No Sense in Heaven

He wakes the minute she crosses the threshold into his room--he doesn't sleep soundly anymore, not after he saw how they took Edgar Bones and his family. His hand is tightening around the wand kept under his pillow when he recognizes her silhouette in the doorframe.

Sturgis doubts there are any Death Eaters ambling around eight months pregnant; Bella Black never quite struck him as the maternal type.

"Hestia, what is it? Is something wrong?"

Her reply is a wordless sniffle and he steels himself; another midnight mood swing, god help him. "C'mere, Hestia," he beckons, shuffling over in bed to make room for her. She maneuvers herself into the bed and curls up on her side, readjusting the nightgown tangling up between her knees.

She's quiet for a few minutes, and he silently hopes she'll just fall asleep. He feels bad about it, but all the same--Hestia gets unreasonable, sometimes. And it's not her fault, but he shouldn't be the one getting woken in the wee hours of morning to deal with it.

He always thinks this. And he always feels wretched for thinking it; Caradoc is the man that should be cuddling Hestia up and dealing with all the ups and midnight downs of her pregnancy. He should be here, in Sturgis' place, and damned happy about it all.

But he's not, and the guilt that inevitably follows Sturgis' impatience and frustration catches up to him.

And just in time; Hestia starts to cry.

And, in the simple timbre of her tears, he knows that this is not the same. This is not the familiar moodswings, a hormonal sweep of irrational emotion like he's been dealing with. This is something else all together.

His arms go around her and she sobs into his elbow as he hugs her to him, her back to his chest in the only embrace physically feasible in this late state of her pregnancy.

"Do you think they're happy?" she manages to gasp through the sobs that roll from her chest like choppy waves.

"Is who happy, sweetheart?" Sturgis asks, rubbing her arm soothingly.

"Caradoc and his wife? Because he's dead now, I'm sure, and now they're together...do you think they're happy in heaven?"

What an awful, painful question she asks, this girl left behind. Sturgis doesn't have an answer--doesn't really need one, Hestia's in the midst of her own monologue in the scant comfort of her best friend's arms.

"I think they are, and I think I'm a terrible person because I can't stand that. I can't fucking stand it." She trembles, with rage or grief or something melded between. "How the fuck is this my life, Sturgis?" There's a long pause, but she's not waiting for him to speak. She's finding her own words.

"It's not fair," she grates into his arm--he can feel her teeth clenched hard.

He shakes his head in agreement, whispers a 'no'; isn't that one thing they've all learned so well, the ephemeral quality of fair. "He loved you, Hestia, don't think he didn't."

She's quiet; when she speaks, her voice is carefully cut away from the misery he can nearly feel welling up inside her. "I know he did, but he loved me because she wasn't here to love him back. And I was. I was here. I am here. And he's there. With her. And I'm here. Here." Her short sentences are a staccato rhythm in the dark, her head nods to punctuate each short flip of speech. "So, what am I now? Just the last, not the first, just the left behind. Not the wife, just the knocked-up girlfriend. It was an accident, too. And he loved me but what does that matter because he loved her too, and he loved her first! And I could make myself feel better before, I could look at her picture and like her because it was all well and good that she was so kind and lovely because she was somewhere else and Caradoc was mine. I had that, but now I don't."

He holds her closer in the dark because the misery and pain is melting her down--the baby kicks under his arm and he starts, still unable to grow used to the idea of an extra little person in the room. "I feel like he ran out on me, isn't that awful? Like he just picked up and left me pregnant to run off with his dead wife, isn't that stupid? I feel like he had a choice and he just picked her! He went off to die and go be with her and left me alone to raise his accidental daughter!"

And it's all wrong. But Sturgis can't find the words to say that to her. Caradoc would've--had laid down his life for Hestia, loved her in every way he should have. Caradoc was not a man who would dwell on dreams and dead possibility. Caradoc had loved her, loved her and this daughter more than his own life--they had been his very life. Sturgis had seen the ring Caradoc was planning to give Hestia--it's lost along with him, and he doesn't tell Hestia because he's sure that, without the diamond proof, she'll just think it some empty reach at comforting her.

But it's still Sturgis curling up with Hestia in rainy November and not Caradoc.

"I don't think heaven works like that, sweetheart," he says into the silence that Hestia's let settle down on them. "I hope it doesn't, anyway--wouldn't be much of a heaven like that, losing what we loved." Her breathing changes tempo--she's listening, stilling herself into stone to catch his words and cling to them. "It must be something different than that...maybe some kind of love without possession. You can belong to everyone at once, love everyone perfectly."

"What is love without possession? To love what you can't hold in your arms is just pain. Sounds like hell, not heaven, it doesn't make sense," Hestia whispers, desperation to believe warring with her rigidly ordered logic.

"Then maybe there's no sense in heaven," Sturgis says firmly.

This seems to sit better with Hestia than anything he's said yet. "No sense in heaven," she echoes back to him. "He always laughed with me when I'd done something silly; I'd say something like 'have I no sense at all?' and he'd say 'no, you have logic, not sense!' and he loved me for it." She pauses, long. "I just have this picture of dying someday--being in heaven with a baby in my arms or a little girl clinging to my robes or even a grown woman standing next to me and he won't be able to spare a glance for us, because we're just..."

"Then I'll come and stand by you. You're all the heaven I've got, sweetheart, so don't worry about that. "

There aren't any more words for him to say for her, because he is only Sturgis Podmore and not Caradoc Dearborn. She hugs his arms closer around her. "We'll be each other's heaven, then."

She falls asleep a few minutes later, comforted by the words. He follows her a few minutes later. He thinks as he fades that they wouldn't make such a bad heaven, at all, and that any heaven lacking Hestia would be truly lacking, indeed.

I know, I know, I said I was gone. And I'm leaving in the morning, but James the Laptop is in some semblance of order! I have internet and he only locks up maybe once a day! I'm hoping that this will prove adequate, as I just need to get through this last year of undergraduate education before I pull out my law school loans and can "afford" a MacBook.

Also, this as well as another one-shot in production was influenced, strangely, by the Bible. I'm not especially religious, but I am in love with some of the poetry (Song of Songs, especially) in the book. I randomly flipped across Matthew 22, which deals with the issue of spouses in heaven, and that we "neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." I find this absolutely beautiful, and it fills in so well to my conception of heaven/afterlife in general and as I apply it to my writing.

The other piece I'm working on will probably take a bit longer due to it being a Severus Snape/Lily Evans piece and it's gonna be a first time for me getting in their heads. So look out for that sometime soon!