dramaturgy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dramaturgy) wrote2005-12-22 03:21 am
dramaturgy) wrote2005-12-22 03:21 am
Fic - Harry Potter - Laugh
Title: Laugh
Word Count: 2,117 (when I say "run away with me", this is what I meant)
Note: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
modest_tales who requested Eloise; Terry; Michael; Stephen (your Terry, obviously). Anyverse, even Academie (it's up you). Mildly AU. The four struggling in a world with the Dark Lord in power. You can take it any way you want. The skinny: Mixed Imp and Acadverses, insofar as they are magical, and Michael Corner and Stephen Cornfoot are cousins. Mikey and Stephen = pure, Eloise = half with a squib father and muggle mother, Terry = Muggleborn. Apologies if I mangle Mike and Stephen, who technically belong to modest_tales and lostlikealice, respectively. Yay. Onto fic.
Eloise pulled her cloak around her tighter against the December cold. She hated going out anymore, but hated being cooped up wherever she was, whoever she was with, more. She leaned against the wall of the Leaky Cauldron - Diagon side, no one could use the London side as a gateway anymore. She shivered, wished she had a fag, wished Terry had never started her on the terrible, horrible habit, and then wished Terry would hurry up at the Apothecary. A whole line of wishes, that's all her life had been since leaving school the second time.
The door to the Leady Cauldron opened, unmuffling the noise of patrons inside as someone stepped out. She stepped back, doing her best to look inconspicuous... right onto a patch of ice. With a squeal of surprise and wild grappling for anything to keep her upright, her legs promptly slipped out from beneath her, landing not so gracefully on her bum. "Oh, ow," she moaned softly, collapsing into the snow. "I'm fine!"
Whatever Eloise was expecting, she wasn't expecting the voice that spoke to her in a familiar supercilious tone. "...Midgen?"
Eloise snapped herself up in a manner that must have been very cartoonish, and responded, "Oh god, I was just caught by the Rainbow Brigade. How'd you know it was me?"
Stephen Cornfoot looked down at her with an unamused glance. "If there is more than one person in all of the United Kingdom who will wear ancient -- what are those, Doc Martens? -- with socks like those, I will have officially lost all faith in humanity."
She scrambled to her feet, adjusting her cloak. "Oh, well, too late for me."
"The crusader? Lose her faith in humanity? The thought is too absurd to comprehend."
"Well, with people like me, we're persona non grata, as the saying goes," she replied, crossing her arms back across her chest.
"Perpetrators of fashion crimes? Yes, I know, I've been saying it for years," he replied, tugging at the scarf around his neck.
"Yeah, sure, those," she said dryly. She hoped he was being facetious, surely he couldn't ignore the rest of society and not care that much. "You're impeccable as usual, I see. I notice you don't have any blood under your fingernails."
"Of course not," was the answer she expected, and the answer she got. "You look... clean."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It was meant in no other spirit."
Considering some of the things she had to endure as a member of the Order, a loud one, and one who was no longer allowed to hold most jobs thanks to legislation against anyone who wasn't a Pureblood, she supposed clean was a compliment from Stephen. "So. I suppose your fancy accountancy job keeps you in tailored robes and well out of harm's way," she said, half-conversational.
“It does, actually, I assume that yours doesn’t do the same.”
“Well, my last job didn’t. And the one before that didn’t, either,” she said. She really hated going from job to job, but there wasn’t really any thing she could do about it that she wasn’t already doing.
“Stephen, what are you doing out here, they’re not going to wait for – Merlin’s cock, Eloise Midgen.”
“Oh my god, not you too,” Eloise pulled a face.
Her chagrin elicited a wide, smug grin from Michael Corner. (The only kind he was capable of, as far as Eloise knew.) “I’ll take that as a ‘Hello, Michael Corner, light of my life, where have you been all these years?’”
“I don’t really care where you’ve been all these years,” she snapped.
“Everyone lost track of you after MCOO was completely destroyed,” Michael commented, as if she hadn’t spoken at all.
