InsaneJournal

Who: Anakin and James Potter
What: First bike stuff, then getting drinks
When: Backdated to June
Where: First James' place, then a local bar
Rating/Warnings: Maybe some swear words
Status:Complete


James had only been home for a few days, but he had kept himself busy during those days. Maybe, he thought, it was time to get a job soon. He’d never had one before, but there was a first time for everything. He needed a job less than ever with his inheritance coming in soon, not to mention the fact that he could sell his father’s shares of his multinational hair care company any time he needed to. But being at home, idle, was not as easy these days as it had been before he’d gone to England.

Today though, he was keeping himself busy with doing some repairs on his bike. He still didn’t exactly know what he was doing though, and when he’d turned something and had all the oil leak out of his engine onto the ground below, he thought it was probably time to call in some help.

From his driveway, he saw Anakin pull up, and he wiped some sweat from his brow, leaving a black, greasy streak there in its stead. “Hey,” he said, raising his hand to wave.

***
Anakin got out of the Uber and walked up to the mess James had made. He had his tools in a tote in one hand. The other hand he held up, in a closed fist with his thumb pointing up, in the air close to James’ forehead, and he moved his fist through the air in a small arc and said, “Simba,” with a bemused smile.

“Reenacting the BP oil spill?”

***

James frowned a little and moved to swat away Anakin’s hand, thought the twinkle in his eye betrayed his amusement. “Oh yeah,” James said. “I was thinking of conjuring up a bunch of tiny animals, but I wound up not having the time.”


He also was pretty sure he couldn’t just conjure up animals, though he had mastered turning mice into tea cups and back again. “I think I might have made a mistake somewhere,” he admitted, unnecessarily.

***

Anakin set down his tools outside the flood zone.

“Can you do that?” he asked casually. “Like, pull a rabbit out of a hat?”

He put his hand on the bike and knew instantly nothing was wrong. But first, he was more interested in James’ ability to make animals appear.

***

“Well, pulling a rabbit out of a hat wouldn’t be much of a problem,” James said. “You would just have to enchant the hat and put the rabbit inside. Conjuring a rabbit though,” he frowned. “Well, it would be complicated, but it could be done. Not a real rabbit, mind, but something that looked and acted like one, assuming you did the spell right and didn’t wind up with some ghoulish thing instead. Snakes and birds are easier.” Not that James really had the skills to conjure either of those yet, either. Not having his books, he hadn’t been able to really study any spells outside of his dreams. He hadn’t had many chances yet to go look at the books Amycus had at the Magic Guild.

He pulled his wand the inner pocket of his jacket, and muttered “Scourgify,” at the puddle of oil, which quickly cleaned itself up.

***

“Now that is useful,” Anakin commented on the spell with admiration.

“Usually when you purge the oil out of your bike, you put a spill pan under it.”

Anakin crouched down to look at the bike. “Do you still have the plug?”

***

“I’m not entirely sure how I ever managed to survive so long without magic,” James said. There was a time in his life when he would have laughed at the idea of it, but even though he didn’t know a great many spells just yet, it was hard to remember that using magic in public would definitely attract all sorts of unwanted attention.

“I didn’t mean to purge it,” James said. “It just sort of did it on its own.” Right after James had unscrewed some kind of cap. It was possible that had something to do with it, but James wasn’t buying it. “You mean this one?” he said, producing said cap from his pocket.

***

Anakin considered agreeing with James but it seemed overkill when he had to explain to James that no, the purge was not a spontaneous event.

But damn he wanted to comment about James just keeping the cap in his pocket.

He took the cap and screwed it back in. “This keeps all the oil inside your motorcycle. Now you need to add more oil and it should work.”

He looked around to see if James had some nearby.

“Why do you have a motorcycle?” he asked, curious.

***


James might normally have taken offense at Anakin’s question, but his nerves were still pretty raw after the last month or so, and he bristled at it. “Just because I don’t know how it works yet doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have one,” he said shortly, and then with a muttered incantation and a flick of his wand, a can of oil flew into his hand.

***

He hadn’t meant his question as an accusation, but he could see how James could take it that way.

“Sorry, you’re right,” he said, moving to twist off the cap on the engine where the oil was poured in.

“But poking and pulling at things blindly is… really dangerous. If you’d turned on your bike with no oil in it, you would have destroyed your engine. I could teach you a few things.”

