With a little help from my friends

@tamara
outfit: oh la la

The weeks had flown past in a blur, what with the growing season at the shop fast approaching and not to mention that she had been conducting research on a new plant species recently discovered in Guam. It wasn't like Kristina to go so long without speaking to her mother. As a child she had spent most of her days with her mother having been an outcast in her community and without many friends she became the best of friends with her mother and grandmother. That friendship did dwindle slightly as her years in Hogwarts progressed, maybe even halted as she traveled after graduation, they picked back up right where they had left off once she returned home. In fact, the two were closer now than they had ever been and it was a certainty that the two would meet every Saturday for lunch.

But, alas, the past few weeks had proven than even certain things can become uncertain. Kristina, though loyal to a fault, found that her loyalties often wavered between her family and her work. This wasn't the first, nor would it be the last, time that she had waived her daughterly duties for that of her profession. There had been a pit wrenching in Kristina's stomach for the past two weeks every time she though of her poor mother sitting alone at their usual table. She had bailed last week, and what was worse? She had even forgotten to call. The digging in her stomach began, the pit gaining depth as she rushed to Clearwater Joint to meet her mother (or possibly her maker, depending on how upset her dearest mother was this time).

An hour, maybe more. Kristina wrung the napkin in her hand, glancing unsteadily at the clock again. The pit in her stomach surely reached her toes by now, and she knew that this was her punishment. Her mother, though a kind woman, could be quite vindictive. She had always claimed that it was her mothering instinct to return the wrongings of Kristina back three fold to teach her a lesson. Funny thing, that three fold rule. Once Kristina had received her letter to Hogwarts those many years ago her mother had done research on witchcraft (or as the Muggles called it Wicca), their type of magic was different and purely based on coincidence; nothing like the magic she had learned in school. One of the rules of Wicca was the rule of three, whatever one might pass out would come back, like Karma, times three. Kristina had tried to tell her mother many times that's not how real magic worked, but it had made her somehow feel closer to her daughter and so Kristina had let it go.

There would be no letting this go, she feared. Her mother most certainly wasn't done with her punishment yet. Kristina wrinkled her nose, shredding her napkin into pieces. The water glass in front of her shook, it's condensate dripping to the table, and as she finished ripping the napkin she looked at the clock once more. She was done. Done waiting, done feeling bad about this damn ordeal, and done ripping the crap out of her napkin. She scooped the remains of it's tattered body and placed it in a heap next to her glass.

Kristina slung her purse on her shoulder with one foot out of the booth when she spotted a familiar face.  "Tamara?" She called, unsure if it was really she. It had been quite some time since she had seen the girl, ten years maybe? Her purse slumped off her shoulder and she scooted back to her spot within the booth. "Tamara?" She called louder, believing the woman hadn't heard her the first time. Or perhaps it wasn't her after all? Kristina awaited any sort of response from the woman, hoping it really was her dear old friend.

OH BABY I GET BY

OUTFIT

It had been an unbelievable couple of weeks. It was hard for Tamara to even wrap her head around everything that had happened. She had… all but given up, on everything involving her old life. There was no reason to hold onto any of it, really. Her husband was dead. Jack was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. There was no changing that. She would always blame herself for that, because in her mind, it was her fault. She couldn’t begin to understand the Muggle military, but she knew that it had always been a part of Jack’s life. His father was a Muggle, and in the military. It was what he had grown up knowing. It was something that he had wanted to be a part of, and she couldn’t blame him for that. She didn’t understand it—she never had, but she couldn’t blame him for wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps. But she blamed herself for not telling Jack how she really felt. He had gone before, and his best friend had died in the process. Once she had gotten him back, she hadn’t been sure she could let him out of her sight again.

