InsaneJournal

Dublin had been the subject of many dreams, most of which began and ended with the unknown quotient of family which existed just north of town. It was to this family that Madoc Dearborn, best beloved of his mother Primrose, was introduced over her body. Laid out peacefully, wizards and Muggles alike swanned through the room whilst leaving the heavy eyed young man to his thoughts. It was only Una, his grandmother, that would hold him tight in her gaze. You’re one of us, now. You’re one of ours. As if they hadn’t had a choice or a chance of a choice. Madoc had smiled, given her the ghost of a kiss to the temple and thanked her well enough. He supposed, if it hadn’t been for her, it’d have been months and he wouldn’t have had time to say goodbye to the splendidly arrayed husk.

Such as it was, long before the funeral began, he’d already had his say. And Primrose, in her own way, assured him that accident was the keyword. A rank horse, a steeplechase and a rock placed just right had robbed him of the mother who’d been a constant presence in his life, if not a physical one.

A day - no more - passed before, Dublin grown too small to withstand the press of Dearborns in and around him, Madoc took himself another few towns beyond the clannish grasp and found himself in England. The further and more animatedly he’d walked, the less attention he drew. But something within him, something along the Rivers Ouse and Foss, encouraged him to stop. There, with the pale sun illuminating the unfamiliar spires, perhaps it was again -- red brick, water -- that gave him that inward suck of familiarity. But really, he supposed. Really, he was just here to catch his breath.

There was a kind of wilful blindness to Gideon’s quick steps, a setting out with purpose if no intended destination, the only goal to remove himself as far from where he had started from as possible. He was usually more meditative on this particular stretch of road, better equipped in faculties to take the measure of the land, from its stretches of grass and moss-carpeted hills to the mottled grey skies to the slowly churning green swath of water that cut across to his his right. Now, in the heat of a deep, slow burn of anger given the chance to seethe, the details were bled away, neither taken in nor remembered.

Soon, without his particular notice, there was the edge of the town itself, suddenly all around him as if having sprung up at command, blessedly spartan at this time of day. Bunched in the pockets of his coat, his hands shook uncontrollably, and though his footfalls fell heavily at a swift pace, Gideon wondered if in the next step, his body would make contact with the earth and simply shatter, so barely held together he felt himself to be. It wasn’t just the anger. It was the betrayal and the fear too. It was the self-disgust at his own suffocating cowardice.

The river widened to his right, the green grew neater, more orderly, intermittent with stretches of car parks, the path trod turned to asphalt. Gideon used to think he could follow that river and let it take him to the sea, wondered how far it would take him today, if the pull of home would stall his tracks and compel him to turn around once more or if this time -- this time -- he would keep going and never look back once.

Perhaps this blind intent did not alert him to the broad shouldered young man standing in his way. For, his own thought processes neither registered the passer-by until shoulders struck. He reached out with a gloved palm to steady himself on the bridge’s railing.

To the form -- “Yeah, yeah. Fuck you too.”

The jarring impact was sharp enough to startle him from his myopic focus, a cold, abrupt awakening. Usually, it was on the tip of Gideon’s tongue to mutter a distracted apology, to hunch in his shoulders further and crawl away, but the ugly American drawl grated on his ears. There was the reflexive, insular thought: foreigner, and with it a defencive, defiant reaction. His gaze locked with the stranger’s (young, surly, wan, sad, annoyed, exhausted), sharp and unyielding, lips pressed firmly together so as to not utter further invective, though his meaning was transparent enough. Oh, sod off.

The full flavour of that countenance, did however, do something for Madoc’s resolve. Though there hadn’t often been talk of his birth father, Primrose Dearborn had never lied or attempted to obscure his identity. He knew Gideon Prewett by name and, thanks to the papers, by face. His sad, ex-con of a father.

His fist balled at his side, shoulders rising and falling in a single swath as he attempted to call the electricity down from his veins. Of all the pale, sad assholes in these sodden aisles why did it have to be him? No. He would not let it go.

“Gideon Prewett. As I live and breathe.”

Perhaps it was a testament to English civility that Gideon had become so accustom to the social contract put into place with him: polite avoidance, or hurrying across to the other side of the street, or some attempt at muffled gossip. The ones who wanted a direct confrontation however, were all ones he knew by heart now. But not this one. He had already nearly passed by fully, back turned, but the words caused him to stop, shoulders tensing instinctively. Turning, hands finally, mercifully stilling, he tried and failed to put a name to a face. “Pardon?”

