benjy fenwick, terrible idea. (curaga) wrote in cultureic, @ 2016-06-10 01:24:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | benjy fenwick |
WHO: Benjy Fenwick, assorted others.
WHEN: 2005 - 2014.
SUMMARY: Various questions over the years or: what makes Benjy Fenwick tick.
WARNINGS: Sexual suggestion (nothing explicit), mentions of death/violence, bad language. This is long and rambling and weird.
Midway through their third whiskey ginger, Colm Fenwick levels a serious look at his son and asks, “So, you and Effie. You’re in it for the long haul, then?” Benjy’s eyebrows shoot up as the pit of his stomach dips down into parts unknown—maybe the floor, or maybe the earth’s core. He doesn’t know what’s on the opposite of point of the globe, but Benjy reckons it’s there, making friends with the locals. Prior to this, the Fenwick men had largely been drinking in silence, the music from his father’s new iPod (Three Dog Night to the Steve Miller Band to Electric Light Orchestra) pleasantly filling in the gaps in conversation. “Yeah.” His answer is absent as well as belated, and he studies the collection of Muggle technology on his father’s desk instead of meeting his eyes. The iMac with the two monitors, the large scanner: Colm Fenwick is in the process of scanning Notable Magical Names of Our Time to his hard drive. “You don’t sound so sure,” Colm points out mildly. “I’m dead sure,” Benjy shoots back, with all the passion of a seventeen year old in love. Straightening in his chair, he waves his glass tumbler around to emphasize his point. “I mean, I love her. Like, every part of me. Down to like, my molecules.” ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ fades into ‘Evil Woman’, and his father laughs. “I’m serious!” Benjy protests. “I know she’s not perfect, but…” “That’s putting it lightly, Benj.” Benjy Fenwick stares at his father with a bright hint of determination in his eyes. “Yeah, I know. But I can fix it. I know she loves me, and I know what she’s like when she’s not…” He makes a vague hand gesture, as if this perfectly illustrates his meaning. Colm nods. “I mean, I don’t want to make excuses for her. I know it’s fucked up. But if I can help her be less, you know, then I should try, right?” “You’re starting Healer training in the summer,” his father says, taking care to keep his voice gentle. “That’s how you can fix people. But purists like Effie—those beliefs are very deeply ingrained. I don’t know if there’s any fixing that.” “But—” Colm fixes his son with a shrewd look. “You put too much energy into trying to fix people, you’re going to burn yourself out.” Benjy considers his father’s words, rolling them over in his head, then finishes his drink. “No worries, Da. It’ll work out the way it’s supposed to, you’ll see.” Beatrice Clutterbuck, Human Resources witch, eyes him over the rim of her glasses. “Why are you interested in working at Gringotts, Mr. Fenwick?” When Benjy answers, his voice is calm and confident, as if he isn’t at all overly aware of the sound of his own breath in his throat. “After four years at St. Mungo’s, I’m interested in applying the skills I learned in their Spell Damage department to a more challenging environment. St. Mungo’s is often hectic, but it’s also stable. Stationary.” Stifling, he wants to add. He pauses, his gaze dropping down to the black and white plaque emblazoned with Beatrice Clutterbuck’s name. When he looks up again, his mouth jerks up into a crooked grin. “I don’t really think of myself as a stationary person. I want to travel and see the world, and I know I’m talented enough to heal anyone who’s bold enough to travel and see the world and cursebreak.” Beatrice Clutterbuck jots something down on her pad of parchment, quill scribbling furiously. She does not return his smile, and Benjy’s confidence deflates, just a little, before it’s completely punctured by the next question: “What do you consider your biggest strength, and what do you consider your biggest weakness?” Before Benjy has time to think better of it, he lets out a low hum from the back of his throat. Dozens of weaknesses come to mind; the only strengths he can think of are jokes, or completely inappropriate for a job