Ten years after I began at Hogwarts, Sebastian Sallow is back. And he's Professor Sallow now. He disappeared after the fall of Ranrok and Rookwood, after I lost Professor Fig, and after Ominis and I couldn't keep him from losing himself. But I never...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"April, darling," I hear Sebastian whisper, urging me quietly awake and lightly scratching along my snout. "There you are!" he coos sweetly as I blink my eyes open to the low light of our room, curled up in a ball on the bed. "You can change back if you'd like," he says with a soft voice between scratches. "We're home. Quite alone." With an earnest, but tired smile he adds, "and it feels a little strange for me to feel so enamored with a tiny animal..."
I stand on all fours and stretch my body, cracking my spine and shaking my head before I muster the dregs of reserve energy I have to return to my human form. As my body expands again, so does my mind. It's flooded with the harsh realities of the evening and I nearly fold beneath the weight of it all. And with Sebastian kneeling on the floor before me at the foot of the bed, I can't help but feel an extra flood of emotion for what he must be feeling, too – reuniting with his sister on top of everything else we've experienced.
It's so much.
Tears crest and fall from my eyes with shocking immediacy as I wordlessly adjust to sitting, hanging my legs over the foot of the bed where Sebastian kneels. My hands find their way behind his head, holding to him like an anchor. His eyes go wide as they work their way up and down my body and I do the same, each of us finally able to fully comprehend the battered physical state of the other.
A subtle, soft mist of dried blood is cast across his skin that must not have been as obvious in the dim light of the cottage when it was more fresh. Or perhaps I, and everyone else, mistook it for dirt at the time. I don't know how to feel about the fact that it makes him look somber and dreadful but powerful and sosexy. Yet, more quiet tears fall from my eyes to think of why he looks this way, as my legs tighten together to stave off the desire that burns within me at the thought of my strong, merciless defender.
How does such carnage make me feel like this?
Yet with the most merciful hand, Sebastian reaches to my face from his kneeling position below, brushing my hair aside, and my heart softens as intermittent, silent tears begin to escape from his eyes in tandem with mine: a stark contrast from the hard-edged perversity he might have shown in a situation like this in his youth. His brows furrow with tenderness and concern as he looks to my shoulder and then to my leg, each completely healed but surrounded by torn clothing, soaked with dried blood.
I follow his gaze as I watch him reach towards my neck to trace the bruises I can feel rising around my throat and the first audible sob escapes him, more generous than any of the streams of tears that have soundlessly fled thus far. His arms wrap around my waist as he collapses into my lap, and I cave myself across him. For long minutes, I am surprised but comforted as we weep together – something I rarely allow myself to do, let alone in the presence of another – and the grief for the weight of the last few hours swells as though from the coldest depths of the ocean, dissipating all of its stress from our mutual witnessing of it.
As my soft, halting sobs shift into timid gusts of laughter I realize that somewhere in the wilderness of my sadness, I have stepped across the line into the absurd. The ridiculousness of what transpired this evening is almost as amusing as it is horrifying. Two silly kids profess their lifelong love. Then some human animal and some goblin animal take advantage of a thestral animal, all of us just steps above our primal state in the grand scheme of evolution, and Sebastian and I – animals, alike – come in to play at 'morality.' Add to that the extraneousness of the misunderstandings and drama in our little family's circle. And looking at the futility of it in context of the massive, spinning universe is laughable.
