Divided Loyalties The sun shone down on the neighborhood for the second time in the holiday season the morning after Eleazar Crowley’s party and Julian tilted her face to the sky, eyes closed against the throbbing of the headache born of fatigue that still pounded behind her eyes, to drink it in for a moment before she opened the library door. Her mother had left her lunch at home by mistake and when Joe had noticed that, Julian had volunteered to walk it down to the library even though her feet were throbbing in time with her temples and she thought she might have pulled a muscle in her left leg. Walking, she’d thought, would do her good, burn off some of the restlessness which had made it difficult to stand herself all day, and besides, there were some of her mother’s coworkers she hadn’t seen for a while….
Once inside, though, she found Laurel on the desk and her bratty grade five son, the bane of the rest of the regulars, with her, and since the current argument between the kid and his mother was something Julian wanted nothing to do with, she kept her greetings brief and just went to the staff room to drop off her mother’s lunch. Mom, busy helping a patron with genealogy, smiled briefly at her when she saw her leaving the staff room and Julian smiled back on her way to the door before the actions of another staff child over by the computers caught her eye.
John gluing himself to one of those machines the minute he got the chance was not unusual and would not, by itself, have made Julian stop for longer than it took to wave, if that. As much as he loved books, John was also impatient when he was on the hunt for something specific and therefore also loved the convenience of being able to bring any information - or at least any Muggle information - he wanted to his fingertips in seconds instead of hours. What she could not believe she was seeing was not the sight of John staring intently at a computer. It was the sight of John allowing one of their neighbors to wedge herself into the tiny cul-de-sac he occupied, stand over him, and read whatever was on the screen over his shoulder.
A closer look revealed that the other girl’s hand was actually resting on the back of John’s chair.
Julian stared. They were hardly caught up in a passionate embrace - it didn’t, at third glance, look like the girl, one Joan Murphy, was actually touching him at all, just his chair - but the proximity was still...unusual. The girl was well inside the rather large personal bubble John liked to keep around himself and he wasn't complaining, a combination of circumstances weird enough that Julian had to wonder if he had made some unauthorized additions of an alcoholic nature to his breakfast tea while no-one was looking. That John generally preferred to keep people at arm’s length was, after all, one of the very few things about him that was still nearly the same as it had been the day Julian had met him….
For a long moment after the loud cracks which had followed the whistling of the teakettle, there was silence. Then little John, his face so white that Julian was afraid he was going to be sick, gasped and started rocking back and forth, hugging himself. Paul, also looking very pale, started to move toward his brother but then hesitated, his half-raised hand falling to his side. A couple of twisted pieces of metal from the shattered kettle were still floating in the air. Pieces of ice broke away from the boiling-water-shaped lump of ice they had briefly surrounded. For a second, Julian stared, fascinated, at the spout, which was still surprisingly intact and still had a wisp of steam hovering above it.
Her attention quickly returned to more important matters, though. “It’s okay,” said Julian soothingly, confused about why the boys were so upset. Did they think her mom was going to be mad at them about the kettle when she got home? Julian had jumped when it exploded, but things like that…happened sometimes. It was okay, though she didn’t know why John had been so upset to start with. All that had happened was Julian explaining, for the third time, that Mom was going to be in Ottawa for a few days because Grandfather had broken his hip and was in the hospital. Maybe he had very strong feelings about hips? She stepped toward John, but Paul, moving very quickly this time, intercepted her and grabbed her arm roughly.
“Stay away from him,” he snapped. “You want to be the next – “ he said a very bad word – “thing he blows up?”
Julian looked at him incredulously, and not just because he didn’t look at all embarrassed about saying bad words. She was almost used to things like that from Paul, who she had concluded, after things like that outburst at Sunday dinner when he’d been offended by their forks and how often she saw him sit and do lessons with his five-year-old brother, must be a little slow. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “We’re not old enough to hurt anybody. It’s just an accident.” She slipped away from Paul. “I’ll make you tea,” she informed John. “Erm, with a saucepan, since you killed the kettle and it’s…dead now. Then you’ll feel better.” That was what Mom said when people were upset, anyway, minus the parts pertaining to the death of the kettle. She patted his shoulder, which was more like Daddy and also good.
John stopped rocking. Now he looked confused. He stared at her as though he had never seen her before and blinked a few times. “You’re not - scared," he stated.
Julian laughed, wondering now if John and Paul were really playing a joke on her. “Of course not,” she said. “I’ve done weird stuff, too, and - oh, goodness, you don’t even know about the time Steve broke the wards on the fireplace….”
