featherxquill

Title: Alternate Endings, Part 1
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Strangers
Summary: Post-war, Rita sits in the Leaky Cauldron and ponders past and present; watches the strangers.
A/N: I wrote this one as my application post for the postwar RPG

the_leaky and thought I would post it as a fic for a prompt. It is the first in two 'endings' fics I am going to write, which may or may not be how I see Rita's future by the time I come out the end of this ff100 tunnel, hence the 'alternate' suggestion. Cookies for anyone who gets the obscure intertextual name reference on their own.

She watched them from her seat at the bar, stirring the olive in her martini and surveying the room over the top of her glasses.

Kids, all of them, still courting death long after the Dark Lord’s downfall, only now with cigarettes, firewhiskey and casual sex rather than clandestine defence groups and secret spells that they’d thought no one had known anything about.

She smiled, watched the flicking of hair, the flirtatious glances, the fingers creeping up knees under tables. She knew names, knew faces, filed snippets of information in her head for later. It was gossip, rumour and trash, and thank god for that. They’d all seen enough death and gloom for three lifetimes.

She lifted the glass to her lips, caught the eyes of a wizard on the other side of the bar, smirked, winked at him. He was years younger than her, she could tell with a single glance. She’d seen his face at the Ministry.

Rita Skeeter liked them young. Twenties, thirties, fresh from their first war and finally tasting freedom. She remembered what that had been like. It had been muggle bars, then, nightclubs; fuck you Voldemort and watch us snort cocaine and dance like the world is still going to end, you didn’t effect us.

He had, of course, but that particular brand of forgetting had always been attractive. Still was. She slid off her bar stool and circled the room to sidle up beside the young man whose name she didn’t know, but would in all likelihood be screaming by the end of the evening.

Afterward, there’d be pillow talk. She’d probe him for information, help him along if he needed persuasion, and eventually he’d ask if he knew her, she looked familiar, was she really called Susan? She’d laugh and tell him no, but it didn’t really matter, did it.

She turned fifty next week. She’d celebrate with a perfectly slanderous front page.