No Welcome Home ((Charlie))

[Ivy Tunstall]

"There you are!" Ivy exclaimed in relief as she pushed aside the door of the compartment she'd espied Charlie through the window of and turned round to smile at the younger girl behind her, moving aside to reveal her to her friend. "This is Sophia," she explained as she plonked herself down on the seat next to Charlie, deciding there was no point in remaining tottering in the doorway. "I'm so sorry!" she told her friends who she'd unintentionally abandoned for much of the train journey. "We both came across a Slytherin who wasn't too pleased to see either of us... but anyway then it's all fine, just about." Ivy said, with a slightly doubtful glance at Sophia. She'd've been rather upset had her teddy bear been thrown out of the window too. "Got a bit flustered and forgot where you lot were though," she said, blushing hotly. The train was grinding to a halt already; Ivy regretted that she'd missed out on her last chance to spend time with her friends before the summer.

"Are you sure about this?" Ivy asked Charles nervously as she hopped down onto the platform and tugged her trunk out behind her. "'Cos there's no one at home to greet us, obviously, and my neighbours have gone away on holiday. Mr. Ashton hasn't been so well so Fanny wanted to celebrate him getting better and... well, they haven't had the chance for a holiday in a while. Um... I can manage though, as long as you don't mind." Ivy glanced up to meet her friend's eyes. A lot of things got done for you at Hogwarts, so he would have absolutely no experience that would mean he should just assume she was perfectly capable of managing everything. But her ludicrously anxious expression didn't do too much to communicate the fact she was just needing Charlie to put his trust in her, wanting him to be able to have a happy stay, but could only hope that he would be able to do that without the personal experience Ivy made most of her own judgements from.

"And it's small, okay?" she continued, as though he might accidently have picked up any notions of grandeur from her. "I mean pretty small, not just what some lpeople like to deem 'a modest little cottage with a lot of charm'." Ivy glanced at Charlie again and then laughed at herself. "All right, I'll stop making excuses for what doesn't need excusing before you tell me to stop yourself. I just don't want you expecting too much, because I mean... it's not all that much. I wish my neighbours were going to be there while you are so you could meet them but... well, they really deserve their holiday. But I'll give you the best hospitality I possibly can!"

Ivy gave him a jaunty smile and then frowned at her heavy trunk. She couldn't place another Featherweight charm on it because no magic was allowed now until September. Darn. Very inconvenient. She lugged that after her with her left hand as she caught Charlie's with her right and pulled him after her gently. "You said you'd come before; there's no going back on your word now whether you want to or not," she shouted behind over the din of parents meeting their children. Ivy tried to turn a blind eye to all that as far as she could. It shouldn't really bother her too much - her dad had only brought and taken her back from this station in her first year; he'd been too frail to help after that year. She'd fended for herself getting home more often than not, there wasn't memory associated with it, so it shouldn't bother her - Ivy told herself this in theory.

They were into the luxurious quiet of a waiting room, and Ivy felt a lot calmer and more herself again. Plush chairs were aligned in rows, while a simple wooden bench was all that was provided underneath the timetables and old fashioned clock which showed the time to be twenty minutes past five. Ivy didn't pay attention to these however; she made her way to the small brick log fire which was glowing at one side of the room. It was a rather hot day for a fire, she thought, but magical people understood the use for them.
"I'm hoping that you're comfortable travelling by Floo," she said, proffering some of the powder, "because if not my plans are rather scuppered and we'll have to get on the Tube to be able to catch a train for Taunton." Ivy glanced at Charlie again, doubting he'd ever been on the London Underground. "I've only been able to start using Floo since I got my fireplace connected when I started working at Catalina's Cubby." she told him. "The address you want is , by the way."

