Solace & Ignorance

On most days, Addison would probably have avoided the very place in which she stood, like the plague. Many people visited to remember those that had fallen. Addison visited it to remind herself of everything she still didn't understand.

Her mouth was curved into a slight frown as she walked slowly down the pathway, footsteps light - as if too much noise would alert someone that she could not even begin to understand what this place stood for. There was a certain age up to which it was okay to be clueless. But she was fourteen for Merlin's sake. Now it was simply embarrassing to be this ignorant. Yet, she couldn't build up the courage - no, determination to do some research. So, she just stood there in the oppressive silence, staring unseeingly at a plaque. The heat of the day slowly began to make itself known, making Addison shift uncomfortably in her place as she tried to ward off the growing mugginess.

The frown finally lifted from her lips and Addison registered the words on the plaque in an attempt to distract herself. She was sure she recognized the name somewhat. She'd probably read it in a history book somewhere. Assuming that she'd even touched a history book in recent years. A small sigh escaped Addison's lips and she cast a glance around before making her way to the next tree.

The recent Battle had not ended well for the Death Eaters. No matter though, their numbers could be made up; especially while the light side were in mourning for those that they had lost. Athena’s desire to desecrate the place was unyielding but it was nigh on impenetrable. The spells were hard to break through and the combination of ward-breakers and a little bit of Leglimency did little to aid Athena’s endeavour. She’d spent most of the morning as the sun tried to break through the thick cloud cover, trying to change something about the memorial - even if it was the state it was in. So far, all she’d managed to do was force grow some of the plants. Apart from that, she’d had little success and so went to have lunch in the Three Broomsticks feeling rather disheartened.

Two cups of tea and a steak and kidney pie later and Athena was back in the memorial, trying once more to find the source of the wards and break it down. She was having little luck and cursing her inability to break the spells and the lack of knowledge that ensured she would forever be prevented from being the cause of another blow to the Order. She knew that to get to them now would be to ruin their precious memorial and she was insistent on doing. The wards had been tickled by someone else but she was doing much of the same. It was as if she was just running a brush across the surface, barely scraping the top.

It frustrated Athena to no end and the irritation was beginning to show on her face.

Athena’s focus was on a large piece of marble when the Hufflepuff entered the memorial. The Slytherin looked up from her work and rose to her full height, her eyes narrowing and her scarlet lips coming together in a pout as she set her gaze on the girl. Athena twisted a curl of dark hair around her wand and observed the girl. She was young, almost too young, but not young enough to unhinge.

Strolling forward, Athena stopped beside the girl. She glanced at the names and gave them little thought before looking at the girl.

“It’s a shame not more died really,” She commented breezily. “There simply aren’t enough here to justify a silly little garden.”

Addison heard the girl approach a mere second before she appeared into her peripheral vision. She was willing to ignore her. It was only the way she spoke that really caught her attention. Merlin, her voice reminded Addison of London. London, and that lovely home of hers. She interrupted that thought before it could even branch out, reminding herself that she was being addressed.

She listened and somehow, the words were the most interesting thing she'd heard all day.

But the inherent wrongness of the girl's words still hit Addison like a slap in the face and there was little that she could do not to gape. It was understood that there were people who felt that way. After all, there was a bad guy. At Hogwarts though, she hadn't even glimpsed someone who could be that brash about it. But here, as the girl spoke those words, Addison knew there wasn't any way she could justify contradicting her.

She was the clueless one here.

Even if she wanted to say something, she doubted she could have. So she just stared silently at the plaque in front of her, willing the girl away but wanting her to stay at the same time. It was a refreshing change, to have someone other than a staunch do-gooder shoving their beliefs down her throat. Or worse, trying to be subtle about it.

Addison cast her a sideways glance and shrugged nonchalantly. "It's not silly." she said. "But then, I don't really get it."

It was not a matter of being blunt, coarse or crude. Perhaps that was how it sounded but Athena was merely stating the truth. It was a silly little garden. Money could have been spent on the poor little homeless Mudbloods but those blockheaded Lupins evidently thought it to be a stroke of genius. It wasn’t. The only genius was the wards and even those, with the right amount of power and probing, would soon fall; and Athena would see to that. Until then though, there was the little problem of the girl that seemed to linger, confused by the sight of the memorial. She was probably just as bewildered as Athena was though the latter daren’t show it on her face.

