Gideon Prewett and his brother (diedlikeheroes) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-11-17 16:54:00 |
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The handle was smooth, smooth, smooth, like an especially fine woman’s leg... that was, of course, your wife’s, shapely and supple; its angle canted on a slight slope, nothing harsh, to allow for easier steering and wicked out in an aerodynamic blade, meant to literally cut through the air for the sake of speed. The tail curved and swished, not at all hardened, every twig trimmed and placed with obvious craftsmanship, but with enough malleability to it to lend itself to maneuverability. The wood, too, was ebony, polished to a high gloss, either by the drool of onlookers or someone’s lavish care. James didn’t know, or care to know, which. Instead, he simply stood outside the pane of glass that went from cobblestones to canopy, and stared, bent forward at the waist to better appreciate the subtle beauty of the broomstick. He was sighing, as he had been expressly forbidden from another broom purchase. Lily didn’t understand, though. Ellerby and Spudmore had reinvented themselves in totality. Their brooms had always been noted for their resilience, but this baby was built for speed, for the daring player with a mind for spontaneity, but with a need for absolute control. It was made for someone like James. His fingers twitched in the wool of his robe pockets, wanting to grasp however many Galleons were necessary to unite man with destiny/broom. The scarf, a long thing, done up in the colors of Puddlemere United (rah rah rah!), was wound about James’ neck and over his mouth, leaving him rather anonymous under the cold gray skies. His black hair was still free, however, and did its best to let everyone know just who the man in the glasses was. He ignored the looks, so busy was he with making eyes at the broomstick behind glass. One man made no eyes at all. He was tall and he was wide-shouldered and both of these things together were noticeable in a crush like the one outside the Quidditch supply shop, taking up more space than he had any right to (and so on and so forth). He was tow-headed, the fluff of curls were windswept and the ruddy look to his face and the absence of scarf (and hat, and gloves and anything that were suited to November in England) were mildly peculiar, although the befuddled way he was stood turning from side to side, gaping at various window displays suggested perhaps drunkenness. Gideon was not drunk. He felt almost exactly as when he had drunk half a pint of home-brewed Firewhiskey made in the disused toilets on the third floor on a dare in sixth year, sloshed about with how he had felt almost immediately after finishing his NEWTs. He could make no sense at all of it having been summer yesterday - (he was certain on both the summer and the yesterday) and it presently both an intemperate that suggested Christmas rapidly approaching and also completely the wrong year. Gideon Prewett did not own a Timeturner. He had heard vague rumors of them and that the Order possessed one (the Order in this case being the tight-knit crew at the very center, all of whom retained the authority of teachers). But he was beginning to think it was an enormous practical joke that someone very clever and dastardly had managed to pull. The nearest Daily Prophet being read by a man in scarlet robes and a green woolly hat, sitting outside the nearest pub, said the date was a decade or two out of sync. Diagon Alley had changed. The tall, spindly shops that remained as those alongside them expanded, shrank, changed owners, changed purpose, shut forever and re-opened with a closing down sale - those were comfortingly familiar. Ollivanders had not changed in five hundred years and would not change for another five hundred, when a change of wallpaper in the backroom might be mooted, discussed, thoughtfully discharged and put aside for the next five hundred. And yet the door was closed. The shades drawn. No small people running in and out, alight with the joy of first wands. Sighting Ollivanders did not stop the lurching southwards of his stomach, the crawling unease finding itself a home at the place between his shoulderblades. Gideon’s polar North in Diagon Alley was always Quidditch. He jostled through the crowd to the very front, immediately blocking view for a considerable number, all of which expressed through mutters and tuts and polite coughing to encourage him to move out of view. But he had expected some grand reveal, the invisible prankster’s nod toward unveiling the end. There was nothing but a broom. A grand broom, to be sure. A glorious broom, far more advanced than the last one he had seen - aerodynamic, very swish - but still. Just a broom. Not a decade swallowed up in a minute when he was certain