“We didn’t really mind that part,” Stephen reminded him, fastidiously examining his fingernails.
“Is the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come hanging around here somewhere? I have to ask,” Eloise returned.
“Such a joker,” Michael said with mock fondness that really annoyed Eloise. “Some things never change.”
“That seems to extend to you being one of the most obnoxious wankers I’ve ever met,” Eloise rolled her eyes, sliding her hands into her pockets to keep them warm. “Close second to Stephen, of course.”
“Oh good, I was afraid I’d be forgotten,” Stephen said.
“Oh, never,” she said.
“Oh, of course never,” Michael imitated her tone.
“I can already see where that’s going, and I want you to close your mouth before you take it any further,” Eloise told Michael with an accusatory finger extended at him.
“Well then again, I suppose why you could, since you two never did anything,” Michael amended.
“It’s because he’s gay,” Eloise replied, matter-of-factly.
“I AM NOT GAY,” Stephen yelled at the top of his lungs.
Eloise burst out laughing, in a way that she hadn’t in a long time. It wasn’t a low, half-amused laugh like it was at Head Quarters, where everything seemed to be quiet anyway, or a laugh at a really morbid joke that was in actuality not funny, but since she either had to laugh or cry, she laughed. She was half bent over and holding her stomach, it was glorious. She hadn’t laughed like this in a long time.
“El?” Terry was standing aways down the street, and then ran at a dead sprint. He slid the last six feet or so to land solidly between Eloise and Stephen and Michael. “Get the hell away from her.”
“What the hell, Boot?” Stephen asked, rather affronted. “Got rid of the bleached look, I see. For your own good, you know, it was a terrible look and who knows what it was doing to your brain.”
“My brain is fine,” Terry snarled.
“Terry, chill, we were talking. They weren’t going to, like, rape and kill me or anything,” Eloise tapped Terry on the shoulder, and immediately returning her hands to her hips.
“You know Stephen couldn’t…”
“MICHAEL.”
“I don’t really care what you thought they weren’t going to do, you shouldn’t be around here – what am I thinking, I should have taken you into the Apothecary with me-“
“Earth to Terry, come in Terry,” Eloise said, waving her arms. “Two is easier to identify, remember?”
“Because they always come and go in pairs,” he echoed. “We really should be going.”
“Mm, well, don’t bother yourselves…” Stephen said, sounding as though there were about twelve other things he’d rather be doing at that moment and could wait to move on to them.
“No, I want to know what’s going on here,” Eloise interrupted halfway through his sentence, turning to Terry for such an explanation.
He stared back down at her, seeming abashed for a moment and then said, “Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you haven’t heard of their family, right? Almost matches the Malfoys for wanting to train up Junior Death Eaters.”
“Exaggeration is your forte, is it not?” Stephen asked him.
“Just a bit,” Michael said coldly, stepping forward. “You don’t want to be judged for your family, I’d hardly think it’s fair to judge us on ours.”
“Like we’d be related if we could help it,” Stephen added.
“Then why don’t you show us your arm?” Terry asked quietly. Michael seized the neck of his robes like a snake striking its prey, and Terry had his wand out, leveled at Michael.
“STOP,” Eloise yelled. “Just stop. We’re going.” She took hold of Terry’s elbow, dragging him away from the two.
“Good riddance,” Michael called after them. “Good riddance,” Michael called after them. “YOU SHOULD KNOW ME BETTER THAN THAT.”
“Enjoy your matching tatts, you fucking ponces!” Terry yelled and Eloise gave up before Apparating the two of them to the flat they shared.
“What in God’s name was that all about?” she demanded half a second before Terry threw the parcel on the table.
“Lacewing flies. Should keep the Order in Polyjuice for awhile,” he said shortly before excusing himself over the back of the couch to the fire escape of the dingy building. Terry slept on the couch, his feet hanging off one end, she took the bedroom, and the logic behind that was if anyone wanted to come in, the window or front door, Terry would be the one to die in duel and Eloise could get away. Morbidly put, anyway, but it was logic that Terry was going to stick to, and therefore not argue about with Eloise.
