Council Housing -- Blackpool

"No... I'm sorry." Sophia said earnestly. She stared at Hugh, looking so defeated, so sad. She took a deep breath, and continued plowing on, in a shaking voice.

"I ruined our lives. Well, mine anyway. I'm nothing but selfish; you shouldn't have given into my demands." And she proceeded to wrap her gentle arms around Hugh in a tight embrace.

There was a particularly stubborn chunk of something left on one of Hugh's ceramic plates. It looked a bit like marinara sauce. The fact that the bottle of dish soap he gripped in one hand was nearly empty didn't catch his attention. No, he just stood there with a rather disheartened look on his face, picking away at the blot with what stumps of fingernails he had. Hugh was a nail-biter -- a nasty little habit he'd picked up around his second year. Weighed down beneath the galleons needed to purchase his school supplies for the upcoming year, bones racked by the blows of his mother's hand, he had been driven to the only form of self-harm he could muster in the countenance of bleeding cuticles and screaming hangnails. The soapy water and bits of old food did nothing to heal these, though Hugh himself had grown numb to most forms of physical pain over the years.

Sophia didn't even bother to knock. She just came right into the house looking as disheartened as she did on the hill, only an hour ago. Her hair was all tangled, and her face was blotchy from all the crying she did.

"I told her." she said simply to him.

He turned to her with a start, the dish he was scraping at so thoroughly making a small plop as it hit the foamy muck that had formed in the sink. "Can't you knock!?" he snapped at Sophia, one hand poised as though Hugh had caught himself on a reflex -- the reflex to strike, had she been some other intruder.

"I'm sorry!-I just thought you should know!" she cried out at him fearfully. She stared at him with slight disbelief, this Hugh, standing over with a dishpan and the blazing eyes and the bleeding fingernails wasn't the same Hugh, who was wearing the pressed (but yet quite worn) school uniform, the gentle eyes, the slow smile, the lisp...

"That requires bursting in here unannounced like you OWN the damn place?" Hugh berated her, hand slowly moving to return to its chore.

"Well, I'm sorry! I thought you wouldn't care! God, what's up your ass today?!" The anger in Sophia's voice was slowly raising at a dangerous pace.

Hugh gently shook the excess muck from the dish he'd been so carefully cleaning before -- filthy, once again. "It's none of your business."

"For God's sake Hugh, why can't you just fucking care about the girl who actually gave you some JOY in your dreary life for once?! I've done EVERYTHING for you and you give me a fucking baby!" Sophia screamed at him. She was completely on fire now, and her frustration with Hugh had gone off the charts. She reached out, and smack him hard across the face, her eyes murky with tears.

Oh, the slapping business again. Hugh remained completely motionless towards her, as though he had just exchanged an ill-tempered glance with Medusa herself. "Oh, this is my fault, now," he grumbled, working the pad of his thumb into the reddish crust that so held itself to the glazed white surface.

"Might as well be... You do nothing but sit around all day, and bag groceries." she grumbled, as she went to sit down on a threadbare couch, with the stuffing coming unstitched from it.

"Do you really think this is what I wanted!? Any of it!" The plate hit the floor. "That bloody job, this shithole of a house... You! You, you... Do you ever think I ever actually wanted romantic love?! I didn't!" Hugh had taken another plate from the rack and taken a step around the corner into the living room. "I NEVER did! And now you've gone and... and..." He spoke as though he was having quite a difficult time finding the words, as though he were trying to emotionally force himself to take her down. "I don't want you. I've never wanted you, you... you complacent, self-loving little anathema! I hate you! I hate you with every fibre of my being!" The plate hurled just past Sophia's head, crashing into the wall.

Sophia stood up, with stark anger on her face, and her hand was gribbed tightly on her wand, which she had unearthed from her pocket.

"I hate you too, Hugh Gearldson. And, I hope you die in this shithole of a house, with no one to call a friend or family. I'm glad you're a friendless son of a bitch with not even a pathetic goldfish to call family. And, I don't blame your mother for being dead, as well. I'd die too if I had a motherfucker like you for a son."

And, after muttering a curse under her breath, a swarm of yellow jackets came shooting out of her wand, before she apparated straight out of the apartment, and back home.

It was that moment in which, with two less dishes, a flock of artificial insects, and both freedom from his relationship and from employment, Hugh Geraldson died.