The Thin Red Line
1925
1 Smoke in the air. Lights flickering. Someone coughed – Celestia herself. What was happening? Arm side head hip in agony. Couldn’t move. Why couldn’t she-
Black-out.
Someone calling her name – again, again, louder. No. Too much pain. Too much. No.
“Tia? Tia! Open your damn eyes! We need to go!”
Eyelids so heavy. Like trying to move through syrup. She blinked. Everything was blurred. A haggard, freckled face framed by short, carroty hair stared down at her. “Nana? What-”
Black-out.
Blinding, searing torture coursed through Celestia’s body. Cracking sounds. Her broken bones mended themselves. She uttered a blood-curdling cry, thrashed-
Black-out.
She came to half walking, half being dragged, her older sister Nocturna supporting her with relative ease. “Nana? What is…where…”
“Sh. It’s all right. We’ll be able to apparate outside,” Nocturna said right into Celestia’s ear. “Come on, now. I need you to help me-”
Black-out.
Stairs. She was tripping, dragging her feet. Her whole body was hurting, shaking, bogged down heavy unwieldy where was all the smoke coming from screams stench of blood oh God she gagged-
Black-out.
Fresh air. Cold. Sunshine. Felt like heaven.
“Hold on, love,” Nocturna said, and hugged Celestia around the waist. “This’ll be unpleasant in your condition.”
The world distorted and fell away as they apparated to safety.
2 She came to gradually, unwillingly, preferring to stay in the lovely blackness of being knocked out. Sadly, though, her consciousness was dragged to the surface, and she found herself in her sore and aching body, lying on a bed in a dimly lit room. It smelled of wood and varnish. She could hear heavy rain pattering against the shuttered window. Wow, did the weather always change this quickly in New York?
Then again, maybe she’d been unconscious for several hours. There was only one way to tell.
Slowly and carefully, she pushed herself into a sitting position, gnashing her teeth and seeing stars and shaking badly. Her head was pounding, her stomach lurching. Well, she had taken quite a beating at the MACUSA building.
The memory sent an icy jolt of adrenaline through her veins. Nocturna! She’d attacked the MACUSA headquarters with what had to be either a very potent element of surprise or a small army to bust her out. How had she known that Celestia would be there? Had she even known? How had she even got to America? What the hell was going on?
After three unsuccessful tries that nearly got her falling face-first on the wooden floor, Celestia managed to get to her rubbery legs. The stars and black spots in front of her eyes made her almost blind for a few seconds, but then faded, as did most of the nausea. Feeling like an ancient crone trapped in a crumbling fortress, she lurched to the door, then onto a nearly dark corridor, toward the only room were a considerable amount of light was coming from. It was a living room of sorts, small and cramped with ratty furniture (incidentally, it was dark outside, so she really had been out for most of the day), on which sat five people: Nocturna, one person she didn’t know, Leta Lestrange, and…
…oh, dear.
It was the Malfoy brothers, Apollo and Ares.
Everyone was looking at her. Luckily, she wasn’t the blushing type. It was important to always be thankful for small blessings, so one didn’t lose sight of the big ones – one of Mother’s favourite sayings, and it was a good one in Celestia’s opinion. “Good evening.” She was, however, the type to not be able to verbally improvise very well.
“Tia,” Nocturna said, looking worried. She jumped to her feet and hurried to where Celestia was, before leading her to the moth-eaten reddish divan she’d been previously occupying and helping her sit to Leta’s left. “Here. Let me get you some tea.” Immediately, she dashed off toward wherever this place’s kitchen was.
“How are you feeling?” Apollo asked, his tone level and polite as always. People had trouble telling him and Ares apart, because they were almost the same age and eerily similar to each other in appearance, but Celestia knew both of them well enough to not suffer from that particular malady.
Besides, she and Apollo had been married for three years, so there was always that. Her throat went dry. Her thoughts started to go where they shouldn’t, wanting badly to dwell on a sweet little girl with fair hair and blue eyes and the cutest dimples and…no. No, this was the price Celestia had paid for following her heart. She’d made her decision then; she wasn’t about to allow herself to question it now. Dwelling on sorrow never did anyone any good – not ever. She folded her hands on her lap, wishing she’d straightened her crumpled green dress out with a spell, before remembering that both her wand and her briefcase were gone. “I’m all right.” After a couple of seconds, she remembered to add, “Thank you. I hope you all are, too.” Getting smashed into a wall had done a bit of a trick on her cognitive abilities, it seemed.
