The Art of An Ending

Chapter Three: The Ask and the Answer

"Erica, what are you doing?" Avery asked as she vanished several of the now-empty cardboard boxes she had been sorting through and glared at a growing stack of leather-bound journals.

She heaved another box up onto the coffee table, which had finally become visible again, and opened it, beginning to sort through the contents quickly.

"Contemplating the many ways I may die before the illness gets me," she told him without looking up. "I think my favourite so far is falling down the marble staircase at Hogwarts and breaking my neck on the last step, but that's probably because I have a peculiar fascination with falling downstairs in general that results in many fantasies of pushing people down them. Fred wrote a whole paper about it once. It was quite interesting. We hid it in Hogwarts library among the stacks on memory charms."

"Entrail-expelling curse to the back," came his reply, and she was glad he didn't question the morbidity of her thoughts. "The who is the fun part. Imagine it was Flitwick."

"I'm fairly certain he'd cry," Erica snorted slightly, sighing as she added another few stacks of journals to the pile, spelled the rest of the contents of the box to the appropriate place and then vanished the cardboard remains. "That's the last one."

"As much as I appreciate the relative cleanliness of my flat now that you've sorted through all your junk and the riveting conversation about death, you still didn't really answer my question."

He placed his hand over the journals as she went to move them from the coffee table. She glared at him for a moment, and he removed his hand with a sigh, watching as she took the top book from the pile and then shrank down the rest to a more manageable size. There were twenty in all, not counting the book she had removed, and she placed them all carefully into a small canvas bag she had placed an undetectable enlargement charm on earlier, stacking them all up neatly. It wasn't until she was finished and had closed the bag that she replied to Avery.

"I'm going to take all of the journals that my father ever wrote to me and shove them back in his face as I demand an explanation as to why he wrote them in the first place, why he had me, and why he married a Muggle. I'm still figuring out the phrasing and how I'm going to survive the reaction enough to hear his answers, but I'm pretty positive about how it'll go in the end."

"That's a suicide mission and you know it," Avery shook his head, before cracking a twisted sort of smirk and huffing out a laugh, "A likely way for you die; ask the Dark Lord annoying questions."

"I'll give you that one. It's no good telling everyone that I'm off limits if he gets pissed enough to kill me himself. Sort of defeats the objective of making me untouchable," she laughed with him, standing up with a small groan and stretching her arms above her head before glancing over at him where he stood beside her, a sly grin spreading across her lips. "You got a sharp knife I could borrow?"

"This went from talks of mere annoyance to treason in 0.2 seconds," he sighed, but there was a definite note of worry in his voice now as he ran his hand through his hair and turned on his heel, making his way back to the bedroom.

She followed him, practically bouncing on her feet as she called after him in a lilting voice.

"It's not like I'm actually planning on killing him. My father appreciates bravery and cunning-"

"When it isn't directed at him," Avery cut her off angrily as he stalked over to his bedside table and began to rifle through the middle drawer. "You're crazy and you're going to get hurt."

"I trust that you'll patch me up again," she laughed as she collapsed back across his bed, staring up at the ceiling as he continued to search for whatever he was looking for.