Eloise managed a sound of utter disgust in the back of her throat and opened the parcel, examining the lacewing flies. Nice specimens, large but not quite to full maturity. She closed the parcel again when she thought about exactly where it was she learned all about Potions.
She hated her life.
Pulling on another sweater over the one she was already wearing, she also climbed out of the window onto the fire escape and nearly decapitated herself when the window started to close on her. “Careful with that,” she pointed, looking at Terry, who sat halfway up the fire escape.
A fag smoldered slowly in Terry’s hand, and he smiled a bit at her, but it quickly faded. “When was the last time you saw Meg and Anthony?”
“Jones and Goldstein?” she asked.
“One and the same.”
She thought about it. “I… don’t know. Oh wait, I do, I saw Megan at her mum’s house, that was… a month ago.” She ran out of steam when the words left her mouth, and that scared her. “Anthony in more than that.”
“I saw Anthony three weeks ago, in Flourish and Blotts,” Terry said. “Three weeks is a long time.”
“We would have heard something,” she insisted.
“Maybe not,” Terry said. “Not if their bodies were mangled beyond recognition or were missing.”
“Megan’s mother would know,” Eloise said desperately. “She’s probably got a tracking charm on Meg or something. And if Megan went missing, she’d be frantic.”
“I suppose,” Terry said. “If they’re smart, they’re away from here.”
“Probably together. We gave them, what, a year after we left school?”
“Six months,” he said, ashing his fag through the railing.
Eloise came up the stairs and ignoring the cold from the metal seeping through her clothing, sat a stair down from him. She shivered and asked, “You meant what you said in the Alley.”
“About those pansy-arsed berks? I don’t say things I don’t mean, El,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “I just keep thinking of when we were in school and we didn’t really care about any of the shite and it was just great.”
“It was, but it was school, El. And we never were exactly neutral.”
“I guess not,” she admitted. “But come on, Michael Corner was in the DA-“
“And he was dating Ginny Weasley,” he reminded her.
“…Oh yeah.” She still wasn't so sure, but she supposed anything was possible these days. She looked down at her Doc Martens, her favorite shoes in the world that Stephen had always hated, because she wore them with her school uniform and constantly plagued him with them. He claimed to have nightmares haunted by her shoes, and she would proudly smile and say, “Thank you.” “I used to be jealous of Stephen.”
“Why, because he could apply lip gloss straighter than you could ever hope to?” Terry asked jokingly.
“Well, no. Because he doesn’t care. Or, I guess, didn’t care,” she said uncertainly.
“Stephen doesn’t care, but if you got him unarmed and put a wand to his throat, it’s my guess that he’d do pretty much anything, include take the Mark,” he said with a frown.
She looked up at him. “You’re sure?”
“Well, I wouldn’t bet my life’s savings, but I did live with the guy for seven years and despite all the mickey that was taken from one another, we were kind of close.”
“I guess,” she said. “But I used to be jealous because he didn’t care and I couldn’t make myself not care.”
“And you wanted to screw him and he wouldn’t let you,” Terry suddenly broke the pensive silence that followed.
“Oh please,” she said, glad the dark hid her burning cheeks.
“You did. You wanted like, eight million of his sparkly, ambiguously gay-and-straight babies.”
“Eugh, no.”
“You did!”
“Please!”
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome!”
“Why are you welcoming me?”
“… You said thank you!”
“You said please!”
“Don’t try and blame this on me!” she squealed, and then tugged at his longish, light brown locks. “You know, Stephen was completely wrong, the bleach look suited you. You shouldn’t have a natural hair colour.”
“You think so?” he asked, running his hand through it. “I don’t know, I look pretty rakish without it.”
“You sound pretty silly using the word rakish in normal conversation. You should so give yourself another bad dye jobs.”