When he was away, it had felt like she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t take a full breath when he was gone, because she had no idea if he was okay. He wrote, sure, but getting letters to her the Muggle way wasn’t exactly fast, and that was the only option that they had. He had gone into the Muggle military, and that meant relying on Muggle forms of communication. It wasn’t as if he could have owls flying to and from where he was stationed on a regular basis. It wasn’t something that could happen, and that meant relying on slow Muggle transportation to even know how he was doing, and if he was okay. It was horribly difficult for her, but she hadn’t told him that. She didn’t tell him that she felt like she was paralyzed when he was gone. That it literally paralyzed her, and that she didn’t know if she could do it again. Instead, she’d let him go. She’d had to. She couldn’t be the one that tried to make him choose, because she thought she knew what he’d do. He would stay. He would stay put if she really wanted him to, and she didn’t want to come to resent her for guilting him like that.

It wasn’t as if it would be purposeful. She wouldn’t have been trying to guilt him. It was just… the truth. And if she had gotten him to stay home because of that, she knew she would have felt just as guilty. So she hadn’t talked about it, and he had gone. And he had never come back. They had told her that he was dead, and she’d had to come to terms with that. Her life had fallen to shambles, and then she had lost her mother as well—and then everything else. Holding a job had been impossible, and the things she’d had to resort to… she didn’t feel bad about them. She hadn’t. It had just been something that she had done for money, in order to get by. It was just a fact about herself at this point, but then it had happened. She had been sure that she was imagining things but one night, Jack was there. And it hadn’t been her imagination at all. He had been there. He was alive. And then everything had changed again. She didn’t know how it was even possible for him to be alive, but he was.

The things that he had been through… she didn’t even want to imagine. She knew that this wasn’t going to be easy, but they were going to try. Tamara thought that was what was most surprising about all of this. He had been gone because he’d had no choice. He’d been taken prisoner. He had never given up on her. But what had she done? She’d fallen apart, and sold her body to make ends meet. Not even that. She had done well forever. She’d made plenty of money, and she didn’t even know how Jack could even stand to touch her, or be near her, or let her wear the ring that he had given her. Because they were still married. After all of this… they were still married. He still loved her, even when she had stooped to such lows in order to make money. She wasn’t sure she knew how he could love her even through that, but he did somehow. She was grateful for that. She still had to figure out what she was going to do for a living now, because she couldn’t very well keep her old job… It was just difficult when she hadn’t worked out her… other issues. She’d decided to at least head out for the day, and that had ended up with her at Clearwater Joint. She’d grabbed the first table she’d seen, and ordered a glass of water and a turkey sandwich. Frankly, she hadn’t been paying a bit of attention to her surroundings or anything else, until she heard a voice and found herself looking in that direction. “Kristina? Hey.” She said, with a smile. “It’s been ages, how are you?” Tamara was exhausted but she had always been decent at faking being okay, so she hoped that wasn’t about to change now.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

As Kristina's calls were met she felt a glow of happiness where her worry had just sat. It was nice to feel that, for a moment, but it returned just as quickly. The past few weeks had been full of worry about one thing or another, and it was very unlike her. Worrying meant you were scared, Kristina was never scared, and yet there it was. That chaotic black buzzing swarm of anxiety following her seeming to creep closer and closer. Only when she gave in to her temptations did it disappear. At first the swarm was small, minuscule things like ordering herbs, trimming plants, paying the heat bill on time, meeting mum for lunch. Then one day it seemed as though it had grown. Was this all she would do in her life? Order herbs, trim plants, pay bills and have lunch with mum? What happened?! She had been young and vibrant once, traveled the world once, and now...now she was just living to get by.

The realization that her life had become so plain seemed to attract even more of the buzzing sooty swarming things, it grew rapidly and it closed in on her. She felt that if she didn't do something, if she didn't make a change, that it would swallow her. But how? She could just pack up, move away, travel once again. But for what? Nothing. Moving wouldn't rid her of the swarm, it would find her once again. One day in her new apartment, they would return and she would find the same life, the same boorish life that she feared, just with a different address. She decided to experiment. There had to be a way to shrink the swarm, and if she could find out what could do that....she could be eradicated. 

First she had tried calling in to work. She played hookie for the first time in years and yet she found herself quickly bored in her flat, and before she knew it she had phoned her mum to see if she would like to join her for dinner. This wasn't the extermination she had hoped for. Kristina was still stuck in the cycle, missing that day did nothing. 

