Address in the stars

OPEN	CJ's Outfit

It had been almost a year, and that was something that she almost didn't know how to comprehend. That it had been a year since the... Well, her therapist said to call it an accident. That that was the healthier way to look at it. But it hadn't been an accident at all. It was an attack. They had been attacked, and six of them were dead. She was the only one that had survived. Thrown from the car before the second explosion. That wasn't something that you just, recovered from though. It wasn't something that you just got over, and moved on from, and she knew that. CJ knew that when she had come too, when she had woken up in that hospital in Germany, she had had a long road ahead of her. And they had brought her back here, to the UK. All of her physical injuries were healed by the time that they had let her come home, but the mental ones. The wounds that just wouldn't quite heal... Those were still here. They were always going to be there, until she figured out how to deal with them... Something that, even with consistent therapy, she hadn't figured out how to do.  She thought that she would get there, and if she were being honest, she was already quite a bit better than she had been last year. Things had changed, her life had changed, but that didn't mean that things weren't still staying the same. That didn't mean that the world didn't keep on turning, and all of it, and so that was what she was going to focus on, for the most part. Just making sure that everything was working out the way that it was supposed to. For once in her life, she just wanted something to go right. She wanted something to make sense, and for now, she would take that wherever she could get it. If that meant that she needed to try and not wind up in a room alone with Jasper Avery, then she was going to try not to end up in a room alone with Jasper Avery. The problem was that she wanted to end up in a room alone with him. She wanted to see if it would happen again... If she could make it happen again. There was a draw there, and it was one that she couldn't even really explain.  It was like there had to be something that she did that was exciting. Like she had to have something that pushed her just that much further than she should have gone. Because the hospital was routine, and it was consistent, and she liked that. But more than anything, she liked seeing if she could make him look at her. She liked seeing if she could still capture someone's attention. And the fact that he was her boss should have made it off limits, she should have enforced that rule for herself, but she wasn't. She wasn't trying to enforce rules, she was just... Living. That was what she was doing, because the only way to really live right now, was to put the effort in to do more than survive. She had already survived, this was about something else. This was about learning what it was going to take, to actually be someone again. To find the person that she was going to be now. And it wasn't something that she knew how to do. Becca helped. Talking to her sister helped, and she knew that Millie would have tried, but she was younger... Too young, to burden with things like that. Even at only a couple years age difference.  CJ had grown up a long time ago. Living the way that she had lived, traveling the world the way that they had, they had seen everything. There was no doubt in her mind that it had aged her. That seeing everything that she had seen, had tacked on years that she hadn't actually lived. But it was war, and famine, and disease that aged someone more than anything else. She was younger than some of the young children that she met abroad, and older than some of those that were their leaders here. She was everything, all at once and she didn't know if that was something that she was going to handle consistently for the years to come. What she did know, was that Becca had told her about this place. The bookshop in the north, that would have whatever it was that she needed. That hadn't made a hole lot of sense at the time, but now that she was here... she thought that she understood a little better. Weaving her way through the aisles, CJ realized that she didn't have a destination in mind, so much as a simple draw towards a certain portion of the shop...

It was over a year since she had come to England, and still she mostly just knew London and maybe the moor where her great-aunt and uncle lived. But there was not much to be seen there, just the same sinister landscape extending over miles and miles. She didn’t like it there all that much, and she was glad that she was moving out. London, especially Diagon Alley with its bustle agreed more with her. This might be slightly strange, after all she had grown up in a distant mountain village, but that was not the problem. It was just too silent in the moors. Where she came from, there were always people running through the streets, always having some errand or task to perform or somewhere to go or… in many cases she had no idea what they were about to do and some might not have even known themselves. These were the weird coincidences happening when growing up in a wizarding village. Many things didn’t make sense and nobody cared. Then again, everybody did. It was truly fascinating as to what excited the villagers interest while other matters left them completely indifferent.

For one, they never lost sight of those who had gone down to the towns. Whether they went to university, worked at the Ministry, had a Quidditch career, or just sold Fanged Frisbees in the street, their fate was never lost out of sight where they came from, they were constantly gossiped about. Then again, they could turn a completely blind eye on their neighbour’s illegal breedings between jackdawss and Augureys. Yes, everybody would know this was happening, but nobody ever said a word in public. In case the Ministry would dare to show interest in any illegal magical activities up in the villages, they would not find a single person ready to speak up. Admittedly, there had been incidents in the past when personal feuds had been fought by using the power of a force outside the villages, but it was no strategy that won any sympathies. They were a very seclusive people up there, and just because someone moved away didn’t mean that the village would move out of them. She surely felt as much belonging to them as ever though she hadn’t lived there for years, not counting when she had visited.

