Agnes O'Hare (her royal HIGHness) (saintagnes) wrote in blurred_lines, @ 2008-09-16 01:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! [1979-09] september, agnes o'hare, alastor moody |
Who: Aggie & Moody
When: 15 September
What: Shootin' the breeze
Where: St Mungos
Rating: PG for fucks and depressingness
Status: Complete
Agnes was as high as a loony bird, and though she gave the outward appearance of feeling goddamned dandy, beneath the stoned-as-fuck façade was an inkling of true emotion. It had been a rough couple days; being cooped up in hospital was bad enough as it was - being almost killed was bad enough as it was - but being cooped up in a hospital after almost being killed because the man you were sleeping with and trusted turned out to be a death eater? Fucked up beyond all reason.
She'd only let herself feel angry about it, because, to be honest, dipping further down into a less shallow estimation of her emotional state might have resulted in gut-wrenching tears, and if there was anything Agnes didn't need right now it was to wrench her gut. It had been through enough... as had her shoulder, her thigh, her ribs. In an unusual turn of character, she was beginning to feel insecure about her body. It had never been more than mediocre, but now it was ugly, and despite her acceptance of just about anyone's body (her fucking of Severus ought to have proven that point), she couldn't quite shake the feeling of being less now than she was before.
Moody had been up most of the day, seeing as many of the survivors as he could, doing paperwork, delivering pain potions and bandages, all the things that the injured couldn't do. He'd promised to come see Agnes, and that wasn't a promise he was willing to break.
He knocked on the side of the door lightly, giving her a lopsided smile. She may not have looked all that bad, but he knew what being injured was like all too intimately; she couldn't be feeling as well as she looked.
"Heya Moody," Agnes chirped, tongue lagging a bit so that her vowels crushed into each other and tumbled messily outward. She sounded a lot better than she looked and she looked a lot better than she felt, but that wasn't saying much. Aside from a tanktop sort of thing to give a charade of modesty, Agnes's right arm and shoulder were bandaged up to the neck. Beneath the sheets (which had been bundled up around her carelessly), another set of bandages rumpled the left side of her shirt: ribs, thigh, rear - the entire side had been torn open, and she wasn't sure yet if the scars had been avoided. She didn't feel embarrassed around Moody, though, and gave him a crumpled sort of smile. "How is you then?"
"Hey, Aggie."
He went further into the room, setting a box down on the bedside table; it contained a wand Kennard had convinced Phoebe to buy, years ago, before he'd accepted that he was a Squib, some chocolate and a couple of books. Things that he thought she might appreciate, being cooped up in here.
"I'm doing all right. Getting used to this thing," he added, thumping the prosthetic and getting a dull, hollow thunk in answer. "How're they treating you in here?"
"Holy damn that is a sweet leg." The exclamation was a genuine one, if not the most sensitive thing she could have said. She hadn't seen it yet, and she crawled out a bit from her covers - and now, against the white backdrop of the hospital, she seemed all limbs and bandages and tiny, almost pathetic, attempts at curves. Indecency wasn't something Agnes was entirely cognisant of, especially when with friends.
"They're nice 'nuff. Bethie is an absolute doll, but they ain't lettin me get no weed in here. Guess I ain't supposed to need it what wif the potions." She gestured vaguely at the curiously pink potion bottles beside her bedtable. Scooping up the box he'd set down, Agnes patted the bed next to her and curled over the box (looking very toddler-at-Christmas). She picked up the chocolate, promptly stuffing some in her mouth before examining the wand. "This ish fab-lous," she blurred around a full mouth.
"It's certainly better than I expected," he agreed, sitting by the bed and absently massaging the muscles in his thigh. Sweet or not, the leg was taking some getting used to, and he'd been on it a great deal more than was his wont today. He ignored her rather less-clad-than-normal state; it was Agnes. He was fond enough of her that it didn't bother him.
"It should do you until we can get you to Ollivander's," he added. "It won't be as good as a wand that chose you personally, but at least you'll be able to ward things."
