WHO: Therese Bonaccord & Axe Brookstanton
WHAT: Something that escalates very quickly
WHERE: Kestrel locker room
WHEN: Today

She had waited patiently for practice to be over, reading a book in the lobby of Kestrels Stadium until the hour struck. It had taken a lot of strength to keep her distance this past week (though it was helped by some minor inconveniences), but seeing as her own dirty history had recently been spread in public, though not to the intimacy of Rupert’s, Therese knew that some time to one’s self was beneficial. She shut her book and rested it on her lap as the first of the Kestrels exited. With the season coming to a close, they all looked ragged and exhausted. Charlie Spinnet spotted her at once, and true to his nature he divulged his worry and concern for his captain as the rest of his team left, lingering to eavesdrop for a moment before departing. He went on about how he felt guilty for keeping a bit of distance from Rupert these last few weeks because of some personal issues, claiming that he didn’t really know what to say----

Therese had to cut him off before the chatter became a therapy session and eyed his security badge. Charlie had no problem letting her take it, and instead of waiting for Rupert to leave or having him heading out through some alternative route, she started her way down to the locker room. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t walked these corridors before, she knew a lot of the staff of the stadiums of the various teams, but Therese always had some professional reason to be there. Today was all personal, so she forced herself to keep her look of worry and concern at a minimum when she pushed into the locker room. Charlie had seen his captain there last, and hopefully she wasn’t too late.

“Rupert?” she called out tentatively, stepping in and shutting the door behind her.

It was not, in fact, possible to drown one's self in the shower, though Axe had given it his all earlier in the week.

Yes, his life had changed irrevocably at six years old. Remembering Rupert Weiss was as if remembering a hazy dream after a long, fitful slumber, so many years and so much had come to pass. But he had never once been allowed to forget where he had come from by the people he'd wished so badly to belong to. His only consolation was that the world believed he did, because it had been his step-mother's wish to hide his past. That one small fact, that they wished to protect that knowledge, and by extension him, had been a balm.

No article written about him, nothing published, could spook him. In fact, he had a vindictive pleasure at being important enough to be talked about, a feeling which lingered even after his forced hiatus, though he never again pursued such attention. Axe built himself up to be the image he'd always imagined he deserved, to what should have been his birthright. After paying for the sins of the father, so to speak, he deserved a new identity, and he had worked hard to cultivate one, dubious as that might seem. Other people might not have viewed The Tattler as so devastating, but the violation of privacy, to have all the carefully placed smoke and mirrors whisked away… To be so thoroughly unmade, for a person like Axe, who strove to appear as blasé and untouchable as he did, it was truly the world and his worth wrecked in a single blow.

He knew his brother had been responsible for this, knew he'd somehow added to the sick little game he had Axe playing, but he couldn't prove it. His father assumed it had been he responsible for this breach in privacy, and even his step-mother seemed inclined to agree. Then to see Broadmoor, of all the people in the world, defending him in the tabloid debacle—

Yes, he'd certainly attempted a drowning in the shower.

He'd shrugged into fresh robes and lingered in the empty locker room, unable to think of a good reason to move. Axe toweled his hair absently, but the spiky array had already dried and he'd abandoned the towel to the far end of the bench. As he tossed it, he heard the sound of someone approaching, causing him to immediately tense. It wasn't her voice that tipped him off to the identity of his visitor, but how she addressed him, as those who favoured his prenom were few and far-between. Axe laughed dryly to himself, wondering how he could have believed himself to be a new man when his life was unraveled a little with every use of his name.

Gritting his teeth for a second, he turned to face Therese, lacing his fingers behind his head and leaning against a locker. "Chère," he greeted. "This is unexpected."

“I was in the neighborhood.”

She frowned, feeling as if ‘unexpected’ was a bad thing, though they’d never been a pair for schedules and arrangements. It made her wonder if she’d been a bad friend to him these past few months, but with a slight shake of her head she determined that now was not the time to dissect every word. Therese shrugged, crossing her arms. It was very difficult to find the appropriate way to feel. It was in her nature to try and fix people, help them through what was troubling them, but Rupert had always seemed so very in control of his demons. Was she even allowed to be this concerned for his well-being?