Ivy went through first and hauled her trunk into the narrow hallway as she took in the tired floral decoration of the sitting room with a sigh. She tucked the trunk neatly against the bottom of the stairs and then progressed into the tiny kitchen to fill the kettle with water and put it on the stove. She found herself a duster from the dining room (her favourite room) before going back into the lounge where Charlie had arrived. Ivy smiled brightly at her friend and started dusting the fireplace through which he'd arrived somewhat self-consciously. All houses accumalated dust over time, but Ivy didn't see the point in having Mrs Gibbon come now her father wasn't there to maintain the house for. "Yup, that's one more thing I forgot to describe... this house doesn't realise it isn't the 1950s anymore." Ivy said as she moved onto the top of the television. "It's been in the family for a while, so this is my grandmother's - my dad's mum's - taste. She was dead against us changing it so we didn't, and by the time we could've done, my mum wasn't really interested anymore. Maybe I'll have to be the one changes it. Depends how long I get to hang onto the house for." Ivy left the room as the kettle began to whistle. "D'you want tea?" she called back to him, appearing in the doorway again to lead him through to the kitchen.

[Charles Driscoll H7]

The loud clanging of the train's bell announced that their arrival was to be in a few minutes, the noise interrupting Charles thoughts as he stood up feeling slightly disoriented after the long time sitting down. Somehow he'd managed to lose Ivy as they made their way from the platform to the train, how that had happened was anyone's guess but Charles had been rather preoccupied, he'd been trying to make sure he hadn’t forget anything which he was rather prone to do and also he'd found himself thinking of the last time he'd been on the train, when he'd just learned that Samantha and his father had been sent to prison and he had been more afraid of going home than he ever had in his whole life. He smiled when they finally met and gave her hand a little squeeze. He turned to her friend. "Yeah, I know your name, sorry about the bully," he said, avoiding the word "Slytherin". Charles had actually been on his own on the way back; he hadn’t meant that to happen but he realised he hadn’t minded it, which was rather unlike the boy who had never understood why people needed to be on their own at times. He wondered for a few moments why it hadn’t been so important to him that he have someone with him on the trip home and then noticed Ivy blushing. "Have a great summer everyone!" he said cheerily following Ivy.

Was he sure? He'd never been this certain in his life that was how sure he was! He wasn't going to miss out on the chance to tease her though. "You know, now we're here I don’t really think I want to do this," he said, wondering if his eyes betrayed him. He looked behind him at the train as it left past them, rushing across the tracks with a roar that almost drowned his words. "Ivy, this is the first time in a very long time – maybe the first time ever – that I am actually looking forward to my summer vacation," he said placing his hand on her shoulder so she would stop walking for a moment. This seemed to stem the flow and they once again proceeded to walk, but Charles found he was already preparing himself for the next stream of doubts and concerns that inevitably were going to come out of his friend's mouth.

She was repeating herself and he found himself doing it too to continue arguing his point. "You’re such a worrier Ivy; I didn’t know that about you. I thought it was just schoolwork and Quidditch, honestly, I have never had a warm welcome home, this is the first time in my life I'm not dreading going home. In my first year I seriously considered hiding somewhere in the school and spending all summer there rather than go back. So really you could live in a box and I'd still be happy," he said, genuinely pleased that she wanted him to enjoy himself. He'd jumped at the chance when she asked him to spend a few days with her at the beginning of the summer, it was going to give him a chance to take a break before the court or social services or whoever it was decided what was to be done with him – Professor Foxcroft had told him not to worry and that he had everything under control, and he'd make sure no-one bothered him in the first few weeks of the summer or sent him to live anywhere he didn’t want to. It didn’t look as if Samantha was going to be allowed to be his guardian but nothing had been settled yet, and Charles thought it would be best for them like this if they didn’t see each other until they knew what was going to happen – Samantha had said she was going to try and find an apartment in Hogsmeade which was where she had decided to live. She had a lot of decisions to make know she was done with school, but Charles had suggested she relax and take a break until the results of her NEWTs were released.

Charles wondered if she could do that. He wasn't exactly in an easy place in his life right now, but he was one of those people who could live without knowing exactly how things were going to work out. He was optimistic enough to hope they turned out for the best and accepted the simple fact that you had to enjoy the moment you had even if you had reason to be scared about the future – and Charles could settle for that. He didn’t believe in hoping that things would happen and not doing your best to make them, but he wasn't going to brood over things like Sam. If they would have to be apart, they would make it through. If a family was going to have to be found for him, well, he could learn to live through that just as he had survived other hard trials in the past years.

