Chapter 1
Seven times I have despised my soul:
She felt the eyes roaming down and across her body before she saw them out of the corner of her eye. She turned and raised her glass in the light-haired woman’s direction, returning the favor to run her eyes suggestively down the length of the body clad in gold before taking a sip of the too-warm bourbon. The woman averted her eyes and made no move that indicated she noticed, recognized, or even saw Lou, but Lou wasn’t deterred in the slightest. The woman had caught her attention, so Lou watched as the woman pushed in her chips and made a bid, winning big but flashing a smile so innocent Lou recognized its insincerity a mile away. Lou checked her own game and watched the woman cash in her chips to strut through the doors of the casino, five-inch heels screaming sensuality as they flashed the room with small glimpses of red. Lou drained her cup, pushing in all of her chips as well when her game came around to her again. She grinned crookedly when she won, cashed her chips in before anyone noticed the lone blonde with surprisingly good luck, and sauntered out of the casino with her winnings in one hand and her long black cloak in the other.
She was barely out of the casino when she felt a hand grab her, tugging her into the alleyway behind the establishment. She let herself be led. Logically, she should have felt fear, but the sweet smell of lavender and the brush of thick hair against her skin only made adrenaline rush from the top of her head to the tip of her heeled leather boots. “No need to manhandle me, sweetheart.” She shifted her other hand, the one not clutched by warm, calloused hands, and chuckled when she heard the small gasp her captor made at the tip of Lou's wand against their back. “I’m an easygoing gal.”
The warm skin pressed against her pulse belonged to a voice that was soft, feminine, and deeply amused. “Aren’t you worried about breaking the International Statute of Secrecy?”
The image of the woman with deep brown eyes flashed in Lou’s mind and she grinned wide. “I’m very good at Memory Charms, Debbie Ocean.” The con didn’t seem surprised that Lou knew who she was, but when Lou twisted her wrist to trail her fingers suggestively over the sensitive skin on the inside of Debbie's wrist, there was no mistaking Debbie's intake of breath, soft though it was. Lou pulled Debbie closer by the hands that still gripped her tightly and purred low in her ear, the blood strumming against her eardrums as she remembered the tight gold dress and wandering eyes. “How can I help you?”
There was a rustle of fabric in the dark and before Lou knew it, soft lips were pressed to hers. The smell of lavender was overpowering this close, and before Lou could think twice, she was licking and biting and kissing back with a fervor, her free hand finding and squeezing hard at the soft swell of flesh at Debbie’s hips.
They broke apart, Lou grinning manically. Debbie asked, her features still an impenetrable fortress in the dark but her chest heaving, “How did you know who I was?”
Lou licked her lips and tasted the expensive lipstick Debbie wore, let Debbie trace her necklaces with a feather-light touch. “Lucky guess.”
Debbie tugged her further along the alleyway, until they found a spot where there was enough light to look one another in the eye. The streetlights from behind Debbie gave her wings of golden light. Distantly, Lou thought that it made her look like a butterfly bursting from its cocoon, stopping in its inexhaustible journey for beauty in front of Lou to coo, eyes aglow with mirth. “Are you looking for a partner, Lou Miller?”
Lou didn’t blink at her name. Instead, she clucked her tongue, tilted her head to the side, and ran her hand slowly down the length of Debbie’s dress, suddenly pulling at Debbie’s ass to bring Debbie's body flush against hers. She captured Debbie’s lips again, slow and deadly, the strokes of her tongue matching and drowning Debbie’s. When she broke the kiss, Debbie’s eyes were glazed over, color high on her cheekbones, and she seemed a bit dazed. Lou licked her own lips, felt the heady cocktail of desire and something she chalked up to curiosity, and let a heartbeat of silence past between them. She worked alone, and she didn’t make promises while under attack by soft skin and lavender notes. Her whisper still came without prompting. “Yes.”