A scoff, long and hard, as he let his chin tip back with the weight of his rolling eyes -- “Of course you wouldn’t know. Why would you know? Can’t shatter the glass, can we? Well...” The young man strode forward, eating the distance between the two of them. His gloved hand rose of its own accord, fisted knuckles aiming to pound the bridge of his nose. There. That’s it. That’s what you get.

“I’m your son.”

It was all muttered, angered nonsense until the boy was swiftly to him and Gideon only had a moment’s regard for belated wariness before the front of his face exploded in a bright blossom of pain. The force of that fist knocked his head back, tipping over his balance until he was stumbling back, barely able to catch himself on the bridge’s rail. When the blazing white light receded from his watering vision, he watched two drops of blood fall into the river below. The sting spread out across his cheeks; something hot, wet, and thick coated his upper lip. His fingers touched it and came away red. The shock and pain nearly drowned out the boy’s next words.

He looked up at him with outraged incredulity that nearly bordered on a bout of hysterical laughter. “I have no idea what you’re on about. That’s...” Impossible.

“You want another one?” The spurt of red on Gideon’s lip, drew a hot and alkaline tang along the back of Madoc’s throat. Finish him, it said. But the concussion of fist and nose exhausted him. Perhaps he could blame a long slog of Dearborn or, even, that punch hadn’t been all he’d dreamt it could have been. (Nights he awoke, and had no good reason for he was well guarded and well loved, and remembered the searing pain in his knuckles from dreams which allowed him to beat his father again and again.) But now, faced with the man, all he could do was snort.

“...not impossible. You do the math and get back to me. I’m twenty-seven and I just came from my birth mom’s funeral.”

The blood had sunk to the back of his throat, thick, metallic and nauseating. A low, insistent throbbing replaced the sharp pain in his face. Broken, he knew well from experience. If left alone, the bruising would spread out from his nose like the radius of ash from a bomb. Twenty-seven years ago, Gideon Prewett must have been a painfully naive, awkward boy burdened by his parents’ overwhelming expectations as their designated heir, but bursting with promise of making something of himself in the Aurors. Not yet grown into his tall frame which had sprung up like a weed over the year (he had relished the chance to laud it over Fabian though he had probably resembled more a mawkin with a large Prewett-cursed nose than anything).

The boy might as well have asked him to peer into a tarnished mirror, such were the memories of his past. In the long, obscuring shadows of the war and the depthless, all-consuming despair of Azkaban, little else had a chance to distinguish themselves, much less relationships, laughable as they had been for much of his life. “Who are you?”

“You don’t much deserve it, I think. But --” His broad shoulders rose and fell before, with a sigh, they wrapped across his chest and settled in the hollow of his elbows. “The name’s Warren to most, but I go by Dearborn round these parts.”

A pause -- “Dearborn, yeah? You remember Dearborn … ?”

Of course. Of course Gideon would always remember that name. It was hardwired into the very marrow of his bones, seemingly etched into the insides of his eyelids at night. There were few names that could immediately trigger such a specific lancing pain upon utterance -- but that wasn’t the Dearborn to whom the boy was referring. No.

...and then, like the faintest glimpse of sun cresting over a horizon, he recalled a cold late autumn night, a girl -- no, woman -- with wildness in her eyes and awkward fumbling. The desire -- no, desperation -- to want something. The right thing. And he’d liked everything about her. Thought he did. She broke boundaries without a single care in the world and laughed at his anxieties and told him in the end, they didn’t really matter at all (and in the end, they really hadn’t).

And he had wanted to, because she had been beautiful and everything he wished he could have. Could be. “Prim,” he whispered, dumbfounded.

“She’s dead. My Mum’s dead and I just came from her funeral.” A beat of his brow rose, reading this very shocked reaction to his news perhaps not in earnest (for what sadsack ex-con could ever show himself open, the damage had been done) but in grand theatre.

The dawn of this meeting sunk blood-black behind his eyes.

“You didn’t fucking know you made a baby? Wicked smart.”

Gideon never saw Prim again, after that night (which he still shied away from remembering, for the strangely hollow feelings with which it had left him). Had thought she had, in her own stubbornly particular way, understandably lost interest in him and gone on to other pursuits. There was a vague recollection of hearing she had gone to America. But none of that mattered now, because she was dead. Primrose Dearborn, Caradoc’s sister. Mother of his only child.

“No,” he said, and could barely find the strength in him to utter it over a staggered whisper. “I...I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

The reading of this news -- whether pure shock or unadulterated theatre -- grew more complex with each stilted syllable. Madoc could not entrust himself to wholly read Gideon Prewett. He could not trust himself to divine the truth from this much lined and too familiar face (one, he supposed, he saw when he looked into his own mirror). What he could trust -- what knew nothing of conceit without the bonds of flesh -- were the spirits swirling around them.

