|
WHO: Benjy Fenwick and Sirius Black.
WHEN: August 12, 1978. A Tuesday evening. The ideal time to get drunk.
WHERE: A Park.
WHAT: Some explanation of Benjy and Sirius's cryptic, hostile conversations, and a potential end to them.
Letters are funny things, and not always for the best. Sometimes people burn them, sometimes people rip them up. Sometimes they throw them out, sometimes they recycle them. Sometimes they keep them, kiss them, press them to their hearts or have them always in some secret special box that would be useless without its contents, down in a cool basement where it collects dust quietly and is never opened, but always remembered, and happily kept safe.
Benjy was writing a letter that he expected would get tossed out, but should have the desired effect, nonetheless.
Benjy wasn't a pedo. He also wasn't a gay man, no matter what his friends may say about his taste in pubwhores, or what Dax may say about Benjy's repressed years of longing for Dax's sweet kiss (which never happened) (the longing, that is). These were the biggest reasons why he had not spoken to Sirius Black for approximately a year. These were the reasons why, after they had nearly snogged one drunken night, thus taking their previous intense but largely platonic in nature brotherly friendship to a new and terrifying and unallowed level, Benjy had decided it was best for both of them if they never spoke again, and cut off all contact most cruelly.
Of course, the reasons why Benjy had done his part to nurture said brotherly friendship in the first place despite their sometimes jarring age difference (and various temperamental incompatibilities), mostly to do with Sirius's nature, which he found at turns charming, aggravating, and undeniably in need of a helping hand, also meant that he'd felt like a fucking shit about it and been a miserable bastard every time he'd been reminded of the fact that he'd probably fucked up some poor kid for life (not the first time that'd happened, although the method and reasons for it were certainly new). It was those reasons which now forced him to write this letter, because evidently, from their journal conversations, he'd fucked up Sirius proper, and his nagging conscience said he had to make good on that no matter how hard he tried to drink himself cold.
Besides, he missed talking to the fucked up little nutjob.
So Benjy sat by a lamp in his slightly shambolic flat's livingroom on a dilapidated couch, the evening news on the telly, and wrote on a piece of parchment with a pen, because he'd never gotten properly used to the peculiar scratch of the quill.
Sirius,
I'm an arse. We both know this. Fortunately, we also both know that you are, too.
Come out for a drink, then.
Don't snog me.
-Benjy
|