Later, Lou laid on top of strewn clothes and Debbie laid on top of Lou, leaving red imprints where Debbie pressed against the metal Lou hung around her neck. Lou played absently with the copper streaks among Debbie’s thick brown locks and whispered flippant and meaningless syllables that meant nothing now into Debbie’s ear. Her mind raced with inebriating fantasies where those syllables began to spell out promises she could keep, but the fantasies ran into the thick thorns covering her beating heart and died moments later, impaled on poisonous spikes.
She had promised herself, when she shouted her escape into the only fireplace near her with nothing more than a Mokeskin pouch, that she was never, ever going to be burdened with the qualms of pheromones and heart palpitations. She knew what it could do to people as she ran further away from the shack she called home for the first seventeen years of her life. Slowly her wall grew. By now Lou could twist a brown lock in her hand and breathe deeply, letting purple flowers and lustful red hues bloom in her lungs without touching her heart.
Debbie turned her head up to look Lou in the eye and pressed close to give Lou another searing kiss, and before Lou knew it she was pressing against Debbie again, frenetic for something more than release.
The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height.
She had barely just dropped onto the couch when she felt the slight tremor in the air that belied the sudden presence of another. She would have been on her feet in an instant, wand out and pointed, but she trusted Debbie’s Defensive Charms. And anyway, she knew the perfume that floated towards her, shades of lavender that caressed her gently.
“You’re home early,” Debbie said, turning to lay down the pouch Lou had cast an Undetectable Extension Charm on that on the footstool near the door. Lou didn't ask what was inside of it. Debbie was on duty tonight. Debbie tugged off her thick black cloak and hung it up with a wave of her wand.
“I just got back. How was it tonight?” She stood ran a hand through her wind-tousled hair and got on her feet to move towards their small kitchen. “I bought Chinese.”
“Fine,” the single word was distant, Debbie shaking out her loose curls as she kneeled to unlace her boots. Lou set the plates down and watched her sit down at the table without another word. Debbie handed her chopsticks absentmindedly, and sliced a piece of orange chicken with her own spork, chewing without seeming to taste. Lou wanted to touch her, but Debbie was lost inside herself and even now Lou didn’t know how to guide her out.
They chewed in silence until Lou, standing to pour herself a glass of whiskey and draining it for another, asked the cupboards, “How much did you get?”
She slowly sipped this second glass as she sat back down. Debbie swallowed and said, eyes faraway, “Enough to cover rent.” Lou didn’t note the annoyance that always colored Debbie’s tone at having to pay Muggo rent. Debbie had wanted to just Obliviate their landlord, and Lou had told her that going to Azkaban for missing rent is not punk rock.
The silence was all-consuming, swallowing the two of them until they were nothing more than small black dotes in a vast, endless pool of white. Debbie dropped her spork and the sound of plastic breaking made Lou flinch, but Debbie barely blinked before reaching for her wand and murmuring “Depulso” to banish the utensil to the trash can without sparing it another glance. Lou handed her another one silently.
Debbie went to bed early and Lou counted the haul by herself as she removed her necklaces and rings carefully. She swirled her fourth glass of whiskey and considered having enough to cover rent for the next year when their lease would break soon. Lou and Debbie and Debbie and Lou made decisions together, but Debbie sans Lou and Lou sans Debbie made the big decisions that tasted of promise. Lou sipped her drink, smarting with hurt at a phantom choice, and tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter what Debbie decided. Their decisions were always like dominos. When one piece fell, others fell with it, and there was no separating their decisions no matter how many times they both told themselves it did.
She counted the haul again, clenched the whiskey bottle in her hand so tightly it hurt, and fell asleep on the couch with a book on ancient Egyptian architecture. When Debbie shook her awake for breakfast, she stretched out sore muscles and stiff limbs and took the aspirin and water Debbie left on the coffee table, all the more reminder that she wasn’t twenty anymore. They ate Lou’s favorite blueberry pancakes in silence, balancing on the precipice of something else, and Debbie stood to put her plate in the sink when she paused. Oh, Lou thought as she watched her behind hooded lids. This is what balancing in a car on the edge of a cliff feels like.
