WHO: Gabby Proudfoot and Mundungus Fletcher WHEN: Backdated to October 31 WHERE: Their flat, Knockturn Alley WHAT: Debrief after Ministry events. Wayward moustaches. WARNINGS: None
It really wasn’t as bad as Gabby had expected. Having avoided the punch himself, he spent the evening with a few members of the waitstaff trying to bite his arm, but was otherwise unharmed. This meant that he was able to slip back to his flat without much hassle, which was good enough for him. Stripping out of his costume, he put on a kettle as he waited for his roommate. Hopefully, she didn’t drink the punch after Dorcas did her magic.
Mundungus had intended to help keep lookout, but the trouble with dressing like Maintenance was that people tended to take your disguise at face value—and actually expect you to do Maintenance-y type things. So she had spent the better part of the time helping some poor sod take care of his office, of which the ceiling had somehow started to rain and been a near foot deep on the floor by the time he’d annexed her. She’d half thought about stunning him when his back was turned and making a run for it. But there was her cover, and there was also the fact that the people in the framed picture on his desk hadn’t been moving. So a Muggleborn, or at least someone with close ties to that community, and who knew whether someone else had hexed his space, hoping that he’d be so worn down by the cumulation of this and other things that he’d evict himself from this job, this life.
She had stayed to help.
Now there was a soft pop as a sopping wet janitor appeared in their living room, dashing the water out of her impressively thick moustache and swearing. What felt like the contents of the school lake gushed out of her Wellington boot as she heaved it off, followed by a frog eager to escape.
“Feck this an’ feck yer,” she muttered at the departing amphibian. “Any of them others chimed in yet?”
“I haven’t really checked,” her roommate answered with a small shrug of his shoulders. Turning around from the stove, Gabby raised an eyebrow as he leaned back against the edge of the counter and gave his flatmate a good look. “But it looks like you had a bit of fun?”
“‘Fun’.” Mundungus grimaced then launched into the whole sodden story as she peeled off her soaked pair of coveralls, accioing a towel from their shoebox of a bathroom and working its way through her hair once she had transfigured it back to its normal length. The masculine build of the janitor had been shed with the uniform but she still, rather jarringly, had her moustache. It was rather like seeing a twenty-something woman fused with Slughorn.
“So ‘e was tellin’ me ‘thank yer thank yer thank yer I’ll give yer me first born’ an’ all’ and I was all ‘gotta go me dude, no bovver, totally not lookin’ out fer me vigilante friends breakin’ into the Minister’s office or nought.” She summoned the nearest jumper over - inconsequential that it was Gabby’s - and dove into it with a sigh. “Fuck ‘m freezin’. Start me up a cup of rosy, will ya?”
Lifting his hand, Gabby pointed just below his nose. “You got something on your face, Mun.” He wished he had a camera to capture the moment, but that wasn’t a good idea considering everything. Secrets had to remain so, especially with them. “And I already have the kettle on. Just have to pick your poison.”
“Wha’, the kebab I ate earlier? Goin’ to make a late supper of it, I was.” Mundungus caught her reflection in the glass of one of the tiny room's many framed pictures, angled her upper body slightly so that Gabby's was visible too. Cat sudden, her wand hand snapped out. A tugging sensation as the handlebar-like hairpiece vanished from her upper lip, then reappeared on her flatmate's.
“Earl Grey with a slosh of whiskey, please yer.”
Pushing himself off the counter, he wandered the short distance to where the liquor was stored, crouched down, and opened the cabinet doors as he briefly stroked his new moustache. “Is a slosh an exact measure measurement?” Gabby asked as he grabbed the whiskey bottle for Mun and the apricot brandy for himself. “Or are we just going to drink out of the bottle between sips of our tea?”
“Yer know when yer make ‘m,” Mundungus shot back, her wand acting as a hairdryer now as she waved it over her damp locks. “It’s like a movement, yanno? A sound.” Her free hand demonstrated. “And nah, dump it in. That way we can say it’s a cocktail and we’re classy, whot.”
Standing up, he shut the cabinet floor with his foot before depositing the bottles onto the counter. He then reached for his wand that was laying by the bread boxed and picked it up to take care of the unfortunate mustache he had inherited. “Are we really worried about looking classy when no one is here?” Now half the mustache was gone.
“Are we worried ‘bout bein’ classy ever?” It was all very much window dressing in her mind, the things rich people did to make themselves stand apart from the masses and assure themselves that they were superior—another means of exclusion. “Tell yer what, I’ll stick me pinky out while I’m drinking. That oughta make Lucy Malfoy happy, if she decides to grace us with ‘er presence.”
“Once in a blue moon, I like to be classy,” Gabby informed her as he pointed his wand at the remain half of mustache and made it vanish. With his mission accomplished, he turned his attention to his flatmate. “If Lucy Malfoy decides to grace us with her presence, I would wonder if she had been hit on the head lately.”
“Are clove cigarettes classy, or are they jus’ pretentious?” Now dried off, she wandering the short distance over to the kitchen, plopping down at their old table with the hearty sigh of someone decompressing. Already the adrenaline from their evening jaunt was wearing off. Her body ebbed. Her mouth cracked open with a yawning sigh.
Gabby snorted. “I would go more with disgusting, but that’s just me.” After all, what kind of healer would he be if he promoted smoking of anything. Well. Most things. “But everything went all right, yeah?”
“Assume we would of ‘eard about it sooner if not.” Speaking of. Mundungus pulled over her own journal, then her eyebrows shot up as a new ward appeared on the pages. “Oof, ‘ere we go. Nadine’s just updated.”