Cross My Heart

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter, anyhow
An' it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don't know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm trav'lin' on
Don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway
So don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
I can't hear you any more
I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right

I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right.

~Bob Dylan, Don't think Twice, It's Alright

Chapter 2: Hafiz

I had expected Bill for lunch, but he sent an owl saying he was held up at work, so he wouldn't be coming home until dinnertime. Having finished my morning exercise and meditations, I hummed distractedly as I flipped through some books. I was trying to find articles for my apprentice to study when she got back. It seemed that whenever I thought of my student I made more noise than usual. It was her influence, I knew. She refused to do anything quietly unless it was absolutely necessary. I would have forced her to do more practice in quiet activities if she wasn't so superbly stealth already.

I shouldn't be so influenced by my student, but we had spent the better part of two years together, and she was a very, very strong personality. Or at least, she projected a very strong personality. Singing was one of my student's favourite things. I wanted to kill her half the time just to shut her up. Especially since she knew the words to every single New Kids On the Block song. If you can call "The Right Stuff" a song. She had learned them specifically to annoy me.

"Oh, oh, oh, oh-oh. Oh, oh, oh-oh." Yes, my apprentice would have her work cut out for her when she got back. Although I had a feeling I wouldn't be hearing Joey, Jon, Jordan, Donnie, and Danny for quite a while. My student would probably take a long while to become anything resembling the happy, slightly psychotic teenager I knew, and even if she were only on a holiday and nothing had changed, my student had discovered metal, grunge, and punk music, and I wasn't sure that I liked it more than those insipid juvenile Bostonian miscreants.

I had called those New Kid boys that once in front of her and to my surprise she had pouted rather than laughed. "But I'm an insipid juvenile Bostonian miscreant."

She then laughed at the embarrassed look on my face.

I picked up my wand and turned on the stereo that my student had rigged to work with magic. Things were far too quiet without her. She stomped and shouted and swore like a sailor fluent in twelve languages. She laughed at and with everything and she insulted anything that moved and most of what didn't.

But there was a very good thing about my student's absence, even if the circumstances were horrible. With my student back with her family, I could spend plenty of time with Bill and not worry about her waltzing in on us, playing Pachebel's Cannon on a kazoo and throwing rice.

She did that once, the first time Bill spent the night at our place. She was wearing a doily on her head and these tacky stiletto heels she had transfigured herself out of a pair of bunny slippers- and the heels still had floppy ears to show for it. She had paired the doily and shoes with bright red reindeer socks and smelly gym shorts. She toasted us with sparkling cider and I hexed her out of the room. Bill very nearly died laughing.

Bill. I smiled just thinking about him. He was absolutely perfect, and in ways I had never thought I'd want. He was tall, but very fair, covered in freckles and red hair. He had fabulous and expensive taste, too. He wore these dragon hide boots and nice, expensive but not flashy robes. His hair was long and his ear was pierced. I think that's why my student pointed him out to me in the first place. She's a sucker for people with too many holes in their bodies.

Me, I usually went for punks myself, but I liked hygiene. Most of the men I had dated before Bill had more holes than nature had given them at birth. I wouldn't have defined myself as punk per se, but it was definitely more my realm than the New Kids were. I preferred classical and chamber music, with a bit of classic rock thrown in (Zeppelin!) It was the whole punk mindset that interested me, that "Damn the Man!" idealism mixed with a "Fuck the World" cynicism that I found very alluring. Not to mention the vinyl pants and combat boots.

My apprentice listened to anything and everything, except for that soft rock, Boys II Men-type stuff, but her true fondness was for the edgy rock musics like punk and grunge. But I had found that the music itself could be rather... repetitive? And there was a certain lack of showering that concerned me. When I discussed this with my student she said that I had no right to be mean about her punk rock, because punk songs were only supposed to truly vary in their lyrics. I told her punk music was fine; I could hand three power chords mixed with a diatribe about Reganism and Star Wars. Even grunge I could deal with, because there was usually some kind of point. But these Metallica people...were they always so unhappy? Didn't they ever wash their hair?

