Arcturus Black (arcturusfirst) wrote in onewaythreads, @ 2018-02-03 10:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | anne bonny, arcturus black |
Who: Arcturus Black and Anne Bonny
What: A pirate meets a wizard!
Where: Everdale
When: Saturday afternoon
For the first time in his life, Arcturus wasn't particularly enthused about the snow. At Hogwarts, heavy snow always meant merriment and disruption. They held 'snow wars,' which, true to the name, weren't just opportunistic snowball fights but planned campaigns, one house against another, with the prefects plotting tactics which last year had involved great walls of snow blocking tunnels, and enchanted snowmen who threw snow at their enemies. Despite being fiercely competitive, it was harmless. Nobody was hurt by snow, and by agreement nobody took the fight indoors. Far more injuries were sustained at duelling club – snow wars were only a game, like chess on a grander scale, and Arcturus had always joined in enthusiastically.
In Preya, nothing of the sort happened, and he wouldn't suggest it. It would only bring up all those unpleasant lies from objectionable people of the future. Snow wars were good fun precisely because wizards didn't have real ones. They were civilised people who had chosen international co-operation and diplomacy over the barbarism of war. It was muggles who settled their disputes with other nations by killing and enslaving, not wizards. Cassiopeia told him not to listen to people who told him things with the intention of angering or distressing him, because spiteful words weren't to be trusted, and he took that quite seriously.
He was doing his best to look after cousin Cassiopeia. Theirs was an uneasy relationship, sometimes, and occasionally he wasn't sure that he wouldn't be better off on his own in the boarding-house, like he had been when he first arrived. He'd done whatever he liked, then. Cassiopeia insisted on lessons every day, and having to attend her dinner parties even when she invited hopelessly dull people or annoying muggles, and she wouldn't let him even try any of the strange foods wrapped in plastics that could be found in some of the Summerbridge shops. Still, she was family, and it was better than being around muggles, and he'd have been a cad and a hypocrite to abandon her. She didn't like to travel too far from the safer parts of Everdale on her own, and in this weather she worried for her health and hardly went out at all. She might have said that he was a child who shouldn't be alone, but she needed him just as much.
There wasn't too much to complain of. He had more freedom here than he did either at home or at school, and he knew that he'd be going home someday, because Miss Emerton had promised him so, and she'd said that his family wouldn't be worrying about him or fearing that he was dead. This was a revelation that he'd agreed to keep entirely secret, and it made things here tolerable. It was why he wasn't in some muggle building cursing off some councilman's fingers until they sent him home. Arcturus could be patient.
On Saturday afternoons there were no lessons and no demands on his time, and so today Arcturus was going to the pub – the Kingsby Tavern, where he was a regular. Cousin Cassiopeia might have disapproved, but what she didn't know did her absolutely no harm, and visiting a pub in the afternoon was far easier and more straightforward than sneaking out at night as he and his friends had done at school. Arcturus saw no reason why a fellow his age shouldn't have beer and cigarettes if he wanted them, it was only tiresome prigs who said otherwise.
There he was, then, flying along on his broomstick at a fairly gentle pace. He followed one of the dirt roads that led to the tavern, simply because it was the fastest route. Sometimes he liked to fly particularly low, forcing walking muggles to leap off the path, out of his way, but the road was quiet today and so he kept to a sensible height. From a distance he might have been a peculiar sight – a figure wrapped in a dark robe, perched atop a broom seemingly indistinguishable from the ordinary muggle kind. His legs dangled down, clad in grey trousers and well-polished black boots, and the hem of his robe fluttered in the wind. Five minutes longer, and he'd be at his destination.