Maybe she wanted to be allowed. Whatever was the case, Therese let out a breath and approached him, the click of her heels echoing around the empty locker room. She leaned against the locker beside him, letting her head drop again the metal as her eyes shot up to the dark ceiling. She did not want him to think she was trying to play shrink, or get him to relinquish his feelings in order to feel better about the whole ordeal. Therese had never found Rupert to be someone who cared what people thought about him, there had been absolute ridiculous stories written about the incomparable Axebanger and he hadn’t batted an eye. Usually laughed and egged on the people who took some truth to it. But that article had been scathing in another manner. She didn’t know who at The Tattler thought it would be a good idea to start ripping into these players’ personal histories in such a manner, but to have such painful childhood memories, ones that she knew even Rupert would not be able to bat away, published for all to see?

For a good story? As if he wasn’t a real person behind the jersey or flying high on the broomstick? Therese grew so angry at the thought, but she kept her breaths even and her demeanor calm. There was nothing she could say that could try to flip the situation around, and feeling sorry for him would be an insult.

Though...it may be a risk, but Therese in her complete analysis of the situation (she couldn’t help it) thought that there was one thing that could relieve some stress. Something that she realized he’d been avoiding for a very long time.

“Do you remember her?” she asked, turning slightly to face him. She was curious, but believed there was a purpose behind her words.

It was his nature to effortlessly halt prying of any sort into his past. The stories Axe revealed of himself were carefully constructed and, more often than not, almost entire fabrications with one small grain of truth. He considered himself a master of deflection, and even his years of therapy had not cracked his armour of secrecy and lies. Yet he had never once been asked that question honestly. Suddenly, Axe no longer wanted to hide it all away, burying the mess beneath his well-cultivated façade. He was seized with the urge to rip all those scars and scabs open and bleed so everyone could see him, so everyone could see why he troubled to hide them away from the world. Axe wanted the world to bleed with him, and if it would not do that, he wanted it to wish, oh, wish that it could.

He laughed hollowly as he recalled, in one of his few, abbreviated sessions with Therese, being unintentionally prompted to think of his mother by one of her very asinine, trying questions. That had been just one year ago, though it seemed to be the life of another person. Yet here they were, and how very fitting this all was.

"I do not remember the woman they wrote about," he said, seeming perfectly at ease in his lounging position against the lockers as he stared unseeingly above. "I remember someone… like a princess. She would tell her son stories and had a laugh like… a song, until she was too sick to do either. But what does un petit garçon know or see?" He shook his head. "Nothing."

Letting out a low breath, he told her, "I was so poorly educated of my own history." He sounded so apologetic, sheepish. "But now," he unlaced his hands so he could tap one finger against his temple, "now, ah, I am éclairé. I am enlightened."

As Axe re-adjusted his hands behind his head, he began, "You see, I had not known she was une droguée," his voice dragged derisively over the term. "Mon demi-frère would say so over and over again. Rupert, le fils d'une pute. In English, he would taunt how many men she must have entertained for just one—fix. I told myself it was the angry words of a boy betrayed by his father, but," Axe shrugged, "he was right. All along, he knew what I did not."

He closed his eyes and smiled serenely. "That is what they said my birthright is, you know. La folie et la drogue. Madness and addiction." Axe's laugh sliced through the stillness of the room. "Oh, the urge to prove them right."

Therese slowly dropped to the bench to watch Rupert as he spoke, mesmerized by his story or the fact that he was speaking so freely, she wasn’t sure. She had heard the most miserable of pasts and histories within the confines of her office, but there Therese was able to take notes, detach herself from emotions like sympathy or anger. Her patients needed her to be neutral so that they could find their own answers to their problems, they didn’t need someone to agree with them that their erratic behavior was the key to their self-healing. Right now, part of her desperately wished she would have managed to get Rupert to talk about his mother during one of their (three) sessions. There she could have been blunt, to the point, she could have over analyzed every last word and not have felt guilty about it.