“You think? Fire engine red, maybe…”
Word Count: 2,117 (when I say "run away with me", this is what I meant)
Note: For
modest_tales who requested Eloise; Terry; Michael; Stephen (your Terry, obviously). Anyverse, even Academie (it's up you). Mildly AU. The four struggling in a world with the Dark Lord in power. You can take it any way you want. The skinny: Mixed Imp and Acadverses, insofar as they are magical, and Michael Corner and Stephen Cornfoot are cousins. Mikey and Stephen = pure, Eloise = half with a squib father and muggle mother, Terry = Muggleborn. Apologies if I mangle Mike and Stephen, who technically belong to modest_tales and lostlikealice, respectively. Yay. Onto fic.Eloise pulled her cloak around her tighter against the December cold. She hated going out anymore, but hated being cooped up wherever she was, whoever she was with, more. She leaned against the wall of the Leaky Cauldron - Diagon side, no one could use the London side as a gateway anymore. She shivered, wished she had a fag, wished Terry had never started her on the terrible, horrible habit, and then wished Terry would hurry up at the Apothecary. A whole line of wishes, that's all her life had been since leaving school the second time.
The door to the Leady Cauldron opened, unmuffling the noise of patrons inside as someone stepped out. She stepped back, doing her best to look inconspicuous... right onto a patch of ice. With a squeal of surprise and wild grappling for anything to keep her upright, her legs promptly slipped out from beneath her, landing not so gracefully on her bum. "Oh, ow," she moaned softly, collapsing into the snow. "I'm fine!"
Whatever Eloise was expecting, she wasn't expecting the voice that spoke to her in a familiar supercilious tone. "...Midgen?"
Eloise snapped herself up in a manner that must have been very cartoonish, and responded, "Oh god, I was just caught by the Rainbow Brigade. How'd you know it was me?"
Stephen Cornfoot looked down at her with an unamused glance. "If there is more than one person in all of the United Kingdom who will wear ancient -- what are those, Doc Martens? -- with socks like those, I will have officially lost all faith in humanity."
She scrambled to her feet, adjusting her cloak. "Oh, well, too late for me."
"The crusader? Lose her faith in humanity? The thought is too absurd to comprehend."
"Well, with people like me, we're persona non grata, as the saying goes," she replied, crossing her arms back across her chest.
"Perpetrators of fashion crimes? Yes, I know, I've been saying it for years," he replied, tugging at the scarf around his neck.
"Yeah, sure, those," she said dryly. She hoped he was being facetious, surely he couldn't ignore the rest of society and not care that much. "You're impeccable as usual, I see. I notice you don't have any blood under your fingernails."
"Of course not," was the answer she expected, and the answer she got. "You look... clean."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It was meant in no other spirit."
Considering some of the things she had to endure as a member of the Order, a loud one, and one who was no longer allowed to hold most jobs thanks to legislation against anyone who wasn't a Pureblood, she supposed clean was a compliment from Stephen. "So. I suppose your fancy accountancy job keeps you in tailored robes and well out of harm's way," she said, half-conversational.
“It does, actually, I assume that yours doesn’t do the same.”
“Well, my last job didn’t. And the one before that didn’t, either,” she said. She really hated going from job to job, but there wasn’t really any thing she could do about it that she wasn’t already doing.
“Stephen, what are you doing out here, they’re not going to wait for – Merlin’s cock, Eloise Midgen.”
“Oh my god, not you too,” Eloise pulled a face.
Her chagrin elicited a wide, smug grin from Michael Corner. (The only kind he was capable of, as far as Eloise knew.) “I’ll take that as a ‘Hello, Michael Corner, light of my life, where have you been all these years?’”
“I don’t really care where you’ve been all these years,” she snapped.
“Everyone lost track of you after MCOO was completely destroyed,” Michael commented, as if she hadn’t spoken at all.
“We didn’t really mind that part,” Stephen reminded him, fastidiously examining his fingernails.
“Is the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come hanging around here somewhere? I have to ask,” Eloise returned.
“Such a joker,” Michael said with mock fondness that really annoyed Eloise. “Some things never change.”