interview. “Er,” he says, stupidly. Noise from the busy Malasaña streets filters up through the thin walls and windows of the Spanish cursebreaker’s flat. Renata Garcia. She runs her fingers along the base of his spine, and her voice is so low it seems to be emanating from inside Benjy’s skull. “Would you like to get dinner tomorrow night?” A pause. “Yeah, sure,” he mumbles into her neck. “Is that a lie, Benjamín?” Benjy considers his next response: it is, in fact, a lie, but Renata Garcia is a very sharp knife who happens to be shaped like a very attractive woman. He can’t say the wrong thing, or he’ll end up bleeding out in some back alley. Laughing softly, his mouth moves down the column of her throat. “I mean, I don’t know. I’m not a Seer, I can’t predict the future. I’ll try to make it, but you know how things are with—ow, fuck!” “It’s just dinner,” Renata says as she slides out of bed, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “I wasn’t asking for your hand in marriage.” “Dinners give me anxiety,” Benjy grumbles into the now vacant pillow. “And I think my back is bleeding. Are you going to come kiss it better?” “Get the fuck out of my bed, Fenwick.” “And then he left me for some paper pusher in the Minister’s office — he broke up with me over o-mail, if you can believe it,” the blond (Nicholas? Nikolai?) continues to explain as he luxuriates on his bed, though Benjy never asked for a detailed history of the man’s love life. He barely knows his name. The blond (Nicomedes?) lifts an expectant eyebrow as he watches Benjy slide his boxers on. “Any notable exes in your life?” he presses. “Oh, sure,” Benjy replies, looking around the room for his jeans. “Who doesn’t have a notable ex?” “Well?” “She’s blonde,” he says mildly, tugging his shirt off the bookshelf it had somehow landed on. “She didn’t break up with me over o-mail, if that’s what you’re asking.” Nicholas-or-Nikolai-or-Nicomedes rolls his eyes as he flops back onto his pillow, and says, as archly as he can, “She must’ve done something terrible if you’re being this cagey about it. Did she—” “Why the fuck are we talking about our exes right now?” Benjy cuts in, sharp as a razor. He lets his shirt drop to the floor, then his boxers. “‘Cause I don’t know about you, but I can think of a much better use of our time.” “Anyway, now she’s engaged to a complete bastard,” Benjy confesses, the words tumbling out of their own volition. It’s the alcohol, he thinks. His head is resting in the head of a lap of a redhead he met in Arles—Vivian. (“Like Vivian Leigh? Or Ward? Or,” in his best Bogart impression, “Rutledge?” She was unfamiliar with the actress, and she’d never seen Pretty Woman or The Big Sleep.) “So that’s fucking that, I guess,” he says, twisting on his side to press a kiss to Vivian’s thigh. She’s lacing her fingers through his hair, and he’s really drunk. “I’m really drunk,” Benjy announces. “I noticed,” Vivian says, wryly. She crinkles her nose down at him as she contemplates his situation. “If you were involved with this girl back in Hogwarts, don’t you think it’s time to move on? Not with me,” she adds quickly, before Benjy can open his mouth to protest. “But you will find a nice girl—or boy. One who is less unpleasant to your friends, perhaps.” “Oh.” Benjy goes quiet for a moment, and something in his chest twists tight at the thought, cinching like a length of thread around a spool. “Nah, I don’t think so. I don’t think I d—I’m not very good at dating, and it’s just a lot of… no.” Vivian raises an eyebrow, then reaches for the bottle of wine on her nightstand. “I can listen to your relationship troubles, but I’m not nearly drunk enough to play mind healer.” A beat, and a fog-slow smile spreads across Benjy’s mouth as he watches her take a long swig straight from the bottle. “Yet.” They are at something of an impasse. Talk therapy is a mainstay of mind healing, but it's only as effective as the patient's own willingness to talk. Lilith Grinberg finds this particular subject a difficult nut to crack. “It sounds like the larger issue you're having is one of utility,” she says, after the latest in a series of lengthy lulls in conversation. “Or, rather, the perception of