"Assumin' I can even still get into Olli's," Agnes replied with a sharp tinge of bitterness. "I ain't muggleborn, but good as, you know?" She swept her fingers along the smooth grain of the wand and then tucked it between her legs while fiddling with the books. The chocolate was good - and she helped herself to a bit more. "You got, like. What's them called. Phantom pains? My mum had to take off some bugger's arm and she had to treat 'im for that kind of thing. I knows a good remedy if you's having problems with that."
"And hey, thanks. This is fucking brilliant." Abandoning the things for a minute, she sloppily thrust her arms around his neck and planted a kiss on his cheek.
Slightly surprised, he reacted on instinct, returning the hug as much to ensure that she didn't overbalance and hurt herself as to just, well, return the hug.
"Ollivander's not the sort to listen to that rot," he told her, absently stroking her hair back. "And there're some, but I'm dealing with them. Physical therapy's taking care of a lot of the problems."
"Alright," she replied absently, settling back down to drag a book into her lap (and wince, though that wouldn't stop her), she fingered through it. "Hey so uh. I need to tell you something. I ain't told Marly the whole thing yet cuz. I dunno, I's gonna I just ain't yet." Where the sudden urge to exorcise these demons had come from, she did not know - nor why Moody was the unfortunate recipient.
"All right," he said slowly, settling back into the chair. "I'm listening."
"OKAY, so basically there is this person I have been seeing sort of on my own and like... I trusted him and we fucked and I thought he was a good guy and then basically Saturday night this person fucked me ten ways from Friday and here I am and almost dead and I want to punch him in the nose, but that ain't really the point, the point is that I don't fucking get how I could have had my head so far up my ass because it ain't like I'm in LOVE or anything like that, he was just a guy who I thought were decent but he weren't and what the fuck do I do now, just go on with my life and not worry about another friend shoving their foot up my ass and trying to kill me?" She paused for breath. And some chocolate.
...well, that wasn't what Moody had been expecting.
"Someone you like turned out to be a Death Eater?" he asked quietly, turning that over in his mind. Who could she be talking about, really? Someone around the same age, probably, although with Agnes it was difficult to be sure; someone she'd liked. Someone she'd trusted, perhaps.
She had been talking to Severus on the journals; he'd seen some of their conversations that were unwarded. Was this really his secret to tell, though?
Fuck it.
"Are you talking about Severus?"
Agnes sighed. "Yeah." Wouldn't really do much good to deny it, she intended to tell the entire order not to touch that son of a -- no his mother was nice, he was just a complete lying bastard. "Fucker silencioed me while his fuckhead friend stepped on my wand then bound me up after I punched him in the face. Next thing I know I'm on the ground and my blood is escaping quick as fuck." Her voice was tight - bitter - non-Agnes-like.
That... made things complicated.
"You have to keep what I'm about to say between the two of us and Abe," he said slowly. "I'm not sure what you've just told me means in regards to what I already know, but... well. Severus is a double agent, for lack of a better term. He was one of them, but he had a change of heart, I suppose you could say. Abe is the one who convinced him. I'm not sure what Saturday means; it could be that he couldn't find a way out of it that didn't end up blowing his cover. But it's something to take into the equation."
Agnes's mouth snapped shut, and she was literally taken aback - several inches even - as she looked on Moody with new eyes. She couldn't speak, not for several very long seconds - seconds she needed for heart to stop pounding in her throat and red to appease from her eyes. When she spoke, she tried to be calm, to be easy.
"YOU FUCKING KNEW?!"
Not quite how it was meant to come out - but she was more livid than she had been at finding out on her own. "I WAS FUCKING THIS GUY AND YOU AND ABE FUCKING KNEW HE WAS A DEATH EATER? ARE YOU FUCKING WITH ME?"
