Days After Death

It’s not James’ job to catalogue soft evidence that may turn out to be incriminating to the individuals in future onto the notes in his journal, but he despises the people chanting in front of him. So he might as well.

‘The Sight’ (what a stupid name) thinks itself a European activist group for the liberation of wizardkind under the dominant Muggle population. At this point, they’re not even trying to cover up their blatant supremacist beliefs.

Now, James is a lawyer. It’s quite literally in the job description to remain neutral towards others, to be as unbiased and objective as he can be, to give them the benefit of the doubt for their incredibly stupid or desperate actions. But when he looks out to this angry mob, he finds it harder and harder to do so.

They range from all ages. They’re actually quite diverse, although most of them are white and male. They wear ugly, average English clothing, but he guesses protests aren’t quite supposed to be ‘dressy,’ James is just bitter that this is allowed to go on. He’s disgusted that no one has stopped this madness yet– his aunt or his dad.

He spies a few Aurors lining the mob now conglomerated around the unassuming Muggle Liaison Office. They seemed to have followed the crowd here, protecting their right to free speech and protest, and it revolts him more. As if this doesn’t border on hate speech. He had heard the chants of their ‘journey towards the New World Order’ from blocks away.

James turns his head and spies a masked man thrusting a sign that condemns Muggles as inferior in the eyes of God. He scowls and scribbles down the personal attributes of the man– his clothes, what he can glean from the mask and its details. It’s a full-face Venetian mask painted fully black, although the eye areas are overlined with white. He had seen another zealot earlier on with similar radical beliefs wearing the same one.

The Aurors seem to get more antsy now, eyeing the crowd. If the protestors decide to get violent towards the Office, they’d be forced to break it up. The Aurors finally looked to be considering it now, as if it hadn’t been obvious where The Sight had been marching towards from the get-go. They always followed the Muggles Liaison Office wherever it spawned next.

James takes note of the characteristics of the crowd, of every sign, every chant. He takes notes on the individuals who seem to be the most incriminating. If the Aurors won’t do anything about it, maybe he could attempt to find a legal loophole to put a stop to this. It won’t be long before this sort of sentiment transforms into explicit discrimination and violent incitement. Although, Squibs and Muggles are always disproportionate victims nevertheless.

The mob’s volume suddenly increases, ringing out so heavily that it shocks James away from his notetaking. It’s not long before he finds the reason.

Shane Kelsier. Oh, Merlin.

The founder of The Sight steps towards where a young wizard swathed in bandanas holds out his wand, spelled to be a makeshift mic. Kelsier waves towards his hooligans, an amicable, plastic yet dead smile that makes him resemble that of a robot wearing a human’s face.

He is dressed formally compared to the mob. His salt-and-pepper hair is slicked back, his smile lines deeply pressed into his leathery face, his blue eyes unnerving even from where James observes him from afar. Kelsier is handsome in an American-Psycho sort of way, like there’s something not quite right about his mannerisms, but perhaps that is only James’ heavily biased dislike for the man speaking.

Kelsier goes on with his predictably infuriating, bigoted speech about the prowess of wizardkind and the stupidity of Muggles that James blocks out for his own wellbeing. Kelsier calls for his Aunt Hermione’s retirement, painting her out to be a power-hungry dictator with Muggle sympathies due to her upbringing. Then he mentions that he's running in the upcoming election to be seated at the Ministry, with his less-notorious members of his party. This was all announced eight hours ago, so James already knows this. Whether his league of muppets do, however, is unknowable to him. They get very excited at this part of the speech, but they’re always excited about what Kelsier has to say.

The world is going to shit, James surmises, just when he spots a familiar face in the crowd. A woman. James has seen her before… but he can’t place when–

“James!”

He swivels around to find Nasira, her glasses fogged by the heavy breaths fanning in and out of her. She gestures hurriedly for him to follow her into the building he has been leaning against, and James stuffs his notebooks into his briefcase and follows her without a second thought, relief flooding him as soon as the door shuts and the chanting is immediately muffled by the silencing charm Nasira casts.