your own utility. You couldn't save them, and healing is your job.” She gestures vaguely with her hands as she speaks, pantomiming a broken tool. “Fulfilling your stated function was impossible, and so you feel as though you 'malfunctioned'.” Her blue eyes catch his gaze and hold it. “Is that accurate? Do you feel useless?” Benjy is pinned under her stare, and his knuckles instinctively flex and relax on the arm of the chair. He looks back at Healer Grinberg for a long moment, then a flickering little frown passes over his face as he glances away. “Uh, I mean, yeah, I guess,” he says at last. The next words have to be forced out: “I let two Cursebreakers die because I wasn’t good enough.” The huff of laughter that punctuates his admission is hollow, dry, devoid of humor. “And now I’m back here and I’m, what, a mediwizard for the Ballycastle Bats when people are dying.” He sucks in a breath to collect himself, but it doesn’t do any good. “Things are just getting worse by the day, and I’ve not gone back to St Mungo’s because I was unhappy there.” Lilith leans back a bit in her own chair, steepling her fingers. “That's a very input/output model of human interaction, though, Benjy. You're a person, not a machine.” She tilts her head to the side just slightly, face as coolly dispassionate as ever but voice now a bit more soothing, a bit more sympathetic. “If you did the best you could, is that really 'not good enough'? It's not as if you've been programmed. People are fallible. Why are those deaths your fault, and not the fault of the Cursebreakers? Or the person who laid the curses to begin with?” “Because,” Benjy says, and his voice cracks, “I should’ve done more. I should’ve pushed myself harder. I didn’t do enough.” His eyes drift up to hers. “I’m still not doing enough.” “None of us is ever doing enough, Benjy,” Hr. Grinberg says. “It's what we do at all that matters.” He buys them both pints and they drift out to the patio to catch up on their jobs (shitty) and their love lives (non-existent). She bites back a smile at a terrible joke about a blind nun, and the conversation eventually turns to the war. “Doesn’t it suck to not be able to do more?” Emmeline asks as she takes a sip of her beer. “Yeah.” Benjy glances away, but his eyes snap back to hers as if by magnetic pull. “I mean, the DMLE’s doing what they can, I guess, but what can they do when the Ministry’s overrun with purists. They’ve not caught a single Death Eater in all this time, and things are just getting worse. Thank Christ for the Order, that’s all I’m saying.” He raises his glass to his lips and forces himself to smile. “But like, I’m not sure there’s all that much I could do anyway, you know? I’m a shit duelist.” A week later, at dinner with Caradoc: “But do you think the Order is making that much of a difference?” Caradoc asks, sounding wary. It makes sense. Of the two of them, Caradoc has always been the rule-abiding one. But Benjy doesn’t have the same reservations, and excitedly stabs a cherry tomato before exclaiming, “Yeah, mate, of course I do. That fight in Diagon Alley last year?” He thrusts the speared tomato in Caradoc’s direction as he goes on, “Or that attack back in Tinworth in ‘11? I bet there wouldn’t have been zero casualties if the Order hadn’t been there.” “I guess that’s true,” Caradoc says, in the same mild tone. “If you were in a situation to help them out… would you do it?” “Yes,” Benjy replies, without missing a beat. “Absolutely.” “If you keep saying things like that,” Gideon says a few days later, “people will think you’re a vigilante.” Benjy levels the Hitwizard with a look that can only be described as fond disbelief before clasping a hand on his shoulder. “There are worse things to be known as, mate.” A beat. “Like a terrible wing wizard,” he adds in a bright voice, before steering his friend in the direction of an attractive blonde across the bar. “Besides. No disrespect to the DMLE, but all disrespect to the DMLE: with all the Death Eaters they’ve caught, I bet they wouldn’t be able to spot a vigilante if one fisted them in the ass.” When Albus Dumbledore show up on his doorstep, eyes twinkling, Benjy can’t say yes fast enough. Yes, yes, yes. |