"I hardly knew you were fucking him," Moody snapped. "I don't exactly make it a practice to know all about the sex lives of everyone in the Order. You want to know what I knew, Agnes? I knew that the Order can hardly hold itself together with the people who like each other, so how the hell were we supposed to trust that we could tell anyone 'oh, by the way, the Slytherin that you all dislike so much is a Death Eater but he's really working for us, please don't do anything that will get him killed'? I haven't known for long, and the only reason I know is that Abe knew I could deal with what Severus being a double agent meant. He knows he's made mistakes, and he's trying to atone for them. Unfortunately for him, he's also having to play the loyal Death Eater or risk losing our advantage at having a man on the inside, not to mention what Voldemort would do if he found out. Stop screeching at me about it, or so help me I'll Obliviate these last five minutes from your memory. You aren't well enough to be exerting yourself like that and I'm in no blasted mood to put up with it."
"NO." She was shouting now. She didn't want to shout at Moody. She wanted to shout at Severus. And hit him till he cried. But right now there was only Moody and she was angry and hurt and betrayed and there was nothing to do.
Her finger shot out to point at him. "No, what I expected was that you would INFORM US. REMEMBER? US? That there was some fucking confirmation he were a death eater. Because maybe there were somebody out there who was stupid as shit enough to try and give him a chance. And fuck you and fuck Abe if you're okay with him almost killing one of us just to get you some information." She was crying now, angry, fat tears of embarrassment and distress, and she curled over herself, fingers stuffed into her eyes, as if that might stop the sickness that spread out over her, the feeling of worthlessness, of helplessness, that seemed to be eating every speck of happiness left in her life.
"Fu-fuck." But whatever she had to say next dissolved into muffled sobs, then more genuine - loud - ones. She hadn't cried in months, and though this was not how, or where, or why she wanted to finally let herself - it was here, and she couldn't bloody stop.
"None of you gave us a reason to think you wouldn't get him killed," Moody said sharply. "Remember the reception Pepper got? And he wasn't even suspect, he was just a Slytherin and new. How could we trust that someone wouldn't let something slip that would get Severus killed? I'm not all right with him almost killing you, and you can damn well be sure I'm going to have words with him about what the fuck was going through his head when he did, but I only found out he was a Death Eater when I found out he'd agreed to spy for us. This is Abe's project, not mine, but I agree with his reasons for not telling the rest of the Order. Albus knows, and quite frankly the way the Order is at the moment I don't blame Abe for not wanting to tell anyone else."
Oh, fuck. She was crying. She was crying and he wanted to comfort her, but what sort of comfort could he give? All the things he could say, all the explanations, they wouldn't change what had happened. They wouldn't change the fact that someone she'd thought she could trust had betrayed her, that people in whose hands she'd put her welbeing had kept things from her.
He couldn't say he was sorry for keeping things back and mean it. And he wasn't about to lie to her.
"If I'd known," he said, his tone gentler now, "if I'd known about the two of you, that it was more than friendship, I would have told you."
That much was true, at least.
Agnes choked back her crying, which was now dripping past her fingers and spoiling her chocolate. She didn't care about it anymore. She didn't care about food or how much her shoulder hurt because she had to bend it to cry like a fucking pussy. This went beyond 'not fair' or whatever excuse she might have made when she was eight. This was about utter and complete betrayal. Snape's betrayal. Abe's - or Moody's, she didn't fucking care who did what and why. It was like a suckerpunch to the gut from a best friend, and it was enough that she lived in utter fear of the death eaters finding her, getting their hands on her - now she had to worry about which of her so called friends, people she'd always entrusted implicitly, would hand her off to a death eater. Fuck. FUCK.
When she finally got enough of a handle on herself to pull to upright, her cheeks were flushed pink, and she avoided his eye, fingers wrapping around the wand as if it might protect her from this pain. "There ain't no reason," she stammered, " that you and Abe couldn't of told us he were a death eater. Not this double agent bullshit, which I ain't even gonna touch, because fuck that. But you shoulda told us he were a confirmed death eater. Lily let him go to her fucking parents' funeral. Parents his fuckin' friends prolly murdered. It ain't." Her throat cought and she angrily shoved through the distorted sound. "It ain't RIGHT. How is any of this fucking RIGHT."