What was she in such a hurry about? She had his complete attention despite the crowd around them and their loud greetings, he'd been glad to see the jaunty smile a few moments ago but after those few moments he had felt a certain discomfort about her attitude that he could not quite find a reason for. It seemed to be more than just her earlier concerns but Charles let it go to the back of his mind now wanting to ruin the moment after he had done all he could to reassure this was where he wanted to be. And just as he had that thought he thought once again about her words about welcome and he wanted to find out about her other and why Ivy never mentioned her, but Charles wasn't going to bring that up till Ivy said something about it first. He knew better than to do that to Ivy, she took her time and he appreciated that. He'd his secrets, though it took less time and effort from another person for Charles to give them up than it did Ivy.

Charles thought of the big mansion he lived in and how it had seemed so much bigger when he had been there on his own. He almost smiled at the reminiscence of how he'd got some of the house elves to stay in rooms nearby and one to sleep in the same room as he did, he had been that nervous of being on his own in the large empty house. He'd never really liked living there, and at one point he'd stopped trying to, and the few weeks of last summer when he'd been too numb to do anything but lay on the couch and wonder what he was going to do now he was completely on his own in the world. But then Kris and Mary had come, and then he'd finally got some news from Foxcroft, and slowly things had started looking better and he'd crawled out of the hole and what he considered to be the lowest point in his life.

"Done it too many times to give it any thought," said Charles, thinking Ivy was calmer. He listened to the address and repeated it then nodded, taking the powder and stepping in to the fire after Ivy. They arrived after the usual few moments of discomfort, and Charles thought that would probably be the last taste of anything magical they would get before next year. He dusted himself down and slowly took in the room as Ivy talked about how old the house was and how little her family had changed it. But it wasn't that that struck Charles the most, it was the fact that the house had obviously not been lived in for a while. No person could put up with hat much dust. And again Charles had that feeling that there much he didn’t know about the girl before him, and he wished he could tell her that there was nothing that she could stay that would make her drop in his estimation. There was so much he had come to admire in Ivy over the past years – and the time over which things between them had developed had made him appreciate what they had all the more.

"Yes," he said. "You know a lot more about your house than I do. Mother used to change our furniture all the time just to keep in with the trends, or at least that was her reason. I stopped arguing after a while when she kept changing my bedroom," he said with a shrug. "Sam's getting her own apartment in Hogsmeade. Our house was too far for her to start reinventing her life," he said. He wondered if Ivy minded him talking about Sam. "So why are you thinking of getting rid of the house?" he asked.

[Ivy Tunstall]

Ivy gave Charlie a disparaging glance as he told her he was having second thoughts. She might be slightly nervous, yes - after all, her house posed a lot of questions and she was afraid even of what Charlie might think of her situation which could only become all the clearer seeing her living arrangements - but at the same time she was quite sharp enough to know when he was trying to wind her up. She smiled as he said living in a box would suffice to make him happy. It was a bit like a box, except for that part of the house protruded further into the garden than the rest of it. Still, a big box.

"Worrier?" she asked, thinking about it for the first time. "One of my old school reports described me as 'carefree'. And 'extraordinarily talented at causing commotions'. That last comment seemed to worry my mum loads for some reason... but it wasn't that I was rebellious or anything. Just my magic, completely untrained - well, things tended to go wrong. Maybe it's you makes me worry," she suggested with a smile and tone of voice that indicated she wasn't serious. She worried less around Charlie - enough that he got to know what the things that worried her were. Yes, he was right: she had turned into a worrier, but worries either had to be dealt with (not always possible), worried about or buried away.

