Gideon Prewett is socially awkward (gid_not_git) wrote in first_order, @ 2012-02-16 21:53:00 |
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Entry tags: | dorcas meadowes, fabian and gideon, fabian prewett, gideon prewett |
BACKDATED to Feb 14
Characters: Gideon and Fabian Prewett, with a cameo by Dorcas Meadowes
Location: A Muggle pub in London
Summary: Fabian takes his brother out drinking to distract him from his Valentine's woes but the twins have a little too much fun and must be rescued by Dorcas.
Rating: PG-13 for brief use of language
Valentine’s Day was for long romantic dinners over candlelight that ended with something chocolatey and delicious shared between two people. Gideon loved it, of course. He loved the romance, the idea of focusing solely on the person you cared about. He wanted to send candy and flowers and silly love notes.
He was spending the evening with his brother. Not so unusual since Gideon spent half his evenings with his brother but tonight was Valentine’s. He had no date, of course. There hadn’t been much time for dating since he joined the Order. His work was about the greater good, about sacrificing himself. Anything else was selfish. But that didn’t mean he didn’t wish he had someone much more feminine than Fabs to spend it with.
They were at a Muggle pub, which Gid didn’t mind so much even if their money was slightly odd.
“Did you know we’re almost thirty?” he asked Fabian, setting down his beer glass after a long drink.
The Muggle pub had been Fabian's idea. He'd have preferred to spend the entire evening holed up in his flat, separated from the world of over-the-top romance and chocolates. But he had his brother to consider. He couldn't spend the evening moping, even if his initial suggestion that they hit a gay bar in Soho was shot down. Apparently, some things never changed. Even on Valentine's.
Fabian set his glass down with a groan. "Did you have to remind me?" He eyed their fellow pub-goers. It was a much grungier pub than usual, and Fabian had to admit - it wasn't his best decision as far as pubs went. Not if they intended to pick up a pretty lady or two and have a decent Valentine's. The majority of the crowd here were older, and they looked as though they didn't even know that today was a special day of romance and cupid arrows.
"I was just beginning to think that we might overlook that one..." Fabian flagged down a waitress, and ordered another round. He needed it, if they were going to discuss birthdays - and potentially his least favorite topic, weddings. "Honestly, I didn't bring you here for the yearly reminder that I'm another decade closer to being an old bag lady with a few dozen cats..."
“You don’t have a cat,” Gid pointed out, sticking firmly to logic. “And I’m older than you are, so I don’t know why you’re complaining.” He pulled a packet of fags from his pocket and slipped one into his mouth, turning towards the wall and covering his mouth with his hands. Gideon charmed his cigarettes himself and he had only to inhale and the fag would light. The ash also disappeared when he flicked it off the end and he was working on something for the smell but hadn’t managed it yet. He glanced around nervously but no one seemed to notice he hadn’t used a Muggle light.
“You wouldn’t rather be here with someone else?” He offered Fabian a fag to be polite.
Fabian took a fag and mimicked Gideon's movements to hide the obvious magic. As he exhaled smoke, he said, "Yes, someone far more adventurous." A teasing grin crossed Fabian's face. He flicked the ash off the end of his cigarette, and glanced around them. He felt at ease here, far more than was normal for a Wizard of his heritage. But here there wasn't a war, there wasn't anything that meant he couldn't enjoy the last few months of his 29th year - and that he wouldn't be the next to be murdered across the headline news. "Do you want me to find you a lovely girl, and you can pick flowers, and skip along the Thames? Might have to try another pub, mind, as this one doesn't seem to have much variety."
“I do not need my brother to get me a date. I’m not that pathetic.” The waitress returned with another couple of pints and Gideon was grateful. “Not yet, anyway. And stop winding me up, a man has a right to wonder about his life.” Or mope about it. But that was the good thing about
going out with Fabian - moping only counted if you did it alone.
Fabian shook his head. "Wonder about life another day. It's Valentine's..." He gestured vividly with cigarette in hand, a few stray ashes disappearing in thin air as he did. He didn't seem to notice. "Let's get pissed, and later I'll braid flowers in your hair, and we'll discuss how I tried to hide a stray cat in the broom cupboard and Mum..." Fabian laughed at the recollection. It wasn't his usual laugh; it was quieter, lost in a memory that had nearly faded. "Oh, Mum." He stabbed his cigarette into the nearest ash tray. "Did you send her flowers? I never remember..." There was too much to remember these days, too much tension that separated him from his parents' generation. Another reason he preferred Muggle pubs, if he were honest with himself.