he ought to be in Somerset. The broomstick must be commensurate with the player, and the player the broomstick. A rudimentary, elementary lesson in Hooch’s Flying 101. An excellent player on a terrible broom was nothing more than an equation for failure, and so it went with a novice on an expert’s ...shaft. Any good player knew, whatever his position, that his broomstick was just as important as he, that its skills, detractors and advantages, fed into his own, and that it was only through a perfected complement that any man truly played. James had won the Quidditch Cup for Gryffindor enough times to know. Just as he knew too that this was broom for him, that they, through the collapsed decades and the suck of time, were meant to be in the most romantic of ways. The fingerless gloves, a heady Gryffindor red, spread palm flat over the wall of glass that separated him from his love, the heat they emanated clouding the destiny just out of reach. James sighed again, his forehead pressed against the cold pane. But that was uncomfortable, so he straightened up. He was a tall boy, thinnish, but not slight, a jut of black hair and thick spectacles, the bend of his nose winding underneath the soft scarf and tugged over the red ridges of his ears. The air he was breathing was fogging up his glasses, so he resituated things, freeing his mouth from the clutches of warmth and baring skin to the wet air. He shuffled backward on thick-soled boots, treading over cobblestones and through the clutch of Quidditch fans and players alike, until his back met with a wall. He blinked, wondering if someone had made the buildings jump forward, across the zig and zag of the alley and into the gutter of their neighbor. But he soon realized he’d been mistaken, and that that “wall” was actually the boat-wide chest of a man. “I’m terribly sorry,” he began with a finger to that bridge of his glasses, the little span, to juggle them up his nose, until the face near his came into clearer view. The expression of confusion was etched clear on light skin—light skin James recognized. Gobsmacked, he sputtered a moment, before he turned on his heel and, after slicing through that hang of icy air between them, smacked the flat of his palm against one oaken shoulder in a comrade’s greeting. The well-known Potter smile settled on his lips like snowflakes packed on windowsill on winter mornings, looking rather cozy, as if they’d been there all along. He laughed. “Oy!” There had never been money enough for the really good brooms. Gideon had (like all scroungers before and after him) managed to sweet-talk spares and replacements out of his team-mates, had ridden things bare of twigs at the back end and with a clot of Spell-o-Tape holding the broom handle together. Some of them had even been decent. He had healthy broom-lust as any Quidditch aficionado but no hankering to empty a bank account he already knew was largely a handful of knuts, a galleon or two and a lot of dust in the ancient corners. Some idiot was gazing so close his breath was fogging up the glass and if Gideon hadn’t been thrown by the date of release (the little placard propped up next to the broom that helpfully laid out the price for all dreamers who would be stupid enough to try and count the coinage in Gringotts) he would have reached out to snag the scarf in his fingers and haul the guy back so that everyone else could have a look. Instead Scarf Boy backed up, step by step, and Gideon shuffled foot to foot, cold in the grey November air whistling down the back of his robes and impatient to know exactly what had happened; if this was some idiot lark of Fabian’s, he was done now, come out come out, wherever you are. But Scarf Boy took one step too close and rebounded heavily off Gideon’s chest. It was not even a glancing blow, Scarf Boy probably weighed less than one of Hogwarts’ Bludgers but Scarf Boy turned and through the clouded confusion, Gideon registered one happily familiar face. Potter. Younger than Potter had a right to be. He’d last seen Potter half a day or so back, Order headquarters having Apparated into the middle of a conversation sketched out in low voices between a heavily pregnant Evans and Potter himself. That Potter looked a little more sleep-deprived (they all did) and a little more lined and wan. This Potter grinned at him the way he had back at school, and without thinking, Gideon clapped out a heavy hand across his shoulder with relief sinking low in his chest. “Mate. Am I ever bloody glad to see you.” There was a darkness, even there under the obscureness of sun, on Gideon’s face that was blatant. There was confusion, yes, but a darkness too. He was older, James realized slowly. Not nearly as old as he ought to have been, given the year, but older than James remembered him, the glacier of his grin slimmer and more heavily footworn as a frown, even if the weight of his hand was still enough to nearly knees. Now it made sense.