She replied that she didn't listen to music for the hygiene. Besides, she pointed out, I had once said that Axl Rose was very attractive. I reminded her that she had gotten me very, very sloshed so that I would be fooled into signing her permission form for more piercings.

"In vino veritas, Fizzy!" She laughed. I never should have taught her Latin.

Bill had actually been very helpful in my apprentice's education. She had a very rebellious nature; it was half the reason she had been placed with me and most of the reason we got on so well. I hadn't taken so well to my training either. Guardians in the Sisterhood give up much more of their lives than anyone else. Most of our order live rather ordinary lives; Guardians, in a word, don't.

But Bill, even though he didn't really know why she travelled with me as opposed to going to a traditional school of witchcraft, like the Salem Institute where most of her old friends went, he was good with her. When she complained about studying runes or struggled with gemmology, Bill was patient. Even if he didn't understand something himself- that wasn't often, he was very talented- he still walked her through it step by step until they both understood it. Bill had told me he had a brother, Ron, who was the same age as my student. There were far fewer temper tantrums with Bill around.

He was soothing for me too. I smiled over a picture of Alukah, a vampire demon, remembering the first time Bill had shown up at our apartment in Alexandria. I had gotten a job (that I didn't particularly need but was rather interested in) as a free-lancer with Gringotts, and I ended up working with a rather dashing man by the name of Bill Weasley. To my utmost surprise when I showed up for my first day, he was the very man my student had pointed out the day before at a cafe. We had worked together for a week before he decided to show up at our apartment unannounced with Chinese take-out.

Bill had knocked at the door right when my student and I had been in the middle of a furious row. It was just after the Axl Rose/piercing incident, and I was on fire. She was acting like a four year old because I had assigned her some particularly evil research on ancient, mostly extinct, elemental earth demons, to be cross-referenced with at least four foreign sources, and the argument had turned into a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Unfortunately for me, my student most excels in her combat training. There is very little that she can't knock unconscious in less than thirty seconds without a wand when she really applies herself. Again unfortunately for me, she seems to have a somewhat sadistic streak. She goes for the pain.

The battle was so loud that we didn't hear Bill knock, and he heard the sounds of things crashing around inside the apartment, so he comes in wand blazing, blasting the door clean off of its hinges and tries to stupefy her, just as I finally got a hold of my wand. My apprentice, however, has reflexes like a cat, which stem from her rampant yet somehow endearing paranoia. She freaked out, and Bill and I both were knocked out before I could say anything.

When I finally came to, Bill was tied to a chair and chatting merrily with my apprentice, who was surrounded by open boxes of Chinese food and all of her potion-testing equipment. She apparently had felt the need to test the take-out for poisons before feeding it to herself and Bill, who was being spoon-fed by my apprentice. They seemed to be getting along fine, except for the fact that Bill was strapped to the chair with 200 feet of climbing rope and three rolls of duct tape and he was sporting an ice-pack on his head.

"Look, Fizz!" my apprentice had cried excitedly when she noticed that I was up. "Your hot co-worker brought us Vegetarian Delight and scallion pancakes! There's cashew chicken too, if you want some."

Bill had invited us to go to England with him when he went to visit his family in June. Apparently his younger brother's best friend was participating in a tournament up there, and Bill's parents had practically adopted the boy. Bill said the boy, named Harry, hardly had any family, and Bill's mother would have taken him in if the Headmaster had let her. I didn't really understand why the Headmaster would have say in the boy's custody, but then Bill had told me that Harry was really Harry Potter. I still didn't fully understand it, but I knew that Harry Potter was a rather important person in our world, though I didn't really have the best understanding as an American who had always been rather separate from the contemporary wizarding world.