“We’re just glad we got to you in time,” Leta said, smiling impishly.
Well, if Celestia had broken into the MACUSA headquarters and got someone out who was about to be sent home anyway, she’d be chipper, too. Sighing inwardly, she told herself to quit the useless, wry internal commentary, already. The answers would certainly come sooner rather than later. There was no need to panic. She looked at the only person she didn’t know – a youthful, short, thin woman who wore her dark-brown hair piled up on her head in a rather old-fashioned bun and who was wearing a grey suit. “May I ask who you are, miss?”
The woman, who was reclining in her armchair in the most relaxed manner, came across as someone at a social gathering in a pub rather than a person caught in a serious post-ambush situation. “I’m Ethel,” she said, tipping one finger to her temple in a lazy salute. “Nice meeting ya.”
Oh. A local, then. Well, why not? Ignoring her rather nasty headache, Celestia subtly inclined her head in acknowledgment. “How do you do?”
“Great. It was pretty nifty, what we pulled off.” She grinned, uncrossed and re-crossed her legs, and wagged her eyebrows. “You’re welcome.”
“I dearly hope you didn’t break into the MACUSA building just to get me; they were going to let me go.”
“It was a lucky coincidence, in a sense,” Ares said, barely looking at her. He was visibly tense, sitting straight and drumming on his thighs with his fingertips.
“We were planning to do it anyway, but got the tip about you from an inside source, actually,” Nocturna said, returning with a mug in her hands. She wedged herself between Leta and Celestia and handed the mug to the latter. “Here you go, love. Drink.”
It was so, so strange to be here, amongst these people she hadn't seen in a good long while, completely in the dark about what was going on. What had they been doing there? Who was the inside source? Had Newt really ratted her out to the authorities? What was even going on? Everyone knew that Nocturna was a Grindelwald ally, yes, and she’d been off the grid for two years, so it was obvious that her political agenda was her prime motivator, and…
…for crying out loud! Did it even matter? This was her sister! This was her sister, and she was here. She was actually here. It wasn’t as if Celestia didn’t care about the well-being of the others, but sitting next to her older sister made her almost give into the temptation of bursting into tears. There was a knot in her throat, and she had to blink, fight for poise. This was happening. Nocturna was really here, right next to her. She looked haggard and worn, her short hair was brittle and she had dark rings under her eyes, but she was alive and she was here.
Celestia couldn’t help it; her vision grew blurry and she sniffled. Mortified, she stared into her mug and breathed in the fragrant aroma of herbal tea. It was the one Nocturna always made when she thought someone was in need of being nursed. The scent brought back so many memories. “I apologise,” she said quietly.
“It’s all right, pet,” Nocturna said, putting an arm around Celestia’s shoulders and placing a brief kiss on her cheek. “You’re safe. Don’t you worry about a thing.” That was so typical of her. She always did her best to shield Celestia from pain.
It wasn’t all right, though – not by a long shot. Fighting to get her composure back, Celestia sipped some of her tea. “Why did you attack the MACUSA?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Nocturna said, and from the corner of her eye, Celestia could see her shoot a warning glance at Ares. “Just know that they had no intention of letting you go, because-”
“But that Graves fellow told me-”
“Because they knew you wouldn’t stop looking for the frozen heart, and under no circumstances can they let you have it.”
A small silence ensued.
Celestia shifted her weight so she could get a proper look at her sister. “I’ve been looking for this thing for almost a year, and yet, everyone here seems to know more about it than I do. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing you need to know.”
“I beg to differ, Ares,” Celestia countered, an edge to her voice as she glowered at her erstwhile brother-in-law. “I’m a fugitive from the law, now, and associated with a group of zealots working for Gellert Grindelwald. I do believe that I deserve at least some answers.”
“Doll’s got a point,” Ethel said, shrugging when Ares gave her one of his patented death glares. “What? Do I got something on my teeth?”
Of course he didn’t deign to answer her, but then again, he was overly selective about who he chose to interact with.
“The artefact you’re looking for is a lot more powerful than your…friend has led you to believe,” Apollo said, that typical solicitous expression on his face, his tone calm and level. It was hard to faze him.
