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Tweak says, "to the windooooow to the wall!"

Edmund Urquhart. (violencing) wrote in buggerallrpg,
@ 2009-10-19 11:15:00

Entry tags:

edmund urquhart, lillian mclaggen

WHO: Eddie Urquhart and Lillian McLaggen.
WHAT: A run-in at the Owlery.
WHERE: ... The Owlery.
WHEN: Sunday, around midday.
RATING: PG-13, for Urquhart potty-mouth.
STATUS: Complete.

The Owlery was looking even more caked with birdshit than it normally did around noon, when the pitiful excuse for sunlight was fighting its way through the windows from its highest point. Eddie made a mental note to avoid getting detentions this week, for as a learned student in the ways of academic punishments; he could tell that it was around about the time for a Professor to give out the job of cleaning the place. Taking advantage of the last day of his weekend, which had felt way too short, the eighteen-year-old had made a temporary perch for himself on one knee as he placed a small note and a purse filled with jangling galleons into the box he’d placed in front of him, on the hay-covered floor. With his cigarette hanging perilously between his teeth and his form kept safe from the cold by the layers of his t-shirt, unzipped hooded jacket, and his dragon-hide one over that, Eddie roughly bound his box with thick spell-o-tape before rising to his feet.

“C’mere, fucker,” he half-heartedly growled to his brother’s owl, tying the box to his left claw. Although he wasn’t the worst handler of animals, Eddie had never had any interest in keeping a pet; he’d attempted once, with a toad, but he had never cared enough to be consistent with the feeding or the caring or the whatever, and the animal had hopefully found a better life in the lake, away from him. Peter’s owl, Argus, gave him a bit of attitude and pecked at his wrist, but Eddie was thankfully unbothered by the smattering of resistance and got his package attached quite easily. “Go on, then,” he mumbled at last, once the job was done. Excess hay was brushed off the knee of his jeans and he dismissed the bird with a shrug of his shoulders and a wave. “Fuck off.”

Argus thankfully obliged, leaving Eddie to watch the creature flying off into the distance as he shoved his hands into his pockets. The growing chill of November didn’t bother him at all. Eddie preferred the colder months of the year, as weird as that sounded. He liked snow and rain, as long as he didn’t have plans to go anywhere. On top of that, the cool breeze was rather soothing on his cheeks and his eyebrow, where fresh nicks and slightly purple skin was healing. Unfortunately, Potter and Corner hadn’t been able to acquiescence the night before, but moving swiftly on, Eddie had found another pair to take their place. Scratches peppered his and Callum’s fists, if anyone cared enough to look.

Eddie had no complaints.

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mclagg
2009-10-19 01:07 am UTC (link)

Lillian had been severely slacking off with her correspondence as of late and finally took it upon herself to spend most of Sunday morning writing letters to her mother and father. She scribbled some brief nonsense to her mother about doing well in school, behaving like a good girl, taking care of her brother and sister, things of that nature. These were all things that Rose Zeller expected to read about and kept her content, even though she and Lillian were still at very odd odds with each other after the divorce. Her letter to Cormac was much longer but still omitted certain little details regarding previous detentions for mouthing off to prefects and showing up to the ball drunk. Lillian also strategically left out recent news of her date with Simon Nott, and by doing so could avoid any long-winded lectures about all boys being scum, blah blah, so on and so forth. With letters tucked in the back pocket of her jeans, Lillian bundled up in her winter coat and ventured out into the cold November air.

The weather wasn't too awful, considering this was Scotland and there had been far colder Novembers at Hogwarts, but by the time Lillian reached the Owlery, her face felt a bit numb and she had her sleeves pulled over her fingers. The climb up the dozens of steps left her a little breathless, which only made inhaling the foul smell of straw, birds, and shit worse than she'd hoped for. Her nose wrinkled as a reflex as she maneuvered over what appeared to be some freshly-dropped bird crap, ensuring she would not have to cope with the calamity of dirtying her faux suede boots. It was then, while hopping over bird shit, that Lillian noticed she was in the company of another. Eddie Urquhart stood a few steps away, picturesque with a cigarette between his lips and the usual apathetic look on his face. It wasn't uncommon for other people to be in the Owlery -- it was the Owlery, after all -- but Lillian still jumped, startled. "Christ!" she swore aloud.