She trailed off when John continued to look confused. “He is,” the five-year-old observed, pointing his thumb toward Paul. Paul said another bad word under his breath. He looked like John had hurt his feelings. John didn’t seem to notice. Julian bit her lip. It wasn't good to hurt people's feelings at all, but it was extra bad not to notice and say sorry. “Because when I do that, when I do that, that’s very bad,” he continued, his voice going higher and his words coming very fast, almost as if he was saying his ABCs. “I was very bad, so they took m – my mommy, and now they took yours, too, and y – your m – mom – your mommy was nice, her gived me a book with w-words and pictures, and now she’s – and - and - and now she’s – “
His face crumpled in a way that made him look a lot like the picture of a house-elf in one of the picture books at Grandpa’s house. He stopped crying abruptly, though, when she tried to pet him, at which point he nearly toppled the stool he was sitting on over trying to push her away and hit her shoulder so hard it hurt. “No! I, I don't want to b - blow you up. Go away!”
“Don’t be silly,” repeated Julian, rubbing her shoulder. “See? I’m fine. And Mom’s not gone, she’s just - " she considered that John could be kind of literal-minded and decided to slightly adjust what she had planned to say - "visiting Grandfather in Ottawa. For goodness sake.” This was really getting very ridiculous.
“Granfather isn’t here,” said John matter-of-factly, and only after staring at her as though she were an alien from space for another long moment, but he did look a little calmer. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “What’s Ottawa?”
Julian made him a cup of her favorite strawberry tea and then went and got the atlas and put it on the table to show him where the city was. He kept twisting around to look at her standing behind him instead, though, only looking at the book when she reminded him to. Maybe he didn’t like geography. She put up the atlas, took a seat of her own, and started repeating funny things Daddy said about MPs instead.
He’d improved a lot since then, of course. Mom had come back from Ottawa. They’d all had a nice life for – goodness – ten years now. If John hated and feared his powers now, those feelings weren’t reflected in his marks or his attitude toward school; if anything, he’d shown every sign of enjoying himself almost every time Julian had ever seen him deliberately perform magic. Everything was good. But John still - admittedly, at this point, probably more because of his unfortunate tendency not to get along with other children in all but one of the youth organizations Mom had put him in before Sonora than because of his childhood neuroses - didn’t really like people getting too close to him. He accepted it from family and tolerated it in crowds where it couldn’t be helped, sometimes more and sometimes less awkwardly in both situations, but he could be downright rude to outsiders who didn’t take the hint if he moved away from them the first moment he had enough room to do it. And yet, there Joanie Murphy stood, leaning over his shoulder now, and he didn’t seem to mind at all.
“There, I got it back on,” said Joanie as Julian stepped into earshot. From the looks of it, they were watching a video. John looked away from the screen, though, the moment Julian took a step closer.
Joanie’s eyes followed his up, and for a moment Julian thought she looked very...wary. It only lasted for a second, though. “Oh, hi, Julian,” said the younger girl, smiling her perky Girl Guide’s smile. Something about that expression irritated Julian and, though she had seen it on Joanie’s face plenty of times – Joanie had always, as the closest, in an aggressively competitive sort of way, thing to a friend John had ever had before he met Clark Dill, been around, but one of the surprises of the past few months had been how much Joanie was still around even when John wasn’t at home – suddenly reminded her of someone else, though she wasn’t sure who.
“Hi,” said Julian, smiling, too. “What’re you guys up to?”
“Nothing,” said John. Did he say it a little too quickly?
“I was just asking John to help me come up with some – arguments opposed to mine using a source I’m using for a school project,” said Joanie. She smiled again. She had fantastic teeth. Her parents must have spent a fortune. “As annoying as it is sometimes -" this was said with what sounded like real affection, of a kind, but Julian still frowned. Only she and Paul and Joe got to point out that John was annoying - "it’s helpful to have that one friend who automatically argues with everything whether he really disagrees or not,” she continued.
“I’m very reliable that way,” said John. “Almost as much as you.”
“At spotting holes in an argument or being annoying?” asked Joanie, looking down at him, her eyes half-lidded.
John seemed to mull that one over for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally, and Joanie laughed. A smile flickered on his lips and then was gone. “What’re you doing here, Julian?”
Julian bit back the first answer that occurred to her, one involving the library’s status as a public place or one where she had grown up, too. He probably hadn’t meant that question to come off the way it sort of had, like a challenge instead of just a question. “Just dropping off Mom’s lunch,” she said. “She forgot it this morning.”
