WHO: Owen and Jeremy Dearborn, feat. Kevin Dearborn WHAT: Fanmail from Anonymous Lestranges WHEN: After this WHERE: Owen's house WARNINGS: blood, ash working through her recent nosebleed trauma
"What'cha doing, bud?" Owen asked as he flipped the grilled cheese sandwiches from his frying pans onto the plastic Disney's Hercules that he'd had since he was around Kevin's age. He slid one of the plates down onto the table on top of the piles of notebooks and papers and colouring books that were stacked around his son's workspace at the kitchen island, where Kevin sat tracing the picture of a cartoon elephant onto the sheet of paper he held over it.
"Paying taxes," was Kevin's very serious reply. He only looked up to answer his dad, then immediately went back to work.
"I hear forgery comes in real handy for some people with that, so keep up the good work," Owen grinned as he sat down across from him, taking a bite off the crust of his own sandwich. The pile of unpaid bills was starting to stack up even higher than Kevin's notebooks. He flipped through the mail, a hope in the back of his mind that there would be some sort of communication from Zef lingering inside, but knowing nothing would be there. It was safer that way.
"Bill. Bill. Bill… what's this?" Owen wondered, his envelope-shuffling landing on an unopened glittery-inked letter. Maybe it was a thank-you card from that wedding he and Zef had gone to a few months ago. A quick flick of his wand assured him that it wasn't hexed, and a moment later the envelope was ripped open.
While Owen didn't specifically recall the specific Shirley from the letter, before the Azkaban breakout, the Aurors definitely had ended up going on several human-interested calls for cats up in trees, especially for older folks who'd gone through the first war and were convinced that the dangers of then were coming back.
Turns out they had been the ones who were right.
Even without "officially" being an Auror anymore -- even Shirley from the letter had updated his new title to Hitwizard -- and even though Owen felt like he was yelling at a ticking bomb when it came to arguing with the Death Eaters on the journals without knowing how to diffuse the situation, it was nice to hear that it wasn't entirely in vain. He took a long sip of his coffee, feeling vaguely better about things, and deciding that it was finally time to start paying some of those bills before they started coming in angry red howler envelopes.
"Daddy, your nose is dripping."
Owen looked up at Kevin, who was staring back at his father with wide-eyed concern. Running his palm back past his nose, Owen's hand came away smeared with blood. "Oh. Shit. Sorry, it's just a nosebleed, these are normal things that happen because the weather's changing," Owen informed his son, keeping his voice calm and steady as he pinched his nostrils shut with one hand and went fishing for a napkin with the other in the bag from last night's takeaway.
"Is mine going to start bleeding??" Kevin asked, two fingers immediately diving into his nose to plug up the holes.
Owen laughed and shook his head. "No, Kev. Don't pick your nose, though, because that might make it start."
"HAHA DAD WAS PICKING HIS NOSE!"
"I was n-" Owen started to protest, but realized just how saturated the napkin he had held against his nose was becoming. He grabbed the last few napkins from the paper fast food bag and pinched his nose shut, pointing his wand at the table to clean up the mess that had been made during the switch. Across the table from him, Kevin had stopped laughing at his father the non-nose picker, his crayons and coloring books abandoned as he stared and watched. "It must be really dry in here. No big deal," Owen shrugged it off again, even if his adrenaline was starting to spike. Having run out of napkins, he crumbled up the paper bag itself and used that as a makeshift tissue instead, pushing himself to his feet so that he could go get some toilet paper out of the bathroom. He should've been better about buying Kleenex. Zef had always been the one who remembered to buy tissue.
Once he was on his feet, though, Owen felt like his legs were going to give out from under him. A headache was starting to settle between his eyes, and it felt as though all the blood in his body was rushing to his head (and immediately pouring out of his nose.) He took a few shaking steps away from the table, having given up the ghost of trying to stop the bloodflow and instead focusing on making it to the sink. His legs didn't agree, though, his right leg falling out from underneath him and sending Owen toppling to the floor.
This no longer felt like something that was due to needing a humidifier.
"Dad?" Kevin asked cautiously, keeping his distance from his father but also not wanting to leave him there when his nose was clearly broken.
"Hey, Kev. Hey. You want to be a big helper?" Owen asked, having pulled himself up into a sitting position against the counters, tilting his head back in an effort to stop the blood flow. Kevin nodded, even though he looked terrified, which managed to feel even worse to Owen than the nosebleed and the spreading migraine. "Good. I'm gonna need you to be my brave big boy for me right now, Kev. You remember how your mum and me taught you to send the owl?" Another nod. "Good good. Go send Chewie to Uncle Jeremy and ask him to bring his Healer Kit. Can you do that for Daddy?"
Kevin was already running out of the room before yelling yes. His timing was as good as possible when it came to avoiding any further trauma, as that was the moment that Owen learned that tilting your head back during a massive nose bleed causes it to start coming out your mouth.