“Our lease is coming up in two months.” Lou had the strangest thought that if she were still the woman Debbie had first met, she would interrupt her now and say it first with a smirk and a wave of her hand, as though saying the sex was nice but—And she would end on the but, leaving the rest to Debbie’s restless mind, and she would be the one leaving, not the one left. She took another bite, scraping the inside of her mouth with the plastic knife she used in lieu of a fork. Debbie used their extra one last night. “I don’t think we should renew it.”
Old habits die hard, so she tilted back in her chair, forced an air of nonchalance, willing Debbie to turn around and look at her to no avail. She wished she had her necklaces on, something to fidget with that wouldn’t give her away. In a voice she knew Debbie could tell was not nearly as bland as it was on the surface, she replied, “Okay.”
Debbie continued, as though she hadn’t heard Lou. “I’m sick of No-Maj Bingo.”
Lou chased down the metallic taste of fear with a sip of bitter coffee. “Okay.”
Debbie’s plate fell into the sink with a clatter, and she bent her head, studying the fallen plate. Lou, silent and cautious, noted her tell. Debbie’s only tell was that she didn’t have a tell. She faked tells, did it with aplomb, but when she didn’t have one was the only time Lou knew anything was amiss. “I found a new job.” She reached out and turned on the faucet to rinse her plate. “It’s a two-person job.”
They were both too apt at reading the annotations and asterisks for Lou to not understand. This time, the taste of abandonment wasn’t washed down so easily, so she sat forward and pressed the legs of her chair firmly into the floor and lifted more of the eggs and pancakes Debbie made her into her mouth. “Okay.” She spoke and chewed, pretending to be distracted by the flicker of egg that fell out of her mouth. Words tore out of her, like she was thrust back into being twenty and impulsive, “Out with the old, in with the new, huh?”
Debbie didn’t react, rinsing the plate for longer than she needed to. Their conversations had always played more in their heads than aloud. “It’s art.” Debbie excelled at answering questions that Lou hadn’t asked and ignoring the ones she did. “No-Maj art,” she clarified.
Lou’s laugh was mirthless to her own ears. She prayed Debbie didn’t hear the hollowness. They were hurtling towards a fiery end faster than a comet headed for destruction in the atmosphere, and Lou couldn’t- didn’t- wouldn’t stop it.
She knew Debbie wouldn’t say, Lou, I’m suffocating. Lou, I need something bigger. Lou, I’m an Ocean. They always sat in a sea of assumptions and lines read in-between, each of them their own small island surrounded by the cold, dead embrace of silence. She knew that, but she still couldn’t stop the flash of hurt that pierced her chest when Debbie finally turned off the faucet and turned around with a small smirk on her lips, as if about to make a joke about Lou being stabbed with a dull pencil with each word.
Lou arranged her mask meticulously so that Debbie wouldn’t see her bleeding all over the table and stood, cleaning her plate with a flick of her hand. “Say hi to your new bedwarmer for me,” she said, caustic and flailing, wanting to hurt but reeling at the knives inside, slicing at her until she was nothing more than a shell of human skin. The smug look on Debbie’s face froze. “You can have the two months,” Lou said, her voice steady, striding over to the coffee table where her jewelry gleamed and tossing them on without preamble.
Debbie’s face was still frozen in a look of smug assuredness and Lou couldn’t look at her anymore, so she turned, picked up her wand, and murmured “Accio”. She marveled at the way all of her meager belongings—books and records and clothes and shoes and jewelry—fit into her old, ragged Mokeskin pouch, the way it was always with her when she needed to run faraway. Debbie didn’t move from next to the sink, so still she might have been an unfeeling statue of marble, and Lou didn’t slam the door on her way out.
The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled.
