kneeling on shrieking knees beside Don in his dress blues, her cold, twitching hand clammy and restless inside the white cotton of his glove. It had taken a conscious effort not to swoon from the pain in her knees and the chafing terror of exposure in the house of God, and as she'd wobbled and swayed next to her handsome groom and stared into the icy, blue eyes of Father Carmichael, she had been seized with the awful certainty that he knew of the voices that whispered to her with the coming of the witching hour of dragons and gnomes on spindly legs and the piteous wailing of house elves left behind.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, she had thought with frozen clarity, and it had been such a Jonathan Edwardian thought that she'd quailed beneath his searching gaze.
She'd been so distracted that she'd missed her cue, and a restless murmur of burgeoning alarm had begun to ripple through the church before the crushing grip of Don's fingers around her own had jarred her from her reverie. She'd announced her assent in a ringing declaration that had echoed through the church, and when Don had raised her veil with tender solemnity and pressed his lips to hers, she had pushed the moment of unreasoning fear from her mind.
The rest of the evening had passed in too much dancing and too much wine, and she did not think of the priest again until the bedside clock had heralded the witching hour in bright, bloody digits.
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, she'd thought dully, and her head had ached with the muzzy, nascent promise of a hangover. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Then Don had been on her and in her, and the melancholy had vanished in the blissful haze of consummation.
Life had settled into its trundling, uneventful rhythm. She had earned her Masters and exchanged the penniless idealism of the student for the unforgiving discipline of the associate professor, and Don had gone grimly about the business of unmasking the monsters that roamed their midst. There had been family dinners and pay raises and uncomfortable evenings spent fending off increasingly pointed queries by the in-laws about the possibility of grandchildren, and as the first year had given way to the second, the nebulous anxiety of Dark Marks and Unforgivables and unintended discovery had been usurped by the fear of the knock at the door in the middle of the night and the appearance of a grim police captain on her threshold.
Until the arrival of the owls, that was.