Adrian (acrophile) wrote in whatprice, @ 2009-09-17 19:44:00 |
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Entry tags: | !completed, adrian pucey |
What I'm really thinking is ...
Who: Adrian Pucey and his sister Ellie.
What: An overdue family discussion.
When: Thursday, 17 September, after dinner.
Where: Adrian's study, in his townhouse.
Warnings: Mild language.
Status: Closed narrative.
Adrian was reading the latest post from Vienna when he heard the rap on his study door. Setting aside the letter from his teacher, he picked up his wand and made the passes that opened it, calling out, "Come in."
It was Ellie, and she did as instructed, crossing the distance between door and desk to drop a fond kiss on her brother's cheek. "Do you have a few minutes to talk?" she asked, her tone implying that she expected the answer to be yes.
"For you? Always." Adrian gestured to her to take the chair opposite his. "Shall we have a late snack? I'm sure there's something in the kitchen Flitchy can whip up for us."
"No, I'm fine. It's you I'm worried about." Ellie settled into her seat, drawing her legs up underneath it and resting her elbows on the arms in a gesture familiar to him.
Relaxing back into something approximating his usual graceful sprawl, Adrian found himself arching an eyebrow. "Me? Why do you say that?"
"You've been locking yourself up in here even more than usual this last week. You're quiet at dinner. Flitchy says somebody's not eating their lunch, which I hope isn't you." She waggled a finger at Adrian.
"Oh, that's not me." Adrian shook his head. "Gus has taken to having lunch outside the office. He's seeing someone and prefers to take his meals somewhere else now. So you and Flitchy can stop worrying about me being underfed. I need to tell Flitchy so he can cut back." Flitchy was probably listening in on this conversation, so he might well have heard already, but it was part of the delicate web of polite fictions of the house that Flitchy generally waited to know important things until directly advised.
"Well, that's a relief, at least." Ellie smiled and leaned forward slightly. "What about Gus's lady friend? Tell me about her."
Ellie had undoubtedly meant it as a light change of subject. Little did she know. His name's Michael Corner and he has Ollivander's old shop, Adrian did not say. Instead, he said, "I think that's Gus's to tell and not mine."
Mystery was only spice to a Ravenclaw. "Then you must invite him to dinner so I can ask him myself."
Adrian sighed. He did not want to have this discussion right now, or ever, but there was no way to avoid it and answer Ellie's question. "That's not going to happen. I'm afraid Gus and I are at odds right now."
This was, of course, the thing she'd been looking to weasel out of Adrian. "Oh, Adrian, that's awful. I'm so sorry." Partisan as always, she continued, "What did he do?"
"That's a long story."
Pursed lips and a steely gaze met Adrian's blue eyes. He shrugged. "All right, then. Gus has accidentally let out a secret I'm not comfortable with keeping. Committing to staying quiet indefinitely, as he wishes, would require me to agree to deceive his sister. She'll be dreadfully hurt when this comes out, based on her reaction to things in the past. Not so much by the content, mind you, as best I can tell, but by the fact of being deceived, because Gus has a history of not bothering to tell his family about inconvenient things. So I told him I wasn't willing to lie explicitly to Miranda and he's royally hacked off."
Ellie sat there putting it together for a few moments, and came to a conclusion. "So she's unsuitable, and he's serious. And Miranda will approve of her in spite of that, you think, but won't like not being told." She gave Adrian another penetrating look; the other half of the equation had not passed her by. "And you resent being asked to lie to her. You're rather fond of her, aren't you?"
This was a subject he didn't want to talk about either, but it was better than explaining what Gus was hiding from Miranda to Ellie. He was really not up to explaining to his sister how two men managed to have sex, and she'd probably ask. With a reluctant sigh, Adrian nodded. "I am. In part because she doesn't ask things of me that I'm not comfortable doing." That particular part of it made made him scowl. "Maybe if Gus thinks I'm a rotten friend he should be a better one to me, and not continue telling me things I don't want to know when I've just said I don't want to know them."
Ellie pursed her lips. She had her own opinion of how things should be in general between Gus and Adrian, but this wasn't the moment to broach that. She'd save that advice for later. "It's not just your fondness for her that's at issue."
"I consider her a good friend."
"How good?" Ellie's tone made it clear she didn't mean to leave off.
"I don't see that it matters at this point. If her brother poisons the well, I'm quite sure our friendship is done with. So just don't start, all right?"
"I'm not going to start anything. All I want is to see you happy. And you are clearly not, not to anyone who knows you at all." Ellie leaned forward again, her tone brooking no denial. "You're fighting with Gus, you're under all the stress of opening the new clinic and dealing with what's left from the old one, and your social life is nil while you work with your friend. And you can't entertain or have anyone over for dinner either." She took a breath and let it partway out to find the right words. "Having this priest, this witness, in the house, keeping him safe until he can testify, is admirable, and it's not as though it's not obvious why you're doing it. But if that old guilt is suffocating you, maybe it's time to--."