—He was a transplant, a soul lost and then found by the enchanted hotel, thrown unceremoniously alone into the tumultuous stew of the post-war 21st century. James’ spectacles slid down his nose at the impact of the greeting, but he wasn’t bothered. Quick fingers rocketed up to straighten before the boy spoke again, meticulously cutting himself and Gideon away from the crowd as he did so. Sharp brown eyes were aimed like a curse at the man. He wondered after Fabian. “Likewise, Prewett. I think we ought get a drink,” James said with solemnity and a softness that bespoke of the need for quiet,if not secrecy. His eyebrows met with animation and his smile slid to the side, gathering like an icicle. He pat the shelf of the shoulder once again, bracingly and brotherly, a Quidditch player’s embrace. “On me.” James was young. He was always bloody young, James Potter managed to look like he was fresh-faced and barely able to shave when the Order closed in on the worst of the violence, the Carrows and the Lestranges causing the kind of mayhem that couldn’t be mopped up. It was one of Potter’s charms, but the Potter stood in the street, still with a fleck of drool where he’d been studying a broom like it was Evans in a mood, was young enough that his hair stuck straight up and Gid couldn’t picture this James quiet, he looked like he’d just won the Quidditch Cup or something, ink still on his fingers from NEWTS. Gideon let himself be towed, the wind whipping down the back of his robes once out of the cluster of broom-oglers and other Quidditch-equipment fanciers. He shivered, thought briefly and longingly of the sweaters folded in his trunk back at the flat shared with Fabian, motley-mongrel bits of balls of wool turned into eyesores that were warm all the same, and stood in the center of traffic as if he didn’t give a monkey’s if the crowd had to part round him. He was so tall he might not have noticed. “A drink,” Gideon said as heavily as the clap on the shoulder had been, “Sounds like a good idea. I haven’t got a knut to my pockets, so you’re definitely buying, ta.” He turned, looking for the pub they’d liked most, but the shops had all gone higgledy-piggledy, turned themselves inside out and sold different things. Gideon’s expression was clear dismay, Prewett-blue eyes bright as November light, “You’re going to have to lead the way. This isn’t the Alley I know.” The shiver of one so broad and great as Gideon was not a private thing; there were ripples and waves that washed outward from his form, disturbing the cold wind. It chopped at any bits it could get at, any skin that was uncovered. James hid once again underneath the protection of his scarf and held himself close, elbows squeezed to sides and eyes closed to the whip. His smile widened underneath the sheath of tight-knit yarn, given away by the crinkle of his eyes. “Come along,” he beckoned, the broomstick in the window gone from his mind. He understood the strange sense of deja vu that combined far too easily with disorientation that one felt upon washing ashore in the Alley after decades. He’d been there himself only months earlier. The shops were juggled, changed, shuttered, and opened, and, just as with First Year at Hogwarts, one was given no map to make sense of the new landscape. James led the way through the fall crowds, past the faces of witches and wizards who were as old as James ought to have been. He ignored them. He chose to stray from any holes in the wall, from anything out of the way, and instead took them to the Leaky, through the bricks, and into the dark innards of the old pub. “What’ll you have?” He asked the man, not yet removing the mask of his scarf. The Alley was myriad changes. Gideon let himself be steered through streets he would have once been convinced he knew as well as he knew Molly’s place, as well as he knew the freckles on the back of his hands. There were shops from when he was tiny that had always been there, and there was comfort in them being there - for all the trouble Voldemort had brought with him, there was nothing that could not be withstood, the British blitz spirit never stronger than in the determined stubborness of bricks and mortar. But that, it appeared, had changed. Gideon was not subtle in his observations; he craned his neck and the blond curls were wind-ruffled as he turned his head like a spectator at Wimbledon all the way to the Leaky. Heat began to spread blissfully up his spine, and Gid gave a heavy sigh of appreciation for some bloody piece of the world remaining consistently in place. “Butterbeer, if you wouldn’t mind, ta,” Gideon said without looking behind the bar. Alcohol would have warmed him better, a glass of Firewhiskey was never a terrible