WHO: Jeremy Dearborn WHAT: TL;DR he's sad WHEN: Over the last month or so WHERE: Various WARNINGS: Grief. Blood. Overly indulgent.
Sometimes Jeremy hated the Order.
It had never been particularly fair, and it was even less so now, not when he knew the names and faces and personalities and intentions. So many of them had nothing to do with the Order as it used to be. So many of them hadn’t known his dad.
(Not that it had ever been fair to blame a group of people trying to make things better when the people at fault were part of the terrorist group making everything worse.)
But sometimes Jeremy hated his dad too. He hated how he’d never come home and how he’d put this group ahead of his own safety. He hated how he was never going to know what happened, even now after he knew who was to blame. But mostly he hated the fact that he hated his father at all, because holding dying against a dead man didn’t change the fact that he was dead one bit.
But even though Jeremy knew that it wasn’t fair, the darkest part of him couldn’t shake the feeling that had his father never joined the Order in the first place, then maybe — just maybe — the Lestranges never would’ve cared about the Dearborns at all.
Jeremy didn’t know what to do with that.
It was worse at night. Every time Jeremy closed his eyes he could see his mum. He could detail every bit of those few seconds, from the placement of the wound to the exact shade of the blood and how it’d bloomed through the fabric of her blouse and pooled on the floor and how it’d felt on his hands. He could still see the look in her eyes when they both knew it was over, but how it hadn’t been quite over until moments later when he was by her side. He could still see the exact moment when he’d failed to save her.
She was hardly the first person that Jeremy had watched die, but he didn’t know how to shake this one.
He didn’t know how to sleep.
Sometimes, Jeremy didn’t bother to try. He just waited until Baz was asleep before slipping out for tea and a book, letting the hours pass by until it was time to go back and pretend for a while.
Other times he just took dreamless sleep, because he knew what sleep deprivation did to a person and it was an answer all the same.
He only ever tried when he was alone, when waking up in a cold sweat and a yell wouldn’t result in a worried look or a conversation. Pretending he was fine was important to him. If he pretended long enough, maybe eventually it would be true.
He wanted it to be true.
His first day back at St. Mungo’s was supposed to be fine. Slipping back into a routine and hours upon hours when there was too much to focus on to think about anything else was good for him. His first few patients were run of the mill — hexes during bar fights that got a little too intense, ambitious home repair that never should’ve been done without a qualified professional, that sort of thing.
Jeremy ignored the twinge of guilt that tried to wind its way through his chest when he ended up in the examination room where he’d told Rodolphus Lestrange that the next time the man attempted to murder a member of his family, he should have the decency to leave a body. As if there wouldn’t ever be a next time.
It had been dumb to assume that there wouldn’t be a next time.
But he was fine.
He was fine with patient after patient. He was fine when he had to call time of death on someone who was already dead when they’d been brought through the door. He was fine, at first, when his next patient was a fifty-eight year old woman with brown hair until his eyes caught sight of the abdominal wound, and then everything seemed to stop.
“Healer Dearborn!”
Even when he could breathe again, it was a losing battle. He couldn’t manage to save this woman either.
When it came down to it, Jeremy hadn’t wanted to just steal Lestrange’s horses. He wanted to break into his house and burn it to the ground, or maybe find Lestrange himself and slit his throat until he bled out and died. It scared him, how much the plans the Order detailed didn’t feel like enough, even when it was discussions of distractions and explosives and all the things he’d said they ought to do when the purists had their stupid charity balls.
It scared him to be the sort of person who wanted that level of revenge.
Horse liberation hadn’t seemed like enough of a reason to skip valentine’s day. Not when there was no guarantee of another one. Not when there was always going to be a nearly twenty year grudge and a name that would always be his. Not when he felt this close to snapping and becoming someone that Jeremy wasn’t sure he wanted to be.
When Baz silenced his phone, he didn’t object. He didn’t even really think twice about it.
Jeremy wasn’t sure what sort of person that made him, but he was pretty sure it made him a shitty vigilante.
Feeling better wasn’t supposed to be a factor in helping the wandless. It was the right thing to do and even if they hadn’t managed to get everyone out, at least they’d managed to help a few. Stopping a Death Eater from going after a civilian wasn’t meant to be a hero move. Jeremy couldn’t manage to feel great about it, not when the kid’s presence had been the one thing holding him back.
The Death Eater hadn’t been a Lestrange though, of that much he was sure.
He’d managed to slow the bleeding of the wound slicing across his chest, but it still took a lot of effort as he slumped against the bathroom wall. Steady motions grew increasingly unsteady as he worked to stitch the wound up, as if he could keep a month’s worth of emotions from tumbling out at the same time.
But he couldn’t, really.
After nearly a month, Jeremy still hadn’t cried, but suddenly he didn’t seem to know how to stop.