There are still scars. There always will be.
Perhaps if he’d let her heal them properly the first time. Perhaps if he hadn’t been such a mess of self-loathing and humiliation that he’d shoved away the one person who could help. Perhaps if he hadn’t been such a fool back at age 17.
()()()()()()()()()()()()
“Ready, mudblood?”
The voice is mocking, the eyes dark and devilish. The boy is enjoying this. Jasper licks his lips and cuts his eyes to the knife in Warin’s hand. It glints in the lurid firelight, sending splinters of panic into his fingers and up his arms. He doesn’t manage a spoken answer, just nods.
Warin jerks his chin at Leofwin and Savaric. Savaric’s meaty hand closes on the back of Jasper’s neck, snapping it painfully downward, forcing him into a kneeling position.
()()()()()()()()()()()()
He tends to trace the scar that slithers across the back of his left hand when he’s thinking. The knife’s path was meandering; careless, even. The familiarity of its staggering curves is comforting in its fashion. He makes an effort to keep most of them hidden. The beard hides those on his jawline, his hair covers those on his neck. His clothes hide the rest. Most he has almost forgotten. But this one. It asserts itself at odd moments – when he is working and his hand pulls against the taut skin, when he clenches his fist around his wand to quell a rising temper and is rewarded with a whisper of remembered pain, when he runs his hand through Helga’s hair and feels the strands catch both on the calluses on his palm and on the scars on the other side.
Helga doesn’t like to see him touch it, but she no longer pulls his hand away as once she did. Perhaps she understands that remembering isn’t the same thing as regressing. Or perhaps the years have softened her compulsion to focus only on the light. They never speak of that night.
()()()()()()()()()()()()
The first cut is unexpected. A thin trail of pain down the side of his neck, obscenely intimate and light, a devil’s kiss.
Jasper tightens his jaw and stares up at the sky as the blood oozes from the wound, focusing on the stars, on the breeze on the bare skin of his torso, on the faint crescent of the Gealach úr – the earliest days of the new moon. The time of purification. The ancient teachings state that a person wishing to purify himself of deep transgressions must allow his blood to be let in the time of the Gealach úr. For the boy who had been driven from his village because of his unexpected powers and found nothing but mockery and derision among wizards, too, it seems the only avenue left. Either the rite will take his powers from him, if possessing them is indeed evil, or it will remove the taint of his Muggle ancestry from him. He has reached the point of not caring which way it falls. It is certain no one else in the world does.
Helga, he instantly corrects himself. Helga will care. There is a reason he has kept this entire undertaking from her, chosen a night she is summoned to a gathering at the Dark Lake with the other powerful ones. She would tell him his blood matters not, that his status will improve with time, that she will not let them shun him while she lives in the valley.
The second cut traces a swirl on his shoulder. Still nearly gentle, but this one betrays Warin’s pleasure in the task. It is impossible to ignore the slick of blood that creeps down his arm from this, even more impossible than stopping the gasp of pain at the next cut.
Jasper squeezes his eyes and lips shut and resolves not to make a sound. This is his choice. His atonement.
()()()()()()()()()()()()
He has never quite gotten over his tendency to flinch away in the presence of purebloods. Sometimes his magic falters in their presence. He hates himself for this weakness, but it is never quite conquered. Salazar treats him to condescending looks down his nose and the barest civilities delivered with ill grace when Helga or Godric demands it. Even some of the apprentices whisper about him when he passes them on the grounds – the only muggleborn connected to The Masters, as the four have become known. Some of them believe, as Warin, Leofwin, Savaric and countless others in his past did, that a muggleborn is an abomination, a plague to be eradicated.
Slytherin encourages this attitude, Ravenclaw does nothing to check it. Gryffindor steps in when the younger apprentices suffer for it. And Hufflepuff… his Helga is as outspoken as ever on the issue of Muggleborns. It has hurt her, he knows, when it comes to apprentices. The best and brightest turn to the more selective masters, anxious for their approval. Helga takes those who come ready to work, regardless of their other qualifications. Her only real stipulation for anyone in her life. Jasper loves her for it, and yet in moments of quiet finds himself discomforted by it.
“What made you choose me?” He used to ask in the early days, before silver had touched their temples and when their laugh lines disappeared when their smiles did.
She always smiled, reached up to cup his neck where the thin scar remained, and kissed him, saying, “You remind me that the reward for perseverance is always greater than the pain.”
()()()()()()()()()()()()
His back, shoulders, and arms are spider-webbed with trickles of blood. Leofwin and Savaric have long since released his arms, trusting him now not to run. Warin has done his job thoroughly, and still continues, circling Jasper’s trembling, near-prostrate body, looking for the next outlet.