Over the course of many days she tried tweaking things here and there, but no change. The swarm still followed, still grew, and in her panic of not being able to find a cure-all it grew even faster. On the third day of her work week the swarm touched her for the first time. A panic attack. Kristina lost it right there in the greenhouse, she spent an hour curled up underneath the jasmine that was hanging to dry. The floral air rushing in and out of her lungs as she gasped for air. She was drowning. Drowning in the jasmine, drowning in her life. Once she could muster the ability to stand she ran, literally ran, to the nearest pub.

Now, of two things in life is Kristina sure. The sweet brunette loved to lie, and she, being a proper Scot, loved drinking her whisky. That night she had a little too much fun doing both, but damn did it feel amazing. Who knows how many drinks she had, how many men she had danced with, or kissed on the dance floor. All she knew was that the swarm wasn't there, it wasn't smaller, the buzzing wasn't quieter, it was GONE. And it didn't return until the next morning when she awoke to the unfamiliar scent of the linens over her head.

Kristina didn't know the man, never had saw him before, didn't know his name, and somehow she didn't care. The swarm hadn't found her there in his room and she felt no regret in knowing that she had giving in to a man she didn't know. In an earlier time in her life, a time before the swarm, things would have been different but that day she was just...happy. Happy for the first time in a long time. This was the change she needed. THIS was the excitement she needed to keep the mundane away. 

The walk home from the strangers home allowed the buzzing dreadful things to return, she couldn't very well go on a bender and completely leave her life behind, could she? No, not after all she had accomplished. Kristina had to keep living her mundane life, and, like a junkie, get her fixes on the  run and take it day by day. She found that she could do well at keeping the swarm at bay while she was away from work. Drinking helped, smoking helped, men helped, lying helped but only slightly. A combination could keep the swarm away longer and longer, but once she returned to work so did they. 

That was when the idea had sparked in her mind, an idea she was still working on making a reality. Soon enough she would get to talk to Eli and she hoped he would take her up on her offer of becoming partners, but even if he said no she knew that she would do it. She would become a criminal. Smuggling, she found, was easy given her profession. Over the past week she had tested the waters and found that this criminal road kept the swarm away while she was at work. It was amazing. Ah-maz-ing. It was one of the reasons she had missed her mother's meeting last week, but as close to her mother as she was, she didn't dare tell her of her anxiety or worse tell her about the acts she had been committing recently.

Kristina couldn't imagine the size of the swarm that Tamara was dealing with, what with Jack being dead. She had heard the news from gossip in the pub and, as sad as she was about Jack's death, she was also mourning for Tamara as well. It was hard to lose a loved one, especially a husband. As the woman smiled at her from her empty booth and greeted her, Kristina felt her happy heart turn back to worry. Was she bothering her? Oh, she probably wanted to be alone and now you've done it, she scowled in her thoughts. "I'am alrigh' hen*, how're you? It really 'as been ages! " Kristina chimed trying to sound pleasant as she approached her friend's table.  She pointed at the empty space across from Tamara with a soft smile. "Have ye any company? " 

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*hen- Scottish term of endearment for a woman (ie. dear, lovely, hun)

It was hard. The word hardly felt good enough to explain everything that she was feeling, but it was as close as she thought they could get. It had been hard for her, in the past couple of weeks. She had thought that Jack had been dead. Merlin. They had come to their door, and they had told her so. They'd told her that he was gone, and of course she had believed them. Why wouldn't she? It was what she had been terrified of from the moment that he had joined the Muggle military, of all things, anyhow. It had felt like her world was falling apart, because her worst nightmare had come true. He had been gone. She should have told him not to go, she should have told him the truth about how she felt… but she hadn't wanted to make him feel bad. The Muggle military was something that he had wanted--his father was a Muggle, and he was high ranking in the military. Jack wanted to follow in his footsteps. Tamara hadn't felt like she could guilt him out of doing something that he'd really wanted to do.