Ivy busied herself pouring boiling water into the teapot and milk into a couple of mugs. One of them had an ornate 'T' and 'Thomas' emblazoned on it, and she smiled at the mug sadly. She turned her full attention to Charlie though as he started talking about Samantha, watching his expression. It was something that had been upsetting him terribly not all that long ago, but it was also something Ivy found difficult to say anything about. Her own reaction was to just block those times out from her memory, but if she did that she wasn't able to talk to talk to Charlie and help him as she'd like to. As he did her. She was trying, as much as she could, to overcome her prejudice. It was slightly inexplicable to her, though, that Sam and Charlie wouldn't be staying together. Charlie cared so much about his sister.

"How close're you going to be to Sa -mantha this summer?" she asked him and then, "Strong or weak? Actually, you can just have to I give you, and tell me whether you want more or less milk." She handed him his tea and then leant against the small kitchen counter sipping from her own mug. The kitchen was probably less dated than the rest of the house - it had boring white surface tops and wooden cupboards. Her mother had made sure that got fitted out again; they used to tell Ivy she'd said 'I have to cook in it, I have to be able to stand it.' Still, nothing could stop it being tiny and Ivy never dared open any cupboards while anyone else was in the vicinity for fear of inadvertently clouting them on the head. Ivy shooed Charlie out of the room so that she could put the teabag-containing tin back in the cupboard, her eyes wide. She owed him more than being cryptic when answering that last question of his.

"Sorry," she said, as she went back into the hall. "I didn't want to give you a bump on the head. D'you want to sit down in the lounge for a bit? I'll get the place ship-shape soon but... you get tired too when we have the long journey on the Hogwarts Express right?" She sat down in the armchair and held her tea between her hands, trying to stop their slight shaking. "Um... well it's not so much that I want to get rid of the house," she began, "as that I might not have much choice. It's just... I don't know how long I'll be allowed to stay here on my own - I mean I wouldn't be on my own anyway, but the Ashtons just don't have any room: there's six of them and three of those are boys and they make the house just slightly chaotic already without needing more room for me - so that's an uncertainty, whether anyone will decide I can't stay here. And then... there's my mum. I don't think she got half of anything when she divorced my dad and it was only my dad left this house to me. But I mean... she didn't take half of me with her so... I don't think she'd have the gall to come back demanding her half of the house. I'm less sure about her husband. He's not very keen on me communicating with my mum at all and I don't know... I don't know him so maybe he isn't malicious but I can't help but think of him as that sometimes, from my experience with him." Ivy looked at Charlie anxiously, wondering if he had managed to follow everything she'd just said, and then gulped at her tea in an effort to calm herself.

((I think Ivy would probably have told Charlie before that there wouldn't be anyone from home around at the time he was staying, although not made it clear why. Although she had hoped her neighbours would be there... but anyway then there's things that may be a surprise and things that won't be. )

[Charles Driscoll H7]

“Ha, ha,” said Charles when she suggested it might be him that made her worry. “I keep you from going completely insane with worry, Tunstall,” he said with a lopsided grin. He wondered what had happened to that carefree person. Maybe she was still there somewhere, and if she wasn’t, he didn’t care; he wouldn’t change a thing about Ivy. Charles didn’t let anything worry him, which was a rather extreme attitude as well, but that was what made them both balance each other out. He felt a funny warm feeling as he had that thought. He’d never thought of anyone in that way before. “That’s OK. Don’t worry, you’re right, it’s funny how exhausted after a train ride. Let’s just sit on the couch and talk,” he said. As Ivy talked more about her family a suspicion he had long had was finally confirmed: her father was dead and she had a very bad relationship with her mother. They both came from broken families, even if his parents had been together; he had just lived in one rather than come from one.

“To be perfectly honest I really don’t how much of Sam I’ll be seeing. She hasn’t been allowed custody of me, which again to be perfectly honest, is not a surprise to me or her, much as it hurts to face the fact. But she needs to find out who she is and what she wants, you know, I’ve never seen Sam passionate about anything her whole life. And she’s started off by buying a place in Hogsmeade, and we’re selling our house in Cornwall, neither of us are particularly attached to it anyway. It secures us financially and means she doesn’t have to find employment at once, I’m hoping she’ll go out there and explore different things, I’ve been talking to her about Defence and magical creatures, the problem is I really have no idea what it is that she likes. I think she can do more than just get a job right out of school, I mean, I think she should try and develop her skills, get a little more specialised in something. It’s hard to be almost eighteen and trying to reinvent yourself and your life. But at least she has the financial security. And me, well they might have to find me some foster parents. But Professor Foxcroft said he was looking into some other solution. He was a little unclear but just told me not to worry. And I trust him and so I’m just going to live in the moment and enjoy my time with my close and dear friend,” he said, reaching out and rubbing Ivy’s hand.