James observes her. Her folders are clutched to her chest, her usually dark, neat ponytail messy from the outside wind, stray hairs falling loose around her flushed face. It seems she had just arrived at the office.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she huffs breathlessly, her heels clacking against the floorboards as he walks past the reception desk and through the narrow corridor. “I had to rush back home to prepare for a more impromptu meeting with another client. It seemed doable at the time, but those damn extremists appeared out of nowhere and clogged up this entire side of the block.”

“It’s quite alright,” James says. “You were barely late, anyway.”

“But you’ve been waiting outside the building for a while now, haven’t you?”

James shoots her a smile as she opens the door to her office.

“You know me,” he says, “I’m always early.”

Nasira asks about his medication. James gives a little recount of the fortnight, including any depressive episodes he might have had (nothing major in these two weeks). James talks about the stress of work. He talks about Jojo a little, but not much because Jojo’s never been problematic in his life, and therapy is specifically for airing out his issues. Nasira asks how Albus is holding up. James talks about him and then about his mum because he’s always a little worried about her. And Lils. And his dad too, now that he thinks about it. Everything is going to shit, but at least his family stays consistent on being a slowly sinking ship.

They’re halfway through the session when Nasira finally cuts to the meat of it. She’s known James for long enough to understand he tends to avoid topics he feels more personal towards. It’s a mechanism he knows is extremely irrational, considering he already pays to see a therapist who would be rendered useless if he never talked about the things that were truly disturbing him.

Nasira crosses her legs over and flexes her shoulders, which is how James knows to prepare himself.

“How’s Alice?” she asks.

“She’s good.”

“You’ve still been speaking to her?”

More than that, James thinks ruefully. He hadn’t had the courage to tell Nasira about their… more complicated… situation. He finds himself feeling stupid every time he thinks about it, and James loathes feeling stupid.

But he shouldn’t be stalling any longer. That wouldn’t help anything.

“Actually,” James looks away, “she and I are– more or less– involved now. Again, I mean.”

“Ah.” Nasira doesn’t look particularly surprised, but her hand jots down some notes at lightning speed. “So you’re back together again?”

James looks horrified at the thought.

“Merlin, no!”

Nasira raises her brows at him, which makes him feel like a very young child, despite her looking to be only a few years older than him.

“Why are you so against the idea?” she asks.

“You know why. You know what happened last time.”

“It was years ago, James. You were a different person then.”

“It was horrible. I was a terrible boyfriend to her.”

“You were experiencing debilitating, undiagnosed mental illness.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It absolutely does.”

“It doesn’t erase how I hurt her.” James looks away, feeling an acute pain bunch in the space between his furrowed brows. “What I made her go through– it was just terrible, Nasira. I realise that now, of course. I could barely even acknowledge the extent of it back then, though, because I was so blinded by my own suffering, which I had always brushed aside. So how could I have ever responded positively to hers?” He rubs at the pained spot impatiently. “I was neglectful to almost everyone back then, but especially her. I’d push her away, only to sink my claws into her again and pull her back when I felt lonely. It was just horrible.”

Nasira, who had been periodically writing down some things James did not feel the urge to be privy to, looked back up at him.

“The breakup,” Nasira says carefully, tapping her pen against the clipboard. “Do you mind if I talk about the events leading up to it?”

James feels himself freeze a little. His palms start to go clammy, but he clenches them shut and says, “Of course.”

“If you wish to stop at any moment, just say so,” Nasira says the same thing every time they discuss the topic of her. But maybe James needs the verbal reminder. He has the habit of thrusting himself through painful experiences out of preconceived necessity. He needs to be reminded that healing is an annoyingly slow journey that can’t be rushed.

“Alice is still under the impression that you cheated on her,” Nasira says. “And since this new,” she flaps her hands trying to find a different word to describe it, but gives up, “sexual relationship with her, you haven’t made any effort to disapprove that belief?”

James blushes. He doesn’t care if it’s therapy, it’s still embarrassing to have to put forth your private life so openly. Dissect it so painstakingly. Although at his request, he knows Nasira will move on. James knows he shouldn’t.

“No,” he says.

“Do you plan on telling her any different?”

“No.”

There’s no judgement on Nasira’s face. She gives him a look of understanding. It makes him feel less guilty about his decision.

“I thought Alice was on bad terms with you after that final breakup.”

“I was too.”