option (or it hadn’t been after the first time Fab had been dared to do three shots in succession in Fifth Year and he’d done it too for company) but keeping clear-headed was the first rule. Anything suspicious, anything out of the ordinary and you kept your wits about you, didn’t you, you kept your mind sharp as you could. He deposited himself heavily into a chair that creaked under his weight, and he awaited James’ return. If it was as he suspected, washed up somewhere he wasn’t meant to be, long after he was meant to be there at all, then there were a whole number of questions about the War that needed asking. And where the hell was Fabian? James kept his scarf secure as he ordered, using gestures to get what he wanted. It was curious to the patrons dotting the bar, but witches and wizards had tolerance for eccentricity that many Muggles lacked. A few shining coins were dumped into the rag-damp, wrinkled palm of Tom and two mugs brimming with a frothy head of Butterbeer were transferred to James’ mittens. There was a nod of thanks, followed by some muttering from Tom. Cutting through the disarray of tables, the Potter boy seated himself next to Gideon, his back to the room, a head of spiky black hair near the shoulder of the broad blond. He finally snagged the scarf from his mouth and smiled at his companion. He placed a Butterbeer in front of the man and lifted his own mug. “Cheers,” he said with the bob of a head. The first mouthful warmed him on the way down, and the second did what chocolate did during Patronus training in the Order, mouthfuls cracked against the teeth against all the possibilities a Dementor might haul out of you, give you to think about. Gideon put his tongue against the back of his front teeth and let the butterbeer wash its way down his throat, and then he eyed James once again. Definitely too young, unless James had managed to find the way to grow younger instead of older, Merlin’s hairy arse he had. This James hadn’t seen the worst of the War yet, hadn’t been in the tight-knit war council meetings when the death toll climbed. Gideon drummed his fingers on the table, the restless motion of a man used to being perpetually moving. “That’s to keep them off, is it?” he gestured to the scarf, blond curls awry and the sharp look that came into the blue eyes that surprised anyone who looked at the Prewett brothers and guessed at Gideon’s smarts. He was big, and he was blond and he was cheerful and he could take a Bludger. But cheerful didn’t survive a war. “You can’t do a charm or something? Bloody glad you didn’t or I wouldn’t have recognized you,” a grin, broad and incalculable, the Prewetts smiled like the morning paper didn’t bring bad news every day. “So how the hell is it twenty bloody years or so past yesterday then?” Gideon leaned forward, elbows on the table. James swallowed a warm, golden bubble of Butterbeer and felt it splash and settle in his stomach, low and comforting. He smiled against the frosted rim of his mug and let himself feel normal for a second, like he was at the pub, and the world without was the same as it had ever been. Dark, yes, but with the shops he knew hemming the flames of streetlamps, with Lily in Godric’s Hollow waiting for him, ready to chide him for drinking in the middle of the day, everything as it had been. As the taste receded down the slope of his tongue and reality flickered back into color from its sepia hues, James sighed and turned his attention to Gideon. He didn’t know how much to say, or not to say, here at the Leaky, but it was obvious, the man needed a bit of instruction. It was as with Narcissa, he thought. Yes, just like that. “Unless you mean an aging charm or a Polyjuice, I’m afraid not, outside of some hair recoloring nonsense.” He shrugged. He pulled the scarf from the bobbin of his neck and let it slither to the table, mirroring Gideon as the bigger man moved forward in secrecy. “It’s that bloody hotel. It brings us here. There -- was another war. You-Know-Who-Was defeated after you and I were killed. But now he’s back again, with us, with the hotel.” Gideon blinked. It was, for such a small movement, a matter of many things drawn together - James’s words had the vivid effect of being punched in the solar plexus. Gideon’s face was open and pleasant, much of the time, now it telegraphed shock, swiftly followed by something close to nausea at the idea of You-Know-Who resurrecting himself to destroy the world once more, and then finally, for a minute that felt like all the air sucked out of the room leaving nothing but his ears ringing, killed? His face greyed, tinged itself the same sepia as James’ fond memories, and his knuckles went faintly white as his hands locked together. Gideon had not given much thought to dead. Secretly, he imagined winning. He imagined the War survived, and