It wasn’t a great sight. Jeremy was used to sudden owls. He was used to the pressure and the high stress of sudden medical emergencies, but it didn’t matter how used to them he was when the owl was scrawled in his nephew’s handwriting. There was a jolt of instant panic, the sort that stopped everything for a second that felt like an hour, and then there was the immediacy of needing to get to his brother’s house as fast as he could apparate.
There wasn’t really time for Jeremy to imagine a ton of terrible possible scenarios, but he really wasn’t sure if what he found would’ve been better or worse than most of them. “What the hell?” he said, as he rushed his way into the kitchen and knelt down on the floor next to Owen. He immediately aimed spells at his nose to try and stop the bleeding.
"I'm fine," Owen insisted, despite clearly not being fine. "It just started; I didn't even do anything." Which was annoying in and of itself -- if he was going to get knocked on his ass like this, he wanted there to at least be a reason for it! "I was just paying bills. Maybe I'm allergic."
“I’m allergic to bills too but they don’t make me hemorrhage in my kitchen. Drink this,” Jeremy ordered, pulling a vial of blood replenisher from his bang and closing it into Owen’s hand. “And you’re not fine.”
"Shh, Kevin is eavesdropping," Owen whispered to his brother, jerking his chin toward the door to the kitchen where he assumed his son was hiding behind. The sudden motion, though, left him woozy and lightheaded, and he had to catch himself before he wobbled over onto the floor. "I'm definitely fine!" Owen said, louder this time as he took the potion from Jeremy and tried to maneuver his nose-pinching hand so that he could drink down the potion at the same time. "Thank you for coming though, Jez. It was just so fucking sudden and there was so much and I couldn't think of what else to do."
“Stop moving.” The order didn’t have a lot of bite to it, but it did have the authority of someone who’d ordered his share of patients around. “But you’re right, you’re totally fine!” he added after a moment, louder and entirely for Kevin’s eavesdropping benefit. Fine wasn’t really the word he would use, but he didn’t think Owen was in danger of dying on the spot which certainly made things a little bit easier to breathe for himself.
Jeremy cast a few diagnostic spells, frowning as he did. “Obviously I came, Owen. You don’t have to thank me. But what were you doing? You couldn’t have just been paying bills. This is a lot for it to be spontaneous.”
Owen stopped moving. His little brother tendencies nearly crept out in protest of being bossed around by his slightly older brother, but both knowing that Jeremy knew what he was doing, and wanting whatever this was to stop kept him still. "No, that's literally it. I was making grilled cheese, and I had some coffee, and was going through the mail, and--"
He stopped short. "I'm a fucking idiot." He started to move to get the letter from the person who "appreciated his work," but then remembered his orders to stay still. "There's a letter over there telling me I'm awesome. It's probably hexed or something so don't touch it."
“Well sure, if someone’s telling you you’re awesome, then it must be cursed! Drink this, too,” Jeremy said as he handed his brother another bottle and trying to use a faux burst of levity to tamp down on the panicked feeling in the pit of his stomach. Seeing his brother covered in his own blood made everything seem a hell of a lot more serious.
“Tell me how you’re feeling and then we can talk about the possibly cursed fan letter.”
"I feel like an art project from someone going through a lot of stuff right now," Owen replied, looking down at his hands, and his clothes, and the floor. He moved the paper bag away from his nose, which had slowed down to a trickle. "Did you know that thing about tilting your head back when you have a bloody nose is bullshit, because I sure didn't."
"I feel like my brain is trying to explode out of my head right here and here," he pointed out where the worst areas of the migraine thundered in his head, "but my nose doesn't hurt at all. It's just a fucking faucet. And I'm thirsty."
“The pain should start dissipating a bit within a few minutes. And the bleeding should be stopping any time now.” Jeremy stood up from where he’d been crouched on the floor, grabbing a glass and filling it with water and dampening a kitchen towel in the process to offer for blood cleanup. “And p.s., next time try tilting your head forward. Or better yet, maybe we could avoid a next time entirely!”
He chewed at his lip as he knelt back down, full hands preventing any sort of other nervous gesture. But he was nervous. “What do you think this was? I mean, do you think this was because of arguing with Death Eaters or…?”
"Good. Good," Owen kept repeating as he waited for the bleeding to stop, hoping that chanting it as some sort of mantra would make him believe it was true. "It probably was, based on that letter. I'm surprised they'd do it like this instead of doing something more personal. Usually they hate other people getting credit for their work."
“Oh cool something more personal. Should I be worried about that too?” Jeremy held out the glass of water.
"Hopefully not!" Owen replied, crunching up his paper bag tissue into a ball and tossing it across the kitchen towards the trash can. It bounced off the rim and rolled back across the kitchen floor. "They're all old now. Maybe they don't have time for that anymore."