“Then how do you know that it isn’t, as you put it, ‘silly’?” Athena retorted with a smirk lifting her lips up. “The comprehension of something allows one to form an opinion. I comprehend it, therefore I have an opinion, you do not yet you disagree. Is it truly your own thoughts or is it what the Order and those infernal light wizards have been telling everyone?”

Athena was siding with the latter. The girl looked simply too young to form an opinion of her own pertaining this memorial without help. Athena was willing to help her choose the right one though. There was simply no sense in believing those foolish wizards who had thought that the memorial would go without tarnish. Athena was insistent on destroying the memory of the people that had been lost. She knew she’d need a little bit of help and she knew especially that that help was not going to come from the girl beside her. She didn’t need that kind of help though, not the curiousness from a younger student. She needed a man with brute force and ignorance to aid her and, since there were none around, she figured she’d have to wait a while.

Despite herself, Addison's lips curved into the faintest of smiles as the girl spoke. She had a point and Addison shrugged in response. "I suppose. But commemorating the dead is never silly, no matter which side does it." she murmured, more to herself than the girl. She wasn't entirely sure whether she believed it herself. It was just something which seemed like a fitting thing to say, yet it felt right - as if saying it out loud reaffirmed the thought. But then, the girl's later words registered and Addison couldn't help but smile a little.

"I don't know. Can't tell the difference anymore." Addison said and it was the truest thing she'd said in a while. All day and all night, she was smothered by an overwhelming sea of do-gooders and underachievers. She'd become like them. She talked like them, she walked like them and now she was beginning to think like them. Addison was used to hearing loud declarations from the Hufflepuff boys as they read the Prophet every morning. She supposed there came a time when some of it began to sink in, even if she had to concentrate for half the morning to build up any interest and appear like she agreed with them.

Yet to her cynical side, it was always amusing to watch them argue - to watch them protest as they never quite realized that they were the biggest hypocrites the world had probably seen and then some.

Addison's shoulders relaxed a little as she ran over the girl's words in her mind and her smile did fade a little in her disappointment. "I'm assuming that you think I don't have an opinion." Addison said, and she didn't bother to correct her either. Her beliefs were her own, and four years in Hufflepuff plus ten more in that home of hers had taught her to keep her mouth shut - especially in the confines of her common room.

Commemorating the dead was something that everyone did, regardless of allegiances. Athena had always been sceptical about it. The dead were dead; there were no two ways about it. You buried the dead otherwise you had to deal with that god-awful smell. Athena had always wondered how her father had truly felt about her mother, and whether he’d grieved for her upon her death. Athena was aware of Apolline’s disdain but her father was so quiet, so brooding. He didn’t smile at anyone, let alone his daughter, and he certainly didn’t reminisce about things like Apolline did. He didn’t live in the past but neither did he live in the moment. Athena didn’t know where he resided but she had a feeling that it was probably in his own mind. Clearly, that place was better than the brutal reality that they all had to face. The dead were lucky. They escaped. Their journey was finished in this life. Their soul cycle could continue and take whatever form they wished upon.

“To commemorate is to forget to forget. To remember is to dwell.” Athena pressed her lips together, her eyes falling to the wand in her hand as she rolled it between her fingers. “If you are smart then you’ll cut your losses and move on. This is naive. Memorials in general are naive. Death is a learning curve for those who live. One might argue that remembering is the best way to recall the lessons learned but I find, if a lesson is worth remembering then you don’t need memorials to prompt those threads of knowledge.”

Athena glanced at the girl, a small smirk playing at her lips at the honesty in the girl’s words. The tiniest bit of Leglimency told Athena that the girl was most definitely being truthful and for some reason, the Slytherin appreciated it. In the Slytherin Common Room, every sentence was shielding something from the view of those looking in. Every syllable was masked with barbed wit. Honesty was rare and when this girl spoke words of nothing but honesty, Athena felt oddly relieved and oddly thankful for it. Perhaps that showed just how often Athena experienced honesty and how often it rolled off her own tongue. It was though, not a case of how often; it was a case of how rare. How rarely she heard such honesty and how rarely she spoke it herself.

“Neither can I,” she replied after a moment of thought. “Which is why,” she added, “I don’t listen to it. It is better, if you’re going to listen to propaganda at all, to take heed of what makes sense.”

That was a piece of sound advice if Athena had ever heard any.

“You assume correctly.” Athena retorted, her smirk deepening. “You’re not nearly as painfully stupid as I thought. Now, assuming that your assumption implies you actually have an opinion -- what is said opinion?”