The origami bird, stamped with the official seal of Azkaban, fluttered down out of nowhere and landed on an abandoned glass on her bedside table. Lou lifted her pounding head up from her pillow, blinked, and tried to think straight. She rubbed her temple, the metal of her rings cool on her skin; she had no idea how the British Ministry of Magic worked, but she was pretty sure picking Muggo pockets didn’t lend itself to maximum security prison. Her wand was somewhere underneath the pile of clothes strewn across the floor but she didn’t want to touch the note, so she pushed herself up on her elbows and stumbled out of bed, retrieving her wand from under a pair of lacy pink underwear. The floor tilted when she stood, and she had to pause to wait for the floor to right itself before she moved back to kneel in front of her bedside table. She poked at the note carefully, and leaned in to read it when it unfolded. It was brief:
‘Visit? - D.’
She stared at it for a moment, her head throbbing painfully. The blood froze in her veins at the word scrawled in the elegant scroll that Lou knew as well as her own unruly print and her pulse felt erratic. She wanted to reach out to trace the letters, thought better of it, and stared.
A warm hand pressed itself to the small of her naked back, startling her out of her stupor. “Why’re you holding a stick?” The woman’s voice was rough, and when Lou turned to look at her, she had mascara smeared under her eyes. Her auburn hair was everywhere, framing a pale face and olive-green eyes, and her expression was one of concern as her eyes flicked across the note lying innocently still. Her brow stitched together. “What’s Azkaban?”
Lou closed her eyes, trying to get her head to stop spinning and her skin to stop crawling at the touch of someone else’s skin. The woman smelled like cheap perfume and sex. “You need to leave,” she said, her voice even and measured. “I’ll call you an Uber.”
When she opened her eyes, the woman was blinking at her as though confused, waiting for Lou to take her words back. Lou stared back blandly, letting the silence slant her world back in place. She couldn’t remember if she made any promises to the woman the night before but that didn’t matter now, not when the silent note screamed at Lou. Eventually, the woman scoffed, finding nothing from Lou she could latch onto. “Don’t bother,” she said, and pushed herself off the bed, the sheet slipping off her naked form as she stomped around, picking up and putting her clothes on. The lacy pink underwear was hers, Lou reflected, not the tall blonde’s from the other day. She pressed down on her eyes and let red and green static fill her sight.
Lou stayed in her position, kneeling by her bedside table, and listened until she heard the front door slam. Then she got up, went to the bathroom, swallowed two aspirin, showered, and walked back into the room, ignoring the feeling of her heart being trampled by a herd of Centaurs as she put on a pair of clean underwear. She couldn’t find her wand, so she just pointed her finger and murmured “Wingardian Leviosa”, levitating the note to her desk, sweeping the discarded wine bottles off and lowering the note gently down.
She picked up an open bottle of Scotch from the floor and sat down behind the desk, glaring down at the cream paper. She gulped down a mouthful of the amber liquid, and glared even harder at the question mark punctuating the sentence. She hated the implication of question marks. It meant there was uncertainty, meant that there was foreignness, meant that the writer was being polite.
She took another swig from the bottle, and wished for a moment that it had never arrived at all. It had taken no time at all for her to adapt to having a warm body and lone brunette hairs in bed, but three years later, she was still searching for that warmth from amber liquids and foreign scents. She pretended for a moment that she could set the note aflame, rip it, throw it away. The fantasies made her feel better, the thudding of her heart in her ears quieter. But the note still screamed at her, so with a sigh she set the bottle down and rummaged around her desk for a quill, finding a rusted one hidden behind a dildo and some cigarettes. She lit one, surprised to find there was still ink in her ink pot, and dipped the quill inside it to pen her note back. It was short and to the point, too:
‘Yes. - L.’