He strode forward, until half a hair’s breadth passed between them.

“Take me somewhere out of Muggle sight.”

Perhaps it was his mind still steeped in shock that Gideon didn’t even flinch at the boy’s approach, given the last time he had gotten so close, nor did he think to question him. The moments of stillness that followed, where his thoughts were sluggish to process the words given, were dealt in an unbroken stare and damning observations. My nose. My mouth. “Give me your hand.”

He ripped the glove from his palm, a sneer erupting on his lips, before clapping it round Gideon’s wrist.

There was strength in those fingers, the hint that with just a little more pressure, the bones of his wrist could be crushed as easily as the cartilage of his nose. The dark anger coming off the boy set off all his senses, but he retrieved his wand from the inside of his coat and didn’t have to think of where to go next -- the northern moors. With the brief, crushing pressure of Apparition (he’d wince at the effect of it on his current injury had he the time), the quiet, humble trappings of the town slid into a rolling, barren landscape and endless slate sky.

Imperceptibly, Apparition still left its mark on the young man. Though Gideon would surely feel the strain of their efforts as the magical centrifugation meant to rip his skin to ribbons, it was Madoc who felt the press of each and every spirit seeking to pierce the between through which they traveled. It was only when, with both feet firmly planted upon the ground, that same slate swarmed into his eyes.

His voice took on County Cork’s music. “Gideon.” A sigh. “The boy’s a right uncanny gift, a bit nutty, but useful all right.” It was Colin, reaching through the link to which Madoc connected with the place beyond the veil. “But he doesn’t believe a word you’re saying with your wide doe-eyes.”

And whereas the sudden empty eyes of the boy had been deeply alarming, the grip on his wrist tightened to painful, it was that voice, spoken in a deeper tone than he remembered, but the lilt of it, the cadence, that threatened to send him to his knees. Every empirical detail he could perceive told Gideon who it was before him, but for the very knowing that it wasn’t the boy he was facing now. He tried to pull his trembling hand out of that vice grip, but the fingers only seemed to close in further. “Colin?”

“Yes, it’s your Colin.” Unbeknownst, Madoc’s lips lifted into a gracefully crooked smile, and his brow cocked with brief amusement. “Warms you right up, sitting tight in flesh again.” Then, as if he took a moment to re-arrange all the limbs and sundries to his liking, he turned his attention back to his erstwhile lover.

“I’d tried before. I’d wanted to. But this boy, he meant to measure the truth of you. Out came me instead.”

There were questions to be had there, what the boy could do, this skill, but all of it was, at this very moment, pushed well aside, for all Gideon could now see was him. The set of his features, the way everything uttered always seemed to be teasing and yet never mean spirited. Always fond, always loving. “Colin,” he found himself repeating, this time with the full measure of all his longing, the way he still, even now, sometimes could pass by a tow-headed figure with a hauntingly familiar profile and his heart would stutter. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Stop wasting time with words that don’t matter, Gideon. It isn’t yours to be sorry about but if it’s all the same, I will tell you I never blamed you. Not months before and certainly not moments after. I was glad, if it had to be, it was you that was there with me. At the end.”

But the gravity of that conversation rolled through Madoc’s body, upsetting the hold Colin had of him and the lilt took on a more urgent note -- “Not a lot of time, lamb. He’s strong, your boy. And he’s a willful sod. I can feel him want to reach out and believe you, but he’s always thought you a … well, a bit of a wastrel.” The lips pursed.

“Gideon, I don’t want you to sabotage your life seeking revenge for something that happened in another age. Live for now -- or, live. For now. Whatever you do, be your truest self. And bloody well kiss me.”

There was no hesitation in raising his free hand to cup Colin’s cheek, to feel life given flesh once more. It was muscle memory to bend his head down (though this time, the angle -- not so low), close his eyes and kiss this man, the first man he had ever loved, and recall all the hundreds of times he had done this, at first with the anxiousness and thrill of doing something wrong and then with immense growing desire to do it every day for the rest of his life. But he wouldn’t get to have that. This was the last, and the knowing of it made him desperate to put to memory every detail and observation he could glean, that he could take this moment and expand it into a another happier lifetime that, maybe somewhere, some other version of them would get to have.

