Sick of all the insincere

TAG: @atticus

Attie,

Missing you! Paris is great. The weather…phenomenal! School is more difficult than I had imagined, but I’ve already learned so much. It’s crazy to think that in just a few short years, I’ll be able to call myself—

Hadley sat on the corner of the street, wrapped in her hoodie sweatshirt, staring down at the parchment on her lap. How long could she keep this up? Her hand hovered just over where the next word should go, but she found that she couldn’t put the tip of the quill down. Something was blocking her. Maybe it was guilt…maybe it was something else. Fear. How long before Attie and their parents realized that she was…

It didn’t matter what they thought, Hadley reminded herself. It had stopped mattering when she had realized just how deep the lying went. Everything they said…everything that came out of her mother and father’s lips…how could she trust any of it?

It was like fate.

She saw her brother moving across the busy street, his head tucked as he tried to avoid the bitter cold of London in April.

Hadley wanted to jump up and hug him — she wanted to let him know that she was alright.

But she also knew that she had been lying to him for about a year.

When she had graduated Hogwarts, she had left the Erixon home. She was determined to get out from under their thumbs…to learn on her own and not be burdened with her parents’ expectations…and their lies.

So she had run — bouncing back and forth between Carter’s and couches that she could find. Sometimes traveling so she could get more information about her family. Hadley had traced their family tree back generations, trying to figure out where they had gone wrong. But all she had found were more questions.

“Attie!” Her hand crumpled the piece of parchment that she had been writing to her brother, pushing it into her satchel bag as she ran across the street towards him. A taxi had to swerve out of the way at the last minute and Hadley sucked in a breath of terror, her hands resting on the hood of the car. “Woah…” she said quietly before she shook it off and kept running after her brother. “Attie!”

The searing pain in his side had kept him up for most of the night, Aunt Desdemona had been in a particularly unforgiving mood yesterday and after he got caught at work late, she had taken it out on him. He needed to go for a walk, needed to clear his head. Atticus wandered the streets, feeling all of the things he had been pushing down for the last year. He had come very far in his training, both at work and the private lessons with Des. Leaving his parents behind hadn’t been easy but that wasn’t nearly as bad as leaving his sister, he and Hadley had been sending letters, but they had really grown apart over the last year.



His hair had gotten long, longer than he had ever worn it but surprisingly he really liked it. He was still getting used to it hanging in front of his face, which in this wind was quite obnoxious. He pushed it back again, and then lowered his face to protect himself from the whipping air. He wondered how school was going for his sister, he hoped she was learning something. He knew that the Lamont boy was with her and figured that would be enough to help her through.



As he went to turn onto another street, he heard someone yell out his name. A voice he knew well, a nickname that only two people in the world called him. He knew it wasn’t his mother, so that only left Hadley. He turned to see her rushing across the street, waving her arms at him. She almost got hit by multiple cars in the process. “Hads! Be careful!” He ran towards her and met her near the street corner. “What are you doing, trying to get yourself killed?” He wrapped his arms around her and smiled, it was good to be near her again. “Good to see you kid, what are you doing here?”
He stepped away and looked at her, she looked good, different but good. It had been such a long time since they had seen each other and it felt great. And somehow the searing pain in his side seemed to subside a little bit. 

“I’m so out of shape,” Hadley said her hand over her chest. She could feel her own elevated heart rate and the adrenaline coursing through her veins. Maybe she needed to go back to playing Quidditch…that always did wonders for her stress levels…which were unspeakably high at the current moment. Standing in front of her brother, she felt like she was being exposed — like she had some how walked onto a stage without practicing her lines, or she had forgotten to get dressed before going outside.

There were days when Hadley wondered just how much Atticus knew. Was he still shrouded in the darkness that their parents had created?

Over the last few months, Hadley had been able to trace their family tree back generations. She had visited her grandparents' graves, learned that Orpheus Vaisey, her uncle, was still alive and that Desdemona Vaisey was...well, still alive too (though she was having a hard time finding her).

Her father’s closet was full of even more skeletons. He was from a pureblood line — one full of Death Eaters and killers alike.

She reached out and wrapped her arms around her brother, hoping that the hug would mask the lies that she was telling. Hadley wasn’t a good liar. It seemed that unlike the rest of her family tree, she wore too much of herself on her sleeve to be convincing. But she couldn’t reveal where she had been all these months. Attie would tell their parents and then they would force her to come home. “We’re on Spring Holiday at Uni,” she said with a grin. It was believable…at least, that’s what she thought. “I wanted to come visit Carter,” she paused, hoping that he wouldn’t ask anything more about that. Hadley and Carter had been researching together while he was enrolled in Lufkin. “Well, and you.” She didn’t mention Atlanta and Mikael. She wasn’t ready to see them.