Dramatically she held a hand to heart and narrowed her eyes at Eddie, as though he had been the one to intrude on her and not the other way around. Just as quickly as she had noticed him, however, Lillian decided to ignore him and with one swift turn on her heel, she sauntered away toward the owls. She located one of the school's and stroked its head affectionately, silently wishing she had an owl instead of a toad. Bloody Ainsworth, he was always disappearing, and if he didn't have the habit of always showing up in her sister's hands, Lillian would already have thought him dead. She smiled at the bird and reached into her back pocket for the letters, which she then attached to the bird's talon. It ruffled its wings before taking off swiftly out the back of the tower. Lillian's eyes followed it as its shape got smaller and smaller in the sky, then took a turn and was gone out of sight.

Standing with back still faced to Eddie, Lillian cursed herself and her rather unlucky timing. Running into Eddie was an unpleasant reminder of the boy's little display of rotten behavior yesterday. He'd given her an extra handful of dirty looks when he'd spotted her walking around with Simon and then, as she had half expected, he'd made some awfully witty remarks about her date. Lillian had her suspicions about what Eddie's problem was, but she chose to dismiss them and carry on as if nothing was wrong. Eddie was just being Eddie, she'd decided to tell herself.

When Eddie didn't say anything to her, Lillian finally broke the silence and inquired in a rather catty voice, "So did you fall down some stairs, or did someone finally give you the proper beating you deserve?" Even if he couldn't see her face, he could probably sense her smirk from where he was standing.

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violencing
2009-10-19 02:02 am UTC (link)

Unlike Lillian, Eddie became aware that his space was being encroached upon pretty quickly. Merlin only knew how fast he’d have been expelled had he not developed a keen sense of hearing and talent for evasion. His head turned sharply as he heard her footsteps, and his hand whipped up to grip his cigarette, preparing to throw it out of the window if it was a Professor, but his luck wasn’t that bad today - however, he wasn’t exactly pleased to see that it was Lillian who walked through the entryway either. His hand lowered and, with a frown, he waited for his presence to be noticed by her before looking back to follow the disappearing speck that was Argus. Had his sense of humor been in a better place, he would’ve shown some amusement in her reaction, but he wasn’t in the mood. She and Simon were currently causes of annoyance for Eddie, and the darker side of him would’ve been a lot more pleased if it’d been the male Ravenclaw who’d found his way into the Owlery instead.

His cigarette was getting smaller. Eddie could tell since all of the sudden, he had an urge to smoke two at once. Scowling a little, he snaked his hand into the breast pocket of his hoodie to take out his packet, and shook it slightly to free a fresh one from the hole he’d cut into the top of it. Using the burning tip of his wilting smoke, Eddie lit the new one. With two cigarettes sitting in opposite sides of his mouth, it was now that Lillian decided to give him a verbal greeting with a good dose of sarcasm, and he turned on his boot in order to see her better in the corner of his eye. She noticed his slightly battered appearance, which he wasn’t concerned about (someone who was used to being around Eddie usually found that the times that he showed up looking a little rough were pretty frequent, especially when he was out of school and didn’t have the risk of expulsion hanging over his head), but he didn’t have the good grace to take being the butt of her jokes well.

Eyeing her, silently disapproving, Eddie took a long drag of both cigarettes before plucking the smaller one out of his mouth between his thumb and pointer fingers. And in a way that was very ungentlemanly of him, he held the smoke out and pointedly flicked it with his thumb, causing the burning nub to go flying down at Lillian’s pretty boots. “Stairs,” he said, as if the word was some kind of lazy insult. His arm swung down to his side again, but before his hand retreated back into his jeans pocket, he gestured toward her boots with a subtle wave of his fingers. “Those look better with ash and owl shit on them, no? Smart-arse.”