Nothing like this seemed to exist in England. The only family she had here seemed perfectly content to live far from the madding crowd and to interact with their neighbours about once a week — generously estimating. And at London, well, that was the city. That people were distant there was sort of normal. Cities were strange. She didn’t understand why anybody would live there out of their own free will. Then again, she had decided to do so, hadn’t she? But that was different, her situation was different, that didn’t count. She was a little uneasy as to how it would be, but then she had lived more or less secluded anyway ever since she had come here, so it couldn’t be that bad. And she wouldn’t live like that forever. Yes, her living in a city certainly had nothing to do with others who lived in cities being strange.

But there were not only cities in England. Villages did exist. And it might be interesting to visit one — preferably one without Muggles, especially now that without university, she had a little more time to herself. She could try and see for herself what she had heard like that there were apparently villages in England where magical and non-magical people lived with the Muggles completely oblivious to wizardry. It was weird. It seemed impossible to hide witchcraft in such a small society. It couldn’t work, and yet, it apparently did. One day, she might go to one to see if she could unravel that mystery. But it would be wiser to start with something more familiar, and that meant a purely magical village. And the obvious choice there seemed to be Toadstool End. She had never heard of it before she had come to England. Hogsmeade had been somewhat familiar to her by name, but nothing else. But she was here now, and she was curious. It did look nice, that yes, but apart from that she hadn’t really seen anything that would have really caught her interest. She hadn’t been to the port yet, though, so that might still be interested. Or… Out of the corner of her eyes she saw the sign of a shop. It did look welcoming and she walked nearer. A book shop? She spent enough time in one anyway, there was little reason to enter here. And yet, it would be interesting to see how this one looked. Hesitating one moment longer, she then pulled open the door and entered. And once she was in the shop, she let, without consciously thinking about it, her feet carry her through the aisles.

Address in the Stars

She had three days to wrap her head around the fact that she was going to hit the year mark. That all of the things that had happened in the last year were a result of what had happened that day. They were the result of the three minutes that had felt like an eternity. They were the result of all of that. They were a result of everything that had happened when they were just trying to travel across the desert. Of what had happened when they were just trying to do their jobs. Because that was all that they had been trying to do. They were healers. They had been doing this all over the world for a decade. They had been traveling, and taking care of people, and making sure that there were opportunities in some of the poorest communities in the world. CJ thought that they were doing good things. That they were the people that were actually trying to do something for the world, as a whole. It didn’t matter who they were, and what they were doing. It didn’t matter if they didn’t believe in magic. They healed them. They used muggle means. They used magic. They used whatever they had to do to get the job done.

And that had been what had gotten them killed. The fact that they had used muggle means. That they had been traveling in a caravan. That they had gotten blown up. There had been seven of them, in her unit. Seven of them that had been together so long that they had become a family. And she knew that there was no recovering that sense of family. There was no recovering everything that she had lost. Because there was more to it than just the people themselves. She had lost that sense of closeness. She had lost love. She had lost something that she didn’t know that she had even had. There was a security in what they had been doing. Something that had seemed as if they were helping, but the cycle was never ending. They could have kept doing that for years on end. They could have been looking to make the entire world a better place, a healthier place. And she was for that. CJ would have been happy to do that the rest of her life. Even if she and Colton had ended up with a group of their own.

That was what Stefan and Jane had done. They had been doing that their entire lives, and they had never gotten tired of it. Now… Now she didn’t know if she had that sense of adventure anymore. She didn’t know if she was willing to go back out there, and risk losing everything again. That seemed like something that she just didn’t want to do. Something that she wasn’t sure that she was willing to put at risk. Living through a loss like that once was bad enough, doing it again? She wasn’t that strong, and she didn’t think that she wanted to go back out there without her family either. Not her biological family, they were here, they were all doing well here, succeeding in being the healers that they were, and she was proud of them all for that. But there was another family out there. There was a family that she had lost. There was a family that was buried under six headstones that she had been to visit. That she would go back and visit again and again. They were her family too. And she was the only one that had survived.