“Oh. Cool.”
They were both regarding her perfectly politely, but somehow, Julian just had the feeling that she had intruded on something and that she would be far more welcome in her absence than in her presence. She smiled again. “And now I’ve done that, so I’ll go,” she said. “Before Laurel’s brat decides it would be hilarious to put a banana peel in front of the door or something.”
“I hate that kid,” said John, with real feeling. Said kid had made his life miserable during his tenure as a shelver at the library over the summer. Julian distinctly remembered John wishing such unpleasant fates as boiling in oil and being permanently Transfigured into a figurine upon him.
Had they just been teasing, she wondered as she walked home, or had she just witnessed some Aladren-ish variant of flirting? It had kind of sounded like the latter to her, but…John, flirting? That was just bizarre, and would have been even if Joanie Murphy had not been a hyper-polished, highly social, rather American sort of girl. She couldn’t imagine John wanting to flirt with such a person even if the specific specimen hadn’t been a Muggle. And even if John had succumbed to the allure of the generally appealing for once, what on Earth would a little Cheerleader of the Damned like that want with him? Julian knew their relationships made it impossible for her to properly assess the relative attractiveness of any of her brothers, but she couldn’t really imagine anyone but maybe the worst sort of nerd pursuing this one, much less a girl concerned about appearances. Finding out that John and Clark Dill had made the transition from friendship to romance might surprise her less than confirmation that John and Joanie had done so, considering that she couldn’t imagine why, after all these years, John and Joanie were even still friends….
After supper, she cornered her mother. “Mom,” she said, “John and Joanie Murphy – Do they still write each other when he’s at school?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mom. “They talk about books and scientific things I don’t understand. I read John’s letters before I pass them along, of course, make sure he hasn’t said something he shouldn’t, but there haven't really been any problems, he has more time to think on paper – “ a knife clattered to the floor from a plate held at a bit too much of an angle. “Drat,” she said.
“I’ve got it,” said Julian. She threw it in the sink and then took the plates. “Go sit with the others,” she said. “I’ll wash these up.”
“You wash, I’ll dry,” was the compromise.
Books. Scientific things Mom didn’t understand. School projects. It was all mundane enough. It could be just that. If Joanie could keep up with John, then she had to be a good deal more than what she looked like and might enjoy the company of someone she could show that side of herself to without social consequences from time to time. John seeming genuinely comfortable with her like that, though…he was comfortable with Julian too, of course, but she was his sister. They were family. There were no secrets between them except the ones Julian was currently keeping, which she was only keeping because John wasn’t old enough to understand about biological parents and so didn’t count. Joanie was just a girl John had been in a book club with when he was a little kid. Was intelligence really so isolating that Joanie had kept up a friendship with him just for that, and was John really nice enough to keep up his end of the relationship even though he had friends he didn’t have to lie to now? And why, Julian wondered, did it worry her so much?
* * * * * * * *
The flower arrangement Julian received early the next morning was not large. Its components were not flashy like roses, excessively exotic, or even necessarily blatantly magical. It did not come with a vase of silver or Waterford crystal or with any diamonds tied to any portion of it. No single component of the flower arrangement was all that remarkable at first glance, which was why Julian thought it was actually kind of amazing just how obviously expensive the gestalt was.
If she had any doubts about her perception of the arrangement, they went away as soon as her mother and brothers trailed in for breakfast. John, stumbling toward the teapot, didn't even seem to notice it, but Mom and Joe both stopped in the door to blink at it and Joe whistled between his teeth.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Julian felt herself flushing already. “Flowers,” she said.
“Great Scott, Holmes, you’ve got it,” said Joe. Julian chose not to respond with a rude word or a rude gesture and assured herself that her choice was the product of scruples and a desire to set a good example for the baby of the family and had nothing whatsoever to do with their mother being in the room. “Where did they come from?”
Julian, panicking a little, had put the card down in the shadow of the arrangement when the sound of Joe’s voice in the living room had warned her that she was about to have company, hoping nobody would notice it there. John, who always noticed what she least wanted him to, predictably saw it and picked it up before Julian could even try to slide it away. The portion of his face not obscured by a huge mug contorted into a frown as he squinted at one of the only examples of male handwriting she'd ever seen that actually managed to be a bit more flowery and old-fashioned than his was. He lowered the mug after a couple of swallows and absently ran his sleeve over his mouth before, to Julian’s complete mortification, he started reading it out loud.
