anything to get to the rush

one.

rita skeeter didn’t have scandals;  she wrote about other people’s scandals,  real and imagined and blown far out of proportion.  and she made sure to make her own life seem boring in comparison to the sensational stories she pushed out with startling frequency.  she was a polarizing figure,  liked by some and disliked by many.  those that disliked her might have loved it if she was a scandalous figure herself    —    at least,  rita assumed they would.  certainly,  when she disliked people she relished in seeing them fall;  it was a perk of her job,  then,  that she could be the one to send them tumbling down.  

that was part of what drove her to live a life few could condemn;  what made her so desperate to bury all the things she wanted buried.  rita did what she could to ensure that her personal life was tucked away and hidden behind several locks with secret keys.  there was no other way;  there was no room for weaknesses.  

the truth was that she’d had enough things about her exposed in the pursuit of other people’s secrets that she knew better,  now.  there was no way anyone could find dirt on her, not really.  sometimes,  they could think they found something    —    only if rita wanted them to think that way.  only when it was to her own use.  

and if they did find something real,  something she didn’t plant herself?  no one had the notoriety she had;  there were few wixen writers who could be assured the stories they broke would spread like wildfire.  she knew well that she was one of a kind.  

even despite knowing no one else had the status to tear her down,  part of her was a little paranoid,  maybe.  if she hadn’t had a healthy dose of paranoia,  then she might not have had the foresight to lock her secrets up so tightly.  people only knew what she told them.  no one knew where she was,  or what story she was trailing,  until she published it with great fanfare.  when she disappeared from the thick of british wizarding society,  people knew to assume she was hard at work on a new story.

a quarter century ago,  people assumed her year long absence was due to the exposé on a famous french witch she pushed out shortly after her return.  nothing else made sense;  nothing about her was different.

two.

if anyone asked rita   ( and no one ever would, because no one would ever know ),   she’d say she never felt anything for gabriel atlas;  he’d just happened to attend the same parties rita did while tailing the french witch.  he was just around,  and easy    —    a little distraction during her time in france,  which surely she’d earned.  rita had filled her life with dalliances,  all either the sort of people who wanted something from her,  or who didn’t have a clue who she was.  as a high ranking official in the foreign affairs department of the french ministry,  a career ambassador   —   gabriel atlas fell into the latter category.  he was worldly and cute and fun,  as she felt all distractions should be.

if anyone had asked rita,  she’d tell them he meant nothing to her,  and it would mostly be true.

gabriel was,  regrettably, a good man.  something about good men always turned her stomach,  no matter how fun they were at in conversation or at parties or in bed.  this had been true for most of rita’s life and she was disinclined to change it now,  just because this one good man spoke french and invited her to galas on his arm.  at least bad men wore their dirty secrets on their sleeves;  with a good man, she was always on her toes,  waiting for the other shoe to drop.

when rita told him she was pregnant,  he offered to marry her    —    she’d cackled long and loud over their meal in his apartment,  which seemed answer enough.  he did not seem torn up by the rejected proposal.  rita liked that about him;  it spoke well of his ego,  that he didn’t flush with anger at being turned down.  he simply took a calm sip of his wine,  then he offered to raise their child alone.  he was a good man,  willing to keep things discreet,  but he insisted upon one thing:  if rita wanted to return to her life following cecily’s birth,  give their daughter to him to raise,  cecily would be his daughter and his alone.  the other shoe dropped, and rita found it dropped in her favor.  she had no use for a child,  she decided  then  &  there;  this was what was best for everyone.

she could pretend nothing happened,  he promised her.  spin whatever story she wished once she returned to britain,  nine months later than expected,  with a french scandal ready to hit the presses.  and he would ask no questions of her.  her daughter would ask no questions of her,  either.  it was a price,  but one rita was more than willing to pay.  her image and her secrecy mattered more to her than motherhood;  she knew this then,  and knew it would always be true.  

three.

cecily grew up an atlas    —    her father wasn’t of one of the  older,  stories  pureblood names in wizarding france,  but he was well respected and well liked.  during her childhood they traveled often as his job as ambassador to the argentinian ministry,  then the swiss ministry,  then the american ministry.