Honestly, she wasn’t sure she ever would be.

Pulling away, she took one look at him and laughed. She hadn’t ever seen his hair that long. He looked like their dad during his Hogwarts days. “You look like you need a haircut…” Hadley said, reaching up to ruffle her brother’s hair. “What are you doing outside the Ministry? I thought they didn’t give the underlings lunch breaks?”

Two years. He had kept the secret of his aunt from everyone for over two years now, he barely recognized it as a lie anymore. Desdemona Vaisey was dead and he would allow everyone in his family to believe that indefinitely. No one needed to know that he was being trained and molded into a warrior, a sword for the dark arts to swing into the light. He had learned so much, yet still felt he had so much more to learn. His aunt was not a patient teacher but she was thorough, using pain as a deterrent of failure. How could he explain all of that to his dear sister, who would never hurt a fly.



“Or maybe don’t try and leapfrog cars” He grinned as he looked at her closer, she looked different somehow but he would always be able to recognize that smile she gave him. It had been months with minimal contact, a letter here and there discussing what classes she was enjoying but no face to face in that time. They were so close for so many years, but time had eroded at their relationship and he missed it dearly. But he knew he had to keep his distance, he knew too much now and there was no going back to the boy he had been.



Ezio D’Orleone. A name that would haunt Atticus forever, he had thought about the young man for the last few months. He had been best friends with his father in school and died at the Lewis/Monroe wedding. He had been a Death Eater, forced into it by his abusive father and he was killed. Barely even eighteen and struck down at the start of a war. He wasn’t the only person who died that day, but he was the only one murdered by Mikael Erixon. Atticus had known his father had killed before, in his job it was an impossible feat to avoid but he had murdered one of his best friends at the age of seventeen. That was the crazy part, that was what had driven him to question everything his parents had told them. He knew that his mother fought that day too, but as a Death Eater. They considered themselves heroes, and so did the majority of the Wizarding world. It made Atty sick.



Holiday. He had really lost track of time, of course she was on holiday and that made total sense. He wondered why she hadn’t written to warn him if she had really wanted to see him but he figured he would let that slide, he knew his sister would be upset at the thought of being accused of ignoring her brother. “How is Carter?” He had no feelings for the boy himself, he was kind and seemed to love his sister and that was really all that mattered to Atticus.



He laughed at her crack about the underlings and his hair. He liked his hair, and he pushed it out of his face as he spoke. “I’m quite fond of my hair, thank you.” Her rustling had pushed it right back into his face. “Day off for me, had a long day of work yesterday.” He felt the pain in his side stab again, so much for keeping his mind off of the it.

“I’ll try,” she said with a laugh, though she promptly rolled her eyes. He was always looking after her. A younger Hadley liked that about her brother. She always felt like she needed the protection. There was a time in her life when she was so timid and so shy, almost unbearably so. She was an easy target for bullies and pranks. But now, she had changed. She wasn’t the little girl that he remembered. Though she couldn’t just come out and say it. She couldn’t tell him that sometimes she and Carter dueled just to test her skills and that more and more recently she had been able to best him (though she had a sneaking suspicion that he let her win sometimes). She was getting better. And she didn’t need to be protected. Perhaps there were now people out there who needed to be protected from her. People like…the Death Eaters. The darkness. All of it.

Hadley’s cheeks instantly pinked at the mention of Carter. He was good. Great, honestly. When she thought about everything that they had been doing — all the research, the late nights staying up reading into diaries and journals from years gone by, falling asleep with their heads pressed together as they tried to figure out her botched family history. They were good. But of course, Hadley had always had difficulty expressing her emotions, Atticus understood that. He was her brother, he was supposed to understand her the best of all, right? “He’s alright. Says he loves Lufkin,” she answered before sheepishly trying again. Maybe she could do better than that. “We’ve been planning a few summer trips, actually. Thought we might explore a little bit during the holiday.” There. That sounded more believable. No matter that their trips were largely centered around where their family had been over the past few centuries. "Have you talked to Alice lately?" She raised an eyebrow, remembering an old flame.

“You might like your hair but you look like a sheepdog,” she muttered before rolling her eyes and walking down the sidewalk. Maybe they could grab some ice cream before they both had to part ways. And they would part ways, she reminded herself. For all she knew, he was going to meet Mum and Da for dinner and she absolutely wasn’t doing that. “Guess that means you have time for ice cream and a walk, Mr. Unspeakable-in-Training?”

She paused, turning back to make sure that he was coming with her and then broke her promise, just a little. “Hey, how are mom and dad, by the way?” She asked quietly.