“Dear Miss Umland,” he droned. There were a few words missed because of Julian’s total lack of desire to hear them (it all would, she imagined, sound pretty good in the sender’s voice, but John’s was a completely different story; she wasn’t the biggest fan of her brother’s voice at the best of times, and it was not at its best first thing in the morning and especially not when reading something a hot guy had written to her at that time) and subsequent focus on the scrape of the knife Joe was using to spread lemon curd on his toast, but she caught “enjoyed your company…hope we meet again…yours truly, William Welles.”
“Julian’s got a boyfriend!” exclaimed Joe, in a tone perfectly pitched for an audition for the role of Most Super-Annoying Little Brother On The Planet.
“I do not,” snapped Julian, putting a stack of plates on the table forcefully enough that they rattled as her face glowed like a sunset. She really wished they would come up with special make-up that would help control or conceal physiological responses like that and wondered if she could persuade John to get to work on that. Make-up wasn’t really his thing, but he seemed to like potions well enough. He might be persuaded to focus on that aspect of the thing. Or maybe Charlie had to do some hard sciences work for his studies, he could make a fortune....
“Boys, be nice to your sister,” said Mom, passing the plates around. “Still, Julian, you didn’t tell us you had a new friend.”
“I didn’t know I did,” said Julian, picking up the pan of curried eggs she had just finished making and beginning to serve. “Just a guy I met while I was – out with friends, we talked for a while and he kind of saved me from looking stupid once, but I honestly didn't ever expect to hear from him again. Who’s saying the grace?”
After breakfast, her mother went to work and Joe washed dishes and John dried them and Julian put the flowers in a vase. Afterward, John made himself a fresh pot of tea and retreated with it to the stack of books he had left carelessly piled up beside the couch the night before, but when Julian passed through the living room a few minutes later, she was mildly alarmed to find that his attention did not seem to be on his latest self-improvement project (apparently something involving Ancient Runes). Instead, he was staring into space, still turning the forgotten flower card between his fingers.
“Give me that,” said Julian, plucking it away in mid-turn.
“Wh - oh, sorry,” said John. “Hey, isn’t there a guy called Welles on the MSC?”
He managed to put distaste even into the acronym. It was not, she thought, the Magical Security Council’s actual function John objected so much to, but rather the near-hereditary nature of the seats upon it. It was one of those groups which was virtually closed to even people like them, never mind Muggleborns, and that annoyed her brother even though she didn’t think the state of magical security was a subject he had ever given more than a passing thought to when doing anything other than reading the newspaper. John didn’t like being told he couldn’t do something even if he had no real interest in doing it, and where Paul and Joe’s response to a closed door was to see if there was a window big enough to slip through nearby, John’s was to at least want to blast the entire wall into rubble just to make a point. Julian’s head was suddenly full of alarm bells.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure there is,” said John. “Do you reckon Mr. Flowers is related?”
Julian scoffed. “I really doubt people with relatives who treat government departments like personal fiefdoms are going to talk to me,” she said, though there was much less evidence for her theory than there would have been last week. Still, William was probably a distant relative. The closer ones would still think themselves above talking to her. She glanced at John’s books. “Though while we’re talking about magical security, you probably shouldn’t leave those lying around,” she said. “Not when your – friends – are probably going to be in and out of here even more than usual until you go back to school.”
"Nobody's coming over this early," said John, "and everybody knows my parents aren't crazy about visits off the schedule. Why did you put significant pauses in that sentence?" All of this was said without a shift in tone or any pauses. John did that, sometimes, to throw people off their stride when they caught the last, incongruous, part.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."
She hadn't meant to, but now that she had... "You know you always have to be careful with people here, though," she continued. "You know that, right?"
John's expression darkened suddenly, far out of proportion, Julian thought, to the criticism. "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked sharply.
"Nothing," said Julian quickly, but then she became irritated, too. "Exactly what it sounds like. For goodness' sake." Julian's hands fluttered in exasperation. "You've always been more comfortable out there - " she gestured vaguely toward the front door - "than the rest of us," she said. "I just - " her nerve failed her short of asking about the girl. There was just nothing remotely comfortable about contemplating the love life of someone she'd looked after since he was a five-year-old who'd somewhat resembled a house-elf. "Just don't get too comfortable, you know?" Julian made a face and picked up a teacup she had somehow abandoned on the mantle the night before, then sat down beside him on the couch and helped herself to a cup of his tea even though she strongly suspected she'd find it undrinkable. "I didn't tell you this last year because I didn't want to make you mad or anything," she said, taking a sip of the tea and trying not to make another face, this one largely unrelated to her emotional state, as her tongue curled up and died, "but I worried about you last year, after that message in the Gardens - not that I thought you were the one who broke the Statute of Secrecy," she said quickly as John sat up straighter, looking alarmed. "I was just afraid that if you'd ever talked about your friends here, people there might think things...."