cecily loved her father dearly and considered him her best friend growing up.  she made friends with the children of other diplomats,  of course,  but she always felt like she was play-acting at those friendships.  after all,  all parties involved with them knew they had an expiration date.  right?  she couldn’t have been the only child aware of how fleeting it all was.  most of the friendships didn’t quite feel real to her;  then,  she felt guilty for not finding them real.  then,  she wondered why she couldn’t fall so easily into friendships,  like the other children around her.  maybe it was cynicism,  cecily thought;  maybe there’s something wrong in the way I see things.  

then,  she threw herself into those friendships even as she felt like there was something not quite solid about them.  maybe by wanting solidity,  she could make it appear.  

she tried,  she really did;  cecily read books and wanted desperately to have the sort of best friend all her favorite characters had.  it just didn’t seem to be in the cards for her. people liked her,  but she wasn’t anybody’s best friend.

her father,  at least,  was a constant.  he didn’t seem to notice cecily didn’t have friends,  real friends,  for which cecily was grateful.  they explored the places they lived together,  did as much as they could while working around his schedule.  gabriel considered this part of cecily’s education    —    his daughter would be  thoughtful  &  intelligent,  would come away from all these places knowing their wizarding and muggle culture both.  

though cecily could have begun beauxbatons when she was eight,  her father and her were both content with her attending an american school with the children of the other diplomats.  when she was eleven,  however,  her father thought maybe it was time for her to get serious about her education.  she could have easily attended ilvermorny,  at the time;  the school certainly extended an offer to her.  but both of them decided that beauxbatons was her better option.

four.

part of cecily had always expected beauxbatons to be the place where she finally sunk her roots in and made friends    —    real,  lasting relationships she could carry and cherish for the rest of her life.  but by the time she enrolled,  most of her peers had known each other for years;  no one was outright cruel to her,  but she was an oddity and a mystery despite her attempts to be known.

beauxbatons had an exchange program with ilvermorny.  sometimes cecily dreamed of signing up for it,  and then,  never leaving the american school,  where she knew she’d at least be friendly with some of the students she’d grown up around.

the longer cecily went through school as a loner   ( a nice enough girl,  people’s whispers went,  but she’s a little strange, a little cold, a little full of herself )   the more cecily wondered if there was something wrong with her.  if maybe she just wasn’t cut out to have friends;  she wrote to her father and those old friends from her childhood as constantly as she could get away with before revealing something was wrong.

none of it had felt quite real when she’d been living it,  but cecily began to wonder if those childhood friendships with other diplomats’ children were the  one  &  only  shot she’d had.  no one else seemed to look at her quite right;  at least those friends had liked her.  it seemed like a low bar to cross, but at school,  cecily missed it.  

when she was fifteen she happened on some boys calling her an ice queen,  which stung more than any other cruel thing she’d heard.  surely even an ice queen would have a meager court,  and cecily had nobody.  

she knew part of the problem was her obsession with honesty;  she couldn’t stomach making polite small talk and tossing around inane compliments just to get people to like her,  not when that wasn’t who she was.  she didn’t like wielding brutal honesty    —    she wasn’t mean.  but in cases when it was that,  or a sweetened white lie   …   she’d just shut her mouth,  and sometimes that said haughty more than merciful.

there were other students at beauxbatons who seemed to face more derision than she did,  but none of her felt any kind of relief at that.  if anything,  she thought she should gave expected it,  and that tired her to the bone.  if they were so eager to shun her,  a perfectly  ‘ normal ‘  girl,  with a perfectly acceptable family name,  for holding   ...  what,   slightly different principles?  of course there was hell to pay for larger  ‘ indiscretions. ‘

she was just a girl with a love for the truth,  gifted to her by a father who she knew had never lied to her.  it had never seemed to put people off when she was surrounded by other children who had grown up being treated like adults.  but at beauxbatons,  it felt as if she’d missed a step coming down the stairs;  like she was doing something wrong without even realizing.  all she could do was tumble to the bottom and hope nothing broke.

five.

she wrote letters weekly:  to her father,   to those friends from her youth that hadn’t felt right at the time,  but who now filled cecily with so much longing.  without even realizing it,  cecily found herself turning to words as her solace.  she was wittier on the page than she ever got the chance to be verbally;   clever  &  deft  &  descriptive.  she felt comforted by her words when she read them back to herself before sending owls off to the other side of the world.

