Beth H (bethbethbeth) wrote in hp_beholder, @ 2010-05-21 12:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | beholder_2010, dennis creevey, fic, het, millicent bulstrode, rating:r, severus snape, slash, snape/bulstrode/creevey, threesome |
FIC: "Sod Off" Means "I Love You" for kinky_kneazle
Recipient: kinky_kneazle
Author/Artist: anguis_1
Title: “Sod Off” Means “I Love You”
Rating: R
Pairings: Severus Snape/Millicent Bulstrode/Dennis Creevey
Word Count: 6,227 words
Warnings: Umm . . . you did read the pairing, right? And you’re aware this exchange is for characters of dubious popular attractiveness?
Summary: It begins and ends with the camera. Snapshots of life, and the living thereof.
Author's Notes: This fic takes place about 5 years after DH (so Dennis is, indeed, of age).
***
Millicent’s first thought was that he could use a good meal (or ten). He was standing outside her shop, studying the sign that listed her hours (“Whenever I’m arsed to be here.”) as though it were the newest installment of Big Breasts Bimonthly or whatever it was that blokes of his age went in for. She was just contemplating ordering him to shove off--not that there were any customers that he was scaring off, but still, it was the principle of the thing--when he jammed his hands deep into the pockets of his ragged cloak and slouched away towards the high-end shops farther down the road.
A week later, he was back, bouncing on the balls of his feet on the pavement outside her door as preoccupied passersby shouldered past him without taking the slightest notice. He wasn’t setting off her Anti-Loitering Charms, which probably meant that she ought to recast them. Before she could make a note to that effect, he opened the door and stepped inside, setting off a host of tiny silver bells hovering above the lintel.
Millicent tossed a spell in his direction, and he dove to the floor, catching his chin on the edge of a dusty wireless.
He scrambled to his feet. “I’m not trying to rob you, honest!”
Millicent glared down at him. “I’d like to see you try.”
The prospect was amusing. He barely cleared five feet and probably wasn’t even half her weight, and his reflexes obviously tended more towards flight than fight.
The door, which he’d not had time to fully close, swung open in a gust of wind. The bells above it began their delicate pealing, and Millicent silenced them again with another offhanded wave of her wand.
“Oh, sorry, I thought--”
“Whaddaya want?” Millicent interrupted before he could explain himself into a deeper hole.
A hopeful smile brightened his face, and he produced a battered camera from his robes.
“It’s a Muggle camera. Take it to a Muggle shop.” She dismissed him with a half-hearted shrug and returned to fusing the cracked glass on the tabletop Sneakoscope she’d been mending.
“I did. They told me to scrap it without even looking at it. It was curse damage, I think.”
That much was obvious. Its casing had crumpled like tin foil and was marked with purplish gashes.
“Muggles do occasionally get things right. It’s not worth the trouble.”
"Could you at least try? It belonged . . . . Um, it's . . . it’s important. I can pay whatever you ask.” His assurance was even more holey than his cloak, desperation apparent in every stammered syllable. (The Sneakoscope remained silent, however, and Millicent made a note to recalibrate its sneakometer.) Even so . . . . She could definitely use whatever it was that he could pay her. Besides, it would be a bit of a diversion from the usual magical devices that were her stock in trade.
Momentarily distracted, the white-hot tip of her hornbeam wand slipped across the glass and glanced off the hand she’d been using to steady the device, leaving a small burn trailing down the length of her thumb. She hissed a few obscenities that brought two spots of colour to his cheeks.
“It’ll be a week or two.”
His big, brown cow eyes lit up, and he began to babble some disgusting sentiments of gratitude.
She ignored this blunder and wrote up a chit, and he scrawled his name Dennis Creevey. As he slipped out the door, she recalled a tiny, blank-eyed waif curled over another slight body, the pair engulfed in the eerie calm that shadows death. Then she shrugged again and picked up her wand. The dead had no use for maudlin thoughts, and the living certainly didn’t need them either.