Jeremy stared at the paper bag ball for a moment before aiming his wand at it and sending it into the trash can. “I don’t think we should bank on them not having time for it,” he said quietly. He frowned, throwing a few thoughts around in his head but it was only after he cast another diagnostic spell at Owen and was satisfied that he wasn’t going to start bleeding again that he said anything else.
“This freaks me the fuck out, Owen.”
"I know," Owen agreed, drawing his knees into his chest and folding his arms on top of them to rest his chin. His hands were still shaking. He was pretty sure it wasn't due to the blood loss anymore. "I've read so many stories and transcripts about what happened last time. No one ever seems scared in them. I thought this was what I was supposed to be doing. And instead I almost ended up the Auror who almost got murdered by a bloody nose."
He paused. "Sorry, Hitwizard who almost got murdered by a bloody nose." Owen rolled his eyes at his own correction of the situation.
“You’re still an Auror. And call it being almost murdered by a cursed object. It sounds cooler.” Jeremy cast a glance over to where the letter was. “I guess we’ll need to deal with that. But Owen, I don’t really think that nobody was scared in the things you read. I think that’s just not the sort of thing that they write down.”
"It doesn't exactly make for good folk ballads. Just country songs. And those are more about your dog leaving you than being scared of dark wizards," Owen replied, babbling enough to where most healers probably would've thought he was delirious, but Jeremy would likely know that he was feeling better. "What do you think we should do? Besides being more careful about the mail?"
“Well first I think you should clean the blood off your face before you traumatise your kid more than he already is,” Jeremy said instead of an answer, mostly because he wasn’t sure he had an answer. He wasn’t sure if Death Eaters let you backtrack — if anything was ever a warning shot or if everything was a matter of playing with their food. He wasn’t sure if it even mattered.
He let out a breath, a hand coming up to scrub at his forehead. “I used to spend a lot of time thinking that what Dad was fighting for wasn’t worth losing him. But I don’t think I really feel that way anymore. Doing nothing doesn’t exactly feel good.”
"I think being Dearborns was going to fuck us even if we didn't have journals warning us that it was coming," Owen replied, rolling himself over onto his knees before pushing himself up to his feet and using the counter to guide his way over to the sink. "They love to replay the hits. Purists are all about tradition."
Owen fell silent for a few moments while he splashed water on his face, trying to clean up the mess, before turning back to Jeremy. "You think any of the people who were out there fighting with him back then are still doing it now?"
Jeremy watched Owen carefully, looking for any sign that he couldn’t handle the movement, but he seemed steady enough. The weight he’d felt since he received the owl started to dissipate, just a little. “There has to be at least a couple, right? Surely they didn’t all die in the first war.”
"Mum always made it sound like they were all dead. Maybe those were the only ones she knew about." Owen shrugged. "Though maybe she did that on purpose. It's like parents telling their kids they need to check their halloween candy for razor blades first before they eat it but it's really just so they can steal a few of the best parts of the haul. I dunno though. It's not like we can hext Harry Potter."
“Wait, there wasn’t really a risk of there being razor blades in the candy? This changes everything,” Jeremy replied with a smile, though it faded a moment later. “But even if you could hext Harry Potter, what would you say? ‘Sup HP, can you hook us up with your Order buds for—’ what? To get all the old war stories we never got? To join?”
Owen laughed, shaking his head as he shot cleaning spells around the mess that he'd made of the kitchen. "At this point, I don't even know. 'Hey HP, it would've been great if you' taken out a few of the Death Eaters running departments in the Ministry while you were there the other day. Next time?'"
“‘Oh and by the way if you could save the world before we all die, that’d be great too, thanks!’ I’m sure he’d really love to hear from us.” Jeremy looked around the kitchen. “Where’s the letter? We need to get rid of it.”
"Over there on the island," Owen said, jerking his chin toward the table in the middle of the kitchen. Drawing out his wand, he moved closer to it, his other hand going out to his side to keep Jeremy back as if he was a parent slamming on the car breaks and his brother was a kid in the passenger seat. The letter hovered into the air, Owen keeping it at a safe distance away from them. "Should I take it into work as evidence? Do we burn it?"
Jeremy rolled his eyes at the hand coming out to stop him, as if he hadn’t just been the life-saving one in this pair, but he decided not to comment. “Is there a point to taking it into work? If you think there is then do that, otherwise let’s burn the thing.”
That was a good point -- taking it to work at this point would probably just lead to him getting laughed at by Yaxley, rather than an actual investigation. He slipped his phone out of his pocket to take a picture of the letter, just in case, then levitated the letter over the kitchen sink. "Yeah. Burn it."
Aiming his wand, Jeremy cast a quick incendio, watching the sink carefully in case the whole thing decided to explode or some other dramatic second wave of evil. When it didn’t, he looked over at Owen. “How are you feeling now?”
"Better. Especially now that that's gone," Owen replied, during on the sink to let the water run on top of the few remaining charred ashes from the note. "And now I want revenge."