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mclagg
2009-10-19 05:33 am UTC (link)

Lillian reacted with lightning-quick speed and jumped sideways one step, a tiny yelp escaping her lips. "Hey!" she whined, throwing her arms up in the air as if Eddie had just tossed something poisonous on her. "Be careful, I just bought these yesterday in Hogsmeade!" In fact, she had pre-ordered them at the beginning of the month just so they'd be in on Saturday in time for the Hogsmeade trip. She hadn't been able to pick them up until Simon went to meet up with Scott, then Ioan, leaving her by her lonesome. Naturally she went straight for the boutiques after Simon left her because she hadn't felt cruel enough to drag him around while she shopped for clothes. Lillian stared down at her boots, giving the one nearest to Eddie a tiny shake to rid it of any cigarette ashes. She then shot a dirty look up at Eddie.

"Pity," she spat fiercely. "I would have hoped the fall broke your legs instead of bruising that handsome face." There was a snooty shake of her curly hair, but somewhere under the malice of her sarcasm, she hoped that he didn't take her too seriously. She was choosing sarcasm over friendliness today simply because he'd been behaving ruder than usual, and his little performance at Hogsmeade yesterday was no exception. With all said and done, however, Lillian wasn't actually that mad. At least not mad enough to carry on about it. When he was done calling her a smart-arse, Lillian crossed her arms and turned so that they were face to face -- or rather, face to shoulder. "I'm actually surprised you got a bruise that lasted..." She reached up one hand slow enough for him to stop her if he wanted and rubbed her thumb gently across it. She'd seen worse battle wounds before, but a grimace still formed on her face as she touched it. "Who'd you fight?"

Not that she was too concerned, she was simply just curious. Though momentarily a mental image of Eddie picking a fight with Simon and Simon laying a good one into him before getting away flashed across her brain. It seemed unlikely, though she hadn't seen Simon since Saturday evening. A pang of nervousness hit her, and she began to worry about Simon, Eddie bullying him, and then she began to wonder for the hundredth time that weekend why Eddie suddenly hated Simon so much. Jealousy, perhaps? There was no proof of such, and Lillian denied the possibility. It was Eddie Urquhart, after all. Not some sentimental cad.

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violencing
2009-10-19 07:04 am UTC (link)

The yelp was expected; Eddie responded to her negativity with the barest, confrontational rising of his eyebrows. He didn’t seem to care much if he pissed her off, but then he’d hardly been nice to her the day before when seeing her in Hogsmeade had caused him to sneer and mutter discriminatory jokes to Callum, which only the two of them would’ve probably found amusing. People at Hogwarts tended to not enjoy his brutal sense of humor, in general. His eyes lowered to her footwear as she fussed over them, but all her furious stare received in return was another blaze of his smoke, another temporary pull from his lips, and another bubble of smoke cascading from his throat. His frown darkened slightly when he registered the second line of cynical nonsense she had to say, but instead of flicking his second smoke at her or giving her a slice of his own cruelty, he simply turned his head away and puffed again. All of this felt so tiresome for a young man who preferred to mock other people’s bullshit, than find himself knee-deep in it.

It was only a moment of redirecting his stare through the window before he became aware that her hand was approaching his face, and he responsively turned himself back around again. He sighed when his bruises became the focus of her attention, but he gave in – smartly, and only with a little hesitation – and lowered his hand so his smoke wouldn’t waft in her direction and the burning tip would tilt away from her, safely. He wasn’t too much taller than her, not so much that he felt as if he was looming over her as he sometimes experienced with others, but he still lowered his chin downward a fraction as she touched at his bruise. Fresh as it was, there was a stinging sensation rippling across his cheeks, but Eddie wasn’t a stranger that feeling, he hardly blinked.