“That seems to extend to you being one of the most obnoxious wankers I’ve ever met,” Eloise rolled her eyes, sliding her hands into her pockets to keep them warm. “Close second to Stephen, of course.”
“Oh good, I was afraid I’d be forgotten,” Stephen said.
“Oh, never,” she said.
“Oh, of course never,” Michael imitated her tone.
“I can already see where that’s going, and I want you to close your mouth before you take it any further,” Eloise told Michael with an accusatory finger extended at him.
“Well then again, I suppose why you could, since you two never did anything,” Michael amended.
“It’s because he’s gay,” Eloise replied, matter-of-factly.
“I AM NOT GAY,” Stephen yelled at the top of his lungs.
Eloise burst out laughing, in a way that she hadn’t in a long time. It wasn’t a low, half-amused laugh like it was at Head Quarters, where everything seemed to be quiet anyway, or a laugh at a really morbid joke that was in actuality not funny, but since she either had to laugh or cry, she laughed. She was half bent over and holding her stomach, it was glorious. She hadn’t laughed like this in a long time.
“El?” Terry was standing aways down the street, and then ran at a dead sprint. He slid the last six feet or so to land solidly between Eloise and Stephen and Michael. “Get the hell away from her.”
“What the hell, Boot?” Stephen asked, rather affronted. “Got rid of the bleached look, I see. For your own good, you know, it was a terrible look and who knows what it was doing to your brain.”
“My brain is fine,” Terry snarled.
“Terry, chill, we were talking. They weren’t going to, like, rape and kill me or anything,” Eloise tapped Terry on the shoulder, and immediately returning her hands to her hips.
“You know Stephen couldn’t…”
“MICHAEL.”
“I don’t really care what you thought they weren’t going to do, you shouldn’t be around here – what am I thinking, I should have taken you into the Apothecary with me-“
“Earth to Terry, come in Terry,” Eloise said, waving her arms. “Two is easier to identify, remember?”
“Because they always come and go in pairs,” he echoed. “We really should be going.”
“Mm, well, don’t bother yourselves…” Stephen said, sounding as though there were about twelve other things he’d rather be doing at that moment and could wait to move on to them.
“No, I want to know what’s going on here,” Eloise interrupted halfway through his sentence, turning to Terry for such an explanation.
He stared back down at her, seeming abashed for a moment and then said, “Oh, come on. You can’t tell me you haven’t heard of their family, right? Almost matches the Malfoys for wanting to train up Junior Death Eaters.”
“Exaggeration is your forte, is it not?” Stephen asked him.
“Just a bit,” Michael said coldly, stepping forward. “You don’t want to be judged for your family, I’d hardly think it’s fair to judge us on ours.”
“Like we’d be related if we could help it,” Stephen added.
“Then why don’t you show us your arm?” Terry asked quietly. Michael seized the neck of his robes like a snake striking its prey, and Terry had his wand out, leveled at Michael.
“STOP,” Eloise yelled. “Just stop. We’re going.” She took hold of Terry’s elbow, dragging him away from the two.
“Good riddance,” Michael called after them. “Good riddance,” Michael called after them. “YOU SHOULD KNOW ME BETTER THAN THAT.”
“Enjoy your matching tatts, you fucking ponces!” Terry yelled and Eloise gave up before Apparating the two of them to the flat they shared.
“What in God’s name was that all about?” she demanded half a second before Terry threw the parcel on the table.
“Lacewing flies. Should keep the Order in Polyjuice for awhile,” he said shortly before excusing himself over the back of the couch to the fire escape of the dingy building. Terry slept on the couch, his feet hanging off one end, she took the bedroom, and the logic behind that was if anyone wanted to come in, the window or front door, Terry would be the one to die in duel and Eloise could get away. Morbidly put, anyway, but it was logic that Terry was going to stick to, and therefore not argue about with Eloise.
Eloise managed a sound of utter disgust in the back of her throat and opened the parcel, examining the lacewing flies. Nice specimens, large but not quite to full maturity. She closed the parcel again when she thought about exactly where it was she learned all about Potions.