Consciousness is flirting with him, dancing sometimes within his grasp, sometimes not. He has fallen forward on trembling arms and can neither push himself back upright, nor yet collapse. He wishes vaguely for his wand. Surely this is the end. Purification is pain, he accepts this willingly, but the rite does not include death.
He opens his mouth, but only manages a wordless moan as the knife traces a delicate new pattern at the nape of his neck.
“E-enough,” he gulps. Somehow, despite the fire it awakens across his back, he raises his head to his antagonist. “No more.”
Warin laughs. Somewhere in an oddly faraway part of his brain, he understands this is dangerous. He attempts to sit upright, but the movement is beyond him. His elbows lock and then fold, sending him nearly to the ground. The laugher is louder now.
*Crack* The dirt inches from his nose is disturbed by whatever has made the sound. Jasper orders his head to turn, but his muscles are slow to obey. He hears her voice before he sees more than the hem of her cloak.
“What have you done to him?”
It is the angriest Jasper has ever seen Helga. Her features seem transfigured, her wand is up in dueling position, and her voice has a growl of anger he’s suspected she is capable of, but never seen.
“Calm down.” It is Warin’s lazy, placating voice. Jasper doesn’t have to see him to know he’s probably sliding his wand out of his sleeve. “It’s Gealach úr. Night of purification. Jasper asked for our he-“
He can feel the comprehension dawning in her. There is a flash of red light, and Warin yelps in surprise.
“You animals! You filthy, evil trolls!”
Helga never insults people, but she has no trouble spitting out the invectives. Her sturdy traveling boots appear in his line of sight. There is another flash of light, and Jasper feels a shift in the air. A shield of some sort? The cruelly chill breeze is gone, that much is certain, and Warin’s next words seem muffled.
“You are absolute monsters. All of you!” Helga turns to him and murmurs words he can’t translate in his mind. A warmth flows over his torso, soothing his wounds, staunching the blood still dripping from them, seeping strength into his shaking muscles.
“He asked us –“
“Get away.”
Her voice is calmer now, and somehow much more frightening. Jasper forces himself up to a kneeling position and observes her face. It is fierce as she watches Leofwin take a stumbling step backwards.
“All of you. Away. Now. Or I might decide not to let the elders handle this.”
Even Warin will not trifle with the witch rumored to be one of the most powerful in the country despite her youth. He spits into the fire ring and tramps away. Jasper wonders with sudden, surprising humor, if he resents the fact he has not mastered the difficult magic of disapparating. His exit has a mundane sense the pureblood must loathe.
Helga kneels beside him, all virago extinguished. “Jasper? Are you alright? Can you stand?”
With the gentle words, the shame comes rushing in. He has been a fool.
“I’m fine,” he says, surprising himself with the gruffness in his voice.
“Let me look at these cuts,” she says, raising her wand. “I can heal them better.”
“No,” he says, rocking back. “I can take care of it. You’ve done enough.”
Her forehead crumples in confusion. “Jasper –“
“Please.” He tests his ability to stand, staggering to his feet in a less dignified way than he would wish. “Just let me be.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
He grimaces, feeling the fiery itch of the cuts as his shirt makes contact with them. “Too late for that, Helga.”
She does not stop him as he turns away into the forest.
()()()()()()()()()()()()
Helga is making plans for her dormitory in the castle the Masters are commissioning. She pours over sketches until her eyes are strained from the wand light, and Jasper has to gently extinguish it and lead her away. She talks of little else, even when the drawings are not directly in front of her. Her enthusiasm is too beautiful to be annoying.
“I considered only taking Muggleborn students,” she says one night as they are drifting off to sleep.
Jasper is suddenly awake, left hand clenching in surprise. “Oh?” he says, carefully.
“Yes, but I decided against it.”
“Oh.” Jasper stops several comments from crossing his lips. “Probably wise. What changed your mind?”
For an answer, her fingers trace the scars on his neck and down his shoulder. She rarely touches them anymore, but tonight she treats them like relics, exploring their path across his body. Jasper says nothing as she does this, staring at the faintly illuminated lines of her face in the wan moonlight. The love there is almost painful to behold. She ends with the meandering scar on his hand and peels back his tense fingers to intertwine her own with them.
“What does it say to everyone if I take only Muggleborns?” she says quietly. “That they must be separate from the others. That they are different. That their blood status means anything at all. I can’t allow that. Not ever again.”
Jasper raises their clasped hands and gently kisses her hand. For all the years they have been together, sometimes she still overwhelms him.
“You never did.”