His features softened slightly, out what seemed to be tiredness. His shoulders rolled forward and bounced slowly, saying, even before he bothered verbally, that it didn’t matter who’d given it to him. And then he paused. And then his lips began to twist into a distasteful scowl and his forward lean became even more prominent. “Not your boy, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, his voice lowering into unreadable huskiness. “Some Gryffindor.” His arm lifted and he touched the side of his face with his finger, eyes scanning over Lillian’s face, clearly pausing at her mouth, then moving down to his feet. Smug, all of the sudden, he smirked, “He looks worse.”

— “You and Nott.” An abrupt change of subject. Eddie’s cigarette reappeared between his teeth, clenched, and his freed hands slowly, slowly, slowly, reached out for the edges of Lillian’s jacket collar. He didn’t pull her, pull was too strong a word, but if he legs her generous, they’d have been guided toward him another step. “Is he your boyfriend? You fucking?”

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mclagg
2009-10-19 07:43 am UTC (link)

In fact, it was exactly what she had been worried about — Simon fighting with Eddie. Not that she didn't have faith in Simon's fighting abilities (there was such thing as victory for the underdog, after all), she just had more faith in Eddie's ability to give a bloke a near-death experience with just one fist. When he assured her that it was not Simon he'd been fighting with, Lillian breathed a small sigh of relief and waved her hand to dismiss his cocky comment. "Well, that's just a weight lifted off my mind, now that I know the other bloke took a classic Urquhart thrashing." She licked her lips and looked up at him with a glimmer of what could have been taken as admiration in her eyes. She pulled a face that was bound to lead him to believe she was on the verge of complimenting him, then simply shrugged her shoulders and raised her eyebrows with nonchalance.

With the sudden turnabout in the conversation's topic, Lillian was slowly being pulled toward Eddie. She held out a hand and pressed it to his chest, not in an act of hesitation or struggle, simply to just balance herself. The last thing she needed to do was topple onto him or worse, the shit-covered floor. Her mind was directed once again to thoughts of Simon, and though she fancied thinking about Simon Nott more than was necessary, the manner in which Eddie asked about it flat out offended her. She gasped, her brow furrowing in rage, and titled her chin upward in defiance. "I don't know!" she cried, exasperated. "What do you think? Why do you care? Suddenly Hogwarts' biggest gossip?" She avoided answering his question not because she didn't know the answer, but because she was more curious about his. Her jaw was clenched as she stared into his brown eyes with a certain ferocity that, within a moment, would be returned to her.

"And God...are you always smoking?" Without any warning, she reached up and snatched the cigarette from between his lips, only to place it between her own. She took a slow drag, blew smoke to the side, then held the cigarette at arm's length so that if he wanted it back, he'd have to reach for it. Head titled to the right, a malicious little grin put a dent in her outraged expression.

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violencing
2009-10-19 02:28 pm UTC (link)

The relief in Lillian’s demeanor was noticed with keen eyes and Eddie’s face developed a secretive gleam as his open scowls dissolved into a pensive line. At times it was good for him to vocalize what he thought through his actions and his words, and other times Eddie found that it was better to simply observe and wait on it. Most people didn’t realise he was capable of that sort of restraint, but Eddie liked to think he was full of copious surprises. He took mental notes of her sigh, the flippant way she waved his cocky words away, but his features betrayed little as he stared down at her. Oh, how different her expression would’ve been had the young man Eddie thrashed had been Simon Nott; he smirked more at that thought than her little joke. For one thing, it’d have been much more difficult for Lillian to feign that annoying brand of nonchalance if he had, Eddie was fucking sure, and he could faintly hear his and his brother’s laughter in some distant region of his mind.

Edmund was more fueled by subtleties than he believed Peter was, however. He watched Lillian’s feet when he noticed that she was fearful of slipping over, going so far as to use his chest as support, and the corner of his mouth stretched out to one side as she (unsurprisingly) went through another huffy routine at his expense, in a scowl. He was smart enough to see it for what it was, a whole lot of noise, and he held off on giving any outward response until he had received all the information that she was willing to give him, which as it turned out wasn’t much. Answering questions with questions. Eddie’s eyes followed the swoop of her neck in a heavy-lidded peer, like he was stuck between the inclinations to lower his mouth onto it - or both his hands so he could choke her. The lines in his forehead became prominent as he frowned angrily at her, wrinkling his nose and puckering his lips in a full sneer. “Why the fuck do you think? Is your skull made up of ninety percent fucking hair and ten percent mouth?” he growled in a low and unfriendly tone, not having the patience to deal with her girly desire for him to spell everything out for her as if she was mentally deficient.

