gooseberryhigh | (no subject)

Who: Ari & her brother Nico
When: Backdated to July 1, 2014
Where: Nico’s flat in the London wizard quarter
What: they had a ROUGH day and now they’re bonding
Warnings: None

The room her brother has given her is small and plain. There’s a twin bed, a set of drawers, and a well-worn wooden desk and chair, but space for little else. The walls are plastered in a dreary brown pinstripe wallpaper and the only hint of color is a knit blanket of scratchy wool that he bought specifically for her — purple, but not quite an Ebonhide plum, like so many of his recent gifts for her.

She’s sitting wrongways on the bed, hands folded over the blanket, as she stares out the window. Her brother’s flat is just off Diagon Alley in the wizard quarter, but her window looks out on muggle London; dreary, grey, somehow comforting despite all that.

It’s been a long day and she has very little to show for it. Leaning her head back against the wall, she runs her thumb over her knuckles. When she and Nico had returned to their parents’ house to retrieve some of her things, they hadn’t intended on confronting their parents at all. The house is so large and rickety that they’d been sure they could sneak in and out. Their father always holes himself up in his study during the morning hours; their mother sleeps til noon, most days.

But of course things hadn’t gone smoothly. And now she hardly has more than what she left for school with, and she’s lost her wand. She’ll need a new one before she starts at the Prophet, and where that money will come from… she’ll worry about later.

There’s a knock at her door.

“Ariadne?” her brother asks, pushing the door open a fraction before she has a chance to respond. She rearranges the knit blanket around her crossed legs and sits up a little straighter. “Can I come in?”

She can see him peering through the crack in the door, she so just shrugs instead of responding. He pauses for a moment before opening the door and entering the room.

“I brought you lunch,” he says, handing her a plate with a sandwich and a carefully sliced apple. He’s even cut the crusts off the sandwich, and though she doesn’t particularly mind them, she appreciates the effort.

“Thanks,” she says, setting the plate down on her lap.

As she picks at the apple slices, he sits down on the edge of her bed, tentatively, as far away from her as the length of it will allow.

“Are you all right?” he asks after a second, and she sets her half-eaten apple slice down and sighs.

“What do you think?” she asks, sounding a little more petulant than she’d intended. He looks down at his hands.

“Well… if you’re anything like me, I’d say you’re going to pretend you are. But… I don’t know if that’s fair to say. I don’t know you very well,” Nico says. It’s not the first time he’s expressed the sentiment, and Ariadne is a master of inference and oblique statements.

“I suppose you don’t,” Ari agrees. If he wants to get to know her better, he could bother asking her a question more than once a year.

“It’s my own fault, I know that,” he says, but then he doesn’t say anything else. Taking some responsibility and cutting the crusts off her sandwiches are good enough first steps, she supposes, but she’s not really in the mood today to make him feel better about himself. After they’ve sat in silence for a half-minute, Ariadne still eating her apple slices, he speaks again. “How about this,” he says, leaning back against the wall so he can look her in the eye. She glances down at her plate. “I tell you something about me that nobody else knows, then you tell me something I don’t know about you.”

“Alright,” Ariadne says after a moment of consideration. It’s an easy deal on her part; he’s admitted himself that he doesn’t know very much about her, so almost anything will pass holding up her end of the bargain.

“Okay…” But he doesn’t say anything else. His hands are balled up in fists, rested on his knees, and he knocks his knuckles together a few times. She knows this expression well, knows how to note it in almost anybody. Not trying to think of something, but working up the pluck to say what he’s already thought of. “My first kiss was with Adam Rackham.”

“Adam Rackham?” Ari asks, interest piqued. She knew him, although not well. He didn’t seem like someone her brother would have noticed at all; Nico had been popular, constantly surrounded by friends and admirers. Adam had been a quiet, strange boy who hadn’t cared for any of that. Ari’s surprised they ever spoke, let alone…

“Yes,” he says, looking out the bedroom window. “It was third year, after the big Ravenclaw-Gryffindor game. He walked me back to Ravenclaw tower and kissed me before he left. He didn’t even say anything.”

Ari sits in silent contemplation for a second, unsure how to proceed. Finally, she settles on nitpicking a technicality. “That doesn’t count.”

“Why not?” Nico asks.

“Well, he’d know. You said something nobody else knew about you.”

“He didn’t know it was my first kiss,” Nico says.

Which is fair, she guesses.