“I wish we were older – if we were, you and I could have got a place together,” he said wistfully.

[Ivy Tunstall]

"Maybe you do," Ivy replied, this time serious. She paused for a moment, looking a little awkward as though she were considering holding back her words, but then continued. "I don't know how I'd have got through this year without you, all of you," she said truthfully. "I wondered whether it was worth it, at the beginning, when Laura was murdered - if the wizarding world was worth it when it could recoil so cruelly against Muggleborns... or, no, against good people... why I'd given up... my mum, my dad too - because I think sometimes that maybe if... I'd rejected my magic, he'd still be here, maybe - I wondered why I'd given that up if the people I'd made that decision to join didn't even want me. But I've realised that the Muggle world has those kinds of people too, which in truth I knew all along, and I've begun to think that my mum would have left anyway, and most of all... all of you as my friends are reason enough for me to have gone to Hogwarts, and you do want me there. At least I think you do!" she said, her eyes twinkling with a tiny bit of mischief as she added the modest uncertainty, but her chin tilted upwards at an almost indiscernibly defiant angle.

Ivy listened closely to what Charlie told her about Samantha. She'd been so scared of her for so long, had held such a negative viewpoint of her, that she'd hardly been able to mentally connect her with her brother for many months, even though she knew that Charlie's sister meant a lot to him and believed that that was reciprocated by Samantha. Now she wanted to form a more positive, or at least more accurate, impression of the girl that was Charlie's sister, and she believed that the best way she had of doing that was by paying attention to what Charlie had to say about her. His words suggesting that Samantha idn't know who she was and what she stood for echoed in Ivy's mind after Charlie had finished speaking. She stared at him in thought for a moment before asking, "When did Samantha last tell you what she wanted to do, before all..." She let her question trail off, not bothering to try and describe that period in Charlie and Samantha's life. She still didn't feel as though she knew enough to make any judgement on the events that had passed, and had decided it wasn't her place anyway.

Ivy was never able to bring herself to call Samantha 'Sam' when they were talking about her, and she didn't know whether that bothered Charlie. Some of the time she worried about it. Most of the time, contrary to what he would probably have expected, she put it entirely out of her mind. The thought that stuck with her at the moment was that if Samantha didn't know who she was now, she couldn't have had much control over it before. Had she done everything because she had been influenced to do it by others? Wondering that was why Ivy had asked the question she had, seemingly unrelated though it might appear to the rest of her thoughts. Would Samantha have continued in that way, allowing her entire life's course to be dictated? Ivy felt for her, just a little. It was as though the first time she had done something true to her self, in protecting her brother, she had been punished for it. Although she hadn't been punished so much for that as for the way she had done it. But Ivy didn't want to think about that - the knowledge that the same thing had happened to Charlie, too, was quite painful. Thinking about it made her feel physically sick.

Ivy turned her head to smile at Charlie as he reached out for her hand, finding it comforting as a reminder that he was here and reasonably content after her previous thoughts. She blushed, just a little, at his next comment. It was nice to think that someone outside her family liked her enough that they could put up with her and her worries day in, day out. She found, when she thought about it, that it would probably have worked out quite well.
"There's no point thinking about 'would have's' or 'might have's' though," she sighed, once finished with her pondering. "I would have liked that, though," she said after another moment, in a lower voice. Ivy stared at him a while longer, trying not to rue the fact that it wasn't possible, before suddenly exclaiming in the horror of remembrance:
"Oh Charlie! I forgot - I mean I knew I'd have to find somewhere to put you, but I hadn't thought about where." She started off up the stairs, which led to a small, narrow landing. Ivy pushed her door open to reveal her bedroom in all its homespun glory. "Kiyla stayed in here with me - it just fits two beds," she said, walking into the space which smelt partly of dust and partly just like Ivy's room. "But it's a bit of a squash as I'm sure you can imagine, and well, we were fine but you're a guy so you might want more space," she said, looking dubiously at Charlie. She went back onto the landing and lingered in front of a door that was pulled fully shut, instead of slightly ajar as the door to her own bedroom had been, her hand faltering on the doorknob. "And this... is - was, my dad's bedroom." She looked back at Charlie, hesitant and uncertain - and showing it. "I've only been in here once since he died," she added, her voice hoarse so that it came out almost as a whisper.