James had been in many relationships during his time at Hogwarts. He was popular, despite how apathetic he had been to the people around him. Girls liked him. He started talking to them in his second year but got into his first official relationship at the start of third year for the sole reason that Teddy had told him to wait until he was a proper teenager before he began dating. As soon as his thirteenth birthday, an older girl on the Quidditch team offered to give him a blowjob. He accepted and they went out for about a month before James had dumped her for being too clingy. The rest of his relationships were just as short and just as shallow. He had only pursued relationships because he liked the feeling of losing himself in others for a temporary amount of time. And he hadn’t cared enough to reflect on the ethics of that.

But Alice had broken every precedent, every law he had set out for himself. She made James feel too much, made him into the needy one, distracted him in areas he had dedicated himself to, switched up his steadfast routine. She upended everything; made him hate her for it some days, and made him realise how much he loved her because of it. She ignited him in dark places he never thought another person could touch before.

But she hadn’t been enough. And after their first relationship in fourth year, which had lasted a record of nine months, James had dumped her, only to beg for her back two months later, only for Alice to dump him after another five months, and so on and so forth. Their on-and-off game of hearts grew notorious around school until even that lost its shine and people stopped keeping score. Their toxicity grew with age– it became a skill developed with experience. Especially during their off-seasons. Brass comments and purposefully placed actions that left the other spewing in jealousy until they swindled the other back to them (mostly Alice vying for his attention). Drunken confessions during their breaks that had the other moved to tears, ready to accept the other back without a thought to how manipulative the entire scene had been (mostly James vying for her attention). Arguments that had James’ dormmates moving for the night and the whole Gryffindor House casting silencing charms on them (the blame lay at both of their feet).

To this day, Alice was probably still the only person who really knew James back then. She was the only person he let see him. And that’s why it was so terrible.

“Tell me about who she is,” Nasira says. “I just can’t imagine ever wanting to sleep with the boy who broke my heart in school so thoroughly.”

Fair.

“Alice, from how I remember her, at least, was someone who fancied herself a helper. Or a saviour. I leeched off of her, but she let me. Sometimes she’d purposefully offer herself up. She never minded that I was dead weight. She was…” He thinks for a moment. “A big part of why we were so terrible together was because she saw our love as a complete union, whilst I always thought of it as something that would wear off. She expected me to give my entire self to her the way she was giving everything to me. She wanted us to be fused. She couldn’t be happy if I wasn’t happy, and vice versa.”

And I was never happy, James thought sullenly.

Yes, it had been draining. The guilt of the aftermath still was.

“I’m scared I might be doing the same thing I did to her back then,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“Taking advantage of her selflessness. Or her willingness to help.” He frowns, his heart sinking. “Maybe she still thinks of me as that broken boy in school.”

Nasira ponders that, her pen tapping the clipboard again.

“Forgive me, again,” she says, “but after that final breakup, after she saw you with Sam–” James freezes at the name, but doesn’t tell Nasira to pause– “you two were not on speaking terms?”

“No. She wanted nothing to do with me.”

“And she hadn’t spoken to you since?”

“Not for the rest of our Hogwarts years. I think last year was the first time since, but it’s been strictly business on legal matters and such. Until now, of course.”

“Did she ever find out about…?”

James kisses his teeth. He knows what she’s getting at. He had been questioning the same thing for years without Nasira’s prompting, embarrassingly enough.

“I’m not sure if she ever found out about my attempt,” he says slowly, “but there’s a chance she knows. All my professors at Hogwarts, including her dad, were debriefed about it. So he could’ve told her or she could’ve picked up wind somehow. But to the students, my extended absence was explained through an impromptu internship with the Ministry. The hospital I was at closed off an entire wing so I could recover in private.”

“And who found you that day?” Nasira asks, looking apologetic to press him. “Could it have been another student?”

A painful lump forms in his throat at the false memory, and James swallows it down, purposefully ignoring the fire crackling behind his eyelids. He had imagined the scene so many times it had now taken a real form in his mind, despite having been unconscious at the time it occurred.

“Um, it was my little brother who found me. He didn’t tell anyone about it.”

Nasira looks shocked, before sympathetic pain colours her features.

“I’m so sorry.”

