Harry Potter One Shots

Twelve Grimmauld Place

All rights belong to the author, LadyAltair

Hestia Jones doesn't fall apart until she's waved goodbye to Megan and made her way back to Grimmauld Place.

She puts Sirius to shame with her pacing, ripping through the decrepit old house in a panic. "Where is he?" she keeps saying, dragging her fingers through her hair until it's loose from the professional twist, worrying the pewter buttons on the cuffs of her sleeves until they come loose. Neat, impeccable Hestia is a harried mess, her heels clicking up and down the unpolished hardwood floors until the noise of it nearly drives Sirius mad.

"Jesus, Hestia, calm down," he grits through his teeth with as much empathy as he can manage, catching her by the sleeve as she strides past him in the kitchen. "He'll turn up, I'm sure."

"Sturgis doesn't just not show up to things," Hestia says around the cuff of her sleeve—in the absence of buttons to pick at, she's chewing on the starched white fabric.

"They'll find him, everyone's out looking," he tries to assure her. "He'll come back."

Her hand drops to her side as she looks at him. Her teeth are white against the pink stain remnant of her berry lipstick; her bright blue eyes wide beneath perfectly fanned black lashes. She looks helpless.

And then she says, very simply, "Caradoc didn't." Her voice is quiet, a mere breath of sound.

He's waiting for tears, because that's the woman he remembers from the periphery of before. But she just turns away and braces herself over the sink. The sound of the incoming floo in the parlor is like an electric shock to her body, and she sprints in her spindly heels, in a graceful years-practiced lope, to greet the news, of whatever sort there is to be had.

She spends a lot more time in Grimmauld, with Sturgis in Azkaban.

Hestia Jones is a highlight to how unkind the years have been to the last two Marauders. She's a few years older than the two, and looks a decade younger. She's better looking than he remembers; in her twenties, she was a little too thin and little too fussy in her dress. The gaunt, tight age of Azkaban that he sees in the mirror, the lined, heavy-eyed weariness he sees in Remus...there is none of that in Hestia. Her skin is clean and powder-perfect, her eyes bright beneath her tastefully done makeup, her steps quick and shoulders light-she must carry all her worry some other way, because it isn't weight on her back like it is on the others. She walks with her head high and her hair perfectly styled.

It's almost painful to look at her; she wears so little of her tragedy in her appearance, it's easy to forget. It's easy to resent her, almost, beautiful and light shouldered, when she walks out the door into the sunshine (or even the grey-ceilinged London rain), a free and beautiful bird.

One afternoon, both of them dusty from the continued campaign on the decrepit old house, she directs him to retrieve her wand from her handbag in the kitchen. It's in a case in the bottom of the leather bag on the kitchen table; rolled up along with her beautifully scrolled lilac wood wand is a worn old note. It's addressed to 'my hummingbird' and signed 'Caradoc.' He doesn't read the rest.

He's a little kinder to Hestia for the rest of the day, keeps the bite of his bitterness back, doesn't resent her when she retrieves her bag from the kitchen and leaves. It's easier to understand the way she carries herself, her shoulders light and chin held up; she carries her pain in her handbag.

She doesn't come to Grimmauld over Christmas—she spends the holidays with her daughter at Caradoc's parents' house in Beaumaris. She takes the time to wish him a happy Christmas before she goes to Kings Cross to meet Megan at Platform 9 ¾. It would be a lie to say that he misses her—the house is busy and Harry is more than enough of a distraction.