won, and being able to do what Mum and Dad had done, move somewhere with apple trees in the back garden and small terrors running around. He imagined the growing-old stuff that came after doomed youth cavorted about a bit, won a few battles and started going grey. He had never imagined, not really, his or Fabian’s name added to the list. He had never thought of Potter’s name added to the list. He had thought they would survive. Dizzyingly, they had survived thus far. The air continued to ring, Gideon paddled with difficulty to what felt like the surface of underwater, “What do you mean he’s back?” It was not the slow resurgence of old fear, Gideon knew You-Know-Who as ever-present, a vivid threat scything down his schoolmates. But time, twenty years, in twenty years he was supposed to be long gone. The world safe again. What the hell had they been fighting for? What had so many people been murdered for? Gideon took a slow, shaky breath. “Right then,” it was the ‘business as usual’ voice, the one after the latest round of names had been listed off, first thing in the morning to a somber group. Bright as if nothing had happened. Blitz spirit, that was the ticket. “Right then. Evans? Molly? The rest of your lot?” His voice was studiedly casual, “You haven’t seen my other half, have you?” Right. That shock. James’ dark eyes met the darker, dinged wood of the table and his palm played on the slick of his mug. He cleared his throat. He’d forgotten about not knowing. He’d forgotten the freefall of his own stomach when he’d learned of his own fate in the world they were in now. The looks of curious passersby, wondering who the strange brown-eyed boy who looked like Harry Potter was, those he remembered. They dogged him everywhere. But he’d forgotten that first moment of realization and it made him feel cruel. Letting the condensation catch on his fingers, he lifted a hand to clap Gideon again on the shoulder, to welcome him to the brotherhood of the undead Order. The questions, however, made his palm slip back to the table and his chin tuck to his chest. “Evans, no. Molly, yes. Sirius and Remus were killed later. Everyone but Molly is here now though. It’s my son who saved us all, did you know that?” There was one shade of sunbeam pride in James’ voice then, all youth, and his smile beamed briefly, before the shutters came down. For most, ‘my other half’ would refer to a significant other, but James knew just of whom Gideon spoke: Fabian. Finally, James looked up from the table. He looked sad to have to deliver the news. “No, mate. I’m sorry.” There was no other half but Fabian. They had little time for girls. Not real ones, the kind that were more than the handjob you could claim as a hero, half-drunk in the back of a pub after a raid, some warm weight on your lap who shoved her hand down your robes as she kissed some of the fear and adrenaline out of your bloodstream. Until tomorrow you woke up to do it all again. Potter had been lucky. Evans was schooldays and inky parchment, pared down to the freckled softness of a girl grown beyond Hogwarts and exams and pranks. She’d hardened. They all had. You didn’t go looking to find love in a war, not if you planned on fighting it. It was another thing Gideon had intended on doing after. After the run of girls that came with staying all around the country to monitor the other side, or not at all if keeping a low profile. Find someone with a smile that didn’t dissipate in the morning, good legs. Gideon took that about as well as he had his own death. They had not been often parted. They hadn’t wanted to be parted, his twin was the echo of his own heartbeat, the smarter, cleverer one who came up with the brainy bit of any scheme and whose hand, Gideon would secretly swear to, faltered a little more than Gideon’s own. They were all things divided down the middle, two of each. There wasn’t a bloody world that didn’t have Fabian in it. The smile slid sideways and was gone abruptly. Gideon didn’t think of pride, of sons that would survive a war. “Ta for letting me know,” he said, with the unnatural politeness that had stiffened up all Gideon’s ease. “He died too, I take it. I died, he died. So he’s just,” a short pause, the butterbeer was in motion, slopping the sides of the glass, “Still dead. Like them all.” He didn’t ask about the Vance girl, or the Longbottoms. “What do you mean, You Know Who is here?” Gideon went rigid, as if all the Prewett in him had fled, all the good humor in freckles and hair that was colored by the cycle of the sun snuffed black by the shadow of Fabian’s absence. Had James been a more naturally empathetic person, he might have felt guilty for having his own family, as it were, together, but, he wasn’t. He did feel sorry for the man next to him, however. He could feel the weight on those shoulders and the