Another Verse “And just where do you think you’re going?”
Serapes glanced between his packed luggage and his goddaughter, grey eyes moving to suggest an obvious answer. He sat his briefcase down among the rest, knowing from the raised blonde eyebrow across the room that this conversation would not be short. Supporting himself with his cane--damned thing, when would he be rid of it?--he crossed to her, his angular form overtaking her height as he grew near. “I am getting ready for work.”
“You’re not going back yet,” she informed him, brushing away the hand he had lightly placed on her shoulder, an obvious attempt to soften her (because otherwise, to say physical affection was not his forte would have been an enormous understatement) that was not going to succeed. “You need to recover fully before you get back to Hogwarts.”
“And what if I do not?” Serapes posed. His voice did not waiver, but something in it made her worry. Was that doubt? Fear? “Sophia, this may… be the most I ever recover. I cannot sit and wait forever. My speech… is slower, and paused, and I depend on this cane , but… I may not get any better.”
“That’s preposterous,” Sophie returned, anxious steps taking her away, forward and back and sideways. “Why wouldn’t you get better? You’ve got no reason not to! I mean, jeez, you’re still relatively young; I don’t know why you’d even have the damn stroke in the first place!” A startling contrast to Serapes’s slowed speech, Sophie’s was accelerated, propelled even more quickly than her usual chattering, her mouth foregoing its filter in favor of a desperate string of emotion.
“Some people recover to full capacity,” said Serapes with painful deliberateness. “And others… do not.” He had made his peace with the idea, and it showed in his tone.
But she couldn’t accept the same complacency. “You’re just being negative!” Sophie shot back, her throat burning as if this was some sort of argument. She was the only one fighting here. “You’re always so… down. About everything. And I know you don’t think you’ve had enough good in your life to indicate anything else, but open your eyes! There’s always been good! There’s me and Dad and my boys. But because of Mom-”
“She was everything!” He spit the words in a way she could have never imagined, like poison burned his tongue, seeping down his throat and into his stomach. It burned her, too, since she had caused it. “My life was nothing, and she was everything! She was….”
His voice faded, as if he ran out of words. And he was right, because there were no words for Sara Jamison nee White. “I know,” Sophie answered weakly, returning to him like a kitten with its tail between its legs, her eyes glued to his shoes. “I shouldn’t have thrown that out there like that. I just mean…” She looked up, her neck craned to find his face. His stony eyes could not hide his heart from her; he was broken. “Serapes, there is good out there. There’s bad, sure, but there’s good too. And maybe some people don’t heal, but you gotta believe that you will. That’s faith. You have to have some, or else you won’t get anywhere. Stay home another semester. See if anything changes. Don’t give up because it hasn’t happened soon enough.”
Serapes sighed, his gaze bouncing between his luggage and his goddaughter. “Fine,” he relinquished. “One more semester.”