Return of Sebastian Sallow | 10 Yr After Hogwarts

Chapter 118: I Once Was Lost

"Hospital Wing?" Anne asks, eyeing me. She is sitting on the other side of April, leaning over the table to speak with me, her legs bouncing with nervous energy whilst I finish the last few bites of roast and potatoes as an overextended Defense Against the Dark Arts professor is wont to do.

"You can't go being impatient with me when I was the one who wanted to skip dinner in the first place!" I say, defensively, putting my hands up as if to prove my innocence and nodding to April. "This was her idea."

"Hey, calm down!" April chides back with a grin, our mutual sense of sarcastic irony providing the thin but solid barrier between my desire to collapse into her for the night and my desire to help Ominis. "I didn't force you to do anything, Bash!" She puts her hand on her chin and furrows her brow playfully as she posits, "it's just this old wive's tale I've heard? They say human bodies do a little better with this stuff called 'water' and 'calories' and 'nutrients?' And I just figured if we're going to do this thing, we owe him our best shot? Which includes having a modicum of quality energy?"

In the few seconds that pass while I chuckle along with Anne and April and finish the last bite of my meal, a whole mountain of thought rises up through the ever-threatening fissures of my mind.

April has a point. I haven't thought much about it, given everything that needs doing. But all of us have been working tirelessly for Ominis' sake, both visiting and working on solutions for restoring him. And I'm desperate to help April prepare for Helvig's arrival – trying to condense years of focused, tireless work into the pockets of time we have found to discuss and practice the methods I've learned for stillness, acceptance, and ultimately release of the effects of the two unforgivables. Add on the early mornings spent in the basement of the Ministry of Magic, trying to connect all the dots of what has been surrounding us all while utilizing the resources available to the Department of Mysteries. Not to mention that 've tended to my Defense Against the Dark Arts students, Sharp to his potions classes, April to her Magical Theory classes, and both she and Thiago have covered transfiguration since his recovery.

In short: too many consecutive days of over-working, hardly sleeping and skipping meals. It's objectively unsustainable, but it reminds me of periods of intense training in my past, some of which were worse, and all of which I survived.

But I don't have to live like that anymore.

It's a difficult thing to remind myself. But April's patience and kindness have begun to transform me in ways I could never have anticipated. Ever since I learned she both accepts and more-or-less supports the choices I made so long ago, I've been wondering, lately, if perhaps I've paid my penance. And the partner she has become to me has me wondering if regular suffering is no longer necessary to temper me when I have her shoulders to lean on and to help bear the heavy weight of overwhelm when it comes to rest upon my shoulders.

It seems my problem was always that I denied myself from having her when, in fact, she was what was missing all along.

"Sebastian?" Anne asks with a sly grin, calling my attention back to the present. She smirks towards April and then towards me in a way that makes me feel suddenly terrified of what will happen to me when the two of them become real friends – something that seems to be happening. It's also something I've always hoped for but never thought would happen, and so have never faced the question of 'then what?'

Given how close they both are with Ominis, too, I suspect it means becoming an occasional-to-frequent punching bag and third wheel to my own relationships. There are worse problems to have, I suppose.