Being the only one that lived was something that was harder to get over than she thought that it was going to be. She didn’t know that there was ever going to be a time when it was just easier to accept, but they weren’t there yet. They weren’t to the point where she was just, okay. And she knew that there were times when it was easier. There were times when it was simple to just put them all out of her mind, and live. There were times when she could focus on what was in front of her right then, on what it was that they were doing, what she was doing, and how she felt. Moments like that were nice. The moments when she could focus on what was happening right then. And there were different times when that happened. In the operating room. When she was in a room alone with Jasper Avery. There were moments where she didn’t have to think about it, and everything went away. CJ looked around the shop that she had found herself in, not quite knowing what it was that she was looking for in the first place. Becca had sent her here, and she was just… Looking, when the door opened behind her and she turned to smile at the girl that had come in after her, “Hello.”

tags: @ gioconda
word count: 833
cj's outfit

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Shops looked more or less the same, no matter in which village or even in which country they were situated. As long as they had similar products, they would present them in a similar way. It had to be the result of experimenting if anything could explain it. With time, maybe even generations, every shop tried to display their goods in one way or the other, and they would settle with the one that was most successful. It might be interesting to see how shops had looked several hundred years back. Though, thinking it through again, Gioconda decided to let it be. She wasn’t that interested in the history of marketing after all. History was fine and all, but it wasn’t that exciting that she would want to spend too much of her time pondering things that she only fleetingly cared about. If she owned a shop or intended to own one, it might be different. Then, studying what kind of display had worked in the past and might be integrated again with positive effects might be interesting. She wouldn’t know and didn’t care. She had nothing to do with arranging the books at Flourish and Blotts. She only needed to put the books where they should be, which was pre-decided by the decades, maybe centuries, of practice. And so was how she had to order books, pay for books, advice customers, and so on. She had had a supervisor for about the first week, and after that, it had been perfectly clear what was her task.

She certainly wouldn’t work there for all eternity. It was not at all bad, on the contrary, she enjoyed it most of the time. There were days when everything was going wrong, but such days existed no matter where she was working or what she was doing. She wasn’t complaining about working at the book shop, it was perfect for while she was at university. But afterwards, she wanted to do something… something… something different, as imprecise as this was. She still didn’t really know what she wanted to do, which was slightly scary. In the autumn, there would be so many new students at Lufkin again, and they’d be ten years younger than she was, and they would know exactly what goals they were pursuing. Admittedly, she had to at their age, and that had led to her not knowing what to do now. It might have been better if she had had her doubts when she was still a teenager. Then again, these were silly thoughts. She still had three years of studying to do during which she had a pretty good job and plenty of time to think. She’d certainly go back to Italy afterwards. After another three years, she’d certainly be sick of England and its horrid weather and even more horrid food. It was annoying her already, but at the moment, she still considered that there were enough novelties for her not to be overly bothered about having to suffer under the existence of marmite or the fact that the English ate breakfast as if it were dinner.

Once she was in Italy again, she was certain that she’d know what to do. She’d be back home at her village, and there everything would be clear. And if not, she had a mother and grandmother who notoriously knew everything better. She used to hate that, but with the distance, their hovering was more the cause of sentimental reminiscences than of anything else. Maybe she would try to have an own book shop. She didn’t know where that idea suddenly came from. No, she wouldn’t that was a stupid idea. It would be far too complicated, and she didn’t have enough interest anyway. Though, it would be sort of nice. Maybe-

“Hello,” she greeted back when her musing was suddenly interrupted and she noticed that there was a woman standing before her. “How-” She cut herself short, almost giggling at herself. “How can I help you?” She had spent too much time at Flourish and Blotts when she already wanted to offer her help in a book shop that she didn’t know at all. She hadn’t known that rows of books could have such an effect on her — maybe she should think about changing her job after all. Then again, that was a silly idea. She seemed to be full of these today. “Excuse me, do you know how this shop is structured?” she asked, only when saying the words realising that she hadn’t figured out where the different types of books were. She should have noticed groups by now. How else could a shop be organised. She usually understood a book shop after a short while because there weren’t endless possibilities and every shop wanted to give a customer the feeling of familiarity. But here, she had no idea how she would find a book if she had entered with any goal. And yet, she didn't feel lost. Maybe this shop was made just for browsing, for that was how it felt like — even though this made no sense.

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