sadness that came out in polite words for polite company. He was lucky to have Lily. For all his love for Sirius and Remus, Lily was James’ saving grace. He could not, and did not want to, imagine himself without her, without the comfort of her hand and her smile, and the splendid fall of her hair over her shoulders. Merlin. This was ridiculous. James finished his Butterbeer and set the mug ringing on the tabletop. “He could come back. No one stays dead anymore,” the boy said with some hope. There was always hope, wasn’t there? It was as important as safety in war. His sad smile faltered again. “He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named has returned as Tom Riddle. Bellatrix Black is here. Narcissa. Snape. Carrow.” James adjusted his glasses and mussed his hair. “It is good to see you, Prewett.” “Sodding hell.” It was not erudite. It was not even the most creative curse Gideon could fish out of the recesses of his beleaguered mind. But it did, he thought, aptly sum up a situation when half the villains of the piece, the nightmares under the bed, had crawled back out of the woodwork and half those that had kept them back the last time, were missing. He watched James’s ritual with the typical fondness for silliness that had shown itself - smile sliding up his left cheek - since he was a sixth year and James Potter the typical ickle firstie with a hard-on for Quidditch and reached out an absent hand to ‘help’ with standing all that black hair truly on end. It was familiar. Gideon liked familiar. Familiar did not feel as though the floor was dropping away. “I spose my flat no longer exists,” he said, thinking of the small place in North London, crammed in with washing drying damply on every available surface and Fabian the other side of the thin bedroom wall. “My being dead and all.” The Leaky did rooms, the Leaky did nice enough rooms, even if they did have the kind of floral counterpanes his mum liked. But Gideon thought suddenly, terrifyingly, of his Gringotts account. “Bit buggered with the living practicalities, this coming back from twenty years ago, business.” James ducked his head in an attempt to ‘escape’ the helping hand, but it was nothing more than a front. He appreciated the feel of familiarity in the world turned on its head and his own grin crooked across youthful face as he batted the fingers away. He fished a Knut from his pocket to spin on the table. It slid in the shining wetness left by mug on winter wood. One eyebrow lifted and he peered sideways at Prewett. “Oy, wanna come stay with the lot of us? We’ve a cottage, hedged with safe-guards, of course. Lily would be pleased to see you. There’s an extra room upstairs, though it’s not large. But you’re more than welcome to it. That keeps the money bit out of play, yeah?” It was an earnest offer, produced by an earnest face and a hand on a coin. It came with a smile. The Prewetts weren’t wealthy people. They had cousins who were wealthy (who managed, somehow, to leave them off the Christmas card list or something whenever there was a healthy possibility they might be asked for a loan, all in the family, that kind of thing) but their bank accounts at Gringotts were the small kind, nothing show-room about the size of the space to store enough money you could probably fit under the bed. There hadn’t been hazard pay, as part of the Order. You showed up, you did your bit, you made some cash in the evenings bartending or something, and you paid your rent with a lick and a promise. Gideon did not think about it, he had no pride at all. “Yeah,” he said, with gratitude, the kind of relief that flitted up to the surface and bobbed there briefly. “Ta. Just until I get on my feet. I don’t want to stick around when you two are,” he waved a hand across the table that encompassed a heavily pregnant Evans last time he’d met her. Evans who was a little too quick off the mark when there were practical jokes that met the wrong target. “Lovey-dovey. Can’t let the littlest Potter not turn up, after all.” “Lovey-dovey?” James’ eyebrows contracted in a violent clash of black on black, above a rim of black, before he grinned, sending them rocketing upward faster than the broom in the window could ever have dreamed of flying. His grin hinged on mischief, on inky footsteps on a tea-yellow scroll underneath candlelight, and when he tipped his head to the right, his hair splayed messily. “We can close the door, if it bothers you so much.” There was a shrug and James scraped the coin across the table, digging a groove in its worn top thoughtlessly. “The littlest Potter is the biggest at this point, as it is,” he said with one more hand to Gideon’s shoulder. The four legs of his chair scraped loudly on the burnished wood of the floor, they clattered and chattered as James re-affixed his scarf. “Let’s go then.” |