He can’t quite believe he never told her that. And yet he can. He’ll never not feel guilty for putting his family through that aftermath, but he won’t tell Nasira that. She’ll say it wasn’t his fault and he knows it, he just doesn’t feel that way yet.

She looks like she knows how he feels already, though.

“I just never want to hurt anyone the way I hurt people when I was in Hogwarts again,” he says. “I’m so terrified of doing something that destroys someone I love and shows me I haven’t changed. Something that reverts me back to square one and undoes everything.”

He’s not thinking of Alice now. He’s thinking of his mother. The grief he had to confront as soon as he awoke from his short coma is the most painful memory he has. Merely thinking about the way she cried when she held him made tears spring to his eyes. He rubs them away with a swift hand.

“That won’t happen,” Nasira tells him softly. “You’re different now, you know that.”

He does. It can never be as bad as it once was. He would never allow it.

Still.

“I’ve changed, but I’m not so different,” James sniffs. “No matter how hard I try, I can’t escape that boy.”

“That’s not what this is about. It’s not about escaping or subtracting your old self entirely, it’s about adding on.”

James tries to find a fallacy there, something to disprove her. He feels himself adamantly rejecting that sentiment but is unable to explain why.

James has always been someone who could compartmentalise everything easily, organising the chaos in his life in a way that gave him control he had always felt he lacked. This included his understanding of people, even himself. It wasn’t unethical so much as it was simply wrong, because people were complex and he could spend his entire life studying himself and his likes and dislikes and motivations and strengths and weaknesses and proclivities and still not have all the answers. James wasn’t a fan of that.

So when Nasira gently pushed the conversation back to Alice again, James didn’t stop her.

“If you’re so afraid of hurting her again, why bother being in any sort of relationship with her at all?”

And that was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?

Because Alice was attractive, but that wasn’t close to a satisfying answer.

Because I’m selfish, but it didn’t feel right either.

Because I love her, which he didn’t think was true right now. He had yet to separate her from the pain that clogged his past.

His silence was damning enough. Nasira’s gaze pierced him as he thought. It used to make him so uncomfortable; he’d blurt anything to shift the pressure away. Any pressure to self-reflect had left him feeling like a defendant being brought forward for sentencing. How dramatic.

“Do you feel as if you have something to prove?” Nasira asks, and it clicks, just like that.

“Yes,” he says softly.

“Something to prove to her?”

“Maybe a bit. I think I’m trying to prove something to me too.”

Nasira smiles and writes something down again. She had told him at the start of their sessions that she would show him all her notes if James merely asked. He had never done so.

James doesn’t see Alice tonight, but he does receive a letter.

Am back at work tomorrow. Will be waiting all evening if you feel like stopping by for a drink after work.

It’s not signed with who it's to, nor with who it's from. But Alice has drawn her telltale winky face at the bottom, and though writing letters isn’t commonplace to them, James could still recognise her handwriting. It was the exact same as when they were younger.

Normally they knew subconsciously where the other was– Alice was always working late, James was always working later. She normally sought him out, but there were some instances where James saved up his breaks to get off early to go to the pub again. It was always a cycle of working up the courage to go, going, regretting as soon as he saw the smirks of the casuals and Alice’s snoopy manager, and then elation whenever she locked eyes with him, a playful twinkle in her eye that soothed him. She didn’t hate him, at least, not on that day. He would not blame Alice if she randomly ridded herself of him entirely.

But she hadn’t done so yet, and James wouldn’t either. He wouldn’t do that to her again.

This is not a relationship! he reminds himself sternly.

He had asked Nasira for guidance on what he should do; whether he should put a stop to whatever this situation with her was before it could escalate as he could already feel it doing. Impromptu visits were bordering on becoming planned, after all.

“You’re smart, James,” Nasira had said. “Do what you want, but be aware. You have a better head on your shoulders to navigate this now.”

Right. He's a grown man. But Alice always had the talent to reduce him to a boy in her presence.

Iris hoots at her spot in the cage, as if she can sense him composing a response. Will he ignore it? Will he politely decline?

He stares at his horned owl, who's holding up her leg, ready for him to tie something to her.

James sighs.

Seems like they both knew the answer there.