“Because,” he stated plainly, “if you are, I’ll leave you the fuck alone. You get it? Did that get through?”

His reaction was minimal when his cigarette was stolen. His chin lowered, causing the front portions of his hair to fall over his brows and eyes, and he rubbed his emptied mouth and the side of his head with his hand. He didn’t have any sensitive spots for Lillian to attack, physically or emotionally, but his mood wasn’t gentle just then. It was harder than it usually was for him to stay where he was and not do what he liked to do when a girl annoyed him, which was to either insult her or leave her, but he managed it. Tiredly. “It’s called an addiction,” he retorted bluntly, sighing as she inhaled a mouthful of his smoke and held it out of his reach like a child. “Look the word up in a fucking dictionary.” Moving unhurriedly, Eddie looped one arm around her waist and nudged her even closer against him in his effort to get his smoke back, reaching up his second hand. He didn’t have the energy to reach too far, far enough that he could grab it, which was a possibility simply because his limbs were that much longer than hers were; instead his fingers remained poised over her wrist and he waited for her to surrender herself.

Then he looked down, away from her hand, to her face again, and the sheen of fresh saliva against Lillian’s lower lip appeared to pull him in like a rope. He scanned her eyes suspiciously at first, but his path was set and his face was lowering whether she was going to try to spit out another argument or not. His neck bowed his head over hers, making up for the difference in their heights, and he tilted his face to avoid the bumping of noses so he could connect his mouth to hers in a simple kiss that’d only end when she’d make it so. Eddie wasn’t shy.

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mclagg
2009-10-19 11:00 pm UTC (link)

Addiction, her arse. No teenager should be addicted to nicotine by the age of eighteen years old, no matter how common it was in the United Kingdom. At least in Lillian's mind. She frowned at him and his "addiction". It was disgusting and unhealthful and, shallow as it was, she probably would have been able to take him more seriously without a cigarette smoking lazily from the corner of his mouth every time she spoke to him. "I know the definition of addiction, thanks," she retorted, dropping her arm down, then to the side, and up again in a little game of keep-away. Inevitably her wrist was seized and she found herself locked in an odd sort of embrace with Eddie's arm around her tiny waist. A glower, accompanied by a childish little pout of the bottom lip, settled on her face, not because she'd failed at keeping the cigarette away from Eddie, but because of the rest of the conversation. His mouth was just inches from hers, causing her heart to do some tremendous thudding, and she knew, just knew there was no way she was going to get a word in before he kissed her.

Lillian didn't hesitate when his lips touched hers. There wasn't that cliche moment in which girls were supposed to freeze up and then melt like butter into some long, slow-motioned romantic kiss. The two fingers holding the cigarette away from their bodies loosened, allowing it to fall to the floor. With both hands free, Lillian reached forward and gripped the unzipped front of his jacket. She returned Eddie's kiss with minimal thought about the consequences of her actions. Inevitably, however, when she closed her eyes, the context of the kiss became ever so clear in her mind. Her suspicions about Eddie fancying her had been correct all along, and despite her attempts to deny it, the kiss was now undoing her strategy of pretending Eddie was just pulling some sort of stunt.

She pulled away, no longer able to enjoy the sensation of his lips against hers. Leaning away, lips pressed into a hard, thin line, she mulled over what it was that she wanted to say to him. 'Thank you for this tense yet equally satisfactory snog?' Dare she ruin it by insisting that he was supposed to hate her, not fancy her? No, her ego was far to large for that. Still, pleased as she was about all this attention she was receiving, she couldn't help but feel sorrowful that it wasn't Simon kissing her. She really, truly liked Simon, but Eddie was a third element in the equation that Lillian had definitely not foreseen. How utterly confusing and fantastic for her! A love triangle of sorts! Lillian squeezed her eyes shut, clearly frustrated.