After a moment, she laughs. Not really at him. It’s good natured, and she hopes he can tell. “I can’t believe you kissed Adam Rackham,” she says.

“That wasn’t the only time,” he says, also laughingly. But she goes quiet, chews her tongue. “Does that bother you?” Nico asks.

“No,” Ari replies, picking at a loose end in her knit blanket. “Plenty of my friends at school are the same. No one thinks anything of it there.”

“That’s good,” he says, leaning his head back against the wall again. She knows he thinks Gooseberry is a good influence on her, and wonders now if this had something to do with it. Not everyone at Hogwarts is intolerant, but plenty of her pureblooded friends had been. She wonders what Mara would think if she knew that Nico had kissed Adam, or that she had kissed Bianca, even if it was just during a party game. “Sometimes I think people here care more than they let on,” Nico adds.

“You tell people?” Ari asks. That’s unfathomable to her, but she’s never been very brave.

“Sometimes, if I like them well enough,” he says. They lapse into silence, and Ari draws a breath to say something - she isn’t quite sure what, but she feels words burgeoning on her tongue. Before she’s worked it out, though, her brother beats her to it. “And what about you? Is there anybody you fancy at school?”

A deep flush jumps to Ari’s face at the question, and she ducks her head to hide her burning cheeks.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“I promised to tell you something, though,” she mumbles.

“Well, that can be anything. It doesn’t have to be about snogging.”

“I haven’t been snogging anyone,” Ari insists, which is… mostly true, barring aforementioned kissing games at parties, which shouldn’t count. “But…”

She’s feeling generous. Nico’s secret might’ve bent his own rules a little bit, but it was a gamble on his part, and she knows that. She also knows that this isn’t really meant to be a wager, just a conversation. He’d be happy with anything, she’s reasonably sure. But she can’t quite turn that part of her brain off, and she thinks he deserves something worth a little more than her favourite subject in school.

Setting her blanket aside, she crawls out of her bed and crosses the room to pull her school trunk out from under her desk. It’s still meticulously packed; she’s been taking clothes out of it as she needs them, and considered packing her things away again after washing them. Instead, she’s got a few pieces of clothing hanging in the closet, a step towards permanence that makes her uncomfortable even though she’ll only be here for two months.

But now she pulls her carefully folded clothes out of the trunk and stacks them on the floor so she can reach the pile of notebooks and school papers stashed away at the bottom of the trunk. It’s easy to find the ones she’s looking for; she keeps them in a thick envelope so they stay orderly.

Before she gives it to Nico, she taps her nails against the envelope. But the moment of hesitation is brief, and she hands it over.

“What’s this?” he asks as he opens it to draw out the sheaf of papers stored within.

“It’s a book,” Ari says as he turns over the handwritten pages.

“Did you write this?” he asks, obviously impressed. She’s blushing again. He doesn’t really have a reason to be impressed. It’s not as if he’s read it. It could be rubbish, for all he knows. When he looks up at her, she just nods. “Ariadne, this is amazing. Is it…” he turns the stack of papers over, checking the last page. “Is it done?”

“Mostly,” she says, reaching out to take it back from him. She doesn’t actually want him to read it. He surrenders it easily, even though he seems a little disappointed, and she clutches it to her chest. “I haven’t edited it at all.”

“We should get you a typewriter - or a… a muggle computer. You shouldn’t have to write everything out by hand,” he says, clearly meaning it very earnestly. They don’t have the money for that, and she knows it.

She puts the papers back into the envelope and tucks it away in her trunk. “I still need a new wand,” she reminds him.

“Don’t worry about that,” he insists. “I’m sure Aunt Penelope will buy you one, and…”

“I wish you wouldn’t call her that,” Ari says to the lid of her trunk as she packs everything away again. The woman is hardly even a cousin of theirs, a third or fourth cousin or something like that. Calling her aunt seems presumptuous and unearned. She’s been helpful enough, Ari has to admit. But she’s not family, not really, and they shouldn’t be accepting charity from her.

Nico heaves a heavy sigh and stands from her bed. The room’s so small that he doesn’t even have to take a step to lay a hand on her shoulder. “Everything’s going to work out now,” he says, giving her shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Promise.”

He kisses the top of her head before he leaves her room, and the small gesture of affection almost feels natural.

It’ll all be alright now, she thinks to herself again as she slams the lid of her trunk shut, and she almost believes it.