(I should start replying a bit faster now. ;D)

The girl made a lot of sense - that much Addison had to say. For once in more than four years, someone was honestly laying down their opinions in front of her without any mention of the Death Eaters or the Order of the Phoenix. She couldn't be sure if the girl truly was unbiased or concealing the forces influencing her own opinions. Even if it was the latter, Addison would have to say that she lied very well.

For now, though, that little tinge of disappointment was fading fast and Addison was content with listening to what the girl had to say. "I never said I was here to commemorate anyone. I don't have any losses." Except perhaps a certain 25 year old, thousands of miles away from her - the only person keeping her sane even though she wished he was dead already. What was the point of having a brother - a living, breathing, eating, drinking brother - if he had all but faded from memory? Addison would have liked a place to remember him - a shrine seemed too glorifying, he didn't deserve that kind of respect for abandoning her. A tomb, perhaps. But that would require too much effort. There had been pictures but she'd burnt them all in that first wave of uncontrollable rage and hurt. And so, here she stood - in northern Britain, next to a girl she didn't know, in a world she didn't understand, in a school where she had no friends.

No, Addison supposed. Those were quite a few losses. She'd never had those things in the first place though, so it didn't hurt as much as it could have.

"Would you like to be forgotten so quickly?" Addison asked suddenly, her tone unassuming. It was a fact that people spoke a lot. She was sure that half the PA's opinions would change if they had to turn their wands on on a brother or a sister or a mother - that half the Hufflepuffs would falter if Addison asked them if they would honestly be able to take a Death Eater's life if they viewed them as a true human being. Maybe they had mothers and brothers too.

It didn't matter either way. Addison would never ask and no one would ever be honest. For now, she could listen to the girl beside her and hope that she was being truthful.

"Take heed of what makes sense." Addison echoed. "And what's that?" The tiniest bit of frustration seeped into her voice and she finally turned her head to look the girl in the face, as if daring her to answer the question that Addison had been mulling over for years. She didn't even know why she was insisting on testing the girl. Perhaps a person of even marginal intelligence and some skills of deduction was all she needed to answer the questions that everyone seemed to have the answers to.

She felt herself relax a little further at the girl's later words, a smile dawning on her lips at the girl's choice of words. Not nearly as stupid. "You aren't either." she said. Perhaps a little too bold, but she pressed on. "My opinion..." she paused, pretending to mull it over even though the words were threatening to burst forth without any prompting. She forced herself to keep quiet for at least ten seconds and then spoke, slowly. "I think that if everyone wasn't out to be such a revolutionary, the world would be a little better off - if people simply tried to fix up their own lives before taking the responsibilities of the entire wizarding world upon their shoulders but only after considering or even admitting that maybe they might do more harm than good. Or maybe that they're filthy, little hypocrites." Addison said it levelly, her voice wavering only a little as she swallowed the rest of her words and forced herself to shut up.

There was little truth in the girl’s next words, even though there was honesty in her tone. Everyone wanted to commemorate someone. It was human nature to want to remember and never let that memory go but that didn’t excuse the stupidity of it. Athena herself had her own fear of forgetting what was important to her - forgetting who was important to her - and though her cynicism was perhaps a little on the hypocritical side, Athena knew that what she was speaking was the truth, not something she necessarily adhered to herself. What she could suffer through was the loss itself but she’d think of those that she’d parted with, even if it was not in death. Death was finite and as far as the mere mortals knew, there was nothing beyond it. Athena could accept that though she did learn from the mistakes of those around her. She did learn from the deaths of those foolish enough to succumb to it and those who were foolish enough to get themselves murdered. Athena took note and learned from it, as she had said, but she never truly forgot; however worth remembering that lesson was.

But would she like to be forgotten as quickly? Well, that was an entirely different question; one that Athena did not know how to answer. Her wit did not fail her. Her mind did not fail to come up with a suitable reply, one filled with the wisdom she possessed little of. She knew that she would have been a hypocrite once more to admit that she did not want to be forgotten. There was little to admit, though, as Athena cared little whether people remembered her of not. Her footprint on the earth was tiny among so many others; and even those would one day be forgotten.

“Everyone falls into the past.” Athena replied slowly. “Everyone is forgotten. Why not accept the inevitable while you still have time to come to terms with that?”

