Sean and Kaycee's Hogwarts Highlights

Sean's seventh year

" And I was happy. It seemed to me that the crazy crowded bright hot shelter was a beautiful place. I thought, 'this is the second battlefield. The battle now is going on over the helpless bodies of these men. It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real enemies.' "
                              ~blind, Mary Borden

A/n: Mary Borden was a nurse during the first world war, who wrote down her experiences in a series of short stories. This particular part has always fascinated me, because I'd never thought about 'the aftermath' of anything, really, as a 'second battlefield'.
Somewhere halfway during the process of writing this chapter, I realised that I'd subconsciously chosen to focus on the quiet moments, rather than the big canon ones, but I was okay with this being a collection of mostly quiet moments. I hope you'll enjoy reading them.

*****

Summer

"How do I look?"

She was swirling around the room, the skirt of her bright yellow dress flaring out, and he knew it was her subtle way of teasing him about what was underneath that skirt. In any other circumstance, it probably would've worked, his girlfriend was gorgeous after all, but today, his brain was clouded with worries that were most definitely too heavy for a 17-year-old boy.

"Breathtaking, as always. Kaycee, don't go."

She promptly stopped swirling, her smile vanishing as snow does under the sun.

"Sean, no, we've talked about this already. We're not going to fight about this again, are we? I don't....I don't want a fight to be the last verbal exchange we have and right now, every word could be the last one. You know I can sense it."

He closed his eyes, as if to protect himself against the truthfulness of her words. He didn't wish for a repeat of last Thursday. No, it was just that since that night, nightmares had been plaguing him, forcing him to tiptoe to Ginny's room, in the middle of the night, hoping no one would catch him creeping around the house. The only thing he wanted to do was check on Kaycee and her sister anyway, but he doubted Mrs. Weasley would believe that, coming from a teenage boy with a girlfriend who, coincidentally, lived under the same roof.

Last Thursday was the night Hermione, Ron and Harry had agreed to take Kaycee with them on the horcrux hunt -as she requested- because the extra, now trained capacity of her mind could be handy, and therefore, it was the night of their first ever fight as a couple. He had ignored her at first, not knowing how to deal with the thought of losing her for an unknown amount of time. He hadn't been ready to let her go. After the ignoring, he'd gone to yelling, throwing all his fears like daggers in her face, not even stopping when tears were streaming down her face and her upper lip was trembling. When he had finally stopped yelling, he'd crumpled down, and she had, too, there in that small, stuffy room on the second floor of the Burrow.
He'd been stupid enough to assume she wouldn't go, since she had broken down then as well, but when he had voiced that thought, she'd suddenly stood up, raging, making heated hand gestures and screaming in such a pitchy tone that he was convinced someone would come and check on them within 10 seconds. Kaycee had stormed out of the room and hadn't said anything to him at first. Gradually though, she'd started acting normal again, and so they didn't speak about it anymore. But now, barely 4 days later, he still hadn't been able to let go of all his fright. An icy blanket had seemingly wrapped itself around his chest since that evening. He remembered Kaycee once comparing her actual blanket to a prison, and thought bitterly that she couldn't have been more accurate.