soon,  the letters stopped being enough;  she kept writing them,  but turned to a journal,  too.  then she begun sneaking prosier turns of phrase into her assigned essays.  it only took a professor or two complimenting her writing before cecily dove head first into the page like she’d only been waiting for permission.  she used to feel so terribly, terribly alone sitting in the common room with no-one next to her.  now,  she’d set herself in front of the fire and lose herself for hours writing.  she wrote essays and stream-of-consciousness diary entries and poems and snatches of dialogue from a novel she didn’t even know she had inside of her.

for a while she was clumsy with it;  stumbling like someone saved from drowning first landing on the shore.  but she was always so alone    —    she had nothing but time to improve.

by the time she finished beaxbatons, she had finished a novel and refined enough poems and personal essays to fill a dozen books.  she’d made friends with her professors and graduated with honors and knew she’d find a life for herself beyond the castle walls.  plenty of people, she was sure,  didn’t find their true friends until they were adults. she would be just fine.

by then,  she had to tell her father that writing was her passion.  the pair of them didn’t lie to each other    —    they just didn’t.  he knew how much she loved writing,  but didn’t know that she was planning on building a life around it.  something had held cecily back from telling him until the absolute last minute.  but she knew it would have been too big a lie not to tell him now,  to craft some other dream,  some other profession,  some other reason for her not having another career lined up.  she had the test scores and the intellect to do better than idle around,  waiting for her book to get picked up.  still;  she didn’t think of it as idling,  and she knew in fact that it’d be worth it.  

he took it well enough;  it didn’t change much of their comfort-worn dynamic,  and he made sure cecily knew that she had his support.  but still, cecily could see something in him,  like he was remembering or thinking hard,  when he thought she wasn’t looking.

six.

it took a year post-grad of constantly editing and paring her book of creative non-fiction down to a sharp finish.  then,  it took two more years to see it published.  she took on a literary agent and knew once her book was out,  readers would be interested in tales and musings on her life as a diplomat’s child in a world post-voldemort.  she was fluent in french and english both,  thanks to her years spent in america,  and she insisted on translating the french to english herself.

when her book was released,  it was with minimal fanfare and a handful of ebullient praise in the reviews.  most congratulations came from her former professors and some beauxbatons alums who,  apparently,  hadn’t actually had anything against cecily.  they just hadn’t liked her enough to keep her from feeling alone.  her old friends from her childhood in america wrote to thank cecily for the copies she sent them personally;  her father wrote to tell cecily how proud he was.

she did a small book tour through wizarding france,  then wizarding america,  before finishing it up in britain.  she wasn’t expecting the british leg of her tour to be anything more special than france and america had been    —    after all, she actually knew people in france and america.  she didn’t know anybody in britain well enough to think they’d turn out to hear her do a reading and snag a signed copy of the first edition.

so, imagine her shock when an older woman,  with hair the same shade of blonde as cecily had always dyed hers,  was waiting for cecily in the back of flourish & blotts an hour before her reading was set to begin.

seven.

rita skeeter didn’t quite turn cecily’s stomach,  but it was a near thing.  the woman wearing bottle green hugged cecily to her chest the moment she saw her.  cecily had been raised unfailingly polite in the diplomatic world of her father    —    that was the only thing that kept her from shoving this stranger off of her.  that,  and the camera man the woman had trailing after her.  she had a sinking suspicion she knew where this encounter was headed.  rita pinched cecily’s cheek and promised that they’d have drinks and dinner once cecily’s  ‘little event’  was over.

over drinks and dinner,  rita revealed what cecily suspected    —     she was her mother,  whose existence cecily had never once wondered about in all her life.  her father had always been more than enough for her.  cecily was, above all else, honest. so she told rita as much:  that she had never  wondered or cared  about the identity of her mother. 

the woman seemed insulted,  almost,  which cecily thought was rich coming from someone who never sought out her child.  she had a wonderful poker face, though; a split second of insult was quickly covered by a slick smile and false warmth.

cecily wondered both how her father had met this woman and why he had never warned cecily of her.

rita had a proposition for cecily,  based on the apparent success of cecily’s book.  she thought it would do wonders for both of their careers if they revealed themselves to be mother  &  daughter.  she left cecily with a business card,  telling her to think about it before giving an answer.  most of cecily wanted to give an answer then and there:  a resounding thanks,  but no thanks.

