mars mulciber is the death eater's therapist (marring) wrote in traintickets, @ 2011-06-23 12:14:00 |
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Entry tags: | mars mulciber, petunia dursley |
you're a stranger, so what do I care?
Who: Mars Mulciber and Petunia Dursley; later Lily Potter
What: Petunia Dursley shows up in America, panics the entire Order.
When: June 23rd, 1980, 6:30 p.m.
Where: John F. Kennedy International Airport
Mars hadn't bothered with the formality of an airport on his way to America, so this was his first time setting foot in one since he'd gotten to the country. It was, in fact, only the second time he'd been in an airport at all, but what he'd learned about fitting into strange Muggle environments was that the first step was not to stare. The second step was to have the appropriate camouflage, especially when you were as tall as he was.
Today, he'd taken extra precautions in the form of wearing large sunglasses and a hooded jacket with the hood worn up, and he leaned inconspicuously at the edge of the area he'd ascertained was where Petunia would come from on her way out.
He'd looked up the blueprints of the airport last night (it took some doing, to get his hands on them, but he'd managed it) so this also happened to be where the fewest cameras in this room would pick up on him, if he hadn't jinxed them to erase themselves spontaneously in half an hour. He wasn't sure what kind of chaos that might cause, but he imagined it'd be blamed on technical failures or human error, and it wasn't like anyone would have reason to investigate it magically if everything went according to the plan that he'd cobbled together last night.
He hadn't slept or eaten since then, but he couldn't feel the effects of either in the midst of his buzzing electric hum of tension and focus--the entire world felt sharpened and more acute to him, the outlines of everything brighter and more real, and he couldn't seem to shut off the part of his mind that was meticulously and dispassionately going over the reasons that what he intended was the kind of betrayal that he wouldn't be able to smooth over, if he got found out.
It wasn't the consequences that worried him. He knew he could lie his way out of those, easily, but this ran deeper than just what might happen to him. He was betraying his family, and there was no way to lie out of that knowledge, even if it was a small betrayal. This little thing. He wondered if this was how it had started for Regulus.
She was just a Muggle. A Muggle he didn't even know, and sister to a Muggleborn witch who was actively involved in everything that might destroy his family, and it ought not to matter that she cared for theatre and that she'd made napalm in her garden. These things didn't matter. (But he remembered being fourteen and watching his uncle being handed his infant sister, and the way that everything in him had started screaming while he knew that he couldn't move his face, that he couldn't do anything, and how it'd been worse than the inside of a thousand chests, how it'd been like nails dragged jaggedly down the inside of his ribs, and he wished he didn't understand, but he did and he couldn't change that. The part of him that remembered couldn't bend. Not with this.)
So Mars watched the crowd filing out of Petunia's flight and checked the clock on the wall for the fifth time in five minutes, his heartbeat as rapid and steady as the seconds hand of the clock.