***

“Yeah, I know that much,” James said, frowning. “But if I broke it, I could just buy a new one.” He didn’t even have to think about that; being able to buy and replace whatever toys he wanted was something that James, or James’s parents, had always been able to do. He was being obstinate though, and he knew it. James had always enjoyed learning things on his own; even in school he tended to put the most effort into the studies he wanted instead of what his teachers had wanted him to learn, though he’d always been smart enough to still pull off fairly high grades.

But his head maybe wasn’t in the right place for self-studying now, and he did like his bike. He’d rather not replace it if he didn’t have to. “But I guess I could let you teach me some things.”

***

Anakin held back a flat stare - he’d been raised on sand and air and everything he’d owned growing up came second-hand from the rich kids on the right side of town or he’d made it or fixed it up himself. There was no just going out and buying a ‘new one’. But he kept that commentary in his head.

But something wasn’t feeling… right. Maybe Anakin’s offer just came off wrong.

“You want to go get a drink instead?”

***

For a moment, James was surprised, but his look of surprise gave way to his first smile of the afternoon. “Can it be? Is Mr. Rootbeer-at-a-rave actually inviting me out for drinks? And here I had assumed you were a teetotaler.”

***

“Well,” Anakin said, about to burst James’ excitement, probably. “I’ll be drinking rootbeer,”

And then he shrugged, “But I don’t care what anyone else drinks so you can get whatever you want. Just seems like a better idea right now than talking about a bike.”

***

James let out a bit of a sigh, a little disappointed, but he wasn’t about to force alcohol on someone who didn’t want to drink it. Even if it probably would loosen up Anakin a little.

“Well, I’ve got to agree with you there,” James said. “I could go for a drink. You have any favourite places?”

***

Anakin didn’t hold back the flat stare this time. Did he have a favorite place to drink?

“Really?” he let that hang in the air, waiting for the answer.

***

“You’re right, dumb question,” James acceded, already trying to think of a good place to go. There was the pool hall that wasn’t too far from his place. “Well then, come on,” he said, leading his way to his car. “That rootbeer isn’t going to pour itself.”

***

Anakin followed. “You just cleaned up spilled oil by making it disappear. You saying you can’t make rootbeer pour itself?” Part of Anakin was only joking around, part of him wanted to see something like that happen.

***

“Of course I can,” James said, and then wondered if he should have said that. He knew it was possible in his dreams, so long as you had a source for the rootbeer to come from - you couldn’t create food or drink with magic - but he hadn’t actually learned those skills in his dreams yet. His disappointing lack of school books so far made it very difficult for him to learn any magic tricks he hadn’t already mastered in his dreams in the real world. Maybe he could make a bottle pour itself through a combination of Wingardium Leviosa and another charm to help make the bottle tip over, but he’d never tried it before and it was almost certain that he’d cause a mess the first few times he attempted it. He definitely didn’t have the skills to make it come out of the tip of his wand just yet.

“I’ll show you sometime,” James said, hoping that Anakin wouldn’t press the matter and insist he show him now.

***

Anakin kept touching the top of the bar with first his left hand and then his right hand. Each time he looked more concerned as his fingers stuck to the surface. He didn’t have the same kind of feeling in his right, metal hand that he did in his left, but he could still tell the surface was sticky.

“This surface is distracting,” he said, leaving his rootbeer mostly alone.

***

James generally didn’t put too much thought into how stick or not the surface of his bars were, but watching Anakin, he couldn’t help but be amused. If he hadn’t known any better, he’d have thought that Anakin was on the good drugs. He stuck his own hand on the bar top, a little bit amused at the feeling, and then took a healthy gulp of his rum and coke.

“You want me to take care of that for you, Anny-kins?” he asked.

***

The thing was, Anakin was on good drugs - drugs that helped his inattentiveness and his PTSD. But he was tactile and the sensation of touch was the first way to distract him.

He shrugged, “Go for it, Jouji.”

And then he had a thought. “Where will the stick go? Once you wave your magic wand. Where did the oil go? What are the fundamental laws of magic? The magic version of e=mc squared?”

***

Jouji? Where did Anakin even come up with these names? Still, James grinned, and, making sure no one was watching, pulled his wand out from the inside pocket of his jacket, muttered an incantation, and cleaned the bar.

He frowned at Anakin’s question. Sure, James had gotten fairly high scores in his physics classes - he’d gotten high grades in all of his classes, when he could be bothered to do the work, but that didn’t mean that he could speculate on that kind of thing.