[Charles Driscoll H7]

Charles didn’t say anything but smiled faintly at her words, he knew he and their friends had played a part, but sometimes he wondered if she gave herself too little credit for what she in herself had to do to get through the harder times they'd been through in the past years. He felt the same exactly as she did; he knew he was nothing without his friends at Hogwarts – and Ivy – well he'd never thought a friend could mean so much or that he had it in him to care about a friend so much. He almost poked at fun at her but didn't; he'd been there before, uncertain that he was needed or wanted. But he didn’t say anything because he wanted her to know it and feel it and believed she would know it someday without a shadow of a doubt; to him, Ivy was – there wasn't even a word for it, what she was to him. "Been there done that – well, not exactly, but you know what I mean. It's the one thing I would never give up going to Hogwarts for," he said. They were getting closer now – he could feel it, he knew when Ivy was telling him something important little as she did to convey that.

"I wish I could tell you that I knew Ivy, but I don’t think she knows the answer to that herself, I'm sure my parents, the owner of the Potions shop with the questionable deals I never knew about until all the world did, and my mother, the suicidal narcissist had plans for Samantha - she always seemed to have this fixed idea that she had all the connections and the skills to be better than everyone else. So, right now, I have no idea what she's going to do," he said. He paused for breath, and hoped he hadn't sounded too bitter - he couldn’t think about this right now – that summer was behind him, the dark headlines screaming out at him from the newspapers what his family was like, their dirty secrets a public scandal for everyone. "You know she actually couldn’t do magic with her wand after she came out of Hogwarts for quite a bit, I don’t know how they didn’t find out about that in her classes, but eventually she did get control over it again when I almost got hot soup all over me and she used a Levitating Charm to stop it – it was because the last thing she'd done with a wand was an Unforgivable- so even though it wasn't the same one, she felt guilty about using a wand. She's got a long way to go Sam, but I think the best thing is just for her to go into many different things until she tries something and loves it – she didn’t do to badly on her NEWTS but it put a lot of strain on her taking those tests with what she was going through. She needs a year with no stress. She's got a lot of energy Sam, only it was all directed in the complete direction. Professor Foxcroft said that to me," he said, cheering up a bit.

He could think of other reasons why he and Ivy shouldn’t stay in the same room and almost laughed at himself, he couldn’t believe he'd just thought that. When they arrived at her father's room any previous levity he'd been feeling disappeared in a flash and suddenly he was hit again by the same feeling he'd first felt when he'd come to the house and had just attributed to carelessness. It was more than that – the slightly musty smell and the abandoned air were because this was a dead man's house, in his absence it seemed to Charles almost as if the house had lost some of its spirit. And then Ivy's hoarse voice made his heart fall right into his feet – he'd never heard her sound like that before.

What was it like to enter the room of a dead person? Would Ivy see things that reminded her of her father, did the smell of anything that reminded of her father still linger somewhere in some corner waiting to jump out and break her? He could hardly imagine putting himself in her shoes; he had no happy memories of his father or his home, but he knew he was the exception. Over the past years he thought he knew Ivy, he thought he'd entered those boundaries she set up around herself, he thought he knew her.