instead,  she sat on it.  she called her father that very night    —    this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to wait on owls for.  he assured cecily had never thought he was keeping some great secret from her by not revealing who her mother was,  and cecily believed him.  well,  she believed that he had never thought of it that way.  it certainly stung that he hadn’t ever told cecily her whole truth.  but if she’d ever spared a second to wonder about her biological mother,  she might have been more hurt by the revelation.  as it was, cecily was more puzzled than anything else.  rita was an equation cecily couldn’t quite solve,  not even with her father on the other end of the line.  he didn’t try and dissuade her from taking rita’s offer,  but then,  he’d always let cecily make her own choices.

just once,  she wanted someone else to take direction of her life.  she was twenty one and bone tired,  all of a sudden.

eight.

her father was still in america;  it wasn’t like she’d left any friends behind when she embarked on her book tour.  there was nothing calling her back home to france.  cecily extended her stay in london for one extra week,  then another,  mulling over what it would mean to link herself to rita skeeter.  she didn’t think her career needed it;  cecily wasn’t vain,  not really,  but she was greeting minor acclaim and could see that only growing the longer she worked at her writing.  she had visions of a novel on the horizon,  vague ideas of a book of poetry,  the thought of turning to journalism one day.

cecily had lived so long with words as her only companion,  and she knew that it would pay off for her now,  if she let it.  she wanted   …   something more than she’d always had.  something more than frustration,  and loneliness.  part of her knew that her father had always thought she’d do well in the diplomatic world he’d always called his own,  but cecily wasn’t so sure.  people had to like you for that sort of job.  to be a writer,  people only had to like the things you said.  

she read over the highlights of rita’s body of work with a speed that shocked cecily herself.  rita had been tight - lipped about her motivations in seeking cecily out;  but cecily was hungry for the truth,  and knew it could be uncovered if she cared to look. if she was considering this   ( and she told herself she wasn’t, really!  but she was.  she knew she was )  she needed to know what it meant;  she needed a firmer grasp on what,  exactly,  the skeeter legacy was.    

half of cecily was horrified at some of the things her  ‘ mother ‘  had written,  the sensationalized stories that seemed  sharp-toothed and mean  in spite of any traces of honesty.  cecily valued honesty,  yes,  and truth;  she believed there were things people had a right to know.  but she believed there were proper ways to say those things,  as well.  she didn’t believe every truth needed to be shared with malice. 

so,  part of her was horrified.  but the rest of her wondered what it meant that the woman was so eager to tie herself to cecily,  whose own prose was made of soft clarity and introspection.  perhaps,  rita wanted to change;  maybe she read cecily’s writing and thought,  this is what we could be now.  or perhaps she just saw an opportunity shaped like a pretty,  young daughter,  and decided to seize it.  cecily never asked rita,  and figured the reasoning didn’t matter.  

no matter how hard cecily tried,  she couldn’t see any trace of her mother in her own writing.  and that was a relief.  it made her wonder what it would look like,  rehabilitating her mother’s last name.

more than anything,  cecily just knew she had nothing to lose.  that had been the case for most of her life,  true,  but she’d never been faced with a risk like this before.  

cecily called up the number on her mother’s business card and said she’d do it:  she’d oust herself as a skeeter and see where that took them,  so long as rita promised to never,  ever touch cecily’s work.  rita made the promise with a seriousness cecily was nearly inclined to believe.

nine.

rita skeeter didn’t have scandals,  but when she did,  she broke the story herself:  not even a week after cecily agreed to rita’s proposition,  rita published a story proclaiming new french writer cecily atlas was actually cecily skeeter.  cecily was startled to see her own freckled face peering seriously off the front page of gossip magazines in the following days.  she wondered,  constantly,  if she was making the right choice.  her old friends from her childhood in america wrote to ask cecily if it was true;  her father wrote to tell cecily he’d still stand behind her no matter what.

she couldn’t quite ignore the part of her that was still the  bright,  hopeful  girl who had always wanted people to want to know her,  to see beneath the still face and unwavering voice.  she’d always been cecily atlas,  and cecily atlas had always been alone.  nothing fundamental about her had changed with this decision,  but wearing a different name felt liberating.  she’d never been  cecily skeeter  before    —    maybe that girl would have an easier time of it.  maybe that girl could make friends,  and a life for herself,  and never once feel so alone she ached with it. 