His oblique mention of Newt, however, made her stomach pang. It was all she could do not to glance at Leta, who was sat at Nocturna’s right side. “I don’t care how powerful it is or what your kind might want with it. I need it.”
A muscle in Apollo’s cheek twitched, but other than that, he remained outwardly unfazed. “Of course. Your bunch of Fawleys can’t wait forever.”
“We don’t want to beat you to it and keep you from using it,” Nocturna said, and gave Celestia’s shoulders a squeeze. “We understand your plight and share your concerns – all of us.”
Apollo and Ares shared a look. “Of course,” the former said.
Celestia suddenly felt the nigh-on irresistible urge to chuck her tea mug at his head. Here they were, ignoring the elephant in the room that was the unnameable price she’d had to pay for being allowed to leave him, that was the one person she dared not think about for fear of coming completely undone, and he got snooty? Really? How dare he? How dare he take the liberty of-
She interrupted herself in her own mind, made herself unclench her teeth and relax the muscles in her face, neck, and shoulders. No need to bring any more tension into this already stressful mess. “So what do you want?”
“Easy,” Ethel said, serene, and winked when Celestia faced her. “Team up, get the stupid thing, and solve all our problems. How’s that sound, princess?”
Naturally, Celestia just had to think of Newt. He’d warned her about how dangerous the frozen heart could be if misused, how much death and destruction it could cause. He’d never elaborated on it much, only telling her that he believed it could only be used in cooperation with the Hibernus Horridus, and only in a limited capacity. But how…
…oh, it didn’t matter! These were people with skills and with determination and, she assumed, not many scruples, who wanted the same thing she did – in a way, at least. So what if she had to make a pact with the devil in order to get done what she so desperately needed? Desperate times did indeed call for desperate measures.
She thought of Alastair, about the state he’d been in when she’d been forced to leave, about how he wasn’t here with her, about how his time was running out. Her throat constricted. Her breath hitched in her throat. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a few deep breaths, marvelled at how hard it had become to keep her emotions under control. There were still so many questions rattling about in her head, but she already knew that she was going to say yes to Nocturna and the others. Her choices were limited, and she could simply not give up, no matter how difficult it got, no matter how drained of energy and strength she might feel. Nothing else mattered apart from her completing this quest successfully. Failure was not an option.
Her little girl might be lost to her forever, but she could still save everyone else. If that thought didn’t give her the strength to carry on, then nothing ever could.
When she opened her eyes, they were dry. “You can count on me.”
Nocturna laughed, and it sounded so carefree, so jolly, so like her, it was like a sting in the heart. “I knew it! Finally!” She kissed her sister’s cheek again.
“You’ll have to commit to the cause, though,” Ares said, clearly neither convinced nor enthusiastic. “Our mission is much more important than the few lives you want to save.”
“Not to me,” Celestia said coolly, raising her carefully plucked eyebrows at him. “But you already knew that. I will help you if you will help me. The Fawleys will live and I will do what I can to help you spread the message that wizards are done hiding from Muggles.”
“Nice summary. At least you don’t have to keep pretending you don’t sympathise, huh?”
Celestia gave Ethel a little smile. “I never much approved of any secrecy statutes, anyway.” She’d once promised herself not to get involved in this conflict, but in truth, it was rather impossible to stay on the fence, not to mention cowardly. No, she did not approve of innocents suffering, but maybe she could convince herself that what Nocturna had once said was right: that this was all governmental propaganda, and that Grindelwald’s Army were freedom fighters and not murderers.
Truth be told, it was hard to picture bubbly Nana murdering anyone. That was almost as hard as shutting up the objecting voices in her mind. All that mattered was that she save the Fawleys – her Fawleys. Everything else was secondary. This she had learned to believe by reciting it to herself over and over, in her mind, like a prayer.
“So, how is he doing?” That was Leta, speaking quietly. “Newt.”
“He’s fine,” Celestia said, her voice a little thin. She briefly felt the urge to go hide in some other room. How very ridiculous. “He’s travelling the world and doing his research, like he always wanted.”
“It is what he always dreamed about,” Leta said warmly, somewhat wistful. “Good for him.”
“Yes.” Celestia resumed staring into the mug she was cradling with both hands. “Good for him.”