That was part of the reason why she'd always felt like it was her fault. Like she could have stopped it, could have stopped him from going if she had been honest with him. And then he would have been alive. Instead, she'd let him go, and she had lost him forever. Or so she had thought. Now she was trying to come to terms with the fact that he was alive. He had been alive all this time. Merlin knew what he had been through, what he'd survived, but he had made it back here. He'd made it home, and what he had found was her working at Fleur de Lis. He'd walked into a room where she was standing around in her lingerie, because that was what she'd had to do to survive. It wasn't as if she had been ashamed of her job, or that she'd thought it was beneath her. It wasn't. She hadn't thought anything of what she did. It worked for her. She got to live at the hotel, Lady Mellie kept the place safe, and she had more than enough money to do whatever she wanted. It had worked out well. She had been as happy as she thought that she could get without Jack.

It wasn't until he was standing in front of her that she felt like she'd been hit with a ton of bricks. Now she had to deal with… all of that. She had to deal with the fact that he was alive, and worry about what he had been through. But she also had to work through everything she'd done, while she'd thought he was dead--because he hadn't been. He had been alive while she was sleeping with any man or woman that came into Fleur de Lis and chose her. She didn't know how he could stand to even look at her. She knew that it hadn't been cheating since she'd thought he was dead, but that didn't make her feel any better about it. It still felt wrong. It felt like she needed him to forgive her, and yet… he hadn't expected a bit of anger at her, or disgust, or anything. She didn't know what she had done to deserve that, but she knew that it had only been a couple of weeks. They still had a lot to work through. She still wasn't doing all that well, all things considered. As happy as she was that Jack was alive, that he was back… she was still having trouble sleeping, and she knew she was still unhealthy. Still a little too thin. She knew it all showed.

Tamara would glamour it away when she had been working at Fleur de Lis. She had for the first couple of days that she'd been back with Jack too, until she'd realized that there was little point in hiding it from him. She wanted to be better anyhow--she wanted to do better. She was trying to eat more, and she knew she had to try something to get rid of the insomnia, or the nightmares and sleep paralysis that came with the nights she did end up sleeping. There had to be something that she could do. "I'm… good. Everything's good." She had no idea when she had seen Kristina last. She had no idea if the woman knew that Jack was dead, but if she did, she certainly hadn't heard that he was alive yet. "I don't--please, sit." She added, with a smile. Maybe the company would do her some good. It really had been too long since she'd seen her old friend.

oh baby i get by

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

Living in the craziness that was her life, Kristina found it was easy to forget that others had issues of their own. A good friend might be able to keep up on such matters, but lately she hadn't been a good friend to anyone, including herself. The last time she had seen Tamara's face, Merlin, it had felt like eons ago. Jack had been alive, that much she was certain of, when they last saw one another. How long ago was it exactly? Kristina found a lump in her throat as she thought of Jack's passing. It was in the tavern that she had heard of his ill fate with the muggle military, and she had been so wrapped up in her own life and problems she didn't even have the decency to visit her old friend.

This was one of those moments that Kristina had which were few and far between, a moment of clarity through the clouds. Through the haze of her life, through the booze, the potions, muggle substances, the men and the smuggling, she could see a glimpse of who she used to be. What she used to be... Someone who cared about others, who cared for others. Where had that woman gone? Now Kristina only cared about herself most of the time, worrying about her problems and solutions. Worrying about that next drink. That next lay. That next hit of whatever she could get her hands on. Her life was beginning a downward spiral, and she lived in that haze, blinded by it. And she liked it that way.

Still, she found herself covering it up with lies. Faking stability and putting on a mask of who she used to be for others. She didn't want anyone to see how she had fallen to temptation. And she most definitely didn't want anyone to try and stop her. So she kept it hidden, and she would until that was no longer possible. The very idea of her mum finding out was enough to drive her to madness. She had repressed herself, letting new Kristina come aboard, but from time to time she could feel that old Kristina coming to the surface. Digging and scratching her way to the top of the pit she had dug herself into, and she could feel something, something real, for a moment.

The old Kristina clawed her way out the moment she saw her friend Tamara sitting in that booth. She wanted nothing more than to squeeze her and beg forgiveness for the terrible friend she had been, but new Kristina still ran the show. New Kristina had dug the heal of her boot into Old Kristina's fingers as she had tried making her way from the pit. Twisting the sole into her knuckles, keeping her still, but not kicking her down. She would allow this, for now.