she decided to stay in london for the time being.  the wizarding world there offered a breadth of people who only knew what she’d written of herself,  who had no idea that she was hard to love.  it was intoxicating;  her loneliness at beauxbatons felt lifetimes away.  occasionally,  she made appearances with her mother;  a publicity stunt to remind everyone that,  for all they were inclined to deride rita for her work,  writing was in the skeeter family’s blood.  

there was a sort of fame waiting for cecily;  the sort that came with watchful eyes,  curious of her every step.  rita assured cecily that no one had to know a thing about her that she didn’t tell them.  cecily felt uncomfortable with the assurance   —   she didn’t love that this woman that barely knew her knew exactly what cecily needed to hear.  it was like their hair;  cecily had lightened her naturally dark - brown hair to a honeyed blonde since she was thirteen years old.  when she met rita,  it was clear she was no natural blonde,  either.  cecily noticed this,  uncomfortably;  went out and bought a box of dark brown hair dye and never looked back.  

what did it say?  that cecily’s mother made something in her stomach come unsettled,  but that there were all these little similarities between them?  cecily had always put more stock in nurture than nature,  but rita made her question if things were ever anything but predestined.  

cecily wrote to her father and childhood friends still,  but she no longer felt the need to write so frequently.  she’d made this choice;  she wanted to commit to it.  she wanted to embrace the breadth of new possibilities in her life.  instead,  she threw herself into her work,  finding no shortage of jobs as people waited to see what rita skeeter’s daughter would do.

she began slow work on a novel,  returned to poetry now and again.  and in the meantime,  she revisited the notion of journalism she’d toyed with before her creative non-fiction took center stage.  cecily took to freelancing for a few publications    —    found her name published   again  &  again   in op-eds and serious news work in her flowing prose. with her devotion to honesty and her love affair with deft turns of phrase,  her writing was quite different from her mother’s.  for every dozen articles she published herself,  she saw a half - dozen others dissecting the difference between the two skeeter women.

she made herself make peace with that.  

ten.

with the shocking string of deaths in and around the ministry,  it became hard for cecily to keep her mind on finishing fluff pieces and the first draft of her novel.  so rarely has cecily ever felt like she belonged somewhere;  she’d always been transient,  isolated.  she was twenty five and felt like she scarcely knew how to care for a plac,  or a people.  she never wanted to blame her father for anything,  not even know that she was grown past seeing him as her only friend    —    but she wondered if he shouldn’t have wanted so badly to have an independent child.   maybe he should have pushed her towards friendships,  and making roots.  

maybe,  if she’d gone to  ilvermorny over beauxbatons,  her adolescence wouldn’t have been so lonely.  she might not have turned to her writing, then;  not so eagerly,  or at least,  not so young.  but she wouldn’t have felt like she was on the brink of something she didn’t understand when war broke out. 

if she was being honest;  and cecily almost always was,  with herself    —    she hadn’t called london home long enough to really belong there,  either.  but cecily decided she wanted to belong.  she didn’t want to see this new life of hers torn asunder by a war and all the death it brought.  she’d decided way back when she first met rita,  that it was up to her to reclaim the skeeter name.  now was the perfect time to do so.  

she knew her mother wasn’t going to take the war as a sign to turn to hard - hitting truth.  hell,  cecily knew that plenty of publications in wixen britain weren’t all that dedicated to hard - hitting truth,  themselves.  she’d had one too many ask her to write a scathing human interest piece in the style of her mother to feel   …  convinced of much journalistic integrity.  but she believed the people were owed that truth,  and she felt inclined to try and give it to them.  

in cecily’s mind,  writing was beholden to the truth;  if you asked her,  even people’s fiction contained honest words that they could not,  and should not,  try to edit out.  it was hard to be impartial when your words were so tied to yourself,  but in her journalism,  cecily tried;  she wouldn’t join the order,  or the ministry,  or the death eaters,  or any other rising faction on the horizon.  but she’d do what she could to work against the order’s opposition   —   those people who looked at the wixen community and decided they knew who belonged.