She stood on her tip toes to make up for the few inches of difference in their heights and leaned into him, bringing her mouth level with his ear. Yet even for all her impressive body language which was bound to throw him off track, if only momentarily, Lillian still couldn't come up with anything clever, seductive, or appealing (maybe appealing to Simon, but definitely not Eddie) to say. She rubbed her cheek against his, her lips grazing his jawline, and when she grew tired of her own temptress bullshit, she finally muttered, "He's not my boyfriend." She took a step back, as far back as she could go with his arm still linked around her waist, and stared into his eyes with a firmness that was out of character for her. "But I fancy him. A lot." She refrained from repeating the last bit a few times more, even if three times wouldn't begin to cover how she felt about Simon. She figured Eddie would be mad already, so she certainly didn't need him to be downright explosive because she tossed her words around carelessly.

With nothing else left to say, she added a quiet apology, though she wasn't really all that sorry for telling him the truth. She wanted to be with Simon (even if she didn't know if the feeling was mutual), and that was that. There was definitely a strong appeal, like some sort of invisible anchor forcing her toward Eddie, to this -- odd run-ins at the Owlery or late night smokes. But she needed to make up her mind, didn't she?

"I'm sorry."

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violencing
2009-10-20 04:22 am UTC (link)

Eddie recognized the bevy of contradictory motions. For his taste, the kiss hadn’t lasted long enough and Lillian pulled away from him with a look on her face that was too thoughtful for it to seem as if she’d enjoyed it. Something wasn’t quite right. He was used to tongue and lips and teeth, girls who pulled away from him only to double-back, but this experience was proving to be very different. The signals were being read, flashing neon lights in the place of her pressed mouth, despite her unusual decision to lean against his body and temporarily throw him off-course. His arm kept a secure hold of her waist as she raised high enough to touch her lips against his jawline, which in turn earned her a distinct rub of his own mouth against the region of her neck that led to the corner of her jaw – but he paused when she whispered her romantic status in his ear, which was made easier by the angle of his face, and then attempted to step away from him.

He didn’t release her. He didn’t make it easy for her to move away from him. Eddie’s posture straightened somewhat, but it was not until Lillian’s elaboration, where she added that she fancied Simon, that his arms dropped from her and he gave her all the space she desired to take by stepping away from him. There were no facades across Eddie’s face and demeanor, but the young man was not generous to showing what it was that he was thinking on his person; Lillian had his disarming squint to study as his eyes rolled down to her feet and back up again, a small raise of his eyebrows that did not hint of surprise, and a lazy cock of his chin. He was listening just fine, although he didn’t seem to have much to say; his own mouth flattened into a line and he considerately swept his tongue across his lips. So, she liked Simon Nott. So, she wanted to be with Simon Nott.

Eddie didn’t respond to her apology gratefully. He wasn’t a little boy with a crush; he didn’t need anything to cushion any kind of blow. His head shook slowly, from left to right, and after a considerate silence, he spoke in his normal, neutral tone, “Don’t be.” His hands raised, and he allowed his two index fingers to touch each other at the tips, and then separate into opposite directions. “I’m done with you.” He wasn’t angry – a person knew when Eddie Urquhart was angry – but there was no hint of doubt or uncertainty in his voice. His arms lowered and he casually pulled the sides of his jacket, adjusting the fall of it against his stomach in preparation to leave.

Goodbyes were superfluous. Eddie’s stare was directed to the floor a final time as his leg stretched out and his first step brought the broad heel of his work-boot against the cigarette Lillian had dropped. He extinguished it with a rub against the hay underneath, and with his characteristic apathy intact, his brisk, broad-shouldered swagger headed him for the entryway and beyond. A fresh cigarette was filched from his pocket before he hit the stairs, and in the distance came the sound of his zippo slapping open and shut – then he was gone.

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