The Persistence of Memory. Salvador Dali
(oil on canvas)

Despair lies in the chests of the grieving, between their third and fourth ribs. It presses through the blood and the entire body, feeling all-encompassing. Despair is the claw marks on the cages of the trapped, the bile rising in the chests of the sick. Despair is like memory, thick and lingering. It holds on, a grip so solid that when it lets go, it is missed. Despair fills the hospital, fills every witch and wizard who had to fight.

Calm at St. Mungos is hard to come by. Despite May Second being the true end of the war with the death of Voldemort, people were being injured and dying from death eater attacks. Even if the war isn't truly over, remnants linger everywhere, melting snow in the spring that tracks mud through the streets.

George Weasley goes to Saint Mungo's every week now. Every once in a while Birdie catches his eye as he walks into the hospital, where he has therapy with the head neuro-healer, Jeanette "Nettie" Atkinson. Therapy is a muggle design brought up at the end of the war to help the grieving witches and wizards cope with survival. Another change added to try to help disinfect the wound left in the wizarding world.

They never speak when he comes. They rarely look at each other. But when they do, Birdie notices how tired he looks. How the light, the joy, is gone from his eyes. When she sees him, she thinks about how long it's been since they went to school together, how they're strangers now. She wonders how she must look to him, how much has changed since the last time they spoke.

The halls of the hospital are, as usual, full of people. She is in the entrance area, speaking to a medi-witch about potions she needs to get for her patients upstairs when she sees him. He walks in and takes a seat by the door, dressed in an orange flannel and a pair of jeans. His hair is rumpled, and he has a paperback book in one hand. He doesn't open it, just sets it on his lap and stares out the window.

She should stop looking at him, the way his side profile is lit with the afternoon sun, and wishing she could've done something more the last time she had a chance. She pulls her eyes away from him and goes to ask a witch with a bloody nose a few questions.

"George?" Nettie stands in the doorway leading to the mind ward, her dark green scarf draped across her shoulders. She smiles at George, whose expression doesn't change as he makes his way across the admittance floor. A few words are exchanged before the door behind them is shut, and Birdie loses sight of the boy.

Birdie returns upstairs after a few minutes, pulling back her hair and washing her hands. She walks to the end of the room, where the patients who have been permanently damaged by dark magic are.

"Hello Alice, how are you?" Birdie asks, standing by the woman's bedside. Alice's discarded food tray sat on the table next to her, half-eaten. It's still better than yesterday, though.

"Birdie," Alice mumbles, a distant, almost harmonious tone in her voice. It makes Birdie sick. The guilt rises in her throat, thick and hot, but she chokes it down and does not look across the room. They would consider this a good day for Alice, with vague coherence and some small mumbling singsongs from her voice. Birdie can only imagine what she used to be like, what joy and spirit was taken from her.

"It's time to take your potion," Birdie tells her, helping Alice into a seated position. It is significantly easier to give the potion by syringe or smaller vial so Birdie pulls the latter from her bag and pours half of the silvery potion into it. She kneels next to her bed, placing the potion to Alice's lips, helping her tilt her head back, and watching as she swallows.

This was her favorite unit of the hospital, despite the sick feeling in her stomach whenever she looked at the half she didn't work at. She knows that it isn't the preferred section of the hospital, but it was relaxed and her patients were kind. Frank and Alice may not have all of their dispositions, but they are kind and gentle. It's almost like the people they were push through on the periphery.

Birdie and Frank go through a similar process, but he is doing worse than his wife. His eyes looked more distant than normal, and he didn't recognize Birdie. She gave him his potion without much complaint and turned to see Alice doing her wandering. Birdie sighed but didn't do anything about it. The couple could roam all they wanted around the room.

The number of people in this part of the hospital, (the ones inhibited by dark magic) only grew during the second war. The Longbottom couple was here for much longer than Birdie was a healer, but most of the patients under the care of this unit were significantly newer.

Birdie looks towards a figure curled into a hospital bed. She looks so small, the soft features of girlhood pulled from her with the same curse that pulled the sanity from Frank and Alice. Birdie considers for a moment, the strength of those whose convictions were set in stone, those who would rather have the life, the sanity, the joy sucked from them rather than fall to betrayal.

The war tested strengths. The world after the war tests strength. Birdie doesn't know how long she can hold herself up.

☄︎

Hugo is curled on Birdie's bed when she gets home. He makes a soft sound when she reaches to pet him, before standing and stretching. He follows her into the kitchen, Black fur illuminated by the sunset. Birdie clicks her tongue when he jumps up on the kitchen table, reaching to pet his head as she sorts through the mail.

"Bad news Mr. Hugh," she says, and he looks up at her like he's listening. "I work nights the rest of the week. I'm going to lunch with Dad tomorrow, then I have to sleep to catch up. I know. It's so sad."

The sky is golden with the falling sun. Light curls across the clouds and through the crack in Birdie's curtains. It's a gentle reminder of the world still turning, despite feeling stagnant—almost trapped in time since that night in May that pressed its scars into everything that experienced it. The sunset reminds her that days have curled into months and they have all passed, despite being full of anguish and the tepid pain in her chest and throat.

