If it weren't for his tone, she might have brushed off his remark. Yes, of course you can, but that's not the sort of guilt I mean, she might have said, with reasonable confidence that he really couldn't help her with this particular article. They'd talked about guilt before, as one of the feelings surrounding every full moon regardless of what happened. She'd taken a lot of notes about it, anyway — she wrote guilt besides his name in her codebook far more often than he wrote it on the page. But his tone was too serious here to leave her in any doubt about what he meant.

She'd never guessed. Or, no, that wasn't true — she had suspected, last Christmas, but then the tone of his letters had changed and she'd come to the conclusion that she'd misinterpreted the earlier ones. She'd felt guilty about it, actually, as though she had done him an injustice by believing him capable of making such a grievous mistake.

Clearly, she needed to reexamine her own assumptions on that front. It's never on purpose. Juliana traced through their conversation over the past few minutes, recasting it in light of this new information. For a moment she said nothing, because she was too busy adjusting everything mentally. She was caught off guard, certainly, but she tried not to show it. She always thought she'd been good at keeping her thoughts and feelings off her face, when she wanted to, and she tried for perfectly neutral now.

"May I get my notebook?" she asked after a moment.

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   Kieran Abernathy

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Kieran shifted where he sat, getting settled back against the comforting familiarity of his sofa. "Of course," he said, although what he wanted to say was I'm sorry.

They would have plenty of time for that, though, when she interviewed him. The burn itched again. He got up. "I'm going to put on another kettle of tea," he said. They may be talking for a while, and — at the very least she should have tea for it.

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set by MJ!

This was going to be difficult.

Interviews were always difficult, of course, in the sense that they were work; if one was doing them properly, they were much more mentally taxing (at least on her end) than simple conversations. It was going to be even more difficult because she hadn't prepared for it, because it had never occurred to her that she would be in this situation unless she had gone very much out of the way to put herself in this situation. Finally, it was going to be difficult just by virtue of the fact that it was him. They might have only know each other's faces for a few weeks, but she'd known him for over a year, and she was already feeling less objective about this than she would have liked. He was saying he would make more tea, and she suspected this had very little to do with tea itself and much more to do with a desire to keep himself busy for a few minutes while she got ready. He didn't want to look at her, or talk to her, or think about her for a few minutes — he was ashamed, and they hadn't even gotten into it yet. She felt a well of sympathy and she wanted to say it's alright, it's alright, but she pushed it down, because she knew if it had been anyone other than him she would have watched him move to the kitchen and merely thought how fascinating.

Juliana retrieved her notebook. She prepared the area around her as best she could, in this unfamiliar setting. She put out her quill and ink, her cup of tea, a list of notes and potential questions she'd jotted down while working on the article earlier that week. She laid out the top of the page in her notes the same way she always had in the past for interviews, hoping that the ritual would invoke some of the objectivity she currently felt was missing. She wrote down, as far as she could remember, how they'd gotten to this point. Announced he would put on a kettle before starting, she wrote. Just the facts, in the first iteration of her notes. The sensemaking, to avoid having to sit beneath the weight of this subject, would come later.

When he'd returned, she offered him a very small smile.

"I have a process for this," she began. "It might be similar to what you do when you interview, or maybe not. I'll be taking a lot of notes. Just about what you say, and quotations, that sort of thing, not about my opinions or what I think it means. I'll ask questions, and you can say as much or as little as you like in response. If you don't want to answer a question at all, that's alright, too. Just tell me and we'll move along. And if you want to stop to take a break..." she drifted off for a moment, unsure exactly how to say this. "I recognize this may be difficult to speak about. So just... tell me what you need, as we're going through." She paused, going over a brief mental checklist to ensure she'd said all of the important bits before beginning. When she was satisfied that she hadn't missed something, she offered a small, quick smile again. "Do you want to start, or do you want me to ask a question?"

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

While he waited for the kettle to boil, Kieran pressed both his palms against the countertop, leaned against it, and sighed. He had an absent wish that he'd lied to her, or at least delayed — he didn't know if he was up for this, was the thing. He didn't talk about it, ever, not in detail. He hadn't planned out how he was going to anonymize it, although he was — if anything in the account could lead directly to Topaz Urquart, then the Ministry wouldn't stop until they found him.