"It's not," he said bluntly. "None of this is right, and I wish to God I could fix things so that none of you had to go through this. But this is a war, whether the Ministry want to call it that or not, and I can't act according to what I want anymore. It's not right that we didn't tell you, it's not right that we didn't feel like we could. It's not right that at least three hitwizards are dead right now, that there's a healer in a coma because of some stupid eugenics debate, it's not right that my sister's rotting in Azkaban because of something I know she'd never do. None of this is fucking right, and I don't have any of the answers."
A few more pieces of chocolate were shoved past trembling lips, and Agnes's fingers shook as her brain tried unsuccessfully to reconcile rage with despair.
"Who the fuck'm I supposed to trust?" More tears - more treachery - spilled down her cheeks, and she looked into the now-pathetic looking chocolate bar, and the wand and the books. What the fuck good was this going to do her. She'd always relied more on kinship than magic or food or whatever else was supposed to get you through your life. "I can't fucking believe this." Over and over and over she replayed his words in her mind. She replayed Severus's levicorpus. Everything had gone horribly drastically wrong - but what the fuck was she supposed to do now? Strap a bomb to her chest and walk into Lestrange Library?
"fuck."
"I don't know."
It was war. These things happened in war. But oh, it hurt watching her. It hurt letting himself think about his sister, about the people they'd lost on Saturday, about the fact that the younger members of the Order who hardly seemed like more than kids for all he defended them to Alice were being systematically torn down, eroded, their trust in the world and each other destroyed until they had nothing left.
"They breed despair. They want us suspicious, not trusting each other, because when we're separated, we're not a threat." Machiavelli; make it so that your enemies cannot trust each other. If your enemy goes to ground, give them no ground to go to. Take away any comfort, any solace that they have, and you will destroy them as surely as if you took a knife to their throat. "I wish I could give you an easy answer, Agnes, I really do. Right now... I don't know who I trust outside of this room. I don't expect you to trust me after what I've told you, but at least believe I would make things better if I knew how."
God, he was so tired. They'd been fighting for so long, never gaining ground. Losing Edgar, losing Benjy and the Prewetts, every little victory they managed to gain almost immediately negated by their enemy or from within, by stupidity or rashness or sheer, uncaring circumstance. He'd joined the Order thinking maybe they could make a difference, but what difference could they make like this? How could they make the world safe when he couldn't even comfort one scared, upset girl lying in a hospital bed?
"What the fuck we need them for? I ain't exactly feelin' a whole lot of trust goin' round." She stiffened a trembling lip, feeding on newly found bitterness to keep her crying locked away in her chest; but this ploy at straightfacedness was belied by the tears that continued to pour down her cheeks, by the way she clutched onto the wand - her shield against her realisation tht no one, no one was trustworthy. She wanted to give up and go home. She wanted to lock herself away in a commune and get high till the walls came tumbling down around her. She wanted to bury her head so far in the sand she couldn't feel her feet.
"I don't think I can do this anymore." Agnes's words were slow, dull. Her chest burst in a new tightness - so scalding it seemed to melt away every physical pain. She should drink more potion. She should sleep. Sleep and sleep and get high until the apocalypse was night. It sounded so easy.
"I know."
What else was there to say? He'd been feeling the same way for days now, ever since his sister was arrested if he was honest with himself. What hope was there if innocent lives were destroyed, if kids like Agnes and Marlene and Remus couldn't trust anymore?
"I'm sorry, Aggie." His voice was low, held together only by sheer force of will. "God, I'm so sorry."
"Yeah." Her voice was breathless and almost sedate; all anger seemed to have drained from her, but she could not smile.
"Thanks for the gifts, they was real thoughtful." Automatic now, machine-like.
"Yeah," he said softly, standing. "Goodbye, Aggie."
He couldn't fix this. Couldn't fix what was happening to all of them.
"Bye Moody." Her mouth opened, then closed. There was nothing she, in all her helplessness, could say. Nothing. And it had always been that way, she was realising. This was just the first time she had acknowledged it.