She hated her life.
Pulling on another sweater over the one she was already wearing, she also climbed out of the window onto the fire escape and nearly decapitated herself when the window started to close on her. “Careful with that,” she pointed, looking at Terry, who sat halfway up the fire escape.
A fag smoldered slowly in Terry’s hand, and he smiled a bit at her, but it quickly faded. “When was the last time you saw Meg and Anthony?”
“Jones and Goldstein?” she asked.
“One and the same.”
She thought about it. “I… don’t know. Oh wait, I do, I saw Megan at her mum’s house, that was… a month ago.” She ran out of steam when the words left her mouth, and that scared her. “Anthony in more than that.”
“I saw Anthony three weeks ago, in Flourish and Blotts,” Terry said. “Three weeks is a long time.”
“We would have heard something,” she insisted.
“Maybe not,” Terry said. “Not if their bodies were mangled beyond recognition or were missing.”
“Megan’s mother would know,” Eloise said desperately. “She’s probably got a tracking charm on Meg or something. And if Megan went missing, she’d be frantic.”
“I suppose,” Terry said. “If they’re smart, they’re away from here.”
“Probably together. We gave them, what, a year after we left school?”
“Six months,” he said, ashing his fag through the railing.
Eloise came up the stairs and ignoring the cold from the metal seeping through her clothing, sat a stair down from him. She shivered and asked, “You meant what you said in the Alley.”
“About those pansy-arsed berks? I don’t say things I don’t mean, El,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “I just keep thinking of when we were in school and we didn’t really care about any of the shite and it was just great.”
“It was, but it was school, El. And we never were exactly neutral.”
“I guess not,” she admitted. “But come on, Michael Corner was in the DA-“
“And he was dating Ginny Weasley,” he reminded her.
“…Oh yeah.” She still wasn't so sure, but she supposed anything was possible these days. She looked down at her Doc Martens, her favorite shoes in the world that Stephen had always hated, because she wore them with her school uniform and constantly plagued him with them. He claimed to have nightmares haunted by her shoes, and she would proudly smile and say, “Thank you.” “I used to be jealous of Stephen.”
“Why, because he could apply lip gloss straighter than you could ever hope to?” Terry asked jokingly.
“Well, no. Because he doesn’t care. Or, I guess, didn’t care,” she said uncertainly.
“Stephen doesn’t care, but if you got him unarmed and put a wand to his throat, it’s my guess that he’d do pretty much anything, include take the Mark,” he said with a frown.
She looked up at him. “You’re sure?”
“Well, I wouldn’t bet my life’s savings, but I did live with the guy for seven years and despite all the mickey that was taken from one another, we were kind of close.”
“I guess,” she said. “But I used to be jealous because he didn’t care and I couldn’t make myself not care.”
“And you wanted to screw him and he wouldn’t let you,” Terry suddenly broke the pensive silence that followed.
“Oh please,” she said, glad the dark hid her burning cheeks.
“You did. You wanted like, eight million of his sparkly, ambiguously gay-and-straight babies.”
“Eugh, no.”
“You did!”
“Please!”
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome!”
“Why are you welcoming me?”
“… You said thank you!”
“You said please!”
“Don’t try and blame this on me!” she squealed, and then tugged at his longish, light brown locks. “You know, Stephen was completely wrong, the bleach look suited you. You shouldn’t have a natural hair colour.”
“You think so?” he asked, running his hand through it. “I don’t know, I look pretty rakish without it.”
“You sound pretty silly using the word rakish in normal conversation. You should so give yourself another bad dye jobs.”
“You think? Fire engine red, maybe…”
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Stephen also wants to say that his babies would not be gay or sparkly.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA. I love it.
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Terry says maybe not so much sparkly as a Special Sort of Sheen over them. (And Eloise still wants them.)
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(And hey, MAYBE he didn't take it! Terry doesn't know anything! Boys and their egos, only like to think they know everything.)