Manners

Everything had been a mess since she had left school. First, her grandmother died. That hadn't been a shock. She had been old, approaching eighty with all the dignity of a furious goose. Then, she didn't get accepted into art school. Then her father had a heart attack. And another. Then a third. That was the last time she'd ever speak to him--the day before the third, when she wished him luck for his final exams with the latest batch of students. She had popped into the Ukraine, followed the winding halls until the reached his office. He had been warm, but weathered. The lines had shown on his face--the exhaustion and pain and age had caught up with him. Maddie had stayed the night on his couch. They watched terrible movies in Russian, laughing over the ridiculous punch lines and even, while against his orders from the hospital, imbibed in a little vodka.

"Where did you learn to drink?" he laughed as she tossed back the splash of alcohol he'd poured into a tumbler for her.

She blushed bright pink, shrugging just barely as she flashed back to her fifth year of Hogwarts--how she had met and fallen in love with the students from Durmstrang. How Katja had given her vodka as a present and she'd spent the rest of the year doing her best to fit in with them. How the next year, she followed their individual pursuits in the papers, drinking a shot to their victories when with Constance. Or how she had, during her seventh year, gifted a bottle to another fifth year--like herself--who had felt so desperately out of place. The memories were bittersweet.

Their conversations had dwindled until they fell asleep to the soft commercials of the late-night television, Maddie drifting into a restless sleep. Her father, however, slept the best he had in years. The next morning, the familiar pain of a heart attack came and went, so he didn't mention it. By three o'clock, he was gasping for air in the middle of a class, taken quickly to the hospital, where he died before he ever was admitted. The family was alerted as quickly as the owl could get there. And JJ had been the one to keep Maddie on her feet as her mother sent word with the owl. Literally.

"Let's go break something," she'd offered, her voice full of uncertainty.

The blonde consented because while they threw plates, the shattered pieces breaking the way she felt broken, she could pretend the news didn't exist. That the owls that piled up from all sides of the world weren't true. That the flowers at the funeral home weren't from former students and friends. That seeing Katja or Jana or any of the others who had, at some point, cared for her and her father were nonexistent. They broke plates until Maddie was screaming from the pain of losing her best friend and from accidentally smashing her fingers on the counter as she miscalculated where to throw the plate through her blurry, tear-filled eyes.

Seasons passed and JJ drifted into herself, her mother worked long hours in the broom shops, the house in Paris sold. The house in England, sold. Maddie had enough money from her father's will to buy her own place to live, but she refused to touch it. Because if she used it, that would be admitting he was gone. She had barely gotten through the funeral. But now that things had calmed, she could repeat her daily mantra of merely pretending he was still half a world away. And for a while, she believed it. Until the day when she apparated to Durmstrang, walked through the halls, and opened the office to find someone else's things, someone else's furniture. The shock had sent her reeling, all the way back to London, splinching herself in the process. Someone wanted to take her to Mungo's, but she refused like a horse in a barn full of fire. She knew that she needed help, but she was terrified of having to walk through the doors to get it.

She was certain, now, that if she went in, she would never come out.

Years went by, Maddie turned twenty-two, and her friendship with JJ had taken a sharp, dramatic turn. While she worked, during the day, at a studio making her own art to sell, during the late evening and into the early hours of the morning, she bartended at a local pub. Every once in a while, her friend would pop in, do her best to convince her that the job wasn't suitable for her, and then they would meet in the bathroom--JJ's antics were teenage at best, but they never failed. Maddie liked to be wanted. And when her friend was ripping the buttons off of her shirts or gripping her hair a little too hard, when the blonde whispered "Mind your manners!", her lips swollen and likely bloody from a nip turned into a bite, she meant something totally different.

In fact, during her brief flashes with JJ, when the girl hunted her like a jungle cat would stalk its prey, it was the only time Maddie didn't feel the desperate ache of her family falling to pieces, one cog at a time.