“I signed your name, too.” Talking about their parents was a bad idea. There was too much friction there for Fabian, something Gid found distressing. He’d tried to fix it and gotten nowhere. The two of them weren’t identical and most people had trouble believing they were twins but having this family relationship as one of their differences continued to bother him. For Fabian’s sake, Gid stopped trying to make things better. But signing Fab’s name to flowers couldn’t hurt anything.
“No more of that. If I’m not allowed to mope, you can’t either.” He waved again at their waitress.
“Miss?” The woman looked surprised at the term. “I think we’re going to need something stronger.”
She agreed to bring them two shots of whiskey and Gideon turned to his brother, sucking down the last of his fag. “Adventurous enough for you?”
Fabian frowned, poking an accusing finger at Gideon. "What have you done with my stick-in-the-mud brother?" But his scolding didn't last. The waitress soon returned with the round of shots; the amber liquid sloshed inside the tiny glasses, smelling vaguely of ginger and vanilla. Fabian took his, and he nodded to Gideon. "How about this for your lonely Valentine's?" He downed the entire shot, and then ordered another round. "Let's dance..." Fabian had his hand around Gideon's wrist, tugging him vaguely into the open space in front of their table before his twin could stop him.
The whiskey was warm in Gideon’s throat and he chased it with a swallow beer, the cup spilling a little and splashing on his wrist as Fabian dragged him away. He didn’t know why his brother would want him to dance; Gid understood slow dancing because there was an expected place to put his hands and the dance wasn’t hard to do and involved time pressed up against some curvy girl who usually smelled nice. Any other dancing was beyond him. He tried though, awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“I feel like a ponce.”
Fabian brushed aside Gideon's complaints. He swayed unevenly to the music and halfway through the chorus flailed through a fantastic spin. He wasn't exactly drunk enough to dance like an idiot, but felt that he needed to compensate for his brother's overall awkwardness. "Come on, you flayed Stormtroopers better than that..." Reaching for Gideon's wrist, again, he tried to sway his brother into a more relaxed dancing motion. "You're thinking too hard." Fabian did another spin, which ended with him nearly toppling into a nearby Muggle. He apologized, and then grinned at his brother, as the old man groused his way to the bar. "See, just like that."
Gideon pulled a face. “The most romantic night of the year and I’m dancing with my brother. If that’s what this is.” The appearance of the waitress with another round was a welcome distraction. Gid tossed it back and shook his head a little to clear it. “I will give you anything if I can go sit back down and have another fag.”
After a few more rounds and aborted attempts to convince Gideon to dance, none of which were entirely successful on Fabian's part, Fabian found himself stuck outside in the cold. Bloody English weather. He fumbled around his pockets, fortunately discovering that he still had his wand and a few Muggle coins. Fabian walked a few steps, and the ground gave a decided lurch in the wrong direction. Everything looked fuzzy, and for someone who generally held his liquor well, that was a definite accomplishment.
In spite of, or perhaps no thanks to, his relative impairment, Fabian managed to stumble inside of a phone booth. It wasn't red like the stereotypical London ones, but rather entirely made of glass and rather disgusting. Fabian didn't notice though as he dug through his pockets again and dug out a slip of paper. "Fucking hell," he said, not even caring if his brother had followed him the few metres down the pavement as he punched numbers into the machine, "how does one manage this sort of thing..." But eventually Fabian had somehow managed the right combination and the right change until there was the proper sort of ringing on the end.
"Hello," he called into the receiver. "Hello?" Under ordinary circumstances, Fabian was very adept at Muggle phone usage. These were not ordinary circumstances though, seeing as how he was completely off his face and could barely lean against the glass walls of the booth without feeling that he needed another drink - just one more to right the crooked picture that was the pavement before him. "This is the Circus. We're calling to inform you that... that..." Fabian made a waving gesture with the phone, ignoring the jabbering on the other end, and then promptly forgot his train of thought. "For fuck's sake, where is Dorcas?"
"Dorcas?" a thick Geordie accent repeated, and then hollered - the volume balancing out the distance from the phone, "Who tha feck is Dorcas then?" Further off in the aural distance, someone else shouted, "Cas! Phone!" and a woman could be faintly heard swearing and asking who. Despite being told it was MI6 and they were drunk, after a few muffled and shuffling moments, the phone was picked up and a female voice said, at a reasonable volume if a bit tersely, "If this is you again, Howard, I'm going to sodding kneecap you."
"Is Howard a part of MI-" Fabian trailed off, as he watched a few of their fellow revelers crossing the street. They were singing a cheery ditty, and for a brief moment, Fabian realized how very fucked he and Gideon would be if they had to spend a night in a dingy phone booth. "Dorcas," said Fabian, speaking in a much lower and hopefully more sober voice than before, "It's not bloody Howard. Gideon requires your assistance. You see, he's a bit..." Fabian side-eyed his brother. "Thrashed. Valentine's and all." He omitted that he was far too drunk to be having this conversation; some things didn't need to be said.