I would have gone with him too, but my student balked. She said she was sure England was a lovely place, and that it would be interesting to see a real wizard school, but she didn't want to. When I asked her why, her eyes got very dark, and it seemed as if the tan she had acquired in the hot African sun fled her face.

"I can't go England, Fizz," she had whispered. I remember it was at night when she told me, and I felt as if all the shadows and curses and terrible dark things that Egypt held were crawling up around the corner to come after me. "England will be the death of me."

I had tried to laugh it off. "Oh, come on now, Miv. They don't kill Irish girls the way they used to."

"I can't, Fizzy. England will kill me."

I hated the tingly feeling she was giving me. When my student was serious, she was frightening. "Hogwarts isn't in England," I snapped. "It's in Scotland."

She very nearly rolled her eyes at me. "Did you even read my report on Muggle Celts of the Middle Ages? Haven't you heard of William Wallace, of the Norman conquests and the Saxon kings? Do we need to go over Prima Nocte and the murders of over 8 million Irish women and their first born daughters?"

I then reminded her that my own father had been a British wizard. She countered that "Hafiz" was not a very British name, and that he had been a half-Egyptian, half-Welsh financier who had married a French woman who was a Spanish citizen before moving to America, which said something about my father's British pride.

This was why my own mentor had warned me about getting to close to my student.

It didn't matter anymore though. Bill had gone to Egypt, my student came down with a suspicious "disease" that rendered us unable to travel, and that was it. Bill came back several days late and looking rather pale and shaky. He didn't even go to his apartment first, but came straight to ours. When I opened to door to find him there he didn't even say a word. He simply took me in his arms and held me for a long time. My student wasn't home; she had had to return to the States for the funeral.

"I love you," he had whispered to me. "I love you." He had never said it before.

I pulled him to the table and sat him down. I knew my student wouldn't mind me dipping into her tea collection; she grew them herself, and she believed firmly that Bill was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. If she noticed that some of her chamomile blend was missing, I'd simply tell her Bill had some. She'd probably send him a whole jar.

As he drank Miv's tea, he told me the whole story. About the maze, and the false Defence teacher, and how the darkest wizard of the modern world had risen once more. As he told me everything, I felt a chill clench around my heart, and my student's words echoed in my head. "England will be the death of me."

When he was done, I embraced him again. "I love you, Bill." He held me tighter. "We'll be all right."

It had been two weeks since then, and I hadn't heard a word from the Sisterhood. My student was due back in a couple days; Bill was over almost everyday. I knew he worried about the events in England, and I was almost sure he was going to ask for a transfer back. I dreaded it.

A large bird flew through the window suddenly. It settled on the desk, and I recognised it immediately with a sinking, cold heart. It was a red kite, found mostly in Wales now, and I knew whom it belonged to. It was my old mentor Rhonwen's bird, Deryn. With trembling hands I pulled the letter off of Deryn's leg and opened it.

"Hafiz,

"The heir of Slytherin has risen once more. You are to protect the Lion until his power comes to full. We have arranged for you to take a post at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please return to Wales with your student at once for details."

Rhonwen

That was all. Everything I had hoped for since November was gone. All because of some stupid ancient tradition that I was locked into. The letter fell from my hand. My only thought was of Bill. How could I explain this to him? All this time I had been worried he would leave me, and now...

The door opened. Bill walked through, carrying a large, gorgeous bundle of orchids and wearing a huge smile on his face. Instantly my tears spilled over. Bill dropped the flowers and ran to me.

"Lia? Lia, what's wrong? What is it?" he asked, gripping my hands tightly, but I couldn't bear to tell him. I didn't know how to tell him. How to tell him I was leaving and couldn't tell him why or where. I shook my head, trying to wipe my tears away, then leaned forward to kiss him softly. My mouth lingered near his, and I came back for another. He kissed me back, and as he held me something deep inside of me decided that he wasn't close enough. My hands pushed at his robes, but didn't really try to take them off of him, and then, with an odd, slow kind of desperation he pulled me back into the apartment, into the bedroom.