Instead, it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain her composure and she felt like a fool. Familial complications were often the worse to handle, but such torture to a child who had done nothing but be born into this world made absolutely no sense to Therese. Deliberate cruelty was the one thing in the world that she could not forgive and she’d forgiven a lot, in her years. But, since she had dealt with the pain of someone’s sadistic behavior for no other reason than their own sick pleasure, Therese knew...she knew the guilt that came along with it. What had they done to garner such pain? Could they fix it? Maybe she deserved it...

“She loved you,” Therese said, dropping her chin. She felt like such an intruder, but she was the one who had seeked him out; she wanted to be of some help and this was all she knew how to do. “It doesn’t matter what mistakes she might have made, your mother loved you, Rupert. Don’t take that away from yourself.”

He could hear her, understand what she was saying. To someone who had not lived a life similar to Axe's life, those might have been standard words of reassurance. True ones, but not of the earth-shattering variety. But to him, the idea that real love was unconditional, that anyone had an innate right to it, was nearly laughable. Instead, he wondered how the voices of one little boy and a mysterious dead woman of ill repute were supposed to overpower the years everyone else had spent contradicting them.

"She did." He opened his eyes and stared blankly ahead, the cynical amusement stripped from his face. Lines of tension radiated throughout his body.

When the article had been published, he'd had no one. If he had been a person to lean on shoulders, there would have been none, and it was all of his own making—his decision to steadily push away all the people he might once have been able to call friends, including the witch who sat beside him.

But of course, Axe did not even claim friendship. He'd learned early on in life the frailty of relationships, and the abuse of trust, so he never again pursued one in seriousness. But he wasn't an idiot to think he could distance himself from the entire world forever. His team was his life, and though they had no reason to, people in the league… liked him. Had he not, for one shining moment during his birthday, even started to believe that he'd been wrong all this time? Right before his scheming brother waltzed into his life and made it painfully clear exactly what Axe was made of. Had he not just said his team was his life, and yet here he was, willing to sacrifice them all to save his own neck? Proven just that, after what he had done to his own teammate? Axe clenched his teeth. No. He had no right to anyone, no right to claim any bond to anyone.

He worked his jaw silently as he gazed above, almost imagining he could see shapes and cracks in the ceiling above. "But I don't deserve it," he muttered.

She let out a sharp breath at his words, her hand shooting out to grab his leg, “Don’t ever say that.”

While these last few weeks had been trying, the past year overall had been, to use his own words, enlightening. Since Remy’s initial betrayal Therese hadn’t attempted to live her life. She went to work and she let out any ill feelings at a bloody muggle bar where no one knew who she was, her history, or who had hurt her. Therese had wasted so much time sitting around and dwelling on the past that she had needed a lightning bolt like Rupert Brookstanton to knock her out of the perpetual daze she’d put herself in. He---thrilled her and gave her the strength to go out into the world and try new things. Be bold, have fun. She had seen the good he could do for a person.

Therese also knew that he was capable and deserving of being loved. She looked away from him at the thought, her feelings becoming conflicted and confusing. She needed Rupert to know that he wasn’t a terrible person, that he didn’t have to take on the guilt that his family had thrust upon him. He had surely made mistakes, but he’d done good as well. He’d changed her life and she knew he’d changed the lives of his team. The rest of the Kestrels were nearly children in the league’s eyes, a group of kids who had no idea what they were doing, and he’d brought them to the top of the league. Best in the world.

“You deserve love,” Therese said slowly, looking back at him. Her hand pulled away from him as quite suddenly she didn’t trust herself with where it laid. “You’ve earned it before. From---your team and---others. You’ve earned it.”

Her hand on him caught his attention more than her impassioned words in the beginning. People did not touch Axe. That untouchable demeanour was a literal one, too, and he considered it a victory to have worked hard in mastering this one detail. When he allowed contact, even of the most casual, it was on his terms, and that was but one tiny building block in the forging of Axebanger Brookstanton. When Therese breached it, even from sympathy (because it was sympathy), for no longer than the space of a few heartbeats…

His eyes travelled along her arm, up her neck, to her face, where her eyes looked so intently into his. So earnestly, and they made him think… Their gaze held, just for a moment, until he heard, really heard, what she was saying.