And now it was like he'd fooled himself into believing that – what did he really know of her family? They had only ever touched on that topic. He wasn't one of those people who just assumed you came from a happy background if you didn’t talk about it, how could he be? Or was he? No, he'd known there was something there. Why hadn’t he asked more probing questions, didn’t he consider herself to be her best friend and best friends knew these things about each other – he'd poured his heart and soul out to Ivy, and he'd known she hadn’t reciprocated, and yet he still thought that he could deal such a situation and that her past was her past and she would tell her everything in her own time. Was he wrong to wait for her so long to trust him, should he have made her tell him?

Why did all of these annoying questions have to pop into his head at this moment? He didn't know how to deal with this situation and he had to, he just had to be there for her, because he couldn’t bear her pain any more, because this was their vacation – damn it, they were here to be happy, he hadn’t signed on for this – just for these few days! Just for once he'd dared to dream they could stop having to tread water to keep their heads up and just lie back on the shore and enjoy the hot sun drying away the water and they would be happy, not happy because they chose to be happy but just because there was nothing to darken their spirits. He allowed himself only a few moments of wistfully pondering that notion and then convinced himself that they would get through this – because it came down to one thing that he felt in his heart even if his mind wouldn't allow him to claim it to be completely true – he knew Ivy, knew her from a thousand little things that might make up for one big thing - and the important thing was that he was here, that she'd chosen one person to do this with, and that had been him, and that even if she hadn’t prepared him before hand for this he was here and that was what mattered.

Please don't let me make this worse for her than it already must be. Her hand was near the doorknob and Charles decided he'd make the first move. He opened the door and deliberately made sure he was close to her but not touching her, he'd jump in when she needed him but would leave her with what he hoped was the control she needed over the situation. He leaned on the side of the door frame and didn't look inside and didn't look directly at Ivy, just at the side of her face. And he forced himself to wait, because as much as just wanted to hug her, he needed to do what she wanted. And he had all the time in the world for Ivy.

[Ivy Tunstall]

Ivy wasn't looking at Charlie as he started answering her question: she was staring at her hands, her fingers locked together and resting calmly in her lap. She was listening though, and eventually she glanced at him briefly and touched his hand lightly, slightly askance at his choice of words and tone of voice. He sounded well, a bit angry perhaps, or worse than that... bitter. Charlie didn't usually hold onto his grievances: he was very good at doing the healthy thing and letting them go - so it made her feel a flicker of concern. Coming from Charlie, such pent-up anger was a sign that it had given him very great sadness. Ivy wished she knew how to mend that for him - he was always so supportive of her. But then, he was just being blunt about how it made him feel, because of course it must have hurt. Ivy tried to think what it would have been like for her had the papers started revealing secrets that she hadn't known herself... if the first she knew about something personal was a newspaper headline. The very thought was horrific. But she didn't say anything. Rather, she looked back down at her hands, nodding every now and then at what he was saying about Samantha to show that she understood. She smiled at Charlie as she could sense him brighten.
"I think she'll be fine, Charlie, given time and the chance," Ivy said, wanting to reassure him. And, as far as she could tell, there was every reason to be optimistic for Samantha's future happiness. She had a brother who cared about her, first off, and secondly, she had the freedom to explore who she was and who she wanted to be, and to begin to enjoy her independence rather than feeling lost because of it.

Ivy was very grateful to have Charlie with her. She had thought about entering her father's bedroom on more than one occasion since his decease, but had never been able to find the courage. Now that Charlie had opened the door, she saw light streaming into the room, making the white squares of the blue and white chequered duvet almost dazzling. Dust which had been given more than a year to settle now swirled furiously in the air, glinting in the sunlight. Merely opening the door had been enough to disturb the still air in the room. Ivy faltered, but she could feel that Charlie was right beside her. She would have to enter someday. Now, while Charlie was here to support her, had to be one of the best times she was going to get. She took a couple of steps across the threshold, reaching out behind her for Charlie's hand, but then dropping her own to her side when she didn't make immediate contact. It was a bit strange... she didn't know whether she wanted him there or not. She wouldn't be able to go in without him there, but at the same time... it wasn't a part of her life that she'd shared at all before, with anyone, because it was just so... intimate. Not that she was uncomfortable with the thought of Charlie knowing, understanding, but still… she was hesitant and even frightened about it. Ivy had never been one to reveal her deepest secrets and worries, especially since her mum had left. Without her childhood confidant to go to, she had grown out of the habit of being open about the burdens that she carried with her. She and her father had had separate sorrows and anxieties after her mother left, and they had both kept them locked up. Ivy often regretted that now: that because of a lack of willingness to communicate between them, her father might not have had a clear, untroubled mind when he died – the thing which she had owed him the most.