"That's great," Kristina replied with a soft smile before taking the empty seat across from Tamara. She wasn't entirely sure if her friend was being honest, or if she was simply saving face. She brushed her wavy brown hair from her shoulder before folding her hands in her lap. "Listen-" she shifted in her seat, unsure of how to start, "-I'm real sorry ta hear about Jack. I ken it must be hard for ye to bare his loss...." It was a terrible thing, bringing him up, but she couldn't hold back her guilt about the subject any longer. "And I ken I wasn't there for ye, when ya probably needed a friend. For that I'm sorry as well."

Tamara hadn’t thought that she was ever going to get past Jack’s death. It was something that she’d thought would affect her for the rest of her life. Falling apart hadn’t been a part of the plan. She knew that people coped with loss on a daily basis. They survived it. They picked up and they moved forward. Most people didn’t fall to pieces. Most people moved on. But she hadn’t been one of those people. She hadn’t been able to keep going, as much as she had wanted to. Tamara hadn’t been strong enough. That was the way that she saw it anyway. She hadn’t been strong enough to tell Jack what she’d really thought about him joining the Muggle military, and every time he had left, she thought that it had just made her worse. It had been harder every time.

It had never gotten easier. Every time that he had left her, it had been hard. She had thought that learning more about the Muggle military would help but it hadn’t. Somehow that had made it even worse, had made it even more terrifying to know what he was dealing with out there. Her knowledge of the Muggle world was pretty limited and knowing only the worst hadn’t made it any easier for her. It had made her feel weak, being that afraid of what was going to happen to him while he was gone. She thought that was why she had fallen apart completely. It had just been too much for her to take, and then her life had just kept on going downhill. There had been no picking the pieces up once they had all shattered.

There had been no repairing everything that she had broken. Her mum had gotten sick, and then she had lost her too. Then the house. All that she’d had left had been her brother and she had lost him too the second he had found out what she was doing for a living. He hadn’t found out in a nice way--there was no nice way of finding out that his sister was working in a brothel. He had found out because his friend had gone to Fleur De Lis and had seen her there. He had more than just seen her there, he had sought her out once there and they had spent the night together. She didn’t know if he had left that part out of the story, but that had been the last straw for her brother. So she’d lost him too.

But now Jack was alive. He wasn’t lost at all, and for some reason he still wanted her. He still wanted to be with her even though he had found her in Fleur De Lis in her knickers. That had been… Merlin. She wasn’t even sure she had a word for what kind of reunion that had been. An overwhelming one, certainly. To find out that he had been alive all this time, and to find that out while she was working in a job where she had apparently been cheating on him this whole time. She had already felt like she was disgracing his memory, but finding out that she had been cheating on him had been worse. The fact that she’d thought that he was dead did not make it any easier on her. It didn’t make her feel less guilty. And she wasn’t even sure how he could stand to look at her, let alone be with her.

Somehow he did. So she knew that she had a chance to try to get her life together. To quit Fleur De Lis and try to just… fix everything that she had broken. She could try to get her old job back at the publishing house, but she knew it was too soon for that. Tamara knew that she didn’t have a shot of anything going back to normal until she got healthy. The insomnia, the sleep paralysis, it was taking a toll on her and she knew that it showed. There was no way she could get a real job when she was always exhausted. There had to be a way to fix it, and that was what she was trying to figure out.

She was trying to work through those problems first. And because of that… she was honestly get to see Kristina. Seeing her friend was normal. Tamara didn’t know if she was the best company, but she certainly knew that Kristina would be. She smiled softly at the woman’s words, and nodded. “Thank you… That means a lot.” She paused then, knowing that there was little use hiding something that was hardly a secret. It was just complicated. “But actually… Jack--he’s… alive.” There was no good way of explainaing that one so she figured she’d just let Kristina ask questions if she had them.

OH BABY I GET BY

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

It was a strange feeling, this guilt that had floated to her surface. Kristina was truly sorry for having not been there for her friend, especially during such a terrible time in her life. She could not imagine being in that position herself. The anxiety of having a loved one fighting in a war was terrible enough to deal with, but their loss... unfathomable. Kristina had never lost anyone in her life, aside from her father, but she had never known him. Both her grandparents lived, though she couldn't recall the last time she visited them. Aside from her mother they were all she had, and they had been cast aside as a result of her issues. Everyone had, except for her mother. She could never ignore her own mother, and not just for the reason that it was her mother, but because the old hen would have probably kicked her door down had she even considered it.

