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Tweak says, "Dancing Pairie dogs at dawn"

Susan Amelia Bones (susanamybones) wrote in finnigans_rpg,
@ 2015-03-27 16:29:00

Entry tags:

character: lucy spinks, character: susan bones

RP: Cohabitation (Backdated to March 24)
Who: Susan and Lucy

What: Moving in

Where: Hanover Terrace, Regents Park

When: Tuesday 24th of March

Rating:SFW

Susan took a moment to flitter around Lucy's room, making sure everything was in it's place. After some consideration, she'd decided to leave the room decorated in it's light gold and cream, figuring that she and/or Lucy could change things around as needed.

She was just shooing Shadow out of the room when there was a polite knock on the door. She grinned to herself, and headed quickly for the stairs and down to the upper ground floor to fling open the door - fervently hoping it was Lucy and not one of her more amorous neighbours bent of asking her to come for a "ride on his pleasure boat" again. She flung open the door and smiled brightly. "Well hello you! Nice to finally see you!"

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addingvalue
2015-04-27 08:39 am UTC (link)

Lucy rolled her eyes slightly. Though her confidence had improved in her years out of the magical world, she was under no illusion that 11-year-old Lucy, confused and homesick and appalling at magic, had been 'awesome'. "It certainly was," she agreed. She'd seen Wayne once since her return to the magical world - and he'd seemed a lot more serious, though still a little flirty.

Though she wasn't entirely sure what cursebreaking was, Lucy figured she could probably guess. "Sounds... exciting," she said, quickly replacing the word 'dangerous' that had immediately sprung to mind. She nodded, making a mental note not to be too alarmed if she found a strange man sleeping on the sofa one day. Though, really, if that were the most unexpected place she found a strange man it would actually be less alarming than certain things that had gone on in her previous house.

She snorted in slight annoyance. "I've had a long day and you sent a knife zooming in my direction," she said. "I'm allowed to make a noise." She decided to let the topic of money drop - as much as she was of the opinion that Susan didn't 'have' to use the money she'd inherited, or that she could have used it for more charitable ends, she was aware it was bad manners to say so when Susan was currently using at least a little of it to house her. "It's a mexican mole sauce," she answered. "Chocolate and chillies and loads of other ingredients - takes forever to shop for, but it's delicious."

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susanamybones
2015-04-29 02:10 pm UTC (link)

Susan snorted and nodded. "I sometimes miss the times when things were simpler. Not that we had an idyllic childhood, what with Voldemort turning up at the school every other year." She tilted her head and repressed a snort at Lucy's hesitant declaration of cursebreaking as 'exciting.' "I don't know that breaking into old tombs and getting your eyebrows blasted off by three thousand year old automated curses is exactly my idea of exciting... But then I regularly chase people down, pepper them with hexes, and make them cry for their mothers so what would I know eh?"

She blinked several times, and then began to laugh weakly. "Sorry dear, I forget that you wouldn't a) be used to knives flying at you all the time, and b) probably didn't use magic much while cooking in your old house." She poured the onions into the saucepan with some olive oil, and began absently breaking the meat up. "Merlin's teeth that sounds amazing! What do you need for it, I think one of the stallholders at the goblin markets is Mexican, maybe we could get some of the stuff from her?"

"So," she said, in what she hoped was a nonchalant manner. "What's the whole deal with you being advised to live away from Muggles? Is it an issue with your erm, magic?" She started breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon, before remembering that she needed garlic, and pointing at a jar of it to summoning it to herself. "I was going to ask around, but I thought that would be a bit invasive of me." She finished breaking up the meat and turned to look at her friend. "I figure when received the journal it kind of helped set you on the path again, yes?"

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addingvalue
2015-05-02 04:59 pm UTC (link)

"I don't," Lucy said decidedly. "At least, not those times." Sometimes she thought about what it would be like to go back to before she got her Hogwarts letter, when she'd just been a normal girl playing football with her friends and making cookies with her sisters. When she'd first found out about it she'd thought magic would be an amazing thing that would change her life - but it had never been anything like that easy. "I like who I am now. I like knowing I'm actually good at things - even if..." She trailed off, then shrugged. "Even if those things aren't magic." Susan had been with her all six years at school, she knew Lucy wasn't good at magic.

She snorted slightly at Susan's description of her job. These new adult versions of her old friends were taking some getting used to. They'd all changed so much, and yet in some ways were just the same - it felt like Lucy kept missing a step when trying to walk down stairs. "If we can get authentic stuff that would be even better," she said. "I've been using basic Sainsbury's ingredients and it's really good just with those. I've got a list somewhere." She hadn't remotely managed to memorise the massive ingredient list yet - but sometimes she liked a challenge when she cooked.