"Ellie--" Adrian cut her off in a voice that warned her she was on the verge of going too far. For a moment both of them continued, their words unintelligible as the volume increased and each tried to override the other. Surprisingly, it was Adrian who fell silent first.
"Will you just tell me what you're really thinking?" she finally asked.
"What I'm really thinking? What I'm really thinking? Is that I've done what I can and now it's out of my hands." His blue eyes wild in his pale face, Adrian began gesticulating sharply. "I work with people every day who despise the society I come from, who it's clear feel that my background and bloodline make me unfit company for their family--and don't think I don't understand 'not my sister', because I have a sister, so I understand it very well. Even my own fu--" and he managed to catch himself before he finished the expletive "--even my own spiritual director constantly acts as if the moral bases of our society, the very foundations of the way I think, are wrongheaded and unethical, not worth considering. Which is pretty bloody rich considering that I didn't need to finish my Healer training, much less go among the Jesuits for years of moral instruction, to know that human experimentation on unwilling people is profoundly and deeply evil. What I'm really thinking is 'what happens if we let this information out and it turns out nobody cares because Muggles are just as morally lazy as wizards, if not moreso?'" And Adrian slumped back into his chair, rubbing his temples with the middle finger and thumb of one hand as if to stave off an incipient headache.
There were a few seconds of dead silence and then Ellie came to throw her arms around Adrian in his chair. "Surely people will stand up and say no. It can't be that bad," she told him, her tone reassuring.
"But it could be. And if it is, then it's war, because we have nothing else, and there aren't enough of us, and we die." It was stark and bleak.
"You'll think of something. You out-thought the Death Eaters and you can certainly out-think these Muggles."
She had meant it kindly, but all Adrian could hear was another underestimation of what they were dealing with. "Even I'm not that brilliant. And even if it were true one-on-one, there are millions of them and what, ten thousand of us? Less than that now. They don't have to be smarter than we are. They just have to be smarter in the aggregate, and there are thousands of them to one wizard. Killing them four or five to one like we did on the Seeker won't be enough. And if we do it, we'll just be everything the Death Eaters wanted us to be. Kings of a boneyard." It made Adrian physically ill to contemplate it.
"You're only saying this because you're overwrought. Should I owl Chris and Marcus to come over here and see to you? Or take you to Redbridge?" Ellie added hastily as Adrian started to object to either of them coming to the house and risking them finding out about Phil. Both of them were too close to Astoria to be allowed to find out that Adrian was hiding someone who'd worked for MI7, even someone who'd turned against them.
Instead of protesting, Adrian shook his head and lapsed into silence.
Stroking Adrian's shoulder, Ellie turned to address Flitchy, whom she was sure was listening somewhere. "Flitchy, bring Adrian some warm milk with a little nutmeg and cinnamon in it. He's not feeling well."
A moment later, the house-elf popped in with two tumblers on a tray, and some homemade ginger biscuits: Adrian's favourite. She handed Adrian his warm milk; he took the glass and drank from it without complaint. Setting the biscuits on the desk beside him, Ellie thanked Flitchy and returned to her own chair with her own drink.
"You need someone who can support you through all this, Adrian, and it's not me. You need someone in your life who can help you with these things as an equal, in the long term. And I know if you're that enamoured of Gus's sister this is the wrong time to say it, but--I had lunch with Jac last week and I think she's done with von Rothstein again."
The warm milk probably had a potion in it, because Adrian was suddenly hit by a terrible, and terribly comforting, lassitude. "Of course she's done with him. He's an idiot and a mummy's boy." The muttered comment only contained half of his usual disdain for the breed of idiot Adrian thought von Rothstein to be.
"Jac adores you. She always has."
"Chris would kill me because I'd make her miserable."
"You'd make her happy."
"Right up to the point where she realised what putting up with me entails."
"I can hardly argue with that," Ellie said with some asperity, "but that may not dissuade her. She lived with you for a year and the prospect apparently hasn't completely dissuaded her yet. Just think about it, Adrian. All right?"
It was terribly difficult for Adrian to say no to Ellie, and she knew it, and knew he knew it. He was being manipulated, and he might resent it in the morning, but the answer was inevitable. "I'll think about it. After the twenty-first."
"That's all I ask," Ellie replied sweetly. "Now will you go to bed? Whatever you're reading can wait, and you'll feel better in the morning."
Adrian doubted that, but he'd humour Ellie and Flitchy anyway. Leaving the biscuits where they were, he drained his glass of warm milk, trying to figure out from the taste what they'd hidden under the nutmeg and cinnamon before giving it up as a bad job and swallowing it all. He came to his feet and ushered Ellie out of the study, closing the door and the wards behind him, and escorted her up the stairs. Once goodnights were said, Adrian collapsed into bed.
For once, his sleep was deep and dreamless.