“Oi,” Gid interjected. “Why do I need rescuing? You’re no better and I’m fine.” Of course, he hadn’t moved from where he was leaning against the glass of the booth but he was pretty sure the drink was wearing off.
He grabbed the talky end from his brother’s hand. “I’m fine, Dorcas. See? I can even talk on the fellytone.”
It had taken Dorcas a moment to recognise the voice, but even before Fabian had referenced Gideon, she had started to grin on the other end of the phone - even if it was a little bit appalling that she was home, sober, practically in her pyjamas (metaphorically, she didn't actually own any) while the Prewett boys were out getting smashed. Both of them, apparently, because whatever he said, there was a certain liquid roundness to the way Gideon said it that made the truth of the matter quite apparent. "You're a pinnacle of sobriety in an ocean of pissheads," she assured him, with nothing like a straight face, but whatever, it's not like he could actually see her. "You'd better tell me where you lads are, because I think Fabian's too drunk."
“I’m fine,” Gideon repeated. “You really don’t feel much after the third one. I don’t. I think I’m getting better.” A fine time to suddenly become talkative. “We’re at some Muggle pub Fabs found. The..er..Open Hand. Hey! It’s our waitress! Fabs, it’s our waitress.” He could hear yelling from outside and looked over at Fabian. “We did pay, didn’t we?”
Fabian turned towards the shouting and then shrank further into the phone booth. "Pay?" He dug into his pockets and when he discovered that he was skint, he pulled the phone back from Gideon. "How good do you think Gideon would look in a Muggle jail?" Fabian said into the receiver, looking at his brother and not the increasing shouts from the waitress. "Maybe best not to find out..." There was now a distinct rapping at the glass, but Fabian continued to pretend as if he couldn't hear it. "We're near the King's Road, do you know where that is?"
Dorcas gave up and just laughed out loud, tipping her head back and earning herself a glare from whatever Serious Discussion of Oppression was happening in the kitchen. "I will be there in five," she said down the phone, putting it back to her ear. "Try really hard not to get arrested in that time."
And then even as she was pulling the phone away from her ear, long before she got to hanging up, she was shouting down the hall, "Oi, you lot, pubs near the King's Road, something or other about hands?"
Which was how she ended up, four and a half minutes later, coming out of an alleyway across the way from the Golden Hind (which was a few blocks from the Hand of God, which had had a football boot on the sign for no apparent reason but no actual phone booth). Even bundled up in a big grey army coat and heavy black boots, she drew a couple of comments from a passing troupe of drunken lads, which she answered with a cheerful two fingers as she jogged across the road.
Gideon nearly sagged with relief when he caught sight of Dorcas. He was trying to explain that they hadn’t run out on the bill. Gideon had money but it was in Galleons and if he tried to pay with it he’d have to Obliviate the waitress and he was fairly sure that was a bad idea at the moment. The worst part was he couldn’t even explain that to the angry lady because then he’d have to Obliviate her and it just went on and on. Maybe next year he’d stay in for Valentine’s Day.
“Dorcas! This is money, right?” Gideon was holding a few crumpled bits of paper money. A dodgy system, if you asked him, printing money on paper. What if it got ripped or blew away in a stiff wind or you spilled tea on it or any number of other things? “It has a ten on. It’s not torn or anything.”
“Yes, Prewett, that’s ten quid,” Dorcas confirmed, as she clomped up, with some relief. She had a bit of money lurking in the pockets of her coat, but it had occurred to her, on her way here, that it might not have been enough. Watching the lads scullery-boy their way out of the debt might have been entertaining if she wouldn’t have had to make sure they didn’t cheat with magic.
Leaning out around Gideon, she flashed a grin at Fabian, and then the waitress, the former a more cheery expression that the latter. “Evening,” she offered.
"Evening." Fabian tipped an imaginary hat in greeting, and dug through his pockets for more money. "Fancy a bit of curry?" The glowering waitress, who took the money that they offered her and stormed off, mumbling about crazies, didn't bother Fabian. Inexplicable happiness seemed to radiate from within, and as soon as they'd paid off their debt - through combined efforts, Fabian felt as though he might like to join in one of the nearby drunken singing groups. He hummed a steady tune, and did a half-spin on the pavement, which resulted in him grabbing onto Gideon for support. "Best lead the way, Meadowes," he said, waving unsteadily in the opposite direction of his flat.