"You think too much about people," muttered John, sitting back again, evidently relieved that she had not suspected him of treason. Julian was almost hurt by that. Did he really think she would think that of him? John knew firsthand, if on a much smaller scale, that Muggles were no fonder of anyone who was different than purebloods were, knew yet more about it from history, and, as far she knew, had no burning desire to do sociological research in a prison. "I don't know why anyone believed any of that anyway, before we found out what it was. It wasn't a very credible source. Might still not be. Pye said."
Julian had been studying her reflection in the surface of the closer-than-usual-to-literally-black tea, but looked up quickly when John said that. "Really?" she asked. "Pye said some of it might be lies? You asked him?"
That last question came out a bit more hesitantly than the others, as she didn't want to think about why John might have felt the need to ask personal questions about the Satori. If he had, simple scientific curiosity was a lot more probable than suspicion of her loyalties, but...she had never quite forgotten the look on his face that day in the Transfiguration classroom. She had known then, if she hadn't known it before, that she could never, ever confide any of her confusion or more nuanced feelings about her situation to her family. Words could hardly express the relief she'd felt over Charlie not considering her a monster, but she had still never wanted to test the hypothesis that other people would be as understanding as Charlie was. Charlie was, after all, a rarity.
"I heard it, yeah." John fake-smiled for some reason. "For science club."
Julian, unthinking, took another sip of the tea. Her stomach protested the desecration of her tongue's corpse. "You really never believed any of the messages you heard about, then?" she asked, thinking again of that day in Transfig and, now that she thought about it, how disturbed he'd seemed when she'd asked if he'd heard about the Secrecy thing. As John just was not the sort to think sensibly about his own position, she had assumed he was worried about Clark possibly being a suspect or about the possibility of a general uptick in purist sentiment around the school. That second one was what she had worried about, at least; the message itself had not inspired any particular fear for her safety (the age Muggleborns were taken in at meant the law would have all the structural integrity of cheesecloth until the Ministry either navigated the politics of magically binding Muggles or else figured out a way to prevent people with Muggleborn children from having others who were younger or only a tiny bit older than the Muggleborns, but Misinformation had done enough over the past few centuries that any adult or even older teenager who said anything would get laughed at or packed off to the funny farm), but she had worried about John's status in a House full of purebloods who'd just been told that their boggarts might have teeth after all. If he'd said one wrong word....
John hesitated for a long moment. She could not make much sense of the seemingly endless small shifts of expression he went through in that moment, but that they existed at all sent a chill through her and gave her a moment's warning.
"I can't say that," he said finally. "I tried not to, though."
Their eyes, despite what she thought was a mutual best effort, met for a second, and during that second she thought they both wanted to say more. Before Julian could make a beginning, though, John looked away and pushed aside some of the books in his pile instead, only looking back at her once he had a hardcover which had been near the bottom of the stack in his hand.
“I meant to ask,” he said, “do you still need this, or can I borrow it?”
Julian opened her mouth to tell him he could have it, but her throat refused to let that message get across when she realized what it was. Or, more accurately, what was tucked between two of its later pages, the top of it just protruding above the cover line. There was nothing in her occasional in-text notes about magical geometry that she cared much if John saw, but a great deal of the invitation to Eleazar and Ceyda’s party that was none of his business at all.
“I - just want to copy down a few fomulas, just in case,” she said, putting out a hand that only trembled a little for it. A lump of ice the size of a dragon’s egg seemed to have spontaneously formed in her stomach. “Then you can have it.”
John handed it back to her without complaint and she tried not to outright run to her room. Once she closed the door, she first hugged the volume to her chest and then pulled the incriminating invitation out of the glossary and used her wand to set it on fire. She sank into her desk chair as it burned, her eyes moving restlessly around the room.
John could not, she assured herself, have seen the invitation. He would have said something if he had. He hadn’t seen the invitation, he hadn’t noticed her smuggling a second dress out of and back into the house the night of, he was as clueless as the rest of the family about what she did and where she went, and that was a good thing. Why, then, didn't she feel relieved?