Besides, it was magic. It wasn’t like it was bound by the same rules of science, and that wasn’t something that Magical Theory had ever delved into. So, he shrugged. “Who knows,” he said. “Away, I guess. It’s magic, try not to think too hard about it.”

***

“You don’t think about that stuff?” Anakin said, baffled. He thought about physics. All. The. Time. And not just because his job required him to. That was really more of the job fitting his personality than him making himself fit his job. He was always thinking about how the universe worked. He just wanted to know.

“I’m baffled by the Force all the damn time,” he said. And he held up the palm of his hand, calling the bottle to him with the Force. This was, perhaps, the very first time he blatantly used the Force around James, aside from assessing his bike’s problems.

“How did I do that?” he asked. “The only answer I have is: the Force. An energy field that surrounds everything, penetrates everything, binds the universe together.” That was the lesson he was given in his dreams. “But you can’t measure it with the scientific method. You can’t do tests on it- it works differently for everyone who can use it, and not everyone can use it.”

He took a drink.

“It’s also probably sentient. How? I don’t know. But it is.”

He looked at James, “Don’t you think about how your magic works?”

***

James’ stared, impressed, as the bottle flew perfectly into Anakin’s hand. “Wicked,” he said. “That’s not a spell, is it?” he asked. Because it seemed like a wandless, nonverbal version of Accio but to do magic either wandless or nonverbally was pretty advanced stuff, and to do it both at the same time was very impressive. “How’d you do that? Is that the same thing that you used on my bike? You didn’t tell me it could be used to summon things.”

He shrugged though. “Not really,” James said. “I mean, it’s magic. Kind of takes all the fun out of it if you get scientific about it. Anyway, I’m not entirely sure that magic always makes sense anyway. Your liable to do your head in if you think too hard about it, so why go through all the trouble. Outside of how to perform a spell and possible backfires, it doesn’t seem at all necessary.” He frowned. “You might be better off not thinking too hard about that Force of yours, too.”

***

Anakin looked at James and then the bottle of rootbeer and then James again, momentarily confused. Was summoning the bottle the same as knowing how to fix bikes? Then Anakin caught on.

“Well, kinda. It’s all the Force. I can do lots of things. Like your spells.” He thought for a moment. “But I can’t make things disappear.”

***

“That’s wicked,” James said, because it kind of was. It seemed like a great power to have, and you didn’t even need spells and a wand to make it work. Not that James would have ever given up his magic for anything. “What else can you do?”

***

“Umm,” Anakin thought while he took a drink of rootbeer. He was not going to mention the empathic powers. He’d told Padme and her response, while expected, didn’t give him confidence that someone who wasn’t as close to him would take it well.

“How do you say- extreme durability? You’d have to drop a building on me to knock me out. Super speed and really fast reflexes- I can dodge bullets or lasers, we have laser guns in my dreams. Extreme endurance… heightened senses and athletic ability... I don’t have to sleep as much, which is nice ‘cause then I don’t dream as much.” He paused to think some more because now that he’d existed with his powers for a while, he didn’t really think about them in distinguishable segments. “I get premonitions… and the machine thing. I heal faster, but I can’t heal others- it’s kind of a big deal that I can’t.

“Oh! I can absorb or deflect energy.... Ya, that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.”

***

“That’s… a lot,” James said, trying to wrap his head all around it. He might have had magic to do nearly everything, but he had to memorize the spell for it, and it certainly hadn’t changed his body in any way. He wouldn’t have given up magic for anything but… well, the Force seemed nearly as good.

“One of these days, you’re going to have to show me that agility of yours. Did you ever get a laser beam>? And if you can absorb energy, couldn’t you just absorb the lasers instead of dodging them?”

***

Anakin thought for a moment and then said, “I could probably do that.” And also, “I did get a blaster, so we could try it some time.”

Just a casual invitation to shoot a deadly weapon at him. No big deal.

***

It took James’ mind a moment to catch up with Anakin’s words, but a grin slowly began to spread across his face. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” James asked. Because he definitely didn’t want to hurt his friend, but the idea of getting to shoot a space laser at him? Well, it sounded wicked.

***

“Yes,” Anakin said more emphatically. “We can use my blaster to see if I can deflect or absorb the energy of a laser bolt with just my mind. What’s the worst that could happen?”