She reaches to move the plant that Hugh is trying to eat. She watches the way her fingers curl around the terracotta, feeling detached from her body, almost not feeling the ceramic beneath the pinch of her fingers.

She's tired, mostly. She sees herself reflected in the hollow-looking boy that is George Weasley, the boy she knew so desperately well. She tries not to fall into recollection because it's a slick hill leading to melancholy, or something deeper that gets caught under her fingernails and threatens to swallow her whole. The fact that she's a stranger to him now, and the same being true (despite knowing the bubbly, sharp short, and sweet sound of his laughter by heart) of her to him.

There are moments, hours, days, months, years before tragedy. Birdie had her entire life—nineteen years—of 'before'. Now, she's reeling in the 'after'. the effects of the world they left her to deal with, to survive in. There was once hope for an extravagant future, one filled with laughter and joy, but now, all Birdie can do is wonder how the hell she's going to survive this hell. The dead had the easy part, and sure they won the war, but at what cost? There are no funerals for the living.

She comes out of her head and back into her body when her skin meets the hot steam pushing itself from the boiling, whistling kettle. It burns her hand and before she rinses it with cold water, she just looks at it. The skin turns red where the steam hits it, and it hurts with a curling, jagged pain. She likes the way it hurts, the way she can sit with it and feel something for once.

She closes her fist and walks to the sink, turning the tap to cold before placing her hand under it. It hurts at first, the sharp difference between searing heat and liquid cold, and then it fades to just a dull throb when she wraps it in a potion-soaked bandage.

More carefully this time, Birdie pulls the kettle from the stove and pours it into the mug, watching the tea bag float to the top and the tea begin to steep. She goes and lays with Hugo on the couch, curled around him as he purrs and falls asleep. She tries to read, but her body is threatening to match Hugo. She carries him to the bed, where he kneads the comforter until he decides it's to his standards and curls into a little black ball next to Birdie's pillow.

The water is too warm in the shower she takes, but she doesn't have the energy to change it. It feels nice in a masochistic way. When she's done, she turns the water off and puts on her pajamas, not caring enough to dry her hair more than wringing it through the towel a few times. so, she goes into a fitful sleep with wet hair.

☄︎

"What happened to your hand?" Paul asked, making Birdie look up from her plate. Her fingers curled around the white ceramic of the mug, the too-thick body and handle that was too small for anyone's hands to fit through. She's reached the dregs of her coffee, where the grounds managed to poke through the filter and make it gritty.

"Burned it," She said. "On the kettle." There's a distance between them. It curls like smoke and is hard and infrangible. it doesn't suffocate or choke, it just makes eyes water and throats dry.

"That's the worst," He says, reaching across the table to steal a chip from her plate. She gave a half-hearted glare, before drifting back into melancholic silence. Birdie mostly moves her remaining food around her plate,

"Harry Potter just got back from his first Auror mission," Paul says after a while, and Birdie looks up.

"He's an auror? How old is he again?"

"Eighteen I think. They're bringing in former death eaters to try and limit the remaining battles as much as possible."

"Isn't there Auror training?" Birdie shifts in her seat, glancing out the window. The war is officially over, but some death eaters did not get the memo.

"the ministry decided to forgo the excess training seeing as their experience in the war was enough training and they were needed."

birdie nods. If she's tired of the war, she doesn't know how they must feel. The exhaustion pulls at her, a gnawing feeling that eats away at her, curling into her skin and threatening to decompose her right there.

Birdie takes her food home in a box once they get their check. Paul pays, and she reaches to hug him. The hug is awkward and single-armed, the distance between them a cavern. She feels as if she's staring down her childhood hallway in the middle of the night. she's unbearably alone, staring into the darkness.

Birdie and her father's relationship shifted. tectonic plates pulling away from each other. They needed something neither of them could have, neither of them knew what. As they leave each other on the sidewalk, they barely say goodbye. It might just be that they don't have it in them anymore.

The thing about grief is that it comes at strange times. It knocks the wind out of Birdie when she pulls her sister's oyster card from her pocket. She must have grabbed the wrong one, and now she's reeling. She can't take the tube now, so instead, she apparates, arriving home and leaning over the toilet to vomit. She sits on the floor of her bathroom, staring at nothing.

Hugo pads in, and she barely registers that he's there until he announces his presence and crawls into her lap. She scratches his head, his purring helps settle her stomach. He makes a soft sound when she lifts him to go to her medicine cabinet, pulling out a sleeping potion to help her catch up on rest before her sleep schedule changes again.

They walk back into her bedroom, curling into bed together. Hugo blinks up at Birdie with golden eyes, and she knows that he's anything but bad luck.

Despair lies in the chests of the grieving. It takes too long before it gets let out. 

☄︎

word count: 2.1K

terms/slang
- oyster card: the cards used to pay for public transportation in England

Author's Note:

WELCOME BACK TO HOAX  I HAVE MISSED WRITING FOR THEM SM!! also sorry for the lack of birdiegeorge interaction but you will get content in the next chapter. angst will persist, sorry (not really).