He couldn't conceptualize anything past this interview, though; he was going to wait for the kettle to whistle, bring it back to the coffee table, and then: it was blank. An interview would happen, or maybe it wouldn't — maybe he wouldn't be able to get through it, and Juliana would think differently of him forever, and it would all be for nothing. He tugged at the ends of his shirtsleeves. The kettle whistled.

The kettle whistled. Kieran plucked it up and brought it back to the main room of the flat with him; he set it down on a knit potholder and settled back into his same space on the couch. He tugged on his sleeves again when she ran through things. "That sounds good," Kieran said, his mouth dry, "Can you ask a question?"

He didn't know where to start; a burn on his side, waking miles from where he should, the conviction that he'd done something terrible. That felt like the start, but it wasn't all the context, was it?

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set by MJ!

Juliana considered him for a moment, then nodded. She glanced at her notes. She knew where to begin, but was nervous all the same; once something was said, it couldn't be unsaid.

"How did you know something had happened? What was different that morning? And for context, if you could tell me how those mornings usually went. This may feel a little repetitive from some of our letters," she said with a slightly sympathetic smile. "But it's useful, I think, to have it all together in one place." Not so much for her notes, but more for the cohesiveness of the interview and getting both of their thoughts moving in the same direction.

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Kieran sighed before he started to answer, not because he was exasperated (he wasn't) but because he was already tired. "I may have mentioned this when we first started writing," he said, "But for the first few years, I wasn't in a building on full moon nights. I chained myself to a tree in the Forbidden Forest, instead."

He let that hang in the air for a second. "So normally I would wake up in the same spot, still in chains. But one morning I woke up and I wasn't there. I was — a mile and a half, I think, or two miles — from where I'd been the night before. But — I knew I'd hurt someone because there was a burn down my side. From a spell."

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set by MJ!

When he started his reply Juliana was watching him, but in very short order she began to grow uncomfortable and shifted her attention instead to her notes. Luckily it was easy to look as though she were preoccupied with what she was writing, rather than that she was avoiding looking at him. The actual words he was saying weren't particularly charged, but filling in the gaps and trying to imagine what that moment must have been like was difficult. Waking up in an unfamiliar place, alone and vulnerable and injured, and coming to terms with the notion of what had happened the night before... That would have been bad enough, but then to have to walk over a mile in such a state before he could so much as reclaim his wand was painful to imagine.

But imagining wasn't enough; the whole point of an interview like this was to have it all in his own words, not just her filling in by reading between the lines. Juliana drew a long, careful line across the page of notes to divide what she'd written already from what would follow. She swallowed, then looked back up at him. "Talk me through what you were thinking and feeling. From the first moments you can remember of that morning up through wherever you went next."

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Kieran looked down at his hands on the mug and remembered. "I was worried I would wander around the woods all morning and never find where I'd left my wand," he said, "And then I realized I could sort of — see its tracks in the woods, and I was worried the Werewolf Capture Unit would find me before I could get out. The guilt came later." First, there was just fear, and the pain of the burn, and stumbling through the woods.

"Eventually I found my things. I put dittany on the burn and it — sort of helped. It had gotten out by — the tree I was chained to, it was dead, and weaker than I'd thought. So it pulled it up by the roots and slipped out." A stupid mistake. He should have tested it. But he'd been tired — he had always been tired, then — and he hadn't, and he'd ruined a life for it.

"I apparated back here, once I had everything."

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set by MJ!

Juliana scribbled down notes, about the specifics of what he was saying but more urgently about the feelings he described. Worred — lost; worried — WCU; "the guilt came later," she scrawled out.

"Do you know who it was?" she asked carefully, once her pen had caught up with everything he'd said. She didn't expect him to give her a name, if he knew, but it would be telling to see how he responded. If he did know, it meant he had to take some steps to find out, which she thought would make people more sympathetic to the werewolves in these situations. It spoke to a sense of responsibility, ownership of their actions even if they hadn't been cognizant of them at the time.

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Kieran had expected that question, but it came as a shock all the same; his eyes flashed up at her and he swallowed before he answered. "Yeah," he said; his tone was that of a confession. "Yeah, I know who it was." He wasn't going to tell her — he didn't think she'd ask, either, she was respectful of the identities of his friends — but it did certainly make things worse.