Perhaps that's what I loved best about Bill. Not the forwardness. I loved the way he always knew what I needed. But as much as I trusted him, I couldn't tell him that I had to leave. I didn't know how to tell him that I could never see him again, and that he could never know why.

I shouldn't have ended it that way. I shouldn't have let him give me what I wanted. But I was so afraid; afraid of leaving him, of what he would say; afraid for my first actual Guardianship, of taking my first, and likely last charge; afraid for my fragile apprentice, who was positive England would kill her, even before her life had shattered two weeks ago.

"England will be the death of me." Those words echoed in my head. My apprentice had always been a bit prescient. Her mother had been a brilliant Seer, before her mind began to implode and insanity began its hold over her. My apprentice, though, she had a bit of the Sight herself, even if she didn't fully trust it yet. With her most recent vision...I wasn't sure that her vision of her friend's death would reassure her of her talents.

"England will kill me." If England held death of my student, what did it hold for me?

All I wanted was Bill, but as I lay there in the dark, tears formed in my eyes. Bill had done what I had needed; I had needed him, as close to me as I could get. He had reassured me of his love, but it was his love I could never have. Rhonwen had warned me about falling in love.

"Fool girl!" she had growled once when I had snuck home at two in the morning. "You think that life's about friends and fun and falling in love! Ha! Your life's never about that, child. Your life's about your charge, whether or not you have one. You always have to be ready, child, and a man, any man, will stand in your way. They can't know about us, child, what would you tell him?"

"But some men know. They have to!" I had protested. "Husbands and sons of other-"

"Idiot!" Rhonwen had snarled. "Sure, some know a few things. But they don't know our mysteries. They don't know about the Guardians. A charge should never know he's guarded."

"Yours did!"

"Aye, mine did," Rhonwen conceded grudgingly. "And it almost killed him and his family! Trust me, child, romantic attachments get charges killed. It's happened before. Guenevere. Delilah-"

"She was greedy!"

"Still an attachment! Don't you understand! If you must attach to something, attach to your charge! Because that's where your life lies. With your charge. Whoever that may be."

Rhonwen's words echoed in my head. For years I had been so good at remembering them, but the moment I met Bill, they just flew out the window. Well, maybe once or twice in that first week I heard them, but Bill just swept me away, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

I turned over to study his face, to memorise it. His hair had fallen out of its clasp and was swirled like honey around his face. His finely chiselled cheekbones, that hollow above his jaw, the freckles. He was fastidious about his mouth; it was smooth and soft. I touched it gently, memorising its shape. I was fastidious about his hands; I always gave him hand massages, rubbing lotions into them and then filing the nails. Before he met me, he had this terrible habit of picking at the sides of his finger nails as he thought. I'd mostly broken him of it.

I smiled sadly at those hands, taking one of them in my own. They were strong hands, roughened slightly from Quidditch before I had gotten a hold of them. Bill played as often as he could. He had been a Chaser while at Hogwarts, and two of his brothers played on the team there. A third, Charlie, had been a seeker. Bill's hands were smooth then from all the work I had done on them.

"Lia?" He whispered softly. Tears sprang to my eyes again. His voice was so gentle. It was deep and warm, and when he spoke it was if I had drank an entire mug of Miv's special hot chocolate with extra marshmallows and whipped cream. For the first time, though, it hurt me to hear him say my name. "Lia, what is it? Tell me what's wrong."

"I can't," I said very quietly. My voice caught on my tears. Bill wet his fingertips on my face. I shivered at his touch. "I can't tell you."

"Lia," he started, but I cut him off.

"I'm leaving, Bill. I'm leaving Egypt."

"So am I. Come with me. Come back to England with me."

Any control I had was gone at that point. "I can't," I sobbed. "I can't go to England with you."

