rarepair_shorts | "Scars Unseen" Susan/Seamus 9/13

Title: Scars Unseen
Pairing: Susan/Seamus
Prompt: Two Weekends Ago
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,200
Summary: No real Saints survive a war.
Author's Notes: Set in the DAYDverse, uses the canon of Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness and the sequel novel, Sluagh. Will not make sense without them. Both stories, as well as the rest of the 'verse, can be found here
Link to Prompt Table: On my LJ, here

OOO

He hadn’t known if she would believe him when she finally emerged into the kitchen again, but Ernie had chosen his message well. Seamus hadn’t been there at the wedding, hadn’t known the precise phrasing of their vows to one another, and the words had struck her with such force that he couldn’t have felt more guilty if he had physically slapped her as he saw the sick, reeling shock and grief fall across her face, as she collapsed watery-kneed into the chair, hands clutched to her mouth.

She hadn’t denied loving him, and oh, wrong though it might have been, he hadn’t been able to stop the thrill of that, even when she had started to cry, even when she had begged him for time, to wait, to just leave things be for now. He’d agreed, both because he could never have forgiven himself for pushing for more just then, but also because she hadn’t denied it. Because if he had waited over a year in despair, he could wait forever in the knowledge that she loved him too.

It might have been forever, might at least have been years, but the magic that kept out unwanted human visitors from the Glen had no sway over animals, and the night that had seemed like it would define everything had been completely forgotten when a pack of rogue werewolves had gotten in among the sheep. The carnage had been horrible, worse still that Duncan hurt his back, that Robbie was in Edinburgh on business, and it was left to Seamus and Susan alone to deal with it while Fiona kept Cecily safely away from the horrible mess.

Almost two dozen that had survived were bitten and had to be killed, but twice that many had been hurt when the flock had stampeded blindly in terror, and it was exhausting, draining work to round them all up again, to repair the walls and treat the injured, to get rid of the carcasses and bloody aftermath that would have called more predators down from the jagged tors. Yet for all that it was a nightmare, it was a dream and a relief all the same, because it kept them far too busy to wonder or worry about anything more abstract.

It wasn’t until the third night that they finally had the last wounded animal bedded down safely in the barn’s clean straw, and they had still been too keyed up on the potent cocktail of coffee and adrenaline to even attempt sleep, no matter how they both needed it. They had meant to just sit down for a few minutes, unwind a little, but minutes had turned into hours, and somewhere along the line, a bottle of the Macmillans’ homemade cider had appeared, passed back and forth to go down so sweet and easy that one barely felt the potency of it.

For three and a half years, Seamus had lived there now, and after the initial awkwardness of the first few months, he and Susan had spoken every day, but it was astonishing to realize that they had never actually talked. There had always been so many other things – the farm, the Fund, Cecily – and then later, the specter of their own unspoken feelings, that their own lives had just never been of issue. Yet now that taboo seemed lifted, and he heard himself laughing and even crying a little, talking more and more freely than perhaps he ever had in his life, even though he would have never considered himself close-lipped in the least.

Susan’s clothing was smeared in blood and dirt, speckled in straw and stained with sweat, her hair hanging in long strands that had pulled free of the thick plait, but her cheeks were flushed, her lips red and eyes bright, and she looked more vibrantly alive than he had ever seen her before. Usually, no matter how beautifully pulled-together or how worn out, she had the air of a porcelain doll, something fragile and not quite real, but she was nothing but a woman now, warm and heavy against his side as she turned the bottle thoughtfully in her surprisingly callused fingers.

“All we’ve talked about, all this….”She mused. “Ireland, England, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, Hogwarts, Druim Cett, it’s all that we’re different, and we’re ignoring it, ignoring the thing, the big thing, the thing that makes us same.”

It should have made him tense, should have frightened him to come at last to what he knew she must mean, but he had discovered that several years wholly sober had blunted his once-terrifying capacity for drink, and he felt enough of a lazy blur to things that he barely raised an eyebrow as he looked over at her. “That we’ve wound up lovin’ each other?”

She shook her head, her smile twisting into something darker than he had expected. “That we’re liars, both of us.”

“What d’ya mean by that?” Now he did sit up, turning to frown at her in disbelief. “You’re one o’ the most honest women I’ve –“

“I am not! And you’re no honest man, Mr. Finnigan!” Susan let out a harsh little bark of a laugh, putting down the bottle to gesture at both of them. “We’re liars, we lie to the whole world about what we really are.”

The bitter smile was on his own mouth now as well, and he nodded ruefully, then shrugged. “I don’t reckon anyone’d listen or care if a convict goes confessin’ his sins, but I’ve said fair to ya tonight even that I’m a coward when comes to.”

“There!” She jabbed a finger at him triumphantly. “Just like I said! You’re a liar, Seamus…you want people to believe, and maybe you believe – and that makes me sad – that you’re this awful, dangerous person, but you’re not.”

He didn’t know how to respond, but she didn’t seem to want a response, dropping back now to lie on her back and stare almost wistfully at the ceiling as she went on, her words no longer flung at him, but bled unflinchingly into the chill February night. “You’re the best one of us, I think sometimes, because you don’t hide it, you just do what you think is right for the world and damned what it means for you. Dangerous….” She made a small, dismissive snort. “Hell, Neville’s a hundred times more dangerous than you, because he can turn off his heart. I’ve seen him do it. Shut it out and just do things but you feel everything, and that’s so brave, it really is. Not one person in a million has the guts to feel their own life and just be what they are.”