Colin’s kiss was filled with greed -- for the warmth of flesh, Gideon’s flesh, the divine spark of living encased in muscle and sinew -- and he let these son’s bones be claimed as his for as long as he could hold them. His chest rose and fell against Gideon’s, his fingertips tracing that familiar Brewer’s Star across his beloved’s nape and the scent of myrrh rich in his memory. Colin wished he’d lived a thousand lives in Gideon’s estimation, whether lover or son, and did not let himself give over to the slow panic o’ercrowing his currently beating heart.

I can find the strength again, love. I can. “Make him believe you.”

Then, just as quickly as the colour napped across Madoc’s eyes, it shuttered away to once again indicate the flesh allocated to Madoc Dearborn was once again housed by its owner. Exhaustedly - warily, even - he stepped back from Gideon and dropped to a knee.

His voice, once cracking with riotous anger, now bone-weary: “ … that one say what he wanted?”

“Wait. Wait, don’t, don’t…” go had been on the tip of his tongue, but the pleas were doused by the cold realisation that Colin was now gone, and what warmth there had been, the fullness and breadth of it expanding within his heart, was empty once more. Like looking at a photograph one had taken and trying to and failing to recall the precise feeling and moment captured by it--whatever was left was only the echo of the thing itself.

Gideon blinked. His cheeks were wet. He turned away and pressed the back of his now freed hand to below his nose in a half hearted attempt mop up the tacky blood there but more to stall whatever was clawing at his throat to get out. He choked on it, shuddered with it, and then the danger of it passed, swallowed back once more into the dark recesses of his heart. After, he felt scraped raw, little more than an exposed, pulpy mass of blood and nerves laid out for vultures to pick clean. It would have been nice to be free of this moment, to be free of this pain filled existence.

But the rough voice behind him reminded Gideon of who was left. A son. His son. His son.

Make him believe you.

He turned back and dropped to his knees before the boy, digging his hands into the boy’s shoulders and compelling him to look up and meet his gaze, shining with a bright glint of ferocity. “I hadn’t known. I swear to you I hadn’t known. But if I had, if I had, I would have wanted you. I would have wanted you with every fibre of my being. I would have wanted you because I want you now.”

“Wait, I --” Without thinking, as if some element of muscle memory still drove him, Madoc’s forearm rose to wipe the blood smeared across his face. The tension inherent in his father’s grip -- the earnest truth, the desperation -- drove him to believe whatever he said gave Gideon the impetus needed to leave with the theatre. At least, for now, he could trust the strength of his father’s grip. And if there was a moment to hide in the hollow of his throat, if he took deep draughts of oxygen laced with Gideon’s scent, he could do naught else but that. The stilted flutter of his heart -- (One, two. One, two. One, two.) -- thumped in his ribs.

But it couldn’t be that easy. It wouldn’t be.

He leaned back, pressing thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose.

“I need to go back.” A pause. “To Dublin.”

After a beat, Gideon blinked and almost reluctantly let his hands drop to his sides, nerveless. It wasn’t--well, he didn’t know what he could have expected, but there was still the heavy, sickening drop of disappointment, the bitter taste of failure at the back of his throat anyhow. He let it burn through him, well accustomed to its presence in his life, and then could only accept it and the hollow feeling it left in its wake. “Okay...y-yes, of course.”

“ ...her affairs require settling,” he said softly, slowly re-furling as he rose to his feet and re-applied his gloves. Finally, with a glance around, he took in the austerity of their surroundings. He’d thought Gideon Prewett to be as unyielding as these stones and yet -- yet --

Softly: “You could write to me.”

His breath caught; he glanced up. An unfamiliar whisper of tentative hope curled within his chest. “I don’t even know your first name,” he said, smiling mirthlessly, a fool who would laugh at his own fortune, it would seem.

Laughing, then, he let his brow rest briefly in the span of his fingers as it shook gently back and forth. He supposed names had been a little less than epithets hurled across the space as he’d postured and swung. Then, a gesture, palm to chest -- “Madoc. My name is Madoc.”

“Madoc.” Gideon had to say it for himself, let the syllables sink into his mind, for he had no part in their inception. It was a good name from a good family. Slowly, he found his legs again and rose, knees only slightly protesting the cold. “I’ll write.” He’d take the foothold, however small, whatever was allowed.

“I hope you do.” And there was a certainty in his heart which inundated the timbre of his voice. He wanted to touch his father again (wanted to gently wipe the blood crusting on his lip, wanted to ask forgiveness for his assumptions and feel the stories he’d spent nearly thirty years missing).

“ ...I’ll be around for a while.” And with that, with the dread of Apparition a pin-pricked moue darkening his brow, he popped out of existence upon the moor to find himself again in Dublin.