Her mother was her closest friend. For a long time she had been her only friend, especially when she was a young lass. The sting of rejection never really fades when the memory comes to mind, the way those kids damned her. The way those families damned her...and her mother. Damned them all. It was a cruel village who believed that their belief in God had somehow made them better than Kristina and her mother. So much so that they had shunned them both, her grandparents had felt the sting of it as well, though not nearly as strong. In the absence of her peers Kristina grew extremely close to her mother and grandparents, but as she grew so did the distance between them all. By the time she had graduated Hogwarts she was barely on speaking terms with any of them.

It wasn't until she returned that she grew close to her mother once again. She had been worried about Kristina during her travels, thought her dead once after she ignored her owls. It had been selfish of her, but she was deep in her research then and couldn't possibly have found the time to write her mother back. Once she finally had she received the howler of a lifetime. There are probably still stories of it being laughed about around a tribal fire in New Guinea. Her mother's strong emotion resonated with her, she could only imagine how it felt to Tamara for Jack.

Especially since he...was alive?! Kristina's jaw dropped as she spoke, her brow furrowing with confusion. Had she received the wrong information? No, she could have sworn that they had said Jack was dead. He was surely dead once? Right? Yes, certainly he had been dead. Well, not really dead, clearly. "He's no dead?" Kristina shook her head. That hadn't been a great choice of words. "Sorry, erm...so he's OK?...is he...like in one piece?" Kristina scrunched her face slightly, Merlin she shouldn't have started day drinking before such a conversation. Maybe if her mother had shown she wouldn't have had time to down three daiquiris. "That sounds bad. What I'm meaning is, is he healthy? All sound? Is he really OK?"

This was the first time that she had to explain what had happened to someone else. Tamara could barely believe it herself, so actually trying to find the words to say it to another person was going to be hard to wrap her head around. Of course, some details were no one’s business but theirs, or even just Jack’s. She didn’t even pry about the details. He told her what he felt comfortable telling her but she didn’t think she knew the half of it. That was his decision. It wasn’t as if she went into explicit details about what she’d been doing the past couple of years. If he had wanted her to, she would… she would honestly tell him anything that he wanted to know, if he truly wanted to hear it, but he hadn’t. And she thought that the same could be said for him. Even if she didn’t really want to talk about what she had done, she would have for him--and she thought that he might tell her everything if she asked. She just wasn’t going to push. They had time to talk about all of it, if that was what he decided he wanted to do.

And maybe, if he wanted to talk about all of it… she would too. If he wanted. Tamara wasn’t honestly sure if he would want to know. It was hardly the same, what they had been through in the past couple of years. He had been a prisoner of war. She had made her choices willingly. Yes, it had been the only way that she thought she could make money, but she didn’t think that made it any better. There were other ways. She could have figured out any other way, and she hadn’t. So the two situations didn’t really compare. It was why she couldn’t stop feeling guilty about everything that had happened since she had been told that Jack was dead. It was why she didn’t want to talk about what she had done, and why she hoped that he didn’t want her to. She had cheated on him--time and time again, and she had been paid for it every time. It was how she had made her living and she was never going to forgive herself for that. Even if he forgave her, she couldn’t do the same for herself.

Not after everything that she had done while he had been captured, while he had been tortured. It was hard to believe that he could even forgive her at all for that, but somehow he had. She just had to figure out how she was going to tell people about him being alive now. It was clearly a complicated matter, and so much of it was no one’s business but his. She just knew that word needed to get out that he wasn’t dead, because well… it would just be easier that way. It would be easier if he didn’t have to explain it every time he saw someone and they thought they were seeing a ghost--or if she didn’t have to explain it to everyone that asked how she was doing and how sorry they were about Jack. If word started to spread, then everyone would know, and people would stop having to ask about it or have it explained to them. Hopefully, anyhow. There was just a line of how to explain it, and that was what they were going to have to figure it out. This was just the first time, it wouldn’t be the last.