The note fluttered away once she finished, and Lou watched it disappear through her chimney. She stubbed out her cigarette, barely having smoked it, picked up the bottle, emptied it, and then got up to use the bathroom. Her head swam as she sat down, and it took much too long for her to get up and wash her hands.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Her cheeks were sunken, cheekbones bursting out of translucent skin that hadn’t seen sun in too long, sallow now in the florescent bathroom light. Her eyes were filled with lines of blood red, the blue of her irises standing starkly out. Her hair had grown long, her bangs in her eyes and blond strands sticking up in all directions, and she tilted her head up to see the imprints on her neck from where she hadn’t taken off her necklaces for the night, identical to the ones on her fingers from her rings. She never took off her jewelry anymore.
Her hand trembled as she reached out to touch her reflection, the glass smooth and cool under her fingers. She could count the bones on her ribs, could see her hips protruding from under the cloth of her underwear, and the already blossoming hickey under her left breast glowed purple against her skin. She met her own eyes and saw nothing except pity.
Anger flared in her, and she yanked her hand back as though she had been burned. That wasn’t enough, though. The body in the mirror jeered, taunting and teasing her, so she pulled back and punched the mirror as hard as she could, ignoring the piercing pain that shot up her arm. She pulled back again and again, not stopping even as she heard more than felt bones break. She struck the glass until she couldn’t raise her hand and a thin film of sweat covered her body, but even then the mirror gleamed at her, mocking her weakness. She glowered at it, cradling her hand, her face wet with sweat and something she refused to name. Her throat was so tight she felt nauseous, but still the mirror shined, smooth and completely unaffected by her.
She was so tired. She just wanted to lie down, close her eyes, and go to sleep. But the pain in her hand sparked like lightning when she dropped to the floor, and it hurt so bad that she held her breath to bite back a scream, tasting blood in her mouth. Vaguely, she heard something crack and the doorbell, but when she tried to stand to go to her wand, go to the kitchen where she had healing tonics, stars burst in front of her eyes and she fell back. Her last thought before the darkness collected her was that the floor glittered like the night sky.
She woke up in her bed, disoriented and not alone. She heard breathing, felt a weight sitting next to her in bed and a wet cloth gently being passed over her face. She opened her eyes, everything hazy for a moment before they focused on furious brown eyes.
“Tammy?” She croaked.
The blonde glared harder, but her touch on Lou’s face was soft as she wiped Lou’s chin. Lou cleared her throat and tried again. Her mind was spinning. “Why- When did you get here?”
“Just be glad that I was here,” Tammy barked, still glaring, but, to Lou’s horror, starting to blink hard. “Be glad that you’re not fucking dead.”
It was Lou’s turn to blink at her. “I wasn’t trying to hurt myself,” she protested, and remembered her hand with a twinge of guilt. She wiggled both hands, and nothing hurt. She frowned. “You healed my hand.”
Tammy sniffed and scoffed at the same time. “What, you think I should’ve just left it broken?” She put the cloth on the nightstand, pressed a hand to her eyes. Lou watched her take a deep breath, then another, but a wretched sob ripped out of her anyway, and she stood quickly, racing out of the room. Lou laid still, her eyes wide as she listened to broken sobs that Tammy was obviously trying to stifle, the broken pieces inside her chest cavity trembling painfully.
She got up slowly, realizing that Tammy had dressed her in a T-shirt and taken off all of her jewelry, and found Tammy outside the room, her hand pressed hard to her eyes and her body trembling with the effort of suppressing her sobs.
“Tammy,” Lou laid a gentle hand on her arm. “I’m okay.” Tammy shook her head, her hand still covering her face. “I really am okay. I promise.”
Tammy shook off Lou’s hand and removed her own hand from her eyes to look Lou hard in the eye. “No,” she hiccuped, but Lou didn’t dare make a joke like she usually would, “You’re not. Do you know—” Her voice broke, and fresh tears welled in her eyes. “Do you know how scared I was?” She choked out, her eyes searching Lou’s frantically. “How scared I was when I walked in and all I could see were empty bottles and you weren’t answering? When I walked into the bathroom and you were passed out on the ground with the mirror shattered around you? Do you even care how scared I was, Lou?” She spat the last question out, her breath hitching on Lou’s name.