Once they were all chopped, Lucy pushed the peppers over to Susan to add to the saucepan. "It's so stupid," she complained bitterly. "I had one magical accident and the Ministry got involved, sent me a letter 'reminding' me not to magic around muggles." She added air-quotes around the word as she spoke. "Then months later I get that vanishing sickness and my hand disappears on the fucking tube as I was trying to get myself to St Mungos." She paused, trying to tamp down the irritation - Susan did work for the Ministry, after all. She popped a stray cube of green pepper into her mouth and crunched through it before she continued. "After that, I had to go see them and fill out loads of paperwork and get one of Alicia's lawyers involved. In the end it seems like they can't force me to stop living and working with muggles - not unless there are several more instances in a twelve-month period - but when an owl showed up at work and just flapped outside the window for hours I sort of gave up."

Once she'd finished speaking, her shoulders sagged a little, making her even shorter than she usually was. She still wasn't sure this was for the best, no matter how she tried to convince herself. Both magical and muggle worlds had drawbacks, and she still wished she could have struck a more equal balance. "It definitely set me on a path. I guess we'll see if it was a good one..."

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susanamybones
2015-05-04 02:28 pm UTC (link)

"Hmmm," Susan agreed. "I guess it's more thinking wishfully of a time before most of my family was murdered for standing up for what's right, you know? Plus some school nostalgia." She looked at Lucy closely for a moment. She'd always had a weird intuitive suspicion that Lucy hadn't been matched to her wand properly - something that happened far more with purebloods who passed wands down family lines then sensible people like Lucy, who got an Ollivander's original. "Your worth is not measured by your ability to do magic, not in this house anyway," she replied at last.

"Excellent," she replied enthusiastically. "I like the idea of making this. It can be fun little dinner thing for us to do eh? Who knows, maybe your presence means that I'll eat more." She stired the onion medatively for a moment. "So where'd you get the recipe from anyway?"

She pushed the peppers into the mix as she listened to Lucy. "I'm so sorry darling," she said with genuine feeling, wisely deciding to not mention such trivialities as the fact that making sure magic wasn't used in front of Muggles was a major purpose of the Ministry. "Merlin's teeth! I knew you Vanishing Sickness, but goodness I didn't realise you were on the train system" she cried, whirling around in concern. "Did I know this? I feel like I should have known this!" She reached over and grasped the other woman's shoulder warmly and turned back to focus on their dinner. "Yeah, that sounds about right. They always get their way eventually. I'm sorry that you've been forced to leave your comfort zone, but hopefully you'll like living here?"

Susan smiled to herself and nodded. "Good, I'm glad. I imagine whoever tracked you down took a lot of effort to do so."

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addingvalue
2015-05-06 02:07 pm UTC (link)

Lucy winced slightly. It wasn't that she'd forgotten about Susan's family, but she was just so tired and stressed out that she hadn't been thinking about it. "I'm sorry," she said genuinely. "Of course it's different. If I think wishfully about anything it's going to be my primary school days. But there's no guarantee that I'd have figured out I was good at anything in the muggle school system either. I certainly wasn't showing any unusual promise when I left." Her mother had always said she'd be a late bloomer - though she'd been talking about Lucy's height, which had never changed much.

"I like recipes," Lucy said. "I've got more cookbooks than I know what to do with. I left most of them at Jenny's, for now." The thought reminded her of the awkward way she'd left things with her sister - but she didn't want to dwell on it right now. "That one's in a book of chocolate-based recipes," she said, picturing the book cover in her mind but unable to recall the exact title. "It's mostly cakes and biscuits and things, which I'm not so good at, but it has a few savoury dishes too."

Susan's genuine apology was appreciated, even if Lucy knew it wasn't Susan's fault that any of this had happened. "I woke up with my leg gone," she said, repressing a shudder. Even once she'd realised her leg was definitely still there, she'd panicked. "So I just... put on jeans and socks and tried to get to Diagon Alley so I could floo from the Leaky Cauldron." She couldn't remember whether or not they'd talked about it. The only person to comment on her panicked journal at the time had been Gwenog. She managed a small smile as Susan tried to re-orientate them to the positive. "I'm sure I'll like living here," she agreed. Even if the house was a little intimidating...

She hadn't thought about the sender of the journal in months, but she nodded in agreement. "I guess so. I mean - don't owls just sort of know where people live?" Lucy had certainly sent things without knowing where the people she was sending them to were living, and they seemed to have arrived.

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