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set by MJ!

If only there was a way to put the look in his eyes into the article. If everyone who had their doubts could have sat in this chair and seen the look in his eyes when he thought it, there wouldn't even need to be an article. It was clear how he was feeling, and how he'd wrestled with it. Clear that he was human, and as full of remorse as anyone would be in this situation. But Juliana was not a novelist, and she was not going to put a lyrical description of the emotion behind his eyes into her article. She was a researcher. She needed quotes. She needed to hear him talk about it.

Even knowing that, she still hesitated before she pressed on. "How did you find out?" she asked gingerly. "And what happened to them?"

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Kieran's mouth twisted into a wry approximation of a smile. "I work for the paper," he said, although he was going to have to say more than that, because it wasn't like she could say that. "It's — when you are a werewolf, any time you see news about werewolves, you're caught by it. Because — someone like you did that." He shifted in his spot on the couch again, like he could shake off his guilt or his discomfort.

"Except this time, the someone was me. I read the article, and I — tried to eavesdrop on anything people said about them. But they got caught. They're registered with the Ministry."

He knew exactly who it was.

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set by MJ!

Juliana's heart skipped a beat at this last statement. If they were registered with the Ministry, she could probably find out who it was. This was unrelated to the interview, because obviously she wasn't going to put the name in the article. It was her natural curiosity and her inclination towards solving puzzles that made her think of it. Given enough disparate pieces, her instinct was always to try and put them together, even when she knew she shouldn't. That had been why she'd staked out the inn a year ago when she'd given him the rabbit, and why she'd poured through all of her compiled letters for clues once she'd recognized one of his turns of phrase. There weren't that many people who were registered with the Ministry to begin with, and while it wasn't as though the list was routinely published in the Daily Prophet she hardly thought it was a secret, either. The attack had been in the paper, which might narrow it down a little more. She knew roughly when it had happened. He'd told her before how long he'd been living with this condition, and just a moment ago he'd said for the first few years he had been out in the forest. There was a relatively small window of time to check, then, particularly if this had be the instigating incident for his change of full moon plans.

She ought not to be thinking of this, because she ought not to look into it any further. She wasn't going to look into it any further. She wasn't. Kieran trusted her, enough to talk to her about this. This was probably the biggest secret in his life, and he was telling her about it, and she ought to respect any minor boundaries he left in place. He trusted her, and she should leave it alone. She was going to leave it alone.

She had been scratching out notes while she frantically worked through all this in her mind — luckily she had always been good at multitasking — so the pause didn't seem so egregious when she returned to her questions. "They're registered with the Ministry, and you're not," she said carefully. "Tell me about that."

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

"There's another layer of guilt there, isn't it?" Kieran said. He took a sip of his tea and wished it was whiskey. "Because I get to — have a life, and friends, and a job. And they don't. They never get to have that." As far as he understood, T was something of a shut-in — she was the most famous werewolf in Britain, so that wasn't surprising and he couldn't blame her, but that made the situation entirely different from Kieran's.

"I thought about turning myself in," he admitted. "But — I never seriously considered it. Because why would anyone ever do that, when the consequences of being public are so —" he trailed off, not sure what the word he was looking for was. Overwhelming, maybe. Dire. Consequential.

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set by MJ!

These were exactly the sorts of quotes that she'd been hoping for. Her handwriting slanted into near illegibility as she scribbled down exactly what he'd said. Of course she understood why he wouldn't have seriously considered turning himself in. They'd already talked about reasons to avoid the registry, and even if they hadn't she'd heard the same sentiment echoed often enough from other people afflicted with lycanthropy that she could have filled in the end of his sentence. Still, it was interesting that he'd brought it up at all. There had been some thought there, even if he had never 'seriously considered' it, as he put it.

"Maybe as a kind of penance," she suggested.

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Kieran nodded — the word penance felt accurate. "I owed them something," Kieran said, "For ruining a life. And — I can never take it back, and being registered wouldn't take it back either, but it would be something." He had ruined things for enough other werewolves that it seemed like he should have, and yet.

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set by MJ!