Lou was astonished. Their relationship had been tenuous before, and though Tammy had become one of the few people she spoke to on a regular basis after Lou parted with Debbie, she had always thought of Tammy as ‘Debbie’s friend.’ She had forgotten all about Tammy coming over to London to visit her because she hadn’t expected Tammy to come anyway. But here Tammy was, trembling so hard she was shaking, her eyes filled with angry tears, so angry she looked like she might implode, because she thought Lou was hurting herself.
Something shifted inside the wasteland Lou had nourished for the past three years. Tammy was still sobbing silently, tears streaming down her face and her shoulders shaking, but Lou suddenly felt warm.
She pulled Tammy into her, wrapping her arms around the smaller woman’s quivering form, relishing the feeling of warmth that spread from Tammy into Lou’s frozen bloodstreams. Tammy remained still for a moment, before she gave a loud sob and Lou felt her arms around her as well. “You’re going to AA and therapy.” Tammy’s voice was hoarse and muffled by Lou’s shoulder, but her tone brokered no argument. “I’ll Apparate here every day to make you go if I have to. I don’t care.”
Overcome, Lou didn’t trust her voice, so she just nodded, and felt Tammy’s arms tighten around her.
Tammy was a fixture in her flat for the rest of that year, cleaning and cooking for Lou when all Lou wanted to do was drown in a vat of alcohol, crying with Lou when things hurt, pulling Lou into her arms when Lou couldn’t stop shivering. She practically moved in. Lou wondered, aloud sometimes, why Tammy was there, and Tammy wouldn’t say anything except, “Do you want me to leave?” The thought filled Lou with dread that must have shown on her face, so Tammy stayed, even in moments when Lou wanted to just give in so badly she lashed out, spitting out things at Tammy that even she shuddered to think about later. But though tears flowed down her face, Tammy stayed, her expression stoic and her hold strong.
Slowly, the taste of metal fear in Lou’s mouth faded. Slowly, the wasteland in Lou receded. A year sober, and Tammy Apparated Lou to a carnival with her boyfriend in New York to celebrate the occasion. He was a nice bloke, tall with sandy hair, soft-spoken, and he bought Tammy the cotton candy she insisted she didn’t want but had a soft spot for anyway. Tammy softened when she looked at him, even when he tripped over his own shoelaces. He was a Muggo and an upstanding citizen of the community, of course, but Lou didn’t need a wand to be magical, and she delighted in scaring him with sudden charms and jinxes. She watched as Tammy leaned towards him on the carousel, and felt a yearning for something light, happy, carefree and without the burden of history. She turned away from them. She was never one for cotton candy and stuffed animals anyway.
Still, Lou laughed so much that day that her throat was scratchy the next day.
It was another year before Lou finally decided she could make good on her promise. She told Tammy, who came over once a week now that Lou had officially passed the one-year mark, about her plans. Tammy watched her steadily. “Are you sure, Lou?” She didn’t ask her if she could, didn’t ask her if she was capable. She just looked at Lou, and asked her if she was sure.
Lou’s eyes filled with hot tears that she blinked away quickly, and she nodded. “Yeah,” she said after a moment, when she was sure she could speak evenly. “I’m sure.” Tammy just nodded, solemnly, and told her she trusted her. Lou pretended that didn’t make her want to weep, and Tammy made her lasagna. Before she Apparated back to the home she bought with the boyfriend in New Jersey, she squeezed Lou’s hand tight, told her to find her anytime she needed, and left with a kiss pressed to Lou’s cheek.