Seamus laughed, dropping down beside her, then rolling to prop himself on one elbow so that he could meet her eyes. “If I had that kinda courage, I’da told ya I loved ya without waitin’ for a ghost t’give me say-so two weekends ago.”

“I knew you loved me,” She fired back quickly. “I’m the one that stopped that, I did everything but put Silencio on you every way I could, I know damned well. Made you think it’d ruin everything just because it’d ruin my lies.”

He took a deep breath, not sure why he hadn’t been prepared for her to say that when he supposed he’d known all along it was true. “And what’re those, now?”

She didn’t answer at once, and as she scrambled to her feet, he thought at first that maybe the look on her face was the cider, that she was trying to get to a far corner of the barn to be sick, but she had only taken a few steps away from him before she spun back, and the twisted expression wasn’t nausea, but a self-hatred that nearly rose the bile in his own throat to see. “I’m the sweet, tragic, noble widow.” She pursed her lips, fluttering her long eyelashes in exaggeratedly sugar-sweet innocence. “The wonderful philanthropist, helping all her friends out of the goodness of her heart!”

The sweetly simpering mockery vanished, and she snatched the bottle up again, taking a deep pull that he recognized as a brace against what was to come, then tossing it back to him as she wiped her mouth on her sleeve in a deliberately crass motion, her dark eyes defying him to say anything. “I don’t do it because it just barely makes the guilt bearable that I got myself knocked up and didn’t fight with them. I don’t make excuses to the Sheltons when I’m invited to their daughter’s wedding because I hate that little bitch for getting caught in a staircase when she was twelve years old and I’m the one who decided to go back in the first place. I don’t go up that hill and scream at the grave of a man who loved me because he saved my life but he left me seventeen and scared and pregnant and not ready for any of it. And I don’t –“

She had begun to pace, but now she stopped, dropping to her knees again not just in front of him, but straddling his legs, and she leaned forward until he could smell the dusky scent of apples on her breath, her eyes burning into his as she ran a single finger to burn like a brand along his throat at the edge of his collar, her voice low. “I absolutely don’t look at the man that I’ve taken in to show him that there are good and pure and wholesome ways to live his life, who takes such good care of my daughter and has never tried to lay a hand on me and think about just how far those tattoos go down his body and wonder if the skin with ink on it tastes different from the rest.”

“Too bad, that is,” Seamus made no effort to hide the desire in his voice, but he forced himself to hold perfectly still beneath her, knowing that she was drunk, knowing that there was less room for error now than perhaps there ever had been, and that although he wasn’t quite smashed himself, he certainly couldn’t trust his own judgment. “Because I think I’d love ya all the more if ya did.”

“Why?” The laugh was soft, throaty, only an inch away from his mouth. “Because you think you deserve a nasty, vengeful, horny, two-faced bitch?”

“’Cause I don’t care if ya think we’re both liars.” His hand brushed through her hair, dropping free another thick tendril to shadow one eye. “I ain’t no saint and neither are ya, and I’m glad there’s dark to ya, Sue, ‘cause that means we don’t need fear hidin’ our scars for scarin’ the other if’s we both have them.”

Her eyes held his, then dropped, and she seemed to melt against him, half-lying, half-kneeling with her head ducked against his chest, her arms wrapped around herself in comfort against her own confession as his circled to draw her in, and what was wrong with him that she was hurting, that she was shaking and yet it was so much a kind of heaven to be holding her like this?

“I don’t have any scars,” she whispered. “I never fought…I just let everything happen. I didn’t fight for Ernie when I loved him for years. I didn’t bother with protection once we were married because I had this stupid little-girl idea that a baby wouldn’t happen unless we wanted it because married people decide to have children and only bad girls who do it before get pregnant by accident. I let him pull me from the DA. I let him send me away when it was time to fight. I let him die for me.”

“Ya didn’t let him, Sue.” He pulled the band from her hair, combing his fingers through the plait to let it fall free over her back, over his hands, stroking and soothing as the shivers became sobs. “Ya didn’t have a choice in it…I were more there than ya were.”

Her fingers twisted in his shirt, her knees drawing up to curl onto his lap fully now, and it felt so good, so right that he could encircle her completely, feel like he was shielding her from all the world even when it was the merciless past that wracked her slender body. “It wasn’t supposed to be that way! Not like that! Everyone says it’s so beautiful and tragic and romantic! Like I should be happy about it! Like I should be proud, but it just hurts so bad, Seamus, because he should have made it! He was strong enough and brave enough and he’d made it through, he’d already made it through and I killed him! I killed him, and oh, Merlin, how can he want me to live and go on and love and have when I killed him!?”

The answer came before he even thought about it, murmured against her cheek on the taste of salt and cider and hands that had already begun to slip beneath clothing as if their bodies had given up on the foolish minds and hearts that theoretically should have held them in check. “’Cause sometimes even murderers deserve a second chance.”

THE END

"Scars Unseen" Susan/Seamus 9/13

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