She was glad that it was Kristina. Tamara thought that her old friend was a good person to tell something like this to first. This wasn’t going to be an easy conversation at all. She would be lucky if she got through it without nearly crying at some point or another, and she would rather cry in front of Kristina than some acquaintance of Jack or something like that. It was much better this way. “He’s--really okay. I mean, as okay as can be expected, all things considered.” Tamara really didn’t know how much was too much to say. She thought that maybe they should have prepared for this better, but… she couldn’t exactly go back now. “You know he was in the Muggle military and that was where he died… well he was actually taken prisoner.” She didn’t think that she should, or if she was even allowed, to go into more detail than that. “I probably shouldn’t say any more than that. It’s… been hard.” It was the understatement of the century, but words really couldn’t explain all of this quite right.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

Kristina had grown up in the muggle world, but that did not mean she knew all muggle things. She could vaguely recall what their school system was like, though she hadn't been enrolled in it since she was very young. She knew about the muggle jobs, like the one her mother had, and knew that they weren't all that different than what the wizarding world had to offer. There were muggle gardeners, just as she was a gardener. There were bankers, like those at Gringotts, and there were those who protected their realm. In the muggle world there were police, fireman, emergency medial technicians, and of course, military. In her world the Ministry took care of protection. Protecting their realm and the people in it was top priority. Well, at least it was once. Now, she wasn't too sure. 

It seemed like everyone was a bit flustered by the ever changing dynamic that was the Ministry these days, and no one really felt safe. At least, no one she knew. The muggleborns were struggling with the change in power in a way that she couldn't imagine. It was terrifying, actually. If it hadn't been for luck alone she may have been right beside them. She grew up with her muggle mother, knowing only that her father had magical blood. It was pure happenstance that she had met a distant cousin at Hogwarts that she was able to provide proof of her own heritage, or they may have sent her down to registration with the rest of them. Kristina wasn't sure that they wouldn't still. When the death eaters had been the low men on the totem poll the Minister hadn't been happy with just a few. Oh, no. He broadened and broadened and broadened the horizons searching for wrong-doers. Taking in family after family and throwing more and more people into the camps. 

Kristina was fearful that this, too, would happen with the muggleborns. That soon she may leave her apartment and never return, having been taken away. She hoped that it would never come to that. She hoped that she was safe, no matter what or who was in power. Being a halfblood seemed to have the advantage in such a crazy world. Not quite pure, not quite mudblood. She was grateful that her father had been a wizard, even if she had never met him. If he hadn't been she wouldn't be where she was, wouldn't know the things she knows and most certainly wouldn't have experienced the things she had experienced. She couldn't help but wonder sometimes what her life would be like if she hadn't, though.

What if she had been a muggle? Would she have married by now? What if she found herself in a relationship with a military man? No, she couldn't. She couldn't deal with the stress of losing him to deployments time and time again. Until, eventually, there were no deployments. Until he just never came back, like Jack did. But he had come back. He wasn't dead, and he had returned! Kristina listened and nodded as her friend divulged bits and pieces of the story, though it seemed hard for her to do so. Surely it was no easy task to explain how a dead man came back to life. Or, rather, how he was never dead at all. "Prisoner?" Kristina's brows shot up with concern. She didn't know what that meant exactly. Well, she knew what a damn prison was. But in war, what had that meant? Did they have actual prisons to send them? Or were they bound and gagged in some cave somewhere. She had swore to have saw something like that on the news once...

"Oh, of course. No. No need to go on, babe. I'm sure it's been rough for the both of you." Kristina could only imagine what a touchy subject it must have been. All the feelings wrapped up in it. Gosh, she couldn't even imagine. Especially since he had been dea...he had been gone for so long. Surely she had moved forward with her life in that time.  She hadn't wanted her friend to go on about the details, not if it was difficult, but she found herself wanting to know more.  She wanted to know how her friend was coping, and she wanted to be there for her. Like she should have been all along. "So are you guys getting on like old times? I'm sure things must be...odd? He's been gone for so long..."