The next day, she woke with the grim feeling of righteousness. She needed to do this, just as much as she needed to eat and sleep. The woman in the mirror who stared back at her while she brushed her teeth was still slightly underweight, sure, but her eyes were clear and Lou no longer felt like her skin was stretched too tightly on her body. She had a quick breakfast and paused right as she grabbed a fistful of the iridescent Floo powder. She looked at it, looked at her hand, and steadied herself. She took a deep breath the way her therapist told her to, threw the powder in the air above the fire, and stepped into her fireplace, where gentle emerald flames ruffled her cloak. “Azkaban.” The word tasted of rot in her mouth.
The smell of bleach and a metallic tang was nearly overwhelming as she stepped out of the fireplace and cleaned the dust from her cloak with a wave of her wand. There were no other visitors in the lines, and though the Dementors had long since been banished from the redecorated prison, the prison was still laden with the feeling of despair in the air. She wrote her name down at the place indicated, and handed her wand over to the Wand Weigher.
“Wollemi pine,” the Wand Weigher said, pressing into her wand lightly, “Supple. Twelve inches long, and with,” he turned the wand over in his hands, “A very interesting heartstring. I’ve never seen one like this here,” he turned to her, his eyes alight with interest.
“It’s an Australian marsupial dragon heartstring,” Lou replied, trying her best not to sound short. It had been a long time since she interacted with anyone outside of Tammy. She was rusty at human interaction. The thought nearly made her chuckle. “A bit more controllable than the heartstrings Ollivander favors.”
The man’s eyebrows shot up, and for a moment Lou almost bristled defensively in case he was one of the British wizards who believed that Ollivander was the definitive best wandmaker in the world. “It’s not an Ollivander wand?”
“No.” She shook her head, resisting the urge to tap her foot impatiently, knowing she was the one who opened this can of worms.
The man seemed to sense her growing agitation. “Well, regardless, it’s a beautiful wand,” he replied, and flicked his own, attaching a tag that glowed violet to her wand’s handle. “You can retrieve it here, once you’ve finished visiting.”
“Thanks.” She nodded at him, striding into the hallway leading her to Debbie, pondering the usage of confiscating wands. She used her wand more often once she arrived in London, realizing the hand gestures she learned in school weren’t the norm here, but she preferred wandless magic and was shocked when she found out that Hogwarts didn’t teach it. Poor chaps, she thought mindlessly, relying on wands when magic soared in their veins.
She reached the door behind which Debbie sat, and Lou took a moment to just stand there and look at her. Debbie was sitting primly, her hands folded in her lap, and she was silent and still in the standard black and white striped prison uniform. She didn’t look like the beacon of shimmering light that had shone down on Lou so long ago, but Lou still felt the age-old tug in her gut that yearned to be near Debbie. She contemplated leaving Debbie in the bleak room with nothing except the broken promise on paper, but instead, she took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, brushed off her cloak unnecessarily again, and pushed open the door.
Debbie looked up, and Lou released a sigh of relief she didn’t know she held. Debbie still looked like Debbie. She didn’t know why she expected otherwise; three years is hardly a lifetime when the average wizard lives to over a hundred fifty. But somehow, she expected leaving Lou to have left its permanent mark on Debbie, and a weight fell off Lou’s shoulders when she realized that, of course, she was wrong. She crossed the room, pulled out the chair, and sat down.
“Stripes are really not your thing, babe.” Lou said, breaking the silence. They could use this time to talk about how Debbie got caught, talk about why Lou was there when they had never admitted the other was personal and in their industry a week of absence was enough to sever all ties, talk about why Lou was two years late to their appointment. But they wouldn’t, because Lou was giving Debbie an out, and Debbie was never one to let an escape pass by her without noticing.
Debbie’s eyes were hungry when they raked down Lou’s body, and Lou didn’t need to have known her for decades to hear the note of frenzy in her voice when she replied drily, “Not everyone has access to David Bowie’s wardrobe.”
She gasped in mock surprise. “You know a Muggo artist?” Debbie flinched, and Lou wondered for a moment if it was possible that this was because Lou had blasted Bowie constantly five years ago in a shared flat, but Lou shook off the thought. She took off her cloak and draped it over her chair. Her robes were a dark navy, sleek and sharp at the shoulders before drawing in at the waist. They made her feel powerful, and it was too easy to slip into old patterns with Debbie.