Earned. What a joke that should have been, only he didn't much feel like laughing over it. The worst part of it all was perhaps he had earned, if not love, at least trust. Respect. Esteem. All which he'd coveted, craved, and finally, finally could have. So if he could outrun the past, all of his ugly, secreted (oh yes, even now) past, and had truly earned these things... then he had squandered them over fear and self-interest. No better than the people he came from who he believed so terribly abused him.

Just like them, in fact.

"You should not have come," he ground out, pushing abruptly away from the locker, feeling sick. Sick that Therese should be here, sick she should tell him to be told he had earned, he was deserving, when he was not. Sick, and unclean. With his back to her, he gripped the last locker with one hand and fisted his other to press against his forehead. "This—was a mistake."

“Don’t--” she started, following him swiftly, standing by his side. “Don’t push me away!”

Why? Why was it a mistake? Therese silently questioned him, but in her head she too was wondering if she should have come, why did she come? Perhaps she knew that he would be locking himself up forcing anyone who might come to him in concern away. Perhaps she wasn’t able to control herself when it came to these quidditch players and their endless supply of issues, maybe she was obsessed. Perhaps...she cared.

She did care, and she was one of the few (if that) that was brave enough to try and push past these walls that Rupert so expertly constructed. Or the dumb enough, it was surprising how often bravery and stupidity got mixed up---she sounded like a bloody Gryffindor! Therese shook her head, no, no. Her hands were in fists by her side and she was feeling like the most stubborn of Slytherins. Why was she having this infernal House debate at a time like this?

“I care about you, Rupert,” Therese said softly, her cheeks going red. She hadn’t been able to say those words a few months ago, and she wondered if she’d been braver if things would be different right now. Instead she’d stopped her gentle pushing toward something she knew wasn’t...or couldn’t, she wasn’t sure, happen. Therese felt like a coward, but she was here now when she knew he needed someone to be there, even if it was just to take the brunt of his frustrations and sadness.

"You can't push me away."

He clenched his jaw and tried to breathe. Axe could feel her there, just beside him, and tensed. He didn't understand why him, what in him she could possibly have seen to feel so strongly that he was worth any of what she was saying with such intensity. Hadn't she seen all he had to offer? Hadn't she walked away?

Axe did not need her hero's complex to save him from the censure of the world, or himself. He had no desire for her pity, nor her sympathy. This was all of his own doing, one way or the other, and one way or the other—he himself would fix it. He had to manage at least that.

The urge to use the flippant, caustic humour that served him so well in maintaining those impenetrable walls he'd built was almost undeniable, but it would be yet another reason for her to delude herself into thinking of saving him, or whatever this intervention was. Turning, he skirted around Therese as he went to his locker, unable to control himself when wrenching it open. If she would not leave, if he could not make her, then he would be the one to go instead. Shoving equipment in, grabbing his belongings, he slapped its door shut. "Yes, I can."

Her eyes shut tightly at the slamming locker, and her lips twisted harshly to try and hold back her tears. No matter---no matter how they’d fallen apart, she still cared for Rupert. She still cared greatly for him, he was one of the best friends she’d made in years. Therese felt---she couldn’t describe how she felt, because all she wanted was---she wanted him to not be miserable, she wanted him to be happy, but who was she to want those things for him? She was just some girl, really, when it came down to the bare bones of it. They got along quite well, she wouldn’t deny that, but----was she really anything more?

Why did his words hurt so much, then? Therese blinked, letting out a shuddering breath before turning to face his back. She wiped at her eyes and shook her head; there was no making Rupert Brookstanton do something he didn’t want to do, she knew that well enough. Even so, part of her wanted to shove him into the locker and make him understand that he didn’t have to be so guarded, that she honestly did care for him, because that’s what she wasn’t getting through, right? She---no, this wasn’t about her, it had nothing to do with her feelings or any unresolved matters that she couldn’t even bring up in her own mind.

Feeling horrendous, but deciding that it was the best to let him have his way, Therese put a gentle hand on the small of his back.

“You know where to find me,” she said miserably, unable to conceal the cracks in her voice. Therese hesitated, but eventually she did pull away. “If you ever---I’ll be there.” With another breath she started toward the door, and her tears finally escaped.