"Why not? Because of Miv? She can come too. It will be the three of us. We can get a plat in London, and-"

"No, Bill, I can't. I can't go with you." I fought my way through the sheets and started fumbling for my robe.

Bill sat up and watched me in silence for a moment. "Why not?"

"Because I can't!" I snapped. "I can't go with you to England, Bill."

"Why not, Hafiz? What's keeping you in Egypt?"

"Nothing. I'm leaving Egypt."

"Where are you going?"

"I can't tell you."

"Can't tell me? What the hell is going on, Hafiz?" Bill stood up and started getting his own clothes on, following me around the room in the process. "Where are you going?"

"Away, Bill." I turned to face him. "And I can't tell you where, or why, or what I'm doing, and I'll probably never see you again and I'm sorry!" I couldn't keep my sobbing at bay any longer. "I'm sorry, Bill! I'm so sorry I can't tell you anything. I'm sorry!"

"Lia, please, you can tell me anything." Bill held me by my shoulders. I refused to look up at him.

"I can't, Bill, I can't tell you this."

"What is so terrible that you can't tell me?"

"This isn't about you, Bill!" I shouted, tearing myself out of his hold. "This isn't about you! This is something I have to do! I have to go! And it's my own damn business if I can't tell you! Now stop trying to make this all just go away and get the hell out!"

"Make what go away, Lia?" Bill bit back. "What are you talking about?"

"Nothing, Bill. Just...nothing. Just go." I turned away again. I stormed out into the kitchen to find my wand. I needed to pack. I need to get the hell out of Egypt as quickly as I could.

"Go where, Lia?" Bill yelled after me. He followed me into the kitchen. "Lia. Lia!"

Bill grabbed my arm like a vice. "Let go of me, Bill." I tried pulling away again but without luck. "Bill, you're hurting me!"

"What is going on, Lia? What the hell has got you so bloody rattled?" He shook me like a doll. For the first time I was actually frightened. I knew he'd never hurt me, but the look on his face was so desperate. I hated myself. "Lia, please," he begged, his voice softer. "I love you so much. Just tell me, Li. Please. I love you."

Some one hates me. Whatever supposedly benign deity that's watching out for us hates me, I was absolutely sure of it. Why else would I have to do this. What Goddess was worth this? Did I really want to do the will of some outdated goddess that me, my mother, a few hundred witches and a few thousand Muggle New Agers worshipped blindly if it were going to cause so much pain? There was no other possible explanation. Diana hated me and I was crazy.

I forced myself to meet Bill's eyes. Gods, those fabulous eyes. "I don't." I whispered brokenly.

Bill shook his head, thinking perhaps he hadn't heard me correctly. "What?"

"I don't," I repeated, my voice only marginally stronger. "I don't love you."

"You- you what?" He backed away from me. I thought that he might start crying himself.

"I don't love you, Bill. I don't want to go to England with you. I don't want to go anywhere with you. Sorry I wasted your time. Now please, just leave." I couldn't bear to watch him anymore. that horrible look on his face, as if he were four years old and I had killed his puppy in front of him; that was the image that sprung to my mind just thinking about it.

"Lia..." The ache in his voice was awful, and it resonated perfectly with the emptiness in my chest.

"Just get out," I spat out as coldly as I could manage. ~Don't look at him.~ I thought. ~Don't look up. Don't even move.~

I heard him take a shuddering breath. "Fine," he said evenly, barely trying to keep the anger and hurt from his voice. "If that's what you want."

Bill stalked heavily to the door. It banged against the wall as he threw it open. I heard him stop. "Goodbye, Bill."

"It really isn't, Lia," he replied. It sounded like something my student would have said. "It really isn't."

I heard the pop that told me he was gone, and I sat down heavily in one of the chairs. By this time tomorrow I would be in Wales. My apprentice would have to meet me there. Gods, she would be furious.

I didn't think she'd ever forgive me for what I did to Bill.