Debbie recovered quickly, and when she spoke again there was no hint of the flash of wistful desire that Lou had caught a moment before. “I miss New York,” Debbie told her, her thoughts as hidden as a wizard in an Invisibility Cloak. Lou tilted her head in acknowledgement. She had never been to New York herself, but it was Debbie’s second home. This admission was the closest thing to vulnerability Lou knew Debbie would express knowing that the room was bugged, and even that morsel Lou was shocked Debbie had shared.
Then the tone of Debbie’s voice changed, and she looked back down at her nails. “I need a credit line.” Debbie said, her voice clear and unfaltering, though she didn’t look up at Lou. Her hair had grown longer, Lou thought absently to herself. Debbie didn’t used to like wearing her hair longer than shoulder length, but now it reached down to her shoulder blades.
Lou frowned. Wizards don’t use credit lines. “A Muggo credit line? For what?”
Debbie looked at her only to roll her eyes, and Lou got the message. Not here, clearly, so she shook her head. “I can’t get you a credit line if I don’t know what you’re doing, Deb.” The nickname slipped out, and she was unsure if she wanted Debbie to register it or not.
Debbie didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, she leaned forward, moved her hands forward until Lou could reach out and touch her if she wanted to, and looked deep into Lou’s eyes. “Do you trust me, Lou?”
Her mind flashed to the smarmy face of Claude Becker, his face dripping with fake grief as he told the papers how he had been tricked by the so-called conniving witch who sat in front of Lou now. For a moment she nearly shook her head, nearly let Debbie off the hook by retorting with something like ‘No honor among thieves.’ As if anticipating her response, Debbie’s mouth hardened and her eyes softened, borderline pleading, and this told Lou what it was like inside Azkaban more than any Daily Prophet article in the world. So instead, she nodded once and said simply, “Yes.”
Debbie drew her hands back into her lap. “Then get me that credit line.”
They talked about nothings for the next half hour until one of the Aurors pacing outside in the halls knocked on the door to tell them their time was up. Lou stood, pulled on her cloak, and paused next to Debbie, who had stood up as well. She turned to go, but Debbie shifted just enough to brush her fingers, and Lou sucked in a breath and thought, fuck it. She turned back and pulled Debbie into her arms.
She took a deep breath and tried not to let tears spring to her eyes when she realized that Debbie smelled like prison-issued soap. She clung a little tighter, held on a little longer, and wondered whether or not things could have been different if she hadn’t told Debbie ‘Okay’ so many times that day she left.
Debbie released her first. Her hands clung to Lou’s arms as she told her, her voice measured, “See you when I see you, Lou.”
She heard the message in between. Even expecting it, it felt like a roaring wind had come through and poked holes through the just barely repaired door to her heart. She always expected it, and it always hurt anyway. She nodded. Their meetings were always on Debbie’s terms anyway, she thought bitterly.
She sucked in a deep breath after she retrieved her wand from the Wand Weigher. The smell of ocean air, the feeling of the wind and light drizzle against her face, and the knowledge that with any luck, she would never be back here again, filled her with something dark and heavy. She thought about going inside, back to the Floo station, back to the flat she inlaid with Defense Charms and magical barriers, International Statute of Secrecy be damned. She nearly shuddered at the idea, even though she hadn’t felt suffocated before now. New York would be a challenge, she thought, wiping the wet off her face as she turned to go back inside. And she’d be closer to Tammy, who’d been talking about settling down with her boyfriend. She wiped her face one last time in the threshold of the Azkaban waiting area.
She strode up to the fireplace and grabbing a handful of Floo powder. Home, she thought as the prison twisted away from her. Then she arrived in her fireplace, the wind still raging in her chest, and ignored the sunken feeling that she had just left home behind.