Some of her father was still here, in this room. She knew that he was gone, but the extent to which the bottom drawer of the bedroom chest was left slightly open, his favourite novel on a small dressing table below a few shelves, on the windowsill an empty plant pot which she had decorated in primary school and given to him – they all reminded Ivy of her father. And… “It still smells like his room,” she whispered, turning to Charlie and gripping hold of his arm. It did… amongst the dust, her father’s smell still lingered in the enclosed space. Now that she looked again, she could even see reminders of her mother: a half-used packet of potpourri on the dressing table and an old nightdress on one side of the open drawer. She stood and stared for a while, and then finally let go of Charlie’s arm, walking towards the window. It had a view of the garden. She took a deep breath, and then opened the window, letting in slightly cool late afternoon air and the scent of the honeysuckle that had started to take over the garden during the spring, in her absence. She was shaking and couldn’t hold back a few silent tears: it felt wrong to be effectively destroying a memory of her father. But she would rather that the memory was outside, mixing with the scents of nature, than shut up in a room she was too afraid (of herself) to enter. The tears kept on coming, and were now dripping off the tip of her nose, which was very wet and unpleasant for her and made her a little more aware that she had a consciousness more immediate than her dull, all-consuming grief. She wiped the tears away with her hand, folded her arms and continued to look down at the yard below, still unable to stop herself shaking.

There was a bit of a breeze outside, and Ivy realised that it had blown something off the dressing table. She went to pick it up, and found that it was a folded letter addressed to ‘Tom’. Ivy handed it to Charlie and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“It’s my mum’s writing on the front,” she told him, speaking at her normal volume. That felt wrong to start with, as though the room wanted hush, not to be disturbed by the voices of mortals, but as she spoke some more she found that she wouldn’t go back to whispering either. “I found this… my dad had been reading it just before he was rushed to hospital: he dropped it on the stairs. I put it back in his room. I don’t know how long he’d had it for, or whether that was the first time he’d read it or not.” She took it back off Charlie and fiddled a bit. “I wish I knew what it was about,” she confessed, “and wha… why it… whether something in it triggered his heart attack.” It took her a while to blurt out the last words, and then a while longer to compose herself again. “Me and my dad didn’t really talk about my mum much, it was too painful… we preferred to keep our thoughts about her to ourselves. But now I wish… there are so many things that I wish I’d asked. I don’t understand what it was like for my dad and… it matters so much now because I wonder whether something my mum wrote broke his heart. I think that something made him give up, though if I’d been here then it might have been different,” she continued, brandishing the letter a bit. “And I can’t ask my mum because she refuses to have any contact with me and only her husband responds to my letters.”

Ivy sighed and put the letter down between them, standing up. She took down a photo album from one of the shelves and brought it back to show Charlie.
“I would have liked someone here to welcome you,” she said quietly. “But at least I can show you what my family is like… and Fanny and the rest of the Ashtons – they’re my neighbours,” she explained anxiously. She opened the album and started pointing out her father, mother and grandmother on her mum’s side. Ivy herself was a smiley, happy young girl in most of the pictures, with the utter trust in her parents that she had held clearly visible in the photos. She hadn’t been able to sense that things were about to go wrong. Had her father been able to? Ivy wiped away a few more tears at the thought.
“I wish that things had been different,” she said slightly glumly. Even a small change would have made things work out so much better. But then again, she didn’t have the right to complain; she did still have Charlie, the best best-friend anyone could wish for, with enough patience even for her. Ivy smiled slightly at him and squeezed his hand. She didn't feel better for what she'd done but she did feel... more in control of her life, and her happiness, than she had been for a long time.