#cxradocdearborn

Dorcas had never felt so miserable -- and the fact she looked it, too, was no consolation. Still dressed in the bedraggled, blackened remnants of her once-so-lovely phoenix costume she sat, knees up to her nose, toes dangling off the edge of the couch on which she perched, and waited for judgement. The orange paste smeared across her burns didn’t precisely itch as it restored her blistered skin, but it did smell strongly of marigolds and flobberworm mucus, which was not, in Dorcas’s estimation, a pleasant combination.

The souring effects of guilt probably did nothing to improve it.

She should have been in bed hours ago, but she had been told to report to Order headquarters as soon as she felt well enough to walk -- so here she sat in a long hallway of the Potter Estate, waiting for Moody or Dumbledore or Alice or someone to call her in to talk about what she’d done. The gray light of predawn streaking the walls made the whole world feel liminal and half-formed. Dorcas raised a shaky hand into the thin beam and turned it back and forth, studying the way it washed the color from skin and paste alike to leave her hand looking as gray as she felt. She folded it back over her knees when she realized it was trembling.

She should have been in bed hours ago -- but she wouldn’t have been able to sleep, anyway. The sights and sounds of yesterday evening kept unrolling like a screen across her mind whenever she closed her eyes, hot and fresh and heavy. She didn’t understand. The plan had been so good. How had it gone so wrong?

The sound of a door opening jerked her from her reverie and she looked up, orange cheeks glistening. She didn’t realize that the paste had been scoured away in two thin tear tracks, giving her a hollow jagged look -- or maybe that was caused by guilt, too.

The guilt sank into her stomach like a block of ice when she saw who’d walked into the dim hallway that was hosting her penance: Caradoc Dearborn, dried blood on his robes and sticking plasters covering wounds that he apparently hadn’t had time to see a Healer for yet. Dorcas was terribly afraid that she knew why he had been in such a rush; was terribly afraid that she knew exactly what was coming next...

“Um,” she said. Her mouth was dry. She couldn’t meet his eyes. “Are you okay?"

Oh, come on, you know this one. You weren’t that drunk (were you drunk at all?) … I was, like, nineteen and I’d never been to a Halloween that wasn’t part of Hogwarts, you know. Because my parents are fuck-all weird about it. 

Think about your soul, Courage! All that dreck.

Anyway, so I’ve never been out and it turns out I’m not working that day so what am I going to do? Fuck all if I know.

So I’m, like, pretending to be American and mainlining sugar with way too much glitter and not enough pants and… fuck, do you remember how this goes? I think I might have ascended for a while there. Anyway. I introduced you to some of the best movies ever. Some bonified greatness. 

Lots of zombies, though, and a few werewolves. I think we might have stopped by one house for trick or treat and got a potato for it.

29. You Tried To Kill Me Once & 33. Battle Pack (We Fight So Well Together) 

If anyone had asked Dorcas to choose a partner to walk into battle beside, she would not have named Caradoc Dearborn – not until after she fought by his side, anyway.

It wasn’t that Dorcas had expected him to be a poor wizard (he was a Hufflepuff, after all, and House Loyalty demanded that she at least assume him to be adequate until potentially proven otherwise) but he was so stiff all the time…she had thought he would be the same in a fight: too unbending, too dull, too prone to debate over action to be of much use in the fast-paced and frenetic world a magical duel.

She had been wrong…as she discovered to her chagrin and horror when a spell that had been meant for a Death Eater came perilously close to taking Caradoc’s head off his shoulders instead. It wasn’t that Dorcas hadn’t been watching where she’d been casting; she just hadn’t expected Caradoc to be so fast! so nimble! so right there in front of her…

Fortunately he had proved just as adept at dealing with friendly fire as at deflecting that of the Death Eaters, and had taken her hex slantwise on his Shield Charm and tossed it right into the thickest part of the cloud of black robes and silver masks assailing them. Dorcas had been relieved (imagine if one of her first fights for the Order had had the end result of killing one of her own allies!) and more than that: she had been impressed.

Apparently so had Caradoc, because along with the short-but-stiff-but-well-deserved lecture about watching where she was throwing those spells he delivered after the fight – he also complimented her on her jinxing. Said it had been a particularly well-turned example of a joint-reveal hex. Said he thought she had a knack for this sort of thing…if she could keep her head in the game and her spells away from her own side in future, please.

(For once, Dorcas hadn’t objected to the reprimand; sickened by the near-miss she had nodded fervently and stumbled her way through seven disjointed apologies spun into one incoherent mess of remorse. Not her finest hour…but not her worst, either.)

From then on, she’d approached any battle fought at Caradoc’s side gleefully. They didn’t see eye-to-eye on most anything…but in a fight? In a fight, they proved that Hufflepuff Unity wasn’t just empty words, wasn’t just House Bravado talking a load of hot air. Dorcas was reckless and wild and unpolished; Caradoc was smooth and steady and strong. There wasn’t anything synchronized about their fighting styles – but balance?

Everything that made them so contradictory, so opposed, off the field only made them more suited to compliment one another in a fight. It was almost too convenient, how well their skills and styles meshed on the battlefield.

Dorcas still thinks he’s a stiff old stick-in-the-mud…but. But he’s got more fire hiding behind that cool expression than he likes to let on, doesn’t he? But she sometimes thinks she almost catches him smiling at her when nobody’s looking. But he’s faster on his wand than she is on her and given how quick Dorcas is to dive into anything, that’s saying something. But he’s as good in a fight as anybody and better than most. But he lost his mother to the Death Eaters…he might be ready to do more than talk.