Who: Ciara Fawcett, mentions of other family members. What: Ciara gets an owl, I try to find a reason for her absence over the last month. When: Backdated to yesterday, before the party. Where: Dublin. Warnings: Sads. Status: Complete!
She’d forgotten about the Halloween party. Every year, like clockwork, and she’d still forgotten until the last minute. Not that it was a surprise. Ciara couldn’t seem to keep anything in her head these days. She felt like the world was moving on without her, everything bouncing off her where she stood, watching from afar.
She went to work, did very little, went home again. Sat by the window, wondering if Dad had one too, or if all he had was walls. Forgot to reply to hexts, to phone calls, to wards. Remembered, some days, to go to the pub to help Mum.
Usually she wished she hadn’t come once she stepped inside. Mum did her best, but she was an Obliviator (one that refused to work for a Death Eater, who had flipped a table or two and walked away), not a pub owner. She was never as good with people as Dad had been.
The Halloween decorations looked nice, Ciara had to admit that. Something was still missing. They stepped around it, both of them, and talked about the party. They almost managed to make it sound fun.
It would be fun, of course. Ciara just wished she could appreciate it the way she used to.
She ran over to her parents’ house once the silence (the silence she could hear, even through the chatter of the customers, settling in for the evening) of the pub became unberable, digging through her sister’s room. Almost all her things were still there, even though Saoirse hadn’t lived there for at least a year. Too much travelling to be done. Too many places to be. There was no time to sift through it all. Packing it all up.
The Quidditch jersey wasn’t hard to find. Ciara grabbed it, stopped by her old room to pull out some of her old Quidditch gear to complete the look.
It was a half-arsed costume at best, but it’d have to do.
She ran home after, looking for a quick recipe, something to throw together (“never go anywhere empty-handed,” Dad was saying in her head) when the owl pecked on the window. It left her with a small envelope, and she didn’t even know to be scared of the little paper rectangle.
It hadn’t come by owl, the last time. This time it did, and she found herself standing in her kitchen, staring at the garish, grotesquely painted face of her father.
She couldn’t tell if the picture was real –– it had to be a glamour, had to be –– but the possibility of him sitting in his cell, made up like that just to taunt her...
Ciara knew better than to blast it to pieces. She still did it. It multiplied. Of course. That had happened the last time too, and would happen each time she tried to kill one of them. But there were so many of them, and the panic was so close to the surface. With the panic came the spell, came the multiplying pictures, came her skin crawling, a spiral of awfulness, moving faster and faster the longer she stood there.
She did the only thing she could think of. She ran outside. She locked the door behind the pictures, checked the wards, and left. Maybe if she got drunk enough she’d forget about them. And if she didn’t, at least she’d be drunk.
Ciara smoothed down her Harpies jersey, put on a smile and did the only thing she could think of.