Athena laughed a little when the girl echoed her words. How sweet. Athena knew that mentally, the girl was mulling over the words and the heftiness of the subject that Athena was ensuring was boring down upon the girl. She was admirable really. She handled it with surprising grace and for that, Athena was mildly proud of her. Any other person would have stuttered, ummed and ahhed at the difficult questions posed to them.

“You tell me,” Athena countered with a wide smirk.

For the opinion, Athena remained silent and only gave a nod. The child was right of course. Far more correct than Athena would have given her credit for. What a surprise.

“And what’s your name?”

Addison's gaze flickered down to rest on the plaque as the girl spoke and she had to smile a little to herself. Everyone? Then, Addison almost laughed. She looked at the girl out of the corner of her eye and lightly dragged her shoe across the ground. She was very smart, that much Addison had to say. Somehow, she managed to shove all of her facts and philosophies to the front when Addison's question had been very simple. Would she have liked to be remembered? Addison hadn't been entirely concerned with her rather impressive view on things. She had expected a selfish answer. She had half a mind to ask again, but from the impression that she'd already formed of the girl, Addison doubted that she would answer any other way.

So she merely ran over the girl's words and nodded slowly. "But there's always someone who goes a little too far into the delusion and wants to be remembered forever." Addison said slowly. She didn't mean it as a contradiction. It was, perhaps one of those rare things about humans that Addison thought she understood a little. Perhaps every single psychopath in the world started out like her. She had a spectacular base. She was desperate for attention. She might even want to be remembered forever. The thought was so pathetic that Addison smiled a little.

It was only once the girl spoke again that Addison looked up, shrugging at her words. What could Addison tell her? The only thing that, to her, made sense was the money she'd stashed away beneath a tile underneath her bed in London - the money that would ensure she got out of here, to Russia, to Africa, to the most godforsaken place on Earth. Nothing else was even remotely important or rational. She could have told the girl that nothing made sense - after all, Addison had no wish to reveal her goals to anyone - but that might have been a little too dramatic, even for her.

So she shrugged and said, "Getting away from here, from Britain to perhaps live in some pathetic end of the world. That makes plenty of sense to me." And even though she did grin a bit at how odd that sounded, her gaze was serious.

Addison wasn't entirely sure why, but she was thankful for the mere nod that the girl offered as a response to her rant. Anything more might have unintentionally encouraged her and she wasn't sure she would have stopped then. So she nodded too, for no discernible reason.

"Addison."

Philosophy seemed to be ripe inside of Athena’s mind today. She’d never really contemplated the questions the girl asked but apparently she had. She spoke with such depth and such meaning - in amounts she did not know she possessed. Athena had often recalled her father speaking fondly of her mother - comparing her to some sort of philosopher. Athena had never put much stock in it until now, though. She had never thought for a second that that philosophy that her father claimed to be in her mother had also been gifted to her. It gave Athena this warm, almost bubbly feeling inside. She quickly quelled that feeling though. She wanted a connection with her mother but he didn’t want to have to explore that with a girl she barely knew. She didn’t want to have to explore that with anyone, in fact. Athena was doubtful that she wanted to explore it at all. Her mother was this beacon of hope but also of anxiety. When she began to explore that woman’s life, it would be like opening Pandora’s Box - there would be trouble inside for sure.

At the girl’s words, Athena smirked. Indeed, there was always someone that wished to be remembered forever - or, never need to be remembered at all. Why strive to be remembered if you can instead live forever? That was surely Lord Voldemort’s desire after his fear of death. It was amiable, of course, but she did not think that anyone in their right mind would attempt that again. Everyone was forgotten eventually. She could live with that and she could most certainly die with that knowledge. It didn’t bother her but she did have that little niggling fear. Of course she didn’t want to be forgotten - did anyone, really? - but she could accept that it was merely a fact of death. Eventually, the headstones would mean very little and they’d be lost with time. Eventually, there would be very little left on the planet that would prove her existence. Her name scrawled into the front of her text books, perhaps? Well, maybe. That was hardly a footprint that made its mark though. Still, it was a little reminder, a little memory to invoke.

“Lord Voldemort.” Athena returned simply.

The girl did not seem to have political sway. It was a shame too, otherwise she probably would have understood. Seemingly, politics flew straight over her head. It was probably a good thing too, really. So instead of replying, Athena stayed silent and merely accepted the girl’s words. A trip to the end of the world wasn’t Athena’s idea of sense but each to their own.

“Athena,” she returned with an air of snobbery. Addison. What a perfectly common name.